Stephen Prager, Common Dreams

Immigrant rights activists in Florida are expressing alarm as they have found themselves “unable to locate” more than 1,000 detainees who have been “administratively disappeared” from the state’s immigrant internment camp known as ”Alligator Alcatraz.”

Last week, the Miami Herald reported that “the whereabouts of two-thirds of more than 1,800 men detained at Alligator Alcatraz during the month of July could not be determined” after the paper “obtained the names from two detainee rosters.”

The reporters found that around 800 of the people on the rosters do not appear on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Online Detainee Locator System, which provides publicly available information about the court status and locations of people who have been jailed by immigration enforcement. Another 450 had no location listed and instead merely instructed users to “Call ICE for details.”

The Herald also found that the vast majority of the detainees in the system did not have final orders of removal issued against them by immigration judges, which would be required for their deportation. Nevertheless, the detainees’ families and attorneys have been left unable to find them.

Detainees and other witnesses, including several members of Congress who visited in July, have described the conditions inside Alligator Alcatraz as horrific. The ramshackle tent camp was set up in a matter of days this summer in the Everglades to warehouse thousands of people detained by ICE, often without criminal charges or warrants, and with restricted access to attorneys.

While people in federal immigration facilities are typically able to be tracked through the system, the state-run Alligator Alcatraz works differently.

Shirsho Dasgupta, one of the reporters who broke the story for the Herald, told Democracy Now! on Thursday that attorneys he’s spoken to often “don’t know who to call” to get in contact with their clients.

Operations at Alligator Alcatraz were briefly halted in August when a federal district judge ruled against the facility on environmental grounds. But that ruling was stayed by a federal appeals court just two weeks later, allowing operations to resume.

While the state of Florida runs the facility, it has requested and was promised reimbursement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Shelter and Services Program, which was initially created to provide housing and other services to individuals released from ICE custody who were awaiting immigration court proceedings.

In a statement on Friday, the Florida Immigrant Coalition (FLIC), which has also attempted to track the detainees, said that the Herald’s report shows what they “have been warning about for months,” that “those detained in this detention camp have effectively been administratively disappeared.”

FLIC said that the state of Florida has refused to confirm how many detainees are currently in Alligator Alcatraz and that, in addition to those not listed on the ICE locator tool, they have also seen people deported before scheduled bond hearings. The group also said it had “confirmed data showing Florida is lying when claiming those detained at the Everglades camp had final orders of removal.”

“Since this depraved torture camp funded with state FEMA funds reopened,” said Tessa Petit, FLIC’s executive director, “we have been unable to locate the fathers, brothers, friends, and sons that are caged there without due process in the ICE locator. Hospitalizations for severe medical incidents, which include cardiac incidents and surgeries, go unreported.”

Thomas Kennedy, a policy analyst at FLIC, said: “What we’re seeing at Alligator Alcatraz is basically a new model of immigration detention, where a state-run facility is operating as an extrajudicial black site, completely outside of the previous models of immigration detention in this country. It’s making what was already a terrible system somehow even worse.”

Immigrant rights activists in Florida are expressing alarm as they have found themselves “unable to locate” more than 1,000 detainees who have been “administratively disappeared” from the state’s immigrant internment camp known as ”Alligator Alcatraz.”

Last week, the Miami Herald reported that “the whereabouts of two-thirds of more than 1,800 men detained at Alligator Alcatraz during the month of July could not be determined” after the paper “obtained the names from two detainee rosters.”

The reporters found that around 800 of the people on the rosters do not appear on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Online Detainee Locator System, which provides publicly available information about the court status and locations of people who have been jailed by immigration enforcement. Another 450 had no location listed and instead merely instructed users to “Call ICE for details.”

The Herald also found that the vast majority of the detainees in the system did not have final orders of removal issued against them by immigration judges, which would be required for their deportation. Nevertheless, the detainees’ families and attorneys have been left unable to find them.

Detainees and other witnesses, including several members of Congress who visited in July, have described the conditions inside Alligator Alcatraz as horrific. The ramshackle tent camp was set up in a matter of days this summer in the Everglades to warehouse thousands of people detained by ICE, often without criminal charges or warrants, and with restricted access to attorneys.

While people in federal immigration facilities are typically able to be tracked through the system, the state-run Alligator Alcatraz works differently.

Shirsho Dasgupta, one of the reporters who broke the story for the Herald, told Democracy Now! on Thursday that attorneys he’s spoken to often “don’t know who to call” to get in contact with their clients.

Operations at Alligator Alcatraz were briefly halted in August when a federal district judge ruled against the facility on environmental grounds. But that ruling was stayed by a federal appeals court just two weeks later, allowing operations to resume.

While the state of Florida runs the facility, it has requested and was promised reimbursement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Shelter and Services Program, which was initially created to provide housing and other services to individuals released from ICE custody who were awaiting immigration court proceedings.

In a statement on Friday, the Florida Immigrant Coalition (FLIC), which has also attempted to track the detainees, said that the Herald’s report shows what they “have been warning about for months,” that “those detained in this detention camp have effectively been administratively disappeared.”

FLIC said that the state of Florida has refused to confirm how many detainees are currently in Alligator Alcatraz and that, in addition to those not listed on the ICE locator tool, they have also seen people deported before scheduled bond hearings. The group also said it had “confirmed data showing Florida is lying when claiming those detained at the Everglades camp had final orders of removal.”

“Since this depraved torture camp funded with state FEMA funds reopened,” said Tessa Petit, FLIC’s executive director, “we have been unable to locate the fathers, brothers, friends, and sons that are caged there without due process in the ICE locator. Hospitalizations for severe medical incidents, which include cardiac incidents and surgeries, go unreported.”

Thomas Kennedy, a policy analyst at FLIC, said: “What we’re seeing at Alligator Alcatraz is basically a new model of immigration detention, where a state-run facility is operating as an extrajudicial black site, completely outside of the previous models of immigration detention in this country. It’s making what was already a terrible system somehow even worse.”

In the latest display of brutality by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a video that has gone viral on social media shows a plainclothes ICE agent hurling an Ecuadorian asylum seeker, Monica Moreta-Galarza, to the ground at an immigration courthouse in New York City following the arrest of her husband in front of their two children.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, the agent has been relieved of his duties while his conduct is investigated.

The incident was captured by multiple reporters on the scene Thursday. A video posted by Elaad Eliahu of the conservative Timcast News network shows Moreta-Galarza’s husband—who had appeared for a court hearing with his family as part of their legal application for asylum—being wrestled away from his family by several masked agents as he attempts to cling to them. After ripping him away, three agents are shown dragging him out the door.

In another video, Moreta-Galarza is seen tearfully pleading in Spanish with one of the ICE agents, who is wearing a blue flannel shirt, a baseball cap, and no mask. He is shown repeatedly shouting “adios” at her, telling her to leave. When she moves toward him, he quickly grabs her and flings her across the room, through a crowd of photographers, and into the opposite wall. He then grabs her again and pushes her to the ground.

After she rises to her feet, the agent shoves Moreta-Galarza into the arms of security guards who escort her from the building.

Though Eliahu’s post described the man arrested as an “illegal alien,” ProPublica‘s Till Eckert, who was at the scene and spoke with Moreta-Galarza after the fact, reported that she “was seeking asylum with her family,” which is legal under U.S. law.

The incident occurred at 26 Federal Plaza, a federal building that houses an immigration courthouse and a makeshift detention facility in which migrants have been shown to be living in wretched conditions recently. Last week, more than 70 demonstrators, including several state lawmakers, were arrested during a protest at the facility.

“For the past two weeks, I’ve been going to the same New York City immigration courthouse,” Eckert said. “Nearly every time, I see ICE agents arresting immigrants. Today, a woman was slammed to the ground after begging officials not to take her husband away.”

Eckert reported that Moreta-Galarza’s injuries from the encounter required her to go to the hospital, where she has since been discharged.

The arrest is part of an increasing trend under the second Trump administration of immigrants being detained, often violently, while attempting to follow the legal process by appearing in court for immigration hearings.

As Stateline reported in August, ICE has increasingly been using a new, “unexpected legal tactic” to lure immigrants: “Rather than pursue a deportation case, it is convincing judges to dismiss immigrants’ cases—thus depriving the immigrants of protection from arrest and detention—then taking them into custody.”

While some are undocumented entrants, many of those snatched up in these courthouse arrests are legal applicants for asylum.

Eckert explained that “these sorts of actions were outside the norm historically for ICE agents.”

“Yet under Trump’s second term, immigration courts have shifted from being seen as relatively safe venues into places where immigrants face the risk of surveillance, arrest, and sometimes even violence,” he said.

While the Trump administration often describes those arrested by ICE as “the worst of the worst,” immigration data as of September 7 showed just over 70% of those currently detained have no criminal convictions. On Friday, The Guardian reported that a plurality of people currently in ICE custody have not even been charged with crimes.

Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) said that Moreta-Galarza “fled to my office for safety after she was assaulted by this [ICE] agent in an egregious act of excessive force.”

In a recorded interview after the incident, Goldman said his office would “continue to follow this particular story because it is just one example of too many where we have these secret police officers who are attacking our communities with excessive violence, excessive force, and they just think that they can do it with impunity because nobody is holding them accountable.”

Social media users later identified another video outside the same court in August, which appeared to show the same ICE agent forcibly prying a crying young girl away from her father as he is arrested and his family watched in tears.

In a statement provided to CBS News on Friday, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for DHS, called the agent’s conduct toward Moreta-Galarza “unacceptable.”

“Our ICE law enforcement are held to the highest professional standards and this officer is being relieved of current duties as we conduct a full investigation,” she said.

New York City comptroller Brad Lander, who has been arrested twice at the facility—once in June while escorting an immigrant out of his court hearing and again last week while protesting the facility—expressed outrage at the treatment of Moreta-Galarza and her family.

“An ICE agent violently threw this bereft woman to the ground in front of her kids. She had not touched him. She did not pose any threat. She had to be taken to the hospital,” Lander said. “Seconds earlier, her husband had been abducted by masked ICE agents who did not identify themselves, did not present a warrant, did not give any lawful grounds for his detention.”

“Every day, masked ICE agents are acting violently against our neighbors, illegally abducting them, holding them in cruel and inhumane conditions. Treating them as less-than-human and not deserving due process,” Lander continued. “We will not stop bearing witness, stop condemning them, or stop doing all we can to stand up to this lawless behavior.”

Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, called the agent’s behavior “sickening,” and said, “the fact that Mayor [Eric] Adams has rolled out the red carpet for ICE is a stain on our city.”

After being discharged from the hospital, Moreta-Galarza spoke about her experience to reporters.

“Over [in Ecuador], they beat us there too,” she said in Spanish. “I didn’t think I’d come here to the United States and the same thing would happen to me.”

The US Department of Transportation began earlier this month to rescind federal funding for local projects across the country to improve street safety and add pedestrian trails and bike lanes, because they were deemed “hostile” to cars.

A report Monday in Bloomberg cited several examples of multimillion-dollar grants being axed beginning on September 9, all with the same rationale:

"A San Diego County road improvement project including bike lanes 'appears to reduce lane capacity and a road diet that is hostile to motor vehicles,' a US Department of Transportation official wrote, rescinding a $1.2 million grant it awarded nearly a year ago.
In Fairfield, Alabama, converting street lanes to trail space on Vinesville Road was also deemed 'hostile' to cars, and “counter to DOT’s priority of preserving or increasing roadway capacity for motor vehicles.”

"Officials in Boston got a similar explanation, as the Trump administration pulled back a previously awarded grant to improve walking, biking, and transit in the city’s Mattapan Square neighborhood in a way that would change the 'current auto-centric configuration.' Another grant to improve safety at intersections in the city was terminated, the DOT said, because it could “impede vehicle capacity and speed.”

These are just a few of the projects cancelled in recent weeks by the Trump administration. According to StreetsBlog, others included a 44-mile walking trail along the Naugatuck River in Connecticut, which the administration reportedly stripped funding from because it did not “promote vehicular travel,” and new miles of rail trail in Albuquerque for which DOT said funding would be reallocated to “‘car-focused’ projects instead.”

The cuts are part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to slash discretionary federal grants under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act signed by former President Joe Biden in 2021.

These include the RAISE infrastructure grant and Safe Streets and Roads for All programs, for which Congress has allocated a combined $2.5 billion annually to expand public transportation and address the US’s worsening epidemic of pedestrian deaths.

Data published in July by the group Transportation for America revealed that the Trump administration has been implementing funds for safety grants at about 10% of the speed of the Biden administration.

According to a report published in July by the Governors Highway Safety Association, US drivers struck and killed 7,148 pedestrians in 2024, “enough to fill more than 30 Boeing 737 jets at maximum capacity.” Though fatalities have decreased slightly from a 40-year peak in 2022, the number of fatalities last year was 20% higher than in 2016.

Research has overwhelmingly shown that adding bicycle and pedestrian lanes to streets can reduce these fatalities. Even the DOT’s own Federal Highway Administration website recommends introducing “Road Diets” that reduce four-lane intersections to three lanes, making room for pedestrian refuge islands and bike lanes to serve as a “buffer” between automobile traffic and sidewalks.

According to the website, “studies indicate a 19 to 47% reduction in overall crashes when a Road Diet is installed on a previously four-lane undivided facility as well as a decrease in crashes involving drivers under 35 years of age and over 65 years of age.”

Car crash fatalities are also up in general, according to preliminary data from the Department of Transportation: 39,345 were killed in motor accidents in 2024 compared with 32,744 a decade prior, a 20% increase.

Despite this, the Trump administration has made its preference for maximizing car travel abundantly clear. Trump has attempted to block California from constructing a massive new high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco and has tried to stymie New York’s wildly successful congestion pricing program.

Citing isolated cases of subway and train crime, he and other members of the Republican Party often paint public transit as excessively dangerous.

In one interview on Fox News in May, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy ranted that, “if you’re liberal, they want you to take public transportation.” While stating that he was “OK with public transportation,” he said, “the problem is that it’s dirty. You have criminals. It’s homeless shelters. It’s insane asylums. It’s a work ground for the criminal element of the city to prey upon the good people.”

However, data show that between 2007 and 2023, deaths from automobile accidents were 100 times more likely than deaths on buses and 20 times more likely than on passenger trains.

That hostility extends toward efforts to expand bicycle usage. In March, Duffy announced that the department would “review” all grants related to green infrastructure, including bike lanes, which was characterized as an effort to combat the previous president’s attempts to reduce US transportation’s carbon footprint.

Grant criteria sent to communities for the Safe Streets and Roads for All program explicitly warned communities that if “the applicant included infrastructure [resulting in] reducing lane capacity for vehicles,” the application would be “viewed less favorably by the department.”

When asked about this decision at a panel the next month, StreetsBlog reported that Duffy “grimaced and grumbled the word ‘bikes’ like it was an expletive, before repeating a string of corrosive myths about bike lanes that are all too common among people who only get around by car,” including that they supposedly increase traffic congestion.

Many of the communities that have lost funding for their projects say they are still going to move ahead with them in some capacity. However, they argue that the government providing funds to improve road safety should be common sense.

Rick Dunne, the executive director of the Naugatuck Valley Council of Governments, stated that the effort to build a trail along the river will continue, even without the funding. But he expressed bewilderment at the administration’s statement that investing in highway travel would better serve residents’ “quality of life.”

“Look, if your definition of improving quality of life is promoting vehicular travel, that’s just, on its face, bad. Increase vehicle travel, increase pollution, increase safety risks,” Dunne told the CT Post. “Taking this money from this project, putting it into highway travel, is in no way going to increase economic efficiency. I don’t see how you argue that it improves the quality of life of Americans, or the residents of this valley.”

Local police body camera footage released Monday has further called into question the government’s justification for an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent’s fatal shooting of Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, a 38-year-old father of two, in the Chicago suburb of Franklin Park on September 12 during a traffic stop.

In a statement justifying the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that Villegas-Gonzalez “refused to follow law enforcement’s commands and drove his car at law enforcement officers. One of the ICE officers was hit by the car and dragged a significant distance. Fearing for his own life, the officer fired his weapon.”

Video footage of the incident recorded by local businesses had already raised doubts about the government’s version of events, showing that Villegas-Gonzalez had not initially driven his car forward toward the agents, but that one of them had instead grabbed ahold of his window frame as he attempted to reverse.

Federal law enforcement’s refusal to provide information on the shooting has raised further suspicion, leading Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) and groups like Human Rights Watch to call for independent investigations.

The ICE agents who conducted the arrest were not wearing body cameras at the scene after the Trump administration scrapped a policy requiring them.

According to Belkis Wille, the associate director of the Human Rights Watch’s crisis, conflict, and arms division, who wrote about the shooting last week, “law enforcement officers can only use lethal force when an individual poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or another person.”

But the body camera footage from a Franklin Park police officer who responded to the scene, obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times, has cast doubt on DHS’s claims that one of the agents involved in the shooting had been severely injured.

In the video, the injured agent is shown with a large hole in his blue jeans, revealing a scraped knee. Over the radio, the other agent is heard explaining to police that his partner had suffered “a left knee injury and some lacerations to his hands.”

The injured agent said it was “Nothing major,” and his partner reiterated: “Nothing major.”

Later, after his partner was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, the other agent was heard explaining: “I think we’re good, man. Just shooken up a little.”

This video footage directly contradicts the description of events presented by DHS, that the agent “sustained multiple injuries” and was “seriously injured” by Villegas-Gonzalez’s car.

Democratic Rep. Delia Ramirez, a Chicago native, reacted to the video on social media: “An ICE agent shot Silverio dead. DHS lied about what happened.”

“There needs to be a full, thorough investigation into what happened that morning,” she added. “All camera footage must be released. And [Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi] Noem must come to the committee and account for ICE’s unlawfulness and lies.”

Jimmy Kimmel will return to the airwaves Tuesday night after his suspension by ABC was met with a massive public backlash. But while they say the comedian’s reinstatement is cause for celebration, advocates say that it’s just one small victory in a much larger fight against the Trump administration’s campaign to censor dissent.

Andrew O’Neill, the advocacy director of the group Indivisible, which called on its members to boycott ABC‘s parent company Disney in response to the company’s capitulation to President Donald Trump, said that Kimmel “wasn’t reinstated because Disney executives slept on it and had a change of heart.”

“He’s back on air because those executives got a wake-up call from the American public,” O’Neill said. “People all over the country showed up, canceling subscriptions, protesting outside ABC and Disney, Nexstar and more, and made it damn clear this political alliance with Trump was not in Disney’s best interest. Trump’s authoritarian playbook is unpopular, and when these CEOs comply, it’s not only cowardly. It’s unstrategic.”

Kimmel’s program was suspended last week after Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr threatened the broadcast licenses of local ABC affiliates, which led to pressure from the media conglomerates the Sinclair Broadcast Group and Nexstar to take action against Kimmel following comments he made criticizing Trump and his administration’s reaction to the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

Craig Aaron, co-CEO of the media monitoring nonprofit Free Press, said that Kimmel’s reinstatement shows that “protest works.” However, he said, “the Trump regime’s war on free speech is no joke—and it’s not over. Brendan Carr threatened the licenses of ABC affiliates with coercive, mafia-like threats because his boss in the White House didn’t like Kimmel’s views, a chilling First Amendment violation that would have forced any previous FCC chair to resign.”

“The next time the Trump administration uses its power to shut down dissent, a rich and famous comedian likely won’t be the target,” Aaron continued. “We are seeing journalists being fired and even deported for simply reporting the facts about this administration. Their stories are not making headline news, but the government’s attacks on their speech are no less important.”

In the days after Kimmel was forced off the air, Trump also threatened to strip the broadcasting licenses of networks that gave him “bad press,” saying, “They’re not allowed to do that.”

“While we’re glad Kimmel is back on air,” O’Neill said, “the fight doesn’t end here. FCC Chairman Carr still must be hauled up to Congress to testify. Sinclair and Nexstar must commit to airing the program and drop their wild demands. And Bob Iger and Disney must make it clear they are fully opposed to being bullied by Trump and his cronies.”

Sinclair and Nexstar, which own a combined 20% of ABC’s local news affiliates, said Tuesday that they will refuse to air Kimmel’s broadcast. In order for Kimmel to return, Sinclair—known for its efforts to push right-wing talking points into the mouths of local anchors—has demanded that Kimmel issue a public apology and make a “meaningful personal donation” to Kirk’s family and to his conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA.

As Aaron noted, Sinclair and Nexstar, two of the US’s largest owners of local media, are currently ”lobbying for a major merger requiring FCC approval,” which he said may explain why they were so eager to pressure ABC to comply with Carr’s demands. Last week, Democrats in the House of Representatives called on Carr to resign from his post and threatened to subject him to an investigation.

Beyond Carr, Aaron said that “Congress should investigate and put everyone involved under oath at a public hearing to get to the bottom of this threat to free speech” including Nexstar founder Perry Sook, Sinclair CEO Christopher Ripley and chairman David Smith, and Disney’s Iger, so the public can understand “what pressure the government put on these media companies and what they were promised in exchange for cutting shows from their lineup and silencing network voices.”

Lina Khan, the former chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), told MSNBC‘s Ali Velshi that the Kimmel saga is emblematic of a much broader problem of capitulation by corporations that have grown less accountable due to unchecked consolidation.

“Overwhelmingly, we have seen that some of the most powerful corporations in this country... have chosen profit and self-enrichment over any kind of commitment to democracy or the principles of liberty,” Khan said. “We’ve heard people say, ‘Well, actually, we really need to protect and pacify corporate interests because they’re going to be the ones that are going to stand up to government abuse. This moment should entirely disabuse us of that illusion.”

She discussed that this moment comes after “40 years of a bipartisan choice to accept a philosophy that basically thought monopolies are good, that consolidation was good.” As a recent article from the University of Chicago’s business school notes:

"In the past decade, consolidation of American TV broadcasting has accelerated and put 40% of all local TV news stations under the control of the three largest broadcast conglomerates: Gray Television, Nexstar Media Group, and Sinclair Broadcast Group. Their stations—each company now owns about 100 affiliated with ABC, CBS, FOX, or NBC—operate in more than 80 percent of US media markets."

“If you’re somebody who cares about protecting democracy, of course, we need to care about voting rights, making sure that elections are fair,” Khan said. “But we also need to make sure that we understand extreme concentration of economic power is incompatible with democracy, and that needs to be at the center of our democratic agenda too.”

Progressives are beginning to fear Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer may once again “cave” in budget negotiations with Senate Republicans, even as Democrats hold a crucial bargaining chip related to healthcare costs.

Democrats are pushing the GOP to make concessions in order to fund the government, namely by extending a health insurance subsidy that, if allowed to lapse, will result in tens of millions of Americans paying higher premiums at the end of the year.

They are also hoping to use the negotiations to curtail Trump’s ability to rescind federal funding appropriated by Congress and restore funds that have been stripped from public broadcasting and foreign aid.

On Friday, after Republicans passed their version of the bill through the House, both the Republican and Democratic versions of the Senate bills were struck down by the other side.

In an interview Sunday with Dana Bash on CNN, Schumer (D-NY) lamented that Republicans were attempting to ram a bill through with “zero input from Democrats,” adding that “that’s not how to get things done.”

Congressional Democrats have described a refusal to extend the healthcare subsidies as a red line. But Schumer has come across somewhat shakier in his commitment to that fight, saying last week that “We don’t have a red line, but we know we have to help the American people.”

Later in the interview with Bash, Schumer said, “I hope and pray that Trump will sit down with us and negotiate a bipartisan bill. That’s how it’s always been done in the past. That’s how shutdowns have been avoided in the past.”

Bash pushed Schumer to clarify his position: “If he doesn’t—I’m just confirming here—You will vote ‘no,’ is that correct?”

Schumer responded: “We are hoping that he will negotiate with us. So far, he hasn’t. We’ve had two bills in the House and Senate and neither of them have passed. Our Democrats are firm. We need to get something done to relieve the distress the American people are in.”

Bash again asked for clarity: “That sounded like a ‘yes,’ but you can confirm that, and we can move on. Is that accurate?”

Once again, he neglected to give a clear answer, instead reiterating that “The bottom line is that we must—we must—get a better bill than what they have, plain and simple.”

Schumer’s antics during his last budget showdown with Republicans are looming large in the minds of progressives. In March, the Democratic leader faced perhaps the greatest groundswell of outrage in his career when he abandoned promises to hold firm against a Republican-led continuing resolution that funded the government for six months and expanded Trump’s power to override Congress’s control over spending.

Many Democrats accused him of “caving,” with some calling for him to resign from leadership altogether.

Schumer justified the decision at the time by warning that a temporary shutdown would give Trump greater latitude to consolidate his power. Democrats who voted to break the stalemate also reportedly worried about the political ramifications of being blamed for a shutdown, which could disrupt the functioning of many government services and result in more layoffs of federal workers.

Republicans are reportedly betting that Schumer will cave once again. CNN‘s Manu Raju reported that late last week, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) told him that “Chuck Schumer is not gonna shut the government down.”

His unwillingness to make a firm commitment on Sunday has reignited fears that yet another capitulation may be coming—even as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and others warn that Republicans’ budget proposal would cause healthcare premiums to rise by an average of 75% for millions of Americans who are already struggling with the cost of living.

Sam Seder, host of the progressive talk show The Majority Report, called Schumer’s comments “pathetic.”

“It’s not an ultimatum if there are no consequences,” Seder said. “This is just Schumer begging Senate Republicans for a fig leaf to justify his coming cave and weak leadership.”

Mehdi Hasan, founder of the media outlet Zeteo, expressed bewilderment that Schumer had been reduced to “literally hoping and praying” for Republicans to act differently rather than using leverage.

Sixty votes would be needed for a continuing resolution to pass through the Senate, meaning that seven Democrats would need to join all 53 Republicans in order for it to pass. On Friday, just one Democrat, Sen. John Fetterman (Pa.), joined Republicans in voting for their version of the bill while Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Rand Paul (Ky.) joined Democrats in voting against it.

The progressive activist group Indivisible has urged constituents to call their Democratic senators and pressure them to use their bargaining power and reject any deal that does not include significant GOP concessions.

“The GOP is threatening to shut the government down at the end of this month unless Dems let them take healthcare away from millions and hand Trump another blank check to continue his power grab,” the group said in a call to action on Bluesky. “Democrats need to keep opposing any funding deal that enables GOP healthcare cuts or allows Trump’s chaos and lawlessness to go unchecked. We must make sure Democrats are fighting like hell and Republicans are held accountable.”

President Donald Trump’s Department of Education has announced that it will partner with right-wing think tanks and organizations to develop a new curriculum for “patriotic education” in American classrooms.

Earlier this week, the Trump administration redirected $137 million initially meant for programs aimed at minority students toward what it described as “American history and civics education.”

Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced Wednesday that the money will be directed toward discretionary grants aimed at K-12 schools that adopt a new curriculum being drawn up by the 250 Civics Education Coalition—a consortium of more than 40 right-wing groups that launched on same day. The goal, McMahon said, was to advance education that “emphasizes a unifying and uplifting portrayal of the nation’s founding ideals” in advance of the nation’s 250th anniversary in 2026.

It is not Trump’s first crack at instilling the nation’s youth with a “patriotic education.” In the waning days of his first term in office, Trump unveiled the 1776 Report, which, education columnist Jennifer Berkshire recently noted in The Baffler, “was widely panned by actual historians for its worshipful treatment of the Founding Fathers, its downplaying of slavery, and its portrayal of a century-old ‘administrative state’ controlled by leftist radicals.”

While little has been publicized yet about what McMahon’s new endeavor will look like, it is known who will be crafting it. The initiative is being led by the America First Policy Institute, a MAGA-aligned think tank that has been responsible for staffing Trump’s second administration and has received over $1 million from his political action committee, the Save America PAC. Until 2023, McMahon herself served on the board of AFPI.

In 2022, the group presented a piece of model legislation for a “Civics Course Act” to be introduced in states. It included requirements for students to spend ample time studying the nation’s founding documents and figures while banning the teaching of what it called the “defamatory history of America’s founding,” which suggests that slavery or inequality are in any way inherent to the nation’s institutions.

It also banned the concepts of “systemic racism” and “gender fluidity” and forbade teachers from giving students course credit for engaging with “social or public policy advocacy.”

Also included in the coalition is Hillsdale College, a private Christian liberal arts school in Michigan that has proposed its own K-12 curriculum, which Vanity Fair notes “has been criticized for revisionist history, including whitewashed accounts of US slavery and depictions of Jamestown as a failed communist colony.”

Another participant is PragerU, the overtly partisan and often factually loose YouTube channel that has been tasked with creating children’s educational content in nearly a dozen red states.

The group has produced content venerating figures notorious for practicing slavery, like colonist Christopher Columbus and Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Its videos have argued, among other things, that climate change is a myth, that European fascism was a “far-left” ideology, and that Israel has “the world’s most moral army.”

The pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA will also be involved in crafting the curriculum. Its longtime leader, Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated in Utah last week, went on a crusade last year to, in his words, “tell the truth” about Martin Luther King Jr., whom he described as “an awful person,” while claiming his signature achievement, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, was a “huge mistake.”

An offshoot of Kirk’s group, Turning Point Education, said Kirk’s assassination has increased its resolve to promote a “God-centered, virtuous education” in US public schools.

The 250 Civics Education Coalition has not yet published a curriculum. But according to the Department of Education, it will be rolling out “a robust programming agenda” over the next 12 months.

During Trump’s second term, he has undertaken an effort to purge federal museums and national parks of what one executive order called “improper ideology,” which has resulted in the erasure of exhibits and monuments to Black and Native American history. Last month, he lamented that the Smithsonian Museum focuses too much on “how bad slavery was” and ordered a review of the museum’s content.

Federal websites, meanwhile, have systematically eliminated many pages that acknowledged the accomplishments of nonwhite historical figures or important events in women’s and LGBTQ+ history.

Critics in the education world view Trump’s effort to use grants to induce them to adopt his preferred curriculum as an illegal effort to propagandize children.

“The law is clear,” said education historian Diane Ravitch in a blog post. “Federal officials are prohibited from seeking to influence or direct curriculum in any way.”

Since 1970, the federal government has been barred by law from “any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum” of public schools.

“Civic education is and must be non-partisan,” said Ted McConnell, the executive director of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools. “While the funding is long sought, this is the wrong approach and smacks of authoritarianism.”

This story was published in partnership with Common Dreams. Read the original story here.

Free speech advocates are sounding the alarm about a bill in the US House of Representatives that they fear could allow Secretary of State Marco Rubio to strip US citizens of their passports based purely on political speech.

The bill, introduced by Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL), will come up for a hearing on Wednesday. According to The Intercept:

Mast’s new bill claims to target a narrow set of people. One section grants the secretary of state the power to revoke or refuse to issue passports for people who have been convicted—or merely charged—of material support for terrorism...

The other section sidesteps the legal process entirely. Rather, the secretary of state would be able to deny passports to people whom they determine “has knowingly aided, assisted, abetted, or otherwise provided material support to an organization the Secretary has designated as a foreign terrorist organization.”

Rubio has previously boasted of stripping the visas and green cards from several immigrants based purely on their peaceful expression of pro-Palestine views, describing them as “Hamas supporters.”

These include Columbia protest leader Mahmoud Khalil, who was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after Rubio voided his green card; and Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts student whose visa Rubio revoked after she co-wrote an op-ed calling for her school to divest from Israel.

Mast—a former soldier for the Israel Defense Forces who once stated that babies were “not innocent Palestinian civilians”—has previously called for “kicking terrorist sympathizers out of our country,” speaking about the Trump administration’s attempts to deport Khalil, who was never convicted or even charged with support for a terrorist group.

Critics have argued that the bill has little reason to exist other than to allow the Secretary of State to unilaterally strip passports from people without them actually having been convicted of a crime.

As Kia Hamadanchy, a senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, noted in The Intercept, there is little reason to restrict people convicted of terrorism or material support for terrorism, since—if they were guilty—they’d likely be serving a long prison sentence and incapable of traveling anyway.

“I can’t imagine that if somebody actually provided material support for terrorism, there would be an instance where it wouldn’t be prosecuted—it just doesn’t make sense,” he said.

Journalist Zaid Jilani noted on X that “judges can already remove a passport over material support for terrorism, but the difference is you get due process. This bill would essentially make Marco Rubio judge, jury, and executioner.”

The bill does contain a clause allowing those stripped of their passports to appeal to Rubio. But, as Hamadanchy notes, the decision is up to the secretary alone, “who has already made this determination.” He said that for determining who is liable to have their visa stripped, “There’s no standard set. There’s nothing.”

As Seth Stern, the director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, noted in The Intercept, the language in Mast’s bill is strikingly similar to that found in the so-called “nonprofit killer” provision that Republicans attempted to pass in July’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act. That provision, which was ultimately struck from the bill, would have allowed the Treasury Secretary to unilaterally strip nonprofit status from anything he deemed to be a “terrorist-supporting organization.”

Stern said Mast’s bill would allow for “thought policing at the hands of one individual.”

“Marco Rubio has claimed the power to designate people terrorist supporters based solely on what they think and say,” he said, “even if what they say doesn’t include a word about a terrorist organization or terrorism.”

In a decision that has terrified medical professionals, Florida's surgeon general announced Wednesday that he would seek to end all childhood vaccine requirements in the state, which he compared to "slavery."

Currently, Florida requires children to be immunized against deadly diseases like measles, mumps, chickenpox, polio, and hepatitis to attend public school.

At a press conference alongside the state's anti-vaccine Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida's surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, said that he believed the decision to make these vaccinations optional would receive the blessing of "God."

"Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery," Ladapo said of the mandates. "People have a right to make their own decisions. Who am I, as a government or anyone else, to tell you what you should put in your body? Our body is a gift from God. What you put into your body is because of your relationship with your body and your God."

Many Republican-led states have rolled back requirements for residents to receive the COVID-19 vaccination and, in some cases, restricted access to it. But Ladapo, who has in the past been caught personally altering data to exaggerate the risks of the COVID-19 vaccine, is treading new ground with his pledge to eliminate "every last one" of the state's childhood vaccine mandates, something no state, red or blue, has done.

While Ladapo's decision is unprecedented, it is in step with the position of the current Republican Party, which is making health policy under the stewardship of longtime anti-vaccine influencer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, who is the secretary of Health and Human Services under President Donald Trump.

Kennedy has limited who is eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine and is reportedly considering pulling it from the market altogether. And alongside a handpicked panel of anti-vaccine activists, he has also launched an effort to revise the entire childhood vaccine schedule.

In April, as a measles epidemic swept through pockets of Texas with low vaccination rates and killed two unvaccinated children, Kennedy downplayed the disease's severity and hyped long-disproven claims about the dangers of the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine, which virtually eradicated the disease in the U.S. for over 20 years.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of parents declining to vaccinate their children has soared across the US. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, during the 2019-20 school year, just three U.S. states had rates of MMR vaccination lower than 90%. In 2025, that number had increased to 16.

As of July, 1,280 measles cases had been reported in the U.S.—the most cases since 1992, before the MMR vaccine became part of the standard childhood vaccine schedule. In 92% of cases involving children and teenagers, the people who became infected were either unvaccinated or had unknown vaccination statuses.

Following news of Florida's decision to end childhood vaccine requirements, Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, told the Washington Post: "We can expect that measles will come roaring back. Other infectious diseases will follow. This is an unprecedented move that will only put our children at unnecessary risk."

Measles is not the only vaccine-preventable illness experiencing a resurgence. After the rate of whooping cough vaccinations dropped below the 95% threshold required for herd immunity during the 2023-24 school year, the number of cases of the disease doubled, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

"Florida will repeat what happened in West Texas, where immunization rates are low," said Dr. Peter Jay Hotez, a pediatrician who serves as Dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. "All for health freedom propaganda, and lousy Fox News sound bites."

According to CDC data, Florida has one of the lowest rates of childhood vaccination in the country, with just over 88% of kindergarteners receiving the required shots in the 2023-24 school year. But just as they did in Texas, the effects may harm people across the country.

"Florida's decision to erase school vaccine requirements will cause preventable illness and death. Not just for kids in Florida, for whole communities, of all ages, across the country," said Dr. Andrea Love, an immunologist and microbiologist, who writes a newsletter responding to medical misinformation. "Pathogens don't follow state lines."

Dr. Robert Steinbrook, director of Public Citizen's Health Research Group, called the plan "a recipe for disaster and exactly the wrong approach to protecting state residents from infectious diseases."

"High immunization rates against dangerous infectious diseases such as measles and polio protect individuals as well as their communities," Steinbrook said. "If this plan moves forward, Florida will terminate one of the most effective means of limiting the spread of infectious diseases and embolden [Kennedy] to wreak even more havoc on vaccinations nationally. The Florida Legislature and state residents must vociferously reject these plans."

The US Department of Energy's July climate report is "biased, full of errors, and not fit to inform policymaking," according to a comprehensive review released Tuesday by a group of 85 scientists who reviewed the document independently.

The department's "Climate Working Group" drew up the report as part of the effort by President Donald Trump to fatally undermine the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) determination, commonly known as the "endangerment finding," that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane endanger human lives by warming the planet.

"If successful," Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M, says, "this move could unravel virtually every US climate regulation on the books, from car emissions standards to power plant rules."

The Energy Department's nearly 150-page paper, titled "A Critical Review of the Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the US Climate." Dessler describes its five authors as "climate contrarians who dispute mainstream science." The team behind the report, he argues, was "hand-picked" by Energy Secretary Chris Wright to lend legitimacy to the Trump administration's predetermined conclusions about climate science.

The DOE report's five authors seek to contradict the much more rigorous analyses conducted by groups like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose reports have been written by over a thousand researchers and which cite tens of thousands of academic studies.

The multinational panel has concluded that human fossil fuel usage has considerably warmed the planet, causing increased amounts of extreme weather, threatening food and water security, destroying ecosystems, and risking dangerous amounts of sea-level rise.

The Energy Department's report advances the main idea that climate scientists like those at the IPCC broadly "overstate" the extent of the human-caused climate crisis as well as its risks. Unlike other research of its kind, the department crafted its report in secret, which prompted the expert response.

"Normally, a report like this would undergo a rigorous, unbiased, and transparent peer review," said Dr. Robert Kopp, a climate and sea-level researcher at Rutgers. "When it became clear that DOE wasn't going to organize such a review, the scientific community came together on its own, in less than a month, to provide it."

Their review found that the Energy Department's report "exhibits pervasive problems with misrepresentation and selective citation of the scientific literature, cherry-picking of data, and faulty or absent statistics."

For instance, the report claims that there is "no obvious acceleration in sea-level rise" even though the number of days of high-tide coastal flooding per year has increased more than 10-fold since the 1970s.

It also attempts to portray CO2 emissions as a net benefit to the environment, particularly agriculture, by pointing to its benefits for crop growth, but ignores that the impact of increased droughts and wildfires far outweighs those benefits.

And it attempts to pick out isolated historical weather events like the Dust Bowl during the 1930s as evidence that dramatic climatic changes happen very frequently within short amounts of time and that the unprecedented increase in global temperatures over the past century and a half is not worthy of alarm.

"My reading of the report uncovered numerous errors of commission and omission, all of which slant toward a conclusion that human-caused climate change poses no serious risks," said Kerry Emmanuel, a meteorologist and climate scientist who specializes in hurricane physics. "It seems to work backward from a desired outcome."

Dessler notes that over 99% of the literature included in the IPCC's report was simply ignored by the Department of Energy. He described the report as a "mockery of science" akin to a "Soviet show trial."

"The outcome of this exercise by the Department of Energy is already known: climate science will be judged too uncertain to justify the endangerment finding," he said. "Once you understand that, everything about the DOE report makes total sense."

In 2025, the US National Weather Service issued a record number of flash flood warnings, while 255 million Americans were subject to life-threatening triple-digit temperatures in June. The previous year, 48 of 50 US states faced drought conditions, the most ever recorded in US history, while nearly 9 million acres burned due to wildfires.

"We live in a world where the impacts of climate change are increasingly being felt by citizens all around the globe—including communities throughout the US," said Andra Gardner, a professor of environmental science at Rowan University.

"This is perhaps what makes the DOE Climate Working Group report most astounding," she continued. "In a country where we have the tools to not only understand the impacts of climate change but also to begin meaningfully combating the crisis, the current DOE has instead decided to promote fossil fuel interests that will further worsen the symptoms of climate change with a report that turns a blind eye to the established science."

According to an analysis from Climate Power published in January, oil and gas industry donors gave $96 million in direct donations to the campaign of Donald Trump and affiliated super PACs during the 2024 election, while spending $243 million to lobby Republicans in Congress.

The result has been an administration that has purged climate science information from federal websites, laid off thousands of EPA employees, and gutted government funding for wind and solar energy.

Becca Neumann, an associate professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of Washington, says that "the goal" of the report "is clear: to justify inaction and avoid meaningful emissions reductions."

Unions and progressive organizations are planning nearly 1,000 "Workers Over Billionaires" demonstrations across the United States this Labor Day to protest President Donald Trump's assault on workers' rights.

The day of national action has been organized by the May Day Strong coalition, which includes labor organizations like the AFL-CIO, American Federation of Teachers, and National Union of Healthcare Workers, as well as advocacy groups like Americans for Tax Fairness, Indivisible, Our Revolution, and Public Citizen.

"Labor and community are planning more than a barbecue on Labor Day this year because we have to stop the billionaire takeover," the coalition says. "Billionaires are stealing from working families, destroying our democracy, and building private armies to attack our towns and cities."

Since coming into office, the Trump administration has waged war on workers' rights. Among many other actions, his administration has stripped over a million federal workers of their right to collectively bargain in what has been called the largest act of union busting in American history and dramatically cut their wages.

He has also weakened workplace safety enforcement, eliminated rules that protected workers against wage theft, and proposed eliminating the federal minimum wage for more than 3.7 million childcare and home workers.

Despite Trump's efforts, Americans still believe in the power of collective action. According to a Gallup poll published Thursday, 68% of Americans say they approve of labor unions, the highest level of support since the mid-1960s.

"Just like any bad boss, the way we stop the takeover is with collective action," the coalition says on its website.

The May Day Strong coalition previously organized hundreds of thousands of workers to take to the streets for International Workers Day, more commonly known as "May Day." On Monday, rallies are once again expected across all 50 states.

Four months later, their list of grievances has grown even longer, with Republicans having since passed a tax cut expected to facilitate perhaps the largest upward transfer of wealth in US history, featuring massive tax breaks for the wealthy paid for with historic cuts to the social safety net.

"There are nearly 1,000 billionaires in the country with a whopping $6 trillion, and that is still not enough for them," said Saqib Bhattie, executive director of the Action Center on Race and the Economy, another group participating in the protests. "They are pushing elected officials to slash Medicaid, [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] benefits, and special education funding for schools in order to fund their tax breaks. We need to claw back money from the billionaire. We need to push legislation to tax billionaires at the state and local levels. We need to organize to build the people power necessary to overcome their money."

The group also plans to respond to Trump's lawless attacks on immigrants and his militarized takeovers of American cities.

"This Labor Day," said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, "we continue the fight for our democracy, the fight for the soul of our nation, the fight against the vindictive authoritarian moves Trump and the billionaire class aimed at stealing from working people and concentrating power."

"This is about workers showing up and demanding what workers deserve all across the country," said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. "This Labor Day is really different, because it's not just labor unions, as important as we may be to the workers we represent. It has to be all workers and all working families saying enough. Workers and working families deserve the bounty of the country."

May Day Strong will host a national "mass call" online on Saturday. The locations of the hundreds of protests on Monday can be found using the map on May Day Strong's website.

A pair of House Republicans is moving forward with an investigation that will seek to reveal the identities of Wikipedia editors who have edited articles to include information that portrays Israel negatively.

On Wednesday, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chair of the House Oversight Committee, and Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), chair of the House Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation, sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that owns the free encyclopedia.

The representatives asked Wikimedia's CEO, Maryana Iskander, for "assistance in obtaining documents and communications regarding individuals (or specific accounts) serving as Wikipedia volunteer editors who violated Wikipedia platform policies as well as your own efforts to thwart intentional, organized efforts to inject bias into important and sensitive topics."

The letter requested information about "nation state actors" or "academic institutions" that may have been involved in efforts to "edit or influence content identified as possibly violating Wikipedia policies."

A spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation told The Hill that they were reviewing the request.

"We welcome the opportunity to respond to the committee's questions and to discuss the importance of safeguarding the integrity of information on our platform," the spokesperson said.

The GOP investigation coincides with a long-standing objective of the far-right Heritage Foundation, which has accused Wikipedia of anti-conservative bias and promoting content that portrays Israel in a negative light, and sought to unmask the identities of the internet users who run it.

The letter sent by Comer and Mace requests that Wikimedia provide Congress with "records showing identifying and unique characteristics of accounts (such as names, IP addresses, registration dates, user activity logs) for editors" who have been "subject to actions" by Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee, which resolves internal disputes between editors.

It was, in essence, a request by Congress for Wikipedia to "dox" many of its editors.

"In the culture of Wikipedia editing, it is common for individuals to use pseudonyms to protect their privacy and avoid personal threats," wrote tech writer and Wikipedia expert Stephen Harrison for Slate in February. "Revealing an editor's personal information without their consent, a practice known as doxing, is a form of harassment that can result in a user's being permanently banned from the site."

Of chief concern to the legislators is investigating Wikipedia's handling of content related to Israel. They cited a report from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a pro-Israel lobbying group, which the legislators said "raised troubling questions about potentially systematic efforts to advance antisemitic and anti-Israel information in Wikipedia articles related to conflicts with the state of Israel."

The ADL report makes the allegation that 30 "bad-faith" Wikipedia editors, whose identities are not public, were collaborating to edit pages about the Israel-Palestine conflict by "spotlighting criticism of Israel and downplaying Palestinian terrorist violence and antisemitism," and in the process violating Wikipedia's commitment to neutrality.

That report, however, has been heavily criticized, including by some of the academics it cited. In a piece for The Forward, Shira Klein, whose research on Wikipedia's documentation of the Holocaust appears in the report, said the ADL "inaccurately" used her work, and the work of others, as part of its "ramped-up efforts to police public discourse about Israel," and quoted other researchers who felt the same.

Klein described the study's interpretation of the facts as "very skewed" and said it was reliant "on a faulty premise: that criticism of Israel or Zionism is inherently antisemitic."

"To establish foul play, the ADL would need to demonstrate that Wikipedia content about Israel and Zionism regularly expresses as fact ideas that diverge from broadly held scholarly opinions on the matters in question," Klein said. "But where is the evidence of editors repeatedly misrepresenting or contradicting peer-reviewed literature? There is none. The report simply wants us to take the ADL's word for it."

The ADL's report, as well as a similar report from the Atlantic Council alleging that Wikipedia editors had conspired to spread pro-Kremlin propaganda, are the sole pieces of evidence cited by Comer and Mace in their request for identifying information on Wikipedia's editors.

However, right-wing efforts to undermine Wikipedia's independence and attack the privacy of its editors go back much further.

In January, documents obtained by The Forward's Arno Rosenfeld revealed a secret plan by Heritage, the think tank behind the authoritarian Project 2025 playbook, to "identify and target Wikipedia editors" who the organization said were "abusing their position."

Among the methodologies it directed Heritage employees to use include "analyzing text patterns, usernames, and technical data through data breach analysis, fingerprinting, [human intelligence], and technical targeting."

The targeting methods also included "creating fake Wikipedia user accounts to try to trick editors into identifying themselves by sharing personal information or clicking on malicious tracking links that can identify people who click on them."

According to Rosenfeld, "The Heritage Foundation sent the pitch deck outlining the Wikipedia initiative to Jewish foundations and other prospective supporters of Project Esther, its roadmap for fighting antisemitism and anti-Zionism."

Jewish Voice for Peace has described Project Esther as Heritage's "blueprint for using the federal government and private institutions to dismantle the Palestine solidarity movement and broader US civil society, under the guise of 'fighting antisemitism.'"

"Even if you take issue with how the site is currently framing the conflict, that doesn't justify Heritage's plan," Harrison wrote. "Targeting Wikipedia editors personally, instead of debating their edits on the platform, marks a dangerous escalation."

Coming amid the Trump administration's crackdowns against campus protests and efforts to deport immigrants over pro-Palestine speech, critics have described the House Republican investigation as the latest GOP attempt to censor criticism and the spread of unflattering information about Israel.

Adam Johnson, a co-host for the political podcast Citations Needed, described it in a post on X as "House Republicans working with the ADL and Atlantic Council to discipline Wikipedia into parroting the Israeli and NATO line."

Johnson noted that this push was coming as the clear majority of Americans, including an overwhelming number of Democrats, now oppose US support for Israel, with many now believing the country is committing a genocide.

"Rather than end the genocide," Johnson said, "the response instead is to continue firing, doxing, smearing, and attempting to censor inconvenient narratives."

Another horrific mass shooting that left multiple children dead and injured has once again ignited a wave of fury at Republican lawmakers who refuse to take action to stop gun violence.

Two children—ages 8 and 10—were killed when a gunman fired through the windows of a church at the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis on Wednesday morning. Another 17 people, including 14 more children, were also injured in the attack before the gunman died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Minneapolis police say the gunman carried out his attack, which is now being investigated as an act of domestic terrorism, using three weapons: a rifle, a shotgun, and a pistol.

According to the Gun Violence Archive, not even eight months into 2025, there have already been 286 mass shootings—defined as cases in which four or more people are shot or killed—in the United States just this year, averaging more than one per day.

Gun violence is the number-one killer of children in the US, causing more deaths each year than car accidents, poisonings, and cancer. The victims of the shooting in Minneapolis join the more than 800 children killed and more than 2,200 injured by firearms this year.

Like dozens of mass shootings before it, Wednesday's deadly attack has stoked calls in Minnesota and around the country from Democratic lawmakers and gun control advocates for stricter gun laws, which have been repeatedly shot down by Republicans in Congress.

"We need better laws on the books nationally," said Minnesota's Democratic senator, Amy Klobuchar. "When you have so much access to guns right now and so many guns out there on the streets, you're going to continue to see these kinds of mass shootings."

"Don't just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now," said Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. "These kids were literally praying. It was the first week of school. They were in a church."

"They should be able to go to school or church in peace without the fear or risk of violence, and their parents should have the same kind of assurance," Frey said. "These are the sort of basic assurances that every family should have every step of the day, regardless of where they are in our country."

Congress has not passed a significant piece of gun legislation since 2022, when it passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act in the wake of the horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

That law, which was supported by just 15 Republicans, introduced some modest reforms—including extended background checks for firearm purchasers under 21, funding for state red flag laws, and the closure of gun purchasing loopholes.

However, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) only agreed to negotiate the bill if Democrats abandoned more ambitious reforms, such as bans on high-capacity magazines and universal background checks.

Since its passage, even this watered-down piece of legislation has been fought aggressively by Republican lawmakers backed by the gun industry's lobbying arm, the National Rifle Association, who have attempted to have it repealed.

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to present an action plan to reverse any law that the Department of Justice determines has "impinged on the Second Amendment rights of our citizens."

Through executive orders, Trump has rolled back efforts under the Biden administration to regulate ghost guns and enhance background checks.

The administration has also choked off more than $800 million in grants to local gun violence prevention groups and pushed for "concealed carry reciprocity" legislation, which would require all states to honor concealed carry permits issued by other states.

Instead of stricter gun control measures, Trump has personally advocated for schools to arm teachers and focus on improving mental healthcare—even as he's rolled back rules ensuring Americans have access to that care.

"Until we have more elected officials willing to place gun safety over allegiance to the gun lobby, more and more families will face unbearable suffering from random acts of violence," said Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) on Wednesday. "Congress could—and should—pass stricter gun safety laws, but continues to cave to the gun lobby."

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) added: "The United States continues to be the only country where school shootings are a regular occurrence. We must stop this epidemic of gun violence and finally put the lives of our kids first."

Other advocates noted the contrast between Trump's response to the imaginary "crime wave" in Washington, DC, where he has initiated a militarized takeover, and his lack of interest in fighting America's endless wave of gun violence.

"Guns are the leading cause of death for kids in the US," said Melanie D'Arrigo, the executive director of the Campaign for New York Health. "Trump will send the military into DC to pick up litter and arrest homeless people, but won't do a damn thing to end the gun violence epidemic killing our kids."

Charles Idelson, a former communications director for National Nurses United, said: "If Trump wants to pretend he is 'fighting crimes,' stop protecting the pro-gun violence cabal."

An executive order signed Monday by President Donald Trump may permit "random fascist vigilantes" to help him crack down on protests across the country, according to one prominent civil rights lawyer.

The new order, which comes amid wider concern about Trump's militarized takeover of Washington, D.C., directs Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to ensure that each state's National Guard is equipped to "assist Federal, State, and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety."

To that end, it orders the secretary to create a "standing National Guard quick reaction force" that "can be deployed whenever the circumstances necessitate," not just in the nation's capital but in "other cities where public safety and order has been lost."

Monday's order calls for the creation of "an online portal for Americans with law enforcement or other relevant backgrounds and experience." Agency heads then "shall each deputize the members of this unit to enforce federal law."

Alec Karakatsanis, the executive director of the Civil Rights Corps, described it in a post on X as "an online portal to permit random fascist vigilantes to join soldiers," adding that it was "one of the scariest things I've seen in US politics in my adult life."

Earlier this month, the Washington Post reported on an internal memo discussing the creation of a "quick reaction force," which outlined its objectives in clearer detail.

It called for 600 National Guard troops to be "on standby at all times so they can deploy in as little as one hour," to "American cities facing protests or other unrest." It did not specifically mention the involvement of civilians.

Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the pro-democracy advocacy group Public Citizen, said on Monday that the executive order represents a dangerous expansion of Trump's authoritarian takeover.

"Freedom of speech and the right to assembly are foundational constitutional rights, and the Posse Comitatus Act prevents the use of the military domestically," Gilbert warned in a statement. "The moves outlined in this overreaching and unnecessary executive action undercut those foundational rights and are egregious steps by a wanna-be-dictator who is placing the pursuit of power above the well-being of our country."

During his second term, Trump has maintained friendly relations with far-right militia groups. He pardoned over a thousand people involved in the violent insurrection of January 6, 2021, including members of the militant Proud Boys group, which Trump infamously told to "stand back and stand by" amid 2020's racial justice protests in American cities.

He has also met with its leader, Enrique Tarrio, who, along with Oath Keepers militia leader Stewart Rhodes, had previously suggested after his pardon that their groups could help Trump serve "retribution" upon his enemies.

The Oath Keepers also notably used the same term "quick reaction force" to refer to its efforts to transfer weapons across state lines to have them ready in DC to help with efforts to overturn Trump's election loss on January 6.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration—attempting to swell the ranks of Immigration and Customs Enforcement—eliminated degree requirements for new recruits, lowered the minimum age to 18, and introduced a fat $50,000 signing bonus, along with student loan relief.

In The Atlantic, technology reporter Ali Breland noted that members of the Proud Boys he'd been monitoring "seemed to be particularly pleased by the government's exciting career opportunity."

Since Trump took over law enforcement in Washington, DC, onlookers have described and documented countless egregious civil rights violations.

Jesse Rabinowitz of the DC-based National Homeless Law Center has described the dystopian scene on the ground in a post on X.

"There are full-on police checkpoints most nights," he said. "Every day, multiple friends see ICE kidnapping people. Daycares are scared to have kids go on walks due to ICE."

According to research by the libertarian Cato Institute published earlier this month, one in five people arrested by ICE have been Latinos with no criminal past or removal orders against them from the government, which they called a "telltale sign of illegal profiling."

Karkatsanis warns that through his latest order, Trump has created a "vigilante portal" where anyone can "sign up to be a Brownshirt to brutalize poor people, immigrants, people of color, and anyone else who might dare to, say, go to a protest."

He says that it "should be a nonstop emergency news alert," but that "instead, mainstream news and Democrats are barely mentioning it."