A Chilling Effect on ICE

The Justice Department, Heather Mac Donald writes, has “just filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court to vindicate its authority to enforce immigration law.” The move comes in response to a ruling from a federal judge in Los Angeles that ICE’s questioning of suspected illegal aliens was unconstitutional. U.S. District Court Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong declared that the use of race in tandem with several other factors—including a Spanish accent or inability to speak English and presence at day-job pickup sites known to harbor illegals—did not constitute sufficient grounds for questioning people about their immigration status.

The ruling will have a “chilling effect on immigration enforcement,” Mac Donald writes, and “That chilling effect is precisely the point.” The Supreme Court has ordered the plaintiffs to respond to the government’s emergency appeal by August 12. Regardless of what the Court decides, she writes, “Frimpong’s rules for litigating in her courtroom are themselves a violation of the principle of color-blindness.” Read more here.

The University of Texas at Austin has a long history of using racial preferences in admissions. Before 1997, for example, the school awarded black, Hispanic, and other “underrepresented” applicants a boost in the process.

While UT–Austin has supposedly abandoned these practices after the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action in college admissions, Renu Mukherjee is skeptical. She reviews a recent lawsuit against the Texas flagship university brought by Students for Fair Admissions, which claimed that admissions officers had access to applicants’ racial data—and were potentially using it to discriminate. Read her take here.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act includes a federal tax credit for donors to Scholarship Granting Organizations that help students attend private schools. The program amounts to free money for state education systems, but there’s a catch: states have to opt in to the program, and union leaders are pressuring governors to decline.

Danyela Souza Egorov argues that New York governor Kathy Hochul should sign on to the tax-credit program, which would benefit not only students but also the governor’s political prospects.

If Hochul “truly cares about helping low-income students and stemming Democrats’ losses among minority voters,” Egorov writes, “she’ll opt in.”

The FBI’s latest report on crime trends is in: the 2024 U.S. murder rate was five per 100,000.

“This was well below its 2020–21 surge of around 6.5, a 15 percent decrease from 2023, and even a touch below the 2019 rate,” writes Robert VerBruggen.

Read here for more details on the causes of the decline—and whether it will continue.

The Condé Nast media empire, which includes such storied publications as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Vogue, was responsible for some of the twentieth century’s most powerful journalism and visual media. Charles McElwee reviews a new book by Michael M. Grynbaum on the media conglomerate and its impact on American culture.

“Though many of Condé Nast’s magazines endure today,” McElwee writes, “Grynbaum captures the bygone black-and-white vitality of an operation that, at its peak late last century, held no regard for frugality in aesthetic expression.”

Read his review here.

Photo credits: Genaro Molina / Contributor / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images