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
editorial standards.
Receive the daily digest by email
One email each morning with every entry filed the day before. Free. No tracking, no ads. Unsubscribe anytime.
In an Associated Press exclusive published May 27-28, 2026, current and former U.S. law enforcement officials said the Trump administration quietly instructed federal prosecutors in Miami to avoid pursuing criminal investigations into Venezuela's acting President Delcy Rodríguez, a longtime DEA target whose intelligence file dates to at least 2018 and who has surfaced in nearly a dozen DEA investigations. Officials said the directive was meant to avoid upsetting the administration's efforts to stabilize Venezuela after Nicolás Maduro's removal and to open the country to U.S. investment; the AP separately reported federal scrutiny of Colombian President Gustavo Petro, another DEA "priority target," has likewise been paused. A Justice Department spokesperson said "there was never an investigation into her to shut down," a denial that conflicts with the law-enforcement sourcing and DEA records obtained by AP.
On May 28, 2026, the ACLU and the ACLU of Tennessee filed a motion for a preliminary injunction in federal court (Demster v. Blanche, W.D. Tenn.), backed by sworn declarations from nine community members who say they were surveilled at home, tailed and "bumper-ridden" in their cars, subjected to pretextual traffic stops, and in at least one case tackled and falsely arrested after observing and recording the Memphis Safe Task Force. The 31-agency federal-state task force has patrolled Memphis since September 2025 at the invitation of President Donald Trump and Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, deploying thousands of federal, state, and National Guard personnel. The declarations are allegations in active litigation, not adjudicated findings.
On May 28, 2026, a federal jury in the Eastern District of Washington found three Spokane protesters — Army combat veteran Bajun Mavalwalla II, Justice Forral, and Gonzaga Law alum Jac Archer — guilty in the first prosecution in that district's history under 18 U.S.C. § 372, a Civil War-era conspiracy statute, for their roles in a June 11, 2025 protest against an ICE deportation transport. Forral and Archer were convicted of conspiring to impede federal officers and to damage their property; Mavalwalla was convicted of aiding and abetting the conspiracy. The defendants face up to six years in prison and $250,000 fines and plan Rule 29 acquittal motions and appeals. The Justice Department had directed prosecutors nationwide to prioritize anti-ICE-protest cases, and the acting U.S. Attorney for Eastern Washington resigned rather than sign the indictment.
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.
Internal National Park Service records obtained by The New York Times show NPS contracting analysts concluded that Atlantic Industrial Coatings — the Virginia firm given a no-bid contract to repair the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool (recorded earlier as issue #66) — built a 20% overhead-and-profit margin into its bid, against a typical federal-construction range of 6% to 12%. The analysis described the margin as "inflated" and "excessive" and identified at least roughly $850,000 in avoidable cost. A senior official in the Park Service's contracting office approved the full $13.1 million bid anyway — about seven times the cost President Trump publicly estimated for the project.
A joint THE CITY / Documented investigation published May 27, 2026 analyzed more than 1,200 habeas petitions filed in three federal courts in the New York region between October 2025 and March 2026 and identified 430 ICE street arrests, of which more than 93% were of people from Latin American countries — even though Latinos make up roughly 66% of the region's immigrants without legal status. The 27-point gap is consistent with an active federal lawsuit by the Workers' Center of Central New York alleging suspicionless, warrantless ICE stops aimed at Latino communities.
The Department of Defense awarded Dell Federal Systems a five-year, roughly $9.7 billion blanket purchase agreement on May 27, 2026 to consolidate Microsoft software licensing and cloud services across the military, intelligence community, and Coast Guard. Financial disclosures released by the Office of Government Ethics show investment accounts in President Trump's name bought Dell Technologies shares during the procurement window — a roughly $1M–$5M purchase on February 10, 2026, followed by smaller buys in March — nine days before Trump publicly urged supporters to "go out and buy a Dell computer." The award also follows Michael Dell's $6.25 billion pledge to the administration's "Trump Accounts" initiative and his seat on Trump's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
On May 27, 2026, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed a joint motion with Gemini Trust Company asking a federal judge in the Southern District of New York to vacate the January 2025 consent order that had imposed a $5 million penalty and a permanent injunction on the Winklevoss-twin-owned crypto exchange. The CFTC, under Trump-appointed Chairman Michael Selig, said the 2022 case "should not have been filed," while agreeing the $5 million penalty would not be refunded. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss together donated more than $1 million to Trump's super PAC before his 2025 inauguration.
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 April 6, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a brief order with no noted dissents, vacated the D.C. Circuit ruling that had upheld Steve Bannon's 2022 conviction on two misdemeanor counts of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the House January 6 committee, and remanded the case for consideration of a pending dismissal motion. The Trump Justice Department had moved to dismiss the prosecution of the president's former chief strategist as "in the interests of justice," and the order clears the path for that dismissal. Bannon served four months in prison in 2024 after a jury found him guilty.
On 2026-04-06 the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights rescinded six Title IX resolution agreements with five school districts and Taft College that had required protections for transgender students, ceasing all monitoring and enforcement. OCR said the prior administration's agreements "distorted the plain meaning" of Title IX; the agreements had followed federal findings of discrimination against transgender students.
Acting CDC Director Jay Bhattacharya blocked publication of a completed, internally peer-reviewed CDC study finding that COVID-19 vaccines sharply reduced harm last winter — cutting COVID-related emergency-room visits by roughly 50% and hospitalizations by roughly 55% among healthy adults. The study had cleared the agency's scientific review and was scheduled to run March 19 in the CDC's flagship journal, the MMWR, before Bhattacharya personally intervened to withhold it, citing the study's observational methodology — a method the agency routinely uses to estimate vaccine effectiveness against seasonal respiratory viruses. After an initial delay surfaced in early April, HHS and CDC moved to reject publication outright, reported April 22.
On April 9, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan against Washtenaw County, its Board of Commissioners, Sheriff Alyshia M. Dyer, and Prosecuting Attorney Eli Savit, alleging that local measures declining ICE detainers absent a judicial warrant and barring ICE from county property unlawfully obstruct federal immigration enforcement. DOJ seeks declaratory and injunctive relief and frames the case as one of roughly 14 similar actions it has filed against Democratic-led jurisdictions in the past year.
On April 11, 2026, independent journalist Mel Buer was shoved by Los Angeles Police Department officers and threatened with arrest while filming a protest against immigration raids outside the downtown Metropolitan Detention Center. As officers made arrests, they advanced on roughly half a dozen clearly identified reporters with batons, pushing them down the street and declaring the area an emergency operation subject to arrest. Buer said she was shoved hard enough that her ribs hurt for about two hours afterward.
In sworn testimony to the House Armed Services Committee on April 29, 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth defended firing or sidelining nearly 30 generals and admirals over the prior year by telling lawmakers that "under Barack Obama, 197 general officers were removed." The New York Times reported the figure "has no basis in fact": it traces to an unsigned 2018 Investor's Business Daily editorial sourced to Breitbart, and the underlying list combines years and counts field-grade officers dismissed for unrelated reasons such as misconduct and DUIs. The Pentagon had used the same number in November 2025 and, when challenged on its origin, asked the Times not to publish it and reissued a statement without it — indicating the department knew the figure was baseless before Hegseth repeated it under questioning.
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 1, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane in federal court to compel turnover of the state's complete, unredacted voter registration database for roughly one million registered Idahoans — including dates of birth and either driver's license numbers or the last four digits of Social Security numbers. The DOJ invoked the Civil Rights Act of 1960 and asked the court to order compliance within five days. McGrane, a Republican, had signed a data-sharing agreement in fall 2025 but reversed course in February 2026, citing Idaho's voter-privacy law and the absence of any clear legal duty to release the sensitive fields. The filing was at least the 30th DOJ suit against a state in a nationwide campaign to obtain voter data ahead of the 2026 midterms.
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 Friday, April 10, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice fired Boston immigration judge Roopal Patel and Chelmsford immigration judge Nina Froes by email, days before the end of their two-year probationary terms. Patel had ruled in January that DHS failed to prove its case for deporting Tufts graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, and Froes had dismissed removal proceedings against Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi. The two were among roughly six judges fired that weekend and more than 100 immigration judges removed since the start of the second Trump term.
Depositions and documents unsealed in American Oversight's Federal Records Act litigation, reported by the Washington Post on April 13, 2026, showed that U.S. DOGE Service staff routinely conducted official agency-restructuring business over Signal chats configured to auto-delete, leaving no government record of the deliberations behind DOGE's firings, reorganizations, and data-access decisions. After the earlier Signalgate scandal, the White House issued a records-retention policy that merely advised — but did not require — employees to preserve such messages or disable auto-delete. American Oversight reports that more than a dozen FOIA requests for top officials' ephemeral-platform messages have returned zero responsive records.
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.
In sworn testimony to the House Armed Services Committee on April 29, 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed that under President Biden "troops were deployed to polling locations in 15 states" during the 2024 election, and repeated the claim to the Senate Armed Services Committee the next day. The claim is false: the roughly 250 National Guard personnel active across 15 states on Election Day 2024 were activated by individual state governors — not the President — for election cybersecurity and logistical support, and none were placed at polling sites, according to a CNN review and responses from the states.
On May 2, 2026, masked ICE agents who had arrested Nigerian national Chidozie Wilson Okeke in Bushwick, Brooklyn took him to Wyckoff Heights Medical Center, drawing roughly 200 protesters. An ICE agent deployed pepper spray — injuring four NYPD officers and affecting the surrounding crowd — while other agents dragged Okeke, who appeared semi-conscious, from the emergency room across the pavement to a waiting ICE vehicle. Nine demonstrators were arrested or charged, and the NYPD's role drew accusations that it violated New York City's sanctuary-city laws.
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.