Many noncitizens need immigration records the government has to prove their legal stay and resist deportation. The government is redacting and withholding those documents, lawyers say.

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom does not like being on Donald Trump's side on any issue.

But when it comes to transgender girls and women in sports, particularly at the school level, the Democrat said he largely agrees with the Republican president. Newsom, one of his party's leading White House prospects, believes it's "deeply unfair" for people who are assigned male at birth to compete against girls.

"I don't want to be on that side of it, but I'm being honest — I'd be lying to you if I said differently," Newsom told The Associated Press as he was campaigning recently in South Carolina. "I haven't been able to figure out how to make it fair from my perspective."

Newsom is not alone.

While most Democratic officials remain steadfast supporters of the transgender community, an increasing number in red and blue states are distancing themselves from their party's unflinching support for the transgender community's policy priorities, such as allowing athletes to compete on teams that match their gender identity. The shift follows years of conservative attacks against Democrats on the divisive issue, which affects a relatively small number of transgender people and their families, but has emerged as one of Republicans' most potent political weapons in the Trump era.

A last-ditch Trump administration effort to hunt for noncitizen voters ahead of November’s elections is requiring federal employees to misrepresent themselves on voter lookup tools in a way that likely violates state laws, according to a federal whistleblower’s statement released Monday.

The Department of Homeland Security probe known as the “Unlawful Voter Initiative” also asks employees to create federal law enforcement records about voters based on unreliable data, the account warns. That could potentially wrongly implicate U.S. citizens in official documentation that could spur further investigation.

The anonymous, nearly 30-page disclosure was published Monday by Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla of California, the ranking member of a Senate committee overseeing federal elections.

September 14, 2026

[They caved, dammit.]

Court cases involving Twin Cities churches and immigration enforcement highlight how the acrimonious debate continues to roil faith communities more than six months since the federal surge turned Minnesota into a symbol of defiance of the Trump administration's policies.

In one case, a Minneapolis Baptist church — alongside congregations nationwide — asked for the government to be reprimanded after spying on protest-related activity on its property. In another, more than three dozen protesters have asked for their charges to be dismissed after they disrupted a worship service in a St. Paul church where one of the pastors was also a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official.

Even congregations uninvolved in the court cases say they're still feeling the repercussions of the weekslong surge in immigration operations last winter. Protesters confronted federal law enforcement daily, and the killing of two protesters sparked global outcry.

Sen. Mitch McConnell returned to Capitol Hill on Monday for the first time after a three-month absence due to health issues.

He was seen leaving his home in a wheelchair en route to the Capitol.

“Today, I’ll cast my first Senate vote since I took a bad fall back in June. I’m really looking forward to being back on the Senate floor and seeing my colleagues,” the GOP senator from Kentucky said in a statement.

…the OIG reported on September 11 that staff at the facility, which was operated by the state of Florida and private contractors, “confined 79 detainees in small metal enclosures—each offering about 18 square feet of floor space—for periods ranging from several minutes to nearly two hours.”

“Facility staff described the small metal enclosures as ‘calming areas’ for detainees to de-escalate and have time alone,” the report states. “Staff further maintained that detainees asked to spend time in the small metal enclosures. We found at least one instance in which the small metal enclosures may have been used as a disciplinary tool.”

While held in the cages, detainees—who reported being shackled and locked to the ground—were subjected to dangerously high temperatures and swarms of mosquitoes.

On Sunday, Fox News reported, “Calls to repeal women’s rights to vote are emerging from the online firestorm over the Lindsay Clancy trial, prompting Republican women to warn that the intraparty rhetoric could hurt the GOP.”

The fact that this article was published by Fox News was itself noteworthy. Press Baron Rupert Murdoch is one of the few remaining centers of power on the right who is strong enough to pick fights with Trump and his MAGA supporters. In recent years, Murdoch’s outlets have carved out a position for themselves as gatekeepers who work to protect the GOP brand from the most self-destructive impulses of MAGA. One recent example of this phenomenon is the decision to fire (or at least take off the air) the firebrand election denier Maria Bartiromo.

The Fox article was also significant for highlighting how the tragic case of Lindsay Clancy is being exploited by the hard right to justify misogyny. Clancy killed three of her children in 2023. Her legal defense was that she suffered from postpartum psychosis and bipolar disorder. Eleven jurors voted to acquit Clancy based on this argument, but one juror resisted, leading to a mistrial.

Nine of the jurors who voted to acquit—presumably because they thought Clancy deserved pity rather than harsh punishment—were women; the lone holdout was a man. The hard right has seized on these facts to justify arguments that women are incapable of reason. The Fox article quoted a post on X that made a common argument: “The female jurors in the Lindsay Clancy trial are speaking out about their deliberations and disagreements with the sole male holdout. The more they speak the better they make the case for repealing the 19th Amendment.”

The world’s richest man is spending at least $100 million on the midterm elections to support the Republican Party and his far-right agenda. But it looks like Elon Musk’s focus won’t be the economy, or the war in Iran or artificial intelligence. It won’t be his repellent ideas about race and his advocacy for “white solidarity.” Instead, Musk has come out of the gate with a barrage of ads targeting Democrats for not being sufficiently supportive of discrimination against transgender Americans.

In 2022, no-fault divorce finally came to the UK. Couples can now simply call it quits by declaring an “irretrievable breakdown” in their marriage without needing to cite a reason (like adultery) for the split. The legal shake-up was hailed as a much-needed overhaul that would streamline the process of divorce and ease undue stress on couples and the family courts. In this aspect, we had lagged behind our neighbours across the pond for decades.

In 1969, California became the first state to legalise no-fault divorce, with then-governor Ronald Reagan declaring : “I believe it is a step towards removing the acrimony and bitterness between a couple that is harmful not only to their children but also to society as a whole.” The rest of America soon followed. By 2010, every US state had legalised some form of no-fault divorce. The “no-fault revolution”, as it became known, had finally won.

At least, until recently. Right-wing commentators like Daily Wire host Matt Walsh have previously shared support for an end to no-fault divorce, while podcasters Tim Pool and Steven Crowder argue that it creates a “raw deal” for men. Now-Vice President JD Vance argued on his 2021 Senate campaign trail that it let people “shift spouses like they change their underwear” (although, he hasn’t made any public comments on this since). House Speaker Mike Johnson has campaigned against it for years and once said that he holds it partly responsible for creating an “amoral society” that leads young people to “go into their schoolhouse and open fire on their classmates”.

This isn’t all talk from politicians and conservative blow-hards, either. There is legislative momentum building in red states like Texas, Iowa and Louisiana, which are all attempting to scale back no-fault divorce. In Texas, Republican legislators have repeatedly called to abolish it and even introduced a bill to that effect. It failed in 2025 but the party has continued to commit to ending it as part of its 2026 policy agenda. Iowa Republicans have also introduced a bill that would allow couples to sign away their right to no-fault divorces when they get married.

Far-right ideologues have transformed American foreign policy into a tool of private gain and antidemocratic reaction.

New York is leading a 22-state lawsuit against the Trump administration for unlawfully expanding the “public charge” rules that restrict entry to the United States for immigrants deemed likely to make use of public benefits. A group of municipalities, led by New York City, are separately suing over the same rules. The new regulations, scheduled […]

A wave of Republican attacks against two Muslim Democrats has ended with one of the most prominent right-wing commentators in the country endorsing Abdul El-Sayed for Senate.

Tucker Carlson wrote in his newsletter on Friday that El-Sayed’s opponent, Mike Rogers, was unfit for office and defended him over his past criticism of the war on terror.

The Michigan Democrat emerged from this past week after a wave of attacks were hurled at him and Zohran Mamdani, the first elected Muslim mayor of New York, around the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Both men were the subject of intense focus from media organizations on the right and even some mainstream outlets as the two faced differing but related accusations of anti-American sentiment impossible to separate from their Muslim faith.