by Ja'han Jones | Jul 15, 2026 | Civil Rights, Opinion, White House
The MAGA movement is touting yet another development that stands to enable more racial segregation in the United States.
The president has falsely — and revealingly — complained that the Civil Rights Act was harmful to white people. And true to form, he has overseen a regime that has helped usher in a Jim Crow resurgence.
I’ve written on numerous occasions about Donald Trump’s administration taking steps to roll back desegregation measures. That trend has included a push by the Justice Department to target consent decrees that force school systems to comply with desegregation obligations. Trump officials have provided no evidence showing that the places with consent decrees have ended segregation, and many parents from these areas have said the decrees are still needed.
Several of these killed decrees have occurred with the blessing of Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, who has sought to roll back the decrees using “joint stipulated dismissals,” which don’t require proof that segregation has been rooted out.
That brings us to Tuesday, when the ultraconservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided it would uphold the Trump administration’s lifting of a consent decree for schools in Louisiana’s Concordia Parish — an order that originated with a lawsuit in 1965, when segregation and the Ku Klux Klan reigned supreme in the region.
It’s certainly telling that the Louisiana attorney general’s statement in response to the court’s decision effectively mirrored the “states’ rights” arguments that white supremacists have used throughout history.
In 1981, as an adviser to Ronald Reagan, Lee Atwater was infamously quoted explaining the art of racist dog whistling.
By 1968, he said, politicians couldn’t say the N-word, because “that hurts you,
by Ja'han Jones | Jul 15, 2026 | Civil Rights, Opinion, White House
Formerly detained Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil has filed a lawsuit against conservative activist groups and several members of the Trump administration that cites the Ku Klux Klan Act, a Reconstruction-era law designed to thwart racist intimidation.
Khalil, a staunch critic of Israel’s government whom Trump officials have tried to deport, has become the face of the administration’s push to weaponize the government against liberals — particularly pro-Palestinian activists — and to censor speech on college campuses.
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday, accuses several current and former officials of a “conspiracy” to deprive Khalil of his rights. Per the suit:
The federal officials who are a part of the conspiracy include Senior Presidential Advisor Stephen Miller, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, and John Armstrong, an official at the Department of State’s Bureau of Consular Affairs.
The lawsuit contends that the officials were aided by pro-Israel groups — including The Heritage Foundation, via its dubious “Project Esther” initiative, and Canary Mission, a group known for releasing information on pro-Palestinian students and professors — in their effort to “terrorize and make an example of Mr. Khalil” in order to “intimidate and silence the growing movement for Palestinian rights and political freedom, in a manner the KKK Act was designed to proscribe when enacted during Reconstruction.”
The Associated Press reported that a White House spokesperson defended the executive branch’s “lawful authority to take actions that will protect the public and to ensure the integrity of our immigration system,” while a representative for The Heritage Foundation told Jerusalem News Syndicate that the
by David J. Bier | Jul 15, 2026 | Civil Rights, Opinion
Following two killings of motorists in two weeks in Maine and Texas, Immigration and Customs Enforcement briefly suspended most vehicle stops to retrain its agents. The suspension implicitly conceded the obvious — ICE could have prevented these deaths — but President Donald Trump quickly overruled the agency, ordering it to resume the stops.
The president posted on social media Wednesday that “we cannot give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” But he’s wrong. His own adviser, White House border czar Tom Homan, has admitted that vehicle stops are not an important enforcement tool, and that permanently ending them would better protect ICE agents, their targets and the public.
ICE agents appear to relish the car chases and often fail to stop the suspect before they drive away.
It’s true that ICE officers receive less training on vehicle stops. That’s because, before this administration, most arrestees came straight from federal, state or local custody, and when ICE had to go to the streets, it carefully planned operations — surveilling suspects to learn their routines, sometimes for weeks, and working as a team of agents and creating a pre-enforcement action plan.
To speed up arrests, however, ICE reportedly eliminated the pre-enforcement planning last year as it started targeting areas more than specific people. “It’s hard to fill out a worksheet that just says, ‘Meet in the Home Depot parking lot,’” one former ICE official told NBC News. Enforcement went from targeted and planned to indiscriminate and opportunistic, which led to more chaotic interactions.
Reflecting this lack of planning, both of the immigrants shot and killed in the past two
by Anthony L. Fisher | Jul 15, 2026 | Civil Rights, culture, Opinion
MAGA trolls and their allies in right-wing media joined forces last week to gin up an exceptionally dumb, cynically engineered culture war “outrage.” Apparently, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani “hates” Italians because a map of “immigrant enclaves” released by the city’s Office of Immigrant Affairs did not include downtown Manhattan’s Little Italy. The recriminations from deeply offended supporters of America’s most unapologetically racist president in at least a century were swift.
My grandfather was born over 110 years ago in a cold-water flat on Bleecker Street to impoverished Sicilian immigrants who had arrived in America less than a year earlier. (I guess that makes me an anchor great-grandbaby.) I still get a kick out of taking my kids to Little Italy’s Feast of San Gennaro festival in the fall and showing them Giuseppe and Margherita’s old neighborhood. But the neighborhood hasn’t been an Italian immigrant enclave in many decades. Census data from 2010 showed that not a single Italian immigrant lived in the neighborhood. What was once a 50-block Italian American community has long since shrunk to about 2 1/2 blocks — with at least as many tourist trap tchotchke shops and Albanian-owned pizzerias as “authentic” Italian red sauce joints. The immigrants who made Little Italy, and their descendants, assimilated and moved on.
What’s especially rich is that this concern-trolling about immigrant enclaves is coming from some of the country’s most vitriolic anti-immigrant activists.
But why let sober contemplation of facts get in the way of stoking an angry mob? Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo — well known for bragging about his success at manipulating the media with relentless, truth-bending (to put it
by Ja'han Jones | Jul 14, 2026 | Civil Rights, Opinion, Supreme Court
Republicans are yet again looking for help from the Supreme Court’s GOP-appointed supermajority in placing a thumb on the scale for Republicans in future elections.
Rep. Byron Donalds, a Florida Republican and gubernatorial candidate, and America First Legal, the far-right law firm founded by Trump adviser Stephen Miller, were handed a serious setback last week when a court panel dismissed their lawsuit with prejudice, meaning they can’t file it again. The suit claimed Florida had been wrongfully denied an additional congressional seat and Electoral College vote because of the way the 2020 census was conducted.
For years, many Republicans have followed President Donald Trump’s lead in falsely claiming that the census count intentionally benefits Democrats. Liberals, including Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas, have debunked these claims while spotlighting how the process of apportionment — that is, the delegation of congressional seats based on population — has been used to benefit conservatives.
The Florida Phoenix reported on last week’s ruling from a U.S. District Court three-judge panel. Per the outlet:
The Republicans alleged that a proper count would have given Florida an additional U.S. House seat and an additional vote in the Electoral College but for the “vast use” of a statistical method known as imputation. However, for the second time in six months, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida dismissed the case, this time with prejudice, finding that any further amendment to the pleadings “would be futile.”
The ruling was celebrated by lawyer Marc Elias, the pro-democracy attorney whose law firm helped thwart conservatives in the case. A day later, the plaintiffs appealed the decision to the Supreme Court.
For the record,
by Ja'han Jones | Jul 11, 2026 | Civil Rights, Opinion
The mysterious death of Mississippi teenager Nolan Wells remains under investigation. But the response to it has already served as an indictment of racism in America in some ways.
Authorities in Mississippi are investigating the circumstances by which the 18-year-old college student, who was Black, died after visiting an island off the Gulf Coast on the Fourth of July. A photo on social media, purportedly from the boat ride to the island, shows Wells and three white friends.
There’s no evidence to date that race played a role in Wells’ death. But as Capital B noted, the case “immediately drew national attention, along with a surge of misinformation, unverified allegations and skepticism by some Black online commentators … who question whether Mississippi officials will be transparent in their investigation.”
The Rev. Al Sharpton, host of MS NOW’s “Politics Nation,” appeared at a news conference Friday in his activist capacity, alongside Wells’ family and civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, and alluded to some of the speculation while demanding a thorough investigation.
“We’re not bringing in race, but we’re not discounting race either,” Sharpton said, adding: “This smacks of some of the worst fears that we’ve had historically, not only in Mississippi, but in this country.”
Sharpton’s point about not immediately “discounting” race seems apt — for all scenarios, really.
Because in the United States, particularly these United States under this administration, such a presumption is foolish. Some might say willfully ignorant.
Amid the speculation surrounding Wells’ death, I’ve thought back to a 2024 report from the Pew Research Center that garnered fierce blowback. As I wrote at the time, the report’s headline — “Most Black Americans Believe Racial
