The Trump administration locked in a consent decree last week that does what congressional gridlock never could: it declares one of President Biden's mass migrant "parole" programs unlawful and binds the federal government for the next 15 years from resurrecting it. The settlement was signed off by Judge T. Kent Wetherell in a federal court in northern Florida.
The decree emerged from a lawsuit Florida filed in 2023, and the language leaves little room for creative reinterpretation. The federal government agreed not to use the Secretary of Homeland Security's parole authority under Section 1182(d)(5) to create any categorical processing pathway for aliens at the border designed to alleviate detention capacity concerns or improve DHS operational efficiency. That includes any policy that would shift removal proceedings from the border to the interior or postpone them altogether.
In plain English: the pipeline Biden built to wave millions through the border is sealed shut — and the next president who tries to reopen it will have a federal court order standing in the way.
As The Washington Times noted, parole was never designed to be a mass-entry program. It exists as a narrow tool allowing the Secretary of Homeland Security to admit individuals on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit. The Biden administration turned that scalpel into a firehose.
Under Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, categorical parole programs welcomed tens of thousands of Afghans, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, and millions more from other countries. Former immigration judge Andrew "Art" Arthur calculated that nearly 3 million migrants were paroled into the United States during the Biden era — a figure he says accounts for a large portion, if not an outright majority, of the illegal immigrants who successfully settled in the country.
The mechanics weren't subtle. Biden didn't want to maintain the stiff controls President Trump left in place. Rather than work through Congress to change immigration law, the administration turned to parole to alleviate pressure at the border — pressure that its own policy reversals had created.
A 2022 deposition proved how deliberate this was. Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody's office deposed Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz, who admitted that Biden policy changes had made it tougher to detain and remove illegal immigrants caught at the border. Arthur put it bluntly:
"When Moody deposed Raul Ortiz, the entire Biden administration catch-and-release scheme, which up to that point had been operating under the wire, was exposed."
That deposition became the foundation for Florida's 2023 lawsuit — and ultimately, this consent decree.
The consent decree doesn't merely reverse a Biden-era memo. It constrains executive discretion for 15 years, a timeline that stretches across at least three presidential terms. Arthur framed the stakes clearly:
"This consent decree will prevent a future administration from abusing DHS's limited parole authority in the way that the Biden administration did."
Under the decree's terms, Arthur estimated parole numbers would drop to maybe a couple of hundred per year, which is far closer to what the statute actually contemplated. Case-by-case, not categorical. Individual, not industrial.
Jae Williams, press secretary for Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who finalized the decree as Moody's successor, connected the legal victory to the broader enforcement picture:
"We thank the Trump administration for working with our office to obtain this result, which ensures that the next Democratic administration cannot abuse the parole system to allow another invasion of illegal aliens into our country."
The Trump administration had already moved to suspend the Biden parole programs upon taking office and is now working to remove those who entered through the legally questionable pathways. The consent decree ensures that the suspension isn't just a policy preference of one administration — it's a judicially enforceable commitment.
Critics will note the tactic at work here: "sue and settle," where a plaintiff files suit against a sympathetic administration and both sides agree to a binding resolution that bypasses Congress and the standard rulemaking process. Left-leaning activists have been the most prolific users of this approach for decades, leveraging friendly administrations to lock in environmental regulations, housing mandates, and immigration expansions that would never survive a floor vote.
Now it cuts the other direction, and the discomfort is already audible. Jennifer Coberly, a lawyer with the American Immigration Lawyers Association, objected to the decree's reach:
"The biggest thing about this is it's directly contrary to law. Generally, [the law] does provide discretion to the administration, and this is saying you can't do that for 15 years."
The irony is rich. For years, the immigration bar cheered as the Biden administration stretched "discretion" past its statutory breaking point to parole nearly 3 million people into the country. Now that a court has drawn the line, discretion is suddenly sacred. The argument isn't really about legal principle — it's about who gets to exercise the power.
Coberly did note that some Biden parole programs might fall outside the decree's scope, pointing to the pathway that allowed Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans to skip the southern border and fly directly into American airports without visas. That interpretation hasn't been confirmed by either party to the settlement, and it remains to be tested. But even if that narrow carve-out survives scrutiny, the core architecture of Biden's border parole regime is gone.
Executive orders are temporary. Regulations can be rewritten. But a consent decree is a court order, enforceable through contempt proceedings. A future administration that wanted to revive categorical parole at the border wouldn't just need to issue a new memo — it would need to go back to a federal court in northern Florida and convince a judge to dissolve the agreement. That's a fundamentally different legal obstacle than anything a policy reversal alone could create.
This matters because the Biden playbook was always about exploiting the gap between what the law says and what an administration can get away with before courts intervene. Parole authority existed in statute. The Biden team simply decided that a tool meant for individual cases could be scaled to millions. By the time courts caught up, the people were already here.
The consent decree closes that gap preemptively. It doesn't rely on the next Republican president remembering to reverse the policy on day one. It doesn't depend on Congress passing legislation that Senate rules would likely kill. It creates a durable, enforceable boundary that exists independent of who holds the White House.
Nearly 3 million people entered the country through a system that a federal court has now declared unlawful. The programs that admitted them have been suspended. The legal mechanism that enabled them has been locked for 15 years. And the administration that built them never responded to a request for comment.
The decree speaks for itself.
Convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell appeared virtually before the House Oversight Committee on Monday from a federal prison camp in Texas, invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, and refused to answer a single question. Her lawyer then made the play everyone saw coming: Maxwell will talk — but only if President Trump grants her clemency.
The 64-year-old is serving a 20-year sentence. She has every incentive to deal and almost no leverage to do it with. Yet her attorney, David Oscar Markus, framed the offer as something close to a public service.
"If this Committee and the American public truly want to hear the unfiltered truth about what happened, there is a straightforward path. Ms. Maxwell is prepared to speak fully and honestly if granted clemency by President Trump."
The White House has denied that clemency is under consideration.
Markus didn't stop at the clemency gambit. According to the New York Post, he volunteered an unsolicited declaration on behalf of his client — one that conveniently names the two most powerful men whose orbits intersected with Jeffrey Epstein's.
"Both President Trump and President Clinton are innocent of any wrongdoing."
He then added:
"Ms. Maxwell alone can explain why, and the public is entitled to that explanation."
Think about what's happening here. Maxwell won't answer questions under oath before Congress, but her lawyer will assert — without cross-examination, without evidence, without sworn testimony — that two presidents are clean. That's not transparency. That's a press release dressed in legal clothing.
If Maxwell truly possesses exculpatory information about powerful figures, the place to deliver it is under oath, subject to questioning, with the full weight of perjury consequences behind every word. Not through a lawyer's statement on X. The Fifth Amendment exists for good reason, but you don't get to invoke it and simultaneously shop your version of events through your attorney's social media account.
This isn't Maxwell's first attempt at controlled disclosure. Trump's Justice Department already interviewed her in prison last year. She testified to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on July 24 and 25 under limited immunity protection.
The result was underwhelming. Maxwell provided almost no new information about Epstein's infamous associates — a list that includes Prince Andrew, former Harvard President Larry Summers, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. On the subject of Trump specifically, Maxwell said she:
"never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way."
Days after that interview, Maxwell was transferred from a federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida, to a medium-security camp in Texas — a facility reportedly nicknamed "Club Fed." No official reason for the transfer has been provided.
Meanwhile, a DOJ memo released on July 6 concluded that Epstein held no "client list" and that no additional co-conspirators would be charged. A joint DOJ-FBI document concluded Epstein committed suicide in his Manhattan jail cell on August 10, 2019, while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
House Oversight Chairman James Comer announced at least five more depositions following Maxwell's non-event Monday:
Comer told reporters after the deposition that the committee still has serious work to do.
"We had many questions to ask about the crimes she and Epstein committed — as well as questions about potential co-conspirators."
"We sincerely want to get to the truth for the American people and justice for survivors. That's what this is about."
Comer said he was open to hearing from more Epstein associates but hasn't committed to further interviews, including with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. According to emails released by the Justice Department, Lutnick planned to visit Epstein's private Caribbean island, Little St. James, in 2012 — though Lutnick told the New York Post he broke off contact with the financier around 2005.
Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat who co-authored legislation allowing ongoing DOJ disclosures, submitted seven questions he wanted Maxwell to answer before Monday's deposition. Among them: whether Maxwell could verify a claim made in a December filing by her own legal team — that 29 Epstein associates had secret non-prosecution agreements, and whether she or Epstein would "arrange, facilitate, or provide access to underage girls to President Trump."
That last question tells you everything about where Democrats want this investigation to land. Not on the bipartisan constellation of powerful men who populated Epstein's world. Not on the systemic failures that let a convicted sex offender serve 13 months — most of it on work release — after pleading guilty in 2008 to soliciting a minor for prostitution. Not on the institutional rot that allowed Epstein to build his operation across decades.
They want a headline with one name in it.
Every few months, the Epstein story resurfaces with the promise that this time the truth will come out. It never does. Maxwell won't talk without a deal. The DOJ says no client list and no further charges are coming. The powerful men adjacent to Epstein's crimes have spent years lawyering up, and the victims are still waiting for something resembling accountability.
The clemency offer is a sideshow — a convicted sex trafficker trying to negotiate her way out of a 20-year sentence by dangling information she could provide under oath right now, today, if she chose to. She doesn't need a pardon to tell the truth. She needs a pardon to avoid the consequences of everything else.
When Trump was asked about a potential pardon in November, he was characteristically noncommittal:
"I haven't even thought about. I haven't thought about it for months. Maybe I haven't thought about it all. But I don't talk about that. I don't rule it in or out."
The depositions will continue through March. The Clintons are both scheduled. Epstein's inner circle — his accountant, his lawyer — will face questions. Whether any of it produces genuine revelations or just more Fifth Amendment invocations remains to be seen.
But one thing is already clear: the people who know the most about Jeffrey Epstein's crimes have the least interest in sharing what they know — unless the price is right.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani became the first New York City mayor in nearly a century to skip the installation of the city's new Catholic archbishop — then tried to cover it with a tweet.
Archbishop Ronald Hicks, 58, accepted the reins of the New York Archdiocese from Cardinal Timothy Dolan at St. Patrick's Cathedral on Friday in a ceremony that began at 2 p.m. The 11th archbishop since 1850 now leads a flock of an estimated 2.5 million Catholics across Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island, and counties north of the city.
The mayor was not there. He posted about it on X instead.
"Congratulations to Archbishop Ronald Hicks on today's installment and welcome to New York City."
He followed that with a promise that he and Hicks share "a deep and abiding commitment to the dignity of every human being" and that he looks forward to "working together to create a more just and compassionate city where every New Yorker can thrive."
Every New Yorker, apparently, except the 2.5 million Catholics whose most significant religious ceremony in years didn't rate a walk up Fifth Avenue.
The mayoral attendance record stretches back to at least 1939, when Fiorello LaGuardia attended the installation of Francis Spellman. Ed Koch — Jewish — was present for Cardinal John O'Connor's ceremony in 1984. Rudy Giuliani was at St. Patrick's for Archbishop Edward Egan's installation in 2000. Michael Bloomberg — also Jewish — attended Cardinal Dolan's installation mass in 2009.
Koch and Bloomberg didn't share the faith. They showed up anyway. That's what leaders of a pluralistic city do — they honor the institutions that bind their constituents together, especially the ones that don't share their own background. It is the most basic gesture of civic respect.
Mamdani couldn't be bothered, however, as MSN reported.
City Hall eventually claimed Mamdani had a "scheduling conflict" and had sent a Catholic deputy mayor in his place. But his own public schedule tells a different story. The mayor attended an interfaith prayer breakfast at 10 a.m. and had a winter weather press conference at 4 p.m. The installation began at 2 p.m. — at a cathedral that, as the Catholic League pointedly noted, is a short walk up Fifth Avenue from the prayer breakfast venue at the New York Public Library.
The Catholic League did not mince words:
"The mayor of New York City traditionally attends the installation of the new archbishop of New York, but Mamdani — who was invited — ghosted the event."
"He could easily have been there. Instead, he attended to business as usual."
City Hall ignored several outreach attempts by the New York Post on both Friday and Monday. Only after publication did a spokesperson surface to say Mamdani and Hicks would speak on Tuesday. The damage-control instinct arrived well after the damage.
What makes Mamdani's absence sharper is the context surrounding it. In the same week, he put out a tweet marking World Hijab Day. At the annual interfaith prayer breakfast — the very event he attended that same Friday morning — he suggested that the United States should use the Prophet Muhammed's example on immigration.
No one objects to a mayor engaging with the Muslim community. The problem is the contrast. When you find time to commemorate World Hijab Day and invoke the Prophet Muhammed at a public event but can't walk a few blocks to honor the installation of the Catholic archbishop who shepherds millions of your constituents, you aren't practicing interfaith leadership. You're practicing selective faith engagement, and the selections are telling.
Bill Cunningham, former communications director and top adviser to Mayor Bloomberg, attended the 2009 installation himself. He told the Post:
"It was a missed opportunity for the mayor to show he wants to serve all the segments of the city."
"There are certain institutions the mayor of New York might want to take note of. One of them is the Catholic Church."
Ken Frydman, spokesman for Giuliani's 1993 campaign, was blunter:
"I thought Mamdani only disdains Jews who like Israel. Turns out, he also disdains Italian, Irish and other Catholic New Yorkers."
The Catholic League framed the absence in terms that will resonate far beyond one missed ceremony:
"Mamdani has been in office for just over a month, and already he is signaling to Catholics that they are not welcome."
That's the read, and Mamdani has done nothing to rebut it. His own representative, asked about the absence, offered this to a reporter: the mayor didn't go, but he tweeted about it. As if a social media post is a substitute for presence. As if the mayor of the largest city in the country can discharge his civic obligations from a phone screen.
Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Catholic, was in Syracuse at the Democratic convention formally accepting a nomination — an actual scheduling conflict with a verifiable event. Nobody faulted her for it. Mamdani had a four-hour gap between breakfast and a press conference. The excuse doesn't hold.
A mayor barely five weeks into office has managed to signal to one of the city's largest religious communities that their traditions rank below a weather briefing. He's shown that "interfaith" means the faiths he personally prioritizes. And when called on it, his administration went silent for days before offering a story contradicted by his own public calendar.
New York has had mayors of every faith and no faith. Every single one of them understood that the installation of an archbishop isn't a church picnic — it's a civic event, a recognition that the Catholic Church is woven into the fabric of the city. Schools, hospitals, charities, and parishes in every borough. You don't have to take communion to acknowledge what that institution means to millions of people.
Mamdani tweeted. The 2.5 million Catholics of the New York Archdiocese will remember what he didn't do.
Senator Ted Cruz told donors at a private fundraiser that Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy would deploy his network to support a Cruz 2028 presidential campaign, according to an anonymous attendee who spoke to the Daily Mail. The claim — denied by both Cruz's office and Ruddy's team — lands just as Ruddy prepares to testify before Cruz's own Senate committee on media ownership.
The timing alone deserves attention.
Cruz chairs the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, which is holding a hearing Tuesday titled "We Interrupt This Program: Media Ownership and the Digital Age." Ruddy is a scheduled witness. The two men share a common opponent in the proposed Nexstar-Tegna merger — and if the anonymous donor's account is accurate, they may share quite a bit more.
The donor, described as someone who has contributed financially to Cruz, told the Daily Mail:
"I attended a Ted Cruz fundraiser late last year and during the fundraiser Senator Cruz mentioned that Chris Ruddy would be using Newsmax to support his candidacy when and if he runs for the Republican primary, which is expected."
Cruz spokesperson Macarena Martinez fired back without hesitation:
"Once again, anonymous sources are putting words in Senator Cruz's mouth to further their own agendas. These are obvious lies, but the media once again shows that they are ready and eager to be spun up and used at every opportunity."
She added:
"Journalists used to know how to do their jobs. Those days are clearly far behind us."
Ruddy's team issued its own denial after publication, with a spokesperson saying the Newsmax CEO "denies the 'fake news' he ever promised Senator Cruz any endorsement, and neither he nor Newsmax has made any pledge of support for any candidate in 2028."
The anonymous donor, when presented with the denial, offered a parting shot:
"I guess they don't call him lying Ted for nothing."
So what we have is a single anonymous source against two on-the-record denials. That's worth noting before anyone builds a narrative castle on this foundation.
Even if the specific claim is exaggerated or fabricated, the underlying dynamics are real — and they illuminate the early fault lines of what could be a bruising 2028 Republican primary.
Cruz has been making moves. Last week, in an episode of the Ruthless podcast first obtained by the Daily Mail, he rejected the idea of a Supreme Court appointment that President Trump had recently floated:
"My answer's not just no, it's hell no."
His reasoning was characteristically blunt:
"A principled federal judge stays out of political fights and stays out of policy fights. I want to be right in the middle of them."
That's not a man positioning himself for a lifetime of judicial temperament. That's a man who wants to run for president — again.
Then there's the leaked audio. Last month, recordings given to Axios by a Republican source captured Cruz offering a remarkably candid assessment of Vice President JD Vance:
"Tucker created JD. JD is Tucker's protégé, and they are one and the same."
That's not the kind of thing you say about someone you view as an ally. It's opposition research delivered in your own voice.
If Cruz were shopping for conservative media support, his options would be limited. A source described as close to the White House explained why Ruddy's backing — real or imagined — would matter:
"Because he's got no other conservative outlet. Everyone else is gonna be with JD."
That same source added a less flattering assessment of what Ruddy's support would actually be worth:
"Maybe the way he sees it is Ted's going to be in the primary for a month and then he'll be gone, so it's not really - it's not like he's making a long-term commitment."
The numbers bear out the skepticism. Newsmax pulls roughly one-sixth of Fox News Channel's audience. In January, Newsmax's highest-rated primetime show drew 345,000 viewers. Fox's comparable figure: 2.046 million. It's the difference between a megaphone and a bullhorn — both amplify, but one carries a lot further.
Lost in the 2028 speculation is an actual policy fight worth watching. Tuesday's hearing centers on media ownership rules in the digital age, and the Nexstar-Tegna merger sits at the heart of it.
Tegna owns 64 local television stations across 51 U.S. markets. The FCC currently prohibits broadcasters from owning stations that reach more than 39 percent of American households. An enlarged Nexstar would reach 54.5 percent — blowing past the cap.
Ruddy filed a complaint with the FCC, arguing the deal violates national ownership caps. In a November Newsmax op-ed, he wrote:
"The answer to Big Tech consolidation is not to give left-wing TV broadcasters massive consolidation and power too. We don't need anti-Trump media controlling everything."
He also took a direct shot at the administration's own FCC chairman, Brendan Carr:
"It shocks me President Trump's FCC chairman has made his main priority giving the TV broadcasters more power and control, especially over local news."
President Trump, for his part, endorsed the merger on Truth Social Saturday:
"We need more competition against THE ENEMY, the Fake News National TV Networks. Letting Good Deals get done like Nexstar - Tegna will help knock out the Fake News because there will be more competition, and at a higher and more sophisticated level."
That puts Ruddy and Cruz on one side of a media consolidation fight and the President on the other — a notable split that makes the alleged backroom alliance all the more interesting, regardless of whether it's real.
It also places Ruddy on the same side of the merger issue as Elizabeth Warren, Maxwell Frost, and Summer Lee. Strange bedfellows don't begin to cover it.
Cruz has tangled with FCC Chairman Carr before — particularly over Carr's September move to go after ABC's broadcast license over comments made by Jimmy Kimmel. Cruz called it what he saw:
"Dangerous as hell."
"That's right out of Goodfellas."
His concern wasn't about defending ABC. It was about precedent:
"Going down this road, there will come a time when a Democrat wins again – wins the White House … they will silence us. They will use this power, and they will use it ruthlessly. And that is dangerous."
Cruz warned that if the government got into the business of policing what the media said, "that will end up bad for conservatives." It's a consistent libertarian-conservative position on media regulation, and it explains why he'd chair a hearing designed to scrutinize ownership consolidation rather than rubber-stamp it.
Strip away the anonymous sourcing and the denials, and a clear picture still emerges. Ted Cruz is not going to the Supreme Court. He's not retiring to a podcast. He's running for president — or at minimum, keeping every door open and every relationship warm.
Whether Chris Ruddy promised anything is almost beside the point. The structural reality is that a Cruz campaign would need a media ecosystem, and the major conservative outlets are likely to coalesce around Vance. If Newsmax — even at one-sixth of Fox's audience — provides a platform, it's better than nothing.
Ruddy, meanwhile, told the Daily Mail he looks forward to Tuesday's hearing and "an open and frank discussion about the dangers of media consolidation in the television broadcast industry." He did not answer directly when asked about supporting Cruz's presidential bid.
The denials are on the record. The ambitions are obvious. And both men sit down on Tuesday in a Senate hearing room where their interests happen to align perfectly — on media ownership, at least.
Everything else is just 2028 positioning disguised as 2026 policy.
Ken Paxton is pulling ahead of John Cornyn in the race for Texas's open Senate seat — and the gap isn't shrinking.
A new survey from the University of Houston's Hobby School of Public Affairs, conducted between Jan. 20 and Jan. 31, shows Paxton commanding 38% of likely Republican primary voters to Cornyn's 31%. U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt of Houston sits a distant third at 17%, with 12% of respondents still undecided. Early voting starts Feb. 17 — just over a week away.
On the Democratic side, U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Dallas leads state Rep. James Talarico by 8 points, 47% to 39%. The general election matchups, meanwhile, suggest the eventual Republican nominee won't matter much: both Paxton and Cornyn beat Crockett by 2 percentage points in head-to-head hypotheticals, and the survey found "little difference" in expected performance regardless of which candidates emerge.
Texas remains Texas.
What makes Paxton's lead notable isn't just the topline number. It's the breadth. According to the poll reported by the Texas Tribune, Paxton leads Cornyn across every key demographic group surveyed — with one exception. Cornyn edges Paxton among Latino voters by 7 percentage points in the Republican primary.
That's a real data point, but it's a narrow one. Paxton's advantage everywhere else — and the survey's indication that he'd hold a big advantage over both opponents in a potential runoff — paints the picture of a candidate whose base is locked in and whose ceiling hasn't been reached. Twelve percent undecided in a three-man race with early voting days away is real estate, and Paxton is positioned to claim it.
Previous polls had described this race as a dead heat. This one doesn't. A 7-point lead outside the margin of error — the poll carries a ±4.18-point margin — marks a genuine shift.
Crockett's 8-point lead over Talarico tracks with what you'd expect when one candidate simply owns the room. Ninety-two percent of respondents said they knew enough about Crockett to form an opinion, compared to 85% for Talarico. That 7-point awareness gap maps almost perfectly onto the 8-point vote gap. Democratic voters know Crockett, and they're picking her.
Talarico has his pockets. He leads among white voters and those with advanced degrees — the wine-track progressive coalition that runs strong in Austin and not many other places. But Crockett dominates among the voters Democrats need in a statewide Texas race. She carries 46% of likely Latino Democratic primary voters to Talarico's 37%, with 15% still unsure.
That's a problem for Talarico, who recently secured an endorsement from the state's largest Hispanic Democratic organization. Previous polls had shown him leading among Latino voters. The endorsement doesn't appear to be holding.
Here's the number that should keep Democratic strategists up at night: it doesn't matter who they nominate. Both Paxton and Cornyn beat Crockett by 2 points in hypothetical general election matchups. The survey even found Paxton could do slightly better than Cornyn against Talarico. Between 7% and 8% of likely general election voters remain unsure in those head-to-heads, but the structural reality of Texas hasn't moved.
Among the 1,502 likely general election voters polled — with a tighter ±2.53 margin of error — President Trump's approval sits at 49% to 50% disapproval. Majorities disapprove of his handling of foreign policy, the economy, international trade, and the cost of living. But 51% approve of his handling of immigration and border security, with 47% disapproving.
In Texas, immigration and the border aren't abstract policy debates. They're lived experience. That single issue keeps the floor firm under any Republican running statewide.
With early voting opening Feb. 17, the contours of both primaries are hardening fast. Twelve percent undecided on each side leaves room for movement but not transformation. Cornyn needs something to change the trajectory — and the poll offers him little to work with beyond his narrow advantage among Latino Republican voters. Hunt, at 17%, is running for a bronze medal or an exit ramp.
The real question isn't whether Paxton or Crockett wins their primaries. The polls — this one and the ones before it — have been trending in one direction for both. The real question is whether Democrats invest serious money in a Texas Senate race where their best candidate trails the Republican field by 2 points in a state that hasn't elected a Democrat statewide since 1994.
The answer to that question tells you more about the national party's resource discipline than any poll can.
TM Landry College Preparatory Academy claimed a 100 percent graduation and college acceptance rate. It sent students to Harvard, Stanford, and other elite institutions. Michelle Obama praised it. Ellen DeGeneres featured its students on national television. More than 18 million people watched viral videos of students opening Ivy League acceptance emails.
It was, according to a new book titled Miracle Children (via MSN), built on fabricated transcripts, inflated grades, and the physical and psychological abuse of the very children it claimed to champion.
The school, founded in 2005 in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana — a small town ten miles east of Lafayette with a poverty rate twice the national figure — operated unaccredited and unregulated for years. Mike Landry was never charged. The FBI investigated in 2019 and shelved its inquiry. And the Landrys have since disappeared.
Mike Landry and his wife, Tracey, opened the school to homeschool five children and their own. Landry, a University of Louisiana at Lafayette graduate with a business degree and military background, pitched the academy as a place of advocacy for young black children. He charged $600 a month in tuition. By January 2017, enrollment had reached 142 students.
The appeal was real. Louisiana's education landscape gave parents every reason to look elsewhere. Only half of the state's secondary students learned from qualified teachers. More than one in four adult residents was illiterate. Landry positioned himself as the alternative — described as captivating and flamboyant, clad in bright colors, radiating the promise that black children from forgotten towns could reach the most elite institutions in the country.
The school's first Harvard acceptance came in December 2015. The video went viral. The media machine followed. In 2018, students Alex Little and Ayrton Little appeared on the Ellen DeGeneres show after being accepted to Stanford and Harvard, respectively. Ellen told her audience the Little family frequently faced homelessness, spent winters without heat, and rarely knew if there would be food on the table.
Their mother, Maureen Little, was a trained chef who ran a catering business, taught cooking classes, drove an SUV, and had found a new full-time job at a vocational college. She had put the boys through private schools before sending them to Landry just the year before the Ellen appearance. The narrative Ellen sold and the reality didn't quite align — but by then, the myth was already set in stone.
Mary Mitchell heard about TM Landry in 2016. She and her husband, Allen, ran the local gas station. She enrolled her son Nyjal, then 14, and her daughter, then 10.
Nyjal, now 23, explained why the school drew him in:
"I had been put in a public school and was having a lot of experiences with bullying from my black peers, because I was a nerdy black kid in a poor, less-educated part of America."
He respected the vision. He said so plainly:
"The Landry aura of knowledge appealed to me. Mike was an intelligent-seeming black man who wanted other black people to be successful in places that they were not allowed into. He had a vision that I respected, and I still can say to this day that I respect the vision of wanting black people to succeed, or wanting black people to be in these Ivy Leagues, these places that they're deserving to be in."
In January 2018, Nyjal told his mother that Landry had repeatedly beaten him — placing him in a chokehold from behind, forcing him to the floor, dragging him across concrete by his hoodie, and insisting he kneel before the class. He said Landry had previously slapped and shoved him, pinning him to a door.
Students alleged Landry's methods were brutal, humiliating, and belittling, with pupils shoved, slapped, and forced to kneel for hours. He allegedly doctored students' personal essays, inventing clubs and teams that didn't exist. He allegedly terrorized students, playing them off against each other, warning that challenging him meant no college acceptance.
When parents confronted him, Landry angrily told them that if they didn't like his methods, they could leave.
Mary Mitchell took her son's claims to the police. Landry was questioned. He told police and other parents that Nyjal was lying and that the Mitchells had invented their claims to extort him. The police believed Landry. Other pupils denied seeing the attacks.
The Mitchell family was ostracized. Nyjal and his sister were branded traitors. Mary described what it did to her children:
"It destroyed them. As teenagers, you put your whole world into who you think your friends are, and then those people now hate you, saying that you're a traitor, and you turned on this man that's next to God in their world."
Mary pulled both children from the school. Both sank into deep depression. The experience drove Mary to a breaking point — she followed Landry to a Walmart parking lot with the intention of running him down, then broke down in tears in her car when she recognized the insanity of the thought.
It wasn't until November 2018 that the New York Times published its own account of the school. The Breaux Bridge police then received about ten complaints involving the school in the month that followed. Enrollment fell to around 60 students by 2019. The school closed in 2022.
Mary Mitchell had been telling the truth for nearly a year before anyone listened.
The damage didn't end when the school closed. It followed the students who believed TM Landry had prepared them for the institutions it placed them in.
Nyjal Mitchell had to redo a grade. He has been in therapy since the alleged abuse. But he graduated from the University of Louisiana in May 2025 with a degree in psychology and is now studying for his master's at Southern University in Baton Rouge. He wants to train as a counselor.
"I feel like I got off really lucky out of that situation. The trauma is one thing, but the reality of this situation is I was able to speak on something that needed to be stopped. And, you know, I left Landry and got to keep going to high school. It sucked to have to redo a grade, but at least I made it to college on my own. Others paid probably tens of thousands of dollars, and they didn't even get a high school diploma."
Mike Landry was never charged. The FBI opened an investigation in 2019 and quietly shelved it. No charges were ever filed. Mike and Tracey Landry left town after the school closed and have not been seen or heard from since. Landry could not be reached for comment.
The school operated in a regulatory void — unaccredited and unregulated under a framework dating to the 1970s, when some Louisiana schools successfully sought permission to avoid desegregation restrictions. That loophole, originally carved out for a very different purpose, gave Landry the legal cover to operate without oversight for nearly two decades.
Mary Mitchell's assessment of what should change is difficult to argue with:
"Even home schools need to be regulated by someone. And if they're going to be in the presence of children, they need to pass background checks. There should be some oversight yearly, at least, where someone comes in and verifies that nothing is happening to these kids, right?"
This is a case that should force an uncomfortable conversation — not about whether school choice works, but about what happens when the institutions meant to validate education simply don't exist. Elite universities accepted students with fabricated transcripts. The media amplified an unverified feel-good story without asking basic questions. A first lady lent her credibility to a school no one had bothered to audit. Law enforcement dismissed the mother's account and believed the accused.
Every institution that should have caught this — from the local police to the Ivy League admissions offices to the FBI — either looked the other way or showed up too late.
Nyjal Mitchell sees it clearly:
"It was completely possible for TM Landry to be an amazing place that did amazing things. But he was using the backs of black children and other children to prop himself up, to prop his organization up."
The viral videos got 18 million views. The feel-good story got the talk show appearances and the praise from the First Lady. The children who were beaten, lied to, and sent to universities they weren't prepared for got therapy bills and dropped credits. Mike Landry got to vanish.
A Hong Kong court sentenced 78-year-old media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai to 20 years in prison Monday under Beijing's national security law, drawing immediate condemnation from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who called the verdict "unjust and tragic" and urged Chinese authorities to grant Lai humanitarian parole.
Lai — the founder of Apple Daily, once Hong Kong's most prominent pro-democracy newspaper — was convicted on two counts of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and one count of conspiracy to publish seditious materials. Judges labeled him the "mastermind" of alleged plots to use his media platform and international network to lobby foreign governments for sanctions against China and Hong Kong.
His crime, in plain terms: running a newspaper that criticized Beijing.
Rubio's statement, reported by Fox News, left no ambiguity about how Washington views the conviction:
"The conviction shows the world that Beijing will go to extraordinary lengths to silence those who advocate fundamental freedoms in Hong Kong."
Prosecutors cited hundreds of Apple Daily articles as evidence against Lai. Let that register — a government cataloging journalism as proof of criminal conspiracy. The newspaper Lai founded in 1995 became, under Beijing's 2020 national security law, Exhibit A in a case designed not merely to punish one man but to demonstrate what happens to anyone who dissents.
Lai had already spent more than five years behind bars, serving a separate sentence for fraud and for organizing unauthorized assemblies during Hong Kong's anti-CCP protests. The 20-year addition isn't a sentence. For a 78-year-old man, it's a burial order with extra paperwork.
His son Sebastian Lai put it bluntly:
"Twenty years, he's 78 years old now. This is essentially a life sentence — or more like a death sentence, given the conditions he's being kept in."
Sebastian told Fox on Monday that his father has lost significant weight and suffers from heart issues and diabetes. He said the family is "incredibly worried about his life."
What makes Lai's case remarkable — and what separates it from the stories of countless other political prisoners around the world — is that he had every opportunity to leave. Lai is a billionaire. He had the means, the connections, and the warning signs. Beijing's national security law swept through Hong Kong in 2020 after months of massive pro-democracy protests, reshaping the city's legal landscape. Lai knew what was coming.
He stayed anyway.
Sebastian Lai described his father as "a man of deep faith" who believes "no matter how hard the conditions he was under, that he still did the right thing." That's not political theater. That's conviction of the kind that embarrasses regimes built on coercion, which is precisely why Beijing wants him locked away until he dies.
President Trump raised Lai's case directly with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in December 2025. His comments at the time were characteristically direct:
"I spoke to President Xi about it, and I asked to consider his release. He's not well, he's an older man, and he's not well, so I did put that request out. We'll see what happens."
Trump is expected to travel to Beijing in April amid broader negotiations with China. Lai's imprisonment now sits squarely within the wider framework of U.S.-China relations — trade, Taiwan, military posture, and the question of whether Beijing faces any real cost for crushing internal dissent.
Rubio's public call for humanitarian parole adds diplomatic weight. It signals that Lai's case isn't a side issue to be quietly shelved during trade talks — it's on the table.
The national security law Beijing imposed on Hong Kong in 2020 was sold as a stabilizing measure. In practice, it has become the instrument through which a once-vibrant city was brought to heel. The prosecution of Jimmy Lai — a publisher, not a general — tells you everything about the kind of "stability" Beijing values. It's the stability of silence.
Prosecutors argued Lai and unnamed co-defendants used his media platform to lobby for sanctions and "other hostile actions" by foreign governments. The colonial-era Crimes Ordinance was dusted off and applied alongside the national security regime to convict him of publishing seditious materials. A law written by the British Empire, repurposed by the Chinese Communist Party, to jail a man for printing newspapers.
Sebastian Lai argued that Beijing's broken "one country, two systems" promise should serve as a warning for Taiwan. He has a point. Whatever guarantees Beijing extends to its neighbors, Hong Kong is the proof of concept — and the proof is a 78-year-old man sentenced to die in prison for the crime of publishing.
Jimmy Lai built Apple Daily into a media force that gave Hong Kong's people a voice Beijing could not tolerate. He could have taken his fortune and left. He chose the newspaper, the city, and the principle over his own freedom.
Twenty years. Hundreds of articles entered as evidence. A courtroom that called journalism a conspiracy.
Beijing delivered its verdict on Jimmy Lai. In doing so, it delivered a verdict on itself.
Dr. Jeff Johnson, a Republican running for governor of Minnesota, has suspended his campaign after his 22-year-old daughter, Hallie Marie Tobler, was found dead from multiple stab wounds in a St. Cloud apartment Saturday night.
Tobler's husband was found at the same apartment with what St. Cloud police described as self-inflicted injuries. Police stated he will be taken to jail for suspected homicide once his injuries are treated. No formal charges have been announced.
The Republican Party of Minnesota shared a Facebook post on Monday identifying Tobler as Johnson's daughter. Johnson, a former St. Cloud city council member, suspended his gubernatorial campaign in the wake of her death.
The details are sparse, and the investigation is still unfolding. Officers responded to an apartment on 40th Avenue South in St. Cloud on Saturday night. Inside, they found Hallie Marie Tobler dead from multiple stab wounds. Her husband — who has not been publicly named — was also at the scene, injured in what police described as self-inflicted wounds, according to NBC affiliate KARE11.
Tobler was publicly identified on Monday. She was 22 years old.
The medical examiner confirmed the cause of death. Police have signaled that the husband is the suspect, stating he will be jailed for suspected homicide after receiving medical treatment. But as of the latest reports, no formal charges have been filed.
Dr. Jeff Johnson is not the same Jeff Johnson who twice sought the governor's mansion as a former Hennepin County Commissioner in 2014 and 2018. This Jeff Johnson was building a campaign from his base in St. Cloud — a city he served on the council — when the worst thing that can happen to a parent happened to him.
There is no political spin to apply here. No policy debate makes this moment easier to process. A young woman is dead. A father buried his child. The campaign he was building stopped mattering the instant he got the call.
Johnson suspended his campaign. That word — "suspended" — carries a technical meaning in political language, leaving the door open for a future return.
Domestic violence doesn't belong to a political party. It doesn't care about ideology, income, or geography. It strikes across every demographic in the country, and when it ends in death, the devastation radiates outward — through families, communities, and in this case, the political life of a state.
What makes cases like this particularly haunting is the proximity. Police found the suspect in the same apartment. The injuries were self-inflicted. The contours of this tragedy — a young wife, a husband now facing suspected homicide — trace a pattern that law enforcement and victim advocates encounter with grim regularity.
Hallie Marie Tobler was 22. She had a father who served his community and was trying to serve his state. Whatever the full circumstances turn out to be, nothing will restore what was taken Saturday night in that apartment on 40th Avenue South.
The investigation remains active. Formal charges against Tobler's husband have not been announced, and the public knows very little about the circumstances or motive behind the stabbing. St. Cloud police have committed to jailing the suspect once his medical treatment concludes, but the legal process from here will determine what charges he ultimately faces.
For the Minnesota governor's race, one less candidate is in the field — not because of polls or fundraising or political miscalculation, but because of violence that no amount of ambition or public service can shield a family from.
Dr. Jeff Johnson asked for nothing from the public except, presumably, the space to grieve. That request deserves to be honored.
A father shouldn't have to bury his daughter. He certainly shouldn't have to do it in the middle of a campaign for public office. But the calendar doesn't negotiate, and grief doesn't wait for a convenient moment. Johnson stepped away from the race because the only thing that mattered was the thing he lost.
Former MSNBC host Joy Reid unleashed a string of racially charged attacks on rapper Nicki Minaj during an appearance on "The Don Lemon Show," calling her a "house pet" for the Republican Party and accusing the GOP of using her to "put blackface on MAGA."
The tirade — dripping with the kind of language that would end careers if a conservative uttered it — targeted Minaj for her growing alignment with President Donald Trump and the broader Republican agenda.
Reid didn't just disagree with Minaj's politics. She went after her worth as an artist, her identity as an immigrant, and her standing among Black Americans — all because a Black woman dared to think for herself.
The comments are worth reading in full because paraphrasing them would soften what Reid clearly intended to be a public shaming. As Fox News reported, he framed Minaj's entire relationship with the Republican Party as a transaction built on desperation:
"The reason they want her on a leash as their house pet cuddled at Donald Trump's feet, the reason she is the new house pet is because they need, N-E-E-E-D Black people to give them 'cultural cool.' Black 'cultural cool' has always been a powerful, powerful element in the country."
"On a leash." "House pet." "Cuddled at Donald Trump's feet." This is the language Reid chose — not to describe a political disagreement, but to describe a Black woman who made a choice Reid didn't approve of.
She then dismissed Minaj's entire career by measuring her against other artists:
"She'll never be Rihanna. She'll never have a brand like Rihanna. She'll never be Beyoncé. She's a 40-some year-old, Black female rapper who clearly don't care that much about Black people or immigrants, even though she was an undocumented immigrant."
And she wasn't finished. Reid aimed at Minaj's fanbase directly:
"So the Barbs, you know, you know Nikki ain't s--- and she ain't saying nothing. And a 100 little Barbs can't tell me nothing. Y'all mad about it, be mad about it."
This is a former cable news anchor. On a podcast. Talking like this. About a woman whose crime is attending a policy summit.
Strip away the theatrics, and Reid's argument reduces to something conservatives have watched play out for decades: a Black public figure supports Republicans, and the left's cultural enforcers arrive to revoke their credentials.
Minaj joined President Trump on stage at the Treasury Department's Trump Accounts Summit on January 28 at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, D.C. She has condemned cancel culture. She has aligned with the Trump administration on stopping the killings of Christians in Nigeria. She has taken on California Gov. Newsom in a scathing interview.
None of that earned a serious policy rebuttal from Reid. Instead, it earned "house pet."
Reid even preemptively attacked the next Black artist who might step out of line:
"Their next gambit is to get the Trinidadian who doesn't care about the killing of Trinidadian fishermen, the female rapper who hates other female rappers, who hates on women who are more popular than her, Cardi B."
The message to any Black artist, entrepreneur, or public figure considering a rightward move could not be clearer: we will come for you. We will question your Blackness, your relevance, your worth. The left doesn't argue with Black conservatives. It punishes them.
A thought exercise that never gets old because the double standard never changes: imagine a conservative commentator calling a Black liberal entertainer a "house pet" on a leash, "cuddled at" a Democratic president's feet. Imagine them declaring that entertainer "ain't s---" and dismissing their fans as irrelevant.
The segment wouldn't survive the hour. Advertisers would flee. Apology tours would be demanded. The word "dehumanizing" would trend for days.
Reid faces none of that. She won't, because the rules that govern racial rhetoric in American media apply in one direction only. When a liberal commentator uses imagery rooted in slavery — leashes, pets, ownership — to describe a Black woman's political choices, it's treated as sharp commentary rather than what it plainly is.
Reid mentioned "other examples of Black cultural icons who have been publicly friendly with the Republican Party in recent years," though she didn't name them. She didn't need to. The playbook is familiar enough.
Every Black figure who breaks ranks gets the same treatment — their intelligence questioned, their motives reduced to money or manipulation, their identity challenged. The left's version of diversity has always had a terms-of-service agreement: think what we tell you, vote how we instruct you, or lose your membership.
Minaj, to her credit, has shown no sign of caring. A rapper who built her career on defiance turns out to be — defiant. The left assumed the rebellion was aesthetic. It wasn't.
The White House offered a brief and pointed response to Reid's comments:
"Reid's takes are so bad even MSDNC fired her."
Short. Accurate. Reid is, after all, a former host — a detail that makes her rant land less like media criticism and more like a person shouting from the parking lot of a building she no longer works in.
Reid told on herself with one line buried in the middle of her diatribe:
"They wouldn't want her if they didn't need cultural cool. Their problem is she ain't cultural cool no more."
This is the fear. Not that Minaj is irrelevant — if she were, Reid wouldn't have spent a segment trying to destroy her. The fear is that she's relevant enough to matter. That a Black woman with a massive platform choosing Trump signals something the left's coalition cannot afford: permission.
Permission for other Black Americans to consider that the party demanding their loyalty hasn't earned it. Permission to attend a policy summit without being called a pet. Permission to care about the killings of Christians in Nigeria without having your racial identity revoked by a former cable host on a podcast.
Reid didn't attack Nicki Minaj because she's irrelevant. She attacked her because the left's grip on Black political identity is slipping — and everyone in that room knew it.
A federal judge has ordered the government to unseal documents tied to the FBI's warrant-authorized seizure of 2020 election ballots from a Fulton County, Georgia, election facility. Judge J.P. Boulee, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, gave the government until Tuesday to file the warrant affidavit — with redactions limited to the names of nongovernmental witnesses.
The order comes as Fulton County officials fight to get the ballots back. Board of Commissioners Chair Robb Pitts and the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections have sued the federal government over the seizure, demanding the return of troves of 2020 ballots taken into federal custody.
They originally filed the case under seal. That veil is now lifting — and both sides say they're fine with it.
Judge Boulee — nominated by President Trump in 2019 — made clear that neither party objected to transparency, Breitbart News reported:
"Although Petitioners originally filed this case under seal, both parties have now indicated to the Court that they do not oppose unsealing the docket or the motions filed by Petitioners."
He also noted that the federal government had no objection to releasing the search warrant affidavit itself, the document that would lay out exactly why the FBI sought a warrant in the first place:
"Respondent has stated that it does not oppose the unsealing of the search warrant affidavit and any other papers associated with the warrant subject to the redaction of the names of nongovernmental witnesses."
That's worth sitting with. The federal government executed a judicially authorized warrant to seize election materials from one of the most controversial counties in American election history — and it has no problem with the public seeing why. Whatever is in that affidavit, the Justice Department isn't running from it.
The FBI operation at the Fulton County election facility took place late last month. It was executed under a judicial warrant — not a rogue operation, not an extralegal power grab, but a law enforcement action authorized by a court. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard appeared at the scene. In a letter to Sen. Mark Warner, Gabbard stated her presence was "requested" by President Trump and that she only observed the operation "for a brief period of time."
At the National Prayer Breakfast last Thursday, Trump indicated it was Attorney General Pam Bondi who insisted Gabbard oversee the raid. The details of who requested what and why will presumably become clearer as the sealed documents come to light. That's the point of unsealing them.
Fulton County's response has been litigation. Rather than cooperating with a federal investigation backed by a judicial warrant, county officials lawyered up and filed suit — under seal, no less — to get the ballots back. The instinct to hide first and fight second tells you something about the posture of local officials who spent years insisting they had nothing to hide.
Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, offered a characteristically breathless response:
"When you put all of this together, it is clear that what happened in Fulton County is not about revisiting the past, it is about shaping the outcome of future elections."
Warner and other Democrats have warned that Trump may attempt to meddle in the 2026 midterm elections — a claim offered without any specific evidence cited in the source material. The logic appears to be: the federal government investigated election materials in a county dogged by controversy; therefore, the federal government is trying to steal future elections.
This is the infinite loop Democrats have perfected. Any scrutiny of election integrity is itself an attack on election integrity. Any attempt to verify results is an attempt to overturn them. The only acceptable posture, in this framework, is to never look. Ask no questions. Examine no ballots. Trust the people who ran the process — even when the process is what's being questioned.
If the warrant affidavit reveals a serious evidentiary basis for the seizure, Warner's framing collapses. If it doesn't, he'll have his moment. But the fact that the federal government is welcoming the unsealing suggests they're not worried about what the public will find.
Fulton County is not some random jurisdiction caught up in a political dragnet. It is the single most scrutinized county in the most scrutinized state in the 2020 election. For years, questions about its election processes have been met with dismissal, deflection, and accusations of conspiracy theorizing directed at anyone who raised them.
Now the FBI has executed a warrant, seized ballots, and the county's first move was to file a sealed lawsuit demanding them back. Not a public statement of confidence. Not a welcome-mat posture from officials with nothing to fear. A sealed legal action.
The unsealing order changes the dynamic. By Tuesday, the public will have access to the warrant affidavit — the government's own stated reasons for seizing those ballots. Whatever those reasons are, they were persuasive enough for a judge to sign off on the warrant in the first place.
Tuesday's deadline is the inflection point. Once the affidavit is public, the conversation shifts from speculation to substance. The legal battle between Fulton County and the federal government will proceed on the merits. Democrats will either have to engage with the specific facts laid out in the warrant — or keep insisting that looking at ballots is itself a form of election interference.
The federal government wants these documents to be public. Fulton County filed under seal. One side is asking for sunlight. The other reached for the curtain.