Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

mickeyrat

October 25, 2025 (Saturday)

Yesterday the Trump administration said it would not use any of the approximately $6 billion the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) holds in reserve to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The government shutdown means that states have run out of funds to distribute to the more than 42 million Americans who rely on SNAP to put food on the table.

Roll Call’s Olivia M. Bridges notes that this position contradicts the shutdown plan the USDA released in late September. Then, it said: “Congressional intent is evident that SNAP’s operations should continue since the program has been provided with multi-year contingency funds that can be used for State Administrative Expenses to ensure that the State can also continue operations during a Federal Government shutdown. These multi-year contingency funds are also available to fund participant benefits in the event that a lapse occurs in the middle of the fiscal year.”

Yesterday’s USDA memo also says that any states that tap their own resources to provide food benefits will not be reimbursed.

Today, in yet another violation of the Hatch Act that prohibits the use of government resources for partisan ends, the USDA Food and Nutrition Service website reads: “Senate Democrats have now voted 12 times to not fund the food stamp program, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Bottom line, the well has run dry. At this time, there will be no benefits issued November 01. We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats. They can continue to hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures or reopen the government so mothers, babies, and the most vulnerable among us can receive critical nutrition assistance.”

It appears the administration is using those Americans who depend on food assistance as pawns to put more pressure on Democrats to cave to Trump’s will. Today, Annie Karni of the New York Times reported that Trump has joked, “I’m the speaker and the president,” and Trump ally Steven Bannon calls Congress “the state Duma,” a reference to Russia’s rubber-stamp assembly.

With Republicans refusing to negotiate with Democrats in the normal way, with House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) keeping the House out of session, and with Trump leaving for Asia for a week, Republicans are clearly making the calculation that Democrats who refused to give up their demand for the extension of the premium tax credit to stop dramatic hikes in the cost of healthcare premiums will cave when America falls into a hunger crisis. 

What are we doing here, folks?

The nation’s nutrition program was once the symbol of government brokering between different interests to benefit everyone. When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in 1933, one of the first crises he had to meet was the collapse of agricultural prices, which had been falling since the end of World War I and fell off a cliff after the stock market crash of October 1929. Farmers reacted to falling prices by increasing production, driving prices even lower.

In summer 1933, the government tried to raise prices by creating artificial scarcity. They paid farmers to plow their crops under and bought and slaughtered six million piglets, turning the carcasses into salt pork, lard, industrial grease, and fertilizer. The outcry over the slaughter of the pigs was immediate, and the escape of some intrepid animals into the streets of Omaha, Nebraska, and Chicago, Illinois, increased the protest at both the slaughter and the waste of food when Americans were going hungry.  

So in fall 1933 the administration set up the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation, designed to raise commodity prices by buying surplus production and distributing that surplus through local charities. In a story about the history of nutrition assistance programs, journalist Matthew Algeo noted that in January 1934, the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation bought 234,600 hogs. This time, their meat went to hungry Americans.

But that fall, when officials from the FSRC announced they were planning to open a “goods exchange” or “commissary” outside Nashville, Tennessee, to distribute food directly to those who needed it, grocers protested that the government was infringing on private business and directly competing with them. 

The next year, the agency became the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation and began to distribute surplus food to schools to be used in school lunch programs. Needy students would not otherwise be able to afford food, so providing it for them did not compete with grocers. In 1937, Congress placed that agency within the Department of Agriculture. 

To get food into the hands of Americans more generally, officials at the Department of Agriculture came up with the idea of “food stamps.” As Algeo explains, eligible recipients bought orange-colored stamps that could be redeemed for any food except alcohol, drugs, or food consumed on the premises. With the orange stamps, a buyer received blue stamps worth half the value of the orange stamps purchased. The blue stamps could be redeemed only for foods the government said were surplus: butter, flour, beans, and citrus fruits, for example. 

Any grocery store could redeem the stamps, and grocers could then exchange all the stamps—orange and blue—for face value at any bank. The Treasury would pay back the banks. 

It was a complicated system, but when the government launched it in May 1939 in Rochester, New York, it was a roaring success. By early December, Algeo notes, the government had sold more than a million dollars’ worth of orange stamps. That meant another half-million dollars’ worth of the blue stamps had been distributed, thus pumping a half a million dollars directly into the 1,200 grocery stores in Rochester, and from there into the local economy. 

The program spread quickly. In the four years it existed, nearly 20 million Americans received benefits from it at a cost to the government of $262 million. With the economic boom caused by World War II, the government ended the program in 1943.  

In 1959, Congress authorized the secretary of agriculture to restart a food stamp program, but it was not until 1961, after seeing the poverty in West Virginia during his campaign, that President John F. Kennedy announced a new program. Since then, the program has gone through several iterations, most notably when the Food Stamp Act of 1977 eliminated the requirement that beneficiaries purchase stamps, a requirement that had kept many of the nation’s neediest families from participating. 

In 1990 the USDA began to replace stamps with Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards, and in 2008, Congress renamed the program the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. In July 2025 the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act cut about $186 billion from SNAP programs, and then in September 2025 the USDA announced it would no longer produce reports on food insecurity in the U.S., calling them “redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous studies” that “do nothing more than fear monger.”

While a great deal has changed in nutrition support programs in the past sixty years, what has not changed is the importance of food assistance programs to retailers, and thus to local economies. In 2020, Ed Bolen and Elizabeth Wolkomir of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that about 8% of the food U.S. families buy is funded by SNAP. In fiscal year 2019, that amounted to about $56 billion. Beneficiaries spent SNAP dollars at about 248,000 retailers. While about 80% of that money went to superstores or supermarkets—in 2025, Walmart alone captured about 25% of that money—the rest of it went to small businesses. Bolen and Wolkomir note that about 80% of stores that accept SNAP are small enterprises. SNAP benefits are an important part of revenue for those smaller businesses, especially in poorer areas, where they generate significant additional economic activity.

Not only will the loss of SNAP create more hunger in the richest country on earth, it will also rip a hole in local economies just as people’s health insurance premiums skyrocket.  

And yet, at the same time the Department of Agriculture says it cannot spend its $6 billion in reserves to address the $8 billion needed for SNAP in November, the administration easily found $20 billion to prop up right-wing Trump ally Javier Milei in Argentina. 

What are we doing here?

mickeyrat

October 26, 2025 (Sunday)

Economist Paul Krugman probably didn't have the Erie Canal in mind today when he wrote about the rise of renewable energy, but he could have. The themes are similar. 

In his newsletter, Krugman noted that renewables have grown explosively in the past decade, spurred by what he calls a virtuous circle of falling costs and increasing production. That circle is the result of subsidies that made renewable energy a going concern in the face of fossil fuels. Today, he points out, reports like that of Vice President Dick Cheney’s 2001 energy policy task force warning that renewable energy would play a trivial role in the nation’s energy future would be funny if the Trump administration weren’t echoing them. 

In fact, as Krugman notes, solar and wind are unstoppable. They produced 15% of the world’s electricity in 2024 and account for 63% of the growth in electricity production since 2019. Green energy will continue to grow even if U.S. policy tries to wrench us back to burning coal, “with important geopolitical implications," Krugman writes. “China is racing ahead.” 

Krugman notes that it was originally Alexander Hamilton who called for government investment in new technologies to enable the economy of the infant United States of America to grow and compete with other nations. But Hamilton was not the only one thinking along those lines. 

In the early years of the American republic, trade was carried on largely by water, which was much easier to navigate than the nation’s few rough roads. In 1783, even before the end of the Revolutionary War, George Washington was contemplating how to open “the vast inland navigation of these United States” to trade. In 1785, after the war had ended, Washington became the head of a company created to develop a canal along the Potomac River that would link the eastern seaboard with the Ohio Valley, bypassing the waterfalls and currents that made navigation treacherous. But under the Articles of Confederation then in place, the country’s states were sovereign, and there was no system for managing the waterways that traversed them.  

In 1785, representatives from Maryland and Virginia agreed on a plan for navigation on the Potomac and other local waterways, as well as for commerce regulations and debt collection. Virginia delegates then invited representatives from all the states to another meeting on commercial issues to take place in Annapolis, Maryland, on September 11, 1786. That second meeting called for a constitutional convention to discuss possible improvements to the Articles of Confederation.

Delegates met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1787. They produced the United States Constitution. 

With a new, stronger government in place, lawmakers and business leaders turned back to the idea of investing in infrastructure to facilitate economic development. Lawmakers in New York worried that settlers in the western part of the state would move their produce north to Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River into Canada, breaking the region off from the United States. The vast lands around the Great Lakes would naturally follow. 

New York legislators asked Congress to appropriate money to build a canal across the state from the Hudson River to Lake Erie (avoiding Lake Ontario to keep traders away from Montreal). But while Congress did pass creating a fund to construct roads and canals across the nation, President James Madison vetoed it, despite his previous support for internal improvements. His opposition helped to spur support within New York for the state to fund the project on its own.  

And so in 1817, after legislators under Governor De Witt Clinton funded the project, workers broke ground on what would become the Erie Canal. 

To build the canal, untrained engineers figured out how to cut through forest, swamps, and wilderness to carve a 363-mile path through the heart of New York state. Workers dug a 40-foot-wide, 4-foot-deep canal and built 83 locks to move barges and vessels through a rise of 568 feet from the Hudson River to Lake Erie. The project became the nation’s first engineering school, and those trained in it went on to other development projects.

Detractors warned that in Clinton’s “big ditch would be buried the treasure of the State, to be watered by the tears of posterity.” But after it was completed in 1825, the project paid for itself within a few years. Before the canal, shipping a ton of goods from Buffalo to New York City cost more than 19 cents a mile; once a trader could send goods by the canal, the price dropped to less than 3 cents a mile. By 1860 the cost had dropped to less than a penny. 

The canal speeded up human travel, too: what had been a two-week trip from Albany to Buffalo in a crowded stagecoach became a five-day boat journey in relative comfort. As trade and travel increased, new towns sprang up along the canal: Syracuse, Rochester, Lockport. 

The Erie Canal cemented the ties of the Great Lakes region to the United States. As goods moved east toward New York City and the Atlantic Ocean, people moved west along the canal and then across the Great Lakes. They spread the customs of New England and New York into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, bringing explosive growth that would, by the 1850s, clash with southerners moving north.

But in fall 1825, that cataclysm was a generation away, and New Yorkers marked the completion of the canal with celebrations, cannon fire, and a ceremony with Governor Clinton pouring a keg of water from Lake Erie into the Atlantic. 

The festivities began on October 26, 1825, exactly 200 years before economist Krugman wrote about the importance of government support for renewable energy, demonstrating that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Halifax2TheMax

* The following opinion is mine and mine alone and does not represent the views of my family, friends, government and/or my past, present or future employer. US Department of State: 1-888-407-4747.

Green New Deal, anyone? Nah, too woke.

mickeyrat

October 27, 2025 (Monday)

There is a lot going on tonight, but the world is going to have to turn without me: it's been a long run without a break and I need to sleep. 

The last time I posted a picture of Buddy's was in May, I think, when he was setting traps. This week he took this shot as he pulled the last of his gear up in preparation for winter. 

This has been both the shortest and the longest summer ever.

I'll be back at it tomorrow.

[Sunrise photo by Buddy Poland.]

mickeyrat

October 28, 2025 (Tuesday)

In the election of 1920, Americans handed a landslide victory to the Republicans and their presidential candidate Warren G. Harding, giving them control of both Congress and the White House. After the moralizing of the Progressive Era and the horrors of World War I and the Spanish flu epidemic that followed it, Americans looked forward to an era of “normalcy.” 

Once in charge, Republicans rejected the Progressive Era notion that the government should regulate business and protect workers and consumers. Instead they turned the government over to businessmen, believing they alone truly knew what was best for the country. 

Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon—one of the richest men in America—cut taxes on the wealthy to spur investment in industry. He also gave rebates and tax abatements: between 1921 and 1929 he returned $3.5 billion to wealthy men. 

At the same time, Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, who had made a fortune as a mining engineer and consultant, expanded his department to fifteen thousand employees with a budget of more than 37 million dollars, working as a liaison between businessmen and the government and helping businesses to avoid antitrust lawsuits. He urged European countries to buy American.

Their policies seemed to work brilliantly. Between 1925 and 1926, more than twenty-two thousand new manufacturing companies formed. Industrial production took off. Business profits rose, and if wages didn’t rise much, they didn’t fall, either. 

And oh, the changes the new economy brought! By 1929, more than two thirds of American homes had electricity, which brought first electric lights, then refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, toasters, and radios. Consumers rushed to buy them, along with ready-made clothing, beauty products, and cars, all of which the new advertising industry, which grew out of the government propaganda campaigns of World War I, promised would bring them glamor, sophistication, romance, and power. 

In the Roaring Twenties, it seemed that government and business had finally figured out how to combine government promotion with the efficiency of an industrial economy to benefit everyone. Business was booming, standards of living were rising, and Americans were finding the time to read, learn, invent, and improve. In 1928, Republicans tapped Hoover for president. He promised that continuing the policies of the last eight years would bring the U.S. “in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.” He won with a whopping 58.2% of the vote.

With Hoover in the White House, Americans wanted in on the inevitable growth of the economy. They invested in industries producing steel, coal, and consumer goods, and in utilities and transportation. Stock prices rose. And rose, and rose. By 1929 the rush to buy stocks had become a rush to speculate in the stock market. Prices that in spring 1928 had seemed too high to be real were laughably low by fall. Radio had been at 94½ in March 1928; by September 1929 it was 101 but had split so often that the holdings from 1928 were actually worth 505. And so it went, down the stock lists. 

Those with less money to burn could get into the market by buying on margin, putting down 10 or 20 percent of the cost of a stock and borrowing the rest from a broker with the promise that the loans would be paid off by the anticipated increase in the stock’s value. 

Those excited by the scene dismissed those who warned that stock prices were a bubble as ignorant, anti-American naysayers. “Be a bull on America!” boosters urged. “Never sell the United States short!”

October 24, a Thursday, was the beginning of the end. Heavy trading in the morning slowed the ticker tape that recorded trades. Brokers fearful of being caught sold more and more heavily. When the tape finally caught up after 7:00 that night, it showed that an astonishing 12,894,650 shares had changed hands. By afternoon, bankers managed to shore up the market, which regained the ground it had lost in the morning. But those dreadful early hours had wiped out hundreds of thousands of small investors. 
 
The market seemed to recover on Friday and Saturday. But then, on Monday, October 28, prices slid far in heavy trading. And then, on October 29, 1929, it all came crashing down. 

When the opening gong in the great hall of the New York Stock Exchange sounded at ten o’clock, men began to unload their stocks. The ticker tape ran two and a half hours behind, but that night it showed that an extraordinary 16,410,030 shares had traded hands, and the market had lost $14 billion. 

Black Tuesday began a slide that seemingly would not end. Within two years, manufacturing output dropped to levels lower than those of 1913. The production of pig iron fell to what it had been in the 1890s. Foreign trade fell from $10 billion to $3 billion. The price of wheat fell from $1.05 a bushel to 39 cents; corn dropped from 81 cents a bushel to 33 cents or lower; cotton fell from 17 to 6 cents a pound. Prices dropped so low that selling crops meant taking a loss, so struggling farmers simply let them rot in the fields. 

By 1932, over a million people in New York City were unemployed. By 1933 the number of unemployed across the nation rose to 13 million people—one out of every four American workers. Unable to afford rent or pay mortgages, people lived in shelters made of packing boxes.

Republican leaders blamed poor Americans for the Great Depression, saying they drained the economy because they refused to work hard enough. “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” Treasury Secretary Mellon told Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.” 

But the problem was not poor workers. The rising standards of living that had gotten so much attention in the new magazines of the 1920s mainly benefited white, middle-class, urban Americans. Farm prices crashed after WWI, leaving rural Americans falling behind, while workers’ wages did not rise along with production. The new economy of the 1920s benefited too few Americans to be sustainable.  

Hoover tried to reverse the economic slide by cutting taxes and reassuring Americans that “the fundamental business of the country…is on a sound and prosperous basis.” But he rejected public works programs to provide jobs, saying that such projects were a “soak the rich” scheme that would “enslave” taxpayers, and called instead for private charity.

By 1932, Americans were ready to try a new approach. They turned to New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who promised to use the federal government to provide jobs and a safety net to enable Americans to weather hard times. He promised the American people a “New Deal”: a government that would work for everyone, not just for the wealthy and well connected.

Under Roosevelt, Democrats protected workers’ rights, provided government jobs, regulated business and banking, and began to chip away at racial segregation. New Deal agencies employed more than 8.5 million people, built more than 650,000 miles of highways, built or repaired more than 120,000 bridges, and put up more than 125,000 buildings. 

They regulated banking and the stock market and gave workers the right to bargain collectively. They established minimum wages and maximum hours for work. They provided a basic social safety net and regulated food and drug safety. And when World War II broke out, the new system enabled the United States to defend democracy successfully against fascists both at home—where by 1939 they had grown strong enough to turn out almost 20,000 people to a rally at Madison Square Garden—and abroad.

mickeyrat

October 29, 2025 (Wednesday)

Today is the twenty-ninth day of the government shutdown, and the House of Representatives is still on break as House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) continues to try to force the Senate to pass the House measure to fund the government without negotiating over the Democrats’ demand for the extension of the premium tax credit without which healthcare premiums will skyrocket. 

Yesterday air traffic controllers received their first “zero” paycheck. For weeks, flights have been delayed across the country as air traffic controllers call in sick. Also across the country, states are bracing for food insecurity among the 42 million Americans who depend on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits when those payments don’t go out on time on November 1.  The administration maintains it cannot distribute the $6 billion the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) holds in reserve to cover for November 1. 

Meredith Lee Hill of Politico reported on Monday that even some Senate Republicans want to fund SNAP in a stand-alone bill, but yesterday House speaker Johnson dismissed Democrats’ attempts to pass stand-alone measures to fund federal workers and SNAP, calling them a waste of time. Also yesterday, governors and attorneys general from 25 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia sued the USDA and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, the Office of Management and Budget along with its director Russell Vought, and the United States itself over the government’s refusal to use the USDA’s reserves to fund SNAP. 

The lawsuit argues that Congress has mandated SNAP payments and has made appropriations for them, including the $6 billion the USDA holds in reserve. Another USDA fund has more than $23 billion in it. The USDA took money from it earlier in the shutdown to fund another nutrition program, the Women, Infants & Children (WIC) program. The lawsuit notes that the USDA itself initially said it could use reserve funds; the decision saying it cannot is recent. 

The lawsuit notes that the “USDA’s claim that the SNAP contingency funds cannot be used to fund SNAP benefits during an appropriation lapse is contrary to the plain text of the congressional appropriations law, which states that the reserves are for use ‘in such amounts and at such times as may become necessary to carry out program operations’ under the Food and Nutrition Act of 2008.”

Today, ignoring Johnson’s insistence that he would not recall the House to debate stand-alone funding for SNAP and WIC, Democrats led by Senator Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico introduced a measure to fund both. 

The loss of SNAP benefits will hit not only the 42 million Americans who depend on them but also the stores that accept Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards. At the same time, the cost of healthcare insurance premiums is soaring because of the expiration of the premium tax credits. Medical debt is central to throwing families into bankruptcy. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which under President Joe Biden tried to remove medical debt from credit reports, yesterday published a rule to make sure states cannot stop companies from including such debt on credit reports. The acting director of the CFPB is Russell Vought. 

So, just as the government stops addressing food insecurity and as healthcare costs skyrocket, the administration permits credit-reporting agencies to put medical debt back onto people’s credit scores even if state laws say they can’t. 

This is happening as higher costs, economic uncertainty, and increased use of AI mean hiring is slow and jobs are disappearing across the economy. Lindsay Ellis, Owen Tucker-Smith, and Allison Pohle of the Wall Street Journal reported last night on layoffs at Amazon, UPS, Target, Rivian, Molson Coors, Booz Allen Hamilton, and General Motors that together mean the loss of tens of thousands of white-collar jobs. 

The Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill of July, the law they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” cut more than $1 trillion from Medicaid and made dramatic changes to SNAP, including cuts of $187 billion from SNAP over ten years. Crucially, the Republicans designed those cuts to go into effect after the 2026 midterm elections.

But their refusal to extend the premium tax credits and end the government shutdown has given Americans an early taste of what those changes will mean. 

Despite the growing crisis in the U.S., President Donald J. Trump broke precedent to leave the country during the shutdown. His erratic behavior on that trip has drawn attention. On October 27, Greta Bjornson of People noted that Trump seemed to be referring to a dementia screening when he boasted on Air Force One that he got a perfect score on an “IQ test” that required him to identify “a tiger, an elephant, a giraffe.” Physicians have been giving Trump the test since at least 2018. In Japan, during a welcome ceremony on October 28, Trump appeared to wander, leaving Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi behind. 

While Trump is out of the country, the White House has made dramatic changes to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Sasha Rogelberg of Fortune reported last week that law enforcement agents from ICE are still getting their paychecks, including overtime, thanks to the injection of an extra $75 billion into ICE’s budget from July’s budget reconciliation bill. Nonetheless, ICE is claiming the shutdown means it no longer has any legal obligation to permit congressional oversight visits to its detention facilities. 

On October 24, Hamed Aleaziz and Tyler Pager of the New York Times reported that the White House was frustrated that deportations are not moving quickly enough to meet what deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller has said is the target of a million deportations in Trump’s first year.

On October 27, Anna Giaritelli of the Washington Examiner broke the story that the White House was reassigning ICE field officers and replacing them with officers from Customs and Border Patrol (CPB). Greg Wehner and Bill Melugin of Fox News reported that the shift will affect at least eight cities, including Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Denver, Portland, Philadelphia, El Paso, and New Orleans. They reported that the changes reflect a split within the Department of Homeland Security. In one camp, so-called border czar Tom Homan and ICE director Todd Lyons have focused on arresting undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes or who have final deportation orders. The other includes Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, special government employee Corey Lewandowski, who advises Noem, and Greg Bovino, a Border Patrol sector chief who has been overseeing the agency’s operations in Los Angeles and Chicago. That faction, Wehner and Melugin say, wants to arrest all undocumented immigrants to boost their deportation numbers.

One senior official told Wehner and Melugin: “ICE is arresting criminal aliens. They [Border Patrol] are hitting Home Depots and car washes.” A border patrol agent, though, told the journalists: “What did everyone think mass deportations meant? Only the worst? Tom Homan has said it himself—anyone in the U.S. illegally is on the table.”

Bovino has been the official face of CBP’s violence. On October 6, journalists and protesters in the Chicago area sued the Trump administration for a “pattern of extreme brutality” designed to “silence the press and civilians.” On October 9, 2025, U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) to restrict federal officers’ use of flash-bang grenades, tear gas, pepper-spray and other “less-lethal” weapons and tactics against journalists, peaceful protesters, and religious leaders in and around Chicago. On October 16, after videos emerged of agents throwing tear gas canisters into crowds and charging protesters, Ellis required officers to wear body cameras.

Last Thursday, a video showed Bovino throwing what seemed to be a tear gas canister at protesters without warning, and plaintiffs called Ellis’s attention to it, arguing that his actions violated the TRO. Immigration officers claimed a “mob” of “hostile and violent” rioters had thrown a rock at Bovino and hit him in the head, although none of the videos from the protest show such an event. On Friday, Ellis ordered Bovino to appear in court on October 28, yesterday. Michelle Gallardo, Mark Rivera, and Cate Cauguiran of ABC Eyewitness news in Chicago shared the Department of Homeland Security’s boast that Bovino would “correct Judge Ellis of her deep misconceptions” about what it calls “Operation Midway Blitz.”

In fact, according to WTTW Chicago politics reporter Heather Cherone, Ellis took time to read her initial TRO to Bovino and reminded him that agents must give warnings before throwing tear gas. She called out an incident in Little Village when an agent pointed a pepper gun and then a real gun at a combat veteran lawfully standing on the side of the road and allegedly said: “Bang, bang,” and “You’re dead, liberal.” She also called out an incident in Old Irving Park on the North Side of Chicago in which federal agents threw tear gas near a children’s Halloween costume parade. “Those kids were tear gassed on their way to celebrate Halloween in their local school parking lot,” Ellis said. “[T]heir sense of safety was shattered.” “Kids dressed in Halloween costumes walking to a parade do not pose an immediate threat. They just don’t. And you can’t use riot control weapons against them,” she said. 

When Bovino told Ellis he does not wear a body camera and has not been trained in their use, she ordered him to get one by Friday and undergo training, reminding him that the camera would enable him to back up claims like the rock-throwing incident. 

Bovino promised to abide by the TRO. Ellis ordered him to submit to the court all the reports and all the body camera footage of use of force incidents in and around Chicago by Friday. She also ordered Bovino to come to her court every day at 6:00 p.m. to keep her informed of agents’ actions.

Meanwhile, there are also changes underway at the Pentagon. Yesterday Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced three strikes on four boats in the eastern Pacific Ocean that killed another 14 people. This brings the total of those dead to at least 57. Hegseth says one person survived the recent strikes.

Phil Stewart of Reuters reported yesterday that officials in the Defense Department have asked subordinates to sign non-disclosure agreements concerning the administration’s expanding operations in Latin America. This is, as Stewart puts it, “highly unusual,” especially as lawmakers are complaining the administration is not disclosing information about the strikes that would support its claim that those killed were trafficking drugs. Military officers are already required to keep national security issues out of public view.

Administration officials briefed Republican lawmakers today about the U.S. military strikes but excluded Democrats. Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the administration had shut Democrats out of a briefing on the military strikes. “Shutting Democrats out of a briefing on U.S. military strikes and withholding the legal justification for those strikes from half the Senate is indefensible and dangerous," he said. "Decisions about the use of American military force are not campaign strategy sessions, and they are not the private property of one political party. For any administration to treat them that way erodes our national security and flies in the face of Congress’ constitutional obligation to oversee matters of war and peace.”