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Hoo boy. With the approach of what bleakly promises to be "the super-Islamophobic midterms," the Bigot-In-Chief is letting his racist freak flag fly by attacking Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, whose smarts, strength, hotness, accomplished wife and Michigan win clearly terrify him. Cue charges of "communist," "man of hate," and, probs soon, AI slop featuring suicide vests. Meanwhile, El-Sayed, a far sharper tool in the shed, has embraced the charge they represent "(two) America’s": The ads write themselves.
Planet MAGA, of course, is already so delusional Trump just boasted of his "Great Poll Numbers," which now sit at rock-bottom lows of 38% to 33%. For a bunch of hacks led by a fragile narcissist who's never seen a scapegoat he didn't relish, the fantastical goes hand-in-stubby-hand with the fear-mongering: vandals in the Reflecting Pool, domestic terrorists at No Kings, migrant caravans, lunatic Bolsheviks, weird names or just brown-or-black skinned success, more terrifying to many of these losers than any threat of extremism. Enter, in peril, the high-achieving epidemiologist, health official, author and "Muslim boogeyman" El-Sayed. “Expect them to throw the whole bigoted kitchen sink at El-Sayed," says Mehdi Hasan. "This will be the anti-Zohran Mamdani campaign on anti-Muslim steroids."
Unsurprisingly, it began in earnest the minute the good doctor won Michigan's against-the-odds primary against establishment Dem Haley Stevens. He'll face off against GOP Rep. and racist ijiot Mike Rogers, who of course has rushed to call the U.S.-born-and-bred El-Sayed "anti-American" and - pulling the same juvenile "Barack Hussein Obama" crap to undermine his legitimacy - to use his full, scary, def-not-in-Kansas-anymore name Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed. But Abdulrahman, who doesn't suffer fools gladly, has brutally pushed back. "With a name like mine, I never thought running for office would be possible," he said at a campaign event. But if "Mike" wants to focus on his 11-letter (a lot!) first name, he just wanted to remind him, "If you don’t know how to say it, keep the name out of your damn mouth.”
In moronic lockstep, MAGA's bigots, brown shirts and zealots have followed suit with "cartoonishly Islamophobic attacks." They use his full name and say he's a "socialist," which they can't define but anyway he isn't. Anti-trans goon Nancy Mace charges, “Every single Muslim holding public office (is) a Trojan Horse and a threat to national security and our republic," and woe is us when "our granddaughters are wearing burkas to school." Vapid scumbag JD calls him a "crazy" guy who doesn't want Trump's rip-off, oligarch-run "prosperous economy" and flings "personal insults" at Vance's family, though hours later Trump attacked El-Sayed's wife, who is U.S.-born and thus not an alleged Einstein Visa immigrant third wife who somehow after 30 years here can still barely speak English. Maybe it was an Epstein Visa?
As usual, Trump has eagerly led the racist, vulgar charge. Along with a communist man of hate, he's also called El-Sayed a "jihadist" from a rigged, "strictly Third World" state who's "full of shit." It turns out El-Sayed is also "the absolute best at casually burning Trump to the fucking ground": Asked about the barb, El-Sayed snapped back, “At least I don’t let mine go in the middle of the Oval Office." And as with another smart, quick, non-white guy who's way above his pay grade and lives rent-free in his wee puerile mind, he likes to sneeringly recite, often stumbling, the full, scary name of a guy who this time actually would be the first Muslim U.S. senator. Presumably, the ketchup really hit the White House walls last weekend when El-Sayed said he'd had "a really good conversation" with Obama about "what we need to do to win."
Above all, the bigot for all seasons pivots to the trope of anyone Arabic - El-Sayed's parents immigrated from Egypt - being anti-Semitic. "He doesn't love Jewish people," babbles Trump. "He hates them with a passion that burns in his heart." In fact, El-Sayed has plainly, repeatedly said he opposes not Jews but Israel's genocidal policies, AIPAC and the dark U.S. money that abets both: "I believe in equal rights to peace, dignity and self-determination for all people." That call for equality under the law has nothing to do with anti-Semitism, notes Peter Beinart; cognizant of history. he also warns that a political party or ideology willing to be "nakedly bigoted" toward any group of people, in this case Muslims, in order to maintain power would, if the politics were to shift, "do the same thing to Jews in a heartbeat."
Obviously, such subtlety is beyond the dim-witted likes of Trump and his MAGA zombies, who alone could look at Dr. El-Sayed and his (one) wife Dr. Sarah Jukaku, a psychiatrist whose parents emigrated here from India, and see a threat. Both are U.S.-born-and- raised doctors with undergrad degrees from University of Michigan, where they met, and advanced degrees from Columbia and Oxford. In his book Healing Politics, El-Sayed offers a rigorous framework for understanding systemic medical and political failure, and building conditions for lasting healing. He also calls Jukaku his “rock" and praises the "quiet confidence" that led her to work with people confronting pain. "I struggled to learn who I was,” he wrote of their earlier selves. “Sarah did not. She danced with her emotions. I wrestled with mine." The couple has two daughters.
No wonder, then, a needy, hollow rapist, con-man, bully and aspiring tinpot dictator, routinely raking in billions while kids go hungry and stuffed into a cheap tux for his fellow billionaire felons, posted a photo of himself with his tacky, mail-order, call-girl wife in a tight dress with "redacted Epstein files written all over it" - both smirking, "We're richer and be better than you and just ignore our vile name appearing in those pedo files thousands of times" - alongside the other couple, warmly smiling after a pancake breakfast in a diner, El Sayed in a t-shirt, Jukaku in a hijab so she must be a terrorist (though Trump, suspect, is wearing a cat.) The caption for the side-by-side pics, which only the spectacularly tone-deaf Trump could remotely imagine as a mic-drop: "Two VERY DIFFERENT America’s (sic).” Umm. Sure.
Kudos to El-Sayed, prince among men, who didn't even stoop to pick the low-hanging fruit of Trump's "grammatical shitbaggery" - one comment: "What a maroon" - emblematic of a proudly semi-literate GOP somehow come to power in our debased America without understanding how apostrophes work. Instead, El-Sayed went for the meat of the matter. "Yeah, he's right," he told CNN. Swiftly, he embraced the campaign-ready concept of two Americas: "Trump's vision, the one you're living in right now (in) which your overlords are two people who don’t like each other, but join in the interest of making billions of dollars off of you...Or two people who genuinely love each other, enjoyed some pancakes together, and want to come together to build the kind of America where they can raise a family and know that family is going to have the good things."
Those "good things" - health care, good jobs, clean air and water, a relatively level playing field to replace gross inequality, a country where people can live peaceably together "with their sisters and brothers" - are what he and his wife want for their kids, and he wisely gauges most of the rest of us do too. And no, he says, rebutting GOP charges, it's not "radical" to believe people should be able to afford groceries, have health care, partake in free elections. Also, he and his wife actually "like each other," he adds; as to the couple in the "very different" America, "From what I've heard, it's a bit of a rocky road." As mid-terms loom. “They are going to try to paint me as a certain thing, (but) America is a lot bigger than (these) very small people make it out to be," he says. "They all think we won't step up and fight...We fight for each other."
@abdulelsayed They all think we won't step up and fight... They think they're the biggest, baddest bully on the playground... That they're going to show up and we're going to run away...
Last month's average global ocean surface temperature was the hottest ever recorded in the month of July, fueled in part by uniquely intense, fossil fuel-driven El Niño conditions that have wreaked deadly havoc around the world this summer.
The European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said Monday that last month—which ranked as the second warmest July on record—"saw exceptionally high temperatures for the month across a large portion of the tropical Pacific, an area where El Niño conditions are present and forecast to further strengthen in the coming months." Average global sea surface temperatures (SSTs) were 20.96°C last month, surpassing the July 2023 record of 20.89°C.
"Around Europe, SSTs reached record highs for July along the Atlantic coast and western Mediterranean, associated with widespread strong or severe marine heatwave conditions," C3S said.
Brian O'Donnell, director of the Campaign for Nature, said the latest Copernicus data "is more than another climate milestone; it is a warning that the natural systems we depend on are being pushed closer to their limits."
"Governments have become very good at documenting these records. Now they need to become much better at safeguarding the forests, wetlands, and oceans that help regulate the climate and protect communities from the impacts of warming world," said O'Donnell. "With land and ocean temperatures across Europe breaching records, governments should be investing far more and delivering on their global commitment to protect at least 30% of land and ocean by 2030."
The new analysis was released as western Europe and other regions faced deadly heat, wildfires, drought, and other extreme weather as the international community, including the US and other leading polluters, fails to rein in fossil fuel use—and as oil and gas giants reap record profits.
“Our leaders’ response has to be swifter and stronger than El Niño," Anne Jellema, executive director of the environmental group 350.org, said Monday. "We already know that global heating is supercharging extreme weather damage, and the public wants polluters to pay for it. With Big Oil’s earnings skyrocketing while a global food crisis looms, now is the time to act. The only way to stave off a humanitarian disaster is to make those causing it pay upfront—before even more damage is done.”
Scientists have characterized this year's El Niño, which officially began on June 11, as historically strong and dangerous, earning it the informal "Super El Niño" label.
The Washington Post reported Monday that the 2026 El Niño is "on track to become the strongest ever recorded, with cascading effects on global climate peaking late this year and into next."
"El Niño’s effects have already been felt around the planet," the Post observed. "The higher frequency of heat domes worldwide, the nonstop temperature records in Peru and deadly storms in Chile can all be linked to this pattern. As can the destructive typhoons in the western Pacific Ocean and the relative calm of the Atlantic hurricane season so far."
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned in remarks to reporters last month that El Niño is no longer just "on our doorstep."
"It is inside the house—and turning up the heat," said Guterres. "We have already endured a summer of extremes—record-shattering heat domes, apocalyptic wildfires raging in Spain, France, and far beyond. Thousands of lives lost in the scorching conditions.”
“But according to the latest science," he added, "this is only a warm-up act."
As progressives on Monday urged US House Speaker Mike Johnson to haul artificial intelligence leaders before Congress to answer questions under oath about "the dangers posed by this technology," Sen. Bernie Sanders wrote directly to a trio of AI CEOs.
"Almost every day, there is a new story about how your companies are losing control of the AI technology you are developing, with potentially cataclysmic results," Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote to OpenAI's Sam Altman, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg.
Citing a study published Thursday in the journal Science, he noted that "this week we learned, frighteningly, that AI has been used for the first time ever to create new viruses. As you know, this type of development, in the wrong hands, could lead to new bioweapons that result in the deaths of tens of millions of people."
That revelation came just weeks after "the world found out OpenAI lost control of an AI model," the senator continued. "The result? The model hacked into another company’s computers—a clear violation of federal law. After conducting internal reviews, Anthropic and Meta reported their models similarly escaped their control."
Pointing to recent calls for action from Yoshua Bengio, the most cited living scientist in the world, as well as top scientists at various AI companies, Sanders stressed that the international community wants "to create a safety mechanism—a pause button—to avoid catastrophe."
"And yet, at a moment when we have seen human loss of control and the creation of potentially dangerous viruses, your companies are still racing ahead—investing tens of billions of dollars into a technology that nobody can fully understand, predict, or control," he wrote. "That is absurd, irresponsible, and extremely dangerous. It is also a betrayal of your own stated commitments."
After outlining those commitments from the past few years, the former presidential candidate argued that "AI capabilities HAVE reached a critical threshold. There is a reason why the head of the CIA says that AI models are 'akin to digital nuclear weapons' and 'almost like a doomsday device.'"
"Mr. Altman, Mr. Amodei, and Mr. Zuckerberg: In the interest of humanity, stand by your word. Pause AI development. It is not too late to avoid disaster. Stop building machines that humans cannot control," he urged. "Let me be very clear: If you do not take appropriate action now, my colleagues and I in the US Senate will."
Sanders earlier this year proposed the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would give the public "a direct ownership stake" in the largest artificial intelligence companies in the country. The senators is also co-leading a data center moratorium bill.
Francesca Hong on Wednesday unequivocally endorsed David Crowley in Wisconsin's gubernatorial contest following her razor-close loss in the Democratic primary, a show of unity in the face of the Republican Party's extremist nominee, Trump-endorsed US Rep. Tom Tiffany.
"Congratulations to David Crowley and his team," said Hong, a grassroots candidate who lost by less than one percentage point despite a massive fundraising disadvantage. "I fully support him and look forward to working with him to defeat Congressman Tiffany in November."
Hong said she is "overwhelmingly proud" of her campaign and emphasized that her run "was not about getting one person into office."
"It is about building a movement for permanent affordability and a government that puts working people first," said Hong. "Our movement is strong, and the work isn't done."
The last 11 months have been one of the greatest joys of my life. Traveling the state, meeting people in churches and dive bars and bike races and dance parties and in their homes, and hearing about what matters most to them informed every decision we made on the trail. It will… pic.twitter.com/Navh81hgvP
— Francesca Hong For Governor (@FrancescaHongWI) August 12, 2026
Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive who suspended his campaign in early July only to reenter the primary less than a month ago with the support of outgoing Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, echoed Hong's call for party unity to defeat the GOP in November.
“Every one of us has something much bigger to unite around,” Crowley said at a press conference on Wednesday. “And that is keeping MAGA extremism from bringing the chaos we see in Washington into our neighborhoods right here in the state of Wisconsin. From the very first day I announced this campaign, I said the real threat wasn’t any of my primary opponents. The real opponent has always been Tom Tiffany. That remains true today.”
Of the more than 311,000 Wisconsinites who voted for Hong on Tuesday, Crowley said, "I look forward to earning their support."
“We may not agree on every policy," said Crowley. "We may not use the same labels, but we all want safe communities, strong schools, affordable health care, good-paying jobs, and a brighter future for all of our children."
A new database launched Wednesday that details more than 100 cases of alleged abuse by law enforcement officers using Flock Safety's nationwide camera network is adding fresh urgency to the growing backlash against automated license plate readers.
The database, published by the Institute for Justice (IJ)—a libertarian nonprofit public interest law firm based in Arlington, Virginia—documents "romantic stalking, wrongful stops and detentions, non-law enforcement use, and other types of misconduct."
"Automated license plate readers (ALPRs) were sold to American communities as a targeted tool for catching car thieves and finding missing people," IJ said in an introduction to the database. "What they actually purchased has grown into something far broader and more frightening: an AI-powered network of cameras that photograph and log the movement of every driver who passes, whether or not they are suspected of any crime."
"Companies like Flock Safety have now blanketed thousands of communities with ALPRs, quietly assembling powerful mass surveillance systems that can reconstruct where people have been, when, and how often, all without a warrant," the institute continued. "This dragnet surveillance threatens the freedoms the Fourth Amendment was adopted to protect. These concerns aren’t just abstractions: Every day, innocent people are harmed by officials’ abuse and misuse of these ALPRs."
"When the government can track the everyday movements of ordinary people—to their jobs, their churches, their doctors, their protests—it holds a kind of power over private life that the Constitution does not allow," IJ added.
Among the cases highlighted in the database are those of a Florida sheriff's deputy who allegedly used an ALPR to track and pull over a woman after seeing her at a television shoot, a Texas deputy who reportedly searched tens of thousands of Flock cameras while trying to locate a woman who had allegedly obtained a medication abortion, and a Georgia police chief who reportedly tracked his former girlfriend and her teenage daughter hundreds of times.
The database's authors warn that even those 100-plus cases may represent only a fraction of the actual misconduct. Officers often provide vague explanations when searching ALPR databases, making systematic detection of abuse difficult. In one case in Norfolk, Virginia, for example, IJ found that three generic search terms accounted for nearly one-third of roughly 230,000 searches over two years. One officer repeatedly entered “la la la la” as a justification without apparently attracting scrutiny.
Growing public angst over ALPRs is increasingly transcending partisan lines. As Common Dreams reported last month, the backlash has prompted dozens of communities to cancel or reject Flock contracts. According to Ban Flock Cameras, 82 contracts across 28 states had been terminated between August 2021 and May 2026, including 39 cancellations during the first five months of this year alone.
"It's my professional opinion that Flock is a dystopian violation of our rights," Ohio State University professor Viet Trinh said Monday during a public safety audit in Columbus.
"What I mean by that is that it inverts the very nature of how police are supposed to function," he explained. "So in traditional investigations, a crime is supposed to happen first, and then detectives are supposed to identify a list of plausible suspects, and then those suspects are placed under investigation."
"But under Flock, we are all—everybody in this room, every day, every time we get into our cars—we are all under investigation at all times for all crimes," Trinh continued. "Then, when a crime actually does occur, the police have a list of pre-investigated suspects. That's you, that's me, that's everybody in this room who gets in a car, that's everybody in this city."
"So today in Columbus, our constitutional rights—especially our Fourth Amendment rights—are flagrantly violated every single day as a matter of regular government policy," he asserted.
Trinh contended that Flock "is not a tool for investigating crimes, and that misnomer has apparently bamboozled several people in this room."
"Flock is, at its very foundation, a tool for investigating pre-crimes," he stressed. "Not crimes, but pre-crimes."
"So others in this room have implied that we can reform Flock, we can have Flock and preserve our civil liberties, we can make this technology work for us," Trinh noted, adding that "it is not a technology that can be made righteous."
"On this matter, we cannot and we can never have our cake and eat it too," the professor added. "To believe otherwise is hubris."
Home demolitions by Israeli forces; attacks on healthcare infrastructure, homes, and schools; mass displacement of Palestinians; and the expansion of illegal settlements across the West Bank have brought the occupied Palestinian territory to "the breaking point," said a top humanitarian official at the United Nations Security Council Tuesday, calling for a "coordinated international effort" to end the violent Israeli occupation.
At a meeting on the situation in the territory, Ramiz Alakbarov, the UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, addressed the council as families in the town of Qusra, northern Nablus, were facing days of attacks by Israeli settlers.
That violence exemplified what the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem called an escalating "ethnic cleansing" operation that Israel's military allows.
As B'Tselem said Wednesday, settlers had established an illegal outpost in the yards of two Palestinian families' homes, “forcing the families out and taking over their homes," and the US-backed Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had done nothing to protect the Palestinian residents.
“Israeli ethnic cleansing in the West Bank is accelerating and expanding in full view of everyone,” Yuli Novak, president of B'Tselem, told Anadolu Agency, adding that the settlers' seizure of the Palestinian homes was “not an isolated incident."
Breaking the Silence, an organization run by former IDF members who oppose the occupation, explained how settlers, with the backing of the military, essentially blockade individual homes as a method of driving Palestinians out.
"Violent settlers may do the 'dirty work' of daily terror against Palestinian men, women, and children, but neither this terror nor ethnic cleansing would be possible without the army’s support," said the group. "Village after village, house after house. It keeps happening because it is policy."
At the Security Council meeting, Alakbarov said Israeli forces have killed 76 Palestinians, including 18 children, in the West Bank in 2026 so far, while children make up nearly half of the 3,800 Palestinians who have been displaced by settler attacks, demolitions, and evictions.
"One hundred and twenty-seven Palestinian communities have experienced full or partial displacement since January 2023, including 47 that have been entirely displaced, affecting more than 6,390 Palestinians," said Alakbarov. "Settler violence has reached unprecedented levels. So far this year the UN has documented more than 1,430 incidents involving Israeli settlers that resulted in casualties, property damage, or both, affecting approximately 260 Palestinian communities. Many incidents occurred in the presence of Israeli forces."
As Alakbarov spoke Tuesday, the World Health Organization warned that the West Bank has also seen an uptick in violence against healthcare infrastructure, with Israeli carrying out 83 attacks on healthcare transport such as ambulances and 11 attacks on medical centers and facilities, injuring at least 33 people and killing four. July saw a surge in healthcare attacks—a hallmark of Israel's assault on Gaza that began in 2023—with 37 strikes on infrastructure.
Settler attacks were once mainly concentrated in Area C, which comprises about 60% of the West Bank and is under Israeli control.
But Alakbarov said settlers are increasingly waging violence against Palestinians in Areas A and B, which are under the administration of the Palestinian Authority.
“The future of the region is at stake,” the UN permanent observer for the state of Palestine, Riyad Mansour, told the Security Council. “International will cannot bow before the colonial whims of the Israeli government.”
Israeli officials in recent months have advanced and approved about 12,360 housing units in settlements across the West Bank this year, with the Security Cabinet signing off on 13 new settlements in the central part of the territory last month. The move further isolates East Jerusalem, which Palestinians consider the capital of a future Palestinian state, from the rest of the West Bank.
Last year Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also signed an agreement to develop 3,400 new units in the E1 settlement, which would also cut off access to East Jerusalem. The prime minister said as he approved the deal, "There will be no Palestinian state."
The approvals of more settlement housing this year and the escalation in IDF-sanctioned violence against Palestinian communities across the West Bank "are interconnected steps, not isolated developments,” Alakbarov said Tuesday.
"The situation in the West Bank must be treated as an emergency requiring urgent action," he said. "The concern is not only the continued expansion of settlements, but the speed and systematic manner in which new facts are being created on the ground. New outposts are established, often with state support, and can be retroactively authorized or incorporated into the wider settlement system. From these outposts, settler violence and intimidation have driven the displacement of Palestinian communities."
He added that the spread of settler outposts in agricultural and grazing areas is "deeply troubling."
"Requiring only a small number of settlers, they enable control over vast areas of land," said Alakbarov. "Israeli monitoring organizations report that agricultural and pastoral outposts now exercise effective control over close to 20% of the West Bank."
Israeli forces also arrested 23 Palestinians on Tuesday, including two children, days after a large-scale operation at Qalandia refugee camp resulted in the detentions of more than 60 people.
Hannah Sulieman, deputy executive director of the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), emphasized that 355 Palestinian children are currently being detained in Israeli military prisons—"the highest number in eight years."
The arrests and the violence mean that for children and their families in the West Bank, "the fundamental spaces of childhood—the home, the classroom, the street, the community—are becoming increasingly unsafe," said Sulieman.
“Children in the West Bank have the same rights as children everywhere,” she said. "To live, to learn, to be protected, and to imagine a future beyond violence and fear."
“Approval of the resolutions... point the way for the Democratic Party to move in directions consistent with what voters want."
As the war for the future of the Democratic Party rages on, progressives took steps toward a pair of key victories at the Democratic National Committee on Thursday, advancing one resolution calling to abolish the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and another in support of barring US military aid for Israel.
The resolutions, which were both introduced by Louisiana DNC member Michele Johnson, were approved during a meeting in Austin by the DNC Resolutions Committee and are expected to be put before the full committee for a vote by Saturday.
Though resolutions passed through the DNC do not bind lawmakers or presidents to take particular actions, they play an important role in legitimizing positions once confined to the margins but which are fast becoming a consensus among Democratic voters.
"While it may not actually push Congress to do something, it sends a message that we believe these things," Johnson said during an interview last week. "Ultimately, these resolutions can be used in the creation of a platform... to guide Democrats for the next four years."
The first resolution “urges Democratic members of Congress to craft legislation abolishing ICE and enacting immigration reform that provides pathways to citizenship, protects workers, and ensures dignity for all impacted people.”
If passed, it would put the party in line with the majority of its voters, 73% of whom said in an Economist/YouGov poll last month that they believe ICE should be abolished.
It's a position that has been adopted by increasing numbers of lawmakers in the party's progressive wing, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), but has been resisted by party leaders, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY).
As part of the “mass deportation” crusade during President Donald Trump’s second term, which has resulted in individuals being detained nationwide with little due process, ICE has increasingly relied on indiscriminate raids, warrantless arrests, and racial profiling while setting up a vast network of opaque detention camps with squalid conditions. Most of those rounded up have had no criminal convictions.
As of Thursday, more than 50 people have died in ICE custody since Trump retook office in January 2025, and several more, including multiple US citizens, have been shot during enforcement operations without clear justification.
The resolution "urges Democratic members of Congress to pursue civil and criminal accountability for any federal agent, attorney, or official who lied under oath, misrepresented evidence, or gave false testimony regarding DHS conduct, and to remove qualified immunity and other protections shielding DHS and ICE personnel and subcontractors who have injured protesters or journalists, fired into moving vehicles, or caused deaths in custody, whether of detained individuals, US citizens, or immigrants regardless of nationality or documentation status.“
The other resolution advanced on Thursday states that the DNC supports the "full, consistent, and impartial enforcement" of the so-called "Leahy Laws" to prevent military aid to Israel or any other countries that violate US human rights law.
These laws, named after their sponsor, former Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), state that the US cannot provide training, weapons, equipment, or other assistance to a foreign military unit when the government has credible information that it has committed a “gross violation of human rights.”
Critics have argued that former President Joe Biden violated the Leahy Laws by continuing to provide unrestricted military aid to Israel as it waged a genocidal war in Gaza and escalated its assaults on Palestinians in the West Bank during his presidency. Secretary of State Antony Blinken repeatedly balked at calls, including from within his own State Department, to enforce the Leahy Laws despite mounting evidence of atrocities.
A classified State Department report whose findings were publicized in October 2025 found that the Israeli military had committed hundreds of human rights violations that may have warranted enforcement of the Leahy Laws, including many during the Biden administration.
The resolution advanced on Thursday “calls for strengthened vetting capacity, clear remediation standards," referring to the process by which a military that violates human rights can restore eligibility for US funding, "and regular public reporting on the implementation of the Leahy Laws by the Department of State and the Department of Defense."
The resolution also "encourages Democratic members of Congress to conduct robust oversight of Leahy Law implementation and to support legislative measures that close documented enforcement gaps."
Like with ICE, a growing number of Democratic lawmakers are calling for the US to cut off support for Israel, but party leadership has been resistant. This is despite nearly three-quarters of Democratic voters saying in a May 2026 New York Times/Siena poll that they are opposed to sending more funding.
The passage of the Leahy Law resolution shows how the ground has shifted beneath the Democratic establishment since last August, when the Resolutions Committee blocked a resolution that would call for an arms embargo against Israel in favor of a more limited one pushed by DNC chair Ken Martin, calling for unrestricted aid to Gaza and a two-state solution. Martin later withdrew his resolution, leaving neither as the party's adopted position.
In April, more resolutions, which called for the conditioning of military aid to Israel and the recognition of a Palestinian state, were deferred to a working group. Another resolution condemning the influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was also killed by the resolutions panel.
Sam Rosenthal, the political director of the progressive advocacy group RootsAction, attended the committee meeting on Thursday. His group promoted both resolutions, including by sponsoring a mobile billboard that circled outside the conference, which read, “HEY DNC, UPHOLD THE LEAHY LAWS. SUPPORT HUMAN RIGHTS!”
"These were twin victories for human rights, at home and abroad,” Rosenthal said of the votes on Thursday. “Approval of the resolutions for abolishing ICE and upholding the Leahy Law point the way for the Democratic Party to move in directions consistent with what voters want."
"Getting sufficient turnout from the party’s base at election time," he added, "will require a change in the approach of the party’s national leadership so that it is clearly responsive to the views of Democrats nationwide.”
"This latest development is a transparent effort to circumvent the court's ruling, and flies in the face of the statutes that Congress passed," said US Rep. Joyce Beatty.
President Donald Trump's name is going back on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, despite a court order that mandated its removal.
Trump-appointed members of the Kennedy Center board on Thursday voted to add an inscription underneath the building's main signage that reads, "Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump." The board also voted to rename the site outside the building as "the President Donald J. Trump Plaza."
In December, the board voted to rename the building the "Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts," despite having no congressional authorization to do so.
Six months later, US District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled that the board lacked power to rename the building without congressional approval and ordered the president's name taken down from the building.
Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), an ex-officio Kennedy Center board member who filed a lawsuit to stop the building from being renamed, vowed to challenge the latest gambit to slap the president's name on a historic building.
"This latest development is a transparent effort to circumvent the court's ruling, and flies in the face of the statutes that Congress passed," Beatty said. "I will continued to fight for this treasured national monument."
Democracy Defenders Action co-founder Norm Eisen, who served as co-counsel in the previous lawsuit against the board, said that the Trump-appointed members defied the judge's ruling by putting Trump's name back on the building, and vowed that "they'll answer for it in court, again."
Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) said the Kennedy Center board's latest actions made it imperative to cleanse the nation's capital of Trump's name in the next Democratic administration.
"My bright lines for who I will endorse for president in 2028," wrote Lieu in a social media post. "1. Candidate must put in writing that all references to Trump’s name will be removed from the Kennedy Center and federal buildings. 2. Must do this at a public ceremony with fireworks."
CNN senior political reporter Aaron Blake questioned the political wisdom of forcing Trump's name back on the Kennedy Center given his current low approval ratings.
"Just a reminder that between 7 in 10 and 8 in 10 Americans think Trump is neglecting important issues like affordability, per recent polls," wrote Blake. "And apparently nobody will convince him that stuff like this isn’t helping."
"Free speech is a constitutional right that we must all stand up and protect," the progressive congresswoman said.
US Rep. Pramila Jayapal on Wednesday joined First Amendment defenders in condemning the University of Washington’s cancellation of a planned lecture by controversial socialist streamer Hasan Piker and implored all Americans to stand up for free speech.
The University of Washington (UW) vaguely explained earlier this week that Piker's scheduled January 2027 appearance as part of the school's Speaker Series was canceled after "it was determined that the process for organizing this event did not meet the necessary level of rigor for university-hosted events."
"Going forward, procedures will be updated to ensure the standards we have for university-hosted events like the Speaker Series are met, particularly so that we can help elevate the level of dialogue on divisive topics during a polarized time in our country," the school added.
Japayal (D-Wash.), a UW alumna, said on social media: "As a member of the Judiciary Committee, I have been absolutely clear that free speech is a constitutional right that we must all stand up and protect. I have been communicating my concerns about the cancellation of the Hasan Piker event directly to the university, and they have informed me that they are doing an internal review to ensure this never happens again."
As a Member of the Judiciary Committee, I have been absolutely clear that free speech is a Constitutional right that we must all stand up and protect. I have been communicating my concerns about the cancellation of the Hasan Piker event directly to the University... (1/2)
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— Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (@jayapal.house.gov) August 13, 2026 at 11:22 AM
Piker—who has millions of subscribers and followers on Twitch and other platforms—responded to the cancellation by accusing UW officials of caving to a "barrage of botted emails" from Israel supporters.
"If this had happened to Charlie Kirk or if this had happened to Ben Shapiro, this would be the number one news story on Fox News for a month," he said, referring to the assassinated Turning Point USA (TPUSA) co-founder and the co-founder of the right-wing Daily Wire.
In fact, TPUSA spokesperson and Charlie Kirk Show producer Andrew Kolvet opposed Piker's cancellation, writing on X: “Let the radical Mao-loving communist Hasan Piker speak, so long as he can resist the urge to call for the death of his political opponents. Universities do this to TPUSA often and blame some admin error etc. It’s wrong.”
The Anti-Defamation League—which has faced heavy criticism for conflating opposition to Israel's wars, illegal occupation and settler colonization, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid with hatred of Jewish people—accuses Piker of "a history of rhetoric that sanitizes violence and denigrates Jewish people."
Piker's most controversial statements include calling some ultra-Orthodox Jews "inbred psychopaths," calling Zionism a "mental illness," dismissing sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas against Israelis on and after the October 7, 2023 attack, calling Hamas "a thousand times better than Israel," and saying the United States "deserved" the al-Qaeda attacks carried out on September 11, 2001 in response to decades of US militant imperialism in Muslim nations. Piker subsequently apologized for his "inbred" comment; he also called his 9/11 remarks "inappropriate."
Piker and his uncle, The Young Turks founder Cenk Uygur, were recently banned from entering the United Kingdom, whose Labour government declared that their presence in the country “may not be conducive to the public good.”
The UW cancellation came four months after the US Department of Justice launched an investigation into the school's handling of alleged antisemitism on campus, which saw a crackdown on pro-Palestine protests during Israel's annihilation of Gaza—described by a United Nations commission of inquiry, international experts, nearly 20 national governments, and people around the world as a genocide.
Ironically, UW officials in 2024 dismantled a sukkah—a temporary outdoor hut built during the annual Sukkot festival—erected by Jewish students opposing Israel's onslaught.
The nonprofit civil liberties group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) also condemned UW's decision to cancel Piker's speech, arguing on X that "if the decision was based on process—and not public backlash or criticism—UW should be transparent about what standards were not met and how they were applied."
"Public universities can set standards for events," FIRE added. "But they can’t use those standards as cover for canceling a speaker because of their views."
“It begs the question about why you would need to do this. What would be the purpose of the secrecy?” said a former US government official.
The Washington Post reported on Thursday that recent mysterious attacks on Ecuadoran fishing boats were carried out as part of a covert CIA operation.
According to the Post, the strikes on the fishing boats, which took place in multiple instances near the Galápagos Islands earlier this year, are separate from the US Department of Defense's bombing campaign against purported drug-trafficking boats that was launched in September 2025 and has so far killed at least 220 people.
Survivors of a boat attack that occurred in March told the Post they remember coming under fire from small quadcopter drones that either dropped munitions on their vessels or directly crashed into them.
After being shipwrecked, the survivors said they were picked up by a nearby vessel, where they were taken aboard, and "hooded and cuffed by armed men, and transported to El Salvador—only to be returned later without explanation to Ecuador."
The Post noted that "no evidence has publicly emerged that the crew members were involved in drug trafficking," adding that "the Galápagos Islands have increasingly become a hub for drug traffickers, where local fishermen are known to pick up jobs delivering gas to smugglers heading to the United States."
Some former US officials with experience working in Latin America told the Post that they were bewildered about the need for a covert CIA boat strike campaign given that the Trump administration has openly boasted about its other attacks on vessels, which many human rights groups and international law experts have called acts of murder.
“It begs the question about why you would need to do this,” one former official said. “What would be the purpose of the secrecy?”
The covert boat strikes were also reported on Wednesday by The New York Times, which presented evidence that they originated in the US without naming their specific source.
Amnesty International last month raised suspicions of US involvement in the January disappearance of Ecuadoran fishing boat called Fiorella.
Amnesty's investigation of the Fiorella's disappearance found that the vessel, in the days before its disappearance, was "allegedly subjected to sustained monitoring by aircraft, patrol boats, and drones bearing United States markings," as the boat's captain sent "daily satellite messages to his family expressing his growing concern about the surveillance."
The ship vanished on January 20.
Two crew members who had departed the ship earlier in the day on a skiff to lay out fishing lines reported seeing "a large column of smoke in the distance in the direction of the Fiorella, but were unable to determine with certainty whether it was from a fire on board," wrote Amnesty.
The two crew members aboard the skiff are the only confirmed survivors of the incident, as the eight other men aboard the Fiorella are still missing.
“Trump is making it easier for cartels, criminals, and US adversaries to abuse our financial system," said Sen. Andy Kim. "Because he’s in the pocket of billionaires like Elon Musk, who’d potentially benefit."
Critics are warning that the Trump administration just made financial crimes a lot easier to commit by permanently gutting a law that prevented criminals from using shell companies to obscure their activities. Elon Musk may benefit.
On Tuesday, the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) issued a final rule permanently exempting US individuals and companies from a section of the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) requiring them to identify the true owners of opaque companies.
The law, which passed in 2020, was ironically introduced and championed by then-US Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who is now President Donald Trump’s secretary of state and national security adviser.
At the time, Rubio called the law—which he introduced with Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)—"the most significant anti-corruption and money laundering law in decades."
But Republicans have since pushed to repeal the legislation, which Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) referred to as "big government overreach."
With Republicans in Congress unable to muster the votes to reverse it legislatively, the Trump administration has effectively killed the law by weakening Treasury Department policy. In March 2025, Treasury adopted an interim rule exempting US companies from its requirements.
Plans for a rule change were announced by Treasury less than 24 hours after the SpaceX and Tesla CEO, Musk—who was then leading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—commented on his social media platform X that he would “look into” the statute in response to a right-wing comedian who'd complained about it.
According to a May report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, more than 99% of entities previously required to report under the law were now exempt. That exemption was made permanent this week.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said it was "a victory for common sense and American small businesses" and called the reporting requirements "burdensome... for millions of law-abiding business owners without compromising our national security.”
Nelson Bunn, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association, said the exact opposite was true.
"By exempting domestic entities and owners from reporting, FinCEN has significantly hindered prosecutors’ ability to identify the bad actors from legitimate businesses when investigating US shell companies used by transnational cartels, human traffickers, and cyberscammers,” Bunn said. "Taking away this indispensable tool for law enforcement endangers American families and communities.”
The change is drawing outrage from Democrats and some Republicans. In a statement on Thursday, Whitehouse and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said the rule change "undermines the clear intent of the law."
"The act gave the federal government needed tools to address criminal activity like human trafficking, terrorist financing, drug distribution, sanctions evasion, and more without unduly burdening legitimate commercial entities," they said. "This decision is an unfortunate one that fails to use all available tools to protect Americans and crack down on illicit financial schemes.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the ranking member of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, highlighted that the committee's previous oversight found the rollback would likely hamper efforts to stop a host of bad actors.
These included Chinese money-laundering networks that have been used to funnel proceeds to drug cartels, fraudsters using opaque ownership to rip off federal grants and benefits, and a Venezuelan national who allegedly used shell companies to hide over $1 billion in cryptocurrency transactions.
Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) said the law was “designed to stop criminals from laundering money, and Trump and Secretary Bessent are violating the Constitution to gut it,” and in doing so, “intentionally facilitating corruption and crime.”
In a letter sent to Bessent in March 2026, Warren and other Democratic lawmakers noted that Musk himself would be a direct beneficiary of the rule change, since he "uses a network of dozens of secretive companies—potentially the type of entities that, under the CTA, are required to report ownership information to the Treasury Department."
The New York Times found that in Texas alone, there are over 90 different companies and other legal entities tied to Musk, with others in California, Delaware, and Nevada, which he has used to buy property, structure business deals, hold assets, and pay for political activity—including more than $80 million in super political action committee spending to support Trump in 2024—without putting his own name on the transactions.
"Trump is making it easier for cartels, criminals, and US adversaries to abuse our financial system and harm Americans," said Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ). "Why? Because he’s in the pocket of billionaires like Elon Musk, who’d potentially benefit from his shady and corrupt actions."
Warren said: "Secretary Bessent should reverse this decision. And he needs to testify in front of this Committee to explain why he’s putting American national security at risk.”
One critic said he hopes the Hague-based tribunal will investigate the Trump administration's "illegal, unproven, expensive, destructive, and pointless boat strikes."
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday urged Latin American governments to quit the International Criminal Court, accusing the Hague-based tribunal of plotting to prosecute American and allied military personnel while defending the Trump administration’s increasingly aggressive—and, experts say, illegal—campaign against alleged drug traffickers.
"We are working together, we are building together, and we are training together," Hegseth said during a speech in Panama at a gathering of the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition (ACCC), a group of mostly right-wing regional governments. "We are killing terrorists. And we're defeating the failed and toxic ideologies of radical socialism and communism."
"Now, speaking of socialism, make no doubt about it, the international left, along with their enabling left-wing media, is plotting to unlawfully assert International Criminal Court jurisdiction over US and partner military personnel and operations," Hegseth asserted, offering no evidence or explanation to support his claim.
Legal experts, including former US military Judge Advocate General Corps attorneys, have argued that aspects of the Trump administration's bombings of boats allegedly smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean—particularly Hegseth's alleged order to "kill everybody" and follow-up attacks targeting survivors—may constitute unlawful extrajudicial killings and war crimes. More than 220 people have been killed in at least 66 such strikes over the past 11 months, with survivors, victims' relatives, and regional governments claiming at least some of those killed were fishers with no narco-trafficking ties.
Hegseth has also been accused of promoting war crimes in the illegal US-Israeli war of choice on Iran by vowing that US forces would not be bound by "stupid rules of engagement," threatening to destroy critical Iranian civilian infrastructure like power plants and bridges, and by boasting that US forces were delivering "death and destruction from the sky all day long" as airstrikes killed hundreds of civilians, including 156 students and staff massacred at an elementary school in Minab on February 28.
"To be clear, there is no legitimate basis for the ICC's lawless power grab that they will entertain anywhere they can in the world," Hegseth said in Panama. "Our efforts in this effort are 100% lawful under the laws of armed conflict. It's striking that this so-called court and other globalist bodies undermine our efforts but do nothing to hold real terrorists and real tyrants accountable. And that's why the ICC poses a threat to your national sovereignty, your constitutional mandates, and the national interests of your people—just as it does ours."
"That's why I strongly encourage every ACCC member to leave the ICC, and reject their attempts to rob your governments and your courts of your sovereignty," he added. "I know as a soldier, I swore an oath to the Constitution, not some fake and illegitimate international court."
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Trump's assault on the ICC, which began during his first administration, has escalated during his second term. In February 2025, the president issued an executive order declaring a national emergency over the ICC and authorizing sanctions against court personnel involved in investigations concerning the United States and Israel—two of whose leaders are fugitives from the tribunal.
In November 2024, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, including murder and forced starvation. The court also ordered the arrest of three Hamas leaders for the same categories of crimes allegedly committed during and after the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, but Israeli forces extrajudicially assassinated all three of the men.
The warrants for the Israeli leaders incensed the Trump administration, which responded with sanctions and threats.
Last month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a "campaign to dismantle" the ICC, promising to “teach” the court "the full meaning of American resolve." The State Department, meanwhile, said the campaign would seek to “systematically disable” the tribunal’s ability to operate or target US personnel.
The US is not a party to the Rome Statute governing the ICC. However, the treaty states that individuals from nonsignatory nations can be held liable for crimes committed in the territory of a member state, a situation applicable in Palestine, which is an ICC member, while Israel is not.
US disdain and animosity toward the ICC long predates Trump's presidencies. During the administration of George W. Bush, the US passed the American Service Members’ Protection Act—also known as the Hague Invasion Act—which authorizes the president to use “all means necessary and appropriate,” including military intervention, to secure the release of American or allied personnel held by or on behalf of the ICC.
The Trump administration is seeking to persuade countries to abandon the ICC.
Chad and Venezuela—where Trump ordered a January invasion to abduct President Nicolás Maduro and his wife—have announced plans to withdraw, with Chad saying its decision followed a call from a senior US diplomat. The ICC’s Assembly of States Parties has urged both countries to reverse course, warning that the departures threaten the global fight against impunity. The two nations join Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, which also initiated ICC withdrawals in 2026.
Only Burundi and the Philippines have actually completed withdrawals from the Rome Statute. Hungary, meanwhile, reversed its planned departure this year after voters ousted longtime right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
Hegseth’s Panama appearance coincided with Colombia becoming the ACCC’s 19th member, as new right-wing President Abelardo de la Espriella requested joint US-Colombian military operations against drug cartels and trafficking.
The alignment marks a sharp turn from the government of former leftist President Gustavo Petro, which repeatedly criticized Trump administration boat strikes and supported the South African-led genocide case against Israel currently before the International Court of Justice, also in The Hague.
Such cooperation has led to US intervention in Ecuador's war on drugs. US and Ecuadorian forces are carrying out Operation Total Extermination, a joint counternarcotics operation beset by allegations of human rights violations, including arbitrary detention, torture, and destruction of civilian property.
Responding to reporting, University of Virginia researcher and doctoral student Joseph Bouchard wrote on X that the "ICC may investigate the US's illegal, unproven, expensive, destructive, and pointless boat strikes."
"They should, and hopefully hold these criminals accountable," he asserted. "They are killing hundreds of fishermen for no reason beyond cruelty."
"They're scared of a movement that demands Medicare for All, prescription drug coverage, and a government that everyday people can be proud of and know works for them."
Troy Jackson, the Maine Democrat running to unseat Republican US Sen. Susan Collins in November, took aim at Elon Musk and other billionaires Wednesday evening for supporting his GOP opponent directly or through a key super political action committee.
"Look, the billionaires in the country know whose side they're on, and it's not ours," Jackson, a former logger and state Senate president, said in a brief video shared on social media, including Musk's platform X.
Jackson—chosen as the Democratic nominee via a convention process last month, after primary winner Graham Platner left the race following a rape allegation that he denied—pointed to a $42 million investment in the contest from the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), whose backers include Musk and various other right-wing megadonors.
"They're here to prop up Susan Collins because they want her to continue to be a rubber stamp and get their income tax cuts," Jackson said. "They're already out with an ad attacking me and my family, to try and make sure that they totally don't talk about the issues."
SLF's 30-second ad, which launched Wednesday, notes his son's lobbying work and smears Jackson as "another dirty politician."
According to Jackson: "They're scared of a movement that goes against the things that they want. They're scared of a movement that demands Medicare for All, prescription drug coverage, and a government that everyday people can be proud of and know works for them."
Wednesday isn't the first time Jackson—who previously ran for governor—has called out billionaires, specifically Musk. After The New York Times reported last month that through his America PAC, Musk intends to spend up to $120 million on a program to help elect Republicans in at least eight states, including Maine, Jackson released a video stressing that the billionaire "doesn't care about us. Really doesn't care about Susan. He cares about him."
"So I would say to you Elon: Maine and really the whole United States doesn't want your dirty money in our politics," Jackson continued. "You don't get to buy the government that you want. This is about all of us coming together and fighting for the government that we deserve, and you're not in it."
Musk became the world's first trillionaire in June, when his company SpaceX made its public market debut, but his current net worth is estimated at over $860 billion, according to the regularly updated Bloomberg and Forbes lists. His trillionaire status came after the early months of the second Trump administration, when Musk was the de facto leader of the Department of Government Efficiency.
Reuters reported Thursday that new data from the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations shows how Musk's controversial compensation plans for SpaceX and Tesla are benefiting other chief executives. Fred Redmond, the AFL-CIO's secretary-treasurer, said that his pay "changes the dynamic when other CEO compensation plans come up, boards use it as a reference."
The average ratio of CEO to worker pay at S&P 500 companies rose from 285:1 in 2024 to 312:1 last year, excluding Musk's Tesla compensation. When that is included, the ratio becomes 5,387:1. Redmond told Reuters that "as we talk to our members, they're pissed off over what's happening to them, and they feel as though they should be more vocal in terms of calling attention to inequality."
It is currently unclear which charges Mangione would plead guilty to as part of a plea agreement, according to NBC News.
Luigi Mangione is reportedly set to plead guilty to federal charges related to the 2024 murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
According to a Thursday report from NBC News, prosecutors are negotiating a plea agreement where the 28-year-old Mangione will plead guilty to at least one of the federal charges that were brought against him.
The NBC report noted that it is unclear which charges Mangione would plead guilty to, and that the defendant could reverse his plea "at any time, even during the hearing."
In a December 2024 indictment, federal prosecutors charged Mangione with two counts of stalking, one count of murder, and a firearms offense for his alleged role in Thompson's killing.
Prosecutors had initially sought the death penalty for Mangione, but a federal judge in January dismissed the murder and firearms offense, thus taking capital punishment off the table.
Mangione also faces New York state charges, the most serious of which is murder in the second degree.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had initially charged Mangione with first degree murder in furtherance of terrorism, but a New York City judge last year determined that the defendant's alleged actions did not rise to the level of terrorism and dismissed the charge.
"While claiming to protect all Americans, the administration is rolling back systems that communities have long turned to for relief.”
Eighteen months into President Donald Trump's second term in the White House, the administration has systematically gutted the infrastructure within the federal government that for decades had worked to ensure that civil rights and anti-discrimination laws were being enforced—and has turned agencies "against the communities they were meant to protect," as one researcher at Human Rights Watch said Thursday.
In a new report, the organization detailed how four key agencies have been substantially weakened since Trump took office and almost immediately, with the help of tech billionaire Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, set about slashing the federal workforce and demanding that the civil servants who remained be "fully on board" with the president's right-wing agenda.
The report, titled "Remedies Abandoned: US Civil Rights Enforcement Under the Trump Administration," explains how the US Department of Justice's (DOJ) Civil Rights Division lost about 75% of its attorneys after the White House told staff that they were not to operate independently from the president; the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) at the Department of Education closed more than half of its regional offices and laid off nearly half its staff in one day; the Fair Housing Office at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) shrank from 31 staffers to 11; and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reached its lowest staffing level in over four decades.
With the federal civil rights enforcement workforce decimated, the White House has abandoned discrimination complaints at the four agencies and has carried out demands outlined in Project 2025, the right-wing policy blueprint put forward by the Heritage Foundation. In addition to pushing for the administration to reclassify civil servants like those who were pushed out of their civil rights enforcement roles, the document called for presidential control of the Justice Department and an end to "disparate impact enforcement."
In April 2025, three months after taking office, Trump signed an executive order directing all federal agencies to eliminate their analysis of disparate impact—the framework that confronts discriminatory policies based on their impacts rather than their intent—to the "maximum degree possible."
Disparate impact analysis, said HRW, "allows people to challenge hiring criteria, lending practices, school discipline policies, and housing regulations that produce discriminatory outcomes even when no one can identify a smoking gun like a policy that explicitly says 'exclude Black applicants.'"
The executive order and related directives that followed had a sweeping impact, with HUD dropping seven major housing discrimination and environmental justice cases months later, after they had been ongoing for years.
For example, the agency informed Chicago officials it would no longer monitor the civil rights agreement that had required zoning reform to end concentrated industrial pollution in Black and Latino neighborhoods.
"Department leadership said it would no longer treat environmental harms as fair housing violations in situations without explicit indication of intentional discrimination, in line with President Trump’s April 2025 order seeking to end disparate impact enforcement," reads the HRW report.
HUD has closed at least 115 fair housing complaints without issuing findings on the claims of discrimination, and career attorneys at the agency filed a whistleblower complaint last September showing they'd been barred from contacting complainants and working with the DOJ to resolve the matters.
"One of the ways we know that our democracy is functioning and healthy is that your rights don't just disappear because the political winds shift," said Trey Walk, a US program researcher at HRW.
NEW: The Trump administration has gutted federal civil rights enforcement in the United States, leaving the people the laws were built to protect without adequate remedies.
In a new report, HRW documents the administration’s efforts to unravel the work of four key agencies… pic.twitter.com/4VADDpmFDR
— Human Rights Watch (@hrw) August 13, 2026
The Education Department's OCR also appears to have resolved no racial harassment cases in 2025, despite the fact that in 2024, such complaints reached a new record among Black and Latino students.
The case of a 12-year-old boy in Lubbock, Texas, who had been interrogated by school officials without his parents present and falsely accused of a sexual offense, had been close to being resolved when the OCR office for the region abruptly closed in March 2025. When an attorney for families in Lubbock who had had open cases emailed the federal investigator who had been working on the complaints, they received an autoreply, saying the employee no longer had access to any of the case files.
"Numbers illustrate the scale of abandonment," reads the report. "With 11,985 education-related civil rights cases pending when the administration took office, OCR reached just 112 resolution agreements across all of 2025—1% of the caseload, and 78% fewer than the year before on the same budget. OCR reported no resolution agreements for sexual harassment, none for sexual violence, none for racial harassment, none for discriminatory school discipline, and none for seclusion and restraint of students with disabilities. The 2025 case resolution number is low, even compared to previous years when the agency was not adequately staffed or funded."
Walk said that the Trump administration "is targeting efforts to address discrimination without offering any alternatives. While claiming to protect all Americans, the administration is rolling back systems that communities have long turned to for relief.”
More than half of OCR's nationwide staff were among the 1,300 Education staffers whose jobs were cut in a single day in March 2025. Vince L., a career attorney at OCR who was one of 40 people interviewed by HRW for the report, said that in the administration's first weeks, he and his colleagues had received a directive essentially saying: "Stop all work. Decimate staffing. Divert resources to political witch hunts."
"Seven of 12 regional offices shut with no notice," he said. "Some people didn’t even know until their computers didn’t work. You’d come in the next morning and your badge wouldn’t work. That’s how you’d find out you were being terminated.”
Similar scenes played out at the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, where an attorney identified as Gloria A. described how the department's independence from the White House "flew out the window" early in Trump's term when lawyers were directed to carry out the president's political agenda.
“We viewed ourselves as attorneys for the United States,” another civil rights lawyer who was reassigned to complete administrative work, told HRW. “Which is different.”
A significant sign of the gutting of civil rights enforcement at the DOJ came when the agency moved to dismiss multiple consent decrees to reform police departments.
A two-year DOJ probe had found a pattern of racially discriminatory force by the Louisville Metro Police Department, where officers fatally shot Breonna Taylor in 2020, but the DOJ moved to dismiss the consent decree that had demanded reform at the police department just six months after it was signed.
A similar consent decree was dismissed around the same time, in May 2025, in Minneapolis—almost exactly five years after George Floyd was murdered by a police officer there.
"At least four other consent decrees to reform police departments across the US were dismissed in the same period," reads the report. "In each case, the department withdrew before any independent finding that the underlying violations had stopped."
HRW called on Congress to conduct oversight hearings on "the collapse of enforcement capacity at key federal agencies" and urged state legislatures to pass or strengthen disparate impact standards, create or fund state fair housing enforcement agencies with investigative authority, and create private rights of action under state law for discrimination claims previously only covered by federal enforcement.
It called on state agencies to expand intake capacity to take complaints currently not being accepted at the federal level and urged state attorneys general to consider challenging federal agency decisions, including case closure policies that have harmed state residents.
The group emphasized that it was not making formal recommendations to the White House or any federal agencies.
"The leadership of these agencies have not demonstrated good faith interest in improving anti-discrimination enforcement in the US," said HRW. "The immediate remedies lie with Congress, state and local actors, the media and civil society, and international bodies. A future administration will need to rebuild what has been dismantled by this executive branch."
"This agency is completely out of control," said the Democratic nominee for US Senate in Minnesota.
Fresh off a resounding US Senate primary victory, Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan on Thursday castigated her Republican general election opponent for praising federal immigration agents' treatment of children during their siege of Minneapolis.
During an interview on MS NOW, Flanagan highlighted GOP Senate nominee Michele Tafoya's support for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), whose violent operations in the Twin Cities area last winter resulted in widespread protests, including an unprecedented one-day general strike.
"Michele Tafoya, my Republican opponent, she used footage of ICE in the streets of Minnesota during her launch video, and recently said... 'ICE treated children really, really well,'" Flanagan said. "Tell that to Liam Ramos or to the children who have been separated from their parents. This agency is completely out of control."
Peggy Flanagan: "Michele Tayofa, my Republican opponent, used footage of ICE in the streets of Minnesota in her launch video, and recently said 'ICE treated children really really well.' Tell that to Liam Ramos or to the children who have been separated from their parents." pic.twitter.com/Vy9kKpYZkq
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 13, 2026
Five-year-old Liam Ramos in January was abducted by ICE agents during his walk home from school and sent along with his father, an Ecuadoran asylum seeker, to the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas, where family members said the child grew sick from eating spoiled food. In February, Ramos and his father were released and sent back to Minnesota.
Elsewhere in the interview, Flanagan was asked about Republican attacks on her and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz for purportedly not doing enough to prevent healthcare fraud in their state, and she quickly turned the tables back on Tafoya and President Donald Trump.
" Republicans are going to run against every Democrat on fraud, because they want to distract from what's happening under the most corrupt president we've ever seen," she said. "They want to talk about fraud, they have to talk about the fact that, right out of the gate, Donald Trump got rid of 17 inspectors general whose whole job it is to police fraud at the federal level."
Peggy Flanagan: "Republicans are going to run against every Democrat on fraud, because they want to distract from what's happening under the most corrupt president we've ever seen ... Michele Tayofa and Republicans up and down the ballot are going to have to answer for that. The… pic.twitter.com/dyMqisM1AH
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 13, 2026
"He's pardoned 70 white-collar criminals who have stolen billions of dollars in Medicaid and Medicare," Flanagan continued. "And every day, this guy is making money hand over fist from the Oval Office, from his... cryptocurrency, through hundreds of millions of dollars in insider trading. And Michele Tayofa and Republicans up and down the ballot are going to have to answer for that. The grift has to stop."