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      Rural Americans who rely on Head Start worry about its future: ‘Without free childcare I couldn’t work’

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      For almost as long as she’s been a mother, Sara Laughlin has known where she could turn for help in Troy, a western Ohio town 20 miles north of Dayton.For years, the local Head Start program provided stability and care for her oldest son, and it now does the same for her two younger children, twin boys. Head Start was there for Laughlin and her family through tough transitions, including the end of a long relationship. She credits the free federally funded program, housed in a blue building on the edge of this manufacturing hub of 27,000, for allowing her to keep her job as a massage therapist while raising three kids.“If we had to pay for childcare, I would not be able to work,” Laughlin said. “There’s no way I could do it.”So, Laughlin said, she was “dumbfounded” when she heard this spring that Head Start was targeted for elimination in an early draft of Donald Trump’s budget proposal.In small towns and rural areas throughout the country, voters like her were key to both of Trump’s election victories. Laughlin was particularly attracted to his campaign promise to eliminate taxes on tips, which she relies on. She couldn’t conceive why cuts to early childhood programs would be on the table.“Out of all the things in this country that we could get rid of, why do you want to attack our children’s learning?” she said. Laughlin’s experience shows what’s at stake in towns and rural areas up and down the western side of Ohio – and across the country. In many of these communities, Head Start, which combines early childhood education, health, nutrition and other family services, is the only game in town for childcare, allowing thousands of parents to work. It’s often the only early childhood program in which educators can make a decent wage in a chronically underpaid industry. And it’s a key source of connection and support for parents dealing with trauma, job loss, poverty and parenting challenges.View image in fullscreenNearly 90% of rural counties in the United States have Head Start programs, which are funded with federal dollars and run by public or private agencies including schools and non-profits. Almost half of the 716,000 children Head Start serves live in rural congressional districts, compared with just 22% in urban districts.“These are communities that are underinvested in by philanthropy or the states where they are,” said Katie Hamm, who during the Biden administration served as deputy assistant secretary for early childhood development at the federal Administration for Children and Families, which oversees Head Start.In many rural communities, the program is not just about education and childcare. Head Start is particularly crucial to the survival of these local areas in a way it isn’t in larger urban areas with more diverse economies. The program not only employs local residents; it also supports other local businesses as centers pay rent, buy food from local farmers and grocers, use local mechanics to repair buses, hire local technicians to service kitchens, and pay local carpenters to outfit centers.Head Start was created in 1965 to provide early learning, family support and health services to low-income families, part of Lyndon B Johnson’s “war on poverty”. The program has long enjoyed bipartisan support: 74% of Trump voters and 86% of Democrats said earlier this year that they support funding the program, according to a survey conducted on behalf of the advocacy group First Five Years Fund.Although Head Start has survived elimination so far this year, its local centers are still trying to recover from what many say feels like death by a thousand federal cuts since Trump took office – with more likely to come.In early February, many Head Start programs were caught up in a federal funding freeze. Then the Trump administration fired about 20% of the program’s federal staff.This spring, some rural programs shut down because the administration delayed Head Start payments in some regions. In April, the administration abruptly closed five regional Head Start offices, cutting off a main source for support for programs. Just three months after that, the administration announced that undocumented immigrant children, long eligible for Head Start, could no longer participate.In the midst of all that turmoil, some local and regional Head Start programs have begun laying off employees. At the start of the year, the government withheld nearly $1bn in funding from local programs, a move the Government Accountability Office called illegal in July. While the money has since been distributed, in the interim several Head Start programs closed temporarily, and a few have told some staff they will be let go.View image in fullscreenAfter all that, Head Start leaders in rural communities said, their futures feel more tenuous than ever. While urban Head Start programs are more likely to be supported by large, well-resourced organizations that receive donations from individuals and local philanthropies, those additional funding streams are often absent in rural communities.In Greenville, Ohio, a town of about 12,700 that hugs the Indiana border 40 miles north-west of Dayton, the median household income is just under $47,000. The local Head Start program is one of just two licensed childcare centers available in town for nearly 600 children under the age of five who live in Greenville. Run by the Ohio-based Council on Rural Services non-profit, it serves children whose parents work in nearby retail stores, fast food chains or factories, as well as a growing number of kids being raised by their grandparents.Teachers there describe their work as far more than providing childcare. On any given day, in addition to teaching a group of preschoolers, Greenville Head Start teacher Sasha Fair may find herself lending an ear to parents who need to vent and helping caregivers track progress toward personal educational, parenting or employment goals. At her center, like many others in the region, Head Start workers pool their money to buy birthday presents for children who would otherwise go without. They track down car seats for parents who can’t afford them. And they go door to door to local dentists trying to convince them to accept children who use Medicaid.“It’s about connection and community,” Fair said. She was terrified for the families she serves when she heard Head Start was briefly on the chopping block.“These are our future,” she said, gesturing at the preschoolers playing in her classroom. “We need to give them the strongest, best possible start, and that includes their healthcare, their access to care, their education.”Many residents would also be out of jobs if Head Start programs were to close. Nationally, nearly a quarter of the program’s teachers are parents with children currently or formerly in the program. In Ohio, Head Start is among the state’s 50 largest employers, providing work for more than 8,000 Ohioans and, by extension, additional area residents who rely on Head Start spending.“We try to stay local and utilize whoever is local,” said Stacey Foster, who leads a Head Start program in Urbana, a town of about 11,000 that is 40 miles north-east of Dayton and surrounded by picturesque fields and farmhouses.The program’s fleet of buses is serviced by Jeff’s Automotive Service, a local garage. Katy Leib, service manager at Jeff’s Automotive, said demand for work rises and falls, especially this year, with some people spending cautiously because of economic uncertainty.View image in fullscreenShe said being able to rely on Head Start as one of its larger, more consistent accounts has been helpful for the business’s stability. If Head Start were to lose its funding, it would affect not just Jeff’s Automotive, but other companies that contract with Jeff’s.“When we’re working on their vehicles, we’re also purchasing parts from local businesses. It’s affecting tire companies and our oil companies,” Leib said. ”It’s a domino effect.”Heather Littrell, who lives in Troy, is an example of a parent who found support, and eventually employment, through Head Start. At 19 years old, she was standing in line to apply for housing assistance when she spotted an ad for free preschool. At the time, she was struggling to keep a job while raising her two young children. Family members helped when they could, but without consistent childcare, Littrell was forced to leave job after job at local factories and a gas station.“Everything was unstable,” she said. “I wasn’t really knowing what direction I was going to take.”Littrell ended up enrolling her girls in Head Start, where they learned their colors, numbers and social skills, while Littrell received parenting advice, diapers and meals for her daughters. Most important, she could work. A few years later, inspired by her experience as a Head Start parent, Littrell decided to pursue a degree in early childhood education.Now, 17 years later, she has moved from being a Head Start student teacher to serving as a coordinator for mental health and disability services in Head Start programs across western Ohio.“If I hadn’t seen that flyer that day, I wouldn’t be standing here now,” she said. “I really did use Head Start to help me become a better person and a better member of society.”Trump’s latest budget proposal would not change the amount of money set aside for Head Start, but, given inflation, keeping the program’s budget unchanged effectively amounts to a cut.View image in fullscreenLaurie Todd-Smith, appointed by the Trump administration in June to oversee federal early childhood programs at the Administration for Children and Families, including Head Start, acknowledged that the programs play an important role in rural areas. “If Head Start wasn’t in rural areas where those most impoverished families are, we’d have very different outcomes for children,” she said.But Todd-Smith isn’t convinced that the program needs more money. Rather, she said, programs should look for ways to be more efficient. In some places, state-funded offices already provide health services, employment assistance and mental health assistance. She said Head Start programs could tap into those services instead of offering their own.“There might be some cost savings if we actually link state systems to some of the work of Head Start, instead of creating duplication of services,” Todd-Smith said.At the local level, however, Head Start providers say that if they’re going to raise salaries, keep teachers and serve more children – there aren’t currently enough seats for all who qualify – they need more money.Littrell, the former Head Start parent who now works for the program, hopes residents will realize programs such as Head Start are critical for communities like hers and vote for politicians who will try to protect them. From her early years as a teen mom, she said, she knows how easy it is to end up in a situation where a family needs some help to move forward.“We had food stamps, we had [subsidized] housing, we used Head Start,” Littrell said. “We used them to help us build a life where we didn’t depend on those social services. But they were there for us when we needed them.”This story was produced by the Hechinger Report, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. More

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      Trump to meet with US congressional leaders in last-ditch effort to avoid shutdown

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      Donald Trump has reversed course and is purportedly planning to host a bipartisan gathering of the top four US congressional leaders at the White House on Monday afternoon in a last-ditch effort to avoid a looming government shutdown, the House speaker and the US president’s fellow Republican Mike Johnson said on Sunday.Trump’s climbdown comes days after he scrapped a planned meeting to discuss the crisis with Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, the respective Democratic minority leaders in the House and Senate.The president accused the pair of making “unserious and ridiculous demands” in return for Democratic votes to support a Republican funding agreement to keep the government open beyond Tuesday night – but left the door open for a meeting “if they get serious about the future of our nation”.Johnson, appearing on CNN, said he spoke with Trump at length on Saturday, and that the two Democrats had agreed to join him and John Thune, the Republican Senate majority leader, for an Oval Office discussion Monday.He did not say if Trump would be negotiating directly with the Democrats – but portrayed Trump as keen to “try to convince them to follow common sense and do what’s right by the American people”.Schumer, talking to NBC’s Meet the Press, said he was “hopeful we can get something real done” – but was uncertain of the mood they would find Trump in when they sat down for the 2pm ET discourse.“If the president at this meeting is going to rant, and just yell at Democrats, and talk about all his alleged grievances, and say this, that, and the other thing, we won’t get anything done,” Schumer said.“We don’t want a shutdown. We hope that they sit down and have a serious negotiation with us.”According to CBS News on Sunday, meanwhile, Trump is not hopeful the meeting will lead to an agreement.The network’s chief national correspondent, Robert Costa, told Face the Nation he spoke with Trump by phone Sunday morning and that a government shutdown “looks likely at this point based on my conversation … He says both sides are at a stalemate.”Costa said: “Inside the White House, sources are saying president Trump actually welcomes a shutdown in the sense that he believes he can wield executive power to get rid of what he calls waste, fraud and abuse.”If no deal is reached, chunks of the federal government are set to shut down as early as Wednesday morning, with the White House telling agencies to prepare to furlough or fire scores of workers.Republican and Democratic leaders have been pointing fingers of blame at each other for days as Tuesday’s deadline for a funding agreement approaches.The narrow House Republican majority passed a short-term spending bill known as a continuing resolution earlier in September that would keep the government funded for seven weeks – but it faces opposition in the Senate, where it needs the support of at least eight Democrats to pass.Democrats have made the extension of expiring healthcare protections a condition of their support, warning that planned Republican spending cuts would affect millions of people.“If we don’t extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits, more than 20 million Americans are going to experience dramatically increased premiums, copays, deductibles, in an environment where the cost of living in America is already too high,” Jeffries told CNN on Sunday.“We’ve made clear that we’re ready, willing and able to sit down with anyone, at any time and at any place, in order to make sure that we can actually fund the government, avoid a painful Republican caused shutdown, and address the healthcare crisis that Republicans have caused that’s [affecting] everyday Americans.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut Trump and Republicans have repeatedly accused their political opponents of exploiting the issue to force a shutdown while there was still plenty of time to fix healthcare before the subsidies expire on 31 December.“The Obamacare subsidies is a policy debate that has to be determined by the end of the year, not right now, while we’re simply trying to keep the government open so we can have all these debates,” Johnson said.“There is nothing partisan about this continuing resolution, nothing. We didn’t add a single partisan priority or policy rider at all. We’re operating completely in good faith to get more time.”Thune, on Meet the Press, also attempted to blame Democrats for the potential shutdown and said “the ball is in their court” as to the next development.“There is a bill sitting at the desk in the Senate right now, we could pick it up today and pass it, that has been passed by the House that will be signed into law by the president to keep the government open,” he said.“What the Democrats have done is take the federal government as a hostage, and by extension the American people, to try [to] get a whole laundry list of things that they want.”But US senator Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat who has previously urged his party leadership to be stronger in standing up to the Trump administration, said the problem was Republicans handing “a complete blank check” to the president to spend money on his own political interests, and not those of the nation.“Until now the president has said he’d rather shut down the government than prevent those healthcare costs from spiking,” he told CNN.“Democrats are united right now on this question. I’m glad we’re finally talking. We’ll see what happens.” More

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      ‘Like the Gestapo’: trailblazing immigration judge on Ice brutality and Trump’s damage to the courts

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      Dana Leigh Marks had the kind of career most immigration judges dream of.At 32, she won a precedent-setting supreme court case that made it easier to claim asylum in the US. In the decades that followed, she led the National Association of Immigration Judges to gain collective bargaining rights, fought to protect immigration courts from political meddling and blazed a trail for a generation of female judges.Now retired at 71, she’s seen her share of political ups and downs over her 10 years as an immigration lawyer and 35 years on the bench. But nothing could have prepared her for what she’s seen the Trump administration do to the court systems she once served.“I have seen my entire career destroyed by Trump in six months,” said Marks, reflecting on the state of her profession while sipping coffee near her home in Marin county, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, where she spent much of her career. “I’m flat out terrified on all fronts.”Whip-smart, with a shock of white curls, Marks can speak more freely than a sitting immigration judge. And the picture she paints is alarming.Trump’s immigration crackdown has thrown the already backlogged courts into chaos. More than 100 immigration judges have been fired since Trump was sworn in, including roughly a third of the judges in San Francisco, home to one of the largest immigration courts in the country. People across the US are routinely arrested outside their court hearings by Ice agents “acting like the Gestapo”, Marks said.She described her former colleagues as under siege. “If I were an immigration practitioner now, I’d tell my clients that they have to act like they’re in a war zone,” she said. “Be prepared for any eventuality, because it is so random and so chaotic.”Despite the grim subject matter, Marks is full of wisecracks and seems to have her spirits permanently set on high – gushing at every passing dog and baby.“Immigration judges do death penalty cases in a traffic court setting” is among her oft-quoted zingers.She describes the frenetic work of an immigration judge as like “the guy behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz”: managing dockets, juggling courtroom tech and interpreters, typing verbatim notes while monitoring audio recording levels, then issuing immediate oral rulings with few clerks and barely any time to think. It’s an already frenzied job, and one she believes the Trump administration is intentionally trying to make harder.Humor aside, her message for the public is a serious one: that the Trump administration is “attacking” immigration courts “on all fronts” in order to eliminate them entirely by proving they’re “dysfunctional”. There’s a backlog of 3.6m cases waiting to be adjudicated, and Marks believes the courts have been purposefully starved of resources.“I feel like the immigration courts are the canaries in the coalmine,” she said, “and what’s happening to them is an illustration of what might happen to other court systems if we don’t stop it.”A critical eye and an open mindMarks’ interest in refugees and the immigrant experience comes from her own family’s lucky escape to America.“I was raised with an awareness of immigration to begin with,” said Marks. Her Jewish grandmother fled pogroms in Lithuania and was on one of the last boats to the US before the first world war severely restricted transatlantic migration. By the 1920s, the US enacted laws imposing strict quotas on refugees from eastern and southern Europe that almost completely shut down legal pathways for Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust.View image in fullscreenMarks grew up in a diverse part of west Los Angeles, and spent a year in Chile after Salvador Allende’s election, where she learned Spanish and saw first-hand the dissonance between US media coverage of his presidency and how Chileans talked about politics around dinner tables. She learned to read and listen to many perspectives with a critical eye and an open mind.She wanted to be a social worker, but went to law school and nearly dropped out before falling in love with immigration law. “You met the world coming into your office,” she said, describing her years in private practice.In 1987, at the age of 32, she won the supreme court case known as INS v Cardoza-Fonseca, which expanded asylum eligibility by granting relief to those with a “well-founded fear” of persecution. The morning after that victory, she started her training to become a judge.Alongside her work in court, she led the National Association of Immigration Judges for nearly two decades and recruited half a dozen female judges to the bench. She prided herself on using compassion and humor to lower the tension in her courtroom: when people feel heard and judged fairly, they’re more likely to accept your decisions, she said, even when you rule against their claim.View image in fullscreenMarks retired in 2021 to become “Nana Dana” and care for her grandchild, but she remains deeply engaged in the field, speaking at conferences, advising the National Association of Immigration Judges, educating law students, officiating weddings and serving on the advisory board of the non-profit Justice Connection.What’s been playing out now in courtrooms, in policy memos and on the streets has chilling echoes of the authoritarian eras her Jewish ancestors fled.Among her more recent concerns is the push to recruit hundreds of military lawyers to serve as immigration judges. In late August, the Trump administration scrapped the rule requiring temporary immigration judges to have spent a decade practicing immigration law before qualifying for the bench. Days later, 600 military lawyers were cleared to fill vacant judge seats. All of this is “absolutely unprecedented”, said Marks. “I don’t want to slam military lawyers, but there is the concern that they’re being picked because there’s a perception that they will just follow orders.”Political interference in the courtFor Marks, political encroachment on immigration courts has been “a slow creep that now has gone to light speed”.A hallmark of American democracy is the separation of powers and an independent judiciary. But this has never been so for immigration courts, which are overseen by the Department of Justice, a part of the executive branch rather than the judicial branch.“Deep in my bones, I always felt the placement of the immigration court in the Department of Justice was wrong,” she said. “The boss of the prosecutor should not be the boss of the judge.”The court’s placement has led to political interference and underfunding by both parties in power, and Marks wanted to fight back. She spent decades advocating for the nation’s immigration court system to be moved out from under the political whims and meddling of the justice department and into an independent judiciary. In 2022, the congresswoman Zoe Lofgren introduced a bill that would have created an independent immigration court system – but the bill ultimately died. Marks thinks reviving that bill should be a top priority for Democrats.She believes everyone across the political spectrum should be incensed by the current level of meddling with due process: from firing immigration judges, to pressuring them to toss out asylum cases so they can be reassigned as emergency deportations, to turning courthouses into traps where Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents scoop up immigrants to meet deportation quotas, and more.“Americans were raised with the golden principle that everybody deserves due process, and I really think the majority of Americans believe that, and that that’s what makes us exceptional in the world,” she said.“What kills me, as a lawyer, is that Trump turns everything on its head and blows through clearly established legal precedent as if it doesn’t exist. Fealty to precedent is the core of our legal system.”If there’s a silver lining for her, it’s that she predicts the administration’s embrace of chaos will ultimately backfire. For example, she thinks that dropping military reservists on to the bench for six-month stints is a recipe for failure. Rather than expediting the backlog of asylum cases, it will unleash chaos, “screw up the records” and “make appeals go wild”.“If you build by chaos, even if you’re right in what you construct,” she quipped, “it’s going to crumble.” More

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      Why Trump is backing Argentina’s Thatcherite economics | Heather Stewart

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      “We’re backing him 100%. We think he’s done a fantastic job. Like us, he inherited a mess.” Donald Trump gave his enthusiastic endorsement to Javier Milei’s radical economic experiment when the pair met in New York last week.The US has declared itself ready to offer more than rhetorical support to the chainsaw-wielding Argentinian president in the coming days, as Buenos Aires stands on the brink of a fresh financial crisis.The US Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said the US was “ready to do what is needed”. He suggested the Federal Reserve could offer Buenos Aires a $20bn (£15bn) dollar swap line – a crucial crisis-fighting tool – or the US could even buy the country’s bonds directly.US administrations have rallied support for Argentinian governments in the past – Bill Clinton was a fan of Carlos Menem’s 1990s reforms, for example. But Trump’s readiness to wade in directly is the latest example of his determination to use economic tools for political ends: in this case, propping up an ideological ally.Milei swept into power two years ago, on a wave of frustration and discontent with the economic status quo.Like Trump and Boris Johnson, he eschewed the usual conventions of politics and promised to smash up the establishment and remake the state on behalf of the people.But while Milei’s political playbook may echo Trump’s, with its embrace of chaos and showbiz, his economic policies owe something to another radical with big hair – Margaret Thatcher, whom the Argentinian president has called “brilliant”.Like the Thatcher governments in the UK, Milei sees slaying the dragon of inflation as an overriding priority. The challenge in Argentina is on a completely different scale to 1980s Britain, however: the inflation rate peaked at more than 25% a month soon after Milei came to power.But aspects of his approach, including a systematic onslaught on trade union rights, public spending cuts and a wave of privatisations, have echoes of Thatcherism.Despite lacking a parliamentary power base, Milei has succeeded in cutting deep into pensions and public sector wages – and more than 48,000 public sector workers have lost their jobs.He travelled to CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, in the US, to pose on stage next to a chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) was partly inspired by Milei’s aggressive style.Argentina’s tough policies have won plaudits from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which granted a new $20bn lifeline to Argentina in April.On stage at the IMF’s meetings in Washington that month, its managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, proudly pinned on to her green jacket a tiny silver chainsaw badge, handed to her by Argentina’s minister for deregulation, Federico Sturzenegger.But while Milei’s “shock therapy” may have met with approval in Washington – and indeed in financial markets – the Argentinian economist and campaigner Lucía Cirmi Obón highlights its human impact.“The macroeconomic changes implemented by Milei have not shown – nor do I believe they will show – any positive impact on people’s quality of life. In practice, what we are seeing is an economic recession,” she told the Guardian.“The main reasons are that real wages fell, and the opening of imports also dismantled a large part of national industry. On top of that, there were cuts to the number of people receiving a pension, support for childcare, for people with disabilities who used to receive pensions. All of the policies the population used to receive from the state have been reduced.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUnemployment has risen by two percentage points, but she argues that there is also significant hidden unemployment – with former factory workers crowding into poorly paid gig-economy jobs such as Uber driving, for example. Household debt is rising, and because many of the occupations targeted by cuts are female-dominated, the gender pay gap has widened, undoing six years’ worth of progress.Obón adds that while Milei’s approach was meant to unleash the corporate sector, to open the way for surging economic growth, investment as a share of GDP has actually fallen.Meanwhile, determined to squash inflation, Milei has maintained the peso’s link to the dollar – a trigger for so many crises in Argentina over the years.For several decades, the peso has been pegged – within limits – to the greenback, which circulates within Argentina as an alternative currency, in which many citizens like to hold their savings, especially in times of trouble.Milei had advocated full dollarisation during the election campaign – a policy that would leave Argentina without the right to set its own interest rates. When he came to power and allies rejected that plan, he instead devalued the peso by more than half, willing to wear the resulting inflation in the hope of stimulating exports.But the currency has nevertheless come under continued selling pressure – exacerbated by the political uncertainty unleashed when Milei suffered a disastrous showing in local legislative elections in Buenos Aires province, which he had himself called a “life or death battle”.Since those local elections, and amid a mounting clamour of corruption claims against Milei’s powerful sister, Karina, the peso sell-off has accelerated. The central bank burned through more than $1bn of reserves in a week trying to prop up the currency, before Bessent announced Washington was ready to step in.As well as political fellow feeling, some experts suggest geopolitics may have been another motivation for Washington’s intervention, with China becoming increasingly influential in Latin America.The peso rallied and the markets calmed after Bessent’s comments, but as the costs of “shock therapy” bite and Milei looks to crucial midterm elections in October, the Argentinian public face a volatile period ahead. More

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      The US government is facing a crisis of legitimacy | Daniel Mendiola

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      Between anti-immigrant zeal and a general disdain for any rules whatsoever, the Trump administration has shredded the constitutional order that makes government legitimate.This is now a legitimacy crisis.There are different philosophical approaches to government legitimacy, but in the United States, the most straightforward explanation is the social contract. Often associated with Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke and Rousseau and extremely influential with US founders, the social contract refers to the idea that the government requires the consent of the governed to be legitimate.Crucially, in exchange for this consent, the government accepts certain limits on what it can do. In other words, the government also has to follow the rules.The US has suffered crises of legitimacy before. Arguably, the 1964 Civil Rights Act emerged from just such a crisis. At a base level, the act conceded that to be legitimate, the government needed to actually recognize the rights of all its citizens – not just those of a certain race. It didn’t fix everything, but it was an important step in creating a stronger social contract for the next generation.The Trump administration, however, has reversed course on civil rights, abandoned limited government and eviscerated the social contract beyond recognition. From defying courts, to attacking judges, to capriciously revoking legal immigration statuses, to executing suspected drug smugglers, there is no shortage of examples.One example that deserves a lot more attention than it is currently receiving, however, is the horror story of Trump’s collaboration with a megaprison in El Salvador.To summarize, in March, the Trump administration forcibly sent more than 250 people, mostly Venezuelans accused of having ties to the Tren de Aragua gang, to El Salvador to be detained in a paid arrangement with Salvadorian president Nayib Bukele. Investigative reporting quickly confirmed that the entire operation – ostensibly to target dangerous criminals – was based on lies: only a small percentage of the targets had any criminal record at all, accusations of gang affiliations came from spurious evidence, and many of the detainees had followed the rules to enter the country legally.Nonetheless, instead of enjoying the rights guaranteed by US law, they suddenly faced imprisonment and alleged torture. Lower courts tried to halt the flights, but the Trump administration acted anyway.All of this would be horrifying enough as an isolated incident, but the legal saga surrounding the case has further disturbing implications. At first, the administration justified its actions through a controversial 18th-century law allowing the government to expel “alien enemies” in times of war – even though the country was not at war, and these were not “alien enemies”.However, the administration soon switched to a different argument that might be described like this: it doesn’t matter how many laws we broke – as long as the victims end up in a prison in a foreign country, US courts have no power to stop us. Also, we may do the same to US citizens.When the Trump administration first made these claims, news agencies covered them with much alarm. However, commentators since have avoided stating an uncomfortable truth: the administration was right. Apparently, it didn’t matter how many laws they broke. No one stopped them, nor have they faced any consequences.Significantly, the supreme court has played a critical role in this legitimacy crisis, not only by giving the Trump administration an unprecedented series of wins – often employing mind-boggling logic and blatant distortions of plain text – but also gutting the mechanisms that courts have to stop the executive branch when it gets caught doing illegal things.Here the battle over injunctions is revealing. In normal times, if the government gets caught doing something illegal, then judges have the power to issue an injunction to make the government actors in question stop. Government officials may appeal to a higher court, but in the meantime, the injunction prevents them from continuing to do harm while the case plays out.Now, think about a reality where injunctions don’t exist. If courts can’t issue an injunction to stop the government from doing illegal things, then no matter how blatantly the government is violating people’s rights, it can keep doing it unimpeded so long as the case stays tied up in appeals – a process that often takes years. In this scenario, law exists in theory, but there are virtually no limits to what the government can do in practice.This is shockingly close to the reality that the supreme court has now created. By rushing to overturn injunctions with no regard to who is being harmed, as well as creating seemingly arbitrary technicalities to prevent future injunctions, the message from the supreme court is clear: It doesn’t matter how many laws they broke. Now that Trump is in office, courts are simply not supposed to stop executive officials from putting Trump’s agenda into practice, regardless of how unlawful those practices might be.The extreme inability of our government to police itself becomes even clearer when it is placed alongside Brazil – the second-largest democracy in the Americas – where the former president Jair Bolsonaro was recently convicted for an attempted coup: after losing re-election in 2022, Bolsonaro tried a variety of tactics to stay in power, including inciting his followers to swarm government buildings to physically stop the peaceful transfer of power. If that sounds familiar, that’s because it was, indeed, strikingly similar to what Trump did in the January 6 riots after losing the 2020 election.Now, consider the difference in how our respective constitutional systems handled this. In the US, the supreme court not only blocked any potential trial for Trump’s role in the highly visible attempt to overthrow the government; it also took the opportunity to give him sweeping immunity for just about anything else. According to the logic of the majority decision, it doesn’t matter how many laws he broke. Being president is hard, and it is even harder if he has to worry about getting in trouble for breaking the law. So he should just have a virtual license to commit crimes. That way, he can take “vigorous, decisive” action.The Brazilian supreme court took a strikingly different approach. Apparently, it does matter how many laws Bolsonaro broke. Prosecutors presented strong evidence that he broke the law, so the supreme court decided that he should be prosecuted.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTellingly, this infuriated the Trump administration, which heaped criticism and sanctions on Brazilian judges in response. Brazilian courts refused to back down, however, and the trial ultimately resulted in a conviction.After watching this play out, I can’t help but wonder: what would it look like if my country had the courage to hold a lawless executive accountable?Here I want to be clear that in posing this question, I am calling for peaceful action. People will have to decide for themselves what this peaceful action looks like, though there is strength in numbers, and I think those numbers exist. As I have written previously, the nationwide protests against capricious and unlawful immigration raids are a testament to how many people are already fed up, and looking for ways to remind the government that it owes us rights.I also don’t think that questioning the government’s legitimacy right now is radical, partisan or even unpatriotic. In fact, nothing I am saying here contradicts what I was taught about legitimate government in my fifth grade social studies class at a conservative, patriotic public school in rural Texas. It is simply our civic duty to call out the government when it strays from the social contract.What’s giving me hope nowIn the classic Latin American protest anthem Me Gustan los Estudiantes, the celebrated Chilean composer Violeta Parra lauds the indomitable spirit of students. “Long live the students!” the song declares. They are the “garden of our joy” because they fearlessly defend truth, even when those in power try to force them to accept lies.Students give me hope as well.Overwhelmingly, the students that I have worked with over the years have shown themselves to be insightful thinkers with an unyielding dedication to truth, empathy, and solidarity. This is hopeful for many reasons, not the least of which being that this seems to terrify the people in power. Indeed, the same architects of our legitimacy crisis are also waging an aggressive campaign to squash campus protests, restrict institutional autonomy, and generally abolish academic freedom. Clearly, academic institutions have the potential to serve as a counterweight to government abuses. Otherwise, why would a lawless government be trying so hard to suppress us?Sadly, too many university leaders are now sacrificing academic legitimacy by caving to government pressure. The situation is bleak on this front as well, yet the battle is far from over.Our best hope: we need to be as fearless as our students.

      Daniel Mendiola is a professor of Latin American history and migration studies at Vassar College More

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      Trump news at a glance: Trump orders deployment of national guard to ‘war ravaged’ Portland

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      Donald Trump has ordered the deployment of the national guard to Portland, Oregon, authorizing “full force, if necessary”, ignoring calls from local and state officials who say the president has been misinformed about the scale of a protest outside a federal immigration office.The president says that he has directed all necessary troops to be deployed to protect “war ravaged Portland”, claiming that immigration facilities were “under siege from attack by Antifa and other domestic terrorists”.Officials in Portland have pushed back against the decision and rejected the president’s characterization.“There is no insurrection. There is no threat to national security and there is no need for military troops in our major city,” said Oregon’s Democratic governor, Tina Kotek.Here are the key stories at a glance.Donald Trump says he is deploying troops to Portland, OregonDonald Trump made the announcement on social media, where he claimed that the deployment was necessary “to protect war ravaged Portland,” and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facilities he said were “under siege by antifascists and other domestic terrorists”.Oregon’s governor, Tina Kotek, rejected the president’s characterization. “In my conversations directly with President Trump and secretary [of homeland security, Kristi] Noem, I have been abundantly clear that Portland and the state of Oregon believe in the rule of law and can manage our own local public safety needs,” Kotek said at a news conference in Portland on Saturday.Read the full storyPortland residents scoff at Trump threat to send military: ‘This is not a war zone’A visit to downtown Portland on Saturday, hours after Donald Trump falsely declared the city “war ravaged” to justify the deployment of federal troops, made it plain the US president’s impression of the city, apparently shaped by misleading conservative media reports, is entirely divorced from reality.There were just four protesters outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) field office in an outlying residential neighborhood that the president had claimed was “under siege” by antifascists and “other domestic terrorists”.Read the full storyTrump fires US attorney who told border agents to follow law on immigration raidsDonald Trump fired a top federal prosecutor in Sacramento just hours after she warned immigration agents they could not indiscriminately detain people in her district, according to documents reviewed by the New York Times.Michele Beckwith, who became the acting US attorney in Sacramento in January, received an email at 4.31pm on 15 July notifying her that the president had ordered her termination.Read the full story‘Hell on earth’: immigrants held in new California detention facility beg for helpImmigrants locked up in California’s newest federal detention center have described the facility as a “a torture chamber”, “a zoo” and “hell on earth”, saying they were confined in filthy cells and suffered medical crises without help.Six people detained at the California City detention center, which opened in late August and is now the state’s largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention center, shared accounts with the Guardian of poor conditions and alleged mistreatment by staff.Read the full storyUS military brass brace for firings as Pentagon chief orders top-level meetingUS military officials are reportedly bracing for possible firings or demotions after the Trump administration’s Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth, abruptly summoned hundreds of generals and admirals from around the world to attend a gathering in Virginia in the upcoming days.The event, scheduled for Tuesday at Marine Corps University in Quantico, is expected to feature a short address by Hegseth focused on military standards and the “warrior ethos”, according to the Washington Post.Read the full storyFBI arrest man who allegedly threatened to shoot people at Texas Pride paradeFederal authorities in Texas have arrested a man for allegedly threatening to shoot people at a pro-LGBTQ+ parade, to avenge the murder of Charlie Kirk.According to court documents viewed by the Guardian, on 18 September, the FBI’s field office in Dallas was notified by Abilene, Texas, police about online threats from a local resident.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Northwestern University students blocked from enrolment after refusing controversial antisemitism training.

      ‘Free speech for me, not for thee’: how Trump’s censorship blitz is splitting the right.

      Trump is flaunting his corruption. Is it changing what the US thinks of scandal? The Guardian’s David Smith on Trump’s brazen approach to the presidency.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened 26 September 2025. More

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      Portland residents scoff at Trump threat to send military: ‘This is not a war zone’

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      A visit to downtown Portland, Oregon, on Saturday, hours after Donald Trump falsely declared the city “war ravaged” to justify the deployment of federal troops, made it plain the US president’s impression of the city, apparently shaped by misleading conservative media reports, is entirely divorced from reality.There were just four protesters outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) field office in an outlying residential neighborhood that the president had claimed was “under siege” by antifascists and “other domestic terrorists”. Jack Dickinson, 26, wore a chicken costume draped in an American flag and held a sign that read “Portland Will Outlive Him”. Passing motorists honked in appreciation.Dickinson, who is from Portland and has helped organize the small but persistent protest at that location, which is going on three months, said he was not surprised to see Trump focus his attention on the city. But he called the president’s threat to have soldiers use “full force” against the protesters, whose numbers occasionally swell into the dozens, unwarranted.“There’s no justification, no reason for the national guard or military to be using ‘full force’ on people,” Dickinson said, “but they have this narrative about Portland that’s been helped by selectively edited videos to set themselves up for a crackdown.”The Ice field office, which the city of Portland recently accused the agency of illegally using for detentions, is also attractive to protesters because it sits directly next to a Tesla dealership. Another protester held up a sign that read “Tesla Funds Fascism/Stop Buying Teslas”.A third protester, a young man who goes by the nickname Burrito, said that he was “protesting them wrongfully kidnapping random individuals based on their skin color”.He also rejected the president’s characterization of the city and of the anti-Ice protesters. “This is not a war zone and it’s disgusting the way that he talks about us,” he said.The activist said that the point of the protests was to frustrate and wear out the federal agents, who, he said, have been responsible for any violence that has taken place: “As the day progresses, we get more numbers, they start to show more force and our people come out. It’s just a matter of how they escalate things, because they are the escalators, not like the one that Trump took that doesn’t work.”The number of protesters was vastly smaller than the number of people in nearby coffee shops and restaurants, where Portlanders went about their usual weekend business, joking about life during wartime.The city’s downtown blocks, which were the scene of mass protests in 2020, first against racist policing and then against Trump’s deployment of federal agents to guard a courthouse, were similarly placid.View image in fullscreenThe only person on the sidewalk outside the federal courthouse was a street sweeper, wearing a neon-green vest with the words “Clean & Safe” on the back. The fence that surrounded the building five years ago had long since been removed, as had the plywood boards that covered the windows of the adjacent police headquarters, where thousands of racial justice protesters rallied after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.There was also no sign of activity at the nearby Edith Green federal building, with its distinctive facade clad in vegetated screens, one day after a local TV reporter recorded the arrival of a convoy that included masked federal agents in an armored homeland security truck.By contrast, the nearby Portland farmers’ market was packed with residents and tourists buying produce and eating acaí bowls from a thriving local business started by a yoga and meditation teacher.On social media, Portlanders continued to mock Trump’s false claims about the city as they have for weeks, by posting images of themselves enjoying life in the city with audio of the president saying, earlier this month, that it is “like living in Hell”. More

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      FBI arrest man who allegedly threatened to shoot people at Texas Pride parade

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      Federal authorities in Texas have arrested a man for allegedly threatening to shoot people at a pro-LGBTQ+ parade, to avenge the murder of Charlie Kirk.According to court documents viewed by the Guardian, on 18 September, the FBI’s field office in Dallas was notified by Abilene, Texas, police about online threats from a local resident.The resident, identified as Joshua Cole, allegedly used a Facebook account under the name “Jay Dubya” where he “threatened to commit a shooting” at a Pride parade in Abilene on 20 September.“Fk their parade, I say we lock and load and pay them back for taking out Charlie Kirk,” Cole allegedly wrote, referring to the rightwing political activist, in one comment.Kirk was shot to death on 10 September at Utah Valley University (UVU).Citing investigators’ interviews with people close to the suspect in the case, Utah prosecutors have alleged Tyler Robinson killed Kirk after becoming sick of what he perceived to be Kirk’s “hatred”. Investigators reported being told by his family that Robinson had become “more pro-gay and trans rights oriented” in the year prior to Kirk’s killing.Another comment Cole allegedly posted about the Abilene Pride parade read: “Theres only like 30 of em we can send a clear message to the rest of them.” Invoking an insult used to demean LGBTQ+ people, Cole also allegedly wrote: “come on bro let’s go hunting fairies.”In a sworn affidavit, FBI special agent Sam Venuti wrote that investigators confirmed the “Jay Dubya” account belonged to Cole.Venuti said that he had attempted to contact Cole at his place of work, where he had been employed for the past year. But the employer said that Cole had “just quit” and had “stormed out of the facility in anger”, Venuti said.Co-workers reportedly described him as a “hot head”, according to Venuti’s affidavit.Not long after, local police, with Venuti present, conducted a traffic stop on Cole.When the agent told Cole that he wanted “to talk to him about his online activity”, Venuti wrote that “Cole then sighed and his body posture indicated that [he] knew the reason for our discussion”.Venuti’s affidavit added that Cole “did not appear surprised”.Cole was then detained. According to the FBI, Cole waived his rights against self-incrimination and – during questioning – reportedly admitted to owning a firearm, to operating the “Jay Dubya” Facebook account and to making the threatening posts.The affidavit states that Cole reportedly agreed that “a reasonable person could interpret his comments as a threat”. He also said he did “not believe that the gay pride event should be allowed” though denied “that he was going to take action or shoot parade participants”.Venuti concluded in the affidavit that Cole’s “threats were not conditional”.“The threats were specific,” Venuti wrote. “The threats were also specific to a particular set of victims: people participating in the gay pride parade.”Based on the evidence, the FBI agent wrote, he believed that there was probable cause to arrest Cole for violating a federal law that prohibits threatening communications.Cole could face up to five years in prison if convicted, according to the Cornell University law school’s Legal Information Institute.After being jailed, Cole appeared briefly at a preliminary hearing, where a judge ordered him to remain in custody pending further proceedings.An attorney listed for Cole did not immediately respond to a request for comment.On 26 September, the Abilene Pride Alliance issued a public statement about the incident.“We want to reassure our community that the safety of everyone at Pride has always been, and will continue to be our top priority,” they wrote. “The swift action and continued diligence of [authorities] reflect their commitment to protecting our city and ensuring that Pride remains a safe, inclusive and celebratory space for all.”The Trump administration – which has threatened to crack down on leftwing groups who opposed Kirk’s views – did not announce and has not commented publicly on Cole’s arrest. More