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    America survived a coup attempt. Can it endure dictatorial creep? | Lawrence Douglas

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    January 6 demonstrated that longstanding democracies can readily resist a disorganized effort at a coup. They are less equipped to withstand the normalization of exceptional measures: the use of federal agents to quell domestic protest, the staging of police raids on the homes of leaders’ political opponents, the pretextual invocations of emergency powers. Each of these steps may seem temporary and targeted; they may even enjoy a thin patina of legality. But over time, a democratic order turns into what Ernst Fraenkel, a German-Jewish lawyer whose book The Dual State stands as one of the first and most perceptive examinations of Hitler’s regime, called a “prerogative state” – a government in which the executive “is released from all legal restraints and depends solely on the discretion of the persons wielding political power”.So let us be clear: Trump’s commandeering of control of the Washington DC police department was simply an opening salvo. While Americans were greeted with images of soldiers in combat gear, toting rifles and establishing roadblocks and checkpoints near the National Mall, Trump was already tasking his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, with creating “specialized units” of the national guard to be “specifically trained and equipped to deal with public order issues”.What are the politics behind this militarization of domestic policing? Trump says he alone has the will and resources to pacify the “killing field” of Chicago, but clearly his “crime fighting” justification is no more than a ruse. Statistics – that is, reality – tell us that the crime rate in Washington DC was at a 30-year low when Trump sent in the troops. Which is not to deny the rhetorical power of ruses. Installing soldiers in Democratic strongholds allows Trump to present himself as the protector of law and order, especially to Maga supporters who have been trained by rightwing news outlets to view the nation’s largest and most multiethnic metropolitan areas as dens of iniquity and vice. Never mind that this is the president who pardoned members of the lawless mob that stormed the Capitol, fired career justice department prosecutors who worked to hold insurrectionists to account, and has installed in the department the likes of Jared Lane Wise, an insurgent who was charged with urging his fellow rioters to kill members of the police.Militarizing the police also serves Trump’s politics of intimidation. Here we can connect the deployment of troops on the National Mall to the FBI’s raid on John Bolton’s residences. Both are disturbing displays of the kind of force more familiar to a police state than to a constitutional democracy. The fact that both acts were formally legal – two federal magistrates signed off on the Bolton warrants, while several statutes specific to the District of Columbia authorized the president’s use of the national guard – makes them textbook examples of the kind of dictatorial creep that Fraenkel diagnosed.Deploying troops to police Chicago would, of course, represent a far more alarming and legally dubious exercise of executive power. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, a post-Reconstruction law, essentially bars presidents from using troops as domestic police. But we would be naive to conclude that federal law provides an adequate safeguard against the consolidation of the prerogative state. The Insurrection Act carves out disturbing exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act, allowing the president, in cases of “rebellion”, to deploy the military to enforce federal law. Would a supreme court that has held that a president enjoys broad immunity from future prosecution for all “official acts”, no matter how nefarious, question a president’s determination of what constitutes a “rebellion”?While the appearance of troops on the streets of Chicago or New York may frighten marginalized communities from exercising their basic rights of free movement, it may also trigger an equally dangerous and predictable response. The specter of city streets patrolled by soldiers trained to fight enemy combatants, not US citizens, may well serve not to quell violence but to invite it. The prospect of protests turning ugly and violent is all too real. The deployment of troops, under the pretext of responding to an emergency, then works to create the very emergency that justifies an ever-greater deployment. The danger is this is precisely what the president wants.Why? Trump has already aggressively inserted himself in the battle over the 2026 midterms, pushing Texas to further gerrymander its already gerrymandered districts; jesting that war may supply a justification for delaying elections; and pledging to issue an executive order ending mail-in ballots – while clearly lacking the authority to do so. What if he were to deploy troops to polling places on election day?In principle, a strong edifice of law explicitly bars such a deployment on election day, but imagine if the president, in the wake of a series of violent protests, invokes the Insurrection Act to “safeguard” polling stations from domestic unrest. Now we have armed soldiers at polling stations, handling ballots and “monitoring” the chain of custody – all done in the name of protecting democracy. Legally, such a deployment would stretch the Insurrection Act beyond recognition, but courts deliberate slowly; elections are decided in days.As Fraenkel noted, authoritarianism does not operate outside law; it manipulates law until legality and illegality are indistinguishable.

    Lawrence Douglas is a professor of law at Amherst College in Massachusetts More

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      Donald Trump accused of ‘turning military on American citizens’ over plans to send National Guard to Chicago – US politics live

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      Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. My name is Tom Ambrose and I’ll be bringing you the latest news lines over the next few hours.We start with news that Donald Trump has been accused of “turning the military on American citizens” after a Pentagon official confirmed that planning is under way to send National Guard troops to Chicago.Illinois attorney-general Kwame Raoul also told CBS News that the president’s actions are both “un-American” and “unwise strategically”.Accusing the president of “turning our military on American citizens in his ongoing attempts to move our nation toward authoritarianism,” he added:
      His actions are not just un-American. They are unwise strategically. Our cities are not made safer by deploying the nation’s service members for civilian law enforcement duties when they do not have the appropriate training.
      To be clear: We have made no such request for the type of federal intervention we have seen in Los Angeles or Washington DC. There is no emergency in the state of Illinois.
      It comes as lieutenant-governor Juliana Stratton accused Trump of pursuing “political theatrics, not safety,” since crime in Chicago is already declining and there was no local request for troops.In a statement to ABC7 Chicago, she said:
      Tonight’s reporting from the Washington Post that President Trump is preparing to deploy federal troops in Chicago proves what we all know: he is willing to go to any lengths possible to create chaos if it means more political power-no matter who gets hurt.
      As lieutenant-governor and throughout my career, I’ve fervently fought for the reformation of our criminal legal system and under the Pritzker-Stratton administration, we’ve made tremendous progress.
      Crime in Chicago is declining and there’s absolutely no rationale for this decision, other than to distract from the pain Trump is inflicting on working families with his dangerous agenda. Illinois, governor Pritzker and I are here to stand for your rights, your freedoms, and will protect you against whatever storms of hate and fear come our way.
      Earlier on Sunday, Hakeem Jeffries, House minority leader and New York Democratic congressman, said Donald Trump has “manufactured a crisis” to justify sending federalized national guard troops into Chicago next, over the heads of local leaders.Read our full report here:In other developments:

      France summoned the American ambassador Charles Kushner after he wrote a letter to president Emmanuel Macron alleging France had failed to do enough to stem antisemitic violence, a French foreign ministry spokesperson said on Sunday.

      Sergei Lavrov, Moscow’s most senior diplomat, praised efforts by Donald Trump to end the war, in an interview on NBC on Sunday, while US vice-president JD Vance said Washington would “keep on trying” to broker talks in the absence of a deal.

      In the opening weeks of Donald Trump’s second term, Gavin Newsom wagered that peacemaking was best: a tarmac greeting for Air Force One, an Oval Office visit and a podcast slot for Maga’s biggest names. But then Trump came for California, and its governor dropped the niceties. Read the full report here.

      The president and his allies have been accused of executing a “pattern of lawfare” akin to those exerted by authoritarian regimes in Hungary and Russia after adopting a new strategy to target political opponents: allegations of mortgage fraud. Read the full report here.

      The justice department is alleging in a new court filing that three Smartmatic executives who were indicted last year on bribery and money-laundering charges transferred money from a 2018 voting machine contract with Los Angeles county into slush funds that were originally set up to pay bribes to overseas election officials. More

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      Trump ‘manufactured crisis’ to justify plan to send national guard to Chicago, leading Democrat says

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      Donald Trump has “manufactured a crisis” to justify the notion of sending federalized national guard troops into Chicago next, over the heads of local leaders, a leading Democrat said on Sunday, as the White House advanced plans to militarize more US cities.Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader and a New York Democratic congressman, accused the US president of “playing games with the lives of Americans” with his unprecedented domestic deployment of the military, which has escalated to include the arming of troops currently patrolling Washington, DC – after sending troops into Los Angeles in June.The mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, said any such plan from Trump was perpetrating “the most flagrant violation of our constitution in the 21st century”.Late on Friday, Pentagon officials confirmed to Fox News that up to 1,700 men and women of the national guard were poised to mobilize in 19 mostly Republican states to support Trump’s anti-immigration crackdown by assisting the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (Ice) with “logistical support and clerical functions”.Jeffries said he supported a statement issued by the Democratic governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker, that Trump was “abusing his power” in talking about sending the national guard to Chicago, and distracting from the pain he said the president was causing American families.The national guard is normally under the authority of the individual states, deployed at the request of the state governor and only federalized – or deployed by the federal government – in a national emergency and at the request of a governor.Jeffries said in an interview with CNN on Sunday morning: “We should continue to support local law enforcement and not simply allow Donald Trump to play games with the lives of the American people as part of his effort to manufacture a crisis and create a distraction because he’s deeply unpopular.”He continued: “I strongly support the statement that was issued by Governor Pritzker making clear that there’s no basis, no authority for Donald Trump to potentially try to drop federal troops into the city of Chicago.”The White House has been working on plans to send national guard to Chicago, the third largest US city, dominated by Democratic voters in a Democratic state, to take a hard line on crime, homelessness and immigrants, the Washington Post reported.View image in fullscreenPritzker issued a statement on Saturday night that began: “The State of Illinois at this time has received no requests or outreach from the federal government asking if we need assistance, and we have made no requests for federal intervention.”Trump has argued that a military crackdown was necessary in the nation’s capital, and elsewhere, to quell what he said were out of control levels of crime, even though statistics show that serious and violent crime in Washington, and many other American cities, has actually plummeted.Talking to reporters in the Oval Office on Friday the president insisted that “the people in Chicago are screaming for us to come” as he laid out his plan to send troops there, and that they would later “help with New York”.“When ready, we will start in Chicago … Chicago is a mess,” Trump said.Johnson, in an appearance on Sunday on MSNBC, said shootings had dropped by almost 40% in his city in the last year alone, and he and Pritzker said any plan by the White House to override local authority and deploy troops would be illegal.“The president has repeated this petulant presentation since he assumed office. What he is proposing at this point would be the most flagrant violation of our constitution in the 21st century,” Johnson said.California sued the federal government when it deployed national guard and US marines to parts of Los Angeles in June over protests against Ice raids, but a court refused to block the troops.Main target cities mentioned by Trump are not only majority Democratic in their voting but also run by Black mayors, including Washington, DC, Chicago, New York, Baltimore, Los Angeles and Oakland.Rahm Emanuel, a Democratic former Illinois congressman, chief of staff to former president Barack Obama, and a former mayor of Chicago, also appeared on CNN on Sunday urging people to reflect that Trump, in two terms of office, had only ever deployed US troops in American cities, never overseas.Emanuel said if he was still mayor he would call on the president to act like a partner and, although crime was coming down, to “work with us on public safety” to combat carjackings, gun crime and gangs and not “come in and act like we can be an occupied city”.He added about Trump’s agenda: “He gave his speech in Iowa, he said ‘I hate’ Democrats, and this may be a reflection of that.” The speech was in July, when Trump excoriated Democrats in Congress who refused to vote for his One Big Beautiful Bill, the flagship legislation of the second Trump administration so far that focuses on tax cuts for the wealthy, massive boosts for the anti-immigration agenda and benefits cuts to programs such as Medicaid, which provides health insurance for poor Americans. 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      Judge blocks White House from defunding 34 municipalities over ‘sanctuary’ policies

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      A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from cutting off federal funding to 34 “sanctuary cities” and counties that limit cooperation with federal immigration law enforcement, significantly expanding a previous order.The order, issued on Friday by the San Francisco-based US district judge William Orrick, adds Los Angeles and Chicago, as well as Boston, Baltimore, Denver and Albuquerque, to cities that the administration is barred from denying funding.Orrick, an Obama appointee, previously ruled it was unconstitutional for the Trump administration to freeze funding to local governments with “sanctuary” policies, limiting their cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).The April ruling came after cities including San Francisco, Sacramento, Minneapolis and Seattle sued the administration over what they claimed were illegal executive orders signed by Donald Trump in January and February that threatened to cut off funding if Democrat-controlled cities do not cooperate.Cities and counties suing the administration contend that the executive orders amount to an abuse of power that violate the constitution. The administration argues that the federal government should not be forced to subsidize policies that thwart its control of immigration.The administration has since ordered the national guard into Los Angeles and Washington DC, both cities with sanctuary designations, under a law-and-order mandate. On Friday, Trump said Chicago is likely the next target for efforts to crack down on crime, homelessness and illegal immigration.“I think Chicago will be our next,” Trump told reporters at the White House, later adding: “And then we’ll help with New York.”The number of people in immigration detention has soared by more than 50% since Trump’s inauguration, according to an Axios review published Saturday, reaching a record 60,000 immigrants in long-term detention or around 21,000 more than at the end of the Biden administration.Separately, the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, last week issued fresh threats to 30 Democrat-led cities and states, including to the governors of California, Illinois and Minnesota, and the mayors of New York, Denver and Boston, to drop sanctuary policies.Bondi said in the letter that their jurisdictions had been identified as those that engage “in sanctuary policies and practices that thwart federal immigration enforcement to the detriment of the interests of the United States”.“This ends now,” Bondi wrote.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDemocrat leaders uniformly rejected the Trump administration’s assertion. Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, said in response that Bondi’s order was “some kind of misguided political agenda” that “is fundamentally inconsistent with our founding principles as a nation”.The accelerating confrontation between the administration and Democratic-led jurisdictions comes as the Pentagon began ordering 2,000 national guard troops in Washington to carry firearms.US officials told NBC News that the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, had authorized national guard members who are supporting local law enforcement will probably carry weapons but troops assigned to city beautification roles would not.The official said troops supporting the mission “to lower the crime rate in our nation’s capital will soon be on mission with their service-issued weapons, consistent with their mission and training”, according to the outlet. More

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      Democratic socialists think they’re on a winning streak – can they build on Zohran Mamdani’s victory?

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      It’s an energizing time for democratic socialists across the country, and not only because New York state assembly member Zohran Mamdani’s recent win in the New York City mayoral primary moves the United States’ most populous city closer than it ever has been to having a member as mayor.For supporters of the leftwing, worker-led political ideology, last weekend’s annual democratic socialists of America national convention in Chicago, which welcomed tens of thousands of politically minded individuals from across the country to the unionized McCormick Place convention center, was further recognition of the growing influence of the DSA, the country’s largest socialist organization, founded in 1982.Amid the backdrop of a fraught national political stage, one in which traditional Democrats are struggling to connect with voters and a Donald Trump-led GOP continues to push a far-right agenda, a growing cadre of democratic socialist politicians are finding increasing success in local elections by touting platforms of progressive policies, tapping into social media with snappy, engaging content, and connecting face to face with typically forgotten voter blocs.View image in fullscreenThe continued presence of democratic socialists Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York representative; and Rashida Tlaib, the Michigan representative, in Congress has been an inspiration to many of these similarly minded political hopefuls.However, it’s Mamdani’s recent success that many DSA-endorsed candidates like Jake Ephros, running for Jersey City council; Kelsea Bond, running for Atlanta city council; Jorge Defendini, running for Ithaca common council; and others who attended this convention are hoping to replicate. The goal is to show that the campaign isn’t a flash-in-the-pan win, but instead a burgeoning tide shift toward a leftwing political future divorced from capitalism, despite criticism from traditionalist Democrats and Republicans alike.“Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York or Omar Fateh in Minneapolis, also poised to become a socialist mayor of a major city – these are things that come after years of structure that DSA helped build up in a bunch of chapters … This is also why DSA is growing so much and having all this new energy, because we’re just really demonstrating what the alternative is,” said Ashik Siddique, the national co-chair of the DSA. “The Democratic party has not really presented a meaningful alternative.”With the DSA’s membership having surged in recent months, and both the 2026 midterm and 2028 presidential elections on the horizon, this weekend’s convention was a key opportunity for many to strategize on how to capitalize on expanding influence and recent wins.“There’s so much excitement around our huge victory, Zohran Mamdani winning the primary,” said Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair for the New York City chapter of the DSA. “People are coming up to us and asking us about the campaign, wanting to learn from our experience as well, and I’ll say that the big change that I’ve seen over the years is that DSA as an organization has matured politically.”While the NYC-DSA continues its work, other chapters will attempt to follow its lead, organizing around their own socialist candidates while the national DSA organization reaffirms its position on Palestine, organizes to end US aid to Israel, supports the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement – which calls on consumers to stop supporting both Israeli companies and companies that have supported Israel – and stands against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in solidarity with immigrants.That and a clear economic agenda that supports the working class “over billionaires, the bosses, the corporations that are raising prices, that are keeping our wages low” are what will lead to further success for democratic socialist candidates, in Gordillo’s eyes.Persistence can also be helpful.It helped Alex Brower, who won his election for Milwaukee common council district three alderman in an April special election after the death of his predecessor, in his third bid for office as a democratic socialist.“That happens to a lot of socialists because … if socialists were 100% successful, we’d have a socialist America right now. So there’s a lot of losing, but I think, honestly, I think we learn more by losing than winning,” Brower said.Many DSA-endorsed candidates will also be deep in the throes of fieldwork in the coming months: knocking on doors, attending events, meeting with neighbors and being visible in communities, all key to keeping the DSA’s recent momentum going, according to Ephros, who is currently running for the Jersey City council on a platform of affordable social housing, universal rent control, universal childcare, public healthcare and the Green New Deal, among other issues.“It goes a long way to just demonstrate: ‘Oh, this isn’t some shadowy, weird, fringe guy who calls himself a socialist and that means scary things to me; it’s my neighbor and he’s active in the community and he’s showing up,’” he said.Over the three days of the convention, the conference’s largest in its history, DSA members gathered to deliberate resolutions that will guide chapter actions and concerns over the next two years.Members voted to approve a measure for “a fighting anti-Zionist DSA”, a resolution that prompted much debate and some resistance due to a clause that would expel members for supporting Israel. Arguments both for and against the measure were raised to the crowd of voting members on Sunday afternoon, delayed by calls from DSA leadership to hold applause in favor of the silent American Sign Language motion for clapping, consisting of the waving of both hands. The request was only mildly successful.Members also voted to prioritize efforts to put up a DSA-endorsed socialist candidate for the 2028 presidential election, and elected both new and returning delegates to the DSA’s national political committee, the 16-person body that serves as the organization’s board of directors.On Friday, members heard from Rashida Tlaib, the keynote speaker for this year’s convention. As one of Congress’s most outspoken supporters of Palestine, Tlaib largely spoke about the responsibility Congress has to condemn Israel’s bombing and starvation of the people in Palestine. She also emphasized the work she believes the DSA still has to do.View image in fullscreen“For DSA to live up to our potential, we have to be willing to grow ourselves. We need more members for more diverse communities and leadership roles, y’all. We are failing, and again, I’m telling you as a big sis, we are failing when a room like this only has a handful of our Black neighbors. You need to be intentional,” Tlaib said to Friday’s intently listening crowd.“A lot of working-class folks have strong historical ties to the Democratic party. They know they have been let down, and they’re looking for a new home. They want to envision the alternatives, and we have it.”Álvaro López, an electoral coordinator for NYC-DSA who assisted Mamdani’s campaign, attended the DSA convention for the first time after being a member since 2017. He’s grappling with what to take from the convention’s more introspective measures.“In this convention, unfortunately, Donald Trump was not raised. Zohran’s victory was not strategically discussed, and I think that’s a product of our larger, big-tent organization that we have. I think there is a lot of work for the left and the DSA to still get to a point where we are really thinking about how do we build power, and how we are not so inward looking and think of ourselves as the protagonist of everything around us,” López said.The NYC-DSA’s strategy for creating successful campaigns has previously involved contesting local and state-level positions, before shifting to one that seeks to place democratic socialists in the highest levels of local politics. With many DSA chapters strategizing what that looks like for them back home, taking similar steps may help, Gordillo believes.“Many working-class people, for example, don’t really know what the state assembly is,” he said.“It’s harder to get traction or to do mass communications that way, so we decided to run a socialist for mayor,” he said of reaching voters in local elections. “We need to do that, not just in New York City. We need to do it in Minneapolis. We need to do it in Los Angeles and in Detroit and Michigan, eventually in 2028. I hope that we take that to the federal stage in the presidential run.”A resolution brought up at this year’s DSA convention would create a strategy to build socialism in each of the 50 states and help the DSA build more statewide organizations. The DSA has also previously expanded an electoral program to provide more support to chapters that want to learn how they can run their own candidates and develop class-struggle elections.It’s political actions like these that can be the key to winning races, even by the smallest of margins, Tlaib said on Friday, reminding DSA members of her win in 2018 by only 900 votes.“We are standing at a crossroads in American history,” Tlaib said. “We are going to take this country back for our working families and defeat these pathetic, cowardly, hateful fascists. We’re going to win because we don’t have any other options, and yes, we are going to free Palestine. They don’t have any other choice. Our movement isn’t going anywhere, and we’re just getting started.” More

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      White House says 23 arrested after hundreds of federal officers deploy to DC

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      About 850 officers and agents took part in a “massive law enforcement surge” across Washington DC on Monday night and made nearly two dozen arrests, the White House has said.The show of force came after Donald Trump announced that he was sending the national guard into the capital and putting city police under federal control, even though the violent crime rate is at a 30-year low.Press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Tuesday: “As part of the president’s massive law enforcement surge, last night approximately 850 officers and agents were surged across the city. They made a total of 23 arrests, including multiple other contacts.”The arrests consisted of homicide, firearms offences, possession with intent to distribute narcotics, fare evasion, lewd acts and stalking, Leavitt added. “A total of six illegal handguns were seized off of District of Columbia’s streets as part of last night’s effort.”Leavitt added: “This is only the beginning. Over the course of the next month, the Trump administration will relentlessly pursue and arrest every violent criminal in the district who breaks the law, undermines public safety and endangers law-abiding Americans.”Leavitt used to briefing to argue that opinion polls show broad public backing for the crackdown on crime and that Democrats and the media are out of touch.View image in fullscreenIn a bizarre interlude, the first question went to podcast host Benny Johnson, who delivered a monologue about crimes he had suffered during his 15 years as a Washington DC resident. “To any reporter that says and lies that DC is a safe place to live and work, let me just say this,” he said, looking at Leavitt, “Thank you. Thank you for making the city safe.”Johnson followed up by asking if Trump would consider giving the Presidential Medal of Freedom to “Big Balls”, whose real name is Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old software engineer, for his “heroic actions” in an attempted carjacking in Washington last week. Leavitt replied: “I haven’t spoken to him about that, but perhaps it’s something he would consider.”The press secretary also told reporters that homeless people have the option be taken to a homeless shelter and offered addiction and/or mental health services. “If they refuse, they will be susceptible to fines or to jail time. These are pre-existing laws that are already on the books. They have not been enforced.”Trump’s intervention has been widely condemned as an authoritarian power grab that undermines the autonomy of Washington’s DC local government and seeks to distract attention from political problems such as the Jeffrey Epstein files.Earlier, Muriel Bowser, the mayor of Washington DC, pledged to work “side by side” with the federal government as national guard troops arrived at their headquarters in the capital.View image in fullscreenSpeaking after a meeting with the attorney general, Pam Bondi, at the justice department, Bowser told reporters: “I won’t go into the details of our operational plan at this point but you will see the Metropolitan police department (MPD) working side by side with our federal partners in order to enforce the effort that we need around the city.”Bowser has cultivated a delicate working relationship with Trump since his return to power in January, avoiding direct confrontations when possible. On Tuesday, she struck a conciliatory note and said she would try to make the most of the extra resources to fight crime.“What I’m focused on is the federal surge and how to make the most of the additional officer support that we have,” she said. “We have the best in the business at MPD and chief Pamela Smith to lead that effort and to make sure that the men and women who are coming from federal law enforcement are being well used and that, if there is national guard here, that they’re being well used and all in an effort to drive down crime.“So, how we got here or what we think about the circumstances right now, we have more police and we want to make sure we’re using them.”However, other Democratic mayors across the country have adopted a different tone, warning Trump against expanding his law and order power grab in other major cities.Trump told reporters on Monday: “We have other cities also that are bad,” citing the Democratic strongholds of Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. “And then, of course, you have Baltimore and Oakland. You don’t even mention them any more, they’re so far gone.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStephen Miller, an influential White House deputy chief of staff, stepped up the rhetoric on Tuesday, tweeting without evidence: “Crime stats in big blue cities are fake. The real rates of crime, chaos & dysfunction are orders of magnitude higher. Everyone who lives in these areas knows this. They program their entire lives around it. Democrats are trying to unravel civilization. Pres Trump will save it.”All five cities named by Trump are run by Black mayors. Most were outspoken in denouncing the president’s move. Brandon Johnson, Chicago’s mayor, said in a statement: “Sending in the national guard would only serve to destabilize our city and undermine our public safety efforts.”Brandon Scott, the mayor of Baltimore, said: “When it comes to public safety in Baltimore, he should turn off the rightwing propaganda and look at the facts. Baltimore is the safest it’s been in over 50 years.”Barbara Lee, the mayor of Oakland, wrote on X: “President Trump’s characterization of Oakland is wrong and based in fear-mongering in an attempt to score cheap political points.”Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, where troops were sent earlier this month in a crackdown on protests, posted: “Another experiment by the Administration, another power grab from local government. This is performative. This is a stunt. It always has been and always will be.”View image in fullscreenTrump took command of the Washington DC police department and deployed the national guard under laws and constitutional powers that give the federal government more sway over the nation’s capital than other cities. But Democrats raised concerns that Washington DC could be a blueprint for similar strong-arm tactics elsewhere.Christina Henderson, a Washington DC at-large councilmember, told CNN on Tuesday: “I was listening to the president’s press conference yesterday, and I think it should be concerning to all Americans that he talked about other cities.“The District of Columbia, for decades, without statehood, has always been used as a petri dish, where Congress or the federal government is trying out ideas here. So, I would hope that folks don’t lose sight of what’s happening in the district. And even if they don’t live here, they fight hard with us.”California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, warned that Trump “will gaslight his way into militarising any city he wants in America”.JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, insisted that the president “has absolutely no right and no legal ability to send troops into the city of Chicago, and so I reject that notion”.He added: “You’ve seen that he doesn’t follow the law. I have talked about the fact that the Nazis in Germany in the 30s tore down a constitutional republic in just 53 days. It does not take much, frankly, and we have a president who seems hell-bent on doing just that.” More

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      ‘People are scared to go out’: fear of Ice agents forces cancellation of US summer festivals

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      For Orlando Gutierrez in Kansas City, the thought of cancelling his community’s summer Colombian Independence Day festival first surfaced “the week after the inauguration” in January, “when the raids started happening”. The decision was rooted in “trying to be safe”, Gutierrez said. “We’re not talking about folks that are irregular in terms of their immigration status. You only have to look a certain way and speak a certain language and then you’re in danger.”For decades prior to 2025, the event had gone on interrupted – “in rain, in extreme heat” – and hosted thousands of Colombians and non-Colombians alike, Gutierrez said. “Our mission is to share our culture with people that don’t know it,” he added. “To not have the opportunity – that’s where it hurts the most.”In Donald Trump’s second term as president, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) has been historically expansionist: it now aims for an unprecedented 3,000 minimum arrests a day. Its agents have thrown undocumented people, residents with protected legal status, and even American citizens into a deportation system that increasingly does not respect due process.Out of fear of being targeted indiscriminately, cultural and musical events from coast to coast – block parties and summer concerts in California; Mexican heritage celebrations in Chicago; soccer fan watch parties in Massachusetts – have been postponed or canceled altogether. Even religious gatherings are no longer perceived as safe from Ice. In San Bernardino, California, Bishop Alberto Rojas has dispensed his congregation from the obligation to attend mass out of fear of deportation raids.Every decision to cancel is heartbreaking. In Philadelphia, Carnaval de Puebla, which was scheduled for April, made the call to cancel in February, said organizer Olga Rentería. “We believe this is not a time to celebrate,” Rentería explained, “but a time to remain united, informed, and strong.” In Los Angeles, organizers of Festival Chapín, a celebration of Guatemalan culture, have postponed the event from this August to October. “It was really hard to take that decision,” Walter Rosales, a restaurateur and one of the event’s organizers, told the Guardian. “We have a lot of attendees; more than 50,000 people every year. People have hotels, they have flights. We hire people to be there. But I think it was the best [choice.] The first thing we want is the security of the people.”View image in fullscreenRosales said he hopes that by waiting a few months, Festival Chapín can take place amid a different political climate, one in which Ice sticks to promises made by Trump to target primarily undocumented people with criminal records.But mass raids are likely to get more frequent: the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, legislation forced through Congress by Republicans and signed into law by Trump on the Fourth of July, will slash social programs while funding Ice at levels comparable to the budget of the US army.It means that even huge stars are questioning whether concerts are safe for their fans. When the Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny announced a recent tour that skips the continental US altogether, social media speculation centered on the notion that the artist did not want to put his fans in Ice’s crosshairs. That theorizing was in part fueled by Bad Bunny’s own dips into the wider political conversation: he’s called Ice agents “sons of bitches” on social media and his “NUEVAYoL” video – in which the Statue of Liberty is garlanded with the Puerto Rican flag – is a lovely and grand ode to New York’s immigrants.View image in fullscreenOf avoiding the US on his upcoming tour, the artist himself has only said that, after touring regularly in the US in recent years, more dates at this time were “unnecessary”. (A representative for Bad Bunny did not respond to a request for comment.)Gabriel Gonzales, the bandleader of the Los Angeles Latin music ensemble La Verdad, said some of their gigs have had to be cancelled this summer. “A lot of people are very scared to go out,” he said. “It’s kind of like the pandemic all over again.”But as La Verdad continue to perform around Los Angeles and elsewhere, Gonzales is finding new meaning in playing live amid the Trump administration’s policies.“It’s not like a rebellion,” he said. “It’s more like a resistance. As musicians, we are there to take people away for a few moments. I see communities pulling together and I feel like everything is going to be OK.”For Joyas Mestizas, a Seattle-based Mexican folk dance youth group, which cancelled their annual festival this year, the plan is to be “more creative” going forward. “But we’re not going anywhere,” said the group’s co-director, Luna Garcia. “If I have to teach kids out of my basement, I’ll do it. The kids are going to dance.”For some organizers of cultural events for Latino communities, pushing through and executing their plans despite fears of raids has become its own kind of crusade.In July, federal agents were spotted on the premises of Chicago’s National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture just days before the institution was scheduled to hold its annual Barrio Arts Festival. The museum said the agents entered the property, “refused multiple requests to present a warrant, badge, or identification”, and “informed museum staff that they were assessing entry and exit points for upcoming events that may draw undocumented attendees”.(In a statement, homeland security said agents “staged and held a quick briefing in the Museum’s parking lot in advance of an enforcement action related to a narcotics investigation”.)In response to the presence of the federal agents, the museum decided not to cancel the festival – but, rather, to ensure it would go forward without endangering its attendees. Veronica Ocasio, the museum’s director of education and programming, said that in the days before Barrio Arts, she and her team “met non-stop” in order to create “as tight a security plan as we could”. The museum is located inside Chicago’s Humboldt Park; in order to cover the park’s 200 acres, Ocasio and her co-organizers assembled a group of volunteer immigration advocates who created a trigger warning and stood guard on rotation for the entirety of the two-day festival. If Ice agents were spotted, the museum was ready to shut down the event, close the gates, and bunker in place – holding attendees inside until the agents left. The plan then called for Ocasio and other museum employees to stand out front with immigration attorneys, holding the fort.View image in fullscreenDelia Ramirez, an Illinois congresswoman, was also a key part of the museum’s plan. In order to head off potential Ice raids, Ramirez as well as other elected officials were on the premises “around the clock”, she said. “State representatives, city council folks, the mayor. All to protect constituents from homeland security.”“The president has taken away people’s healthcare so he can hire more Ice agents to terrorize communities,” added Ramirez, but that doesn’t mean “there’s no oversight or accountability. At a time where the federal government wants to harm you, we will keep each other safe”. For Ramirez, Barrio Arts Festival was “a beautiful showing of people saying to Ice, ‘not here, not now, not ever’.”Beyond her support for local cultural events, Ramirez is attempting to push back on Ice action more broadly: she’s a co-sponsor of the No Anonymity in Immigration Enforcement Act which would prohibit Ice from the now-common practice of carrying out their deportation actions while masked. “People are freaking the hell out,” she said. “They don’t know whether it’s an Ice agent who is going to criminalize them with no due process or it’s someone who wants to rob them. No other law enforcement agency does this.”Ultimately, not only did the Puerto Rican event in Chicago go on without interruption, but it was “our largest, most well attended Barrio Fest in our twenty-five year history”, Ocasio said. “We stood against intimidation and we created a blueprint for festivals in the city of Chicago.” The museum has already shared the safety plan it developed on the fly with organizers of upcoming events representing the local Colombian and Mexican communities.Ahead of New York’s Colombia Independence Day festival – held in July in Corona, a working class neighborhood in Queens – organizers were similarly concerned about the possibility of Ice raids. They took precautions by bordering off the event, marking it as private, and creating a single entrance point where they would have stopped Ice agents operating without a warrant, organizers told the Guardian. Like Chicago’s Barrio Arts Festival, they had lawyers on hand from a local legal services organization. Ultimately, like Barrio Arts, they too set a new attendance record, with around 20,000 festival goers.View image in fullscreenCatalina Cruz, a New York state assembly member who helped plan the Colombian festival, said that all the precautions she and her fellow organizers took “doesn’t explain why so many people came out – from all over the city and beyond”. She credited attendees with a certain kind of mental fortitude: “I’m not in their minds, but I don’t think they were giving a fuck about the president.”Of course, that fuzzy feeling of having put on a successful mass event for the Latino community in the era of all-pervading fear of Ice isn’t a panacea. As Cruz put it: “What would have really stopped [Ice] if they wanted to get in? As we have seen in the case of California” – where federal agents have forcefully and en masse raided parks and working farms – “not a goddam thing.”Newly flush with cash thanks to the Big Beautiful Bill, Ice is now actively recruiting waves of new agents – to, in their words, “defend the homeland” – by offering $50,000 signing bonuses and student loan forgiveness. Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s border czar, has promised to “flood the zone” with Ice agents in New York and other sanctuary cities.But on that Sunday in Queens, the Colombian festival ticked along beautifully with no sight or sound of the federal government’s aggressive deportation machine. Vendors pushed street-cart ceviche and plastic pouches full of high-octane primary-color beverages: “Coctelitos, coctelitos!” Seemingly every other person wore the powerful yellow jersey of the Colombian national soccer team. Twentysomethings salsa’d next to older family members grooving in their wheelchairs.When a performer with serious pipes sang the Star Spangled Banner, everybody perked up. When she followed it up with the national anthem of Colombia, throat-bursting singalongs broke out. After she wrapped up, the DJ smashed the ehh-ehh-EHH horns and, all together, folks chanted: “Viva Colombia! Viva Colombia!” More

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      Landlord who stabbed Palestinian American boy to death dies in prison

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      A landlord jailed for decades after he attacked a Palestinian American boy and his mother has died.Three months ago, Joseph Czuba was sentenced to 53 years behind bars for the attack. He was found guilty in February of murder, attempted murder and hate-crime charges in the death of Wadee Alfayoumi and the wounding of the boy’s mother, Hanan Shaheen.The 73-year-old Czuba targeted them in October 2023 because of their Islamic faith and as a response to the war between Israel and Hamas, which started days earlier.Czuba died Thursday in the custody of the Illinois corrections department, the Chicago Sun-Times reported, citing the Will county sheriff’s office. The law enforcement agency did not return a call seeking comment on the death.Ahmed Rehab, the executive director of Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Chicago office, said in a statement on Saturday that “this depraved killer has died, but the hate is still alive and well”.Evidence at trial included harrowing testimony from Shaheen and her frantic 911 call, along with bloody crime scene photos and police video. Jurors deliberated less than 90 minutes before handing in a verdict.The family had been renting rooms in Czuba’s home in Plainfield, about 40 miles (64km) from Chicago when the attack happened.Shaheen told jurors Czuba attacked her before moving on to her son, insisting they had to leave because they were Muslim. Prosecutors also played the 911 call and showed police footage. Czuba’s wife, Mary, whom he has since divorced, also testified for the prosecution, saying he had become agitated about the Israel-Hamas war, which had erupted days earlier.After the start of the war, Czuba told Shaheen that they had to move out because Muslims were not welcome. Later, he attacked her and her son.“He told me: ‘You, as a Muslim, must die,’” said Shaheen.Shaheen had more than a dozen stab wounds.Czuba attacked her with a knife before going after her son in a different room. Police said Czuba stabbed the boy 26 times, leaving the knife in the child’s body. Some of the bloody crime scene photos were so explicit that the judge agreed to turn television screens showing them away from the audience, which included Wadee’s relatives.The case, which generated headlines around the world, comes amid rising hostility against Muslims and Palestinians in the US since Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023, killing roughly 1,200 Israelis, and Israel’s attack on Gaza, which has killed more than 48,000 Palestinians.The attack hit particularly hard in Plainfield and surrounding suburbs, which have a large and established Palestinian community. Wadee’s funeral drew large crowds, and Plainfield officials have dedicated a park playground in his honor.Marina Dunbar contributed reporting More

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      She fled Cuba for asylum – then was snatched from a US immigration courtroom

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      Jerome traveled a thousand miles from California to El Paso, Texas, so he could accompany Jenny to her immigration hearing. He and his wife had promised to take her after she had fled Cuba last December, after the government there had targeted her because she had reported on the country’s deplorable conditions for her college radio station.Everything should have been fine. Jenny, 25, had entered the United States legally under one of Joe Biden’s now-defunct programs, CBP One. By the end of the year, she could apply for a green card.But a few days before her hearing, Jerome started to feel like something was off. Jenny’s court date had been abruptly moved from May to June with no explanation. Arrests at immigration courthouses peppered the news.And when Jenny went before the court, the government attorney assigned to try to deport her asked the judge to dismiss her case, arguing vaguely that circumstances had changed.View image in fullscreenInstead, the judge noted that Jenny was pursuing an asylum claim and scheduled her for another court date in August 2026 – the best possible outcome.“She turned around and looked at me and smiled. And I smiled back, because she understood that she was free to go home,” Jerome said.But as Jenny left the courtroom and approached the elevator to leave, a crowd of government agents in masks converged on her and demanded she go with them. Just before she disappeared down a corridor with the phalanx of officers, she turned back to look at Jerome, her face stricken, silently pleading with him to do something.“I said, ‘She’s legal. She’s here legally. And you guys just don’t care, do you? Nobody cares about this. You guys just like pulling people away like this,’” Jerome recalled telling the agents. “And nobody said a word. They couldn’t even look me in the eye,” he told the Guardian.Footage of her apprehension was taken by those advocating for her and shared with the Guardian.Now Jenny is languishing in immigration custody. Her hearing for August 2026 has been replaced with a date for next month when the government attorney might once again attempt to dismiss her case, and her case been transferred from a judge who grants a majority of asylum applications to one with a less than 22% approval rate.“There’s no heart, there’s no compassion, there’s no empathy, there’s no anything. [It’s] ‘We’re just going to yank this woman away from you, and we don’t care,’” Jerome said. The Guardian is not using his or Jenny’s full name for their safety.Similar scenes have played out again and again at immigration courthouses across the country for weeks, as people following the federal government’s directions and attending their hearings are being scooped up and sent to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention.The unusual tactics are happening while Donald Trump and his deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, push for Ice to make at least 3,000 daily arrests – a tenfold increase from during Biden’s last year in office. Ice agents have suddenly become regulars at immigration court, where they can easily find soft targets.At first, the officers appeared to focus arrests on a subset of migrants who had been in the US for fewer than two years, which the Trump administration argues makes them susceptible to a fast-tracked deportation scheme called expedited removal. Ice officers seem to confer with their agency’s attorneys, who ask the judge to dismiss the migrants’ cases, as they did with Jenny. And, if judges agree, the migrants are detained on their way out of court so that officials can reprocess them through expedited removal, which allows the federal government to repatriate people with far less due process, sometimes without even seeing another judge.View image in fullscreenBut reporting by the Guardian has uncovered how Ice is casting a far wider net for its immigration court arrests and appears also to be targeting people such as Jenny whose cases are ongoing and have not been dismissed. The agency is also snatching up court attendees who have clearly been in the US for longer than two years – the maximum timeframe that according to US law determines whether someone can be placed in expedited removal – as well as those who have a pathway to remain in the country legally.After the migrants are apprehended, they’re stuffed into often overcrowded, likely privately run detention centers, sometimes far from their US-based homes and families. They’re put through high-stakes tests that will determine whether they have a future in the US, with limited access to attorneys. And as they endure inhospitable conditions in prisons and jails, the likelihood of them having both the will to keep fighting their case and the legal right to stay dwindles.“To see individuals who are law-abiding and who have received a follow-up court date only to be greeted by a group of large men in masks and whisked away to an unknown location in a building is jarring. It breaks my understanding and conception of the United States having a lawful due process,” said Emily Miller, who is part of a larger volunteer group in El Paso trying to protect migrants as best they can.One woman Miller saw apprehended had come to the US legally, submitted her asylum petition the day of her hearing, and was given a follow-up court date by the judge before Ice detained her.“My physical reaction was standing in the hallway shaking. My body just physically started shaking, out of shock and out of concern,” Miller said. “I have lived in other countries where I’ve been a stranger in a strange land and did not speak the language or had limited language abilities. And as a woman, to be greeted by masked men is something we are taught to fear because of violence that could happen to us.”Elsewhere in Texas, at the San Antonio immigration court earlier this month, a toddler dressed in pink and white overalls ran gleefully around the drab waiting room. Far more chairs than people lined the room’s perimeter, as if more attendees had been expected. A constantly multitasking employee at the front window bowed her head in frustration as the caller she was speaking to kept asking more questions. Self-help legal pamphlets hung on the wall – a reminder that the representation rate for people in immigration proceedings has plummeted in recent years, and the vast majority of migrants are navigating the deportation process with little to no expert help.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn one of the courtrooms, a family took their seats before the judge. Their seven-year-old boy pulled his shirt over his nose, his arms inside the arm holes. The government attorney sitting with a can of Dr Pepper on her desk promptly told the judge she had a motion to introduce, even as the family filed their asylum applications. She wanted to dismiss their cases, she said, as it was no longer in the government’s best interest to proceed.The judge said no. She scheduled the family for their final hearings just over a year later. And she warned them, carefully, that Ice might approach them as soon as they left her courtroom. What happened next, she said, was not in her control.Her last words to the family: “Good luck.”Men in bulletproof vests were hanging around in the hallway, but the family safely made it into the elevator and left the courthouse for the parking lot. Stephanie Spiro, associate director of protection-based relief at the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC), said that for the most part, Ice is leaving families with children alone (with notable exceptions). It’s “single adults” they’re after, people who often have loved ones in the US depending on them, but whose immigration cases involve them alone, she said.A few days later, two such adults – a man and a woman – separately went before a different immigration judge in San Antonio, whose courtroom had signs encouraging people to “self-deport”, the Trump administration’s phrase for leaving the country voluntarily before being removed.The government attorney that day moved to dismiss both the man’s and the woman’s cases, which the judge granted, dismissing the man’s case even before the government attorney had given a reason why.Using a Turkish interpreter, the judge then told the man it was likely that immigration authorities would try to put him into expedited removal – despite the fact that he had entered the US more than two years earlier.Soon after, the woman – who had been in the country for nearly four years – went before the court without a lawyer. The judge tried to explain to her what might happen if her case were dismissed, but as he finished, she admitted in Spanish: “I haven’t understood much of what you’ve told me.”View image in fullscreenThe woman went on to say that she was deep in the process of applying for a visa for victims of serious crimes in the US – a visa that provides a pathway to citizenship. But the judge was upset with her for not also filing an asylum application, and he threatened to order her repatriated. It was the government attorney who “saved” her, the judge said, by requesting the case be dismissed instead.As soon as the woman walked out of the courtroom, agents approached her and directed her out of the hallway, into a small room. Around the same time, outside the building, men wearing gaiters over their faces ushered a group of people into a white bus, presumably to be transported to detention.Spiro of the NIJC, meanwhile, works in Chicago and said she and fellow advocates have documented Ice officers in plainclothes coming to immigration court there with a list of whom they’re targeting – and court attendees are apprehended whether or not their case is dismissed.“People are getting detained regardless,” Spiro added. “And once they’re detained, it makes it just so much harder to put forth their claim.”Migrants picked up at the court in Chicago have been sent to Missouri, Florida and Texas – to detention spaces that still have capacity, but also to where judges are more likely to side with the Trump administration for speedier deportations. Many of them end up far from their loved ones, and a lag in Ice’s publicly accessible online detainee locator has meant some of them have at times essentially disappeared.As word of mouth has spread among immigrant communities in Chicago about these arrests, the once bustling court has gone eerily quiet, Spiro said. That, in turn, could have its own serious consequences, as no-shows for hearings are often ordered deported.“They don’t want to leave their house because of the detentions that are happening,” Spiro said of Chicago’s immigrants. “So to go to court, and to go anywhere – they don’t want to come to our office. To go anywhere where there’s federal agents and where they know Ice is trying to detain you is just terrifying beyond, you know, most people’s imagination.” More