Books&Ideas

When Even Foreign Affairs Says the U.S. Is Authoritarian

In December 2025, Foreign Affairs published an article by Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Ziblatt titled “The Price of American Authoritarianism,” arguing that the United States is now an authoritarian country, not a functioning democracy, and that whether it remains so depends on how institutions and citizens respond in the coming months and years.This is a striking development. Foreign Affairs is arguably the most influential foreign‑policy magazine in the United States, long a venue where the foreign‑policy establishment talks to itself, from George Kennan’s anonymous “X Article” in 1947 to Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” in 1993, and contributions by figures such as Hillary Clinton, Donald Rumsfeld, Ashton Carter, Colin Powell, David Petraeus, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Stanley McChrystal, and Henry Kissinger.

That three of the most prominent scholars of democratic backsliding—the authors of How Democracies Die—now say, in this flagship establishment journal, that the U.S. is already an authoritarian regime, not a functioning democracy, marks an important threshold. Whether this condition can be reversed, they argue, depends on how citizens and institutions now respond. Yet this conclusion has barely pierced mainstream coverage, which still tends to describe Trump’s second term as unusually hard‑edged populism rather than a completed regime change.

The first weeks of 2026 have thrown this system into stark relief: an ICE agent killing a citizen on camera; Special Operations forces abducting Venezuela’s president; a single executive order withdrawing the U.S. from 66 international organizations and climate/IHL regimes; open threats to “own” Greenland despite Danish warnings that would mean the end of NATO; and a New York Times interview in which Trump declares that the only limit on his global powers is “my own morality. My own mind.” The question is no longer whether the United States is drifting toward authoritarianism. The question is whether we are willing to see—and name—the regime we already live under, and the bipartisan paths that brought us here.

1) The Silent Judicial Coup

Levitsky, Way, and Ziblatt reassure readers that, unlike in Hungary or Turkey, “courts in the U.S. remain robust and independent.” That may have been true in 2017. It is not true in 2026. In 2025, a little‑noticed Supreme Court decision—Trump v. CASA—quietly rewrote how federal courts can respond when a president breaks the law.

Before CASA, if a district judge concluded that a federal policy was unconstitutional, they could often issue a nationwide (universal) injunction: a temporary order stopping the government from enforcing that policy against anyone while the case moved up on appeal. The administration attacked these orders as “judicial overreach” and argued that lower‑court judges should only be allowed to block a contested policy as to the specific people who had sued. In Trump v. CASA (2025), they got their wish. In a 6–3 emergency ruling on the Court’s “shadow docket”—without full briefing or oral argument, via an unsigned order with Justice Barrett providing the rationale over a sharp dissent by Justice Sotomayor—the Court held that universal injunctions exceed the constitutional power of lower federal courts. From then on, district judges could no longer halt a policy nationwide; they could offer relief only to named plaintiffs or to members of a carefully certified class.

In plain terms: if a president announces an unconstitutional mass‑deportation or surveillance program today, a judge can still help the people who manage to sue—but can no longer simply hit a “pause button” for everyone else while the case is litigated.

L.G.M.L. v. Noem shows what this looks like in practice. In August 2025, advocates discovered that the administration planned to put at least 327 unaccompanied Guatemalan children on planes over Labor Day weekend and send them to Guatemala, without giving them the hearings and protections Congress guaranteed them under federal law. Lawyers scrambled: they filed a lawsuit in Washington, D.C. in the middle of the night, just hours before the first flights. At 4:22 a.m., the federal judge on duty, Sparkle Sooknanan, issued an emergency order stopping the government from deporting the ten children named in the case.

Later that day, after an urgent hearing, Judge Sooknanan expanded her order. She said the government also had to pause removals for a larger class of children: unaccompanied Guatemalan kids in federal custody who did not yet have final deportation orders. On September 18, she turned that temporary order into a preliminary injunction, finding that the administration’s supposed “reunification” plan likely violated the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act by simply ignoring the process Congress had laid out for unaccompanied minors.

The ruling mattered enormously for those children. Some were literally taken off planes and brought back into federal custody because of it. But notice what it did not do. It did not stop the administration from trying similar mass removals for children from Honduras, El Salvador, or elsewhere. It did not protect Guatemalan children who were not yet in the specific kind of custody covered by the order, or who entered the system after the class was defined. Under the post‑CASA rules, the judge could not simply say: “This kind of secret weekend airlift is illegal for any unaccompanied child, so you must stop doing it, full stop.”

Even at its best, then, the case functioned as emergency triage for a specific, defined group at a specific moment, not as a broad brake on executive behavior held to violate the constitution. That is now the norm. CASA and the shadow docket have turned federal courts from institutions that could once stop a lawless program in its tracks into institutions that can only carve out narrow pockets of safety for those lucky enough to reach them in time. A judiciary that can no longer issue broad, promptly enforceable injunctions is not the robust bulwark Levitsky’s comparative story presupposes.(see:

Sources on CASA and the Shadow Docket (Working Bibliography)

Trump v. CASA, Inc., 24A884 (June 27, 2025), U.S. Supreme Court opinion.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a884_8n59.pdf

Congressional Research Service, “Trump v. CASA, Inc. and Nationwide Injunctions During the Second Trump Administration,” CRS Legal Sidebar, July 15, 2025.
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48600

“CASA’s Complete Relief Paradox,” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 139 (Dec. 9, 2025).
https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-139/casas-complete-relief-paradox/

“Reining in Relief: Trump v. CASA and the Judicial Retreat from Nationwide Injunctions,” Columbia Law Review Online, Jan. 2, 2026.
https://www.culawreview.org/journal/reining-in-relief-trump-v-casa-and-the-judicial-retreat-from-nationwide-injunctions

Mila Sohoni, “What Trump v. CASA Means for the Future of Universal Relief in Administrative Law,” Yale Journal on Regulation (Notice & Comment), July 14, 2025.
https://www.yalejreg.com/nc/what-trump-v-casa-means-for-the-future-of-universal-relief-in-administrative-law/

“Trump v. CASA and the Future of the Universal Injunction,” SCOTUSblog, July 1, 2025.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/07/trump-v-casa-and-the-future-of-the-universal-injunction/

Cary Coglianese & co., “Judicial Remedies After CASA,” The Regulatory Review (Univ. of Pennsylvania), Aug. 10, 2025.
https://www.theregreview.org/2025/08/11/coglianese-wiener-judicial-remedies-after-casa/

“How New Restrictions on Universal Injunctions Could Change Litigation Strategies,” ArentFox Schiff client alert, Aug. 14, 2025.
https://www.afslaw.com/perspectives/alerts/how-new-restrictions-universal-injunctions-could-change-litigation-strategies

Brennan Center for Justice, “Supreme Court Shadow Docket Tracker — Challenges to Trump Administration Actions,” 2025–26.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/supreme-court-shadow-docket-tracker-challenges-trump-administration

Brennan Center for Justice, “Supreme Court Must Explain Why It Keeps Ruling in Trump’s Favor,” Aug. 14, 2025.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/supreme-court-must-explain-why-it-keeps-ruling-trumps-favor

2) Gaza, NAS, and Bipartisan Authoritarian Machinery

If CASA is the silent judicial coup, Gaza and NAS ("New Anti-Semitism" that equates criticism of Israeli policy vis a vis Arabs with discrimination against Jews treating the latter as illegal ) are the core of the political and legal apparatus that Trump now uses against universities, NGOs, and dissent—and they are bipartisan in origin.

Gaza as Genocide, and as a Test of Law

By late summer 2025, a striking convergence had emerged among the people whose professional work is to distinguish genocide, ethnic cleansing, and “mere” mass atrocity. The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) adopted a resolution declaring that “Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide in Article II” of the Genocide Convention, citing indiscriminate and deliberate attacks on civilians, the destruction of over 90 percent of Gaza’s housing, mass displacement, and the destruction of schools, universities, and cultural institutions. The International Court of Justice, in provisional orders on South Africa’s case, found it “plausible” that Israel’s acts infringe “the right of the Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide,” and ordered Israel to prevent genocidal acts and enable humanitarian relief.

Leading genocide and Holocaust scholars—many of them Israeli, Jewish, or from survivor families—went further. Omer Bartov, an Israeli‑American historian and former IDF soldier, warned of a “systematic attempt to make Gaza uninhabitable” and to destroy the institutions that allow a group to sustain itself physically and culturally. Amos Goldberg described what he saw as “the intentional destruction of Palestinian society,” arguing that the goal was not merely to defeat Hamas but to “break the very possibility of life for Palestinians in Gaza.” William Schabas, perhaps the most influential living authority on the Genocide Convention, called South Africa’s case “arguably the strongest case of genocide ever brought before the [ICJ],” pointing to both patterns of conduct and “explicit statements and clear indications of policy” by senior Israeli officials. In multiple interviews, Schabas added that third‑party states—including the United States, Germany, Canada, and others—risk legal responsibility as accomplices to genocide if they provide “material assistance of a significant nature” in the face of this record.

This was not a marginal view. It was the emerging consensus of the professional community entrusted with guarding the legal and historical meaning of “genocide.” Yet U.S. policy under Biden did not fundamentally change. Washington continued large‑scale arms transfers and diplomatic cover, vetoing ceasefire and accountability resolutions, pressuring the ICC, sanctioning UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese, and joining efforts to isolate UNRWA based on contested and, in many cases, unsubstantiated allegations.

Biden himself effectively acknowledged the moral stakes. In his farewell Oval Office interview with Lawrence O’Donnell, he recounted a 2023 exchange in which Netanyahu demanded heavy bombs and, by Biden’s own telling, made clear he intended to use them not only against Hamas fighters but across Gaza’s urban areas. Biden says he protested, “Bibi, you can’t be carpet bombing these communities,” only to be told that the United States had done exactly that in World War II in Dresden and Tokyo, and that “it was justified.” Biden replied that this was why the UN and post‑1945 rules were created, but when Netanyahu pressed, “Would you really give me that line if it was your citizens and your children?” Biden admits, “I had nothing to say. What could I say to that?”—and then stopped resisting. Schabas’s warning that the U.S. itself could one day face findings of complicity is not an abstract law‑school hypothetical; it applies to decisions Biden has already publicly described.

NAS, Title VI, and Biden-Era Priming

While this was happening abroad, a parallel architecture was being built at home under the banner of fighting antisemitism. The Biden administration, with Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff as a high‑profile convenor, worked closely with organizations such as the ADL, AJC, and ISGAP to promote a “new antisemitism” (NAS) framework that equated a wide range of criticism of Israel and Zionism with antisemitism and “hate.” Central to this effort was the informal adoption of the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, which folds core political positions (e.g., describing Israel as an apartheid state, calling for a binational or single democratic state) into examples of antisemitism—even though IHRA has never been enacted into U.S. law and remains non‑binding.

After October 2023, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights issued letters and guidance that effectively encouraged universities to treat much pro‑Palestine speech and organizing as potential Title VI violations, on the theory that they created a hostile environment for Jewish students. Legal analyses and reports by the AAUP and civil‑rights clinics show that OCR staff and informal “Dear Colleague” messages treated slogans like “From the river to the sea” and “intifada” as presumptively suspect, priming administrators to see Palestine solidarity as a compliance risk.

The result was an unprecedented wave of campus repression in 2024–25. Encampments at Columbia, UCLA, UT Austin, Emory, and elsewhere were cleared with heavy police force, often at the urging or with the blessing of Democratic officials such as New York mayor Eric Adams and Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, who framed the protests as infiltrated by “Hamas supporters” and hotbeds of antisemitism. At the federal level, high‑profile House hearings dragged the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT into McCarthy‑style show trials in which they were accused of enabling “genocidal antisemitism” and pressed to promise bans on wide swaths of pro‑Palestine speech. All three ultimately lost their jobs—even though, by that point, their own administrations had already suspended or derecognized groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine on multiple campuses.

Crucially, the underlying factual record did not match the panic narrative. Systematic reviews of Title VI complaints and incident reports found that the vast majority of cases involved speech, protest chants, disruptions, and “atmosphere,” not adjudicated patterns of physical attacks on Jewish students by Gaza protesters. By contrast, multiple documented incidents involved violence against Gaza protesters, including Jewish ones: chemical “skunk spray” attacks at Columbia, baton charges and rubber bullets at other encampments. In other words, a legally and rhetorically inflated antisemitism panic—tied explicitly to Gaza and NAS—was used to normalize police repression and administrative sanctions against a largely nonviolent student movement.

Trump’s Escalation

When Trump returned to office in 2025, he inherited this apparatus and turned it into a blunt authoritarian instrument. Building on the NAS framework and Biden‑era OCR guidance, the administration and allied Republicans have:

Launched sweeping Title VI investigations of universities, threatening to cut billions in federal funding and strip tax‑exempt status from “antisemitic” institutions.

What Levitsky’s otherwise powerful analysis of Trump’s war on universities omits is this genealogy. Trump 2.0 has not invented the legal tools he now uses to cow higher education, museums, and cultural institutions. He is wielding and radicalizing Biden‑era NAS and Title VI/IHRA machinery forged in the crucible of Gaza. Any account that treats the current moment as the work of one party, acting on a blank slate, fails to see how liberal and centrist actors helped build the infrastructure of today’s authoritarianism, even if they did not intend the result.

One System: From Gaza to ICE, Venezuela, Treaties, and Greenland

The same pattern appears when we move from universities and courts to policing and foreign policy. Trump’s own words in his January 8 interview with the New York Times supply the conceptual key. Asked whether there were any limits on his global powers as commander in chief, he replied:

“Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me… I don’t need international law.”

Pressed on whether his administration needed to abide by international law, he offered a perfunctory “I do,” then immediately added, “It depends what your definition of international law is,” making clear that, in his view, he is the arbiter of when such norms apply. He cited with pride the strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the “decapitation” of Venezuela’s government, and his insistence that the United States must own Greenland, a territory of NATO ally Denmark. Sovereignty, treaties, and post‑1945 restraints appear in this account not as binding law but as negotiable instruments subordinate to a single will.

ICE and CBP: Paramilitary at Home

Domestically, that same contempt for constraint is most visible in the conduct of ICE and CBP tactical units, which now function less like ordinary law‑enforcement and more like internal paramilitary forces. Since September 2025, at least eleven shootings by ICE or Border Patrol agents in U.S. cities have been documented, including at least two cases in which U.S. citizens were shot in or from their vehicles. In none of these cases has any agent been criminally charged.

Two recent incidents, both involving women labelled “terrorists” for allegedly “weaponizing” cars, illustrate the pattern.

In October 2025 in Chicago, Border Patrol agent Charles Exum shot Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen, five times after agents claimed her car had rammed and boxed in their vehicle. Martinez and a co‑defendant were charged with forcibly assaulting a federal officer. But in November, the Justice Department moved to dismiss all charges, and in December a federal judge denied a request to release body‑camera footage from the incident. At a November hearing, defense counsel confronted Exum with his own text messages: “Cool, I’m up for another round of **** around and find out. Lmao”; “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book, boys”; “Sweet. My 15 mins of fame. Lmao.” Exum admitted he turned his bodycam on only after the shooting, leaving it on the passenger seat because he believed he would be a “target” if people saw it recording. Despite this record of apparent gloating and evidence manipulation, Exum has not been charged.

In January 2026 in Minneapolis, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37‑year‑old citizen, after she parked her SUV perpendicular to the street, blocked an ICE convoy for several minutes, and attempted to drive away. Within hours, Trump and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem labeled Good a “domestic terrorist” who had “weaponized her vehicle” and tried to run over agents, and Noem repeated this characterization at a press conference. But multi‑angle analyses by CNN and the New York Times tell a different story. By synchronizing home‑surveillance video, bystander footage, and Ross’s own phone recording, CNN showed that as Good turned her wheels to the right and accelerated, Ross moved to the left side of the SUV, drew his weapon, and fired three shots into the driver’s window as the vehicle passed, with his feet clearly on the pavement and his body outside the car’s path. The New York Times’s forensic video analysis likewise concluded that “the vehicle appears to be turning away from a federal officer as he opened fire,” and that synchronized clips show “the agent is not being run over. In fact, his feet are positioned away from the SUV.” Use‑of‑force experts interviewed on CNN noted that DOJ policy instructs officers to move out of a vehicle’s path and de‑escalate, and that firing from the side into a car moving away is very difficult to square with a claim of imminent mortal danger.

Hours after the killing, masked ICE and CBP agents led by CBP head Craig Mivino entered Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis at dismissal time, tackling students, pepper‑spraying bystanders, and handcuffing two staff members, prompting the district to cancel classes for the rest of the week. A school official told Minnesota Public Radio, “They don’t care, they’re just animals. I’ve never seen people behave like this.” Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, drawing on a months‑long Senate investigation of ICE/CBP force, described the agencies as being turned into a “nationwide paramilitary force with vast resources that lawlessly detains citizens based on its own whims,” and said the Minneapolis events “smack of a cover‑up,” noting that DHS was blocking state and local police from investigating the shooting. Noem has since announced that “hundreds of federal troops” are being sent to Minneapolis, ostensibly to investigate “fraud,” in the immediate wake of the scandal.

In both Martinez and Good’s cases, then, we see the same cycle: lethal force against civilians; instant framing by top officials and right‑wing media as “terrorism” via “weaponized” cars; video or documentary evidence that undercuts those claims; suppression of key footage; and no criminal accountability. This is not ordinary over‑policing. It is the internalization of war‑on‑terror rhetoric and practice—masked squads, domestic “enemy” categories, impunity—inside U.S. cities.

Venezuela, Treaties, Greenland

Externally, the same pattern appears in Trump’s approach to Venezuela, the treaty system, and Greenland.

In early January, U.S. special‑operations forces carried out a lightning operation in Caracas to remove President Nicolás Maduro and install a new leadership, without congressional authorization and in obvious violation of the UN Charter’s prohibitions on the use of force and interference in another state’s political independence. The administration has moved to seize effective control over Venezuela’s oil revenues, with allies such as Senator J.D. Vance boasting that the United States will “control the purse strings” and sell Venezuela’s oil “indefinitely” to recoup its “investment.” Former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, in a widely circulated interview, asserted that international law is “largely irrelevant” to great powers and that the U.S. has the right to “govern and control Venezuela” as a matter of strength.

Almost simultaneously, Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the United States from 66 international organizations and treaty‑based bodies, including 31 UN entities and 35 other institutions, many of them central to global climate, health, and environmental cooperation. The White House framed these as “wasteful” or “anti‑American” organizations that infringed U.S. sovereignty, and did not return to the Senate to seek repeal of prior consent for the underlying treaties. This is a sweeping, unilateral retreat from the post‑1945 institutional order that previous administrations of both parties built, ordered by a single person’s pen.

On Greenland, Trump has gone beyond his first‑term musings about “buying” the island. In the Times interview he insists that “ownership is very important,” that Greenland “must become part of the United States,” and that “ownership gives you things… that you can’t get from just signing a document.” Asked whether acquiring Greenland or preserving NATO is a higher priority, he concedes “it may be a choice.” The Danish prime minister has warned that any U.S. military attempt to seize Greenland would mean “everything stops… the end of NATO,” because it would amount to an attack on an ally’s territory.

Taken together, Venezuela’s decapitation, the mass treaty withdrawals, and the Greenland threats are not isolated foreign‑policy disputes. They are the external face of the same personalist regime that deploys ICE as a paramilitary at home, that treats Gaza as a zone beyond law, and that has repurposed civil‑rights law into an instrument for disciplining universities. They enact precisely the worldview Trump described to the Times: law and multilateral constraint are subordinate to his “own mind,” and power, not rules, is the decisive fact.

Beyond “It’s All MAGA”

Levitsky, Way, and Ziblatt are right about several crucial points. They correctly describe the United States today as a competitive authoritarian regime, not a healthy democracy. They emphasize the importance of broad, cross‑ideological coalitions to defend the remaining spaces of electoral and civic competition. And they warn, rightly, that if Trump consolidates further control over the security state and bureaucracy, subsequent elections may become increasingly hollow.

But the analysis needs to go further in three ways.

First, on institutions: the judiciary is not the robust bulwark their comparative narrative assumes. Trump v. CASA and the Supreme Court’s shadow‑docket practices have radically narrowed courts’ ability to issue broad, timely injunctions, transforming even heroic litigation into case‑by‑case triage. The judiciary has, in effect, participated in its own partial disarmament, obviating the need for an overt purge.

Second, on responsibility: the apparatus of repression Trump now wields did not spring fully formed from MAGA. Biden‑era decisions on Gaza, the embrace of NAS and IHRA, the use of Title VI and Dear Colleague letters to police Palestine solidarity, and bipartisan participation in campus crackdowns and McCarthy‑style hearings all pre‑legitimated key tools and narratives. Trump is accelerating and expanding a machinery that liberal and centrist actors helped construct, particularly around the “war on terror” and “new antisemitism.”

Third, on scope: foreign policy is not a separate theatre. Gaza, Venezuela, Greenland, the 66 treaty withdrawals, and sanctions against the ICC and UN officials are not side shows; they are arenas where the regime practices and demonstrates its contempt for law and its fusion of security and private economic interests. The same logic that justifies shielding an ally’s genocide—and that leads William Schabas to warn that the U.S. and Germany themselves may face findings of complicity—also animates ICE’s domestic killings, the criminalization of Gaza protesters, and the casual assertion that only one man’s “own morality” can restrain American power.

A realistic strategy must therefore start from a fuller picture: a personalist, kleptocratic, NAS‑driven, post‑legal regime operating across domestic and international domains, built on bipartisan foundations and now openly contemptuous of both international and constitutional law. Electoral coalitions and civic mobilization remain essential. But they will fail if they treat courts as stronger than they are, if they ignore the foreign/domestic circuit of violence and impunity, or if they refuse to confront how much of today’s authoritarian toolkit was forged in the very institutions that once imagined themselves as bulwarks of liberal democracy.

Working Bibliography (for Endnotes)

You can adapt this into numbered endnotes; I’ve grouped by theme.

Levitsky / regime diagnosis

Steven Levitsky, Lucan A. Way, and Daniel Ziblatt, “The Price of American Authoritarianism,” Foreign Affairs, Dec. 2025.

CASA / courts / L.G.M.L.

Trump v. CASA coverage and analyses on changes to nationwide injunctions and the shadow docket.

Gaza genocide / Schabas / IAGS

International Association of Genocide Scholars, “Resolution on the Situation in Gaza,” Aug. 31, 2025.

Biden / Gaza / NAS / Title VI

Lawrence O’Donnell interview with President Biden (MSNBC), Jan. 2025, recounting the Netanyahu bombs conversation.

ICE / CBP shootings and raids

CNN, “How the ICE shooting unfolded, step by step” / “New video reveals ICE agent’s POV on MN shooting,” Jan. 10, 2026.

Venezuela / treaties / Greenland / NYT interview

David E. Sanger, Tyler Pager, Katie Rogers, and Zolan Kanno‑Youngs, “Trump Lays Out a Vision of Power Restrained Only by ‘My Own Morality’,” New York Times, Jan. 8, 2026.

Pushed legislation to impose civil and even criminal penalties on universities deemed insufficiently aggressive in policing “antisemitic” expression, using IHRA‑style definitions that collapse core criticisms of Israel into hate.

Backed Project Esther and related initiatives that formally label a dense web of campus groups, NGOs, and community organizations as a “Hamas Support Network,” institutionalizing earlier smear campaigns about students “helping Hamas” as an official domestic‑terrorism frame.

“How Bad Is It?: Three Political Scientists Say America Is No Longer a Democracy,” New Yorker Political Scene podcast, Dec. 11, 2025.

L.G.M.L. et al. v. Kristi Noem et al., case documents and summaries: National Center for Youth Law; National Immigration Law Center; Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights; ICAP at Georgetown Law; Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse.

Al Jazeera, “Why did genocide scholars association say Israel’s war on Gaza is genocide?” Sept. 3, 2025.

Human Rights Watch, “Gaza: World Court Orders Israel to Prevent Genocide,” Jan. 26, 2024 (ICJ provisional measures).

William Schabas, interview with European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), “US, Germany, and Others Could Be Held Liable as Accomplices to Genocide in Gaza,” Aug.–Sept. 2025.

William Schabas, interview with Middle East Eye on ICJ, Gaza genocide, and third‑state complicity, Nov. 27, 2025.

Commentary on Schabas’s Gaza work and legacy.

U.S. Department of Education, May 3, 2024 letter from Secretary Cardona regarding antisemitism and Title VI.

AAUP report, “Discriminating Against Dissent: Restrictions on Campus Protest in the Gaza War Era,” Nov. 2025.

Legal/academic analyses on “Efforts to Weaponize Title VI against Pro‑Palestine Speech on Campus.”

House staff report on campus antisemitism and related hearings (Comer, Stefanik, etc.).

New York Times video, “Videos Contradict Trump Administration Account of ICE Shooting in Minneapolis,” Jan. 2026.

Jake Tapper interview with DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, CNN, Jan. 11, 2026 (PDF transcript you provided).

Chris Hayes segment with Sen. Richard Blumenthal on ICE/CBP force and the Roosevelt High School raid, MSNBC, Jan. 2026.

Fox 32 Chicago, “Marimar Martinez update: Bodycam video ordered withheld in Border Patrol agent shooting case,” Dec. 19, 2025.

NPR, “Why is the U.S. pulling out of 31 U.N. groups? And what’s the impact?”, Jan. 8, 2026.

Verfassungsblog, “Retreating from Internationalism: The Announced U.S. Withdrawal from Many International Entities,” Jan. 9, 2026.

White House Fact Sheet, “President Donald J. Trump Withdraws the United States from International Organizations that Undermine U.S. Sovereignty,” Jan. 6, 2026.

Earth.org, “US Withdraws From 66 Int’l Bodies, Including Key Climate Treaties,” Jan. 8, 2026.

Fox News and WTOP coverage of treaty withdrawals and Denmark/Greenland reactions.

Coverage of the Venezuela operation and J.D. Vance’s comments on controlling Venezuelan oil revenues.

Social and broadcast clips of Stephen Miller asserting U.S. rights to “govern and control Venezuela” and dismissing international law.