curated news excerpts & citations
Rolling Stone: Trump’s DNA Dragnet: The Law That Turns Us All into Suspects
A little-used federal law is being activated in ways that could turn immigration screening into the backbone of a far-reaching DNA surveillance system.
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For roughly 20 minutes, Mubashir says, he repeatedly asked to show his I.D., which officers declined. Instead, they took him to a federal building that houses immigration court and Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices, fingerprinted him, and ran his biometrics through federal systems. When officers finally allowed him to present his identification, it confirmed what he had said all along: He is an American citizen.
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Increasingly, identity doesn’t live on paper; it is something the government extracts from your body. This didn’t come out of nowhere. On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order containing a blunt directive: DHS should start collecting DNA from everyone it detains, breathing new life into an existing law allowing federal agents to take genetic samples from anyone in immigration custody.
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Tucked into dense language, the agency seeks to redefine “biometrics” so broadly that almost nothing about a person is off-limits.
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This opens the door for immigration bureaucracy to sweep millions of ordinary people into a biometric capture system once aimed only at migrants in custody.
(Rolling Stone more…)
CBS Baltimore: Woman detained by ICE in Baltimore claims she’s a Maryland-born U.S. citizen
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WSJ: The SpaceX Explosion That Put Flights in Danger
Three planes flew through a temporary no-fly zone in January as air-traffic controllers scrambled to get planes to safety; federal officials halted an internal review of rocket debris risks.
…The documents also said that SpaceX didn’t immediately inform the agency about the explosion through an official hotline. The FAA requires launch operators to use the hotline to quickly alert a failure. Controllers need the information about debris areas to warn pilots and get them out of harm’s way.
The no-fly debris zones were activated four minutes after the Starship vehicle began to stop providing data about its test flight, FAA documents show. SpaceX confirmed with the agency that Starship was disintegrating 15 minutes after that, according to the documents.
Controllers in Miami first heard of the explosion from pilots seeing the debris, documents show. Other FAA officials learned of the incident via an internal chat.
(WSJ more…)
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – December 21, 2025
Speaking today at Turning Point USA’s annual “AmericaFest” conference, Vice President J.D. Vance said, to great applause: “The only thing that has truly served as an anchor of the United States of America is that we have been, and by the grace of God we always will be, a Christian nation.”
Actually, we haven’t.
Vance’s statement flies in the face of our Constitution, whose First Amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….” James Madison of Virginia, the key thinker behind the Constitution, had quite a lot to say about why it was fundamentally important to make sure the government kept away from religion.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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Jennifer Rubin: Remember the Unsung Resistance Fighters
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Brian Allen: Why ‘60 Minutes’ Pulled a Completed Report on Trump’s El Salvador Deportations Just Hours Before Air
NY Times: ‘60 Minutes’ Pulled a Segment. A Correspondent Calls It ‘Political.’
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“Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” Ms. Alfonsi wrote in the note, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. “It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”
(NY Times more…)LAWdork: Zero minutes, or journalism on the chopping block at CBS News
Daily Beast: ‘60 Minutes’ Staff Threaten to Quit Over Pro-Trump Censorship
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Bari Weiss, the network’s new editor-in-chief, allegedly made the decision just three hours before the show was due to air because it “needed additional reporting,” and suggested the program would benefit from an interview with White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.Miller is one of the chief architects of the Trump administration’s immigration raids, so it is partly at his direction that migrants were sent to the center in the first place.
(Daily Beast more…)Adam Kinzlinger: CBS Pulled a “60 Minutes” Story Because the White House Refused to Comment — That’s a Veto on Journalism
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Politico: RFK Jr. wanted to endorse the Danish vaccine schedule. He was forced to pull back.
Legal and political concerns prompted the health department to cancel a planned announcement on Friday, officials said.
…Critics inside the administration, the officials said, argued the plan to recommend the Danish schedule was not rigorous and science-based — and that promoting it publicly would invite criticism. Rather than restoring trust, they said it could undermine it by signaling doubt about the need for, and safety of, routine immunization.
Going forward without laying the scientific groundwork or going through normal regulatory processes could also make the department vulnerable to lawsuits, the HHS general counsel’s office argued, according to the first senior official. Mike Stuart, who was a U.S. attorney in West Virginia in Trump’s first term, now is HHS general counsel.
(Politico more…)Your Local Epidemiologist: We dodged a vaccine disaster (for now). And a quick virus weather report
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Raw Story: ‘The statute is crystal clear’: GOP congressman gives evidence Trump admin is breaking law
… The law required the DOJ to provide internal communications about any omissions related to the Epstein files, but the DOJ instead provided a letter.
Dean Obeidallah: Where is the footage Jeffrey Epstein secretly recorded of people in his houses?!
… Pam Bondi’s own July 2025 memo told us that the DOJ is in possession of large swaths of videos connected to Epstein.
GriftMatrix
Trump Action Tracker
Timeline: Tracking the Trump Justice Department’s Anti-Voting Shift
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
Trump Pardons Database
Project 2025 Tracker
DOGE Tracker
ProPublica: Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew
Wired: 6 Tools for Tracking the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Civil Liberties
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