People first noticed the black helicopter in the sky. 

It was a chilly Sunday afternoon a year ago at La Catedral Arena, a popular track for horse racing outside the Idaho town of Wilder. Hundreds had gathered at the arena for a festival celebrating horse racing and Mexican culture. 

As the military-style helicopter hovered above them, attendees from the rural, predominantly Latino community, began to get nervous.

“Something is wrong,” Ivan Popoca, who attended the festival with his two kids, remembers thinking.

Within minutes, the festival grounds descended into chaos. Backed by armored trucks and snipers, more than 200 members of law enforcement stormed the grounds, some shot rubber bullets into the crowd and hurled flash-bang grenades into vehicles where people had fled to hide. Hundreds of people, including teens as young as 14, were detained and zip-tied.

When it was all over, federal authorities had arrested 105 people for alleged immigration violations. Yet on paper, this wasn’t an immigration raid at all. The only warrant for the Wilder raid was secured by the FBI. Its target: the owner of the track and four others for alleged unlicensed gambling. 

Twelve months later, the Wilder raid is at the center of a court fight that could shape ICE operations around the country. Advocates argue that in Idaho, ICE unlawfully piggybacked on an FBI operation, rather than securing their own warrant, as they would be expected to do on this type of operation. A lawsuit brought forth by the ACLU argues that federal authorities violated the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, by using an unrelated search warrant as a “cover to go fishing for immigration arrests.” 

“That is not what a criminal search warrant execution looks like. That is what a massively violent immigration raid looks like,” says Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, an ACLU attorney who helped bring the resulting lawsuit. 

Trump Administration officials insist that the arrests made that day were lawful. “The facts haven’t changed: ICE helped dismantle an illegal horse-racing, animal fighting, and a gambling enterprise operation out of a property known as La Cathedral Arena in Wilder, Idaho,” a DHS spokesperson told TIME. Idaho Gov. Brad Little also defended the raid, saying in a statement at the time that it is “common practice” to detain others present while processing the scene. 

For Wilder residents, the La Catedral raid remains an open wound that refuses to heal. Popoca still recalls with anger how he and his 16-year-old son were zip-tied for hours for no apparent reason. 

The ACLU and some of the families involved in the case released a documentary online on Monday called Wilder Raids in which they discuss the raid’s impact, and why the legal challenge matters beyond people in Wilder. 

“Some community members don't even want to think about this anymore,” says Leo Morales, the executive director of the ACLU Idaho. “But there are also folks who are also realizing how critical it is to be able to push back, to organize and to demand fairness and justice.”

Recurring nightmares

Juana Rodriguez attended the festival with her three-year-old son. Despite both of them being U.S. citizens, they were zip-tied and detained for hours following the raid. Like many others who were detained, she described not being given access to food or water. 

“For the longest time, my son begged me for food. He begged me for water,” Rodriguez says. She repeatedly asked the officers she could be untied so that she could feed and console her crying son, she says, but was rebuffed. “I wish I could have done more in the moment, but I couldn't.”

Detainees were eventually taken into a tent and questioned by ICE agents about their immigration status.  Among the 105 people who were ultimately arrested, 75 are believed to have been deported to their home countries, according to local media, and 26 were released from ICE custody after their lawyers filed habeas corpus petitions. The whereabouts of the remaining four people are unclear. ICE did not provide an update on their case status.

The day after the raid, the Wilder School District reported absent rates soared, with 20% of students absent, according to The Idaho Statesman. More than half of the district’s student body is Hispanic or Latino.

A year later, Rodriguez says she is still scared to go to Latino cultural and other public events because of what happened at La Catedral. She also has nightmares about ICE officers taking her child away from her.

“I'm from here. My kids are from here,” she says. ”Why should I have to feel that? Like, I shouldn't.”

ICE’s growing legal fights

The ACLU filed a class-action complaint in February, charging that a variety of local, state and federal agencies violated the constitutional rights of those at the festival. Both sides are now waiting for a judge to rule on a motion by ICE and other agencies to dismiss, in which it argued that federal and state law enforcement are protected by qualified immunity, a longstanding legal doctrine when executing a federal warrant. 

The Wilder case is one of multiple lawsuits the Trump Administration is fighting over its immigration enforcement operations. In Minnesota, none of the federal agents involved in the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti have been criminally charged, but a string of civil lawsuits is beginning to emerge. Earlier this month, the family of Renee Good, who was killed last January by a federal agent during the immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota, filed a pair of civil lawsuits against the federal government, according to their legal representative. Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen who was shot by a Border Patrol agent during a confrontation on a Chicago street last year, has also filed a lawsuit against the federal government. 

Anyone seeking to hold federal agents accountable must be prepared for a long wait, says Borchetta. A lawsuit against the federal government can’t even be filed unless it’s been six months since a complainant filed a claim for compensation and the issue remains unresolved.  

“If a federal employee is driving their car negligently on the job and hits you with their car, you can bring a claim for them for that negligence,” Borchetta says. “It also applies where an ICE agent is mistreating you or causing you harm.”

But the law itself imposes many limitations on suing the federal government. Victims can seek compensatory damages for actual losses, but not punitive damages. And unlike state authorities who can be sued for civil rights violations in state courts, federal law enforcement authorities are generally shielded from such lawsuits based on legal precedents. 

But Borchetta says the impact of the lawsuits can be bigger than any verdict. She argues that the ongoing Wilder case has already helped change ICE’s conduct as well as how local governments collaborate with them. 

“While we don't yet have a decision from the court, we haven't seen more raids like this in Idaho,” she says. “The lawsuit itself exposes both the state and the federal actors to liability, and that can change behavior itself.”

On the day Vivek Ramaswamy made official his run for Ohio Governor, President Donald Trump did not dally.
“He will be a GREAT Governor of Ohio, will never let you down, and has my COMPLETE AND TOTAL ENDORSEMENT!” the President wrote on Truth Social on Feb. 24 of last year, within hours of Ramaswamy kicking off his campaign.

Trump’s post essentially cleared what had been expected to be a crowded GOP field, boxing out the likes of state Attorney General Dave Yost, state Treasurer Robert Sprague, and Lieutenant Governor Jim Tressel in a state where Republicans felt dominant. It also effectively gave Ramaswamy almost two years to focus on keeping the Governor’s mansion in GOP hands. But the very connections to Trumpism that fueled Ramaswamy’s fast political rise are now giving his party reason to worry, as polls show him trailing Democrat Amy Acton, a former state health chief and a first-time candidate.

“Something is happening here. I just can’t tell you what,” says one Ohio Democratic strategist, reflecting the apprehension pervasive in both parties right now.

On the campaign trail, Ramaswamy occasionally moderates his image as the brash MAGA warrior railing against “the woke left,” pitching tax cuts and economic development when he’s with suburban crowds and chamber of commerce types. But he can still come off at times as a pugilistic troll. He has promised to be "the most conservative Governor in Ohio's history,” defying Ohio’s history of moderate conservatives who have governed the Heartland homebase. He has embraced AI data centers in a state where they are far from popular. And he has not shrunk from Trumpian hardline immigration policies, especially when he appears with Trump. 

"As Americans, we believe in merit, that the best person gets the job, regardless of their skin color, that you are judged not on the color of your skin, but on the content of your character and your contributions,” Ramaswamy said during an Oct. 12 rally with Trump in Youngstown, where Acton grew up. “That is who we are as Americans."

Ramaswamy has not developed a thicker skin than when he ran for the White House just two years ago. In July, when confronted by hecklers at Xavier University in Cincinnati, he simply walked off stage: “Peace out, see you guys.”

The polls still show a close-range contest, but in the increasingly nasty ad war, the spending suggests a far more lopsided fight. Ramaswamy and his supporters have now run $101 million in ads against Acton, with $36 million of that coming from Ramaswamy himself. 

Acton and groups supporting her have spent about one-third of the Ramaswamy media wave, much of it describing Ramaswamy as a “swindler” who conned his way to a fortune and harnessing anti-billionaire sentiment.

“This is a guy who has been flying around the state on his corporate jet. Ohio is not a huge state geographically. It’s a state that’s incredibly driveable,” says David Cohen, the director of the Applied Politics Program at the University of Akron. “He was the worst possible choice for Republicans, not that they really had a choice.”

A loss for Ramaswamy would be a stunning reversal of fortunes for Ohio Republicans. Once seen as a quintessential swing state, Trump won Ohio during all three of his presidential bids with margins between eight and 11 points.

If Democrats can show a rebound in Ohio, the state may actually wind up back on the must-visit list for 2028 contenders from both parties. After all, states like Georgia and Arizona were also once solidly red until break-out candidates—backed by party spending—upended those assumptions.

 “Calm down,” says a consultant who has worked with Ohio candidates in past cycles, when asked about Democrats’ optimism. “It’s still Ohio.” 

Ramaswamy’s rise via Trump

For a while there two years ago, Ramaswamy seemed like the most obvious heir to Trumpism. When he launched his presidential bid in 2025, he couched it in effusive praise for the then-former President, to the point that he sometimes sounded like a Trump surrogate in the GOP debates that Trump refused to attend.

After a weak showing in Iowa, Ramaswamy ended his campaign and quickly folded into the broader MAGA-verse. He was chosen by Trump to help Elon Musk upend the federal government at the Department of Government Efficiency, before dropping out of that partnership.

But the talent for going viral that helped Ramaswamy gain a national profile has proved less successful this election cycle in Ohio. Social media videos of him hitting tennis balls and baseballs while listing his policy proposals have provided a font of online mockery. He hastily left Ohio State’s season opener after being booed and heckled. Later, he faced criticism for having worn a knock-off Ohio State jersey to the game. 

Ramaswamy has also struggled to navigate his identity as a Hindu and the son of immigrants from India in the modern GOP. In the gubernatorial primary, auto entrepreneur Casey Putsch ignored Trump’s endorsement of Ramaswamy and vied for the nomination, pitching himself as an “America First” alternative to Ramaswamy. In one YouTube spot,  Putsch hoisted a rifle and challenged Ramaswamy to a game of “cowboys and Indians.” 

While Ramaswamy easily won his party’s nomination, almost one-in-five votes in the primary were for Putsch, a hint that Ramaswamy’s appeal had its limits even within his own party. “One of the storylines here is a man who is Indian American and whose religion is Hindu,” says Christopher Devine, a political science professor at the University of Dayton, says. “There are a lot of members of the Republican base who may have difficulty voting someone of his demographic profile.”

Amid efforts by both campaigns to push policy ideas like tax cuts and education reform, the ad war has boiled down to attacks portraying Ramaswamy as a conman and Acton as a drunk. The latter is based on an August 2019 incident in which police responded to an incident in Acton’s home that Acton has accused Ramaswamy of dramatically mischaracterizing, to the point that she refused to share a debate stage with him. Ramaswamy has also refuted allegations his fortune came from misleading investors.

On Tuesday, the race took an even nastier turn. An anti-Acton video surfaced online starring Acton’s mother, who has not spoken to her daughter since 1978. In the ad, she calls her daughter a “liar”—not over the candidate’s allegations that she was molested and raped by her stepfather, who was indicted, but her claims she spent time as a homeless youth.

“Don’t let her become your Governor,” Acton’s mother Donna Arthur says in the video. “If you think she’ll make your life better, you’re fooling yourself. It will only get worse.” It is not at all clear who created the ad, who funded it, or if it is destined for broadcast. Still, its existence was a stunning escalation in a race that may set the new standard for mudslinging, so much so that Philip Stearns, Acton’s brother, released a statement calling the ad “a despicable low.”

Devine says the tone of the attacks is a shift from the Senate race, where former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown and current Republican Sen. Jon Husted both have extensive records for each side to focus on. “In the Governor’s race, there’s no record to pick apart. Without much of a track record in politics to run on, they’re focusing on personal attacks against the other,” Devine says.

Ohio polling raises questions 

As polling consistently shows an advantage for Acton, Republicans are increasingly arguing that the polls may be wrong by just enough to give Ramaswamy the win. One proof point is 2018, when some polls showed Brown winning re-election by double digits. By the time votes were cast, Brown won by less than seven points

Republicans, heading into a make-or-break stretch of voting, are repeating those statistics to make the case that the polling once again is under-counting Republican voters. 

Cohen, the political science professor, doesn’t share that view of skewed polling: “I’m not skeptical at all. All of the polls are trending in the right direction for Acton.” 

Democrats, for their part, are viewing the race as a tie, at best. Among their reasons for concern is Ohio’s poor track record when women are on the ballot. The state’s voters have never elected a woman as Governor and rejected both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris as presidential contenders. 

Yet given the strong headwinds against Republicans’ national brand, they can’t hide their bullishness toward the races for Governor and Senate, where polls show Brown up over Husted. “I haven’t felt this good, like we have a chance, in a while,” says a second Ohio Democratic strategist. But, he adds, given how tight both races may be, no one should expect an early race call once the polls close.