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Federal authorities are carrying out intensified operations this week in Minnesota as President Donald Trump escalates his attacks on the Somali community in the state. The administration halted green card and citizenship applications from Somalis and people from 18 other countries after last week’s fatal shooting near the White House. During a recent Cabinet meeting, Trump went on a racist tirade against the Somali community, saying, “We don’t want them in our country,” and referring to Somali immigrants as “garbage.” Minnesota has the largest Somali community in the United States, and the vast majority of the estimated 80,000 residents in the state are American citizens or legal permanent residents. “We have seen vile things that the president has said, but in these moments, we need to come together and respond,” says Jaylani Hussein, the executive director of CAIR-Minnesota. He also highlights the connections between Trump’s targeting of the community and foreign policy. “If you demonize Muslims, then you can get away with killing Muslims abroad. This has always been the case, from the Afghanistan War to the Iraq War.”

A lower court said the map was manipulated to eliminate majority-minority districts, an unconstitutional racial discrimination.

A major immigration crackdown is underway in New Orleans and the surrounding areas of Louisiana, dubbed “Operation Catahoula Crunch” by the Trump administration. According to planning documents, 250 federal agents will aim to make 5,000 arrests over two months. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem says the operation will target “the worst of the worst,” though the number of arrests being planned suggests that authorities will conduct broad sweeps including those who have no criminal records, as has happened in other immigration crackdowns. “They’re going to target whoever they can, and as the Supreme Court has unfortunately authorized them, they’re using racial profiling as part of that approach,” says Homero López, legal director for the New Orleans-based organization Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy, or ISLA. “What they’re doing is they’re taking folks out of our community: our neighbors, our friends, our family members.”

Neo-Nazis and other far-right extremists were early adopters of bulletin board systems, pioneering online recruiting and radicalization techniques long before the social media revolution.

The conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court has cleared the way for Texas to use a gerrymandered congressional map in next year’s midterm elections that a lower court found racially discriminatory. The 6-3 ruling is another political win for President Donald Trump and his allies, who have gotten a number of favorable rulings from the justices after being stymied by lower courts. Trump has asked Republican-led states to redraw their maps in order to preserve the narrow GOP majority in Congress when voters head to the polls in November 2026. The Texas effort could flip as many as five seats for the party. Ari Berman, voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones magazine, calls it a “catastrophic ruling” that further normalizes extreme partisan gerrymandering. “This whole exercise made a complete mockery of democracy.”

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Hamm v. Smith, a death penalty case that will decide whether intellectual disability can be ruled out on the basis of IQ tests alone. Long before he was convicted of murder in 1997, Joseph Clifton Smith was placed in schooling for an intellectual disability. Smith […]

It was National Voter Registration Day, and Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows was on her way to a small liberal arts college for a voter registration event. That’s when she learned the US Department of Justice was suing her over how she manages Maine’s voter registrant list. While the DOJ appearing as the official […]

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The Louisiana Department Of Wildlife And Fisheries (LDWF), typically responsible in part for overseeing wildlife reserves and enforcing local hunting rules, has assisted United States immigration authorities with bringing at least six people into federal custody this year, according to documents Wired […]

This story was originally published by The Watch, Radley Balko’s substack publication, to which you can subscribe here. In the 15 years from 2010 through 2024, 375 people in Texas were exonerated after being imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. Of those, 97 received some form of compensation or settlement from the state. Collectively, those 97 people spent more […]