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
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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.
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.
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, 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 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, 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 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, 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. 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, 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 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.
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 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 May 22, 2026, the Department of Homeland Security awarded BI2 Technologies a $25.1 million no-bid contract for more than 1,500 iris-scanning devices and continuous access to BI2's biometric database of more than five million booking records — roughly five times the value and nearly eight times the device count of DHS's prior September 2025 contract with the Massachusetts firm. The procurement did not require the system to clear FedRAMP, the federal cloud-security review for systems handling sensitive data, and the award documents described no independent audit, no congressional notification, and no outside review of how scans would be retained, shared, or matched. ICE plans to deploy the devices to Enforcement and Removal Operations agents for field use by late June.
On May 21, 2026, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services issued Policy Memorandum PM-602-0199, reclassifying adjustment of status — the process by which eligible immigrants obtain a green card without leaving the country — as an "extraordinary" form of relief and an act of "administrative grace" rather than a routine pathway. The memo directs officers to treat an applicant's choice to pursue adjustment of status inside the United States, instead of consular processing abroad, as an adverse factor weighing against approval, a change that would force most green-card seekers — including spouses of U.S. citizens, students, and employer-sponsored workers — to leave the country and apply through a U.S. consulate. The restructuring affects an estimated half-million cases a year and was made by internal agency memorandum, without legislation or notice-and-comment rulemaking; USCIS says it implements existing law, while former officials of both parties call it largely unprecedented.
On May 21, 2026, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois moved in open court to dismiss with prejudice all remaining charges against the "Broadview Six" — protesters criminally charged over a September 2025 demonstration outside the Broadview ICE facility — after his office acknowledged misconduct in the grand jury proceedings that produced the indictment. Defense counsel said the transcripts showed prosecutors improperly vouched for evidence, concealed that an initial grand jury had refused to indict, re-presented the case after excluding grand jurors who disagreed, and redacted transcript pages without telling the court. U.S. District Judge April Perry, who reviewed the transcripts, said she had never in her career seen prosecutorial conduct as bad, and signaled a possible separate hearing on sanctions.
On May 21, 2026, the Louisiana House and Governmental Affairs Committee voted 10-7 along party lines to advance Senate Bill 121, a mid-decade congressional redistricting plan, to the full House, adopting an amendment by Rep. Dixon McMakin. The map dismantles the majority-Black 6th District held by Rep. Cleo Fields, reducing Louisiana's majority-Black congressional districts from two to one, and is projected to give Republicans a 5-1 advantage in the state's six-seat U.S. House delegation. The redraw follows the U.S. Supreme Court's April 29, 2026 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which struck down the state's two-majority-Black-district map and weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
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 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.
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.
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.
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."
On April 18, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice installed Joseph diGenova — a longtime Washington attorney, former U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, and a Trump legal-team adviser during the Mueller investigation who has publicly backed efforts to overturn the 2020 election — as Counselor to the Attorney General in the Southern District of Florida, assigned to the federal criminal investigation of former CIA Director John Brennan. The appointment came one day after the Justice Department removed career national-security prosecutor Maria Medetis Long from the Brennan probe after she resisted bringing charges career prosecutors judged unsupported by the evidence. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, seeking to retain the job after President Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi earlier in April over dissatisfaction at the pace of cases against Trump's political adversaries, drove the appointment.
On April 24, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice announced — in a same-day press release from the Office of Public Affairs paired with the Office of Legal Policy report "Restoring and Strengthening the Federal Death Penalty" — that it had directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons to expand the federal execution protocol to include the firing squad alongside other methods, and to reinstate the pentobarbital lethal-injection protocol used during the first Trump administration. The DOJ also directed BOP to consider relocating or expanding federal death row or constructing an additional execution facility to accommodate the added methods. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the action; the underlying report's preparation had been directed by former Attorney General Pamela Bondi.
On April 24, 2026, the Trump White House emailed all 22 seated members of the National Science Board — the statutory body Congress created in 1950 to set National Science Foundation policy, submit its budget, and approve its programs and awards — informing them their positions were "terminated, effective immediately." The mass dismissal removed the NSF's entire congressionally-created oversight body in a single morning, without legislative action and without replacement appointments in hand, leaving the agency's roughly $9 billion in research funding without its governing board.
On April 24, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice announced — in a same-day press release from the Office of Public Affairs paired with the Office of Legal Policy report "Restoring and Strengthening the Federal Death Penalty" — that it planned to publish a proposed rule prohibiting capital inmates from submitting clemency petitions, and the Office of the Pardon Attorney from considering them, until the inmate's direct appeal and first collateral attack are final. The rule, within DOJ's claimed rulemaking authority, would for the first time foreclose for years at a time a clemency remedy that historically has run in parallel with — not after — judicial review.
On April 24, 2026, the Board of Immigration Appeals — an administrative appellate tribunal within the Department of Justice's Executive Office for Immigration Review — issued a precedent decision, Matter of Santiago-Santiago, 29 I&N Dec. 589 (BIA 2026), holding that an immigration judge "erred" by terminating removal proceedings solely because the respondent, DACA recipient Catalina "Xóchitl" Santiago, held active Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status, without weighing the Department of Homeland Security's reasons for opposing termination. The three-judge appellate panel sustained DHS's appeal, vacated the immigration judge's termination, and remanded the case to a different immigration judge. The ruling is binding on immigration judges nationwide and narrows what had operated as a de facto class-wide protection for the roughly 500,000 active DACA recipients, without any statutory or formal regulatory change to the DACA program itself.
On April 25, 2026, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents re-arrested Hayam El Gamal and her five children at the family's first required post-release check-in in Colorado Springs, two days after U.S. District Judge Fred Biery of the Western District of Texas ordered them freed pending their asylum proceedings. ICE routed the family onto a flight bound for Michigan and told them they would be deported to Egypt; the plane reversed course mid-air only after Judge Biery and U.S. District Judge Nina Wang of Colorado issued emergency orders Saturday evening directing that the family not be removed. The mother and her five children — held at the Dilley, Texas family detention center for more than ten months and never charged with any crime — were released again just after midnight on April 26.
On April 25, 2026, The New York Times reported the existence of internal Department of Homeland Security training materials — not previously published by DHS or USCIS — instructing officers to treat protected political speech as a discretionary negative factor in green-card and other immigration-benefit adjudications. The training names flag-burning, criticism of the state of Israel, and pro-Palestinian campus protest activity as triggers, and directs officers to escalate cases involving "potential anti-American and/or antisemitic conduct or ideology" to USCIS managers and the agency's general counsel's office.
On May 5, 2026, ProPublica disclosed that in November 2024 — days after Donald Trump won the presidency and Jenniffer González-Colón clinched Puerto Rico's governorship — supervisors at the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Puerto Rico ordered line prosecutors to drop voting-fraud counts and all charges against prison staff from a built-out drugs-for-votes indictment, and after Trump took office told them to abandon the probe of any campaign ties entirely. The pulled charges arose from evidence that the Los Tiburones prison gang traded drugs for inmate votes for González-Colón in 2024 and that the candidate had communicated with a gang leader on WhatsApp during the primary. In the weeks that followed, Puerto Rico's resident commissioner and four U.S. House Democrats publicly called for a DOJ Inspector General and congressional investigation; González-Colón has denied wrongdoing and has not been charged.
On May 8, 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a two-page memo directing the creation of an "ongoing, long-term, department-wide review of all aspects of the military legal system," convened by Department of Defense General Counsel Earl Matthews and reporting directly to Hegseth. The new panel substitutes for the Military Justice Review Panel — the 13-member independent oversight body created by Congress in April 2022 to report to Congress, which Hegseth disbanded in 2025 after it delivered a 238-page review of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Current and former JAGs describe the move as completing a transfer of military-legal oversight from an independent, Congressionally-created body to an executive-controlled panel staffed by political appointees.
On May 8, 2026, U.S. Southern Command struck a vessel in the eastern Pacific Ocean that it described as a suspected drug-trafficking boat, killing two people and leaving one survivor. SOUTHCOM said it notified the U.S. Coast Guard to begin search-and-rescue operations and called the boat a narcotrafficker but provided no public evidence; the strike is the third deadly attack in five days and brings the open-ended campaign's reported death toll to roughly 192 people across the eastern Pacific and Caribbean theaters.
On May 8, 2026, CNN published an investigation detailing how the Justice Department restructured the criminal probe of former CIA Director John Brennan after career prosecutors told leadership the evidence did not support charges. At a Washington meeting earlier in 2026 attended by Southern District of Florida U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones, lead prosecutor Maria Medetis Long told acting Deputy Attorney General Colin McDonald and his top deputy Trent McCotter the case against Brennan was too weak to bring; the reply, per two people briefed on the meeting, was "that's not good enough." Medetis Long was removed days later. CNN reports that with Trump ally Joe diGenova installed in Fort Pierce, Florida, the investigation has been "essentially reset" into a broader conspiracy probe, more than 150 subpoenas have been issued, and another round of subpoenas targeting officials close to Brennan is expected. CBS News corroborates that DOJ veterans fear the probe is being staffed with Trump loyalists.
On Sunday, May 10, 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth publicly called for a second Pentagon investigation of Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) over Kelly's comments on CBS' "Face the Nation" about depleted U.S. munitions stockpiles amid the Iran war, posting that the Pentagon's legal counsel would review whether Kelly had "violate[d] his oath." Kelly, a retired Navy captain who sits on the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence committees, responded that the substance of his remarks was not classified and pointed to Hegseth's own prior public testimony about the same stockpile-depletion timeline. The referral came days after a D.C. Circuit panel appeared poised to reject Hegseth's first effort to punish Kelly — an administrative action to reduce Kelly's retired military rank over a November video urging service members to refuse illegal orders.
Internal Department of Justice case-tracking documents obtained by The New York Times and reported publicly on May 11, 2026 reveal that the Board of Immigration Appeals — an appellate body housed within the DOJ — fast-tracked the deportation case of Palestinian Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil along a procedural track that a former BIA member called "unprecedented." Per the internal documents, the case was flagged high-priority before the board officially received it; a staff note instructed handling Khalil's case as if he were still in detention even though he had been released several days earlier; the BIA's April 9, 2026 decision authorizing Khalil's deportation came just nine days after paperwork was submitted; and at least three judges recused themselves from the proceedings.
On May 14, 2026, The Washington Post reported, citing an internal U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo, that ICE staffers were "exploring what work can be done" at a Hagerstown, Maryland warehouse being converted into a 1,500-person ICE detention facility despite a Baltimore federal judge's standing temporary injunction blocking the project. The Baltimore judge had found the building's four toilets and two water fountains insufficient for the planned capacity. The Hagerstown build-out and operations contract was awarded in March 2026 to KVG LLC, a Pennsylvania-based defense contractor with no prior experience operating detention facilities, with a $113 million base and a $642 million three-year ceiling.