Good morning. I’m Corrine Straight, and this is AlterNet America.
Donald Trump has announced he will deploy an “Election Integrity Army” across every state in America. The Supreme Court is preparing to decide how easily states can execute people with intellectual disabilities. Pregnant women are being shackled and detained by ICE in defiance of ICE’s own written policy. And The Trump administration set up an email address where corporations could ask to be exempted from the Clean Air Act.
Before we get into it: We don’t have a billionaire. We don’t have advertisers. We don’t have a broadcast license the FCC can yank the moment we say something inconvenient. What we have is readers. And right now, that’s the most defensible position in American media. The Washington Post and the LA Times have already been consumed. 60 Minutes, sources say, is next. A paid subscription to AlterNet America is a bet on the kind of journalism that can’t be bought. Please consider making it today.
Now, let’s dive in.
Trump Will Have an ‘Election Integrity Army’ at Every Polling Place
The president wants you to know the 2026 midterms will be free and fair. He is building an army to make sure of it.
On Sunday, posting from Truth Social, Donald Trump announced that Republicans would deploy an “Election Integrity Army” in every single state for the 2026 midterms. Much bigger than 2024, he promised.
He did not say who would be in it. He did not say how large it would be. He did not say what it would do when it got to the polling locations. These details were apparently beside the point. The point was the army.
In 2024, the Republican National Committee recruited thousands of volunteers to serve as poll watchers across the country. They were trained to challenge voter eligibility, observe ballot counting, and report irregularities. That operation, by Trump’s own description, is now the baseline.
Trump also said in February that he will only accept the midterm results if he feels they were honest. That same month, he called for Republicans to “nationalize the voting” in 2026. The administration has since deployed ICE agents to polling locations ahead of the election.
The midterms are six months away. The army is already being built. The concession speech is not being written.
SCOTUS Could Make It Easier to Execute People With Intellectual Disabilities
In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled that executing people with intellectual disabilities violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. The Court did not define intellectual disability. It left that to the states. This was, in retrospect, optimistic.
Joseph Clifton Smith has been on Alabama’s death row since his conviction for a 1997 murder. He has taken five separate IQ tests over nearly 40 years. In 1979, he scored 75. In 1982, 74. In 1998, 72. In 2014, 78. In 2017, 74. A lower court found him intellectually disabled and spared him from execution. Alabama appealed.
The Supreme Court, which now has a very different composition than it did in 2002, has agreed to hear the case. The Trump administration has filed a brief backing Alabama’s position.
The question before the Court is technical: how should multiple IQ scores be weighed? But the practical question is simpler. A man has scored between 72 and 78 on intelligence tests his entire adult life, has been found intellectually disabled by a federal court, and the state of Alabama would still like to execute him.
A ruling is expected by the end of June.
The 2002 ruling said executing the intellectually disabled was cruel and unusual. The current Court is fine with cruel. Unusual is the sticking point.
Pregnant Women in ICE Custody Are Being Shackled and Left to Miscarry
ICE has a written policy. It says, plainly, that ICE “should not detain, arrest, or take into custody” individuals who are medically certified as pregnant. This policy is not a secret, and it has not been formally rescinded.
It is also not being followed.
Since Trump returned to office, credible reports of abuse in immigration detention centers have numbered in the thousands. Among the most documented: pregnant women arrested, transported in shackles, denied prenatal vitamins, denied food that meets basic nutritional standards, and in multiple cases, left without medical care while actively miscarrying.
One woman miscarried in detention after experiencing severe abdominal pain and bleeding for weeks. ICE returned her to the facility the night of her miscarriage. She was deported two months later and sought hospital care for a severe infection she developed while in custody.
Others described being told to “just drink water” when they reported pregnancy complications. One was left alone in a hospital room without water or medical assistance for over 24 hours while she miscarried. One woman detained in Louisiana reported being restrained at the ankles, hands, and waist during cross-country transport while pregnant.
ICE has disputed the reports, claiming that pregnant women in custody are properly cared for. No one has independently verified this, because ICE has also stopped publicly reporting how many pregnant women it is holding, and has refused to provide the number to Congress.
ICE’s official rules say the number should be near zero. Whatever the actual number is, it is not near zero.
Corporations Asked to Poison Your Air and Trump Said Yes
Exemptions from the Clean Air Act used to take years of litigation. In 2025, they took an email.
The EPA set up an email address in March last year. Coal plants, chemical manufacturers, and copper smelters had until the end of the month to write in and request exemptions from Clean Air Act rules. No application was required. The agency’s own air quality scientists were not involved in reviewing the requests.
More than 3,000 pages of emails poured in. Executives from Citgo wrote in, which had active Clean Air Act violations at its refineries in Illinois, Louisiana, and Texas. A vice president at Sterigenics, a medical sterilization company, requested exemptions for nine facilities emitting a carcinogenic gas, including plants near Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, Charlotte, and Atlanta.
More than 45,000 people live within a mile of those facilities. Most of them are not white.
Both companies got their exemptions approved. More than 180 facilities nationwide received a two-year pause on compliance with the rules the EPA had previously said would “provide critical health protections to hundreds of thousands of people living near chemical plants.”
The Clean Air Act is estimated to have prevented thousands of premature deaths. One hundred and eighty three companies decided those deaths were worth an email.
Still No Billionaire. Still Here.
Here is what we know about the people in today’s newsletter: they would prefer you hadn’t read it. The corporations that emailed the EPA for clean air exemptions would prefer you hadn’t read it. The officials overseeing immigration detention would prefer you hadn’t read it.
None of these stories fit into a twelve-second television segment. None of them are easy to dismiss, which is exactly why the institutions capable of sustaining that kind of pressure are disappearing one by one.
We are not disappearing. We answer to you. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, there has never been a better time, or a more urgent one. Your subscription is the only thing that keeps this work free from the people we’re writing about.
Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tonight.
POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
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Bill banning whites-only housing passes Pennsylvania House by 1 vote. Pennsylvania’s House passed a bill last week closing a legal loophole that allowed white nationalist groups to establish whites-only housing communities by operating as private membership associations. It passed 101 to 100. Not a single Republican voted for it. One Democrat voted against it. It now heads to the Senate, which is also controlled by Republicans.
California hospitals will soon provide free diapers to newborns. California will become the first state in the country to provide free diapers to newborns, with every family leaving a participating hospital receiving 400 diapers starting this summer. One in two families in the US struggles to afford diapers. A newborn goes through roughly eight to ten a day, so 400 gets a family about five weeks in. It is not nothing.
Many Medicare enrollees can get GLP-1 drugs for $50 starting in July. Starting in July, Medicare enrollees can access GLP-1 weight loss medications like Wegovy for $50 a month through a new pilot program running through the end of 2027. The drugs were previously not covered by Medicare at all, and cost as little as $149 a month without insurance. For millions of older adults managing obesity and related conditions, that is a meaningful change. We are as surprised as you are.
