Hey, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m here with my coffee, and I have a lot to catch you up on this week.

To our paying subscribers: thank you. Your support keeps our newsroom running without a billionaire deciding what we can say. This week, with your help, we kept our reporter on Capitol Hill and pushed forward plans to bring you exclusive access to the people at the center of these fights. You make this possible.

If you’re not yet a subscriber, this is the week to change that. The corporate press has buried or walked away from the stories below. Someone has to stay on them. We will. But we can only do it with your support. Please consider upgrading your subscription today.

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The Story Nobody Is Talking About: The DOJ Is Building a Voter Database and Handing It to DHS

The Iran war is consuming the oxygen of every newsroom in America. That’s a problem, because while everyone watches the war, something is happening at home that could permanently alter American democracy.

For nearly a year, the Justice Department has been demanding sensitive voter data from states. Not just names and addresses, but driver’s license numbers, partial Social Security numbers, and dates of birth. When states refused, the DOJ sued them. Trump’s DOJ has now sued more than 30 states. Twelve — mostly red — have complied, handing over the private information of every registered voter in their state.

This week, at a hearing in Rhode Island, the DOJ revealed for the first time what it actually intends to do with this data: share it with the Department of Homeland Security and run it through an immigration database called SAVE. This isn’t a voter maintenance program. It’s an immigration enforcement tool being built on top of voter data.

The DOJ is building a national voter database containing the Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers of tens of millions of Americans and handing it to the same agency conducting mass deportation raids.

Also this week: NPR reported that the chief FOIA officer and senior privacy official for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division quietly resigned. His name is Kilian Kagle. His exit follows a pattern of privacy and civil rights officials leaving as the administration pursues data-sharing arrangements that legal experts call unconstitutional.

Courts in California, Michigan, and Oregon have dismissed the DOJ’s cases. The administration is appealing all three. Steve Bannon has been unusually honest about what this is really for. This week he described ICE’s presence in airports as a “test run” for having ICE agents at polling places. “They’re trained to check IDs,” he said. “That’s perfect training for the fall of 2026.”

This isn’t paranoia. This is the architecture of voter suppression being built in plain sight, while everyone watches the war in Iran.

ICE: A No-Bid Contract for the Largest Detention Center Yields Horrific Results

A government inspection of Camp East Montana — the largest immigration detention center in America, on a military base outside El Paso — found 49 violations of national detention standards. The inspection was conducted in February and posted publicly this week.

The violations include 22 related to use of force and restraints, failures to document suicide prevention checks, failure to quarantine a detainee with suspected tuberculosis, and inadequate medical care. Three people have died at the facility since it opened last August. The company that ran it, Acquisition Logistics, had never operated a detention center before.

For this facility, they received a $1.3 billion no-bid contract. (Once again, they’ve never operated a detention center before.)

One former detainee, Owen Ramsingh, told NPR he heard guards running a betting pool on which detainee would die by suicide next. Ramsingh was held for four months before being deported. He claimed he personally talked three people out of killing themselves. Guards laughed when detainees beat on the windows yelling that they were being killed, he said.

“When they say in the news that this is the worst facility in the country,” he added, “they damn right.”

The facility houses approximately 3,000 people per day. The majority have no major criminal history. DHS, in a statement, said the agency “inherited the contract.”

If this reporting on ICE matters to you, please consider upgrading your subscription today. We are going to keep covering this every single week until this changes.

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Democrats Are About to Pick Up a Seat in Utah. And Wisconsin Could Lock In a Decade of Voting Rights Protection.

Federal courts this week upheld Utah’s new congressional map, drawn by an independent redistricting commission, rejecting multiple Republican attempts to block it. The map creates a Democratic-leaning district that didn’t exist before.

A year ago, a Democratic pickup in Utah seemed like a fantasy. Today, it’s the likely outcome. One more seat in the House. One more vote against everything we’ve been writing about this week.

And then there’s Tuesday.

Wisconsin holds a Supreme Court election next week. Democrat-backed Chris Taylor holds a clear fundraising and ad-spending advantage. A Taylor win would expand the liberal majority from 4-3 to 5-2, potentially putting the court out of conservative reach for the rest of the decade.

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court has the final word on redistricting, abortion rights, and election law in one of America’s most critical battleground states. A 5-2 liberal majority means Wisconsin’s voting maps and reproductive rights protections will be defended by a court that answers to the state’s constitution, not to Donald Trump.

Voting is Tuesday, April 7. If you know people in Wisconsin, tell them.

What This All Means to Me

I founded Raw Story because someone had to say plainly what the mainstream press wouldn’t. Twenty years ago, it was that the Bush administration lied us into a war.

Today the cover-up looks different but the impulse is the same. The DOJ is building a secret voter database and handing it to the deportation agency while its own privacy officer quietly walks out the door. Guards at America’s largest detention facility are allegedly betting on which detainee will die by suicide next. The architecture of voter suppression for the 2026 midterms is being assembled in plain sight.

Raw America exists because someone has to say it plainly.

Here’s what I’m genuinely excited about: we’re building something that can actually meet this moment. We have a reporter on the ground in Washington. We’re on the verge of partnering with a new Capitol Hill journalist who has extraordinary access to Democratic members of Congress. We are in the rooms.

And we’re growing. But we can’t do it without you.

If this is the journalism you want, the kind that stays on the ICE deaths, voting rights, and everything Trump is hoping the Iran coverage buries — I need you with us. Consider upgrading your subscription today.

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If you’re already a subscriber: thank you. You made this possible. Please share this with someone who needs to see the full picture.

— John Byrne

Founder, Raw America and Raw Story

P.S. If you can’t afford a subscription, I totally get it. Please share this newsletter with your friends and family. Thanks for sticking with us. We’re more powerful together.

Hey, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m here with my cup of coffee, excited to share the week’s news with you.

To our paying subscribers: thank you. This week, your support put Raw America reporters on the ground at No Kings in Washington and Louisville. With your subscription, we funded the journalism the billionaire press won’t do.

If you’re not yet a subscriber, I hope today’s newsletter makes the case. Independent media has never mattered more. This is the week to upgrade your subscription. It’s the easiest thing you can do right now to make a real difference.

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I’ll be honest: I’m excited. I’ve covered protests that faded before they found their footing, and I know how these things usually go. So when I say that what happened yesterday felt different — genuinely, meaningfully different — I want you to understand that I’m not saying it lightly.

Nine million people. Every state. Small towns in Georgia. Protesters at the gates of Fort McNair, where Stephen Miller has been hiding. A 27-point swing in a Louisiana special election. A Democrat who just flipped a Florida district that includes Mar-a-Lago.

The Cook Political Report this week shifted 18 House races toward Democrats. The energy in crowds yesterday is the energy of a country that has made up its mind.

James Carville, who engineered Bill Clinton’s 1992 upset, went on The Daily Beast podcast this weekend and said Democrats are running 10 to 11 points ahead of their 2024 performance in special elections. His over-under for Senate seats in November is 55.

Carville called it flatly: Republicans are going to get “slaughtered.” He also warned that a man willing to overturn one election won’t hesitate to interfere with another. But nine million people in the streets is not a movement that gets suppressed. It’s a movement that wins.

Yesterday was the largest protest in American history. The billionaire press spent Saturday questioning whether it matters. We know it does. Now let’s get into the week’s news.

ICE: The Story They Don’t Want You To Read

Trump has successfully distracted the mainstream media with his illegal war in Iran. Let’s return the focus to what’s really going on.

Thirteen people have died in ICE detention so far in 2026, and we’re not even through March. Last year set a record with 31 deaths; this year is on pace to shatter it. Geraldo Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban father, died in El Paso after what ICE described as a “struggle” with security staff. The county medical examiner said it differently: homicide.

Others died by what ICE calls “presumed suicide.” This means by bedsheets, in cells, with families who say their loved ones showed no signs of depression.

One man, a Cambodian refugee, was found unresponsive in his cell the day after his arrest. A Nicaraguan man died at the same El Paso facility. His body was sent to a military hospital rather than the county medical examiner, delaying independent review.

It’s a pattern: ICE controls the information. ICE writes the death reports. ICE decides who examines the body. Measles outbreaks have since hit three separate facilities, the result of overcrowding that advocates warned about for months.

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The Secret Prison Construction Program

Congress gave ICE $45 billion for detention expansion. With that money, the agency has been quietly buying industrial warehouses and converting them into mass detention centers, often without notifying local communities.

ICE paid over $100 million for a site in Maryland; $87 million in Pennsylvania; and $123 million for an 826,000-square-foot facility near El Paso. Local representatives in Georgia, Texas and Michigan told NPR they received no response from DHS.

In Social Circle, Georgia, local leaders cut off water and sewage to a planned site. In Kansas, a no-bid contract was doled out to reopen a prison a judge once called “an absolute hell hole.” Community members showed up 42 to 3 against it. The city commission voted 4-1 to approve it anyway.

A year ago, roughly 37,000 people were in immigration detention. Today that number exceeds 70,000. This is the highest in American history, a scale not seen since the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The target is 100,000 beds by year’s end.

If this reporting on ICE matters to you, please consider upgrading your subscription today. MAGA media won’t give you the truth, and we can use your help in this fight.

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Citizenship Is Not Enough

At least 170 U.S. citizens have been detained during ICE raids. The ACLU filed a class-action lawsuit in Minnesota after multiple citizens were grabbed without warrants. One was Mubashir Khalif Hussen, a 20-year-old American walking to lunch in Minneapolis.

“I’m a citizen, I’m a citizen,” he repeated. Agents refused to look at his ID. He was shackled and fingerprinted before being released.

This week, the DOJ admitted in federal court that the legal justification it had been using to defend ICE’s courthouse arrests was based on a memo that doesn’t even apply to immigration courts.

This means ICE was arresting people showing up for their own hearings, operating under authority that didn’t exist. The UN’s racial discrimination committee condemned the United States this month. The State Department hasn’t responded.

Epstein: The Cover-up in Plain Sight

Three weeks ago, the DOJ released FBI files “mistakenly” withheld from the Epstein tranche. Those files contained detailed summaries of a woman’s allegations that she was sexually assaulted by both Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump when she was between 13 and 15 years old.

The question that won’t go away: why were the three summaries mentioning Trump missing from the original release, while the fourth, focused only on Epstein, was included? The DOJ called it a coding error.

Also: a new report adds a bizarre dimension. This week, an investigative journalist revealed that Epstein’s ranch in New Mexico was equipped with a private microwave communications link to a tower cluster at Sandia National Laboratories. The link is documented in FCC records.

Microwave links are infrastructure used by the NSA, CIA, and Department of Defense. They’re not typically found on a private desert ranch.

The link remains active. The current owner is Donald Huffines, a Trump ally who purchased it secretly in 2023 and whose son was hired by the Trump administration last June. Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Robert Maxwell, sold backdoored surveillance software to Sandia in 1985. His daughter’s partner then built a communications link pointed directly at it. The Huffines family terminated several FCC licenses on the property but kept that one.

Meanwhile, the House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi, with five Republicans crossing the aisle. When she met with committee members last week, Democrats walked out, saying she refused to commit to complying.

Some 2.5 million Epstein documents remain hidden. Reps. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna say that violates the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The committee has also subpoenaed the prison guard on duty the night Epstein died.

The administration that promised to expose the Epstein network is now the one protecting the files.

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What This All Means to Me

I founded Raw Story because someone had to say plainly what the mainstream press wouldn’t: that the Bush administration lied us into a war. The mainstream media played along until it was too late.

Today, the cover-up looks different but the impulse is the same. ICE is writing its own death reports and deciding who examines the bodies. The Epstein files with Trump’s name on them were the only ones “accidentally” left out.

Raw America exists because someone has to say it plainly. Thirteen people have died in ICE detention this year alone. Two and a half million Epstein documents remain hidden. And the Attorney General who’s supposed to release them answers to the man whose name is in them.

If that’s the journalism you want, I need you with us. Please become a paid subscriber today.

Subscribe now

If you’re already a subscriber: thank you. You made this possible. Share it with someone who needs to see the full picture.

Share

I’m glad you’re in this fight with me. We’re in it to win it.

— John Byrne

Founder, Raw America and Raw Story

Correction: The original version of this column incorrectly stated that Zorro Ranch sits at the midpoint between Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Zorro Ranch is close to each lab but not at the midpoint between the two. To Los Alamos, it is approximately 50 miles. To Sandia, it’s approximately 40-45 miles.

Good morning, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup, where I get you the week’s news as I drink my morning coffee with you.

Thank you for being a paying subscriber. Your support allowed us to be on Capitol Hill this week. We showed up because you made it possible. That means everything.

This week I want to do something different. I want to talk…

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Hey, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m here with my cup of coffee, excited to update you on what you might have missed.

Thank you for being a paid subscriber. You’re the reason we had a reporter in Senate hearing rooms, at White House protests, and on Capitol Hill this week. While corporate newsrooms were being managed, we were showin…

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Hey, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m on my third cup of coffee, and I’m here to cover what Trump tried to hide with bombs this week. I’ve also got some good news.

Thank you for being a paid subscriber. Your support funded a Washington, D.C. reporter who filmed protests yesterday outside the White House. While corporate newsrooms ign…

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Good morning, Raw America family. I had to get you the news of dead servicemembers this morning, so I’m late with my Sunday coffee. But I’m here, and I’m livid.

Early yesterday while America slept, Donald Trump announced that the U.S. had entered war against Iran. The Pentagon called it Operation Epic Fury. Israel called it Lion’s Roar. The rest of us sh…

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To our paying subscribers, thank you. Your support makes everything we do possible, and we don’t take it for granted.

If you haven’t yet subscribed, I need to be direct. The Washington Post answers to Jeff Bezos. The

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