Northern Border Migrant Encounters at ‘Record Highs’ | America Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow | Boston Marathon Bomber’s Path to Radicalization, and more

As Trump Prosecutions Move Forward, Threats and Concerns Increase  (Michael S. Schmidt, Adam Goldman, Alan Feuer, Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush, New York Times)
At the federal courthouse in Washington, a woman called the chambers of the judge assigned to the election interference case against former President Donald J. Trump and said that if Mr. Trump were not re-elected next year, “we are coming to kill you.”
At the Federal Bureau of Investigation, agents have reported concerns about harassment and threats being directed at their families amid intensifying anger among Trump supporters about what they consider to be the weaponization of the Justice Department. “Their children didn’t sign up for this,” a senior F.B.I. supervisor recently testified to Congress.
And the top prosecutors on the four criminal cases against Mr. Trump — two brought by the Justice Department and one each in Georgia and New York — now require round-the-clock protection.
As the prosecutions of Mr. Trump have accelerated, so too have threats against law enforcement authorities, judges, elected officials and others. The threats, in turn, are prompting protective measures, a legal effort to curb his angry and sometimes incendiary public statements, and renewed concern about the potential for an election campaign in which Mr. Trump has promised “retribution” to produce violence.

Did the Musk Takeover Boost Contentious Actors on Twitter?  (Christopher Barrie, Misinformation Review)
After his acquisition of Twitter, Elon Musk pledged to overhaul verification and moderation policies. These events sparked fears of a rise in influence of contentious actors—notably from the political right. I investigated whether these actors did receive increased engagement over this period by gathering tweet data for accounts that purchased blue-tick verification before and after the Musk takeover. Following the takeover, there was a large increase in post engagement for all users, but tweet engagement for accounts active in far-right networks outstripped any increased engagement for general user accounts. There is no obvious evidence that blue-tick verification conferred an additional engagement boost.

The Supreme Court Needs to Make a Call on Trump’s Eligibility  (Richard L. Hasen, The Atlantic)
There’s an old saying that sometimes it is more important for the law to be certain than to be right. Certainty allows people to plan their actions knowing what the rules are going to be.
Nowhere is this principle more urgent than when it comes to the question of whether Donald Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election results have disqualified him from becoming president again. As cases raising the question have begun working their way through the courts in Colorado, Minnesota, and elsewhere, the country needs the Supreme Court to fully resolve the issue as soon as possible.
Eminent constitutional-law scholars and judges, both conservative and liberal, have made strong cases that Trump is disqualified from being president again under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which bars from office those who have taken an oath to defend the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” Some of those scholars are professed originalists—as are many of the Supreme Court’s conservative justices—and to make their cases, they have analyzed what they say is the “original public meaning” of this provision. Other conservative and liberal scholars have concluded otherwise about the clause’s meaning, or at least raised serious doubts about whether and how these provisions apply to Trump.
Among the unresolved issues are whether the disqualification provision applies to those who formerly served as president, rather than in some other office; whether Congress must pass legislation authorizing the Department of Justice to pursue a civil lawsuit in order to bar Trump; whether Trump “engaged” in “insurrection” or “rebellion” or at least gave “aid or comfort” to “the enemies thereof.” Unsurprisingly, given that this provision emerged in response to the Civil War in the 1860s, there is virtually no modern case law fully resolving these issues, and many enormous questions remain on which reasonable minds disagree—for example, who would enforce this provision, and how.

Northern Border Migrant Encounters at ‘Record Highs’ as Terror Watchlist Encounters Grow  (Bridget Johnson, HSToday)
Security on the northern border of the United States is a growing concern as migrant encounters with border enforcement have “reached record highs,” as noted in the Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Threat Assessment 2024, and terror watchlist encounters have soared past last year’s numbers.
The Department of Homeland Security said on Sept. 14 that it scrapped its periodic National Terrorism Advisory System bulletins in favor of an annual Homeland Threat Assessment report and said that the issuance of NTAS advisories would be “reserved for situations where DHS needs to alert the public about a specific or imminent terrorist threat or about a change in the terrorism threat level.”

Haunted by Regret: What the Boston Marathon Bomber’s Friend Reveals About the Path to Radicalization  (Uran Botobekov, HSToday)
Dias Kadyrbayev, who served time for obstructing the investigation, said there were three key incidents that illustrated the progression of Tsarnaev’s religious radicalization and the transformation of his beliefs.