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.
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.
