That’s not a small thing to build a career on. It’s an even smaller thing to sustain it.

Elders was controversial because she told the truth about teenagers and sex in a country that preferred a comfortable lie. She talked about contraception, about masturbation, about what was actually happening in the lives of the kids she was tasked with protecting rather than what polite society wished were happening instead. It ended her tenure in Washington. It also helped drive down teen pregnancy rates in Arkansas and nationally — a legacy that outlasted the outrage by decades, the way real ones tend to.

There was a line in the play that has not left me since the curtain came down: You can’t be what you can’t see.

What I Saw

I have few memories of my original nuclear family. My parents divorced when I was very young, and most of that first chapter of my life is gone to me now — not repressed, just unrecorded, the way a lot of early childhood is. But one thing survived, intact and specific: the roll call of names.

My father was Dr. Nathaniel Boggs, Jr. — the first Black American to receive a PhD in the field of zoology, a dissertation he defended in both English and German. His colleagues had the same title in front of theirs. Dr. Vivian and Dr. Roscoe Howard — she was a mathematician, he was a biologist like my father. Dr. Raymond and Dr. Carol Cutts, both Howard University classmates, both physicians. Dr. Amos Gayle, another Howard classmate, a dentist. And more names behind them that I no longer have complete, but the shape of the memory is unmistakable: in the first years of my life, I was surrounded by Black excellence. Not exceptional Black excellence, held up as a singular achievement against the odds — ordinary Black excellence, the kind that fills a room and doesn’t remark on itself, because everyone in it has already arrived.

My sister, Paula Boggs, founded the Boggs Fellowships in our father’s honor at her alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, to help fund minority students pursuing doctoral degrees in the hard sciences — a way of making sure the ceiling our father broke stays broken for the people coming after him.

I did not know, at four or five years old, that this was rare. I know now that it was almost statistically invisible in the America of that era — a cohort of Black physicians, mathematicians, and dentists, Howard University classmates building lives and practices and families around each other, entirely outside the narrative the rest of the country was telling about who could achieve what. I was handed, before I could read, the evidence that the ceiling other people saw simply wasn’t there. That gift is the reason there has never been one day in my life that I have doubted my own Black excellence. Not one.

Elders’ line explains why that mattered more than I understood at the time. You can’t be what you can’t see — and I saw it before I could talk.

The Loneliness Nobody Warns You About

Here is what nobody tells you about being handed that kind of certainty early: it doesn’t insulate you from the room. It just means you know, with total clarity, exactly how empty the room is.

I was one of 13 Black women in a class of 1,500 at the University of Notre Dame — in the first decade of women on campus at all, since Notre Dame went coed in 1972. I knew who I was walking in. I did not doubt my place there for a single day. But knowing you belong and being surrounded by people who reflect that back to you are two entirely different experiences, and I have spent most of my career living in the gap between them.

I have yet to work for a boss with my own academic credentials.

Not yet.

I want to be precise about that phrase, because I chose it deliberately. It is not resignation. It is not a complaint dressed up as an observation. It is a placeholder — the same placeholder Elders herself must have used a hundred times on her way from Arkansas to the Surgeon General’s office, the same one Dr. Boggs and Dr. Vivian Howard and Dr. Carol Cutts used on their way from Howard University into a country that had not yet decided what to do with them. Not yet is what you say when you have already done the math on how long trails take to blaze, and you have decided the timeline doesn’t change the destination.

Say What You Want About Her

Elders took plenty of criticism in her time, and she never much cared to soften it after the fact. Say what you want about Joycelyn Elders — she said what she wanted too, and Arkansas’s teen pregnancy numbers, and the nation’s, bent because of it. Trailblazing is rarely comfortable for the trailblazer or for the people watching. It is judged, retroactively and very selectively, by what it moved.

I take that seriously, because I have to. Being first, or nearly first, or one of 13 out of 1,500, is not a credential you get to set down. It comes with an obligation attached, whether you asked for it or not: to be visible enough, and to stay long enough in rooms that were not built with you in mind, that the next person walking in doesn’t have to build their own certainty from scratch the way I got to. My father and his colleagues did that for me without ever framing it as a project. They just lived their lives, fully, in front of a child who was watching.

I’m told the play is heading to New York next. It should. Dr. Elders deserves a bigger room than the one she got the first time around, and this is a debt Arkansas can help pay by sending her story further than the state line.

In the meantime, I’ll keep doing what she did, and what my father’s whole generation of “Dr.” did for me before I could spell the word: blazing trails for the people coming up behind, whether or not they know yet that they’re watching.

Lynette M. Perez is Chief Deputy City Attorney for the City of Little Rock. She is licensed in Texas and Arkansas and admitted to the U.S. District Courts for the Eastern and Western Districts of Arkansas and to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals. She has tried more than 100 cases on the merits over her career, primarily as a defense lawyer, including years in private practice in San Antonio, and served as a deputy prosecuting attorney in Arkansas’s 17th Judicial District. She teaches constitutional law at the Little Rock Police Department Academy and serves as Regional Vice President for the 8th Circuit South of the International Municipal Lawyers Association. Bench & Crown covers law, power, and accountability. The views expressed are her own.

The ideas here start with me and come out of my work as an attorney. I use AI to help outline, edit, and pressure-test my arguments against a range of perspectives. The analysis and conclusions are my own.

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Liberia’s government has described the arrangement in the softest possible language: a “humanitarian” gesture, consistent with the country’s founding as “a refuge for freed slaves from the United States of America and other parts of the world.” The deportees, officials say, are free to apply for asylum, or free to leave the country if they wish. In exchange for taking them, Liberia is receiving $5 million from Washington for “migration management.”

I don’t know whether the President has ever been told the story Liberia’s government is now leaning on to make this deal sound noble. I doubt it. But it’s worth telling, because it cuts the opposite direction from the one his administration wants you to draw.

A Colony Built to Solve “the Negro Problem”

Liberia exists because, in the early 1800s, white America did not know what to do with free Black people.

In December 1816, a group of men gathered at the Davis Hotel in Washington, D.C. and founded the American Colonization Society. Its founder, Robert Finley, was a white Presbyterian minister. Its members eventually included two sitting or future presidents — James Monroe and Andrew Jackson — along with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who lent their sympathy from retirement. The Society’s purpose was to relocate free African Americans to a colony in Africa.

The coalition behind it was not united by conscience. Some members were genuine abolitionists who believed Black Americans would never be treated as equals in a country built on slavery, and thought removal was the only path to dignity. Others were slaveholders, plain and simple, terrified that a growing free Black population would inspire revolt among the enslaved, or would simply be an uncomfortable reminder of what slavery was. Both camps arrived at the same convenient answer: send them away.

In 1820, the ACS put the first ship to sea — the Elizabeth, later nicknamed the “Mayflower of Liberia” — carrying 88 free Black men and women and three white ACS agents, funded in part by $100,000 from Congress. They landed first in British Sierra Leone, where malaria killed a large share of the settlers within weeks. It took nearly two more years, and by some accounts a loaded gun held to the head of a local ruler known to the settlers as King Peter, before the Society secured land roughly 150 miles down the coast at Cape Mesurado. In April 1822, the survivors began building the settlement that would become Liberia. Between 1822 and the Civil War, roughly 15,000 to 16,000 African Americans — free-born and formerly enslaved — emigrated there. The mortality rate among early settlers was brutal: of 4,571 emigrants who arrived between 1820 and 1843, fewer than half were still alive by 1843.

They named their capital Monrovia, after President Monroe, an ACS supporter. They called the country Liberia — “land of the free.” On July 26, 1847, the colonists declared independence, and Joseph Jenkins Roberts, a free-born Virginian who had emigrated to the colony as a young man, was sworn in as Liberia’s first president on January 3, 1848. Liberia became the second Black republic in the world, after Haiti, and the first in Africa. Britain, France, and much of Europe recognized it within a year or two. The United States — the country whose racial order had produced Liberia in the first place — did not formally recognize it until 1862, one year before the Emancipation Proclamation.

Freedom That Looked a Lot Like Exile

Here is the part of the story that Liberia’s government left out of its statement this week, and the part I’d bet the President has never heard: a great many Black Americans at the time did not want to go.

Free Black communities and Black abolitionists in the 1810s through 1830s were bitterly divided over colonization, and many saw straight through it. To them, the American Colonization Society wasn’t offering liberation — it was offering removal, dressed up as opportunity, so that white America could avoid the harder work of extending citizenship and rights to Black people at home. Free Black conventions in Philadelphia and elsewhere passed resolutions rejecting colonization outright, insisting that African Americans were Americans, entitled to stay and fight for full legal standing rather than be shipped off a continent away from a country most had never seen and had no ties to. The ones who did emigrate weren’t always volunteers in any meaningful sense — some went because enslavers conditioned their manumission — a formal, individual grant of freedom by the enslaver, as opposed to freedom won by law or general emancipation — on their agreeing to leave the country entirely.

And once they arrived, the settlers built a society that replicated the very hierarchy they’d fled. The Americo-Liberians — the American-descended settler class — set themselves at the top of a caste system, over the indigenous peoples who had lived on that land for centuries and who had no vote in any of it. It would take Liberia more than a century to begin reckoning with that.

So even the founding story Liberia’s government invoked this week — “a long history of accepting people seeking refuge” — was never as clean as the press release makes it sound. It was refuge built on someone else’s decision that these people didn’t belong.

The Rhyme

Nearly two hundred years later, we are watching a version of the same maneuver, run by a different administration, on different people, dressed in the same borrowed language of humanitarianism.

The deportees landing in Monrovia this week are not, by and large, descendants of Americans returning to a homeland their families chose. Liberia’s own Information Minister says most are Cuban and Venezuelan nationals — people whose ancestors, if we’re being honest about the Atlantic slave trade’s actual geography, were far more likely to have been forced onto ships bound for Havana or Caracas than for the strip of coastline that became Liberia. They are being sent to a country most have never set foot in, to build a life among people who don’t know them, because it was administratively convenient for two governments — one offering cash, the other collecting it.

Since retaking office, the Trump administration has struck third-country deportation agreements with at least 35 nations, including at least 14 in Africa, according to tracking by Human Rights First and Refugees International. Immigration attorneys have been clear about what this accomplishes: it lets the government route around U.S. immigration judges who’ve issued protection orders barring someone’s return to their home country over safety concerns, by sending them somewhere else entirely — a country that was never their home country to begin with. Liberia’s own Justice Minister acknowledged as much when he said most of the deportees had committed “immigration violations,” not crimes, and that they were free to “seek asylum” once they landed — asylum, notably, being something they would not have had to seek at all if due process at home had simply run its course.

I don’t think the administration selected Liberia because someone in the West Wing knows its history and thought the symbolism was clever. I think it’s simpler and sadder than that: Liberia was willing, the U.S. had cash to offer, and nobody asked whether the people on that plane had anywhere they wanted to go.

But intent doesn’t erase resonance. A nation founded because white America didn’t want free Black people living among them as equals is now the landing strip for a policy that, once again, treats human beings as a problem to be relocated rather than people entitled to due process. The deportees on that first flight didn’t choose Liberia. Neither, in any real sense, did the people who built it.

Bench & Crown covers law, power, and accountability. The views expressed are my own.

Sources

On this week’s deportations:

• Reuters, “Venezuelans and Cubans among deportees to Liberia under Trump deal, official says,” Aug. 20, 2026

• Al Jazeera, “First group of US deportees, out of an expected 1,200, arrive in Liberia,” Aug. 20, 2026

• AP via PBS NewsHour, “U.S. sends 20 deportees to Liberia, part of 1,200 migrants the country will receive under new deal,” Aug. 20, 2026

• Global News, “U.S. deports 20 non-Liberians to Liberia in first flight under new pact,” Aug. 20, 2026

• NPR, “Liberia agrees to take 1,200 third-country deportees from the U.S.,” Aug. 19, 2026

• The American Prospect, “Liberia Joins Trump’s ‘Third-Country Deportation’ Network,” Aug. 20, 2026

• allAfrica, “Liberia: Trump Pushes for Abrego Garcia Deportation to Liberia” (Nov. 2025 reporting, via CBS News)

On Liberia’s founding and the American Colonization Society:

• History.com, “How a Movement to Send Formerly Enslaved People to Africa Created Liberia”

• National Geographic, “Were there sinister motives behind founding Liberia?”

• Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, “African Americans and the Making of Liberia”

• History Today, “The Foundations of Liberia”

• Library of Congress, African-American Mosaic Exhibition, “Colonization”

• Britannica, “History of Liberia”

• EBSCO Research Starters, “Liberia Proclaims Its Independence”

• BlackPast.org, “Joseph Jenkins Roberts (1809–1876)”

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This is not a mystery. It is a childcare crisis, and it has a name and a shape that anyone who has tried to hold down a job while raising small children already knows by heart: the math doesn’t work. The cost doesn’t work. The hours don’t work. And when something has to give, it is overwhelmingly women who give it.

I think about this crisis through the lens of my own family, because I was raised inside its solution before I understood there was a problem.

My great-great aunt Maggie — my great-grandmother’s older sister — was born in 1895. She helped raise my grandmother Dorothy, my mother Janice, and then me. When my mother became part of the first group of Black teachers to desegregate the Richmond, Virginia public schools, she was able to walk into that history-making classroom because Aunt Maggie was home taking care of us. When my parents’ marriage ended and my mother spent three years as a single mother, she had something that mattered as much as any paycheck: peace of mind. She knew Aunt Maggie would be there to feed us, watch us, keep the household running until she got home. When we moved to Europe in 1972, Aunt Maggie came with us. She died in 1981, my freshman year at Notre Dame, having spent 86 years as the quiet architecture that let the women in my family go to work.

A generation later, it was my children’s turn, and Las Vegas, not Richmond, was the setting. My children’s paternal grandparents — Shirley McDonald, whom my son Adam named “Kema” and who was known by that name by everyone from then on, and Thomas “Pops” McDonald — provided the childcare, the school pickups, the after-school hours that let their father and me build our careers. Aunt Kimberly McDonald ran carpool too. None of that was incidental. It was the infrastructure underneath everything else I was able to become professionally.

I tell you this not for nostalgia but because it is the exception that proves the rule now breaking in plain sight: multigenerational, extended-family childcare used to be how American families — and especially Black American families — absorbed the cost of raising children while working. It is a system built on proximity, on aunts and grandparents and chosen family living close enough to show up every day after school. And it is a system a huge number of today’s young professional parents simply do not have. They do not live near family. Extended family, if it exists at all, is scattered across states or working full-time jobs of its own. The scaffolding that carried my mother and carried me is gone for a lot of people, and nothing has replaced it — not affordable daycare, not paid leave, not workplaces that bend for parents the way they used to bend, occasionally, for men with wives at home.

So when the jobs report comes back and women — again — are the ones leaving, I don’t read that as some abstract labor-market puzzle. I read it as hundreds of thousands of individual mornings where the math stopped working. Care costs more than the job pays, or the job’s hours no longer flex around the school day, or there is no Aunt Maggie, no Kema and Pops, no aunt running carpool — so someone has to stay home, and it is almost never the father.

There’s a racial dimension to this that shouldn’t be left out of the frame. The same period that produced this labor-force exodus among women also produced a documented, disproportionate hit to Black women specifically through the Department of Government Efficiency’s federal workforce cuts. Black women make up about 12 percent of the federal workforce — nearly double their roughly 7 percent share of the overall labor market — and research on DOGE’s short-run effects found the cuts reduced Black women’s federal employment by roughly a quarter, an effect not found at statistically significant levels for other demographic groups. Black women’s unemployment rate spiked to 7.5 percent in September 2025 against a 4.4 percent rate for all workers. Federal employment has been one of the most reliable paths to Black middle-class stability for generations — my mother’s generation of teachers and civil servants understood that in their bones — and it was disproportionately the women in that pipeline who got cut loose.

Put those two data points together — a labor market where women, overall, are the ones absorbing the losses, and a federal downsizing that has fallen hardest on Black women in particular — and you don’t have two separate stories. You have one story about who is expected to absorb the cost when the system doesn’t provide for care, and who pays first when the economy contracts.

Here is where I’ll be direct, as a lawyer and as someone who has spent a career around the people who write the laws: this cannot keep being treated as a women’s issue, a family issue, a private matter to be solved by whoever happens to have an Aunt Maggie in the family tree. It is an economic policy failure, and it belongs on the desk of every person asking for your vote this cycle — for state legislature, for Congress, for anything in between.

Every candidate running this year should be asked, directly and specifically: What is your plan for the cost of childcare? Not a platitude about “family values.” A plan. Do you support expanding the childcare tax credit? Do you support direct subsidies for providers so that quality care becomes affordable without being subsidized on the backs of underpaid childcare workers, who are disproportionately women of color themselves? Do you support paid family leave, and at what wage replacement? What happens to federal workers — disproportionately Black women — when the next round of “efficiency” cuts comes for the agencies that employ them?

If there is one place where the distance between the people governing and the people being governed shows up most starkly, it’s here. The costs of childcare — financial and emotional — are invisible to the people making policy about it, because those people, disproportionately, have never had to carry them alone. They have wives, staff, nannies, family offices. They do not lie awake doing the math on whether a second income covers daycare after taxes. The rest of us do that math every month, and lately, for hundreds of thousands of women, the answer keeps coming back negative.

I was fortunate. Twice. Once as a child, once as a mother. Both times, someone showed up so the women in my family could go build something. That is not a policy. That is luck, and love, and a family structure that not everyone has access to anymore. The people asking for your vote this fall should have to say, plainly, what they intend to do for the families who don’t have an Aunt Maggie — and what they intend to do about a federal workforce restructuring that has already told us, in the data, exactly whose jobs are considered expendable first.

Sources

• National Women’s Law Center, “July Jobs Report: Women Accounted for 100 Percent of the Labor Force Decline,” Aug. 7, 2026 — https://nwlc.org/press-release/july-jobs-report-women-accounted-for-100-percent-of-the-labor-force-decline/

• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “The Employment Situation — July 2026” — https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

• PBS News, “What the July jobs report reveals about the strength of the economy” — https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/what-the-july-jobs-report-reveals-about-the-strength-of-the-economy

• CNBC Make It, “Black women were disproportionately impacted by DOGE cuts. A year later, they’re rebuilding careers for themselves and each other,” Mar. 11, 2026 — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/11/black-women-impacted-by-doge-cuts-are-rebuilding-their-careers.html

• “When (Government) Work Disappears: Disparate Employment Effects of DOGE in the Short-Run,” MIT Shaping the Future of Work Initiative / ScienceDirect, May 2025 — https://shapingwork.mit.edu/research/when-government-work-disappears-disparate-employment-effects-of-doge-in-the-short-run

Lynette M. Perez is Chief Deputy City Attorney for the City of Little Rock. She is licensed in Texas and Arkansas and admitted to the U.S. District Courts for the Eastern and Western Districts of Arkansas and to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals. She has tried more than 100 cases on the merits over her career, primarily as a defense lawyer, including years in private practice in San Antonio, and served as a deputy prosecuting attorney in Arkansas’s 17th Judicial District. She teaches constitutional law at the Little Rock Police Department Academy and serves as Regional Vice President for the 8th Circuit South of the International Municipal Lawyers Association. Bench & Crown covers law, power, and accountability. The views expressed are her own.

The ideas here start with me and come out of my work as an attorney. I use AI to help outline, edit, and pressure-test my arguments against a range of perspectives. The analysis and conclusions are my own.

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This is about the gap between what we were promised and what we are watching happen in real time — a gap measured in vetting failures, in a body camera rollout that is moving slower for a federal agency than it did for the largest municipal police force in the country, and in a new piece of hardware that should worry anyone who has ever had to explain “reasonable force” to a jury.

The officer nobody should have armed

Start with David Brouillette, 37, the ICE officer who fatally shot Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, on July 13. Relatives told the Associated Press that Brouillette had struggled with serious mental health issues since childhood. Military recruiters initially turned him away over his psychiatric diagnoses — and then, according to a family member, encouraged him to go off his medication for a year so he could reapply. He did. He got in.

That detail should stop every reader cold, because it is not a story about ICE alone. It is a story about an entire federal hiring pipeline that treats a documented mental health history as an obstacle to route around rather than information to act on. Brouillette went on to hold law enforcement roles, including with the VA, before joining ICE — and because of that prior experience, ICE policy meant he skipped the in-person training academy most new officers attend. Rep. Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, said Brouillette’s history “directly call[s] into question the supposed vetting and training ICE does of its recruits.” I don’t think that’s overstatement. I think it’s an understatement.

Two timelines, one excuse

Here is where I want you to sit with a comparison, because it is the heart of this piece.

The NYPD — a department of more than 36,000 officers handling everything from homicide to subway fare evasion, working under a federal court order after a constitutional stop-and-frisk ruling — went from a 2017 pilot program to full body camera deployment across its entire patrol force by March 2019. Roughly 2 years. 24,000 cameras. The department’s own leadership called it the largest deployment in the nation, and they still hit an accelerated timeline the mayor moved up by a year.

ICE, by contrast, secured $20 million for body-worn cameras in a bill Senator Susan Collins says she personally negotiated — money that became law in April of this year. It took a man’s death in her own state, three months later, before Collins pressed ICE leadership for a firm date. She now says every ICE agent in the field will have a camera by the end of August. Maine, she notes, was “prioritized at my request.” I am glad it was. But prioritization after a body hits the pavement is not the same as guardrails built in before one does.

And it is worth saying plainly what the Maine Democratic Party has already said publicly: Collins voted against a measure to make body cameras mandatory for ICE agents just weeks before the Biddeford shooting. She is now the one calling for the cameras. That is not hypocrisy so much as it is a pattern — support the funding, decline the mandate, then act surprised when the absence of a mandate produces exactly the outcome critics warned about.

Now add a glove that shocks on contact

If the camera timeline were the whole story, it would be bad enough. But DHS has also published notice that it intends to spend up to $20 million on the G.L.O.V.E. — Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter — a device that delivers up to 380 volts through direct skin contact with the push of a button. No prongs. No visible deployment. Just a handshake, essentially, that can drop a grown man to the ground — or coerce a false confession.

The manufacturer’s own user manual warns against using the device on children, pregnant women, the elderly, or people with disabilities, and against using it merely for “verbal defiance.” Those are the manufacturer’s limits, not ICE’s. The ACLU’s Jenn Rolnick Borchetta put the concern about as well as it can be put: the public should have no confidence that ICE officers will use a concealed pain-compliance device appropriately, when the same agency still can’t get cameras onto every agent’s chest.

Think about who is standing in that encounter. Sister Leticia Ugboaja, a Nigerian-born nun and registered nurse in McAllen, Texas, was detained by ICE while walking to Mass in her habit on June 28. She was released only after Texas lawmakers intervened. No shock glove was involved in her case — but nothing about the encounter suggests ICE’s screening in the field is precise enough that it wouldn’t have been, if she had resisted, or simply not understood what was happening fast enough.

She is not alone. American citizens have been detained on mistaken identity — a Hmong-American grandfather pulled from his home in St. Paul at gunpoint without a warrant; a man stopped three separate times in the same week despite presenting a REAL ID; a traveler in Atlanta pinned to a jet bridge wall because he shared a name and birthdate with someone on a list. These are not edge cases in an agency this size. They are the predictable output of speed without oversight.

What I’m actually arguing

I am not asking anyone to disarm federal law enforcement or to pretend that dangerous people don’t need to be removed from this country. I am asking why an agency conducting civil immigration enforcement — not raids on cartel compounds, not hostage rescues — needs a concealed compliance weapon before it has finished equipping its own officers with cameras to record how that weapon gets used.

NYPD proved a department can move fast on accountability infrastructure even under the weight of a federal consent decree and a mission far more complicated than immigration enforcement. ICE had the money in April. It had a body camera policy on paper. It took a death in Susan Collins’s own state to produce a deadline. That is the order of operations I want readers to sit with: hardware first, accountability second, and an explanation only after someone is already gone.

Lynette M. Perez is Chief Deputy City Attorney for the City of Little Rock. She is licensed in Texas and Arkansas and admitted to the U.S. District Courts for the Eastern and Western Districts of Arkansas and to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals. She has tried more than 100 cases on the merits over her career, primarily as a defense lawyer, including years in private practice in San Antonio, and served as a deputy prosecuting attorney in Arkansas’s 17th Judicial District. She teaches constitutional law at the Little Rock Police Department Academy and serves as Regional Vice President for the 8th Circuit South of the International Municipal Lawyers Association. Bench & Crown covers law, power, and accountability. The views expressed are her own.

The ideas here start with me and come out of my work as an attorney. I use AI to help outline, edit, and pressure-test my arguments against a range of perspectives. The analysis and conclusions are my own.

Sources

• Associated Press (via NBC News), “ICE officer in Maine shooting has history of violent behavior, family and records say,” July 2026 — https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ice-officer-maine-shooting-history-violent-behavior-family-records-say-rcna587972

• Associated Press (via PBS NewsHour), same report — https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/ap-report-ice-officer-in-maine-shooting-has-history-of-violent-behavior-family-and-records-say

• CBS News, “ICE officer in Maine shooting has history of violent behavior, relatives say” — https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-shooting-maine-officer-history-violent-behavior/

• Fortune, “ICE officer in fatal Maine shooting had history of mental health crises, Congress learns in ‘bombshell’ report,” July 17, 2026 — https://fortune.com/2026/07/17/ice-maine-shooting-mental-health-illness/

• Maine Public, “Susan Collins says all ICE agents to be issued body cams by the end of August,” July 31, 2026 — https://www.mainepublic.org/politics/2026-07-31/susan-collins-says-all-ice-agents-to-be-issued-body-cams-by-the-end-of-august

• Office of U.S. Senator Susan Collins, “Senator Collins Releases Letter on Biddeford Shooting” — https://www.collins.senate.gov/newsroom/senator-collins-releases-letter-on-biddeford-shooting

• Bangor Daily News, “All immigration stops will be recorded, Susan Collins says after meeting with ICE leader” — https://www.bangordailynews.com/2026/07/31/politics/washington/sen-collins-ice-body-cameras-joam40zk0w/

• The Boston Globe, “AOC, Democrats accuse Maine’s Susan Collins of giving ICE a ‘blank check,’” July 14, 2026 — https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/07/14/nation/susan-collins-ice-car-stops/

• NYC.gov, “NYPD Completes Rollout of Body-Worn Cameras to All Officers on Patrol,” March 6, 2019 — https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/pr0306/nypd-completes-rollout-body-worn-cameras-all-officers-patrol

• NYC.gov, “De Blasio Administration, NYPD Announce All Officers on Patrol to Wear Body Cameras by End of 2018,” January 30, 2018 — https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/071-18/de-blasio-administration-nypd-all-officers-patrol-wear-body-cameras-end-2018-

• ABC News, “DHS seeks to purchase electric shock gloves for ICE officers” — https://abcnews.com/Politics/dhs-seeks-purchase-electric-shock-gloves-ice-officers/story?id=135581306

• NPR, “ICE to buy electric shock gloves to help with arrests,” August 12, 2026 — https://www.npr.org/2026/08/12/nx-s1-5929545/ice-buys-electric-shock-gloves

• CNN, “ICE plans to spend up to $20 million on electrical shock gloves for agents,” August 12, 2026 — https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/12/us/ice-electrical-shock-gloves-agents-hnk

• NBC News, “ICE plans to give officers gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks,” August 11, 2026 — https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/ice-plans-give-officers-gloves-painful-electric-shocks-rcna592030

• National Catholic Register, “Nun Arrested by ICE While Walking to Sunday Mass in Texas Released After Lawmakers’ Intervention,” July 1, 2026 — https://www.ncregister.com/cna/nun-arrested-by-ice-while-walking-to-sunday-mass-in-texas-released-after-lawmakers-intervention

• ABC News, “Questions grow about why ICE arrested a Texas nun,” July 2, 2026 — https://abcnews.com/US/questions-grow-ice-arrested-texas-nun/story?id=134397783

• The Texas Tribune, “Texas nun detained by ICE faces uncertain future in U.S.,” July 23, 2026 — https://www.texastribune.org/2026/07/23/ice-detained-south-texas-nun/

• CBS Minnesota, “ICE arrests elderly Hmong-American man inside his St. Paul home over mistaken identity, family says,” January 20, 2026 — https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/ice-elderly-hmong-american-citizen-arrested-st-paul/

• Daily Kos, “ICE detains U.S. citizen in an absurd case of mistaken identity,” August 2026 — https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/8/11/800082912/community/ice-detains-us-citizen-in-a-case-of-mistaken-identity/

• Newsweek, “How ICE Agents Detained One US Citizen Three Times,” May 10, 2026 — https://www.newsweek.com/how-ice-agents-detained-one-us-citizen-three-times-11928213

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They pinged the phone anyway.

The request — justified as an “emergency” — was never seen by a federal magistrate. It went directly to Verizon. The citizen in question was driving from North Carolina to his home in Virginia. No one inside the agency, by its own internal record, believed he was in danger. He was never the one in danger. At least not until he got indicted.

Whose phone it was

By the way, the phone was James Comey’s.

The ping itself wasn’t relayed to the President in real time — the location data went to the Secret Service, not to Air Force One. But the record does show Trump closely tracking the investigation as it unfolded. Comey’s filing states that “the Secret Service sent frequent updates to Air Force One, in response to direct requests from President Trump who wished for an update in advance of speaking to the press.” An agent traveling with him described the case as a “hot topic” on the plane and said the president “is very interested,” and Trump wanted the notes from Comey’s interview turned around fast enough to use at a press conference that same day. The push to ping the phone itself, though, came from someone else — an unnamed senior Justice Department official, identified in the filings only as the department’s “number three.” Who that is isn’t stated in the record, and I’m not going to guess.

I want to be honest about why that matters and why, for the purposes of this piece, it should matter less than it feels like it does. You already have an opinion about James Comey. Everyone does. He fired off a controversial announcement eleven days before the 2016 election; he was fired by Donald Trump seven months into Trump’s first term; he has spent the years since calling Trump “morally unfit,” and Trump has spent them calling Comey a “dirty cop” and mused publicly about prosecuting him. None of that is in dispute, and none of it is what this piece is about.

I spent years as a defense lawyer and a prosecutor before I ever supervised a legal department. I have read a lot of warrant applications, argued a lot of suppression motions, and sat across the table from clients who did not have the benefit of a former U.S. Attorney representing them or the resources to litigate a Franks hearing. What follows is not a defense of James Comey. It’s an account of a tool — invoked here against a former FBI director with the best lawyers in the country — that exists just as easily to be pointed at you or me.

What the filing says happened

On July 29, Comey’s legal team filed a package of motions seeking to dismiss the federal charges accusing him of threatening the president through the “86 47” seashell post. The motions argue vindictive and selective prosecution, seek suppression of evidence obtained through warrants on Comey’s and his wife’s digital accounts, and ask the court to unseal the grand jury record that produced the indictment. It came one day after a separate motion arguing the post itself was protected First Amendment speech, not a true threat.

Buried inside that filing — in an affidavit from Comey’s attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, built on discovery the government itself turned over — is the surveillance allegation: that the Secret Service, at the request of that unnamed “high-level DOJ official,” tracked Comey’s location without a warrant, shortly after he deleted the Instagram post. The internal messages describing the “ping” and the “emergency” justification to Verizon are not characterizations by Comey’s lawyers. They are the government’s own words, filed as exhibits.

That’s the warrantless piece. The account warrants are a separate defect, and it matters that they’re separate — one process was skipped, the other was allegedly gamed. A magistrate did issue warrants for Comey’s and his wife’s digital accounts. The defense isn’t claiming those were warrantless; they’re seeking a Franks hearing — a proceeding where a judge determines whether the government misled the magistrate who approved them in the first place. The claim is that the affidavits supporting those warrants omitted known facts and misled the magistrate with insinuations that Comey’s lawyer and wife had obstructed the investigation. The defense points to a witness cited in those affidavits who, in interviews with law enforcement, admitted being estranged from Comey for at least two years and displayed open bias against him — and who reportedly didn’t read “86 47” as threatening until after hearing it discussed on a podcast.

So the piece has two distinct process failures, not one: a track-and-locate operation that never went to a judge at all, and a set of warrants that did go to a judge — but, the defense argues, only because the judge wasn’t told the whole truth.

There’s a second thread worth its own beat. In September 2025, the FBI searched its own case files for any reference to the term “86” in matters Comey had worked — the search came back inconclusive. Investigators then pulled the Bureau’s file on mob boss John Gambino, whom Comey prosecuted in the 1990s. Nothing there either. After Comey was already indicted, an FBI agent and a federal prosecutor sat down with Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano — the former Gambino underboss turned government witness — and asked him whether Comey had ever discussed the term “86” with him. Gravano said he doubted it, though he confirmed the word can mean “to kill.” That is the caliber of evidentiary reach the government’s own filings show it engaged in after the charging decision was already made.

None of this should be read as a forecast. Everything above is the defense’s account, filed in a motion. The government has not yet responded to it on the merits, and it will — prosecutors get that opportunity in every case, and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has already denied publicly and repeatedly that Comey was singled out for political reasons. Courts are also traditionally skeptical of vindictive- and selective-prosecution claims specifically, which require a defendant to show both discriminatory intent and that similarly situated people went unprosecuted. That’s a high bar, and it’s entirely possible the government clears it.

But if Comey’s account of the surveillance holds up, there’s a doctrine that governs what happens to what the government found because of it: fruit of the poisonous tree. The idea is simple even when the case law around it isn’t — evidence obtained through an unconstitutional search isn’t just excluded itself; anything derived from it, however many steps removed, can be excluded too. The Fourth Amendment is the starting point. It guarantees “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” and it says no warrant shall issue except “upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” It does not carve out an exception for people the government dislikes, or people it’s already decided are guilty of something.

That’s not incidental to how the Constitution works — it’s the whole design of it. The document isn’t a grant of power to government; it’s a list of limits on one. The Bill of Rights exists specifically to draw lines the government cannot cross regardless of who’s standing on the other side of the search. If a judge ultimately finds that line was crossed here — that the ping, or the warrants built on a misleading affidavit, trampled the Fourth Amendment — the remedy isn’t a stern word from the bench. It’s exclusion. The evidence doesn’t come in. That’s not a technicality that lets the guilty go free on a loophole. It’s the entire point of having the Amendment in the first place: a right that carries no consequence when violated isn’t a right at all.

Why it survives the outcome

Say the motions fail. Say the Franks hearing, if granted, finds nothing. Say Comey is convicted, or acquitted, or the case is dismissed on some procedural ground entirely unrelated to any of this — it has already happened once, when a judge found the prosecutor who indicted him was improperly appointed.

None of those outcomes touch the fact that sits underneath all of it: a location ping, justified by an “emergency” that the agency’s own personnel did not believe was real, executed against a private citizen’s phone without a warrant, at the request of a Justice Department official, while the President himself was being kept personally and urgently updated on the investigation from Air Force One.

This isn’t the first time this year the same shape has shown up in what I write about. Tennessee v. Garner is a Fourth Amendment case: the Supreme Court held that an officer can’t use deadly force against a fleeing suspect just because the officer, in the moment, believed it was justified. The Constitution requires more than a good-faith belief in the moment — it requires an objective threat, a reasonableness the officer doesn’t get to define for himself. The Court didn’t trust a single officer’s split-second judgment as the last word, because unsupervised split-second judgment is exactly what constitutional rules exist to constrain in the first place.

The Secret Service supervisor who said pinging Comey’s phone was “legally a bad idea” — and then authorized it anyway — made the same move an officer makes when he substitutes his own read of a moment for the rule that’s supposed to bind him regardless of that read. Swap the agency and the acronym — ICE, DOJ, Secret Service — and the shape doesn’t change. Each is, in its own context, deciding that its own judgment in the moment outranks what the Fourth Amendment actually requires. That’s the throughline running under everything I’ve written this year on use of force and unlawful searches. It isn’t a partisan one. It’s the same failure, wearing a different uniform depending on the week.

That tool is not exotic. It does not require that you be a former FBI director, or that a sitting president hold a grudge against you, or that a mob associate happens to know your name because you actually prosecuted him decades ago. On that last point, worth remembering: nothing in the record suggests Comey ever spoke to Gravano — or any defendant he prosecuted — without a lawyer in the room, if he spoke to them at all. That’s what a career built on process discipline looks like. The tool used against him doesn’t ask for any of that discipline in return. It requires an “emergency” designation and a carrier willing to cooperate. The safeguard between that tool and any of us is not the target’s resume. It is whether a warrant was required, and whether anyone was willing to insist on one.

Where it actually gets tested

The Franks hearing is the concrete next step — a specific, checkable milestone, not a prediction. If it’s granted, a judge will determine, on the record, whether the government misled a magistrate to get these warrants. That’s not a political outcome. It’s a factual one, and it’s coming regardless of what anyone believes about James Comey.

Lynette M. Perez is Chief Deputy City Attorney for the City of Little Rock. She is licensed in Texas and Arkansas and admitted to the U.S. District Courts for the Eastern and Western Districts of Arkansas and to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals. She has tried more than 100 cases on the merits over her career, primarily as a defense lawyer, including years in private practice in San Antonio, and served as a deputy prosecuting attorney in Arkansas’s 17th Judicial District. She teaches constitutional law at the Little Rock Police Department Academy and serves as Regional Vice President for the 8th Circuit South of the International Municipal Lawyers Association. Bench & Crown covers law, power, and accountability. The views expressed are her own.

The ideas here start with me and come out of my work as an attorney. I use AI to help outline, edit, and pressure-test my arguments against a range of perspectives. The analysis and conclusions are my own. ~LMP

Sources

Primary documents (CourtListener/RECAP, U.S. v. Comey)

Fitzgerald affidavit (surveillance and investigative-record allegations): https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nced.227448/gov.uscourts.nced.227448.43.0.pdf

Secret Service internal messages re: pinging Comey’s phone: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nced.227448/gov.uscourts.nced.227448.43.4.pdf

Request to Verizon for real-time location data: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nced.227448/gov.uscourts.nced.227448.43.5.pdf

Emails re: Air Force One updates during Comey’s Secret Service interview: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nced.227448/gov.uscourts.nced.227448.43.2.pdf

FBI file search re: Gambino case: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nced.227448/gov.uscourts.nced.227448.43.25.pdf

Gravano interview record: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nced.227448/gov.uscourts.nced.227448.43.35.pdf

Suppression motion (warrants for Comey’s and his wife’s accounts): https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nced.227449/gov.uscourts.nced.227449.40.0.pdf

Motion to unseal grand jury proceedings: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nced.227449/gov.uscourts.nced.227449.38.0.pdf

76-page insult spreadsheet (vindictive-prosecution exhibit): https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nced.227449/gov.uscourts.nced.227449.36.1.pdf

Docket entry, defense filing on warrant-affidavit misrepresentations: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/73256624/40/united-states-v-comey/

Case docket and procedural history tracker (Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy): https://levin-center.org/congressional-lawmakers/congressional-oversight-resources/oversight-case-law/case-list/us-v-comey/

Reporting

CBS News, “Comey claims DOJ ordered illegal surveillance in new motion seeking dismissal of Trump threat charges,” July 29, 2026: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/james-comey-claims-doj-conducted-illegal-surveillance-new-motion-to-dismissal-trump-threat-charges/

CNBC, “Secret Service ‘illegally’ surveilled Comey in Trump ‘8647’ threat case: Court filing,” July 29, 2026: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/29/james-comey-trump-8647-seashells-threat-secret-service.html

Democracy Docket, “Trump intimately involved in DOJ’s seashell case against James Comey, new filing alleges”: https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/trump-involved-justice-department-seashell-case-james-comey/

GV Wire, “Trump Demanded Details of Agents’ Interview of Comey, New Filing Says,” July 29, 2026: https://gvwire.com/2026/07/29/trump-demanded-details-of-agents-interview-of-comey-new-filing-says/

MS NOW, “Comey asks judge to ‘86’ seashells case, alleges he was surveilled at Trump’s direction”: https://www.ms.now/news/comey-asks-dismiss-seashell-case-trump-surveillance

MS NOW, “Secret Service felt pressure from administration to surveil James Comey, new documents reveal”: https://www.ms.now/news/secret-service-james-comey-seashells-case-8647-trump

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It was months before he told me his story. He had been an officer in Idi Amin’s army in Uganda. He took part in a coup to remove the dictator, and the coup failed, and a man who takes part in a failed coup has two options: run, or die. He ran. To this day there is a bounty on his head. He cannot set foot in Uganda. When he wants to see his parents, he arranges to meet them in Ethiopia, on neutral ground, because the alternative is a grave.

He is a United States citizen now. I will not use his name, even though he has every legal right to it, because old dangers do not always expire when a passport says they should. I tell you about him for one reason: he is alive because this country once had a process that let a person say I will be killed if you send me back to someone with the authority to hear it. That process is what Tuesday’s rule quietly dismantles.

What actually happened on Tuesday

On July 28, 2026, the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services published an interim final rule with the anodyne title “Affirmative Asylum Referrals Without Interview.” It took effect the day it was published. The comment period runs until September 28 — which is to say, the public may comment on a policy that is already operating.

Here is what it does, in plain terms. When a person inside the United States applies affirmatively for asylum, the long-standing practice has been an interview: a non-adversarial conversation with an asylum officer, the first structured chance to explain what happened to you and why you fear return. The new rule lets USCIS skip that step and refer certain applications straight to an immigration judge on the paper file alone. It removes the requirement that a referral even include the officer’s assessment of the applicant’s credibility. And it strikes from the regulations the language describing an applicant’s right to an interview.

The scale is not small. Of roughly 1.43 million pending affirmative asylum cases, the government has identified up to 444,724 — nearly a third — as eligible for referral without an interview, concentrated among claims it deems time-barred or unlikely to succeed. The administration’s rationale is a backlog it calls an unprecedented crisis straining the system’s capacity, and it describes a referral to a judge as a second look rather than a denial. That argument deserves to be stated at its strongest, because the backlog is real and the incentive to file weak claims for a work permit is real too.

But a lawyer reads the mechanism, not the press release. Move a case from the non-adversarial USCIS track into immigration court and you move it into a removal proceeding — and immigration judges have been separately empowered to dismiss certain cases without a hearing at all. Strip the interview, strip the credibility assessment, and you can arrive at a removal order without any human being ever having listened to the person it removes. The interview is not a courtesy. For a torture survivor working through a translator, for a convert who cannot safely put her faith in writing, it is often the only place the truth of a case can surface. Take it away and the entire weight of a life falls on a form.

This is not hypothetical

We already know what it looks like when the machinery moves people back toward the danger they fled, because it has been happening for a year, and the record is documented.

Start with Iran. In late September 2025, the government put Iranians from ICE custody onto a chartered flight that touched down in Tehran on the 29th — the first deportation flight of its kind in decades, arranged with a regime the United States does not even recognize diplomatically. The New York Times reported 54 people on that plane: Christian converts, ethnic minorities, political dissidents. Several insisted their lives were at risk. During a transfer in Qatar, some resisted and were subdued with tasers and restraints. One man, describing the moment agents came for him, said he shouted, “You have to kill me first before sending me back.” Advocates flagged a second horror particular to how we handle removals: a deportee’s file travels ahead to the destination government, which means the asylum paperwork — the very documents establishing a person’s conversion or dissidence — can land in the hands of the government that person fled.

Then there is the case that should stop any judge cold. The BBC reported on an Iranian Christian convert it called Majid, whom an immigration judge had already granted protection from removal five months before agents pulled him from a Texas cell, shackled him, and routed him through Managua, Venezuela, and Turkey toward Iran. His wife, also a convert, was deported as well. Another man in the same reporting, whose wife was sent back, put the arithmetic of return plainly: “If they deport me, I could go to prison the moment I land.”

The government’s answer is on the record, and fairness requires it be heard. A White House official told the BBC that everyone deported had their asylum claims fully adjudicated before removal, that these were people with final orders or voluntary-departure requests, and that confidentiality rules bar officials from confirming whether any individual applied and was denied. DHS has said the deportees expressed no fear of return. Set that against the sworn accounts of people who say they were never meaningfully heard, and you have the exact gap this column exists to sit inside — the space between what an agency asserts and what the record shows. And the flights are not finished: in January 2026, two members of Congress condemned reports of a planned third removal flight of at least 40 Iranians, including LGBTQ Iranians who face execution.

There is a bitter irony a faith-minded reader will feel. This is an administration that publicly laments the persecution of Christians abroad. Iran punishes conversion from Islam as apostasy. And we are returning Iranian Christians to it.

Iran is not the only broken promise. Consider Sayed Naser, who served as an interpreter for the U.S. military in Afghanistan from 2015 to 2018, entered the country lawfully in 2024, and had both an asylum case and a Special Immigrant Visa petition pending. In June 2025, ICE arrested him at a San Diego immigration court minutes after his own hearing; a judge then tossed his asylum case and the government began processing him for expedited removal. He is one man among roughly 45,000 Afghan visa applicants still in limbo, and among Afghans who came here on protected status now watching that status stripped away. These are people who stood next to American soldiers. We told them there would be a door.

The part where the courts still mattered

I want to be precise about history, because precision is the whole point. Cast your mind back to June 2017, when ICE swept metropolitan Detroit and arrested more than 200 Iraqi nationals — the majority of them Chaldean Christians who faced persecution or death if returned to a homeland where ISIS had nearly erased their community. Many had decades-old removal orders and had been living quietly under supervision for years. The government meant to put them on planes.

It did not, and the reason is the reason I still believe in this work. In Hamama v. Adducci, Judge Mark Goldsmith of the Eastern District of Michigan issued a stay, then a nationwide injunction, holding that these men and women were entitled to go before an immigration judge before they could be removed — that due process meant a hearing, not a plane. Most were eventually released. The lead plaintiff went on to become a citizen. The Sixth Circuit later vacated the injunctions on jurisdictional grounds, but the interval mattered: a judge stood between vetted human beings and a death sentence, and the standing did its work.

Hold 2017 next to 2026 and you see what has changed. The check that saved the Chaldeans was judicial review — a person’s right to be heard by a court before removal. In June of this year, in Mullin v. Doe, the Supreme Court held 6 to 3 that the statute governing Temporary Protected Status strips the courts of any power to review the administration’s decision to end it, clearing the way to terminate protections for roughly 350,000 Haitians and thousands of Syrians. The Court did not say the terminations were lawful. It said no court may ask. And now the interview rule removes the administrative hearing on the front end, just as the doctrine removes the judicial one on the back end. Squeeze from both directions and the space where a person gets to say I will be killed narrows to nothing.

What I am and am not saying

I have spent a legal career in courtrooms, on both sides of the aisle — more than 100 trials, most of them defending the accused, some of them prosecuting. I have no quarrel with removing people who commit crimes. A nation is entitled to its borders and its laws, and I have enforced enough of both to say so without flinching.

But there is a category the law has always treated differently, and treated differently for a reason written in the ash of the last century: the person who will be persecuted or killed for who they are, what they believe, or whom they helped. The refugee. The asylum seeker. The interpreter who bet his life on our word. The convert who read a Bible in secret. My friend, who chose a coup over a dictator and has spent the rest of his life unable to go home.

The interview is where that person becomes visible to the state. Tuesday’s rule makes them easier not to see. And a government that arranges never to hear the plea has arranged never to be accountable for ignoring it.

My friend had a path. I watched a good man walk through it and build a life on the other side. The question this rule puts to us is whether the door he came through is still open — or whether we have decided, quietly, on a Tuesday, in a notice most people will never read, to close it.

Lynette M. Perez is Chief Deputy City Attorney for the City of Little Rock. She is licensed in Texas and Arkansas and admitted to the U.S. District Courts for the Eastern and Western Districts of Arkansas and to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals. She has tried more than 100 cases on the merits over her career, primarily as a defense lawyer, including years in private practice in San Antonio, and served as a deputy prosecuting attorney in Arkansas’s 17th Judicial District. She teaches constitutional law at the Little Rock Police Department Academy and serves as Regional Vice President for the 8th Circuit South of the International Municipal Lawyers Association. Bench & Crown covers law, power, and accountability. The views expressed are her own.

The ideas here start with me and come out of my work as an attorney. I use AI to help outline, edit, and pressure-test my arguments against a range of perspectives. The analysis and conclusions are my own.

Notes and sources

• The rule: Affirmative Asylum Referrals Without Interview, interim final rule, Dep’t of Homeland Security / USCIS, effective July 28, 2026 (FR Doc. 2026-15190; DHS Docket No. USCIS-2026-0199; comments due Sept. 28, 2026).

• Judicial review of TPS termination: Mullin v. Doe (U.S. June 25, 2026) (6–3) (holding the TPS statute precludes judicial review of termination; ~350,000 Haitians and ~6,000 Syrians affected).

• The 2017 precedent: Hamama v. Adducci, 261 F. Supp. 3d 820 (E.D. Mich. 2017) (nationwide preliminary injunction); 349 F. Supp. 3d 665 (E.D. Mich. 2018) (release order); later vacated on jurisdictional grounds by the Sixth Circuit.

• Iran deportation flights: The New York Times, “‘It Feels Like I’m in a Nightmare’: Inside the First Deportation Flight to Iran” (Nov. 11, 2025); BBC News, “Christian converts are among the Iranians being sent home from US” (Nov. 2025); statement of Reps. Yassamin Ansari and Dave Min condemning planned deportations to Iran (Jan. 23, 2026).

• Afghan allies: CBS News, “Afghan ally detained by ICE after attending immigration court hearing” (2025); reporting on SIV backlog (~45,000 applicants) and termination of protected status for Afghans admitted under Operation Allies Welcome.

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I’ve been reflecting about that ambulance presentation while reading a 32-page decision out of a federal courthouse in Boston. The two things are not as far apart as they look.

The case is about a paragraph of federal regulation almost nobody outside a grants office has ever read. But strip away the citations and it’s about something everyone understands: whether the government can make you a promise, let you build your life around it, and then break it because it changed its mind. And it’s about who is standing there when the promise breaks. It is never the people who made it. It’s the patient in the ambulance, the kid whose school lunch was federally funded, the crime-victim program that suddenly has no money to answer the phone. And does a school district, a municipal government, a water authority, or a state even plan not knowing whether or not the rug will be pulled right underneath them.

Here’s what happened, why it matters, and why the ruling you’re about to read is already half out of date.

What happened in Boston

This just happened 10 days ago. On July 17, 2026, Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts handed down a decision in New Jersey v. Office of Management and Budget. On one side: 20 states, the District of Columbia, and 3 governors — Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Laura Kelly of Kansas, and Andy Beshear of Kentucky. On the other: OMB and a long roster of federal agencies — Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Justice, Labor, State, EPA, Homeland Security, FEMA, the NSF, and more.

The states weren’t asking for their canceled grants back. That’s a different lawsuit in a different court, and the judge said so plainly. They were asking a narrower and more forward-looking question: going forward, what does the law actually allow the government to do to the grants we still have?

The judge’s answer, in one sentence: an agency cannot cancel a grant it already awarded just because the administration later decided it cares about different things.

That’s the whole ballgame, and it’s worth slowing down on how she got there.

The clause nobody voted on

Buried in Title 2 of the Code of Federal Regulations is a provision that governs how federal grants can be terminated. The relevant piece — the government’s people call it the “Termination Clause” — says an award can be ended “if an award no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.”

Read that again, because the entire case turns on a handful of words. The program goals or agency priorities. Whose priorities, and as of when?

The states read it the natural way: the goals and priorities that existed when the grant was made. You applied for a grant to do a specific thing, the agency funded you to do that thing, and if the money stops achieving that thing, it can be pulled. The clause is a backstop for programs that stop working.

The administration read it the other way. In its view, “agency priorities” means today’s priorities — whatever the sitting administration values this month. Under that reading, a grant is terminable the instant the political winds shift, whether or not you did anything wrong, whether or not the program is working beautifully.

This is not an abstract dispute. Starting in early 2025, a series of executive orders directed agencies to comb through existing grants and cancel the ones that didn’t fit the new agenda — orders targeting “equity-related” grants, anything touching what the orders called “gender ideology,” and funding tied to so-called sanctuary jurisdictions, plus a broad “cost efficiency” directive to terminate or renegotiate awards to “advance the policies of the Administration.” Agencies did exactly that, citing this clause, often in letters that said nothing more than: this award no longer aligns with agency priorities. Billions of dollars in grants to the plaintiff states were terminated. By the states’ count, more than 1,180 of their active awards — over $5.39 billion — still hang on how this clause is read.

Why the judge ruled the way she did

What makes this opinion worth your time is that the judge didn’t just wave at the “natural reading” and call it a day. She walked through five separate reasons, and a couple of them matter far beyond this case.

The words themselves. The states argued the grammar favors them — that “the” points to a specific, already-existing set of goals, and that a grant can only “no longer” effectuate priorities that were there in the first place. The judge agreed this was the more natural reading. But — and this is the kind of honesty that makes the rest of the opinion credible — she acknowledged the government’s reading was also “plausible.” Text alone didn’t settle it. So she kept going.

The rest of the rulebook. This is where the government’s position falls apart. The whole federal grant system is built on telling applicants the rules up front. Before an agency can even announce a grant, it has to design the program with clear goals, publish those goals, list its funding priorities in the notice, and then measure whether the grantee is hitting them. If the government could cancel a grant based on priorities it never disclosed — priorities that didn’t exist when you applied — that entire notice machinery would be pointless. You can’t require an agency to publish its priorities and simultaneously let it terminate you for secret ones.

The history. When OMB first wrote this clause in 2020, it told the public what the clause was for. Its own examples were about programs that stop working — new evidence shows the project can’t achieve its objective, or the goal turns out not to be feasible. Not one example was “we changed our minds about what we value.” And when commenters worried back then that the clause gave agencies too much power to cancel arbitrarily, OMB’s own answer was that agencies are not able to terminate grants arbitrarily. The government is now arguing for exactly the power its predecessor swore the clause didn’t grant.

The Constitution. This is the piece that will outlast the case. Federal grants to states run on what’s called the Spending Clause, and the Supreme Court has long held — in a case called Pennhurst — that when the federal government attaches conditions to money it gives the states, it has to do so clearly enough that a state can make an informed choice about whether to accept. There is no informed choice if the terms can change after you’ve said yes. If the state knows the rules when it takes the grant, fine. But if the rules can be rewritten midstream, the required notice is simply missing. That’s not a policy preference; it’s a constitutional floor.

“The President’s vision.” The government’s last argument was essentially that OMB exists to help a President carry out his agenda, and reading the clause narrowly would tie his hands. The judge’s response is the cleanest line in the opinion, and it’s worth keeping in your back pocket: nothing stops a President or an agency from setting whatever priorities they like — before they award the grant. Set your priorities, publish them, fund accordingly. You just don’t get to change the rules after the game has started.

What the ruling does — and doesn’t — do

Before anyone celebrates too hard, read the fine print, because the scope here is narrow and a little uncertain.

• It does not get canceled grants back. The judge was explicit: claims for already-terminated funding belong in the Court of Federal Claims, not here. This ruling is about the grants still standing.

• It’s a declaration, not an injunction. The court declared what the regulation means going forward. It clarifies rights; it doesn’t, by itself, write anyone a check.

• The reach is fuzzy at the edges. The declaration is written broadly, but courts and the Justice Department will fight over whether it protects only the plaintiff states — and whether it extends to their cities, counties, and local subdivisions, which weren’t separately before the court. If you work for or with a government in one of the 20 plaintiff states and you have a line to your attorney general’s office, this is worth a phone call: ask how they read the scope, and whether your entity is covered.

• An appeal is coming. The government is expected to take this to the First Circuit. A district-court declaration is a real win, but it is not the last word.

The move already underway

Here’s the part that keeps this from being a victory lap.

This case is about the rule as it exists today. But OMB has already proposed rewriting it. On May 29, 2026, OMB and roughly 40 agencies published a sweeping overhaul of the grant regulations; the comment period closed July 13, and the target date for a final rule is October 1.

The proposed language is a direct answer to the very argument the states just won. It would let an agency terminate an award whenever termination is “in the interest” of the agency — including if the award doesn’t effectuate program goals, agency priorities, or “the national interest” as they exist at the time of the termination. Read that clause and then reread Judge Talwani’s opinion. The new phrase — “at the time of the termination” — is engineered to erase the exact distinction she just drew. The proposal borrows the “termination for convenience” power the government has long held over its procurement contracts, but strips out the settlement and appeal protections that historically came with it. It also writes the administration’s policy priorities directly into the terms of every future grant.

So does the ruling still matter if the rule is about to change? Yes — for one big reason. The textual arguments the states won on may get harder if the words are rewritten. But the constitutional argument does not go away. You cannot rule-write your way out of Pennhurst. If a state has to be able to make an informed choice when it accepts federal money, a regulation that lets the government move the goalposts after the fact still runs into the same wall. New words, same Constitution. That fight is coming, and this opinion just handed the states a map for it.

The part that isn’t about law

Now let me step out from behind the bench for a minute, because the legal reasoning is only half of why I’m writing this.

There has never been, in my lifetime, this kind of deliberate, tactical use of federal power to punish states — and it has fallen hardest on the states that didn’t vote for this President. I’ve been reading Regime Change, the Haberman and Swan account of this second term, and the throughline is exactly this: the machinery of the executive branch retooled to reward loyalty and punish everyone else. Grants are one of the levers.

But here’s what that strategy fails to grasp, and what I wish more people in Washington understood: the citizen is the beneficiary of the service, not the governor and not the party. A federal grant doesn’t fund a Democrat or a Republican. It funds a hate-crimes unit, a school lunch line, a water project, a shelter, a research lab, a road. When you cancel it to make a political point, the point lands on a person who never cast the vote you’re angry about.

I live in a red state. By the crude logic of this campaign, we’ve been “spared” — and I put that word in quotation marks on purpose, because the ambulance I opened with tells you what “spared” is worth. Rural health here has collapsed under pressures that have nothing to do with how anyone voted, and the cost of that collapse is measured in miles driven with a patient in the back. Now imagine layering on top of it a federal government that treats every grant as revocable the moment its mood changes. The uncertainty alone is corrosive. You cannot staff a program, hire the graduate assistants, sign the contractor, or plan the water project if the money underneath it can vanish on a memo.

That’s what this case is really about, underneath the regulation numbers. A grant is a promise. And a government that can break its promises whenever the politics turn is not a government its own citizens can plan a life around — no matter which way that state votes.

The judge in Boston understood the small version of that principle: tell people the rules before they play. The question now is whether it survives the rewrite. Watch October 1. And watch November 3.

Source: State of New Jersey v. U.S. Office of Management and Budget, No. 1:25-cv-11816-IT (D. Mass. July 17, 2026). Read the opinion (PDF).

Lynette M. Perez is Chief Deputy City Attorney for the City of Little Rock. She is licensed in Texas and Arkansas and admitted to the U.S. District Courts for the Eastern and Western Districts of Arkansas and to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals. She has tried more than 100 cases on the merits over her career, primarily as a defense lawyer, including years in private practice in San Antonio, and served as a deputy prosecuting attorney in Arkansas’s 17th Judicial District. She teaches constitutional law at the Little Rock Police Department Academy and serves as Regional Vice President for the 8th Circuit South of the International Municipal Lawyers Association. Bench & Crown covers law, power, and accountability. The views expressed are her own.

AI Disclosure: The ideas here start with me and come out of my work as an attorney. I use AI to help outline, edit, and pressure-test my arguments against a range of perspectives. The analysis and conclusions are my own. ~ LMP

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I have also been a defense lawyer and a prosecutor, and I teach constitutional law and use of force at the police academy. So let me tell you what the standard actually is.

Under Tennessee v. Garner, deadly force is lawful only when an officer has probable cause to believe the person poses a significant threat of death or serious physical harm to the officer or to others. That has been settled U.S. Supreme Court law for 41 years. Flight alone does not meet it. Noncompliance alone does not meet it. It is what you do when you have no other option.

And here is the part people miss. My client is the City. Not the Mayor and Board of Directors. Not the officer. When officers do not meet that standard, they are reviewed, they are fired, and my office does not represent them. That is not hostility toward police. That is the only thing that makes the defense mean anything when I do stand up for an officer. A badge that cannot be taken away is not a badge to serve and protect. It is a license to kill.

Now look at what we are being asked to accept with ICE.

Houston, July 7. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, shot by an ICE officer while driving his construction crew to a job site. No criminal record. Lawmakers say he was not the target of the operation.

Biddeford, Maine, July 13. Johan Sebastian Guerrero, 26, a Colombian man his community says was authorized to work here. Not the intended target of the warrant. The agents were not wearing body cameras.

Minneapolis, January. Renee Good, 37, shot in her car. Alex Pretti, 37, an ICU nurse, shot while agents had him on the ground. Both U.S. citizens. In a third Minneapolis shooting, ICE and the Justice Department reviewed the video and concluded that 2 officers appear to have made untruthful statements under oath.

And Ruben Ray Martinez, 23, a U.S. citizen, shot through his own driver’s side window in South Padre Island, Texas. That one is worth sitting with for a different reason. We did not learn a federal agent fired those shots for 11 months, and we only learned it because a watchdog group sued under FOIA to pry the records loose.

To this day that agent has not been publicly named. There is no public record of any review, any finding, any discipline. Ask the question I would have to answer about one of our own officers in about 48 hours: what did the review conclude, and what happened to that agent? Nobody can tell you. Presumably the badge and the gun are still there.

That is not an accountability system. That is a press release and a hope that everyone stops asking.

And they do stop asking. That is the part that has been most revealing.

Because a verdict does, in fact, come down within hours. It is just never a verdict on the shooter.

Before any video is public, before a single witness has been interviewed, before most people have even learned the name of the person who died, the conclusion is already in, and it is entered against the body in the street. He must have done something. She must have lunged. ICE would not have fired for no reason.

That is a conviction. Handed down in absentia, against an alleged defendant who cannot testify, cannot cross-examine anyone, and cannot appeal, by people who have seen no evidence at all. The shooter is never the one on trial. The dead are. And they lose every time.

And notice what that verdict is keyed to. It is not keyed to citizenship. Martinez was a citizen. Good was a citizen. Pretti was a citizen, and federal officials called him a domestic terrorist inside of a day.

It is keyed to disposability. And there are only 2 ways in: 1) You are brown. Or 2) you used your voice on behalf of someone who is.

Stop on that. One of those is an accident of birth. The other is the First Amendment. Neither one is a crime. And both of them are now enough to put a person in the category where the shooting explains itself and nobody has to look any further.

And let me be precise about who I mean. I mean the people who, the moment an officer is accused of anything, produce a genuinely admirable set of instincts. Wait for the investigation. You have not seen the whole video. Do not rush to judgment. One frame does not tell you what happened in the 4 seconds before it.

Every one of those instincts is correct. I have made all of those arguments in a courtroom and meant them.

They are simply never extended to the dead person on the ground. The patience, the presumption, the demand for the entire record before anyone concludes anything, all of it is available, and all of it runs in one direction.

Nobody says the rest of it out loud. They do not have to. The social media posts say it. The reposts say it. The share with no caption says it, because the caption is understood: THEY GOT WHAT THEY DESERVED.

That is the sentence. Handed down by people who have seen no evidence, against someone who was never charged with anything, and who cannot answer.

Here is what our system is: charge, hearing, evidence, verdict. Not a sentence carried out in the street by whoever got there first. The Fifth Amendment says NO PERSON shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Person. Not citizen. The framers had the other word available and did not use it.

That is not a loophole. That is the U.S. Constitution.

I will keep walking into court to defend officers who meet the standard. I believe in that work. What I will not do is call it accountability when nobody can tell me what happened to the agent who killed Ruben Ray Martinez.

So if you preach pro-life until the person killed is brown, or speaking up for someone who is, you were never arguing about life. You were arguing about which lives count as lives. That is not pro-life. That is white Christian nationalism. Say the second thing and stop borrowing the language of the first.

I rest.

Lynette M. Perez is Chief Deputy City Attorney for the City of Little Rock. She is licensed in Texas and Arkansas and admitted to the U.S. District Courts for the Eastern and Western Districts of Arkansas and to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals. She has tried more than 100 cases on the merits over her career, primarily as a defense lawyer, including years in private practice in San Antonio, and served as a deputy prosecuting attorney in Arkansas’s 17th Judicial District. She teaches constitutional law at the Little Rock Police Department Academy and serves as Regional Vice President for the 8th Circuit South of the International Municipal Lawyers Association. Bench & Crown covers law, power, and accountability. The views expressed are her own.

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But there is another number that gets far less attention, and it is the one I can’t stop thinking about. As of that same week, U.S. Central Command counted 414 troops wounded. And the majority of them, a CENTCOM spokesman said, had suffered traumatic brain injuries — the blast wounds that come from being near a missile strike or an explosion, the kind of injury that never shows up in a photograph.

Traumatic brain injury and PTSD have become the signature wounds of the post-9/11 generation, and the military itself admits the long-term effects are still poorly understood. When a spokeswoman was asked how many of the wounded had been hurt badly enough to require evacuation from the region, she said only that nearly all had returned to duty. She gave no number.

Returned to duty is not the same as made whole.

I spent the first decade of my legal career in San Antonio — Military City, USA — and I learned there what “returned to duty” can cost. A quarter-million veterans call the greater San Antonio area home. They are not an abstraction there. They are your neighbor, your kid’s coach, the man two pews over. My own parents chose San Antonio for their retirement precisely because of that community — because a city built around service treats the people who served as though they belong.

I don’t want to make sweeping generalizations. Every veteran’s story is his or her own. But I’ll tell you what I’ve seen with my own eyes. In San Antonio, every paralegal I hired was a veteran, and they were among the finest employees I’ve ever had — disciplined, steady, unflappable under pressure. Veterans have worked in our law office in Little Rock, too, and some are with me still. Whatever the service asks of people, it forges extraordinary colleagues.

And I know what these wounds look like decades on, because the man who raised me carried his. He fought in Korea and in Vietnam. For the last 20 years of his life he was nearly deaf — even with a cochlear implant, the war never fully left his ears. He came home. He also never entirely came home. Both things were true at once, the way they are true for so many.

That is the part we forget when the shooting slows and the headlines move on. A death is final and public; we mourn it, we fold the flag, we read the name aloud. A wound is quiet and permanent. It goes home with a young airman from this Iran war, and it stays — in a ringing ear, in a brain that no longer works the way it did, in nightmares that don’t ask permission, in the marriages and jobs and ordinary Tuesday mornings that get harder than anyone outside the house will ever see. The 414 are not a footnote to the 14. They are a generation of Americans who will carry the winter and spring of 2026 for the rest of their lives.

I write often in this space about accountability — about what governments owe the people who bear the cost of their decisions. There is no accountability more basic than this: when a nation sends its sons and daughters into a war, it does not get to count only the graves. It has to count the living wounded, too, and keep counting, long after it has become inconvenient. “Almost all returned to duty” is a sentence built to close a subject. Our job is to keep it open.

So yes — grieve the 14. Say their names. But don’t let the wounded slip into the space between the casualty report and the parade. The ones who come home changed are still paying, quietly, every day. The least we owe them is to keep count alongside them.

Sources

• Konstantin Toropin, “US military death toll in Iran war rises to 14 after Navy pilot death this month,” Associated Press (via ABC News), July 13, 2026 — U.S. killed and wounded totals, the predominance of traumatic brain injuries, and U.S. Central Command’s statements on wounded troops returning to duty.

• Center for a New American Security, Greater San Antonio Military & Veteran Family Needs Assessment, 2022 — Bexar County veteran population.

• City of San Antonio, SA Tomorrow Comprehensive Plan (Military element) — veteran and military-retiree population of the greater San Antonio area.

About Lynette M. Perez

Lynette M. Perez is the Chief Deputy City Attorney for the City of Little Rock, Arkansas. She began her legal career in San Antonio, has more than 100 trials on the merits to her name, and teaches constitutional law at the Little Rock Police Department Academy. She serves as Regional Vice President for the International Municipal Lawyers Association and is the author of Finding God in Sin City (HigherLife, 2015). She writes Bench & Crown, an essay series on law, power, and accountability.

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Here is the uncomfortable truth for anyone who has read a casualty report: you cannot bomb a chokepoint open. A strait is not a fortress you seize. It is a behavior you have to change — the behavior of a regime that has decided the waterway is worth more to it closed than open. Ordnance does not change that calculation. It hardens it. Every target we hit becomes a funeral, and every funeral becomes a reason to keep the strait shut one more week. This is not deterrence. It is a vengeance loop with a body count, and we are as bound to it as they are.

So let me state the proposition this newsletter exists to argue: the Strait of Hormuz will only reopen when we stop treating this as a war to be won and start treating it as a price to be negotiated — and the only lever that moves Tehran is economic.

Follow the incentives, not the impulse

Look at what Iran actually wants. It is not martyrdom. Read the 14-point framework that Washington and Tehran themselves put on the table in June: lifting sanctions and unfreezing assets were core Iranian demands. Iran has spent months trying to convert the strait into a tollbooth — charging fees, dictating “approved” routes, asserting the kind of control that turns a global commons into a revenue stream it controls. That is not the conduct of a country that wants a fight to the death. It is the conduct of a country that wants leverage and money.

Which is exactly why economic pressure — and economic relief — is the instrument that fits the lock. Sanctions are the one form of force Tehran cannot answer with a Shahed drone. You cannot shoot down a frozen asset. You cannot fire a warning shot at a secondary-sanctions designation on the banks that keep the regime liquid. A serious, coordinated sanctions architecture — paired with a credible, sequenced path to relief the moment the strait reopens and stays open — gives Iran a reason to unlock the water that no airstrike ever will. Bombing offers them only a reason to dig in and a martyr to bury. Sanctions offer them a door.

I am not naïve about sanctions. I know their history of leakage, their humanitarian cost, the way China has quietly become the chief beneficiary of this very closure while we spend blood over it. Sanctions are a scalpel that too often gets swung like a hammer. But a scalpel swung badly is still the right tool for this particular incision. The alternative on offer is a 10th night of strikes, and an 11th.

Send experts. Not the son-in-law.

If economics is the battlefield, then look at who we have sent to fight on it. The Americans who have carried our negotiations — in Switzerland, in Doha, in Islamabad — are Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Both are real-estate developers. Able men, perhaps, in their own arena. But the reopening of the world’s most important oil artery is not a Manhattan closing. It is a problem of sanctions economics, energy markets, maritime law, and the deep regional knowledge of people who have spent careers, not weekends, on Iran.

We have those people. We have Treasury sanctions architects who know precisely which financial arteries to clamp and which to leave open. We have energy economists who can model what a reopening does to the price at the pump in 90 days. We have career State Department Iran hands and maritime lawyers who understand that the legal status of the strait under the law of the sea is itself a card to be played. When the stakes are this high, you send the surgeons — not the family and the friends.

And where, exactly, is the Secretary of State?

Which brings me to a question I cannot answer, only ask. We have a Secretary of State — Marco Rubio — with 14 years in the United States Senate, a long record on the Foreign Relations Committee, and the actual constitutional portfolio for this exact crisis. He is, by several accounts, involved behind the scenes. So why is he not the visible lead at the table? Why is the American face of these talks a special envoy and a son-in-law rather than the nation’s chief diplomat?

I can think of charitable explanations. Perhaps the White House prefers back-channel envoys to the formality of the Secretary. Perhaps Rubio, who has publicly noted the rules constraining his involvement in domestic politics, is being deliberately walked around the wreckage of a war with a $4 gas price attached to it. And perhaps — this is my read, not a reported fact — a man widely floated as a 2028 contender has calculated that ownership of an unpopular, unresolved war is not an asset he wants on his ledger. If that is the calculation, I understand it as politics. I reject it as public service. The office of Secretary of State is not a résumé to be protected. It is a duty to be spent. When the strait is shut and Americans are dying, the country’s chief diplomat should be the one at the table, credentials and all — not the one keeping a careful distance from the outcome.

We had a general who saw it — and we lost him

Here is what makes this maddening rather than merely tragic: our own Army had already learned the lesson. In 2025, before a single bomb fell in this war, General Randy George — the 41st Chief of Staff of the Army, and a man I have had the honor of breaking bread with — flew unannounced to Kyiv alongside Army Secretary Dan Driscoll. They were the highest-ranking Pentagon officials of this administration to make the trip. Their purpose was precisely the point of this essay: to study how Ukraine, fighting the very same Iranian-designed drones now killing our soldiers, had rewritten the economics of air defense. Driscoll came home calling Ukraine “the Silicon Valley of warfare” and held its cheap, scalable, endlessly adapted weaponry up as the model American defense should emulate.

Then, on April 2 of this year — in the middle of this war — Secretary Hegseth phoned General George while he was in a meeting and told him to retire, effective immediately. He removed on the same day the general in charge of Army modernization. The Pentagon’s stated reason was that it wanted leadership more aligned with the administration’s vision; I will not pretend to know all that went into the decision. But I know the timeline, and so do you. One unnamed official put the objection plainly to reporters: here was a four-star actively working to get equipment and people into theater to protect American forces — removed in the middle of a shooting war.

The bitter coda is that within weeks, the Pentagon began saying George’s own words back to us. By late spring, Secretary Hegseth was touting $56 billion for “drone dominance” in the next budget and publicly crediting Ukraine’s battlefield playbook — the same playbook the man he fired had flown to Kyiv to bring home. We did not lack the insight. We had it, in uniform, at the top of the Army. We just could not keep it in the room.

The $5,000 rebuke

Let me close with the number that should end this argument on its own. Ukraine — 4 years into a war against the very same Iranian Shahed drones now aimed at our troops — builds interceptor drones that cost between $1,000 and $5,000 apiece. We are defending against those drones with Patriot missiles that cost $3 million to $4.5 million each — and in the first 96 hours of this campaign, our batteries and our partners’ fired more than 900 of them. A $5,000 problem, answered with a $4 million solution, on repeat, on our dime.

That is the math all three of them were running when they died. They were air-defense soldiers, asked to hold the line against a swarm with an arsenal that costs a thousand times more per shot than the thing it is meant to stop. Sergeant Swinton did not even fall to a drone in flight; he was killed clearing the unexploded ordnance of one we had already brought down — proof that the cheap weapon exacts its price coming and going. We are not only bleeding money on this exchange. We are burying 19-year-olds over it — in Jordan, no less, the very country where Kyiv had already offered us the cheaper, faster answer we keep declining to take.

President Zelenskyy has already sent us his interceptors and his specialists to defend American bases in Jordan. He has offered to trade the technology we lack for the Patriots he needs. We should be on the phone with Kyiv learning how a country with a fraction of our budget is winning the math we are losing — not because Ukraine has better weapons, but because it long ago accepted the lesson we keep refusing: you do not out-spend a cheap weapon. You out-think it.

The same is true of this whole war. We will not out-bomb a chokepoint open. We will have to out-think it — with sanctions instead of Shaheds, experts instead of envoys of convenience, the generals who saw this coming instead of their forced retirements, and a Secretary of State who remembers that the job is to end wars, not to survive them politically.

A closed strait cannot be bombed open. It can only be negotiated open — by people who understand what they are negotiating. We have them: the sanctions strategists, the energy economists, the career diplomats, and yes, the generals who saw this coming before the first bomb fell. Send them to the table, and put the Secretary of State at its head. Every night we choose ordnance over expertise instead, the bill comes due — at the pump, and in names like Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Carrollton, Texas. She deserved a country wise enough to end this war. So does the next soldier, whose name we do not yet know.

Sources

The war and the Strait of Hormuz

• Congressional Research Service, Iran Conflict and the Strait of Hormuz: Impacts on Oil, Gas, and Other Commodities — congress.gov/crs-product/R45281

• CNN, US strikes Iran after ship attack in Strait of Hormuz (July 11, 2026) — cnn.com

• CBS News, Pentagon IDs 2 U.S. soldiers killed in Iran strike on base in Jordan (July 20, 2026) — cbsnews.com

The soldiers killed

• Associated Press, U.S. soldiers killed by Iran were from Texas and Hawaii (July 20, 2026) — via Boston.com

• Hawai‘i Public Radio, US soldiers killed by Iran were from Hawaiʻi and Texas (July 20, 2026) — hawaiipublicradio.org

• The Hill, Pentagon identifies US service member killed in Iraq (July 21, 2026) — thehill.com

The negotiations and the negotiators

• CNN, Iran and US make opposing claims on Strait of Hormuz ahead of talks in Switzerland (June 20, 2026) — cnn.com

• CNN, Meetings in Doha, Vance says talks ‘going well’ (July 1, 2026) — cnn.com

The Secretary of State and 2028

• CNBC, Marco Rubio heads to the Vatican as 2028 presidential buzz ramps up (May 6, 2026) — cnbc.com

• WBUR Here & Now, Will Marco Rubio run for president in 2028? (May 27, 2026) — wbur.org

• New York Post, Rubio on 2028 election: ‘I think JD Vance would be a great nominee’ — nypost.com (via AOL)

General Randy George

• Top Army officials visit Kyiv on peace and tech-sharing mission (2025) — via Yahoo News

• Forbes, The Pentagon Is Learning Drone Warfare From Ukraine (May 15, 2026) — forbes.com

• CNN, Hegseth ousts US Army chief of staff and two other generals amid Iran war (April 2, 2026) — cnn.com

• CBS News, Hegseth ousts Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George (April 2, 2026) — cbsnews.com

• Kyiv Post, Hegseth Reveals Key Strategic Lessons Shaping the US $56B Drone Budget (May 2026) — kyivpost.com

The cost asymmetry

• National Defense Magazine, Ukraine Flips Cost Imbalance Script With Low-Cost Interceptors (April 15, 2026) — nationaldefensemagazine.org

• The War Zone, Cheap Interceptor Drones Proven In Ukraine Protected U.S. Troops Against Iranian Shaheds (April 2026) — twz.com

• DroneXL, Ukraine Interceptor Drones Sent to Protect U.S. Bases in Jordan (March 9, 2026) — dronexl.co

About the name: Bench & Crown stands for the two roads behind this newsletter — the bench, a life in the law, and the crown, earned as Miss Oregon 1989 and carried through the public service that followed. Neither was inherited. Law and the crown both take work.

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The first is the special assessment: $100 per felony count, mandatory under 18 U.S.C. § 3013, imposed on the day laborer and the hedge fund manager alike. The second is restitution — the number that is supposed to make the victim whole.

I have sat at both tables when that second number is argued. As a defense lawyer, I have spent months fighting over loss calculations. As a prosecutor, I have watched a victim sit in the gallery while the lawyers debate, in careful and bloodless language, exactly how much her life was worth in dollars. Restitution hearings are among the least glamorous and most consequential proceedings in American criminal law. They are also, as I want to explain here, among the most fragile.

Because a single signature can erase them.

When President Trump pardoned roughly 1,500 January 6 defendants on his first day back in office, and when he pardoned dozens of fraud and tax defendants in the months that followed, the coverage focused on the prison doors. It should also have focused on the ledger. A presidential pardon does not only release the offender. It reaches the money they were ordered to pay the people they hurt.

What follows is an attempt to say — carefully, and with the numbers checked — how much that has actually cost crime victims, and who benefited most.

What restitution is, and what it isn’t

Under the Mandatory Victims Restitution Act of 1996, a federal judge sentencing a defendant for certain offenses — fraud, most crimes of violence, offenses against property — must order restitution in the full amount of each victim’s losses. The statute is explicit that the court orders it without regard to the defendant’s ability to pay. Congress made the order mandatory precisely because it did not trust discretion on this point.

That order is enforceable for twenty years after release, with liens, garnishment, and the machinery of the U.S. Attorney’s Financial Litigation Units behind it.

Three other numbers get confused with restitution, and the confusion matters enormously to the arithmetic below:

• Fines are punishment paid to the government. Nearly all of them are deposited by law into the Crime Victims Fund, along with special assessments and forfeited bail bonds.

• Forfeiture strips criminal proceeds. It goes to the government, not to victims.

• Restitution is the only one of the three that is supposed to end up in a victim’s hands.

Keep those three straight. Almost nobody covering this story has.

What a pardon does to it

Here the law is older, thinner, and stranger than you would expect.

The controlling authority is Knote v. United States, 95 U.S. 149 (1877), a Reconstruction-era case about confiscated Confederate property. Its rule: a full pardon releases the offender from the disabilities of the offense, but it does not disturb rights that have already vested in other people. Property or proceeds still under the control of the executive or in the custody of the courts can be restored to the pardoned offender. Once the money has passed out of the officer’s hands — paid over to the person entitled to it, or covered into the Treasury — it is gone, and the pardon cannot reach it.

In 1995, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel applied Knote to modern restitution and reached a conclusion that reads very differently today than it did then. Restitution orders, OLC advised, do not create vested rights in victims until the victim actually receives the money. A full and unconditional pardon therefore remits restitution the victim has not yet been paid — unless the pardon warrant itself says otherwise. Money already in the victim’s hands is safe. Money still owed is not.

OLC also noted, in a footnote, that no court had decided the question.

Pause on what that rule actually means. The victim’s remedy turns on timing. Whatever cleared her account before the warrant was signed is hers. Everything after is smoke. Restitution — the one part of a criminal judgment that exists solely for the person who was hurt — is treated as a debt to the sovereign, forgivable at the sovereign’s pleasure, with the victim as an incidental beneficiary who happened not to get paid in time.

That is not a loophole. That is the doctrine.

The number you’ve read, and why I don’t use it

Three tallies are in circulation. Liz Oyer, the career Justice Department pardon attorney fired in March 2025, has maintained a public pardon tracker; she counted 24 pardons carrying roughly $1.34 billion in forgiven payments. House Judiciary Committee Democrats published a $1.3 billion figure in June 2025. In March 2026, Governor Gavin Newsom’s office put restitution above $1.3 billion and the total near $2 billion once fines and forfeitures are added.

PolitiFact rated Oyer’s version Mostly True — accurate, but needing context.

I want to give you that context, because I think the honest number is smaller and the honest argument is stronger.

Newsom’s own release contains the disclaimer: the figures are not confirmed remaining balances as of the moment clemency was granted, and may include joint-and-several obligations appearing on more than one defendant’s record.

That is a large concession. Sort the clemency grants into four buckets and you can see why.

Tier one — court-ordered restitution to identifiable private victims. This is the real category, and every figure here comes from the pardon warrant itself, published by the Office of the Pardon Attorney. Marian Morgan, who ran a prime-bank Ponzi scheme that took in some $28 million from 87 investors, owed $19,958,995 in restitution; the President commuted her 33-year sentence in May 2025. Devon Archer’s warrant recites “$43,427,436 restitution” and remits it. Carlos Watson and his company Ozy Media were each ordered to pay $36,769,153.97 — and there, in a single case, is the counting problem this whole piece is about, which I will come back to.

Take the Chrisleys, because their case shows both halves of it at once. Todd and Julie Chrisley were convicted of bank and tax fraud in a case Trump’s own first-term Justice Department brought. At sentencing in 2022, the court ordered them, jointly and severally, to pay $17,270,741.57 in restitution to the eight community banks they defrauded. Jointly and severally is a term worth translating: it is one debt, not two. Each defendant is liable for the whole of it, the banks collect the total only once, and a dollar paid by either reduces what both owe. Their two pardon warrants each recite a restitution figure. Add those figures together and you have double-counted a single loss — which is precisely how a real ledger of erased restitution inflates itself, and precisely the move Governor Newsom’s own office warned its numbers might contain.

Julie’s figure also tells the second half of the story, because it moved. She was not a passenger on her husband’s clemency. She stood trial, a jury convicted her, and she drew a seven-year sentence against his twelve. She appealed, and in 2024 the Eleventh Circuit vacated her sentence, finding the trial court had held her responsible for bank-fraud losses reaching back to 2006 without evidence she had joined the scheme that early. On resentencing, her restitution was recalculated downward to the conduct actually proven against her. Her warrant records the result in its own hand: “$4,740,645.04 restitution (November 21, 2022; as amended September 25, 2024).” Todd’s warrant still carries the full $17,270,741.57.

Sit with what that means. After years of appellate litigation, the system had done the hard, unglamorous work of pinning down what Julie Chrisley actually owed — a smaller, adjudicated, collectible number, the product of exactly the loss-amount fight I described at the start. Then a signature erased it. Not an inflated headline figure. The careful one, the one the courts had labored to get right.

Tier two — the government as victim. Lawrence Duran’s $87.5 million ran to Medicare. Paul Walczak, sentenced in April 2025 to 18 months, owed more than $4 million to the IRS; his pardon arrived twelve days later. Joseph Schwartz owed $5 million. These are taxpayer losses. They are real, but they are not what most readers picture when they hear “crime victim.”

Tier three — money that never goes to victims at all. Ross Ulbricht’s roughly $184 million was forfeiture and fines. HDR Global Trading, which operates the BitMEX exchange, had been fined $100 million for Bank Secrecy Act violations. This is the money that carries the headline from $1.3 billion to $2 billion. Not one dollar of it was headed to a victim.

Tier four — requested but never ordered. Trevor Milton, the Nikola founder convicted of securities and wire fraud, is the single largest line item in every tally: $676 million, of which $660.8 million was said to be for shareholders and $15 million for one victim. Here the warrant is its own best witness. Milton’s lists his sentence — “48 months’ imprisonment; three years’ supervised release” — and stops. There is no restitution figure on it, because none had been ordered; the $676 million was a prosecution request pending before the judge when the pardon issued in March 2025. It is roughly two-thirds of the billion-dollar headline, and any lawyer who has litigated loss amount knows that a pending request is not a judgment.

Then there is duplication. The warrants for Adriana and Andres Camberos each recite the identical “$48,824,415.45 restitution” — one loss from one scheme, entered against two defendants who owe it jointly. Add the two warrants together and you have invented nearly $49 million that no victim was ever owed twice.

Do the tiering across the full clemency list and the shape is unmistakable, even where the last dollar isn’t. Restitution actually owed to identifiable private victims — the Chrisley banks, the Ozy and Archer investors, Morgan’s, a handful of others — lands in the low hundreds of millions once joint-and-several duplication is stripped out, not the $1.3 billion in circulation. A comparable sum was owed not to private victims but to federal agencies: the IRS, Medicare, the Treasury. The single largest number in every tally, Trevor Milton’s $676 million, was never ordered at all. And every surviving figure still has to be discounted by the collection reality I take up next.

I am giving you the method rather than a false precision, because the method is the point and because anyone can run it against the warrants themselves. However you total it, it is a fraction of the headline — and the fraction is much harder to argue with than the headline ever was.

The part that should actually alarm you

Here is where my prosecutor’s experience cuts against the easy story — and then, on the second pass, cuts much deeper for it.

Federal restitution is, empirically, mostly paper. The Government Accountability Office examined fiscal years 2014 through 2016: courts ordered $33.9 billion in restitution; U.S. Attorneys collected $2.95 billion over those three years; and at the close of FY2016, $110 billion in previously ordered restitution remained outstanding, of which $100 billion had been written off as uncollectible because the offenders could not pay.

Ninety-one percent. That is the baseline. So when anyone tells you a pardon “cost victims $1.3 billion,” the honest counterfactual is not that victims would have received $1.3 billion. They would have received whatever the collection rate delivered.

For January 6, we know that rate exactly. Convicted rioters were typically ordered to pay $2,000 for a felony and $500 for a misdemeanor toward roughly $3 million in damage to the Capitol. CBS News found that as of the summer of 2024 — three and a half years on — about $437,000 had been collected. Fifteen percent.

So the erased January 6 restitution is on the order of $2.5 million. Not the $2.7 billion that GAO estimated as the total taxpayer cost of the insurrection, a figure that includes the National Guard, the Capitol Police, and security hardening. Conflating those two numbers is the fastest way to lose an argument you should win.

Now turn it over.

That 91% uncollectible rate is driven by defendants who have nothing. It is the shoplifter, the wire-fraud defendant who spent it all, the man who will leave prison at sixty with a bus ticket. The federal government writes off their restitution because there is no blood in that stone.

Look at who got the pardons.

An electric-truck founder who took a company public. Reality television celebrities. A cryptocurrency exchange. A private-equity dealmaker. A health care executive. A union president. These are the defendants with houses, portfolios, royalty streams, and future earnings — the exact population against whom a twenty-year restitution lien is not a formality but a real, enforceable, collectible obligation.

The clemency was concentrated on the collectible tier.

That is the finding. Not the billion-dollar number — the composition. The presidential pardon power, applied here, has functioned as a means-tested benefit running in the opposite direction from every other means test in American law. The defendants whose restitution orders were most likely to actually produce money for actual victims are the defendants who were relieved of them.

Trevor Milton, asked in a local interview whether he would repay the investors he defrauded, said he wouldn’t pay them back, though he allowed that he might help them out someday. One of them, a 64-year-old named Supoto, told a reporter the old line about crime not paying — and observed that in this case it had paid quite well.

Todd Chrisley, according to the House Judiciary memorandum, celebrated his pardon with a profane boast about what had just happened to the government, and went shopping twelve hours after his release.

I have no interest in the vulgarity. I am interested in the accuracy. He was describing the legal effect correctly.

The door that closed on January 20, 2026

There was one argument left for victims, and the Supreme Court foreclosed it — exactly one year to the day after the January 6 pardons.

The argument went like this: the pardon power in Article II reaches “Offences against the United States.” If MVRA restitution is not punishment for an offense but a civil, compensatory remedy running to a private party, then it arguably sits outside the power altogether. The Eighth Circuit — my circuit — had held for years, under United States v. Carruth, precisely that: restitution under the MVRA is not penal.

On January 20, 2026, in Ellingburg v. United States, 607 U.S. ___ (2026), a unanimous Supreme Court reversed. Justice Kavanaugh wrote that MVRA restitution is plainly criminal punishment for purposes of the Ex Post Facto Clause. Justice Thomas concurred, joined by Justice Gorsuch. The Court reasoned from the statute’s text and structure, its placement in Title 18, and its relationship to other criminal sentences. It acknowledged that the MVRA also serves the non-punitive goal of compensating victims — but held that once Congress intends to impose punishment, the inquiry ends. And it observed that victims cannot initiate or settle a restitution proceeding the way a civil plaintiff could.

Holsey Ellingburg, Jr. won his case. He had robbed a bank in 1996 and owed $7,567.25.

And in winning, he handed the pardon power the one thing it needed. If restitution is punishment for an offence, it sits squarely inside Article II. The civil-remedy escape hatch is, for MVRA restitution, closed.

The Court did leave one crack: its holding does not mean a restitution statute can never be civil. That is a narrow opening, and someone should walk through it.

And then the money started running backward

If the story stopped at erasure, it would be bad enough. It doesn’t.

In April 2025, the Justice Department told Judge Tanya Chutkan that it agreed pardoned January 6 defendant Stacy Hager was entitled to the return of the $500 he had paid to the Architect of the Capitol. In August, Judge John Bates ordered a refund to another pardoned defendant, reasoning that because the pardon vacated the conviction, the government cannot punish a person — by taking her liberty or her money — who stands adjudged guilty of no crime. Roughly $2,200. The logic is not frivolous. That is what makes it hard.

So the $437,000 that victims’ side of the ledger actually collected is now flowing back out.

Then, on May 18, 2026, the Justice Department announced the Anti-Weaponization Fund: $1.776 billion drawn from the federal Judgment Fund, created as part of the settlement of the President’s own $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. The plaintiffs — the President, his sons, and the Trump Organization — receive a formal apology and no damages. Instead, the department established a claims process for others alleging political targeting, administered by a five-member commission appointed by the Attorney General, with claims processing to conclude by December 2028.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche did not rule out January 6 defendants as claimants, telling senators that anyone in the country could apply.

Judge Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia halted the fund on May 29 and extended the block on June 12, calling it problematic that nearly $1.8 billion in taxpayer money could reach people convicted of crimes arising from the Capitol attack. She read aloud from an amicus brief filed by Senators Cory Booker and Bill Cassidy — a Democrat and a Republican — and asked the government to certify in a sworn declaration, signed under penalty of perjury, that the fund was dead. Blanche has told Congress the department is not moving forward. He has not rescinded the memorandum. The litigation continues.

And the Judgment Fund itself — a permanent appropriation that long predates this administration — remains available regardless. The family of Ashli Babbitt received just under $5 million. Mike Flynn and Carter Page have received payouts. The Associate Attorney General has said publicly that he already possesses authority to settle claims against the United States.

The White House’s position is straightforward and deserves to be stated plainly: a spokeswoman has said the President exercised his constitutional authority on behalf of people who were over-prosecuted and targeted by a weaponized Justice Department. Asked why taxpayers should pay the January 6 defendants, the President said he was reimbursing people who had been treated horribly.

That is the argument. Readers can weigh it. The pardon power is nearly absolute, and no court is going to say otherwise.

The shelter down the street

Here is the part I would ask you to carry out of this essay, because it is the part with the cleanest causal chain and the least political noise.

The Crime Victims Fund was created by the Victims of Crime Act in 1984 and is financed entirely by fines and penalties from federal convictions — not by taxpayers. Conservatives designed it that way on purpose: offenders would fund the services their victims needed. The money flows to domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, and child abuse treatment programs, and it matches state victim compensation that pays for funerals, medical bills, and lost wages.

Deposits have been collapsing. In 2021, the fund allocated more than $3.7 billion. By 2024, it was nearly $2.2 billion — a 40% decline. Nearly 10 million people were served by VOCA-funded organizations in 2021. In 2024, 7.1 million.

The Guardian and The Trace analyzed all 117 clemency grants of this term and found that at least $113 million in forgiven fines and penalties would have gone into the Crime Victims Fund absent a pardon.

That chain has no missing links. HDR Global’s $100 million fine was statutorily destined for that fund. It is not going there.

Which means a woman who has never heard of BitMEX, sitting in a shelter in a city like mine, waiting on a compensation claim for an emergency room bill from the worst night of her life, is standing at the far end of a line that runs back to a crypto exchange’s pardon. She will never know that. Nobody will tell her. There is no hearing, no notice, no docket entry.

We tell victims that the system sees them. The special assessment, the restitution order, the twenty-year lien — that is the promise, and it is written into the judgment in black and white.

What the last eighteen months have taught us is how much of that promise was always contingent on a signature nobody asked them about.

What Congress could actually do

The instinct, reading all this, is simple: Congress should pass a law saying restitution survives a pardon. If a jury convicted you, or you stood in open court and pled guilty, what you owe the person you hurt shouldn’t evaporate because your lawyer had the right phone number.

I have had that instinct. It is wrong. Understanding why it’s wrong is where the useful ideas start.

Article II gives the President power to “grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States.” The Court has read that clause about as broadly as a clause can be read. In Ex parte Garland (1866), it held the power is not subject to legislative control — that Congress can neither limit the effect of a pardon nor exclude any class of offenders from it, and that the prerogative of mercy cannot be fettered by legislative restrictions. In United States v. Klein (1871), it voided a statute that tried to make courts treat pardons as null. In Ex parte Grossman (1925), it said the power operates without modification or regulation by Congress. And in Schick v. Reed (1974), it said the power flows from the Constitution alone and cannot be modified, abridged, or diminished by Congress.

Now note what Garland says the power reaches: every offense known to the law, exercisable before proceedings begin, during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment.

That is exactly the moment the intuitive fix picks. A statute providing that restitution survives once a jury convicts is a legislative limit on the effect of a pardon, aimed at the precise stage the Court has said the power operates. It is Klein with the serial numbers filed off. It would be enjoined — not because the outcome is right, but because that is what the clause says. A constitutional amendment would work. A constitutional amendment is not happening.

So here are three things that would.

One: vest it at judgment

Knote — the same 1877 case that leaves victims exposed — contains its own limit. A pardon does not touch rights that have already vested in third parties. That is one of the power’s genuine boundaries, and the Court drew it itself.

The only reason restitution falls inside the pardon’s reach is that OLC concluded in 1995 that a victim’s right does not vest until she physically has the money. That conclusion is an executive branch opinion. It is not a holding. OLC said as much in a footnote: no court had decided the question.

Congress cannot limit the pardon power. But Congress writes the MVRA. It could amend 18 U.S.C. § 3664 to provide that entry of a restitution order vests the award in the victim as a property right at judgment, not at receipt.

That is not a restriction on the pardon. It is a definition of the interest the pardon operates on. Knote would do the rest: the money was never the executive’s to hand back.

Would it hold? Nobody knows. A court could call it Klein in a wig. But understand the posture we are in — the entire position of every federal crime victim in this country currently rests on a thirty-year-old memo that has never been tested in a courtroom.

Two: make it civil

This is the one I would write.

Return to Ellingburg. The Court held that MVRA restitution is criminal punishment — and then said, in terms, that its holding does not mean a restitution statute can never be civil.

The pardon power reaches offences. It has never reached civil liability. A pardoned man can still be sued. A pardon has never been a defense to a tort claim.

So Congress builds a parallel civil remedy. On entry of a criminal judgment, an automatic civil judgment issues in the victim’s favor, in her own name, for the same loss amount, enforceable by her as any other civil judgment is enforceable. Put it in Title 28, where civil procedure lives, not Title 18. Give the victim power to initiate and to settle — the two features Ellingburg pointed to as missing from the MVRA when it explained why MVRA restitution is criminal rather than civil.

Then apply Ellingburg’s own test to that statute. Text and structure. Did Congress intend to punish? No — it intended to compensate, and it said so in every structural choice. The statute is civil. The pardon does not reach it.

The case that closed the door left the key in the lock.

Three: refill the fund

The first two require litigation. This one requires a floor vote.

The Crime Victims Fund Stabilization Act would route False Claims Act recoveries into the Crime Victims Fund. False Claims Act recoveries are civil. No pardon touches them. Its sponsors include Representative Ann Wagner of Missouri and Representative Nathaniel Moran of Texas — both Republicans — alongside Representative Debbie Dingell of Michigan, a Democrat. Wagner’s description of the problem is the same one I have made here: a fund financed entirely by fines from criminal convictions is draining, and victims’ services are draining with it.

The House passed it in January 2026. It is sitting in the Senate.

That bill requires no one to concede anything — not about January 6, not about this President, not about whether any particular pardon was deserved. It refills a fund that Ronald Reagan signed into law, from a source the pardon power cannot reach, for shelters that never ask a woman how she voted.

If you take one thing from this to your senator, take that.

One last thing, and it matters where I sit

The pardon power reaches offences against the United States. Federal crimes. Nothing else.

Every restitution order entered in an Arkansas circuit court is beyond its reach. So is every restitution order in the other forty-nine states. When we talk about presidential clemency erasing restitution, we are talking about the federal docket — a small fraction of American criminal justice.

That limit is worth knowing. It is also, if you sit with it a moment, the whole argument in miniature. The victims exposed to this are the victims of the largest, most sophisticated, most collectible frauds — because those are the cases that get made federally in the first place.

The pardon power reaches only the docket where the money was real.

Sources

Primary and nonpartisan. The individual pardon and commutation warrants published by the Office of the Pardon Attorney, Clemency Grants by President Donald J. Trump (2025–Present), justice.gov/pardon; the docket and judgments in United States v. Chrisley, No. 1:19-cr-00297 (N.D. Ga.), via CourtListener, and the Eleventh Circuit’s opinion affirming the convictions; GAO-18-203, Federal Criminal Restitution: Most Debt Is Outstanding and Oversight of Collections Could Be Improved (Feb. 2018); Justice Department Office of the Inspector General, Review of the Debt Collection Program of the United States Attorneys’ Offices; Ellingburg v. United States, 607 U.S. ___ (2026); Knote v. United States, 95 U.S. 149 (1877); Ex parte Garland, 71 U.S. 333 (1866); United States v. Klein, 80 U.S. 128 (1871); Effects of a Presidential Pardon, 19 Op. O.L.C. 160 (1995); Congressional Research Service Reports R42672, IF12973, R46179, and LSB11397; Justice Department Office for Victims of Crime; Justice Department Office of Public Affairs (May 18, 2026).

Reporting, across the spectrum. The Wall Street Journal, on the lobbying economy that has grown up around clemency; National Review, whose editors have criticized the use of the pardon power to reward allies and called for reform; The Washington Times, which reported the $2 billion figure and the White House’s answer to it; The Washington Examiner; USA Today; CBS News; NBC News; ABC News; The Washington Post; ProPublica; Time; PolitiFact; and the joint reporting of The Guardian and The Trace on the Crime Victims Fund.

Partisan and advocacy materials, identified as such. House Judiciary Committee minority staff memorandum (June 17, 2025); Office of the Governor of California (Mar. 5, 2026); statements of the White House press office. I have used these for their underlying citations to court records, not for their conclusions.

Lynette M. Perez is a lawyer who has tried more than 100 cases on the merits over her career, primarily as a defense attorney, and has served as both a criminal prosecutor and a defense lawyer. She is licensed in Arkansas, Texas, in multiple federal jurisdictions, and teaches constitutional law at a municipal police academy. She writes Bench & Crown, on law, power, and accountability. The views here are her own and not those of any employer or client.

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Your father is buried at Fort Sam Houston. So is mine.

Colonel John Cornyn II, United States Air Force — a B-17 pilot with the 303rd Bomb Group out of the Eighth Air Force, shot down over Germany on his 22nd mission, held in a Nazi prison camp until the war ended, home, and then thirty-one years in uniform. You’ve stood in that cemetery on Memorial Day and told people he’s there.

Mine is Command Sergeant Major Marlin Coolidge Barber. The man who raised me. Purple Heart and Bronze Star recipient. He fought in Korea and Vietnam where he took bullets for America. For the last 20 years of his life he was nearly deaf because of his front line combat. He served in the United States Army for 30 years.

I grew up in Germany. My mother ran Department of Defense schools there — teaching the children of the soldiers who came after your father’s war, in the country that held him. You and I didn’t choose San Antonio, Senator. The service chose it for us. And it forever kept our fathers there.

Military children learn one thing early, and it isn’t patriotism. It’s that an oath is a real object. It has weight. You watch adults carry it, and you see what it costs them, and you never get the picture out of your head.

You went to Trinity, then St. Mary’s Law, class of ‘77, then practiced in San Antonio. I came to St. Mary’s Law later and spent the first decade of my career trying cases at 100 Dolorosa and in the counties around it — mostly defense, mostly standing between one person and the power of the State. Same school. Same courthouse. Different chairs.

In 1984, at 32, you won an open seat on the 37th District Court. You said you were running against the good ole boy system — that you wanted that courthouse to look fair again. Six years there. Seven on the Texas Supreme Court. Then Attorney General of Texas, the first Republican to hold it since Reconstruction, sworn in by George W. Bush.

Forty years of that. And for years, in Texas, you had my vote. Every time.

I can’t give it to you now. I live in Arkansas. And you don’t need it — you aren’t running. On May 19th the President endorsed Ken Paxton against you, and the reason he gave was that you hadn’t been loyal enough. A week later, you lost.

So let’s be plain. He ended your career over loyalty. Now he wants your vote for a nominee whose central qualification is loyalty.

YOU OWE HIM NOTHING. Whatever you do in the coming days, you do free. In Washington right now, that may be the rarest thing there is.

You held the office Todd Blanche wants. State level — but the oath is the same, and you know it in your hands: the Attorney General’s client is not a man. It is the people. You cannot serve both.

Blanche has already told the Senate which one he chose. On the record, at his own confirmation hearing for Deputy Attorney General, he said he owes Donald Trump a continuing duty of loyalty and described an ongoing attorney-client relationship. He has never taken it back. A federal judge dismissed the Kilmar Abrego Garcia indictment after finding that Blanche’s own public statements tainted the prosecution with a vindictive motive. More than 1,200 former Justice Department lawyers have written your committee in opposition. And this week a federal judge tore up DOJ’s asses over the fraud Todd Blanche orchestrated in this IRS case that aimed to financially reward January 6th criminals.

You sat on a trial bench and a supreme court for thirteen years. You know exactly what it looks like when a lawyer forgets who the client is.

You said you’d decide after the hearing. Then listen closely, Senator. Ask him under oath whether he still owes the President a duty of loyalty. Watch what he does with the question. He’ll do what he did the last time — and you’ll know.

When this comes to a vote, your margin is one. You and Senator Tillis are the only two Republicans on that committee with no campaign left to protect. One “no” stops it in the room.

The bench you won at thirty-two is still there. Third floor at 100 Dolorosa. Still filled by a St. Mary’s law graduate doing the ordinary, unglamorous work of deciding cases on the law. That work only means anything if it means the same thing at the top of the Justice Department as it does in that courtroom.

We were both raised by men who took an oath and kept it when it cost them something. They’re in the same ground off Harry Wurzbach Road, and neither of them can vote.

You can.

Vote no on Todd Blanche.

Lynette M. Perez writes Bench & Crown, on law, power, and accountability.

She is Chief Deputy City Attorney for the City of Little Rock, where she has represented the City in the federal district courts of Arkansas and before the Eighth Circuit. She has tried more than 100 cases on the merits, primarily as a defense lawyer, and teaches constitutional law at the Little Rock Police Department Academy.

Her article The 14th Amendment from Homer Plessy to Kilmar Abrego Garcia appears at 59 Creighton L. Rev. 281 (2026).

An Army brat raised in Germany and Italy, she holds a J.D. from St. Mary’s University School of Law and practiced for a decade in Bexar County. She is the author of Finding God in Sin City (HigherLife, 2015).

The views expressed are her own.

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The dead man’s name is Joan Sebastian Guerrero — twenty-six years old, his three-year-old nearby — and he was not the target ICE was looking for.

By midday Monday, U.S. Senator Angus King of Maine had spoken by phone with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and relayed what he was told: the dead man had been ordered out of the country, there was a warrant for his arrest, and he was the target of the operation — not a bystander, King said, but the person the agents were searching for. The secretary’s word for what the man did with his car, King reported, was that he had “weaponized” it. Then, a few hours later, King’s office issued a correction. Mullin had called back. The victim, the secretary now said, was not the target of the warrant after all.

Read that again. Between one conversation and the next — same secretary, same senator, same day — the government’s story shifted from this was the man we came for to this was not the man we came for. And there was no body camera to check either version against. King said Mullin told him the cameras were on order, distributed across much of the country but not yet in Biddeford. Hold onto that detail. It leads somewhere specific.

In March of this year, when the Senate passed a Department of Homeland Security funding package, the chair of the Appropriations Committee issued a statement taking credit for exactly this safeguard. The bill, she said, contained “additional funding for body-worn cameras and deescalation training,” along with measures to increase oversight of detention facilities and limit civil enforcement in sensitive places like schools and hospitals. The chair of that committee is U.S. Senator Susan Collins of Maine.

This is the fact that should reorganize how Mainers read Monday’s killing. Susan Collins is not a bystander to federal immigration enforcement. She is the first Mainer in ninety-two years to chair the Senate Appropriations Committee — the panel that writes the check for every dollar ICE spends. The power of the purse is not a figure of speech. It is the authority to hold oversight hearings on how that money is used, to bring a cabinet secretary to a witness table and make him answer for a dead man in her home state, and to attach conditions — real ones, enforceable ones — to the next tranche of DHS funding. Cameras “on order” but not deployed, two years into a mass-enforcement campaign, is not a puzzle of logistics. It is a statement of priorities. And no Mainer in Washington has more leverage over those priorities than the senator who funds the agency.

And money is not the excuse — it cannot be. In 2025, Congress handed ICE roughly $75 billion in new money over four years, piled on top of a base budget near $10 billion. By the Brennan Center’s accounting, that leaves the agency with more funding than the FBI, the DEA, the ATF, the U.S. Marshals, and the federal Bureau of Prisons combined — the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the history of the United States, with a war chest larger than the military budgets of most countries on earth. Against that ocean of money, a body camera is a rounding error. Collins herself took credit for the $20 million she added for them, and told the Senate floor that those cameras “protect both law enforcement officers and the people with whom they are interacting.” Joan Sebastian Guerrero was one of the people they were interacting with. Secretary Mullin told Senator King the cameras were on their way — perhaps in another forty-five days. Forty-five days too late for a man already in a Biddeford morgue.

To see how deliberate that choice is, set ICE beside the New York City Police Department. The NYPD polices nearly nine million people. It runs a counterterrorism and intelligence operation with officers posted overseas, works the city’s homicides and gang cases, tracks transnational criminal networks, and secures everything from the U.N. General Assembly to New Year’s Eve in Times Square. It does all of that on an operating budget of roughly $6 billion — a fraction of what ICE now commands each year to carry out civil immigration arrests. And years ago, under a federal court order, the NYPD equipped all twenty thousand of its patrol officers with body cameras, the largest such deployment in the country. A single city’s police department — doing heavier and more dangerous work on a sliver of the money — managed what the best-funded law-enforcement agency in American history insists it still cannot: it turned the cameras on.

The missing camera in Biddeford was not a budget shortfall. It was a choice — and it belongs to the two people with the power to have chosen otherwise: the senator who signs the checks, and the secretary who runs the agency. The shame is theirs to share.

So what has she done with it? On Monday, as several hundred people filled the streets of Biddeford and marched on her district office, Collins said the shooting “requires a full and impartial investigation,” and she spoke with Secretary Mullin, who assured her the department’s own inspector general and the FBI would look into it. That is not nothing. But her colleague Angus King — who holds no gavel over DHS and caucuses with the minority — reached the same secretary twice and did more with it: he stood before reporters, pressed on the missing body cameras, and demanded a transparent, independent inquiry. The difference between the two of them is not access. Both got the secretary on the phone. The difference is that only one of them holds the power to compel more than a promise — and she has not reached for it.

And a sentence is a strange thing to spend, because what happened to Joan Sebastian Guerrero was not a Maine aberration. It was a method.

There is a phrase Black Americans have carried for as long as we have owned cars: Driving While Black. It is not a slogan, and it is not new — it is as old as the automobile itself, old enough to have needed The Negro Motorist Green Book to survive it. It is the earned knowledge that a broken taillight or a turn signal can be made into a reason — that for a Black driver, the traffic stop has always been among the most dangerous places in American life. I know it. My siblings know it. We learned the choreography young: hands visible, movements slow, voice level, because the margin for error was never ours.

What took Guerrero’s life is that same machinery, escalated past anything a citation could hold. Under this administration’s ICE, Driving While Brown does not end with a ticket or a warning. Consider only the months since January 2026, and only the people we can name:

• Eduardo Cruz Garcia — New Jersey, June 15. Fired on at a traffic stop; the government said he struck an agent with his van.

• Clemente Lara-Hernandez — Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, July 1. Fired on at a traffic stop; the government said he rammed an ICE vehicle.

• Lorenzo Salgado Araujo — Houston, July 7. Killed. A fifty-two-year-old Mexican father who had lived in Texas thirty-five years, shot as he collected his construction crew. ICE said he “weaponized” his vehicle. No footage of the shooting has ever surfaced.

• Joan Sebastian Guerrero — Biddeford, July 13. Killed. “Weaponized” his vehicle, the secretary said — until, by dinnertime, he was not the man they were after at all.

Guerrero is the fourth person shot dead by immigration agents this year, and by the count of several news organizations at least the eleventh since this crackdown began. Set the government’s explanations side by side and the language stops sounding like separate incidents and starts sounding like a single script, recited: the civilian car “rammed,” “fled,” was “weaponized”; the officer “feared for his safety.” And in case after case, the moment a bystander’s phone surfaces, the script cracks. They said Renee Good — a U.S. citizen, thirty-seven, a mother of three killed in her SUV in Minneapolis in January — had tried to run agents down; the video showed her turning her wheels away from them. The words have been used so often they have worn smooth. Police departments spent decades training officers not to fire into moving vehicles. ICE, flush with new agents and new money, is training itself to do the opposite.

And when the script does not hold, a killing can simply be buried. In March 2025, a Homeland Security Investigations team on South Padre Island shot and killed Ruben Ray Martinez, a 23-year-old U.S. citizen who had driven to the Texas coast with his best friend to mark his birthday. The account was familiar — he had run over an agent, they said. What was different is that no one was told. For eleven months the federal government never disclosed that immigration agents had killed him at all; the truth surfaced only when the watchdog group American Oversight pried the records loose through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The footage authorities finally released does not clearly show his car striking anyone, and a grand jury brought no charges. That is what enforcement without cameras and without oversight produces — not merely a false account, but no account at all, until someone forces the file open.

And it happened here — in a state ICE has used as a proving ground before. In a federal surge this past January, roughly two hundred people were arrested in Maine. Fewer than a dozen had criminal convictions; more than 180 did not. So much for the worst of the worst.

Here is the uncomfortable thing about power: it turns silence into a decision. When Susan Collins wields the Appropriations gavel to secure $1.5 billion for Maine’s roads, laboratories, and working waterfronts, she asks — rightly — to be judged by what that power delivers. She cannot then treat the same gavel as dead weight when a man is killed by an agency she funds, on a street in the district she represents, by officers she personally assured us had money for cameras they were not wearing. The purse she raises for potholes does not evaporate when the subject becomes a body in the road.

Collins is on the ballot in November. That is not incidental to this argument; it is the mechanism of it. In a constitutional system, the remedy for a powerful official who will not use her power to protect the people she represents is not a strongly worded press release. It is an election. Mainers are owed a senator who grasps that chairing the committee which funds ICE carries an obligation to hold ICE to account — and who will spend political capital, not only federal appropriations, to meet it.

The investigations will now grind forward. The Maine Attorney General’s office has opened one; the Department of Homeland Security’s own inspector general is reported to be conducting another; Senator King said he was told the FBI would be involved. The officer who fired is on administrative leave, as protocol requires. The forensics will eventually sort out what the man in the Kia did or did not do with his steering wheel in the seconds before he was shot. But some questions do not wait on ballistics. Why were there no cameras? Why did the government’s account of who this man was change between lunch and dinner? And why is the one Mainer with the power to demand answers content, so far, to ask so little?

He said he tried to stop. The least his senator can do is refuse to.

About Lynette M. Perez

Lynette M. Perez is a constitutional and municipal lawyer who has tried more than 100 cases and represented municipal clients in trial and appellate courts, including the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. She serves as Chief Deputy City Attorney for the City of Little Rock, teaches constitutional law at the Little Rock Police Department Academy, and is Regional Vice President for the 8th Circuit South of the International Municipal Lawyers Association. She is the author of the law review article The 14th Amendment from Homer Plessy to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, 59 Creighton L. Rev. 281 (2026), and of the book Finding God in Sin City (HigherLife, 2015). She previously held elected and appointed office in Nevada, including service as a county commissioner with oversight of metropolitan police. She writes Bench & Crown, a newsletter on law, power, and accountability. The views expressed here are her own and do not represent those of any employer, client, or organization.

Sources

The Biddeford shooting (July 13, 2026)

• CNN, “One person killed in Maine in second fatal ICE-involved shooting in less than a week” — https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/13/us/live-news/maine-ice-shooting-houston-minnesota

• NBC News, “Man fatally shot by ICE officer in Maine wasn’t the target of arrest warrant, senator’s spokesman says” — https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/biddeford-maine-ice-investigation-fatal-shooting-rcna587279

• The Boston Globe, “Maine ICE shooting in Biddeford: Live updates” — https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/07/13/metro/biddeford-maine-ice-shooting-live-updates/

• The Washington Post, “ICE officer fatally shot man in Biddeford, Maine, attorney general says” — https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2026/07/13/federal-officers-involved-fatal-shooting-biddeford-maine-governor-says/

• Bangor Daily News, “ICE agents involved in fatal Biddeford shooting, lawmaker says” — https://www.bangordailynews.com/2026/07/13/politics/state-politics/biddeford-maine-ice-shooting-investigation/

• The Daily Beast, “ICE Kills Man in Biddeford, Maine, in Second Fatal Shooting This Week” — https://www.thedailybeast.com/ice-kills-man-in-biddeford-maine-in-second-fatal-shooting-this-week/

The national pattern of shootings

• CNN, “4 people have been killed this year in shootings by federal agents linked to Trump’s immigration crackdown” — https://www.cnn.com/us/trump-immigration-crackdown-shootings

• NBC News, “List: ICE and Border Patrol shootings as Trump doubles down on immigration enforcement” — https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ice-shootings-list-border-patrol-trump-immigration-operations-rcna254202

• PBS NewsHour, “Shooting deaths climb in Trump’s mass deportation effort” — https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-look-at-shootings-by-federal-immigration-officers

• The Trace, “How Many People Have Been Shot in Trump’s Immigration Raids?” — https://www.thetrace.org/2025/12/immigration-ice-shootings-guns-tracker/

• American Immigration Council, “6 Deaths in ICE Custody and 2 Fatal Shootings: A Horrific Start to 2026” — https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/ice-deaths-shootings-2026/

• The American Prospect, “A Running Count of How Many People ICE Has Killed and Injured” — https://prospect.org/2026/01/29/ice-trump-killed-injured-list-dhs-cbp-border-patrol-renee-good-alex-pretti/

• CNN, “Texas man was fatally shot by a federal immigration agent last year during a stop, new records show” (Ruben Ray Martinez) — https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/20/us/texas-ruben-ray-martinez-shooting

• NBC News, “Texas U.S. citizen was fatally shot by an immigration agent last year during a stop, new records show” — https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/texas-us-citizen-fatally-shot-immigration-agent-martinez-rcna260030

ICE’s funding

• NPR, “How ICE became the highest-funded U.S. law enforcement agency” — https://www.npr.org/2026/01/21/nx-s1-5674887/ice-budget-funding-congress-trump

• PolitiFact, “Does Trump’s new law make ICE the largest federal law enforcement agency?” — https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2025/jul/11/jon-favreau/ICE-FBI-bill-Donald-Trump-largest/

The NYPD comparison

• New York City Council, Committee on Public Safety, “Overview of NYPD’s fiscal year 2026 budget” (FY2026 expense budget ~$6.15 billion) — https://citymeetings.nyc/meetings/new-york-city-council/2025-05-29-1000-am-committee-on-public-safety/chapter/overview-of-nypds-fiscal-year-2026-budget/

• City of New York, “NYPD Completes Rollout of Body-Worn Cameras to All Officers on Patrol” (March 2019) — https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/pr0306/nypd-completes-rollout-body-worn-cameras-all-officers-patrol

Collins and the appropriations record

• U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations, “Senator Collins Statement on Passage of DHS Funding Package” (March 27, 2026) — https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/news/majority/senator-collins-statement-on-passage-of-dhs-funding-package

• U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations, “Senator Collins Delivers Floor Remarks on DHS Shutdown” (the $20 million body-camera line) — https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/news/majority/senator-collins-delivers-floor-remarks-on-dhs-shutdown

• NewsCenter Maine, “Collins backs Senate DHS funding bill, blames Democrats for shutdown” — https://www.newscentermaine.com/article/news/politics/national-politics/senate-dhs-funding-vote-susan-collins-angus-king-tsa-ice-fema-coast-guard/97-89d23a19-2dff-455d-8f78-41f91a843ddc

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Lindsey Graham spent one of the last full days of his life standing in front of tanks in Kyiv, telling reporters he had never been more optimistic about ending a war. Hours after he flew home, he was gone — 71 years old, felled by what his office called a brief and sudden illness, on a Saturday night at his home on Capitol Hill. He had called the President earlier that evening. He sounded, the President said, a little tired but otherwise himself. Then he wasn’t there at all.

It was his tenth trip to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. He did not have to keep going. He was 71, a senator of three decades, a man who could have chosen the golf course and the Sunday shows over a war zone. He kept getting on the plane. And on that last trip he finally got the thing he had been chasing for more than a year: a green light from the White House to move his Russia sanctions bill.

I want to be careful and clear about what that bill is, because the word “sanctions” gets thrown around until it means nothing. The Sanctioning Russia Act of 2025 — S.1241, the bill Graham built with Richard Blumenthal, Jeanne Shaheen, and Roger Wicker — is not a press release. It is primary and secondary sanctions on Russia, and up to a 500 percent tariff on any country that keeps buying Russian oil, gas, and uranium to fund the war. The mechanism is the point: you cannot cripple Putin’s war machine by scolding Moscow. You do it by making it ruinously expensive for Beijing, Delhi, and everyone else to keep bankrolling him. That is what the bill does.

Here is the part that should end the debate. That bill already has 84 Senate cosponsors. Eighty-four. Two-thirds of the Senate is sixty-seven. Graham and Blumenthal did not just have the votes to pass this thing — they had the votes to override a veto, from both parties, with an independent thrown in. On July 10, standing in Kyiv, Graham announced the four sponsors had reached agreement with the Trump administration on the language. The machinery was assembled. The safety was off. And then the man whose name is on the bill died before the gavel came down.

So the question in front of Majority Leader Thune and the House leadership is not whether the votes exist. They exist. The question is whether Congress can be bothered to finish something that was one procedural step from done, for a colleague who died with it in his hands.

I think it must. And I want to tell you why this one is personal for me.

I grew up in Europe, though not the way people picture it. In 1972 my mother — a single mother with four children — moved us to Karlsruhe, Germany, for a career with the Department of Defense Dependents Schools, the system that educates the children of American servicemembers overseas. In Vicenza, Italy, she met the man I have always called my father, an American soldier, and remarried. From there we went on to Würzburg, and then Kitzingen. My childhood was measured out in Army posts.

Those schools existed because those bases existed, and those bases existed for one overriding reason: Russia was, and had always been, a threat to Europe and therefore to us. American forces were forward-deployed across the continent not out of charity but out of cold arithmetic — it is cheaper, in blood and treasure, to hold the line there than to fight the war that comes when the line breaks. My family lived inside that arithmetic for nearly a quarter century. My mother was a principal in that system; my father served in it in uniform. I left for college in America at eighteen, and my parents stayed on — for years I flew back across the Atlantic to see them, my mother’s last postings at Comiso, in Sicily, and La Maddalena, off Sardinia. They did not come home for good until 1996, five years after the Soviet Union itself was gone. That continent has never been an abstraction to me. It is the ground my parents gave their careers to.

I have felt what that presence means from the inside. In December 1989, visiting my parents at Comiso — then the closest American base to Libya — I was there when the invasion of Panama put the base on lockdown. A war launched an ocean away reached our gate within hours. That is exactly what forward deployment does: it absorbs the shock of a violent world so the shock never has to arrive at home.

People treat Ukraine as a faraway quarrel. It is not far. Kyiv sits closer to Berlin than Dallas sits to Chicago — roughly 750 miles against 800. When a Russian army marches west across Ukraine, it is not marching across some abstraction on a map. It is marching toward the exact ground where my father and thousands of other American servicemembers spent their careers making sure no such march would ever succeed. The distance that is supposed to make this someone else’s problem is the distance between two American cities in the same time zone.

Let me draw a distinction some of my readers will want me to draw. I supported our intervention in Iran, and I will say plainly that it was, in large part, about protecting Israel — an ally whose security I believe is bound up with our own. Reasonable people argue about that one, and I understand why. But Ukraine does not require that argument. You can reject every word I just wrote about Iran and still land in the same place on Russia, because Ukraine has never been about a distant ally. It is about the order that has kept great-power war off of American and European soil since 1945. It is about whether borders can be redrawn by tanks. When that principle dies in Kyiv, it does not stay in Kyiv. It is, in the most literal and least sentimental sense, about protecting us.

Now let me put on the other hat, the lawyer’s hat, because this is Bench & Crown and the constitutional point matters. Leader Thune has said for months that the Senate would follow the White House’s lead and would not move the bill until the administration was certain. I understand the political logic. But I want to be honest about the constitutional posture: Congress does not need the executive’s permission to legislate. Article I is not a courtesy the President extends to the Senate. The power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, to lay tariffs, to set the terms of America’s economic relations with the world — that is Congress’s power, enumerated, original, and non-delegable at its core. A bill with 84 cosponsors is not waiting on the White House because it lacks authority. It is waiting because leadership chose deference over duty. Graham’s death is the moment to stop choosing that.

I am not going to pretend Lindsey Graham and I saw the world the same way. There is a great deal I could never agree with him on, and most of it dates to the days after January 6th, when I watched him find his way back to a version of loyalty I did not recognize as courage. I hold that. I am not laundering it. Honoring the good work a man leaves behind does not require me to forget the rest of the ledger — and anyone who tells you it does is selling a eulogy, not a reckoning. You can grieve a man honestly, which means grieving him whole.

But this bill was the right work. It was right when he started it, it was right when he stood in front of those tanks, and it is right now that he is gone. On the thing that actually protects American soil, I agreed with him without an asterisk.

So here is what Congress owes him. Not the flags at half-staff — those cost nothing and change nothing. Not the floor speeches about a happy warrior. The respect that would actually mean something is the respect he asked for while he was alive: pass the bill. Bring S.1241 to the floor, hold the vote he did not live to see, and send Vladimir Putin the message Lindsey Graham crossed an ocean ten times to deliver.

He did the traveling. He did the counting. He did the persuading. He left the Senate exactly one thing to do.

Grant him his last wish.

Lynette M. Perez is the Chief Deputy City Attorney for the City of Little Rock, Arkansas, and Regional Vice President for the 8th Circuit (South) of the International Municipal Lawyers Association. A trial lawyer with more than 100 trials on the merits, she is admitted in Arkansas and Texas, before the Eastern and Western Districts of Arkansas, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. She was appointed by President George W. Bush to the Board of Visitors of the United States Naval Academy, where she served alongside Senator John McCain. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame and St. Mary's University School of Law, she came of age in American military communities across Germany and Italy and writes on law, power, and constitutional accountability at Bench & Crown.

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Lorenzo Salgado Araujo built homes. He came to Houston roughly thirty-five years ago, raised three American-citizen sons — a teacher, an engineer, a third who called him a simple man of morning routines — and ran a construction company that put dozens of other men to work. He had no criminal convictions. After years of building other people’s houses, he was, his family says, close to finalizing his own legal status. On the morning of July 7, he was doing what he did every morning: driving his crew to a jobsite in the East End. He never got there. A federal immigration agent shot him in the abdomen during a vehicle stop on Canal Street, and he died at a hospital hours later.

He was, by every account that has since emerged, not the man they were looking for.

Two Stories

There are two accounts of that morning, and they cannot both be true.

The first is the government’s. Within hours, the Department of Homeland Security described a “targeted enforcement operation” and told the public that Salgado Araujo rammed an ICE vehicle, ignored repeated verbal commands, and “weaponized his vehicle” in an attempt to run over an officer — who then fired in self-defense. It is a tidy story, and it is one DHS has told before, nearly word for word.

The second account is the one assembled from the physical record. Agents were hunting other people entirely — two individuals reported to be traveling in a white van. Salgado Araujo happened to be driving a white van. Surveillance video obtained by KHOU 11 shows the agents, in an unmarked black SUV, maneuvering to box him in — they initiated the encounter, not him. He responded by making a U-turn and heading the other way; the agents turned to follow. Separate footage shows no damage to the ICE vehicle, which is difficult to reconcile with a man who supposedly rammed it and tried to run an officer down. The agents wore no body cameras. The video does not capture the final seconds, so no one should claim it shows the shooting. It doesn’t. What it shows is that the story told to justify the shooting is contradicted by the evidence that does exist.

That distinction matters, and it is the whole game. A prosecutor does not need a camera trained on the trigger to disprove a self-defense claim. She needs to show that the surrounding facts are inconsistent with the account. An undamaged vehicle. A box-in maneuver. A U-turn away. These are the facts, and they are not friendly to the word “self-defense.”

The Script

If the DHS statement reads like a template, that is because it is one.

When Marimar Martinez was shot five times in her car, the government said she had tried to run officers over, forcing them to fire defensively. Bodycam footage told a different story; her charges were dismissed. Before that, Ruben Ray Martinez was killed on South Padre Island, and again the account was that he tried to run agents down — and again the video did not clearly show it. The public only learned of federal involvement in his death through a records request months later.

The recurrence is the point. When the same justification appears after killing after killing — he weaponized his vehicle, he tried to run us over, we had no choice — and when that justification is repeatedly undercut by whatever footage survives, it stops being a description of events and becomes a script. Salgado Araujo’s death is, by the count of reporters covering this, the tenth fatal shooting by an immigration agent this year. The script has had a great deal of use.

What a Real Agency Would Have Done

I have spent years defending a city, and years teaching constitutional law to the officers who police one. So I want to be precise about the sentence people keep saying: a real police department would have fired them by now.

They are right, and the reason they are right is structural.

When a municipal officer uses deadly force, an architecture of accountability closes around the event almost immediately. The officer is named. The body-worn camera footage — because there is body-worn camera footage — is preserved and, increasingly, released on a legal clock. An internal affairs division opens a use-of-force review measured against Graham v. Connor‘s objective-reasonableness standard and Tennessee v. Garner‘s limits on deadly force. Discipline can follow, and it can go as far as termination. That discipline is not frictionless — officers have union representation, civil-service protections, and the right to contest a firing through grievance, arbitration, and, if it comes to that, the courts; those protections are real, and they are due. But the ledger has another side. An officer whose use of force crosses the line can be charged with a crime — something that has happened in my own department. And the city itself carries civil liability, because a family whose loved one is killed by a city officer has a federal cause of action — 42 U.S.C. § 1983. City lawyers like me spend our careers aware that every stop, every shot, every report may be litigated. That awareness disciplines behavior. It is supposed to.

Now subtract all of it.

The agent who killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo has not been named. There was no body camera. The “investigation” is bifurcated in a way that should trouble anyone: the FBI is examining a possible assault on a federal officer — that is, scrutinizing the dead man — while the DHS Office of Inspector General, an internal watchdog inside the very department that employs the shooter, reviews the killing. And the § 1983 remedy that anchors municipal accountability does not reach them at all, because § 1983 runs against those acting under color of state law.

The federal analog — a Bivens action — is, for practical purposes, gone. In Egbert v. Boule (2022), the Supreme Court took a case involving a Border Patrol agent and made plain that courts should almost never recognize a Bivens remedy in any new context. The immigration-enforcement context is precisely the one the Court has been most reluctant to touch. So a family standing over a body in Houston has, as a matter of black-letter law, very nearly no one to sue and no federal door to walk through. The city cop operates inside a cage of liability. The federal agent operates in open country.

This is not an accident of enforcement. It is the design. And it produces exactly what we are watching: an agency that can kill, narrate the killing in its own words within the hour, detain the witnesses — three of Salgado Araujo’s own crew, one of them his brother — and reasonably expect that no camera it controls, no officer it names, and no court it fears will ever hold it to the story.

The Government That Narrates

There is a particular danger in a state that reserves to itself both the power to kill and the power to describe the killing. Due process was built precisely to break that monopoly — to insist that the government’s account be tested by something outside the government. What Houston shows is a system engineered to keep the account untested: no camera it does not control, no officer it must name, no remedy it must answer.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was not a dangerous criminal to be removed. He was a homebuilder driving to work in the dark, mistaken for someone else, killed by men who were looking for other people. The government’s word for what he did to a vehicle he apparently never damaged was weaponized. The more honest word for what was done to him — and to Marimar Martinez, and to Ruben Ray Martinez, and to the ones who come next while the script still works — is the one no official statement will ever use.

His son asked that his father not be reduced to a headline. The least the law can do is refuse to reduce his death to a press release. So far, it has not managed even that.

Sources & Authorities

Legal authorities

• Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1 (1985) (deadly-force limits under the Fourth Amendment).

• Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386 (1989) (objective-reasonableness standard for use of force).

• 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (civil action for deprivation of rights by persons acting under color of state law).

• Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Fed. Bureau of Narcotics, 403 U.S. 388 (1971) (implied damages remedy against federal officers).

• Egbert v. Boule, 596 U.S. 482 (2022) (declining to extend Bivens; instructing that courts should recognize no new Bivens context where any reason counsels hesitation — arising from a U.S. Border Patrol agent).

Reporting

The man, and the shooting (§ opening). Alex Nguyen, Uriel J. García, Colleen DeGuzman & Stephen Simpson, ICE Agent Fatally Shoots Man in Houston, Texas Tribune (July 7, 2026), https://www.texastribune.org/2026/07/07/ice-fatal-shooting-houston-lorenzo-salgado-araujo/; ICE Agent Fatally Shoots Man in Houston During ‘Targeted Enforcement Operation,’ Houston Public Media (July 7, 2026), https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/immigration/2026/07/07/556478/houston-ice-shooting-death-east-end/; Kyle McClenagan, Relatives of Houston Man Fatally Shot by ICE Agent Describe Him as ‘Hard-Working Family Man,’ Houston Public Media (July 8, 2026), https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/immigration/2026/07/08/556533/lorenzo-salgado-araujo-houston-ice-shooting-family-speaks-out/; A Mexican Father Was Shot and Killed by an ICE Officer. His Son Is Demanding an Independent Probe, Associated Press (via PBS NewsHour) (July 9, 2026), https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-mexican-father-was-shot-and-killed-by-an-ice-officer-his-son-is-demanding-an-independent-probe; What We Know About the Fatal ICE Shooting in Houston, TIME (July 8, 2026) (age; full DHS statement), https://time.com/article/2026/07/08/what-we-know-about-the-fatal-ice-shooting-in-houston/.

Two Stories — wrong man, van, footage, no body cameras (§ “Two Stories”). Lorenzo Salgado Araujo: Mexican Man Fatally Shot by ICE Was Not Target of Immigration Operation, Source Says, CNN (July 9, 2026), https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/09/us/lorenzo-salgado-araujo-houston-ice-shooting; ICE Killed a Man in Texas — But He Wasn’t Who They Were Looking For, New Republic (July 9, 2026) (New York Times sourcing; KHOU 11 surveillance footage; box-in maneuver; no vehicle damage; tenth fatal ICE shooting this year), https://newrepublic.com/post/212928/man-ice-killed-texas-not-who-looking-for; ICE Agent Kills Wrong Target in Houston, Sparking Protests, Associated Press (via Yahoo News) (Rep. Sylvia Garcia; Mexico response), https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/article/ice-agent-kills-wrong-target-in-houston-sparking-protests-110832113.html.

The Script — pattern of contradicted accounts (§ “The Script”). New Republic, supra (Marimar Martinez; witness detention pattern); Texas Tribune, supra (Ruben Ray Martinez, South Padre Island; American Oversight records request); Associated Press (via PBS NewsHour), supra (noting initial federal descriptions later contradicted by video in several shootings).

Accountability, investigations, and remedies (§§ “What a Real Agency Would Have Done,” “The Government That Narrates”). Texas Tribune, supra (FBI Houston investigating potential assault on a federal officer; DHS Office of Inspector General investigating the shooting; HPD not part of the operation); TIME, supra (bifurcated FBI/OIG investigations); Sons of Mexican Man Killed by ICE Officer in Houston Demand Independent Investigation, CBS News (July 8, 2026) (Magnolia Park; three men detained, incl. Araujo’s brother; Rep. Al Green’s call for a Homeland Security Committee hearing and release of body-worn-camera footage; bystander video), https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lorenzo-salgado-araujo-mexican-houston-ice-shooting/; Houston ICE Shooting: Family, Activists Call for Transparency, FOX 26 Houston (July 8, 2026) (Harris County District Attorney pursuing available investigative avenues; Rep. Christina Morales’s request that Texas DPS open an investigation), https://www.fox26houston.com/news/houston-ice-shooting-death-lorenzo-salgado-araujo-press-conference; ICE Agent Kills Mexican Immigrant in Houston in Latest Deadly Enforcement Encounter, PBS NewsHour (Geoff Bennett & Colleen DeGuzman) (July 8, 2026) (unmarked vehicles; family account), https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/ice-agent-kills-mexican-immigrant-in-houston-in-latest-deadly-enforcement-encounter.

Witnesses’ account (for the pending update). Witnesses Dispute ICE Account of Immigrant’s Fatal Shooting in Houston, Associated Press (the three surviving workers, through counsel, call ICE’s account false), https://uk.news.yahoo.com/witnesses-dispute-ice-account-immigrants-022103753.html.

Note: All secondary reporting is dated within days of the incident and reflects developing facts; the DHS account is the agency’s own and remains, as of this writing, unsupported by any released video or vehicle-damage evidence. Primary legal authorities are cited to the U.S. Reports.

About Bench & Crown

Bench & Crown is a newsletter about law, power, and the machinery of accountability — who answers for the use of state force, and who is permitted not to. It is written by Lynette M. Perez, a public lawyer with more than three decades of public service, who serves as Chief Deputy City Attorney for the City of Little Rock and teaches constitutional law at the city’s police academy. Her scholarship on the Fourteenth Amendment appears in the Creighton Law Review. The views expressed here are her own and do not represent the City of Little Rock or any client. If this was worth your time, subscribe — and send it to someone who should read it.

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Seventy-plus years later, a different word does similar work. Protesters, journalists, and elected officials get called “Marxist” or “radical left” — not as an argument, but as a substitute for one. And this time the accusation comes with something McCarthy’s Senate subcommittee never had on its own: a Justice Department and an FBI that answer to the man doing the accusing.

That distinction is the whole argument of this piece. The rhetorical move — label your opponent, skip the debate — is genuinely old. What’s worth examining is whether the machinery behind the label has changed, and what that means for how dangerous this moment actually is.

Part I: The Playbook Repeats

McCarthy’s method was never really about communism. It was about using a scary word to avoid a fair fight. Say “communist” and you don’t have to rebut what someone actually said — you just have to make the room afraid to be seen agreeing with them. Hundreds of people were blacklisted from film, television, academia, and government service not because prosecutors proved anything in court, but because congressional committees made the accusation and employers didn’t want the trouble of standing behind the accused.

The FBI’s counterintelligence program went further than any single senator did, and outlasted McCarthy by two decades. J. Edgar Hoover’s bureau built files on the civil rights movement’s leadership on the theory — grossly overstated even by the FBI’s own internal memos — that it was Communist-infiltrated. King’s phones were tapped, his hotel rooms bugged, on the strength of his association with adviser Stanley Levison, who did have Communist Party ties in the 1950s but had long since severed them by the time King relied on him. Bayard Rustin faced the same accusation, compounded by attacks on his sexuality. Segregationist governors and senators called the entire civil rights movement a “Communist plot,” which was easier than answering for segregation itself.

The mechanism is the one thing that hasn’t changed: attach a frightening ideology to a person, and you never have to engage what they actually said or did.

Part II: Where the Two Eras Diverge

Here is where the comparison needs to be precise rather than just satisfying.

McCarthy’s power was congressional — subpoenas, televised hearings, the threat of contempt citations. It ran on association and belief, not conduct. You could be blacklisted for who you’d had dinner with in 1938. There was no need to charge anyone with a crime, because the point was never prosecution; it was making the accusation itself costly enough that people would police themselves and each other.

Today’s most-watched cases run through actual prosecutorial channels, and they’re nominally about conduct, not ideology. Critics have described a pattern since 2025 of Trump administration officials pursuing investigations into people the president has publicly named as enemies, following his campaign promise of retribution if reelected — while the administration itself insists these actions are “driven by law and not by politics.” James Comey was indicted, saw that indictment dismissed over an invalidly appointed prosecutor, and was indicted again months later on a different theory. John Bolton, one of the president’s sharpest former-adviser critics, was charged with eighteen felony counts under the Espionage Act and ultimately pleaded guilty to a single count, telling the court he was “sorry for it.”

That last case is the one that complicates any clean McCarthy parallel. A former DOJ attorney who now runs an organization of former department staffers has drawn a distinction between the Bolton case, which she called legitimate, and what she described as the “vindictive cases” pursued against other Trump critics. Independent reporting found the Bolton prosecution retained the support of career prosecutors and investigators in a way other high-profile cases against Trump critics did not. Even a national security scholar with no particular sympathy for the administration’s broader approach concluded Bolton’s conduct was real and warranted consequences. That’s a meaningfully different animal than a subpoena built on a thirty-year-old dinner guest list. Due process, actual evidentiary standards, and — in Bolton’s case — a career prosecutor’s independent judgment all did some work that McCarthy’s committee never had to survive.

But the Comey and James cases sit closer to the McCarthy end of the spectrum than the Bolton case does. A judge dismissed both indictments after ruling the prosecutor who’d brought them, handpicked by the president, had been invalidly appointed. Reporting has documented the Defense Department opening a review of a senator for a video urging service members to refuse unlawful orders, and a U.S. Attorney’s office pursuing a grand jury indictment against six lawmakers that the grand jury itself declined to return — the kind of outcome that used to be rare enough to make headlines on its own. A tracking project maintained by legal researchers has cataloged dozens of similar episodes since 2025: subpoenas, stripped security clearances, and removed protective details aimed at people the administration has publicly named as adversaries, with one former national security adviser reportedly included on an “enemies list” kept by the FBI director before his own indictment followed.

So the honest account isn’t “this is McCarthyism” or “this is nothing like McCarthyism.” It’s that the same administration is running cases that land at genuinely different points on that spectrum — some closer to ordinary law enforcement that happens to embarrass the president, some closer to the pure association-based accusation McCarthy specialized in.

Part III: Why “Dangerous Either Way” Is the Right Frame

Here’s the deeper problem, and it’s the reason I don’t think this moment can be graded on a curve just because today’s version comes wrapped in indictments instead of subpoenas: both versions produce the same downstream harm. Whether the tool is a congressional hearing built on guilt-by-association or a prosecution that starts with the president naming his target before a single fact has been found, the end state is the same — citizens calculating whether a controversial opinion is worth the risk, and institutions that are supposed to check power instead being used to wield it.

McCarthy’s era eventually corrected itself, but not quickly and not gently. It took the Army-McCarthy hearings, a televised moment where the country watched Joseph Welch ask “have you no sense of decency,” and years of subsequent institutional rebuilding before Congress meaningfully checked its own committee’s excesses. The correction came from public shame, not from any court striking down what McCarthy’s subcommittee had done — because there was rarely a legal violation to strike down. That’s a sobering data point for anyone hoping the current moment resolves itself the same way it did then: our institutions today have more formal guardrails (grand juries that can and did decline to indict, judges who found unlawfully appointed prosecutors and threw out cases, a defense bar willing to fight), and those guardrails have, in fact, been doing real work. That’s the good news buried in an otherwise grim comparison.

The bad news is that guardrails only hold as long as the people operating them keep choosing to use them. A grand jury that declines to indict is a guardrail functioning. A prosecutor invalidly appointed and later removed is a guardrail functioning. But those are individual acts of institutional courage, repeated case by case — not a structural immunity to the underlying instinct, which is older than McCarthy and will outlast this administration too. The 14th Amendment’s promise of due process doesn’t ask us to determine whose accusation is more sincere. It asks whether the process itself — the charge, the evidence, the independent judge, the jury that can say no — was allowed to function. Measured against that standard rather than against which political side is doing the accusing, both the ideological smear and the selectively aimed prosecution fail the same test, and both leave the same wreckage behind: a citizenry that has learned dissent has a price, regardless of which era’s currency it’s paid in.

Sources

• ABC News, “Here’s a list of the individuals, including James Comey, targeted by the Trump administration,” updated June 2026 (Comey re-indictment, Mark Kelly censure, grand jury declining to indict six lawmakers, Bolton indictment): https://abcnews.com/US/list-individuals-including-lisa-cook-targeted-trump-administration/story?id=124968309

• “Targeting of political opponents and civil society under the second Trump administration,” Wikipedia, compiling primary reporting on the DOJ “weaponization working group,” FBI “payback squad,” and related actions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeting_of_political_opponents_and_civil_society_under_the_second_Trump_administration

• Protect Democracy, “Tracking retaliatory use of arrests, prosecutions, and investigations by the Trump administration” (ongoing tracker): https://protectdemocracy.org/work/retaliatory-action-tracker/

• CNN Politics, “Tracking Trump’s retaliation,” updated May 2026: https://www.cnn.com/politics/retaliation-tracker-trump-vis

• NPR, “Trump has used government powers to target more than 100 perceived enemies,” April 2025: https://www.npr.org/2025/04/29/nx-s1-5327518/donald-trump-100-days-retribution-threats

• ABC News, “Trump has taken steps to make his campaign promise to seek ‘retribution’ reality, critics say,” April 2025: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-steps-make-campaign-promise-seek-retribution-reality/story?id=121125087

• Axios, “Red-meat retribution: Trump escalates campaign against MAGA foes,” April 29, 2026 (Comey Round 2 seashell-post charge): https://www.axios.com/2026/04/29/trump-investigations-maga-red-meat

• Reuters (via The Philadelphia Inquirer), “Trump’s campaign of retribution: At least 470 targets and counting,” November 2025 (Kash Patel’s “Government Gangsters” enemies list, at least 17 of 60 named individuals facing retribution): https://www.inquirer.com/politics/nation/trump-retribution-tracker-political-punishment-20251126.html

• U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs, “Former U.S. National Security Advisor John R. Bolton, II Pleads Guilty to Violating the Espionage Act,” June 2026: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-us-national-security-advisor-john-r-bolton-ii-pleads-guilty-violating-espionage-act

• NPR, “John Bolton, former Trump national security adviser, pleads guilty in classified documents case,” June 26, 2026 (Stacey Young/Justice Connection distinguishing Bolton from “vindictive cases”): https://www.npr.org/2026/06/26/nx-s1-5871292/john-bolton-national-security-classified-documents

• ABC News, “John Bolton pleads guilty to 1 count of mishandling classified information,” June 26, 2026: https://abcnews.com/US/john-bolton-expected-plead-guilty-mishandling-classified-information/story?id=134224305

Bench & Crown is written by Lynette M. Perez, Chief Deputy City Attorney for the City of Little Rock, Arkansas, and Regional Vice President (8th Circuit South) for the International Municipal Lawyers Association. She teaches constitutional law at the Little Rock Police Department Academy and is licensed in Texas and Arkansas. Bench & Crown covers the Supreme Court, constitutional law, and the moments where they two collide with the rest of American life.

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What Gorsuch Actually Wrote

Start with the bottom line. The Court split 6-3 to strike down the executive order, with Chief Justice Roberts writing for the majority (joined by Sotomayor, Kagan, Barrett, and Jackson) that children born here to parents unlawfully or temporarily present remain “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and are citizens at birth. Kavanaugh concurred in the judgment on narrower statutory grounds. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissented — each writing separately, with Gorsuch joining Thomas’s opinion in full and adding his own six paragraphs besides.

Gorsuch framed the case as a contest between two readings of the Citizenship Clause: one incorporating the English common-law rule of jus soli — birthright by soil, full stop — the other reflecting what he called a distinctly American promise, extending citizenship to children of parents who had made this country their “permanent home.” He sided with the narrower, “permanent home” reading. Because the challengers brought a facial challenge — arguing the order was invalid in every application, not just some — he reasoned that if the order was lawful even as applied to a narrow slice of cases (children of “birth tourists” or temporary visitors), the facial challenge had to fail on its own terms.

It’s a technical, almost fussy basis for dissent — not “the order is constitutional” so much as “the challengers picked the wrong vehicle to attack it.” Gorsuch’s opinion was the shortest of the three dissents by a wide margin: roughly 800 words next to Thomas’s 91-page treatise. Legal commentators have noted that his brevity read almost as reluctance — a justice checking a box rather than building a monument.

The Moment at Oral Argument

Here’s what makes Part 3 necessary rather than redundant: the written dissent is not where Gorsuch was most revealing. That happened months earlier, at oral argument, when he pressed Solicitor General Sauer on a question the government’s own brief hadn’t grappled with — what does the administration’s domicile-and-allegiance theory do to Native Americans?

It’s not an idle hypothetical. Native Americans born on tribal land were, for much of the nation’s history, treated as citizens of a “domestic dependent nation” rather than the United States — a status Congress didn’t fully resolve until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. If the test for constitutional birthright citizenship turns on parental allegiance and permanent domicile rather than simple birth on U.S. soil, as Thomas’s opinion (which Gorsuch joined) argues, that framework sits uncomfortably close to the very doctrine that once excluded tribal citizens from the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee. Sauer, by several accounts, hadn’t prepared an answer.

This is not a small tell. Gorsuch has spent a decade building the most consistent pro-tribal-sovereignty record of any sitting justice — a record that predates his elevation to the Court. During his time on the Tenth Circuit, covering six states and the territory of 76 federally recognized tribes, he ruled for tribal interests far more often than against them, and organizations including the National Congress of American Indians and the Native American Rights Fund formally endorsed his 2017 confirmation on that basis, citing his “understanding of tribal sovereignty” and “active judicial record” in the field. He went on to write McGirt v. Oklahoma in 2020, holding that roughly 40% of Oklahoma remains “Indian country” under 19th-century treaty obligations — a decision joined by the Court’s liberal wing and one that infuriated the state’s political establishment.

So when Gorsuch, of all justices, is the one who forces the government to reckon with what its own theory does to tribal citizenship — and then turns around and joins a 91-page dissent built on exactly that theory — the tension is his to explain, and he didn’t. His six paragraphs never mention the exchange. That silence is the story.

Reading the Silence Fairly

It would be easy, and wrong, to assume bad faith. The honest framing is that the record creates an open question, not a verdict. A few possibilities coexist:

• Gorsuch may see the “permanent home” theory and tribal sovereignty as fully reconcilable — that domicile-based citizenship, properly bounded, was never meant to touch the tribal-citizenship line, which he’d treat as its own constitutional category (as Elk v. Wilkins and the tribal-exception cases already do). His dissent’s citation pattern — a passing reference to Wong Kim Ark, no engagement with the Indian-law thread he raised at argument — is consistent with that view, even if he never says so.

• Or the oral argument moment may have been exactly what it looked like in the room: a justice testing the government’s theory for hidden costs, finding one, and then declining — for whatever reason — to let that finding change his vote.

Without Gorsuch saying more, assigning him a motive is speculation dressed as analysis. What’s fair to say is narrower and, I think, more useful: the justice with the strongest institutional case for defending tribal citizenship as a matter of principle is also the justice whose vote in Barbara rests on a theory his own questioning showed could be turned against that same principle. That’s not a partisan point. It’s a structural one, and it’s why this case will be taught for its architecture as much as its outcome.

Where This Leaves the Series

Part 1 showed the ruling itself, and how narrowly it held. Part 2 showed the administration extending citizenship’s benefits to whoever is useful to the story — a soccer pitch, a cabinet roster, a refugee program. Part 3 shows that even among the justices who voted to preserve the administration’s order, the reasoning doesn’t sit still — and the justice best positioned to name that instability chose not to.

The Legislative Fix That Isn’t One

One more thread is worth pulling before this series closes, because the President has already tried to pull it himself. Within hours of the ruling, Trump posted that Congress could “easily make it up... through Legislation,” framing the loss as a speed bump rather than a wall. Kavanaugh’s separate opinion gives that idea some surface plausibility — he concurred in the judgment on statutory grounds, reasoning that the executive order violated 8 U.S.C. §1401(a) as currently written, and noted that Congress could amend that statute to carve out exceptions “consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment.”

That last qualifier is the whole ballgame, and it’s easy to lose it in the noise. Kavanaugh’s opinion was not the Court’s holding. The controlling opinion — Roberts, joined by Sotomayor, Kagan, Barrett, and Jackson — decided the constitutional question directly: the Fourteenth Amendment itself guarantees birthright citizenship to children born on U.S. soil, regardless of their parents’ status. That’s a 5-4 constitutional ruling, not a 6-3 statutory one. A statute cannot narrow a right the Constitution has already been held to guarantee. Congress is free to legislate around the edges of citizenship policy — visas, naturalization procedures, the mechanics of documentation — but any law purporting to deny birthright citizenship to a category of U.S.-born children would be squarely foreclosed by Barbara the moment it was challenged, and would lose for the same reason the executive order did.

If the goal is genuinely to change who qualifies for birthright citizenship, the Constitution already tells us how: Article V. A constitutional amendment, not a floor vote. That’s a deliberately high bar — two-thirds of both chambers of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states — and it exists precisely so that a right this fundamental can’t be redefined by whichever party holds a simple majority in a given term. Anyone promising a legislative shortcut around Barbara is either misreading the decision or hoping the public won’t read it at all.

Bench & Crown will continue tracking how this decision reshapes the administration’s approach to citizenship policy going forward.

Sources

• Trump v. Barbara, 609 U.S. ___ (2026) — full opinion, Supreme Court of the United States: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-365_4hdj.pdf

• Trump v. Barbara, Cornell Legal Information Institute (syllabus and vote breakdown): https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/25-365

• SCOTUSblog, “Supreme Court strikes down Trump’s order ending birthright citizenship,” June 30, 2026: https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/supreme-court-strikes-down-trumps-order-ending-birthright-citizenship/

• Suzette Brewer, “The Dangerous Misreading at the Heart of Trump v. Barbara,” Native News Online, April 3, 2026: https://nativenewsonline.net/opinion/the-dangerous-misreading-at-the-heart-of-trump-v-barbara/

• “An 1884 case about tribal members was cited to end birthright citizenship,” KJZZ Indigenous Affairs, April 4, 2026: https://www.kjzz.org/indigenous-affairs/2026-04-04/an-1884-case-about-tribal-members-was-cited-to-end-birthright-citizenship

• “Justice Neil Gorsuch asks Solicitor General Sauer if Native Americans are birthright citizens,” The Hill, April 4, 2026: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5811785-gorsuch-asks-sauer-if-native-americans-are-birthright-citizens/

• Congressional Research Service, “Trump v. Barbara: Supreme Court Considers Birthright Citizenship,” Legal Sidebar LSB11423, Library of Congress: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB11423

• Republican Leader (Senate Judiciary Committee), “Judge Gorsuch Clearly Understands the Tenets of Indian Law,” compiling NCAI/NARF and tribal endorsement letters, March 2017: https://www.republicanleader.senate.gov/newsroom/research/judge-gorsuch-clearly-understands-the-tenets-of-indian-law

• Mark Joseph Stern, “Why Neil Gorsuch keeps joining the liberals to affirm tribal rights,” Slate, May 21, 2019: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/05/neil-gorsuch-supreme-court-tribal-rights-sonia-sotomayor.html

• “What Trump’s Supreme Court pick holds for Indian Country,” High Country News: https://www.hcn.org/issues/49-22/tribal-affairs-what-trumps-supreme-court-pick-could-mean-for-indian-country/

• “Neil Gorsuch Affirms That Treaties With Tribal Nations Are the Law,” The New Republic, on McGirt v. Oklahoma: https://newrepublic.com/article/158408/neil-gorsuch-affirms-treaties-tribal-nations-law

• Anna O. Law, “I Read Trump v Barbara So You Don’t Have To”: https://www.annaolaw.com/blog/i-read-trump-v-barbara-so-you-dont-have-to

• MSNBC Opinion, “The Supreme Court saved birthright citizenship — but Kavanaugh’s dissent is ominous,” June 30, 2026 (Kavanaugh’s statutory concurrence and Trump’s post-ruling statement on Congress): https://www.ms.now/opinion/supreme-court-birthright-citizenship-kavanaugh-dissent

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On Wednesday, Folarin Balogun stepped on the back of an opponent’s leg during a World Cup match. The referee didn’t call anything on the field, but after a video review by an off-field official — soccer’s version of instant replay, known as VAR — he was shown a red card. It is the kind of call that happens in soccer every week — Balogun himself said he thought it was unintentional and that a yellow would have been fair, and even his own coach called it “a normal action in football.” A red card carries an automatic one-match ban. That is the rule. It has applied to every other red card issued at this World Cup.

It did not apply to Balogun.

By Sunday, FIFA’s Disciplinary Committee had suspended the suspension — a “probationary period” instead of a ban — clearing him to play today, Monday, July 6, against Belgium in Seattle (5:00 p.m. Pacific / 8:00 p.m. Eastern). Belgium’s federation called the reversal unprecedented and said it directly contradicted FIFA’s own disciplinary code and the tournament’s competition regulations. Belgium’s coach said he thought it was a joke. A rival coach called it a mistake. And ABC confirmed what many suspected: President Trump had personally called FIFA President Gianni Infantino to ask him to review the decision. When the reversal came through, Trump posted: “Thank you to FIFA for doing what was right, and reversing a great injustice!”

Set aside, for a moment, whether the underlying call was correct. What’s worth sitting with is why this particular player got a personal phone call from the President of the United States to overturn a disciplinary process that governs everyone else.

The Irony Sitting Right Underneath It

Folarin Balogun is only wearing the U.S. crest because of the Fourteenth Amendment. He was born in Brooklyn to Nigerian parents living in London, in the country only because an airline refused to let his very pregnant mother board her flight home. Neither parent was a citizen. Neither was here to stay. He is a citizen for exactly one reason: he was born on American soil, and the Constitution says that’s enough.

That is the same doctrine the Trump administration has spent this entire term trying to unwind. On his first day in office, the President signed an executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented or temporary-status parents — the same fact pattern, essentially, that produced Balogun. Courts blocked it. This week the Supreme Court, in Trump v. Barbara, upheld the constitutional guarantee and struck the order down. The administration lost.

And three days later, the same President was on the phone fighting to keep that same category of American on the field.

Republicans in Congress, when pressed on the contradiction, have mostly waved it off. “You’re dealing with a sports team, and you’re dealing with policy,” one member of the House said. Another argued there’s no dilemma because Balogun already has his citizenship and it can’t be stripped “retroactively.” Maybe. But that answer only works if you ignore the stated goal, which was never just about future babies — it was about which births on U.S. soil count as American enough to matter.

It’s Not the Doctrine. It’s the Résumé.

Here’s what makes this more than a soccer story. Look at who else in this administration owes their citizenship to the exact principle they’ve fought to narrow. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is the son of Cuban immigrants who weren’t naturalized until years after he was born — and he once defended birthright citizenship in his own legal filings when his natural-born status was challenged. Second Lady Usha Vance is a birthright citizen. So is FBI Director Kash Patel. So is the man now running Medicare and Medicaid, Mehmet Oz. None of that has slowed the policy down.

Meanwhile, the same administration created an expedited, fast-tracked refugee pathway — bypassing a refugee system it froze for almost everyone else — specifically for white Afrikaners from South Africa, citing racial discrimination as the justification. Experts in South Africa, and the South African government itself, disputed the premise. It didn’t matter. That population fit a story the administration wanted to tell about who deserves protection and why.

Line those three things up — the World Cup star, the cabinet officials, the Afrikaner refugees — and a pattern comes into view that has nothing to do with constitutional text and everything to do with narrative fit. When a birthright citizen is scoring goals for the American team, or sitting in the cabinet, or fits a story about persecution the administration wants told, the door opens without a second thought. When a birthright citizen is the infant child of someone who crossed the border without papers, the same doctrine becomes an “injustice” to be corrected by executive order.

That is not a legal position. It’s a sorting mechanism dressed up as one. The Fourteenth Amendment does not ask whether a child’s parents were “the right kind” of temporary visitor, whether they’ll grow up to be useful, popular, or politically convenient. It asks one question: were you born here. Balogun was. So was the four-month-old whose parents came without documentation. The Constitution doesn’t distinguish between them. The administration, evidently, does — and it will pick up the phone for one and sign an order against the other.

Part 3 of this series will take up Justice Gorsuch’s dissent in Trump v. Barbara and what it reveals about where this fight goes next.

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Life was simpler at the Bicentennial. I was 13, my brother Dallas was 10, and there’s a picture of us on a porch that year — him grinning in his ‘76 jersey, me trying to look older than I was. Neither of us had any idea how much history we were standing on top of, or how much more we’d stand on top of before we were through.

Dallas died in 2024. I have other siblings, but Dallas was my ride or die — so that photo isn’t just a throwback anymore. It’s the last living witness to that porch, that summer, that particular kind of simple. I’m the only one left who remembers it from the inside — and that’s its own kind of history lesson. The country turns 250, and not everyone who helped turn it with you makes it to see it.

I’ve learned so much about my own history since then, some of it before Dallas left and some of it only since.

I always knew I was a descendant of slaves. What I didn’t fully appreciate, not the way I do now, is that I’m just as much a descendant of immigrants. I’ve read the diary of my ancestor Edward Hodgson of Newcastle enough times to know that something bad happened in England — something bad enough that a man packed up his wife and four children in 1836 and crossed an ocean because he believed he had no other choice. I don’t know the whole story. I know enough to know it cost him something to leave.

And maybe that’s why I understand, in a way I couldn’t as a young woman, why my mother expatriated from America to Europe in 1972. People leave when staying becomes unbearable. People also leave when they still believe, somewhere underneath the unbearable part, in something worth reaching for on the other side.

The enslaved and the immigrant aren’t the same story, and I won’t flatten them into one. But they meet in me at the same place: survival. Both of my origin stories are stories of people who did not have the option of giving up.

Here’s what I didn’t expect, standing at America’s 250th: that the rights my parents fought for would be under this much strain, and that my own children would still have to fight for them. I thought that work would be further along by now. I was wrong. I’m an attorney, and I’ve spent my career believing the Constitution means what it says and says what it means — the Constitution and the Bible are still the two friends I trust most, most days, on most questions. But belief isn’t the same as arrival. We’re not there yet. Maybe we’re never fully there — maybe that’s the point of a document built to be amended.

I turn 63 later this month. Jackie Kennedy and I share a birthday. Her roses at the White House were destroyed — pulled up, replaced, gone the way so many things a person plants and tends can be gone.

But I can still plant.

So this year, for both of us, I’m putting in a few rose bushes. And honestly, there will be a third one for Dallas — the boy in the ‘76 jersey who isn’t here to see the 250th, but who is the reason I remember what simple used to feel like.

Not because I’m certain of the harvest. Because it’s still worth doing. Because that’s what you do with a 250-year-old inheritance that isn’t finished yet — you tend it, you add to it, and you trust that someone after you will know what to do with what you left in the ground.

Happy 250th, America. We’re still planting.

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This time it’s Mitch McConnell.

What we actually know

On June 14, McConnell was found unconscious at his Capitol Hill home. EMS dispatch audio — not his office, not a press release, but a recording obtained independently by CBS and NBC — describes a “cardiac arrest” call and CPR in progress at his address. He was transported by Advanced Life Support ambulance, the tier of emergency response reserved for patients who are critically unstable. He has now been hospitalized for close to three weeks. His office has never confirmed what happened that morning, never named a diagnosis, and has instead recycled a single line of boilerplate — that he “continues to improve” and remains “working closely with staff” — through statement after statement.

Eighty-four years old. Chairman of the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, with jurisdiction over the funding of the U.S. military. Second hospitalization this year. A man who has, by his own office’s prior accounting, survived childhood polio, a 2023 concussion and fractured rib from a fall, a 2024 fall that left him with lasting leg stiffness, and two on-camera freezing episodes that neurologists who reviewed the footage have publicly disputed the “lightheadedness” explanation for.

None of that, on its own, disqualifies a person from service. Age and illness are not corruption. But there is a legal and civic principle at stake here that has nothing to do with McConnell’s health and everything to do with what the public — his constituents, the voters who returned him to office for 42 years — is owed when someone holding constitutional power becomes unable, even temporarily, to exercise it.

Why this isn’t just a health story

We don’t have a mechanism in the Senate that requires disclosure the way corporate securities law requires a public company to disclose a material event affecting its leadership. There’s no 8-K for a senator. What we have instead is a voluntary norm — that offices will tell the public roughly what’s going on — and that norm has been fraying for a generation, across both parties, from the Oval Office on down. The gap between what McConnell’s office has said and what an EMS dispatcher’s own words describe is not a technicality. It is the difference between “recovering” and “found unconscious, CPR in progress.” Those are not the same sentence, and constituents are entitled to know which one is true.

The Kentucky wrinkle

Here’s where it moves from a health story to a governance story. Kentucky’s Republican-controlled legislature has now tightened U.S. Senate succession law twice in four years, and both moves track McConnell’s health timeline with a precision that’s hard to write off as coincidence. First, in 2021, Senate Bill 228 amended KRS 63.200 to strip the governor of unrestricted appointment power, forcing him to choose an interim senator from a three-name list submitted by the outgoing senator’s own party — effectively foreclosing a cross-party pick. Then, in 2024, House Bill 622, enacted as 2024 Ky. Acts ch. 187, repealed KRS 63.200 outright. Governor Andy Beshear, a Democrat, vetoed it on April 9, 2024; the legislature overrode him three days later, 81–17 in the House and 29–5 in the Senate, with an emergency clause making the repeal effective immediately. There is now no gubernatorial appointment mechanism at all. A vacancy in McConnell’s seat goes straight to a special election.

The bill’s sponsor, House Majority Floor Leader Steven Rudy, told reporters the legislation “has nothing to do with the health of the state’s senior senator.” That statement was made in the same breath as reporting that the bill followed directly on the heels of McConnell’s public health scares. I want to be precise about what I am and am not saying. Legislatures change succession rules all the time, and states have real discretion under Article I, Section 4 to regulate the “Times, Places and Manner” of elections, which courts have read to extend to certain aspects of vacancy-filling. There is nothing per se unconstitutional about a state choosing special elections over gubernatorial appointment. But intent matters to how we understand power, even when it doesn’t determine legality. A legislature that narrows, and then eliminates, a Democratic governor’s appointment power in the specific years its own aging senator is experiencing repeated, serious health crises is not making a neutral structural choice. It is hedging a bet. And the bet only makes sense if the legislature itself harbored real doubts about whether McConnell would finish his term — doubts his own office was, at the same moment, publicly declining to share with voters.

The through-line

I’ve written before about the quiet mechanisms by which power protects itself from accountability — the procedural moves that never generate a headline of their own but that, added up, insulate institutions and individuals from the ordinary friction of democratic scrutiny. This is another entry in that ledger. No one broke a law. No one will be prosecuted. But a state legislature anticipated a succession crisis it didn’t say out loud, and a senator’s office managed the optics of that crisis rather than leveling with the people who elected him.

McConnell is retiring in January regardless of how this resolves. Andy Barr and Charles Booker are already running to replace him. In that sense, the stakes here are lower than they might otherwise be — this isn’t a fight over an active reelection where disclosure could shift votes. But that’s precisely why it’s a useful case study rather than a partisan flashpoint: with the outcome already settled, what’s left exposed is the bare mechanism itself. How institutions behave when they think no one is watching closely is the truest measure of how they’ll behave when the stakes are higher and someone is.

The Senate reconvenes July 13. That’s the first moment anyone will be positioned to ask McConnell’s colleagues, on the record, what they know and when they knew it. I’ll be watching for whether anyone does.

Sources

• Frank Thorp V, Zara Morris, and Raquel Coronell Uribe, “Paramedics responded to a ‘cardiac arrest’ at Mitch McConnell’s home on day of hospitalization,” NBC News, July 1–2, 2026.

• “EMS was called to Sen. Mitch McConnell’s home for ‘unconscious’ patient last month, recording suggests,” CBS News, July 1, 2026.

• “Mitch McConnell still hospitalized after EMS responded to his home for ‘unconscious’ person last month,” CBS News, updated July 2, 2026.

• Antonio Pequeño IV, “Mitch McConnell Has Been Hospitalized For Weeks—What We Know About His Health,” Forbes, July 2, 2026.

• “EMS dispatch audio reveals Mitch McConnell found unconscious in June health scare,” The Washington Times, July 1, 2026.

• Hannah Pinski, “Report: McConnell Was Unconscious When He Was Hospitalized Last Month,” Lexington Herald-Leader, July 1, 2026.

• “Is Mitch McConnell dead? What we know about his health,” Snopes, updated July 1, 2026.

• Taegan Goddard, “What Is Going on with Mitch McConnell’s Health?,” Political Wire, July 2, 2026 (citing New York Magazine and NewsNation).

• “Former Senate Leader Mitch McConnell Is in the Hospital, but Little Information Is Known,” AP News, June 14, 2026.

• “Former Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Hospitalized,” NPR, June 14, 2026.

Statutory citations

• Senate Bill 228 (2021 Regular Session), amending KRS 63.200 to require gubernatorial appointment from a three-name, same-party list.

• House Bill 622 (2024 Regular Session), enacted as 2024 Ky. Acts ch. 187, repealing KRS 63.200 in full — vetoed by Gov. Andy Beshear on April 9, 2024; veto overridden April 12, 2024 (House 81–17, Senate 29–5), effective immediately under emergency clause.

• Spectrum News 1, “Kentucky lawmakers pass U.S. Senate vacancy bill,” April 1, 2024 (reporting bill sponsor Rep. Steven Rudy’s comments and the bill’s timing relative to McConnell’s health).

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