• Can Biden’s New Asylum Policy Help Solve the Migrant Crisis?

    The Biden administration’s proposed immigration policy aims to curb migrant flows to the United States amid record border crossings. What will it do, and how does it compare to the Trump years?

  • No, Texas Can’t Legally Secede from the U.S., Popular Myth Notwithstanding

    The theme of independence has recurred throughout the history of Texas, which was a republic from 1836–45. But the Civil War established that a state cannot secede. Texas seceded from the Union in January 1861, but even before Texas formally rejoined the nation on 30 March 1870, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that secession had never been legal, and that, even during the rebellion, Texas continued to be a state.

  • Three Ways to Prevent School Shootings, Based on Research

    We study the circumstances that lead to violence in which an attacker picks a target – like a person, group, or school – in advance. We find that the same patterns of concerning behavior emerge among the perpetrators, but that’s not all. We also find that there are often many opportunities to intervene with the perpetrator before the tragedy that peers, family members, school staff, law enforcement officials, and others miss.

  • ATF Director: Action Needed on Auto Sears Which Are“Flooding Our Communities”

    Fully automatic weapons are highly regulated, but the agency has recovered a startling number of machine gun conversion devices in recent years.

  • Great Leap Nowhere: The Challenges of China’s Semiconductor Industry

    China is struggling in the battle for advanced semiconductor technology. With President Joe Biden’s most recent round of export controls on semiconductors, China is now facing an increasingly urgent challenge as it seeks to ramp up its domestic innovative capacity for high-end chips. These difficulties and challenges notwithstanding, Elliot Ji writes, “U.S. policymakers should be keenly aware that China’s relative success with creative adaptation means that it can boost certain sectors of the chip industry by exploiting leaky export controls and engaging in cyber espionage.”

  • Ohio Chemical Spill Draws Focus on Railroad Dangers

    The U.S. has one of the most extensive rail networks in the world, but diminishing safety standards puts people and the environment at risk. The latest accident has drawn sharp focus onto the safety standards of the highly profitable freight rail industry and its prolific lobbying against regulation.

  • The Train Derailment in Ohio Was a Disaster Waiting to Happen

    The derailment of a freight train filled with volatile chemicals in rural Ohio earlier this month captured the headlines, but researchers and chemical spill experts say it’s a situation that plays out far too often across the country. Trains carry hazardous chemicals everyday. They’re also dangerously unregulated.

  • U.S.-Mexico Border Encounters Decline After Increased Migrant Expulsions

    The number of migrant encounters at the United States-Mexico border dropped nearly 40% — from a record of about 252,000 in December 2022 to about 156,000 in January — according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. CBP credits the decrease to a parole program that began on January 5 for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

  • Arizona’s Top Prosecutor Concealed Records Debunking Election Fraud Claims

    Following the 2020 election, the Arizona attorney general’s office conducted its own through investigation, and confirmed that Joe Biden had won the state, debunking Donald Trump’s false accusations. But Mark Brnovich, the attorney general, was by then running in the GOP primary for the Senate. In an effort to court primary voters, Brnovich refused to release his office report, and “began to flirt with claims of election fraud instead,” Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Isaac Stanley-Becker write.

  • Train Derailments Get More Headlines, but Truck Crashes Involving Hazardous Chemicals Are More Frequent and Deadly in U.S.

    Highway crash of hazmat-carrying trucks do not draw national attention the way train derailments do, or trigger a flood of calls for more trucking regulation like the U.S. is seeing for train regulation. Truck crashes tend to be local and less dramatic than a pile of derailed train cars on fire, even if they’re deadlier. Federal data shows that rail has had far fewer incidents, deaths and damage when moving hazardous materials in the U.S. than trucks.

  • 5 Key Takeaways from State of Antisemitism in America Report 2022

    For too many American Jews, being Jewish no longer feels as safe as it once did. And the younger those American Jews are, the more they experience that threat firsthand.

  • Bruen Decision Takes Gun Law Back to a Time Before ‘Domestic Violence’

    The Supreme Court introduced a historical test that is upending gun laws across the country. The most recent policy to fall: a ban for subjects of restraining orders.

  • American Democracy and Pandemic Security

    Covid-19 cost the nation and the world millions of lives and trillions of dollars in economic losses and caused major societal deficits in learning, health, and well-being. The United States faced specific challenges in how its national pandemic response, rooted in its culture and federated system of public health, was organized and executed. National crises have historically brought the country together. Yet, the United States was unable to organize cohesive leadership at the national, state, local, and tribal levels, and it failed to rapidly unify its citizens to act in solidarity to suppress the emerging pandemic.

  • EFF Files Amicus Briefs in Two Important Geofence Search Warrant Cases

    Unlike traditional warrants for electronic records, a geofence warrant doesn’t start with a particular suspect or even a device or account; instead police request data on every device in a given geographic area during a designated time period, regardless of whether the device owner has any connection to the crime under investigation. The EFF argues these warrants are unconstitutional “general warrants” because they don’t require police to show probable cause to believe any one device was somehow linked to the crime under investigation.

  • The Lessons of the Electoral Count Reform Act: Next Steps in Reform

    The passage of the Electoral Count Reform Act (ECRA), which President Biden signed into law on 29 December 2022, suggests there are achievable goals of democracy reform even as polarization retains its grip, we now have a divided government, and a presidential election is less than two years away.