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      Should we ban opinion polls?

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      Ahead of the 2016 US presidential election, opinion polls predicted a win for Hillary Clinton. She lost, and the polling industry went through one of its regular spasms of self-criticism and supposed reform. Alas, it did not vote itself entirely out of existence. France and Spain ban the publication of opinion polls in the days leading up to an election, but we should go one better and ban their publication at any time.No doubt it adds much to the gaiety of the British nation to see the Conservative party slip to third or fourth in the polls, but any poll asking who you would vote for if there were a Westminster election tomorrow, held at a time when there almost certainly will not be an election for another four years, is meaningless as a guide to the makeup of the next Parliament.If polls were simply useless that would be no reason to ban them, though. A better reason is that they are actively harmful: a species of misinformation that pollutes the public sphere.One fundamental problem, recognised long ago, is that there is no such thing as “the public”, thought of as a hive mind with a single homogeneous view. To report the results of any poll as “the British public thinks…” is simply a falsehood, except perhaps in the unlikely circumstance that fully 100% of respondents agree on some point. There is, for the same reason, no such thing as “the will of the British people”, a spectre conjured into being only when something very dubious is being proposed.So what is it exactly that opinion polls measure? A random sample, hopefully statistically reliable, of differing and irreconcilable opinions. Not informed opinions exclusively, of course, but also the opinions of conspiracy theorists, the news-phobic and the merely deranged. By such a scientific operation we may uncover the valuable truths that a third of Conservative voters would prefer to see Nigel Farage as prime minister, while 7% of American men believe they could beat a grizzly bear in unarmed combat.A deeper question is whether polls actually create, in whole or in part, what they purport to be revealing. Does everyone go around with settled, reasoned views on every hot-button issue of the day, just waiting to be revealed by a questioning pollster? The answer was clear to the American journalist Walter Lippmann in his 1922 book Public Opinion. It is unrealistic, he argued, to expect people to be able to form “sound public opinions on the whole business of government”, and they shouldn’t actually have to. “It is extremely doubtful whether many of us would … take the time to form an opinion on ‘any and every form of social action’ which affects us.”The act of asking a question, though, heightens the importance of the subject in the mind of the questionee, creating an urge to have one’s say where there might previously have been neither urge nor say at all. As Walter Bagehot, the 19th-century political theorist and editor of the Economist, once observed: “It has been said that if you can only get a middle-class Englishman to think whether there are ‘snails in Sirius’, he will soon have an opinion on it.” As though to prove him right, in 1980 a third of American respondents helpfully offered their view on whether the “1975 Public Affairs Act” should be repealed, even though that legislation did not actually exist.The way you ask the question, moreover, can profoundly influence the outcome. A 1989 study by the American social scientist Kenneth A Rasinski found that varying verbal framings of political issues changed the outcome: “More support was found for halting crime than for law enforcement, for dealing with drug addiction than for drug rehabilitation, and for assistance to the poor than for welfare.” Other such experiments have shown that the order of questioning also matters, that Americans express more support for government surveillance if terrorism is mentioned in the question, and that nearly twice as many people think that the government “should not forbid speeches against democracy” than it “should allow speeches against democracy”, though the options are exactly equivalent.Modern opinion polls, then, are part of the machinery behind the “manufacture of consent”, a phrase originally coined by Lippmann to describe the propaganda operations of politicians and the press. It is no accident, after all, that George Gallup had been an advertising man, with the Madison Avenue firm Young & Rubicam, before he helped to pioneer the methods of systematic opinion polling by borrowing from market research and PR. In 1936, Gallup and his colleagues correctly predicted the election of Franklin D Roosevelt, proving the old-fashioned forecasting methods outdated. Using the “new instrument” of polling, he declared happily in 1938, “the will of the majority of citizens can be ascertained at all times”. This was, of course, partly by way of advertising his own commercial interest as founder, in 1935, of the American Institute of Public Opinion (Gallup Poll). His fellow pollster Elmo Roper described their nascent industry as “a veritable goldmine”.Profitable it may be, but the constant drizzle of polling also incentivises short-term, knee-jerk decision-making by governments. A leader may make a hasty policy change merely in response to a poll, and then if the polling improves, take that as proof that the new policy is correct. Keir Starmer was no doubt cheered when, following his Enoch Powell-adjacent speech on immigration in May, polling found that “more Britons [now] believe that the government wants to reduce net migration”. But a policy designed to massage approval ratings over the course of weeks is not always going to be the same as a good policy that will last years.It would be invidious after all this not to mention one consideration that strongly favours opinion polls, which is that they provide a steady stream of pseudo-news to the media. If each day did not bring a new revelation about the imaginary public’s confected opinion on one or another issue, there would be much less for news programmes to report on. And what would we all do then?Further readingPublic Opinion by Walter Lippmann (Wilder, £7.49)Manufacturing Consent by Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky (Vintage, £12.99)Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics by Michael Wheeler (WW Norton & Company, £13.99) More

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      Ice secretly deported Pennsylvania grandfather, 82, after he lost green card

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      An 82-year-old man in Pennsylvania was secretly deported to Guatemala after visiting an immigration office last month to replace his lost green card, according to his family, who have not heard from him since and were initially told he was dead.According to Morning Call, which first reported the story, long-time Allentown resident Luis Leon – who was granted political asylum in the US in 1987 after being tortured under the regime of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet – lost his wallet containing the physical card that confirmed his legal residency. So he and wife booked an appointment to get it replaced.When he arrived at the office on 20 June, however, he was handcuffed by two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers, who led him away from his wife without explanation, she said. She herself was kept in the building for 10 hours until relatives picked her up.The family said they made efforts to find any information on his whereabouts but learned nothing.Then, sometime after Leon was detained, a woman purporting to be an immigration lawyer called the family, claiming she could help – but did not disclose how she knew about the case, or where Leon was.On 9 July, according to Leon’s granddaughter, the same woman called them again, claiming Leon had died.A week later, however, they discovered from a relative in Chile that Leon was alive after all – but now in a hospital in Guatemala, a country to which he has no connection.According to Morning Call, the relative said Leon had first been sent to an immigration detention center in Minnesota before being deported to Guatemala – despite not appearing on any Ice detention deportation lists.A recent supreme court decision ruled the Trump administration could deport immigrants to other countries beside their country of origin.In his nearly 40 years living in the US, Leon spent his career working in a leather manufacturing plant, and raised a family. He had since retired.His condition at the hospital in Guatemala is unknown. He suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure and a heart condition, according to his family, who said they are planning to fly to Guatemala to see him.An Ice official told the Morning Call it was investigating the matter. More

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      Carol Moseley Braun, first black female senator: ’Sexism is harder to change than racism’

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      “Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton … ”Carol Moseley Braun was riding a lift in the US Capitol building when she heard Dixie, the unofficial anthem of the slave-owning Confederacy during the civil war. “The sound was not very loud, yet it pierced my ears with the intensity of a dog whistle,” Moseley Braun writes in her new memoir, Trailblazer. “Indeed, that is what it was in a sense.”The first African American woman in the Senate soon realised that “Dixie” was being sung by Jesse Helms, a Republican senator from North Carolina. He looked over his spectacles at Moseley Braun and grinned. Then he told a fellow senator in the lift: “I’m going to make her cry. I’m going to sing Dixie until she cries.”But clearly, Moseley Braun notes, the senator had never tangled with a Black woman raised on the south side of Chicago. She told him calmly: “Senator Helms, your singing would make me cry even if you sang Rock of Ages.”Moseley Braun was the sole African American in the Senate during her tenure between 1993 and 1999, taking on legislative initiatives that included advocating for farmers, civil rights and domestic violence survivors, and went on to run for president and serve as US ambassador to New Zealand.In a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian from her home in Chicago, she recalls her history-making spell in office, argues that sexism is tougher to crack than racism and warns that the Democratic party is “walking around in a daze” as it struggles to combat Donald Trump.As for that incident with Helms, she looks back now and says: “I had been accustomed to what we now call microaggressions, so I just thought he was being a jerk.”Moseley Braun was born in the late 1940s in the post-war baby boom. Her birth certificate listed her as “white” due to her mother’s light complexion and the hospital’s racial segregation, a detail she later officially corrected. She survived domestic abuse from her father, who could be “a loving advocate one minute, and an absolute monster the next”, and has been guided by her religious faith.In 1966, at the age of 19, she joined a civil rights protest led by Martin Luther King. She recalls by phone: “He was a powerful personality. You felt drawn into him because of who he was. I had no idea he was being made into a modern saint but I was happy to be there and be supportive.“When it got violent, they put the women and children close to Dr King in concentric circles and so I was close enough to touch him. I had no idea at the time it was going to be an extraordinary point in my life but it really was.”Moseley Braun was the first in her family to graduate from college and one of few women and Black students in her law school class, where she met her future husband. In the 1970s she won a longshot election to the Illinois general assembly and became the first African American woman to serve as its assistant majority leader.But when she planned a historic run for the Senate, Moseley Braun met widespread scepticism. “Have you lost all your mind? Why are you doing this? But it made sense to me at the time and I followed my guiding light. You do things that seem like the right thing to do and, if it make sense to you, you go for it.”Moseley Braun’s campaign team included a young political consultant called David Axelrod, who would go on to be a chief strategist and senior adviser to Obama. She came from behind to win the Democratic primary, rattling the party establishment, then beat Republican Richard Williamson in the general election.She was the first Black woman elected to the Senate and only the fourth Black senator in history. When Moseley Braun arrived for her first day at work in January 1993, there was a brutal reminder of how far the US still had to travel: a uniformed guard outside the US Capitol told her, “Ma’am, you can’t go any further,” and gestured towards a side-entrance for visitors.At the time she did not feel that her trailblazing status conferred a special responsibility, however. “I wish I had. I didn’t. I was going to work. I was going to do what I do and then show up to vote on things and be part of the legislative process. I had been a legislator for a decade before in the state legislature so I didn’t at the time see it as being all that different from what I’d been doing before. I was looking forward to it and it turned out to be all that I expected and more.”View image in fullscreenBut it was not to last. Moseley Braun served only one term before being defeated by Peter Fitzgerald, a young Republican who was heir to a family banking fortune and an arch conservative on issues such as abortion rights. But that did not deter her from running in the Democratic primary election for president in 2004.“It was terrible,” she recalls. “I couldn’t raise the money to begin with and so I was staying on people’s couches and in airports. It was a hard campaign and the fact it was so physically demanding was a function of the fact that I didn’t have the campaign organisation or the money to do a proper campaign for president.“I was being derided by any commentator who was like, ‘Look, this girl has lost her mind,’ and so they kind of rolled me off and that made it hard to raise money, hard to get the acceptance in the political class. But I got past that. My ego was not so fragile that that it hurt my feelings to make me stop. I kept plugging away.”Eventually Moseley Braun dropped out and endorsed Howard Dean four days before the opening contest, the Iowa caucuses. Again, she had been the only Black woman in the field, challenging long-held assumptions of what a commander-in-chief might look like.“That had been part and parcel of my entire political career. People saying: ‘What are you doing here? Why are you here? Don’t run, you can’t possibly win because you’re not part of the show and the ways won’t open for you because you’re Black and because you’re a woman.’ I ran into that every step of the way in my political career.”Since then, four Black women have followed in her footsteps to the Senate: Kamala Harris and Laphonza Butler of California, Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware.Moseley Braun says: “I was happy of that because I was determined not to be the last of the Black women in the Senate. The first but not the last. That was a good thing, and so far the progress has been moving forward. But then we got Donald Trump and that trumped everything.”Harris left the Senate to become the first woman of colour to serve as vice-president, then stepped in as Democrats’ presidential nominee after Joe Biden abandoned his bid for re-election.Moseley Braun comments: “I thought she did as good a job as she could have. I supported her as much as I knew how to do and I’m sorry she got treated so badly and she lost like she did. You had a lot of sub rosa discussions of race and gender that she should have been prepared for but she wasn’t.”Trump exploited the “manosphere” of podcasters and influencers and won 55% of men in 2024, up from 50% of men in 2020, according to Pew Research. Moseley Braun believes that, while the country has made strides on race, including the election of Obama as its first Black president in 2008, it still lags on gender.“I got into trouble for saying this but it’s true: sexism is a harder thing to change than racism. I had travelled fairly extensively and most of the world is accustomed to brown people being in positions of power. But not here in the United States. We haven’t gotten there yet and so that’s something we’ve got to keep working on.”Does she expect to see a female president in her lifetime? “I certainly hope so. I told my little grandniece that she could be president if she wanted to. She looked at me like I lost my mind. ‘But Auntie Carol, all the presidents are boys.’”Still, Trump has not been slow to weaponise race over the past decade, launching his foray into politics with a mix of false conspiracy theories about Obama’s birthplace and promises to build a border wall and drive out criminal illegal immigrants.Moseley Braun recalls: “It was racial, cultural, ethnic, et cetera, backlash. He made a big deal out of the immigration issue, which was racism itself and people are still being mistreated on that score.“They’ve been arresting people for no good reason, just because they look Hispanic. The sad thing about it is that they get to pick and choose who they want to mess with and then they do. It’s too destructive of people’s lives in very negative ways.”Yet her fellow Democrats have still not found an effective way to counter Trump, she argues. “The Democratic party doesn’t know what to do. It’s walking around in a daze. The sad thing about it is that we do need a more focused and more specific response to lawlessness.”Five years after the police murder of George Floyd and death of Congressman John Lewis, there are fears that many of the gains of the civil rights movement are being reversed.Over the past six months Trump has issued executive orders that aim to restrict or eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. He baselessly blamed DEI for undermining air safety after an army helicopter pilot was involved in a deadly midair collision with a commercial airliner. Meanwhile, Washington DC dismantled Black Lives Matter Plaza in response to pressure from Republicans in Congress.None of it surprises Moseley Braun. “It should have been expected. He basically ran on a platform of: ‘I’m going to be take it back to the 1800s. Enough of this pandering and coddling of Black people.’”But she has seen enough to take the long view of history. “This is normal. The pendulum swings both ways. We have to put up with that fact and recognise that this is the normal reaction to the progress we’ve made. There’s bound to be some backsliding.More than 30 years have passed since Moseley Braun, wearing a peach business suit and clutching her Bible, was sworn into the Senate by the vice-president, Dan Quayle. Despite what can seem like baby steps forward and giant leaps back, she has faith that Americans will resist authoritarianism.“I’m very optimistic, because people value democracy,” he says. “If they get back to the values undergirding our democracy, we’ll be fine. I hope that people don’t lose heart and don’t get so discouraged with what this guy’s doing.“If they haven’t gotten there already, the people in the heartland will soon recognise this is a blatant power grab that’s all about him and making a fortune for himself and his family and has nothing to do with the common good. That’s what public life is supposed to be about. It’s public service.” More

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      To defeat Trump, the left must learn from him | Austin Sarat

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      In the first six months of his second term as president, Donald Trump has dominated the national political conversation, implemented an aggressive agenda of constitutional reform, scrambled longstanding American alliances, and helped alter US political culture.Pro-democracy forces have been left with their heads spinning. They (and I) have spent too much time simply denouncing or pathologizing him and far too little time learning from him.And there is a lot to learn.Not since the middle of the twentieth century, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt led a constitutional revolution, has any president achieved so much of his agenda in so short a time. But to recognize Trump’s political genius is not to say that it has been put to good use or that he has been a good president.Like others who see “connections and possibilities in circumstances that even people who are smart in conventional ways do not see,” the president has shown himself to be adept at reading the temper of the times, exploiting weaknesses in others, and assembling a coalition of the faithful that others would have never thought possible. What PittNews’ Grace Longworth wrote last September has been confirmed since he returned to the Oval Office.“Trump is not as crazy or dumb as his opposition would like to believe he is,” Longsworth said.Trump’s genius is demonstrated by his ability to transform “calamitous errors into political gold”. In the past six months, he has continued to do what he has done since he first appeared on the national political scene. From then until now, he has convinced millions of Americans to buy into his version of events and not to believe what they see with their eyes.Insurrectionists become patriots. Law-abiding immigrants become threats to America’s way of life. Journalists become “enemies of the people”.It’s magic.Of course, the last six months have not been all smooth sailing for the president, who is now embroiled in a controversy about releasing material about the child sexual offender Jeffrey Epstein.But Trump succeeds because he is undaunted by critics and unfazed by the kinds of barriers that would throw any ordinary politician off their game. When necessary, he makes things up and repeats them until what he says seems to be real.None of this is good for democracy.Trump has done what millions of Americans want done: transform the political system. He has not been afraid to call into question constitutional verities. The greatest, and most dangerous, achievement of the president’s first six months has been reshaping the balance of power among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.The president has activated a political movement that has produced what Yale Law Professor Bruce Ackerman describes as “constitutional moments.” In those moments, fundamental political change happens without any formal change in the language of the Constitution itself.“Normal politics is temporarily suspended in favor of a ‘constitutional politics,’ focused on fundamental principles.” Since January, the Trump administration’s actions have indeed focused the attention of the nation on such principles.Like it or not, Donald Trump is turning the constitution on its head, changing it from a Republican to an authoritarian document. And with every passing day, we see that transformation happening.The Republican majority in Congress seems eager to let the president reshape the constitution and take on functions that it clearly assigns to the legislature. Tariffs, Congress is supposed to decide. Dissolving executive departments, Congress is supposed to decide. War powers, they belong to Congress.But you’d never know any of that from the way the president has behaved since 20 January.The supreme court has followed suit, giving its blessing to his aggressive assertions of executive authority even when they violate the clear meaning of the constitution. The court even severely limited the role of the lower courts by denying them the right to issue nationwide injunctions to stop the president from acting illegally.Beyond Congress and the court, it seems clear that pro-democracy forces did not do all they could have to prepare for this moment. Trump’s opponents have not learned from Trump how to effectively counter his “constitutional moment”.So what can we do?We can learn from Trump the importance of telling a simple, understandable story and sticking to it. Pro-democracy forces need to pick a message and repeat it again and again to drive it home. There is surely no one in America who has not heard the phrase Make America Great Again and does not associate Maga with Trump. We can learn to appeal to national pride and drive home that national greatness requires addressing the daily experiences of ordinary Americans in language of the kind they use.Make America Affordable Again. Make America Work Again for Everyone. Think X, Instagram, and what works on a podcast.Pro-democracy forces can learn to be as determined and undaunted in defense of democracy as the president has been in his assault on it. Take off the gloves. Show your teeth, take no prisoners. Trump has shown that it matters to voters not just what you stand for but also how you go about standing for it.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSmile less, swear more.We can learn from the president that political success requires building a movement and not being trapped by the norms and conventions of existing political organizations. Remember Trump has gotten to where he is not by being an acolyte of Republican orthodoxy but by being a heretic.In the age of loneliness, pro-democracy forces need to give people the sense that they are caught up in a great cause.We can learn from the president that if the pro-democracy movement is to succeed, it needs to offer its own version of constitutional reform. Stop talking about preserving the system and start talking about changing it in ways that will make government responsive and connect it to the lives that people live.The six-month mark in his second term is a good moment to dedicate or rededicate ourselves to that work.What’s giving me hope nowEvery Friday since April, I have organized a Stand Up for Democracy protest in the town where I live. People show up.They hold signs and come to bear witness, even if what they do will not convert anyone to democracy’s cause. They want to affirm their belief that democracy matters, and they want to do so publicly.Some are fearful, worried that they will somehow be punished for participating, but they show up.In addition, Harvard University’s willingness to resist the Trump administration’s demands that threatened academic freedom and institutional independence set a powerful example. Whether or not the university reaches an agreement with the administration, Harvard’s example will still matter.It is also true, as Axios reports, that protests against Trump administration policies and allies “have attracted millions in the last few months: Tesla Takedown in March, Hands Off! and 50501 in April, May Day, No Kings Day in June, and Free America on Independence Day”. Another mass event, “Good Trouble Lives On,” occurred on 17 July, “commemorating the fifth anniversary of the death of civil rights leader and former Rep John Lewis”.Those events need to happen more frequently than once a month. But they are a start.Axios cites Professor Gloria J Browne-Marshall, who reminds us that “effective protesting often starts with an emotional response to policy or an event, swiftly followed by strategy … The current movement is reaching that second stage”. In that stage, it has a chance to “‘actually make change in the government’.”I think that the seeds of that kind of opposition have been planted. But there is no time to waste if we are to prevent Trump’s political ingenuity from succeeding in permanently reshaping the institutions and practices of our constitutional republic towards authoritarianism.

      Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author or editor of more than 100 books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty More

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      Atlanta journalist fights deportation from Ice jail despite dropped charges: ‘I’m seeing what absolute power can do’

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      Prosecutors dropped the last remaining charges against Atlanta-area journalist Mario Guevara last week after he was arrested while livestreaming a protest in June. But the influential Salvadorian reporter remains penned up in a south Georgia detention center, fending off a deportation case, jail house extortionists and despair, people familiar with his situation told the Guardian.Donald Trump’s administration has been extreme in unprecedented ways to undocumented immigrants. But Guevara’s treatment is a special case. Shuttled between five jail cells in Georgia since his arrest while covering the “No Kings Day” protests, the 20-plus-years veteran journalist’s sin was to document the undocumented and the way Trump’s agents have been hunting them down.Today, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, he’s the only reporter in the United States sleeping in a prison cell for doing his job.View image in fullscreen“For the first time in my life, I’m seeing what absolute power can do,” said Guevara’s attorney, Giovanni Díaz. “Power that doesn’t care about optics. Power that doesn’t care about the damage to human lives to achieve a result I’ve only heard about as some abstract thing that we heard about in the past, usually talking about other governments in the way that they persecute individuals. This is powerful.”Around Atlanta, Guevara has been the person that immigrants call when they see an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raid going down in their neighborhood.Guevara had been working for La Prensa Gráfica, one of El Salvador’s main newspapers, when he was attacked at a protest rally held by the leftwing group Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in 2003. The former paramilitary organization viewed reporters from his paper as aligned with the rightwing government, and threatened his life. He fled to the United States in 2004, seeking asylum with his wife and daughter, entering legally on a tourist visa.He has been reporting for Spanish-language media in the United States ever since, riding a wave of Latino immigration to the Atlanta suburbs to career success and community accolades. He began reporting on immigration crackdowns under the Obama administration, one of the few reporters to note a tripling of noncriminal immigration arrests in the Atlanta area, as noted in a 2019 New York Times video profile of his work.. He meticulously documented cases and interviewed the families of arrestees. People around Atlanta began to recognize him on the street as the journalist chasing la migra.His work continued through the Trump administration, drawing an audience of millions that followed him from Mundo Hispánico to the startup news operation he founded last year: MGNews or Noticias MG.“It’s a unique niche that was met by Mario’s innovation and entrepreneurialism, if you will,” said Jerry Gonzales, executive director of the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials and GALEO Latino Community Development Fund. “He developed a really strong relationship with the community. He developed significant trust with much of that community. And because of that, his eyeballs started increasing.”An immigration court judge denied Guevara’s asylum claim in 2012 and issued a deportation order. Guevara’s lawyers appealed, and the court granted administrative closure of the case. He wasn’t being deported. But he wasn’t given legal residency either. Instead, the government issued him a work permit, his lawyer said. With a shrug, he went back to work.Guevara is arguably the most-watched journalist covering Ice operations in the United States, a story that the English-language media had largely been missing, Gonzales said. And local police were well aware of his work. He has been negotiating with them for access to immigration enforcement scenes for more than a decade.“Mario Guevara is well known – sometimes liked sometimes not – but definitely well known by law enforcement agencies, particularly in DeKalb county and Gwinnett county, and also with federal agents, and particularly immigration agents,” Gonzales said.Gonzales, among others, believes this put a target on his back in the current administration.“It seems like law enforcement coordinated and colluded with the federal agents,” Gonzales said. Gonzales points to the misdemeanor traffic charges laid by the Gwinnett county sheriff’s office shortly after Guevara’s arrest in DeKalb county by the Doraville police department as evidence.“The facts and the timeline indicate that pretty clearly to anybody that’s been following this,” he claimed. “In this regard it’s particularly troubling, given that he is a journalist and his situation. He had no reason to have been targeted for his arrest.”The Department of Homeland Security has not responded to a request for comment about their relationship with local law enforcement. The Gwinnett county sheriff’s office said in a response to a lawmaker’s inquiry that it cooperates with Ice when deemed “mutually beneficial” but has not responded to requests for additional comment.Doraville’s police chief, Chuck Atkinson, has not replied to an email seeking answers and fled from questions about the case at a city hearing. But Doraville’s mayor, Joseph Geierman, denied a connection between Ice and Doraville’s arrest of Guevara.On 14 June, the day of his arrest, in Atlanta’s DeKalb county, Guevara darted around a Doraville police truck. A group of riot cops nearby took note. One shouted “last warning, sir! Get out of the road!”Guevara was helmeted and wearing a black vest over his red shirt with the word “PRESS” in white letters. James Talley, an officer with the Doraville police department, was wearing an olive drab Swat jumpsuit with a helmet and gas mask.A masked demonstrator set off a smoke bomb near the cops. Guevara ran into the street with a stabilized camera in hand to capture the police reaction and the crowd scampering out of the way, as was shown on a police body camera video.Police had issued a dispersal order and were kettling protesters out of Chamblee-Tucker Road. They chased the suspected bomb thrower into the crowd, to no avail. But Guevara was in front of them on a grassy slope.Police from DeKalb county managing the raucous protest had been taking verbal abuse from demonstrators for a while – a sharp contrast from other protests around Atlanta held that day. The protest was winding down. Body camera video from the event suggests Talley was in an arresting mood.“Keep your eye on the guy in the red shirt,” Talley said to another Swat officer from Doraville. “If he gets to the road, lock his ass up.”Talley pulled another police officer aside. “If he gets in the road, he’s gone,” Talley said. “He’s been warned multiple times.”The other officer drew a finger across his chest. “The press?” Yep, Talley replied.The three of them waited about 50ft away as a DeKalb county police officer approached Guevara on the hill, ordering him to get on the sidewalk. Guevara backed away from the officer, his attention focused on the recording, took two steps into the street, and the Doraville police pounced.Guevara pleaded for the police to be reasonable.“I’m with the media, officer!” Guevara said. “Let me finish!”People shouted at the officers “That’s the press!” as they walked him handcuffed to a vehicle. “Why are you all taking him! He didn’t do nothing.”More than one million people were watching Guevara’s livestream when he was arrested.Trump has stepped up his rhetorical attacks on journalists since his inauguration. Last week, he described a reporter asking about warnings and emergency response in the Texas flooding disaster as “an evil person”, an epithet he has turned to with increasing frequency.The Guevara case is a sign of increasing hostility toward a free press, said Katherine Jacobsen, a program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists. She traced a through line from the Associated Press being barred from government briefings after it refused to accept the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America”, then lawsuits and investigations reopened against media companies, then attacks on journalists covering protests in Los Angeles, then Australian writer Alistair Kitchen’s deportation seemingly in relation to his reporting on student protests.“Next thing you know, we have Mario Guevara, a long time Spanish-language reporter in the Atlanta metro area, who is in Ice detention,” she said. “It’s growing increasingly concerning by the day.”Guevara’s audience views it as more than an attack on press freedom, though. They view it as an attack on themselves.“He’s a test case to push the envelope for legal immigrants that have committed no crime, to trump up charges against them,” GALEO’s Gonzales said. “And the second piece is how to target journalists.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGuevara’s arrest set off an immigration nightmare akin to the kind he has spent the last decade documenting.His arrest on a Saturday led to a weekend in DeKalb county’s decaying jail and a bond hearing that Monday. A magistrate court judge granted Guevara a no-dollar bond, but by then Ice had become aware of the arrest and placed Guevara on a hold. The jail released him into Ice custody, and held him briefly in a metro Atlanta facility.The next day, Gwinnett county charged Guevara with three misdemeanor traffic offenses, claiming that they were related to Guevara livestreaming a law enforcement operation a month earlier. The charges would be sufficient to keep him in jail and provide Ice an argument for his deportation at a federal bond hearing. The Gwinnett county sheriff’s office said Guevara’s livestreaming “compromised” investigations.Guevara’s attorneys tried to work quickly, Diaz said. “The detained dockets are so backed up, and the immigration detention centers are so overwhelmed that what used to take us two or three days to get a bond hearing now is taking about a week,” he said.Attorneys working for immigration enforcement argued in court that Guevara’s reporting constituted a “threat” to immigration operations.Jacobsen with CPJ was listening to the hearing when the government made that argument.“We felt a sense of alarm,” she said. “Alarm bells were raised by the government’s argument, as well as the judge not necessarily pushing back against the government’s argument that live streaming poses a danger to threaten law enforcement actions.”View image in fullscreenThe immigration judge granted Guevara a $7,500 bond for the immigration case. But Guevara’s family was not allowed to pay it because government attorneys appealed the bond order to the board of immigration appeals. But it took seven days for the court to issue a stay to the government’s appeal. Meanwhile, Ice began playing musical jail cells with Guevara.Over the course of the next three weeks, Ice shuttled Guevara between three different counties around Atlanta and eventually to the massive private prison Ice uses in Folkston, Georgia, 240 miles south-east of Atlanta on the Florida line.“We weren’t surprised that they appealed, because the government’s reserving and in most cases appealing everything, even stuff where they shouldn’t appeal because they’re wasting everybody’s time,” Diaz said. “But we didn’t really know the breadth of what they were trying to do to him.”Earlier this week, Todd Lyons, Ice’s acting director, issued a memo changing its policy on bond hearings, arguing that detainees are not entitled to those hearings before their deportation case is heard in court. Immigration advocates expect to challenge the move in court.But Guevara is not facing a criminal charge. The Gwinnett county solicitor’s office dropped the traffic charges last week, noting that two of them could not be prosecuted because they occurred on private property – the apartment complex – and the third lacked sufficient evidence for a conviction.For now, Ice has mostly kept Guevara in medical wards in jails even though he is healthy, Diaz said. “From the beginning, they’ve been keeping Mario under a special segregation because they’re claiming he’s a public figure. They want to make sure nothing happened to him.”Doraville is a municipality of about 10,800 in DeKalb county with a separate police force, and had been asked to assist managing the protest in the immigrant-heavy Embry Hills neighborhood nearby. Protests have become a regular occurrence in DeKalb county since the Trump administration’s immigration raids began.Doraville’s cops have displayed a more cooperative relationship with immigration law enforcement than many other metro Atlanta departments, and observers have raised questions about whether its police department arrested Guevara to facilitate an Ice detainer.Geierman, the mayor, denied those accusations.“The Doraville police department was not operating under the direction of, or in coordination with, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) during the June 14th protest,” he said in a statement. “To the department’s knowledge, no Ice personnel were present at the event. Doraville officers were on site to support the DeKalb county sheriff’s office as part of a coordinated public safety effort.”Observers have also questioned Guevara’s charges from Gwinnett county – ignoring traffic signs, using a communication device while driving, and reckless driving – that stemmed from an incident that occurred in May, a month before his arrest.“Mario Guevara compromised operational integrity and jeopardized the safety of victims of the case, investigators, and Gwinnett county residents,” the department said in a statement.But Gwinnett’s belated prosecution left his attorneys gobsmacked.“In the narrative that they put out, they say he was livestreaming a police operation, and he was interfering,” Diaz said. “But when they went to a judge to get warrants, the only warrants the magistrate was able to sign for them was for traffic violations. I mean, that’s kind of telling.”“I think the whole thing is suspicious,” he added. “From the beginning, just everything seemed they were really making efforts to make it difficult for him to go free.”Marvin Lim, a Filipino American state representative whose district contains the apartment complex in Gwinnett in Guevara’s citation, has asked the sheriff’s office a detailed set of questions about the department’s relationship with federal immigration enforcement. He has not received an adequate response, he said in an open letter to the sheriff.An array of six advocacy organizations challenged Gwinnett’s sheriff, Keybo Taylor, in a letter Tuesday over Guevara’s arrest and the sheriff’s posture toward immigration enforcement, demanding details about the relationship. GALEO, among them, also issued a separate letter Wednesday calling on Taylor to be transparent about the Guevara arrest.Guevara “was arrested while doing the vital work that journalists in a democracy do”, GALEO’s letter states. “Not only do the circumstances surrounding his incarceration and subsequent immigration detainment stir serious civil rights concerns, but they also build upon an expanding sense of fear and confusion in Georgia’s most diverse county.”“I am being persecuted,” Guevara wrote in a 7 July letter seeking humanitarian intercession from, of all people, Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s rightwing president.“I am about to complete a month in jail, and I need to get out in order to continue with my life, return to my work, and support my family,” Guevara wrote. “I have lived in the United States for nearly 22 years. I had never been arrested before. In these past three weeks, I have been held in five different jails, and I believe the government is trying to tarnish my record in order to deport me as if I were a criminal.”Guevara’s American-born son turned 21 this year, permitting him to sponsor Guevara’s green card and eventual citizenship. His application is pending, Diaz said. It may not matter.“This is the first time I’ve ever seen a stay filed for someone who has no convictions, has almost no criminal history in 20 years, and only had pending traffic violations,” Diaz said.“It’s clear that everybody’s working really hard to keep him detained.” More

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      Trump news at a glance: How Robert F Kennedy Jr is cancelling medical science

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      “The current administration is waging a war on science,” warned Celine Gounder, a professor of medicine and an infectious disease expert at New York University in a keynote talk in May to graduates of Harvard’s School of Public Health.That war appeared to enter a new phase in the aftermath of a recent supreme court decision that empowered health and human services secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, a prominent vaccine sceptic, and other agency leaders, to implement mass firings – effectively greenlighting the politicization of science.Kennedy abruptly cancelled a scheduled meeting of a key health care advisory panel, the US Preventive Services Task Force, earlier this month. That, combined with his recent removal of a panel of more than a dozen vaccine advisers, signals that his dismantling of science-based policymaking is likely far from over.‘Making viruses great again’“Do you enjoy getting sick from preventable diseases?” Arwa Madhawi asks in her Week in Patriarchy column. “Do you have a hankering to make once-declining viruses great again? If so, why not pop over to the US where the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, and his anti-vaccine cronies are making a valiant effort to overturn decades of progress in modern medicine.”Measles cases are at their highest rate in 33 years in the US, and while not entirely to blame, Trump’s officials don’t seem bothered. RFK Jr has downplayed the numbers. Kennedy has announced that the federal CDC will stop recommending Covid-19 booster shots for healthy children and pregnant women. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) said in a statement: “It is very clear that Covid-19 infection during pregnancy can be catastrophic and lead to major disability”. Leading medical associations are suing the Trump administration as a result.Two new surveys, published as a research letter in Jama Network Open, have found that only 35% to 40% of US pregnant women and parents of young children say they intend to fully vaccinate their child. That means the majority of pregnant women and parents don’t plan to accept all recommended kids’ vaccines.Read the full storyAttack on ‘heart and brain of the EPA’ The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said on Friday it is eliminating its office of research and development (ORD) and cutting thousands of staff. One union leader said the moves “will devastate public health” by removing “the heart and brain of the EPA”. The ORD’s work underpins the EPA’s mission to protect the environment and human health.The agency is replacing it with a new office of applied science and environmental solutions that will allow it to focus on research and science “more than ever before”. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin – inevitably, a close Trump ally – said the changes would ensure the agency “is better equipped than ever to deliver on our core mission of protecting human health and the environment, while powering the Great American Comeback”.Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, the top Democrat on the House science committee, called the elimination of the research office “a travesty”. “The Trump administration is firing hardworking scientists while employing political appointees whose job it is to lie incessantly to Congress and to the American people. The obliteration of ORD will have generational impacts on Americans’ health and safety.”Read the full story10 more Gaza hostages may be releasedTen more hostages will be released from Gaza “very shortly”, Donald Trump said at the White House. The news comes as the president continues to push for a 60-day ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.“We’re going to have another 10 coming very shortly, and we hope to have that finished quickly,” Trump said during a dinner with Republican senators. The current Israel-Hamas ceasefire proposal includes terms calling for the return of 10 hostages, and the remains of 18 others. In exchange, Israel would be required to release an unspecified number of Palestinians held in Israeli jails.Read the full story‘Arbitrary and completely groundless’The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has reportedly stripped eight of Brazil’s 11 supreme court judges of their US visas as the White House escalates its campaign to help the country’s former president Jair Bolsonaro avoid justice over his alleged attempt to seize power with a murderous military coup. In support of the far-right Bolsonaro, Trump has also placed tariffs on Brazil – appalling millions of Brazilians who want to see their former leader held to account.Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who won the presidency from Bolsonaro, denounced what he called “another arbitrary and completely groundless measure from the US government”. While the Bolsonaros have hailed Trump’s actions, they also appear to have grasped how the announcement of tariffs has backfired, allowing Lula to pose as a nationalist defender of Brazilian interests and paint the Bolsonaro clan as self-serving “traitors”. Even influential rightwing voices in Brazil have criticised Trump’s meddling in one of the world’s most populous democracies.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      The White House is trying to drive out the Federal Reserve chair who is refusing to do the president’s bidding and cut interests rates, as the Fed waits to see how prices respond to Trump’s tariffs. Critics warn deposing Jerome Powell would be a costly bid to pass the buck, Callum Jones writes.

      In post-2024 election polling, defense of democracy was a top issue for Democrats but way down the list for those who voted for Donald Trump: their top concerns were inflation and the economy. Democrats lost the popular vote. If they are to win back voters who abandoned them in the last election, their messaging needs to change, writes Joan C Williams.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 18 July. More

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      Rubio moves to strip US visas from eight Brazilian judges in Bolsonaro battle

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      The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has reportedly stripped eight of Brazil’s 11 supreme court judges of their US visas as the White House escalates its campaign to help the country’s former president Jair Bolsonaro avoid justice over his alleged attempt to seize power with a military coup.Bolsonaro, a far-right populist with ties to Donald Trump’s Maga movement, is on trial for allegedly masterminding a murderous plot to cling to power after losing the 2022 election to his leftwing rival, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Bolsonaro is expected to be convicted by the supreme court in the coming weeks and faces a jail sentence of up to 43 years.As the day of judgment nears, Trump has been increasing pressure on the court and President Lula’s administration. On 9 July, the US president announced he would impose 50% tariffs on all Brazilian imports as of 1 August, partly as a result of the supposed persecution of his ally. The move triggered an outpouring of nationalist anger in the South American country, with Lula describing it as “unacceptable blackmail”.On Friday, after federal police raided Bolsonaro’s house and fitted him with an electronic tag to stop him absconding, Rubio announced further moves in support of the defendant, who he claimed was the victim of a “political witch hunt”.Writing on X, Rubio said he had ordered visa revocations for the judge leading the investigation into Bolsonaro, Alexandre de Moraes, as well as “his allies on the court” and their family members. Rubio did not name his other targets but the Brazilian newspaper O Globo identified them as Luís Roberto Barroso, José Antonio Dias Toffoli, Cristiano Zanin, Flávio Dino, Cármen Lúcia Antunes Rocha, Luiz Edson Fachin and Gilmar Ferreira Mendes.Two other judges who were nominated to the court during Bolsonaro’s 2019-23 presidency, André Mendonça and Kassio Nunes Marques, reportedly avoided the sanction, as did a third judge, Luiz Fux.Lula denounced what he called “another arbitrary and completely groundless measure from the US government”.“Interference in another country’s justice system is unacceptable and offends the basic principles of national sovereignty and respect between nations,” the president said on Saturday, adding: “I’m certain that no kind of intimidation or threat – from whoever it may be – will compromise the most important mission of our nation’s powers and institutions, which is to act permanently to defend and safeguard the democratic rule of law.”The Trump strategist Alex Bruesewitz welcomed Rubio’s announcement, calling Bolsonaro’s treatment “sick and wrong”.Bolsonaro’s congressman son, Eduardo, thanked Rubio for his decision. “Thank you very much for this fight in favor of free speech, we do believe in the same values,” tweeted Eduardo, who has been living in the US since February and has reportedly been lobbying officials there over his father’s plight.Trump’s interventions have appalled millions of Brazilians who hope to see their former leader held responsible for the alleged coup attempt, which culminated in the 8 January riots in Brasília.Lula’s institutional relations minister, Gleisi Hoffmann, called the visa cancellations “an aggressive and petty retaliation” and “an affront to the Brazilian judiciary and national sovereignty”.Even influential rightwing voices have criticised the US’s attempt to meddle in one of the world’s most populous democracies by imposing 50% tariffs.On Saturday, the conservative Estado de São Paulo newspaper described Trump’s behaviour as “unacceptable external interference in Brazil’s domestic matters”. “Trump has not only attacked our national sovereignty … [but also] stained the history of diplomatic relations between the two largest democracies in the Americas,” the newspaper’s editorial board wrote.While the Bolsonaros have hailed Trump’s actions, they also appear to have grasped how the announcement of tariffs has backfired, allowing Lula to pose as a nationalist defender of Brazilian interests and paint the Bolsonaro clan as self-serving “traitors”.Lula, who had been facing growing public disillusionment and an uphill battle to win re-election next year, has enjoyed a bounce in the polls since Trump launched his trade war, the brunt of which will be borne by coffee producers and cattle ranchers in Bolsonaro-voting regions, such as São Paulo.Celso Rocha de Barros, a political columnist, said he suspected the Bolsonaros had been blindsided by the scale of Trump’s attack.“I think [Bolsonaro] wanted some kind of penalty – something he could use to say: ‘Look, Brazil’s being punished because of Bolsonaro’s persecution. But [the tariffs] went far too far … [they] screwed Bolsonaro’s base,” said Rocha de Barros, pointing to their potential impact on agribusiness.On Friday night, Bolsonaro’s senator son, Flávio, post on X, calling on Trump to suspend the tariffs and replace them with individual sanctions. Soon after, however, he deleted the post. More

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      Trump’s EPA eliminates research and development office and begins layoffs

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      The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said on Friday it is eliminating its research and development arm and reducing agency staff by thousands of employees. One union leader said the moves “will devastate public health in our country”.The agency’s office of research and development (ORD) has long provided the scientific underpinnings for the EPA’s mission to protect the environment and human health. The EPA said in May it would shift its scientific expertise and research efforts to program offices that focus on major issues such as air and water.The agency said on Friday it is creating a new office of applied science and environmental solutions that will allow it to focus on research and science “more than ever before”.Once fully implemented, the changes will save the EPA nearly $750m, officials said.Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, the top Democrat on the House science committee, called the elimination of the research office “a travesty”.“The Trump administration is firing hardworking scientists while employing political appointees whose job it is to lie incessantly to Congress and to the American people,” she said. “The obliteration of ORD will have generational impacts on Americans’ health and safety.”EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said in a statement that the changes announced Friday would ensure the agency “is better equipped than ever to deliver on our core mission of protecting human health and the environment, while Powering the Great American Comeback”.The EPA also said it is beginning the process to eliminate thousands of jobs, following asupreme court ruling last week that cleared the way for Donald Trump’s plans to downsize the federal workforce, despite warnings that critical government services will be lost and hundreds of thousands of federal employees will be out of their jobs.Total staffing at EPA will go down to 12,448, a reduction of more than 3,700 employees, or nearly 23%, from staffing levels in January when Trump took office, the agency said.“This reduction in force will ensure we can better fulfill that mission while being responsible stewards of your hard-earned tax dollars,” Zeldin said, using a government term for mass firings.The office of research and development “is the heart and brain of the EPA”, said Justin Chen, president of American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, which represents thousands of EPA employees.“Without it, we don’t have the means to assess impacts upon human health and the environment,” Chen said. “Its destruction will devastate public health in our country.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe research office – EPA’s main science arm – currently has 1,540 positions, excluding special government employees and public health officers, according to agency documents reviewed by Democratic staff on the House science panel earlier this year. As many as 1,155 chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists could be laid off, the documents indicated.The research office has 10 facilities across the country, stretching from Florida and North Carolina to Oregon. An EPA spokeswoman said that all laboratory functions currently conducted by the research office will continue.In addition to the reduction in force, the agency also is offering the third round of deferred resignations for eligible employees, including research office staff, spokeswoman Molly Vaseliou said. The application period is open until 25 July.The EPA’s announcement comes two weeks after the agency put on administrative leave 139 employees who signed a “declaration of dissent” with agency policies under the Trump administration. The agency accused the employees of “unlawfully undermining” Trump’s agenda.In a letter made public on 30June, the employees wrote that the EPA is no longer living up to its mission to protect human health and the environment. The letter represented rare public criticism from agency employees who knew they could face retaliation for speaking out.Associated Press contributed to reporting More