The Daily Brief
Today
Good morning. Family separation is back — not as an announced policy but as just another devastating consequence of the president's mass deportation agenda, the same cruelty rebuilt to dodge the backlash the first version drew. At the southern border the machinery is literal: armed agents arrested at least 10 protesters and bulldozed a 200-year-old tree standing in the way of Trump's border wall. The arrests and the destruction have not ended the standoff.
The same expansionist logic runs through policing. As the surveillance firm Flock draws fire, experts warn that real-time crime-center software is the more worrisome tool — aggregating immense amounts of data and significantly expanding police reach, built quietly while attention fixes elsewhere. The apparatus that disappears migrants and the one that watches everyone are the same apparatus.
Capital, meanwhile, collects. Trump is set to tout an innovation 'Golden Age' amid funding cuts and a researcher exodus as his administration moves to shift science money from universities to private firms — a transfer lawmakers and others have pushed back on. And Nestlé CEO Philipp Navratil tells workers the most important skill now is understanding AI: labor ordered, again, to retool itself for the bosses' machines.
Into this the Democrats in competitive races are betting an anti-corruption pitch — that Washington is corrupt — can win in November, while analysts game out what a Democratic wave would mean for the president. Power is already nervous: in San Antonio protests disrupted Trump's rally for Ken Paxton, and he revealed his own trepidation that one of the party's longest winning streaks may be about to end. Even child safety online is rare common ground, with momentum building for a federal crackdown on social media companies. But the sharpest answer isn't at the ballot box: in France, nearly half a million youth and workers marched against austerity and militarism. That is what reaching the people already being disappeared looks like.
Zoom out: An administration pressing mass deportation and a border wall at the cost of families and a two-century-old tree, funneling science money to private firms as police surveillance expands — while in France nearly half a million marched against austerity and militarism.
Share this issue
Facebook · X · Reddit · LinkedIn · WhatsApp · Email · Bluesky