The latest episode of “Deportation, Inc.: The Rise of the Immigration Enforcement Economy" examined how United States immigration enforcement, a rapidly growing multi-billion-dollar industry shaped by private profit and political power, deports and removes detainees.
On Lawfare Live, Tuesday, Sept. 29, at 2 p.m. ET, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Anna Bower, Roger Parloff, and Molly Roberts to break down the morning’s D.C. Circuit’s oral argument over Judge Boasberg’s inquiry into whether top Trump administration officials committed criminal contempt when they sent 137 Venezuelans to CECOT, a notorious El Salvador prison.
Loren Voss and Natalie Orpett argued that federal law under 18 U.S.C. § 592—which bars troops and armed men from places where elections are held unless necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States—is not overridden by the Insurrection Act, which authorizes the president to use the armed forces domestically. Voss and Orpett analyzed statutory text, canons of construction, and legislative history to illustrate that Congress intended the ban to constrain the president even where the Insurrection Act might otherwise apply, in order to prevent voter intimidation and protect the integrity of elections.
On Lawfare Daily from last week’s Lawfare Live, Wittes sat down with Roberts, Bower, Parloff, and Eric Columbus to discuss the latest developments in litigation surrounding the Trump administration, including President Trump’s bans on CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House, updates in third-country removal litigation, and more.
James Goodwin and Wendy Wagner warned how a case the Supreme Court will hear this fall, Suncor v. Boulder County, could allow a court already encroaching on the horizontal separation of power to erode vertical federalism. The case turns on whether federal law preempts local and state-law climate deception suits against fossil fuel companies, and the authors argued that a ruling in favor of the companies could give greater power to the president.
On Lawfare Daily, Orpett sat down with Rachel VanLandingham to discuss the many ways the Trump administration has been remaking the Department of Defense, ranging from bans on transgender service members and the so-called “High-T” initiative to quiet bureaucratic moves such as changes to personnel management. The two spoke about how these changes are being implemented, what’s rhetoric and what’s reality, and the impact it’s all having on the Defense Department and on troops themselves.
Madison Hunke, Megan Karlshoej-Pedersen, and Anna Zahn examined the Pentagon’s “1057” report on civilian harm from U.S. military operations in 2025 and how the report raises concerns about the military’s ability to protect civilians from harm, outlining harms the report failed to acknowledge in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and the Caribbean. The authors noted how structural challenges, such as cuts to civilian-harm assessment capacity, may have left the military unable to learn from mass casualty incidents.
On Lawfare Live, Friday, Oct. 2, at 4 p.m. ET, Orpett sat down with Scott Anderson, Roberts, Bower, Parloff, and Columbus to discuss the latest developments in litigation surrounding the Trump administration—including a lawsuit challenging the Iran War, updates on litigation over the cancellation of foreign aid funds, and more.
Kim Christian Priemel reviewed Jessica Trisko Darden’s book, “The Accused: How Women Faced Justice for Nazi-Era Crimes,” praising her uncovering the lost names of female perpetrators and her account of how gender norms shaped both accusations and defenses. Priemel also noted that limited judicial records meant that the book reveals more about the deeds of the accused women than their trials and how they faced justice after the war.
On Lawfare Daily, Julia Curlee sat down with Jonathan Czin to unpack Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit to Washington, his first in 11 years. The two discussed what each side walked away with, the implications for Taiwan and the war in Iran, and how the loss of China expertise and policy staff showed in the summit’s preparation and readouts.
Peter Harrell sat down with Martin Chorzempa to discuss President Trump's Sept. 24 summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the balance of leverage in the geopolitical and economic relationship, and the countries' differing perspectives on—and approaches to—artificial intelligence.
In the latest edition of Lawfare’s Foreign Policy Essay Series, Jeremy Shapiro argued that the conventional wisdom regarding Obama’s 2013 “red line” on Syria is wrong: Obama achieved a diplomatic success by declining to bomb Syria and instead accepting a deal that removed much of then-President Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons. Shapiro described how President Trump’s symbolic 2017 Tomahawk strike on a Syrian airbase did not accomplish anything operationally, and how Washington’s belief that credibility requires following threats with force is a myth that perpetuates the war in Iran.
Gabor Rona examined the legal analysis underlying the United Nations’ report from the International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran, which found that U.S. airstrikes, including attacks on the Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School and the Lamerd Sports Complex, constituted war crimes under international humanitarian law. Rona argued that shifts within the Pentagon toward “lethality over legality” and degraded human oversight likely contributed to these failures.
On Rational Security, Anderson sat down with Tyler McBrien, Bower, and Michael Feinberg to talk through the week’s big news in national security. The group discussed the Supreme Court clearing the way—for the third time—for the Trump administration to resume deporting migrants to “third countries,” public corruption investigations into Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and other members of Congress, President Trump’s war on the press, and more.
Adam Segal and Matt Ferren warned that amid attention on recent Iran-back cyber operations, the People’s Republic of China poses a longer-term and more strategic cybersecurity threat to U.S. critical infrastructure. The authors noted that the U.S. requires stronger domestic defenses and must disrupt Chinese cyber operations while applying economic and diplomatic pressure.
In the latest edition of the Seriously Risky Business cybersecurity newsletter, Tom Uren broke down OpenAI’s recent revelation that its agents had been acting undesirably on government websites, ShinyHunters’ breach of the FBI jobs site, and more.
Mailyn Fidler and Matt Kristoffersen argued that lawmakers attempting to regulate frontier artificial intelligence (AI) face the temptation toward cybersecuritization: flattening complex issues into their technical complexity and danger to the public. Fidler and Kristoffersen described that “cybersecurity” can become a substitute for hard policy choices when it pulls decisions out of democratic deliberation into separate expert and national security channels and increases secrecy around governance.
Sam Hunter and Seamus Hughes described the growing threat of abliterated and uncensored AI: models that have had their ethical safeguards removed. Hunter and Hughes warned that these models are more difficult to monitor when run locally, can supply harmful guidance to malign actors, and act as sycophantic “coaches” for extremists.
On Scaling Laws, Kevin Frazier sat down with Dave Willner and Vaishnavi J. to discuss how AI is affecting younger users, why existing child-safety responses are often inadequate, and the open-source teen self-harm and suicidal ideation policies they have developed.
On Lawfare Daily, Frazier sat down with Alex Bores, Nat Purser, and Mackenzie Arnold to discuss recent developments in the AI risk environment, what led us here, what comes next for domestic and AI foreign policy, and more.
Joe Khawam argued that U.S. export controls can meaningfully reduce the risks of open-weight AI, but only at particular chokepoints like the supply of computing power and services that help users customize models. Khawam explained that when the government seeks to control AI model weights themselves, they face legal and practical obstacles.
In the first installment of the “Posting Through the Singularity” column, Scott Shapiro explained that in this semi-regular series of essays, he will explore where AI and law meet, with a particular focus on computational jurisprudence. Shapiro discussed how his lab at Yale Law School converted insurance regulations into formal logic so that a theorem prover could deduce the answers to an actuarial exam's computational questions, rather than a language model predicting them.
And that was the week that was.
