Attention to the Unseen

Rolling Stone reports: Adelita Grijalva made history last week, becoming the first Latina woman elected to represent Arizona in the U.S. House of Representatives. She won a special election for the seat previously occupied by her father, Democratic Rep. Raúl Grijalva, who died in March after serving over two decades in office. Despite a blowout, uncontested victory — and a precedent of swearing in the winners of special elections almost immediately after their elections — Grijalva still has no idea…

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A man was just arrested outside of the Broadview ICE facility in Chicago. When legal observers from the National Lawyers Guild asked why, an agent threatened to arrest them too. pic.twitter.com/uvs7p5t3sX — amanda moore 🐢 (@noturtlesoup17) September 27, 2025 The New York Times reports: U.S. citizens, many of them Latino men, have been stopped and in some cases taken into custody by law enforcement officers who are carrying out President Trump’s immigration crackdown and who suspect the men are living…

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MSNBC reports: Tom Homan, the White House border czar, became entangled in an FBI sting last year after an associate of his suggested to undercover FBI agents that Homan could facilitate future government contracts in exchange for big money, according to four sources familiar with the investigation and a government document. Julian “Jace” Calderas, a former U.S. immigration official who worked under Homan in the Obama administration, allegedly proposed to the agents — who were posing as businessmen — that…

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Adam Serwer writes: According to the law, Robert Morris was a criminal. The second Black lawyer in the history of the United States, Morris was among a group of abolitionists who, in 1851, stormed a Boston courtroom to free Shadrach Minkins, an escaped slave from Virginia. Minkins had been detained under the Fugitive Slave Act and was to be returned to his master. Morris filed a writ of habeas corpus on Minkins’s behalf, but the effort failed because Minkins was…

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Ken Klippenstein writes: In NSPM-7, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” President Trump directs the Justice Department, the FBI, and other national security agencies and departments to fight his version of political violence in America, retooling a network of Joint Terrorism Task Forces to focus on “leftist” political violence in America. This vast counterterrorism army, made up of federal, state, and local agents would, as Trump aide Stephen Miller said, form “the central hub of that effort.” NSPM-7 directs a new…

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Axios reports: The indictment of former FBI Director James Comey has delivered President Trump and the MAGA movement their first real taste of legal retribution — and likely not their last. Why it matters: To Democrats and the legal establishment, the charges against Comey for obstruction of justice and lying to Congress represent one of the most brazen collapses of prosecutorial independence in U.S. history. To Trump’s base, the indictment is vindication — a long-awaited strike against a “Deep State” villain they’ve obsessed over for nearly a…

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Quinta Jurecic writes: For years, Donald Trump has demanded that criminal charges be filed against former FBI Director James Comey. Now the president has gotten what he wanted. Yesterday evening, well after the federal courts usually close their doors, a grand jury in Virginia handed up an indictment alleging that Comey lied when testifying before Congress in September 2020. The news was first announced (how else?) in a post on X by the Trump ally Laura Loomer. The charges represent…

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The Guardian reports: The 79-year-old owner of a Los Angeles area car wash is seeking $50m in damages from the federal government after US immigration authorities allegedly slammed the US citizen to the ground and detained him for almost 12 hours. Rafie Ollah Shouhed suffered significant injuries during an immigration raid this month, his attorney said, including broken ribs and a traumatic brain injury. The agents “violated the Constitution, California civil rights law, and basic human decency”, V James DeSimone,…

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NBC News reports: The number of right-wing terror attacks in the U.S. plunged dramatically in the first half of 2025, while the amount of political violence from the left creeped up, a new study found. The report on terrorism and political violence by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan research group, found that, through July 4, “2025 marks the first time in more than 30 years that left-wing terrorist attacks outnumber those from the violent far right.”…

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Benjamin Wittes writes: The conventional approach would be to go through the normal pretrial motions, and specifically to file a motion to dismiss based on an allegation of vindictive prosecution. This would be one of the most powerful such motions ever filed in an American court—the abusiveness of this indictment having little parallel in the modern history of the Department of Justice. It would be powerful just based on the public record: the president’s public statements and specific removal of…

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This is, without any exaggeration, exactly how Putin and Orbán proceeded — using antisemitism to discredit the idea of civil society and political opposition, and as an excuse to undo the rule of law. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/25/u… [image or embed] — Timothy Snyder (@timothysnyder.bsky.social) Sep 25, 2025 at 11:14 AM The New York Times reports: A senior Justice Department official has instructed more than a half dozen U.S. attorney’s offices to draft plans to investigate a group funded by George Soros, the…

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CNN reports: Top congressional Republicans and White House allies are working behind the scenes to prevent a politically charged floor vote to release the government’s Jeffrey Epstein case files next month, according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions. The intensifying effort to halt that floor vote comes as Reps. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, and Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, declared on Wednesday they have the 218 votes needed to compel one when Congress returns. That final signature on…

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Matt Ford writes: Twenty years ago, Chief Justice John Roberts took the oath of office and ushered in a new era for the Supreme Court. His 2005 confirmation vote marked the transition from the Rehnquist court—where a narrow majority of conservatives and moderates had largely maintained the status quo on abortion, affirmative action, and voting rights—into something much more reactionary. At his swearing-in ceremony, the new chief justice spoke eloquently about the immense weight of the court’s duty to preserve…

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