Democracy Watch: June 2026

Who Gets to Exercise Power Without Meaningful Public Scrutiny?

Photo by Mike Newbry on Unsplash

When I saw the indictments, I had to read them twice. Fifteen Minnesota activists were charged in connection with Operation Metro Surge. Some of them had been doing what I had done: watching, dispatching, documenting. The kind of civic participation that has a name in a democracy and a different name when a government decides it needs one.

That is where June 2026 begins.

No single development this month proves democratic backsliding. Democracies are designed to withstand conflict, litigation, protest, and political disagreement. But the pattern is there. The question is whether enough people are still positioned to name it before the institutions designed to interrupt it finish adapting to it.

What connects several of June’s most significant developments is a common thread: who gets to exercise power without meaningful public scrutiny?

The Street

On June 10, federal prosecutors announced charges against fifteen Minneapolis activists, alleging they conspired to impede federal officers during Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operation that brought thousands of agents to the Twin Cities earlier this year, many of whom were masked and heavily armed, traveling in unmarked vehicles.

The defendants are members of Direct Action Minnesota and affiliated groups, including the Black Cat Workers Collective. U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen described them at a Tuesday briefing as “far-left antifa activists” engaged in “organized, lawless behavior.” Five of the fifteen face additional charges, including solicitation to commit a crime of violence, interstate threats, interstate stalking, assault on a federal officer, and destruction of government property.

The indictment cites defendants’ texts and Signal messages and alleges they deployed “hard and soft blockades” against federal law enforcement, threw ice blocks, and damaged vehicles. When asked how many federal agents were actually injured, Rosen said the charges stem from their plans. “Whether or not they actually, at the end of the day, caused bodily harm is not the measure of whether or not they committed a serious crime,” he said.

Law professor Carl Tobias, who has read the indictment, called it “pretty thin” and said he doesn’t find it a compelling case. Minneapolis City Council member Jason Chavez responded the same day: “Alerting our neighbors about ICE activity is not a crime. Observing is not a crime, and loving your immigrant neighbors is not a crime.”

What Rosen did not address at the briefing: asked about charges against officers involved in the fatal shootings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, both killed by federal agents during the operation, he said those investigations are ongoing.

That asymmetry is worth sitting with. Fifteen activists face federal conspiracy charges for their plans. The agents who killed two people during the same operation remain under ongoing investigation, uncharged.

When governments frame political activism through the lens of a security threat, the line between dissent and criminality becomes elastic. Elastic categories do not need to be enforced to do their work. Uncertainty is enough. People begin running the calculation on whether ordinary participation might someday be read through that frame, and they adjust their behavior accordingly, before any verdict, before any charge, sometimes before any investigation.

The concern is not simply who is charged. It is who decides where dissent ends and criminality begins, and whether that line can be moved without anyone formally changing it.

The Narrative

Long before governments change laws, they change categories.

Over the past several months, administration officials and allied commentators have increasingly described antifascist activists, protest networks, and certain forms of left-wing organizing through the language of extremism, disorder, and security threat. No formal legal designation currently classifies “Antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization. The label appears anyway in official rhetoric, press conferences, charging documents, and media narratives surrounding protest activity.

The power of an elastic category lies not in precisely describing everyone inside it. It doesn’t have to. Its ambiguity is the point. It can encompass people whose actions differ dramatically, from those who commit violence to those who protest, document, observe, or associate. Once those distinctions begin to blur, the category itself starts doing the work that evidence cannot.

This month, a UFC fighter standing on the White House lawn used his post-fight interview to repeat the longstanding false conspiracy theory that Michelle Obama is a man. No correction interrupted it. No one seemed surprised to hear it. The significance isn’t so much the fighter as it is the lawn. An idea that spent years on the political fringe appeared comfortably in one of the most visible public spaces in the country, and the room absorbed it without friction.

That is how narrative conditioning works. A claim does not need to be true to become useful. It only needs to be repeated until it feels familiar. Once a political identity becomes associated with threat or disorder, the public becomes more willing to tolerate extraordinary measures directed at people in that category. Most people will never know exactly where the boundary is. That uncertainty is often enough.

The Press

Democracy depends on documentation. Journalists may report events, but more importantly, they create independent records when official narratives are contested, when force is used in public, and when the account given afterward diverges from what actually happened.

Earlier this year, Don Lemon was arrested in Los Angeles, while Georgia Fort and independent journalist Shane Bollman were arrested in Minnesota. All three had covered a January protest at Cities Church in St. Paul, where demonstrators alleged that one of the church’s pastors served as an ICE field director. Lemon, who had no affiliation with the organizing group, was there as a solo journalist. Fort was documenting. A grand jury indicted them on charges of conspiracy and interfering with the First Amendment rights of worshippers. These were charges a federal magistrate judge had earlier declined to authorize, finding no evidence of criminal behavior.

Prosecutors sought search warrants for Lemon and Fort’s YouTube accounts. A federal judge denied those requests and criticized prosecutors for failing to inform the court about the Privacy Protection Act, which, with few exceptions, forbids the search and seizure of journalists’ work product. Prosecutors made the same omission in an unrelated raid on Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home earlier this year. The judge who granted the warrant later said he hadn’t known about the PPA and scolded the government for omitting it.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press filed a FOIA lawsuit in May seeking records showing whether the Justice Department followed its own internal guidelines, which largely bar the use of search warrants against journalists. To date, none of the requested records have been produced.

Lemon said after his court appearance: “I will not be silenced. I have spent my entire career covering the news. I will not stop now.”

The issue is not whether reporters are above the law. The issue is whether prosecutors are obligated to follow it when journalists are the target, and whether omitting the Privacy Protection Act from two separate warrant applications in the same year was oversight or strategy.

A journalist who cannot confidently distinguish between documentation and participation will eventually stop showing up. The chill does not require a prohibition. It requires enough uncertainty that people begin making the calculation themselves.

The Ballot Box

The administration’s March 31 executive order directed the Department of Homeland Security to provide states with citizenship verification lists and instructed the Postal Service to refuse mail-in ballots from anyone whose name doesn’t appear on them. The Postal Service subsequently proposed a rule requiring states to submit every registered voter’s name and address to a new federal ballot portal and preprint unique barcodes on every outgoing and return envelope. In Washington state alone, that means individual entries for more than five million voters. Election officials there estimate envelope reprinting alone could cost over $1.5 million, before accounting for the cascade of additional steps the rule would require.

The Department of Justice is simultaneously suing multiple states to obtain unredacted voter rolls. Maine’s secretary of state sent a letter to DHS in March seeking written assurance that ICE would not be deployed to polling locations. Months later, no response has arrived.

When asked whether he would send ICE or National Guard troops to the polls, Trump said he would do “anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections.” His press secretary declined to guarantee ICE agents wouldn’t appear at polling locations. The incoming Homeland Security secretary said during his confirmation hearing that he didn’t understand the concern.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court, which spent two decades insisting that federal courts shouldn’t order major changes close to an election, allowed Louisiana to suspend its congressional primary mid-vote and discard 42,000 ballots already cast, and then it fast-tracked redistricting across Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, and Tennessee ahead of November. The Purcell principle, which the court had cited only five months earlier to chide a lower court for intervening in an active campaign, went unmentioned in the Callais opinion. As law professor Steve Vladeck wrote, the court’s own interventions are now wreaking havoc, with the coincidental effect of benefiting Republicans.

Five states, including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, and Washington, have responded by passing legislation to shield their elections from federal interference. Connecticut now bars law enforcement from within 250 feet of a polling location without the election official's permission. Washington made it a felony to disclose voter registration data without the secretary of state’s authorization.

The Back Room

Dialog was cofounded in 2006 by Peter Thiel and investor Auren Hoffman. It convenes annually at venues such as the Ritz-Carlton Dove Mountain and the San Clemente Palace in Venice. It’s invitation only, registration fees are north of $16,000, and everything is said off the record. For two decades, it maintained almost no public footprint. Its members kept quiet about it. That changed this week when a Swiss hacktivist found the group’s registration records embedded in the publicly accessible code of its own website.

The 2026 retreat, scheduled for August in Ireland, lists 222 registrants. Among them: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, Senators Ted Cruz and Cory Booker, Representative Jim Himes (the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee), NATO Supreme Allied Commander General Alexus Grynkewich, Jared Kushner, Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt, and Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale (whose software runs case management for ICE and data fusion for the Pentagon). Also registered are: The governors of Maryland and Colorado. The CEO of YouTube. The head of the Anti-Defamation League. The executive director of the Charles Koch Foundation. A Nobel laureate economist. A former DEA acting chief of staff. Six members of the PayPal Mafia.

None registered using government email addresses. All used personal or corporate accounts, placing their attendance outside public records laws.

The session titles included “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” “Build-a-Cult,” and “How’s Your Sex Life?” The moderator guide found in the same exposed database instructs session leaders to remind participants that everything is off the record and to model brief introductions to avoid status signaling in a room containing senators, a NATO commander, and multiple billionaires.

Auren Hoffman, Dialog’s chairman, founded the location-data broker SafeGraph and identity-resolution firm LiveRamp. He appears in the directory alongside Scott Bessent, whose Treasury Department writes the rules on financial data, and Ted Cruz, whose Senate Commerce Committee oversees the FTC’s data privacy authority. Joe Lonsdale, whose software runs ICE’s case management system, is listed alongside Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and the ranking member of the committee that oversees the agencies with which Palantir contracts.

The future gets drafted in rooms most people will never be invited into. The people inside this one registered with personal email accounts specifically because government accounts are subject to public records law.

The Courts

Courts across the country are hearing an extraordinary volume of litigation challenging executive actions, and they were already strained before this year began.

Lawsuits naming Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security reached 10,281 in 2025, nearly double the 5,508 filed the year before. That number is a proxy for something larger: the volume of legal challenge that immigration enforcement alone has generated, filed by states, advocacy organizations, and individuals who have no other mechanism left to push back.

Civil cases pending more than three years rose 346% over the past two decades. Median trial times in some districts now exceed five years. Cases that need resolution in months are entering a queue measured in years.

Courts are the primary remaining mechanism through which executive power is being contested. And right now, they are being asked to carry more weight than they were built to hold, at exactly the moment the other mechanisms are under pressure too.

The Pattern

Each of these developments has an innocent explanation. So did the last set. And the one before that. Taken individually, none of it requires a conclusion. Taken together, it describes an environment in which the mechanisms designed to check power are being asked to absorb more pressure than they were built to hold, at the same moment that the cost of using them is rising.

Some of the activities described by supporters as watching, documenting and dispatching information are now facing federal conspiracy charges for plans, while the agents who killed two people during the same operation remain under ongoing investigation, uncharged. The journalists who documented a protest are fighting charges that a federal magistrate judge had already declined to authorize. The election officials planning for the possibility of their own arrest are doing so as they rebuild the federal cybersecurity infrastructure dismantled in March 2025. The courts absorbing the legal challenges to all of this are working through backlogs measured in years.

None of this is hidden. It is distributed across enough jurisdictions, news cycles and separate legal proceedings that it rarely gets named as a single thing. That distribution is part of how it works. Each arena looks like its own story. The pattern becomes visible only when you hold them side by side.

I have written in this series about narrative conditioning, the way stories about who is threatening and who is threatened get established before any law changes. And about probabilistic punishment, the way uncertainty about where the line is does the work that prosecution cannot. June 2026 is when both of those mechanisms run simultaneously, across the street, the press, the ballot box, the back room, and the courts.

Viewed together, they reveal the same dynamic appearing in different arenas: the concentration of power, the narrowing of access, and growing uncertainty about who remains capable of challenging either.

The question is not whether any single development crosses a line. It is whether the line is still where we think it is. And whether the institutions positioned to tell us have the capacity, and the will, to do so.

Who gets to exercise power without meaningful public scrutiny? And who, if anyone, is still in a position to watch?

Megan M. American Horse writes about democracy, power, and belonging. Her work examines how institutions, narratives, and public policy shape civic life, often through the lived experiences of ordinary people navigating extraordinary systems.