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
recording — or to two independent investigative outlets. See our
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ProPublica reported that the Justice Department's Office of the Deputy Attorney General, then headed by now–Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, shut down a career-initiated federal criminal investigation into potential Clean Water Act violations by the coal empire of Sen. Jim Justice (R-WV), a close Trump ally. Prosecutors with the EPA, DOJ's Environmental Crimes Section, and the Western District of Virginia believed they had a strong case and were litigating subpoenas when they were told "pencils down." DOJ said the case was not consistent with the administration's priorities and should be resolved civilly; former prosecutors called top-level intervention to quash an early-stage criminal case highly unusual.
On Saturday, June 6, 2026, GEO Group — the private contractor operating ICE's Delaney Hall detention facility in Newark — canceled the day's family visitation, turning away spouses and children at the gate, according to Mother Jones. U.S. Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.), conducting a congressional oversight visit, was admitted but told that if he spoke with any detainee the tour would be terminated immediately. Kim reported seeing a woman curled up in visible medical distress in a women's housing unit, more than two weeks into detainees' hunger and labor strike over conditions, and said guards would not answer his questions about her.
An NPR investigation published June 6, 2026 documented that U.S. Customs and Border Protection has deported more than 200 Filipino professional mariners since 2025 after accusing them — without charges, prosecutions, or presented evidence — of possessing child sexual abuse material. Agents board cruise and commercial ships in port, search crew members' phones, revoke their crew visas, and remove them to Manila within roughly 24 hours, with 10-year entry bans in at least some cases. The Pilipino Workers Center has tracked at least 212 such cases, all visa revocations with no criminal charges.
In a Wall Street Journal interview published June 5, 2026, President Trump said he has directed newly installed acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte to "start the process" of firing national-security personnel and to make the intelligence community smaller, framing the targets as career officials who served under the Biden and Obama administrations. Trump said Pulte's "acting" status leaves him "less shackled" to execute rapid cuts, and indicated he does not intend to formally nominate Pulte — who has no national-security background — for the permanent role.
On June 5, 2026, the U.S. Attorney's office in Los Angeles, led by Trump appointee Bill Essayli, said it had opened "multiple election fraud investigations" into California's elections and dispatched an assistant U.S. attorney to Los Angeles County's vote-counting center. The move followed days of evidence-free claims by President Trump that Democrats were "rigging" the slow primary count for governor, Los Angeles mayor, and Congress, and inserted federal pressure into a routine state-run tabulation that local officials said was proceeding normally.
U.S. District Chief Judge John J. McConnell Jr. of the District of Rhode Island ruled on June 5, 2026 that USCIS unlawfully froze asylum claims and immigration-benefit adjudications — work permits, green cards, and citizenship — for nationals of the 39 countries under the administration's travel restrictions. The 135-page ruling found the freeze exceeded the agency's statutory authority, was arbitrary and capricious, and masked anti-immigrant animus behind pretextual national-security claims, and ordered processing resumed.
On June 5, 2026, the FBI fired five employees — four intelligence analysts and a supervisory analyst — who were involved in creating the withdrawn 2023 "Richmond memo" on "Radical Traditionalist Catholic" ideology, a document long targeted by President Trump's allies. An internal FBI review and a DOJ inspector general review had both previously found no malicious intent and no discriminatory conduct, and the employees had already been admonished, with corrective process changes adopted. Their lawyer called the firings "manifestly unjust, completely unsupported by the facts."
As California carried out its routine post-election ballot count following the June 2 primary, President Trump posted on Truth Social accusing Democrats, without evidence, of trying to "steal" the gubernatorial and Los Angeles mayoral races by misusing mail-in ballots and deliberately delaying the tally. He asserted the count was "under investigation" by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles — which declined to comment — even though California law routinely allows up to 30 days to count ballots and certify results.
On June 4, 2026, the Trump administration moved to direct roughly $700 million in federal support to the coal industry, invoking the Defense Production Act — a 1950 national-defense statute — to fund coal-fired power plants and export infrastructure. The package routes about $425 million in DPA funds to 13 existing plants across 10 states, roughly $185 million in Energy Department grants to build two new coal plants (Alaska and West Virginia) and restart a Maryland plant, and $75 million in DPA funds toward the West Gateway coal export terminal in Oakland, California. It builds on an April 20, 2026 Presidential Determination declaring coal supply chains and baseload power "essential to national defense," with the stated rationale being rising electricity demand from AI and data centers rather than a defense emergency.
On June 4, 2026, President Donald Trump granted a "full, complete, and unconditional" pardon to Stephen Buyer, a former Republican congressman from Indiana convicted in 2023 of securities fraud for two insider-trading schemes, sentenced to 22 months, and ordered to forfeit more than $350,000. The proclamation cites the "advice and recommendation" of more than 50 current and former Republican members of Congress, whose letters — which Trump amplified on Truth Social on May 31 — cast the jury conviction as Biden-administration "lawfare" against a "deep state" target.
On June 4, 2026, the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division announced it had opened 15 new investigations into U.S. medical schools over alleged race discrimination in admissions, expanding a campaign that had already produced adverse findings against the medical schools of Yale University and UCLA. The Division said it would examine whether the schools — each a recipient of millions of dollars in federal funding — comply with Title VI as interpreted by the Supreme Court's 2023 decision restricting race-conscious admissions. The schools under investigation were not publicly named.
Acting ICE Director David Venturella issued an internal memo on June 4, 2026 ending the agency's requirement to report and investigate deaths that occur within 30 days of a detainee's release from custody, rescinding a transparency policy adopted in 2021. The change removes a congressional accountability data stream that oversight bodies had used to track deaths connected to detention conditions. Advocates and public health experts warned the rollback would obscure the human cost of immigration detention as in-custody deaths reach a two-decade high.
On June 3, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order implementing "Schedule Policy/Career" — a revival of the first-term "Schedule F" — that reclassifies roughly 8,000 senior career federal positions, about 97% of them at the GS-15 level or above, into a new at-will category. Affected employees lose civil-service removal protections and the right to appeal adverse actions to the Merit Systems Protection Board, letting agencies fire them without cause. The Office of Personnel Management, which finalized the underlying rule, had earlier estimated up to 50,000 positions could ultimately be covered and has not ruled out expanding the pool.
On June 3, 2026, the U.S. military struck a vessel it alleged was smuggling drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing two men, according to U.S. Southern Command. The strike was part of Operation Southern Spear, the administration's open-ended military campaign against suspected traffickers begun in September 2025; the Pentagon provided no evidence the boat carried drugs and no arrest, charge, or judicial process preceded the killings. The reported cumulative death toll from the campaign's boat strikes reached at least 207.
On June 2, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court granted Alabama's emergency request to use its Republican-drawn congressional map for the November 2026 midterms, a map with a majority-Black population in only one of the state's seven districts. The unsigned emergency-docket order, decided 6-3 along ideological lines, overrode a three-judge federal panel that had found the map intentionally discriminated against Black voters in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and displaced the court-drawn districts used in 2024. The three liberal justices dissented, with Justice Sotomayor warning that the decision "disregards both democratic values and the rule of law."
On June 2, 2026, the Department of Defense confirmed it had placed Elias Irizarry — who pleaded guilty to a charge stemming from the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack and, like other January 6 defendants, was later pardoned — as a political appointee in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict (SO/LIC), within its irregular-warfare and counterterrorism section. The post oversees sensitive special-operations activity and requires a top-secret clearance. The appointment drew internal alarm over entrusting someone convicted in the Capitol assault with a national-security role; the Pentagon defended the hire, calling Irizarry a "qualified, patriotic young professional."
On June 2, 2026, President Trump named Bill Pulte — director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, with no intelligence background — acting Director of National Intelligence, succeeding Tulsi Gabbard, who plans to resign effective June 30. The acting designation lets Pulte lead the 18-agency intelligence community without Senate confirmation while he keeps his FHFA post and his chairmanship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Federal officials announced a "summer surge" of the DC Safe and Beautiful Task Force, requesting roughly 1,500 additional National Guard members to raise the federalized troop presence in Washington, D.C. to about 5,000 (up from ~2,800) ahead of the America 250 / July 4, 2026 celebrations. The plan keeps Guard members on Title 32 orders under the D.C. National Guard and folds militarized enforcement tools — high- visibility patrols, drones, tactical K-9 units, and helicopters — into routine policing of the capital, with no announced end date.
On May 31, 2026, U.S. Southern Command struck a vessel in the eastern Pacific Ocean it described as a drug-trafficking boat, killing three men in the fourth such strike of the week. SOUTHCOM said the boat was "engaged in narco-trafficking operations" and operated by a designated terrorist organization but provided no evidence, and said the strike came at the direction of Gen. Francis L. Donovan, the top U.S. commander in Latin America. The strike is the latest in an open-ended military campaign begun in early September 2025 whose reported death toll has now reached roughly 205, carried out with no judicial process and no congressional authorization for hostilities against Latin American drug-trafficking organizations.
On May 30, 2026, President Donald Trump published a 700-word Truth Social post demanding that U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper "be brought up on charges" and impeached over Cooper's ruling that the Kennedy Center board lacked authority to rename the institution after Trump. Trump asserted the judge had "a total Conflict of Interest," citing the political affiliations of Cooper's wife, attorney Amy Jeffress, rather than any finding of judicial misconduct. The demand to prosecute and remove a sitting judge specifically for how he ruled is a direct pressure campaign against judicial independence.
On the night of March 22, 2026, plainclothes ICE agents forcibly arrested a woman, later identified by DHS as Angelina Lopez-Jimenez, and her roughly 10-year-old daughter inside San Francisco International Airport, holding the crying woman on the floor and wheeling her away in restraints while refusing bystanders' requests to identify themselves or show badges. About a dozen San Francisco police officers formed a barrier around the agents but did not intervene. DHS said the family was subject to a 2019 final order of removal and was being repatriated to Guatemala; the arrest coincided with a new federal deployment of ICE agents to U.S. airports.
On March 23, 2026 — three days after a federal judge permanently enjoined the Defense Department's earlier press restrictions as unconstitutional — Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell announced that the in-building press workspace, including the decades-old "Correspondents' Corridor," was now entirely off-limits to journalists. The department said a replacement workspace would be relocated to an annex outside the Pentagon and that all journalist access would henceforth require an escort by authorized personnel. The New York Times and the Pentagon Press Association called the move a violation of the court's order and a retaliatory narrowing of press access.
José Guadalupe Ramos-Solano, a 45-year-old Mexican national, was found unconscious in his bunk and pronounced dead on March 25, 2026, while detained at the GEO Group-operated Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California. Other detainees said he had complained of overheating and difficulty breathing hours earlier and that staff did not respond until he was unresponsive. His death was the 14th known death in ICE custody in 2026 and at least the fourth at the Adelanto complex since 2025, prompting Mexico's Los Angeles consulate and two members of Congress to demand an investigation.
On March 25, 2026, the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division opened Title VI compliance-review investigations into the medical schools of Stanford University, the Ohio State University, and the University of California, San Diego, over alleged race discrimination in admissions. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon announced the probes, and the Division sent letters demanding seven years of applicant data — MCAT scores, GPAs, ZIP codes, family ties to alumni or donors, internal DEI communications, and correspondence with pharmaceutical companies — by an April 24, 2026 deadline, citing the schools' federal funding.
On March 25, 2026, the U.S. Justice Department agreed to pay $1.25 million to retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, President Trump's former national security adviser, to settle his lawsuit alleging malicious prosecution over his 2017 criminal case. Flynn had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and was later pardoned by Trump; he originally sued for $50 million in 2023 and revived the case after Trump returned to office. The settlement was reached under DOJ leadership Flynn publicly thanked by name.
ProPublica reported that the Justice Department's Office of the Deputy Attorney General, then headed by now–Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, shut down a career-initiated federal criminal investigation into potential Clean Water Act violations by the coal empire of Sen. Jim Justice (R-WV), a close Trump ally. Prosecutors with the EPA, DOJ's Environmental Crimes Section, and the Western District of Virginia believed they had a strong case and were litigating subpoenas when they were told "pencils down." DOJ said the case was not consistent with the administration's priorities and should be resolved civilly; former prosecutors called top-level intervention to quash an early-stage criminal case highly unusual.
On March 26, 2026, President Trump signed Executive Order 14398, "Addressing DEI Discrimination by Federal Contractors," directing agencies to insert a mandatory clause — flowing down to subcontractors at every tier — that bars "racially discriminatory" diversity, equity, and inclusion practices and makes compliance material to government payment decisions, exposing contractors to False Claims Act liability and to cancellation, suspension, or debarment. The order directs the Attorney General to prioritize False Claims Act enforcement against violators and defines covered "program participation" expansively to include training, mentoring, leadership-development programs, clubs, and associations. A legal challenge was filed within days, and the new clause was set to take effect April 24, 2026.
At a CPAC fireside chat on March 26, 2026, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche declared that every Justice Department and FBI employee who worked on the criminal investigations into President Trump had been fired, resigned, or taken early retirement — "not a single man or woman" remained — putting the DOJ figure at "over 200." His public confirmation marked the completion of a systematic purge of the career personnel who had investigated the president, with termination letters citing employees' prosecution work as the reason they could not be "trusted."
At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Grapevine, Texas on March 27, 2026, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr declared that President Trump "is winning" his fight against the "fake news media," citing the defunding of PBS and NPR, the departures of named journalists and hosts, and ownership changes at CBS and CNN as "results." Carr added the administration was "not at the point yet" of "raising the mission accomplished flag," a week after he had warned broadcasters they would "lose their licenses" over Iran War coverage he called "hoaxes and news distortions."
One day after telling a federal judge at argument in United States v. Amore that no analysis had been conducted on the nonpublic state voter registration data in its possession, DOJ's Civil Rights Division filed a "Clarification of Record" admitting that preliminary internal analysis had in fact begun — specifically, identifying and quantifying "duplicate and deceased" registered voters in each state. The correction came a day after CBS News revealed DOJ was finalizing a deal to share voter-roll data with DHS, and after DOJ attorneys had assured judges in Connecticut and Minnesota that the data was not being analyzed or shared.
The Justice Department filed a federal lawsuit against the Minnesota Department of Education and the Minnesota State High School League, alleging that the state's trans-inclusive athletics policies violate Title IX by allowing transgender girls to compete in girls' sports and use girls' locker rooms and bathrooms. The suit seeks a permanent injunction barring transgender girls from female-designated sports, sex-separated locker rooms and bathrooms, compensation for female athletes, and "correction" of past athletic records — with roughly $2.98 billion in annual federal education funding at stake.
Roughly a dozen ICE vehicles surrounded Salah Sarsour — a lawful permanent resident of more than 30 years and five-year board president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee, Wisconsin's largest Islamic organization — on Milwaukee's south side, where by his family's account a plainclothes officer pointed a gun at him before identifying the arrest as immigration custody. He was moved to the Broadview Detention Center in Illinois and then to a county jail in Indiana, and DHS publicly branded him a "terrorist" and an "illegal alien from Jordan," resting on an Israeli military-court conviction from his teenage years that his counsel says the government knew about when it admitted him in 1993. His attorneys say the government is also invoking the foreign-policy-threat ground used against Mahmoud Khalil and that the case is retaliation for his Palestinian-rights advocacy.
The Marine Corps confirmed that ICE agents would be stationed at access points of Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island during recruit family days and graduation week to conduct "enhanced screening and lawful immigration status inquiries" on visiting families of graduating Marines — by the depot's own account, the first time federal law enforcement has supported base access operations there in this capacity. After NBC News reported the notice, DHS denied that arrests would occur, defense officials blamed an internal communications failure, and the depot's guidance was revised — though the updated rules still bar visitors without legal status from the installation entirely.
On March 31, 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on his personal X account that the Army aircrews suspended over a March 28 Apache helicopter flyby of singer Kid Rock's Nashville estate would face "No punishment. No investigation," lifting the suspensions and quashing the Army's formal review hours after the service had confirmed it. The reversal came shortly after President Trump commented publicly on the incident, and Hegseth opened his post by thanking Kid Rock.
U.S. District Judge Jennifer Thurston ruled in an order unsealed April 1, 2026, that U.S. Border Patrol agents defied her April 2025 preliminary injunction barring detentions without documented reasonable suspicion and warrantless arrests without a flight-risk finding. In a July 2025 sweep at a Sacramento Home Depot, agents arrested 12 people — 11 noncitizens and one U.S. citizen — using essentially identical, boilerplate I-213 forms that failed to document the required articulable facts. She ordered agents to write signed, individualized narrative reports supporting each stop.
In the week of April 1, 2026, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posted a list of more than two dozen diagnostic tests it had paused — the largest set the agency has ever halted at once — including testing for rabies, mpox, Epstein-Barr, and varicella-zoster, as well as rare imported pathogens. Reporting tied the pause directly to the agency's downsizing: staffing fell an estimated 20-25%, with the poxvirus and rabies labs losing about half their staff and the malaria branch gutted further. HHS called the pause a "routine review," a framing the reporting on staffing losses contradicts.
ProPublica revealed on April 1, 2026 that Aaron Szabo, the EPA assistant administrator leading the rollback of federal methane-emissions rules, was the unnamed author of the oil industry's January 2022 comment letter against those same rules, written while he was a registered lobbyist for an industry member. Now overseeing the rewrite at EPA, Szabo has solicited input and specific regulatory language from the industry groups that stand to benefit.
On April 2, 2026, federal immigration agents detained Annie Ramos, the 22-year-old newlywed wife of U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Matthew Blank, inside Fort Polk, Louisiana, where the couple had gone to register her for a military ID and spouse benefits. Ramos, born in Honduras and brought to the U.S. before age 2, was held on a final removal order issued in absentia in 2005, when she was a toddler, despite a DACA application pending since 2020. After five days in detention she was released April 7 on an order of supervision with a GPS monitor, with removal proceedings continuing.
On April 2, 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth forced Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George to retire "effective immediately," roughly 18 months before the end of his statutory four-year term. Defense officials tied the removal not to policy differences but to Hegseth's effort to clear the orbit of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll — whom Hegseth cannot fire — and to install loyalists, with Hegseth's former senior military aide, Gen. Christopher LaNeve, made acting chief of staff.
On April 6, 2026, the U.S. Department of Education announced it had terminated six civil-rights resolution agreements — reached with five school districts and one college under the Obama and Biden administrations — that protected transgender students from discrimination. The terminations end federal enforcement of obligations such as staff training on students' names and pronouns and access to facilities matching gender identity; in one case the department went further, requiring Delaware Valley School District (PA) to affirmatively roll back its antidiscrimination protections, which its board did in late March.