“”What’s interesting about crime in DC is that there’s three very distinct problems,” writes Reason’s Robby Soave, who lives there. “One is semi-professional gang crime, mostly confined to sketchy neighborhoods, that usually targets other gang members. This is the kind of crime every large city has, and is counteracted by spending more money on homicide detectives and then aggressively prosecuting illegal firearms violators.”
“Then there’s mentally ill and drug addicted homeless people setting up tent cities,” he continues, noting that the most egregiously large and disorderly encampments were cleaned up. “Lastly, there are large groups of teenagers rampaging through otherwise fairly nice and affluent areas, assaulting people and stealing cars, and also getting into fights with each other. Seems to be driven by a mix of post-pandemic societal collapse, trends in youth behavior, and insufficient action by authorities. It’s here where a more robust police presence might do the most good.” It’s this third group that news reports are mostly fixating on, the group responsible for the Big Balls assault and that has caught Trump’s attention.”
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Crime is down, and, “though the decrease is laudable, this is in part because crime and disorder were rampant during the pandemic. It has taken years for it to come down to seminormal rates, and those “normal rates” aren’t even that good: “The murder rate at the end of 2024 was, per Asher’s data, lower than 2023, but still about 70 percent higher than that of a decade prior. And although carjackings are down, they’re still elevated over pre-2020.” But lots of crime data is unfortunately easy to manipulate, and novel approaches by new entrants—young people engaged in serious property crime and assaults in previously safe areas—are surely worth stamping out as they emerge.
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a ton of D.C.’s criminal justice system is already under the federal government’s control, and the feds are doing a rather poor job managing it. “That starts with the US attorney’s office, which, unlike a normal federal prosecutor’s office, also does the job of a district attorney and prosecutes local crimes. More significantly, the basic local trial court—the DC Superior Court—is technically a federal court whose members need to be confirmed by the Senate. Senate majority leaders, understandably, are normally not that fired up about local trial courts in DC, and they don’t like to spend floor time on these confirmations.” A high vacancy rate (roughly 20 percent) is the result, which means people in need of punishment don’t receive it so swiftly.
The federal government also handles pretrial supervision for people who’ve been arrested and are awaiting full court proceedings, adds Yglesias, but the agencies handling this can’t seem to figure out how to do their damn jobs: The Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, in 2023, “had 2,120 offenders on ‘maximum supervision level’ but only 490 outfitted with GPS monitors,” for example, per Politico. And when a pretrial release of a man accused of shooting 26 rounds from an AR-15 at a car made the rounds on the news, the Pretrial Services Agency came under intense scrutiny, with prosecutors writing in a legal filing that “while GPS monitoring by the vendor may be in real time, PSA’s monitoring of defendants is not. PSA only works during normal business hours. Therefore, PSA only finds out about violations that occur at night or on weekends after the fact.” (When would you guess that the majority of violations occur?)
Trump, of course, is not focused on the unsexy work detailed above, which could meaningfully impact which criminals get locked up and how quickly, who gets leniency and who gets surveilled and confined.”
“Vivergo’s plant is now at risk of closure due to the U.K.-U.S. trade deal, which allows 1.4 billion liters of tariff-free American ethanol into the British market. It’s a volume Vivergo’s managing director Ben Hackett says is equivalent to the entire U.K. bioethanol market.
Unless ministers intervene, 160 staff at Vivergo — one of only two major bioethanol producers in the U.K. — will lose their jobs from Aug. 18. Thousands more in farming and haulage will also feel the impact.”
“The Trump administration is now struggling to reconcile its mass deportation efforts with the need to keep farm production going. Huerta is not optimistic about how it will all play out, though she was able to poke at Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ recent suggestion that automation will soon replace human laborers. “I guess I could just wait until they get enough robots to do the farm work,” Huerta joked.”
“The Trump administration is escalating its efforts to punish lawyers whom it sees as obstacles to the president’s agenda.
The Justice Department is asking a federal judge to impose “substantial monetary sanctions” on a California lawyer who briefly halted but ultimately failed to block the deportation of an immigrant from Laos who pleaded guilty to attempted murder in the 1990s.”
“Big American companies are also reporting growing tariff expenses.
Ford said last week it paid $800 million in tariffs in the second quarter and could shell out as much as $3 billion this year. General Motors reported a $1.1 billion tariff hit in the second quarter and said trade friction could cost the automaker $4 billion to $5 billion in 2025.
Heavy equipment manufacturer Caterpillar warned this week that rising tariffs could cost it $1.5 billion this year. And Apple CEO Tim Cook – who was at the White House on Wednesday to announce an additional $100 billion investment in the U.S. — said the company paid $800 million in tariffs in its most recent quarter and faced another $1.1 billion this quarter.
The White House has pointed to the more than $136 billion it has already collected in tariff revenue, as well as agreements from a number of trading partners to lower tariff barriers and invest billions in the U.S., as a sign that Trump’s approach is working.
However, nearly seven months after he took office, there has been no uptick in manufacturing employment, which remains flat at 12.7 million workers. The increased tariff revenue also amounts to slightly more than 7 percent of the $1.9 trillion federal government budget deficit projected in fiscal 2025.
A survey released this week by the National Foreign Trade Council, a business group, found that companies have been increasingly forced to delay or reduce their product and service offerings due to rising costs and sourcing challenges.
The administration has also shown little sympathy for companies complaining of higher tariff costs and supply chain disruptions.”
“The census is a constitutionally mandated count of every person in the United States every 10 years, which was last conducted in 2020. A full census has never been conducted mid-decade in this manner, nor has one ever excluded noncitizens from the count.
Censuses are immensely important in American governance; each count determines how many House seats every state gets through a process called apportionment, and the results of the census help direct billions of dollars in federal, state and local funding.
Trump has been trying to include a citizenship question on the census since his first term, though the Supreme Court struck the effort down on procedural grounds in 2019. Apportionment numbers have also historically included people residing in the United States regardless of their immigration status.
A 2020 Pew Research Center report indicated removing noncitizens could cost multiple states House seats, including California and Texas.
Any attempt to do a mid-decade census would likely result in a flurry of legal and logistical challenges. Preparing for the decennial count takes multiple years, and planning for the 2030 census is already well underway.
It is unclear how the Trump administration plans to exclude undocumented people from the count, or if the president intended to just remove them from apportionment totals, which would also face legal hurdles.”
President Trump literally arrested a legal resident based on his speech. This is a huge, massive infringement of basic democratic rights by a president who ran on free speech.
Because the man was educated, in custody, people getting deported would talk to him and ask him questions. A man who had been in the country for over 20 years and had four children under 11, was showing up to his immigration hearing when he was grabbed to be deported. Another person asked him what a paper he signed was. The paper said he was to be deported. Another 19-year old asked if it would be safe for his mom to visit him, the answer was no. The immigration detention center had a lot of crying people in it. These people were depicted as criminals by the administration when they were picked up at their immigration hearings and their jobs.
Khalil missed the birth of his child because Trump decided to arrest him based on speech. The justification required the Secretary of State to go along with it. Marco Rubio did, losing what little dignity he had left. Khalil requested to be temporarily let out for the birth of his child. HIs request was denied.
I disagree with a lot of what he says about Palestine and Israel, but his detention was an insult to the principles that democracy stands on.
“State contracts for Florida’s controversial “Alligator Alcatraz” detention camp were removed from a public database and replaced with far less detailed documents after media outlets began writing about them…
The Florida Division of Emergency Management (FDEM), which is overseeing the state’s new immigrant detention camp in the Everglades, says the contracts contained “proprietary information.”…
open government advocates and state Democratic lawmakers say that removing details of the contracts flies in the face of Florida’s promises to provide transparency in public spending, especially given the massive expenditures of taxpayer money involved. The most recent reporting on the ballooning costs of the Everglades detention camp puts it at $250 million and growing.”
“The Trump administration has awarded a Virginia-based defense contractor a $1.26 billion contract to build a 5,000-bed immigration detention center in El Paso, Texas, reports Bloomberg. The newest—and biggest—facility will be located at the 1 million-acre Fort Bliss Army base, equipped with tents for detention infrastructure and an airport to serve as a deportation hub.”