A raid last month in Chicago has signaled a sharp escalation in the White House’s immigration crackdown and ratcheted up tensions in a city already on edge. Dozens of agents stormed the building. Guns were drawn. Unmarked cars filled the streets. Agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter. The raid was executed in the heart of South Shore, an overwhelmingly Black neighborhood on Lake Michigan that has long been a tangle of middle-class dreams, urban decay and gentrification. The raid echoed through South Shore, pinballing through memories of the 1990s drug wars, ongoing economic divides and the sometimes uncomfortable relations between Black residents and the wave of Latino migrants who began arriving in 2022, often bused in from southern border states.

Efforts to back fill some of the cuts to U.S. foreign aid by the Trump administration raised over $125 million in eight months. The sum is more than the organizers of the emergency funds had imagined possible, while still falling far short of the tens of billions cut or frozen with the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development. A team of former USAID employees launched an effort they called Project Resource Optimization to recommended 80 specific programs for private donors to fund. In September, donors had given more than $110 million in charitable grants. Other emergency funds raised an additional $15 million.

Ex-Trump national security adviser John Bolton has been charged with illegally storing and transmitting classified information. The investigation burst into public view in August when the FBI searched Bolton's Maryland home and Washington office for classified records he may have illegally retained. Bolton’s attorney says many of the documents seized were approved as part of a pre-publication review for his book. Bolton's indictment Thursday sets the stage for a court case centering on a longtime fixture in Republican foreign policy circles. Bolton served in President Donald Trump’s first administration before being fired and emerging as a vocal critic.

One of the U.S.’s longest standing pieces of environmental legislation, credited with helping save rare whales from extinction, is the subject of an effort for cutbacks from Republican lawmakers who now feel they have the political will to do so. The Marine Mammal Protection Act, enacted 1972, protects whales, seals, polar bears and other sea animals, and it places restrictions on commercial fishermen and shippers. The legislation has long been a target of conservatives and industry members who now seek to remove key pieces of it. A GOP-led bill is in the works to do just that. Conservation groups adamantly oppose the changes and say they will erase years of hard won gains for jeopardized species.

Vice President JD Vance is warning of deeper cuts to the federal workforce the longer the government shutdown goes on. Vance spoke Sunday as the shutdown entered its 12th day. He warned that the new cuts would be “painful,” even as he said the Trump administration is working to ensure that the military would be paid and some services would be preserved for low-income Americans, including food assistance. Hundreds of thousands of workers have been furloughed in recent days. In a court filing on Friday, the White House said well over 4,000 employees would soon be fired. Vance said the new cuts would be “painful.”