Showing posts with label election. Show all posts

Saturday, May 2, 2026

‘Deplorable’: ICE hires firm accused of ‘torture’ to track down undocumented children

ice-contracter-torture-allegations-undocumented-children

A blurry child's head in the foreground, with adult hands operating a cellphone and an ICE badge on a waistband beyond. — A child with his family and an ICE agent in the halls of immigration court at the federal building in New York City on 23 July 2025. Photograph: Michael M Santiago/Getty Images

‘Deplorable’: ICE hires firm accused of ‘torture’ to track down undocumented children

Exclusive: Contractor denies allegations including ‘enforced disappearance’ and will help locate unaccompanied minors

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has awarded a contract to a private security company that has faced accusations of “torture” and “enforced disappearance” to assist in tracking down undocumented immigrant children who arrived in the US alone, a contracting document shows.

ICE has stepped up its work so much in pursuing these minors in the US that it has contracted out some of its mission to a third party to put “boots on the ground” and locate immigrant children previously released from US government custody.

The agency characterizes the work of tracing immigrant children who reached the US without authorization and were released into communities while they go through immigration court proceedings as “safety and wellness checks”. ICE says it wants to confirm the children’s location, school enrollment and overall wellness, including checking for signs of abuse or trafficking, according to the contracting document.

But an internal ICE document reviewed by the Guardian last year shows ICE actually runs the operations with the aim of deporting the children or pursuing criminal cases against them – or their adult sponsors sheltering them legally in the US. A critic at the time called ICE’s efforts “backdoor family separation”.

“Accusations that ICE is ‘targeting’ and arresting children are FALSE and an attempt to demonize law enforcement,” a DHS spokesperson said on Friday. “Rather than separating families, ICE asks parents if they want to be removed with their children or if the child should be placed with someone safe the parent designates.”

Now, as that program continues, the agency in mid-April gave a contract to a US company, MVM Inc, to assist in carrying out such operations.

MVM is a longtime security contractor, based in Ashburn, Virginia, with about 2,500 employees, and provides detention and transport services to federal immigration agencies. It previously provided security services to the CIA.

MVM did not respond to a detailed request for comment by time of publication.

In 2024, MVM was sued by two Guatemalan fathers and their respective children in a California federal court for alleged “torture, enforced disappearance and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment”, according to the lawsuit, for the role it played in the family separation policy at the border under the first Trump administration that prompted widespread uproar.

Families divided at the border: ‘The most horrific immigration policy I’ve ever seen’

“MVM physically took thousands of children away from their parents and transferred them to shelters,” the lawsuit said. “MVM transported and harbored these children using unmarked vehicles, commercial airlines, and makeshift detention centers.”

MVM asked a judge to toss the lawsuit, saying the company had “openly denounced” the family separation campaign, adding that since it was a private company, it should not be held liable for a US government policy.

The two Guatemalan children, a 16-year-old and a three-year-old, were separated from their respective fathers in 2017, “with the substantial assistance of MVM”, the lawsuit says. The case continues to move through federal court.

In March 2025, a judge dismissed some of the claims on procedural grounds but allowed the case to continue based on the torture, enforced disappearance, and inhuman and degrading treatment claims.

Eighteen different companies offered their services to ICE to assist in the “wellness checks” operation, according to a document posted publicly on a government contracting website. But the other companies that vied for the contract lacked “the critical ‘boots on the ground’ child welfare personnel and infrastructure needed to physically locate and conduct wellness checks on children”, the document said. MVM, however, did appear to have the resources ICE was seeking, according to a review of the document.

The contract is supposed to run for one year. The amount ICE is paying MVM is redacted, along with the number of “wellness checks” the agency wants the company to perform.

“MVM contractors have ZERO immigration enforcement authority. This partnership, as part of the UAC Safety Verification Initiative, represents ICE’s commitment to protect vulnerable children from sexual abuse and exploitation. The primary focus of this initiative is to conduct welfare checks on these children to ensure that they are safe and not being exploited or abused,” the DHS spokesperson added, using the official term for the program to conduct checks on children who immigrated to the US unaccompanied and have been placed with sponsors.

Last year, the Trump administration began efforts to track down immigrant children who had entered the US alone to request asylum or reunite with family members already in the US. Such children largely arrive at the US-Mexico border and either turn themselves in or are apprehended by border officials.

After an unaccompanied immigrant child enters the US, they are placed under the custody of the office of refugee resettlement (ORR). While their immigration cases, which are handled by ICE, play out, ORR will place the children in shelters, in foster homes or under a sponsor’s care if available. Typically, sponsors, who complete an assessment process and background checks, are the children’s relatives in the US; at times, they are unrelated adults.

In the past year, ICE, in partnership with local law enforcement agencies, has begun to track down those children, many of whom the Trump administration says have gone “missing”, to provide “wellness checks”. But the operations have been criticized by many immigration attorneys and advocates.

“This all seems like a ploy to do two things: one, find either kids or their sponsors to arrest and deport. Or, two, scare children into self-deporting,” said Michael Lukens, the executive director of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, which provides legal representation to immigrant children. “It’s really deplorable. It’s really concerning.”

For years, Trump administration allies pointed to a 2024 homeland security inspector general report that found that ICE was not able to adequately track unaccompanied minors. They used that report to push a narrative that unaccompanied immigrant children have been lost and trafficked, Lukens said.

“Their parents know where they are, their lawyers know where they are, usually the courts know where they are. It’s just ICE doesn’t have their address in a file,” said Lukens. “Those kids were never missing but they’re using it as an excuse to do these ‘wellness checks’.”

The inspector general report suggested understaffing at ICE and deficient cross-agency communication are mostly to blame for the agency’s inability to keep track of the children, rather than actual trafficking.

MVM is a longtime government contractor that now mostly works with federal agencies to transport immigrant children and families between government-run facilities. It was started in the late 1970s by former Secret Service agents and ballooned into a significant government contractor. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2008 that MVM had a secretive contract with the CIA in Iraq for security guards to protect CIA staff.

MVM also has a track record of allegations of abuse with its previous immigration-related contract work. In 2018, MVM was accused of holding immigrant children in a vacant office building for three weeks amid the family separation crisis under the first Trump administration. During the Covid-19 pandemic, MVM detained immigrant children and families in hotels before they were removed from the country. MVM also had the contract to run the secretive Guantánamo Bay immigration detention center, until it was taken over by another company in 2025. Most recently, last August, the non-profit newsroom Injustice Watch reported that MVM locked an immigrant woman and her baby inside a Chicago hotel for five days.

“We have seen MVM harm children in federal immigration custody in egregious ways for many years now,” said Neha Desai, the managing director of children’s human rights and dignity at the National Center for Youth Law. “It is both deeply disturbing and completely unsurprising that this government has hired MVM to conduct so-called ‘wellness checks’. These checks have already terrorized numerous children and have led to family separation throughout the country.

“What will come next once MVM is involved will surely be even worse,” Desai added.

Friday, May 1, 2026

The Best Way to Fix the Supreme Court’s Attack on Voting Rights

https://newrepublic.com/article/209825/supreme-court-callais-proportional-representation

Matt Ford

May 1, 2026

Fair Vote

The Best Way to Fix the Supreme Court’s Attack on Voting Rights

If U.S. electoral politics is going to survive the high court’s attack on equal rights, the game will have to change.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Voting rights activists rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court’s decision this week to destroy what remained of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 compels us to consider structural reforms to the court itself to preserve the republic. By giving a de facto blank check to Republican-led states to racially gerrymander Black Americans out of electoral power, the court has delegitimized itself and damaged the nation’s multiracial democracy.

Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor who specializes in election law, described Wednesday’s court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais as “one of the most pernicious and damaging Supreme Court decisions of the last century.” Hasen, whose research was cited in Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent, is hardly a firebrand. He argued that Democrats must now “consider reform of the Supreme Court itself, a conclusion I had been resisting until the Court made this unavoidable.”

I agree. On racial and political gerrymandering in particular, however, there is another important reform that a Democratic Congress and president could also implement at the next opportunity: abolishing the House’s current system of single-member districts and electing members by proportional representation instead.

Article 1 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to set the “time, manner, and place” of federal elections. States administer elections within the bounds that Congress sets for them. For the first half of the nineteenth century, Congress allowed states a certain amount of discretion to devise their own electoral system, so long as it elected the apportioned number of representatives to the House. (The Senate, which would not become elected until the early twentieth century, is not at issue here.)

Many states adopted single-member districts. Under this method, which survives to this day, state lawmakers divide the state into congressional districts, each of which elects a single representative to the House. Like any electoral system, this approach has some benefits—greater regional diversity, direct constituent representation, and so on.

It also has some drawbacks. The most obvious of these is gerrymandering. The term derived its name from Elbridge Gerry, an early American statesman who served as governor of Massachusetts from 1810 to 1812. His tenure coincided with the 1810 census and the reapportionment of House seats that occurs every 10 years. To maintain control of Massachusetts’s state legislature, Gerry’s fellow Democratic-Republicans drew an obviously manipulated map to maintain their majority. After Gerry signed the new map into law, Federalist denunciations ensured that the practice became forever associated with his name, to Gerry’s great consternation.

This is fairly rote stuff for high school American civics. What is less well known is that single-member districts weren’t the only method of electing House members in the early republic. One common alternative was known as a “general-ticket” election. Under this system, voters would cast votes for as many candidates as there were seats, and the candidates who received the most votes would be elected to those seats.

General-ticket voting had problems as well. For one thing, it essentially transformed each state’s House races into a winner-take-all system, with one party often able to win an entire state’s delegation with a simple majority of votes. While Northern and Southern states both used general-ticket elections at first, the method was eventually associated with Southern states that wanted to maximize the Democratic Party’s control of Congress.

Some larger states also used what were known as “plural districts.” Under this method, a single district would elect the top two candidates to the House on a general ticket. Some states, like New York and Pennsylvania, mixed plural districts in urban areas with single-member districts for rural ones. Others, like New Jersey, divided themselves into multiple plural districts.

Perhaps the best example of the early republic’s patchwork system is the Thirteenth Congress, which served from 1810 to 1812. Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, New Hampshire, and Vermont used the general-ticket system, with each one resulting in one-party slates. Maryland, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania elected representatives through at least some plural districts, producing a mixture of party representation. Massachusetts, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia exclusively used single-member districts, with similarly diverse results.

Only in 1842 did Congress begin to standardize House elections. Until the 1920s, lawmakers would adopt a new Apportionment Act after each census to expand the House of Representatives to match the nation’s population growth. The Apportionment Act of 1842 was a milestone because it sought to reduce, not grow, the number of House seats for the first time. It also sought to constrain how each state elected its representatives.

With the new act, Whig lawmakers sought to dismantle single-party rule in the South and increase their own chances of securing a House majority in the future. By this point, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Rhode Island still used the general-ticket method. Southern Democrats argued for a greater role for states in determining how federal elections could be run, but the Whigs’ reading of Congress’s election powers won out.

The 1842 act was less successful than its drafters had hoped, in no small part because Democrats retook the House in the following election and seated members elected by general-ticket systems anyway. But the law hastened the country’s drift toward single-member districts. Only a few states retained statewide at-large districts into the twentieth century. Finally, in 1967, as part of a legislative negotiation over reapportionment after the Supreme Court’s “one man, one vote” rule, Congress formally forbade any other method of electing representatives to the House.

This diversity of House electoral methods shows that single-member districts, though now ubiquitous, are not an intractible constitutional command. What Congress makes, it can also unmake. Democratic lawmakers in recent years have proposed bills that would require states to elect members via proportional representation instead. Proportional representation can take a number of different forms, but in the general strokes, it would allocate each state’s House delegation according to the ratio of votes that each party received.

Abolishing single-members districts would re-enfranchise tens of millions of Americans who have no real opportunity to cast a meaningful vote for a House candidate. In the 2024 elections, voters in Texas cast roughly 6.2 million ballots for Republican candidates and 4.3 million ballots for Democratic candidates. Thanks to the state’s harsh gerrymander, Texas Republicans won 65 percent of the seats despite obtaining only 58 percent of the vote. Some states had even wider disparities: North Carolina Republicans won 10 of the state’s 14 congressional districts despite only obtaining 52 percent of the vote.

Under single-member districts, millions of voters in each state are effectively disenfranchised by preordained outcomes in their House seats. Proportional representation’s benefits would not be exclusively felt by Democrats, of course. That same year, California voters cast nine million ballots for House Democratic candidates and 5.9 million ballots for House Republican candidates. Though Democrats only received 60 percent of the vote, they captured 76 percent of the state’s House delegation.

Since many House seats are only competitive in the primary elections, single-member districts also produce more extreme candidates by insulating lawmakers from a broader segment of the electorate. Most Americans do not live in a competitive House district, giving them little influence over their own representation. Since 2010, when the GOP embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering on a national scale, the Senate has arguably become more representative than the House since its candidates must answer to a broader, more diverse electorate.

A group of House Democrats introduced a bill in 2025, for example, that would require any state with six or more House seats to create multimember districts under proportional representation. For states with five or fewer House seats, members would be elected at large instead. It would also require ranked-choice voting, which is not strictly necessary for proportional representation but may be incorporated into it.

I’ve called for Congress to adopt some form of proportional representation for the last few years. But reforms are particularly urgent after the Supreme Court’s malfeasance on gerrymandering. It was no surprise that the conservative justices demolished what was left of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais this week. But the way in which they did it suggested that the nation’s ongoing redistricting wars may have played a role.

The court originally appeared set to decide that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act’s limits on racial gerrymandering were no longer needed now that Jim Crow had been dismantled and Black electoral participation had risen far above its pre-1965 levels. While that reasoning was present in the final opinion by Alito, it played a secondary role to his interest in protecting partisan gerrymandering.

The Supreme Court had ruled in 2019 that federal courts could no longer hear partisan-gerrymandering claims. What was framed as a lamentable practice that courts could not solve in 2019 was now an important state interest that must be protected in 2024. “The upshot of Rucho [v. Common Cause] was that, as far as federal law is concerned, a state legislature may use partisan advantage as a factor in redistricting,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court. “And litigants cannot circumvent that rule by dressing their political-gerrymandering claims in racial garb.”

I will not claim to have any special insight into Alito’s private thinking on this case, nor that of any other justice who participated in it. But it is hard to escape the sense that Democrats’ embrace of partisan gerrymandering over the last year—driven in response, of course, to Trump’s own demands to retain power in this year’s midterms—may have played a role in how the Supreme Court framed Callais.

After all, Democrats in California, Illinois, and Virginia can pursue extreme partisan gerrymandering without risk of Voting Rights Act litigation because their own states are much more racially diverse. But Republicans face an inherent hurdle when trying to maximize their own seats, particularly in the South: They can only gerrymander away so many seats before they eventually run into the majority-minority districts created through past VRA litigation. Since Black voters typically vote for Democrats in unusually lopsided margins, partisan gerrymanders tend to become racial gerrymanders, as well, past a certain point.

Given the choice between the VRA and the court’s racial gerrymandering precedents on one hand, and the prospect that the GOP might face a structural asymmetry in American elections on the other hand, the conservative justices sided with the GOP. The results will be catastrophic for Black electoral representation in the South, both in the House and in state legislatures, where Congress has no power over redistricting.

Proportional representation may not be the panacea for all that ails our nation’s politics. But it stands the best chance of ensuring that Americans will have competitive congressional elections no matter the state in which they live. It is indisputably constitutional, derived both from Congress’s own Article 1 powers as well as past diversity in electoral methods. And it would make it impossible for state legislatures to deny fair representation to any American because of their race ever again by making gerrymandering—whether racial or partisan—a thing of the past.

Matt Ford

Matt Ford is a staff writer at The New Republic.

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The Supreme Court’s attack on voting rights is already causing chaos

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/4/30/800030817/courts/the-supreme-courts-attack-on-voting-rights-is-already-causing-chaos/

The Supreme Court’s attack on voting rights is already causing chaos

by Lisa Needham

Staff

VIEW PROFILE

Thursday, April 30, 2026 at 5:01:00p PDT

49 Comments

UNITED STATES - OCTOBER 15: Voting rights activists protest outside the U.S. Supreme Court as the court prepares to hear arguments in a case challenging Louisiana's congressional map in Washington on Wednesday, October 15, 2025. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images) — Attribution: APVoting rights activists protest outside the U.S. Supreme Court as the court prepares to hear arguments in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map in Washington on, Oct. 15, 2025.

The fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais has been as quick as it was inevitable. Justice Samuel Alito’s reprehensible 6-3 decision functionally killed the tiny bits of the Voting Rights Act that we were clinging to in the face of Chief Justice John Roberts’ decades-long crusade to end the VRA.

Louisiana wasted no time taking a victory lap, with Gov. Jeff Landry and Attorney General Liz Murrill issuing a joint statement that the state was postponing its primaries even though early voting was already scheduled to begin on May 16.

In theory, Purcell v. Gonzalez, a 2006 Supreme Court decision, bars this sort of last-minute change to elections, the idea being that if election rules are changed too close to an election, that can result in voter confusion. However, conservative judges and justices have essentially turned this into “Purcell for thee but not for me.” Already-gerrymandered states like Georgia and North Carolina get the go-ahead to muck around close to elections, but for potential election changes that would enfranchise, rather than exclude, voters, somehow Purcell kicks in then.

A cartoon by Clay Bennett depicting a voting location with a sign that says, "early voter suppression here." — Attribution: Clay Bennett/Tribune Content AgencyA cartoon by Clay Bennett.

“This is going to cause mass confusion among voters—Democrats, Republicans, white, Black, everybody,” said Louisiana state Sen. Royce Duplessis, a Democrat who represents the New Orleans area, reported the AP. “What they’re effectively doing is changing the rules of the game in the middle of the game. It’s rigging the system.”

Who knows what sort of chaos has been unleashed in Louisiana, but it’s definitely not great. Roughly one-third of Louisiana’s population is Black, but the state didn’t send a Black member to Congress until 1990, and when the Callais case began in 2022, there was still only one Black House member. Well, the Supreme Court seems to have ensured that in the future, that number will be zero.

Elsewhere, Alabama’s Republican attorney general, Steve Marshall, is hyped to find out that Alabama might have a green light to discriminate. Get excited! “The Court rightly acknowledged that the South has made extraordinary progress, and that laws designed for a different era do not reflect the present reality.”

This is, to put it bluntly, a straight-up lie. The South has not made extraordinary progress. Instead, ever since 2022’s Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted a different part of the VRA, Black voter turnout has decreased, and the racial gap has widened. This decision will weaken Black and Hispanic turnout and representation even further, which was always the point.

Alabama hasn’t yet moved to redraw its maps, but they’re going to, and the GOP is no doubt thanking its lucky stars that this latest decision seems to implicitly reverse the 2023 Allen v. Milligan Supreme Court decision which had held that Alabama’s map diluted Black voting power. The state has been fighting that decision ever since and is currently barred from redrawing its districts until 2030, but hey, that can be solved by a quick little trip to the Supreme Court or something, can’t it?

Over in Texas, the state doesn’t really have to do anything because the Supreme Court already blessed its new maps openly designed to ensure a perpetual white GOP majority, which seems to be the only type of redistricting that is allowable now.

But hey, President Donald Trump is happy, and he’s the main client not just for the Department of Justice these days, but also for the conservatives on the Supreme Court who tenderly protect and approve almost everything Trump wants. The president immediately declared this was the “kind of ruling I like” and “a BIG WIN for Equal Protection under the Law.”

It’s a big win for John Roberts and it’s also a big win for the neo-Confederates who want to wipe out the Reconstruction Amendments and have a court happy to help. For everyone else, it’s a huge loss. Democrats are gearing up to fight fire with fire and do some on-the-fly redistricting, and they’re right to do so, but ultimately this sort of thing is corrosive and bad for democracy. John Roberts knows it. Samuel Alito knows it. Trump definitely knows it, and it’s exactly the future they want.

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Thursday, April 30, 2026

The Supreme Court Lands Its Fatal Blow on the Voting Rights Act

https://newrepublic.com/article/209677/supreme-court-voting-rights-act

Matt Ford

April 30, 2026

Supreme Injustices

The Supreme Court Lands Its Fatal Blow on the Voting Rights Act

The conservative bloc has dismantled the law that ensures that Black Americans can fully participate in American electoral politics.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

From left: Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito Jr., Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts

The Supreme Court achieved one of the principal goals of the conservative legal movement by destroying the last remaining pillar of Voting Rights Act of 1965. In Wednesday’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, the court’s six-justice conservative majority effectively dismantled its protections against racial gerrymandering, and thus rendered the once-mighty law a hollow shell of itself.

“Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was designed to enforce the Constitution—not collide with it,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court. “Unfortunately, lower courts have sometimes applied this Court’s Section 2 precedents in a way that forces states to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids.”

Alito’s majority opinion fundamentally rewrote the court’s Section 2 precedents and the law itself to achieve the conservative bloc’s goals. It raised numerous new hurdles to racial gerrymandering claims, including some that will likely be insurmountable. It even blessed the use of partisan gerrymandering as an explicit legal defense by states against racial gerrymandering.

The effects for American democracy will be corrosive. Southern Republicans will now likely set out to wipe out as many majority-minority congressional districts in the South, some of which were created by past VRA lawsuits, as they feasibly can without diluting other solidly Republican districts. Black representation in Congress will likely plummet, further tilting the House map in favor of the GOP.

Something noble and dignified has also been lost. The Voting Rights Act “was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent. “It ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality. And it has been repeatedly, and overwhelmingly, reauthorized by the people’s representatives in Congress. Only they have the right to say it is no longer needed—not the members of this Court.”

After the 2020 census, every state redrew its congressional map to account for population changes over the previous 10 years. Louisiana’s map was an obvious gerrymander that locked in Republican control of five districts. The sixth one, centered in and around New Orleans, packed most of Louisiana’s Black residents into an ultra-Democratic district.

A coalition of Black voters and voting rights groups filed a Section 2 challenge to the new map, arguing that Louisiana lawmakers had diluted their electoral power by packing them into a single district. A federal district court agreed and ordered the state to draw a second majority-minority district. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is generally considered to be the country’s most conservative court, upheld that ruling.

Normally, that would be the end of that matter. After Louisiana adopted a revised map to comply with the court order in 2023, however, a separate group of plaintiffs who described themselves as “non–African American voters” filed a separate lawsuit to challenge the new map’s constitutionality. They argued that state lawmakers had impermissibly used race as a factor when drawing the new districts, even though the new map was drawn to remedy racial gerrymandering in the first instance.

This upside-down approach already had supporters at the Supreme Court. That same year, the high court upheld a court order for Alabama to draw a second majority-minority district, with the court’s liberals joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh. In a concurring opinion, however, Kavanaugh suggested that he would be open to considering in a future case whether such remedies were themselves a form of racial gerrymandering.

Wednesday’s result was hardly a surprise. The high court originally heard Callais during its last term to decide a much narrower question, only to schedule it for reargument this term to allow for a much broader challenge to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Lest there be any doubt about the conservatives’ goals, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote an unusual side opinion where he complained about the court’s delay.

That frustration only made sense, as I noted at the time, if Thomas knew that there was already at least a five-justice majority for attacking Section 2 and they could simply do it now. But some of the justices apparently wanted to do things by the book, leading to the yearlong delay and to Wednesday’s decision. Indeed, Alito wrote on Wednesday that the court had delayed the case to avoid upending elections.

I am journalistically obligated to note that conservatives’ attack did not fully succeed. Thomas wanted the court to hold that Section 2 does not apply to redistricting at all, which would leave voters with no mechanism whatsoever to challenge racially gerrymandered maps in court. Alito instead left Section 2 nominally intact and framed Callais as a mere tune-up to the court’s preexisting framework for weighing racial gerrymandering claims.

“We need only update the framework so it aligns with the statutory text and reflects important developments since we decided Gingles 40 years ago,” Alito wrote, referring to Gingles v. Thornburg, the 1986 case where the court first interpreted a strengthened version of Section 2 passed in the 1980s.

The reality is that, thanks to the court’s butchery, it will be nearly impossible for any future racial gerrymandering claim to succeed. Thomas’s concurring opinion, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, lamented that his approach was not followed but celebrated that his preferred outcome was attained. “Today’s decision should largely put an end to this disastrous misadventure in voting-rights jurisprudence,” he crowed.

Kagan found this explanation unpersuasive. “Let’s first drop the majority’s misleading label,” she wrote in her dissent. “What the majority gives us today is not an ‘updated Gingles framework.’ It is its own thing, deserving of its own name. Maybe the Callais contrivance? Or if that seems too immediately pejorative, just say that what the majority does today is to impose the Callais requirements.”

At the core of the new Callais requirements is backbreaking deference to partisan gerrymandering, the sordid practice where state lawmakers draw maps to dilute a party’s electoral power as much as possible. In the 2019 case Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority held that federal courts could not hear partisan-gerrymandering claims, finding no justiciable standards for them under the Fourteenth Amendment. The justices have traditionally described the practice in negative terms, with Alito noting on Wednesday that “disapproval” of it “dates back to the founding.”

Now Rucho has swallowed the court’s racial gerrymandering cases whole. Alito warned that litigants could try to circumvent Rucho by using racial gerrymandering claims to break extreme partisan gerrymanders. “In a state where both parties have substantial support and where race is often correlated with party preference,” he claimed, “a litigant can easily exploit Section 2 for partisan purposes by repackaging a partisan-gerrymandering claim as a racial-gerrymandering claim.”

This is wretched reasoning, driven by a clear desire to avoid handing victories to certain plaintiffs instead of a faithful adherence to law and precedent. The obvious outcome is that states can now, with the court’s blessing, invoke partisan gerrymandering as a legitimate rationale to foil racial gerrymandering claims, especially in states where race and partisanship are closely correlated. “Assuming the State has left behind no smoking-gun evidence of a race-based motive (an almost fanciful prospect), Section 2 will play no role,” Kagan warned in her dissent.

Gingles’s first precondition, for example, was that a “community of minority voters” is “sufficiently numerous and compact to constitute a majority in a reasonably configured district.” Section 2 plaintiffs typically accomplished this by drawing an “illustrative map” to show, as Alito put it, “their desired number of majority-minority districts.”

Alito revised this prong to require Section 2 plaintiffs to also meet “all of the state’s legitimate districting objectives, including traditional districting criteria and the state’s specified political goals.” The first part basically repeats the existing Gingles precondition: Districts must generally be contiguous and compact. But the second part requires plaintiffs to draw maps that comply with a state’s partisan-gerrymandering aims.

“If the State’s aims in drawing a map include a target partisan distribution of voters, a specific margin of victory for certain incumbents, or any other goal not prohibited by the Constitution, the plaintiffs’ illustrative maps must achieve these goals just as well,” he wrote. “If not, the plaintiffs would fail to demonstrate that the State’s chosen map was driven by racial considerations rather than permissible aims.”

That also sounds suspiciously like a requirement that Section 2 plaintiffs must prove discriminatory intent by lawmakers. The Supreme Court has been down that road before: In the 1980 case Mobile v. Borden, the justices read an intent requirement into Section 2, only to be overridden by Congress when it passed an updated version of the VRA to explicitly nullify that ruling. Gingles and its preconditions emerged from the aftermath where the court—until now, at least—accepted Congress’s discriminatory-effects test.

“The problem, as even the majority recognizes, was ‘that a focus on discriminatory intent, rather than discriminatory effects, would defeat worthy claims because of the difficulty of proving intentional discrimination,’” Kagan wrote, quoting from precedent. “It is the rare legislature, as the history of voting discrimination shows, that cannot camouflage racial targeting with race-neutral justifications.”

Alito claimed that he wasn’t simply reintroducing a discriminatory-intent test in his opinion, but it was not convincing. “The dissent states over and over again that our decision requires a Section 2 plaintiff to prove discriminatory intent,” he wrote, referring to Kagan’s dissent. When a discriminatory effect is shown, he continued, plaintiffs must then show that “the circumstances must give rise to a strong inference of racial discrimination.”

Kagan, in a footnote, sounded almost surprised to read this portion of Alito’s opinion, “which, if true, would be welcome news. And welcomer still if lower courts took those last words seriously and allowed Section 2 claims to succeed even absent proof of race-based purpose. But I suspect they will not. Because they, like I, will have read the many pages leading up to the majority’s coda.”

It was “something of a mystery,” Kagan wrote, to try to figure out what Alito meant to do by disclaiming an intent test. “To try to disguise what it is really doing?” she asked, rhetorically. “To somehow absolve itself of responsibility? Or could it just be that, in responding to this dissent, the majority can do nothing but agree?”

Few conservative justices have been honest enough to describe what they have been doing to the VRA. The plot against the VRA was best articulated 13 years ago by Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the principal co-conspirators. He delivered a lengthy monologue on why the Supreme Court had to act, during oral arguments in Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 case where the justices considered the constitutionality of the VRA’s preclearance mechanism.

“This Court doesn’t like to get involved in racial questions such as this one,” Scalia claimed. “It’s something that can be left to Congress. The problem here, however, is suggested by the comment I made earlier, that the initial enactment of this legislation in a time when the need for it was so much more abundantly clear was—in the Senate, there—it was double-digits against it. And that was only a 5-year term.”

The justice was describing the law’s original passage and the stiff resistance of Southern senators to it. “Then, it is reenacted 5 years later, again for a 5-year term,” Scalia continued. “Double-digits against it in the Senate. Then it was reenacted for 7 years. Single digits against it. Then enacted for 25 years, 8 Senate votes against it. And this last enactment, not a single vote in the Senate against it. And the House is pretty much the same.”

What Scalia is describing is factually true. The Voting Rights Act became much more popular over time, and was eventually seen as a celebrated milestone of the nation’s progress in dismantling racial segregation and creating a more equal country. “Today, we renew a bill that helped bring a community on the margins into the life of American democracy,” President George W. Bush told an audience on the White House lawn when signing the 2006 reauthorization.

But not everybody was so celebratory. “Now, I don’t think that’s attributable to the fact that it is so much clearer now that we need this,” Scalia continued. “I think it is attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement. It’s been written about. Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.”

Describing the VRA as a “racial entitlement” for ensuring that Black people in the South can fully participate in American political life needs no further comment. But his ultimate point was that since the Republican Party could not openly oppose the Voting Rights Act without immense political backlash, it must fall to the conservative legal movement and the Roberts court to demolish it.

“I don’t think there is anything to be gained by any Senator to vote against continuation of this act,” Scalia explained. “And I am fairly confident it will be reenacted in perpetuity unless a court can say it does not comport with the Constitution. You have to show, when you are treating different States differently, that there’s a good reason for it.”

To that end, the court’s conservative majority held in Shelby County that the VRA’s preclearance formula was no longer valid because Congress had not taken changing circumstances into account. “Nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically,” Roberts wrote for the court, in what now sounds less like a celebration of America’s progress toward racial equality and more like a lament—or a threat to reverse it.

Then, in the 2021 case Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the Supreme Court struck again, this time by throwing new encumbrances on plaintiffs who wish to invoke Section 2 to challenge election laws with racially discriminatory effects. Alito, writing for the court that time, even managed to invoke concerns about voter fraud—a phantasmal specter in American elections—to hamstring the VRA’s ability to protect Black and Hispanic voters.

In her Callais dissent, Kagan noted that Alito’s work in 2021 was so thorough that since Brnovich was handed down, “not a single Section 2 suit has successfully challenged such a restriction on voting, however discriminatory in operation.” The same fate will now likely befall racial gerrymandering claims under Section 2, as well. Thanks to Callais, the Voting Rights Act is dead.

So, what is to be done? First, if they are ever able to retake Congress again, Democrats must now abolish single-member districts and adopt proportional representation instead. (I have written about this at some length before.) Only then will the American electorate be free from the antidemocratic poison of gerrymandering—of any kind, in all places, at all times, and for any reason.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, there must be consequences for the Supreme Court for its war on the Reconstruction amendments and on multiracial democracy. Twenty years ago, President George W. Bush signed the VRA’s reauthorization into law with civil rights leaders around him, only for two of his Supreme Court appointees to destroy the law and its protections. No civil rights advance, no voting rights protection, no democratic recourse can survive a conservative Supreme Court majority that is determined to stop it.

Since the Supreme Court as currently constructed cannot be trusted to protect the egalitarian republic that, as Kagan noted, Union soldiers and civil rights activists fought and died to build, sufficient justices must be appointed to it to remedy the problem. Fortunately, since the conservative justices lacked the courage of their convictions to strike down the VRA altogether, all the liberal justices must do is wipe away the false shackles that bind it: Shelby County, Rucho, Brnovich, and now Callais. The Voting Rights Act may be dead today, but through court reform, it can one day be given new life again.