An All-Out Assault on Citizenship

Let’s start on a positive note

After a long, terrible week of abuses, corruption, and violence in the Trump administration, it’s Friday and you deserve some good news.

First, as Khaya Himmelman reports at Talking Points Memo, the DOJ’s campaign to collect voter rolls from states has been struck down in court.

“In her 78-page ruling, Sooknanan said that the DOJ’s efforts to access unredacted voter files from states and then run those files through the SAVE system violated federal law, specifically the Privacy Act and the Paperwork Production Act. Sooknanan’s decision goes further than the actions taken by federal judges that have rejected the DOJ’s legal arguments in several individual state-by-state cases. Her ruling suspends the DOJ’s nationwide voter roll crusade, invalidating what the DOJ has called its ‘list maintenance project.’”

This is one of those things that was unlikely to ever work yet kept quietly plodding along in the background for months, limping from court defeat to court defeat but continuing to try and find a way through. Do I believe this will truly be the end of it? Not over the remainder of Trump’s term, but it may well be done for the midterm cycle.

“Eighteen states have complied with the DOJ’s demand for voter roll data. The DOJ has sued the 31 states that have not and has lost every case, with the exception of one that reached a settlement with the DOJ. Some experts say the ruling could have implications for the states that voluntarily handed their data over to the DOJ, as well.”

Here’s hoping.

Second, you will recall Pete Hegseth announcing that there would be a livestreamed firing-squad execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood mass shooter. Opponents’ pressure campaign against it hasn’t yet blocked the execution, but the livestreaming of it appears off. As Katie Rogers, Tyler Pager, John Ismay, and Greg Jaffe report in the New York Times:

“President Trump on Thursday canceled the Pentagon’s planned livestream of the execution of the Army officer who was convicted in the 2009 Fort Hood mass shooting. …

“The president and his advisers remain adamant that Mr. Hasan deserves to be executed, but the president’s decision to change course constituted a rare retreat in the face of enormous public pushback. The criticism came from Democrats, Republicans, military officials and faith leaders who maintained that broadcasting the execution would turn it into a barbaric source of entertainment that violated core democratic principles.”

A few too many administration talking points made their way into that article (“The president’s main concern was whether broadcasting the execution would deter other mass shootings, according to a White House official who was granted anonymity to discuss his thinking,” oh please), but nevertheless a narrowly positive outcome here. It is always good to make MAGA retreat, wherever and whenever we can. The appearance of weakness is weakness in politics and in institutions generally.

Stopping a barbaric public execution is good in and of itself. And who knows, maybe one blessed day we will look back on this as a turning point on our way to being finally, entirely rid of the death penalty in this country.

The grinding away of citizenship

At Talking Points Memo, Josh Kovensky argues that The Omar Case Encapsulates MAGA’s Attack on Citizenship:

“Last year, TPM first reported, the DOJ opened the door to using politics as grounds to denaturalize people through a little-noticed memo. There, it said the same kind of national security justification it applied in its attempts to deport people like Mahmoud Khalil could be used in deciding whether to push to denaturalize someone. …

“It is unclear what case the administration thinks it has against Omar because no case has been filed. Per multiple media outlets, Homeland Security Investigations searched her apartment and seized her phone as part of an investigation into immigration fraud. Warrants went out to her relatives; per CNN, they came after a court fight in which a magistrate judge narrowed what the DOJ could examine. Per the Wall Street Journal, this is all with a view towards potentially moving to denaturalize and deport her.

“The basis of the investigation is reportedly that Omar was not 17, but in fact was 18, when her father became a U.S. citizen. A minor whose parent becomes a U.S. citizen naturalizes with them; adulthood means applying separately. As several outlets have noted, Omar’s first country of Somalia has been wracked by wars and competing governments: accurate records are hard to come by.”

The nature of administering the law always leaves a great deal of discretion open to the administrators. Because the Trump administration is so brazen in its actions and telegraphs everything its administrators are attempting, it has faced a great many defeats in court and in politics. But it continues to bend the administration of citizenship to its will, steadily and surely.

As Sean McDonnell reports on NPR’s All Things Considered:

“Immigration officials have canceled 13 naturalization ceremonies in Northeast Ohio so far this year. These ceremonies are vanishing because fewer people are becoming citizens under President Donald Trump's policies. The numbers are stark. In 2024 and 2025, officials approved 70,000 naturalizations a month. But this year, the average dropped to 22,000, and Ohio has seen an almost 50% drop in new citizens. The application backlog is growing and processing times have doubled from six to 13 months.”

This is the exact same kind of tactic taken during the first Trump term. When they could not win in court or actually change the law with legislation, they simply changed the behavior of the executive branch overall through changes in personnel and internal policy. A future administration will need to undo the damage, the way the Biden administration did, and a future trifecta will need to actually pass some legislation reforming the whole system.

In less positive news

Trump suggests he is going to pardon everyone, including himself: "I'm allowed to do a self-pardon ... I don't want to see people that work for me go through years of nonsense"
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-16T00:20:10.130Z

TERF Island sinks further

Toby Buckle has written extensively for us about the rise of anti-trans politics in the UK. Alison Holt and James Melley in the BBC report that yet another abusive policy has been rolled out: trans patients cannot use single-sex hospital spaces that align with their gender.

Decisions like this have come entirely from the administrative branch of the British government, under the control of the Labour Party, without Parliament ever passing a new piece of legislation. Toby discusses the ridiculous origins of this horrible discrimination regime in detail.

A white nationalist attempts a mass shooting

WREG News Channel 3’s Ashlyn Wright, Ethan Illers, Michael Johnson, Jenna Barnes, and Erik Runge report:

“On Sunday, Palatine police arrested Alexandros Paporakis, a 19-year-old local accused of planning a mass shooting targeting a suburban Hindu place of worship.

“Police say Paporakis had been planning for two years to commit a mass shooting at Aurora’s largest Hindu temple. On Sunday, authorities say, Paporakis told one of his Taco Bell coworkers he was at a temple, but his gun had jammed and he was on his way to fix it.

“The coworker called 911, and authorities say there is video evidence of Paporakis’ car being at the temple. Palatine police said they were contacted by the Mount Prospect Police Department Sunday afternoon. Police then located and arrested Paporakis at the apartment he shares with his mother in Palatine.”

Hat tip to John Light at Talking Point Memo.

Around Liberal Currents

Public Execution, by Gareth Watkins: Acts of violence are a sacrament in the fascist civic religion. The new fascist man must be posted into being.
Editor’s Notes: Fellas, Is It Gay to Be James Talarico?, by Alan Elrod. They need us to hate each other.
Sexual Violence on Campus and the Universities That Enable It (Half the Answer #109, with Nicole Bedera): Institutions of higher education regularly prevent survivors from accessing justice.
Liberal Currents Live: Libertarianism Captured by Racism: Was it inevitable that bigotry would become so dominant within libertarianism, or could it all have gone differently?
A Bigger Danger Than Dictators, a video by publisher Adam Gurri: Why do ordinary people so often turn against freedom? Why are the open society's greatest enemies often the very people who benefit the most from it?
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