Joe Biden and the Biden Administration

The Trump Administration Wants the Supreme Court to Permanently Close the Border to Asylum Seekers

PUBLISHED 3/23/2026 by

On Tuesday, March 24, the government will ask the Supreme Court to declare that asylum law does not apply at the border. The case—Noem v. Al Otro Lado—was brought by asylum seekers to challenge Trump’s turnback policy.

If the Supreme Court succumbs to Trump’s twisted logic, he will likely consider it carte blanche to keep the border closed permanently to asylum seekers and other people in need of protection. In other words, only people who already have permission to enter the United States could ask for protection.

As the Trump administration has shuttered virtually all other avenues to obtain protection in the United States, this effectively would violate non-refoulement and expose people seeking asylum at the southern border to danger and death.

The Noem v. Al Otro Lado case is both an effort to preserve the right to asylum and a step towards holding the administration accountable for ignoring the human cost of its border policies.

Three Women Veterans on the Devastating Reality of the VA Abortion Ban

PUBLISHED 3/15/2026 by | UPDATED 3/16/2026 at 7:54 A.M. PT

The Trump administration is no longer providing abortion care for veterans relying on VA healthcare, even in instances of rape and incest.

Through firsthand accounts, veterans describe the fear, medical risk and loss of autonomy created by the policy.

“Abortion is my right, if that was what I deemed I needed.”

“No patient in America should have to go back and forth with their providers … and for damn sure not with no politicians about what medical care they are allowed to have.”

“We are all people who volunteered. We raised our hands and said, ‘yes send me.’ Healthcare is our right as veterans.”

Immigration Detention Is Failing Women and Children—By Design

PUBLISHED 2/26/2026 by

The South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley has been the subject of an onslaught of headlines in recent weeks, but the truth is, it’s been routinely criticized for inhumane conditions for years. But what we are seeing now, as Trudy Taylor Smith put it to me, is horror “on a shocking scale.” Children describe being served worm-infested food and dirty water, getting little or no classroom time and being perpetually sick. A toddler nearly dies because of medical neglect. A teenage boy with symptoms consistent with appendicitis is turned away by a nurse. There is no better way to describe it than state-sponsored child abuse.

If this isn’t stomach-churning enough, consider what is happening a few hours south, where girls’ reproductive healthcare and freedom is also in grave crisis. Pregnant and unaccompanied migrant children are being sent to San Benito, Texas.

Why Texas? Why else? … Because it is a place where abortion is illegal and high-risk pregnancy care is unavailable.

“Putting pregnant kids in San Benito is not a decision you make when you care about children’s safety,” one source said plainly.

This is entirely by design, pulled straight from the Project 2025 playbook. The constant split-screen scene in Texas is representative of the nation MAGA wants us to be, “where the cruelty is the point” and where the anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-freedom banner is flown.

We have to keep these stories—and all the women and girls in this state, willingly or not—front and center in the democracy movement. Their humanity is at the heart of all of ours.

The Cost of Treating Immigration as a War

PUBLISHED 1/13/2026 by

On Jan. 7, 2026, Renee Macklin Good became the latest person to die because of Donald Trump’s brutal immigration agenda.

She is not the first to lose her life at the hands of immigration enforcement agents—362 people have died during encounters with CBP since 2010. Nor will she be the last, unless we take action to dismantle the power and authority given to ICE and CBP over the last year.

When state-sanctioned violent tactics are used alongside recruitment campaigns encouraging new hires to protect the homeland and help decide who will live in this country; questionable training; and administration rhetoric that comes out of the nationalist movements of the 1930s and ’40s; violence against innocent people—regardless of race or nationality—is inevitable.

As Jennifer Mascia wrote for The Trace: “… Where immigration agents have gone, gun violence has usually followed.”

Texas and Florida Sue FDA in New Bid to Block Abortion Pill Access

PUBLISHED 12/17/2025 by

Texas launched a lawsuit against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last week over the agency’s approval of mifepristone, marking the state’s latest effort to crack down on access to abortion pills.

Joined by Florida, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the case on Dec. 9 in federal court in Wichita Falls. The two states argued in a 120-page complaint that the FDA did not properly evaluate mifepristone’s safety and effectiveness when approving the drug in 2000 and its subsequent generic versions. They also challenged the agency’s moves that expanded access to the pills, including the ability to dispense them by mail.

Abortion access advocates have blasted the lawsuit.

“If they succeed in restricting access to mifepristone, abortion access will be devastated across the country, even in states where abortion remains legal,” Shellie Hayes-McMahon, executive director of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Texas. “This lawsuit is not about safety or healthcare; it is about control. And nothing short of full control over our bodies will satisfy them.”

Following Tragic D.C. Shooting, Afghan Allies Face a New Wave of Enforcement and Fear

PUBLISHED 12/16/2025 by

The shooting in Washington, D.C., that left one National Guard member dead and another critically wounded on Nov. 26 quickly became a major focus of U.S. media. In the days since the shooting, the national conversation has focused almost entirely on the suspect’s identity as an Afghan refugee. Yet those who knew him describe a man who appeared to be struggling long before he drove across the country to Washington, D.C. One volunteer who worked closely with his family said he became increasingly withdrawn, isolated and overwhelmed by the challenges of resettlement. They noted that his behavior reflected profound distress, not radicalization or hostility toward the United States.

Despite these documented struggles, the current administration immediately cast the shooting as a failure of vetting by the Biden administration and threatened to punish an entire community for the crime of one individual. That framing ignores the basic fact that the suspect had been vetted repeatedly. It also ignores the testimony of those who interacted with him in the U.S. and saw no signs of ideological motivation.

Internal directives show ICE has begun targeting more than 1,800 Afghans with past deportation orders and is tracking arrests and removals in daily reports. Officials are also reassessing Afghan vetting programs created after the 2021 withdrawal, despite the fact that the suspect himself was granted asylum during the Trump administration after already receiving extensive screening.

The policies signal a retreat from those commitments and send a dangerous message to future partners: Support for the United States may not translate to safety once U.S. needs are met.

The tragedy in Washington stands as a devastating loss. It deserves a full investigation and a clear accounting of what shaped the suspect’s unraveling. But it must not be used to justify policies that abandon allies, ignore humanitarian obligations and dehumanize an entire community.

We Can No Longer Tinker With the Machinery of Death: New ACLU Report Exposes Fatal Flaws in Capital Punishment

PUBLISHED 11/26/2025 by

On the first day of his second term President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order entitled Restoring The Death Penalty And Protecting Public Safety. In doing so he chose to ignore the mounting and irrefutable evidence, recently highlighted in a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), that the death penalty is riddled with human error and poses the undeniable risk of executing innocent people.

At least 150 countries have abolished the death penalty, by law or by practice. Resisting the humanitarian trend around the world, the United States remains part of a gruesome club, along with China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

A Century After the Eugenics Movement, the U.S. Is Again Barring Disabled Immigrants

PUBLISHED 11/20/2025 by

This month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio instructed visa officers to consider obesity and other chronic health conditions, such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes, as justification to deny people visas to the United States.

Many were outraged and shocked, observing the Trump administration’s new expansion of the “public charge” rule—directing visa officers to deny entry to people with disabilities, chronic illnesses or age-related conditions—as a modern revival of eugenic immigration policy designed to exclude, control and institutionalize disabled and marginalized people.

When Trump first took office in 2016, the Trump administration broadened the definition of public charge to include people who receive SNAP benefits, medicaid, housing assistance, childcare subsidies and more. This new rule was published in 2019 and went into effect in 2020 and early 2021; President Biden ended the use of this public charge rule definition in March 2021, returning it to the older but still restrictive version. Following Trump’s new rule, visa denials based on the “public charge” rule exploded during Trump’s first residency, rising from just over 1,000 denials in 2016 to over 20,000 in 2019, and it had disastrous effects.

As the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) found, broadening this public charge rule led many people to reduce or stop using benefits or services for themselves.

Russia Was Once a Revolutionary Feminist Motherland

PUBLISHED 10/22/2025 by

Russia’s hostility to feminism today stems not from its foreignness, but from memory. A century ago, it was Russian women who lit the first sparks of revolution. On International Women’s Day in 1917, factory workers filled the streets of Petrograd demanding bread, peace and equality—an uprising that toppled the Romanovs and pulled the world into modernity. Under the Bolsheviks, women won the right to vote, divorce became accessible and abortion was legalized. For a brief, radical moment, the Soviet experiment made women’s liberation a pillar of the state.

Julia Ioffe’s book, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy, reminds us that today’s Russia rejects feminism precisely because it once knew what it could do: ignite revolutions, upend hierarchies and reimagine power itself.

From Berlin to Beijing to U.S. Congress, Women’s Courage to Convene Propels Us Forward

PUBLISHED 9/26/2025 by

Weekend Reading for Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation in politics, sports and entertainment, judicial offices and the private sector—with a little gardening mixed in!

This week:
—We mark 60 years since former President Lyndon Johnson advanced equal opportunity in employment.
—When women come together, share our strength, and lift one another up, the impossible becomes possible. 
—In a landslide victory, Adelita Grigalva becomes Arizona’s first Latina to Congress.
—Of the four Republican House members signing the petition about the actions and allies of sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, three are women.
—A record number of U.S. legislators won’t run for reelection next year.
—Hillary Clinton “sees a dangerous moment for women’s rights and democracy.”
—Akshi Chawla, who writes the #WomenLead Substack and is a valuable resource on international women’s representation, on the great question: “How do I get started?”
—The Marshall Islands, a rapidly vanishing Oceania nation, is led by the region’s first-ever woman president, Hilda Heine.
—Who was the first American woman to have an airport named in her honor?

… and more.