Attention to the Unseen

The Wall Street Journal reports: Uncle Sam. Miami Vice. When it comes to recruiting new Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, the Trump administration is getting creative. A social-media campaign launched late last month touted immigration enforcement as an opportunity for father-son bonding and to “deport illegals with your absolute boys,” a slang term for close friends. The WSJ probably isn’t the most reliable source when it comes to definitions of slang terms. The Urban Dictionary, on the other hand, offers…

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Philip Bump writes: Governors of three states — Ohio, South Carolina and West Virginia — are sending members of their state National Guards to D.C. to … well, theoretically to combat crime but, if the past week is any indicator, mostly to stand near tourist sites and wear uniforms. This isn’t because there’s no crime in D.C. to combat (of course there is, as the right-wing media insists one acknowledge) but because the mission as established by President Trump isn’t…

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Austin Sarat writes: What is happening in Washington, D.C., should alarm every American. The Founders of this country imagined that the federal government would play a small and secondary role, backstopping state and local government and carrying out functions (such as negotiating with foreign powers) that they could not. The sight of the National Guard and Drug Enforcement, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and other federal law enforcement agents on the streets of the nation’s capital would have shocked and horrified…

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  Paul Blumenthal reports: The march for voting rights from Selma, Alabama, to the capital of Montgomery in 1965 wasn’t meant to lead to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. But then came the horror of the scenes on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where police fractured the late John Lewis’ skull and beat organizer Amelia Boynton unconscious, with much of the violence caught on camera. It swayed public opinion: President Lyndon Johnson delivered the voting rights bill to Congress…

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National Guard members arrive at the Guard’s headquarters at D.C. Armory on Aug. 12, 2025 in Washington. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images By Charli Carpenter, UMass Amherst and Geraldine Santoso, UMass Amherst With his Aug. 11, 2025, announcement that he was sending the National Guard – along with federal law enforcement – into Washington, D.C. to fight crime, President Donald Trump edged U.S. troops closer to the kind of military-civilian confrontations that can cross ethical and legal lines. Indeed, since Trump returned…

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Jeff Stein, Michael Isikoff, and Karen J. Greenberg report: A top official in the Justice Department unit assigned to combat domestic terrorism has resigned in frustration after watching his office effectively gutted with much of its funding cut off and its lawyers reassigned to immigration enforcement and other matters. “I no longer had a functioning job. There was nothing for me to do anymore,” said Thomas Brzozowski, who had served as the unit’s senior counsel for the last 10 years,…

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Democracy Docket reports: The broad legal theory behind President Donald Trump’s use of the military in civilian law enforcement took center stage Tuesday during day two of a trial over the deployment of National Guard troops and Marines to Los Angeles earlier this year. The three-day, non-jury trial before San Francisco-based federal Judge Charles Breyer concerns California’s claim that Trump’s use of troops in Los Angeles violated the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which generally prohibits using the military in…

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The New York Times reports: Investigators have uncovered evidence that Russia is at least partly responsible for a recent hack of the computer system that manages federal court documents, including highly sensitive records with information that could reveal sources and people charged with national security crimes, according to several people briefed on the breach. It is not clear what entity is responsible, whether an arm of Russian intelligence might be behind the intrusion or if other countries were also involved,…

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CNN reports: For weeks, the Trump administration has made a series of rather curious moves related to the Jeffrey Epstein files. It has gone back on its promises of extensive disclosure. It has misled about the situation. It has strained to avoid acknowledging President Donald Trump’s ties to Epstein. It has treated Ghislaine Maxwell suspiciously well in still-unexplained ways. And it has taken actions geared toward supposed transparency that didn’t appear all that transparent. The whole thing has several of…

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The Daily Beast reports: A rebel Republican congressman has invited multiple victims of Jeffrey Epstein to a press conference at the U.S. Capitol as part of a bipartisan push to force the release of legal files linked to the late pedophile. Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a thorn in Donald Trump’s side for his frequent objections to the president’s spending bills and foreign policies, said that he and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna will be co-hosting the Sept. 3 conference. The…

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The Associated Press reports: A federal judge will hear arguments on whether the Trump administration violated federal law when it deployed National Guard soldiers and U.S. Marines to Los Angeles following June protests over immigration raids. President Donald Trump’s administration federalized California National Guard members and sent them to the second-largest U.S. city over the objections of Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and city leaders, after protests erupted June 7 when Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested people at multiple locations….

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Asha Rangappa writes: In February, I wrote a piece for Substack called “A Battle for the Soul of the FBI.” That battle is (pretty much) over, and I’m sad to say that the FBI — at least the one we knew — lost. Weirdly, I’m writing this on the same evening that William Webster, the FBI’s third director, died at the age of 101, a little more than a century after the FBI’s first and longest-serving director, J. Edgar Hoover,…

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The New York Times reports: If Republicans succeed in pulling off an aggressively partisan gerrymander of congressional districts in Texas, they will owe the Supreme Court a debt of gratitude. In the two decades Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has led the Supreme Court, the justices have reshaped American elections not just by letting state lawmakers like those in Texas draw voting maps warped by politics, but also by gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and amplifying the…

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