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This week at Unbreaking, October 10

A blog entry posted by Unbreaking Team on .

Immigration

The clear story in Immigration this week is the escalation of — and pushback against — the Trump administration’s militarized raids and warrantless stops in Democrat-run major cities. These raids and stops by federal agents, in some cases backed by National Guard troops, are conducted under the aegis of immigration enforcement and crime prevention. They are actually operating as warrantless inspections and campaigns of mass violence against Black and brown adults and children living their lives, and also as targeted violence against people protesting federal abuses or reporting on them. ACLU analysis suggests that we’re watching the development of a paramilitary national police force; what we take from the facts we’re gathering is that calling what’s happening in US cities “immigration enforcement” is simply no longer accurate.

The shocking violence against children and adults in the South Shore apartment-building raid in Chicago is hard even to read about. We think it’s important to point out that most of the people targeted were not arrested for any offense and that at least some were US citizens, but we also don’t want to lose sight of the fact that those who were arrested now descend into an increasingly backed-up system of indefinite detention in brutal and overcrowded conditions.

We’re continuing to track lawsuits against militarized federal immigration operations in California, Chicago, Portland, and Washington, DC, and we’ve also added coverage of:

Finally, we’ve highlighted Judge Young’s ruling in American Association of University Professors v. Rubio, which has rightly received a lot of attention for establishing that noncitizens, including foreign students, do in fact possess First Amendment rights (and for being a pretty virtuosic piece of legal writing). We couldn’t squeeze all their stories into the timeline, but we appreciate the vigorous coverage at Law Dork and TechDirt.

Data Security

Since our last update in Data Security, the administration has ramped up its quest for voter data, suing six more states that refused to give their voter rolls to the DOJ. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) also confirmed that it is ending support for MS-ISAC, a security collaboration relied on by state and local election departments to protect electoral data. Professors and faculty members are protesting (PDF) the University of California’s’s agreement to share information with the Department of Education, after UC Berkeley handed over the personal information of roughly 160 students and staff in compliance with a federal investigation into alleged antisemitism on campus. We also learned that ICE is planning to hire a team of 30 to surveil Americans’ social media.

We heard of two significant federal data breaches recently: In the first, hackers stole employee data at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). In the second, very personal breach, the National Archives released Democratic New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill’s complete military service record, including her Social Security number, to an ally of her electoral opponent. And — in a move that isn’t a security breach, but seems like a breach of something — we saw federal agencies change employees’ personal out-of-office messages to text that blames Democrats for the government shutdown.

In countermoves, Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee issued a report (PDF) revealing new details on DOGE’s activities at the Social Security Administration, the General Services Administration, and the Office of Personnel Management, as well as agency leaders’ resistance to normal oversight. Following this, the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center sued DOGE (PDF) for creating consolidated national databases, alleging that the “secretive and unlawful…consolidation of Americans’ personal data is a clear example of the constitutional crisis we are living through.” Finally, 404 Media and Freedom of the Press Foundation sued DHS over its Medicaid data sharing agreement, and the largest federal employee union sued the administration for its unauthorized use of workers’ personal out-of-office responses for political messaging.

Medical Research Funding

Our update for Medical Research this week is focused on one of the most severe threats to research overall: the administration’s ongoing effort to leverage federal funding to enforce ideological compliance at universities. The now-predictable pattern consists of threats and investigations, punitive (often illegal) funding freezes, and then coercive deal-making to undermine academic freedom. The biggest story right now is that the administration has offered nine universities priority access to funds in exchange for scrapping DEI, restricting international student enrollment, and promoting conservative viewpoints, among other demands. The extortionate loyalty oath has drawn condemnation from academics and politicians alike, with California governor Gavin Newsom threatening to deny state money to universities who cave to the administration. MIT, the first of the universities to respond, has declined the offer.

Meanwhile, the government shutdown has caused further disarray, with 41% of Health and Human Services employees furloughed and many more layoffs feared. Against all odds, the NIH was on track at the end of the fiscal year to disburse nearly all of its 2025 budget, although implementation of a new up-front funding scheme means that grant funding success rates have fallen to an all-time low. To resolve the shutdown, legislators will need to reach agreement on a spending bill to reopen the government. That is a separate fight from the appropriations bills that will set research spending going forward. As things stand, the 2026 National Institutes of Health budget remains in limbo, with last month’s House appropriations proposing to retain funding at $48 billion despite the administration’s initial attempts to cut funding by 43%.

Equality at Work

The Trump administration has slashed hundreds of thousands of jobs this year, leaving many vital federal functions un- or under-staffed, and they don’t seem to be letting up. We updated our Equality at Work timeline this week, and here’s what we saw.

The White House laid the groundwork to take political advantage of the government shutdown before it even started, telling agencies to “use this opportunity” to carry out mass firings in areas “not consistent with the President’s priorities.” This is completely different from previous shutdown furloughs, when government employees would temporarily stop work and be reinstated with backpay when funding resumed, and it neatly aligns with the administration’s stated mission to shrink the federal government.

And the government is shrinking: More than 100,000 federal employees formally resigned on Sep 30, the largest mass resignation in US history. These workers had opted in to a deferred resignation program that kept them on payroll through September. The White House also fired all but four members of the National Council on the Humanities, a group that normally includes 26 private citizens appointed to advise the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In slightly better news, a judge ordered the Trump administration to reverse layoffs at the agency that oversees Voice of America, a news source funded by the US government. The status of Voice of America has been an ongoing legal battle since April, featuring several attempted rounds of layoffs.

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