Gaby Del Valle | The Verge

Enshittification

2026-07-17T18:16:08-04:00

Bryan, a food broker from Michigan, wasn’t sure if he’d be able to make it to urgent care in time. He started feeling off on Thursday, and by Saturday, he was having to use the bathroom every 15 to 30 minutes.

“It’s no joke about the explosive diarrhea,” Bryan, who asked that his last name be withheld for obvious reasons, told me. I met him via Reddit, where I recently spent hours lurking in threads about cyclosporiasis, the explosive diarrhea illness infecting people across the country, and Cyclospora cayetanensis, the microscopic parasite that causes it, which spreads through human fecal contamination. Symptoms — including nausea, loss of appetite, cramping and bloating, and the much-discussed watery, explosive diarrhea — can begin anywhere from two days to two weeks after exposure, and experts say they can wax and wane. The explosive diarrhea may stop for a day or two, only to come back in full force. In extreme cases, patients can end up hospitalized after experiencing severe dehydration. So far, the government reports 141 hospitalizations and no deaths.

As a connoisseur of elaborate salads, I was dismayed by the news that a poop-causing parasite may have found its way into America’s summer produce. I wanted answers — and, it appeared, so did thousands of other people on Reddit, who have taken to crowdsourcing information (and misinformation) in the absence of concrete guidance from the federal government. Health agencies are being cautious about doling out immediate advice, but the gap in information has left suffering, toilet-bound Americans — and those who fear joining their ranks — to their own devices, and even made people a little conspiratorial. Online, people are speculating whether the government is trying to protect farmers or food distributors. The reality is more mundane but no more satisfying: Federal agencies won’t make hasty recommendations until they have more data, and Cyclospora infections are notoriously difficult to pin down.

Though Bryan wasn’t able to get a test to confirm it, he believes he has cyclosporiasis, making him one of more than 5,000 people across the country infected by the parasite. That figure is almost certainly an undercount, since many cases aren’t reported — and cuts to a federal program that tracks foodborne illness may be hindering investigation efforts. The “explosive diarrhea parasite” is a bigger problem than anyone has been able to grasp, though it’s not clear just how big. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed 1,645 cases since May 1st and is aware of at least 5,100 additional cases that require further analysis.

At urgent care, Bryan received “a full battery of tests” except for one — the one that would detect Cyclospora, which isn’t detectable by standard diarrhea tests. “The nurse practitioner said, ‘We can do one of two things: We can wait until Monday, or I can prescribe you Bactrim immediately,’” he explained. “She told me the labs were so backed up in Michigan that they can’t even keep up with the amount of people.”

Michigan has more confirmed cyclosporiasis cases than any other state: 2,640 as of Monday, according to state health officials, who said lettuce and other salad greens are a “potential source for this outbreak, although other food items cannot be completely ruled out.” State health officials haven’t traced the outbreak to a specific type of produce, or to any growers or suppliers. But The Washington Post reports that federal and state officials are investigating Taco Bell after the fast food chain voluntarily recalled lettuce, cilantro, onion, pico de gallo, and guacamole at some of its locations.

Cyclospora outbreaks are among the most challenging foodborne outbreaks to investigate

Janet Hamilton, executive director of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, explained that a lack of information doesn’t mean a lack of government action.

“Anytime we have large outbreaks like this, it’s important to remember that they take time to solve, and it’s not uncommon that it can take multiple days, especially if there’s more than one product that’s involved,” Hamilton said. “There are a lot of folks who are working on this investigation, and it’s a good demonstration around why we do need epidemiologists and disease detectives to have some support and protect our food supply in the US.”

Even under the best of circumstances, the parasite is a tricky one to track.

“Cyclospora outbreaks are among the most challenging foodborne outbreaks to investigate,” Rodney E. Rohde, program chair of the Medical Laboratory Science Program at Texas State University, told The Verge. The parasite’s long incubation period — usually about a week — and the short shelf life of most fresh produce make it hard to determine what foods made someone sick. Even when a culprit is identified, testing foods for Cyclospora is difficult.

“Another challenge is that pathogens are often present in very low numbers and may be unevenly distributed throughout a food lot,” Rohde said, so a lab may analyze a 25-gram sample of thousands of pounds of product without getting a conclusive result. And even when a tainted batch is confirmed, Rohde explained, “tracing remains difficult because fresh produce often passes through multiple growers, packers, distributors, and retailers before reaching consumers, and contaminated lots may no longer be available once illnesses are recognized.”

But there are some additional hurdles to that. ProPublica’s Annie Waldman pointed out that the Food and Drug Administration lost more than 240 consumer safety specialists last year amid President Donald Trump’s cuts to federal health agencies. And last July, the CDC scaled back a program that tracked foodborne illnesses in partnership with the FDA, the Department of Agriculture, and state health departments. Before July 2025, the CDC’s Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet) worked with 10 state governments to track Campylobacter, Cyclospora, Listeria, Shigella, Vibrio, Yersinia, Salmonella, and Shiga toxin-producing E. coli. FoodNet stopped requiring state health departments to track most of those pathogens, including Cyclospora.

“Essentially, CDC is backing off on one of their best surveillance systems,” Dr. J. Glenn Morris, director of the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida, told NBC News at the time. In a list of talking points provided to the Connecticut Department of Public Health, the CDC said financial constraints had led to the drop in surveillance: “Funding has not kept pace with the resources required to maintain the continuation of FoodNet surveillance for all eight pathogens.”

On a Tuesday press call, CDC officials distinguished between FoodNet and its more robust national surveillance program. “The data that we have for cyclosporiasis for this outbreak is the same as we’ve had for all the other seasons,” said Gwen Biggerstaff, deputy director of CDC’s Division of Foodborne, Waterborne, and Environmental Diseases. “We use the same systems and the same process, so that is unchanged.”

FoodNet was “designed as a sentinel system,” said Hamilton of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists. “It was not designed to be the primary system for detecting outbreaks. The primary way that we detect outbreaks when it comes to Cyclospora or cyclosporiasis is really associated with making it be reportable within states, and it’s that reporting process, and then sharing of data with the CDC, that really allows us to detect Cyclospora infections.”

The CDC has identified an epidemiologic link between four states: Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky. Cases have been reported in 34 states, though it’s not clear how many of those are linked. The department has not identified the source of the outbreak, and tracing efforts are ongoing. Where does that leave Americans who want to take an abundance of caution? The CDC and FDA aren’t currently recommending that people avoid eating certain foods, and both Hamilton and Rohde stressed the importance of practicing proper food hygiene, including thoroughly washing and drying all fresh produce.

And in light of recent reports suggesting lettuce may be a potential vector for infections, Rohde suggested avoiding it and other products connected with outbreaks in the past, especially if you’re immunocompromised or live in a state with high caseloads.

“Vegetables and fruits are obviously important to a nutritious diet,” he told me via email, “BUT one should be cautious and pay attention to ongoing local, state, and federal health reports for your geographic locale.” And if that means avoiding herbs at the peak of summer, then so be it.

Previous cyclosporiasis outbreaks have been traced to lettuces and other leafy greens. After more than 640 people across 11 states fell ill with cyclosporiasis in 2020, the Food and Drug Administration recalled bagged salads sold at Aldi, Walmart, and other retailers under the names Fresh Express, Giant Eagle, Walmart Marketside, and others. The FDA and the CDC reportedly traced the infections to Fresh Express’ Illinois plant. Other outbreaks have been traced to snow and snap peas, raspberries, and herbs like parsley, basil, and cilantro.

“Ultimately, prevention depends most on reducing contamination during production rather than in the home,” Rohde said.

Desperate for a leafy green, I asked whether farmers market produce is a safe alternative. Rohde’s answer was disappointing but illuminating. He explained that preventing future outbreaks means reducing contamination at the source — that is, in farms and distribution networks. “Farmer’s markets may be non-connected to any type of common agricultural water supply that could be a potential source of contamination. So, in that sense, they may be safer. But, if one is in a ‘hot geographic area,’ I would still be cautious.”

Though expert opinion on the matter is mixed, and will likely remain so until more information about the outbreak emerges, I’m going to avoid raw greens for now, lest I succumb to Bryan’s fate.

Nearly a week in, he’s starting to feel much better, he said — but the road to recovery was a long, bumpy one, punctuated by Preparation H wipes and many, many trips to the bathroom. “I wish this on no one,” he said.

ICE is threatening to deport witnesses of its latest shooting

2026-07-13T15:35:42-04:00

Department of Homeland Security. | Image: The Verge

Advocates are demanding that the Department of Homeland Security release bodycam footage of the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant who was killed by ICE officers in Houston during a traffic stop earlier this week. But DHS claims the agents involved in the shooting weren’t wearing body cameras because of the lengthy government shutdown that prevented ICE and Customs and Border Protection from receiving additional federal funding for 76 days — a shutdown that was itself spurred by congressional bickering over reforms to DHS after federal agents killed two civilians earlier this year.

Two competing narratives have emerged in the absence of any footage of the shooting, which occurred Tuesday around 7AM CT as Salgado Araujo, who owned a construction business, drove to a work site with three of his employees. But as the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti demonstrated, DHS will readily accuse victims of attacking agents — even when video evidence shows otherwise.

But what good is video footage or eyewitness accounts in a world where the government will just deny accountability, even when confronted with evidence that clearly contradicts their statements? Even if footage of Salgado Araujo’s shooting does emerge, it won’t stop DHS from saying whatever it wants about the people it kills.

An ICE spokesperson said Salgado Araujo “weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer” — which echoes claims DHS has made after other shootings, some of them fatal. But three eyewitnesses, all of whom are in ICE detention, maintain that Salgado Araujo did no such thing. According to their accounts, which attorney Hugo Balderas-Ibarra shared with The Washington Post, ICE vehicles surrounded the work van on both sides and shot into their vehicle. Juan Proaño, the CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, told The New Republic that DHS is pressuring the witnesses to self-deport.

In a statement released after the shooting, DHS said agents stopped Salgado Araujo “as part of a targeted enforcement operation.” But sources with knowledge of the situation told both The New York Times and CNN that Salgado Araujo wasn’t the target. Officers were reportedly looking for two Guatemalan men. While surveilling a property connected to the Guatemalan men, officials had seen two white vans, a DHS spokesperson told the Times. Later, “they observed a white van with an individual who resembled the target” — the van driven by Salgado Araujo.

ICE has reportedly increased its presence in Houston in recent weeks as part of a broader enforcement push, albeit a less bombastic one than DHS’s shock-and-awe raids in Minnesota. DHS changed tactics after widespread backlash to Operation Metro Surge, opting for “targeted” arrests over mass raids. But quieter enforcement doesn’t mean less enforcement. Earlier this month, ICE reported it had arrested 10,000 people in just five days.

This sharp rise in arrests may be fueled by rampant racial profiling. Federal agents are disproportionately targeting Latinos in the New York City area, according to hundreds of federal court records analyzed by The City Reporter. Though Latin Americans make up approximately 66 percent of the region’s undocumented population, more than 93 percent of people DHS agents grabbed off city streets were Latinos. Many of these followed the same pattern as the attempted arrest of Salgado Araujo in Houston. According to court records, agents would grab someone who they claimed looked like their intended target and detain them even if they weren’t the person they were looking for.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who took over the department after the ouster of Kristi Noem, reportedly wanted to present a softer image on immigration after facing widespread criticism over its tactics in Minnesota — especially in advance of the midterms.

If DHS was hoping that its less overtly aggressive approach would keep ICE out of the headlines, the shooting of Salgado Araujo has done the opposite. Hundreds of protesters gathered in Houston on Wednesday, marching to the block where Salgado Araujo was killed. Democrats are calling for an independent investigation of the shooting. DHS’s Office of the Inspector General has reportedly opened its own probe. The FBI’s Houston field office is also investigating the alleged assault on a federal law enforcement officer — even though eyewitnesses say no assault occurred.

In fact, the three witnesses claimed that ICE agents shot unprovoked. “It is impossible for them to say that they were going to get run over,” Jose Trinidad Rojas, one of the men who was traveling with Salgado Araujo, said in a handwritten note reviewed by the Post, because “there were no officers in front of or behind the vehicle. They were on the sides.”

Hugo Balderas-Ibarra, the attorney who shared Trinidad Rojas’ and the other witnesses’ statements with the Post, said all the survivors independently verified that government vehicles surrounded Salgado Araujo’s van on both sides and then started shooting.

This isn’t the first time that federal immigration officers have justified shooting civilians by claiming they acted in self-defense. Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot Renee Good, said he feared for his life, and testified in court that he had previously been dragged 100 yards by a driver who refused to stop. Charles Exum, the Border Patrol agent who shot Marimar Martinez in Chicago in October 2025, claimed Martinez had rammed her car into his government vehicle. But footage from the scenes of both shootings shows the opposite — and federal officials even shared videos of an unrelated incident in which a black SUV rammed an agent’s truck, claiming it had been Martinez.

Given the lack of footage of ICE’s shooting of Salgado Araujo, it’s the agency’s word against those of three witnesses, whom the government is now trying to deport. Meanwhile, other Houstonians are afraid that they may end up sharing Salgado Araujo’s fate. “If this is a routine traffic stop,” Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-TX) said on Hello Houston after the shooting, “then everybody in Houston has to kind of fear for driving on our roads.”

CNN reports that body cameras have been distributed to half of ICE’s field offices across the country, and DHS claims all offices will receive cameras in the next 60 days. Even if video evidence of its agents’ actions won’t force DHS to hold itself accountable, that footage can travel widely, allowing people to know the truth — even if the government tries to deport eyewitnesses.

ICE agents are making house calls for online critics

2026-07-09T10:06:59-04:00

A few hours after checking into a hotel in New York City, David Streever woke up to a call from the front desk saying someone was looking for him.

Streever had just landed on a return trip from Finland, where he’d vacationed with his daughter. Though Streever didn’t know it yet, while he’d been away, agents with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had shown up to his home in Rochester and spoken to his wife. They dropped off a “WARNING NOTICE,” which informed Streever that ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) is “responsible for enforcing crimes against the United States,” including “threats made against ICE personnel.” Then, nearly as soon as he touched US soil, another agent tracked him down at his hotel.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington, DC, Streever says he didn’t threaten anyone. Shortly after federal agents killed two US citizens in Minneapolis, Streever emailed Todd Lyons, at the time the acting director of ICE. “You are a monstrous human being and will go down in history as America’s Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher,” Streever’s message read in part. “Even Trump will turn on you before the end, and you will be a sad, despised man who eats himself alive with shame at your own pathetic weakness.” The message castigated Lyons, warning him of his “downfall” — but the consequence, it said, would be “the burden of knowing the truth about yourself.”

Streever wasn’t arrested over the message. But the notice warned him that it “MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW.”

The warning Streever received isn’t an isolated incident. For much of the past year, DHS has been going after people who criticize President Donald Trump’s immigration policies in emails and social media posts, accusing them of threatening federal personnel or “doxing” agents whose identities are already known to the public. OPR has opened more than 100 investigations into “incidents of doxing and threats” involving ICE, Wired reported this week. Unlike the recent arrests and prosecutions of so-called antifa members, no criminal charges have apparently been filed in these cases — but especially against the backdrop of a larger crackdown, the threat to civil liberties is clear.

“I think that everyone would instantly recognize it as a First Amendment violation if the police showed up and arrested someone for this email. But the First Amendment doesn’t just cover arrests — it also prohibits government retaliation or coercion,” said Adam Steinbaugh, a senior attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression who is representing Streever.

Steinbaugh doesn’t know how DHS tracked Streever down to his hotel, but noted that the department regularly asks web platforms to help identify critics. Since at least last August, DHS has sent several hundred administrative subpoenas to companies like Google, Reddit, Discord, and Meta asking for the names, email addresses, phone numbers, and other identifying information of people who criticize ICE online, according to The New York Times.

“There is a broader pattern of the federal government using dubious legal resources or tools to deter speech,” Steinbaugh said.

In a statement to The Verge, DHS spokesperson Lauren Bis said the department does not comment on ongoing investigations. “Any allegation DHS and its components are attempting to ‘squash’ free speech is categorically FALSE. ICE investigates all credible threats towards its employees and officers, including threats to the ICE Director,” Bis said. “Anyone who assaults or threatens our law enforcement officers will face the consequences.”

The same day that they spoke to Streever’s wife, ICE special agents David Brodie and Abbi Henry confronted Paigelynne Gonyea, a Syracuse woman, while she was working at a polling place. Brodie and Henry gave her a warning notice similar to the one Streever received, accusing her of publicly posting personal information about federal officers. Gonyea told The Associated Press that she believed the warning was related to a January social media post she made about Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot Renee Good.

Gonyea said she told DHS agents to meet her at the polling place after receiving a voicemail saying they wanted to talk to her about “a post that we believe you made on Instagram where you doxxed an ICE agent back in January.”

DHS has repeatedly claimed that identifying federal agents — even those whose identity, like Ross’, is already publicly known — is a form of doxxing. “Doxxing federal law enforcement officers is a federal crime that puts their lives and their families in serious danger,” DHS spokesperson Bis told The Associated Press.

But reports suggest that DHS is conflating criticism and threats. Last year, agents questioned a 67-year-old retiree living in the Philadelphia suburbs about an email he sent to Joseph Dernbach, the lead ICE prosecutor on a deportation case of an Afghan refugee identified in a Washington Post article as “Mr. H.”

“Mr. Dernbach, don’t play Russian roulette with H’s life,” the man, identified as Jon, wrote, according to The Washington Post. “Err on the side of caution. There’s a reason the US government along with many other governments don’t recognise the Taliban. Apply principles of common sense and decency.”

A few minutes later, Jon received an email from Google saying DHS had requested information related to his account. And a little over two weeks after that, two plainclothes DHS agents showed up to his house with a local police officer. They had a printout of his email. The agents reportedly agreed that the email Jon sent wasn’t illegal, but said the mentions of “Russian roulette” and “the Taliban” could be construed as threats.

Beyond equating criticism and threats, DHS claims that “doxing” agents puts their lives at risk, and says that the threat of being identified is why they cover their faces and don’t wear badges labeling them as law enforcement. In March, DHS claimed there was an 8,000 percent increase in threats made against its agents and that assaults had increased by more than 1,300 percent, figures Bis reiterated in her email to The Verge. In a statement issued at the time, Bis implied that people who compare ICE to Nazis were to blame for these assaults. “Comparing ICE day-in and day-out to the Nazi Gestapo, the Secret Police, and slave patrols has consequences,” Bis said in March.

I think that everyone would instantly recognize it as a First Amendment violation if the police showed up and arrested someone for this email.

Aaron Mackey, the deputy legal director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that there are types of speech that can be considered threats — such as telling people rallying outside a government building to break in and set fire to it — but calling someone a Nazi doesn’t meet that legal standard. “Just calling someone a Nazi, which is an age-old epithet that is protected by the First Amendment, is not in the same universe as incitement, which is not protected by the First Amendment,” Mackey told The Verge.

An NPR analysis found that there aren’t nearly as many assaults of ICE agents as DHS claims. But DHS has used these dubious statistics to justify its own violence against civilians.

Last October, Border Patrol agent Charles Exum shot Marimar Martinez, a US citizen, while on patrol in Chicago as part of DHS’s Operation Midway Blitz. Martinez had been following Exum’s unmarked vehicle around the Brighton Park neighborhood, recording the incident on her phone and shouting “La migra! La migra!” out her window to alert people to the DHS presence.

Exum later claimed that Martinez had rammed his vehicle with her car; he bragged about the shooting in a Signal chat, according to court records reviewed by The New Yorker. Martinez, who survived the shooting, was charged with assaulting, impeding, and interfering with a federal law enforcement officer, and faced up to 20 years in prison if found guilty. But the agency was apparently already tracking her, though it’s unclear if the shooting was connected to that. Five days before Martinez was shot, a Customs and Border Protection team reportedly shared her name, photo, and social media account with agents in Chicago, and said she was “encouraging the doxxing” of agents by sharing posts about them on social media.

The government ultimately asked to drop the case, and the charges against her were dismissed with prejudice. Afterward, DHS released a statement calling Martinez a domestic terrorist.

Internal communications reviewed by The New Yorker said that Martinez’s information had been verified on DHS databases — but a department spokesperson told the publication that “there is NO database of ‘domestic terrorists’ run by DHS,” adding that DHS does monitor and investigate threats against its agents. In other words, DHS has denied that it has a dedicated domestic terrorism database, but it hasn’t denied keeping tabs on what it considers threats — which seemingly includes criticisms made online. Congressional Democrats have been trying to get more information about these lists, but DHS hasn’t complied, according to recent reporting by Mother Jones.

Whether or not a specific database exists, administration officials have accused critics of engaging in terrorism. White House adviser Stephen Miller called Alex Pretti a “would-be domestic terrorist” after he was killed by federal agents. Last year, Trump designated “antifa” a domestic terror organization. This June, while sentencing a man who shot an agent after a protest outside ICE’s Texas Prairieland Detention Center, a federal judge handed down decades-long sentences to several others uninvolved in the shooting — including people with no ties to the shooter who left before the incident or didn’t attend the protest at all, all of whom the government claimed were connected to an “antifa cell.”

And that same month, federal prosecutors in Minnesota indicted 15 people on charges including conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer, solicitation to commit a crime of violence, assault on a federal officer, and the destruction of federal property. Prosecutors claim that these 15 people are connected to “antifa.” The 94-page indictment accuses the defendants of property violence and mentions that one of them wrote for an “anarchist blog.”

The sum total of these efforts is to conflate dissent and crime — implying that anyone who criticizes or protests Trump’s immigration policies is endangering the lives of federal law enforcement officers.

“Even when there are specific acts of violence where federal officials are being targeted, we’re seeing the federal government reach much broadly beyond that to also prosecute people who are very far removed from that context and that criminal conduct in a way that does chill speech,” Mackey, the EFF attorney, said. Streever and Gonyea may not be facing criminal charges or prison time, but the government is still trying to shut them up.

While you’re watching the World Cup, the feds may be watching you

2026-07-03T09:37:46-04:00

It’s a big year for America. It’s the semiquincentennial, otherwise known as America250, and the United States is cohosting the World Cup. But spectators at these events — and the millions of people who live in the cities hosting them — may not realize that they, too, are being watched.

From Kansas City to New York, the US cities hosting the World Cup have been ramping up their surveillance capabilities in the months leading up to the tournament. Security measures are at an all-time high in Washington, DC, which isn’t hosting the World Cup, but is home to a series of spectacles this summer. The Fourth of July festivities in the nation’s capital will have an unprecedented level of surveillance. Law enforcement agencies say they can’t take any risks during these once-in-a-lifetime events — but privacy advocates warn that some of this surveillance won’t be limited to this summer’s celebrations.

Both the Fourth of July fireworks on the National Mall and the July 19th World Cup final in New Jersey have been designated National Special Security Events (NSSE) by the Department of Homeland Security, the most stringent security designation the agency gives. This isn’t unusual for major sporting events — the Super Bowl is always given an NSSE designation — but it’s a first for the Fourth of July. The UFC fight at the White House in June was also an NSSE, as was the official UFC watch party on the Ellipse.

Attendees at the Fourth of July fireworks show on the National Mall will have to pass through airport-style security checkpoints and won’t be allowed to bring folding chairs or coolers. Counter-drone measures will be in place, The Washington Post reports, as will bomb technicians, countersnipers, and medical personnel from several federal agencies. While attendees will notice these security measures, others could be close to invisible — including camera networks that track their biometrics.

The measures at the National Mall appear to be a response to criticisms of lax security at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which was infiltrated by a gunman who allegedly shot at a Secret Service agent.

There will be similar measures in place at the World Cup final, which Donald Trump is expected to attend — and where he will reportedly present the trophy to the winning team.

“This is going to be security-o-rama regardless of whether the president goes,” Jules Boykoff, author of Red Card: The 2026 World Cup, Sportswashing, and the FIFA Greed Machine, told The Verge. “If the president goes, that’s just an extra lacquering of security.”

Boykoff, a professor of political science at Pacific University, said there may be an increased ICE presence at the World Cup final as well, and pointed out that ICE arrested rapper 21 Savage at the 2019 Super Bowl — another NSSE — claiming he overstayed his visa.

Anne Toomey McKenna, an attorney who specializes in privacy and biometric surveillance, said the NSSE declaration may also make it easier to justify collecting communications data under the looser standard of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, instead of the more stringer requirements of the Wiretap Act.

Andrew Giuliani, executive director of the White House task force for the World Cup — and son of Rudy Giuliani — has said there will be heightened security at all the World Cup matches, even the ones Trump doesn’t attend. “You’ll have multiple perimeter checks from security. You’ll have checks while you get onto public transportation to make sure you’re a valid ticket holder,” Giuliani told the Atlantic Council’s Frederick Kempe. “Soccer fans — or futból fans — they generally like to come to stadiums late, in the 15, 20 minutes or so before the game.” But Giuliani said ticket holders should know that gates open three hours before kickoff and plan to arrive early so they don’t miss kickoff.

The surveillance isn’t limited to one-off events and in fact involves building up a massive apparatus across the country. Through FEMA, the Department of Homeland Security gave $250 million in grants to states that are hosting World Cup matches, much of which was used to buy counter-drone equipment, according to The New York Times. The FBI has also been training local law enforcement agencies on drone mitigation. According to Giuliani, the Fan Fests in all 11 host cities will be covered by counter-drone technology. It’s unclear whether these cities are using the same tech that led to an airspace closure in El Paso earlier this year.

This is going to be security-o-rama regardless of whether the president goes.

New York City — technically one of the host cities, even though the matches are taking place across the river in New Jersey — spent $6.5 million on counter-drone technology. In Kansas City, Missouri, authorities have confiscated at least 16 drones since the World Cup began.

“The general rule with the World Cup and Olympics is that local and national police forces use the sports mega event like their own private cash machine,” Boykoff said. “The World Cup creates a state of exception that allows for all manner of securitization processes.” And in many cases, once these tools are in place, they remain. Paris, for example, enabled AI video surveillance ahead of the 2024 Olympics — and is keeping it in place through the end of 2027 despite privacy concerns.

Similar camera systems have been installed throughout the US ahead of the World Cup, even in areas far beyond stadiums. Kansas City also planned on putting cameras equipped with facial recognition on some city buses, even though the state government refused to fund the project over privacy concerns. The city initially went through with the program anyway, saying it would help identify missing persons and could thwart human trafficking attempts during a major international sporting event. City officials said that the images captured are checked against active missing persons alerts and only retained if there’s a match.

“Privacy is always a tricky thing,” Tyler Means, chief mobility and strategy officer at Kansas City Area Transportation Authority, told The Washington Post. “We’ve always had cameras on our buses. It’s just new technology. I think in time it’ll smooth over and people will realize, ‘Well, it didn’t really feel any different.’”

The cameras aren’t operational yet because of backlash and technical delays, but Kansas City plans on implementing the program later this year — even though the World Cup will be over by then.

The America250 celebrations will be monitored by thousands of law enforcement officers, including National Guard troops and FBI agents, many of whom will be wearing body cameras. Several cities have expanded or reactivated CCTV systems ahead of the World Cup. Seattle reportedly reactivated dormant cameras after FBI and Seattle Police Department officials briefed the mayor on “credible threats” during the games.

McKenna said the increase in surveillance at these events isn’t unwarranted given the increased level of risk, but said there’s an issue with how biometric data is gathered and retained. McKenna noted that British Columbia, which is also hosting the World Cup, has regulations around how long surveillance footage from matches and other events can be retained — rules the US lacks.

Though CCTV has been around for decades, advances in camera technology — and AI integrations — have made these systems incredibly sophisticated. Early footage “told us a lot about what was happening, but it really wasn’t that different from what a police officer standing on the street could see themselves,” McKenna said. “That’s how the law in the US reached the conclusion that CCTV systems are okay — because it happens in a public space, so there’s no real reasonable expectation of privacy risk under the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

But cameras reach much farther than they used to — they can tilt, pan, or zoom, and can often see several miles away. They can be equipped with thermal imaging devices and facial recognition technology, all of which may be accessible to law enforcement. Some AI software can even analyze people’s facial expressions and claim to predict a person’s behavior, McKenna said.

“We have increasingly advancing AI systems with analytical capabilities that can merge so much data and detect things from the footage that before we wouldn’t know,” McKenna said. “An officer on the street wouldn’t be able to identify every person walking by, but facial recognition technology software is very common, and it can be utilized together with the footage that is being taken and collected by CCTV systems.”

All of this information can be sent to federal fusion centers, where information is shared between local law enforcement and federal agencies like ICE and the FBI. McKenna explained that when there’s more information-sharing between local law enforcement and federal security agencies, “we lose control over how that information is used.”

“That’s part of the protection we’re supposed to have under our laws — that information that’s been collected for national security purposes not be used for domestic law enforcement purposes,” McKenna said. “We have increasingly seen a blurring of national security measures becoming part of domestic law enforcement.”

There are still a couple weeks left in the World Cup. But there’s no telling how long all the surveillance data gathered around the matches will be stored, or how it will be used.

The Supreme Court stops Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship

2026-06-30T11:18:13-04:00

The Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship, ruling 6-3 against President Donald Trump’s effort to end the longstanding constitutional right via executive order.

Birthright citizenship dates back to Reconstruction. Under the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868 to guarantee citizenship and equal protection to the children of formerly enslaved people, anyone born in the United States “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” is a citizen.

Trump issued the executive order, titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” just hours after being sworn back into office in early 2025 — and the administration was almost immediately sued in response. Defending the executive order before the Supreme Court, Solicitor General D. Sauer argued that noncitizens and their children aren’t “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, since their loyalty lies with a foreign power.

An estimated 250,000 children are born on US soil to noncitizen parents each year. The birthright citizenship ban would not have gone into effect retroactively, but would have applied to anyone born 30 days after Trump’s executive order was issued.

Even conservative justices were skeptical of the administration’s argument. After Sauer claimed that the 14th Amendment needs to be revisited because we live in a different world than that of Reconstruction, Justice Neil Gorsuch countered: “it’s the same Constitution.” Still, the fact that such a fundamental constitutional right was up for debate shows just how much Trump’s nativist vision has affected American politics.

Gorsuch ultimately caved, not only signing onto Justice Clarence Thomas’s dissenting opinion but also writing one of his own. Justice Samuel Alito also dissented.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh signed onto the majority opinion, issued by Chief Justice John Roberts, but also wrote a partial dissent. For Kavanaugh, the issue wasn’t that Trump flouted the 14th Amendment — in fact, Kavanaugh claims he didn’t — but that the executive order violated the Nationality Act of 1940 and subsequent Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, both of which mirror the language of the 14th Amendment. “The constitutional issue,” Kavanaugh wrote in his partial dissent, “is not straightforward, much as we want it to be.”

Kavanaugh noted that in 1898, the Supreme Court determined that there are four groups of people who are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and are therefore ineligible for birthright citizenship: “children of foreign sovereigns, or their ministers, or born on foreign public ships, or of enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory,” as well as the “children of members of the Indian tribes.”

But he sees no reason why the category can’t be expanded to keep up with the changing times, just as the court has previously extended 1st Amendment protections to the online speech, even though there was no internet in the 18th century. Kavanaugh suggested that Congress could overturn birthright citizenship, indicating that the fight for the 14th amendment may not be over yet.

The beautiful shame

2026-06-26T14:15:46-04:00

While European tourists marvel at ranch dressing, Buc-ee’s, and other wonders of Middle America, would-be World Cup attendees from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East have experienced a different American pastime: exclusion. President Donald Trump’s nakedly racist immigration policies have prevented scores of people from traveling to the United States for the event — even, in some cases, the players themselves.

Swiss forward Breel Embolo wasn’t allowed to board the team’s flight to the US because of a criminal conviction from 2018 and had to apply for an emergency visa. In the wake of the US’s attack on Iran, the Iranian team moved its training base from Tucson, Arizona, to Tijuana, Mexico, after the State Department denied visas to several players. Customs and Border Protection agents detained Iraqi striker Aymen Hussein at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, where he was questioned for seven hours and had his phone searched. The team’s photographer was also detained and was denied entry into the US. CBP denied entry to Omar Abdulkadir Artan, who would have been the first Somali referee in World Cup history, because of “vetting concerns,” even though he had already been issued a visa.

Fans, too, have been turned away. One Scottish visitor had his travel authorization revoked an hour before his flight took off. The Trump administration has justified these actions, emphasizing that traveling to the United States is a privilege, not a right — and suggesting that some of the athletes it has turned away are threats to America, despite being some of the world’s most gifted soccer players.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin — who also threatened to pull CBP from airports in so-called “sanctuary cities” ahead of the World Cup — defended the visa denials, as did Andrew Giuliani, executive director of the White House task force for the World Cup. “The players, in particular, if it wasn’t for the World Cup, they may not necessarily be allowed to enter the United States,” Giuliani, the son of Rudy Giuliani, told CBS News. Providing few details, Giuliani claimed that Artan, the Somali referee, was denied entry because officials discovered that he had been talking to “some very bad people.” Meanwhile, CBP officials have claimed that Artan was associated “with suspected members of terrorist organizations.”

Jules Boykoff, author of Red Card: The 2026 World Cup, Sportswashing, and the FIFA Greed Machine, described the Trump administration’s stance toward international travelers as an unusual break from World Cup practice. “When you bought a ticket to the Russia men’s World Cup in 2018 or the Qatar 2022 men’s World Cup, that was tantamount to getting a visa,” Boykoff said. “Your ticket was your visa. That is definitely not happening with the United States.”

Boykoff, a professor of political science at Pacific University, said the 2017 joint bid between Mexico, the US, and Canada for the World Cup promised that international travel would be smooth. In addition to claiming that fans would get free transportation to stadiums, the three countries promised that traveling across their borders would be easy for players and attendees alike.

Even FIFA president Gianni Infantino, who awarded Trump the first FIFA Peace Prize, claimed that traveling to the US would be smooth despite the president’s immigration policies. “Everyone will be welcome in Canada, Mexico and the United States for the FIFA World Cup next year,” he said in 2025. “This process will be smooth, and it will ensure that those that qualify will be able to come with their fans.”

“There were a lot of promises made that this was going to be smooth,” Boykoff said. “FIFA has this phrase that they overuse: ‘Football united the world.’ Well, Trump’s policy here for the World Cup in regards to immigration and visas very much divides the world.”

Last December, the Trump administration issued stringent travel restrictions for nationals of 39 countries. Some — including Haiti and Iran, both of which are playing in the World Cup — have had visas banned entirely, while others, like Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal, are subject to a “partial suspension” on visa processing, including for tourists and business travelers. The ACLU issued a travel advisory in April, warning travelers that the “deteriorating human rights conditions in the United States” could lead to arbitrary denials of entry, arrests, detention, and deportation of travelers. A federal judge temporarily blocked the travel ban in early June, but by that point it was too late for most fans to plan travel to the US, much less secure visas.

Days before the World Cup began, Iran’s federation had fan tickets revoked for its three US games, preventing thousands of fans from attending matches in Los Angeles and Seattle. Compounding the problem, Iranian player Mehdi Torabi received a single-entry visa to the US, meaning he wouldn’t be able to return to the country after leaving. Giuliani, of the White House World Cup task force, told The Associated Press that US officials worked with FIFA to ensure Iranian players can enter the country ahead of its matches. He added that some Iranian officials will be denied entry, saying, “as you can imagine, there are some people that claim that they are coaches that may not be coaches,” and implying that some people associated with the Iranian team have ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The US has since eased restrictions on the Iranian team, allowing players to enter the country two days before its Friday match in Seattle.

Even fans from countries not on the travel ban list have had trouble securing visas. Abu Kass, head of the Jordanian fan association, told the BBC that he took more than 42 documents to his visa appointment in Amman, only to have his application denied. “If the head of the fan association was refused,” he asked, “who will be accepted?” Kass said he only knows of one Jordanian fan who was issued a visa for the World Cup. Dozens of Moroccan fans — including members of the country’s supporter associations — were reportedly denied visas even though they had tickets to matches in the US. In light of these denials, a member of Morocco’s parliament asked the country’s foreign minister to ask the US to provide transparent justifications for visa rejections.

Infantino has effectively responded to all of this by telling everyone to calm down, and emphasizing that FIFA can’t control any country’s border policies. “It is unfortunate what happened to Omar, the referee from Somalia, but again we don’t control everything,” Infantino said at a pre-World Cup press conference in Mexico City. “We try, we’ll discuss, we’ll see. Maybe sometimes it’s good as well to chill, relax. We work on everything, we try to resolve everything.”

But DHS has doubled down. Though the administration didn’t make good on Mullin’s threats to pull CBP from airports in sanctuary cities, border czar Tom Homan continues to hint that ICE will descend on New York, and federal officials have said that ICE may be deployed to World Cup host cities to help out local law enforcement.

Todd Schulte, president of the immigration reform group FWD.us, said mass raids at stadiums are unlikely, but acknowledged that an increased ICE presence in host cities is likely to put immigrant communities on edge.

“They’re taking an all-of-government approach to going after immigrants, but less the Greg Bovino Call of Duty kill squad approach,” Schulte said. Instead, the administration is targeting people through the legal immigration system by allowing ICE to engage in racial profiling, and by stripping people of legal status. Schulte pointed to the Supreme Court’s recent decision allowing Trump to rescind Temporary Protected Status for nationals of Syria and Haiti, which will make hundreds of thousands of people deportable with the stroke of a pen. Trump’s approach to enforcement, Schulte said, is now more “pervasive and bureaucratic” than it was before. “They’re trying to make it less visible.”

Communities in host cities are preparing for crackdowns. In Houston, volunteers with Organized Power in Numbers (OPIN) dressed as referees and handed out “red cards” to fans outside Shell Energy Stadium. These flyers informed people of their rights when interacting with ICE and other federal law enforcement — even if they’re noncitizens. Volunteers also helped local business owners put up “employees only” signs to ensure that parts of their businesses are inaccessible to law enforcement, and showed them how to recognize the difference between administrative and judicial warrants, the latter of which ICE rarely obtains.

Mauricio Escobar, an organizer with OPIN, said ICE has ramped up its presence in Houston over the past year and said the group has been preparing for even more agents to flood the city during the World Cup. “We know that ICE and DHS will be here to act as overflow police, but that’s not to say that they won’t be doing other things,” Escobar said, adding that OPIN is aware of racial profiling incidents involving ICE.

Like the Olympics, hosting the biggest event for the most popular global sport is supposed to be a boon for national pride. But Trump’s stance on immigration has only become more aggressive since his return to office, and his second term has been characterized by an unprecedented crackdown on legal immigration, especially from countries he considers inferior. Given that the US, Canada, and Mexico started campaigning to host the World Cup in 2017, it’s possible that no one — not even Trump himself — thought Trump would still be in office nearly a decade later, when the country would be actively inviting thousands of foreign nationals to its shores. Bringing people of all nationalities together in a single place is the whole point of the World Cup, but for the US president, the more important message seems to be that even at a celebratory global event, some people don’t belong.

Charlie Kirk’s legacy is a 30-year sentence for moving zines

2026-06-25T05:47:59-04:00

Just days after a gunman killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk, it became clear that President Donald Trump would use the assassination to fuel a crackdown on free speech. To avenge Kirk’s death, the administration vowed to go after so-called “antifa” (otherwise known as antifascist) terrorists. Now that promise is bearing fruit. This week, eight Texas activists were sentenced to between 30 and 100 years in prison — one for attempted murder, but most for supposedly belonging to an insurrectionary “Antifa cell,” including one sentenced to 30 years in part for moving a box of zines.

These unusually harsh sentences are a major victory for the Trump administration, one that will likely serve as a blueprint for targeting activists across the US. The emboldened administration has quickly celebrated them. In a statement, acting attorney general Todd Blanche said that the sentences show that the law will come down hard on “Antifa terrorists who attack law enforcement and federal facilities.” But many of those sentenced did no such thing.

The Texas cases concern a July 4th, 2025 protest outside the Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas. Roughly a dozen protesters set off fireworks and shouted messages in Spanish through a bullhorn. Then it escalated: a few people slashed an ICE van’s tires, broke a security camera, and vandalized a guard shack. When guards came out of the building and told the group to leave, some complied, but others stayed. After a police officer arrived on the scene and drew his gun, one person shouted “Get to the rifles” and fired a rifle he’d brought with him, according to charging documents. The officer, who was shot in the neck, testified that he “knew” his life was in danger and spent three to four hours in the hospital after being shot.

Benjamin Song, the shooter, said he fired because he thought the officer was going to fire on a protester, and was convicted of attempted murder. But in addition to the shooting charge, prosecutors dubbed Song the “leader of the antifa cell.” Alongside rioting and discharging a firearm during a violent crime, a conviction for providing material support to terrorists was also included — and he was sentenced to 100 years in prison.

Other defendants were convicted of lesser crimes ranging from rioting to providing material support to terrorists, catch-all charges the government has applied to acts as disparate as distributing anarchist literature and “dressing in black bloc.” But their sentences, too, spanned decades.

Two people — Savanna Batten and Elizabeth Soto — weren’t involved in planning the protest, arrived separately from the others, and left when guards told them to, before the shooting. They were each sentenced to 50 years in prison. Among other accusations, the government declared they “were part of a group that created and distributed insurrectionary materials called ‘zines.’” Daniel Sanchez-Estrada, who didn’t attend the protest at all, was sentenced to 30 years in prison for moving a box of zines — an act prosecutors claimed was “corruptly concealing a document or record.” Ines Soto, Elizabeth Soto’s husband, was granted a continuance and will be sentenced on July 1st, according to the Department of Justice. (So will seven others who pleaded guilty to one count of providing material support to terrorists, some of whom testified as witnesses in the trial.) The other sentences handed down suggest that his will be similarly harsh.

The Department of Justice reportedly conceded that the zines weren’t even illegal — they were made for a book club named after anarchist organizer Emma Goldman, which read about topics including feminism and “the eradication of artificial intelligence from the face of the earth.” But it claimed that the Sotos had, by tabling at a zine fair, provided “material support to terrorists.”

“The defendants’ violence and terrorism is an assault on Democracy,” said Reed O’Connor, a Republican-friendly judge who among others handed down the sentences. O’Connor argued that the government needs to “deter this type of conduct.” In a statement to The Guardian, Song called it “collective punishment.”

In a statement, FBI director Kash Patel said the agency “remains committed to identifying, locating, and dismantling Antifa and its funding networks across the country,” and more cases are coming. Last week, prosecutors indicted 15 people in Minnesota on a raft of charges including conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer, solicitation to commit a crime of violence, assault on a federal officer, and the destruction of federal property. Like the Prairieland defendants, the DOJ claims the 15 people charged in Minnesota are connected to “antifa.”

The DOJ is trying to punish people for trailing ICE officers — and if it succeeds, other activists could be next.

The indictment notes that the defendants are involved with the Black Cat Workers Collective and claims they “infiltrated and exploited lawful protests” in the Twin Cities, where thousands of people resisted Operation Metro Surge, a months-long DHS operation that resulted in the arrests of thousands of immigrants and the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, which the federal government has suppressed efforts to investigate and prosecute. It accuses some — but not all — of the defendants of using homemade shields, using debris to obstruct traffic, and obstructing DHS vehicles with wood, leafblowers, and other items as they left the Whipple Federal Building to make arrests.

The indictment cites communications on Signal, which was used widely to coordinate mutual aid distributions and patrols of neighborhoods for ICE vehicles in Minnesota. Patel said during the protests that the FBI had opened an investigation into activists’ group chats. Here, the indictment says defendants coordinated “anti-law enforcement action,” practiced operational security — or OPSEC — techniques, and engaged in “counter-surveillance tactics.” One defendant is accused of kicking a government vehicle and “causing dents.” Two are accused of traveling across state lines “with the intent to kill, injure, harass, intimidate, or place under surveillance another person.” In plain English, the DOJ is trying to punish people for trailing ICE officers — and if it succeeds, other activists could be next.

Though the indictment distinguishes between legal and allegedly illegal actions, its language is slippery. Erik Davis, a religious studies professor at Macalester College in St. Paul and one of the arrested activists, expressed disbelief at the charges at a court hearing last week. “I seem to be indicted for holding meetings,” Davis reportedly told the judge. Indeed, the 94-page indictment claims that Davis moderated an “Emergency Meeting on Resistance to ICE Operation” in January and sent messages about other meetings in Signal group chats. The indictment notes that another defendant, Isaac Auman Sant, wrote an article for an “anarchist blog.” In his article, Sant allegedly mentioned watching someone break into an ICE vehicle. Notably, the indictment does not say that Sant vandalized the car, just that he was in the presence of someone who did.

The strategy here is guilt by association. Just as White House officials justified Alex Pretti’s death by smearing him as a domestic terrorist and “would-be assassin,” any of the thousands of regular people who resisted ICE’s siege of the Twin Cities could be called an antifa terrorist — and be condemned to a lifetime in prison as a result.

AI is cursing renters with the promise of impossible homes

2026-06-22T15:52:26-04:00

Joyce, a native New Yorker, didn’t think finding her first solo apartment in the city would be easy. But she also didn’t think it’d be “hell.” After looking at a lot of tiny, overpriced places she described as “shitholes,” Joyce found her dream apartment: a reasonably priced studio in Manhattan.

“It was big and airy, and there was a fireplace,” she said. The kitchen was small but well equipped and looked like it had been recently renovated. She dropped everything to see the apartment, and when she got there, she learned that five other women, all around her age, had viewings scheduled after hers.

“I get in, and it’s not the same apartment at all,” she told me. It was much smaller than it looked in the pictures. The kitchen sink was different. The stove was missing several knobs. There was no fireplace. “There’s the idea of the apartment that we saw in the pictures,” she said, and then there was the apartment itself. “My friend said we should’ve known it was AI because there was a plant on the gas stove in the picture.”

New York City brokers have always had a knack for making even the most run-down apartments look passable in photos, but generative AI has given them the ability to do so with the click of a button. For renters, this means spending even more time scrutinizing every listing to avoid ending up in an apartment that looks far better online than it does in person.

Virtual staging isn’t new, but AI is. Bee, a Realtor who works in Florida who asked that her last name be withheld for privacy reasons, said virtual staging often helps people envision how they could refurnish or remodel a home. “You’d be surprised how little creativity a buyer or renter has,” she said. “Virtual staging could be anywhere from, like, $40 to $400 based on what you’re having these stagers do, whereas real-life staging can’t be done for under a couple grand.”

She showed me a photo from one of her active listings, a house with furniture she described as “dated.” The living room had plush sofas, an ornate wood coffee table, a Persian-style rug, and heavy drapery. Then she showed me the way she redecorated it with ChatGPT. The white sofa, track lighting, and plain, woven rug were decidedly modern. She said the edited photo isn’t going on the listing, but she does share it with clients to demonstrate how they could update the space.

Real estate agents and brokers have several virtual staging tools at their disposal. Bee’s favorites are Stuccco and BoxBrownie, both of which charge per listing. But Bee said there’s a difference between using virtual staging software to show what a house could look like with new furniture and a few DIY upgrades, and using AI tools to create misleading listings. “There’s a lawsuit waiting to happen,” she said. “I think ‘digitally altered’ is not accurate. I don’t necessarily put ‘digitally altered’ if I have AI make a bed, but ‘digitally altered,’ to me, says, ‘I patched a hole.’”

Madison, a Queens resident, said she wanted to get a head start on looking for apartments before her lease is up in the fall. In her six years of living in New York, she’s found apartments via Facebook groups and, once, through a post on the queer dating and classifieds app Lex. This time, she’s been looking on StreetEasy, where she’s seen a proliferation of AI-enhanced listings.

“I think scammy or misleading pictures for apartments have existed for as long as internet listings for apartments have, but it’s really egregious now,” she said. Whereas pre-AI real estate scams included photos of totally different apartments, “now I’m looking at a picture of a room that more or less looks real until you start looking at the details of the furniture and things like that, where they clearly took a picture of the actual room and said, ‘Hey, ChatGPT, can you put some furniture in this for me?’”

Some states are starting to crack down on AI-enhanced listings. New York recently implemented a law mandating disclosure of AI in ads, but the legislation mostly focuses on “synthetic performers,” not on AI-generated furniture. But the New York secretary of state did issue a warning last year about misleading AI-generated or AI-enhanced listings, noting that brokers are already prohibited from posting dishonest advertisements.

California’s recent Altered Image Law goes a step further, requiring anyone advertising property to disclose when they’ve used AI to alter or enhance images. But much like broker and Realtor regulations, laws governing the use of AI in listings and other advertisements vary from state to state.

Joyce, who found an apartment after searching for several months, said that even the descriptions appear to be AI-generated. “Everything is ‘charming.’ Everything is ‘cozy.’ You notice the same wording patterns over and over again, where everything has ‘spa-like finishes,’” she said. “Brokers are already so dishonest, and now they have, like, the lying machine in their pocket.”

A warrantless wiretap law is about to expire — but surveillance networks aren’t actually ‘going dark’

2026-06-11T12:42:26-04:00

Congress has failed to pass a three-week extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), with the House voting 218-198 against reauthorizing the controversial warrantless wiretapping authority through July 2nd. After a short-term extension earlier this year, the spying program now appears set to lapse for at least a week. This is the nightmare scenario FISA’s proponents have been warning about — but it doesn’t actually mean the US has lost its surveillance capabilities.

Proponents of a clean extension claim a lapse will hinder intelligence agencies’ efforts to thwart potential terrorist attacks, with surveillance networks “going dark.” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) stressed the importance of reauthorizing Section 702 ahead of the World Cup. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has said even a brief lapse would be disastrous. “Democrats in the Senate are playing political games right now with the lives of Americans,” he told reporters Wednesday. “It’s a very dangerous situation.”

In March, the FISA court recertified surveillance under Section 702 until 2027. The Brennan Center for Justice notes that a lapse won’t allow telecom companies to flout requests to hand over communications information to the NSA and other spy agencies. In 2008, after Yahoo failed to comply with a Section 702 request during a lapse, the FISA court ruled that the directives issued under Section 702 are effective while the certification is in place — even in the event of a lapse.

“The phrase ‘going dark’ is significantly misleading,” Andrea Sawka Fiegl, the senior policy director for media and technology at Common Cause, said on a Tuesday press call. Fiegl added that companies don’t choose whether they participate in surveillance under Section 702. If they don’t comply after being served with a directive, they face fines starting at $250,000 a day.

“The ‘going dark’ framing is basically a pressure tactic designed to strip Congress of its leverage to negotiate reforms by creating this false binary,” Fiegl said. “There is ample time for Congress to consider and pass reforms.”

Among those reforms are a warrant requirement for queries involving US persons, including so-called “backdoor searches” in which intelligence agencies identify a foreign target with ties to a US person, and then search that person’s communications, thus granting them access to their desired US target. Reformers also want to prohibit intelligence agencies from buying Americans’ data from private brokers to get around warrant requirements.

“Every day that Section 702 is in effect without reforms is a day that Americans’ rights are under threat,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said in a statement Wednesday night, after Senate Republicans blocked his request for a five-week extension of Section 702 with new transparency requirements. “If there is going to be an extension of these authorities, there needs to be some guardrails or at least some transparency that would allow Congress and the American people to understand the abuses that have taken place and the need for reforms.”

Though President Donald Trump and Republican leaders in both chambers have called for a clean reauthorization of Section 702, there’s bipartisan appetite for reform — and a handful of Republican holdouts stand in the way of a clean reauthorization. Most Democrats — even some who have supported reauthorization in the past — have objected to a clean extension due to Trump’s appointment of Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence.

Congress just gave DHS another $70 billion

2026-06-09T19:12:54-04:00

Congress narrowly voted to fund President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda, giving the Department of Homeland Security $70 billion over the next three years.

The house voted 214 to 212 in favor of the reconciliation bill Tuesday, following the Senate’s 52-47 vote last Friday morning. The vote fell largely along party lines. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) was the only Senate Republican to vote against it. Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI), initially voted against the bill — meaning it would have failed — but changed his vote after huddling with House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) and Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-OK), according to The Hill. No Democrats voted in favor of the funding bill, which was done through a budget reconciliation process to avoid a Democratic filibuster.

Democrats tried to use the legislation to block Trump’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund,” which would compensate people who claim they were victimized by the federal government — and which critics say is a slush fund for Trump’s allies. (The Department of Justice said it would stop work on the fund after a federal judge in Virginia temporarily blocked it from making any payouts, but Trump has continued to express interest in the idea.) They also tried to get Republicans to agree to a number of reforms for ICE and Customs and Border Protection in the wake of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Neither appear in the final bill.

In a speech on the House floor ahead of the Tuesday vote, Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-PA) criticized Republicans for using the budget reconciliation process to avoid negotiating with Democrats, and emphasized ICE’s lack of popularity with the American people.

“At its core, this Republican reconciliation budget bill is a statement about priorities, and the priorities represented in this budget bill could not be more out of step with the needs and values of the American people,” Scanlon said.

Scanlon noted that DHS has yet to spend $100 billion of the nearly $200 billion it received under Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. She added that Trump has not only expanded ICE’s reach by increasingly going after legal immigrants but also weaponized DHS against its critics. The bill, she said, will “supercharge” Trump’s abuses.

After the House markup last Friday, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, noted that the bill not only lacks sufficient reforms but also cuts funding for cybersecurity and TSA, whose workers went weeks without pay during the DHS shutdown.

The funding bill comes at a time of deep unpopularity for ICE. One recent poll found that just 33 percent of voters approve of how the agency is doing its job.

And it comes amid yet another threat from border czar Tom Homan to flood New York City with ICE agents. In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Homan said he would send “more ICE agents than you’ve ever seen” to New York City if the state government passed a bill limiting cooperation with DHS.

“Providing a quarter trillion dollars to an administration promising that the public ‘ain’t seen shit yet’ when it comes to mass deportation is a historic mistake,” Todd Schulte, president of the immigration reform group FWD.us, said in a statement. “Supercharging the funding for these already out of control systems will come with terrible human consequences and continue to be met with increasing opposition from voters.”

Correction, June 9th: A previous version of this story said Rep. Tim Walberg voted against the funding bill. He initially voted against it but then changed his vote to support it.

Update, June 9th: This story has been updated to include comment from FWD.us president Todd Schulte.