Trump-Appointed Judge Rules Against Him on Swing State’s Voter Rolls

A Trump-appointed judge blocked an attempt by the Department of Justice to seize the state of Michigan’s voter rolls Tuesday.

U.S. District Court Judge Hala Jarbou ruled that federal law does not require Michigan to turn over voter registration lists or voters’ personal information, and dismissed the case. The Trump administration wanted an electronic copy of Michigan’s voter registration list of eight million voters, complete with full names, birth dates, addresses, and either driver’s license numbers or partial Social Security numbers. It will likely appeal the ruling.

The president was also rebuffed in court last month for trying to get Oregon and California to hand over their voter registration data. It’s all part of a plan to centralize voter information under the direction of the White House, raising issues of what the Trump administration plans to do with that data.

Trump’s Department of Justice has reportedly sent draft agreements to several states that would give the federal government the ability to flag voters’ names and order states to remove them from the rolls. Some Republican-run states, such as Alaska and Texas, have agreed to do this, while other states, controlled by both Democrats and Republicans, have refused.

In Minnesota, the Trump administration tried to use the federal immigration crackdown in the state to leverage Governor Tim Walz into handing over not only his state’s voter registration data but also Medicaid and SNAP records. Walz said no.

President Trump has been fearmongering about the 2026 midterm elections for months, making baseless claims about voter fraud and election rigging recycled from 2020. In recent weeks, Trump has spoken of “taking over” elections. This, coupled with the FBI raid of a Georgia elections office last month and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s suggestion to send ICE to the polls, reveals how much Trump wants to rig the midterms.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement chief Todd Lyons faced tough questions while defending his agency’s wanton violence before a meeting of the House Homeland Security Committee Tuesday—but none tougher than those from Representative LaMonica McIver.

“Mr. Lyons, do you consider yourself a religious man?” McIver asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Lyons replied.

“Oh, yes! OK, well how do you think Judgment Day will work for you with so much blood on your hands?” the New Jersey Democrat asked.

“I’m not gonna entertain that question, ma’am,” Lyon said.

“Oh, OK, of course not. Do you think you’re going to hell, Mr. Lyons?” McIver pressed.

Their exchange was interrupted by the smack of committee Chair Andrew Garbarino’s gavel, who urged the lawmakers to “adhere to established standards of decorum and debate.”

“Mr. Chairman, I was asking a question,” McIver replied. “You guys are always talking about religion here and the Bible, I mean, it’s OK for me to ask a question, right?”

McIver continued: “How many government agencies, Mr. Lyons, are you aware of that routinely kill American citizens and still get funding?”

Again, Lyons refused to “entertain” the question.

“Of course you’re not, exactly. Once again, questions that you cannot answer,” McIver replied.

“This is why we need to abolish ICE,” McIver urged, before yielding back her time.

Last year, McIver was arrested during a visit to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in New Jersey and charged with “assaulting, impeding, and interfering [with]” law enforcement officers as they moved to unlawfully arrest Newark Mayor Ras Baraka. McIver has pleaded not guilty and recently moved to appeal a judge’s decision not to dismiss all of the charges.

Those weren’t all the questions that Lyons refused to answer. The ICE chief wouldn’t say whether any federal agents had been fired since the deadly shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Lyons also wouldn’t say whether those two deserved to die because the investigations into their deaths were still ongoing.

Instead, Lyons insisted that it was the ICE agents who were really the victims of their own sweeping immigration enforcement crackdown, and refused to commit to unmasking the agents under his supervision.

A Republican senator is claiming to have seen the light after new revelations from the government’s Jeffrey Epstein files.

Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming said Monday that she suddenly understands “what the big deal is,” saying she had “not been one of the members who has glommed on to this as an issue.”

“I’ve sort of intentionally deferred to others to find out about it. But 9-year-old victims …” Lummis told journalist Pablo Manríquez. “Well, initially, my reaction to all this was, ‘I don’t care. I don’t know what the big deal is.’ But now I see what the big deal is, and it was worth investigating. And the members of Congress that have been pushing this were not wrong. So that’s really my only reaction.”

Lummis coming out in support of Epstein’s victims only now is opportunism, and might have something to do with her announcing she won’t run for reelection this year. Like other Republicans in Congress, Lummis put her support of President Trump above the gravity of Epstein’s heinous sex crimes against children, preferring to remain willfully ignorant. It was well known for years that the billionaire was convicted of sexually assaulting numerous women, many of them minors.

But Trump’s desire to cover up the extent of Epstein’s crimes to protect himself was more important to Lummis, who is only speaking out now because Epstein’s crimes are a persistent issue for Republicans and the MAGA base, and she has nothing to lose since she’s retiring. In the coming days, we should expect to see more Republicans suddenly claim to be Epstein’s biggest detractors.

Representative Ro Khanna read the names of six powerful men in the Epstein files, whose names were previously hidden by the Justice Department, aloud on the House floor on Tuesday.

“Yesterday, Congressman Massie and I went to the Department of Justice to read the unredacted Epstein files. We spent about two hours there, and we learned that 70 to 80 percent of the files are still redacted. In fact, there were six wealthy, powerful men that the DOJ hid for no apparent reason,” Khanna said. “When Congressman Massie and I pointed this out to the DOJ, they acknowledged their mistake, and now they have revealed the identity of these six powerful men.

“Salvatore Nuara, Zurab Mikeladze, Leonic Leonov, Nicola Caputo, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, CEO of Dubai Ports World. And billionaire businessman Leslie Wexner, who was labeled as a ‘co-conspirator,’ by the FBI.” Khanna said. “Now my question is: Why did it take Thomas Massie and me going to the Justice Department to get these six men’s identities to become public? And if we found six men that they were hiding in two hours, imagine how many men they are covering up for in those three million files.”

Former Victoria’s Secret CEO Les Wexner was revealed as a possible co-conspirator of sex predator Jeffrey Epstein in a 2019 FBI document, even as FBI Director Kash Patel claimed under oath last year that the agency had no knowledge of any other sex traffickers in the Epstein files. And the UAE’s Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem was identified as the recipient of the “I loved the torture video” email from Epstein. The sultan’s name was initially redacted.

As for the other men—Salvatore Nuara is rumored to be a former NYPD contact from Epstein’s black book. The most notable, Nicola Caputo, is a former European Parliament member. Little is publicly known about Mikeladze and Leonov.

“But the story gets worse,” Khanna continued. “The reality is that Donald Trump’s FBI scrubbed these files in March, long before Thomas Massie and I passed the Epstein Transparency Act.… That means the survivors’ statement to the FBI naming rich and powerful men who went to Epstein’s island … they’re all hidden.”

This is an unprecedented amount of transparency that was withheld from the public for likely no other reason than to protect the rich and powerful men within these files. Only time will tell what, if anything, will happen next.

“I say enough,” said Khanna. “It’s time to begin with accountability for the Epstein class. Hold them in front of Congress, those people who visited the island or did business with Epstein after he was a convicted pedophile. Investigate them. Prosecute them. And let us return to democratic accountability in the United States of America.”

A longtime resident of deep-red Wilder, Idaho, said his small town was “nearly destroyed” by a massive federal immigration raid last year, The New York Times reported.

On October 19, dozens of federal agents wielding automatic rifles and flash-bang grenades descended on La Catedral Arena, a horse-racing track outside of Wilder. The track had long been a hub for the town’s Latino community—but had now become a target of the Trump administration’s brutal immigration crackdown.

While state and federal officials praised the raid as a crackdown on an alleged gambling ring, only four people have been scheduled for trial on gambling charges. And agents seemed to have another purpose altogether.

“The one thing everyone got asked was, ‘Where were you born?’” Neal Dougherty, an immigration lawyer, told the Times in the story published Monday. “Not, ‘Did you see gambling?’ Not, ‘Did you participate in gambling?’ Just, ‘Where were you born?’”

While a black military-style helicopter circled the scene, federal agents zip-tied the hands of most adults and some teenagers. Several hundred people were detained for four hours. In the end, 105 people were held for immigration charges, and 75 people were deported.

John Carter, a white Trump voter whose company provided security at La Catedral, told the Times that his 14-year-old daughter had had her hands zip-tied by federal agents.

“They could have gone first thing in the day with a few F.B.I. agents and just arrested the people they had warrants for,” Carter said. “Instead, they went in at the busiest time with maximum force.”

While the raid on La Catedral Arena is dwarfed by the massive operations in major American cities, it demonstrates just how destructive Trump’s immigration enforcement can be to the very communities that support him. A whopping 91 percent of the precinct that includes Wilder supported Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Meanwhile, roughly 60 percent of the population of 1,725 people identifies as Latino.

Chris Gross, a second-generation mint farmer in Wilder, told the Times that the town relies on Hispanic labor. “Nobody thought something like this could happen here,” he said.

David Lincoln, a longtime resident of Wilder who runs a rural economic development nonprofit, said that the raid “nearly destroyed” the town.

“What happens if everyone who is Hispanic thinks they’re at risk? There’s fear now that didn’t exist here before. I don’t know how you make that go away,” he said.

Meanwhile, Wilder’s Mayor Steve Rhodes has dismissed the effect the raid had on his community. “These were not our people,” he told the Times. “What happened out at that track had nothing to do with Wilder.”

Rhodes claimed that people in Wilder don’t even think about race anyway. “I don’t know anyone in town that sees a race,” he said. But come spring, when Wilder feels the full economic weight of the people the town has lost and the labor they provided, he may yet change his mind.