THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Sign up for Inside the Trump Presidency, a newsletter featuring coverage of the second Trump term.The ICE officer who shot a Venezuelan man last weekend in Austin was a recent hire who was not wearing his body camera, three officials at the Department of Homeland Security with knowledge of the incident told me. The officer, who has not been publicly identified, was hired last year, according to two of the officials, but he previously worked for another federal law-enforcement agency, one of the officials said. The officials were not authorized to discuss the investigation into the shooting, which left Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez with a bullet lodged in his upper torso, according to his attorney.ICE officials have rushed to distribute body-worn cameras to officers since the fatal shootings in July of a Mexican construction contractor in Texas and a Colombian delivery driver in Maine. Officers making arrests are required to have the cameras at all times. The agency has directed officers to activate the devices prior to engaging in enforcement activity, the three officials said, and ICE instructs them to stop recording only when the incident has safely concluded. Officers who do not follow these instructions are required to submit a written statement to their supervisors and could face possible disciplinary action, the three officials said.DHS and ICE public-affairs officials did not immediately respond to questions about the incident in Austin and whether the officer will face consequences.On Sunday, the officer was working with a partner who was driving in a separate vehicle.  That second officer had a body-worn camera that was turned on, two officials told me. The officers were checking license plates using a system that helps them find targets for arrest using commercial databases and federal immigration files. When they ran the plates from the blue Toyota Corolla driven by Garcés Pérez, the officers saw he had an outstanding deportation order from an immigration judge.The ICE officers, who were driving unmarked vehicles, attempted to pull Garcés Pérez over, but he drove away, nearly striking one of the officers, according to one of the DHS officials. The official said the incident was recorded by the body camera of the ICE officer’s partner. The officers followed Garcés Pérez in their vehicles. The officer without the body camera found Garcés Pérez and attempted to detain him. When Garcés Pérez attempted to drive away again, that officer pulled his gun and… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Photographs by Christopher Gregory-RiveraThe message from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services arrived on August 7 as Jeanne was finishing up her shift at a restaurant in the suburbs of Charlotte, North Carolina. Her legal status in the United States had been terminated. Her work permit was no longer valid. Jeanne immediately switched off the location-tracking on her phone. What if ICE was already looking for her? What if she was deported back to Haiti?Five years in the United States had brought her physical safety but nagging stress. Jeanne, who asked me not to use her real name, arrived in the United States in July 2021 to visit family on a short-term visa. She had been mugged on the streets of Port-au-Prince a few months earlier, and gangs were taking over more of the city. The Biden administration had recently expanded Temporary Protected Status for Haitians—offering provisional residency, protection from deportation, and work permits—citing the country’s deteriorating security. Two days after Jeanne arrived, Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in his bedroom. Jeanne overstayed her visa, applied for TPS, and tried to begin a new life in North Carolina. But she could never really settle in, she told me.As President Trump campaigned to return to the White House, he promised the largest immigration crackdown in history—and repeated false rumors about Haitian migrants in Ohio eating pets. Soon after he returned to office, he canceled TPS protections for Haiti, and Jeanne lost her job. She was scared to leave her home and had to drain her savings to pay bills. After a federal judge blocked Trump’s move in February 2026, effectively reinstating TPS, she got her job back. But in June, the Supreme Court sided with Trump, and when the ruling took effect last month, Jeanne was among the roughly 300,000 Haitians who could no longer work legally and faced possible arrest and deportation by ICE. Jeanne looked for advice online, finding mostly fear and despair. Her relatives urged her to head north and stay with her brother in Canada.Canada’s asylum rules allow migrants with close family members to enter the country and seek protection, but Jeanne worried about making the 900-mile journey to the border. She had read that ICE officers and Border Patrol agents were checking buses and trains, asking for papers. A friend gave her the number of a driver, who charged $700 for the one-way trip. “I was… [TheTopNews] Read More.

In 1946, the year that Donald Trump was born, the pinball machine offered everything but control. The bumpers were propulsive, the lights flashed, but the player’s only honest move was to pull a spring-loaded plunger. After that, the ball belonged to the machine, zinging and zooming wherever the bumpers sent it.This is how many Americans experience the Trump presidency today: antic caroming that they can do little more than watch. The ballroom. The Iran war. The threats against Canada. Greenland. Portraits of himself as Christ, a decorated general, or the pope. The arch. The Kennedy Center. Prosecution of enemies. Pardons. Imaginary Reflecting Pool vandals. Federal incursions into voting. Tariffs on. Tariffs off. Tariffs on again. The Qatari plane. Endless promises—to release tax returns, to end corruption, to deliver $5,000 checks—that never materialize.No president has been more with us than Trump, because no president has been better at seizing public attention. But there is a difference between getting attention and doing something with it. For months, the president has been unable to convince the public that he’s up to the job. In a CNN poll released at the end of July, 65 percent of respondents said that his policies had worsened the economy, and only 28 percent approved of his handling of Iran.Voters have watched the caroming and have concluded that he doesn’t have his eye on the ball. They care about the economy, and he seems to care about everything else. Only 27 percent of adults told CNN that Trump has the right priorities, down from 45 percent when the term began. And a record 73 percent said he hasn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important issues. In June, while Trump was fixated on the Reflecting Pool and stopping widespread voter fraud that doesn’t exist, a bipartisan housing bill aimed at high costs reached his desk. He called it “a big yawn” and said he hadn’t decided whether to sign it. In July, he let it become law without his signature.This is a problem for Republicans in November 2026, but it’s an opportunity for voters looking to November 2028. Once a roster of candidates emerges, their supporters will discover that the office demands—wouldn’t you know it?—exactly the qualities that their preferred candidate happens to possess. Now, when there’s no one horse to back, is the time to use the current president’s rat-a-tat treatment of our attention to ask… [TheTopNews] Read More.

If you’re a Democrat, attending a Jon Ossoff rally feels very good. Therapeutic, even. Many Democrats feel as if every day of the second Trump administration has brought some fresh horror: a discouraging development in the never-ending Iran war; a new vow of retribution from the 80-year-old leader of the free world; or the revelation of yet another money-making venture cooked up by the Trumps.But now, from the South, a young senator has emerged, with a deep voice promising change and a speaking cadence not unlike Barack Obama’s. His dark hair sits just so; his skin is perfectly even—is that makeup he’s wearing? Never mind. We’re looking at his sleeves now, which are carefully rolled up and emphasize biceps that are, well, quite noticeably larger than they were when Georgia voters sent him to Congress in 2021.More important, this senator sounds different from other Democrats. Ossoff is doing something on the campaign trail that basically no one else in his party seems able to pull off: elegantly and comprehensively skewering the Trump administration, while earning some Republican support.He’s doing this in speeches at his campaign events, such as the one I attended on Sunday in Athens, Georgia. But those speeches seem carefully calibrated to be heard by an audience much farther away: Every week, millions of Americans are encountering Ossoff on their phones, through perfectly produced clips of the senator unveiling a new insult or innovative critique of the Trump administration. “He’s trying to put his face on the money. Did you see that? He’s building a monument to himself,” he said in May. “He’s doing these things now because no one will honor him when he’s gone.” Last month, the senator’s reference to the zealous Trump aide Natalie Harp spiked Google searches for Harp by 5,000 percent.[Read: Ossoff’s ‘Natalie’ moment]The revelation of Ossoff’s particular talent explains why the senator is suddenly all over the news and Instagram, and why so many people in his party are breathlessly positioning him as the new favorite to win the Democratic nomination in 2028. Premature? Maybe. Ossoff might not be well suited for such a task. But Democrats are desperate for leaders and feel that the senator has pierced the party’s gloom like a beam of warm light. (Ossoff, through a spokesperson, declined an interview for this story.)Outside the Georgia Theatre in Athens, Judith McWillie struggled to explain how she felt about her… [TheTopNews] Read More.

In a conversation at The Atlantic Festival with The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg warned fellow members of the Democratic Party to resist the urge to revert to “the previous status quo” if they regain power in the midterms.It would be a mistake, Buttigieg argued, for Democrats to try to reverse “the damage” of the past two years of the Donald Trump presidency by trying to restore the country to how it looked in 2022 or “whenever we think that America was great.” He said that Democrats instead need to build for the idea that “the next quarter century between here and 2050, which is kind of a make-or-break quarter century for the whole American project, is subject to very different conditions and problems than the ones that we inherited.”Buttigieg—whom many analysts see as a potential 2028 presidential contender—offered examples of what that vision might look like. He called for banning gerrymandering and passing a constitutional amendment to address the deluge of money in politics. “This idea that it is somehow beyond our power to use what is probably the single most elegant feature of the Constitution, which is its capacity to be amended—right?—is a complete failure of ambition and imagination,” Buttigieg said.When asked by Goldberg about the Democratic Socialists of America, Buttigieg responded that he thinks “there’s a temptation to imagine that being bold is the same thing as being kind of maximally ideological.” Sometimes it is the case, Buttigieg said, that the leftmost idea is the boldest. But other, more ideologically moderate projects may require “radical reform to our institutions,” he noted.“I know the commentariat wants to get it all fixed on some left-to-center-to-right spectrum,” Buttigieg continued. “To me, what’s more interesting is: Do we have the right package of base hits and big swings, and are we going after both of them, at the same time, all the time?”The following is an edited transcript of the conversation.Jeffrey Goldberg: I want to get to the state of our civilization, but there’s this thing—and we’ve talked about this already—there’s this thing that’s been bothering me more than most things bothering me in the past few days. The fact that a Vladimir Putin–aligned oligarch, extremely dubious past—as opposed to the oligarchs with a wholesome past—(Laughter)Extremely dubious past, funded openly—or not openly, it was discovered, but there’s no secret—funded a two-day celebration for the… [TheTopNews] Read More.