curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’
Jason Sattler: The Best Way to Close a Concentration Camp Is to Keep It From Opening
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If those seven facilities are truly dead—and we should keep a vigil over the graves—they were killed by a sudden, inconvenient eruption of public conscience. After the Washington Post first reported the warehouse buying spree in December, residents in red counties and blue ones alike started showing up: at city council meetings, at protest lines outside half-built facilities, in calls to members of Congress who’d rather not have a concentration camp named after their district.
(Jason Sattler more…)
WSJ: America’s Immigrant Soccer Team
A quarter of the World Cup squad was born outside of the U.S.
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – June 22, 2026
It appears to be more and more clear that the Trump administration is mired in its own mistakes.
There is no way to spin the memorandum of understanding Trump signed last Friday at Versailles to advance peace talks with Iran as a win. …
… inspections were part of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated in 2015 under the Obama administration, the agreement that Trump tore up in 2018, and they continued at some sites until Trump ordered military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities on June 22, 2025, a year ago today. After that, Iran refused inspections of the bombed sites. Inspections are good, but they basically just get us back to where we were before Trump took over.
…A friendly media figure at the White House today noted that in April Trump said he was going to fix the Reflecting Pool “in a week for about a million dollars,” and wanted to know what was going on two months and sixteen and a half million dollars later. …
…Trump is doing more than threatening media figures. He is increasing his effort to use the government against political opponents. …
…Gabbard herself is under increased scrutiny today after an in-depth story yesterday by Jon Swaine of the Washington Post explored her ties to a religious leader of what observers describe as a cult. …
…The administration appears to be trying to intimidate voting rights groups. On June 11, 100 FBI agents and other federal officers raided the offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a group encouraging voter participation, especially by voters from groups that have historically been disenfranchised. Then the agents went to the homes of board members, staff, and volunteers, where they seized computers and phones, took documents, and questioned the people they found.
The search warrant said they were looking for voter fraud. As the Brennan Center—along with many others—has established, a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than commit voter fraud. It is vanishingly rare.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
Jon Swaine @ Washington Post: Tulsi Gabbard, her guru and the mysterious messages that helped shape her political career
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Jennifer Rubin: You Can See Why Trump Hates Obama
Obama is everything Trump could never be.
On Thursday, Americans could see the stark contrast between two presidents, two visions of America, and two codes of behavior. Rarely has a split screen been so informative.
(Jennifer Rubin more…)
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Steve Vladeck: DOJ’s Alarming Arguments in the xAI Case
The Justice Department’s move to toss out a Clean Air Act lawsuit against xAI for illegally operating methane gas-burning turbines to power data centers turns on a dangerous new constitutional claim.
…DOJ’s filing is remarkable in at least three respects. First, it argues that the NAACP’s suit threatens “American national, economic, and energy security by seeking to shut off the power supply for artificial-intelligence innovation that supports the Department of War’s military operations”—pointing to the military’s reliance on xAI’s Grok model for national security missions, including recent strikes against Iran.
Second, and even more significantly, it objects to all “citizen suits” under the Clean Air Act on constitutional grounds—claiming that decisions about whether to enforce federal law rest exclusively with the executive branch and cannot be overridden by a private citizen suit, even one Congress has expressly authorized. Thus, in addition to having the right to intervene in citizen suits brought under the Clean Air Act, DOJ claims the right to unilaterally have such suits dismissed. Third, and most gallingly, DOJ is making this argument in a context in which it is making no argument that xAI is acting legally. In other words, the central premise of DOJ’s submission is that xAI can be flagrantly breaking the law (and heavily damaging the environment), and only the executive branch of the federal government has the constitutional authority to do anything about it.
(Steve Vladeck more…)James Eagle: Anthropic pulls ahead of OpenAI in enterprise business
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Jim Mustian, Joshua Goodman @ AP: Staggering amounts of fentanyl hit streets as the DEA watched and took no action, records show
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Ariel Zilber @ NY Post: Trump official says US control of Greenland could bring back all-you-can-eat shrimp at Red Lobster
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Liz Dye: How The Onion Made Alex Jones Cry
(Liz Dye more…)
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Borowitz: Trump Orders Rubio to Distract from Algae by Skinny-Dipping in Reflecting Pool
Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting
resources tracking the “Andes” hantavirus outbreak
Apocalypse Early Warning System
Al Jazeera Death toll and injuries live tracker
ICE Accountability Project
Sergio Martínez-Beltrán, Ximena Bustillo, Jasmine Garsd @ NPR: Deaths of migrants in ICE custody hit record high under Trump
- April 16: Aled Damien Carbonell-Betancourt
- March 25: Jose Guadalupe Ramos-Solano
- March 16: Royer Perez-Jimenez
- March 14: Naseer Paktiawil
- February 25: Nurul Amin Shah Alam
April 1 – Jennifer Peltz and Jake Offenhartz @ AP: Death of a refugee left at a Buffalo doughnut shop by Border Patrol is ruled a homicide - January 24: Alex Pretti
- January 14: Heber Sanchaz Dominguez
- January 14: Victor Manuel Diaz
- January 9: Parady La
- January 7: Renée Good
- January 6: Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz
- January 5: Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres
- January 3: Geraldo Lunas Campos
- December 31, 2025: Keith Porter
Suffering Under President Obama
NACDL Criminal Case Tracker
Texas Tribune: A Walk for Peace: photos of Fort Worth monks’ journey to Washington
Walk for Peace – Dhammacetiya – The Ancient Sacred Buddhist Scripture Stupas
Margaret Chase Smith: Declaration of Conscience
NPR: January 6, 2021: A visual archive
Accountability Initiative ICE List
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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