As food prices remain high, the Trump administration has made it easier for farmers to hire foreign guest workers and to pay them less. Now, other industries with large immigrant workforces also are asking for relief as they combat labor shortages and raids.

Visas for temporary foreign workers are a quick fix with bipartisan support in Congress. And Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ office told Stateline that “streamlining” visas for both agricultural and other jobs is a priority for the Trump administration.

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In recent days, five U.S. senators and two representatives requested documents from the Department of Homeland Security and a formal investigation into how a firm closely tied to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem ended up receiving money from a $220 million, taxpayer-funded ad campaign.

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Ralph Abraham, MD, the former Louisiana surgeon general, has been quietly named the deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a controversial pick to help lead the nation’s top infectious disease organization as the second highest-ranking CDC official. 

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As 2025 draws to a close, the departure of the beleaguered acting director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, David Richardson, caps a tumultuous year for FEMA. In January, President Donald Trump took office and vowed to abolish the department.

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As the Trump administration’s immigration dragnet intensified in June, a nurse in Portland, Oregon, left work one midafternoon and drove to a nearby detention facility to voice his opposition. Federal agents had set off smoke grenades, driving away many protesters at the front of the facility, but Vincent Hawkins lifted his megaphone anyway.

“You should stop and think about what you’re doing!”

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The Trump administration wants access to state driver’s license data on millions of U.S. residents as it builds a powerful citizenship verification program amid its clampdown on voter fraud and illegal immigration.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security seeks access to an obscure computer network used by law enforcement agencies, according to a federal notice, potentially allowing officials to bypass negotiating with states for the records.

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In a tacit admission that U.S. food production requires foreign labor, the Trump administration is making it easier for farmers to employ guest workers from other countries.

At the same time, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in recent months appears to be refraining from conducting agricultural workplace raids, even as it scours Democratic-led cities for immigrants who are in the country illegally.

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For nearly 80 years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was respected around the world for its authoritative, evidence-based leadership in public health.

But the CDC’s stunning reversal Wednesday—stating on its website that “studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism”—shows the agency can no longer be trusted, multiple doctors and public health advocates told CIDRAP News.

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Today, the Washington Post reports that career scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are quite upset to learn that the agency has updated the CDC website to resurrect the long-debunked link between vaccines and autism.

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On Oct. 2, the second day of the government shutdown, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived at Mount Rushmore to shoot a television ad. Sitting on horseback in chaps and a cowboy hat, Noem addressed the camera with a stern message for immigrants: “Break our laws, we’ll punish you.” 

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If you’re confused about what the law does and doesn’t allow the president to do with the National Guard, that’s understandable.

As National Guard troops landed in Portland, Oregon, in late September 2025, the state’s lawyers argued that the deployment was a “direct intrusion on its sovereign police power.”

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FBI Director Kash Patel granted waivers to Deputy Director Dan Bongino and two other newly hired senior FBI staff members, exempting them from passing polygraph exams normally required to gain access to America’s most sensitive classified information, according to a former senior FBI official and several other government officials.

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U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced “a war of bureaucratic attrition” in a speech on Friday afternoon. The target of his address was the Pentagon’s perennially-criticized process for buying and fielding military capabilities.

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A massive military buildup in the Caribbean has sparked speculation that the U.S. is now engaged in its latest chapter of direct intervention in Latin America.

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Fine points of the law are likely to dominate legal arguments in the case before the Supreme Court challenging the Trump administration’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose tariffs. Facts, however, matter and should play an important, even dominant, role.

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President Donald Trump and officials in his administration say National Guard troops are needed in “War ravaged” Portland, Oregon, to protect a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement office that he described as being under siege.

But a ProPublica review found a wide gap between the reality on the ground and the characterizations by the president and the Department of Homeland Security, which said ICE facilities like Portland’s were under “coordinated assault by violent groups.”

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This year, when states began using an expanded Department of Homeland Security system to check their voter rolls for noncitizens, it was supposed to validate the Trump administration’s push to harness data from across federal agencies to expose illicit voting and stiffen immigration enforcement.

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As the Trump administration deletes climate data and shutters resources that track the impacts of a warming world, nonprofits, state-level governments, and independent scientists are rushing to preserve the information. 

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One of the striking features of the present administration is the regularity with which its leaders, from President Donald Trump on down, confidently describe the state of the law in ways entirely contrary to what had been seen as settled, on topics that range from flag burning to Congress’s TikTok ban to whether civil servants can be removed on a partisan basis.

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Wired said it best: “A Quarter of the CDC Is Gone.”

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