The List

Federal judges have found the Trump administration noncompliant in 31 separate lawsuits. More than 250 individual immigration cases have produced the same finding. Courts have ordered. The administration has ignored. The violations aren’t close calls. Judges found the White House deported accused gang members to a notorious Salvadoran prison after being ordered not to. It withheld billions in foreign aid that Congress had appropriated. It kept immigrants locked up past court-ordered release dates. When a judge ruled that denying detainees bond hearings was unconstitutional, a top DOJ official declared the ruling wasn’t binding — and the administration kept doing it anyway. ...

WIRED obtained more than 1,000 pages of internal, unpublished reports from DHS, the FBI, and fusion centers around the country. What they describe is a coordinated national shift — using the domestic surveillance apparatus to monitor a threat category the government invented itself. They’re calling it “anti-tech violent extremism.” The term appears nowhere in any publicly available DHS or FBI extremism framework. No public rulemaking created it. A New York Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau report obtained by WIRED warns that AI adoption may fuel “large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti-tech violent extremist activity” — and that this threat is already emerging. People who show up at town halls and budget meetings to object to data centers in their neighborhoods are being surveilled under this label. ...

The National Park Service just handed a $5 million no-bid contract to a Maryland gilding studio. The job: coat four bronze horse statues near the Lincoln Memorial in 23.75-karat gold leaf. Deadline: July 4th. That’s not a restoration. The horses were last restored in the 1970s and are showing their age — but there’s a reason you don’t rush a $5 million gilding job through without competitive bidding. The reason is usually that you’re not trying to get the best value. You’re trying to get it done fast, for someone who wants it done. ...

Federal law bars putting a living person’s image on U.S. currency. That law exists for a reason. Trump wants an exception. His allies in Congress have introduced legislation to carve one out, and the Treasury Department isn’t waiting for it to pass. It’s already “conducting appropriate planning and due diligence” on a new $250 bill — featuring Trump’s portrait. The $250 is framed as honoring the country’s 250th anniversary. That’s the packaging. What’s inside is a president who has spent two terms putting his name and face on airports, schools, military bases, and now money — and rewriting whatever laws get in the way. ...

On April 23, a federal contractor building Trump’s border wall bulldozed the Las Playas Intaglio — a roughly 200-foot fish-shaped geoglyph etched into the floor of the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in Arizona. It’s approximately 1,000 years old. It’s sacred to the Tohono O’odham Nation. And it had been flagged by a cultural protection monitor as a site contractors were supposed to avoid. About 60 to 70 feet of it are just gone. ...