A bill introduced by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) would prohibit the Department of Homeland Security from converting warehouses and similar buildings into immigrant detention centers, an attempt to slow President Donald Trump’s mass deportations campaign. The Ban Warehouse Detention Act would also forbid Immigration and Customs Enforcement from developing other “non-traditional” detention facilities.

 “ICE and CBP [Customs and Border Protection] are murdering people in the streets, tearing families apart, abducting our neighbors, and locking them in cages. Now they are attempting to buy and convert warehouses across our country into massive prison camps to expand their operations, despite strong local opposition in communities like mine,” Tlaib said. “This will only increase the serious human rights abuses and trauma on immigrant families including medical neglect, inhumane conditions, and rising deaths.”

ICE detailed its plan to expand into “non-traditional” facilities like warehouses in a February 2026 memo. The agency estimated that it would spend $38.3 billion on this new detention plan, which would be funded through allocations from Trump’s 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which passed in 2025, included $45 billion for the construction of new ICE facilities. As of April 1st, DHS has spent over $1 billion on warehouses. Under the direction of former secretary Kristi Noem, the department purchased 11 warehouses across eight states as part of an effort to expand its detention infrastructure. After Noem’s ouster, the department halted its plan to buy additional warehouses. Two DHS officials told NBC News the pause — which they emphasized is only temporary — was intended to give Noem’s successor Markwayne Mullin time to review the department’s policies. In the meantime, Tlaib’s bill aims to stop the policy for good.

ICE’s detention footprint has grown significantly since Trump’s return to office. To supercharge Trump’s mass deportation plan, DHS opened 104 facilities between January and November 2025, according to a report by the American Immigration Council. ICE’s detention capacity increased by over 75% in the first year of Trump’s second term, reaching a record 73,000 people in mid-January. But the administration wants to expand further — and is turning to warehouses to meet its need for detention beds. 

“The Trump administration is ruthlessly pursuing a multi-layered detention expansion plan,” Marisol Hernandez, the senior advocacy manager at Detention Watch Network, told The Verge. The warehouses will allow the administration to scale up at an “unprecedented rate,” Hernandez said. “Warehouses aren’t meant to detain individuals. There’s concern that people are being treated as commodities. People aren’t supposed to be treated that way. They’re not supposed to be shipped or discarded or profited off.”

DHS spent $145.4 million on a warehouse outside Salt Lake City, Utah, paying 50% more than the property’s assessed value, according to The Atlantic. The warehouse facilities haven’t opened yet, and the plans have faced local pushback — even in deep-red communities that supported Trump’s reelection bid in 2024. Lawsuits have stalled construction in New Jersey, Maryland, and Michigan. The Atlanta city council unanimously passed a resolution opposing ICE’s plans to build detention warehouses in Georgia, as did the Georgia cities of Oakwood and South Fulton. At a February city council meeting, more than 100 residents of Surprise, Arizona, a small community outside Phoenix, spoke out against ICE’s attempt to open a warehouse facility there.

The construction of new detention centers, “comes at the expense of Americans’ access to healthcare, food security, and housing and education,” Hernandez said. If stories of ICE raids have centered on cities or far-off urban areas, the visibility of Trump’s deportation policies are about to be in everyone’s backyard.

I was unsure if my parents would notice that the voice on the other end wasn’t mine — or that it was mine, sort of, but it wasn’t me. The voice said hello, asked my dad how he was doing, and asked again when he didn’t respond quickly enough. “What is that, Gaby?” He realized something was wrong almost immediately. I explained I had tried to trick him and it clearly hadn’t worked. “It didn’t,” he said. “It sounded like a robot.”

It wasn’t a perfect experiment. My parents were out of the country, which made for a shoddy connection. They were having lunch with friends, and the voice couldn’t deal with crosstalk or delays in the audio — it tried to fill the silences. And most importantly, the voice sounded human, but it didn’t sound like me.

The voice was generated by the deepfake detection company Reality Defender. The problem of manipulated media isn’t new, but the advent of consumer-grade AI tools has made the creation of fake audio, video, and images essentially frictionless, and a number of companies have sprung up in recent years to combat it. Reality Defender, Pindrop, and GetReal are part of a rapidly growing deepfake detection cottage industry valued at an estimated $5.5 billion as of 2023. These startups use machine learning to identify manipulated media. To fight deepfakes, you have to be able to make them. 

The term “deepfake” refers to a specific type of manipulated media that has been generated with “deep” learning, but aside from the way they’re made, there is no one commonality that unites all deepfakes. They have been used for fraud, harassment, and memes. Tools like Grok AI have led to a proliferation of nonconsensual sexual deepfakes, including child sexual abuse material. Scammers have cloned people’s voices, called their relatives, and had the voice say they’re being held for ransom. During the 2024 election, a political strategist and a magician teamed up to create a deepfake of former President Joe Biden, which they used to discourage registered Democrats in New Hampshire from voting in the state’s primary. The head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee took a Zoom call from someone using AI to pose as a Ukrainian official. At the corporate level, deepfake fraud is now “industrial,” according to one study. 

The deepfake detection industry primarily exists to address one of these problems: the issue of corporate fraud.

Reality Defender is effectively training AI to combat AI. The company uses an “inference-based model” to detect deepfakes, CTO Alex Lisle told me. “Our foundational model uses something called a student/teacher paradigm. We take a bunch of real things and say, ‘These are real,’ and then a bunch of fake things and say ‘This is fake.’”

For the fake me, we spent some time fine-tuning the voice: fiddling with the consistency, stability, and tone to make it sound more like the actual me. We could only do so much. There isn’t much publicly available footage of me speaking Spanish — the language I use to communicate with my parents — aside from a single podcast interview from 2021, most of which is unusable because there’s music in the background. But with nine seconds of audio and data scraped from years of posts, we managed to cobble together a somewhat convincing AI agent that was able to carry on a conversation with my parents, albeit an impersonal one. The English model we used on my brother was better, because we had much more training data, but even then it wasn’t convincing enough.

But family is the toughest test.

“They know what your voice sounds like,” Scott Steinhardt, the head of communications at Reality Defender, told me. Steinhardt made the deepfake with my consent and tinkered with it until it more or less sounded like me. It might not fool my family, but it’d probably be good enough for, say, colleagues or corporate entities like banks.

To be effective, these tools have to work quickly. Generative AI is rather slow. The model we used to call my parents sacrificed quality for speed. To get the voice to respond quickly, we had to accept lower quality all around. Text-to-speech was far better, but it took longer to generate. When we had the voice read Lucky’s monologue from Waiting for Godot, it sounded almost exactly like me.

“As a person, it’s pretty challenging to not be deepfaked,” Nicholas Holland, the chief product officer at Pindrop, told me. “I think that the challenge of ‘How do I protect my personal identity?’ is something that the world hasn’t figured out yet. I think ‘How do my institutions know it’s me?’ is where different institutions are implementing different security layers.”

It’s also a question of resources. I don’t have the funds to hire a deepfake detection company to screen my calls, but my bank does — and my bank has more to lose, in absolute terms if not relative ones. One 2024 survey found that businesses have lost $450,000 per deepfake incident, with more than one firm having lost upwards of $1 million in a single fraudulent transaction.

Some of these cases have involved scammers posing as executives, calling their subordinates, and asking them to transfer large sums of money to their accounts. Before I logged in to the call with Holland, I got a pop-up notification on Zoom:

This meeting is being analyzed. Pindrop Security and its third-party providers record the audio and video of your meeting to determine whether you’re a real person and/or the right person. By clicking ‘Agree’ below, you consent to Pindrop’s collection, use and storage of the meeting and audio, your voice and face scans (which may be considered biometric information), and your IP address (to further determine your state, province or country) for the above purposes.

My face, voice, and IP address, they assured me, would be retained for no longer than 90 days.

Holland told me that companies are now being inundated with fake job applicants — ironically, even at Pindrop. “We’re seeing a range of it. We’re seeing where people are actually doing the job, maybe they work in the IT department,” Holland said. “We’ve had customers who have had somebody get hired, but then that person has made referrals. They’ve hired two other people and it turns out to be the same person hired three times using three different voices, three different faces, three different Slack identities.”

Typically, these aren’t entirely AI-generated video personas; they’re people using deepfake technology to change their own features, almost like a digital mask. There used to be a trick for detecting this: asking the person to hold three fingers in front of their face.

“That doesn’t work at all now. The AI models are so good that they can absolutely create hands, you can put hands in front of your face,” Holland said. “It’s basically imperceptible with your eyes now.”

Lisle from Reality Defender told me that as the technology improves, attacks become less high-effort. Where scammers would once impersonate a single executive, they’re now targeting employees at all levels of a company. He told me of a recent attack on a publicly traded company that he declined to name, in which the fraudster went to LinkedIn, pulled the name of every current employee, and then scraped TikTok and Facebook to create a “pool of information” and get a voiceprint for each of these people. Their information and voiceprints were put into an LLM, which built a context window and a map, and then “scattershotted the entire company” calling employees at all levels.

“In cybersecurity, we talk about these things called ‘trust boundaries,’” Lisle said. “The problem with deepfakes is that there’s always this implicit trust boundary, which is seeing and hearing is believing. We’ve gone the last 40,000-odd years believing our ears and eyesight, but now we can’t. There are all these trust boundaries we’ve never had to think about before that hackers are leveraging in interesting ways.”

For now, this software is only aimed at big companies — they have the need, the high stakes, and the deep pockets to pay for it. But regular people don’t have deepfake detection software, nor will they in the near future. As Holland explains it, the biggest challenge to mass adoption is awareness, since “many consumers aren’t aware of the threat, so they don’t know how to go find a solution — ground zero is with the businesses that serve the consumer.” Pindrop doesn’t have a consumer product yet, but it hasn’t ruled out developing one in the future. The challenge, Holland said, is “making these systems fast, accurate, and trustworthy enough for people to rely on in everyday moments.”

Reality Defender has a different perspective. Steinhardt said a consumer product would create “an uneven and spotty playing field for people.”

“Think of it as antivirus: Whereas this used to be a thing individual people worried about (or, worse, didn’t), now our browsers, email providers, internet providers, and the like are all scanning files before they hit our computer for malware,” Steinhardt said. “This is our approach to deepfake detection.”

My deepfake hadn’t been able to trick my family, but I hadn’t really put it to the test. For years, law enforcement agencies across the country have warned of a deepfake kidnapping scam: A parent will get a call from a very convincing voice begging for help, and then the “kidnapper” will demand a ransom. Even if the voice isn’t entirely convincing, the crying and screaming is. I couldn’t bring myself to do that to my parents, even if it was fake. I briefly considered other scams: I could call my bank, or maybe my health insurance provider, but the idea of locking myself out of my own accounts — or of committing actual, legitimate fraud — made me sour on the experiment. Instead, I called my brother. “Oh, NO,” he said as soon as the voice greeted him. He hadn’t been fooled either.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is asking the attorneys general of California and New York to investigate Google for deceptive trade practices, saying the tech giant fails to notify users before handing over their data to law enforcement agencies like ICE.

“For nearly a decade, Google has promised billions of users that it will notify them before disclosing their personal data to law enforcement,” the letter says. But it didn’t in the case of Amandla Thomas-Johnson, a PhD candidate at Cornell University who received a notice after Google handed his data over to ICE.

The EFF alleges that this isn’t an isolated incident, and that “through a hidden but systemic practice, Google has likely violated that promise numerous other times over the years.” The EFF says it has learned that Google sometimes sends data over without authorizing users “in order to save time and avoid delay with complying with a government demand.”

Last May, Thomas-Johnson, who was involved in pro-Palestine activism on campus, found out that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had subpoenaed his personal email. Thomas-Johnson had left the country a month earlier because he feared deportation in light of the Trump administration’s targeting of student activists like Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, and Rümeysa Öztürk. Since Google had notified him that DHS subpoenaed his personal email, Thomas-Johnson assumed the government also sought access to his university account — but when he asked Cornell, he received no response.

“This is the big question — whether they were using our [Cornell] emails to track us as well,” Thomas-Johnson told The Cornell Daily Sun.

At the time, a Google spokesperson told the Sun that its “processes for handling law enforcement subpoenas are designed to protect users’ privacy while meeting our legal obligations.” The spokesperson said Google reviews “all legal demands for legal validity, and we push back against those that are over broad or improper including objecting to some entirely.”

Google told the Sun that Thomas-Johnson’s subpoena requested basic subscriber information and didn’t include the contents of his email. 

Thomas-Johnson shared records with the Sun showing that his information was accessed under federal communications law 18 USC 2703(c)(2), which “may require” communications providers to hand over users’ address, telephone number, telephone connection records “of session times and durations,” and credit card or bank account number.

But the EFF maintains that administrative subpoenas like the one DHS issued for Thomas-Johnson’s are an abuse of authority and a violation of his First Amendment rights. Moreover, these subpoenas aren’t approved by a judge; companies can refuse to comply with them and face no repercussions for doing so.

“Google should commit to ending its deception and pay for its past mistakes,” the EFF said in its letters to California and New York. The organization is asking the states to investigate Google’s practices and seeks injunctive relief, which includes civil penalties of up to $2,500 per violation in California.  

Correction, April 15th: An earlier version misstated Amandla Thomas-Johnson’s status at Cornell, and which of his emails was accessed by ICE. He is a current, not former PhD candidate, and the EFF letter concerns his personal, not university, Gmail account.

Usha Vance has a new podcast: Storytime with the Second Lady. It’s exactly what it sounds like. Each episode begins with a brief introduction, after which JD Vance’s wife reads a children’s story. The first three episodes were released Monday, and none is longer than 11 minutes — children’s books are, after all, quite short. 

It’s an unexpected move for Vance, who gave up a career as a high-powered lawyer to be second lady. But her pivot to podcasting isn’t entirely unprecedented. She’s simply the latest conservative spouse to pivot to content creation. It’s a new front of the ongoing culture wars: Instead of trying to win back supposedly liberal institutions, the right is hell-bent on creating its own. And if these institutions reinforce conservative gender norms, that’s all the better.

“I’ve always loved reading, from when I was a kid until today. And now as a mom, storytime with my kids is the highlight of my day,” Vance says in the inaugural episode, a reading of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Lest anyone think she will only be reading classics in keeping with the right wing’s aversion to contemporary children’s literature, the second episode is a reading of Cars — as in, a book based on the Pixar movie — featuring racecar driver Danica Patrick, and the third is Playground Lessons read by author and Paralympian Brent Poppen.

This is completely anodyne, even wholesome content, at least if you ignore the fact that the Trump administration slashed grant funding for libraries. As second lady, Vance has championed literacy: Last year, she announced a summer reading challenge for children. Vance said the challenge was about focusing more deeply, being more present, and spending less time on devices. Her taste skews literary: She has read Hernan Diaz’s Trust and Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Iliad, the latter of which was much denigrated by conservatives. Storytime with the Second Lady seems like the right’s answer to Ms. Rachel, the popular children’s entertainer who, to the chagrin of some conservatives, has been outspoken about the ongoing war on Gaza and the Trump administration’s detention of immigrant children.

Katie Miller, wife of Trump adviser Stephen Miller, launched a podcast last year after leaving the Department of Government Efficiency, where she was a spokesperson. Erika Kirk took over her late husband’s media empire after his assassination. Unlike Kirk, however, both Miller and Vance are creating content that is apolitical on its face. Miller and Vance’s seemingly banal podcasts are indicative of conservatives’ efforts to create a parallel media ecosystem, a project that signals their aspiration for cultural relevance that they feel they’ve been denied by the mainstream.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that some on the right want nothing more than to be liked. They aren’t content with power; they want cultural cachet, and their politics of resentment are often born of an understanding that this desire will always remain out of reach. So much of the MAGA movement revolves around culture wars: They are fixated on the wokeness of children’s cartoons, Hollywood’s liberal slant, and the perpetual boogeyman of drag queen story hour. The Vances were reportedly hurt by the negative reaction to the film adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy. The vice president and second lady are often heckled in public: they were booed at the recent winter Olympics in Milan and jeered at the Kennedy Center. During Trump’s first term, the Millers reportedly avoided going out in public because of how often they got harassed.

Unable to win over the public, these political wives have chosen to carve out spaces for themselves in conservative media. “There isn’t a place for conservative women to gather online,” Miller said when announcing her podcast in 2025. Except, as The New York Times pointed out at the time, there is a thriving right-wing “womanosphere” as embodied by magazines like Evie and The Conservateur and a litany of podcasts including The Brett Cooper Show, Alex Clark’s Culture Apothecary, and Allie Beth Stuckey’s Relatable. But right-wing media relies on the illusion of rejection and transgression — Miller needs to position herself as a conservative lighthouse in a sea of liberal lifestyle content, because she has nothing else to differentiate her from the crowd. Similarly, Vance’s podcast is just the latest among many storytime podcasts, some of which are overtly political.

The most interesting thing about Vance and Miller’s podcasts is that they aren’t interesting at all. Episodes of Storytime with the Second Lady are short: there’s a brief introduction, a reading, and that’s it. Miller does long interviews, but as Tess Owen wrote in Slate, her podcast is “eye-wateringly boring.” Granted access to some of the most powerful people in the country and the world — her former boss Elon Musk, FBI director Kash Patel, attorney general Pam Bondi, and JD Vance himself — Miller asks such hard-hitting questions as: Is a hot dog a sandwich? Her big cultural gets are those few celebrities who have publicly aligned themselves with the right: Dr. Oz; vaccine skeptic Jenny McCarthy; fitness personality Jillian Michaels; Cheryl Hines, the first lady of MAHA; Mike Tyson; and Nicki Minaj, who recently cast her lot with the MAGA crowd. Miller’s latest guest is NBA player Tristan Thompson, who is perhaps most famous for cheating on Khloé Kardashian. (He is, for the record, good friends with Eric Trump and averse to repeating outfits.)

For Vance and Miller, these podcasts also function as a sort of rebrand. Miller has had political ambitions since college. She was involved in student government at the University of Florida, where she had her fair share of scandals. As an assistant press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first term, Miller was tasked with defending the administration’s family separation policy. She was such a hard-liner that her supervisor once sent her to the border in the hopes that it would make her more compassionate — which, Miller later told journalist Jacob Soboroff, “didn’t work.” Amid this cruelty, she met Stephen Miller; the two nativists found love in a hopeless place. “Where does true love happen?” she said in a recent interview. “Over border security,” naturally. Usha and JD Vance met at Yale Law School, where she was his “spirit guide” through the rarified world of the university. Until her husband received the vice presidential nomination, she worked for the prestigious firm Munger, Tolles & Olson. Vance quit this job to support her husband’s political goals, and aside from a handful of projects, has remained largely out of the spotlight.

These are driven, high-achieving women who have recast themselves as domestics, even as they pursue careers (in Miller’s case) and projects (in Vance’s) outside the home. This is the paradox of the “tradwife” influencer: these are jobs and performances, a canny camouflaging of professional ambition. It’s also worth noting that both Miller and Kirk sought fame and attention for most of their lives. As a teenager, Miller appeared on a reality show about her high school’s student newspaper. Kirk was a contestant on the reality show Summer House and founded a Christian clothing brand called Spiritual Gangster. Vance, by contrast, is a private person — her foray into podcasting is likely an effort to fit into a more traditional second lady role. Vance has said she hopes to practice law again someday. For Miller, the podcast appears to be the apex of her career. She spent all those years shilling for homeland security so that someday, she could interview a lesser Kardashian’s cheating ex.

On Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Trump v. Barbara, a case challenging President Donald Trump’s 2025 executive order banning birthright citizenship. Justices seemed skeptical of the administration’s argument, but by taking up birthright citizenship at all, they showed how much ground nativists have gained since Trump’s first term. The 14th Amendment is quite clear: “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Trump seeks to overturn this and create a new, effectively stateless American underclass, and he’s gotten alarmingly far.

Hours after being sworn back into office for his second term, Trump issued an executive order titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” Under the order, children born to undocumented mothers — or to women in the country on non-immigrant visas — would no longer be citizens upon birth, unless the children’s fathers were citizens or permanent residents. The order’s provisions would take effect 30 days after it was issued. It was immediately challenged in court and several federal injunctions prevented its implementation, meaning birthright citizenship remains the law of the land for now. 

Trump’s efforts hinge on the meaning of a specific clause: “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The administration contends that noncitizens and those who don’t have permanent residency are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, since they’re actually loyal to a foreign power. This interpretation would reverse not only centuries of US law but also precedent set by English common law, leaving hundreds of thousands of children without status or stateless upon birth. Karen Tumlin, the director of the Justice Action Center, called the case a “canary in the coalmine for our democracy”: If Trump can end birthright citizenship with the stroke of a pen, then no constitutional protection is safe. 

All but the most conservative justices seemed unconvinced. Their questions largely focused on two landmark decisions. One was Dred Scott v. Sandford, the 1857 case in which the court decided that enslaved people were not citizens — which the 14th Amendment was ratified partly to overturn. The other was United States v. Wong Kim Ark, an 1898 case in which the court ruled that, despite the Chinese Exclusion Act, the American-born children of Chinese nationals were indeed US citizens.

After Justice Clarence Thomas asked Solicitor General D. John Sauer how the citizenship clause responds to Dred Scott, Sauer acknowledged that the 1857 decision “imposed one of the worst injustices in the history of this court.” But he argued that Congress specifically ratified the 14th Amendment to grant citizenship to “newly freed slaves and their children” who, according to Sauer, had “a relationship of domicile” to the United States and no “relationship to any foreign power.” 

Nineteenth-century legislators, Sauer argued, couldn’t have foreseen the problem of birth tourism. “There are 500 — 500 — birth tourism companies in the People’s Republic of China whose business is to bring people here to give birth and return to that nation,” Sauer said.  The current interpretation of birthright citizenship “could not possibly have been approved by the 19th century framers of this amendment,” he said. “We’re in a new world,” he continued, “where eight billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who’s a US citizen.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch, who was questioning Sauer, appeared unswayed. “It’s a new world,” he agreed, but “it’s the same Constitution.”

Chief Justice John Roberts called Sauer’s examples of existing exceptions — including children of ambassadors or enemies during a hostile invasion — “very quirky” and not necessarily comparable to “a whole class of illegal aliens who are here in the country.” Justice Elena Kagan noted that most of Sauer’s brief focused on people who are temporarily in the country on visas — but Trump’s executive order was clearly intended to restrict immigration, and the president has said so himself.

In 2019, Trump called birthright citizenship a “magnet for illegal immigration.” Last year, presidential adviser Stephen Miller said the US-born children of immigrants are just as much of a problem as the immigrants themselves. “With a lot of these immigrant groups, not only is the first generation unsuccessful,” Miller said in a Fox News interview, citing the Somali-American community, which the administration would soon target in Minneapolis, as an example. “You see persistent issues in every subsequent generation. So you see consistent high rates of welfare use, consistent high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate.”

The administration has sought to restrict legal immigration in all its forms: it implemented a steep fee for H-1B work visas, has signaled it may end a work program for international students, and it enacted a travel ban on several countries that is even affecting World Cup players. The operation is barefacedly racist. The president famously complained about “all these people from shithole countries” who migrate and expressed his desire to have “more people from Norway.” Last year, he cut the refugee resettlement cap to just 7,500 and prioritized the resettlement of white South Africans. The Department of Homeland Security has linked the “homeland” to a decidedly white vision of Manifest Destiny that, like debates about birthright citizenship, harkens back to the nineteenth century.

Experts are broadly in agreement that most justices weren’t convinced by the administration’s argument, but it’s not clear exactly how the court will rule. 

If the court did hand Trump an unexpected victory, a series of grim questions would immediately come into play — starting with when the change kicks in. The order was supposed to be implemented on February 19, 2025, 30 days after Trump signed the order, and would have gone into effect if not for a number of federal injunctions. “If the court sides with Trump, it will have to decide on a date on which to begin applying the president’s interpretation of the 14th amendment,” César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a professor of civil rights and civil liberties at the Ohio State University College of Law, told The Verge. “Anyone born on or after that date and described in Trump’s order would be treated as a migrant rather than a U.S. citizen.” 

Sauer asked the court to apply Trump’s executive order “proactively” and not retroactively, and backdating the change to 2025 would pose a number of problems, calling the citizenship of millions of children into question.

The Trump administration is trying to narrow who counts as an American while simultaneously pushing for policies that prevent noncitizens from participating in public life. The administration has tried to prohibit states from offering in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants who live there, revoked accreditation for training centers that work with noncitizen truckers, and has broadly sought to turn America into a “papers, please” country.

Trump was in the audience during Wednesday’s arguments, making him the first sitting president to attend oral arguments before the Supreme Court. His presence may have intended to intimidate skeptical justices into taking his side. Norman Wong, a direct descendant of Wong Kim Ark, was also outside the courthouse, according to The New York Times. Wong and his family embody the stakes of this case, and he had a message for the justices: “They will be shamed for history if they get this wrong.”

I arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport nearly five hours before my domestic flight. This is not my way — usually I roll up to the airport 30 minutes before boarding — but not even I have enough hubris to think that my good luck is more powerful than a partial government shutdown. Congress has yet to pass a bill funding the Department of Homeland Security, meaning thousands of federal employees from TSA to the Coast Guard are working without pay — or, in the case of TSA, calling out of work, causing staff shortages and hourslong security lines at airports across the country. 

On Monday, President Donald Trump deployed between 100 and 150 ICE agents to several airports to, he claimed, manage these growing, impatient crowds and alleviate wait times. Almost immediately after the fact, a video began circulating of ICE agents tackling a woman to the ground at San Francisco International Airport. The video had been taken one day before ICE’s deployment, and it’s unclear whether the agents were at SFO at the president’s direction or whether they were looking for that woman in particular. Still, the presence of armed federal agents who are notorious for carrying out violent arrests prowling through airports made people uneasy. It made me uneasy to see them at JFK the day they were deployed.

The effects of the ongoing DHS shutdown are most palpable at airports. The shutdown began on February 14th, after Congress failed to pass an appropriations bill for DHS. Democrats have refused to fund DHS unless Congress implements a number of reforms, including prohibiting agents from wearing masks and requiring them to wear badges or clothing that identifies them as law enforcement. Though ICE and Customs and Border Protection are at the center of these negotiations, both agencies have continued operations unabated by the funding lapse, thanks to the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which gave the agencies a combined $170 billion to put toward immigration enforcement through 2029. Democrats have pushed for legislation funding TSA, FEMA, the Coast Guard, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, all of which are housed within DHS, while negotiations over ICE and CBP continue. Trump, meanwhile, has reportedly said he’s open to a $5 billion funding cut for ICE if the Senate passes the SAVE Act, a voter ID law that critics say could prevent millions of citizens from casting a ballot. Congress still hasn’t come to an agreement regarding DHS funding; the chaos will continue until it does.

I saw ICE immediately after arriving at JFK’s Terminal 4. Four agents stood in a tight circle outside the Delta Sky Priority check-in area. They didn’t seem to be managing the crowd or doing much of anything at all. Their vests identified them as ERO: Enforcement and Removal Operations, the division that carries out immigration arrests and raids. As I made my way to the TSA line — wait time: one hour and counting — I saw two more agents standing idly in a corner.

Despite the crowd, I had plenty of time to check out the ICE presence at JFK’s other terminals. I saw the same thing in each one: ICE agents, sometimes from ERO and sometimes from other divisions, gathered together near the check-in area. Sometimes a pair would break off and walk around. They weren’t violently arresting anyone, but they also weren’t helping manage the crowds, which is ostensibly why they had been dispatched to JFK and other airports in the first place.

I saw six ERO agents at Terminal 5 huddled around a coffee stand near the entrance. I made my way to Terminal 7, the oldest and smallest at JFK, and saw ICE before I even walked inside. These agents were with Homeland Security Investigations, the unit typically tasked with investigating terrorism, child sexual abuse, human smuggling, and international financial crimes, which under Trump has had its resources diverted toward the president’s mass deportation effort. Like the ERO officers at the other terminals, the five HSI agents at Terminal 7 — people who, it bears repeating, could otherwise be investigating child sexual abuse — were standing in a circle and chatting. I stood outside and peered through the large windows, trying to look inconspicuous while puffing on my matcha-flavored vape. I waited to see if something would happen. Nothing did, so I went to Terminal 8. 

At Terminal 8 I saw four officers, also standing against a wall near the check-in area. Two of them broke off from the group and joined another pair of agents near bag drop. As I took the escalator down to the AirTrain, I saw a man approach them. I couldn’t hear what he said, but the conversation looked friendly enough. A strange version of this scene repeated itself at the next terminal.

The first thing you see upon entering JFK’s Terminal 1 is a large American flag. The second thing you see is an even larger photo of Kendall Jenner. And if you happened to be there at approximately 4:30PM on Monday, the third thing you’d see is a man approaching a group of six ERO agents and asking them to take a photo with his baby. The agents beamed, seemingly thrilled at the request and not otherwise occupied. The father beamed back. The baby sat in his arms limply, as babies do. 

I had seen enough. My flight was in a little over three hours; there was no reason for me to keep skulking around JFK. 

The stress at airports seems to be manifesting in silly and serious ways. The TSA line at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson was so long that one woman pulled out a violin to entertain her fellow passengers. Sunday night, an Air Canada plane hit a fire truck on the runway of New York City’s LaGuardia Airport. Two pilots died and dozens of people, including travelers and plane staff, were injured in the crash. The accident is seemingly unrelated to the shutdown — air traffic controllers are fully funded, though the Federal Aviation Administration has been dealing with a long-running staffing crisis of its own — but for travelers, the particulars of this crisis are hard to extricate from the long lines and ICE agents they now see at the airport.

Did ICE’s presence make the TSA process smoother in some way I couldn’t detect from the other side of the gate? I’d soon find the answer.

Back at Terminal 4, I saw two different ERO agents in the void between the TSA PreCheck line and the Delta One lounge. They, too, were doing nothing. One wore sunglasses even though we were indoors. I did not see a single ICE agent in line, nor did I see them helping process passengers. The woman one row down thanked the TSA agent for working and said we were all grateful. “We do it because we love y’all,” the agent said. I felt a beautiful sense of camaraderie and goodwill toward my fellow man in the TSA PreCheck line at JFK Terminal 4, which are not typically things I feel in the TSA PreCheck line at JFK Terminal 4. When I got to the front of the line I also thanked the agent and said I was sorry he was working without pay. He told me he was doing it because a lot of his friends couldn’t afford to. 

From the relative comfort of my gate, I emailed the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which oversees the JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark airports. I asked about the ICE presence and what exactly the agents were supposed to be doing there. A spokesperson got back to me a few hours later: “The Port Authority expects that any such personnel assigned to assist with passenger processing functions will be appropriately trained and focused on supporting screening operations, consistent with maintaining the safety, integrity, and efficiency of the security process at our airports and protecting the flying public.” That didn’t quite line up with what I had seen.

The situation has gotten more chaotic since Monday. JFK’s Terminal 5 was packed Tuesday morning. Nationwide, more than 11.5 percent of TSA agents called out of work on March 21st. A staggering 47.4 percent of agents at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport didn’t show up to work that day. By Tuesday, wait times at Bush Intercontinental were around four hours, and ICE agents had started handing out water bottles to weary travelers.

Republicans are now considering a compromise that would fund TSA and other DHS agencies while omitting money for ICE enforcement, The New York Times reports. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), chair of the appropriations committee, told reporters Monday night that she was “more optimistic that by the end of the week we will fund the Department of Homeland Security.”

They may finally feel a sense of urgency. 

On Tuesday, Delta announced it was suspending standalone service for members of Congress until TSA funding is reinstated. “Due to the impact on resources from the longstanding government shutdown, Delta will temporarily suspend specialty services to members of Congress flying Delta,” a statement from the airline read. “Next to safety, Delta’s No. 1 Priority is taking care of our people and customers, which has become increasingly difficult in our current environment.”

With their perks gone, members of Congress will have to deal with lines and hassle just like everyone else. Maybe this will give them the push they need to fund TSA. Until and unless they do, the bad vibes at the airport will continue.

A bipartisan duo is pushing back on President Donald Trump’s attempts to end a program that lets hundreds of thousands of foreign students work in the US for a year after graduation. Reps. Sam Liccardo (D-CA) and Jay Obernolte (R-CA) introduced a bill that would codify Optional Practical Training (OPT), which allows international students to work in their field of study for 12 months, with extensions of up to 24 months for STEM students. 

OPT was introduced in 1992 and functions as a sort of bridge between student visas, or F-1s, and H-1Bs, the visa category issued to foreign nationals who work for US companies. But OPT is now under threat from the Trump administration, which has floated the possibility of doing away with it altogether as part of its broader crackdown on legal immigration. Liccardo and Obernolte are hoping to shore up bipartisan support for the program, which until recently went under the radar and faced little opposition from either party.

Between 2006 and 2022, 56 percent of the international students who entered the country on F-1 visas enrolled in OPT, according to data from the Institute for Progress. Students with postgraduate degrees are more likely to enroll in OPT than those with bachelor’s degrees, and those in STEM fields are more likely to use the program to find work in the US than those in other fields. The Department of Homeland Security’s statistics show that 165,524 foreign students participated in STEM OPT in 2024 alone. STEM PhDs have the highest rate of participation in OPT, with 76 percent of graduates enrolling in the program.

“The OPT program enables hundreds of thousands of the best and the brightest from around the world to be educated in the United States, and to have a pathway to contribute to our economy,” Liccardo, the bill’s cosponsor, told The Verge. “The alternative to OPT is to educate these brilliant people and to then send them back to their countries of origin, where they’ll start companies to compete against us.”

Congress hasn’t passed any meaningful immigration reform in decades, and OPT wasn’t created by legislation at all. President George H.W. Bush established the program in 1992 under the authority of the Department of Justice, which oversaw the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the precursor to ICE, until DHS began operations in 2003. The OPT program is now administered by US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the agency within DHS that deals with legal immigration.

When new regulations have been issued regarding OPT, they’ve always expanded the program rather than reduced its scope: Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama increased the OPT period for students with STEM degrees, who can now work in the US for up to 36 months.

“It’s never had a life in statute,” Liccardo said, “which is precisely why in this environment, in which every two hours there’s a new idea about how this administration can cut the United States off from the world — whether that’s choking off talent, or exports, or relationships with our allies — we want to codify it to make sure that this valuable program continues to help us drive the American economy.”

Though OPT has broad bipartisan support, the program has faced legal challenges for over a decade. The Washington Alliance of Technology Workers sued DHS in 2014 after the Obama administration extended STEM OPT to 17 months, arguing the change hurt American workers. The suit also claimed that DHS exceeded its regulatory authority when creating OPT. In an amicus brief filed in 2019, more than 100 colleges said that ending OPT would make it harder for them to “compete for international students, particularly at a time when global competition is fierce and international students are already questioning whether they are welcome in the United States in light of recent changes in immigration policy and enforcement.”

During his May 2025 nomination hearing, Joseph B. Edlow, Trump’s pick for the head of USCIS, promised to end OPT. Edlow, who was confirmed by the Senate, said OPT has been “mishandled,” adding that he favored a “regulatory and sub-regulatory program that would allow us to remove” employment authorizations for international students after they leave school. Several groups that favor immigration restriction, including the right-wing Center for Immigration Studies, have long sought an end to OPT, which they say brings down wages for American workers. 

There were some reports last fall that the Trump administration could issue a rule to that effect early in 2026, but no changes have been made to OPT yet. Still, in addition to conducting large-scale ICE raids across the country, the Trump administration is pushing to restrict many forms of legal migration. It raised the fee for H-1B visas to $100,000 and imposed full or partial travel bans on nationals of 20 countries. Though Trump has previously said that he would like to give green cards to every single international student who graduates from a US university, it’s far more likely that his administration will move to limit OPT or get rid of it altogether.

Liccardo, who cosponsored the bill that would codify OPT, said eliminating the program will have downstream effects that hurt all Americans. “At a moment when China in particular is outcompeting the United States across many technologies and industries ranging from solar and energy storage to, increasingly now, biotech,” he said, “we cannot afford to lose American-trained, American-educated engineers, scientists, and innovators to fuel our competitors’ economies.”