Since Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025, migrant arrests have surged in the United States. More than 610,000 people have passed through detention centres run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal immigration agency in under two years. The pace only continues to accelerate: in August 2026, nearly 51,000 arrests were made in a single month – a record for Trump’s second term. Who are the people being held in these centres? What are their living conditions like? And how is Trump’s mass deportation policy upending the lives of families settled in the United States? In this report, Valérie Defert and Pierrick Leurent investigate the issue in Texas – the heart of the new US immigration detention system.

Every adult who purports to care about a free press should read at least one story about the frustrating hurdles and bad-faith nitpicking confronted by student journalists (and their advisors). Earlier this year, a young reporter for the Redwood High School Bark found a few local references in the US Department of Justice’s public files concerning Jeffrey Epstein, the sex offender who died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. Soon, the high school faced legal threats, and administrators grew concerned that students had published inaccurate information. Ara Rosenthal tells the story of the steady, diligent young journalists who weathered the worries and pressures of the adults around them—and kept their story intact.