IVN is joined by Nate Allen, founder and Executive Director of Utah Approves, to discuss Approval Voting and his perspective on changing the incentives of our elections.
Podcast: Seeking approval in Utah
Site Navigation
Search
Latest Stories
Join a growing community committed to civic renewal.
Subscribe to The Fulcrum and be part of the conversation.
Top Stories
Latest news
Read More
people walking on street during daytime
Photo by Chip Vincent on Unsplash
A Ballroom Won’t Save Our Children
Apr 29, 2026
When an active shooter threat disrupted the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the president and members of his cabinet were evacuated swiftly and efficiently. The threat ended with a shooter apprehended and a Truth Social post. Then President Trump returned to the podium, bypassing the persistence of gun violence in this country to make the case for his long-sought $400 million White House ballroom, one that would supposedly prevent criminals from entering the space. The solution to a potential mass killing was a bulletproof ballroom.
I was an elementary student when Columbine made school shootings a national emergency. The safe haven of school became a potential war zone overnight, and the fear that settled into children that year never fully left. But how could it? The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting happened when I was a new high school teacher. Parkland when I was a doctoral student. Uvalde during my first faculty position. The shooting at Brown University happened during my fifteenth year working in education. Gun violence has followed me the entire length of my educational career, from K-12 student to high school teacher to university professor. Nearly three decades later, I am still waiting for the final straw, the moment that produces gun reform and makes school feel safe again. Instead, I have more thoughts and prayers than ever, and no gun reform in sight.
What struck me watching footage from the Correspondents’ Dinner wasn’t the chaos, but the normalcy within it. In the videos, I heard the clinks and clanks of wait staff collecting plates while journalists knelt on the floor. The familiar sound of dinner being cleared became the soundtrack for cowering humans. Attendees drifted toward the floor as if unsure whether to be alarmed, as if violence was something that happened to other people, in other rooms. Those sounds and slow movements told me everything I needed to know: the people in that room had no idea what to do.
And I knew that because I’ve spent years learning exactly what to do in those situations. Active shooter drills are now standard in schools across the country, with approximately 92% of schools drilling students and teachers on lockdown procedures. We learn to lock and barricade classroom doors. We learn to cut the lights and stay still so the shooter believes the room is empty. We learn to jump out of windows and fight back against an attacker by throwing objects. We learn to play dead in order to live. We learn that silence is survival and that even when violence surrounds us, we should not make a sound.
Part of that training is also making sure no one is left without information. Every drill I’ve been a part of has a formal or informal alert system to ensure everyone stays informed about what’s happening. Even the Department of Education recommends planning how “the school community will be notified that there is an active shooter on school grounds” through “the use of familiar terms, sounds, lights, and electronic communications such as text messages.” In a K-12 classroom, no one gets left without direction. We learn together, we shelter together, we survive together.
The drills, alongside metal detectors and clear backpack policies, are Band-Aids on a wound that policy could have closed long ago. We know what to do because we have spent decades trying and failing to do it. After San Bernardino, after Pulse, after Sutherland Springs, and after Las Vegas, numerous policy proposals existed: background checks at gun shows; bans on bump stocks; laws preventing domestic abusers from purchasing firearms. Some never made it out of committee, and others were defeated along party lines. But the knowledge of what to do has never been the problem. It’s the will to change that eludes us.
We have to want to protect children more than gun rights. We have to want to redirect the urgency and funding that would build a $400 million ballroom toward making schools safe. We have to want reform over platitudes.
But right now, even if our leadership openly states that they want safety and the protection of young people, their actions prove otherwise. President Trump had a microphone, a shaken room, and a country watching. He could have discussed how easily the shooter entered that space and shared how that same ease exists at the doors of our schools every day. He could have called for policy reform rather than a ballroom renovation. He could have praised the bipartisan unity in that room and asked us to unify in our goal to end gun violence. That didn’t happen this time. But I have to hold onto hope that one day, we’ll care enough to protect children as much as we protect the spaces where the powerful gather—that we’ll stop building ballrooms and start building policy.
Stephanie Toliver is a Public Voices Fellow and a member of the OpEd Alumni Project sponsored by the University of Illinois.
Keep ReadingShow less
Recommended
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.
Keep ReadingShow less
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.
Keep ReadingShow less
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.
Keep ReadingShow less
Load More