Sunday, May 03, 2026
Finishing Off Voting Rights Act, Supreme Court Declares Racism Over — Again
Finishing Off Voting Rights Act, Supreme Court Declares Racism Over — Again
“The Court’s conservative majority used outdated examples to say the racial gap in voter turnout has closed, but in reality, the gap is growing.
This week, the Supreme Court destroyed what little remained of the Voting Rights Act. In Louisiana v. Callais on Tuesday, the Court eliminated the law’s protections against lawmakers drawing maps that dilute the political power of minority voters. The decision continued more than a decade of the Court’s assaults on what is often called the crown jewel of the civil rights movement.
The opinion’s reasoning is based in part on a claim that is simply not factual. Pointing out that Black and white turnout reached parity in “two of the five most recent Presidential elections,” Justice Samuel Alito assured Americans that racial disparities in voting are no longer a problem. But Alito’s claim represents egregious cherry-picking, as he was not referring to recent elections, but to those in 2008 and 2012 — the years that Barack Obama ran for president. In the three most recent presidential elections, the trend shows exactly the opposite. The indisputable fact is the racial turnout gap is widening, and the Roberts Court is partially responsible.
Alito’s sleight of hand is outrageous but not surprising.
The Supreme Court first took its sledgehammer to the Voting Rights Act in 2013. In Shelby County v. Holder, the justices suspended the provision requiring states and localities with a history of racial discrimination in voting to get approval from the federal government before they could make changes to election rules, a process known as preclearance. To get permission, the state or locality had to prove that any changes wouldn’t fall harder on racial and ethnic minorities than on white voters.
In the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts cited the same two elections that Alito picked out in the new Callais decision: 2008 and 2012. Pointing to the fact that the racial turnout gap narrowed to zero in those years, Roberts argued that the Voting Rights Act had done its job and preclearance could be safely suspended.
As my colleague Michael G. Miller and I explain in our forthcoming book on the Voting Rights Act and Shelby County, the ruling was suspect even at the time. There was good reason to believe that 2008 and 2012 were anomalies — not the end of the racial turnout gap — in light of Obama’s candidacy driving up Black turnout.
And there was another possibility that the majority also refused to consider: that the protection of the law’s approval requirement itself was responsible for the narrowing of the turnout gap. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg put it in her dissent, “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
And yet the Supreme Court continued to hammer away at the Voting Rights Act. In the 2021 case Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the Supreme Court effectively nullified the ability to use Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to challenge laws that make it harder for minority voters to cast a ballot. The justices did this in direct violation of a promise in Shelby County to leave Section 2 intact. And in this week’s case, they finished off Section 2.
Which brings us back to Alito’s claim in Callais that racism in elections is over.
What Alito doesn’t mention is that since 2013, the racial turnout gap around the nation has exploded. It beggars belief that Alito was unaware of this fact. He reached back nearly 20 years to include the only two elections in American history in which Black and white turnout reached parity. Surely, he or one of his clerks checked to see whether they could update the Shelby County argument that racism in American elections was over by using more recent data. But the data is unambiguous: Roberts’s assurances in Shelby County were spectacularly wrong.
What’s worse, our research shows that much of the increase in the turnout gap was caused by the disastrous Shelby County ruling. Make no mistake: The turnout gap was always likely to expand when Obama was no longer running for office. But it would not have widened this much if preclearance were still in effect. How do we know this? In a recent peer-reviewed academic journal article, Miller and I show that Shelby County directly increased the racial turnout gap in parts of the country that were once covered by the law’s preclearance requirement. In fact, we estimate that by the 2022 midterm elections, the Shelby County effect was causing hundreds of thousands of ballots to go uncast by minority voters.
“In large part because of the Voting Rights Act, our Nation has made great strides in eliminating racial discrimination in voting,” Alito wrote in Callais. “And if, as a result of this progress, it is hard to find pertinent evidence relating to intentional present-day voting discrimination, that is cause for celebration.”
There was reason to celebrate . . . 13 years ago. The Voting Rights Act was at its strongest point ever, Black political participation rivaled white participation, and the nation had elected its first minority president.
But history didn’t stop then, and things have only gotten worse. As Alito himself wrote this week, “Far more germane [for understanding our current world] are current data and current political conditions.” He should take his own advice.“
Spain demands release of Gaza flotilla activists ‘held illegally’ by Israel | Israel | The Guardian
Spain demands release of Gaza flotilla activists ‘held illegally’ by Israel
"Israeli court extends detention of two men who were among 175 people intercepted near Crete on Thursday
Spain’s foreign ministry has demanded the immediate release of a Spanish national it said was being “held illegally” by Israel after the interception of a Gaza-bound flotilla, hours after an Israeli court moved to extend his detention by two days.
Saif Abu Keshek, who lives in Barcelona, and Thiago Ávila, from Brazil, appeared in court in Ashkelon on Sunday, days after Israeli forces intercepted at least 22 boats from a flotilla that was attempting to break Israel’s maritime blockade of the devastated Palestinian territory to deliver aid.
The interception took place in international waters off Greece. Israel later said it had removed 175 activists from the Global Sumud Flotilla, which was made up of about 58 vessels carrying crew members from 70 countries. Two members of the flotilla, Abu Keshek and Ávila, were later taken to Israel for questioning.
On Sunday, the rights group representing the pair said the court had ruled to extend their detention and that no formal charges had been filed against them. “The court extended their detention by two days,” Miriam Azem, the international advocacy coordinator at Adalah, told Agence France-Presse.
A source from Spain’s foreign ministry told the Guardian on Sunday that the Spanish consul in Tel Aviv had attended Abu Keshek’s court hearing, adding that he was being “held illegally”.
His next hearing was scheduled for Tuesday, the source said, adding: “The Spanish government demands his immediate release.”
On Saturday, Adalah said its lawyers had met the two detained activists at Shikma prison in Ashkelon.
The right group said Ávila had told the lawyers he had been “subjected to extreme brutality” when the vessels were seized, saying he had been “dragged face-down across the floor and beaten so severely that he passed out twice”.
Since arriving in Israel, Ávila said he had been “kept in isolation and blindfolded”, according to Adalah.
Abu Keshek, meanwhile, had been “hand-tied and blindfolded … and forced to lie face down on the floor from the moment of his seizure” until reaching Israel, the group said. “Both activists are continuing their hunger strike in protest of their unlawful detention and ill-treatment,” it added.
Israel’s foreign ministry has accused the two activists of being affiliated with an organisation that is subject to US Treasury sanctions.
Washington accuses the Popular Conference for Palestinians Abroad (PCPA) of “clandestinely” acting on behalf of the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
Israel’s foreign ministry accused Abu Keshek of being a leading PCPA member and alleged that Ávila was also linked to the organisation and “suspected of illegal activity”.
On Friday, after it emerged that the two men had been taken to Israel for interrogation, Spain and Brazil issued a joint statement condemning what they described as the “abduction of two of their citizens in international waters by the government of Israel”.
The Spanish and Brazilian governments demanded the immediate return of their citizens, adding: “This flagrantly illegal action by the Israeli authorities outside their jurisdiction constitutes a violation of international law, which could be brought before international courts, and may constitute a crime under our respective national laws.”
Spain and Israel have long been at diplomatic odds, particularly as the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, emerges as one of Europe’s most vocal critics of Israel’s war in Gaza.
Speaking at a political rally on Saturday, Sánchez condemned the detention of Abu Keshek and Ávila. “We have seen that the Israeli authorities under [Benjamin] Netanyahu’s government have kidnapped several citizens who were on the flotilla heading to Palestine to deliver humanitarian aid and to continue reminding the world that there are people suffering in Gaza, in the West Bank, and throughout Palestine,” he said.
Sánchez added: “Now that Netanyahu has done this – kidnapping foreign citizens, one of them Spanish – and taken him to Israel, I have several things to say to Prime Minister Netanyahu. The first is that Spain will always protect its citizens. The second is that we will always defend international law, and this is a new violation of international law. And the third is that we want the release of the Spanish citizen who has been illegally kidnapped by the Netanyahu government.”
Organisers of the flotilla said the Israeli interception took place more than 620 miles (1,000km) from Gaza and that their equipment was smashed, leaving them grappling with what they called a “calculated death trap at sea”. The Israeli military declined to comment when asked about the accusations by AFP.
The Global Sumud Flotilla’s previous attempt to reach Gaza in the summer and autumn of 2025 drew global attention after Israeli forces intercepted the boats off the coasts of Egypt and Palestinian territory. Crew members including the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg were arrested and expelled by Israeli forces.
The flotilla’s latest attempt came as a senior UN official said the humanitarian needs in Gaza remained “overwhelming.” About 1.8 million people – almost the entire population of Gaza – were displaced and dependent on aid, while hostilities continued and public health risks were mounting, Khaled Khiari, an UN assistant secretary general, told the security council last week.
Gaza, which is governed by Hamas, has been under an Israeli blockade – described by the UN as “a direct contravention of international human rights and humanitarian law” – since 2007.
Israel’s war in Gaza, triggered by the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, has led to severe shortages of food, water, medicine and fuel, and killed more than 72,500 Palestinians, according to aid agencies.
AFP contributed to this report"
‘This is just disarray’: alarm inside Pentagon after Hegseth staff purges
‘This is just disarray’: alarm inside Pentagon after Hegseth staff purges
Robert Tait
Man testifies at hearing
Pete Hegseth testifies before the Senate armed services committee on Thursday. Photograph: Cliff Owen/AP
Since Donald Trump’s first term, they have been viewed comfortingly as the “adults in the room,” a last line of defense against the impulsive whims of a president with access to the nuclear codes.
Now – after an unprecedented wave of firings that has been compared by some to Stalin’s purges – the Pentagon top brass no longer seem like such a reliable bulwark.
Since Trump returned to office in January last year, Pete Hegseth, the rumbustious defense secretary who has made it his mission to remake a military ethos he denounced as “woke”, has fired or forcibly retired 24 generals and senior commanders, with no performance-related reason given.
About 60% have been Black or female, an approach seemingly driven by the administration’s proclaimed onslaught against “DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) hires”.
Yet the officers forced out have had impeccable reputations. The most recent victim was Gen Randy George, the army chief of staff, ousted last month reportedly after he refused to obey Hegseth’s instruction to strike four officers – two Black men and two women – from a list of prospective promotions.
The spate of firings began in February last year with the termination of General CQ Brown as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, a figure that serves as the main interface between the armed forces and the civilian leadership.
Brown, who is Black and a distinguished former air force commander, was replaced by Dan Caine, a three-star general who had retired and had to be quickly promoted to earn the fourth military star needed to win Senate confirmation to a position some observers say he lacks the necessary qualifications for.
Prominent among the female officers removed was Lisa Franchetti, an admiral who was the first woman to be chief of naval operations and the first to sit on the joint chiefs of staff.
Hegseth was unapologetic at a hearing of the Senate armed services committee last week when Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island, asked him if Trump had instructed him to single out Black and female officers for dismissal.
“Of course not,” he replied. More revealing was his follow-up: “Members on this committee and the previous leadership of this department were focused on height, social engineering, race and gender in ways that we think were unhealthy.”
In interviews with the Guardian, insiders have portrayed Hegseth – a former Fox News host known for combative public appearances and an aggressive stance towards journalists – as increasingly isolated within the Pentagon’s sprawling bureaucracy and surrounded by a small coterie of close friends and relatives.
Some say he expresses fear and paranoia about Trump firing him from a job for which critics say his background as a former national guard infantry major with combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan is inadequate qualification.
Pentagon staff have been surprised to see him accompanied to official meetings by his wife, Jennifer, a former Fox News producer who frequently sits at the back during such encounters.
Hegseth’s other close companions are said to be his brother, Phil, who he has appointed as a senior adviser, along with Tim Parlatore, an attorney who has previously represented Hegseth and Trump, and Ricky Buria, a former marine and Biden administration holdover, to whom he has grown close.
Man holds woman’s hand
Pete Hegseth and his wife Jennifer at the White House correspondents’ dinner last weekend. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
Most of the day-to-day work of running a vast department with around 2.1 million military personnel and 770,000 civilian employees worldwide is overseen by Steve Feinberg, the deputy defense secretary, who is a billionaire owner of an investment firm.
Hegseth, meanwhile, has focused on issues of personal interest to him. These include shaking up the Pentagon’s chaplain services – a preoccupation in line with his avowed Christian beliefs, which he is said to give frequent voice with the invocation that “Christ is king”.
Military analysts say Hegseth’s recent firings dovetail with plans spelled out in Project 2025, the radical blueprint drawn up by the rightwing Heritage Foundation that has closely guided Trump’s second-term policies.
“It talked about an officer purge and going after the so-called woke officers at the senior level,” said Paul Eaton, a retired army major-general who commanded US forces after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. “They want to create ideologically pure armed forces that will be pliant to the president and his secretary of defense and whose oath will be more to a person than to the constitution.”
Eaton likened the removals to Stalin’s far bloodier purge of red army generals before the second world war – which is widely believed to have hampered the Soviet Union’s initial efforts to repel the 1941 invasion by Nazi Germany – warning that it could hinder US military operational capacity in its war effort against Iran.
“I believe that the senior leadership of the US military has been substantially damaged,” he said.
“You develop a fracture in the cohesion of the people at that level. It is if you haven’t been purged, you wonder if you are next if you say the wrong thing to the man or woman on your left or right that may invoke the wrath of the secretary of defense or the president.
“That’s a really unhealthy environment when you’re afraid to speak your mind, and not just truth to power, but truth in the defense of the armed forces against stupid decisions.”
The military’s willingness to resist Trump seems more crucial than ever in the light of the president’s recent vows to devastate Iran’s civilian infrastructure and his now-notorious warning that a “whole civilization will die” unless Iranian leaders agree to his conditions.
Veterans worry about the rank-and-file impact of threats to carry out war crimes or even genocide. They are also concerned about the ability of senior figures – including Caine – to stand against it.
“All the retired officers I know are seriously concerned of the long-term effect on the force of senior leaders saying things like no quarter, no mercy (comments that have been made by Hegseth), or [that] we’re going to eliminate a civilization without any remonstration from the senior military officials,” said Kevin Carroll, a former army colonel who has served in the offices of the defense secretary and the joint chiefs of staff.
“I think it poses a real long-term risk threat to the ethics and ethos of the force.”
Misgivings have been voiced about the standing of Caine, who has never held a senior command role and who some believe lacks the authority of previous joint chief chairs to resist Trump’s wilder impulses in the manner of Gen Mark Milley, who told officials to inform him of any suspect military order from the president in the wake of the 6 January, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol.
“He has an extremely unusual résumé, I think an unprecedented résumé for chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and that just has to make Caine feel that his job is always vulnerable when he sees Trump and Hegseth have fired people with excellent resumes like Brown, Franchetti or Randy George,” said Carroll.
Eaton said: “I hear he’s a good man, but something happens to you when you vault from a three-star to a four-star general and there is a massive growth requirement. His body language when he does briefings with Hegseth is not that of a man who is thrilled to be there.
“What he says to the president as his senior military adviser behind close doors, I don’t know. But if you have the president of the United States get within two hours or 90 minutes of committing a strategic war crime, going after a civilization neutralization as he was threatening, we definitely have something missing in the civilian-military relationship.”
Restraining Trump seems all the more urgent amid unconfirmed reports that he discussed the possibility of using nuclear weapons against Iran in a recent White House meeting.
A source with knowledge of the meeting insisted Trump was just “talking out loud about nukes” and not “demanding a strike”.
One senior official from Trump’s first administration proclaimed himself unsurprised, calling the president “enamored with nukes” and saying he had to be talked out of using them against North Korea in 2017, seeing them as the “ultimate expression of his toughness”.
Some question whether such powers of persuasion still exist in the present-day Pentagon.
“For years, we’ve been told that we don’t have to worry about a crazy president launching a nuclear war, because the military would not carry out any illegal order,” said Joe Cirincione, a veteran national security analyst and nuclear non-proliferation expert, who called for new rules of command over nuclear strikes.
“But that’s not real. What we’ve seen in the last year is the military repeatedly carrying out illegal orders. The attacks on the alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, the raid to seize [President Nicolas] Maduro in Venezuela, the war on Iran, have all been illegal – yet the military carried them all out.
“People don’t understand the president has sole unfettered authority to launch nuclear weapons whenever he wants, for any reason he wants. It’s a very short chain of command. It turns out that relying on the military to refuse an illegal order from the president is not an adequate barrier. We need something a whole lot stronger.”
On one famous previous occasion, the possibility of an unstable president ordering a nuclear strike was blocked by the actions of the Pentagon.
In 1974, with Richard Nixon’s presidency on the verge of disintegration over Watergate, the then defense secretary, James Schlesinger – fearing that the president’s fragile mental state might induce him to order a nuclear attack – ordered senior military figures to check any such commands with him.
It is hard to see such a restraining role being played by Hegseth, who by common depiction sees his role as catering to Trump’s every wish and has frequently matched his boss’s belligerent rhetoric towards Iran.
It adds up to scenario seen with bewilderment by Pentagon veterans seasoned in observing tensions between the civilian and military leadership but conditioned to seeing them resolved amicably.
“There was tension between the office of the secretary of defense and the joint chiefs of staff when I served on the joint staff in 2002 and 2003 because of disagreements about Iraq over whether and how we should go to war,” said Carroll. “But it was all very professional and civil. This is just disarray. It’s crazy.”
Aram Roston contributed reporting"
Behind Voting Rights Case, a Clash Over the Reality of Racism
Behind Voting Rights Case, a Clash Over the Reality of Racism
"The Supreme Court ruling said there must be proof that a racial group was “intentionally” disadvantaged. The dissent called it “well-nigh impossible.”
In 1965, the year Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, it did not take much detective work to discover how some of the South’s most powerful white politicians felt about their Black neighbors.
Senator James Eastland, a Democrat from Mississippi who wanted to kill the landmark legislation, once openly stated that Black people were an “an inferior race.” During his 1963 inauguration speech, Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama, a Democrat, infamously declared, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
These days, such racism, at least when directed at Black people, is rarely openly expressed by white Southern politicians, who consider it to be immoral, bad politics, bad manners — or all of the above.
But a question central to the Southern experience lingers: Has anti-Black racism eased, or has discrimination against African Americans simply become more subtle, disguised as a web of rules embedded in regular partisan politics?
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court strode once again into this fraught territory with a decision that weakened the Voting Rights Act, the law that allowed many Black Southerners to finally participate in American democracy after decades of systemic oppression and exclusion.
At issue was the way in which the courts should determine whether a legislative map is racially discriminatory. Writing for the six-judge conservative majority, Justice Samuel A. Alito stated that from now on, anyone who wished to challenge a map on such grounds must show proof that the map makers had “intentionally” drawn legislative districts to disadvantage a given racial group.
In a blistering dissent, Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the liberal minority, argued that under the ruling, a plaintiff would have to show “that the legislators were ‘motivated by a discriminatory purpose,’” which was contrary to the “clear text and design” of the Voting Rights Act.
Congress has long known, she wrote, that trying to find smoking-gun evidence of racist motives is “well-nigh impossible.”
Indeed, such proof may be harder than ever to find. For Gerald A. Griggs, a civil rights lawyer in Georgia, the old measures of racism — some stomach-turning tally of crosses burned, of people lynched — does not apply so much anymore. Mr. Griggs, who is Black, said that subtler discriminatory forces have “gotten into the system and corroded the arteries of the system,” and will require particularly nuanced legal challenges to “ferret out.”
“What we’re dealing with now is less overt racism,” said Mr. Griggs, a past president of the Georgia N.A.A.C.P.
Some Black Southerners still feel that kind of racism deeply. But proving it in a courtroom is another matter.
The Supreme Court’s requirement that there must be some proof of an intent to discriminate has taken form in other areas of the law — with serious implications in the South and beyond, said Stephen B. Bright, who teaches law at Georgetown and Yale.
Mr. Bright, the former director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, noted that in a closely watched capital punishment case in 1987, the court rejected the appeal of Warren McCleskey, a Black man who had been sentenced to death in Georgia for killing a white person.
Mr. McCleskey’s lawyers presented the court with a study of the state’s justice system showing that a defendant who had been accused of killing a white person in Georgia was four times as likely to receive a death sentence as someone who had killed a Black person. But the court ruled that this was not enough to help Mr. McCleskey. To win his case, the court said, he needed to show that he had been personally subject to discrimination.
The problem of “proving” racial discrimination has also bedeviled the South when it comes to racially lopsided juries, Mr. Bright said. In a 1986 case, Batson v. Kentucky, the Supreme Court established that a judge must find “purposeful discrimination” to determine that racial discrimination had been present in the jury selection process.
“You have to prove that the prosecutor, in using peremptory strikes, intentionally discriminated,” Mr. Bright said. “You can’t possibly know that unless the prosecutor tells you.”
This is one reason, he said, that all-white juries remain common in many parts of the South — “even in places with very substantial African-American populations.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling on Wednesday nullified a majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana, one of two in the state. The district, long and intermittently bulbous, had been created by state lawmakers who felt pressured by the courts to draw a map that carved out two districts with a majority of Black voters, in order to meet the requirements of the Voting Rights Act.
Justice Alito, writing the decision, made the case that the South had come a long way since 1965, particularly on Black voter participation, an assertion that is highly contested.
“Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate, even turning out at higher rates than white voters in two of the five most recent presidential elections nationwide and in Louisiana,” he wrote.
Some conservative African Americans this week welcomed the ruling, viewing it a fitting response to real racial progress in the United States. To them, the Voting Rights Act, which often forced state legislatures to draw majority-minority districts around the country, had merely put Black Americans into archaic race-based boxes.
Among those approving of the ruling was Josh Williams, a Republican state representative of a majority-white district in Ohio.
“The idea that Black Americans need special districts carved out just for them is complete nonsense,” Mr. Williams posted on social media this week, noting that he was currently running for Congress in a district that is also majority-white. “It’s a violation of the law and blatantly unconstitutional.”
Wednesday’s ruling is of a piece with the Supreme Court’s decisions to move to what some justices have called a “colorblind Constitution.” In 2023, the court effectively ended affirmative action in college admissions, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. writing, “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”
The second Trump administration, meanwhile, has used its executive power to try to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the public and private sectors.
The stakes in the voting-rights case, Louisiana v. Callais, are arguably bigger, potentially reconfiguring the very architecture of national political power just as a polarized country is barreling toward the midterm elections. Some states are already considering whether to redraw their maps.
The ghosts of the past still inform Southern politics at the most elemental level. Decades ago, many Black voters migrated from the Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln, to the Democratic Party, impressed by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign to usher in a new era of civil rights. Today, many Black Southerners are committed Democrats.
Many white Southerners were coaxed away from the Democratic Party, starting in the 1960s, thanks in part to a Republican “Southern strategy” that exploited their resentment over Mr. Johnson’s push for civil rights and desegregation. Today, many white Southerners are committed Republicans.
In today’s redistricting efforts, it has been a struggle, at times, to tease out whether a redrawn electoral map is a result of partisanship or old-fashioned racism. Complicating matters is the fact that the Supreme Court, in 2019, ruled that federal judges have no power to hear challenges to gerrymanders carried out purely for partisan advantage.
Stephen Menendian, an academic researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, has described the mess as “the problem of entanglement.” In a 2023 law review article, he warned of a big risk: “that unconstitutional racial gerrymanders will escape judicial review under the cover of partisanship.”
The court’s conservative majority sees it the opposite way. In the opinion, Justice Alito wrote that plaintiffs could challenge a partisan gerrymander by claiming it is actually a racial gerrymander. Mr. Alito warned that litigants should not be able to get around the rules “by dressing their political-gerrymandering claims in racial garb.”
Quin Hillyer, a white conservative opinion writer who lives in Alabama, believes that these days, Republican map makers would welcome any Black voters into a district if it would bolster their party’s strength.
“If there were an enclave, or a neighborhood, that was 100 percent Black, but that voted 80 percent Republican,” he said, “I think that the white Republicans would gladly take those people.”
Richard Fausset, a Times reporter based in Atlanta, writes about the American South, focusing on politics, culture, race, poverty and criminal justice."
Saturday, May 02, 2026
Judge blocks Trump administration from deporting 3,000 Yemeni refugees
Judge blocks Trump administration from deporting 3,000 Yemeni refugees
“A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from deporting 3,000 Yemeni refugees, extending their temporary protected status. The judge criticized the administration for not following the established process for altering or rescinding the status and for terminating it despite acknowledging the dangers in Yemen. The ruling was praised by immigrant rights advocates who emphasized the humanitarian basis of the protections.
Emergency order allows extension of temporary protected status that has been repeatedly granted
A federal judge on Friday blocked the Trump administration from forcing about 3,000 Yemeni refugees to leave the US, ruling that temporary protected status repeatedly granted to them and due to expire Monday should be extended again.
Judge Dale E Ho in Manhattan extended the status temporarily while a lawsuit seeking to preserve the protections plays out. In an emergency order, he wrote that people granted the status are ordinary, law-abiding people whom the US government had determined could face threats to their safety if they were returned to a country facing an ongoing armed conflict.
Amid its immigration crackdown, the Trump administration has terminated temporary protected status for people from nine countries, including Haiti, Venezuela and Ethiopia. Before Ho’s ruling, protections for Yemeni refugees were set to end on Monday, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services.
People with temporary protected status are eligible to remain in the US, may not be removed from the country and are able to receive work and travel authorization.
In his ruling, Ho criticized former homeland security secretary Kristi Noem, saying Congress had established a process for temporary protected status to be altered or rescinded, but she had not followed it.
He was particularly critical of a social media message she sent out in early December in which she said she had just met with Donald Trump and was recommending a full travel ban “on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies”.
On 13 February, he noted, Noem announced in a news release that temporary protected status would be terminated for people from Yemen, finding that letting them stay in the US was “contrary to our national interest”.
“TPS holders from Yemen are not ‘killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies,’” Ho wrote at the start of his conclusion in his 36-page decision.
He noted that among 2,810 Yemenis who hold TPS status and another 425 who have applied were a pregnant 33-year-old Detroit woman due to give birth this month whose unborn child has a congenital heart condition that is not treatable in Yemen, and a 50-year-old former human rights worker in Brooklyn who is a target of Houthi-aligned militias in Yemen.
“Temporary means temporary and the final word will not be from activist judges legislating from the bench,” the US Department of Homeland Security said in a statement.
Razeen Zaman, director of immigrant rights at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, applauded Ho’s ruling, saying that “the court has made clear that humanitarian statutes like TPS cannot be used as a deportation pipeline”.
Zaman said in a release that Homeland Security had determined that it was unsafe for Yemeni refugees to return to their country “but terminated their protection anyway”.
Zaman added that Ho’s ruling “affirms that protection must be based on facts and conditions on the ground, not on the political appetite to end it”.
Noem announced her decision to end temporary protected status for Yemen in February. The Department of Homeland Security on Friday said she had reviewed conditions in the country and consulted with government agencies before determining that Yemen no longer met the legal requirements for temporary status.
The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund included comments from several lawsuit plaintiffs in its press release heralding Ho’s ruling.
One plaintiff identified by a pseudonym to protect his safety wrote that the people fighting to preserve protections for Yemenis were “doctors, engineers, and pilots like myself, and also drivers, deli workers, and countless other people who contribute meaningfully every day, supporting not just our own families but the broader fabric of society”.
He added that their presence “represents resilience, skill, and dedication – values that strengthen the nation as a whole”.
A woman also identified by a pseudonym called Ho’s decision “a lifeline for my family”. She added: “It is the moment we finally breathed a sigh of relief after months of existential anxiety.”
‘Deplorable’: ICE hires firm accused of ‘torture’ to track down undocumented children
‘Deplorable’: ICE hires firm accused of ‘torture’ to track down undocumented children
“US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) awarded a contract to MVM Inc, a private security company, to assist in tracking down undocumented immigrant children. ICE claims the purpose is to conduct “wellness checks” to ensure the children’s safety and well-being. However, critics argue that the program is a ploy to deport the children or their sponsors and that ICE is using the program as an excuse to conduct these checks.
Exclusive: Contractor denies allegations including ‘enforced disappearance’ and will help locate unaccompanied minors
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has awarded a contract to a private security company that has faced accusations of “torture” and “enforced disappearance” to assist in tracking down undocumented immigrant children who arrived in the US alone, a contracting document shows.
ICE has stepped up its work so much in pursuing these minors in the US that it has contracted out some of its mission to a third party to put “boots on the ground” and locate immigrant children previously released from US government custody.
The agency characterizes the work of tracing immigrant children who reached the US without authorization and were released into communities while they go through immigration court proceedings as “safety and wellness checks”. ICE says it wants to confirm the children’s location, school enrollment and overall wellness, including checking for signs of abuse or trafficking, according to the contracting document.
But an internal ICE document reviewed by the Guardian last year shows ICE actually runs the operations with the aim of deporting the children or pursuing criminal cases against them – or their adult sponsors sheltering them legally in the US. A critic at the time called ICE’s efforts “backdoor family separation”.
“Accusations that ICE is ‘targeting’ and arresting children are FALSE and an attempt to demonize law enforcement,” a DHS spokesperson said on Friday. “Rather than separating families, ICE asks parents if they want to be removed with their children or if the child should be placed with someone safe the parent designates.”
Now, as that program continues, the agency in mid-April gave a contract to a US company, MVM Inc, to assist in carrying out such operations.
MVM is a longtime security contractor, based in Ashburn, Virginia, with about 2,500 employees, and provides detention and transport services to federal immigration agencies. It previously provided security services to the CIA.
MVM did not respond to a detailed request for comment by time of publication.
In 2024, MVM was sued by two Guatemalan fathers and their respective children in a California federal court for alleged “torture, enforced disappearance and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment”, according to the lawsuit, for the role it played in the family separation policy at the borderunder the first Trump administration that prompted widespread uproar.
“MVM physically took thousands of children away from their parents and transferred them to shelters,” the lawsuit said. “MVM transported and harbored these children using unmarked vehicles, commercial airlines, and makeshift detention centers.”
MVM asked a judge to toss the lawsuit, saying the company had “openly denounced” the family separation campaign, adding that since it was a private company, it should not be held liable for a US government policy.
The two Guatemalan children, a 16-year-old and a three-year-old, were separated from their respective fathers in 2017, “with the substantial assistance of MVM”, the lawsuit says. The case continues to move through federal court.
In March 2025, a judge dismissed some of the claims on procedural grounds but allowed the case to continue based on the torture, enforced disappearance, and inhuman and degrading treatment claims.
Eighteen different companies offered their services to ICE to assist in the “wellness checks” operation, according to a document posted publicly on a government contracting website. But the other companies that vied for the contract lacked “the critical ‘boots on the ground’ child welfare personnel and infrastructure needed to physically locate and conduct wellness checks on children”, the document said. MVM, however, did appear to have the resources ICE was seeking, according to a review of the document.
The contract is supposed to run for one year. The amount ICE is paying MVM is redacted, along with the number of “wellness checks” the agency wants the company to perform.
“MVM contractors have ZERO immigration enforcement authority. This partnership, as part of the UAC Safety Verification Initiative, represents ICE’s commitment to protect vulnerable children from sexual abuse and exploitation. The primary focus of this initiative is to conduct welfare checks on these children to ensure that they are safe and not being exploited or abused,” the DHS spokesperson added, using the official term for the program to conduct checks on children who immigrated to the US unaccompanied and have been placed with sponsors.
Last year, the Trump administration began efforts to track down immigrant children who had entered the US alone to request asylum or reunite with family members already in the US. Such children largely arrive at the US-Mexico border and either turn themselves in or are apprehended by border officials.
After an unaccompanied immigrant child enters the US, they are placed under the custody of the office of refugee resettlement (ORR). While their immigration cases, which are handled by ICE, play out, ORR will place the children in shelters, in foster homes or under a sponsor’s care if available. Typically, sponsors, who complete an assessment process and background checks, are the children’s relatives in the US; at times, they are unrelated adults.
In the past year, ICE, in partnership with local law enforcement agencies, has begun to track down those children, many of whom the Trump administration says have gone “missing”, to provide “wellness checks”. But the operations have been criticized by many immigration attorneys and advocates.
“This all seems like a ploy to do two things: one, find either kids or their sponsors to arrest and deport. Or, two, scare children into self-deporting,” said Michael Lukens, the executive director of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, which provides legal representation to immigrant children. “It’s really deplorable. It’s really concerning.”
For years, Trump administration allies pointed to a 2024 homeland security inspector general report that found that ICE was not able to adequately track unaccompanied minors. They used that report to push a narrative that unaccompanied immigrant children have been lost and trafficked, Lukens said.
“Their parents know where they are, their lawyers know where they are, usually the courts know where they are. It’s just ICE doesn’t have their address in a file,” said Lukens. “Those kids were never missing but they’re using it as an excuse to do these ‘wellness checks’.”
The inspector general report suggested understaffing at ICE and deficient cross-agency communication are mostly to blame for the agency’s inability to keep track of the children, rather than actual trafficking.
MVM is a longtime government contractor that now mostly works with federal agencies to transport immigrant children and families between government-run facilities. It was started in the late 1970s by former Secret Service agents and ballooned into a significant government contractor. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2008 that MVM had a secretive contract with the CIA in Iraq for security guards to protect CIA staff.
MVM also has a track record of allegations of abuse with its previous immigration-related contract work. In 2018, MVM was accused of holding immigrant children in a vacant office building for three weeks amid the family separation crisis under the first Trump administration. During the Covid-19 pandemic, MVM detained immigrant children and families in hotels before they were removed from the country. MVM also had the contract to run the secretive Guantánamo Bay immigration detention center, until it was taken over by another company in 2025. Most recently, last August, the non-profit newsroom Injustice Watch reported that MVM locked an immigrant woman and her baby inside a Chicago hotel for five days.
“We have seen MVM harm children in federal immigration custody in egregious ways for many years now,” said Neha Desai, the managing director of children’s human rights and dignity at the National Center for Youth Law. “It is both deeply disturbing and completely unsurprising that this government has hired MVM to conduct so-called ‘wellness checks’. These checks have already terrorized numerous children and have led to family separation throughout the country.
“What will come next once MVM is involved will surely be even worse,” Desai added.“
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