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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This morning I woke up and turned on the TV to see our “president,” easily the stupidest president in American history, walking hunched over and tired in Davos to give another long, rambling, nonsensical, insulting “speech” to the assembled political and business leaders. He spoke for 70 minutes and it seemed much longer.
I watched the speech for awhile, but it was the same old garbage he talks about off the cuff to the assembled press in the oval office. He went on and on in his old man voice, attacking allies, demanding that Greenland be handed over to him, ranting about windmills–all to complete silence from the audience. How could they sit there and watch this embarrassing display of abject stupidity?
I don’t expect this post to make much sense, because I’m just soooo angry!
The big headline, according to the legacy media is that Trump announced he won’t “take Greenland by force.”
President Donald Trump ruled out military force to acquire Greenland in his remarks Wednesday to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, providing a momentary sense of relief to Europe after weeks of worry that the U.S. would enter a confrontation with NATO.
“We probably won’t get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force, where we would be, frankly, unstoppable, but I won’t do that,” Trump said. “That’s probably the biggest statement I made, because people thought I would use force, but I don’t have to use force. I don’t want to use force.”
Trump said Wednesday that he wants to see negotiation to acquire what he called “a piece of ice.”
The president, though, warned Denmark that if it doesn’t give up Greenland to the U.S., “we will remember.”
He argued in his remarks that the U.S. can protect “this giant mass of land” better than Europe can, insisting that taking over Greenland wouldn’t be a threat to NATO but would instead enhance security for the alliance. While the president’s obsession with Greenland has accelerated in recent weeks, his pledge to not use force to acquire the island marks a shift in his rhetoric.
“I don’t want to use force,” he added. “All the United States is asking for is a place called Greenland, where we already had it as a trustee but respectively returned it back to Denmark not long ago after we defeated the Germans, the Japanese, Italians and others in World War II. We gave it back to them.”
He added that it was “stupid” for the U.S. to not keep the island after the war. Still, Trump downplayed the significance of his threats against Greenland, arguing it’s a trade-off for the years of support the U.S. has given to NATO allies.
“What I’m asking for is a piece of ice, cold and poorly located,” he said. It’s a very small ask, compared to what we have given them for many, many decades.”
What does that mess of words really mean? Nothing. Trump is the world’s worst liar and he’s insane. Not to mention stupid. Nothing he says can be believed.
The choice is impeachment and removal or calamity for the United States. I don't see how anybody watching Trump's speech in Davos can draw any other conclusion. He's a senile madman.
“Denmark’s investment in U.S. Treasury bonds, like Denmark itself, is irrelevant,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters Wednesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
It comes as Trump’s threats to impose 10% tariffs on eight European countries as part of his push to take over Greenland spooked markets. The levies would come into force on Feb. 1, Trump said, and later rise to 25%.
Danish pension operator AkademikerPensionsaid Tuesday it was selling $100 million in U.S. Treasurys. The decision was driven by “poor [U.S.] government finances,” said Anders Schelde, AkademikerPension’s investing chief.
When Bessent was asked how concerned he is about European investors pulling out of Treasurys, Bessent said at a news conference at the World Economic Forum: “Denmark’s investment in U.S. Treasury bonds, like Denmark itself, is irrelevant.”
“That is less than $100 million. They’ve been selling Treasurys for years, I’m not concerned at all.”
Really? I’d like to hear what Daknikat has to say about this.
No one can be watching this Davos speech and reach any conclusion but that the President of the United States is mentally disturbed and that something is deeply wrong with him. This is both embarrassing and extremely dangerous.
Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada delivered a stark speech in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday, prompting global political and corporate leaders in the audience to rise from their seats for a rare standing ovation.
He described the end of the era underpinned by United States hegemony, calling the current phase “a rupture.” He never mentioned President Trump by name, but his reference was clear.
The speech came as President Trump doubled down on his threats to take Greenland away from Denmark, saying he would slap fresh tariffs on European powers as punishment for their support of Greenland’s sovereignty.
Global leaders have been scrambling to find a unified response.
“Every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great-power rivalry,” Mr. Carney said. “That the rules-based order is fading. That the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.”
And he warned, “The middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”
He would know.
Mr. Trump started his second presidential term making claims on Canada as the 51st state and threatening Canada’s previous leader, Justin Trudeau, whom Mr. Trump publicly derided, with unilaterally scrapping agreements that have governed the relationship between the neighboring countries for over a century….
Mr. Carney chastised other leaders too, many of whom would have been following his speech in Davos, for not standing up for their interests.
“There is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along,” he said. “To accommodate. To avoid trouble. To hope that compliance will buy safety. It won’t.”
Mr. Carney made clear he is choosing a different path.
He wrote his own speech, according to a government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the inner workings of his team, which is a departure since speeches of this magnitude are usually prepared by high-level staffers with the leader’s input.
Mr. Carney, a former investment executive who has served as the governor of Canada and England’s central banks, has attended the global gathering about 30 times, according to his office….
Mr. Carney spoke not long after Mr. Trump had posted an altered image on social media that featured a map of American flags superimposed over both Canada and the United States, as well as Greenland.
Well worth a listen from Canadian PM Mark Carney at Davos summit.
President Trump said in Davos on Wednesday that Canada should be “grateful” to the U.S. for the “freebies” it receives because of the two nations’ relationship.
Why it matters: Trump’s dig at Canada came a day after Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered his own warning at the World Economic Forum over the “rupture” of the world order.
Driving the news: “Canada lives because of the United States,” Trump said Wednesday before taking a direct jab at Carney. “Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.”
Trump said Carney “wasn’t so grateful” in his address.
Carney avoided naming Trump in his speech — a strategy a Canadian official previously told Axios was deliberate. However, the official indicated that Carney’s remarks were aimed squarely at the president’s recent actions.
Zoom out: As Trump pushes a vision of hemispheric dominance — coupled with threats of the U.S. making its northern neighbor the “51st state” — Ottawa has reportedly started preparing for how to repel a U.S. invasion.
Growing up, I never really understood Aesop’s fable about the goose that laid the golden egg. It’s a cautionary tale about greed and hubris: A farmer with a miraculous goose that lays a solid-gold egg every morning gets fed up with passive wealth generation and figures killing the bird will speed things along. But alas: He finds no store of eggs within and realizes he butchered his meal ticket for nothing. The moral’s straightforward, but it never really worked for me as a story. Like, come on: Nobody’s that stupid.
Well, almost nobody, I guess.
As long as I live, I don’t think I’ll get over this pure, dumb fact: Trump told his fans he had to blow up the liberal order because it was the only way to secure the very benefits the liberal order was already bringing us.
Trump insists America needs Greenland as a strategic positioning ground from which to restrain Russia and China in the Arctic. But thanks to the liberal order, this was something we already enjoyed. Through the magic of multilateral cooperation, we were able to treat someone else’s territory as though it were our own for the purposes of military positioning—not by bribing or intimidating them, but because they agreed their interests and our interests aligned.
Trump insists America needs to blow up America’s preexisting economic relationships to ensure America gets an advantageous position in international trade. But America already had such an advantageous position: an orderly world economic system that had lavished previously unimaginable prosperity on America and to the entire globe, with us at the proverbial (and very profitable) head of the table.
It’s not just that Trump had the hubris to think he could hero-ball the country to a better deal by canceling a century of history and starting over. It’s that his own broken personality—his miserable meanness, his dispositional inability to cooperate with and trust others—has always prevented him from understanding what was good about the deal we had to begin with. The idea that multipolar agreements could be better for America, in some cases, than outright ownership—that, say, we already have everything we need from Greenland—he rejects as ridiculous. Ownership, he told the New York Times, is “what I feel is psychologically needed for success. . . . I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty.”
He really is determined to burn everything down if he can’t get his own way on everything.
1/ Jonathan Lemire writes, "Trump's lust for Greenland is about increasing American dominance in the Western Hemisphere 7 redrawing the maps of the world. The island is roughly 836K square miles, which would make it the largest territorial addition in US history." Gift link.
Franklin D. Roosevelt famously illustrated with a simple metaphor the need for a healthy transatlantic alliance. Justifying his decision to lend Great Britain warships and other military supplies in the early days of World War II, Roosevelt likened it to loaning a neighbor a garden hose to put out the fire consuming his house. Sure, Roosevelt charitably wanted to help a neighbor in need. But it was self-interested too; if the neighbor could extinguish the blaze, it wouldn’t spread to FDR’s home. The United States benefited from the friendship—and the buffer—that allies could provide.
Today, Donald Trump will fly to Europe. Ukraine is already ablaze. And now the president is ready to set a bunch of new houses on fire.
The president will speak at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, tomorrow, and he appears prepared to shatter the nearly 80-year-old NATO alliance in order to seize Greenland. In his quest to claim a strategically located island of ice and rock, Trump has turned against his nation’s most stalwart friends. He has antagonized and mocked panicked European leaders, threatened punishing tariffs on countries that object to his plans, and pointedly not ruled out using military force. Trump’s thirst for Greenland—even if he stops short of ordering an armed invasion—threatens to unravel the partnership born from the ashes of World War II that has, in the decades since, ensured the spread of peace, prosperity, and democracy on both sides of the Atlantic.
Today marks one year since Trump’s return to office, and in that time, he has fundamentally reshaped the United States’ relationship with the rest of the world. But nothing has upended the global order more than what would happen if he follows through on his threats toward Greenland. The island, of course, belongs to Denmark, which says that it is not available for the taking. Troops from Europe have been dispatched to the territory, and Greenland’s prime minister warned his populace to prepare for an invasion. If Trump were to persist, Denmark could trigger NATO’s Article 5 mutual-defense pact, and then the unthinkable could occur: American soldiers firing on Europeans while Russian President Vladimir Putin’s dream of NATO’s self-immolation is thoroughly realized.
The annual meetings in Davos, normally a clubby gathering of business titans and political leaders, have been consumed by talk of what Trump may or may not do. European leaders have found themselves scrambling on strategy—appeasement? Defiance? Compromise? Early this morning, Trump posted screenshots of text messages that revealed the dilemma facing those leaders. (Lesson to everyone: Be careful what you text the guy unless you want the world to see.)
In one message, Mark Rutte—the secretary general of NATO, who has prized warm relations with Trump—praised the president’s foreign policies, then vowed that he is “committed to finding a way forward on Greenland.” But in another, French President Emmanuel Macron, whose relationship with Trump has been turbulent, admitted: “I do not understand what you are doing on Greenland.” In fact, Trump couldn’t be more clear, as he demonstrated once again by circulating a pair of presumably AI-generated images on social media. In one, he’s planting an American flag in Greenland. In the other, he’s lecturing European leaders in the Oval Office with a map behind him that depicts Greenland as part of the United States. (Canada and Venezuela too.)
Trolling close U.S. allies has seemingly been an unofficial policy of Trump’s second administration since its first days, beginning with Vice President Vance lecturing Europe in Munich on the virtues of free speech. But this time feels different for those nervously waiting in snowy Switzerland. The president’s address to the forum tomorrow is poised to be a defining moment, and Trump plans to make the unequivocal case that the United States should have Greenland, a senior White House official told me.
Pretty good predictions, except for Trump’s claim he won’t use force.
A few non-Davos stories:
Did you watch Lawrence O’Donnell last night? He still insists that Trump’s Greenland obsession is really a way to distract the press from the Epstein files. I think he could be right. If you didn’t see it, I recommend watching it now.
Three hundred and sixty-five days after Donald Trump swore his oath of office and completed an extraordinary return to power, many historians, scholars and experts say his presidency has pushed American democracy to the brink – or beyond it.
The scale and velocity of what he has been able to accomplish in just a year have stunned even longtime observers of authoritarian regimes, pushing the debate among academics and Americans from whether the world’s oldest continuous democracy is backsliding to whether it can still faithfully claim that distinction.
“In 2025, the United States ceased to be a full democracy in the way that Canada, Germany or even Argentina are democracies,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, the prominent Harvard political scientists and authors of How Democracies Die, and the University of Toronto professor Lucan Way, wrote in Foreign Affairs last month. They argued that the US under Trump had “descended into competitive authoritarianism”, a system in which elections are held but the ruling party abuses power to stifle dissent and tilt the playing field in its favor.
There is no universally accepted definition of democracy. Some argue the US is a “flawed” or “illiberal” democracy, or a democracy facing substantial “autocratization” – a process that began long before Trump came to power a decade ago but which his presidency has rapidly accelerated. Still, others believe the concerns are overblown, or reflect an intense partisan dislike of the current president.
Since Trump’s first term, scholars have warned that it can happen here. But many now say this moment is different – not only because Trump’s approach is more methodical and his desire for vengeance more pronounced, but because he now faces far fewer internal constraints.
Read more at the link.
Hunter Walker at Talking Points Memo: Trump Marks First Year In Office With Unhinged Racist Rant Targeting ‘Very Low IQ’ Somalis.
President Donald Trump spent the first anniversary of his second term on Tuesday pitching himself to the American people from behind the White House briefing room podium. In nearly two hours of remarks, Trump seemingly sought to address his cratering approval by running through a list of his supposed accomplishments. His remarks also included a series of vicious, racist remarks about Somali people and other immigrants.
I think Trump likes this photo.
“They all ought to get the hell out of here, they’re bad for our country,” Trump said of the Somali population at one point during the extraordinary rant.
At multiple points during his remarks, Trump indicated he felt the need to make his case directly because his team was not up to the task. A slew of anniversarypolls show the president’s numbers are currently underwater with notably steep declines in voter approval of the president’s handling of his signature issues: immigration and the economy. Those figures have come amid slow job growth and violent raids staged by Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
“Maybe I have bad public relations people, but we’re not getting it across,” Trump said as he argued the economy is particularly strong since he returned to office.
Trump came equipped with a couple of binders including one labeled “ACCOMPLISHMENTS.” Yet as he read through the provided list, Trump repeatedly raged against the Somali population, including suggesting that they are of inferior intelligence. Trump first turned to the topic as he alluded to the ongoing ICE raids in Minnesota, which have been met with massive protests. The state is home to the country’s largest Somali population and the federal crackdown has come amid a wave of right-wing influencers making exaggerated claims about alleged daycare fraud in the community.
“Nineteen billion dollars at a minimum is missing in Minnesota, given to a large degree by Somalians. They’ve taken it,” Trump said. ”Somalians, can you imagine? And they don’t do it — a lot of very low IQ people. They don’t do it. Other people work it out and they get them money and they go out and buy Mercedes Benzes.”
The Supreme Court will consider Wednesday whether President Trump can fire Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve board, in a case that tests the longstanding independence of the central bank, with potentially major consequences for the economy.
The court’s conservative majority has repeatedly allowed Mr. Trump to oust leaders of other independent agencies as he moves to expand presidential power and seize control of the federal bureaucracy. But the justices have signaled that the Fed may be different and uniquely insulated from executive influence because of its structure and history.
Lisa Cook
The case lands as the administration has dramatically escalated its attacks on the Fed, apparently aimed at remaking its board and lowering interest rates. The Justice Department this month opened a criminal investigation into whether Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, lied to Congress about cost overruns related to the Fed’s renovation of its headquarters.
Mr. Powell, whose term as chair ends in May, forcefully pushed back on the threat of criminal charges, saying it was a result of the Fed setting borrowing costs “based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the president.”
The investigation prompted a backlash from Republicans, international policymakers, Wall Street and some Trump allies, who warned that the central bank’s independence and credibility was at risk.
It also threatened to complicate Mr. Trump’s plans to name Mr. Powell’s replacement as chair — and, legal experts said, the Supreme Court case being heard on Wednesday.
The justices agreed to hear Ms. Cook’s case on an expedited basis, and are likely to rule quickly on her status as litigation continues in the lower courts. The outcome of the case could determine how much latitude Mr. Trump and future presidents have to influence the direction of the powerful central bank, which Congress intentionally tried to insulate from political pressures.
Police agencies in the United States kill more than 1,000 people each year. After many of those deaths, the agencies involved put out statements. Those statements often use what’s known as the exonerative voice to minimize officers’ involvement. The first statement from the Minneapolis Police Department after George Floyd’s death, for example, said that the officers at the scene “noted that he appeared to be suffering from medical distress.” Quite the understatement. These communications often cast events in a light most favorable to the officers involved, sometimes to the point of deception. Too often, they’ll try to smear the deceased by citing a criminal record or suggesting a drug addiction or gang affiliation.
Renee Good
I have been covering policing for more than 20 years and have read and parsed a lot of these statements. The Department of Homeland Security’s response after the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis this month is something else entirely.
For all their flaws, typical communications from police officials usually include a modicum of solemnity. There are assurances that there will be a fair and impartial investigation, even if those investigations too often turn out to be neither. There’s at least the acknowledgment that to take a human life is a profound and serious thing.
The Trump administration’s response to Ms. Good’s death made no such concessions. There were no promises of an impartial investigation. There was no regret or remorse. There was little empathy for her family — for her parents, her partner or the children she left behind. From the moment the world learned about her death, the administration pronounced the shooting not only justified but an act of heroism worthy of praise and celebration.
It isn’t just the lying; it’s that the lies are wildly exaggerated and easily refutable. All the evidence we’ve seen so far, including a meticulous Times forensic analysis of the available footage, makes clear that at worst, Ms. Good mildly obstructed immigration enforcement, disobeyed ambiguous orders or perhaps attempted to flee an arrest. None of those are capital crimes, nor do law enforcement officers get to dole out punishment in such cases. At one point, President Trump justified her shooting by claiming she’d been “very disrespectful” to immigration officers. That isn’t a crime at all.
The lies this administration is telling about Ms. Good aren’t those you deploy as part of a cover-up. They’re those you use when you want to show you can get away with anything. They’re a projection of power.
For the past decade or so, since the protests in Ferguson, Mo., America has engaged in a high-stakes dialogue about police abuse and accountability, the militarization of law enforcement and the push and pull between public safety and civil liberties. Those discussions, while occasionally heated, have been based on a shared understanding that the primary job of domestic law enforcement is to serve the public. What Mr. Trump is doing with federal immigration forces has rendered those debates obsolete.
Those are my recommended read for today. What do you think?
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I really struggled to get out of bed this morning. I’m usually an early riser although I don’t really get going until I’ve had some caffeine and psyched myself up a bit, but today my body resisted all my efforts to be dragged out of dreamland.
Like many Americans, I’m traumatized by what’s happening to our country and the cumulative effects of a decade of dealing with the monster from Mar-a-Lago. Everything is awful, and I’m not sure we can make it until the midterm elections.
So here’s a Caturday distraction from The Smithsonian Magazine. (The illustrations are from the article except for one from The Baltimore Sun.)
A cat left pawprints on this 500-year-old manuscript.
More than 500 years ago, after dedicating hours to the meticulous transcription of a crucial manuscript, a Flemish scribe set the parchment out to dry—only to later return and discover the page smeared, filled with inky paw prints.
Perhaps the world’s first known instance of a so-called “keyboard cat,” that manuscript is the inspiration for and centerpiece of an exhibition currently on display at Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum. Running through late February, “Paws on Parchment” explores the roles of cats in the Middle Ages—and the myriad ways humans showed affection for their feline friends hundreds of years ago.
“Objects like [the manuscript] have a way of bridging across time, as it’s just so relatable for anyone who has ever had a cat,” Lynley Anne Herbert, the museum’s curator of rare books and manuscripts, tells Artnet’s Margaret Carrigan. “Many medieval people loved their cats just as much as we do.”
This affection is evidenced by the myriad illustrations of cats across cultures. After finding the Flemish manuscript, Herbert searched the museum archives and found no shortage of other feline mentions or depictions in Islamic, Asian and other European texts and images….
“Because they were so stealthy and they could see in the dark, they were seen as a little bit ethereal as creatures,” Herbert told WYPR’s Ashley Sterner in August. “This sort of translates to the idea that that’s kind of the way the devil works. If you’re sinful, he can stalk you, and eventually he’ll pounce on you.”
Paws on Parchment is the first of three animal-themed exhibitions planned at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore over the next two years. The Walters Museum
In the margins of manuscripts on display, seemingly silly illustrations of cats playing instruments detail this double-sidedness. “[They] reinforce the importance of an orderly society by showing the chaos possible if the natural order of things got turned on its head,” Herbert tells Artnet.
But at the same time, humans relied on their pets’ killer instincts much more than they do today. Rats, mice and other vermin in the Middle Ages were more likely to carry disease, and housecats were an important defense for families.
“Their ability to catch and kill mice and rats was actually critical to healthy living,” Herbert told WYPR. “Those critters would often get into food stores and contaminate them or eat them. They would also chew on valuable things like cloth and books. … Very early on, people realized that cats were excellent mousers. They were actually defined in encyclopedias of the era by their ability to catch mice.”
You can read more about medieval cats and the Walters Museum exhibit at the link.
In the news today:
Trump beclowned himself and embarrassed most Americans by accepting the Nobel Peace Prize medal that was awarded to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado. I can’t imagine being so shameless that you would accept a medal won by someone else, but Trump apparently can’t feel shame. In fact, he kind of strong-armed Machado into giving it to him. She probably imagined he might then let her return to her country as president–after all, she did win the election. But Trump isn’t likely to do that. In fact later yesterday, he seemingly forgot her name.
President Donald Trump was handed the Nobel Peace Prize he has been whining about for so many months—only to seemingly forget the name of the woman who passed hers on to him just hours earlier.
In a media huddle outside the White House, the 79-year-old president was asked why he has yet to support María Corina Machado’s bid for Venezuelan leadership.
“I had a great meeting yesterday by a person who I have a lot of respect for and she has respect, obviously, for me and our country and she gave me her Nobel Prize,” Trump said, notably avoiding her name.
“I’ll tell you what, I got to know her, I never met her before, and I was very, very impressed. She’s a really—this is a fine woman.”
On social media, severalcommentatorsnoted that it appeared as though Machado’s name had slipped the president’s mind.
Machado, leader of the opposition to Nicolás Maduro’s government, has been vying for power in the South American nation following the U.S. gunpoint abduction of Maduro at the start of the month.
However, despite claiming Maduro was operating a “cartel,” the Trump administration left his vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, running the country, along with virtually all of his government….
While the coveted Nobel Prize was claimed by Trump, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has since reiterated its ruling that prizes cannot be exchanged and the transfer is ultimately meaningless.
I doubt if this will stop Trump’s incessant whining about how the Nobel committee cheated him out of his own Nobel Peace Prize.
Meanwhile, Trump is supporting Venezuela’s vice president Delcy Rodrigues as acting president.
When President Donald Trump announced the audacious capture of Nicolás Maduro to face drug trafficking charges in the U.S., he portrayed the strongman’s vice president and longtime aide as America’s preferred partner to stabilize Venezuela amid a scourge of drugs, corruption and economic mayhem.
Left unspoken was the cloud of suspicion that long surrounded Delcy Rodríguez before she became acting president of the beleaguered nation earlier this month.
In fact, Rodríguez has been on the radar of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration for years and in 2022 was even labeled a “priority target,” a designation DEA reserves for suspects believed to have a “significant impact” on the drug trade, according to records obtained by The Associated Press and more than a half dozen current and former U.S. law enforcement officials.
The DEA has amassed a detailed intelligence file on Rodríguez dating to at least 2018, the records show, cataloging her known associates and allegations ranging from drug trafficking to gold smuggling. One confidential informant told the DEA in early 2021 that Rodríguez was using hotels in the Caribbean resort of Isla Margarita “as a front to launder money,” the records show. As recently as last year she was linked to Maduro’s alleged bag man, Alex Saab, whom U.S. authorities arrested in 2020 on money laundering charges.
The U.S. government has never publicly accused Rodríguez of any criminal wrongdoing. Notably for Maduro’s inner circle, she’s not among the more than a dozen current Venezuelan officials charged with drug trafficking alongside the ousted president.
Three current and former DEA agents who reviewed the records at the request of AP said they indicate an intense interest in Rodríguez throughout much of her tenure as vice president, which began in 2018. They were not authorized to discuss DEA investigations and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Rodríguez’s name has surfaced in nearly a dozen DEA investigations, several of which remain ongoing, involving agents in field offices from Paraguay and Ecuador to Phoenix and New York, the AP learned. The AP could not determine the specific focus of each investigation.
Obviously, Trump couldn’t careless about drug trafficking.
WEST PALM BEACH, Florida (AP) — President Donald Trump said Saturday that he would charge a 10% import tax starting in February on goods from eight European nations because of their opposition to American control of Greenland, setting up a potentially dangerous test of U.S. partnerships in Europe.
Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Finland would face the tariff, Trump said in a social media post while at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida. The rate would climb to 25% on June 1 if no deal was in place for “the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland” by the United States, he said.
The Republican president appeared to indicate that he was using the tariffs as leverage to force talks with Denmark and other European countries over the status of Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark that he regards as critical to U.S. national security.
“The United States of America is immediately open to negotiation with Denmark and/or any of these Countries that have put so much at risk, despite all that we have done for them,” Trump said on Truth Social.
The tariff threat could mark a problematic rupture between Trump and America’s longtime NATO partners, further straining an alliance that dates to 1949 and provides a collective degree of security to Europe and North America. Trump has repeatedly tried to use trade penalties to bend allies and rivals alike to his will, generating investment commitments from some nations and pushback from others, notably China.
Trump is scheduled to travel on Tuesday to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he likely will run into the European leaders he just threatened with tariffs that would start in little more than two weeks.
Making a symbolic visit to Copenhagen, a bipartisan delegation of U.S. lawmakers — including senior members of the House and Senate — tried to reassure leaders of Denmark and Greenland, and their increasingly anxious citizens, that most Americans do not support President Donald Trump’s plan to annex or buy Greenland, let alone the prospect of military action against a fellow NATO ally.
The Congressional visit comes as tensions are soaring over the Trump’s threats. Thousands gathered Saturday in Denmark for “Hands-off Greenland” protests, with gatherings also planned for later in Greenland’s capital, organizers said.
“It is important to underscore that when you ask the American people whether or not they think it is a good idea for the United States to acquire Greenland, the vast majority — some 75 percent — will say we do not think that that is a good idea,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said Friday at a news conference after the American group met counterparts in the Danish Parliament. “This senator from Alaska does not think it is a good idea.”
“Greenland needs to be viewed as our ally, not as an asset,” Murkowski added.
Asked how Trump might be stopped in his quest to obtain Greenland, Murkowski suggested Congress would assert its authority. “You are hearing from the executive branch,” she said. “The Congress also has a role.”
That’s if Republicans in Congress are willing to stand up to Trump. Meanwhile:
COPENHAGEN – Thousands of people marched from Copenhagen City Hall to the U.S. embassy Saturday afternoon in protest of President Trump’s comments that he wants to acquire Greenland.
The crowd, waving Greenlandic flags, chanted “Greenland is not for sale.” Many demonstrators wore red hats in Trump’s own “Make America great again” fashion that read, “Make America go away.” [….]
A 15th-century prayer book featuring an illustrated gray cat The Walters Museum
Saturday’s protest came on the heels of a bipartisan Congressional delegation that travelled to Copenhagen. House and Senate lawmakers met with Danish and Greenlandic officials, as well as members of the Danish business community. The visit was meant to be a reassurance tour — affirming the longstanding relationship between the U.S. and the Kingdom of Denmark in the face of Trump’s rhetoric.
Peder Dam, who lives in Denmark,attended the demonstration with a sign that featured an image of Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker from Star Wars that read: “Americans: I know there is good in you. Come back to sanity.”
“We know what is going on in the White House is not representative for all Americans,” he told NPR.
But he said he wonders why there isn’t more widespread outrage from the American public.
“I can’t understand. If my government said they would attack Sweden, then Denmark would step up and protest that,” he said. “I like protests in the U.S. But why aren’t there more normal, average Americans stepping up, trying to protest what is going on? It’s crazy.”
Another protester, Thomas, whom NPR is identifying only by his first name because of concerns about retaliation at work, said the march represents “an unseen level of resentment towards the U.S.
“I cannot express how deeply disappointed I am — that we have sent our troops to die with you in Iraq, we were with you in Afghanistan,” he said. “How dare you turn your back on us in this way?”
The Trump administration’s persecution of Minnesota is going from bad to worse.
The Justice Department is planning to issue subpoenas for Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey as part of an investigation alleging that the two Democratic leaders are impeding federal law enforcement officers’ abilities to do their jobs in the state, two people familiar with the matter confirmed Friday.
In partnership with the Baltimore Animal Rescue and Care Shelter, four foster kittens visited the exhibition shortly after it opened. The Walters Museum
The subpoenas, which are without recent precedent, escalate an already bitter political battle between the Trump administration and state officials following the fatal shooting of a woman in Minneapolis by an immigration officer last week. That shooting happened amid a surge of federal immigration officers in the state ordered by President Donald Trump.
One of the people familiar with the case confirmed that the plan was to serve the subpoenas Friday. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an open investigation. Neither Walz nor Frey had been served with a subpoena by early Friday evening, spokespeople for the officials said.
Walz and Frey have claimed they have been wrongly excluded from the investigation into the killing of Renée Good, who was fatally shot by an ICE officer through the window of her SUV as she and others were monitoring and protesting the crackdown. The governor and mayor have publicly said they fear that the Justice Department is not conducting a fair and robust probe. In turn, Trump administration officials have said that Minnesota’s Democratic leaders are corrupt and can’t be trusted to handle an investigation.
Minnesota’s attorney general this week sued the federal government over the surge, saying it amounted to an unconstitutional “federal invasion.”
The subpoenas suggest that the Justice Department is examining whether Walz’s and Frey’s public statements disparaging the surge of officers and federal actions have amounted to criminal interference in law enforcement work. The law under which they are investigating the two officials, a federal statute on conspiracy to impede a federal investigation, is similar to the charges filed against protesters who federal officials allege have attempted to block immigration officers as they do their work.
That sounds like a violation of the Walz and Frey’s first amendment rights.
In a statement Friday, Frey called the subpoenas “an obvious attempt to intimidate me for standing up for Minneapolis, our local law enforcement, and our residents against the chaos and danger this Administration has brought to our streets.”
“I will not be intimidated,” he said. “My focus will remain where it’s always been: keeping our city safe.”
“Weaponizing the justice system and threatening political opponents is a dangerous, authoritarian tactic,” Walz said in a separate statement Friday evening. “The only person not being investigated for the shooting of Renee Good is the federal agent who shot her.”
We have late word this evening that the Department of Justice has launched a “criminal investigation” of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minnesota Mayor Jacob Frey over a purported “criminal conspiracy” to impeded ICE’s work in the state. Let’s start with the obvious and important fact that the bar that has to be cleared to launch such an investigation is essentially nil. All you need is a couple toadyish and corrupt DOJ appointees and they are currently in oversupply. Getting a criminal indictment let alone a conviction is in a different universe of possibility. The main point of this is simply to generate the headlines you’re seeing this evening (“criminal investigation!”) and perhaps load state and local government with subpoenas or perhaps raids.
Medieval cat art from the Walters Museum, source The Baltimore Sun
But none of that should distract from the fact that this is the main conflict being joined or at least pointed to in a very clear and public way. Right now Trump has created a kind of rickety authoritarian presidency with lots of prerogative powers on overdrive — military adventures, pardons, corruption of the DOJ, ICE wilding expeditions in Blue states — and a lot of corruption. But there’s not a lot more. It doesn’t have the kind of power in depth to really subvert the constitutional order in a robust or durable way. To do that you have to bring the states to heel. That’s where most policing power operates. It’s where elections operate. It’s where most of the actual governmental power in depth in the U.S. actually operates.
As recently as Monday I wrote this: “If you look at the trend of Trump rule in blue cities and blue states, the clear trajectory is that not being dominated is getting closer and closer to being a criminal offense, likely through conspiracy laws and such.” That’s precisely what’s being alleged here: that resisting these kinds of federal invasions or ICE wilding expeditions into Blue cities through entirely legal means and by the elected state authorities actually amounts to a criminal offense or, as predicted, a criminal conspiracy. In other words the states’ very existence as a separate albeit subordinate sovereign is a criminal offense against the federal government.
This is really scary, because we just don’t know what the Supreme Court will do with these arguments if they get their hands on the case. Fortunately, it will probably be hard to get a grand jury to indict on these ludicrous grounds.
Federal officers in the Minneapolis area participating in its largest recent U.S. immigration enforcement operation can’t detain or tear gas peaceful protesters who aren’t obstructing authorities, including when these people are observing the agents, a judge in Minnesota ruled Friday.
U.S. District Judge Kate Menendez’s ruling addresses a case filed in December on behalf of six Minnesota activists. The six are among the thousands who have been observing the activities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol officers enforcing the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area since last month….
The activists in the case are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota, which says government officers are violating the constitutional rights of Twin Cities residents….
Safely following agents “at an appropriate distance does not, by itself, create reasonable suspicion to justify a vehicle stop,” the ruling said.
Menendez said the agents would not be allowed to arrest people without probable cause or reasonable suspicion the person has committed a crime or was obstructing or interfering with the activities of officers.
Menendez is also presiding over a lawsuit filed Monday by the state of Minnesota and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul seeking to suspend the enforcement crackdown, and some of the legal issues are similar. She declined at a hearing Wednesday to grant the state’s request for an immediate temporary restraining order in that case.
“What we need most of all right now is a pause. The temperature needs to be lowered,” state Assistant Attorney General Brian Carter told her.
Menendez said the issues raised by the state and cities in that case are “enormously important.” But she said it raises high-level constitutional and other legal issues, and for some of those issues there are few on-point precedents. So she ordered both sides to file more briefs next week.
Those are my recommended reads for today. What do you think? What else is on your mind?
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“The hypocrisy of this Trumplican administration continues to reach unfathomable levels. If you’re not paying attention, shame on you. If you’re paying attention but ignoring it, shame on you. Violent protest is what they are provoking. Contest the alternative so-called facts everywhere you can, woke is what they fear! Elon hasn’t funded a vaccine for the Woke Mind Virus, yet.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
My home and I have been going through a major streak of Danshari (断捨離)at the beginning and end of the year. It sure feels good to throw junk out and get down to the basic, simple life, but wow, is it time-consuming and brutally exhausting after living in a house for 25 years and letting things accumulate. My house is quite small, and still, stuff piles up. Time to toss out all the things that you don’t need, don’t want, and that really create a burden on your way of life and take up needless time.
This is how I feel about the Trump administration. We never needed them; the health effects of having their garbage pile up are devastating and exhausting. Time to toss them all out.
Having gone through a period of ICE Raids and watching other American cities suffer in similar ways, I have to admit that what’s going on in Minneapolis right now is beyond the pale. It’s like they used the rest of us to beef up their levels of assaulting normalcy, morality, and decency. Time to remove the real refuse and live a simpler, more productive life.
This first suggested read is from the AP. “Federal immigration agents filmed dragging a woman from her car in Minneapolis.” This is not the American Dream. It’s an American Nightmare.
A U.S. citizen on her way to a medical appointment in Minneapolis was dragged out of her car and detained by immigration officers, according to a statement released by the woman on Thursday, after a video of her arrest drew millions of views on social media.
Aliya Rahman said she was brought to a detention center where she was denied medical care and lost consciousness. The Department of Homeland Security said she was an agitator who was obstructing ICE agents conducting arrests in the area.
Rahman said that she was on her way to a routine appointment at the Traumatic Brain Injury Center when she encountered federal immigration agents at an intersection. Video appears to show federal immigration agents shouting commands over a cacophony of whistles, car horns and screams from protesters.
In the video, one masked agent smashes Rahman’s passenger side window while others cut her seatbelt and drag her out of the car through the driver’s side door. Numerous guards then carried her by her arms and legs towards an ICE vehicle.
damn — CNN put together a video of Kristi Noem claiming ICE officers are "highly trained and skilled" and "gifted" alongside to a clip of them beating someone nearly to death in Minneapolis
Philip Bump, writing at MS NOW, has the Op-Ed up. “Trump could be close to unleashing the state violence he’s always wanted. President Trump suggested on Thursday that unrest in Minneapolis might prompt him to invoke the Insurrection Act. He’s wanted to do that for years.” He’s doing this while trying to win a Nobel Peace Prize, which still blows my mind. He’s also after protestors while telling Iraq we will attack them if they attack peaceful protestors. Go figure. You may remember that Bump was noticeably crying during the reporting on the death of Renee Good, imagining her small child and the backseat filled with stuffed animals.
On Thursday morning, President Donald Trump suggested — not for the first time — that unrest in Minneapolis might prompt him to invoke the Insurrection Act, allowing him to deploy active-duty soldiers to combat protesters. The president’s musing about the Insurrection Act should not be understood as a reaction to what’s happening right now. It should instead be understood as the next link in a chain of events that Trump set in motion back in his first administration — and dramatically accelerated in his second.
Trump seems to have lingering regrets about not doing some of the things he wanted to do back in 2020, when protests following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis spawned unrest across the country and outside the White House.
When Trump was hurried to the bunker at the executive mansion one evening, it projected weakness. Members of his administration pushed back against his ambitions to unleash more forceful responses — such as deploying soldiers against protesters. This frustrated the president, contributing to his removal of Defense Secretary Mark Esper.
Trump returned to Washington last year even angrier at the establishment and his opponents, but now he’s well-versed in the levers of power and understands how flimsy the barriers to that power can be. Since early in his second term, he’s seemed eager to show that this time around, he won’t waste any time in using an iron fist against dissent. And he’s staffed his Cabinet with people who aren’t likely to object.
During the 2024 campaign, Trump and his allies insisted that immigration laws needed to be tightened and that people living in the country illegally needed to be removed. They often insisted that they would prioritize criminal immigrants, people who — Trump said — were known to law enforcement and could be rolled up quickly.
Once inaugurated, however, Trump and the Department of Homeland Security initiated sweeping dragnets, first in Los Angeles, then in Chicago and now in Minneapolis. Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, working with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (which includes Border Patrol), were given free rein to aggressively detain immigrants — and anyone who stood in their way.
Speaking to reporters in May, Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, warned Democratic leaders in blue states that they could expect to see federal agents in their cities.
“If we can’t arrest a bad guy in the jail … you’re gonna force him in the community to find him,” Homan told reporters last week. “If we can’t find him in the community, we’re gonna find him at the worksite. So we’re going to flood the zone, and sanctuary cities will get exactly what they don’t want.”
Comply or we’ll blanket your streets, Homan warned. And they did.
Notice that Homan framed the threat as being about criminals: If cities wouldn’t hand over criminals who were in custody, ICE would “flood the zone” everywhere else. DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin repeated this framing in an interview on Fox News this week centered on the current operation in Minnesota.
“If [Gov.] Tim Walz and [Minneapolis] Mayor [Jacob] Frey would let us in their jails, we wouldn’t have to be there at all,” McLaughlin said. “Currently, there are 680 criminal illegal aliens [in the city] … people who, whether you’re Republican or Democrat, you would never want these people to be on your streets or your neighbors. That’s the people who we are targeting.”
McLaughlin’s assertion is also untrue outside of the context of Minneapolis. Data released by DHS shows that more detainees in ICE custody have no criminal records than have criminal convictions or pending charges. A new report from the American Immigration Council, an immigration advocacy group, summarizes the shift since Trump returned to office: “The result of … changes in arrest practice has been a 2,450% increase in the number of people with no criminal record held in ICE detention on any given day.”
Those numbers alone give the lie to the idea that ICE is simply doing what it has always done. It isn’t. It’s doing something broader and more aggressive than what it has done in the past — at the direction of DHS leaders and with Trump’s approval.
The unjustified and indefensible killing of an innocent woman, Renee Good, by U.S. government agents; the lack of any recognition or acknowledgement by those agents or their superiors that what they did was wrong; the intensification of the government’s reign of terror in the streets of our cities and towns; the unabashed defense of brutality by the administration in power, and their wholesale lying about it . . . it’s horrifying.
But the less dramatic stories emerging from our reign of terror are also horrifying.
At around 3 p.m. Wednesday, four Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents showed up for lunch at a small, family-owned Mexican restaurant, El Tapatio, in Willmar, Minnesota. They took a booth and apparently enjoyed their meal—though staff at the restaurant appeared “frightened,” according to a witness who spoke to the Minnesota Star-Tribune.
When the restaurant closed that evening at 8:30 p.m., ICE agents followed departing workers and detained three of them.
The agents presumably had a good laugh about this. Perhaps they relished their meal even more because the staff that served them was frightened. Humiliation of their victims, a kind of relish in their fear and misery, a kind of—let’s call it what it is—sadism has become a dominant part of the culture of ICE.
It does not, thankfully, appear to be dominant in the culture of the country. At least not yet. A Quinnipiac poll shows only 40 percent of Americans approve of the way ICE is enforcing immigration laws, while 57 percent disapprove. In a CNN survey, 51 percent of Americans say they believe ICE is making cities less safe, while only 31 percent say ICE is making cities safer.
Those numbers in support of ICE are higher than they should be in a healthy and humane society. But still, in today’s polarized politics, a 17–20 percent margin is substantial. If only Democrats could win the national vote this fall by that amount!
White House border czar Tom Homan admits the administration has a problem. Not with the policy, of course. It’s just, Homan said yesterday, that ICE needs “to be better at messaging at what we’re doing.” Still, it’s good to see Homan on the defensive.
The question is whether the Democratic party is going to go on the offensive.
Yesterday Minnesota Democrat Sen. Amy Klobuchar put out a statement: “Our local law enforcement, mayors, and community leaders all agree: The best way to restore order and safety in Minnesota is for ICE to leave our streets. This Administration is escalating rather than de-escalating and it needs to stop.”
ICE of course could care less about local law enforcement, mayors, and community leaders, who can do little to stop ICE’s terror. But ICE is an agency of the federal government. It operates under authorities granted and defined by Congress. It uses funds appropriated by Congress.
So if ICE needs to stop what it is doing, it’s Democrats in Congress who need to try to do their best to stop it. Which does not mean offering a couple of pro forma amendments that will lose. It does not mean failing to excoriate Republican senators, by name, for refusing to stand up to their dear leaders. It does not mean going on to approve government funding as usual.
You know what Americans aren’t talking about very much today after Trump’s threat to detonate the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) this week and his threat this morning to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota?
They aren’t talking a lot about the fact that the Department of Justice has released less than 1% of the Epstein files despite the law, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Congress passed requiring the release of those files in full no later than December 19. Trump loyalists are trying to shift public anger at Trump over the files back to former president Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whom QAnon conspiracy theorists believed were at the heart of a child sex trafficking scheme.
Representative James Comer (R-KY) has threatened to hold former president Clinton in contempt of Congress for refusing to appear for a closed-door deposition about Epstein. But in a scathing four-page public letter to Comer, the Clintons called the subpoenas invalid and noted that Comer had subpoenaed eight people in addition to the Clintons and had then dismissed seven of them without testimony.
They also noted that Comer had done nothing to force the Department of Justice to release all the Epstein files as required by law, including all the material relating to them, as Bill Clinton has publicly called for. They said, “There is no plausible explanation for what you are doing other than partisan politics.”
The Epstein files are the backdrop for everything else, but also getting less attention than they would in any normal era are the fact that an agent for Immigration and Customs Enforcement shot and killed a 37-year-old white mother a little more than a week ago and that President Donald J. Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem all defended her killing by calling Renee Good and her wife “domestic terrorists.”
As G. Elliott Morris noted today in Strength in Numbers, more Americans disapprove of that shooting and the way ICE is behaving than approve of them by a margin of about 20 points. There is a gap of about 8 points between Americans who want ICE abolished over those who don’t. Morris writes: “Trump has turned what was nominally a bad issue for him (–6 on immigration and –10 on deportations, per my tracking) into a complete sh*t show in the court of public opinion.” Although immigration had been one of Trump’s strongest positions, now only 20–30% of Americans favor the way ICE is enforcing Trump’s immigration policies.
While Trump and administration officials insist they have had to crack down violently on undocumented immigrants because an organized arm of the Tren de Aragua gang has invaded the United States, Dell Cameron and Ryan Shapiro of Wired reported yesterday that they had obtained hundreds of records showing that U.S. intelligence described Tren de Aragua not as a terrorist threat, but as a source of fragmented, low-level crime. Although Attorney General Pam Bondi insisted that Tren de Aragua “is a highly structured terrorist organization that put down roots in our country during the prior administration,” U.S. officials in 2025 doubted whether the gang even operated in the U.S.
In the wake of Good’s murder, the administration sent more agents to Minnesota in what appears to be an attempt to gin up protests that change the subject from Good’s murder and appear to justify ICE’s violence. Today, Minnesota governor Tim Walz asked Minnesotans to bear witness: “You have an absolute right to peacefully film ICE agents as they conduct these activities…. Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans, not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution.”
Last night a federal agent shot and wounded a man in Minneapolis, setting off clashes in the area between agents with tear gas and flash-bang grenades and about 200 protesters who threw snowballs and firecrackers at the agents. What happened between the agent and the victim is unclear: Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Mitch Smith, and Hamed Aleaziz of the New York Times reported that a Minneapolis police supervisor told protesters he didn’t know what happened, saying, “It’s not like [the agents are] talking to us.”
This morning, Trump’s social media account posted: “If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State. Thank you for you [sic] attention to this matter! President DJT.”
My friends in Minneapolis are experiencing the same kind of trauma that every city that has experienced an ICE invasion, but on a much larger scale. I wake up to read what is going on in their neighborhoods and their city, and I know the feel of those intense emotions. It freaks me out all over again.
This is the latest news on their latest reign of terror. It’s from the AP. “ICE says a Cuban immigrant died in a suicide attempt. A witness says guards pinned and choked him.
A Cuban immigrant died in a Texas immigration detention facility earlier this month during an altercation with guards, and the local medical examiner has indicated that his death will likely be classified as a homicide.
The federal government has provided a differing account surrounding the Jan. 3 death of Geraldo Lunas Campos, saying the detainee was attempting suicide and staff tried to save him.
A witness told The Associated Press that Lunas Campos died after he was handcuffed, tackled by guards and placed in a chokehold until he lost consciousness. The immigrant’s family was told by the El Paso County Medical Examiner’s Office on Wednesday that a preliminary autopsy report said the death was a homicide resulting from asphyxia from chest and neck compression, according to a recording of the call reviewed by the AP.
The death and conflicting accounts have intensified scrutiny into the conditions of immigration jails at a time when the government has been rounding up immigrants in large numbers around the country and detaining them at facilities like the one in El Paso where Lunas Campos died.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is legally required to issue public notification of detainee deaths. Last week, it said Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old father of four and registered sex offender, had died at Camp East Montana, but made no mention of him being involved in an altercation with staff immediately before his death.
This is exactly why the framers of the Constitution and the signers of the Declaration were obsessed with Due Process. Everyone should have access to a trial, to lawyers, to a judge, to a jury of peers, and to laws that protect everyone from unjust prosecution and punishment. This is at the absolute core of our American Way of Life and system of Government.
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Before I get going with today’s news, I want to share this disturbing, but absolutely essential piece by Robert Reich: You could be next. This is personal.
If agents of the federal government can murder a 37-year-old woman in broad daylight who, as videotapes show, was merely trying to get out of their way, they can murder you.
Even if Trump and his vice president and his secretary of homeland security all claim, contrary to the videotapes, that Renee Nicole Good was trying to kill an agent who acted in self-defense, they could make up the same about you.
Even if Trump describes her as a “professional agitator” and his goons call her a “domestic terrorist,” they could say the same about you regardless of your political views or activism. If you have left-wing political views and are an activist, you’re in greater danger.
Renee Good
How can we believe what the FBI turns up in its investigation, when the FBI is working for Trump and is headed by one of his goons, and is investigating possible connections between Renee Good and groups that have been protesting Trump’s immigration enforcement?
What credence can we give federal officials who are blocking local and state investigators from reviewing evidence they’re collecting?
You could be murdered because Trump’s attorney general has defined “domestic terrorism” to include impeding law enforcement officers. What if you’re merely standing in the way — in the wrong place at the wrong time? Or maybe you’re engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience?
In October, Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen in Chicago, was in her car trying to warn people about ICE when she collided with a Border Patrol vehicle. Federal officials say she “rammed” the car. Her lawyers say she was sideswiped by it.
The agent then got out of his car and shot her five times. She survived. The Justice Department then charged her with assaulting a federal officer.
You could be next. All of us need to realize this. The people who are being assaulted and murdered are abiding the law….
Trump could just as well arrest and expel permanent residents who voice support for, say, transgender people or DEI or “woke” or anything else the regime finds “anti-American” and offensive.
What’s to stop the Trump regime from arresting you for, say, advocating the replacement of Republicans in Congress in 2026 and electing a Democrat to the presidency in 2028? [….]
What’s at stake isn’t just American democracy. It’s also your safety and security and that of your friends and loved ones. This is personal — to every one of us.
A dictatorship knows no bounds.
These are the facts of life in the U.S. now. We are all at risk. Trump can order his goons to any city or state and they will run wild because Trump and Vance have told them they have “absolute immunity.” You can be dragged from your car and beaten–even killed and Trump will celebrate you for it.
Admittedly, those of us who are white are less at risk, but the murder of Renee Good shows that we are not immune from the ICE reign of terror. Trump now has his private army–comparable to Hitler’s SS. They report to him, not to Congress or the American people.
The video shows a young employee in a reflective vest being hauled away by federal agents from the entrance of a Target store in a Minneapolis suburb.
“I’m a U.S. citizen!” the worker shouted as the armed agents shoved him into an S.U.V. after he had directed expletives at one. “U.S. citizen! U.S. citizen!”
In and around Minneapolis in recent days — in quiet residential neighborhoods and busy shopping districts, at gas station and big box store parking lots — similar chaotic scenes are unfolding, an escalation of tensions between residents and federal agents as the Trump administration intensifies its immigration crackdown in Minnesota after the killing of Renee Good by an immigration officer last week.
“It feels like our community is under siege by our own federal government,” said State Representative Michael Howard, a Democrat whose district includes Richfield, where the Target employee and another colleague were seized on Thursday.
Mr. Howard said both workers were U.S. citizens and were later released. The Department of Homeland Security said the Target worker seen in the video was arrested in connection with “assaulting, resisting or impeding federal officers.” It was unclear on Tuesday if the employee had been charged.
Federal officers are descending on streets in what they say is an effort to find undocumented immigrants with criminal and dangerous backgrounds. They are displaying a show of force they argue is necessary in cities and states where local governments and law enforcement agencies have refused to help them. But many residents, business owners and immigrant workers have denounced the tactics, saying the agents are indiscriminately sweeping up hard-working friends and neighbors based on racial and ethnic profiling, and are increasingly organizing to push back.
The skirmishes between residents and the heavily armed federal agents have been especially nerve-racking for residents of Minneapolis, where the memories of the 2020 murder of George Floyd — and the protests and rioting that followed — are still raw. This time, residents and elected officials say, the fear is not abuses by law enforcement but an encroaching federal government.
Video of the Target arrests:
ICE kidnapping two U.S. citizens from a Target in Richfield, Minnesota. I recognize their head dickhead, Greg Bovino, showed up for the festivities. I’m grateful that there were people there that spoke up and got their names before they could be disappeared. #FuckICE #FuckGregBovino #Minnesota
Mr. Howard said both workers were U.S. citizens and were later released. The Department of Homeland Security said the Target worker seen in the video was arrested in connection with “assaulting, resisting or impeding federal officers.” It was unclear on Tuesday if the employee had been charged.
Federal officers are descending on streets in what they say is an effort to find undocumented immigrants with criminal and dangerous backgrounds. They are displaying a show of force they argue is necessary in cities and states where local governments and law enforcement agencies have refused to help them. But many residents, business owners and immigrant workers have denounced the tactics, saying the agents are indiscriminately sweeping up hard-working friends and neighbors based on racial and ethnic profiling, and are increasingly organizing to push back.
The skirmishes between residents and the heavily armed federal agents have been especially nerve-racking for residents of Minneapolis, where the memories of the 2020 murder of George Floyd — and the protests and rioting that followed — are still raw. This time, residents and elected officials say, the fear is not abuses by law enforcement but an encroaching federal government.
Local concerns over the federal government grew on Tuesday when six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned over the Justice Department’s push to investigate the widow of Ms. Good and questions over whether the shooter would be investigated.
Use the gift link to read more. There are lots of photos too.
Six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned on Tuesday over the Justice Department’s push to investigate the widow of a woman killed by an ICE agent and the department’s reluctance to investigate the shooter, according to people with knowledge of their decision.
Joseph H. Thompson, who was second in command at the U.S. attorney’s office and oversaw a sprawling fraud investigation that has roiled Minnesota’s political landscape, was among those who quit on Tuesday, according to three people with knowledge of the decision.
Joseph H. Thompson
Mr. Thompson’s resignation came after senior Justice Department officials pressed for a criminal investigation into the actions of the widow of Renee Nicole Good, the Minneapolis woman killed by an ICE agent on Wednesday.
Mr. Thompson, 47, a career prosecutor, objected to that approach, as well as to the Justice Department’s refusal to include state officials in investigating whether the shooting itself was lawful, the people familiar with his decision said.
The Minneapolis police chief, Brian O’Hara, said in an interview that Mr. Thompson’s resignation dealt a major blow to efforts to root out rampant theft from state agencies. The fraud cases, which involve schemes to cheat safety net programs, were the chief reason the Trump administration cited for its immigration crackdown in the state. The vast majority of defendants charged in the cases are American citizens of Somali origin.
“When you lose the leader responsible for making the fraud cases, it tells you this isn’t really about prosecuting fraud,” Mr. O’Hara said.
The other senior career prosecutors who resigned include Harry Jacobs, Melinda Williams and Thomas Calhoun-Lopez. Mr. Jacobs had been Mr. Thompson’s deputy overseeing the fraud investigation, which began in 2022. Mr. Calhoun-Lopez was the chief of the violent and major crimes unit.
A bit more:
Tuesday’s resignations followed tumultuous days at the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota as prosecutors there and in Washington struggled to manage the outrage over Ms. Good’s killing, which set off angry protests in Minnesota and across the nation.
After Ms. Good was shot, Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, told her staff that she would not consider opening an investigation into whether the agent had violated federal law, according to three current and former department officials who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the situation. At least four prosecutors who had already intended to quit or retire signaled they would accelerate their departures, those officials said.
Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, said in a statement that “there is currently no basis for a criminal civil rights investigation” into the ICE agent.
Instead, the Justice Department launched an investigation to examine ties between Ms. Good and her wife, Becca, and several groups that have been monitoring and protesting the conduct of immigration agents in recent weeks. Shortly after Wednesday’s fatal shooting, Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, referred to Ms. Good as a “domestic terrorist.”
A week after37-year old Renée Good was fatally shot by an ICE officer near her Minneapolis home, her partner, parents and four siblings have hired an attorney who represented the family of George Floyd to file a claim against federal officials.
“What happened to Renée is wrong, contrary to established policing practices and procedures, and should never happen in today’s America,” Chicago-based law firm Romanucci & Blandin said in a statement to The Washington Post. The statement said Good’s family wants “to honor her life with progress toward a kinder and more civil America. They do not want her used as a political pawn, but rather as an agent of peace for all.”
One of the firm’s founding partners, Antonio M. Romanucci, a civil rights lawyer, was among those who represented relatives of George Floyd after he was killed in 2020 by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. That legal team’s lawsuit against the city and the four officers involved resulted in a record $27 million settlement for Floyd’s family in 2021, the largest of its kind involving police misconduct.
Good’s shooting, on a residential street where neighbors were monitoring and protesting immigration enforcement activity, has similarly stirred national outrage on the left and the right. Since the fatal encounter on Wednesday, federal officials have sent additional ICE officers to the city, leading to a number of violent encounters publicized on social media and accusations that the operation to detainundocumented immigrants has become more ofan armed occupation.
“It absolutely is escalating considerably over the last week here and it was already quite intense before that,” said State Rep. Mike Howard (D), who represents the suburb of Richfield. “We’ve seen many many examples of an escalating level of violence from federal immigrant officials, in particular targeting citizens, not just immigrants.”
“We’ve seen agents break windows of cars and pull observers out of vehicles, pepper spraying cars and individuals who are literally just exercising their constitutional rights to observe or protest. We had an incident outside of one of our high schools … where chemical irritants were utilized right as school was getting out,” Howard said. “It’s really honestly an hour-by-hour type of incursion, if you will, in a lot of our communities.”
More significant news stories:
Pete Hegseth is trying to crack down on reporters who receive leaks from the DOD.
The FBI raided the home of a Washington Post reporter early Wednesday in what the newspaper called a “highly unusual and aggressive” move by law enforcement, and press freedom groups condemned as a “tremendous intrusion” by the Trump administration.
Agents descended on the Virginia home of Hannah Natanson as part of an investigation into a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials. The Post is “reviewing and monitoring the situation”, a source at the newspaper said.
“It’s a clear and appalling sign that this administration will set no limits on its acts of aggression against an independent press,” Marty Baron, the Post’s former executive editor, told the Guardian.
Pam Bondi, the attorney general, said in a post on X that the raid was conducted by the justice department and FBI at the request of the “department of war”, the Trump administration’s informal name for the department of defense.
Hannah Natanson
The warrant, she said, was executed “at the home of a Washington Post journalist who was obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor. The leaker is currently behind bars.”
The statement gave no further details of the raid or investigation. Bondi added: “The Trump administration will not tolerate illegal leaks of classified information that, when reported, pose a grave risk to our nation’s national security and the brave men and women who are serving our country.”
The reporter’s home and devices were searched, and her Garmin watch, phone, and two laptop computers, one belonging to her employer, were seized, the newspaper said. It added that agents told Natanson she was not the focus of the probe, and was not accused of any wrongdoing.
A warrant obtained by the Post cited an investigation into Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a system administrator in Maryland with a top secret security clearance who has been accused of accessing and taking home classified intelligence reports.
Natanson, the Post said, covers the federal workforce and has been a part of the newspaper’s “most high-profile and sensitive coverage” during the first year of the second Trump administration.
Democrats are hoping to flip an Alaska Senate seat.
Former Rep. Mary Peltola raked in $1.5 million in the first 24 hours of her bid to unseat GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan in Alaska, a sizable haul to kick off what will likely be a costly battle for Democrats to flip a Senate seat squarely in Trump terrain.
Peltola’s day-one haul was fueled by small-dollar donors from across Alaska, including fisherman, silversmiths and train conductors, according to information her campaign shared first with POLITICO. Ninety-six percent of those contributions were $100 or less.
“In just 24 hours, Alaskans made it clear that we’re ready to put Alaska first,” Peltola said in a statement. “I’m grateful and honored for this incredible support from people who are ready to take on the special interests and DC people and focus on what matters: fish, family, and freedom.”
Former Rep. Mary Petola
Peltola raised more in one day than the roughly $1.2 million that Sullivan brought in over the third quarter of last year, according to federal campaign finance filings. Sullivan had yet to post his fourth-quarter fundraising report as of Tuesday night, but the Republican was sitting on nearly $4.8 million in cash on hand to start the last three months of the year.
Her total was likely padded by messages from prominent Democrats including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), former Vice President Kamala Harris and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who blasted out emails Monday asking their supporters to split donations between their political arms and Peltola.
Her campaign said it also recruited more than 500 volunteers in its first day.
Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan says she has learned that federal prosecutors are investigating her after she took part in a video urging military service members to resist illegal orders.
Senator Elissa Slotkin
Ms. Slotkin, a Democrat, said in an interview on Monday that she found out about the inquiry from the office of Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and a longtime ally of President Trump’s. In an email sent to the Senate’s sergeant-at-arms, Ms. Pirro’s office requested an interview with the senator or her private counsel.
A spokesman for Ms. Pirro’s office declined to confirm or deny any investigation, and it is unclear exactly what officials have identified as a possible crime related to the video.
Ms. Slotkin organized the video, which Mr. Trump and other administration officials have described as “seditious,” along with five other Democratic lawmakers who are also military veterans. Its message that military officers are obligated to ignore illegal orders is a fundamental principle of military law.
The investigation by Ms. Pirro’s office is the latest escalation in a campaign by Mr. Trump and his allies to exact retribution on those he views as enemies seeking to undermine his administration or his authority as commander in chief.
Tom Tillis isn’t running for reelection, so now he feels free to criticize Trump.
Sen. Thom Tillis is getting some things off his political chest.
The North Carolina Republican, who decided to oppose President Donald Trump’s massive policy bill last summer and not run for reelection this year, has stepped up his criticism of White House advisers and other Republicans whom he accuses of not serving Trump’s best interests.
Senator Tom Tillis
On Sunday night, Tillis leaped out as the first Republican to bash the Justice Department’s investigation of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell. He declared he won’t support any Fed nominees until the central bank’s long-standing independence is fully restored.
That came after Thursday’s significant symbolic victory in getting unanimous Senate support to display a plaque honoring the police who defended the Capitol during the 2021 insurrection, overriding the efforts of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) to keep the plaque hidden.
And last Wednesday, Tillis delivered a more-than-1,500-word stem-winder on the Senate floor denouncing Trump’s advisers for egging him on with the idea that the U.S. military could take over Greenland.
“I am sick of stupid,” Tillis said.
Early Tuesday afternoon, facing questions about the fallout from the Powell investigation, Tillis said his problems are with the Trump advisers who entertain these positions, not the president himself.
“Who on earth believes that the president could possibly have the depth of expertise to make some of these detailed decisions that he’s making? So, of course, it’s his advisers,” Tillis told a group of reporters in an interview just off the Senate floor.
It would have been nice if he’d spoken up sooner, but better late than never.
Those are my recommended read for today. What stories are you following?
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
Philip Bump, writing at 
Trumpian narratives are never backed by fact. They represent pure propaganda since these talking points are never true. Here’s a take from the Never Trumper Republican folks at 
Heather Cox Richardson’s latest offering on
My friends in Minneapolis are experiencing the same kind of trauma that every city that has experienced an ICE invasion, but on a much larger scale. I wake up to read what is going on in their neighborhoods and their city, and I know the feel of those intense emotions. It freaks me out all over again.
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