The Crystal Ball released its 2024 Senate Ratings this week. With 34 Senate contests, Democrats are defending 23 of these seats, while Republicans are defending just 11. That Democratic tally includes the 3 states with independents who caucus with the Democrats.
In this episode, Kyle Kondik, Managing Editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, provides an overview of the initial ratings and why Democrats will be playing defense.
Professor Carrie Bearden (on the left) at a Stand Up for Science rally in spring 2025.
UC Los Angeles Psychology professor Carrie Bearden is among many whose work has been stalled due to the Trump administration’s grant suspensions to universities across the country.
“I just feel this constant whiplash every single day,” Bearden said. “The bedrock, the foundation of everything that we're doing, is really being shaken on a daily basis … To see that at an institutional level is really shocking. Yes, we saw it coming with these other institutions, but I think everybody's still sort of in a state of shock.”
She researches early risk factors for developmental neuropsychiatric disorders in her lab with several undergraduate and graduate students. Still, her lab lost almost 20 people after their training grant had been suspended. Though she has enough people to continue her research, Bearden said the lab’s work has been paused as she and other professors attempt every avenue to keep their student researchers and assist professors whose entire work has been stalled by funding cuts.
UCLA is the first public university to face funding cuts from the Trump administration. And though a judge restored the university’s lost grant funding from the National Science Foundation, funding cuts from the National Institute of Health and the Department of Energy remain in place. A total of 700 grants were suspended, and 300 were restored after the judge’s ruling.
The federal government has been cutting funding from multiple universities, including Harvard, Northwestern, and Johns Hopkins University, citing alleged antisemitism on campuses and demanding changes to admissions practices, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, as well as the curriculum.
“This is not only a loss to the researchers who rely on critical grants. It is a loss for Americans across the nation whose work, health, and future depend on the groundbreaking work we do,” UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk wrote in a press release from July 31.
The administration is requiring $1 billion and several policy changes to restore funding to UCLA. Trump’s unprecedented intervention within higher education is forcing many universities to reckon their principles of academic freedom with their budget. And while Harvard University took its battle with the administration to the courts, Columbia University acquiesced to their demands. UCLA has yet to decide how to proceed against the Trump administration’s grant suspensions, though the university is in the middle of negotiations with the administration.
Third-year graduate student Dylan Hughes had been working on Bearden's research project since 2024. However, the administration’s grant suspensions revoked the training grant that had funded his participation. Now, Hughes must pause his research and, instead, serve as a teaching assistant to maintain his stipend from the university.
“I have so much on my plate as a clinical psychology student. A lot of my time is spent in clinical work, and I also have all these other research responsibilities,” Hughes said. “So an additional 20 hours of teaching, even though it's very fulfilling to me, is taking away from the time that I can be doing that research and pushing this forward — this goal of bringing early intervention to kids at risk for psychosis.”
He said the university is looking to reorganize its budget to provide labs that have lost their funding with “bridge funds” acquired internally. If sufficient bridge funds can be provided, Hughes may be able to return to the lab in the future.
Amid a mental health crisis in this country, Bearden said her work goes toward understanding the causes and mechanisms of developmental neuropsychiatric disorders, and that the Trump administration’s budget cuts come at a time when her lab is focused on critical developments.
“This is why it's so frustrating, because I think we're poised at a really, incredibly important time in research. Our research is really on brain diseases and psychiatric disorders, and then at the exact same time, this axe is being dropped on the work,” Bearden said. “It's not an understatement that we are in a mental health crisis in this country, in terms of an epidemic of suicide, serious mental illness, and the way that this is affecting adolescents, and how this is affecting brain development.”
She added that the Trump administration’s grant suspensions to UCLA don’t bode well for the rest of the University of California system’s schools and said she hopes the university doesn’t cave to Trump’s demands.
“We all want this to resolve as quickly as possible. We don't want it to resolve by saying, ‘Oh, yeah, you're right. We need to give up our academic freedom in order to put a band-aid on this,” Bearden said. “It's a mafia shakedown. [Submitting to the administration’s demands] doesn't solve the problem. Then it just goes down the list. OK, now we're gonna go hit UC Berkeley.”
Hughes said the administration’s grant suspensions come at a time when there’s a divide between scientists and the public, and that oftentimes, community and public interests are missed by researchers.
“There's distance. I think there needs to be more community engagement, whether that's having focus groups with the community, whether it's bringing scientific education to high schools from researchers or something,” Hughes said. “Science is a really important tool, and it involves the community, and I think there just needs to be just more face-to-face interaction with the community, and especially, more community engagement, where we check in with the community to see what they want to study.”
Many researchers and professors worry about the financial consequences in the near future, and what that might mean regarding layoffs. In a press release from Aug. 15, Frenk wrote that the university was already facing budgetary challenges prior to the Trump administration’s grant suspensions.
“Unfortunately, the challenges we now face come on top of a difficult few years for our university’s finances,” Frenk wrote. “Even before the suspension of our research funding, we were undertaking efforts to reduce operational costs — instituting a hiring review process, limiting travel expenditures, and putting in place a 10 percent budget reduction for administrative units.”
Even a university like Columbia, which acquiesced to the administration’s demands, laid off employees as a result of budget deficits. The cuts from the administration have altered the ability of UCLA’s professors and researchers to continue their research at the country’s number one public university.
"All these things that you take for granted day-to-day — that you're gonna have a lab, that you're gonna have a job, it's all very much in question,” Bearden said. “It's very hard to do science under those in that context."
Atmika Iyer is a graduate student in Northwestern Medill’s Politics, Policy, and Foreign Affairs reporting program. Atmika is also a journalism intern with the Fulcrum.
To read more of Atmika's work, click HERE.
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“Citizens who abide by the tribal theory of democracy rarely ask questions because they routinely believe that they have all the answers.” Tim Redmond - Political Tribalism in America (2022)
In the D’Amuro house, politics, history, and even religion were regular dinner-table fare. I may be one of the few Americans whose parents were disappointed when he chose teaching over politics.
I’ve carried those conversations into adulthood—often, I suspect, to the annoyance of friends and family. But as we cross the midpoint of the 2020s, I can’t shake a growing unease. The 24-hour news cycle has locked us into what I call minutiae politics: a fixation on whatever story the media winds blow our way. We bicker over headlines, soundbites, and scandals as if they were the lifeblood of democracy. They aren’t. And the more we mistake them for the real work of self-government, the weaker our system becomes.
This narrowing of focus comes at a cost. In high school and college, I was part of the problem. I devoured the latest statistics, polls, and talking points, always ready with ammunition for my side. What I rarely did was pause to ask the larger questions in divisive moments: Does this policy or action align with the ideals laid out in our founding documents? Is this the kind of government we actually want? And what do our disagreements demand of us—unyielding loyalty to a side or a willingness to find common ground? When framed that way, compromise no longer looks like surrender. It becomes one of the ways a diverse republic manages to hold together.
Disunion and an aversion to unity may feel like uniquely modern problems, but they are not. The founding generation wrestled with them too and sought to embed remedies in the framework we still operate under.
As I began teaching, it was time to step back from the churn of headlines and weigh them against the framework of our constitutional system—and how our founding ideals might speak to modern challenges. Recently, I read Yuval Levin’s American Covenant, which provided a clearer articulation of what I had been reaching toward.
Levin reminds us of what the framers of our Constitution understood deeply: Representative government isn’t about speed or partisanship. It is about unity and cohesion. Our system was built to move slowly, to deliberate, and to build consensus. That design is most visible in the legislative branch, where progress depends on compromise, and in the presidency, which was never meant to be wielded as a partisan battering ram each time power shifts. On the contrary, Levin argues, the framers intended the executive branch to serve as a stabilizing force between elections.
This deliberate pace was not a flaw; it was the point. The founders believed stability and unity mattered more than winning every policy battle of the day. To them, compromise was the means of holding a diverse republic together. And when compromise did produce legislation, the framers trusted it would endure, rather than be undone by subsequent leaders.
Contrast that vision with today’s political culture. Each day delivers a new controversy via our news outlets or social media, and we demand our leaders respond faster than an Amazon package arrives at our door. The result is not only polarization but also civic shallowness. We debate headlines without ever grappling with the deeper question of how we want our government to function.
I don’t mean to dismiss the importance of current events. The issues of the day matter, but if we only engage at that surface level, we squander much. Too often, politics resembles a binge-worthy series discussed around the water cooler rather than a serious attempt to sustain representative government.
The challenge before us is to reorient political conversations. Imagine if, alongside our debates about the latest story, we also asked: What does this mean for the health of our constitutional system? How does this fit into the long-term vision of our government’s framework? Are we strengthening unity—or just deepening divides?
Those aren’t easy questions, and viral reels and tweets won’t answer them.
We can start small. Around our tables, in classrooms, and even online, we can elevate the conversation. Instead of letting talking points define our politics, we can place that story in the broader framework of democratic life.
That’s what I want for my children—and for all future citizens: not to react to headlines but to think deeply about the nature of government, the meaning of compromise, and the responsibilities of citizenship. In a world of breaking news alerts and political noise, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture. But if we put aside the distractions and ask the larger questions, we may rediscover the principles that bind us—and in doing so, hand down a republic worthy of the next generation.
Nicholas D'Amuro is an Instructional Coordinator at Genesee Valley BOCES, supporting curriculum development and professional learning. In 2024, he co-founded the Civi Coalition (civiawards.us), a statewide initiative dedicated to civic education and bridging divides. He also serves as a sector ambassador for the Listen First Project and as a town councilman.
Steph Martinez and Rachel Ramirez with their mothers after their last performance
When Northwestern theater and creative writing junior Lux Vargas wrote and brought to life La Ventanita, she created a space of rest and home for those who live in the grief of not belonging anywhere, yet still yearn for a sense of belonging together. By closing night, Vargas had mothers and daughters, once splintered by politics, in each other's arms. In a small, sold-out theater in Evanston, the story on stage became a mirror: centering on mothers who fled the country and daughters who left again for college.
Performed four times on May 9 and 10, La Ventanita unfolds in a fictional cafecito window inspired by the walk-up restaurant counters found throughout Miami. “The ventanita breeds conversations and political exchange,” said Vargas.
At the center of the play is Renata, a longtime Cuban immigrant who owns the ventanita. The story follows Ines, her college-bound niece who wants to leave Miami behind, and Genesis, a newly arrived immigrant from Cuba struggling to find her place in the U.S. Their lives intersect as the real-life Patria y Vida protests erupt in South Florida and across Cuba, forcing each woman to confront the ghosts of displacement, the cost of political detachment, and the emotional burden of leaving home behind. As the protests escalate, the play turns surreal — a dreamlike sequence filled with music, dance, and protest, revealing Renata’s internalized grief and guilt for staying silent. Meanwhile, Genesis wrestles with survivor’s guilt and ultimately accepts that she may never return to Cuba. Her small act of adding mango coffee to the café’s menu becomes a quiet but powerful gesture: a way of honoring the past while carving a new future. At its core, La Ventanita is about what it means to grieve a country you can’t return to — and the uneasy peace that comes with trying to move forward not despite that loss, but because of it.
The song, Patria y Vida, released in 2021, replaced Fidel Castro’s slogan Patria o Muerte (“homeland or death”) with a call for “homeland and life.” That summer, the soundtrack became a route for Cubans to protest, a defiant anthem against food shortages, censorship, and repression. This song served as a rallying cry, giving voice to years of frustration for Cubans both on the island and in exile. In the play, this protest surfaces in the living rooms and kitchens – in mothers who still defend the revolution as survival and daughters who see Patria y Vida as the urgency of demanding more.
Vargas began writing the play two years ago after finishing her first quarter. Missing home, she started to write characters who reminded her of the community she left behind.
“I wanted to make sure that people understood that you can't just generalize a group of people under the umbrella of where they come from. We are American too, like we were living these different experiences, and we Latinos come in multitudes,” said Vargas. “I really wanted people to understand that. Despite how conflicted I felt knowing the majority of Cubans had voted for Trump, or that Miami-Dade County had turned red, I knew that I still wanted to tell this story, and I know that there were people who wanted to be heard and wanted their story to be told.”
In the hands of the student cast, these characters became family. For Cuban-American Northwestern students Rachel Ramirez and Steph Martinez, the roles made them — and more importantly, their mothers and Steph’s grandmother — feel seen in an institution that has long overlooked their stories.
For parents and grandparents, the revolution is as real today as it was in the past — many remember when Fidel Castro’s rebels overthrew Fulgencio Batista in 1959 and Cuba became a communist state. That shift forced thousands into exile, including the families whose daughters now wrestle with how to carry both their parents’ trauma and their own sense of belonging.
As liberal daughters of Cuban Republican mothers since they were 11 years old, Ramirez and Martinez have held a friendship that has carried them through college and helped them build communities that feel like home. Ramirez and Martinez became my friends and later my roommates after our own long search to find familiar faces in a predominantly white institution with few spaces for Hispanic students.
Senior Communications major Ramirez connected deeply with Renata’s quiet ache — the experience of building a new life in a new country while still mourning what was left behind. Resonating with Renata’s grief over Cuba and her complicated Americanness helped Ramirez feel less alone. The play made it easier for her mother to understand that she carries Cuba — and her mother’s story — with her, wherever she goes.
“It's hard to disagree with the play, it's saying people are dying, people are hungry, the dictatorship is restricting our freedom of speech,” said Ramirez. “In terms of her political views, it's remembering that she's been through a lot. She didn't have a good experience growing up. She was very poor; communism affected her insanely. And then in terms of how she handles that, and addresses me about it, it's remembering that she has her own trauma that she hasn't overcome, and like in her way of expressing her emotions, and she really just wants to be heard, and I don't think she was very heard growing up.”
Learning and Organizational Change major Martinez, who played Ines, added that the way her mother talks about those issues stems from unprocessed trauma and a deep desire to be heard — something she likely wasn’t afforded as a child.
“Trauma takes over knowledge,” said Martinez. “I have to remember that my mom is not a bad person, and that's honestly it. She's done everything for me.”
At a time when Cuban-American identity is often reduced to voting patterns, La Ventanita dares to be messy, tender, and human. It doesn’t ask for resolution — it asks for recognition. In a cultural landscape that often flattens or romanticizes the Hispanic experience, Vargas’s play pushes back.
“Cuba is not a tourist destination. That’s not what our families fled,” said Martinez. Cuba is not a Caribbean paradise — it’s a dictatorship where everyday people can’t access basic necessities. Tourism dollars don’t reach families; they fuel the regime.
La Ventanita offers a return. In a world that flattened Cuban identity into red and blue, the play became a place where mothers and daughters could finally see and hear each other again.
Maria Jose Arango Torres, a student at Northwestern University and an intern with the Latino News Network.
We received a question through our Instagram account asking "if it's true what people say" that President Barack Obama deported more immigrants than Donald Trump. To answer our follower, Factchequeado reviewed the public deportation data available from 1993 to June 2025, to compare the policies of both presidents and other administrations.
Deportation statistics ("removals") are not available in a single repository, updated information is lacking, and there are limitations that we note at the end of this text in the methodology section.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does not have publicly available deportation figures for Trump's second term. It has data through December 2024, but not all of it is in the same link or in a statistical record that breaks it down by year.
Because of this, we obtained the number of deportations from January to June 2025 via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by the Deportation Data Project, an academic and litigation initiative that collects and publishes datasets on U.S. government immigration control. The project is led by David Hausman, professor at UC Berkeley School of Law, Graeme Blair, professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Amber Qureshi, an attorney specializing in federal immigration and FOIA litigation.
The Deportation Data Project leaders are concerned about the reliability of ICE's record regarding the deportation table from late June 2025: "It may not include all relevant records." They warn that associated fields, such as departure dates, "may also create an incomplete picture of deportations."
This demonstrates the limitations in accessing and analyzing the data.
Despite the challenges posed by current migration figures, data compiled and analyzed by Factchequeado shows that President Obama deported more immigrants than any other president in the last three decades.
Obama's immigration policies primarily focused on deporting immigrants with criminal charges and those considered national security threats, especially during his final years in office. By contrast, under President Trump, criminal priorities were eliminated, categorizing all undocumented individuals as deportable.
For instance, in this article, we explained that 80% of immigrants taken to detention centers in the first months of Trump's second term had no criminal record. Yet authorities publicly describe them as "the worst of the worst." Additionally, detentions of immigrants without crimes rose from 1,048 in January 2025 to 11,972 in June 2025.
Our analysis covers fiscal year 1993 through June 26 of fiscal year 2025, encompassing the administrations of Democrat Bill Clinton, Republican George W. Bush, Democrat Barack Obama, Democrat Joe Biden, and Republican Donald Trump.
We provide a breakdown of the statistics by president and by period of government.
863,958 deportations | Annual average: 107,994 | Daily average over 8 years: 296
All figures are based on fiscal years (October-September)
Context of the period: Under Clinton, deportations focused primarily on people with criminal backgrounds and immigration violations. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 expanded deportation categories and reduced available legal defenses.
2,021,965 deportations | Annual average: 252,745 | Daily average over 8 years: 692
Context of the period: Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001, Bush prioritized deportations for national security reasons. He expanded the operations of the newly created ICE (2003) and intensified workplace raids. Deportations included both criminals and those accused of civil immigration violations.
1,589,451 deportations | Annual average: 397,362 | Daily average: 1,088
In 2012, a historic peak was reached, with an average of 1,123 deportations per day. This unprecedented figure led immigrant organizations to label Obama the “Deporter in Chief.”
Context of the period: Obama's first administration maintained the Secure Communities program launched in 2008 under Bush's presidency, a system where local police sent fingerprints to the FBI for identification, and the FBI sent the information to ICE to detect immigrants without legal status or with deportation orders. Deporting people with serious crimes and recent border crossers became a priority. Expulsions of immigrants without
criminal records in the country's interior decreased.
However, of the 375,000 immigrants expelled during the 6 years the program operated (active until 2014), more than 70% did not have crimes considered a national security threat, according to data from Syracuse University's TRAC Center (Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse).
At a time when he faced criticism for the high number of deportations, Obama approved the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in June 2012.
1,160,255 | Annual average: 290,063 | Daily average: 794
FY 2013: 368,644 deportations (1,010/day).
FY 2014: 315,943 deportations (866/day).
FY 2015: 235,413 deportations (645/day).
FY 2016: 240,255 deportations (658/day).
Context of the period: During the first fiscal year of Obama's second administration, thousands of immigrants were deported for entering without authorization (46,759 cases), a misdemeanor; driving under the influence of alcohol (29,852 cases); and for traffic violations (15,548 cases), despite the goal being to focus on level 1 criminals.
In 2014, Secure Communities closed, and DHS created the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP) with 4 categories for deportation:
The Obama years: From 2009 to 2016, his administration deported 2,749,706 individuals, averaging 343,713 deportations per year—the highest in 32 years. In 2012, the daily peak reached 1,123 deportations.
935,346 deportations | Annual average: 233,836 | Daily average: 641
Context of the period: Trump reversed the changes with PEP, and his administration eliminated the DHS's 4 deportation priority categories. He signed an executive order to return to the Secure Communities system and arrests intensified in the country's interior. Deportations due to traffic violations increased again (138% after 9 months of the government change).
He implemented, with the endorsement of former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the "Remain in Mexico" policy, a program that forced non-Mexican asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for months or years while U.S. immigration courts resolved their cases.
Migrant communities, including families with children, set up tents on the Mexican side of the border and were exposed to extortion, kidnapping, and other crimes. The measure faced judicial restrictions.
545,252 deportations | Annual average: 136,313 | Daily average: 373
Context of the period: Biden ordered a 100-day pause on interior deportations for people with final removal orders, except for national security threats, recent border crossings (after November 1, 2020), and cases where the law required deportation. But a federal judge in Texas blocked it after 6 days.
His administration formally ended the "Remain in Mexico" program, and implemented more selective interim priorities focused on 3 categories: (1) national security threats, (2) recent border crossings, and (3) people released from prison with convictions for serious aggravated felonies who represent a public threat.
The DHS established "Prosecutorial Discretion Guidelines" that maintained the three categories but added mitigating factors (age, time in the United States, military service, family ties) that agents had to consider before arresting or deporting someone, even if they were in a priority category.
Interior deportations fell and returns at the southern border and immigrants convicted of serious crime increased. He launched the CBP One program, a mobile application to request an appointment from outside the United States to process asylum.
Title 42 Expulsions under Trump and Biden from March 2020 to May 2023
Between March 2020 and May 2023, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) carried out 2,381,810 expedited removals under Title 42 at the southern border. Expelled immigrants had no right to asylum process, and these figures are not included in formal removals.
Title 42 is a 1944 public health provision that allows restricting entry to prevent disease.
Trump began using it for immigration expulsions in March 2020 as a COVID-19 measure, and Biden maintained it during part of his term.
Expedited removals by fiscal year:
128,039 deportations | 5.2 months* | Daily average: 810 (over 158 days).
Context of the period: Trump began his second administration with more than 1,000 deportations per day in the last weeks of January, according to ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by Factchequeado.
On January 23, 2025, alone, his administration deported more than 2,000 people, according to our analysis. Although deportations decreased in February and March to less than 800 per day, they increased in May and June 2025 to an average of 860 per day. However, these numbers did not reach the daily averages recorded during Obama's peak years.
While deportees are fewer, the number of arrests have hit record highs. According to ICE data, the number of people in detention centers exceeded 60,000 on August 11, 2025, and, as we previously reported, 8 out of 10 have no criminal record.
Trump has signed anti-immigrant executive orders, carried out large-scale coordinated raids, and expanded cooperation with local authorities.
Additionally, among other things, he has signed agreements with third countries to receive expelled immigrants without due process rights. For example, he sent 238 Venezuelans to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act and labeled most of them as Tren de Aragua members based on their tattoos, although they weren't. He has also sent migrants to Sudan and other third countries.
*Monthly breakdown with data provided by ICE to the Deportation Data Project. The January to June period analyzed corresponds to the second part of fiscal year 2025 that began under Biden on October 1, 2024, and will end on September 30, 2025, under Trump.
Editor's Notes: "Who deported more migrants? Obama or Trump? We checked the numbers" was first published by our partners, Factchequeado.
Wendy Selene Pérez is a Fact-checker for FactCheckeado.
