The redrawing of legislative district boundaries. A 1967 federal law requires House members be elected from single-member districts that (within each state) have nearly identical populations. House maps must be redrawn after reapportionment but before the first congressional election of each decade, based on population changes in each state revealed by the census.
President Darryl Morin of Forward Latino speaks at a press conference about anti-immigration posters found around Kenosha, WI, on June 3, 2026.
KENOSHA, Wis. —Community leaders, faith leaders and civil rights advocates gathered this month to condemn anti-immigrant posters that appeared across Kenosha, as police continue investigating who is responsible.
The posters, which depicted a green alien inside of a firearm target alongside the acronym “MAGA,” were first reported in early June after residents discovered them posted on telephone poles throughout the city, according to Racine County Eye. WISN 12 reported the Kenosha Police Department opened an investigation after receiving reports of the signs.
During a press conference hosted by Forward Latino, a national Latino civil rights and advocacy organization based in Wisconsin, President Darryl Morin called the posters an attempt to intimidate immigrant communities.
“This messaging, these posters, is unacceptable. It’s wrong, and it’s un-American,” Morin said. “Regardless of whom these posters are intended to target, they promote intimidation, discrimination, and violence.”
Morin said the organization has documented an increase in hate incidents across the country in recent years and encouraged anyone who experiences threats or harassment to report them to law enforcement and advocacy organizations, such as theirs.
Community member Angeles Arzate said she discovered one of the posters while driving her children to school and immediately reported it after finding additional signs throughout the city.
“To see something like this in the city of Kenosha, it’s really hurtful,” Arzate said during the press conference.
According to Spectrum News 1 Wisconsin, community organizations said similar posters have also been reported in Waukegan and North Chicago, Illinois.
According to WISN 12, Waukegan police said the same posters have been appearing there for weeks, only half an hour away.
Faith leaders joined the coalition in condemning the displays, giving their own remarks during press conference.
“These anti-immigrant posters are a symptom of a much deeper issue,” said the Rev. Wesley Isberner of Congregations United to Serve Humanity. “A rampant hatred of our immigrant and asylum-seeking neighbors has taken root in our country, including here in Kenosha, and this is dangerous.”
Residents who encounter one of the posters should report it to the Kenosha mayor’s office so city officials can document and remove it as part of the investigation, speakers said during the news conference.
As of late June, no arrests or suspects had been publicly announced. WISN 12 reported the investigation remains ongoing.
Community leaders condemn anti-immigrant posters in Kenosha as investigation remains open was first published on WI Latino News and was republished with permission.
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.
A group of Bus youth pose for a photo with Senator Noel Frame at the Millionaires Tax signing. (2026)
Washington is a politically active state where, through protests, parades, nonprofit organizations, and community groups, people have proven they will advocate for the causes and issues they care about.
Seattle, a major hub for nonprofits, boasts nearly 25,000 nonprofit organizations focusing on a wide range of local, national, and international issues. These groups reflect activism efforts across major issues impacting the United States, such as advocacy for police accountability initiatives, rights for the LGBTQ+ community, and demands for action against crime, violence, and drug trafficking.
The Seattle government has also taken steps to protect citizens’ right to protest. It has enacted policies and initiatives like the City Policy on Immigration Enforcement, the Stand Together Initiative, and Know Your Rights resources, which provide information on how to recognize Seattle Police officers and vehicles.
Beyond city government initiatives, organized groups with missions to advocate for or with targeted populations continue to work toward building a better state.
Two organizations in particular are making a difference in Washington through their own initiatives, reflecting the broader work being done to elevate voices and communities across the state.
Washington Bus
The Washington Bus is the largest youth-led organization working to harness and empower the political power of Washington’s youth, especially those who have been historically disenfranchised.
Despite the name, there is no bus involved in their work; rather, the name represents the organization’s mobility across the state as it sponsors leadership development, advocacy efforts, and voter mobilization for Washington youth.
“We consider ourselves the political home for young organizers in Washington state, advocating for progressive change in a multiracial democracy,” Bailey Medilo, the communications manager for Washington Bus, said. “We are the ones who are constantly in collaboration with community leaders, especially government institutions, elected officials, and grassroots organizations, to build capacity and access for young people in political spaces.”
The Bus acts as a stepping stone for young activists to learn to become better leaders and advocate for the issues they care about. By providing a space for youth leaders to grow, Medilo said these leaders are likely to engage their peers and encourage more youth to get involved in activism, organizing, and voting.
The Bus acts as a stepping stone for Washington youth who are activists in their communities and can learn to become better leaders and advocate for the issues they care about. By providing a space for youth leaders to grow as activists, Medilo said their leaders are likely to engage their peers and more youth to get involved in activism, organizing, and voting.
“[We] ensure that youth organizations can persist in a healthy, expansive way in Washington state and build on existing infrastructure,” Medilo said. “But we also explore ways that we can reimagine how political spaces for young people can be developed and created.”
To get involved with the Washington Bus, there are some paid positions available, as well as several ways to participate through events, cohorts, and councils. The Bus Underground is a youth-led organizer clinic that offers leadership development to help youth build connections with a community of like-minded activists and organizers.
One of their most successful initiatives has been their summer fellowship, where 12 people from across the state are selected from communities in need of intensive youth leadership training. The Bus helps them gain skills that can lead to professional positions, including campaign managers and political activists.
“We have a philosophy of believing in the best intentions of our youth population and our youth voters,” Medilo said. “We believe that if young people are given the tools and the resources to engage in change-making, they will engage in change-making.”
Civic Commons
Civic Commons has the overarching goal of uniting people across Washington state to achieve greater racial and economic equity.
The organization uses three core programs—Belonging, Scorecard, and Network Weaving—to provide training, relationship-building, and a network to empower communities to achieve equitable outcomes, such as homeownership.
“We’re bridging the fragmentation across sectors and communities to build the trust and relational muscle that’s necessary to tackle the issues to get to outcomes,” Michael Brown, the founder and Chief Architect of Civic Commons, said.
The Belonging programs offer programming to build a sense of belonging in neighborhoods, towns, cities, and campuses across Washington state. They aim to build trust and a sense of community before helping groups reach shared goals. The Scorecard for Shared Prosperity serves as a data resource to measure change across the Puget Sound region and help provide insight into how communities are evolving.
The Network Weaving program builds relationships across two major initiatives: the Black Home Initiative, which works to increase the rate of Black homeownership in Western Washington, and Starter Home Plan WA, which works to make homeownership more accessible for low- and moderate-income households.
Through Starter Home Plan WA, Civic Commons provides the resources and tools necessary to help lower-income households in Washington begin their homeownership journey with confidence and knowledge.
Brown identifies the Black Home Initiative as one of their most successful and impactful programs. The organization developed a plan to help 1,500 low-to-moderate-income Black individuals become homeowners between South Seattle and Thurston County by 2028, with a long-term goal of reaching 3,000 homeowners over 10 years.
Brown said the initiative’s progress so far has been possible as a result of “A network bridging sectors and a community working together to achieve something none of them could do on their own.”
Brown added that many other cities and states have begun modeling their own initiatives after the Black Home Initiative to increase homeownership rates among low- to moderate-income Black individuals.
“The essence of our work is the foundational pieces around belonging, but once we create that, it’s really then appealing to the leaders across those various sectors and communities,” Brown said.
Civic Commons has made an impact across the state, particularly in Seattle, where it continues to create new programs and products that accelerate the journey toward building a more racially and economically equitable state.
Both the Washington Bus and Civic Commons are driving change in Washington in unique ways. Through their models, they are helping diverse demographics across the state not only improve their lives and build a better society, but also advocate for their own futures and aspirations.
Daniela Mattson is a student at the University of Southern California and a Fulcrum Fellowship cohort member.
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ICE agents stand guard in front of protesters outside the federal immigration center at Delaney Hall in Newark, where ICE is housing detained immigrants on May 26, 2026 in Newark, New Jersey.
Last week, while the world watched JD Vance fly to Switzerland to negotiate an Iran deal, a quieter document surfaced from inside the Department of Homeland Security that may matter more to the daily lives of Americans than anything that happened at Lake Lucerne. A DHS Privacy Threshold Analysis, obtained and reported by NPR, outlines plans to give approximately 1,300 local police forces access to the same facial recognition technology that federal ICE agents currently use in the field. The app is called the ICE Task Force Module. It allows an officer to photograph any person they stop, run the image against federal databases, and receive an identity match in seconds. Every photograph taken is stored in a DHS system for fifteen years. The document states plainly that this surveillance will sweep up American citizens. The DHS knows this. It is proceeding anyway.
This is not an immigration story. It is a surveillance infrastructure story, and the distinction is the most important thing to understand about what is being built.
The ICE Task Force Module is already in partial operation. Community members in Minnesota and Maine have reported that federal immigration officers photographed their faces and license plates during enforcement operations, and that officers appeared to already know their names and addresses before approaching them. That is what real-time facial recognition plus a fifteen-year database looks like in practice: it means that attending a public event, standing on a sidewalk near an ICE operation, or legally observing an enforcement action can result in a photograph entering a federal file that persists for over a decade.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin acknowledged to Congress that the agency has already used facial recognition on protesters, including identifying people who attended protests in Oregon and cross-referencing them with individuals present at protests in Newark. That is not an incidental use of immigration technology. That is the surveillance of political activity, conducted by a federal immigration agency, stored in a database for fifteen years.
The DHS's own document provides the clearest evidence of what the program will do to people who are not its stated targets. The text reads: "It is conceivable that a photo taken by an ICE non-federal law enforcement officer using the TFM mobile application could be that of someone other than a removable individual, including U.S. citizens." The use of the word "conceivable" is the bureaucratic tell. The document is not describing an edge case. It is describing the standard operating reality of any biometric surveillance system deployed on public streets. Facial recognition software makes errors. It makes more errors with darker skin tones. The people most likely to be wrongly identified and detained are the people who were already most exposed to aggressive enforcement.
Patrick Eddington of the Cato Institute put it directly: giving 1,300 police agencies this capability makes face surveillance "ubiquitous on American streets." This is no longer a speculative concern about future technology. It is a description of a program being rolled out now, through a network of local police forces who were never elected to run a federal surveillance operation and who have no independent oversight mechanism for how the photographs they collect are used.
The most important thing about what is being built is that it will not end with this administration. Surveillance infrastructure, once constructed and normalized, almost never contracts. The fifteen-year retention window for photographs taken today means that a database assembled under a deportation mandate in 2026 will still exist, fully searchable, in 2041. A different administration with different priorities will inherit a tool capable of identifying, locating, and tracking millions of Americans whose faces were captured during immigration operations they had nothing to do with.
Congress has the authority to require that biometric data collected in the course of immigration enforcement be purged after a defined period, that its use be restricted to the stated purpose of that enforcement, and that any secondary use, including tracking protest attendance, require a warrant. None of those safeguards currently exist. None appear to be under serious consideration. The database grows, photograph by photograph, fifteen-year retention by fifteen-year retention, while the debate remains focused on Switzerland.
Consider what this looks like on the ground. On March 27, 2026, ICE agents in Huntington Beach surrounded a man next to his vehicle, failed to establish his identity through conventional means, and then attempted to scan his face using facial recognition technology. The man was not suspected of any crime. No warrant had been issued. He was a United States citizen. On December 10, 2025, in Cedar-Riverside, Minneapolis, a 20-year-old American citizen named Mubashir Khalif Hussen was stopped by masked ICE agents walking to lunch. He repeated, "I'm a citizen, I'm a citizen." The agents refused to look at his ID. He was shackled and driven to a federal building before being released. His face is now in a federal database. It will remain there until 2041.
These are not isolated incidents. Facial recognition systems have already misidentified individuals, leading to wrongful arrests and months of detention for people with no connection to any alleged activity. Fifteen known people in the United States have been wrongfully arrested due to facial recognition errors; virtually all of them were Black. The system that generated those errors is now being scaled to 1,300 local police forces and integrated into a fifteen-year federal database.
The political will to stop this exists, but it is not being applied. The technology is being deployed in the noise of a news cycle saturated with Iran, Switzerland, and British politics. By the time the public focuses on what has been built, most of the building will already be done. That is, of course, precisely the point.
Imran Khalid is a physician, geostrategic analyst, and freelance writer.
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner speaks to voters at a town hall at the Elks Lodge 188 on June 7, 2026, in Portland, Maine.
McConnell and Platner both feel entitled
The two men could not be more different. One, a Republican, octogenarian, seven-term Southern senator, the other a progressive, millennial Maine oysterman who’s never spent a day in elected office.
But Mitch McConnell, the senior senator from Kentucky who’s been MIA for the past few weeks and Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate who’s facing calls to drop out of his race against Sen. Susan Collins, apparently do have something in common: an outsized sense of entitlement.
McConnell, who is 84 and not running for reelection, has been hospitalized for three weeks, and yet we still don’t fully know what he was admitted for or what his condition is. Per CNN, “his office has not disclosed a medical reason for the hospitalization or provided specifics on his health status beyond saying last week that he ‘continues to improve’ and ‘is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters.’ ”
While several legislators have said they’ve talked to him and insist he sounds strong, others have said they are completely in the dark. One MAGA influencer, Laura Loomer, posted ”High level source close to the White House tells me ‘Mitch McConnell is officially brain dead. He’s not coming back.’ ”
Meanwhile, up in Maine, Platner has been artfully dodging calls from his own party to drop out of his race after several allegations of misconduct from women, including a sexual assault allegation from a former girlfriend, came to light. While Platner, who has managed to survive a Nazi-tattoo scandal, a sexting scandal, and several old tweets scandals, denies the allegations, he has not quit.
High-profile Democrats including Sens. Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer, the latter of whom had unsuccessfully hand-selected Maine Gov. Janet Mills to face Collins instead of Platner, have urged Platner to drop out, while other Dems have accused him of trying to influence the picking of his replacement.
Maine Democratic Party Executive Director Devon Murphy-Anderson released a statement Tuesday, which said in part:
“Unfortunately, Graham Platner’s team has repeatedly reached out to us in an attempt to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like. We have repeatedly reiterated to Graham Platner’s team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate nor in determining what this process looks like.”
Both incidents show a deep lack of accountability to voters, who in one case deserve to know whether their senator is capable of performing his duties, and in another deserve a candidate who isn’t being accused of crimes, bigotry and deception.
The offensive and odious entitlement of both McConnell and Platner stands out not because it is particularly unique among today’s political class. Tom Kean, the New Jersey GOP congressman, missed more than 100 votes, only sharing after a three-month mystery absence that he was dealing with depression.
Former President Joe Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin failed to disclose a hospitalization for prostate cancer surgery, flouting the established rules for Cabinet members and senior U.S. officials.
From Biden’s insistence on running for reelection despite his obvious cognitive and political weaknesses to Trump’s brazen flouting of laws and norms, few politicians seem to appreciate that their public service job comes with responsibilities to constituents, including transparency and honesty.
But both parties increasingly justify the chicanery, because the stakes of winning elections and keeping power are simply too high. But that’s no excuse. If we’ve learned anything over the past decade, it’s that character and accountability do, in fact, matter. And when we, the voters, stop caring about it, well, so do they.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.