Real men lift people up. Weak men tear them down.

Hundreds of National Guard troops spent months at Army Reserve facilities outside Chicago after President Trump ordered them in during a mass deportation campaign last fall. 1/2

Natalie Rodriguez and Pablo Ortiz ran a telephone operation that cold-called people already on the National Do Not Call Registry, posed as the U.S. Department of Education, and charged monthly fees as high as $1,400 for student loan forgiveness that did not exist. 1/2

Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George declined to charge six people arrested during a federal immigration operation in South Burlington, Vermont, saying it would be difficult to build a legal case using evidence gathered by officers whose own conduct is under question. 1/2

Supporters packed the Philadelphia City Council chamber on April 23 chanting as council members voted on seven bills restricting how ICE operates in the city. 1/2

Offshore wind farms under construction on the East Coast had been stalled by federal permitting rules until a Boston judge intervened on April 21. 1/2

A migrant who crossed the southern border and was denied a hearing now has the right to apply for asylum. A federal appeals court ruled April 24 that the Trump administration’s directive suspending asylum access violates the Immigration and Nationality Act. Judge J. 1/2

Virginia Giuffre named them. Testified. Fought for years and died April 25, 2025. The DOJ released 3.5 million pages of Epstein files under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, managed to expose 43 victims while still protecting the rich men. 1/2

A Long Island broker named Mark Donnelly said every additional cost in his market gets magnified because land is limited, zoning is restrictive, and inventory is already tight. Nearly 60,000 construction jobs have been lost since December 2024. 1/2

A federal judge ruled Mississippi’s Supreme Court district maps dilute Black voting strength and barred the state from using them. The legislature was given the chance to draw new ones and declined. The governor says he will call a special session after a related SCOTUS ruling. 1/2

Someone who paid $888 for health coverage last year is now facing $1,904. That is the average jump following the expiration of enhanced ACA subsidies at the end of 2025. About 22 million people are absorbing the change. 1/2

School bus routes and commercial trucking in New York are at risk after the federal government withheld $73.5 million in already-approved highway funding. 1/2

A donor was caught on security camera handing checks to Wyoming lawmakers on the House floor on the first day of the budget session. The House voted unanimously to investigate and a criminal bribery probe opened through the county sheriff. 1/2

Chemical tanker trucks were parked outside an Arizona warehouse last week, blocking the fire hydrants. The federal government spent $370 million converting that building into an ICE detention facility one mile from two schools. AG Kris Mayes is suing to stop it. 1/2

A service member’s spouse living overseas while her husband was deployed stood to lose her Michigan voting rights under a Republican National Committee lawsuit. On April 23, the Michigan Court of Claims dismissed the case with prejudice. 1/2

During an overnight Senate session on April 23, Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, Thom Tillis, and Lisa Murkowski joined every Democrat to vote no. The amendment they blocked would have required a passport, birth certificate, or naturalization papers to register to vote in federal elections. 1/2

Christine Rabassa is a lifelong U.S. citizen and longtime Virginia resident. Her voter registration was canceled because she forgot to check a citizenship box on her DMV paperwork. On April 17, Virginia agreed to stop removing voters from the rolls in the 90 days before federal elections. 1/2

A voter in Maricopa County sealed her mail ballot and drove to a drop box outside her local library. That sealed envelope was the target of a lawsuit courts rejected for the final time on April 22. 1/2

In 1991, before most people had even heard of the internet, I met my first boyfriend on something called IRC, Internet Relay Chat. We were just two screen names on a black screen, him in California and me in Michigan. His name was boobear and mine was zeroboy. 1/2

The New York Times published leaked internal memos from six Supreme Court justices showing Chief Justice Roberts invented the shadow docket in 2016 to block Obama’s climate rules before any lower court had ruled. He acknowledged it was not typical and pushed through anyway. 1/2

Indiana and Idaho decided the federal Medicaid work requirements did not go far enough and passed laws requiring three consecutive months of work history before anyone receives coverage. Missouri and Arizona are moving the same direction. An OB-GYN in St. 1/2

A family putting groceries back on the shelf because the total is too high is now doing it more often than last year. Beef is up more than 14%. Overall grocery prices are rising faster than the 20-year average. 1/2

A special forces soldier who helped plan and carry out the capture of Nicolas Maduro was arrested for using classified information to bet $33,000 on Polymarket that the operation would succeed. He walked away with $409,000. 1/2

Congress is moving toward a vote on whether the FBI can keep searching Americans’ emails, texts, and phone calls without a warrant. The FBI has already used this program to search 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign and run 6,800 Social Security numbers through the system. 1/2

Carmella Charrington has lived in her Brooklyn home for six decades. Scammers transferred the deed without her knowledge, sold it to investors, and a judge signed an eviction order. Deed theft complaints in New York are up nearly 300%, targeting elderly Black homeowners. 1/2

Starting January 2027, millions of Americans on Medicaid will have to prove they worked at least 80 hours a month or lose their health coverage. The rules apply to 42 states. States are already too understaffed to process the paperwork. 1/2

Some rural communities were months away from getting internet access for the first time when the federal government proposed eliminating the program that was paying for it. No internet means no telehealth, no remote work, no homework. House appropriators restored $40 million yesterday. 1/2

Philadelphia parents and city council members pushed back hard enough that the school board pulled a vote on closing 17 public schools two hours before the meeting was set to begin. 1/2

Houston, Dallas, and Austin each passed local ordinances this month saying police cannot hold someone during a traffic stop solely because ICE issued a civil warrant. ICE administrative warrants are not signed by a judge and do not establish probable cause for an arrest. Texas Gov. 1/2

Farmers and their families in Iowa and across the Midwest are being diagnosed with cancer at rates above the national average. Research links pesticide exposure to prostate, lung, pancreas, and colon cancers, lymphoma, and Parkinson’s. 1/2

Nearly 140,000 people filed claims against Purdue Pharma for what OxyContin did to their families. A ProPublica investigation found fewer than half will receive anything from the $7.4 billion settlement. 1/2

Last year the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence helped more than 40,000 people. This year it will help about 26,300. Not because demand dropped. Because the federal grant that funds it was cut nearly in half, from $8.5 million to $4.5 million, with deeper cuts coming in 2027. 1/2

The federal government collected your name, address, voting history, and partial Social Security number without telling you. At least 12 states handed this data to the DOJ, which is building a database to flag voters as non-citizens. 1/2

The 2026 Farm Bill includes a provision that strips your right to sue a pesticide company if their product causes cancer or Parkinson’s disease, as long as the company had an EPA-approved label. A bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced an amendment this week to strip it. 1/2

Three Pennsylvania lawmakers introduced a bill this week requiring app-based companies like Uber, DoorDash, and Amazon to disclose how their algorithms set pay, assign work, and discipline workers. App workers report take rates as high as 70 percent on individual rides. 1/2

xAI is running 27 unpermitted gas turbines near homes, schools, and churches in Memphis. The turbines pump 1,700 tons of smog, 500 tons of carbon monoxide, and 19 tons of formaldehyde into the air every year. The neighborhood already has a cancer risk four times the national average. 1/2

The Trump DOJ indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on 11 counts of fraud, alleging it paid informants inside hate groups without disclosing it to donors. The SPLC says the program was shared with the FBI and saved lives. The case was assigned to a Trump-appointed judge in Alabama.

AI data centers consume as much power as small cities. Maine residents started showing up to packed public meetings after developers pushed projects through in secret with no community input. Maine’s legislature just passed the first statewide ban on large data centers in the country.

A Republican-appointed judge ruled that every vote cast in Virginia’s redistricting referendum was legally void. The judge declared the election never legally happened. Virginia’s attorney general said a judge should not have veto power over the People’s vote. The appeal is filed.

The DOJ has sued 30 states and Washington D.C. to obtain voter roll data that includes partial Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers. 1/2

A joint ProPublica and FRONTLINE investigation found that federal prosecutors quietly dropped or reduced charges against the overwhelming majority of people arrested at anti-ICE protests in Minnesota. In Chicago, 75 of 109 cases were dropped. 1/2

Federal agents arrested over 100 people at anti-ICE protests in Minnesota and Chicago, calling them violent rioters. A ProPublica and FRONTLINE investigation found prosecutors dropped or reduced charges in the vast majority of cases. 1/2

The Trump DOJ demanded 865,000 ballots from Wayne County, Michigan. Every fraud case they cited was from 2020 and already thrown out by Michigan courts. Trump won Michigan in 2024. There is no fraud to find. Michigan’s governor, attorney general, and secretary of state refused to hand them over.

The Trump DOJ demanded 865,000 ballots from Wayne County, Michigan, the county that includes Detroit. The fraud cases cited as justification were from 2020, none from 2024, and Michigan courts already dismissed them as not credible. 1/2

The federal government awarded seven billion dollars in grants to expand residential solar energy in low-income communities. This funding will support solar and battery storage for nine hundred thousand households across the country. 1/2

Freedom House released its 2026 report and found the United States recorded one of the sharpest drops in political rights and civil liberties among countries still rated as free. The U.S. was grouped with Bulgaria and Italy in that category. 1/2

Governor Jared Polis signed the Press Freedom and Transparency Act into law to protect journalists from surveillance and harassment. The law limits the ability of state agencies to seize reporter notes or uncover anonymous sources without a court order. 1/2

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked an attempt to limit the types of scientific data the Environmental Protection Agency can use. The rule change would have required all raw data from studies to be made public, which critics said was a tactic to exclude peer reviewed medical research. 1/2

Trump spent years calling FISA an illegal spying tool used against him. Now he is demanding an 18-month extension of the same law with zero reforms to protect Americans’ privacy. More than 20 of his own Republicans blocked it on the House floor this week.

Angela Lipps was babysitting her grandchildren when U.S. Marshals arrived with guns drawn. Fargo police used AI facial recognition to link her to bank fraud in North Dakota, a state she had never visited. She spent 108 days in jail. Lost her home, her car, and her dog. 1/2