The Daily Brief
Today
Good morning. Hundreds of immigration lawyers exhaled on Friday after the Supreme Court announced it would not hear Genalo v. Black, the case that asked whether certain immigrants could be held in immigration detention facilities. The reprieve was no accident but a deliberate campaign to keep that question away from a bench that, as Slate argues, is curling up at the feet of a presidency increasingly unchecked by law.
The machinery ground on elsewhere. A federal judge found DHS likely violated a US citizen's free speech rights by warning him over an anti-ICE email — the state punishing a citizen for opposing its own deportation force. Abroad, the administration moved to bar some South Africans over Trump's claims of anti-white discrimination; South Africa's president has called those policies racist, and Washington admits Pretoria has done nothing to fix a grievance that exists mainly in Trump's telling. Even the classroom is a front: Arizona made its English fluency test easier to pass, which experts say will harm students' ability to succeed.
Accountability still reaches some rulers — an EU-backed court convicted former Kosovo President Hashim Thaci of war crimes from the war for independence from Serbia, sentencing him to 25 years. But courts also jail the left: a Ukrainian court handed socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk 15 years for high treason, drawing outraged protest from anthropologist John Comaroff. In Brazil, Flávio Bolsonaro runs a campaign painting opponents as soft on crime and tainted by graft.
Meanwhile Washington scrambles to manage the panic around AI, hobbled by party politics and no consensus, as Trump — all-in on AI despite the warnings — swats away Anthropic's Dario Amodei over how to regulate it. And for most people the coming midterms are effectively already decided in primaries, because most Americans don't live in a competitive House district.
Zoom out: Across immigration detention, citizens' speech, the classroom, the courts, and international justice, the day's news traces a US presidency that its critics say is growing less checked by law.