Roughly 6,600 people who were not citizens were improperly registered to vote over a yearlong span ahead of the 2024 election because of a software error in New Jersey’s motor vehicle system, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill disclosed Tuesday.
The revelation came just days after President Donald Trump’s administration targeted New Jersey as one of four states that the Department of Homeland Security claimed had noncitizens on its voter rolls, along with neighboring Pennsylvania. The White House said the announcement from New Jersey underscored the need for Trump’s proposed national overhaul of elections.
Among the noncitizens, who were wrongly registered between June 2023 and June 2024, fewer than 400 cast a ballot, Sherrill said.
The voters were scattered across the state and registered as Democrats, Republicans, and unaffiliated voters, though the office did not provide percentage breakdowns.
Sherrill, a Democrat who took office in January, pointed a finger at her predecessor, noting that the wrongful registrations took place under former Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy. She said that she “immediately ordered” her chief counsel to investigate the issue andthat the individuals erroneously added to the voter rolls be removed “before the next election,” which will be the November midterms that will determine control of Congress. The individuals have been notified of their planned removal.
“As a military veteran who swore an oath to defend our Constitution, and as a former federal prosecutor, I believe the integrity of our elections is fundamental to our democracy. I am appalled by the reckless failures that allowed this to happen and the lack of transparency shown by those in charge at the time,” Sherrill said in a statement.
Sherrill, at a news conference Tuesday afternoon, said the investigation would determine which elections the noncitizens’ votes were cast in — and whether they included the 2025 gubernatorial race in New Jersey, which Sherrill won, or the 2024 presidential election, when the state went for Vice President Kamala Harris — but neither contest’s outcome would have been changed by these ballots cast.
The glitch occurred when individuals were applying for driver’s licenses and identification cards in New Jersey. Although they answered “no” when asked on a keypad whether they were a U.S. citizen, “through no fault of their own, the system registered them anyway,” Sherrill’s office said.
Trump last Thursday delivered a prime-time address in which he, amid conspiracy theories about his 2020 election loss, claimed the Department of Homeland Security had identified more than 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote across four Democratic-led states —New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, and Nevada — according to a document the White House posted online during Trump’s speech.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed Tuesday on X that more than 35,000 noncitizens could be registered in New Jersey.However, the department has not shared the methodology it used to arrive at that number, and experts have cautioned it could include new citizens who have not been updated in a system meant to check work eligibility.
“Just ONE illegal vote cancels out the vote of a U.S. citizen,” Mullin said.
He said he appreciated Sherrill’s announcement, but “this should’ve been done a LONG time ago.”
Pennsylvania election officials have disputed DHS claims of noncitizen registrations, but the timing of the New Jersey disclosure is sure to fuel scrutiny of the four states.
Sherrill said she learned of the error last Wednesday, the day before Trump’s address.
White House, Republicans call for changes to voting laws
Trump’s administration has been pushing states to hand over unredacted voter rolls and threatening legal consequences for election officials, but New Jersey and Pennsylvania have resisted, saying doing so could put voters’ personal information at risk.
“As the Trump Administration tries to weaponize elections for political gain, I am ensuring we protect our elections. Let me be clear: Donald Trump has zero credibility on the issue of election integrity,” Sherrill said in her statement.
The White House argued that the New Jersey disclosure helped make the case for the SAVE Act, which would require prospective voters to prove their citizenship in order to register to vote.
“Democrats and their media allies have repeatedly said it is impossible for noncitizens to register to vote, let alone cast a ballot. Time and again, they have been proven wrong. As President Trump has said, there is nothing more important than the integrity of our elections,” said Abigail Jackson, a spokesperson for the White House.
The legislation has stalled in the Senate, but the New Jersey announcement will likely renew a push for it ahead of the midterms.
“This is why we must confirm citizenship before anyone registers. Only US citizens should vote in our elections,” U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.) said on X in response to the Garden State’s news.
The senator has yet to weigh in on Pennsylvania’s inclusion on the White House’s list.
U.S. Sen. Cory Booker (D., N.J.) called the failure of the registration software “not acceptable.” But he said he trusts Sherrill and the state to solve the problem and criticized “those who will choose to weaponize this issue” as attempting to undermine confidence in elections.
“I have full confidence in New Jersey’s ability to administer voter registration and elections accurately and securely, and to ensure every legal ballot is counted,” Booker said.
U.S. Sen. Andy Kim, a South Jersey Democrat who criticized Trump’s speech last week, declined to comment.
New Jersey Republicans called for a bipartisan investigation and chastised Democrats for dismissing the issue in the past.
“We believe this issue is not isolated to this one-year time frame or a software glitch. The system and verification process must be improved in order to safeguard our elections,” said Christine Giordano Hanlon, chair of the New Jersey GOP. “The public also deserves to know why this was covered up and who was responsible for keeping this critical information from the public.”
U.S. Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a South Jersey Republican facing a challenge from Cape May Mayor Zack Mullock this fall, said the state should end automatic registration through the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission and require proof of citizenship to register.
“We have had extremely close elections in New Jersey, and God knows how many other ineligible voters may still be on the rolls or how many ballots have been cast without ever being identified,” Van Drew said in a statement. “It is unacceptable.”
The National Voter Registration Act of 1993, commonly known as the motor voter law, requires states to enable people to register to vote through departments of motor vehicles when they are getting a driver’s license. Twenty-three states, including New Jersey and Pennsylvania, provide automatic voter registration through the DMV, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Micah Rasmussen, the director of the nonpartisan Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University in Mercer County, said the wrongful registrations were a small slice of the state’s 6.6 million voters.
“It’s got to be dealt with,” he said. “The administration is dealing with it, but it’s also something well short of systemic.”
He said that the DMV has long been a weak link in motor vehicle voter registration and that it is worth looking into replacing the vendor that runs the registration software.
“On Election Day, when voters can go and argue and plead their case before a judge because they’re not registered and they thought that they were, invariably, it surprises nobody when DMV winds up being the problem,” he said.
This is not the first time a state’s motor vehicle system has incorrectly registered noncitizens.
Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt uncovered a similar glitch in 2017 while he was serving as a Philadelphia city commissioner, discovering that a Pennsylvania Department of Transportation error had allowed168 noncitizens to register to vote in the city, and likely a couple of hundred statewide.
The state’s voter rolls were updated in 2018, and Schmidt has emphasized that noncitizenvoting remains incredibly rare.
In a statement, Schmidt said Pennsylvania’s automatic voter registration system, which was implemented in 2023, permits only eligible applicants — American citizens — to register to vote.
“AVR has allowed hundreds of thousands of eligible Pennsylvanians to register to vote while safeguarding the integrity of our voter rolls,” he said in the statement.
Sherrill said that she is exploring options to rectify the problem, and that the vendor behind the error will be replaced. Individuals responsible for the error will be held accountable, she said.
“We’re open to suggestions that make our elections more safe,” she said. “The investigation will have findings on what occurred. We will be looking carefully at what we can do to make sure it doesn’t occur again.”
The special prosecutor for crimes on or near SEPTA property will be funded through the end of the year as part of the newly approved state budget, Pennsylvania lawmakers said this week.
After that, the office’s fate is uncertain.
The controversial position is set to expire in December. It was championed by GOP lawmakers in Harrisburg, who for years have tried to limit Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s powers and contended that the position was necessary because Krasner failed to prosecute crimes on the state’s largest transit system.
Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R., Indiana), thetop Republican leader in Pennsylvania’s split legislature, where Democrats narrowly control the state House and Republicans lead the state Senate, said Democratic leaders repeatedly rejected GOP efforts to extend the position as part of the closed-door budget talks.
Krasner’s office has strongly opposed the law that created the special prosecutor position, calling it a “shocking usurpation of power” that unconstitutionally singled out Philadelphia and stripped an elected officials’ authority.
He could not be reached for comment Thursday.
The post has also faced opposition from Philadelphia-area lawmakers who say the effort is an affront to city voters who have reelected Krasner, a progressive prosecutor, three times.
“This is nothing more than voter suppression and an attempt to circumvent some of the extremely popular criminal justice reforms under this DA,” said Sen. Nikil Saval (D., Philadelphia), who chairs the city’s Senate delegation to Harrisburg.
Pittman, by contrast, said extending the special prosecutor is a critical component for Senate Republicans to agree to a new long-term funding source for SEPTA, which is approaching another fiscal cliff that could cause service disruptions when the state’s current short-term fix runs outnext year.
Asked about the future of the special prosecutor’s office, House Majority Leader Matt Bradford (D., Montgomery) said at Shapiro’s budget signing earlier this week that he hadn’t “given it much thought.”
Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday, a Republican who is tasked with overseeing the office, has lauded the special prosecutor’s work so far.
He said his office supports extending the position, calling it a “force multiplier” that has been effective in combating violent crimes against both SEPTA employees and riders.
“Our caseload reflects a range of very serious conduct — including murder and aggravated assaults — and we have secured results through convictions,” he said.
In one example of that effort, the special prosecutor will oversee the case of a 22-year-old woman charged with simple assault after authorities said she pepper-sprayed and punched a conservative social media influencer during a viral confrontation on a SEPTA bus.
Some House Democrats supported creating the role in 2023, as part of a state budget deal with the Senate GOP and Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, who was critical of Krasner when he served as attorney general.
Saval said Democrats shouldn’t use the position as a bargaining chip again.
“House Democrats who voted to suppress the will of Philadelphians should be ashamed of themselves, and should not support other attempts to do so,” Saval added. “This has nothing to do with the essential task at hand, which is to secure funding for mass transit.”
A spokesperson for Bradford said the House needs to “take a critical look” at whether the SEPTA special prosecutor is necessary. She noted SEPTA’s success in reducing crime and the size of its police force, but said the money used to fund the position may be better spent to reduce fare evasion by replacing gates to full-length ones that cost $40,000 each.
The funding was approved in the 2026-27 fiscal year budget “in the case of reauthorization,” and would be used to wind down the office, said Beth Rementer, Bradford’s spokesperson. Any unused funds would be returned to the general fund, she said.
A spokesperson for Shapiro declined to comment on the prosecutor role, but said Senate Republicans “need to do their jobs” to find a long-term funding solution for mass transit.
The office
The office is overseen by Special Prosecutor Michael Untermeyer, a former deputy attorney general and real estate investor who ran against Krasner in the 2017 primary.
Untermeyer did not respond to a request for comment.
The single lawyer employed by his office is investigating about 15 cases, including charges of homicide, aggravated assault, and robbery, according to a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office. That figure does not include cases the special prosecutor is considering taking on or are still under investigation, the spokesperson said.
Lawmakers could still choose to extend the position as part of their fall legislative session. It is among the several time-sensitive issues before the General Assembly ahead of the November election, in which Democrats hope to flip control of the state Senate for the first time in decades.
Krasner’s office has challenged the special prosecutor role from the beginning. His office filed a lawsuit in 2024 in an attempt to nullify the law, but was rebuffed by a 4-3 Commonwealth Court ruling that said legislators had not violated the state constitution in creating the post.
The office then appealed to the state Supreme Court, which has yet to decide the matter. As the high court heard oral arguments in the case last year, justices cited the Pennsylvania Constitution when suggesting that the legislature had been free to pass such a law, even if it interfered with the duties of an elected county official.
And lawyers for the attorney general’s office argued that the special prosecutor role did not strip Krasner’s power, but rather offered additional powers to a prosecutor appointed by the attorney general to handle cases involving crimes in and around SEPTA property.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin was speaking to reporters this month in New York when one asked whether he was under pressure from the White House to increase immigration arrests. Mullin replied that his department was in lockstep with the president’s team and boasted that arrests and deportations were rising.
“When we go after the worst of the worst, which is exactly what we’re doing, we’re saving lives,” he said.
Just over two weeks later, Mullin is facing his biggest political and managerial crisis since taking office in March as he scrambles to respond to two deadly shootings involving U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. The violence has drawn harsh denunciations from Democrats and immigration advocates, as well as criticism from one prominent Republican senator, and the situation has threatened to reignite the wide public backlash that arose in January when immigration officers killed two U.S. citizens during a surge of operations.
Mullin’s attempt to quell the uproar over the shootings this week — ordering a moratorium on vehicle-stop arrests by ICE officers — has exposed the precarious position he is in while trying to comply with President Donald Trump’s demands. Less than 48 hours after Mullin issued the directive on traffic stops, a White House official confirmed that it had been reversed.
Mullin promised to rebuild public trust in the Department of Homeland Security after replacing Kristi L. Noem, and he has undone some of his predecessor’s moves, taking a quieter approach in an effort to stay out of the headlines.
At the same time, he has doubled down on Trump’s deportation agenda. Data provided to Congress and reviewed by the Washington Post show that under Mullin’s leadership, ICE officers have been making record numbers of arrests. Through July 12, ICE had arrested more than 200,000 people in 2026, a more than 40% increase compared with the same period last year.
Those arrests were largely happening outside public view until last week, when an ICE officer shot and killed a 52-year-old Mexican man, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, in Houston. Salgado had been driving to work, and DHS officials said he was not the target of the ICE operation. His family said he had lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for more than 35 years and had no criminal record. Surveillance footage has raised questions about DHS’s account of the events surrounding the shooting.
Less than a week later, a 25-year-old Colombian man, Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, was shot and killed by an ICE officer in Biddeford, Maine. He was also shot while driving, was the father of a young child and does not appear to have had a criminal record.
Mullin’s apparent predicament illustrates the competing incentives within the Trump administration over immigration enforcement ahead of the midterm elections in November that will determine whether Democrats win back control of Congress and establish a meaningful check on Trump’s power for his final two years.
Trump abruptly undercut Mullin on Wednesday by praising vehicle stops as one of ICE’s most important tools, and Trump’s far-right base revolted over Mullin’s leadership on enforcement, calling him weak and ineffective. After the policy was reversed, Mullin wrote on social media that there was no conflict between himself and the president.
“President Trump and I are on the same page,” he wrote. “We want our @ICEgov officers to have all options available to keep them safe while executing our mission of deporting as many illegal alien criminals from our country as possible.”
Some Republican allies and Trump political advisers are wary about the potential for a broader public backlash to the president’s immigration agenda in an election year. But the administration’s immigration hawks, including White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, have continued to push for mass deportations to make good on the president’s campaign promise and appeal to his hard-line base.
“The president’s supporters reacted absolutely as they should have, and I think the president saw that,” said Mike Howell, president of the Oversight Project and a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, in regards to Mullin’s pause on traffic stops. “Everyone is now seeing another example of the walk-back instinct of DHS leadership.”
ICE earlier this month had topped 2,000 arrests per day several times, a DHS official said, after setting that figure as a daily arrest target. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal information not authorized for release.
In June, ICE arrested and detained more than 39,500 individuals, topping the previous monthly high of 37,800 in December, according to the data reviewed by the Post. DHS is on pace to exceed that number in July.
The agency has added thousands of new officers, as well as surveillance technology and other resources, thanks to more than $170 billion in new immigration enforcement funding approved by congressional Republicans last year.
During his news conference in New York this month, Mullin called that funding “the most consequential bill — definitely of President Trump’s tenure and possibly in recent history.” He accused Democrats, including New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, of being soft on crime and immigration enforcement, and said DHS “might have to flex a little bit more” to respond to the policies in places such as New York.
Yet Mullin’s pullback on the vehicle stops, which came after he spoke with Sens. Susan Collins (R) and Angus King (Ind.) of Maine, has left him open to criticism from immigration hawks inside and outside the administration.
One former DHS official suggested that Mullin made the policy change amid pressure from Collins, who is facing a difficult reelection campaign, without consulting the White House.
“A cabinet secretary just went 180 degrees from the policy of both Trump administrations,” said the former official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to frankly discuss his former agency.
In an interview with Fox News on Tuesday, White House border czar Tom Homan said Mullin had made the decision to pause vehicle stops after consulting with ICE leadership.
“I’m confident that ICE is well trained in vehicle stops,” Homan said. “This is a temporary pause while they look at the incidents.”
Mullin has said little publicly about the shootings. When asked about the Houston incident in a brief phone interview with Atlanta News First, he expressed regret that ICE officers were not wearing body cameras and blamed a 76-day partial shutdown of DHS in the spring as Congress was deadlocked over a funding bill for slowing efforts to distribute more cameras.
Wednesday on X, Mullin reposted Trump’s message in support of ICE and added his own statement, saying DHS is focused on keeping officers safe and removing criminals.
“Illegal aliens will be arrested and deported wherever they are. If you are here illegally, LEAVE NOW,” Mullin wrote, adding that officers are facing a major increase in attacks by people using vehicles to threaten them. (In fact, federal prosecutors in several cases have dropped charges against people accused of assaulting officers in light of contradictory evidence.)
“We remind illegal aliens attempting to evade arrest is dangerous,” Mullin wrote.
A former ICE official said Mullin was chosen for the role because he would follow White House directives, and had predicted that Mullin would walk back the pause on vehicle stops or water it down if Trump demanded he do so.
“He’s not going to do anything counter to what the president wants,” the former official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to offer a frank assessment of internal deliberations.
Immigrant rights advocates expressed skepticism that Mullin is committed to softening ICE’s image to restore broader public trust in the agency.
Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council, said the Trump administration “may have moved away from the more theatrical displays of force that characterized operations in places like Minneapolis and Chicago, but the basic objective has not changed: a fixation on increasing detentions and deportations simply for the sake of numbers.”
Gupta said that effort has accelerated as ICE has begun to spend the money from the congressional funding bill, and that it’s leading to more violence by federal officers.
Yet some business leaders who have worked with Mullin, who previously owned a large plumbing company in Oklahoma, say he has taken a measured approach to enforcement and been far more receptive than Noem to hearing their concerns over the impact of mass deportations on their companies, many of which rely on immigrant labor.
To the immigration hard-liners, any sign that Mullin is appeasing more moderate interests reads as a betrayal of the president and his voters.
“Secretary Mullin comes from the Senate, and when it comes to that body, there’s an overeagerness to please other people in that body,” said Howell, of the Heritage Foundation. “So when Senator Collins calls and asks him to do something, then he does it, and it looks bad.”
With control of the U.S. House on the line in November, Pennsylvania’s swing-district candidates are stocking up their war chests for a critical election — but one Democrat is lagging behind his counterparts.
Bucks County Commissioner Bob Harvie, who is challenging longtime incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick in the 1st Congressional District, raised almost $552,300 between April 30 and June 30, according to new campaign finance reports filed Wednesday, putting him at a little over $2 million raised since he launched his campaign in April 2025.
But Harvie’s sum for this two-month period is almost half a million less than Fitzpatrick, and roughly $915,000 on average less than the other Democratic candidates.
Fellow swing–district Democrats Bob Brooks, Paige Cognetti, and Janelle Stelsonall outraised the Republican incumbents in the 7th, 8th, and 10th Districts respectively, each gathering more than $1 million during this two-month period, a sign national Democrats say is proof of their strength in these competitive Pennsylvania seats.
The reporting period covers the final weeks before the May 19 primary and the six weeks that followed.
Bucks County Commissioner Bob Harvie hosts a veterans roundtable on May 4 at Middletown Township Building in Langhorne.William Thomas Cain / For The Inquirer
The Bucks County Republican has been tough to beat, thanks to his name recognition and ability to garner support from voters across the political spectrum, but Democrats believe Harvie’s roots in the county, and his electoral record as county commissioner, make him their strongest candidate to date.
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And their outlook on the race hasn’t budged. Democrats believe all four swing district Democrats will be successful in November but understand it will take continued investments, including more money, to get all of them across the finish line.
Bucks County’s 1st Congressional District “is a winnable race, and Democrats should be all in on investing in Harvie so that he can help take back control of Congress,” said Dan McCormick, Harvie’s campaign manager, in a statement.
He also added that Harvie doesn’t “take a dime” of corporate PAC money.McCormick did not comment on the contrast between Harvie’s fundraising and that of his counterparts in the other targeted districts.
“Fitzpatrick sees the same polling we do, that’s why he’s busy lighting his money on fire lying about Bob,” McCormick said.
Fitzpatrick began funding ads against Harvie before the May 19 primary, underscoring the significance of Harvie’s challenge in a year Republicans are expected to lose seats nationally. Fitzpatrick’s campaign spent nearly $2 million between May and June, compared with about $360,000 in spending by Harvie’s campaign.
Both parties are targeting the seat, which includes all of Bucks and a sliver of Montgomery County, as they battle to secure control over the U.S. House.
In a pre-primary report that covered April 1 through 29, Harvie had raised about $107,000, in addition to his stockpile reported Wednesday. Fitzpatrick raised $246,000 during that same period.
Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R., Pa.) speaks to reporters June 3 after the House passed an Iran war powers resolution.Haiyun Jiang
The nonpartisan Cook Political report has rated the 1st Congressional District as “likely” Republican, and the three other swing districts are considered toss-ups.
In a high stakes election year — and with popular Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro at the top of the ticket and a sinking approval rating for President Donald Trump — Harvie’s fundraising numbers at this point are mostly on par withthe last Democrat to take on Fitzpatrick.
Former challenger Ashley Ehasz, who ran against Fitzpatrick in 2022 and 2024, raised more than $767,000 during this period two years ago, bringing her campaign total to $2.1 million as of June 30, 2024.
Brittany Crampsie, a Democratic strategist in Pennsylvania, said donors may be doing “a little bit of hedging” their spending for Harvie at the moment, waiting to see more information on Shapiro’s poll numbers, Trump’s approval rating, and the national mood before investing more in the 1st District.
“Democratic donors absolutely want to beat Fitzpatrick,” Crampsie said. “We want to control Congress by large margins. But PA-1 is an expensive race. I mean, you might want to be looking at a little bit more information.”
The 1st and 7th Congressional Districts are part of the expensive Philadelphia television market, meaning both Harvie and Brooks will be competing for airtime.
Brooks, who is taking on freshman Republican U.S. Rep. Ryan Mackenzie in the Lehigh Valley, has raised $2.3 million over the entire span of his campaign — getting a boost this period after winning a competitive primary — but it’s not too far off from Harvie’s $2 million total haul.
Christopher Nicholas, a GOP consultant who grew up in Bucks County, said that Harvie is not just in a competition against Fitzpatrick, but also with the three other Democratic contenders in Pennsylvania.
“If you’re some official at the DCCC, and you say ‘Let’s see, get me the report on Pennsylvania,’ and you see this, where is Harvie going to be in the rankings? Is he going to be moving up or moving down? I think that’s a pretty easy question to answer,” Nicholas said.
Eli Cousin, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, emphasized that Pennsylvanians are wholeheartedly behind all four candidates who he says are “on the front lines of our path back to the House majority and will shake up a broken Washington in order to put Pennsylvania families first.”
Donors still have a lot of time to realize that Harvie is “the right candidate” and to contribute to TV and other ad spends that will come later this summer into the fall, Crampsie said. Some may already be writing checks to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and other Democratic aligned-issues to support their cause of flipping the House blue.
“Fitzpatrick has won several times after being called the number one target, and stakeholders may be less likely to oppose him publicly and want to put their money into spending for Harvie that’s not necessarily into PAC spending … but I don’t think that it’s a sign that people are not supporting Harvie,” Crampsie said.
But even in the races where Democrats are outraising incumbents victory isn’t guaranteed in districts where Republicans have previously managed to prevail despite a cash disadvantage.
Janelle Stelson, running to represent Pennsylvania in Congress, campaigns at a gas station. Michelle Gustafson
In 2024, Stelson raised about $6.5 million during the entire cycle, roughly $2.1 million more than Republican U.S. Rep. Scott Perry, and still lost. Republicans are hoping Perry can prevail again when they have a rematch in November.
And Republicans see other signs of hope in these races despite Democrats’ momentum. For example, Mackenzie has more than $2.9 million cash on hand, roughly $1.9 million more than Brooks.
“Republicans remain in a strong position to defend our House majority after excellent quarters by our incumbent Members across Pennsylvania,” Reilly Richardson, a spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said in a statement.
WASHINGTON — Doug Mastriano, the far-right Pennsylvania lawmaker whom President Donald Trump nominated to become the U.S. ambassador to Slovakia, refused to tell senators during his confirmation hearing on Thursday whether he believes all American political leaders should be Christian.
A key Trump ally during the president’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, Mastriano also rejected claims that he is a conspiracy theorist who assisted in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
And while he said he regretted some of his past statements about the Holocaust and his associations with individuals considered antisemitic, he repeatedly pushed back on Democratic senators’ concerns about his fitness for the role.
“I’ve never been involved in conspiracies,” he said during a heated exchange with U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine (D., Va.), who at different points referred to Mastriano as “gullible” and someone who needs to “look in the mirror a little bit.”
The Republican state senator from Franklin County is a retired U.S. Army colonel who deployed three times to Afghanistan after 9/11 and previously served in Eastern Europe.
He was the Republican nominee for Pennsylvania governor in 2022 with Trump’s backing, but he lost to Democrat Josh Shapiro by nearly 15 percentage points. Mastriano’s nomination for the ambassadorship came as his supporters were promoting him as a write-in candidate for governor ahead of the May Republican primary, in which Treasurer Stacy Garrity was unopposed.
U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.), who pushed for Mastriano’s nomination and chaired his confirmation hearing during the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing Thursday, said Mastriano’s military career made him “highly qualified” for the role.
“This position needs a leader with strategic judgment, intimate knowledge of NATO’s inner workings, and firsthand experience working alongside our allies with an unwavering commitment to advancing America’s interest,” McCormick said during the hearing. “Doug brings that experience, and I’m confident that he’ll represent the United States with great professionalism and integrity.”
Mastriano also leaned on his experience, which he said involved planning operations in the Baltic states and fending off Russian aggression. He said he hoped to strengthen America’s relationship with Slovakia and encourage the country to contribute to Ukraine’s defense.
But Democrats on the committee said they had serious concerns about both Mastriano’s past comments on foreign policy and a range of other issues — including an ideology that has been described as Christian nationalist.
U.S. Sen. Jacky Rosen (D., Nev.) said Mastriano had spoken often about his Christian identity and his belief that the separation of church and state is a “myth.” Rosen, who is Jewish, asked Mastriano to look her in the eye and say whether all U.S. political leaders should be Christian.
Mastriano said that he believed “religious liberty applies to every American” and that it was “why our country was founded.” After Rosen said it was “deeply problematic” that he would not say America is a pluralistic nation where leaders do not need to be Christian, Mastriano responded, “I will look you in the eye and repeat even simpler language” — though he did not answer the original question.
“We are absolutely a pluralistic society and I have worked for non-Christians in the military and the government, and I’ve had them working for me,” Mastriano added.
Rosen also questioned him about previous comments comparing abortion and his loss to Shapiro in the 2022 Pennsylvania governor’s race to the Holocaust.
“There was a social media post that I would not post today,” Mastriano said, calling any comparisons to the Holocaust “unwise.”
Asked about his associations with Andrew Torba, founder of the online platform Gab, which has been used to share extremist and antisemitic views, Mastriano said he “immediately” returned a campaign donation from Torba and cut off advertising on the platform when he learned about the Gab founder’s views.
“You can denounce your past associations with antisemites. You can point to your support of Israel,” Rosen said. “But for me, I’m not sure that either excuses you or erases your record.”
U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D., N.H.) questioned Mastriano while displaying a giant poster with his picture and a 2018 quote in which he said European Union leaders were “political, diplomatic enemies of the United States of America.”
She said staff who had interviewed him recently had also quoted him as saying he believed the European Union was a “rising rival comparable to China and that it would eventually create a standing army to challenge the United States.” Visibly frustrated during her questioning, Shaheen said that the EU should be treated as allies, not rivals, and that Mastriano “should absolutely know better.”
The most contentious exchange came between Mastriano and Kaine, who started by saying that he respected the nominee’s military service and that the nomination brought him “a real sense of sadness.”
“You’ve associated with antisemites and Holocaust deniers. You’ve associated with 9/11 conspiracy theorists. You’ve made comments about foreign leaders that are not diplomatic in quality. And you and I share a very special day in American history,” Kaine said. “We were both here on Jan. 6, 2021.”
Mastriano was Trump’s top ally in Pennsylvania as the president contested his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. He worked both publicly and privately to contest the vote, and he was near the Capitol on the day that a mob broke in to stop the certification of the results. The Republican lawmaker was not charged with a crime related to any of those activities, which he reminded Kaine about on Thursday.
“That is incorrect,” he said as Kaine pressed and said he had been at the Capitol to overturn the results. “I was here to hear the president. I was here with my wife to hear the president of the United States speak. We didn’t do anything illegal. We came, we saw, we left.”
Asked if he would say, now, that Biden had won the election, Mastriano said only that Biden had been certified as the winner — a phrase that other Trump nominees have used in nomination hearings and that Democrats have described as a pre-negotiated script to appease a president who still stands by the fraudulent claims.
“Conspiracy theorists generally are gullible people. They might have master’s degrees and Ph.D.s, and you’ve got them,” Kaine said to Mastriano, referring to his degree in history.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, senator,” Mastriano said, denying that he subscribes to conspiracy theories as the two talked over each other.
Kaine said Mastriano could claim, if he wanted, that he only held a public hearing on the 2020 election — an event in Gettysburg that helped spread false claims that there was widespread fraud in the election — but he could not erase his record.
“No, sir, there’s no erasing,” Mastriano said. “Facts are stubborn things.”
WASHINGTON — Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, thumbing his nose at national Republicans on the morning after they subpoenaed him, rallied protesters on Capitol Hill on Thursday as one of his counterparts in Virginia, who had also been compelled by a subpoena from the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, prepared to testify behind closed doors.
Taunting both Rep. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), the committee chair, and President Donald Trump outside the building where the committee meets, Krasner railed against Republicans generally and the ongoing legal maneuvers he said are intended to ensure progressive prosecutors like him “roll over and play dead.”
“Jim Jordan, can you hear me?” he asked as he stood before a crowd of mostly Virginians outside the Rayburn House Office Building. “Why don’t you come out here? We miss you. We haven’t seen you, and apparently, you don’t like us when we’re with you in public.”
The monthslong war of words escalated on Wednesday, when Jordan ordered Krasner’s office to produce documents about its handling of immigration issues. The Republican-led committee requested the documents in May as it accused the district attorney — as well as Philadelphia Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel and Sheriff Rochelle Bilal — of protecting criminal immigrants through sanctuary policies.
Republicans have similarly targeted multiple jurisdictions, including Arlington County and the city of Falls Church, in Virginia’s Washington suburbs.
The committee subpoenaed the area’s top prosecutor, Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, in March for documents related to protests outside the home of deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller. After a back-and-forth in which Dehghani-Tafti requested a public hearing, the committee wrote in a July 1 letter that it was compelling her to appear to answer questions about “politicized interference in a doxxing investigation and your preferential treatment of illegal immigrants accused of criminal conduct in your district.”
“I’m here because I respect the law, and I’m here because I upheld the rule of law,” Dehghani-Tafti said Thursday as she walked by the gathering of about 75 people, some of whom wore shirts and held signs reading “No Secret Hearings.”
Krasner said the committee was afraid to conduct the questioning in a public setting because Dehghani-Tafti, whom he described as a top-notch prosecutor and communicator, would “wreck them.”
“And they are not just trying to do it to her,” Krasner said. “They’re trying to do it to a whole bunch of us — pretty much anybody who they see as standing in their way.”
Krasner did not otherwise address his own subpoena while speaking in Washington.
Asked for comment, a spokesperson for the committee said Thursday: “We look forward to Mr. Krasner’s compliance with the subpoena.”
In an interview after his speech, Krasner said it was important for him and other local prosecutors, some of whom were in attendance Thursday, to join together to show that “none of us are backing down.” He said that he has the same legal representation as Dehghani-Tafti to deal with the situation, and that if he was compelled to testify he would answer the committee’s answers truthfully.
“I’d be shocked if these cowards wanted a public hearing,” Krasner said. “Not because I’m so important, but because the questions are so stupid, and the truth harms them so much.”
In a private setting, he said, the committee can control any transcripts or videos and decide when and how to make them public. He compared the situation to “Putin’s Russia,” mocked Jordan for not completing law school, and repeatedly called Trump the “criminal-in-chief.”
Krasner also alleged that part of the reason he and others are being targeted is because of their ability to prosecute state-level crimes, for which Trump does not have the power to pardon. That includes potential crimes related to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender and former Trump associate who died in 2019.
“Make no mistake, Epstein class, we are coming for you,” Krasner said in shouting distance from federal lawmakers. “We’re coming for you now, or we’re coming for you later.”
Epstein’s private islands were in the U.S. Virgin Islands and his mainland home was in Florida, outside Krasner’s jurisdiction in Philadelphia.
Late Thursday afternoon in Philadelphia, Krasner said he was in the process of complying with the subpoena.
“It encompasses an infinite number of documents, many of which they’re not entitled to have, but there’s little doubt they’re entitled to have some of them, and what the law requires is what we’re going to do,” he said. “It is very likely that sooner or later we’re going to turn over some documents.”
He derided Jordan as “the criminal-in-chief’s little helper” and accused the House committee of being on a “silly mission” to try to show fault with how honest prosecutors are handling immigration issues in their jurisdictions.
“If they want to mess with Philly, they’re going to come through me,” Krasner said. “My job is to protect Philadelphians. I’m going to do that. We’re not going to have ICE agents or federal agents murdering people on the streets of Philadelphia with no consequence.”
This month ICE agents fatally shot two men in six days during traffic stops in Texas and Maine.
The House committee gave Krasner a July 29 deadline to provide the documents it requested. In a letter Wednesday, Jordan said Krasner’s “refusal to cooperate” included “bizarre and baseless demands and conditions.”
“The Committee has no obligation to entertain your unreasonable demand because as federal courts have explained, it is exclusively the prerogative of the Committee to determine how and in what manner it conducts its oversight,” Jordan wrote.
Staff writer Jeff Gammage contributed to this article.
The House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner on Wednesday, ordering him to turn over documents related to his office’s handling of immigration matters and criticizing what it called the prosecutor’s “pro-illegal-alien policies.”
The Republican-led Congressional committee said in a letter that it sent the subpoena after Krasner, a Democrat, promised but failed to provide materials that were requested in May.
The committee, in a letter signed by Rep. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), its chair, accused Krasner of declining to prosecute or under-prosecuting foreign nationals so that they could avoid consequences connected to their immigration status. The committee said it was asserting its authority to try to end sanctuary-city policies in cities including Philadelphia.
In response, Krasner called the subpoena “yet another step in authoritarian efforts to do dirt in the dark” and to put pressure on state prosecutors.
“We have always complied with the law and will continue to do that,” Krasner said Wednesday. “That makes us different from [President Donald] Trump, who spends all day, every day, violating the law of the U.S. Constitution ― and morality.“
Krasner and the House committee have sparred since May, when the panel accused top city law enforcement officials of shielding criminal immigrants through sanctuary policies and demanded that they quickly turn over a trove of related records and correspondence.
That represented an escalation by Trump-allied Republicans in their criticism of Philadelphia government on rules concerning undocumented residents, particularly around limiting city cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In May, in letters to Krasner, Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel, and Sheriff Rochelle Bilal, the Judiciary Committee accused each of hindering federal immigration enforcement. Each letter sought up to six years of immigration communications between their agencies and immigration officials and, in the sheriff’s case, with activist groups including No ICE Philly, Juntos, Asian Americans United, and others.
The Trump administration has clashed with cities and states that embrace sanctuary policies, contending they are hurting Americans and threatening to cut their federal funding. Philadelphia has long been among the targets.
Krasner had responded by telling the committee, which said it was conducting oversight of state and local jurisdictions that it believes endanger Americans by not assisting immigration agents, that such policing powers belong to the city.
“The legal errors are unsurprising,” Krasner wrote to Jordan and to Rep. Tom McClintock (R., Calif.), chair of the subcommittee on immigration, noting that neither had passed the bar. “The factual errors are also unsurprising, given your histories of adhering to wholly repudiated, counterfactual and unscientific election denialism, climate change denialism, and the like.”
Krasner wrote that he needed time to address each of the committee’s allegations and requests, and was working to hire a lawyer who would be in touch soon.
In July, Krasner wrote the committee and encouraged it to “question me in public so all Americans are able to see who is telling the truth.”
The committee’s “fear of such a public airing only makes clearer your lack of real purpose and your complicity in peddling lies,” such as, he said, that local and state prosecutors “rather than President Trump’s ill-conceived deportation actions are responsible for criminals going free.”
Immigrants are far less likely to commit and be arrested for crimes than U.S. citizens, Krasner noted. But the small number of immigrants who commit serious crimes are being deported by ICE before they can stand trial and be sentenced, given “a ‘get out of jail free’ card and a plane ride to another country, a country where they will never face American justice.”
The committee told Krasner on Wednesday that time to provide the requested records had run out. Its subpoena directs him to turn over the materials by July 29.
“Although you may disagree about the need to reform federal law to end sanctuary policies … you cannot seriously contend that the committee lacks the authority to do so,” the committee wrote, adding that Congress may amend statutes “to ensure that prosecutors cannot circumvent immigration law and allow aliens to escape accountability for their crimes.”
A journalistic mentor of mine back in the 1980s told me that Harry Truman, pressed for a comment on the passing of a political enemy, finally said, “It’s a damn shame when anybody dies.” Of course, like most perfect quotes, HST probably never actually said this, yet I find occasion to think of these words often. On Saturday night, South Carolina GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham — whose moral compass went haywire in the 2010s when a brief moment of truth–telling about Donald Trump melted into embarrassing capitulation — died suddenly from heart problems. He was just 71. It’s a damn shame.
Dems need to give up on fake blue-collar campaigns like Platner’s
Supporters cheer for Graham Platner in Blue Hill, Maine, after he won the Democratic Senate primary on June 9. Platner’s bid for the Senate inspired progressive Democrats. But the campaign, which he suspended July 8, was messy, disorganized and ultimately doomed by a steady drip of scandal. SOPHIE PARK
Graham Platner, the failed Maine Democratic Senate candidate, was introduced to most of us outside of the Pine Tree State less as a human being than as a fully formed narrative.
The ruggedredhead with angry eyes was an ex-Marine from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars who became an oyster farmer and then a political outsider with all the right words for an electorate that’s mad as hell and isn’t going to take it anymore.
We now know that Platner’s origin story — compelling, but larded with omissions and sprinkled with lies — belonged on the fiction shelf. But even after the Democrats’ scandal-scarred June primary winner accepted the inevitable and ended his candidacy on Friday, he lives on as an avatar upon which everyone with a stake in a badly broken Democratic party can project their distrust and rage toward others — folks who ought to be their allies in an all-out war against fascism.
Days later, the Platner discourse is almost as toxic as the candidate himself. People who voice their opinions, even in 280 characters on social media, get called everything from sexist Bernie-bro rape apologists to Quislings who want big corporations to keep running the Democrats into the ground, and all the rest in between. Don’t even mention Israel. In fact, don’t @ me after this is posted.
Having said all that, there is a conversation that must be had by the Democrats, and probably a wider circle. And the disappearance of Platner himself from the picture makes that easier, because I think we can all stipulate that as a human being he was clearly not worthy to be a U.S. senator, even in the Senate’s current morally diminished state.
There is another Graham Platner somewhere on Earth 2 who also suffered PTSD and developed a drinking problem fighting in pointless wars, and who also got a Nazi tattoo and posted wretched stuff on Reddit, but turned his life around in a glorious redemption song. But that’s not the Platner we got on here on Earth 1. Instead of an apology, he was weirdly defensive about his past, because — we now know — he was hiding stuff that was even worse than that.
Although Platner has denied the most serious charge of a sexual assault, there should be zero tolerance in the Democratic Party for the type of sexual misconduct that’s been confirmed, let alone what’s been additionally alleged. That’s not just the only proper moral stance, but it sets Dems apart from a twisted GOP that nominated Trump three times. Platner’s disappearance is a blessing to everyone.
But even with that matter resolved, we still haven’t answered the bigger question that I posed the only other time I wrote about Platner back in the spring: Why did a majority of Maine Democrats — roughly 150,000 voters — ignore the party establishment to back this guy?
But first Democrats — and just about everyone, frankly — need to do a better job understanding not just the “why” of Platner supporters, but the “who.” Baked into the Platner myth was this notion that in running a gruff-sounding ex-Marine and oyster farmer, Democrats had found a key to regaining the long-lost white working class.
Two huge problems with this. First — and this will sound familiar here in Pennsylvania where shorts-and-hoodie-wearing Sen. John Fetterman grew up upper middle class before donning a blue collar — Platner comes from a fairly privileged background. He’s the son of a lawyer and upscale restaurant owner and grandson of a famous architect; he started high school at the super-elite Hotchkiss School.
Which brings us to the crux of the problem: the notion that Platner’s pre-implosion success was his ability to win back working-class voters in an overwhelmingly white state. Polls exposed this all as a lie. A late June survey from the New York Times/Portland Press Herald/Siena showed Platner losing white, non-college educated voters by a whopping 21% to the GOP incumbent Sen. Susan Collins. So what gave him a shot at winning? A massive 37% edge among college degree holders.
Look, we all know that it’s been the obsessive mantra of the political pundit class that Democrats will never fully win back America without restoring the working-class coalition that elected Franklin Roosevelt four times during the New Deal era. I hate to be a contrarian here, but what if that’s not true?
A society that over a half-century has once again made higher education an elite sport and now has a right-wing media and demagogues like Trump to heighten working-class grievances and blame the wrong people has created voters who — at least for now (hold this thought) — arguably aren’t worth chasing after.
The frayed alliance of progressives and liberals who comprise the core of the Democratic base do some dumb stuff — opposing new units that could lower housing costs, or “nice white parents” leading to de facto school segregation — that should stop.
An America that’s not inclusive and that isn’t fair when it comes to gross income inequality, not to mention who gets to see a doctor or send their kid to college, isn’t a cause worth fighting for. And there’s already a healthy number of working-class people — not the majority, not yet — who would agree with this.
Platner was a bad guy but he appealed to voters who wanted good things. Let’s not bemoan the fact that his movement was based on educated people. Let’s build on that. Instead of lowering our values to win elections, let’s play the long game to lift more people up to a better place.
It’s way past time for college-educated progressives and our allies to stop apologizing for the things we believe in. The current push to find a candidate who can replace Platner and fight for all the right stuff — without the personal baggage of their predecessor — is a great place to start. Maybe it’s even time to revive the old cliché: As Maine goes, so goes the nation.
Yo, do this!
Tuesday is the folk-music legend Woody Guthrie’s 114th birthday. I use the present tense because it very much feels like the singer who influenced living icons from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen is still with us. Now, a friend, the pioneering rock journalist Greg Mitchell, has directed a new documentary about the musician, his political activism in the mid-20th century, and his lasting influence: Woody Guthrie and the Ghost of Tom Joad. It’s now streaming on PBS.org and will also be popping up on PBS stations this summer. You can — and should! — stream it here.
Monday night I read a remarkable piece of journalism that I feel compelled to share. Last week, a lot of America was talking about a photo from July 4 that showed a young Black woman on a D.C. Metro train surrounded by masked members of the white supremacist Patriot Front. There was so much commentary about what this woman must be feeling and thinking, and almost all of it — as shown by some remarkable reporting by former Inquirer journalist Ellie Silverman, writing for NOTUS — was wrong. The truth is heartbreaking.
Ask me anything
Question: Why do we not know what’s going on with (ailing Kentucky Sen. Mitch) McConnell? What is the Republican endgame? What’s the benefit to prolonging the process of determining a replacement? What is that process (seems to be in dispute)?
Answer: We know a little more now than we did when I addressed this issue last week. His staff on Sunday released a brief statement and what is being called a “proof of life photo” — with that morning’s Washington Post sports page visible in the shot — seeking to explain McConnell’s month-long hospitalization and hoped-for return to the Senate. There were, of course, immediate conspiracy theories that the photo was artificial intelligence, but there’s no compelling evidence of that. The biggest mystery is, why doesn’t the 84-year-old McConnell just quit, with only about six months left until he leaves office in January? Kentucky has changed its Senate replacement law a couple of times, mainly because GOP lawmakers don’t want Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear making the pick. The new law requires a special election, but there probably will not be one if McConnell stays in office through Aug. 3. Republicans seem desperate to avoid the special election, and I’m not sure why, since McConnell surely isn’t helping advance the Trump agenda from his hospital bed.
What you’re saying about…
You really didn’t think I could go a whole newsletter without mentioning soccer, did you? Last week’s question about Trump’s FIFA intervention and the reversal of the American Folarin Balogun’s red-card suspension drew a unanimous response: The president was wrong to get involved, and he seemed to create a negative vibe around the U.S. team before it got blown out of the World Cup by Belgium, 4-1. “To me, it appeared to be the wrong call, but the ref called it.” wrote ex-soccer mom Suzanne Urban Ryan. “We had to live with it. Trump getting involved was just really poor judgement based on his need to win a game that he is not even a player.” Added Jordan Lang: “I’m sure his corrupted meddling negatively affected the psychology of the U.S players.” Yup.
📮 This week’s question: Trump plans to address the nation in prime time Thursday with ginned-up information about his bogus and debunked claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. He is laying the groundwork for November, and election interference on a scale to rival the Jim Crow South. How can Congress, the courts, the media, and everyday citizens respond to this dire threat before it spirals out of control? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Trump election meddling” in the subject line.
Backstory on why ICE is killing immigrants, again
A vehicle with a damaged window is transported away from the scene of a shooting involving U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Monday in Biddeford, Maine. Robert F. Bukaty
The fight against police brutality against African Americans in the late 2010s found its rallying cry when New York City police choked and killed a street peddler named Eric Garner, whose last words were. “I can’t breathe!” Now, Monday’s latest fatal shooting by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents that shattered the morning calm of Biddeford, Maine has produced a new mantra. As 26-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero lay dying on the pavement — shot in the head, then dragged from his car and handcuffed — a bystander heard him say in anguish: “I tried to stop.”
Moments earlier, the man, reported to be a Colombian national with a U.S. work permit, had left his home, possibly with his daughter, in a white Kia sedan, which was hemmed in by ICE agents in their vehicles. Although the Department of Homeland Security changed the wording of its statements over the course of the day, it ultimately reported that an ICE agent shot Guerrero because the driver attempted to flee and the officer was “fearing for public safety.” But ICE and DHS, whose officers have now shot and killed at least 11 people since Donald Trump returned to office, have repeatedly seen their versions unravel as more video and witnesses emerged. The two most recent attacks — Monday’s assault on Guerrero and last week’s Houston shooting of 52-year-old Mexican national Lorenzo Salgado Araujo — happened on working-class residential streets without clear videos of the shootings, and with ICE agents not wearing body cams.
Still, a pattern is starting to emerge as DHS and its new leader, the former Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin, put a flood of new, barely trained ICE recruits on the streets in attempt to make mass arrests of immigrants without the same level of hoopla and backlash that happened in cities like Minneapolis and Chicago under Mullin’s predecessor, Kristi Noem. In both the Houston and Biddeford shootings, ICE began the morning in what it claimed was a targeted operation seeking a specific immigrant with a removal order, only to try to arrest and ultimately kill men, in Salgado and Guerrero, who were not the supposed targets.
It’s quickly becoming clear that ICE’s new strategy is a recipe for disaster. Both Salgado and Guerrero, according to what we know from witness accounts, didn’t seem to know what exactly to do when their vehicles were surrounded by unmarked vans and yelling men. In both cases, ICE agents interpreted the predictable panic and chaos as aggression, and made a split-second decision to end a human life forever. It increasingly looks as if the federal agents — facing an impossibly ambitious goal from the Trump regime of arresting and deporting 1 million people a year — insist they have a name on a sheet of paper, when in reality they are racially profiling brown-skinned men driving to blue-collar jobs.
Like so many projects of our current government, the new ICE scheme is not only inhumane but also dumb and counterproductive. Mullin’s apparent new strategy was to meet the high arrest quotas sought by Trump and his immigration guru Stephen Miller without generating the kind of public protest and backlash that all but drove DHS out of Minnesota this winter. It’s not working. Even before Guerrero’s name was released, angry demonstrators took to the streets in Biddeford and stormed the office of the state’s GOP Sen. Susan Collins, who recently voted for a $70 billion cash infusion for immigration raids.
The tactics may have changed slightly, but the repulsive devaluation of human life has not. Mass deportation is a failure — strategically, politically, and morally.
What I wrote on this date in 2019
Some days my past writings read like Nostradamus, but more often than not they reveal how fleeting our political moments can be. On this date seven years ago, this columnist joined a lot of progressive voters in swooning over the early-stage presidential ambitions of Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who had just spoken at the left-wing convention Netroots Nation here in Philadelphia. “With her slam-dunk performance Saturday,” I wrote, “Elizabeth Warren became president … of the American progressive movement, anyway.” But Sen. Bernie Sanders had other ideas about that, and then Joe Biden and South Carolina voters came along with different ideas about Warren, Sanders, and control of the Democratic Party. Read the rest: “Netroots Nation was the day Elizabeth Warren became president of the American left.”
Recommended Inquirer reading
It was a full week for me, and for American outrage. First, I tackled the Houston ICE killing of 52-year-old Mexican national Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and the return of ambitious immigration raids to American cities. I noted that the new ICE strategy aimed to ramp up arrests without generating public outcry, and I urged readers not to go to sleep on mass deportation. Over the weekend, I wrote about the similarities between the Trump regime and the disastrous ancient reign of the Roman emperor Caligula. I detailed how Trump’s growing paranoia that he will be assassinated in office is causing new bloodshed in the Persian Gulf and inspiring fresh efforts to quash civil liberties here at home.
Kenesaw Mountain Landis must be spinning in his grave. He was the former federal judge who tried Chicago’s notorious “Black Sox” for throwing the 1919 World Series at the behest of New York gamblers, then became baseball commissioner to clean up the national pastime. For decades, Major League Baseball shunned even the slightest whiff of gambling connections that might taint the sport — but times have changed. My Inquirer colleague David Gambacorta — one of the best investigative reporters in the business — last week broke a remarkable story about how the lucrative betting site FanDuel egged on a local addicted gambler to keep playing until he lost some $1.5 million. Plot twist: FanDuel’s effort includedhaving Phillies slugger Bryce Harper send a personalized video to please the local bettor. It’s disturbing that a) Harper, with a 13-year $330 million contract, also feels the need to peddle $899 videos on Cameo and b) he has a relationship with people at a gambling website. But FanDuel is now “the official sports betting partner” of MLB — an appalling relationship that only encourages morally dubious behavior like the Harper video. The rank corruption of modern American society, including sports, is why we need investigative reporters like Gambacorta. You can read the next installments in this saga, and support his work, when you subscribe to The Inquirer.
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State lawmakers left Harrisburg on Sunday without approving a new sentencing structure for second-degree murder convictions, all but ensuring Pennsylvania will miss a court-imposed deadline to replace a law the state’s highest court struck down as unconstitutional because it barred judges from weighing individual culpability.
The legislature’s failure makes it exceedingly likely that judges across Pennsylvania will soon have to sentence people convicted of second-degree murder without a legislatively enacted sentencing range to guide them. It also sets the stage for what is expected to be years of litigation over the roughly 1,100 people already serving mandatory life-without-parole sentences.
The political stalemate leaves thousands of people — incarcerated Pennsylvanians, victims’ families, and attorneys — waiting to learn what happens next.
“In the absence of a law, there’s going to be a lot of chaos and a lot of confusion,” said Sean Damon, director of strategic partnerships for Straight Ahead, a decarceration advocacy organization.
Gov. Josh Shapiro said Sunday that he agreed with the Supreme Court’s decision striking down the mandatory sentencing law as unconstitutional, but had hoped lawmakers would reach a compromise before leaving Harrisburg.
Shapiro said he spent much of the final two days of session trying to bridge the divide between House Democrats and Senate Republicans. Though no agreement emerged, he said that House procedural maneuvering left a legislative vehicle available should negotiators eventually strike a deal before a July 24 deadline to rewrite thelaw.
“I’d like to see the legislature act on this and not just leave it up to every individual county to act,” Shapiro said.
‘Someone’s going to need to act’
Until the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling in March, the state was one of only two that still required life without parole for every second-degree murder conviction — a category of homicide that generally applies to deaths committed during certain felonies, including cases in which a defendant played a role in the crime that led to the death.
In their decision, the justices said courts must consider the facts of each case and the defendant’s culpability before deciding on a punishment.
But the high court stopped short of deciding whether its ruling applies retroactively to people already serving those sentences. And it delayed implementing its decision for 120 days to give lawmakers time to rewrite the law.
Since March, judges across the state have postponed sentencing defendants convicted of second-degree murder while awaiting action from the General Assembly.
That action never came.
Lawmakers adjourned for the summer with 12 days remaining before the Supreme Court’s stay expires and with no realistic path toward a compromise. Republicans and Democrats spent months advancing competing visions for replacing the unconstitutional law but failed to bridge deep disagreements.
Senate Republicans twice approved legislation that would replace the mandatory sentence with a minimum term of 35 years to life, allowing parole eligibility after 35 years — or after 20 years for prisoners at least 70 years old.
House Democrats backed legislation that would cap future second-degree murder sentences at 50 years while allowing many people already serving mandatory life-without-parole sentences to seek parole after 25 years. The proposal, supported by the Philadelphia Bar Association, the Defender Association of Philadelphia, and District Attorney Larry Krasner, never advanced to a vote in the House.
House Majority Leader Matt Bradford (D., Montgomery) said Sunday that Democrats have a legislative path prepared, so when they reach an agreement they can swiftly pass it and send it to Shapiro’s desk.
Asked whether that could happen before July 24 despite no additional voting days currently scheduled, Bradford replied: “We’re hoping to get something accomplished.”
Republican Attorney General Dave Sunday urged lawmakers this weekend to reach an agreement before the deadline, warning that failing to enact a new sentencing law would leave courts without clear guidance and could allow some people now serving life-without-parole sentences to become immediately eligible for release.
“It is dangerously inadequate for the House to allow the deadline to pass without a substantive and realistic proposal that includes sensible sentencing ranges with the option of a life sentence for the most serious offenders and protections for the victims of these horrible crimes,” Sunday said.
Sen. Wayne Langerholc (R., Cambria) voiced similar concerns during a committee meeting Saturday.
“Someone’s going to need to act in the House, or else this risks 1,100 violent offenders being released onto the streets of our commonwealth that we cannot afford to have,” he said.
A ‘free-for-all in the courts’
The Supreme Court cannot create a new sentencing range itself because establishing criminal penalties is the legislature’s responsibility. But advocates say Pennsylvania has already faced a similar situation.
After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles were unconstitutional, Pennsylvania enacted a new sentencing law that applied only to future cases. Four years later, when the high court ruled that decision applied retroactively, judges had to resentence hundreds of incarcerated people without legislative guidance.
Many attorneys expect a similar pattern after July 24. Judges will continue sentencing people convicted of second-degree murder on a case-by-case basis until lawmakers or appellate courts provide clearer direction. At the same time, attorneys representing people already serving mandatory life-without-parole sentences are expected to begin seeking new sentencing hearings.
Because the Pennsylvania Supreme Court did not decide whether the decision applies retroactively, that question is also expected to return to the justices.
“We reasonably believe that if this matter is brought to them [the justices] again, they will mandate mass resentencing,” said Damon, of Straight Ahead.
Some criminal justice advocates argue that individualized sentencing hearings before judges are preferable to replacing one mandatory sentencing scheme with another because judges are better positioned to weigh a person’s role in a crime, rehabilitation while incarcerated, and risk to public safety.
“Even though it will be a free-for-all in the courts,” said Celeste Trusty, a consultant for criminal legal reform organizations and former state legislative affairs director of FAMM, “people serving the now-unconstitutional mandatory life-without-parole sentences would also likely fare better” under individualized resentencing than under the failed bill.
Even so, the absence of a statewide framework is likely to place enormous demands on courts, prosecutors, and public defenders, particularly in Philadelphia, where more than 500 people are serving mandatory life-without-parole sentences for second-degree murder — about half the statewide total.
Keisha Hudson, chief defender of the Defender Association of Philadelphia, estimated each resentencing would require about $40,000 in attorney time, investigators, mitigation specialists, and other resources — roughly $24 million if every potentially eligible Philadelphia case returned to court.
She said defenders are expected to shoulder much of that work but lack the resources to handle the oldest cases, including about 30 that predate the creation of the office’s homicide unit in 1993.
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner did not respond to an interview request.
HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania’s new $50.8 billion state budget was sprawled across more than 600 pages of legislation and signed into law on Sunday. New data center regulations, education funding, and more were approved in the wide-ranging spending package.
But some of the most pressing issues facing the General Assembly were noticeably absent from the final deal, as Gov. Josh Shapiro and lawmakers in the split legislature were unable to reach a compromise — or did not want to touch the contentious issues until after they are up for election in November, sidelining some of Shapiro’s top budget priorities.
Here’s a look at what is in — and what was left out of — the 2026-27 Pennsylvania state budget.
Pennsylvania took another jump toward filling a multibillion-dollar funding gap between wealthy and poor school districts, after a court found that the state’s old system of funding education was unconstitutional. Since 2024, when the state first implemented new adequacy and tax equity formulas in efforts to fill the $4.5 billion“adequacy gap,” lawmakers have put nearly $1.9 billion toward funding lower-income districts, with plans to fill it by 2032.
“It keeps our promise to our school districts,” said State Rep. Jordan Harris (D., Philadelphia), who serves on the powerful appropriations committee responsible for allocating state dollars, in remarks on the House floor Sunday.
The latest installment of adequacy and tax equity payments — $565 million — will largely go to low-income districts that already have high property taxes. The Philadelphia School District, Pennsylvania’s largest district and the only one in the state that is unable to raise its own revenue, will get $136 million of that funding increase.
Out: Revenue generators
Shapiro proposed generating new revenue streams to help the state fix its multibillion-dollar structural deficit in his last four budget addresses. But the ways he wants to raise that cash have drawn resistance from Senate Republicans, who argue they are not policies that will improve the state’s economic standing — or cannot reach agreement within their caucus on how to address the issues.
Shapiro this year did not get the hefty minimum wage increase he asked for, seeking to raise the hourly rate from $7.25 to $15 — and counting on the higher wage for $80 million in higher income tax revenues. Nor was he able to get the General Assembly, where Democrats control the House and Republicans lead the Senate, to approve adult-use cannabis, which his office estimated would bring in $729.4 million in its first year, largely through licensing. (House Democrats have approved plans for a minimum wage increase and recreational marijuana legalization, but the Senate has not voted on the bills.)
Screen shows skill games and cannabis regulation and reform as Gov. Josh Shapiro makes his annual budget proposal in the state House chamber in Harrisburg Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2026.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer
Shapiro, in his February budget proposal, also called on the General Assembly to regulate and tax skill games at the same rate as casinos, a move that he has estimated could generate nearly $800 million in revenue in its first year. But any regulation of skill games — slot machine look-alikes that the state Supreme Court ruled last month are a form of gambling — was left out of the budget.
Lawmakers have until October to decide whether skill games will be taxed and regulated, under a grace period in the high court’s ruling. Otherwise, the devices found in many corner stores, gas stations, and bars will become illegal gambling machines. The issue has been the target of more than $8 million in lobbying and $9 million in campaign spending in Harrisburg, mostly funded by one company.
State Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R., Indiana) during a press conference at the Capitol in Harrisburg Feb. 3, 2026.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer
“We can act within the 120 days; we can act after the 120 days,” Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R., Indiana) said Sunday. “But the choice is now quite simple. These machines are illegal, and in less than 120 days, they will be leaving the marketplace.”
In: Data center reporting requirements
Data centers — which are seeing a boom in Pennsylvania as artificial intelligence usage increases and communities push back on where the centers are being built — will be required to submit information about their energy and water usage.
Beginning next summer, data centers in the state with a peak energy demand greater than 10 megawatts will be required to submit information annually to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.
Outlined as part of this year’s fiscal code, those reports will be publicly accessible. Data centers that do not submit information about their resource usage will be fined $10,000 a day.
A yard sign protests the proposed data center on New Elm Street near the Closed Cleveland-Cliffs steel mill photographed on Thursday, June 4, 2026 in Conshohocken, Pa.Monica Herndon / Staff Photographer
Out: Data center regulations
A data center regulation bill, which would have limited state benefits for data center developers and was championed by Shapiro, was not included in the final budget deal. The governor called for limiting a sales and use tax exemption and expediting permitting to projects that comply with a set of transparency and environmental standards.
And several other data center regulation efforts that have received bipartisan support in recent weeks were also absent from the final spending package.
Those included efforts to repeal the sales tax exemption afforded to data center developers and attempts to enact a local or statewide moratorium on new data center development.
Both chambers passed language repealing the tax exemption and advanced differing bills to freeze development. One Democratic-sponsored bill would have given municipalities the option to implement a 180-day moratorium on new centers. The other, a Republican-sponsored measure, would allow for local moratoriums of up to 18 months.
In: Compromise
Compromise was the word of the day around the Capitol on Sunday, when the legislature swiftly passed the more than 600-page budget deal hashed out behind closed doors by Shapiro, Pittman, and House Majority Leader Matt Bradford (D., Montgomery) and passed with bipartisan support in both chambers.
The legislative leaders and Shapiro emphasized that they did not get exactly what they wanted in the budget, as a symptom of dealing with divided government. And leaders were proud to have reached the deal less than two weeks after their July 1 deadline, rather than the nearly five months it took to hash out an agreement last year.
House Majority Leader Matt Bradford (D., Montgomery) speaks on Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2025.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer
Lawmakers had agreed to work over the weekend to hurriedly approve the budget deal, with members of the Senate coming in on Saturday night to begin advancing parts of the budget deal and the House joining them Sunday afternoon. By 6:15 p.m. Sunday, Shapiro had signed it.
Among the inspirations for the weekend of productivity, Bradford said: making it to the MLB All-Star Game in Philadelphia, for which he had tickets.
Out: Typical budget math
Leaders returned to some old accounting maneuvers to address the state’s multibillion-dollar structural deficit and avoid pulling from the state’s emergency savings account.
They spent down unused and underused dedicated funds, and rolled some of the state’s Medicaid payments totaling $1.3 billion to the next fiscal year, a move lawmakers typically resorted to before the state saw an influx of federal dollars during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Without those delayed payments, the state budget would total closer to $52.1 billion, and several GOP members criticized the total as being disingenuous.
Public school teachers and other state employees who retired before July 1, 2002, will receive a tiered monthly payment based on the date of their retirement. Similarly, police officers and firefighters who retired more than five years ago will receive monthly payments ranging from $50 to $300, depending on how long they have been retired.
Lawmakers from both parties had called for the cost-of-living increase.
Mayor Cherelle L. Parker had asked the General Assembly to close it as part of her own city budget pitch in a move estimated to bring an additional $1.5 million to Philadelphia.
Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle L. Parker is cheered by members of Philadelphia City Council at conclusion of her budget address, Thursday, March 12, 2026.Alejandro A. Alvarez / Staff Photographer
Out: Banning cell phones in schools
Twenty-nine states have bell-to-bell cell phone bans. This year, Pennsylvania will not join them, despite the passage of two separate phone ban bills — one in each chamber of the legislature.
In: Mandatory recess for students K-5
Recess is now law in Pennsylvania.
Another education policy change championed by Shapiro, a mandatory, 30-minute recess for students in kindergarten through fifth grade was established in this year’s budget as a way to improve learning outcomes.
Out: Addressing looming problems — with looming deadlines
Several Pennsylvania funding issues that have gone years without being addressed were left out of the latest budget, some with more pressing deadlines than others.
Lawmakers did not address a need for mass transit funding — which led to last year’s bitter budget stalemate among legislators — but are expected to identify a long-term funding stream for the transit agencies next year when a two-year fail-safe runs out.
Senator Nikil Saval, speaks at a press conference calling for more SEPTA funding from the state at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pa., on Friday, June 26, 2026.Tyger Williams / Staff Photographer
Other local governments and service providers said their needs are more pressing.
The County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania released an urgent plea after the state budget was signed, noting that counties still have not received the critical mental health funding they need, or a surcharge increase used to fund 911 call systems. Home-health service providers also continued their calls for increased state funding they say is needed, as the industry faces serious staffing issues due to low state reimbursement rates.
Republican and Democratic lawmakers championed the organizations in this budget, making it the largest single-year increase for the critical services in state history, according to the Pennsylvania Coalition to Advance Respect.
“Today marks a turning point for survivors and rape crisis centers across Pennsylvania,” said Joyce Lukima, the organization’s coalition director, in a news release.
Ethan Young is an intern with the Pennsylvania Legislative Correspondents’ Association.
