On Friday, 63 years after the 1963 March on Washington, thousands of people will once again gather on the National Mall, hoping to “bend this country toward its better self.”
With less than 10 weeks until the Nov. 3 midterm elections, this year’s central theme is particularly timely: Defend the vote.
“We stand on the same ground because the work is not finished,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton who, along with Martin Luther King III, is leading the march. “The right to vote, the very foundation of our power, is being chipped away in statehouse after statehouse. When the vote is weakened, every other right grows fragile with it. That is why we march. That is what we mean when we say Defend the Vote.”
Speakers will include Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, along with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger.
“Everyone, whether you call yourself progressive or moderate, understands that voting rights is imperative,” Sharpton said. “You can’t decide which wing you’re on if the bird is not allowed to get off the ground. A bird can’t flap its left wing or its right wing if the body is held down. And the body of voting rights is being held down.”
The march is partly in response to the gerrymandered election maps Republicans in several states, mostly in the South, redrew earlier this year after a 6-3 Supreme Court decision gutted the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The effective disenfranchising of most of those states’ Black voters represented a wrenching reversal of 60 years of racial progress — a revival of the Jim Crow era when Black people had no political power, no matter their number.
The march also comes as the Trump administration continues to pursue any number of avenues to reduce Democratic voting in the Nov. 3 election.
The most immediate battle is over mail-in voting, which Trump is trying to curtail by having the U.S. Postal Service deliver only those mail-in ballots sent by voters who appear on the administration’s approved list of eligible citizens.
The measure is caught up in the courts (see below). But the Supreme Court ruling last week, in which the six zealous right-wingers in the majority refused to nip the obviously illegal move in the bud, is a green light for Trump to make other moves to rig the midterms.
As civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill wrote in her newsletter:
This decision is yet another instance in which this Court demonstrates that it will credit take any action made by this President with legitimacy, no matter how compelling the evidence to the contrary. This is potentially catastrophic in the context of elections.
The march is not just about voting rights. In addition, the organizers say:
We march to defend civil rights, because attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion are attempts to roll back access, opportunity, and representation.
We march for economic justice, because too many families are still fighting for fair wages, affordable housing, equal opportunity, and a fair chance to build wealth.
You can sign up to go the march here (or just show up).
The Third Red Scare
Conservative and libertarian groups are taking up the cause of the 15 Minnesotans who face trumped-up conspiracy charges based mostly on traditional community organizing tactics.
Those lame charges were all that came out of a massive months-long DHS spying campaign on ordinary Minnesotans who gathered over the winter to resist the federal immigration agents terrorizing their communities. According to DHS documents turned over in discovery, the agency sent undercover agents to infiltrate citizen groups engaged in First Amendment-protected speech in churches, schools and parks — ostensibly to expose “an organized network of conspirators operating through online and in person who are providing material support to violent opportunists and agitators.”
DHS also obtained financial records for nonprofits and labor unions, none of whom were accused of any crimes.
Now the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the Society for the Rule of Law, and the Cato Institute have filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the conspiracy case, supporting the defendants’ request for yet more discovery.
“Backed by the machinery of federal investigative and prosecutorial powers, the Trump administration has…. set out to dictate orthodoxy and suppress dissent,” the brief reads. “The scale of the government’s assault on free expression has not been seen since the Second Red Scare.” (The First Red Scare came after World War I, the second after World War II and featured Sen. Joseph McCarthy.)
The groups draw a bead on Trump’s September 2025 National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, which classified “anti-fascism” as “domestic terrorism,” potentially criminalizing views including “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
The brief argues that NSPM-7 “animates the prosecution in this case and is a directive designed to chill participation in protest activity, quell dissent, and silence critics of Trump administration policies under the guise of combatting terrorism.”
Maybe you’ll start reading and hearing more about this scandal now (like I’ve been asking for since Aug. 12).
As Rachel Levinson-Waldman, the director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, posted on social media:
This blockbuster story about DHS’s and DOJ’s joint investigation of individuals and orgs who committed no crimes should be getting ALL the attention. With a functional legislative branch, it would be kicking off a major Congressional investigation as well.
NPR, to its credit, covered the dragnet on Monday, interviewing Steve Sylvester, the outraged interim pastor of the Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Roseville, Minn., where undercover DHS agent infiltrated a meeting of ICE protesters, captured license plates, and compiled dossiers with their names, addresses and information about their families and jobs.
“It feels weird. It feels like I’m living in 1950s Eastern Europe,” Sylvester told NPR. “I don’t know that it feels frightening or daunting. It just feels completely out of place and inappropriate.”
Talking Points Memo reporter Josh Kovensky looked through more DHS documents released by the defense on Tuesday and found that DHS surveilled people at a makeshift memorial to Alex Pretti, and that one undercover agent attended a meeting where an unnamed group was voting on it policy platforms and voted to get rid of jails because it was the “most extreme” position.
As Kovensky reported: “Throughout the transcripts, agents repeatedly asked whether activists and organizers that the undercover agents met with expressed interest in violence. Across the board, the agents said that they found no evidence of threats or intent to commit violence.”
Alex Pretti’s Family Speaks
Seven months after their son, VA nurse Alex Pretti, was shot and killed in Minneapolis by federal immigration agents he was video recording, his family sat down with ABC News’s Good Morning America co-anchor George Stephanopoulos and told him they want accountability. Pretti was helping a woman who had fallen down when he was swarmed by agents.
“I was not shocked that he helped somebody,” Alex’s mother, Susan Pretti, said. “My shock is that he was murdered. And no one has given us the complete truth or anyone has been held accountable. And it’s been 7 months!”
“They murdered our child,” she said. “People need to be held responsible when they murder people in this country. Period… And the case just what disappears? No!”
“There was more effort in vilifying him than pursuing justice,” said his father, Michael Pretti. “We want justice. We want accountability for the people that did this to Alex.”
Administration officials, including Stephen Miller and Trump himself at various times accused Alex Pretti of being a “terrorist” and an “agitator.”
“They don’t care,” said the father “They do what they want. How are you supposed to trust a government after that?”
“I expect an apology,” said the mom. “Why shouldn’t be we get one?... For what they said.”
In all previous administrations, a controversial law-enforcement shooting like Pretti’s would get aggressively investigated by the FBI and prosecutors in the criminal section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
Trump administration officials instead blocked both federal and state investigations, then claimed that DOJ had opened a civil rights investigation. But there is no evidence of one.
Talking to ABC, Pretti’s parents said they found out their son had been shot while watching the news on TV. “That’s how we found out, watching it on TV. Watching our son be shot ten times on TV,” Michael Pretti said.
“In the back,” Susan Pretti, Alex’s mother, added.
“What did he do to deserve to be murdered?” his mother asked. “To be left cold, on the ground, dead, my child? What did he do?”
Outrageous Conduct
Eyes on Ice described how ICE officers attacked Sisi Rose, a regular protester outside the Sacramento ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations office on Monday — a confrontation caught on video here, here, and here. One video shows an ICE agent shooting pepper spray at close range directly into Rose’s mouth. When she spat out the irritant, officers arrested her for assault. They also tased her, tackled her to the ground, and held her down. She was taken to the hospital in respiratory distress, and with a metal taser probe embedded into the bone of her wrist.
WUSA showed video of a Washington, D.C., man filming an apparent ICE arrest in his neighborhood on Sunday — then being knocked down and arrested by a Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) officer. The man told WUSA he was filming because he believed that documenting the operation could help keep the neighborhood safe. He spent Sunday night in jail, although he said charges of obstructing justice and resisting arrest were dropped on Monday. “I was told by the government… that MPD was not working with ICE to do these type of task forces and these raids,” he said. “I’m very disappointed to find out with my own eyes and my own experience that that is exactly what is happening.” Brad Johnson, a local journalist, identified the police officer involved.
This Week in the Courts
Democratic groups are seeking a new injunction to block Trump’s executive order calling for the U.S. Postal Service to toss mail-in ballots from people not on a federal registry. The Supreme Court on Monday blocked a previous injunction, saying it was “unripe” because the USPS hadn’t filed a final rule yet. But the USPS has now issued a final rule, so the groups are again arguing that “the Ballot Mail Rule is flagrantly unlawful.” Why? “The Constitution assigns primary responsibility for election administration not to USPS, or even the President, but to the States, and ultimate oversight to Congress — and Congress has enacted nothing to empower USPS or the President to interfere with States’ decisions about who should receive a mail ballot or how mail-ballot envelopes should be designed.”
A federal judge in New York struck down the Trump administration’s blanket ban on the processing of immigrant visas for people from 75 countries. Judge Jeannette A. Vargas wrote that “In many ways, this is not a challenging case.” Federal law “categorically prohibits the issuance of immigrant visas based upon the nationality of the applicant,” she wrote.
A federal judge in Ohio blocked a new Ohio law that required voter registration applicants at the bureau of motor vehicles to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote at the same time. Judge Solomon Oliver Jr., wrote that the Ohio law “violates Section 5 of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) by imposing a proof-of-citizenship requirement that exceeds the federal standard, which allows only the minimum information necessary to determine voter eligibility.”
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a Trump administration request to pause a lower court order requiring immediate improvements at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in San Bernardino County, California. “The district court found that Plaintiffs are subject to punitive conditions, including a lack of consistent access to potable water and adequate medical care,” the appellate panel found. “Although the Government asserts that any harm from such conditions was caused by GEO Group (“GEO”), the private company the Government contracts with to operate Adelanto, the Government is directly responsible for placing and keeping Plaintiffs in Adelanto.”
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals held that a vacated criminal conviction cannot render a noncitizen inadmissible under the Immigration and Nationality Act, rejecting a long-time rule set by DOJ’s Board of Immigration Appeals. Irony alert: This was a pro-immigrant decision based on the Supreme Court’s regressive 2024 ruling that the judiciary should no longer defer to agencies’ interpretations of federal statutes (“destroying the administrative state.”
The Democratic National Committee sued the Department of Justice, demanding records “concerning any planned seizure of ballots, voting machines, and other voting system components.”
A federal judge in Florida ordered the release of a Colombian man, arrested for opening a beer inside a convenience store, who ICE portrayed to an immigration court judge as a recent arrival, with no pending application for relief, who had left the U.S. during a prior stay. The thing is that the man, Jorge Eliecer Madera Reyes, had actually lived in the U.S. since 2019, had never left, and had applied for asylum. Even after Madera Reyes appealed, and ICE admitted its mistakes, the judge in the case, Stuart Siegel, kept citing the false facts. Judge Sheri Polster Chapell wrote that “The government’s decision to double-down on its mistake, despite clear evidence and tacit acknowledgement that it was a mistake, is arbitrary” and violated the man’s Fifth Amendment liberty rights.
A federal judge in Maryland ordered the return from Mexico of a Mexican man who was deported even after receiving a protection order from an immigration judge because, having testified against Mexican cartels in federal court, he would likely face torture. Citing a Mexican government assurance to the State Department that he would not be harmed, ICE terminated his protection and sent him off. But Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher wrote that “There is an immense public interest in ensuring that persons who risk their personal safety to assist the government in prosecuting wrongdoing are not placed in harm’s way by the very entity they assisted.”
Must Reads
The Nautilus science magazine has published a marvelous article by Adam Piore titled “The Resistance Is Here.” It’s about the government-funded scientists who didn’t plan to be activists but ended up founding Stand Up for Science, which now counts thousands of members and has held scores of protests across the United States. Highly recommended.
The American Immigration Council has released an “Immigration Response Playbook”: a “structured, searchable resource to help local and state governments document, share, and deploy policies that protect immigrant communities from federal enforcement overreach.”
The Center for American Progress is out with a new report titled “The Trump Administration Is Interfering in the 2026 Midterm Elections To Entrench the Imperial Presidency.” It explains that “Based on the discredited myth of widespread election fraud, the administration’s multipronged plan includes 15 interlocking tactics designed to make it harder for eligible Americans to exercise their right to vote.”
The New York Times reports that GEO, the private prison company, “donated more than $1.4 million to President Trump’s political operation last month after his administration awarded contracts that could pay the company $165 million a year to house immigrants awaiting deportation.”