Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann. If you’re watching this right now on Substack, help us out by tapping that ❤️ and restacking this newsletter. That’s the best way to make sure these important stories don’t get buried in the algorithm.
A federal judge just blocked Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security from conducting election-related sweeps in nine separate states in a huge blow to the administration. The cryptocurrency industry has spent more than $62 million in Ohio trying to keep Sherrod Brown out of the U.S. Senate, but that flood of money appears to be having the opposite effect. Volunteers across the nation are now training to counter any efforts by the Trump administration to deploy ICE agents near voting precincts next week. And a new investigation finds that ICE has illegally detained a mentally ill U.S. citizen for nearly 10 months.
A quick thing before we get to the news. We’re seeing our stories get throttled on Elon Musk’s social media platform, just as Musk has officially become the largest GOP donor this cycle. We’re also seeing our stories get buried by the algorithms on Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta platforms. The connection is clear: when we criticizing the tech billionaires who carry water for Trump, our stories get suppressed.
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A federal judge in California just halted one of the Trump administration’s pre-election schemes. On Wednesday night, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín — a Joe Biden appointee — issued a preliminary injunction that barred the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from conducting election-related field operations in nine states — California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin — until the polls close on November 3.
The lawsuit challenging the sweeps was filed by nurses’ unions and the Voto Latino Foundation in San Francisco and Santa Clara. The plaintiffs alleged DHS was sending armed agents to local residents’ homes to question them about their voter status. An internal memo filed in court referred to a “surge initiative” beginning on September 1 that included field interviews.
Judge Martínez-Olguín wrote that the evidence shows an “objectively reasonable fear of law enforcement entanglements” that could intimidate citizens and dissuade them helping other people vote. She paused the order until Friday, which was likely done in order to allow the Trump administration time to appeal her decision.
DHS now says it has no plans to question people it believes are citizens. However, Trump’s Justice Department is currently suing California to set aside approximately 20,000 ballots and prevent them from being counted with other ballots due to alleged non-citizen voting that studies consistently show almost never happens.
This has happened before. Back in 1981, Republicans sent armed off-duty cops equipped with “National Ballot Security Task Force” armbands into Black and Latino precincts in New Jersey. It took 36 years of a federal consent decree in order to make them stop. That decree expired in 2018. What you’re watching now is what happens when the leash comes off and the “task force” now carries a federal badge.
In Ohio, the cryptocurrency industry is quickly learning that tens of millions of dollars in outside money doesn’t go as far as it used to.
The American Prospect reported that the Fairshake super PAC — which is funded by Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase and Ripple Labs — put up $30 million in September all in order to prevent former U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown from returning to Washington. That number has now topped $55 million. And initial Facebook investors the Winklevoss twins, who became billionaires thanks to Bitcoin, just kicked in another $7 million through one of their PACs.
Fairshake spent $40 million against Brown in 2024, when he loudly criticized the crypto industry as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and lost his race to Republican Bernie Moreno. Now it aims to make an example of him again.
But in 2026, Ohioans have had it with data centers. One poll from Bowling Green State University poll found that 75 percent of likely voters oppose the development of data centers in their own community. And the Buckeye State is host to 21 of the 41 local data center measures on ballots across the country next week.
Brown has Republican Senator Jon Husted the face of data centers in Ohio, pointing to tax breaks his opponent supported as lieutenant governor, along with the $630,000 he’s taken from donors with ties to the data center industry. A National Republican Senatorial Committee memo leaked to ABC News last month called data centers “the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck.”
Husted has benefited from more than $200 million in outside money compared to $97 million for Brown. However, Brown’s average polling lead has grown from 3.4 points in late September to 4.3 points, suggesting that flow of Big Tech money may be driving more voters to back Brown.
Back in 1907 Congress passed the Tillman Act, which made it a federal crime for corporations to spend money on federal elections. This is because the men who’d lived through the Gilded Age understood that when robber barons’ money plays a role in elections, the voices of the people get drowned out. But a century later, five Republicans on the Supreme Court threw that wisdom in the trash. Now, Ohio’s Senate race has become a test of whether working people can outvote $62 million worth of billionaire influence.
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Elsewhere in Ohio, the Franklin County board of elections building in the capital city of Columbus also serves as an early voting site. It’s located right in the middle of the Somali American community U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) targeted last December in Operation Buckeye. That crackdown only produced few arrests but it did result in months of harassment for immigrants.
Liliana Rivera Baiman of 614 ICE Watch recently told the publication WIRED that dozens of trained volunteers are already patrolling near early voting sites on a daily basis, and they expect around 250 volunteers to mobilize next week on Election Day. They’ve been trained to recognize ICE uniforms and vehicles and document what they see and share it through various groups on encrypted apps like Signal and Whatsapp. When tensions rise, volunteers are trained to hum or sing to keep everyone calm.
Advocacy groups like Common Cause, the American Civil Liberties Union, Indivisible and NorCal Resist are also mounting similar ICE monitoring operations across the country. Last week, when six ICE vehicles rolled up outside the Yuba City elections office in California, NorCal Resist deployed a volunteer and posted an alert to the community on its Instagram account.
DHS says ICE isn’t planning to conduct any operations targeting polling places, though it notably didn’t rule out “targeted enforcement.” Voto Latino’s Beatriz Lopez said there’s “legitimate fear” in Latino communities, and her group is preparing for the possibility of ICE home raids specifically timed for when people are voting.
In 1963, Fannie Lou Hamer was almost beaten to death in a Mississippi jail simply because she helped Black Americans register to vote. And despite her wounds, she walked out of her cell and went right back to registering voters. The volunteers outside that Columbus, Ohio elections office are carrying her torch. The fact that American citizens need these volunteers at all in 2026 shows exactly how far the Trump administration has dragged this country backward.
Our final story this morning: the Associated Press has discovered that ICE has held 39 year-old U.S. citizen Phillip James — who suffers from grand delusion, a symptom of his official diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia — since January. Medical experts say part of that delusion is his belief that he was born in Jamaica as the son of a former prime minister. ICE simply took him at his word when agents detained him.
James has actually held a U.S. passport for 15 years. A 1988 Florida paternity case matches his Florida birth certificate. Jamaica says it has no record of him being born there. But DHS is claiming without evidence that James’ birth certificate is fraudulent.
He’s currently being detained at Indiana’s so-called Speedway Slammer, where at least two detainees have died in federal custody and the state is paid $291 per day for each detainee. Former ICE chief of staff Deborah Fleischaker told the Associated Press she worries that in agents’ goal of reaching their detention quota, James is “in the machine.” A federal judge is expected to issue a ruling soon on his release.
The men who authored our Constitution wrote the right of habeas corpus right into Article I, four years before there was even a Bill of Rights. This is because they’d lived under the thumb of a tyrant who had the power to lock men away while never having to explain why. When a state prison can collect $291 a day to hold an American citizen on nothing but the word of agents who ignored his own mental illness, we’re no longer a republic, but a business. That’s exactly the kind of government the founders were trying to avoid.
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Tomorrow at 10 AM ET, Raw America managing editor Carl Gibson will be interviewing Kentucky Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Charles Booker! Watch live on our homepage at RawAmerica.com.
I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media. Once again, please be sure to click the ❤️ and tap restack if you haven’t already so we can make sure these stories get in front of the most people.