The past 18 months have seen a significant number of health issues, perhaps crises, arise in America. Measles, cyclosporiasis, whooping cough, and more have all been in the news. RFK Jr. is either stroking his pet conspiracy theories alongside Trump, or else he’s completely out to lunch. In the meantime, Kennedy is also continuing to sow doubts about vaccines generally, while also trying to claim he’s not, which helped result in a Trump executive order to reduce vaccination schedule recommendations for children. It’s as though this administration saw before it a four alarm fire and asked out loud, “How can we make this worse?”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday released data on the vaccination rates of US kindergarteners in the 2025–2026 school year, revealing that rates have once again decreased from the previous school year.
Vaccination rates have been slipping since the 2019–2020 school year, when the US had obtained rates of around 95 percent, the threshold needed to keep outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases from spreading in communities. The latest data shows the US is moving further away from that target.
Nationally, only 92.4 percent of kindergartners were vaccinated with the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine in the 2025–2026 school year, down from 92.5 percent last year. Coverage with the DTaP vaccine, which covers diphtheria, tetanus, and acellular pertussis (whooping cough), similarly fell from 92.1 percent to 92.0 percent.
This is bad quite generally, but it’s not equally bad in every state. And it’s very easy to demonstrate that state and local policies when it comes to vaccine requirements for school and the availability for non-religious exemptions are having quite the effect. This data is partially from the last school year, for instance, but it does a nice job highlighting the differences between states. In California, where exemptions face relatively tight requirements, 95.7% of kindergartners had the MMR vaccinations. In Florida, where the DeSantis administration has attempted to end all vaccination requirements for public schools, 88.9% of kindergartners had their MMR vaccinations.
The messaging from state and local leaders matters. The same is true for federal leaders. Public and health policy matter. And when we fall below herd immunity vaccination levels, the consequences are, well, precisely what we’re seeing out in the American wild at the moment.
If the overall number of exemptions exceeds 5 percent in any given location, it means that the location will not be able to achieve the 95 percent coverage target. Currently, 24 states have exemption rates at or above 5 percent. That’s up from 14 states in the 2023–2024 school year.
The data lands as vaccine-preventable diseases continue to rise and spread in the US. The country is on the verge of losing its measles elimination status as cases have reached a 34-year high and are still ticking upward. Last week, President Trump and Kennedy continued their efforts to undermine childhood vaccines, announcing an executive order to reduce the number of recommended vaccinations. The order has no scientific basis, and at a White House signing event, Trump and Kennedy spread vaccine falsehoods, misinformation, and disinformation.
This will get worse before it gets better, in other words. And the only real question is how many people have to get sick and/or die before we correct course.
It was late March when Joe Teirab, the second-in-command at Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, received an urgent email from Washington.
The federal government was scrambling to find criminal cases to back up President Donald Trump’s claims that illegal voting by noncitizens was tipping the scales in American elections. Agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a massive federal law enforcement agency, had been dispatched to work leads across the country, including hundreds in Minnesota.
Teirab was already under pressure. In an earlier missive, Nick Davis, a high-ranking Justice Department appointee helping to lead the election fraud crusade, had reminded him the cases were so high priority that Teirab and his staff couldn’t decline to move forward on them without express approval from agency higher-ups. On March 24, Davis demanded a status report — within hours.
Teirab, a former Marine and a Harvard Law graduate who’d run unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican, responded with a blunt reality check.
“Bottom line up front,” he replied in an email reviewed by ProPublica. After subpoenaing records on about 130 people, only one had been referred for prosecution, his staff had told him. Agents had deluged local election offices with calls and demands for voting histories, demonstrating “a complete lack of understanding” of illegal voting investigations.
“The HSI task force has been disjointed and disorganized,” Teirab wrote. The entire process, he said, had been “dysfunctional.”
Since Trump regained the White House, his administration has launched a series of unprecedented initiatives to find and prosecute voting by noncitizens, which he’s long claimed, without evidence, is rampant.
He’s stepped up this push in recent weeks, saying in a nationally televised speech that the American election system was “so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it.” To support that assertion, the Department of Homeland Security, HSI’s parent agency, released documents asserting it had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in just four states, all led by Democrats. The documents included no explanation of how that number was calculated.
It’s well known the administration has tasked HSI — a force established to combat drug cartels, terrorism and other cross-border criminal enterprises — with leading the campaign to find election fraud cases in the United States.
But an investigation by ProPublica reveals for the first time how the Trump administration came to harness HSI’s personnel, technology and sweeping legal authority in service of its election agenda — and how meager the results have been, despite the prodigious resources sunk into the effort.
According to interviews and internal emails reviewed by ProPublica, career staffers at the Justice Department warned that transferring voter rolls to HSI to enable it to search for noncitizen voters could violate federal privacy laws. Similarly, longtime HSI insiders cautioned that using the agency’s databases and tools to search these lists would yield mismatches and wildly inflated results.
The administration plowed forward anyway.
HSI’s involvement in the hunt for election fraud traces at least to summer 2025, when agency supervisors embraced a proposal from a midlevel agent who’d publicly echoed Trump’s claims about elections. He argued the agency’s powerful databases and tools could find noncitizens even on the voter lists that states make publicly available, from which the most confidential information has been redacted. Under Trump, the Justice Department had collected many public voter rolls as part of a controversial effort to compel states to turn over the unredacted versions.
Those searches went forward, ProPublica’s reporting shows, helping to generate tens of thousands of leads regarding illegal voting across the country. But when HSI agents were sent to investigate them, the results were similar to what Teirab reported from Minnesota.
Between January 2025 and May 2026, a ProPublica analysis of Justice Department data shows, fewer than 150 alleged noncitizen voters were referred for prosecution. Even fewer — 41 — were charged with voting illegally or other election-related crimes. (More than 150 million people voted in the most recent presidential election.)
In response to questions from ProPublica, administration officials insisted the effort spearheaded by HSI was producing meaningful results.
“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said in response to ProPublica’s request for comment. “Noncitizens voting is a crime. Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable.”
A DHS spokesperson didn’t answer questions about why so few prosecutions have resulted from HSI’s work. The agency wouldn’t specify what tools or techniques HSI had used, but confirmed it had cross-referenced “publicly available data” from state voter rolls with information on “known illegal aliens” in its systems. “It’s not rocket science,” the spokesperson wrote of this initiative in a response to ProPublica’s questions. “It’s an easy step to secure our elections.”
Teirab and the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota declined to comment.
There’s an array of reasons why Trump’s campaign to document claims of widespread voter fraud hasn’t succeeded. Most obviously, it’s exceedingly rare, as countlessstudies and state audits have found. Noncitizens often get on voter rolls by accident or when government officials make errors. Last month, New Jersey disclosed that a mistake involving its Motor Vehicle Commission caused 6,600 noncitizens to be registered (fewer than 400 voted).
The administration’s critics say its hunt for noncitizen voters aligns with Trump’s attempts to seek more federal control over elections while stoking doubt and fear about the voting process. Since taking back the Oval Office, Trump has tried to impose new restrictions on voter registration, mail-in ballots and voting machines, though judges have shut down most of these efforts.
Former officials at DHS and the Justice Department called the move to involve HSI a further escalation and questioned the propriety of aiming the agency’s muscle and technology at individual cases of illegal voting.
“It’s one thing if you’re going after Pablo Escobar,” said Steve Bunnell, a former DHS general counsel and senior intelligence adviser who handled voting fraud prosecutions during more than a decade at the Justice Department. “It’s another thing if you’re going after some cleaning lady who’s been working in the United States for 20 years and taking care of her 80-year-old mother and taking her little kids to church.”
“The Swiss Army Knife of Federal Law Enforcement”
Trump’s enlistment of HSI in his election fight is no accident. Cobbled together in the aftermath of 9/11, the agency has 7,100 armed, highly trained agents and another 800 criminal analysts, as well as access to troves of confidential data about hundreds of millions of Americans.
Though part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency has historically stayed out of immigration cases. During the first Trump administration, leaders of 19 HSI regional offices — virtually its entire top field hierarchy — signed a letter calling for HSI to become a standalone agency, arguing that ICE’s deportation work dissuaded people from cooperating with its investigations. But when Trump returned to the White House, it swiftly became clear that the agency would play a central role in investigations related to the president’s twin obsessions, illegal immigration and noncitizen voting.
Trump picked his field general for repurposing HSI even before taking the oath of office. In December 2024, he named Anthony Salisbury, a 50-year-old career agent who’d run the agency’s Miami office, as a deputy homeland security adviser, reporting to White House policy chief Stephen Miller. He was also given a dual appointment as head of HSI.
Salisbury was colorful: A mixed martial arts enthusiast, he once appeared at the agency’s headquarters with his face bruised and eye blackened from a recent bout. He’d sometimes entertain colleagues by pulling out a bridge that covers his missing front teeth.
To agency veterans, however, he was forever linked to a 2011 operation he’d overseen in Mexico in which one agent was killed and another wounded in a highway ambush by a drug cartel. An agency review submitted to Trump in April 2020 concluded that errors by HSI supervisors, including Salisbury, contributed to the outcome; it urged the administration to consider disciplinary action. None was taken against Salisbury, however.
Salisbury did not respond to requests for comment from ProPublica. A White House official called him “a critical member of the Trump administration” who was “cleared” in every review of the Mexico incident and was subsequently “promoted six times under multiple administrations.”
Once elevated to his new posts, Salisbury took charge of carrying out the second Trump administration’s agenda for HSI, personally issuing staffing directives, reassignments and promotions, current and former agency officials told ProPublica. (A number of them spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution.)
Starting in early 2025, Salisbury oversaw the unprecedented reassignment of more than 6,000 agents to immigration enforcement, diverting most of the agency from its normal duties. He then also pointed HSI at noncitizen voting, presiding over multiple meetings with officials at DOJ and Homeland Security focused on election fraud, according to emails reviewed by ProPublica and agency supervisors who worked with him.
“Stephen Miller has an HSI deputy for a reason,” said Eric Balliet, a high-level HSI manager who retired in 2024 after 23 years with the agency. (Like many HSI veterans, Balliet has remained in close contact with former colleagues.) “Salisbury is going to salute and execute, and he is going to make sure that from the HSI side, they fall in line, and there’s going to be no resistance or pushback. HSI has been turned into the Swiss Army knife of federal law enforcement.”
In early July 2025, Frank Quiñones, an HSI special agent who’d worked under Salisbury in Florida, approached leaders at the HSI Innovation Lab with an idea for using the agency’s technology to find noncitizen voters on state voter rolls, sources at the agency told ProPublica. Quiñones had been transferred to Washington to oversee a unit that had previously handled cases involving the theft of government benefits but that had been enlisted into voting investigations.
The lab, housed in an unmarked office in a D.C. suburb, had access to the government’s most sensitive databases, from suspicious activity reports to arrest records. Staffed by a combination of HSI experts and outside consultants, it developed software tools to comb the data for information that could help agents pursue criminal suspects.
Quiñones was a true believer in Trump’s claims about election fraud: In multiple Facebookpostsandreposts, ProPublica found, he promoted claims that the 2020 presidential vote had been stolen. At a meeting with the Innovation Lab’s overseers, according to sources who worked in the lab, he pitched using the lab’s technology to identify illegal voters — even though the agency lacked voter rolls that included identifiers such as partial Social Security numbers. (Quiñones did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment.)
For proof of concept, Quiñones proposed using a February 2021 public voter list he’d obtained for New Jersey and running it through HSI’s databases. The lab staff viewed his idea as “a little insane,” one recalled — both unreliable and improper. Since the public rolls don’t include voters’ unique identifiers, people at the lab also knew linking them to HSI’s data would produce mismatches — what the staffer called an “ungodly” number of false positives. The lab team also worried about violating longstanding safeguards limiting use of private citizen data. They “didn’t want to touch this,” the staffer added. Quiñones defended his idea, repeatedly declaring: “The president wants this!”
Tom Hodge, an HSI data analyst at the meeting, proposed running the voter information through the Athena Toolbox, an analytical platform developed by the Sandia National Laboratories that had access to all of HSI’s databases. (Hodge did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment. Sandia referred ProPublica’s questions to the facilities’ parent agencies, including the Department of Energy, which did not respond to our requests.)
Hodge and the Sandia team spent the next six weeks on the project, reporting they’d found large numbers of noncitizens on Quiñones’ 2021 New Jersey list. According to one former HSI official, they said they’d found “5,000 high-confidence illegal voters” in just a single New Jersey county. (Officials at the New Jersey secretary of state’s office, which oversees the state’s voter rolls, declined to comment on the claim. Beth Thompson, head of a group for local New Jersey election officials, called the number impossibly high, even accounting for the mistake disclosed by the state.)
The apparent breakthrough couldn’t have come at a better time.
The Trump administration’s other efforts to identify noncitizens on state voter rolls were running into a variety of roadblocks.
The administration had hoped to persuade states to check their voters’ citizenship status using a system called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, but many didn’t. Most states also refused the Justice Department’s demands to turn over their unredacted voter rolls, including partial Social Security numbers, which thwarted the agency’s plan to run them through SAVE. Courts have stymied the DOJ’s attempts to sue for the records, citing the Constitution, which gives primary control over elections to the states.
In an Aug. 21 email to a half dozen administration officials, Quiñones touted the solution he’d brought to the HSI Innovation Lab: using HSI’s platform to search voter rolls. The results, Quiñones noted, could fuel both criminal and immigration investigations.
By the end of the month, those in top election-related roles at DHS and the Justice Department were actively promoting what they dubbed the “HSI Tool” as a preferred alternative to SAVE, according to people familiar with the matter. Among them was Heather Honey, the prominent election denier appointed as a senior counselor at DHS, who is helping lead the government’s efforts to identify noncitizens on voter rolls. (Honey did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. In an email responding to questions to her, DHS said Honey’s “expertise in election administration” was “invaluable to the Department’s efforts to protect critical infrastructure.”)
The White House, too, got behind the idea. In a November email, J. Brian Sikma, special assistant to the president, excitedly noted that the New Jersey trial cross-checking voter rolls with DHS data appeared to have identified a “very significant number” of “potential non-citizens.” (Sikma didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
The DOJ, Sikma reported, had already obtained public voter rolls for many other states. He included a list of them, adding: “It is of paramount importance that these also be reviewed expeditiously.”
Running “Roughshod” Over Privacy
As the push to use HSI’s tech to search voter information gained momentum, a new problem emerged.
Career attorneys at the Justice Department, including specialists on privacy law, raised concerns that transferring voter rolls wholesale from the agency to DHS might not be legal, according to internal emails reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with several former officials.
The voter rolls the DOJ had collected contained sensitive information on millions of Americans. Even the public versions, which political parties and candidates routinely obtain to target ads and messages, included voters’ addresses, birth dates and party affiliations. For the 16 states that have agreed to share their unredacted voter lists, the DOJ had citizens’ partial Social Security numbers or driver’s license information, too.
Federal laws, particularly the Privacy Act, dictate what data government agencies can collect, what it can be used for, how it can be shared, and how it must be protected. Agencies have to disclose their plans in advance, gathering public comment. A person’s information can’t be released or shared without their consent, subject to limited exceptions.
From the outset, the Trump administration’s effort to combine data across federal agencies has repeatedly drawn criticism from courts and whistleblowers for failing to adhere to restrictions meant to keep data private and secure. In June, for example, a judge prohibited the government from using SAVE for mass searches, ruling the administration had violated federal privacy laws by giving DHS access to Social Security data to enhance the tool. The administration has appealed that ruling.
In July 2025, as word got around that the DOJ might hand over voter data to DHS, a half dozen career attorneys who had been reassigned into the voting section voiced their unease to supervisors, according to two former DOJ lawyers. Their concerns were disregarded, prompting most to resign.
Instead, the DOJ’s office of legal counsel pushed forward with plans to share the public voter rolls, claiming a Privacy Act exception allowed HSI to receive such data without public notice as long as it was for law enforcement purposes. DHS just needed to submit a letter officially requesting the data for those purposes, an attorney in the legal counsel’s office explained, according to internal emails.
But this exception was meant to be used to get information on individual criminal suspects, not to gain mass access to data on people suspected of no wrongdoing, according to Nikhel Sus, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has sued the Trump administration on behalf of voter and pro-privacy groups, filing the case that eventually limited SAVE’s use.
Peter Winn, a 29-year Justice Department veteran who had served as the agency’s acting privacy chief for nearly a decade, drafted a letter to set out the data-sharing agreement between the DOJ and DHS, according to internal documents reviewed by ProPublica.
In a Feb. 12 email to two top DOJ officials, he said he’d rewritten an initial draft memo to “make the information sharing arrangement far easier to defend, if and when it is challenged in court.”
Rather than simply handing over the voter rolls, Winn proposed having DHS request “pertinent and relevant” information about specific people from the DOJ, then having technical staff at Justice and Homeland Security “coordinate” to fulfill the requests.
“Having slept on it,” Winn wrote, “I ended up deciding that our initial idea of sending a huge amount of raw unprocessed voter registration data to DHS, involved taking far too much unnecessary legal risk, given that 99% of the data would implicate the privacy and civil liberties of United States Citizens, and would risk adding to the false narrative in the establishment press of DOJ and DHS being unconcerned with the privacy and civil liberties of Americans.”
Winn attached his proposed letter, to be signed by Todd Lyons, then the acting director of ICE.
Winn’s suggested restrictions were quickly abandoned, however. A second draft of the letter, dated March 4, contained altered language providing that the voter information would be “transferred” to HSI, with one exception: Voters’ party affiliation would be redacted, if possible, it said.
The final letter, signed by Lyons and sent to the DOJ just two days later, abandoned even that limitation. Just three paragraphs long, it permitted HSI to use the voter rolls to pursue any “appropriate investigation of potential violations of federal election law.”
In response to questions from ProPublica, Winn said “I can’t really comment on internal drafts of correspondence.”
A Justice Department spokesperson defended the government’s actions, saying “no one should oppose intergovernmental data sharing and coordination that enable swift investigations and prosecution of illegal alien voting.” DHS echoed the DOJ’s view, calling such information sharing “essential to protecting America’s election process by keeping noncitizens off voter rolls” and “an easy step to secure our elections.”
Sus said that by pooling voters’ sensitive personal identifiers, along with their party and voting histories, the administration has “run roughshod” over privacy laws and is creating a “1984-style database” that could be used to surveil political participation.
Balliet, the former HSI agent, expressed similar concerns, saying that handing over voter rolls to run through DHS’ systems amounted to “a mass data-collection effort by the government against its own citizens in a non-criminal setting.” On a practical level, he added, the data sharing increased the risk of breaches that can open law-abiding citizens up to identity theft.
“As a citizen, I want the government to take seriously the protection of my private data,” he said. “If it falls into the wrong hands, it’s not the government that suffers. It’s me.”
Collapsing Claims
By January 2026, scores of HSI agents were fanning out across the country to investigate thousands of leads about illegal voting.
About 25,000 of them involved people SAVE had identified as potential noncitizens on state voter rolls. Another 15,000 were given to HSI’s cross-border financial crimes unit, which was told to prioritize them over money laundering and fraud cases, a former high-level HSI official said. Quiñones’ unit led a separate effort to find additional cases by reviewing whether people who’d recently become citizens had voted before they were naturalized, then lied about it in naturalization interviews.
Still more leads came from running public voter rolls through the HSI lab’s databases, though it’s not clear how many. Agency sources told ProPublica that the rolls of New Jersey and Pennsylvania were searched using the Athena Toolbox. When DHS announced it had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on the registered voter lists of four Democrat-led states, it said that included “as many as” 35,152 in New Jersey and 14,576 in Pennsylvania. Both states have asked DHS to provide the source of the numbers.
Once federal investigators started digging into these cases, however, they often fell apart.
Through May, prosecutors had charged fewer than four dozen people with crimes related to noncitizen voting, ProPublica’s analysis of DOJ data and federal court filings shows, getting convictions or guilty pleas in 14 cases.
The largest cluster of cases was brought in the Southern District of Florida, headed by Jason Reding Quiñones (no relation to the HSI agent), a staunch Trump ally who has led investigations of the president’s political opponents. Voters have been sentenced in eight of the office’s cases; seven others are pending.
Prosecutors have initiated a total of seven noncitizen voting cases as of May in the four states where DHS claimed to have found more than a quarter million noncitizens on the rolls. Collectively, these states have more than 40 million registered voters.
Overall, the paltry numbers reflect the realities HSI investigators confronted on the ground as they tried to convert leads into cases, a ProPublica review of records obtained by voting-advocacy groups Campaign Legal Center and Democracy Forward shows.
Emails between agents and local election officials in Texas and Ohio indicate much of the federal information on purported noncitizens was inaccurate, the consequence of flawed data matching. When agents demanded voting histories and registration forms, they often discovered people weren’t registered in the counties where HSI thought they were. When voters register, they must attest that they are U.S. citizens; agents found some, however, who’d been put on voter rolls in error after disclosing they weren’t citizens. Many had never voted.
Most HSI agents, steeped in pursuing complex international crimes, had no experience in pursuing voting fraud. In his email to Nick Davis at the Justice Department, Teirab, the top deputy in Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, described the chaos that ensued when the state and at least six counties got subpoenas for voters’ records. The demands “presented a host of issues,” Teirab wrote to Davis. (Davis did not respond to a request for comment.)
“An unknown number of agents are constantly arriving in Minnesota without any knowledge of the investigation, the issues already discussed and decided, and the processes they need to follow,” Teirab complained. “Instead of getting up to speed and learning, they have demanded many calls and subpoenas, most of which demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the investigation.”
In Stearns County in central Minnesota, HSI agents subpoenaed voting histories on 13 people, county officials told ProPublica. Only six turned out to live there.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, said the effort revealed federal investigators’ ignorance about “the nuance of elections administration.” The rate of purposeful election crime is “microscopic,” he said. “The very human errors that can happen are not some sort of plot or scheme to dirty up the voting rolls, but are just everyday human beings making mistakes, not intending at all to violate any law.”
As of May, only one illegal voting case has been referred for prosecution in Minnesota. The state has more than 3.8 million registered voters.
Even Republican-led states like Ohio, which has shared its unredacted voter rolls with the DOJ and run them through the SAVE system, have struggled to meet Trump administration demands to deliver cases.
In October, the Ohio secretary of state referred more than 1,000 voters identified as possible noncitizens to the federal government, claiming 167 had voted at least once since 2018. At least nine HSI agents in Cincinnati and Cleveland began to investigate, emails obtained by Campaign Legal Center and shared with ProPublica show.
The agents bombarded local election officials with requests for voting histories and other records, some dating back decades. “Sorry again for piecemealing these to you,” one agent wrote to an official in Butler County, outside Cincinnati, after making five separate requests over two weeks. Mohamed Al-Hamdani, a Democratic member of Montgomery County’s Board of Elections, which received similar inquiries, said they amounted to “witch hunts” that ate up staff time.
In February, Davis sent an email pressing Ohio’s two U.S. attorneys’ offices for an “election integrity” update, asking: “How close are we to complaints/indictments, how many subjects, what issues you’ve run into, how many referrals have been closed and why, how helpful HSI has been.”
As of May, just two voting cases had been referred for prosecution in Ohio and no one had been charged, federal data shows. The state has nearly 8 million voters.
Now, however, U.S. attorneys’ offices are taking a different approach, pursuing prosecutions that could result in prison terms or deportation.
In May 2025, federal prosecutors in Florida filed illegal voting charges against a mother and daughter, both Ukrainian citizens, who’d registered after becoming permanent U.S. residents, then voted in the 2024 presidential election. They’ve pleaded not guilty, with the mother saying in an interview with investigators that she thought having a green card meant she could vote. They and their attorneys didn’t respond to requests for comment from ProPublica. The prosecutor handling the case for the Southern District of Florida also didn’t respond to questions. The mother and daughter are scheduled to go to trial in September.
“Far-Reaching Consequences”
Experts on both elections and national security warn there may be profound longer-term costs to unleashing the federal government’s investigative and prosecutorial might to try to prove the president’s claims about noncitizen voting.
Current and former HSI agents say critical investigations — including task forces aimed at drug rings, human trafficking and money laundering — have languished as the agency has pivoted to take on noncitizen voting and immigration enforcement.
In February 2026, according to court files and emails reviewed by ProPublica, an HSI agent in Ohio who’d been leading a multistate child sex abuse investigation was abruptly assigned to pursue dozens of leads on suspected noncitizen voters, work that took months. It wasn’t until May that he made an arrest in the other case. Prosecutors have filed child exploitation and pornography charges against the man, 38, in connection with acts involving at least five 14-year-old girls.
Cases like this “don’t just stop,” said Balliet, the 23-year HSI veteran. “When you pull people off them for an extended period of time, those criminal networks will adapt, and people get killed and kidnapped.”
Federal data hints at a broader slowdown in what had been HSI’s most urgent work. According to an annual government report, the number of wiretaps obtained by DHS — often to investigate drug trafficking — plummeted to 23 in 2025, from 133 the previous year. In the report, DHS attributed the decline to several factors, including “changes in administration enforcement and prosecutorial priorities.”
“It’s never been a better time to be involved in transnational organized crime,” said John Tobon, a high-ranking HSI official who retired in early 2025.
In its statement, DHS denied HSI has neglected its core mission, saying the agency has increased its efforts to combat criminal cartels, gangs and drug traffickers in response to multiple Trump executive orders.
Though HSI’s voting-related investigations have yielded only a small number of prosecutions, voter advocacy groups worry the Trump administration will use them to justify more extreme interventions.
“Those concerns are playing out in real time, with far-reaching consequences,” said Dax Goldstein, a director at the States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit group that works to build confidence in elections. “When federal agencies are misused and weaponized, people lose trust in government itself.”
Sure, the town’s insurance will pay most of this, but it’s probably fair to say most of this small county’s population (11,823 at last count) wasn’t supportive of local law enforcement’s decision to violate as much of the First Amendment and Fourth Amendment as possible in the apparent hopes of making one local business owner happy.
The backstory is long and convoluted. It involves a local business owner who wanted a liquor license (but had been cited/arrested from drunk driving), her estranged spouse (who shared some documents with Marion County Record reporters), a local attorney who just wasn’t up to the job, a police chief who was far too friendly with the business owner, and a bunch of other law enforcement agencies that pitched in with the constitutional violations just because. And all of that is on top of then-police chief Cody’s animus towards the paper, due to its reporting on his past misconduct.
There’s Kari Newell, a local business person who was seeking a liquor license for a new business when her previous drunk-driving record became public. There’s County Attorney Joel Ensey, who claimed to have no knowledge of the raid until public records showed he actually knew plenty about it beforehand. There’s the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, which also disavowed all knowledge, until it became clear it had knowledge as well, at which point it began publicly condemning Chief Cody and his department. There’s the mayor who didn’t like his deputy mayor and seemed to be all too willing to indulge the police chief. There’s the judge who signed off on the search warrants without reading them and then tried to distance herself from actions — a judge who apparently had some drunk driving problems of her own. There are the communications Chief Cody made to Kari Newell, informing her he was going to raid the newspaper to shut down its coverage of her and, presumably, any further investigation into his law enforcement past. In the middle of all of this, there’s some bullshit computer crime charges, which were invoked despite the newspaper accessing driver record data legally through a third party.
Following the raids — that’s right, raids — multiple lawsuits were filed. Not only did the Marion County PD (under the leadership of Gideon Cody, whose past misconduct was being examined by the local paper) talk a local court into blessing its raid of the newspaper’s office, it also raided the home of the paper’s owner, 98-year-old Joan Meyer, who died less than 48 hours after the raid.
Pretty much every lawsuit filed by the victims of these raids has paid out. Last November, the county agreed to pay $3 million to three of the affected journalists and one of the town’s city council members, who was also subjected to an illegal raid by local officers.
That large settlement followed a $235,000 settlement the town agreed to pay to Marion County reporter Deb Gruver, whose computer was seized along with her personal cell phone by local law enforcement officers.
That brings the total to $3,235,000 (at minimum!). The latest settlement — one that will be paid to another of the paper’s reporters — now means county residents will be asked to contribute to a tab that has now surpassed the $4 million mark:
Phyllis Zorn, the reporter whose acts of journalism served as an excuse for the August 2023 police raid of the Marion County Record, will get $850,000 from the city of Marion to settle her federal lawsuit over the raid.
This is the sort of thing that should make all good Americans yank on their imaginary suspenders and get their rural lawyer shtick on. We should — as a unified drawl — make it clear that we, as the collective “small town lawyer,” think this is some disturbing bullshit. And we should fervently argue in favor of large settlements, even if we know this just means our fellow Americans will be asked to give a little more the next time the budget’s on the agenda.
While I do think its sucks that the public has to pay the price for government malfeasance, things like this encourage more people to vote with their wallets. That doesn’t mean funneling money into some PAC. That means protecting your earnings by expelling the people who were on board with these blatant violations of constitutional rights. And Marion County residents aren’t done paying for the perverse acts of prosecutors, law enforcement, and the mayor who had the cops’ back all the way through this debacle:
The county government is making things right. That it’s doing this with other people’s money doesn’t mean the settlements are meaningless. We, the people, should simply rejoice in our magnanimous nature. Even though we’re getting fucked, we can at least take heart in the fact that we were invited to the climax.
Even as the wider EU was grinding through a long, drawn-out process to figure out which regulatory levers to pull on kids’ safety online, France decided to YOLO it earlier this summer by jumping at the chance to ban all social media for kids under 15. This kind of thing has become popular with out of touch adults in the grips of an ongoing moral panic, since Australia led the way after gambling companies pushed the ban as an alternative to banning gambling ads. Australia’s ban isn’t doing very well, with the majority of kids figuring out how to work around it, and those being left out being the most marginalized and in need of community.
And yet, countries around the globe have all suddenly decided — some based on reading Jonathan Haidt’s badly reasoned book — that they must do this too.
France was the first in the EU, with President Emmanuel Macron gleefully treating France’s willingness to rush in with little thought or understanding as a selling point:
“France is leading the way in Europe in protecting our children and our teenagers,” Macron said. “We will keep on going.”
He wanted the ban to be implemented in mere months, just as kids returned to school.
But that’s all run into a bit of a stumbling block known as the French Constitutional Council, which has said the ban is an unconstitutional attack on kids’ rights to free expression and communication. The Council also flagged a second problem: you can’t enforce an under-15 ban without making every user, adults included, prove their age. The law demanded exactly that, without defining a single condition, limit, or technical standard for how that verification would work.
A court in France on Friday shot downa bill seeking to ban access to social media for under-15s from September — a major blow to President Emmanuel Macron that raises fundamental questions about efforts to protect kids on the internet.
The Constitutional Council, which reviews the constitutionality of French legislation, said the restrictions in the bill disproportionately infringe on minors’ right to freedom of expression and communication.
Reading through the Google translation of the actual ruling, it’s pretty short and to the point. Similar to how the First Amendment requires any restriction on speech to be narrowly tailored to a specific government interest, here the Council says the ban is way too broad and not based on any specific, narrowly defined harm, though it admits that the aims of protecting children are certainly legitimate:
Furthermore, while the established prohibition does not apply to online encyclopedias, educational or scientific directories, or platforms for developing and sharing free software or open-source educational digital projects, the exceptions provided for in the contested provisions remain limited. In particular, these exemptions do not cover collaborative services for sharing leisure, information, or mutual aid content, online communication applications, or online games with strong collaborative and social features, nor do they cover online social networks which, while not inherently educational, are created in connection with educational activities.
Thus, the prohibition established is likely to apply to online communication services whose risks to the health and safety of minors, relating in particular to their content or mode of operation, are not established.
In short, the law goes way too far in issuing a blanket ban of all children, no matter what the circumstances. If you have a legitimate, well-defined problem, come up with a narrowly tailored solution. The French government rushed this one through with little concern for things like that.
It also leaves little room for parents to decide for their own kids what’s appropriate:
… neither the contested provisions nor any other provision sets out the conditions under which the holders of parental authority or the legal representative of the minor, duly informed of the potential risks and safeguards presented by the services concerned, may, in the child’s best interests and in the exercise of their duties under the law, decide to lift the prohibition, limit its scope or authorise access to certain services.
Thus, the prohibition established does not give rise to any particular assessment of the risk to the minor, taking into account in particular his age, his degree of maturity, his family situation as well as the nature of the service concerned.
Also, the age verification attack on privacy is important to recognize:
By prohibiting access for any minor under fifteen years of age to certain online services, the contested provisions imply, in themselves, that any person, even an adult, must prove their age before accessing them.
The Council further notes that the law makes no real effort to figure out how one might implement age verification in a manner that protects the privacy rights of adults.
Of course, having hitched his own legacy to this thing, there’s no way Macron lets it go quietly:
In a statement late Friday, the French presidential office said the government would not be giving up on the bill. It has set a new target date for spring 2027, which coincides with when Macron will leave office.
The statement said Macron “has instructed the Prime Minister to work, as quickly as possible, on a legally sound draft that takes into account” the court’s decision. The ruling hinted at what would make the age restriction align with fundamental rights: giving parents more flexibility.
Politico also spoke to Peter Craddock, a Brussels-based attorney who works on social media regulation, who notes that any other EU country attempting a similar blanket ban is likely to run into exactly the same wall:
“The reasoning is actually equally relevant internationally, throughout the EU, because this fundamental freedom is not specific to France,” he said.
Which is a useful reminder that the freedom of expression problem here isn’t a quirk of French constitutional law. It’s baked into the whole approach — and no amount of “but it’s for the children” framing makes it go away. That’s even more true of the problems with age verification requiring the scanning of everyone’s ID, which is an even touchier subject in large parts of the EU than elsewhere.
Really, though, the bigger, more important message here should be to slow down. What’s incredible is that for all of the political and media class whining that social media is some rogue experiment on our children, none of them seem to consider that abruptly trying to block all social media from kids is just as much an experiment, and one that might have equally damaging effects.
Why not wait and see how the Australian ban actually works in practice? The early results are a mess. I get that Macron and other politicians want headlines and a legacy to point at, but it would be nice if they actually followed what the research shows and looked at how the early experiments of these bans have worked out.
So what France produced here was a total rush job that sacrificed the expression rights of every teenager in the country, the ability of parents to make their own judgment calls regarding their own kids’ access to information and — as a cherry on top — the privacy of every adult who would now need to prove their age at the door to the internet. Thankfully, the Constitutional Council caught all three.
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Things used to be normal. We used to be doing alright here in the United States, limiting ourselves to catching people at the borders or picking up migrants with criminal charges or convictions with detainers at local jails.
Now, it’s just a constant swarm all day, every day. “Worst of the worst” has long been abandoned as a pretense. Under Trump, it’s “anyone of anyone,” so long as they fit the profile: not white from whatever countries Trump claims are “shitholes,” especially if they speak with an accent.
No more targeting. No more plugging holes in the migration dyke with border-focused deterrents. These days, its masked officers storming hardware store parking lots to grab day laborers, hanging around immigration courts to pick off people just trying to follow the naturalization process, leveraging surveillance tech and government data to find people with un-American surnames, and generally terrorizing entire neighborhoods — if not entire cities — just to satiate this administration’s bigoted bloodlust.
The Trump administration has begun arresting foreign citizens with expired U.S. visas as they travel through airports, including spouses of Americans, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and interviews with immigration lawyers — a tactic that opens up a vast new pool of people for deportation.
Immigration agents in plain clothes have whisked away targets at check-in counters and arrival gates, with enforcement actions in at least 15 airports in recent weeks. Some of the arrests have occurred quietly, while others have happened as angry fellow passengers filmed the encounters.
The obvious question is “why?” Why do we need to do this? Why are we ambushing people boarding or disembarking from planes over something as menial as an expired visa? Is this going to make America greater or safer? Or is it just going to cement our reputation as a nation of bigots who were just waiting for a white nationalist-leaning blowhard to finally start massaging our repressed id?
Whatever it is, it’s fucking ugly. And it doesn’t look like America. It looks like some “lets round up the Jews” action from Nazi Germany, except that Trump’s “Jews” are people who come from any country that doesn’t have a Caucasian majority.
And it’s even worse than jumping travelers at the gates. In some cases, ICE officers — greatly enabled by new TSA data sharing provisions — are attempting to board planes to arrest people.
On July 25, a Southwest agent prevented ICE from boarding a flight from Dallas to Orlando, according to documents reviewed by the journal. The gate agent reportedly wouldn’t allow officers to board without a judicial warrant signed by a judge.
Following the incident, Southwest said in a statement that it “has longstanding policies in place to ensure appropriate legal documentation is presented by law enforcement personnel before any information about customers is shared.”
The journal also reported that an unnamed airline at a southern airport recently declined to assist ICE in accessing a jet bridge so they could arrest a man traveling with his family.
The DHS has defended its actions. And by “defended,” I mean has issued yet another “we’re right and everyone else is wrong” bit of pissiness.
“This administration is working diligently to ensure that aliens in our country illegally can no longer fly unless it is out of our country to self-deport,” a spokesperson for the Homeland Security Department said in a statement.
I’m sure another equally bitter statement will greet “Welcome to the Resistance… Southwest Airlines?” activity. While the federal government is free to move about airports, it is not free to board private property (the planes themselves) without the proper paperwork. Good to know Southwest staffers can tell the difference between an “administrative warrant” (which is not a “warrant” in the generally accepted definition of the term) and a real, judicially authorized warrant. When even front line employees are willing to push back, you know the administration has pushed too far.
In one widely circulated video, Chantal Morales Rojas, a 27-year-old from Ecuador, was detained by plainclothes officers as she boarded a Southwest Airlines flight from Denver to Oakland, Calif., on July 20. She had been spending the weekend with the family for whom she had worked as an au pair, according to the family.
When Ms. Morales Rojas scanned her boarding pass, an alarm sounded and the gate agent asked her to wait. Moments later, two plainclothes agents intercepted her in the jetway.
However it all shakes out, it reeks of desperation. The administration can’t keep its arrest numbers up which means immigration agencies are becoming increasingly opportunistic. None of this has anything to do with public safety, crime reduction, or just enforcing the rules. It’s a war on migrants being waged on as many fronts as the DHS can at all times. It’s the government padding its stats while satiating the xenophobes that make up most of its party, as well as its voting base.
It all looks a whole lot like things this country swore it would never do (or never do again). It’s rounding up and caging undesirables who will also be blamed for any or all societal ills. And it’s not that far removed from pursuing escaped slaves who went north in hopes of actually partaking in the American dream.
Back in June, Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr announced he’d be reviewing the FCC E-Rate program with an eye on “reforms.” Generally, when Brendan Carr promises “reforms,” usually what he means is either “I’m going to destroy this program,” or “I’m going to illegally make changes to this congressionally-mandated program that ensures telecom giants like AT&T get more money with less accountability.”
E-Rate is a historically bipartisan and uncontroversial program that helps bring affordable broadband to rural libraries, schools, and communities. While it has had some issues with fraud at times (almost always at the hands of private companies), the program generally does a lot of good in bringing affordable internet access into communities neglected by telecom monopolies.
Without it, or under a pared down version, schools and rural schoolkids would be more inclined to have to rely on what regional telecom monopolies deem appropriate, which is usually either over-priced broadband, or nothing at all.
Carr’s June announcement proclaimed he was “taking a look” at the program because he’s worried about kids having too much “screen time”:
“Over the last several years—and especially during COVID—many schools dramatically increased screen time for kids, with many students now swiping for hours every day. Research has now been pouring in that America’s experiment with heightened screen time in schools may be related to the negative educational outcomes we are now seeing in classrooms across the country—from declining academic performance to diminished reading comprehension skills.”
That’s quite the act of misdirection. For one, the FCC doesn’t regulate “screen time,” so you’ve once again got Carr wandering into areas he should have no say in. Which is weird for a guy who has endlessly complained of “government overreach” every single time previous FCCs have tried to bolster broadband telecom consumer protection (see: net neutrality) or prevent harmful media consolidation.
E-Rate was also mandated by Congress. Much like other recent actions (like Carr’s illegal dismantling of media consolidation limits), Carr is pretending he’s only making modest tweaks to existing systems, so he can pretend he’s not openly breaking the law.
Carr’s FCC is also pretending to be seriously fielding comments on his upcoming E-Rate rule changes. Librarian organizations this week filed their input defending E-Rate, correctly noting that Carr’s obsession with “screen time” is a straw man designed to misdirect attention from the potential harm of gutting a useful subsidy program.
“E-Rate was established by Congress for a specific purpose – to ensure affordable connectivity for schools and libraries, and that mission must remain the focus of this proceeding. For nearly three decades, E-Rate has been successful in connecting students, educators, and library patrons in rural, suburban, and urban communities alike.
Questions about curriculum, instructional practice, or student behavior should not be used to undermine a proven program that helps schools and libraries maintain the networks modern education depends on.“
This sort of stuff doesn’t really get press attention, but it matters all the same.
The E-Rate program spends about $3 billion a year driving affordable broadband into parts of the country left high-and-dry by the regional telecom monopolies Carr refuses to regulate. While there is sometimes fraud in programs like this, the vast majority of the time it’s caused by private companies that Carr, again, refuses to competently regulate and is afraid to stand up to.
Were you seriously interested in reforming these programs, you’d start doing audits of major companies like AT&T, which have a long history of defrauding these and other initiatives. Instead, Carr’s trying to shift the focus to the idea that taxpayers are funding internet access that’s delivering “harmful content” to kids, which, if you’ve tracked Brendan Carr’s censorial extremism, should be a huge red flag.
I suspect there are several motivations here. One being big telecoms like AT&T that want E-rate revamped in a way that financially benefits them. The other being Carr and the right wing extremist mission to extend their censorship and ideological dominance into every aspect of American life, starting with the classroom, where they’re compelled to root out any and all criticism of right wing ideology.
This is how he framed his new plan for E-Rate reforms on a recent appearance on Fox News:
“There are school districts that have read our law as only requiring them to put Internet safety procedures in place on the devices that the school owns. If you bring your own device to a network supported by this program, you don’t necessarily have any filters on where you can go. Kids are ultimately finding pornography, and that’s a problem.”
To be clear, schools already employ filtering systems. Some work, some don’t. The nature of these systems is such that they not only tend to over-filter content, but they’re generally easy to bypass.
Still, it’s not the FCC’s job to determine what content is acceptable, or even to manage kid “screen time” on personally-owned devices. That’s not only an unworkable game of whack-a-mole that would waste a lot of taxpayer money, that’s the precise sort of weird overreach Carr (and Republicans, and “free market” Libertarians) have whined about for as long as I’ve been alive.
But as with so much Republican “policy,” the pretense that they’re protecting kids helps obscure the fact they’re actively hurting them. In this case by making already shaky U.S. broadband even more expensive and spotty in long-neglected rural, minority, and lower-income areas.
