May. 26, 2026, 8:40 PM EDT

Rep. Christian Menefee, D-Texas, defeated veteran Democratic Rep. Al Green in Tuesday’s runofffor Texas’ 18th Congressional District, according to the Associated Press.

Menefee, 37, prevailed in a high-profile incumbent versus incumbent showdown created by Republican-led redistricting that placed the two Democrats in the same heavily Democratic Houston-area district.

The runoff was forced after neither Green nor Menefee secured more than 50% of the vote in the March Democratic primary. Menefee’s victory ends Green’s more than two decades in Congress and signals a generational shift in Houston-area Democratic politics.

Menefee emerged as one of Texas Democrats’ rising stars before launching his congressional bid. He became Harris County attorney in 2021, making history as the youngest person and first Black person elected to the position.

As county attorney, Menefee gained attention for legal battles against Republican state officials and outspoken opposition to conservative policies advanced by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Menefee first won the congressional seat earlier this year in a special election held after the death of former Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, who briefly represented the district following the death of longtime Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee in 2024.

The race was largely viewed as a test of whether younger Democratic voters were ready to move on from longtime party figures.

Green, 78, represented the Houston-based 9th Congressional District for more than two decades. He built a national profile as one of Congress’ most outspoken liberals and an early advocate for impeaching President Donald Trump during his first presidential term. Before Congress, Green spent years as a Harris County justice of the peace and became a prominent figure in Houston civil rights and Democratic politics.

But Menefee capitalized on growing calls for generational change and strong support among younger demographics and newer Democratic activists in the Houston area.

The race exposed generational divides within Houston-area Democratic politics. Menefee performed strongly with younger voters and in parts of Harris County during the March primary, while Green maintained support among older Black voters and longtime Democratic constituencies.

Polling leading into the runoff suggested a highly competitive race, with Menefee appearing to gain momentumin the final weeks.

Menefee is expected to easily hold the safely Democratic seat in November.

The contest marked the latest chapter in a turbulent period for the district, which has seen multiple elections in less than a year following the deaths of Jackson Leeand her successor, Turner.

Ebony Davis is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW based in Washington, D.C. She previously worked at BLN as a campaign reporter covering elections and politics.

May. 26, 2026, 8:13 PM EDT

ByDaniel R. DePetris

For President Trump, negotiating an end to the war with Iran has proven to be the most difficult endeavor of his second term. U.S. and Iranian officials continue to work to clinch an agreement that would trade a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz for an end to the U.S. blockade on Iranian ports and a suspension of the war over a 60-day time period, during which detailed talks on Tehran’s nuclear program could be hashed out.

While the overall concept of a framework agreement is soundthe details, including how much of Iran’s frozen assets will be unblocked and when they will be released, remain sources of contention. The U.S. defensive strikes against Iranian boats and missile batteries — in what the Trump administration has called retaliation for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ attempted mining of the strategic chokepoint — have only added to the complications.

Trump, however, is keen to make the entire diplomatic process even more laborious. He wants a more historic outcome: ending the conflict, severely constraining Iran’s nuclear capabilities and expanding the Abraham Accordshis first-term project that normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states. In a May 25 Truth Social postTrump made those ambitions clear. After speaking with the leaders of the Gulf States, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey and Pakistan, Trump wrote, “It should be mandatory” for all these countries to sign on to an updated version of the accords.

When Trump brought up the idea during his conference call, an uncomfortable silencelingered in the air. Saudi Arabia reaffirmed its position that normalization with Israel was impossible until the Palestinians were offered an “irreversible pathway” to statehood. The Pakistanis were even more empathic in their resistanceto the proposal. Qatar, which was on the receiving end of an Israeli airstrike last September, rejected it as well.

Surely none of this should be a surprise to Trump. The Middle East of 2026 is a lot different than the Middle East of 2020, when the accords were consummated. Back then, a growing number of Gulf Arab states, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, were not actively exploring the prospect of normalization. Israel was viewed not only as an established power in its own right, but also a beacon of entrepreneurship and the epitome of a startup nation. Israel also shared a mutual adversary in Iran, whose regional proxies militias and nuclear program were a constant cause for concern.

The Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks against Israel, and Israel’s subsequent two-year military campaign in Gaza, changed those calculations virtually overnight.

Before Oct. 7, Israeli and Saudi officials were working through the United States, then led by the Biden administration, to establish formal relations with each other. Then-President Joe Biden was so enamored about a possible Israel-Saudi normalization pact that he was willing to offer Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman — the very man he called a pariah during the 2020 presidential campaign — the kinds of U.S. defense guarantees that past Saudi royals could only dream of.

Once the war in Gaza was underway, however, the Saudis changed their tune. The Saudi political and security establishment increasingly viewed formal relations with Israel as not only inappropriate at a time when Israeli bombs were killing hundreds of Palestinian civilians every week, but also potentially dangerous to the Saudis’ internal stability. They may very well have been right: the Saudi public was highly opposed to normalization, and the fact that Gaza was becoming a wasteland of despair and destitution appeared to dissuade the crown prince from being willing to manage the negative domestic politics associated with such a move. Plus, the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear program in June 2025, coupled with Hezbollah’s growing weakness in Lebanon, Bashar Assad’s collapse in Syria a year earlier and Riyadh’s decision to explore detente with Tehran meant the Saudi government no longer saw Iran the same way it did years earlier.

As long as Israel continues to occupy more than half of Gaza and a significant portion of southern Lebanon, it is highly likely Saudi Arabia will continue to brush Trump’s requests aside. And as long as the Saudis don’t move, it’s unlikely other states — be they Pakistan, Qatar or Kuwait — will move either.

Why, then, is Trump harping on the Abraham Accords?

The first motivation is political. As talks toward a framework with Iran continue, Trump wants to cover his bases on the homefront and ensure the hawkish wing of his party is satisfied. Despite Trump’s stronghold over the Republican Party, there is a vocal faction that considers any agreement short of full Iranian surrender as the epitome of Neville Chamberlain-esque appeasement. Senior Republican lawmakers were aghast over the weekend when nuggets of the framework deal were presented in the press, with Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Ted Cruz of Texas and Roger Wicker of Mississippi all coming out to pan it.

In an ideal world, Trump wouldn’t listen to any of them. These are the same people, after all, who lobbied Trump to authorize a military campaign against Iran in the expectation that the regime would either collapse entirely or respond to the pressure by suing for peace on Washington’s terms. Those terms, presumably, would include a total ban on Iranian enrichment, the removal of Tehran’s stockpile of enriched uranium and a 180-degree change in Iran’s foreign policy. This was naive at best, yet Trump bought the argument and was poorly served by doing so.

Even so, Trump wants unanimous support from his party for any agreement he strikes — and appears to have concluded it will take some honey to get there. By tying the Abraham Accords to an Iran framework, the thinking goes, the administration will be able to attract lawmakers, like the Lindsey Grahams of the worldwho would otherwise be disgusted by the idea of conceding anything to the Iranians.

The other motivation is about legacy. The last thing Trump wants is to sign an agreement with Iran that is perceived to be boring or noninnovative.

Currently, that’s precisely what’s occurring.

The U.S. and Iran are seeking to return the region to the pre-February status quo, when 150 or so vessels transited the Strait of Hormuz every day, the U.S. Navy didn’t have to expend limited resources on enforcing a blockade and the two sides could get back to the business of negotiating a final-status arrangement on Tehran’s nuclear program without missiles flying between them. That’s probably the best Trump can do, at this point, because the alternative, which would entail bringing the nuclear question into the framework, risks jeopardizing the entire diplomatic effort.

Still, if the preliminary deal currently on offer simply rewinds the clock by three months and gets us to the same position we were in before the war started, how exactly could Trump sell this as a groundbreaking win? The straightforward answer is that he can’t. Use the time to pad the Abraham Accords, though, and he would have a stronger foundation to celebrate.

In the end, all of this might be irrelevant. Even if the war in Iran concludes, Trump will be hard pressed to transform the Middle East into one big, happy family.

May. 26, 2026, 8:08 PM EDT

The Trump administration announced a new move Friday that will make it harder, if not impossible, for immigrants to the United States to become permanent legal residents. Instead of continuing the sensible and longstanding practice of letting immigrants who are already here on visas apply for their green cards, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services announced that, moving forward, except in extraordinary circumstances, people seeking permanent residency must first return to  their home countries and apply at U.S. consular offices there.

USCIS spokesperson Zach Kahler tried to make the new policy sound reasonable and said new rules would “make our system fairer and more efficient.” But that’s not true. This isn’t about fairness or efficiency. The obvious goal is to discourage immigration altogether, and the implementation of this policy would lead to awful consequences.

According to Department of Homeland Security datathe U.S. issued about 1.4 million green cards in 2024. More than 820,000 of them were issued to applicants already living in the U.S. through what’s called “adjustment of status.” Former USCIS official Doug Rand said in a statement, “The purpose of this policy is exclusion,” and then added: “Remember that Trump has banned people from over 100 countries from returning to the U.S., so forcing them to go abroad for consular processing is no pathway at all.”

The green card process as it exists now is already long, expensive and complicated. For example, my parents first applied for a green card in 1989. We didn’t arrive to the U.S. until 2002. That’s how long it took. And we had every resource available to us, including money.

That’s why Rand is right to say that this new proposal is about exclusion and eliminating a pathway.

Unreliable transportation to hard-to-reach embassies are among the challenges many applicants will face if they return to their home countries. The process, which many applicants tackle on their own while here in the U.S., will most likely have to be navigated with  lawyers if they do so abroad.

Completing the application process from inside the U.S. provides access to support networks. Multiple organizations across the U.S. help applicants with the green card process for free. These organizations offer resources and know-how, in addition to emotional guidance for what is a daunting and costly multistep process. Such a level of support would be nearly impossible to find in many applicants’ home countries. This will undoubtedly force applicants and their loved ones to incur debt just to complete the green card application process.

​Most alarming is the risk of family separation. This policy change, if carried out, will disrupt lives and destabilize families by uprooting the applicant from their home. Subjecting these individuals to family separation is cruel and unnecessary. For applicants with children, there is the financial burden of maintaining two households, which will further affect the livelihood of these families.

​For applicants who have already secured jobs and built their careers in the U.S., this new policy would force them out of those positions and create an interruption that stalls their careers and makes their green card application less likely to be approved.

​This measure doesn’t benefit the lawful immigration process. It devalues it by penalizing individuals who are in the country legally and already following the rules and procedures they have been asked to abide by. This change erodes the faith and trust necessary for an immigration system to function fairly by forcing immigrants who want to apply for permanent residency to rearrange their lives for an uncertain period of time and depriving them of the economic and political freedoms and opportunities they seek in this country.

​The immigration process can take many years, but assimilation, including language acquisition and fluency, can take even longer. Forcing people to go back home would further complicate, if not, completely end that process of adjusting to a new country and culture. It would deny applicants the chance to assimilate faster.

But all of the above assumes the new rules are being offered in good faith and that applicants abroad will be given a fair chance. In reality, these changes are likely intended to derail applicants by forcing them out of the country and making it impossible for them to return.

My family’s journey took well over a decade. But we navigated the bureaucratic processes with hope, and most importantly, with the belief that we wouldn’t face additional hurdles. New applicants deserve a shot at a consistent, fair process that won’t change from one day to the next — a process that will allow them to use their time and resources to be the best version of themselves.

Many of the conversations regarding immigration focus on the legality or illegality of a person’s entry. But in this case, we’re talking about people who entered by the book. How the U.S. treats the people it knows have entered legally is an equally important aspect of the conversation. What the Trump administration is proposing clearly isn’t intended to soon welcome them as new Americans but to send them away and leave them be stuck in an overseas paperwork purgatory they may never escape.

Annell López is the winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize and the author of the short story collection I’ll Give You a Reason, a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for best debut short story collection.