Inside the Biggest FBI Sting Operation in History | Biden Issues Order Allowing Temporary Border Closure to Migrants | AI Employees Warn of Technology’s Dangers, and more

Through America’s numerous enigmatic intelligence agencies, presidents possess the ability to dive deeply into the communications, movements, and relationships of everyday Americans. Presidents of both parties have abused the surveillance state, but under a second Trump administration, this power could be abused in ways it has never been before.
Donald Trump, a now convicted felon and the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee, has said he plans to prosecute his political opponents should he return to the White House. He’s said he would allow states to monitor pregnant women and prosecute those who seek abortions. Trump wants to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. He plans to invoke the Insurrection Act to quell civil unrest, which means sending the military into the streets. The much publicized Project 2025 outlines how he would quickly replace thousands of career civil servants in the federal government with loyalists.
If a president was interested in prosecuting their political opponents, crushing protests, targeting undocumented immigrants, and had the right people in place to help them carry out those plans, surveillance could become a valuable tool for accomplishing those goals. Like former US president Richard Nixon in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Trump could use the surveillance powers available to him to monitor his political opponents, disrupt protest movements, and more.

In Shift, Biden Issues Order Allowing Temporary Border Closure to Migrants  (Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Hamed Aleaziz, New York Times)
President Biden issued an executive order on Tuesday that prevents migrants from seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border when crossings surge, a dramatic election-year move to ease pressure on the immigration system and address a major concern among voters.
The measure is the most restrictive border policy instituted by Mr. Biden, or any other modern Democrat, and echoes an effort in 2018 by President Donald J. Trump to cut off migration that was blocked in federal court.
In remarks at the White House, Mr. Biden said he was forced to take executive action because Republicans had blocked bipartisan legislation that had some of the most significant border security restrictions Congress had considered in years.
“We must face a simple truth,” said the president, who was joined by a group of lawmakers and mayors from border communities. “To protect America as a land that welcomes immigrants, we must first secure the border and secure it now.”
Aware that the policy raised uncomfortable comparisons, Mr. Biden took pains to distinguish his actions from those of Mr. Trump. “We continue to work closely with our Mexican neighbors instead of attacking them,” Mr. Biden said. He said he would never refer to immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the country, as Mr. Trump has done.
Still, the move shows how drastically the politics of immigration have shifted to the right in the United States. Polls suggest there is support in both parties for border measures once denounced by Democrats and championed by Mr. Trump as the number of people crossing into the country has reached record levels in recent years.

Garland Rebukes Attacks on Justice Dept.  (Glenn Thrush and Charlie Savage, New York Times)
Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, facing the prospect of a contempt vote in Congress, lashed out at House Republicans on Tuesday, accusing his critics of seeking to undermine the rule of law, peddling conspiracy theories and spreading falsehoods.
The usually mild-mannered Mr. Garland pushed back against the false accusation that the Justice Department was somehow behind the prosecution and subsequent conviction of former President Donald J. Trump on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal. The case was brought by Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, who as a local prosecutor is not under the control of Mr. Biden or his administration.
“That conspiracy theory is an attack on the judicial process itself,” Mr. Garland said in an opening statement to the House Judiciary Committee.
His remarks amounted to a vigorous defense of the department as Mr. Trump and his allies have escalated their attacks on law enforcement after his conviction in Manhattan court last week and as the former president has been shadowed by other criminal cases.
Among Mr. Trump’s more extraordinary claims in recent weeks was the highly misleading statement that the Biden administration was prepared to kill him when the F.B.I. conducted a court-ordered search of his Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022 to retrieve classified documents.
“This is dangerous,” Mr. Garland said in response to a question by Representative Jerry Nadler, Democrat of New York, about the consequences of such an assertion. The claim, the attorney general said, distorted a standard Justice Department use-of-force policy that had also applied to a search of President Biden’s Delaware home.
“It raises the threats of violence against prosecutors and career agents,” Mr. Garland said. “The allegation is false.”

Arizona Weighs Texas-Inspired Law Allowing Cops to Enforce Immigration Law  (Arelis R. Hernández, Washinton Post)
Arizona is moving closer toward adopting a Texas-inspired law directing law enforcement agencies to arrest migrants who cross the border illegally, the latest effort by Republican state leaders to challenge federal authority on immigration.
The state legislature is expected to pass a resolution Tuesday that would send the measure to Arizona voters for approval in November. The copycat resolution mimics Texas’s Senate Bill 4 and is similar to a bill recently signed into law in Louisiana.
In the past year, the Iowa and Oklahoma legislatures have also enacted laws that mirror parts of the controversial Texas law, which is currently being challenged in court. Meanwhile, lawmakers in Tennessee, Florida and Georgia adopted measures to more easily penalize and report undocumented immigrants to federal authorities.
The constitutionality of the statutes closely resembling the Texas law hinges on the case before U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the Fifth Circuit. In that case, opponents contend Senate Bill 4 is unconstitutional because it usurps federal authority on enforcing immigration laws. Lone Star leaders have expressed a willingness to challenge the federal government’s supremacy on immigration matters all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

AI Employees Warn of Technology’s Dangers, Call for Sweeping Company Changes  (Pranshu Verma and Nitasha Tiku, Washington Post)
A handful of current and former employees at OpenAI and other prominent artificial intelligence companies warned that the technology poses grave risks to humanity in a Tuesday letter, calling on companies to implement sweeping changes to ensure transparency and foster a culture of public debate.
The letter, signed by 13 people including current and former employees at Anthropic and Google’s DeepMind, said AI can exacerbate inequality, increase misinformation, and allow AI systems to become autonomous and cause significant death. Though these risks could be mitigated, corporations in control of the software have “strong financial incentives” to limit oversight, they said.
Because AI is only loosely regulated, accountability rests on company insiders, the employees wrote, calling on corporations to lift nondisclosure agreements and give workers protections that allow them to anonymously raise concerns.
The move comes as OpenAI faces a staff exodus. Many critics have seen prominent departures — including OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and senior researcher Jan Leike — as a rebuke of company leaders, who some employees argue chase profit at the expense of making OpenAI’s technologies safer.