It appears as though New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D) will not comply with the Justice Department’s demands for the identities of the 6,600 noncitizens who were, through no fault of their own, placed on the voter rolls in 2023 and 2024.
Continue reading “Sherrill Signals She Won’t Hand Over Names of Noncitizens Who Voted as DOJ Seeks Scapegoats”President Donald Trump on Monday morning called on Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to cancel the upper chamber’s lengthy August recess until they pass the SAVE America Act — the voter suppression bill the president and his MAGA allies have been obsessively pushing Congress to pass for months.
“John Thune should not allow the United States Senate to ‘leave town’ until it passes The Save America Act or, far better still, TERMINATES THE FILIBUSTER, where Republicans can then quickly pass everything they ever dreamed of, including a full and deep throated SAVE AMERICA ACT, the Budget, and the ever looming Debt Ceiling disaster, 1929!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. “The Dumocrats will do it on day one, and can’t believe how lucky they got with this Senate leadership. Remember, stupidity always brings LOSING & DEATH!”
Continue reading “Senate Poised to Once Again Collapse Into Chaos Over SAVE Act “Sorry for the brusque headline. But we really need your help here. We’re at the hardest part of our Annual TPM Journalism Fund Drive. I’ve spoken to a lot of you who tell me you’re going to contribute but haven’t found the right moment. Please make right now or whenever you see this post the moment. We need to keep building the total to get to our goal in the time we have. Simple as that. Believe me, I’d much rather be writing news and commentary posts. But this Drive is what makes it all possible. It would be HUGE if we can get to $350,000 today.
Especially if you’re a member, we’ve made contributing super, super easy. Just take a moment right now from your routine. Click here and just get this out of the way today. We appreciate it so much, and it’s so needed. If you make a contribution now it helps us get back to full time posting more quickly. Thank you from all of us.
Update: $8,157 to go! Making progress!
Update II: A very larger contribution has put $360,000 in range for today. This is very exciting. A huge thank you to this large contributor and thank you to everyone. Math is math. The big contributions are a big part of the equation. But the much larger number of smaller ones are even more important. So thank you to everyone. Every contribution is a critical part of what makes this possible. We’re now $2,974 from hitting $360,000 today. We can do this!
Update III: Wow! Now over $360,000. THANK YOU! Let’s keep this going. Can we get to $370,000 tonight?
This short passage in an article (paywalled) in Haaretz focuses on a point that hasn’t been sufficiently visible in the US press. There’s been a decent amount of U.S. coverage of the increasingly violent and predatory escalation in the West Bank, in which the government has both encouraged and allowed the most violent members of the settler community to accelerate their campaign of harassment, violence and expulsions of Palestinian families and communities. But this isn’t just a broader expression of Greater Israel maximalism, though it’s also very much that. There’s a nearer term goal. It’s also an electoral strategy, one aimed at hyper-mobilizing the settler parties in Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition and also creating a security crisis he hopes he will benefit from.
Continue reading “The West Bank Electoral Strategy”This story was originally published by States Newsroom.
The Trump administration has a new plan for teenagers learning about pregnancy: Beginning this summer, it will steer millions of dollars toward organizations that focus on anatomy, fertility tracking, hormonal production and “reproductive goals counseling.”
The plan will also emphasize abstinence from sex and the importance of marriage.
Continue reading “The Trump Admin’s New Teen Pregnancy Prevention Plan Hinges on MAHA and Abstinence”Yesterday I was reading this piece from Status about the agreement between Paramount and the states suing the company on anti-trust grounds to halt the Time Warner merger for up to a year. (The piece is paywalled. But I think you can read it without a subscription by giving them your email.) Reporter Natalie Korach spoke to a handful of antitrust experts to evaluate what this agreed upon delay means, who it’s good or bad for and what it means for the future of the merger deal itself.
Continue reading “The Paramount Merger and the Power of the States”A new court order Friday in federal court in south Texas, first flagged by Politico’s Kyle Cheney, reveals that another Salvadoran national has been unlawfully deported twice by the Trump administration in the past eight months in violation of separate orders by a federal judge and an immigration judge.
In an under-the-radar case reminiscent of the brutalization of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Nelson Ariel Umanzor Chavez was deported to Mexico in November despite a federal court’s temporary restraining order barring the administration from removing him from the United States. As in the Abrego Garcia case, the court ordered the administration to facilitate his return from Mexico and he was in fact returned to the U.S. by the end of November.
But then in January — despite a 2019 immigration court order barring his removal to his native country because he was “more likely than not to be tortured” there — the administration deported him to El Salvador anyway, where he was immediately imprisoned.
His condition and the exact location of his detention remain unknown.
“Salvadoran authorities have transferred Petitioner between prisons and his family has not been provided information regarding his current location, his condition, or whether he is alive,” according to the latest court order, citing a declaration filed in the case.
Umanzor Chavez unlawfully entered the United States in 2015 but was released as an unaccompanied minor. His asylum claim was rejected in 2019, but he was granted withholding of removal to El Salvador under the Convention Against Torture. He appears from the court order to have remained free for a decade, until he was detained in May 2025 in Baltimore during an ICE check-in.
In his order Friday laying out the circumstances of the case, U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. (a Trump appointee) denied the relief Umanzor Chavez was seeking because his request was based on his earlier deportation to Mexico, not his more recent deportation to El Salvador. The judge gave him until next month to amend his pleadings to challenge the second deportation.
The substance that the FBI found in the work van being driven by Lorenzo Salgado Araujo when he was shot and killed by an ICE agent tested negative for narcotics or illicit drugs, the House district attorney announced Friday. The fact that the news came not from the FBI but from the local prosecutor reinforced suspicions that the Trump administration had tried to sully the victim’s reputation. For reasons which remain unclear, the search warrant for the van which revealed the FBI’s suspicion of meth was unsealed unusually early in the case amidst outrage over the shooting.
With the Supreme Court ending Temporary Protected Status (TPS) protection for more than 300,000 Haitians, ICE is planning for a potential arrest and deportation blitz, CBS News reports.
A new report from the Washington Office on Latin America says the death toll from President Trump’s lawless high seas campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats is 221.
But despite the illegal carnage, the campaign is failing to achieve its own stated objective of strangling drug trafficking by sea, the WaPo reports:
The Trump administration’s deadly military strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats have not reduced the amount of cocaine entering the United States, but they’re prompting criminal organizations to develop new strategies and tactics and undermining traditional investigative methods, according to a previously unreported assessment by the Drug Enforcement Administration, a closed-door congressional briefing and interviews with current and former U.S. and foreign officials.
Undaunted by the Trump DOJ’s unlawful subpoenaing of five of its reporters, the New York Times continues to crank out new stories on President Trump’s scandalous new Air Force One boondoggle:
Over the weekend, Brazil announced that it denied visas to two senior State Department officials — assistant secretary Riley M. Barnes and deputy assistant secretary Samuel Samson — who were being dispatched by the Trump administration “on a mission to cast doubt on the fairness and integrity of the country’s electoral system” ahead of the Oct. 4 presidential election, the WaPo reports.
The 1st Circuit Court of Appeals handed the administration an important loss Friday when it declined to pause a lower court order that blocked the administration from moving ahead on President Trump’s executive order purporting to revamp mail voting ahead of the midterm elections.
In a little-noticed court filing, the Trump administration admitted that it canceled $7.5 billion in federal clean energy grants “based solely” on the projects being in states that voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.
NYT: “More measles cases have been reported in the United States in the last two years than in all the years from 2000 through 2024 combined.”
The White House Correspondents Dinner — interrupted in the spring by a gunman’s assassination attempt — finished up over the weekend. It was … something:
News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
The Trump administration went to the Supreme Court Monday asking for an emergency ruling to let it overhaul mail-in ballots and assemble citizenship lists for the 2026 midterms.
Continue reading “Trump Asks SCOTUS to Let Him Mess with Mail-In Voting Before Midterms”Perhaps I’m flattering myself or my country. But the language and mindset of great replacement and of race armies overrunning a primarily white, Christian country seems much more widespread, entrenched and pervasive across a wider swath of the political spectrum in the United Kingdom than it is here in the United States. I don’t really have an argument here or a even a question here. And this may seem like quite a lot to say given that the federal government here in the U.S. fairly openly propagandizes with white nationalist imagery and is more than a year into a campaign of mass deportation. But it is still my perception based on reading the language of statements from people across the political spectrum in the UK, the reaction to pogrom-like incidents in the UK and so forth.
Continue reading “Thoughts On Immigration Rhetoric and the Gnashing of Teeth”Hello there. We’re back after a week away.
It’s becoming a cliche, but this administration has the kind of scandal that took up years of the Nixon administration on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis.
The latest emerges in a New York Times article flagging a court filing in a dispute between the federal government and researchers who work on grant-funded projects. In a stipulation, the administration admits that funds for various Biden-era clean energy projects were withheld from blue states, and blue states alone.
“With one exception, the 284 terminated grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing Senators (‘Blue State’ grants),” it confesses.
Like much in this administration, the magnitude of the scandal is deadened somewhat by the fact that the White House Office of Management and Budget, under the direction of Russ Vought, has made a practice of finding creative and novel ways to impound congressionally appropriated funding, a topic TPM’s Emine Yücel has been diligently chronicling. Back in October 2025, Vought heavily insinuated what was going on with this specific funding by tweeting “$8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled,” adding that the projects “are in the following states: CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA.”
Elsewhere, the administration has withheld funds with the thinnest of justifications. Just last week, for example, the Trump administration announced it was withholding $1 billion in Medicaid funds from California and Minnesota, alleging fraud.
But the stipulation filed in court earlier this month contains no such fig leaf. It makes what is going on explicit. ”The inclusion of grants in the October notice tranche was based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state, i.e., whether the recipient’s location and/or place of performance was in a Blue State or a non-Blue State,” it says.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MA) called it an “imbecilic deep betrayal of America.”
“The illegally impounded funds must be restored and released immediately to the blue states,” he added.
Maine has, as expected, nominated Troy Jackson as its Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate. He emerged from Saturday’s pop-up Democratic convention with 566 of 571 delegates voting for him.
ICE plans to target Haitians — including in Springfield, Ohio, the target of the Trump administration’s campaign smears about people eating pets — now that the Supreme Court has cleared the way for the administration to revoke Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of people, CBS News reports. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and some state-level Republicans are warning of a significant impact on the economy from losing so many workers, the New York Times reports.
Brazil denied visas to Trump State Department officials, fearing they were coming to undermine the country’s elections, the Washington Post reports.
It’s Laura Loomer, who, after a visit to Ukraine, is now conceding she was “bamboozled by Russian propaganda” and “came to believe a lot of untrue things about Ukraine.”
Yes, and according to a report in Axios, top military advisors believe our bombing campaign around the Straight of Hormuz “has reached the limit of its effectiveness.”
