Donald Trump reached an agreement with the IRS that “forever” prevents the federal government from “prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims against the president, his family members, and his companies.

Trump’s former criminal defense attorney and now acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, signed the document and appointed a five-member board to manage payments from a $1.776 billion fund to beneficiaries whose identities will remain secret. Blanche publicly stated that Trump and his family are ineligible for these payments, but he has not ruled out payments to the president’s donors and allies.

In other words, Trump sued his own government, demanding that he not be prosecuted for his well-known tax fraud, that he be compensated with billions of dollars, and that he be protected forever from any further scrutiny of his tax returns.

Trump filed the lawsuit over the leak to the press of some of his tax return documents that exposed the tax fraud his organization and family have committed for decades. It’s no wonder he has refused for so long to voluntarily hand over his tax returns.

Now, the fund approved by his own government can literally go to anyone. Some claim it could go to the January 6 insurrectionists. Others will most likely remain anonymous. For his part, Trump can remove the commissioners from the attorney general’s board, and, as The Guardian explained, reports on the attorney general’s administration must be confidential under the agreement.

This Is the Dictator’s Playbook

And as perverse as the ploy sounds, it is not new. In fact, it is, once again, part of the dictator’s playbook.

Even if Vladimir Putin releases his tax returns, we can trust those figures about as much as we can trust the results of his “democratic” elections. His own regime (and Russia’s historical structure since the Bolshevik Revolution) has been, as autocracies tend to be, opaque.

However, in most autocracies, there is a national tax administration process. The economic system of dictatorships eliminates the middle class, dividing the population between the 1% and the rest. Often, the former are members of the government or direct beneficiaries of it. And the president? Well, I don’t think it ever occurred to anyone that someone like Fidel Castro or Hugo Chávez Frías ever paid taxes.

“The deal that Trump extracted from the government he leads is really a spectacular demonstration of the fact that there really are two sets of tax rules, one for those at the top, and another for the rest of us,” according to Steve Wamhoff, federal policy director with the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a nonpartisan tax policy group.

“Trump and his officials view themselves as untethered from the tax laws that apply to ordinary Americans,” he told The Independent.

America’s Constitutional Guardrails (In Theory)

However, the United States is not (yet) a dictatorship. In fact, its constitutional structure was designed to be bulletproof, preventing what we are seeing unfold in real time. That is why the Trump vs. IRS scheme appears, at first glance, to be just another tantrum by the celebrity-turned-president. What it really is, on the contrary, is the cementing of a regime that puts in writing that “no one criticizes me.”

“Trump’s dirty deal has crossed the line into illegality,” according to Robert Weissman and Lisa Gilbert, co-presidents of the nonprofit consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.

“If Acting AG Todd Blanche tries to effectuate this settlement by directing the IRS to end audits underway or not to conduct audits it would normally undertake, both he and Donald Trump will be violating the law and putting IRS officers at risk,” they said.

Who Else Gets the Money?

In Trump’s rhetoric, convoluted by his team to confuse the public, the money will go to his supporters, “persecuted” by Democratic administrations.

Trump said the victims of “weaponization” under the Obama and Biden administrations — an apparent reference to his allies who were investigated in connection with his 2016 and 2020 campaigns and the attack on the Capitol — were “destroyed, they went to jail, their families were ruined, they committed suicide.”

“We’re reimbursing those people for their legal fees and for their costs, and for anybody involved,” he said. “It was the most violent thing I’ve ever seen in politics.”

Blanche has not ruled out millions of taxpayer dollars going to people who assaulted law enforcement officers during the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021. The first lawsuit against the “weaponization” fund came from two law enforcement officers who were beaten and bloodied by a mob of Trump’s supporters that day.

The 14th Amendment Problem

Trump’s IRS lawsuit was a “Potemkin lawsuit, a sham brought about only so that it could be settled,” according to the complaint filed by Harry Dunn and Daniel Hodges.

The administration is also accused of violating the 14th Amendment’s clause prohibiting the government from paying debts and other obligations “incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States” by effectively creating a roundabout payment system for aggrieved rioters.

“The fund’s mere existence sends a clear and chilling message: those who enact violence in President Trump’s name will not just avoid punishment,” according to the lawsuit, “they will be rewarded with riches.”

Meanwhile? The president can continue to pocket money, directly or indirectly, through illegal means, without anyone being able to hold him accountable.

1934? Is that you?

While the world is distracted by the senseless war in Iran, the Hantavirus, and the slow decline of the last Western empire, something was brewing here on the continent.

A series of recordings leaked by investigative journalists in Honduras and the Spanish news platform Canal Red have revealed the behind-the-scenes plan of the United States and Israel. It is a campaign to promote their interests in Honduras and destabilize left-wing governments in Latin America, according to Middle East Eye.

And yes, this may sound like “nothing new” to some, especially given the United States’ history of political interventionism on the continent. However, the investigation, led by anonymous Honduran journalists, reveals a macabre plan that goes beyond even the most dystopian of imaginations.

The investigators had access to 37 leaked voice notes from WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram that, according to what’s now called “Hondurasgate,” have been authenticated through forensic analysis. They were recorded between January and April 2026. The website that published the 37 recordings, making them available in their entirety, explains that each file was analyzed using the Phonexia Voice Inspector protocol, a forensic suite from the Czech company of the same name, founded in 2006 and used in more than 60 countries by intelligence agencies, law enforcement, banks, and media outlets.

The first finding of the investigation was that the recordings appear to indicate that Israeli interests were behind U.S. President Donald Trump’s pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández.

For those who don’t recall, in December of last year, Trump pardoned Hernández, who was serving a 45-year prison sentence following a U.S. federal court conviction on drug trafficking charges.

At the time, many of us questioned the U.S. president’s decision, given that he had campaigned for years against drug trafficking—a stance he used to justify intervention in Venezuela and the bombing of ships in the Caribbean.

Shortly thereafter, Trump endorsed the then-presidential candidate of Palestinian origin, Nasry Asfura, who was running against his centrist opponent Salvador Nasralla, and threatened to cut aid to the country if Asfura lost the election.

The question was, what is Trump’s interest in Honduras? We now know that it was not in the interest of the U.S. administration but of Israel.

What interest does Israel have, then?

Hernández, known as JOH, served as president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022 as a member of the conservative-leaning National Party. Those were years of supposed cooperation with the United States in the fight against drug trafficking. In 2024, he was sentenced in Manhattan to 45 years in prison for associating for more than a decade with drug traffickers who paid him bribes to ensure that more than 400 tons of cocaine reached the northern border of the Rio Grande. According to El País, three years earlier, his brother Juan Antonio Hernández had been sentenced to life in prison for the same crimes. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York had accused JOH of receiving $1 million from Mexican drug trafficker Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

According to new leaks from “Hondurasgate,” Trump’s pardon of JOH, days before the elections in Honduras, was not clemency, but rather the initial payment in a larger agreement. In one of the recordings, Hernández explains it directly, though without revealing his interlocutor: “The pardon money didn’t even come from you. It came from a group of rabbis and people who supported Israel.” In another audio recording, he says that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had “everything to do” with his release and the negotiations that made it possible.

The investigation into “Hondurasgate,” which includes voice messages from Asfura following private meetings at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, reveals plans to establish a new U.S. military base in Honduras, expand private “economic development” zones, and encourage investment by U.S. artificial intelligence companies.

According to the investigation, Asfura’s election was intended as a transitional step before an alleged plan backed by the United States and Israel to have Hernández take power in the upcoming presidential elections.

In a January 20 voice note, Hernández said that “the prime minister of Israel is going to support us.” He added that “they [the Israelis] had everything to do with my departure and negotiation,” referring to Trump’s pardon.

In a March 14 voice message, Hernández credited the money for his pardon to “a group of rabbis and people who supported Israel.”

The investigation also includes messages from Hernández to the president of the National Congress of Honduras, Tomás Zambrano, in which the former instructed Zambrano to undermine Asfura’s power with Israeli support.

“I sent you the people of Israel; they sent you money. I’m the one doing the lobbying,” the former president said.

The plan extends beyond Honduras.

The investigation also included conversations between Hernández and Asfura about creating a “digital journalism unit” funded by the Honduran government and the U.S.-backed Argentine president, Javier Milei, to launch media attacks against the governments of Colombia and Mexico.

The second installment from the investigators includes a recording of an alleged conversation between Hernández, Asfura, and his vice president, María Antonieta Mejía. The goal would be to undermine the governments of Claudia Sheinbaum and Gustavo Petro.

In the conversation between Hernández and Asfura, the former president tells the Honduran leader that he needs $150,000 to rent an apartment in the United States, where he plans to set up an office for a digital journalism unit. This unit would “publish information about Manuel Zelaya,” who accused Trump of “protecting the plunderer of the state,” referring to Hernández’s pardon last November, and about Xiomara Castro, who served as president until handing power to Asfura. “Someone else here, from the U.S. president’s team, will handle it for me. Well, he’s one of the Republicans who are helping us. They’re going to set up a news site for us.”

Asfura’s response is: “I’m going to transfer it from a friend’s account. Let’s see if they can give it to you in cash, but explain to me, what are we going to do with it, what do we gain?” Hernández replies: “We’re going to set up a cell, Mr. President. From here, from the United States, an information cell, so they can’t track us there in Honduras. It’s going to be like a Latin American news site. I was on a call with President Javier Milei, and it was successful. Very, very, very good, and I think that at this point we can do great things for all of Latin America. There are some cases coming up against Mexico, some cases coming up against Colombia, and, most importantly, against Honduras, against the Zelaya family.”

“Also, I think you need a little more money for yourself. So we’re going to send another $150,000. And that way, you can survive a little longer. “We’re going to take it from INSEP [Secretariat of Infrastructure and Public Services],” Asfura says. On the same topic, in another alleged communication between the former Honduran president and the current vice president, Hernández emphasizes the importance of having that liquidity, “with the support of some Republicans,” to “attack and eradicate the cancer of the left” in Honduras and throughout Latin America.

“I was telling President Asfura that we were able to speak with Javier Milei, and he’s also contributing $350,000. Another great friend of ours from Mexico is also providing support, specifically for the Mexican community. We’re pretty much ready and hoping this moves forward quickly,” Hernández added.

For her part, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, during her morning press conference this Wednesday, said she listened to the audio recordings and reviewed part of the news reports. The Mexican president again sent a message to Isabel Díaz Ayuso, regional premier of Madrid, who is currently on a tour in Mexico as part of an international right-wing network linked to groups in Spain, the United States, and Argentina that spread fake news because “they don’t like Mexican humanism” and “prefer to worship Hernán Cortés.”

“They can set up a smear campaign office against our government in Honduras, using resources from a friendly nation. It won’t affect us, not at all. There may be days of confusion, but if we remain true to our principles, know what we must do within the framework of our Constitution and the laws, and respect sovereignty, no one will be able to undermine the transformation project. It’s that clear,” Sheinbaum stated.

Meanwhile, in September 2025, the U.S. government announced its intention to revoke Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s visa after he joined a pro-Palestine demonstration in New York City and urged U.S. soldiers to “not point their guns at people” and to “disobey Trump’s orders.”

For his part, Argentine President Javier Milei has promoted relations between Israel and Argentina with U.S. support, fostering economic cooperation and announcing plans to move the Argentine embassy to Jerusalem.

Israel has a long history of interventionism in Latin America.

Latin American presidents such as Gustavo Petro, Lula da Silva, and Sheinbaum herself have opposed Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people. However, they have been among the few to speak out in recent years.

In contrast, the region’s right wing has always maintained ties with Israel. As president of Brazil (2019–2022), Jair Bolsonaro expanded security cooperation with the Israeli military and visited the Western Wall alongside Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Argentine President Javier Milei (who calls himself a “fan of Israel”) promised to move Argentina’s embassy to Jerusalem and pledged to maintain his “unwavering commitment to the State of Israel and its people in the fight against Islamic terrorism, for peace and freedom.”

The relationship between Latin America and the Middle East dates back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when waves of Palestinian, Syrian, and Lebanese immigrants left the crumbling Ottoman Empire and settled in South and Central America. Today, their descendants number in the tens of millions, including approximately 700,000 Palestinians. While this diaspora has strengthened support for Palestine, the region’s solidarity is rooted in more than just ancestry. Latin America has suffered the same tactics of state terrorism that Palestine faces at the hands of regimes armed, trained, and advised by Israel.

Israel proved to be an indispensable ally to the dictatorships and military juntas that ravaged Latin America in the late 20th century. For example, Israel’s oldest ally in the region is Nicaragua, where the ruling Somoza dynasty provided weapons and diplomatic cover to the Haganah (a militia of Zionist settlers) between 1939 and 1948. In return, Israel began selling automatic weapons, tanks, and military aircraft to the autocracy in the 1950s. Inspired by the examples of Algeria and Cuba, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) was founded in 1961 to lead a revolution against the regime.

Similarly, the largest single recipient of Israeli arms in Latin America during the Cold War was Argentina’s fascist military junta. After seizing power in 1976, the regime launched the so-called “Dirty War” against students, intellectuals, trade unionists, human rights activists, journalists, and anyone else suspected of leftist sympathies. Between 1978 and 1983, Israel sold more than $1 billion in military equipment to the junta, during whose rule more than 30,000 people were murdered. Among those kidnapped, tortured, and executed, Argentine Jews were disproportionately represented. Investigations later revealed that the regime murdered 2,000 Argentine Jews, while Tel Aviv’s arms sales to Argentina continued uninterrupted.

And in Guatemala, Israel’s role became evident after the United States suspended military aid in 1977, and Tel Aviv became the government’s primary source of arms and training. General Benedicto Lucas García, later prosecuted for mass killings, stated that “we consider the Israeli soldier to be the best soldier in the world today, and we take him as a model and example.”

So, while the findings of Hondurasgate do not tell a new story, they do show how, in the end, decisions regarding much of Western international policy, both within and outside Latin America, have always been in the hands of Tel Aviv.

There is something especially cruel about the way this Administration talks about work.

It wraps itself in the language of entrepreneurship, grit, self-reliance, and “American job creators,” while targeting the very people who have spent years building businesses, hiring workers, and keeping local economies from hollowing out. This week, the U.S. Small Business Administration made that contradiction impossible to ignore.

According to a March 9 news release from the SBA, the agency has now expanded its restrictions on access to SBA-backed loans, banning foreign nationals and non-citizens from all SBA-guaranteed small business loan programs. That includes the agency’s Surety Bond and Microloan Programs, and it builds on an earlier policy change that had already made any small business owned in whole or in part by a foreign national ineligible for the SBA’s flagship 504 and 7(a) loan programs. Under the new rule, small business owners applying for any SBA loan program “must be U.S. citizens or U.S. nationals with their principal residence in the United States.”

“The Trump SBA is committed to driving economic growth and job creation for American citizens,” SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler said in the agency’s release. “Last month, we made it clear that SBA would not allow foreign nationals to access our core small business loan programs, and today, we are expanding that policy to include all SBA-guaranteed loans. With our lending authority capped annually by Congress and amid record demand for access to capital, our responsibility is clear: the limited resource of SBA financing must prioritize American citizens who are building businesses and creating jobs here at home.”

On paper, the White House and the SBA want this to read as a simple America First correction. In practice, it reads as an attempt to choke off access to capital for immigrant communities, including a large swath of Latino entrepreneurs, at the precise moment they have become one of the country’s clearest engines of business growth.

What the SBA actually changed

According to Politico, the Small Business Administration issued policy guidance in early February requiring that all owners of a small business applying for the agency’s primary 7(a) loan program be U.S. citizens or U.S. nationals with principal residences in the United States. The outlet reported that the move rescinded a December policy that had allowed a 7(a) loan borrower to hold up to 5% of a business’s ownership by a foreign national, a green card holder, or a U.S. national or citizen living outside the country.

That shift was severe enough on its own. Green card holders who had permanent U.S. residency could no longer own any part of a business applying for the federal government’s most popular small business loan program. Then the Administration went further.

According to Reuters, the SBA notice stated that “Legal Permanent Residents (LPRs) will not be eligible to own any percentage interest in an Applicant/Borrower.”

Then came the March 9 expansion. According to the SBA’s own release, the rule now covers all SBA-guaranteed loans, including the Surety Bond Guarantee and Microloan programs. The agency said the change would take effect 30 days after publication.

The SBA said that in fiscal year 2025, it approved 3,358 loans for small businesses owned in part by lawful permanent residents, representing 4% of the agency’s total loan approvals of 85,000. Because Congress caps the agency’s lending authority each year, the SBA argued that “the limited resource of SBA financing must prioritize American citizens.”

But that framing leaves out the basic reality that lawful permanent residents are legal residents of the United States. They live here. They work here. They pay taxes here. They hire here. They build here. The Administration is asking the public to treat them as outsiders while depending on the economic life they help sustain.

Latino business owners already carry more of the economy than Washington admits

According to Brookings analysis of the Annual Business Survey, American Community Survey, and Bureau of Economic Analysis data from 2017 to 2022, Latino or Hispanic individuals owned 7.9% of all employer businesses in 2022, totaling 465,202 firms. Those businesses employed 3,550,230 people and generated more than $653 billion in total revenue. From 2021 to 2022 alone, Latino or Hispanic-owned businesses increased employment by 14.1% and total revenue by 18.9%.

That growth did not come out of nowhere. According to the same report, Latino or Hispanic-owned businesses grew at an average annual rate of 7.7% between 2017 and 2022, far outpacing the 0.46% growth rate for all employer businesses. Between 2017 and 2022, Latino or Hispanic-owned businesses grew in 204 of 227 U.S. metro areas studied. Between 2021 and 2022, they represented 58% of the increase in total employers nationwide.

This means that without Latino or Hispanic-owned businesses, the U.S. would have had 619,655 fewer jobs between 2019 and 2022, alongside a loss of $34 billion in workers’ wages and $190 billion in total revenue.

So when this Administration narrows access to capital in the name of protecting “American job creators,” it is attacking a sector of the business community that has already been doing the work of creating jobs, wages, and revenue at a pace the broader economy has struggled to match.

However, another point buried in the Brookings data deserves more attention. Latino or Hispanic business owners remain underrepresented relative to their share of the U.S. population. In 2022, Latino or Hispanic-identifying individuals made up 19.1% of the population but owned only 7.9% of employer businesses. According to Brookings, if the share of Latino or Hispanic-owned employer businesses matched the share of Americans who identify as Latino or Hispanic, there would be 812,440 more businesses generating a combined $1.1 trillion in revenue and $250 billion in payroll.

In other words, the country is already benefiting from Latino entrepreneurship while still starving it of the full room it deserves to grow.

And who gets shut out when Latino business owners lose access to capital?

The SBA does not need to name Latinos explicitly for Latino communities to feel the blow.

According to The Guardian, this is the first time in the agency’s history that legal residents, including green card holders, have been cut off from loans backed by the Small Business Administration. The paper reported that many of those loans support “main street” enterprises such as retail shops, restaurants, cafes, franchises, and business-to-business services in sectors ranging from manufacturing to transportation.

That description should sound familiar to anyone who knows how Latino entrepreneurship actually looks on the ground. It is the restaurant owner trying to expand, the contractor trying to bid on a larger project. The family business struggling to buy equipment. The franchisee who wants to open a first location.

According to The Guardian, Keegan McBride, co-founder of SBA Source, said many franchisees are immigrants, including both green card holders and naturalized U.S. citizens, and that under the new rule, even married couples trying to launch a business together could be blocked from an SBA loan if both people are not U.S. citizens. He explained why these loans matter by saying, “SBA loans are really only meant to be issued in situations where folks wouldn’t be able to get access to credit on similar terms without the government guarantee. It’s challenging because SBA is kind of designed to fill that gap.”

That gap is the story. Conventional lenders already reward people who have home equity, inherited wealth, investment portfolios, or the kind of financial cushion that makes risk feel manageable. SBA-backed loans were created to reach people who do not move through the economy with those protections.

Many Latino families know that terrain intimately. They build businesses while carrying less generational wealth, thinner margins, and fewer institutional connections. Cutting off access to government-backed financing does not level the playing field. It tilts it even harder toward the people who already own most of it.

The Administration says this protects Americans. The record says something else.

The Administration has not been subtle about the worldview behind this policy.

According to Politico, the change is consistent with Trump’s January 2025 executive order on “protecting the American people against invasion,” which directs federal agencies to “employ all lawful means to ensure the faithful execution of the immigration laws of the United States.” According to Lexology’s review of the policy changes, the SBA’s tightening rules have been gradual, beginning in 2025 and becoming more restrictive over time, culminating in a February 2026 policy that excludes legal permanent residents from owning even 1% of a business applying for SBA-backed financing.

This was not a one-off administrative correction. It was a deliberate campaign to tether access to capital to the Administration’s broader immigration enforcement agenda.

In an op-ed posted to the SBA’s website in February, Loeffler said, “Trump has restored confidence and opportunity to Main Street with a commonsense economic agenda designed to put hardworking families and small businesses, not Washington bureaucrats, illegal aliens or coastal elites, in the driver’s seat,” according to The Guardian.

But the policy does not stop at undocumented immigrants. It reaches legal permanent residents. It reaches people whom the government itself has authorized to live and work permanently in the United States. It reaches people who have built businesses, paid taxes, created jobs, and committed themselves to this country for years.

According to Politico, Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Nydia Velázquez said in a joint statement: “The Trump administration is stoking the flames of hatred, spreading fear and confusion among immigrants and small business owners. Rather than support hardworking legal immigrants to start or expand a business, the Trump SBA is choosing hatred by barring green card holders from receiving an SBA loan. The Administration’s message to immigrants is clear: you are not welcome to pursue the American Dream.”

According to The Guardian, Aissatou Barry-Fall, CEO of the Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union, said the new policy makes “no sense whatsoever” and added, “I think it’s discrimination. That’s all it is.”

Latino business owners grew across the country. The punishment is national too.

One of the laziest myths in American politics is that Latino economic power is confined to a few predictable places. The data says otherwise.

According to Brookings, Latino or Hispanic-owned businesses grew in nearly 90% of the metro areas examined between 2017 and 2022. The biggest numerical gains came in places with large Latino communities, including Miami, Los Angeles, and New York. Miami alone added 13,693 Latino or Hispanic-owned businesses during that period. Los Angeles added 10,999. New York added 8,727.

And yet the pattern was national. Growth was observed across the Midwest and parts of the Southern Appalachians. Latino or Hispanic-owned businesses also contributed heavily to overall business growth in major metro areas. According to Brookings, they accounted for over 93% of total growth in Miami, 47% in Los Angeles, and 65% in Orlando.

These businesses are concentrated in sectors that shape everyday life. In 2022, according to Brookings, Latino or Hispanic-owned employer businesses were clustered in construction, accommodation and food services, and professional, scientific, and technical services. From 2017 to 2022, Latino- or Hispanic-owned construction businesses increased by over 37,500, a 75% jump. Transportation and warehousing grew by 74%. Arts, entertainment, and recreation grew by 86%. Real estate and rental leasing grew by 66%.

So why target Latino business owners now?

Because capital is power.

A community that starts businesses builds more than income. It builds autonomy. It builds leverage. It builds local hiring power, local political influence, neighborhood stability, and the ability to survive institutions that were never designed to make life easy. Small business formation changes the social map of who gets to own, employ, and endure.

That helps explain why this Administration keeps returning to the same pressure points: Immigration status. Access to credit. Federal legitimacy. The right to belong economically.

According to the SBA’s March 9 release, the agency also pointed to earlier efforts, including citizenship verification requirements across its loan programs, to “cut off access to loans for illegal aliens” and plans to move SBA field offices out of sanctuary cities that it says do not comply with ICE. In other words, this is a political worldview being translated into administrative barriers.

And it arrives at a brutal time. According to Politico, small business advocates warned that restrictions on green card holders come as small businesses are already struggling with tariffs, health care costs, inflation, and long-standing difficulties accessing capital. Small Business Majority founder and CEO John Arensmeyer said the decision “will limit the growth of small businesses and jobs throughout the United States” and that “the timing of SBA’s tighter lending eligibility criteria could not be worse.” He called on the agency to “prioritize broadening eligibility rather than narrowing it.”

According to The Guardian, restaurateur Aneesa Waheed, who was named the SBA’s New York state small business person of the year in 2024, put the emotional reality of the shift into plain language. “I’m really shocked,” she said. “I’ve been in the SBA world for a long time. You think of the SBA as a source of support and strength for small businesses.”

For decades, the SBA was one of the few places where the federal government acknowledged that access to capital should not be limited exclusively to the already secure. Now the agency is being used to narrow who counts as fully investable in America.

What they are really cutting off

There is a temptation to describe this as an immigration story and leave it there. That would let the Administration off too easily.

This is also a labor story. A wealth story. A race story. A story about who gets to convert work into ownership.

According to Reuters, the new rule does not stop non-citizens from owning businesses in the United States or from accessing conventional bank loans. That is true. It is also incomplete. Conventional credit is often harder to obtain, especially for founders without the collateral, asset base, or financial history that banks prefer. That is exactly why SBA-backed loans exist.

According to The Guardian, McBride said that without the SBA guarantee, many borrowers will have to rely on home equity, investment portfolios, or other forms of collateral to secure financing. Those are resources that many working and immigrant families do not have in abundance.

This is where the broader economic picture comes back into view. Brookings found that Latino or Hispanic-owned businesses likely buffered the U.S. economy against a more severe downturn during and after the pandemic. They helped drive post-pandemic business creation. They generated jobs, wages, and revenue in places that badly needed all three.

And still, they remain underrepresented. Still, there is room for growth. Still, the ceiling has not remotely been reached.

So when this Administration closes off a critical financing pathway, it’s telling a fast-growing entrepreneurial community that its labor, taxes, hiring, and revenue are welcome, but its claim to institutional support remains conditional.

On Wednesday morning, federal authorities came through Los Angeles like a warning siren with a battering ram.

They raided the home and office of Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho. Officially, this falls under an investigation tied to a company that developed an AI chatbot for the country's second-largest school system. That is the paper story. Reality is different.

The three raids were painted as three points of pressure: Carvalho’s home in San Pedro, LAUSD headquarters downtown, and a residence associated with Debra Kerr, a saleswoman whose clients included a Florida-based artificial intelligence company called AllHere.

The AllHere chatbot, the collapse, and the official rationale

AllHere was a failed artificial intelligence company whose founder was charged with fraud in 2024. Joanna Smith-Griffin, founder and former CEO, was arrested that year and charged with securities fraud, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft. By the time those charges landed, the LAUSD chatbot had already been taken out of service.

The tool had a name: “Ed.”

Carvalho introduced “Ed” in August 2024 as revolutionary for student education and as a new channel between LAUSD and the families it serves. The tool never fully launched. It never became the future. It became a problem, and then it disappeared.

The indictment and the collapse of AllHere embarrassed Carvalho and the school system, but it did not appear to be a catastrophe on the balance sheet. LAUSD spent about $3 million with the company for work done under a contract originally worth up to $6 million over five years. LAUSD’s budget this year is $18.8 billion. In dollar terms, this was not the kind of figure that usually triggers a federal spectacle.

A former AllHere executive has accused the now-bankrupt company of inadequate security measures. Even if that accusation holds, there is no evidence of a security breach affecting student or employee data.

AllHere also held a contract for somewhat different services with Miami-Dade County Public Schools, which Carvalho ran before joining LAUSD. He has said he had nothing to do with that contract. He has also denied personal involvement in selecting AllHere for the Los Angeles project.

When the accusations surfaced, Carvalho said he would appoint a task force to examine what went wrong with the LAUSD project and chart a way forward. There is no evidence that he has done so.

Debra Kerr, the commission dispute, and the relationships around the deal

Debra Kerr rapidly becomes the connective tissue.

She is a successful consultant to companies seeking to work with school districts, and she has a long relationship with Carvalho dating back to his time as superintendent in Miami. She worked as a consultant for AllHere. In court documents, she has claimed the company owes her $630,000.

Her claim: AllHere never paid her the commission she says she was owed for closing the Los Angeles AllHere deal.

Carvalho’s standing in LA, and the earlier scrutiny in Miami

Carvalho has not floated through his career unnoticed. LAUSD hired him in February 2022. The school board renewed him in September. In September 2025, the Los Angeles Board of Education voted unanimously to keep him on for another four years, at an annual salary of $440,000. Board President Scott Schmerelson said at the time that the superintendent “has demonstrated consistent leadership in difficult times.”

Before Los Angeles, Carvalho spent 14 years leading Miami-Dade County Public Schools. His biography on the district’s website lists an array of honors, including National Superintendent of the Year in 2014 and National Urban Superintendent of the Year in 2018.

But there is history here, too. In 2020, Carvalho came under scrutiny from the Miami-Dade school system’s inspector general. He had helped solicit a $1.57 million donation from an online education company for a foundation he oversees while the company had a pending contract with the district. Once hired, the company delivered an online platform riddled with problems and quickly scrapped it, according to the Miami Herald.

In June 2021, the inspector general concluded the donation, intended to benefit teachers, did not violate state or district ethics policies but created “an appearance of impropriety,” and that the foundation Carvalho created should return the funds. Instead, the foundation distributed the money in $100 gift certificates to teachers.

The federal lawsuit, the Justice Department’s intervention, and what changed the temperature

If this were only a chatbot story, it would be just that. But last week, the Trump administration joined a lawsuit filed by the 1776 Project Foundation, a conservative group based in Billings, Montana, alleging that LAUSD “discriminates against white students” under its decades-old desegregation policy.

Filed last month in federal court in Los Angeles, the lawsuit alleges LAUSD’s allegedly racially discriminatory policies “systematically disadvantage certain students based on the racial composition of their schools.”

The suit argues LAUSD used race-based classifications to label schools as “PHBAO,” or “predominantly Hispanic, Black, Asian, and other non-Anglo,” and allocated benefits accordingly.

Fewer than 100 schools in the district lack the PHBAO designation. The lawsuit alleges that students in those schools, including white and Middle Eastern students, are denied equal access to educational resources and opportunities.

Then the Justice Department walked in. In its motion to intervene, it contends that LAUSD provides additional funding to PHBAO schools to reduce the student-to-teacher ratio by 5.5 students and increase parent-teacher conferences. It also alleges that LAUSD gives students who wish to transfer to a magnet program admission preference equal to that of an overcrowded school, and that LAUSD treats attendance at a non-white school as a disadvantage equivalent to that of an overcrowded school.

The case is framed as a civil rights case. It is also, plainly, a political weapon aimed at the spine of desegregation policy.

The April school incident, immigration enforcement, and why this is not isolated

And then there is the part that makes the timeline feel like retaliation with paperwork.

In April of last year, Carvalho denied federal immigration agents entry to two elementary schools. On Monday, April 11, several federal agents visited Lillian Street Elementary School and Russell Elementary School within two hours of each other.

“They wanted access to the students, to determine their well-being based on, according to the agents, the fact that when they entered this country, they entered as unaccompanied minors,” Carvalho said. “It is well-known that these students are under the care of relatives.”

Now, under the pretext of investigating the AI chatbot, the government wants to try to silence Carvalho, who is not only an idol in the education system but has also been an outspoken critic of the administration.

Down the Rabbit Hole: Who is behind the 1776 Project Foundation?

The 1776 Project PAC, which is behind the lawsuit, is a conservative organization focused on electing school board members, founded by Ryan James Girdusky in 2021. The group aims to counter critical race theory and promote “patriotic education” in public schools. Conservative donors, including billionaire Richard Uihlein, heavily fund it.

According to a 2025 PR release, the organization behind the 1776 Foundation called it “the NRA of conservative education.” Girdusky is the founder of the 1776 Project PAC, which supports conservatives running for school board elections. The PAC has supported more than 350 races and won more than 200 school board seats across the country.

Girdusky is not a fringe amateur. He is a political consultant who has advised campaigns for Senator JD Vance and Representative Thomas Massie, among others. He is also the author of They’re Not Listening: How the Elites Created the Nationalist Populist Revolution.

In his “letter from our chairman” on the organization’s website, he writes:

“I first became involved in education as an issue after an incident at my godson’s school. His teacher read the books Race Cars and Something Happened In Our Town: A Child’s Story About Racial Injustice to his fourth-grade class, followed by a lecture about how police were racist.”

He then accuses: “Progressive activists within our public education system were using their positions to indoctrinate children. Even conservative communities in red states were not immune to this growing epidemic.”

“The truth is that public education in its current state is failing millions of American children. Even if there wasn’t a single culture war issue in our public schools, millions of children are behind in reading and math proficiency, parents and teachers fear for their safety inside schools, and school districts across the country have begun moving away from ideas like colorblindness and merit and instead embracing soft segregation and telling children their identity matters more than their ability.”

Get the idea?

The money behind it: Richard Uihlein

Just as every movement has its language, every movement has its donors. The organization's biggest donor is Richard Uihlein.

Uihlein has been a Republican donor for decades and increased his political giving after Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. He is a longtime donor to Republicans who share his ultra-conservative views. He is a staunch social and economic conservative with views that are anti-union, anti-tax, and pro-deregulation.

He has supported far-right candidates and often supported efforts opposing gay and transgender rights as well as abortion rights. He has been described as someone who “shuns the spotlight.” He rarely gives interviews.

This is the kind of donor profile that funds palpable outcomes.

So what is really behind Carvalho?

The justice system must investigate any wrongdoing involving the AI company and any other wrongdoing. That is not optional, and it should not be negotiable.

But set the pieces on the table and the picture sharpens. It may be about the chatbot. It may be about procurement. It may be about a trail of emails, contracts, and signatures.

But the force behind this moment looks like something else, too: the multi-million-dollar far-right machinery moving through courts and federal agencies to attack public education and to target the people who stand in its way, especially when those structures attempt to serve students of all races.

The Trump administration is no stranger to a lawsuit. There have been more than 650 lawsuits filed against the Trump administration during his second term. Historically, there have been more lawsuits filed against the administration in its first ten months than in the past three presidencies combined. Not only is the administration being sued often, but it is also losing pretty often. Here are some of the cases that the Trump administration has lost. There are a lot of lawsuits and ongoing litigation. We will continue to update this list as we learn more.

Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump - (loss)

The original lawsuit was filed on April 22, 2025, in the District Court in the District of Columbia. The Supreme Court agreed to take it up on June 17, 2025, with oral arguments taking place on Nov. 5, 2025.

At the heart of the lawsuit was the sweeping tariffs that President Donald Trump enacted as part of his economic agenda. The plaintiff argued that the tariffs imposed were a tax, not a regulation. The argument against the tariffs was that they go against the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA). IEEPA allows the president broad authority to “regulate” and “prohibit” certain imports. But placing a broad tariff on most imports went outside of that scope of power.

The Supreme Court sided with the family-owned toy company and ruled on Feb. 20, 2026, that the tariffs were illegal. It was a major blow to the Trump administration and a major win for American consumers. The tariffs serve as a tax that is passed down to the consumer, causing the affordability crisis to get worse.

The Supreme Court ruled that the president didn’t have the authority to impose sweeping tariffs. Additionally, the court stated that unilaterally imposing a tax without congressional approval usurped the power vested in Congress. Congress, per the Constitution, is the body responsible for imposing taxes.

“The president asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration, and scope,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority. “In light of the breadth, history, and constitutional context of that asserted authority, he must identify clear congressional authorization to exercise it.”

United States v. California - (ongoing)

This is an ongoing case brought against California by the Department of Justice (DOJ) due to the No Vigilantes Act (SB 805). The law requires all local, state, and federal law enforcement agents to identify themselves with names and badges when conducting official business. It also prohibits bounty hunters from conducting immigration enforcement in the state. The DOJ sued California, claiming that the law is unconstitutional since California is trying to regulate federal operations. Additionally, the DOJ argues that the law puts federal agents in danger by exposing them to doxxing.

U.S. District Judge Christina Snyder ruled against the Trump administration on Feb. 9. The judge stated that the law is constitutional since it did not discriminate between local, state, and federal law enforcement. A stay was put on the law until Feb. 19 to give the administration time to appeal, which it did.

The case currently sits in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which placed a temporary administrative injunction on the law while it is reviewed. Oral arguments at the appellate court are set to begin on March 3.

Barbara v. Trump - (ongoing)

Formally called Trump v Barbara, this lawsuit is sitting before the Supreme Court. Barbara v Trump is a nationwide class action lawsuit against the executive order aiming to end birthright citizenship. As of February 2026, the Trump administration has lost every lower court case in this lawsuit. The first loss came on July 10, 2025, when a federal judge in New Hampshire issued an injunction on the executive order. Furthermore, the judge allowed for a class action lawsuit against the federal government for all babies born on or after Feb. 19, 2025, and might be targeted by the order.

The federal government is arguing that the 14th Amendment is being misinterpreted. Representatives for the government argue that the children of undocumented people or those on visas are not granted citizenship. The federal government is pushing a narrative that birthright citizenship is only passed down from parents with “immediate allegiance” to the United States.

On Dec. 5, 2025, the Supreme Court agreed to take up the case in a rare move to bypass the appeals process. Due to injunctions, the executive order is not enforceable, and all children born in the United States must be recognized as citizens. Oral arguments are set for April 1, 2026, with a final decision expected in June or July 2026.

New York v. Trump - (loss)

Immediately after taking office, President Trump ordered the freeze of all federal funding that did not align with the administration’s policy priorities. New York led a coalition of states to file suit against the administration to block the order. A federal judge agreed, claiming that blocking funding likely violated the Impoundment Control Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. The order threatened $410 billion in funding for projects in dozens of states. The funding was appropriated for things like public health grants, green energy projects, and social safety nets like child care.

The First Circuit Court refused the administration's request for an emergency stay on the injunction from the lower court in March 2025. The administration appealed to the appellate court, and as of February 2026, the case is still active on the docket as the court reviews the appeal’s merit.

Trump v. Illinois - (loss)

The Trump administration attempted to federalize the Illinois National Guard against Chicago last year in its sweeping immigration raids. Brutal immigration raids are central to the Trump administration’s image. Whenever there has been mass organization against the raids, President Trump has federalized National Guard troops to quell protests.

A lower court blocked the action immediately after it was announced. Hoping to rely on a friendly Supreme Court, the Trump administration asked for a stay on the ruling. The Supreme Court rejected the request in a Dec. 23, 2025, ruling. In response, President Trump withdrew troops from multiple cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland.

President Donald Trump is putting the squeeze on Cuba

In an effort to continue to topple foreign governments, President Donald Trump took direct aim at Cuba. The president recently signed an executive order that opens up the possibility for new tariffs on goods from countries that give Cuba oil. According to “Addressing Threats to the United States by the Government of Cuba,” the president plans to punish countries that trade oil with Cuba.

The executive order claims that the increased economic pressure is in the name of national security.

“The Government of Cuba has taken extraordinary actions that harm and threaten the United States,” reads the executive order. “The regime aligns itself with — and provides support for — numerous hostile countries, transnational terrorist groups, and malign actors adverse to the United States, including the Government of the Russian Federation (Russia), the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Government of Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah. For example, Cuba blatantly hosts dangerous adversaries of the United States, inviting them to base sophisticated military and intelligence capabilities in Cuba that directly threaten the national security of the United States. Cuba hosts Russia’s largest overseas signals intelligence facility, which tries to steal sensitive national security information of the United States.”

President Trump hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, on Aug. 15, 2025. The summit was criticized for its insensitivity to national security by allowing a foreign adversary into the US and onto a military base. The summit took place at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson.

Countries are responding to the threat of increased tariffs

Part of the US’s takeover of Venezuela included controlling the country’s oil supplies. There was an immediate stop to all oil being shipped to Cuba from Venezuela. It was a direct assault on Cuba, which is a nation reliant on allies for its energy needs.

Mexico is the island nation’s largest energy supplier. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has remained ambiguous on what Mexico was going to do in response to the threat of tariffs. According to the Associated Press, Mexico was at one point this year shipping 200,000 barrels of oil a day to Cuba. However, around Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s trip in September 2025, shipments drastically fell.

The latest news from Washington could force Mexico to further slash oil shipments to Cuba. The results could endanger the lives of Cubans already living in precarious conditions. Last year, Cuba suffered a series of power failures across the island, with a nationwide blackout also happening in September 2025.

According to Reuters, President Trump is already claiming that Mexico will not send oil. Meanwhile, Reuters independently reports that Mexico is still reviewing what actions to take in response to the executive order.

President Trump is attempting a second regime change without finishing the first

The US government removed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on Jan. 3, 2026. The Venezuelan president’s arrest shocked the international community. Despite claiming to want to topple a dictator, the Trump administration has done little to push for democracy in Venezuela.

Instead, President Trump has endorsed Delcy Rodriguez, who was vice president to President Maduro, as the interim leader. As for María Corina Machado, President Trump doesn’t think she can lead the country despite having won the last election. She did, however, give him her Nobel Peace Prize medal.

He has not been shy about claiming that the goal in Cuba is regime change. Now, how, and if, he goes about it remains a mystery.