2026-07-17 04:11:47
This article has been republished from Autonomy News, a worker-owned publication covering reproductive rights and justice. Follow Autonomy News on Instagram, Bluesky, TikTok, Threads, and LinkedIn.
At the very end of acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s Wednesday confirmation hearing, Texas Senator Ted Cruz got Blanche to commit to taking a step that could upend abortion access in all 50 states.
Cruz brought up the Comstock Act, an 1873 anti-obscenity law that abortion opponents want to use to stop the mailing of abortion pills. He pressed Blanche to review Biden-era guidance that cleared shipments of medication abortion into states that ban abortion. Alarmingly, Blanche agreed.
The 19th-century law made it a federal crime to mail, possess, give away, or sell “obscene materials”—including items used for abortion. Parts of the law relating to birth control were repealed in 1971, but Comstock was never repealed in its entirety. When abortion providers started prescribing pills to patients in states where abortion was banned thanks to “shield” laws, anti-abortion activists argued that this was a violation of the Comstock Act. Project 2025 also called for criminal prosecutions of abortion pill providers under Comstock, though the document only references the law by statute number, not by name.
In response, a December 2022 opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel said it was not illegal for the U.S. Postal Service and other carriers like FedEx and UPS to deliver abortion medications to states that ban abortion, and that Comstock did not apply unless the sender intended pills to be used unlawfully. That interpretation has reassured abortion providers that they can prescribe pills across state lines without fear of federal prosecution.
Cruz asked the nominee point blank to review the 2022 memo. Blanche said he would. “Office of Legal Counsel opinions may be reconsidered when the attorney general concludes they are inconsistent with the law,” Cruz said. “Will you commit to carefully reviewing that opinion to ensure that it faithfully reflects the actual statutory text [of the Comstock Act] that Congress enacted?” Blanche responded with an instant “yes.”
Notably, Donald Trump appointed two anti-abortion lawyers to the Office of Legal Counsel last summer: Elliot Gaiser, who in 2020 called abortion a “moral evil;” and Josh Craddock, a Comstock proponent who also believes that fertilized eggs are people under the Fourteenth Amendment.
Cruz also brought up Comstock in the context of a lawsuit that Louisiana filed against the Food and Drug Administration, which seeks to end telemedicine prescriptions of mifepristone, the first of two drugs in a typical medication abortion. “Without asking you to comment on the merits of that litigation, will you commit that the [Justice] Department will carefully evaluate every lawful action available to ensure the faithful enforcement of the Comstock Act and other federal pro-life acts?” Again, Blanche said yes.
Blanche, Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, didn’t hesitate in any of his responses to Cruz. Here’s video of the exchange.
Ted Cruz is the latest of a string of Republican senators to push an agreeing Blanche to ban the mailing of mifepristone. They're coming for abortion pills next.
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 11:05 AM · Jul 15, 2026
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Blanche’s comments come as anti-abortion activists and lawmakers like Missouri Senator Josh Hawley are pressuring him to commit to the DOJ settling with Louisiana in its suit against the FDA. Ostensibly, a settlement would involve the agency agreeing to end telehealth prescriptions of mifepristone nationwide. Hawley’s wife Erin is representing Louisiana in that litigation.
That case is pending before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, with a hearing scheduled for September. When an emergency appeal in the lawsuit reached the Supreme Court in May, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a dissent espousing the same view on Comstock that Cruz took today. Thomas claimed that “it is a criminal offense to ship mifepristone for use in abortions” under the law and that the drug’s manufacturers are engaging in “criminal enterprise.”
Nearly 115 Republican members of Congress, including Cruz, filed a “friend of the court brief” on Louisiana’s side at the Supreme Court, arguing that mailing mifepristone violates the Comstock Act. Cruz also signed a January 2023 letter to then-AG Merrick Garland urging him to enforce Comstock related to the shipping of mifepristone, alongside 40 other members of Congress including now-Vice President JD Vance.
American Civil Liberties Union chief political and advocacy officer Deirdre Schifeling called Blanche an “anti-abortion yes man” in a statement. “Todd Blanche demonstrated that if confirmed as Attorney General, he will be content to go along with anti-abortion extremists’ plan to restrict medication abortion nationwide,” Schifeling said. “Senators pushed dangerous misinformation about medication abortion and fringe legal theories that would ban abortion nationwide entirely—and Blanche blithely entertained them.”
Katie O’Connor, senior director of federal abortion policy at the National Women’s Law Center, said, “Once again, Blanche has shown that he is a Trump loyalist above all else, and would rather further the president’s extreme anti-abortion agenda than work on behalf of the American public.”
The abortion-related provisions of the Comstock Act were rarely enforced after the 1930s. The law only applies to “unlawful” abortions, and judges have generally agreed that it doesn’t apply to medications or devices prescribed or used by physicians.
However, anti-abortion leaders argue that the DOJ could weaponize Comstock to ban not just telemedicine abortions, but shipments of abortion drugs to brick-and-mortar clinics. The most extreme interpretation could even result in a ban on shipping supplies used in procedural abortions, as Comstock applies to all materials, not just medications. As anti-abortion legal activist Jonathan Mitchell said in early 2024, “We don’t need a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books…There’s a smorgasbord of options.” Mitchell has filed multiple lawsuits that ask federal courts to declare the law is active.
That’s why some Democrats wanted to repeal Comstock ahead of the 2024 election. However, three major reproductive rights organizations—Planned Parenthood, Center for Reproductive Rights, and the American Civil Liberties Union—advised Vermont Rep. Becca Balint not to introduce a Comstock repeal bill in 2024, per NOTUS. They were concerned it could affect the outcome of the first abortion pill lawsuit to work its way up to the Supreme Court after the fall of Roe v. Wade. Some Democrats also worried that introducing a Comstock repeal could validate anti-abortion ideologues’ interpretation of the law, which they believe to be incorrect.
Anti-abortion leaders argue that the DOJ could weaponize Comstock to ban not just telemedicine abortions, but shipments of abortion drugs to brick-and-mortar clinics.
But others viewed complacency as dangerous. “I fully agree with the [Biden] administration’s position … that it’s illegal to use Comstock to ban abortion,” Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith told NOTUS. “However, I can see, as can everybody else, that the extreme right-wing MAGA Republicans have a road map for using Comstock to do exactly that, and so, as a legislator, it’s my job to do everything I can to take that tool away from them.”
In June 2024, Smith and Balint were among the cosponsors when a repeal bill was finally introduced. This happened shortly after the Supreme Court punted the legal battle over abortion pills back to lower courts, which seems to have assuaged previous concerns from Planned Parenthood, CRR, and the ACLU, because they endorsed the measure.
Still, the bill disappointed many advocates because it failed to fully repeal the Comstock Act. Instead, it would have merely removed language about abortion from the statute. A source involved in crafting the legislation told Garnet at the time that this was because of an unlikely roadblock: the Biden Department of Justice. The DOJ claimed it needed the Comstock Act—specifically, the part that bans “obscene” materials—to prosecute cases involving child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
“Obviously, we couldn’t really have that,” the source said. “It’d be a GOP field day on ‘Dems support child porn.’”
The partial repeal was always a longshot. Even if it had gained majority support in both chambers, it almost certainly couldn’t have won a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. But lawmakers worried that having the repeal effort labeled “pro-porn” or “pro-child abuse” would have killed any attempt to repeal Comstock in the future. Similar bills had been introduced in 1997, 1999, and 2001, but none ever received a floor vote.
Following the death of Senator Lindsey Graham, Blanche can’t lose a single Republican vote on the Judiciary Committee. Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis had been noncommittal about his confirmation, but released a letter Tuesday urging him to settle the Louisiana mifepristone lawsuit. Nothing Cornyn or Tillis said during the hearing suggested they would vote against advancing Blanche.
Blanche also spouted misinformation during the hearing, telling Senator Chuck Grassley that, “For the first time in a decade, HHS and the FDA are actually taking a real look at what’s happening with some of these abortion pills and whether they’re actually safe or not.” To Senator Katie Britt he said, “it’s not only what the Department of Justice can do, but it’s what the FDA is doing right now for the first time in a decade: Actually doing real studies about the safety and the appropriateness of these drugs.” More than 100 studies have shown mifepristone to be safe and effective for ending an early pregnancy. The FDA’s decision to allow telehealth prescriptions was based on real-world data.
Hawley did not directly ask Blanche Wednesday to settle the suit, though he did ask why the administration couldn’t just restore the old rules requiring in-person appointments while the FDA conducts a politicized safety review. Blanche responded, “I don’t think it’s appropriate to talk about our litigation strategy here, except to say that we want to get to a good result consistent with President Trump’s administrative directive and priorities, and we very much believe that the Biden rules were wrong.”
Blanche then said part of the purpose of the FDA’s bogus review is to have something to point to in court. “We have to have studies that we can defend in court,” he said. “We have to be able to say to a judge, probably in this district, that our change was not arbitrary and capricious.”
His answer shows that the Trump administration expects lawsuits in response to any changes it may make to mifepristone prescribing. But the DOJ could significantly limit access to medication abortion even without changes to FDA policy. Rescinding the Biden-era guidance on Comstock would signal to telehealth abortion providers that federal prosecutions may be coming—and that could scare some of them away even if no charges were ever filed.
2026-07-17 02:58:05
Researchers and staff involved with Brandeis University’s National Research Center for Parents with Disabilities have learned that they will not be able to soon apply for continued federal funding, likely forcing the center’s operations to stop when current funding runs out at the end of August.
Working across roughly a decade, the center has investigated laws that allow states to strip parents of custody based on disability and health disparities faced by disabled parents, and provides assistance to disabled parents who reach out for support. It is the only research center in the US focused on disabled parents.
Without further funding, “there’s going to be no national infrastructure dedicated” to those issues that offers evidence-based solutions to parties including judges in the child welfare system, healthcare providers, and disabled parents themselves, said principal investigator Monika Mitra.
Last week, the grant through which the center is funded was removed from the federal grant portal Grants.gov. The grant is one of 36 awards, together worth more than $6.5 million, from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research that were expected to be made available but removed from the federal database so far this year. Mitra was told by an inside contact at NIDILRR that the grant would not be reposted.
“The parenting center’s absence would leave a gaping hole of critical support,” said Heather Watkins, a disabled parent who sits on the research center’s board.
In May, the White House Office of Management and Budget, led by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, released a proposal that, if finalized, would have the federal government arbitrarily terminate grants and involve political appointees more deeply in the grantmaking process. The Office of Management and Budget did not respond to a request for comment, referring me to the Department of Health and Human Services. HHS did not respond to a request for comment.
Mia Ives-Rublee, the disability justice initiative senior director at the center for American Progress, said that the “absolutely essential” center’s funding cutoff represents part of a “continual attack on the disability community.”
Nicole Lomerson, now a research associate at the center, used its public resources after her parenting was called into question due to her cerebral palsy when her infant was in neonatal intensive care.
Now, as part of the center’s work, Lomerson responds to disabled parents seeking support with regard to the child welfare system.
“We were really hoping to expand our technical assistance efforts to parents,” Lomerson said. “We were thinking about novel ways to provide support that was meaningful, that was delivered by peers.”
Mitra said she was stunned to find the center wasn’t able to apply for further funding under a grant she’d expected to be available. “It is a profound setback for disability rights and family equity,” she said.
2026-07-17 01:19:24
Since Donald Trump returned to office, federal agents have shot at more than 20 people as part of the administration’s immigration crackdown, killing six of them. Almost all those shootings have had one thing in common: They aimed at someone inside their vehicle. That includes Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, the two men ICE agents killed in Texas last week and Maine on Monday.
Soon after Durán’s death on Monday, ICE directed its officers to temporarily pause most stop vehicle stops. On Wednesday, Trump reversed that decision, posting on Truth Social that “we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!”
Durán, who was 25, came to the United States in 2023 and received work authorization last year, the Washington Post reported. Friends and family members told the paper that he made the journey to provide a better life for his then-infant daughter. In Maine, he spent the morning cleaning a veterinary office and delivered food later in the day.
Mary Hayes, a retiree who lived near Durán, told the Post that she saw his partner sobbing on her knees after the shooting. “If anybody with a heartbeat stood there and heard it, and it didn’t bring tears to your eyes, then I don’t know what kind of person you are,” Hayes said. “I’ve never seen pain like that before.” She added that the couple’s daughter, who recently celebrated her third birthday, was standing near her mom with a pink backpack on the ground.
The number of people immigration agents are shooting inside their vehicles is shocking. Police officers have been taught for decades to avoid shooting at moving vehicles. The reason is simple. As Geoffrey Alpert, a professor of criminal justice at the University of South Carolina, explained, “For the most part, you do not shoot at vehicles because if you hit the driver, now you have an unguided missile.” Instead, cops are told to simply step away. “It takes more time to pull your gun and do that than it does to take three steps back,” Alpert said.
In previous shootings, DHS alleged that the people it killed posed a specific threat.
Most police officers seem to have absorbed the training they receive about not shooting at drivers. A nationwide study of people shot by municipal police between 2015 and 2020 found that only 7 percent involved a person described as being “armed with a vehicle.” For the Trump administration’s immigration agents, that figure now stands above 90 percent. “From what we’ve seen, it doesn’t look like they’ve been trained very well, if they’ve been trained at all in this,” Alpert said about how immigration agents are handling vehicle stops.
The agent who killed Durán was hired this year as part of ICE’s recruitment surge, according to The Atlantic. He previously worked at the Department of Veterans Affairs Police.
The Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly tried to justify shootings by claiming that drivers threatened the lives of immigration agents by “weaponizing” their vehicles. In many cases, videos and other evidence have made clear that these justifications were false and bore little resemblance to what actually happened. The department’s response to the killing of Durán, the 25-year-old Colombian man killed by an immigration agent in Maine on Monday, is different.
Instead of responding immediately, ICE took most of Monday to craft an ambiguous statement about why Durán was killed, claiming that agents were “conducting targeted surveillance on the last known address of an illegal alien with a final order of removal” then encountered an “illegal alien” leaving that residence. It neglects to say Durán was apparently not the person whom ICE agents were targeting.
The statement explains the shooting on the basis that the “vehicle attempted to flee the scene and fearing for public safety an officer discharged his weapon.” In previous shootings, DHS alleged that the people it killed posed a specific threat to immigration agents. ICE did not respond to a request for comment asking whether the agent who killed Durán feared for his own life.
Can a general fear for public safety ever justify shooting the driver of a moving vehicle? “Hell no,” Alpert replied. He added, “What does that mean? What do they know about this person? What do they know about them at the time the officer pulled the trigger? What was the immediate threat?”
Seth Stoughton, a former Tallahassee police officer and current professor of law and criminology at the University of South Carolina, said via email that the “generic statement that an officer ‘feared for public safety’ would not, in and of itself, establish that the fleeing subject’s actions presented a threat justifying the use of deadly force.” At a minimum,” Stoughton added, he would expect a clear account of why the person’s driving “created a serious threat.”
Six days before killing Durán, ICE agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant who had lived in Houston for three decades. Like Durán, Salgado was not the person whom ICE agents in unmarked vehicles were pursuing.
“I want to tell you about my dad,” Ronaldo Salgado said at a press conference last week. “He was a hardworking family man. He was also a man of routine.” He said that his dad got up before dawn to drive to work on a construction site—the same thing he had done for the past 35 years. Ronaldo Salgado said he found that his dad had died from a video posted on social media. As Mother Jones has reported, he said he recognized his father immediately “from his voice, crying for help as he lay on the street bleeding out.”
DHS claimed that Salgado “weaponized his vehicle,” but has provided no evidence—and, as with Durán’s killing, agents were not wearing body cameras. A video analysis of security camera footage by the Washington Post shows agents “aggressively following” Salgado but does “not appear to show Salgado Araujo ramming a vehicle” as DHS alleges.
The fatal shootings of Durán and Salgado come after numerous accounts of shootings by DHS have been contradicted by video evidence and witness accounts. After Ruben Ray Martinez was fatally shot by immigration agents in Texas last year, the agency later claimed Martinez “intentionally ran over” a DHS agent.
Joshua Orta, who was in the car at the time, rejected that account. Orta said in a statement that Martinez was shot “without giving any warning, commands or opportunity to comply.” He added that Martinez “was unarmed, nonviolent, not fleeing and not resisting at the time he was shot.” (In February, Orta died in a car accident in Texas.)
In October, a Border Patrol agent shot Marimar Martinez as part of DHS’ “Midway Blitz” operation in Chicago, led by disgraced Border Patrol “commander at large” Gregory Bovino. In the aftermath of the shooting, DHS claimed that Martinez was one of two “domestic terrorists” who ambushed Border Patrol agents and “rammed” them with their vehicles before taking “defensive fire.” The Trump administration then tried to prosecute her.
Text messages and body camera footage unraveled the case. Body camera footage showed one of the Border Patrol agents saying “Do something, bitch,” and “It’s time to get aggressive,” shortly before Charles Exum, the agent who shot Martinez, jerked the steering wheel of his SUV as part of an apparent effort to ram Martinez’s vehicle. Exum then jumped out of the SUV. Within seconds, he shot Martinez five times. “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys,” Exum later wrote in a text message about his actions.
Three months later, immigration agents shot and killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. DHS initially said that Good attempted to “kill” federal agents after she “weaponized her vehicle” in “an act of domestic terrorism.” But Good’s death was captured on video from multiple angles that made clear that she was driving away from the ICE agent who killed her.
DHS similarly alleged that Pretti, who was killed after an immigration agent removed his holstered and permitted handgun, appeared to be trying to “massacre law enforcement.” Video evidence showed that he was disarmed, surrounded, and defenseless when immigration agents killed him.
The nationwide backlash to Good’s and Pretti’s deaths cost Bovino his authority and forced DHS to at least temporarily adopt a less publicly confrontational approach. In the five months after Pretti’s death, immigration agents shot one person during interior enforcement activities. But in the past month, as arrest numbers increased, they have shot at four people, including Durán and Salgado. And in the case of its latest killing, the agency is offering essentially nothing in the way of explanation.
2026-07-17 00:55:00
On Wednesday, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced an initiative to screen US military members for low testosterone. “The modern battlefield is brutal and unrelenting,” he said. “It requires and demands maximum psychological and mental readiness. And by addressing these health markers early, we’re keeping you on the leading edge of lethality.” Troops found to be deficient in the screening, Hegseth said, would be offered testosterone therapy—which, he promised, would make them better warriors. “It’s about restoring and optimizing your natural capabilities,” he said, “protecting your longevity, ensuring you have the biological foundation required to sustain the fight.”
The idea of a widespread testosterone deficiency—”Low-T” among the extremely online—is having a moment. Over the last few years, influencers have made a cottage industry of telling men that their testosterone levels are low and selling them testosterone therapy. Consumer research firms estimate the market value for testosterone replacement therapy at around $2 billion; that number is expected to increase by a third by 2033.
Earlier this year, the Guardian reported on a recent study of low-T influencers by Emma Grundtvig Gram, a public health researcher at the University of Copenhagen. Gram and her colleagues analyzed 46 TikTok and Instagram posts with a combined following of more than 6.8 million. In the study abstract, the researchers noted that common themes in the posts included “the rebranding of low testosterone from an ‘old man’s problem’ to an issue affecting younger men and their fitness” and “low testosterone as a crisis of masculinity and male sexual performance.”
Yet the notion of a testosterone crisis in need of treatment is not backed by science, says Adriane Fugh-Berman, a professor of pharmacology and physiology at Georgetown University Medical Center. Screening for testosterone levels isn’t always accurate, she wrote in an email to Mother Jones, because in otherwise healthy men, levels can fluctuate dramatically. Symptoms can be “vague and nonspecific;” classic ones such as fatigue, brain fog, and low libido can be caused by myriad other conditions. What’s more, she says, “there is very little evidence that administration of testosterone can help symptoms.” The drawbacks of overprescribing testosterone are considerable; adverse effects include blood clots, fractures, heart arrhythmia, high blood pressure, kidney problems, infertility, and, adds Fugh-Berman, “let’s not forget testicular shrinkage.”
Despite these drawbacks, the Food and Drug Administration seems intent on exploring more applications for testosterone therapy. Last December, the agency convened what it described as an expert panel on the subject; panelists claimed that testosterone supplementation could improve men’s health and quality of life. In a comment to the FDA after the panel, the National Center for Health Research, a medical product safety advocacy group, wrote that testosterone therapy “does not improve strength or physical ability” and that “there is no established relationship between ‘Low-T’ and most of the symptoms that testosterone is being promoted to treat.” Testosterone, the group warned, “is not a fountain of youth or vitality.”
“A masculine message is not going to be declared by effeminate men. We have a real crisis in masculinity.”
But that doesn’t stop online influencers from claiming it is exactly that. Gram’s team wrote in the study abstract that the “low-T” posts they analyzed “prey on men’s insecurities about relationships and sexual performance” to sell “testosterone products for improving the masculine self without supporting evidence.”
In addition to the manosphere, another influence on Hegseth’s fixation on masculinity may be his spiritual leader, Doug Wilson, the self-proclaimed Christian nationalist Idaho pastor who preached at the Pentagon earlier this year. Wilson has opined extensively about the virtues of “biblical masculinity,” which he has called “cultural gluten.” Without a patriarchal society led by manly men, he wrote in his 2023 book Mere Christendom, “the cookie just crumbles to pieces in your hand, and is tasteless on top of that.” In a 2020 YouTube broadcast, Wilson declared, “A masculine message is not going to be declared by effeminate men. We have a real crisis in masculinity.” In a February interview with Military Times, Wilson noted, “We should do everything we can do to keep women out of combat roles.”
In an email to Mother Jones, Wilson called Hegseth’s testosterone screening initiative “a fascinating move” and said he would be “interested to see what they find out.”
Since becoming defense secretary in January 2025, Hegseth has ended affirmative action and trans-inclusive policies, dissolved the Pentagon committee that supported female troops, and blocked female military leaders from being promoted. In a speech at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, last year, he proclaimed, “No more dudes in dresses, we’re done with that!”
2026-07-17 00:03:13
There’s a specter haunting Los Angeles, and it’s Spencer Pratt. A few days after the former reality TV heel turned Republican candidate lost his second-place spot in the Los Angeles primary mayoral election to progressive Nithya Raman, he released a statement and video saying that, unfettered from the bonds of actually winning, he has now entered “phase III” of a “war” on corruption and his political opponents.
“You enjoy your worthless meetings at City Hall,” he declared. “You think your election is going to stop me. If you want to stop me, you’re going to have to fucking kill me.”
For a few weeks, Pratt’s war seemed to entail tweeting angrily about Communism, defining it as broadly, flexibly and self-referentially as possible. Communists, he tweeted, were responsible for the demise of Los Angeles’ signature Art Deco building style, for a supposed war on landlords, for the destruction of history and erasure of Little Italy from a map of immigrant neighborhoods produced by the New York mayor’s office, and for making Los Angeles more vulnerable to a coming earthquake. In the midst of all this Red-scaring, Pratt also promised to release unspecified information during the general elections that would damage either incumbent Mayor Karen Bass or Raman, declaring, “We have some recordings of one of your exalted candidates doing and saying something that would make her resign in shame.” Thus far, Pratt has not released any compromising information on either candidate.
In time, though, Pratt has begun returning to the approach that has served him well since launching his nascent political career, which replaced his irrelevance as the lesser-known half of a reality TV couple in The Hills. The approach is simple: talking more and more overtly about voter fraud. Pratt, who soon after his loss posted a tweet implying that homeless people could have been paid to vote for Raman, suggested again on July 8 that fraud could have played a role in his election, while stopping short of definitively saying that it had taken place.
“Whether or not there is widespread fraud occurring, there certainly could be,” he declared in a 9-minute video on July 8, which he posted to both X and Instagram. He also claimed that “dead people” were still on the voter rolls, that organizations supporting Raman had been “hoarding” ballots, and that California laws prevented anyone from taking action to prevent voter fraud. “It’s like a bank heist, but California has no law that you can lock the bank vault, you’re not allowed to have security cameras, and you can’t count the money inside the vault,” he declared. “Robbing the bank is still 100% illegal, but there’s no way to stop it from happening.” Over AI-generated images of a zombie-like figure helping someone fill out a ballot, he also accused “socialist street animals” of going “door-to-door and violat[ing] the ballot harvesting laws.”
As unserious and posting-heavy as this all seemed, Pratt’s July 8 video garnered more than 4 million views on X alone. And by July 9, his self-described war had brought him to the Oval Office, where he released a photo of himself, his child, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and another, as-yet-unidentified man sitting across from President Donald Trump. Neither Pratt nor Trump has disclosed what they discussed in the meeting; both Pratt and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
In what has proved to be a busy month, Pratt also found time to travel with his wife and fellow former reality TV star Heidi Montag to Hawaii, where she shot a music video. Montag and Pratt are pursuing very different public profiles; while he fulminates about fraud, she’s stuck with video promotion and glamorous studio portraits of herself. She hasn’t weighed in on his claims.
Days before his meeting with Trump, Pratt also announced the creation of something he’s calling “the War Foundation,” which is unrelated to the addiction recovery group of the same name. The organization, he declared in a tweet, will “win the war against political corruption with innovative new media” and “restore common sense and roll back the long march of socialism through our vital institutions.” Using “hard-hitting media, investigative research, educational campaigns, and strategic partnerships,” the organization will achieve those goals, he added.
Put simply, Pratt is joining three overlapping movements at once. He’s dipping a toe into the world of election denial—while still carefully couching any suggestions of fraud in “could be” language. Meanwhile, he’s also joining, with much more force, a group of self-styled right-wing “new media” figures, as well as the fever swamp of the anti-Communist far right—which both dates back to the John Birch Society and is as recent as Trump’s sudden emphasis on “communists,” as the root of all ills, following the frightening-to-him victories of a plethora of progressive and Democratic Socialist candidates. All these groups have enthusiastically embraced Pratt as the newest symbol of a stolen election, and as part of a continued campaign to paint California as a liberal-controlled hellscape, dominated by fraud and mired in poverty. And their solutions to this dystopia are, unsurprisingly, extreme.
He has some strong allies in these fights. “We need to be at every precinct,” former Trump adviser Steve Bannon declared at an event called the “Fraud Fighter Summit” on June 16, which was held by Unauthorized, which describes itself as a “candidate consultancy” for “grassroots Constitutionalists candidates.”
“Whether you’re armed or not depends upon your state laws. ICE has to be there. Or we’re going to have a situation exactly like what happened in Los Angeles, where they sat there and stole the election from Spencer Pratt, who should be on the ballot in November.”
“Whether you’re armed or not depends upon your state laws,” Bannon added. “ICE has to be there. Or we’re going to have a situation exactly like what happened in Los Angeles, where they sat there and stole the election from Spencer Pratt, who should be on the ballot in November.” On July 10, pardoned January 6 defendant and white supremacist Jake Lang held a rally supposedly in support of Pratt near LA’s Union Station. Demonstrators held signs that read “Elect Spencer Pratt,” “Spencer Pratt Can Save L.A. From Communists,” and just for good measure, “Deport Nithya Raman.” The rally quickly grew chaotic and dangerous, with counter-protesters chasing and punching Lang, while his supporters reportedly used pepper spray and stun-guns on counterprotesters.
Both Pratt’s supporters and an army of self-styled journalists have also recently descended on Skid Row, which has been an epicenter for the city’s unsheltered for the last 100 years. Skid Row is often host to some of the most abject human misery imaginable, and the far-right content creators have gone there to showcase just how hellish they consider California to be under liberal rule. It’s also where a 64-year-old woman named Brenda Lee Armstrong recently admitted in a plea agreement that she paid unhoused people to register to vote, a case brought by a Trump-appointed US attorney after he saw a video exposing her conduct by conservative sting video-maker James O’Keefe.
In Pratt’s case, “investigators” apparently working with him and calling themselves “the Pratt Pack” went to Skid Row to interview people who seemed to be unhoused. The New York Post happily highlighted the many ballots sent to the Skid Row area that they claimed to have found, adding, “but few there actually voted in the Los Angeles mayoral race.” (This does not prove Pratt’s implication that homeless people were paid to vote for Raman; in fact, it does the opposite.)
All of this, says Kayla Gogarty, is part of a “feedback loop.” Gogarty is a research director at Media Matters who recently wrote and oversaw the organization’s report about right-wing media’s response to the Los Angeles mayoral primary. The loop, Gogarty says, begins with content creators “providing content that is then amplified by right-wing media.” At that point, she notes, the Trump administration will “take certain actions or advocate for certain policies,” which are then covered by right-wing media. The content is “largely around fraud,” Gogarty says, especially with the midterms approaching. “In March, we saw them descend on Skid Row when Trump was making a push on the SAVE America Act,” she says. Now, with the midterms approaching, “they started reupping some of these claims.”
Bannon is the “most extreme” we’ve heard, Gogarty adds, with his suggestion that armed people should head to voting precincts if state law allows. “But we’ve seen others talking about the National Guard, the military, or ICE being at the polls. We’ve also seen far-right election deniers pushing for Trump to take additional executive action,” which includes declaring a national emergency or pushing for an executive order imposing more sweeping action against alleged fraud.
It’s a crowded field, but for Pratt, as a failed candidate willing to engage in conspiracy theories about his loss, there is a bounty of potential opportunities for self-promotion. Gogarty says that Pratt could be following in the footsteps of far-right sting videomaker James O’Keefe, calling his recent content blitz “very reminiscent” of some of O’Keefe’s tactics, who, as Gogarty puts it, produces “often misleading and inflammatory content to advance a certain narrative.”
The simple willingness to engage in voter fraud allegations can, of course, be valuable politically under Donald Trump. Indeed, it has become a prerequisite for anyone appointed by Trump—from the head of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to lower-level political appointees—to assert that the 2020 election was stolen and that former President Joe Biden lost. Pratt could be traversing a path followed by people like election denier Kari Lake, who lost her Congressional election in Arizona in 2024. While she never won elected office, she’s now heading Donald Trump’s version of the United States Agency for Global Media and has been nominated to serve as the Ambassador to Jamaica. Other current administration officials also came from the election-denying right-wing media sphere, including FBI Director Kash Patel, who has engaged in stolen 2020 election claims, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who claimed in 2021 that the 2020 election was rigged using mail-in ballots.
Whatever Pratt chooses to do—become a new media figure, a voter fraud warrior, or retire to the life of a reality TV star once again—he “almost doesn’t need to stay involved,” Gogarty added. “He’ll be synonymous with the California primary and these voter fraud allegations.” Which means that for the midterms and in the 2028 presidential election, if the election-denier ecosystem has its way, California will become synonymous with fraud, at least as long as it’s politically expedient to do so.
2026-07-16 20:00:00
In the span of a week, immigration officers shot and killed two people in the streets of American cities. And a third person died on Tuesday in Florida after being struck by a tractor-trailer while running from an encounter with federal agents.
Last week, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, his brother, and two others were driving to work at a construction site in Houston when ICE stopped their van. An agent then reportedly fired into the passenger window, fatally hitting Araujo. He was not, however, the intended target of ICE’s operation.
Fifty-two-year-old Araujo was a father of three from Mexico and had lived in the United States for 35 years. He was in the process of obtaining lawful status. His son, Ronaldo Salgado, learned about the shooting from a video on social media. Speaking at a press conference the following day, he described his father as a family man who, after a hard day at work, liked to spend the evenings resting on his porch, listening to music, and petting his dog.
“He did not deserve to die,” Salgado told reporters. “He did not deserve to be reduced to a headline of ‘Mexican Man Shot and Killed by ICE.’”
As the Araujo family grieved, another casualty made the headlines. On Monday, July 13, an ICE agent shot and killed 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero inside a vehicle in Biddeford, Maine. The Colombian-born father of a three-year-old girl worked two jobs as a food delivery driver and a cleaner at a veterinary clinic. Like Araujo, Guerrero apparently wasn’t ICE’s initial target either.
In both shootings, the agents involved wore no body cameras. The Department of Homeland Security has claimed, without providing evidence, that Araujo had “attempted to evade arrest” and “weaponized” his vehicle against law enforcement. About Guerrero, DHS said he “attempted to flee the scene” and the officer, “fearing for public safety,” fired his weapon.
Araujo and Guerrero are among some 20 people who have been shot at by immigration agents since September, according to the New York Times. And there have been at least 17 shootings of motorists by federal immigration officers during Trump’s second term, the Washington Post found.
“When you see now people losing their lives,” said Naureen Shah, the ACLU’s Director of Government Affairs, Equality Division, “it’s not surprising that it’s happening. It’s totally foreseeable in the most tragic way.”
“A pattern of civil rights violations arising from immigration enforcement—at a scale and severity without precedent in our nation’s history.”
A new ACLU report co-authored by Shah documents how these deadly ICE shootings were not only predictable; they fit into a broader pattern of reckless misconduct by the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement machine. Entitled “Agents of Chaos and Cruelty,” the report analyzes the ways in which this national deportation policing force has inflicted harm in communities around the United States.
The killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis, the report’s authors note, “were not the excesses of a few rogue officers.” They were “part of a pattern of civil rights violations arising from immigration enforcement—at a scale and severity without precedent in our nation’s history.”
After reviewing more than 1,200 immigration enforcement-related incidents across eight US states between January and December 2025, the ACLU found for instance:
“The incidents we reviewed,” the authors write, “indicate agents used force and the threat of force as default tactics and tools to coerce immediate compliance rather than to respond to a threat.” In more than 370 of the reviewed incidents, the agents were masked.
The comprehensive report paints a damning, albeit incomplete, picture of a policing force—made up of more than 50,000 agents among ICE, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and other federal, state, and local law enforcement—acting with few guardrails and increasingly unlimited resources.
In the last year and a half, the Trump administration revoked policies that limited immigration enforcement in areas such as schools, places of faith, and courthouses and set priorities for arrests. In the words of Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and architect of the immigration crackdown, “Everyone is fair game.”
Enabled by billions of dollars awarded by Congress, ICE went on a recruiting spree, adding about 12,000 agents to its force, while lowering hiring and training standards. At the same time, the administration gutted DHS’s internal watchdog. DHS whistleblowers warned Congress earlier this year that without oversight, the number of deaths and injuries in detention and as a result of excessive use of force would rise, as they have.
The ACLU report’s authors attribute the pattern of misconduct not to the actions of “a few bad apples”—individual agents—but rather to a “systemic breakdown in professional norms and standards” and “a culture of abuse, practices designed to evade accountability, and direct orders and encouragement of abuse by senior administration officials.”
Their findings also reinforce how no one, anywhere, is safe. The documented immigration enforcement incidents took place on highways, at bus stops, in grocery stores, car washes, restaurants, and construction sites. And the people impacted included US citizens, green card holders, DACA recipients, as well as those with humanitarian protections. The authors also counted 214 children who experienced or were exposed to law enforcement misconduct.
“While the administration has tried to make it seem like they are now taking a quieter, smarter approach to immigration enforcement, they actually haven’t changed the way they’re behaving day to day.”
“While the administration has tried to make it seem like they are now taking a quieter, smarter approach to immigration enforcement, they actually haven’t changed the way they’re behaving day to day,” Shah said. “We still have these agents who are causing chaos wherever they go. These street arrests are creating danger zones out of places of daily life, like bus stops and gas stations and small town intersections, and that’s what we just saw in these shootings, and that’s also what we’ve seen around the country in many occurrences that just haven’t broken through in the national headlines over many months.”
In the report, Shah and her co-author warn that the abuses and practices they documented offer a blueprint for authoritarianism, including the suppression of protests, retaliation and intimidation of observers and witnesses, and the use of federal law enforcement agencies as an “internal security force.”
“We should think about this mass deportation drive as a project of the authoritarian slide that we’re in,” Shah said. “And if we want to future-proof our democracy against authoritarianism, we have to fix the system.”
Following the killings of Araujo and Guerrero, the Trump administration ordered ICE to halt most vehicle stops. But in an interview with Fox News, border czar Tom Homan said the pause would be temporary while ICE leadership and DHS looked into the incidents: “Is there something that could have been done better? Is there any training that can be improved? Or is ICE simply doing its job, and bad things happen when people don’t comply with law enforcement officers?”
Homan said the “noise” wouldn’t affect ICE’s arrests moving forward and called it a “bump in the road.” On Wednesday, Trump also indicated that he had no intention of slowing down the immigration crackdown surge, posting on Truth Social that ICE should “go back and do your very important job.”
“These officers aren’t getting enough training on how to distinguish the circumstances of an arrest to know when they should be engaging in it,” said Ryan Schwank, a former attorney and instructor for ICE who became a whistleblower. “What we’re seeing is officers are rushing to make arrests. They’re being pressured to get high numbers. And as a result of that, they’re looking for the opportunity to get the arrest done quickly.”
Schwank said the “escalation” of action by agents in the recent fatal shootings doesn’t “fit their training and it doesn’t fit their operational practices historically.” He added: “I don’t think that an agency like ICE stops a practice like vehicle stops, which is so critical to its operations, without having internally already decided that something was going wrong, that there’s clearly a failure if they’re having this many fatalities, this many incidents…They know this is not working, and they’re going to keep doing it anyway because they’ve been ordered to do so.”
