Three foreign nationals in Florida confessed to knowingly casting ballots in federal elections just days before the Fourth of July, the latest in a wave of roughly two dozen noncitizen voting prosecutions the Trump Justice Department has secured in recent months, with approximately 90 more cases under active investigation, Just the News reported.
The cases stretch from Hawaii to New Jersey, from Kansas to Louisiana. A 66-year-old Philippines national on Maui. A Chinese student at the University of Michigan. A Canadian man who had been voting illegally since 2004. Two Pakistani men in New Jersey. An Australian in Louisiana. A former small-town mayor in Kansas who is a Mexican national. Each one got caught. And the Department of Justice says the count is only going to climb.
The crackdown marks a sharp departure from years of institutional passivity. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon, described as the top election enforcement official inside the DOJ, told Just the News, No Noise that the administration sent notices this month to all 50 states warning that election officials who knowingly allow noncitizens to vote will face criminal prosecution.
"It isn't just bad policy to let non-citizens vote in federal elections, it's a crime. And this Department of Justice will intend to prosecute that crime if these election officials, having been informed that they are non-citizens on the voter rolls, knowingly allow those people to vote, enable their enrollment on the voter rolls, are passive in the face of this knowledge, etc. This is not some idle threat."
That is not the language of a department issuing a polite memo. It is the language of an agency that has spent months building cases and now wants the states to understand the rules have changed.
The Florida confessions are among the most straightforward. A Cuban national and a Haitian national admitted to voting in the 2020 federal elections. A Brazilian national, who had become a lawful permanent resident, voted in a 2024 federal election. All three confessed.
U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones of the Southern District of Florida put it plainly:
"Voting in federal elections is one of the most important rights and responsibilities of American citizenship. Federal law is clear: only United States citizens may vote in federal elections. These defendants admitted that they knowingly violated that law."
In Hawaii, Remedios Alasaas, a 66-year-old Philippines national living in Maui, was charged last month with illegally voting in the 2022 general election and again in an August 2024 primary. It was the first time in four decades that a foreigner had been charged with voting in a federal election in Hawaii.
In North Carolina, a Canadian man who had lived in the United States since the 1960s was sentenced to two months in prison after pleading guilty to making false citizenship claims to vote in elections going back to 2004. Two decades of illegal ballots, and no one caught it until now.
At the University of Michigan, a Chinese national turned himself in after allegedly registering to vote and casting a ballot in the general election. He faces two felony charges: false swearing to register to vote and attempting to vote as an unqualified elector. Meanwhile, Ohio is advancing a constitutional amendment to permanently require voter photo ID, a measure that could help prevent similar cases in neighboring states.
In New Jersey, two Pakistani men were indicted for fraudulent voting in a federal election. In Louisiana, an Australian national was arrested for illegally voting. And in Kansas, Joe Ceballos, a Mexican national who had served as mayor of Coldwater, pleaded guilty earlier this year to three misdemeanor charges for voting without being a U.S. citizen. He was ordered to report to federal immigration detention.
Ceballos called it "an honest mistake," noting he is a permanent legal resident. But permanent legal residency does not confer the right to vote in federal elections. It never has.
These individual cases are striking, but the DOJ says the real numbers are far larger. Dhillon told reporters that a dozen or so cooperating states have helped the department identify between 20,000 and 30,000 noncitizens on voter rolls. She believes the total will grow into the hundreds of thousands once all state reviews are completed.
The department has also identified hundreds of thousands of dead people still listed as eligible to vote, along with tens of thousands of illegal immigrants on the rolls.
Those numbers draw support from state-level findings elsewhere. Ohio referred 597 apparent noncitizens for possible prosecution after a comprehensive review cross-checking DMV, DHS, Social Security Administration, and federal jury pool data. Of those, 138 had actually cast ballots. That was the highest number of such referrals in recent years, and it came from a single state that chose to look.
Virginia identified 6,303 noncitizens on its voter rolls in 2022 and 2023. Texas removed 6,500 noncitizens, of whom 1,930 had a history of voting, as Fox News documented in reporting on congressional pressure over the issue.
In Washington, D.C., Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton cited a report finding that nearly 400 noncitizens voted in the 2024 general election:
"It is an outrage and insult to every American citizen, and may be a violation of federal law, that D.C. allowed 388 foreign nationals to vote in the 2024 general election. Congress can and should end this practice immediately."
The Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal organization, has argued that noncitizen registrations are a minor problem overblown by conservatives. But that argument grows harder to sustain as case after case surfaces in state after state, and as officials who once denied the problem begin to acknowledge it.
Michigan's Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson offers a useful case study. She previously claimed noncitizens don't vote in Michigan. Then her own office reviewed the rolls and found 15 credible cases of foreigners voting in the 2024 elections.
Her revised position: "This is a serious issue, one we must address with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer."
Fifteen confirmed cases in a single state is not a number that justifies complacency. It is a number that raises an obvious question: how many more would turn up in states that refuse to look? New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and California have been identified as non-cooperating states where a much larger bloc of noncitizens is expected to be found on voter rolls. Multiple blue states, and some red ones, are fighting in court to block the DOJ from examining their rolls at all.
The administration has responded by filing lawsuits against 30 states and the District of Columbia seeking access to voter roll data after those jurisdictions declined to provide it voluntarily, Newsmax reported. Those DOJ letters gave election officials five days to explain how they would comply with federal voter eligibility requirements and maintain clean voter lists.
That legal fight is playing out alongside a Biden-appointed judge's decision to halt a Trump voter verification system designed to clean state rolls, a ruling that underscores just how fiercely some corners of the judiciary are resisting federal oversight of voter eligibility.
The mechanics are not mysterious. State "motor voter" programs at DMVs have long been identified as a weak point. Pennsylvania's program alone inadvertently allowed approximately 100,000 noncitizens to register to vote, the New York Post reported in a detailed investigation of how illegal immigrants from Africa, India, and China ended up casting ballots. One Mauritanian illegal immigrant marked for deportation since 2002 allegedly voted in every U.S. election since 2008 as a registered Democrat before being arrested in Philadelphia.
J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, told the Post: "The reality is aliens are voting in American elections... It's way worse than the left says, but it's way better than some others say."
That's a fair summary of where the evidence stands. This is not a conspiracy theory about millions of fraudulent votes swinging a presidential election. But it is also not the trivial, one-off anomaly that progressive groups have spent years describing. It is a systemic failure, one that compounds every year that voter rolls go uncleaned and registration systems remain porous.
Dhillon herself acknowledged the scale of the challenge with unusual candor: "We are trying to empty an ocean with a teaspoon because there isn't a culture of U.S. attorneys going after these."
President Trump is pushing the U.S. Senate to pass the Save America Act, which would impose citizenship and voter ID requirements on all federal election voters. The Senate has been described as reluctant to move on the bill.
Rep. Glenn Grothman, a Wisconsin Republican, told Just the News that the resistance is telling:
"Obviously, political parties that want to cheat. They will do what they can to fight to prevent photo ID in those states. And that is a problem we have here. People are going to continue to feel that elections are not honest, because that's the only reason I can think of why people would not want photo ID."
Grothman noted the absurdity of the objection: "My goodness, you need it for things like getting a drug prescription to save your life, and that's right, but there are politicians, all of whom happen to be Democrats, who feel that photo ID is racist."
The Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project has made a related point. As Mike Howell put it in the Washington Examiner: "The reason why the Left loves to point to the absence of prosecutions is because they fought tooth and nail to make a vote-by-honors system while simultaneously flooding this country with foreigners."
That logic is hard to argue with. For years, the low prosecution rate was cited as proof the problem didn't exist. Now the DOJ is actually prosecuting, and cases are turning up in Hawaii, Kansas, Michigan, Florida, North Carolina, New Jersey, Louisiana, and D.C. The absence of enforcement was never evidence of absence. It was evidence of indifference.
Meanwhile, DHS Secretary Mullin has not ruled out ICE presence at polling places and has defended citizenship checks ahead of the 2026 midterms, a sign the administration views election integrity enforcement as a whole-of-government priority, not just a DOJ project.
The 90-plus cases still under investigation will likely produce more charges in the months ahead. The lawsuits against non-cooperating states will grind through the courts. The Save America Act faces an uncertain path in the Senate. And the midterm elections are approaching.
Noncitizens who vote in federal elections risk not just criminal prosecution but the loss of any pathway to citizenship and the ability to remain in the country. That is the law. The question has always been whether anyone would enforce it.
For the first time in a generation, someone is. The results so far suggest the problem was never as small as its defenders claimed, and the only way to know how big it really is would be for every state to open its rolls to review. The states fighting hardest to keep those rolls closed should be asked a simple question: what are they afraid the DOJ will find?
President Donald Trump terminated the remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission on July 9, leaving the independent federal agency without a single sitting commissioner months before the 2026 midterm elections. The White House cited the Supreme Court's recent Trump v. Slaughter ruling as legal authority for the move and pointed to the commission's failure to act on non-citizen voting as the reason.
Democratic commissioners Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland were fired via email, effective immediately. Republican commissioner Christy McCormick was allowed to resign rather than face outright removal. A fourth Republican commissioner, Donald Palmer, had already departed voluntarily earlier this year.
The result: an agency responsible for certifying voting systems, distributing election grants to states, and maintaining national voter registration forms now has no governing board, and cannot take formal action until new members are nominated and confirmed by the Senate.
The White House grounded the firings in the Supreme Court's June 29 ruling in Trump v. Slaughter, which significantly expanded presidential authority to remove officials from independent federal agencies. The decision effectively restored a president's power to fire independent agency employees at will, a power that had been constrained by precedent for decades.
A White House statement provided to the Associated Press made the administration's position plain:
"The President, and head of the Executive Branch, reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America's elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted. The Slaughter decision gives the President precedence to do so."
In an exclusive Oval Office interview with Breitbart News last month, Trump said the Slaughter ruling "more than made up" for a separate, disappointing Supreme Court decision upholding birthright citizenship. That interview, published July 1, signaled the president viewed the ruling as a broad mandate to reshape federal agencies he considered misaligned with his priorities.
The immediate trigger was the commission's handling, or lack thereof, of non-citizen voting concerns. The AP reported that the EAC had previously declined to update the national voter registration form to require citizenship documentation, a step Trump demanded in a March 2025 executive order.
That refusal set the commission on a collision course with the White House. The administration's view, as expressed in its public statement, was that commissioners who would not act to verify voter eligibility were not "totally aligned" with election security.
The EAC's three core functions, distributing federal grants to states, overseeing the testing of voting systems, and maintaining voter registration forms, all now sit in limbo. Newsmax reported that without commissioners, the agency cannot take formal action on any of those responsibilities until the Senate confirms replacements.
For an agency whose entire purpose is to support election infrastructure, the timing matters. Midterm elections are approaching, and states rely on EAC grants and guidance to prepare.
Just The News obtained the language of the termination notice sent to the two Democratic commissioners:
"On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as Commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service."
No extended explanation. No transition period. The contrast with McCormick's treatment was notable, the Republican commissioner was permitted to resign on her own terms rather than receive the same curt email.
Trump's earlier removal of officials across multiple agencies has followed a similar pattern since the Slaughter ruling gave him clearer legal footing. The EAC shakeup fits a broader effort to bring independent commissions and boards into alignment with the president's policy agenda.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wasted no time framing the move as an assault on democratic norms. The Washington Examiner reported his response:
"Firing every remaining member of the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission months before the midterms is a brazen attempt to seize control of our elections before a single vote is cast."
Senator Alex Padilla and Representative Joe Morelle issued a joint statement claiming Trump was "trying to dismantle yet another independent guardrail of our democracy designed to keep elections fair and secure." Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice called the action "deeply concerning in light of President Trump's relentless efforts to try to interfere in elections."
Even former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, a Republican, offered criticism. "Donald Trump wants to eliminate oversight of his administration's oversight, and that's what this is about," Duncan said.
But the Democratic objections run into an awkward fact. The commission had an opportunity to address non-citizen voting, a concern shared by large majorities of American voters, and chose not to act. If the EAC had moved to update voter registration forms to require proof of citizenship when the president asked in March 2025, the confrontation that followed might never have happened.
Schumer's history of clashing with the White House over election policy makes his outrage here unsurprising but not especially persuasive. The question is not whether the EAC should exist, it should, but whether its commissioners should be able to stonewall a lawful executive order and face no consequences.
The EAC now operates in a holding pattern. It has staff but no commissioners, which means no quorum and no formal decision-making authority. States expecting grant money, voting-system certifications, or updated guidance will have to wait.
The White House has not announced nominees to fill the vacant seats. The Senate confirmation process, even under favorable conditions, takes time, and whether the administration prioritizes speed here will say a great deal about its intentions.
Critics argue that leaving the EAC leaderless ahead of the midterms creates unnecessary risk. Supporters counter that an agency that refused to act on voter eligibility verification was already failing its mission. Both sides have a point, but only one side had the legal authority to break the stalemate, and the Supreme Court just confirmed it.
The Slaughter decision has given this president a tool that future presidents of both parties will inherit. How Trump uses it in the coming months, whether he moves quickly to install new commissioners who will update registration forms, or lets the vacancy linger, will determine whether this was a serious policy intervention or a political gesture.
The broader fight over accountability for federal officials who resist presidential direction is far from over. The EAC is a small agency, but the principle at stake is large: when an independent commission defies a lawful order, who answers for it?
Non-citizen voting is either a problem worth solving or it isn't. If it is, then a federal commission that maintains the national voter registration form and refuses to add a citizenship verification requirement is part of the problem. If it isn't, then Democrats should say so plainly, and explain to voters why requiring proof of citizenship to vote is unreasonable when proof of identity is required to board a plane, buy a beer, or pick up a prescription.
The EAC's defenders want to talk about process. The White House wants to talk about results. Voters, as usual, are stuck in the middle, asked to trust a system that won't take the most basic step to prove it deserves that trust.
An agency that won't do its job doesn't become sacred just because an election is coming. It becomes more urgently in need of new leadership.
Fox News host Brian Kilmeade took direct aim at two of President Trump's most trusted negotiators Thursday, declaring on air that Jared Kushner and special envoy Steve Witkoff should be removed from the lead role in U.S.-Iran peace talks and replaced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
The remarks, delivered on Fox News's "The Five," mark a striking moment: a conservative commentator with deep loyalty to the broader Trump agenda publicly challenging the president's choice of diplomatic point men on one of the most consequential foreign policy files in the world.
Kilmeade's core argument was blunt. As The Hill reported, the Fox host called Kushner and Witkoff "business guys" who have failed to deliver results across multiple theaters, and said the Iran portfolio demands a different skill set entirely.
"I also don't think that Witkoff and Kushner should be the ones doing this. They're business guys. They have not been effective in Ukraine, not been effective in Gaza, they have not been effective in this."
That is not the language of a casual disagreement. Kilmeade named three separate diplomatic fronts and rendered the same verdict on all of them.
Kilmeade did not stop at criticism. He offered a specific alternative, saying Rubio, the Senate-confirmed secretary of state, should helm the Iran talks because the negotiation cannot be treated like a real-estate transaction.
"He should take the lead on this because you can't do this like a business deal. You have to understand the history of the region and how distrustful the Iranians have been. They will only make a decision if they have no other choice."
The distinction Kilmeade drew is worth noting. He did not question the business credentials of either Kushner or Witkoff. He questioned whether business credentials are the right tool for a regime that has spent decades mastering delay, deception, and brinksmanship at the negotiating table.
That concern is not new for Kilmeade. As Breitbart noted, Kilmeade specifically cited the existence of the State Department as the proper channel for this kind of high-stakes diplomacy, a point that carries institutional weight regardless of party.
Kilmeade's Thursday broadside was not his first public reservation about the negotiating team. In December, he raised questions about Witkoff's posture toward Russia following reports that the special envoy had advised a senior Russian official to praise Trump during Ukraine-Russia negotiations.
At the time, Kilmeade said he was "so glad Jared Kushner's going with Steve Witkoff because I just think he likes Russia too much. All indications are that he sees more Russia's point of view."
That earlier criticism treated Kushner as a check on Witkoff. Thursday's comments dropped even that distinction, lumping both men together as ineffective.
And Kilmeade is not alone among Republicans. Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who has been vocal about administration missteps, raised a structural objection in an ABC News interview earlier this year.
"Kushner and Witkoff are very accomplished businesspeople. I'm sure they're good negotiators, but they're not subject to Senate confirmation and they're not subject to oversight."
Tillis's point cuts to a principle conservatives have long championed: accountability through constitutional process. Envoys who bypass Senate confirmation operate outside the confirmation hearings, oversight mechanisms, and institutional checks that the Founders built into the treaty and diplomacy powers.
Rep. Adam Smith, a Washington state Democrat, agreed with Kilmeade's assessment during a CNN interview with Kaitlan Collins on Thursday. Smith said the administration had not done the necessary diplomatic groundwork.
"I don't think the Trump administration has done the work on diplomacy any more than they did the work to know that this war wasn't going to lead to the result that they wanted, even though that was something a lot of experts told them."
Smith also said the situation requires "very talented negotiators", a formulation that implicitly questions whether the current team meets that bar.
The fact that a Fox News host and a House Democrat arrived at the same conclusion through different doorways tells its own story. Kilmeade's objection is rooted in effectiveness and institutional competence. Smith's is rooted in a broader critique of the administration's diplomatic preparation. But the landing point is identical: the wrong people are at the table.
The stakes of these talks are not abstract. The United States and Iran have been locked in a volatile cycle that has included military strikes and the collapse of a prior memorandum of understanding. Fighting reportedly resumed the same week as Kilmeade's comments, as Just The News reported, underscoring the absence of a final agreement.
That timeline matters. If Kushner and Witkoff have been the administration's lead negotiators across Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran, and none of those tracks has produced a durable settlement, the question of whether a personnel change is warranted becomes harder to dismiss as mere punditry.
The Iran file, in particular, demands negotiators who grasp the regime's internal power dynamics, its history of using talks to buy time for its nuclear program, and the regional alliances that shape Tehran's calculus. Kilmeade's argument is that those are not skills you pick up closing commercial real-estate deals.
The broader diplomatic picture has also been shaped by Senate war powers debates that have tested the boundaries between executive and legislative authority on Iran policy, the same constitutional turf that Tillis flagged when he noted Kushner and Witkoff are not subject to Senate oversight.
The Hill reported that it reached out to the White House for comment on Kilmeade's remarks. No response was noted.
That silence leaves several questions hanging. Has the administration considered giving Rubio a larger role in the Iran talks? Does the White House view the criticism from a Fox News host as significant enough to warrant a public defense of its negotiating team? And what, precisely, is Kushner's formal role, official government capacity or informal advisory?
None of those questions have public answers yet. Meanwhile, the negotiations themselves appear stalled or worse, with the path to any lasting Iranian agreement still unclear.
Kilmeade's comments deserve to be taken seriously not because a television host said them, but because the underlying logic is sound and the track record he cited is public. Three diplomatic fronts. No final deals. And a negotiating counterpart, the Iranian regime, that has spent four decades outmaneuvering Western diplomats far more seasoned than any real-estate executive.
The conservative case for strong diplomacy has never been the case for no diplomacy. It has been the case for the right people, with the right authority, backed by the right leverage. Rubio went through Senate confirmation. He sits atop the State Department. He has spent years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee studying exactly the kind of regime the United States faces in Tehran.
If the goal is a deal that actually holds, the question is not whether Kushner and Witkoff are talented. The question is whether talent in the boardroom translates to results at a table where the other side has been perfecting the art of delay since 1979.
When your own team starts asking that question out loud on national television, the answer may already be obvious.
A gastrointestinal illness caused by a microscopic parasite has now sickened nearly 3,000 people across 31 states, sent at least 86 to the hospital, and left federal health authorities without a confirmed source of contamination, weeks into an outbreak that has overwhelmed testing labs and exposed gaps in the government's food-safety surveillance.
The disease is cyclosporiasis, caused by the cyclospora parasite. It spreads through contaminated fresh produce, clings to fruit and vegetable surfaces in ways that are difficult to rinse away, and triggers severe watery diarrhea, cramping, bloating, nausea, and fatigue that can last for weeks. No deaths have been reported. But the scale of this outbreak, and the federal government's inability to pinpoint its origin, raises hard questions about whether Washington scaled back the wrong surveillance program at the worst possible time.
Michigan has been hit hardest. The state reported 1,562 cases as of Friday, with at least 36 hospitalizations, NBC News reported. In a typical year, Michigan sees 40 to 50 cyclosporiasis cases. This year's count is more than 30 times that figure, and still climbing.
Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian, Michigan's chief medical executive, described the surge as "highly unusual." State laboratories are now racing to sequence the genome of the cyclospora parasite to determine whether the cases share a common origin.
"We can see if isolates are closely related, meaning that there was likely a common source, and then we can potentially go back and look for the source of that contamination."
The outbreak is concentrated in Michigan's southeast corner, bordering northwest Ohio, a geographic cluster that suggests a shared food supply chain. Breitbart reported that Dr. Bagdasarian stated plainly: "There is clearly a linked outbreak happening right now."
Ohio's numbers tell a similar story. The Ohio Health Department listed 177 cases with 28 hospitalizations as of July 2. The Toledo-Lucas Health Department, covering the northwest Ohio border region closest to Michigan's outbreak cluster, reported 306 cases in the past week alone. Whether Toledo-Lucas's count overlaps with or is separate from the statewide Ohio figure remains unclear.
New York has reported 394 cases. Illinois logged 141. Colorado, North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin have all reported infections as well, though specific case counts for those states have not been published.
An NBC News tally of state health department data put the nationwide total at 2,912 cases reported or confirmed. The CDC, for its part, has confirmed 843 cases acquired domestically and said it is investigating more than 1,500 additional cases. The gap between the CDC's confirmed count and the state-level tallies is itself a data point worth noting.
The speed of the outbreak's growth has been striking. Just The News reported that Michigan's confirmed cases exploded from 170 on June 22 to 992 in a matter of weeks. Earlier in the outbreak's trajectory, Fox News reported that the CDC had documented 145 confirmed cases across 17 states as of mid-June, with the agency noting at the time that "there is currently no evidence of a single, multistate Cyclospora outbreak linking all cases." That was before the numbers multiplied roughly twentyfold.
Despite the scale of the outbreak, no food product has been identified as the source. No recalls have been issued. The FDA said Friday it was "actively engaged" with state partners, language that conveys motion without specifying action.
State and local health departments are interviewing patients and analyzing grocery receipts, trying to identify a common food product. But the parasite's biology makes that detective work difficult. Symptoms typically appear about a week after exposure, meaning patients are often trying to recall meals from seven or more days earlier.
Dianna Blau, acting chief of the CDC's Parasitic Disease Branch, acknowledged the challenge:
"In an average year, there's a small proportion of cases that actually get traced back to one particular food item."
That is not a reassuring track record for an agency asking the public to trust the process.
Driscoll's, the nation's largest berry supplier, told NBC News that health authorities have not contacted it regarding any connection to the rising cases. That detail stands out. If investigators cannot even narrow the field enough to contact the country's dominant berry company, a product category historically linked to cyclospora, it suggests the investigation is still in its earliest stages, even as the case count approaches 3,000.
Here is where the story gets uncomfortable for federal health officials. In July of last year, the CDC made tracking cyclospora optional as it scaled back its Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, known as FoodNet. That decision, made quietly, without fanfare, meant the federal government was doing less monitoring of exactly the kind of parasite now ripping through 31 states.
Blau stated there has been no difference in how cyclosporiasis cases are reported to or handled at the agency in recent years. Donald Schaffner, a food microbiology professor and department chair at Rutgers University, was less sanguine.
"Could we have learned earlier? Could we be finding out more?"
Schaffner added bluntly: "We need to be doing more to track these."
The question is straightforward. If the CDC had not made cyclospora tracking optional, would the outbreak have been detected sooner? Would investigators be further along in identifying the contaminated product? Blau's assurance that nothing has changed procedurally does not answer the more pointed question of whether the reduced surveillance left a blind spot during the exact months, May through August, when cyclospora cases historically peak.
Melanie Firestone, a University of Minnesota foodborne illness researcher, told Newsmax that "there is a lot of underreporting when it comes to this." If the reported number is nearly 3,000, the actual number of Americans sickened could be substantially higher.
The CDC reported 86 hospitalizations nationwide. Michigan alone accounts for 36 of those. Ohio's health department reported 28. The primary driver of hospitalization is severe dehydration from prolonged diarrhea, a complication that hits the elderly and immunocompromised hardest.
Blau noted that on average, 10 percent of cyclosporiasis patients require hospitalization. At nearly 3,000 cases, that math implies the hospitalization count will continue to rise. Testing turnaround times, normally about 24 hours, have stretched to two or three days in some areas as labs strain under demand.
The illness is treatable with antibiotics and is not usually life-threatening. But "not life-threatening" is cold comfort to patients enduring weeks of debilitating symptoms while investigators still cannot tell them what food made them sick, or whether it is still on store shelves.
Health officials are offering practical advice, though it comes with caveats. The cyclospora parasite is not easily washed off produce. Janet Buffer, senior institute manager at the Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition Security at George Washington University, recommended that consumers "agitate the surface vigorously" when washing fruits and vegetables, but cautioned against using dishwashing soap.
Michigan's health department suggested cooking raspberries when possible, an acknowledgment that rinsing alone may not eliminate the risk. The parasite is not spread person-to-person, which rules out the kind of rapid community transmission seen with viruses. But it also means every new case points back to a contaminated food product that has not been identified.
Schaffner, for his part, urged Americans not to abandon fresh produce:
"We know that fresh produce is part of a healthy diet. We know that cyclospora cases peak between May and August, which is also prime fresh produce eating season. I can tell you that I'm not going to change my consumption habits."
That is sensible advice from a food scientist. But it does not absolve the agencies responsible for keeping the food supply safe.
Last year, approximately 2,700 cyclosporiasis cases were reported nationally. This year, we are already past that number, and it is only mid-July. The outbreak is still growing. The source remains unknown. The FDA has issued no recalls. And the CDC scaled back the very tracking program designed to catch outbreaks like this one.
None of this happened in a vacuum. Federal agencies made choices about resource allocation and surveillance priorities. Those choices have consequences. Nearly 3,000 Americans are now living with those consequences, and the number grows daily.
When the government quietly downgrades its own early-warning systems and then cannot explain where a nationwide outbreak came from, taxpayers deserve more than "actively engaged." They deserve answers.
President Donald Trump told reporters at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, on Wednesday that Iran wants to assassinate him, and that his luck may not hold forever. The remarks came days before the two-year anniversary of the Butler, Pennsylvania, shooting that nearly killed him, and against a backdrop of escalating Iranian hostility that has included death bounties, crosshair posters, and a charged murder-for-hire plot against one of his former advisors.
Standing alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other top cabinet officials, Trump was blunt about where he stands on Tehran's target list, and about what that might eventually mean.
"I'm on every single one of their lists, and so far I guess I've been a little bit lucky, but that maybe doesn't last very long, because that's the way it goes," Trump said, as reported by the Daily Mail.
This was not abstract speculation. Trump has survived at least one assassination attempt. In July 2024, a gunman named Thomas Crooks opened fire at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, grazing Trump's ear and killing rallygoer Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old firefighter, as the New York Post reported. Crooks was shot dead at the scene. The anniversary of that day is just days away.
And the Iranian threat is not new. US intelligence officials repeatedly warned during Trump's 2024 campaign that Iran was plotting to kill him and former officials from his first administration. The motive traces to Trump's 2020 order to kill Revolutionary Guard General Qasem Soleimani in a drone strike, an act Tehran has never forgiven.
Federal prosecutors have already charged a Revolutionary Guard operative with offering $300,000 to have John Bolton, Trump's former national security advisor, murdered on American soil. Trump's ex-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Iran envoy Brian Hook were both placed under round-the-clock government protection because of the ongoing threat from Tehran.
Ivanka Trump has spoken publicly about watching the Butler shooting unfold in real time, describing the horror of seeing her father targeted on live television.
Trump's comments at the NATO summit did not arrive in a vacuum. Earlier this week, the funeral of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, killed in the war, became a stage for open threats against the American president. Pro-regime demonstrators in Tehran carried posters featuring crosshairs over Trump's face. Other posters bore the faces of JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alongside the phrase "There will be blood."
Footage from Monday's funeral procession showed mourners chanting "Death to America" and "Death to Israel." American and British flags were set ablaze. A Trump effigy was hanged near the front of the march. Mourners placed a death bounty on Trump, though the precise amount, mechanism, and organizers remain unclear.
Hardline Iranian lawmakers in Tehran went further, calling for missiles to be fired at Trump's location at the summit. No names of those lawmakers have been publicly identified.
Trump addressed Iran's post-Khamenei leadership at his press conference with characteristic directness: "They're gone now. They have another set of leaders. They may be gone."
He continued: "Who knows? And you know what, I may be gone too because I'm their number one target. It's out all over the place. I'm the number one, because they're scum."
The timing of Trump's remarks also coincides with damning new findings about the agency tasked with keeping him alive. A Department of Homeland Security Inspector General report released last week found that the Secret Service missed 102 radio calls flagging Thomas Crooks on a nearby roof with a long gun at the Butler rally, and never warned the agents at Trump's side to get him off the stage.
One hundred and two calls. Every one of them a chance to pull the president to safety. Every one of them missed.
That report landed just as the Secret Service was again managing heightened security around Trump during his travel from the NATO summit. Newsmax reported that the Secret Service urged Trump against using the new Air Force One during his return from Turkey amid the resumed hostilities with Iran. Trump himself acknowledged that passengers were "probably on a dangerous flight" given the threats from Tehran.
White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said that "many enemies of America have their sights" on Trump, a statement that reads less like political rhetoric and more like a security briefing made public.
Security incidents at Trump properties have underscored the persistent nature of threats against the president and his family even on domestic soil.
The New York Post revealed in 2024 that US officials had received intelligence about an Iranian assassination plot against Trump weeks before the Butler shooting. The Secret Service boosted protection around Trump in response to that specific threat, yet it still failed to prevent a gunman from reaching a rooftop with a clear line of fire.
The Butler shooting does not appear to have been connected to the Iranian plot. But the overlap, active foreign assassination planning running simultaneously with a domestic attack that nearly succeeded, illustrates the scale of the security challenge surrounding this president.
A National Security Council spokesperson said at the time: "We have been tracking Iranian threats against former Trump administration officials for years, dating back to the last administration." The Secret Service said it was "constantly receiving new potential threat information and taking action to adjust resources, as needed."
Adjusting resources did not stop 102 radio calls from going unanswered.
Calls to reject political violence have come from figures across the political spectrum, yet the threats against Trump continue to escalate from both foreign and domestic sources.
The Iranian hostility is not merely rhetorical. Trump declared his ceasefire with Iran "over" and ordered fresh military strikes after Iranian attacks on commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. The cycle of provocation and response has ratcheted tensions to a level not seen in years, and Trump's physical safety sits at the center of that escalation.
Iran's regime has made no secret of its desire for revenge over the Soleimani strike. The crosshair posters, the death bounties, the murder-for-hire plots, the calls for missile attacks on a sitting president's location, these are not vague grievances. They are operational signals from a regime that has demonstrated both intent and capability.
Casual depictions of Trump's death in American popular culture have drawn fierce backlash, and for good reason, the man has already been shot at, and a foreign government is openly promising to finish the job.
Several questions hang over this story. What is the precise nature of the death bounty placed on Trump at Khamenei's funeral, who organized it, and how much was offered? Who are the hardline Iranian lawmakers calling for missile strikes on a NATO summit? What is the full scope of the DHS Inspector General's findings beyond the 102 missed radio calls? And what has Iran's new post-Khamenei leadership actually said or done about the assassination plots that predated their rise?
None of these questions have been publicly answered. The threat environment around this president is dense, documented, and growing, and the institutions responsible for his protection have already proven they can fail at the worst possible moment.
When a president says out loud that his luck may run out, and the evidence backs him up, the only proper response is to make sure luck has nothing to do with it.
Wisconsin's liberal-majority Supreme Court ruled 5-2 to block a conservative activist from accessing guardianship records he sought to cross-reference against the statewide voter registration list, closing off a potential tool for identifying ineligible voters in one of the nation's most closely watched battleground states.
The decision, reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, rejected a lawsuit filed in 2022 by Ron Heuer, who leads the Wisconsin Voters Alliance. Heuer had sought access to Notice of Voting Eligibility forms, court documents generated during guardianship proceedings, to determine whether individuals found legally incompetent remained on the voter rolls.
Four liberal justices joined with one conservative, Justice Brian Hagedorn, to form the majority. Justices Annette Ziegler and Rebecca Bradley, both conservatives, dissented. The ruling effectively bars the public from using guardianship records as a check on voter eligibility, and it does so under a privacy rationale that the dissenters argued stretches the law beyond recognition.
Justice Janet Protasiewicz wrote the majority opinion, citing a state statute that declares "court records pertinent to the finding of incompetency are closed." The ruling, Protasiewicz wrote, "is rooted in the legislature's choice to protect the privacy of individuals subject to guardianship proceedings."
That framing treats the guardianship forms Heuer sought, documents that note whether a person has lost the right to vote, as inseparable from the underlying incompetency finding. The majority concluded that releasing those records would effectively expose the private details the statute was designed to shield.
Chief Justice Jill Karofsky and Justices Rebecca Dallet and Susan Crawford joined Protasiewicz in the majority. Hagedorn, a conservative who has occasionally broken with the court's right flank on election-related matters, sided with them.
Justice Ziegler's dissent drew a distinction the majority declined to make. A finding of incompetency, she argued, is not the same thing as a finding that someone has lost the right to vote. The majority blurred the two, and in doing so, locked away records that serve a different legal purpose.
"The majority's conclusion fails to recognize this important distinction: A finding of incompetency is distinct from a finding that one has lost the right to vote."
Ziegler went further, calling the majority's interpretation "overbroad and unworkable." She wrote that shielding the guardianship forms from public records law "runs counter to the statute's language, scheme, and the presumption of open government."
That last phrase matters. Wisconsin, like most states, operates under a legal presumption that government records are open to the public unless a specific statute says otherwise. The dissenters argued the majority turned that presumption on its head by expanding the scope of the privacy shield well beyond what the legislature intended.
Justice Rebecca Bradley also dissented, though her opinion was not quoted in the court's published materials. Both Ziegler and Bradley have been described as leaving the court, a development that will further entrench its liberal majority.
Heuer and the Wisconsin Voters Alliance did not limit their effort to Walworth County. They filed lawsuits in 13 counties seeking the same guardianship-related voting eligibility forms. The Supreme Court ruling now settles the legal question statewide.
Heuer alleged that the Wisconsin Elections Commission's public website listed figures for "ineligible voters" that did not match counties' ward-level tallies. The precise nature of that discrepancy was not detailed in the court proceedings as reported, and the Elections Commission has not publicly responded to the claim.
The Wisconsin Voters Alliance has a history that invites scrutiny from both sides. The group filed three lawsuits over aspects of the 2020 presidential election, two of which sought to overturn results. Heuer himself was hired by former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman as an investigator in a taxpayer-funded review of that election, a review that produced no actionable findings. Courts across the country have similarly grappled with election-related cases from 2020, often rejecting them on procedural or evidentiary grounds.
None of that history, however, changes the underlying legal question: whether the public has a right to access records that could reveal whether legally incompetent individuals remain registered to vote. The majority said no. The dissenters said the statute doesn't support that conclusion.
The Wisconsin ruling fits a broader pattern in which courts have constrained efforts to verify and clean voter rolls. A Biden-appointed federal judge halted a Trump-era voter verification system designed to help states cross-check their rolls, citing procedural concerns. In each case, the legal reasoning differs, but the practical result is the same: fewer tools available to identify voters who may not be eligible.
Wisconsin has been a flashpoint for election administration disputes for years. The state's Supreme Court, when it still held a conservative majority, issued a 4-3 ruling banning absentee ballot drop boxes outside of election offices, a decision reported by Fox News that Republicans praised as a victory for election integrity and Democrats condemned as voter suppression. That ruling affected elections in which over 40 percent of Wisconsin voters had cast mail ballots and at least 500 drop boxes were used across more than 430 communities.
The court's ideological composition has since shifted. The liberal bloc now holds a commanding 4-3 advantage, and with Ziegler and Bradley departing, that margin is poised to widen. The trajectory is clear: future election-related challenges in Wisconsin will face a court less sympathetic to arguments framed around ballot security and voter roll accuracy.
Other states have seen courts intervene in election processes in ways that carry significant consequences. A Virginia circuit court blocked certification of a redistricting referendum, declaring the vote unconstitutional, another instance of judicial power reshaping the electoral landscape.
The decision resolves the narrow legal question of whether guardianship records can be obtained through public records requests. But it leaves several practical questions hanging.
If the public cannot access these records, who is responsible for ensuring that individuals found legally incompetent are removed from voter rolls? The Wisconsin Elections Commission maintains a list of ineligible voters, but Heuer's allegation, that the commission's numbers don't match county-level data, has not been publicly addressed or refuted. The ruling offers no mechanism for independent verification.
The case also raises a question about the scope of privacy protections. The statute says records "pertinent to the finding of incompetency" are closed. The dissenters argued that a form noting whether someone has lost the right to vote is not itself a finding of incompetency, it is a consequence of one. The majority treated the two as interchangeable. That interpretive choice could have implications beyond voter eligibility, potentially shielding other downstream records generated by guardianship proceedings.
Meanwhile, courts in other states continue to shape ballot access and election administration in contested ways. An Alaska judge recently ordered a same-name challenger back onto a Republican primary ballot, illustrating how judicial decisions at every level carry outsized weight in election disputes.
The majority framed its ruling as a defense of vulnerable people, those under guardianship who deserve to have their legal proceedings kept private. That is a legitimate concern, and no serious person argues that guardianship records should be thrown open without restriction.
But the dissenters identified something the majority chose not to confront. There is a difference between protecting someone's medical or cognitive history and preventing the public from knowing whether ineligible names sit on the voter rolls. The forms Heuer sought do not describe a person's diagnosis. They describe a legal status, one that directly affects whether that person can lawfully vote.
A state that cannot verify its own voter rolls, or that actively prevents citizens from doing so, is a state that has chosen opacity over accountability. Wisconsin's liberal Supreme Court made that choice. The voters who have to live with the consequences did not get a say.
Lauren Bennett, the British-born singer best known for her featured vocal on LMFAO's mega-hit "Party Rock Anthem," has died at the age of 36. Her former group G.R.L. confirmed the news in an Instagram post dated July 6, offering no details about the cause or circumstances of her death.
The announcement left fans and the music world with far more questions than answers. No cause of death has been disclosed. No location has been made public. The statement from G.R.L. was brief and emotional, and entirely silent on the facts surrounding Bennett's passing.
Bennett's death adds to a string of losses in the entertainment world that have shaken fans in recent months. The sudden death of actor Patrick Muldoon at 57 from a heart attack was another reminder of how quickly public figures can be lost.
Bennett started young. She kicked off her professional music career at just 18 years old, forming the Paradiso Girls in 2007 with several other women. The group released its debut single, "Patron Tequila," in 2009. That track gave Bennett her first taste of commercial exposure, but it was what came next that made her a household voice.
By 2010, Bennett had embarked on a solo career. She worked alongside major names, CeeLo Green and will.i.am among them. That same period brought the collaboration that would define her public profile: a featured spot on LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem," one of the most inescapable pop songs of the early 2010s.
The track became a global phenomenon. Bennett's vocal hook was embedded in the song's DNA, played at sporting events, weddings, and parties for years after its release. For millions of listeners, her voice was the song, even if her name wasn't always the one they remembered.
After her solo run, Bennett joined G.R.L., a girl group that carried its own following. The group eventually disbanded in 2015. The reasons for the split were not detailed in the announcement, and Bennett's activities in the years that followed have received less public attention.
A 2017 photo credit places Bennett onstage at the GIRL CULT Festival at The Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles that August, evidence she remained connected to the performance world even after G.R.L. ended.
The entertainment industry has faced a difficult stretch of unexpected losses. French actress Nadia Farès died at 57 after a medical emergency at a swimming pool in Paris, another case where youth and apparent vitality made the news harder to absorb.
The group's Instagram post, published July 6, was the only public confirmation of Bennett's death. The statement read in full:
"It is with great sadness that we share the passing of our beloved Lauren. Our hearts are broken, and we cannot being to express how much she meant to us. We will forever cherish the love, laughter, and countless memories she gave us. Her beautiful spirit touched so many lives, and she will be deeply missed and forever loved."
The apparent typo, "cannot being to express", appeared in the original post. No follow-up statement corrected or expanded on it. No individual members of G.R.L. were named in the announcement.
TMZ was listed as a contributor to the initial reporting, though no additional details from that outlet were included in the public account of Bennett's death.
The gaps in this story are wide. Bennett's cause of death has not been revealed. The exact date she died, as opposed to the date of the announcement, has not been stated publicly. The location of her death remains unreported.
Her birth year can only be estimated. The reporting states she began her career at 18 in 2007 and died at 36, which would place her birth in approximately 1988 or 1989. But no official birth date has been confirmed in connection with the announcement.
Sudden and unexplained deaths of relatively young public figures have become a recurring pattern in recent coverage. The death of Darrell Sheets of "Storage Wars" prompted its own set of difficult questions, with a medical examiner later confirming suicide amid a cyberbullying investigation.
Whether Bennett's family or representatives will release further details remains to be seen. For now, the public record consists of a single Instagram post and a career that, however brief, left an outsized mark on pop music.
The entertainment world has also grappled with tragedy closer to home in Los Angeles, where an SNL writer's missing sister was found dead, prompting an LAPD homicide investigation. These cases share little in common except the shock of lives cut short and the questions left behind.
Bennett never became a solo superstar. Her name didn't trend the way the acts she collaborated with did. But her voice, looped into one of the defining party anthems of a generation, reached more ears than most artists ever will. "Party Rock Anthem" didn't just chart. It embedded itself in the culture.
That a 36-year-old woman whose voice soundtracked a decade of celebrations can die with so little public explanation is its own kind of loss. Not just of talent, but of transparency.
Fans deserve more than a social media post. At 36, Lauren Bennett deserved more time.
A masked gunman opened fire into a family Fourth of July cookout near the Coney Island boardwalk Saturday night, wounding eight people, four of them children, in a neighborhood that sits inside one of the most restrictive gun-control regimes in the country.
The youngest victims were six and seven years old. The oldest was a 37-year-old man. A 21-year-old woman was listed in critical condition. The other seven victims were expected to survive, AP News reported.
NYPD officers responded to West 31st Street in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn at approximately 10:37 p.m. on July 4, the 250th anniversary of American independence. What they found was a sidewalk and courtyard crime scene roughly one block from the boardwalk, shell casings on the ground, and eight people bleeding from gunshot wounds. No arrests have been made.
NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch described the attack in stark terms. A suspect wearing all black and a ski mask walked up and fired into the courtyard of an apartment building where a family had gathered for a cookout. The New York Post reported that at least 10 shots were fired and that police recovered a Tec-9 style firearm with an extended magazine at the scene, along with 10 discharged shell casings.
Tisch said there was no indication of any argument or altercation at the barbecue before the shooting.
"There is no indication at this time that there was any argument or altercation at the barbecue before the shooting occurred."
The attack, in other words, appears to have been unprovoked, at least from the perspective of the people gathered at the cookout. Tisch said investigators are looking at a possible connection to a confirmed gang-related homicide on the same block earlier in the week. The shooting may have been retaliation.
That possibility makes the victim list even harder to stomach. The four children, boys aged 6, 7, 12, and 14, were at a family gathering. They were not combatants. They were not targets in any rational sense. They were kids at a holiday barbecue.
Tiffany Williams, whose 21-year-old daughter was shot in the chest and listed in critical condition, told the New York Post exactly what she saw.
"They aimed for babies."
That single sentence carries more weight than any policy paper. A mother watched a gunman fire into a crowd that included small children, her own daughter among the wounded, and her immediate, unfiltered reaction was that the shooter targeted the most vulnerable people in the courtyard.
The scene unfolded near the Seapark Apartments, an area residents described as prone to violence. One unnamed witness and resident of the same building told Just The News, "I came home to have fun and now this? This building always has some trouble."
That resignation, the sense that holiday gunfire near a family cookout is part of the background noise of life, tells you something about the gap between Albany's legislative output and the reality on the ground in Brooklyn.
New York State maintains one of the most extensive gun-control frameworks in the nation. Breitbart News catalogued the layers: an "assault weapons" ban, a "high capacity" magazine ban, a concealed carry permit requirement, a red flag law, gun storage laws, universal background checks for handgun sales, a bump stock ban, "ghost gun" regulations, a micro-stamping requirement for new handguns, and more.
Every one of those laws was on the books Saturday night. Every one of them was in effect when a man in a ski mask walked up to a family barbecue with what police described as a Tec-9 style firearm fitted with an extended magazine and opened fire on children.
The weapon itself is a useful data point. A Tec-9 style firearm with an extended magazine would violate multiple New York statutes on its face. The magazine ban, the assault weapons ban, concealed carry requirements, the gun's mere existence in a Brooklyn courtyard represents a cascade of broken laws before the first trigger pull.
Gun-control advocates in Albany and Washington have spent years arguing that the answer to urban violence is more regulation of lawful firearms owners. New York has obliged. The state has passed law after law, restriction after restriction, requirement after requirement. And on the Fourth of July, a masked man carried an illegal weapon to a family gathering and shot eight people, half of them children, without apparent fear of any of those statutes.
The pattern is familiar. Violent criminals do not consult the penal code before committing acts of violence. Laws designed to burden legal gun owners, background checks, storage mandates, permit regimes, impose costs on the law-abiding while doing nothing to disarm the people who actually pull triggers in places like Coney Island. A recent shooting at a New Jersey Chick-fil-A offered another grim reminder that public spaces remain vulnerable regardless of how many laws sit on the books.
Coney Island was not the only New York community hit by Fourth of July gunfire. In Rochester, seven people were shot and one person was stabbed during the evening. Rochester police said none of the gunshot victims suffered life-threatening injuries.
Police in Rochester also said they did not know whether any of the gunshot victims were intentional targets, Newsmax reported. No further details about suspects or circumstances have been released.
Two cities, fifteen victims, one state, one holiday. New York's gun-control apparatus, the most elaborate in the country by almost any measure, failed to prevent either incident.
The eight Coney Island victims break down as follows: a 37-year-old man, a 33-year-old man, a 25-year-old woman, a 21-year-old woman in critical condition, a 14-year-old boy, a 12-year-old boy, a 7-year-old boy, and a 6-year-old boy. Seven were in stable condition as of the latest reports.
No suspects have been arrested. The investigation remains open. Police recovered the firearm at the scene, but the gunman fled and has not been publicly identified.
The shooting occurred during what should have been a celebration, families watching fireworks, eating together, marking the nation's 250th birthday. Instead, children were rushed to hospitals with gunshot wounds. Shootings involving children carry a particular weight because the victims had no agency, no ability to avoid the danger, and no connection to whatever grievance may have motivated the attacker.
If investigators confirm the gang-retaliation theory, the picture gets worse, not better. It would mean a shooter targeted a family gathering, with children present and visible, to settle a score from an earlier killing. That is not random violence. That is calculated indifference to innocent life.
And it happened in a jurisdiction that has passed every gun-control measure progressives have asked for. Universal background checks did not stop it. The red flag law did not stop it. The assault weapons ban did not stop it. The magazine ban did not stop it. Mass shootings continue to occur in states across the regulatory spectrum, but New York's case is particularly instructive because the state has held itself out as a model.
The open questions in this case are significant. Who is the gunman? Was this gang retaliation? Will prosecutors pursue the case aggressively if an arrest is made? Will the suspect, if caught, face consequences proportional to shooting four children at a holiday barbecue?
Those questions point to the enforcement side of the equation, the side that gun-control legislation consistently ignores. New York can pass a hundred more gun laws. None of them will matter if prosecutors decline to pursue violent offenders, if judges release defendants awaiting trial, or if gang violence is treated as a sociological curiosity rather than a public safety emergency.
The residents of the Seapark Apartments already know this. They live with it. They described their own building as a place that "always has some trouble." That is the lived experience of people who exist inside the most regulated gun environment in America and still cannot sit outside on the Fourth of July without fear of being shot.
Violent crime investigations across the country continue to expose the same gap: the distance between the laws politicians pass and the safety those laws actually deliver.
New York's political class will respond to this shooting the way it always does, by proposing more restrictions on legal gun owners. The micro-stamping mandate will be praised. The red flag law will be cited. The universal background check will be invoked as proof of good intentions.
None of that will explain why a man with an illegal Tec-9 style weapon and an extended magazine was able to walk up to a family cookout in Brooklyn and shoot four children.
At some point, the question stops being whether New York has enough gun laws. The question becomes whether the people running New York are willing to enforce the ones they already have, and to hold violent criminals accountable with the seriousness that a six-year-old with a bullet wound deserves.
Four children were shot at a barbecue on the Fourth of July, in a state with every gun law progressives have ever wanted. If that doesn't settle the argument, nothing will.
The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals handed the Trump administration a significant legal setback Thursday, ruling 2-1 that Immigration and Customs Enforcement cannot detain immigrants for more than 90 days without giving them a chance to seek release on bond. The decision could affect thousands of migrants held in ICE facilities across Texas and Louisiana, two states at the center of the federal government's stepped-up deportation effort.
Judge Leslie Southwick authored the majority opinion, leaning on the Fifth Amendment's due process clause and a 2001 U.S. Supreme Court precedent holding that constitutional protections extend to all persons within U.S. borders, citizens and non-citizens alike. The cases before the court involved two Mexican citizens and one Honduran national facing deportation proceedings.
The ruling lands at a moment when the administration has been accelerating enforcement. The Department of Homeland Security has ramped up its arrest rate to roughly 2,000 per day, with reports indicating DHS arrested some 10,000 illegal immigrants in a single recent week. A federal appeals court decision forcing bond hearings for detainees held longer than 90 days threatens to slow that machinery, and to put thousands of cases back before immigration judges who may order release.
The 2-1 split revealed a deep disagreement about where the Constitution draws the line between executive enforcement power and individual liberty claims by non-citizens. Southwick, writing for the majority, framed the question in sweeping terms.
As Fox News reported, Southwick wrote:
"It is part of the historic majesty of this long-ago founding charter that it makes no exceptions in providing basic rights to those within our boundaries, including a right to be heard when personal liberty is taken."
Judge Cory Wilson disagreed. In his dissent, Wilson argued that the majority "marginalizes the Constitution's express grant of plenary authority over immigration matters to Congress." That doctrine, Congress's broad, largely unreviewable power to set immigration rules, has been a bedrock principle in federal courts for more than a century. Wilson's position reflects the view held by many conservative legal scholars: that when Congress grants the executive branch detention authority, the judiciary should not graft a 90-day expiration date onto it.
The tension between these two positions is heading for the Supreme Court. The justices have already agreed to examine the bond-hearing question, though oral arguments are not expected until 2027. In the meantime, the Trump administration has asked the high court to bar lower judges from releasing illegal immigrants until the deportation process concludes.
The Fifth Circuit's ruling stands in direct tension with a decision from the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals issued in March. That court barred lower judges from releasing illegal migrants after DHS arrest, the opposite result. The Eighth Circuit's jurisdiction covers Minnesota, Indiana, Missouri, and several other states.
Minnesota had been a particular flashpoint. Pro-migration judges and lawyers in that state and elsewhere used bond proceedings to release detained illegal immigrants at a pace that alarmed enforcement officials. Over recent months, more than 10,000 illegal migrants were released after arrest through such proceedings, a figure that helps explain the administration's urgency in seeking Supreme Court intervention.
Now two federal circuits have reached opposite conclusions on the same constitutional question. That kind of split virtually guarantees Supreme Court review, but the 2027 timeline means the legal uncertainty will persist for months, possibly more than a year.
The Supreme Court already faces a packed docket on executive power and immigration. Adding another contested detention question only raises the stakes of a term that could reshape the boundaries of presidential enforcement authority.
For the Americans who live in communities absorbing the consequences of illegal immigration, circuit-court doctrinal disputes are abstractions. The practical question is simpler: will people arrested by ICE stay in custody long enough to be deported, or will they be released back into the interior?
The Fifth Circuit's answer, that after 90 days, detained migrants must get a bond hearing, creates a procedural gateway that immigration attorneys will use aggressively. Bond hearings require judges, courtrooms, lawyers, and time. Immigration courts are already overwhelmed. Every hearing added to the docket pushes other cases further out. And every migrant released on bond becomes harder to locate if a final deportation order eventually issues.
Rebecca Cassler of the American Immigration Council called the ruling a victory, telling Newsmax she was "delighted that the panel recognized the core constitutional principle that the due process clause does not allow the government to lock them away indefinitely."
That framing, "indefinitely", does real work. No one in the administration has proposed holding migrants without any process forever. The dispute is whether 90 days is a constitutionally mandated ceiling or whether Congress's broad detention authority permits longer holds while deportation proceedings grind forward. Casting enforcement detention as indefinite imprisonment is effective advocacy. It is not a neutral description of the policy at issue.
The Fifth Circuit ruling fits a broader pattern. Across the federal judiciary, judges have repeatedly intervened to limit, delay, or block the administration's immigration enforcement actions. Federal prosecutors have had to challenge judicial dismissals of cases against illegal immigrants accused of serious offenses. Courts have ordered the release of detainees over the administration's objections. And legal advocacy groups have forum-shopped aggressively, seeking sympathetic judges in circuits likely to rule against enforcement.
The result is a patchwork. In states covered by the Eighth Circuit, ICE can hold detainees without bond hearings after arrest. In Texas and Louisiana, states on the front lines of border enforcement, the Fifth Circuit now says it cannot hold them past 90 days without offering a hearing. The law varies depending on which side of a state line a detention facility sits.
That incoherence is not the administration's doing. It is the product of a judiciary that cannot agree on basic questions about who has authority over immigration enforcement, questions the Supreme Court will eventually have to resolve.
Meanwhile, the cases that prompted this ruling involved real people with real records. The two Mexican citizens and one Honduran national at the center of the Fifth Circuit decision were in deportation proceedings. The court's ruling does not dismiss their cases. It simply requires the government to give them a chance to argue for release while those cases proceed. Whether individual immigration judges grant bond, and under what conditions, will determine whether the ruling amounts to a procedural speed bump or a genuine obstacle to removal.
The administration's track record suggests it will not accept the decision quietly. The Trump team has already signaled its intent to take the bond-hearing question to the Supreme Court, and the circuit split gives the justices a strong reason to act. Other deportation fights have already reached the high court through similar paths, appeals court losses followed by aggressive petitions for review.
The Fifth Circuit's ruling will almost certainly be appealed. The administration has the circuit split, the pending Supreme Court case, and Congress's historically broad immigration authority all working in its favor on the merits. But timing matters. Until the Supreme Court acts, the 90-day bond-hearing requirement is the law in Texas and Louisiana, two of the most important states for interior enforcement.
Every day that legal uncertainty persists, immigration lawyers file motions. Judges hold hearings. Detainees walk out of facilities on bond. And the deportation pipeline slows.
The Constitution protects everyone within American borders. No serious person disputes that. But due process has never meant that Congress cannot authorize the executive branch to detain people who entered the country illegally while their removal cases are decided. Judge Wilson's dissent had it right: the majority's reading shrinks congressional authority over immigration to fit a judicial preference.
When the Supreme Court finally takes up this question, it will decide more than a procedural rule about bond hearings. It will decide whether federal judges or the elected branches get the last word on who stays and who goes. Until then, the people paying the price for judicial indecision are the same ones who always do, the citizens and lawful residents left waiting for a government that enforces its own laws.
President Trump sat down in the Oval Office in mid-June and did something no sitting president has done before: he read a children's picture book aloud on a podcast hosted by the second lady of the United States. The prerecorded episode of "Storytime with the Second Lady," Usha Vance's children's literacy podcast, dropped Friday, just ahead of the nation's 250th Independence Day weekend, and featured Trump flipping through "Presidents Play," a White House Historical Association book about former commanders-in-chief and their favorite pastimes.
What followed was less a bedtime story and more of a freewheeling presidential commentary track, with Trump offering quips, compliments, and gentle jabs at his predecessors as he turned each page.
The Hill reported that when Vance asked Trump whether he has time to read for fun while balancing his presidential schedule, Trump didn't miss a beat.
"I usually read stories about myself."
From there, the episode became a tour through presidential history, filtered through Trump's characteristic bluntness and delivered to an audience of children.
The book, published by the White House Historical Association, features illustrations of former presidents playing sports and enjoying recreation on the White House grounds. Trump read it aloud, but he didn't stick to the script.
Reagan earned warm praise. Trump called him a "high-quality person." Lyndon Johnson got a more colorful label: "tough cookie." Kennedy, Trump said, was "the second-most good-looking president", leaving listeners to draw their own conclusions about who he had in mind for first.
Nixon drew a more measured comment. Trump said he "got himself into trouble, I guess", an apparent reference to Watergate that managed to be both understated and unmistakable.
Herbert Hoover's page featured a game called "Hoover Ball," which Trump noted "worked out better for him than the economy." The Great Depression, summarized in one line for the kids.
When the book reached Barack Obama playing basketball, Trump referred to him as "Barack Hussein Obama," acknowledged his basketball skills, but said Obama's favorite sport is actually golf. Then came the needle: "He won't be in the Master's anytime soon."
Bill Clinton's page showed the former president jogging. Trump was generous. "I like him a lot," he said. Clinton apparently had a small track built on the White House grounds, which prompted Trump to add, "I don't think I'll ever do that."
William Howard Taft got perhaps the most memorable treatment. Trump called him "a large man, very large," then added that Taft "was our heaviest president, and I have to be careful because I don't want to supersede his record."
And when the book showed John Quincy Adams swimming in what was once Tiber Creek on the White House grounds, Trump pivoted to current events: "I think we're building a big beautiful ballroom on top of it."
The podcast appearance is the latest marker of Usha Vance's expanding role as second lady. She launched "Storytime with the Second Lady" as part of a broader childhood literacy initiative, and the show features guests reading picture books aloud to young listeners. The format is simple, episodes run roughly ten minutes, but the guest list has been anything but ordinary.
The Washington Examiner reported that the podcast launched with three episodes featuring guests including former NASCAR racer Danica Patrick and Paralympian and author Brent Poppen. Vance has framed the project around a straightforward principle: "Reading for pleasure at home builds stronger literacy and classroom skills and opens the door to a world of opportunity for children."
A White House spokesperson described Vance's motivation plainly: "The Second Lady is passionate about childhood education, and hopes to inspire a lifelong love of learning in children across the country." The initiative also includes a summer reading program that gave completers a chance to visit the White House, a tangible incentive that connects the digital project to the physical seat of government.
Vance has been open about balancing her role as a pregnant second lady with her public duties, and the podcast has become one of the most visible pieces of her official portfolio.
AP News reported that the episode was pre-taped in mid-June in the Oval Office itself, a setting that lent the children's reading a distinctly presidential backdrop. Trump's commentary went beyond the book at one point, touching on the state of the country.
"We have a great country. We have a country that, it's on a little bit of a ledge right now. It can go one way or another, you understand that. But we're going to make it go the other."
That line, delivered during a children's storytime, carried the weight of a man who has never been able to separate himself from the office, even when the audience is supposed to be in pajamas.
Usha Vance promoted the episode on social media ahead of its release. The New York Post noted that she posted: "Independence Day is almost here! Celebrate our country's 250th birthday with me and special reader President Trump as he reads about our former (and current!) presidents' favorite pastimes on Storytime with the Second Lady."
The timing was deliberate. Dropping a patriotic episode featuring the president reading about his predecessors' love of sport and recreation, right before the Fourth of July and the nation's semiquincentennial, gave the podcast its highest-profile moment yet.
The episode also serves as a reminder of how central the Vance family has become to the broader political landscape. JD Vance's name has been floated repeatedly in discussions about 2028, and Trump himself has stirred speculation about the vice president's future alongside other potential successors.
Breitbart reported that the episode was posted online on a Friday, consistent with the podcast's release pattern, and emphasized Usha Vance's active role in creating family-friendly public programming from her official position.
Newsmax described the appearance as highlighting Vance's initiative to create educational content for children, a project that has given the second lady a public identity distinct from her husband's political operation.
That distinction matters. The modern vice-presidential spouse role has often been vaguely defined, filled with ribbon-cuttings and ceremonial appearances. Vance has carved out something more concrete: a literacy platform with a regular publishing schedule, recognizable guests, and now a sitting president as a featured reader.
The broader Trump and Vance families have been increasingly visible in public life beyond the strictly political. Donald Trump Jr.'s recent wedding and other family milestones have kept the extended political family in the spotlight in ways that go beyond policy debates and legislative fights.
There is something clarifying about watching a president read a children's book. The format strips away the podium, the teleprompter, and the adversarial press corps. What's left is the person, and in Trump's case, what's left is exactly what anyone who has watched him for a decade would expect: off-the-cuff opinions, a competitive streak, self-aware humor about his own weight, and a refusal to let any page go by without adding his own commentary.
The podcast also reveals something about Usha Vance's approach to her role. She is not building a political brand. She is building a literacy brand, and doing it with a consistency and seriousness that her predecessors in the second lady role rarely matched. Whether the podcast outlasts the current administration remains to be seen, but the infrastructure is real, the guests are notable, and the audience is growing.
For a political culture that spends most of its energy tearing things apart, a children's reading podcast is a small, deliberate act of construction. That it managed to be both genuinely charming and unmistakably Trumpian is the whole story.