A delivery to a Black women-founded brokerage in the West Plaza took a violent turn when the driver, frustrated that no one answered within seconds, was recorded using a racial slur at the front door. The company’s founder says she wants answers from FedEx.

Kansas Republicans overrode their own governor to pass the Halo Act, a moving 25-foot arrest zone around every agent in the state. In Olathe, ICE is already using it to trap the people who film them, with local police finishing the arrests.

Somewhere between a gerrymander and a Twitch stream, American politics broke open in Kansas City. Young people are staging leftist insurgencies all across the country while millions watch live, and nobody who drew the maps saw them coming.

Three days after City officials stormed their buildings and ordered families out within 24 hours, the Health Department suspended the Chicago slumlord’s rental license. The union that forced the reckoning says he cannot rent another unit until he fixes what he broke.

From Nairobi cab stands to Lagos livestreams, Africans who once sheltered the ANC’s revolutionaries are celebrating every defeat of South Africa’s national team, as mobs with machetes hunt immigrants door to door in Johannesburg and Durban to the chant of “abahambe,” they must leave. It is MAGA’s playbook and ICE’s manhunt run on African soil, colonial violence surviving its colonizers.

From Baltimore to Kansas, states are pouring millions into militarized surveillance software for schools. An investigation into the AI that sent armed police after a Black teen holding a bag of Doritos.

In a Palestinian displacement camp by the sea, Hassan Herzallah and his friends built a volleyball court to steal back a feeling the genocide had taken. On its sideline sat an old friend who could no longer rise to play. This is the first piece The Defender has ever published from the ground in Gaza.

On the eve of the semiquincentennial, we are republishing the speech I gave on July 4, 2020, at the Anti-Independence Day Rally in Westport, steps from a building that held Black people enslaved in its basement. Then we are going to talk about the cookout.