• State Lawmakers Stand Ready to Help ICE — or Impede It

    Tensions rise nationwide over aggressive enforcement tactics and deadly encounters. As lawmakers convene for this year’s state legislative sessions, immigration has surged to the top of the agenda.

  • License to Kill? The Legal Black Hole of Federal Misconduct

    The killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by ICE agents reveals a disturbing reality: everyday Americans falling victim to a system that enables—or even encourages—gross misconduct. To understand how we got here, we have to look at the bolted-shut doors of the American courthouse—a legal regime designed to ensure federal agents remain untouchable.

  • Democratic AGs Stress Importance of Citizen-Generated Evidence in Challenging ICE

    Cellphone video has emerged as a powerful rebuttal to Trump’s – and Trump officials’ — version of events, at a time when the federal government has restricted state and local investigators from accessing potential evidence to pursue their own investigations into excessive force and fatal shootings by immigration agents in their jurisdictions.

  • Repeated Government Lying, Warned Hannah Arendt, Makes It Impossible for Citizens to Think and to Judge

    Politics is not a seminar in absolute clarity, and competing claims are always part of the process. Democracies can survive spin, public relations and even occasional falsehoods. But Hannah Arendt’s observations show that it is the normalization of blatant dishonesty and systematic withholding that threatens democracy. Those practices corrode the factual ground on which democratic consent is built.

  • Footage, Documents at Odds with DHS Accounts of Immigration Enforcement Incidents

    As a growing number of encounters between civilians and DHS agents are scrutinized in court records and on social media, federal officials are returning to a familiar response: self-defense. Often, this line of defense is contradicted by the evidence. Still, as Trump’s crackdown intensifies, people face steep barriers to holding federal agents accountable.

  • Trump Administration Sues Another State for Sensitive Voter Data

    The Trump administration has sued another state — Virginia — in its quest to obtain sensitive voter data, despite two recent legal setbacks in suits against other states. The suit against Virginia is the latest in a monthslong quest to obtain voters’ private information.

  • States, Cities Are Hard-Pressed to Fight Violent ICE Arrest Tactics

    State leaders who want to curb the increasingly violent arrest tactics of immigration enforcement agents in Minneapolis and elsewhere are struggling to push back. Potential approaches include state civil rights laws and a refusal to cooperate.

  • ICE Is Pushing the Legal Envelope

    ICE’s legal advisory – asserting that ICE agents may enter private homes with an administrative, rather than a judicial, warrant — rests on arguable, but exceedingly fragile, legal foundations. Administrative warrants, consent, and exigent circumstances can justify certain actions, but none supports a general authority to enter homes without a judicial warrant. The legal debate is not about immigration policy but about whether the executive branch can erode one of the Constitution’s most settled protections.

  • Trump Is Keeping Coal on Life Support. How Long Can It Last?

    Heading into President Donald Trump’s second term, coal looked like an industry nearing the end of its life. In 2025, however, regulatory rollbacks and surging power demand helped buoy an industry in trouble.

  • Supreme Court Is Set to Rule on Constitutionality of Trump Tariffs – but Not Their Wisdom

    The question of whether a policy is legal or constitutional – which the justices are entertaining now with regard to Trump’s tariffs — isn’t the same as whether it’s wise. And as a trade economist, I worry that Trump’s tariffs also pose a threat to “economic democracy” – that is, the process of decision-making that incorporates the viewpoints of everyone affected by the decision.

  • New Ban Bars Half of Legal Immigrants, Even Citizens’ Spouses and Kids

    The State Department announced it will suspend immigrant visa processing for nationals of 75 countries starting this week. This ban builds on prior bans, and it brings the number of banned nationalities up to 93, or 42 percent of those in the world. Congress specifically barred discrimination based on national origin, but the courts the administration have invented ways around that prohibition.

  • Security Guards at Vogtle Nuclear Power Plant Demand Vote to Remove SPFPA Union Officials

    The NLRB is the federal agency responsible for enforcing federal labor law, a task that includes administering votes to install (or “certify”) and remove (or “decertify”) unions in workplaces. Security guards at Vogtle have collected enough signatures to prompt the NLR to administer union removal vote.

  • DOJ’s Dangerous Silence in the Face of Federal Immigration Agents’ Violent Tactics

    The killing in Minneapolis is but the latest in a series of incidents involving federal immigration agents’ use of apparent excessive force, in violation of the Fourth Amendment and federal criminal law. Samantha Trepel writes that DOJ has remained disturbingly silent through months of these tactics. “This silence is a dangerous abdication of DOJ’s authority and responsibility.” Unfortunately, DOJ’s current abdication of responsibility “puts communities at needless risk and undermines the rule of law itself.”

  • Social Media Research Tool Lowers the Political Temperature

    Researchers created a method to downrank antidemocratic and highly partisan posts on X, reducing polarization while potentially giving users greater control over their feeds.The method reprioritizes social media posts, pushing those that breach democratic norms and use hostile partisan language lower in a feed.

  • Trump Has Always Hated Offshore Wind. Now He’s Moving to Kill It.

    The Department of Interior abruptly paused the leases for five of the nation’s largest proposed offshore wind projects last month. That effectively halts all ongoing offshore wind development in the United States.