For Ashton Reed, President Donald Trump dominated his political consciousness for more than half of his life — until he suddenly realized he was being lied to.

The 22-year-old “literally grew up in MAGA” under the influence of his grandmother, who was “a huge sympathizer for the Tea Party movement” and started bringing politics to the dinner table when Reed was around 6 years old.

“When Trump announced his candidacy, at this point, I was being fed a whole bunch of false information, skewed information, and I really thought because my grandma thought this way, and I guess because she was the most trusted adult to me at the time, I figured that her judgment must be good,” Reed said.

“Plus, I really did think that Trump was going to help bring America into an economic golden age.”

Reed grew up in Jackson, Missouri, about 10 miles from Cape Girardeau, the hometown of the late conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh.

Reed’s grandmother learned that Limbaugh was immersed in political conversation at a young age, with his grandfather serving as a state representative and ambassador, and other family members serving as federal and state Supreme Court judges.

She aspired for Reed to be “the next Rush Limbaugh,” he said.

“I was taught to absolutely fear Muslims and to fear Democrats because I really thought that they were trying to get me killed, basically,” Reed said.

“I was 6 years old, very very scared.”

By the time Reed attended high school, he considered learning about political beliefs outside of MAGA, encouraged by his mother, only to face the COVI9-19 pandemic.

“My mother did a huge political relapse, essentially, and she actually went from being this very nuanced person to being a very ultra far-right extremist, essentially,” said Reed, now a controls engineer for a radiopharmaceutical manufacturer based in St. Louis.

“I was back to a ‘MAGA is the way. MAGA is life.’ situation … my grandparents, my mother, they definitely really influenced how I got into it, and then that continued for a couple of years.”

Reed continued to dive deeper into the MAGA movement, even arguing that “MAGA was not extreme enough.” He drifted into neo-libertarianism after high school but returned to MAGA once again and voted for Trump in 2024.

Ashton Reed.(provided photo)

But, in spring 2025, an AI chatbot started to give him a new perspective when he wanted to learn more about the pushback against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s raids across the country.

“I started asking ChatGPT why there's been a bunch of uproar, and what are people saying about it?” Reed said.

What he discovered left him sick.

“I was absolutely disgusted with how the operation went down because, for the first time in my life, I actually saw how dehumanizing, how ICE was being used by the Department of Homeland Security under the Trump administration. I was appalled. I was horrified.”

Watching federal agents kill and detain U.S. citizens made Reed turn on Trump and the Republican Party.

“That's when it was enough for me,” Reed said.

“At that point, I realized that I supported a really bad cause. I really meant well, and I did wrong. I really did.”

'GOP deserves to suffer'

Reed said he had the choice to live with “cognitive dissonance” or speak out about his mistake in following Trump.

“The best thing I thought that I could do at that point was to further educate myself on why there has been an uproar against MAGA and to then use that newfound information for me to go ahead and actually do something about it,” Reed said.

While researching, Reed found Leaving MAGA, a growing online community of former Trump supporters whose allegiance to him is blamed for issues including losing friends, family relationships and marriages, committing crimes in Trump’s name, embracing Christian nationalism, and believing conspiracies.

Joining Leaving MAGA was “the first time I ever saw a community that allowed people to connect based on the same grounds, being we all once supported MAGA and now we are done,” Reed said.

Unlike others who left MAGA after the Trump administration’s policies directly affected them in a negative way, Reed said he turned away from the GOP for how Trump and the party hurt others.

“The pattern was voting for Trump, something happened to them directly due to a result of the Trump administration, whether it be the first or second terms, and then they were done with MAGA because the Trump administration directly affected their quality of life,” Reed said.

Instead, Reed “saw what was happening to other people across the country and felt awful about it.” The Trump administration’s policies didn’t really hurt him except for rising gas prices, he said.

“Since then I've been very vocal against the Trump administration, and I will continue to be until the administration is out of office. And then, even after that, I will continue to denounce this regime that we have because, unfortunately, I don't know if MAGA is going to necessarily leave after Trump leaves office,” Reed said.

Looking to history, Reed said he doesn't believe MAGA will die out because “when extremism has been brought into a government, into society, it is bound to come again."

But he thinks Republicans will pay the price in the midterms.

“The House of Representatives, they are for sure going to lose big time, and there's nothing that the GOP can do to help anything,” Reed said.

“When the GOP decided to officially adopt MAGA into their doctrine, basically their success became solely dependent on worsening economic and social factors.”

Reed began voting for Democrats in Missouri’s primary election.

“I do think, with full faith and confidence, that there will be a blue wave,” Reed said.

“The question is, I don't know how big of a blue wave is going to be, realistically speaking.”

Reed predicts the power of Republicans will not only be weakened after the Nov. 3 election but for future presidential elections — unless the party distances itself from Trump and MAGA.

“If the GOP nominates [Vice President JD] Vance, the GOP may as well kiss goodbye to any sort of chance of having a Republican president between 2028 to 2032 because people are getting sick of MAGA,” Reed said.

“The GOP deserves to suffer because this is the consequence of adopting an extremist ideology into your political party. You risk absolutely losing every ounce of your credibility if what you're fighting for is not what most people want.”

When people are considering abandoning the MAGA movement, they often don’t know where to start, which is why the Leaving MAGA community is so vital, Reed said,

“There are people who were absolutely scared to leave MAGA because they didn't want to feel alone. They didn't want to be villainized. They didn't want to be completely separated from both the right and the left, or from any political group, really, because MAGA really satisfied the human desire for tribalism — in a very extreme form, of course,” Reed said.

“It's awesome that there are groups like Leaving MAGA that will welcome anyone with open arms, despite how involved they were in the Trump campaign."

A year after far-right activists forced historian Mark Bray to flee New Jersey with his family due to death threats and doxxing, the Rutgers University professor is back in the United States with a defiant message — and a new book.

“Turning Point and their allies tried to run me out of my job and out of my country, and I didn't want to let them win,” Bray told Raw Story.

“I wanted to do what I can to make this place a better place.”

Bray's book, "Unpunctuated Death Threats," is coming out in January. It describes how he was targeted for writing the bestselling book “Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook” after President Donald Trump issued an executive order declaring “antifa” a terrorist organization.

Despite “antifa” being shorthand for “anti-fascist” and referring to a decentralized political ideology focused on opposing fascism, white supremacy and racism — rather than an organization with a figurehead — Bray was targeted by the conservative student group, Turning Point USA, which pushed for him to be fired.

“This is not a new story that something that's decentralized and bottom-up is being portrayed by the right as top-down, paid, George Soros-money, secret leadership," Bray said about the right's attacks on antifa.

"That's a playbook that's even older than Occupy [Wall Street], but that has come back around now, and it's not accurate.

“The game seemed to be establishing the notion that antifa is terrorism, then introducing the concept of the antifa-aligned, and trying to spread this bogeyman term as broadly as possible in order to be able to say more and more and more of the left and the Democratic Party are antifa or are aligned to antifa or adjacent to antifa.”

When Fox News reported on Turning Point's push, Bray said he started receiving death threats, one including his home address. Then his address was posted publicly to X.

Book cover for Unpunctuated Death Threats. (provided image, used with permission)

"We were concerned about the larger political situation and concerned that there might be some sort of bogus charges thrown at me,” Bray said.

When Bray and his family arrived at the airport in Newark, New Jersey, in an attempt to head to Spain, he was notified their reservations had been canceled right before boarding.

“I do believe it was a politically motivated act, even if I don't know who did it,” Bray said.

After staying at an airport hotel, the family returned to the airport the next day. Bray and his wife were then questioned by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents for an hour, he said.

“I think part of it was intimidation, part of it was phishing,” Bray said. “I think they really very much would have liked to have found something illegal on my possession to have charged me with, but fortunately, we've not reached the point in authoritarianism where they planted something, so I was allowed to go.”

Bray and his family made it to Spain, a "second home" to them after living there on a sabbatical two years prior, but the story of his attempt to flee blew up in the press around the world.

Turning Point USA did not immediately respond to Raw Story's request for comment.

'The ingredients'

With the Trump administration being “unpredictable,” Bray said he isn’t sure what will happen in next week's midterms — whether it’s immigration agents at the polls to intimidate voters or Republicans claiming Democrats stole the election, again.

“What I say in the book is the ingredients for a more formally authoritarian structure are largely in place, but not all of the criteria have been satisfied, and so we're in this kind of strange in-between position, and the midterms may help clarify just which way we're leaning,” Bray said.

While Bray said he doesn’t take much "umbrage" when people call Trump a fascist, he considers him to be “very fascistic,” rather than a full-out fascist leader.

“I think that Trump, more than anything, is someone who seeks his own self-aggrandizement, and in the context that his political career emerged, he rightly diagnosed the far-right as a good vehicle for that,” Bray said.

“I don't think he actually deeply cares about long-term political outcomes so much as he cares about what works for him, and a part of what fascism has meant historically is this vision of radically transforming society in a fascist direction. I'm not so sure how much he cares about that as long as he has power and money and influence.”

On the other hand, Bray said Trump’s Make America Great Again movement aligns with the traits of fascism, which historically seeks “to return to a past before what they considered to be natural values and hierarchies were perverted by fill in the blank — feminists, Jews, leftists, what have you. It is this pursuit of this imagined past through a redemptive violence, and often builds on the occult of personality of the key leader," Bray said.

“The MAGA movement … by virtue of its interest in returning to this past, its glorification of violence, its anti-democratic and conspiratorial mindset, I would call a fascist movement."

Other members of the Trump administration like White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller could be more directly called fascist, Bray said. And U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has “essentially created a jobs program for fascists,” he added.

After spending about nine months in Spain, the threats reduced to a trickle, and Bray felt comfortable coming back to the U.S to resume his university job.

His family sold their house, and Bray said he’s optimistic they can “let the storm pass and move on” if the threats start again.

“I wanted to make lemonade out of lemons. I wanted to take this difficult, traumatic experience and make a work of art from it, and that's what I see this book as, primarily as an artistic expression. It also has political argumentation, historical analysis, and other things,” Bray said.

“It was therapeutic and cathartic to write it, and it's what happened on my terms.”

Closing in on a week before Election Day, a lawyer is pushing state leaders to take legal action to prevent President Donald Trump from interfering in the midterms.

Lawyer Kevin K. Johnson wants a lawsuit filed before the midterms to get a court order that would block Trump from disrupting the election or interfering with the official approval of the results — before he has the chance to even try.

Anticipatory injunctive relief would aim to stop the immediate threat of Trump's interference from happening via a court order. Such a legal action intends to prevent damage before a formal hearing takes place and adds weight to any violation of the order by Trump, strengthening a potential case against him and possibly leading to more severe punishment.

“You get an order which says do not, Mr. Trump, directly or indirectly interfere to any degree with the state's administration of the elections,” said Johnson, a civil and appellate trial lawyer in California who’s successfully sued major corporations and the government.

“You have that big umbrella statement basically that just says whatever other strategies you have, whatever pivots you have, whatever creative ideas you have, if your intent is going to be to interfere with the administration of the elections by the state, you are barred from doing it.”

Rather than wait to file lawsuits until Election Day, or after, Johnson encourages a preemptive lawsuit since Trump has already sowed doubts in “election integrity” and appears poised to claim foreign interference in the election.

Did you see anything suspicious while voting? Raw Story wants to know. Contact our investigations team at tips@rawstory.com

“Everybody is just playing defense … which I think is just a huge mistake because every time he gets stopped, he pivots and goes someplace else, or he ignores a court order, or he delays complying with a court order,” Johnson said.

“There are so many things that he can do to just freeze up the system by just preemptively seizing ballots or whatever, and once the ballots are seized in, say, for example, most of the competitive congressional districts, he literally is in a position to have stopped the process for an indefinite period of time.”

Johnson said leaders in blue states could take on such a lawsuit, like Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson or California Attorney General Rob Bonta.

On Thursday, Pritzker called out Trump on X in response to news reports of the Department of Justice sending "election monitors" to two Democratic counties in Indiana.

"The Trump administration is on notice: Governors across this country — myself included — are watching closely," Pritzker posted.

"Any attempt to silence Americans' voices will be met with fierce resistance from the states. We WILL defend the right to vote."

In response to Raw Story's questions, a spokesperson from Pritzker's office emailed a statement.

"The State of Illinois will hold a free and fair election that is safe, accessible and secure — just like every election cycle before," the spokesperson said.

"The Illinois State Board of Elections is constantly collecting information, providing educational materials and programs, and collaborating closely with all 108 state election authorities to equip election workers with comprehensive trainings and resources, and to ensure Illinois citizens can make their voices heard."

Neither the Chicago mayor's office nor Bonta's offices immediately responded to Raw Story’s request for comment.

'You're out'

Injunctive relief would not just be beneficial in relation to the midterms but also in anticipation for January 3, when the new Congress is sworn in, Johnson said.

An “expansive injunctive relief request” would be a safeguard if another insurrection attempt were to happen as seen on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters became violent and attempted to block certification of electoral votes, he said.

“You’re going to need the same thing when it comes to January 3. Basically, do not interfere directly or indirectly with the seating of these people, and so hopefully that has an effect on [Trump],” Johnson said.

“If you have an order like that and he violates it, then you have an additional leg up in terms of getting a court to really bring the hammer down on him, in terms of the remedy you want, i.e., you breach your employment contract. It's a material breach. You're out.”

Johnson has been advocating for a bigger picture legal strategy to ultimately remove Trump from office based on violations of his oath of office under employment and contract law, which he outlines in his book, “The American Oath Project: Protecting the Backbone of Democracy.”

Gary Lucks, an attorney and activist in California, wrote the book, “We Are the Power To Win the Future: Mobilize to Defend Democracy,” to offer a “roadmap” for how Democrats can take back control from Trump and is a companion to Johnson's book.

Johnson and Lucks have partnered to find supporters to take legal action against Trump.

“The longer play is post-election opportunity to remove Trump from office, regardless of the election outcome,” Lucks said. “It's time for us to really put pressure on him to leave.”

Grassroots organizations across the country are reporting record levels of interest from thousands of volunteers who want to help their neighbors vote and prevent interference with this year’s midterms, organizers said.

But, beyond the helpers dressed in bright yellow shirts to answer questions at polls, as is the case for Common Cause volunteers in Florida, or those escorting people into polling places under cover of umbrellas, as some with Popular Democracy plan to do — experts said these groups are gearing up for ferocious legal battles during and after the election on Nov. 3.

“We are prepared to take action after the election. That's what's different. We're prepping for mobilization after in a way that we have never done before,” said DaMareo Cooper, executive director of Popular Democracy, a grassroots network focused on building political power for Black, brown, and low-income people across the country.

“We know this administration lies. We know that they serve interests outside of the goodwill of the people.”

Popular Democracy is prepared for “a mass mobilization if we see something fishy with the election” and is preemptively pushing petitions encouraging attorneys general, governors and secretaries of state to certify the election, Cooper said.

President Donald Trump has continued to sow doubts in election integrity, citing widespread election fraud, despite investigations showing that illegal voting, and convictions for such a crime, are infinitesimal compared to the hundreds of millions of votes cast in the past decade.

Numerous Republican legislators refused to certify the election results in 2020, and election officials in 2024 were prepared to do the same.

“If someone's taking ballots or if some agents are taking ballots out of an election location, or if a state chooses not to certify the election for whatever reason, or if they don't seat the new Congress, we are all preparing across the country for what that means and how we need to react to those types of moments,” Cooper said.

“We've been training people, making sure that they understand what an election sabotage might look like … we need our people to understand that this is what it looks like for someone to be stealing or tampering or corrupting the free and fair election.”

Jill Garvey, executive director of States at the Core, which works to combat authoritarianism and political extremism, said her organization has heard from people across the country who want to go beyond volunteering as election observers to ensure their neighbors vote without interference.

Did you see anything suspicious while voting? Raw Story wants to know. Contact our investigations team at tips@rawstory.com

“This election is a vulnerability for authoritarian movements and their leaders,” Garvey said.

“This is one of those windows of opportunity when we can see how much resistance, how much opposition there is to this authoritarian advance, and most people have a way to exercise some agency over whether that advance continues.”

Some voters are concerned about encountering physical threats to themselves or ballots, particularly in light of an unprecedented ballot seizure that took place in Riverside County, California, Garvey said. Others worry about “anti-democratic actors” who aim to “disrupt voting or intimidate people or surveil people as they try to vote,” she said.

“I think the level of concern is really heightened right now because, potentially, the leaders of authoritarian movements become really desperate in this moment, not just on Election Day, but in the sort of period right after,” Garvey said.

“They're going to be desperate to hang on to power and potentially they won't be able to, so there may be more extreme measures that certain factions of these movements go to in order to maintain control.”

Common Cause, a nonpartisan democracy watchdog, has already engaged in litigation and policy advocacy to protect voter rights, such as fighting to block deployment of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at polling places, a possibility floated by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, said Andrew Walchuk, senior policy director and counsel for voting and fair representation at Common Cause.

“From the policy and legal attacks to the dangerous xenophobic rhetoric to violence unleashed in our neighborhoods by federal agents, we have seen time and again how the Trump administration is targeting Latino, Black and immigrant voters across the country,” Walchuk said at an Oct. 14 media briefing.

“This is all part of this administration's effort to decide from the national level who can and cannot vote, in an effort to evade accountability for its actions.”

'Purely an intimidation tactic'

While Common Cause’s work begins in the courts long before and after Election Day, volunteers on the ground still respond in real-time.

“For example, if we receive a report of possible immigration enforcement activity, our teams will work to verify what's happening, communicate with local election officials, ensure that voters have the accurate information and know where they are able to vote safely, and bring in national voting experts and partners when necessary,” Walchuk said.

Anthony Gutierrez, Texas director at Common Cause, said election protection work looks like bracing for a range of potential issues from federal interference to natural disasters and contending with Texas having “the most antiquated, archaic voter registration system in the country.

“The list of potential problems that we're on the watch for is much longer than ever before,” said Gutierrez, who has spent the last 10 years doing election protection.

Popular Democracy has engaged poll watchers who will document issues at the polls such as ICE activity, and the group is on the lookout for “nationalist groups showing up to the polls and threatening folks,” Cooper said.

“There's no reason to have federal agents at polling locations unless you're trying to intimidate people," Cooper said. “If that happens, it is purely an intimidation tactic.”

Popular Democracy’s volunteers also serve a role of “reminding people, even if there is some form of voter intimidation, that you have the complete right to vote, guaranteed by the 14th Amendment of the Constitution,” Cooper said.

For instance, the volunteers are instructed to encourage voters to stay in line to cast their ballots even if polling sites start to shut down.

Common Cause directs people to call the national election protection hotline, 866-OUR-VOTE, if they encounter any issues at the polls. The hotline also offers language services in Spanish, Asian languages and Arabic.

Garvey, whose group also hosts ICE Watch trainings, said the worst-case scenario her group is preparing for is people who simply “feel too frightened to exercise their right to vote, or they feel like they can't trust the system.”

All of the grassroots groups encourage voters to vote early and come up with a plan to ensure they can cast their ballot by Election Day, especially if they arrive at the polling place and find deterrents requiring them to return another day.

“Regardless of what the outcome is, Election Day is not the end," Garvey said. "It is the beginning. It is the beginning of the next phase of how people can defend democracy and potentially push back against authoritarian movements. ”

When James Hicks still supported President Donald Trump, he took to showing his coworkers a Confederate flag wristband he was wearing.

Hicks, who is Black, became one of Trump’s Make America Great Again devotees after moving from a mostly Black town to a mostly white city — Conway, Arkansas — while in high school, and was taught that Arkansas was not a pro-slavery state, but joined the Confederacy as a states’ rights issue.

“I really was never actually able to be really a part of the community that I came from, and so at that point, I really just gravitated towards being someone who was acceptable to the white kids around me, and they were into the more conservative things,” said Hicks, who is now 31.

Hicks wearing confederate flag wristband (James Hicks/provided photo)

Hicks, a call center worker, said he used to rationalize Trump’s actions during his first term, like when he failed to initially denounce white supremacists who led the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

“Trump and MAGA … it aligned on me being maladjusted and me being a fundamentalist Christian,” said Hicks, who is now no longer religious.

Hicks once attended a Trump rally, recalling other MAGA supporters being “so excited” he was there — the only Black person. Even then, Hicks said he heard racist comments from Trump voters there.

While dealing with mental health struggles, Hicks said he lived for seeing Trump elected in 2016.

“I would say I would just survive to see Trump become president. I just didn't have much of anything to live for at that time, and I just gave it all to one person,” Hicks said.

“Why would I give so much of my life to this one person? I was arguing with family and friends all the time, like ‘just support him.’”

After a series of breaking points, Hicks’ has now left Trump behind and joined Leaving MAGA, a growing online community of former Trump supporters whose allegiance to him is blamed for issues including losing friends, family relationships and marriages, committing crimes in Trump’s name, embracing Christian nationalism, and believing conspiracies.

'Really destructive'

When he was taking college classes, Hicks said he learned about bias and fact-checking in a journalism class. That’s when he stopped watching Fox News and reading Breitbart.

Hicks’ first major breaking point from MAGA came during the COVID-19 pandemic when he was working at a restaurant and encountered an old man who refused to wear a mask, saying, “If I die, I'll be with Jesus.”

Throughout the pandemic, Trump mocked mask wearing, held large rallies and contradicted his own public health experts’ medical advice, promoting dangerous remedies for the virus, including injecting bleach.

“I was just like, ‘Well, President Trump, say something. Why do you keep saying not to wear the mask? Why are you saying things against the social distancing? Why are you letting everybody die?’” Hicks said.

“That was really frustrating to me.”

His MAGA allegiance continued to weaken when Hicks watched the video of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin.

“It was undeniable when I actually saw the video … you could just see the person die on camera, and I couldn't argue with that,” Hicks said.

“No matter how Fox would spin it, I could not really rationalize it.”

Watching Trump promote “really destructive” policies to weaken LGBTQ+ rights, and then hearing Trump spread the lie that President Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, were his final straws, Hicks said.

He recalled a friend who called him distressed that Democrats “stole” the election.

“Somebody lied to him, and they are driving him into a depression. He actually is crying, and he's scared, and he's panicking,” Hicks said.

“Trump doesn't care. He's hurting my best friend, and he doesn't care, and so, that was when it really clicked to me … it was like he really is a bad guy.”

By the time 2024 came around, Hicks ended up voting for former Vice President Kamala Harris and “Democrats up and down the ballot.”

“That's what I'm going to be doing in this midterm,” Hicks said.

Hicks is confident that Democrats will at least take back control of the House, particularly as voters are upset over sky-high gas prices under Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress.

But, he wishes that more people would vote for Democrats for the sake of democracy and standing up for immigrants’ rights in order to “hold off this movement in the future."

Alarms are blaring as the United States Postal Service orders an influx of contracted-out armed security at facilities just weeks before the midterm elections.

Nearly 1,000 armed security officers (ASOs) have been deployed in at least 55 USPS facilities through a private contractor, multinational security firm Prosegur, which has a history of alleged human rights abuses and price fixing, according to a recent Raw Story investigation.

President Donald Trump waged a war on mail-in voting earlier this year when he issued an executive order limiting who would receive mail-in ballots. But, six months later, the Supreme Court rejected his push for USPS to impose some mail-in voting restrictions.

This week, Trump made an about-face from his frequent criticisms of mail-in voting to encourage Republicans to vote by mail for the Nov. 3 elections.

Still, the timing of installing armed guards employed by a private security company has left many worried, including current and former USPS employees.

“The Trump administration is clearly taking every step they can to control voting, and they're going to use the Postal Service to do that,” said Mark Ungar, a political science professor with the John Jay School of Criminal Justice in New York who has studied privatized security firms like Prosegur.

“Any contract with Prosegur, any way that removes accountability from the American people of the Postal Service, which they're already doing, I think, is concerning at the very least.”

Claire McKean, a postal contractor and investigative researcher, said she was “alarmed” when she started seeing armed security guards deployed in mostly “deep blue states or swing states.”

ASOs are located at USPS facilities coast-to-coast in places like Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Indianapolis, Phoenix, San Diego and Tampa, according to internal memos.

They are most commonly deployed at facilities with 1,000 or more employees, said Frank Albergo executive director of the Postal Police Officers Association union, which is notified whenever a new facility plans to deploy ASOs.

“No one from the postal service will be supervising these armed guards. It will be completely a private contractor who controls these armed guards, so you basically have private contractors in and around ballots without any federal control. To me, that's crazy,” Albergo said.

“It just could be a red flag. Will it have an impact on the election? Who knows? But you certainly could argue that it has an effect … it might give Trump an excuse to call into question the integrity of the election. That's the problem. It’s the perception of it.”

In response to multiple questions from Raw Story, a spokesperson for the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS), the law enforcement arm of USPS, sent an emailed statement.

“At key facilities throughout the country, we have had a mix of armed and unarmed contract security officers in addition to the current career employee Postal Police Officer (PPO) complement,” the spokesperson said.

“They are deployed to provide security and act as a deterrent to criminals or employees who may wish to compromise the mailstream or potentially harm the people inside. To maintain operational security, we do not disclose specific locations of security force deployments. The deployment of armed guards is part of our overall security plan and is not specific to elections.”

In response to Raw Story's inquiry, a Prosegur spokesperson sent an emailed statement.

"We looked into the allegations you raised and could not find any incidents or complaints as you referenced," said Fernando Geijo, a spokesperson for Prosegur. "Further, we are not in a position to discuss the USPS account for confidentiality reasons."

‘Really suspicious’

Founded in Spain 50 years ago, Prosegur has expanded to multiple regions — from Africa to Australia to Central America, South America and Asia.

The company has been accused of violations of human rights and labor codes, threats to union workers and unsafe working conditions, particularly in Latin American countries.

“They are now contractors to the U.S. Postal Service to provide security for the huge regional distribution and processing facilities all over the country here, and it's like what the hell? My head is exploding,” McKean said.

“How can this be happening with this company, that has this background, has this footprint, that's been involved in all of this stuff, sending armed guards into our postal facilities just before the midterm elections?”

Jim Bjork, a former postal police officer (PPO) and current armed security guard for a different federal agency in the Chicago area, said PPOs historically have been 80 percent minorities and tend to be Democrats, stationed in large metropolitan areas.

The union for PPOs has been embroiled in a six-year battle with USPS after the agency effectively benched its own officers from patrolling the streets where crime against letter carriers was spiking.

“My biggest concern with these armed contractors is the election. The timing is just really suspicious to me. Without being too political, Trump always seems to have a second or third avenue in everything he does,” said Bjork, a former president of the Postal Police Officers Association.

“It'd be hard to manipulate your own police force to do your bidding because there'd be accountability that would concern them, that our own people are involved in whatever hijinks are afoot in terms of ballots that are coming into a postal facility.

“Whereas with a contractor, you just disavow any knowledge of it, but you still have them do it.”

‘How do we know?’

McKean questioned the intentions behind the deployment of private security armed guards, particularly those provided by an international company involved in cash management, security and armored car services.

“How do we know that they're not going to have armored trucks pull up, load up all the ballots into armored trucks while the armed security officers stand there and make sure that nobody interferes?” McKean said.

Albergo theorized Trump could issue an executive order about private security. Trump has long supported the idea of privatizing the agency.

“Trump could issue a direct executive order that says, ‘Oh, by the way, all federal security will be done by American companies.’ He hasn't done that, but what if he threatens that?" Albergo said.

"Now he would have control over Prosegur. Prosegur would do basically whatever he said.”

‘Very curious’

Miriam Bell, president of the Charlotte Area Local American Postal Workers Union (APWU,) said the hiring of ASOs is likely an attempt at union busting, since PPOs are unionized.

Her chapter has filed complaints about Prosegur-contracted armed security guards at a regional processing and distribution center (RPDC) who made members feel unsafe, in one case allegedly shoving a worker to the ground and punching her in the face.

In another case, Bell called out security guards for sleeping on the job.

Bell said the ASOs are hired at a local building that processes packages, not standard mail.

“I think it's really strange. If they were going to have security guards, they would have them in both places if it were just for the election,” Bell said.

“They were supposed to be patrolling the parking lot to keep things secure, but now they're all inside, and they're only putting these in these RPDC buildings, not in the buildings that process the actual mail, which is very curious to me.”

With USPS consistently losing billions of dollars in recent years — clocking $2.5 billion in net losses in the third quarter alone this year — contracting with Prosegur for millions of dollars in security costs could just be a poor business decision, Albergo said.

“What I found with the Postal Service is never ascribe malice where just complete incompetence can also explain something,” Albergo said.

But, he added, “It's absolutely conceivable that this is part of some larger strategy.

“Is there a track record of the Postal Service in favor of things that somehow separate a ballot from a voter. Yeah … and can armed guards be used in that way? Maybe. Who knows?”

The United States Postal Service is hiring armed security guards through a multinational private contractor with a history of alleged human rights abuses and price fixing, according to a Raw Story investigation.

USPS has a contract with Prosegur, a multinational security firm, to provide armed guard services, according to public records obtained by Raw Story through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The government redacted the monetary amount of the contract.

Current and former USPS employees detailed alleged abuses by Prosegur-hired security guards and raised questions about supervision and training for armed security officers (ASOs), who are now working at dozens of facilities across the country and clocking thousands of weekly hours.

Researchers also sounded the alarm on Prosegur’s controversial history in Latin America.

“It's not a great company in Latin America, so I wouldn't trust it in the U.S. either,” said Mark Ungar, a political science professor with the John Jay School of Criminal Justice in New York.

Prosegur did not respond to Raw Story’s request for comment.

After publication, Prosegur sent an email in response to Raw Story's inquiry.

"We looked into the allegations you raised and could not find any incidents or complaints as you referenced," said Fernando Geijo, a spokesperson for Prosegur. "Further, we are not in a position to discuss the USPS account for confidentiality reasons."

‘Staggering’

Nearly 1,000 ASOs are deployed in at least 55 facilities across the country, approved for nearly 40,000 hours of work per week, according to Frank Albergo, executive director of the Postal Police Officers Association union, which gets notifications every time a facility is approved for more security contractors.

In July alone, USPS planned to deploy ASOs at 18 more mail facilities across the country, approving more than 12,000 hours per week, Raw Story found.

ASOs are located at USPS facilities coast-to-coast in places including Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Indianapolis, Phoenix, San Diego and Tampa, according to internal memos.

ASOs are most commonly deployed at facilities with 1,000 or more employees, Albergo said.

“It's not based on criminal risk. It’s based on headcount,” Albergo said.

Topeka, Kansas, was the latest city set to deploy ASOs with an agreement starting as soon as Oct. 2. Two facilities in Topeka had unarmed guards working 120 total hours per week, which could be increased to 712 hours per week until the armed guards transitioned to their approved 712-hour-per-week deployment, according to an internal memo reviewed by Raw Story.

In response to multiple questions from Raw Story, a spokesperson for the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS), the law enforcement arm of USPS, sent an emailed statement.

“At key facilities throughout the country, we have had a mix of armed and unarmed contract security officers in addition to the current career employee Postal Police Officer (PPO) complement,” the spokesperson said.

“They are deployed to provide security and act as a deterrent to criminals or employees who may wish to compromise the mailstream or potentially harm the people inside. To maintain operational security, we do not disclose specific locations of security force deployments. The deployment of armed guards is part of our overall security plan and is not specific to elections.”

Jim Bjork, a former PPO and current armed security guard for a different federal agency in the Chicago area, said a suburban processing center that never had PPOs will now have more armed guards than postal police in all of Chicago.

A September 2026 memo about the deployment of armed guards at the processing center in suburban Carroll Stream, Illinois, indicates the hiring of 12 armed guards. There are currently only 11 active bargaining unit PPOs in all of Chicago, Albergo said.

“That suburban facility with very minimal crime, if any, is going to have this massive armed presence,” said Bjork, who does not work for Prosegur.

“What is it they're going to do? The amount of them, it's just staggering.”

Conflicting job scope

Descriptions of ASOs’ job responsibilities vary across communications, creating confusion on whether or not the armed guards should be considered law enforcement officers.

A job posting from Prosegur for five armed sergeants in Topeka advertises a $31.96 hourly wage and responsibilities of providing “emergency response, including de-escalation, arrest control, and restraining individuals as necessary.”

A Prosegur job post for 10 armed security officers at a facility in Olathe, Kansas, outside of Kansas City, advertises a $23 hourly rate and also emergency response, including de-escalation and detainment support.

The September 2026 memo about the deployment of armed guards at the Chicago area USPS facility characterized armed security guards as "federal law enforcement officers,” and a scope of duty for ASOs from 2024 said the guards have “arrest authority if provided under state law.”

But those responsibilities are “very different than what USPS is telling its employees and unions,” Albergo said.

An August 2026 stand-up talk in Denver, shared by the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), emphasized contract ASOs will not “conduct arrests nor portray themselves as a police officer.”

The spokesperson for USPIS did not confirm whether or not ASOs have arrest responsibilities or law enforcement status.

‘Just shocking’

Postal unions also expressed concerns about training standards for ASOs, as well as lack of direct supervision from USPS since ASOs are employed by a private contractor.

An investigation by CNN and the Center for Investigative Reporting found that armed security guards lack consistent oversight and training, which varies by state.

Training for armed security guards in general ranges from four to 96 hours, with the average being around 40 hours, according to a July 2026 report from the University of California Berkley Labor Center.

By contrast, PPOs undergo at least 1,440 hours of training, Albergo said.

“They're just basically giving people guns without any training,” Albergo said.

A vice president for Prosegur previously testified against the PPOA union during contract negotiations, Bjork and Albergo said.

“He said, ‘My people could do everything the postal police could do,’” Bjork said. “The only thing they couldn't do is make an arrest. It was just shocking.”

Albergo accused USPS of having been “in cahoots” with Prosegur since at least 2020.

“It was ridiculous. He testified against us saying that his armed security guards would be much better than postal police, which is completely not true, and then he admits, ‘Oh yeah, well we actually don't have any arresting authority,’” Albergo said.

Miriam Bell, president of the Charlotte Area Local APWU, said the hiring of ASOs is an attempt at union busting.

“They're trying to get rid of postal police because they're actually unionized workers,” Bell said. “They want the contracted people … we preferred the postal police.”

‘Too much authority’

Bell said she inquired about bringing in PPOs at a Charlotte-area regional processing and distribution center (RPDC) after a local APWU member reported an ASO shoved her to the ground and punched her in the face in April 2024.

“One of the other employees, who was a mail handler, saw him reaching for his sidearm, and they grabbed her and pulled her away,” Bell said. “Mentally, she was scarred, but what was so appalling is they put her on what's called emergency placement to try and terminate her, and I was livid.”

In written testimony, the employee said security guards were “antagonizing and harassing us.”

“I felt unsafe, scared and anxious every time a security guard walked past me,” the employee wrote.

“I can't sleep at night because everytime I close my eyes I see this man's face violently hitting on me.”

Bell’s request for PPOs was denied.

A different Charlotte-area APWU member was fired after making a comment about feeling unsafe based on how security guards act and was “worried that someone could just grab the gun” from a guard, Bell said. The security guard alleged the APWU member actually did intend to take his gun.

The employee who made the comment ended up terminated, which the union is fighting against.

“These guards have been given way too much authority,” Bell said.

Bell said she posted a photo she received of a security guard sleeping on the job at the Charlotte-area facility, sarcastically calling him an example of “Prosegur’s finest.”

“We found out what they were doing was subcontracting locally, so we jokingly called it Leroy and Bubba's security guards,” Bell said.

“They were hiring just anyone and everyone, and these guys were sleeping on the workroom floor. They were forcefully trying to … get with our female employees. It was not pleasant.”

‘Completely ineffective’

The origin of postal police officers came after security guards were found to be “woefully inadequate,” according to a memo from the chief postal inspector dating back to 1969, which identified problems similar to those reported recently — from sleeping on the job to lack of training.

The guards failed to challenge people from entering the buildings and even conspired with thieves, according to the memo.

“The reason why the Postal Police were even created was because the armed security guards didn't work,” Albergo said.

“Now, 50 years later, they're going back to the model that they had already determined is completely ineffective. It's amazing.”

A 2022 report from the USPS Office of Inspector General examined USPIS’ contract with Prosegur, estimated to cost about $250 million over the course of a four-year contract from 2014 — with three two-year renewal option periods.

The report found 30 percent of contractors did not operate with the proper security clearance, and USPS did not adequately measure the quality of Prosegur’s performance. OIG could not verify if contract security guards had completed required training.

“Without training or guidance that identifies the clear roles and responsibilities for carrying out Postal Inspection Service security clearance procedures for contract personnel and an updated statement of work, it is difficult to ensure that Prosegur is complying with contract requirements,” the report said.

“As a result, unauthorized contract personnel have and may continue to access postal facilities — or grant access to other unauthorized individuals — posing a physical safety and security risk to Postal Service employees, property, and the mail.”

Prosegur “struggled with maintaining those very limited standards just for unarmed guards,” said Bjork, who was a past president for the PPOA. “The same company is now running the armed aspect.”

Based on a $23 per hour wage, Prosegur’s armed security guards conservatively cost USPS around $50 million per year just for wages, without benefits or other costs.

The increased hiring comes as USPS continues to bleed money, reporting $2.5 billion in net losses in the third quarter of this fiscal year.

USPIS “always bragged” during negotiations with the PPOA union about not needing PPOs at facilities across the country, Bjork said.

“Now, all of a sudden, they found money to churn these people in,” Bjork said. “It’s amazing that an entity that's losing so much money all of a sudden found a pot of gold at the end of some rainbow to bring in. This is millions of dollars. For what?”

Prosegur was founded in Spain 50 years ago by a man named Herberto Gut, who was backed by a private security firm and cash-transit operation called Juncadella in Argentina.

After Gut died in a car accident in 1997, his wife, Helena Revoredo, became Prosegur’s president in 2004, and his son Christian Gut became managing director in 2008.

The family is estimated to be worth $1.9 billion, according to real-time data from Forbes.

“We have this company that is a huge conglomerate that controls not only ports of entry in multiple countries all over the world but also handles cash through transporting it in these trucks and armored vehicles … who has a huge security force of armored personnel,” said Claire McKean, who is a postal contractor and investigative researcher.

“They are now contractors to the U.S. Postal Service to provide security for the huge regional distribution and processing facilities all over the country here, and it's like what the hell? My head is exploding.”

Revoredo and her family expanded Prosegur’s reach into Africa, Australia, Central America, South America and Asia. During that time, it was accused of violations of human rights and labor codes, threats to union workers and unsafe working conditions.

In Central American countries and in the Amazon, there is a “high level of convergence of organized crime groups, ex-militias” such as MS-13, Ungar said.

“By being in these countries, by participating in these economic sectors, which are highly controlled by the convergence of organized crime, they're perpetuating it,” he added.

“They're helping perpetuate a system which is illegal and/or criminal.”

Five years ago, Juncadella Prosegur was fined the equivalent of more than $25 million for connections to a price-fixing scheme in Chile.

And in 2024, the Norwegian Council on Ethics recommended excluding Prosegur from investment by the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global due to risks of “serious human rights abuses” and involvement in “severe acts of violence and abuse of tribal people’s rights.”

The Norwegian move came as Prosegur provided security to Agropalma, a firm involved in the extraction of palm oil in Brazil — which is controversial for its role in deforestation and labor rights abuses, Ungar said.

Between 2021 and 2023, Prosegur's security guards were accused of "serious and systematic human rights violations" while guarding Agropalma's land. They were accused of forcefully blocking local Indigenous communities from accessing their ancestral burial grounds, fishing, and traveling to nearby towns for medical attention and food supplies.

“There have been repeated accusations against Prosegur in terms of providing cover for these palm industries, which have committed very serious human rights violations," Ungar said. "To me, that's the most serious problem in terms of directly knowing a much more close relationship with these kinds of abuses.”

Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), who is running for governor of Arizona, took donations from leaders of an accused anti-LGBTQ+ hate group for which he formerly served as a board member, according to recent state election filings.

The Biggs for Arizona campaign took in $3,000 on April 15 from Sharon Slater, president, and Greg Slater, board member, of Family Watch International, which has been investigated for connections to extreme anti-gay legislation in Africa, according to July campaign filings with the state of Arizona.

Family Watch International calls itself a “worldwide leader in the pro-family movement” with supporters in 170 countries and consultative status with the United Nations.

The nonprofit says it works to “preserve and promote traditional marriage, safeguard parental rights, defend human life, uphold religious liberty and protect the health and innocence of children.”

Family Watch International was the subject of a 2023 months-long CNN investigation into connections between Sharon Slater and the leaders behind anti-gay bills in Kenya, Ghana and Uganda — where a "Kill The Gays" law means consensual same-sex relationships are punishable with life imprisonment, and “aggravated homosexuality” can carry a death sentence.

Multiple other reports and humans rights activists have echoed the claims, though Family Watch International has repeatedly denied connections with the Ugandan bill, saying on its website, “Family Watch has never supported any efforts in Africa to promote anti-homosexual bills.”

Sharon Slater called the allegations “absurd” when confronted by CNN.

Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni signed the bill, considered one of the world’s harshest anti-LGBTQ+ laws, in 2023. He has publicly praised Sharon Slater and was photographed with her, according to CNN.

CNN wrote that a source involved with a sex education conference in the weeks before the Ugandan bill was signed said Family Watch International was "vital" in planning the event and that the group "assisted members of parliament in pushing the legislation and helped shape its wording," which Family Watch International denied.

The Southern Poverty Law Center wrote of Sharon Slater, "She’s forged close ties over the years with virulently antigay African activists like Ugandan pastor Martin Ssempa — an enthusiastic supporter of the country’s 'Kill the Gays' bill."

The CNN investigation also interviewed opposition politician Peter Kaluma, the main sponsor of an anti-gay bill in Kenya that prevents LGTBQ+ Africans from seeking asylum in the country and punishes groups and landlords for supporting LGBTQ+ individuals with maximum fines equivalent to $65,000 or 10 years in jail.

Kaluma denied a close relationship with Sharon Slater but was photographed with her book and attended U.N. meetings with her, according to CNN.

“The right likes to pander to their base, and their base clings to family values, and most of the people on the right don't fully fit in that box, but they understand to get votes, they must push out a harsh message,” said Kristin Davis, CEO of Think Right PR, who has worked with major right-wing figures such as Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., conservative lobbyist and commentator Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, retired Army lieutenant general and former White House national security adviser during President Donald Trump’s first term.

“Behind the scenes, their private lives are completely different, many of them … in a party that has based their entire message off of family values, they know that if they were honest, they wouldn't get votes.”

A new CNN investigation this year revealed continuing harsh conditions for LGBTQ+ individuals in Africa, supported by U.S. groups.

The Southern Poverty Law Center designated Family Watch International as an extremist, anti-LGBTQ+ hate group.

“They not only try to push back against any sort of reproductive healthcare or sex education, but they often try to link homosexuality with pedophilia, or they'll claim that homosexual lifestyle — or rather, as they call it, same-sex attraction — will sometimes lead to a bad end, will lead to disappointment, and they won't be able to find happiness in that identity. They also recommend conversion therapy,” said Emerson Hodges, a research analyst with Southern Poverty Law Center.

The group's own website states it publicly opposes bans on conversion therapy, a medically discredited and controversial practice of attempting to change someone’s sexual orientation.

“That right there is why Family Watch International rises to that level, in particular, and they often equate homosexuality with a mental disorder, and they're vehemently against gender-affirming care, along with affirming trans youth or even trans people in general and their gender identity," Hodges said.

Family Watch International acknowledged Raw Story’s request for comment and said the Slaters were out of the country, but did not respond to questions by the time of publication.

After publication, Sharon Slater sent an emailed statement through Family Watch International.

"With regard to Representative Andy Biggs, he left FWI shortly after we were founded to pursue his political career and has played no substantive role whatsoever in FWI's policies, activities or direction over the last 20+ years. Furthermore, Family Watch has never supported Representative Biggs' current or past political campaigns nor any other candidate for that matter, as we are a 501(c)(3) organization," Slater said.

"Individuals at FWI, including Greg and Sharon Slater, have the right to support any candidate they wish for whatever reason, and it would be highly inappropriate for FWI to inquire of our staff about their votes or the reason for supporting any particular political candidate."

Biggs for Arizona did not respond to Raw Story’s request for comment, nor did a spokesperson for Biggs’ congressional office.

‘A calculation’

Biggs’ ties to Sharon Slater go back several years, and the Republican Arizona congressman since 2017 was flagged by GLAAD, the LGBTQ+ advocacy nonprofit, for anti-gay rhetoric.

Family Watch International was originally incorporated as Global Helping to Advance Women and Children, where Biggs was listed on its original board, according to Arizona state filings.

Biggs also served as a policy adviser and U.N. representative to United Families International, affiliated with Global Helping to Advance Women and Children. Sharon Slater formerly served as the organization’s president.

United Families International did not immediately respond to Raw Story's request for comment.

Biggs and Sharon Slater appeared together at a “Patriotism over Socialism” event in Gilbert, Ariz., in 2019, and he spoke at Family Watch International’s Family Policy Forum in 2020.

Sharon Slater was listed as a member of the Women for Biggs Coalition in November 2020.

Politicians like Biggs are “meticulous about the company they keep, the people they talk to, the money they bring in,” said Adin Lenchner, founder of Carroll Street Campaigns, which works with Democrats.

“He is keenly aware of his relationship to this group, to the folks involved and the costs and benefits of his association with it … at the end of the day, he made a calculation that it is more important to appease folks that would be upset about distancing himself from them than the benefits that come from it.”

Gregory Slater previously faced calls from human rights groups for dismissal from his role as a senior executive and counsel at te political action committee Intel due to his connections with Family Watch International, according to The Guardian.

Gregory Slater has made nearly 400 donations to the Intel Corporation Political Action Committee, totaling more than $63,000. He made recurring payments of more than $200 biweekly between October 2012 and October 2024, according to Federal Election Commission records.

The Intel Corporation PAC gave a slight edge to Republican candidates for election cycles between 2016 and 2022. In 2012, 2014 and 2024, the PAC slightly favored Democrats. The PAC has made more than $386,000 in disbursements since January 2025, according to FEC records.

“We're right now in a controversial time. We see, on both sides of the aisle, politicians and elected officials who are aligning themselves with extreme ideologies, and so in the case of Rep. Biggs or any other individuals aligning themselves with an extreme ideology, I think it's very concerning as a strategist and as an American,” said Tiffany Raspberry, a Democratic strategist and former deputy mayor for the City of New York.

Each recent donation from Gregory and Sharon Slater “sends the message that the Slaters still have a stake in what happens with Biggs,” Hodges said.

Biggs’ gubernatorial campaign has raised more than $3.2 million and has $1.2 million on hand, according to the Arizona state website.

His opponent, incumbent Democrat Gov. Katie Hobbs, has raised more than $11 million and has about $175,000 cash on hand, according to the filings.

A conservative law firm with deep ties to Justice Clarence Thomas, President Donald Trump and a history of arguing more than a dozen cases on hot-button right-wing causes before the Supreme Court took in more than $33.5 million from nonprofit dark money networks, according to new watchdog research.

Consovoy McCarthy, a boutique conservative law firm started in 2014, brought in more than $29 million since 2015 from nonprofits associated with Leonard Leo, a co-chair of the Federalist Society, a Project 2025 contributor and architect of the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, alone, according to tax filings analyzed by True North Research, a progressive investigative research firm.

Leo has a well-documented history of using his networks to funnel money to ultraconservative causes, from working to limit access to abortion medication to supporting anti-trans laws.

Nonprofits do not need to disclose the identities of their donors, and when such groups support political causes without revealing the sources of their funding, it's considered “dark money.”

Consovoy McCarthy has “become a go-to for these far-right networks, especially networks tied to Leonard Leo ... who's seeking to impose his agenda on all Americans by weaponizing the court system,” said Alyssa Bowen, deputy director at True North Research.

“We've seen Consovoy McCarthy undertake a ton of cases furthering Leo's agenda as they're enriching themselves with Leo cash and cash from other far-right dark money operatives.”

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Consovoy McCarthy took in money from nonprofits associated with other conservative activists like Edward Blum, who has brought at least eight cases to the Supreme Court, mostly about race-conscious college admissions and voting rights.

“You've got money funneled through a nonprofit organization, you don't really know if there's a wealthy mega donor or special interest helping bankroll the legal arguments that are appearing before a court,” said Michael Beckel, money in politics reform director at Issue One, a bipartisan nonprofit that advocates for reducing the influence of money in politics.

“You don't know if a wealthy donor or special interest is helping underwrite this type of legal advocacy when so much money flows through a nonprofit network.”

Consovoy McCarthy argued high-profile cases before the Supreme Court, including Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which effectively ended affirmative action in 2023 and was spearheaded by Blum.

The biggest nonprofit contribution Consovoy McCarthy took in was more than $1.8 million from Students for Fair Admissions in 2018.

In total, the firm took in nearly $8.8 million from the nonprofit founded by Blum, according to tax filings.

“There's a lot of money behind the legal challenges to a lot of these high-profile cases that we see from voting rights law to affirmative action cases, other race-conscious policies,” Beckel said.

“These are very hot-button issues right now, and where there's heat, there's fire, and when you've got the ability to bring big guns into the courtroom, there's some donors who are more than willing to have their money help pay for that type of legal representation all across the ideological spectrum.”

The firm also represented Trump in his effort to conceal his tax returns.

Six of Consovoy McCarthy’s 11 partners clerked for Thomas. Another clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts.

“When you've got many of your partners previously clerking for a specific Supreme Court justice, that can give you an edge in the courtroom. That can give you an edge in recruiting and landing new clients. It can give you an edge in landing major cases before the Supreme Court,” Beckel said.

“These are individuals who might have a particular insight into how Clarence Thomas approaches the decisions that he makes on the bench. If you've got lawyers with special insights into how a Supreme Court justice thinks, that can be very lucrative.”

Thomas McCarthy, co-founder of Consovoy McCarthy, Blum and Leo could not be immediately reached for comment for this story.

'Sad state of politics'

The 85 Fund, managed by Leo, is formerly known as the Judicial Education Project and is the oldest in his dark money network. It gave Consovoy McCarthy $5.65 million between 2016 and 2023.

America First Legal Foundation, co-founded by Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff and a recipient of funding from the Leo-connected donor-advised fund, DonorsTrust, paid Consovoy McCarthy nearly $235,000 in 2022.

Do No Harm, a medical and policy advocacy nonprofit associated with Blum and funded by Leo's network, paid Consovoy McCarthy more than $1.4 million total in 2022 and 2024. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated Do No Harm as an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group that promotes conversion therapy.

Consovoy McCarthy was paid more than $544,000 from the Project on Fair Representation, founded by Blum.

“There's a coordinated effort by a few billionaire-backed political operatives that are throwing … their weight behind legal cases that undermine policies that help people and benefit politicians or billionaires,” Bowen said.

Speech First, which says it works to protect free speech rights on college campuses and is associated with the conservative billionaire Koch brothers, paid the firm more than $7.3 million total between 2018 and 2024.

The U.S. Chamber Litigation Center, which works on “defending Trump-era deregulation in court,” paid Consovoy McCarthy nearly $200,000.

Defending Education, formerly Parents Defending Education, which advocates for removing critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion from schools, paid Consovoy McCarthy $4 million total since 2021. Blum is a board member.

These nonprofits have been considered dark money networks with lack of transparency about their funders.

“Dark money has an incredible influence in the judicial system, as well as the political arena writ large,” Beckel said.

“There are a lot of decisions that have big impacts on the bottom lines of big donors, big businesses, and this is a pattern that we see playing out over and over again — that there is so much opaque and mysterious spending in the court system, as well as the campaigns and elections that are helping elect the politicians who ultimately confirm or deny judges who are nominated by the president to serve in our legal system.

“Unfortunately, campaigns and elections aren't the only place where mystery money is playing a large role today.”

The nonprofits did not immediately provide comment.

“It's just a sad state of politics today, pushed by the far-right, that allows self enrichment and this — if not corruption, perceived corruption — in doing so,” Bowen said.

When news broke that a Navy officer’s sexual assault claim was dismissed as a workman’s compensation issue, Dawn, a retired Marine, took a bat to a tree in rage.

Dawn is one of the survivors of military sexual trauma (MST) who is fed up with the direction of the armed forces under Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has rolled back numerous initiatives to protect and promote women and minorities.

“I don't think people understand that this trauma never stops. You just learn how to deal with it. I still don't know all my triggers, but that story sent me into a trigger that I haven't had for a long time,” said Dawn, who requested use of her first name only out of fear of losing her disability benefits and retaliation from the Trump administration.

“All I could do was scream and cry.”

Dawn has taken to showing up at recruitment offices to discourage women from enlisting in the military while President Donald Trump is in office and Hegseth still leads the Department of Defense.

“I would sit there and tell women, ‘Do not go in,’” Dawn said.

“After this regime came in, don't go into the military. If you value your safety and your mental health, do not go into the military … I'm not going to allow another woman to enter the military so she can have what happened to me happen to her.”

Dawn said she was gang-raped in her barracks room while overseas and ended up getting pregnant from the assault, which happened more than 35 years ago.

The attack left Dawn “scared to death,” and no investigation occurred. Dawn said she “shut the hell up, and I didn't say anything” due to concerns for her career.

“We did not have a way to report anything. We did not have any confidentiality where we could go and talk to anybody and say what was going on, so I was just by myself,” Dawn said.

Katy Eilers, a veteran advocate, said she was assaulted by four military police officers while deployed as an Army medic at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq when she was 18 years old.

Katy Eilers in uniform (provided photo)

Seeing a judge dismiss the multi-year attempt for justice by Elsie Dominguez who said she was raped in her bed on a Navy transport ship, as a “workman's comp thing is just wild to me,” Eilers said.

“Every time I see another safety thing that Pete Hegseth took away for women in the military, it's like reliving that trauma all over again,” said Eilers, now 38.

To promote a “no more walking on eggshells” policy,” Hegseth has engaged in an effort to overhaul military equal and civilian opportunity programs, speeding up investigations and calling them “weaponized,” Federal News Network reported.

Earlier this month, Hegseth blocked dozens of promotions for women and minorities in the Army, and he previously intervened to remove female candidates from promotion lists, leading to no promotions of active-duty female Navy officers to one-star admirals — the first time that's happened in more than a decade.

“Under Trump, I still have a lot of active-duty friends, and they're messaging me, and they said all their protections are essentially gone,” Eilers said. “We always joke that every unit has a Hegseth, and we all warn the rest of the female soldiers about the Hegseth in that unit, just as a type of vibe. Active duty women are scared right now.”

Hegseth faced intense questioning during his confirmation hearing about a sexual assault claim against him from 2017 when he was then a Fox News host, which Hegseth vehemently denied.

“When I say a Hegseth … it's just like somebody [who] grabs you or touches you, and then says, ‘Oh, you're just being a pain in the butt,’ when you report it,” Eilers said. “It's a Hegseth, a jerk.”

The Pentagon responded to Raw Story's questions with an August press release about its Fiscal Year 2025 Sexual Assault in the Military report.

The report said an estimated 20,492 service members experienced unwanted sexual contact in 2025, which represented a decrease in rates since the last report in Fiscal Year 2023.

Reporting of active-duty sexual assault incidents increased from 25 percent to 33 percent in that same time period, according to the press release.

"Dignity, respect, and discipline are foundational to the warrior ethos and the overall preparedness of the force. Sexual assault and sexual harassment undermine these values, eroding trust and threatening the mission," said Anthony J. Tata., Under Secretary of War for Personnel and Readiness, in the press release.

"The FY 2025 report underscores our ongoing commitment to maintaining high standards, protecting our people, and building a unified, ready, and lethal fighting force."

‘They destroyed me’

As an advocate in Omaha, Nebraska, Eilers is working to shine a light on issues for women veterans. The common experience she hears from MST survivors is “nothing believed and nothing happening to them, and having to work with the person that raped you,” Eilers said.

Eilers said her own assault wasn’t “handled.”

“They didn't get in trouble. Nothing happened to them,” Eilers said. “I got moved though, and I just didn't speak about it again for a really long time. There was no therapy provided. There were no resources.”

A March report from the Department of Veterans Affairs said one in three women and one in 40 men report experiencing MST when screened by their VA provider.

MST survivors often say “I need therapy for the way they treated me after I was raped” regarding how military leadership responded to their attacks, Eilers said.

“The way I was treated after is what hurt the most,” she said.

Katy Eilers (provided photo)

MST victims have the opportunity to do an unrestricted report, where there’s a police investigation and medical treatment allowed outside of a military base, Eilers said. Restricted reporting can only be done with military medical personnel, and there’s no investigation, Eilers said.

“I did a restricted report because I was scared that the [military police] were gonna be mad,” Eilers said.

Dawn said she continued to be sexually harassed when she re-enlisted in the Marines when a leader frequently touched her butt. Women were treated as “less than” and called “walking mattresses,” she said.

“At that point, you become very numb. Your head is always on a swivel, and you can become very numb to things,” Dawn said.

Dawn said she got a hysterectomy at 26 years old after her cervix was damaged due to the assault.

“Not only did they destroy me mentally and emotionally, but they destroyed me physically,” Dawn said.

To improve support for MST victims, Eilers said restricted reporting should be ended, and more robust programs should be offered where victims can safely report assaults.

Dawn and Eilers support the Military Sexual Trauma Accountability Act, introduced in June, which would allow service members and veterans to file civil lawsuits against the government for cases of military sexual trauma and negligence.

But, ultimately, Hegseth needs to be fired, Dawn said.

“He's got to go. He's destroying our military. He doesn't want women in it,” Dawn said.

This story has been updated with comment from Turning Point USA.

In the Chicago suburbs near where Charlie Kirk attended high school, a couple Republican groups promoted vigils for the one-year anniversary of the right-wing activist’s assassination.

The small collection of gatherings stand in stark contrast to the hubbub that occurred in the area a year before when Kirk was murdered at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10, 2025. Tyler Robinson, accused of shooting Kirk from a rooftop at the university in Orem, Utah, must now stand trial for seven charges, including murder.

Dueling petitions circulated after the shooting debating whether Township High School District 214 should honor Kirk, an alumnus of Wheeling High School, in the northwest suburbs of Chicago.

The district was bombarded with dozens of emails — most of them asking the superintendent, board of education and school leaders to not publicly honor Kirk due to misogynistic, anti-LGBTQ+ and racist comments the co-founder of Turning Point USA made — according to public records obtained by Raw Story.

But, others called on the district to recognize Kirk with a Distinguished Alumni Award, a moment of silence or permanent memorial.

Parents at Kirk’s alma mater received an email addressing “social media rumors” and the need for increased police presence on campus, along with altering Homecoming plans.

School leadership fielded emails about safety issues ranging from reports of a “strange man” at a nearby gas station asking questions about Kirk after making a pilgrimage from South Dakota due to “visions” — to a parent looking for guidance on potential concerns for a Mariachi trio performing the national anthem at the upcoming football game.

While the petitions about supporting honors for Kirk, or opposing them, garnered more than 5,900 and 5,500 signatures, respectively, and lots of media attention, a year later, Kirk is “too sensitive to talk about in the current climate,” said an area teacher.

“I hate hate hate that everyone is so scared of this disgusting government of ours.”

The school district declined to participate in any interviews.

“At this time of year, our focus is on the start of the school year and supporting our students, staff and schools as we get underway,” said Lindsey Dombrowski, a District 214 spokesperson.

An apology

The fight over honoring Kirk has consumed the school during the year since he died.

A public records request for emails about Kirk sent to District 214 Superintendent Scott Rowe in the two weeks after Kirk’s death yielded 135 pages, with emailers’ names redacted.

The emails received by school and district leadership included a note from an alumnus who made a school pride video with Kirk parodying the State of the Union.

“With the tragic passing of Charlie Kirk, it has been very difficult for all of us who were blessed to know him,” the emailer said. “He was a great friend, teammate, and fellow Wildcat.

Another emailer asked Wheeling High School Principal Angela Hawkins to establish a permanent memorial for Kirk, who received a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Donald Trump.

“It is necessary for Wheeling High School to recognize the legacy of alumni who have left a lasting impact,” the emailer wrote. “With millions of followers and a significant role in American media, Charlie’s influence as an advocate for free speech cannot be overlooked.”

Others asked Rowe to honor Kirk in a “meaningful way” such as “a moment of silence, a public acknowledgment or another tribute.”

“Charlie was not only a national political figure but also a fellow Wildcat who often credited Wheeling as an important part of his journey,” the emailer wrote. “Regardless of political affiliation, Charlie was a rising voice in national discourse who inspired and engaged countless young people across the country and he spoke frequently about his roots in District 214.”

But, when the district and Wheeling High School posted website messages acknowledging Kirk’s death, criticisms came in, accusing the district of harming marginalized communities and failing to uphold its values of “inclusivity and kindness.”

“We are writing in response to the District 214 message regarding Charlie Kirk, a man who once said that he hated the word empathy and continuously spouted hateful, racist and xenophobic rhetoric … we vehemently do not approve of glorifying his accomplishments and his time in d214, when his actions and message in his adult life were hateful and dangerous,” said one emailer.

It prompted Rowe to send an apology to those who emailed with concerns, and the district took down a pop-up website announcement about Kirk.

“We apologize if the way we displayed our statement on Charlie Krik’s [sic] passing caused any discomfort,” Rowe wrote.

“Our intention was to remember and express our condolences following the tragic death of an alumni. However, the statement should not have been a pop up on our home page, and we have removed that feature.”

Calls for firings

The district continued to put out fires related to Kirk’s death, including facing calls to terminate an employee for their social media posts about Kirk. One emailer accused the faculty member of “celebrating the death of a former student of the school.”

A handful of school employees and teachers in the area were targeted for termination over their social media posts about Kirk.

Another pushed for a school board member to resign for protesting Trump.

The school board also addressed rumors circulating on social media by conservative groups like Moms4Liberty that accused Wheeling High School of quietly removing an alumni plaque honoring Kirk.

The school board emailed the person who brought up the topic during public comment at a board meeting.

The email clarified that Kirk was not previously named a Distinguished Alumni but was featured in a “Where Are They Now” campaign about the district’s career pathways program. All alumni photos, including Kirk’s, were removed when the program ended and the foam board displays deteriorated.

The board also shared information about district policies on students starting Turning Point USA chapters, which would be designated non-school sponsored groups due to advocating for specific religious, political or philosophical beliefs.

After his death, Kirk’s high school started a Club America chapter, the high school version of Turning Point USA groups.

Turning Point USA responded to Raw Story's questions with flyer about the organization's "unprecedented expansion" in the one year since his death.

In the 2025-2026 school year, Turning Point engaged more than 1 million students, had 3,500 Club America high school groups — up 180 percent from the previous school year — and 1,500 college chapters, up 64 percent from the previous school year, according to the Turning Point flyer.

'Trumper whores?'

The vast majority of the messages Rowe and other school leaders received about Kirk implored the district not to honor Kirk.

“While every shooting is abhorrent, considering any kind of District 214 commemoration or recognition of Charlie Kirk is not only wrong, but is an insult to the hundreds of schoolchildren who are killed year after year in this country,” one email to the school board said.

“The very fact that our flags had to be flown at half-staff for a civilian who spread so much hate, misogynistic, anti-gay, antisemitic, anti-black, anti-immigration verifiable messages should alone set off alarms to this board. (Was the flag flown half-staff for Melissa Hortman, the Minnesota lawmaker who was assassinated or for all those slain schoolchildren?)

“Most historians agree that our country is spiraling to a fascist type of government; and capitulating and recognizing Kirk's messages of hate is contributing to one more step toward that spiral.”

Another email to the school board was filled with exclamation points, telling the district Kirk “DESERVES NOTHING” in terms of honors from the district.

“Any sort or recognition by the board, the district or even Wheeling HS would say to me that you are nothing but political whores. What type of message does this send to the students of the district? Are you all Trumper whores? Moreover, I resent even a dime of my tax dollars being spent on anything like this. I am a fan of the district and am very glad . But if you are even remotely considering doing any sort of honor or recognition for Kirk, please get your collective heads out of your rear ends and wise up!” the Sept 16 email said.

The school was asked to create a memorial to gun violence victims by one emailer warning against “false prophets” like Kirk known to “indoctrinate young women.”

“I am not writing merely to be an obstructionist; I offer an alternative proposal. Rather than honoring only one victim of gun violence because he was local or famous, let us instead honor all victims of school shootings,” the emailer said.

Others asked the district not to elevate Kirk for his history of promoting white nationalism, hostility toward diversity and inclusion and “racism, transphobia and homophobia,” which stand “in stark opposition” to the district’s mission.

Ultimately, the district opted not to host a district-wide day of honor for Kirk and displayed no mention of the anniversary of Kirk’s death on its website.

“While we extend our deepest condolences to Charlie Kirk’s family and friends for this terrible and senseless loss, a district-wide event would disrupt the learning environment at our schools,” the board wrote to the public commenter and other emailers.

“We encourage students, faculty, staff, and families to mourn and remember Charlie together at one of the many public services and vigils that are being organized throughout the community.”

Six months into the planning of an in-person fundraiser with Rock and Roll Hall of Famers Bonnie Raitt and David Crosby, the COVID-19 pandemic derailed the event.

The goal had been to raise $150,000 for Democrats in 2020. But the California East Bay chapter of Indivisible was forced to pivot to a more low-key, and fully virtual, events it called “Parties for Democracy” — and ended up raising $450,000, helping to flip seven California districts blue.

Averaging $10,000 per fundraising event, “Parties for Democracy” are just one of the strategies now being rolled out to fuel a blue wave in the midterms, said Gary Lucks, attorney and founder of the Resistance Action East Bay, a chapter of the anti-Donald Trump group Indivisible that's fighting against authoritarianism.

In his book, “We Are the Power To Win the Future: Mobilize to Defend Democracy,” Lucks offers a “roadmap” for how Democrats can take back control from Trump in November, “the most consequential election of our lifetime,” he said.

“We need to win this election, in my personal opinion, by significant margins, which is how we will be able to avoid a contested election,” Lucks said.

“With [now-former Hungarian President] Viktor Orbán losing by substantial margins, he couldn't contest the election.”

Trump repeatedly praised and backed Orbán, who led Hungary as a far-right prime minister for 16 years under what he called an "illiberal democracy," before losing re-election in April.

Experts called Orbán’s loss a “cautionary tale” for Trump, which he appears to have heeded. As November approaches, Trump has ratcheted up his efforts to sow doubts about “election integrity.”

This week, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to rule on limiting mail-in ballots.

Lucks book is designed to be a guide to fighting back.

“We Are the Power” intends to inspire everyone to take action, “whether it's the lapsed activist who's demoralized after 2024 or someone new,” including one of the estimated 89 million people who chose to stay home rather than vote in the last general election, Lucks said.

Lucks hosted a training open to the leaders of Indivisible’s 300 California chapters Wednesday and said there’s potential for strategies in his book to be shared with leaders of all 2,600 Indivisible chapters around the country.

“The book is designed as an accessible tool for no matter where you live, whether you live in a blue state or district, red or purple, no matter what your skill set is, your relationships, your money It's how everyone can step into action,” Lucks said.

“It's really designed to engage, activate people, give them hope, and so many people are demoralized, feeling powerless and deeply concerned.”

Indivisible declined to comment.

Being based in California, Lucks thinks about how those living in Democratic states can back left-leaning candidates in swing or red states.

“Here in the blue part of the country, the idea is how do we export our resources of our talent, lots of money in California,” Lucks said.

His Indivisible group creates handouts on a different issue or election race across the country and hands them out at farmers markets and near public transit — what Lucks calls an "underutilized technique.”

“It connects people who are in a blue-oriented environment,” Lucks said.

“We get them to the next step, and they're busy, and we give them the two-minute ask, and they thank us all the time, and we're the trusted advisors in the community, so I'd love to see this advance across the country.”

Gary Lucks (provided photo)

To support potentially disenfranchised voters worried about intimidation at the polls, Lucks encourages taking off Election Day, Nov. 3, “to protect the vote” as witnesses.

When asked if he's worried about Republicans stealing his strategies for Democrats to take back control of Congress in November, Lucks said, “I don't think we have any choice” but to publicize his tactics.

“They're more focused on big donors,” Lucks said. “We are able to compete with them because of small donor contributions … I think they don't really focus on the ground game like we do.”

Lucks said his book is a companion to “The American Oath Project: Protecting the Backbone of Democracy,” a book by attorney Kevin K. Johnson, which presents novel legal strategies to remove Trump from office.

Both books, published by the “pro-democracy” publishing house, Writers Integrity Network, emphasize peaceful protest, Johnson said.

“That's going to become extra, extra important as we roll into the midterms because what Trump is going to do is going to p— a lot of people off, and there's a good chance there'll be a lot of people in the streets,” Johnson said.

“We have to be peaceful because Trump wants us to get violent.”

When ICE agents smashed their vehicle into a pick-up truck last week and detained a man on a Chicago highway, protests erupted — and an impromptu action meeting was called to hit what the community is calling a "shadow surge."

The urgent ICE Watch and Community Defense session came together on Friday to address what's being seen as a stealth rise in action rise in actions by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Last year, federal immigration agents very publicly descended on the city in what the Department of Homeland Security called Operation Midway Blitz.

The immigration enforcement surge involved two shootings — including the killing of Silverio Villegas González — excessive and violent use of force, frequent publicity of former U.S. Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Greg Bovino and highly visible immigration raids.

By comparison, the latest wave of ICE activity in Chicago is “not always quiet,” but is “something that they're trying to do in the shadows,” said Jill Garvey, executive director of States at the Core, which hosted last week's meeting and works to combat authoritarianism and political extremism.

“We talk about the shadow surge as a way to distinguish it from what people saw last summer and fall and into the winter. We are not seeing DHS announce where they're going to go like they were a year ago,” Garvey said.

“They would be openly out there even as they were obscuring their identities with masks and stuff. They were a visible presence in these cities.”

ICE activity in Chicago now feels “much less visible” and more “targeted,” said Gabe Gonzalez, a community organizer with Protect Rogers Park, which organizes ICE neighborhood patrols on the far North Side of the city.

“When the Border Patrol was here, it was really obvious. They were highly confrontational and violent and scary to a lot of people, and there were instances of them beating people and tear gas and pepper balls and all of that, and large numbers of them roving around trying to scare people,” Gonzalez said.

“It feels different, but it is definitely a lot more activity than there had been.”

Illinois State Sen. Graciela Guzmán said communities on Chicago's Northwest Side saw "multiple detentions per day, every day" last week. Her office works with the Northwest Side Rapid Response Team and is activating School Watch across all schools in her district area given the increased ICE activity seen around local schools.

"These detentions are not only, I think, really speeding up in frequency, but they're increasingly becoming across multiple geographies," Guzmán said.

"It's really feeling like the sustained targeting of individuals, and they're being, in many instances, scouted and chased for across many, many miles."

Guzmán said "there's much more surveillance" happening instead of the "broad community tactics" employed during Operation Midway Blitz, which were "wildly unpopular." Those being targeted include people whose Temporary Protected Status or asylum protections have been revoked, Guzmán said.

The arrests are happening in residential areas where sometimes the only evidence is an abandoned car or work truck left running, Guzmán said. She said her own vehicle was boxed by ICE agents a few weeks ago.

"They are increasingly doing these stops very, very quickly, and it is clear that they are using an exorbitant amount of resources to really be able to surveil people's patterns like when they leave the house, when they come back. Do they go alone?" Guzmán said.

In response to Raw Story's questions, a DHS spokesperson sent a list of "public safety threats" arrested by ICE in Illinois. Listed convictions for the "criminal illegal alien" men include homicide, sexual assault, kidnapping, domestic violence, child abduction, larceny and burglary, according to the spokesperson.

“Since Day One, DHS law enforcement has been delivering on President Trump’s promise to the American people to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens including murderers, rapists, pedophiles, gang members, and terrorists. We will continue to deliver on the president’s promise to make America safe again," the spokesperson said.

“Our message is clear: if you come into our country illegally and break our laws, we will find you, we will arrest you, and we will deport you. ICE enforces the law as written. What makes someone a target for immigration enforcement is whether or not they are illegally in the U.S.— full stop.

“Nationwide, our law enforcement is targeting public safety threats — including murderers, rapists, gang members, pedophiles, and terrorists. Nearly 70% of illegal aliens ICE arrested across the country have criminal convictions or pending criminal charges just in the U.S. This statistic doesn’t account for those wanted for violent crimes in their home country or another country, INTERPOL notices, human rights abusers, gang members, terrorists, etc. The list goes on."

'Going to hurt more people'

ICE’s tactics in Chicago have been “quieter” recently, but there’s been a “return to some of these violent clashes” like with the highway crash on Aug. 24, Garvey said.

DHS’ account of the incident said a Venezuelan man, Robinson Mendez-Gutierrez, fled from immigration officers and rammed an officer’s vehicle during a traffic stop before he was arrested.

"From reports on the ground, an ICE officer activated his emergency lights to conduct a vehicle stop, but Mendez-Gutierrez refused to comply and weaponized his pickup truck against the officer by ramming it into the officer’s vehicle. The officer was able to stop Mendez-Gutierrez's pickup truck and arrest him without further incident," a DHS spokesperson told Raw Story.

“Mendez-Gutierrez has a criminal history including arrests for possession of a controlled substance, failure to reduce speed, driver's license not on person, driver's license expired more than a year, operating an uninsured motor vehicle and illegal possession/transportation of liquor by driver. He illegally entered the United States in 2023 and was RELEASED into our county by the Biden administration. He will remain in ICE custody pending the outcome of his removal proceedings."

Neighbors and protestors showed up to the site where the immigration agents’ SUV needed to be towed. One tow truck company refused to assist the agents.

“These various agencies and their leadership are showing some cracks in their ability to mount different tactics,” Garvey said.

“There are not easy or necessarily quiet ways to abduct people over and over again from a community that gets organized.”

States at the Core has trained at least 55,000 people nationally, many in documenting and responding to ICE activity. As community groups see how “incredibly effective” community defense training is, there’s been interest in other trainings such as de-escalation tactics and election protection, Garvey said.

“It’s really setting in that the mass deportation agenda is a thing that has limitless funding and resources and isn't going to stop just because DHS and ICE experienced defeats in Chicago and Minneapolis,” Garvey said.

“These different tactics will march forward. The agenda will keep moving. The motivation behind the rounding up millions of people and deporting them hasn't changed, and that's hard because I think folks are wondering how much, how long they can sustain this.”

Between 2,000 and 3,000 federal immigration agents were deployed to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area in January, with two community members, Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, fatally shot by agents. Federal agents started retreating from Operation Metro Surge in February.

ICE returned to Chicago this year with “less confrontational” tactics but has been seemingly “grabbing people,” particularly "anybody who's got any sort of difficulty in the immigration system … [which] has got to be the majority of them because the system doesn't work,” Gonzalez said.

ICE still frequently targets people at Home Depots, he said.

“When this ‘shadow surge’ started off, the agents seemed a little bit more tentative. They seemed a little bit more unsure of themselves, and that has disappeared,” Gonzalez said.

“They are much more aggressive … it's obvious where that comes from. It comes from the top. They're being told that they will be protected no matter what they do. If they crash their cars into somebody, they'll be protected. If they hit somebody or wrestle them to the ground and push their face into this concrete, they'll be protected,” Gonzalez said.

While the aggressiveness isn’t quite to the level it was during Operation Midway Blitz, it’s “getting there,” Gonzalez said. Organizers have observed “individually aggressive people” among immigration agents, including some using racial slurs," he said.

“It's getting bad. They're going to hurt more people. We can see this coming,” said Gonzalez as he was responding to a report of ICE agents in his neighborhood.

“We knew this was going to happen in Chicago, and we knew it was going to happen in Minneapolis. We are absolutely certain that if something isn't done to hold them accountable for their violent activities, it's just going to get worse, and they're going to hurt other people. We’re certain of it.”

Once a teenage MAGA follower and self-identified conspiracy theorist, Addy Leugers, 24, now finds herself supporting Democratic Socialist candidates.

When she was just 14 years old, Leugers said she was primed to back Trump and his Make America Great Again movement during the 2016 presidential election.

“I was working, so I did have that exposure to other thought processes, but it really wasn't enough to pull what was essentially the foundation that primarily my dad laid for me to become infatuated with Donald Trump and with the thoughts and ideologies that he was putting out into the world around his first election in 2016,” Leugers told Raw Story.

Leugers grew up in a wealthy suburban Kansas City household with “very authoritarian-style parenting” and was homeschooled for religious reasons.

Her home was a “Fox News 24/7 household,” and she came to believe in far-right conspiracy theories like QAnon, which promotes lies that Trump waged a secret war against cannibalistic pedophiles among Democrats, Hollywood elites and the so-called “deep-state.”

“I was raised, ‘You respect the military. You respect the police. You respect the president. These are the people that God put in power. You listen to them because it's your moral obligation, basically,’” Leugers said.

“I feel like that's kind of where things started to go downhill for me.”

Addy Leugers (provided photo)

But when Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in May 2020 and sparked a national racial reckoning, Leugers began to depart from the MAGA movement.

“I was one of those people that was like, ‘Well, because I haven't experienced it, and everyone else says that racism died when we ended slavery, racism isn't real,’ and people were like, ‘Addy, you're stupid,’” Leugers said.

‘My breaking point was that because I did have friends that I knew closely that were trying to correct me and trying to be kind and helpful, and I was just being nasty, and I doubled down, and they were like, ‘OK, well, I'm not gonna be your friend anymore because you're not being open-minded, and I'm trying to help you, and you're just being ignorant on purpose.’”

Leugers, a registered behavior tech who works with children who have autism spectrum disorder, has now joined dozens of others in Leaving MAGA, a growing online community of former Trump supporters whose allegiance to Trump led them to lose friends, family relationships and marriages, commit crimes in Trump’s name, embrace Christian nationalism, and believe conspiracies.

‘Echo chamber’

Leugers, who now lives in the Honolulu area, said she primarily votes for Democrats these days and is very supportive of younger representation in politics.

“I'm no longer a Republican,” she said.

Her time in MAGA gave Leugers insight into the drastic ways the direction of the movement has changed since Trump’s first election, when MAGA was more about “regular people” whose “support for our president is unmatched,” she said.

Now “MAGA [is] taking such a hit in the last couple of years because of what the president has been doing,” Leugers said.

“The MAGA movement itself is very shallow, but it's based in this sense of community and banding together, almost of ‘Oh, they hate us. They hate our president, but we have each other, and we have God, and everything's gonna be OK because this is God's will,’” Leugers said.

“It does turn into this little echo chamber of everyone believing all the same things and no one challenging anything.”

Leugers said she believes MAGA started with good intentions with people seeking community, but “it lacks nuance, and it lacks education, and that is what turns into this slippery slope, because it's like the hills they choose to die on.”

MAGA’s anti-abortion stance is one example, she said.

“You have the anti-abortion on one hand. They also have like ICE is killing people in the streets right now, so it's like it becomes very closed-minded, narrow, blinders-on type of thinking that ignores a broader picture,” Leugers said.

The second Trump administration’s policies have been of particular concern to Leugers and her roommate, especially the aggressive actions of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has led to “people getting killed in the streets, shot in the streets, kidnapped in the streets, U.S. citizens being taken into detention centers without due process," she said.

At least 52 people in ICE custody have died since January 2025, and at least 23 people have been shot by ICE in that time, six of them fatally.

Other concerns include food contamination and recalls alongside the historic lows of food inspections by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and "propaganda" coming out of White House, Leugers said.

“We kind of laugh it off every day … but it kind of is getting to feel pretty dystopic,” Leugers said.

Leugers said she knows firsthand “admitting you're wrong sucks,” but she hopes that sharing her story will help others who are considering deconstructing their MAGA beliefs.

“If I can be one person to do my little part in this grand scheme of what is 2026 politics, then that's enough for me, and maybe even one person will see it and be like, 'Well, if she can change, I can change.’”

As the midterms approach, Leugers hopes for historic voter turnout in November.

“I hope that we, the American people, decide to get stuff done, and we decide that enough is enough,” Leugers said.

Dubbed the "Nostradamus" of predicting presidential election results by using his famous “Keys to the White House,” historian Allan Lichtman will debut a different set of keys focused on evaluating presidential greatness in a new book coming out next month.

“Great American Presidents: The Twelve Who Transformed the Nation” will be on shelves Sept. 22, and the distinguished history professor at American University is already working on the natural follow-up book — “Worst American Presidents.”

He says that will certainly feature the current president.

“Donald Trump will definitively be making an appearance in my worst presidents book, along with a rogues gallery of presidents like James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Herbert Hoover,” Lichtman told Raw Story.

In “Great American Presidents,” Lichtman includes a preliminary ranking of modern presidents since Ronald Reagan, putting Trump at the very bottom.

“We have never seen a president who so fundamentally threatens American democracy. He has openly said, ‘As president, I can do anything I want.’ Not surprisingly, he cozies up to the dictators of the world,” Lichtman said.

“He seems to be bringing this dictatorial, authoritarian approach to American politics. We've also seen the fact that he bases his presidency on blatant lies ... Not to mention the fact that his policies have been an abject disaster."

Lichtman presents in the book 10 keys to presidential greatness, focused on “the consequences of the president, not necessarily whether you agree with everything they've done.” Types of keys range from how presidents handled crises to their moral vision and narrative abilities.

Allan Lichtman (Photo Credit: Sam Lichtman, used with permission)

Franklin D. Roosevelt tops Lichtman’s list, followed by Abraham Lincoln.

Lyndon B. Johnson might surprise some with the third highest ranking, but Lichtman argues Johnson’s “extraordinary depth and breadth of domestic accomplishment … merits the designation as a great president, despite the tragedy of Vietnam.”

That legacy includes the development of the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act and Medicare and Medicaid programs during his presidency.

Another surprise among great American presidents might be the lesser known James K. Polk, Lichtman said, who ranked him 11th in the top 12.

“Although a one-term president, a racist, an imperialist, James K. Polk transformed the nation,” Lichtman said.

“He basically doubled the size of the continental United States.

While Lichtman’s book looks at more than 200 years of American presidents, he argues this type of book is needed today “to show that we can achieve great leadership,” particularly as polled Americans overwhelmingly express disapproval with the direction of the country.

On Monday, Trump’s approval rating hit its lowest point at 33 percent, according to new Reuters/Ipsos polling.

“We can put into place presidents who transform and redeem the nation,” Lichtman said. “'Great American Presidents’ is, I think, the needed antidote to the despair that so many Americans seem to be showing right now. It shows what our nation can become.”

'Pivotal'

Lichtman’s keys indicate that the U.S. has lacked a great president since Reagan due to “the increasing complexity and difficulty of the office, the increasing polarization of our politics.”

The midterms will be “pivotal” as the policy achievements of some of Lichtman’s greatest presidents are at stake under Trump's leadership, he said.

“This is the biggest backlash against voting rights that we've seen since the end of Reconstruction and the adoption of Jim Crow in the South,” Lichtman said.

“We're also seeing the undermining of other great initiatives of Lyndon Johnson. For example, the so-called Big Beautiful Bill — I call it the Big Ugly Bill — gives huge tax breaks to big corporations and the rich.”

Lichtman agrees with the prediction of a much-discussed blue wave in the November elections, giving Democrats control of the House again. Senate control shifting to Democrats seems to be about a “50-50” chance, and the "gerrymandering war that Trump started" might backfire, Lichtman said.

“Are we going to redeem the domestic legacy of Franklin Roosevelt, Johnson, or are we going to move into a new era in which public policy favors the wealthy and undermines support for the more marginal and less affluent peoples in this country?”

However, the blue wave in the midterms relies on the elections being “free and fair,” which is of particular concern to Lichtman as Trump continues to push lies about election fraud since 2020.

“When Trump talks about election integrity, that's just code word for his interfering in elections,” Lichtman said.

The Justice Department announced on Tuesday last week plans to deploy 1,000 federal monitors to polling places for the midterms.

“In my view, it is a direct attempt at election interference and rigging,” Lichtman said.

‘Come out of the darkness’

“Great American Presidents” attempts to “codify historical judgment” in a similar way to how Lichtman’s “Keys to the White House” applied mathematical models used to predict earthquakes to election prediction.

“Like the ‘Keys to the White House,’ which were the world's only do-it-yourself presidential prediction system, the ‘10 Keys’ enables anyone to be a do-it-yourself evaluator of presidents,” Lichtman said.

Book cover (Credit: Christine Van Bree Design)

Lichtman had a near-perfect presidential election prediction record for more than 40 years using the model until Kamala Harris lost the 2024 presidential election.

Unprecedented disruptions of the Democrats publicly “trashing” their nominee in incumbent President Joe Biden before replacing him with Harris and the prevalence of misinformation during that election caused a break in the model, Lichtman said.

Misinformation will continue to be a concern in elections going forward, but Lichtman remains hopeful for other great presidents after Trump’s term ends.

“After a period of weak and failed presidencies, you often get a great president,” Lichtman said.

“I'm always the optimist. One thing I've learned from the study of history: at times when things have seemed most bleak for the country, somehow we've turned the corner and come out of the darkness.”