If you’re looking to up your privacy game on the internet in the new year, you can do so for a little less than usual thanks to ExpressVPN’s latest deal. Its two-year plans are up to 81 percent off right now: the Advanced tier is on sale for $88 for two years, plus four additional free months. The Basic plan is where you’ll see the biggest discount: it’s $68 for two years, plus the same four additional free months.
We’ve consistently liked ExpressVPN because it’s fast, easy to use and widely available across a large global server network. In fact, it’s our current pick for best premium VPN. One of the biggest drawbacks has always been its high cost, and this deal temporarily solves that issue.
ExpressVPN
Get two years (plus four bonus months) for $88.
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In our review we were able to get fast download and upload speeds, losing only 7 percent in the former and 2 percent in the latter worldwide. We found that it could unblock Netflix anywhere, and its mobile and desktop apps were simple to operate. We gave ExpressVPN an overall score of 85 out of 100.
The virtual private network service now has three tiers. Basic is cheaper with fewer features, while Pro costs more and adds extra perks like support for 14 simultaneous devices and a password manager. Advanced sits in the middle and includes the password manager but only supports 12 devices.
If you are to believe the glossy marketing campaigns about ‘quantum computing’, then we are on the cusp of a computing revolution, yet back in the real world things look a lot less dire. At least if you’re worried about quantum computers (QCs) breaking every single conventional encryption algorithm in use today, because at this point they cannot even factor 21 yet without cheating.
In the article by [Craig Gidney] the basic problem is explained, which comes down to simple exponentials. Specifically the number of quantum gates required to perform factoring increases exponentially, allowing QCs to factor 15 in 2001 with a total of 21 two-qubit entangling gates. Extrapolating from the used circuit, factoring 21 would require 2,405 gates, or 115 times more.
Explained in the article is that this is due to how Shor’s algorithm works, along with the overhead of quantum error correction. Obviously this puts a bit of a damper on the concept of an imminent post-quantum cryptography world, with a recent paper by [Dennish Willsch] et al. laying out the issues that both analog QCs (e.g. D-Wave) and digital QCs will have to solve before they can effectively perform factorization. Issues such as a digital QC needing several millions of physical qubits to factor 2048-bit RSA integers.
Tem has built an energy transaction engine that relies on AI to cut prices relative to other energy traders. The company has signed up more than 2,600 business customers throughout the U.K. on the promise that buying energy from its utility division can save them up to 30% on their energy bills.
The startup recently closed an oversubscribed $75 million Series B led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from AlbionVC, Allianz, Atomico, Hitachi Ventures, Revent, Schroders Capital, and Voyager Ventures, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.
The round values Tem at more than $300 million, a source familiar with the deal told TechCrunch. The startup plans to use the funding to help expand to Australia and the U.S., starting with Texas.
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“We’re in a nice position where we kind of have control over our own profitability. So I could have chosen not to raise at all and had a lovely, nice bootstrap business in some ways,” Joe McDonald, co-founder and CEO of Tem, told TechCrunch. “Well, we’re not that kind of business. We know what we want to achieve as someone who wants to go public over the years.”
Tem is a classic marketplace play, matching electricity generators with consumers. The company intentionally started by focusing almost exclusively on renewable energy generators and small businesses to fill both sides of the ledger. “The more decentralized and the more distributed, the better it is for the algorithms,” McDonald said. “But this works all the way up to enterprise.”
The company’s customers include fast-fashion retailer Boohoo Group, soft drink company Fever-Tree, and Newcastle United FC.
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Boston, MA | June 23, 2026
Currently, Tem is running what amounts to two different businesses. One, called Rosso, is the transaction engine that matches suppliers with buyers. Here, machine learning algorithms and LLMs help predict supply and demand.
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The goal with Rosso, McDonald said, is to cut costs by eliminating several layers that are present in current energy markets. “In each of them, you’ve got different teams doing different jobs, taking different levels of profit from back office to trading, trading desks to other trading desks, and probably five to six intermediaries in total that enable the flow of money to move from one side to the other,” he said.
With AI, he said, “you now have an opportunity to replace the humans, the labor costs, and the disparate systems into one single transaction infrastructure.” The goal is to make the price that customers pay for electricity closer to the wholesale cost.
The other part of Tem, called RED, is a “neo-utility” built to prove the value of Rosso.
“When we first started, we tried to sell our infrastructure to the energy companies, and we got nowhere,” he said. RED is currently the only utility using Rosso, and McDonald said its growth has pushed the company to prioritize it over opening Rosso to others.
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At some point, though, Tem plans to allow other utilities in.
“In reality, it doesn’t matter how good [RED] is; it’s not going to get above a 40% market share. And it shouldn’t, because that becomes a monopoly in itself. So, me, I’d much rather go to get access to all the transaction flow,” McDonald said.
“Long term, we really don’t mind who owns the customer, who owns the generation as long as our infrastructure is being used,” he said. “This is just an infrastructure play in the same way AWS was, or Stripe was.”
Users on ChatGPT’s free and Go plans in the US may now start to see ads as OpenAI has started testing them in the chatbot. The company announced plans to bring ads to ChatGPT. At the time, the company said it would display sponsored products and services that are relevant to the current conversations of logged-in users, though they can disable personalization and “clear the data used for ads” whenever they wish.
“Our goal is for ads to support broader access to more powerful ChatGPT features while maintaining the trust people place in ChatGPT for important and personal tasks,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post. “We’re starting with a test to learn, listen and make sure we get the experience right.”
These ads will appear below at the bottom of chats. They’re labeled and separated from ChatGPT’s answers. Ads won’t have an impact on ChatGPT’s responses.
Ads won’t appear when users are conversing with ChatGPT about regulated or sensitive topics such as health, mental wellbeing or politics. Users aged under 18 won’t see ads in ChatGPT during the tests either. Moreover, OpenAI says it won’t share or sell users’ conversations or data to advertisers.
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A source close to the company told CNBC that OpenAI expects ads to account for less than half of its revenue in the long run. Currently the company also takes a cut of items bought through its chatbot via the shopping integration feature. Also according to CNBC, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told staff on Friday that the company will deploy “an updated Chat model” this week.
The tests come on the heels of Anthropic running Super Bowl ads that poked fun at OpenAI for introducing advertising. Anthropic’s spot asserted that while “ads are coming to AI,” they won’t appear in its own chatbot, Claude.
Patrick Williams discusses the tech trends he expects to see over the next 12 months and offers his advice to professionals navigating change.
On reflection of the technology landscape, particularly across the previous year, Patrick Williams – a 40-year veteran of the tech ecosystem – has come to the firm conclusion that “we are on the cusp of redefining survival”.
He elaborated: “In work and as humans, we need meaning more than ever to be able to cope with the speed of change we are facing. In the year gone by, I have seen a worrying increase in apathy.
“I believe a powerful emergent counter-trend is the pursuit of Ikigai, that vital nexus of: what we love to do, what we are good at, what pays and what is seeking to change the world.”
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In contrast to the “default facts before feelings mindset” he believes popular among those in leadership roles, Williams – who worked at Google for 21 years as a software engineer – said another emerging trend is the realisation that this old-fashioned model leads to a dead end of burnout and a lack of stability.
“The only way to optimise for efficiency is to work on the whole agile ecosystem. This means that we need more than just to be technically excellent; we need to be ‘self-aware and self-regulating,” he said.
This self-awareness has powered Williams’ own professional evolution over the course of the last 12 months, as he has moved away from the urge to constantly change his skin to fit the mould. Instead, he noted the importance of entering professional spaces with “a clear sense of purpose, proactively leading change”.
He said: “I believe this kind of sense of meaning and purpose is missing in the world right now, in fact, in three areas in particular.”
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The first being “meaning as a survival skill”, as if you don’t have a strong sense of purpose in your work, you may well be an “island of technical capability, but you are not going to be resilient enough to make a long-term difference”.
Secondly, he highlighted the need for new types of leadership. He said there is a shift away from top-down and “poor at best” communications and management, moving towards the idea of open communications and high-trust partnerships where the understanding of the self and wider teams is a priority.
Thirdly, he discussed the use of AI as an ‘EQ agent’, which he said is possibly the most exciting new trend. “It is being used not just as an automation tool, but as a mirror to help people reflect on and remember what gives their lives meaning.”
And this is all pulled together by recognising the “self as an instrument”. Williams is of the opinion that among the most important developments of this year will be those that can bridge the disconnect between technically complex problem-solving and human meaning.
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“As we struggle to grapple with a world where ‘doing it right’ is harder and harder to do and means more than just ‘speed of execution’ one thing is clear, it has to be work that can help the next generation be confident, resilient and emotionally intelligent in a world that is often designed to produce polar opposites,” he said.
A year of innovation
“The paradox for innovation as the 21st century unfolds,” explained Williams, “is a conflict between the short-term perspectives of an increasingly traditional corporate model driven by quarterly ‘Wall Street presence’, with its reactive ‘chameleon’-like tendencies for survival mode, versus the longer-term essential humanity-focus needed to drive sustainable change, particularly as innovation becomes more decentralised.”
To break free of the cycle, he is of the opinion that those powering the ecosystem must commit to double loop learning – the modification of goals or decision-making rules in the light of experience – that incorporates a more comprehensive review of an organisation’s challenges, goals and outcomes. He finds professionals should be encouraged to explore the fundamental need for meaning in their roles and should also have access to strategic consortia.
He said: “This complexity can be managed, tackled, only when it is attacked by a consortium of partnerships. Such ‘families’ give the collective and stable base necessary to innovate within the increasing chaos.
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“This (empowered by digital transformation success) will bring into focus the most valuable innovators, the ‘change agents’ who are not merely technically correct, but are giving licence for a more empowered generation of people who value confidence, resilience and EQ, not just the technical IQ.”
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Zillow Group wants to not only help people search for homes, but also facilitate other parts of the homebuying process such as mortgages. (Zillow Image)
When Jeremy Wacksman joined Zillow Group in 2009, his first job was getting the upstart real estate site onto the iPhone. Now, amid a generative AI boom, the CEO says the next platform shift is even bigger for Zillow than mobile — and so are the company’s ambitions.
“It’s going to enable all of our services to just be a lot smarter and a lot more intelligent and a lot more personalized,” Wacksman told GeekWire. “And I think it will help us solve the problem we’ve been after forever: how do we digitize the transaction, and how do we actually integrate and remove all the busy work and the redundant paperwork and the errors and the pain of the transaction?”
Zillow built its brand by letting people window‑shop for homes and by generating advertising revenue from real estate agents. More than 200 million people visit Zillow’s apps and sites on a monthly basis. But now, as Zillow marks its 20th anniversary on Monday, its leaders are pushing toward something bigger: a “remote control” that keeps buyers, agents and lenders inside Zillow for the entire home-buying experience.
Zillow CEO Jeremy Wacksman. (Zillow Photo)
It’s part of a “housing super app” strategy the company first laid out several years ago, following the failed attempt to build Zillow Offers, its “iBuying” home-flipping business. Zillow remains focused on finding ways to streamline how people buy homes beyond search and alleviate what can be a stressful process.
“More than half of buyers report that they cry during the transaction process,” Wacksman noted.
While Zillow’s traditional advertising business still makes up a majority of its revenue, it has made a bigger push into mortgages — which grew 36% year-over-year in the third quarter of 2025 — as well as rentals, which grew 41%. Zillow, which reports fourth quarter results this week, is also piloting closing services.
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The shift marks a deliberate move away from a model where Zillow made money when a shopper raised a hand, toward one where it participates in — and tries to simplify — the entire transaction.
Executives see AI as central to the super app play. Zillow CTO David Beitel, who has led technology efforts at the company since 2005, said the new capabilities of large language models feel “pretty monumental.”
He said AI models have improved so much and so quickly that there is no single part of the business where Zillow isn’t exploring how to harness them.
“It’s really starting to change the way we think about presenting information and change the way that we interact with our customers,” Beitel said.
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Long before Zillow launched an app within ChatGPT, the company has used AI in some form since its early days. It applied machine learning to create the “Zestimate” home value tool and later built out computer vision tools to enhance listings.
Now the company is using AI to boost CRM tools for real estate agents — summarizing calls, drafting follow‑up messages, prepping next‑step checklists, and reducing repetitive data entry. Zillow says agents have sent millions of AI‑assisted messages, and that those tools are improving conversion.
Inside Zillow’s own walls, the shift may be even more dramatic.
Beitel said software teams are shipping more code with the same headcount thanks to AI‑assisted development — in some cases, up to a 15% improvement in productivity. The company also uses internal copilots that sit on top of documents, Slack conversations and email, letting employees ask natural‑language questions against Zillow’s own data. Recruiters are using AI to help schedule interviews and coordinate with candidates.
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Zillow CTO David Beitel. (Zillow Photo)
Just in the past two years, Beitel said, the company has “much higher expectations of our team about embracing these tools and using them in their daily jobs.” Zillow encourages experimentation but stops short of mandating specific tools across every team, letting managers decide how to adapt LLMs to their own workflows.
Both executives stressed that, for all the automation, they don’t see AI replacing real estate professionals. Instead, they framed the technology as the next step in a long evolution that started when agents were gatekeepers of listing books and became guides in a world where buyers already know what’s on the market.
“It’s going to pull away all the busy work, all the back office work, all the coordination, all the data collection — all the stuff that a machine can do — to let the human do a great job of actually being your guide,” said Wacksman, who was named CEO in 2024, taking over for co-founder Rich Barton.
All of this is unfolding against a housing market that Wacksman describes as “bouncing along the bottom.” Existing home sales remain well below pre‑pandemic norms; affordability is still strained in many markets; and even optimistic forecasts call for only modest improvement this year. That puts pressure on Zillow’s bet that it can keep growing revenue at a double‑digit clip by capturing a bigger slice of every transaction, even if there aren’t many more transactions to go around.
At the same time, the company is facing louder questions from regulators and rivals about how much control one platform should have over the digital plumbing of the housing market. Zillow is a defendant in a high-profile antitrust lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission and multiple states over its multifamily rental listings syndication deal with Redfin — a case that alleges the arrangement stifles competition in the rental advertising market. The company is also defending a lawsuit from brokerage Compass challenging Zillow’s private‑listing policies and a separate copyright infringement case from rival CoStar over the use of listing photos.
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Wacksman said it hasn’t changed the core roadmap — or Zillow’s room to grow. He said the company still touches a single-digit share of U.S. transactions. “We can grow our business regardless of what happens in [the] macro, and regardless of the clouds from external forces,” he said.
If you’ve ever watched a stream or a YouTube video and thought, “The visuals are fine, but the audio is rough,” you already know the truth: sound quality makes or breaks content. The Logitech Creators Blue Yeti USB microphone is $94.99, down from $139.99 for 32% off. For anyone starting a podcast, upgrading a WFH setup, or trying to make game chat and voiceovers clearer, this is one of those practical buys that pays off the first time you hit record.
What you’re getting
The Blue Yeti is a USB microphone built for easy plug-and-play use on a PC. You don’t need an audio interface or a complicated setup to get studio-ish voice quality compared to a laptop mic or a basic headset.
It’s popular for a reason: it works across a ton of use cases, including streaming, podcasting, voiceovers, Discord, and general video calls. It’s the kind of mic that can follow you from “I’m just trying this” to “okay, I’m doing this consistently” without forcing an immediate upgrade.
Why it’s worth it
This deal is worth attention because sub-$100 is a great price point for a microphone that can become your default for years. The real win is clarity. Your voice sounds fuller, background noise becomes less of the main character, and listeners do not have to strain to understand you.
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It’s also an underrated upgrade for non-creators. If you’re on calls all day, a solid mic makes you sound more professional with basically zero effort. Pair it with a decent set of headphones, and your whole communication setup feels cleaner.
The bottom line
At $94.99, the Logitech Blue Yeti is a strong value if you want an easy, reliable way to improve voice quality for streaming, podcasting, YouTube, gaming chat, or work calls. If you want something ultra-compact or you prefer an XLR studio workflow, there are other options. But for a straightforward plug-in-and-sound-better upgrade, this 32% discount is a great time to buy.
The 2026 Winter Olympics are taking place in Italy this year, with all the action taking place in Milan and the Alpine city of Cortina. This year marks the fourth time Italy has hosted the Winter Games; most recently, Turin hosted in 2006. Of the 16 sports featured at the Winter Olympics, 15 will return, including figure skating, hockey, luge, speed skating, and one entirely new sport, snow mountaineering. (Will it be as big a hit as the 2024 Summer Games’ new addition, breaking? It remains to be seen.)
Live coverage of every event at the Olympic Winter Games Milan Cortina 2026 will be available to stream on Peacock — though thanks to the time difference between Italy and the U.S., to watch many of the events live, you’ll have to wake up (or stay up) until 2AM or 3AM ET. Primetime replays and select live coverage will air on NBC. Here’s what else you need to know about watching the 2026 Winter Olympics.
How to watch the 2026 Winter Olympics
Dates: Feb. 6 – Feb. 22
TV channel: NBC
Streaming: Peacock
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When are the 2026 Winter Olympics?
The Winter Olympics officially begin with the opening ceremony on Feb. 6, although some events will start as early as Feb. 4). The Milano Cortina 2026 games will run through Feb. 22. The closing ceremony of the 2026 Winter Olympics will take place in the Arena di Verona on Feb. 22.
Where are the Winter Olympics this year?
The 2026 Winter Olympics will be held in Northern Italy, primarily in Milan and also the Alpine mountain resort town of Cortina d’Ampezzo, where events like bobsled, skeleton, alpine skiing, curling, para snowboard, and more will take place.
What channel are the Olympics on?
The 2026 Winter Olympics will air on NBC and stream live on Peacock.
How to watch the 2026 Winter Olympics without cable
For $11/month, an ad-supported Peacock subscription lets you stream live sports and events airing on NBC, including the 2026 Winter Olympics, Super Bowl LX and more. Plus, you’ll get access to thousands of hours of shows and movies, including beloved sitcoms such as Parks and Recreationand The Office, every Bravo show and much more.
For $17 monthly you can upgrade to an ad-free subscription which includes live access to your local NBC affiliate (not just during designated sports and events) and the ability to download select titles to watch offline.
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When is the Winter Olympics opening ceremony?
The Milano Cortina 2026 opening ceremony will be held on Feb. 6, 2026. Due to the time difference, the ceremony will kick off around 2PM ET/11AM PT.
Winter Olympics time difference
This year’s Olympic Games are in Italy, which is 6 hours ahead of U.S. Eastern Time. Meaning that some events will start bright and early for U.S. viewers, and live coverage will likely wrap up around 4PM ET each day. NBC will have primetime replays of the biggest moments each night.
Hockey (bronze medal games) – 1PM (Peacock – Live)
Friday, Feb. 20
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Biathlon mass start – 6AM (Peacock – Live)
Speedskating final medals – 8AM (Peacock – Live)
Figure skating gala – 1PM (Peacock – Live)
Saturday, Feb. 21
Men’s hockey gold medal game – 12PM (Peacock – Live)
Women’s hockey gold medal game – 3PM (Peacock – Live)
Men’s hockey gold medal game – 8PM (NBC – Primetime)
Sunday, Feb. 22 – closing ceremony
Cross-country skiing final event – 6AM (Peacock – Live)
closing ceremony – 2PM (Peacock – Live)
closing ceremony – 8PM (NBC – Primetime)
More ways to watch the 2026 Winter Olympics on NBC
While Peacock is the best way to watch the Winter Olympics, there are other options if you restrict yourself to the NBC broadcasts. As our guide to the best live TV streaming services to cut cable notes, both YouTube TV and Hulu + Live TV are excellent options, but you’ll want to skip Fubo until and unless the service resolves its contract dispute with Comcast, as NBC channels remain unavailable for now.
Elon Musk in Seattle in 2015. (GeekWire File Photo / Taylor Soper)
Elon Musk’s xAI is establishing its Seattle-area engineering center in a former Epic Games space in downtown Bellevue, Wash., following through on Musk’s announcement in September that the company planned to open an outpost in the region.
The location was first reported Monday by the Puget Sound Business Journal, and confirmed by GeekWire based on references to xAI in online permit logs. The nearly 25,000-square-foot space is on the 8th floor of the Lincoln Square South building at 10400 NE 4th St.
The lease makes xAI the latest AI company to set up shop in Bellevue, following the news last week that OpenAI is expanding to nearly 300,000 square feet at nearby City Center Plaza.
In fact, the xAI and OpenAI offices in downtown Bellevue will be about a 10-minute walk from each other, should Musk and Sam Altman ever find themselves in their respective Seattle-area hubs at the same time and decide to patch things up.
Founded in 2023, xAI is best known for Grok, its AI chatbot, which is integrated into Musk’s social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
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News of the company’s Seattle-area location comes days after SpaceX announced its acquisition of xAI in a deal valuing the AI company at $250 billion, further consolidating Musk’s businesses. The key tenant-improvement filing for the Bellevue space was in late December, indicating that the lease was in the works before the acquisition closed.
Job listings show xAI is hiring for a range of engineering roles in the Seattle area, with salaries from $180,000 to $440,000. The positions go beyond networking and infrastructure to include core AI research roles, such as members of the technical staff focused on CUDA/GPU kernel development, image generation, video generation, and world models. This signals that the Bellevue office will serve as a hub for AI model development, not just operations support.
SpaceX already has a large presence in the Seattle region, focused on the development of Starlink satellite internet service out of the company’s Redmond engineering offices.
We’ve contacted xAI for more information about its plans for the office.
A dedicated Apple Watch application from automaker Rivian is set to enable vehicle locking, unlocking, window adjustment, and much more, even on cars from 2021.
Rivian is set to launch a dedicated Apple Watch app.
Apple’s Car Key feature has let iPhone and Apple Watch owners unlock and start their cars using mobile devices since 2020. The capability is built into iOS and is supported by more than 30 car companies, including Cadillac and other GM brands. However, certain car manufacturers, like Tesla, offer proprietary mobile apps that facilitate the same vehicle locking and unlocking functionality. Now, Rivian is set to be the next brand to introduce a vehicle-related application for the Apple Watch, with added functionality. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums
Trump and his supporters clearly believe migrants have no constitutional rights. But that’s simply not true. They have the same rights as citizens for one truly obvious reason: a government could choose to declare certain people non-citizens in order to strip them of their rights. That would be highly problematic in a nation that’s almost entirely the result of immigration, which is why courts have routinely held that non-citizens have the same rights as citizens while on US soil.
That’s still the case, for the most part. The Fifth Circuit — fulfilling its role as the preferred US Supreme Court understudy — has chosen to ignore literally hundreds of rulings in favor of due process rights for immigrants to decide those no longer exist in the states most migrants detained by the government get sent to before being removed from the country.
Last November, the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate due process rights had been rejected by more than 100 judges in more than 200 cases. A few months later — and with a full-press surge happening in Minneapolis, Minnesota — the number of rejections has spiked:
A POLITICO review of thousands of ICE detention cases found that at least 360 judges rejected the expanded detention strategy — in more than 3,000 cases — while just 27 backed it in about 130 cases.
While most of the mass deportation action is currently happening far north of the Fifth Circuit (which covers Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas), arrested immigrants are often sent almost immediately to detention facilities closer to the southern US border. Texas is, by far, the most popular destination for ICE detainee flights.
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The Fifth Circuit waited around until late Friday night to release this decision [PDF], presumably in hopes of seeing the backlash subside a bit before the judges were due back at the office. Steve Vladeck covers all the angles in his post on this abhorrent ruling, starting with how this is an insane conclusion to reach given that 3,000 cases around the country have upheld the same rights the Fifth Circuit has chosen to deny to any migrant with the misfortune of finding themselves in its jurisdiction.
Well, late Friday night, in a ruling handed down just two days after oral argument, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit adopted the extreme minority view—holding that, yes, the government can indefinitely detain without bond millions of non-citizens who have been here for generations; who have never committed a crime; and who pose neither a risk of flight nor any threat to public safety. The Fifth Circuit’s opinion was written by Judge Edith Jones and joined in full by Judge Kyle Duncan—two of the most reactionary, right-wing federal appellate judges in the country…
The obvious upshot of this decision is that ICE et al will be rushing detainees to Texas ASAFP to take advantage of this ruling.
As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick from the American Immigration Council noted last night, the Fifth Circuit’s decision will “fuel ICE’s push to transfer people to Texas immediately,” and it will put “even more pressure on plaintiffs and district courts outside the 5th Circuit. Unless the habeas is filed before a person is transferred to the 5th Circuit, a person may remain locked in appalling conditions, never even allowed to ask for bond.” All of that can be traced to another procedural technicality—the principle that a district court gains jurisdiction over a habeas petition if, but only if, it is filed while the petitioner is physically in that court’s jurisdiction. In other words, to avoid being subject to the Fifth Circuit’s decision (while it remains on the books), detainees arrested elsewhere would have to have someone file on their behalf before they’re physically transferred into the Fifth Circuit.
There’s still a chance that people arrested in, say, Minneapolis, Minnesota might be able to avoid the Fifth Circuit’s refusal to recognize their due process rights. But the denial of due process rights begins immediately in most cases, with ICE officers refusing to allow detainees to contact family members, much less seek legal representation. If ICE can get them on a plane headed south before anything is filed in local courts, the Fifth Circuit’s ruling will override whatever rights migrants might have still had access to in the states they were removed from.
An appeal of this decision is already in process. And while it’s concerning that this particular iteration of the Supreme Court will be handling it, it’s not a foregone conclusion that it will convert the Fifth’s ruling into nationwide precedent. Even at its worst, the Supreme Court has rejected a handful of Fifth Circuit rulings that cross the line into an open embrace of violent fascism. On the other hand, this version of the Supreme Court is far more prone to deliver wordless rubber stamps of appellate decisions it likes, so some caution is warranted.
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This decision requires the most MAGA-coded judges in the Fifth to buy everything the Trump administration is selling. And what it’s selling is a brand new interpretation of the phrase “seeking admission.” Rather than limiting it to people crossing the border illegally, it applies this definition to any migrant who doesn’t have the proper paperwork, even if they arrived in this country decades ago.
The dissent, written by Judge Dana Douglas, makes it clear that this administration will do anything and everything that serves its racist desire to eject non-whites from the United States.
The Congress that passed IIRIRA (Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act [1996]) would be surprised to learn it had also required the detention without bond of two million people. For almost thirty years there was no sign anyone thought it had done so, and nothing in the congressional record or the history of the statute’s enforcement suggests that it did. Nonetheless, the government today asserts the authority and mandate to detain millions of noncitizens in the interior, some of them present here for decades, on the same terms as if they were apprehended at the border.
Do you want to be this shitty, Judge Douglas asks the judges who pretended this sort of thing is OK as long as it’s Trump doing it.
The majority stakes the largest detention initiative in American history on the possibility that “seeking admission” is like being an “applicant for admission,” in a statute that has never been applied in this way, based on little more than an apparent conviction that Congress must have wanted these noncitizens detained—some of them the spouses, mothers, fathers, and grandparents of American citizens. Straining at a gnat, the majority swallows a camel. I dissent.
Hopefully this ruling will be reset by the Supreme Court or an en banc rehearing. But for now, the law of the land in three states that are willing to house ICE detainees says due process rights are only available in the 47 states the Fifth Circuit doesn’t control.
