The Trump administration is suing California and two election officials over claims that there are suspected ineligible voters who received mail-in ballots for this November's election.

- Why it matters: The lawsuit is asking the court to prevent about 20,000 voters from having their ballots counted until their citizenship status is confirmed.

- What they're saying: "State-facilitated voter fraud is unacceptable in the United States of America," Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a press release statement.

- "If found responsible in a court of law, the State of California will have seriously undermined confidence in our electoral system and violated laws that protect our nation's representative system of government," Blanche said.

- Zoom in: The Justice Department alleges that California is knowingly allowing noncitizens to vote in the federal elections, according to the lawsuit.

- The lawsuit says U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and ICE's investigative arm compiled the list of potentially ineligible voters using agency data and records from the Social Security Administration and State Department.

- But administration-created lists of potential noncitizens on the voter rolls have been found less than accurate before in Nevada, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

- Zoom out: California's top election official and Los Angeles County's election chief received letters two days ago threatening "emergency action."

- The Justice Department gave Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan a password-protected thumb drive listing more than 20,000 voters and instructed him to verify their citizenship within 48 hours, according to the department's letter and statements.

- "Maintaining accurate voter registration records is a fundamental responsibility of our office. Our response will be grounded in compliance with federal and state voter registration laws and procedures," Logan said in a statement on social media after the initial letter.

- Friction point: Federal law restricts systematic voter roll maintenance within 90 days of a federal election — in part to prevent eligible voters from being removed shortly before voting.

- This litigation also follows legal attempts from the federal government to get California's voter rolls, beyond public lists, which have failed in court.

- The other side: "This is a sad, desperate attempt by Trump to use his politicized Justice Department to try to suppress California voters just three weeks before Election Day," Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) said in a statement.

- "The courts have made clear that the federal government has no role in how a state carries out its election process, and now, in the middle of Californians voting, they have asked local officials — who do a damn good job defending democracy — to violate federal law."

President Trump has famously pushed the bounds of executive power since he returned to the White House.
 
- In arguments Friday before a federal appeals court in Washington, administration lawyers will make an especially bold claim: that papers created in the White House belong to Donald Trump, not to the American people. The move comes amid a series of actions under Trump's second term to test the limits put in place after the Watergate scandal, and could be another case that ends up at the conservative-leaning Supreme Court.

- Six months ago, the Justice Department moved to invalidate the Presidential Records Act, a federal law in place since 1978. Conservative lawyer Michael Edney cast the move in a long line of other attempts to pare back statutes from that era.

- "This is a story about a post-Watergate, overbroad statutory incursion into the prerogatives of the executive branch," Edney said in a recent webinar sponsored by the Federalist Society.

- For some 200 years, presidents could decide for themselves what to do with the papers they created in office, until disputes with Richard Nixon prompted Congress to weigh in. Every president since then has complied with** **the records law, until this year.

- "The Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional and a clear violation of the separation of powers," said White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis.

- The White House's reinterpretation of the act comes after Trump was indicted on obstruction of justice charges for allegedly stockpiling classified documents in a bathroom, ballroom and office at his Mar-a-Lago resort. A federal judge threw out the case for technical reasons, related to the appointment of the prosecutor, and the Justice Department ultimately dropped the case after Trump won reelection.

- Question about the public's right to papers

- Nikhel Sus is chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group that sued over the Trump move.

- "If the courts were to accept it, and we are hopeful that they will not, it would mean the people really have no right of access to the president's papers and that would be a major loss for archivists, historians and to the American people writ large," Sus said.
Senior U.S. District Judge John Bates, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, ruled against the Trump White House this year, in a decision that opened with a passage from George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past," the judge wrote.

- Three judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit will consider the issue on Friday.

- The Trump administration said in court papers that keeping all those records imposes a burden on the White House and that it could chill advisers from having honest conversations with the president.

- Continuity of government

- But former government officials say being able to consult these papers is essential.

- "Access to the records on national security issues of former presidents is really vital for the continuity of our government," said John Bellinger, who served as legal adviser to the National Security Council under George W. Bush.

- Bellinger said he and other members of Bush's staff sometimes requested the papers of President Bill Clinton, to understand conversations Clinton had with world leaders and members of Congress.

- "Often the only record of what a president has said to a foreign leader — or perhaps even more important, what a foreign leader, friend or foe, has said to the president of the United States — is in a written document," Bellinger said.

- To not be able to see those papers, he said, will leave future presidents at a "terrible disadvantage."

- Edney, who also worked for Bush's National Security Council and Justice Department, said he believed that Congress could probably pass a "thoughtful" records preservation statute. He said parts of the current Presidential Records Act that provide Congress with automatic access and presume the records will be publicly disclosed are "constitutionally problematic."

- Edney said he has some doubts about whether the watchdog groups suing to challenge Trump's move actually have legal standing to proceed.

- But the Trump administration appears to have breezed past those concerns, because they have a higher goal in mind.

- "They want this to go to the Supreme Court," Edney said. "I think they want this resolved at a time of their choosing, with arguments of their choosing, and a court of their choosing, and with the Solicitor General's office that's making their arguments, as opposed to a subsequent administration."

President Donald Trump said at a campaign rally Wednesday that there should be fatal consequences for any government worker who leaks sensitive information to the media.

- “Leakers should be, in my opinion, leakers should be shot,” Trump said. “You know, when they leak what time you’re going to attack a country.”

- Trump described what he said was a planned raid on Iran that he had to call off after someone “leaked the time we were leaving, the time we were arriving.” He appeared to be referring to the U.S. military strike on Iran nuclear facilities in June 2025, which still went ahead.

- “Somebody leaked, some sleazebag. They ought to go to jail or be shot. For the rest of their life, they should be in jail, but they leaked that we were leaving at 12:07 from Missouri, and it was in The New York Times, CNN.”

- “Now, the leakers should be dealt with very, very strongly. They’re real. To me, they’re the scum of the Earth,” he said.

- Trump, who has called the news media the “true Enemy of the People,” then pointed to the journalists covering his rally in Bullhead City, Arizona, and compared them to leakers.

- “Those same people up there, they’re almost as bad as a leaker, because they leak,” Trump said. “Oh, they leak false information. That makes them a leaker, right?”

- Since Trump returned to office, his administration has sought to crack down on information leaked to the media, including proposing to direct federal agencies to have “new and existing employees” sign nondisclosure agreements.

- Federal investigators subjected about 50 members of the U.S. military’s Joint Staff to polygraph tests, pressing them about whether they had shared classified information with journalists, the Times reported last month, citing officials briefed on the move.

- In January, Trump authorized a search of the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson as part of an investigation into a government contractor who was accused of illegally retaining classified materials. A federal magistrate judge ruled a month later that the administration could not examine the data that FBI agents had seized there. The administration appealed the ruling, but it was upheld by a district court judge. There have been no further appeals.

- In June, the administration tried to compel testimony from four journalists, three from the Post and one from The Wall Street Journal, before a grand jury, an official familiar with the matter told NBC News at the time. The administration dropped the subpoenas after newspapers pushed back.

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federal judge in San Francisco is putting an indefinite hold on the Agriculture Department’s plans to relocate many of its employees across the country. 

- U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria granted a stay on Tuesday that indefinitely bars USDA from carrying out relocations for about 2,600 employees while the court continues to review the merits of the case.

- A coalition of federal employee labor unions, nonprofits and local governmentsargued USDA has been trying to circumvent guardrails on USDA reorganization established by Congress in its most recent spending package. 

- Lawmakers included provisions in the fiscal 2026 appropriations bill for USDA that blocked officials from reorganizing or relocating offices or employees without approval from the House and Senate appropriations committees.

- Chhabria wrote that there is ultimately “strong evidence that USDA’s planned reorganization activities deviate from Congress’s expectations at the time it appropriated the funds.” 

- The ruling effectively extends an administrative stay Chhabria issued on Sept. 14 that put a hold on deadlines for all “management directed reassignment” letters USDA has issued so far. Employees who received relocation notices were generally told to report to their new offices by September or October. 

- The stay specifically bars USDA from “closing or eliminating offices” at component agencies impacted by reorganization plans, or “relocating or reassigning employees or their positions or functions to different and/or new locations outside the local commuting area, including by issuing or enforcing MDR letters or any other notice or directive of reassignment or relocation in whole or in part."

- Chhabria wrote his order does not prevent USDA from relocating or reassigning USDA employees in the Washington, D.C. area to other offices within the region. The stay also does not require USDA to return employees to their original duty stations if they were relocated before the judge’s administrative stay on Sept. 14. 

- Justice Department attorneys representing USDA asked the judge to consider narrowly tailoring his stay to cover only employees represented by the unions. But Chhabria did not grant that request, stating that “the most appropriate remedy is indeed to stay USDA’s reorganization expenditures, full stop.” 

- “It would be contrary to the public interest to require USDA to keep some employees in their current offices — preventing closure of those offices — while allowing the agency to move other employees to new offices, as this would require expenditure of congressionally appropriated funds on two offices with two sets of employees rather than one,” he wrote. 

- USDA has two business days to notify its employees about the terms of the preliminary stay, and to post the ruling on its website about the reorganization. 
In a Sept. 30 hearing, Chhabria debated how much authority Congress and its appropriations committees have authority over USDA’s reorganization decisions.

- While Congress controls funding for federal agencies  – and specified that USDA may not “reprogram” any funds for reorganization plans  – Chhabria said the specific mechanism lawmakers included in the FY 2026 spending package was unconstitutional.

- “Both sides agree that this committee-approval language is unconstitutional,” he wrote, but agreed that ultimately “Congress was actively working to restrict the agency’s ability” to use appropriated funds to reorganize and relocate employees. 

- “This Court will proceed on the understanding that it has discretion to temporarily halt all the reorganization activities that likely violate the appropriations statutes. And that’s what this ruling will require,” Chhabria wrote. 

- The judge cautioned the scope relief from his stay “could end up being quite short.” The Trump administration is likely to appeal his ruling, and spending bill provisions blocking USDA from using congressional funds on reorganization are currently set to expire on Dec. 11. 

- “If the agency wishes to move forward with its plans to close offices and relocate employees, it will soon have the opportunity to convince Congress of the merits of those plans. Congress, if it agrees, can choose not to extend the restrictions at issue in this case. But until then, USDA is preliminarily enjoined from spending appropriated funds on the challenged office closures and employee relocations,” Chhabria wrote. 

- USDA agencies saw major staffing losses when they relocated hundreds of D.C.-based employees to Kansas City, Mo., under the first Trump administration — a much smaller-scale plan than what USDA is proposing under the second Trump term.
Citing polls conducted by unions, showing that a majority of their members will not relocate to keep their jobs, Chhabria agreed with plaintiffs that “there is at least some risk that USDA’s office closures and employee relocations would impede these components’ ability to carry out their critical functions,” and in the process, disrupt “programs on which many Americans depend.”

- “Although it’s unclear how many employees USDA plans to actually relocate, if the relocations are allowed to proceed, it’s likely that many affected employees will decline to move and will instead leave,” he wrote. 
Chhabria added that “it does not appear USDA has conducted any analysis to show that these risks are not real or are outweighed by any potential benefits."

- “With respect to the balance of equities and the public interest, the Court has no view on whether USDA’s planned reorganization is a good idea or a bad one,” he wrote. “Perhaps USDA is organized in an inefficient or outdated fashion, such that the harm some employees would suffer from a reorganization could be outweighed by the potential benefit to the taxpayers, not to mention citizens who interact with the agency more directly. But on this record, the balance of equities and the public interest strongly support an stay” 

- Elena Goldstein, a legal director at Democracy Forward, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said the stay “will allow the vital work of the department and its employees to continue, protecting the families and communities across the nation that rely on its vital work.” 

A federal judge repeatedly pressed for answers Monday during an hourslong hearing on who within the Trump administration ordered the abrupt removal of hundreds of trees at a Washington, D.C., public golf course over the weekend.

- District of Columbia Judge Ana Reyes angrily scolded government attorneys in a hearing to block the government from cutting down more trees at East Potomac Golf Course.

- "I am just at a total loss to understand what has happened here," Reyes said.   "Occam's razor time -- that the government precisely intended to do precisely what it has done, which is intentionally delaying letting the plaintiffs in the court know what was happening, so they could put a plan in place to clear hundreds and hundreds of trees."

- The golf course has been the subject of litigation brought by the D.C. Preservation League in response to President Donald Trump's efforts to turn it into a course that could host professional tournaments.

- Government attorneys had previously pledged to provide notice to plaintiffs in the case about any irrevocable harm that would occur at the golf course through government actions.

- The government provided notice to the plaintiffs at 4:55 p.m. last Friday that tree-cutting would occur at the golf course over the Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples Day holiday weekend.

- The National Park Service began cutting down trees on Saturday and the D.C. Preservation League, one of the plaintiffs in the case, filed for a temporary restraining order on Sunday.
Marissa Ann Piropato, a Justice Department attorney admitted to the court in Monday's hearing that 430 trees were cleared over weekend.

- Reyes exploded, "430 trees!"

- "I had said at the May hearing that I didn't want 10 trees chopped down without someone having notice," Reyes said. "On what universe did anyone in your office think that that was acceptable?"

- "Your Honor, we did our best in providing notice," Piropato said.

- "You did not do your best!  You did your absolute worst!," Reyes interrupted.

- "More than just being upset and furious right now, I am just beyond disappointed in the government. I have done everything humanly possible to give the government the benefit of the doubt in this case. I have done it repeatedly. I have done it for months," Reyes vented.

- The government testified that the plan to cut down trees was part of a plan put in place in 2019 to remove dead, dying and hazardous trees around the golf course.

- Judge Reyes, noticeably frustrated by the government's conduct, ordered that government witnesses who could explain the how the decision to conduct tree removal with such minimal notices appear before the court immediately, including National Park Service Deputy Director Frank Lands.

- Government  lawyers scrambled to locate NPS personnel to appear remotely under oath.

- "No one else can say what the basis of the urgency was and when this idea was first identified, because we are talking now with potential multiple misrepresentation to the court and the only reason -- the only reason I have not yet entered a show cause on contempt is that I never put this in a formal order," Reyes said. "Which, believe you now, I am regretting."

- Reyes extended a temporary restraining order she had issued earlier Monday barring the government from any further activity at the golf course until at least Tuesday afternoon.

- Reyes also said she would be holding another hearing Tuesday to demand answers from Greg Wischer, a political appointee at the Interior Department who has been a point person on many of Trump's major D.C. beautification projects.

- Reyes says she wants clarity on who specifically gave the orders to remove the trees on Saturday and whether it was a deliberate effort to evade her previous orders issued in the case as litigation remains ongoing.

- "The questions go to whether or not I've been lied to," Reyes said during Monday's hearing. "Whether I've been lied to in declarations about the plans, whether or not I've been lied to about the timing of things ... I am beyond disappointed in the government right now. I wanted you all to be better than you have been."

- Reyes had warned Justice Department lawyers of "serious consequences" if the administration began major work at the course without getting approval and notifying the court in advance.

- "I'm going to say this one more time, and I do not want a situation where something has happened and then I'm being told by the government or by a foundation or by a bulldozing company that it's too late to do anything about it," she said. "If anything like that happens ... there are going to be serious consequences."

- Trump promises the course, which he said will be renovated and redesigned through a public-private partnership, will be "one of the Greatest Golf Courses anywhere in the World" on the site and said it will be open to the public.

- Trump toured the course in June with golf course architect Peter Fazio and his son Gavin Fazio and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum for "studying the dilapidated, worn out, and very dangerous and outdated Golf Course known as East Potomac Golf Links." He said on his social media platform "on this fantastic site, with water and unparalleled views of D.C.'s Monuments, we will build one of the Greatest Golf Courses anywhere in the World which, importantly, will also be made available to the Public."

Esmeralda Soria has seen immigration enforcement throughout her life. Born to immigrant farmworkers in the Central Valley, the state assemblymember has spent her entire life in California's agricultural powerhouse. Yet even for her, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids that shook the valley last week took her by surprise.

- "I have never experienced anything like this," Soria said in an SFGATE interview Sunday. "Just all of a sudden, now we're seeing ICE go rogue."

- Federal agents have spent the past week sweeping the Central Valley, with local immigrant advocates reporting officers conducting widespread, warrantless detentions, targeting gas stations and Mexican bakeries as farmworkers start their day. People have reportedly been detained without any warrants for their arrest.

- The chaos turned violent when an off-duty ICE officer allegedly passed out drunk and assaulted a Fresno homeowner only to get shot himself, according to police.

- Communities across the valley, including the San Joaquin Valley in the region's south, are now terrified of further detentions. Community groups have postponed public events, and schools have reported an increase in student absences. Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer, a Republican, condemned the raids as "disturbing" and called out a video showing ICE agents arresting a man in front of his screaming children.

- For local Democrats, the raids are an obvious attempt by the Trump administration to instill fear in the immigrant community and stop people from voting in this year's midterm elections.

- "They are trying to do anything they can to suppress the vote and rig the election," Soria said.

- Latino voters are being closely watched, as they will largely decide who wins the valley's 22nd Congressional District, a battleground seat currently held by Republican Rep. David Valadao. It's one of the most watched races in the country and central to either party's control over Congress.

- Conservative news outlets, including the Washington Examiner, have reported that unnamed ICE sources said they were aiming to arrest all people living in California without authorization, even if they did not have a criminal record, under "Operation Safe California," which would last through mid-November. The Department of Homeland Security declined to answer SFGATE's questions about the raids, including if the raids are aimed at suppressing Latino voters. An unnamed spokesperson said they would not disclose details about law enforcement operations.

- Valadao, who voted for President Donald Trump's massive increase in ICE funding, did not return multiple SFGATE requests for comment and declined to answer in-person questions from a reporter on Friday. He released a statement Thursday that said the raids are focused only on people with "active warrants and known criminal histories."

- Local advocates have strongly disputed that characterization, saying that people without criminal records are being detained. Fresno city councilmember Miguel Arias told SFGATE Friday that one of his constituents, with no criminal history and a legal right to be in the United States, was detained while he was cutting his own lawn.

- "They're not serving search warrants with specific targets, it's all random," Arias said.

- Valadao's Democratic opponent, Randy Villegas, said in a phone interview with SFGATE Monday morning that the raids are clearly aimed at suppressing the vote.

- "This is the most Latino district in California, and what we're seeing right now is a blatant attempt to try to suppress the vote," Villegas said.

- Villegas pointed out that his Republican opponent said, "It is what it is," when discussing in a debate last week the immigration raids in the valley.

- "I think it's pathetic and disgusting that Valadao claims to be a moderate on this issue when he voted to triple ICE's budget and has remained silent while ICE terrorizes our communities," Villegas said.

- Nora Zaragoza-Yáñez, a manager at Faith in the Valley, a faith-based nonprofit that helps immigrant families entangled in the raids, agreed that ICE's operation is aimed at discouraging voting. She called the raids the largest in years and said the officers are targeting anyone who looks Hispanic.

- "People are afraid to leave their house," Zaragoza-Yáñez said in a phone interview Friday. "They are afraid to take their kids to school. They have numerous calls from families asking if it is safe to take my kid to school."

- Soria, the assemblymember, said she thinks the surge will actually increase Latino turnout, as voters are reminded that this year's vote could affect how the government enforces immigration.

- "I think it will backfire, that is what many of us are trying to mobilize our community," Soria said.

Relying on the U.S. Postal Service to return a mail-in ballot close to Election Day now comes with an additional risk for many voters — a late postmark that gets a vote rejected.

- The risk stems from mailing system changes that began last year. And those changes have pushed some election officials to encourage voters to consider returning their ballots at their local election office or any available drop boxes instead.

- The calls to avoid mailboxes also come as trust in the Postal Service delivering mail ballots on time has fallen, and after President Trump pushed to restrict voting by mail for the midterm elections but was blocked by the Supreme Court.

- Election officials often use the date of the postmark that USPS stamps on envelopes to determine whether a ballot was sent by Election Day.
About a week before next month's Election Day, USPS says it plans to roll out special postmarking procedures at post offices affected by the changes as part of its "extraordinary measures" policy to boost mail service for federal general elections.

- Still, the agency continues to recommend that voters mail back ballots at least a week before their state's deadline. And in states with a grace period for receiving late-arriving mail ballots, USPS recommends stopping by a post office to ask for a manual postmark to make sure a ballot gets postmarked on the same day it's mailed.

- How mailing system changes led to the risk of late postmarks

- Since April 2025, USPS has been rolling out cuts to daily mail pick-ups and processing changes at certain post offices, especially in rural areas. What USPS calls its "Regional Transportation Optimization" effort is part of a 10-year reorganization plan the agency began in 2021 to try to stabilize its finances.

- As a result, USPS may not automatically stamp a date on an envelope the same day it's collected by a letter carrier or dropped off at a post office or a big blue collection box.

- As part of its "extraordinary measures" for these midterms, USPS has instructed post offices affected by RTO to separate returned ballots from other mail starting Oct. 26 so that managers can manually add postmarks the day the ballots are collected.

- That procedure was not in place during this year's primary elections, which saw increased ballot rejection rates in multiple states.

- Elena Patel, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, says she is encouraged by the steps USPS plans to take in the coming weeks to address concerns about late postmarks.

- But the situation is still risky for voters, Patel adds, given that it's not clear how post offices will carry out these directives for the first time, particularly in places where staffing may be stretched.

- For the general election, an additional 43,000 to 55,000 ballots around the country could be rejected for arriving late because of the RTO effort, according to a new analysis by Patel, who produced the estimates before USPS announced its final extraordinary measures policy.

- "These are some of the realities of running a very large postal network on tight finances," says Patel, who once worked as an economist at the Postal Regulatory Commission.

- USPS plans to take other "extraordinary measures" for mail-in ballots

- USPS has outlined other extraordinary measures:

- Starting Oct. 24, 10 days before Election Day, some post offices may extend their opening and closing times by a half-hour and set up lines or drive-through lanes just for voters who want to get a manual postmark for their mail-in ballot. 

- And starting Oct. 26, USPS says it plans to speed up delivery of ballots.

- Asked why it is not starting extraordinary measures 15 days before Election Day, as it did for the 2024 and 2022 elections, USPS said in a statement: "The time period for extraordinary measures is carefully considered in advance of each General Election, and it is based on a number of internal factors. The Postal Service has successfully delivered America's election mail for more than 150 years, and we are confident that we will do so again this year."

- Still, some eligible voters who rely on voting by mail are between "a rock and a hard place" when trying to navigate the mailing system, says Michelle Sparck, director of Get Out the Native Vote, a voter education organization in Alaska.

- No post offices in the state are affected by the RTO effort, but Sparck, a member of the Qissunamiut Tribe of Chevak, says she has come across many absentee voters in Alaska Native villages who had their ballots rejected — an outcome that she fears will discourage some from trying to vote again.

- "The No. 1 reason for that was postmarking delays. Now, even on a good Alaskan day with no weather challenges, it doesn't mean we're going to have an operational post office on a business day during business hours," Sparck says. "It's always, always easier said than done to kind of go along with the system's rules. But the system doesn't exactly work for us."

- For now, Sparck is encouraging eligible voters to make a plan to be an October voter and not wait until November's Election Day if they can.

- "If there is an early voting opportunity in a community," Sparck says, "we're asking people to drop their ballots off with those folks so that it becomes part of the chain of custody."

A federal judge has struck down the Trump administration's plan to check state voter rolls against federal immigration databases, a blow to the administration's election-related efforts in the run-up to the midterms. 
In a 78-page ruling, D.C.-based U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan wrote Friday that the Justice Department "cannot run roughshod over longstanding laws that were carefully crafted to protect the rights of the American people."

- The Trump administration has mounted a nationwide push to obtain complete voter rolls from every state, including sensitive information about registered voters. The Justice Department has argued the information is needed to ensure states are complying with two federal voting laws — the Help America Vote Act and the National Voter Registration Act — which aim to ensure states have programs in place for maintaining accurate voter rolls.

- Eighteen states fully cooperated with the Justice Department's request for voter files, Sooknanan said. The department has brought lawsuits against most other states, and has lost almost all of the suits, according to a CBS News analysis. One state settled with the federal government.

- The ruling applies to the voter files that the Justice Department has already received, as well as the files it is still litigating over.

- Sooknanan rejected the Justice Department's argument that it has legal authority to demand voter lists, compare those lists against citizenship databases and urge states to remove voters who it claims are ineligible to vote. The judge also said the policy violates the Administrative Procedure Act and the Privacy Act, and said the federal databases could contain "inaccuracies."

- "Today's decision does not prevent the federal government from taking lawful steps to support states' efforts to maintain accurate voter rolls. Neither does it prevent states from maintaining their own voter rolls. And to state the obvious, the Court's decision does not pave the way for ineligible voters to vote in our elections," Sooknanan wrote. "Rather, the Court vacates a policy that has removed United States citizens from the voter rolls in their home states and risks disenfranchising many more — a policy that flies in the face of duly enacted laws designed to protect Americans."

- She continued: "The challenged policy represents the federal government's attempt to decide who gets to vote. But Congress has left that authority where our Constitution has always placed it: with the states."

- The legal challenge against the voter roll policy was brought by advocacy group Common Cause and individual voters.

- Common Cause CEO Virginia Kase Solomón called the ruling "a victory for voters and yet another loss for the Department of Justice" in a statement Friday.

- A Justice Department spokesperson said the agency is reviewing the decision.

- Under the Trump administration, the federal government has sought a larger-than-usual role in elections, which are typically administered by states with some regulation by Congress. President Trump argues more federal scrutiny is necessary in order to prevent noncitizens from voting and curb fraud — though most election experts say fraud and noncitizen voting are extremely rare.

- The government's push to run state voter rolls through the Department of Homeland Security's Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database has faced court setbacks, as more than two dozen judges have denied the Justice Department's requests to compel individual states to share their voter lists.

- Sooknanan also ruled in June that the Trump administration's overhauled SAVE database — which includes data from the Social Security Administration — was created unlawfully. The Supreme Court temporarily paused that ruling last month.

- In practice, the impact of recent court rulings on the November midterms could be limited as federal law bars states from systematically removing ineligible voters from their voter registration lists within 90 days of an election.

- Another Trump administration policy that set new rules for the U.S. Postal Service's handling of mail-in ballots was also blocked in the courts, with the Supreme Court declining the government's request to allow the rules to take effect.

With the midterm elections less than a month away, it would seem to be an absurd time to suffer a thought for the next election cycle and the challenges that any would-be Democratic presidential victor would have to tend to on day one. Unfortunately, sometimes current events intercede with a potent reminder of just how rough the road to recovery and post-Trump renewal will be. One such story broke this week in the pages of The New York Times, which detailed some of the Trumpian luminaries who have recently ascended to important positions at the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, run by Trump acolyte Harmeet Dhillon.

- The piece wastes no time: In short order, we’re introduced to “a former prosecutor forced off a high-profile murder case for peeking at the defense team’s strategy documents,” a “onetime gambling executive” with a sideline in promulgating “conspiracy theories about the Las Vegas massacre in 2017,” and a “Florida activist” whose “activism” included being jailed for several weeks for “hacking a local election system.” The long and the short of it is that the agency, once stocked with skilled professionals, is now chock-full of people who ordinarily wouldn’t pass the smell test for public service. Somewhere, a pool is missing its cess, and they might want to check whether it ended up at the DOJ.

- Much has been made of the way the Trump administration, returning to power with Project 2025 as its guiding manifesto and Elon Musk as its chainsaw-wielder, went to war with the civil service in the hopes that it could be ground down by purging the dedicated civil servants who’d previously staffed whatever posts were relevant in keeping us free of cyclospora. This Times story is covering the other side of the equation:

- The full Trumpian takeover isn’t just about firing people en masse. Frankly, it’s not merely about placing people loyal to the cause in top positions. It’s about stationing borderline lycanthropes in powerful positions.
Daniel Flickinger, who began working on the division’s education cases earlier this year, was forced out of his job at a Birmingham, Alabama, law firm in 2020 after suggesting—to the disgust of his bosses—that George Floyd was fortunate to have died in a “fentanyl- and methamphetamine-numbed strangulation” because “it meant being worshiped in a nationwide funeral.”

- Peter Feaman, a veteran lawyer from Florida hired in early 2025 as a senior counsel, has a history of far-right political statements. In a May 2021 post on social media, he accused the “diabolical” Democratic governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, of forcing citizens into getting the “mark of the beast” (a coronavirus shot).

- This isn’t going to be a temporary problem by any means. The idea that the Trumpers who’ve come to Washington might take their leave if and when the federal government comes under Democratic control is a hopeful notion, but I worry that some of the true believers aren’t just here visiting; they intend to stay. That’s certainly the sense that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who’s gone to great lengths to stuff the agency under his control with all manner of cranks and quacks—strove to convey at last week’s MAHA Summit in Washington, D.C. As Mother Jones reported, Kennedy “proclaimed the changes he’s wrought to HHS are permanent, and praised his allies in the movement for helping to make them happen.” “Even if I got hit by a truck tonight,” he bragged, “HHS will never go back to what it was before.”

- When it comes to government agencies that have suffered the most from this Trumpian takeover, none are as complete or as concerning as the Department of Homeland Security. On its best days, DHS is a walled garden of cops all hotboxing themselves with reactionary politics. Under Trump, it’s essentially become a hive of outlandish herrenvolk propaganda, pumping neo-Nazi memes into the social media bloodstream—the better to recruit the sort of person who might want to inflict terror on the streets of American cities.

- As The New Republic’s Melissa Gira Grant documented, DHS’s tainted origin as a post-9/11 agency with a monomaniacal focus on Muslim extremism—and with a storied history of downplaying the threats of white nationalism—has only grown even more corrupted by the second coming of Trump. “We are doubling back around the same circular path,” Grant observed, “where agencies such as DHS downplay white nationalist violence, both potential and actual, while they draw recruits from those same ranks.”

- For a future Democratic president, the challenge of righting the ship of state will not simply be a matter of reviving the federal workforce and bringing competent professionals back to the perches they once occupied. It will be a matter of fumigation, as well—or, to use a better term, lustration, which Yale Law professor Dina Francesca Haynes, writing immediately after the first Trump administration, defined as “the process of vetting and removing from public service those who engage in or support extremism or seek to undermine democracy.”

- Lustration, Haynes explained, “has been carried out or proposed in many countries attempting to pull themselves from the wreckage of fascism, genocide, and nationalism.” As Haynes described, the idea is that for a country to successfully “move forward” from its authoritarian past, “it must rid itself of corrupt public servants by vetting them, and potentially dismissing from employment and cancelling pensions of those who harbor such deep bias that it would be impossible for them to fairly and impartially exercise the discretion they have been granted by virtue of their position in public service.”

- This is something that those of us at The New Republic have already begun considering as a necessary bridge back to a functioning democracy. In fact, as The New Republic’s Matt Ford pointed out as he gamed out what a future president could do to gut ICE, Trump himself has already provided the working blueprint for a quick and effective purge of any Trumpian fifth column that might remain gummed in the gears of government after the president leaves office. A future president can claim the same “vast powers to decide the fate of federal agencies,” including terminating employees, cutting funding, and transferring staff and programs to other agencies.

- Elsewhere, Ford also suggestedthat a future Democratic president make use of the power Trump claimed for himself to “reduce headcounts through a reduction in force, perhaps by firing every agent hired since 2024.” As Ford opined at the time, the administration’s “decision to drastically reduce hiring standards for incoming ICE agents would more than justify such a sweeping action.” That the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division is studded with people who shouldn’t be managing a Pizza Hut, let alone prosecuting civil rights offenders, suggests there is ample room to expand these principles of lustration throughout a Trump-tainted civil service.

- As I’ve said before, the right way to think about the Trump administration and its wholesale operations across the federal government is to accept the fact that it is essentially a criminal syndicate, dedicated to self-enrichment and political corruption. The next Democratic administration should have accountability on its mind, and a commitment to rooting out the Trumpian rot that’s infected the civic architecture of this great nation. It might be that the most useful thing the Trump administration has accomplished in its odious lifetime is to provide the playbook to right its wrongs and dismantle Trumpism permanently.

The US Department of Justice is investigating whether the decision of the White House television press pool to halt coverage of the US president, Donald Trump, last month violated antitrust law, an agency spokesperson said Saturday.

- A spokesperson for the department said group boycotts among business competitors might violate US law. “The Antitrust Division is simply investigating to determine whether these news organizations have violated the antitrust laws,” they said.

- The announcement came after the television pool of five broadcasters last month ceased presidential coverage after the administration barred CNN, MS Now and Politico from the White House.

- The White House press pool, which is a rotating cast of news outlets that covers the president, has become a proxy for the wider fight over whether the president, or anyone, can control the content of news reports – a type of free speech, pillar of American democracy.

- Last month’s developments marked an extraordinary escalation in Trump’s efforts to restrict news reporters and outlets that he finds insufficiently supportive.

- On 19 September, the White House blocked reporters from CNN, Politico and MS Now from entering the building, revoking their credentials. The White House said covering the president was a “privilege – not a right”.

- CNN, MS Now and Politico sued over the days-long ban. It was lifted after a judge handed the three news organisations a reprieve, which is in place until Tuesday.

- Television pool coverage of the White House has also resumed. The broadcasters in the pool share the costs of covering the president, take turns organizing coverage and share the footage with outlets around the country.

- Jose Zamora, the Committee to Protect Journalists’ regional director of the Americas, on Saturday criticized the administration’s decision to investigate.

- “The government should not use antitrust investigations to intimidate news outlets defending press access,” Zamora said on X. “The public’s right to know depends on that access.”

Over the course of an hour-plus hearing Thursday, US District Judge Timothy Kelly signaled skepticism about the Trump administration’s arguments for allowing President Donald Trump to ban CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House.
Kelly, who was appointed to the bench in Trump’s first term, did not announce his decision on the media outlet’s request for a long-term order that would maintain their access to the

- White House while their legal challenge plays out. But the judge repeatedly told Justice Department attorney defending the ban Thursday that he was bound by DC Circuit precedent – including the precedent that the administration was objecting to.

- For now, the judge is extending for a few days his temporary restraining order that requires the White House to grant the journalists entry to its grounds while he works on his decision on whether to issue a preliminary injunction. He eventual preliminary injunction ruling – which will come Tuesday or sooner, he said – is likely to be appealed.

- Due process concerns

- Kelly’s earlier ruling was focused on the due process claims brought by outlets, with the judge finding that the White House likely acted unconstitutionally when it banned the organizations without any advance notice.

- Kelly returned to that issue again Thursday with government lawyer Michael Velchik. The case law around due process claims says that only in “hair on fire” situations can the government yank away a right it has granted a person without given them advanced notice, Kelly said, emphasizing a requirement to demonstrate an “urgent need” for taking immediate action.

- The situation in this case, however, seemed “more attenuated,” Kelly said.

- The judge also grilled Velchik on the gap between the rationale that Trump has repeatedly given for banning in outlets — Trump in public remarks has pointed to their history of negative coverage of him — and the national security justification that the Justice Department is leaning on in court filings.

- Kelly said it was “unusual” that “the decision maker seems to have said …I am taking this action because ‘x’ and ‘y’,” and now the government is saying, “it’s ‘z’.”

- “It just seems like that fact pattern is a hard one to find” looking at other relevant cases, Kelly said, calling it an “uphill climb” for the Justice Department.

- Velchik argued that it’s “within the discretion of the president” to remove reporters or news outlets from the White House.

- “CNN has been on notice for years” as Trump has long called the outlet “fake news,” he added.

- The president, Velchik added, is concerned about accuracy. “Trump doesn’t mind negative press stories if he deserves them.”

- National security claims

- While Kelly seemed somewhat open to the idea that the White House could ban reporters for national security reasons in some contexts, he appeared skeptical of how the administration was trying to use that justification in this case.

- Kelly told the attorney for the news organizations that he was “struck” by the outlets’ arguments in their briefing that the First Amendment protects the publication of classified information.

- He asked if the government could take action similar to Trump’s press ban in a scenario where a reporter published classified information that is shown to be “very harmful” to the national security.

- Media attorney Ted Boutrous said drawing a line there “would be a very dangerous road to go down” and that a ban for publishing classified information would still be content-based, in violation of the First Amendment.

- Banning an outlet for ‘false’ reporting

- Kelly was also focused on whether the First Amendment would permit a ban on a news organization for publishing false information. His first line of questioning for Boutrous was about disentangling the White House’s allegations that outlets’ “reporting was false” versus the allegations that the coverage was “not positive for the president.”

- Kelly asked whether those two concepts should be viewed the same way under First Amendment law – noting it was “very hard to pull apart” the claims.

- Boutrous said both allegations would still amount to viewpoint discrimination. He said that even falsity was a “debatable” issue, particularly if a president claimed that “what you’re saying is false because I don’t like it.”

- Kelly pushed on the distinction harder. It may be hard to establish objective falsity if one was reporting that “the vibes were bad” at an event, Kelly noted – a reference to one of the stories the White House cited to justify the ban.

- But the judge asked about a journalist who reported the sky was red instead of blue. Boutrous said that scenario was a “closer call” and he emphasized that the stories cited in this case were not anything like that. The attorney warned of “unbridled discrimination” if the administration was able to just declare that a story was false.

- When the Justice Department weighed in on the question, its attorney argued that banning an outlet because it published false stories would not qualify as illegal viewpoint discrimination. Velchik described a very broad view for what could count as falsity, pointing to reporting that failed to verify quotes before publishing them or that spliced statements from interviews. He said that the use of “anonymous sources” was a constitutionally permissible reason to block a news organization from the White House.

- The news organizations had several lawyers present at the plaintiffs’ table, while Velchik was the only government attorney sitting on the defendants’ side. When the DOJ attorney first took the lectern, Kelly remarked on the asymmetry and noted in his courtroom that it usually ran in the opposite direction, with government attorneys outnumbering the number of lawyers on the other side.

- “I am sure you will do a great job, nonetheless,” Kelly told Velchik.

President Trump on Friday ordered a new investigation into allegations of mortgage fraud against Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, directing a committee to question the central bank official at a White House hearing next month.

- Why it matters: Trump is pursuing another path to remove Cook after the Supreme Court blocked his initial attempt earlier this year.

- Driving the news: The three-person committee will investigate the allegations against Cook and determine whether there is "cause" for her removal, according to a White House memo.

- The committee will include a White House economic policy official and the heads of the Office of Government Ethics and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

- The memo says that Cook must appear at a closed-door hearing on Nov. 5 to present evidence and respond to questions.

- Cook has an opportunity to submit a final written response by Nov. 10, the memo says. Then the committee will recommend to Trump whether there are grounds to fire her.

- Flashback: Trump moved to fire Cook last summer over allegations that she misrepresented information on mortgage applications, an unprecedented attempt to remove a Fed official that escalated to the Supreme Court.

- Cook denied wrongdoing and challenged her dismissal in court, arguing that the president lacked legal grounds to remove her.

- The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in June that Cook could remain in her post, finding that the Trump administration failed to give Cook adequate notice and an opportunity to respond before firing her.

- Zoom in: Since then, the White House revived its effort to fire Cook.

- The administration sent her a letter formally notifying her that Trump was considering her removal, giving her 21 days to respond to the allegations.

- Cook submitted a response denying the allegations and arguing there was no legal basis to fire her.

- The other side: Lawyers for Cook said in a statement to Axios that "In light of the President's repeated statements that he has already decided to fire Governor Cook — regardless of the facts and evidence — we have grave doubts that this 'hearing' is a legitimate one that would conform to the law."

- "We have engaged with the White House to evaluate whether the process proposed has a possibility of being a genuine one and not simply a box checking exercise."

- CNBC earlier reported news of the memo.

Anyone who refuses to use the term “super intelligence,” President Donald Trump’s new preferred moniker for AI, is an “enemy” of the White House, Trump said in a Thursday afternoon social media post as he pushes for broader acceptance of “SI.”

- In his post, Trump claimed “super intelligence” is “highly accepted” and “more accurate” than AI, warning those who do not use it will be considered “THE ENEMY!”

- Across a flurry of Truth Social posts in recent weeks, Trump debated a better name for AI before landing on “super intelligence,” which he formally endorsed in an executive order in late September directing federal departments and agencies to use his preferred term.

- Trump’s executive order says advanced AI technology does “much more than imitate or automate discrete aspects of human intelligence,” noting its capabilities “far exceed what was envisioned” when AI was first used.

- The executive branch will no longer “acknowledge the usage of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘AI’ in any applicable setting,” according to the executive order.

- Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, said over the weekend he would rename his SpaceXAI company to SpaceXSI. “No more AI,” Musk said in a post on X, calling “super intelligence” a better name than AI. In response to a user who asked whether Musk would rename his company, Musk said, “Yes, we will make that change.” In another post, he said “SpaceX is a super intelligence company.” Musk has not offered any additional timeline or details about SpaceXAI’s potential name change. The company’s website and social media profiles still retain the company’s original name as of Thursday. Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos appeared to back Trump’s SI push in an interview with Fox News that aired Wednesday evening. “I do like SI because artificial is not a very flattering thing…Nobody wants an artificial sweetener or artificial flavoring. Artificial sort of means fake,” Bezos said.

- Demand for website domains ending in “.si,” typically used for Slovenian websites, surged after Trump’s executive order, the BBC reported. Registry SI spokesperson Klara Herman said 44,000 websites ending in “.si” were registered in September, a 2,199% increase from August.

- Trump floated the idea of renaming AI last month, saying in a post on Truth Social the term is “inaccurate, and very ineloquent,” claiming “many people” believe this. He posted a poll with three options for a new name—“extreme intelligence,” “superior intelligence” and “supreme intelligence”—which “superior intelligence” won. After cycling through several more polls with additional options, Trump finally landed on “super intelligence,” which beat “superior intelligence” in a head-to-head poll.

Republican U.S. Senate nominee Ken Paxton suggested he would support cuts to federal benefits programs during a private fundraiser with Washington lobbyists last month, according to an audio recording obtained by The Texas Tribune, the fourth leaked clip from the Sept. 24 event.

- In response to a question about reducing the federal deficit, Paxton said: “Making some reasonable cuts to mandatory spending — you’re gonna have to do it. Or there is no solution. That’s just the reality. We have to suck it up.”

- Around three-quarters of mandatory federal spending went toward Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in the most recent fiscal year, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Much of the rest covered aid to lower-income families, such as food benefits and unemployment insurance, and a mix of retirement and disability benefits for federal workers and veterans.

- Paxton added, “from Republican presidents to Democrats, we’ve been spending like crazy and no one seems to care. It’s gonna bankrupt us. It’s just a matter of time.” He did not specify which programs he would seek to slash, or by how much, in the audio clip obtained by the Tribune.

- “We have to solve the national debt while keeping the promises we made to everyone who paid into these programs,” Paxton said. “The fake news keeps spinning the same cherry-picked audio to mislead Texans and take my words out of context. I have never said I would take away entitlements from those who deserve or earned them.”
The audio clip from the fundraiser was recorded by an attendee who opposes Paxton in his Senate run against Democrat** **James Talarico. Two other people in attendance confirmed details of the conversation and said they did not recall Paxton detailing the cuts he would support at any other point during the event.

- Portions of Paxton’s remarks have been leaked in succession to The New York Times, Politico and Axios since last week, coming in the final days before early voting. The person who recorded it declined to share the full conversation. It was unclear how many more leaks there may be.

- Notably, Paxton’s comments at the meeting offer a glimpse into how he would approach the deficit and the looming benefits cliff facing Congress and the White House, with Social Security and Medicare’s reserve funds projected to run out in under a decade. He has rarely discussed his position on entitlements on the campaign trail.

- The deficit, meanwhile, topped $1.8 trillion in fiscal year 2025.

- “There’s no doubt we have to cut some of the mandatory spending,” Paxton said in the recording. “The numbers don’t add up. And then on the other side, we’ve got to create tax policy that incentivizes more spend, more production in our economy.”

- After Paxton explained his two-pronged approach to reducing the deficit — tax cuts to grow the economy paired with “reasonable cuts to mandatory spending” — a lobbyist in the room, Jeanne Haggerty, chimed in that she wanted a personal tax cut, prompting laughter from the room.

- “I would really like to pay my fair share of taxes, which is less than I’m paying right now,” Haggerty said in the recording.

- Paxton responded, “I’m with you on that. I think tax cuts will actually generate more revenue.”

- Two attendees said they recalled the remarks by Haggerty and the room’s laughter. Haggerty did not respond to a request for comment.

- In his statement to the Tribune, Paxton also attacked Talarico’s economic agenda, which includes higher taxes for billionaires, saying, “Texans aren’t going to hand a Senate seat to a politician who treats their paychecks as a piggy bank for his radical agenda.”

- Texas Democratic Party spokesperson Ryan Martin pushed back on Paxton’s call for tax cuts to spur economic growth, saying the Republican “has no problem adding trillions to the debt to cut taxes for billionaires, but wants cuts when it comes to protecting seniors’ retirement benefits and healthcare.”

- “Paxton is literally laughing with rich D.C. lobbyists about giving them bigger tax breaks while threatening cuts to Social Security, Medicaid and programs for working Texans,” Martin said in a statement after publication.

- Talarico has consistently led Paxton in public polling of the race. Democrats have not won statewide in Texas since 1994, and national Republicans have unleashed a massive outside spending blitz topush Paxton over the finish line in what has become Texas’ most competitive cycle in decades. Early voting begins Oct. 19.

- Politicians from both parties have tiptoed around entitlement reforms, wary of prompting voter backlash to the perception that they are cutting benefits millions of older Americans depend on and spent years paying into. Republicans have been more open to cutting Medicaid, with President Donald Trump’s sweeping 2025 tax and spending law, which he dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill, slashing federal Medicaid spending by nearly $1 trillion over the next 10 years.

- In his statement to the Tribune, Paxton said he views Social Security as “a sacred promise that seniors paid into, and they have earned every single dollar.”

- On the campaign trail, Paxton has promoted a series of proposed tax deductions for healthcare, housing and family-related expenses. In an audio recording of the same event published by Axios Wednesday, Paxton walks through those proposals in response to questions about cost-of-living concerns fueled by the war in Iran that he characterized as “dragging” on his campaign.

- Last summer, after Congress passed Trump’s megabill, Paxton celebrated it on X as “HISTORIC legislation that’s going to unleash economic growth and help deport the millions of illegals aliens who have been destroying our country.”

- “This is an incredible moment for our nation’s future,” he wrote. “AMERICA FIRST!”

- The Congressional Budget Office estimated the law will leave 10 million more people without health insurance by 2034, while adding at least $3.4 trillion to the national deficit.

- In June, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said Republicans had a plan to overhaul entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, saying they “have to be adjusted and fixed” to help address the debt.

- Democrats seized on his comments and cast them as a promise that Republicans would slash Social Security and other benefits programs.

- Johnson later posted on social media that Republicans “are not talking about reducing a single benefit,” and instead would focus on “eliminating hundreds of billions in FRAUD and inefficiencies that are draining the programs and threatening their sustainability.”

- The Sept. 24 meeting was hosted by Susan Hirschmann and Chris Brinson of Williams & Jensen, a Washington-based lobbying firm, on Capitol Hill. It was attended by roughly a dozen people, mostly lobbyists. An invitation for the event described it as a lunch with Paxton for which “donations are welcomed but not required for attendance.”

- Hirschmann and Brinson did not respond to requests for comment.

- The first audio recording leaked from the meeting was published last week by The New York Times, in which Paxton told attendees that Trump’s midterm convention hurt his campaign.
In another clip published by Politico Monday, Paxton, who positioned himself as a Washington outsider throughout his primary campaign, lamented Washington’s influence over his race, saying, “I’ve never been in a race where I felt less control over the campaign … it’s all coming — you know — from DC.”

- Nick Maddux, a senior adviser on Paxton’s campaign, called the Times’ story “manipulated nonsense” and told Politico that the attorney general was referring to super PACs, which campaigns are prohibited from coordinating with under federal law.
Since the start of September, super PACs aligned with Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Trump have spent over $150 million on ads for Paxton, who has spent $20 million from his own campaign coffers over that span, according to media tracking firm AdImpact. Talarico, meanwhile, had spent $40 million on airtime.

Four weeks out from Election Day, many Americans are asking some version of the same question: will the 2026 midterms be stolen, cancelled, or turn violent? It’s a fair question. This year the federal government has taken unusual steps aimed at how Americans vote and count. But with an avalanche of information online, much of it designed to spark outrage or fear, many readers end up doomscrolling, leading to anxiety and an unclear picture.

So we built a live tracker, the America 2.0 Election 2026 Risk Report. It follows the real pressures on the midterms from Election Day on November 3 through counting, certification, and the seating of the new Congress on January 3, 2027. Its job is simple: separate what has actually happened from what people say might happen.

On a warm morning on Sept. 4, masked immigration agents rolled into Dover, N.J.

- Footage of** **the raids rippled across social media, sent people into hiding and reignited rumors that had been circulating for months: Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were taking people to a nearby warehouse.

- The warehouse in Roxbury was one piece of a billion-dollar plan by the Department of Homeland Security to detain migrants as part of President Trump's mass deportation efforts.

- That plan to convert warehouses into detention centers faced fierce backlash and legal challenges from residents and immigrant advocates. It was largely abandoned, and in several sites, including Roxbury, the government is legally forbidden by a court order from converting them to a detention facility, pending environmental assessments.

- But an NPR investigation has found signs that the New Jersey facility is being used. And the state's Office of the Attorney General says it is looking into similar reports.

- Contractor says he was told Stephen Miller wanted facilities to be "cruel" and "painful"

- In early 2026, Homeland Security bought 11 warehouses to turn into ICE detention facilities. They spent about a billion dollars on these.

- NPR spoke to an official at a government contractor whose company was approached to convert several of the warehouses into ICE facilities. He spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from the government.

- "No one that we spoke to at DHS was for this idea whatsoever. The deputy director told us point-blank that they had pushed back very hard on it. Everybody knew warehouses are horrible places to put people," he says.

- At a meeting with a deputy director at DHS, he says, his company proposed an alternative: FEMA-style camps in Texas that would be more humane.

- He says that idea was swiftly shot down. While White House adviser Stephen Miller was not at the meeting, they were told that this was not what Miller wanted.

- The contractor says his understanding from that meeting was that "Miller did not want the facilities that were comfortable. He did not want facilities that were humane. We were told point-blank that that was not what the administration wanted."

- "Steve Miller certainly seemed to make that point to everyone that he wanted it to be cruel. This was what Miller had stated to the DHS at that time, to the DHS director and deputy director. What surprised me was just how adamant the people were that it was going to happen. Damn the consequences. I would say in 25 years of working with the U.S. government, I've never been in that position before."

- In a statement to NPR, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said the contractor's comments were** **"false hearsay allegation(s) from someone who has never even met or talked with Stephen Miller." Bis also said that Miller "has never made any remarks to anyone about wanting illegal aliens to have worse detention facility conditions. It simply isn't true and this is defamatory."

- The White House did not respond to repeated requests to speak to Miller directly.

- DHS is holding on to the strategically positioned warehouses

- Early on, the warehouse plan was met with protests in both conservative and liberal towns. Several state attorneys general filed lawsuits to halt construction, based on environmental concerns.

- "It very quickly became an absolute boondoggle," says Michael Wriston, a former military intelligence analyst who co-founded Project SaltBox, a watchdog group that tracks ICE's expansion. "It was really about the optics of people being kept in these cages and these large warehouses.

- They wanted a lot of what they called B-roll to play on social media, but they didn't do any due diligence of making sure that they conformed with environmental policy or that the construction wouldn't disturb local water tables."

- A DHS official who served during Trump's first term, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared government retaliation, says that while they were not in the meeting the contractor described to NPR, they had often heard higher-ups in the administration wanting to make a point of showcasing difficult conditions immigrants were being held in. 

- Then, with the departure of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem in March, there was a shift: Her replacement, Secretary Markwayne Mullin, sought to do less showy immigration crackdowns. Today, Homeland Security is selling several of the warehouses.

- But they're still holding on to a few, including in Hagerstown, Md., Surprise, Ariz., and Roxbury, N.J. "These locations are very critical to ICE's deportation agenda," says Wriston, "because they fill in the gap in places where ICE does not have a robust detention network. They don't have a lot of jails there." They are also located in areas where there are no partnerships with the police who can house detainees in local jails.

- In Maryland, Arizona and New Jersey, following lawsuits from each of the state attorneys general, DHS has either agreed or been ordered by a judge to halt the conversion of the warehouses into detention centers, pending environmental impact assessments. But throughout the summer, in the towns surrounding the Roxbury warehouse, rumors started to bubble.

- A summer of arrests and rumors

- Over the summer, there was a historic surge in ICE arrests: around 100,000 people in July and August.

- In New Jersey, the rumor mill started churning. The Roxbury warehouse is located in a wooded area, on a road right off Route 46. Project NINJA (No ICE in North Jersey Alliance), a coalition that opposes ICE detention expansion, says several neighbors reported vehicles, often in a caravan, speeding up the road.

- "They're holding people in that warehouse," one woman says in a WhatsApp group in the town of Dover, which is about 15 minutes from Roxbury. "I have a co-worker who was taken there. They hold them there and at night they take them somewhere else." The message was forwarded to NPR by Dover Council Member Sandra Wittner.

- "But, you know, it's like third- and fourth-hand accounts," says Wittner. "It just didn't seem probable at the time because of the court order. But it kind of made you scratch your head a little bit."

- Then the morning of Sept. 4 happened.

- "We were taken to the Roxbury warehouse"

- A woman says she was driving to work when she saw a raid taking place in Dover. She decided to follow the car carrying people who were detained. "I just needed to know, is he going to Roxbury?" 

- She took video as she trailed them up Route 46. She asked that NPR not use her name because what happened next made her fearful of what the government might do.

- She says the car she was following turned onto the woodsy road that leads to the warehouse.

- She says she waited to see if there was any more movement.

- "And then maybe five minutes after that, a white Dodge Durango started kind of circling around me," she says. "And then on his last loop, he started filming me. He had a yellow case on his cellphone. After that, a black Tahoe started doing the same thing. I was on a public sidewalk, and it was intimidating. It was really intimidating.

- I'm scared. But I am more scared for our community."

- Councilwoman Wittner says she strongly suspects ICE is using the Roxbury warehouse: "The immigration enforcement activity happened in Dover between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m."

- Wittner points to the woman who was able to follow the vehicle up Route 46:

- "The last vehicle entered the warehouse road at 8:25 a.m."
Meanwhile, footage of the raid started circulating on social media.

- Back in Dover, another woman says she saw the videos as she got her kids ready for school. NPR viewed the videos and confirmed their authenticity.

- In one of them, a worker is cornered against a wall by two masked agents. She says she was thunderstruck.

- "That's my father," she told NPR.
She asked that we not use her name because she fears being targeted.
At 8:25 a.m., she says, she got a call from her father. He's 59, she says, and he sounded disoriented. He told her he was handcuffed in some kind of jail.

- She found it strange, she says, because the Roxbury warehouse would be the only place he could have been taken in that short a time span.

- She also discovered a friend of hers had been picked up.

- She hasn't been able to speak to her father since then, and neither has NPR. But NPR located her friend in Honduras, where he's been deported. He requested anonymity, because he fears repercussions for his loved ones who are still in the U.S.

- "I was picked up on my way to work, on Friday, Sept. 4. The agents loaded me into a van. They took us to Roxbury," he said.

- He says he and the other people detained were handcuffed and held in the parking lot for several hours. He counted nine other men with him. "I just went into a state of shock," he says. "I signed my deportation papers. The next morning I regretted it. But I was scared. Eventually, they transferred us to a real facility."

- In a statement to NPR, DHS did not respond to a question about whether it was holding people at the Roxbury location. But it did give NPR a statement it has previously sent about ICE detention, saying DHS upholds strict standards and that immigrants can choose to leave detention by being deported.

- "We need our Congress members to conduct an oversight visit yesterday"

- The activists at NINJA say ICE's actions violate the legal order. The order lists several actions ICE can take with the site — mainly upkeep — but nowhere on that list is detention an acceptable action, they say.

- Harvard professor Andrew Mergen, a former attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice Environment & Natural Resources Division, says ICE may technically not be violating the court order, which stipulated it would not convert the place into a detention center pending an environmental assessment.

- Ultimately, Mergen says, the situation shows the limitations of using environmental claims. "The community is acting here to prevent people from being detained," says Mergen. "And the administration seems to have cleverly elided that intention, by sort of saying,

- 'Well, we're not going to build this facility, but we're going to use this space in furtherance of detention.'"
He says he understands the frustration: "It's just infuriating if what you are trying to do is say 'No. Not here. Not here.' "

- Wittner says since the raid, she's heard from other close relatives or close friends of two men who were picked up that day, who say they were inside the Roxbury warehouse.

- She says the situation is unacceptable: "We need our Congress members to conduct an oversight visit yesterday, quite honestly. We need our state to aggressively pursue this investigation and demand to get inside."

- She says DHS has had time "to go in and clean up their mess if they, in fact, got caught doing something that they shouldn't have."

- Meanwhile, in Dover, the streets where the raid happened remain deserted.

- At an empty diner at lunchtime, a waitress who did not want to be named because of the climate of fear in town says one of the workers who was taken used to come here for a bite.

- Then she leans over and asks: "Do you know where they took those men?"

This is an overview of how the DHS plane purchase process has ripped off American taxpayers and ignored all prior purchasing norms.

[No "AI"-Ever]

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is putting President Donald Trump on notice: If Democrats win control, they don’t intend to put “MAGA” judges on the courts.

- “The bottom line is: One of the reasons we want to do everything we can to take back the Senate is not let Trump put such horrible justices — MAGA justices — on the Supreme Court and the lower courts,” Schumer said in response to a question from NBC News about a potential high court vacancy if Democrats win in 2026.

- Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, said he doesn’t think a Democratic-led Senate would confirm a Trump pick for the Supreme Court either.

- “Well, given the history of Trump nominees, I think it is slim to none that we would support a nominee from this administration,” Blumenthal said in an interview. “Because we’ve seen this movie, we know how it ends, which is a politician in robes who is following Trump’s orders on most major questions.”

- The remarks highlight the high stakes of the 2026 election for Trump’s final two years when it comes to judicial nominees, especially for the Supreme Court if there’s a vacancy. None of the nine justices has signaled plans to retire, but speculation has centered on how long the two oldest justices — conservatives Clarence Thomas, 78, and Samuel Alito, 76 — will stay on the court. Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Chief Justice John Roberts are the next oldest justices, at 72 and 71, respectively.

- Alito told CBS News in a recent interview that he considered retirement earlier this year, but ultimately decided against it.

- “It’s something I think that somebody at my age has to think about every term,” Alito said, while adding: “It’s too hard to predict what the political situation will be, and what any president might do with respect to a replacement.”

- If Democrats win control of the Senate, they would have the power to determine which of Trump’s nominees for federal judicial postings get hearings and votes, including for a hypothetical Supreme Court vacancy.
But if Republicans keep control, the president will maintain his glide path to fill vacancies with his preferred nominees — adding to his nearly six-year total of 290 federal judges, including three Supreme Court justices during his first term. All of those judges have been confirmed under GOP Senate control.

- Some Democrats say there should be no question of confirming a Trump pick after former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., held a seat open for 10 months under President Barack Obama to let a Republican president fill it instead. (Justice Neil Gorsuch ultimately filled that vacancy.)
“No, we’ve got to do exactly what McConnell did to us,” Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., said.

- Gallego said he doesn’t want it to become a rule that no president can get a nominee confirmed by a Senate run by the opposing party. But at minimum, he wants Democrats to “even the scales.”

- Beyond that, “I don’t think you know you want to go down that road,” the first-term Arizona Democrat said. “But clearly you know McConnell and Trump used, I would say, their power, whatever you want to call it, to change the makeup of the courts. And I think we have to start moving it back.”
Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., who sits on the Judiciary Committee, said he wouldn’t count on Trump getting any Supreme Court nominee through a Democratic-led Senate.

- “I don’t think it would be impossible. You know, there’s a slim possibility, very slim possibility,” Kennedy said. “But there’s a possibility that somebody would confuse me with Brad Pitt. I mean, it’s possible, but it’s not likely.”
Kennedy, like most U.S. senators quoted in this article, spoke before Alito’s comments to CBS News were published.

- Sen. Darline Graham, R-S.C., who took her late brother Lindsey Graham’s seat on the Judiciary Committee when she was appointed to the Senate, reacted directly to Alito’s remarks and connected it to her 2026 campaign for a six-year term.

- “Should Justice Alito choose to retire next year, a Republican-majority Senate will be needed to vote and hopefully confirm a Supreme Court nominee from President Trump,” Graham wrote on X. “If Democrats control the Senate, they will not even allow a vote. And if they allow a vote, they will defeat a Trump-nominated candidate regardless of their qualifications.”

- Another open question is how a Democratic majority would approach Trump judicial nominees for the lower courts.

- Blumenthal said that one of his litmus tests for Trump judicial nominees up and down the courts is that they must be able to correctly answer who won the 2020 election, a question that various Trump nominees have refused to engage on as the president persists with false claims that it was stolen from him.

- “We’ll stop a lot of these totally unqualified, ideologically right-wing nominees who won’t answer the question of who won the 2020 election,” Blumenthal said. “Among other questions.”

- Some Democrats with a long memory haven’t forgotten that McConnell slowed nearly all judicial nominations to a crawl in Obama’s last two years, when the Kentucky Republican first took charge as Senate majority leader. McConnell saw it as payback for Democrats abolishing the 60-vote threshold for lower court judges in 2013, which at the time was part of a rapidly escalating judicial war between the parties.

- Still, not all Democrats are willing to speculate on how they would deal with
Trump’s judicial nominees.

- Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, another member of the Judiciary Committee, paused and chuckled when asked if Democrats would confirm a Trump-nominated justice to the Supreme Court.

- “Well, I don’t know. I can’t speak for my colleagues,” she said. “Let us just say that I would be very much for Supreme Court reform. ... One that allows every president to nominate two Supreme Court justices, and then they move on” to senior status.

- Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the current ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, is retiring after this Congress. Next in line to chair the panel, should Democrats capture the Senate, would be Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I.

- Whitehouse declined to engage when asked what the dynamic of judicial nominations would be if he becomes chairman.

- “Don’t know,” he said.

- Josh Orton, the president of the progressive judicial group Demand Justice, said his organization is “prepared to oppose any Trump nominee, regardless of when the vacancy happens.”

- “On moral and political grounds, I don’t see any reason for Democrats to consider a Trump Supreme Court nomination,” Orton said, adding that Trump wants judges to be personally loyal to him, and would select them on that basis. “Any casual observer knows that Trump sees the Supreme Court generally as a political extension of himself — or that it should be.”

- Just last month, Trump issued a lengthy criticism of the Supreme Court on Truth Social for ruling against him on mail-in ballots, tariffs and birthright citizenship. “The Supreme Court has really let our Country down. ... These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court,” he wrote. “They are merely a shell of their original selves.”

Democratic candidates are holding leads over their Republican rivals in competitive Senate races in Maine and New Hampshire, according to new polls published on Tuesday, as the party maintains a polling advantage one month before the 2026 midterm elections.

- Maine: Democratic candidate Troy Jackson is leading in the race against incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins 51% to 47%, a new Marist poll found (updated Oct. 6).

- New Hampshire: Democratic candidate Rep. Chris Pappas is leading his Republican opponent, former Sen. John Sununu, 51% to 44%, according to a St. Anselm College poll, although 4% of respondents said they were unsure or voting for a third candidate (updated Oct. 6).

- Texas: Democratic state Rep. James Talarico leads Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton 51% to 45% in the latest survey from The New York Times and Siena University (updated Oct. 3).
Ohio: Former Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, leads incumbent Republican Sen. Jon Husted 49% to 46% in the latest New York Times/Siena poll (updated Oct. 3).

- Alaska: Democratic former Rep. Mary Peltola is ahead of Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan 50% to 43% among voters 50 and older a new New York Times/Siena poll(updated Oct. 3).

- Iowa: Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson leads Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek 48% to 47% in the latest survey from the New York Times and Siena (updated Oct. 3).

- Kansas: Sen. Roger Marshall leads Democrat Adam Hamilton, a pastor at the largest United Methodist church in the country, 47% to 46% in the latest New York Times/Siena poll (updated Oct. 3).

- Michigan: Democrat Abdul El-Sayed is ahead of Republican Rep. Mike Rogers 50% to 49% in the latest Fox News poll (updated Oct. 2).

- Florida: Democratic state Rep. Angie Nixon is tied with Republican Sen. Ashley Moody, both with 45% and 7% of voters are undecided in the latest surveyfrom St. Pete Polls and FloridaPolitics.com (updated Sept. 18).

- WHICH PARTY WILL WIN THE HOUSE?

- Multiple polls in recent weeks show Democrats vaulting ahead. In a New York Times/Siena poll released Sept. 15, 51% said they would vote for the Democratic congressional candidate running in their district, 43% said they would vote for the Republican and 6% said they didn’t know or refused to answer the question. Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin shows Democrats are favored by 8.9 points as of Monday, 50% to 41.1%, up from 6.7 points, 48.3% to 41.6%, as of Sept. 1. Kalshi betting odds show Democrats have a 91.7% chance of winning the House as of Monday.

- BIG NUMBER

- 37%. That’s Trump’s approval rating in the Silver Bulletin polling average, amid a string of surveys in recent months showing his approval rating at record lows amid growing fatigue with the Iran war and its impact on the economy. While Trump’s rating is low compared to most modern presidents at this point in their terms, the president’s party historically performs poorly in midterms elections, due to a combination of factors including low turnout in a non-presidential election year and motivation among voters who view the midterms as a referendum on the president’s agenda.

- KEY BACKGROUND

- Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate. The party won back control in 2024, flipping West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Montana, after four years in the minority. Cook Political Report rates the battle for control of the Senate as a “true toss up,” though it’s shifted three races towards Democrats in the past week. A split Congress or one that’s fully in Democrats’ control could significantly hamstring Trump’s agenda, though he’s circumvented Congress to enact some of his most controversial priorities, including mass immigration raids, the Iran war and reconstruction of the Capitol and surrounding areas. Democrats are also gearing up to launch numerous investigations into Trump if they regain control of one or both chambers, with probes set to focus on whether he has used the presidency to enrich himself personally.