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After NSPM-7, the federal agency is building a real-life Minority Report predictive policing system with AI.

The Trump administration is not making its case against Anthropic.A federal judge flamed the government during a hearing Thursday, noting that Justice Department attorneys had failed to provide evidence “justifying” the Defense Department’s decision to class the AI company as a national security risk, or Donald Trump’s subsequent order barring federal agencies from utilizing the company’s services.California-based U.S. District Judge Rita Lin literally spelled out the questions she would ask the government’s attorneys via a legal notice earlier this week, but the DOJ still failed to impress. Lin remarked at the outset of the hearing that, “if anything, it seems like the record in some ways has gotten worse for the government,” according to the Law & Crime network.In May, Lin blasted the government for the “Orwellian” way that Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attempted to sever ties with the AI contractor after Anthropic refused to grant the Pentagon unrestricted use of its AI bot, Claude, for military purposes.At the time, the president and Hegseth claimed that Anthropic had gone “WOKE” for arguing that Claude could not safely or reliably be used for “autonomous lethal warfare and mass surveillance of Americans.”“Having reviewed the record that the parties have submitted on the cross motions for summary judgment, it appears to me to be largely the same as the record that I assessed at the preliminary injunction stage,” Lin said Thursday. “I don’t see additional evidence from the government really justifying what it did.”She added that she found it “really troubling” that the Trump administration was taking a position that “seems at odds to me with the First Amendment,” in “threatening to take away contracts from anyone who might do business with them” by “labeling them as subversive.”Lin even posed a hypothetical question: whether it would be unconstitutional for the government to terminate “every defense contract with anyone who’s ever publicly criticized President Trump.”When DOJ lawyers hedged, Lin said, “I’m surprised that you can’t give a yes to what seems to be an easy question.”

The State Department has set a $20,000 bond for some tourists and business visitors who seek a visa to enter the U.S.The finalized plan, published by the State Department on Friday, requires visitors from a select list of countries to put up a bond of $10,000, $15,000, or $20,000, which would be paid back when their B1 or B2 visa expires. The pilot program for the bonds was introduced last year, and affected 50 countries.Most of the affected visas last about three months, but some of them are for 10 years, meaning that visa holders wouldn’t get their money back for a decade, American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick noted. The move is guaranteed to further hurt the U.S. tourism industry at a time when it is already struggling thanks to Trump administration policies.During the World Cup this summer, the Trump administration suspended the bonds for anyone who had a ticket to one of the games. But many fans still were unable to attend, including the relatives of some of the players, thanks to a separate travel ban and other visa restrictions.Trump’s immigration policies have cost the country billions of dollars in tourism and also caused prices of goods and services to go up for Americans. U.S. visa policies have also hurt international student enrollment and in turn led to a big drop in revenue for universities and colleges. Now that this visa bond program is being finalized, the U.S. is set to only further suffer economically.

Zohran Mamdani’s tenure as New York City mayor has raised hopes of a more invigorated, deeper form of democracy and posed a question facing progressive mayors everywhere: how to translate the grassroots energy that brings them to office into a sustained movement for change. In our new book, The Power and Perils of Participatory Democracy: Participatory Budgeting and Democracy [...]

Expiration of federally funded contracts will leave some 20,000 children to face deportation proceedings alone.

The White House’s “Ice Maiden” has gotten involved to salvage Donald Trump’s SAVE America Act.Chief of staff Susie Wiles made a rare appearance on Capitol Hill Wednesday to implore top Senate Republicans to pass the wildly unpopular voter restriction bill ahead of the midterm elections.“This was her attempt to say to [Senate Majority Leader John] Thune and [Senate GOP Whip John] Barrasso [that] ‘A lot is stalled in the Senate. SAVE/reconciliation ... nominations ... what can we do?” a person familiar with the discussion told Politico via text Thursday.Wiles was also interested in discussing efforts to end the filibuster, a Trump priority that the upper chamber has repeatedly rebuked. The stalled succession of acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was not mentioned, multiple sources told Politico.The discussions were “candid” but not immediately productive, according to the unidentified source.“Thune basically said: I want to move the president’s agenda whenever it has the votes,” they added.Wiles’s visit has been interpreted as a deliberate attempt by the White House to smooth over ruffled feathers and keep the president’s political priorities on track—particularly after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt put Thune on blast last week, sharing with reporters during a White House press conference that Trump’s patience was “running out” on the SAVE Act.“He wants to see as much of the SAVE America Act passed by the August recess,” Leavitt said at the time. “He knows that’s what the American people want to see passed.”Thune was quick to hit back, bluntly stating that the caucus simply didn’t have the votes.That timeline would offer Senate Republicans just five more business days to pass the controversial legislation, which promises to ban mail-in voting and institute new voting policies that would require voters to prove their identities via either a birth certificate or passport in order to access the ballot box.“You can’t show how high the importance of this issue is to the president other than bringing in Susie,” a former Trump adviser told Politico. “If there is an ability to land it, the president is certainly putting pressure on Susie to land it. It’s still an uphill battle.”

A first-of-its-kind survey by the UFW Foundation quantifies the impact of Trump’s mass deportation campaign on farmworkers, the vast majority of whom are undocumented. The post Top Farmworker Fear Is Family Separation appeared first on The American Prospect.

At least one Republican governor is pushing back against President Trump’s plan to take over elections, saying they should continue to be run by states.Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt told the Associated Press in an interview published Friday, “I don’t think that we should federalize the elections at all.“I believe that is a state issue. The states should control their own elections. Should we make sure they’re done fairly and U.S. citizens are voting? 100%. I think there’s broad agreement with that,” Stitt said, ahead of the National Governors Association meeting in his state this weekend, where he will turn over leadership of the organization to Maryland Governor Wes Moore, a Democrat.Stitt noted, “It is weird that in a swing state, in a certain county, it takes them a month to count the votes. So rightly, you should be questioning some of these things.” However, he also said he trusted the leaders of those states “100 percent.”“I don’t think we should federalize that. Because then you’ve got a pendulum swing. What about the next guy gets in office and the next guy and the next guy? The system that we have with 50 different states is the right system,” Stitt said. But he also came out in support of Trump’s voter ID bill.“Now, the SAVE America Act, making sure that we know who’s voting, I think that’s a very legitimate thing to do,” Stitt said.Stitt isn’t entirely on Trump’s good side. During the last NGA meeting in Washington in February, he had to persuade the president not to exclude two Democratic governors from a White House meeting, and Trump ended up criticizing his performance and calling him a “RINO” for his efforts. In October, Stitt also called out Trump’s decision to deploy the National Guard to places like Illinois.“We believe in the federalist system—that’s states’ rights,” he said at the time. “Oklahomans would lose their mind if Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration.”As states wrap up their primary elections and gear up for the general election in November, Trump is taking drastic steps to engineer a favorable Republican outcome, including demanding voter rolls from states and severely restricting mail-in voting. Statements like Stitt’s aren’t enough—after all, Oklahoma has already agreed to hand over its voter rolls to the Trump administration. Republicans have to actually fight to safeguard the vote from Trump overruling the will of the people.