Friday, June 26, 2026
Opinion | Why Is the Supreme Court Unshackling the Presidency? - The New York Times
Why Is the Supreme Court Unshackling the Presidency?
By Kate Shaw
Ms. Shaw is a contributing Opinion writer.
"We have just witnessed another example of the Supreme Court’s unshackling of the U.S. presidency. On Thursday morning the court issued a decision allowing the Trump administration to cancel Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of individuals from Haiti and Syria. The administration is now free to move forward with what immigrants’ rights advocates describe as the largest de-documentation in U.S. history.
In addition to its awful human toll, the decision allowing the T.P.S. terminations to go into effect highlights one of the more troubling mysteries of this era. Between the first and second Trump terms, why has the conservative majority of the Supreme Court become so much more accommodating of and deferential to this president? And, in particular, why has Chief Justice John Roberts proved so much less willing to call the administration out on its lies and challenge its motives — particularly since, according to virtually every metric, the second Trump administration has been far more extreme, and far more lawless, than the first?
It’s possible that the court fears that ruling too frequently against the administration risks noncompliance, and so it is doling out its losses carefully. It could also be that for a majority of the justices, support for the administration’s substantive agenda, including its restrictive immigration policies, outweighs concerns about specific legal violations. But neither of those theories fully explains why the court — and Chief Justice Roberts in particular — has approached Trump 2.0 so differently from Trump 1.0.
During the first Trump term, the court ruled against President Trump in critical cases. In two cases that bear more than a passing resemblance to the T.P.S. case, Chief Justice Roberts cast the deciding votes and wrote the opinions blocking Mr. Trump from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census and rescinding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
These decisions did more than thwart the administration’s policy objectives: They essentially called the administration out on its dishonesty.
The census case featured substantial evidence that the goal of the citizenship question was, in the words of a prominent Republican operative, to facilitate legislative redistricting that would be “advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.” When the Trump administration sought to defend its actions on the grounds that it needed the citizenship question to enable the Justice Department to enforce the Voting Rights Act, the court concluded that the explanation was plainly pretextual.
The DACA rescission went down on related grounds — that the Department of Homeland Security did not consider or explain important aspects of the action it was taking, and, implicitly, that it had concealed its true motives.
Of course, Mr. Trump also notched important Supreme Court victories during his first term. But even some of the pro-Trump rulings came with an undercurrent of skepticism.
In Trump v. Hawaii, the court allowed the president to carry out the third iteration of his travel ban, refusing to invalidate the ban on the grounds that it was a product of unconstitutional anti-Muslim bias. But Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion for the court seemed to convey disapproval of Mr. Trump’s anti-Muslim statements, favorably quoting a statement by President George W. Bush, following the Sept. 11 attacks, in which Mr. Bush urged tolerance and emphasized that we are “a great country because we share the same values of respect and dignity and human worth.”
In what appeared to be an implicit rebuke of Mr. Trump, Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion noted that throughout our history, presidents have “performed unevenly in living up to those inspiring words.” The chief justice’s opinion in that case also turned at least in part on the fact that the policy process that resulted in the ban had involved extensive interagency consultation and input from other government entities, like the Department of Homeland Security. But as for Mr. Trump, the court intimated, he alone could perhaps not be trusted.
Over the past two years, the court’s posture toward Mr. Trump — and Chief Justice Roberts’s posture in particular — has been strikingly different. Even before the start of the second Trump term, Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion in Trump v. United Statesgranted Mr. Trump extraordinarily broad immunity from criminal liability for acts taken while in office — along the way offering a vision of the presidency beyond the reach of most checks on government power.
This posture has continued. Again and again on the shadow docket, the court has issued entirely unreasoned orders siding with Mr. Trump — allowing immigration enforcement agents to stop citizens and noncitizens alike simply because they speak Spanish or appear to be Latino, allowing the president to remove individuals to third countries without complying with the Convention Against Torture and permitting the expulsion of all transgender service members from the military, among many such orders.
In the T.P.S. case, the court has permitted the administration to terminate the immigrants’ protected status in the face of considerable evidence that it flouted statutory requirements for doing so and that key decision makers — including the president — were motivated by unconstitutional racial bias.
It is true that the court ruled against Mr. Trump in the case of sweeping tariffs on imports, and it will almost surely rule against him in other cases before this Supreme Court term is done. But it is telling what the court did not do in the tariffs case.
It did not note the considerable tension between the national-security rationale the administration presented to the courts and Mr. Trump’s many other statements suggesting the imposition of tariffs was actually driven by other reasons: Brazil’s prosecution of its former president Jair Bolsonaro, for example, and India’s importation of Russian oil.
The opinion also did not address the tension between Mr. Trump’s public crowing about the revenue-raising effect of his tariffs and Solicitor General D. John Sauer’s insistence before the court that the tariffs at issue were “not revenue-raising tariffs.” “The fact that they raise revenue is only incidental,” he said. Instead, the court’s majority merely concluded that the statute’s text did not confer on Mr. Trump the authority he claimed.
Even if Chief Justice Roberts now wished to rein in Mr. Trump, it’s not clear that he would have the votes, as he did in the first term. But the chief justice’s decision to assign the writing of the opinion in the T.P.S. case to Justice Samuel Alito, and to join that opinion without writing separately, gives his imprimatur, as well as the imprimatur of the court, to presidential action that is antithetical to the very notion of the equal protection of the laws. It also provides the administration with a permission structure to proceed with still more actions based on egregiously unconstitutional motivations.
Aspiring autocrats and authoritarians often seek to marginalize not just the law but also courts. And perhaps John Roberts has seen this potential, has grasped it and has maneuvered in hopes of avoiding it. The problem is that he has wildly empowered Mr. Trump, and betrayed core constitutional values, along the way.
Kate Shaw is a contributing Opinion writer, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and a host of the Supreme Court podcast “Strict Scrutiny.” She served as a law clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens and Judge Richard Posner."
Pro-MAGA Groups Spur Trump Push For Cultural Change In Schools - The New York Times
MAGA Groups Help Trump Push Cultural Change in Schools
"One nonprofit, Defending Education, initiated nearly a dozen civil rights investigations targeting diversity programs and transgender policies.
Michael C. Bender has been covering the Trump administration’s efforts to bring cultural changes to the education system. He reported from Washington.
The complaint that prompted a federal civil rights investigation into gender policies at Smith College was not filed by a student, graduate or anyone affiliated with the 151-year-old women’s college.
The grievance originated from Defending Education, a conservative parents’ rights group. The organization’s senior attorney said she targeted Smith after learning that one of the school’s graduation speakers last year was Dr. Rachel Levine, a physician and retired four-star admiral who is transgender.
“I saw Levine was speaking and thought that was a curious choice for an all-women’s institution, so I decided to take a look at the college’s policies,” Sarah Parshall Perry, a vice president and senior legal fellow at Defending Education, said in an interview.
What resulted from Ms. Perry’s scrutiny was a formal investigation by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which in May accused Smith of discriminating against female applicants by allowing transgender women to enroll, a policy that had been in place for more than a decade. The investigation also involves determining whether the college violated civil rights law with gender-neutral restrooms and locker rooms. Smith, which has an unknown number of transgender students, now risks losing millions of dollars in federal funding.
The origins of the Smith investigation highlight the catalytic role that Defending Education and other nonprofit groups have played in President Trump’s bid to reshape policy at the nation’s K-12 schools and universities, and to pressure the country to bow to his ideological and cultural agenda.
These groups, many with close ties to Mr. Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, have filed dozens of discrimination complaints aimed at eliminating diversity programs that the White House opposes. The groups have brought complaints to the Education Department and the Justice Department, which last week was put in charge of enforcing civil rights laws in schools as part of the administration’s attempt to dismantle the Education Department.
Of the more than 70 investigations into transgender school policies that the Education Department has announced since last year, about one-fourth have been based on complaints from nonprofit groups with ties to the Trump administration. Many of the investigations have been aimed at blocking transgender women from playing on female sports teams.
If federal investigators determine that schools have broken civil rights laws, educators face a choice. They can adopt the Trump administration’s policy prescriptions on gender and diversity, or fight the findings and risk losing federal funding. But for the complaining groups, the investigations themselves are partial victories that signal support from the federal government and apply pressure on schools to make changes.
The Education Department declined interview requests for Linda McMahon, the education secretary, and Kimberly Richey, the assistant secretary for the Office for Civil Rights, who is a former fellow at Defending Education. Amelia Joy, a spokeswoman for the department, said in a statement that outside groups were an important part of the agency’s process.
“Groups like Defending Education, like so many other groups, play a key role in protecting the rights of students, parents and teachers,” Ms. Joy said, adding that the department would investigate “any complaint that indicates a school is not in compliance with federal law.”
Law professors and civil rights lawyers have questioned the viability of the administration’s investigation into Smith, pointing to an exception to the federal ban on sex-based discrimination for private college admissions policies. Smith College officials, who declined an interview request, have maintained that they comply with federal law.
L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy groups have characterized the investigation as part of a broader anti-transgender agenda.
“This administration has turned the Office for Civil Rights, which was designed to protect students and guard against harms, into an ideological battering ram,” said Suzanne Goldberg, the director of the Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic at Columbia Law School and a deputy assistant secretary for civil rights at the Education Department under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Smith is among roughly 30 women’s colleges remaining in the United States, most of which now admit transgender women, according to data compiled by Maggie Nanney, an independent researcher and Smith College graduate. Ms. Nanney, who was a student when the college first allowed transgender women to enroll, said the policy aligned with the college’s commitment to inclusion, which has led to broad support among students and alumnae.
After the investigation was announced, Smith students expressed support for their college’s policy with chalk drawings around campus of the transgender pride flag and phrases such as “trans Smithies belong” and “trans women belong here.”
“From what I’ve seen, this policy is fundamentally important at Smith,” Ms. Nanney said, adding that students had found the introduction of transgender classmates an enriching experience. “What is key is understanding this is an opportunity to learn, and it’s not an agenda being pushed down someone’s throat.”
Defending Education filed a similar complaint against Wellesley College on Thursday and plans to target transgender admissions policies at other women’s college, said Nicole Neily, the president and founder of the group.
She said that she was focused on protecting spaces for women based on biological sex, and that admitting transgender women was a “bait and switch” for female applicants. She described a hypothetical situation in which a woman had been sexually assaulted by a man and chose the college as a result.
“If somebody chooses that, that is not what they are being provided,” Ms. Neily said. “There are federal laws that apply. You have to uphold your promises.”
‘Voice of reason’
For decades, including during Mr. Trump’s first term, enforcing civil rights in schools has largely relied on parents to flag discrimination. In recent years, the majority of these complaints have raised allegations related to students with disabilities.
But over the past 18 months, new voices have emerged in this complaint-driven process.
America First Legal, a group founded by Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s chief policy architect, has filed complaints that have led to investigations into six school districts in Virginia and Massachusetts over gender and diversity programs.
The Defense of Freedom Institute, founded by two first-term Trump officials, Jim Blew and Robert S. Eitel, has had similar success. The group’s complaints about gender policies in two Chicago school districts, four Kansas school districts, three Maryland school districts and the Maryland Department of Education have become federal civil rights investigations.
Do No Harm, a group opposed to hormonal interventions for transgender children and diversity policies that exclude white students, has prompted federal investigations into the medical schools at Duke University and the University of California, Los Angeles. In an end-of-year report last December, the group’s founder, Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, described meeting with White House officials “aligned with our mission.”
And America First Policy Institute, where Ms. McMahon served as chairwoman for four years, triggered a civil rights investigation into transgender girls playing on female sports teams in Oregon.
But few have rivaled Defending Education’s success at turning civil rights complaints into federal investigations.
Founded in 2021 with the name Parents Defending Education, the group was intended to harness the energy of a parents’ rights movement that grew out of the backlash to school shutdowns and other restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic.
Membership dues accounted for about 1.5 percent of Defending Education’s $5.3 million revenue in 2024, with donations covering the rest.
One of Defending Education’s largest donors has been Donors Trust Inc., a fund for conservative donors to make anonymous contributions. It has given $2.2 million since 2021, tax records show.
In 2024, more than 75 percent of Defending Education’s income came from two dozen private foundations, including major philanthropic forces in the conservative movement, such as the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the Searle Freedom Trust.
With a staff of 17 people, Defending Education also helps local groups and parents navigate civil rights issues in schools, engage in the local and federal policy process, and build networks and coalitions.
Complaints from Defending Education have prompted four federal investigations into transgender policies, and seven into diversity programs accused of discriminating against white students.
“We have tried to be the voice of reason,” Ms. Neily said in an interview. “We’re teaching people what the issues are and how to effect change. You don’t have to go in guns blazing and screaming at somebody.”
‘A women’s experience’
Ms. Neily works from a cramped den in a modest townhouse in suburban Virginia, decorated to reflect her politics and background.
Conservative books critical of “woke” culture are stacked around the room, including one titled “When Harry Became Sally.” A box of Trump-branded presidential chocolates sits on a shelf.
A silver-and-blue kimono hangs on the wall. The display is a tribute to Ms. Neily’s paternal Japanese American grandparents. A nod to her mother, an Irish immigrant, is the name of her black-and-white kitten, Finn.
Ms. Neily’s work is increasingly devoted to paring back protections for transgender students. But in 2012, she was a prominent member of Young Conservatives for the Freedom to Marry, a group that supported same-sex marriage.
Ms. Neily said in an interview that she was still supportive of same-sex marriage, and did not believe people could choose to be gay or transgender. But Defending Education aggressively pushes for school policies that strictly define gender.
“To put someone in a dorm room with somebody when, like, I have to get naked? I am going to be sleeping?” Ms. Neily said. “Those are real concerns, and for them to be swept under the rug is, I think, a little bit unfair.”
She has been quoted in official government news releases and has attended parties at the White House. In a sign of her close relationship with Education Department leaders, she was seated next to Triple H, the bulky, bearded and bald wrestling star, during Ms. McMahon’s confirmation hearing. Triple H, whose real name is Paul Levesque, is Ms. McMahon’s son-in-law.
But Defending Education’s most tangible gains during the first 18 months of Mr. Trump’s second term have been turning 11 civil rights complaints into Education Department investigations. An additional five complaints appeared close to becoming government investigations, according to correspondence between the agency and Defending Education.
Defending Education’s board includes a veteran of Mr. Trump’s education team: Ken Marcus, who ran the Office for Civil Rights for two years in the first Trump administration. Ms. Neily’s top lieutenant, Ms. Perry, also worked for the office during Mr. Trump’s first term.
Ms. Richey, who ran the civil rights office during Mr. Trump’s first term and returned to the role last year, announced the investigation into Smith College with a news release saying the inquiry was about “privacy, fairness and compliance under federal law.”
“An all-women’s college loses all meaning if it is admitting biological males,” Ms. Richey said. Her statement did not disclose that her former group filed the complaint.
The complaint that Defending Education filed did not mention Dr. Levine, a former assistant secretary for health in the Biden administration and the highest-ranking transgender person to serve in a Senate-confirmed position.
One of the attachments was a news release from Smith College that Dr. Levine would speak at commencement. Dr. Levine was a frequent target of television ads from the Trump campaign during the 2024 presidential race. The campaign spent more money on ads opposing pro-transgender policies than on any other issue in the final weeks of the race, according to AdImpact, which tracks advertising data.
Last year, the Trump administration changed the label on Dr. Levine’s official portrait in the Department of Health and Human Services to identify her by her previous name.
“I have no comment about this administration’s acts of pettiness and cruelty,” Dr. Levine said in a statement. “But I will say to trans youth everywhere that who you are is valid, and that this moment will pass.”
Ms. Neily said Defending Education was not punishing Smith for providing a platform to Dr. Levine, but because the college was defrauding women seeking a “women’s experience.”
Supreme Court Expands Trump’s Power Over Immigration
Supreme Court Expands Trump’s Power Over Immigration
“The Supreme Court ruled in favor of President Trump’s immigration policies, allowing the administration to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians and to turn away asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border. The decisions, made along ideological lines, were seen as a victory for Trump’s efforts to restrict immigration and a setback for immigrant advocates. The rulings also raised concerns about the potential deportation of hundreds of thousands of individuals and the implications for other countries with Temporary Protected Status.
The court handed President Trump victories in his push to rescind deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of people and turn away migrants at the southern border.
In a pair of sharply divided decisions on Thursday, the Supreme Court allowed President Trump’s aggressive crackdown on immigration to move forward, permitting the administration to expel hundreds of thousands of migrants from the country and to turn away others at the southern border.
Taken together, the opinions from the court’s conservative majority signaled deference to the president’s ability to set the nation’s immigration policy, as the justices prepare in the coming days to issue more rulings that will decide how much power to give Mr. Trump across his boundary-pushing agenda.
In one ruling on Thursday, the justices allowed the Trump administration to end humanitarian protections that have permitted people from Haiti and Syria to live and work legally in the United States for more than a decade.
Mr. Trump has long pushed to terminate the program, known as Temporary Protected Status, as part of his efforts to restrict immigration. The program was created by Congress with bipartisan support in 1990 to provide temporary legal status to people whose home countries were deemed unsafe because of war, natural disasters or other crises.
The court’s 6-to-3 decision, divided along ideological lines, clears a path for the potential deportation of 350,000 Haitians and 6,100 Syrians, and it is likely to have implications for T.P.S. holders from about a dozen other countries.
The United States, which has a long history of political and military interventions in Haiti, initially extended T.P.S. protections for Haitians in response to a 2010 earthquake that killed an estimated 220,000 people. People from Syria were included in T.P.S. protections in the months after civil war broke out there in 2011. Both countries have faced violence and instability in the years since.
In immigrant communities throughout the United States on Thursday, the ruling brought fear and uncertainty, as people who were following the rules and living in the country legally contemplated a change in their status, potentially also affecting their ability to obtain work permits and driver’s licenses.
The ability of the government to quickly expel individuals who previously had protections will depend on whether they already have pending deportation orders. In many instances, T.P.S. holders have not received such orders, which will allow some of them to contest their removal before an immigration judge.
In a separate decision that also split 6 to 3, with the liberals dissenting, the court on Thursday also said the Trump administration could turn away migrants seeking asylum along the U.S.-Mexico border by physically preventing them from crossing into the United States as they sought protection from persecution.
The administration had asked the court to permit the government to revive the policy, first used in 2016. Under that so-called turn-back policy, the government had stopped asylum seekers from setting foot on U.S. soil, where federal law would have entitled them to try to claim asylum and receive protections.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who read a lengthy summary of her dissent from the bench on Thursday, said the court had endorsed the administration’s decision to “slam the door shut on all who are fleeing persecution,” despite a system enacted by Congress to help people seek asylum in the United States.
The opinions were delivered in the final days of the Supreme Court’s term that began in October. On Monday, the justices are expected to announce another batch of decisions, and the president has been bracing for a likely defeat when the court rules on the legality of his effort to end the guarantee of birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born babies of illegal immigrants.
Immigrant advocates denounced Thursday’s rulings as major departures from the nation’s long history of providing refuge to immigrants escaping persecution and unsafe conditions.
Ahilan Arulanantham, a lawyer representing the Syrian migrants, said the court’s decision had allowed the government to “ignore a bedrock humanitarian protection that Congress, in bipartisan fashion, established three decades ago to ensure that vulnerable refugees would not be subject to partisan whims.” Millions of people, he said, “are at risk of being sent back to countries in crisis.”
The administration called the rulings a vindication of its efforts.
“The T in TPS stands for TEMPORARY, yet many of these designations became de facto amnesty,” James Percival, the general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security, wrote on social media. “This is a win for the rule of law and common sense.”
In the majority decision allowing the president to strip deportation protections, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the federal law at issue prohibited courts from second-guessing an administration’s determination.
“This text is clear, and its plain meaning is very broad,” he wrote.
The court also rejected claims that the administration’s decision was motivated by anti-Black and anti-Haitian prejudice that would violate constitutional prohibitions against discriminatory government actions.
None of the statements the challengers cited by administration officials, including the president, “was overtly racial,” Justice Alito wrote on behalf of the court’s six Republican-appointed justices. “In substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications.”
The three liberal justices dissented, with Justice Elena Kagan quoting extensively from Mr. Trump’s derogatory comments about Haitian immigrants.
“The statements fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the president’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country,” she wrote.
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Since Mr. Trump returned to office last year, his administration has tried to end T.P.S. for people from 13 out of 17 countries with the designation when President Joseph R. Biden Jr. left office. The administration has separately reshaped the refugee system, cutting the number of people allowed through the program from prior administrations, and limiting it mostly to white South Africans.
The changes have made it far more difficult for people who come from troubled or war-torn nations to find refuge in the United States.
In response to Thursday’s rulings, Stephen Miller, the top White House aide, said that the United States was “fully closed to asylum seekers” and that Haitian refugees who received Temporary Protected Status should leave the country.
For humanitarian protections, the homeland security secretary determines when it should be available to migrants from any specific country, and the designation can last from six to 18 months. There is no limit to how many times a designation for a particular country can be extended.
The law allows the secretary to periodically review such protections, terminating or extending them for certain countries. But the law requires the secretary to consult with relevant federal agencies, including the State Department, about conditions in a country and then make a decision based on those assessments before initiating a change.
The program had been repeatedly extended, becoming all but permanent for recipients from Haiti, Syria and several other nations where crises have spanned many years. Last year, Kristi Noem, then the homeland security secretary, moved to withdraw the protections from various countries.
Both sides in the case before the court agreed that the law allows the administration to periodically remove countries from the T.P.S. program and that once terminated, beneficiaries lose legal protections and have to leave the United States.
But immigrant rights advocates said Homeland Security Department officials failed to consult with other agencies about conditions in those countries as required by the law.
In its opinion on Thursday, the court acknowledged that the process the department followed included “a terse and unspecific email” and that the department proceeded with the termination of protections for Syrians “after receiving a laconic answer.”
But the majority said there was no role for courts to review the administration’s determination, which it said encompassed both the final decision and the process leading up to that decision.
Justice Kagan disagreed, saying that nothing in the statute would prevent courts from deciding whether the government had followed the proper procedures to reach a final determination. In this case, she said, no meaningful consultation had taken place between the agencies. They had “no two-way communication about the right subject,” she wrote.
The court’s decision had left most of those affected with “no legal option except to leave the country, even at the price of leaving family behind; otherwise, they will likely be detained or removed.”
The case reached the Supreme Court after class-action lawsuits were filed by T.P.S. holders, including engineers, students, doctors and caregivers, who want to continue to work and live in the United States because, their lawyers say, they could be killed if they were forced to return to Syria or Haiti.
During oral arguments in April, the court’s liberal justices pressed the administration’s lawyer about whether the decision to end the program for Haitians was racially motivated. The justices cited the president’s false accusations during the 2024 campaign that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, ate their neighbors’ pets and Mr. Trump’s comments in December about Haitian immigrants being undesirable because they come from a “filthy, dirty, disgusting” country.
D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, said those statements were “unilluminating” and were references to poverty and crime rather than race.
The text of the statute prohibits “judicial review of any determination” of the executive branch “with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation.”
Lower-court judges, however, sided with the Haitians and Syrians, finding that the homeland security secretary’s process was subject to court review and that her decisions had been preordained and not based on meaningful analysis. The judges postponed the terminations, prompting the government’s lawyers to ask the Supreme Court to intervene.
Hamed Aleaziz, Miriam Jordan and Tyler Pager contributed reporting.“
Thursday, June 25, 2026
Wednesday, June 24, 2026
‘We’re witnessing the end of the America that made our lives possible’: author Eddie Glaude on US’s 250th birthday | History books | The Guardian
‘We’re witnessing the end of the America that made our lives possible’: author Eddie Glaude on US’s 250th birthday
“The mere presence of Black people at the Fourth of July celebrations, acting as if freedom belonged to them, exposed the lie at the heart of this ritual of remembrance by the nation: ours was not a nation committed to liberty and equality.” So goes the second chapter of the author Eddie S Glaude Jr’s latest book America, U.S.A.: How RaceShadows the Nation’s Anniversaries.
The Princeton University professor’s new text illustrates how political turmoil has historically reached a boiling point around celebrations of the nation’s founding on the Fourth of July. The text is especially relevant now as the United States approaches its 250th birthday. Throughout the book, Glaude argues that since the very beginning, Black Americans have played a vital role in establishing this country. Their presence is a constant reminder that the mythological America – one of a white republic – does not exist. Celebrations of the nation’s founding, he says, reinforce myth-making at the expense of the truth. They’re treated as sacrosanct events, thus justifying the sanitization of the nation’s brutal history.
Against today’s backdrop, the 250th celebrations come with the normalizing of white supremacist rhetoric, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and the threatening of birthright citizenship.
The Guardian spoke with Glaude about his book and how it explains America’s current political moment. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
You juxtapose past racist violence against Black people with current-day violence against them. What do you make of the cyclical nature of race relations in this country, in which progress is typically marred by these attacks?
I think it’s rooted in the chapter “Freedom is the white man’s gift”, which flows out of the divided soul of the nation. I make a claim that America suffers from a kind of double consciousness, that it imagines itself as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic. And you can’t hold those two claims together without contradiction or depositing a kind of madness at the heart of the country. Freedom is seen as the possession of a particular group of folk who can give it and take it away. And so when we find ourselves in these moments where we want to live up to our ideals and address racial injustice, we typically do so in a sentimentalized way: “What can we do for you?”
But that charity runs dry, such as at the end of Reconstruction, where people said: “We are done with the issue of slavery, but we don’t want Black folk to have full citizenship rights.” Folks who were anti-slavery suddenly were deeply suspicious about extending the franchise to Black people. Or we have these other moments where folks are asking the question, “What else do you want? We’ve given you so much. Show some gratitude.” We find ourselves in these cycles of sentimentality and white rage, as Carol Anderson talks about. So we find ourselves, over and over again, in these moments of backlash and then a desire for absolution.
To that point, with so many of these anniversaries, there seems to be a racial flashpoint. What do you think of 250 years coinciding with the gutting of the Voting Rights Act?
Six years ago, folks were saying that we were experiencing a racial reckoning after we witnessed the murder of George Floyd, and people risked their lives to protest as Covid-19 raged. In a blink of an eye, we’ve witnessed a simultaneous attack on two major pieces of legislation: the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Both of them fundamentally changed the trajectory of the nation. They opened up the doors for a genuinely multiracial democracy by changing the national quotas around who can immigrate here, in effect overturning the Nationality and Immigration Act of 1924, which was basically written by the Klan. The Voting Rights Act expanded Black political power and our participation in the political process. What we’re experiencing in this moment is a wholesale attack on that vision of the country.
Much has been made of the Trump administration’s whitewashing of the country’s history ahead of the 250th anniversary. But you point out that that’s par for the course, highlighting the 1876 anniversary and the 1926 anniversary as other times when Americans decided to whitewash history to preserve a specific idea of Americanness. What can people do to push back on the distortion of history?
“Disremembering” is so important, right? That’s Toni Morrison’s language, this active forgetting that echoes “dismembering”. There’s a violence that attends this.
In 1876, after the carnage of the civil war, over 600,000 people dead on land and sea, President [Ulysses S] Grant and others focused on talking about the business acumen of the country, its technological fortitude, its innovation. Black folks are effectively disappearing because our presence reveals the lie of that narrative.
Just think about the backdrop of 1876: you have the Colfax massacre in Louisiana. You have Vicksburg, Mississippi. You have Hamburg, South Carolina. There is literally a political coup going on in some parts of the occupied south.
What has to happen here in order to protect the innocence of the country? Black folks have to be disappeared. We have to be made to play minor bit parts in the story. This is one way that I’m trying to parse [James] Baldwin’s sentence in The Fire Next Time. He says the innocence constitutes the crime. It’s a way of preserving American innocence by redacting the historical record.
Do you think it’s possible for Americans to be anything other than, as Frederick Douglass said, “destitute of political memory”?
I think so. I don’t want to say we’re fated to be this, that the country can never change. I’m attached to people on the ground, and I have a fundamental faith in the fact that people can be otherwise. It’s not my place to throw away people. If we grow up finally as a nation, if we don’t remain in this perpetual state of adolescence where we can look at our past and honestly see it for what it is, maybe we can discover who we really are as Americans. That’s what I’m calling for at the end of the book. I don’t put forward any policy agendas. I don’t want to participate in the ongoing ritual of behaving like we’re actually trying.
I simply say it’s clear. We have to make a choice. Either we’re going to be a white republic, or we’re going to be a beacon of freedom. We can’t be both. That requires of us a kind of tragic sense, a blue-soaked sensibility torecognize and acknowledge the horrors and the joys, the triumphs and the defeats that make us who we are as Americans.
Where do you think the country is headed, given this volleying back and forth – yet another anniversary, yet more tragedy?
Right now, we’re on the precipice. I don’t know who we’re going to be on the other side of this. [Donald] Trump and Maga are literally destroying the foundations of our democracy right in front of us. We’re witnessing the end of the America that made our lives possible. It’s going to take generations to get back on our feet. It’s a dark hour. But, you know, midnight is the beginning of a new day. It’s the darkest of hours, but it’s also the beginning of a new period, a new day. We have an opportunity, if we are mature enough as a people, to actually try to build a country in the aftermath of the ruins left behind by Trump and his people."
‘This is injustice’: how leftist zines were used to sentence anti-ICE protesters to decades in prison | Protest (US) | The Guardian
‘This is injustice’: how leftist zines were used to sentence anti-ICE protesters to decades in prison
"Advocates sound alarm after zines were used as evidence to convict protesters of terrorism charges tied to 2025 protest at Texas ICE facility
It’s the day after Mother’s Day, the first one Elizabeth Soto has spent apart from her three children. Sitting in jail in Wichita Falls, Texas, her face is washed out by the overhead fluorescent lighting, and her dingy jumpsuit blends into the cinder block walls surrounding her.
Speaking through a glass separator, she tells me she celebrated the holiday with her children over the jail’s video-call system while they had dinner at their grandmother’s. “I’ve been a full-time mother all of their lives,” she said. “I’ve never been away from them.”
Soto’s children have not visited her in jail, which lies on Texas’s northern border near Oklahoma, hours from their home in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Elizabeth Soto has only seen her husband, Ines Soto, once over the past year, the longest they’ve spent apart since they first started dating more than 20 years ago. He is being held in a federal prison more than 100 miles away.
On Tuesday, Elizabeth was sentenced to 50 years in federal prison; Ines’s sentencing is set for 1 July. All because, as she put it: “They didn’t like my book club.” Her laugh doesn’t quite reach her eyes.
Last year on the Fourth of July, a small group from Dallas-Fort Worth held a night-time noise demonstration, setting off fireworks outside the Prairieland Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility south of the cities, in solidarity with the detainees. A few protesters broke away and spray-painted graffiti on employees’ cars and a security post, slashed the tires on a government van and broke a security camera. The facility’s guards ordered the protesters to disperse, and most of them did. When a police officer arrived at the scene, drawing his gun, an armed protester shot her rifle, hitting the officer in the shoulder. The officer survived.
After a three-week trial, a jury found eight of nine protesters guilty of “providing material support to terrorists”, among other crimes. For the Sotos, this “material support” included owning a “printing press” used to print anarchist zines and being part of a leftist book club, the federal government argued. The couple had already left the scene by the time guns were drawn. All eight of the defendants sentenced so far have received unusually harsh sentences – 30 to 100 years – essentially life in prison.
Their attorneys announced their intention to appeal, but many supporters are doubtful that anything short of a presidential pardon from a future administration would free them.
The Prairieland case was the first tried and convicted under the Trump Department of Justice’s “counter-terrorism” initiatives targeting “antifa” – short for antifascist – a decentralized movement the administration has officially categorized as a “domestic terrorist organization”. The federal government argued the Prairieland defendants, what they called a “North Texas Antifa cell”, had planned the demonstration as an assassination attempt against a law enforcement officer. The government alleged this conspiracy even though the defendants were loosely connected, and some who attended the protest did not even know each other.
The conviction of the Prairieland defendants has shocked legal and civil liberties experts, who say the Trump administration is making examples of them and setting a dangerous precedent for what this means for the first amendment right to protest and to create and distribute information.
“It is not only an attempt at chilling speech,” said Chip Gibbons, policy director at the advocacy group Defending Rights and Dissent, “but an indication that the [the Trump administration is] going to continue going after protests extremely hard.”
In total, 22 people have been charged in connection with the protest: five others took plea deals, another five have state charges pending and three more were indicted last month. What the federal government has described as “antifa extremists” are activists you’d find anywhere in the US: trans people, tattoo artists, vegans and anti-ICE community members who engage in mutual aid. The federal government’s focus on the possession of leftwing literature, including zines, and other basic security measures common in our modern era – like owning Faraday bags, meant to block wireless signals to prevent surveillance; using the encrypted messaging app Signal; or dressing in all-black clothing – is alarming to activists.
“Zines are a foundational first amendment document” going back to the Federalist papers, said Xavier de Janon, the director of mass defense at the National Lawyers Guild and the attorney representing Elizabeth in her state case. “Zines discussing ideas of revolution, mutual aid, ideas of a world after capitalism, should not be able to be criminalized in and of themselves … That’s just dangerous to all of us.”
The Emma Goldman book club
The Sotos’ crimes largely stem from a “printing press” that the FBI noticed during the initial raid of their home: a standard office printer, a paper cutter and a book binder. During the raid, one of the Sotos’ children told Elizabeth’s attorney that police put a bag over their head and brought them in for an interrogation; another child was interrogated in the home. Elizabeth only found out about their child being taken for interrogation from an article published by the anarchist collective Crimethinc that was later made into a zine. The justice department did not return the Guardian’s request for comment on the raid of the Sotos’ house, its attacks against the first amendment or its unusual use of counterterrorism law.
The federal prosecution argued the Sotos used the printing press to produce anti-government zines for a book club they and some of the other defendants were part of, named for the celebrated 20th-century anarchist Emma Goldman, who 99 years ago this month was arrested on conspiracy charges for organizing against the first world war draft.
At the book club, the group read political zines on subjects like “a journal of materialist feminism” and “a call for the eradication of artificial intelligence from the face of the earth” – perhaps niche, but nothing illegal, an FBI agent testified in court. Still, the FBI seized these zines, along with the printing press and a collection of poetry about losing a sibling to cancer.
Zines have been an important source of information for leftwing community organizing for decades, in part because they’re analog and can be anonymous. They’ve become even more important during the second Trump administration, amid the rise of the state surveillance of protesters and aggressive social media censorship. In many local bookstores, libraries and coffee shops across the US, you can find “know your rights” zines explaining how to legally observe ICE agents or how to maintain anonymity at a protest.
“It definitely feels like there’s an overarching project to limit the amount of information that people have,” said Dario Sanchez, another Prairieland defendant, who did not attend the protest. Sanchez is facing state charges, not federal, and his trial has yet to be scheduled. He was charged with tampering with evidence after removing two other defendants from a Signal chat after the shooting.
During the trial, federal prosecutors argued that the possession of these zines and other leftist materials, like stickers with the letters “ACAB” (a slogan that stands for “all cops are bastards”) or “Chinga La Migra” (Spanish for “fuck the immigration police”), were evidence of their participation in an “antifa” terror cell. Prosecutors held up several of the zines in front of the jury for dramatic effect.
One zine found in multiple homes during FBI raids was a 2019 review of the films Hereditary and Midsommar by the feminist theorist Sophie Lewis, titled: “The Satanic Death-Cult Is Real.”
“If you weren’t crying, you would laugh, because it looks as though they didn’t read any further than the title,” Lewis said, “and so it’s almost like a confession – as though the words on the pamphlet are: ‘We worship the devil, signed, antifa’.”
Donald Trump’s targeting of “antifa” began in his first administration and has only intensified since he retook office. Last month, the Trump administration issued its “counterterrorism strategy”, describing “anarchists and anti-fascists” as “violent left-wing extremists” and equating “pro-transgender ideology” to terrorism. This strategy built upon its National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7), issued in September shortly after the killing of far-right commentator Charlie Kirk, which the right inaccurately blamed on violent leftwing protesters and trans people. At least three of the nine people convicted and five of the 22 charged Prairieland defendants are trans; many have been incorrectly named in legal filings, despite having legally changed their names.
“There’s a long history in the US of trying to claim that anarchists or communists, or other -isms on the left, are engaged in criminal conspiracies, and then conflating their activism with those so-called conspiracies, casting a wide net to equate speech with violence or critical acts,” said Gibbons of Defending Rights and Dissent. That history goes back to the conspiracy charges against Goldman – Joseph McCarthy’s early attempt at building the Red Scare – to the political imprisonment of Black Panther and American Indian Movement members, to police arresting George Floyd protesters to control crowds.
Book club members and local activists familiar with the Prairieland case say that the literature and other leftist rhetoric were presented as evidence of criminality to a jury unfamiliar with or even hostile to the cultural and intellectual diversity in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. They say Johnson county, where the Prairieland facility is located and where defendants were initially jailed, antagonized the defendants, putting them into solitary confinement for weeks, subjecting them to repeated strip-searches and denying them dietary restrictions, while characterizing them as violent terrorists from the big city.
Defendants Autumn Hill and Meagan Morris, both trans women, are being held in men’s facilities, where they are vulnerable to rape and sexual abuse – counter to recent federal rulings that trans women should be held in women’s facilities for their safety. According to Hill’s wife, Lydia Koza, Morris was denied access to hormone treatments while in Johnson county, which could have had severe medical consequences. (The Johnson county sheriff’s department did not return the Guardian’s request for comment on the defendants’ treatment in jail.)
Hill and Morris received 50-year sentences for conspiracy to riot and ambush a law enforcement officer, even though they were not present when shots were fired.
“[The prosecution] just used the fact that this is not ‘normal’ to most people – you don’t recognize this, therefore it’s sinister,” said Koza. “They’re just anti-intellectual, too: ‘Oh, these defendants read, that’s so fucking scary. You shouldn’t trust people who read. They might be writing things that’ll be dangerous to you.’”
When the FBI pulled up in Swat gear and raided Koza and Hill’s house – where they lived with several roommates, plus their three dogs and five cats – agents sent flashbangs through a front window, leaving burn marks across their floor.
Daniel “Des” Sanchez-Estrada, an artist, tattooer and green card holder, was not at the protest, but his wife, Maricela Rueda, was. When she called him from jail after her arrest, she asked him to tow her car and check on her home. The government recorded the conversation. Soon after, Sanchez-Estrada was stopped by police while moving a box of zines from his home. Many of his illustrations, in the form of stickers or tattoo flash sheets, criticizing ICE and police, were entered into the prosecution’s exhibit files. His arrest has led to the rallying cry written in zines, sewn on to patches and posted online: “Zines are not a crime!”
Sanchez-Estrada was convicted of “corruptly concealing a document or record” and “conspiracy to conceal documents” and sentenced to 30 years in federal prison.
“I worked really hard every day in this country, and I believe in human rights and helping others in need. I donate money and art to help animals and other people,” he told the court before sentencing. “I’m a father, a husband and a teacher. But I’m not a terrorist.”
The precedent set
The Department of Justice’s successful conviction over the possession of leftist, anti-Trump or anti-ICE literature may be novel, but it’s part of the Trump administration’s broader crackdown against protesters. It’s a strategy that’s had little success in the courtroom.
A ProPublica and Frontline investigation earlier this year found that over a third of more than 300 anti-ICE protest cases “crumbled”. In Chicago, anti-ICE protesters were charged with conspiring to obstruct law enforcement operations; the case was tossed last month over alleged prosecutorial misconduct, and defendants, known as the Broadview Six, are now pushing for an investigation into the case’s handling.
But after the Prairieland conviction, federal prosecutors have had at least one other success: in Spokane, Washington, three people were convicted last month of conspiring to impede a federal officer over a protest to block an ICE vehicle attempting to transporttwo migrants. And the justice department shows no signs of stopping. Last week, 15 people in Minneapolis, Minnesota, were hit with the same charges of conspiracy to obstruct ICE operations, and were accused of being a part of “antifa” groups that “violently oppose immigration law enforcement”.
What legal experts say differentiates Prairieland from many other federal protest cases that fell apart was that a police officer was shot. According to Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, the combination of property damage and injuring an officer is what the state built a conspiracy around.
While the government said protester Benjamin “Champagne” Song fired directly at the officer with the intention to kill, her attorney showed footage from the shooting that suggested Song fired at the ground as a warning shot or an attempt to distract the officer, raising doubt that she intended to shoot him. Defendants’ supporters have hired an investigator to further study the evidence released from the shooting.
During the trial, the judge refused to let the defendants enter a self-defense plea. Song, a former US marine, was the only one convicted of attempted murder of a government employee and discharging a weapon.
In a statement issued after she received 100 years in federal prison, Song wrote that she brought her weapon out of fear that law enforcement would hurt or kill protesters, as in the cases of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, protesters who were shot and killed by immigration enforcement officers in Minnesota earlier this year.
“This is wrong,” she said of the charges against the 21 others. “This is mass punishment. This is collective punishment. This is guilt by association. This is injustice.”
Some of the defendants, including Song, were part of the Socialist Rifle Association and legally owned guns, which the federal government presented as evidence of intended violence. Many marginalized communities, especially trans people, have opted to engage in the second amendment in recent years amid rising hate crimes. Homemade first-aid kits carried by Prairieland demonstrators were also presented as evidence that they planned for violence.
Sanchez said making those first-aid kits was “something we were incredibly proud of”. Sanchez is a teacher and started bringing the first-aid kit with him in case he needed to make a tourniquet for a student during a school shooting.
“Is it normal to charge a terrorism offense in this context?” said Kadidal. “It strikes me as excessive, and I think it would strike an ordinary American listening to this conversation as excessive.”
Savanna Batten, another member of the Emma Goldman book club, has been sentenced to 50 years in federal prison. (The eighth defendant convicted, Zachary Evetts, was also sentenced to 50 years.) When I visited her in the Wichita Falls jail in May, her spirits were bright despite her circumstances. I wanted to ask her about what she’s been reading, but wondered if she was scared to answer.
“It’s crazy that we live in a world where it’s not safe to ask what books you’re reading,” she said. Batten, a vegan who has often had to go hungry in prison, said her life outside revolved around nature and her “companion pets”: a cat named Garfielda, whom she brought on a leash on hikes, and six rescued hermit crabs, the first two of which she found in a dumpster. In jail, she is reading a book about the natural history of crabs, and she tells me that hermit crabs can live for 40 years when not in captivity.
“The irony is not lost …” Batten trailed off, hearing herself describe the humanity of hermit crabs inside a jail where the only place she can see the sky is under bars. “I understand that living in captivity is inherently awful.”
Perplexity AI
A zine is a small, usually self-published and noncommercial publication, often made by one person or a small group and distributed in limited numbers. It can be printed or digital, and it often focuses on a niche interest, personal expression, or a subculture.[1][2]
## What makes it a zine
- DIY and independent, rather than professionally published.
- Small circulation, often photocopied, stapled, folded, or otherwise handmade.
- Content can be anything from art and comics to politics, music, memoir, or fandom.[3][4]
## Where the word comes from
“Zine” is short for **magazine** and is closely tied to “fanzine,” an early form of fan-made publication.[4][5]
## Simple example
A zine might be a 12-page booklet about punk music, a personal photo essay, or a handwritten mini-magazine about gardening or local history.[6][3]
Sources
[1] Zine Definition & Meaning | Britannica Dictionary https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/zine
[2] Introduction - Zines at the Library of Congress https://guides.loc.gov/zines
[3] What's a Zine? - Zines! - LibGuides at University of Richmond https://libguides.richmond.edu/zines
[4] Zine | Examples, Definition, Printing, Making, History, & Facts https://www.britannica.com/topic/zine
[5] Zine Definition & Meaning https://www.yourdictionary.com/zine
[6] What is a Zine? - Zines - LibGuides at University of Texas at Austin https://guides.lib.utexas.edu/c.php?g=576544&p=3977232
[7] Zine - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zine
[8] Zine History & Culture - Zines - LibGuides at UVa Library https://guides.lib.virginia.edu/zine/history
[9] Zines and Fanzines - Zines, Pamphlets, Artists' Publications ... https://libguides.pace.edu/zines/definition
[10] zine https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/zine
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