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Citing ProPublica, Lawmakers Introduce Bill to Help U.S. Citizens Sue ICE for Wrongful Detentions

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Photo illustration by ProPublica. Source images: Congress and videos obtained by ProPublica. What Happened: A New Mexico Democrat in the House introduced a bill last week that would make it easier for U.S. citizens to sue immigration agents and the federal government over wrongful detentions and arrests. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández credited ProPublica’s reporting as the catalyst for the bill, the Justice for Citizens Wrongfully Detained by ICE Act. Earlier this month, we revealed that more than 500 U.S. citizens have been detained in warrantless arrests during the second Trump administration. Leger Fernández said the legislation would roll back the protections from lawsuits that agents and the federal government currently have. It would also establish a minimum level of compensation for people who win their suits, and extend the statute of limitations for such cases. The legislation would also take back any unspent Immigration and Customs Enforcement funding fro...
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He Tried to Set Limits on His State’s School Vouchers. Billionaires Helped Bankroll a Campaign to Unseat Him.

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PACs targeted former West Virginia Delegate Vernon Criss following his proposal to rein in state spending on school vouchers.  Will Price/West Virginia Legislature On a cold February morning at West Virginia’s Capitol, children in winter jackets, holding signs and their homework, clogged the hallways outside the House Finance Committee room. Delegate Vernon Criss, the committee’s chairperson, popped outside his office, then promptly walked back in.  Five days earlier, the Republican lawmaker had proposed to limit payouts from a voucher program that diverts public tax dollars to private education. Since then, families had shown up each morning, and with them lobbyists and organizers posting inflammatory assertions that the proposal would kill the program. Criss didn’t want that. Five years earlier, he voted to create the Hope Scholarship program, the nation’s first educational savings account program to have no income requirements. Since then, 11 other states hav...
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This Cybersecurity Agency Is Supposed to Protect U.S. Elections. Officials Fear It’s Been Compromised by Trump.

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Photo illustration by Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica. Source images: Christopher Mark Juhn/Anadolu via Getty Images, Erlon Silva - TRI Digital via Getty Images, Mironov Konstantin via Getty Images. A few months into President Donald Trump’s second term, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security made an unusual request of its agency focused on cybersecurity: Secretly acquire a voting machine and hack it. The appointees wanted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to procure the machine, examine it and report back the findings so they could be given to the White House, according to two former administration officials with knowledge of the request.  The proposition was shocking to CISA’s career staffers, according to one of the former officials. CISA typically worked to thwart hackers. Moreover, the agency had been directed not to alert the voting machine company if it uncovered flaws, contrary to its standard practices. The request made ...
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“Devoid of Any Factual Basis”: Again and Again, Judges Have Dismissed Trump’s Voter Data Lawsuits

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Since September 2025, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia to demand their unredacted voter rolls.  The rolls contain confidential information on millions of Americans and have historically been managed by states. Now these lists are a major focus of President Donald Trump’s push to take federal control over elections and prosecute alleged noncitizen voters. To date, there have been final rulings in 26 of the DOJ lawsuits. Four cases are yet to be decided, and one state settled.  Of the judges randomly assigned to the 26 cases, eight were Trump appointees, four were appointed by another Republican — George W. Bush — and 14 were appointed by Democrats. Tactic No. 1 The first seven lawsuits used the same opening, citing Trump’s March 2025 executive order on election integrity to claim the Justice Department needed states’ voter rolls to check that they were following federal ...
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Trump Says the Border Is Secure. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Keeps Declaring an Emergency.

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Emily Scherer for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. Source images: The Texas Tribune and documents obtained by ProPublica. Last month, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott repeated a claim he’s made for the past five years. He stated that the number of people crossing the Texas-Mexico border illegally “posed an ongoing and imminent threat” across the state. In doing so, he renewed a border security disaster proclamation that has greatly expanded his powers without going through the state Legislature. Abbott’s declaration stands in sharp contrast to the numbers reported by the Trump administration, which says the drop in the flow of migrants crossing the border has been unprecedented and has reached historic lows since it took over in January 2025.  Yet, since Abbott first declared an emergency at the border during the Biden administration in 2021, he’s renewed or amended the proclamation at least 69 times — 21 of those during Trump’s tenure.  The Republican governor, ...
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