50501 FRIDAY BRIEFING | JUNE 12, 2026
ICE received its funding, surveillance powers hit a wall, and organizers kept democracy alive in public.
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Congress handed ICE and Border Patrol nearly $70 billion. Another man died at a Louisiana detention center that federal inspectors had already flagged. Advocates say women inside Delaney Hall joined a hunger and labor strike now in its third week. A major surveillance law was pushed to the brink of a historic lapse. And a Senate committee tried to erase 45 million acres of forest protections inside a wildfire bill.
A federal judge indefinitely blocked Trump’s $1.8 billion payout fund. Another judge refused to pause the order stripping his name from the Kennedy Center. Brad Lander walked out of a Manhattan courthouse acquitted. And the man who assassinated Melissa Hortman pleaded guilty, days before the one-year anniversary of her death.
ICE Just Got Nearly $70 Billion, Signed Into Law
On Tuesday, the House passed the Secure America Act by a vote of 214 to 212, with no Democratic votes. The Senate had cleared it 52 to 47 the week before. Trump signed it Wednesday.
The package funds ICE and Border Patrol through the end of Trump’s term. It includes about $38 billion for ICE, roughly $26 billion for Border Patrol and border technology, and $5 billion in discretionary money for the Homeland Security Secretary to spend as he sees fit. This comes on top of last year’s law, which provided about $75 billion for ICE over four years and made it the most heavily funded law enforcement agency in the federal government.
Remember how we got here…… After federal agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Democrats refused to fund these agencies without reforms: limits on detaining citizens, mask requirements, body cameras, training standards. That standoff produced the longest partial DHS shutdown in history. Republicans ended it not by negotiating reforms but by using budget reconciliation to pass the money on party lines, with none of the accountability measures attached.
So the agency accused of courthouse arrests, masked operations, family separations, and a record-breaking string of deaths in custody now has guaranteed funding through 2029, and Congress gave itself no new tools to restrain it.
Mamuka Artmeladze Should Still Be Here
Mamuka Artmeladze was 43 years old, from the country of Georgia. He had been detained for nearly four months at Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana when staff found him unresponsive on the night of June 4. He was pronounced dead at a local hospital less than an hour later. His cause of death is pending an autopsy.
He had no criminal record. Like most of the more than 1,500 men held at Winn, he was detained purely on immigration grounds, picked up in February during an operation targeting commercial vehicle drivers in Alabama.
According to an ABC News analysis, Artmeladze is the 50th person to die in ICE detention during this administration, and the 19th this year alone. Outside of the pandemic, the first 14 months of this term represent the deadliest period for the federal detention system in recent memory.
His was also the second death at Winn in under two months. Federal inspectors had already documented unsanitary conditions, medical care failures, and excessive force at the facility before either man died. The warnings came first. The deaths came after. That sequence is the story.
And here is the part that should alarm everyone: last week, ICE quietly ended the policy requiring it to report deaths of people who die within 30 days of release from custody. A person who is detained, neglected, and released in crisis will simply vanish from the public record. The deaths will not stop. We will just see fewer of them.
The agency receiving billions more is the same agency making its own death toll harder to count.
Inside Delaney Hall, Women Have Joined the Strike
The hunger and labor strike at Delaney Hall in Newark is now in its third week, and it is growing.
On May 22, an estimated 300 people detained at the GEO Group-run facility stopped eating and stopped working, citing medical neglect, spoiled food, lack of sanitation, denial of bond, and coercion to sign deportation documents, according to Human Rights Watch. This week, dozens of detained women joined them. Among their demands, advocates say, is that the facility fire a guard accused of sexually assaulting at least 10 detained women.
The response from inside has been retaliation, with most of the original hunger strikers transferred to other ICE jails in recent days. Moving people doesn’t resolve their allegations, it scatters the witnesses.
But the pressure from outside keeps building. New Jersey’s attorney general sued GEO Group to force health inspectors into the building. The governor toured the facility. More than 80 people have been arrested at solidarity protests outside. Lawmakers from two states have demanded access. Some of the most vulnerable detainees have been released, including an 18-year-old high school senior who spent nearly two months inside. And this week, the Jersey City Council voted unanimously to divest from Citizens Bank over its financing of GEO Group and CoreCivic.
DHS continues to deny that a hunger strike is happening at all. Read that denial next to the lawsuits, the transfers, the congressional visits, and the testimony of families, then decide for yourself which account holds up.
Delaney Hall is no longer invisible, and that happened because people inside risked their bodies and people outside refused to look away.
Surveillance Powers Hit Their First-Ever Lapse Tonight
At midnight tonight, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act expires, the first lapse in the program’s nearly 18-year history. On Thursday, the House failed to pass even a three-week extension, falling well short on a 198 to 218 vote, and three separate attempts in the Senate also failed before lawmakers left town.
Section 702 lets the government collect communications of foreigners abroad without a warrant. The problem civil liberties groups have warned about for years is that Americans get swept up whenever they communicate with those targets, and agencies have repeatedly searched that data without warrants, including queries on protesters, journalists, and lawmakers.
What broke the renewal this time was not the privacy fight alone. Trump installed Bill Pulte, a loyalist with no intelligence background known for targeting Trump critics with mortgage fraud investigations, as acting Director of National Intelligence. Democrats refused to hand a warrantless surveillance tool to an administration that had just put that person in charge of it.
Collection will likely continue for now under existing court certifications, so the lapse is a legal gray zone rather than a shutdown. But Congress has now put on the record that this much power requires this much trust, and the trust is not there. When renewal talks resume, the demand should be reform with warrant requirements, not a clean rubber stamp.
A Wildfire Bill Became a Trojan Horse for Public Lands
On Wednesday, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, chaired by Mike Lee, voted 11 to 9 along party lines to advance the Wildfire Prevention Act with a last-minute amendment attached: a full statutory repeal of the 2001 Roadless Rule.
The amendment was filed late Tuesday night. There was no hearing. By Wednesday morning it was done, and a bill that began as bipartisan wildfire legislation now carries language that Environment America says would strip protections from 45 million acres of wild national forest land. Ranking member Martin Heinrich called the result a trojan horse, and that is the accurate word for it.
For 25 years, the Roadless Rule has barred new road construction and large-scale development in the last undeveloped stretches of our national forests, including 4 million acres in Oregon and Washington, per OPB. These lands protect drinking water, wildlife habitat, and the kind of backcountry that belongs to everyone. And the wildfire framing does not survive contact with the evidence: the rule already allows prescribed burns and thinning, and most research finds that roads increase fire frequency, because people start most fires and roads bring people.
The bill still needs the full Senate, which means there is still time. If lawmakers want to erase a 25-year-old conservation policy, they should have to do it in daylight, with hearings and votes the public can see, not through a midnight rider on a bill named for preventing fires.
Courts Declined a National Shield for Trans Patients’ Records
On Thursday, a federal judge in Maryland declined to certify a nationwide class action that would have barred the Justice Department from pressuring hospitals across the country to hand over the medical records of transgender minors. Eleven families had sought the order after DOJ sent subpoenas to more than 20 major medical systems demanding records of patients who received gender-affirming care.
The ruling stings, but the fuller picture matters. The same judge quashed DOJ’s subpoena to Children’s National Hospital in January, calling it a fishing expedition with no purpose other than to intimidate and harass. Courts in Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Colorado have thrown out similar subpoenas, and to date no reported federal decision has ruled in the government’s favor on these demands.
The legal record protecting medical privacy keeps growing. It just has to be built brick by brick, which makes supporting the legal organizations doing that work, like GLAD Law, all the more concrete a way to help.
The Man Who Killed Melissa Hortman Pleaded Guilty
On Thursday, Vance Boelter pleaded guilty in federal court to six charges, including murder and stalking, for the June 14, 2025 attacks that killed former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and seriously wounded State Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette. He came to their doors disguised as a police officer. Investigators found a list of dozens more names in his vehicle.
Under the plea agreement, he will serve two consecutive life terms plus 40 years, with no death penalty. He still faces state charges. The Hoffman family’s statement said what no sentence can fix: “There is no justice for Mark and Melissa Hortman.”
Sunday marks one year since that morning.
We include this story in every form it takes because political violence is the end state of dehumanization, and dehumanization is the daily language of authoritarian politics. We can be angry, organized, loud, and relentless. We can sue, strike, boycott, document, vote, and refuse to comply with injustice. What we can’t do is let violence become an answer, ours or anyone’s. A democracy where public service carries a death sentence is not a democracy for long, and the people working to crush this movement would like nothing more than an excuse to paint every protester as a threat. We will not hand them one.
The Good News:
Brad Lander Was Acquitted
A federal judge found Brad Lander not guilty of obstruction Thursday, ending the case from his September arrest at 26 Federal Plaza, where he and roughly 75 others were detained while trying to inspect the conditions in ICE’s 10th-floor holding cells. He turned down a plea deal and demanded trial. The prosecution’s closing argument literally cited him singing “We Shall Not Be Moved.” The judge’s response: the government failed to prove its case.
The $1.8 Billion Payout Fund Is Indefinitely Blocked
This morning, Judge Leonie Brinkema issued a preliminary injunction indefinitely blocking the administration’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, the pool of taxpayer money that emerged from Trump’s settlement of his own lawsuit against the IRS and that could compensate his allies, including January 6 defendants, as victims of government “weaponization.”
Trump’s Name Is Still Coming Off the Kennedy Center
Last month, a federal judge ruled that Congress named the Kennedy Center and only Congress can rename it, ordered Trump’s name removed by today, and blocked the planned two-year closure of the building. This week, with the deadline looming, the Trump-appointed board voted to fight the order, and the judge refused to pause it, writing that the public is rarely served by letting the government keep breaking the law.
The Wins From Last Week Are Holding
Two victories we covered in our last briefing remain in force and deserve a status check.. The appeals court order blocking the Pentagon from discharging the transgender service members who sued is still standing, with the court on record that the policy appears driven by the bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group. And the House’s Iran war powers resolution, passed 215 to 208, now sits with the Senate, which has already advanced its own version.
Movement Spotlight: Portland OR Answers With Joy for The Make America Fair
Sunday, June 14, carries heavy history. It’s the day Melissa and Mark Hortman were killed one year ago. It’s also a No Kings anniversary, marking one of the largest coordinated protest days in American history.
Here is how 50501 / No Kings Portland is spending it, by hosting The Make America Fair at Laurelhurst Park, a community fair with carnival games, food, music, teach-ins, tabling organizations, volunteer sign-ups, and a food drive for families affected by ICE. We wrote about why this makes a difference in Portland Is Teaching Democracy With Carnival Games.
Resource of the Week: ICE Activity by State
This week we published ICE Activity by State, a 50-state public-interest severity tracker. It’s not an official database. It is a editorial tool built from recent verified reporting on arrests, raids, 287(g) agreements, detention conditions, deaths, lawsuits, and local controversy, rated 1 to 5 for every state.
A few national numbers from the tracker that put this week in context: 60,311 people were in ICE detention as of early April per TRAC at Syracuse University, 70.8 percent of them with no criminal conviction at all. At least 19 people have died in custody this year. And AP’s analysis found ICE arrests dropped nearly 12 percent nationwide in the weeks after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, when the whole country was watching. Public attention does not fix the system, but it can change how the system behaves, and that is the entire reason to know what is happening where you live.
If your state’s rating looks wrong, too high, too low, or incomplete, help us fix it. Drop credible local reporting in the comments and we will fold verified corrections into the next edition.
What to Watch For
The Roadless Rule repeal heads to the full Senate, where it can still be stripped out. The FISA 702 fight resumes when Congress returns in 12 days, with reformers holding more leverage than they have had in years. Judge Brinkema’s one-week deadline for a sworn statement on the payout fund lands next Friday. The Kennedy Center appeal proceeds. The Senate’s Iran war powers resolution awaits a final vote. And early voting in New York’s congressional primaries begins Saturday, with the June 23 election ahead.
I AM SHOCKED! I just checked the USFS site yesterday to look for an update to this issue. Crickets there, and now I see why!!! Calling my senators and becoming a paid subscriber to this valuable briefing!
I don’t think I will be living in the USA anymore