This piece was originally published at The Redoubt, a reader-supported publication based in Vienna, Austria. If you appreciate this reporting, consider a paid subscription or one-time donation.

The U.S. State Department is seeking to build out a consortium for “independent journalism” that will produce critical reporting on public policies in European countries, with a particular focus on immigration, “civilizational values” and “the state of sovereignty.”

President Donald Trump has not tried to hide his disdain for most European governments. “Your countries are going to hell,” he declared in a September 2025 speech at the United Nations, stating that Europe’s “open borders” — a claim at odds with Europe’s highly visible efforts to dissuade and deport immigrants — are leading to societal collapse. Vice President J.D. Vance has also openly campaigned for right-wing opposition parties across the continent, including the neo-fascist Alternative für Deutschland.

Now the Trump administration is seeking to bolster its critique of Europe under the guise of journalism.

Good morning! I hope this morning dispatch, focused on the latest updates about ongoing TPM storylines, has been useful. Starting next week, TPM members will be able to recieve it as an email. If you’re not a member, consider becoming one!

Propaganda Meets Reality

Ahead of President Trump’s big speech last month touting supposedly new information about election interference (there was little new info, and no new conclusions to draw from it), the Department of Homeland Security claimed to have uncovered “tens of thousands of non-citizens who are illegally on the states’ voter rolls.” That press release inspired credulous headlines in major news outlets, even as experts scrambled to explain that its conclusions appeared to be baseless, and likely founded on a database that would not allow the department to make such claims.

Now, despite DHS’ July assertion that it found “15,903 non-citizens registered to vote in Nevada,” the department has privately told state election administrators that it has identified on the voter rolls only a fraction of that number of “potential” noncitizens — 185, according to emails and recordings obtained by the New York Times.

Whats more, the administration has not given Nevada actionable information about who those 185 are — it hasn’t even provided names, per the Times. It also has apparently not alleged any of them voted. “In the virtual meeting, federal officials told Nevada that the nearly 16,000 they had originally identified represented ‘the ceiling’ of potential noncitizens,” the Times reports.

21-Year-Old Uses AI to ‘Test’ a ‘Theory.’ Chaos Ensues.

Following some impressive digital sleuthing, the Guardian identified and spoke with a 21-year-old who appears to be behind the website that put out fake polling data about California, Nevada and the gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin that saw David Crowley defeat Francesca Hong. The Hong polling, in particular — it showed her 20 points ahead, only for her to later lose her election — helped launch a thousand thinkpieces.

• Rahil Prakash, the guy the Guardian identified, told the newspaper the polling miss in the Michigan governor primary, when surveys showed Abdul El-Sayed with more of an advantage over Haley Stevens than he actually had on primary day, gave him the idea for the “experiment.” “This is what inspired me to test my theory,” said Prakash. “I was a bit shocked, perhaps at how fast this sort of information can spread.”
• Prakash said he used AI to create the fake polling results.
• Speculation has abounded that the whole operation was some kind of scheme to make money on betting sites such as Kalshi or Polymarket, even though “Median Strategies,” the outfit behind the “poll,” insisted the “project was not undertaken for financial gain or to influence the value of any financial or prediction-market position.” It has “all the earmarks” of a “pump-and-dump scheme,” American Prospect editor Dave Dayen wrote. “I think this falls into the category of hard to prove but very hard to think it’s anything else,” Corey Frayer, a former financial regulatory staffer in Congress now with the watchdog group Consumer Federation of America, told Dayen.
• Nonetheless, Prakash denied to the Guardian he placed bets on any prediction markets amid his scheme. “No, not at all,” he said.
• If this is the full story, it’s a wild cautionary tale about AI and our current media environment, where slop easily insinuates itself into our social media feeds, and even into coverage by major news outlets and statements by political campaigns. It also may not be the full story.

Tabs

• The Daily Beast has published what it says are two letters from Natalie Harp to Trump. They are bizarre!

“And please, when I fail, will you tell me? You have the absolute right to cuss me out, if need be, when I deserve it, because no one knows or cares about me more.”…“With all my heart, Natalie”

— Bill Grueskin (@bgrueskin.bsky.social) 2026-08-21T00:11:50.088Z

• Mike Rogers, the candidate running for Senate against Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, backed a one-year moratorium on data centers, The Detroit News reports — a clever finger to the wind amid widespread distrust of AI and the facilities needed to support it.
• Relatedly, a Reuters analysis of money in this year’s election finds that “Crypto companies, artificial intelligence firms and online betting have emerged as the biggest industries shaping the 2026 midterm races, driving a record amount of business spending on congressional contests, according to campaign finance watchdogs and interviews with more than a dozen political ​strategists from both parties.”

Man of the Hour

Its Barron Trump, the college sophomore who is worth $150 million. Much of that fortune comes from his family’s various cryptocurrency schemes, Forbes suggests.

Are We at War?

Oman and the UAE are thrilled that parts of their countries are now “U.S. Territory.”

President Donald Trump lost the popular vote in the 2020 election by 4.4%. That hasn’t stopped him, though, from latching on to a highly unusual Census Bureau report published Tuesday afternoon that allegedly found less than two-hundredths of a percent of voters in that presidential election were noncitizens.

According to the report, 24,000 out of 128 million voters in the 2020 presidential election were ineligible “non-citizen” voters. Unnamed authors of the seven-page report, partially titled “A Beginning Analysis,” said the bureau still has to analyze 32 million voter records. According to Pew, some 158.4 million ballots were cast in the 2020 election. The Census Bureau’s report found 159.9 million ballots were cast in the election.

“The Census Bureau’s library of administrative records makes it uniquely capable of compiling and publishing statistics on election crime and other forms of fraud,” the report concludes, echoing the Trump administration’s prior attempts to link election and social service spending fraud to immigration.

The Census Bureau report comes after Trump has sought to lean on the statistical agency to uphold his administration’s monomaniacal goal of delegitimizing the results of the 2020 presidential election. Trump used the report’s findings to urge the passing of the SAVE America Act, a sweeping voter suppression bill that Trump has been pressuring Congress to pass for months, but which does not have widespread support even among Republicans  in Congress. 

“On the first 128,000,000 Voters,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “the Census Bureau proves that over 24,000 non-citizens voted illegally! The Census Bureau is going to analyze the next 32,000,000 Voters, and this number will explode. I WON THE ELECTION!”

Howard Lutnick, the secretary of the Department of Commerce, under which the Census Bureau falls, backed his boss in a post on X touting the report.

Experts have told TPM that there is “absolutely no basis” to Trump and the MAGA movement’s claims about noncitizen voting. Trump and Republicans have been propping up conspiracy theories about noncitizens voting en masse for Democrats in federal elections for years. Nevermind that the findings of Tuesday’s Census Bureau report obviously does not support any claim that the 2020 election was somehow rigged by a crush of ineligible, noncitizen voters. The bureau’s analysis diverts from normal operations in several ways, researchers and public data experts said Tuesday, which makes the veracity of its findings impossible to confirm.

“It lacks transparency and accountability,” Beth Jarosz, a senior fellow in demographic and socioeconomic analysis at the Georgetown University Massive Data Institute, told TPM.

Neither the Census Bureau nor the Commerce Department immediately responded to TPM requests for comment.

The Census Bureau used a roll of private voter data, compared with various federal data sources, to substantiate its finding. That’s unprecedented, Jarosz said.

“[O]ne of the red flags in the report is that the Census Bureau, when they start to use a new data source, typically goes through a very extensive process of trying to understand the data quality,” Jarosz said. “And I don’t see any evidence that they did that.”

On X, Omar Noureldin, senior vice president of policy and litigation strategy at Common Cause, said the Census Bureau doesn’t collect the information it would have needed to publish definitive findings about alleged noncitizen voting.

“The 2020 Census did not collect citizenship status, and the Census Bureau does not have a comprehensive individual ‘citizenship records’ file to definitively match against voter rolls,” Noureldin wrote. The type of data the Bureau did use in its report, according to its own methodology, “are modeled population estimates, not evidence that 24,000 people voted illegally,” he continued. 

The report doesn’t list any authors or even a bureau department from which the report came. According to Mike Schneider, an Associated Press reporter who covers the Census Bureau, that’s atypical.

“Every other report on the bureau’s ‘Census Publications’ site is credited to a statistician, economist, demographer or researcher,” Schneider wrote on his Substack.

Not even a department within the bureau is listed on the completely anonymous report. The report says its data was analyzed and published with “high confidence,” but lacks any definition on what high confidence means.

Tuesday’s report references legislation from 1902 which made the Census Bureau into a permanent governmental entity and empowers the Bureau to “collect statistics related to… crime, pauperism, and benevolence, including prisoners, paupers, juvenile delinquents,” and the like. The report’s authors cite this provision as giving the Bureau authority to “compile and

publish information on crime.”

This is an oversimplified interpretation of that provision, Mark Mather, the associate vice president of programs at the Population Reference Bureau, said in a data user forum. The legislation’s provision authorized the decennial Census to count “people already in institutions,” Mather wrote, not to identify “potential lawbreakers.”

“I’m concerned about the potential chilling effect of this work,” Mather continued, saying the report “sends a potentially troubling message about how administrative data shared with the Census Bureau might be used.”

Just in the last two months, the administration has:

• Thrown out long-awaited plans to update race and ethnicity data collection;
• Eliminated an umbrella of highly technical, statistical privacy methods, which will result in less published data from the bureau;
• Proposed adding a question to the 2030 Census to identify and eliminate noncitizens from the total population count, and;
• Proposed a regulation that would eliminate the collection of race and ethnicity data for the first time in census history.

The Department of Justice since 2025 has continued escalating its efforts to obtain voter roll data from states. Federal judges have dismissed 23 DOJ suits against states which have refused to turn over voter information.

This story was originally reported by Mel Leonor Barclay of The 19th. Meet Mel and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s second election, voting for legislation to boost immigration enforcement could have seemed like a safe choice to some Democrats, who tied Donald Trump’s second presidential victory to a rejection of their party’s handling of immigration. 

Forty-six Democrats broke with their party to support legislation named after the murdered Georgia college student Laken Riley. Now, for some, that vote is a potential liability, as primary opponents say the votes cosigned Trump’s mass deportation agenda. 

A new report from Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) details shocking allegations about the conditions inside an ICE detention facility in Texas. The report, which was published on Friday, was based on interviews Senate staff conducted with “approximately 20 family units and approximately 40 women detained in the adult detention unit” at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, it said. In a statement released along with the report, Durbin described the findings as part of “an ongoing investigation into medical and mental health care” in immigration detention facilities. He also called for the Senate Judiciary Committee, of which he is the ranking member, to hold a hearing on the issue. 

 “Children and their parents described a top-down culture of cruelty among Dilley staff, including guards deliberately disrupting children’s sleep at night, purposely entering rooms without knocking, and taunting children who are often provided with inedible food by eating candy and pizza in front of them,” Durbin said.  

Steven Owen, the vice president of communications at CoreCivic, a private prison company that operates the Dilley facility, disputed the claims made in the report in an email to TPM.

“The critical characterizations of the Dilley Immigration Processing Center (DIPC) do not reflect the operations, standards or care provided at the facility. DIPC was purpose-built to meet the needs of families, and families are housed together in accommodations designed to support family unity, safety and children’s well-being,” Owen said, adding, “Claims that children are denied care or experience delayed medical assessment are false. DIPC maintains on-site pediatric expertise, and emergency services are activated when a child’s clinical presentation requires off-site care.” The children and their families at DIPC receive health care that is clinically rigorous, federally overseen and delivered with dignity. Residents receive:”

Owen also provided links to material CoreCivic prepared including a primer created response to prior critical reporting on conditions at the Dilley facility.

When reached by TPM, the White House referred all questions about the report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE did not respond to a request for comment, but an unnamed spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the agency, provided a statement. The DHS spokesperson stated “any claim that there are subprime conditions at ICE detention facilities is FALSE.” They also claimed “Dilley does meet federal detention standards and actually undergoes regular audits and inspections.”

“Another day and another hoax about the South Texas Family Residential Center. Nearly every single day, this office responds to media questions on FALSE allegations about illegal alien detention centers,” the DHS spokesperson said. “The media is clearly desperate for these allegations of inhumane conditions at this facility to be true.”

Along with the other disturbing claims, Durbin’s report alleges there is “substandard medical care” at Dilley. 

“Poor medical care was the most urgent concern raised by both families and adult women. They described a range of unaddressed health issues and voiced that, because they were not receiving adequate care, those medical conditions are worsening,” the report said. 

Specific issues detailed in the report include a mother and child who were ill yet allegedly “were repeatedly refused blankets to address the extremely cold temperatures in their unit.” The report also described multiple instances where detainees said they were not given care despite “extreme” pain and others who said chronic or troubling conditions were not addressed. 

Along with the allegedly inadequate medical care, the report also claimed facility staff failed to provide detainees with proper meals. 

“One family reported finding worms and a fingernail in their food. Several families said their children refused to eat facility meals entirely,” it said.

A lack of required educational programs is another issue detailed in the report, which said Judiciary Committee staffers found “no evidence that the facility was meeting … basic education standards.”

“One 16-year-old described the education offered at Dilley as ‘drawing in coloring books,’ which was not appropriate for students his age,” the report said.

The lack of school programs was described in the report as part of a pattern of “psychological harm to children” that included “demeaning, dismissive, and abusive behavior by Dilley staff.”

“One parent reported that guards who are perceived as ‘too nice’ are scolded by supervisors and told to be harsher. A guard told the parent: ‘You only have three rights here: drink, sleep, eat.’” the report said.

The report also said Dilley detainees face a lack of access to family members and attorneys.

“Many of them stated they have committed no crimes, have pending immigration cases, have minor children at home, and have lived in the United States for years. They stated repeatedly that they have followed the rules, and they are not criminals—and do not understand why they are being treated as if they are. They are desperate to be reunited with their families and spoke about their efforts to seek release through habeas petitions,” the report explained. 

Dilley has been a hotbed for protests and activism that have taken place around the country in response to ICE and President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda. Durbin claimed the Judiciary Committee staff had issues speaking to detainees as part of what the report described as “DHS obstruction.”

“My staff visited Dilley as part of an ongoing investigation into medical and mental health care, solitary confinement, and access to counsel in immigration detention. During that visit, in an attempt to curtail oversight, DHS imposed an arbitrary two-hour time limit on visiting the facility,” Durbin said in his statement.

Other members of Congress have similarly accused DHS and ICE of attempting to thwart lawmakers’ right to conduct oversight in what they have called a violation of legislation. The practice led to a successful lawsuit in federal district court. In his statement, Durbin also suggested some of the things Judiciary Committee staff observed at Dilley violate the Flores Settlement Agreement, a court ruling that sets standards for immigration detention. 

Durbin has previously released reports on conditions at ICE detention facilities in Florida and Louisiana. Overall, his latest report blamed the issues in detention centers on Trump administration policies. 

“The Trump Administration is intentionally subjecting longtime law-abiding residents of our communities and children who have grown up in our communities to neglectful and dangerous detention conditions,” the report said, adding, “In a desperate attempt to meet Stephen Miller’s quotas in furtherance of the Trump Administration’s mass deportation campaign, immigration officials now target law-abiding families attending immigration

court hearings and ICE check-ins.”

Durbin’s report also predicted the issues observed at Dilley will have devastating consequences and that “more people will die in detention without necessary medical care.” 

“Medical care in immigration detention is dangerously inadequate. Immigration detention facility staff routinely deny or defer necessary medical treatment, providing only minimal care until emergency care is required. Without better policies for quickly addressing urgent medical needs, including facilitating release, more individuals, including children, will die in Detention,” the report said. “Thirty-two people died in ICE custody in 2025—the highest number in more  than two decades. Twenty-two people have already died in ICE custody thus far in 2026.”

This story was updated at 9:31 pm with a response from CoreCivic. It was also updated at 4:38 pm on August 1, 2026 with the statement from a DHS spokesperson.

This story was originally reported by Candice Norwood of The 19th. Meet Candice and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Masked law enforcement officers in tactical gear throwing civilians to the ground. In some cases — like Renee Good, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastian Guerrero — officers shoot people dead. Others disappear into detention before being deported to countries where they may have no family or connections.

Critics argue that the great country President Donald Trump envisions could be taken right out of a dystopian novel. A version of this society has existed since 1977 in the comic book world of Judge Dredd, a British series set in the year 2099 AD that depicts an authoritarian police state in the eastern United States. 

And Judge Dredd is the image the Trump administration has chosen to assist with recruiting new immigration judges.