The Trump administration's immigration machine is running at full speed: ICE arrested nearly 50,000 people in July alone — a 15% jump from June and the highest monthly total of Trump's second term — while the administration also plans to revoke visas for up to 200,000 asylum seekers in what would be the largest mass visa revocation in U.S. history. Courts keep pushing back — a federal appeals court has now struck down ICE's no-hearing detention policy for the eighth time — but the legal whipsaw over mail-in voting is murkier: the Supreme Court issued an emergency order temporarily letting Trump's mail-in restrictions stand, and experts fear the chaos will suppress midterm turnout. Meanwhile, U.S. Central Command has been quietly maintaining a secret journalist blacklist, per The Intercept.

The Democratic Party's response to all this is generating its own controversy. Zeteo reports that elected Democrats coordinated a pile-on against Twitch streamer Hasan Piker — Rep. Brad Sherman went so far as to accuse him of advocating child rape, a charge the newsletter calls flatly false — while Democrats were laser-focused on Piker rather than Laura Loomer, who has called for the deportation of all Muslims. Senators like Elissa Slotkin condemned an Islamophobic march in Dearborn without naming the organizers, while Rep. Hillary Scholten did the same. Amanda Nelson's newsletter digs into the electoral side of this problem — she interviewed Virginia candidate Tom Perriello on why rural voters tune out candidates who run to the pro-corporate center, and she compiled advice from activists in countries with weakening democracies.

WIRED's daily briefing adds a few odd data points to the week: a federal judge blocked the Pentagon from blacklisting Anthropic, Microsoft Teams is being used to scam Chinese users, and ICE detained far-right figure Milo Yiannopoulos. Over on the science desk, 404 Media's Becky Ferreira reports that new research predicts thousands of interstellar objects may be lurking in the Oort cloud, while ancient lunar glass beads from the Chang'e 6 mission preserve chemical traces of the Moon's long-lost atmosphere. Researchers also published what they're calling "the worst energy policy in the world" — fossil fuel subsidies triggered by rising oil prices — and archaeologists found DNA evidence that Mississippian civilization in Georgia was consuming cacao 1,000 years ago. Seth Godin, for his part, makes the case that "fit and finish" — the obsessive attention to craft that distinguishes a great product from a cheap one — is always worth defending against short-term budget cuts.