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.
ProPublica reported that Reliance Industries, the energy conglomerate of Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani, invested at least $100 million in America First Refining, an obscure Texas startup secretly backed by Donald Trump Jr. The investment followed months of Trump-administration tariff pressure on the Ambani empire and coincided with major U.S. policy wins for Reliance, including a February trade deal that lowered tariffs and a license to buy Venezuelan oil. The startup's representatives reportedly told foreign officials that investing would open doors at the White House.
Reporting published June 8, 2026 details that the Justice Department has not taken its customary steps to protect the 2026 election: it fired most lawyers in its Public Integrity Section, left the Election Crimes Branch director post unfilled, canceled election-integrity training for prosecutors and FBI agents, deleted a 281-page guide to prosecuting election offenses, and has not stood up the usual Election Day "command center" to monitor voter intimidation and disinformation. Enforcement now falls to the 93 local U.S. attorney offices, which former prosecutors warn lack the specialized expertise the dismantled units provided.
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.
Vice President JD Vance announced on June 8, 2026, that he was referring Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and state Attorney General Keith Ellison — both Democrats — to the Justice Department for a criminal fraud investigation. Vance said the referral followed a Republican-led House Oversight Committee report and letter alleging the officials knew of fraud in federally funded social programs and failed to act. Ellison called it "a political stunt from an administration that uses the machinery of government to target its perceived opponents."
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.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials denied entry to Omar Abdulkadir Artan, a Somali national and one of FIFA's 52 selected referees for the 2026 World Cup, when he arrived at Miami International Airport on June 6, 2026, despite his holding a valid U.S. visa. DHS said on June 8 that Artan was "determined to be inadmissible due to vetting concerns" — Somalia is among the countries named in the administration's June 2025 travel-ban proclamation — and FIFA confirmed he will be unable to train or officiate at the tournament.
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 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.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials denied entry to Omar Abdulkadir Artan, a Somali national and one of FIFA's 52 selected referees for the 2026 World Cup, when he arrived at Miami International Airport on June 6, 2026, despite his holding a valid U.S. visa. DHS said on June 8 that Artan was "determined to be inadmissible due to vetting concerns" — Somalia is among the countries named in the administration's June 2025 travel-ban proclamation — and FIFA confirmed he will be unable to train or officiate at the tournament.
Reporting published June 8, 2026 details that the Justice Department has not taken its customary steps to protect the 2026 election: it fired most lawyers in its Public Integrity Section, left the Election Crimes Branch director post unfilled, canceled election-integrity training for prosecutors and FBI agents, deleted a 281-page guide to prosecuting election offenses, and has not stood up the usual Election Day "command center" to monitor voter intimidation and disinformation. Enforcement now falls to the 93 local U.S. attorney offices, which former prosecutors warn lack the specialized expertise the dismantled units provided.
Vice President JD Vance announced on June 8, 2026, that he was referring Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and state Attorney General Keith Ellison — both Democrats — to the Justice Department for a criminal fraud investigation. Vance said the referral followed a Republican-led House Oversight Committee report and letter alleging the officials knew of fraud in federally funded social programs and failed to act. Ellison called it "a political stunt from an administration that uses the machinery of government to target its perceived opponents."
ProPublica reported that Reliance Industries, the energy conglomerate of Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani, invested at least $100 million in America First Refining, an obscure Texas startup secretly backed by Donald Trump Jr. The investment followed months of Trump-administration tariff pressure on the Ambani empire and coincided with major U.S. policy wins for Reliance, including a February trade deal that lowered tariffs and a license to buy Venezuelan oil. The startup's representatives reportedly told foreign officials that investing would open doors at the White House.
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.
Malik Muhammad — an Army veteran and activist serving the longest federal sentence of any 2020 Black Lives Matter protester — disappeared from Oregon's inmate-tracking system for weeks in spring 2026 before supporters learned they had been transferred roughly 3,000 miles to Kirkland Correctional Institution in South Carolina, a facility designated a "confidential location." In mid-May, South Carolina's prison system told The Intercept it had no record of anyone named Malik Muhammad in its custody, and Muhammad's Oregon-based attorney has been unable to communicate with them in a privileged manner since the transfer. Muhammad's attorney characterizes the interstate transfer as retaliation for helping other incarcerated people pursue a class-action suit over Oregon's use of solitary confinement; Oregon flatly denies the transfer was retaliatory.
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.