Trump's DOJ Has a New Target: Democratic Governors

The White House admitted it used keyword searches to kill $2 billion in research grants, Madison police shot a restrained Black man, and ICE is arresting parents who come to claim their children

Good afternoon. I’m Ryan Rose, and this is AlterNet America.

The DOJ is quietly recruiting prosecutors to investigate Democratic state officials. The White House admitted in court it used keyword searches for words like “diversity” and “health equity” to kill nearly $2 billion in research grants. Madison police shot and killed a Black man who was already restrained on the ground. And ICE is arresting the relatives who come forward to claim migrant children from federal shelters.

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The DOJ Is Building a Team to Prosecute Democrats

The Justice Department picked the defendants first and is now working backwards.

The DOJ is quietly recruiting prosecutors for a public corruption initiative inside its White House-linked fraud division, and the target is state officials. The National Fraud Enforcement Division, established by JD Vance in January, is building a team exploring how state officials facilitate the misuse of taxpayer dollars, including by simply failing to prevent schemes on their watch.

The template is Minnesota. Vance referred Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison to the fraud division in June, arguing that officials who “looked the other way” must be held accountable.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche pushed the same idea at his confirmation hearing, saying states that “stood idly by” while fraud happened are “also a problem.”

Former prosecutors note a small snag: inaction is not a crime. The Supreme Court has narrowed the honest-services fraud approach, and supposed inattentiveness by a governor isn’t something the DOJ would have investigated in prior administrations.

The department also dismantled its apolitical public integrity section before standing up this one. They didn’t want the new team getting confused by the old team’s standards.

White House Killed $2 Billion in Grants Over Banned Words

The Trump administration built a content filter for science. It works exactly like parental controls except it blocks cancer research instead of porn.

In signed court stipulations filed last week, federal agencies admitted they used keywords related to diversity, gender and COVID-19 to screen and cancel research grants at the University of California. The agencies conceded they didn’t terminate any grants over actual noncompliance — they used “general criteria” instead of reviewing each award.

The National Institutes of Health flagged UC grants that mentioned “health equity,” “workforce diversity,” “structural racism,” and “sexual orientation.” The NIH alone suspended or cancelled more than 1,000 UC grants, nearly 700 of them at UCLA, covering vaccines, cancer research and health disparities.

The Department of Transportation zeroed out six grants worth about $42 million for the sin of prioritizing “disadvantaged communities.” The termination of three UC Davis grants forced 77 researchers to abandon 79 in-progress projects. Meanwhile, the Energy Department terminated 283 grants from states that voted for Harris while leaving red-state grants untouched.

Judge Rita Lin, a Biden appointee, has already sided with the professors repeatedly, restoring hundreds of grants. A hearing on a final ruling is set for Oct. 20.

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Madison Police Fatally Shoot Restrained Black Man

Police in Madison, Wisconsin, shot and killed a man in his 30s after responding to reports of someone stealing bicycles and checking car doors in the Marquette neighborhood.

Officers chased the man as he fled on a bicycle through backyards. At an intersection, he “either fell or was pulled off the bicycle” — police have not clarified which. A struggle followed. An officer deployed a Taser; it failed. Video reviewed by CBS News shows police shooting the man three times roughly two seconds later.

Police say the man pulled a fixed-blade knife and injured an officer during the struggle. No independent account of the encounter has been released. The video showed the officer discharging his weapon three times while the man was already restrained on the ground.

Police declined to release the man’s name or race. Protesters didn’t need them to. Demonstrations began within hours of the shooting. “Another Black man is dead on a Madison street, and our community watched him die before we even knew his name,” said Brandi Grayson of Urban Triage.

Four officers were involved or witnessed the shooting. The officer who fired was a veteran. All four are on administrative leave while the Wisconsin Department of Criminal Investigation reviews the case.

The shooting happened less than two miles from the state Capitol, on the same street where police killed Tony Robinson in 2015. No charges were filed in that case.

ICE Is Using Migrant Children as Bait to Arrest Their Relatives

The government found a way to make “come pick up your kid” a sting operation.

A growing number of relatives have been detained after stepping forward to take custody of children held in federal shelters. Advocates have a word for the practice. They call it using children as “bait.”

The Trump administration rewrote the vetting process for close relatives and guardians who volunteer to take in undocumented children. It narrowed the list of acceptable identity documents, mandated DNA tests, and scrapped a rule that barred the Office of Refugee Resettlement from sharing information about potential sponsors with ICE.

ICE documents show the agency has found and arrested people with help from the office that is supposed to be caring for the children. An NPR affiliate cited at least 100 such cases as of March.

When asked about it, an ICE spokesperson blamed the Biden administration and offered more than a dozen examples of sponsors with criminal histories. The examples do not appear to include the 32-year-old Guatemalan woman who was arrested while trying to claim her 13-year-old son. He has now been in a federal shelter for eight months.

Another mother came forward to sponsor her daughter after a social worker assured her nothing bad would happen. She was arrested too. The social worker appears to have different definitions of “nothing bad.”

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POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

For a Second Time, the House Votes to End the War in Iran. The House on Thursday approved a resolution to remove U.S. forces from hostilities with Iran by a vote of 214 to 208, the second such rebuke of Trump since the war began. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who led the effort, called it an “illegal war” that Congress never authorized, with no clear mission or end goal. Four Republicans — Tom Barrett, Brian Fitzpatrick, Warren Davidson and Thomas Massie — joined Democrats. The resolution isn’t legally binding, but voting to notice a war is more than Congress usually manages.

Democrats Hit a 20-Year High Over the GOP on the Economy. A new Fox News poll released Wednesday shows Democrats leading Republicans 54 percent to 45 percent on which party would better handle the economy. The 9-point edge is their strongest since July 2006. The survey, conducted July 17 to 20 among 1,003 registered voters, puts Trump’s approval on the economy at 33 percent against 67 percent disapproval. Separate Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos polling found the share of Republicans who feel financially worse off rose to 18 percent from 13 percent.

Melissa Hortman’s Killer Sentenced to Two Life Terms Plus 40 Years. Vance Boelter, 59, was sentenced Thursday after pleading guilty to federal charges in the murder of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, and the critical wounding of state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife Yvette. Boelter, disguised as a police officer, spent months stalking his targets before the June 14, 2025 attacks that sparked the largest police search in state history. Boelter avoided the death penalty by pleading guilty, and he still faces state charges, with a first appearance scheduled for Aug. 3.

Judge Says Trump’s Attack on Mail Voting is ‘Unconstitutional.’ Trump signed an executive order directing the Postal Service to refuse to deliver mail ballots unless states add barcodes and send voter lists to USPS first. A federal judge in Massachusetts called the order unconstitutional, noting that the president “plays no role in the regulation of elections” and that Congress never gave USPS the authority to refuse to deliver mail. The ruling came after a DC appeals court suspended a nationwide injunction blocking the order, so the administration got about 48 hours to celebrate before a different judge said the same thing.