SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
civil rights
Setting 'Powerful Example' for Other States, Newsom Works to Clear Country's Largest Death Row
"The death penalty is a flawed, expensive, and error-filled practice that fails us all," said Equal Justice Initiative's Bryan Stevenson, urging other elected officials to follow the California governor's lead.
Nov 05, 2026
Opponents of capital punishment applauded on Thursday after Gov. Gavin Newsom moved to commute all of California's death sentences, sparing up to 548 lives as the term-limited Democrat prepares to leave office with eyes on the White House.
The New York Times had reported last month that Newsom was mulling the move, which he addressed in a Thursday letter initially obtained by The Sacramento Bee: "After nearly 30 years in public office, I have come to understand the limits of what government can justly accomplish. I take this action because I firmly believe that state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California's values, undermines the foundations of our legal system, and diminishes each of us."
The Bee explained that "Newsom can commute single-felony sentences, but must receive the California Supreme Court’s approval to commute sentences for people with multiple convictions. Four of the seven justices must approve those requests, though there is no time limit for them to do so. If they do not approve before Newsom leaves office on January 3, 2027, the requests lapse and do not roll over to the next governor, according to attorney Natasha Minsker, an anti-death penalty advocate."
However, Democratic Gov.-elect Xavier Becerra has pledged to maintain the death penalty moratorium that Newsom issued in 2019, and could keep pushing to make all 548 sentences life without parole if the state's high court doesn't initially sign off. In his letter, Newsom cited his decades of publicly opposing state-sanctioned killings and his executive order seven years ago, which "formalized the de facto moratorium on executions in place since 2006, the last year California executed anyone."
"The people sentenced to death in California caused indescribable suffering to victims, their families, communities, and our state as a whole," but "I have concluded the state cannot morally kill them," Newsom wrote. "Because the death penalty is inherently incompatible with our legal system's commitment to justice, I have determined that this clemency decision, while difficult in many respects, will ultimately affirm the strength and integrity of our state and its justice system."
The outgoing governor called the decision "among the most difficult" of his career, but also "a righteous action." He said it follows "the moral leadership of past presidents, including our Founding Fathers, and governors across America," and is informed by what he has heard from "crime victims and survivors, public safety experts, and religious, civil rights, and other community leaders."
Coalitions of civil rights groups, business executives, faith leaders, victims' family members, former corrections professionals, and ex-prosecutors have recently urged Newsom to take this action before leaving office. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, he is now among a dozen state and federal leaders who have made sweeping clemency grants to death row inmates since capital punishment was reinstated in the United States in 1976.
It is arguably the most significant of those actions because of its scope. California has the largest death row in not only the United States, but the Western Hemisphere, according to the governor's letter. The Times reported that "Newsom's action cancels approximately one-fourth of all death sentences nationwide."
The national ACLU and its three affiliates in the state were among the groups pressuring the governor to act. The organization's executive director, Anthony Romero, declared Thursday that Newsom "made history" and "honored his commitment to end a system that conflicts with human dignity, fairness, and the values enshrined in our Constitution."
"These commutations reflect what justice demands: an end to a racist, error-prone, and inhumane punishment that has burdened California for far too long," Romero continued. "By taking this step, Gov. Newsom has affirmed that the death penalty has no place in California, and he showed real courage by confronting racialized injustice head-on."
US Campaign to End the Death Penalty's executive director, Laura Porter, also offered praise: "We are grateful that Gov. Newsom, like other Republican and Democratic leaders across the country, has decided to grant clemency to individuals on death row. The historic number of commuted sentences would set a new record and offer an acknowledgment that the death penalty process is flawed."
Bryan Stevenson, Equal Justice Initiative's founder and executive director and the author of the award-winning memoir Just Mercy, similarly welcomed the development, saying: "The death penalty is a flawed, expensive, and error-filled practice that fails us all. I commend Gov. Newsom for this historic act and hope that other state elected officials follow his lead... Now more than ever, Americans need leaders who act on our beliefs, protect the vulnerable, and stand up for human rights and human dignity."
As the Times noted:
Death penalty opponents have planned a national ad campaign praising him for the move. The minute-long commercial casts the governor’s decision as an act of courage and leadership inspired by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dolores Huerta, and Robert F. Kennedy. It will air on dozens of news and political shows nationwide, said Dan Newman, a Democratic strategist who advises both Mr. Newsom and the anti-death penalty groups sponsoring the ad.
Mr. Newman said that the governor had been motivated by personal conviction. But the ad could also help Mr. Newsom in a 2028 presidential campaign.
Among the Californians cheering Newsom's move is Jeanne Woodford, who presided over four executions as warden of San Quentin State Prison, signed a recent letter to Newsom, and shared that "as someone who has carried out executions in California, I am haunted by the fear that we will execute an innocent person."
"Innocent people have been sentenced to death in California," she stressed. "Since 1973, more than 200 individuals nationwide, including eight in California, have been freed from death row after they were found to have been innocent. Gov. Newsom will ensure that California will never execute an innocent person."
Newsom's move may save some innocent prisoners, but it is also set to spare some notorious ones. The Times pointed out that the state's death row includes "Richard Allen Davis, who murdered Polly Klaas, a 12-year-old, after kidnapping her from her home in 1993," as well as "Cary Stayner, who killed four women near Yosemite in 1999, and the 1980s serial killer Charles Ng."
Relatives of the 12-year-old are divided: Her father, Marc Klaas, has criticized Newsom for the 2019 moratorium, but her stepsister, Jess Nichol, recently met with the governor and encouraged his action. She said in a statement that "I won't pretend I've always opposed the death penalty. I used to think the man who killed my sister deserved execution. But over time I've realized that whether he's executed has absolutely nothing to do with my recovery or with real public safety."
"The system tells survivors that execution matters to our healing," Nichol added. "It doesn't. It's a distraction from what we actually need."
While President Donald Trump—whose Republican Party just lost its majorities in Congress—is infamously pro-death penalty, fresh calls for ending capital punishment nationwide have mounted since late September, when Christa Pike survived two injections of pentobarbital from a doctor involved with an earlier botched execution at the maximum security prison in Tennessee.
"There hasn't been a moment since that night when I haven't been in pain," Pike said last week. "My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak. And the pain isn't just physical. There is pain in my mind and in my soul. I had not contemplated life beyond that night, and I'm deeply hurt by the incompetence that has put so many people in this terrible position. I continue to think about my victim's family and the terrible pain and loss they have endured. I am recovering, and I know that I am getting stronger. But healing is not the same as being okay."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump's Proposed Census Rule Changes Are a Threat to Democracy
Trump's Census Bureau has proposed removing questions on race and ethnicity from the census and excluding noncitizens without a green card as part of this administration’s racist and anti-immigrant agenda.
Oct 28, 2026
With the nation’s focus on the upcoming midterm elections, the Trump administration is quietly proposing changes to rules for the 2030 census that would threaten American democracy for decades to come. If we don’t act now, the next census could erase millions of people from the count.
The last Census in 2020 undercounted Latinos by almost 5%, three times the undercount of the 2010 Census, making this racial-ethnic group second only to American Indians and Alaska Natives in undercount. Latinos are now at even more risk of being undercounted by the next Census. The Trump administration has created fear and mistrust of the government by unleashing Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) terror on our communities and is now scheming to strip us of political power and economic resources.
For the first time in history, Trump's Census Bureau has proposed removing questions on race and ethnicity from the census and excluding noncitizens without a green card from the census count. The proposed rule changes are part of this administration’s racist and anti-immigrant agenda to unravel civil rights protections and erase immigrants from our nation.
Excluding immigrant residents would harm every person in the communities where they reside, including US citizens. States with substantial immigrant populations could receive fewer congressional seats.
Our organization, LatinoJustice PRLDEF, is sounding the alarm on how these changes would harm Latino and immigrant communities. Census undercounts have real world consequences, not only in the loss of congressional representatives, but also in the reduction of lifesaving resources like funding for Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) as well as funding for public education and school lunches. More than 300 federal programs allocate resources based on Census data.
The constitution mandates a numerical count of every person living in the United States every 10 years, regardless of immigration status, and requires that congressional seats and federal tax money be apportioned based on the number of people living in each state. The census has included questions on race since it was first initiated in 1790.
Removing questions on race and ethnicity would make it harder to track whether Black and brown communities have equal access to education, housing, and healthcare, and make it more difficult to monitor and address racist exclusion from resources and opportunities.
The proposed rule to exclude noncitizens without a green card would not only exclude undocumented immigrants but also exclude refugees, asylees, and residents with pending immigration applications. LatinoJustice objects to treating such residents as absent from our communities for purposes of representation.
Excluding immigrant residents would harm every person in the communities where they reside, including US citizens. States with substantial immigrant populations could receive fewer congressional seats.
Adding a question on immigration status to the census would further discourage Latinos—regardless of their immigration status—from participating in the count at a time when trust in the government is at an all time low in our communities. ICE terror has made many immigrants afraid to interact with the government in any way—whether to report being the victim of a crime, access medical care, or accept disaster assistance. A census designed to heighten those fears could erase millions from the count.
The Trump administration is proposing another rule change that would cause even more confusion and lead to an undercount of students, snowbirds, and those in non-traditional housing by using tax records to establish residence. All of these proposed changes seem aimed at reducing census participation and undercounting vulnerable communities.
LatinoJustice PRLDEF has worked to promote participation in the census—as imperfect as it is—because we know what a huge impact the count has on our communities. We submitted commentary opposing the dangerous rule changes proposed by the Trump administration. It’s not too late for you to submit your objections, too. But you need to act now.
The open comment period on the proposed census rule changes ends on November 2. We’re calling for the comment period to be extended at least another 90 days so that advocates and experts have the opportunity to weigh in, but we don’t know if the extension will be granted.
Latinos’ enormous contributions to our economy and society make America what it is. Each and every one of us deserves to be counted.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Shameful': Trump DOJ Ditches Civil Rights and School Desegregation Cases
Meanwhile, Rep. Jamie Raskin noted, "this administration carries out presidential vendettas, covers up child sex trafficking, promotes corruption, and pardons and coddles violent felons in the president’s private militia."
Oct 22, 2026
A pair of papers published Thursday by the legal group Democracy Forward detail how, under President Donald Trump, the Department of Justice has dumped dozens of cases focused on school desegregation and the civil rights of people of color, all while weaponizing the DOJ to serve "the most dangerous criminal in US history" and his allies.
The cases were previously taken up by the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, currently led by Harmeet Dhillon, whose confirmation was controversial—like those of Trump's first attorney general for this term, Pam Bondi, whom he fired in April and replaced with his former personal lawyer, Todd Blanche.
The new analyses of the cases—"Walking Away: DOJ's Abandonment of Civil Rights Cases for People of Color" and "Filling in The Gaps: Tracking The 50+ School Desegregation Cases DOJ Says It Is Ending"—were developed by Democracy Forward's oversight and accountability project Red Line for Civil Rights.
"People and communities rely on DOJ to pursue vital cases to address threats to civil rights under our nation's laws. The Red Line for Civil Rights reports don't just highlight the cases that have been abandoned, but also make clear the harm that DOJ's abandonment of its mission retreat has caused," said Democracy Forward president and CEO Skye Perryman.
The project found at least 36 abandoned cases and probes addressing discrimination against Black, Latino, and Native American people, from Voting Rights Act lawsuits and redlining settlements with banks to firefighter and police hiring issues.
There was United States v. Cobb County, Georgia, in which the DOJ alleged that credit checks and a written exam illegally screened out Black firefighter applicants, and United States v. Patriot Bank, a 2024 consent order over redlining of Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in Memphis, Tennessee.
In United States v. SouthEast Bank, the department argued that a student loan refinancing product discriminated against Alaska Native, American Indian, and Black applicants, and in United States v. City of Minneapolis, the DOJ concluded that police discriminated against Black and Native American in Minnesotans.
"The shameful withdrawal of DOJ resources from these cases and investigations highlights how this administration is abandoning communities across the country," said Megan Marks, a former leader in the department who is now the project's deputy director and managing editor. "Walking away from them doesn't mean the discrimination has been addressed. It just means DOJ is no longer watching."
In its second analysis, the project identified 56 school districts in 12 states where the department has moved to ditch or end a desegregation case, or did not oppose ending one—from Athens City, Alabama and Chesterfield County, South Carolina to South Bend, Indiana and Waterbury, Connecticut.
Tanisha Milton teaches a lesson on busing and the desegregation of Boston, Massachusetts public schools during an 8th grade civics class at TechBoston Academy on May 22, 2024. (Photo by Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
"The Supreme Court held in its landmark 1954 case, Brown v. Board of Education, that segregating public school students by race violates the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection," the report notes. "Since Brown, DOJ has monitored and enforced desegregation orders, reviewing evidence and often working collaboratively with school districts and, in some cases, private plaintiffs to support progress."
"This work was central to the Civil Rights Division's history. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 authorized DOJ to file its own school desegregation lawsuits against public schools or institutions of higher education and to join cases that families had already brought," the paper explains. "These school desegregation cases are how the promise of Brown reaches individual classrooms. Behind each of these cases are children, families, and a community that fought, sometimes at great personal risk, for the right to an equal education."
Shaheena Simons previously oversaw the Justice Department's desegregation docket but is now a senior adviser at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. In response to the report, she said that the "DOJ's haste to end these cases without deliberation or transparency is a betrayal of Black students who continue to face segregation and inequality in our schools."
"This retreat is part of a much bigger picture," Simons emphasized. "Not only has the Civil Rights Division abandoned its work to protect the rights of our most marginalized students, but it is also weaponizing civil rights statutes against them."
Democratic leaders in the US House of Representatives also spoke out about the project's findings. Education and Workforce Committee Ranking Member Bobby Scott (Va.) accused the "politicized" department of "turning its back on workers and students by abandoning entire categories of discrimination cases and ending the fight against school desegregation altogether."
Democrats on his panel "are committed to the protection of civil rights and to guaranteeing that all Americans are protected from discrimination in accordance with the civil rights laws that so many Americans fought to secure," pledged Scott, as his party prepares for next month's midterm elections, in which Republicans could lose control of one or both chambers of Congress.
Harmeet Dhillon shakes hands with Republican US President-elect Donald Trump in a photo she posted on social media on October 31, 2024. (Photo: Harmeet Dhillon/X)
Fellow Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin (Md.), a constitutional scholar and ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, said that "Democracy Forward's reports expose the Justice Department's shocking betrayal of its central duty to protect Americans against race discrimination."
"While DOJ devotes its resources to persecuting Trump's political enemies, it has dropped protection of voting rights and is allowing discrimination to proliferate by abandoning school desegregation and job discrimination cases," he said, as the Trump administration pursues everyone from former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey to New York Attorney General Letitia James and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).
"We need a Department of Justice that stands by the rule of law and the rights of all Americans," Raskin asserted. "But this administration carries out presidential vendettas, covers up child sex trafficking, promotes corruption, and pardons and coddles violent felons in the president's private militia."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Student Protesters Inspire One Another—and Should Inspire All of Us
When high schoolers in the US protest, they demonstrate our historic connection to the recent uprising in France.
Oct 17, 2026
High school students in France have captured international attention by protesting essential conditions of schooling—too few teachers, too many funding cuts, and a crumbling infrastructure. After nearly 7,000 arrests—more than 85% of whom were under 18—French education minister Edouard Geffray conceded to some of their demands and offered to hire 3,000 more teachers.
The role of high school students is clearly impactful, but we need not look to France to understand the power of student-led activism. The United States, in fact, is rich with examples.
Protestors have made reference to May 1968 protests in France, when 10 million workers, about two-thirds of the workforce, went on the largest general strike in French history. Students in France inspired a transnational movement that galvanized millions around decolonization, national liberation movements, and the rights of students in a new social order.
Those 1968 uprisings were also informed, most likely, by high school student activism in the United States.
As I explore in my book in 2022, “A New Kind of Youth,” high school students were agents of social change in the U.S. for more than 100 years. The NAACP, the oldest longstanding civil rights organization, began mobilizing high school students in 1921, where they challenged many of the same schooling conditions that French high schoolers protest today. More than a century earlier, the first NAACP youth chapters rejected textbooks with racist histories and demanded more equitable investments in segregated Black schools, for instance.
The NAACP was not the only organization to see the potential of youth activism. Radical organizers Esther Cooper Jackson, James E. Jackson, Edward Strong and others who worked in solidarity with interracial and international working-class coalitions formed the Southern Negro Youth Congress in 1937 in order to mobilize youth to actualize full citizenship rights for all, including equitably funded education.
By the Second World War, thousands of high school youth formed local organizations and joined national and international conferences in calling on state and federal agencies to alleviate discriminatory schooling conditions, end police brutality, build international solidarity, and promote pacifism in the face of wars for empires, all the while illuminating the links between racism and capitalism.
In 1946, activist scholar W.E.B. DuBois spoke to hundreds of young people assembled in South Carolina, and delivered a stirring speech he titled “Behold the Land.” As an elder in the Black freedom struggle, Du Bois charged the youth movement he saw unfolding before him. He observed that young people, many of whom were in high school, were “embarked upon a great and holy crusade, the emancipation of mankind, the upbuilding of democracy, the breaking down…of forces of evil.”
Du Bois’s words, not surprisingly, were prophetic.
High school students emerged as overlooked progenitors of key Civil Rights Movement victories. Robert Russo Moton High School student Barbara Johns orchestrated a student walkout in 1951 in Farmville, Virginia. She led her classmates in a schoolwide walkout and marched downtown. Facing expulsion, she reached out to Oliver Hill, a Virginia-based attorney with the NAACP.
The NAACP responded to Johns’ call and organized the small but committed Black community in the heart of Virgina to file a suit that demanded desegregation. The court case became Davis v. Prince Edward County, Virginia (1951)—one of the five court cases behind the Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
Students turned out in larger numbers and provided needed momentum in other parts of the Civil Rights Movement. When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. tackled segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, he called for massive nonviolent protests. It was youth from elementary to high school, not local adults, who responded to the call.
An estimated 4,000 students participated in the Birmingham Children’s Crusade. They prompted the iconic photographs of the notoriously racist police commissioner Bull Connor who turned police dogs and fire houses on children. When the dust settled, more than 2,000 students were arrested and expelled from school.
Moderate segregationists listened in the wake of the offensive. State and federal governments conceded basic points and desegregated public spaces in Birmingham. During the “Freedom Summer” of 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law, promising anti-discriminatory protections for all.
Historic student activism led to historic liberal milestones that protected basic civil rights and made the United States more inclusive.
To be sure, such concessions fell short in enacting a genuine collective and participatory democracy. But youth activists were quick to respond to its shortcomings, making demands for today’s most salient issues. High schoolers went on strike to support common sense gun reform legislation during the March for Our Lives protests in 2018. Youth not yet in college participated in the Fridays for Future climate justice protests and joined Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.
When high schoolers protest, they demonstrate our historic connection to the recent uprising in France. The connection proffers inspiring indications that massive youth organization will lead to structural change. And the material demands made in France—for better schooling conditions and equitable investment in education in the race of austerity cuts—resonate across the United States and other struggling democracies.
It’s time that we listen, again, to what high schoolers have to say.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Minnesota Proves Trans Inclusion Works; the Government Needs You to Believe It Doesn't
When we allow our government to dismantle the fundamental rights of transgender people, we validate a legal precedent that threatens the liberties of every single citizen tomorrow.
Sep 25, 2026
In 1993, Minnesota became the first state in the country to protect people from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in its Human Rights Act, with explicit trans-inclusive language built into the law from the start. In 2014, the Minnesota State High School League clarified that student athletes can participate on teams that align with their gender identity. And just last year, the Minnesota Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Cooper v. USA Powerlifting that it’s illegal discrimination for sports organizations to ban trans women from participating.
Throughout these 30-plus years of trans inclusion, girls' and women's sports in Minnesota have thrived—the state ranks No. 1 in the nation on Action Network's Girls' Sports Opportunity Index, which measures participation, access, and gender parity across all 50 states. Minnesota is also home to the winningest coach in Women's National Basketball Association history.
As a cisgender woman, I believe it's past time for more women like me to stand in loud, public solidarity with trans people, rather than let this manufactured fight be waged in our name. The people most invested in “protecting” women's sports have rarely shown up for women's sports at all. And as the executive director of Gender Justice, a nonprofit advocacy organization based in the Upper Midwest, I’d love to know where all the urgency around fairness in women’s sports has been.
This is a familiar political playbook: Choose a wedge issue that polls well, use it to normalize the once-radical idea that civil rights law is negotiable, then expand from there.
I've spent years talking with women athletes across Minnesota. They talk about the sexual harassment. The state of their locker rooms. Subpar training facilities. Uneven access to fields and courts. Unequal pay and unequal media coverage. They talk about the coaches and administrators who still don't take their teams seriously. What they don’t talk about is the urgent need for the government to ban trans women from participating in sports.
So why does the noise persist? Republicans and their allies spent nearly $215 million on network television ads vilifying transgender people during the last presidential election cycle alone—more money than has ever been spent championing the women and girls they claim to want to protect.
Because sports was never the destination—they were the entry point. This is a familiar political playbook: Choose a wedge issue that polls well, use it to normalize the once-radical idea that civil rights law is negotiable, then expand from there. Across the country, courts are being asked whether Title IX protections extend to transgender students. The very law, passed in 1972, that guarantees equal access to education and athletics, protection from harassment, and freedom from discrimination based on sex, is being weaponized as a tool for exclusion. Executive orders now redefining "sex" across federal law and agencies don't stop at locker rooms either; they reach into schools, healthcare, and workplaces—into the fabric of American life. Title IX has never required schools to exclude trans students. It has long protected them.
What we are witnessing is not about fairness in athletics. It's political theater, and transgender youth are the ones paying the price—subjected to fear, harassment, and public scrutiny that lawmakers should be ashamed to have invited. What's happening now isn't a return to what the law always meant—it's a rewrite, carving an exception into a civil rights statute so that protections can be revoked for whichever group is politically convenient to sacrifice.
Attacks on trans rights, attacks on abortion rights, and persistent pay inequity are not separate fights; they are one fight against gender inequality, taking on different forms depending on the news cycle. Minnesota already answered the question of whether trans girls and women should have the right to play, with 30 years of evidence and a unanimous state supreme court ruling showcasing that trans inclusion works. The question still on the table is much more dangerous: Do we accept a government empowered to decide who gets rights, and who doesn't? When we allow our government to dismantle the fundamental rights of transgender people, we validate a legal precedent that threatens the liberties of every single citizen tomorrow.
If trans inclusion were the threat opponents claim, then three decades of it in Minnesota would have proven it. Instead, it's proven the opposite.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Bush's Post-9/11 Policies Are Doing Further Damage in Trump's Hands
Because they were never decisively laid to rest by subsequent administrations, they formed the foundation for the excesses of the Trump administration’s foreign and domestic policies that we face today.
Sep 15, 2026
In response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration rushed to implement domestic and foreign policies that had dramatic consequences for the US and the world.
They pushed through far-reaching legislation which, when combined with Executive Orders and “national security” memoranda, effectively gutted one-half of the rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights and erased 50 years of work advancing civil rights and liberties here in the US. In addition, the steps they took to justify the invasions, occupations, and nation-building gambits in Afghanistan and Iraq contributed to degrading the roles of the United Nations and NATO and contributed to dismantling the architectures of diplomacy, rights, and law that had been created by the international community in the aftermath of World War II.
The assault on rights and freedoms had been brewing before 9/11. Beginning in the Reagan era and continuing through the Clinton administration, there’d been “secret” plans to round up, detain, or deport “aliens” without due process. Because of domestic opposition, earlier administrations had been hesitant to publicly implement them. But with the nation reeling in shock in the aftermath of the terror attacks, it became possible for the Bush administration to openly give law enforcement agencies a grab bag of repressive tools they had been seeking. They did so knowing that domestic or partisan opposition would be muted because 9/11 had taken such a traumatic toll. In the end, the Bush-endorsed legislation was easily passed in Congress, with only one senator voting against the bill. And there was only modest opposition to the administration’s measures to use racial and ethnic profiling, deny due process to immigrants, conduct warrantless searches and surveillance, make use of entrapment techniques against vulnerable individuals, and implement a range of costly and invasive measures at airports—all of which have been shown to be wholly ineffective in protecting national security.
If the shock of the attacks had made the public more willing to accept new laws and programs that sacrificed the rights of others, they also created a sense of dread about what might happen next. America had invaded, bombed, and fought wars in other countries around the world, but not since Pearl Harbor, more than a six decades earlier, had the American homeland been attacked. This resulted in feelings of vulnerability. People wanted to know: “Who are these people who committed these crimes?” “Why did they do this to us?” and “What should we do now to respond?”
As a result of the US unilaterally steamrolling its way into the war, insulting allies who refused to join them, and faring so poorly in its execution of both conflicts, respect for the US plummeted worldwide.
It was a short time after the attacks that I accepted an invitation from the Council on Foreign Relations to participate in a post-9/11 study group to discuss these troubling questions and offer recommendations to policymakers, specifically regarding what America’s message to the world should be in this moment. The group they assembled was mixed and bipartisan, including former lawmakers and diplomats, military and government officials, and Middle East “experts.” In the months that followed, we met several times, seated around a conference table in center city Washington DC.
While many of us had questions and concerns, it was striking that a core group of participants came with an obvious agenda. The dust hadn’t yet settled, nor had the embers cooled at the site of the burning towers, but a cohort of the “study group” already had answers. America, they argued, had been attacked because it was perceived as complacent and weak. The terrorists saw that weakness and took advantage of it. The solution, they posited, was for America to demonstrate strength by dealing with a devastating blow so that our enemies would know better than to strike at us again. They had already settled on their preferred target: Iraq. Saddam Hussein was a ruthless leader who’d committed crimes against his own people and his neighbors—and so he was deemed a worthy and non-controversial foe.
Interestingly, at this very early point, the “pro-war hawks” had not yet fabricated their later justifications for the war they so desperately sought. There was no case being made that Saddam sponsored al Qaeda, or that he had weapons of mass destruction. This was to come later. In the beginning, the only justification they advanced was that America needed a dramatic display of strength to put fear into the hearts of those who might be inclined to attack again.
The group who advanced these views in the study group was part of a much larger ideological movement of “neoconservatives” who were growing in influence in Republican circles. They were ideologues whose belief system had more in common with Christian fundamentalism than with traditional Republican thinking. They saw a worldwide cosmic struggle between good and evil. America, of course, was the force for good. The evil had been the Soviet Union but had now been replaced with Arab or Islamic extremism. It was imperative that the forces for good be relentless in its never-ending struggle against evil—to root it out and crush it. No compromise was possible.
While then-President George W. Bush did not initially share their world view, the shock of 9/11 catapulted the neoconservatives into a dominant force shaping his administration’s policies. In the months and years that followed, the Bush administration made decisions reflecting their influence. The repressive legislation and anti-Arab, anti-Muslim programs were part of this, as were the wars and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The costs and consequences of these two ill-conceived wars have been immense in lost lives, treasure, and respect. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis who perished, 7,000 US military personnel died. While the Bush Pentagon tried to sell the war to Congress by saying it would cost just a few billion dollars, it is now estimated to have cost between $6 and 7 trillion. And as a result of the US unilaterally steamrolling its way into the war, insulting allies who refused to join them, and faring so poorly in its execution of both conflicts, respect for the US plummeted worldwide.
These post-9/11 policies inflicted tremendous damage during the Bush years, but their consequences are still with us. Because they were never decisively laid to rest by subsequent administrations, they formed the foundation for the excesses of the Trump administration’s foreign and domestic policies that we face today.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Human Rights Watch Details How Trump Has Gutted Federal Civil Rights Enforcement
"While claiming to protect all Americans, the administration is rolling back systems that communities have long turned to for relief.”
Aug 13, 2026
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."
Keep ReadingShow Less
ICE Funding Approved by Susan Collins and Trump GOP to Deliver Electric Shock Gloves to Agents Nationwide
"Congress must end the blank check to ICE," said the president of one immigrant rights group.
Aug 12, 2026
As Mainers continue to target Sen. Susan Collins' office with protests following a recent killing by an immigration agent, new reporting shows how some of the $70 billion she and her GOP colleagues gave to President Donald Trump's immigration agencies is being spent.
According to the Associated Press on Tuesday:
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers may soon be outfitted with gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks intended to gain compliance from combative individuals.
ICE plans to spend up to $20 million to purchase thousands of “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices” for officers and agents by March, according to a notice published Monday by the Department of Homeland Security.
The devices are known as the GLOVE, which stands for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, and are manufactured by Compliant Technologies LLC of Lexington, Kentucky. They have been used in recent years by some jails and police departments.
As the company's website explains, "the discomfort associated with the stimulation is usually effective in bringing individuals into compliance in less than three seconds and leaves no burns, marks, or scars." It describes them as a "humane, low-optics, de-escalation solution for many situations facing our men and women in uniform."
John Peters, president of the Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths, told the AP that the sensation is "immediate and sharp," comparing it to a "bee sting."
While he said it could be an effective tool to prevent "resistance," he warned that it should not be used as a form of punishment against those merely exhibiting “verbal defiance or belligerence” or on high-risk populations such as children, pregnant women, or elderly or disabled people.
But given the recent record of rampant civil rights abuses, extrajudicial killings, excessive use of force, and efforts to lie about misconduct, civil rights advocates are warning that these gloves are being placed into, or onto, the exact wrong hands.
"ICE spent the last year showing this country that they are willing to disregard the law and are too quick to use force, with devastating and at times fatal consequences for citizens and noncitizens alike," Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, deputy director on policing at the American Civil Liberties Union, told Common Dreams. "Now they might be equipped with a device that allows them to deliver an electric shock with their hands by pushing a small button, in a move that might be imperceptible to those watching."
Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center, concurred, telling Common Dreams that ICE is a "rogue agency with an $80 billion slush fund that allows them to concoct and fund new ways to visit cruelty upon our communities."
"Arming poorly trained agents with electric shock gloves to inflict pain on our neighbors is disgusting and barbaric," Matos added. "Congress must end the blank check to ICE, and ICE must get out of our communities.”
The shock gloves are just one way that immigration agencies are spending the $70 billion in additional funding they were given back in June, when Republicans in the Senate voted 52-47 to authorize the funding despite rampant lawlessness. Only one Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), voted against supercharging the funding.
In a July 16 letter to Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, Collins defended her vote for the increased ICE funding by pointing to "reforms" passed in April as part of the Department of Homeland Security's broader appropriations bill, which included $20 million for body cameras and $2 million for "de-escalation" training.
Collins' office did not immediately respond when asked by Common Dreams whether she believes electric shock gloves were a good form of "de-escalation."
A five-term senator in the midst of a fierce reelection bid against Democrat Troy Jackson has taken fierce criticism for her vote to support ICE on the campaign trail, which has only grown in intensity since July's fatal shooting of 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford.
It was one of two fatal shootings of men without criminal records over the course of a week. ICE later acknowledged that the victims were not the target of their operations.
When asked after the shooting, Collins declined to say that she regretted her vote for increased ICE funding.
Protesters who gathered outside Collins' Biddeford office on Tuesday said she should.
"$70 billion to fund the terror that left my family and community in fear,” Fernanda McLaughlin, a Maine resident and community organizer, said over the loudspeaker, according to NBC News Center Maine. "You know what that money can be really used for? To feed Mainers. To fund our schools. To fund our health system."
"There were no guardrails included, and she still voted yes on it," McLaughlin said. "Simple guardrails that exist in nearly every other law enforcement agency across our nation."
Keep ReadingShow Less
After Killings, Homan Says There Will Be ‘More Bloodshed’ Unless Dems ‘Shut Their Mouth’ About ICE
"They are blaming the opposition for people being killed by their police."
Jul 16, 2026
As Democrats demand investigations and accountability after a pair of fatal shootings by immigration agents, the White House border czar, Tom Homan, issued an ominous warning on Wednesday: Shut your mouth or the "bloodshed" will continue.
Since July 7, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have shot and killed two men—Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas and Johan Sebastián Guerrero in Maine.
The killings, which are part of a broader rash of violent behavior by immigration agencies, briefly led DHS to suspend the use of traffic stops by agents, before President Donald Trump ordered them to continue.
Meanwhile, Democratic lawmakers have promised to launch investigations and congressional hearings. Some have threatened to withhold funding for the agency unless reforms, like body camera requirements, are enacted, while others have called for the agency to be defunded or abolished.
Homan, a senior adviser to Trump tasked with coordinating immigration enforcement across agencies, took to Fox News on Wednesday night to address this heightened scrutiny.
Just one day before, Homan had defended the decision to temporarily halt vehicle stops, saying there should be a "short-term review to make sure ICE agents are safe and doing the right thing.”
But following Trump's orders, he reversed course entirely the next day and rejected the idea that anything about the agency's tactics needed reevaluation.
He told host Laura Ingraham, "President Trump was clear, this policy is not going away."
Instead of trigger-happy agents, he said that anti-ICE "rhetoric" from Democrats was to blame for the recent killings.
"It all goes back to the Dems who want to continually attack ICE and tell people to evade them and tell people don't comply, tell people to resist, and tell people ICE isn't a real law enforcement agency," Homan said.
"You and I talked about this a year-and-a-half ago, Laura," he continued. "I said, if the hateful rhetoric didn't stop, there would be bloodshed."
"I'm saying it right now," Homan said. "There's still going to be more bloodshed unless they shut their mouth and let ICE enforce the laws that they enacted."
DHS has acknowledged that neither of the men who have been shot in recent weeks was the target of the ICE operations that led to their deaths.
A witness reported that Guerrero shouted, "I tried to stop" after being shot by an agent while his vehicle moved forward slowly.
ICE's use-of-force rules state that agents should only use deadly force if they believe an individual poses an imminent threat to an agent or someone else, not simply because they are fleeing arrest.
DHS claimed that Salgado attempted to "weaponize" his vehicle, but that claim has been undercut by video evidence and eyewitness accounts.
The agency said in a statement that Guerrero "attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon," a justification that has not been used for previous shootings.
Many Democratic lawmakers, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), have provided information about individuals' rights when dealing with immigration agents—including the right not to answer the door without a judicial warrant, the right to decline a search or to sign documents, or the right to record law enforcement.
But Homan did not reference any particular case in which they encouraged those facing detention to "resist" by fleeing or attacking agents.
Several Democratic members of Congress, including Reps. Jimmy Gomez (Calif.), Jason Crow (Colo.), and Ilhan Omar (Minn.), among others, have published "Know Your Rights" documents explicitly warning people not to run away or resist arrest.
Agents have frequently faced criticism that they are not, in fact, "enforcing the law" as Homan claimed, but defying it by conducting indiscriminate arrests without warrants, using excessive violence, detaining legal residents and US citizens, and engaging in racial profiling.
Homan's remarks were widely seen as a deflection of blame from immigration agents and as a way to intimidate critics into silence.
"They are blaming the opposition for people being killed by their police," said Alex Nowrasteh, the senior vice president of policy at the libertarian Cato Institute.
USA Today columnist Chris Brennan said Homan was "threaten[ing] more governmental violence… unless Americans stop engaging in speech protected by the First Amendment."
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) called it "extremely irresponsible and dangerous language from the Trump administration's top immigration official."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump Accused of 'Abandoning Kids With Disabilities' in New Assault on Education Department
"By moving special education from the Department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services, the administration is taking us back to a dark period in American history."
Jun 17, 2026
The Trump administration accelerated its assault on the US Education Department on Tuesday by announcing that the agency's work defending civil rights and students with disabilities will be placed under the authority of other federal departments, a move that teachers, Democratic lawmakers, and advocacy organizations condemned as illegal and disastrous for vulnerable children.
Linda McMahon, the billionaire education secretary who has enthusiastically advanced the destruction of her own agency, announced the transfer of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services—which oversees the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)—to the US Department of Health and Human Services, headed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Additionally, the Justice Department will oversee the work of the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights, McMahon said, claiming the changes would "break down the bureaucratic barriers and strengthen the coordination of resources to improve programs that serve infants, toddlers, children, and adults."
Critics argued the moves would do the opposite, scattering crucial programs across departments that lack the expertise and resources to fulfill the education offices' mandates, ultimately depriving children and their families of support.
“Moving IDEA out of the Department of Education is not an administrative adjustment—it is an attack on the educational and civil rights foundation of the law," said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association. "It would drag us backward by treating disability as a medical issue instead of an educational right and by unraveling decades of progress. The Department of Education is the only federal agency with the expertise, infrastructure, and specialists needed to protect students’ rights and ensure they receive the services they are guaranteed."
"Relocating the Office for Civil Rights to the Department of Justice as part of this scheme would further erode federal oversight and endanger disability-rights enforcement nationwide," Pringle added.
The Arc of the United States, a nonprofit that advocates for the rights of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, said that "moving special education to HHS and civil rights enforcement to DOJ would split apart the offices responsible for making disability rights real in schools, leaving families chasing answers across the federal government instead of getting accountability from one education agency."
"Moving IDEA oversight into HHS pushes students with disabilities toward a medical model, where disability is treated as a diagnosis to manage instead of a natural part of human life," said Katy Neas, the group's CEO. "When that mindset drives education decisions, students are more likely to be segregated, underestimated, or treated as separate from the school community."
"It’s an outrageous betrayal that undoes decades of hard-won progress for students."
The changes that McMahon announced Tuesday are part of the Trump administration's effort to completely dismantle the Education Department, which cannot be legally abolished without congressional approval. The Washington Post noted that the newly targeted offices were among the last Education Department segments to "outsource major functions," underscoring that the administration's assault "has advanced far more than most observers predicted would be possible."
In addition to displacing agency functions, the Trump administration has gutted the Education Department's staff, firing nearly half of its workers in what opponents say is an obvious effort to decimate public education.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said the transfer of critical functions out of the Education Department is unlawful, "usurping the power of the purse while the Republican majority stands idly by, forfeiting their authority as a co-equal branch of government." DeLauro pointed to language in a 2026 appropriations measure enacted earlier this year that prohibits the Education Department from transferring responsibilities to other federal agencies without congressional approval.
“This is a disgraceful violation of the law," DeLauro said Tuesday. "By moving special education from the Department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services, the administration is taking us back to a dark period in American history. One where individuals with disabilities were viewed not as whole persons deserving of an education, but as medical patients whose education is not a priority."
The top Democratic appropriator in the Senate, Patty Murray of Washington, warned that "the Trump administration is abandoning kids with disabilities and its most basic legal responsibility to protect the rights of every student in the classroom."
"Instead of helping kids get a great education, this administration is spending its time, energy, and taxpayer resources fixated on where employees sit and illegally trying to shutter the Department of Education," said Murray. "It’s an outrageous betrayal that undoes decades of hard-won progress for students."
Keep ReadingShow Less
See More
Most Popular
To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
News & Opinion
Trending
Common Dreams, Inc. Founded 1997. Registered 501(c3) Non-Profit
Privacy Policy