Aziz Huq

On​ 18 January, ten vans of immigration agents carrying rifles and riot shields descended on Columbia Heights, a suburb of Minneapolis. At the home of ChingLy ‘Scott’ Thao, a US citizen, they knocked quickly before shattering the front door with a battering ram. They yanked Thao, who was wearing only bright blue boxers and Crocs, out into the sub-zero cold and bundled him into a...

‘Ithink we’ll get five,’ President Trump said, and five was what he got. At his prompting, the Republican-dominated Texas legislature remapped the districts to be used in next year’s elections to the federal House of Representatives. Their map includes five new seats that are likely to be won by the Republicans, who already hold 25 of the state’s 38 seats. Until...

Russell Vought​, architect of Project 2025 – the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page compendium of extreme conservative policies – and now head of the White House Office of Management and Budget, explained a couple of years ago what a new Republican administration following his plan would do. It would, he said, ‘throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have...

In​ the 1920 US presidential election, Eugene Debs, or Convict 9653, won 913,693 votes while serving a ten-year sentence in a federal prison in Atlanta. ‘Under the influence of this unreasoning mob psychology,’ the editors of the New York Times complained, an ‘acknowledged criminal is nightly applauded as loudly as many of the candidates for the presidency who have won...