2,044 events on record Subscribe September 10, 2026
Standing Record home The Standing Record A non-partisan record of US democratic norms —
and the events that erode them.

Episodes

Episodes are named compound real-world happenings — protests, election days, congressional hearings, operations, court rulings with multiple defiance responses — that contain multiple recorded entries. Each episode page provides editorial overview of what the compound event was and lists every entry filed against it in chronological order.

Every episode in the archive, ordered by the date the compound event began. Page 1 of 2, showing July 4, 2024 to July 16, 2026. Pages contain 50 episodes each.

2026 Episodes (16)

July(1)

Arizona Prison Healthcare System: From Unconstitutional Care to Receivership

A federal judge found Arizona's prison system had unconstitutionally denied incarcerated people adequate medical and mental health care, and after years of documented noncompliance with a court-ordered injunction, placed the entire prison healthcare system into court receivership. The case traces a state agency's escalating defiance of a binding federal order and the remedy a judge concluded was the only one left.

1 entry documented.

June(1)

Acting DNI Pulte's ODNI Staff Purge

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Days after becoming acting Director of National Intelligence, Bill Pulte directed a purge of career intelligence staff that proceeded through multiple undisclosed rounds over several weeks, without the administration ever publishing comprehensive figures on positions or offices affected. The episode collects each disclosed round of cuts as it's recorded.

5 entries documented.

May(4)

Delaney Hall / Newark ICE Facility Crisis

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Detainees at a New Jersey ICE facility launched a hunger strike over conditions, and ICE and its private operator responded with pepper spray and force against strikers, a sitting U.S. senator during an oversight visit, and outside demonstrators. The standoff ended with ICE transferring most of the strike's organizers out of the facility, which their attorneys characterized as retaliation.

10 entries documented.

Trump ICE Defiance of the Manhattan Immigration-Court Arrest Ban

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A federal court barred ICE from making civil arrests at three Manhattan immigration courthouses, finding the agency lacked legal authority for the practice — and the next day, ICE made an arrest at one of the courthouses anyway. The pair of entries captures a direct confrontation between a court order and the agency's defiance of it.

3 entries documented.

Trump Administration Assertions of Federal Authority Over State Election Administration

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The executive branch moved to assert federal control over election administration — an authority the Constitution assigns to the states — beginning with an order restricting mail-ballot delivery to voters on federally compiled lists. The episode tracks the order, its implementing rules, and the litigation it triggered.

6 entries documented.

Trump Administration's Iran War Waged in Defiance of the War Powers Act

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The administration's military operations against Iran produced a sustained standoff with the War Powers Resolution's authorization limit, including a Pentagon plan to rename the campaign specifically to reset that clock. Strikes continued in open defiance of a House resolution invoking the War Powers Act.

23 entries documented.

April(4)

2026 Mid-Decade Congressional Redistricting Wave

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A wave of Republican-led states raced to redraw congressional maps outside the normal decade-long cycle, several targeting majority-Black and majority-minority districts, while President Trump personally pressured state lawmakers to comply. Courts split on the result, striking down at least one map as intentional racial discrimination while allowing others to stand.

12 entries documented.

Trump Administration Offshore Wind Lease Buyouts

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The Interior Department has paid offshore wind developers hundreds of millions of dollars each to voluntarily surrender valid federal leases, committing billions in taxpayer funds across multiple deals to remove permitted wind capacity. The pattern amounts to an offshore wind moratorium implemented through individual settlements rather than legislation.

4 entries documented.

Trump Administration D.C. Monument Projects Steered Outside Competitive Process

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Ahead of the nation's 250th anniversary, the administration steered a cluster of Washington, D.C. monument and park contracts to politically connected recipients outside normal competitive process, including firms tied to the president personally and to a major donor. The episode collects the administration's pattern of directing public D.C. projects toward favored recipients.

5 entries documented.

March(1)

Trump DOJ Medical School Race-Discrimination Campaign

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The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division launched a coordinated campaign of Title VI investigations into medical schools' admissions practices, opening probes at an expanding list of institutions. The campaign used civil-rights enforcement authority to pressure schools to abandon race-conscious admissions, treating diversity policies themselves as unlawful discrimination.

5 entries documented.

February(2)

Trump Administration Retaliation Against Anthropic Over AI-Use Limits

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After the AI company Anthropic declined to let the Pentagon use its models for autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance, the Trump administration barred federal agencies and contractors from doing business with the company and formally labeled it a national-security supply-chain risk. Anthropic has sued over the designation, calling it unprecedented and unsupported.

3 entries documented.

Trump Administration Resistance to Epstein Files Disclosure

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The House Oversight Committee has pursued a bipartisan investigation into the Justice Department's handling of files on Jeffrey Epstein, and the administration has resisted producing records and testimony, including the attorney general skipping a subpoenaed deposition. Committee Democrats have characterized the pattern as a cover-up, an allegation the administration disputes.

4 entries documented.

January(3)

Trump's $10B IRS Lawsuit and Self-Dealing Settlement

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A personal lawsuit by President Trump and his sons against the IRS over a tax-return leak was settled with a payment directed into a DOJ-controlled fund, followed within a day by a DOJ order barring the IRS from auditing Trump, his family, or their businesses. The entries trace how a personal legal claim was resolved into public money and protection from tax enforcement.

3 entries documented.

Trump DOJ Prosecutions of Cities Church (St. Paul) Anti-ICE Protesters

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After demonstrators protested at a St. Paul church whose pastor is an ICE official, the Justice Department built an expanding federal prosecution around the protest, charging participants and journalists under place-of-worship civil-rights statutes originally written to protect abortion clinics. A magistrate judge had already found no probable cause to arrest several defendants before a superseding indictment added dozens more.

4 entries documented.

EPA's Non-Monetization Cost-Benefit Methodology

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Starting in January 2026, EPA under Administrator Lee Zeldin began declining to assign a dollar value to the health benefits of reduced air pollution in the cost-benefit analyses underlying its Clean Air Act rulemakings, while continuing to fully monetize industry compliance costs in the same analyses. Each entry documents a separate, independently significant rule that applies this same one-sided accounting methodology to a different pollutant, industry, or source category.

4 entries documented.

2025 Episodes (33)

December(3)

Operation Metro Surge (Twin Cities ICE Surge)

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A large federal immigration-enforcement deployment to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area produced fatal shootings of U.S. citizens, warrantless home raids, denial of legal counsel to detainees, and defiance of a court order, alongside retaliatory federal investigations into local officials and activists who opposed it. The episode documents the operation and the enforcement, due-process, and retaliation entries it generated.

48 entries documented.

November(2)

Trump Administration Asylum and Immigration Benefit Restrictions

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The administration issued directives restricting asylum processing and immigration benefits, beginning with a policy memo that froze adjudications for nationals of travel-ban countries. A federal court later vacated the policy as beyond the agency's authority, and the administration defied that ruling.

7 entries documented.

October(3)

Trump Administration No-Bid and Irregular Contracts

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Multiple federal agencies have repeatedly awarded contracts outside normal competitive process — sole-source awards, bypassed bidding, and deals steered to administration-linked parties — spanning the Coast Guard, National Park Service, Pentagon, and DHS. The episode collects the administration's pattern of procurement irregularities across agencies.

19 entries documented.

September(6)

Trump DOJ Reshaping of the Brennan Investigation

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The Justice Department reshaped its investigation of former CIA Director John Brennan after the career prosecutor leading the case declined to bring charges her colleagues judged unsupported, removing her and installing a Trump ally in a senior role tied to the probe. The entries trace a politically directed prosecution and the staffing moves used to keep it alive over internal objections.

5 entries documented.

Hegseth Pentagon Politicization Campaign

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth carried out a sustained campaign to politicize military personnel and institutions, including severing academic ties with universities, ordering ideological reviews of senior service colleges, forcing out a service chief, and striking qualified nominees from a promotion list. Each entry documents a distinct exercise of the same campaign to reshape the military along political lines.

19 entries documented.

Trump FCC Broadcast License Campaign Against Disfavored Media

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FCC Chair Brendan Carr used the agency's broadcast license review authority as a tool of political pressure against news organizations covering the administration critically, threatening licenses over war coverage and opening a review of a network's stations the same day the administration demanded a host be fired. The episode collects the FCC's use of its regulatory power as a press-freedom threat.

6 entries documented.

Operation Midway Blitz (Chicago Immigration Crackdown)

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A sustained federal immigration-enforcement surge in the Chicago area, beginning in September 2025, produced fatal and non-fatal shootings of bystanders and U.S. citizens, repeated excessive-force incidents against people uninvolved in enforcement actions, a same-day disinformation episode following one of the shootings, a state National Guard federalization fought by the governor, local government pushback against protests near an ICE facility, court findings that hundreds of arrests were unconstitutional, and the eventual collapse of a retaliatory prosecution against protesters. The episode collects the enforcement, due-process, and accountability entries the operation generated.

10 entries documented.

August(2)

Trump DOJ Campaign to Collect State Voter Rolls

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The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division pursued a nationwide campaign compelling states to hand over complete voter-registration databases, including partial Social Security and driver's-license numbers, under a legal theory federal courts had repeatedly rejected. Election administration is a power the Constitution assigns primarily to the states, and judges have questioned whether the department's real aim was a centralized federal voter file.

15 entries documented.

Trump Administration Data and Record Suppression Campaign

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Federal agencies across the government suppressed, deleted, or restricted access to public records and research, including shuttering a decades-old CIA reference publication, purging official social-media history, and blocking publication of a completed vaccine-effectiveness study. The episode documents a cross-agency pattern of limiting public access to government data and research.

24 entries documented.

July(1)

Glass House Farms Immigration Raid

A July 2025 federal immigration raid on two Southern California cannabis farms produced a cluster of distinct harms against different people on a single day: a legal observer shot with less-lethal rounds and tear-gassed, a U.S. citizen and Army veteran pulled from his car and held three days without charge or contact, and a farmworker who fell thirty feet from a greenhouse roof and died. The government disputed the circumstances of each.

3 entries documented.

June(1)

Trump Domestic Military Deployment Campaign

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The administration carried out a sustained campaign of domestic military deployment into American cities over the explicit objections of governors and mayors, federalizing National Guard units and local police in multiple states and the District of Columbia. The campaign expanded executive control over domestic law enforcement without invoking the Insurrection Act.

9 entries documented.

May(3)

2025–2026 ICE Detainee Death Surge

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ICE detainees have died in federal custody at an elevated rate across multiple facilities, including deaths ruled homicides and a documented rise in suicides. A class-action lawsuit and a government audit both found a pattern of neglect and unsafe conditions rather than a series of isolated incidents.

22 entries documented.

Trump ICE Defiance of Federal Court Orders

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ICE repeatedly defied federal court orders protecting immigration detainees, with judges describing individual incidents as showing an unprecedented disregard for judicial authority. Documented conduct includes re-detaining a man minutes before a court-ordered release and transferring a detainee across state lines against a standing order, with the agency's own lawyers advising continued noncompliance.

26 entries documented.

April(3)

Trump Administration Attacks on Judicial Independence

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The administration conducted a sustained campaign against judicial independence — pledging to defy court orders, filing misconduct complaints against judges who ruled against it, firing officials after adverse rulings, and arguing entire categories of presidential action are unreviewable in court. The pattern treated judicial authority as contingent on executive approval rather than as an independent check.

13 entries documented.

Trump Self-Dealing: Personal Financial Holdings Benefiting from Administration Decisions

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On multiple documented occasions, President Trump held personal financial stakes in a company or sector shortly before his administration took regulatory or procurement action that benefited those same holdings. His own financial disclosures make the sequence of personal investment and official action a matter of public record.

8 entries documented.

March(1)

Signalgate and the Absence of Accountability

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After Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared classified strike details in a Signal chat that inadvertently included a journalist, officials repeatedly turned to other auto-deleting or unvetted messaging channels for government business, including after the practice triggered a records-preservation violation and a security breach. The entries trace a pattern in which officials responsible for preserving government records kept choosing channels designed to make them disappear.

4 entries documented.

February(3)

Trump Law Firm Targeting Campaign

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The administration issued a series of executive orders targeting law firms whose attorneys had opposed Trump in court or represented his political opponents, suspending employees' security clearances and directing agencies to cancel federal contracts with the firms. The campaign used presidential power to punish attorneys for their legal representations and pressure firms into abandoning disfavored clients.

6 entries documented.

Trump Administration Food-Safety Capacity Cuts

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Beginning with DOGE's February 2025 termination of 89 FDA Human Foods Program staff, federal agencies lost the specialized personnel behind several discrete food-safety testing, surveillance, and oversight functions over the following months, including bird-flu testing-reliability checks, a nationwide pathogen quality-control program, and CDC's foodborne-pathogen surveillance network, with staff and agency officials repeatedly attributing each loss directly to the staffing cuts. The episode collects each disclosed loss of capacity, and the food-safety failures that followed it, as they're recorded.

5 entries documented.

January(5)

License-Plate Data Shared Beyond Its Legal Limits

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Local license-plate-reader networks installed for local policing have been queried by outside agencies, across state lines and for purposes the hosting jurisdiction never authorized — including immigration enforcement in states whose own laws forbid it. Because the networks pool data by default, a camera bought by one city becomes a lookup tool for thousands of agencies that answer to no one in that city.

5 entries documented.

Trump Administration Third-Country Deportation Program

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After the Supreme Court allowed removals of migrants to countries with no connection to their cases, the administration built a growing network of bilateral agreements to deport people — some holding U.S. immigration-court protections — to third countries, several of which have held deportees in high-security detention without charge. The episode tracks the enabling ruling and each country-specific expansion of the program.

23 entries documented.

World Liberty Financial Self-Dealing

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World Liberty Financial (WLFI), the crypto venture co-founded by President Trump's sons and majority-owned by entities controlled by the Trump family, has repeatedly generated income for the family from counterparties or arrangements that raise conflict-of-interest, sanctions, or foreign-influence concerns, and has been used to channel value toward the family through the trappings of the presidency itself.

7 entries documented.

2024 Episodes (1)

July(1)

Wrongful Stops From Bad License-Plate Data

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Plate-lookup systems have flagged innocent drivers as wanted — through stale hot-list records and through officers' own entry errors — and the stops that followed were carried out as though the hit were confirmed. In documented cases officers drew weapons, smashed a window, and pepper-sprayed a driver before anyone checked whether the plate actually matched the car in front of them.

2 entries documented.