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After Virginia Special Election, The Gerrymandering War Escalates Again
Gerrymandering: The Maps Shaping Power Ahead of the 2026 Midterms
Apr 28, 2026
Gerrymandering, the strategic manipulation of voting district boundaries to benefit certain political parties or candidates, has once again taken center stage as this year’s primary elections approach. Though redistricting is typically marked by the decennial census, mid-decade redistricting has become more common across the U.S. since the early 2000s.
The aim of redistricting is to ensure that representative assemblies within a state continue to accurately represent their constituents as population demographics shift over time; however, since the early 1800s, this system has been exploited by U.S. political parties seeking to manipulate voting outcomes in their favor. The same can be said about the current election cycle.
Ahead of the 2026 Midterms, five states have proposed and passed new congressional maps to date. Virginia is poised to be the next state, if the state’s Supreme Court approves its new congressional maps.
On Monday, the Virginia Supreme Court heard oral arguments about the legality of the congressional maps the state’s Democrats proposed. The maps were approved by voters last week with a slim 51.45% majority, but Republicans challenged their plan. If the new maps are approved, it could grant Democrats four additional seats in the U.S. House.
Current (top) versus new (bottom) boundaries for Virginia’s congressional districts. The new map would reflect 10 strong Democrat seats and 1 strong Republican seat, whereas the current map has 7 strong Democrat seats, 3 strong Republican seats, and 1 flip. See here for more comparisons. Image source: AP News.
This is just the latest in the national redistricting battle, with both Democrats and Republicans fighting for control of the chamber come November. Though North Carolina and Ohio were the first to pass new congressional maps in October 2025, the GOP’s bid to retain control kicked off after President Donald Trump pressed Texas Republicans to redraw their congressional maps. Texas did so, and in return, the GOP hopes to flip five seats in the House following the 2026 Texas Midterms.
Florida will be the next to participate, as Gov. Ron DeSantis (R ) called for a special session to address congressional redistricting. This is set to begin on Tuesday, April 28.
Nationwide gerrymandering has created the potential for nine extra seats Republicans are poised to win across Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio. Democrats are expecting to win six seats from redistricting efforts in California and Utah, and a grand total of 10 if the new congressional maps are approved in Virginia.
Though the legal situation is complex and ongoing, the stakes are high for both parties: the GOP, egged on by President Trump, is fighting to retain the slim majority it holds in the House, while the Democrats are doing whatever they can to flip it.
This goes to show that gerrymandering is more than the way district lines are drawn. It is the product of a power-and-control struggle that can impact everything from political priorities to the strength of the public’s vote, and for voters trying to understand why election outcomes sometimes feel inconsistent with public opinion, the answer may lie not in the ballots but in the boundaries.
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Britton Struthers-Lugo is a journalist and visual storyteller. She currently works as a Digital Content Producer across The Fulcrum and the Latino News Network.
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Congress advances a reconciliation bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security while passing key rural legislation. As debates over ICE funding, wildfire policy, and broadband expansion unfold, lawmakers also face new questions about the use of AI in government.
Getty Images, Bloomberg Creative
Starting Up the Reconciliation Machine
Apr 28, 2026
This week the Senate began the long, procedure-heavy process of creating and passing a reconciliation bill in order to enact Republican priorities without requiring any votes from Democratic legislators: funding the parts of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) whose funding remains lapsed and additional funds for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Also this week, the House agreed to two bills that next go to the President and voted on a number of bills related to rural areas.
Two New Laws Soon
Both of these bills go to the President next for signing:
- S. 98: Rural Broadband Protection Act of 2025 passed the House by voice vote.
- S. 1020: A bill to require the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to extend the time period during which licensees are required to commence construction of certain hydropower projects, passed the House 394-14.
House Votes on Rural-related Bills
These bills will go the Senate next. They are not close to becoming law.
- H.R. 2493: Improving Care in Rural America Reauthorization Act of 2025 passed 406-4.
- H.R. 5201: Kari’s Law Reporting Act passed 405-5. According to the FCC, “Kari’s Law requires direct 911 dialing and notification capabilities in multi-line telephone systems (MLTS), which are typically found in enterprises such as office buildings, campuses, and hotels.” This bill would require a report on how the implementation of Kari’s Law is going.
- H.R. 5200: Emergency Reporting Act, which would result in reports after activation of the Disaster Information Reporting System and to make improvements to network outage reporting, passed 386-7.
- H.R. 1681: Expediting Federal Broadband Deployment Reviews Act, which would establish an interagency group to ensure that certain Federal land management agencies prioritize the review of requests for communications use authorizations, passed 384-9.
- H.R. 5587: HEATS Act, which would amend the Geothermal Steam Act of 1970 to waive the requirement for a Federal drilling permit for certain activities and exempt certain activities from the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, passed 231-186.
- H.R. 6387: FIRE Act passed 220-198. Per the site Legis1, “The FIRE Act addresses a long-standing tension between federal air quality enforcement and state-level wildfire prevention. Under the current law, states risk falling out of compliance with national air quality standards when they conduct prescribed burns, even though those controlled burns are designed to reduce the far more damaging emissions from uncontrolled wildfires. The bill amends Section 319(b) of the Clean Air Act to give states a clearer path to exclude wildfire mitigation activities from air quality compliance calculations.” As you can see from the vote totals, this bill has strong partisan divergence. Why? As Legis1 went on to say, it’s an open question “…whether the bill is a practical fix for wildfire-prone states or a backdoor weakening of air quality standards…”. Which way a member of Congress sees it is almost entirely determined by which party the legislator belongs to.
- H.R. 4690: Reliable Federal Infrastructure Act, which would amend the Energy Conservation and Production Act to repeal certain Federal building energy efficiency performance standards, passed 215-202.
Funding the Department of Homeland Security by Reconciliation
The Department of Homeland Security is, sort of, in a shutdown. When appropriated funds for fiscal year 2026 lapsed early this year because Congress did not reach an agreement on funding it, DHS agencies without multi-year funds including TSA and the cybersecurity agency CISA stopped paying its employees. (ICE and CBP, on the other hand, had more-than-sufficient multi-year funds from last year’s reconciliation bill, and did not shut down.) Then they re-opened — the Trump Administration dubiously reassigned money appropriated to other purposes (more on that next week) — but that money isn’t expected to carry the department through September, the end of the fiscal year.
Last year’s reconciliation bill provided four years worth of funding for DHS. But now at least one Republican is telling Migrant Insider that DHS is running out of all that money because they’ve repurposed it to pay staff during the shutdown. As Migrant Insider goes on to note in this post, it’s hard to know if these claims are true because DHS has stopped reporting how it’s spending its money.
Republicans want to use the reconciliation process to fund DHS, and potentially other policy changes, without any Democratic votes.
The budget reconciliation process is complicated. Step 1 is having either chamber of Congress come up with a “budget resolution”. The budget resolution sets the amount of money that relevant committees will have to allocate in the reconciliation bill itself. As noted by reporter Jennifer Shutt, it’s just a blueprint and nothing in it, even if both chambers agree to it, changes existing law or funding amounts.
The Senate passed its budget resolution on Tuesday, April 21, in a party-line vote of 52-46. The resolution now goes to the House. Just like any other piece of legislation, the House could amend it and if they did, it would bounce back to the Senate.
Legislator Use of AI
NOTUS published an interesting piece describing how some members of Congress are using AI, both personally and professionally. So far, as far as we’re aware, AI is not being used to draft legislation, but from the kinds of uses described in the article, you could see how legislators might want to go that way some day.
Something that caught our eye was a mention that Sen. Schiff (D-CA) used an AI tool to draft a living will. Given all the stories in the news about lawyers submitting legal documents with made up cases in them to courts (like this one), Schiff’s choice might be surprising.
But, in general, when the user has expertise in an area, some of the AI tools out there can be helpful. Mike Masnick of Techdirt wrote about how he uses AI tools to do his work and argues that, when the user has a specific task and enough expertise to assess the tool’s output, it can be helpful.
Now, Sen. Schiff is a former prosecutor. Does this make him expert enough in trusts to assess the quality of the draft he was given? We don’t know - your GovTracker is not a lawyer of any kind. But we do know that many professions have enough specialization that expertise in one area would not automatically confer expertise in another.
So while GovTrack doesn’t care about Sen. Schiff’s personal trust arrangements (unless it somehow turned out the trust was a vehicle to violate House Ethics rules), we do care about legislators becoming reliant on AI tools if they don’t have the relevant expertise to assess how well the tools are performing or demonstrated awareness of their own limitations.
Starting Up the Reconciliation Machine was originally published by GovTrack and is republished with permission.
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CBP Chief Rodney Scott (left), Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons (middle) and USCIS Director Joseph Edlow (right) testify at budget hearing.
Jamie Gareh/Medill News Service)
ICE Director Requests Additional $5.4 Billion at Congressional Budget Hearing
Apr 24, 2026
WASHINGTON- The acting director of ICE on Thursday told Congress that while the Trump administration pumped $75 billion extra into ICE over four years, many activities remain cash starved and the agency needs about $5.4 billion in additional funding for 2027.
There’s misinformation with the Big Beautiful Bill that ICE is fully funded,” said Todd Lyons, acting director of ICE, whose resignation was announced later that day.
He added that the recent influx of money funds adequately funds detaining and deporting immigrants. But everything from “putting gas in the vehicles” to special unit investigation teams remained underfunded. He cited growing needs, in particular, to fund their intelligence network and victim specialist teams.
“We just don’t have that [money],” he said.
With the passing of the One Big Beautiful Bill in July 2025, ICE had already become the largest law enforcement agency in the U.S.. The administration’s request for even more money came amid intense and continuing controversy over agents’ tactics, which have caused mass protests across the country.
“They [ICE] have been out of control,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., to Medill News as he walked through the tunnels of the U.S. Capitol. “They have acted grossly, illegally and unconstitutionally.”
Democrats at the hearing argued that funding for law enforcement agencies like ICE should not increase without significant reform and oversight. These same demands from Democrats spurred a partial government shutdown that began in February - now the longest in U.S. history. The hearing, however, focused on next year’s funding.
Lyons argued that the agency needed more money to continue its efforts. He said that 451,000 people had been detained by ICE under the Trump administration. Including “281,000 with criminal histories, 8,400 gang members and 1,600 known and suspected terrorists,” he said.
Immigration advocacy groups and academic researchers challenged that data, finding that 71% of current ICE detainees have no criminal conviction.
Republicans at the hearing echoed Lyons, highlighting ICE’s role in national security, while some Democrats expressed their concerns about the prospect of additional funding. Among other things, Democrats pointed to the 44 detainees who have died in ICE custody during the Trump administration.
“That is a 20-year high for an agency that was only formed in 2003,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn.
She spoke about ICE agents arresting US citizens without warrants, tear-gassing a family on their way home from a basketball game, sexual abuse in detention centers and one Cuban man who recently died while in detention due to excessive force. His death was ruled a homicide, according to an autopsy report.
“In January of this year, ICE violated nearly 100 federal court orders,” she said, “which the chief federal judge in the state of Minnesota estimated was more violations than some federal agencies have committed during their entire existence.”
Rep. Lauren Underwood, D-Ill., questioned the pattern of “reckless, incompetent, cruel, illegal, corrupt and unconstitutional behavior,” she has seen from ICE agents. “These are leadership problems, not funding problems,” she said, later declaring that she would not give the agency “another penny.”
Colleen Putzel, a spokesperson from the D.C. based think tank the Migration Policy Institute, expressed frustration with the potential of an increased ICE budget, describing what she sees as a “mismatch” in funding in the immigration system.
She explained that while the budget for immigration enforcement operations like ICE remains at “large and growing levels,” other immigration agencies, such as the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Executive Office for Immigration Review, have seen drastic cuts.
For example, the office, which runs immigration courts, has seen a quarter of their immigration judges fired in the past year. This has helped create a back-log of 3.8 million cases.
Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., who held office during the height of Operation Midway Blitz at the end of last year, sees a country where family budgets decline while ICE budgets grow.
“It would be a travesty for taxpayers," she said to Medill News Service, and for many across the country asking “Why is my gas price so expensive? Why can’t I buy a home? Why is my life so hard?”
Jamie Gareh is a graduate student at Medill.
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The Illinois State Capitol Building, in Springfield, Illinois on MAY 05, 2012.
(Photo By Raymond Boyd/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
Illinois House Passes Bill to Restrict Construction of Immigration Detention Centers in Communities
Apr 24, 2026
The Illinois House passed a legislative proposal in a 72-35 partisan vote that would restrict where immigration detention centers can be built, located or operated in the state.
House Bill 5024 would amend state code so that an immigration detention center cannot be located, constructed, or operated by the federal government within 1,500 feet of a home or apartment complex, as well as any school, day care center, public park, or house of worship. Current detention facilities in the state would not be affected by the legislation.
The bill was introduced by House Speaker Emmanuel 'Chris' Welch in response to what he described as federal actions involving the Broadview detention facility.
“This is not an abstract policy debate for me — this is personal, and it is deeply local. The Broadview detention facility sits in the heart of the district I represent. And during Operation Midway Blitz, the people who live in and around that community did not just witness aggressive federal activity — they lived through trauma,” Welch said in a press statement.
“This bill says something very simple and very reasonable: detention facilities do not belong in the middle of our neighborhoods. They should not be next to schools. They should not be near day care centers. They should not sit beside parks, public housing, places of worship, or private homes. Because when a detention center is dropped into the middle of a residential community, it doesn’t just affect the people inside that building — it affects every child walking to school, every senior looking out their window, and every family trying to live in peace,” he continued.
One of the most notable witnesses on the bill was Broadview Mayor Katrina Thompson, who testified in March in support of the legislation.
Appearing via Zoom, Thompson voiced support for the measure, highlighting concerns about how Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity at the village’s detention center has impacted residents.
Those concerns follow Operation Midway Blitz, which began in September 2025 and led Gov. JB Pritzker to create the Illinois Accountability Commission in response to federal immigration enforcement actions.
“In Broadview, we have residents who live as close as 600 feet away from the ICE facility,” Thompson told committee members. “That is not a statistic; those are people, families, children, individuals whose daily lives are directly impacted by what happens around that facility.”
House Republicans voiced concerns about the legislation, including Rep. Patrick Windhorst, who said the bill reflects ongoing conflict between Illinois Democrats and the federal government.
“The result of this effort to not work together with the federal government to resolve the issues, particularly related to immigration and enforcement of our laws, has resulted in huge problems in our state that the majority party attempts to blame the current presidential administration for,” Windhorst said, according to WQAD 8.
“But we need to take a hard look at what we're doing as a state to make sure we're fulfilling our obligations to protect our citizens and to enforce the laws, including the federal laws of our country,” he continued.
In Illinois, privately owned detention centers have been banned since 2019, with the enactment of the Private Detention Facility Moratorium Act, which prohibits state and local government agencies from contracting with or paying private prison companies for detention purposes, including federal immigration detention.
The bill is currently in the Senate Assignments Committee. If passed and signed by Gov. Pritzker, it would take effect immediately.
Angeles Ponpa is the Managing Editor of Latino News Network Midwest, overseeing Illinois Latino News, Wisconsin Latino News, and Michigan Latino News. She is based in Illinois.
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