Thursday, January 15, 2026
Alarm as Trump DoJ pushes for voter information on millions of Americans | US voting rights | The Guardian
Alarm as Trump DoJ pushes for voter information on millions of Americans
"Officials ask at least 43 states for sensitive details as critics fear effort to sow doubt about midterm election results
The justice department is undertaking an unprecedented effort to collect sensitive voter information about tens of millions of Americans, a push that relies on thin legal reasoning and which could be aimed at sowing doubt about the midterm election results this year.
The department has asked at least 43 states for their comprehensive information on voters, including the last four digits of their social security numbers, full dates of birth and addresses, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Eight states have voluntarily turned over the information, according to the Brennan Center, and the department has sued 23 states and the District of Columbia for the information.
Many of the states have faced lawsuits after refusing to turn over the information, citing state privacy laws. Some of the states have provided the justice department with voter lists that have sensitive personal information redacted, only to find themselves sued by the department. Nearly every state the justice department has sued is led by Democratic election officials.
“Our position on this starts and ends with the law. We looked at state law and federal law regarding disclosure of this very sensitive personal information on millions of people, and what we discovered, or at least the way we’ve concluded, is that the law protects voters from this kind of disclosure under these circumstances,” said Steve Simon, a Democrat who is the top election official in Minnesota, one of the states being sued.
Adrian Fontes, the Democratic secretary of state in Arizona, another state being sued, was more blunt. “Pound sand,” he posted on X in response to a justice department official who announced the department was suing his state.
The justice department has not said what exactly it intends to do with the sensitive information, beyond a general effort to ensure states are making sure only eligible voters are on the rolls. There is no national database of voters in the United States, and both the constitution and federal law gives the states, not the federal government, the authority to screen their voter rolls. A 1993 law, the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), requires states to make a “reasonable effort” to keep ineligible voters off their rolls, but gives states leeway on how to do so.
“The federal government does not have the right to collect information on hundreds of millions of American voters unless Congress has authorized it. It has not,” said David Becker, the executive director for the Center for Election Innovation & Research, and an expert in policies dealing with monitoring voter rolls. “This appears to be more focused on amplifying false narratives about problems with our election system and preparation for elections that candidates aligned with the president might lose.”
The department’s efforts amount to a push by the federal government to take over the power of policing voter rolls, said Sejal Jhaveri, an attorney at the Campaign Legal Center, a non-profit organization challenging the department’s efforts to obtain voter registration records in some states.
“Once they get into the role of determining who belongs on a voter roll and who doesn’t, that obviously has the ability to affect elections,” she said.
A justice department spokesperson said the agency had the authority to request the rolls and “responsive data is being screened for ineligible voter entries”. The spokesperson did not say how the data was being reviewed.
“Clean voter rolls and basic election safeguards are requisites for free, fair, and transparent elections. The DoJ civil rights division has a statutory mandate to enforce our federal voting rights laws, and ensuring the voting public’s confidence in the integrity of our elections is a top priority of this administration,” Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump ally who heads the justice department’s civil rights division, said in a statement.
The justice department is sharing voter information with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the news outlet Stateline reported in September. The sharing comes as DHS has expanded the functionality of a database, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (Save), that allows officials to check someone’s citizenship status. Until recently, if someone wanted to use the database, they needed someone’s alien number – a unique number the Department of Homeland Security assigns to non-citizens – and could only search one by one. Now, the database can query immigration status if they have the last four digits of someone’s social security number.
But matching up voter records with the sprawling Save database can lead to errors, Becker warned.
“It is hard to take a record for David Becker or Sam Levine on one list and that on another list and say for sure it’s the same person,” he said. “We already know that the comparison of voter lists with the Save system is leading to very high error rates.”
The DHS has run nearly 50m voter registrations through the database and referred about 10,000 people for further investigation, the New York Times reported on Wednesday. That means about 0.02% of those screened are potential non-citizens.
Voter fraud – including voting by non-citizens – is extremely rare. While there are isolated examples of non-citizens getting registered because of confusion or bureaucratic mistakes, there also have been documented instances in which states have falsely accused people of being non-citizens ineligible to vote. Someone may register to vote after getting naturalized, for example, and databases may not capture the change.
Some states have already voluntarily uploaded data to the Save database and the results so far have not indicated widespread fraud. In Texas, where there are more than 18.2 million registered voters, officials ran the full voter file through Save and uncovered 2,724 potential non-citizens last fall. At least some of those flagged turned out to actually be citizens, NPR reported last year. In Denton county, north of Dallas, the Save database flagged 84 people as potential non-citizens, but 14 people proved they actually were citizens, said Frank Phillips, the county’s election administrator. Phillips said he was unsure how those people had been wrongly flagged.
Alabama election officials recently announced they removed 186 people from the voter rolls – 25 of whom voted - after running data through Save, a tiny fraction of the state’s more than 3.8 million registered voters. In Tennessee, where there are about 4 million registered voters, officials used Save to identify 42 potential non-citizen voters. Louisiana officials identified 390 potential ineligible voters in the state (there are about 2.9 million registered voters).
The justice department has also offered states the opportunity to voluntarily enter into an agreement to share its voter rolls. One proposed agreement, obtained by the Guardian, says that the justice department will provide an “analysis and assessment” of a state’s voter file and notify state officials “of any voter list maintenance issues, insufficiencies, inadequacies, deficiencies, anomalies, or concerns”. It then requires states to remove any ineligible voters flagged by the justice department within 45 days of the department flagging them.
Such an agreement would probably violate the NVRA, the Democratic National Committee wrote to 10 states earlier this month. The law sets out a clear process with safeguards for removing voters and prohibits systematic removals within 90 days of a federal election. Dhillon responded to the legal letters by suggesting the DNC was interfering in a federal investigation and encouraging the obstruction of justice.
“Assistant Attorney General Dhillon seems to have mistaken a letter identifying potential violations of the National Voter Registration Act for obstruction of justice. The DNC will never back down from a fight to protect voting rights, and we look forward to meeting the justice department in federal court,” Dan Freeman, the litigation director at the DNC, said in a statement.
Ten secretaries of state sent a letter to the justice department in November asking for clarification on how the department would use the data and whether it intended to share it with the DHS. The department never responded.
The justice department has argued in court filings it needs the records to ensure states are complying with the NVRA and a 2002 law that requires states to collect certain identifying information when someone registers. More recently, the justice department has argued it is entitled to the voter roll information under provisions in the 1960 Civil Rights Act. Those provisions require election officials to preserve election materials for 22 months after a federal election and require them to turn them over to the justice department once they make a written request stating their basis and purpose for the records. The law was used during the civil rights movement to ensure that registrars across the south were registering Black voters.
But the justice department has not yet articulated a basis for needing the records, said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who has worked on voting rights issues at the justice department and the White House.
“It has acknowledged a purpose. And that purpose is: we’re investigating the rolls and we want to make sure your rolls are clean,” said Levitt, who was among several former justice department officials who signed on to an amicus brief opposing the justice department’s efforts to get information on California voters. “They have, to my knowledge, literally never articulated a basis for the request. The statute requires both.”
A 1974 law, the Privacy Act, also requires the government to inform the public when it collects their information in bulk, disclose how it intends to use it, and to allow for public comment. The justice department has not taken those steps in this instance, experts said.
“The DoJ, despite being begged for an answer to that, has just refused to file this. And it’s a fairly simple procedure,” Becker said. “The only thing I can come up with is that if they were to be honest and transparent and answer all of those questions, it would reveal the problems of what they’re trying to do.”
During the first Trump administration, a short-lived White House panel also tried to request sensitive voter information from all 50 states but was met with swift bipartisan push back. Mississippi’s top election official, a Republican, famously said the commission could “jump in the Gulf of Mexico”. The panel dissolved amid infighting as it sought the records."
Alarm as Trump DoJ pushes for voter information on millions of Americans | US voting rights | The GuardianJudge to Weigh Next Steps in Student Activist Deportations Case - The New York Times
Judge to Weigh Next Steps in Student Activist Deportations Case
"The hearing on Thursday followed up on the court’s sweeping finding in September that noncitizen students had the same free speech rights as citizens.
A federal judge in Boston last September issued a landmark ruling that the Trump administration deliberately chilled the speech of international students with a string of targeted arrests intended to “strike fear” in demonstrators and academics critical of Israel’s conduct in Gaza.
Now Judge William G. Young will decide what should be done about that violation.
Last year, he did not order the Trump administration to correct course right away, but asked the government and the academic organizations who sued to return to argue over how he could intervene.
In his ruling, Judge Young, who is 85 and has served as a federal judge for over 40 years, described the case as “perhaps the most important” of his career. Academic organizations that sued argued that the attempted deportations of a few prominent student activists — and broader threats by President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio — had a silencing effect across academia and chilled speech about the war in Gaza and other contentious issues.
During a two-week trial, lawyers for the groups examined the cases of five prominent student activists: Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Mohsen Mahdawi, Badar Khan Suri and Yunseo Chung. Though the students were in the United States legally, the administration accused them of undermining U.S. foreign policy interests through their activism.
In some cases, they were held for months, and federal officials attempted to deport them. The students successfully challenged their deportations in separate, individual lawsuits, and those who were detained were eventually ordered released.
The central question before Judge Young last year was whether Mr. Trump’s policies had suppressed academic speech on campus more broadly. In an extraordinary 161-page opinion, Judge Young found that they had. He upbraided the Trump administration and the president himself for cultivating what he cast as a climate of fear and repression, concluding that noncitizens had an equal First Amendment right to free speech.
Legal scholars said that deciding on a remedy was likely to be a harder task for Judge Young than excoriating the administration.
Michael Kagan, a law professor and the director of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Immigration Clinic, said that Judge Young could focus on stopping the implementation of the executive orders and Department of Homeland Security policies that had authorized the wave of student arrests last spring.
But he said it would be challenging for Judge Young to craft a remedy that would predict and pre-empt other ways the administration may try to pursue noncitizen academics.
“This is all pretty dicey territory for the court to navigate in terms of solving the problem,” he said.
The groups behind the lawsuit have argued for broad relief that would prohibit the administration from pursuing any part of what they describe as an “enforcement policy” of revoking green cards and student visas based on anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian speech.
“The government’s unconstitutional actions have made many noncitizen students and faculty fearful of speaking out on issues that are important to them,” said Ramya Krishnan, a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute, which helped represent the academic organizations. “We want the court to grant relief that addresses that fear — starting with an order that expressly prohibits the government from pursuing its policy of deporting people based on constitutionally protected speech.”
But some legal scholars speculated that following his blunt ruling, Judge Young could opt for a narrower solution, to avoid overstepping in ways that could be questioned on appeal.
“One thing I could imagine is that the judge, having made that rather substantial departure from the norm, would get cautious at the remedy stage, and not purport to tell the government in too stark or precise terms what to do,” said Gregory P. Magarian, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
Mr. Magarian said that Judge Young may want to avoid taking steps that would endanger his underlying landmark ruling on the First Amendment rights of noncitizens, which by itself was a major breakthrough for groups promoting freedom of speech on campus.
The administration has argued throughout the case that the court lacks the authority to interfere in the Trump administration’s foreign policy priorities, or curtail the “investigative and enforcement” power of agencies it tasked with reviewing the conduct of noncitizens and visa holders.
In filings, it has argued that threatening language from Mr. Rubio and other cabinet officials about investigating critics of Israel was also protected speech the court should not police.
Judge Young on Thursday will also consider requests from a variety of news organizations, including The New York Times, that he agree to unseal some evidence presented during the trial last year. The documents appeared to include details about how top officials justified arresting students and attempting to strip them of their visas or legal status.
During the trial, witnesses for the government described parts of the process through which the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security identified student leaders to target. They testified that they had relied in part on lists published by an anonymously run site that shared the personal details of academics it deemed hostile to Israel.
But other evidence Judge Young relied on to reach his decision, including memos and dossiers passed between the agencies authorizing the arrests of the five students, have remained sealed.
Judge Young provisionally agreed to keep certain documents private at the government’s request during the trial last year, citing caution over revealing confidential details about immigration enforcement. But he referred to many of them in his opinion.
Zach Montague is a Times reporter covering the federal courts, including the legal disputes over the Trump administration’s agenda."
Federal Agent Shoots Man in Minneapolis, Prompting Tense Protests - The New York Times
Federal Agent Shoots Man in Minneapolis, Prompting Tense Protests
"The agent shot a Venezuelan man who was resisting arrest, an official said. Protesters and law enforcement officers clashed for hours, as city officials urged people to go home.
A federal agent shot and injured a man in Minneapolis on Wednesday evening, federal officials said, an incident that touched off hours of clashes between protesters and law enforcement officers and that came just one week after an immigration agent killed a woman in the city.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement that federal agents were trying to arrest a man from Venezuela who was in the country illegally in a “targeted traffic stop” at around 6:50 p.m. She said that he fled from agents.
When the officer caught up to him, Ms. McLaughlin said he “began to resist and violently assault the officer.” She said two people came out of a nearby building and, along with the man being sought, attacked the officer with a snow shovel and a broom handle.
The officer feared for his life and fired shots, striking the man whom agents were seeking in the leg, Ms. McLaughlin said. The agent and the man who was shot were in the hospital, she added, and the other two people she accused of attacking the agent were in custody.
The federal government’s narrative could not immediately be verified. City officials said the person who was shot had “apparent non-life-threatening injuries.” The agent’s condition was not immediately clear.
Minneapolis residents have protested repeatedly in the week since an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot an American woman, Renee Nicole Good, on the south side of Minneapolis.
City officials said the latest shooting occurred on the city’s north side, in the 600 block of 24th Avenue North. At a news conference, Brian O’Hara, the city’s police chief, said his understanding was that a 911 call appeared to have been made from a house. He said the caller reported that the man was running from immigration agents and was driving toward the residence.
Neighbors said they saw federal agents ordering people inside the house to come out with their hands up, and that several people, including children, walked out.
Mayor Jacob Frey said after the shooting that “there’s still a lot that we don’t know” but that “this is not sustainable.” He reiterated his call for ICE to leave.
“This is an impossible situation that our city is presently being put in,” Mr. Frey said. “And at the same time, we are trying to find a way forward to keep people safe, to protect our neighbors, to maintain order.”
As word of the latest shooting spread, at least 200 protesters gathered near the apparent scene on Wednesday night. A group of them yelled at Minneapolis police officers who had blocked the street to traffic, telling the local officers that the federal agents should be arrested.
Chief O’Hara said the crowd at the scene was “engaging in unlawful acts.” He and the mayor urged people to leave the area near the shooting.
“They have thrown fireworks at police officers and at multiple times, gas has been deployed,” Chief O’Hara said.
Several heavily armed Border Patrol agents arrived in a large, military-style vehicle outside of the crime scene tape. Protesters swarmed the vehicle and yelled and threw snowballs at agents who had gotten out. The agents eventually retreated, and as they left, they fired at least two canisters of gas that made a loud bang and made it difficult for some to breathe.
A few minutes later, at least two ICE agents arrived in an unmarked S.U.V. and sprayed chemical agents in the faces of protesters who approached them, causing one protester to say that he could not see. At one point, a protester fired several fireworks toward retreating ICE agents and their cars.
Chemical agents were used against protesters, and two people were detained and later released. Protesters damaged an unmarked vehicle with police lights.
A Minneapolis police officer who identified himself as a supervisor to several protesters told them he did not know exactly what happened. “It’s not like they’re talking to us,” he said, referring to the federal agents on scene.
Federal Bureau of Prisons officers were seen carrying out crowd-control duties alongside state troopers. Chief O’Hara said he had asked the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to investigate the shooting, and its agents were also at the scene. That agency was excluded from the F.B.I. inquiry into Ms. Good’s death.
Some 3,000 federal immigration agents have flooded the Minneapolis area in recent weeks, angering residents and local officials. The Trump administration has defended the deployment as necessary to cracking down on illegal immigration and rooting out fraud.
Shortly before the latest shooting was reported on Wednesday night, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota gave a speech that called on the Trump administration to “end this occupation.”
Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, referred to a “Minnesota insurrection” in a social media post after the shooting and accused Mr. Walz and Mr. Frey, both Democrats, of making the situation worse.
Liish Kozlowski, a Democratic state representative, said that Minnesotans should be “enraged” by the report of another ICE-related shooting, adding that “we’ve been raising alarms that they are not here for public safety or for fraud or for the well-being of anybody, but to hunt and harm us.”
Julie Bosman, Orlando MayorquÃn and Pooja Salhotra contributed reporting. Georgia Gee contributed research.
Mitch Smith is a Chicago-based national correspondent for The Times, covering the Midwest and Great Plains.
Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy for The Times."
Wednesday, January 14, 2026
FBI raids home of Washington Post reporter in ‘highly unusual and aggressive’ move | US news | The Guardian
FBI raids home of Washington Post reporter in ‘highly unusual and aggressive’ move
The FBI raided the Virginia home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, seizing devices as part of an investigation into a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified materials.
Agents searched Hannah Natanson’s Virginia home and seized devices in inquiry tied to a classified materials case
The FBI raided the home of a Washington Post reporter early on Wednesday in what the newspaper called a “highly unusual and aggressive” move by law enforcement, and press freedom groups condemned as a “tremendous intrusion” by the Trump administration.
Agents descended on the Virginia home of Hannah Natanson as part of an investigation into a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials."
FBI raids home of Washington Post reporter in ‘highly unusual and aggressive’ move | US news | The GuardianOpinion | ICE Is Waging War on Blue Cities - The New York Times
ICE Is Waging War on Blue Cities
"You’re reading the David Wallace-Wells newsletter. The best-selling science writer and essayist explores climate change, technology, the future of the planet and how we live on it.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have discharged their weapons at least 16 timessince President Trump and Stephen Miller launched their mass intimidation and deportation campaign last summer. Renee Nicole Good, who died last Wednesday in Minneapolis, is not even the first of these victims to have been killed.
We have been told by the Trump right that these are officers of the law struggling to do their jobs in the face of unlawful disruption. But when Americans catch glimpses of ICE agents on social media, they are not typically in orderly pursuit of undocumented migrants. Quite a lot isn’t really immigration enforcement at all, but moments of escalatory panic and rage — chaotic episodes in which often masked agents scramble to intimidate, coerce and ultimately pacify groups of civilians whose sympathies lie not with the state but with its nominal targets. Increasingly, what we are seeing resembles a war against the liberal resistance.
The spectacle looks from one vantage like a horrifying break with soft-focus American history. But there are also obvious continuities, not just with the country’s long history of vigilantism but also with a very recent period of militarism: empowered mercenaries treating the cities in which they’ve been deployed like intimidating war zones, seeing opposition and hostility around every corner and treating anyone who dares stand in their way as a terrorist or insurrectionist. This isn’t border enforcement; it is a kind of blundering counterinsurgency.
For more than two decades now, left-wing critics of the war on terror have warned about the possibility of what they often called the “imperial boomerang,” drawing on the work of Aimé Césaire, who argued that it was European colonial brutality that eventually enabled the rise of fascism at home, and Hannah Arendt, who endorsed the theory in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” (Michel Foucault later picked up the thread, too.)
Sometimes the prophecy seemed to suggest an element of karma — that in launching an open-ended war of choice America might reap what it had sown, with that cruelty and excess abroad returning from the imperial periphery not just in the form of soldiers’ trauma but also in the form of blood lust and violence, too.
But journalists, including Evan Wright and Radley Balko, and intellectuals, such as Chalmers Johnson and Julian Go, also offered some particular and pretty concrete predictions, including about the way that advanced military equipment, once purchased, would eventually find its way into the hands of domestic law enforcement officers, who would surely find something to do with all of it — helicopters and tanks, tactical gear and flash-bang grenades and sniper rifles. As the active campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan subsided, giving way first to less visible military operations and increasingly to remote-control warfare, the writers Noura Erakat, Connor Woodman, Richard Beck and Spencer Ackerman have warned of the paranoid logic of the forever war and the authoritarian drift of the state, and about the growth of repression and surveillance and the curtailment of civil liberties, the militarization of normal police action and the elevation of any conflict to a kind of “Clash of Civilizations” status.
And here we are, with an Iraq veteran in tactical gear, surrounded by comrades swarming a car partially blocking his way, firing point-blank at its driver. In the immediate aftermath, sympathetic nativists justified the shooting by describing a Minneapolis taken over by Somali refugees, but also by pointing to the victim’s divorce and sexuality, the social justice curriculum at her child’s elementary school and the obstinateness of liberal white women.
The crisis in Minneapolis began when the Trump administration sent ICE surging into the cosmopolitan city, which just five years ago had given rise to the largest protest movement the country had ever seen, not because there was some sudden burst of migration but to respond to a large-scale social-services fraud scandal, an obsession of the right-wing online ecosystem. This was the equivalent of dispatching the military to clean up a failed state, with “blue” now effectively a Trump administration synonym for “failed.” And the immigrants accused of perpetrating the fraud scheme were Somalis — many of them former residents of the quintessential failed state, a Muslim country in Africa that has been hit by more than 130 U.S. strikes since Inauguration Day. On the very day of Good’s shooting, the Fox News host Jesse Watters proposed to Vice President JD Vance that the Democrats in Minnesota have “a little bit of a Somali problem.” The vice president laughed, “America has a bit of a Somali problem.”
Over the last few years, noting pandemic-era peaks in crime and homelessness, it was possible for conservatives to demagogue blue cities as hell pits of social disorder, discrediting liberal governance of any kind. But crime has fallen so far and so fast that national murder rates are now lower than they ever were in records dating back to the 1960s. The migration surge that produced a spasm of American nativism is inarguably over, too. Since Trump’s second inauguration, actual border crossings have fallen close to historic lows.
But the logic of the forever culture war is that it must continue. In the last year MAGA has grown obsessed with government fraud, even after an empowered Elon Musk failed to find any meaningful major waste in federal spending. At the same time, it has embraced a throwback Islamophobia that has probably generated more references to Sept. 11, 2001, than we’ve heard in years.
In 2025, ICE has brought the border to blue strongholds quite literally, turning whole sanctuary cities into zones of open conflict — between state leaders and federal ones, city police and federal agents, resistance liberals and a descending force of outsiders who see a “The Future Is Female” bumper sticker and imagine the driver is a domestic terrorist.
Officers have already arrested and assaulted and harassed many dozens of citizens, many of them for the supposed crime of documenting ICE operations, as though journalism is a form of violence. They have arrested elected officials engaged in protest under false pretenses, too, as though political opposition has been criminalized. Agents have reportedly dragged pregnant women, pointed guns at children and left victims to seek out medical attention on their own. They have used banned chokeholds, according to ProPublica, at least 40 times.
Much ICE activity, though certainly not all, has unfolded within the distressingly capacious boundaries of American immigration law. But the shape of that immigration law, too, and the entire enforcement apparatus that has grown up to police it, is the result of the war on terror. ICE was created relatively recently, as part of the 2002 domestic legislative initiative that created the Department of Homeland Security, too — based on the logic that, given the imminent-seeming threat of terror, immigration enforcement would have to grow more expansive and sophisticated and militaristic in response.
Over time, what once looked like unstoppable war-on-terror jingoism soured into rage and regret, which destabilized American politics for a decade. Will ICE’s domestic campaign produce a similar blowback?
For the moment, Americans seem to be recoiling as they watch border-police vigilantism documented every day now, by citizen observers circling federal agents — each side filming the other in a kind of livestreamed mutual surveillance state. Last summer, support for immigration was at a record high. Recent polling from YouGov showed that abolishing ICE, once a widely mocked position of the online left, is now more popular than not abolishing it. By a 25-point margin, Americans believe the amount of force used in Good’s shooting was not justified; they oppose the use of military-grade weapons and the use of force against protesters by similar margins. Nearly 60 percent of the country supports the criminal prosecution of ICE agents who kill civilians, according to polling, and a similar share believes that what is happening in our cities can be fairly characterized as a conflict or war.
But just as alarming as what ICE has done in American cities in the first year of Trump’s second term is what the agency has in store for the next three — no matter the tide of public opinion. Last year Trump’s signature domestic policy law helped roughly triple the ICE budget, allocating $45 billion for building new immigration detention centers and hiring 10,000 new agents. One dispiriting lesson of the imperial boomerang is that, once bought and paid for, structures of intimidation and oppression tend to endure."