Editor’s note: This piece is part of Lawfare’s collection “9/11 at 25: The Legal Architecture of the War on Terror, Twenty-Five Years On,” examining how 9/11 remains—or doesn’t—embedded in current legal and policy frameworks, a quarter century after the attacks. Read the full collection here.

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A federal judge has sided with Anthropic on its claims that the Department of Defense illegally retaliated against Anthropic’s protected speech by labeling the AI company a “supply chain risk.” The judge found that designation, intended to penalize Anthropic for telling the U.S. military it would not allow their technology to be used for mass surveillance of U.S.

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Economists, policymakers and journalists have been puzzling over why so many workers between 25 and 54 have been leaving the labor force over the past two years.

An Ohio data analyst has identified one cause that could be a warning sign for the overall economy.

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The U.S. recently reached a grim milestone: As of July 23, more measles cases have been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention than in any year since 1991. It took less than seven months to blow past the three-decade high recorded last year.

This potentially deadly disease is easily prevented. Shots are widely available and, in many cases, free. Still, since the beginning of last year, more than 4,850 people here have been infected, and three have died. Among them were two unvaccinated girls in West Texas whose deaths made national headlines.

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Reporting Highlights

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A robot was on fire. Again.

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Federal immigration agents are employing new tactics — from arresting academics at airports to setting up a checkpoint at a popular creek in a National Forest — to boost their arrest numbers, leading to more arrests in July than in any previous month of the Trump administration.

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In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the PATRIOT Act and the Homeland Security Act were enacted as urgent responses to reorganize and bolster the U.S. counterterrorism apparatus. Some of these authorities were intended to be temporary emergency measures.

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U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin last weekend implored states and cities to cooperate with federal immigration officials, which he said would lead to safer and lower-profile arrests and deportations.

Speaking to a group of Democratic and Republican governors gathered for the National Governors Association summer meeting, Mullin called on local governments to help focus on removing the “worst of the worst” offenders, particularly targeting people without legal citizenship status who have criminal court convictions.

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The Federal Emergency Management Agency has issued new grant guidelines that threaten to withhold counterterrorism funds from states that do not comply with President Donald Trump’s election security directives.

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Twenty-six states accuse the Trump administration in a new lawsuit of illegally threatening to withhold billions in counterterrorism and emergency preparedness funds from states that don’t adopt sweeping election changes or cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.

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Most Americans don’t read the rules that govern the federal grants funding science. Those rules, called the Uniform Guidance, shape how cancer research is funded, graduate students are trained, clinical trials are sustained, universities stock their labs and discoveries from those labs move into broader society.

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Seeking to stop a “flood” of court cases freeing immigrants from mandatory detention, the Trump administration is asking an appeals court to put three immigrants back in detention.

The immigrants were freed by Texas federal judges in February and March in a case that was upheld by an appeals court panel for Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, which found that such immigrants have the right to bond hearings within 90 days of being detained. That decision was reversed by the full 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which will hold a full hearing on the case in September. 

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On an early April morning, two U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents approached Y.R. in the parking lot of her Dallas-Fort Worth area apartment as she was about to head to her construction job.

Y.R., a 37-year-old undocumented Honduran immigrant who came to the U.S. in early 2022, had spent nearly a year filling out government forms and submitting to a background check and DNA test to get custody of her niece and nephew, who had been stuck in a federal shelter after they crossed the Texas-Mexico border in the spring of 2025.

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