When Becky Pepper-Jackson started middle school, she wanted to join her school’s track and field team. Like many girls her age, she was excited to make new friends and cultivate a passion for a sport. But unlike the other girls on her school’s track and field team, Pepper-Jackson is trans. And because she lives in West Virginia, a state which has banned transgender girls from participating in public school sports, Pepper-Jackson was excluded from what for her classmates is a normal childhood experience. Pepper-Jackson sued, and her case is now before the conservative-majority Supreme Court — which, after oral arguments Tuesday, appears likely to uphold similar laws throughout the country. “The states have attempted to justify these things in terms of some sort of alleged sex-based athletic advantage,” says Karen L. Loewy of the LGBTQ+ legal advocacy organization Lambda Legal. “It’s really about whether the court is going to uphold trans people’s equal opportunity in all aspects of public life.”
A new report finds the number of people in ICE detention has nearly doubled in Trump’s first year back in office, driven by indiscriminate arrest policies that have locked up more and more people without criminal records, “an unprecedented situation for immigration detention.” We break down the numbers with Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, which published the report. Reichlin-Melnick explains that ICE’s annual budget has approximately quintupled, even as 2025 marked the agency’s deadliest year so far. Four more people have already died in detention in just the first two weeks of 2026. “Crucially, all of this has been slower than they wanted,” he adds. “Their hope was to have over 100,000 people in detention by today; they’ve hit 70,000.”
Reporter Ken Klippenstein’s latest investigation into the inner workings of the Trump regime finds that immigration enforcement agencies ICE and Border Patrol have relaxed recruitment and deployment guidelines in an effort to fill the administration’s sweeping deportation goals. “There’s splits within the agency about the shooting [of Renee Good] and the general mission,” says Klippenstein, whose reporting is based on leaked documents and interviews with officials from the Department of Homeland Security. Because “they’re worried about sending more experienced agents there who might not agree with the mission,” he explains, DHS is heavily recruiting volunteers with little vetting or training to carry out its deportation mandate. “They have more money than they know what to do with, and they need to fill those roles, and they’re doing everything they can to create them so that the actual personnel head count can match the resources that they now have.”