The Week Magazine November 21, 2025

Any week, you can fill a whole morning with reading about the travesties of immigration enforcement. ICE officers ride around Chicago like third-world paramilitary squads. Immigrants married to U.S. citizens are whisked away to detention centers because of a missing document. Christians are deported to Iran. There are random raids on Home Depot parking lots. Border Patrol agents strut around in masks many miles from any border. Once you start putting the list together, it’s hard to know where to end. And yet: We did not get here suddenly. As cruel and erratic as immigration enforcement has become, what we are seeing is the product of 20 years of failure. Sen. John McCain almost got a bipartisan deal—which would have toughened borders and offered legal status to most undocumented immigrants—in…

What happened The Democratic Party was wracked by infighting this week, after eight senators in its caucus struck a deal with Republicans to end the longest government shutdown on record—a deal that failed to secure the party’s primary goal. For 40 days, Democrats were united in refusing to reopen the government unless Republicans agreed to extend soon-to-expire enhanced subsidies for the millions of Americans who get health insurance through the Affordable Care Act. But cracks began to emerge among Democrats as shutdown pain mounted, with about 1.4 million federal workers missing paychecks, food aid for some 42 million Americans put on pause, and thousands of flights canceled due to air traffic controllers calling in sick rather than working without pay. The eight caucus moderates said that with Republicans refusing to…

■ In 2022, Sharon and Andy Longhurst rescued two wild European hedgehogs and helped the sickly animals recuperate at their home in the Scottish Lowlands. Three years later, their garage is now an ICU, with seven incubators and 40 cages, and a maternity ward in the garden. The Longhursts and a team of volunteers have treated some 567 hedgehogs and released 65% of them back into the wild. Sharon says it’s a labor of love. “We say we have to draw a line, but then the phone rings and we say, ‘Bring it in.’” ■ More people have walked on the moon than have successfully rowed across the Pacific Ocean. But that didn’t deter Jess Rowe, 29, and Miriam Payne, 26. In May, the Britons launched from Peru on a…

What happened House Democrats this week released emails in which Jeffrey Epstein suggested Trump was more aware of his sex-trafficking crimes than the president has admitted. “Of course he knew about the girls,” Epstein wrote in a 2019 email to journalist Michael Wolff, “as he asked Ghislaine to stop.” In a 2011 email to longtime confidante Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein wrote that Trump was the “dog that hasn’t barked,” and that although a victim “spent hours at my house with him,” Trump hadn’t “once been mentioned” during an investigation into Epstein. In 2015, Wolff advised Epstein—who died by suicide in 2019—on how to respond if Trump denied flying on Epstein’s plane or visiting his house. “You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you,” he…

What happened President Trump ordered officials to redouble their immigration crackdown in Chicago this week even as federal judges rebuked those agents for using excessive force. Although a court had already barred Trump from sending in the National Guard, the president posted online: “CALL IN THE TROOPS, FAST, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!” Last week, Judge Robert Gettleman demanded that Immigration and Customs Enforcement improve “disgusting” conditions at its Broadview facility, saying that making detainees “sleep on a floor next to an overflowed toilet” was “obviously unconstitutional.” And Judge Sara Ellis curtailed the use of tear gas in the city, saying federal agents’ aggressive tactics “shock the conscience” and that Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino had “admitted he lied” in accusing protesters of violence. Homeland Security official Tricia McLaughlin credited…

Republicans face a pair of existential threats as they look ahead to next year’s midterms, said Chris Brennan in USA Today. The first is the economy. In exit polls from last week’s off-year elections—where Republicans suffered a “thorough thrashing”—voters cited the economy and cost of living as their top concerns. And in a Washington Post/ABC News poll taken just before the elections, 71% of Americans said they were spending more on groceries than a year ago, with 59% blaming Trump for rising prices. Republicans’ second threat is that Trump “refuses to admit there is a problem.” Instead of asking for voters’ patience, Trump this week dismissed the affordability crisis as a “con job by Democrats,” insisting that prices are “down,” and that polls showing Americans’ economic worries are “fake.” Of…