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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New York City has more than 500 miles of coastline. The city’s coastal zone is home to around 1 million people as well as billions of dollars of residential and commercial property, and no two miles of the waterfront are quite the same. The marshy areas of southern Queens, the housing projects in waterfront Brooklyn, and the towers of Manhattan’s Financial District are all vulnerable during high tides and major storm events, and each of these areas is vulnerable in a different way.

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Nevada officials have long presented themselves as a voice for compromise and conservation in debates over the Colorado River. The Las Vegas area, home to two-thirds of the state’s population and most of its economy, has become a model of urban water conservation.

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Kairos Power announced the Nuclear Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Precast (NuCAMP), an initiative focused on maturing new manufacturing and construction methods and developing vocational training for skilled workers in East Tennessee to support the deployment of advanced nuclear reactors.

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Luther “Sunny” Miller is nearly 80, but in his younger days, he worked at Aerojet, a rocket and missile manufacturer located quite literally in his backyard. He can’t prove it, but he worries that his thyroid and bladder problems, and his wife’s kidney disease, can be traced to the plant.

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 When Scott Norton became president of the TexAmericas Center, he hoped the industrial park would attract employers that would bring much-needed jobs to North East Texas.

Little did he know the industrial center would sit atop one of the country’s largest and richest lithium deposits, known as the Smackover Formation, and would also become a key location for mineral production in Texas.

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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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State Democratic officials are preparing for chaos at the polls this November, as President Donald Trump casts doubt on election security and pushes for more federal involvement in local voting. 

“We’re no longer talking about hypothetical situations,” said Nick Brown, Washington state’s Democratic attorney general, noting the president’s push to nationalize election administration and to question the integrity of upcoming elections.

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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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When torrential rain doused the Texas Hill Country last month, Paul Welch stayed up past his bedtime checking radar and rain gauges on RiverHub, the Upper Guadalupe River Authority’s new tracking website. At midnight, comforted by what he saw, he went to bed. 

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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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