Thursday, July 2 — the border monument

0:00 The Department of Justice has the legal tools to go after a foreign dictator for murdering his own people — but it's choosing not to use them.

0:09 That's the day's real story, and it tells you almost everything about how this administration picks its fights. Let's start with the DOJ.

0:19 This week a civil lawsuit was filed by the families of five Venezuelan men, killed in police raids back home, trying to hold Nicolás Maduro liable under the Torture Victim Protection Act.

0:32 The Justice Department has a whole unit for this kind of thing — the Human Trafficking and International Human Rights Unit inside the Civil Rights Division — but the administration has pretty much stopped staffing it.

0:45 Instead, the only active case against Maduro is a narcoterrorism indictment out of Manhattan that's been sitting there since 2020.

0:55 So here's the picture: the DOJ has the authority to hold a foreign strongman accountable for extrajudicial killings, and it's just not doing it.

1:06 That tells you something about which human rights this government treats as real. Meanwhile, the border.

1:13 The administration is spending forty-six billion dollars — that's billion with a B — on a so-called "smart wall" of steel bollards and surveillance tech along the southern border.

1:26 They're racing to build it under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. And here's the kicker: border crossings are already at historic lows.

1:36 Customs and Border Protection reports thirteen straight months with zero migrant releases, and May apprehensions were below ten thousand — the lowest in decades.

1:48 So you're looking at a forty-six-billion-dollar monument, not a security need. It bisects the Tohono O'odham Nation's land. It tears up fragile desert ecosystems. It pays for none of the proven, humane approaches.

2:04 On the civil rights front, the Supreme Court handed down a major ruling this week. All nine justices agreed: state laws that ban transgender athletes from women's and girls' sports do not violate Title IX.

2:19 A 6-3 majority went further, saying those same laws pass even the weakest test under the Equal Protection Clause.

2:28 Now, the majority opinion — written by Justice Kavanaugh — was careful to tie that analysis just to sports. It did not give a green light to other forms of discrimination: bathrooms, locker rooms, school activities.

2:44 So this is a real setback, but it's not the broad doctrinal blow some feared. It leaves the next fight for another day. Then there's immigration enforcement.

2:56 ICE arrest rates have doubled to two thousand a day, as of early July. The New York Times is reporting this. That's a deliberate push for mass deportation — but the court system hasn't grown to handle it.

3:11 Meanwhile, in Birmingham, Alabama, Homeland Security raided two manufacturing plants last week, detaining more than thirty people.

3:21 The American Immigration Council's analysis shows these workplace raids are targeting workers, not the employers who knowingly hire them. It's a pattern: blame the people at the bottom, let the companies off.

3:35 Closer to home, the EU's top court upheld a four-point-one-billion-euro fine against Google for forcing phone makers to pre-install its search and Chrome. That's a rare moment of accountability for a digital gatekeeper.

3:51 In the U.S., the parallel Google search monopoly case is still stuck in appeals at the D.C. Circuit. Europe acts; we talk.

4:01 And finally, Executive Order 14414 came out this week — wrapped in the language of soil health and regenerative agriculture.

4:12 But read the fine print: Section 2 speeds up approval for new pesticides, not phase-outs of the dangerous ones. Section 3 tells USDA to expand a pilot program — without new funding or acreage targets.

4:28 The order is silent on the real barriers to regenerative farming: corporate consolidation, input monopolies, an insurance system that rewards chemical monoculture. Rhetoric is not policy.

4:42 The bigger picture: Project 2025 is not a hypothetical anymore — its actions are being written into law and policy every week. We've read, reframed, and logged 147 of its prescriptions so far.

4:57 Across the whole arc, 1,080 distinct actions are on the record and mapped. The watch is constant. We don't claim to have reversed anything — we just keep documenting.

5:08 Next week, the House Ways and Means Committee is expected to take up the next round of tax cuts — what Republicans are calling Reconciliation 3.0.

5:19 Also, the June jobs report comes out tomorrow, which could be inflated by World Cup hiring, but the underlying weakness in wages and union power remains.

5:30 And the DOJ will face questions in the coming weeks about whether it will formally weigh in on the Venezuela families' lawsuit. That's the news for Thursday, July 2. I'm Gus Calloway. We'll be back tomorrow.

5:45 Take care of each other.