2025-09-09 21:30:00
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Every cold and flu season, you probably find yourself thinking about vaccinations for your kids: flu, Covid, the works. Maybe you’re at a routine checkup and you’re wondering if you should ask your doctor for the shots; maybe the pediatric clinic is running a vaccine clinic and you’re considering stopping by with the whole family. Either way, it has become a routine part of every autumn.
But this year, it’s different.
Any parent who reads the news or logs onto social media has probably heard that the US government has changed its vaccine guidance. They may also have learned that some of the leading doctor organizations in the country are opposed to those changes, as are a growing number of states.
I am lucky to have three healthy children under age 7, but I have still found myself wondering particularly about the value of Covid-19 shots for them the past few years. Like many parents, I have a lot of questions: Is the government going to change what vaccines we can get? Are Covid and flu shots going to be accessible anymore? Will they be covered by health insurance? How do I even know anymore which vaccines are safe for my child?
It used to be simple: The federal government, professional medical societies, your personal physician would all tell you the same thing about which vaccines you should get. And then your health insurance company — following that guidance — would usually cover the cost. But perhaps not anymore.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the US health secretary, is making a lot of changes to the government’s vaccine policy.
He has unilaterally declared that healthy children and healthy pregnant women should not receive a dose of the Covid vaccines — a move that has spurred uproar among staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and led to an exodus of its leaders, including director Susan Monarez. There have been reports that the Trump administration may pull the Covid vaccines from the market entirely. He has ordered a review of all of the vaccines that children receive when they’re growing up, and Kennedy has put vaccine skeptics in important positions in the administration.
Now, the medical establishment has started pushing back forcefully. In the past few weeks, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists have said that children and pregnant women should receive the Covid vaccine.
There is a group of infectious disease experts at the University of Minnesota who are working on alternative vaccine recommendations, in consultation with a range of medical organizations. Groups of states on the West Coast and across New England are teaming up with their neighbors to potentially issue their own vaccine recommendations. Massachusetts will require health insurers to cover state-endorsed vaccines, and more states may follow suit.
Here are some essential things to know about where vaccine access stands right now: The Trump administration has granted more limited approval for the latest update of the Covid shots. Healthy adults under 65 and children are not technically covered by the new Food and Drug Administration approval, and it’s not clear how widely available the vaccines will be at pharmacies and doctors offices in the fall. And the CDC will release its own recommendations for the Covid vaccines later in September, which could match the FDA approval — but could not. We’re in uncharted territory.
So far, other vaccines have not yet been affected, but we have already seen Kennedy make changes to the vaccine guidance outside of the normal process. The government could still make changes to who is recommended to get flu shots and RSV shots, and, in the long term, they could change the recommendations around measles shots, hepatitis shots, and all of the other vaccines that make up the childhood immunization schedule.
And in this new normal, where the government and medical establishment are at odds, whenever Kennedy walks back a recommendation for a specific vaccine, professional medical organizations may recommend the exact opposite. So, what are parents, trying to do the best for their children, supposed to do?
First, know which sources can help you find your bearings. Even though many experts in the public health establishment are pushing back on the federal government right now, it’s still worth understanding what the CDC recommends. You can find this on the CDC’s website. After that, you want to get the bigger picture: Understand what the relevant professional medical societies recommend. Some of the big ones are: the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
But you’re not on your own in the labyrinth of the internet, either.
Your family physician, primary care doctor, and pharmacist will also be able to walk you through the best available information. They may also be able to tell you about any recent changes to the federal policy and what’s being communicated to the public about why they were made.
If both the CDC and the doctors’ groups agree on their vaccine guidance — as they might for, for example, the flu shot — then you can feel good about which shots to get, and you can be confident that your health insurance will cover it. Federal law mandates that most insurers cover the vaccines that are recommended by the federal government.
But what if the CDC and the doctor groups disagree, as they seem to on the value of Covid shots at the moment? This is a situation where it is valuable to have a doctor you can trust.
Unfortunately, finding a primary care doctor is more difficult than it should be in the United States. But something most families can do is pose these questions even to a nurse at a pharmacy or health care worker at a vaccine clinic, for your own knowledge and peace of mind:
What are the benefits of receiving the vaccine? What are the potential risks? How common are serious side effects?
And, in their opinion, Do the benefits outweigh the risks or vice versa? Is one vaccine preferable over the other? The Pfizer vaccine, for example, is approved for children ages 6 and older, while the Moderna shot is approved for kids 6 months and older.
The next major question we’re all going to have to face is: If I want to get a vaccine for myself or my child, will it cost me any money? This largely depends on your health insurance, if you have it.
As of today, none of the major health insurers have made significant changes to their vaccine coverage policies. But that could change.
Your doctor likely deals with insurance coverage in these situations all the time. Use them as an ally when trying to figure out if you can get your health insurance to cover a vaccine in a scenario where it is not federally required. They should also know about any state-level mandates that could require a health plan to cover you or your child’s shots.
Doctors may even be able to help you file a claim with your health insurer, and they might be aware of other public and private programs that are available to help cover the cost of vaccines. The new FDA approvals do allow for kids with underlying health conditions to receive the vaccine in consultation with a doctor, which could ensure insurance coverage. Adults may also want to ask if any of their preexisting medical conditions allow them to qualify under the new criteria. In general, the list of qualifying conditions is quite long, but it includes things like asthma, diabetes, heart disease, mental health conditions, and immunodeficiencies.
Making health care decisions might not be as easy as it used to be. But your best allies are your health care provider — and yourself. Learn as much information as you can, try to find a doctor you trust, and you can be more confident in your health care decisions for yourself and your family.
2025-09-09 19:15:00
If there’s one thing a large majority of Americans have consistently agreed on this year, it’s that the Democratic Party sucks. Unfavorable views of the party seem to keep rising with every passing month of President Donald Trump’s second term and that discontent has reached a new height this summer. More than 60 percent of American adults view the Democrats with derision, according to weekly tracking polls conducted by YouGov.
Looking at this another way, positive views of the Democratic Party have now crumbled to a historic low, with only about one-third of the country seeing them in a good light, per Wall Street Journal polling that shook the political world in July.
It’s a broad-based dislike: Republicans, independents, and disaffected Democrats are dragging down the party’s brand. But the reasons for this dislike are varied. Since there’s no one explanation for why everyone seems to hate the Democrats right now, it’s useful to break this question up into a few charts to visualize the complicated position of the Democratic Party in 2025.
The biggest contributor to the negative position of the Democratic Party right now comes from depressed Democrats who are frustrated with their party. Poll after poll shows a unique, historically unusual dynamic where Republicans are very satisfied with the state and performance of their political party while Democrats are significantly less happy with their own side.
A summer Gallup poll summed up this development: 91 percent of Republicans have a favorable opinion of the GOP — up from 87 percent in October 2024 — while 73 percent of Democrats have a favorable opinion of their party — down from 92 percent in 2024. It’s a highly unusual dynamic, Gallup notes; Republicans tend to be more unfavorable toward their party, so this unity is surprising. Democrats, meanwhile, historically tend to be more supportive of their party.
The first way to think of this difference is to see the associations that Democrats have with their party. For most of the last year, Democratic voters were sending signals to their leaders that they wanted more aggressive resistance and opposition to Trump — something they feel like their party is not doing well.
Consider this chart with responses to a prompt from an August Associated Press-NORC poll. Per the AP, one-third of Democrats have negative views of their party, largely to do with the party’s inability to respond to Trump.
“Weak,” “tepid,” “ineffective,” and “broken,” came up the most among Democrats and were used by Democrats to describe their party much more frequently than by Americans in general.
In other words, Democrats dislike their party because they think they are incapable of resisting Trump; other Americans dislike the party for other reasons. This matches other trends. Pew Research Center data from this spring showed an overwhelming majority of Democrats thought it was “extremely” or “very” important that their leaders resist Trump and his policies. That was most pronounced among very liberal Democrats, 85 percent of whom said this resistance was “extremely” important — higher than the response from liberal, conservative, or moderate Democrats. And polling from Strength in Numbers/VeraSight suggests that this cohort of very liberal/progressive Democrats might be the Americans bringing down the party’s favorability at the moment.
Ideologically, there’s evidence that the party’s negative perceptions are motivated, in part, by its members not being united on what direction their party should go. After many pre- and post-election surveys found that Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party suffered from being viewed as too radical or too liberal, discussions within the party centered on whether the party needed to ideologically change direction.
Gallup studied this question earlier in the year and found mixed results, but definitive significant changes from four years ago. Democrats, and Democratic-leaning independents, are divided over whether the party should change or not.
More of these partisans want the party to be more moderate than in 2021, but a majority would still prefer it stay the same or move left. This, again, matches trends in other polls and correlates with surveys finding that a majority of Americans think their party is “somewhat” or “very” divided, while Democrats themselves are split in half on that question. Dislike of a political party flows from there. If you think your party should moderate, but is not, you’ll probably be upset at it overall. If you think the party should be more liberal, but it’s not, the same reasoning applies. Republicans, meanwhile, are pretty happy with their party right now: 43 percent think the party should not change.
Relatedly, a third way to visualize this dislike for the Democratic Party is to see it as a reflection of the unpopularity of its leaders. If the party base, and American voters in general, have strong negative feelings about a party’s elite — those spokespeople who stand in for and speak for the party — then it makes sense for those feelings to be applied to the party in general.
Here, Elliot Morris’s Strength in Numbers analysis of favorability of political figures is clear. While most politicians and figures are unpopular, Democratic ones are especially unpopular.
A similar dynamic emerges when looking at Democrats in Congress. They are viewed much more negatively in general by their own voters than Republicans are by their own voters. Meanwhile, individual Democratic representatives and Democratic candidates tend to be viewed more favorably than Democrats as a whole or Republican candidates and the Republican Party.
This suggests some degree of voters not wanting to throw the baby out with the bathwater. They like individual Democratic representatives while disliking party leadership and the party brand. This would also explain why Democrats continue to see a modest advantage on the generic congressional ballot — voters are still more likely to vote for a Democrat in next year’s midterm elections, even if they dislike the party as a whole.
In addition to these three buckets of explanations, there are some more natural dynamics at play: Partisanship and polarization explain why Republicans still strongly dislike the Democratic Party, while it’s normal for a political party to go through a period of wandering in the wilderness after a presidential loss (Democrats were in a similar polling position in 2017 before surging in the fall into 2018). So while Democrats seem to be hated by everyone right now, they aren’t doomed yet.
2025-09-09 18:45:00
By the time the earthquake struck, flattening mud-brick homes across Afghanistan’s eastern mountains last week, many nearby health clinics had already been shuttered for months.
Mushtaq Khan, a senior adviser for the International Rescue Committee, felt his building jolt from all the way in the capital, Kabul, on Sunday night. He woke the next morning to a horrifying death toll slowly trickling in. First, 200 lives lost; then 500; 800; 1,000; and finally, by Thursday, there were over 2,200 confirmed deaths, with some rural villages still unreachable by rescuers.
As his team searched for survivors, he wondered what could have happened if the gutting of the US Agency for International Development hadn’t forced four of their clinics in the country’s hardest-hit province to close earlier this year, cutting off 60,000 rural Afghans from care.
How many lives could be saved if the emergency aid came rushing in like it did before? If the roads had been built in time, or if the food assistance was at the ready like it used to be, they could have surely reached more people more quickly in the disaster’s wake.
“The way we are responding now would’ve been way different,” he said.
At the beginning of this year, the US cut almost $1.8 billion worth of aid to Afghanistan. Because of those cuts alone, the country’s GDP will likely shrink by a full 5 percent this year, cutting off food, shelter, and medical care for millions of Afghans. In 2022, after a magnitude 6.1 quake hit southeastern Afghanistan the US gave $55 million for food, health, and sanitation supplies. The next year, it gave $12 million in the wake of yet another earthquake. But this time, the US offered nothing.
Globally, we are at risk of unraveling decades of progress in making disasters less deadly, driven by investments in infrastructure, early warning systems, and better coordination between the patchwork of actors and agencies that kicks into gear when crisis strikes. Foreign aid has always been a critical part of that puzzle in low-income countries like Afghanistan. A steady flow of foreign aid helps facilitate the kind of development — the roads and resources — needed to make emergency response truly effective when disaster strikes.
The US isn’t alone in slashing aid. As a result of the worldwide retreat in funding lifesaving development programs, every disaster is now deadlier than it needs to be — and every aid worker is left navigating an increasingly dysfunctional system.
“The resources are really, really scarce right now,” Khan said. If the money was there like it used to be, he told Vox that he “would be on the ground working side by side with my team right now. We are really feeling the difference.”
When an earthquake or a cyclone strikes a poor village, what normally happens first is that the country’s government puts out a call for international relief.
Then, a hodgepodge of NGOs, United Nations agencies, and foreign governments would spring into action. USAID would typically pledge a few million dollars to the government of the affected country or — as would be the case for an unfriendly ruler like the Taliban — to a United Nations agency or humanitarian organizations like the Red Cross working on the ground.
Sometimes, the US would even lend out one of its highly specialized search and rescue task forces to respond to a disaster overseas, as it did to Haiti, Turkey, Peru, the Bahamas, Nepal, and Japan after earthquakes, flooding, and hurricanes over the past decade.
The coordination would kick in really quickly. Most humanitarian organizations didn’t even wait for the contracts to be signed before flying their teams straight into the epicenter to work with local agencies and nonprofits on the ground.
After decades of collaboration, most humanitarian organizations trusted that “the US government would pay its bills” or reimburse them eventually for the costs incurred, said Jeremy Konyndyk, who ran USAID’s disaster assistance branch under the Obama administration and now leads the advocacy group Refugees International. By having those relationships at the ready, a response can kick in much faster when disaster strikes. “Sometimes you need the relief to move faster than our grant processes.”
That trust didn’t come overnight, nor did USAID’s capacity for responding quickly to global disasters, he said. Over time, “it evolved and it grew and iterated,” he said. “It became this really amazing professional operational, deployable machine.”
What makes the most difference in the immediate aftermath of a disaster is not an injection of emergency donations. It’s not as simple as crowdfunding a search and rescue team. Instead, long-term infrastructure projects — often fueled by foreign aid — are what really wax the wheels of disaster relief, ensuring that help can come as fast and efficiently as possible.
It’s important that the protocols are already in place and the rescuers are already on call to respond effectively by the time disaster strikes. But, it’s equally important that the clinics are open, the roads are paved, the water is clean, and the houses are strong enough to withstand some damage.
Achieving those goals through global cooperation has been extremely important for low-income countries, where disasters are still far more deadly than in rich countries, despite efforts to improve early warning systems worldwide.
But, they have made progress, which helps explain why earthquakes, cyclones, and floods used to kill far more people a century ago than they do today, despite there being way more people now, more data reporting, and more disasters tied to climate change than before.
But now, with the death of USAID and plenty of other countries taking sledgehammers to their own aid agencies, everything about disaster relief has gotten a lot more sluggish.
The Taliban, which seized power in Afghanistan in 2021, put out an appeal for aid shortly after the earthquake struck at the end of August. So did the leader of a local rebel group in Sudan last week, after a devastating landslide killed over 1,000 people in a region already ravaged by war and famine.
While a few countries have stepped in to help in the aftermath of the earthquake — including the European Union, China, India, and the United Kingdom — aid workers like Khan say the absence of the US is directly impacting their response. “It’s just a complete mess,” Konyndyk said. “As a functional matter, the US government is simply out of the business of disaster aid globally,” and “it’s done huge damage.”
Those search and rescue task forces the US used to send? They’re still technically on retainer, but in what Konyndyk called an “entirely insane” twist, the Trump administration cancelled the emergency transport contracts that used to get them where they needed to go — meaning that it’s now basically impossible to get them overseas, especially on a time crunch.
It took four days to get those task forces to Texas after the floods this summer — the same first responders that made it to Syria and Turkey after the 2023 earthquake in just two days.
The USAID subagency that once handled global disaster logistics has been quietly subsumed into the much smaller office within the Office of Refugee Resettlement as part of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Not that it seems to be doing much anyway. After a magnitude 7.7 earthquake killed 3,800 people in Myanmar back in March, the US was mostly absent in the disaster response. The UN’s human rights expert for Myanmar recently told the Associated Press that a mixture of aid cuts and the notable absence of US logistical support has severely hampered the country’s ability to recover.
Previous earthquakes had led to the deployment of a full US-led rescue team with dozens of rescuers, search dogs, and heavy machinery that could pull people out alive. This time, the US flew in a team of just three aid workers to assess the damage and then promptly fired them all via email mere days after their arrival as they slept in the rubble-strewn streets of the earthquake zone.
The situation in Afghanistan is even worse. After the Taliban’s takeover, the US remained the country’s largest source of aid by far, sending billions to the poverty-stricken country over the past four years.
The Trump administration’s decision to slash the vast majority of aid spending cut the country off from urgent food aid, forced the closure of about 400 humanitarian health clinics — 40 percent of the country’s total — and gave girls even fewer options to go to school.
“You just name any crisis — we are seeing it over here,” said Khan, who’s especially worried about how damage to water and housing infrastructure could increase the prevalence of disease and make it impossible for families to weather the coming winter. It would be one thing if this were the only crisis on his plate, but the earthquake is only the latest in a series of crises, including a severe drought that has left about one-third of the population facing acute food insecurity and the millions of Afghans forced out of neighboring nations.
“These are very resilient people,” he said. “They just need backing.”
Saving more lives is about more than money for any individual disaster; it’s about addressing a brewing logistical nightmare that’s making the world less safe and far less prepared to respond to all different kinds of crises.
Take Sudan. Western media didn’t even report on the deadly landslide that occurred there — which destroyed an entire village — until two days after the disaster hit. And, the ongoing civil war makes it extremely difficult to get humanitarian aid inside the country anyway, particularly in the region most affected, where many have sought refuge from the violence precisely because the area is so remote.
But almost unthinkably, the destruction of USAID — which funded the bulk of humanitarian relief that did make it into the country — has made things even worse. It ruptured longstanding relationships, unceremoniously firing some of the only people with the logistical expertise needed to navigate such tricky terrain. No matter what comes next, it won’t be easy to build back.
“We are facing a huge loss of capacity and trust,” said Patricia McIlreavy, head of the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, who has spent decades working in humanitarian aid, including in Sudan.
“There may be others who fill those gaps. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just a real unknown,” she said. “How will it look? How will people get support? Will they get support?”
In the meantime, she fears that all of the “cuts in funding, but also cuts in capacity, and cuts in expertise and relationship-building” could have dire consequences long after the dust settles.
“People on the ground in Sudan, people on the ground in Afghanistan, don’t have a vote on any of these changes,” she said. “All they know is nothing is coming.”
At the end of the day, natural disasters don’t see borders. There’s something very human — apolitical, even — in the impulse to support one another in the wake of such tragedies.
Afghanistan offered $100,000 to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Mexico sent dozens of firefighters to Los Angeles when wildfires broke out earlier this year. Hundreds of Canadian workers descended on North Carolina to help restore power after Hurricane Helene.
And with climate change accelerating the pace and intensity of natural disasters around the world — but especially in places like Afghanistan and Sudan — like it or not, we are all in this together.
Granted, the US used to anchor a vast global emergency response infrastructure, and individual donations are absolutely no replacement for that.
But in Sudan — where local volunteer networks have managed to bring lifesaving relief to places that many western donors gave up on years ago — anything is still better than nothing, especially if you choose to support for the long haul. The same is true in Afghanistan, where aid workers have trudged for hours in search of survivors to pull from the rubble.
“We all have a belief that help will come, and when we erode that hope, I think we do something to who we are as people,” McIlreavy said. “How are we advancing together if we can’t believe that we are somehow there for each other?”
2025-09-09 18:30:00
According to Donald Trump, the 45th and 47th president is a very generous man. “I am proud to be the only President (with the possible exception of the Late, Great George Washington) to donate my Salary,” he said in a Truth Social post. “My first ‘Paycheck’ went to the White House Historical Association, as we make much needed renovations to the beautiful ‘People’s House.’”
In his first term, Trump made a big show about donating his government salary. And he’s doing the same now too. The whole spectacle is just that: Trump is trying to imply that he doesn’t need the presidency, and that he’s not interested in making money through the job Americans elected him to do.
Trump’s 2020 tax returns cast doubt on whether he has donated every paycheck as president. But regardless of how much of his salary Trump is actually donating, it’s clear that the presidency has greatly benefited Trump financially. From the very beginning, Trump has used the presidency as a money-making instrument, using his perch from the White House to funnel money into his businesses. When he first won the presidency in 2016, foreign governments started spending money on his private businesses by staying at his hotels. The Secret Service spent millions of dollars — taxpayers’ money — on Trump’s properties. And Trump never divested from his businesses to ensure that there would be no conflict of interest.
Now, in his second term, the way Trump is profiting from the presidency is more brazen than ever before. While running his campaign in 2024, Trump’s media company went public, allowing anyone to buy a stake in his business. He has made millions selling Trump-branded merchandise, from cologne to sneakers to bibles. He even accepted a plane worth hundreds of millions of dollars — which will be transferred to his presidential library after he leaves the White House — from the Qatari government.
But to put into perspective just how much money Trump is extracting from the presidency, look no further than the Trump family’s crypto ventures. Just before his second inauguration, Trump launched a meme coin, as did his wife, Melania Trump — a blatant display of how the Trumps use the presidency for financial gain. If Trump weren’t about to become president when they launched these coins, then would they have attracted as many investors as they did?
So just how much money is Trump actually making from the presidency?
The amount of money Trump is making from his crypto schemes dwarfs the government salary that he routinely reminds people that he donates. Since 2001, American presidents have made a salary of $400,000 a year. So that’s about the amount of money Trump says he selflessly donates. But since becoming president in January, Trump and his family have made billions from their crypto businesses, at least on paper.
Earlier this month, the Trump family’s latest venture, World Liberty Financial — which was co-founded by Trump’s three sons and lists Trump himself as “co-founder emeritus” — opened trading on its crypto token, $WLFI. Previously, people bought WLFI tokens privately through World Liberty Financial, but weren’t able to trade them. Now, it’s all public, and WLFI tokens can be bought and sold on the open market. This latest launch alone has expanded the Trump family’s net worth by as much as $5 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. While those gains only exist on paper for now, since the Trumps can’t sell their tokens yet, it’s a window into just how much money the presidency is generating for the Trump family.
But that’s not all. The meme coins they launched in the days before Trump’s inauguration — $TRUMP and $MELANIA — have generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, according to the New Yorker.
It’s hard to pin down an exact number when it comes to how much money the president and his family have made from these sorts of schemes, in large part because the Trumps aren’t exactly known for transparency into their finances. Moreover, much of the wealth they’ve generated remains unrealized, since they haven’t sold all of their assets. But while the Trump family’s various businesses — from finance to Trump-branded merchandise to his media company — have hauled in hundreds of millions of dollars, all of those ventures pale in comparison to the family’s crypto earnings.
What’s clear is that Trump and his family have leveraged the presidency to draw investors to their cryptocurrencies and greatly expanded their collective wealth as a result. Since becoming president, Trump himself has more than doubled his net worth, from an estimated $2.3 billion in 2024 to more than $5 billion this year, according to Forbes.
What makes this all the more alarming is just how nakedly corrupt these crypto investments are. Just like when Trump made Truth Social a publicly traded company, the Trump family’s crypto coins allow anyone to invest money to boost Trump’s wealth. And what might draw people to do that is not just their love or admiration for the president, but the potential opportunity to curry favor with him and his administration. In fact, earlier this year, Trump hosted a dinner at his Virginia golf club for the top investors in his $TRUMP coin. To put it more plainly, that wasn’t some kind of elite political fundraiser, where rich donors gather to fill a campaign fund for the next election. Trump was instead actively luring people to heavily invest in his private business — to enrich him personally — by promising investors an opportunity to gain access to the president of the United States.
So while Trump likes to tout his donations — particularly his paycheck giveaways — as evidence of his generosity, that is just for show. In the end, how much more brazenly corrupt could the president be than hosting a private dinner for his top investors? With Trump, it’s impossible to know the answer, because he seems to keep finding more blatant ways to turn the presidency into a money grab.
2025-09-09 05:45:00
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: Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Los Angeles can indiscriminately target people for immigration stops on the basis of race and several other factors, the Supreme Court ruled Monday.
What just happened? In a 6-3 decision from the Court’s “shadow docket,” the six Republican justices reversed a lower-court injunction preventing ICE agents in LA from relying on any of four factors, solely or in combination, in their decision to make immigration stops:
Monday’s decision isn’t the end of the case, Noem v. Perdomo, which could work its way back to SCOTUS — but it’s a fair sign of where the question is likely to ultimately end up.
What has ICE been doing in LA? ICE has targeted LA for especially large-scale and indiscriminate immigration raids since earlier this year, prompting widespread protests and the federalization of California’s National Guard by President Donald Trump in response. In some cases, federal agents have carried military-style weapons and equipment when conducting raids, including using flash-bang grenades on bystanders.
What did the Court’s liberal justices say? Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson in a dissent, protested the Court’s process and decision.
“That decision is yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket,” Sotomayor wrote. “We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job.”
What’s the big picture? Monday’s decision is a fairly unsurprising outcome, as my colleague Ian Millhiser wrote last month. The Court has been incredibly compliant with Trump’s preferences, and it’s particularly difficult to secure an injunction against overreach by federal law enforcement.
That said, the implications of Monday’s decision are still concerning — as Sotomayor cautions, the decision threatens to create “a second-class citizenship status,” where US citizens and legal residents can face arbitrary detention for their skin color or accent.
I enjoyed the latest edition of my colleague Bryan Walsh’s Good News newsletter over the weekend, which you can read here (and sign up for here, if you too want it in your inbox).
He writes about a great, overlooked story of progress over the last 70-odd years: Ireland’s transformation from a poor country suffering from high child mortality rates and low rates of secondary education to its current, vibrant, prosperous state.
That’s all for today — have a great evening and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!
2025-09-09 03:15:00
Editor’s note, September 8, 3:15 pm ET: On Monday, the Supreme Court decided Noem v. Perdomo in the Trump administration’s favor, by a 6-3 vote, with all six Republican justices voting with the majority and all three Democratic justices dissenting. The decision lifts a lower federal court’s injunction handed down in July that stopped federal law enforcement, including ICE officers, from stopping or detaining people in Los Angeles based “solely” on four factors, or any combination of them: because of their “apparent race or ethnicity,” because they speak Spanish or speak English with an accent, because of where they work, or because of the type of work they do.
Once again, the majority did not explain its decision, which was issued on the Court’s emergency “shadow docket.” In a solo concurrence, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that these four factors can help establish “reasonable suspicion” for federal law enforcement to stop and detain people: “apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion; under this Court’s case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a ‘relevant factor’ when considered along with other salient factors. Id., at 887. Under this Court’s precedents, not to mention common sense, those circumstances taken together can constitute at least reasonable suspicion of illegal presence in the United States.”
But in a scathing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor countered that the decision amounts to legalizing the racial profiling of Latinos, writing, “We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”
The outcome reflects what Vox’s Ian Millhiser previewed after the case appeared on the shadow docket. His original analysis from August 15 remains below.
Last month, a federal judge in Los Angeles handed down a temporary order placing some restrictions on the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in that city. The Trump administration now wants the Supreme Court to lift those restrictions.
The contested provisions of Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong’s order are fairly narrow. They provide that federal law enforcement may not rely “solely” on four factors when determining to stop or detain someone suspected of being an undocumented immigrant. Under Frimpong’s order, the government may not stop or detain someone solely because of 1) their “apparent race or ethnicity,” 2) the fact that they either speak Spanish or speak English with an accent, 3) their presence at a location such as an agricultural workplace or day laborer pick-up site, or 4) the type of work that they do.
Frimpong’s order prohibits the government from relying exclusively on any one of these factors or on any combination of them, so it could not detain someone solely because they speak Spanish and they are a day laborer, for example. The government may still rely on these four factors to determine whom to stop or detain, however, so long as it has other reasons for targeting a particular individual.
Thus, for example, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) could target someone because that person speaks Spanish, and they work as a day laborer, and they were witnessed getting into a truck owned by a company known for hiring undocumented immigrants, because one of the three factors that ICE considered in this hypothetical stop is not on Frimpong’s list.
That said, at least according to the Cato Institute’s David Bier, Frimpong’s order has drastically reduced the number of immigration arrests within Los Angeles.
The central issue in this case, known as Noem v. Perdomo, is what courts are practically able to do in order to rein in overzealous tactics by law enforcement. Judge Frimpong’s order is modest — again, it does not prevent the Trump administration from targeting anyone, just as long as part of the reason why a particular individual is targeted doesn’t appear on Frimpong’s list of four — but it is also unlikely to survive contact with a Republican Supreme Court that is extraordinarily solicitous toward Donald Trump.
Indeed, the Court has long cautioned lower court judges against issuing broad orders imposing across-the-board restrictions on law enforcement. One of the seminal cases that the Trump administration relied upon in its Perdomo brief was handed down in 1983, well before the Court’s recent partisan turn.
The Republican justices, in other words, likely will not even need to stretch the law very far if they want to rule in Trump’s favor in Perdomo.
The Perdomo case arises out of multiple immigration raids in Los Angeles, which have often taken place at job sites and other locations where the Trump administration believes that undocumented immigrants are often present. As Frimpong found, “car wash workers, farm and agricultural workers, street vendors, recycling center workers, tow yard workers, and packing house workers were targeted.” One early operation “detained multiple day laborers outside of the Westlake Home Depot.”
At least some of these operations appear to violate the Constitution. In some instances, law enforcement appears to have targeted people because of their race. Frimpong, for example, pointed to an incident where “agents approached and prevented a nonwhite individual from walking away but not those who appeared to be Caucasians.” A Latino car wash worker targeted by one of the raids testified that the federal agents who arrested him ignored two of his light-skinned coworkers, one of whom is Russian and another who is Persian.
In other cases, federal agents appear to have targeted individuals despite having no reasonable grounds to believe they are undocumented. Plaintiff Jason Brian Gavidia, for example, is an American who was born in Los Angeles. According to an appeals court that upheld nearly all of Frimpong’s order, agents “forcefully pushed [Gavidia] up against the metal gated fence, put [his] hands behind [his] back, and twisted [his] arm” after he was unable to identify which hospital he was born in.
The agents eventually released Gavidia after he produced a Real ID card, a document that is only issued to people who are legally present in the United States, but they took his ID.
It is likely, in other words, that at least some of the people targeted by these Los Angeles raids could individually challenge their arrests or detention in court. But the ability to bring such individual challenges often isn’t worth very much.
For starters, the Republican justices’ decisions in Hernández v. Mesa (2020) and Egbert v. Boule (2022) likely make it impossible to collect money damages from an ICE agent who violates your constitutional rights. In Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents (1971), the Supreme Court held that federal law enforcement officers who violate someone’s constitutional rights may be personally liable for that violation. But Hernández and Egbert read that decision so narrowly that such suits rarely, if ever, move forward.
So, even if someone like Gavidia brings a successful lawsuit, he probably wouldn’t win anything more than the right to get his ID back.
Someone who is unlawfully detained could potentially obtain a court order demanding their release. But many people targeted by law enforcement lack access to legal counsel or cannot afford to hire a lawyer even if they can find one who will take their case. While indigent criminal defendants have a right to a government-paid lawyer, defendants in immigration proceedings typically do not. And even when immigration defendants do prevail, an occasional court decision declaring some long-past arrest illegal is unlikely to deter future illegal arrests.
Yet, the Supreme Court has long discouraged federal judges from issuing injunctions that forbid law enforcement from acting illegally in the future. The key case is City of Los Angeles v. Lyons (1983), which held that Adolph Lyons, a man who was allegedly choked out by police officers without provocation, could not obtain a court order forbidding LA’s police from using such chokeholds in the future.
“Past exposure to illegal conduct,” Justice Byron White wrote for the Court in Lyons, does not permit someone to seek an injunction. Rather, “Lyons’ standing to seek the injunction requested depended on whether he was likely to suffer future injury from the use of the chokeholds by police officers.”
Indeed, White’s decision placed nearly impossible barriers before most plaintiffs seeking court orders requiring police to modify their behavior. To obtain such an injunction, White wrote, Lyons “would have had not only to allege that he would have another encounter with the police, but also to make the incredible assertion either (1) that all police officers in Los Angeles always choke any citizen with whom they happen to have an encounter, whether for the purpose of arrest, issuing a citation, or for questioning, or (2) that the City ordered or authorized police officers to act in such manner.”
At least some of the plaintiffs in Perdomo present an unusually strong case that they are likely to be caught up in an immigration raid again in the future. According to the appeals court which heard this case, “at least one individual with lawful status was stopped twice by roving patrols in just 10 days.” So a court could quite reasonably conclude that this individual is “likely to suffer” the “future injury” that Lyons demands.
But Lyons also places such a high bar in front of plaintiffs seeking an injunction against law enforcement that it would not be difficult for the Republican justices to write an opinion relying on Lyons to toss out Judge Frimpong’s order, assuming that they even bother to explain their decision in the first place — something that the Court’s Republican majority often refuses to do.
In addition to arguing that Lyons requires the Supreme Court to block Frimpong’s decision, Trump’s lawyers also point to the Court’s recent decision in Trump v. CASA (2025), which held that federal courts typically should not issue injunctions that extend beyond the individual parties to a lawsuit. So, even if the one plaintiff who was stopped twice may obtain an injunction, that court order might have to be so narrow that it protects him and him alone against future illegal stops.
Trump’s CASA argument is hardly airtight. Though CASA did hold that broad injunctions are generally discouraged, it did permit them when necessary to give a victorious plaintiff “complete relief.” Frimpong argued that a broad injunction is warranted in Perdomo, because law enforcement officers cannot reasonably be expected to know which suspects are protected by a court order.
“It would be a fantasy to expect that law enforcement could and would inquire whether a given individual was among the [plaintiffs] before proceeding with a seizure,” she wrote. The only way to stop ICE from targeting the Perdomo plaintiffs is to issue a court order that protects everyone in Los Angeles.
Will that argument persuade a majority of the justices? The honest answer is, “Who knows?” CASA is a brand new decision, handed down less than two months ago, and the Court has yet to apply its new rule to the facts of any specific case — including the CASA case itself.
And the fact remains that it is exceedingly difficult to obtain any injunction against law enforcement, much less the broadly applicable one handed down by Judge Frimpong. The Supreme Court has generally preferred for judges to adjudicate alleged legal violations by law enforcement one at a time, rather than issuing wholesale injunctions halting an illegal practice — even though individual decisions often do little to stop these practices.
In fairness, there are some good reasons to prefer individual lawsuits over wholesale court orders. Fourth Amendment search and seizure cases typically turn on the very specific facts of a particular case. Police might reasonably suspect, for example, that a person spotted with a large wad of cash in a neighborhood where illegal drugs are often sold is engaged in illegal activity. By contrast, police may not have reasonable grounds to suspect a similar person spotted walking near a business where people often make down payments on their new homes.
As a general rule, the Fourth Amendment permits police to briefly stop and search someone if they reasonably suspect that person is engaged in illegal activity — or, in an immigration case, of being illegally present in the United States.
To be sure, there are some things that law enforcement may almost never consider when determining whether to stop a particular individual. In Kansas v. Glover (2020), for example, the Court said that police may not target someone based on “nothing more than a demographic profile” or stop and question someone about their immigration status because of their “Mexican ancestry.”
Frimpong’s conclusion that ICE may not target someone solely because of their “apparent race or ethnicity” is consistent with Glover.
But Frimpong’s conclusion that law enforcement may never reasonably suspect someone of being undocumented solely based on their presence in a particular location is probably a bit of a stretch. As a federal appeals court explained in a 2014 case, day laborer jobs are “one of the limited options for workers without documents.” These jobs are often grueling, unreliable, and underpaid. They are unattractive to virtually anyone who is authorized to work in the United States and, thus, have less-demanding and better-paying job options available to them.
There are at least some cases, in other words, where a law enforcement officer could reasonably suspect someone of being undocumented if they are consistently seen at a location where undocumented workers seek jobs as day laborers — what Frimpong described as a “day laborer pick up site.”
It is difficult to come up with categorical rules governing which factors law enforcement may consider when deciding whom to stop. Even race may be an acceptable factor in very limited circumstances; if multiple witnesses to a robbery tell police that they saw an East Asian man commit the crime, for example, then police could reasonably limit their search to people who appear to be East Asian. This is one reason why cases like Lyons exist: to prevent judges from handing down categorical rules that prevent police from conducting lawful investigations.
The current Supreme Court is far too sycophantic towards Donald Trump, but that does not change the fact that courts are poorly situated to deal with a rogue executive. The executive branch can move quickly, potentially committing thousands of constitutional violations before judges even begin to figure out what happened in those cases. Similarly, practical limits on judicial power can tie judges’ hands when they are confronted with rogue law enforcement agencies.