The Department of Justice filed lawsuits on Monday against New York, Connecticut, and Vermont, challenging state laws which grant in-state tuition and financial assistance to illegal aliens. 

These federal actions arrive amid growing concerns over the civil rights of American citizens, who are denied the same reduced rates and scholarships simply for being born in the U.S.A.

The suits further charge that the state laws create clear incentives and preferential treatment for illegal immigration, placing illegal aliens ahead of American citizens in direct conflict with federal law (8 U.S.C. § 1623).

The Department of Justice’s New York complaint cites average tuition and fees of $8,316 for in-state students versus $18,613 for those from out of state, according to reporting by The Center Square.

A string of recent victories in Texas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Illinois have already permanently enjoined similar residency-based education benefits for illegal aliens.

In a statement to Fox News Digital, the Justice Department expressed confidence in the latest actions, noting that under the leadership of Attorney General Todd Blanche, these efforts have delivered clear wins for the American people, with courts issuing favorable orders that have declared similar laws unconstitutional, including a ruling from the Fifth Circuit.

In late 2025, the Equal Protection Project, a civil rights group based in Rhode Island, filed a complaint with the Department of Justice. The group alleged that more than 100 California public colleges and universities discriminate against American-born students by offering dedicated funding, counseling, and other support programs exclusively to DACA recipients and undocumented students.

Lawsuits against other states that similarly place illegal aliens ahead of American citizens remain pending, including in Minnesota, Virginia, California, New Jersey, Kansas, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maryland, and Colorado remain open.

Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward made the administration’s position clear:
“Congress long ago made clear that States cannot put illegal aliens over our Nation’s own citizens. By granting illegal aliens in-state tuition, New York, Vermont, and Connecticut are doing just that. No more. As of today, we have now sued every state in the Second Circuit that seeks to thwart Congress’s clear prohibition by placing alien over citizen. And our efforts will not cease until President Trump’s promise is fulfilled: illegal aliens will not receive benefits denied to our Nation’s own citizens.”

President Donald J. Trump declared “Liberation Day” in Washington, D.C., on August 11, 2025. One year later, the nation’s capital looks and feels remarkably different.

Citing high crime, urban decay, and deterioration, the 45th and 47th president declared a public safety emergency and invoked Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act of 1973.

“This is Liberation Day in D.C., and we’re going to take our capital back,” he said, pointing to violence, carjackings, homelessness, and blight that he argued embarrassed the country on the world stage.

Metropolitan Police Department data crime stats are impressive: homicides fell 32%, robberies 16%, motor vehicle thefts 53%, and total property crime 22%.

The operation conducted more than 16,000 arrests, seized nearly 2,000 illegal firearms, apprehended 35 homicide suspects, arrested more than 100 known gang members, made over 3,200 narcotics arrests, and located 25 missing children.

The effort to fix D.C. has expanded into restoring Washington’s aesthetics by repairing 22 fountains, restoring 28 statues and monuments all of which were long neglected, and covered in graffiti.

Among the most elegant symbols of this rebirth are the newly regilded Arts of War statues, Valor and Sacrifice, flanking Arlington Memorial Bridge. Once dulled by years of fading, Leo Friedlander’s monumental bronze equestrian figures now shine in 24 gold karat leaf.

Sites that had appeared nearly abandoned, particularly the Columbus Circle fountain near Union Station, were brought back to life ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary.

Homelessness fell 9.3% after an encampment crackdown. Metro rail and bus ridership has risen.

The National Guard has remained a regular presence, and the administration wants to extend the deployment through the end of Trump’s term, at an estimated additional cost of $1.4 billion.

Residents say the sustained presence is necessary to deter criminals, and with such soft on crime policies, such progress remains impossible.

Metro DC DSA member Janeese Lewis George, the Democratic nominee for mayor who won the June 2026 primary, is against the federal safeguards now protecting the city.

Trump has suggested the possibility of revisiting aspects of D.C. Home Rule, though no formal steps have been taken.

Home Rule itself remains in full effect. The 30-day period of federal direction of the Metropolitan Police under Section 740 expired in September 2025. The broader law-enforcement surge and National Guard presence have continued under separate authorities.

Future plans include a large Triumphal Arch near Memorial Bridge, additions to the White House grounds including a ballroom and helipad, and continued upkeep of public spaces.

Robert Gilman, a 32-year-old United States Marine from Massachusetts, is finally home after spending 1,666 days in Russian custody. Arrested in January 2022, convicted on disputed charges, subjected to alleged physical and psychological abuse, and ultimately left gravely ill, Gilman was released after President Donald Trump personally raised his case with Russian President Vladimir Putin. No Russian prisoner was exchanged. No political concession was granted. Putin pardoned Gilman on humanitarian grounds, allowing him to return to the United States for urgent medical treatment.

Gilman served in the Marine Corps from August 2019 until August 2020. After leaving the service, he taught English in Poland and established a program to help Polish students improve their language skills. He later traveled to Moldova for another teaching opportunity and visited relatives near Moscow. His father, Vladimir Gilman, had emigrated from Russia to Massachusetts, giving Robert familial ties to the country. While traveling by train in January 2022, Gilman became ill and was removed from the train in Voronezh, approximately 340 miles south of Moscow. Russian authorities alleged that he was intoxicated, behaved disruptively, and kicked a police officer.

Gilman’s family disputes that account. His father maintains that Robert was sick, collapsed, and accidentally struck the officer with his foot. According to the family, the officer was not injured, declined to pursue the allegation, and presented no evidence at Gilman’s trial. Nonetheless, a Russian court convicted him and imposed a four-and-a-half-year prison sentence.

The timing was ominous. Gilman was arrested weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine and relations between Washington and Moscow deteriorated precipitously. An American military veteran in Russian custody had suddenly acquired political value.

The original sentence did not remain four and a half years. Russian prosecutors subsequently accused Gilman of assaulting a prison inspector, an investigator, and correctional officers. Successive convictions eventually increased his total sentence to ten years. His family and advocates contend that the additional cases were created through deliberate provocation and abuse. They allege that Gilman was forced to exercise for as long as 16 hours, deprived of adequate sleep and food, placed in solitary confinement, compelled to take psychotropic medication, and subjected to sustained psychological manipulation. He was reportedly told that his family had been beaten and that the United States had abandoned him.

These were not merely efforts to punish a prisoner. They were calculated attempts to disorient him, provoke reactions, and manufacture the conduct needed to prolong his confinement. By late June 2026, Gilman’s physical and psychological condition had collapsed. Advocates reported that he had entered a dissociative stupor, a severe stress-induced state in which a person becomes largely unresponsive to the surrounding world. He was transferred from a prison hospital to the psychiatric ward of a civilian emergency hospital in Voronezh.

For approximately seven weeks, Gilman reportedly could not eat, drink, speak, or respond normally. He was fed through a tube and, according to his advocates, handcuffed to a hospital bed under armed guard despite his near-catatonic condition. He developed pneumonia, a high fever, and dangerously elevated blood pressure. His mother traveled to Russia carrying judicial authorization to see him, but hospital officials denied her access. His attorneys also encountered restrictions. Those representing the family warned publicly that Gilman was near death.

The United States had only recently classified him as wrongfully detained. Whatever bureaucratic distinctions throughout the Biden Administration that delayed that designation, the essential facts were unmistakable. An American veteran had entered Russian custody over a disputed encounter involving an uninjured police officer. His original sentence had been expanded to a decade through charges his family considered contrived. He had then deteriorated until he was lying unresponsive and being fed through a tube. President Trump acted before Gilman became another American returned home in a coffin.

Trump discussed the case with Putin, while Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, Sebastian Gorka, Adam Boehler, Jared Kushner, and other administration officials worked through the diplomatic negotiations. Russian presidential adviser Yuri Ushakov informed the American side that Putin had agreed to pardon Gilman because of his medical condition. The result was an exceptionally rare unilateral release. Russia requested no prisoner in return, and American officials confirmed that the United States made no concessions.

President Trump announced the news personally. “Russia has released American Robert Gilman, on a humanitarian basis”, Trump wrote, explaining that he had discussed the case with Putin. “Russia asked for no one in return. No exchange took place.”

Trump then spoke directly with Gilman aboard the aircraft carrying him home. After four years of prison food, forced medication, isolation, illness, and psychological torment, Gilman made one thoroughly American request: “A GREAT cheeseburger…I will take care of that!” Trump promised.

A State Department aircraft brought Gilman to Dulles International Airport on August 11, 2026 Witkoff and Gorka met him with cheeseburgers and milkshakes. A member of the White House team presented him with a Marine Corps flag. Four physicians reportedly evaluated him during the flight, and he was subsequently transported to San Antonio, Texas, for extensive medical and psychological treatment.

Photographs showed a painfully gaunt man holding an American flag, surrounded by those who had helped secure his freedom. Despite the severity of the reports from Russia, an American official who spoke with Gilman said that he was walking and talking. His recovery, however, may be long. The consequences of prolonged isolation, malnutrition, forced medication, sleep deprivation, physical coercion, and sustained psychological abuse cannot be erased by crossing an international border.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted that Gilman joined more than 100 Americans whose freedom President Trump’s administration has helped secure during his second term. Rubio properly welcomed the release as a positive development while demanding freedom for other Americans unjustly imprisoned in Russia, including retired teacher Stephen Hubbard.

Gilman’s release does not absolve the Russian system that confined him or resolve the cases of the other Americans still held there. Nor should the humanitarian pardon obscure the extraordinary escalation of his case. A disputed incident involving an officer who was reportedly unharmed produced a decade-long sentence and a medical catastrophe.

Yet the manner of his release matters. The United States did not surrender a convicted Russian assassin, intelligence operative, arms dealer, or cybercriminal. It did not reward hostage diplomacy by replenishing Putin’s ranks. Direct engagement secured Gilman’s freedom without a prisoner exchange or American concession. This is what presidential diplomacy can accomplish when it is backed by strength, personal relationships, persistence, and a refusal to accept an American’s death as inevitable. Trump did not confuse negotiation with capitulation. He used his relationship with Putin to obtain a humanitarian pardon while giving Russia nothing in return.

Robert Gilman went to Eastern Europe to teach. He entered Russia to visit family and became trapped in a penal system that transformed an obscure railway incident into four and a half years of captivity. He returned emaciated, medically fragile, and bearing injuries that may not be visible for years. But he returned alive.

The Marine Corps teaches its people never to leave one of their own behind. President Trump applied that principle to the country itself. Robert Gilman is home because his government finally placed his life above bureaucratic inertia and acted before the opportunity disappeared.

His first request was not political, profound, or ceremonial. It was a cheeseburger. After 1,666 days in Russian custody, that modest meal represented something much larger: freedom, home, and the restoration of an ordinary American life that had been stolen from him.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has long operated as a major institutional player with extensive fundraising operations inside the progressive and Democratic donor-activist world, raising hundreds of millions while publicly presenting itself as a leading opponent of “hate groups.”

Attorney General Todd Blanche has characterized the SPLC’s work as “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”

The SPLC has acknowledged that it paid informants and has insisted the payments were made exclusively for intelligence purposes.

On Wednesday, August 12, Heidi Beirich, former Director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, who oversaw the organization’s hate-group tracking operation, including the Intelligence Report and the Hatewatch blog, was arrested in California on federal fraud charges.

Beirich is the former SPLC official who wrote the 2015 exposé “Chaos at the Compound” on the neo-Nazi National Alliance.

Beirich left the SPLC in 2019 during a broader internal crisis defined by high-profile resignations and employee complaints, including from Black staff, of racial inequities and workplace toxicity under predominantly white leadership. She later co-founded the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, where she serves as chief strategy officer.

Prosecutors allege that while the SPLC publicly tracked and denounced neo-Nazi and other extremist groups, Beirich helped oversee the secret funneling of donor money to individuals associated with those same groups through fictitious accounts.

According to the indictment, Beirich was in a romantic relationship with a longtime paid SPLC informant, identified only as “F-9,” inside the National Alliance. The two allegedly shared a home and joint bank accounts. She is accused of helping route more than a million dollars in donor funds to him and other extremists through shell companies and business accounts.

Beirich, 59, is the first individual charged in the Justice Department’s expanding case against the SPLC. She faces conspiracy counts for wire fraud, false statements to a bank, and concealment money laundering.

Attorney General Todd Blanche confirmed the arrest. The SPLC itself was charged in April 2026; a superseding indictment now adds Beirich as the first named individual.

Beirich’s attorney, Michael J. Proctor said his client is innocent and called the case “without merit,” adding that the charges against her and the SPLC are “politically motivated.”

Since the original case in April, SPLC officials have maintained that the payments were made to informants for intelligence purposes. The Department of Justice, however, says Beirich helped divert $1.2 million to the National Alliance informant who was also allegedly her lover.

Prosecutors allege that F-9 infiltrated the National Alliance for years while receiving SPLC payments. In 2014 he allegedly stole roughly 25 boxes of documents from the group’s West Virginia headquarters. Beirich then used that material to write her May 2015 Hatewatch article.

To conceal his identity, authorities say the SPLC paid a second person, accountant Randolph Dilloway, referred to in court papers as F-39, about $6,000 to publicly take the blame and pose as an independent whistleblower.

Between 2015 and 2021 alone, roughly $140,000 in SPLC donor funds allegedly flowed into the joint bank accounts Beirich shared with the informant.

The SPLC is accused of routing at least $4.1 million in tax-exempt donations to informants embedded in or leading white supremacist groups while purporting to combat hate and telling donors the money was being used to fight extremism.

President Trump is working to give America’s hemp industry the breathing room it needs to expand.

President Trump is working to give America’s hemp industry the breathing room it needs to expand, the same president who, during his first term, became the first to unlock the industry at the federal level by signing the 2018 Farm Bill. That law ended decades of prohibition on commercial hemp production, removed hemp from the Controlled Substances Act, and established the modern regulatory structure that allowed the sector to grow.

The original framework was later knocked down after a restrictive redefinition of hemp was quietly slipped into the November 2025 continuing resolution that reopened the government. The change was so tight that most hemp-derived THC products are now set to become illegal on November 12, 2026.

Rooted in agriculture, the industry today supports farmers and small businesses, sustaining approximately 300,000 jobs, generating more than $1.5 billion in state tax revenue, representing a market of about $28 billion.

The commander-in-chief personally called North Carolina Senator Ted Budd, who led the charge against the proposed delay.

Budd filed an amendment to strip the delay language out of the continuing resolution and lined up cosponsors, including Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. Both argued that the ban should take effect on the original schedule of November 12, 2026.

During a closed-door lunch, White House aides got an earful from senators who weren’t buying the extra month. A bipartisan coalition of 35 state and territory attorneys general also formally urged Congress to stick to the original November 12 schedule.

Despite that opposition, the Senate voted 61–32 early Saturday to table Budd’s amendment. The funding bill, which delays the ban until December 11, then passed 90–6 and now moves to the House.

The industry is urgently warning that hundreds of thousands of jobs and significant state tax revenue could disappear if products are pulled from shelves in November. Brewers in states like Minnesota, many of whom invested heavily in THC drinks, are particularly concerned.

White House officials frame the delay as a practical step. They are developing a broader framework for medical uses of THC products, especially for veterans, and say a sudden ban would complicate that work. The White House has said it will not push for another extension beyond December.

Still, that assurance hasn’t calmed the senators who see any delay as a gift to an industry they believe needs tighter rules, not more time. The spending bill was supposed to be a relatively smooth bipartisan exercise. It passed an early procedural vote without trouble, but the hemp fight slowed everything down.

For hemp businesses and farmers, the outcome carries real economic consequences. Industry leaders view the language as a temporary lifeline and are using the extra time to push for regulations instead of an outright ban.

The Senate passed its version of the continuing resolution on August 8, including a one-month delay of the hemp ban until December 11, 2026. The House, currently on its August recess, is scheduled to return the first week of September. Until it acts, the delay is not yet law, and the original November 12 deadline remains in effect.

Let me be perfectly clear: there is no fresh tomato on God’s green earth that can touch a Jersey tomato at the height of summer. Not the hard specimens shipped across the continent, not the mealy impostors bred primarily to survive a truck ride, and certainly not the pallid orbs produced in industrial greenhouses where durability matters more than taste. A real Jersey tomato, picked ripe in July or August, is deep red, heavy in the hand, fragrant before the knife touches it, and bursting with that exquisite balance of sweetness and acidity that makes the average supermarket tomato seem like a botanical fraud.

New Jersey is called the Garden State for a reason. Long before the turnpikes, shopping malls, subdivisions, and industrial corridors came to dominate the popular image of the state, New Jersey was an agricultural powerhouse. Its fertile farmland and enviable position between New York and Philadelphia allowed its farmers to supply both cities with fruits, vegetables, grains, and dairy products. The “Garden State” sobriquet is commonly associated with Abraham Browning of Camden, who reportedly described New Jersey in the 19th century as an immense barrel filled with good things to eat, open at both ends, with New York and Pennsylvania reaching in from either side.

Drive through the agricultural stretches of South Jersey and that heritage remains visible. There are fields of sweet corn, peppers, peaches, blueberries, and tomatoes along with roadside farm stands selling produce that may have been harvested only hours earlier. New Jersey may be one of the most densely populated states in America, but beyond its suburban corridors lies an agricultural tradition of remarkable quality.

Its greatest contribution to the summer table is the Jersey tomato. There is no single cultivar called the Jersey tomato. The term encompasses tomatoes grown in New Jersey and several varieties with deep roots in the state’s agricultural history. 

Rutgers University deserves particular credit for preserving New Jersey’s tomato tradition. Flavor mattered then, and it matters now. The famous Rutgers tomato was introduced in 1934. The Ramapo, developed at Rutgers and released in 1968, earned a devoted following for its productivity and exceptional flavor. Rutgers later developed the Rutgers 250, drawing upon the parentage of the original Rutgers tomato and selecting specifically for fruit quality and taste. These were tomatoes intended to taste magnificent, not merely to arrive intact at a warehouse.

A great Jersey tomato announces itself immediately. Pick one up and you feel its substance. Bring it close and there is the unmistakable green, earthy fragrance of the vine. Cut through the thin skin and the knife releases crimson flesh and juice. Add a little salt and watch it dissolve across the surface. The first bite delivers sweetness followed by enough acidity to provide brightness and complexity. The juice winds up on the plate and probably on your hand. That is what a tomato is supposed to taste like.

I speak from considerable personal experience. During Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, I was assigned as the campaign’s liaison to former President Richard Nixon, who was then living in Saddle River, New Jersey. Nixon and I subsequently became friends, a friendship that endured until the end of his life. Consequently, I spent a great deal of time in New Jersey during that period and ate more than my fair share of Jersey tomatoes. After decades of subsequent research conducted enthusiastically at the dinner table, I have reached an unshakable conclusion: the Jersey tomato is superior to any other fresh tomato grown in the United States and perhaps anywhere in the world.

There is, however, one important qualification to my tomato supremacy doctrine. As I explained in my article, “My Mother’s Sunday Gravy and the Only Acceptable Tomato” there is only one acceptable tomato for the sacred undertaking of Sunday dinner: the San Marzano. Whether your family calls it sauce or gravy, and mine calls it gravy, Sunday dinner is another matter entirely. My mother, Gloria Rose Corbo Stone, and my grandmother before her understood that a proper Sunday gravy is not something one improvises with whatever tomatoes happen to be sitting on the counter. It is slow simmered, rich, aromatic, and inseparable from the Italian American traditions of family and heritage handed down through generations. For that purpose, the San Marzano reigns supreme. Its concentrated flavor, fleshiness, sweetness, and relatively restrained acidity make it uniquely suited to a long simmer.

The Jersey tomato has a different calling. While the San Marzano owns the pot. The Jersey tomato owns the table. At its peak, a Jersey tomato requires remarkably little culinary intervention. One of the finest ways to eat it is also one of the simplest: the classic tomato sandwich. Take good white or country bread, spread it generously with mayonnaise, add thick slices of Jersey tomato, salt, and freshly ground black pepper. Nothing else is required. The bread catches the juice, the mayonnaise supplies richness, and the tomato remains the undisputed star.

Then there is the BLT. Crisp bacon, lettuce, mayonnaise, toasted bread, and thick slices of a Jersey tomato constitute one of the great achievements of American summer cuisine. For most of the year, bacon carries the sandwich. In New Jersey in August, the tomato can steal the show.

The Italians naturally know what to do with a great tomato. Caprese salad requires only thick slices of Jersey tomato, fresh mozzarella, basil, good extra virgin olive oil, salt, and pepper. Bruschetta combines diced tomatoes with basil, garlic, olive oil, and toasted Italian bread. Panzanella turns tomatoes, basil, olive oil, and day old bread into something greater than the sum of its parts. A simple salad of Jersey tomatoes, cucumbers, thinly sliced red onion, olive oil, red wine vinegar, and fresh herbs is nearly perfect on a hot summer evening.

The common denominator is restraint. When the tomato is exceptional, the cook’s principal responsibility is not to ruin it. That is precisely where the Jersey tomato separates itself from much of what passes for a tomato in the modern supermarket. Commercial agriculture must accommodate an unforgiving distribution system. A tomato traveling hundreds or thousands of miles must withstand harvesting, packing, refrigeration, transportation, warehousing, unpacking, and days on a shelf. Firmness, uniformity, and longevity are valuable commercial attributes, but none is synonymous with flavor. A locally grown Jersey tomato can be harvested much closer to its peak. It does not need the structural integrity of a tennis ball because it was meant to travel from the farm to your table, not from one coast to another.

California is an agricultural colossus, and Florida has an important tomato industry, but tonnage does not determine supremacy. Soil, climate, variety, cultivation, ripeness, and proximity to the consumer matter. Wine enthusiasts accept without argument that geography and climate leave their fingerprints on a grape. The same principle applies to tomatoes.

The Jersey tomato also serves as an edible rebuttal to the tired caricature of New Jersey itself. People whose knowledge of the state begins at Newark Airport and ends on the New Jersey Turnpike miss its beautiful small towns, beaches, horse country, orchards, farms, and agricultural communities. The same state that gave America Thomas Edison’s laboratories, Princeton University, Atlantic City, and the Jersey Shore also produces blueberries, peaches, sweet corn, peppers, strawberries, eggplant, carrots, zucchini, and of course tomatoes of the most extraordinary quality.

A Jersey tomato does not have to look perfect to be perfect. It may be irregularly shaped. It may bruise easily. Its skin may split if neglected. It may not survive three weeks in a refrigerated distribution chain looking as though it were manufactured from plastic. None of that matters because its purpose is not to be indestructible. Its purpose is to be delicious.

Some will accuse me of regional chauvinism. I plead guilty with enthusiasm. My judgment is based on many summers, many meals, and a respectable lifetime sample size. Cut open a ripe Jersey tomato in August, sprinkle it with salt, and take a bite. The evidence speaks for itself.

There is room in my culinary theology for two supreme tomatoes because they perform entirely different jobs. For my mother’s Sunday gravy there is the San Marzano, and I remain immovable on the subject. But when summer calls for a tomato sandwich, a BLT, Caprese salad, bruschetta, panzanella, or simply thick slices with salt and pepper, the Jersey tomato has no peer. The Garden State earned its name by producing exceptional things from the soil. Every July and August, its most delicious evidence ripens on the vine. The Jersey tomato is not merely the best tomato in America. I am becoming increasingly convinced it may be the best tomato in the world.