This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

In 2017, Americans legally wagered $4.9 billion on sporting events. Last year, they bet over $165 billion. And the true costs of their bets were even higher: One-quarter of sports bettors, surveyed by U.S. News last summer, worried that they couldn’t control their gambling. Over 30,000 people reach out to the National Problem Gambling Helpline every month.

“Problem gambling,” a term referring to an inability to control gambling behavior that results in personal or financial harm, is at least twice as common among sports bettors as among gamblers in general. It’s unsurprising, then, that Congress enacted a law decades ago that prohibited sports gambling throughout much of the country. But in 2018, the Supreme Court struck that law down, freeing states to partner with the gambling industry to profit off their vulnerable residents. A growing body of research shows Americans are now paying the price.

In the last 48 hours, President Donald Trump has revived two issues on which the Supreme Court ruled against him at the end of this term: restricting birthright citizenship and firing Federal Reserve governors.

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

On Tuesday, voters in Kansas will decide whether to make a dramatic change to the process for filling vacancies on the Kansas Supreme Court. For the last 68 years, under state law, a nine-member bipartisan commission has assembled lists of three potential nominees for the governor to choose from. The commission consists of both lawyers and nonlawyers, and it is far more transparent than most systems in place for selecting high court judges: Its interviews of aspiring justices, for example, are livestreamed for the public.

This is a real problem for the state’s Republican culture warriors, who in recent years have become increasingly angry with the court’s decisions on, among other things, abortion access: Back in 2019, the Kansas Supreme Court issued a landmark opinion holding that the state constitution protects residents’ right to access abortion care. In response, the GOP-controlled legislature concocted the Kansas Elections for Supreme Court Justice Amendment, which is, as the name suggests, a constitutional amendment that would abolish the nominating commission and allow the legislature to institute partisan judicial elections instead. 

Supporters of the amendment say it would return political power to the people: Voters, not “attorneys and political insiders,” they argue, should decide who sits on Kansas’s courts. What the amendment is really about is Republican politicians’ desire to restrict abortion rights, and their frustration with both the Kansas Supreme Court, for refusing to let them do so, and also with Kansas voters, who in 2022 ratified the Kansas Supreme Court’s decision by emphatically rejecting a GOP-backed anti-abortion constitutional amendment. 

The legislature’s bet is that in a state that President Donald Trump won by 16 points in 2024, transforming state supreme court seats into explicitly partisan prizes—and infusing the judicial selection process with millions of dollars in dark-money spending—will yield a more conservative Kansas Supreme Court that will do what right-wing activists want.

Republican frustration with the Kansas Supreme Court’s insubordination reached its zenith seven years ago, when the court held in Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt that abortion rights are protected by the Kansas Constitution’s guarantee of “inalienable natural rights.” In its opinion, the court emphasized its power to interpret the Kansas Constitution’s promises “independently of the manner in which federal courts interpret corresponding provisions of the United States Constitution.” 

For reproductive rights advocates in the state, both the holding and its legal basis were huge. Only a year earlier, Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court had created a solid majority of five anti-abortion justices primed to overturn Roe v. Wade. The result in Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt meant that even if Roe fell, Kansans’ abortion rights would remain safe from the conservative legal movement.

Almost immediately after the court decided Hodes & Nauser, Republican lawmakers began pushing to amend the Kansas constitution to explicitly state that it does not protect abortion rights. Eventually, they got a proposal on the ballot in the form of a referendum known as the “Value Them Both” Amendment, which went before voters in August 2022.

Their timing could not have been worse. In June, just two months before Kansans headed to the polls, the U.S. Supreme Court indeed overturned Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. (Kavanaugh indeed joined the five-justice majority.) Support for abortion rights spiked across the country, including in Kansas, where voters responded to Dobbs by turning out in record numbers to defeat the “Value Them Both” Amendment in an 18-point blowout. 

Now, four years after failing to change voters’ minds on abortion rights, Republicans have pivoted to a new strategy: changing the composition of the court that protected those rights in the first place. One group that opposes the current amendment goes by “Vote No (Again) Kansas”—an attempt to remind voters that they already decided the substantive issue, and to urge them not to be fooled by anti-abortion politics repackaged as judicial selection reform.

Republicans, for their part, have not been shy about their motives. In 2022, then-attorney general candidate Kris Kobach called judicial elections “another path” to restricting abortion, and predicted that instituting them would allow conservatives to “slowly and quietly” overhaul the Kansas Supreme Court. In November 2025, gubernatorial candidate Ty Masterson told anti-abortion voters that supreme court elections were the “solution” they’d been waiting for, as long as they had the good sense to play it cool in public. 

“You can’t go out there and say it,” Masterson said, according to the Marion County Record. “Because they’ll say that if you elect your Supreme Court, you won’t have any right to abortion anymore.” 

To give you a sense of the stakes here, spending on the amendment—again, just on the question of whether to hold supreme court elections—has topped $12 million, per the Sunflower State Journal. Given that spending on the 2025 race for a single Wisconsin Supreme Court seat topped $100 million, $20 million of which came courtesy of the reactionary billionaire Elon Musk, it is a safe bet that if the amendment were to pass, the volume of anti-abortion money that would start pouring into Kansas would dwarf that $12 million figure in a hurry.

The amendment’s supporters love extolling the virtues of democratic accountability. But the democratic process has already yielded an unambiguous result: Kansans support their state supreme court’s decision to protect the right to abortion access, and overwhelmingly repudiated politicians’ (initial) hamfisted attempt to take it away. The legislature’s crusade for partisan supreme court elections is reactionary politics in its purest form. Republicans in Kansas do not actually care what voters want. They are upset about a policy choice that voters made, and want to reshape the legal system to shut them out of the process.

‘Yeah, That’s Not Going to Happen’

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and other Senate Republicans are resisting two aspects of Donald Trump’s latest demand that they pass the SAVE Act voter suppression bill: they don’t want to give up or delay their August recess to do so, and they don’t want to nuke the filibuster.

Scrapping the filibuster would allow the SAVE Act to pass with 51 instead of 60 votes. “Yeah, that’s not going to happen,” Thune told ABC News yesterday.

“If the result is only achieved by nuking the legislative filibuster, we don’t have the votes to do that and so that’s not a — that’s just not a realistic option,” he reportedly added.

Trump in recent days has again demanded that both Houses of Congress turn their attention to the SAVE Act and the SAVE Act alone. He has threatened not to sign any legislation until the SAVE Act is passed. In a Monday Truth Social post, he insisted that the Senate delay its recess, and that it nuke the filibuster. “Stupidity always brings LOSING & DEATH!” he warned Thune. Other, vocal right-wing senators, including Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rick Scott (R-FL), are also calling for recess to be delayed.

Thune also dismissed the demands to nix recess, saying it was pointless for the Senate to stay in session without adequate votes for the SAVE Act.

All of this doesn’t entirely close the door on Trump’s push. The House and Senate still have some maneuvers they can try to advance the SAVE Act through budget reconciliation in the next few days, Punchbowl writes. And while the kind of SAVE Act that could be accomplished through reconciliation is not as dramatic as the sweeping election overhaul Trump has been pushing, it would still be ample reason for concern, as law professor and longtime congressional advisor Charles Teifer wrote for us last week.

Trump’s Attempt to Control Elections Through Executive Order Arrives at SCOTUS

A prong of Trump’s attack on the midterms has reached the Supreme Court, the first to do so. It has immediately become one of the most significant issues before the Court.

• Yesterday afternoon, the administration asked the Supreme Court to overturn lower court rulings that have blocked his executive order on elections from March.
• The March order was not his only attempt to seize control of election processes through executive action, but it was one of the most sweeping: it called for federal agencies to compile lists of eligible voters, and for them to exercise control over who can vote by mail.
• The Constitution gives the executive branch no role in setting election rules.
• There are other reasons the Court might be expected to turn the administration back. “If the Supreme Court followed its own guidance with any consistency, the Purcell principle — which prevents courts from changing voting procedures close to elections — would have some heft here, as the administration is demanding enormous and ill-defined changes when the midterms are already underway in many states,” Kate Riga wrote for TPM yesterday. “In recent years, though, the Roberts Court has tended to invoke or ignore Purcell in accordance with Republican preferences.”
• Not unrelatedly, a new Gallup poll finds the Supreme Court’s approval has hit a record low.

Tabs

• Trump recently urged RFK Jr. to do more to investigate supposed links between autism and vaccines, the Wall Street Journal reports.
• The political operative who recruited Graham Platner was himself credibly accused of sexual assault, Marisa Kabas reports for the Handbasket.
• The very extreme far-right candidate James Fishback beat an attempt to kick him off the ballot over questions of his residency, the Miami Herald reports.

Man of the Hour

It’s Sen. Mitch McConnell, not yet back in Congress and drawing demands from Kentucky’s governor Andy Beshear (D) that he “directly, verbally” address his constituents to explain what’s going on.

Are We at War?

Sort of. Trump claims there is a “good chance” for a deal with Iran during this lull. Hear that, stock market?

This book excerpt is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

The story of modern gun culture is partly about how reactionary forces worked lawmakers and the judiciary to transform America’s relationship with firearms. Congress granted extraordinary liability protections to the gun industry, while the Supreme Court reframed the Second Amendment, ignoring the long-held view that its reference to “a well-regulated militia” was not a fusty preamble but a commonly understood restraint.

In Ricochet: Guns, Greed, and the American Way of Violence, I explore how these legal victories freed politicians, businesses, and Wall Street players to seek power and profits by making gun ownership a cultural identifier. And the gun lobby worked especially hard to cultivate a younger generation of gun owners by making rifle shooting a school physical education activity and conducting social research on how to get kids interested in firearms.

The heedless integration of firearms into American life is not solely explainable by historical undercurrents, such as the grand schemes of the NRA and the gun industry to inculcate pro-gun attitudes in young people. Larger cultural and social forces have also become increasingly important.

As I began exploring them more deeply, it quickly became apparent that modern-day gun culture has entered a phase akin to the late-stage Roman Empire, when success and power devolved into selfish extravagance. No longer was it enough to argue that sports shooting, hunting, and self-defense justified an expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment—simply having fun with guns was now a God-given right.

On a 550-acre desert expanse in the unincorporated township of Pahrump, Nevada, you can pay for Rolling Thunder, an “adrenaline-fueled experience” of high-speed tactical shooting from an off-road vehicle, offered by Staccato Vegas, an offshoot of the Staccato gun company. A marketing brochure shows a blond woman wearing mirrored shades blasting away with a semiautomatic rifle painted like an American flag.

For a $1,000 annual Patriot membership plan, you get 50 percent off on “run-n-gun” courses, free firearms cleaning, and unlimited monthly guest passes. If you’re willing to pay $3,000 to upgrade to the Freedom plan, you get additional perks such as concierge services, on-demand food and beverage, preloaded magazines for your pistol or rifle when you arrive, and exclusive access to the Staccato 368 Lounge (368 supposedly was a code used for the word liberty by Revolutionary War patriots).

If all of this sounds rather silly, Staccato wants you to know that it is their solemn obligation as red-blooded Americans. At Staccato, you see, “We believe in protecting freedom and celebrating liberty: “It’s a part of who we are as Americans, allowing us the freedom to be individuals and for each of us to pursue our own unique happiness.” To join this assembly of patriots, you must buy at least one Staccato Pistol. 

Sport-shooting clubs have been around for at least a century. In olden days, they mostly entailed well-to-do men gathering at some secluded retreat to drink, smoke, play cards, and occasionally shoot bolt-action rifles at targets or maybe go out for a hunt. They were genteel affairs. In recent decades, entrepreneurs have taken this concept and jacked it on steroids. Numerous oases of controlled violence dot barren landscapes in Nevada, Arizona, and Texas, with indoor facilities as well in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia. In Las Vegas, the Range 702 offers bachelorette parties, where ladies can shoot machine guns and get a free shot glass, followed by drinks and a “limo to Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club.”

Luxury is a defining theme. An NRA blog post from 2017 explained the emergence of a new name to describe the phenomenon: guntry club. Acknowledging that “gun culture could inspire thoughts of dark and cold ranges, dusty or muddy outdoor environments or even loud, brash and unforgiving crowds,” guntry clubs sought to combine the shooting experience with luxury accoutrements of traditional country clubs.

Some of these places are fashioned as family theme parks, combining sightseeing, swimming, and horseback riding with shooting machine guns and grenade launchers. “Drive a tank! Crush cars!” blares an ad for Bullets and Burgers, an apocalyptic playground of sorts in Arizona. If you’re willing to part with $2,300, the Super Platinum Shooting Package gets you access to eight machine guns of your choice, a flamethrower, and a gigantic .50-caliber tripod-mounted sniper rifle “used in several Hollywood hits including Jumanji and Rambo II.”

In 2014, Alex MacLachlan, an Ivy League-educated investment banker from New Jersey, and his wife, Alison, visited Bullets and Burgers. Their nine-year-old daughter was allowed to shoot an Uzi submachine gun, but lost control of it, accidentally killing the shooting instructor who was guiding her.

The relative wealth and professional status of the tragedy-struck MacLachlan family came as somewhat of a surprise to me. I suppose that betrays my own biased assumptions about the type of person who would want to go to a place such as Bullets and Burgers. Part of my preconception was based on my experience in the 1990s visiting gun ranges such as the one in Kentucky where you could pay to blow up gas-filled barrels—“Machine gun and flame thrower rentals available Friday, Saturday and Sunday!” It was the epitome of “loud, brash and unforgiving.” Since then, it seemed, the audience had expanded to include a demographic

I had not thought would be as interested in it. When I learned about the MacLachlan incident it immediately brought to mind an eerily similar case I knew of involving a physician from Connecticut. In that tragic incident, the doctor’s eight-year-old boy was accidentally shot in the head when he lost control of an Uzi submachine gun he was given at a range in Massachusetts (unlike the Arizona case, this one led to criminal indictments and changes in the law). Well-educated, well-off parents with the freedom to choose any number of healthy, memorable adventures for their children gravitated to ones centered around instruments of lethal violence as entertainment. Some of this was undoubtedly influenced by the gun lobby’s decades-long effort to position firearms as an acceptable way to teach responsibility to kids by making shooting a family-friendly pastime.

But there were deeper societal currents working as well. Legally purchasing and maintaining a decent firearm has never been cheap. One consequence of restricting imports of expensive guns such as so-called Saturday night specials—which in the 1960s and early ’70s could be bought for as little as $10—is that it allowed American-made guns to be sold at even higher prices. Gun control advocates such as Sen. Thomas Dodd were often accused of pushing import bans, in part, to protect homegrown manufacturers, such as Colt, Winchester, and Sturm, Ruger in Dodd’s state of Connecticut.

Import restrictions under the 1968 Gun Control Act required firearms to be for “sporting purposes” and go through licensed dealers. The foreign-made guns that continued to be imported, such as the Beretta, tended to be higher quality and thus more costly. And as the AR-15 took off as a cultural icon, the money required to partake in the fun increased exponentially. Gun industry marketing adjusted to target higher earners, who could more easily afford the advanced weaponry they were selling.

By 2014, households earning more than $90,000 were nearly twice as likely to have guns in the home than those earning less than $50,000. A 2019 study found that “slightly less than half of US guns were owned by persons whose household income was $100,000 a year or more.”

At the same time, the typical education level of the people buying these weapons was also on the rise. In 1994, 29 percent of gun owners had some college education. By 2017, that figure had risen to 34 percent, and by 2022 it was 40 percent. Of course, educational attainment for Americans in general has been trending upward, but the concentration of gun ownership among wealthier households outpaced the extra income that accompanies higher levels of schooling.

There is no better window into this phenomenon than the history of the Staccato Vegas gun range in Pahrump, Nevada. The place actually began under a different name and ownership. It started as the vision of Ignatius Piazza, a chiropractor from California, who founded a firearms training program he called Front Sight. But it wasn’t just about shooting.

From the beginning, Piazza imagined more than dusty target ranges nestled in the desert canyons. He obtained a development agreement with the county to build a “vacation club and resort” that would include thousands of time-share condos, single-family homes, a hotel, and a recreational park, among other amenities—a veritable town dedicated to gun lovers.

To join Front Sight required paying membership fees that could reportedly exceed $200,000 at the topmost “lifetime” tiers, which included a luxury home site. I had a hard time believing anyone would actually pay that much, but fortunately there was a way to find out: Front Sight filed for bankruptcy protection in 2022, and buried in the thousands of court records I found a list of close to three thousand members and the amounts they were said to have paid. The membership costs ranged from $500 to $350,000.

There was the real estate sales and investment consultant from California who paid $165,000; an oncologist and vineyard owner, also from California, was in for $148,000; a corporate lawyer in Illinois paid $106,000; for a physician in Arizona it was $50,000; a tech consultant in New Jersey, $48,000. And on and on.

The chief operating officer of Front Sight once described the Clientele this way: “We’ve got people that are college students to Forbes 400 guys. The economic spectrum is quite broad, but what we find is there’s very few, like forty or fifty, who actually want a residence. What they want is an upscale place to stay for the week or two that they’re out here.”

What motivates them? Bruce, a “gold status” member and CEO of a tech company in Orange County, California, explained why he brought his fourteen-year-old son and members of his family’s church group to the range: “The feeling of security that I come home with, that I’m able to protect my family with all the craziness going on in this world.”

Michelle, a tax accountant from Liberty, Missouri, spent weeks at Front Sight with relatives and “girls from my office” learning to shoot and “be ready to defend our family.” Grant, a software-company executive from Bloomington, Minnesota, came with friends because “it’s really important to be able to defend myself and defend my family if I ever got into that situation.”

As much as self-defense may be the practical, mature rationale participants offer when asked, many also gravitate to these guntry clubs for entertainment. The industry has been remarkably successful at selling the eat-your-spinach objective of skills training in a sugary wrapper of fun, comfort, or excitement. And for that, the lure of cool “forbidden” stuff comes in handy.

Desert Wolf Tours in Arizona offers packages for bachelor and bachelorette parties and corporate retreats that combine off-road ATV driving with shooting machine guns, which they are licensed to operate. One of them, priced at $314 per person, is the Machine Guns and Suppressors Adventure, which is cosponsored by a company that makes silencers or, in the industry’s preferred parlance, suppressors: “Shoot REAL, Federally-Restricted Machine Guns and Suppressors! These are the REAL DEAL!”

---

The use of guns for entertainment and over-the-top recreation may be all in good fun (the wisdom of it notwithstanding), but a darker element to the modern idolization of firearms and violence can be found in our political discourse. Here, the societal effects are especially profound because, for better or worse, our elected leaders both reflect and set the tone for what’s considered “normal.”

For schoolchildren, a visit to their class by a politician once conveyed a sense of seriousness and civic duty. Students today could be forgiven for confusing it with professional wrestling.

To be sure, American politics has a long history of bare-knuckle excesses. The 1828 presidential campaign featured accusations, circulated in dueling handbills, that Andrew Jackson was a cannibal and John Quincy Adams a pimp. In modern times, negative attacks on opponents have tended to emphasize fear as much as slander and innuendo. Democrats can lay claim to one of the most notorious examples — The “Daisy ad” of 1964, showing a little girl plucking flower petals followed by a nuclear blast, the unsubtle message being that a vote for Republican Barry Goldwater meant the end of the world.

At the same time, as the NRA made support for gun rights a potent political signifier, it became increasingly common for candidates from both parties to flaunt their love of firearms. Traditionally, they struck relatively tame poses—hunting ducks or shooting at targets—just enough to reassure voters for whom guns were important. But in the 2010s, political messaging around guns took a sharp turn. Conservative opposition to President Obama and the rise of the Tea Party movement propelled a class of antiestablishment Republicans to the fore, along with increasingly agitated campaign ads of a different caliber—literally.

In Arizona, there was Pamela Gorman bragging about her NRA rating in 2010 by firing a machine gun, an AR-15, and a semiautomatic pistol. Another Arizona candidate, Jesse Kelly, promoted a campaign event that year where supporters could “shoot a fully Automatic M16” with him. Around the same time, Christina Jeffrey in South Carolina ran an ad in which she brandished an AK-47 while asserting that gun rights were necessary “to ensure that our limited government stays limited.”

Will Brooke, who unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for Congress in Alabama in 2014, ran an ad in which he used a small arsenal of semiautomatic weapons to blow holes in a printed copy of the “Obamacare” law. He was mimicking a milder ad from four years earlier showing West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat, shooting a bolt-action rifle at a different bill.

In the 2016 Missouri governor’s race, Eric Greitens, a Republican and former Navy SEAL, took gun imagery to new heights in two ads, one showing him firing a mounted machine gun while pledging to “fight Obama’s Democrat machine and their corrupt attacks.” In the other, he shot an assault-style rifle at an unseen target until it blew up. And in 2018, there was the not-so-subtle ad for Republican Kay Ivey, the governor of Alabama, showing two men loading pistols at a range while saying they are “sick of those DC politicians” and that Ms. Ivey “protected our monuments.”

What was different about these is that the political messaging featured a firearm but, unlike in the past, the focus was neither progun nor pro–gun control. Rather, the gun itself was a prop used as a sort of ominous exclamation point for some other argument. The careless flaunting of firearms by these twenty-first-century pols stood in stark contrast to earlier generations of elected leaders, who may have supported gun rights but didn’t shove it in people’s faces. The discourse had become so militant that even John Dingell, the archetype of the pro-gun politician, was having doubts.

In a memoir published shortly before he died in 2019, Dingell recounted watching his wife, who had succeeded him in Congress, give a speech pleading for reason and a spirit of compromise to address gun violence. Thinking about it the next day, he said he found himself regretting that “the gun debate had gotten too polarized.” “As Debbie had said with such passion the night before, ‘Can’t we have a discussion?’” Dingell wrote. “And I thought about the role I know I played in contributing to that polarization.”

Compromise, however, does not sell as well with certain constituencies as performative antics, which have only gotten more extreme in the years since Dingell’s ruminations. Republican Congressmen Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Andy Ogles of Tennessee sent out

Christmas cards in 2021 showing their families posing with assault rifles. A Republican Senate candidate in Georgia, Josh Clark, held weekly giveaways of AR-15s in 2022 to ensure voters are equipped to “fight tyranny and evil” and filmed himself with his kids shooting one of the rifles. And in 2024 in Missouri, Republican attorney General candidate Will Scharf fired a grenade launcher at a stack of documents from Trump-related court cases.

Watching these ads, I found myself thinking of another politician from a bygone era, Robert F. Kennedy, and his remarks about gun ownership after his brother, the president, was assassinated: “We have a responsibility to the victims of crime and violence. It is a responsibility to think not only of our own convenience but of the tragedy of sudden death. It is a responsibility to put away childish things, to make the possession and use of firearms a matter undertaken only by serious people who will use them with the restraint and maturity that their dangerous nature deserves and demands.”

Copyright © 2026 by Mike McIntire. From Ricochet by Mike McIntire, published by One Signal/Atria Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

On July 7, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a homebuilder in Houston, woke up before sunrise, ate breakfast prepared by his wife, and drove his construction crew to work. Around 6:50 AM, federal immigration agents surrounded Salgado Araujo’s van and shot him through an open window. Struck in the stomach, he died at a hospital a few hours later. 

The Department of Homeland Security put out a statement that evening which claimed that immigration officers stopped Salgado Araujo’s van as part of a “targeted” operation, and that an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot him “in self-defense” after he “weaponized his vehicle” in an attempt to run agents over. Later, DHS admitted that Salgado Araujo was not the target of an investigation. And video evidence and witness reports revealed that Salgado Araujo did not aim his vehicle at ICE agents, who shot him from the passenger side of the van.

Just a few days later, the same deadly scenario played out all over again. On July 13, around 7 AM, Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero left his apartment in Biddeford, Maine, to go to work. Mere feet from the front door, federal immigration agents fired at least four shots into his car. Nearby, his 3-year-old daughter looked on, in her Bluey pajamas, and cried.

Again, the Trump administration initially claimed that Guerrero was the “target” of an arrest warrant, and that officers shot him after he “weaponized” his car. Again, the administration later admitted that Guerrero was not the target of an investigation. An ICE spokesperson eventually abandoned the self-defense claim, too, saying only that agents shot Guerrero out of an amorphous concern for “public safety.”

The American Civil Liberties Union published a report on Thursday that examined more than 1,200 incidents of immigration enforcement across eight states that occurred during President Donald Trump’s first year back in the White House. The report concluded that in 432 of those incidents—representing more than one in three of the reviewed enforcement actions in 2025—agents used or threatened force, used intimidation tactics, or retaliated against observers. The ACLU also identified 130 instances in which agents brandished weapons and 16 incidents in which agents used lethal force.

The report stresses that the misconduct of immigration agents is not the result of “a few bad apples.” Rather, the fault lies with “a culture of abuse” encouraged by the Trump administration, and “a broken system of accountability.” Basically, when immigration agents are free to break the law without personal consequence, there are deadly consequences for everyone else.

I wanted to direct your attention to this podcast episode from Slate. It’s actually the first episode of a series Slate is doing on popular constitutionalism. (The page linked above is paywalled. But, I’m told, the ‘By the People’ pod series itself is not. So you should be able to find it on podcast platforms.) It brings together in a engaging and coherent way a number of themes we’ve been discussing over the last couple years about the problem of and the corruption of the U.S. Supreme Court. And it frames the question around a 20-year-old book on popular constitutionalism by Larry Kramer (The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review).