Federal Level

U.S. and Iran Reach Deal to End the War

President Trump announced on Sunday, June 14, that a ceasefire agreement with Iran has been finalized, with the Strait of Hormuz set to reopen to shipping. Iran’s deputy foreign minister confirmed the agreement on state television the same day, with the formal signing ceremony scheduled for Friday, June 19, in Switzerland. The deal calls for an immediate halt to hostilities, 60 days of negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program, and phased sanctions relief tied to Iranian compliance. It is the most significant diplomatic development of Trump’s second term.^{1, 2, 3}

Trump Blasts Netanyahu Over Iran Deal Delay

President Trump publicly and privately rebuked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday, June 14, after Israel struck targets in Beirut just one hour before the U.S. and Iran were set to sign their ceasefire agreement. Trump posted on Truth Social that the attack “should not have happened” and told Axios he was furious, saying Netanyahu has “no judgment.” Iran’s parliament speaker cited the strike as a direct challenge to the peace process. Trump pressed both sides to stand down and said the deal remained on track.^{4, 5}

Obama Calls Trump’s Iran Deal ‘No Improvement’

Former President Barack Obama said on Sunday, June 14, in an interview set to air on ABC News, that he is “doubtful” the new Iran deal will be meaningfully different from the 2015 agreement that Trump withdrew from during his first term. Obama said the framework that appears to be taking shape is unlikely to be “a significant improvement” over the original deal. Trump hit back, calling Obama’s 2015 deal “stupid” and saying Iran was developing nuclear weapons throughout that period.^{6, 7}

Trump’s Approval Hits Second-Term Low

An NBC News poll released on Sunday, June 14, shows President Trump’s overall approval rating among all U.S. adults has fallen to 39 percent, the lowest recorded in his second term. The survey, released on Trump’s 80th birthday, shows 58 percent disapproval and finds Democrats leading Republicans on the question of which party voters want to control Congress ahead of the November midterms. Trump retains strong support among Republicans at 82 percent.^{8, 9}

McConnell Hospitalized for Second Time This Year

Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the 84-year-old former Senate majority leader, was hospitalized on Sunday morning, June 14, according to a brief statement from his office. Spokesperson David Popp confirmed McConnell was admitted and is “receiving excellent care,” but did not disclose any details about his condition. This is his second hospitalization in 2026, following an eight-day stay in February for flu-like symptoms.^{10, 11, 12}

State Level

Kemp Endorses Jones in Georgia Governor Runoff

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp endorsed Lt. Governor Burt Jones in the Republican gubernatorial runoff on Sunday, June 14, just two days before Tuesday’s vote. Kemp said Jones “has been a strong, trusted ally” and knows how to get things done. Jones faces billionaire Rick Jackson, who has poured millions of his own money into the race. With both Trump and Kemp now aligned behind Jones, Jackson faces a steep climb heading into Tuesday.^{13, 14}

Texas GOP Chair Ousted at State Convention

Republican Party of Texas Vice Chair D’rinda Randall defeated incumbent Chair Abraham George at the state’s GOP convention on Friday, June 13, in a surprise leadership shakeup ahead of the fall midterm elections. George had been backed by Attorney General Ken Paxton, who won the Republican Senate primary runoff last month. The change at the top of the state party signals continued internal tensions within Texas Republicans as they head toward November.^{15, 16}

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Article Sources

1. Al Jazeera, “US-Iran ceasefire deal announced, Trump says Strait of Hormuz reopening,” June 14, 2026.

2. Bloomberg, “U.S., Iran strike deal to reopen Strait of Hormuz,” June 14, 2026.

3. Axios, “What’s in the Iran deal Trump says he’s ready to sign,” June 12, 2026.

4. Washington Examiner, “Trump scolds Netanyahu for having ‘no judgment’ after Beirut strikes,” June 14, 2026.

5. New York Post, “Trump says Iran peace deal will be signed in next several hours, after criticizing Israel for strikes,” June 14, 2026.

6. Washington Times, “Obama ‘doubtful’ Trump’s Iran deal will be different than the one he signed,” June 14, 2026.

7. ABC News, “Obama says it’s ‘doubtful’ Trump’s Iran deal will differ from 2015 framework,” June 14, 2026.

8. NBC News, “Trump’s approval rating hits second-term low in new poll,” June 14, 2026.

9. USA Today, “President Trump’s approval rating hits second-term low in new NBC poll,” June 14, 2026.

10. Politico, “Sen. Mitch McConnell hospitalized, his team says,” June 14, 2026.

11. The New York Times, “Mitch McConnell Is Hospitalized, His Spokesman Says,” June 14, 2026.

12. Washington Post, “Sen. Mitch McConnell is hospitalized, but his office does not disclose why,” June 14, 2026.

13. Politico, “Brian Kemp endorses Burt Jones in Georgia’s gubernatorial runoff,” June 14, 2026.

14. CBS News Atlanta, “Gov. Brian Kemp endorses Burt Jones for Georgia governor ahead of runoff,” June 13, 2026.

15. Washington Examiner, “Paxton-backed Texas GOP chairman ousted by vice chairwoman,” June 12, 2026.

16. KETK/FOX51, “Texas GOP Chair Abraham George ousted by second-in-command D’rinda Randall,” June 13, 2026.

Federal Level

U.S.-Iran Peace Deal Teeters on Edge of Signing

President Trump announced on Saturday, June 13, on Truth Social that a memorandum of understanding with Iran is “set to be signed” on Sunday, June 14, with the Strait of Hormuz to reopen “immediately after.” Iran’s foreign ministry pushed back the same day, saying no signing was scheduled for Sunday, though it did not rule out a deal within days. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif confirmed that both sides had agreed on framework text, and a virtual signing ceremony is under discussion. Key terms include a 60-day ceasefire, a halt on uranium enrichment, and the release of frozen Iranian assets.^{1, 2, 3}

Trump Names Personal Lawyer to Run SDNY

President Trump announced on Saturday, June 13, that he will appoint James M. McDonald, one of his personal attorneys currently handling his hush money conviction appeal, as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. McDonald would replace Jay Clayton, whom Trump nominated this week as Director of National Intelligence. The Southern District of New York is one of the most powerful federal prosecutor’s offices in the country, handling cases ranging from Wall Street fraud to public corruption.^{4, 5}

FBI Raids Ohio Voter Registration Group

FBI agents on Thursday, June 12, raided the Cleveland office of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a progressive voter registration group that ran one of the largest registration drives in the state during the 2024 election. Agents seized computers and mobile phones and also visited the homes of volunteers and staff members across Columbus, Dayton, and Cincinnati. The group’s board member Prentiss Haney said more than 100 agents were involved, calling it “a coordinated attack” on voter access. Federal prosecutors have not publicly stated what prompted the investigation.^{6, 7, 8}

Trump Pushes Congress to Erase His Impeachments

President Trump is pressing House Republicans to pass a resolution that would symbolically expunge both of his impeachments from the congressional record, according to reports confirmed on Saturday, June 13. Speaker Mike Johnson acknowledged discussions with Trump and legal advisers on the matter. Constitutional scholars are clear that no legal mechanism exists for reversing a completed impeachment, and any such resolution would carry no legal force. Lawmakers are not expected to take up the measure before the November midterm elections.^{9, 10}

Trump Backs Collins in Georgia Senate Runoff

President Trump endorsed Rep. Mike Collins in Georgia’s Republican Senate primary runoff on Sunday morning, June 14, just two days before Tuesday’s vote. In a Truth Social post, Trump called Collins a “WARRIOR and WINNER” while dismissing runoff opponent Derek Dooley as someone he does not know. The endorsement puts Trump in direct conflict with Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who backs Dooley. The Republican winner will face Democratic incumbent Senator Jon Ossoff in November.^{11, 12}

U.S. Strike Kills Tren de Aragua Leader in Venezuela

President Trump announced on Friday, June 13, that U.S. forces killed Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, known as Nino Guerrero, the leader of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang, in a military strike carried out in cooperation with the Venezuelan government. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed the operation, which took place at a Tren de Aragua compound in Venezuela’s Bolivar state. The Trump administration had classified Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization and a drug trafficking cartel.^{13, 14}

State Level

Georgia Opens Redistricting Session Tuesday

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp convenes a special legislative session on Tuesday, June 17, to redraw the state’s congressional and legislative district maps in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s April ruling that significantly weakened Voting Rights Act protections against racial gerrymandering. Republicans are expected to use the session to eliminate or reshape the district held by 17-term Democratic Rep. Sanford Bishop. Any redrawn maps would take effect for the 2028 election cycle, not the current midterms, as Kemp has said changing maps now would be too disruptive.^{15, 16, 17}

DOJ Scales Back Election Oversight Ahead of Midterms

As of Saturday, June 13, the Trump Justice Department has dismantled the centralized “command center” that historically coordinated federal election oversight on Election Day, and has canceled training sessions for prosecutors and FBI agents on election integrity. The DOJ has also fired attorneys from its Public Integrity Section, which traditionally handles election-related prosecutions. State election officials from both parties have raised concerns that the rollback leaves voters without the federal oversight infrastructure that has existed for decades heading into the 2026 midterms.^{18, 19}

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Article Sources

1. NBC News, “Trump says deal with Iran is expected to be signed on Sunday,” June 13, 2026.

2. Reuters, “Iran says draft US deal includes oil sanctions waiver, nuclear limits and asset release,” June 14, 2026.

3. Associated Press, “US and Iran have agreed to wording of a deal to end their war, Pakistan’s prime minister says,” June 12, 2026.

4. ABC News, “Trump names James M. McDonald to lead powerful New York federal prosecutor’s office,” June 13, 2026.

5. Politico, “Trump picks James McDonald to run SDNY,” June 13, 2026.

6. The Guardian, “FBI raid at office of Ohio voting rights group raises concerns of crackdowns before midterm elections,” June 12, 2026.

7. NBC News, “Ohio progressive group searched by FBI accuses Trump’s DOJ of intimidation,” June 12, 2026.

8. Washington Post, “FBI searches office of Ohio group that supports voter registration efforts,” June 12, 2026.

9. The Guardian, “Trump asking Congress for symbolic expunging of his two impeachments,” June 12, 2026.

10. Forbes, “Trump Is Pressuring Congress To Expunge His Impeachments, Report Says,” June 12, 2026.

11. Politico, “Trump endorses Mike Collins in Georgia Senate runoff,” June 14, 2026.

12. The New York Times, “Trump Endorses Mike Collins in Georgia Senate Runoff,” June 14, 2026.

13. Al Jazeera, “Trump says US strike killed Tren de Aragua gang boss with Venezuela help,” June 13, 2026.

14. Politico, “US kills Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua leader in military strike, Trump says,” June 12, 2026.

15. The New York Times, “Georgia Governor Calls Special Session to Redistrict for 2028 Elections,” May 13, 2026.

16. Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “What to know about Georgia’s special session on redistricting, voting,” May 2026.

17. CBS News Atlanta, “Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp calls special legislative session to redraw district maps,” May 12, 2026.

18. Spotlight PA, “Trump admin has weakened federal election oversight ahead of midterms,” June 7, 2026.

19. The Grio, “As the 2026 midterms approach, the U.S. Department of Justice has quietly shifted how it handles election oversight,” June 13, 2026.

Federal Level

U.S.-Iran Peace Deal Could Be Signed This Weekend

Senior U.S. and Iranian officials confirmed on Friday, June 12, that both sides have agreed on the text of a memorandum of understanding to end the three-month war, with a signing ceremony possible as early as this weekend. The deal calls for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within 30 days, halt enrichment of highly enriched uranium, and allow an international inspection regime, in exchange for the phased lifting of U.S. sanctions and the release of frozen Iranian assets. Pakistan’s prime minister, who helped mediate, confirmed the agreed text on Friday. Nuclear program details would be finalized during a subsequent 60-day negotiating period.¹

Judge Permanently Blocks Trump’s $1.8B ‘Slush Fund’

Federal Judge Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia issued a permanent preliminary injunction on Friday, June 12, blocking the Trump administration’s $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund, which had been billed as compensation for individuals who claimed to be victims of politically motivated prosecutions. Brinkema said she does not trust the administration’s assurances that it has abandoned the fund, and ordered the DOJ to provide a sworn declaration within one week confirming the fund will not proceed in any form or under any name. Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress had previously labeled the fund a political slush fund.²

Courts Force Trump’s Name Off the Kennedy Center

Federal appeals courts on Friday, June 12, denied the Trump administration’s last-minute request to pause a lower-court order requiring the removal of President Trump’s name from the facade of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts by midnight Friday. Judge Christopher Cooper, who issued the original ruling on May 29, held that only Congress has the authority to rename the federally chartered arts center. Workers began removing the signage in the early hours of Saturday morning, though the administration is expected to continue pursuing the matter on appeal.³

Surveillance Law Lapses as Congress Leaves Washington

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act officially lapsed at midnight Friday, June 12, after Congress was unable to agree on a renewal and the House left Washington for its scheduled recess until June 23. Speaker Johnson called the lapse “a significant national security risk.” Intelligence officials note that existing court-approved collection orders will allow most surveillance operations to continue uninterrupted through at least early 2027, but no new collection orders can be issued while the authority is expired.⁴

House Passes Bill to Reopen $9B Ukraine Aid Package

The House voted 226-195 on Wednesday, June 11, to pass a bill providing approximately $9 billion in direct aid and loans to Ukraine, after a bipartisan group of members used a rare procedural maneuver called a discharge petition to force the vote over Speaker Johnson’s objections. It was the first time in years that the House rank and file successfully overruled the Speaker to bring a bill to the floor. The measure now moves to the Senate, where its prospects remain uncertain.⁵

State Level

Maine Ranked-Choice Count Begins; Results Next Week

Maine’s ranked-choice tabulation for both the Democratic and Republican gubernatorial primaries got underway on Friday, June 12, at the state’s Department of Public Safety headquarters in Augusta. In the Democratic race, public health official Nirav Shah leads on first-choice votes with roughly 27 percent, followed by Hannah Pingree and Troy Jackson. Republican businessman Bobby Charles leads his field at about 37 percent. Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said she expects to certify results no earlier than late next week.⁶

South Carolina GOP Primary Runoff Now Required in July

With all precincts reporting from Tuesday’s Republican primary for governor of South Carolina, Lieutenant Governor Pamela Evette and former Congressman Ralph Norman advanced to a July 14 runoff after neither candidate secured the majority needed to win outright. Evette led with roughly 36 percent and Norman followed with approximately 22 percent. The eventual nominee will be heavily favored in November in a state that voted for Trump by 20 points in 2024. The winner will succeed term-limited Governor Henry McMaster.⁷

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Article Sources

1. Reuters, “US, Iran Signal Peace Deal Near as Tehran Claims Victory,” June 12, 2026.

2. Associated Press, “US expects to sign agreement to end Iran war within next few days: Senior official,” June 12, 2026.

3. Audacy/WCCO Radio, “US and Iran are close to a deal to end their war, officials say,” June 12, 2026.

4. UPI, “Judge extends block on Trump administration anti-weaponization fund,” June 12, 2026.

5. Reuters, “US judge indefinitely blocks Trump’s anti-weaponization fund,” June 12, 2026.

6. Reuters, “Trump’s name removed from Kennedy Center in predawn operation,” June 12, 2026.

7. CNBC, “Trump name still must come down from Kennedy Center, judge says,” June 12, 2026.

8. The New York Times, “Kennedy Center Appeals Order to Remove Trump’s Name,” June 11, 2026.

9. The New York Times, “FISA Surveillance Law Is Set to Lapse After Congress Fails to Reach Deal,” June 12, 2026.

10. KPMG Capitol Hill Weekly, “House Passes Bill to Reopen $9B Ukraine Aid Package,” June 8, 2026.

11. Maine Secretary of State’s Office, Press Release, “Ranked Choice Voting Tabulation Begins,” June 12, 2026.

12. El Pais, “Primary elections in South Carolina, Maine, Nevada, and North Dakota: What you need to know,” June 8, 2026.

This week, in a federal courtroom on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, the police commissioner of a United States territory was sentenced to ten years in federal prison for selling his badge. The next day, the territory’s former budget director got seven years for helping him do it. Five months earlier, in the same courthouse, the territory’s former Sports, Parks, and Recreation commissioner was sentenced to five years for a parallel shakedown. His bagman got five years and eight months. Their contractor of choice, a man named David Whitaker who founded a company called Mon Ethos Pro Support, pleaded guilty in 2024 and turned state’s witness (U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice).

Six convicted public-corruption defendants in two parallel schemes inside one small territorial government. The money was federal disaster-relief money, sent down from Washington under the American Rescue Plan Act to help the Virgin Islands rebuild after hurricanes. The bribes that bought it were paid in cash, in private-school tuition, in luxury travel, and in restaurant equipment for the police commissioner’s personal restaurant project. And the very company paying the bribes was caught planting fourteen surveillance devices inside Virgin Islands government offices, then billing the government more than $130,000 to come back and “find” them (Exec Security TSCM, Virgin Islands News Online).

You did not read about this in the New York Times. You did not read about it in the Washington Post. You did not read about it in the Wall Street Journal. The people of the Virgin Islands are American citizens. The money was American taxpayer money. The convictions are federal. And the mainland press treated the story like a foreign country.

What the Centercratic Party Stands For

Three of our nine principles describe exactly what just happened in St. Croix.

“Safeguard Our Democratic System. Govern through compromise, not domination. Reject extreme tactics by special interests and defend the Constitution for everyone.” When the most senior law-enforcement officer in a territory is on the payroll of the contractor he is supposed to oversee, democracy is not being safeguarded. It is being inverted (U.S. Department of Justice).

“One Law for All. The law applies equally to all. Independent courts ensure fair process and protect basic rights.” Federal Judge Mark Kearney applied the law to a police commissioner, a budget director, a parks commissioner, a middleman, and a contractor. That is one law working as designed. The question is whether anyone above them, including the governor who appointed them, will face the same standard (U.S. Department of Justice).

“Govern with a Balanced Approach. Reject both government overreach and government absence. Provide essential services, measure results, end what fails, and enforce fiscal discipline.” The Virgin Islands Police Department paid Mon Ethos $3.31 million for CCTV services. The Department of Sports, Parks, and Recreation tried to steer the company another $1.43 million security-camera contract. The Office of Management and Budget pushed payments to the company forward in the queue. None of this was essential service delivery. It was a captured government writing checks to a captured contractor (Loop News).

The Sordid Details

The story begins with David Whitaker, founder of Mon Ethos Pro Support, a St. Thomas-based company that pitched itself as a one-stop shop for cybersecurity, surveillance, and digital services. By the early 2020s, Mon Ethos had embedded itself across multiple Virgin Islands government agencies. The Virgin Islands Police Department alone had paid Whitaker’s company $3.31 million for CCTV services. The Department of Sports, Parks, and Recreation had a $1.43 million security-camera contract in motion. And the Office of Management and Budget controlled the spigot of federal American Rescue Plan Act money that kept Mon Ethos paid (Loop News, Virgin Islands Free Press).

To keep that spigot open, Whitaker paid bribes. Lots of them.

Police Commissioner Ray Martinez took nearly $100,000 in benefits. According to evidence presented at his federal trial, the payments included cash, luxury travel, personal expenses, private-school tuition for a member of his family, and restaurant equipment for a personal restaurant project Martinez was building on the side. In exchange, Martinez approved Mon Ethos invoices and helped award the company a $1.4 million contract funded by federal disaster-recovery dollars. The federal jury convicted him in December 2025 on every count brought against him: honest services wire fraud, federal program bribery, money laundering conspiracy, and obstruction of justice. On June 9, 2026, Judge Mark Kearney sentenced him to ten years in federal prison, ordered him to forfeit $127,000, pay $77,250 in restitution, and a $5,000 fine (U.S. Department of Justice, Facebook post by Virgin Islands Source).

OMB Director Jenifer O’Neal helped move Mon Ethos invoices to the front of the territory’s payment line. She was convicted on every count alongside Martinez in December 2025 and on June 11, 2026, Judge Kearney sentenced her to seven years in federal prison (U.S. Department of Justice).

In a parallel scheme, Sports, Parks, and Recreation Commissioner Calvert White solicited a $16,000 bribe in exchange for steering the $1.43 million security-camera contract toward Mon Ethos. He successfully collected $5,000 of it. White and his middleman, Benjamin Hendricks, owner of A Clean Environment USVI, were convicted at a five-day jury trial in July 2025. On January 22, 2026, Judge Kearney sentenced White to five years in prison and Hendricks to five years and eight months. White was the son of a longtime Virgin Islands senator and was fitted with a GPS ankle monitor on his way out of the courthouse (U.S. Department of Justice, Virgin Islands Free Press).

Whitaker pleaded guilty in September 2024 to two counts of wire fraud and one count of bribery concerning federal programs. He cooperated. He testified against the commissioners. His sentencing was held on June 10, 2026, the day between Martinez and O’Neal, with prosecutors seeking a reduced 22-month term in light of his cooperation (WTJX).

And then there is the wiretap. In September 2024, court documents were unsealed showing that Mon Ethos had planted fourteen eavesdropping devices inside Virgin Islands government offices, including inside the Office of Management and Budget itself. The same company that was bribing the budget director was bugging her office. And the same company then turned around and billed the Virgin Islands government more than $130,000 for technical surveillance counter-measure services to detect and remove the very devices it had planted. The territory paid that bill (Exec Security TSCM, Virgin Islands News Online).

Six convicted defendants. Three sitting cabinet-level commissioners under one governor. Federal disaster money targeted. A contractor who bugged the offices of the officials he was bribing. This is what one-party government looks like when nobody is watching.

Both Parties Have Failed Us

The Virgin Islands is governed almost exclusively by Democrats. Governor Albert Bryan Jr. is a Democrat. He appointed Martinez. He appointed O’Neal. He appointed White. He has not been charged with any crime and the U.S. Attorney has not implicated him in the bribery schemes. But he requested the resignations of Martinez and O’Neal only after the FBI seized their cellphones, and he was reluctant even then to concede that his administration had erred in continuing to do business with a contractor whose founder was already a convicted felon (Virgin Islands Consortium, Loop News).

This is the pattern of one-party rule everywhere it takes root. Where the party in power faces no real opposition, the people inside the government stop fearing the voters and start fearing only the federal prosecutors. The Virgin Islands have a Democratic monopoly. Other places have Republican monopolies. Ohio just produced one of the largest utility-bribery cases in American history under Republican one-party rule in Columbus. Newark, New Jersey just produced a duffel-bag-cash deputy mayor under Democratic one-party rule. The party label changes. The structure does not. One-party dominance plus federal dollars plus weak local press equals exactly this kind of scandal, in cycle after cycle, in jurisdiction after jurisdiction.

And the national press has failed every one of these stories. The Virgin Islands case checks every box that should make it national news. American citizens. Federal money. A sitting police commissioner convicted. A sitting budget director convicted. A sitting parks commissioner convicted. A contractor planting listening devices inside government offices, then billing the government to find them. And yet the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal have produced essentially nothing on it. What coverage exists has come almost entirely from territorial reporters at WTJX, the Virgin Islands Consortium, the Virgin Islands Free Press, Virgin Islands News Online, the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation, Loop News, and one DOJ press release picked up nowhere else. That is not journalism failure as an accident. That is a structural blind spot in how the mainland press decides whose corruption matters (WTJX).

The Virgin Islanders who paid for this scandal cannot meaningfully vote for the president of the United States who appoints the U.S. Attorney that prosecuted it. They cannot send a voting member to the Congress that allocated the disaster money that was stolen. They have an inspector general, a territorial DOJ, and the FBI. That is what stood between them and total impunity, and only just barely.

We do not have time left to keep tolerating this. A democracy in which territorial citizens fund a captured government, federal money buys a contractor who bugs the very officials he is bribing, the local press carries the story alone, and the mainland press cannot find the territory on a map, is a democracy already failing the people inside it. The Centercratic Party exists to insist on the alternative: term limits that break the political machines, one law that actually applies to commissioners and contractors and governors, transparent procurement that makes bug-the-budget-director schemes impossible, and a politics where federal disaster money goes to rebuild communities instead of to building police commissioners’ restaurants.

We must save our democracy before it is too late.

That is the wave.

The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party. Visit centercratic.party | centervoter.com

Welcome to Friday Vision where we expose the depth of our institutional
decay and present the blueprints required for long-term solutions.

Almost everyone agrees that America’s immigration system is broken. That may be the only thing almost everyone agrees on. Past that point, the conversation falls apart into slogans. Build the wall. Abolish ICE. Mass deportation. Open borders. Each side treats the other as the problem, and every couple of years we get a fresh round of promises that go nowhere.

The story underneath all of that noise is this. The system has been broken in much the same ways for about forty years, and it keeps getting worse. Not because the problem cannot be solved, but because hardly anyone in Washington has been willing to define it clearly before reaching for a microphone. Solutions get announced before the problem is understood. Enforcement gets ramped up before the courts are funded. Legal doors get shut before anyone builds new ones.

The result is a system that serves no one. It does not serve American workers, or American employers, or the millions of people living in legal limbo, or the taxpayers who pay for all of it. It does not even serve the politicians, who keep promising to fix it and failing.

This article walks through the whole story in no more than a 5–10 minute read. How immigration used to work. The moments when it broke. What the system looks like today. And how we can realistically get it back on track. It is a short version of two longer research reports we have published, which are there for you whenever you have the time.

How Immigration Used to Work

For most of American history, immigration simply worked. It did not work because someone designed it cleverly. It worked because it matched a basic reality. A young country with enormous land and a constant shortage of labor needed people, and people came.

The founders understood this. One of the grievances in the Declaration of Independence was that King George had been “obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners.” Immigration was treated as a national strength, not a threat. For most of the nineteenth century there were no visa systems, no numerical limits, and no quotas. Between 1815 and 1930, the country took in more than thirty million immigrants from Europe alone.

That open era did not last. Beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Congress started closing the doors, often along plainly racial lines. The major turning point came in 1921 and 1924, when Congress set the first comprehensive numerical quotas in the nation’s history. They were written to favor Northern and Western Europeans and to shut out arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. Total immigration fell from more than 800,000 a year to around 150,000.

Then came two laws that still shape everything today.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 gathered the scattered rules into one master statute. It finally removed race as an outright bar to citizenship, but it kept the national-origin quotas in place. That 1952 law is still the foundation of American immigration law today. It has been amended many times, but never replaced.

The larger change came in 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Act at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. It abolished the national-origin quotas and built a new system around family reunification. Its sponsors promised it would barely change the makeup of the country. Senator Ted Kennedy assured the nation that “the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.” They were wrong, and the reason still matters.

The family reunification system let immigrants sponsor relatives, and those relatives could sponsor relatives of their own. Over the decades, that chain shifted American immigration away from Europe and toward Asia and Latin America. But the 1965 law did something else that almost no one noticed at the time. For the first time, it placed a cap on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, which included Mexico.

For generations, people had moved back and forth across the southern border freely, following the work. Now there were limits that had nothing to do with the deep economic ties between the two countries. When the legal door closes but the work on the other side does not go away, people do not stop coming. They come another way. Unauthorized immigration from Mexico and Central America became all but inevitable the moment that cap was set, and that dynamic has never been fixed.

The Four Moments That Broke the System

If 1965 set the trap, four later decisions sprang it. Each made the same basic mistake. Each pushed hard on one side of the system while leaving the other side alone.

1986: A Grand Bargain That Backfired

By the 1980s the unauthorized population had grown large. Congress responded with the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which President Reagan signed in a rare bipartisan moment. It was meant to be a grand bargain. Legalize the people already here, and crack down on the illegal hiring that drew the next wave.

The first half worked. About four million people, including roughly 1.3 million farmworkers, received legal status.

The second half did not work at all. Employers were now required to check their workers’ documents, but they only had to confirm that the papers “reasonably appeared” genuine. They did not have to verify that the documents were real. Within four years, the government’s own auditors reported that this loophole had made employer enforcement close to meaningless. An employer could knowingly accept fake papers and still comply with the law.

So the country legalized millions of people while leaving in place a reliable way to hire the next several million. Between 1986 and 2000, the unauthorized population grew from about three million to about eight million. The grand bargain delivered neither order nor enforcement.

1990: The Caps That Were Frozen in Place

The Immigration Act of 1990 was the last time Congress meaningfully set the levels for legal immigration. It created the H-1B visa for skilled workers, and it set the numerical caps that we still use, in essence, today.

Those caps were built for the economy of 1990, the year before the World Wide Web came online. The workforce has changed since then. The economy has changed. The country has changed. The caps have not.

The results are hard to believe. Employment-based green cards are capped at roughly 140,000 a year, and no single country is allowed more than seven percent of the total. India, with 1.4 billion people and an enormous professional class, gets the same allocation as Iceland. So a skilled worker from India in certain categories now faces a wait measured not in years but in lifetimes. The Migration Policy Institute has noted that some applicants are effectively scheduled to wait 223 years, an impossibility written into law and left untouched since the first President Bush. We bring talented students into our universities, train them in our graduate programs, and then push many of them out. Canada, Australia, and Germany are glad to take them, because they built systems that respond to real demand. We did not.

1996: More Enforcement, No New Doors

In 1996, President Clinton signed a law that sharply expanded enforcement. More detention. More grounds for deportation. Faster removals. What it did not do was open a single new legal pathway. This is the central imbalance of the last thirty years. Enforcement keeps expanding, while legal immigration stays frozen at the levels set in 1990.

The 1996 law also backfired badly. It created three-year and ten-year bans on re-entry for anyone who had been in the country illegally and then left. Before this, a great many Mexican workers came for the season and then went home to their families. The new bans made leaving dangerous. Step out of the country, and you might be locked out for a decade. So people stopped leaving. A law meant to push unauthorized immigrants out instead trapped them inside, turning a seasonal, back-and-forth pattern into permanent settlement.

After 9/11: A System Divided Against Itself

The attacks of 2001 set off the largest reorganization of the immigration agencies in the nation’s history. The old Immigration and Naturalization Service was broken into three pieces inside the new Department of Homeland Security: USCIS for applications and benefits, Customs and Border Protection for the border, and ICE for enforcement inside the country. Meanwhile, the immigration courts were left in an entirely different department, the Department of Justice. So a single system is now run by four agencies across two cabinet departments, each with its own budget, leadership, and culture. When these pieces fail to coordinate, it is not an accident. It is built into the design.

There is one more piece to this, and it did the most damage. After 9/11, enforcement funding grew enormously. Border Patrol staffing doubled. ICE detention budgets swelled. But the courts that were supposed to decide the cases that enforcement produced barely grew at all. We built a powerful machine for catching people and a small, starved one for judging them. The backlog that followed was entirely predictable.

What the System Actually Looks Like Today

Set the politics aside and look at the machinery itself. It is in worse shape than most people realize.

Only three narrow doors

There are exactly three legal ways to immigrate permanently. Through family. Through an employer. Or through humanitarian protection, such as asylum. For most of the world, all three are closed.

Family-based immigration is the largest category, but outside of the immediate relatives of citizens, the waits are staggering. Filipino brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens who applied in 1998 are only now becoming eligible. Employment-based immigration, as we have seen, is capped and limited by country to the point where it no longer makes sense. And there is no general skilled-worker visa, no points system, for a person who has valuable skills but no employer to sponsor them and no family already here. If you do not fit through one of the three narrow doors, there is no legal way in.

A court system that has collapsed

The clearest measure of failure is the immigration court backlog. As of April 2026, it stands at more than 3.2 million active cases. In 2015 it was about 475,000. It has grown roughly eightfold in a single decade.

The average case now waits more than four years. During that time, people cannot get any certainty about their future. They often cannot work legally, and they cannot reunite with family. And they frequently face all of this alone, because only about thirty percent of people in deportation proceedings have a lawyer.

One number settles the argument. Fewer than two percent of new immigration court cases involve any allegation of criminal activity beyond the crossing itself. The courts are not clogged with dangerous criminals. They are clogged with people who overstayed a visa, or crossed without papers, or are seeking asylum, all moving through a court system that was never designed to carry this kind of weight.

People who followed the rules are stuck too

Separate from the courts is the backlog at USCIS, the agency that processes legal applications. It has more than tripled in a decade, to more than ten million pending cases. These are not people who crossed the border. These are people who did everything the right way, who filed the forms, paid the fees, and submitted the paperwork, and now wait years for an answer. When the legal system punishes the people who follow the rules, it has stopped working.

An asylum system built for another world

The asylum system was created in 1980, for the world of the Cold War. It was designed to handle a small number of individuals fleeing political persecution, one case at a time. That world is gone. Worldwide, the number of displaced people now exceeds 120 million. And the forces driving people out of Central America today, gang violence, the failure of crops in a changing climate, economic collapse, and governments too corrupt to protect their own citizens, do not fit neatly inside the narrow 1980 definition of a refugee. The result is that more than half of asylum claims are eventually denied on the merits, but only after the applicants have waited years for a decision. That does not mean the claims are frauds. It means the legal standard no longer matches the real reasons people are fleeing.

The border numbers swing, but the pressure stays

The number of people arriving at the border is highly volatile. It peaked at nearly 250,000 in a single month in late 2023, then fell below 10,000 a month by early 2025. That swing tells us enforcement and policy do affect migration, and the border can be managed when there is political will to manage it. But it does not touch the deeper problem. As long as the legal pathways stay broken and the work on the other side keeps drawing people north, the pressure toward unauthorized migration never goes away. It only waits.

The Part Neither Party Likes to Say Out Loud

Any serious look at immigration has to deal with two facts neither party is comfortable saying in public.

The first is that immigrants, including those here without authorization, are central to the American economy. Foreign-born workers make up about 18.6 percent of the labor force, roughly twenty-nine million people. They are about seventy-three percent of farmworkers and about a quarter of construction workers. Unauthorized workers in particular paid an estimated 11.7 billion dollars in Social Security taxes and three billion dollars in Medicare taxes in a single year, paying into programs they are not even allowed to draw from. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the recent surge in immigration would add roughly 8.9 trillion dollars to the economy over a decade. These are not talking points. They are measured facts.

This is why enforcement-only approaches keep failing. When an industry has a real, structural need for workers that the legal system refuses to supply, unauthorized employment continues no matter how tough the border becomes. We can deport people, but we cannot deport the economic demand that draws them here.

The second fact is that America is growing older. Our birth rate has been below the replacement level since the early 1970s. The baby boomers are retiring, and the number of workers supporting each Social Security and Medicare beneficiary keeps shrinking. For most of our history, immigration is the main thing that has kept the working-age population growing. This is not a matter of opinion. It is arithmetic. Without immigration, the funding problems facing Social Security and Medicare get structurally worse, and neither party has been willing to say so plainly.

There is a deeper cause that sits entirely outside our borders. People leave Mexico and Central America mainly because of poverty, violence, corruption, and, more and more, the failure of crops in a changing climate. A farmer in Guatemala whose harvest has failed three years running, who faces extortion from a gang the government cannot stop, is not studying American visa law before he decides to leave. He is trying to survive. A policy that deals only with what happens at our border, while ignoring why people leave home, treats the symptom and calls it a cure.

How We Get Back on Track

There is good news buried under all of this. The problem can be solved. Not easily, and not without cost, but it can be solved. The failures of the last forty years were not random. They share a single root mistake, and once that mistake is clear, the path forward becomes clear with it.

The one principle that changes everything

Every major reform since 1986 expanded enforcement without expanding either the legal pathways or the capacity of the courts. The lesson of that history is plain. Enforcement and legal pathways have to grow together. Push hard on enforcement while keeping the legal doors shut, and the unauthorized population does not shrink. It grows. That is exactly what happened in 1986, and again after 1996.

So the answer is not enforcement first, and it is not pathways first. It is both, designed and built as one connected system. The full reform plan organizes the work into six tracks.

1. Modernize legal immigration

Replace the frozen 1990 caps with a system that responds to real demand. Canada’s Express Entry system processes skilled-worker applications in about six months, using a points-based ranking, and Australia runs something similar. America can do the same. Set employment-based visas at a sensible floor, at least 200,000 a year, and adjust the numbers regularly based on real labor-market data. Scrap the per-country caps that produce century-long waits, and rank applicants on skills and experience. Speed up the family categories for spouses and young children. And clear the ten-million-case USCIS backlog on a defined ten-year schedule, so that following the rules actually works again.

2. Make employer verification real

The loophole from 1986 is still open. The fix is mandatory, nationwide E-Verify, the electronic system that checks work authorization in real time, phased in over five years and beginning with large employers and federal contractors. States that adopted it saw unauthorized employment fall significantly. But there is a condition that cannot be skipped. Mandatory verification only works if the legal pathways expand at the same time. If they do not, the work simply moves further underground. So the plan pairs E-Verify with strong protections for legal workers who get wrongly flagged.

3. Rebuild the courts

Take the immigration courts out of the Department of Justice and make them genuinely independent, as an Article I court system with judges who serve fixed terms and are free from political pressure. A bill to do exactly that, the Real Courts, Rule of Law Act, was introduced in 2026. Then fund the courts to clear the backlog, with roughly 1,500 judges added over five years, along with the support staff and legal representation the work requires. The financial case is simple. Holding a person in detention costs about 150 dollars a day, and resolving cases in months instead of years saves far more than the judges cost.

4. Modernize asylum

Update the 1980 definition of a refugee so that it reflects the forces actually driving migration today, such as the collapse of a government’s ability to protect its people from widespread violence, or a genuine environmental catastrophe. Add fast, professional screening at the ports of entry, handled by trained asylum officers rather than Border Patrol, that can sort credible claims from weak ones within thirty days. And create a temporary protected category for people fleeing real danger who do not quite meet the asylum standard, rather than leaving them in a permanent shadow.

5. Resolve the long-term unauthorized population

About ten to fourteen million people live here without authorization, and roughly sixty percent of them have been here for a decade or more. They have homes, businesses, and American-born children. No serious plan exists to deport all of them, and every economic study says that trying would be devastating. The plan, modeled on the bipartisan Dignity Act of 2025, offers a structured status it calls Earned Presence. It is a ten-year legal status for people who have been here since before 2021, who pass a background check, who have no serious criminal record, and who pay fees and restitution. It is not amnesty, and it is not an automatic path to citizenship. After ten years, a person can apply through the normal channels, the same as anyone else. And all of it is tied directly to the verification and court reforms happening at the same time. The mistake of 1986, legalizing people without fixing the system around them, must not be repeated.

6. Address the root causes

Finally, invest in the countries people are leaving, through a long-term Regional Development Compact with Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, built on the logic of the Marshall Plan rather than on short-term aid. The arrangement is straightforward. Sustained investment over fifteen years, in exchange for verifiable reforms in governance, the rule of law, the fight against corruption, and agriculture. Most of the money flows through private-sector projects under independent oversight, not blank checks to governments. This is not charity. It is a calculation about our own national security. The cost of endless enforcement at the border is far greater than the cost of reducing the pressure at its source. But the plan is honest about the timeline. This kind of development pays off over a generation, not over a news cycle.

Building a system that lasts

There is a reason past reforms keep failing, and it is not only that the policies were flawed. It is that the system has no way to keep itself up to date. The 1990 caps stayed frozen for thirty-five years because nothing ever forced anyone to revisit them.

So the plan adds two safeguards. The first is an independent Immigration Policy Commission, modeled on the Federal Reserve, which would monitor the system, set demand-based visa levels using real data, and report to the public on whether the reforms are working. The second is a required review of immigration law every ten years, with binding recommendations that Congress must vote on. It cannot force Congress to agree, but it can force it to act, so that the system never again drifts for decades while everyone looks the other way.

Why It Has Not Happened, and Why It Still Can

If the path is this clear, the obvious question is why no one has walked it. The honest answer is uncomfortable. A broken immigration system is useful to the people who are supposed to fix it. As we have written before, an unsolved problem raises money, turns out the base, and gives each side someone to blame. A solved problem is yesterday’s news. For forty years, the incentives have quietly favored leaving it broken.

But that is a choice, not a law of nature. The system cannot be fixed by enforcement alone, or by legalization alone, or by any single slogan. It can be fixed by a clear-eyed, evidence-based plan that repairs all of the broken pieces at the same time. A legal system that matches reality. Courts funded as seriously as enforcement. An asylum framework built for this century. An honest resolution for the people already here. And real investment in the reasons people leave home.

None of this is painless, and none of it is free. But the alternative is the path we are already on, a system that keeps deteriorating, a backlog that keeps growing, millions of people in limbo, and an economy that quietly depends on a workforce we refuse to acknowledge. That is not a stable arrangement. It is a slow failure we have gotten used to. We do not have to keep doing this. We only have to define the problem plainly and then fix it on purpose. That is what serious governing has always looked like.

Want the Full Story?

This article is the short version. If you want the complete history, the underlying data, and the detailed plan, the Centercratic Party has published two in-depth research reports.

• America’s Immigration Crisis: What Is Broken and Why It Matters. The full diagnosis, tracing the entire history of American immigration and laying out every dimension of today’s crisis, with the data and sources behind it.

• America’s Immigration Reform Plan: A Practical Path Forward. The complete solution, covering all six reform tracks, the institutional safeguards, a fifteen-year timeline, and the benchmarks for measuring progress.

Both are available at centercratic.party and centervoter.com.

Prepared by the Centercratic Party Research and Policy Division centercratic.party | centervoter.com

This document is the second step in the Centercratic Party’s comprehensive immigration policy initiative. Part One, America’s Immigration Crisis: What Is Broken and Why It Matters, defined the full scope of the problem: its historical roots, its structural causes, and its current dimensions. It concluded by identifying six structural conditions that any serious reform effort must address. This document takes the next step. It presents the solutions.

The discipline of separating diagnosis from prescription is essential, because every failed immigration reform effort in the last forty years has skipped the diagnostic step and jumped straight to politics. The result is what we have today: a system that serves no one. That discipline was honored in Part One. It is honored here by ensuring that every solution proposed in this document is grounded in a specific structural failure documented in Part One, and that no solution is presented without the implementation architecture, the evidence base, and the measurement framework needed to evaluate whether it would actually work.

The framework used to develop these solutions is the six-stage policy cycle and the three disciplines of serious governance introduced in America’s Biggest Problems Keep Getting Worse (June 2, 2026).¹ In that framework, Part One completed Stage 1 (Problem Identification). This document carries that work through Stage 3 (Policy Formulation), with direct attention to Stage 4 (Policy Adoption), Stage 5 (Policy Implementation), and Stage 6 (Policy Evaluation). The three disciplines, which start with root causes rather than surface symptoms, let evidence lead rather than ideology, and prioritize by impact rather than political convenience, govern every recommendation that follows.

The solutions presented in this document are designed to be durable. The goal is not a reform that survives one administration or one congressional cycle. The goal is a structural overhaul of the American immigration system capable of managing the nation’s immigration needs for the next fifty to one hundred years. That means the framework must be built on evidence rather than politics, on institutions rather than executive orders, and on legal pathways that match the real economic and demographic demands of 21st-century America rather than the assumptions of 1990.

What follows is the prescription.

Part I: The Foundational Principle: Enforcement and Pathways Must Scale Together

The Core Structural Error of the Past Forty Years

Every major immigration reform effort since 1986 has shared a fundamental structural flaw: enforcement capacity has been expanded without a commensurate expansion of legal pathways or adjudication capacity. Part One documented this pattern in precise terms. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act legalized approximately 4 million people but built a defective employer sanctions system that the General Accounting Office documented as largely unenforceable within four years of its passage.² The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act dramatically expanded enforcement authorities, mandatory detention, and grounds for deportation while freezing legal immigration levels at their 1990 caps.³ The result was structurally predictable: enforcement pressure increased, legal options did not expand, and the unauthorized population continued to grow.

The 1996 three- and ten-year bars on re-entry produced a particularly perverse outcome. Before 1996, many unauthorized migrants from Mexico engaged in circular migration, working in the United States seasonally and returning home to their families. The bars made this circular pattern too risky, because leaving the country meant being barred from legal re-entry for years. The rational response was to stop leaving. Researchers have documented that the 1996 bars effectively converted a circular migration pattern into a permanent settlement pattern, increasing the long-term unauthorized population precisely because the cost of departing had become too high.⁴

This history leads to the foundational principle of any durable reform framework: enforcement and legal pathways must be designed as a single integrated system and must scale together. Expanding enforcement without expanding pathways does not reduce the unauthorized population. It increases it.

Every specific recommendation in this document flows from this principle. The framework is not enforcement-first or pathways-first. It is both, together, designed as a coherent system with the same goal: a legal immigration system that is functional, fair, and capable of managing the nation’s actual immigration needs for the next fifty to one hundred years.

Part II: Six Structural Reform Tracks

The solutions presented here are organized into six structural reform tracks, each addressing one or more of the core structural failures identified in Part One. Each track specifies the problem it tackles, the structural solution proposed, the implementation architecture, the evidence base, and the measurement framework.

Track One: Modernize the Legal Immigration System

The Problem

The foundational architecture of the U.S. legal immigration system was last comprehensively updated in 1990, a year before the World Wide Web went online, eight years before Google was founded, and decades before the demographic and economic conditions of the 2020s could have been anticipated.⁵ The system provides three principal pathways, namely family-based immigration, employment-based immigration, and humanitarian protection, all of which are operating under structural constraints that make them inadequate to meet 21st-century demand.

Employment-based immigration is capped at approximately 140,000 visas annually, a number calibrated to the economic conditions of 1990. The per-country cap of 7 percent means that a worker from India applying in the EB-2 or EB-3 category faces a wait time extending beyond one hundred years. The Migration Policy Institute has documented that some workers in the employment-based green card queue are effectively scheduled to wait 223 years.⁶ This is not a backlog. It is a statutory impossibility that has been permitted to exist for more than three decades.

The USCIS administrative backlog for lawful immigration benefits has more than tripled over the last decade, from approximately 3.5 million cases to over 10 million cases pending as of early 2026.⁷ These are not unauthorized immigrants or asylum seekers. These are people who followed the rules, paid the fees, and submitted the documentation. The system cannot process their applications within a human career lifespan.

The Solution

Reform One: Establish a Demand-Responsive Legal Immigration Framework

The central structural reform to legal immigration is the replacement of fixed numerical caps with a demand-responsive framework that adjusts annually based on labor market data, demographic projections, and national security assessments. Canada’s Express Entry system, introduced in 2015, demonstrated that a points-based, labor-market-responsive immigration system can process skilled worker applications within six months, compared to the years or decades required by the American system.⁸ Australia’s General Skilled Migration program similarly uses a points-based ranking system that allows numerical allocations to track actual occupational demand.⁹

The proposed American framework would retain the three existing pathways (family-based, employment-based, and humanitarian) while making the following structural changes:

Employment-based immigration: Total annual employment-based visa allocations would be set through a biennial review conducted jointly by the Department of Labor, the Department of Homeland Security, and an independent Congressional Budget Office analysis of labor market conditions. Base allocations would be set no lower than 200,000 annually, with upward adjustments tied to documented labor shortfalls in critical sectors. The per-country cap of 7 percent would be eliminated and replaced with individual per-country allocations set through the biennial review process, calibrated to actual application volume and labor market need. A points-based ranking system, modeled on Canada’s Comprehensive Ranking System, would be used to prioritize employment-based applications on the basis of education, work experience, English language proficiency, age, and adaptability. The system would maintain a rolling pool of applicants ranked by score, with invitations to apply issued through regular rounds, allowing the system to respond dynamically to changing labor market conditions without requiring new legislation every time economic circumstances change.

Family-based immigration: Immediate relative immigration, covering spouses, children under 21, and parents of U.S. citizens, would remain numerically unlimited. Preference category family immigration would be restructured to reduce processing times for the highest-priority relationships, specifically spouses and minor children of lawful permanent residents, from the current multi-year waits to a target of eighteen months. Existing family preference backlogs, some of which extend to cases filed in the 1990s and early 2000s, would be addressed through a multi-year backlog reduction program with dedicated annual funding and a ten-year clearance target.

Diversity Visa program: The Diversity Visa lottery, which provides 50,000 annual visas to nationals of countries with historically low immigration to the United States, would be retained but reformed to incorporate a points-based skills assessment as a secondary selection criterion among lottery winners. This preserves the program’s geographic diversity function while improving the economic integration outcomes of its beneficiaries.

Reform Two: Eliminate the Legal Immigration Backlog on a Ten-Year Schedule

The USCIS administrative backlog of over 10 million pending cases represents a fundamental failure of the legal immigration system’s basic operational capacity. Clearing this backlog requires a sustained multi-year investment in USCIS staffing, technology infrastructure, and processing capacity. The proposed framework calls for a dedicated backlog reduction program structured around the following elements:

1. A ten-year clearance target for all pending cases, with annual benchmarks established and publicly reported

2. A USCIS fee structure reform that separates application fee revenue from operational funding, ensuring that USCIS does not face the perverse incentive of slowing processing to extend the fee revenue stream

3. A technology modernization initiative to replace paper-based processing systems with digitized, case-management systems capable of real-time tracking and automated workflows

4. Dedicated congressional appropriations for backlog reduction staffing, separate from USCIS’s baseline operating budget, for the duration of the ten-year program

The cost of this investment is measurable and has a documented return. The $1.2 trillion in projected federal revenue from the immigration surge of 2021–2026 demonstrates the fiscal value of a functional legal immigration system.¹⁰ A backlog that prevents workers from obtaining legal status delays that fiscal contribution and, in many cases, drives those workers to leave the United States for countries with more functional immigration systems. Canada, Australia, and Germany have all implemented points-based systems specifically because they recognized that the competition for skilled workers is global and that processing speed is itself a competitive advantage.¹¹

Track Two: Build a Functional Employer Verification System

The Problem

As Part One documented in detail, the employer sanctions system established by the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 was structurally defective from the moment of its enactment.² Employers were required only to review documents that appeared genuine on their face, without any obligation to verify their authenticity. The General Accounting Office documented within four years that this flaw had rendered employer sanctions largely unenforceable. The result was a workforce enforcement system that created the appearance of accountability without the substance.

The voluntary E-Verify system, introduced in 1996, represented a significant improvement in principle: an electronic database check against Social Security and DHS records that can verify work authorization in real time. However, as of 2026, only approximately 30 percent of new hires are run through E-Verify, leaving the demand side of unauthorized employment effectively unaddressed.¹²

Research on the effect of mandatory E-Verify mandates in states that have implemented them shows significant results. A 2016 study by economists Pia Orrenius and Madeline Zavodny found that state-level mandatory E-Verify laws reduced the likely unauthorized immigrant population from Mexico and Central America by meaningful margins, with newly arrived immigrants most likely to seek unauthorized employment falling by nearly 50 percent in states with mandatory E-Verify laws.¹³ In five of seven states with universal E-Verify mandates, the unauthorized workforce was substantially lower than the projected counterfactual.¹⁴

The Solution

Reform Three: Mandatory National E-Verify with Robust Due Process Protections

The proposed framework calls for a phased implementation of mandatory national E-Verify for all employers, structured as follows:

1. Phase One (Year One through Year Two): Mandatory E-Verify for all federal contractors and subcontractors, employers with 500 or more employees, and agricultural employers in the H-2A visa program. Compliance infrastructure, employee training, and an enhanced error resolution system would be established during this phase.

2. Phase Two (Year Three through Year Four): Mandatory E-Verify extended to all employers with 50 or more employees. Continued investment in error resolution capacity and employer compliance support.

3. Phase Three (Year Five): Universal mandatory E-Verify for all employers of record in the United States.

Critical to the framework is the parallel development of a next-generation employment verification system that addresses E-Verify’s documented weaknesses. The current E-Verify system can verify that a document is consistent with government records, but it cannot authenticate identity. This vulnerability to identity fraud, where unauthorized workers use stolen Social Security numbers or other fraudulent documents, is E-Verify’s primary known weakness.¹⁵ The Migration Policy Institute’s research on next-generation verification systems has identified biometric identity authentication as the most promising path to closing this gap. The proposed framework therefore pairs universal mandatory E-Verify with a biometric identity authentication pilot program that would be tested in volunteer employer communities during Phase One and Phase Two, with the goal of replacing document-based verification with biometric-based verification by Year Eight of full implementation.

Mandatory E-Verify without parallel expansion of legal pathways would simply divert labor demand from legal employers to underground employment arrangements, driving wages down and working conditions below enforceable standards. This document’s recommendation for mandatory E-Verify is therefore explicitly conditioned on the simultaneous implementation of Track One’s legal pathway reforms. The two tracks are not alternatives. They are complements.

Due process protections in the mandatory E-Verify system are non-negotiable components of this framework. The proposed framework requires:

1. An employer obligation to provide any employee with a tentative non-confirmation a minimum of ten business days to contest the result before any adverse action is taken

2. A dedicated USCIS error resolution office with a 72-hour initial response target for contested cases

3. An independent appeals mechanism for employees whose E-Verify results are challenged, separate from the employer’s reporting chain

4. Annual public reporting on E-Verify error rates, broken down by worker national origin, to ensure that the system’s known disparate error patterns are monitored and corrected

Track Three: Rebuild the Immigration Court System

The Problem

Part One documented the immigration court collapse in precise terms. As of April 2026, the backlog stands at 3,267,302 active cases, with 2,322,467 individuals having already filed formal asylum applications and waiting for hearings or decisions.¹⁶ The average case has been pending for more than four years. In fiscal year 2024, there were 735 immigration judges, the highest number in a decade, but the Trump administration’s dismissal of approximately 100 judges in early 2025 and subsequent departures have reduced that number to approximately 685 as of mid-2025.¹⁷ A new hiring class of 42 judges was announced in March 2026, a number that represents a fraction of what is needed to clear the backlog on any reasonable timeline.

Only 29.6 percent of immigrants facing removal proceedings as of April 2026 had legal representation. Research consistently demonstrates that unrepresented individuals face substantially worse outcomes and create substantially greater court inefficiency than represented individuals, because unrepresented parties are less able to present their cases clearly, require more judicial time to manage, and are more likely to have cases continued for procedural deficiencies.¹⁶

The structural independence problem is equally significant. Immigration judges are not Article I or Article III judges. They are attorneys in the Department of Justice, supervised by an Attorney General who is a political appointee and who has the legal authority to issue binding precedent decisions that constrain how immigration judges apply the law.¹⁸ This structure compromises the integrity and independence of the adjudicatory process and has been criticized by the Harvard Law Review as producing a system that functions as “courts in name only.”¹⁸

The immigration court backlog is not primarily a product of excessive migration. It is a product of four decades of failure to fund the adjudication system in proportion to the enforcement system. As the Bipartisan Policy Center documented as early as 2018, adding 238 additional immigration judges would cost approximately $259 million (8.6 percent of a single year’s ICE custody operations budget) and would significantly reduce the backlog by 2030.¹⁹ The court system has not received that investment.

The Solution

Reform Four: Transform the Immigration Court into an Independent Article I Court

The most important structural reform to the immigration court system is the conversion of the Executive Office for Immigration Review from an agency of the Department of Justice into an independent Article I court, a court created by Congress with judges appointed to fixed terms, insulated from executive branch political pressure, and operating under the procedural standards and due process requirements that apply to other Article I courts. The Real Courts, Rule of Law Act, introduced in the House in March 2026, would accomplish this conversion.²⁰ The proposed framework endorses this approach as the foundational institutional reform from which all other court improvements follow.

An independent Article I immigration court would:

1. Establish immigration judges as judicial officers appointed through a merit-based selection process, serving fixed terms of ten years with reappointment subject to performance review

2. Remove the Attorney General’s authority to issue binding precedent decisions that override immigration judge rulings

3. Create a standardized case management system across all immigration courts nationally, replacing the current patchwork of local practices

4. Establish mandatory recusal standards and conflict-of-interest rules consistent with federal judicial ethics requirements

Reform Five: Eliminate the Backlog on a Five-Year Schedule

Converting the court to Article I status addresses the structural integrity problem. Eliminating the backlog requires a separate, sustained resource commitment. Based on research published by the Center for Migration Studies, eliminating the current backlog of more than 3 million cases over a five-year period would require expanding the immigration judiciary to approximately 1,500 immigration judges, supported by proportionate increases in support staff, hearing facilities, and case management infrastructure.²¹ The proposed framework calls for:

1. Congressional appropriation of funding sufficient to build the immigration judiciary to 1,500 judges over five years, with a hiring plan of approximately 160 additional judges per year

2. A proportionate increase in immigration court interpreter services, court administration staff, and technology infrastructure

3. A dedicated backlog reduction docket separate from the ongoing case management docket, staffed by judges specifically assigned to adjudicate the oldest pending cases on an expedited basis

4. A Legal Representation Initiative that expands access to legal representation for unrepresented respondents, with the goal of achieving 70 percent representation rates by Year Five

The financial case for this investment is straightforward. Detention costs for a single individual held in ICE detention average approximately $150 per day. Cases that could be adjudicated and resolved in months instead drag on for years, accumulating detention costs that far exceed the cost of the judicial infrastructure needed to resolve them. The Bipartisan Policy Center estimated in 2018 that adding 238 judges would save $823 million in detention costs while costing $259 million in new judicial salaries, a net return of $564 million.¹⁹ At the scale proposed here, the financial returns are proportionately larger.

Track Four: Reform the Humanitarian Protection System

The Problem

The American asylum system was designed in 1980 to process a relatively small number of individually persecuted people in a Cold War geopolitical context. As Part One documented, the world for which that system was designed no longer exists.²² Global displacement has exceeded 120 million people. The primary drivers of migration from Central and South America, namely gang violence, generalized poverty, climate-driven agricultural failure, and institutional corruption, do not fit neatly within the legal definition of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group that the 1980 Refugee Act established. The result is a system that is asked to apply a narrow legal standard to a massive and growing population whose circumstances are genuine but whose legal eligibility under the existing framework is frequently uncertain.

More than 50 percent of asylum claims filed at the border in recent years have been denied when adjudicated on the merits.²³ This does not mean those claims were fraudulent. It means the legal standard does not capture the actual circumstances that are driving migration. A system designed around that standard will continue to generate enormous backlogs and inconsistent outcomes until the standard is modernized.

The Solution

Reform Six: Modernize the Asylum and Humanitarian Protection Framework

The proposed framework calls for three parallel reforms to the humanitarian protection system:

Restructure the asylum eligibility standard. The legal definition of “refugee” under the 1980 Refugee Act would be updated to add a sixth protected ground, “serious harm caused by inability of home country government to provide basic protection from pervasive violence, environmental disaster, or systematic economic failure,” that captures the primary circumstances driving contemporary asylum claims from Central America and other high-migration origin regions. This change would allow immigration judges to adjudicate claims on their merits rather than forcing applicants to contort their circumstances into inadequate existing categories.

Establish an Expedited Pre-Screening System at Ports of Entry. The most effective mechanism for managing asylum claim volume at the border is a rapid, professional pre-screening process conducted at ports of entry that distinguishes, within 30 days, between claims with prima facie merit and claims that do not meet threshold eligibility criteria. Pre-screening would be conducted by trained USCIS asylum officers (not Border Patrol agents) using a standardized written assessment protocol with a brief structured interview. Applicants who pass pre-screening would be placed on an expedited court docket with a mandatory 90-day hearing timeline. Applicants who do not pass pre-screening would have the right to a one-time administrative appeal before an immigration judge on an expedited basis, with a final determination within 60 days.

Establish a Climate and Hardship Temporary Protection Category. For individuals displaced by conditions that do not meet the threshold for asylum but who face genuine harm if returned to their country of origin, specifically individuals from countries experiencing severe climate-driven food insecurity, epidemic-level gang violence, or governmental collapse, a new Temporary Protection Category (TPC) would be established. TPC status would provide five-year renewable work authorization, access to federal health and safety standards, and a defined pathway to a formal legal status determination. TPC would not be a pathway to permanent residence or citizenship by itself, but TPC holders who meet legal immigration criteria during the TPC period would be able to apply through the standard family-based or employment-based pathways.

Track Five: Address the Long-Term Unauthorized Population

The Problem

Part One documented that between 10 and 14 million people currently reside in the United States without legal authorization, and that approximately 60 percent have been here for a decade or more.²⁴ Many have been here for 20 or 25 years. They have built lives, started businesses, raised families, and paid taxes. Unauthorized workers paid an estimated $11.7 billion in Social Security taxes and $3 billion in Medicare taxes in 2022 alone, contributing to programs for which they are ineligible to receive benefits.²⁵

No enforcement-only approach has ever produced a credible operational plan for removing this population, and every independent economic analysis has concluded that attempting mass deportation of the long-term unauthorized population would cause severe economic disruption across the industries, namely agriculture, construction, food service, and domestic services, that have structural dependencies on this workforce.¹⁰ The solutions to the long-term unauthorized population must be honest about what they are. A legalization program is a legalization program. It should not be presented as anything else. The question is whether the conditions attached to it are serious enough to warrant the benefits extended, and whether the accompanying enforcement reforms are credible enough to prevent the recurrence of another multi-decade unauthorized population buildup.

The Solution

Reform Seven: A Structured Legal Status Program for Long-Term Residents

The proposed framework calls for a structured program modeled on the broad outlines of the bipartisan Dignity Act of 2025, which was reintroduced in Congress in July 2025 with bipartisan support.²⁶ The core structure of the proposed program is as follows:

Eligibility: Individuals who have been continuously present in the United States since before January 1, 2021, who have no disqualifying criminal history (defined as any felony conviction or three or more misdemeanor convictions), who pass a background check, and who pay a processing fee and restitution contribution toward border security and court infrastructure.

Status granted: A ten-year Earned Presence status, which provides work authorization, the ability to travel outside the United States and return, and access to state-level services on the same basis as lawful permanent residents. Earned Presence status is not permanent residence and is not a direct pathway to citizenship, but it is renewable and provides a stable, defined legal status.

Pathway to permanent residence: After completing the ten-year Earned Presence period without disqualifying criminal activity, an individual may apply for lawful permanent residence through the standard employment-based or family-based pathways, subject to the same criteria and waiting periods that apply to other applicants. This is not a separate fast-track pathway. It is access to the standard legal immigration system from which these individuals were previously excluded.

DACA and long-term residents under 25: Individuals who were brought to the United States as children and have lived here for the majority of their lives present a specific case that warrants a more direct resolution. The proposed framework calls for a statutory pathway to permanent residence for individuals who arrived before age 16, have been continuously present for at least ten years, have no disqualifying criminal history, and meet an education or military service requirement.

Conditionality: The Earned Presence program described above is explicitly conditioned on the simultaneous enactment of Tracks One, Two, and Three of this framework. A legalization program without a functioning legal immigration system, mandatory employer verification, and a rebuilt court system will reproduce, within a generation, the conditions that created the current unauthorized population. The lesson of 1986 must not be repeated.

Track Six: Address the Root Causes of Migration

The Problem

Part One documented in detail that the root causes of unauthorized migration from Central America and other high-migration origin regions are structural conditions in origin countries, namely poverty, endemic violence, institutional corruption, and increasingly, climate-driven agricultural failure, combined with persistent American employer demand for labor that the legal immigration system was never designed to accommodate.²⁷

A policy framework that addresses only what happens at the border and in the interior of the United States, without any attention to the structural conditions generating the migration impulse, is not a durable solution. It is a containment strategy that must be sustained indefinitely at enormous cost, with results that are inherently temporary, because the underlying pressure does not diminish.

Evidence on the effectiveness of foreign aid in addressing root causes of migration is mixed. Research published by the Centre for Economic Policy Research in 2024 found that aid can temporarily reduce irregular migration but may lead to increased regular migration as conditions improve over time, because improved economic conditions give people the resources to finance planned migration.²⁸ Development aid is not a short-term migration deterrent. It is a long-term economic development investment whose migration effects may not be measurable for a generation.

The Solution

Reform Eight: A Long-Term Regional Development and Security Investment Compact

The proposed framework calls for a Regional Development Compact with Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, the countries of origin for the majority of unauthorized migration to the United States, modeled on the logic of the Marshall Plan rather than the logic of conditional foreign aid.

The distinction is important. Conditional aid, meaning funding contingent on measurable migration reductions, has been tried repeatedly and has failed, because the conditions it requires governments to meet are not within those governments’ immediate control, and because the funding levels have been insufficient to produce the structural changes needed.²⁹ A compact modeled on the Marshall Plan commits to sustained, substantial investment over a defined multi-year period (fifteen years is proposed here) in exchange for verifiable structural reforms in governance, rule of law, and economic development.

Specific commitments from participating countries would include:

1. Audited anti-corruption programs with measurable benchmarks, monitored by an independent body with U.S. and partner-country representation

2. Legal system reform programs, including judicial independence, legal aid infrastructure, and public defender systems

3. Agricultural development investments specifically targeting small-holder farming communities affected by climate-driven crop failure, with technical assistance from U.S. Department of Agriculture programs

4. Violence reduction programs in high-emigration municipalities, modeled on evidence-based community violence intervention models

U.S. investments under the compact would be channeled primarily through private sector partnerships, targeted to industries, namely agricultural technology, renewable energy, and infrastructure construction, that generate sustainable employment in origin communities. Direct cash transfers to governments would be minimized in favor of project-specific funding with independent oversight.

This investment is not charity. It is a national security and economic security calculation. The cost of sustained border enforcement, detention operations, and court backlog management under a no-investment-in-origin-countries scenario is measurable in tens of billions of dollars annually. A fifteen-year development compact that produces even a 20 percent reduction in unauthorized migration pressure from Central America would generate fiscal savings that dwarf its cost.

The framework acknowledges the academic research establishing that development aid’s effects on migration are long-term rather than immediate. The compact is therefore presented as a generation-long commitment, not a short-term migration management tool. It is one component of a comprehensive framework, not a substitute for the legal pathway and enforcement reforms of Tracks One through Five.

Part III: Institutional Governance: Building a System That Lasts

The Lesson of Four Decades of Failed Reform

Part One documented that every major immigration reform effort since 1986 has failed to produce a durable solution. The IRCA grand bargain of 1986 legalized millions and failed to enforce. The 1990 caps became outdated within a decade and were never updated. The 1996 enforcement expansion made the unauthorized population larger, not smaller. The comprehensive reform efforts of 2007 and 2013 collapsed before reaching a vote.

The reasons for these failures are structural, not personal. They are rooted in the six-stage policy cycle’s systematic underfunding of Stages 3 through 6, namely policy formulation, adoption, implementation, and evaluation, in favor of the perpetual Stage 2 loop of agenda-setting and political performance documented in America’s Biggest Problems Keep Getting Worse.¹ Solutions are proposed before problems are fully defined. Enforcement is expanded before courts are funded. Pathways are narrowed before alternatives are created.

A reform framework designed to last fifty to one hundred years must include institutional structures specifically designed to prevent the recurrence of this failure pattern. The following institutional mechanisms are integral components of the proposed framework.

An Independent Immigration Policy Commission

The proposed framework calls for the establishment of a permanent, independent Immigration Policy Commission, an independent federal body modeled on the Federal Reserve’s structure of professional governance insulated from short-term political pressure, with the following authorities:

1. Conduct and publish the biennial labor market and demographic review that sets legal immigration allocations under the demand-responsive framework of Track One

2. Monitor and publicly report on implementation progress across all six tracks of the reform framework, with annual reports to Congress

3. Trigger mandatory congressional review procedures when implementation benchmarks are not met, creating accountability mechanisms for Stage 5 failures

4. Conduct the Stage 6 policy evaluation function: measuring outcomes across the legal immigration system, the employer verification system, the immigration courts, and the humanitarian protection system against defined benchmarks, and publishing findings publicly on a two-year cycle

Commission members would be appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate to staggered six-year terms. The Commission would have no enforcement authority. Its function is research, monitoring, evaluation, and public reporting, the institutional equivalent of a financial auditor for the immigration system as a whole.

A Statutory Ten-Year Review Mechanism

The immigration system must have a built-in mechanism for updating its legal framework as conditions change. The core failure documented in Part One, that immigration caps set in 1990 remained in place for thirty-five years despite being profoundly misaligned with economic reality, must not be permitted to recur.

The proposed framework includes a statutory requirement for a comprehensive decennial review of the entire Immigration and Nationality Act, conducted by the Immigration Policy Commission in consultation with Congress, with binding recommendations to Congress requiring a floor vote within twelve months of submission. This mechanism does not require Congress to adopt the recommendations. It requires Congress to vote on them. The combination of a professional evaluation and a mandatory floor vote creates both the evidence base and the political accountability mechanism needed to keep the system updated over time.

Consolidated Interagency Coordination

Part One documented the institutional fragmentation created by the post-9/11 reorganization of federal immigration agencies: USCIS, CBP, and ICE operate under DHS, while the immigration courts (EOIR) operate under DOJ.³⁰ This split-department structure produces coordination failures that are not exceptional events but structural features of the current design.

The proposed framework calls for the consolidation of USCIS and EOIR under a single Department of Homeland Security umbrella, with a dedicated Deputy Secretary for Immigration Policy responsible for coordinating policy across all four immigration agencies. This does not require the elimination or reorganization of any agency. It requires a unified chain of authority and coordination mechanism that currently does not exist.

Part IV: Implementation Architecture and Timeline

The reforms described in this document are complex, interdependent, and long-term in their effects. Their successful implementation requires a phased timeline that sequences reforms in the right order, invests in institutional capacity before expanding requirements, and establishes clear accountability benchmarks at each stage. The proposed implementation architecture is organized around a fifteen-year timeline with three five-year phases.

Phase One: Foundation (Years One Through Five)

1. Enact the Immigration Policy Commission and establish its governance structure

2. Enact the Article I Immigration Court conversion and begin the judicial hiring program

3. Enact the legal pathway modernization legislation and initiate the demand-responsive visa framework

4. Implement Phase One of mandatory E-Verify for large employers and federal contractors

5. Launch the USCIS backlog reduction program

6. Initiate negotiations on the Regional Development Compact with Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries

7. Establish the humanitarian protection pre-screening system at ports of entry

8. Launch the Earned Presence program for long-term unauthorized residents concurrent with the above enforcement and pathway reforms

Measurement benchmarks at Year Five:

1. Immigration court backlog reduced by at least 40 percent from the 2026 baseline

2. USCIS administrative backlog reduced by at least 30 percent

3. E-Verify coverage expanded to all large employers and federal contractors

4. Legal immigration processing times for employment-based applicants reduced to an average of 24 months or less

5. Earned Presence applications received and processed with a 90-day target determination window

Phase Two: Scaling (Years Six Through Ten)

1. Expand mandatory E-Verify to all employers with 50 or more employees

2. Complete Article I immigration court conversion and reach 1,200 immigration judges

3. Initiate biometric identity authentication pilot for next-generation E-Verify

4. Complete first biennial labor market review under the demand-responsive framework and adjust visa allocations accordingly

5. Implement first Regional Development Compact investment cycle with measurable outputs

6. Conduct first decennial review of the Immigration and Nationality Act

Measurement benchmarks at Year Ten:

1. Immigration court backlog reduced by at least 75 percent from the 2026 baseline

2. Average time from asylum application to final determination: 18 months or less

3. E-Verify coverage at 80 percent of all new hires nationally

4. Legal immigration processing times for employment-based applicants: 18 months or less for most categories

5. Unauthorized border encounters trending downward compared to Year One baseline

Phase Three: Stabilization (Years Eleven Through Fifteen)

1. Universal mandatory E-Verify fully implemented

2. Biometric identity authentication system deployed nationally

3. Immigration court backlog at manageable sustainable levels, with ongoing case completion rates exceeding new case intake

4. First comprehensive Earned Presence cohort eligible for permanent residence pathway applications

5. Second decennial review of the Immigration and Nationality Act incorporating lessons from Phase One and Phase Two

6. Regional Development Compact first five-year evaluation with evidence-based course corrections

Measurement benchmarks at Year Fifteen:

1. Immigration court backlog at or below 500,000 cases, a level consistent with a functioning court system under normal intake conditions

2. USCIS administrative backlog at or below 2 million cases

3. Unauthorized workforce as a share of total employment reduced by at least 50 percent from the 2026 baseline

4. Legal immigration system processing an annual volume of immigrants calibrated to documented labor market demand, without multi-decade wait queues for any category

Part V: What a Functional System Looks Like

The goal of this framework is not simply to fix what is broken. The goal is to build what has never existed: an American immigration system that is functional, fair, predictable, and durable. A description of what that system looks like in practice serves as the closing standard against which this framework should be judged.

For an employer: Federal law is clear, consistently enforced, and operationally straightforward. E-Verify provides a reliable, fast determination of work authorization that protects employers from legal liability and ensures that their workforce is legally employed. The employment-based immigration system provides realistic, predictable pathways for recruiting skilled workers at timelines measured in months rather than decades.

For a legal immigrant: The system processes applications on a timeline that is consistent with human career planning and family formation. A skilled worker from any country in the world can receive a determination within 24 months. A family member sponsored by a U.S. citizen has a realistic expectation of resolution within a defined timeframe. A person following the rules experiences a system that functions and responds.

For a person seeking asylum: The system has a professional, humane pre-screening process that evaluates claims against a modernized legal standard within 30 days. People with credible claims have a defined pathway to a hearing within 90 days. People whose claims do not meet the threshold have a swift, due-process-protected determination and a prompt, dignified return.

For the American economy: The legal immigration system supplies labor at the volumes and skill levels that the economy actually needs, calibrated through a biennial evidence-based review rather than fixed by statute in 1990. The demographic pipeline for Social Security and Medicare is stable. Industries that depend on foreign-born workers have legal pathways that eliminate the structural incentive for unauthorized employment.

For the American taxpayer: Enforcement spending is matched by adjudication capacity, so that money spent on border operations produces actual case resolutions rather than growing backlogs. Court cases are resolved in months rather than years, reducing the detention costs that accumulate during indefinite legal limbo. The system is measured against public benchmarks, evaluated against actual outcomes, and updated through a defined institutional process rather than left to deteriorate for decades between reform crises.

That is the immigration system this framework is designed to build. It is not the system we have today. But it is the system that the structural analysis in Part One demonstrates is achievable, and the solutions in this document describe how to get there.

Conclusion: The Complexity That Demands Action

The immigration problem has resisted solution for forty years not because it is too complex to solve, but because the political incentives have consistently favored keeping it broken. As America’s Biggest Problems Keep Getting Worse established plainly: an unsolved problem raises money, turns out a base, and gives the other side something to be blamed for. A solved problem is yesterday’s news.¹

This framework is built on the opposite conviction. The immigration system is solvable. It is not solvable with enforcement alone. It is not solvable with legalization alone. It is not solvable with any single-lever approach that addresses one structural failure while ignoring the others. It is solvable with an integrated, sequenced, evidence-based framework that treats the problem as what Part One demonstrated it to be: a legal system misaligned with economic reality, an adjudication system starved of resources, a humanitarian framework built for a different century, and a workforce dependency that requires legal channels rather than underground ones.

The solutions presented here are not painless. A functional legal immigration system requires sustained investment in institutional capacity. A credible employer verification system requires requirements that carry real consequences. A rebuilt immigration court requires the judicial staffing and independence that have been withheld for decades. A resolved unauthorized population requires a legal status program that is honest about what it is. An addressed root cause problem requires a generation-long investment commitment.

These are not small things. They are also not optional. The alternative, the current trajectory, is a system that continues to deteriorate, a backlog that continues to grow, an unauthorized population that continues to exist in legal limbo, and a workforce dependency that continues to be met through underground channels rather than legal ones.

The framework in this document is designed to last fifty to one hundred years. It will require updating. The decennial review mechanism is designed for exactly that purpose. But the structural logic, which is to enforce and expand pathways together, invest in adjudication as heavily as enforcement, modernize the humanitarian framework for contemporary realities, resolve the long-term unauthorized population on honest and conditional terms, and address root causes with the patience and investment they actually require, is not a framework that will need to be rebuilt from scratch in twenty years. It is a framework that can be maintained, calibrated, and improved over time.

That is what serious governance looks like.

This document is Part Two of the Centercratic Party’s comprehensive immigration policy initiative. Part One, America’s Immigration Crisis: What Is Broken and Why It Matters, is available at centercratic.party and centervoter.com.

Prepared by the Centercratic Party Research and Policy Division centercratic.party | centervoter.com

Primary Sources and References

1. Chapman, Paul J. “America’s Biggest Problems Keep Getting Worse. But There’s a Path Forward.” The Center Voter, June 2, 2026. https://centervoter.com/p/americas-biggest-problems-keep-getting

2. Migration Policy Institute. “IRCA in Retrospect: Guideposts for Today’s Immigration Reform.” MPI, updated 2024.

3. American Immigration Council. “How the United States Immigration System Works.” AIC, 2025.

4. Migration Policy Institute. “Fifty Years On, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act Continues to Reshape the United States.” MPI, October 2015.

5. American Immigration Council. “Immigration Reform.” AIC, 2025. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/about-immigration/immigration-reform/

6. Migration Policy Institute. “Explainer: How the U.S. Legal Immigration System Works.” MPI, 2025.

7. American Immigration Council. “New Dashboard Reveals Insights Into USCIS Backlogs and Processing Trends.” AIC, April 2026.

8. Canada Immigration and Citizenship. “Express Entry: Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) Criteria.” Government of Canada, updated December 2024. https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/immigrate-canada/express-entry/check-score/crs-criteria.html

9. Australian Department of Home Affairs. “General Skilled Migration Points Test.” Australian Government, 2026. https://www.australianskilledmigration.com.au/general-skilled-migration/points-test/

10. Congressional Budget Office. “Effects of the Immigration Surge on the Federal Budget and the Economy.” CBO, July 2024.

11. Sweetman, Arthur. “Canada’s Immigration Selection System and Labour Market Outcomes.” Canadian Public Policy 39, Supplement 1 (2013). https://utppublishing.com/doi/pdf/10.3138/CPP.39.Supplement1.S141

12. Migration Policy Institute. “The Basics of E-Verify, the U.S. Employer Verification System.” MPI, updated 2024. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/basics-e-verify-us-employer-verification-system

13. Orrenius, Pia M., and Madeline Zavodny. “Do State Work Eligibility Verification Laws Reduce Unauthorized Immigration?” Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, 2016. https://cis.org/Huennekens/Study-Shows-EVerifys-Effectiveness

14. Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “Digital Enforcement: E-Verify in Seven States.” December 2015. https://www.dallasfed.org/research/pubs/everify

15. Migration Policy Institute. “The Next Generation of E-Verify: Getting Employment Verification Right.” MPI, 2012. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/next-generation-e-verify-getting-employment-verification-right

16. TRAC Immigration. “Immigration Court Quick Facts.” Syracuse University, April 2026.

17. USAFacts. “Are Immigration Judges Keeping Up with Rising Caseloads?” November 2025.

18. Goodwin, Helena. “Courts in Name Only: Repairing America’s Immigration Adjudication System.” Harvard Law Review 136 (2023). https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-136/courts-in-name-only-repairing-americas-immigration-adjudication-system/

19. Bipartisan Policy Center. “Why Hiring More Judges Would Reduce the Immigration Court Backlog.” BPC, July 2018. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/article/why-hiring-more-judges-would-reduce-immigration-court-backlogs/

20. Goldman, Dan. “Goldman Leads Bill to Create Independent Immigration Court System.” Press release, March 8, 2026. https://goldman.house.gov/media/press-releases/goldman-leads-bill-create-independent-immigration-court-system

21. Kerwin, Donald, and Brianna Kerwin. “What Will It Take to Eliminate the Immigration Court Backlog?” Journal on Migration and Human Security, January 2024. https://cmsny.org/publications/jmhs-dkerwin-bkerwin-012924/

22. American Immigration Council. “Asylum in the United States.” AIC, 2025.

23. U.S. Department of Justice, Executive Office for Immigration Review. FY 2025 Statistics Yearbook.

24. Pew Research Center. “What We Know About Unauthorized Immigrants Living in the U.S.” July 2024.

25. Social Security Administration. “Contributions and Coverage of Unauthorized Immigrants.” SSA Office of Retirement and Disability Policy, 2023.

26. National Immigration Forum. “The Dignity Act of 2025: Bill Summary.” NIF, July 14, 2025. https://forumtogether.org/article/the-dignity-act-of-2025-bill-summary/

27. Chapman, Paul J. “Why Is Immigration Even Political? It’s Broken. Let’s Fix It.” The Center Voter, January 21, 2026. https://centercratic.party/why-is-immigration-even-political/

28. Centre for Economic Policy Research. “Foreign Aid and the ‘Root Causes’ of Migration.” VoxEU, October 30, 2024. https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/foreign-aid-and-root-causes-migration

29. de la Torre, Jesús M., et al. “‘Do Not Come’: The US Root Causes Strategy and the Co-optation of the Right to Stay.” Journal on Migration and Human Security, March 2025. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23315024241306366

30. Department of Homeland Security. DHS Organization Overview. U.S. Government, 2024.

There is no shortage of opinions about what to do about immigration in America. Every politician has a plan, every cable news segment offers a solution, and every election cycle produces a new round of promises. And yet, after four decades of debate, the system remains broken in ways that are structurally the same as they were in 1986, only worse, because the underlying conditions have grown more complex and the political incentives to actually solve the problem have calcified further.

The Centercratic Party begins every serious policy discussion the same way: with a clear, evidence-based, jargon-free definition of the actual problem. Not the political version of the problem. Not the version that fits on a campaign sign. The actual problem, in all its complexity, with the real numbers and the real history.

This document is the first step. It defines the full scope of America’s immigration crisis, from its historical roots to its current dimensions. It does not offer solutions, because that is the work of the next document. The discipline of separating diagnosis from prescription is essential, because every failed immigration reform effort in the last forty years has skipped the diagnostic step and jumped straight to politics. The result is what we have today: a system that serves no one.

What follows is the diagnostic.

Part I: How Immigration Worked, and Why It Worked

The Founding Principle

Immigration was not an afterthought for the founders of the United States. Immigration was treated as a design priority, not an afterthought. The Declaration of Independence itself lists among its grievances against the British Crown that King George had been “obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners” and “refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither.” The founders understood, from practical experience, that a nation’s strength depended on its ability to attract and absorb new people.

The first federal immigration law, the Naturalization Act of 1790, established simple rules for who could become a citizen. It was narrow and reflected the prejudices of its era, restricting citizenship to “free white persons of good moral character.” But the underlying logic was pro-immigration: the new country needed people, needed labor, needed economic energy, and immigration was the mechanism for getting it.^1, 2

For most of the 19th century, immigration to the United States was largely unrestricted. There were no visa systems, no numerical limits, and no formal quotas. Between 1815 and 1930, the country absorbed more than 30 million immigrants from Europe alone. The Irish came fleeing the Potato Famine by the millions between 1845 and 1855. German, Italian, Polish, and Eastern European immigrants arrived in waves through the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Chinese laborers built the transcontinental railroad. Every successive wave was greeted with some combination of cultural anxiety and economic embrace, and in the end, the economic imperative almost always won.^3, 4

The system worked not because it was perfectly designed, but because it matched a basic economic reality: a growing country with enormous land, abundant resources, and chronic labor shortages had an almost unlimited absorptive capacity for new workers and settlers. The immigrants who arrived built the infrastructure, staffed the factories, and populated the cities that became the foundation of American prosperity.

The First Great Restriction Era: 1882 to 1924

The first wave of serious restriction began with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was the first major federal law to restrict immigration based on nationality. It was driven by economic competition and racial animosity in the American West, where Chinese laborers who had built the railroads were now competing for mining and agricultural work.^1, 2

What followed was an escalating pattern of exclusions and restrictions. The Immigration Act of 1882 barred “lunatics, idiots, convicts, and those likely to become public charges.” The Immigration Act of 1891 added health restrictions and expanded enforcement. The Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 restricted Japanese immigration through a diplomatic arrangement. And then, in 1921 and 1924, Congress enacted the first comprehensive numerical quotas in American history.^3, 4

The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924 fundamentally restructured the system. They established per-country annual caps based on the proportion of each nationality already living in the United States as measured by the 1890 census, a formula deliberately designed to favor Northern and Western European immigrants and severely limit arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. Total immigration dropped from over 800,000 arrivals per year in the early 1920s to around 150,000 by the mid-1920s.^1, 3

These laws set the basic structural architecture that would govern American immigration for the next four decades.

The 1952 Foundation: The Law That Still Governs

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, known as the McCarran-Walter Act, was the first comprehensive codification of all immigration and nationality law into a single statute. It eliminated race as a legal barrier to immigration, making it possible for Asian immigrants to become citizens for the first time. But it retained the national origins quota system, maintaining the preference for Northern and Western European immigrants. President Truman vetoed it as discriminatory, but Congress overrode the veto.^1, 2

The 1952 Act is important not just for what it did but for what it established structurally. It created the framework of visa categories, numerical caps, and enforcement mechanisms that, with significant modifications, still governs U.S. immigration today. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 remains the foundational statute of American immigration law, subsequently amended but never replaced.¹

The 1965 Transformation and Its Unintended Consequences

The most consequential single piece of immigration legislation in American history is the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. Known as the Hart-Celler Act, it abolished the national origins quota system entirely and replaced it with a preference system that prioritized family reunification and, to a lesser degree, employment-based immigration. It also imposed, for the first time, a cap on immigration from the Western Hemisphere.⁵

The law’s sponsors and supporters predicted it would change very little demographically. Senator Ted Kennedy, a primary sponsor, assured the Senate that “the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.” That prediction proved spectacularly wrong, not because of any deception, but because the family reunification preference created chain migration dynamics that nobody had modeled accurately. When legal immigrants could sponsor family members, and those family members could in turn sponsor their own relatives, the cumulative effect over decades was transformative.⁵

Since 1965, immigration to the United States has been dominated by arrivals from Asia and Latin America rather than Europe. The Hispanic and Asian American populations have more than quintupled as a share of the total population. The foreign-born share of the American population has risen from about 5 percent in 1965 to approximately 15 percent today. By 2043, demographers project that the combined non-white and Hispanic population will constitute a majority of the United States.⁵

Critically, the 1965 law created a structural mismatch that is directly relevant to today’s crisis. By capping Western Hemisphere immigration for the first time while simultaneously creating enormous demand through family reunification chains from Latin America, the law made unauthorized immigration from Mexico and Central America structurally inevitable. People who had crossed the border without restriction for generations suddenly found themselves subject to limits that bore no relationship to the economic ties that had developed between the United States and its southern neighbors. When legal pathways are inadequate to meet actual demand, unauthorized pathways expand. That dynamic began in 1965 and has never been resolved.^5, 6

Part II: The Four Turning Points That Broke the System

Turning Point One: The 1986 Reform That Created Perverse Incentives

By the early 1980s, the unauthorized immigrant population had grown substantially, driven primarily by economic migration from Mexico and Central America. Congress, in one of its most significant bipartisan efforts on immigration, passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, signed by President Ronald Reagan.⁷

IRCA was built around three main components. It granted amnesty, formally called legalization, to approximately 2.7 million unauthorized immigrants who could demonstrate continuous residence in the United States since January 1, 1982. It created a separate program for Special Agricultural Workers, granting legal status to another approximately 1.3 million farmworkers regardless of when they arrived. And it established employer sanctions, imposing civil and criminal penalties on employers who knowingly hired unauthorized workers, along with a requirement that employers verify workers’ eligibility using a new I-9 form.⁷

The law was designed as a grand bargain: amnesty for those already here in exchange for serious enforcement going forward. The enforcement half of the bargain failed comprehensively. The employer sanctions provisions contained a critical statutory flaw: employers were only required to review documents that appeared genuine on their face. They were not required to verify their authenticity. The General Accounting Office documented within four years of the law’s passage that this design flaw had rendered employer sanctions largely unenforceable. Employers could satisfy their legal obligation by accepting documents they knew were fraudulent, as long as the documents “reasonably appeared” legitimate.⁷

The practical result was a system that legalized millions while creating, through the loophole, a sustainable framework for future unauthorized employment. The amnesty also communicated an unintended signal to prospective migrants: that a sustained period of unauthorized presence in the United States could eventually lead to legal status. Migration Policy Institute researchers have characterized this as IRCA’s “fatal flaw” – the failure to provide legal pathways to meet future labor needs while the enforcement mechanisms were too weak to actually deter unauthorized entry and employment.⁷

Between 1986 and 2000, the unauthorized immigrant population grew from approximately 3 million to 8 million. The grand bargain had produced neither lasting order nor meaningful enforcement.^7, 8

Turning Point Two: The 1990 Legal Immigration Act and the Caps That Have Never Been Updated

The Immigration Act of 1990 represented the last major restructuring of legal immigration levels. It increased the total number of available visas, created the H-1B temporary worker visa for specialty occupations, and established the Diversity Visa lottery program. It set the basic numerical caps for employment-based and family-based immigration categories that, with modest adjustments, remain in effect today.^1, 6

Those caps were calibrated to the economic and demographic conditions of 1990. The American workforce, the nature of labor demand, the composition of the immigrant population seeking visas, and the demographics of the United States have changed dramatically in the 35 years since. Those caps have not been updated to reflect current realities.⁶

The employment-based preference categories authorize approximately 140,000 immigrant visas per year. With a per-country cap of 7 percent of total annual employment-based visas, high-demand origin countries face wait times that bear no relationship to any rational immigration policy. For skilled workers from India applying in the EB-2 or EB-3 categories, current wait times using the visa priority date system extend beyond 100 years. The Migration Policy Institute has noted that some workers in the employment-based green card queue are “scheduled to wait 223 years.” This is not a processing backlog. It is a structural incapacity built into statute that has not been updated since the George H.W. Bush administration.^6, 9

The consequences reach beyond those waiting. When skilled professionals cannot obtain permanent residence in reasonable timeframes, many leave the United States for countries with more functional systems. Canada, Australia, and Germany have all implemented points-based systems that can respond to labor market demand in ways the American system structurally cannot. The United States has spent decades educating foreign students in its universities, training them in its graduate programs, and then systematically failing to retain them because the legal immigration system cannot process them within a human career lifespan.⁶

Turning Point Three: The 1996 Expansion of Enforcement Without Expansion of Pathways

The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, signed by President Clinton, significantly expanded enforcement authorities, mandatory detention, and grounds for deportation. It created the three- and ten-year bars to re-entry for people who had been unlawfully present in the United States for six months or more. It expanded expedited removal procedures, reduced judicial review of immigration decisions, and made many more categories of immigrants deportable for prior offenses.^1, 2

The 1996 Act is often described as the most significant expansion of immigration enforcement in the modern era. What it did not do was expand legal pathways in any way commensurate with the enforcement expansion. This is the fundamental structural asymmetry that has defined American immigration policy for the last thirty years: enforcement capacity has grown substantially while legal pathways have remained frozen at levels set in 1990.⁶

The three- and ten-year re-entry bars created an unintended and deeply harmful consequence. Before 1996, unauthorized immigrants from Mexico could and did cross the border seasonally, working in the United States for periods and returning home to their families. The bars made this circular migration far too risky: if someone left the United States after a period of unauthorized presence, they faced a three-year or ten-year prohibition on legal re-entry. The rational response to this incentive structure was to stop leaving. Researchers have documented that the 1996 bars effectively converted a circular migration pattern into a permanent settlement pattern, increasing the long-term unauthorized population precisely because leaving had become too costly.^7, 8

Turning Point Four: The Post-9/11 Reorganization and the Institutionalization of Dysfunction

The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks prompted the most significant reorganization of federal immigration agencies in American history. The Immigration and Naturalization Service was abolished and its functions were split among three new agencies within the newly created Department of Homeland Security: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which handles benefits adjudication; Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which handles border management; and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which handles interior enforcement and removal operations. Immigration court functions remained with the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) in the Department of Justice.^1, 10

This reorganization created a fragmented institutional structure with profound consequences for system function. Four separate agencies, under two different cabinet departments, are responsible for different aspects of a single integrated system. They have different statutory authorities, different budgetary lines, different leadership chains, and different institutional cultures. Coordination failures between these agencies are not exceptional events. They are a structural feature of the design.^10, 11

The post-9/11 period also produced a significant increase in enforcement funding, with Border Patrol staffing doubling between 2001 and 2012 and ICE receiving substantial budget increases for detention and removal operations. Court funding did not grow proportionally. The enforcement pipeline grew dramatically more powerful. The adjudication system that was supposed to process the cases that enforcement generated did not.^11, 12

Part III: The System as It Actually Exists Today

The Three Legal Pathways, and Their Limits

American immigration law provides three principal legal pathways to permanent residence: family-based immigration, employment-based immigration, and humanitarian protection. Each of these pathways has severe structural limitations that make it inaccessible to the vast majority of prospective immigrants.^9, 10

Family-based immigration accounts for approximately two-thirds of all lawful permanent residence grants annually. The law allows U.S. citizens to petition for their spouses, children under 21, and parents without numerical limits. All other family relationships, including adult children, married children, and siblings of U.S. citizens, as well as spouses and unmarried children of lawful permanent residents, are subject to annual caps and per-country limits. The resulting backlogs are staggering. Filipino siblings of U.S. citizens who applied in 1998 are only now becoming eligible. Mexican family members in certain categories wait 20 or more years. For the vast majority of the world’s population, the family pathway is theoretically available but practically inaccessible within anything resembling a reasonable timeframe.^9, 10

Employment-based immigration is limited to approximately 140,000 visas per year across five preference categories. The per-country cap of 7 percent applies regardless of a country’s size or the volume of applications from its nationals. India, which has approximately 1.4 billion people and an enormous professional class, receives the same per-country allocation as Iceland. Workers from countries without large backlogs can receive employment-based green cards in one to two years. Workers from India wait generations. This is not an accident of processing time. It is a statutory design feature that has not been revised since 1990.^6, 9

Humanitarian protection encompasses the refugee resettlement program, the asylum system, and subsidiary forms of protection including Temporary Protected Status. The refugee program admits people from outside the United States who have been determined by the United Nations or direct U.S. resettlement processing to meet the legal definition of a refugee. Annual admission ceilings are set by the president, and they have varied enormously across administrations. The Trump administration set the refugee admission ceiling at 7,500 for fiscal year 2026, a historic low. The asylum system is available to individuals who present themselves at a U.S. port of entry or who are already in the country and can demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. There is no numerical cap on asylum grants, but the application process is adjudicated through either USCIS asylum officers or the immigration courts, both of which are severely backlogged.^13, 14

For anyone who does not fit into one of these three pathways, there is no legal way to immigrate to the United States. There is no general skilled worker visa, no points-based system, no pathway for people who have economic skills but lack family ties or an employer sponsor. The American legal immigration system was designed for a different era, and it has never been comprehensively updated to reflect the economic, demographic, and geopolitical realities of the 21st century.^6, 9

The Unauthorized Population: What We Actually Know

The unauthorized immigrant population of the United States has been a subject of political controversy for decades, in part because it is genuinely difficult to measure accurately and in part because the numbers are politically loaded. The best available estimates, drawing on Census Bureau data, Department of Homeland Security modeling, and independent academic research, place the unauthorized population at approximately 10 to 14 million people.^8, 15

The Pew Research Center, using a residual methodology applied to Census data, has estimated the unauthorized population at approximately 10.5 to 11 million since the early 2010s. The Center for Immigration Studies, which uses a different methodology and tends to produce higher estimates, placed the unauthorized population at approximately 14.8 million in mid-2025 before noting a decline of roughly one million between January and May 2025, attributed to voluntary departures and enforcement actions under the Trump administration. The Center for Migration Studies estimates suggest approximately 11 million as of 2022 data.^15, 16

Regardless of which estimate is most accurate, several things are clear from all the available data. First, the unauthorized population is not primarily composed of recent arrivals. Approximately 60 percent of unauthorized immigrants have been in the United States for a decade or more. Many have been here for 20 or 25 years. They have mortgages, businesses, American-born children, and deep community ties. Second, the unauthorized population is employed. Unauthorized immigrants represent approximately 4.8 percent of the U.S. workforce, concentrated heavily in agriculture, construction, food service, hospitality, and personal care services. Third, they pay taxes. Unauthorized workers paid an estimated $11.7 billion in Social Security taxes and $3 billion in Medicare taxes in 2022 alone, contributing to programs for which they are ineligible to receive benefits.^8, 15

The unauthorized population is not a monolithic group of recent border crossers. It is a highly heterogeneous population of long-term residents, recent arrivals, asylum seekers awaiting adjudication, people with lapsed visas, and people who entered without authorization years or decades ago. Understanding this heterogeneity is essential to understanding why simplistic enforcement-only approaches to the problem have consistently failed.⁸

Border Encounters: The Dramatic Swing in Recent Years

The southwest border encounter data tells a story of extreme volatility over the past decade. Encounters, defined as Border Patrol apprehensions plus CBP Office of Field Operations encounters at ports of entry, reached a record high of approximately 2.4 million in fiscal year 2023, following two consecutive years of record-level encounters during the Biden administration. The December 2023 peak of nearly 250,000 encounters in a single month represented a level of border arrivals that completely overwhelmed processing capacity, detention space, and the immigration court system.¹⁷

Encounters then declined substantially through 2024, driven by a combination of Biden administration policy changes in mid-2024 that restricted asylum access, significantly increased Mexican enforcement through diplomatic pressure and cooperation, and the anticipation of stricter enforcement under the incoming Trump administration. By April 2025, Border Patrol was recording fewer than 8,400 apprehensions per month, the lowest level in approximately 55 years. As of March 2026, encounters have begun to tick upward slightly, with approximately 8,300 attempted crossings detected, about 15 percent more than the same month in 2025, though still at historically very low levels by any measure.^{17, 18, 19}

The dramatic swing from 250,000 monthly encounters in late 2023 to under 10,000 per month in early 2025 has important implications for understanding what actually drives border crossing behavior. It demonstrates that enforcement policy and the conditions in the receiving country do affect migrant decision-making. It also demonstrates that the border can be managed more effectively when there is consistent political will to do so. What it does not address is the underlying structural misalignment between legal immigration capacity and actual demand that continues to push people toward unauthorized pathways when legal options are unavailable or inaccessible.^17, 19

The Immigration Court System: A System That Has Collapsed

The most concrete and measurable evidence of systemic failure in American immigration is the state of the immigration court system. The numbers are not ambiguous.

As of the end of April 2026, the immigration court backlog stands at 3,267,302 active cases. Of those, 2,322,467 individuals have already filed formal asylum applications and are waiting for hearings or decisions. The backlog has declined modestly from its peak of approximately 3.9 million cases in fiscal year 2024, primarily because the sharp reduction in new border encounters under Trump administration enforcement has dramatically reduced new case intake. In fiscal year 2026 through April, immigration courts have completed 503,096 cases while receiving only 309,330 new ones, a case completion rate 1.6 times the new intake rate. The backlog is falling. But it remains, even under the most aggressive enforcement environment in decades, at more than 3.2 million cases.^20, 21

Understanding how this backlog was built requires understanding the structural dynamics that created it. In fiscal year 2015, the immigration court backlog stood at approximately 475,000 cases, manageable if not comfortable. By fiscal year 2019 it had grown to approximately 900,000. By fiscal year 2022 it had exceeded 2 million. By fiscal year 2024 it had peaked near 3.9 million. This represents growth of more than eight times in nine years, driven primarily by the enormous surge in asylum applications from Central American, Venezuelan, and other asylum seekers during the 2019-2024 period, combined with the structural inability of the court system to expand capacity fast enough to keep pace.^12, 20

The judge supply problem is severe. In fiscal year 2024, there were 735 immigration judges, the most in a decade. Through the third quarter of fiscal year 2025, that number had fallen to 685. The Trump administration fired approximately 100 immigration judges in early 2025 and saw more than 125 additional departures before announcing a new hiring class of 42 judges in March 2026. The net effect is a significant reduction in judicial capacity at the precise moment when the backlog, while declining from its peak, remains at historically high levels.^11, 12

The implications of this backlog are not abstract. Each case represents a human being in legal limbo, often for years. The average pending case in many jurisdictions has been waiting more than four years for resolution. During that time, individuals cannot obtain certainty about their right to remain in the country, face significant restrictions on work authorization, and often cannot reunify with family members still abroad. The uncertainty itself produces a range of harmful outcomes: individuals unable to access healthcare, children in unstable living situations, workers unable to plan careers or make investments.¹¹

Critically, only 29.6 percent of immigrants facing removal proceedings in April 2026 had legal representation. Research consistently demonstrates that represented individuals have substantially faster and more accurate case outcomes than unrepresented individuals. The immigration court is perhaps the only major American legal forum where a person facing the severe consequence of permanent expulsion from the country where they have built their life routinely faces that proceeding without legal counsel.^11, 20

Perhaps the most revealing data point about the court system is this one from TRAC’s most recent reporting: only 1.81 percent of new immigration cases in fiscal year 2026 involve allegations of criminal activity beyond possible illegal entry. The overwhelming majority of people clogging a court system that cannot keep pace with its caseload are not criminals in any meaningful sense of the word. They are people who entered without authorization, people who overstayed visas, and people seeking asylum. The court system was never designed to manage a humanitarian protection caseload at this scale.^20, 21

The Legal Immigration Backlog: Separate from the Courts

Separate and distinct from the immigration court backlog is the USCIS administrative backlog for lawful immigration benefits. The American Immigration Council’s analysis shows that the USCIS backlog has more than tripled over the last decade, from approximately 3.5 million cases in the early 2010s to over 10 million cases pending as of early 2026. These are not unauthorized immigrants or asylum seekers. These are people who have done everything the system asked them to do: they filed applications, paid fees, submitted documentation, and are waiting for the agency to process their requests.²²

The USCIS backlog includes pending applications for family-based green cards, employment-based green cards, naturalization, and a range of other immigration benefits. The processing times for many categories are measured in years. The family-based immigration backlog is particularly severe: for countries with high demand, the gap between the date an immigrant petition was approved and the date a visa number becomes available can span decades. The State Department’s Visa Bulletin, which tracks priority date availability, shows some family-based categories for nationals of Mexico and the Philippines with priority dates from the 1990s and early 2000s still awaiting processing.^9, 22

This is not a story about immigration law being violated. It is a story about a legal system that has been allowed to decay so completely that it cannot process the applications of people who are following its rules.

The Asylum System: Designed for a Different Era

The American asylum system was established by the Refugee Act of 1980, which incorporated the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees into domestic law. It was designed to process a relatively small number of individuals who could demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. The system was built for a world where asylum seekers arrived individually or in small groups, with cases that could be adjudicated in months.^13, 14

The world that system was designed for no longer exists. Global displacement has reached record levels. The number of forcibly displaced people worldwide exceeded 120 million by the mid-2020s. Climate-driven agricultural failure, endemic violence, economic collapse, and institutional corruption in Central America, Venezuela, and other origin regions have produced migration pressures of a scale and character that the 1980 Refugee Act’s drafters never anticipated.¹³

The asylum system faces a fundamental design problem beyond just the backlog. The legal standard for asylum eligibility, while clear in principle, is difficult to apply consistently to the situations most commonly presented by contemporary asylum seekers. Gang violence, domestic abuse, generalized poverty, and the institutional failure of governments to protect their citizens are the drivers of most contemporary migration from Central and South America. Whether these circumstances constitute “persecution on account of membership in a particular social group” has been the subject of conflicting administrative and judicial decisions for decades, producing outcomes that are inconsistent, difficult to predict, and experienced by many as arbitrary.^13, 14

The United States government’s own Ambassadors and officials have acknowledged that the majority of asylum claims filed at the border do not ultimately result in grants of asylum when adjudicated on the merits, with denial rates exceeding 50 percent in most years. This creates a situation where large numbers of people are entering the formal asylum system, creating enormous backlogs, and ultimately being denied, but not before waiting years for adjudication and in many cases establishing significant community ties during the waiting period.^13, 14

This is not a problem of bad people abusing a good system. It is a problem of a good system designed for one set of conditions being overwhelmed by a fundamentally different set of conditions for which no adequate legal response exists.

Part IV: The Workforce Reality That Cannot Be Ignored

What Foreign-Born Workers Actually Do

Any honest diagnostic of the immigration problem must include an honest accounting of the role that foreign-born workers, including unauthorized workers, play in the American economy. This is not a political argument for any particular policy. It is a factual precondition for understanding why the system is structured the way it is, and why simplistic enforcement-only approaches have repeatedly failed.

Foreign-born workers represent approximately 18.6 percent of the U.S. labor force, roughly 29.1 million workers. Their labor force participation rate of approximately 66.6 percent exceeds the native-born population’s rate by nearly five percentage points. They are disproportionately present in industries that face persistent labor shortages: agriculture, where foreign-born workers make up approximately 73 percent of farmworkers; construction, where they represent about 25 percent of the workforce; food service and hospitality; and personal care and home health services. They are also disproportionately present at the professional and managerial level, with immigrants and their children founding approximately 40 to 45 percent of Fortune 500 companies.^15, 23

Unauthorized workers specifically represent approximately 4.8 percent of the total workforce. They are concentrated most heavily in agriculture, construction, food processing, and domestic services. In some regions and industries, the dependence on unauthorized labor is structural. California’s agricultural sector, Florida’s construction industry, and the restaurant and hotel industries in major metropolitan areas across the country have been built on a foundation of labor supply that the formal legal immigration system was never designed to provide.^8, 15

The Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2024 that the immigration surge of the 2021 to 2026 period would add approximately $8.9 trillion to GDP and $1.2 trillion in federal revenues over the 2024 to 2034 period, largely because of expanded labor supply. The economic contribution of immigration, including unauthorized immigration, to the American economy is not a point of serious academic dispute. It is a measurable, documented reality.²³

The workforce reality matters to the problem definition for a specific reason: it explains why enforcement-only approaches have repeatedly failed. When employers have a structural demand for labor that the legal system cannot satisfy, and when that demand exists across industries that are economically significant at the regional and national level, unauthorized employment will persist regardless of the penalties applied at the border. You can apprehend and deport border crossers. You cannot eliminate the economic pull that brings them. An immigration policy that does not address the demand side of unauthorized employment, meaning the labor market conditions that make unauthorized immigration economically attractive to both migrants and employers, is not a policy that can produce sustainable order.

The Aging Population Problem

One of the least discussed but most structurally significant dimensions of the immigration problem is the relationship between immigration and American demographic aging. The United States fertility rate has been below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman since the early 1970s. The baby boom generation is now fully in retirement or approaching it. The ratio of workers paying into Social Security and Medicare relative to beneficiaries receiving benefits has been declining for decades and will continue to decline unless the working-age population grows.²³

Immigration is the primary mechanism through which the United States has historically maintained working-age population growth in the face of sub-replacement fertility. The Social Security and Medicare trust funds receive contributions from all workers with Social Security numbers, including authorized workers on temporary visas, and including unauthorized workers who pay FICA taxes under Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers or mismatched Social Security numbers. Unauthorized workers paid an estimated $11.7 billion in Social Security taxes and $3 billion in Medicare taxes in 2022 for benefits they cannot claim. They are, in a meaningful financial sense, subsidizing the retirement security of native-born Americans.^15, 23

The demographic math here is not a matter of political opinion. It is actuarial arithmetic. Without continued immigration at significant levels, the Social Security and Medicare funding challenges that already threaten these programs become structurally more severe. This is a fact that neither party has been willing to articulate clearly to the American public.²³

Part V: The Root Causes of Unauthorized Migration

Why People Actually Come

Understanding why people migrate without authorization to the United States requires separating the proximate causes, the conditions at the border and the policies in the receiving country, from the structural causes, the conditions in origin countries that generate the migration impulse in the first place.

The proximate causes of unauthorized immigration are those most visible in political debates: inadequate legal pathways, inconsistent enforcement, the perception that the border can be crossed, and the economic opportunity available in the United States. These are real, and they matter. But they are not the root causes.

The structural root causes are conditions in origin countries. In Mexico and Central America’s Northern Triangle, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, the drivers of migration are a combination of deeply rooted poverty, endemic violence and crime, institutional corruption that prevents government from providing basic security, and increasingly, climate-related agricultural disruption that has destroyed the livelihoods of rural farming communities. A smallholder farmer in Guatemala whose crops have failed for three consecutive years due to drought, who faces extortion demands from gangs the government cannot control, and whose family members have been threatened with violence does not need a sophisticated analysis of U.S. immigration law to decide to migrate. The choice is not primarily about U.S. policy. It is about survival.¹³

Research on migration from Central America consistently shows that economic conditions and security in origin communities are the primary predictors of migration flows, with U.S. policy variables being secondary. This has important implications for the problem definition: a policy framework that focuses exclusively on what happens at the border and in the interior of the United States, without addressing the conditions that generate the migration impulse, is addressing a symptom rather than a cause.¹³

The Role of American Demand

The structural cause on the receiving side is what economists call demand-pull: the persistent American employer demand for low-cost labor in industries where the domestic workforce supply is inadequate to fill available positions at wages those industries are willing to pay. This is not a new phenomenon. American agriculture, ranching, and railroad construction relied on Mexican labor long before there were formal border controls between the two countries. The legal temporary worker programs of the mid-20th century, particularly the Bracero Program that operated from 1942 to 1964, acknowledged this demand explicitly and created a legal framework to manage it.^3, 4

When the Bracero Program ended in 1964, the employer demand did not end. It simply shifted from the legal channel to the unauthorized channel. The migration networks that had been established during the Bracero years continued to function, channeling workers northward in response to the same demand that had always been there. The 1965 Immigration Act imposed Western Hemisphere caps for the first time, but it did not reduce the labor demand. The predictable result was growth in the unauthorized population.^4, 5

This history matters because it clarifies what the problem actually is. The unauthorized employment of foreign-born workers in the American economy is not primarily a function of criminals exploiting a weak border. It is primarily a function of a legal immigration system that has never been designed to meet actual labor market demand, combined with an employer community that has benefited from the resulting labor supply without being held seriously accountable for it.

Part VI: The Current Moment

What Has Changed Under the Trump Administration

The Trump administration, beginning in January 2025, has implemented the most aggressive immigration enforcement posture of any administration in the modern era. Border apprehensions have dropped to their lowest levels in more than half a century. Deportation operations have expanded, with ICE detention capacity stretched well beyond its designed capacity. The administration has pursued a multi-front strategy of reducing legal immigration benefits, restricting humanitarian pathways, and pursuing enforcement in interior communities rather than exclusively at the border.^{16, 18, 19}

The results at the border have been dramatic and measurable. Monthly encounters that stood at nearly 250,000 in late 2023 have fallen below 10,000. The migration deterrence effect has been real. The unauthorized population appears to have declined by at least one million people since January 2025 through a combination of deportations and voluntary departures.^{16, 17, 19}

At the same time, the approach has produced significant collateral damage that is directly relevant to the problem definition. The shooting death of Renee Good, a 37-year-old American citizen, by a federal ICE agent in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026, followed by a second non-fatal shooting on January 14, along with documented cases of Americans being detained without warrants and ICE agents arresting workers who had cleared federal background checks, illustrates the risk of enforcement operations conducted at high intensity without sufficient procedural safeguards.¹¹

The DHS was shut down for 47 days in the longest partial government shutdown in American history, specifically over the question of immigration enforcement funding. Congress is currently considering a $72 billion immigration enforcement reconciliation package, with a provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act capping the number of immigration judges and support staff at 800 beginning November 1, 2028, which would permanently limit the court system’s capacity to resolve the backlog of cases that enforcement generates.^11, 12

The current administration’s approach represents a significant intensification of enforcement without a commensurate expansion of legal pathways or court capacity. Whether the border reductions achieved over the past 18 months can be sustained without those structural complements remains, as of this writing, an open question.

The Dimensions of the Problem in Summary

Based on the full diagnostic conducted in this document, the problem of American immigration can be characterized by the following structural conditions, each of which requires specific attention in any serious reform effort:

Legal system misalignment: The core architecture of the U.S. legal immigration system was last significantly updated in 1990. Its numerical caps, category structures, and per-country limits are profoundly misaligned with 21st-century economic, demographic, and geopolitical realities. This misalignment is the root cause of unauthorized immigration, as the Migration Policy Institute has stated directly. People do not seek unauthorized pathways when legal ones are accessible and functional. They do so when the legal system does not accommodate the actual demand.⁶

An unauthorized population of long-term residents: Between 10 and 14 million people live in the United States without authorization. The majority have been here for a decade or more. They are employed, taxpaying, and in many cases deeply integrated into American communities. No enforcement-only framework has ever proposed a credible operational plan for removing this population, and every independent economic analysis has concluded that attempting to do so would cause severe economic disruption.^8, 15

A court system in structural failure: The immigration court backlog, while declining from its peak, stands at more than 3.2 million cases. The system receives cases faster than it can resolve them under anything resembling normal conditions. Judicial capacity has been reduced rather than expanded at a critical moment. The court is the mechanism through which the rule of law is actually applied to immigration cases. Without a functional court system, there is no immigration system. There is only enforcement without adjudication, which is not law. It is power.^11, 20

A humanitarian system built for a different world: The asylum framework established in 1980 was designed for individual cases of political persecution in an era of Cold War geopolitics. It is now being asked to process the migration consequences of climate change, endemic violence, institutional failure, and economic despair affecting hundreds of millions of people globally. It is not structurally equipped to do that, and no amount of additional funding to the existing framework will make it so without statutory reform.^13, 14

A workforce dependency that the legal system cannot accommodate: American employers in critical industries have been structurally dependent on unauthorized labor for decades. This dependency is not incidental. It is built into the production models and cost structures of those industries. It will not disappear through enforcement alone. It requires legal pathways that match actual labor demand.^15, 23

An enforcement system operating without adequate safeguards: Aggressive enforcement without robust due process protections, without adequate training, without independent oversight, and without a court system capable of adjudicating the cases enforcement generates is not rule of law. It is enforcement theater that produces collateral damage to citizens and legal residents while failing to produce the durable order that its proponents promise.¹¹

Conclusion: The Complexity That Demands Respect

The immigration problem does not have a simple solution because it does not have a simple cause. It is the accumulated product of legal frameworks built for different eras, demographic trends that no one fully anticipated, economic forces that neither border enforcement nor political rhetoric can stop, humanitarian obligations that a wealthy nation with a tradition of providing refuge cannot simply abandon, and institutional structures that have been systematically underfunded for the functions they are asked to perform.

Any serious attempt to fix this system must begin with the kind of honest, comprehensive accounting of what is actually broken that this document has attempted to provide. The politics of immigration have consistently prevented that accounting from taking place. Solutions are announced before problems are defined. Enforcement is intensified before the courts that enforcement generates cases for are funded. Pathways are narrowed before alternative pathways are created.

The Centercratic Party’s approach begins here: with facts, with history, with data, and with the intellectual honesty to look at the full complexity of the problem before proposing a single solution.

The solutions will come. But they will only be worth proposing if they are built on a foundation like this one.

This document is Part One of the Centercratic Party’s comprehensive immigration policy initiative. Part Two will present structural solutions developed through the six-stage policy framework and the three disciplines of serious governance.

Prepared by the Centercratic Party Research and Policy Division centercratic.party | centervoter.com

Primary Sources and References

1. Migration Policy Institute. “Major U.S. Immigration Laws, 1790 to Present.” MPI, updated 2024.

2. Wikipedia / Library of Congress. “List of United States Immigration and Nationality Laws.”

3. Pew Research Center. “How U.S. Immigration Laws and Rules Have Changed Through History.” September 2015.

4. FAIR. “History of U.S. Immigration Laws.” Updated 2024.

5. Migration Policy Institute. “Fifty Years On, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act Continues to Reshape the United States.” MPI, October 2015.

6. Migration Policy Institute. “Rethinking the U.S. Legal Immigration System: A Policy Road Map.” MPI, 2024.

7. Migration Policy Institute. “IRCA in Retrospect: Guideposts for Today’s Immigration Reform.” MPI, updated 2024.

8. Migration Policy Institute. “Changing Origins, Rising Numbers: Unauthorized Immigrants in the United States, 2025 Fact Sheet.” MPI, 2025.

9. Migration Policy Institute. “Explainer: How the U.S. Legal Immigration System Works.” MPI, 2025.

10. American Immigration Council. “How the United States Immigration System Works.” AIC, 2025.

11. Brennan Center for Justice. “An Insider’s View of the Immigration System.” November 2025.

12. USAFacts. “Are Immigration Judges Keeping Up with Rising Caseloads?” November 2025.

13. Migration Policy Institute. “U.S. Humanitarian Protection System Faces Unprecedented Strain.” MPI, 2024.

14. American Immigration Council. “Asylum in the United States.” AIC, 2025.

15. Pew Research Center. “What We Know About Unauthorized Immigrants Living in the U.S.” July 2024.

16. Center for Immigration Studies. “Illegal Population Down Since January.” CIS, June 2025.

17. USAFacts. “How Many Illegal Crossings Are Attempted at the US-Mexico Border?” Updated March 2026.

18. CBS News. “Amid Trump Crackdown, Illegal Border Crossings Plunge to Levels Not Seen in Decades.” February 2025.

19. BBC News. “Illegal US-Mexico Border Crossings Hit Lowest Level in Over 50 Years.” October 2025.

20. TRAC Immigration. “Immigration Court Quick Facts.” Syracuse University, April 2026.

21. TRAC Immigration. “Immigration Court Operations: February 2026 Update.” Syracuse University, March 2026.

22. American Immigration Council. “New Dashboard Reveals Insights Into USCIS Backlogs and Processing Trends.” AIC, April 2026.

23. Congressional Budget Office. “Effects of the Immigration Surge on the Federal Budget and the Economy.” CBO, July 2024.

Federal Level

19 GOP Members Join Democrats to Kill Surveillance Extension

For the first time in its history, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is lapsing tonight, Friday, June 12, after the House voted 198-218 on Thursday, June 11, to reject a short-term extension. Nineteen Republicans joined the majority of Democrats in opposing the bill, and Democrats refused to support it as long as President Trump’s ally Bill Pulte remains acting Director of National Intelligence. Speaker Johnson said he will not call members back before the House’s scheduled return on June 23. Experts note that existing court certifications should allow surveillance collections to continue until at least March 2027.¹

Senate Unanimously Bans Members From Prediction Markets

The Senate passed a resolution by unanimous consent on Thursday, June 11, immediately prohibiting all 100 senators and their staff from trading on prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi. The action follows a series of incidents raising concerns about insider trading, including a U.S. soldier who was criminally charged with using classified military intelligence to place winning bets on a prediction market platform. The House has not yet taken similar action, leaving House members and their staff free to continue trading.²

Trump Administration Says Iran Hostilities Are Over

A senior Trump administration official declared on Thursday, June 11, that U.S. hostilities with Iran have “concluded” for the purposes of the War Powers Resolution, arguing that the ceasefire in place since early April effectively ended the conflict. The formal declaration allows the administration to avoid seeking congressional authorization for the military campaign, which crossed the 60-day limit required under the 1973 War Powers Resolution. Congress has not accepted this argument, and the war powers debate is expected to continue in both chambers.³

New Trump Assassination Video Released; Agent Was Shot

U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro released nearly six minutes of high-resolution surveillance footage on Thursday, June 11, showing Cole Allen, charged with the attempted assassination of President Trump, shooting a Secret Service agent point-blank at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Secret Service Director Sean Curran confirmed the agent was struck by Allen’s shotgun round, not by friendly fire as some online reports had suggested. The agent survived because he was wearing body armor. Allen was arraigned in federal court on June 11 and waived his right to contest his detention.⁴

Government Shutdown Risk Lingers Despite ICE Deal

Republican members of Congress acknowledged on Thursday, June 11, that the passage of the Secure America Act resolves only immigration enforcement funding, leaving most of the government’s annual spending bills completely unresolved ahead of the September 30 fiscal year deadline. Senator Susan Collins noted that Democrats have made clear they are not willing to cooperate on government funding bills, while Senator John Kennedy predicted Democrats will once again choose a shutdown as political leverage going into the midterm elections.⁵

State Level

Maine Ranked-Choice Tabulation Begins Today

Maine’s Secretary of State announced Thursday, June 11, that ranked-choice tabulation for both the Democratic and Republican gubernatorial primaries will begin today, Friday, June 12, at 1 p.m. at the Department of Public Safety headquarters in Augusta. No candidate in either party crossed the 50 percent threshold on primary night. In the Democratic race, Dr. Nirav Shah leads with roughly 27 percent, followed closely by Hannah Pingree and Troy Jackson. On the Republican side, Bobby Charles leads with 37 percent. A winner is not expected to be declared before next week.⁶

Georgia Lawsuit Targets Nonpartisan Election Law

DeKalb County District Attorney Sherry Boston filed a lawsuit in Fulton County Superior Court on Thursday, June 11, challenging a new Georgia state law that would strip party labels from district attorney and county commission races in five metro Atlanta counties beginning in 2028. The law, signed by Governor Brian Kemp, applies exclusively to Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton, and Gwinnett counties, which are the state’s most Democratic-leaning jurisdictions. The lawsuit argues the legislation is unconstitutional and violates the equal protection clause under both state and federal law.⁷

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Article Sources

1. The Guardian, “US House will attempt to pass extension of powerful surveillance law,” June 11, 2026.

2. USA Today, “House blocks key spying law that shapes Trump’s daily security briefing,” June 11, 2026.

3. Newser, “House Vote Means Spy Law Will Lapse,” June 11, 2026.

4. Anti-War.com, “House Rejects Bill To Renew Warrantless Spy Powers,” June 11, 2026.

5. Signal Ohio / NOTUS, “Senate Votes to Bar Members From Prediction Market Betting,” June 11, 2026.

6. Presidential Prayer Team, “Senate Bans Prediction Market Trading by Members, Staff,” June 2026.

7. Reuters, “US official says Iran war truce ‘terminated’ hostilities for war powers deadline,” June 11, 2026.

8. BBC News, “Trump tells Congress ceasefire means he does not need their approval for Iran war,” June 11, 2026.

9. CNBC, “Video shows Trump attack suspect Cole Allen casing Hilton, storming checkpoint: Pirro,” June 11, 2026.

10. RadarOnline, “Chilling New Video of Trump’s Third Assassination Attempt Suspect Released,” June 11, 2026.

11. Politico, “Republicans just took ICE spending fights off the table. It won’t end shutdown threats,” June 10, 2026.

12. Maine Secretary of State’s Office, Press Release, “Three races proceeding to Ranked Choice Voting tabulations,” June 11, 2026.

13. New York Times, “Democrats in Maine Governor’s Race Head to Ranked-Choice Runoff,” June 10, 2026.

14. CBS News Atlanta, “Fani Willis ally sues Georgia over law changing elections in Fulton, DeKalb and other metro counties,” June 11, 2026.

On June 3, 2026, a Summit County grand jury in Akron, Ohio, returned a fresh indictment against the two men accused of orchestrating the largest public corruption scheme in Ohio history. Former FirstEnergy Corporation Chief Executive Officer Charles “Chuck” Jones and former Senior Vice President of External Affairs Michael Dowling were charged with a combined 22 new felony counts, including engaging in a pattern of corrupt activity, bribery, telecommunications fraud, conspiracy, tampering with evidence, tampering with records, and obstructing justice (Ohio Attorney General, WOSU Public Media).

This was the second indictment. The first ended in March 2026 in a Summit County courtroom after a six-week trial and nine days of jury deliberation, with the jurors deadlocked. According to outgoing Attorney General Dave Yost, ten of twelve jurors voted to convict (Signal Akron, Signal Ohio).

The retrial is set for late September 2026. While Ohioans wait, the same Ohioans continue paying the $445,000-a-day cost of the legislation that the alleged bribery was designed to buy. Total ratepayer cost to date: more than $500 million (Common Cause Ohio).

If you read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, or the Washington Post this week, you almost certainly did not see this story. The Summit County grand jury filed 22 felony counts against two former executives of one of the largest investor-owned utilities in the country, in the middle of one of the biggest state corruption cases in American history, and the national press could not be bothered.

What the Centercratic Party Stands For

The Centercratic Party holds nine governing principles. Three of them describe exactly what happened in Ohio.

“Safeguard Our Democratic System. Govern through compromise, not domination. Reject extreme tactics by special interests and defend the Constitution for everyone.” A $61 million dark-money operation funneled through a 501(c)(4) shell to elect compliant legislators and buy a billion-dollar bailout is the textbook definition of an extreme tactic by a special interest (U.S. Department of Justice).

“One Law for All. The law applies equally to all. Independent courts ensure fair process and protect basic rights.” The speaker who took the money is serving 20 years. The lobbyist is serving five. The PUCO chairman who allegedly took $4.3 million is dead. The two corporate executives allegedly at the top of the scheme have been indicted twice by the state and once by the feds, and they still walk free (Ohio Attorney General).

“Govern with a Balanced Approach. Reject both government overreach and government absence. Provide essential services, measure results, end what fails, and enforce fiscal discipline.” A $1.3 billion ratepayer bailout for failing nuclear and coal plants that competitive markets had already condemned is the opposite of fiscal discipline. It is government as a private subsidy machine for the people who paid to capture it (Energy and Policy Institute).

The Sordid Details

Here is the scheme, stripped to its bones.

In 2017, Chuck Jones and Michael Dowling, the two top executives at FirstEnergy, faced a problem. The company owned aging nuclear power plants at Davis-Besse and Perry that could not compete on the open electricity market. The subsidiary that owned them, FirstEnergy Solutions, was sliding into bankruptcy. They needed a state legislative bailout. They needed it big, and they needed it fast.

They allegedly bought one.

According to federal prosecutors, FirstEnergy and an affiliated generation company funneled approximately $61 million in dark money through a 501(c)(4) called Generation Now, which was controlled by then-State Representative Larry Householder. The money was spent to elect Householder’s preferred candidates to the Ohio House, install him as Speaker, and then pass House Bill 6 in 2019. HB6 imposed a new charge on every Ohio electricity ratepayer to bail out the failing nuclear plants and two aging coal plants partially owned by FirstEnergy and a consortium called Ohio Valley Electric Cooperative (U.S. Department of Justice, Grist).

That was only half of it. While Householder ran the legislative side, Jones and Dowling allegedly handled the regulator. In January 2019, just before Governor Mike DeWine appointed Sam Randazzo to chair the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, FirstEnergy paid Randazzo $4.3 million through what it later admitted was a sham consulting agreement. Once seated as PUCO chair, Randazzo helped shape HB6, fought the citizen referendum effort to repeal it, and four months after the bill became law gave FirstEnergy another gift: he eliminated the requirement that FirstEnergy submit to a 2024 rate case. That single decision let FirstEnergy keep its books closed for years and likely cost Ohio ratepayers millions more (Energy and Policy Institute, Ohio House).

In 2021, FirstEnergy entered a deferred prosecution agreement with the federal government, admitted to paying both the $61 million to Householder’s operation and the $4.3 million to Randazzo, and paid a $230 million federal penalty. Householder was convicted at trial in 2023 and sentenced to 20 years. Borges got five years. Randazzo killed himself in April 2024 (Watching PUCO, U.S. Department of Justice).

But Jones and Dowling have continued to fight. Their first state trial began in early 2026 in Summit County. Six weeks of testimony, dozens of witnesses, hundreds of exhibits. Their defense was that Randazzo was not yet a public official when they paid him, and that the $4.3 million was meant for his outside clients, who they say he then stole from. The jury deliberated nine days and could not agree. Yost said the vote was ten to two for conviction. Judge Susan Baker Ross declared a mistrial on April 1 (Signal Ohio).

The June 3, 2026 reindictment is the state’s second swing. Jones faces eight counts. Dowling faces 19, including 14 separate counts of tampering with records. Yost said in a video statement that the new indictment includes facts the state did not have during the first trial, uncovered through a civil lawsuit against FirstEnergy that surfaced documents prosecutors had not previously seen. The new charges allege a scheme stretching from 2010 to 2021, with Jones and Dowling working in concert to, in the indictment’s own words, “steal the power of government and bend it to the will of FirstEnergy” (TiffinOhio.net, Ohio Attorney General).

While the two men prepare for their September retrial, Ohio ratepayers keep paying. The coal-plant portion of HB6 ran from 2020 until August 14, 2025, when Governor DeWine finally signed HB15 to end it. By then it had cost Ohio electricity customers more than $500 million, roughly $445,000 every single day, to subsidize coal plants that competitive markets had already condemned (Common Cause Ohio).

Both Parties Have Failed Us

The Republican Party owns this one in Ohio. Larry Householder, Republican Speaker. HB6, passed by a Republican-controlled legislature. Sam Randazzo, Republican appointee of a Republican governor. Mike DeWine, Republican governor, who later said he wished he had not appointed Randazzo. Dave Yost, Republican attorney general, who at least had the integrity to indict the executives and to push the second indictment through before he left office. One-party Republican rule in Columbus produced one of the largest pay-to-play schemes in American political history (Ideastream State News).

But the failure is bipartisan in its design. Democratic-run states have produced their own utility-and-statehouse corruption cases, from Illinois ComEd to New York. The pattern does not care which party holds the gavel. It cares only that one party holds it firmly enough that there is no real opposition to police the deals. Where one party dominates a state capital, regulated industries learn that the most efficient lobbying dollar is the one delivered straight into the speaker’s dark-money pocket. Republican or Democrat, blue state or red, the structure of one-party dominance is the structure of corruption.

And the press has failed too. Ohioans owe what they know about this scandal to Cleveland.com, the Akron Beacon Journal, Signal Akron, Signal Ohio, WOSU, Energy and Policy Institute, and Common Cause Ohio. The national outlets that filled their front pages with federal politics for the last two years could find no room for the largest state-level utility bribery prosecution in American history. A grand jury returns 22 felony counts against the alleged corporate masterminds of a scheme that has already cost Ohio ratepayers half a billion dollars, and the national press treats it as too parochial to bother with.

We do not have time left to keep tolerating this. A democracy where utilities buy speakers, speakers buy laws, regulators sell decisions, and ratepayers absorb the bill, while the national press looks the other way, is a democracy already paying for its own decline. The Centercratic Party exists to insist on the alternative: term limits that break the political machines, one law that actually applies to everyone in the boardroom and at the PUCO, transparent campaign finance that makes a $61 million dark-money laundry impossible, and a politics where regulators work for ratepayers instead of for the companies they regulate.

We must save our democracy before it is too late.

That is the wave.

The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party. Visit centercratic.party | centervoter.com

Federal Level

Trump Signs Secure America Act Into Law

President Trump signed the Secure America Act into law on Wednesday, June 10, at an Oval Office ceremony, directing nearly $70 billion to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection through January 20, 2029. The bill allocates $38.5 billion to ICE, $22 billion to Border Patrol, and $5 billion for border security technology, including artificial intelligence tools. It also sets aside $350 million to fund immigration enforcement in jurisdictions that do not cooperate with federal agents. The measure ends 116 days of uncertainty over immigration agency funding.¹

FISA Spy Law Expires Tomorrow; Congress Has No Deal

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is set to expire at midnight on Friday, June 12, with no agreement in sight. An attempt on Wednesday to broker a three-week extension collapsed when Senate Democrats insisted that President Trump must first remove acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte. The House is expected to vote today, June 11, on a short-term extension that is widely expected to fail. If no deal is reached, the surveillance program will lapse, though existing court orders may allow collections to continue for several months.²

Government Shutdown Risk Grows After ICE Bill Passage

Congressional leaders warned on Wednesday, June 10, that the risk of a broad federal government shutdown later this year is now higher, not lower, following the passage of the Secure America Act along strict party lines. Democrats who had been needed to help fund the rest of the government in future spending negotiations are now firmly opposed to cooperating with Republicans, and the two parties are no closer to a deal on fiscal year 2027 appropriations. The government’s current funding runs out on September 30, 2026.³

House Republicans Plot a Third Party-Line Bill

House Republicans met with congressional budget scorekeepers on Monday, June 9, and continued discussions Wednesday, June 10, on the shape of a third party-line reconciliation bill. Priorities under consideration include cracking down on alleged fraud in Medicaid, Medicare, and other social programs; affordable housing initiatives; funding for the ongoing Iran conflict; and a potential overhaul of federal energy permitting laws. Speaker Mike Johnson faces the same math that nearly derailed the previous two bills, where any two Republican defections could sink the effort.⁴

Senate Committee Opens AI Regulation Hearing Today

The Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee is holding a hearing today, June 11, titled ‘AI and the American Dream: Promoting Innovation, Affordability, and American Dominance.’ The session comes one week after a bipartisan House draft bill to freeze state AI regulations for three years drew sharp opposition from governors, civil liberties groups, and lawmakers in both parties. Today’s Senate hearing is expected to examine how AI is affecting housing costs, consumer finance, and the broader economy.⁵

State Level

Maine Governor Race: Ranked-Choice Count Still Underway

Maine’s Democratic gubernatorial primary remained uncalled on Wednesday, June 10, as the state’s ranked-choice tabulation of last Tuesday’s vote continued. No candidate crossed the 50 percent threshold needed to win outright on first-choice votes, triggering a multi-round count under Maine’s ranked-choice system. Public health official Nirav Shah and former state Senate President Troy Jackson were the leading candidates heading into the tabulation. A winner is not expected to be declared until later this week at the earliest.⁶

North Dakota Senate Primary: Cramer Wins Easily

Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota won his Republican primary on Tuesday, June 9, without a serious challenge and will face Democrat Sandy Sadie in November. The race drew national attention earlier this year when Trump urged a potential primary challenger to enter the contest, though no credible opponent ultimately emerged. Cramer, who had occasionally broken with Trump on some issues, secured the nomination as the GOP fights to hold its Senate majority in a state that voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2024.⁷

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Article Sources

1. The Guardian, “Trump signs $70bn immigration act ensuring ICE funding through 2029,” June 10, 2026.

2. Reuters, “Trump signs $70 billion bill to fund ICE, Border Patrol,” June 10, 2026.

3. The Epoch Times, “Trump Signs $70 Billion Bill to Fund ICE, Border Patrol for 3 Years,” June 10, 2026.

4. Dallas Express, “Trump Signs $70 Billion Secure America Act: Massive Boost For ICE And Border Patrol,” June 10, 2026.

5. The Hill, “Senate Democrats hesitate on FISA extension over Bill Pulte as DNI,” June 10, 2026.

6. Politico, “House will vote Thursday on expected-to-fail surveillance patch,” June 10, 2026.

7. New York Times, “Deal to Renew FISA Surveillance Law Falters in the Senate Over Pulte,” June 5, 2026.

8. Politico, “House will vote Thursday on expected-to-fail surveillance patch,” June 10, 2026.

9. Brennan Center for Justice, “Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA): 2026 Resource Page,” June 9, 2026.

10. Politico, “House Republicans gather congressional scorekeepers to discuss Reconciliation 3.0,” June 8, 2026.

11. The Hill, “GOP plots third reconciliation bill as midterm clock ticks,” June 8, 2026.

12. Alston & Bird, “Public Policy Look Ahead to the Week of June 8, 2026,” June 7, 2026.

13. 270toWin, “Live Results: Maine, Nevada, North Dakota, and South Carolina Primaries,” June 9, 2026.

14. NBC News, “Primary results in Maine, South Carolina, Nevada and North Dakota,” June 9, 2026.

On June 3, 2026, in a federal courtroom in Newark, New Jersey, U.S. District Judge Madeline Cox Arleo sentenced a former Deputy Mayor of one of America’s largest cities to twelve months and one day in federal prison. His name is Carmelo Garcia. He is 51 years old. He is a former Democratic state assemblyman from Hudson County. He was personally recruited into Newark city government at the request of Mayor Ras Baraka. And in the words of the United States Attorney for New Jersey, he ran a corrupt scheme to obtain bribes and kickbacks from two Newark business owners in exchange for steering city-owned property into their hands (U.S. Department of Justice, Hudson County View).

The total value of what he took: $156,810. The most cinematic single transaction: a gym bag set down on the floor of a restaurant bathroom stall in Mountainside, New Jersey, while Garcia washed his hands at the sink and an intermediary dropped an envelope holding $25,000 in cash into the bag (NJ.com, News 12 New Jersey).

Search the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal for any of the names in this story. You will find nothing on the sentencing of a sitting big-city deputy mayor for a six-figure bribery conviction. That silence is the first scandal. The conduct is the second.

What the Centercratic Party Stands For

The Centercratic Party rests on nine governing principles. Three of them describe exactly what happened inside Newark City Hall.

The first reads: “Safeguard Our Democratic System. Govern through compromise, not domination. Reject extreme tactics by special interests and defend the Constitution for everyone.” Carmelo Garcia did not safeguard anything. He was the official inside the building who decided which developers got preliminary designated developer status on Newark-owned land. He sold that decision. The special interest was a pawnbroker and his partner. The extreme tactic was a stream of cash, watches, and a paid luxury hotel stay routed to a public official whose entire job was to act on behalf of the people of Newark (U.S. Department of Justice).

The fourth reads: “One Law for All. The law applies equally to all. Independent courts ensure fair process and protect basic rights.” Garcia got twelve months and one day. Any ordinary American who walked into a New Jersey restaurant bathroom to collect $25,000 in cash from a stranger would face the same federal statutes Garcia did. But ordinary Americans do not get recruited into deputy mayor jobs by mayors. Ordinary Americans do not get the long, slow path Garcia got: indicted in October 2021, allowed to plead guilty in June 2024, sentenced almost two years after that (New Jersey Globe, Patch).

The seventh reads: “Govern with a Balanced Approach. Reject both government overreach and government absence. Provide essential services, measure results, end what fails, and enforce fiscal discipline.” The Newark Department of Economic and Housing Development exists to provide an essential service: turning vacant and city-owned property into housing and economic activity for Newark residents. Garcia ran that department. He used it as a private auction house. There is no balance here. There is only government as instrument of personal enrichment (Hudson County View).

The Sordid Details

The two businessmen who bought Garcia were Frank Valvano Jr., 57, of Florham Park, and Irwin Sablosky, 66, of Springfield. They co-owned a New Jersey pawnbroker, jewelry, and check-cashing chain operating under the name William Rich and Sons. Sablosky was also a former president of the Springfield Board of Education. The two men wanted Newark-owned real estate. They wanted the city to hand them designated developer status so they could acquire and redevelop city properties through limited liability companies they controlled. They needed an official inside Newark city government who could make that happen. They paid for one (New Jersey Globe, Hudson County View).

The payments began in 2017. On June 28, 2017, business records later seized by federal agents from the Belleville location of William Rich and Sons show that Valvano and Sablosky provided Garcia with a high-end watch valued at approximately $7,500. By November of that year, the Newark City Council had adopted resolutions approving redevelopment agreements for two Valvano and Sablosky entities, 123-131 Riverside LLC and 281 Passaic LLC (U.S. Department of Justice).

The big moment came on June 14, 2018. Garcia by then was Acting Deputy Mayor and Director of the Department of Economic and Housing Development. The meeting was arranged by twenty-one phone calls and text messages between Garcia and an intermediary the federal indictment calls Individual 2. The location they settled on was a restaurant in Mountainside, New Jersey. Garcia arrived carrying a gym bag. He told Individual 2 to meet him in the bathroom. Inside the bathroom, Garcia set the gym bag on the floor of a stall and walked to the sink to wash his hands. Individual 2 entered the stall, placed an envelope holding $25,000 in cash inside the bag, and left. Garcia picked up the bag and walked out (U.S. Department of Justice, NJ.com).

Four days later, on June 18, 2018, Garcia sent an email from his official City of Newark email address to the department’s Director of Redevelopment, moving the Valvano and Sablosky entities forward in the city’s designated developer pipeline. The cash had cleared. The official act followed in ninety-six hours (New Jersey Globe).

On April 12, 2019, Garcia took another $5,000 in cash. Between those bookend payments, federal investigators documented additional benefits: jewelry from the pawn shop, watches, a $2,994 four-night stay at a luxury Florida hotel that Valvano paid for, and cash payments of $250 to $1,000 at a time that Garcia personally walked into the pawn shop to collect to fund his attendance at political fundraisers, golf outings, and mayor’s balls (U.S. Department of Justice, News 12 New Jersey).

When federal agents searched the Belleville location of William Rich and Sons in September 2020, they found handwritten notes. One column was labeled with the letter “C,” almost certainly for Carmelo. The bottom of that column carried a horizontal line and one final figure: 156810. That is the running total of what the pawn shop paid the deputy mayor. The bookkeeping was not even encrypted. It was a column of numbers on a piece of paper next to a cash register (U.S. Department of Justice).

By late 2018 the businessmen were complaining in text messages that Garcia kept asking for more. “We’ve done nothing but spend tons of money and give away jewelry,” Sablosky wrote to Valvano. “Carmelo wants more too. We can’t afford it.” This is what public service looked like in Newark City Hall (U.S. Department of Justice).

And Garcia was not operating alone. A parallel federal investigation produced sentences last December for two more men inside the same Newark machine. Former Newark City Councilman Joseph A. McCallum Jr., 70, also a board member of the Newark Community Economic Development Corporation, got 18 months in prison for wire fraud and tax fraud tied to a separate bribery and kickback scheme involving Newark development projects. Malik Frederick, 65, the consultant who moved money between developers and McCallum, got 25 months. The same federal indictment that named Garcia as a co-conspirator named McCallum and Frederick. Three convicted public-corruption felons. One Newark city government (U.S. Department of Justice, RLS Media).

Valvano and Sablosky have both pleaded guilty and been sentenced. The pawn shop is on the public record as the financing arm of a deputy mayor’s corruption. Garcia, who had previously been Executive Director of the Hoboken Housing Authority, of the Irvington Housing Authority, and a one-term Democratic state assemblyman before Mayor Baraka brought him into Newark, is on his way to federal prison (New Jersey Globe).

Both Parties Have Failed Us

Carmelo Garcia is a Democrat. So is Joseph McCallum. So is Ras Baraka, the mayor who recruited Garcia into city government. So is every member of the Newark City Council who voted those redevelopment agreements through in November 2017. This corruption was not bipartisan in execution. It was one-party rule in a one-party city using one-party machinery to convert public land into private wealth, with a pawn shop as the cashier.

But the failure here is bipartisan. Republican-run cities have produced the same kind of conviction. The bathroom-stall handoff is a recurring scene in American public-corruption indictments because the incentive structure on both sides of the aisle rewards exactly this conduct: lucrative discretionary decisions about public property, controlled by a small number of officials, with no party competition strong enough to police it. Where one party dominates, whether the color is blue or red, the bribes follow.

And the national press, which spent the last two years writing tens of thousands of words about federal politics, could not be bothered to write a paragraph about a sitting deputy mayor of one of New Jersey’s largest cities trading public housing decisions for cash in a gym bag. The story exists only because the United States Attorney for New Jersey, the FBI, and a handful of New Jersey local reporters at the New Jersey Globe, NJ.com, Hudson County View, News 12, and Patch did their jobs. The institutions Americans pay to inform us about how their cities are run looked away (Hudson County View).

We do not have time left to keep tolerating this. A democracy that lets one party run a city as a closed shop, that lets a deputy mayor take $156,810 from a pawn shop over two years and serve roughly one day in prison for every $429 he stole, that lets the national press treat the conviction as too small to mention, is a democracy living on borrowed time. The Centercratic Party exists to insist on the alternative: term limits that break machines, one law that actually applies to everyone, and a politics where the people deciding what gets built on public land are not the same people taking envelopes in restaurant bathrooms.

We must save our democracy before it is too late.

That is the wave.

The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party. Visit centercratic.party | centervoter.com

Federal Level

House Passes $70B ICE Bill 214-212; Heads to Trump

The House passed the Secure America Act on Tuesday, June 9, in a razor-thin 214-212 vote, sending the nearly $70 billion immigration enforcement bill to President Trump’s desk. The bill provides $38.5 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, $26 billion for Customs and Border Protection, and $5 billion for the Department of Homeland Security, funding all three agencies through 2029. Rep. Kevin Kiley (I-CA) joined all Democrats in voting no, making the margin as narrow as possible.¹

FISA Spy Law Expires Friday; Senate Clock Runs Out

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act will expire at midnight this Friday, June 12, after the Senate failed 47-52 on June 5 to advance a three-year reauthorization. Democrats almost unanimously refused to support the bill over President Trump’s appointment of Bill Pulte as Director of National Intelligence, and seven Republicans joined them. The Brennan Center for Justice noted on Tuesday, June 9, that existing surveillance collection can continue for up to nine months even if the law lapses, based on current court orders.²

State Level

Platner Wins Maine Primary; Collins Race Now Set

Graham Platner, the 41-year-old oyster farmer who survived weeks of misconduct allegations and a challenge from suspended candidate former Governor Janet Mills, won the Democratic Senate primary in Maine on Tuesday, June 9. With 13 percent of votes counted, Platner led Mills 74 percent to 19 percent, with David Costello at 7 percent. He will now face five-term Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins in November in a race that Democrats believe is among their best pickup opportunities in the Senate.³

SC Governor: Trump’s Pick and Wilson Head to Runoff

In South Carolina’s Republican gubernatorial primary on Tuesday, June 9, Lieutenant Governor Pamela Evette, backed by President Trump, and state Attorney General Alan Wilson advanced to a June 23 runoff, knocking out U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace and Rep. Ralph Norman. On the Democratic side, state Rep. Jermaine Johnson won the nomination to face the runoff winner in November. In the U.S. Senate race, incumbent Sen. Lindsey Graham easily won the Republican primary and will face Democratic pediatrician Annie Andrews in the general election.⁴

Nevada Sets Up Premier Governor Battle for November

Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo and Democratic Attorney General Aaron Ford won their respective party primaries on Tuesday, June 9, setting up what analysts consider one of the most competitive governor’s races in the country this November. Lombardo won the Republican primary with 91 percent of the vote while Ford beat Washoe County Commissioner Alexis Hill 66 to 21 percent. The state’s governor’s race is viewed as a toss-up heading into the fall, with Lombardo having won his first term by just 1.4 percentage points in 2022.⁵

Maine Democrats Also Choose New Governor Nominee

Maine Democrats held a crowded gubernatorial primary on Tuesday, June 9, to replace term-limited Governor Janet Mills. Five candidates competed under the state’s ranked-choice voting system, with public health official Nirav Shah and former state Senate leader Troy Jackson leading in pre-election polling. Because no candidate was expected to reach 50 percent on first-choice votes, a ranked-choice tabulation is underway and a final result may not be known until later this week. The Democratic winner will face Republican Bobby Charles, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state, in November.⁶

Nevada Dems Choose Ford to Challenge Lombardo

Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford won his Democratic gubernatorial primary on Tuesday, June 9, defeating Washoe County Commissioner Alexis Hill by a margin of 66 percent to 21 percent. Ford enters the general election as the underdog in a state where Republicans have grown stronger in recent cycles, though Lombardo’s first-term win was among the narrowest gubernatorial victories in the country in 2022. Democrats view a Ford win as critical to preserving a competitive foothold in one of the most evenly divided states on the electoral map.⁷

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Article Sources

1. The Fiscal Times, “Republicans Pass Their $70 Billion Bill Funding ICE and CBP,” June 9, 2026.

2. Washington Times, “House sends $70 billion immigration enforcement package to Trump’s desk,” June 9, 2026.

3. Breitbart, “House Republicans Pass $70B Bill to Fund ICE, Border Patrol,” June 9, 2026.

4. CNBC, “Congress moves toward approving $70 billion for ICE and CBP through Trump’s presidency,” June 8, 2026.

5. The New York Times, “Deal to Renew FISA Surveillance Law Falters in the Senate Over Pulte,” June 5, 2026.

6. Facebook / NEWS9, “The Senate blocked an extension of a key warrantless surveillance program,” June 8, 2026.

7. Brennan Center for Justice, “Section 702 Surveillance Will Continue Until March 2027 Even if the Statute Lapses,” June 9, 2026.

8. The New York Times, “Graham Platner Wins Primary in Maine, Setting Up a Key Senate Fight,” June 9, 2026.

9. The Washington Post, “Maine Senate primary election live results: Graham Platner runs,” June 9, 2026.

10. Ballotpedia, “United States Senate election in Maine, 2026 (June 9 Democratic primary),” June 10, 2026.

11. Decision Desk HQ, “Decision Desk 2026: Maine, South Carolina & Nevada Primaries,” June 9, 2026.

12. ABC News, “South Carolina primary results: Trump-backed Evette in runoff for governor,” June 9, 2026.

13. NBC News, “South Carolina Governor Primary Election 2026 Live Results,” June 9, 2026.

14. 270toWin, “Live Results: Maine, Nevada, North Dakota, and South Carolina Primaries,” June 9, 2026.

15. Fraser Valley Today / Associated Press, “Lombardo wins Republican nomination to seek second term as Nevada governor,” June 9, 2026.

16. The New York Times, “Nevada Attorney General Wins Democratic Nomination for Governor,” June 9, 2026.

17. The Washington Post, “Nevada primary election results 2026,” June 9, 2026.

18. 270toWin, “Live Results: Maine, Nevada, North Dakota, and South Carolina Primaries,” June 9, 2026.

19. The New York Times, “Nevada Attorney General Wins Democratic Nomination for Governor,” June 9, 2026.

20. Las Vegas Review-Journal, “Lombardo, Ford declared winners in gubernatorial primary race,” June 10, 2026.

On July 22, 2026, the City of Corpus Christi, Texas, population three hundred and twenty thousand, will begin a two-day trial to remove its sitting Democratic mayor from office. Pre-trial hearings ran this Monday and Tuesday. The federal injunction the mayor sought to stop the proceedings was denied on May 22 (KRIS 6 News, KEDT).

The four counts against Mayor Paulette Guajardo: aiding a fraud, committing perjury, leaking confidential information, and ordering the deletion of public records. The evidence at the center of all four counts is a single PowerPoint slide containing a screenshot from the Federal Emergency Management Agency website. The screenshot had been altered. The city auditor said so. The city manager said so on a recorded phone call (KRIS 6 News, Texas Tribune).

That altered document was used to extract two million dollars in taxpayer-funded incentives for a downtown Homewood Suites hotel. The developer, Elevate QOF LLC, had principals who donated to Mayor Guajardo’s political campaigns. The FBI, the Texas Rangers, and the Corpus Christi Police Department all investigated. All three walked away. No charges were filed (Yahoo / Corpus Christi Caller-Times, KRIS 6 News).

This story is not getting national press. It should be. Strip the city name off the top and this is the textbook American corruption case of 2026.

What the Centercratic Party Stands For

The Centercratic Party rests on nine governing principles. Two of them describe exactly what happened in Corpus Christi.

The first reads: “Safeguard Our Democratic System. Govern through compromise, not domination. Reject extreme tactics by special interests and defend the Constitution for everyone.” A two million dollar public award based on a forged federal exhibit is the textbook case of why this principle exists. The special interest is a hotel developer whose principals donated to the mayor’s campaign. The extreme tactic is the alteration of a screenshot from a federal agency to manufacture a justification for taxpayer money the developer was not otherwise entitled to. Every guardrail of honest public hearings was bypassed in service of moving public money to a private donor’s project (KRIS 6 News).

The fourth reads: “One Law for All. The law applies equally to all. Independent courts ensure fair process and protect basic rights.” The most damning fact in this case is not the altered document. It is that the FBI, the Texas Rangers, and the Corpus Christi Police Department all reviewed the same forgery, the same recorded admissions, the same auditor findings, and all three walked away. A private citizen and a competing developer are now doing the work that federal and state law enforcement decided was not worth doing. One law for the Homewood Suites developers. A very different law for any ordinary American who alters a federal document to obtain two million dollars (Yahoo / Corpus Christi Caller-Times).

Anatomy of a Two-Million-Dollar Slide

Here is what the public record now shows.

In April 2022, FEMA released updated flood maps for Nueces County, effective October 13, 2022. Months later, in July 2022, the partners behind Elevate QOF LLC reorganized their downtown Corpus Christi property into a planned 126-room Homewood Suites. The flood maps had already been published. The developers knew the rules (Yahoo / Corpus Christi Caller-Times).

In February 2024, Elevate QOF submitted an incentive application asking the city for two million taxpayer dollars. The application included a PowerPoint slide displaying a screenshot of the FEMA website. The part of the screenshot that would have shown the flood maps were published before the project was even on the drawing board was concealed. The first ordinance reading in February 2024 justified the two million dollars as necessary to cover “FEMA flood zone costs.” When the second reading came on April 23, 2024, the justification had quietly changed. Now the two million was for “street-level retail and public space.” Same money. Different reason. The city charter requires two “same” readings of an ordinance. This was not that (KRIS 6 News).

In August 2024, a whistleblower allegation reached the city auditor. In August 2025, the auditor issued a memorandum to the city council. The key finding, in the auditor’s own words: the FEMA document “appears to have been altered” to obscure the fact that flood maps had been issued months before the Elevate project was even considered. The auditor recommended an independent external investigation (Yahoo / Corpus Christi Caller-Times).

Then come the depositions. In testimony from the civil lawsuit filed by competing developer Ajit David, City Manager Peter Zanoni admitted under oath that he had been told the document was altered. In a recorded phone call to David made days before the April 2024 council vote, Zanoni said it plainly: “Right, it was altered. And then when you read the entire PowerPoint it’s so obvious that the reader, or the writer, wanted to be led to believe that the FEMA change was just recent.” On the same call he described what he characterized as a deliberate scheme: “They hatch the scheme that, okay, FEMA floodplain, that’s infrastructure, fixing the bottom floors.” Yet when the council voted on April 23, 2024, Zanoni’s public warning was reduced to this: “The issue with staff is there’s still some uncertainty in some of the information, we’re working to get that.” The city attorney later confirmed in writing that the entire council was informed about the altered screenshot in executive session (KRIS 6 News).

The mayor’s defense, through her attorneys, is that she was never told the document was a “forged federal document,” and that what was altered was merely a screenshot of a federal website, not an official federal document. David swore in his lawsuit that he personally explained the alteration to Guajardo in person on April 16, 2024, again on April 23, and emailed her the proof on April 19 (KRIS 6 News).

In August 2025, Corpus Christi resident Rachel Caballero filed a citizen removal petition under the city charter. In March 2026, by a 5-3 council vote, the petition advanced to formal removal proceedings. In April 2026, articles of impeachment listing the four counts were filed. Guajardo sought a federal injunction. On May 22, 2026, U.S. District Judge George C. Hanks Jr. denied her motion. Trial: July 22 and 23 (Texas Tribune).

The legal fees the city has spent defending this controversy, by Councilman Roland Barrera’s count: more than three hundred and fifty thousand dollars of public money, on top of the two million already paid out (KRIS 6 News).

Three Investigations. Zero Charges. One Quiet Closing.

Forging a federal document is a felony. Using a forged document to obtain public funds is a felony. The document was forged. The funds were obtained. Two million dollars of public money changed hands.

The city did exactly what a city is supposed to do. It referred the case to law enforcement. Three agencies took the file. The Corpus Christi Police Department. The Texas Rangers. The Federal Bureau of Investigation. Between them, they had every advantage a prosecutor could ask for. A city auditor’s written finding that the FEMA document had been altered. A sitting city manager on a recorded phone call calling the alteration a “scheme.” Sworn testimony from city leadership confirming the alteration in deposition. A city attorney’s email confirming the council was warned in executive session. A paper trail from February 2024 to August 2025 that anyone with a working printer could assemble in an afternoon (KRIS 6 News).

In December 2025, all three agencies closed their files. No charges. No public explanation. No referral up the chain to a federal grand jury. Just a quiet announcement from the city of Corpus Christi that the investigations were over (KRIS 6 News).

If an ordinary American had altered a federal screenshot to claim two million dollars in COVID relief, or two million dollars in disaster aid, or two million dollars in food stamps, the FBI would have had them in handcuffs before the check cleared. The Justice Department prosecutes pandemic loan fraud at amounts a fraction of this size, every week, in every federal district in the country. The same alteration. The same statute. The same evidence standard. The only thing different about Corpus Christi is the politics, the donors, and the zip code.

That is what makes this case dangerous. Not the mayor. The mayor will get her trial in July. The developers will have their day in civil court. What does not get a day in court is the decision by three law enforcement agencies to look at a documented forgery worth two million taxpayer dollars and shrug. That decision creates a rule, even if nobody writes it down. The rule is: if you are well-connected enough, in the right city, with the right political alignment, the criminal statutes that govern document fraud do not apply to you. Everybody else gets the handcuffs.

Once Again

This is the kind of story that exposes both parties at once.

Democrats will tell you the mayor is innocent until proven guilty, that no criminal charges were filed, and that this is a politically motivated removal driven by a competing developer with an axe to grind. They will be partly correct. Then they will not say the next sentence, which is that a Democratic mayor presided over a vote handing two million taxpayer dollars to her own donors based on a presentation the city auditor concluded had been altered, and the Democratic Party at every level above the Corpus Christi city limits has said nothing. Not the Texas Democratic Party. Not the national party. Not a single elected Democrat outside Nueces County has called for her resignation or even an independent investigation. When a Democratic mayor’s donors win a two million dollar contract on a doctored slide, the rest of the party prefers to look at the floor.

Republicans will tell you, accurately, that this is exactly the kind of small-city corruption story that gets ignored when the mayor is a Democrat and would be a Fox News lead if she were a Republican. They will be correct. Then they will not lift a finger to do anything about it. Corpus Christi is not a national pickup target. The Texas governor and attorney general have shown no interest beyond the Texas Rangers walking away. Republicans will use this story for one cable cycle, fundraise off it for a week, and forget it the moment the trial ends. The structural problem, federal law enforcement closing a file on a documented forgery, will not get one minute of Republican congressional oversight.

Once again, our parties have failed us. The competing developer who blew the whistle is privately funding a lawsuit. The citizen who filed the petition is paying her own legal expenses. The city has spent three hundred and fifty thousand dollars of public money defending the controversy. The federal government, the body that actually owns the altered document, has done nothing.

This is exactly the gap a centrist party is supposed to fill. Centercrats are the people who can say two true things at the same time. A mayor is entitled to the presumption of innocence and to a fair trial under the city charter, and the documented alteration of a federal exhibit used to move two million dollars to a campaign donor is fraud whether or not federal prosecutors choose to call it that. The two-party system purposely avoids putting both statements on the same page, because doing so would force both parties to admit that the institutions Americans rely on to catch this kind of corruption are no longer reliably catching it.

We have to save our democracy before it is too late. A small Texas city is doing the work the FBI, the Texas Rangers, and the Corpus Christi Police Department refused to do. On July 22 and 23, ordinary residents and elected council members will sit through the trial federal prosecutors decided was not worth their time. If the largest law enforcement apparatus in the world cannot summon the will to charge a documented federal document alteration that moved two million dollars to a politically connected developer, then the line that separates American government from ordinary graft has already moved. The only question left is whether the rest of us notice in time.

That is the wave.

The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party. Visit centercratic.party | centervoter.com

Federal Level

House Set to Vote Today on $70 Billion ICE Funding Bill

The House is expected to vote today, June 9, on the $70 billion reconciliation bill to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection through the end of President Trump’s term. The Senate passed the bill 52-47 on June 5, with Sen. Lisa Murkowski the only Republican in opposition. Moderate House Republicans have raised concerns over the bill’s link to the now-scrapped anti-weaponization fund, but Republican leaders are pressing for passage along party lines.¹

Judge Strikes Down Trump’s $100,000 H-1B Visa Fee

A federal judge in Boston struck down President Trump’s $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas on Monday, June 8, ruling it an unlawful tax that only Congress has the authority to impose. U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin sided with 20 Democratic state attorneys general who filed suit after Trump imposed the fee in September 2025 as a way to discourage companies from hiring foreign workers over Americans. The ruling contradicts an earlier decision by a Washington, D.C. judge who upheld the fee. The administration is expected to appeal.²

FISA Surveillance Law Faces Friday Expiration Deadline

The Senate has five days to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act before it expires at midnight this Friday, June 12. The law allows U.S. intelligence agencies to collect communications of foreign nationals outside the United States without a warrant. The path forward is uncertain because Senate Democrats are conditioning their votes on the removal of Trump’s newly appointed Director of National Intelligence, Bill Pulte, and roughly 15 Democratic votes are needed for passage.³

Bipartisan AI Bill Ignites Firestorm Over State Rights

A bipartisan House bill unveiled on June 4 by Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-CA) and Rep. Lori Trahan (D-MA) drew sharp criticism on Monday, June 8, from both parties over its plan to freeze state AI laws for three years. The 269-page Great American AI Act would bar states from regulating how AI models are built, while permitting states to oversee how they are used. Seventeen Republican governors, the ACLU, and dozens of Democratic lawmakers immediately objected. The bill faces broad opposition heading into a House Energy and Commerce Committee review this week.⁴

House Appropriations Begins FY2027 Labor-HHS Markup

The House Appropriations Committee began its markup of the fiscal year 2027 Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education funding bill on Monday, June 8, one of the most contested annual spending bills in Congress. Republicans are pushing significant cuts to domestic health and education programs, while Democrats argue the cuts will harm working families. The markup opens a likely partisan budget clash, coming as the Senate is simultaneously advancing six of its own FY2027 spending bills this week.⁵

State Level

Maine Primary Voters Decide Senate Fate Today

Maine voters are heading to the polls today, June 9, to choose the Democratic nominee in one of the most closely watched Senate primaries in the country. Oyster farmer Graham Platner, who has faced weeks of misconduct allegations, stands against former state official David Costello and former Governor Janet Mills, whose name remains on the ballot even though she suspended her campaign in April. The winner will face Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins in November in a race that could help determine control of the Senate.⁶

California Governor: Becerra and Hilton Head to November

With a majority of ballots now counted following California’s June 2 primary, Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton are the confirmed top-two finishers and will advance to the November general election for governor. Billionaire Democrat Tom Steyer, who spent more than $216 million of his own money on the race, fell short in third place. Mail-in ballots postmarked by election day and received by today, June 9, are still being counted, but the outcome is no longer in doubt. Final certification is expected in early July.⁷

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Article Sources

1. CNBC, “Congress moves toward approving $70 billion for ICE and CBP through Trump’s presidency,” June 8, 2026.

2. The Epoch Times, “House to Take Up $70 Billion Bill to Fund ICE, Border Control,” June 7, 2026.

3. Alston & Bird / JD Supra, “Look Ahead to the Week of June 8, 2026,” June 7, 2026.

4. NPR / KUAC, “Federal judge strikes down Trump’s $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas,” June 8, 2026.

5. USA Today, “Trump’s $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas struck down by judge,” June 8, 2026.

6. CNN, “Federal judge voids Trump’s $100,000 fee requirement for H-1B visas,” June 8, 2026.

7. Politico, “Capitol agenda: Five days to save FISA,” June 8, 2026.

8. KPMG Capitol Hill Weekly, “June 8, 2026 | Capitol Hill Weekly,” June 8, 2026.

9. Politico, “House unveils AI draft that would preempt state laws,” June 4, 2026.

10. Reuters, “US House lawmakers release draft bill to prohibit state AI rules,” June 4, 2026.

11. ACLU, “ACLU Reacts to Draft Bipartisan AI Bill That Would Preempt State Laws,” June 4, 2026.

12. Broadband Breakfast, “AI Preemption Battle Lands in Congress With Substantive Discussion Draft,” June 4, 2026.

13. Alston & Bird / JD Supra, “Look Ahead to the Week of June 8, 2026,” June 7, 2026.

14. KPMG Capitol Hill Weekly, “June 8, 2026 | Capitol Hill Weekly,” June 8, 2026.

15. ABC News / Good Morning America, “Maine 2026 live primary election results,” June 9, 2026.

16. Ballotpedia, “United States Senate election in Maine, 2026 (June 9 Democratic primary),” 2026.

17. SM Observer, “California Primary Delivers Becerra vs. Hilton Showdown for Governor,” June 7, 2026.

18. The Guardian, “Tense governor’s race in California unsettled as vote-counting continues,” June 4, 2026.

On December 11, 2025, Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice P. Scott Neville Jr. signed an order recalling seven retired circuit court judges to part-time service. One of them was James R. Brown, who spent eighteen years on the Cook County bench before retiring in 2020. The assignment was traffic court. The term ran through December 7, 2026. The authority cited was Article VI, Section 15 of the Illinois Constitution, which lets the high court bring back retired judges to clear backlogs (Illinois Courts, Injustice Watch).

Brown showed up. For six weeks he heard traffic cases. There were no complaints from litigants. No complaints from lawyers in his courtroom. No accusations of bias on the bench. Nothing.

Then, on January 26, 2026, at 6:30 in the morning, Cook County Chief Judge Charles Beach sent Brown a text message. The Illinois Supreme Court had just issued a one-sentence order vacating his assignment. No hearing. No notice. No referral to the Illinois Courts Commission, which is the body the state constitution actually created to discipline judges. One sentence (Injustice Watch, Liberty Justice Center).

What had Brown done in those six weeks to earn a summary removal? Nothing. The trigger was a column he had written four months earlier, in September 2025, on a small news site, before he had even applied for recall. The column was conservative. The court did not like it. So they took his robe (Wall Street Journal, Legal Newsline).

What the Centercratic Party Stands For

The Centercratic Party rests on nine governing principles. Two of them describe exactly what the Illinois Supreme Court just did, and what the rest of us are now obligated to defend.

The fourth reads: “One Law for All. The law applies equally to all. Independent courts ensure fair process and protect basic rights.” The Illinois Constitution creates a specific body, the Illinois Courts Commission, to handle complaints about judges. That body holds hearings, takes evidence, and lets the accused respond. None of that happened to Judge Brown. The same court that is supposed to defend due process pulled his assignment in one sentence, in the dark, without ever telling him what he had done wrong. And as we will see, two sitting justices of that same court ran openly partisan campaigns, took millions from a sitting Democratic governor, and then refused to recuse themselves from cases involving that governor’s signature laws. One law for the retired conservative. A very different law for the partisan justices already on the bench (Wall Street Journal, Legal Newsline).

The fifth reads: “Debate with Facts and Dignity. Conduct fact-based debates with respect. Acknowledge disagreements. Prohibit personal attacks and bad-faith tactics.” A retired judge wrote a column. People disagreed with the column. The proper response was to write a column back. Instead, the Cook County Bar Association and the Chicago Council of Lawyers filed letters with the Illinois Supreme Court asking that he be removed for what he had written. Not for anything he had said on the bench. For an op-ed. The high court complied. That is not a debate. That is a punishment for speech, dressed up in robes (Chicago Council of Lawyers, CWB Chicago).

Two principles. One judge. One column. One state’s judicial branch coordinating against a retired man because they did not like an essay he posted on a website almost nobody reads.

The Column, the Letters, and the Order

Here is what the public record now shows.

On September 5, 2025, Judge Brown published a column titled “His Judgement Cometh and That Right Soon” on johnkassnews.com, a small Chicago opinion site run by the former Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass. The column criticized progressive prosecutors by name, defended the Trump administration’s federal law-enforcement actions, and used heated language about Soros-funded district attorneys, Letitia James, Alvin Bragg, Fani Willis, Kim Foxx, and the question of biological men in women’s sports. It was, plainly, a conservative opinion column. Brown signed it with his name. He was retired. He held no judicial office at the time (johnkassnews.com, Injustice Watch).

Three months later, on December 11, 2025, the Illinois Supreme Court recalled him to traffic court. Six other retired judges were recalled the same day. No bar group objected to any of them (Illinois Courts).

On December 29, 2025, the Cook County Bar Association, the nation’s oldest Black bar association, issued a press release demanding the high court reverse the recall. On January 5, 2026, the Chicago Council of Lawyers followed with an open letter to all seven Illinois Supreme Court justices. Both letters cited the column. Both letters argued that Brown’s published views disqualified him from hearing traffic cases (Chicago Council of Lawyers, Injustice Watch).

On January 26, 2026, three weeks after the second letter, the Illinois Supreme Court, which currently sits five Democrats to two Republicans, issued the one-sentence order vacating Brown’s assignment. No hearing was held. No findings were made. No notice was given. Brown learned about it from a text message at 6:30 in the morning (Ballotpedia, Injustice Watch).

On February 18, 2026, Brown filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Illinois Supreme Court justices, Brown v. Neville et al., case number 1:26-cv-01825 in the Northern District of Illinois. He is represented by the Liberty Justice Center. The complaint alleges First Amendment retaliation, viewpoint discrimination, and a due process violation (Liberty Justice Center, Federal complaint).

On June 1, 2026, a federal judge rejected the Illinois Supreme Court’s motion to dismiss. The federal court found that Brown is “likely to succeed on his due process claim.” The Illinois high court’s argument that it could remove a recalled judge for any reason or no reason, without any process at all, was rejected on the merits at the earliest possible stage (Wall Street Journal, Legal Newsline).

Three Judges the Court Will Not Touch

Now consider what the Illinois Supreme Court does not punish.

Start with the cleanest comparison. Judge Ramon Ocasio III is a sitting Cook County circuit judge. He has written publicly on racial justice, on the Civil Rights Act, and on mass deportations. He is on the bench right now. He has not been removed. There has been no letter from the Cook County Bar Association or the Chicago Council of Lawyers. There has been no one-sentence order at 6:30 in the morning. He is a sitting judge with a published record of political opinion writing, and the Illinois Supreme Court has done nothing about it. The only difference between Judge Ocasio and Judge Brown is the direction the opinions point. That is the textbook definition of viewpoint discrimination, and it is the basis of Brown’s federal lawsuit (Wall Street Journal).

Now move up to the high court itself. Two of the five Democratic justices who run that court, Elizabeth M. Rochford and Mary K. O’Brien, were elected in 2022 after openly partisan campaigns. Both accepted millions of dollars in campaign donations from Democratic Governor JB Pritzker. Both trumpeted endorsements from Democratic politicians and left-wing activist groups. They did this while the court was preparing to hear a constitutional challenge to the state’s ban on so-called assault weapons and a challenge to Pritzker’s signature criminal justice reform abolishing cash bail. When the gun ban challengers asked them to recuse, both refused. They sat on the cases that had been funded, in effect, by the same governor whose laws were on trial (Legal Newsline).

In September 2023, Justice Rochford went one step further. She spoke at a political fundraiser in Lake County in her official capacity as a justice of the Illinois Supreme Court. The fundraiser benefited the Lake County Women’s Political Action Committee, a group that exists, in its own words, to elect female Democratic candidates. The Illinois Code of Judicial Conduct, in Rule 4.1, expressly prohibits judges from publicly endorsing or speaking on behalf of political candidates or organizations. Rochford did it anyway. Her defense was that “the content of my speech was not political in any way.” The Cook County Bar Association did not issue a statement. The Chicago Council of Lawyers did not issue a statement. No public action was taken by judicial regulators (Legal Newsline).

So here is the rule the Illinois Supreme Court is now operating under. A retired conservative judge writes a private-citizen op-ed and is summarily removed from traffic court by one-sentence order with no hearing. A sitting circuit judge writes political columns from the left and stays on the bench, untouched. Two sitting Democratic justices take millions from the governor, refuse to recuse on his marquee cases, and speak at partisan fundraisers in their official judicial capacity. The bar associations stay silent. The high court protects its own.

Brown received the unanimous endorsement of every single bar association in Cook County, including the same two bar groups that just demanded his removal, at his last retention election in 2014. Nothing about the man changed between 2014 and 2026. What changed was the column (Liberty Justice Center, Kass interview).

Once Again

This is the kind of story that exposes both parties at once.

Democrats will tell you, accurately, that judges have to be careful about public speech and that retired judges writing inflammatory columns invite legitimate questions about their fitness for recall. They will be correct, in the abstract. Then they will not say the next sentence, which is that the very same standard, applied honestly, would have forced Rochford and O’Brien off the gun ban cases and pulled Rochford out of that Lake County fundraiser. Their own party will not call it what it is, because the high court is delivering political outcomes the party likes.

Republicans will tell you, accurately, that this is viewpoint discrimination and that a state high court cannot punish a judge for an op-ed without due process. They will be correct. Then they will spend the next six months turning Judge Brown into a culture-war martyr on conservative cable, fundraising off him, and using the case to attack every Democratic-elected judge in the country. They will not spend much time asking why, when Republican-controlled high courts pull similar moves against liberal judges in red states, the principle of independent courts always seems to be situational.

Once again, our parties have failed us. One side will not police its own high court. The other side will turn a genuine constitutional violation into a partisan trophy and discredit the underlying principle in the process. The result is the same in either case: independent courts get weaker, due process gets thinner, and the next state’s high court is already drafting the next one-sentence order against the next judge who wrote the wrong column.

This is exactly the gap a centrist party is supposed to fill. Centercrats are the people who can say two true things at the same time. Judges should hold themselves to high standards of public restraint, and that standard has to apply to the partisan-fundraiser justice on the bench just as much as it applies to the retired judge with an op-ed. A state supreme court has broad authority to manage judicial assignments, and that authority does not extend to summary removal for protected speech with no hearing. Both statements have to be on the page at the same time, or the country gets nowhere. The two-party system purposely avoids putting them there.

We have to save our democracy before it is too late. A retired American judge wrote one column on a small website almost nobody reads, and his own state’s highest court took his robe in a one-sentence order in the dark. A federal court has already ruled he is likely to win his due process claim. The state high court could have referred the matter to the Illinois Courts Commission and held a hearing. Instead they sent a text message at 6:30 in the morning. If five justices can erase a judge for an op-ed while two of their own colleagues sit on cases bankrolled by the governor, that is not an independent judiciary. That is a political branch in a robe.

That is the wave.

The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party. Visit centercratic.party | centervoter.com

Federal Level

Trump Walks Out of “Meet the Press” Interview

President Trump abruptly ended a taped interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker on Sunday, June 7, removing his microphone and telling her, “Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough,” after a heated exchange over election integrity and the proposed anti-weaponization fund. Trump claimed the 2020 and the 2026 California primary elections were rigged, which Welker challenged for lack of evidence. He called NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN all “crooked” before walking out. The interview had covered Iran, the economy, and Jan. 6 defendants, and Trump later said rainy weather contributed to his frustration.¹

GOP Resistance to Trump Widens Ahead of Midterms

A Reuters report published Sunday, June 7, documented a growing pattern of Republican lawmakers in both chambers breaking ranks with President Trump. Over the previous seven days alone, House and Senate Republicans rebuked his Iran war policy, rejected $1 billion in White House ballroom funding, helped force a retreat on the anti-weaponization fund, blocked his domestic surveillance legislation, and passed Ukraine aid over his objections. The White House dismissed the dissent as “election-year politics,” but analysts noted it could complicate Trump’s most ambitious priorities before November.²

Anti-Weaponization Fund Officially Dead, Says Acting AG

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche confirmed on Sunday, June 7, that the Justice Department is permanently scrapping the proposed $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund, stating the department will “not move forward with the fund, period.” The fund had faced a federal court injunction, bipartisan opposition in Congress, and public anger over concerns it could be used to pay Jan. 6 Capitol rioters. Trump, who publicly supported the fund on his NBC interview the same day, said he would be “disappointed” if it wasn’t approved, putting him at odds with his own Justice Department.³

McConnell Won’t Back Trump’s Interim DNI Pick for Top Job

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell issued a statement Sunday, June 7, making clear he will not support Bill Pulte, Trump’s recently appointed interim Director of National Intelligence, for the permanent role. McConnell said the law requires the DNI to have extensive intelligence experience, stating, “No nominee who falls short of this requirement will earn my vote.” Pulte, a real estate investor and Trump loyalist, was appointed after Tulsi Gabbard departed. McConnell’s signal is likely to complicate any formal Senate confirmation process for Pulte.⁴

Trump Defends Iran War as Consistent With “No New Wars” Pledge

In his NBC “Meet the Press” interview on Sunday, June 7, President Trump was asked directly whether launching a war with Iran contradicted his repeated “No new wars” campaign promise. Trump replied that he “didn’t guarantee” there would be no wars if he returned to office. He said progress toward a ceasefire continues but that Iranian leaders “are going to have to do” things that hurt their pride, and that a final deal hinges in part on whether the U.S. would unfreeze $24 billion in Iranian assets, a step the White House has described as politically difficult.⁵

State Level

Maine Primary Polls Open Today as Platner Scandal Deepens

Maine voters head to the polls today, June 9, in a Democratic Senate primary that has been upended by a week of damaging allegations against frontrunner Graham Platner. Senator Cory Booker publicly distanced himself from Platner on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, June 7, saying “that guy has questions to answer,” and CNN reported that rank-and-file Democratic voters across Maine are increasingly torn over whether to support him. Platner continues to deny the most serious allegations while acknowledging inappropriate text messages. Former Governor Janet Mills remains on the ballot as the party establishment’s preferred candidate.⁶

California Governor Race: Steyer Closing Gap on Hilton

With additional mail ballots still being counted on Sunday, June 7, Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer continued to narrow Republican Steve Hilton’s lead for the second spot in California’s November governor’s runoff. Democrat Xavier Becerra’s place as the top finisher is confirmed. Steyer’s campaign pointed to remaining uncounted ballots in heavily Democratic Los Angeles and San Francisco counties as the basis for its optimism. Election officials said a final certified count will not be available until early July, leaving the identity of November’s second candidate still uncertain.⁷

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Article Sources

1. Newsmax, “Trump Abruptly Ends ‘Meet the Press’ Interview,” June 7, 2026.

2. The Guardian, “Trump walks out of interview with NBC’s Meet the Press after clash over election claims,” June 7, 2026.

3. Facebook/NBC News, “President Donald Trump sat for a ‘Meet the Press’ interview with host Kristen Welker,” June 7, 2026.

4. Reuters, “Trump faces new Republican resistance in Congress as midterm pressures build,” June 7, 2026.

5. The Japan Times, “Trump faces new Republican resistance in Congress as midterm pressures build,” June 7, 2026.

6. Yahoo News, “Trump faces new Republican resistance in Congress as midterm pressures build,” June 7, 2026.

7. PBS NewsHour, “Department of Justice appears to drop ‘anti-weaponization’ fund,” June 1, 2026.

8. NPR, “Blanche says DOJ has nixed the ‘anti-weaponization’ fund,” June 1, 2026.

9. CBS News/YouTube, “Department of Justice drops anti-weaponization fund,” June 2, 2026.

10. Reuters, “Trump faces new Republican resistance in Congress as midterm pressures build,” June 7, 2026.

11. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “Trump dismisses idea that Iran betrays his ‘no new wars’ campaign message,” June 7, 2026.

12. TFI Daily News, “Sunday, June 7, 2026,” June 7, 2026.

13. The Center Voter, “This Morning’s Political News: 4-Minute Read,” June 8, 2026.

14. CNN, “Democratic voters in Maine are grappling with new allegations against Senate candidate Graham Platner,” June 6, 2026.

15. ABC News, “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” June 7, 2026.

16. Ballotpedia, “United States Senate election in Maine, 2026 (June 9 Democratic primary),” 2026.

17. CalMatters, “Xavier Becerra advances to California’s November governor election,” June 5, 2026.

18. KQED, “Becerra Advances in California Governor Race as Hilton, Steyer Battle for Second Spot,” June 4, 2026.

19. ABC7 News, “Governor of California race: Live election results and updates,” June 2026.

Federal Level

Pentagon Raises Israel Spy Threat to Highest Level Ever

NBC News and the New York Times reported on Saturday, June 6, that the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency has elevated its counterintelligence threat assessment for Israel to “critical,” its highest possible designation, a level that now exceeds that assigned to all current U.S. allies and even some adversaries. The assessment, contained in a seven-page internal document, cites growing concern that Israel has intensified efforts to surveil senior U.S. officials, including Trump special envoy Steve Witkoff, Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby, and a senior Colby deputy, all of whom are involved in U.S.-Iran negotiations. One official told the Times that the aggressiveness of Israel’s intelligence gathering since Trump took office is “unhinged.” Israel’s embassy and the White House both denied the report.¹

Trump Signs AI Memo Directing Military and Intel Agencies

President Trump signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum on Friday, June 6, directing the military, the CIA, and other intelligence agencies to accelerate their adoption of artificial intelligence and to work with multiple AI vendors rather than a single provider. The memo explicitly prohibits using AI for unlawful surveillance or to restrict free speech, and it gives Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth 90 days to update existing guidelines on autonomous weapons systems. The directive replaces a Biden-era policy that the Trump administration said was outdated.²

Kennedy Center Begins Stripping Trump’s Name from Building

The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts began the formal process of removing President Trump’s name on Friday, June 6, directing staff to update all email signatures, letterhead, and documents to read “The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.” Physical signage on the building must be changed by June 12 per court order. The Trump administration has said it plans to appeal the May 29 ruling, while Trump publicly suggested he may transfer control of the center back to Congress.³

Anti-Weaponization Fund Fight Heads to Court Monday

A federal judge in Virginia is scheduled to hold a hearing today, Monday, June 8, over the blocked $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund that the Trump administration created as part of a settlement tied to the leak of Trump’s tax returns. Judge Leonie Brinkema issued a temporary injunction after critics from both parties called it a political slush fund. The outcome could determine whether the fund survives and whether it remains a sticking point for the House ICE bill.⁴

Former Sen. Bob Packwood Dies at 93

Former Republican Senator Bob Packwood of Oregon died Saturday, June 6, in hospice care at the age of 93. Packwood served in the Senate for more than 26 years after first winning election in 1968, building a reputation as a moderate Republican who supported abortion rights and women’s rights legislation. He resigned in 1995 after the Senate Ethics Committee unanimously recommended his expulsion following a sexual misconduct investigation involving more than 20 women.⁵

State Level

Platner Rallies in Maine Despite Mounting Abuse Allegations

Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner held a get-out-the-vote rally in Bar Harbor, Maine, on Saturday, June 6, his first public appearance since the New York Times reported that multiple women described a pattern of disturbing behavior, including physical altercations. Platner denied the most serious allegations but acknowledged sending sexually explicit messages to other women while married. Several prominent Democrats, including Senator Cory Booker, publicly distanced themselves from Platner over the weekend, with the June 9 primary now just two days away.⁶

California Governor’s Race: Second Runoff Spot Still in Play

As additional mail ballots continued to be counted Saturday, June 6, Republican Steve Hilton maintained a narrow lead over Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer for the second spot in California’s November governor’s runoff, with Democrat Xavier Becerra already confirmed as the top finisher. Steyer’s campaign said late ballots in heavily Democratic counties favor their candidate. The outcome will determine whether November’s race pits a Democrat against a Republican or produces an unusual two-Democrat matchup for governor of the nation’s most populous state.⁷

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Article Sources

1. NBC News, “Pentagon raised threat of Israeli spying on U.S. to highest level,” June 5, 2026.

2. The New York Times, “U.S. Officials Raised Alarm Over Alleged Israeli Espionage During Iran Negotiations,” June 6, 2026.

3. Al Jazeera, “Pentagon said to raise threat level on Israel spying to ‘critical’,” June 6, 2026.

4. Times of Israel, “Pentagon raises threat assessment of Israeli spying on US to ‘critical’ level,” June 5, 2026.

5. Reuters, “US says it will speed development and use of AI for national security,” June 5, 2026.

6. Bloomberg, “Trump Signs AI Memo Addressing Issues in Anthropic-Pentagon Feud,” June 5, 2026.

7. NHK World, “Trump orders US security authorities to accelerate AI use,” June 6, 2026.

8. Reuters, “Kennedy Center to remove Trump name after court decision,” June 5, 2026.

9. TIME, “Kennedy Center Starts Removing Trump References,” June 5, 2026.

10. USA Today, “Kennedy Center staff directed to remove Trump’s name by June 12,” June 4, 2026.

11. PBS NewsHour, “Why legal experts say Trump’s new ‘anti-weaponization’ fund is unprecedented,” May 20, 2026.

12. CNBC, “Trump ‘slush fund’ a flashpoint as Senate leaves without funding DHS,” June 2, 2026.

13. The New York Times, “Bob Packwood, Senator Forced to Quit in Sex Scandal, Dies at 93,” June 6, 2026.

14. TMZ, “Former Sen. Bob Packwood, Ousted by Sex Scandal, Dead at 93,” June 6, 2026.

15. The New York Times, “Where Does the Maine Senate Race Go Next?,” June 5, 2026.

16. CBS News, “Graham Platner faces another controversy days ahead of Maine Senate primary,” June 4, 2026.

17. NPR, “In California race for governor, Democrat Xavier Becerra takes top spot,” June 5, 2026.

18. CalMatters, “Xavier Becerra advances to California’s November governor election,” June 5, 2026.

19. KQED, “Becerra Advances in California Governor Race as Hilton, Steyer Battle for Second Spot,” June 4, 2026.

Federal Level

House Defies Trump, Passes Nearly $2B Ukraine Aid Bill

In a notable break from Republican leadership, the House voted 226-195 on Thursday, June 4, to approve a Ukraine aid and Russia sanctions package after 18 Republicans joined virtually all Democrats to force a floor vote through a discharge petition. The bill allocates nearly $2 billion for Ukraine and expands sanctions against Russia, directly contradicting President Trump’s foreign policy. Speaker Mike Johnson opposed the measure. The legislation now moves to the Senate, where Republican leadership is expected to block it.¹

Trump Pardons Ex-Congressman Convicted of Insider Trading

President Trump granted a full pardon on Thursday, June 4, to former Indiana Republican Congressman Stephen Buyer, who was convicted in 2023 and sentenced to 22 months in prison for trading on inside information related to the T-Mobile-Sprint merger. The White House announced the pardon on Friday, June 5. The proclamation cited Buyer’s military and congressional service and was endorsed by 52 current and former lawmakers, including Senators Roger Wicker and Lindsey Graham. The Supreme Court had declined to hear Buyer’s appeal just weeks earlier.²

Supreme Court Hands 8-1 Win to FCC Over AT&T and Verizon

The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 on Thursday, June 4, upholding the Federal Communications Commission’s authority to impose fines without first requiring a jury trial, delivering a significant victory for federal agency enforcement power. The case arose after the FCC fined AT&T $57 million and Verizon $47 million for selling customer location data without consent. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, with Justice Clarence Thomas the lone dissenter. The ruling strengthens the ability of federal agencies to hold large corporations accountable.³

House ICE Funding Bill: Vote Expected This Coming Week

With the Senate having passed the $70 billion ICE and Border Patrol funding bill in the early morning hours of Friday, June 5, Speaker Mike Johnson announced that the House would take up the measure as early as Friday, with a full floor vote expected next week. Passage is not guaranteed in the House, where Republican margins are thin. Politico reported Friday that Johnson is working to ensure he has the votes, as the bill still contains the $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund that drew sharp Republican dissent during the Senate vote-a-rama.⁴

House Begins Cutting $5.6B from Health and Education Budgets

The House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services opened its markup of the fiscal year 2027 spending bill on Friday morning, June 5, with a proposal to cut $5.6 billion, or 3 percent, from current funding levels. The bill eliminates the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, cuts the Department of Education by 10 percent, and ends funding for Title X family planning grants. The full committee is scheduled to vote on the bill on June 9. Democrats called the cuts devastating to public health infrastructure.⁵

State Level

Becerra Claims Top Spot in California Governor’s Primary

The Associated Press called Democrat Xavier Becerra as the top finisher in California’s June 2 gubernatorial primary on Friday, June 5, with approximately two-thirds of the vote counted. Becerra, the former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, secured roughly 27 percent of the vote in the all-party primary. The race for the second November runoff spot remains unresolved: Republican Steve Hilton holds a narrow lead with approximately 26 percent, while billionaire Democrat Tom Steyer continues closing the gap as millions of mail ballots remain uncounted.⁶

Maine Senate Primary: Platner Leads With Four Days to Go

A UMass Lowell-YouGov poll released Thursday, June 4, shows Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner leading Republican incumbent Susan Collins 48 to 43 percent in a hypothetical general election matchup, ahead of the June 9 Democratic primary. The survey was conducted before recent press coverage of Platner’s text message controversies, and analysts caution the results may not fully reflect current voter sentiment. Former Governor Janet Mills, who suspended her campaign in April, remains on the primary ballot. The Maine race is widely regarded as one of the most competitive Senate contests in the country.⁷

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Article Sources

1. ABC News, “Several Republicans vote with Democrats to pass Ukraine aid, Russia sanctions package,” June 4, 2026.

2. NBC News, “House passes Ukraine aid bill in another GOP rebuke of Trump’s foreign policy,” June 4, 2026.

3. Politico, “Ukraine aid package passes House, bucking GOP leaders and Trump,” June 4, 2026.

4. The New York Post, “Trump pardons former US Congressman Stephen Buyer convicted of insider trading,” June 6, 2026.

5. Reuters, “Trump grants pardon to former US congressman convicted of insider trading,” June 5, 2026.

6. The New York Times, “Trump Pardons Former Congressman Convicted of Insider Trading,” June 6, 2026.

7. Reuters, “US Supreme Court backs federal regulators in wins for FCC and SEC,” June 5, 2026.

8. The Guardian, “US Supreme Court backs FCC in clash with wireless carriers over fines,” June 4, 2026.

9. Earth Justice, “Supreme Court Affirms Federal Agencies’ Authority to Protect the Public,” June 4, 2026.

10. The Hill, “Senate passes $70 billion immigration enforcement package,” June 5, 2026.

11. Politico, “Senate GOP passes immigration enforcement bill,” June 5, 2026.

12. House Appropriations Committee, “Committee Releases FY27 Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill,” June 3, 2026.

13. Association of Schools Advancing Health Professions, “House FY27 Labor-HHS Appropriations Bill Released, Subcommittee Markup Scheduled,” June 4, 2026.

14. NPR, “In California race for governor, Democrat Xavier Becerra takes top spot,” June 5, 2026.

15. CalMatters, “Xavier Becerra advances to California’s November governor election,” June 5, 2026.

16. KQED, “Becerra Advances in California Governor Race as Hilton, Steyer Battle for Second Spot,” June 4, 2026.

17. UMass Lowell Center for Public Opinion, “Maine Poll: Platner Holds Slight Lead over Collins in U.S. Senate Matchup,” June 4, 2026.

18. The Maine Monitor, “2026 Maine Voter Guide,” June 2026.

On May 11, 2026, the mayor of a city of 55,000 people walked into a federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles, signed a plea agreement, and admitted in writing that she had spent the years 2020 through 2022 working as an unregistered agent of the People’s Republic of China. Her name is Eileen Wang. She had been elected to the Arcadia City Council in November 2022 and elevated to mayor in the city’s rotating mayoralty. She is the first elected official in United States history to plead guilty to acting as a covert agent of the Chinese government (The Bureau, DOJ).

She resigned that same afternoon. On May 29, 2026, she stood in federal court and entered the formal guilty plea. Her sentencing is set for October 6, 2026. She faces a statutory maximum of ten years in federal prison (ABC7 Los Angeles, Los Angeles Times).

If a small-town mayor on the East Coast had taken even a single phone call from a Russian intelligence officer in 2020, the story would have been on a continuous Cable News loop for six straight months. A sitting American mayor on the West Coast pleads guilty to running a propaganda operation for the Chinese government, and the story is barely a five-minute segment on the local ABC affiliate. Forty-eight hours after the plea, most Americans east of Pomona had never heard her name.

That is not just a Beijing story. It is a story about what gets covered in the United States in 2026, who pays attention to local elections, who is targeting them, and what happens when one of the most powerful intelligence services in the world picks a sleepy suburb in the San Gabriel Valley to grow a political plant.

What the Centercratic Party Stands For

The Centercratic Party rests on nine governing principles. Three of them describe exactly what Eileen Wang violated, and what the rest of us are now obligated to defend.

The first reads: “Safeguard Our Democratic System. Govern through compromise, not domination. Reject extreme tactics by special interests and defend the Constitution for everyone.” When a foreign government’s intelligence service runs an asset into a city council seat, that is not a special interest. It is a hostile government. Wang took an oath to the Constitution in December 2022. According to her own signed plea agreement, she had spent the previous two years executing directives from PRC officials and “obscuring her connections to the Chinese government from the public” (NPR). You cannot defend the Constitution for everyone if you are working, in secret, for the regime that exists to undo it everywhere it can.

The third reads: “Protect Election Integrity. Strengthen election security with strict voter ID standards and modern, accessible voter rolls. Restore confidence in the system.” Election integrity is not just about who casts the ballot. It is about who runs for the seat and who funds the campaign. Wang’s campaign treasurer and then-fiance, Yaoning “Mike” Sun, was a former officer of China’s Ministry of Public Security. He bragged to his PRC handlers that he had helped elect a “New Political Star” in California and asked Beijing for $80,000 to expand the operation, with Wang’s victory as the centerpiece of the pitch (The Bureau, LA Times). That is foreign interference in an American election. Local, but foreign. Specific, but documented. If election integrity means anything, it means asking who is paying for the campaign of the person who just took the oath.

The eighth reads: “Defend Our Freedom. Unite with allies to deter aggression and defend free nations against military, cyber, and economic threats.” The threat from the People’s Republic of China is not coming. It is here, it is operational, and it has been running through a website called U.S. News Center, posting articles dictated by PRC officials in WeChat group chats, including a 2021 essay arguing that “there is no genocide in Xinjiang” and that “forced labor” in Chinese cotton production does not exist (Los Angeles Times). A sitting American mayor was reposting that essay on the orders of a foreign intelligence service. Defending freedom is not an abstract foreign policy slogan. It is the work of identifying that operation, prosecuting it, and never letting the public forget it happened.

Three principles, one mayor, one foreign government, one city of 55,000 people.

How Beijing Walked Into Arcadia

Here is what the public record now shows.

Arcadia is a wealthy suburb of about 55,000 people on the eastern edge of the San Gabriel Valley. Roughly 59 percent of its residents are Asian. More than 46 percent are foreign-born. It has a large, well-established Chinese American community (NPR). Federal investigators have previously identified Arcadia as a hub for Chinese underground banking networks tied to Sinaloa cartel fentanyl cash flows in the Project Sleeping Giant DEA investigation (The Bureau). This is not Beijing operating in a vacuum. It is Beijing operating in a city where the ground was already softened.

The operation, in plain English, worked like this.

Beginning in late 2020, Wang and Sun ran a website called U.S. News Center, branded as a Chinese American community news source. Sun was a former officer of China’s Ministry of Public Security, which is one of the principal intelligence agencies of the PRC. Together they “received and executed directives” from PRC government officials. They posted Beijing-supplied articles, sometimes pre-written by Chinese officials, sometimes shared in WeChat group chats with other operatives, and they reported screenshots back to their handlers showing how many people had viewed each article (DOJ).

In June 2021, a PRC official messaged the group with a pre-written essay arguing China’s position on Xinjiang. Wang published it. By August 2021, she and three other members of the same group chat were amplifying the same Beijing-scripted essay across their respective websites (The Bureau).

In November 2022, Wang was elected to the Arcadia City Council. Sun served as her campaign manager. Sun then bragged to his Chinese handlers, in messages later seized by the FBI, that he had helped elect a “New Political Star” with connections to prominent California politicians. He reported her city council victory up the chain to PRC intelligence contacts. He asked Beijing for $80,000 to expand operations targeting “anti-China forces,” using her election as proof of concept (The Bureau).

In August 2023, Wang and Sun traveled together to China and met with PRC officials. Federal prosecutors describe the visit as a direct operational conduit between Beijing’s overseas apparatus and an American elected official (The Bureau).

Sun was arrested in December 2024. He pleaded guilty in October 2025 and is currently serving a four-year federal sentence. The Sun indictment did not name Wang. It identified her only as “Individual 1.” The FBI had been watching her for months (DOJ, DOJ Sun sentencing).

On April 1, 2026, federal prosecutors filed Wang’s plea agreement under seal. On May 11, 2026, it was unsealed. Wang resigned as mayor that afternoon. On May 29, 2026, she stood before a federal judge and pleaded guilty. She will be sentenced October 6, 2026.

The defense from Wang’s attorneys, Brian Sun and Jason Liang, is that their client was deceived by “someone she believed to be her fiance.” It is, on its face, an absurd defense. She spent more than two years co-operating an explicitly Beijing-directed propaganda website. She traveled to China with him and met PRC officials. The FBI captured the messages he sent to his handlers describing her as their “New Political Star” who was helping them reach senior California politicians (NPR).

Beijing’s “whole society approach” to intelligence, as former DEA agent Nicholas Eftimiades explained to NPR, does not just target nuclear secrets. It targets local diaspora communities. It recruits city council members and mayors with the explicit hope that they will rise to higher office. Once installed, those officials can monitor dissidents inside the diaspora, surveil visiting Taiwanese delegations, and steer local government policy in directions Beijing prefers (NPR). Wang was not a one-off mistake. She was a designed product of a system. The system worked, right up until the FBI seized Sun’s phone.

Once Again

This is the kind of story that exposes both parties at once.

Republicans will tell you, accurately, that the case proves the threat from the Chinese Communist Party is no longer theoretical. They will be correct. Then they will spend the next six months blaming Democrats for being soft on China, and they will mostly mean the Democrats they want to defeat in November. They will not spend much time asking how their own party screens its candidates, vets their campaign treasurers, or audits the immigrant community PAC endorsements they are also chasing, because at the local level both parties chase those endorsements.

Democrats will tell you, accurately, that anti-Asian hysteria is real, that Chinese Americans are not Beijing’s agents, and that lumping a 59 percent Asian American city in with a single corrupt mayor would be a slander against tens of thousands of innocent residents. They will be correct. Then they will move on, because the alternative is sitting with the uncomfortable fact that the mayor in question pleaded guilty, that she is the first elected American official ever to do so, that her campaign was run by a former officer of the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, and that a Democratic congresswoman, Rep. Judy Chu, accepted campaign donations from Wang and has not publicly returned them (Fox News).

Once again, our parties have failed us. One side will turn this into a culture war about loyalty and the other side will refuse to talk about it because there is no clean partisan version of the story. The result is the same in either case: the public learns almost nothing, and the next Arcadia is already underway in some other city of 55,000 people in some other state, with some other PAC, and some other “new political star” being cultivated by some other handler in some other group chat.

This is exactly the gap a centrist party is supposed to fill. Centercrats are the people who can say two true things at the same time. The Chinese Communist Party is running real operations against American elected officials right now. Anti-Asian bigotry is also real, and lumping every Chinese American in with one Beijing-directed mayor can never be tolerated. Both of those statements have to be on the page at the same time, or the country gets nowhere. The two-party system, as it is currently operating, purposely avoids putting these two statements on the same page.

We have to save our democracy before it is too late. The mayor of a wealthy California suburb just admitted in federal court that she was working for Beijing. She is the first. She will not be the last. The story deserved a six-month cable news loop. It got a five-minute local segment, and a sentencing date in October that most of the country will miss.

That is the wave.

The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party. Visit centercratic.party | centervoter.com

Federal Level

Senate Passes $70 Billion ICE and Border Patrol Funding Bill

After a marathon vote-a-rama that ran through Thursday night, the Senate voted 52-47 in the early morning hours of Friday, June 5, to pass a $69.5 billion bill funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol for three years. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was the only Republican to vote against the measure. Democrats used the overnight amendment process to force Republicans to take on-the-record votes on the administration’s anti-weaponization fund and White House ballroom security provisions, exposing notable GOP divisions. The bill now moves to the House.¹

Senate Advances Iran War Powers Resolution to Full Vote

The Senate on Thursday, June 4, advanced the Iran war powers resolution, setting up a full chamber vote in the coming days after the House passed the measure 215-208 on Wednesday, June 3. Four Republicans joined Democrats in the House vote to direct President Trump to end U.S. military hostilities with Iran, marking the first time the House has succeeded in approving such a resolution after three failed attempts. The administration maintains the ceasefire renders the measure moot, and a presidential veto is expected if the Senate passes it.²

Trump Announces $700 Million to Revive U.S. Coal Industry

President Trump announced on Thursday, June 4, that his administration will commit $700 million in federal funding to the coal industry. Invoking the Defense Production Act, the administration will distribute $425 million to 13 existing coal plants and $75 million to a new export terminal. An additional $185 million in Department of Energy grants will fund construction of the first new U.S. coal plants since 2013, in Alaska and West Virginia, with a closed Maryland facility also set to restart. Critics noted that coal is generally more expensive to build and operate than natural gas or renewable energy alternatives.³

FISA Section 702: Senate Races to Meet June 12 Deadline

With the 45-day extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act set to expire on June 12, Senate Republicans circulated a draft three-year reauthorization bill on Tuesday, June 2, and pressed for action Thursday. The proposal, led by Intelligence Chair Tom Cotton and Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley, stops short of requiring warrants before searching Americans’ communications gathered under the spy program, and includes a ban on the Federal Reserve issuing a digital currency. A bipartisan bloc of privacy-focused senators has signaled it will push back, leaving the outcome uncertain heading into the weekend.⁴

State Level

New York Democrats Launch 2028 Redistricting Campaign

New York’s Democrat-controlled Legislature voted on Wednesday, June 3, to give initial approval to a state constitutional amendment that would allow mid-decade congressional redistricting and eliminate the state’s existing ban on partisan gerrymandering. Currently, Democrats hold 19 of New York’s 26 congressional seats. Analysts say a redrawn map could shift that figure to 23-3 in Democrats’ favor, potentially costing Republicans up to four House seats. The amendment must pass the Legislature again after November’s elections and then win a statewide voter referendum before new lines could take effect for 2028.⁵

California Governor Race Remains Too Close to Call

As of Thursday, June 4, with approximately 57 percent of the expected vote counted, Republican Steve Hilton held a narrow lead at 27 percent in California’s all-party gubernatorial primary, with Democrat Xavier Becerra close behind at 26 percent and billionaire Tom Steyer at 20 percent. Because California allows mail ballots postmarked by Election Day to arrive for up to 30 days, certified results will not be available until early July. The race is the most competitive California governor’s contest in years and is being closely watched as a signal of the national political climate heading into the November midterms.⁶

L.A. Mayor Race Unsettled; Reality Star Pratt Holds Second

The race to determine who will face incumbent Mayor Karen Bass in a November runoff remained unresolved on Thursday, June 4, with Bass leading at 35 percent and Spencer Pratt holding second place at approximately 29 percent, with 66 percent of the expected vote counted. Progressive City Councilwoman Nithya Raman stood at 23 percent, remaining a credible threat to Pratt’s position as late mail ballots continue to be tabulated. The outcome carries statewide implications, as Los Angeles is the largest city in California and the race has drawn significant national attention.⁷

Illinois Passes Landmark Gig Worker Unionization Bill

The Illinois General Assembly passed legislation on Sunday, June 1, giving more than 100,000 rideshare drivers the right to form a union and collectively bargain for pay and working conditions while remaining classified as independent contractors. Governor JB Pritzker is expected to sign the bill, making Illinois the third state, alongside California and Massachusetts, to extend union rights to gig workers. Republicans in the chamber expressed skepticism about organizing independent contractors, but the bill passed comfortably on largely party-line votes and now awaits the governor’s signature.⁸

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Article Sources

1. Bloomberg, “Senate Passes Funding for ICE and CBP After Months of Debate,” June 5, 2026.

2. CNBC, “U.S. Senate passes $70 billion in new funds for ICE, Border Patrol,” June 5, 2026.

3. Politico, “Senate GOP passes immigration enforcement bill,” June 5, 2026.

4. PBS NewsHour, “WATCH LIVE: Senate holds ICE funding vote-a-rama,” June 4, 2026.

5. NBC News, “Some Republicans cast votes against Trump priorities as Senate takes up ICE and Border Patrol bill,” June 4, 2026.

6. American Legion, “House votes for first time to halt Iran war,” June 4, 2026.

7. NPR, “House passes resolution to end hostilities with Iran,” June 3, 2026.

8. TIME, “House Votes to Restrain Trump’s Iran War Powers,” June 4, 2026.

9. The New York Times, “Trump Announces $700 Million in Funds Meant to Boost Coal Industry,” June 4, 2026.

10. CBS News, “Trump announces $700 million investment in coal plants and mining,” June 4, 2026.

11. The Washington Post, “Trump expected to announce $700 million in new support for struggling coal industry,” June 4, 2026.

12. Politico, “Senate Republicans propose 3-year extension of key surveillance power,” June 2, 2026.

13. PBS NewsHour, “WATCH: Senate considers FISA extension as June 12 deadline nears,” June 4, 2026.

14. The Wall Street Journal, “The 2028 Redistricting Wars Begin,” June 4, 2026.

15. Reuters, “New York Democrats take first step toward new U.S. House map for 2028,” June 4, 2026.

16. The New York Times, “N.Y. Democrats Move to Allow More Frequent Redistricting,” June 4, 2026.

17. Spectrum News Albany, “New York State Legislature passes redistricting constitutional amendment,” June 3, 2026.

18. ABC News, “California primaries results: Governor’s race not yet projected,” June 3, 2026.

19. ABC7 Los Angeles, “California primary election results: Becerra, Hilton neck and neck,” June 4, 2026.

20. The Washington Post, “Los Angeles mayor faces a TV star and a former ally. See primary results live,” June 4, 2026.

21. Capitol News Illinois, “Rideshare drivers could unionize in Illinois under bill passed by General Assembly,” June 1, 2026.

22. Pluribus News, “Another blue state gives ride-hailing drivers unionization rights,” June 3, 2026.