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Last month, a federal judge tossed the federal criminal case against Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man who became nationally known last year after the Trump administration acknowledged having illegally deported him to the CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador along with a larger set of Latino men that seemed to have been randomly snatched up by federal agents despite the government’s evidence-free insistence that they were all hardened gang members.All of these removals were illegal, but Ábrego García’s was most obviously, glaringly so, on account of the fact that an immigration judge had specifically ruled that he could not be returned to El Salvador, where he would face danger. After a separate federal judge ordered his return, the government dragged its feet for months, insisting absurdly it had no custody over him before abruptly flying him back and immediately hitting him with criminal human smuggling charges—which were dismissed under an extremely rare finding of vindictive prosecution.That doesn’t mean the 30-year-old sheet metal apprentice is out of the woods. The government is still trying to deport him, having rejected his offer to be removed to Costa Rica and instead gunning to send him to Liberia, where he’s never been, after an effort to deport him to Uganda, where he’s also never been. Every time there’s a new twist in this saga, I see people asking the same basic questions: Are they being serious? Is the administration still expending resources, over a year-plus, in a fanatical attempt to screw over this one guy? Why?I think there’s an answer, and it’s a different one from that of many of the administration’s other targets in its weaponization of its power. While Ábrego García’s case is often lumped in with the attempts to investigate or prosecute people like former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, former Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell, and Senator Mark Kelly, I think there are clear differences in both intent and result, which stem ultimately from an analysis of their relative power.Naturally, each of these efforts is an outrage in its own right, and not just in a “violating our sacred norms and decorum” kind of way. The spurious attempted railroadings of James, Powell, and Kelly are attempts to wrestle control of parts of the government or civil society that Trump has not been able to fully take by force or subservience—local prosecutors, the central bank, and parts of the Senate, respectively. Every single one is a direct shot at the foundations of our system of government, just in time for the nation’s 250th anniversary.These people, though, will ultimately all be fine. Each have gone into an incredibly high-profile and powerful role in government, and while they didn’t and shouldn’t have expected to be criminally investigated for their trouble, they knew they were to some extent playing the game, one that has only gotten more dangerous in the Trump era. For good or ill, elected officials and high government functionaries at all levels, particularly those who are pro-democracy and willing to do something about it, should be steeling themselves for an increased level of risk, perhaps more than they thought they signed up for. Politics these days is a perilous field (and those that aren’t prepared for that should step aside).Ábrego García did not sign up for any such risk. Everything we know about him points to his being a relatively run-of-the-mill Maryland dad that—while having had some acute personal struggles at times in his life—seemed, until his detention, to be focused mainly on learning the sheet metal trade and raising his son. If he’s become a fixation of the federal government, it’s not really because of anything he personally did. Instead, he has become this idée fixe because of something that was done to him. Or, if you prefer, he’s now famous for what his travails have come to represent: The Millerite campaign of savagery is indiscriminate, it is sloppy, and the government is, in fact, making serious mistakes that enormously impact people’s lives. He is a living, high-stakes symbol of Trumpian misrule and this administration’s need to break its opponents on the rack of authoritarianism.The admission of an “administrative error” that triggered Ábrego García’s removal to the notorious CECOT gulag remains one of the few times I can remember when this innately combative and contemptuous administration has acknowledged in any public forum that it made a significant mistake. This was all the more disorienting in the context of a situation where it was sending, without any acknowledged legal basis whatsoever, people to be held in kind-of-but-also-kind-of-not U.S. custody at a foreign mega-prison with no due process. The admission of Ábrego García’s unlawful deportation was a crack in a carefully constructed facade of righteously deployed power for which the administration has never forgiven him.In that way, he has become the most acute example of this phenomenon—but certainly not the only one. Mahmoud Khalil certainly involved himself more in political life than Ábrego García did, but it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that he was a campus activist and negotiator at one university campus, admittedly one of the most high-profile sites of pro-Palestinian organizing. Still, he was little known outside that scene until he was actually detained. I do not in any way intend to minimize his dedication and his activism in saying that it seems clear the Trump administration did not engineer his arrest as a way to decapitate Palestinian activism or take a significant public opponent off the board.As Khalil himself told me when I spoke with him for this magazine last year, he had expected to potentially incur the wrath of the administration (and he certainly did). He never considered that his activism would draw the individualized attention of the federal government, and while he doesn’t at all regret his work, this is a level of consequence neither he nor anyone had really gamed out. Rather, his detention was a signal—you might think you’re not a big enough fish to warrant a heavy-handed response, but that response might come anyway.To this you can add the so-called Broadview Six, an assortment of individuals that include a congressional candidate, her aide, several local elected officials and candidates, and a musician. The Six were all charged with felonies, including conspiracy, after a September protest outside an ICE holding facility in Broadview, Illinois, in which an ICE vehicle was mildly damaged. The defendant pool was whittled down to four people facing misdemeanors before the case was dismissed altogether amid questions about federal prosecutors’ conduct with the grand jury. Still, the months of uncertainty and legal bills took a toll on all of them, just as the specter of prosecution and deportation have taken a toll on Khalil and Ábrego García, who are not insulated by high public office and connections.These committed efforts to throw the massive weight of the federal government against not just potent political enemies but individuals who, at least in the case of Ábrego García, don’t seem to have any public political bearing at all are not coming out of nowhere. It is a tried and true method among authoritarians, of making clear to the population that while any given person might be unlikely to find themselves in these terrifying crosshairs, it absolutely can happen to you, and so maybe you should work assiduously to avoid drawing that unwelcome attention.Most anyone who’s had even a cursory brush with the adversarial power of the state knows how jarring it can be, whether that’s being pulled over or audited or investigated in some way. These interactions might be quickly resolved, but while they’re ongoing, the awesome power of the state and the stark imbalance between you and it put themselves in acute relief. Now imagine that this stretches beyond any one particular interaction and becomes an all-encompassing monthslong ordeal where every legal victory against the state’s vexations leads to the government doubling down again and again, with the goal of depleting resources and willpower even when putatively unsuccessful. It is the legal procedural equivalent of a head on a stake outside the castle doors: a warning to the others, to everyone.While Trump’s malicious series of attempted prosecutions and investigations so far have been framed as an abject failure—and, from a pure legal perspective, they have been a litany of embarrassing disasters that have damaged the Justice Department indelibly—it’s quite possible that, at chilling speech and political action, they’ve been more successful than we can see on the surface. That is a Trump legacy that will be difficult to repair.

The judge didn’t allow Palestine Action activists at trial to explain they were trying to stop a genocide. Their attorneys decried terrorism sentences following a nonviolent conviction as unprecedented and dangerous to speech. Stephen PragerCommon Dreams In a decision that Amnesty International described as “completely disproportionate,” four demonstrators with the outlawed group Palestine Action were sentenced as terrorists in the U.K. […]

Sean Keenan, Next City. As World Cup matches begin, advocates warn that Atlanta is on track to repeat the arrests, displacement, and criminalization of homeless residents that drew criticism during the city’s 1996 Olympics. Atlanta promises a welcoming World Cup for everyone. But just days before kickoff, homeless advocates worry the city lacks the safety net […]

In the first two years of post-Dobbs America, 412 people were charged with “pregnancy-related” crimes, with 399 of these being related to substance use—including alcohol. These charges, which most frequently alleged either child abuse or neglect of the fetus, were made possible by politicians who have slow-dripped the language and ideology of fetal personhood into lawmaking for decades, a process that has only amplified since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. For years, anti-choice lawmakers have sought to lay down legal precedents for fetuses and embryos to be considered fully fledged persons in need of legal protections as part of a wider framework to criminalize abortion as murder. But this language and this broader approach to so-called public health have ramifications beyond abortion: If a fetus is a person, then consuming alcohol or narcotics while pregnant and putting the fetus at risk for fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, or FASD, and other substance-related birth defects is a form of child endangerment.Not only does this result in the criminalizing of pregnant people, it also hinders the prevention, research, and treatment for both the FASD and substance use disorders being weaponized to advance this anti-abortion agenda. What’s more, this ideology has proven to be wholly ineffective in the effort to “protect fetuses.” Laws around “pregnancy-related crimes” have only prevented mothers from seeking support, while simultaneously creating legal frameworks for restricting abortion access, creating a climate where pregnant patients are increasingly policed and where public health policies around prenatal substance exposure, FASD, and reproductive justice movements are increasingly linked.Dr. Sarah Roberts is a professor and legal epidemiologist at the Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health initiative at the University of California at San Francisco, and one of the only researchers in the United States working on the intersections of health care practices and policies around abortion and the criminalization of behaviors while pregnant. “Singling out drinking while pregnant isn’t effective,” she explains, noting that none of the punitive or so-called “supportive” FASD prevention policies that she’s analyzed actually prevented FASD.The only policies that actually prevented FASD and offered support to mothers and babies with FASD were those that addressed alcohol consumption across the board. “People who are drinking while pregnant were drinking before they got pregnant and are in families and communities where people are drinking as well, so by reducing drinking at a population level, that also relates to improved outcomes during pregnancy,” Dr. Roberts explains.In her research, Dr. Roberts has found that the states that criminalize pregnant people consuming alcohol largely overlap with states restricting abortion.“Anti-abortion laws have always opened up the potential for greater surveillance, policing, and punishment of pregnant people. We see that in the way that miscarriage is policed, the way that substance use during pregnancy is increasingly policed, in the way that people have been punished for this, under a range of laws that have nothing to do with abortion,” explains Dr. Gretchen Sisson, sociologist at the University of California at San Francisco, and the author of Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood.As Roberts explains, many of the policies that target pregnant people who drink also target those who consume other substances. These policies have deep roots, often dating back to the “war on drugs,” and, more specifically, the racist “crack baby” scare in the 1980s and 1990s. Media outlets of that era often presented sensationalist narratives that babies born to mothers using crack cocaine would be born with brain damage and overwhelm welfare systems, leading to a widespread targeting and policing of Black pregnant people, in particular. These policies were often ignored or brushed aside by mainstream pro-choice, often white-led organizing groups at the time, without the foresight of recognizing that this very same positioning of fetuses as people would be used to dismantle abortion access in the years to come. “There is a racist history to this, an ableist history to this, and a classist history to this, that these issues weren’t considered ‘mainstream’ abortion rights or reproductive rights issues,” explains Dana Sussman, the vice president of Pregnancy Justice.Today, Roberts’s research has found that Black mothers are still excessively targeted by “total welfare reporting,” or laws that require physicians to report pregnant patients to Child Protective Services if alcohol consumption is suspected. This reporting is linked to an increase in adverse effects for Black women and babies, despite the “pro-family” rhetoric behind them. Similarly, Black women are more likely to face restricted abortion access and be targeted by pregnancy-related (and abortion-related) criminal prosecutions.Pregnancy Justice is a New York–based organization that represents people charged with pregnancy-related crimes, the vast majority of which involve allegations of substance use. For Sussman, the intersections of pro-choice organizing and organizing around FASD and prenatal exposure to substances are clear: “We are all fighting for people to get health care,” she explains. For her organization, the idea of fetal personhood is the product of a shared ideology of control and coercion, linking restricted abortion access and the criminalization of pregnant people. “If your Supreme Court is interpreting your statutes around children to include embryos and fetuses, then how does that work with abortion?”Many of the clients of Pregnancy Justice under criminal investigation were reported or “found out” when seeking health care, including support for substance use disorders. Where mothers sought support for alcohol or substance use disorders, they found credible, legal threats against them under the guise of child protection policies. “We know that when you put people at risk of losing their children, either children already born or future children, or at risk of losing their liberty because they have a substance use disorder, whether it be alcohol or drugs, they will not get care, and outcomes will be worse for everyone—both mom and baby,” says Sussman.Advocacy groups for research and funding toward FASD acknowledge and condemn the criminalization of pregnant people consuming alcohol, with one organization, which requested to remain unnamed so as not to put its research at risk, reiterating that the punitive policies only prevent mothers from seeking help and add to the stigma of both mothers and children with FASD, undermining the principles of disability justice for which the movement is often fighting.At the same time, organizations dedicated to FASD appear to be in an uncomfortable position: Lawmakers supportive of funding and various supportive policies around FASD are not always advocates for struggling pregnant people or for reproductive justice. The FASD Respect Act, a 2025 bill that brought in waves of funding for FASD-related research and programming, for instance, was passed across party lines, with co-sponsorship from Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas, rated an A+ by Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America because he’s “voted to consistently protect the lives of the unborn,” and Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, who describes himself as a “staunch advocate for life.”Many children diagnosed with FASD are adopted. “Children with special needs are more likely to be adopted because if you have a family that is low-resourced who doesn’t feel equipped to care for a child with special needs, they’re more likely to relinquish; and if you have a mother who is engaged in alcohol use at high levels, she’s more likely to be subject to family policing and child removal,” explains Sisson.Anti-abortion, pro-FASD-funding lawmakers appear to see adoption as a fundable, moral alternative to abortion, creating a contradictory overlap between the two movements—all while refusing to acknowledge the harmful ramifications of their policies. “There is definitely a pro-adoption thread within the disability community, and I think it is particularly pronounced in cases where disability is attributed to maternal actions during pregnancy, because then [it’s] even more about how adoption can be about saviorism,” Sisson remarks. This overlap also creates an apparent nervousness within FASD organizations to engage with pro-choice movements, reproductive rights organizing, or even the word feminism, for fear of having these lawmakers turn their back on them.The anti-abortion movement, despite many members labeling themselves as supportive of FASD research funding and programs for those with FASD and their families, seeks a framework that treats fetuses with FASD as the victims of crime—and the mothers as perpetrators. At a lawmaking level, this only propagates extreme stigma against both mothers and babies with FASD and prevents families from seeking help for substance use disorders and for disability support.Laced with saviorism and the desire to police both disability and pregnancy, the anti-abortion underpinning of pregnancy-related laws and prosecution hinders proactive and effective FASD-related support, resulting only in the targeting of pregnant patients, and not in the protection of children or mothers. On the flip side, for organizers working to support disabled people, abortion rights, and mothers targeted by pregnancy-related prosecutions, reproductive rights and policies on prenatal substance exposure are inseparable: The dismantling of fetal personhood ideologies is critical to the underpinning of both abortion rights advocacy and policies that effectively support mothers and babies, as well as reversing the Trojan horse the anti-abortion camp has been building for decades.

Dozens of ICE, CBP, and Border Patrol officers have been charged with sexual abuse of women or children.