A daily, non-partisan record of US democratic norms — and the events that erode them.
The historical record of US democratic norms kept in public.
The Standing documents events involving authoritarianism, anti-democratic
behavior, and corruption in US governance, applied to all actors regardless of
party. No anti-democratic action is too small to record: a precinct-level
incident is filed with the same care as a national one. Every entry is anchored
to a primary source — a court filing, an agency record, a citizen-captured
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At a White House cabinet meeting on May 27, 2026, President Donald Trump publicly directed that the number of National Guard troops deployed across Washington, D.C. not be reduced, saying "don't lower the number." Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, at the same table, responded that the administration would "surge this summer too." The exchange committed the executive branch to maintaining and expanding an ongoing federalized National Guard presence in the District, part of the administration's domestic security posture in U.S. cities.
An Associated Press investigation published May 27, 2026 found that at least 10 people have died by suicide in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody since January 2025 — a pace far outstripping the growth of the detained population and unprecedented in the agency's two-decade history, against a historical baseline of roughly zero to one such death per year. Seven of the deaths have occurred since October 2025, already the most in any single fiscal year, and suicides now account for nearly a fifth of the 51 deaths in ICE custody over the period. AP's review of ICE data, autopsy reports, coroner's rulings, and police records found facilities repeatedly violated ICE's own detention standards on intake screening, suicide-risk monitoring, mental-health care, and access to materials that could be used for self-harm.
In a report released May 27, 2026, Human Rights Watch documented that between January 20, 2025 and March 9, 2026 the Trump administration deported more than 18,000 third-country nationals, nearly 13,000 of them to Mexico under an undisclosed US-Mexico agreement; Cubans were the largest group, with 4,353 sent to Mexico. HRW found that none of the 53 deportees it interviewed were given any opportunity to contest their country of removal, a violation of due-process requirements under the Immigration and Nationality Act and international law, and that detainees faced overcrowding, denial of medical care, and guard violence in US custody before being left stranded in southern Mexico.
On May 27, 2026, the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation involving E. Jean Carroll — who won civil judgments against President Trump for sexual abuse ($5M) and defamation ($83M) — and the Hoffman-funded nonprofit that helped pay some of her legal costs. Prosecutors are examining Carroll's 2022 deposition testimony that no one else was funding her suit, a funding-discrepancy theory a federal appeals court already reviewed and rejected in 2024. The probe is run out of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Illinois under Trump appointee Andrew Boutros; Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, formerly Trump's personal attorney in the Carroll appeal, has recused.
On May 27, 2026, Judge Richard Eaton of the U.S. Court of International Trade ordered Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney S. Scott to appear in person at a June 9 hearing to answer the court's questions about the timing of CBP's compliance with a March 4, 2026 order directing the agency to refund roughly $166 billion in IEEPA tariffs the Supreme Court had ruled illegal. The government has acknowledged it can process refunds for only about $127 billion of the amount collected and has offered no plan for millions of additional entries. Requiring the agency head — rather than counsel — to testify is an unusual judicial escalation signaling concern that the administration is not fully complying with the refund directive.
On May 26, 2026, the Office of Personnel Management posted a Federal Register notice proposing a draft non-disclosure agreement for use by all federal agencies with both new and existing employees. The draft exposes signatories to civil and criminal penalties — and entitles the government to any royalties they receive — for disclosing information the administration deems "confidential" to the press, and requires former employees to obtain written permission from an authorized agency official before speaking to journalists about such material. OPM frames the NDA as preserving whistleblower channels through inspectors general and Congress, but the named target of the proposal is press disclosure of non-public information.
On May 26, 2026, a three-judge federal panel issued a preliminary injunction blocking Alabama from using its new Republican-drawn congressional map in the November 2026 midterms, finding the lines "intentionally discriminated based on race in violation of the Constitution." The map, enacted after the U.S. Supreme Court's Louisiana v. Callais decision that the state read as loosening race-conscious districting requirements, would have eliminated one of Alabama's two majority-Black districts and positioned the GOP to gain a U.S. House seat. The same panel previously found in 2023 that Alabama's map was intentionally discriminatory against Black voters; Attorney General Steve Marshall said the state would immediately appeal to the Supreme Court.
On May 26, 2026, Leon County Circuit Judge Joshua Hawkes -- a DeSantis appointee -- denied a preliminary injunction sought by Equal Ground, Common Cause Florida, the League of Women Voters of Florida, LULAC and other plaintiffs challenging Florida's new mid-decade congressional map, leaving the Republican-friendly map drawn by Gov. Ron DeSantis's office in place for the 2026 elections. The map redraws the state's 28 U.S. House districts to produce roughly 24 Republican-leaning seats, flipping about four seats from Democratic to Republican-leaning and helping the GOP defend its national majority. Plaintiffs argued the map violates Florida's 2010 voter-approved Fair Districts Amendment banning partisan gerrymandering; they filed notices of appeal and have signaled the case will likely reach the Florida Supreme Court, where DeSantis appointed six of the seven justices.
On May 26, 2026, the South Carolina state Senate blocked a Trump-pressured mid-decade redistricting bill that would have redrawn the state's seven congressional districts to dismantle its only majority-Black and only Democratic-held seat, long represented by Rep. James "Jim" Clyburn, and position Republicans to win all seven seats. Twelve Republicans joined twelve Democrats on a procedural vote to deny the 26 votes needed to end debate, killing the map for the cycle. It is the first state in President Trump's national mid-decade redistricting drive where the legislative push has collapsed.
On May 26, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice sued the University of California for the second time in 2026, alleging UCLA was "deliberately indifferent" to Jewish and Israeli students during pro-Palestinian encampment protests in spring 2024, in violation of Title VI. The administration had earlier sought more than $1 billion in fines against the university before a federal judge intervened, and several DOJ attorneys have resigned from the underlying investigation, telling reporters the case was "fraudulent," a "sham," and driven by pressure to "find" evidence against UCLA.
On May 26, 2026, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a motion in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama asking a federal judge to dismiss as vindictive prosecution the 11-count indictment the Justice Department obtained against it in April 2026 on wire-fraud, false-statement, and money-laundering charges. The motion documents a sustained pattern of public hostility from President Trump and senior officials toward the civil-rights group — including Trump branding it "one of the greatest political scams in American History" — and notes the FBI and IRS reviewed the same conduct in 2019-2020 without seeking charges, only for the case to be reopened after SPLC became a frequent target of the administration. The court has not yet ruled on the motion.
On May 26, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit granted a temporary stay barring Immigration and Customs Enforcement from re-detaining Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate, lawful permanent resident, and pro-Palestinian campus organizer, while his legal team prepares a petition to the Supreme Court. The stay halts the Trump administration's renewed effort to detain Khalil that followed a May 22 en banc denial of rehearing, preserving his liberty but leaving unresolved whether the government may detain and deport a green-card holder based on the content of his speech.
On May 26, 2026, U.S. Southern Command struck a vessel in the eastern Pacific Ocean that it described as a suspected drug-trafficking boat, killing one man and leaving two survivors. The strike continues an open-ended military campaign begun in early September 2025 that has now killed at least 194 people across the eastern Pacific and Caribbean theaters; the Pentagon has not provided evidence that any struck vessel was carrying drugs, and Congress has not authorized hostilities against Latin American drug-trafficking organizations.
On the night of May 26, 2026, federal immigration officers sprayed chemical irritants and charged demonstrators gathered outside Delaney Hall, the 1,000-bed GEO Group-run ICE detention facility in Newark, New Jersey, where roughly 300 detainees were conducting a hunger and labor strike over conditions including spoiled food, denial of medical care, and failed air conditioning. The confrontation was the latest in days of clashes at the facility, coming after masked, armored federal personnel pepper-sprayed U.S. Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) there on Memorial Day. Journalists covering the protests were among those exposed to the chemical agents.
On May 26, 2026, Vice President JD Vance — who leads the Trump administration's anti-fraud effort — convened a White House roundtable on government-program fraud attended by Republican state attorneys general. Two dozen Democratic attorneys general had declined the invitation, citing less than one business day's notice and no agenda, and instead sent senior deputies; officials representing New York, California, New Jersey, and (per AG Letitia James) Minnesota, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Nevada said they were turned away at the door. Vance stated on camera that representatives from Connecticut and Oregon were present and that fighting fraud "should not be a partisan effort," even as the excluded Democratic offices held a press conference calling the event a political stunt.
On May 26, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division filed a brief at the Supreme Court urging the justices to take up the Arizona voter-registration dispute (RNC v. Mi Familia Vota) and to hold that the National Voter Registration Act's 90-day pre-election "quiet period" does not bar states from removing suspected noncitizens from their voter rolls. The filing endorses a parallel Republican National Committee certiorari petition as the better vehicle and comes after the Ninth Circuit struck down Arizona proof-of-citizenship and late-purge provisions as violating the NVRA. The filing itself is the recorded event; any decision to grant review or rule for the DOJ remains a contingent future step.
In late May 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice mass-deleted news releases from its website detailing federal prosecutions of Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol-attack defendants — including guilty pleas, jury verdicts, and prison-sentence announcements covering portions of the roughly 1,600 cases, with assaults on Capitol and D.C. Metropolitan Police officers and seditious-conspiracy convictions of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders among the purged set. The DOJ's rapid-response social-media account defended the takedown as removing "partisan propaganda" from the prior administration. The formerly accessible URLs now return "Page not found" errors.
On Memorial Day, May 25, 2026, U.S. Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) said he was pepper-sprayed by federal agents outside Delaney Hall, a private ICE detention facility in Newark, after conducting an in-person oversight visit while detainees inside were on a hunger strike. Kim said he had tried to position himself between ICE personnel and protesters to de-escalate when officers — who had deployed an armored vehicle as a barricade — pushed through and discharged pepper balls and pepper spray. DHS publicly defended the action, blaming "rioters" and asserting officers used "the minimum amount of force necessary," and later said no individuals were directly struck by pepper-ball projectiles.
On May 23, 2026, the South Carolina state Senate advanced a new congressional redistricting map on a 27-17 second-reading vote, after invoking cloture earlier in the day to cap each member's floor debate at one hour and abandoning a planned overnight session to move ahead of schedule. The map redraws the state's seven U.S. House districts to break up the 6th Congressional District -- South Carolina's only majority-minority district and its only Democratic-held seat, long represented by Rep. James Clyburn -- positioning Republicans to win all seven seats. The bill also delays the state's congressional primary from June 9 to August 18; a decisive third-reading vote is scheduled for Tuesday, May 26.
On May 22, 2026, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw of the Middle District of Tennessee dismissed the federal human-smuggling indictment against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, granting his motion to dismiss for selective or vindictive prosecution. The judge found the Justice Department failed to rebut the "presumption of vindictiveness," writing that the evidence "sadly reflects an abuse of prosecuting power" and that, absent Abrego Garcia's successful court challenge to his wrongful deportation to El Salvador, the government would not have brought the case. The Justice Department said the ruling was "wrong and dangerous" and that it will appeal.
On March 15, 2025, Ruben Ray Martinez, a 23-year-old U.S. citizen, was fatally shot at close range through his car window by a Homeland Security Investigations agent during a late-night traffic encounter near a crash scene on South Padre Island, Texas. ICE said Martinez accelerated and struck an agent who ended up on the hood, but body-camera video later obtained by CBS News and reviewed by the family's lawyers indicates the car was barely moving and that no one was on the hood or in front of it when the agent fired. The killing was not publicly attributed to ICE until the agency confirmed it nearly 11 months later; a Texas grand jury declined to charge the agent in late February 2026, and ICE leadership said it stood by that outcome.
On April 2, 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth forced out Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, ordering him to retire immediately, and fired two other senior Army officers the same day: chief of chaplains Maj. Gen. William Green Jr. and Army Transformation and Training Command head Gen. David Hodne. Pentagon officials described the rationale as installing leaders who would implement President Trump and Hegseth's vision for the Army, with the proximate trigger reported to be a clash over Hegseth blocking four officer promotions. Gen. Christopher LaNeve, formerly Hegseth's military aide, was named acting chief of staff.
At his first press conference as Acting Attorney General on April 7, 2026, Todd Blanche said President Trump has a "right" and "duty" to order the Justice Department to investigate his political opponents, acknowledging that some ongoing DOJ matters involve "men, women and entities" Trump "believes should be investigated." Blanche dismissed the idea that Trump's demands amounted to improper "pressure," describing them as orders to investigate "to the fullest extent of the law." Blanche had become Acting AG days earlier, after Trump fired AG Pam Bondi over her insufficiently aggressive prosecution of his foes.
On April 14, 2026, former Attorney General Pam Bondi did not appear for a closed-door deposition before the House Oversight Committee pursuant to a bipartisan subpoena (passed 24-19 in March 2026) into the Justice Department's handling of the Epstein files. The non-appearance followed an April 8 letter from Assistant Attorney General Patrick D. Davis asserting that because President Trump had removed Bondi from office and replaced her with Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the subpoena — addressed to her "in her official capacity as Attorney General" — "no longer obligates her to appear." On April 29, 2026, Ranking Member Robert Garcia and all Committee Democrats filed a resolution to hold Bondi in civil contempt of Congress.
On April 14, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to vacate the seditious-conspiracy convictions and permanently dismiss the indictments of twelve January 6 defendants — Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and seven associates, and four Proud Boys associates. President Trump had commuted these defendants' prison sentences in January 2025; the motion goes further, seeking to erase the jury convictions themselves rather than only the sentences. The convictions remained on appeal and the motion was pending before the court as of filing.
On April 15, 2026, Jeanine Pirro, the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, publicly announced a dedicated tip line (202-252-0809) soliciting information about alleged sexual or inappropriate conduct by former Rep. Eric Swalwell during the period he lived in Washington, D.C. The announcement came days after Swalwell resigned from Congress and ended his California gubernatorial bid amid sexual-misconduct allegations he denies. Pirro, using the apparatus of a federal prosecutor's office, invited the public to report on a single named former member of Congress and prominent critic of the administration that appointed her.
On April 15, 2026, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed it had sent at least one criminal referral to the Justice Department seeking investigation of the anonymous 2019 whistleblower whose complaint helped trigger Donald Trump's first impeachment, and of former Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, who had found the complaint credible. The publicly released supporting documents provide no direct evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
On May 4, 2026, the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights opened a Title IX investigation into Smith College, an all-women's college in Northampton, Massachusetts, over its policy — in place since 2015 — of admitting transgender women and granting them access to women-only housing, facilities, and athletics. OCR's legal theory is that Title IX's single-sex exception permits all-female enrollment only "on the basis of biological sex difference, not subjective gender identity," so admitting trans women makes Smith no longer single-sex under the statute. The probe stems from a June 2025 complaint filed by the conservative legal group Defending Education.
On May 26, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division filed a brief at the Supreme Court urging the justices to take up the Arizona voter-registration dispute (RNC v. Mi Familia Vota) and to hold that the National Voter Registration Act's 90-day pre-election "quiet period" does not bar states from removing suspected noncitizens from their voter rolls. The filing endorses a parallel Republican National Committee certiorari petition as the better vehicle and comes after the Ninth Circuit struck down Arizona proof-of-citizenship and late-purge provisions as violating the NVRA. The filing itself is the recorded event; any decision to grant review or rule for the DOJ remains a contingent future step.
On April 17, 2026, the United States deported 15 South American nationals — seven women among them, all from Peru and Ecuador — to Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, in the first group transfer under a third-country deportation agreement between Washington and Kinshasa announced earlier in April. An attorney for one deportee told the Associated Press the group is entirely Latin American and that all 15 are believed to hold US immigration judges' protection against return to their home countries. The deportees were held near Kinshasa in a country whose language they do not speak, and the DRC said it would keep them briefly while the International Organization for Migration arranged "assisted voluntary return."
The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division notified Fairfax County, Virginia Commonwealth's Attorney Steve Descano that it has opened a federal investigation into his office's plea-bargaining, charging, and sentencing policies, alleging they may discriminate against U.S. citizens by giving preferential treatment based on immigration status. The probe centers on a December 2020 office directive instructing prosecutors to weigh the immigration consequences of charges and was announced about a week before Descano was scheduled to testify before Congress.
On the night of May 26, 2026, federal immigration officers sprayed chemical irritants and charged demonstrators gathered outside Delaney Hall, the 1,000-bed GEO Group-run ICE detention facility in Newark, New Jersey, where roughly 300 detainees were conducting a hunger and labor strike over conditions including spoiled food, denial of medical care, and failed air conditioning. The confrontation was the latest in days of clashes at the facility, coming after masked, armored federal personnel pepper-sprayed U.S. Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) there on Memorial Day. Journalists covering the protests were among those exposed to the chemical agents.
On May 26, 2026, Vice President JD Vance — who leads the Trump administration's anti-fraud effort — convened a White House roundtable on government-program fraud attended by Republican state attorneys general. Two dozen Democratic attorneys general had declined the invitation, citing less than one business day's notice and no agenda, and instead sent senior deputies; officials representing New York, California, New Jersey, and (per AG Letitia James) Minnesota, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Nevada said they were turned away at the door. Vance stated on camera that representatives from Connecticut and Oregon were present and that fighting fraud "should not be a partisan effort," even as the excluded Democratic offices held a press conference calling the event a political stunt.
At a White House cabinet meeting on May 27, 2026, President Donald Trump publicly directed that the number of National Guard troops deployed across Washington, D.C. not be reduced, saying "don't lower the number." Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, at the same table, responded that the administration would "surge this summer too." The exchange committed the executive branch to maintaining and expanding an ongoing federalized National Guard presence in the District, part of the administration's domestic security posture in U.S. cities.
An Associated Press investigation published May 27, 2026 found that at least 10 people have died by suicide in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody since January 2025 — a pace far outstripping the growth of the detained population and unprecedented in the agency's two-decade history, against a historical baseline of roughly zero to one such death per year. Seven of the deaths have occurred since October 2025, already the most in any single fiscal year, and suicides now account for nearly a fifth of the 51 deaths in ICE custody over the period. AP's review of ICE data, autopsy reports, coroner's rulings, and police records found facilities repeatedly violated ICE's own detention standards on intake screening, suicide-risk monitoring, mental-health care, and access to materials that could be used for self-harm.
In a report released May 27, 2026, Human Rights Watch documented that between January 20, 2025 and March 9, 2026 the Trump administration deported more than 18,000 third-country nationals, nearly 13,000 of them to Mexico under an undisclosed US-Mexico agreement; Cubans were the largest group, with 4,353 sent to Mexico. HRW found that none of the 53 deportees it interviewed were given any opportunity to contest their country of removal, a violation of due-process requirements under the Immigration and Nationality Act and international law, and that detainees faced overcrowding, denial of medical care, and guard violence in US custody before being left stranded in southern Mexico.
On May 27, 2026, the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation involving E. Jean Carroll — who won civil judgments against President Trump for sexual abuse ($5M) and defamation ($83M) — and the Hoffman-funded nonprofit that helped pay some of her legal costs. Prosecutors are examining Carroll's 2022 deposition testimony that no one else was funding her suit, a funding-discrepancy theory a federal appeals court already reviewed and rejected in 2024. The probe is run out of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Illinois under Trump appointee Andrew Boutros; Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, formerly Trump's personal attorney in the Carroll appeal, has recused.
On May 27, 2026, Judge Richard Eaton of the U.S. Court of International Trade ordered Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney S. Scott to appear in person at a June 9 hearing to answer the court's questions about the timing of CBP's compliance with a March 4, 2026 order directing the agency to refund roughly $166 billion in IEEPA tariffs the Supreme Court had ruled illegal. The government has acknowledged it can process refunds for only about $127 billion of the amount collected and has offered no plan for millions of additional entries. Requiring the agency head — rather than counsel — to testify is an unusual judicial escalation signaling concern that the administration is not fully complying with the refund directive.
Across 2025, President Trump signed seven proclamations invoking Clean Air Act Section 112(i)(4) — a provision unused in the statute's 55-year history — to grant more than 180 industrial facilities in 38 states and Puerto Rico a two-year exemption from federal hazardous-air-pollutant standards. A May 2026 ProPublica investigation found that facilities qualified by emailing an EPA-run inbox, with no rigorous application and no meaningful role for the agency's air-quality experts. The statute permits such exemptions only where compliance technology is "not available" and the exemption is "in the national security interests of the United States."
At an April 16, 2026 Pentagon briefing, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan Caine publicly committed U.S. forces to pursue "any Iranian-flagged vessel or any vessel attempting to provide material support to Iran," extending the naval blockade of Iran to the entire Iranian coast and the Indo-Pacific Command area of responsibility. The expansion advanced an "Economic Fury" coercion phase announced by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, with the military preparing to board and seize commercial ships in international waters. The campaign proceeds without a congressional declaration of war or AUMF, after the Senate's repeated War Powers resolutions were blocked by Republican leadership.