Black Lady News

— A WEEKLY NOTE FROM LEAH DAUGHTRY —

Black

Lady

News

What matters this week.
For the women who move the world.

Issue No. 005

Friday, May 29, 2026

A NOTE FROM LEAH

This week the work was in four rooms.

In Columbia, the South Carolina Senate refused to redraw Jim Clyburn's district off the map. In federal court in Birmingham, three judges unanimously blocked Alabama from using a map they called intentionally discriminatory against Black voters. At the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) in Washington, on a Friday afternoon, a memo landed that will reshape what hundreds of thousands of African and Caribbean families do next. And also in Washington, the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee heard from twelve states asking to shape the path to 2028.

I was in that fourth room. I will tell you what I saw further down. But this week the lead has to be the first two.

One month ago, the Supreme Court handed down Callais. We told you then that the ruling would not stay quiet. It has not. Six states have moved, with seats redrawn, primaries canceled, ballots voided. On Tuesday, in two of those states, the cascade hit a wall. The wall in South Carolina was built by the voters — 56,407 of them on the first day of early voting, nearly tripling the previous single-day primary record, making the political cost of throwing out their ballots higher than five Republican state senators were willing to pay. The wall in Alabama was legal — a federal court that found no evidence of partisan motive behind the state's map, only racial intent. Different mechanisms. Same direction. Alabama has already appealed; the Supreme Court has set a clock that runs out Monday at 4 p.m. Whatever you do this weekend, do it knowing the next chapter starts on Monday afternoon.

We are also profiling Nana Gyamfi, who has spent twenty-five years arguing that one in five Black people in this country is an immigrant or the child of one. This is the week the rest of the country has to catch up to what she has been saying. The May 22 USCIS memo on green cards will reshape what hundreds of thousands of Black families do next, and the Black Alliance for Just Immigration — the organization Gyamfi runs — has been preparing for a week like this for twenty years. We are tracking what is left of the cascade in Louisiana. We are watching what the Trump administration is calling an “Election Integrity Army” and what its own Department of Homeland Security walked back this week. And we are giving you a novel to read — the first one this publication has recommended — because some weeks the work needs the long evenings to come back from.

Forward it to your group chat. Pull a stat for your next meeting.

Let's get into it.

THE HEADLINE

The cascade hit a wall. One month after Callais, Black voting power held the line in two states — and is losing it in a third.

On Tuesday afternoon, May 26, the South Carolina Senate did something it had not been planning to do that morning. By a vote of 20 to 24, with five Republican senators breaking ranks, it refused to end debate on a bill that would have eliminated the state's only majority-Black congressional district. The bill is dead, for now. Rep. Jim Clyburn's 6th District survives. The senators had not changed their minds on their own. The voters had changed it for them.

That same Tuesday morning, eight hours earlier and seven hundred miles west, a three-judge federal panel in Birmingham issued a unanimous preliminary injunction blocking Alabama from using its 2023 congressional map — the map state lawmakers had hurried back to in hopes of erasing the second Black opportunity district that elected Rep. Shomari Figures in 2024 and protects Rep. Terri Sewell's seat. The court called the map “intentionally discriminatory.” The state has already filed an appeal to the Supreme Court.

Two states. Same day. Different mechanisms. Same direction.

South Carolina: the wall was political — and the people built it

The South Carolina story is the one to sit with for a minute. The state House passed the new 7-0 map last week, eliminating Clyburn's seat in service of giving Republicans the entire congressional delegation. The Senate twice refused to take it up — first on May 12, again on May 22. But Gov. Henry McMaster, under direct pressure from the White House, kept calling them back. On Saturday May 23 the Senate gave the bill a second reading. By Tuesday morning, the bill looked likely to pass.

And then the voters showed up.

At 8:30 a.m. Tuesday, early voting opened for the June 9 primary. By 1:00 p.m., more than 32,000 South Carolinians had cast ballots — already past the prior single-day primary record. By the time polls closed at 5:00 p.m., the number was 56,407. The previous single-day primary record, set in June 2024, had been 23,000. South Carolinians had nearly tripled it. In a single day.

Many of those voters told reporters why they were there. They had read about the redistricting bill. They had heard their congressional ballots might get thrown out. They went to vote anyway — partly as defiance, partly as insurance. Rep. Jim Clyburn cast his ballot in Orangeburg shortly after the polls opened, then told reporters: “Nothing has made me more incensed than to see this kind of imposition on the people of South Carolina.”

By the time the state Senate convened that afternoon, the math had moved. The Republicans who eventually broke ranks said so explicitly. Sen. Richard Cash: “Neither my conscience nor my common sense will allow me to stop an election that is already underway.” That is the people, not the principle, talking through him. Sen. Larry Grooms made the same point in different words, criticizing the consultant from Washington who had spoken to a House subcommittee — via Zoom — for seven minutes and forty seconds, then taken no questions. The people of South Carolina had spoken much longer than that. They had spoken with their feet.

The cloture motion failed 20 to 24. Five Republican senators broke ranks. They broke ranks because the voters had already broken the question for them.

Let us be clear about what this is. This is not five Republican state senators discovering their consciences in a vacuum. This is the people of South Carolina — and especially, given who turns out in the Lowcountry and the Pee Dee and the Black Belt counties, the Black voters of South Carolina — making the political price of throwing out their primary too high for any senator, of either party, to pay. The Clyburn district survives because record-breaking turnout on a Tuesday morning in late May made the cost of erasing those ballots higher than the cost of crossing a White House. The win is real. The win belongs to the voters.

Alabama: the wall was legal

Tuesday's Alabama ruling is the harder, deeper story — and it requires a thirty-second history. In 2023, in a decision that surprised the country, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered Alabama to draw a second district where Black voters could elect a candidate of their choice. The case was Allen v. Milligan; the 5-4 majority included Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh. Alabama's legislature refused to comply, so a federal court drew the map for them. That court-drawn map was used in 2024 and elected Shomari Figures to the 2nd District while protecting Terri Sewell's 7th.

Then came Callais. Last month, the Supreme Court vacated Milligan and sent it back down. Alabama took the implicit invitation, reinstated its 2023 lines, and set August special primaries to lock them in — betting that the federal court would now be overruled. On Tuesday, that same federal court said no.

“This enormous record contains no evidence of a partisan motive.”

— Three-judge federal panel, Allen v. Milligan, May 26, 2026

That sentence is the legal hinge. Callais said that drawing maps for racial reasons violates the Voting Rights Act, but drawing them for partisan reasons does not. Alabama argued partisan motive. The court read the record — the legislative debates, the testimony, the consultant memos — and found nothing partisan. Only racial intent. The two-district map stays. The August special primaries are off. Ballots cast under the reverted map would be voided. Sewell's 7th holds. Figures's 2nd holds.

The state of Alabama has appealed to the Supreme Court. The application landed on the desk of Justice Clarence Thomas, who handles emergency matters from the Eleventh Circuit by default — the same Justice Thomas who dissented from the 2023 Milligan ruling and wrote then that he did not believe federal courts should be deciding the “racial apportionment” of congressional seats. He has given civil rights lawyers until 4 p.m. Eastern on Monday, June 1, to respond. The Court has the option, in 2026, of doing what it would not do in 2023: side with the state. Whether it will is the next chapter — and the chapter starts on Monday afternoon.

Louisiana: the wall has not yet been built

And then there is Louisiana, where the cascade is still cascading. On May 14, the state Senate passed Senate Bill 121 on a 27-10 party-line vote, eliminating one of Louisiana's two majority-Black congressional districts. On May 21, after hours of testimony from Marc Morial of the National Urban League, former New Orleans Mayor Sidney Barthelemy, and former Orleans Parish Clerk Arthur Morrell, the House committee advanced the bill 10-7, also party-line. As of publish, the bill awaits a full House vote. Gov. Jeff Landry has signaled he will sign.

If the bill becomes law, here is what it will do. It dissolves Rep. Cleo Fields's Baton Rouge-to-Shreveport 6th District — the second majority-Black seat courts ordered the state to draw — and folds those voters into surrounding districts. Rep. Troy Carter's New Orleans-anchored 2nd District survives as the state's single remaining majority-Black seat. Because the new lines push Baton Rouge into Carter's district, the two sitting Black members of Congress could be forced to run against each other. Louisiana goes from a 4-2 GOP delegation to a likely 5-1. The cancellation of the existing primaries is built into the bill: more than 250,000 votes had already been cast, and those ballots will be discarded and shielded from public-records law. The legislative session ends Monday, June 1 — the same day Alabama's clock runs out at the Supreme Court.

Rep. Yvette Clarke, who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus, told NBC News this week that the cascade has now put as many as nineteen CBC members at risk. “It's devastating,” she said. “People have sacrificed so much to make this a more perfect union. And here we are, in 2026, seeing this massive regression in all the gains that have been made. It's painful.”

What this week has shown us

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was supposed to make this kind of mapmaking illegal. Four weeks ago, it largely was. This week the cascade ran into walls in two states — in one because the voters made the cost too high, in another because three federal judges read the record honestly. Louisiana shows that neither is enough on its own.

Three states. Three different answers. The cascade is no longer one-directional. Monday afternoon will tell us whether the wall in Alabama holds.

READ MORE. NBC News on the South Carolina cloture vote · Roll Call on the Alabama ruling · Alabama Reflector on what the injunction does · Louisiana Illuminator on the Louisiana committee vote.

FROM THE ROOM

The other Washington meeting: how 2028 begins.

While the cascade was being fought in three states, twelve other state Democratic parties were in a hotel ballroom in Washington making their case to the people who will decide which states go first in the 2028 presidential primary calendar.

From Wednesday to Friday, May 27 through 29, the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee heard presentations from Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. The committee will pick four to five of them — one per region. The 2028 calendar gets ratified at the DNC Summer Meeting in August.

The committee co-chairs are Jim Roosevelt Jr. and Minyon Moore. Moore is a Black woman who has spent four decades inside the Democratic Party's infrastructure — including running the political shop at the Clinton White House — and she is co-chairing the body that decides who Black voters get to see first in 2028. That fact deserves to be named.

The question worth watching: the South slot. Five of the twelve states presenting were Southern — Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia. Black women are roughly a quarter of the Democratic primary electorate in the South. Whichever Southern state is chosen will, in effect, set the tone for how Black women's voices are heard in the early stages of the 2028 race. That is the math under the math.

No decision was rendered this week. None was expected. The presentations were the beginning of the work, not the end of it. I will tell you more when there is more to tell.

A note: I serve on the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee. I was in the room for the presentations described above. I'm telling you because you should know.

THE PROFILE

Nana Gyamfi built the room the rest of the country is about to need.

On Friday, May 22, at the end of the workday, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) dropped a policy memo that will reshape what hundreds of thousands of Black families do next. Gyamfi has spent twenty-five years building the organization that will be doing the work of explaining what just happened — to families, to the press, to a national conversation that, by default, frames immigration as a Latino story and leaves Black immigrants out of it.

WHO Nana Gyamfi

WHAT Executive Director, Black Alliance for Just Immigration

REPS Approximately 10 million Black immigrants, refugees, and their families in the United States

FROM The Ghanaian diaspora, by way of Los Angeles and Brooklyn

Black immigrants are the part of the American immigration story the national press does not usually tell. There are about ten million Black people in this country who are either immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants — from Nigeria, Ghana, Jamaica, Haiti, Trinidad, Senegal, Eritrea, Somalia, Ethiopia, and dozens of other nations across Africa and the Caribbean. They are, on average, the most educated immigrant population in the United States. They are also, on average, paid the lowest wages and disproportionately deported.

That contradiction is the work of Gyamfi's career. She has been a movement attorney for more than twenty-five years — Cornell undergrad, UCLA Law — with stops as a former president of the National Conference of Black Lawyers and former executive director of Maxine Waters's Black Women's Forum. She has been arrested for protesting. She has trained other movement lawyers on how to do the work without burning out.

In 2020, she became executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, the largest Black-led organization in the country focused on immigration. BAJI was founded in Brooklyn in 2006 in response to a wave of anti-immigrant legislation that the Black immigrant community recognized would land on them, even if no one in Congress was naming them. The organization built local chapters in Atlanta, Houston, the Inland Empire, Los Angeles, Miami, and New York. It built the Black Immigration Network, a coalition that connects Black-led social justice organizations to the immigrant rights movement. It has been doing this work for twenty years.

The spine

At the People's March in Washington in January 2025, before this administration had even taken office, Gyamfi said what she has been saying for two decades.

“Immigrant rights are a Black issue, and Black liberation is the key to immigrant rights. One in five Black people in this country is an immigrant or the child of immigrants.”

That sentence is the architecture under everything she does. The Black community in the United States is and has always been an immigrant community — from the involuntary middle passage to the post-1965 waves from Africa and the Caribbean. The native-born and the foreign-born share churches, marriages, mortgages, schools, payroll, payroll problems, and the gaze of the same police precincts. When immigration policy gets weaponized, Black families bear the weight whether or not the press notices.

What landed on Friday

The May 22 USCIS memo does not, technically, change the immigration law. What it changes is how the law will be administered. Adjustment of status — the half-century-old path for people on temporary visas to become permanent residents without leaving the country — is now an “extraordinary form of relief.” Officers have been instructed to deny in-country adjustment for a wide range of reasons and route applicants abroad, where consular wait times can exceed a year. The cohort affected includes a substantial number of African and Caribbean women working in healthcare, education, and ministry — and the U.S.-born Black children whose mothers are now facing more than a year of forced separation if they apply for the green card they have been working toward. (For the full mechanics of the memo and the May 26 White House clarification, see The Watch below.)

What now

Gyamfi has spent the week doing what she has always done. BAJI is briefing affected families. It is partnering with the Haitian Bridge Alliance, African Communities Together, UndocuBlack, and the Nigerian Center to coordinate responses. It is preparing for litigation that immigration attorneys believe is coming. And it is doing the harder work of refusing to let Black immigrant women disappear inside a national conversation that, by default, frames immigration as a Latino story.

WHY THIS MATTERS FOR US — THIS WEEK AND BEYOND

The May 22 memo is going to keep producing news for months. Lawsuits will come. Families will be separated. The press coverage will be uneven and frequently incorrect about which families are most affected. Nana Gyamfi has built the organization that will be doing the explaining when the rest of the country catches up. If you are in a Black church, a Black sorority, a Black professional association, or a Black union local, you already know someone whose family is reading the news with their stomach in their throat right now. Find them. Send them BAJI's resources. Forward them this profile. The point of this publication is to make sure no one navigates a week like this alone.

LEARN MORE. baji.org for the Black Alliance for Just Immigration's resources and legal briefings · NPR on what the May 22 memo does · SHRM on what the May 26 clarification did and did not say.

THE FIVE

Five things to know this week.

TRACKING CALLAIS · ONE MONTH LATER

The state-by-state damage report

For the first time since Callais, the cascade ran into walls. The damage map now has both directions in it. Here is where things stand:

Alabama: Stopped, legally — for now. The federal panel issued a unanimous preliminary injunction on May 26 keeping the two-Black-district court-ordered map in place for 2026. State has filed an emergency appeal to SCOTUS. Civil rights coalition response due Monday, June 1 at 4 p.m. ET.

South Carolina: Stopped by the voters. 56,407 South Carolinians cast early ballots on May 26 — nearly tripling the previous single-day primary record — before the state Senate could finish trying to throw their votes out. The cloture motion on the 7-0 map failed 20-24 that afternoon. Five Republicans broke ranks; they said so explicitly. The Clyburn district survives this round.

Louisiana: Still moving. SB 121 passed the Senate 27-10 on May 14 and cleared the House committee 10-7 on May 21; the full House and final passage were expected this week, before the session ends June 1. The bill dissolves Cleo Fields's 6th District, leaves Troy Carter's 2nd as the lone majority-Black seat, and could pit the two against each other.

Tennessee: Signed, sued, dismissed. Gov. Lee signed the 9-0 map on May 7, splitting Memphis into three districts. On May 26 a state three-judge panel dismissed the NAACP Tennessee State Conference's challenge on sovereign-immunity and standing grounds. The plaintiffs have vowed to appeal.

Mississippi: Pulled. Gov. Reeves canceled the special session on May 13, saying he wants the legislature to redraw maps before the 2027 elections. He also named Rep. Bennie Thompson by name, vowing his “reign of terror” will be “over.”

Virginia: A different fight. Here it was Democrats who passed a mid-decade map; the Virginia Supreme Court struck it down, and on May 18 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to revive it. The prior map stays for 2026, and Democratic congressional campaigns built around the struck-down lines have suspended. Worth watching as the one state where the redistricting story runs the other way.

One ruling. Six states. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was supposed to make this kind of mapmaking illegal. Four weeks ago, it largely was. This week was the first week of mixed news. Take it.

01 The data spine you need this year: “Black Women in American Politics 2025.”

If you are going to argue about Black women's political power this year, argue from the data. Higher Heights for America and the Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics keep the most comprehensive accounting there is. The headline finding: in the 2024 general election, 63% of Black women congressional nominees won their races — a higher win rate than women (48.9%) or men (53.3%) candidates across every other racial group. Black women also hit a record high in state legislative seats, and for the first time two — Angela Alsobrooks and Lisa Blunt Rochester — serve in the U.S. Senate at once. When Black women run, they win. Save it. Quote it. Cite it.

Higher Heights · CAWP Rutgers

02 Kwanza Jones, on the verge of an MLB first.

The San Diego Padres announced in early May that entrepreneur and philanthropist Kwanza Jones — a Princeton grad and Washington, D.C. native — will lead the group buying the franchise in a record $3.9 billion deal. Pending a vote of MLB's 30 owners, Jones would become the first Black woman to hold a majority ownership stake in a Major League Baseball franchise in the league's history. Her husband and business partner, José E. Feliciano, would become MLB's first majority owner of Puerto Rican descent.

Sportico · Black America Web

03 Monday night on the Hudson: Black Women on Broadway.

The fifth annual Black Women on Broadway Awards is on Monday, June 1, at Chelsea Piers' CURRENT venue. The honorees: Debra Martin Chase — producer of the 2025 Pulitzer- and Tony-winning Purpose — receives the Audra McDonald Legacy Award, alongside director Whitney White, performer Alana Raquel Bowers, and casting director Destiny Lilly. Founded in 2019 by Danielle Brooks, Amber Iman, and Jocelyn Bioh, the awards run on free mentorship and fellowship for Black women in theater.

TheWrap · Broadway News

04 Mifepristone won its stay — but the FDA that defends it is in turmoil.

The Supreme Court's May 14 stay preserved nationwide access to mifepristone by mail and telehealth. That is real, and it is the closest thing to a win Black reproductive health has had at the Court in years. But the agency that sets the rules for the drug is unsettled: FDA Commissioner Marty Makary resigned on May 12 after a 13-month tenure, having drawn sustained pressure from anti-abortion groups for declining to restrict mifepristone. A food-division lawyer with no medical degree is now acting commissioner. The win held. The institution behind it is in flux. Watch who Trump nominates next.

SCOTUSblog · Center for Reproductive Rights

05 Black women labor leaders are about to be in every headline. Know the names.

The 30th AFL-CIO Convention runs June 7–10 in Minneapolis. Going in, you should know four Black women shaping the American labor movement: Roxanne Brown, sworn in March 1 as the 10th International President of the United Steelworkers — the first woman, first Black person, and first person of color to lead the 850,000-member union in its 84-year history. Kingston-born, New York-raised. April Verrett, SEIU President, whose union rejoined the AFL-CIO in January 2025. Clayola Brown, President of the A. Philip Randolph Institute. And Becky Pringle, President of the National Education Association — the largest union in the country at three million members; the NEA is not an AFL-CIO affiliate. We will profile them next week.

USW · AFL-CIO · SEIU · NEA

THE WIN

The cascade hit a wall. Twice.

Some weeks the Win is a verdict. Some weeks it is a record. Some weeks it is a vote that did not happen.

On Tuesday, May 26, in two states on the same day, the post-Callais erasure of Black voting power was stopped. In Birmingham, a unanimous federal panel ruled Alabama's congressional map intentionally discriminatory and ordered the state to keep the two-Black-district map in place for the 2026 midterms. In Columbia, the South Carolina Senate voted 20 to 24 against ending debate on a bill that would have eliminated Jim Clyburn's seat. Five Republican state senators broke ranks. Five.

Jim Clyburn's district survives.
Terri Sewell's district survives.
Shomari Figures's district survives.

Let us name what this means in human terms. There are five sitting Black members of the U.S. House of Representatives whose seats were targeted for elimination this month. As of Wednesday morning, three of them woke up still representing the districts they were elected to represent. The other two — Rep. Troy Carter and Rep. Cleo Fields, in Louisiana — are still fighting. The fight is not over. Neither is the celebration.

Issue 002 promised to keep tracking Callais. Issue 003 told you we would. This week, the tracking did its job. The cascade has limits. Republican state senators have consciences. Federal judges can still read a record and call racial discrimination what it is. None of these things were guaranteed four weeks ago.

When the next state moves and the next ruling comes down and the next emergency appeal hits the Supreme Court — and they will, all of them, starting Monday at 4 p.m. — these names are the floor. Clyburn. Sewell. Figures. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 did not protect them this week. The wall, in this case, was built by 56,407 South Carolinians who voted on a Tuesday morning before the legislature had finished trying to throw their votes out. It was built by movement lawyers who walked into a federal courtroom in Birmingham with a record so airtight that three judges agreed unanimously. It was built by the organizations that have been holding the line for Black voting power since Shelby County in 2013. And, yes, finally, it was built by five legislators in South Carolina who could not look at a primary that had already started and call it expendable. But the people moved first. Three names. Two walls. One week. The walls are still standing. Whether they keep standing is the next question, and the next question gets asked on Monday.

THE WATCH

What we are watching next.

Two stories we are tracking closely, then a calendar.

The Election Integrity Army, deployed — and partially walked back.

On Sunday May 11, President Trump announced on Truth Social that Republicans will deploy an “Election Integrity Army” to all 50 states for the 2026 midterms — “much bigger and stronger” than the 2024 operation. It was a direct answer to the election task force Senate Democrats had launched, with Eric Holder and Marc Elias among its outside advisers. The wider architecture is what makes it worth watching: in January, FBI agents raided the Fulton County, Georgia elections center and seized roughly 700 boxes of 2020 ballots, with Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard present; Gabbard's office had earlier taken voting machines in Puerto Rico; the White House has declined to rule out sending ICE to polling places; and the SAVE Act, which would require government-certified proof of citizenship to register, is moving through the House. All of it lands in the post-Callais environment, where the Voting Rights Act provisions designed to prevent exactly this kind of voter intimidation have just been narrowed.

There is one piece of countervailing evidence, and it is worth holding honestly. Back in February, DHS official Heather Honey — a known 2020 election denier who worked on the Cyber Ninjas review in Arizona — told state secretaries of state on a national call that ICE would not be deployed to polling places this November, calling the suggestion “disinformation.” The reaction from state officials, on the record: “I'll believe it when I see it.” An assurance from that source, three months before the “Election Integrity Army” was announced, does not unbuild the rest of the architecture.

We are watching this. So should you.

READ MORE. Straight Arrow News on the announcement · Newsweek on the operational scale (78 lawsuits, 13 battleground directors) · CNN via Yahoo on the DHS assurance and the skepticism that met it · PBS Washington Week on Gabbard, the Fulton raid, and the Puerto Rico voting machines.

The green card rule, and the families on the other side of it.

On Friday May 22 — the same day Issue 004 published — U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services issued a policy memo treating in-country adjustment of status as “an extraordinary form of relief” rather than the default path it has been for half a century. The Profile this week covers what this means and who Nana Gyamfi is. The Watch covers what to track next.

What the headlines may not say plainly: the cohort the AP describes as “doctors and professionals... student and religious visa holders” includes a substantial number of African and Caribbean women working in healthcare, education, and ministry. Mixed-status Black families — U.S. citizens married to immigrant spouses, U.S.-born children of immigrant mothers — are now facing the prospect of more than a year of forced separation if the immigrant family member applies for the green card they have been working toward. Wait times for visa appointments at some U.S. consulates abroad can exceed a year.

The White House issued a clarification on May 26 — not to walk back the rule, but to insist the underlying law has not changed. Immigration attorneys read that and noted the discretion regime is the real story: opaque, case-by-case, and harder to fight in court than a rule change would have been.

We are watching this. So are the litigators. We will return to it.

READ MORE. AP via PBS on the announcement and scope · NBC News on the families framing · SHRM on the discretionary mechanics · BAJI for resources.

Seven dates worth circling.

Mon, June 1, 4 p.m. ET: The civil rights coalition's response is due to the Supreme Court in Alabama's emergency appeal of Tuesday's federal court injunction. Justice Clarence Thomas — the lone dissenter from the 2023 Milligan majority who said federal courts should not be deciding congressional “racial apportionment” — set the deadline. The Court could rule within days of receiving the response. This is the single most consequential moment on the calendar this month.

Fri, June 5: BLS May jobs report. The unemployment story is coming.

Sun–Wed, June 7–10: 30th AFL-CIO Convention, Minneapolis.

Tue, June 9: South Carolina primary — Clyburn's district on the ballot.

Tue, June 16: Georgia GOP gubernatorial runoff. Bottoms's November opponent will be named.

Tue, June 23: New York primary. Adrienne Adams on the Hochul ticket.

Ongoing: Mifepristone back at the 5th Circuit; the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act still in the Senate.

ONE THING TO READ

For your weekend.

Last week's recommendation was a Center for American Progress report. The week before, it was a Brennan Center brief. The publication has earned its way into a different kind of recommendation.

This week, read Kin by Tayari Jones.

It is her fifth novel — the long-awaited follow-up to An American Marriage — published by Knopf in February. It opened at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, was named a Times Best Book of the Year So Far, and became the first Oprah's Book Club pick of 2026 in a surprise selection that aired live. Ann Patchett called it “Tayari Jones's very best work.” Radhika Jones in the Times Book Review: “a lush, beautiful novel about the family we make.”

The book is set in 1950s Louisiana — Honeysuckle, a town Jones invents the way only a Southern writer can — and follows two best friends, Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised next door to each other, whose lives go in starkly different directions before a tragedy brings them back to one another. It is a novel about kinship: the kind we are born to, the kind we choose, and the kind that is forged when the women who should have raised us did not get to.

I am recommending it for three reasons.

One: it is the kind of book Black women have always written and the world has not always known how to read — generous, funny, devastating, and patient. Jones writes the South the way it actually sounds.

Two: it is set in Louisiana. The same state that has spent the spring at the center of the country's hardest fights over voting and reproductive care is also the setting Tayari Jones chose for the deepest novel of her career. There is something to learn from sitting with that overlap. Louisiana is not only what it is being used for in court. It is also what it has produced.

Three: summer is starting. The work continues Monday morning, the way it always does. But the long evenings are yours. Take one with this book in your hand.

Read at: wherever you buy books — independent Black-owned shops especially. For Keeps Books (Atlanta), where Jones has read; Mahogany Books (DC); Hakim's Bookstore (Philadelphia); Marcus Books (Oakland); Café con Libros (Brooklyn); Semicolon (Chicago) — among many others. Kin is published by Knopf (Penguin Random House). 368 pages.

MORE. NPR Fresh Air on the book's origins · Elle's “Shelf Life” for Jones on what she's reading next · Penguin Random House for the publisher's page.

Stay rooted.

— LD

Black Lady News is a weekly curation by Leah Daughtry.
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