‘We Were Very Fortunate That Something Much, Much Worse Did Not Happen’

For years, but with increasing ferocity lately, the far-right has been directing its hatred toward Indian Americans and other immigrants of South Asian descent. Some Republican candidates have seized on this strain of bigotry, perhaps hoping a panic over demographic change will fuel voter turnout.

This week, this dark, very American story advanced to its inevitable next chapter, as a young man who police have described as unstable targeted a Hindu temple west of Chicago for a mass shooting.

However, when 19-year-old Alexandros Paporakis showed up at the temple in Aurora, Illinois, his gun jammed, police say.

He texted a colleague at Taco Bell, where he worked, about what he was up to. The colleague called the authorities.

“I think we were very fortunate that something much, much worse did not happen,” Palatine, Illinois’ police chief, Bill Nord, told press. “The seriousness of this alleged threat cannot be overstated,” he said later.

Police found tactical gear and hundreds of rounds of ammunition at the 19-year-old suspect’s home, as well as white nationalist material. They also found a manifesto titled “Why I Fought: A.K.A.: (Aurora Shooter’s Manifesto).” The manifesto targeted South Asian, Jewish and Black people, per local reports.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) was at the temple on Sunday when Paporakis turned up, he said, and on Thursday called on the feds to get involved.

“We know this type of hate is coursing thorough social media online, it’s exploded,” Krishnamoorthi told a local news station. “We can’t rely on luck, that’s why we have to condemn the hatred. We can’t stay silent, or worse, condone it or fan the flames.”

“Secondly,” he continued, “we have to redirect the FBI’s focus to domestic violent extremism and trying to uncover these plots.”

The FBI, under Trump, has largely abandoned efforts to track neo-Nazi extremists, in some cases repositioning resources toward targeting the president’s critics and political enemies.

Trump’s Long-Brewing Effort to Oust Ilhan Omar From America

The Trump administration effort to eject Muslim representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) from the country is the culmination of a years-long fixation.

• Way back in 2019, TPM reporter Christopher Mathias noted this week, attendees at Trump rallies were chanting “send her back” when the president mentioned Omar.
• That year, the Washington Post reported yesterday, a “political appointee in the first Trump administration” demanded that DHS scrub Omar’s immigration records for any indication of fraud. It ultimately did not find what it needed to to move forward with a case.
• In its second term, the Trump administration is increasingly attempting to make use of denaturalization, an extremely difficult outcome to achieve legally. That, however, is the goal with its latest investigation of Omar, per the Wall Street Journal.
• To successfully denaturalize someone, “the government needs to show that there was an omission or falsehood on the naturalization paperwork of such magnitude that it would have prevented the person from getting citizenship had the truth been shared with immigration authorities,” writes TPM’s Josh Kovensky, who has been covering the administration’s denaturalization efforts for us since 2024.
• The administration appears to specifically be looking into whether Omar’s father filed immigration paperwork claiming she was 17 when she was actually 18, a theory that has been pushed on the right for years, most prominently by a QAnon-supporting candidate who once challenged Omar in a primary campaign, Josh reports. A 17-year-old minor naturalizes with their parent when their parent obtains citizenship, while an 18-year-old adult must apply for citizenship independently.
• “I think her citizenship is solid and there wasn’t any fraud there,” one former official involved in the 2019 investigation told the Washington Post.

Tabs

• The White House is denying that Trump himself gave the order to restrict Ukraine’s access to Starlink, Bloomberg reports. But the order came “from inside the White House,” Reuters reports. “The officials said ‌leaders at the Defense Department received a message that the SpaceX Starshield service for the Ukrainian military needed to be slowed,” the Reuters report says.
• Meanwhile, Ukraine has run out of patriot missiles, CNN reports. The U.S. seems to be withholding them as Trump punishes the country’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, for criticizing his pre-midterms diesel deal with Russia. Patriot missiles, which are used as interceptors, are in extremely short supply more generally thanks in part to the war with Iran. As a result, Russian missiles are more easily striking Ukrainian targets.
• Hunter Walker profiles Bobby Pulido, the Tejano singer who, thanks in part to a GOP Texas gerrymandering effort that appears increasingly to have been misguided, stands a real chance of flipping his district from red to blue.

Man of the Hour

It’s longtime Trump friend and now-former State Department Special Envoy for Arts and Culture Paolo Zampolli, who, Politico recently reported, has been in a bizarre, long-running, sprawling feud with his boss, cc-ing a dozen-plus people as they snap at each other over email. Among other issues, Zampolli blamed said boss, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, for, he thought, being the source of a New York Times article that said Zampolli got his longtime girlfriend deported by ICE as part of a custody battle over their son. (Yes, it’s messy.) The girlfriend, in turn, threatened to reveal details she said she knew about Trump, Melania, and Jeffrey Epstein. (Messy.) Anyway, Trump — who, as Josh Marshall observes, suddenly seems to have no taste for drama — canned Zampolli yesterday

Are We at War?

No, says Rep. Rob Wittman (R-VA).

“Right now we are defending U.S. assets there, so there is no war as we speak,” Wittman told HuffPost Thursday.

Donald Trump and his MAGA followers are obsessed with Somali-Americans. The president frequently rants about immigrants from the easternmost African country and their children, using racist rhetoric that would not be out of place at a Ku Klux Klan rally. At a campaign event Monday in Ohio, ostensibly to boost Sen. Jon Husted’s campaign against Democratic challenger Sherrod Brown, Trump fixated at length on Somali-Americans. They “don’t have pants to wear,” he claimed, but then he also expressed anger that they drive “Mercedes Benz and BMWs.” He accused them of being “low IQ” and alleged that they “plundered, ransacked and destroyed” Minnesota, a state with a large Somali immigrant population.

The president’s remarks followed past comments in which he called Somali immigrants “garbage” and said they “aren’t people that work.” Last week, Trump demanded on Truth Social that Minnesotans “fight back,” saying, “Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing.” Just in case his violent implications weren’t clear enough, Trump promised “the Federal Government will come to your rescue” should anyone follow his instructions. 

It’s worth remembering Trump’s history of condoning violence. In January 2025, on his first day back in office, the president pardoned people convicted of violent crimes during the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. A year later, his administration took pains to shield officers responsible for the shooting deaths of pro-immigrant protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. 

So it wasn’t too big a surprise when Homeland Security officials raided the home of perhaps the most famous Somali-American in the country, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., on Monday. The action is part of an all-hands-on-deck effort to prove a conspiracy theory that has been percolating on the right for years now, accusing Omar and her family of falsifying her documents to become a U.S. citizen when she was 17. The administration hopes it can denaturalize and deport the progressive lawmaker, whom Trump has deemed “deranged and sick,” repeatedly calling for her to be ejected from the country. 

Odds are that the Trump administration has no case at all against Omar — as is true of thousands of other cases it has lost against immigrants so far. Instead, the raid on the Minnesota congresswoman’s home must be understood more as a campaign stunt by a president desperate to distract from his economic failures and the disastrous war in Iran. Omar herself called the raid “pointless” and “the weaponization of federal law enforcement to target political enemies.” This isn’t even the first time Trump’s goons have gone hunting for evidence that Omar’s citizenship is illegitimate. On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that, during his first term, Trump made the same demand of immigration officials, but they found “insufficient evidence of wrongdoing” and “eventually abandoned” the search. 

No matter how many insults or threats Trump flings Omar’s way, he cannot hide that the congresswoman is exactly the opposite of the racist stereotypes he traffics in. She is smart, beautiful and hard-working. Unlike Trump, who grew up a spoiled rich kid in Queens, Omar has overcome steep odds to be where she is. At only eight, she fled war-torn Somalia with her family after gunmen attacked their home and lived in a refugee camp in Kenya for four years. Whatever one’s views of her politics, there can be no denying that everything Omar has attained, from her education to her career, has been earned against high odds.

Trump’s accusations against Omar and Somali-Americans in general have more than a whiff of psychological projection to them. He calls her “crooked” and “terrible,” but in reality it’s Trump who was convicted of defrauding New York State to the tune of half a billion dollars. It’s Trump who tried to steal the 2020 election, and it’s Trump who is using gerrymandering and frivolous lawsuits to try to cheat his way out of Republicans losing the midterms. It’s Trump who has amassed over a billion dollars in shadily sourced wealth as president through cryptocurrency schemes. He even regularly cheats at golf because he’s so incapable of playing fair. 

But that all underscores the greater truth about the administration’s attacks on Omar and her fellow Somali-Americans. The success of the congresswoman and her fellow immigrants handily disproves the claim that non-white people are inferior, and instead proves that progressives are right — that the U.S. is better off for allowing people from around the world to live here. For MAGA, the fear of immigration is not about feeling contaminated, but being shown up and exposed as mediocrities in comparison to industrious newcomers. 

Trump’s attack on Omar is reminiscent of his previous accusations that Barack Obama was not a real U.S. citizen. In 2011, Trump, who was then a host on NBC’s “The Apprentice,” started a noisy public campaign demanding the then-president produce his Hawaiian birth certificate, implying that Obama, whose father was Kenyan, could not be a legitimate citizen. Obama eventually did release his birth certificate, but that ultimately didn’t matter to Trump and others who promoted and believed the birther lie, because this was never about the legal definition of “citizen.” It was about the way that the erudite, charismatic Obama revealed the insecurities of the people who, only a few years later, would call themselves “MAGA” by disproving their hopes that whiteness confers an excellence that they, on their own merits, could never produce.

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Trump made this especially clear by also trying to prove Obama secretly had bad grades in college. The president’s psychological projection isn’t subtle. Unsurprisingly, he has not been keen on releasing his own grades and test scores, but he is quick to assure us he’s a super-genius because he was able to tell the difference between a man and a woman on a medical exam to diagnose dementia. 

Another pointed reminder of MAGA’s true fears came recently when Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, tweeted a photo of non-white students celebrating a University of Texas football win and complained, “The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” He later whined about the university accepting foreign students, though he had no evidence these young people in the photo were born outside the country and neglected to offer any rational arguments for why the school should discriminate against worthy students from overseas. 

French’s outburst kicked off a debate among right-wing commentators about what they crudely called “the Indian question,” an apparent nod to a Nazi euphemism for antisemitic ideas that eventually led to the Holocaust. This revealed an unbelievably noxious racism, and also served as a tacit admission that concern about immigration is not, despite all the “garbage” talk, about immigrants dragging down the country. The MAGA coalition’s fear is that immigrants will make it a lot harder for mediocre white people to compete for plum jobs and school admissions. While decades of right-wing blather about meritocracy was always a lie, now conservatives are basically admitting it: Racism is a protection racket to shield white D-level students from the consequences of their own laziness.

This understanding exposes why Trump and MAGA have it in for Somali-Americans. Like any group of people, the Somali immigrant community contains good and bad people in it, but on the whole, their very existence is a testament to human tenacity. Like so many waves of refugees before and after, these are people who took huge risks to survive, and many of them, like Omar, are thriving. Even though the community suffers from extensive poverty due in part to discrimination and the few resources refugees from a war-torn country are able to marshal, it has also produced a large number of entrepreneurs. Somali-Americans have higher than average rates of labor participation and contribute an estimated $8 billion a year to Minnesota’s economy alone. Like many immigrant communities, such as Irish and Italians in the early 20th century, the second generation is doing much better economically than their parents. 

In other words, Somali-Americans are living the industrious values that a lot of MAGA types valorize but at which many, especially rich boys like Trump, fall short. This, too, would be fine, if only conservatives could just relax. Part of the American dream is being able to move beyond working that 60-hour week that so many recent immigrants have to put in to survive. There is nothing wrong with being a C student — as long as you don’t take your insecurities out on the A students who just so happen to have darker skin. That’s what makes this racism so baffling. It’s not just that it’s immoral. It’s also a waste of a one precious life to be so angry that someone who looks a little different might be better at some stuff.

The post The real reason MAGA fears Ilhan Omar appeared first on Salon.com.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump wants to deport a member of Congress. 

What’s happening? On Monday, Homeland Security officers raided the Washington, DC, home of US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) in an investigation reportedly tied to immigration paperwork filled out by her father when she was a minor.

That was, at the time, more than enough cause for alarm. Trump’s animosity toward Omar, who is Somali-American and an outspoken critic of the administration, is well-known, and the raid is an extraordinary violation of the Justice Department’s usual rule to avoid taking visible action around politically sensitive cases within 60 days of an election. 

On Wednesday evening, however, we learned more about the raid from the Wall Street Journal. The Omar investigation, the Journal reported, is explicitly aimed at stripping Omar of her citizenship — and thus her ability to hold office — and deporting her. 

How would they do that? Omar came to the US as a refugee when she was 12 and became a US citizen when she was 17. The Trump administration’s investigation is said to focus on whether she or her family misrecorded her age in order to more easily gain citizenship. 

The government cannot unilaterally denaturalize a citizen, however; it would have to ask a court to do so.

What’s the context? Historically, it’s rare for the US to strip citizenship from naturalized US citizens. But doing so at volume has been a major, if less visible, priority for the second Trump administration. 

As of earlier this year, NBC News reported, DOJ was targeting hundreds of people for possible denaturalization, and has reportedly hoped to put forward hundreds of new cases per month (though successfully stripping them of citizenship is another matter).

Why does this matter? Trump’s campaign to bend the traditionally nonpartisan DOJ into a tool to punish and harass his enemies has been one of the major stories of his second term. 

Even if it never advances beyond Monday’s raid, an investigation targeting Omar’s citizenship with the eventual goal of deporting her from the US represents a new and even more dangerous evolution of that effort — and it threatens to move the US to a far darker place, where citizenship and the rights it guarantees are predicated on the president’s goodwill.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Hi readers — if you’ll allow me to depart a little from my normal approach to this section, I have a story about politics to share. It’s not, however, about the politics we’re currently dealing with, but about what could be: Democrats’ plan for a quietly ambitious “Project 2029” should they win the White House in 2028. You can read it with a gift link here.

Alternatively, if you’d prefer to just log off, here’s an adorable snow leopard cub with massive paws. Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!

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

Donald Trump’s ability to jail millions of people without even a bond hearing depends on what the Supreme Court thinks about one man’s case. 

Newly released NYPD body-camera footage showing the aftermath of an immigration enforcement shooting in New York City has intensified scrutiny of federal agents who shot a man with his 5-year-old son in the car.

The footage shows officers arriving Thursday in Marble Hill to find Oscar Belgal, 28, wounded, handcuffed and seated on the ground. NYPD officers rendered aid and rushed him to a hospital. Police later located his unharmed son with a family member.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani condemned the shooting in an initial social media post, saying Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had shot a New Yorker while his child was in the vehicle.

This afternoon in Marble Hill, a New Yorker was shot by an ICE agent in a residential neighborhood. Early reports indicate agents surrounded him and a 5-year-old child in his car before firing multiple rounds. We believe the child was physically unharmed.

This is an unconscionable and incredibly serious situation. I have called the President; when we speak I will demand that he ends all ICE enforcement actions in our city. I will not stand by while ICE agents terrorize our communities.

Our thoughts are with the injured New Yorker and his family tonight. We are praying for his recovery.

Get ICE out of our neighborhoods. Get ICE out of our hospitals. Get ICE off our streets. Get ICE away from our children.

Abolish ICE.

— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) October 8, 2026

ICE defended the operation, alleging that Belgal, a Dominican national with a criminal record, accelerated his vehicle toward federal agents who feared for their lives. The agency also accused him of gang involvement.

On October 8, at approximately 4:00 PM ET, ICE officers were conducting a targeted enforcement operation in the Bronx, New York, to arrest a criminal illegal alien from the Dominican Republic with a prior criminal conviction for grand larceny, and multiple prior arrests for assault, robbery, possession of drugs, and weapons possession. He has associations to the Trinitarios gang, the same gang who brutally shot a CBP officer last year.

This criminal illegal alien was arrested by the NYPD on December 7, 2023, but was released into the community a few days later by reckless Democrat sanctuary policies that put American lives at risk.

During the incident, an ICE officer discharged his weapon and the criminal illegal alien was injured.

ICE officers immediately rendered aid. The individual is alive and at a local hospital. The FBI and HSI are on the scene. The incident remains under investigation. More information will be shared as it becomes available.

When dangerous illegal aliens are released back onto the streets by radical sanctuary politicians, our officers are forced to make arrests at large in the community in unpredictable and dangerous environments. Our officers should not have to risk their lives, and innocent Americans should not have to face unnecessary danger, because sanctuary politicians refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement.

— U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (@ICEgov) October 9, 2026

NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at least one federal agent fired seven rounds, striking Belgal in the neck. Surveillance footage shows armed, plainclothes officers approaching his vehicle but does not capture the shooting itself.

The incident sparked demonstrations across the city, including a Friday march from Foley Square to federal immigration offices in Manhattan.

Mamdani said he unsuccessfully appealed to President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to release Belgal. He subsequently called for ICE’s abolition.

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Belgal’s attorneys said he was transferred to New Jersey after the shooting before being returned to federal detention in Brooklyn. A judge has restricted his transfer and temporarily blocked his deportation while his legal challenge proceeds.

New York Attorney General Letitia James called for a “full and transparent investigation conducted without fear or favor.”

The Bronx district attorney’s office is investigating. ICE has not publicly released its own body-camera footage of the shooting.

The post NYPD footage fuels scrutiny of ICE shooting appeared first on Salon.com.

Welcome to The Midterms, Actually. Every week I’ll be writing about two things: one big idea or trend I see forming across the 2026 primaries, and one thing I’m hearing from a voice on the ground. You can sign up here to get it in your inbox every week. Let’s get into it.

One big idea: Democrats’ Laken Riley vote is aging badly

Two things happened this week that reveal how quickly the politics of immigration enforcement are shifting.

First, Republican Sen. Jim Justice of West Virginia, a staunch ally of President Donald Trump, urged the administration to dial back its enforcement push. “Before you know it, you get people that get carried away in their job and whatever it may be, and all of a sudden, then you’re dragging people away that have lived on your street corner for 15 years,” Justice told Politico this week. “I don’t know that we need to be doing that stuff.” And he’s not the only red-state Republican who’s been pushing back on ICE lately, including some facing voters in tough races next month.

The second thing flew under the radar: Sen. Jon Ossoff, the Georgia Democrat running for reelection who has also been floated as a 2028 presidential candidate, struggled to explain himself when a reporter confronted him on camera about his vote for the Laken Riley Act in January 2025. Passed within days of Trump’s inauguration and signed nine days into his second term, the law requires ICE to detain undocumented immigrants who are merely arrested for or charged with theft-related crimes, before any conviction.

In the exchange with a reporter from Drop Site News, Ossoff talked about his Senate work investigating alleged ICE abuses, but didn’t directly address his vote after being asked if he regretted it. “Laken Riley was my constituent and what happened to her should happen to no American, to no person in this world,” Ossoff said. “I think that immigration enforcement should be focused on those who are convicted or charged with serious crimes.” He excused himself to walk into a meeting as the reporter pressed him on whether the law undermined due process. 

In both cases, you see changing winds of electoral politics. Back in 2025, when Ossoff and 11 other Senate Democrats joined Republicans in supporting Trump’s immigration bill, they implicitly validated Trump’s premise on immigration enforcement: that not only was the border out of control, but that there also needed to be new efforts to step up interior enforcement through expanding agencies like ICE. In the year-plus since that vote, Trump has hired more ICE officers, launched sweeping raids in cities like Minneapolis, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and fueled a cauldron of chaos that’s led to shootings across the country. Politically, it has now put Democrats like Ossoff in a pickle, one that will matter more the closer we get to 2028.

How do you explain giving more immigration powers to a Stephen Miller-led White House? How can one argue you couldn’t have seen this coming?

In some ways, you can understand the political logic of the time. Ossoff, who is running in a state Trump carried, and many of the congressional Democrats who supported the Laken Riley law were in competitive races, and Democrats left the 2024 election thinking they had misread the electorate on the issue, particularly after Latino voters swung hard toward the right. But given what’s happened since, it’s clear many congressional Democrats made a familiar mistake: prioritizing political triangulation over standing on their values of protecting marginalized communities.

Take a look at some of the Democrats who have already had to walk back their votes. In the Democratic primary for Minnesota’s open Senate seat, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan made US Rep. Angie Craig’s vote for the law a key focus of her campaign, calling it “disqualifying.” The attacks were so effective that Craig eventually expressed remorse, saying, “I wanted to be honest with the people of Minnesota. I will tell you when I get it wrong, and I got that one wrong.” Craig lost the August 11 primary to Flanagan.

Maryland’s April McClain Delaney, another congressional Democrat, also said she regretted her vote: “I will say that this was in the beginning of my term. And I never thought that ICE immigration and the horror of what has happened would happen.” (She survived her primary, defeating David Trone by 6 points.)

It’s easy to see where the buyer’s remorse is emanating from. Trump’s ICE is broadly unpopular. And as we’ve talked about on this Substack and in our reporting on America, Actually, Trump is doing worse and worse with Latino voters, with both prices and immigration enforcement driving the slide. A Hart Research poll for TelevisaUnivision of 1,500 Latino registered voters in battleground House districts (August 6–17) found 63 percent disapprove of Trump’s job performance and 62 percent disapprove of his handling of immigration enforcement and deportations. Sixty-four percent view ICE unfavorably. 

When I recently talked to Stephanie Valencia of Equis Research, she said this: 

The people who feel most regretful who voted for Trump in 2024 are most regretful because of immigration. They feel like there was a broken promise there. Like, they were told he was gonna focus on the border, which everybody agreed was chaos, and he was gonna focus on violent criminals and serious threats, and at the end of the day, he has not complied with that.

But while the shift in public opinion helps explain the elected officials’ political logic, it doesn’t change the material harm of their votes. Just this week, ICE announced plans to hire 5,000 more employees, most of them deportation officers, by the end of the year as enforcement continues to ramp up.

And these raids have a lasting effect on targeted communities, like in Maine, the Chicago area, and Texas. It’s the No. 1 issue that has come up in my conversations with local reporters. The chief architect of this chaos is the president, but make no mistake: Trump had help from shortsighted Democrats.

One thing I’m hearing 

Maya Miller is a Report for America corps member covering democracy and government for the Gulf States Newsroom, a public radio collaboration that includes Louisiana’s WWNO and WRKF. She’s been reporting on Mississippi’s redistricting fight and what residents are saying about their representation and the upcoming midterms.

You’ve been reporting from redistricting hearings in Mississippi. What are residents most concerned about, and is there a conversation or moment that captures the mood?

Residents are most concerned about their representation. In Mississippi in particular, race and party are strongly intertwined, and Black residents worry that by being drawn into new districts, voters may elect a Republican candidate. There was a bit of secrecy around redistricting earlier this summer, with Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, canceling a special session to redraw judicial lines. So advocates created the People’s Hearings, a series of meetings held across the state to voice concerns and create a public record of testimonies from Mississippians. Quickly after, lawmakers decided to host their own public hearings, and at these hearings, hundreds of residents showed up, mostly to urge them not to redistrict.

“It seems to me that the threat of losing representation has made people more aware of the moving parts.”

At one hearing, I spoke to Joyce Arceneaux-Mathis, president of the Natchez NAACP. She’s frustrated that the state is going to spend millions on new maps when people are struggling with day to day expenses. And Ramona Sanders of Meridian, Mississippi, has a lot of concerns on whether mid-decade redistricting is illegal. While it’s not, she says that lawmakers are opening themselves up to legal action. I haven’t heard anything from voter advocacy groups that points to future lawsuits, but only time will tell, if and when lawmakers redraw the maps, if these maps are constitutional or not.

Redistricting is often covered as a fight over which party wins more seats. What would these changes mean for the communities you cover and their ability to have a voice in Congress?

One change that could happen is that residents who are Democrats might lose the state’s only Democrat leader. Out of four congressmen, there’s only one Democrat, Bennie Thompson, who represents District 2. His district spans much of the west, from the capital city of Jackson to most of the Mississippi Delta and southwest Mississippi. It’s a heavily Black district, somewhere around 63 percent Black. He’s held this seat for 33 years and has brought millions to the district for health care, infrastructure, and agriculture. 

So residents are worried that Republicans are trying to edge him out and replace him with a more conservative leader who may not have the same concerns as the community. 

How are these fights affecting people’s interest in the midterms? Are you hearing more determination to vote, more doubt that voting matters, or something else?

People are fired up. They’re incredibly engaged. I’m hearing from a lot of people who are more determined to vote in November than when I covered redistricting in Alabama in 2024. It seems to me that the threat of losing representation has made people more aware of the moving parts. So they’re attending hearings, participating in rallies, registering to vote and checking their registration, phoning a friend and making plans to be at the polls on November 3.

What is the national conversation about redistricting missing that becomes clear when you spend time in these communities?

I think the national conversation is missing the voice of the community. It’s one thing to report on the politics of redistricting, but there’s a layer of real concern from residents that shouldn’t be ignored. They’re worried about hospitals closing. They’re worried about public schools losing funding. They’re worried about the rising cost of groceries and gas. I find that talking to and listening to residents helps me understand a community more than calling up a lawmaker and asking them their thoughts. There’s a place for that side of the conversation, of course, but I’ve always tried to center people who will be most impacted in my reporting, and I feel that leads to a better story for our listeners.