Category: 2026

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Mitch Jackson:
Six Justices Put Out the Statue of Liberty’s Torch This Morning

The Supreme Court decided who counts as human at our border today, and 350,000 families are about to pay the price. Here is what happened, and what you do next.
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Today, on June 25, 2026, six members of the United States Supreme Court quietly changed what your country promises the world. They wrapped the whole thing in dry legal language built to make your eyes glaze over and your attention drift. Underneath the vocabulary sits a decision about who gets treated as a human being at our border and who gets shoved back into the dark.

You deserve the plain version. Once you see what these six justices signed their names to, you will understand why sitting out the next election is a luxury none of us own anymore.

The Words In Bronze

A poem has welcomed the world from the base of the Statue of Liberty for generations. Most of us grew up hearing a few of the lines without ever reading the whole thing.

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

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Emily Early @ Columbia Missourian:
“Compassion. That is the key. Compassion is love in action”

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For more than a century, [Mel West] has been figuring out humanitarian ways to serve his fellow man. …

West is probably best known for Mobility Worldwide, a nonprofit organization that builds carts for those in developing countries who need a way to get around. …
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“If you want to follow Jesus,” he said, “you go with your antennae out looking for human need.”

In the last 102 years, West said he has seen considerable human achievement and advancement, but the most important changes during his lifetime have been the empowerment of women and the change in attitude toward the treatment of animals.

“The world is getting better every day,” he said.

“I pledged allegiance every morning in grade school to the flag. And then, we ended up with liberty and justice for all. I beg that a word be added to that: with liberty, justice, and compassion for all,” he said.
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Mike Ludwig @ truthout: ICE Says 51 People Died in Custody Under Trump. Experts Say That’s an Undercount.

Immigrants are jailed in unsanitary, overcrowded jails and camps as part of Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

Mamuka Artmeladze, a 43-year-old Georgian national, was found dead on June 4, 2026, in federal immigration custody. Though his name did not appear in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE’s) online death records by the time this article was published, Artmeladze was reported as the 50th person to die in ICE custody since President Donald Trump returned to office. One of two recent deaths at a notorious immigration prison in Louisiana, Artmeladze’s death is one of the latest signs that the president’s mass deportation campaign has predictably created a human rights crisis inside a sprawling system of immigration jails and camps.

At least 51 people have died while in ICE custody since Trump began his second term, federal records show. …
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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.
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WSJ: America’s Immigrant Soccer Team

A quarter of the World Cup squad was born outside of the U.S.
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Jonathan Cohn @ Bulwark: How a Florida City Saved Its Pride Symbol from MAGA Erasure

Ron DeSantis met his match in a coalition of LGBTQ activists and straight city commissioners who refused to be bullied.

Miami Beach, Florida
THE DEMOLITION CREW ARRIVED late in the afternoon. The crowd came not long after that—to watch and to protest and to mourn the dismantling of a beloved landmark. …

… she and fellow community leaders quickly turned their attention to next steps: “We were all talking, part of this group saying it was not okay and that we couldn’t just let this happen.”

They didn’t. And about six months later, Bhatt was with those other leaders at the opening of a new tribute to the LGBTQ community, practically in the same location as the original. It even uses the same brightly colored bricks, which city officials had made a point of retaining. But this marker is on the sidewalk, not in the street, putting it beyond the reach of Florida’s Department of Transportation—and the Republican governor in charge of it.

“They can move the bricks,” Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said at the ceremony, “but they cannot erase us.”
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Oz @ Medium: The $1.2 Billion Zoom Call: How a Live Deepfake Just Killed Biometric Security

Multi-national corporations are quietly abandoning 2FA and facial recognition, returning to analog passwords. Here is the terrifying anatomy of the biggest cyber heist in history.

If you work in corporate finance, IT, or cybersecurity, everything you thought you knew about identity verification changed last week.

For years, we were told that the ultimate defense against cyber fraud was biometric security. We enforced strict Two-Factor Authentication (2FA), implemented liveness checks for facial recognition, and trusted our own eyes and ears.

Then, a coordinated cyber cartel used a Real-Time Deepfake to steal $1.2 billion in a single afternoon.

This wasn’t a phishing email. This wasn’t a compromised password. This was a live, interactive video conference where a Chief Financial Officer (CFO) sat face-to-face with what looked and sounded exactly like his CEO.
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Deuce Davis:
A Juneteenth Journey Through America’s Original Sin

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These nine films are a journey into the way cinema depicts America’s original sin, and watching them in sequence has made this Juneteenth all the more meaningful. As Frederick Douglass once asked what the Fourth of July meant to the slave other than hypocrisy, it is crucial to remember that America is as notable to history for its contributions to the perpetuation of ethnonationalist authoritarianism as it is for the possibility of multicultural democracy. The movies have spent a century telling us which of those two we are. The truth is that we have always been both, and the lie each film tells is just another way of choosing which one to look at.

Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – June 19, 2026

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James Eagle: African life expectancy has risen sharply

A chart like this is worth pausing over because it pushes against the easiest story about Africa. The long-run picture is not only crisis. It is millions of lives extended year by year.

The upward movement reflects vaccination, malaria control, lower child mortality, better food security, urbanisation, basic medicine and public-health systems reaching more people than before. Some countries still lag badly, but the direction is unmistakable.

Life expectancy is an average, not a guarantee of good lives. War, poverty and weak healthcare still matter enormously. The point is not to soften reality. It is to remember that African development has also produced one of the great human gains of the modern era.
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C.J. Atkins @ People’s World: After over 100 days of war, U.S.-Iran deal restores status quo

Workers in the U.S. and around the world paid the price for a war that, by its own ceasefire terms, ends up restoring much of what existed before the first bombs fell, leaving many questioning why the war against was even launched in the first place.

Not everything is like it was in the pre-war world, though. Costs are up, incomes are down, and some of the biggest weapons, energy, and finance corporations are far richer than when the war started.

The United States and Iran announced a framework agreement this week to end more than 100 days of war, with President Donald Trump declaring on social media that the “Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete” and ordering the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and the lifting of the U.S. naval blockade on Iranian ports. Negotiations over details continue, but a formal signing is set for June 19 in Geneva.
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Jonathan Larsen: The vice president’s fraud task force is living up to its name; it’s a task force committing fraud against providers for dying people

Vice Pres. JD Vance and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Director Mehmet Oz are shutting down healthy hospices before they or their residents are ready to die, the Washington Post reports.

Their fraud task force was formed in March to perpetuate the fraud of their false claims of rampant fraud that they used to justify federal interventions in unwelcoming communities. Already, the fraud task force is living up to its name, by being a fraud, and closing law-abiding hospices not even accused of fraud.

Oz — who shares his name with a fictional land led by another Oz who’s a fraud — has said the task force has touched almost no legitimate providers of hospice services. In related news, the Post claims to have “identified at least 43 legitimate hospice agencies that were suspended” from participating in Medicare or Medicaid.

One law firm reported submitting more than 40 appeals, with none addressed by CMS in the legally mandated 15 days. (In fairness, 15 is even less than almost no. Four have had funding restored.)

It’s not clear whether Oz gave those 40 hospices something instead of a review, like an honorary degree of doctor of thinkology.

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