In early August, the Trump administration rolled out a voluntary framework to review certain AI models that don’t release their code to the public. So far, the administration has described the framework only in general terms and has not disclosed what it contains, which companies are involved, or the legal basis for it. The regulatory process was set up without any legislation or legal authority of any kind, and almost no details have been released to the media, civil society, or the American public.

That means the executive branch is now choosing which companies can release their products and which customers get access to a technology that could shape the future of not only American industry and national security, but economies and governments abroad as well. All with no oversight from Congress, the public, or tech experts outside of the executive branch.

We’re suing the administration to demand compliance with a Freedom of Information Act request we made about the framework. This administration has a documented history of using the government’s regulatory power to pit companies against one another for favorable treatment, and has also retaliated against AI companies in the past for holding red lines for the use of its technology. They should not have the blind trust of the American people that it will act in good faith. We deserve to know what’s in the framework.

On August 8, Todd Blanche was confirmed by the Senate as Attorney General of the United States.

Blanche has served as a willing agent of Trump’s retaliatory agenda, overseeing inquiries into Governor Gavin Newsom, Senator Adam Schiff, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, and former FBI Director James Comey. Blanche bragged about the DOJ purging lawyers who worked on January 6 prosecutions and personally signed off on the $1.8 billion dollar “anti-weaponization” fund as part of a settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS.

The fight over that fund lays bare Trump’s total control of Blanche and the DOJ. As GOP senators on the Judiciary Committee named termination of the anti-weaponization fund as a condition of their vote, Trump’s refusal to accede temporarily stalled the nomination. Someone who aims to lead the DOJ independently and judiciously would not need permission from the President to quash a legally dubious slush fund for Trump’s allies — one Blanche had previously sworn under oath he had already abandoned in June.

As The New York Times describes, Blanche’s confirmation “represented a powerful endorsement by Congress of the philosophy that has guided him under a meddling, demanding boss — that he has a constitutional obligation to execute every lawful White House order, even if it shatters longstanding policy and rule-of-law norms, or contradicts what he thinks is right.”

The increase in DHS activity over the summer has had deadly consequences. Several ICE-involved shootings made national headlines, and deaths in ICE detention facilities are reaching record levels. 24 people have already died in ICE custody this year.

Following the recent death of Edwin Jovanny Lopez Cornejo in ICE custody at Delaney Hall in New Jersey, his family said that he was denied the care he needed. “He had high blood pressure, he had diabetes,” the family explained. “And they refused to give him his medication, and they brushed it off as complaining.”

This reported disregard for life is yet another example of the cruelty and inhumanity that has characterized this administration’s approach to immigration since its earliest days. The deaths of those in ICE custody are a heartbreaking reminder of the tangible costs of the scapegoating the president has engaged in for more than a decade.

Under the president’s March executive order DHS, the Social Security Administration, and the State Department are trying to pull Social Security numbers, addresses, birthdates, and citizenship records into one unverified, untested federal system with unknown contractors running it, and states are being given mere days before the start of early voting in the 2026 election to run their voter rolls against the result. This is the same administration whose Secretary of Homeland Security threatened to prosecute election officials who don’t hand over sensitive voter data. In tandem with their ongoing attempts to abuse the USPS as a tool of election subversion, their attempts to tilt the field are getting more desperate— because the closer we get to an election the White House expects to lose, the more they are reaching for ways to decide who votes in it. We’re suing the administration over this unconstitutional attempt to violate Americans’ privacy and to interfere with the 2026 midterms.

Time and again this government has been shown it simply cannot be trusted with Americans’ data. Building a government-approved voter registry in plain sight right before the midterms is more of the same plan to try and deceive Americans, disrupt the state-run process, and deny voters and election outcomes they don’t like. Do something about it: double and triple-check your registration now and again in October. Ask your county clerk what the federal government has asked them to hand over. And then sign up to work the polls.

In his latest attack on a member of the media, President Trump posted on Truth Social that Meet the Press host Kristen Welker would be reported to the FCC. This came after Welker suggested on air that the president has a mixed endorsement record in Republican primaries. “How can anyone be allowed to say this, working for freely given Public Airwaves?” Trump said. “Because of this purposeful inaccuracy, she will be reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment.”

This isn’t an empty threat: One day after Trump criticized ABC host Jimmy Kimmel for a joke about Melania Trump earlier this year, the FCC ordered all eight of ABC’s owned-and-operated TV stations to file for early license renewal, an unprecedented maneuver. We don’t know whether the president plans to follow through on this week’s threat against Welker, but the pattern is clear: the administration is weaponizing the FCC to make broadcasters think twice about how they cover the administration.

The authoritarian project doesn’t limit its disinformation to current events — it deploys government power to challenge shared truths and rewrite history. A recent Executive Order does just that, in the latest of a series of attacks against the Smithsonian Institution. The order mandates that the National Museum of American History include signage that warns visitors of potential “inaccuracies” and to point them towards “alternative resources.” The order follows a report by the Domestic Policy Council that decried the Smithsonian as a tool of “extreme political activism” and “anti-white activism.”

Both the Executive Order and the report position the Trump administration as the proper keepers of “America’s Story” while attacking public knowledge centers. By shoring up familiar grievances against alleged “transgender” and “illegal alien” and “Marxist” activism, these types of actions reinforce division and propaganda that fuel the authoritarian project.

On July 1, a federal judge in Fort Worth handed down the final wave of sentences in the Prairieland ICE detention center case — some as long as 50 to 100 years — for a July 4, 2025 protest outside an Alvarado, Texas immigration facility where one attendee shot and wounded a police officer. The officer survived. But prosecutors charged and convicted sixteen people under a “material support to terrorists” theory tied to Trump’s September 2025 designation of antifa as a domestic terrorist organization — a designation civil liberties groups note has no formal legal definition, meaning it functions less as a criminal statute than as a label prosecutors can attach to political protest.

Several of those sentenced weren’t accused of firing a weapon: one defendant received 30 years for moving a box of “antifascist zines,” and a married couple who said they arrived late and left when confronted by guards were each sentenced to 50 years. U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor said he wanted the sentences to “send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology,” while then-Acting AG Todd Blanche framed the case as proof that “Antifa terrorists who attack law enforcement… will face swift and uncompromising justice.”

Violence is never an acceptable part of political discourse. In weaponizing this single act of violence, though, the Trump administration has worked to quash the dissent of more than a dozen political opponents, many of whom had nothing to do with the shooting, and potentially made other protesters more concerned about the harsh consequences they might face for opposing the administration.