The sun sets over a playground across the street from a group of apartments where many Somali people live in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)

Our church stands one short block from where an ICE agent took the life of Renee Good. A few days later, the violence ICE is perpetrating in our city arrived, literally, on our doorstep: Armed masked men raided our neighbors’ homes, remaining at our corner for two long hours. As we prayed and cared for those around us, several of our pastors and staff were among those who were pepper-bombed.

Our city is under siege, and when we asked the children in our congregation how they are feeling, they told us, unsurprisingly, that they feel scared. One youth, the child of an immigrant, texted his grandmother in the middle of the night: “I’m scared every day i live in fear and I don’t know what to do if your awake please call me.”

How can we comfort our children? We feel scared too.

And so, in this climate of fear, we turn to that life-affirming work. Immigrant families are afraid to venture outside. We’ve had to cancel our children’s choir practice until we can confidently gather the children safely.

Yet a few children and their moms still rallied to go grocery shopping for immigrant families, delivering boxes to a local McDonald’s where many immigrants work. In distributing Happy Meals to the appreciative children, the assistant manager offered a lesson in how mutual care strengthens the bonds of community. “When you share,” he explained in his accented English, “we share.”

We wish that feeding one another during these terrible times would be enough. But our young people tell us it is not. As one of our youth said, “I want to make sure my friends are not stolen from their families.” Another child asked, “Could you make ICE disappear? They hurt people.”

Jesus understood what it meant to live under an occupying force — in his case, the Roman Empire. He understood the helplessness. He understood the stakes, and yet he persisted in showing us, before ultimately dying from the violence, that another way — a way of love — is possible.

So we will continue to deliver groceries. We will make arrangements so that, if the unfathomable happens, the children can stay with other families. And from the epicenter of this occupation, we send out the children’s plea: Please. Make the people who are hurting people disappear.

State Rep. Christine Sinicki (D-Milwaukee), shown here at a September 2025 press conference, said on the Assembly floor Tuesday that the UI bill would "take away benefits from the people who need them the most." (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

On a party-line vote, a bill changing Wisconsin’s unemployment insurance laws, which Gov. Tony Evers’ office said he will veto, passed the Assembly  Tuesday.

The bill would allow people collecting federal disability payments to remain eligible for unemployment insurance if they lose a job. But it would cut their jobless pay by half the value of their disability pay.

The bill was sent to the Legislature from the joint labor-management Unemployment Insurance Advisory Council, which negotiates on a proposed “agreed-upon bill” every two years.

Historically the council’s bills have enjoyed broad support and easy passage, but the current measure, AB 652, includes changes that prompted opposition from Democrats. Evers’ spokesperson told the Wisconsin Examiner on Jan. 7 that the governor will veto the bill if it reaches his desk.

The bill is the first jobless pay measure in more than a decade to raise the maximum benefit, increasing it by $25 a week to $395. Critics argue that is inadequate.

The critics also object to reducing jobless pay for people who receive Social Security Disability Income, and to the measure’s proposed new strictures on the unemployment insurance system that Evers has previously vetoed.

A federal judge in July 2025 ordered the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development to stop enforcing a ban on unemployment compensation for SSDI recipients that was enacted in 2013. The judge ruled a year earlier that the ban violated federal laws protecting people with disabilities.

Before voting on the advisory council’s unemployment insurance bill Tuesday, Assembly Republicans voted 53-44 to block Democrats from passing a substitute amendment removing provisions they opposed and increasing the value of jobless pay. They went on to pass the unamended bill by the same 53-44 margin.

The Democratic amendment would have repealed the state’s ban on unemployment compensation for SSDI recipients, but without the financial penalty. The amendment also included a $127 increase in the maximum benefit through Jan. 2, 2027, followed by annual increases in line with the consumer price index. In addition, it increased the cap on how much income a laid-off person could make in a week while continuing to qualify for jobless pay.

“Wisconsinites deserve adequate unemployment benefits. This amendment is a step towards being able to do just that,” said Rep. Maureen McCarville (D-DeForest).

At a state Senate hearing Jan. 7, Scott Manley, a lobbyist for Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce and chair of the advisory council’s management caucus, defended the council bill’s jobless pay penalty for SSDI recipients, arguing that it would treat disability pay like other sources of income people get while they collect unemployment insurance.

“If you have additional income … that income is going to offset your unemployment benefits,” Manley said. “Unemployment is supposed to provide a temporary safety net of additional income for people who lose their job through no fault of their own.”

On the Assembly floor Tuesday, Rep. Chris Sinicki (D-Milwaukee) — who in the past has supported advisory council bills but came out against the council’s legislation in this session — reiterated her opposition. She said a constituent on the autism spectrum qualifies for SSDI and works part-time at a local library, allowing her to live independently.

“Without that part-time job, she could not afford to be independent,” Sinicki said. “I sure as heck do not want to be one to vote to take away benefits from the people who need them the most.”

A voter casts a paper ballot in Virginia. Despite two recent legal setbacks, the Trump administration has sued the Virginia elections commissioner in its quest to obtain sensitive voter data. (Photo by Markus Schmidt/Virginia Mercury)

The Trump administration has sued another state — Virginia — in its quest to obtain sensitive voter data, despite two recent legal setbacks in suits against other states.

The Justice Department on Friday sued Susan Beals, the elections commissioner in Virginia, after months of seeking a copy of the state’s voter registration lists, including individual names, addresses, dates of birth and Social Security numbers.

“Virginia becomes the next state sued for ignoring federal law!” U.S. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon wrote on the social media platform X.

The Trump administration has sued more than 20 states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, in what the administration frames as a quest to ensure that states are properly maintaining voter rolls, that ineligible people are kept off rolls and that only citizens are voting.

The U.S. Department of Justice is sharing state voter roll information with the Department of Homeland Security in a search for noncitizens, the Trump administration confirmed in September.

While election officials stress that well-maintained voter rolls are important, President Donald Trump and some of his Republican allies have long promoted baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.

In the Virginia case, the Justice Department claims it was reassured by the administration of former Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin that it would hand over voter rolls. But that did not occur and Youngkin was term-limited. On Saturday, Democrat Abigail Spanberger was sworn in as Virginia’s 75th governor.

Beals, the elections commissioner, was appointed by Youngkin in 2022. The state election department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Last week, similar federal lawsuits hit roadblocks in California and Oregon.

U.S. District Court Judge David Carter dismissed a lawsuit by the Department of Justice against California seeking voter information, calling the request “unprecedented and illegal.” Just a day earlier, a separate federal judge said from the bench he planned to dismiss a similar lawsuit against Oregon.

Democratic secretaries of state have criticized the federal government’s data requests, calling them an unwarranted attempt by the Trump administration to exercise federal power over elections. Under the U.S. Constitution, states administer elections, though Congress can regulate them.

Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@stateline.org. 

Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey speaks at a press conference addressing reports that the Trump administration is sending around 100 federal immigration agents to Minnesota, specifically targeting the Somali community Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2025. (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)

Days after news leaked of a criminal investigation of Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey over their handling of immigration enforcement in Minnesota, the U.S. Department of Justice has delivered subpoenas to the offices of Walz and Frey, as well as St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty.

The New York Times first reported the delivery of the subpoenas, and other national outlets also confirmed that reporting.

The subpoenas are an extraordinary escalation of the ongoing conflict between the Trump administration and Minnesota, where heavily-armed, masked federal agents now outnumber all the metro police departments combined, frequently using tactics a federal judge has called unconstitutional.

When the investigation became public last week, Walz replied in a statement: “Two days ago it was Elissa Slotkin. Last week it was Jerome Powell. Before that, Mark Kelly,” he said, referring to the U.S. senators who made a video telling U.S. servicemembers that they can and must refuse illegal orders, as well as the chairman of the Federal Reserve, who has refused to lower interest rates as quickly as Trump desires. “Weaponizing the justice system and threatening political opponents is a dangerous, authoritarian tactic,” Walz said.

Ellison, who’s sued the Trump administration more than 30 times in the past year, said the investigation is being used to distract: “Instead of seriously investigating the killing of Renee Good, Trump is weaponizing the justice system against any leader who dares stand up to him,” referring to the Minneapolis woman shot by federal officer Jonathan Ross earlier this month. “Donald Trump is coming after the people of Minnesota and I’m standing in his way. I will not be intimidated and I will not stop working to protect Minnesotans from Trump’s campaign of retaliation and revenge,” Ellison said.

Frey called the investigation “an obvious attempt to intimidate me for standing up for Minneapolis, our local law enforcement and our residents against the chaos and danger this administration has brought to our streets.”

He added: “I will not be intimidated.”

Her, whose tenure as St. Paul mayor began earlier this month, said in a statement that Trump “promised retribution, and consistent with that promise, we received a subpoena today from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. I am unfazed by these tactics, and I stand firm in my commitment to protect our residents, neighbors and community.”

The Washington Post reported that “the subpoenas suggest that the Justice Department is examining whether Walz’s and Frey’s public statements disparaging the surge of officers and federal actions have amounted to criminal interference in law enforcement work.”

Walz, who announced earlier this month he won’t seek a third term, also used his statement last week to criticize the federal government for not properly investigating the killing of Renee Good by federal immigration officer Jonathan Ross. “The only person not being investigated for the shooting of Renee Good is the federal agent who shot her,” he said.

Six prosecutors in the Minnesota Office of U.S. Attorney quit last week, The New York Times reported, because they objected to their bosses’ push to investigate the widow of Good and their ties to anti-ICE groups.

The ICE surge, which has put as many as 3,000 federal agents in the state — or nearly five times the number of sworn officers with the Minneapolis Police Department — is just the latest round of an ongoing conflict between Minnesota and the federal government. Fraud in Minnesota’s social programs — often funded in whole or part by the federal government — has caught the attention of right-wing media and activists, and the Trump administration has followed with a wide array of investigations of Minnesota programs across a range of agencies.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is auditing Hennepin Healthcare — Minnesota’s largest safety net hospital — for compliance with immigrant employment eligibility laws.

The Trump administration has frozen child care payments and halted small business grants. The administration also says it’s investigating possible housing assistance fraud and looking into Minnesota’s unemployment insurance program. The federal government has also attempted to withhold funds to Minnesota for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, but a federal court issued a preliminary injunction.

Earlier this week, Trump said he would cut all federal funding to Minnesota and other states that have sanctuary cities beginning Feb. 1, but it’s unclear what that means and few details have been released.

A masked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent knocks on a car window in Minnesota on Jan. 12. A new court ruling allows ICE to use Medicaid data, alarming some states and advocates who warn it could have a chilling effect on immigrant families accessing health care. (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)

In a win for President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, a recent court ruling has cleared the way for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to resume using states’ Medicaid data to find people who are in the country illegally.

The case is ongoing. But for now, immigrants — including those who are in the country legally — will have to weigh the benefits of gaining health coverage against the risk that enrolling in Medicaid could make them or their family members easier for ICE to find.

Last summer, 22 states and the District of Columbia sued the Trump administration to block information sharing between ICE and Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program that primarily covers people with low incomes. But at the end of December, a federal judge ruled that ICE can pull some basic Medicaid data to use in its deportation proceedings, including addresses, phone numbers, birth dates and citizenship or immigration status.

The court ruled that in the states that sued, ICE is not allowed to collect information about lawful permanent residents or citizens, nor records about sensitive health information. In the 28 states that didn’t sue, however, the court did not place any limits on the Medicaid information ICE can access.

The U.S. District Court in San Francisco essentially said that government agencies can share some data, including basic identifying information. “That kind of data sharing is clearly authorized by statute,” the decision states.

But the court also ruled that agencies can’t share more sensitive data without adequately explaining why they need it. In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria wrote that ICE and federal Medicaid information-sharing policies were “totally unclear and do not appear to be the product of a coherent decisionmaking process.” He said the states had shown they would “suffer irreparable harm from these vague and likely overbroad” policies.

By law, federal Medicaid money cannot be used to cover people who are in the country illegally.

But in recent years, nearly half of states, including some led by Republicans, have chosen to use their own Medicaid money to extend coverage to certain groups of people, such as children and pregnant women, regardless of immigration status.

Advocates for immigrants and some state officials worry that ICE’s use of Medicaid data will cause widespread fear among immigrant families, keeping them from seeking the health care that states have said they’re eligible to receive. California’s health department recently called the administration’s actions “a grave breach of public trust.”

“States have constantly reassured people that their health care information won’t be used against them, and that’s changed,” said Tanya Broder, senior counsel for health and economic justice policy at the National Immigration Law Center, an advocacy organization focused on immigrant rights.

Court filings in the lawsuit illustrate the potential impact of the ruling.

In Chicago, for example, a patient at an Esperanza Health Center delayed her first prenatal visit until her third trimester because she worried enrolling in Medicaid could put her husband at risk of deportation, the clinic reported in a December court filing. By the time she received care, she had complications that could have been addressed with earlier health visits. Another patient refused to apply for Medicaid for her child, a U.S. citizen, because she worried that seeking benefits would allow ICE to locate her.

“The expectation of privacy that we all have when we seek to enroll in a health care program has been compromised,” said Broder.

“Not only undocumented immigrants but people who live in families with immigrants and the broader community are going to feel less comfortable in applying for these health programs, over concerns their information is going to be weaponized against them or their family members.”

An about-face

Several months into Trump’s second term, ICE gained access to the personal data of 79 million Medicaid enrollees as part of its efforts to find people who may be living illegally in the United States.

Data on Medicaid enrollees is routinely exchanged between states and the feds, including to verify eligibility to receive federal funding. But the new agreement marked an about-face from past federal policies of not using such information for immigration enforcement.

The effort is unprecedented at the national level, said Medha Makhlouf, a law professor at Penn State Dickinson Law who specializes in health and immigration.

“Previously the federal government has balanced immigration enforcement interests with the protection of health-related interests,” she said. “Now they’re weighing much more heavily the interests of immigration enforcement.”

That puts the federal government at odds with states that have expanded health coverage as a matter of public health and economic policy, she said. Many states have extended coverage to a wider swath of people on the premise that broader coverage helps prevent the spread of disease, prioritizes preventive care over more costly emergency treatment and reduces economic losses when employees miss work because of illness.

The judge’s order will stand until the case is resolved, as the judge considers what kinds of data can be released for use in immigration enforcement.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, said in a July statement that the Trump administration’s data-sharing move was illegal and “created a culture of fear that will lead to fewer people seeking vital emergency medical care.”

Federal officials say they’re allowed to use lawfully collected information for immigration enforcement purposes.

The Department of Homeland Security and ICE did not respond to requests for comment.

Broder, of the National Immigration Law Center, said it isn’t clear whether the limited information the court has allowed the Department of Homeland Security to use can be cleanly separated from data belonging to citizens and lawful permanent residents. The ruling says that if that basic data can’t be separated from data that’s still protected, Medicaid can’t share it with ICE.

California’s Department of Health Care Services, which administers the state’s Medicaid program, emphasized that concern in a statement updated earlier this month. The department said the feds haven’t provided any information about how they plan to implement the court’s order.

Meanwhile, some states are looking at their options for protecting their Medicaid data. Oregon Health Authority Director Dr. Sejal Hathi called the move to use Medicaid data for immigration enforcement “disappointing, to say the least” in a public board meeting earlier this month.

She said her agency is “committed to doing all that we can within our authority to protect the health privacy of our members” and is working with health providers to “ensure that Oregonians, no matter their background, can continue to seek and receive quick and responsive health care without worrying about the safety of their health information.”

States step up

In recent years, an increasing number of states have used their own money to extend health insurance coverage under their Medicaid programs to some noncitizens, such as people with green cards, refugees and those with temporary protected status.

For example, 14 states and the District of Columbia cover income-eligible children regardless of immigration status, while seven states and the district offer state-funded coverage to some adults with low incomes, regardless of immigration status. Nearly half of states — including a handful of red states — cover income-eligible pregnant women, regardless of their immigration status.

Makhlouf, of Penn State, directs a legal clinic at her law school where law students assist people who face legal barriers to getting health care and other public benefits. The students have fielded questions from parents — even those who are in the country legally — who have asked if applying for Medicaid for their children, who are U.S. citizens, jeopardizes their own legal status or exposes household members to scrutiny from ICE.

“We see the chilling effects directly,” Makhlouf said. “Folks have many more questions about the risks versus the benefits of applying for government programs. It should be an easy decision for families to accept help, but it’s not easy anymore.”

In the past year, the Trump administration also has ordered states to hand over personal data from sources including voter rolls and food stamps, even as it consolidates information held across federal agencies into a trove of information on people who live in the United States.

In November, a federal judge blocked the IRS from sharing taxpayer information for immigration purposes.

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.

People hold Greenlandic flags as they gather to march in protest against U.S. President Donald Trump and his announced intent to acquire Greenland on Jan. 17, 2026 in Nuuk, Greenland. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump showed no signs Tuesday of backing off his goal to acquire Greenland, after saying over the weekend he would place a 10% tariff on eight European countries that object to his plans and posting several times on social media.

Trump’s insistence that the United States gain control of the Arctic island from Denmark came just hours before he was set to travel to Davos, Switzerland, to meet with other world leaders at the World Economic Forum.

Trump said during an afternoon press conference that threatening tariffs on allied countries that oppose his plans is “the best, the strongest, the fastest, the easiest, the least complicated” way to obtain Greenland. 

Trump said he has “other alternatives” and that people will “find out” how far he’s willing to go to make Greenland part of the United States, though he seemed somewhat optimistic he can reach a deal. 

“I think that we will work something out where NATO is going to be very happy and where we’re going to be very happy,” Trump said, referring to the military alliance founded after World War II. “But we need it for security purposes, we need it for national security and even world security. It’s very important.”

Trump said he plans to talk with people living in Greenland when asked about residents not wanting to become part of the United States.

“I haven’t spoken to them,” Trump said. “When I speak to them, I’m sure they’ll be thrilled.”

Trump posts about Greenland repeatedly

Trump posted on social media numerous times earlier Tuesday and throughout the weekend, pressing other leaders to help him secure Greenland, despite ongoing opposition. 

“I had a very good telephone call with Mark Rutte, the Secretary General of NATO, concerning Greenland,” Trump posted at 12:26 a.m. “I agreed to a meeting of the various parties in Davos, Switzerland. As I expressed to everyone, very plainly, Greenland is imperative for National and World Security. There can be no going back — On that, everyone agrees!” 

Trump posted an altered image of him showing a map to European leaders that had a version of the U.S. flag covering Canada, Greenland and Venezuela. He also posted a fabricated image of him planting the U.S. flag in Greenland and declaring it a territory with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio standing behind him. Both were published around 1 a.m.

Trump posted screenshots of text message conversations with Rutte, who pledged to find “a way forward on Greenland” as well as French President Emmanuel Macron, who told Trump that he does “not understand what you are doing on Greenland,” and asked to set up a dinner in Paris with other world leaders to discuss the issue this week. 

Trump said during his press conference that he didn’t intend to accept Macron’s invitation. 

“No, I wouldn’t do that,” Trump said. “Because, you know, Emmanuel is not going to be there very long and, you know, there’s no longevity there. He’s a friend of mine. He’s a nice guy. I like Macron. But he’s not going to be there very much longer as you know. And I think I have meetings with the people that are directly involved.”

Island of Diego Garcia

Trump posted to social media again around 1:38 a.m., this time criticizing the United Kingdom over its plans “to give away the Island of Diego Garcia, the site of a vital U.S. Military Base, to Mauritius, and to do so FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER.”

“There is no doubt that China and Russia have noticed this act of total weakness. These are International Powers who only recognize STRENGTH, which is why the United States of America, under my leadership, is now, after only one year, respected like never before,” Trump added. “The UK giving away extremely important land is an act of GREAT STUPIDITY, and is another in a very long line of National Security reasons why Greenland has to be acquired. Denmark and its European Allies have to DO THE RIGHT THING.”

A BBC news article from September 2024, where one of its reporters was granted access to the island, notes that “Diego Garcia is one of about 60 islands that make up the Chagos Archipelago or British Indian Ocean Territory (Biot) – the last colony established by the UK by separating it from Mauritius in 1965. It is located about halfway between East Africa and Indonesia.”

The U.K. and U.S. originally signed a 50-year lease in 1966 that was later extended for 20 years and is set to end in 2036, according to the BBC article. 

A U.S. military website states that access to “Diego Garcia is restricted, requiring area clearance by U.S. Navy Support Facility Diego Garcia.”

Tariffs, text messages, Nobel Peace Prize

Trump posted on social media Saturday that he would place a 10% tariff on goods coming into the United States from Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom before increasing that to 25% in June if the countries continue to oppose his attempts to acquire Greenland. 

Trump wrote the tariffs would stay in place “until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.”

Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre released a statement Monday that he and Finland’s President Alexander Stubb sent a text message to Trump to express their opposition to his tariff announcement. 

“We pointed to the need to de-escalate and proposed a telephone conversation between Trump, Stubb and myself on the same day,” Støre wrote. “The response from Trump came shortly after the message was sent. It was his decision to share his message with other NATO leaders.”

Several news organizations, including PBS News reported that Trump sent a message to Støre stating that because he didn’t receive the Nobel Peace Prize he no longer feels “an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.”

Støre wrote in his statement that he could confirm the text message conversation and reinforced that European leaders don’t believe the United States needs to acquire Greenland. 

“Norway’s position on Greenland is clear. Greenland is a part of the Kingdom of Denmark, and Norway fully supports the Kingdom of Denmark on this matter,” Støre wrote. “We also support that NATO in a responsible way is taking steps to strengthen security and stability in the Arctic. As regards the Nobel Peace Prize, I have clearly explained, including to president Trump what is well known, the prize is awarded by an independent Nobel Committee and not the Norwegian Government.”

Minnesota Democratic U.S. Reps. Kelly Morrison, Ilhan Omar and Rep. Angie Craig arrive outside the regional Immigration and Customs Enforcement headquarters at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis on Jan. 10, 2026. The lawmakers were denied entry to  the facility where the Department of Homeland Security has been headquartering operations in the state. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — A Department of Homeland Security policy that barred unannounced visits for lawmakers seeking to conduct oversight at facilities that hold immigrants will remain in place, as ordered by a federal judge Monday.

District of Columbia federal Judge Jia Cobb issued an order that denied a request from a dozen Democratic lawmakers, on the technical grounds that an amended complaint or a supplemental brief must be made to challenge a seven-day notice policy instituted by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem this month for oversight visits.

“The Court emphasizes that it denies Plaintiffs’ motion only because it is not the proper avenue to challenge Defendants’ January 8, 2026 memorandum and the policy stated therein, rather than based on any kind of finding that the policy is lawful,” according to Cobb’s order.

Earlier this month, Democrats brought an emergency request to Cobb after a handful of Minnesota lawmakers were denied an unannounced oversight visit to a federal facility that holds immigrants following the deadly shooting of a woman in Minneapolis by a federal immigration officer.

Under a 2019 appropriations law, any member of Congress can carry out an unannounced visit at a federal facility that holds immigrants, but in June, multiple Democrats were denied visits to Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities. 

Those 12 Democrats sued over the policy that required a week’s notice, and in December, Cobb granted the request to stay Noem’s policy, finding it violated the 2019 law. 

Noem has now argued that the January incident does not violate Cobb’s stay from December, because the ICE facilities are using funds through the Republican spending and tax cuts law, known as the “One, Big Beautiful Bill,” and not the DHS appropriations bill. Noem argued that those facilities are therefore exempt from unannounced oversight visits by members of Congress. 

House Democrats who sued include Joe Neguse of Colorado, Adriano Espaillat of New York, Jamie Raskin of Maryland, Robert Garcia of California, J. Luis Correa of California, Jason Crow of Colorado, Veronica Escobar of Texas, Dan Goldman of New York, Jimmy Gomez of California, Raul Ruiz of California, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi and Norma Torres of California.

Wisconsin Republicans are pushing to eliminate diversity initiatives throughout the state with a constitutional amendment that will likely go to voters this fall and through a government efficiency effort that seeks to cut DEI training and programs. | Illustration by stellalevi/Getty Images Creative

Republican efforts to target diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs throughout Wisconsin are advancing this week with a constitutional amendment likely to appear on ballots this fall following a Wednesday Senate vote. 

For the last several years, Republican lawmakers have sought to limit DEI in Wisconsin including by introducing bills that were vetoed by Gov. Tony Evers, holding hostage pay raises for the University of Wisconsin system employees during negotiations to limit DEI, and now, placing a constitutional amendment before voters. The efforts come as the Trump administration has also targeted DEI in the federal government and throughout the country.

“It’s just a larger attack that we’re seeing in this country against anything that uplifts our most marginalized communities…,” Chair of the Legislative Black Caucus Sen. Dora Drake (D-Milwaukee) told the Wisconsin Examiner in an interview. “This started even before, you know, President Trump was elected. There’s just been a pushback with these programs and it’s because we’re starting to see some progress.” 

The Wisconsin State Senate will vote this week on a constitutional amendment that would prohibit local governments from “discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to” anyone based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin. The proposal was first introduced and passed by the Republican-led Legislature in 2024. It is one of three constitutional amendment proposals that voters may have the final say on in November.

Drake has been seeking to increase awareness of the anti-DEI constitutional amendment over the last week.

Constitutional amendment proposals must pass two consecutive sessions of the state Legislature before they are  placed on ballots. In recent years, Republicans have, with mixed results, relied on constitutional amendment proposals to bypass Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.

If AJR 102 passes on Wednesday, voters will see the following question on their ballots in November: “Shall section 27 of article I of the constitution be created to prohibit governmental entities in the state from discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in public employment, public education, public contracting, or public administration?”

Authors of the amendment, including Rep. Dave Murphy (R-Hortonville), have said the proposal will restore “merit, fairness and equality to government practices from the state Capitol, all the way down to our school boards and everything in between.” It passed the Assembly last week. 

Drake counters that Republican lawmakers are misleading Wisconsinites. 

“Legislative Republicans had the opportunity to expand economic and educational opportunities for all Wisconsinites. They’re the ones that have power, and yet they chose not to,” Drake said. “They are now trying to pin the reason why people are struggling on Black and brown people, women and other minority Wisconsinites for their failures by misleading people with what this ballot measure would do.”

Drake brought together Black leaders in Milwaukee including Mayor Cavalier Johnson and Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who is running for governor, to speak against the constitutional amendment proposal. 

Johnson said at the press conference that the city complies with state and federal law. 

“As mayor of a majority-minority city, I know firsthand that when every resident has the tools and every resident has the resources at their disposal to succeed, the entire community is strong,” he said. 

Drake has spoken about the risk of losing programs including the state’s Supplier Diversity Program, which was established in the 1980s and certifies minority-owned, service-disabled veteran-owned and woman-owned businesses to provide better opportunities for them to do business with the state of Wisconsin. She also says she thinks the proposal could have farther reaching consequences. For example, she said, she thinks the Holocaust education bill that lawmakers passed and Evers signed last session could be disallowed. That effort was approved in the same year that the state enacted legislation to require education on Hmong and Asian American history in schools.

“The reality is in the constitutional amendment resolution they’re putting forth, it applies for any type of public dollars, so… if our public schools and school boards put money towards that, in a way, you’re giving preferential treatment to teaching that specific history,” Drake said. “It’s so much more than just the programs… that Milwaukee county and the city have.”

“They’re saying that this constitutional amendment would prevent discrimination, but then it’s preventing the government from taking actions when discrimination actually happens, so essentially, you’re outlawing accountability when discrimination does occur,” Drake said. 

The Senate will vote on the proposal just days after Martin Luther King Day. Republican lawmakers have cited the civil rights leader’s teachings as justification for the amendment. 

“The principle of a colorblind equality and merit-based decision-making is again articulated by one of their greatest civil rights leaders, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr,” Sen. Steve Nass (R-Whitewater), the other lead author of the proposed amendment, said at a hearing in the Senate Licensing, Regulatory Reform, State and Federal Affairs Committee on Jan. 7. “Using immutable characteristics like race, sex, color, ethnicity, national origin and the like to discriminate against or grant any individual or group is wrong, no matter who it targets or what the reason, it creates distrust and injust division and represents resentments that divide people instead of uniting them. Past discrimination, however wrong, cannot be corrected with more discrimination.” 

Nass said the amendment would ensure people are hired, promoted, selected and admitted to school in the “same way we choose people for our Olympic team.” 

Drake said the lawmakers who are citing MLK misunderstand his legacy. 

“The reality is that he was someone that was a pioneer in his time and he wasn’t liked because he actually challenged and named the systematic structures that cause disparities throughout this country,” Drake said. “He actively called out his fellow white faith leaders on why they were silent in the face of injustice. He never advocated for a so-called colorblind society. What he was advocating for was that people have access to opportunity.”

GOAT report identifies recommendations to eliminate DEI

The goals of the amendment — and the broader desire to eliminate DEI — were on display during an informational hearing in the Assembly Government Operations, Accountability and Transparency (GOAT) committee on a recent report compiled by Rep. Shae Sortwell.

The Republican from Two Rivers used his authority on the GOAT committee, which was created to be the state’s version of the federal Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), in February 2025 to begin investigating DEI practices in local government. He submitted open records requests to Wisconsin’s 72 counties, the 50 largest municipalities throughout the state and all school districts.

The resulting report released on Jan. 9 was more than 80 pages long. Sortwell also listed thousands of pages of records from counties and municipalities on his website. 

During a Jan. 15 hearing on the report, Sortwell told the GOAT committee that he wanted it to be a “fact-finding” mission. The Wisconsin Counties Association helped guide counties in responding to the requests.

“This is what we found so that you can draw your own conclusions as to what you think,” Sortwell said.

Four counties Buffalo, Richland, Sawyer and Waupaca didn’t have relevant records to share. 

Pierce County did not provide any records to the committee and was identified as uncooperative, according to the report. Sortwell noted during the hearing that Pierce is small and it is possible that is the reason they didn’t reply. 

The following municipalities reported that they had no records: Ashwaubenon, Brookfield, Caledonia, Fond du Lac, Fox Crossing, Germantown, Howard, Marshfield, Menasha, Menominee Falls, Mequon, Mount Pleasant, New Berlin, Oak Creek, Oconomowoc, Pleasant Prairie, West Bend and Wisconsin Rapids. Janesville and Sheboygan failed to provide records to the committee. 

Sortwell discussed spending that some counties, including Rock, Milwaukee and Waukesha, did on DEI training and a “disproportionality” conference hosted by the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) in 2024.

He also highlighted the report’s finding that the Manitowoc mayor attended 24 DEI-related trainings between 2021 and 2023 for a cost of $4,000.

“I’m trying to understand what he didn’t get in the first 23… Is he so racist and homophobic or something that you couldn’t manage to figure out not to treat people badly because they’re different from him in the first 23?” Sortwell said. “Where’s the controls here?”

The report listed a number of recommendations for potential bills lawmakers could pass including one to remove DEI language from state grants, to “prohibit all levels of government from contracting with vendors within a discriminatory DEI lens,” to remove the term “health equity” from all state laws and administrative codes, to prohibit policies and practices relating to equity, prohibit the hiring of DEI staff and use of DEI terminology throughout government, the use of funds for DEI trainings and the requirement that employees participate in such trainings and to prohibit DPI from requiring that school districts “adhere to discriminatory and race-based policies and practices, including spending local tax dollars to fund such.”

Sortwell said he thought the constitutional amendment would take care of some of the recommendations, but that other measures could be needed.

Chair of the committee Rep. Amanda Nedweski (R-Pleasant Prairie) said at the hearing that she thought the report “presents a lot of high-level evidence, probably just scratching the surface really, for why we need this constitutional amendment.”

Sortwell said the recommendations included in the report were based on his judgment.

Democratic lawmakers on the committee, however, spoke to the value of DEI work and questioned the framing and findings of the report.

Rep. Angelina Cruz (D-Racine) told the Wisconsin Examiner that the report includes “gross mischaracterizations” of DEI and “reflects a deep misunderstanding of what DEI is,” and said she would frame the report as more of a “witch hunt” than an investigation.

Cruz said she thought the process of compiling the report was not transparent. She noted that Sortwell’s work on the report was not discussed with Democratic members of the committee before he started and that lawmakers did not have much time to review the thousands of pages before the hearing. 

“If you want to talk about waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayer money, it is to waste public servants’ time and our taxpayer resources on generating the data that produce these conclusions that are not grounded in good research methodology,” Cruz said. 

Rep. Mike Bare (D-Verona), the ranking member of the committee, told Nedweski during the hearing that he found her comment troubling.

“I don’t want to make a partisan game here, but I think there’s one side who sees these as not valuable and one side that does see them as valuable,” Bare said. 

The report noted that local health departments have prioritized “health equity” — noting that the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) includes in its rules that local health departments work to help create it. The report called “health equity” a “phantom DEI term.” 

Republicans and Democrats then engaged in a back and forth about the meaning of the term health equity.

“I don’t think we should be treating people differently because they check some box… that’s equality and I support that, and equity says I want a certain outcome, so I’m going to rig the system,” Sortwell said. 

“I don’t think you have to rig the system — and I don’t think a lot of the things that you’ve pointed out are about rigging the system — services for moms or children support services,” Bare said. “We’re trying to allow for an outcome to be possible… You’ve got 50,000 pages. You didn’t do any analysis to tell us why this is bad. There is a lot more that goes into [the question] should we have health equity or not beyond ideology.”

Pete Buttigieg speaks at a town hall in La Crosse, Wis. on Jan. 16, 2026. | Photo by Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner

Dairy farmers and U.S. military veterans were heavily represented among the hundreds of voters from western Wisconsin and Minnesota who packed the La Crosse convention center Friday night, braving snow and freezing temperatures to hear what former U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg had to say about our current political predicament.

Buttigieg was following in the footsteps of other Democrats who have visited Wisconsin’s closely divided 3rd Congressional District to needle Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden for failing to meet publicly with his constituents who are bearing the brunt of tariffs, high prices and unaffordable health care spurred by Trump administration policies Van Orden has supported. 

In making his La Crosse appearance to bolster a Democratic candidate in a swing district ahead of the midterms — and perhaps to stick his toe in the water ahead of a potential 2028 presidential run — Buttigieg connected with rural and blue-collar Midwestern voters.That’s something Democrats arguably need to do better if they are going to overcome total domination by the party of President Donald Trump. 

The most interesting thing about the La Crosse town hall was the energized audience of rural and small-town Wisconsin and Minnesota residents worried about the the scary, violent authoritarian regime that is rapidly consolidating its power over a stunned and fractured citizenry. 

Democratic state Sen. Brad Pfaff, who took the stage ahead of Buttigieg, praised him as “a son of the Midwest,” denounced President Donald Trump’s gilded White House ballroom, and declared, “The rich get tax breaks and what do the rest of us get? Rising costs!” Pfaff also took a jab at “tech bros” who got front-row seats at Trump’s inauguration and are profiting from algorithms that sow “hate and distrust and division.” 

Buttigieg picked up on that theme, urging people to reach out in person to connect with their neighbors who might disagree with them. Responding to a veteran in the audience who said he was in despair about talking to people who live in a pro-Trump social media bubble and who “don’t know how close to the abyss we really are,” Buttigeig said, ”This is where I believe in the power of the offline.” 

“We are increasingly sorted into these silos where not just our opinions, but our facts, or would-be facts, are presented to us. But our relationships, our families, our neighborhoods, our communities, our churches, our little league, our sports loyalty, right? That’s where we have a chance to get through to people.”

Rebecca Cooke, who lost her challenge to Van Orden in 2024 by three percentage points and is seeking a rematch, used her few minutes on stage ahead of Buttigieg to emphasize her dairy farm upbringing and work experience as a waitress, declaring, “I’m a working-class Wisconsinite who hopes to be your next member of Congress.” Cooke touted “right to repair,” legislation, “so every time your John Deere breaks down you don’t have to go to the dealership.” Her parents, she said, were on their annual trip to Mexico to get their dental work done for an affordable price “which is ridiculous.” She described how her dad was hit with a bill for over $1,000 at Walgreen’s when he went to fill a prescription for cancer medication. She’s running, she said, to represent people who “just want to be able to put gas in the car and have a little money left over.”

Going beyond Democrats’ ubiquitous talking points about “affordability,” audience members brought up their spiritual beliefs, the meaning of democracy, how technological change is driving a growing sense of alienation, the need to reconnect with neighbors and overcome political divisions, and the horror of seeing federal agents gun down a woman in a residential neighborhood in Minneapolis.

A young woman who lives near Minneapolis broke down crying as she asked Buttigieg, “How do we deal with this attack on our community, on people that we love?”

“The only antidote to a politics of fear is a politics of courage,” Buttigieg told her, praising her compassion and her desire to work for change. “It seems like you’re alone in caring,” he added, but “the majority of Americans think what’s going on there is wrong.” He had just come from talking to farmers in a conservative area of the state, he said, who were very worried about the impact of immigration enforcement on their workers. “We can bring together strange bedfellows,” he said, “as they’re doing everything they can to pull us apart.” 

A Vietnam veteran, part of a large contingent of vets who stood to accept applause as Buttigieg acknowledged them and thanked them for their service, held up a copy of the U.S. Constitution and said he was upset by Trump’s “abuse” of the military and the National Guard. “I’m really worried that a lot of our people are going to look at our veterans, look at the National Guard — and I’ve got that same creepy feeling that we used to have when we came back before — we’re not going to get the respect for what we really are.”

“Thank you for reminding us of your experience, and I know that was an experience for, really, a generation of service members,” Buttigieg said. When he finished his tour of duty in Afghanistan, he added, “I was fortunate to belong to a generation of veterans who came home to a pretty good welcome, because our country learned the hard way how to separate its attitudes about a policy from its attitudes about the people who were sent somewhere by that policy.”

He connected that change in attitude to a general capacity Americans have for learning from their mistakes, “We learned, we grew. That’s the best thing about this country,” he said. Current efforts to whitewash U.S. history assume that “any time you talk about the things that were wrong about America, that must mean you hate America,” he said, but “some of the finest moments that brought out the greatest character of this country is how we put it right.”

There’s a long way to go before we put things right in our country now, just one year into what already appears to be the most destructive administration in U.S. history. But the feeling in the room at the town hall in La Crosse was hopeful that a new, majoritarian politics could shake off the divisiveness and fear of the Trump era and reclaim democracy and a government by and for the people.

As third-generation dairy farmer Sabrina Servais put it, describing the loss of half of dairy farms in Wisconsin since the early 2000s and her fierce love for her own family’s small, organic farm, “the most beautiful place on Earth,”  “It’s easy to feel small when you’re so far away in rural America. Will anyone listen? … But we matter. We’re a swing state. We have the power to change the outcome of elections. We are the working class of America. How dare they doubt us? … We believe that, despite everything, the world is still beautiful.”

Many candies contain Red No. 40, Yellow No. 5 and Yellow No. 6. They are among the food dyes banned in West Virginia by a measure signed into law in March. Such bans are just one example of how the "Make America Healthy Again" movement has made inroads in state legislatures. (Photo by Carol Johnson/Stateline)

This article first appeared on KFF Health News.

When one of Adam Burkhammer’s foster children struggled with hyperactivity, the West Virginia legislator and his wife decided to alter their diet and remove any foods that contained synthetic dyes.

“We saw a turnaround in his behavior, and our other children,” said Burkhammer, who has adopted or fostered 10 kids with his wife. “There are real impacts on real kids.”

The Republican turned his experience into legislation, sponsoring a bill to ban seven dyes from food sold in the state. It became law in March, making West Virginia the first state to institute such a ban from all food products.

The bill was among a slew of state efforts to regulate synthetic dyes. In 2025, roughly 75 bills aimed at food dyes were introduced in 37 states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Chemical dyes and nutrition are just part of the broader “Make America Healthy Again” agenda. Promoted by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., MAHA ideas have made their deepest inroads at the state level, with strong support from Republicans — and in some places, from Democrats. The $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program — created last year as part of the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act to expand health care access in rural areas — offers incentives to states that implement MAHA policies.

Federal and state officials are seeking a broad swath of health policy changes, including rolling back routine vaccinations and expanding the use of drugs such as ivermectin for treatments beyond their approved use. State lawmakers have introduced dozens of bills targeting vaccines, fluoridated water and PFAS, a group of compounds known as “forever chemicals” that have been linked to cancer and other health problems.

In addition to West Virginia, six other states have targeted food dyes with new laws or executive orders, requiring warning labels on food with certain dyes or banning the sale of such products in schools. California has had a law regulating food dyes since 2023.

Most synthetic dyes used to color food have been around for decades. Some clinical studies have found a link between their use and hyperactivity in children. And in early 2025, in the last days of President Joe Biden’s term, the Food and Drug Administration outlawed the use of a dye known as Red No. 3.

Major food companies including Nestle, Hershey  and PepsiCo have gotten on board, pledging to eliminate at least some color additives from food products over the next year or two.

“We anticipate that the momentum we saw in 2025 will continue into 2026, with a particular focus on ingredient safety and transparency,” said John Hewitt, the senior vice president of state affairs for the Consumer Brands Association, a trade group for food manufacturers.

This past summer, the group called on its members to voluntarily eliminate federally certified artificial dyes from their products by the end of 2027.

“The state laws are really what’s motivating companies to get rid of dyes,” said Jensen Jose, regulatory counsel for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit health advocacy group.

Andy Baker-White, the senior director of state health policy for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, said the bipartisan support for bills targeting food dyes and ultraprocessed food struck him as unusual. Several red states have proposed legislation modeled on California’s 2023 law, which bans four food additives.

“It’s not very often you see states like California and West Virginia at the forefront of an issue together,” Baker-White said.

Although Democrats have joined Republicans in some of these efforts, Kennedy continues to drive the agenda. He appeared with Texas officials when the state enacted a package of food-related laws, including one that bars individuals who participate in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — SNAP or food stamps — from using their benefits to buy candy or sugary drinks. In December, the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved similar waivers sought by six states. Eighteen states will block SNAP purchases of those items in 2026.

There are bound to be more. The Rural Health Transformation Program also offers incentives to states that implemented restrictions on SNAP.

“There are real and concrete effects where the rural health money gives points for changes in SNAP eligibility or the SNAP definitions,” Baker-White said.

In October, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill that sets a legal definition for ultraprocessed foods and will phase them out of schools. It’s a move that may be copied in other states in 2026, while also providing fodder for legal battles. In December, San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu sued major food companies, accusing them of selling “harmful and addictive” products. The lawsuit names specific brands — including cereals, pizzas, sodas and potato chips — linking them to serious health problems.

Kennedy has also blamed ultraprocessed foods for chronic diseases. But even proponents of the efforts to tackle nutrition concerns don’t agree on which foods to target. MAHA adherents on the right haven’t focused on sugar and sodium as much as policymakers on the left. The parties have also butted heads over some Republicans’ championing of raw milk, which can spread harmful germs, and the consumption of saturated fat, which contributes to heart disease.

Policymakers expect other flash points. Moves by the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that are making vaccine access more difficult have led blue states to find ways to set their own standards apart from federal recommendations, with 15 Democratic governors announcing a new public health alliance in October. Meanwhile, more red states may eliminate vaccine mandates for employees; Idaho made them illegal. And Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is pushing to eliminate school vaccine mandates.

Even as Kennedy advocates eliminating artificial dyes, the Environmental Protection Agency has loosened restrictions on chemicals and pesticides, leading MAHA activists to circulate an online petition calling on President Donald Trump to fire EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.

Congress has yet to act on most MAHA proposals. But state lawmakers are poised to tackle many of them.

“If we’re honest, the American people have lost faith in some of our federal institutions, whether FDA or CDC,” said Burkhammer, the West Virginia lawmaker. “We’re going to step up as states and do the right thing.”

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — an independent source of health policy research, polling and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

Dr. Margaret Baum (second from left), chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood Great Rivers, stands with attorneys from the Planned Parenthood Federation of America on the steps of the Jackson County Courthouse in Kansas City, Missouri, on Jan. 12, 2026, the first day of a two-week trial over abortion restrictions. (Photo by Anna Spoerre/Missouri Independent)

The outcome of two trials in the coming weeks could shape what it will look like when voters overturn state abortion bans through future ballot initiatives.

Arizona and Missouri voters in November 2024 struck down their respective near-total abortion bans. Both states added abortion access up to fetal viability as a right in their constitutions, although Arizonans approved the amendment by a much wider margin than Missouri voters.

That was just the beginning of protracted legal battles.

Amy Myrick, senior counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, said ballot measures are a powerful and important step in returning abortion access to a state, but success on Election Day doesn’t mean the fight is over.

“State constitutions don’t automatically repeal laws,” Myrick said. “Sometimes, even if the state isn’t doing it, other groups or legislators will jump in to try to retain these restrictions.” 

The trial over Arizona’s abortion restrictions wrapped up this week, Arizona Mirror reported. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Gregory Como seemed unconvinced of the argument that certain laws around how abortion medication can be prescribed, waiting periods and bans on abortions in cases of fetal abnormalities should remain enforceable.

A similar trial in Missouri will wrap up on Jan. 26 after hours of testimony about more than a dozen abortion restrictions state officials are seeking to preserve. The Republican supermajority state legislature is also putting a countermeasure to reinstate the abortion ban on the ballot in November, paired with a ban on gender-affirming care for minors. 

Arizona and Missouri have what are known by abortion-rights advocates as Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers, or TRAP, laws passed by legislatures before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022. Even states without bans, like Connecticut, Maryland and Rhode Island, have statutes in place that the Guttmacher Institute considers TRAP laws. Abortion providers are subject to state licensing and other medical requirements, but as of December, 25 states still have laws that impose additional regulations for clinics, according to Guttmacher, such as facility size and transfer agreement requirements, or admitting privileges at local hospitals within 30 miles.

Officials and legislators usually argue in the statehouse and in court that the extra parameters increase the safety of abortion procedures, but the safety record is strong under existing medical requirements and is safer than childbirth, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Studies show the risk of maternal death associated with childbirth is about 14 times higher than the risk associated with abortion.

But there are also other laws that advocates say are meant to discourage or frustrate those seeking abortion care, such as mandatory vaginal exams, waiting periods, or a requirement that the same physician must see an abortion medication patient over two subsequent visits. Some of those laws were passed over decades and helped drive abortion providers away, including in Missouri.

As a result, even though Missourians overturned the ban, abortion care remains difficult to obtain, and many are still leaving the state to get it, according to Missouri Independent.

“Because constitutional amendments don’t overturn conflicting laws, people can still experience injuries under these laws,” said Prachi Dave, senior managing legal and policy director at If/When/How, a reproductive rights legal services and advocacy organization. “For example, if a waiting period is interfering with my ability to access the care I am guaranteed under the newly passed amendment, then I would ask a judge to affirm that the law is getting in the way of my right. In doing so, lawsuits give practical effect to constitutional amendments.”

In a Michigan lawsuit led by advocacy groups, a judge ruled in May that a mandatory waiting period was unconstitutional after voters approved an initiative codifying reproductive rights.  

Wendy Heipt, attorney for advocacy organization Legal Voice in Washington, said even if some laws were ruled unconstitutional, they may have to be litigated again because the basis for the unconstitutional argument relied on the Roe v. Wade case that the U.S. Supreme Court overturned almost four years ago.

Heipt frequently works on cases in Idaho, where many lawsuits over the state’s near-total abortion ban have taken place in the past three years. Though still in effect, there is an effort to overturn the ban via ballot in November. 

The initiative is different from those approved in Arizona and Missouri because people in Idaho cannot submit constitutional amendments — only proposed state laws — for ballot consideration directly.

Melanie Folwell, lead organizer of the reproductive rights initiative in Idaho, said even if successful, it’s only one leg of a long race in restoring access. The initiative group, Idahoans United for Women and Families, drafted a bill that would have repealed existing abortion laws, but it was too long and legally complicated for the ballot. Instead, what they’ve come up with for voters is meant to establish a right to reproductive health privacy without undue government interference and override existing laws. 

The outcome of Missouri’s trial could be instructive for Idaho abortion-rights advocates, because the political environments are similar. Idaho has a lengthy list of its own waiting periods for abortion care, mandatory counseling and ultrasound requirements, and elected officials in the Republican-led state have repeatedly signaled their opposition to abortion access, including the attorney general. The legislature also has a Republican supermajority.

And since it can’t be a constitutional amendment, any new law may be more vulnerable to legal challenges. 

“There are things to learn from every one of the states that have reproductive access on the ballot, which is 17 states at this point,” Folwell said. “It is always instructive for us to see what plays out in that state’s legislature, what plays out with their courts.”

Myrick said the legal battles can feel discouraging, but voters shouldn’t let it stop them from using their voices to make their policy preferences known.

“Ballot measures are not the silver bullet. We need a lot of follow-up to make these rights real. And the attempts to keep these restrictions after the voters have spoken are blatantly anti-democratic, but they’re still happening,” Myrick said.

Ryan Patraw processes ballots at the Marion County Clerk’s Office in Salem, Ore., on May 16. Judges in Oregon and California have ruled against the Trump administration’s requests to turn over voter data. (Photo by Ron Cooper/Oregon Capital Chronicle)

The Trump administration hit two major legal roadblocks this week in its effort to obtain sensitive personal voter data from states.

On Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge David Carter dismissed a lawsuit by the Department of Justice against California seeking voter information. The Trump administration has demanded that at least 40 states provide unredacted voter data, which can include driver’s license and Social Security numbers. The department has sued 21 states and Washington, D.C., that have refused to provide the data.

Carter, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, called the government’s request “unprecedented and illegal” in a 33-page ruling.

Just a day earlier, U.S. District Court Judge Mustafa Kasubhai said he planned to dismiss a similar lawsuit against Oregon. Kasubhai, an appointee of President Joe Biden, said his final written decision may be different.

“The federal government tried to abuse their power to force me to break my oath of office and hand over your private data,” Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read said in a statement about the tentative ruling, according to the Oregon Capital Chronicle. “I stood up to them and said no. Now, the court sided with us. Tonight, we proved, once again, we have the power to push back and win.”

The Justice Department has framed its demands as necessary to ensure states are properly maintaining their voter rolls. It says it needs the information to ensure ineligible people are kept off rolls and that only citizens are voting. The department is sharing state voter roll information with the Department of Homeland Security in a search for noncitizens, the Trump administration confirmed in September.

While election officials say well-maintained voter rolls are important, President Donald Trump and some of his Republican allies have long promoted baseless claims of widespread voter fraud. 

Democratic election officials have criticized the data requests, calling them an unwarranted attempt by the Trump administration to exercise federal power over elections. Under the U.S. Constitution, states administer elections, though Congress can regulate them.

In arguing for the data, the federal government cited the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act and Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960, all of which were intended to protect elections and the right to vote. 

In California, Carter ruled that the federal government — and the court — are not authorized to use civil rights legislation “as a tool to forsake the privacy rights of millions of Americans.”

“There cannot be unbridled consolidation of all elections power in the Executive without action from Congress and public debate,” Carter wrote. “This is antithetical to the promise of fair and free elections our country promises and the franchise that civil rights leaders fought and died for.” 

The Justice Department did not immediately say whether it planned to appeal the ruling.

Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@stateline.org. 

A patient registers for care at a mobile dental and medical clinic in August 2025. Nationwide, the number of people buying health plans on Obamacare insurance marketplaces is down by about 833,000 compared with a year ago, according to state and federal data. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Nationwide, the number of people buying health plans on Obamacare insurance marketplaces is down by about 833,000 compared with a year ago, according to federal data released this week.

Many states are reporting fewer new enrollees, more people dropping their coverage, and more people choosing cheaper and less generous health insurance plans with higher deductibles.

Across most states, Thursday was the last day to enroll for plans that start in February. But nine states and Washington, D.C., have deadlines later this month, so the numbers could change.

There are 21 states with state-run health insurance marketplaces, and the rest use the federal website. The vast majority of states have seen declines in enrollment so far, compared with around this time last year.

Preliminary data released Monday by the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services shows 22.8 million enrollees, down from a record total of 24.3 million last year.

Premiums have surged as a result of the expiration of enhanced federal subsidies first made available by the American Rescue Plan Act in 2021 and later extended through the end of 2025 by the Inflation Reduction Act. The availability of the subsidies spurred a sharp increase in the number of people buying health plans on the marketplaces. In 2020, 11.4 million people were enrolled in marketplaces through Obamacare, formally known as the Affordable Care Act. More than double that amount enrolled last year.

Congress failed to reach an agreement on extending the subsidies before the end of last year and still hasn’t reached one. As a result, premiums were expected to increase this year by 114% on average — from $888 last year to about $1,904, according to estimates made in September by health policy research organization KFF.

The higher costs appear to be driving many people to forgo insurance or opt for cheaper, less generous plans this year, health officials and analysts say. Several states with state-based marketplaces — including Georgia, Illinois, Minnesota, New York, Vermont, Virginia and Washington — are reporting fewer enrollments this year in comparison with enrollments through early January 2025, according to early data. Other states, such as California, are reporting fewer new enrollees.

“It’s important to consider that this is preliminary data, so this represents people who have signed up and selected the plan — but they probably haven’t received their first premium bill,” said Elizabeth Lukanen, executive director of the health policy research organization State Health Access Data Assistance Center at the University of Minnesota. “Once that happens, I think there’s concern — and it seems very possible — that people may decide to drop coverage. So, the decline could get bigger.

“On the other hand, open enrollment hasn’t closed, so you have two things sort of competing. It seems pretty likely that there will be a decline,” she said.

If the downward trend continues, the nation could see the first decline in enrollment since 2020, Lukanen said, adding that a full picture of income levels and demographics of people who have dropped coverage won’t be clear until the summer.

In Pennsylvania, data updated through Tuesday shows more than 15,000 previously enrolled adults between the ages of 55 and 64 have dropped coverage entirely — the most of any age bracket.

Pennsylvania’s state-based exchange, Pennie, has seen about 15% fewer new enrollments compared with last year. The state is also reporting 1,000 residents dropping coverage per day during open enrollment — with the most coverage losses among people with incomes 150% to 200% of the poverty level. These could include families of two adults and two children with an income between $48,225 and $64,300.

The state is seeing an “unprecedented” number of previously enrolled people dropping coverage, said Devon Trolley, executive director of the Pennsylvania Health Insurance Exchange Authority.

California is reporting 31% fewer new enrollees this year compared with last year, and more than a third of new enrollees are choosing bronze plans — the lowest, least generous coverage tier — up from less than a quarter at this time last year.

In Minnesota, data as of Dec. 3 shows more than half of active enrollees are opting to keep their coverage tier. But of those changing plans, more than a third — 37% — are going to cheaper plans. The state notes a full picture won’t be available until March.

Meanwhile, some states are seeing roughly the same number of enrollees or more. Texas, for example, is reporting about 4.1 million people enrolling this year compared with 4 million last year.

Charles Miller, health and economic mobility policy director at Texas 2036, a policy research nonprofit, said it’s unclear why enrollments are up, but pointed to some clues.

“Texas had a uniquely large population of uninsured individuals eligible for free and inexpensive plans that hadn’t enrolled previously … [and] has more affordable bronze and gold plans than many states,” he said.

He attributes that to a bipartisan state law, enacted in 2021, that had the effect of increasing subsidies for those plans, Miller said.

Nevada is seeing fewer enrollees overall. But compared with this time last year, the state is seeing 29% more people who are actively shopping the website to explore plans, said Katie Charleson, communications officer at the Nevada Health Authority Division of Consumer Health Services.

The state introduced a new public option, according to the Nevada Current, and health officials told lawmakers last week that about 1 in 5 active shoppers are opting for that plan.

In addition to the expiration of the subsidies, the cost of coverage has risen because of other factors, according to insurers. They say they’ve had to raise premiums because of rising prescription drug costs, inflation and workforce challenges, such as provider shortages.

But the enhanced premium tax credits were aimed at buffering those year-to-year changes for Americans with lower incomes, said Trolley, adding that the tax credit structure “helps make sure that [enrollees] don’t see those really larger drops that happen from time to time, sort of from those market forces.”

“When there are broader rate increases of … the total cost of the coverage, the tax credits are structured so that people who get a tax credit don’t feel a lot of that increase. They’re sort of sheltered from it on a year to year basis,” Trolley said. “The tax credit is tied to someone’s income and limits what they pay as part of their income, not necessarily tied to the cost of the coverage.”

She added that she’s also heard from some residents who say they are waiting to enroll in a plan to see if Congress takes action.

“People are leaving the ACA marketplace because the trade-offs have just become harder to justify,” Lukanen said. “What worries me is that when the coverage becomes unaffordable, it isn’t that people suddenly stop needing care. They just lose the protection that insurance offers, and those health care costs don’t go away.”

Lukanen added that if more people forgo coverage, health care services may end up costing the nation more overall.

“If people are going to the doctor and they don’t have insurance, these costs are then just shifted. They’re shifted to hospitals, ultimately to the community and the taxpayer.”

Trolley echoed that, saying she’s concerned about the overall burden on providers in rural counties, which are seeing the highest drops in Obamacare coverage in Pennsylvania.

“Any increase in the uninsured rate is going to further strain providers that are in rural areas, especially — further strain their financial situation,” she said. “We are very concerned about that in Pennsylvania.”

Stateline reporter Nada Hassanein can be reached at nhassanein@stateline.org.

President Donald Trump tours the assembly line at the Ford River Rouge Complex on Jan. 13, 2026 in Dearborn, Michigan. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump promised during his bid for another White House term that he would be a dictator only on “day one.”

Before a town hall audience in Iowa in December 2023, Fox News host Sean Hannity asked Trump, “Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?”

“Except for day one,” Trump responded, seconds later adding, “I want to close the border and I want to drill, drill, drill.”

But a year since his inauguration, Trump has acted on some of his most extreme campaign hyperbole, and then some. 

A limited history of Trump’s expansion of presidential powers includes:

• The unilateral capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Máduro and deadly U.S. military strikes on suspected drug-running boats off that nation’s coast, as well as a threat to acquire Greenland.
• The targeting of Democratic-led cities with federal immigration agents — most recently Minneapolis — and National Guard troops.
• The threat to cut congressionally approved funding from institutions, including universities, that do not align with the administration’s ideology.
• The prosecution of political opponents and attacks on the free press.

Those actions and others, coupled with a cooperative GOP Congress, have created an unprecedented shift away from the United States’ democratic tradition and founding principles that establish a system of checks and balances, States Newsroom was told in extensive interviews over recent months.

Many congressional Democrats — and nearly half of Americans, in a recent poll — believe Trump has gone too far in his expansion of presidential power. Historians, political scientists and legal experts have sounded the alarm, with some saying the United States has reached authoritarianism, even as Trump has shown no signs of slowing down. 

Experts interviewed agreed that the United States finds itself in a “troubled moment,” as William Howell, dean of the School of Government and Policy at Johns Hopkins University, put it. 

“We’ve never seen a presidency that represents such an enduring threat to the health and well-being of our democracy as we do today,” said Howell, who recently co-authored the book “Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency.”

Experts wary 

Ilya Somin, professor of law at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School and constitutional studies expert with the libertarian Cato Institute, said “I don’t know that it is likely that we’re going to slide into authoritarianism, but the very fact that the issue has to be raised is itself already bad.”

“My hope, and to some extent my expectation, is that a combination of legal and political action will stop these abuses, or at least curb them, and to some extent, it has already. But, you know, how well the system withstands it remains to be seen,” Somin told States Newsroom.

Others painted a more dire picture by pointing to the lack of such checks from the other branches of government.

Retired Army Col. David Graham, a senior fellow at the Georgetown Law Center’s Center on National Security, said Congress’ inability to block Trump’s military action in Venezuela shows that the president is operating with “unbridled” power.

“This unbridled presidential authority represents what I consider to be a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States and to the global security of the international community,” Graham said.

The Cato Institute’s Patrick Eddington offered: “It is absolutely noteworthy the speed and systematic nature (with) which Trump has been successful in literally gutting and reshaping to his will the domestic instruments of coercive power.” 

“I speak here about the departments of Justice and Homeland Security, in particular, but also successful in reshaping the military, the military leadership and the entire institution, to make it essentially as subservient as possible,” Eddington, the think tank’s senior fellow in homeland security and civil liberties, and former senior policy adviser for Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., told States Newsroom.

Doubts growing among Americans

Pollsters also find voters are increasingly wary of Trump’s governing style.

A recent Quinnipiac University poll found 70% believed the president needed authorization from Congress to go to war. The same day the poll was released, Jan. 14, the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate rejected a measure to require Trump to obtain permission before further operations in Venezuela.

Bright Line Watch, a quarterly survey of the health of American democracy, has shown a decline in both expert and public opinion of how U.S. democracy has fared since Trump’s inauguration. The poll, conducted since 2017, surveys roughly 700 political science faculty at U.S. universities and 2,750 members of the general public.

A Pew Research Center survey of 3,455 adults released in late September found 7 in 10 Americans believe Trump is trying to exert more presidential power than previous administrations. And overall, 49% of those surveyed said that Trump’s use of power compared to presidents past is bad for the country — though responses notably split along partisan lines.

In response to an interview request for this story, White House spokesperson Liz Huston provided a one-sentence on-the-record written statement.

“President Trump is making America greater than ever before for all Americans,” she wrote.

Throughout its first year, the Trump White House has trumpeted its many policy victories, including conducting mass deportations, raising money through tariffs, extending tax cuts, cutting some federal spending and exerting influence over elite universities.

Deploying the National Guard 

Throughout 2025, until the Supreme Court disallowed the practice days before New Year’s, Trump sent National Guard troops to a handful of cities led by elected Democrats. 

Depending on the city — Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; Chicago; Portland, Oregon; Memphis, Tennessee; and New Orleans  —  he rationalized the deployments as either to control crime or protect immigration operations and federal property.

His critics, though, say those were pretexts meant to get Americans used to seeing military forces in U.S. cities, potentially to be deployed during the next federal elections.

“It’s really designed to lay the groundwork to normalize a militarization, essentially, of American civic life, as a prelude to using federal troops and National Guard troops, probably specifically for so-called election integrity operations,” Eddington said.

The deployments themselves, especially in California, Illinois and Oregon, where Democratic governors who usually control the state national guards vociferously objected to federal troops patrolling their cities, seemed to violate a founding U.S. principle against the military acting as a police force. 

The Supreme Court eventually ruled that the Chicago deployment violated the Posse Comitatus Act, a 19th-century law forbidding military forces from civilian law enforcement.

Trump’s use of military forces domestically is out of step with precedent, at least of the last 50 years, Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said.

“The last nine presidents, not counting Trump I, we saw exactly two deployments to quell civil unrest or enforce the law,” she said. “Nine presidencies. Under President Trump, it’s happened five times in the last four months. So this is not normal,” said Goitein, who previously worked as counsel to former Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis.

Oregon Democratic U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley told States Newsroom the deployments marked one of the criteria of authoritarianism.

“In order to anchor a strong-man state, you have to have the ability to put troops in the street,” he said.

All night on the Senate floor 

Congressional Democrats, and in a few cases Republicans, have also protested Trump’s reach.

Days after nationwide “No Kings” day protests filled the streets on Oct. 18, Merkley led fellow Senate Democrats in an all-nighter on the Senate floor, speaking against what they described as Trump’s slide into authoritarianism. 

In mid-December, Merkley introduced a resolution “denouncing the horrors of authoritarianism.”

Merkley has emerged as perhaps the leading Democrat focusing on Trump’s authoritarian tendencies. He’s made several closed-door presentations to his colleagues on the subject that includes urging them to look beyond the daily drumbeat of Trump news, he said.

“It’s one issue after another in this flood-the-zone undertaking, and it’s easy to see the issue of the day and miss the big picture,” Merkley said in a Jan. 8 interview with States Newsroom. “And the big picture is a systematic implementation of an authoritarian strategy to create a strong-man state.” 

Merkley has branded Trump’s actions as authoritarianism, but said that is actually “weaker” language to describe it.

“The stronger language is fascism,” he said. 

Speaking the day after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis, Merkley said the agency’s mode of operating under Trump, as well as the deportation of hundreds to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador, were fascism in action.

“And when you see people with their faces covered, with no identifier of what military unit or police unit they belong to, it just says like, ‘Police.’ That’s fascism. Grabbing people off the street without due process, preventing them from talking to a lawyer, shipping them overseas. That’s fascism,” he said.

Congressional Republicans who control the Senate and the House have paved a smooth path for Trump’s agenda.

Despite a notable rebuke of Trump, in which a handful of Senate Republicans joined Democrats to advance legislation to curtail Trump’s unilateral military actions in Venezuela, the chamber eventually opted not to rein in the executive.

Republican Sens. Todd Young of Indiana, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska split with their party in the Jan. 8 procedural vote to act as a check on the administration’s use of military forces — as did Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, the measure’s co-sponsor with Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia. 

Trump swiftly responded on Truth Social that the five “should never be elected to office again.”

The pressure campaign worked. In a followup vote less than a week later, Young and Hawley flipped and voted to block the measure.

Five days prior to the procedural vote, U.S. special forces apprehended Maduro and his wife from their bedroom in the Venezuela capital of Caracas.

Extra-judicial Caribbean killings

In the months leading up to the operation, the Trump administration amassed roughly 15,000 troops and personnel, according to a figure cited in a U.S. Southern Command press article, and nearly a dozen warships in the region, including the largest U.S. aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, according to numerous media reports on the buildup. U.S. Southern Command declined to confirm specifics on “force posture.” 

Since September, U.S. warplanes have targeted numerous small boats off the coast of the South American country, killing more than 115 alleged “narco-terrorists” by the end of 2025, according to the U.S. Southern Command.

By using the military, instead of police, to kill, instead of capture, suspected drug traffickers, Trump was subverting the rule of law, critics across the political spectrum said.

Rep. Adam Smith, ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, said, “Basically what the president has decided is that we are now going to have the death penalty for drug traffickers.” 

“But further, not only are we gonna have the death penalty, but Trump is going to be judge, jury and executioner. … That, again, is a massive expansion of presidential power,” Smith, a Washington state Democrat, told C-SPAN’s Washington Journal Dec. 19.

Graham, a former staff judge advocate for U.S. Southern Command, said the alleged drug-running boats should have been treated as suspected criminals, not as enemy combatants akin to terrorist groups like al-Qaida. The alleged drug organizations involved did not constitute an “armed attack on the U.S. government,” he said.

But the Trump administration wrongly expanded the definition of enemy combatants to include alleged drug organizations, rather than as alleged criminals, to circumvent laws governing police powers, he said. 

“If there exists no non-international armed conflict, and thus no applicable law of armed conflict, no unlawful combatants, no lawful targets, the U.S. personnel conducting these strikes. …  are simply engaged in extrajudicial killings,” he said. 

Perhaps most troubling, Graham said, Trump told New York Times reporters in a Jan. 7 interview he did not “need” international law, and that the only restraint on his use of the U.S. military was his “own morality.”

Venezuela is not the only country on Trump’s radar. The president told reporters as recently as Jan. 11 that the U.S. is going to take over Greenland “one way or the other.” 

Trump first mentioned buying Greenland, a territory of NATO ally Denmark, during his first term. Now, in his second, the president has not ruled out the idea of taking the massive Arctic island by force. 

Quashing dissent 

Soon after Trump took the oath of office for the second time, he trained his focus on any dissent. Universities, media outlets and law firms were quickly in his crosshairs. 

The president demanded that in return for federal funding, access to government buildings and contracts, the institutions adhere to principles in line with the administration’s vision for America. 

The administration froze billions of federal research and grant dollars for Harvard University unless it changed its admissions and hiring policies, among other demands. The university won a First Amendment lawsuit against the administration in Massachusetts federal district court Sept. 3. 

Much of the funding was restored, according to Harvard Magazine, but the Trump administration appealed the decision in mid-December, again putting the nearly $2.2 billion in jeopardy. 

Other higher education institutions settled with Trump’s White House, including Columbia, which agreed to pay $200 million over three years to get its federal funding reinstated. 

“Universities that Trump considers to be liberal in their views are being punished. Journalists and media companies that don’t toe the line (and) that are critical of Trump are being punished, directly or indirectly,” Goitein said. 

“Everywhere you look, you are seeing the targeting of people and institutions based on perceptions that they are politically opposed to the president,” Goitein said.

In late September, Trump signed a memo directing law enforcement to prepare a national strategy to investigate “domestic terrorists” who are animated by “anti-fascism” as well as “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.”

Attacks on the free press

The president has also homed in on news and entertainment media that don’t align with his vision.

The Associated Press and the White House remain tangled up in court over press access after the wire service refused to use “Gulf of America” in its reports without noting that Trump had ordered a renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. The AP, a leader in editorial style, issued the same guidance for other news outlets. In response, the administration curtailed the AP’s access to press events in the Oval Office and on Air Force One. 

The Pentagon has also placed stipulations on press access. In October, dozens of reporters walked out of the building after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gave journalists an ultimatum: either sign a pledge to only publish approved material or lose their press badges.

Trump also requested Congress yank previously appropriated funds for public broadcasting stations around the country, including affiliates of National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service, which the administration said “fueled partisanship and left-wing propaganda.” House and Senate lawmakers voted mostly along party lines to nix the funding in July.

Trump has also been exerting influence over network television, both news and entertainment operations.

In September, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr threatened to revoke Disney-owned ABC’s affiliate licenses unless they pulled “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” from the air after the late-night host made comments about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

Disney and ABC adhered to Carr’s demand but reinstated Kimmel a week later following public outcry.

ABC News settled with the then president-elect in December 2024 for a $15 million charitable contribution to his future presidential library, and $1 million for legal fees. Trump had sued the network for defamation following a misstatement by “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos regarding a civil suit finding.

In July, CBS’ parent company, Paramount, paid Trump $16 million after he sued over an edit in a “60 Minutes” interview with then-Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

Trump and his enemies 

Trump’s latest target among his political foes is Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. The president has publicly pummeled Powell with threats to fire him if he did not rapidly lower interest rates.

Powell learned Jan. 9 upon receiving a federal grand jury summons that the Department of Justice is probing whether he lied to Congress in June about renovation costs to the agency’s District of Columbia headquarters. 

Trump’s investigation of the Fed chair drew swift criticism as an overreach into independent monetary policy decisions meant to stabilize the economy.

Numerous former Fed chairs and White House economic officials who served under both parties issued a statement calling the investigation  “an unprecedented attempt to use prosecutorial attacks to undermine that independence.”

The investigation revelation even roused Senate Republicans to question Trump’s actions. Retiring Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said in a statement he will oppose Trump’s forthcoming nominations to the Federal Reserve board of governors, including the Fed chair vacancy when Powell’s term expires.

“If there were any remaining doubt whether advisers within the Trump Administration are actively pushing to end the independence of the Federal Reserve, there should now be none,” wrote Tillis, who sits on the Senate Banking Committee. 

Murkowski chalked up the investigation as “nothing more than an attempt at coercion.” 

Even Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told numerous reporters on Capitol Hill Jan. 12 that the allegations against Powell “better be real and they better be serious.”

Trump had already exerted his influence over the central bank when he fired Board Governor Lisa Cook, appointed to the panel by President Joe Biden in 2023.  

Trump hit setbacks in lower federal courts after Cook sued and retained her position. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments on Jan. 21 on the question of the president’s power to fire independent agency appointees without cause. 

The justices heard a similar argument Dec. 8 over Trump’s firing of Federal Trade Commission appointee Rebecca Slaughter. 

The president has so far hit roadblocks in his other attempts to prosecute political opponents, including former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

A federal judge in Virginia dismissed Trump’s cases against Comey and James after finding U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi illegally appointed former special assistant and personal lawyer to the president, Lindsey Halligan, as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Halligan secured a two-count indictment against the former FBI chief for allegedly lying to Congress over a leak to the press about the bureau’s investigation into whether Russia played a role in Trump’s first presidential campaign. Comey pleaded not guilty.

The indictment followed the departure of Halligan’s predecessor, Erik Seibert, the acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, who declined to seek charges against Comey.

Halligan also secured an indictment against James, alleging bank fraud and that she lied to a financial institution to receive better loan terms. James also pleaded not guilty.

James successfully prosecuted a massive fraud case in 2024 against Trump, his family and the Trump Organization, for falsely inflating asset values.

In one particularly high-profile post on his own social media platform, Trump directly appealed to Bondi to prosecute Comey and James.

“Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, ‘same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

He continued further down in the post: “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

Eddington described Trump’s actions as a “revenge tour” and said the president is “utilizing the coercive power of government, and in this particular case the Department of Justice, to go after his political enemies.”

Then, the administration on Jan. 5  attempted to downgrade the military retirement rank and pay of Sen. Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat and retired Navy captain. 

Trump and Hegseth singled out Kelly after he and five fellow Democratic lawmakers, all veterans, published a video encouraging U.S. troops to refuse “illegal orders.” 

In a barrage of Truth Social posts on the morning of Nov. 20, Trump wrote, “Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP??? President DJT” 

“SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!,” he added a couple of hours later.

The president reposted several messages from Truth Social users, including one with the handle @P78 who wrote, “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!” 

The lawmakers published the video as the U.S. was nearly three months into its campaign of striking small boats off the coast of Venezuela.

Alien Enemies Act

The president has also reached back as far as the late 18th century to invoke laws meant for extraordinary circumstances.

In March, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to bolster his mass deportation campaign and deport more than 100 Venezuelans, without due process, to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador. 

The wartime law, which had only been invoked during the War of 1812 and both world wars, gives the president power to deport people from nations with which the U.S. is at war.

Even when a federal judge issued an emergency order that the flights carrying men deported under the law turn back to the U.S., the Trump administration did not comply. As of Jan. 13, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said it was unlikely the men could be retrieved due to the chaotic situation in Venezuela, which the Trump administration caused.

The Venezuelan nationals, ages 14 and up, many of whom the administration accused without evidence of being gang members, were incarcerated for months before being released to their home country in a prisoner exchange.   

A federal appeals court has blocked Trump, for now, from using the law to quickly expel Venezuelan nationals. A full hearing is pending.

Trump renaming

Trump is also facing headwinds from Democrats and advocates for affixing his name to federal buildings and his face to this year’s national parks annual pass.

Senate Democrats Chris Van Hollen and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland joined independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont Jan. 13 to introduce what they’re calling the “SERVE Act,” short for “Stop Executive Renaming for Vanity and Ego Act.” 

The lawmakers unveiled the bill less than a month after Trump announced his name would now appear on the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. Trump was elected chair of the cultural center after he installed new board members early in his second term.

Sanders said in a statement that Trump aimed “to create the myth of the ‘Great Leader’ by naming public buildings after himself — something that dictators have done throughout history.”

Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, sued Trump in federal court on Dec. 22, alleging only Congress has the power to rename federal buildings.

A public lands group has also challenged Trump in federal court, alleging he broke the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act when he replaced a national contest-winning photo of Glacier National Park with his image next to George Washington on the U.S. residents’ annual National Parks and Federal Recreation Lands Pass.

‘The best job ever’

Nearly a year after he took office, Trump again sat down with Hannity. 

In the Jan. 8 interview — the same day the administration sent more federal agents to Minneapolis in the face of intense protests and a day after the president said his own morality was the only restraint on his power — the Fox News host asked whether Republicans will win the upcoming midterm elections.

“I think we’ve done a great job,” Trump said. “Maybe the best job ever in the first year.”

Timeline graphic by Ashley Murray.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivers a speech to a crowd of approximately 7,000 people on May 17, 1967, at UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza in Berkeley, California. (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words from his “Beyond Vietnam” speech still ring true.

“When machines and computers, profit motives, and property rights are considered more important than people,” he warned, “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

Those words, delivered in 1967, still summarize today’s political moment. Instead of putting the lives of workingAmericans first, our leaders in Congress and the WhiteHouse have prioritized advancing corporate profits and wealth concentration, slashing government programs meant to advance upward mobility, and deploying military forces across the country, increasing distrust and tension.

This historic regression corresponds with a recessionary environment for Black America in particular. That’s what my organization, the Joint Center, found in our report, “State of the Dream 2026: From Regression to Signs of a Black Recession.”

The economic landscape for Black Americans in 2026 is troubling, with unemployment rates signaling a potential recession. By December 2025, Black unemployment had reached 7.5 percent — a stark contrast to the national rate of 4.4 percent. This disparity highlights the persistent economic inequalities faced by Black communities, which have only been exacerbated by policy shifts that have weakened the labor market. The volatility in Black youth unemployment, which fluctuated dramatically in the latter months of 2025, underscores the precariousness of the situation.

The Trump administration’s executive orders have systematically dismantled structures aimed at promoting racial equality. By targeting programs such as Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Equal Employment Opportunity executive order and defunding agencies like the Minority Business

Development Agency, the administration has shifted federal support away from disadvantaged businesses. As a result, Black-owned firms risk losing contracts and resources tied to federal programs, potentially resulting in job losses and reduced economic growth. These changes threaten billions in federal revenue for Black-owned firms and undermine efforts to move beyond racial inequality in the workforce.

The GOP’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” passed in 2025, further entrenches inequality by providing tax cuts that disproportionately benefit high-income households and corporations — while simultaneously slashing investments in programs like Medicaid and SNAP, limiting access to essential services for low-income households. The technology sector, a critical component of the American economy, is also affected by this disregard for civil rights. Executive orders like “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence” have stripped away protections that could advance inclusion in this rapidly growing field. As a result, the future of the American economy risks reinforcing past inequalities.

Dr. King’s call for strong, aggressive federal leadership in addressing racial inequality remains highly relevant. However, instead of eradicating structures of inequality, our current leadership is implementing policies that destroy government jobs and dismantle agencies responsible for preventing predatory economic practices. These choices undermine longstanding efforts to combat racial and economic disparities — and exemplify the regressive economic policies that coincide with rising Black unemployment.

As Dr. King stated, “we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.” But urgent action is required. Unless we act deliberately, economic and racial inequalities will become entrenched, resulting in generational loss. The core question is whether we will move beyond our nation’s history of racism, materialism, and militarism, and — as Dr. King urged — embrace “the fierce urgency now” to advance equity.

This article originally appeared in OtherWords.org

Kilmar Abrego Garcia speaks to a crowd of people who held a prayer vigil and rally on his behalf outside the ICE building in Baltimore on Aug. 25, 2025. Lydia Walther Rodriguez with CASA interprets for him. (Photo by William J. Ford/Maryland Matters)

WASHINGTON — The first year of President Donald Trump’s return to the White House was defined by clashes with the judiciary branch, as the president and his administration pushed forward with an aggressive immigration agenda.

In the past year, the Trump administration has aimed to drastically change immigration policy in the United States, including by stripping millions of immigrants of their legal status and attempting to redefine the constitutional right of birthright citizenship.  

The moves have often run directly against the judiciary branch. 

Federal judges briefly stalled the Trump administration’s plans to deploy the National Guard in Portland, Oregon, for immigration enforcement. They also blocked the invocation of an archaic wartime law to expel immigrants from the country — a move that raised concerns, all the way up to the Supreme Court, about skirting the due process rights of immigrants.

In response, the president for the last year frequently battled with federal judges, such as in June, when the Justice Department sued all judges in federal court in Maryland over a two-day pause in deportations to ensure due process rights for immigrants.

Trump also fixated on certain judges that put his policies on hold, such as the District of Columbia’s Chief Judge James Emanuel Boasberg.

Boasberg blocked the Trump administration from deporting certain immigrants under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and ordered the return of deportation flights that, despite his restraining order, still landed at a brutal prison in El Salvador. 

Trump’s singling out of Boasberg in late March, and calling for his impeachment, prompted a rare rebuke from conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

But the Supreme Court has often handed wins to the Trump administration on numerous emergency appeals. The high court allowed for deportations of immigrants to countries they have no ties to, referred to as third-country removals, and allowed the use of race in immigration enforcement in Los Angeles. 

The president has found himself at odds with a range of groups in response to his harsh immigration policy.

A group of Quakers sued the Department of Homeland Security after officials removed a so-called sensitive locations policy that limited immigration enforcement in places of worship. 

The Trump administration also faced backlash in its attempt to quickly deport Guatemalan children in the middle of the night, where a Trump nominated judge said the Department of Justice’s arguments for the move “crumbled like a house of cards.”

Out of the dozens of lawsuits against the Trump administration, here are the five most significant court cases related to the president’s immigration policies:

Alien Enemies Act

Last March, two deportation planes carrying immigrants removed under an 18th-century wartime law were ordered to return to the U.S. by Boasberg, chief judge for the District Court for the District of Columbia. 

But the planes still landed in El Salvador, and 137 Venezuelan men were sent to a brutal prison known as CECOT after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The wartime law would apply to any Venezuelan national 14 and older who was suspected of being a member of the Tren de Aragua gang. 

Boasberg then spent months probing whether Trump officials defied his order to turn the planes around. Last month, he concluded that the deportations were illegal and carried out in defiance of his order.

The 137 Venezuelan men were eventually released from CECOT last summer through a prisoner exchange. Boasberg determined that even though the men are no longer imprisoned, they still need to be afforded their due process rights and he ordered the Trump administration to propose a way to afford those due process rights. 

In the latest major development, last month he directed the administration to create a plan on how to do that, such as providing some form of video interview before an immigration judge. 

The Trump administration has argued because of the U.S. military operations to extract Venezuela’s president from the county, the situation is fluid, and they cannot provide a timeline for complying with Boasberg’s order from last month. 

The Justice Department’s most recent filing, from Jan. 12, objects to the court’s order to facilitate remote due process hearings, and “given the current political instability in Venezuela, there is a serious risk of intentional interference with remote proceedings.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio also submitted a Jan. 12 declaration to the court, saying that “introducing the matter of the disposition of the 137 class members into these discussions at this time would risk material damage to U.S. foreign policy interests in Venezuela.” 

He added that the U.S. does not know where the 137 Venezuelan men are. 

“Given the passage of time, the U.S. government does not know—nor does it have any way of knowing—the whereabouts of class members, including whether anyone has departed Venezuela or whether the regime subsequently took anyone back into custody,” Rubio said. 

Kilmar Abrego Garcia

The wrongful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant and longtime Maryland man, cast a national spotlight on the president’s aggressive immigration crackdown. 

Abrego Garcia’s case has highlighted the Trump administration’s appetite for mass deportations. The case started last March in the District Court of the District of Maryland, after Trump officials mistakenly removed Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, despite removal protections placed by an immigration judge in 2019 because it was likely Abrego Garcia would face violence if returned to his home country. 

But in March, Abrego Garcia was placed on a plane, along with Venezuelans removed under the Alien Enemies Act, to the brutal El Salvador mega-prison known as CECOT.

Federal Judge Paula Xinis ordered the Trump administration to facilitate his return, but the Trump administration took the issue all the way to the Supreme Court, arguing that it could not force another government to comply with the U.S.

The Supreme Court sided with Abrego Garcia, but stopped short of ordering his return.   

Abrego Garcia was brought back to the U.S. several months later to face a criminal indictment in Tennessee over allegations of human smuggling. He has pleaded not guilty to those charges, and another federal judge has found cause that the Justice Department brought the indictment in a vindictive move against Abrego Garcia.

Since his return, Abrego Garcia has detailed psychological and physical torture he experienced at CECOT. The Trump administration has also tried to remove him to a country to which he has no ties because of the 2019 removal protections.

Trump officials re-detained Abrego Garcia and have tried to remove him to the African nations of Eswatini, Ghana, Uganda and Liberia, despite Costa Rica’s willingness to accept Abrego Garcia as a refugee and his willingness to go. 

For that reason, Xinis ordered Abrego Garcia’s release from an ICE facility in Pennsylvania and barred the Trump administration from re-detaining him. 

She is currently overseeing Abrego Garcia’s challenge to his detention on the grounds that the Trump administration is using his imprisonment as punishment rather than for the purpose of removal. 

A Jan. 14 hearing was the most recent development in Abrego Garcia’s case. 

There, Xinis briefly conferred with his lawyers and Department of Justice attorneys regarding the timing of a final order of removal for Abrego Garcia was issued — the question was whether it was in 2019 or January 2025. 

The timing of the order of removal could determine whether the Trump administration can re-detain Abrego Garcia for removal. Xinis in December ordered Abrego Garcia’s release, because she determined the Trump administration was unlawfully detaining him and said ICE failed repeatedly to show a final order of removal existed.

Xinis said she plans to make a final decision in Abrego Garcia’s case by Feb. 12.

Birthright Citizenship

One of Trump’s first executive orders he signed on Inauguration Day was ending the constitutional right to birthright citizenship. 

Under birthright citizenship, all children born in the United States are considered citizens, regardless of their parents’ legal status. There is a small carve-out for the children born of diplomats. 

If birthright citizenship were to be eliminated, more than 250,000 children born each year would not be granted U.S. citizenship and it would effectively create a class of 2.7 million stateless people by 2045, according to a recent study by the think tank the Migration Policy Institute.

In response to Trump’s executive order, multiple lawsuits were filed and lower courts across the country have granted preliminary injunctions against the order. 

One of the challenges to birthright citizenship, brought by Democratic attorneys general, made its way to the Supreme Court, but the Trump administration asked the justices to weigh in on the issue of nationwide injunctions issued by lower courts, rather than the merits of birthright citizenship. 

The justices decided on an order that limited nationwide injunctions, such as class action suits. 

The merits of birthright citizenship are now before the Supreme Court, which is expected to hear oral arguments in February. 

That birthright citizenship case is Barbara v. Trump, which stems from a case in New Hampshire. A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction to bar the executive order from taking effect against a class of babies born on or after Feb. 20, 2025. Those children would have been denied citizenship under the president’s executive order.  

Lawmakers’ Access to ICE Facilities 

As the Trump administration continues with aggressive immigration enforcement and detention, one of the few tools Democrats have, as the minority party, is oversight of Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities. 

More than 60,000 immigrants are detained across various ICE facilities in the country, and Democrats argue they need access to conduct oversight at the facilities. Under a 2019 appropriations law, any lawmaker can carry out an unannounced visit at a federal facility that holds immigrants. 

But after several Democrats were denied access to ICE facilities in July, due to a policy instituted by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem that required seven days notice, a dozen House Democrats sued. 

Last month, a federal judge granted the lawmakers’ request to stay the new policy by Noem. But after Minnesota lawmakers said they were denied an oversight visit to an ICE facility following a deadly shooting by an immigration officer in Minneapolis, Democrats were back in court Jan. 14.

Noem required a seven-day notice, nearly identical to the policy that initially prompted the suit from Democrats last year. 

The federal judge handling the case, Jia Cobb, is probing whether the Trump administration has violated her court order.

Democrats who sued include: Joe Neguse of Colorado, Adriano Espaillat of New York, Jamie Raskin of Maryland, Robert Garcia of California, J. Luis Correa of California, Jason Crow of Colorado, Veronica Escobar of Texas, Dan Goldman of New York, Jimmy Gomez of California, Raul Ruiz of California, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi and Norma Torres of California.

Expanded Use of Expedited Removal 

A pillar of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign is the expanded use of expedited removal. The Trump policy allows the removal of immigrants through the interior of the country without an appearance before an immigration judge.

In March, immigration advocacy groups sued the Trump administration over the policy, arguing it stripped due process rights of immigrants. 

In August, the District Court for the District of Columbia issued a stay in the policy, temporarily blocking the Trump administration from using it. The Department of Justice appealed, and in September a panel of appellate judges denied the Trump administration’s request to lift the lower courts’ stay. 

Most recently, in December, the Trump administration defended the merits of its fast-track deportation policy before a panel of judges in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The Department of Justice argued that immigrants who have been in the country for less than two years without legal authorization are not guaranteed due process.

U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon takes in a selection of grade school students’ patriotic artworks and high schoolers’ recent output in a special installation set up at Exeter-West Greenwich Regional Junior High and High School in Rhode Island on Monday, Jan. 12, 2026. (Photo by Alexander Castro/Rhode Island Current)

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Education, for now, is backtracking on plans to garnish wages and seize tax refunds of student loan borrowers in default, the department announced Friday.

Less than a month after the agency said it would begin garnishing wages by sending notices to roughly 1,000 borrowers in default the first full week of January, the department said that the temporary delay would allow it to implement “major student loan repayment reforms” under Republicans’ tax and spending cut bill that President Donald Trump signed into law in 2025.

The delay would “give borrowers more options to repay their loans,” the department said. 

It was not immediately clear from the announcement how long the pause would last. 

Education Secretary Linda McMahon signaled earlier this week during the Rhode Island portion of her Returning Education to the States Tour that wage garnishment has been “put on pause for a bit.”  

The agency resumed collections for defaulted federal student loans in May after a pause that began during the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A borrower can have their wages garnished as a consequence of defaulting on their loans, and a loanholder can order an employer to withhold up to 15% of their disposable pay to collect defaulted debt without being taken to court, according to Federal Student Aid, an office of the Education Department.

The delay also applies to the Treasury Offset Program, which “allows the federal government to collect income tax refunds and certain government benefits (for example, Social Security benefits) from individuals who owe debts to the federal government,” per FSA. 

Aissa Canchola Bañez, policy director for the advocacy group Protect Borrowers, said in a Friday statement that “after months of pressure and countless horror stories from borrowers, the Trump Administration says it has abandoned plans to snatch working people’s hard-earned money directly from their paychecks and tax refunds simply for falling behind on their student loans.” 

“Amidst the growing affordability crisis, the Administration’s plans would have been economically reckless and would have risked pushing nearly 9 million defaulted borrowers even further into debt,” she added, while pointing to a Jan. 7 letter from Protect Borrowers and other organizations calling on McMahon to “immediately halt its plan to resume garnishment of millions of struggling borrowers’ wages.”

Nearly $800 million in funding for Wisconsin hospitals is in question due to potential rule changes under consideration by the Trump administration. (Photo by Thomas Barwick/Getty Images)

Nearly $800 million in funding for Wisconsin hospitals is in question due to potential rule changes under consideration by the Trump administration. 

Wisconsin lawmakers and Gov. Tony Evers rushed to finish the state budget in July, ahead of federal legislation making it to President Donald Trump’s desk, to ensure the state draw down additional federal funds. Whether the state will be able to benefit from that funding is now uncertain. 

The 2025-27 state budget included a provision to increase its Medicaid hospital assessment from 1.8% to 6% as a way to supplement the state’s Medicaid resources with matching contributions from the federal government. The change was meant to increase payments to hospitals and to offset the state’s funding for the Medical Assistance program. It was estimated to result in over $1 billion in additional revenue for Wisconsin hospitals. 

A Legislative Fiscal Bureau analysis this week found that “preliminary federal guidance from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has created some uncertainty about the allowability of changes to Wisconsin’s hospital assessment.”

The analysis said that if the increase is disallowed then it would lead to a general purpose revenue shortfall of $396 million annually — or $792 million in the 2025-27 biennium.

“CMS indicated that this matter will be addressed through formal rule making procedures, and thus will be subject to provisions of notice and public comment. Pending additional information from the federal government, the allowability of the Act 15 changes is not currently known,” the LFB analysis stated. 

A group of eight Democratic state lawmakers, including state Rep. Steve Doyle and Sen. Brad Pfaff, both from Onalaska, sent a letter to U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden urging him to take action to help ensure Wisconsin receives the funds. Following the state budget, Van Orden claimed credit for helping secure the extra funds for the state.

“Our hospitals, and especially our rural hospitals were counting on that funding to keep their
doors open… At a time when our medical institutions are facing unprecedented financial challenges, we must do everything we can to ensure their ability to continue to operate. Our state budget was counting on it, and our constituents’ lives literally depend on it. We implore you to do everything in your power to reverse these catastrophic decisions,” the lawmakers wrote.

A young woman asks AI companion ChatGPT for help this month in New York City. States are pushing to prevent the use of artificially intelligent chatbots in mental health to try to protect vulnerable users. (Photo by Shalina Chatlani/Stateline)

Editor’s note: If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988. There is also an online chat at 988lifeline.org.

States are passing laws to prevent artificially intelligent chatbots, such as ChatGPT, from being able to offer mental health advice to young users, following a trend of people harming themselves after seeking therapy from the AI programs.

Chatbots might be able to offer resources, direct users to mental health practitioners or suggest coping strategies. But many mental health experts say that’s a fine line to walk, as vulnerable users in dire situations require care from a professional, someone who must adhere to laws and regulations around their practice.

“I have met some of the families who have really tragically lost their children following interactions that their kids had with chatbots that were designed, in some cases, to be extremely deceptive, if not manipulative, in encouraging kids to end their lives,” said Mitch Prinstein, senior science adviser at the American Psychological Association and an expert on technology and children’s mental health.

“So in such egregious situations, it’s clear that something’s not working right, and we need at least some guardrails to help in situations like that,” he said.

While chatbots have been around for decades, AI technology has become so sophisticated that users may feel like they’re talking to a human. The chatbots don’t have the capacity to offer true empathy or mental health advice like a licensed psychologist would, and they are by design agreeable — a potentially dangerous model for someone with suicidal ideations. Several young people have died by suicide following interactions with chatbots.

States have enacted a variety of laws to regulate the types of interactions chatbots can have with users. Illinois and Nevada have completely banned the use of AI for behavioral health. New York and Utah passed laws requiring chatbots to explicitly tell users that they are not human. New York’s law also directs chatbots to detect instances of potential self-harm and refer the user to crisis hotlines and other interventions.

More laws may be coming. California and Pennsylvania are among the states that might consider legislation to regulate AI therapy.

President Donald Trump has criticized state-by-state regulation of AI, saying it stymies innovation. In December, he signed an executive order that aims to support the United States’ “global AI dominance” by overriding state artificial intelligence laws and establishing a national framework.

Still, states are moving ahead. Before Trump’s executive order, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis last month proposed a “Citizen Bill of Rights For Artificial Intelligence” that, among many other things, would prohibit AI from being used for “licensed” therapy or mental health counseling and provide parental controls for minors who may be exposed to it.

“The rise of AI is the most significant economic and cultural shift occurring at the moment; denying the people the ability to channel these technologies in a productive way via self-government constitutes federal government overreach and lets technology companies run wild,” DeSantis wrote on social media platform X in November.

‘A false sense of intimacy’

At a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last September, some parents shared their stories about their children’s deaths after ongoing interactions with an artificially intelligent chatbot.

Sewell Setzer III was 14 years old when he died by suicide in 2024 after becoming obsessed with a chatbot.

“Instead of preparing for high school milestones, Sewell spent his last months being manipulated and sexually groomed by chatbots designed by an AI company to seem human, to gain trust, and to keep children like him endlessly engaged by supplanting the actual human relationships in his life,” his mother, Megan Garcia, said during the hearing.

Another parent, Matthew Raine, testified about his son Adam, who died by suicide at age16 after talking for months with ChatGPT, a program owned by the company OpenAI.

“We’re convinced that Adam’s death was avoidable, and because we believe thousands of other teens who are using OpenAI could be in similar danger right now,” Raine said.

Prinstein, of the American Psychological Association, said that kids are especially vulnerable when it comes to AI chatbots.

“By agreeing with everything that kids say, it develops a false sense of intimacy and trust. That’s really concerning, because kids in particular are developing their brains. That approach is going to be unfairly attractive to kids in a way that may make them unable to use reason, judgment and restraints in the way that adults would likely use when interacting with a chatbot.”

The Federal Trade Commission in September launched an inquiry into seven companies making these AI-powered chatbots, questioning what efforts are in place to protect children.

​​“AI chatbots can effectively mimic human characteristics, emotions, and intentions, and generally are designed to communicate like a friend or confidant, which may prompt some users, especially children and teens, to trust and form relationships with chatbots,” the FTC said in its order.

Companies such as OpenAI have responded by saying that they are working with mental health experts to make their products safer and to limit chances of self-harm among its users.

“Working with mental health experts who have real-world clinical experience, we’ve taught the model to better recognize distress, de-escalate conversations, and guide people toward professional care when appropriate,” the company wrote in a statement last October.

Legislative efforts

With action at the federal level in limbo, efforts to regulate AI chatbots at the state level have had limited success.

Dr. John “Nick” Shumate, a psychiatrist at the Harvard University Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and his colleagues reviewed legislation to regulate mental health-related artificial intelligence systems across all states between January 2022 and May 2025.

The review found 143 bills directly or indirectly related to AI and mental health regulation. As of May 2025, 11 states had enacted 20 laws that researchers found were meaningful, direct and explicit in the ways they attempted to regulate mental health interactions.

They concluded that legislative efforts tended to fall into four different buckets: professional oversight, harm prevention, patient autonomy and data governance.

“You saw safety laws for chatbots and companion AIs, especially around self-harm and suicide response,” Shumate said in an interview.

New York enacted one such law last year that requires AI chatbots to remind users every three hours that it is not a human. The law also requires the chatbot to detect the potential of self-harm.

“There’s no denying that in this country, we’re in a mental health crisis,” New York Democratic state Sen. Kristen Gonzalez, the law’s sponsor, said in an interview. “But the solution shouldn’t be to replace human support from licensed professionals with untrained AI chatbots that can leak sensitive information and can lead to broad outcomes.”

In Virginia, Democratic Del. Michelle Maldonado is preparing legislation for this year’s session that would put limits on what chatbots can communicate to users in a therapeutic setting.

“The federal level has been slow to pass things, slow to even create legislative language around things. So we have had no choice but to fill in that gap,” said Maldonado, a former technology lawyer.

She noted that states have passed privacy laws and restrictions on nonconsensual intimate images, licensing requirements and disclosure agreements.

New York Democratic state Sen. Andrew Gounardes, who sponsored a law regulating AI transparency, said he’s seen the growing influence of AI companies at the state level.

And that is concerning to him, he said, as states try to take on AI companies for issues ranging from mental health to misinformation and beyond.

“They are hiring former staffers to become public affairs officers. They are hiring lobbyists who know legislators to kind of get in with them. They’re hosting events, you know, by the Capitol, at political conferences, to try to build goodwill,” Gounardes said.​​

“These are the wealthiest, richest, biggest companies in the world,” he said. “And so we have to really not let up our guard for a moment against that type of concentrated power, money and influence.”

Stateline reporter Shalina Chatlani can be reached at schatlani@stateline.org.

A trial over Missouri’s abortion regulations began Monday at the Jackson County Courthouse in Kansas City, Mo. Experts are watching the case, which could impact abortion access across the Midwest and South. (Photo by Kevin Hardy/Stateline)

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The outcome of a trial over Missouri’s abortion regulations could ripple far beyond the state, potentially creating new availability for women in the Midwest and South who can’t access abortion close to home.

As a judge weighs the constitutionality of a litany of state restrictions on abortion, the stakes are clear for Missouri women: The decision could hamper access for nearly everyone in the state — or greatly broaden it in ways not seen in decades. That would allow women in a dozen nearby states with abortion bans to travel a shorter distance to access the procedure.

“Opening and reestablishing rights in the state of Missouri would help to alleviate some of the pressure that other states have since so many Southern states have banned abortion,” said Julie Burkhart, the co-owner of Hope Clinic in Granite City, Illinois. “It just seems logical that we would see a shift in migration patterns of patients in the country.”

At her clinic, about a 15-minute drive from downtown St. Louis, Missourians account for about half of all patients, Burkhart said. Though Missouri voters in 2024 enshrined a right to abortion in the state constitution, access has remained highly limited because of restrictive state laws. Only procedural abortions are available on a limited basis across three Planned Parenthood clinics in the state.

Many of those state laws face legal scrutiny this week as a Missouri judge weighs the constitutionality of regulations targeting abortion providers. Those include a 72-hour waiting period between initial appointments and procedures, mandatory pelvic exams for medication abortions and a ban on telemedicine appointments for medication abortions.

Planned Parenthood affiliates in Missouri argue state restrictions are unconstitutional under 2024’s voter-approved constitutional amendment. Over decades, state restrictions have gutted Missouri’s provider networks, limited appointment availability and ultimately forced abortions to a halt in 2022, before a limited number resumed after the 2024 vote.

Experts and advocates are closely monitoring the Missouri case, which is expected to be appealed regardless of the outcome, because of its practical implications on access in the region. While many women now rely on abortion medication, procedural abortion is still crucial for those seeking later-term abortions or who prefer an in-clinic procedure.

But the two-week bench trial in downtown Kansas City also tests lawmakers’ ability to put in place rules so restrictive that they effectively ban abortion — a practice used by anti-abortion lawmakers in other states looking to limit access to the procedure.

“Judges do not operate in a vacuum,” Burkhart said, “ … and we know for a fact that judges look outside the borders of their state for information and for guidance. I do see this as having national importance.”

That’s especially true in other states also litigating abortion access, including Arizona, Michigan and Ohio, said Rebecca Reingold, an associate director at Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law.

While state judges are not bound by the decisions of judges in other states, their deliberations can be informed by court rulings, particularly involving novel legal questions or areas of the law that are evolving.

“There is little doubt that advocates and decision-makers in other states navigating similar legal challenges are closely monitoring the litigation over Missouri’s abortion regulations,” Reingold said.

Restrictions targeting abortion

In the first days of the trial, Planned Parenthood leaders argued that ever-changing state laws and agency regulations have drastically limited access, caused needless red tape and posed privacy risk for their patients.

Dr. Margaret Baum, chief medical officer with St. Louis-based Planned Parenthood Great Rivers, said the Missouri requirements specifically target abortion rather than all other kinds of medical care.

“I provide vasectomies routinely. … And I am not required to have a complication plan, contact a primary care physician, even ask the patient how many miles they live from the health center.”

Opening day of Missouri abortion-rights trial focuses on decades of state restrictions

Baum said state-mandated reporting rules unique to abortion require clinicians to ask the race, education level, marital status and specific location of each patient — none of which is relevant to their care.

Planned Parenthood Great Rivers would like to offer abortion services in Springfield, Baum testified. Access in that region would provide an option for rural Missourians, and also could help serve residents in nearby Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas, where abortion is almost universally banned.

But the organization’s facilities there do not meet state abortion regulations for physical attributes, including hallway size, doorway size and the number of recliners in recovery rooms, Baum testified.

Lawyers for the state defended Missouri’s restrictions as commonsense safeguards aimed at protecting vulnerable women. The attorney general’s office argued that complication risks of abortion justify additional state regulation — despite professional medical associations saying it’s generally safe. The AG’s office also maintained that Planned Parenthood faced a conflict of interest because of its financial motivations.

“Abortion is a business,” Deputy Solicitor General Peter Donohue said during a procedural argument on Monday. “Your Honor, the plaintiffs are asking to deregulate their profession in order to make more money.”

The state was expected to call as witnesses anti-abortion doctors and activists later in the trial.

Patients traveling for care

Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that overturned federal constitutional protections for abortion in June 2022, the number of abortions has increased slightly across the country, according to the health research nonprofit KFF.

The group points to expanded telehealth, which can offer medication abortion more affordably through virtual appointments.

Since the 2022 ruling and subsequent state abortion bans, patients have experienced higher travel costs for abortions and delays in care, according to research published in the American Journal of Public Health in July.

Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco found that travel time to access abortion increased from 2.8 hours to 11.3 hours for residents in states with abortion bans. Travel costs increased from $179 to $372. And more than half of survey respondents said their abortion care required an overnight hotel stay, compared with 5% before an abortion ban.

In 2024, an estimated 7,880 Missourians traveled to Illinois and 3,960 traveled to Kansas to access abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization focused on advancing reproductive rights.

Those Missourians were among the approximate 155,000 people who crossed state lines to access abortion care that year, representing 15% of all abortions provided in states without total bans.

Ongoing uncertainty

Regardless of its outcome, the Missouri case is expected to be appealed. Even if the plaintiffs are ultimately successful, it may take a long time to restore care networks across the state, said Isaac Maddow-Zimet, a data scientist at the Guttmacher Institute.

“And that’s particularly the case when there are states that have a lot of legal uncertainty or restrictions coming into effect and then coming out of effect,” he said. “It’s not quick to open up a clinic. It’s not quick to even necessarily expand the kinds of services, or the kinds of the number of people that a clinic can see.”

Kimya Forouzan, the organization’s principal state policy adviser, said Missouri’s landscape is evidence that lawmakers can drastically curb abortion access without total bans. And despite an overwhelming vote to amend the constitution, legal battles can follow.

Even if the state’s laws are found unconstitutional, Forouzan said, lawmakers will likely still push anti-abortion measures. She noted that several bills have already been introduced in this year’s just-convened legislative session, and that Republican lawmakers are pushing a ballot measure to repeal 2024’s reproductive rights amendment.

“There’s very much a push to pass as many restrictions as possible and kind of see what happens later and how things shape up later. … Time will tell, but we do know that they’re still pushing forth restrictions,” she said.

Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@stateline.org. Missouri Independent reporter Anna Spoerre can be reached at aspoerre@missouriindependent.com.