This week at Unbreaking, November 20
As we prepare for holiday gatherings, it’s hard not to think about the way this administration’s actions are rippling across our communities, separating families, and making so many of us less safe — and also about the many ways people are fighting back and protecting one another. We’re taking a week of downtime on the project so our volunteers can spend time with their loved ones and maybe catch up on sleep, so this is the last briefing from us you’ll get until December.
What the administration’s immigration crackdown is doing to us
As immigration enforcement pushed into North Carolina this week, ruptures in daily life were immediately clear in closed small businesses, empty churches, and a school district where more than 30,000 children were kept home from school as ICE and Border Patrol agents flooded the area. We’ve seen the same patterns throughout the country, where even citizens face racial profiling and brutal detentions.
The raids and escalating enforcement are just one arm of a pincer maneuver: The administration is also weaponizing disastrous backlogs in immigration courts and work-permit systems to cut off pathways to legal residence and economic survival — even for people who have done everything “right.” To meet their quotas, ICE and CBP are even arresting already screened and vetted immigrants in the final stages of obtaining green cards.
But in every city under attack, we also see solidarity responses: ICE-spotting neighborhood patrols, hotlines and websites, street-vendor buyouts and mutual-aid food support in Chicago, community protection trainings in Charlotte, and whistle distribution everywhere. In Portland, demonstrators are giving dance lessons — and knitting and crochet lessons — to keep community attention on an ICE detention center.
State and local officials are also stepping up. In Illinois, Governor Pritzker announced the Illinois Accountability Commission to document the conduct of immigration agents in Chicago. Mayor Michelle Wu is fighting back against a DOJ lawsuit over Boston’s “Sanctuary City” laws. NYC Comptroller Brad Lander rejected a deal to drop charges following his arrest during a civil disobedience action. And Congresswoman LaMonica McIver (NJ–10) is currently being prosecuted for federal charges stemming from her oversight visit to an ICE detention center.
We also follow immigration litigation at Unbreaking, and even though we track only the most pivotal lawsuits we find, we’re up to almost 50 major cases in our chronological timeline.
Data and surveillance
In our combined data security/immigration briefing in early November, we wrote about how government surveillance and data-pooling efforts are pushing the country toward systematized targeting of immigrants, everyone around them, and even political opponents. On Monday, WIRED convened three surveillance-focused journalists to discuss the ways the US is becoming — or may already be — a surveillance state, even if the effects are currently unevenly distributed.
In this update, we saw a lot of pushback against data collection, consolidation, and weaponization:
- A coalition of 40 congressional Democrats led by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) sent letters to 19 Democratic governors urging them to stop sharing driver’s license and registration information with a database used for immigration enforcement.
- Senators raised alarms about privacy and security risks of the expansion of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) tool to purge voter rolls of suspected noncitizens. A federal judge cast doubts on the legality of the expansion but declined to block it.
- Earlier this fall, federal judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered the IRS to give the court 24 hours’ notice before complying with any future ICE requests for data. Recent filings in the case revealed that ICE has already sought information on more than 47,000 taxpayers.
Targeted exploitation of data continues, though, as does resistance to oversight: The White House suspended the acting Inspector General of the US Federal Housing Finance Agency and fired a dozen ethics staffers at mortgage company Fannie Mae just as they were acting to expose the sharing of Democratic officials’ mortgage details for politically motivated investigations. And in a particularly dystopian turn, 404 Media reported that ICE is contracting with members of the general public to physically track down immigrants in exchange for a $300 bounty per confirmed location.
We’re tracking these developments and more in our Data Security page.
The government is back to work — minus nearly 300k employees and an NIH opposition leader
The end of the longest-ever federal shutdown brought good news: The spending bill includes a provision that reverses layoffs of about 4,200 workers made during the shutdown and protects against further layoffs through January 30, 2026. Most of the hundreds of thousands of workers who were furloughed or worked without pay should have started receiving backpay this week.
The number of federal job cuts attributed to the Trump administration’s DOGE initiative has reached 293,753 (PDF) so far this year. Government spending is up $375 billion, or 5.6%, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates an unrecoverable loss of $11 billion (PDF) due to furloughed employees working fewer hours during the shutdown. Find these events and more on our Equality at Work page.
As thousands of government workers returned on November 13, Jenna Norton, an NIH Program Director and organizer of June’s Bethesda Declaration against Trump-administration funding cuts, was placed on unexplained leave. The Bethesda Declaration, modeled on NIH head Jay Bhattacharya’s Great Barrington Declaration, warned about the losses that would result from massive cuts at the world’s largest funder of medical research.
Those losses are playing out now. A new analysis of clinical research up to August 2025 revealed that trials affecting 74,000 participants have been affected by terminated grants. Researchers scrambled to find alternatives to delaying or discontinuing life-saving treatments, but some trials paused work or stopped enrolling patients.
The administration continues to hold vital research funding hostage in its fight against US universities. Many universities have resisted these attempts to dictate their policies, but not all. Cornell agreed to pay $30 million to the government and support the administration’s anti-diversity agenda to restore its frozen grants. On the same day, students, faculty, and educational workers at over 100 schools held rallies protesting the administration’s attacks on higher education and academic freedom.
We’re covering these events and many more in our Medical Research Funding explainer and timeline.
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