Linda Joseph, a community activist, shields her eyes while in prayer during a candlelight vigil in support of Haitians with Temporary Protected Status. The event was held at the Little Haiti Cultural Complex in Miami on Feb. 3, 2026.
Carl Juste
cjuste@miamiherald.com
In a hearing that highlighted the increasing pressure the federal judiciary is facing in high-stakes immigration cases, a Washington, D.C. judge on Thursday declined to reverse her decision that blocked the Trump administration from ending immigration protections for more than 300,000 Haitians.
“I am denying the government’s motion to stay,” U.S. District Court Judge Ana Reyes said.
The judge said she would issue a written order in time for an appellate court to hear the government’s appeal. The government, in an unusual move last week, appealed both to the appellate court and to Reyes herself, asking her to reverse her decision. The federal appeals court has given lawyers representing the Department of Homeland Security until April 19 to provide briefs.
After delivering her decision, Reyes said she wanted to address what had followed after her Feb. 2 ruling pausing the termination of Haiti’s Temporary Protected Status designation. The ruling gave a temporary reprieve to more than 300,000 Haitians, who would have faced the loss of their right to continuing living and working in the United States, leaving them vulnerable to deportation back to Haiti.
“I do feel compelled to clarify a couple of misconceptions,” Reyes said as she went on to list some of the accusations some people have made about her, and the threats she has received.
Yes, she is an immigrant herself, she said. No, she did not hide that fact from any of the agencies tasked with investigating her, including the White House, the FBI or the Senate Judiciary Committee when she was nominated to the federal bench by President Joe Biden.
Reyes , who was born in Uruguay and came to the U.S. as a child, said she didn’t mind the messages that referred to her as “illiterate,” even as they failed to note she graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and spent 22 years litigating high-profile federal issues. What she does object to, Reyes said, are the death threat against her that have been posted on social media and sent to her email.
Death threats
“I hope you die today,” she said, reading from a lengthy email. “Enjoy choking on your tongue.”
On social media others called for the hanging of judges, while using other offensive adjectives to refer to her.
It is common for judges these days to receive such threats, Reyes said, and some have received even worse. But she added that, like her colleagues on the bench, she will not stop from upholding the law, acting without fear and favor.
“To those who disagree with me, I say ‘Thank you,’” Reyes said. “Judges should be questioned, the politicians should be questioned. I welcome the government’s appeal because appellate courts are a necessary part of the democratic system.”
But for those who threaten judges, Reyes said, “We will not be intimidated.”
Her remarks came after a contentious hearing in which she made clear she would not reverse her earlier order. Throughout the proceedings, she sharply questioned the government’s lawyer. In one exchange, lawyers for the five Haitian plaintiffs in the case told her that some TPS holders were having difficulties renewing their driver’s licenses, because federal systems showed that their protections had expired.
When she questioned the government’t lawyer, Reyes issued a stern warning after he told her the administration was trying to “avoid mass confusion,” since the case is on appeal.
She told government lawyers she is not “one of those judges who is going to sit around and wait for you all to violate court order after court order. There will be serious consequences.”
Frustrated judges
The Trump administration has increasingly encountered resistance in federal court as it seeks to advance its mass deportation agenda, with some judges expressing frustration both at what they view as disregard for their rulings and at how government lawyers have characterized those decisions.
Thursday’s hearing was no exception. Reyes pressed the government on its claim that it would suffer “irreparable harm” if it were not allowed to end TPS for Haitians.
She questioned the government’s interpretation of her initial order in their appeal, and she pushed back on an administration attempt to compare her to President Biden’s handing of immigration benefits to a broad group of immigrants.
“That Biden decision is not in front of me,” Reyes said, adding that the comparison was “legally meaningless.”
She also stressed that if she were to stay her decision and a higher court were to later rule in favor of the Haitian plaintiffs, those deported to Haiti would have no legal path to return to the U.S. She also criticized the administration for what she said was a misleading interpretation of her ruling, in which she said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had failed to follow the law and consult with other agencies before deciding to end TPS for Haitians.
“My determination is Congress required her to consult with appropriate agencies, and she did not consult with any agency, including the Department of State,” she said.
Jacqueline Charles has reported on Haiti and the English-speaking Caribbean for the Miami Herald for over a decade. A Pulitzer Prize finalist for her coverage of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, she was awarded a 2018 Maria Moors Cabot Prize — the most prestigious award for coverage of the Americas.
The Justice Department failed to black out identifying information about many of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims and redacted the details of individuals who may have aided the convicted sex offender, prompting an outcry from survivors who accuse DOJ of botching the release of more than 3 million documents last week.A CNN review of the Epstein documents identified several examples of people whose identities were blacked out possibly helping to connect him with women, including redacted co-conspirators in a much-anticipated draft indictment of Epstein from the 2000s.A redacted individual wrote in one 2015 email to Epstein: “And this one is (i think) totally your girl.”In another 2014 email in the files, a person wrote to Epstein: “Thank you for a fun night… Your littlest girl was a little naughty.” But the name of the individual who wrote that message is redacted.The Department of Justice on Friday released what it said was the last of the Epstein files that it was required to disclose by law, but the documents have prompted widespread outcry about a continued lack of transparency and justice for Epstein’s many survivors.Epstein survivors are up in arms about the mishandled redactions, including blacked out statements that victims made to the FBI.A DOJ official said in a statement that any fully redacted names are of victims. “In many instances, as it has been well documented publicly, those who were originally victims became participants and co-conspirators,” the official said. “We did not redact any names of men, only female victims.”FBI and law enforcement names were also redacted, the DOJ official said.Meanwhile, the Justice Department has been scrambling to fix the improper disclosure of victim information.The Justice Department narrowly avoided a hearing in federal court on Wednesday by reaching an agreement late Tuesday with lawyers for some of the Epstein survivors, who had accused DOJ of releasing information about nearly 100 Epstein victims in the files.Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche acknowledged Monday that “mistakes were made” but argued that DOJ has moved expeditiously to correct any information unintentionally released.For Epstein survivors, the DOJ’s response is unacceptable.“To have pieces of my life be out there on display in that way, was really troublesome,” said Dani Bensky, who told CNN in a roundtable with Epstein survivors that her name, address and phone number were all initially in the files.“And I know that I’m public now, yes, it hurts me — but it really hurts our survivor sisters who are still ‘Jane Does’ even more,” she added.The furor over what is and isn’t included in the Epstein documents highlights how the department’s release of more than 3 million documents on Friday is hardly the end of the fight over the Epstein files — even as both Blanche and President Donald Trump have said they think it’s time to move on.Congress forced the disclosure of the Epstein documents after passing the Epstein Files Transparency Act last November over Trump’s initial objections. But the bipartisan group of lawmakers who pushed for the law’s passage say there are still millions of files that have not been released, which the DOJ argued fell within exceptions to the law not requiring their disclosure.Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California and GOP Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who led the effort to release the files, have asked to view the unredacted files — and are still threatening Attorney General Pam Bondi with impeachment or contempt for failing to comply with the law if more are not disclosed.“The DOJ has protected the Epstein class with blanket redactions in some areas while failing to protect the identities of survivors in other areas,” Khanna said in a statement to CNN. “Congress cannot properly assess DOJ’s handling of the Epstein and Maxwell cases without access to the complete record.”‘There’s no reason to redact it’The documents released on Friday include the names of numerous high-profile men who interacted with Epstein — who died by suicide in 2019 awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges — a list that included Trump, former President Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Elon Musk and the former Prince Andrew, among many others. All have denied any wrongdoing related to Epstein and have never been charged by law enforcement with any crimes.But Epstein survivors say the files appear to shield those who specifically enabled the convicted sex offender’s abuse, as well as other men who may have been named in the survivors’ statements that were completely redacted.One Epstein survivor pointed to another FBI form contained in the files where full pages were blacked out.“It basically outlines everything that this person experienced and shared with the FBI. It was seven pages long and four of them looked like this,” Jess Michaels told CNN in an interview. “What happened to her and who did it is also redacted. So you cannot say in the same sentence: ‘There were no men, there was no list’ and redact this much of a statement. Because if there’s no men, then there’s no reason to redact it. There’s no other reason.”One of the most anticipated documents in the files was the controversial draft indictment from the Southern District of Florida from the 2000s, which would have charged Epstein, along with three others, who were described as having been “employed” by Epstein.The individuals are all described as having conspired to “persuade, induce, and entice individuals who had not attained the age of 18 years to engage in prostitution.” But their names are redacted.The files also include numerous email exchanges with Epstein that appear to describe the procurement of women.A redacted individual from a Paris modeling agency wrote in a 2013 email to Epstein: “New Brazilian just arrived, sexy and cute, 19yo .”The email appears in the files twice: In one version, the modeling agency’s name is redacted, but in another, the agency is not redacted from the sender’s email signature.In a 2018 email to Epstein, another redacted individual wrote: “I found at least 3 very good young poor.”“Meet this one,” the person continued. “Not the beauty queen but we both likes her a lot.”In a letter to Congress on Friday, the Justice Department detailed how it made redactions, saying it complied with the law by redacting victim information, child sex abuse materials and anything that would jeopardize an active investigation.DOJ also withheld 200,000 pages “covered by various privileges, including deliberative process privilege, the work-product doctrine, and attorney-client privilege,” according to the letter.At his press conference last Friday announcing the release of the files, Blanche said they did not contain information about evidence that would lead to the prosecution of any men who abused women.“I said this earlier, there’s this built-in assumption that somehow there’s this hidden tranche of information of men that we know about that we’re covering up or that we’re choosing not to prosecute. That is not the case,” Blanche said. “I don’t know whether there are men out there that abuse these women.”Scrambling to scrub filesIn the hours after Friday’s DOJ release, CNN reported that multiple survivors, including anonymous “Jane Doe” victims, were seeing their names and information throughout the documents that were published.Attorneys for some of the survivors sent a letter saying the DOJ’s failure to properly redact victims’ information had triggered an “unfolding emergency,” asking two federal judges in New York for an “immediate judicial intervention.”Sunday’s letter included testimony from various anonymous “Jane Doe” victims who described receiving death threats and harassment from the media since the publication of the files.“When DOJ believed it was ready to publish, it needed only to type each victim’s name into its own search function. Any resulting hit should have been redacted before publication. Had DOJ done that, the harm would have been avoided,” the lawyers wrote.DOJ said in a response filed to the judges that it had removed all documents that victims or their lawyers identified, and a Justice Department spokesperson had said it had 500 reviewers looking at the files “for this very reason.”“Mistakes were made by – you have really hard-working lawyers that worked for the past 60 days. Think about this though: you’re talking about pieces of paper that stack from the ground to two Eiffel Towers,” Blanche said Monday on Fox News. “The minute that a victim or their lawyer reached out to us since Friday, we immediately dealt with it and pulled it down.”Epstein’s survivors say the release of names, even if corrected, is yet another example of how the Justice Department failed them.“Publishing images of victims while shielding predators is just a failure of complete justice,” Epstein survivor Sharlene Rochard told CNN. “There’s this deep sense of betrayal when the systems meant to protect you becomes the one causing all of this harm.”
WASHINGTON —
The Justice Department failed to black out identifying information about many of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims and redacted the details of individuals who may have aided the convicted sex offender, prompting an outcry from survivors who accuse DOJ of botching the release of more than 3 million documents last week.
A CNN review of the Epstein documents identified several examples of people whose identities were blacked out possibly helping to connect him with women, including redacted co-conspirators in a much-anticipated draft indictment of Epstein from the 2000s.
A redacted individual wrote in one 2015 email to Epstein: “And this one is (i think) totally your girl.”
In another 2014 email in the files, a person wrote to Epstein: “Thank you for a fun night… Your littlest girl was a little naughty.” But the name of the individual who wrote that message is redacted.
The Department of Justice on Friday released what it said was the last of the Epstein files that it was required to disclose by law, but the documents have prompted widespread outcry about a continued lack of transparency and justice for Epstein’s many survivors.
Epstein survivors are up in arms about the mishandled redactions, including blacked out statements that victims made to the FBI.
A DOJ official said in a statement that any fully redacted names are of victims. “In many instances, as it has been well documented publicly, those who were originally victims became participants and co-conspirators,” the official said. “We did not redact any names of men, only female victims.”
FBI and law enforcement names were also redacted, the DOJ official said.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department has been scrambling to fix the improper disclosure of victim information.
The Justice Department narrowly avoided a hearing in federal court on Wednesday by reaching an agreement late Tuesday with lawyers for some of the Epstein survivors, who had accused DOJ of releasing information about nearly 100 Epstein victims in the files.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche acknowledged Monday that “mistakes were made” but argued that DOJ has moved expeditiously to correct any information unintentionally released.
For Epstein survivors, the DOJ’s response is unacceptable.
“To have pieces of my life be out there on display in that way, was really troublesome,” said Dani Bensky, who told CNN in a roundtable with Epstein survivors that her name, address and phone number were all initially in the files.
“And I know that I’m public now, yes, it hurts me — but it really hurts our survivor sisters who are still ‘Jane Does’ even more,” she added.
The furor over what is and isn’t included in the Epstein documents highlights how the department’s release of more than 3 million documents on Friday is hardly the end of the fight over the Epstein files — even as both Blanche and President Donald Trump have said they think it’s time to move on.
Congress forced the disclosure of the Epstein documents after passing the Epstein Files Transparency Act last November over Trump’s initial objections. But the bipartisan group of lawmakers who pushed for the law’s passage say there are still millions of files that have not been released, which the DOJ argued fell within exceptions to the law not requiring their disclosure.
Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California and GOP Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who led the effort to release the files, have asked to view the unredacted files — and are still threatening Attorney General Pam Bondi with impeachment or contempt for failing to comply with the law if more are not disclosed.
“The DOJ has protected the Epstein class with blanket redactions in some areas while failing to protect the identities of survivors in other areas,” Khanna said in a statement to CNN. “Congress cannot properly assess DOJ’s handling of the Epstein and Maxwell cases without access to the complete record.”
‘There’s no reason to redact it’
The documents released on Friday include the names of numerous high-profile men who interacted with Epstein — who died by suicide in 2019 awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges — a list that included Trump, former President Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Elon Musk and the former Prince Andrew, among many others. All have denied any wrongdoing related to Epstein and have never been charged by law enforcement with any crimes.
But Epstein survivors say the files appear to shield those who specifically enabled the convicted sex offender’s abuse, as well as other men who may have been named in the survivors’ statements that were completely redacted.
One Epstein survivor pointed to another FBI form contained in the files where full pages were blacked out.
“It basically outlines everything that this person experienced and shared with the FBI. It was seven pages long and four of them looked like this,” Jess Michaels told CNN in an interview. “What happened to her and who did it is also redacted. So you cannot say in the same sentence: ‘There were no men, there was no list’ and redact this much of a statement. Because if there’s no men, then there’s no reason to redact it. There’s no other reason.”
One of the most anticipated documents in the files was the controversial draft indictment from the Southern District of Florida from the 2000s, which would have charged Epstein, along with three others, who were described as having been “employed” by Epstein.
The individuals are all described as having conspired to “persuade, induce, and entice individuals who had not attained the age of 18 years to engage in prostitution.” But their names are redacted.
The files also include numerous email exchanges with Epstein that appear to describe the procurement of women.
A redacted individual from a Paris modeling agency wrote in a 2013 email to Epstein: “New Brazilian just arrived, sexy and cute, 19yo .”
The email appears in the files twice: In one version, the modeling agency’s name is redacted, but in another, the agency is not redacted from the sender’s email signature.
In a 2018 email to Epstein, another redacted individual wrote: “I found at least 3 very good young poor.”
“Meet this one,” the person continued. “Not the beauty queen but we both likes her a lot.”
In a letter to Congress on Friday, the Justice Department detailed how it made redactions, saying it complied with the law by redacting victim information, child sex abuse materials and anything that would jeopardize an active investigation.
DOJ also withheld 200,000 pages “covered by various privileges, including deliberative process privilege, the work-product doctrine, and attorney-client privilege,” according to the letter.
At his press conference last Friday announcing the release of the files, Blanche said they did not contain information about evidence that would lead to the prosecution of any men who abused women.
“I said this earlier, there’s this built-in assumption that somehow there’s this hidden tranche of information of men that we know about that we’re covering up or that we’re choosing not to prosecute. That is not the case,” Blanche said. “I don’t know whether there are men out there that abuse these women.”
Scrambling to scrub files
In the hours after Friday’s DOJ release, CNN reported that multiple survivors, including anonymous “Jane Doe” victims, were seeing their names and information throughout the documents that were published.
Attorneys for some of the survivors sent a letter saying the DOJ’s failure to properly redact victims’ information had triggered an “unfolding emergency,” asking two federal judges in New York for an “immediate judicial intervention.”
Sunday’s letter included testimony from various anonymous “Jane Doe” victims who described receiving death threats and harassment from the media since the publication of the files.
“When DOJ believed it was ready to publish, it needed only to type each victim’s name into its own search function. Any resulting hit should have been redacted before publication. Had DOJ done that, the harm would have been avoided,” the lawyers wrote.
DOJ said in a response filed to the judges that it had removed all documents that victims or their lawyers identified, and a Justice Department spokesperson had said it had 500 reviewers looking at the files “for this very reason.”
“Mistakes were made by – you have really hard-working lawyers that worked for the past 60 days. Think about this though: you’re talking about pieces of paper that stack from the ground to two Eiffel Towers,” Blanche said Monday on Fox News. “The minute that a victim or their lawyer reached out to us since Friday, we immediately dealt with it and pulled it down.”
Epstein’s survivors say the release of names, even if corrected, is yet another example of how the Justice Department failed them.
“Publishing images of victims while shielding predators is just a failure of complete justice,” Epstein survivor Sharlene Rochard told CNN. “There’s this deep sense of betrayal when the systems meant to protect you becomes the one causing all of this harm.”
Every so often, someone asks me who my favorite politicians to write about over the years have been. I always place Bill Richardson, the longtime congressman and former governor of New Mexico, near the top of my list. I once mentioned this to Richardson himself.
“How high on the list?” he immediately wanted to know. “Top 10? Top three? I get competitive, you know.”
Richardson died in his sleep on Friday, at age 75. I will miss covering this man, the two-term Democratic governor, seven-term congressman, United Nations ambassador, energy secretary, crisis diplomat, occasional mischief magnet, and freelance hostage negotiator who even holds the Guinness World Record for the politician who’s shaken the most hands—13,392—in an eight-hour period.
“Make sure you mention that Guinness World Record thing,” Richardson urged me the first time I wrote about him, in 2003. “The handshake record is important to me.”
Why? I asked. “Because it shows that I love politics,” he replied. “And I do love politics. I love to campaign. I love parades. I don’t believe I’m pretentious. I’m very earthy.”
But why was the fact that he loved politics important?
“Because I’m sick of all these politicians these days who are always trying to convince you that they are not really politicians,” Richardson went on. I had noticed this phenomenon as well, and it holds up: that the slickest and most unctuous people you encounter in politics are often the ones who spend the most energy trying to convince you they hate politics and are in fact “not professional politicians.”
“I don’t mind being called a ‘professional politician,’” Richardson added. “It’s better than being an amateur, right?”
Richardson was an original. Born to a Mexican mother and an American businessman, he spent much of his childhood in Mexico City and identified strongly as Latino. He served as chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in the 1980s and was the only Latino governor in America during his two terms in Santa Fe. Richardson spoke often about how his dual ethnic and cultural identities placed him in advantageous and sometimes awkward positions—“between worlds” (which he’d use as the title of his 2005 memoir).
His identities also placed Richardson in big demand as probably the most prominent Latino elected official in the country at the time. He absolutely loved being in big demand, and was milking his coveted status as much as possible when I first encountered him. That September, all of the 2004 Democratic candidates for president—John Kerry, Howard Dean, John Edwards, etc.—were straining to pay respects to Richardson after a debate in Albuquerque.
I was working for the WashingtonPost Style section at the time, and I found Richardson’s full-frontal “love of the game” quite winning. He was over-the-top and unabashed about the enjoyment he derived from the parade of candidates coming before him. “It’s fun to get your ring kissed,” Richardson told me that night, though he might not have said ring.
We were walking into a post-debate reception for another candidate, Senator Joe Lieberman. Like most of the Democratic VIPs in Albuquerque that night, Lieberman was an old friend of Richardson’s; they’d worked together on the 1992 Democratic Party platform committee.
“I wore this to curry favor with you,” Lieberman told Richardson, pointing to a New Mexico pin on his jacket. “You also saw that I spoke a little Spanish in [the debate].”
“I thought that was Yiddish,” Richardson said. Lieberman then got everyone’s attention and offered a toast to El Jefe.
Richardson let me ride around with him in the back of his SUV while he tried to hit post-debate receptions for all of the candidates. I noted that he’d instructed the state police driver to keep going faster and faster on Interstate 40—the vehicle hit 110 miles an hour at one point. When I mentioned the triple-digit speed in my story, it caused a bit of a controversy in New Mexico. Ralph Nader made a stink. (“If he will do this with a reporter in the car,” Nader said, according to the Associated Press, “what will they do when there’s no reporter in the car?”)
The next time I saw Richardson, a few months later, he shook his head at me and tried to deny that the vehicle was going 110. I held my ground.
Richardson ran for president in 2008, but he quit after finishing fourth in both Iowa and New Hampshire. I had since moved on to The New York Times and used to run into him on the campaign circuit. A few weeks after he dropped out, I went down to Santa Fe to interview him about the lengths that the two remaining Democratic candidates—Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton—were going to in an attempt to win his endorsement. Another Bill Richardson primary! What could be more fun?
“Oh, the full-court press is on like you wouldn’t believe,” he told me. The “political anthropology” of this was quite interesting too, he added. “Barack is very precise,” like a “surgical bomb,” Richardson said. “The Clintons are more like a carpet bomb.” He relished my interest in the pursuit of him.
“I want to make it clear that I’m not annoyed by any of this,” Richardson said of the repeated overtures he was getting from the candidates and their various emissaries. I quoted him saying this in the Times, but not what I said in response to him in the moment: “No shit, governor.”
I’ll admit that the notion of a pol who loves the game seems quite at odds with the tenor of politics today. People now routinely toss out phrases like our democracy is at stake and existential threat to America, and it’s not necessarily overheated. Fun? Not so much.
But thinking about Richardson makes me nostalgic for campaigns and election nights that did not feel so much like political Russian roulette. Presidency or prison? Suspend the Constitution or preserve it? Let’s face it: Death threats, mug shots, insurrections, and white supremacists are supreme buzzkills.
Richardson made it clear to me that he’d loved running for president—it was one of the best times of his life, he said—and he missed the experience of it almost as soon as he got out. But what he really wanted was, you know, the job. “I would have been a good president,” he said in Santa Fe in 2008. “I still believe that. Please put that in there, okay?”
If nothing else, the Clinton-Obama courtship was a nice cushion for Richardson as he tried to ease back into life in the relative quiet of his governor’s office. It also, he said, might get him a gig in the next administration. Richardson was 60 at the time and said he envisioned “a few more chapters” for himself in public life. Richardson told me he would have loved to be someone’s running mate or secretary of state.
“I’m not pining for it, and if it doesn’t happen, I’ve had a great life,” he told me. “I’m at peace with myself.”
He wound up endorsing Obama, who, after he was elected, nominated Richardson to be his secretary of commerce—only to have Richardson withdraw over allegations of improper business dealings as governor (no charges were filed).
Richardson devoted the last stage of his career to his work as a troubleshooting diplomat and crisis negotiator. He would speak to thugs or warlords, drop into the most treacherous sectors of the globe—North Korea, Myanmar—if he thought it might help secure the release of a hostage. Among the many tributes to Richardson this past weekend from the highest levels (Joe Biden, Obama, the Clintons), I was struck most by the ones from some of the people who knew directly the ordeals he worked to end: the basketball star Brittney Griner and the Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian, who called Richardson “a giant—the first giant—in American hostage diplomacy.”
The last time I saw Richardson was a few years ago, in the pre-pandemic Donald Trump years—maybe 2018 or 2019. We had breakfast at the Hay-Adams hotel, near the White House. I remember asking him what he called himself those days, what he considered his current job title to be.
Richardson shrugged. “‘Humanitarian,’ maybe?” he said. But he worried that it sounded pretentious.
Chris Thomas has made democracy his life’s work. A 73-year-old attorney, Thomas spent nearly four decades leading the elections division in the office of Michigan’s secretary of state. He served under Republicans and Democrats alike, and his mandate was always the same: protect the ballot box. He trained local election workers; sought out and fixed weaknesses in the voting system; investigated errors committed while ballots were collected and tabulated; and, ultimately, ensured the accuracy of the count. Thomas was one of 10 people named to the Presidential Commission on Election Administration in 2013. He earned a reputation as a nonpartisan authority on all things elections, and took pride in supervising a system that was stable and widely trusted.
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Which is why 2020 shook him so badly. Thomas had retired from the secretary of state’s office a few years earlier, confident that Michigan’s elections were in good hands. Then the coronavirus pandemic arrived, prompting changes to election protocols nationwide, and President Donald Trump began warning of a Democratic plot to steal the election. As Michigan rolled out new voting rules—some that had been decided prior to 2020, others that were implemented on the fly during the pandemic—rumors and misinformation spread. Wanting to help, Thomas accepted a special assignment to supervise Election Day activities in Detroit, the state’s largest voting jurisdiction.
What followed was surreal—a scene that Thomas could scarcely believe was playing out in the United States. Michigan had recently expanded absentee voting, allowing any resident to vote by mail for any reason. Because Democrats are likelier than Republicans to vote absentee—and because Detroit is predominantly Democratic—Thomas and his colleagues had to process an unprecedented number of absentee ballots. Complicating matters further, Republican lawmakers in Michigan refused to let election workers start counting absentee ballots until Election Day.
The effect was predictable. Because of the backlog of absentee ballots, Trump took a big lead on Election Night. As Thomas and his team worked into the early hours, Trump’s lead shrank. By Wednesday afternoon, it was clear that Joe Biden would overtake him. “That’s when things got out of hand,” Thomas told me.
Incited by Trump’s acolytes in the state party, hundreds of Republican voters swarmed the event center in Detroit where Thomas and his workers were tabulating votes. Republicans had their allotted number of poll watchers already inside the counting room, but party officials lied to the public, saying they had been locked out. So people busted into the event center, banging on the windows, filming the election workers, demanding to be let into the counting room. Fearing for their safety—and for the integrity of the ballots—the people inside covered the windows. Thomas says the decision was necessary. But within minutes, video was circulating on social media of the windows being covered, and before long, it was airing on Fox News with commentary about a cover-up.
Trump was alleging a national plot to steal the election, and now Detroit—and Chris Thomas—were right in the middle of it.
The GOP assault on the legitimacy of Biden’s victory has led to death threats against election workers and a lethal siege of the United States Capitol. But perhaps the gravest consequence is the erosion of confidence in our system. Late this summer, a Quinnipiac poll found that 69 percent of both Republicans and Democrats believe that American democracy “is in danger of collapse.” They hold this view for somewhat different reasons. Republicans believe that Democrats already rigged an election against them and will do so again if given the chance; Democrats believe that Republicans, convinced that 2020 was stolen despite all evidence to the contrary, are now readying to rig future elections. It’s hard to see how this ends well. By the presidential election of 2024, a constitutional crisis might be unavoidable.
I’ve met men and women like Thomas in small towns and big counties, public servants who have devoted their career to safeguarding the infrastructure of our democracy. Over the past two years, they have been harassed, intimidated, and in many cases driven out of office, some replaced by right-wing activists who are more loyal to the Republican Party than to the rule of law. The old guard—the people who, like Thomas, committed their career to free and fair elections—are witnessing their life’s work being undone. They are watching the rise of Trump-mimicking candidates in this year’s midterm elections and wondering if anything can stop the collapse of our most essential institution. “This election,” Thomas said, “feels like a last stand.”
The irony is that America’s voting system is far more advanced and secure than it was just two decades ago.
The 2000 election was a catalyst for reform. Mass confusion surrounding the showdown between Al Gore and George W. Bush in Florida—butterfly ballots, punch cards, hanging chads—demonstrated that murky processes and obsolete technology could undermine public confidence in the system. Recognizing the threat, Congress passed a law to help local administrators modernize their voting machines and better train their workers and volunteers. Elections officials from around the country began collaborating on best practices. Several states introduced wholesale changes to their systems that allowed ballots to be cast more easily, tracked more accurately, and counted more efficiently.
There were hiccups, but the results were overwhelmingly positive. One study conducted by MIT and Caltech showed that the number of “lost” votes—ballots that because of some combination of clerical rejection and human error went unrecorded—had been cut in half from 2000 to 2004. Florida, once synonymous with electoral dysfunction, now has arguably the most efficient vote-reporting program in the U.S.
At the same time, the machinations that Americans observed—poll workers studying ballots through a magnifying glass, teams of party lawyers and CNN camera crews looking on—bred a public skepticism that never quite went away. In the years following Bush v. Gore, the number of cases of election litigation soared. The small chorus of congressional Democrats who objected to the certification of Bush’s 2000 victory swelled to several dozen following the president’s reelection in 2004, with 31 House Democrats (and one Democratic senator) voting to effectively disenfranchise the people of Ohio. Republicans could not return the favor in 2008—Obama’s margin of victory was too wide—so they sought to delegitimize his presidency with talk of birth certificates and mass voter fraud, introducing measures to restrict voting access despite never producing evidence that cheating was taking place at any meaningful scale.
Much of this can be attributed to what Richard Hasen, a law professor and an elections expert, has called “the loser’s effect”: Studies have shown that voters report more confidence in our elections after their party or candidate has won. But partisan outcomes are no longer the decisive factor: In October 2020—weeks before Trump lost his bid for reelection—Gallup reported that just 44 percent of Republicans trusted that votes would be cast and counted accurately, “a record low for either party.”
This isn’t entirely surprising, given Trump’s crusade to undermine our democratic institutions, which began well before he was ever elected. In 2012, he called Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney “a total sham,” adding: “We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty.” In early 2016, after losing the Iowa caucus to Ted Cruz, Trump called the chair of the Iowa GOP and pressured him to disavow the result; when that failed, he took to Twitter, denouncing the “fraud” in Iowa and calling for a new election to be held.
By the time November 3, 2020, arrived, Trump had already constructed his elaborate narrative of a rigged election. Republican leaders did little to keep their voters from falling for the president’s deception. In fact, most of them enabled and even participated in it. What began as a fringe movement after Bush v. Gore has spread into the GOP mainstream: Polls continue to show that more than half of all Republican voters believe that the 2020 election was stolen.
They are acting on Trump’s lies, flooding into local party offices, demanding to be stationed on the front lines of the next election so they can prevent it from being stolen. They have nominated scores of candidates who deny the legitimacy of Biden’s victory; seven are running to become the chief elections official in their state. Several of these Republicans—Mark Finchem in Arizona, Kristina Karamo in Michigan—are hinting at administrative actions that would reverse decades of progress in making elections more transparent and accessible, in turn leaving our system more vulnerable.
The great threat is no longer machines malfunctioning or ballots being spoiled. It is the actual theft of an election; it is the brazen abuse of power that requires not only bad actors in high places but the tacit consent of the voters who put them there.
This makes for a terrifying scenario in 2024—but first, a crucial test in 2022.
In August, when Michigan held its primary elections, all eyes were on the Republican race for governor. It had been a volatile contest; two of the perceived front-runners had been disqualified for failing to reach signature thresholds. Most of the remaining candidates were champions of Trump’s Big Lie, but none more so than Ryan Kelley, who participated in the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol and was arrested this past June by the FBI on misdemeanor charges. (Kelley pleaded not guilty in July.)
When the returns came in and Kelley lost, he refused to concede. Instead, he called for a “publicly supervised hand recount to uphold election integrity.” But Kelley had a problem: He had finished in fourth place, capturing just 15 percent of the vote and losing to the Republican nominee by 25 points.
It was a similar story in another closely watched Michigan race. State Senator Lana Theis, a Republican who’d co-written a committee report debunking Trump’s voter-fraud allegations after the 2020 election, defeated a MAGA conspiracy theorist, Mike Detmer, by 15 points in their primary contest. Detmer’s response? “When we have full, independent, unfettered forensic audits of 2020 and 2022 I’ll consider the results,” he wrote on his Facebook page. This pattern has played out in races all across the country, with sore Republican losers doing their best Trump impressions, alleging fraud to explain a drubbing at the ballot box.
“This gives me real hope,” Thomas told me in early September. “Because people understand, when there’s a margin like that, you lost. And if you’re going to insist you didn’t lose, well, now people are going to be skeptical of what you’ve been telling them all along. Is the sky really falling? You can only tell a lie so many times before people stop listening to you.”
His optimism struck me as misplaced. For one thing, these were just primary elections. Tudor Dixon, the GOP’s gubernatorial nominee in Michigan, is herself a 2020 conspiracy theorist. In fact, all three Republicans on top of the statewide ticket this fall—Dixon, as well as the nominees for attorney general and secretary of state—have claimed that Democrats stole the election. Michigan’s GOP lawmakers have not allowed changes to vote-processing laws despite the chaos of 2020. In the event of close Democratic victories in November, we can expect another “red mirage,” in which the Republican nominee jumps out to a big lead soon after the polls close, only to fall behind as the backlog of absentee ballots is counted. The conspiracy theories will practically spread themselves.
Sensing my skepticism, Thomas told me there was additional cause for hope. Two years ago, the Republican volunteers who monitored the vote-counting in Detroit on behalf of the party were completely out of their depth; most had never worked an election, and thus confused standard protocols for what they swore in affidavits were violations of the law. Following the grassroots outcry of November 2020, the Michigan GOP recruited hordes of new volunteers who have since received enhanced training. Thomas says his first encounter with this new class of Republican poll watchers came this summer, on primary day in Detroit, where he was once again tasked with overseeing the count. “It was night and day from 2020. They were respectful,” he said. “There were no issues.”
Hours after I finished speaking with Thomas, CNN published a report exposing a Zoom training seminar in which Republican leaders in Wayne County, Michigan—home to Detroit—instructed poll watchers to ignore election rules and smuggle in pens, paper, and cellphones to document Democratic cheating. That seminar was held on August 1—the day before Michigan’s primary.
I want to believe our system of self-government is durable enough to withstand all of this; I want to believe Thomas, that everything will be all right. But as we spoke, it struck me that, despite his expertise, and despite his ringside seat to the unraveling of our democracy, Thomas is like millions of other Americans who can’t quite bring themselves to face what’s happening. Like so many of them, he clings to fleeting hints of a return to normalcy and ignores the flood of evidence suggesting it will not come. He still trusts a system that is actively being sabotaged.
Thomas has never belonged to a party. He remains proudly nonpartisan. But he acknowledges what must happen in 2022 for America to swerve off the road to national calamity. The Republicans who have made election denying the centerpiece of their campaign must lose, and lose badly. They will cry fraud and demand recounts and refuse to concede. They will throw tantrums sufficient to draw attention to their margins of defeat. At that point, Thomas says, maybe a critical mass of GOP voters—the very people who supported these candidates in the first place—will finally realize that they’ve been duped. Maybe they will abandon the lies and choose a different path before it is too late.
But based on the number of candidates who sold a lie to earn their spot on the November ballot, in Michigan and beyond, I fear it may already be.
This article appears in the November 2022 print edition with the headline “Bad Losers.”
