FBI: Violent crime fell 4.5% in 2024--Homicide alone down 15%

Violent crime in the United States fell 4.5% in 2024, according to a new FBI report, while property crime dropped 8.1% from the previous year, reported Pennsylvania Capital-Star.

The declines continue a trend seen since crime surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, when homicides jumped nearly 30% in 2020 — one of the largest one-year increases since the FBI began keeping records in 1930. By 2022, violent crime had fallen close to pre-pandemic levels.

Homicides, which the FBI classifies as murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, dropped nearly 15% in 2024. Reports of other violent offenses also decreased, including rape by 5.2%, robbery by 8.9% and aggravated assault by 3%.

Property crime also fell across all major categories, with motor vehicle theft down 18.6%, burglary down 8.6% and larceny-theft down 5.5%. Reported hate crimes decreased 1.5% from the previous year.

The 2024 report draws on submissions from 16,675 law enforcement agencies — 2.1% more than last year — representing more than 95% of the U.S. population. Every city agency serving a population of 1 million or more people provided a full year of data. Participation in the FBI’s crime data collection is voluntary, and the data is based on crimes reported to police.

About 75% of participating agencies submitted information through the FBI’s new, more detailed National Incident-Based Reporting System, or NIBRS, which covered 87% of the population.

The data release marks a shift from recent years when participation lagged following the FBI’s 2021 transition to the new system, which required many law enforcement agencies to invest in training and technology upgrades. In 2021, national reporting rates fell below 70% for the first time in two decades, forcing the FBI to estimate results for many jurisdictions.

The FBI’s crime trends report also includes new law enforcement safety data. Sixty-four officers were feloniously killed in the line of duty in 2024, 43 officers were accidentally killed and 85,730 officers were assaulted.

Although the FBI’s 2024 report is a year behind, it aligns with other crime trend reports. The Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, recently found that homicides and other serious offenses, including gun assaults and carjackings, fell in the first half of 2025 across 42 major cities compared to the same period in 2024.

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Look at what DHS is doing now, it is frightening!

THE VIDEO OPENS with dim shots of men preparing weapons and equipment in the dark. Over the moody noodling of an electric guitar, the actor Robert Pattinson’s voice can be heard. “They think I’m hiding in the shadows,” he growls. “But I am the shadows.” A rolling electronic beat comes in under the guitar, and we see the men march into the night.

So far, so The Batman (2022). But there are signs that we have left the DC Comics universe. The men have American flags on their uniforms, and as the soundtrack builds, a Bible verse slowly materializes over the b-roll: “The wicked flee when no man pursueth; but the righteous are as bold as a lion.” (It’s Proverbs 28:1.)

The video is not a trailer but a bleak riff on the superhero film intended as a warning—“TO EVERY CRIMINAL ILLEGAL ALIEN IN AMERICA”—and tweeted by the official X account of the Department of Homeland Security. The portentous caption continues: “Darkness is no longer your ally. You represent an existential threat to the citizens of the United States, and US Border Patrol’s Special Operations Group will stop at nothing to hunt you down.”

The faux-Batman video exemplifies DHS’s recent posting strategy, which combines appeals to scripture, dark and foreboding imagery, nihilistic memes, combative and often cruel rhetoric, and allusions to homegrown American mythology about our country’s history, especially in the form of paintings evoking the frontier, reported The Bulwark. 

The overall effect is disconcertingly surreal. And the strategy’s objectives are even darker than the remixed Batman clip suggests.

For example, almost every current or former American high school student will remember seeing American Progress, an 1872 painting by John Gast, reprinted in the pages of their history textbooks. It is most commonly used to illustrate the rhetoric of “manifest destiny” that provided an ideological basis for the country’s westward expansion. The painting depicts a mythical vision of the settling of the continent: A radiant classical goddess floats across the plains stringing telegraph wire as white farmers plow the earth and pioneers and settlers travel by Conestoga wagon, stagecoach, and railroad. Herds of buffalo and small groups of Native Americans flee in front of them—into darkness.

DHS recently posted the painting on X—but rather than use it as an occasion for reflecting on American self-mythologizing (especially when it comes to our country’s history of conquest), as generations of high-school history teachers have done, DHS simply endorsed the vision of American Progress with a short caption:

Reposted by the White House, this tweet is a good example of Donald Trump’s ongoing effort to wrap himself and his movement in the legend of the frontier. “In reaffirming our heritage as a free nation, we must remember that America has always been a frontier nation,” he said during his 2020 State of the Union address. At his second inauguration five years later, he reiterated the theme: “Americans are explorers, builders, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts. The call of the next great adventure resounds from within our souls.” His plan for a National Garden of American Heroes includes $200,000 statues of famous frontiersmen Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Buffalo Bill Cody, a showman after Trump’s own heart.

Trump’s rhetoric of MAGA frontier optimism depends on maintaining a rosy, uncritical view of the past—reviving and perpetuating the myths that generations of students have been taught to think about more critically. This is the goal of several of the president’s executive orders designed to reshape the story our country tells about itself. There is the mandate to make American public school classrooms sites of “patriotic education,” and another aimed at “restoring truth and sanity to American history” by policing monuments, museums, and parks across the nation for signs of any attempt to “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” The tendency of these orders should be clear. As Sen. Cory Booker said during his record-breaking 25-hour speech from the Senate floor, “I don’t want a whitewashed history. I don’t want a homogenized history. Tell me the wretched truth about America, because that speaks to our greatness.”

But while the Department of Homeland Security’s blithe view of our country’s history is deeply concerning, the real message of the Gast tweet—and other DHS posts like it—isn’t about how we interpret the past. It’s about the Trump administration’s vision of the future.

IS IT POSSIBLE there is another meaning hidden in that oddly worded, quaintly capitalized tweet? That’s a theory going around; you be the judge. There are fourteen words in the tweet, and two words beginning with “h” are capitalized. Highlighting these features, a law professor in Illinois named Evan Bernick wrote that “there is literally Nazi code” in DHS’s post.

Bernick argued that the DHS post was subtly but directly invoking the Aryan Nations’ white supremacist numerology of 14/88. The first part of this formulation refers to “the 14 words,” the first phrase of neo-Nazi terrorist David Eden Lane’s white-supremacist mantra: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children, because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the Earth.” And the 8s of the latter part refer to the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, doubled up to signify the Nazi greeting: “Heil Hitler.”

Lane and his ilk had their own point of view on America’s westward expansion in the nineteenth century; the Aryan Nations drew on frontier ideology and iconography to promote a secessionist and segregationist “white homeland,” a domain they intended to carve out of the Northwest while displacing any Jewish and nonwhite residents. The goddess striding across Gast’s painting as people flee before her takes on more sinister meanings when this context for DHS’s caption is taken into account.

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Texas governor and AG want to remove political opponents by fiat, to bolster GOP chances in the 2026 midterm

Why did Texas legislators flee?

According to The New York Times, Democrats left the state to block an effort by President Trump and Gov. Abbott to redraw the state’s U.S. House maps to swing five of Texas’s 38 districts from Democratic to Republican ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Dozens of Democratic members of the Texas House used a tactic called “breaking quorum,” denying Republican State House leaders the 100 members they need to convene.

“Breaking quorum,” has been used before. Texas lawmakers staged similar walkouts in 1870, 1979, 2003, and 2021. The 1979 effort, which was meant to block a proposed change in the date of the presidential primary, is the only one of the four walkouts that ultimately succeeded. Oregon and Indiana, two other states that require a two-thirds legislative majority for a quorum, have also had walkouts.

What have Republicans done in response?

On Monday, after the speaker of the Texas House issued civil arrest warrants for the runaway Democrats, Mr. Abbott ordered the Texas Department of Public Safety to track them down.

Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, asked the F.B.I. to assist Texas authorities in their “efforts to locate or arrest” the Democratic lawmakers.

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Mr. Abbott has also filed a lawsuit asking the Texas Supreme Court to remove Mr. Wu from office, arguing that his “willful refusal to appear” should be construed as a “deliberate abandonment of office.” Under state law, the court can remove legislators from office using a legal instrument called a writ of quo warranto if it finds they have “forfeited his or her office by abandonment.”

Protected speech or dereliction of duty?

Despite the history of breaking quorum, the federal courts have never conclusively answered one key question: Is it protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee to free speech and free assembly, and perhaps other constitutional rights?

In a 2021 federal lawsuit, a group of Texas legislators argued that it was, but the federal court dropped the case without ruling after the plaintiffs failed to pursue it. In the state courts that same year, a county judge issued a restraining order barring the arrest of lawmakers who broke quorum, but that order was quickly blocked by the Texas supreme court.

In its 2021 ruling, the Texas supreme court offered a split decision, seemingly upholding the legality of quorum breaks under the state constitution, as well as civil warrants to end them. “Just as article III, section 10 enables ‘quorum-breaking’ by a minority faction of the legislature, it likewise authorizes ‘quorum-forcing’ by the remaining members,” the court wrote.

 

So the ruling appears to support both the Democrats’ argument that breaking quorum is not the same thing as abandoning their office, but also the Republicans’ argument that the quorum breakers can be subject to arrest.

“Simply denying a quorum is something that has been used for 200 years on and off throughout government,” said Joe Jaworski, the former mayor of Galveston and a Democratic candidate for Texas Attorney General next year.

If the quorum breakers hold fast and the fight ends up in the courts, the judicial terrain might afford Mr. Abbott some advantages. At the state level, all nine justices on the Texas supreme court are Republicans, and six were initially chosen by Mr. Abbott. In the federal courts, Texas falls under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the most conservative appeals court in the country, where six of the 17 judges are Mr. Trump’s nominees.

Can Democrats be arrested?

Under most circumstances, the F.B.I. lacks the authority to enforce state or local laws.

David Froomkin, a law professor at the University of Houston, said that it would be “highly inappropriate” for federal law enforcement, such as the F.B.I., to get involved when no federal law has been broken.

“As far as I’m aware, there’s no allegation of a violation of a federal crime,” he said. “They should not be involved in resolving what is a dispute about state law and the state constitution.”

But Daniel Richman, a professor at Columbia Law School and former federal prosecutor, said it was possible that the F.B.I. could argue it had some basis for investigating or even arresting the legislators under a federal law that bars interstate travel to avoid legal process. Any arrests under that law would then be scrutinized by federal judges in the district where the arrest occurred, Mr. Richman said.

The case is clearer for state police acting within Texas. The Texas high court said in 2021, “Although arrest of absent members may seem an extreme step to some observers, the fact remains that if the absent members are sufficiently motivated to resist, the quorum-forcing authority given by the constitution to the present members can only be effectuated by physical compulsion.”

Can state politicians be removed from office by fiat?

The legal actions being pursued by Mr. Abbott and Texas’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, to remove Democratic state representatives from office have little legal precedent, something Mr. Paxton has conceded.

“It’s never been done,” he said in an interview on Newsmax on Wednesday.

Mr. Froomkin of the University of Houston said the Texas Constitution makes clear that the State House makes its own procedural rules and has authority to impose penalties. The involvement of the executive and the judicial branch in trying to remove members would raise serious separation of powers issues.

“I have no reason to believe that the supreme court would give any credence to these outlandish theories,” he said.

“The stakes are really grave here,” he added, referring to the effort by Mr. Abbott to remove the leader of the walkout, Mr. Wu. “We have a chief executive challenging the legitimacy of his political opponents in the legislature simply because they’re making use of legislative rules to delay his agenda.”

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Trump administration punishing lawyers seen as obstacles to agenda

The Trump administration is escalating its efforts to punish lawyers whom it sees as obstacles to the president’s agenda, reported Politico.

The Justice Department is asking a federal judge to impose “substantial monetary sanctions” on a California lawyer who briefly halted but ultimately failed to block the deportation of an immigrant from Laos who pleaded guilty to attempted murder in the 1990s.

Joshua Schroeder, an immigration and intellectual property attorney based in Los Angeles, appears to be the first target of President Donald Trump’s vow to discipline lawyers who hit the federal government with lawsuits that the administration deems frivolous.

Legal experts described the sanctions motion against Schroeder, which hasn’t been previously reported, as highly unusual. DOJ brought the disciplinary action after Schroeder asked federal judges to stop the deportation of his client, Vang Lor. In emergency court papers seeking to block the deportation, Schroeder cited the administration’s aggressive effort to expel other foreigners under the Alien Enemies Act, and he argued that his own client might be unlawfully ensnared in that effort.

Schroeder succeeded for a couple of weeks, but the Trump administration is now arguing that he falsely claimed his client was facing deportation under that rarely invoked law — and that he persisted even after government lawyers explained the deportation was based on ordinary immigration law.

DOJ’s forceful counterpunch comes after Trump signed a presidential memorandum in March instructing Attorney General Pam Bondi “to seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation against the United States,” including immigration lawyers.

“This is part of the playbook that was announced,” UCLA law professor Scott Cummings said. “Would DOJ, under normal circumstances, move for sanctions against a lawyer who sought to protect their client from removal in this kind of a context? I don’t think so.”

“This is sending a message across the bow that, ‘Look, we are really serious about going after the lawyers, and here’s the case that we’re going to make real the comments that Trump made in his executive memorandum, and any other lawyers that are going to engage in this kind of representation need to be aware,’” Cummings added.

Schroeder said he views DOJ’s bid to fine him for his deportation-related lawsuits as part of Trump’s pressure campaign against law firms he regards as opposing his policies or supporting his political enemies.

“It reminds me of the executive orders that are really targeting these big law firms,” Schroeder said in an interview. “They’re able to go all the way down to the very bottom, that’s where I am — no offense to myself. … It’s top to bottom. It’s not just this elite struggle.”

While Schroeder appears to be the first attorney DOJ has asked a federal judge to sanction under Trump’s March order, Trump has gone after other individual lawyers — such as former special counsel Jack Smith’s lawyer Peter Koski and whistleblower attorney Mark Zaid — by stripping them of their security clearances.

Schroeder, a solo practitioner, said he took on Lor’s case without pay and that the Trump administration’s move is likely to discourage other lawyers from doing the same for other immigrants and indigent or unpopular clients.

“The profession encourages us normal, common attorneys to take pro bono cases,” Schroeder said. “If they are able to just attack someone like me for trying, it can chill our ability to help, not just in this type of case but in all cases.”

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson applauded DOJ’s effort, saying it would discourage meritless litigation. “It is essential to deter future attorneys from bringing baseless actions to the court that are only meant to delay or prevent the enforcement of the law,” she said.

A Justice Department spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Rapid-fire litigation to block an imminent deportation

Schroeder took his first formal action for Lor on May 25, filing a motion for a temporary restraining order with a federal judge in Fort Worth, Texas, near the detention facility where Lor was being held. Lor had been living with his wife in neighboring Oklahoma when he was arrested in April at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement check-in. He told her in a call that he was about to be flown to Laos, court filings say.

Schroeder urged the judge to protect Lor from being swept up in the administration’s mass deportation efforts. The lawyer referenced Trump’s attention-grabbing deportation of 130 Venezuelan nationals to El Salvador in March under the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century law that gives the president the power to expel foreigners who are part of an “invasion” or “predatory incursion.” Schroeder also pointed to the administration’s attempt, days before Lor’s challenge was filed, to deport seven men to war-torn South Sudan even though they’re not from that country.

Fueling concerns his client could face a similar fate, Schroeder wrote, was the fact that, earlier that day, an ICE prisoner database showed Lor en route to the Bluebonnet Detention Facility, a Texas prison that was used to house a second group of Venezuelan detainees the Trump administration sought to deport under the Alien Enemies Act.

Schroeder argued that Lor faced the possibility of “summary deportation” to El Salvador under that law and that the Trump administration’s legal stance in other cases meant Lor could be put beyond the reach of U.S. courts before the courts addressed any protections he might be entitled to.

Lor came to the U.S. from Laos in 1987 on a green card and lived with his parents in California, according to court records. In 1998, he pleaded guilty to an attempted murder charge in state court in Merced, California. Immigration authorities say he was sentenced to 9 years in prison, but records show Lor got a total sentence of 22 years due to enhancements for using a firearm and inflicting great bodily injury.

It’s unclear how long Lor served in prison, but an immigration judge ordered him deported to Laos in 2018. That order — issued during the first Trump administration — wasn’t immediately carried out, perhaps because Laos was refusing to issue passports to its citizens facing deportation from the U.S.

Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act in March targeted only Venezuelan men and was aimed at members of the Tren de Aragua gang, although many of those deported have denied any gang ties. But the proclamation was initially signed in secret, and the administration has refused to say precisely when Trump signed it, fueling fears among immigration advocates that he may have issued additional orders under the wartime authority.

 Schroeder said in his TRO request that Lor’s immigration status was “unclear to counsel” and that he was not seeking “to prohibit the government from removing any individual who may lawfully be removed under the immigration laws.” The filing discussed at length Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, describing it as “an unleashing of unbounded war powers that could apply to any immigrant or disfavored U.S. citizen.”

Amid the uncertainty about Lor’s status, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor, a George W. Bush appointee, quickly ordered the government not to deport Lor pending further litigation. But sometime that night, May 25, he was loaded on a chartered Boeing 767 at Alliance Airport in Fort Worth. Flight-tracking data showed the plane was bound for Laos and Vietnam, via Honolulu and Guam.

Due to O’Connor’s order, when the plane arrived in Guam, Lor was unloaded and taken to a detention facility there. The 767 landed in Vientiane, Laos, on May 27 without Lor on board.

Schroeder refiled the lawsuit in Guam and got U.S. District Judge Frances Tydingco-Gatewood, also a Bush appointee, to order that Lor not be deported without 48-hours notice to the court. But after a hearing, Tydingco-Gatewood dismissed the case, saying she lacked jurisdiction to interfere with a deportation under the Immigration & Nationality Act.

“The evidence proffered by Respondents makes clear that Petitioner’s removal is not based on the AEA but is, in fact, based on a violation of the INA,” the judge wrote, effectively giving the green light for the administration to deport Lor.

Schroeder appealed, but Lor was deported to Laos around June 10, court records show.

Justice Department lawyers maintain in court filings that ICE officials notified Lor on April 19 and May 6 of his impending deportation, although those notices don’t mention him being sent to Laos and one says he was being considered for release.

Schroeder declined to discuss Lor’s current status in Laos, saying he did not have permission to do so. He didn’t use his client’s name when speaking to POLITICO. Lor is identified simply as “V.L.” in most of the court filings. However, his full name appears in the records government lawyers submitted of his California conviction and in the sanctions motion filed last week.

DOJ comes after the lawyer

The sanctions motion, filed Friday in the U.S. District Court of Guam and signed by DOJ attorneys in Washington and the U.S. territory in the Pacific, twice references Trump’s March directive to crack down on what he termed “unscrupulous behavior” by lawyers.

The motion accuses Schroeder of acting “in bad faith, unreasonably and vexatiously” and says he “multiplied proceedings by maintaining positions without bases in fact and law, without making a reasonable, competent inquiry, and for an improper purpose.” DOJ lawyers contend he persisted in claims that the government was deporting Lor under the Alien Enemies Act even though he “knew that assertion to be false.” Tydingco-Gatewood will make the initial decision on whether to grant DOJ’s request for sanctions.

Schroeder said his references to the Trump administration’s aggressive use of the Alien Enemies Act showed the urgency of determining where Lor was being sent and under what legal framework.

“The point is that notice and opportunity to be heard is a fundamental basis of all rights, and if you don’t have that no one can assert any sort of right and the government can do whatever they want,” the attorney said.

Some of Schroeder’s filings appear to have been hastily drafted. The 30-page TRO request filed in Texas makes fairly clear that Lor is from Laos and discusses the possibility of dozens of “mainland southeast Asian” immigrants being gathered for deportation, but at one point it erroneously says Lor is from Venezuela. An appeal Schroeder filed, which is still pending, refers to a court order issued in June as dating from 2010.

Schroeder said he was working “under very heightened pressure” because he had “only hours” to try to forestall his client being moved beyond the jurisdiction of U.S. courts.

“I had to do it very quickly, because he was in Guam and they might have taken him immediately,” Schroeder said this week. “So, I was just putting the basics together in my mind the way I was seeing it.”

Laos appears to be seeking to curry favor with the Trump administration in recent months by being more receptive to deportation of its citizens from the U.S. Lor is of Hmong descent, according to court filings, and like many in that ethnic group his parents are believed to have cooperated with U.S. military forces during the Vietnam War. Those who did so have often faced particular difficulty in getting passports or citizenship documents from Laos’ Communist government.

However, Laos announced in March that it was encouraging its citizens present in the U.S. illegally to return to Laos. But in June, days after the deportation flight Lor was taken off of due to the litigation, Trump put visa sanctions on the Southeast Asian country for a second time. “Laos has historically failed to accept back its removable nationals,” Trump wrote.

David Leopold, former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the sanctions motion seems like an overreaction given the aggressive and unusual tactics the Trump administration has used to carry out deportations in recent months.

“We’re in uncharted waters in terms of the way the federal government is enforcing the immigration laws,” Leopold said. “I think that at a minimum they should expect lawyers are going to be as zealous as possible in preventing their clients from being removed to a place like CECOT prison in El Salvador, or to South Sudan, or some other country where their life could be threatened. … We’ve got to expect lawyers to be aggressive.”

Schroeder attended Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, and graduated from Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon, in 2013. He’s authored numerous law review articles on immigration and other topics.

Tydingco-Gatewood, the judge in Guam, has yet to schedule a hearing on the sanctions motion against Schroeder.

Schroeder said he expects the judge will turn down the motion, but the mere fact it was filed may prompt other lawyers to decline difficult cases that could upset the Trump administration.

“I think this motion for sanctions is not going to work, but it might do what they want it to do anyway,” Schroeder said. “I’m wondering if the filing of the motion itself is supposed to punish me. … That might be the whole point.”

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Autocracy Watch: Lawfully and non-violently withholding our consent for the attack on America’s governmental fabric

The Situation on Friday,  from Lawfare, urged the impeachment of Judge Emil Bove as soon as a majority in the House of Representatives exists to do it.

Today, my social media feeds are an incoherent melange of stories, some related to one another, some not, some important and meaningful, some emphatically neither. There are tariffs; there’s jobs data and resulting personnel actions; there’s a bit of Sydney Sweeney—of whose good jeans I have now heard; there are Texas Democrats fleeing their state; there are non-Texas Democrats pretending they are up to retaliating against Texas Republicans over redistricting. There’s famine in Gaza. And there’s still a bit of Jeffrey Epstein hanging around.

All of which is to say that it’s a good time to ignore the news and to return to the subject of non-cooperation with The Situation—a matter which I treated back at the beginning of March when I declared that “I don’t know about you, but I am not interested in cooperating any more.”

My point in that column was that we should all figure out ways, lawfully and non-violently, to slow things down, to make society work a little less efficiently, to withhold our consent for the attack on America’s governmental fabric.

I have spent a lot of time since writing this column thinking about what mass non-cooperation with The Situation looks like in practice, and I have been moved that others have gotten in touch with their own thoughts and ideas on the subject. Excellent experiments have taken place.

I have also been reading on the subject and thinking about it conceptually, trying to envision mass action based on highly-distributed forms of non-cooperation that are not destructive, not violent, yet are also more than just holding signs and chanting things. 

I have to say, after studying the problem for a few months, I have not yet come up with a magic bullet.

Let’s consider the pros and cons of a few different forms of non-cooperation:

Denying a quorum to the Texas legislature seems like an excellent form of non-cooperation. It will slow down redistricting in the Lone Star State. It gets a lot of attention. It may spur other actions. And it stands for a larger form of non-cooperation, which others may take up: that is, non-participation in official actions that may require one’s participation to take place at all. It’s great—as far as it goes.

The trouble is that most of us aren’t legislators and thus can’t band together with a few dozen of our colleagues to collectively shut down institutions from which The Situation demands anti-democratic action.

Most of us aren’t in a position to operationalize this particular form of non-cooperation—which is to say that it’s not scalable and can’t be done in a distributed fashion.

Here’s one that can be done in a more distributed fashion: I have exactly no intention of cooperating with ICE in its current roundup of undocumented aliens—and neither, it seems, do a lot of other people, both citizens and officials. What’s more, I would have no hesitation about filming any ICE raid which I might happen to witness and making that public—as many others are doing. 

The non-cooperation of civilian bystanders with these law enforcement activities—some by activists and some by people who just happened to be present—has been a salutary thing, raising a lot of awareness of what “mass deportation” really means. These policies have become increasingly unpopular as more and more people have seen them in action. As long as people are careful not to do more than express their views, take pictures, and film things—not, that is, to dox people or to interfere physically with lawful activity—it strikes me as a constructive form of non-cooperation with a dangerous policy. 

But again, there are limits—and risks to personal safety and liberty. As we’ve all seen, it’s not going to stop what ICE is doing. It’s not going to shame members of Congress into refusing to balloon ICE’s funding. And the administration is actively proud of these videos. It stages this sort of brutality and makes ads out of its own videos.

So again, useful, but not a silver dagger.

Here’s a third area of non-cooperation, one which hits close to home for me: For the first time in my life, there are whole categories of government actions in my field with which I will not assist and upon which I will not advise.

Only a few months ago, I was proud to serve on an advisory board convened by DHS on intelligence matters. I would not serve on such a board today. Similarly, I would not assist on or consult with NSA, FBI, the Defense Department, or the Justice Department on policy matters—all of which I have done proudly in the past under administrations of both parties. It’s not that I don't think that career officials in all of those areas are struggling with hard questions. They are. It’s that I don’t trust the leadership of these agencies to act in an apolitical fashion any more—even, perhaps especially, on national security matters. I don’t trust that my advice will be used for the benefit of the country, rather than for the benefit of The Situation. So I will not cooperate. I will not participate. And in that judgment, I am certainly not alone.

The trouble with this form of non-cooperation is that it is a bit bespoke—precious, even. Pam Bondi and Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard don’t want my advice anyway, so announcing that I won’t show up to a party to which I haven’t been invited is striking a bit of a pose. And that’s true even if to the limited extent my point scales. When I say I’m not alone, after all, what I mean is that there are a few hundred, maybe a few thousand people, who are self-consciously not participating in helping the executive branch with national security work. I imagine that there are a bunch more in other fields—fields like public health and climate science. And as the Lord High Executioner might put it, “they’ll none of them be missed.”

Trumpism is, at its core, a war on elites and expertise, so a small handful of elites declaring that they are withholding their expertise is very far from a pressure point; it is threatening The Situation with a good time.

None of this is to criticize the people who are taking these approaches. They all have a place in the mood of non-cooperation that an active citizenry should be contemplating these days.

There may be no single mass act of non-cooperation that everyone can participate in, that is more than momentary, and that paralyzes The Situation. It may be that diversity of non-cooperation is itself an essential part of the mood.

But I keep thinking about it. I keep stewing on it. 

“In this country,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in an essay published in 1844, “we are very vain of our political institutions, which are singular in this, that they sprung, within the memory of living men, from the character and condition of the people, which they still express with sufficient fidelity, — and we ostentatiously prefer them to any other in history.” Emerson was contemptuous of the preference: “But our institutions, though in coincidence with the spirit of the age, have not any exemption from the practical defects which have discredited other forms. Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well.”

Eventually, every actual state is corrupt—and the corruption of this one is happening before our eyes. The search for ways to undermine that corruption, to withhold consent, to not participate in it and to not cooperate with it, to not obey its laws too too well, strikes me as an essential part of maintaining goodness.

The Situation continues tomorrow.

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Tennessee executed man who killed girlfriend and two daughters

 The 28th Execution of 2025

A man convicted of killing his girlfriend and her two young daughters in the 1980s said he was “hurting so bad” while he was given a lethal injection on August 5, 2025 in Tennessee, where authorities had refused to deactivate his implanted defibrillator despite claims it might cause unnecessary, painful shocks as the drugs were administered, reported The Associated Press.

Black’s attorney said they will review data kept by the device as part of an autopsy.

Black died at 10:43 a.m., prison officials said. It was about 10 minutes after the execution started and Black talked about being in pain.

Asked for any last words, he replied, “No sir.”

Black looked around the room as the execution started, lifting his head off the gurney multiple times, and could be heard sighing and breathing heavily. All seven media witnesses to the execution agreed he appeared to be in discomfort. Throughout the execution, a spiritual adviser prayed and sang over Black, at one point touching his face.

“Oh, it’s hurting so bad,” Black said, as he lay with his hands and chest restrained to the gurney, a sheet covering up past his lower half, and an IV line in his arm.

“I’m so sorry. Just listen to my voice,” the adviser responded.

Black was executed after a back-and-forth in court over whether officials would need to turn off his implantable cardioverter-defibrillator, or ICD. Black, 69, was in a wheelchair, suffering from dementia, brain damage, kidney failure, congestive heart failure and other conditions, his attorneys have said.

The nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center said it’s unaware of any other cases with similar claims to Black’s about ICDs or pacemakers. Black’s attorneys said they haven’t found a comparable case, either.

Black killed his girlfriend and her 2 daughters

Black was convicted in the 1988 shooting deaths of his girlfriend Angela Clay, 29, and her two daughters, Latoya Clay, 9, and Lakeisha Clay, 6. Prosecutors said he was in a jealous rage when he shot the three at their home. At the time, Black was on work-release while serving time for shooting Clay’s estranged husband.

Clay’s sister said Black will now face a higher power.

“His family is now going through the same thing we went through 37 years ago. I can’t say I’m sorry because we never got an apology,” Linette Bell, Angela Clay’s sister, said in a statement read by a victim’s advocate after the execution.

Black’s lawyer said the execution was shameful.

“Today, the state of Tennessee killed a gentle, kind, fragile, intellectually disabled man in a violation of the laws of our country simply because they could,” attorney Kelley Henry said.

The legal fight over Black’s defibrillator

In mid-July, a trial court judge agreed with Black’s attorneys that officials must have the defibrillator deactivated to avert the risk that it could cause unnecessary pain and prolong the execution. But Tennessee’s Supreme Court overturned that decision Thursday, saying the other judge lacked authority to order the change.

The state disputed that the lethal injection would cause Black’s defibrillator to shock him and said he wouldn’t feel them regardless.

Henry said Black’s defense team will carefully review autopsy results, EKG data from Black and information from the defibrillator to determine what exactly happened during the execution. The lethal injection protocol is still being challenged in court.

She said she was especially concerned about his head movement and complaints of pain because the massive dose of pentobarbital used to kill inmates is supposed to rapidly leave them unconscious.

“The fact that he was able to raise his head several times and express pain tells you that the pentobarbital was not acting the way the state’s experts claim it acts,” Henry said.

Prison officials did not comment on witnesses and Black’s attorney saying he appeared conscious or his complaints of pain.

It was Tennessee’s second execution since May, after a pause for five years, first because of COVID-19 and then because of missteps by state corrections officials.

Twenty-eight men have died by court-ordered execution so far this year in the U.S., and nine other people are scheduled to be put to death in seven states during the remainder of 2025. The number of executions this year exceeds the 25 carried out last year and in 2018. It is the highest total since 2015, when 28 people were put to death.

Black’s condition

Black had an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator, which is a small, battery-powered electronic device that is surgically implanted in the chest. It served as a pacemaker and an emergency defibrillator. Black’s attorneys have said a doctor can send it a deactivation command without surgery.

The legal case also spurred a reminder that most medical professionals consider participation in executions a violation of health care ethics.

Intellectual disability claim

In recent years, Black’s legal team has unsuccessfully tried to get a new hearing about an intellectual disability they say he’s exhibited since childhood. People with intellectual disabilities are constitutionally barred from execution. 

His attorneys have said that if they had delayed a prior attempt to seek his intellectual disability claim, he would have been spared under a 2021 state law. That is because the 2021 law denies a hearing to people on death row who have already filed a similar request and a court has ruled on it “on the merits.”

A judge denied Nashville District Attorney Glenn Funk’s attempt to get Black a new hearing. Funk focused on input from an expert for the state in 2004 who determined back then that Black didn’t meet the criteria for what was then called “mental retardation.” But she concluded that Black met the new law’s criteria for a diagnosis of intellectual disability.

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CREATORS: The Tragic Abduction and Murder of Etan Patz is Back in the News

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
August 5, 2025

In 1979, a 6-year-old boy disappeared on his way to his Manhattan school bus stop. Etan Patz's disappearance changed the way people parent, launching the missing and exploited children's movement. Patz was never found.

Thirty-three years later, Pedro Hernandez was arrested and charged by the Manhattan district attorney's office with second-degree murder and first-degree kidnapping.

According to The New York Times, "Hernandez was living in New Jersey when a relative told authorities that he suspected him of killing Etan. Prosecutors said that Mr. Hernandez had a history of sexually abusing a family member, drug use and domestic violence."

This arrest was high-profile. As one of the nation's most infamous child abductions, with an arrest decades after the crime, one would think the police would want to make sure everything was done by the book. Not in New York City.

The police elicited a confession from Hernandez after seven hours of questioning. That isn't particularly unusual, but the confession came before he was administered his Miranda warnings. After he confessed, he was mirandized by the police who had Hernandez repeat his confession on tape, according to court filings.

The New York Times reported, Hernandez's first trial in 2015 ended with a hung jury after 18 days of deliberation. The lone holdout said that his primary reason had been Hernandez's initial confession, which to the juror seemed "coerced."

In 2017, a second jury convicted Hernandez on the ninth day of deliberations. The jury foreman later remarked that "deliberations were difficult."

Last month, a federal court granted Hernandez a new trial.

A quarter-century after Patz disappeared, Americans were presented with a list of six crimes that could happen in their local communities. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found that Americans expressed the greatest concern for their children being abducted and sexually molested.

Child abductions by strangers have consistently remained a concern for parents. Despite the more than 30,000 juveniles who are reported missing every year to the National Crime Information Center, it is rare for children to be abducted by strangers. Roughly 182 children were kidnapped by people outside their families in 2019, the latest year for which data is available, according to a study published in 2022 by the Department of Justice.

A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found nearly one-in-three U.S. parents with children younger than 18 say they are extremely or very worried about their children being abducted.

Etan's disappearance, the murders of Adam Walsh, Polly Klaas and JonBenet Ramsey ushered in, and fueled, an era of hyper-vigilance for parents. Parents' irrational fear of stranger danger changed the way parents care for their children, and the way children interact with adults and their peers for that matter. Politicians jumped on the stranger danger bandwagon. Starting with former President Ronald Reagan proclaiming the day Etan Patz disappeared, May 25, as National Missing Children's Day, politicians have enacted more and more draconian laws to deal with the sexual abuse and exploitation of children.

Hernandez's arrest and conviction for killing Etan should have provided some closure for a case that had extraordinary implications. His new trial will open wounds festering for 46 years. The upheaval could have been avoided.

Hernandez was arrested and tried in a cold case based on flimsy evidence devoid of any forensic evidence. Then investigators interviewed Hernandez without advising him of his rights. The police then read him his rights and interviewed him a second time, getting a second taped confession. This tactic flew in the face of a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2004.

The Court, in a 5-4 decision, found the second confession inadmissible, particularly when the police strategy was to intentionally undermine the effectiveness of the Miranda warnings. That decision is the key to Hernandez's successful appeal and Etan Patz being back in the news.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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