Over the last several months, I’ve grown increasingly interested in what a resistance governing agenda would look like – first in Congress, if Democrats win one or both chambers in November, and then across all three branches, if Trumpism is rejected by the voters in 2028.

So I’m thinking about adding a new focus to this newsletter: examining what those two agendas might look like, by aggregating and analyzing the latest ideas smart people have proposed.

From what I’ve seen so far, there are some emerging themes:

Starting in 2027, a Democratic Congress should open a slew of investigations into a wide range of conduct by this administration that has been essentially criminal, including Trump’s personal corruption, corporate bribery, politically-motivated prosecutions, civil rights violations against immigrants and protesters, and inhumane conditions in immigration detention centers. It should seriously consider impeachment.

Democratic majority leaders should also establish some red-line demands that must be met in order to win their support for necessary legislation. Those could include such things as an end to impoundment, reining in ICE, releasing immigrants on bond, reversing safety-net cuts, honoring congressional subpoenas, firing certain people, and ending the war against Iran.

The 2029 resistance agenda is of course much broader. There are high-level goals such as reconstructing a functional and ethical federal government, establishing new limits on executive power, prosecuting crimes committed by the Trump administration, resuming civil-rights enforcement, passing new restrictions on campaign financing, adopting a humane immigration policy, breaking up the Department of Homeland Security, and abolishing ICE.

There are even higher-level goals, such as restoring the rule of law, ensuring fair elections, working to create a true multiracial democracy, addressing climate change and income inequality, and regulating new technologies like AI and cryptocurrency.

And there is a powerful argument that very little of this is possible without structural congressional reform and dramatic changes to the makeup of the Supreme Court.

Plus, there are hundreds – maybe thousands – of thing Trump broke that must not just be fixed, but reconstructed – and a few that he built or gilded, that must be torn down.

My goal is to explore these ideas and many others in the coming months. (Does that sound good? What have I left out? Let me know.)

I’ll start now.

The Latest Thoughts on De-Trumpification

Under current law, state and local law enforcement officials can (with some difficulty) be sued for constitutional violations. But there is no similar legal authority that applies to federal officers, effectively giving them immunity from civil actions. Democrats have proposed legislation that would allow individuals the right to sue federal law enforcement officers and agencies in civil court for violations of their rights.

Radley Balko, the independent journalist who is my go-to source on all matters related to criminal justice, has called passage of such a law critically important. But as he writes in his must-read newsletter, that’s not enough. He wants Congress to pass a law that would allow individuals “to sue the supervisors and political appointees whose policies, priorities, and personnel decisions are responsible for these violations.”

Expanding on his New York Times opinion piece on the topic, he writes that “there needs to be some deterrent.”

At the very least, Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, Markwayne Mullin, Kristi Noem, and the other Trump II officials whose policies have caused unnecessary death should be writing checks to the families of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Joan Sebastian Guerrero, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, and Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez — among others — for the rest of their lives.

Of course as long as Trump is president, he would veto such a law. But, Balko writes:

Assuming the Democrats retake Congress, I think it’s important to pass these laws quickly to send a message to Trump officials and federal immigration cops that culpability is coming. They need to know that they do not have carte blanche to continue inflicting pain and violence for the next two years. It would make clear to everyone responsible for the cruelty and deaths we’ve seen that we are one presidential signature away from imposing lifelong financial accountability on whoever’s policies, instructions, and bullets produce the next Alex Pretti or Joan Sebastian Guerrero.

Protect Democracy is out with a new report advocating for states’ U.S. House delegations to be selected through “proportional representation” rather than single-member districts. It’s fairer, and it would end the warped incentives to redistrict and gerrymander before every congressional election.

As Protect Democracy staffers Grant Tudor, Cyrena Kokolis, and Farbod Faraji explain in a blog post:

Single-member districts are uniquely vulnerable to manipulation. Gerrymandering works by exploiting a common feature of them known as “wasted votes.” When a candidate wins with 60% of the vote, the 40% cast for other candidates doesn’t help to elect anyone; those votes are considered “wasted.” So, too, are the 10% the prevailing candidate earned beyond what was needed to win. Gerrymanderers are essentially engineers of this waste, designing districts to maximize the opposition’s wasted votes and minimize their own.

By contrast, they write:

In a five-seat district, a party that wins 40% of the vote receives two seats, and another that wins 60% receives three…

Recall that a party that wins 40% of the vote in a single-member district wins nothing (lots of waste). But in a five-seat district, that same party wins two seats: instead of being wasted, nearly all of the votes contribute to representation.

Simultaneously, more than 500 scholars — including democracy, voting rights, and redistricting experts — released an open letter calling on Congress to adopt proportional representation. They write:

The requirement to use single-member districts was passed by statute in 1967. Congress has the authority to change it, bringing its electoral system into the 21st century. There should be little doubt that the single-member district system is failing to deliver fair and representative outcomes.

Emile Ayoub writes for the Brennan Center, where he is a senior counsel, that Congress must create new safeguards around the collection, integration, and misuse of people’s data. He writes that

[T]he Trump administration has ushered in a sea change in data consolidation, undermining privacy protections in its reported attempt to build a centralized database of government data. Many of these data troves have been funneled into DHS. And DHS is integrating some of that information with the voluminous personal data generated daily from our phones and online interactions, which the government can buy from data brokers. This data reveals some of the most intimate details of our lives, from religious affiliation to political preferences and more.

Ayoub writes that this kind of data integration makes it much easier for the Trump administration to monitor and target protesters, ramp up mass deportation, and target non-U.S. citizens based on their viewpoints.

He urges Congress to “close the data broker loophole, which government agencies exploit to obtain personal information from commercial entities without a court order,” and strengthen federal privacy laws including the Privacy Act.

Former CIA analyst Julia Curlee writes for Lawfare about “How the White House Broke the NSC and How to Fix It.” In 2025, Trump purged the National Security Council of most of its staff, breaking “the interagency coordination system that has managed U.S. national security since 1947,” and resulting in “serious miscalculations, from ill-conceived tariffs to the catastrophic planning failures in the run-up to the war with Iran.” Her proposal:

Post-Trump, she writes:

Staffing must return to the historical range of 100-200 policy professionals. Beyond headcount, the new NSC leadership will need to set clear expectations: broad policy options, objective analysis, and protection against retaliation for dissent….

Whatever the final mix of reforms, Congress and a new administration will need to ensure that a functional NSC is helping the president make good decisions, not shielding him from hard truths. Far from being the “enemies within,” career detailees are the institutional memory that tells a senior director which agencies need to be in the room, which classified programs can contribute, and which allied governments will need to be consulted for a policy to succeed.

Cerin Lindgrensavage, a counsel at Protect Democracy, and David A. Supe, a law professors at Georgetown University, write in The Hill that Congress needs to take action to stop Trump and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought from cutting the budget of federal programs that Congress has funded. They write:

Members of Congress concerned about preserving the constitutional Separation of Powers should warn Vought and agency officials to reverse these lawless actions or else face consequences. If that fails, criminal referrals to the Department of Justice are possible — if not now then during the first years of the next presidential administration, within the five-year statute of limitations.

Former federal prosecutor Nathan Reilly, writing for Just Security, has some fascinating thoughts about ways to reform the grand jury process to hold the government accountable. As he notes, and I’ve documented here:

Recently, scrutiny of the grand jury and renewed calls to strengthen it as a bulwark against government overreach have grown more intense as courts have determined that federal prosecutors have engaged in misconduct in seeking indictments.

Reilly suggests three changes to Rules 5, 6 and 16 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure:

These proposed reforms would require disclosure of the complete grand jury transcript to the court in every indicted case, give defendants access to the legal instructions delivered to the grand jury, and require prosecutors to confirm on the record that the legal instructions they provided to the grand jurors were legally accurate.

A Big Win for the Resistance

It worked! Months of intense pressure on Citizens Bank from protesters and city governments led the bank to stop financing major private prison operators GEO Group and CoreCivic on Friday.

As the Boston Globe reports: “After enduring months of anti-ICE protests at its bank offices, Citizens Financial Group is parting ways with two for-profit prison operators that oversee detention facilities for the federal immigration enforcement agency.”

The De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition, in a statement, called the move “an important victory for the people who refused to let a major bank finance human suffering brought on by ICE detention activities of the current federal administration.”

The bank, in its announcement, called the move “a business decision based on changed commercial circumstances” that “does not reflect any change in our view regarding these companies’ business models or operations.” The federal government is purchasing several facilities from the two companies, it said, which “has the effect of reducing the required capital of the companies going forward.”

But the De-ICE group didn’t buy it, saying “the reality is clear: public conscience and community resistance matter and have paid off.”

Vigils for ICE Victims

There will be vigils across the country on Saturday to mourn and demand justice for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastian Guerrero, the two men shot dead by ICE officers earlier this month in Texas and Maine. Find one near you.

The Week in the Courts

• A federal judge in California ordered the government to overhaul conditions at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in the Mojave Desert. U.S. District Judge Sunshine Suzanne Sykes laid out more than two dozen requirements for ICE to meet immediately, including 24-hour access to clean drinking water, “Nutritious and sanitary meals that contain a sufficient number of calories;” access to medical care, and at least four hours of access to the yard. A lawsuit on behalf of detainees had alleged inhumane conditions.

• A federal judge in Minnesota rejected the administration’s effort to force Minnesota to abandon its sanctuary laws. Judge Eric C. Tostrud wrote that the government’s attempts to preempt the state’s laws “violate the anticommandeering doctrine.”

• The Justice Department is now 0 for 16 in its attempts to obtain unredacted state voter rolls. A federal judge in Connecticut, Kari A. Dooley, noted that she had “the benefit of numerous (though non-binding) decisions by sister courts as to many of the issues presented.”

• A federal judge in Boston ruled that the Trump administration’s attempt to justify billions of dollars in funding cuts was based on a misreading of an obscure clause. Judge Indira Talwani sided with the 23 states that argued that the clause in question did not allow agencies to terminate grants based on shifts in priorities made after the grants were awarded.

• A federal judge in Texas barred the deportation of a witness in the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Araujo Salgado by ICE agents on July 7.

• A new legal brief alleges that DHS is violating an agreement it made almost 30 years ago that children may not be held in immigrant prison for more than 20 days unless the facility is nonsecure and licensed. The brief says thousands of immigrant children have been imprisoned at the Dilley detention facility in Texas for as many as 323 days under terrible conditions.

End Notes

• From the Huffington Post: “‘Free Them All!’: Inside The Fight To Close Delaney Hall.”

• From Colorado Public Radio: “GEO employee arrested in shooting of protester outside Aurora ICE facility.”

• From Seacoast Online: “Morning Resistance: Why a York [Maine] group protests Trump policies daily.”

Any hope that the Trump administration might voluntarily reform its brutal and sometimes murderous mass deportation campaign vanished this morning.

Public horror and protest over Trump’s immigration tactics reignited this past week after ICE agents recklessly fired into moving cars and killed two model citizens who happened to be immigrants, in Houston and Maine.

Yesterday, Department of Homeland Security officials responded to the outcry by temporarily banning most traffic stops — the practice that has preceded many of the most grievous attacks on immigrants and protesters.

This was seen by some as a sign that the Trump administration recognized that there was such a thing as “too far” to go to achieve Trump’s goals.

But today, we know better. There is no limit

In a post on Truth Social, Trump enthusiastically countermanded his DHS officials and gave an attaboy to the thugs terrorizing American cities and towns. He wrote that “The men and women of ICE are doing a GREAT job, one that has to be done.”

He falsely equated undocumented immigrants with criminals, and he wrote that in order to deport them, “we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!”

So the murders will continue. And the protests will continue.

Those protests had dwindled over the last several months as DHS shifted its tactics away from assaulting entire cities at a time to surging agents across the country. But then came two shocking murders.

On July 7, an ICE agent fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, a Mexican national who had lived in the U.S. for decades, as he drove his home-construction crew to a Houston job site. ICE issued its standard cover story – that he had rammed into the agents with his van, leading one of them to shoot in self-defense – but videos from the scene indicated that was a lie.

And on Monday, ICE agents in Biddleford, Maine, shot and killed Joan Sebastian Guerrero, 26, a Colombian immigrant who was driving with his partner and 3-year-old daughter. This time, ICE didn’t even try to claim self-defense. It said Guerrero was driving away and the agent fired because he was “fearing for public safety.”

Neither victim should have been pulled over in the first place; agents allegedly mistook them for their intended targets.

In Houston, family and local leaders immediately called for an investigation. The next day, a large crowd attended a vigil honoring Salgado Araujo and flooded the street where he had been killed.

Three days later, on Saturday, hundreds of protesters rallied outside Houston’s City Hall. And yesterday, residents packed City Hall demanding answers from city officials, while protesters again gathered outside.

The Houston Chronicle spotted protests in honor of Salgado Araujo in Los Angeles, Tampa, Detroit, Charlotte, Eugene, Ore., Broadview, Ill.

There have also been vigils and protest in an Austin church, in Dallas, in San Antonio, in Philadelphia, in Durham, N.C., in Santa Cruz, Calif., in Oklahoma City, and in Phoenix.

After Guerero’s killing in Maine, residents of Biddleford, population 22,000, came out of their homes in astonishing numbers. Hundreds mourned in a city park just hours after Guerrero’s death, many of them marching to the local office of Sen. Susan Collins and chanting “Vote her out.” Collins supported legislation to expand funding for ICE.

Protests have continued almost daily in Biddleford and nearby, including a protest yesterday outside an ICE facility in Scarborough, a few miles away.

There was a big protest yesterday in the state’s largest city, Portland, where hundreds demanded that ICE get out of Maine.

Also yesterday, protesters gathered in New York, Washington, D.C., and Boston.

The United Farm Workers posted on social media: “Another killing by ICE, this time in Maine. That’s twice in one week. How can America keep asking immigrant workers to work as usual if they are being shot dead on their way to work? Stop killing us.”

The two homicides brought attention to the nationwide deportation surge that’s been taking place in relative quiet for months — but is apprehending as many as 2,000 immigrants a day, a record number.

David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, explained the dynamics to Marcela García, a Boston Globe columnist.

“It really was a matter of time before this surge happened because they’re bringing on so many new officers,” Bier said. “They have so many new resources to spend. You’re talking about altogether over $100 billion of unspent money.”

Bier told Garcia the increase in arrests is also a product of the White House’s impatience. “Stephen Miller never backed off his agenda,” Bier said, referring to Trump’s deputy chief of staff and the main architect of his mass deportation campaign.

The Week in the Courts

• An infuriated federal judge in Florida ruled that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s grant of immunity to Trump from IRS audits was illegal. “Acquiescing to any such demand is wholly incompatible with the duties of DOJ attorneys,” Judge Kathleen M. Williams wrote. , making it clear that the deal was in no way a legitimate “settlement” of the case she had been hearing, in which Trump sued his own I.R.S. over the leak of his tax information by an agency contractor. “This action was never about a party seeking judicial resolution of a legal issue or a factual dispute,” she wrote. “The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the Parties and counsel from its filing make plain that this was an attempt to use the Court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law.”

• Four more losses for DOJ in its baseless attempts to obtain unredacted copies of statewide voter registration lists! On Friday, a federal judge in New York dismissed DOJ’s lawsuit there, bringing the government’s record to 0-12 in these cases. On Monday, a federal judge in West Virginia also dismissed the lawsuit against his state, making it 0-13. On Tuesday, federal judges in Virginia and New Mexico did the same. Now DOJ is 0-15.

• The chief federal district court judge in Washington, D.C., blocked the Trump administration’s visa limits for noncitizen social media researchers who work on such issues as misinformation, disinformation, and fact checking. “Much of American political debate consists of disagreement over whether a practice is liberty or regulation, safety or suppression, accountability or censorship,” Judge James E. Boasberg wrote. “The First Amendment does not permit officials to resolve that dispute by attaching legal burdens to the side they condemn.”

Must Click

• In the New Yorker, Jonathan Blitzer tells the moving stories of detainees held in Camp East Montana, the West Texas tent complex that is ICE’s largest detention center. He finds that deprivation and dire conditions are part of the design, in order to put maximum pressure on detainees to agree to their own deportations.

• The Guardian writes up a new report and interactive map documenting 412 verified incidents of the misuse of crowd control weapons such as teargas, rubber bullets and pepper spray to control protests outside ICE detention centers or during enforcement operations. The report was created by Physicians for Human Rights and the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

• From the Orlando Sentinel: “Alligator Alcatraz is no more. Tents, cars, signs disappear from airport site.”

• From the Redoubt: “ICE eyes 1,000-bed detention facilities in foreign countries.”

• From News 12 in the Hudson Valley of New York: “Opposition is mounting in the Town of Newburgh over plans for a potential Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility.”

• From the Miami Herald: “As work permits for Haitians with TPS expire, South Florida rallies to protect them.” Rallies have also been held in Springfield, Ohio, and Bridgeport, Conn.

• From the Center for American Progress: “The Trump Administration’s $1.7 Billion National Guard Deployments Fail To Reduce Urban Crime.”

• And there are more than 500 “Good Trouble Lives On” events taking place July 17 to 19. The events — named in honor of the late civil rights icon and Rep. John Lewis — are intended to continue the fight for voting rights with nonviolent collective action. Find one near you.

The occupation of Washington, D.C., by National Guard troops is nearly a year old. Donald Trump ordered the deployment of about 2,000 camouflage-uniformed personnel in mid-August 2025, ostensibly to fight crime.

But members of the Guard weren’t sent to high-crime areas. They were scattered across tourist corridors including Union Station, federal buildings, monuments, and other public spaces. Most recently, they’ve been seen chasing tourists away from Trump’s algae-clogged Reflecting Pool.

Their presence has done nothing to reduce violent crime in the city, which was already on the decline.

Instead, the Guard members have primarily served as a show of federal force and as a way of accustoming Americans to the presence of soldiers on their city streets, a dangerous precedent as Trump takes increasingly extreme steps to prevent Democratic victories in the midterm elections.

Trump hugely increased the Guard presence in the city in June to about 5,000. That’s way more than the city’s entire police department, which employs just over 3,000 sworn officers.

Historically, Guard members have been sent to Washington only by red-state governors. But a handful of blue-state governors agreed to send a few hundred of their Guard members to Washington for the summer, specifically to provide security for celebrations of the country’s 250th anniversary of independence – and not for Trump’s open-ended occupation.

That has provided activists with a new opportunity to push back against the Guard’s presence in the city.

Free DC, a popular grassroots organization dedicated to winning self-determination for Washington, sent its members out into the city to see how blue-state Guard members were being deployed. (They produced a handy guide to identifying Guard units by the stylized patches on their left sleeves.)

And they found Michigan Guard members far from the Mall, including this group stationed on a street corner in the Georgetown neighborhood.

On June 29, Free DC called for Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to send her troops home immediately.

And on July 7, a powerhouse coalition of civil-society groups sent a letter to Whitmer calling for her to withdraw troops who, “regardless of any assurances you may have received from the administration,… are not being used solely to assist with 250 events.”

The letter revisited the case against the overall deployment:

Governors aligned with the president have sent nearly 5,000 National Guard forces to DC to patrol neighborhoods throughout the city, purportedly for the purpose of controlling street crime, against the will of the people and the local government. As the State of Michigan recognized when it joined an amicus brief in litigation challenging the deployments, this show of military force for the purpose of policing civilians is unprecedented, dangerous, and unlawful. The use of the military to support civilian law enforcement should be a last resort in cases where emergencies have overwhelmed civilian authorities. That is clearly not the case in DC.

And it noted:

Perhaps most worrisome, the addition of Michigan’s Guard forces to the thousands of troops President Trump has already brought to DC threatens to normalize the misuse of the military perpetuated by this administration and allied governors. That normalization poses heightened risks as we move toward the November elections.

The Associated Press reports that Michigan’s deployment is due to continue through Aug. 31. Minnesota is set to withdraw its Guard members on Saturday, earlier than the planned July 23 return.

Washington’s City Paper reports that “Democratic governors Tim Walz (Minnesota), Wes Moore (Maryland), Andy Beshear (Kentucky), and Josh Stein (North Carolina) are removing their guards from D.C.” But I haven’t been able to confirm that.

Getting blue-state Guards out of D.C. doesn’t solve the problem, of course.

Free DC has long called for the entire Guard presence to leave. Its members yelled “Guard go home” and heckled and booed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and other top administration officials on July 2 when they held an outdoor event honoring Guard troops.

Hegseth, struggling to be heard, lashed out at the protesters. “This background noise this morning is perfect. It’s the sound of ingrates, of ingratitude, of people who are so blinded by ideology they can’t see law and order and common sense in front of them,” he said. You can also watch Miller trying to talk over the noise here.

Another Success for Bystander Video

Nebraska Public Media reports on how initial DHS claims about the arrest of an immigrant were belied by bystander video.

Gabriel Hurtado-Cariaco, a food delivery driver from Venezuela, was detained in Bellevue, Nebraska, last June. A DHS press release said he “violently attacked an ICE agent” by slamming her head into the ground and attempting to choke her to death. But as the article explains, “Under scrutiny, much of the government narrative crumbled.”

Two bystander videos of his arrest showed that he resisted being detained, at times pushing against the two agents who attempted to subdue him, but did not actively attack either of them. Prosecutors admitted that Hurtado-Cariaco had not choked the female officer as previously claimed, chalking it up to a “misperception” from the agent who wrote the affidavit that led to Hurtado-Cariaco’s arrest.

Here is one of the videos.

Originally indicted on charges of attempted murder of a federal officer, Hurtado-Cariaco pled guilty last week to one count of forcibly resisting arrest causing bodily injury. At the sentencing, U.S. District Court Chief Judge Robert Rossiter said that the allegations made in the initial complaint were “at worst a misrepresentation and at best complete negligence.”

It’s no surprise, then, that the family of a Mexican national shot and killed by an ICE agent in Houston on Tuesday is calling for an independent investigation, and the League of United Latin American Citizens is offering a $5,000 reward for information, video or witness testimony.

Last Week in the Courts

• A federal judge in Georgia quashed a subpoena from the Justice Department that would have forced Fulton County to turn over the names and detailed contact information for thousands of employees and volunteers who participated in election day activities in 2020. Judge William Ray wrote that “everyone, whether you support the President or you do not, or whether you believe the 2020 Election was fair or believe that it was not, should be concerned about the DOJ’s ability to utilize the power of the Grand Jury to appropriate your private information without a legitimate purpose.”

• A divided three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s injunction that blocked intelligence agencies from firing 19 career intelligence officers because of their work on diversity issues. “Among the promises of the Fifth Amendment is the requirement that no person be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” Judge Nicole Berner wrote. “This promise of due process has been construed to require federal government agencies to adhere to their own binding regulations.”

• A federal judge in Louisiana ordered the release from ICE custody of a nursing mother who was detained in violation of ICE’s own directive not to detain pregnant, postpartum, or nursing mothers unless there are “exceptional circumstances.” Judge David Joseph scolded government lawyers, who he wrote had “failed to comply with the Court’s invitation to demonstrate that Petitioner’s continued detention comports with the Directive.”

• A second federal judge blocked the U.S. Postal Service from determining who can vote by mail. I wrote last week that Judge Indira Talwani of Massachusetts had ruled that the USPS lacked any authority to do so. Now Judge Emmet G. Sullivan in Washington has ruled that the move would also violate a settlement agreement with the NAACP, in which the USPS promised timely delivery of election mail.

• A federal judge in Florida threw out a defamation lawsuit filed by Trump’s social media company against the Washington Post. As the Post reported, Judge Thomas Barber wrote in a summary docket entry that Trump’s company “failed to present evidence that would allow a jury to find by clear and convincing evidence” that the Post “published the allegedly defamatory statements with actual malice.”

• Public Citizen filed a lawsuit asking a judge to stop the Trump administration’s shocking practice of providing the Iranian government with confidential information from the immigration files of Iranians seeking asylum in the United States. The suite argues: “Disclosing their confidential information to the Iranian Government violates the asylum seekers’ confidentiality rights, endangers their family members and acquaintances who may still be residing in Iran, and puts those who are subject to removal to Iran… at risk of persecution, torture, and death following their arrival in Iran.”

• A New York resident is suing ICE for violating his First Amendment rights after it sent officers to his house with a warning because of an email he sent to former ICE chief Todd Lyons. In the email, David Streever called Lyons “a monstrous human being” who “will never know peace.” The “Warning Notice” from ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility – which is supposed to conduct internal investigations – declared “YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW.”

A Quaker Declaration of Resistance

The American Friends Service Committee has issued a “Declaration of Resistance”.

“The promise of freedom in the United States has always been incomplete, and in this moment, it is under direct and escalating threat,” organizers wrote in their announcement. “We are living through a time of authoritarianism. We see it in the erosion of civil liberties, in policies that target and divide our communities, and in the steady normalization of fear, exclusion, and control. These are not abstract dangers. They are unfolding before our eyes. And yet, this moment also calls something forward in us—a commitment to resist.”

You can sign the declaration here. It consists of three statements:

• Protect. I believe in the inherent dignity of all people. Everyone deserves to have their rights and freedoms respected. I will take action to protect people and communities whose rights are being violated.

• Resist. I will not help the government, law enforcement, or corporate entities violate the rights of others. I will not cooperate, share information, or provide services that will be used to facilitate repression and violence.

• Build. I pledge to join in collective nonviolent protest, mutual aid and community care to prevent the rise of authoritarianism and build a future based on freedom, equality, and justice.

End Notes

• From CNN: “US service member arrested at Capitol after calling for Trump’s impeachment.”

• From CBS Sunday Morning: “The battle over Stars and Stripes.”

• From Kenneth Roth in the Guardian: “Trump is a danger to US democracy. But the resistance is working.”

July Fourth – Independence Day – is the original, organic “No Kings” day. It celebrates the rejection of the tyrannical reign of King George in favor of a government that derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.

And the 250^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence should have been a heck of a party.

But for many of us, it’s impossible to celebrate this anniversary when it’s been coopted by a president who acts like a monarch and keeps being granted more monarchical powers – seemingly every day – by a fanatical Supreme Court and a subservient Congress.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said it clearly this week, in her dissent to the decision by her six extremist colleagues to give Trump absolute power over previously independent regulatory agencies established by Congress.

“The Court,” Sotomayor wrote, “gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.”

Anne Applebaum wrote in the Atlantic that “the Trump administration has destroyed the nation’s 250th-anniversary celebrations,” and that as a result, “Many people who might have participated will not attend, pay attention, or care.”

Paul Starr, writing in the American Prospect, saw a silver lining of sorts:

This is the worst year—and a perfect time—to commemorate the American Revolution. The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is arriving at a political moment wholly inconsistent with the Declaration itself. Our own leader is a would-be king, responsible for “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object,” namely his own power and glory, which he confuses with the nation’s.

The message Starr took from this moment is that “America still has work to do to make good on its founding promise.” Trump’s “return to rule by proclamation and prerogative, the very thing America’s founders abhorred and tried to prevent through constitutional restraints” makes that work more urgent, he wrote. “This year’s anniversary ought to reawaken that foundational opposition to arbitrary, personal rule, slumbering in the hearts of the president’s supporters.”

November Becomes Even More Important

Winning the House back from supine Republicans in the November midterm elections has been the top priority of the resistance for many months now. But a whole series of destructive (and racist) Supreme Court decisions has made taking the Senate feel more like a necessity as well – if nothing else to prevent Trump from appointing any more extremists to the high court. And polls show that a Democratic takeover is not impossible.

Just in the past week – in addition to its independent agencies decision – the high court has given Trump the authority to deport over 350,000 legal immigrants – most of them Haitian – back to their home country, despite Trump’s obvious racial animus. It allowed Trump to turn back asylum seekers at ports of entry, a violation of domestic and international law. It threw out a law that guarded against the corrupting effect of large campaign contributions flowing through party committees to candidates.

It could barely even bring itself to affirm birthright citizenship, which is explicitly guaranteed by the 14^th Amendment. It barely held that mail-in ballots don’t need to be received by Election Day in order to be counted.

Indeed, expanding the high court to marginalize its six racist, corrupt, and pro-monarchical members is also increasingly seen as an imperative for the next administration.

In the Lower Courts, More Resistance

• A federal appeals court panel rejected the Department of Justice’s attempt to force Michigan to turn over its voter rolls as part of Trump’s effort to disenfranchise as many voters as possible. This comes after district court judges in 11 states had ruled the same way. Judge Andre Mathis wrote that when Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 was enacted, “the government used this power to ensure that everyone who had the right to vote could freely exercise that right. But today, the government invokes Title III for an inverse purpose – to ensure that some people have not voted.”

• It was a federal district court judge in New Hampshire who issued that 11^th ruling against DOJ. Judge Joseph N. Laplante wrote that “DOJ’s demand did not contain a sufficiently stated basis and purpose as required to constitute a valid request, and that “the absence of any basis is independently fatal to the United States’ claim and provides an independent ground for dismissal.”

• A federal judge in Massachusetts voided key sections of Trump’s executive order attempting to seize control of voting from the states. Judge Indira Talwani ruled against a centralized lists of adult citizens, writing that “Congress, consistent with the Constitution, has left that authority to the States alone.” She also ruled against the U.S. Postal Service determining who can vote by mail. “No law enacted by Congress delegates authority to control mail-in voting to USPS,” she wrote.

• Another federal judge in Massachusetts permanently voided the other key sections of that same executive order – the ones requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and disqualifying ballots received after Election Day. Judge Denise Casper wrote that she had seen “no evidence” of widespread illegal voting. By contrast, she found a “substantial risk” that citizens would be disenfranchised.

• A federal judge in Washington once again ruled in favor of the New York Times in its ongoing First Amendment fight against the Department of Defense’s attempts to curtail press coverage at the Pentagon. Judge Paul L. Friedman initially enjoined the Pentagon from enforcing a new policy that banished real journalists from a Pentagon workspace in favor of those “willing to publish only stories that are favorable to or spoon-fed by department leadership.” He later ruled that the Pentagon violated his order when it responded by banishing everyone. He has now ruled against an “escort requirement,” writing that DOD is no longer entitled to a “presumption of regularity” and was illegally retaliating against the Times.

• Two different federal judges struck down a Trump administration rule that would have let the Education Department deny public servants the benefits of a student-loan-forgiveness program if their employers were engaged in such activities as assisting undocumented immigrants, providing gender transition care for minors, or engaging in diversity, equity and inclusion. Judge Myong J. Joun in Massachusetts vacated the rule, calling it “arbitrary and capricious” and in violation of the First Amendment. Judge Amir H. Ali in Washington also vacated the rule, citing some “pretty tortured statutory analysis” by the government.

• A federal judge in New York permanently prohibited the Trump administration from withholding funding for the $16 billion rail tunnel under the Hudson River. Judge Jeannette A. Vargas noted that the Trump administration did “not dispute that the suspension of federal grants flagrantly violates federal law,” but rather argued that the court lacked jurisdiction. She disagreed.

• A federal judge in New Jersey threw out a DOJ lawsuit against four “sanctuary” cities – Newark, Jersey City, Paterson, and Hoboken – for limiting assistance with federal civil immigration enforcement. Judge Evelyn Padin pointed out that the policies in question also existed at the state level and had been previously been upheld by the Third Circuit.

Prairieland Reaction – and Another Draconian Prison Sentence

I wrote last week about how two conservative federal judges in Texas sentenced eight anti-ICE protesters to a combined 450 years in prison – a staggering amount of time. One defendant shot a police officer outside the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. But several of the people sentenced to decades in prison were not remotely involved in the shooting, and one defendant, who wasn’t even at the protest, was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for transporting a box of zines, or political pamphlets.

Federal prosecutors alleged that they were members of an “antifa cell.”

Melissa Gira Grant, writing in the New Republic, called the sentences “a national emergency” and wrote “they are also a warning. This is not the last time the Trump administration will try to severely punish dissent. Opposing these sentences could help us stop the next one.”

Kim Wehle writes for Zeteo: “This is part of an increasingly disturbing pattern of the Trump administration criminalizing speech and assembly in the United States. And it should alarm us all.”

Lex McMenamin writes in the Guardian: “The federal government’s focus on the possession of leftwing literature, including zines, and other basic security measures common in our modern era – like owning Faraday bags, meant to block wireless signals to prevent surveillance; using the encrypted messaging app Signal; or dressing in all-black clothing – is alarming to activists.”

David Graham writes for the Atlantic:

The trial and sentences raise uncomfortable questions about protesting, political violence, speech, and equality under the law—especially when compared with the punishments meted out for those who fomented and participated in the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and the subsequent clemency granted to them.

Now a ninth person has been sentenced to decades in prison. KERA News reports that Ines Soto was sentenced today to 50 years. He was convicted of “rioting, providing material support to terrorism, conspiracy to use and carry explosives, and the use and carry of explosives — in this case, fireworks.”

Soto was involved in Signal group chats planning what was intended simply to be a noisy demonstration. He and two others “ran the Emma Goldman Book Club, where members shared anarchist and socialist literature in the form of zines or homemade booklets,” KERA reports.

Six other defendants who pled guilty were also sentenced today to as long as 15 years in prison, the Dallas Morning News reports.

Counter-Programming Trump’s Failed Events

Trump’s hilariously underattended “Great American State Fair” on the National Mall has been an incredible flop.

The scene was different at the Next250 “All of US” rally near the White House on Saturday, where the Guardian reports that more than a thousand people gathered as “organizers launched their Declaration of Interdependence, an art installation featuring the collective values they believe should define the next 250 years of America’s story.”

Those are:

• All people are treated with dignity and respect.

• Everybody feels safe in every community.

• Access to clean, green spaces is abundant.

• Every person who works earns a living wage and benefits that allow families work-life balance.

Marissa J. Lang reported for NPR:

It’s really meant to stand in direct contrast to the ways that we’ve seen the Trump administration honor America’s 250. There was that UFC fight on the White House front lawn a couple weeks ago. Right now on the National Mall, there’s blocks and blocks of this Great American State Fair. There have been military flyovers with B-2 bombers soaring over D.C. And what organizers of today’s protest told me is that all of this emphasis on American might and power and nostalgia kind of misses the point that none of this actually gets at American identity in all of its diversity and complexity.

End Notes:

• From the Texas Tribune: “Catholic bishop seeks information on ‘wildly disturbing’ ICE arrest of nun walking to South Texas church.”

• From Democracy Fund president Joe Goldman and Protect Democracy executive director Ian Bassin in the Philadelphia Inquirer: “The Trump Justice Dept. has forfeited the benefit of the doubt. Act accordingly.”

• From the Guardian: “Anti-ICE organizers shift focus to defend democracy from Trump assault.”

• From NPR: “Trump axed a Black history exhibit. Former park rangers are teaching it anyway.”

Day after day, federal district court judges are providing a clarity that is otherwise largely missing from the political discourse – certainly from the mainstream media – about the rampant illegality and unconstitutionality of actions taken by the Trump administration.

After thorough consideration of the cases before them, in carefully reasoned opinions based on facts, these judges are regularly reaching devastating conclusions about Trump’s lawlessness.

Judicial opinions are normally fairly dry recitations of facts and law, but these are blistering and dramatic – riveting, detailed, must-read accounts of how important government decisions are being made arbitrarily and maliciously, often in defiance of the law and the constitution.

These rulings are coming from judges you’ve heard of and judges you haven’t, judges in every part of the country, young judges and old judges, even some Trump-appointed judges.

And it makes sense. Their job is to judge. They are not pundits. They have no bosses to please, no corporate culture they must adapt to, and Trump can’t fire them.

Just by looking at the facts and the law, and reaching the obvious conclusions – simply by being very clear about what is really going on -- they have become heroes of the resistance.

Dismantling a Database

Consider Washington, D.C., federal judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan’s recent opinion ordering the dissolution of a massive new federal voter-verification database.

Plaintiffs, including the League of Women Voters, had sued, arguing that the database illegally consolidated millions of Americans’ sensitive and legally protected personal information and was leading to purges of voters – and criminal investigations -- based on outdated and inaccurate data.

Judge Sooknanan’s opening paragraph was a marvel of clarity and common sense:

This case implicates two fundamental rights that protect Americans from government overreach: the right to privacy and the right to vote. In the past year, several federal agencies have joined forces to create a centralized federal database that contains the private information of United States citizens, including Social Security numbers, citizenship status, and other sensitive data. But decades ago, Congress put protections in place to prevent precisely this type of centralized data bank. And the record in this case shows that the federal agencies that created this database knew that the database violates those statutory protections. The agencies were scrambling to comply with an Executive Order aimed at reshaping federal elections, which directed them to create a system for mass voter verification. So they haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable. Since then, states have partnered with the federal government to access the database and are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information. All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote. This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.

The judge declared the system “contrary to law, arbitrary and capricious, in excess of statutory authority, and without observance of procedure required by law.”

Quashing Coercion

Or consider how unequivocally Minnesota’s chief federal judge Patrick J. Schiltz quashed subpoenas from the Justice Department that were demanding a broad range of records relating to immigration enforcement from officials in his state.

First, Judge Schiltz laid out the extraordinary history of animus and insults and threats directed by Trump and his administration against “sanctuary” jurisdictions in general – and Minnesota in particular. He recounted Trump’s fury when Minnesota officials filed a lawsuit challenging the extraordinary surge of federal immigration agents into the Twin Cities. He included a link to Trump’s social media post the next day promising the “GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA” that “THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!” He linked to then-deputy attorney general Todd Blanche’s social media post warning Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey that “I’m focused on stopping YOU from your terrorism by whatever means necessary.”

The subpoenas were served less than a week later, and were followed up by a letter from then-attorney general Pam Bondi to Walz to the effect of, as she said on Fox News, “he better support President Trump, the men and women in law enforcement. Because if he doesn’t, we are.”

Judge Schiltz wrote:

Initiating a criminal investigation in order to harass political opponents or to coerce them into taking official action -- particularly official action that the federal government cannot directly require those political opponents to take -- is a blatantly unlawful and unethical use the grand-jury process.

And he then reached the obvious conclusion: that “the subpoenas were issued as part of an unconstitutional effort to coerce Minnesota officials into assisting the federal government with enforcing civil immigration laws and to harass and retaliate against them for failing to do so.”

He wrote that:

On the one hand, the evidence that the challenged subpoenas were issued for unlawful reasons is overwhelming. On the other hand, the Department has struggled-without success-to identify a single plausible investigatory justification for the subpoenas.

And he concluded:

The fact that connections between the information sought in the subpoenas and any possible criminal violation range from extremely weak to nonexistent only adds to the overwhelming evidence that these subpoenas were not issued to investigate, but to harass, coerce, and retaliate.

Ending Courthouse Arrests

Or consider the ruling by Judge P. Casey Pitts, in the Northern District of California, declaring a nationwide block on ICE’s policy of conducting arrests at immigration courthouses. He also ordered ICE to restore the 12-hour limit on detention in short-term holding facilities that it had waived last June. He wrote:

For 80 years, Congress has commanded federal agencies to think before they act. That instruction—codified in the Administrative Procedures Act—does not require an agency to make the choice that a reviewing court might deem preferable. But it demands that an agency at least provide sound reasons for following its chosen course.

And because the record before the Court demonstrates that ICE and EOIR [the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review] failed to provide reasoned explanations for their actions, the Court concludes that each of the challenged policies is arbitrary and capricious in contravention of the APA.

He wrote that the government’s purported rationales were “unconvincing,” and that the decision to remove previous restrictions on civil arrests at immigration courthouses resulted “not from merely unreasoned decisionmaking but a complete lack of decisionmaking.”

The clarity. They lack of hedging. The truth-telling. All so admirable – and rare.

Also in the Courts

• A federal judge in Maryland threw out the Department of Justice’s lawsuit demanding the state turn over its unredacted voter registration list. That brings DOJ’s record to 0-9 out of 31 such lawsuits. Judge Stephanie Gallagher, a Trump appointee, notably rejected a recent opinion published by DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel supporting the government’s argument. “This Court will not interpret the CRA [the Civil Rights Act of 1960] contrary to its text simply because an office of the party advancing that interpretation has adopted it,” she wrote.

• And former judges are making themselves heard, as well. The full D.C. Circuit Court will now decide whether Judge James Boasberg can investigate possible criminal contempt by DOJ and DHS when officials sent 137 Venezuelans to a prison in El Salvador in apparent violation of his court order. In April, a three-judge panel including two Trump judges voted 2-1 to block his investigation. The decision to rehear the case en banc came after 174 former federal and state judges filed an amicus brief arguing that the panel ruling was intended to aid the Trump administration, “whose conduct in this case illustrates an intent to push the limits of compliance with court orders.”

And Now for the Bad News

Two conservative federal judges in Texas on Tuesday sentenced eight anti-ICE protesters to a combined 450 years in prison – a simply outrageous amount of time – apparently because, as one of the judges reportedly stated from the bench, “the state wants to send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology.”

The protest outside the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, on July 4 of last year, turned violent when one protester, Benjamin Song, shot and injured a police officer. But some of the protesters who were given draconian sentences had nothing to do with the shooting.

As the Guardian reports, some of the defendants “were not involved in the planning, arrived separately at the protest, and left when guards at the facility asked them to do so.” Nonetheless, they were found guilty of riot and providing material support to terrorists and sentenced to decades in prison.

One defendant, Daniel Sanchez-Estrada, was not even at the protest. He was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for transporting a box of zines, or political pamphlets, that the prosecution claimed he moved so they wouldn’t incriminate his wife, who attended the protest.

Prosecutors argued the entire group was a “North Texas antifa cell” – and the judges bought it.

Meanwhile in California, a San Diego Superior Court judge sentenced nine anti-Trump protesters to up to two years in jail for their role in a brawl with Trump supporters who were holding a “patriots march” rally three days after pro-Trump mobs stormed the U.S. Capitol. Judge Daniel Goldstein said the defendants were trying to stifle Trump supporters’ First Amendment rights “for the benefit of antifa.”

Resistance Victories

The New York Times reports that “in a major turnabout,” ICE “is planning to offload seven warehouses purchased for more than $700 million by either giving them to other federal agencies or selling them outright.”

That leaves four to go, including one in Surprise, Arizona, where there have been sustained protests. The Arizona Mirror reports that community activists in Surprise are so frustrated by their city council’s refusal to oppose the ICE facility that they are moving to disincorporate the city, placing it “under the control of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which activists believe will be more amenable to local calls to act against the federal plan.”

The New York Times reports: “The Trump administration is abandoning its plan to dismantle a $368 million ocean monitoring system critical to understanding climate change and marine ecosystems, bowing to a bipartisan backlash on Capitol Hill.”

Alligator Alcatraz has shut down, bringing to an “ignominious close a $1.2 billion experiment that had once been hailed by Governor Ron DeSantis and President Donald Trump as a model other states should pursue.” That’s from CBS News in Miami.

On MS NOW, Rachel Maddow had a great rundown on Monday of how Trump folds under pressure.

It’s All About November

The ACLU is devoting massive new resources to stop Trump and state lawmakers from interfering in the 2026 midterm elections.

“The ACLU is laser-focused on ensuring that every eligible voter can vote, that ballots are fairly counted, that elections are properly certified, and that the will of voters is respected,” the group says.

The group’s “largest ever volunteer mobilization and training program” includes the training of “10,000 volunteers across the country to monitor polling sites and protect election results in their communities.”

The group will also deploy staff and volunteers to monitor the elections in all 50 states and Washington D.C., with a special focus on six battleground states.

End Notes

• From MS NOW: “Todd Blanche hit with state bar complaint backed by 101 former judges.”

• From the Wall Street Journal: “ABC Launches On-Air Campaign Against FCC Investigations.”

• From the New York Times: “Former NOAA Employees Revive Climate Site Shut by Trump Administration.”

• From NorthJersey.com: “Woman outside Delaney Hall struck by car while waving an American flag.”

• From the New Jersey Globe: “McIver asks appeals court to dismiss federal charges tied to Newark detention center confrontation.”

• From the New York Times: “ICE Protester Says He Was Shackled in Hospital for Days After Agents’ Attack.”

• From the New Republic: “D.C. Hit With Prank Projections Ahead of Trump’s July 4 Celebrations.”

• From the D.C. Media Group: “Team Algae Trolls Trump’s Botched Paint Project At The Reflecting Pool.”

• From MoveOn.org, a petition: “Helping your neighbor is not a crime, and we refuse to be bullied and intimidated into silence and fear. Drop the charges against the Minnesota 15 now!”

The Trump administration took another major step toward criminalizing the resistance on Tuesday when the Justice Department unsealed grave federal criminal charges against 15 people involved in anti-ICE protests during the government’s violent immigration crackdown in Minneapolis this winter.

The 15 were charged with conspiring to impede federal officers, with some facing additional charges such as interstate stalking and assault, based mostly on traditional community organizing tactics around blockades and the tracking of ICE agents. (Well, that and a few dents in an ICE vehicle.)

The “overt acts” of a violent “antifa” conspiracy cited in the indictment mostly consisted of transcripts of group messages on Signal where participants engaged in protected political speech. Homeland Security agents raided the protesters’ homes early Monday morning.

The Justice Department is hardly making a secret of its intent to send a message. Minnesota U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen announced that the “charges and arrests reflect a broad federal effort to address organized lawless behavior, which seeks to disrupt the execution of federal law, endanger law enforcement, and importantly endanger the very communities that these defendants falsely claim to be protecting.”

But coming amid a slew of other federal prosecutions of protesters (most of which have failed) and after a Trump executive order that redefined opposition to Trump as terrorism, it’s obvious that the real goal is political repression. The Trump administration has resistance activists in its sights and is perverting its law enforcement powers in an attempt to silence them.

Progressive leaders in Minneapolis were quick to condemn the charges. “They represent the latest chapter in a federal operation that has repeatedly divided communities and raised serious questions about civil liberties, transparency and accountability,” Monica Bryon, president of the state teachers union said in statement. She continued:

During Operation Metro Surge, Minnesotans checked on neighbors, helped students, supported families in crisis and delivered food and essential supplies. Those acts of compassion and solidarity are not crimes. They reflect Minnesota values.

Yet while community members face charges, Minnesotans are still waiting for answers and accountability in the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

Four Minneapolis City Council members decried the indictment as “an act of political repression meant to intimidate and terrorize the same people who have been caring for our neighbors and keeping our communities safe from violent immigration agents.” They continued:

Trump sent masked secret police to terrorize our community and occupy our city. They were forced out by the overwhelming resistance of neighbors who stared down guns and chemical weapons with nothing but whistles and phones in their hands. Families were torn apart, and our neighbors, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were gunned down in the street for daring to stand in solidarity, and still Minneapolis refused to back down.

Across the world, Minneapolis residents are seen as heroes for the ways we resisted fascism and took care of our neighbors. Our collective bravery and solidarity exposed the true costs of the Trump administration’s fascist playbook. Now, with the tide of public opinion working against Trump, they are turning to legal retaliation to deflect from their massive failure to improve quality of life for working class people. The retaliatory tactics this administration is using today are frightening– but they are a sign of weakness.

Spencer Ackerman, writing in his “Forever Wars” newsletter, has more on how the indictment is “the latest turn of the ratchet in criminalizing resistance to ICE.” And he notes that “Nowhere in the indictment is there even an account of anyone being hurt as the result of any act by anyone accused.”

U.S. Marshals assaulted Twin Cities protesters

Let’s be clear: When it comes to violence at anti-Trump protests, it is almost exclusively the protesters who are the victims, and the federal agents who ought to be prosecuted (and maybe, someday, will be).

As if to illustrate that very point, U.S. Marshals viciously attacked peaceful protesters who had gathered outside the St. Paul federal courthouse where the indictment was unsealed on Tuesday.

You’ve really got to watch this video. It starts with a young woman politely talking to a U.S. Marshal in the open doorway of the courthouse as several dozen protesters chant anti-ICE slogans outside. Then the marshals attack.

They throw aerosol grenades into the crowd, they shoot pepper spray wildly, they viciously throw one protester to the ground.

Pilar Pedraza reported for KSTP TV:

Witnesses tell me that what was going on at the time is that they were holding the doors open, so that you could hear the chants inside the building, when suddenly somebody saw folks putting on gas masks inside the courthouse. And all of a sudden they came out and started spraying a chemical irritant at them.

Pedraza interviewed the woman in the doorway. “I’m shocked. I’m disgusted,” the protester said. “But more than anything, I am not leaving. I know that they tried to scare us and intimidate us and push us away from solidarity. It’s not going to work. We want justice.”

It’s outrageous. But for people to get outraged, they’d have to hear about it first. In this case, coverage was scant and dismissive. As I’ve written in my Press Watch column, news organizations routinely cover up the one-sided nature of the brutality.

Case in point, the Minnesota Star Tribune simply described it as a “brief struggle between U.S. marshals and protesters.”

The AP published some shocking video, but under the anodyne headline: “Protesters clash with US Marshals in St. Paul, Minnesota.”

Crushing dissent is a White House priority

New evidence of how important squelching protest is to the White House emerged on Monday -- buried in a New York Times article based on a new book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. The article was primarily about how administration figures including Stephen Miller have sought to abolish habeas corpus – something we knew already.

The real news was that Vice President JD Vance unsuccessfully pushed to invoke the Insurrection Act in January, just days after federal agents killed Alex Pretti.

He wanted to deploy the military to quell the growing public outcry in Minneapolis.

The authors described a senior White House staff meeting where Vance argued that Trump “needed to invoke the Insurrection Act, swiftly, to crush the unrest in Minnesota.” They wrote: “It would be painful in the short term, he said, but the message it would send — that paid agitators could not get away with disrupting ICE operations — would make sure no one tried it again.” (Of course they’re not paid.)

When a federal case falls apart

The spectacularly failed Justice Department prosecution of the “Broadview Six” anti-ICE protesters in Chicago continues to spawn fascinating developments.

The defendants are now asking Judge April M. Perry to appoint a special counsel to “investigate the misconduct of certain individuals from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois and, if the evidence supports it, prosecute such individuals for criminal contempt.”

As I wrote last week, transcripts from the grand jury proceedings that resulted in the indictment revealed jaw-dropping abuse of the process by federal prosecutors.

Indeed, the government is so eager to avoid any further discovery that it has informed the defendants that it will not argue against paying their legal fees – even without knowing how much those fees will be.

And Jamie Raskin, the House Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat, is calling for an immediate investigation of U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros. Raskin wrote in a letter to federal and state officials that “Mr. Boutros’s misconduct has done incalculable damage to public confidence in his office, in the Department of Justice, and in the rule of law.”

Yet more intimidation

More than a hundred federal agents last week raided the offices of Ohio Organizing Collaborative — the state’s leading voter registration group — and “fanned out across the state to interview people who have worked with the collaborative and in some cases seized their electronic devices such as phones and laptops,” the Ohio Capital Journal reported.

The intent was obvious.

“I am deeply concerned that this is an effort to use federal law enforcement to intimidate and halt voter registration and organizing efforts,” Rep. Shontel Brown, who represents Cleveland, said in a statement. “This is an unprecedented attack on democracy,” she said. “Unfortunately, this appears to be part of a systematic effort by Trump and Kash Patel’s FBI to attack our elections and perpetuate more myths of voter fraud – all to undermine and challenge any election result that Trump does not agree with. It’s an attack on the People.”

Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice, called the raids “troubling” and “outrageous.” He wrote:

This gives every indication of being an extraordinary abuse of power. It is part of a strategy that aims to intimidate voters and those who would help them exercise the franchise.…

What will be produced by this massive display of prosecutorial force? Probably not much of anything but — its progenitors likely hope — dread. If citizens are afraid to register to vote, or to help others register, mission accomplished.

In fact, the strategy seems focused not on enforcing the law but fomenting fear.

Delaney Hall update

There’s almost no media coverage anymore of the continued vigil outside the Delaney Hall immigrant detention center in Newark, now in its 26^th day.

Status Coup News, an independent streaming-video outlet, documented more ICE brutality there on Monday night. A small group of protesters were lined up in the parking lot blocking traffic and chanting in support of hunger strikers when dozens of masked and armored federal agents emerged from the gates and attacked them with pepper spray, shoving them, and violently arresting at least one person who appeared peaceful to me.

Something similar happened on Friday night, again via Status Coup News. This time, ICE agents came out in force and immediately deployed pepper spray and pepper balls to push the blockading protesters back.

Meanwhile, there appears to be new activity inside the hall. The Guardian reported last week that nearly 40 women have joined the ongoing hunger and labor strike.

NJ.com cites reports that many of the male strikers have been transferred out of the facility. And it notes that the hunger strikers “are not starving themselves entirely” but rather “are refusing to eat the food provided by the GEO Group, while strictly rationing food they purchase at the Delaney Hall commissary.”

MS NOW’s Antonia Hylton on Tuesday interviewed Marianne Delaney, whose aunt Geraldine is the building’s namesake. It used to be a rehab facility, before the GEO Group turned it into a private detention center.

What would her aunt think about what’s going on now?

“I think Geraldine will be horrified,” Marianne Delaney said. “She was all about recovery and healing and giving people a second chance in life. She saved lives. She spent 50 years working as a pioneer in addiction and alcohol treatment, and she is known and renowned globally for her work.”

She continued: “It was intended as a 250 bed facility, to do good, to save people’s lives. Not to be a warehouse for human despair, which it appears to have turned into.”

Democrats from the House Homeland Security Committee are holding a field hearing in Newark about Delaney Hall this afternoon. In his opening statement, ranking member Bennie G. Thompson of Mississippi decried the Trump administration for launching “the most cruel, inhumane, and unlawful immigration policies in modern history.” He continued:

We have all heard the horrific accounts coming out of Delaney Hall—and many of my colleagues here today have witnessed them firsthand. We’ve seen detainees living in inhumane conditions, mistreatment and abuse by staff, and food contaminated with worms and maggots. These are not isolated incidents. These are symptoms of a system collapsing under secrecy, neglect, profiteering, and disregard for human life. Let me be clear: every person detained in this country — regardless of immigration status — is entitled to basic human dignity.

They are entitled to safe and sanitary shelter, necessary medical care, access to legal counsel, and edible food. These are not luxuries. They are the minimum obligations of a government that detains human beings. Facilities like Delaney Hall are required to meet standards of care. What we have seen and heard makes one thing undeniable: those standards are being violated.

A major new resistance figure

Janeese Lewis George, a democratic socialist and ferocious critic of Trump’s interventions in her city, appears to have won the Democratic nomination for mayor of Washington, D.C. (The November general election is a formality in D.C., given the overwhelmingly Democratic electorate.)

She has promised to be much more resistant to Trump than the current mayor, Muriel Bowser. “Complying in advance has never helped a community, especially one under an authoritarian leadership like the one we are currently experiencing in the White House,” Lewis George has said.

Trump last week threatened a federal takeover of the city if Lewis George won.

She responded: “Threatening Home Rule because you do not like how residents vote is an attack on democracy itself.”

So stay tuned.

In the Courts

• A federal judge in Massachusetts ordered the Trump administration to restore information about subjects like slavery and climate change it had removed from displays in national parks. Judge Angel Kelly wrote that “The government’s stewardship of these park sites… carries a responsibility to present history in full rather than in favored fragments. Unfortunately, the Government has disregarded these principles.” She concluded “Not only does this undermine the integrity of the National Parks; it sets a dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization.”

• A federal judge in Maryland struck down Trump administration rules that could have stripped more than a million people of their Affordable Care Act insurance coverage by shrinking sign-up windows and heightening eligibility verification — ostensibly in an effort to reduce fraud. Judge Brendan A. Hurson wrote that “The circular reasoning and conclusory statements offered to justify the policy change are not indicative of reasoned decision-making.”

• A coalition including conservation and historic preservation groups has filed suit seeking to protect West Potomac Park, a popular recreational haven near the Mall, from being turned into a “National Garden of American Heroes” featuring statues of 250 people Trump approves of, starting with Christopher Columbus.

End Notes

• From the Nation: “Raucous Protest Is Coming to the Joyless World Cup.”

• From the Jersey Bee: “Why we’re calling Delaney Hall a ‘concentration camp’.”

• From the Washington Post: “Ms. Rachel goes to Washington, carrying letters from children in ICE custody.”

It’s all about the November election for the next five months, as resistance groups work towards what they hope will be a massive electoral repudiation of Trumpism.

It’s time to mark your calendar for these major events:

June 14: Rise Up, Sing Out: A Concert for the First Amendment

The No Kings Coalition is behind a star-studded concert and nationwide watch parties intended as counter-programming to Trump’s cage fight obscenity on the South Lawn. Jane Fonda, Bette Midler, Rufus Wainwright, Patti Smith, and many others will headline the main event at the Town Hall in New York City. Watch parties will “create a massive night of localized, relational organizing across the country.”

The organizers explain: “Moving beyond mass street mobilizations, June 14 will serve as a critical opportunity for No Kings supporters to strategize, connect with local organizers, and prepare for the ongoing fights ahead of the midterm elections.”

Find an event near you here. Extremely expensive tickets for the concert in New York can be purchased at riseupsingout.com.

June 17-20: Juneteenth Week of Action

The civil rights leaders behind the All Roads Lead to the South National Day of Action in Alabama last month have announced the first event of what they are calling “Freedom Summer,” in honor of the historic 1964 voter registration and education campaign.

The Juneteenth Week of Action includes events in Atlanta on June 17 and a June 20 rally in Harlem.

June 27: A Nationwide Mobilization for Truth, Equality & Freedom

Ahead of America’s 250^th anniversary, organizers of this mobilization say their goal is “to repair our history rather than erase it, ensuring America lives up to its foundational ideals for all of us.” The day will feature marches, rallies, and protests across the country “to reject the whitewashing of our past and future.”

Find an event near you here. Or host one yourself. Partner organizations include 50501, the Women’s March, and Common Cause.

July 17-19: Good Trouble Lives On Weekend of Action

Adopting the phrase coined by civil rights icon Congressman John Lewis, Good Trouble events will “carry the torch of the civil rights movement by doing what Lewis loved most – organizing, educating, and taking action,” organizers say. Partner organizations include the ACLU, 50501, Public Citizen, and Common Cause. The three calls to action:

• TEACH our community members about the critical fight for our freedom to vote

• REACH out to our neighbors to bring them into this movement

• PREACH to our loved ones about the moral necessity to carry the torch of the civil rights movement

There will be a virtual training session on June 11, “to learn how you can host a voter registration event and support your community in ensuring they can exercise their freedom to vote.” Are you a lawyer? A June 17 training session will focus on “how you as an attorney can help provide legal knowledge and support for one of the nationwide voter registration events in your area.”

August 8: Unite & Rise for Voting Rights

The League of Women Voters and its partners are hosting a nationwide day of civic action in honor of the anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

“Leagues and partners will lead hundreds of activations across the country centered on increasing voter engagement, turnout, and education, with particular emphasis on young voters and community partnerships,” organizers say. Anchor events will be held in Phoenix, San Francisco, Atlanta, Detroit, and Michigan.

It’s part of the League’s Unite and Rise 8.5: An Initiative to Defend Democracy.

September 15: National Voter Registration Day

Last year, 3,200 local organizations joined forces to help Americans register to vote or update their registration on National Voter Registration Day.

October 3: Power to the People Fest

At his Washington concert last month, Bruce Springsteen announced that his guest guitarist, Tom Morello, would curate a Power to the People Fest at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, MD, on October 3. The lineup is phenomenal, including Springsteen, the Foo Fighters, Dave Matthews, Joan Baez, Public Enemy, and many more.

Organizers say the event will be “about the power everyday human beings have when they come together — through music, art, community and action — to shape our country and our planet on, and beyond, Election Day.”

In an “immersive space” called Freedom Village, nonprofits and community groups will “highlight ways to get involved through civic engagement, grassroots organizing and mutual aid.”

Portions of the proceeds will be donated to VoteRiders, and HeadCount will help fans register to vote.

Inside and Outside Delaney Hall

The vigil outside Delaney Hall, the immigrant detention center in Newark, is about to enter its third week.

Protesters are once again facing off against ICE agents. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka had sent Newark Police in to de-escalate the situation after ICE agents and New Jersey state troopers repeatedly attacked protesters. But he has now pulled back.

As a result, as AMNY reported, on Friday night ICE agents shot protesters with pepper balls, and a prison employee struck a photographer with their vehicle.

On Monday, N.J. Gov. Mikie Sherrill was finally allowed into the facility. But, she said, “I was not allowed to meet or speak directly with the detainees, which continues to raise serious questions about the real conditions of the facility and the treatment of those held there.”

Ms. Rachel, the beloved children’s YouTube star, paid a visit on Monday. “Met the sweetest children whose hearts are broken,” she posted on Instagram. “They just want their parents home again. I spoke with a 13 year old whose dad is in Delaney. ‘He’s a wonderful father’ she said, tearing up,” she wrote. “It makes no sense that their family has been ripped apart. Why are we traumatizing kids?.. I will always stand with these families.”

The American Friends Service Committee reminds us that inside Delaney Hall, detainees have issued four letters of demands. They are calling for:

• The immediate release of all detained people. They are prioritizing the elderly, pregnant, young people, and those with serious medical conditions—while insisting that all detained individuals deserve to pursue their cases outside of detention.

• Meaningful and fair review of immigration cases and habeas petitions.

• An end to coercive pressure to sign deportation or voluntary departure documents.

• An in-person meeting with Gov. Mikie Sherrill at Delaney Hall so she can observe conditions and hear directly from detained people.

More Vindication for the “Broadview Six”

Transcripts from the grand jury proceedings that resulted in the indictment of the “Broadview Six” anti-ICE protesters in Chicago were released on Tuesday, revealing jaw-dropping misconduct by federal prosecutors.

Many observers had suspected that grand jurors had been railroaded into supporting trumped-up politically-motivated charges.

Wow were they right.

The transcript for the October 9 session shows that Assistant U.S. Attorney Sheri Mecklenburg personally vouched for the credibility of the case and argued the case rather than simply presenting it, two massive violations of grand jury rules. Nevertheless, the grand jury did not indict.

A week later, she came back to try again -- and kicked several people who had expressed skepticism about the case off the grand jury, which is not allowed. (One of them told her “I heard this case like last week and I thought it was a crock of shit then and I still think it is.”)

A week after that, she admitted to having talked to two grand jurors outside the grand jury room, another gross violation of grand jury rules. The jurors finally gave in.

Did this happen because of pressure from the White House? Defense attorneys have filed a motion seeking any communications between Washington and Chicago. So stay tuned.

Last Week in the Courts

• A federal judge in Rhode Island struck down immigration policies that have halted asylum processing, frozen immigration benefits, and targeted immigrants based on nationality. Judge John J. McConnell Jr. assailed “a series of policies that threw the lives of countless immigrants living in the United States into indeterminate legal limbo.” Citing the line that if people want to immigrate to the United States they ought to “follow the law” and “do things the right way,” McConnell wrote that “This case serves as a perfect example of immigrants doing just that.” By contrast, he wrote, the government had done neither. He also slammed DHS for “pretextual concerns of ‘national security’ that mask anti-immigrant sentiments that it is forbidden from letting influence its decision-making.”

• A federal judge in Washington struck down Trump’s move to impose $100,000 fees on employers seeking visas for skilled foreign workers. Judge Leo T. Sorokin said the “payment requirement amounts to a tax, which exceeds the scope of the President’s discretionary authority.”

• A federal judge in Washington struck down an Internal Revenue Service guidance that restricted tax credits for wind and solar projects, finding it “arbitrary and capricious.” Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote that “Defendants failed to articulate a reasoned explanation for this consequential decision.”

• Two members of the publisher’s advisory board for Stars and Stripes, the military’s independent newspaper, have filed suit seeking to block implementation of a U.S. Department of Defense memo that would effectively end the newspaper’s editorial independence.

End Notes

• From Sherilyn Ifill: “The SCOTUS Project to Undo Voting Rights Protections is Nearly Complete.”

• From the Associated Press: “What to know about the growing opposition to Trump family-linked resort in Albania.”

• From the “prophetic preachers” who spoke at “Moral Monday” in Washington: “Truth In A Time Of Lies.”

It will take a massive electoral defeat to put Trumpism fully behind us.

That’s why the fall of Viktor Orban is such a talisman for democracy-loving Americans. Hungarians overwhelmingly threw out their entrenched, corrupt, authoritarian leader in April.

What can we learn from them about how to cleanse the country of ours?

I wrote a bit about this when it happened. My initial takeaway was that if Hungary is a model, then the way to motivate voters across party lines is with a more aggressive, principled, and insurgent pro-democracy agenda than anything the current Democratic leadership is offering right now.

Now M. Gessen, New York Times opinion columnist and my go-to for all things Eastern European, has weighed in with a must-read piece headlined “This Is the Formula That Defeated Orban. It Would Defeat Trump, Too.”

She writes that one lesson of now-Prime Minister Peter Magyar’s success “lies in the scale, reach and relentlessness of his organizing network.“ Magyar had somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 volunteers. The U.S. population is 36 times the size of Hungary’s, so that would equate to at least a million people here.

Another lesson: “Old-fashioned in-person politics can be a powerful antidote to media fearmongering.” Magyar was a relentless campaigner.

Another lesson: “Don’t mince words.” Magyar didn’t just call Orban’s regime “corrupt,” he “called it a mafia state — a fundamentally criminal enterprise.”

Another lesson: Be an outsider. Magyar “was not a member of the old opposition, whose policies had led to the discontent that made Orban’s rise possible and whose timidity had helped perpetuate Orban’s power.”

Another lesson: Voters don’t only care about pocketbook issues. Post-election polling showed that Hungarian voters saw corruption as the most important issue by far, way more than the economy, and also frequently cited “lies,” “fearmongering, war rhetoric,” and “people got fed up.”

Gessen writes:

In other words, Hungarians seemed to see the damage that Orbanism had done to the nation as more important than any harm they felt they had suffered as individuals. They were united by a sense of moral outrage.

Gessen also gives Magyar credit for thinking big:

In his inaugural speech to Parliament, broadcast on giant screens set up around the square, Peter Magyar said that voters had handed him a mandate “not just to change the government, but to change the system. To start over.

So, here’s my takeaway: Hungary tells us the way to beat an authoritarian is with an enormous popular movement led by uncorrupted, charismatic people full of moral outrage and committed to radical reconstruction.

So does that mean the answer lies in a group like Indivisible, rather than the current Democratic party? And in someone like AOC, not someone like Josh Shapiro?

What do you think?

Day 13 in Newark

Protests outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark are in their 13^th day, while an unknown number of immigrants inside remain engaged in a hunger and labor strike to call attention to the facility’s inhumane conditions and the denial of their due process rights.

I wrote last week about how ICE had begun routinely assaulting protesters outside the facility.

In a strange turn of events, New Jersey’s Democratic Governor Mikie Sherrill on Friday sent state police to Delaney to take over from ICE, whose conduct she decried as too aggressive. ICE itself posed a threat to public safety, she said. Exactly right.

But not long after the state troopers arrived on Friday night, they broke out the riot gear and the horses, and took up where ICE had left off, firing tear gas and shooting pepper spray at protesters with little or no provocation.

On Saturday night, troopers – now using flash-bang grenades as well -- aggressively pushed protesters more than half a mile away from the facility. And early on Sunday, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka – an outspoken opponent of Delaney Hall – nevertheless declared a curfew, violating the First Amendment rights of protesters who up until then had been holding a round-the-clock vigil.

Sunday night, when several dozen entirely peaceful protesters refused to leave at nightfall, troopers again responded with violence, shooting at least two people with rubber bullets and arresting 61 people, including at least two credentialed photojournalists.

On Monday, Baraka sent Newark Police officers – notably not in riot gear or on horseback -- to take over from the troopers. Monday and Tuesday nights were calm. The curfew has also been lifted.

Meanwhile, the situation inside Delaney Hall appears unchanged.

Indivisible is hosting a Zoom briefing on “Delaney Hall and Beyond: Showing Up Strategically” Thursday at 8 p.m. ET, “for anyone looking for what to do in this moment to support the strikers and nonviolently take on Trump’s detention and deportation machine.”

This is Very Bad

A federal jury in Spokane, Washington, last week found the “Spokane Three” guilty on felony conspiracy charges for their part in a June 2025 anti-ICE protest.

Felony charges!

Jac Archer, Justice Forral, and Bajun Mavalwalla II were found guilty of “conspiring to impede law enforcement officers or injure property used in the execution of their duties.” They face up to six years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

As the Spokesman-Review reported:

The case widely examined the lines between the First Amendment and when assembly can turn into a crime. Protesters that day had showed up to Spokane’s ICE facility at 411 W. Cataldo Ave. to sit in front of a bus to prevent it from taking a group of immigrants to a federal detention center in Tacoma. The initial group that stationed themselves in front of the bus, including Archer, had intended to remain nonviolent and were prepared to be arrested.

When protesters saw agents attempting to leave out of a parking lot gate, they ran to the gate and stood in front of it. Agents then came outside, walked into the crowd and began pushing and grabbing people, pulling them towards the ground, video footage from the trial showed.

At some point, protesters slashed the tires of the transport vehicles and others linked arms around a red U.S. Customs and Border Patrol van to stop it from leaving.

As Robert Chang, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, told The Guardian: “By this logic, any protest could be a conspiracy.”

Archer’s attorney, Carl Oreskovich, told the Spokesman-Review:

I think it was an extraordinarily aggressive approach to prosecution of protests. And it certainly is going to chill people who want to utilize their First Amendment right to dissent against government actions that they don’t agree with … And it is heartbreaking to see that is the climate of the nation we live in.

By contrast, it’s a dream come true for the fascism-adjacent, like the Manhattan Institute, which as Wired reports is working hard “to classify minor protest-related crimes as ‘civil terrorism.’”

The goal is “to pass state-level legislation reclassifying minor crimes like vandalism, blocking a roadway, or trespassing during a protest as felonies that would carry 18-month prison sentences as punishment,” Wired reports.

This comes “amid a broader Trump administration effort to crack down on leftist organizations, causes, and social movements, while recasting acts of nonviolent civil disobedience as potential crimes.”

MoveOn’s Next Move

MoveOn rolled out its 2026 midterm election strategy last week. The plan is to reach out in particular to people who – for whatever reason -- voted for Joe Biden in 2020 but sat out the 2024 election when Kamala Harris was the Democratic nominee.

A Pew Research Center analysis found that 15 percent of Biden voters – or about 12 million people – did not vote for Harris. MoveOn puts that number at 19 million.

MoveOn is calling those missing voters the “skippers,” and it intends to mobilize tens of thousands of volunteers to find them and win them back. That will entail contacting and persuading skippers directly, as well as volunteering for progressive candidates, and canvassing.

“These are the most important voters for us, and the outcome of the midterms rests on bringing hundreds of thousands of them back into the fold,” MoveOn Executive Director Katie Bethell said.

Warehouse Watch

NBC News reports that DHS is “looking into selling some of the large warehouses that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had purchased earlier this year to serve as mega-detention centers for immigrants.”

DHS officials told NBC that ICE no longer needs the capacity to hold 100,000 immigrants.

ICE is currently detaining as many as 70,000 immigrants on a daily basis.

Project Salt Box reports that DHS paid just over $1 billion for the eleven warehouses it bought this year, and is unlikely to recoup anywhere near as much. “A review of state tax and land records and commercial sales data shows the government paid above the most recent valuation at every one of the sites and above recent market comparables at most of them,” the group reports. “In Socorro, Texas, ICE paid $123 million for a property last valued at about $11 million. In Flowery Branch, Ga., it paid $68 million for a site previously valued at $400,000….” The list goes on.

You’re Being Tracked

A broad coalition of grassroots, civil-rights and press-freedom groups has launched a new campaign called “Solidarity Over Surveillance” to “engage individuals, communities and organizations in the fight against corporate and government-sponsored surveillance.”

Its goals are “to stop data brokers from selling sensitive user information to law enforcement; protect dissent, privacy and anonymity in an age of AI-powered surveillance; empower people to use open-records requests to expose local and state governments’ surveillance partnerships; help mobilize local resistance to the construction of extractive data centers; and challenge the government’s weaponization of domestic-terrorism powers.”

The Past Week in the Courts

• A federal judge in Virginia blocked all activity related to Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund for insurrectionists and other political allies. Plaintiffs represented by Democracy Forward had filed suit against the fund on May 22. The issue is probably moot now that acting attorney general Todd Blanche has said the fund has been scrapped. But you never know.

• A federal judge in Washington prohibited the National Park Service from taking action against a group for displaying an “8647” flag as part of its protest encampment near the National Mall. The ruling by Judge Randolph D. Moss bodes poorly for DOJ’s preposterous indictment of former FBI director James Comey for posting a photo of seashells arranged into the same numbers. “Not every use of the slang phrase ‘86’ constitutes a threat of violence,” Moss wrote. “[T]o the contrary, it is most often used to mean that an item is no longer available or that someone or something should be removed, ejected, or thrown out.” His conclusion: “no reasonable observer could have viewed Plaintiff’s display of the flag as a threat to the President’s life or physical safety.”

• A federal judge in Denver blocked federal officials from breaking up Boulder’s National Center for Atmospheric Research by giving its supercomputing center away. The supercomputing center is a pillar of the nation’s atmospheric research. Judge R. Brooks Jackson agreed that the move was an act of political revenge for Colorado Gov. Jared Polis’s refusal to release from prison Tina Peters, a former county clerk convicted of tampering with voting machines in an attempt to support Trump’s election-rigging conspiracy theories. Ironically, Polis caved and released her last week.

• The ACLU is asking a federal judge in Tennessee to order members of the 31-agency Memphis Safe Task Force to stop retaliating against activists who are monitoring their behavior. The task force, a Trump creation, has been wreaking havoc in Memphis since September. Thousands of federal, state, and local agents aggressively patrol the city, terrorizing immigrants and people of color in particular. The request for an injunction includes declarations from community observers describing pretextual traffic stops, surveillance, bumper-rushing, and false arrests.

End Notes

• From ProPublica: “U.S. Lawmakers Demand Reforms to Immigration Officers’ Use of Tear Gas and Pepper Spray.”

• From In These Times: “How Resisting Trumpism Could Revive the U.S. Labor Movement.”

• In honor of Pride Month, from MoveOn: Buy a “Queer Joy Is Resistance” Unisex Cotton T-Shirt.

Masked federal agents are once again assaulting protesters, this time outside a New Jersey immigration detention facility.

Demonstrators have been holding a round-the-clock vigil for six days outside the Delaney Hall Detention Facility in Newark in support of immigrants inside who are engaged in a hunger and labor strike over inhumane conditions and violations of their due process rights.

ICE agents on Monday and Tuesday responded with brutality when protesters tried to block their vehicles.

On Monday, Sen. Andy Kim was among those caught in a cloud of pepper spray after he positioned himself between agents and demonstrators in an attempt to de-escalate a face-off. (See this photo from photographer Dakota Santiago, and this one from NJ.com’s Jelani Gibson.)

On Tuesday, agents used pepper spray and tasers against demonstrators. And on Tuesday night, agents viciously shoved protesters, hit them their batons, and pepper-sprayed them in the face. At least two men were thrown to the ground and arrested. Here’s some alarming video. Protesters said one of the arrested men was a medic and a veteran.

Several Democratic officials have visited the protesters to show their support, including Kim, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, and Representatives Rob Menendez and LaMonica McIver. (McIver still faces jumped-up criminal charges for a scrum outside that same facility a year ago.)

The Department of Homeland Security, under the new management of Markwayne Mullin, appears far from chastened. It has responded to the protests with a series of hostile tweets and press releases attacking “New Jersey sanctuary politicians” for “spreading smears about ICE.”

Independent journalist Amanda Moore captured the moment as detainees at Delaney Hall flashed the lights inside the facility and protesters cheered.

And Status Coup News interviewed a 10-year-old whose father is detained inside. “If they’re such big and bad,” she said, pointing at ICE agents, “why don’t they just take theirs masks off?”

Scientists Fight Back

Protect Democracy’s Allie Cashel writes:

Scientists are fighting back. A resistance that began as individual acts of courage is now taking collective shape, and what has emerged over the past several months is beginning to look like the early architecture of a movement.

For instance:

The Federal Workers Alliance for Democracy (FWAD) has built a growing coalition of workers and allies mobilizing the federal workforce to refuse compliance with dangerous and illegal orders, building networks across every federal agency in every state.

After HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismissed all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the dismissed scientists “formed the Immunization Scientific Advisory Collaborative (ISAC) and published independent, evidence-based evaluations of the reconstituted committee’s proceedings,” Cashel reports.

And graduate students have formed a nationwide coalition called Scientist Network for Advancing Policy (SNAP), which has produced more than 200 op-eds for the students’ hometown newspapers.

The CBC Responds to Redistricting

The Congressional Black Caucus is calling on major corporations across the U.S to oppose redistricting efforts intended to eliminate majority-Black U.S. House districts.

“Five years ago, more than 150 companies publicly declared that democracy and equal access to the ballot were fundamental American values,” the group’s letter to corporate leaders said. “For those companies that previously chose to speak, this moment demands continued courage and consistency.”

Last week, the caucus and the NAACP called for Black athletes to boycott public universities in states that are trying to eliminate districts held by Black lawmakers.

But most of all, the caucus is focused on voter registration and mobilization, Rep. Yvette D. Clarke, the caucus’s chair, told the Washington Post. And in the longer run, they hope to revive the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

Last Week in the Courts

• A federal judge in Tennessee dismissed the criminal case against immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, calling it the result of vindictive prosecution. Abrego Garcia is a Maryland father of three whose travails have become a focal point for the anti-immigration movement. Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. concluded Justice Department officials filed the criminal charges as retaliation for Abrego Garcia’s legal victories in his deportation case.

• Two more federal judges — in Maine and Wisconsin — have ruled against the DOJ’s demand that state’s turn over their voter registration rolls. Democracy Docket reports that the latest dismissals bring the DOJ’s record to 0-8. In Maine, Judge Lance Walker wrote that a DOJ lawyer’s argument that this was a routine request from the Civil Rights Division, not intended to create a national voter registration database, was “almost immediately undermined by the issuance of an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to compile a ‘State Citizenship List’ in order to ‘assist in verifying identity and Federal election voter eligibility.’”

• The Southern Poverty Law Center is asking a federal judge in Alabama to dismiss criminal fraud charges it argues were the result of vindictive prosecution. (The brief cites the Abrego Garcia case, above.) Meanwhile, a letter from more than 440 civil and human rights, faith, environmental, nonprofit organizations, and labor unions called the SPLC prosecution “a naked attempt to weaponize the criminal justice system to silence speech and activities this administration dislikes.”

Resistance groups are already fighting Trump’s outrageous new $1.8 billion slush-fund.

• Democracy Forward sued on behalf of a coalition of organizations and individuals who argued they would be harmed by “its implicit endorsement of dangerous conduct.”

• And CREW sued on the grounds that the slush fund “is unlawfully structured to evade transparency laws including the Freedom of Information Act and the Federal Records Act and usurps Congress’s authority to spend taxpayer money.”

A Lemon of a Case

This is what happens when inept MAGA prosecutors pursue a ridiculous case against journalists covering a protest.

Independent journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort are among 38 people charged with criminal conspiracy for a protest at a St. Paul church this winter.

As MPRNews reports, newly unsealed documents show that “U.S. Magistrate Judge John Docherty denied requests in February for five separate search warrants, including for YouTube information of independent journalists Georgia Fort and Don Lemon.”

Docherty’s ruling is really quite stunning. His conclusion:

Before the Court are five applications for search warrant by Homeland Security Special Agent Timothy Gerber. None of the five applications establish probable cause to believe that evidence of a crime will be found in the places to be searched, all of the warrant applications improperly refer the Court to material outside the search warrant application itself, and all of the warrant applications seek sealing without, however, a motion to seal or a proposed order being supplied to the Court. The applications are all DENIED.

Docherty revealed the prosecution’s absurdly broad and invasive demands:

The warrant seeks “subscriber information in any form kept,” including the names of subscribers, the mailing addresses, residential addresses, business addresses, and email addresses of subscribers, the telephone numbers of subscribers, and the Internet Protocol addresses from which the “Don Lemon Show” was accessed, among other information. There is no attempt made to explain why the compilation by the government of a comprehensive index of subscribers to “The Don Lemon Show” is evidence that a crime was committed.

An Ode to Bruce

The great labor journalist Steven Greenhouse writes in the Guardian:

The Bruce Springsteen concert I went to in Brooklyn last week was unlike any concert I’ve attended in decades. It was far more than a fabulous, joyous concert; it was also an inspiring resistance event.

From the get-go, the Boss made clear that this concert would be part of the anti-Trump resistance. It was a three-hour-long ode to the resistance and a thunderous call to Springsteen fans to step up and do more to fight for democracy and against authoritarianism. In this way, Springsteen is serving as a model for how celebrities can stand up against Trump and fight for what’s right.

Springsteen performs at Nationals Stadium in Washington tonight. I’ll be there!

Donald Trump’s former defense lawyer, now serving as acting attorney general, gave his boss two astonishingly corrupt payoffs this week: A taxpayer-funded $1.8 billion slush fund to dole out to insurrectionists and other allies, and immunity from tax audits that could have cost him more than $100 million.

Such obvious self-dealing is morally indefensible. And Trump’s assertion that he is above the law is a violation of one of the core tenets of American democracy.

Good-government and pro-democracy groups have been quick to express outrage and call for Trump to be stopped. Corruption is now inescapably a major resistance issue. And here are some questions going forward: Are Trump’s latest moves so universally offensive that they change the political calculus? Will Democrats be able to peel away any of his Republican support? And will new people join in protests and other resistance efforts?

CREW president Donald K. Sherman issued a strong statement on Monday: “Trump and the Justice Department just engaged in the most brazen act of self-dealing in the history of the presidency,” he asserted. “This is one of the single most corrupt acts in American history.”

Public Citizen co-presidents Lisa Gilbert and Robert Weissman declared that “Every member of Congress should be forced to go on record as to whether they will permit this monstrous theft of taxpayer resources.”

Two former U.S. Capitol Police officers, working with the Public Integrity Project, quickly filed a federal lawsuit seeking to dissolve the new fund. The lawsuit is blunt:

In the most brazen act of presidential corruption this century, President Donald J. Trump has created a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund to finance the insurrectionists and paramilitary groups that commit violence in his name.

The fund, styled the “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” is illegal. No statute authorizes its creation, the settlement on which it is premised is a corrupt sham, and its design violates the Constitution and federal law.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, is leading the charge for political accountability. “The whole administration now is just corruption, highway robbery every day,” he told MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow on Monday. “At this point everything must be tried in order to try to restore the rule of law in the country. We can’t leave any potential tool just sitting on the table. We’ve got we’ve got to try to attempt everything.”

Raskin said “we must start by trying to get our at least four or five Republican colleagues to come over to our side to say this is utterly lawless and authoritarian and it cannot stand.” Raskin cosigned a letter demanding documents and written answers from key administration officials and is calling for a Judiciary Committee vote to subpoena them.

And civil rights attorney Sherilyn Ifill continues to provide moral and intellectual heft to the pro-democracy movement. Last week, I recommended her essay about the fight for voting rights: “If You Want Democracy in this Country You Have to Fight White Supremacy.”

Today, in another incredibly powerful, must-read essay, she writes about how Trump’s attacks on racial equality and birthright citizenship, and his “grotesque scheme to reward January 6^th insurrectionists with payouts from the federal treasury,” all have something in common: They are violations of the Constitution’s 14^th Amendment. She writes:

The 14^th Amendment is the constitutional tool designed to constrain the very abuses of power that we are confronting at this moment. It was forged in a time of national fracture, widespread white supremacist ideology, and insurrectionist fervor. In other words, its provisions were uniquely created for such a time as this.

It is, if properly enforced, the most powerful tool we have to stave off the total collapse of democracy in this country.

Read it!

So far, the only specific protest against Trump’s new slush fund that I know of came on Tuesday night, when Stacey Young, a former Justice Department employee who founded the group Justice Connection, projected a John Adams quote on top of the huge Trump banner that hangs on the main Justice Department building.

“A government of laws, not of men,” read the quotation.

From Selma to Montgomery

Tens of thousands of people rallied for voting rights in Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, on Saturday, taking part in events under the banner of “All Roads Lead to the South.:

Signs included “No Jim Crow Maps”; “The Ballot Is The New Underground Railroad”; and “Honor King, End Racism,” Solomon Crenshaw Jr. reported for The Handbasket

Joyce Vance shared pictures in her newsletter.

Protect Democracy staffers Corey Dukes and Alison Hirsh wrote on their group’s blog:

The march from Selma to Montgomery — first trod in 1965, retraced again this weekend — was organized in a little more than a week by Black Voters Matter and a coalition of civil rights and voting rights organizations under the banner “All Roads Lead to the South.” The message was clear. The fight that produced the Voting Rights Act, and with it America’s second, imperfect attempt at a real multiracial democracy, must be refought. And the people who know that best are the ones who showed up to say so….

What is happening in the South right now is not a policy dispute or a legal technicality. It is the opening of a new front in the administration’s Deceive, Disrupt, Deny strategy to override the will of the voters and ensure the outcome they want in the 2026 mid-term elections. This is a racist power grab, locking in discriminatory congressional majorities for the foreseeable future — and it is moving fast.

They offered a list of possible next steps that is worth your time.

The aforementioned Sherilyn Ifill was there. She wrote:

What sane-thinking Americans must now understand is that to eliminate Black political power is to not only consign Black people to second-class citizenship across the South where most Black people live, it will also usher in the end of democracy in this country. It will catapult us back to the 1950s, with all of the ignominy of functioning as a half-apartheid state as part of our national identity once again. And they won’t stop at the South.

That is why it was gratifying to be part of the thousands who gathered in Selma and Montgomery, Alabama on Saturday in an act of solidarity and the shared purpose. I understand from the organizers that this gathering was only the first, and that they will plan similar mobilization efforts in other southern state capitols where legislatures are engaged in eliminating Black political representation in their states.

Other Protests

• Police tackled and arrested protesters after their regular Saturday rally outside a massive warehouse in Salt Lake City that ICE wants to turn into a detention facility. The Salt Lake Tribune reported that four people were arrested “on suspicion of interfering with police.” Police apparently followed and arrested one protester after they drove away. Other protesters followed. Police told the protesters to back up. The protesters questioned the order. Then the police started tackling, pushing, and arresting people. A video was posted on Instagram by one of the protesters.

• “About 100 rallygoers gathered on Capitol Hill Wednesday to hear from activists and members of Congress protesting the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to strike down federal protections for the voting power of minorities,” reported News of the States.

• Bishop William J. Barber II, who leads Repairers of the Breach, held a “Moral Monday Peace and Nonviolence Rally” outside the White House. Here is some video. “Every piece of policy violence has a death measurement,” he said.

• “About 50 protesters gathered outside Detroit’s federal courthouse Monday to oppose the proposed Romulus ICE detention center, urging state and local leaders to take action to block the project after a scheduled court hearing was postponed,” Michigan Live reported.

• Elder Aguilar-Macario, a Georgia high school student, was detained by ICE following a motor vehicle crash earlier this month. On Sunday, Chattooga County Democratic Party hosted a protest outside the county courthouse in support of the teen’s release, WDEF TV reported.

• “Protests took place at 28 locations across Indiana on Saturday as part of the Indiana Statewide Day of Action, a coordinated effort opposing immigration enforcement policies tied to the Trump administration and Indiana Gov. Mike Braun,” Network Indiana reported.

• Members of the Visibility Brigade hung a sign over a freeway in Boston that said “WE ARE UNDERREACTING”.

Is Civil Disobedience a Federal Criminal Conspiracy?

The answer should be obvious, but the New York Times reports:

Federal prosecutors will try to make the case this week that three activists who protested immigration enforcement last summer crossed the line from political dissent into criminal conspiracy — a legal theory that prompted the top federal prosecutor in Eastern Washington to resign rather than sign off on the charges.

Bajun Mavalwalla II, Justice Forral and Jac Archer will stand trial starting Monday on charges of conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers stemming from a June 11, 2025, protest in Spokane, Wash.

Richard Barker, the former prosecutor, told the Times: “We’re used to seeing people arrested because they refused to leave an area or they are engaging in civil disobedience. But when have we used the federal government to police that? That to me is a distinction with a difference.”

Meanwhile, in Chicago, “Prosecutors are set to try the remaining ‘Broadview Six’ immigration protesters in a rare federal misdemeanor trial next week,” Capitol News Illinois reports. “But defense attorneys are still hopeful it might be avoided after U.S. District Judge April Perry agreed to read unredacted transcripts from inside the grand jury room.”

Last Week in the Courts

• A federal judge in Washington granted a preliminary injunction requiring Trump administration officials to follow the Presidential Records Act and preserve work-related documents including text messages. A DOJ legal opinion had argued that the act unconstitutional. Judge John D. Bates disagreed, and granted the order because “plaintiffs have established a substantial risk that the government is no longer fully complying with the Records Act, at least with respect to three categories of records: electronic records created on personal rather than official devices, records created by the President or Vice President themselves, and records the President discards.”

• A federal judge in New York barred ICE from making immigration arrests at courts in New York, reversing his previous order after DOJ lawyers admitted they had misled him about an internal guidance. Judge P. Kevin Castel wrote that he acted “both to correct a clear error and prevent a manifest injustice.” As the New York Times noted: “The policy had led to remarkable scenes within the immigration courts at 26 Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan, as immigrants attending court for routine hearings were suddenly detained and, sometimes, dragged away from their families. Protesters began to attend in droves and some — including [former comptroller Brad] Lander — were arrested alongside the immigrants.”

• A federal judge in Washington has blocked the Trump administration from imposing sanctions against Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for Palestinian human rights, after she spoke in favor of war crime charges against U.S. and Israeli officials over their actions in Gaza. Judge Richard Leon wrote that “Albanese has done nothing more than speak!”

• The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office, in Minneapolis, has filed charges against ICE officer Christian Castro. Castro faces four counts of second-degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime. He fired a shot through the front door of a home that he knew was occupied, hitting a man in the leg. ICE, in a statement that is still available online, falsely claimed agents were attacked by people wielding a shovel and a broom.

• The New York Times has once again sued the Department of Defense over its press restrictions. A new requirement -- that reporters have an official escort – was adopted after the Times won a court order vacating the previous policy for press credentialing.

End Notes

• From the Houston Chronicle: “Houston woman refuses to stop protesting ICE even after being tear-gassed near Dilley detention center.”

• Also from the Houston Chronicle: “We were accidentally sent contract details for Texas’ Dilley detention center. Here’s what we found.”

• From the Washington Post: “Instead of proms and parties, she spent senior year fighting an ICE warehouse.”

• From the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights: “Over 440 Civil Rights, Faith, and Labor Organizations Call Department of Justice Indictment of Southern Poverty Law Center a ‘Naked Attempt to Weaponize the the Criminal Justice System to Silence Speech’.”

The movement starts Saturday morning in Selma at the Edmund Pettus bridge, where faith leaders will gather at sacred ground and pray.

Then, in the afternoon, outside the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery, civil rights leaders from across the country will lead an emergency protest – a kickoff for the battle to win back representation for the millions of Black voters the Supreme Court effectively disenfranchised when it gutted the Voting Rights Act on April 29.

It’s being billed as a National Day of Action for Voting Rights.

The website declares: “Same Fight. New Generation.”

But there’s something new about this fight, too. It comes as Donald Trump and the Republican Party are engaged in an authoritarian and white nationalist campaign to hold power regardless of what the people want.

So it’s even more than a battle for civil rights. It’s also a battle for democracy.

It’s simultaneously a battle for minority representation and for majority rule.

And if you’re not fired up to fight white supremacy in the name of American democracy quite yet, you sure as hell will be after you read this extraordinary essay by Sherilyn Ifill, a towering figure in the modern civil rights movement, titled “If You Want Democracy in this Country You Have to Fight White Supremacy.”

I can’t recommend it highly enough. Excerpts do not do it justice, but the core of Ifill’s argument is this:

It was the demand and sacrifice of ordinary people – civil rights lawyers and activists who forced change – many at the cost of their livelihood and their lives whose demands and sacrifices ushered in democracy our country. Once you understand this truth, then you can also understand that the decades-long resistance to the successes of the Civil Rights Movement has always been an anti-democracy movement.

That is why the effort by Trump and Republican state leadership to gerrymander Black representation out of Congress must be understood as not only an attack on Black people, but on democracy itself. If the Republican racial gerrymandering effort is successful, the U.S. will lose any claim to democracy for a generation or more.

And the forces that stand today against citizenship and political representation for Black people won’t stop there. They will not tolerate meaningful political representation for any group that opposes their oligarchical Christian nationalist ideology. They seek a one-party political system in a country ruled by authoritarians. The political oppression of Black people is not the end. It is the conduit.

What’s needed, Ifill writes, is “a strong, determined, even radical Congress,” a reformed Supreme Court, and a cultural reset that reasserts the value of a multiracial nation.

But we can’t get any of those things without power. And our opponents are moving faster than we imagined. We need to accelerate our work. That means that every American who believes in democracy, who believes in equality and humanity must decide now what they can do and what they must do.

Another extraordinary civil rights figure, the Rev. William Barber, made a similar argument on Monday, at a “Moral Monday in DC” rally. You didn’t hear a thing about it, because the legacy media ignored it completely. But Roland Martin’s Black Star Network covered it and captured it on video.

“Democracy is hard,” Barber told the crowd. “But here’s the question before this generation: What do you do when the democracy has been hijacked?” He explained:

You see, we actually have a hijacking that doesn’t believe that America started out broken and has been trying to get better. It believes America was right in its beginning when only wealthy white men were in control, and every effort since then has been a reversal.

His conclusion:

[The] attack on voting rights isn’t just an attack on Black people. It’s an attack on democracy.

See, because the same people that attack voting rights, they want vote power so that they can attack healthcare, so they can attack living wages, so they can attack public education.

And that’s why we have to say no to unholy war. And we have to say no to the violence of voter suppression. We have to say no to all policy violence.

Arguably the biggest question going forward is whether this new attack on democracy will motivate voters in the upcoming elections – and, in House races, will that make up for the advantage that Republicans in the South are now giving themselves by gerrymandering away minority representation?

Responding to the Supreme Court’s decision, the editors of The Nation wrote that the first step is to nominate strong Democrats:

Democratic primary voters need to nominate congressional candidates who are committed to advancing the agenda proposed by Representative Ayanna Pressley, the Massachusetts Democrat who said, “Congress must immediately pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and take action to restore the integrity and legitimacy of [the] Supreme Court—including expanding the court, imposing term limits on Supreme Court justices, and passing a binding Supreme Court code of ethics. Every option should be on the table.

And then, of course, come the November elections, which could not be more pivotal.

Kristen Clarke, general counsel of the NAACP, told MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow on Monday that the outrage will definitely translate into votes. “This election season, you will see turnout like you have never seen before,” she said. “It is at the ballot box where we will use our voice in the most determined fashion during this dark season.”

Could It Be Desperation?

One school of thought rattling around in progressive circles is that the forces of white supremacy and authoritarianism are acting out of desperation, as they see polls showing a supermajority of the public turning against them.

Nicholas Grossman, a political science professor at the University of Illinois, posted this on Bluesky:

The Roberts Court, the Trump White House, and the national GOP are acting like this is their one big shot. Either they secure the lasting end of US Constitutional democracy, or they’re in very serious trouble from the backlash. And they’ve already gone so far that there’s no other possibility.

Writer and organizer Micah Sifry wrote about finding hope in signs that Trump is losing supporters. He concluded:

[T]here’s no question that Trump allies in Congress and many statehouses can see their declining popularity and therefore are pulling out the stops to tilt the playing field further to their advantage. This is making the path to retaking the House much steeper, as G. Elliott Morris points out. It’s also engendering a lot of despair about how the Rs are rigging the game.

But the question I have for you, dear reader, is which trend are you choosing to fixate on? Because believing that all hope is lost is dangerous, and even more so when so many people are doing all they can to turn the tide.

The Great Rift Over the Great Writ

The numbers are staggering: Over 45,000 habeas corpus petitions have flooded federal courts since Trump took office, according to ProPublica’s Habeas Tracker. And it’s all the result of a Trump policy change that judges are overwhelmingly determining was illegal.

How big an increase is that? The TRAC research center, using a different data set, calculated that there were 86 times as many habeas cases filed this past year compared to the previous year.

Why? It used to be that undocumented immigrants who had been in the country for years and weren’t security or flight risks could be released on bond until an immigration court judge determined whether they should be deported or not. Trump’s new policy instead calls for them to be detained, indefinitely, without due process. Their only recourse is a habeas petition.

Back in February, Reuters reported that as many as 400 judges in some 4,400 habeas cases had ruled that the petitioners’ detentions were illegal.

Now Kyle Cheney at Politico is out with his own calculation. He writes:

More than 10,000 times, judges have said those detentions, typically carried out with no opportunity for detainees to plead their case, were illegal. That’s roughly 90 percent of all cases — a staggering rejection of a core piece of Trump’s immigration agenda.

That includes a majority of Trump-appointed judges.

“This isn’t how things are supposed to work in America,” wrote U.S. District Judge Gary Brown, a Trump appointee based in New York, in the case of a man whose lawful status was revoked after ICE arrested him. “Unquestionably, the laws of human decency condemn such villainy.”

Cheney’s article will make you angry. He writes:

These more than 10,000 cases include a nursing mother who was detained despite active refugee status and another mother separated from her one-year-old child and released from custody only when her son landed in the hospital. They include parents of U.S. military servicemembers, trafficking victims or witnesses, a 5-year-old boy detained by ICE on his way home from school.

So why haven’t Trump officials abandoned this clearly illegal policy? Because they are hoping that the Supreme Court will say it’s OK. They are bolstered in this belief by the decisions of two panels of right-wing appellate judges, in the 5th Circuit and 8th Circuit, who ruled in their favor.

But three other circuit panels have now ruled that the policy is illegal. Two of those rulings came in the last week.

In a 6th Circuit ruling on Monday, Judge Eric L. Clay wrote for his divided panel that “Petitioners are more than just names on a pleading.” He continued:

All appear to contribute to their neighborhoods and local communities. Many are the primary breadwinners or essential caregivers for their families, which include their children who were born here and are citizens of the United States.

His conclusion:

[N]oncitizens like Petitioners should have a forum to explain that their backgrounds and connections to their communities justify release on bond while they undergo their removal proceedings. To hold otherwise would subject long-term law-abiding residents in the United States, such as Petitioners, to the hardship of mandatory detention without due process.

In the 11th Circuit ruling issued last Wednesday, Judge Stanley Marcus wrote for his panel:

Simply put, the language that Congress has chosen to use does not grant to the Executive unfettered authority to detain, without the possibility of bond, every unadmitted alien present in the country. Nowhere in the text, structure, or history of the INA [Immigration and Nationality Act] does that reading find steady footing.

Also in Court This Week

• A federal court ruled against the second set of global tariffs that Trump imposed — after the Supreme Court overturned his first set. This time around, Trump claimed that a “large and serious balance-of-payments deficits” empowered him to impose a 10 percent surcharge on imports. The court found that Trump was unlawfully redefining the statutory term “balance-of-payments deficits” to mean “trade deficit,” which is an entirely different thing.

• In a wildly embarrassing case for the Trump administration, a federal judge in New York ruled that the DOGE Service illegally cancelled $100 million in grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Judge Colleen McMahon called it “a textbook example of unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.” But wait there’s more! DOGE staffers said it was actually ChatGPT that decided what grants were “DEI” and therefore should be cancelled. “The Government,” McMahon wrote, “cannot escape liability for DOGE’s work by scapegoating ChatGPT.”

• A federal judge in Washington, in a pair of rulings, enjoined the Federal Trade Commission from pursuing its demand that the two leading medical organizations on transgender health turn over internal documents. Chief Judge James E. Boasberg wrote that the record showed “extensive evidence of animus and wafer-thin justifications lacking evidentiary support.”

• The Cultural Landscape Foundation, a nonprofit that encourages good stewardship, is asking a federal judge to halt Trump’s efforts to resurface the Reflecting Pool and paint it blue. “The new coloration will cause the pool to resemble a large swimming pool rather than the reflective civic landscape it was designed to be, distorting the experience of the site for the millions of visitors who come to it each year,” the group wrote.

• The Constitutional Accountability Center filed a complaint alleging that Florida’s donation of property worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the Trump library violates the Domestic Emoluments Clause.

‘You Are Winning’

Rachel Maddow devoted much of the top of her MS NOW show on Monday to hailing what she declared was successful pushback to the Trump administration’s plan to establish “a huge new network of some of the largest prison facilities on earth, all specifically designed to hold people without trial and essentially outside the reach of the legal system.”

Over the last few months, I have been acutely interested in this warehouse prison plan that Trump in his wisdom has unveiled. I have been acutely interested specifically in seeing the American people everywhere -- red states and blue states, urban areas, suburban areas, rural areas, everywhere -- have been very interested in seeing the American people step up in all kinds of ways to just say no to this, to say no to building Trump a network of huge new prison camps to fill with whoever he wants.

“I can tell you tonight that if you have been part of the fight against those prison camps,” she said, calling out more than a dozen of them, “I think it’s important to take a moment to know that you are winning. You are winning this. Your pushback has worked.”

She cited an Axios article headlined “ICE targets Plan B after backlash to mega-jails plan.” Then she asked:

Why are they giving up on Plan A? Why are they giving up on the Trump prison camp warehouse idea? Because people have pushed back hard against it. And when people push back against them, generally speaking, they cave.

There are still fights ahead, as Maddow noted, including against an existing ICE facility near State College, Pennsylvania called the Moshannon Valley Processing Center. (Penn Live and Penn State University have just launched a series of stories about Moshannon and the protests there.)

And this just in: Alligator Alcatraz, the notorious jerry-built detention center in Florida, is closing down. CBS News reports that companies hired by the state of Florida to operate the center “were notified Tuesday afternoon that the facility is being shut down, with the remaining 1,400 detainees expected to be removed in the coming weeks.” As the Daytona Beach News-Journal chronicled in video, each Sunday for more than 40 weeks, 75 to 200 people have gathered outside the Florida center to protest.

Also, Project Salt Box reports that “Federal immigration officials and the State of New Jersey reached a temporary agreement Tuesday that pauses major conversion work at a proposed ICE detention warehouse in Roxbury while the government completes additional environmental review, avoiding a scheduled federal court hearing over the project.”

Not all the news is good, though. The American Prospect reports that ICE “wants to expand its concentration camp network in California with a dilapidated Bay Area prison known as the ‘Rape Club.’” That’s on account of its “lengthy history of unchecked sexual abuse.” Critics say the buildings are “falling to pieces and heavily contaminated with toxic waste.”

The Way Forward?

The American Immigration Council is out with a white paper called “Restoring Credibility and Humanity: A New Framework for Immigration Enforcement.”

It’s so different from what we have now:

Built around four pillars—compliance, safety, proportionality, and accountability—it recommends fourteen areas of reform. The plan emphasizes making rules that people living in the country can follow; law enforcement that protects communities from threats rather than treating the community as one; consequences for civil immigration violations that are “tailored, reasonable, and humane”; and holding agencies—and individual agents—accountable, up to and including by firing those who abuse their power.

End Notes

• The New York Times reports: “New York Bars ICE Agents From Wearing Masks in Broad Immigration Deal.”

• Political consultant Mujtaba Rahman writes in the Guardian that Trump’s “ever-more erratic” behavior is leading Europe’s leaders “to publicly confront the Trump administration on issues ranging from Iran to Ukraine and European sovereignty.”

• Author Saul Austerlitz asks in the Guardian: “How do we get more men to join the anti-Trump resistance?”

• Never-Trumper columnist Mona Charen writes in The Bulwark that Trump’s corruption is so wildly excessive that “we may, at long last, be passing out of the ‘LOL nothing matters’ phase of this travesty. There is good reason to believe that, finally, Trump’s unprecedented corruption is going to bite him in the ass.”

The Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act last week – a move that will effectively disenfranchise millions of Black Americans – was a major blow to people who care about multiracial democracy.

It was also a rallying cry.

Dozens of resistance figures immediately weighed in on how to respond.

On MS NOW, Rachel Maddow cast the court’s decision as part of Trump’s wider effort “to get rid of the multiracial democracy that our Constitution is supposed to protect.”

“We are now about 16 months into what has been, from day one, a concerted and intense targeting of Black Americans, specifically by this president and by this administration,” she said. “It is a war on Black America. The fight to save it is looking like it’s going to be the fight of all of our lives.”

“What should we do?” asked Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice. “Yell, loudly, for action by the one part of our government that can do something: Congress.”

Waldman called on Congress to ban partisan gerrymandering, enact new voting rights laws, and impose term limits for the Supreme Court.

Issue One policy director Michael McNulty wrote that banning gerrymandering would require “establishing clear national criteria for fair maps, requiring independent redistricting commissions in every state, and banning mid-decade redistricting. These proven, widely supported reforms would ensure voters — not politicians — choose their representatives.”

The Contrarian published a list of 15 ways to respond to the court decision, from three civil rights leaders.

“Fight Back Hard Now,” Lauren Groh-Wargo of Fair Fight urged. “We are working with existing coalitions and networks across the South alongside our national allies to push back against these cynical, racist attempts to gut Black political power and gerrymander the congressional and state maps. If we cannot block them outright, we must make the fight as long, difficult, and painful as possible for the GOP. The more we can combat its plans and expose them as the extreme and cruel measures they are, the more the public will see how GOP leaders are focused on their own power rather than meeting their needs.”

Juan Proaño of LULAC wrote that his group “will accelerate our voter registration program. We will train Spanish-language poll workers and election observers. We are building the largest Latino voter protection infrastructure the country has ever seen to challenge in real time the suppression measures that will follow this ruling.”

Common Cause vowed to continue the fight to pass state-level Voting Rights Acts — ”powerful tools that protect voters even when federal safeguards fall.” Meanwhile, the group has sued to stop Florida’s new congressional maps from going into effect. (So did a Black-led Florida group, the Equal Ground Education Fund.)

Or Is It Time for Something Different?

On Tuesday, writer and organizer Micah Sifry published something of a shot across the bow: an issue of his newsletter titled “Why ‘vote harder’ and other nostrums aren’t an answer for the Callais decision.”

Sifry criticized much of the resistance community for what he called “a crisis of political imagination.” Realistically, he said, none of their solutions will do much good – not with the current Supreme Court, and not as long as congressional elections are held in single districts under winner-take-all rules.

He and a growing number of other resistance figures support what political scientist Lee Drutman calls the “One weird trick to end the gerrymandering wars and restore fair representation for minorities.” It’s called proportional representation. Drutman wrote:

Here’s how it works. Instead of dividing a state into single-member districts where the winner takes all, you elect the whole delegation at once, proportionally. Parties present lists of candidates. Voters choose from those lists. Votes for all a party’s candidates tally up. If Party A’s list gets 40% of the votes in a five-seat district, it gets two seats, awarded to its two most popular candidates. Seats are awarded in direct proportion to the share of the votes.

Consider Louisiana, where the Supreme Court has now paved the way for Republicans to divide the state into six congressional districts, none of which would be majority Black. The result: the effective disenfranchisement of 33 percent of the electorate.

But with proportional representation, one third of the six seats would go to the candidates supported by Black voters.

And it meets the Supreme Court’s new litmus test. As Harvard Law School professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos wrote on the Election Law Blog, “PR is inherently race-neutral; in some forms, it doesn’t even require districts, and it always operates without any reference to race…. So in one stroke, PR could do a better job fighting racial vote dilution than Section 2 [of the Voting Rights Act] ever did, and do so without triggering equal protection objections.”

Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, responded to the court decision by calling on “Congress to authorize multi-member congressional districts with proportional representation systems to prevent partisan shut-outs and drown-outs across the country.”

And one major pro-democracy group has been advocating for this sort of change for several years. Protect Democracy proposes the adoption of “fusion voting” as a pathway to proportional representation – and maybe even an end to two-party gridlock.

With fusion voting, “more than one political party can nominate the same candidate and voters can vote for their preferred candidate on the ballot line of the party that best reflects their values,” the group explained. (Here’s a graphic that might make it clearer.)

“This allows minor parties with distinct platforms and constituencies to cross-nominate and turn their voters out in support of major party candidates, rather than asking their members to waste votes on a long-shot candidate,” the group argued.

In a 2025 report, the group explained that “expanding fusion voting presents a path to the kind of nascent multiparty system that could effectively advocate for change. Fusion voting could serve as a crucial stepping stone — an incremental but meaningful reform that expands votersʼ choices, strengthens democratic competition, and makes the adoption of proportional representation more plausible.”

May Day Not-So-Strong

There were high hopes that events on May Day this year, held under the “May Day Strong” banner, would significantly disrupt business as usual. The call was for “No Work, No School, No Shopping.”

It was intended as a “tactical escalation” for the resistance — “a structure test for the strength of the movement,” as Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, put it. “It is more than just showing up on a Saturday. It is attempting to gauge our economic power on a single day.”

As it turned out, there were a handful of boisterous events on Friday, but by and large, participation was slim and scattered.

And almost nobody noticed.

I don’t really know where the movement goes from here. Organizers maintained their optimism during a mass call last night. And there’s no denying the significance of millions of people coming out for No Kings rallies (on Saturdays.)

But the current organizational structure, in the current political climate, clearly does not have the ability to shut much of anything down. That would typically be the next step for a mass movement demanding attention and action.

That said, thousand of people turned out on Friday for events in Washington, D.C., marching, rallying, and briefly disrupting traffic.

In New York City, CBS News reported that thousands rallied across the five boroughs, “including outside Amazon headquarters in Midtown. On Wall Street, hundreds of climate activists blocked entrances to the New York Stock Exchange, and some arrests were made.” New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani enthusiastically addressed a heavily union crowd in Washington Square Park. “Together we will show the world what solidarity means,” he said.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that a protest “briefly shut down the departure-level roadway at San Francisco International Airport’s international terminal Friday.” Several elected officials were arrested. Hundreds of protesters also briefly shut down Oakland International Airport.

In Los Angeles, members of the Sunrise Movement briefly “took over” a Home Depot to protest the company’s support of ICE.

Hundreds of protesters rallied in Madison, Wisconsin, and organizers told the Wisconsin Examiner that 250 immigrant-led businesses across 17 cities in Wisconsin shut down for the day.

The biggest turnout by far was in Raleigh, North Carolina, where the state teachers union held a rally to protest school funding.

Brooklyn vs. ICE

The word spread in Brooklyn on Sunday night: ICE officers had taken an immigrant to a local hospital after he was injured during his capture.

Soon, hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside the Wyckoff Medical Center in Bushwick protesting ICE’s presence in the hospital — and then clashing with NYPD officers who had been called to the scene. Nine people were arrested.

Harrowing video showed ICE agents literally dragging the immigrant they had detained out of the hospital and into an ICE vehicle, as police officers cleared their way and demonstrators yelled in outrage.

One witness shared a video with independent journalist Marisa Kabas showing a police officer brutally throwing a peaceful protester to the ground.

At a news conference on Monday, Mayor Mamdani said NYPD officers were not involved in the ICE operation and were just there because of the protest. He said he had seen videos of the officer throwing the man to the ground. “That is incredibly disturbing and that is being actively investigated right now,” he said.

On Monday, at a rally outside the hospital, lawmakers and community activists called for ICE to stay out of New York.

This Week in the Courts

A slow week, for once!

• A group of detained immigrants filed a class action lawsuit challenging a new DHS policy that effectively blocks immigrants held in detention from successfully filing immigration applications. DHS rules require individuals to submit biometrics with their applications, but the agency now refuses to collect that information from people in detention centers. “DHS’ new Biometrics Policy violates the law many times over,” wrote lawyers for Democracy Forward, National Immigration Project, and the National Immigrant Justice Center.

• Environmental groups are suing to block a Trump order that would open the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument to commercial fishing.

End Notes

• From the San Francisco Chronicle: “Bay Area neighbors are turning their blocks into Trump resistance networks.”

• From WGBH: “Faith coalition protests Citizens Bank’s work with detention centers operators”.

May 1 is traditionally a day to celebrate and flex the collective power of workers, led by unions.

This year – this Friday – it is that and more, as a huge coalition of resistance groups are calling on every American to participate in a one-day stoppage of work, school, and shopping to protest billionaires, ICE, the war, and the assault on democracy.

The goal is not just to come together, like at a No Kings rally, but to disrupt business as usual – to force people to pay attention to the crises we are in and the ways to fight back.

The only way that goal will be achieved, however, is with massive union participation. So just as May Day this year is a trial run for a possible general strike, it is also a consequential test of union muscle.

Will business be disrupted in Chicago, or Philadelphia, or Los Angeles, or New York? Or will there be no noticeable effect? It will largely depend on the unions.

In Chicago, for instance, major unions are explicitly calling for an economic blackout there and are planning neighborhood rallies, school block parties, and protests against Amazon, Target and an ICE detention center before marching to Union Park for a mass rally and march through downtown and to Daley Plaza.

Philadelphia could be a hotspot. Some of us had high hopes for May Day last year as well, but pretty much the only place they were realized was in Philadelphia, where a massive crowd gathered outside city hall, and 70 unionized hotel and food service workers were arrested during a peaceful sit-in at a busy downtown intersection.

One group to watch particularly closely is the teachers’ unions. For instance, many North Carolina school districts will be closed on Friday after the state teachers union called on educators across the state to walk out of work and join a rally in Raleigh. Their May Day rally, they say, “represents the culmination of growing frustration among educators, students, and communities over the state’s continued failure to adequately invest in public schools.”

I wrote last week about how this year’s May Day is a major tactical escalation for the resistance. One organizer called it “a structure test for the strength of the movement.”

Organizer Neidi Dominguez told the Guardian there will be more than 3,000 events around the country. But at the same time, she kept expectations low. “We have a long way to go to take massive disruption actions like in other countries, where people will go on general strikes and they can shut down their country, but I think we’re getting more and more close to people having consciousness about their own power as workers,” she said.

Dana Fisher, an American University sociologist who studies protest movements, said there will be something to cheer either way:

Even if May Day Strong does not stop the economic workings of the US for the day and is not clearly noticeable to everyone, these events can still build power…. May Day Strong has the potential to expand the Resistance toolbox by exposing people across the US to a wider range of civic tactics that we can all use to channel our power and push back to autocracy.

In the Philadelphia Inquirer, columnist Will Bunch wrote that he fears the mainstream press – “already too dismissive of the pro-democracy resistance” – will spin May 1 as a step backward compared to the No Kings 3 protest that brought out eight million people. He continued:

Still, there is substantial work behind the scenes that could make the May 1 action a big enough success that it would surprise the more somnambulant general public, and maybe create some momentum for bigger and bolder actions down the road….

Don’t let the media negativity or the passivity that’s weighed down too many citizens for far too long cloud your own feelings about a Mayday signal for a fast-sinking American democracy. Look at this action as the beginning of something. Where it ends is up to us, the people.

So, people, find a May Day event near you. Don’t go to work. Don’t go to school. Don’t shop. And if you need to be psyched up, there’s a final mass call tonight at 8 p.m. ET.

Communities Not Cages

Inhumane and unwanted ICE detention centers were the focus of Saturday’s “National Day of Action” events all over the country. Protesters were particularly energetic in places that are fighting the construction of new detention centers in local warehouses.

MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow, uniquely, captured their significance.

Here’s part of what she said:

I recognize that I am part of the national media. So therefore, I am a little self-conscious about the fact that the national media has really been sucking its thumb on this story and hasn’t much caught on to it yet…. But local media have been taking notice of these fights everywhere they are happening. And local media everywhere this weekend took notice of these protests that happened in more than 180 different locations all over the country.

So check out some of those local reports from Romulus, Michigan; Tucson, Arizona; Marietta, Georgia; Portland, Maine; Salt Lake City, Utah; Hagerstown, Maryland; McHenry, Illinois; and Socorro, New Mexico.

How effective is the local opposition to converting warehouses into concentration camps? It’s so effective I can’t even keep track. But luckily Project Saltbox is doing just that.

This Week in the Courts

Today’s Supreme Court decision effectively dismantling what was left of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a huge blow to our democracy. But there were, as usual, some significant resistance victories in the courts this past week:

• The 2^nd Circuit Court of Appeals – disagreeing with the 5^th and 8^th circuits – ruled against the Trump administration’s policy of locking up most immigrants it intends to deport without access to a hearing that could lead to their release. The ruling declared the move contrary to the plain text of the law, and called it “a radical break from the past” that “would send a seismic shock through our immigration detention system and society, straining our already overcrowded detention infrastructure, incarcerating millions, separating families, and disrupting communities.” Note to the judges: That has almost all happened already.

• The Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit blocked Trump’s day-one executive order claiming the power to summarily deport asylum seekers who cross the border without allowing them to seek protection as required by Congress. The ruling concludes that Trump’s order and subsequent guidance “circumvent Congress’s carefully crafted removal procedures and cast aside federal laws that afford individuals the opportunity to apply and be considered for a grant of asylum or withholding of removal.”

• A federal judge in Arizona has thrown out a DOJ lawsuit demanding the state turn over its voter rolls. The government’s arguments were so flawed that Judge Susan Brnovich wrote that she was dismissing the case “with prejudice because amendment would be legally futile.” It’s the sixth straight loss for DOJ’s attempt to get states’ voter rolls.

• Federal prosecutors in Chicago are dismissing the conspiracy counts against the remaining four members of the “Broadview Six”, the people arrested after protesting outside ICE’s Broadview detention center in September. The judge had ordered prosecutors to turn over transcripts showing how they had explained the law in the case to grand jurors. Rather than do that, they dropped the charges.

I have written admiringly about how federal district court judges keep issuing rulings that boldly defy the Trump administration’s onslaught on the rule of law. And here’s a neat bit of analysis: Politico’s Kyle Cheney has counted “420 district judges who have ruled against ICE’s mass detention policy — now backed by the 2nd circuit — [compared] to 47 who have ruled in favor. Among Trump appointees, 51 have ruled *against* the administration to 37 in favor.”

BRUUUUUCE

Four weeks from now, Bruce Springsteen brings his “Land of Hope and Dreams” tour to Nationals Park. I can’t wait.

This wonderful essay by political strategist and Springsteen fanatic Jamison Foser describes the Boss’s “confidently, unapologetically, thoroughly political show.” Foser writes:

It’s an almost preposterously ambitious thing to try to pull off a (nearly) three-hour political rally dressed up as a rock concert, but it works. It holds up because it is sturdy. It has roots. Springsteen has been preparing himself and his audience for it for fifty years.

And here is what Springsteen generally says to close out his show:

Find a way to take aggressive, peaceful action to defend our country’s ideals. And as the great civil rights leader John Lewis said, go out and get in some good trouble. Say something. Do something. Hell, sing something. That’s all that I do. If you’re feeling helpless, hopeless, betrayed, frustrated, angry: I understand. I have felt that way too. … That’s why the E Street Band is here tonight. Because we needed to feel your strength and your hope. And we needed to bring you some strength and some hope in these times. I hope we’ve done that for you tonight. God bless Alex Pretti. God bless Renee Good. God bless you. And God bless America.

End Notes

• The New York Times explains why the American Association of University Professors is booming: “A Professor Union Grows Fast as It Ramps Up Its Fight Against Trump.”

• A former GOP Senate counsel writes in the Atlantic that “if the Madisonian republic is to endure, conservatives must reckon with our role in bringing the nation to its current breaking point, and work to reestablish the checks and balances that we helped erode.”

• Russell Berman writes in the Atlantic that Thomas Massie, the renegade Kentucky Republican, thinks that if he wins his May 19 primary against a Trump-backed challenger his victory will embolden more Republicans in Congress to stand up to the president.

• And read Nesrine Malik’s opinion column in the Guardian: “Trump’s presidency is what evil looks like: absurd, frightening, cruel.” I mean, she kind of nails it, doesn’t she?

For a lot of the participants in No Kings Day 3, picking the right protest sign was a real dilemma: With so many horrors to be outraged about, how do you pick just one?

Two upcoming events are aimed at more specific targets.

This Saturday, April 25, will be a day of action against ICE.

And on May Day – next Friday – the spotlight will be on economic issues. May Day will also represent a major tactical escalation for the resistance: Its goal is to disrupt “business as usual” through a call for “No School. No Work. No Shopping.”

On April 25, ‘Communities Not Cages’

ICE detention centers are the focus of Saturday’s “National Day of Action.” Many of the organizers are operating under the banner of the Disappeared In America campaign.

“Cruelty against immigrants has been a cornerstone of Trump’s authoritarian agenda,” Indivisible wrote in an email to members. “Over the past year, we’ve seen this cruelty up close as the regime’s secret police raids our neighborhoods, separates families, and rips apart communities. But behind the scenes, the Department of Homeland Security has also been quietly working to scale up their ability to detain and disappear people in massive numbers.”

Sporadic but alarming reports from inside existing detention centers have revealed inhumane treatment. And at least 17 people have died in ICE custody since January.

Now, according to an ICE memo, the agency intends to spend $38.3 billion to build 24 new detention facilities, including eight large-scale detention centers that could hold 7,000 to 10,000 detainees at a time. By comparison, there were approximately 60,000 immigrants in ICE detention last month.

Grassroots movements opposed to the conversion of warehouses in their areas have had some startling successes in cancelling sales and suing to stop work. The Associated Press reported last week that fierce local opposition was a factor in Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s decision to review his predecessor’s warehousing plan.

The message to Mullin and local governments on Saturday will be clear. Here is Indivisible’s summary of the demands:

1. Cancel the warehouse detention plan and stop every conversion immediately.

2. Reject all public funding, permits, and local resources that enable ICE to expand detention.

3. Require full transparency and real community consent before any federal detention action moves forward. Decisions about detention cannot be made behind closed doors.

You can find the closest event to you here. Here’s a map. The hashtag is #CommunitiesNotCages. This toolkit for organizers is full of useful information.

‘This May Day, It’s Workers Over Billionaires’

The organizers of Mayday Strong say that on May 1 this year “workers, students, and families” will “rally, march, and take action across the country to demand a nation that puts workers over billionaires, with many refusing business as usual through No School. No Work. No Shopping.”

It’s a largely economic message. Labor unions are heavily involved.

But perhaps most importantly, it’s on a weekday. And the goal is not just to protest, but to disrupt. It’s a big step forward – if it works.

“May Day is a structure test for the strength of the movement,” Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, told podcaster Katie Phang earlier this month. “It is more than just showing up on a Saturday. It is attempting to gauge our economic power on a single day.”

He continued: “It is a tactical escalation. But I think if we’re serious about what this regime is trying to do, we need to develop these tactics.”

Here, via the NEA, are the demands:

• Stop the billionaire takeover and rampant corruption of the Trump administration.

• Protect and defend Medicaid, Social Security, and other programs working people rely on.

• Fully fund public schools, healthcare, and housing for all.

• Stop the attacks on our communities, including policies targeting immigrants, people of color, Native people, people with disabilities, and those who identify as LGBTQ+.

Organizers say they were inspired by the one-day economic blackout in Minneapolis-St. Paul in January protesting the invasion of their state by masked and thuggish federal agents. Hundreds of businesses closed. Some 50,000 protesters marched through downtown Minneapolis.

Union officials like Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, are hoping that by stressing economic issues and affordability, the event will attract a more politically diverse crowd. This is what she had to say during an organizing call after No Kings 3.

We’ve been told this story for a long time, that our country is so divided. But when I look at the numbers, I’m looking at the 87% of Americans who say we’re in a cost-of-living crisis. I look at the 90% who are stressed out about the price of groceries. And so whether people have a D or an R or an I or whatever next to their name, rent is still too high. Your paycheck still doesn’t stretch to the end of the month, and you’re still worried that the boss or the people running this country don’t give a damn about your family.

So that is our common ground.

Organizers say there will be hundreds of rallies, marches, teach-ins, and labor actions across the country. Find one near you here. And here’s a map.

So Many Ways to Resist

• 404 Media reports that shareholders in Thomson Reuters last week “demanded the company’s board launch an investigation into whether its products have contributed to human rights violations, specifically with regards to Thomson Reuters’ ongoing sale of peoples’ personal data to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.” The company sells ICE access to its investigative tool Clear, which 404 Media says is integrated with ICE tools, including one that ICE uses to find neighborhoods to target.

• The Providence Journal reports that “Anti-ICE activists from throughout the Northeast plan to descend upon Citizens Bank’s headquarters during the company’s annual shareholder meeting on April 23 in Providence. Protesters say they want the bank to cut ties with CoreCivic and the GEO Group, two private prison companies that operate U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers.”

• Democracy Now reports that “dozens of military veterans and their family members were arrested Monday as they nonviolently occupied the Cannon House Office Building to protest the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran, while demanding a meeting with House Speaker Mike Johnson. At least 62 people were arrested, including elderly and disabled activists.”

• The Centre Daily Times in Pennsylvania reports that “About 40 protesters marched to the State College Municipal Building on Monday evening, demanding Borough Council pass a binding ordinance prohibiting collaboration with ICE.”

• Maryland Matters reports that hundreds of protesters rallied outside the federal courthouse in Baltimore even as the judge inside blocked further construction on a planned Washington County immigration detention center.

• And you might just see me here! Public Citizen and Common Cause are among the groups holding a protest tomorrow – Thursday, April 23, from 5:30 pm to 7:00 pm ET – outside the building formerly known as the U.S. Institute of Peace. Inside, David Ellison – who is awaiting regulatory approval of Paramount’s bid to purchase Warner Bros. – will be holding a corrupt gala dinner to “honor” Trump.

House Passes Good Immigration Bill

The first pro-immigrant bill to pass Congress this legislative session would provide a three-year period of protection and work authorization for 350,000 Haitian immigrants who otherwise would risk deportation on account of the Trump administration’s temporarily blocked termination of their Temporary Protected Status.

The bill highlights Republican division over the Trump administration’s immigration policies. The vote was 224-204, with 10 Republicans joining all Democrats in voting yes.

Trump has vowed to veto the bill if it makes it past the Senate.

This Week in the Courts

• A federal judge in Oregon struck down Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s attempt to impose far-reaching restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors. Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai’s ruling was epic. “Unserious leaders are unsafe,” he wrote. “This case highlights a leader’s unserious regard for the rule of law. This case demonstrates how disregard for the rule of law does not merely result in an abstract infraction. Rather, and tragically, this case is one of a long list of examples of how a leader’s wanton disregard for the rule of law causes very real harm to very real people.”

• In another searing opinion, a federal judge in New York warned of potential sanctions against DHS for issuing arrest warrants against two immigrants after they were arrested. “Police and law enforcement cannot operate as roving bands, detaining individuals, figuring out the reasons later, and papering over their failures afterwards,” Judge Sanket Bulsara wrote. “This practice of after-the-fact arrest warrants can be called many things – illegal, improper, and unconstitutional, among them. But whatever label one wishes to apply, the practice is fundamentally at odds with and offensive to lawful, constitutional behavior in this country.”

• I noted above that a federal judge in Maryland blocked further construction on a planned immigration detention center there. “This case provides a crystal-clear example of a federal agency failing to comply with the basic requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act,” Judge Brendan Hurson wrote. “Had DHS done so, it likely would have found that the rapid transformation of a cargo-processing facility with four toilets and two water fountains into a temporary residence and workplace for hundreds, if not thousands, would jeopardize the health and safety of the surrounding ecosystem in myriad ways, most notably through the likely over-taxing of the sewer system.”

• A federal judge in Washington, D.C., clarified that his previous order to stop construction of Trump’s White House ballroom (the above-ground part) still holds, even though construction on the underground portion, which has national security implications, may continue. Judge Richard Leon blasted the government for its attempt “to tum this exception on its head and unreasonably insist that the entire ballroom project may proceed.”

• A federal judge in Rhode Island dismissed the Department of Justice’s lawsuit to force Rhode Island to provide unfettered access to its voter registration rolls – the fifth straight loss in such cases for DOJ. Judge Mary S. McElroy wrote that voting laws do not allow the government “to conduct the kind of fishing expedition it seeks here.”

• A federal judge in Illinois ruled that the Trump administration coerced Facebook and Apple to remove ICE-tracking apps in violation of the First Amendment. Judge Jorge Alonso noted that then-Attorney General Pam Bondi “made public statements taking credit” for the move.

End Notes

• A new investigation from ProPublica and Frontline: “A Protester Threw a Snowball. Federal Agents Responded With Tear Gas and Pepper Balls.”

• Justin Florence for Protect Democracy, on how Peter Magyar’s Tisza Party in Hungary built infrastructure and enlisted 50,000 people as election monitors to thwart Viktor Orban’s attempt to steal the vote.

• From newsletter author G. Elliott Morris: “New poll: 55% support impeaching Trump”.

• From AL.com: An Alabama woman is acquitted after her arrest for wearing an inflatable penis costume to a “No Kings” protest.

For the American resistance to Donald Trump, the fall of Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban on Sunday was a moment of celebration, envy, and learning.

Orban had entrenched his power so thoroughly in his 16 years of political dominance – destroying judicial independence, controlling the media, eliminating academic freedom, enriching his cabal – that, until quite recently, he seemed invulnerable.

He was everything Donald Trump wanted to be.

But now, his massive electoral defeat is an object lesson in how to restore a democracy.

What’s needed, if Hungary is a model, are at least these three things:

• A blowout election, which is fueled by

• A focus on corruption – on how well the oligarchs are doing while everyone else suffers

• And the promise not just to restore democratic checks and balances but to bring to justice those who, in Hungarian prime minister-elect Peter Magyar’s words, “plundered, looted, betrayed, indebted and ruined” his country.

Here in the United States, a blowout election may seem unlikely given the extreme partisan tribalism that divides our country. But if Hungary is indeed an example, it appears that the way to motivate voters across party lines is with a more aggressive, principled, and insurgent pro-democracy agenda than anything the current Democratic leadership is offering right now.

Lessons From a Victory

Anne Applebaum wrote in the Atlantic that Magyar’s “construction of a broad, diverse, and patriotic grassroots social movement” overcame the illusion of illiberal permanence:

Orbán’s loss brings to an end the assumption of inevitability that has pervaded the MAGA movement, as well as the belief—also present in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric—that illiberal parties are somehow destined not just to win but to hold power forever, because they have the support of the “real” people. As it turns out, history doesn’t work like that. “Real” people grow tired of their rulers. Old ideas become stale. Younger people question orthodoxy. Illiberalism leads to corruption. And if Orbán can lose, then his Russian and American admirers can lose too.

Over at Protect Democracy’s blog, Michael Angeloni and Ben Raderstorf wrote (even before the election) that Magyar’s campaign “suggests a clear pro-democracy political playbook to emulate:”

1. Build a multigenerational political campaign that leverages grassroots anti-corruption energy and a genuine reform agenda.

2. Construct a broad-spectrum opposition singularly focused on voter discontent with the regime and refuse to engage in the autocrat’s culture-war narratives.

3. Unite behind a singular, charismatic leader with credibility to bridge disparate opposition factions.

“America can do this too,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote in her newsletter. Her prescription for Democrats is to “come up with platforms that make people feel respected and cared for as they also address the distress and difficulty that cuts to social assistance, corruption, brutality, and neglect by the Trump administration have created.”

In an interview with the Contrarian, Princeton autocracy expert Kim Lane Scheppele credited Magyar’s campaign with focusing attention on how “Orban’s getting rich from corruption while public services are going downhill.” She continued: “You could just transport this to United States right now, right? It’s the campaign promise you need.”

Writer and organizer Micah L. Sifry relished Orban’s defeat in his newsletter, but, he warned:

Look closer, though, and Magyar’s rise offers a clear warning to Democrats who think merely being anti-Trump will deliver their party a convincing mandate in 2026 and 2028. Magyar was a renegade from Orban’s Fidesz party who took a brave risk and told the public the truth about the regime’s corruption. Then he created a non-party movement called “Rise Up Hungarians” and brought it into a relatively new centrist, pro-European, and populist party, Tisza. As a new party, Tisza was unblemished by corruption and could make that its central issue, while sidelining the other opposition parties as too much part of the old system. To me, what Magyar’s rise suggests is that an independent, populist truth-teller (think Ross Perot) could do very well in the 2028 presidential election. Or, maybe a Democratic renegade—but one thing we know from past elections is the Democratic establishment is still strong enough to block such contenders.

On her MS.NOW show on Monday, Rachel Maddow credited Magyar with setting out a clear agenda for pro-democracy reform. “I think it’s a salient lesson for the Democratic Party in the United States in thinking ahead about their electoral platform,” she said. She urged Democrats to back “a program of re-democratizing the United States that undoes and bans permanently the things Trump has been trying to do to turn our country into a strongman state, to undo our constitutional republic.”

The Spirit of 76

Historian of tyranny Timothy Snyder has published the text of the speech he gave at No Kings 3 on March 28 in Cincinnati.

What does it mean, he asked, to be commemorating 250 years of the American republic?

To an uncanny degree, what the Trump people in this 250th year are doing is repeating the abuses that the American founders complained about: arbitrary taxation; taxation without representation; imperial attitudes; wars without consent. The point… is not that the founders were right about everything, but that they were rebels in their time (I was borrowing this from Frederick Douglass and his famous speech “What to a slave is the Fourth of July?”).

To honor the origins of our republic doesn’t mean going back to the eighteenth century. It means being rebels in our own time. It means demanding freedom, aiming for something radically better in the future.

So the way that the Trump people are trying to rule us is about ending the republic. For the republic to survive, it has to be better -- we have to have liberation that includes schools, and health care, and justice, and opportunity, excludes mass incarceration, and concentration camps, and ethnic cleansing, and senseless, criminal wars. We have to be able to speak together rather than have our conversations determined by oligarchs and algorithms. We have to work together rather than allowing ourselves to be isolated.

The Horror of Warehousing People

Grassroots movements opposing the construction of ICE detention facilities inside warehouses are having growing success.

The Associated Press credits the fierce opposition against these facilities with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s decision to review his predecessor’s warehousing plan. The New York Times writes about how “In a Deep Red Town, Locals Vent Over a Planned ICE Detention Center.”

Meanwhile, reports from inside existing facilities are exposing horrifying, inhumane conditions for detainees.

Sarah Stillman writes in the New Yorker about “how the suffering of children, including infants and toddlers, has become central to the Trump Administration’s immigration-enforcement strategy.”

Reporters, immigration lawyers, and human rights advocates continue to collect horrific, isolated anecdotes about detainee treatment.

But as Robyn Barnard of Human Rights First asked Stillman: “If these are the horrors we know about, what are the ones we still don’t know about?”

The Need for More Exposure

The eyewitness accounts and social media videos of public acts of violence by federal agents against immigrants and citizens helped foment a national revulsion to Trump’s immigration policies.

But what happens behind closed doors is, by design, out of public view. Indeed, ICE fought long and hard to block members of Congress from making unannounced visits to detention facilities.

ICE lost, and members do have access now. That leads to sporadic but highly disturbing reports from inside.

In Arizona, after a surprise inspection Thursday of the Mesa Immigration and Customs Enforcement holding facility, three Democratic representatives said they were horrified that immigrants were being stuffed into holding cells “like sardines,” the Arizona Mirror reported.

“I’ve never experienced anything like this in my entire life,” Rep. Adelita Grijalva told the Mirror. “It is frightening in there,” Grijalva said. “It is disgusting.”

The trio is now demanding answers from DHS.

Can you get your member of Congress to start making snap inspections? Is there any way you can communicate directly with a detainee?

Let’s push for more people to pierce the veil of secrecy around these detention sites and let the world know about these assaults on human dignity being conducted in our name. The public needs to start demanding improved conditions.

Anti-ICE Protesters Vindicated

Here is some great reporting by A.C. Thompson and Gabrielle Schonder for ProPublica and Frontline: “Caught in the Crackdown: As Arrests at Anti-ICE Protests Piled Up, Prosecutions Crumbled.”

ProPublica and FRONTLINE combed through social media, court records and news stories. Reporters identified more than 300 protesters and bystanders who were arrested by federal agents during immigration sweeps and were accused of crimes such as assaulting or interfering with law enforcement.

But over and over those accusations fell apart under scrutiny. Our reviews of court files found that statements made by the arresting officers were repeatedly debunked by video footage. In more than a third of the cases, prosecutors quickly dismissed charges that couldn’t be substantiated, refused to file charges at all, or lost at trial. The tally of cases that end this way will likely climb as many of the arrests remain unresolved.

It’s full of stories that will make your blood boil.

Come 2029, god willing, federal agents who abused protesters and then lied about could face prosecution for civil rights violations

Christy Lopez, a former Justice Department attorney who spent years investigating misconduct by law enforcement, told the reporters that the federal agents’ behavior “is on par with the worst protest policing and just law enforcement that I’ve seen from any department, even in their worst days.”

And here’s another one to add to the list: The Los Angeles Times reports that a Cal State professor is feeling a sense of “righteous indignation” after his acquittal by a federal jury on charges of assault on a federal officer with a deadly or dangerous weapon. He lobbed a cannister of tear gas back at agents who were rounding up hundreds of farmworkers at a southern California cannabis farm in July.

This Week in the Courts

• A federal judge in Massachusetts dismissed a DOJ lawsuit demanding that the state turn over unredacted voter registration rolls. It was the fourth loss for DOJ, with zero wins, out of 30 active voter-roll cases, Democracy Docket reported. Judge Leo Sorokin wrote that the statute DOJ cited to support its action -- Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 -- actually prohibited it.

• You may recall that a few weeks back, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., enjoined the Pentagon from enforcing a new policy that banished real journalists from a Pentagon workspace in favor of those “willing to publish only stories that are favorable to or spoon-fed by department leadership.” Judge Paul L. Friedman has now ruled that the Pentagon violated his order when it responded not by letting those journalists in, but by banishing everyone. In his ruling, the judge quoted from a New York Times interview in which a defense official bragged that “We used more words to say the same thing.”

• You may recall that last week, the American Historical Association filed suit challenging a memorandum from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel that declared the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional and advised Trump that he “need not further comply with its dictates” regarding the preservation of official documents. Now the plaintiffs have asked Judge Beryl Howell for an immediate injunction preventing any such destruction. The government refused to provide written assurances that no official records would be destroyed in the interim, they wrote, leading to “a clear danger that official government records of the highest importance will be irretrievably lost absent relief.”

• The Department of the Interior has agreed that the National Park Service will fly the rainbow Pride flag at the Stonewall National Monument in Manhattan, settling a lawsuit filed in February after the flag was taken down. As the New York Times reported, it’s a “rare instance of the Trump administration’s backing down from its nationwide attack on diversity initiatives.”

MAGA Joins the Resistance?

I would be remiss in not welcoming to the resistance a number of MAGA influencers who have turned against Trump in the last week, thanks to his increased signs of mental instability. As Status News reported:

• “The 25th Amendment needs to be invoked. He is a genocidal lunatic. Our Congress and military need to intervene. We are beyond madness,” wrote far-right extremist Candace Owens.

• “How do we 25th Amendment his ass?” Alex Jones, the notorious conspiracy theorist and ardent Trump supporter, asked on his Infowars show.

• And Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host turned podcaster, denounced Trump for his expletive-laced Easter message, calling it “vile” and suggesting he might be the Antichrist. Still others, including Megyn Kelly and Matt Walsh, turned on Trump in strikingly harsh terms after he threatened to wipe out the entire Iranian civilization.

End Notes

• Gustavo Arellano writes in his Los Angeles Times column: “Pope Leo isn’t afraid of President Trump. We shouldn’t be, either.”

• The New York Times reports that demonstrators blocked traffic by sitting down in the middle of Third Avenue in midtown Manhattan on Monday, protesting against arms sales to Israel.

• From WCCO TV in Minnesota: “Columbia Heights school welcomes back nearly 200 students who pivoted to virtual learning during ICE surge.” *sniff*

Donald Trump’s demented threats against Iran, amidst his utter debacle in the Middle East, have suddenly accelerated the resistance view that the most important and urgent question in the world is how to remove him from power.

Calls for his impeachment and removal — or the application of the 25th Amendment — are growing louder in the political discourse.

Such steps remain well out of reach politically, given the Republican party’s control of Congress and continued subservience to Trump’s will. But some fractures in the MAGA coalition are appearing.

And the more we talk about it, the more possible it gets. So listen:

• Sen. Ed Markey: “25th amendment. Impeachment. I will support any avenue to remove Donald Trump from office. We cannot leave this man in charge of America’s nuclear weapons as he threatens to end an entire civilization.”

• Rep. Pramila Jayapal: “Donald Trump threatening the destruction of an entire civilization is madness. He is completely unfit to serve as President of the United States. Invoke the 25th Amendment. Or Republicans must stand up with us to impeach him. We cannot allow him to set fire to the world.”

• Sen. Ron Wyden: “Donald Trump is deranged. He must be impeached and removed from office. Republicans who don’t stop him will have blood on their hands, and anyone who carries out an order to bomb civilian targets will be complicit in war crimes and will be held accountable.”

• Rep. Jamie Raskin: “Donald Trump’s deranged threat to destroy “a whole civilization” in Iran is a threat to commit war crimes and genocide. Republicans in Congress must prevail upon VP Vance, now campaigning for Putin’s puppet Viktor Orban in Hungary, to return to the U.S. and invoke Section 4 of the 25th Amendment.”

• Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “This is a threat of genocide and merits removal from office. The President’s mental faculties are collapsing and cannot be trusted. To every individual in the President’s chain of command: You have a duty to refuse illegal orders. That includes carrying out this threat.”

• Rep. Ilhan Omar: “Donald Trump must be removed from office for threatening war crimes and genocide. Speaker Johnson: bring the House back into session. Invoking the 25th Amendment and impeachment must be on the table, but Congress should also move on a War Powers resolution to stop Trump.”

• Rep. Jasmine Crockett: “We are watching a dangerous and unfit President drag this country toward catastrophe — and Republicans refuse to act. Invoke the 25th Amendment. Do your fucking job.”

• Rep. Rashida Tlaib: “After bombing a school and massacring young girls, the war criminal in the White House is threatening genocide. It’s time to invoke the 25th Amendment. This maniac should be removed from office.”

• Rep. Ro Khana: “If the United States Congress has any life left in it, every member of Congress and senator must be calling for Trump’s removal today based on the 25th Amendment.”

And it’s not just the usual suspects. Axios reports that “More than 85 House Democrats had called for President Trump to be impeached or removed via the 25th Amendment as of Tuesday evening.”

Back in December, Rep. Al Green’s impeachment resolution failed to advance in December, although 140 Democrats did vote in favor of bringing it to the floor.

Practically speaking, the most promising approach to at least limiting Trump’s power is through the War Powers Resolution, which in theory checks a president’s power to engage in hostilities.

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries told CNN’s Anderson Cooper last night that “a two-week ceasefire is insufficient” and that House Democrats will move for a War Powers vote to end the war as soon as the House is in session next week.

“All we need are a handful of Republicans to join us,” he said.

All he actually needs is for all the Democrats to vote with him. A resolution calling for a pullout from Iran within 30 days nearly passed in early March, 212-219, after two Republicans voted for it but four Democrats voted against it. (Jared Golden of Maine, Greg Landsman of Ohio, Henry Cuellar of Texas, and Juan Vargas of California – any of them belong to you?)

Of course the Senate would need to pass such a resolution as well. It failed to do so in March by a 47-53 margin. And then Trump, who calls it a war but officially says it is not a war, would veto it.

Incidentally, there are at least 60 antiwar protests scheduled for this afternoon across the nation.

Looking to the Midterms

The most surefire way to comprehensively stymie Trump, of course, is for Democrats to win back control of one or both houses of Congress in the elections to be held in 209 days.

Sadly, that will take more than just votes. It will also require fights to protect the vote and to count the vote.

Wired, for instance, just published an ominous article detailing how “Trump and his allies are quite openly engaged in a concerted and widespread effort to undermine trust in elections and, seemingly, to lay the foundations for baseless claims of rigged midterm elections in November.”

Protect Democracy has a comprehensive and scary new report about Trump’s attack on elections titled Executive Override. As Ben Raderstorf writes for the group’s blog, “The report describes a coordinated strategy already underway to spread disinformation and conspiracy theories; tilt the electoral playing field and manipulate election outcomes; and, if necessary, try to overturn unfavorable results.”

Happily, this report also identifies five major roadblocks standing in the administration’s way. “These are the pillars of American democracy that make it much harder to corrupt and steal legislative elections in the United States than it was in Russia, Hungary, or Venezuela,” Raderstorf writes.

As for what you can do? Raderstorf writes:

Counter disinformation. Vote. Help others vote. Strengthen community connections. Volunteer as poll workers. Be prepared to mobilize peacefully if a critical moment demands it….

Democracy only survives if we’re active participants in it — that’s always been true, and it’s never been more urgent than right now.

Brennan Center president Michael Waldman, similarly, writes that “we can now see that Trump and his allies are pursuing five distinct tactics. And for each aggressive move, a countermove is in motion to defend our elections.”

One of the Trump tactic Waldman identifies is the possible use of immigration forces or troops to intimidate voters or disrupt balloting. He writes:

That’s where citizen engagement comes in. Civil society groups are beginning to mobilize: clergy, veterans, and more. The League of Women Voters has announced plans to mobilize tens of thousands of volunteers to poll watch, walk people to the polls, and generally ensure calm and safety for voters. Others are doing the same. The business community can help encourage poll workers. We need a community mobilization like the one we saw in Minneapolis, neighbor helping neighbor, in the event of mischief.

Here’s a website summoning people – especially younger ones – to become poll workers.

What might well be the canonical list of all the things you do to protect the elections was published last year by Marc Elias, the all-star election lawyer who also founded the essential Democracy Docket website.

1. Educate Yourself

2. Share What You Learn

3. Run for Something

4. Volunteer for a Campaign

5. Join or Support Pro-Democracy Organizations

6. Become a Trained Poll Worker

7. Engage Your Elected Officials

8. Vote in Every Election

9. Stay Engaged

10. Support Independent, Pro-Democracy Media

Victory in Utah

Here’s a grassroots victory to celebrate, in Utah!

For a while it looked like a Republican-led bid to restore the state legislature’s power to gerrymander voting districts had gathered enough signatures to get on the November ballot. (In 2018, Utah voters had voted for a measure that put an independent commission in charge.)

But news broke that signature-gatherers used deceptive tactics to lure people to sign. So a pro-democracy group called Better Boundaries launched a campaign urging voters who had been misled to remove their names from the petitions they had signed.

More than 10,000 Utahns have now removed their names. Ballot rules require a certain threshold of signatures in at least 26 of 29 state senate districts, and in at least one key district the signature-removals were enough to drop the number below the threshold.

In a Democracy Docket video, Better Boundaries executive director Elizabeth Rasmussen celebrated the victory. “We’ve had less money, less institutional power than anyone else,” she said, “but the voters are smart, they know what they want, so just remind them of what they’ve approved and the reasons why and they’ll show up.”

Big Warehouse News

The Associated Press brings us great news:

The Department of Homeland Security is pausing the purchase of new warehouses intended to house immigrants as it scrutinizes all contracts signed under former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, according to a senior Homeland Security official…

The official also said that warehouse purchases that were already made are also being scrutinized.

Why? At least in part thanks to the resistance:

The plan was hatched during Noem’s tenure but immediately ran into intense opposition around the country by residents and communities opposed to such large Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities in their neighborhoods.

Many objected on moral grounds to ICE’s presence in their neighborhoods, while others questioned whether the facilities would be a drain on local resources, such as sewer and water systems.

Retrofitting work has stopped at one facility that I know of. The Baltimore Banner reports that ICE is “reconsidering the precise scope” of a massive facility planned for a warehouse in Washington County. In a response to a lawsuit filed by the Maryland Attorney General’s Office, ICE said it will conduct additional environmental analysis before making a final decision on its plan.

The essential Project Saltbox website writes that the political struggle is ongoing:

The Enforcement and Removal Operations arm of ICE — the agency actually tasked with running the facilities — has grown increasingly resistant to the program.

But Stephen Miller, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and his principal Homeland Security advisor, is pressing hard to keep it alive.

I never bet against Stephen Miller.

Meantime, as Project Saltbox also reports, Democratic lawmakers this week opened an investigation into the private companies helping build the immigration detention network.

This Week in the Courts

• A federal judge in California demanded that the Trump administration stop violating a 40-year-old court order protecting the due process rights of unaccompanied immigrant children in government custody. Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald revoked a Trump administration memo that encouraged border officials to coerce children by threatening them with “prolonged” detention and other consequences if they sought to speak with a relative or attorney.

• A federal judge in Massachusetts blocked the Department of Education’s demand for seven years of student data from every university, including race, sex, GPA, and test scores on every applicant. Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV wrote that the requirement was promulgated in a “rushed and chaotic manner” in order to meet a Trump deadline, and “epitomizes arbitrary and capricious agency action.”

• Trump’s March 31 executive order purporting to govern mail-in voting and create a federal voter database has prompted at least three lawsuits, led by Democratic congressional leaders, the League of Women Voters, and the League of United Latin American citizens. The thing is that the Constitution explicitly states that only Congress and the states can set the rules for elections.

• The American Historical Association filed suit challenging a memorandum from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel that declared the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional and advised Trump that he “need not further comply with its dictates.” The lawsuit argues that the memo defies binding Supreme Court precedent and asserts “by fiat” that Trump “is legally free to destroy records of his official government conduct, or even spirit away the records for his own future personal use.”

Concentration Camps Around the World

Author Andrea Pitzer writes in her newsletter about the Trump administration’s creation of an international network of concentration camps – and what you can do about it.

“People worried about America pushing concentration camp–style detention overseas might feel particularly helpless, not knowing how to take action,” she writes. “But there are still things that can be done.” Such as:

Try to address the harm at earlier stages. So one way to keep those detained from being deported to a third country—and perhaps deported at all—is to make sure they have legal representation. Few things are as critical as this. Groups like the National Immigrant Justice Center, which works in the Midwest, exist all over the country, and help to make sure that detainees get lawyers….

[S]upport journalism that does reporting about detention and deportation of immigrants. ProPublica has been doing an extraordinary job of late, and independent journalists like Gillian Brockell have newsletters tracking different aspects of ICE movement and operations….

Visit the Third Country Deportation Watch website, and follow the stories uncovered so far. Tie these faraway places to the warehouse conversions happening here at home, and declare that the U.S. should not be in the business of running or creating concentration camps anywhere on the planet.

End Notes

• From the Philadelphia Inquirer: “These Philly groups protest Trump and ICE with song, continuing the tradition of music as resistance.”

• Charles Sennott, co-founder of Report for America, writes in his newsletter with one example of how “Independent local media lifts voices of resistance to the Trump administration.”

• An in honor of Tax Day, this article from the New York Times seems to imply that withholding a symbolic amount of your taxes as a protest won’t get you in trouble. At least not big trouble.

The third No Kings Day was a glorious national declaration of dissent. A record-breaking estimated 8 million people turned out across more than 3,300 events, sharing a powerful sense of connection and taking a forceful stand against Trump’s authoritarian rule — and for peace, democracy, and human rights.

There’s another mass event just a month from now, on May 1. More on that further down.

But right now, the big question is: How do you translate the energy of a mass protest into an effective, ongoing political force?

And this time, organizers are being specific about what you need to do next. They are asking you to host a local organizing meeting sometime between now and April 12 and make plans to take action in your community. Here is an excellent, detailed community gathering toolkit.

Leah Greenberg, co-founder of Indivisible, explained it this way on an organizing call last night:

We talk about the 3.5% of the population that is needed to mobilize to successfully stop dictatorship…. But that figure is not about a single day. It is about getting people into ongoing, sustained civic engagement everywhere in the country. That is what actually defeats dictators….

No action alone is going to fix things, but together it all creates that tapestry of defiance that is necessary and builds the muscles we are going to draw on as we face challenges ahead….

So our top ask for you tonight is a little more complicated than usual, because there is no one simple website to go to or single action to take. This is not about building a national email list or a simple digital action. It is about the work of getting into a relationship and information in real life. Our ask is that sometime in the next couple of weeks, you get into a room with people in your community to talk about what you can do together, to be part of that tapestry of defiance and to build towards that 3.5%.

Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, an activist who emceed the call for No Kings, said:

If you boil it down, our ask for you tonight is to go forth and gather with your people. My hope is that how you define your people is expansive in this moment. I want you to talk with them. I want you to listen to them, and I want you to collectively develop what’s next. Organizing is bringing people together across their differences to be able to take collective action together. I want you to be doing what makes the most sense in your community.

The No Kings “What’s Next?” web page outlines four forms of action:

• Build power locally: grow sustained organizing in your community

• Protect our neighbors: stand up to ICE abuses and threats

• Escalate and innovate: strengthen nonviolent and lawful actions that refuse business as usual

• Defend our elections: protect the vote and enforce the results

Still not concrete enough for you? I feel you. That’s why I loved it when Henderson riffed on some specific possible group activities:

You can build mutual aid action infrastructure, whether it’s a backpack and school supply drive with your local teachers union or a hot meal train for immigrant communities. Whether it’s building a community food market… or maybe it’s a parent swap for childcare …

You could ask neighbors to join a community WhatsApp or Signal group chat to be able to communicate urgent alerts, community support needs, and foster direct connections between community members.

You could participate and spread the word about Ice Watch trainings….

You can get down with warehouse fights. Check out Project Saltbox and the Communities Not Cages toolkit….

You can be hosting Fourth Amendment workplace drives to prepare staff for potential ICE raids. You could be opposing efforts to roll back rights and protections for trans people… supporting the visibility effort, [and] keeping them safe.

You could join local Election Protection Coalition efforts. You could rock with the Freedom Trainers like I do and get trained in noncooperation. Did you know that there are 300 -- at least 300 -- nonviolent tactics that you could be taking to slow down and stop this authoritarian threat in a neighborhood that you are in?

So there’s your to-do list!

The No Kings 3 Experience

Spend some time with these wonderful photo galleries of No Kings 3 from the Associated Press and Getty Images, and as collected by The Atlantic. Reuters’s photo gallery comprises of 47 signs.

Getty also has some great videos. This CNN video focuses on inflatables and other strong visual elements:

Here’s video of Bruce Springsteen, one of the headliners of the No Kings flagship event in the Twin Cities, performing his protest song, “Streets of Minneapolis.” He had a few words to say before he sang:

This reactionary nightmare and these invasions of American cities will not stand. You gave us hope. You gave us courage. And for those who gave their lives: Renee Good, mother of three, brutally murdered, Alex Pretti, VA nurse, executed by ICE, shot in the back and left to die in the street without even the decency of our lawless government investigating their deaths. Their bravery, their sacrifice, and their names will not be forgotten.

Writer and activist Rebecca Solnit wrote a lovely appreciation of the day:

One thing striking about this round of #nokings protest is that people recognize that it’s all connected, because women’s rights, immigrant and refugee rights, trans rights, voting rights, racial justice, public health, environmental and climate issues, the rule of law, and accountability are all under attack by the same players…

There’s fierce joy in feeling far from alone, and something magical can happen and has, again and again, when thousands of individuals feel part of a greater whole, feel the power of solidarity and the possibility that arises from it when they become civil society incarnate. I’m a believer in the almost sacred space of the street and the power of what happens there….

I believe that coexisting with strangers in public is a foundation, of democracy, an embodied participation in literal public life that underpins the capacity to participate in political public life.

Tim Dickinson reported from Portland for the Contrarian:

Portland protesters turned the tables by laughing in the face of fascism, donning chicken suits and inflatable frog costumes, and refusing to cower before an authoritarian president whose exercise of extra-constitutional power hinges on fear, passivity, and submission.

On Saturday — amid the compounding traumas of unaccountable ICE violence, the illegal, unprovoked war with Iran, an economy rigged for billionaires, and a kakistocracy that is eviscerating core investments in science and social services — the people of Portland proved they can still gather to lift each other up, spread courage, and build the solidarity that’s needed, when the only way out of this morass is to get through it together.

Some guy on Bluesky who goes by the name of an ancient fish posted a lovely thread on the righteous anger at his local event. It starts:

Walking thru the “Ultra Normie” No Kings rally in my extremely rural, white town and there are Patagonia wearing moms carrying signs that say “DEAD PEDOPHILES DONT REOFFEND” and “ICE GETS THE WALL” and I hi fived an old guy with a sign that said MY DADDY FOUGHT NAZIS AND SO WILL I” this is wild

Dana Fisher, an American University professor who studies civic engagement, headed a team that collected surveys from 198 random protesters at the main event in Washington,. D.C.. She writes:

What was different at No Kings 3 was that war was one of the top motivations listed: 73% of participants reported peace/anti-war as a motivation for joining, making it the third most common motivation behind immigration (76%), and Trump (75%).

At the Twin Cities rally, John Nichols observed for The Nation, speakers and performers repeatedly expressed opposition to the war. Especially Sen. Bernie Sanders:

Sanders was scathing in his analysis of US militarism. “Let’s be honest,” he declared. “The American people were lied to about the war in Vietnam. We were lied to about the war in Iraq. And we are being lied to today about the war in Iran. This war must end immediately.”

May Day!

“No School. No Work. No Shopping.” That’s the ambitious goal of May Day Strong, the group organizing events for May 1:

On May 1st, we are declaring: workers over billionaires. May 1 will be a day of rallies, marches, teach-ins, walkouts, and a refusal of business as usual with: no work, no school, no shopping.

We think this is especially important because this will be the first national test of what we can pull off when we call for widespread refusal to participate in business as usual. Successful movements innovate, trying new tactics to achieve their goals. And we know that in order to successfully push back on authoritarianism, we need to not just protest—we need to be willing to withdraw our participation from systems that uphold authoritarianism.

Here’s a May Day events map.

Another Big Week in the Courts

• A federal judge in Washington, D.C., ordered that construction be halted on the proposed ballroom that Trump razed the East Wing of the White House to make room for. Judge Richard J. Leon wrote that the president is the steward of the White House. “He is not, however, the owner!” The judge said Trump had failed to identify any law that allowed him to demolish the East Wing and build the ballroom. “[N]o statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims to have,” Leon wrote. Now it’s up to Congress.

• Another D.C. federal judge ruled that Trump’s executive order cutting off funding to NPR and PBS is “unlawful and unenforceable.” Judge Randolph D. Moss wrote that “the First Amendment draws a line, which the government may not cross, at efforts to use government power—including the power of the purse—’to punish or suppress disfavored expression’ by others.”

• A federal judge in Boston blocked the Trump administration’s mass termination of the legal status of over 900,000 Venezuelan, Cuban, and Haitian immigrants who entered the country lawfully, using an app introduced by the Biden administration that granted them humanitarian parole. Judge Allison D. Burroughs wrote that an April 2025 email from DHS telling them to depart the U.S. “immediately” violated a process “mandated by statute and by their own regulations.”

• A federal judge in D.C. ruled that Trump is not immune from civil liability for his actions related to the January 6 insurrection. Judge Amit P. Mehta concluded that Trump’s speech at the Ellipse was political, not official, and therefore not subject to the immunity for official acts granted by the Supreme Court.

• FBI agents who worked on Trump probes filed a class action lawsuit saying they were fired as an act of political retribution, in violation of their First and Fifth Amendment rights.

A Report From Rural Minnesota

This extraordinary article from Emma Janssen for the American Prospect magazine is a gut-wrenching and awe-inspiring look at the resistance to ICE in rural Minnesota. Go read the whole thing. Here are a few paragraphs:

These residents balance their day jobs with going to the Mexican grocery store to pick up food for families, patrolling the town’s poorer streets where ICE agents tend to pop up, and preparing to show up to an active raid or abduction at the drop of a hat….

You can’t always tell who is part of these networks, and that’s what makes them powerful. They’re fresh out of college—and retirees. They’re longtime protesters—and “apolitical” people who suddenly realized they couldn’t sit idly by any longer. They’re pastors and imams, brewery owners and teachers.

A few things are universal: They are scared, exhausted, and they say that the news of a drawdown just isn’t their reality.

More Must Reads

• Reuters reports: “Pope Leo says God rejects prayers of leaders who wage wars.” Coincidentally, or not, the New York Times reports: “Roman Catholic Churches See a Surge of New Converts.”

• In an excellent invitation to wrestle with a tough question, The Nation asks: “What Are Your Obligations When Your Country Is the Villain?”

• A ProPublica photographer who lives in Minneapolis asks his neighbors to say in their own words why they continue to stand up against ICE: “This Is What It Means to Be Minnesotan.”

• From the Chicago Sun Times: “Mayor Johnson unveils ‘Abolish ICE’ snowplow”.

• WTOP News asks and answers the question: “Why is there a golden toilet on the National Mall?”

The list of grievances that fall under the banner of “No Kings 3” is, by necessity, a long one.

Each of the millions of protesters who will rally in over 3,000 locations across the country on Saturday, March 28, will be adding their voice to a massive, collective roar of defiance. But their chants and their signs will reflect the wide range of resistance to tyranny.

Many will focus on Trump’s abuse of power, his undermining of the rule of law, and the cover-up of the Epstein files. Others will decry his attacks on human rights, civil rights, and voting rights. Immigration will be a huge issue -- both Trump’s mass-deportation agenda and the murderous ICE invasion of American cities. Some will call attention to his gutting of the government, his cossetting of his fellow oligarchs, and his regressive environmental policies.

But No Kings 3 is, unexpectedly, taking place in a time of war. It is a war only a mad king would launch, and only a mad king would love.

Trump attacked Iran, unprovoked, based on his “feelings”. He bypassed Congress, which is the only branch of government the Constitution vests with the authority to declare war. He is now bombing people and sinking boats “for fun.” His announced goals are incoherent and contradictory and ever-changing. He makes apocalyptic threats and then withdraws them. His is spoon-fed cherry-picked news by his acolytes.

And now we appear to be mired in a war that is costing the lives of servicemembers, killing innocent people, terrorizing entire populations, destabilizing the globe, tanking the economy, and arguably strengthening Iran’s own tyrannical regime.

The American public overwhelmingly opposes the war – by a 65 to 31 margin, according to a recent poll – driving Trump’s overall approval level down to 36 percent.

There’s been remarkably little anti-war outcry so far. But that could all change on Saturday.

The message, I hope, will be clear: That this war must end now, and that this deranged man must be stopped.

No Kings 3 will almost certainly be the largest one-day political protest in U.S. history. It might also turn out to be the largest anti-war protest the country has ever seen.

Come Out and Bring a Friend

There is, I feel safe in saying, a No Kings 3 event somewhere near you. You can find one here.

Molly Lee, a maker of handcrafted soap in Portland, has posted nine delightful Facebook reels encouraging attendance, including this one, titled “No Kings for beginners.”

And don’t let your participation in the resistance end when you go home. MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow had a rousing segment on No Kings 3 on her Monday show. It included an interview with Indivisible co-founder Ezra Levin, who told her: “The day after No Kings, democracy won’t suddenly be saved. Trump will still be in the White House. This illegal and unconstitutional war will still be going on. His secret police force goon squad will still be terrorizing American communities.”

Levin continued: “So we need to build. This is why it’s important to be organizing where you are… to start organizing your own community for what comes next.”

The flagship No Kings 3 rally will be held in St. Paul, Minnesota. The lineup includes Bernie Sanders, Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, Keith Ellison – and Bruce Springsteen.

Springsteen will perform his new protest song, “Streets of Minneapolis,” which includes these lyrics:

We’ll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
Here in our home they killed and roamed
In the winter of ’26
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis

I hope he also does “War”:

War, huh
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing
Say it again

Why You Should Go

“I hope you will join in. Everything is at stake,” writes University of Toronto professor and tyranny expert Timothy Snyder. He continues:

Protest changes the atmosphere. For authoritarians to win, they need their supporters to be active, the majority to be silent, and their actions to seem normal. Protest shows that their supporters are in the minority, that the majority will not be silent, and that it is the people who set the standards….

Protest wins elections. In the situation that we are in now, the opposition must win elections to halt the shift to a one-person, one-party authoritarian regime. And although these elections will be difficult, they can be won. But winning them means building a big, active coalition, of which the opposition party is just one part. Protestors are another part. The groups we build together are what make the difference.

Protest brings joy. It feels good to be active and to be with other people. It dispels the loneliness we might experience when we are alone or online. When we realize that we are with millions of others, we feel we can make a difference, because we are making a difference: in the world, and in ourselves.

Activist and former labor secretary Robert Reich writes that on Saturday, “we will proclaim our refusal to submit. We will march against this vile regime in larger numbers than have ever protested in America.” He continues:

This alone won’t bring down Trump, of course, but it will show lawmakers on both sides of the aisle the breadth and depth of the opposition to him. This is essential to strengthening their backbones against him.

It will also show each of us that we’re not alone. It will show hope and determination all around us.

Daniel Hunter, the co-founder of Choose Democracy, was the guest on this week’s episode of the National Catholic Reporter’s “The Nonviolent Jesus Podcast.” “This is a good moment,” Hunter said. “We’re getting ready to take on the biggest supervillain the world has ever seen. Every action, everything we’re doing — it’s all adding up right now.”

Home of the Brave, a group largely made up of never-Trumpers, says they have spent $1 million to place this full-page ad in 300 newspapers around the country.

What Comes Next?

There’s a call tonight to prepare for the next big event, on May 1: the May Day Strong “After No Kings” Mass Call starts at 8 p.m. ET.

May 1 comes on a Friday this year. Organizers are calling for “no school, no work, no shopping” to “demand a nation that puts workers over billionaires.”

There’s also a call next Tuesday, March 31, about “What’s Next After No Kings 3?”

Speakers will discuss the importance of local organizing to prepare for the midterms – to protect the vote and vote out Republicans – as well as monitoring ICE in your community, mutual aid, and other activities.

This Week in the Courts

• A federal judge in Washington, D.C., enjoined the Pentagon from enforcing a new policy that effectively banished real journalists in favor of those “willing to publish only stories that are favorable to or spoon-fed by department leadership.” Judge Paul L. Friedman wrote: “A primary purpose of the First Amendment is to enable the press to publish what it will and the public to read what it chooses, free of any official proscription. Those who drafted the First Amendment believed that the nation’s security requires a free press and an informed people and that such security is endangered by governmental suppression of political speech. That principle has preserved the nation’s security for almost 250 years. It must not be abandoned now.”

• A federal judge in Massachusetts granted a motion to block a new Trump administration policy that mandated the warrantless arrest and potentially indefinite detention of lawfully admitted refugees. HIAS argued in an amicus brief that “Because refugees are already subjected to an exhaustive vetting process, and because those who have already arrived in the United States are deeply involved in rebuilding their lives and recovering from persecution and displacement, it is unwarranted, costly, unnecessary, inefficient, and extraordinarily cruel to arrest and detain them to conduct additional screenings.”

• Minnesota state and county officials sued DOJ and DHS for blocking their investigations into the shooting by federal agents in January of Renee Good, Alex Pretti and Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis. Good and Pretti were killed, Sosa-Celis was injured. The suit alleges that in at least one case, the decision to stonewall local investigators “was made at the highest levels of DOJ.” The suit says that Minnesota courts issued search warrants for evidence related to Good’s death, including one for her car, but the FBI won’t let them near it.

• Two former FBI agents sued to get their jobs back after being fired last year for having worked on an investigation that led to Trump’s indictment for election interference. “Plaintiffs’ terminations were unlawful because they were based on a perception that Plaintiffs were not political supporters of President Trump,” the suit alleges.

I take great succor from the court cases I’ve chronicled here on Heads Up News. But Duncan Hosie, a legal scholar at Stanford, writes in a New York Times op-ed that “The Courts Cannot Save Us From Trump.”

“Placing too much faith in the courts in this moment mistakes litigation for resistance,” Hosie writes. “It risks obscuring the greater importance of the political battlefields where the most significant opposition to the administration’s constitutional abuses can and should take place.”

No to Concentration Camps

NPR has published a fabulous resource for those who want to protest ICE facilities or want to learn about those protests: “Mapping ICE’s expanding footprint, and the communities fighting back.”

The state of Michigan and the city of Romulus sued to block the conversion of a suburban Detroit warehouse into an immigration detention center. “DHS’s plan has thrown the Romulus community into disarray,” the suit says.

The state of New Jersey and the town of Roxbury sued to block the conversion of a warehouse there into a 1,500-person immigration detention center. The warehouse is fit for “packages, not people,” the suit says.

In Evanston, Illinois, on Friday, interfaith ministers and others announced their campaign to stop Chicago real estate firm Highlands REIT from contracting for an immigration center in Colorado.

Protesters gathered outside Utah Gov. Spencer Cox’s mansion on Tuesday to protest an immigration center planned for a Salt Lake City warehouse.

One possible attack vector for protesters is how wildly ICE is overpaying for its warehouses. ICE bought the massive Salt Lake City warehouse at a price that one local industrial expert told the Building Salt Lake website was “unheard of.” The broker said the price for such buildings is typically between $100 and $110 per square foot, while ICE paid around $174 per square foot.

I previously noted that it was a mystery why DHS bought a massive warehouse in Social Circle, Georgia, outside Atlanta, for $129 million -- $100 million more than the $29 million purchase price in 2003.

Cui bono?

See you on Saturday!

Organizers estimated that about five million people attended the first No Kings Day events on June 14 of last year, and about seven million came out for No Kings 2 on October 18.

With 10 days to go until No Kings 3 on March 28, organizers are expecting the biggest turnout yet – nine million people, or maybe more. That would make it the largest single-day protest in recent American history.

That’s getting closer and closer to what’s widely considered the magic number: 12 million protesters, or 3.5 percent of the U.S. population. A study of hundreds of 20th-century movements found that, as a general rule, no government can withstand a challenge of 3.5 percent of its population without either accommodating the movement or falling apart.

“We are firing on all cylinders to build toward 3.5% on March 28,” Moveon leaders said in a fundraising email.

But success won’t only be measured by the number of people who show up. It will also be measured by the number of people newly recruited to the resistance, and the extent of protesters’ commitment to continued nonviolent action through local organizing committees.

Local action will be key in the coming months, especially as Donald Trump tries to steal the midterm elections, organizers say.

“It won’t be successful if it’s just Saturday and we all go home,” Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, said in an interview with Wajahat Ali on the Left Hook podcast.

“When he tries to sabotage the midterm election we’re going to have to do a lot more than just show up on a Saturday,” Levin said. “We’re going to have to organize and push back with massive nonviolent pressure akin to what we saw in the Twin Cities.”

The most essential purpose of No Kings 3, he said, is “to grow our ranks.”

The flagship rally on March 28 will be held in Minneapolis. But there will be protests almost everywhere. There are already over 3,000 individual events scheduled. (Find one near you.)

Just for example, there are going to be more than 40 protests in Connecticut alone, 12 in the Houston area, five in the East End of Long Island, and 60 across Oregon.

There will be rallies, marches, festivals, and bridge brigades. People in the Tucson area will be staging an eight-mile “corridor of democracy.”

The ACLU will lead an online training about the Constitutional right to peacefully protest and about best practices for reducing risks when attending protests, at 8 p.m. ET tonight.

And there’s a No Kings “Kickoff call” tomorrow (Thursday) at 8 p.m. ET.

What About the War?

One big question hanging over No Kings 3 is how much of an impact the U.S. war on Iran will have on the protesting. It may be a huge factor. Earlier this week Indivisible posted a social media call linking No Kings with an antiwar message: “No wars of aggression. No terrorizing our communities or yours. No tyrants, no conquests, no kings.”

The war also has the potential to expand the anti-Trump resistance to include former MAGA followers who feel betrayed by the mockery Trump has made of his anti-war campaign rhetoric.

So far, protests against the war have been muted. An essay in the Nation by Rutgers professor Eric Blanc explored why. He identified several possible factors including:

• Americans Feel Powerless

• People Are Hoping the War Ends Quickly

• Trump Is Doing So Many Horrible Things

• No Draft

But he suggested that No Kings 3 – and Mayday Strong events planned for May 1 – could enliven an anti-war movement. He wrote:

Most immediately, each of us—and each of the organizations we belong to—can commit not only to attending the March 28 No Kings demonstrations but to going all in to reach out to our neighbors, coworkers, fellow students, and co-congregants to join as well.

The Legal Resistance Strikes Again and Again

You could well be excused for concluding that the Trump administration is just one big criminal enterprise, based on the seemingly endless string of court rulings that his major initiatives are illegal.

Among that latest major legal blows:

• A federal judge in Massachusetts temporarily blocked HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from making radical changes to the childhood immunization schedule and restricting access to COVID-19 vaccines. “There is a method to how these decisions historically have been made – a method scientific in nature and codified into law through procedural requirements,” Judge Brian E. Murphy wrote. “Unfortunately, the Government has disregarded those methods and thereby undermined the integrity of its actions.”

• The chief judge on the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C., quashed the Justice Department’s subpoenas targeting Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. “A mountain of evidence suggests that the Government served these subpoenas on the Board to pressure its Chair into voting for lower interest rates or resigning,” Judge James E. Boasberg wrote. “On the other side of the scale, the Government has produced essentially zero evidence to suspect Chair Powell of a crime; indeed, its justifications are so thin and unsubstantiated that the Court can only conclude that they are pretextual.”

• A federal judge in Washington, D.C., ordered the parent agency of the Voice of America to reinstate more than 1,000 Voice of America employees who were put on leave a year ago as part of the administration’s efforts to dismantle the agency. “The Court can hardly imagine the defendants have a non-arbitrary justification for these actions,” Judge Royce C. Lamberth wrote.

• A federal judge in Illinois temporarily blocked the Trump administration from pulling back $600 million in public health funds from four blue states. Judge Manish S. Shaw ruled that the administration’s AI-generated explanation for the cuts was not credible, and that the states were illegally targeted at “states with sanctuary jurisdictions.”

• A federal judge in Massachusetts indefinitely paused the termination of Temporary Protected Status for more than 1,000 Somali immigrants who would have faced deportation otherwise. DHS wanted their status revoked as of today. These immigrants entered the country legally under the program that offers refuge for nationals of designated countries that are confronting such things as ongoing armed conflict or environmental disaster. Judge Allison D. Burrough’s ruling was procedural, intended to allow time for briefings and deliberation.

• A federal judge in Rhode Island ordered the Department of Veterans Affairs to reinstate a union contract covering 320,000 VA employees. Judge Melissa R. DuBose wrote that the termination of the contract “seems substantially motivated by the Plaintiffs’ history and frequency of vocally opposing changes to labor policies” and therefore qualifies as a First Amendment retaliation claim.

• A federal judge in Maryland temporarily blocked construction work on an immigration detention center that the DHS had planned to begin operating in an empty Washington County warehouse next month. Judge Brendan A. Hurson cited concerns about the facility’s potential environmental impacts.

• Federal prosecutors in Chicago dropped criminal conspiracy charges against two members of the “Broadview Six” – the six people arrested after protesting outside ICE’s Broadview detention center in September. Lawyers for the remaining four members, who have complained of “improper influence” on the prosecution from federal officials, want the charged dropped against them, too.

These lawsuits don’t just vindicate our rights, they bring essential information to light. Case in point, I wrote two weeks about the federal judge in Oregon who barred ICE from conducting warrantless “dragnets” in the state. Sam Levin of the Guardian writes that ICE officers who were compelled to answer questions about their conduct under oath during the trial revealed that they “used a custom-made app to identify neighborhoods and people to target, and had daily arrest quotas they sought to meet during operations.”

What Up With ICE Warehouses?

• I already mentioned the federal court ruling that temporarily blocked construction work on a Maryland warehouse that ICE intends to use as an immigration detention center. That case was filed by Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown.

• The city government of Social Circle, Georgia, where residents have loudly opposed the transformation of a local warehouse into a massive ICE detention center, has cut off water and sewer services to the building.

• DLR Group, one of the largest architecture firms in the world, will no longer do any work for ICE detention or deportation facilities, the CEO announced after an outcry from employees, Mother Jones reports.

• And now Congress may weigh in. NOTUS reports that “Senators from both parties are hoping that the Department of Homeland Security’s approach to acquiring and converting warehouses into large-scale detention centers will change under new leadership.”

Resistance Hero: Joaquin Castro

The New York Times published a gripping article about Texas congressman Joaquin Castro and his continued efforts to free families from the Dilley Immigration Processing Center – the “sprawling prison fashioned out of trailers, which serves as the country’s largest family immigration detention site.”

Dilley “has become a symbol of the indiscriminate nature of the administration’s crackdown,” Annie Karni wrote. “And Mr. Castro, a seven-term Democrat from San Antonio, is on a crusade to close it.”

Castro “has been highlighting the plight of its most sympathetic detainees in a bid to shame immigration authorities into releasing them — and in the process, calling attention to the cruel consequences of the president’s immigration agenda.”

It’s been five months since around six million Americans took to the streets for the No Kings 2 protest on October 18, and things have only gotten worse.

Trump’s push for dictator-like powers continues to grow, and now threatens the midterm elections.

Federal agents invaded and occupied Minneapolis for nearly three months – and murdered two U.S. citizens who were observing them -- before a powerful people’s movement chased most of them out. But brutal abductions continue throughout the country.

And just now, Trump has mired the country in a dangerous war in Iran without explaining why – and without a plan. He is truly deranged.

Nearly half of Americans – 49 percent -- now strongly disapprove of the job Trump is doing. (Another five percent somewhat disapprove.)

The next No Kings Day — No Kings 3 – is March 28, only a couple weeks away.

Organizers are hoping to far exceed the turnout at No Kings 2.

“Over 2,200 events are already planned across all 50 states, Washington D.C., and a dozen countries, with the flagship gathering in Minneapolis–St. Paul,” the 50501 Movement states on its website.

“When our families are under attack and costs are pushing people to the brink, silence is not an option,” declares NoKings.org. “We will defend ourselves and our communities against this administration’s unjust and cruel acts of violence. America does not belong to strongmen, greedy billionaires, or those who rule through fear. It belongs to us, the people.”

There’s an event near you

What can you do in the meantime?

“The movement grows one conversation at a time. March 28 will be the largest in history only if each of us commits to trying to get more people to join,” 50501 explains. The group suggests that you text three people today to invite them to join you.

Writer and organizer Micah Sifry offers this advice in his Connector newsletter:

Right now, as you are reading this, make a list of the people who you know who didn’t march in No Kings 1 or 2, and commit to contacting each one before March 28. If you are into writing postcards, take a break from postcarding for candidates and instead write to your own people. You may think that emailing or texting people is enough, but a personal phone call or door-knock will be far more effective.

There are also a series of online training sessions you can sign up for.

Two Victories, Maybe

Kristi Noem is gone! Trump fired her as DHS secretary!

“It feels good to see someone in this administration pay a price for cruelty and incompetence,” writes Joan Walsh in the Nation.

Independent journalist Ken Klipperstein thinks you should take a bow:

The media will credit her fall to some shady no-bid contract she was behind, her use of a private jet, or administration rivals like Stephen Miller and whatever boring DC drama. But the real reason is obvious: public activism.

The revolution is here, as I wrote last month, and the people of Minneapolis, Chicago and Los Angeles deserve credit for forcing Donald Trump to reassess the nature of his immigration war, and creating a massive shift in public opinion.

I’ve got to say that I’m skeptical, both about why she was fired and about how much difference it will make.

Then again, the New York Times sees a significant change in DHS’s strategy already happening:

After months of high-profile, militarized immigration raids in major American cities, the Trump administration has scaled back its deportation strategy, leading to a dip in arrests last month, according to three federal officials and internal government data.

In recent weeks, immigration agents have focused on conducting more targeted enforcement operations, rather than indiscriminate street sweeps, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy.

Those arrests have been less visible and chaotic than the campaign that led to violent clashes with protesters — including the fatal shootings of two American citizens in January — and generated intense political blowback against President Trump.

The Habeas Revolution

Mother Jones’s Isabel Dias has a wonderful article on something I’ve been tracking here for months now: “24,403 Lawsuits and Counting: How Habeas Corpus Became the Front Line of Immigration Defense.”

This is all happening because of Trump’s cruelty. His administration abandoned decades of humane precedent and stopped allowing detained immigrants to have bond hearings, which could lead to their release. So now, “Instead of negotiating immigration law with government attorneys in the immigration courts overseen by the Department of Justice,” Dias writes, immigration lawyers “are pleading for federal judges to step in and uphold the basic constitutional rights of thousands of immigrants held in government custody.”

The result has been an amazing rebellion by federal district court judges in defense of the Constitution. “As the number of habeas corpus petitions challenging mandatory detention soared, so did the wins for detained immigrants,” Dias writes. Since September, “federal judge after federal judge has rejected the Trump administration’s reading of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The repudiation has been nearly unanimous. As many as 400 judges — including Trump appointees — in some 4,400 cases have arrived at that consensus, according to a Reuters review of court records.”

Trump Also Losing Lawsuits Over His Defunding Campaign

The New York Times identified 198 lawsuits in the past year “that challenge how Mr. Trump has leveraged federal funding to carry out his agenda without the consent of Congress.”

He keeps losing them:

When plaintiffs have sought immediate relief, district court judges have temporarily blocked the administration’s actions 79 percent of the time, signaling plaintiffs’ likely success on the merits. In the 26 instances where district judges have issued partial or final rulings, the administration lost 23.

That’s the good news. The bad new is that the article is mostly about how Trump “has proceeded undeterred by losses in court.”

That reflects “a new kind of reality in Washington, one where the president wields far more control over spending, and where his opponents aren’t entitled to the services of their federal government.”

This Week in the Courts

• The 350,000 Haitians who arrived in the U.S. legally under Temporary Protected Status can breathe easier. A federal appeals court this week agreed with a district judge’s ruling that saved them from mass deportation — at least for now. The 2-1 ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., concluded that “The government’s failure to meet its burden of demonstrating irreparable harm alone justifies denying emergency relief that would upend the status quo and increase uncertainty while this appeal proceeds.”

• The residents of a low-income housing complex across the street from a frequently protested Portland ICE facility can also breathe easier. A federal judge ordered DHS agents to stop deploying tear gas and other chemical munitions against protesters that could seep into the complex, unless they face an “imminent threat to life”. Judge Amy M. Baggio agreed with residents that ICE’s use of chemical munitions had been “so excessive — so enveloping” that it violated their rights.

• Did federal agents in Minnesota detain people solely based on their race? They sure did, a federal judge in Minnesota has ruled. In fact, they did so routinely. Judge Eric Tostrud, a Trump appointee, concluded that “Defendants have adopted a policy authorizing federal immigration officers to conduct investigatory stops based on ethnicity or race without reasonable suspicion that the individuals were violating immigration laws. The evidence from individual encounters is compelling and troubling.”

• It’s never a good sign for the Trump administration when a ruling starts with a disquisition praising the Framers for “throwing off the fetters of despotism.” And indeed, a chief federal judge in Pennsylvania soundly rejected Attorney General Pam Bondi’s attempt to unilaterally install three people – unconfirmed by the Senate – to replace Alina Habba, who was previously disqualified as U.S. attorney for New Jersey. Judge Matthew W. Brann wrote: “One year into this administration, it is plain that President Trump and his top aides have chafed at the limits on their power set forth by law and the Constitution. To avoid these roadblocks, this administration frequently purports to have discovered enormous grants of executive power hidden in the vagaries and silences of the code.”

• The Trump administration tried to effectively eliminate meaningful review of immigration judge decisions, but a federal judge has blocked the policy from taking effect. Judge Randy Moss found that the Department of Justice had failed to follow proper procedure.

• A federal judge ruled that Kari Lake had illegally served as acting CEO of the United States Agency for Global Media. Judge Royce C. Lamberth’s summary judgement makes the actions taken by Lake since March 2025 legally void. That includes her attempt to fire hundreds of Voice of America employees.

• A federal judge has been asked to block Trump from closing and razing the Kennedy Center. “This is a case about the ongoing desecration and impending destruction of a cherished national monument,” the lawsuit says.

In Minnesota

A Brandi Carlile concert in Minneapolis raised over $600,000 for families affected by ICE.

The Minnesota Reformer published a profile of Jason Chavez, the Minneapolis council member who joined the front lines of the resistance to ICE:

For Chavez, the battle is personal: Two of his uncles were deported during Operation Metro Surge — one in December, another in January.

One, who had a work visa and co-owns a Richfield pizza shop, was detained by ICE while making a delivery, Chavez said.

“You have to have conversations with your loved ones, saying that we just live in a government system that dehumanizes people,” Chavez said. “But if I’m able to ever change that, one way or another, I’m going to — and I’m going to make sure that the voices of our community are not left off the table.”

A Bluesky user named Wendy posts that “I’ve been photographing anti-ICE and related yard/window/tree/street signs around Minneapolis. The variety of commercial and especially handmade signs is amazing, as is the urge for people to let their neighbors know they care and are furious in ways big and small.” Check them out.

Warehouses for People

Maybe you or a friend need a wonderful six-minute primer on DHS’s plans to acquire massive warehouses and turn them into detention centers for immigrants. Austin Kocher, a Syracuse University professor, has you covered.

Concerned residents of Social Circle, Georgia, rallied against the proposed ICE facility in their small town. Protesters in Roxbury, New Jersey, took to the street to express outrage about a planned facility in their town.

Schuyler Mitchell of Mother Jones hung out with Roxbury protesters. She spoke to Chris Lenox, who lives across the street from the warehouse with his wife and two kids.

“To have it in our backyard, it’s horrible,” Lenox told her. “I was thinking about putting my house up for sale. How am I going to sell my house with this crap in my backyard?”

The Washington Post reports that DHS is feeding talking points to Republicans as opposition to ICE warehouses swell. Like: “If there’s a new facility going in here, Merrimack residents should be celebrating, not protesting.”

The whole enterprise is inevitably going to be rife with corruption and failure. Another hint of that: The Washington Post reports that DHS “is turning to a crop of relatively untested businesses to rapidly build and operate the facilities.” And the New York Times examines the detailed plans for the giant Social Circle facility and finds that “the initial designs raise health, safety and security concerns.”

Take It Home, Rebecca Solnit

New York Times journalist David Marchese interviewed writer and activist Rebecca Solnit, who has a new book out, “The Beginning Comes After the End; Notes on a World of Change”, which Kirkus describes as “A convincing vision of a brighter future.”

Here’s the key excerpt, where Marchese asks a question that is either profoundly stupid or a softball, I’m not really sure which:

Marchese: I would like to hear your perspective on whether any of the strategies or tactics against Trump and Trumpism have maybe been counterproductive? Because I wonder if, you know, calling him and the movement “fascist, sexist, racist,” has, sort of, alienated people who, might otherwise be brought into the progressive fold. So do you think there have been any sort of missteps over the last 10 years?

Solnit: That’s the least of our problems. They are racist. They are authoritarian, they are misogynist. They are homophobic. And tiptoeing around it protects them and not the targets of the hatred and discrimination. I just get so tired of the idea that progressives have gone too far in asserting that, like, every human being deserves human rights, when people are being shot in the streets of Minneapolis. We are facing such horrific brutality that politeness is not really the problem to start with. I think we got into this situation, in part, by a lot of people in the mainstream thinking it was more important to be nice and polite than call things by their true names. This is really extreme stuff. If we need to use extreme language to describe it, let’s be truthful, let’s be accurate and let’s be bold. And there’s a wonderful historian, scholar of nonviolence named George Lakey, who says polarization is good. That’s when you have clarity. Sometimes people have to pick sides. You do not get authoritarians to behave better by being meek and gentle and polite. You get it by being strong. You got me all worked up. I feel like it probably didn’t take that much.