Thanks so much for being here. Over seven days in August the Trump regime lost big. In court, on a recorded call, and at the ballot box. Corporate media is too busy focused on Trump’s latest distraction to take the time to read the fine print. So we dug in. That’s what this edition is about.
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The Judge Who Reopened The Door
On Friday, a federal judge threw out Trump’s ban on immigrant visas from 75 countries. Every major outlet read the top of the ruling. We read the fine print.
Cesar Aguirre made $104,000 last year supervising a warehouse in Shirley, New York. In January he flew to Guatemala with his wife and their daughters, ages seven and two. His wife had to interview at the US consulate there to finish becoming a permanent resident. It’s the last step. They were following the rules. Her petition was approved and her fees were paid.
Her interview landed on January 21, the day Trump’s ban took effect. Guatemala was on the list, as were nearly forty percent of the nations on earth.
She’s stuck in Guatemala with their two-year-old, who is still nursing. Their daughter has a condition called Turner syndrome, which means her heart and eyes need constant monitoring. Most recently, she had ear surgery. The care she needs simply doesn’t exist in Guatemala.
Marco Rubio’s State Department claimed the ban would keep out people who would “take welfare and public benefits.” Among those refused was a Colombian endocrinologist who trained at Harvard. He had already been approved for a visa that Congress reserves for those with extraordinary abilities.
Rubio ordered the consulates to keep interviews going, but they were theater. Officers still met with applicants. If they found no lawful reason to refuse someone, the order was to refuse anyway. The outcome was fixed before they even met.
On Friday, Judge Jeannette Vargas put an end to Trump’s cruel policy, striking the whole thing down in a 61-page opinion. “In many ways, this is not a challenging case,” Vargas wrote.
Vargas reached back to a 1965 law that ended the national-origins quota system—the one that sorted people by the country on their passport. Congress passed it alongside the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Rubio rebuilt that system. Vargas used that same law to strike his version down.
Every refusal that relied on Trump’s order is now void. All of those cases go back to the consulates for a real decision.
Nevada Got Them On Tape
In July, a reporter from Fox News emailed Nevada’s election office. He wanted comment on Homeland Security’s discovery of more than 15,000 noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls. Nobody in that office had heard of it. They wrote back and told him so. Three days later, DHS announced it publicly.
Then DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin announced the full number. He said his department found 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote across four states. Nevada’s share was 15,903. If any election official refused to help Mullin investigate and purge the voter rolls, he warned they could face steep fines or even prison time.
Mullin’s announcement conveniently left out the fact that a computer generated the 15,903 names by matching Nevada voter records to federal immigration files. That’s a starter list, it’s not a true finding. Every name still has to be checked by a human being.
On August 13, DHS finally got on a video call with Nevada. The state recorded it and released the recording under a public records request. Chief Deputy Secretary of State C. Murphy Hebert asked the question straight: “So, what you’re saying is that the 15,000 number has not been vetted?”
Kimberley Vogt, the DHS official on the line, wouldn’t say yes. She said her department had done some work to get the number down to 15,000. Then she explained why the rest were still sitting there untouched. Checking them one at a time, according to Vogt, is a lot of work.
Of the 15,903 names, DHS has hand-checked 185. More than 14,000 have never been checked at all.
Mullin threatened election officials with prison over a list his own department hadn’t finished checking.
25 States, DC, and Four Local Governments Sue Mullin
Homeland security money in Nashville buys equipment that detects radioactive and biological threats, chemical response gear, and funds search-and-rescue training for building collapses. This is the same city where a bomb tore up a block downtown on Christmas morning in 2020.
In June of this year, FEMA told Nashville officials that funding for security now comes with conditions. They had to get rid of voting machines that read barcodes, hand-count 5% of all ballots, and run every registered voter and poll worker through a federal database called SAVE—the one that’s supposed to tell you whether someone is a citizen.
FEMA left a big part out, buried deep in the complaint. DHS’s own paperwork estimates that their database is wrong 5-10% of the time. That is an enormous fail rate.
So Nashville sued alongside Columbus, Ohio, as well as Harris and El Paso counties in Texas on August 17. Twenty-five states plus DC sued over the same demands.
Columbus City Attorney Zach Klein was clear as day: “We will not be bullied by this president and his administration.”
El Paso County ran the numbers, and found that in order to comply with the regime’s demands, they’d have to close polling places and cancel naturalization ceremonies where new citizens register to vote. Which seems to be one of the reasons why the regime is pushing this in the first place.
Democrats Flip Another Seat In Florida
Jacksonville is the largest city in Florida. Five of its council seats are elected by the whole city instead of one district. All five were held by Republicans—until now.
On August 18, Moné Holder won the At-Large Group 1 seat outright with 51% in a three-way race. She cleared the threshold that would’ve forced a November runoff. Holder will now be the only Democrat holding one of those five seats.
Holder was not the favorite, a true underdog. Her Republican opponent Deborah Wesley was a retired sheriff’s office commander—endorsed by the sheriff himself, along with more than half the sitting council. It wasn’t enough.
Republicans usually own Election Day in Duval County. Wesley received about 5,000 more votes than Holder that day. But Holder had won early voting and mail ballots by nearly 15,000.
Holder ran on affordability and called out the council for trying to cut “meals-on-wheels and infant mortality programs.” Other Democrats should take note.
She gets sworn in on August 31, just in time to vote on the city budget. The Republican majority dropped from 14-5 to 13-6 on that council. Budget fights there take thirteen votes to pass. Republicans now have exactly thirteen.
Next spring, every seat on that council is on the ballot. We might be focused on the midterms, but we know the fight isn't just for flipping Congress, and it won't end there. That’s why we need all hands on deck, so we can sprint through November and beyond.
So if you haven’t yet, join us as a paid subscriber today to support our exclusive investigations and our organizing against the regime. Let’s go win:
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Onward!
Scott
Vogt said checking them one by one is a lot of work. What else do you think is too much work for Homeland Security?
An underdog story in Jacksonville just gave the City Council its only Democrat elected by the whole city. Are there any other local races you’re following that most people are ignoring?






🚨 MAIN FOCUS TODAY Tell Congress to stop Trump's destruction of our national forests!
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-stop-trump-from-destroying-45-million-acres-of-our-national-forests/
Let's get Blanche to release ALL Epstein files: https://tinyurl.com/2uc9vca9
Close Dilley: https://tinyurl.com/w9zj48j6
Protect US Forest Service: https://tinyurl.com/mrx8cvv7
Data center pause: https://bit.ly/4twnWMU
25th Amendment Commission https://tinyurl.com/44afaxvd
Defend voting rights: https://tinyurl.com/3f3m728j
Hearing about a Democrat take an at-large seat in Jacksonville and immediately change the budget math on that council is a great reminder that these fights don’t only happen in Congress.