As early, in-person voting kicks off in the United States, a coalition of nine advocacy groups and unions filed a federal lawsuit on Friday seeking to block “unlawful voter intimidation” by federal agents before the midterm elections.
“Federal law expressly prohibits sending armed federal agents to voting locations,” the 65-page complaint notes. “Neither the Constitution nor federal law grants federal agencies any role in assessing or policing voter eligibility or regulating election administration in any way. Yet the administration has repeatedly sought to interfere with election systems and announced its readiness to unlawfully deploy law enforcement to voting sites. Simultaneously, in at least one instance, DOJ conditioned the removal of immigration enforcement agents on state leaders turning over voter roll information.”
Possible action item: Plan your vote
Early, in-person voting began today in Virginia, and three other states — Idaho, Minnesota and South Dakota — started allowing voters to cast absentee ballots in-person.
Learn more about voting procedures and ballots in your state here.
The NAACP leads the coalition, and the lawsuit describes the “predictable” result of the policy: Black and Latino communities, among others, “are afraid to vote, help others vote, and participate in civic life.”
The civil rights groups and unions want a federal judge to block Trump’s Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the FBI and their leaders from deploying agents to polling sites under Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act.
That statute, barring voter intimidation, was unaffected by recent Supreme Court decisions gutting the historic civil rights law.
Recounting the Jim Crow history rebuked by the Voting Rights Act, the coalition traced the deployment of federal agents under the pretext of fighting fraud as a continuation of Donald Trump’s attack on the 2020 presidential election. Trump’s attempts to subvert the results hinged upon attempts to invalidate votes in a handful of the most diverse U.S. cities of swing states that he lost, including Atlanta, Ga.; Detroit, Mich.; Phoenix, Ariz.; Milwaukee, Wisc.; and Philadelphia, Penn.
The NAACP flagged that pattern in a still-pending federal lawsuit accusing Trump of targeting cities with many Black and Latino voters in violation of the Ku Klux Klan Act.
Describing Trump’s actions before the midterms as a continuation of this trend, the coalition calls the administration’s “racially coded” fraud claims as an attempt to chill Black and Latino voters more broadly.
“Federal officials’ repeated false assertions that immigrants threaten the validity of American elections ignore substantial evidence that such occurrences are exceedingly rare,” the complaint notes. “In 2026, after Utah completed a review of its approximately 2.1 million registered voters, it announced that it had found zero occurrences of noncitizen voting.”
MSNOW reported on Friday that a top Trump Justice Department official threatened in a conference call to purge prosecutors who refuse to bring voter fraud cases.
The coalition wants a federal judge to declare that the government has violated the Voting Rights Act’s prohibitions on voter intimidation and block the administration “from deploying agents in a manner that unlawfully intimidates voters or anyone urging or aiding voters.”
Read the complaint in full here.
Trump’s slush fund litigation is ‘alive and kicking’
Attorney General Todd Blanche has insisted that the $1.776 billion slush fund to reward Jan. 6 insurrectionists and other Trump allies has been abandoned.
But a federal judge on Friday reportedly reaffirmed the fight against it isn’t over because the administration hasn’t foreclosed the possibility of resurrecting it through other means.
POLITICO’s Josh Gerstein reports:
That could include by paying people directly from the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund, an open-ended source of money tapped by the Justice Department for many settlements.
“That’s being used, apparently, to do exactly what the specific fund in this case was supposed to be doing,” [U.S. District Judge Leonie] Brinkema said during a 40-minute hearing in Alexandria, Virginia. “These issues that underlie this case are still alive and kicking, in my view.”
Brinkema said use of the Judgment Fund to pay claims of anti-abortion protesters contending they were wrongfully charged, and indications that officials are considering using that longstanding fund to compensate participants in what the judge called “the Jan. 6 insurrection,” undermined arguments that a lawsuit filed in May over the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is moot.
“That entity is gone, but is a functional equivalent of that going on…?” asked Brinkema, a Clinton appointee. “Actions speak louder than words.”
Judge Brinkema made her remarks during a hearing in Alexandria, Va.
More Trumpian censorship
In one of his latest social media screeds, Trump announced that he plans to ban MSNOW, CNN, and POLITICO from the White House.
“Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow,” Trump said.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s attempt to effectively silence the traditional Pentagon press corps by imposing draconian restrictions that every serious news outlet refused to endorse resulted in a First Amendment lawsuit that the government lost.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation’s advocacy director Seth Stern said that Trump’s latest act of censorship also trampled over a clear constitutional line.
“It’s difficult to imagine a more blatant violation of the First Amendment than Trump banning news outlets from the People’s House for criticizing the government,” he said in a statement. “It’s also hard to imagine a dumber move. The historically unpopular president has been retaliating against the press for years, but it hasn’t helped him. The press keeps exposing his corruption and his failures. These outrageous attacks only demonstrate how scared he is of an informed public.”
Stern encouraged the exiled outlets to “fight back to protect their rights” — but the exiled reporters should also “take a break from getting lied to and insulted at the White House.”
“There are plenty of places to find news, and reporters will continue to do just that no matter how many tantrums Trump throws on Truth Social,” he said. “Just like he can’t keep his name on the Kennedy Center, he can’t keep it out of the headlines.”
Reminder: ‘Hands Around the Kennedy Center’
Protesters will show their support for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts with a demonstration scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Eastern Time tonight.
The event, dubbed “Hands Around the Kennedy Center,” falls one day after a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to provide at least 30 days notice before moving ahead with any “demolition” of the main building.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper declined to hold an emergency hearing to consider whether the Kennedy Center’s shuttering violated his earlier order, and that leaves the performing arts institution closed to the public for at least seven days, a period that can be renewed indefinitely.
The order puts the closed building in a holding pattern, but demonstrators aren’t waiting for the next court order to take action.
Hands Off the Arts co-founder Mallory Miller, who organized the demonstration, told All Rise News earlier this week that the vision is to give the Kennedy Center a “hug.” (Watch the full interview here.)
One day after the interview, the idea gained increasing national attention, and the demonstration was amplified last night by Kerry Kennedy, the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy, who serves as the president of the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center.
Learn how to attend the demonstration virtually or in-person here.
Many thanks, Adam. The only reason to go to a White House briefing these days is to keep track of Trump‘s lies and those of his administrators.
Thank you Adam. I wish I weren’t on the other side of coast from the Kennedy center, but my heart will be there.