“The Attorney General of the United States showed her true colors.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Just when you think the Circus of Incompetence and Evil has wound down, another one of the players finds a way to the stage to make a hash of reality. The Epstein files and the illegal ICE raids have pretty much taken center stage, but other atrocities are happening within the Trump Regime. I’m going to focus on the Testimony given by Pam Bondi and the entire Epstein mess that has alerted us to exactly how many people with money and power have ruined the lives and the innocence of children.
I must issue trigger warnings here because none of this is easy to see or read.
I will start with this analysis by Dahlia Lithwick at Slate. “Pam Bondi Is Not Practicing Law. The attorney general’s testimony before Congress revealed what a farce this is.”
The release of the Epstein files—the slow-drip revelations of a web of privileged (mostly) men trading gifts, access, favors, and sickening child predation as casually as Pokémon cards—has been deliberately parsed out through 2026 as to both be buried itself and bury other horrific news coming out of the Trump administration. But this misses a critical point: The Epstein file dump is not simply playing out as a backdrop against which other acts of American lawlessness are occurring. The Epstein story is also the template and the proof text for all that is happening in Minnesota; at dangerous detention centers; in efforts to punish members of Congress for lawful speech; for crypto scams; and for measles outbreaks. It is an ongoing road map for an administration that lives out the reality that they are rich and powerful and famous enough to be above the law each day, and wishes for the rest of us to ultimately learn and accept that fact.
And it is equally true that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick could bring his children and their nannies to a bespoke lunch on Epstein’s island in 2012, long after he allegedly broke off contact with the sex predator, precisely because Lutnick’s children and their nannies were not the types of children or women who would be abandoned there to be raped and threatened. He is also a walking infomercial about whom the law protects and whom it leaves broken and invisible, behind. Lutnick’s testimony this past week, like Bondi’s, is thus operating as a still life in what happens when the law becomes inert. On the one hand, it is not relevant as a restraint to those who need not rely on it; on the other, it is not protective for those who do.
Liz Plank, on her Substack, describes the nausea and disorientation felt by women realizing this past week that we had all been gaslit yet again. Those of us who cannot even begin to imagine a permission structure that allowed and encouraged passing young girls around, trading insults and articles about them (“your littlest girl was a little naughty”), and bonding over the hysteria of #MeToo can barely comprehend why it was that this class of men always took the gift and the freebie and the shitty watch and the plane trip, because access to yet more of the same somehow became the coin of the realm. What Plank describes as “trust bias”—the psychological tendency to assume that others are operating within the same moral and ethical universe as yourself—means that we are all, once again, annihilated by the fact that America’s shared moral universe is a collective fiction, one that constrains one class of people and merely titillates another.
We err when we call what is being done by ICE officials to citizens and noncitizens on the streets of American cities “law,” just as we err when we call what has thus far been afforded the Epstein survivors “justice.” Indeed, the word law is too generous to contain the plea deals and the willing ignorance and the prison transfers that were granted to Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirators at every turn. And the word injustice is far too small to describe the spectacle of hundreds of survivors who have still not been given a reckoning or a measure of genuine accountability, whose unredacted names appeared in public documents and who had never been contacted by the Department of Justice.
Pam Bondi may be in charge of many officials and many investigations and many legal things at the DOJ, but what she is protecting is neither justice nor law. And that means that what Plank describes as a trust bias is also an exquisitely American “law bias,” and we should dispense with the notion that we are all in some group compact to protect and preserve the same things. The law is neither protecting the vulnerable nor constraining the Epstein class. And perhaps we should stop referencing that word to mean either project, much less deploying it to describe both.
One of Maria Farmer’s works of art was released from the Epstein Files.
Continue to read this excellent piece at the link. Meanwhile, a friend of mine sent this link to a site with a Link to the Justice Department. The link provides a window into the artwork from Jeffrey Epstein survivor Maria Farmer, found in the Epstein files. CNN reported on Farmer during the first wave of releases. This is from December 19,2025. “Epstein files vindicate a survivor who reported him in the 1990s, but others are still seeking answers.” Everyone is still seeking answers, and all we get are performances like Bondi’s and distractions.
The Justice Department’s partial release of its files related to Jeffrey Epstein on Friday marked a moment of triumph for Epstein survivor Maria Farmer and her sister Annie, who have said for years that Maria had filed one of the first complaints against Epstein in the 1990s.
An FBI document released Friday included a 1996 description of a criminal complaint against Epstein related to child pornography.
While the name of the complainant is redacted in the document, Maria Farmer’s lawyer, Jennifer Freeman, confirmed on CNN that the complaint was in fact made by her client.
The “facts of complaint” part of the document says that the woman — who describes herself as a professional artist — had taken photos of her underage sisters for her own personal artwork.
“Epstein stole the photos and negatives and is believed to have sold the pictures to potential buyers,” the document reads. “Epstein at one time requested (redacted) to take pictures of young girls at swimming pools.” It continued: “Epstein is now threatening (redacted) that if she tells anyone about the photos he will burn her house down.”
Examining these photos is difficult. It is, however, one way we can give voice to these survivors. These paintings have returned to the conversation about who exactly should be brought to justice for this massive child sex trafficking travesty.
Maria’s painting shows many familiar faces. Take a look.
It appears that DHS will shut down this weekend. This is from the AP. “What to know about the Homeland Security shutdown starting this weekend.”
Another shutdown for parts of the federal government is expected this weekend as lawmakers debate new restrictions on President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda.
Funding for the Department of Homeland Security is set to expire Saturday. Democrats say they won’t help approve more funding until new restrictions are placed on federal immigration operations after the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis last month.
The White House has been negotiating with the Democrats, but the two sides failed to reach a deal by the end of the week, guaranteeing that funding for the department will lapse.
Unlike the record 43-day shutdown last fall, the closures will be narrowly confined, as only agencies under the DHS umbrella — like Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection — will be affected. Still, depending on how long the shutdown lasts, some federal workers could begin to miss paychecks.
Services like airport screening could also suffer if the shutdown drags on for weeks.
At the Transportation Security Administration, about 95% of employees are deemed essential. They will continue to scan passengers and their bags at the nation’s commercial airports. But they will work without pay until the funding lapse is resolved, raising the possibility that workers will being calling out or taking unscheduled leave. Many TSA workers already faced financial stress last year.
“Some are just now recovering from the financial impact of the 43-day shutdown” said Ha Nguyen McNeill, a senior official performing the duties of TSA administrator. “Many are still reeling from it.”
This is breaking news from theWashington Post. “Much of DHS set to shut down as Democrats demand new restraints on ICE. Democrats are pushing for new policies requiring agents to wear body cameras and get judicial warrants for raids.”
The Department of Homeland Security is expected to shut down early Saturday as congressional Democrats and the White House remain at an impasse over new restrictions on federal immigration agents.
The shutdown beginning at 12:01 a.m. Saturday would impact about 13 percent of the federal civilian workforce, including the Transportation Security Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Coast Guard.
But Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection — the main targets of Democrats’ outrage — would be able to continue immigration enforcement efforts due to an influx of funding from the Republican tax and spending law passed this past summer.
Despite the stalemate, both chambers of Congress have already left Washington and do not plan to return until Feb. 23 after a scheduled week-long recess that includes, for some senators, a trip to the Munich Security Conference in Germany.
State governments are fighting to keep the Election Clause of the U.S. Constitution real. This is from Democracy Docket‘s Matt Cohen.
The Democratic chief election officials of six states are denouncing two new voter suppression bills making their way through Congress — underscoring how the legislation would place a huge burden on voters and election administrators just as midterm election season kicks off.
“These bills would place a massive burden on American eligible voters, require unfeasible overhauls of state systems while preparations for the 2026 midterm elections are well underway, and create unfunded mandates for already under-resourced states and municipalities,” the secretaries wrote. “American voters will be the ones paying for this — by paying more in taxes, spending more time jumping through bureaucratic hoops, or losing access to the ballot box altogether.”
The House passed the SAVE America Act late Wednesday evening in a 218-213 vote, with every present Republican — along with one Democrat, Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas — voting in favor of the sweeping voter suppression bill. The bill — along with the MEGA Act, which was introduced earlier this week — stands to disenfranchise millions by imposing strict requirements for voters to show proof of citizenship when they register to vote, and to provide photo ID when casting ballots.
While the secretaries highlight that both bills “would make it harder for eligible voters to both register and cast their ballots,” they also call attention to the reality that GOP lawmakers have yet to address: Making such extensive changes to the voting process so close to an election would create chaos for election administrators.
Some states, like North Carolina, have already started with early voting, and any attempt to overhaul requirements for voters to register and cast ballots would be extremely costly to both states and voters, according to the secretaries.
“A series of sweeping overhauls to the nation’s voter registration and election administration laws, when some states are weeks or months away from conducting their primary elections, is not a serious effort at improving the democratic process,” the letter said. “Election administrators already face significant challenges in educating voters on registration requirements, especially considering the significant mis- and dis-information on the issue coming out of Washington, D.C.”
Democracy backsliding is real. One more surreal headline from about the HHS Secretary who admits to snorting coke from bathroom toilets. This is from The Hill’s Joseph Choi. “HHS shaking up top personnel to push Trump, MAHA priorities ahead of midterms.”
Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Thursday announced a reshuffling of top staffers in his department as the Trump administration looks to shore up health wins that can boost GOP success in the upcoming midterms.
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Deputy Administrator Chris Klomp will be chief counselor at the HHS.
John Brooks, CMS deputy administrator and the chief policy and regulatory officer, will now be CMS senior counselor. Kyle Diamantas, deputy commissioner for human foods at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Grace Graham, FDA deputy commissioner for policy, legislation, and international affairs, have been named as senior counselors for the FDA.
As CNN reported, current HHS chief of staff Matt Buckham will also move to a senior counselor role. Administration officials who spoke with the outlet said the changes came as a result of conversation between the HHS and the White House.
“In just over a year, we have driven historic progress on President Trump’s health care priorities and delivered real, measurable change,” Kennedy said in a statement.
“We are restoring accountability, challenging entrenched interests, and putting the health of the American people first. I am proud to elevate battle-tested, principled leaders onto my immediate team—individuals with the courage and experience to help us move faster and go further as we work to Make America Healthy Again.”
Kennedy’s support for President Trump helped deliver a bloc of voters long critical and suspicious of the medical establishment. But many observers have noted this support is tenuous.
As Jeff Hutt, a spokesperson for the MAHA PAC, recently told The Hill “Make America Health Again” voters aren’t necessarily those who show up strongly for the GOP during midterms.
Can you believe anyone still believes this guy?
Anyway, with that , I have to get ready to go get a mammogram. Have a great weekend! It’s total Mardi Gras Crazy down here! It’s also Friday the 13th.
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“The Orangeutan is full-bore flinging poo to distract from the Epstein Trump Files.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers
My outrage today at the latest, least presidential Truth Social Post that I may have ever seen knows no bounds. And yet, the boundless insanity of the “Press Secretary” tells me it’s fake. Don’t you just hate it when some Clairol MAGA Blonde bimbo tries to tell you how you feel? Here’s the headline at the New York Times. I’d share the Washington Post headline, too, but Jeff Bezos is busy ripping all the vital organs of that once great newspaper. “Trump Posts Video Portraying Obamas as Apes. The White House press secretary dismissed criticism of the clip’s racist content, shared by the president’s Truth Social account, as “fake outrage.” What an international disgrace of a country we’ve become!
Erica L. Green and Isabella Kwai share the lede.
President Trump posted a blatantly racist video clip portraying former President Barack Obama and the former first lady Michelle Obama as apes, the latest in a long pattern by Mr. Trump of promoting offensive stereotypes about Black Americans and others.
The brief clip, set to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” was spliced near the end of a 62-second video that promoted conspiracy theories about anomalies in the 2020 presidential election.
The depiction of Mr. and Mrs. Obama as apes perpetuates a racist trope, used historically by slave traders and segregationists to dehumanize Black people and justify lynchings and other atrocities. A spokeswoman for Mr. Obama declined to comment.
Mr. Trump has a history of making degrading remarks about people of color, women and immigrants. And in his second administration, official posts from the White House, Labor Department and Homeland Security Department have posted images and slogans that echo white supremacist messaging.
In response to questions about the clip, which Mr. Trump posted Thursday during a late-night spree on social media, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said criticism of the video was “fake outrage.”
“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” she said. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina — the Senate’s only Black Republican — wrote on X that he hoped the post was fake “because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House. The President should remove it.”
The latest clip appeared to have been taken from a video that was shared in October by a user on X with the caption “President Trump: King of the Jungle,” and an emoji of a lion.
In that video, several high-profile Democrats — including former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and former vice president Kamala Harris — were shown as various animals, while Mr. Trump was depicted as a lion. The Obamas, in the clip, were shown as apes. The video ended with the animals bowing down to Mr. Trump.
NBC News‘ Rebecca Shabad has further information on the disgusting post. “Trump shares racist video depicting the Obamas as monkeys. The White House defended Trump’s post, saying it was “from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle.”
The roughly minute-long video otherwise focused on false election fraud claims about the 2020 presidential election, but at the very end it suddenly flashed to a clip of the Obamas’ faces superimposed on the heads of cartoon apes as the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by The Tokens played in the background.
The imagery, which evokes long-standing racist tropes against Black people, comes during Black History Month, which honors the accomplishments and contributions of Black Americans. Barack Obama made U.S. history as the first Black president.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded to NBC News’ request for comment Friday morning with a statement: “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King. Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
The video the White House referred to appeared to have been posted initially by an X user in October and shows the Obamas as apes in the beginning and other Democrats’ faces as the heads of other African animals as the song continues to play. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is depicted as a warthog and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker as an elephant, for example, while Trump is presented as a lion.
Representatives for the Obamas didn’t immediately respond to NBC News’ request for comment.
Trump’s repost drew strong criticism on social media, including from Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., who sharply denounced the president on X. “Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House. The President should remove it,” he said.
The President continues to do despicable things to immigrant families and to communities that stand up to his reckless and unconstitutional policies. This is from MPR News, located in the Twin Cities area. Regina Medina reports the story. “DHS has requested expedited deportation proceedings against family of Liam Conejo Ramos.”
The federal government has filed a motion seeking to end asylum claims for the family of Liam Conejo Ramos, according to the lawyer representing the family. The 5-year-old returned home this week after he was detained with his father on Jan. 20 and sent to a detention center in Texas.
The Department of Homeland Security filed a motion Wednesday to expedite deportation proceedings in the family’s case, said immigration attorney Danielle Molliver with Nwokocha & Operana Law Offices.
A hearing is scheduled for Friday, although Molliver is requesting more time to respond. She said she thought the motion was “retaliatory.”
“It’s really frustrating as an attorney, because they keep throwing new obstacles in our way. There’s absolutely no reason that this should be expedited. It’s not very common,” Molliver said.
Molliver said the federal government may not deport them to Ecuador, their home country. Instead, the family could apply for asylum in a third country.
Liam’s father, Adrian Conejo Arias, said they don’t know what will happen to them.
“The government is moving many pieces, it’s doing everything possible to do us harm, so that they’ll probably deport us. We live with that fear too,” Conejo Arias said. The interview was conducted in Spanish and translated by MPR News.
DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
I truly believe that the more he goes after this family, the more his polls will fall, and he will pull Republicans down further as the Midterm elections near. What is also clear is that the Washington Post will not be up to doing any kind of real reporting on any of this. Ruth Marcus of The New Yorker has this analysis. “How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post. The Amazon founder bought the paper to save it. Instead, with a mass layoff, he’s forced it into severe decline.”
On September 4, 2013, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos held his first meeting with the staff of the Washington Post, the newspaper he had agreed to purchase a month earlier from the Graham family, for two hundred and fifty million dollars. It had been a long and unsettling stretch for the paper’s staff. We—I was a deputy editor of the editorial page at the time—had suffered through years of retrenchment. We trusted that Don Graham would place us in capable hands, but we did not know this new owner, and he did not know or love our business in the way that the Graham family had. Bezos’s words at that meeting, about “a new golden era for the Washington Post,” were reassuring. Bob Woodward asked why he had purchased the paper, and Bezos was clear about the commitment he was prepared to make. “I finally concluded that I could provide runway—financial runway—because I don’t think you can keep shrinking the business,” he said. “You can be profitable and shrinking. And that’s a survival strategy, but it ultimately leads to irrelevance, at best. And, at worst, it leads to extinction.”
To look back on that moment is to wonder: How could it have come to this? The paper had some profitable years under Bezos, sparked by the 2016 election and the first Trump term. But it began losing enormous sums: seventy-seven million dollars in 2023, another hundred million in 2024. The owner who once offered runway was unwilling to tolerate losses of that magnitude. And so, after years of Bezos-fuelled growth, the Post endured two punishing rounds of voluntary buyouts, in 2023 and 2025, that reduced its newsroom from more than a thousand staffers to under eight hundred, and cost the Post some of its best writers and editors. Then, early Wednesday morning, newsroom employees received an e-mail announcing “some significant actions.” They were instructed to stay home and attend a “Zoom webinar at 8:30 a.m.” Everyone knew what was coming—mass layoffs.
The scale of the demolition, though, was staggering—reportedly more than three hundred newsroom staffers. The announcement was left to the executive editor, Matt Murray, and human-relations chief Wayne Connell; the newspaper’s publisher, Will Lewis, was nowhere to be seen as the grim news was unveiled. In what Murray termed a “broad strategic reset,” the Post’s storied sports department was shuttered “in its current form”; several reporters will now cover sports as a “cultural and societal phenomenon.” The metro staff, already cut to about forty staffers during the past five years, has been shrunk to about twelve; the foreign desks will be reduced to approximately twelve locations from more than twenty; Peter Finn, the international editor, told me that he asked to be laid off. The books section and the flagship podcast, “Post Reports,” will end. Shortly after the meeting, staffers received individualized e-mails letting them know whether they would stay or go. Murray said the retrenched Post would “concentrate on areas that demonstrate authority, distinctiveness, and impact,” focussing on areas such as politics and national security. This strategy, a kind of Politico-lite, would be more convincing if so many of the most talented players were not already gone.
Graham, who has previously been resolutely silent about changes at the paper, posted a message on Facebook that pulsed with anguish. “It’s a bad day,” he wrote, adding, “I am sad that so many excellent reporters and editors—and old friends—are losing their jobs. My first concern is for them; I will do anything I can to help.” As for himself, Graham, who once edited the sports section, said, “I will have to learn a new way to read the paper, since I have started with the sports page since the late 1940’s.”
Tech Bros and MAGA have ruined our democracy. Paul Krugman, however, argues that “American Decency Still Lives. When pushed far enough, Americans will do the right thing.” This is posted on his SubStack. I have found this to be true here in New Orleans. Even more so, I watch the city where I lived before moving here show the earnest Lutheran social justice so famously known as Minnesota nice. It has a yin and a yang, believe me.
If you want to accomplish anything in politics, you have to have realistic expectations about voters. Ordinary people aren’t deeply informed about policy or politics. They have jobs to do, children to raise, lives to live. A large proportion of voters don’t have strong ideological preferences — not because they’re “moderates,” but because they don’t think ideologically at all. Instead, they think pragmatically – they think about things like the price of eggs and the cost of health insurance. And because the average voter isn’t a policy or data wonk, they are often misled – for example, by claims that crime is rising even when it’s actually falling.
Granted, some voting behavior is motivated by ugly biases. Racism and sexism, homophobia and transphobia, are still important factors in politics. But there’s a difference between political realism and nihilistic cynicism.
Many of my readers are probably aware of the famous confessional by the German pastor Martin Niemöller:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
I don’t know if Stephen Miller has ever seen these words. But if he has, he has taken them not as a warning but as operating instructions. MAGA’s ethnic cleansing plans — because that’s what they are — were clearly based on the cynical assumption that native-born white Americans wouldn’t rise to the defense of civil liberties and rule of law if state violence was directed at people who don’t look like them.
And for much of Trump’s first year in office many Democrats were reluctant to challenge his immigration policies, because their defeat in 2024 was widely seen as in part a response to surging immigration during the Biden years. Until recently, Democrats tried to keep the national conversation focused on affordability and Trump’s obvious failure to deliver on his promises to bring grocery prices way down.
While the Democratic strategy was an understandable response to a shattering electoral defeat, it rested on a cynical and nihilistic view of American voters: that they couldn’t be trusted to vote against a party that reveled in inflicting cruelty and injustice as long as the price of gasoline fell.
But recent events refute this nihilistic cynicism. Yes, Americans still name the economy as the most important political issue. But moral outrage over the Trump administration’s brutality (and its corruption, but that’s a subject for another post) has exploded as a political force over the past two months.
There was substantial resistance to ICE’s attempts to intimidate Los Angeles and Chicago. But the response since the invasion of Minneapolis (and now all of Minnesota) began in December has been on another level, a mass nonviolent uprising reminiscent of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the color revolutions in the former Soviet empire.
MPR News reports that nearly 30,000 Minnesotans have been trained as constitutional observers, with another 6,000 volunteers registered to deliver food, give at-risk families rides, and so on. This is time-consuming, exhausting, dangerousactivism. Yet ordinary Americans in large numbers are willing to do it.
Cell phone cameras and whistles can’t completely stop ICE’s brutality and lawlessness. For some reason I’m especially troubled by tales of the many cars found abandoned in the middle of the street, their windows smashed and their occupants obviously abducted. But the resistance is throwing sand in the gears and producing acute frustration among the masked thugs, who have repeatedly been filmed drawing guns on citizens doing nothing but observing them.
And the public is not on the side of the thugs.
Profanity-laden anti-MAGA chant erupts at major pro-wrestling event
Plus, once again, a major nation is turning to China for its trade initiatives because our #FARTUS is too stupid and stuck-up to recognize that his economic policies are dooming a lot of our industries and jobs. This is from the AP. I cannot believe we keep repeating obvious mistakes from the past because no one in Congress will do their fucking job! “Facing high Trump tariffs, Africa’s leading economy says it’s close to a new trade deal with China.” Just think, a few years ago, we were on target to keep them in second place.
China and South Africa signed a framework agreement for a new trade deal on Friday as Africa’s leading economy looks to other options following the high import tariffs imposed on it by the U.S. and its diplomatic fallout with the Trump administration.
South Africa’s Ministry of Trade and Industry said the agreement would start negotiations over a deal that would give some South African goods, such as fruit, duty-free access to the Chinese market. The ministry said it expected the trade deal to be finalized by the end of March.
In return, the trade ministry said China will get enhanced investment opportunities in South Africa, where its car sales have seen rapid growth.
The U.S. slapped 30% duties on some South African goods under U.S. President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs policy — one of the higher rates applied across the world. South Africa has said it is still negotiating with the U.S. for a better deal.
The China-South Africa deal follows others looking for alternatives to U.S. partnership in the face of Trump’s aggressive trade policies.
The announcement on the negotiations between China and South Africa came days after Trump issued a short-term renewal of a longstanding free-trade agreement between the U.S. and African nations. The U.S. extended the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which South Africa is a major beneficiary of, just until the end of the year and indicated it would be modified to fit the administration’s America First policy.
China is already South Africa’s largest trade partner for both imports and exports, while Chinese economic influence across the African continent continues to grow and it dominates in the extraction of Africa’s critical minerals that are key components for new high-tech products.
“South Africa looks forward to working with China in a friendly, pragmatic and flexible manner,” the trade ministry said.
The Stupid. It hurts.
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As usual, there is just too much news for anyone to deal with. I’m going to focus on the death of a great newspaper, the torture of an American city, the efforts of a vain and ignorant “president” to grab power and steal elections, and his obsession with building monstrosities. Here’s what’s happening.
The Washington Post told employees on Wednesday that it was beginning a widespread round of layoffs that are expected to decimate the organization’s sports, local news and international coverage.
The company is laying off about 30 percent of all its employees, according to two people with knowledge of the decision. That includes people on the business side and more than 300 of the roughly 800 journalists in the newsroom, the people said.
The cuts are a sign that Jeff Bezos, who became one of the world’s richest people by selling things on the internet, has not yet figured out how to build and maintain a profitable publication on the internet. The paper expanded during the first several years of his ownership, but the company has sputtered more recently.
Matt Murray, The Post’s executive editor, said on a call Wednesday morning with newsroom employees that the company had lost too much money for too long and had not been meeting readers’ needs. He said that all sections would be affected in some way, and that the result would be a publication focused even more on national news and politics, as well as business and health, and far less on other areas.
“If anything, today is about positioning ourselves to become more essential to people’s lives in what is becoming more crowded, competitive and complicated media landscape,” Mr. Murray said. “And after some years when, candidly, The Post has had struggles.”
Mr. Murray further explained the rationale in an email, saying The Post was “too rooted in a different era, when we were a dominant, local print product” and that online search traffic, partly because of the rise of generative A.I., had fallen by nearly half in the last three years. He added that The Post’s “daily story output has substantially fallen in the last five years.”
“Even as we produce much excellent work, we too often write from one perspective, for one slice of the audience,” he said.
The Post’s sports section will close, though some of its reporters will stay on and move to the features department to cover the culture of sports. The Post’s metro section will shrink, and the books section will close, as will the “Post Reports” daily news podcast.
Mr. Murray told the staff that while The Post’s international coverage also would be reduced, reporters would remain in nearly a dozen locations. Reporters and editors in the Middle East were laid off, as well as in India and Australia.
Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of The Washington Post, and Will Lewis, the publisher he appointed at the end of 2023, are embarking on the latest step of their plan to kill everything that makes the paper special. The Post has survived for nearly 150 years, evolving from a hometown family newspaper into an indispensable national institution, and a pillar of the democratic system. But if Bezos and Lewis continue down their present path, it may not survive much longer.
Over recent years, they’ve repeatedly cut the newsroom—killing its Sunday magazine, reducing the staff by several hundred, nearly halving the Metro desk—without acknowledging the poor business decisions that led to this moment or providing a clear vision for the future. This morning, executive editor Matt Murray and HR chief Wayne Connell told the newsroom staff in an early-morning virtual meeting that it was closing the Sports department and Books section, ending its signature podcast, and dramatically gutting the International and Metro departments, in addition to staggering cuts across all teams. Post leadership—which did not even have the courage to address their staff in person—then left everyone to wait for an email letting them know whether or not they had a job. (Lewis, who has already earned a reputation for showing up late to work when he showed up at all, did not join the Zoom.)
The Post may yet rise, but this will be their enduring legacy.
Ashley Parker
What’s happening to the Post is a public tragedy, but for me, it is also very personal. When my parents’ basement recently flooded, amid the waterlogged boxes of old photos and vinyl records, we found my younger sister’s baby book. There, on a page reserved for memories from the month she was born—news about visits from doting grandparents, perhaps, or descriptions of her mewling gurgles—my dad had filled the lines with news from our hometown paper, The Washington Post.
“Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).” “Irangate.” “The Bork nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.” “The NFL went on strike.” “Wall Street had the worst day since 1929!!!” “The U.S. was having a garbage crisis, i.e.; running out of disposal sites, esp. in the northeast.” (To be fair, he worked in waste management. But also … welcome to the world, Baby Girl!)
Which is to say: The Washington Post feels like a part of my family’s DNA, imprinted on our earliest memories, memorialized among clippings of our hair and other, more traditional, recollections (first diaper blowout, first word)….
The Post was also how I fell in love with journalism. Every newspaper lover has the section they read first—Sports, Comics, Metro—and mine was Style. The section, which debuted in 1969, was like nothing that had come before it, or what has come since: a newspaper that gave its writers the time and space and freedom and voice to produce narrative long-form journalism that was must-read, holding its own against the New Journalism magazine greats of the era. And for me, it was a chance to commune with giants—to read people such as Libby Copeland, Robin Givhan, Paul Hendrickson, Sally Quinn, David Von Drehle, Gene Weingarten, Marjorie Williams—and puzzle over how they’d done it.
Then, in 2017, I arrived at the Post as a reporter to cover the Trump White House, and I stayed for eight magical years. I had planned to stay forever. So what is happening at the Post right now—what has been happening there for a while—is personal. But it is also so much larger than me or any single person.
The least cynical explanation is that Bezos simply isn’t paying attention. Maybe—like so many of us initially—he was charmed by Lewis’s British accent and studied loucheness that mask an emperor whose bespoke threads are no clothes at all. Or maybe, as many of us who deeply love the Post fear, the decimation is the plan.
Bezos is killing the Post. I’m not sure if he just wants it to die or he wants it to become a propaganda arm of the Trump adminisration.
The morning her father called to say that he had been detained on a snowy Minneapolis road, Xochitl Soberanes was seized by an urgent and inescapable feeling. At 16 years old and the eldest of four, she would suddenly have to become the backbone of the family.
Their mother had died of pneumonia less than a year ago, so it was Xochitl who convinced her 4-year-old brother that their father was working late as they packed up belongings to go stay with a nearby aunt. That January night, a cousin found all four siblings curled up asleep in the same queen bed — cradled by Xochitl, who lay on the edge.
“We just wanted to be close together,” she said.
Xochitl cut her younger siblings’ breakfast into bite-size pieces.Credit…Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
For weeks, the Minneapolis area has been a landscape of intense turmoil as federal immigration agents face off against furious citizens. But there is a quieter upheaval taking place behind closed doors as the city’s youngest residents attempt to grasp the altering of their neighborhoods, their schools, their sense of security.
Regardless of what they might understand about the politics embedded in their surroundings, some things are clear: The adults in their lives are weary and overwhelmed. Neighbors are scared to leave the house. Bomb threats have been called in to schools. Events have been canceled. Friends are missing from classrooms. And parents have been taken.
“I was just thinking, ‘What are we going to do without him?’” Xochitl said about the day her father, Victor, did not come home. She began to insist to her aunt that she could finish her final exams and be available to help with her siblings. Within a week, her friend, a U.S. citizen, was also detained and later released.“It’s like living in fear all the time,” Xochitl said.
It is a sentiment that many children in the area speak of — this fear that now feels innate and will continue to linger in ways they cannot yet comprehend. They live in a world where a barrage of honks and whistles signal that immigration agents are in their midst, and that something bad could happen soon.
It is not unusual for them to see agents dressed in riot gear and carrying rifles stationed on their streets. And those who have found themselves swept up unwillingly into altercations have been left to endure the aftereffects.
Tom Homan, the White House border czar, said on Wednesday that the federal government would immediately withdraw 700 law enforcement officers from Minneapolis, scaling down the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the area.
Tom Homan
The change comes after the Trump administration sent thousands of federal officers and agents to Minnesota, a deployment that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said was the agency’s “largest operation to date.” About 2,000 officers and agents would be left in the state, Mr. Homan said.
Tom Homan, the White House border czar, said on Wednesday that the federal government would immediately withdraw 700 law enforcement officers from Minneapolis, scaling down the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the area.
The change comes after the Trump administration sent thousands of federal officers and agents to Minnesota, a deployment that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said was the agency’s “largest operation to date.” About 2,000 officers and agents would be left in the state, Mr. Homan said.
“This is smart law enforcement, not less law enforcement,” he added.
I’ll believe that when I see it.
Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis, a Democrat, said in a statement that the reduction in officers was “a step in the right direction” but that 2,000 federal officers in the region was still “not de-escalation.”
“My message to the White House has been consistent — Operation Metro Surge has been catastrophic for our businesses and residents. It needs to end immediately,” he said, referring to the name of the federal crackdown in the city.
Mr. Homan also emphasized that immigration officers would focus on more targeted enforcement operations that prioritize arresting criminals who pose public safety threats. Last week, Mr. Homan said that was “the way we’ve always done it,” but that “we got away from it a little bit.”
Still, he said that any immigrants residing in the country illegally would not be exempt from enforcement operations.
“If you are in the country illegally, you are not off the table,” Mr. Homan said.
“I want to see elections be honest, and if a state can’t run an election, I think the people behind me should do something about it,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office after signing legislation to end a partial government shutdown, with Republican lawmakers surrounding him.
“Because if you think about it, a state is an agent for the federal government in elections,” the president continued. “I don’t know why the federal government doesn’t do ’em anyway.”
He added, “But when you see some of these states, about how horribly they run their elections, what a disgrace it is, I think the federal government [should get involved].”
“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over. We should take over the voting in at least 15 places,’” Trump said. “The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
In the Oval Office on Tuesday, the president referenced Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta — all Democratic-run cities — as places where “horrible corruption on elections” is occurring.
President Trump’s declaration that he wants to “nationalize” voting in the United States arrives at a perilous moment for the relationship between the federal government and top election officials across the country.
While the executive branch has no explicit authority over elections, generations of secretaries of state have relied on the intelligence gathering and cybersecurity defenses, among other assistance, that only the federal government can provide.
But as Mr. Trump has escalated efforts to involve the administration in election and voting matters while also eliminating programs designed to fortify these systems against attacks, secretaries of state and other top state election officials, including some Republican ones, have begun to sound alarms. Some see what was once a crucial partnership as frayed beyond repair.
They point to Mr. Trump’s push to overturn the 2020 election, his continued false claims that the contest was rigged, the presence of election deniers in influential government positions and his administration’s attempts to dig up evidence of widespread voter fraud that year, even though none have ever been found.
The worry, these election officials say, is that Mr. Trump and his allies might try to interfere in or cast doubt on this year’s midterm elections. The president is urgently trying to defend the Republican majorities in Congress, and the political environment has appeared to grow less friendly to his party.
Of all the threats we face, the threat that Donald Trump will use ICE and Border {atrol agents to suppress the vote calls for a response by the Senate in the pending budget bill. By word and deed, Trump has shown an intent to do all he can to subvert a free and fair election this November. He must be stopped.
Who would bet $5 that Donald Trump, the man who staged an attempted coup and urged a Governor to “find” 11,000 votes, is not going to interfere with the ability of Americans to cast their votes this November? Who thinks that his “moral code,” the only thing that he says restricts him, will prevent him from using his massive ICE private army from suppressing the vote in Democratic precincts? Who thinks Steve Bannon is kidding when he says Trump will use federal agents to screen voters?
Donald Trump represents the largest threat to free and fair voting in American history since Jim Crow. He has demonstrated time and again, his willingness to subvert our democratic norms. His recent extortion note to Minnesota and his seizure of Georgia ballots are clarion calls for action to stop him from using ICE to suppress the vote.
Think about the private voter suppression army he has entirely at his disposal, an organization purportedly in existence to deal with immigration, but which could be used for Trump’s best survival tool, the suppression of votes in Democratic precincts in competitive districts and states.
Unless something changes, what we have seen in Minneapolis is just the harbinger to the use of ICE and the Border Patrol as a massive and strategically planned voter suppression campaign, surrounding polling places with intimidating federal agents.
By separating the Homeland Security budget from the rest, the dedicated Senate Democrats now have a chance to put roadblocks in Trump’s path.
Fulton County in Georgia took legal action on Wednesday demanding that the federal government return ballots and other election materials from the 2020 presidential contest that the F.B.I. seized last week.
The motion was filed under seal in federal court in Georgia, according to Jessica Corbitt, a spokeswoman for Fulton County. The motion also seeks the unsealing of the affidavit that was filed in support of the search warrant that allowed F.B.I. agents to conduct an extraordinary search of the county’s election headquarters.
At a news conference on Wednesday morning, Robb Pitts, the chair of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, cast the legal action as a means of upholding the Constitution, as well as the rights of Fulton County voters.
“We will fight using all resources against those who seek to take over our elections,” he said. “Our Constitution itself is at stake in this fight.”
The move follows a chaotic week in Fulton County, which includes much of Atlanta and is Georgia’s most populous county, after F.B.I. agents conducted an extraordinary search and took away pallets of ballots and other materials.
Local officials were particularly alarmed and confused by the presence of Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, whose agency’s involvement in elections traditionally pertains only to foreign influence. The day after the search, she met with some of the agents who had participated and called Mr. Trump on her cellphone, The New York Times reported on Monday. After initially not picking up, he called back and spoke to them on speakerphone, asking them questions and praising and thanking them, according to three people with knowledge of the meeting.
President Donald Trump is planning to install a statue of Christopher Columbus on White House grounds, according to three people with knowledge of the pending move,in his latest effort to remake the presidential campus and celebrate the famed and controversial explorer.
In 2020, demonstrators targeted monuments deemed symbols of racism, colonialism, and oppression.
The statue is set to be located on the south side of the grounds, by E Street and north of the Ellipse, two of the people said, although they cautioned that plans could change. The three people spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak on private discussions. The piece is a reconstruction of a statue unveiled in Baltimore by then-President Ronald Reagan and dumped in the city’s harbor by protestersin 2020 as a racial reckoning swept the country.
A group of Italian American businessmen and politicians, working with local sculptors, obtained the destroyed pieces and rebuilt the statue with financial support from local charities and federal grant funding.
Bill Martin, an Italian American businessman who helped recover the remnants of the original sculpture and organize a campaign to rebuild it, said the statue is expected to be transferred from a warehouse on Maryland’s Eastern Shore to the Trump administration in coming weeks.
The White House declined to comment on its plans but praised the 15th-century explorer.
“In this White House, Christopher Columbus is a hero,” spokesman Davis Ingle said in a statement. “And he will continue to be honored as such by President Trump.
Trump celebrated his $400 million project on social media, posting that it will be the “Greatest of its kind ever built!!”
A rendering of President Donald Trump’s ‘New East Wing’ at the White House, including his nearly 90,000 square foot ballroom (The White House)
He wrote on Truth Social Tuesday that the new building “replaces the very small, dilapidated, and rebuilt many times, East Wing, with a magnificent New East Wing.” He also said that the new structure will be taller than the White House’s Executive Mansion.
“If you notice, the North Wall is a replica of the North Facade of the White House,” he wrote in the post.
The new rendering is generally similar to previous drawings of the upcoming ballroom shared by Trump.
The ballroom is projected to be approximately 90,000 square feet, and the attached “New East Wing” complex will include a new office for the First Lady, a new movie theater, and a commercial kitchen.
Trump’s decision to demolish the historic East Wing for a ritzy ballroom has been met with severe criticism, particularly from historic preservationists.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation sued the Trump administration in December in an effort to force the president to submit his plans for the ballroom to several review bodies, including Congress and the public. The lawsuit asked a court to pause his construction project until those demands are met.
Construction at the site has not been ordered to stop and Trump’s Department of Justice is moving to try to ensure that doesn’t change.
A DOJ filing on Monday asked a federal judge overseeing the lawsuit to stay any injunction into the construction over alleged “national security” concerns, ABC News reports.
That’s all I have for today. I hope you find something of interest here.
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I’m going to focus on the immigration fight today. So much is happening in Minnesota and now in Maine. The murder of Alex Pretti has raised people’s consciousness in the public and even in Congress. The protests are working. I’m not kidding myself that Trump’s attempts to calm the federal government rhetoric are really sincere, but he seems to feel he needs to fake some semblance of compassion if only for a short time.
Federal immigration officers have been collecting personal information about protesters and agitators in Minneapolis, sources told CNN – and had documented details about Alex Pretti before he was shot to death on Saturday.
It is unclear how Pretti first came to the attention of federal authorities, but sources told CNN that about a week before his death, he suffered a broken rib when a group of federal officers tackled him while he was protesting their attempt to detain other individuals….
A memo sent earlier this month to agents temporarily assigned to the city asked them to “capture all images, license plates, identifications, and general information on hotels, agitators, protestors, etc., so we can capture it all in one consolidated form,” according to correspondence reviewed by CNN.
Pretti’s previous encounter is another reflection of the aggressive approach federal agents are taking with observers and protesters – a philosophy underscored by the request for agents to collect information about protesters whose activities are broadly protected by the First Amendment.
DHS has repeatedly warned of threats against federal law enforcement officers during immigration enforcement operations—and criticized protesters who they argue are impeding those operations. On Tuesday, the department also publicized an online tip form to share information about people allegedly harassing ICE officers….
The earlier incident started when he stopped his car after observing ICE agents chasing what he described as a family on foot, and began shouting and blowing his whistle, according to a source who asked not to be named out of fear of retribution.
Pretti later told the source that five agents tackled him and one leaned on his back – an encounter that left him with a broken rib. The agents quickly released him at the scene.
“That day, he thought he was going to die,” said the source.
Pretti was later given medication consistent with treating a broken rib, according to records reviewed by CNN.
“That day, he thought he was going to die,” Yet he went back out to observe ICE agents and help immigrants.
The two Border Patrol agents who subdued, punched, and fatally shot Veterans Affairs ICU nurse Alex Pretti have been placed on administrative leave, according to multiple reports.
The paid leave will only last three days, an anonymous official told MS NOW. An unnamed Homeland Security official claimed to The New York Times that the placement was “standard protocol.”
MS Now reported that those involved in the brutal killing will return to “desk duty” after three days, not field work. The report added that the two agents who opened fire at Pretti received “mental health support” after killing the 37-year-old in Minneapolis on Saturday morning.
Now Trump is pretending to “de-escalate.” I don’t buy it for one minute. It won’t last.
The government’s account of the killing on Saturday of Alex Pretti, a U.S. citizen with no criminal record, was unraveling. Stephen Miller, the mastermind of President Trump’s hard-line immigration policy, had called Mr. Pretti a “terrorist” and told other administration officials, including Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, to call him an “assassin.”
But videos clearly contradicted that story. Mr. Pretti was pinned down when immigration agents opened fire and killed him. Protests and a palpable sense of outrage were growing across the country. Even the president’s allies were alarmed. Many of them wanted to see changes on the ground, and several made a recommendation directly in calls to the president: Send Tom Homan, the White House border czar, to Minneapolis.
Early Monday, Brian Kilmeade, the co-host of “Fox & Friends,” of which Mr. Trump is a loyal viewer, repeated the message three times in two hours.
Twenty minutes later, the president announced on social media that he was sending Mr. Homan to Minneapolis, a tacit acknowledgment that he was losing control of a situation that posed one of the most serious political threats of his second administration.
Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol official who had been directing on-the-ground operations in Minneapolis, and who was known for aggressive tactics, was out. “Bovino is pretty good, but he’s a pretty out-there kind of guy,” Mr. Trump told Fox News. “Maybe it wasn’t good here.”
And while there is no sign that Mr. Trump is repudiating the tactics used by the federal agents in Minnesota or the core tenets of his immigration policies, the moment was a rare example of the president moving to mitigate the harsh optics associated with a crackdown his administration has otherwise celebrated.
A bit more:
Mr. Trump has honed a survival tactic over many years facing criticism in the public eye: He creates diversions to barrel from one news cycle into the next. But in other moments, when he has faced particularly intense — and politically damaging — public outcry, he has taken stock of news coverage and decided to take a different tack, often temporarily.
Mr. Pretti’s killing and its aftermath created one of those moments. And Mr. Trump seemed to realize in this case that his message, at least, had to change. Shortly after he made the announcement about Mr. Homan, Mr. Trump and his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, softened their tone about the shooting and distanced themselves from the incendiary comments made by Mr. Miller, Mr. Bovino and Ms. Noem. Mr. Trump also said he spoke with Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, whom he had castigated only days before.
And as the White House walks back some of its harshest statements, a blame game of sorts has erupted, with Mr. Miller suggesting immigration authorities in Minneapolis may not have been following protocol.
In a statement, Mr. Miller said the White House had advised Customs and Border Protection officials to create a “physical barrier” between “arrest teams” and “disrupters.”
“We are evaluating why the C.B.P. team may not have been following that protocol,” said Mr. Miller, who just days earlier had called Mr. Pretti a “would-be assassin.”
It remains to be seen if the rhetorical shift will tamp down the outcry or if there is any will inside the Trump administration to change tactics on the ground. Mr. Homan, a longtime ICE official, is seen among Mr. Trump’s allies as someone who could bring a measure of calm to the chaos in Minnesota, particularly because he has called for targeted arrests instead of sweeping raids. But he is fully on board with Mr. Trump’s mass deportation campaign; in 2018, he, along with two senior officials, recommended a policy that eventually led to families being separated at the southern border.
Homan was the architect of the family separation policy in Trump’s first term. He’s also on video accepting a $50,000 bribe. I’m not holding my breath expecting him to be a peacemaker.
The media verdict is in: President Trump has “softened” his stance on his paramilitary war on Minneapolis. He struck a “cooperative tone” in a call with Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz. The administration hopes to “shift its strategy” on its ICE raids. Trump is executing a “pivot” and is attempting to “deescalate.”
You get the idea: Trump is chastened by the backlash to the ICE murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. So he’s now recalibrating the government’s approach in an effort to appear to dial down the violent social conflict that’s been unleashed.
Tom Homan and Kristy Noam
So let’s stipulate some threshold questions: Will any of this change how ICE is actually conducting its operations in American cities that fundamentally do not want ICE’s presence among their populations? Is Trump reversing the underlying reality of these operations—that they have become akin to military occupations of enemy territory within the American nation? Will there be serious governmental efforts to investigate those shootings, mete out accountability for them, and address what went wrong?
The answers to those questions sure look like “no,” “no,” and “no.” To wit, The Wall Street Journalreports that some Trump aides have realized that all this has become a “political liability,” so they’re in discussions over “how to continue deportations without clashing with protesters.” They’re also planning new steps to “improve ICE’s image.”
Meanwhile, The New York Timesreports that Trump met with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for two hours amid “concern” about the shootings. But Noem’s job is safe. Trump has replaced the public face of the Minneapolis occupation, removing Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino, who swaggers around these scenes of occupation like a conquering general, with border czar Tom Homan, who swaggers around on Fox News like a conquering general.
Note the problem here. Trump does apparently want to minimize clashes between government security services and protesters. But he doesn’t appear to want those heavily armed government militias to stop doing the things that are causing those clashes in the first place.
What’s really going on here is this: Trump is looking to defuse anger among congressional Democrats for purposes that don’t portend a meaningful shift. An administration official gave away the game to Punchbowl News, admitting that these “de-escalatory measures” are about placating Senate Democrats so they don’t seize this moment to demand restrictions on ICE as part of any government funding package.
I don’t think that is going to work. Democrats in the Senate at least seem to be getting the message that the majority of the public doesn’t like what’s happening.
ICE Barbie has passed the blame to Stephen Miller after she received calls to be fired in response to immigration officials killing another U.S. citizen, multiple sources told Axios.
“Everything I’ve done, I’ve done at the direction of the president and Stephen,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told one source who relayed her comments to Axios.
In an earlier copy of the Axios report, others blamed Miller for divisive comments about slain anti-ICE protestor Alex Pretti wanting to “massacre law enforcement,” which were made by Border Patrol senior official Greg Bovino.
Miller denied the blame placed upon him for the “massacre” statement, instead deflecting the fault to information provided by Customs and Border Protection, which is under Noem’s Department of Homeland Security.
“Any early comments made were based on information sent to the White House through CBP,” he told the outlet.
President Trump’s shakeup in Minnesota immigration operations in the wake of two fatal shootings is “a disaster” for Kristi Noem, sources have told the Daily Beast.
Kristy Noam and Cory Lewandowski
Trump, 79, announced Monday that border czar Tom Homan, 64, will now run the embattled Minnesota operation and report directly to him. He did so amid rising public anger over the brutal and deadly manner in which operations have been carried out on Noem’s watch under her Border Patrol “commander-at-large” Gregory Bovino, who has been shown the door by the president.
For months, senior officials have griped that Homeland Security Secretary Noem, 54, and her chief adviser and rumored lover, Corey Lewandowski, 52, built a parallel power structure around Bovino, 55. This, they say, marginalized ICE and cut Homan out of key calls as Noem and Homan both fought to lead Trump’s mass deportation drive.
With Homan now tapped to take the reins in Minnesota, administration insiders say it doesn’t bode well for Noem’s job prospects. “Homan taking control is a disaster for Noem,” one Department of Homeland Security source said, adding that Homan was likely to be everything that the publicity-obsessed Noem and Bovino were not.
Meanwhile, ICE is ramping up it’s operation in Maine.
As a snowstorm blanketed the region, the Department of Homeland Security said Monday that federal agents have so far arrested more than 200 people in the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration operation in Maine.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has dubbed its operation “Catch of the Day,” the latest in the administration’s immigration crackdowns across the country.
On Monday, the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project of Maine, the largest organization of its kind in the state, called for ICE to stop its operation, while also sending condolences to their counterparts in Minneapolis.
“There are not adequate words to describe how difficult the past week has been,” ILAP’s Executive Director Sue Roche said.“We are seeing mostly people in lawful immigration processes with no criminal records being arrested. Many have been racially profiled and abducted from their cars off the street, and some have been targeted at home. ICE is stalking grocery stores and schools. The lack of due process or humanity in this enforcement operation is appalling.”
The group added that it is leading a legal effort to file emergency habeas petitions and seek bond hearings “to try to secure the freedom of Maine residents swept up in the ICE operation.” As of Monday, ILAP said, it has received requests for emergency legal help from more than 60 people arrested in the operation, and federal judges have issued at least eight emergency orders blocking ICE from transferring individuals out of the area.
BIDDEFORD, Maine — Five-year-old Keyli Camila Espin Vaca expected her mother to come pick her up after school on Friday, just as she always did.
But her mother never came.
Mayra Vaca Latacunga, 25, had dropped Camila off at the Biddeford Primary School that morning, then went to get groceries. Soon after, ICE agents stopped her car and requested her documentation, her brother said. She didn’t have it. The agents handcuffed her and transferred her to Massachusetts.
Camila sat for a photo with her aunt and uncle, after Camila’s mother was detained by ICE in Biddeford, Maine.Finn Gomez for the Boston Globe
Vaca Latacunga, a single mother from Ecuador, was Camila’s sole caretaker. On Friday, school officials escorted the kindergartner to her Uncle Javier’s house. She stayed there for several days, pleading for her mom.
“Quiero mi mamá, tío,” Camila said in Spanish on Sunday. “Yo quiero estar con mi mamá.”
“I want my mom, uncle . . . I want to be with my mom.”
Camila is among a growing number of children who have been left without a parent as the Trump administration carries out a major immigration enforcement effort in Maine, according to local officials. “Operation Catch of the Day,” as the Department of Homeland Security calls it, is meant to arrest around 1,400 people. They have arrested more than 200 so far, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement Monday to the Globe….
On Tuesday morning, a few hours after the Globe published this article, ICE released Vaca Latacunga in Massachusetts with an ankle monitor, according to Javier. The family was fearful to pick her up because of their legal status, so Vaca Latacunga was in a waiting room at the Burlington field office until the family found an Uber to take her back to Maine. On Tuesday afternoon, she was reunited with Camila.
SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine — When Fátima Lucas Henrique left home before 6 a.m. last Friday to head to her shift as a certified nursing assistant, it was with a sense of resolve. She had come to the United States from Angola, and pursued a career as a nurse so she could help people and make a difference. The ongoing immigration crackdown in the state wasn’t going to change that.
Fátima Lucas Henrique moved to Maine over two years ago from Angola. She was arrested in South Portland on Friday when heading to work.David Fonseca
Then came the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, rushing to her and forcing her from her car as onlookers honked their horns and shouted for help. Her terrified, piercing screamsthroughout the arrest, captured in a video widely circulated on social media, confirmed the fears and panic that many here worried would take hold once federal agents arrived. Since the arrest, Henrique has been detained in Boston and not been able to communicate at length with friends or family.
“We’re not safe right now. We can’t go grocery shopping. We can’t even go put the trash out without being afraid,” said a close friend of Henrique, who asked to not be identified because of her immigration status. When she first saw the video, the friend said, she recognized Henrique’s desperation, because it could have been her. “I felt so impotent,” said the friend, who also came to Maine from Angola and has been following the legal process for applying for citizenship.
The arrest has been held up as an example over recent days of the sort of strong-arm tactics by agents that immigrant-rights advocates have been watching for, as they embark on a campaign to monitor and document an immigration enforcement operation that began in Maine last week and that continues today.
A bit more:
Over the last several weeks, in anticipation of the surge, a team of activists has been training people on what to look out for, preparing them to deploy with whistles and car horns to warn immigrants and to monitor the agents’ tactics. And they said they are already seeing it: The apprehension of people while still in their vehicles, seemingly based on racial profiling; the patrols of bus stops; the arrest of people with no criminal background who are pursuing immigration legally.
The attorney general’s office has also urged Mainers to send in reports of intimidating and excessive federal enforcement behavior, in response to “evidence of constitutionally-deficient, excessive, and intimidating enforcement tactics” in the state.
DHS has maintained it is going after people with criminal histories, though advocates say many of those taken into custody have no criminal backgrounds at all. And they say Henrique’s case has resonated widely because of the rawness of her screams and because she, also, is not a criminal.
A search of the Maine criminal history record information request service returned no results for Henrique. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment Monday about her case.
So that’s the latest on ICE in Minnesota and Maine. Here in Massachusetts, we are wonder if we’ll be next.
What do you think? What else is on your mind?
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MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Federal immigration officers shot and killed a man Saturday in Minneapolis, drawing hundreds of protesters in a city already shaken by another fatal shooting weeks earlier.
The details surrounding the shooting weren’t immediately clear, but Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said the person was shot amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. A hospital record obtained by The Associated Press that a 51-year-old man who was shot by immigration officers had died.
Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told the AP in a text messages that the person had a firearm with two magazines and that the situation was “evolving.” DHS also distributed a photo of a handgun they said was on the person who was shot.
The shooting happened amid widespread daily protests in the Twin Cities since the Jan. 7 shooting of 37-year-old Renee Good, who was killed when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fired into her vehicle. Saturday’s shooting unfolded just over a mile away from where Good was shot.
After the shooting, an angry crowd gathered and screamed profanities at federal officers, calling them “cowards” and telling them to go home. One officer responded mockingly as he walked away, telling them: “Boo hoo.” Agents elsewhere shoved a yelling protester into a car. Protesters dragged garbage dumpsters from alleyways to block the streets, and people who gathered chanted, “ICE out now,” referring to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
Man shot dead was pronounced dead at the scene, DHS says
The Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of ICE and Border Patrol, has just said that the man shot dead by federal immigration enforcement earlier this morning was pronounced dead at the scene.
The federal agency said an agent fired “defensive shots”. It is now characterizing protesters as “rioters”, saying there are about 200 people on the scene in south Minneapolis trying to “obstruct and assault law enforcement”….
In a statement sent to the Guardian, assistant secretary of homeland security Tricia McLaughlin said that at 9.05am local time, “as DHS law enforcement officers were conducting a targeted operation in Minneapolis” against a person they said was in the country illegally, who she said was “wanted for violent assault”, “an individual approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun.”
McLaughlin said that “the officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted” and that “more details on the armed struggle are forthcoming.”
“Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, an agent fired defensive shots” she said, adding: “Medics on scene immediately delivered medical aid to the subject but was pronounced dead at the scene.”
She added that the man also had “2 magazines and no ID”.
Minneapolis officials plead for calm, tell federal enforcement to leave
The police chief of Minneapolis, Brian O’Hara, has kicked off a press conference by acknowledging that people are angry about the latest fatal shooting by federal law enforcement of a man in the city.
He called on federal personnel in the city to conduct themselves with discipline and humanity.
Then he said that members of the public gathered to protest at the scene of the shooting in south Minneapolis were taking part in an “unlawful assembly”.
“There is a lot of anger and questions around what has happened,” O’Hara said.
And he called for calm and begged the public not to damage the city.
A couple more updates:
Man shot dead was 37-year-old US citizen, Minneapolis police chief says
Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara has said the city authorities know the identity of the man killed by federal officers this morning, but the name is not being released at this time.
He described the person shot dead as a white man, a resident of the city and a US citizen. O’Hara said the victim was 37 years old. Wire services had previously said the man was 51.
O’Hara said that the federal authorities have not provided any details about today’s incident to the police department and city authorities….
The Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara said it was his understanding that multiple federal officers were involved in the incident this morning where a man was shot dead by the government personnel.
O’Hara said that the Minnesota authorities have put National Guard troops on stand by.
The scene where the shooting took place this morning in the south of the city appears to be calming down somewhat at this moment.
MINNEAPOLIS — Thousands of people converged at a downtown park on Friday afternoon in the state’s biggest show of opposition yet to the Trump administration’s immigration operations in Minnesota, braving subzero temperatures and skipping work and school.
Hundreds of businesses in the Twin Cities closed for the day of action, an effort organized by faith leaders and labor unions amid continuing tensions over U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions in the state, including the fatal shooting of Renée Good by an ICE officer earlier this month.
On Friday morning, about 100 clergy members were arrested at a peaceful sit-in at Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport protesting deportation flights. Labor leaders said more than 15,600 people had claimed tickets to the 2 p.m. march in Minneapolis — where the National Weather Service warned of minus-50 degree wind chill through Sunday morning.
Bundled in down coats, beanies and ski goggles, demonstrators chanted “What do we want? ICE out!” and held signs bearing slogans such as “No MN Nice for ICE” and “Leave Us Alone!” as they marched peacefully.
“This rally says it all. We’re fighting for truth and freedom,” said Mary Turner, a night-shift nurse in Robbinsdale, Minnesota, and a union member who joined the march.
Residents opposed to ICE’s actions in Minnesota say federal agents have gone far beyond their mission of removing undocumented criminals since starting operations there two months ago, instead detaining U.S. citizens, pulling people from their cars, appearing to stop people on the basis of race, and using chemical irritants on people demonstrating against or monitoring their work.
Federal immigration agents detained a two-year-old girl and her father in Minneapolis on Thursday and transported them to Texas, according to court records and the family’s lawyers.
The father, identified in court filings as Elvis Joel TE, and his daughter were stopped and detained by officers around 1pm when they were returning home from the store. By the evening, a federal judge had ordered the girl be released by 9.30pm. But federal officials instead put both of them on a plane heading to a Texas detention center.
Irina Vaynerman, one of the family’s lawyers, told the Guardian late Friday afternoon that immigration officials had since flown both of them back to Minnesota and released the two-year-old into the custody of her mother. The father remains detained in Minnesota, she said.
“The horror is truly unimaginable,” Vaynerman said. “The depravity of all of this is beyond words.”
Court records and the attorney’s accounts paint a harrowing picture of the toddler and father’s detention and the frantic efforts that followed to get her released from custody and reunited with her mother. The detention came two days after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained five-year-old Liam Ramos in Minnesota, in a case that has prompted international backlash and increased scrutiny of the Trump administration’s aggressive crackdown in the region.
As the father and daughter were arriving home on Thursday, agents entered their backyard and driveway area, Kira Kelley, one of the family’s lawyers, wrote in a filing. The officers did not have a warrant, the attorney said. One agent then allegedly broke the glass window of the father’s car while the girl was inside.
The mother was by the door and stepped inside the house as the agents approached, Kelley wrote. The agents refused to allow the father to bring his daughter to the mother or other family members “waiting terrified inside the home”.
The two-year-old and her father were then placed in an immigration agent’s vehicle, which Kelley wrote did not have a car seat.
Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents refused to allow 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos to stay at his Columbia Heights home with family after being detained, observers said, despite people in the home, neighbors and school officials begging them to do so.
Those who saw the federal agents detain Liam Tuesday pushed back against claims this week by ICE and Vice President JD Vance that the child was abandoned by his family after the boy and his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, were detained on their way home from school.
Neighbors and Columbia Heights school officials say they pleaded with agents to let the child enter the home to join his mother or to stay with a neighbor or school leader after agents took the father into custody.
They also say that they did not see Conejo Arias flee the scene and leave his son in the cold as ICE officials maintain.
“There was ample opportunity to be able to safely hand that child off to adults,” said Mary Granlund, chair of the Columbia Heights School Board who said she was at the scene and among those who offered to take Liam to his family or back to school.
“There was another adult who lived in the home that was there saying, ‘I will take the child. I will take the child.’ Somebody else was yelling … that I was there and said, ‘School is here. They can take the child. You don’t have to take them.’ And mom was there. She saw (through) the window, and dad was yelling, ‘Please do not open the door!’”
ICE officials say the father and son are together at an ICE residential family facility in Texas. Marc Prokosch, the lawyer representing Liam and his dad, said he had still not had direct contact with them.
ICE says the father is in the country illegally but Prokosch says that’s not the case.
The deployment of thousands of federal agents to Minnesota to round up undocumented immigrants has yielded no shortage of indelible images in recent weeks.
There was the American citizen dragged out of his home in subzero weather in his underwear. And the detention of a 5-year-old boy wearing a Spider-Man backpack and a hat with floppy ears drew outrage from school officials.
But photos of a Border Patrol agent squirting pepper spray in the face of a man who was being pinned down by fellow officers on Wednesday searingly captured why the ongoing immigration operation has been met with furious resistance on the streets of Minneapolis.
Images of the episode drew millions of views online, made the front page of The Minnesota Star Tribune and elicited blistering condemnation from local officials.
“No one looking at this image can seriously claim this is about public safety,” said Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis. “It should alarm every American because if it can happen here, it can happen anywhere.”
Gov. Tim Walz reposted the Star Tribune newspaper page on social media, along with a two-word comment: “Trump’s America.”
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, did not respond to an email asking about the confrontation and whether the use of force depicted in photos and videos taken by bystanders that day had violated use of force policies.
The identity and whereabouts of the man who was sprayed was unclear on Friday.
An F.B.I. agent who sought to investigate the federal immigration officer who fatally shot a 37-year-old woman in Minneapolis this month has resigned from the bureau, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The agent, Tracee Mergen, left her job as a supervisor in the F.B.I.’s Minneapolis field office after bureau leadership in Washington pressured her to discontinue a civil rights inquiry into the immigration officer, Jonathan Ross, according to one of the people. Such inquiries are a common investigative step in similar shootings.
After the incident, several Trump administration officials described Ms. Good as a “domestic terrorist,” accusing her of trying to ram Mr. Ross with her vehicle. But a video analysis by The New York Times showed no indication that he had been run over.
Senior Justice Department officials have repeatedly said there are no plans to follow the path normally taken in such situations and pursue an investigation into whether Mr. Ross, who fired multiple shots at Ms. Good, had used excessive force.
Federal investigators have also refused to cooperate with state and local prosecutors in Minnesota, complicating any efforts they might take to open their own investigations into Mr. Ross.
Trump has now sent his private army into Maine and Mainers are fighting back.
PORTLAND, Maine — Hundreds of protesters gathered here Friday in the largest demonstration since a federal immigration sweep began in Maine earlier this week, decrying the ongoing operation as cruel and illegal, while widespread fear continued to paralyze communities across the state, bringing some aspects of daily life to a halt.
On a frigid evening, a crowd nearing an estimated 1,000 people demonstrated at the rally in Portland’s Monument Square before marching through the streets. The energy from the crowd — bundled in hats, scarves, and gloves — was reverberating throughout the city.
“People are afraid,” Portland City Councilor Pious Ali told the Globe after leaving a mosque following a Friday prayer service in the city’s Bayside neighborhood. “There’s fear, there’s anxiety. There’s a feeling of not knowing what’s going to happen next.”
Thirty-five miles north, the streets of Lewiston were quiet, with a few stragglers going in and out of businesses. Shop owners said they had never seen business this slow — and signs on their doors warned of ICE presence in the area. Several stores were completely shuttered due to the increase in ICE activity.
“We are temporarily closed until further notice. Sorry for the inconvenience,” a sign on one Somali-owned food market on Lisbon Street downtown read.
The Department of Homeland Security said Friday US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested more than 100 in Maine this week as part of “Operation Catch of the Day,” the latest initiative that is part of President Trump’s mass deportation agenda. The operation started on Tuesday.
While other cities, such as Chicago and Minneapolis, have seen large-scale deployments of immigration agents swarming neighborhoods, the operations here seem to be quicker and more targeted: A few ICE vehicles will be spotted in a neighborhood. Immigrant advocates who are watching the agents will blow whistles and honk horns. But quickly, the agents move in to arrest one or two individuals. Within minutes, they are gone.
Mainers are grappling with the increased presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in their cities as the state becomes the latest target for President Donald Trump’s mass deportations agenda.
Details, though, about who is being targeted and in which communities are thin, state and local officials say.
“Why Maine? Why now?” Democratic Gov. Janet Mills said Thursday. “We’ve reached out, we’ve asked questions. We have no answers.”
The Department of Homeland Security announced the launch of its Maine operation, “Catch of the Day,” earlier this week, saying agents were focused on “the worst of the worst” in its arrests.
But Mills said in a news conference that the increased ICE presence in the state has been disruptive to schools and businesses, adding that it’s been difficult to know the operation’s full scope and justification because federal agencies aren’t providing those details.
I have no idea how long this post is, but I’m going to end there. We are truly in a crisis as a country. How long before Trump tries sending in military troops? Congress must act now! Democrats need to find their spines and stand up to Trump. This is really getting terrifying.
Take care everyone.
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Another shutdown for 
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Tech Bros and MAGA have ruined our democracy. 
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