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Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation Endorses Day of Truth and Freedom January 23, 2026
January 16, 2026
For Immediate Release
Contact: Stacie Balkaran:
stacie@minneapolisunions.org / 971.291.9486
Minneapolis Labor Union Delegation and Local Regional Labor Bodies Endorse January 23: Day of Truth and Freedom—No Work, School, or Shopping
Minneapolis—The Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation, AFL-CIO along with regional bodies throughout the state, including the Saint Paul Regional Labor Federation, the West Area Labor Council, the North East Area Labor Council and the East Central Labor Council, have joined in solidarity to endorse a powerful unified statewide action on January 23: Day of Truth and Freedom. The Minnesota labor movement is united against the violent ICE occupation of our beloved cities that has directly impacted union members, our workplaces and our families.
Workers are essential for our communities to function. Since the ICE campaign of terror began, both immigrant and non-immigrant workers have feared for their safety when going to work, being at work, and coming home from work. Union members and our families are being illegally detained at alarming rates, with workplaces and schools facing increased challenges.
Chelsie Glaubitz Gabiou, President of the Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, shared why union federations are joining this call:
“Working people, our schools and our communities are under attack. Union members are being detained commuting to and from work, tearing apart families. Parents are being forced to stay home, students held out of school, fearing for their lives, all while the employer class remains silent. Our labor federations are encouraging everyone to participate on January 23rd. It’s time for every single Minnesotan who loves this state and the notion of truth and freedom to raise their voices and deepen their solidarity for our neighbors and coworkers living under this federal occupation.”
Unions join the demands for the day that call for:
· ICE must leave Minnesota now.
· The agent who killed Renee Good must be held legally accountable.
· No additional federal funding for ICE in the upcoming Congressional budget and ICE be investigated for human and constitutional violations of Americans and our neighbors.
· Minnesotan and national companies to become 4th Amendment Businesses—cease economic relations with ICE and refuse ICE entry or using their property for staging grounds.
The Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation, AFL-CIO is the umbrella organization of Minneapolis-area local unions and includes 175+ affiliated unions representing over 80,000 working people across seven Minnesotan counties. www.minneapolisunions.org
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CALL TO DROP THE CHARGES AGAINST NICK TILSEN BEFORE JANUARY 26, 2026
In 2022, an incident took place where a Native unhoused relative was being harassed and assaulted by Rapid City Police (RCPD) in Rapid City, South Dakota. Nick Tilsen, CEO and Founder of NDN Collective, pulled over to conduct a routine cop watch. One officer accused Nick of assaulting him despite no physical contact being made with the officer. During the interaction, Nick remained in his vehicle because he felt unsafe surrounded by several police cars. Nick communicated with an officer, who then got approval from someone off-site and allowed Nick to leave.
Despite no immediate action being taken at the time, more than a year later, the officer involved accused Nick of attempting to run him over, leading to a complaint and warrant for Tilsen’s arrest being filed on June 30, 2023 – the same day NDN Collective announced they would host a July 4th March Towards Justice.
Nick was originally charged with aggravated assault and obstruction of a police officer. But just a few weeks before the trial date (January 12, 2026), Nick was notified that the Pennington County Grand Jury added a “simple assault” to the list of charges.
Nick is being systematically targeted as local prosecutors intentionally sought out the police officer named in this case and encouraged him to press charges. The charges brought against Nick are false and inflated to criminalize, silence, and ultimately isolate him from his community through imprisonment. Nick is being targeted by RCPD because he has unapologetically stood on his values and has called for accountability and justice for people harmed by police in Rapid City.
NDN Collective has been pushing for a federal investigation into the Rapid City Police Department for over 3 years. This fight is bigger than just Nick Tilsen. It’s about protecting movement leaders, movement organizations, our right to free speech, and to demand justice for those harmed by colonial white supremacist systems and structures.
NDN Collective believes this to be a politically motivated effort to silence a movement leader by criminalizing his actions and misusing the legal system. If found guilty of these charges, Nick could face up to 26 years in prison.
Nick’s trial is set to begin January 26, 2026, at 9 am MT at the Pennington County Courthouse in Rapid City, SD.
As we see continued targeting of movement leaders, including Nick, we need your support to continue fighting these legal battles. Trials are expensive and are tactics used to drain movement resources. We need resources to continue this fight against legal repression and to continue our work.
This fund safeguards our organization against legal attacks aiming to suppress our leaders, imprison our people, and obstruct our movement’s objectives.
DONATE TO NDN LEGAL FUND HERE:
https://ndnlegalfund.org
SIGN PETITION: DROP THE CHARGES:
Support for the charges against Nick to be dropped is clear, with over 16,500 signatures on a petition to the Pennington County State’s Attorney’s office. If you haven’t already, please add your name to our petition:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DTdap1GFD-1/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA%3D%3D
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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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 Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) Before Urban Raids, Border Patrol Tested Tactics in California Farm Country
Just before President Trump took office, Border Patrol agents led by Gregory Bovino arrested immigrants in Kern County using the same playbook later seen in places like Chicago and Minneapolis. Then a federal judge ordered them to stop.
By Orlando Mayorquín and Jesus JiménezVisuals by Mark Abramson, Jan. 19, 2026
Orlando Mayorquín reported from Kern County and Jesus Jiménez from Los Angeles. Both of them have covered the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts.
Border Patrol agents, including Gregory Bovino, at a gas station in Columbia Heights, Minn., this week. Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times
A lawsuit filed against the federal government over its operations in Bakersfield and other parts of Kern County claimed that in some instances, Border Patrol agents had not identified themselves or presented warrants. In others, people were grabbed with force, and their requests to call a lawyer were denied.
And in one case, the lawsuit said, agents stopped a U.S. citizen driving a truck, slashed the tires, blocked the truck with another vehicle, arrested the driver and then released him a few hours later.
The raids last January, in the last days of the Biden administration, initially drew little attention outside the farm country of California’s Central Valley. At the time, the eyes of the world were focused on the two vast wildfires raging in Los Angeles County.
But the Border Patrol’s actions in Kern County, which it called Operation Return to Sender, can be seen as a blueprint for the broader immigration crackdown that was to come. Similar tactics have become part of the agency’s standard playbook in other places, including Minnesota, where federal immigration agents are making hundreds of arrests amid sustained protests from local leaders and residents.
The man who led the Kern County raids, Gregory Bovino, became a star among opponents of illegal immigration. When the Trump administration began an immigration crackdown in Los Angeles in June, Mr. Bovino was tapped to lead operations there, and he was later asked to lead crackdowns in other cities.
“The Kern County operation was a test run, or a pilot project, on Bovino’s part,” Minju Cho, a senior lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in an interview. “We called it his audition for the Trump administration, and unfortunately, it seems to have worked. It really propelled him into the national spotlight, and since then, he’s only gained greater prominence as he’s been leading these operations around the country.”
The Border Patrol promoted the Kern County raids as a success, saying that it had arrested 78 undocumented immigrants during the three-day operation, including some with criminal histories.
But the agency’s tactics also showed opponents that it could be challenged and even stopped.
The A.C.L.U. filed a lawsuit on behalf of United Farm Workers and five Kern County residents that accused the agency of racial profiling and coercing at least 40 arrested immigrants “to accept voluntary departure.”
In April, Judge Jennifer L. Thurston of U.S. District Court issued a preliminary injunction barring Border Patrol agents from stopping Kern County residents without a reasonable suspicion of illegal presence, as required by the Fourth Amendment.
In the order, she cited evidence that the Border Patrol had violated its own policies by stopping people without reasonable suspicion, and she wrote that its public statements suggested that it would continue with its aggressive practices. She set out specific rules that the Border Patrol would have to follow for future stops.
The Department of Homeland Security has appealed Judge Thurston’s ruling.
In interviews with The New York Times last year, Mr. Bovino dismissed accusations that the Border Patrol was using racial profiling in its stops.
He also said that the Border Patrol had gone to Bakersfield because agency leaders believed that the area was a hub for smugglers. “It certainly opened our eyes to the need for interior enforcement, whether it’s attacking the smuggling networks going to and through Bakersfield or those illegal aliens that were already in Bakersfield,” he said.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a separate agency within the Department of Homeland Security, was not named as a defendant in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit. ICE was not restricted by the injunction and has maintained a presence in the region.
Ambar Tovar, an immigration lawyer at the United Farm Workers Foundation in Bakersfield, said federal immigration enforcement in Kern County had shifted to ICE agents who target people showing up to court dates or supervisory check-ins.
“These are people who are in active proceedings,” Ms. Tovar said. “ICE knows who they are, where they live, and knows where to find them.”
The Department of Homeland Security said that the Border Patrol had not conducted operations in Kern County since Operation Return to Sender but that Homeland Security continued to enforce the law across the country.
In an interview with The New York Times earlier this month, President Trump said he had directed ICE to ease deportations in the agricultural industry. “They have great people working for them who have been working for them for 25 years,” he said. “They are almost like a member of the family, and I don’t want those people thrown out of the country.”
Still, long after the spectacle of the Border Patrol patrolling the streets has faded in Kern County, immigrant communities there remain shaken and on high alert. The county has two large ICE detention facilities, including one that opened last year, which have loomed large amid the crackdown.
Standing next to his rusty Chevy pickup in the parking lot of a Home Depot in Bakersfield earlier this month, Lazaro Ramirez, a day laborer, recalled the day a year ago when federal agents in green had showed up. Fellow day laborers fled into the street and into the store, he said.
Since then, jobs have become nearly impossible to find. “We never thought that this could happen,” said Mr. Ramirez, a Mexican citizen who has a green card. “This past year, honestly, we have not been well.”
Last week, on the anniversary of the Border Patrol raids in Kern County, Ms. Tovar and members of other immigrant advocacy groups gathered at the U.F.W. Foundation’s office in downtown Bakersfield to reflect on the past year. Some immigrants shared stories of detention and fear, including one woman who said her oldest son had been arrested at an ICE office in October and was still in detention at a facility in California City, in the eastern part of the county.
Leticia Perez, a member of the Kern County Board of Supervisors, said that the Border Patrol’s raids had been unexpected for many. “It was just very clear that Border Patrol was being very creative, very clever and very aggressive,” she said.
Ms. Perez said she had assumed the raids in Kern County would be a singular event. “Certainly in the beginning, I think I was in some denial, hoping that maybe this was to grab headlines and that we would get past it pretty quickly,” she said.
Then in June, Los Angeles became the target of large-scale immigration raids. Mr. Bovino, a Border Patrol chief, was named the commander of the Los Angeles raids, and he later led operations in Chicago, Charlotte and New Orleans. Most recently, Mr. Bovino has been leading the agency’s surge in Minnesota.
Some of those other operations have drawn complaints similar to those in Kern County, including lawsuits claiming that Border Patrol agents targeted people based on the color of their skin or whether they spoke English.
Ms. Cho, the A.C.L.U. lawyer, said that she had noticed the parallels. In several cases that have been filed against the federal government over immigration raids, she said, judges have ruled that the operations have violated the law.
But other cities have not been able to have injunctions put in place the way Kern County did.
“They’re moving faster than courts can,” Ms. Cho said of immigration agents. “So unfortunately, it’s really difficult to hold them accountable.”
Sarah Saldaña, who served as an ICE director during the Obama administration, said she had noticed stark differences between how immigration enforcement was handled while she was with the agency compared with the second Trump administration.
ICE operations, Ms. Saldaña said, have typically required advance preparation and have targeted undocumented immigrants with criminal histories.
The Trump administration is casting a wider net by bringing in the Border Patrol, which uses different tactics. “The agents and the officers, it seems to me from what I can see, are just hitting the streets, as opposed to the targeted operations we did, certainly, under the Obama administration,” Ms. Saldaña said.
On Dec. 31, Rob Bonta, the attorney general of California, led a coalition of 17 state attorneys general in filing an amicus brief in the Kern County case, asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to keep the injunction in place. The filing describes a sense of fear among residents in the area. It cites examples of attendance drops at churches and reduced business at local stores.
“The unscrupulous tactics used by Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino and his team of agents during raids in Kern County, Los Angeles, and across the nation threaten the basic civil liberties afforded to all who call this country home,” Mr. Bonta wrote in the filing.
As the presence of federal immigration agents in cities leads to clashes with protesters, Ms. Saldaña said she is worried about the future.
“This get-them-at-all-costs attitude,” she said, “is just going to continue to cause problems.”
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2) Inside Minnesota Hospitals, ICE Agents Unnerve Staff
As federal agents swarm the Twin Cities, their presence has also grown in medical centers. Health care workers are pushing back.
By Jazmine Ulloa, Jazmine Ulloa reported from Minneapolis, Minn., Jan. 19, 2026
Hennepin Healthcare in Minneapolis on Sunday. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
The arrival of thousands of federal immigration agents has altered life in Minneapolis and St. Paul in ways large and small, including in the corridors of hospitals serving the Twin Cities.
The sheer presence of the agents, sometimes in uniform, sometimes in plainclothes, has been enough to unnerve health care workers, who were already straining under conditions some have compared with those of the coronavirus pandemic.
In interviews, nurses, doctors and other health care workers said the crisis conditions brought on by the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown are wearing down overworked and understaffed medical institutions, and deteriorating patients’ trust in what are supposed to be safe havens.
“Any medical center or hospital is supposed to be a place of healing,” said Dr. Brian Muthyala, a physician at the hospital systems Hennepin Healthcare and M Health Fairview. “It is a place where people go when they are at their most vulnerable, when they are hurt or scared or in need of care, and any presence that disrupts that environment is harmful.”
Officials with the Homeland Security Department said that they do not conduct operations in hospitals. “We go in if there is an active danger to public safety,” said Tricia McLaughlin, an agency spokeswoman.
Health care workers, however, describe a different reality, saying agents have broken hospital protocol, refused to provide documentation and, in some cases, gotten into shouting matches with doctors and nurses.
Over his 20 years as an emergency medicine physician, Dr. Robert LeFevere said, he had encountered law enforcement officers coming in with shooting victims and other patients.
“But federal agents barging into patient care areas trying to question or detain patients — I’ve never seen anything like that before,” said Dr. LeFevere, who works at Regions Hospital, a few blocks from the State Capitol in St. Paul.
Health officials for three of the state’s major health systems, which oversee medical centers and clinics where agents have been spotted, declined to comment on federal activity in their hospitals, but stressed that they do not help enforce immigration laws and that federal officers are expected to follow the law and medical facilities’ safety protocols.
Federal immigration officers, like all law enforcement agents, are allowed to enter hospitals, clinics and other medical institutions if they are accompanying a patient in their custody and cannot be restricted from accessing public areas. But hospital officials said they do not allow immigration officers into private spaces, such as patient rooms and care units, without judicial warrants and that security officers escort them and limit their searches to the terms of those warrants.
“To be clear: We do not allow ICE to circulate in our facilities,” said Aimée Jordan, a spokeswoman with Fairview Health Services and M Health Fairview, which oversees about 10 hospitals in Minnesota. “Our clinics and hospitals remain places where people can seek care without fear. Even in uncertain times — especially in uncertain times — that commitment does not change.”
Tensions have been building since December, when federal agents began fanning out across Minnesota. That unease has increased in recent days after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, Jonathan Ross, shot and killed Renee Good, 37, on Jan 7. The Trump administration has deployed more agents since.
Hospitals have no system in place to track how frequently federal immigration officers enter medical care facilities. But nurses, doctors and local elected officials confirmed that federal agents had increasingly been seen in at least four hospitals in Minneapolis, Saint Paul and surrounding suburbs.
One health official said that over the past week, agents had brought in about two dozen patients to M Health Fairview Southdale Hospital, which is the closest medical center to the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, a multiagency facility that includes a holding area for immigrant detainees. Whipple, located near the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, has become a key spot for clashes between protesters and federal agents.
Two nurses, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss patient care, described witnessing a confrontation between health care workers and federal agents last weekend that devolved into a screaming match in a hallway at Hennepin Healthcare System in Minneapolis.
A crowd of nurses and physicians, many in scrubs and medical gear, tried to stop the agents from shackling a severely injured man to his bedside, they said. Acquaintances in the patient’s neighborhood said they knew little about the man, except that he was a roofer and did not have family in the United States.
Hennepin County lawyers have filed a legal petition on behalf of the patient contesting his confinement by ICE, according to documents filed in a Federal District Court in Minnesota. Jeanette Boerner, the director of Adult Representation Services at Hennepin County, declined to comment on the specifics of the pending litigation.
D.H.S. officials and a lawyer representing the agency did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the episode or the man’s immigration case. Homeland security officials have until Tuesday to respond to the man’s legal petition.
The patient remains in the hospital, and agents have been rotating in and out of the facility as they keep watch at his side, according to three health care workers who asked not to be named because they did not have permission from their employer to speak on the issue.
About 10 miles to the east, in St. Paul, Dr. LeFevere said there had been at least two instances at Regions Hospital when federal agents entered the emergency department, once through the ambulance bay and another through a back entrance reserved for law enforcement.
In both cases, it appeared that the agents had been trailing people with whom they had interacted with on the streets, but the individuals were not in their custody, Dr. LeFevere said. The agents became argumentative when health care workers requested to see their warrants, but they eventually left the hospital, he said.
Dr. Loren Cobb, a psychiatry resident physician at the University of Minnesota and M Health Fairview, said she has been receiving texts and emails alerting health care workers that federal agents have been attempting to enter facilities on their grounds, including a children’s hospital. In at least one instance, the agents entered with someone in their custody, but in another, they were searching for a patient, she said. Staff and health teams have been reminded to follow proper hospital protocols, including not give away patient information.
“I am just worried it is going to escalate even more,” she said, adding that sometimes it is only herself and a handful of doctors on staff who are responsible for overseeing entire floors. “What happens if they inappropriately try to push forward? What comes next?”
For many doctors and nurses, federal immigration officers’ mission can, and often has, collided with their own ethical vows, they said. The Hippocratic oath, taken by doctors, and the Nightingale Pledge, by nurses, guide health care workers to provide patients with treatment and support, regardless of who they are, what they did or where they came from. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, establishes strict national standards to protect patients’ privacy and health information.
Jeffrey Lunde, who serves as a Hennepin County commissioner and chairman of the hospital board of the Hennepin Healthcare System, said there were recent instances at Hennepin Healthcare in which hospital staff had asked federal agents to produce documentation as to why they were present in a private area or in a patient’s private room. Agents were not able to provide it.
“And that is where things get murky and difficult,” he said.
Nurses, doctors and other health care professionals across the Twin Cities had prepared for precisely such situations as they watched immigration crackdowns unfold in other cities over the past six months.
Jamey Sharp, a health care worker who is also a community organizer with the nonprofit Unidos MN, said his organization had trained more than 300 health care workers since March on patient privacy and knowing their rights. The group, which advocates social justice, said it had also helped to connect health care workers through Signal chat groups in hopes of tracking the activity of federal agents inside their facilities and ensure that rules were being followed.
But the reality has gone beyond the scope of their training. Many said they have been shocked, both by the actions of agents inside their hospitals, as well as the injuries that have required treatment as a result of confrontations on the streets. Some health care workers are holding news conferences to denounce the tactics. Dozens flooded a Hennepin Healthcare board meeting this month demanding that local officials provide stronger oversight in their facilities.
Health officials say they are limited in how they can respond. Though hospital staff are obligated to protect the rights of their patients, federal officers can argue that the people they are monitoring or questioning inside hospitals are a danger to society. Who prevails in that back and forth has largely been untested in the courts.
The tension is unfolding at the same time that Homeland Security Department officials are also reviewing the citizenship and legal status of staff at some area hospitals and across the country.
Doctors and nurses say the presence and actions of immigration officials are already having an impact.
Aisha Gomez, a Democratic state lawmaker who represents parts of South Minneapolis, said she is worried about deleterious effect.
“I am deeply concerned about the chilling effect it is having on people seeking the care,” Ms. Gomez said.
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3) Top Catholic Clerics Denounce U.S. Foreign Policy
Citing recent events in Venezuela, Ukraine and Greenland, three cardinals said their statement was inspired by Pope Leo.
By Ruth Graham, Jan. 19, 2026
Cardinal Robert McElroy, archbishop of Washington, was one of the clerics who criticized U.S. foreign policy. Credit...Tierney L. Cross for The New York Times
The three highest-ranking Roman Catholic clerics who lead archdioceses in the United States said in a strongly worded statement on Monday that America’s “moral role in confronting evil around the world” is in question for the first time in decades. Their critique of the Trump administration’s principles — while not mentioning President Trump by name — escalates the American Catholic Church’s denunciations of the country’s top leaders.
In 2026, the country has entered “the most profound and searing debate about the moral foundation for America’s actions in the world since the end of the Cold War,” read the unusual statement issued by Cardinal Blase Cupich, archbishop of Chicago; Cardinal Robert McElroy, archbishop of Washington; and Cardinal Joseph Tobin, archbishop of Newark.
Citing recent events in Venezuela, Ukraine and Greenland as having raised fundamental questions about the use of military force, the cardinals call for a “genuinely moral foreign policy” in which “military action must be seen only as a last resort in extreme situations, not a normal instrument of national policy.”
The cardinals did not delve into policy details, and declined to offer specifics about the countries mentioned in the statement. They specifically frame their statement as a message larger than partisan categories. But the context is clear. The president has threatened to take over Greenland “the hard way.” In Venezuela, the Trump administration has ordered U.S. troops to attack boats it says traffic in narcotics, and U.S. forces captured and extracted President Nicolás Maduro and his wife without authorization by Congress.
Pope Leo XIV has emphasized Venezuela’s “sovereignty” and has called for dialogue over violence. He has also repeatedly called for peace in Ukraine, and said President Trump’s peace plan would bring a “huge change” in the alliance between Europe and the United States.
In interviews and in their statement, the American cardinals expressed concern about the rise of a global order based on force and domination rather than one based on peace and freedom.
“The post-World War II consensus of dialogue among nations, the sovereign rights of countries, the refusal to use war to pursue questions of national dominance and national gain — that consensus is shifting away now,” Cardinal McElroy said in an interview. He was appointed by Pope Francis to the influential role of archbishop of Washington just weeks before President Trump’s second inauguration in 2025.
The cardinals’ statement was inspired in part by conversations the three men had earlier this month in Rome, at a closed-door gathering to which Pope Leo had summoned all cardinals around the world.
In discussions there with fellow cardinals, the three Americans were struck by “a sense of alarm about the way things were going in the world, and some of the actions that were being taken here in the United States,” Cardinal Cupich said in an interview. Their colleagues’ distresses included the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development last year, a decision that shut off streams of foreign assistance to the world’s poorest countries.
Soon after meeting with the cardinals, Pope Leo delivered an address to the diplomatic corps to the Vatican in early January, a speech that essentially serves as the pope’s annual foreign policy statement. In the address, the American-born pope condemned “a diplomacy based on force” and a “zeal for war” without mentioning any world leaders by name.
Leo succeeded Pope Francis in May, and is seen by many observers as more reserved than his freewheeling predecessor, but generally dedicated to similar priorities of solidarity with the weak and the oppressed. In his eight months leading the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, Leo has frequently called for peace and dialogue in thorny international conflicts, and has rebuked political leaders for what he has described as unjust treatment of migrants, the poor and the exploited.
Leo has so far avoided direct confrontations with President Trump, but his approach to the turbulent political landscape of his home country has been closely watched here and abroad. In October, as Mr. Trump escalated his deportation campaign in Leo’s hometown, Chicago, the pope urged U.S. bishops to strongly support immigrants. He later encouraged Catholics and others to read a statement by America’s bishops rebuking the Trump administration’s deportation campaign.
The new statement by the three American cardinals is framed as an interpretation of Leo’s emerging vision for international relations as an “enduring ethical compass for establishing the pathway for American foreign policy in the coming years.”
“The sovereign rights of nations to self-determination appear all too fragile in a world of ever greater conflagrations,” the cardinals wrote. “The building of just and sustainable peace, so crucial to humanity’s well-being now and in the future, is being reduced to partisan categories that encourage polarization and destructive policies.”
The statement also refers to abortion and euthanasia as impediments to the right to life, which it describes as the foundation of other human rights. And it criticizes cuts to foreign aid and “increasing violations of conscience and religious freedom in the name of an ideological or religious purity that crushes freedom itself.”
The three cardinals lead dioceses that together include almost four million Catholics, more than 550 parishes and hundreds of Catholic schools.
President Trump told The New York Times this month that his decisions as commander in chief are constrained only by his “own morality.”
“I don’t need international law,” he said. “I’m not looking to hurt people.”
Cardinal Tobin said in an interview that he had been struck by voices in the Trump administration who seemed to be advancing a moral framework that he described as “almost a Darwinian calculus that the powerful survive and the weak don’t deserve to.”
He added, “I would say that’s less than human.”
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4) Donald Trump’s Middle Finger
By Frank Bruni, Jan. 19, 2026
Ben Wiseman
We define most presidents by their biggest moments: the agonizing judgment calls, the signature legislation, speeches that shape public sentiment, treaties that reshape the world.
But it’s the little gestures that tell the truth of President Trump, like the middle finger that he raised to a heckler during his tour of a Ford factory in Dearborn, Mich., last week.
That one flipped bird showed so many of Trump’s feathers.
For starters, it captured the consistent triumph of his pettiness and puerility over any bearing that fits the old definitions of “presidential.” Trump doesn’t even try for dignity. He has his tantrums in public, and his sycophants peddle those outbursts as authenticity or even boldness; in their telling, he has the confidence and honesty to eschew phony courtesies and be true to his emotions — no mask, no manners. Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, responded to Trump’s Michigan meltdown by more or less praising it. He released a statement that said that a “lunatic was wildly screaming expletives in a complete fit of rage, and the president gave an appropriate and unambiguous response.”
Unambiguous? For sure. Appropriate? Only if you believe in answering ugliness with more ugliness, bile with bile, and only if your conception of leadership is acting no better than anybody else but indulging your snits and staging your fits from a higher pedestal, with a louder megaphone. Only if you believe the antonym of — and antidote to — elitism is vulgarity. That’s what Trump and so many of his abettors seem to think. Or, rather, it’s how they rationalize behaving however they like.
The footage of what happened in Dearborn is crude, but apparently one of the men whom Trump passed while walking through the factory shouted “pedophile protector” at him. Trump reacted not only by gesturing obscenely but also by mouthing something at the man. You needn’t be much of a lip reader to make it out. It’s just two words. Two syllables. The first seems to begin with the letter F.
The F-bomb is Trump’s idea of muscular vocabulary. It’s part of the acronym that accompanied an image that the White House circulated after the recent capture of Nicolás Maduro. Trump, looking suspiciously young and slim, strides toward the camera; below his knees, it says, “FAFO.” If you’re unfamiliar with that threat, the first letter stands for a verb that rhymes with muck, the second is for “around,” and the final two are for “find out.” Add a missing “and” in the middle, and you have Trump’s message to the world — not a summons to freedom but a command to obey.
Trump’s middle finger is the exclamation point punctuating his inability to tolerate any dissent, receive any criticism, shrug off any insult. Coupled with that defensiveness is an insatiable need for affirmation and adulation. He complained so publicly and frequently about not being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize that its most recent recipient, María Corina Machado, presented him with hers during a visit to the White House on Thursday. There, there, Mr. President. Stop your sobbing. You can share mine!
Nobel officials saw that ridiculousness coming and felt compelled to speak up and clarify that Machado didn’t have the authority to pay the medal forward or split it in two. But that didn’t end Trump’s pouting, nor did it shame him into politely declining Machado’s munificence. He posed for a picture with her that commemorated her theatrical but meaningless transfer of the honor. How utterly mortifying. How quintessentially Trump.
I’ve read that he doesn’t actually type his splenetic social media posts, but if he did, it would clearly be with his middle finger only. He rants at and curses his opponents, even on the holidays. His 2023 Christmas musings included these tidings for the “SICK thugs” who accused him of wrongdoing: “MAY THEY ROT IN HELL.” He channeled the same generous spirit last month. “Merry Christmas to all, including the Radical Left Scum that is doing everything possible to destroy our Country,” he wrote. Grab some eggnog and a loved one. The president has holiday-season reflections for you.
Many of his predecessors at least performed a pantomime of concern for the Americans who hadn’t voted for them. Those presidents claimed to understand that they represented the whole of the country and owed everyone a measure of respect. They issued pleas for unity and spoke of common ground. Empty words, perhaps, but important nonetheless — they recognized an ideal.
Trump rejects it. “I hate my opponent,” he said in September at a memorial for Charlie Kirk. A month later, in response to the nationwide No Kings demonstrations, he posted an A.I.-generated video in which he wore a crown, piloted a fighter jet with the words “King Trump” emblazoned on it, flew over American cities and dumped rivers of feces on the protesters below. He’s a scatological spin on Marie Antoinette. Let them eat excrement.
And since the killing of Renee Good by an ICE officer in Minneapolis, he has done nothing to acknowledge so many Americans’ horror over what happened, to persuade them that he’ll get to the truth of the matter, to calm the unrest. He has chided those critics for disobedience, cast them as enemies of the state and threatened to use ever more force to subdue them.
He can’t extend his right hand in fellowship. One of the fingers on it is otherwise occupied.
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5) Federal Agents Blind Two California Protesters Shot in Face With ‘Less-Lethal’ Munitions
By Roque Planas/Guardian UK, January 19, 2026
Kaden Rummler at his home in California. He said he cannot cough or sneeze ‘because it’s dangerous’. (photo: Damian Dovarganes/AP)
Two protesters have been blinded by so-called “less-lethal” munitions deployed by federal officers during an anti-ICE protest last week in Santa Ana, California, according to reports.
The blindings come amid rising scrutiny of federal authorities’ use-of-force policies, after the fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer set off nationwide protests.
Widely seen video recorded at the Santa Ana protest showed a homeland security agent shoot Kaden Rummler, 21, in the face with a less-lethal munition at a distance of only a few feet. Doctors found glass shards and plastic fragments in his skull and a fragment of metal lodged just shy of his carotid artery.
Video also showed the federal officer drag Rummler several yards across the pavement and into a federal building after shooting him. The shooting left him blind in his left eye.
“I can’t sneeze or cough because it’s dangerous,” Rummler told KTLA. “They pulled a piece of plastic the size of a nickel out of my eye.”
“They said it was a miracle I survived,” he added.
Rummler is 5ft 1in tall and weighs 102lbs, he said.
A second person, 31-year-old Britain Rodriguez, described taking a similar close-range shot to the face with a less-lethal round at the same protest, saying it felt like his “eye exploded in my head”, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times published on Friday.
The shooting appeared to take place at roughly the same time as the one that blinded Rummler.
Homeland security use-of-force policies describe “uses of impact weapons to strike the neck or head” as a form of “deadly force”.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not immediately respond to the Guardian’s request for comment about the Santa Ana incidents.
But a DHS spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, has described the protesters as a “a mob”, accusing them of throwing rocks, bottles and fireworks at federal officers. Local police and media reports, however, said protesters threw only traffic cones. There is no evidence of anything being thrown at officers in the video of Rummler being shot.
About 150 people gathered last week for a procession and vigil honoring Rene Good at which the shootings took place. The event culminated with a demonstration in front of a federal building used by ICE.
Orange county supervisor Vicente Sarmiento described the event as “very peaceful”. Attendees included local elected officials and “many parents with strollers”, he said.
A handful of homeland security officers stood at the top of the steps to the federal building during the protest. When protesters moved closer to them, the officers confronted them, according to Sarmiento. Videos of the shooting that blinded Rummler show him approaching the officers with a bullhorn after they grabbed another protester and dragged them up the stairs to detain them.
“I feel just outraged that some of our federal delegation and others are considering continuing to fund these federal agencies that have now gone rogue and are no longer protecting us, but are putting people in critical harm – killing people and maiming people,” Sarmiento said. “I’m just really, really distressed.”
Crowd control is not a typical function for homeland security. It is not clear why the federal officer chose to engage with protesters who were not the target of immigration enforcement and who appeared to be demonstrating on public property, outside the federal building.
Arizona State University criminologist Edward Maguire, who has studied crowd control, did not observe the Santa Ana protest, but said he had noted recent DHS actions elsewhere “appear inconsistent with basic principles of crowd management and de-escalation”.
“Decades of research show that when law enforcement responds to crowds and protests in this way, it tends to escalate tension and conflict and increases the risk of harm to both officers and civilians,” Maguire wrote in an email.
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6) Trump Heckles Europe Before Heading to Davos
As European leaders try to engage with the American president over Greenland and the future of Ukraine, he is mocking them as weak.
By Michael D. Shear and Jeanna Smialek, Jan. 20, 2026
President Trump and his entourage will be in Europe this week. And they are showing their contempt.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, already hobnobbing with elites at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, had a sharp retort when reporters asked him about European leaders’ efforts to block Mr. Trump from seizing Greenland.
“I imagine they will form the dreaded European working group,” Mr. Bessent said, calling it their “most forceful weapon.”
It is no secret that the president and his aides view Europe as a weak, ineffectual collection of nations dominated by liberal leaders and tangled in bureaucracy. His administration’s official national security strategy, released last month, said Europe had lost its “civilizational self-confidence” amid a “failed focus on regulatory suffocation.”
But rarely has the mocking been so overt.
Early on Tuesday morning, as Europe’s leaders continued to wring their hands over the president’s latest threats to Greenland, Mr. Trump posted an apparently A.I.-generated meme that showed him hoisting an American flag while standing on the island.
“Greenland. U.S. Territory. Est. 2026,” the meme read.
Mr. Trump had not even arrived in Switzerland yet. But as he prepared to speak there on Wednesday, he continued to heap dismissive scorn on the leaders he was about to greet.
When reporters told Mr. Trump that President Emmanuel Macron of France was not going to join the American-led “Board of Peace” overseeing Gaza, Mr. Trump waved aside Mr. Macron’s opinions as irrelevant, saying he would be “out of office in a few months.”
“I’ll put a 200 percent tariff on his wines and Champagnes, and he’ll join, but he doesn’t have to join,” the president said, flexing the power of the American market and underscoring France’s vulnerability to his whims.
He also posted flattering messages from Mr. Macron and Mark Rutte, the Secretary General of NATO, on Truth Social — showing just how much European leaders are heaping praise on Mr. Trump in what appears to be an attempt to keep him engaged.
“I will use my media engagements in Davos to highlight your work,” Mr. Rutte wrote in the message that Mr. Trump shared.
“Let us try to build great things,” Mr. Macron said, though he also noted: “I do not understand what you are doing on Greenland.”
Mr. Trump also targeted Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, giving him his signature all-caps treatment as he complained that the United Kingdom had decided to give up sovereignty of Diego Garcia and the other Chagos Islands, while retaining control of a U.K.- and U.S.-operated military base there.
In 2024, the United Kingdom relinquished control of the islands, a remote archipelago it had held since the colonial era, to Mauritius. At the time, Secretary of State Marco Rubio praised the deal, which came after years of negotiations, and after a court found that Britain had acted unlawfully by detaching the archipelago from Mauritius in 1965.
“Our ‘brilliant’ NATO Ally, the United Kingdom, is currently planning to give away the Island of Diego Garcia,” the president wrote on his social media site, accusing Britain of doing so “FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER.”
He added that international powers “only recognize STRENGTH” and that giving away the island was an “act of GREAT STUPIDITY.”
Mr. Trump’s heckling has troubled European leaders, many of whom are hoping to communicate with him on the sidelines of the Davos meetings. Leaders from across the 27-nation European Union will also gather in Brussels on Thursday evening to discuss how to respond to his latest threats on Greenland.
As the United States looks like a more and more volatile ally — and a hugely unpredictable one — European leaders are saying the continent must move away from its tight ties to America.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Union’s executive arm, said during a speech at Davos on Tuesday morning that the old way of doing things was over.
“Nostalgia will not bring back the old order,” she said, arguing against “playing for time — and hoping for things to revert soon.”
She added, “If this change is permanent, then Europe must change permanently too.”
But so far, Europe has mainly been trying to accommodate Mr. Trump and keep him at the table — worried that he’ll pull back needed American support from NATO or Ukraine — even as he mocks them as weak.
Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California, called global leaders “pathetic” on Tuesday for failing to stand up to Mr. Trump, saying that Europeans needed to have a “backbone.”
“I should have brought a bunch of kneepads for all the world leaders,” he told reporters in Davos. “I mean, handing out crowns — I mean, this is pathetic — the Nobel Prizes that are being given away. It’s just pathetic.”
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7) To Their Shock, Cubans in Florida Are Being Deported in Record Numbers
Cubans had long benefited from legal privileges unavailable to immigrants from other countries. President Trump has changed that.
By Patricia Mazzei, Reporting from Miami, Published Jan. 19, 2026, Updated Jan. 20, 2026
Cubans had long benefited from legal privileges unavailable to immigrants from other countries. President Trump has changed that.
Heidy Sánchez took her 17-month-old daughter to a routine check-in last April with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Tampa, Fla. During the appointment, federal authorities told her that she was being detained and that her husband should pick up their daughter, who was still breastfeeding.
Two days later, Ms. Sánchez, 44, who worked as a home health aide, was deported.
Ms. Sánchez’s story quickly spread across social media, in part because she is Cuban, a group that had long been treated differently than other immigrants, even when they entered the country illegally.
That has changed under President Trump.
He has repatriated more than 1,600 Cubans in 2025, according to the Cuban government. That is about double the number of Cubans who were repatriated in 2024. And in the years that Mr. Trump has been president, he has sent more Cubans back than his three predecessors.
Those numbers are greater for Cubans who were deported by land into Mexico. Some of them had been in the United States for decades and built families and businesses, but were removed because of an old criminal conviction — say, from Miami’s infamous cocaine cowboys days in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Nowhere has the shock of treating Cubans like other migrants been felt more than in Florida, which was shaped in modern times by exiles of the 1959 Cuban Revolution.
Families, businesses and communities that once felt removed from or immune to immigration enforcement now must face it head-on. Some Floridians worry that these deportations could stain the state’s proud Cuban identity, turning older immigrants against newer ones.
Under Mr. Trump, many other countries saw similar increases in repatriation. The difference is that Cubans had not previously been targeted as aggressively for removal. Regular deportation flights to Cuba began in January 2017, under President Barack Obama, paused during the coronavirus pandemic and restarted in 2023.
Many Cubans have also been detained for weeks or months in a facility in the Florida Everglades known as “Alligator Alcatraz.” At another nearby detention facility, Cuban detainees protested last June by writing “SOS Cuba” on their shirts and spelling out “SOS” with their bodies in the recreation yard.
Legal immigration has also been all but cut out. Mr. Trump enacted a travel ban on 19 countries, including Cuba, and ended a family reunification program. U.S. officials are rejecting visa applications, which can take years to complete. Last month, the Trump administration paused all Cuban immigration cases, including pending naturalization, residency and asylum applications.
“It’s the most sweeping rollback of Cuban migration channels since the Cold War,” said María José Espinosa, the executive director of the Center for Engagement and Advocacy in the Americas, a nonprofit strategy organization based in Washington.
Polls suggest that most Cuban American registered voters, who tend to be Republican, continue to support Mr. Trump, said Michael J. Bustamante, an associate history professor and director of Cuban studies at the University of Miami who studies Cuban American political culture. But he said that he had noticed “a growing amount of unease” throughout the community.
As a senator, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the Trump administration’s most prominent Cuban American, often criticized Cuban immigrants who received government benefits like food stamps and Medicaid, and frequently returned to the island. Over the summer, Mr. Rubio said in a video commemorating huge anti-Communist protests in 2021 that many Cubans had found it “easier” to “abandon” the island than stay and fight the regime.
Immigration enforcement in South Florida has not involved a mass federal operation, as in Los Angeles or Chicago, and previous administrations had made changes that started to erode Cubans’ immigration privileges. Still, Mr. Trump’s anti-immigration campaign has shaken some Cubans unused to feeling at risk in the United States.
“I am scared of everything,” said Javier González, a 36-year-old salesman in the heavily Cuban city of Hialeah, northwest of Miami.
Mr. González and his family crossed the United States-Mexico border in February 2022, fleeing what he described as a threat to his life in Cuba, where he was a political dissident.
Mr. González and his wife, like hundreds of thousands of recent Cubans migrants, were released under what is known as conditional parole. That does not allow them to apply for residency under the Cuban Adjustment Act, a law that Congress passed in 1966, and leaves them vulnerable to deportation.
But Mr. González and his wife legally obtained Social Security numbers, work permits and driver’s licenses. He applied for political asylum and has a pending court date in 2028. He found work as an HVAC technician. Mr. Trump’s campaign promise to deport criminals seemed sound to him.
Then early last year, ICE officers, during regular check-ins in South Florida, started detaining Cubans with conditional parole. Now, to avoid immigration sweeps, Mr. González said he avoided unnecessary car rides and local Hispanic supermarkets. He cannot fathom the repression he might face in Cuba were he to return as a former dissident.
“Sometimes I tell myself, ‘Why do you have to feel as if you were a criminal when you are an upstanding person?’” Mr. González said. But, he added, “They can grab you and do whatever they want.”
Some older Cuban American immigrants are angry over the turnabout in circumstances. Alicia Peláez, 78, arrived in the United States as an unaccompanied minor in 1960, under Operation Pedro Pan, a secret program run by the Catholic Church with help from the State Department that resettled some 14,000 young Cubans.
“We were welcomed into the country,” said Ms. Peláez, who is a registered Republican, but has not voted that way in recent elections. “Now, it’s the complete opposite.”
Ms. Sánchez, who was separated from her baby and husband, remains in Havana, with a pending visa interview that will determine whether she can apply for a waiver to return to Florida.
She came to the United States through the border, presented herself to request asylum, and waited in Mexico. But she missed a hearing because of safety reasons, which resulted in a deportation order and nine months of detention. In the end, she was released in the United States because Cuba at the time did not accept her repatriation.
Once in Florida, Ms. Sánchez studied and became a nursing assistant. She met and married her husband, an American citizen, who petitioned for her residency. She underwent fertility treatments and had their daughter. Three months before her deportation, they had bought a house.
After being returned to Cuba, Ms. Sánchez said she was so upset that she had to see a psychiatrist. Her daughter, in Tampa, was no longer her cheery self.
“She didn’t laugh anymore, which really worried us,” Ms. Sánchez said.
Her husband and daughter visited Ms. Sánchez over Christmas, which lifted their spirits, she said. But she did not know how she would handle more months of separation.
Her daughter, she said, “is our joy, our happiness, our life.”
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8) Volunteers in Minnesota Deliver Groceries So Immigrants Can Hide at Home
Thousands of Minneapolis residents have joined a church-run effort to deliver donated groceries to immigrant families who fear being caught in public by federal agents.
By Orlando Mayorquín, Reporting from Minneapolis, Jan. 20, 2026
Sergio Amezcua, a pastor at Dios Habla Hoy in south Minneapolis, organized the effort by his church to help fearful immigrants remain at home. Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Sergio Amezcua arrived at the house carrying two boxes filled with groceries, but the man inside was afraid to come to the door. A blue sedan parked outside seemed suspicious.
“Don’t come out,” Mr. Amezcua, speaking in Spanish, told the man by phone. “Let me check the car first.”
The car was empty, and Mr. Amezcua saw no signs of federal agents in the area. So the man appeared at the door, expressing gratitude for the food, and Mr. Amezcua, a pastor, prayed over him.
As thousands of federal agents have flooded streets in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area to round up and deport undocumented immigrants, Mr. Amezcua, 46, has mobilized his church and organized free grocery deliveries to help people stay safely inside their homes.
An effort that started with a couple of hundred deliveries a week quickly swelled into a vast operation involving thousands of volunteers, who have signed up at the church to pack boxes with donated grocery items and make deliveries.
Mr. Amezcua said that, so far, the church had received almost 25,000 requests for grocery deliveries through an online request form. Since the program started, he said, there have been 14,000 deliveries.
Mr. Amezcua’s church, Dios Habla Hoy in south Minneapolis, offers services in English and Spanish to roughly 500 members. It organized a similar effort during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, but that was smaller in scale.
“To us, as Latinos in Minnesota, this is worse than Covid,” he said of the enforcement surge. “This is a bigger pandemic.”
“Our community is traumatized,” he added. “People that are born here are traumatized.”
Falling snow and freezing temperatures on Friday afternoon seemed to do little to slow the busy scene in the church’s parking lot.
A steady stream of volunteer drivers rolled into the lot, where their cars were loaded with grocery boxes that had been stacked on shipping pallets. Other people arrived to drop off donations.
Inside the church lobby, dozens of volunteers filled cardboard boxes with chicken, milk, fruit, paper towels, potatoes, flowers and, in some cases, hygiene products. A human chain snaked out the church doors to move the boxes to the staging area in the parking lot.
More volunteers crammed into the church sanctuary, waiting in lines to sign up to make deliveries. Some had their children in tow.
Mr. Amezcua said that volunteers were vetted to make sure they had driver’s licenses and to try to prevent infiltration by federal agents. Once they are registered, volunteers are given an orientation on how to make deliveries and what to do if they encounter the authorities.
Germaine Grueneberg, a Minneapolis resident, was standing in line at the volunteer sign-up on Friday afternoon.
“I think the desperation is palpable right now, and we need to do something,” Ms. Grueneberg said. “I’m lucky enough to have the privilege of a comfortable home, being able to buy my own food and go out and feel somewhat safe, for the most part, and it’s about time that we support our neighbors.”
Molly Kenny, a recent retiree, started volunteering last month to make deliveries, and she eventually took on a bigger role helping Mr. Amezcua run the program.
“We’re literally building this as we go, and every day is a little bit different, so it really requires all of us to be super fluid and patient,” Ms. Kenny said.
Much of the food is packed off-site and supplied to the church by food bank organizations. Some of it is packed at the church.
The need is greater than the church can meet, Mr. Amezcua said, so he is focusing on expanding the effort and hopes to open up more food delivery hubs in other parts of the city. With no end to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation in sight, he said, the organizers are preparing for a long haul.
The pastor’s cellphone has been buzzing relentlessly since the federal surge began. He gets texts and calls from his staff about people showing up at the church to donate money or help out — and, just as often, he said, from church members alerting him about close calls with ICE or seeking information about sightings.
When the pastor was out making deliveries on Friday, a church member called him for help getting his car registration renewed because he was afraid to go to the Department of Driver and Vehicle Services office to do it in person.
Mr. Amezcua, who immigrated to the United States from the state of Sinaloa in Mexico, described himself as a conservative and said that when he first heard that ICE was coming to Minneapolis, he was not concerned. Agents would target people with criminal records, he thought, and then they would be gone after a couple of weeks.
But the firsthand accounts he started hearing from community members about ICE’s aggressive tactics and its apparent targeting of nonwhite people changed his view, he said. Businesses, especially those serving or employing immigrants, have been decimated, he said.
“This is literally racism in the name of patriotism — and a conservative guy is telling you that,” he said. “I feel betrayed by Donald Trump.”
Trump administration officials have denied that agents target people based on their race.
Tensions have run high around the city, he said. Community observers patrol the streets and stand near businesses, keeping watch for any unmarked vehicle that might be carrying federal agents.
The pastor, who drives a lifted pickup truck with tinted windows, said he himself had been mistaken for a federal agent while on the road.
“This is where they showed me the finger,” he said, as he drove by a shopping center filled with Latino businesses on Friday. “They thought I was an ICE agent.”
So when he drove back to the church grounds and saw two women peering into his truck from a stopped car, he got out to reassure them that he was the church’s pastor.
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9) What to Know About Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ for Gaza
Numerous countries say they have been invited to join President Trump’s newly minted organization, which critics say could undermine the United Nations.
By Aaron Boxerman and Isabel Kershner, Reporting from Jerusalem, Published Jan. 19, 2026, Updated Jan. 20, 2026
Gaza City in December. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
When President Trump said he planned to establish and lead a “Board of Peace” to oversee the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, many did not know what to make of it.
On Friday, letters went out asking countries to join the newly minted body, among them U.S. allies like Canada, France, Britain and Saudi Arabia. But Russia and Belarus, hardly allies, were also on the list.
And a review of the body’s charter — which governments received alongside their invitations — suggested that Mr. Trump hoped the Board of Peace could get involved in all kinds of global conflicts, not just the one in the Gaza Strip.
Critics reacted furiously, saying the Trump administration appeared to be setting up the board as a potential American-dominated rival to the United Nations, which Mr. Trump has long accused of liberal bias and waste.
As chairman, Mr. Trump would have considerable influence over the Board of Peace. With countries being asked to pay more than $1 billion for permanent membership, its budget could be substantial, though it is unclear how much control Mr. Trump would have over how the money is spent.
The presence of Turkey and Qatar on one of the board’s subcommittees also prompted an immediate outcry from Israel, which has been at odds with the Turkish government, particularly over the war in Gaza.
Here’s what we know so far about the Board of Peace.
What is its mission?
Initially, the board appeared to be part of Mr. Trump’s vision for postwar Gaza.
His plan called the board a “new international transitional body” that would help supervise the rebuilding of the Palestinian enclave. The board’s members would include world leaders, with Mr. Trump sitting at the head of the table.
The United Nations Security Council later formally backed the board in a U.S.-drafted resolution in November, giving it the force of international legitimacy.
The resolution gave the board a mandate to work with governments to recruit international peacekeepers for Gaza. It was to carry out Mr. Trump’s plan in Gaza until the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority conducted reforms, the resolution said.
But after the United States circulated the board’s charter on Friday, it became clear that Mr. Trump envisioned a much bigger role for the body.
The proposed charter said the Board of Peace would “secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict,” not just Gaza, according to a copy shared with The New York Times. It also called for “a more nimble and effective international peace-building body.”
Who’s been invited? Who will join?
The list of invitees includes Britain, Jordan, Russia and others. But so far, only a handful — like the pro-Trump Argentine president, Javier Milei, and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary — have said they will join.
Despite overseeing Gaza, neither the Board of Peace nor a Gaza Executive Board underneath it has any Palestinian members as yet.
The board is, however, to oversee the work of a group of Palestinian technocrats charged with administering public services in Gaza. Analysts say they will face a formidable challenge, given that Gaza is still split between areas under Israeli and Hamas control.
Some countries appear skeptical. To acquire a permanent seat on the Board of Peace, each would have to pay more than a billion dollars in cash within the first year to fund the body’s operations. (Countries can join for three years free of charge.)
The charter would invest considerable personal power in Mr. Trump as chairman. It says that he will name members of a second “executive board” to carry out the board’s decisions, and that Mr. Trump would wield considerable veto power over its actions. He would also be able to name his own successor.
Mr. Trump would also be permitted to enact “resolutions or other directives” to carry out the board’s mission, and to “create, modify or dissolve subsidiary entities.”
France does not currently intend to join, as the board’s charter raises serious questions about respecting the role of the United Nations, a senior French official said. In response, Mr. Trump threatened to impose 200 percent tariffs on French wine and Champagne if President Emmanuel Macron declined his invitation.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia has been invited to join the board as well, Mr. Trump said.
It remains unclear how many countries will pay the fee to become permanent members, as opposed to accepting the optional three-year term free.
How will the board work in Gaza?
It is not exactly clear how much oversight the Board of Peace will exert over Gaza and for how long. But two subcommittees reporting to Mr. Trump’s board have already been set up to carry out his Gaza peace plan.
Last week, the White House named a Gaza Executive Board that includes Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s envoy. The group also has Qatari and Egyptian officials as well as an Israeli businessman.
In a rare public break with Mr. Trump, Israel criticized the makeup of the committee, particularly the presence of Qatar and Turkey. Both countries helped mediate between Israel and Hamas to secure the Gaza cease-fire, but Israeli officials have accused them of being too close to Hamas.
Ségolène Le Stradic and Francesca Regalado contributed reporting.
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10) ‘This Is Trump’s Goon Squad, for Christ’s Sake’
By Thomas B. Edsall, Jan. 20, 2026
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.
Federal agents in camouflage arresting a protester in jeans, who is lying on the ground. Tyrone Siu/Reuters
In theory, Immigration and Customs Enforcement describes itself as “the Department of Homeland Security’s premier law enforcement agency, mitigating transnational threats and safeguarding our nation, communities, lawful immigration, trade, travel and financial systems.”
In practice, the Trump administration has turned legions of ICE agents into a violent and unaccountable domestic police force, empowered by claims of immunity to exercise force against American citizens and immigrants alike.
A 233-page court order issued Nov. 20 by Sara L. Ellis, a federal judge in the Northern District of Illinois, reveals the scope of duplicity, lying and open abuse of power by ICE and Homeland Security officials. She addressed civilian complaints that ICE violated constitutional rights during its pursuit of undocumented immigrants in Chicago, writing,
While defendants argue that they used less lethal force as a de-escalation technique to reduce the risk of harm to both agents and the public, plaintiffs have marshaled ample evidence that agents intended to cause protesters harm and that no legitimate governmental interest justified their actions.
In its efforts to triple the number of ICE agents in the field, the administration has adopted recruitment strategies that appear to be designed to appeal to white nationalists and supremacists, including the use of what amounts to an unofficial anthem of theirs, “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” in a recruitment ad.
According to numerous reports, the Department of Homeland Security has cut back on new employees’ training about abiding by constraints during potentially hazardous confrontations. In addition, the Trump administration, according to court documents, fails to enforce those rules and regulations in places such as Minneapolis.
Instead, the department has shown employees a video of Stephen Miller declaring:
To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. Anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony.
You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one — no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist — can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties. The Department of Justice has made clear that if officials cross that line into obstruction, into criminal conspiracy against the United States or against ICE officers, then they will face justice.
On Jan. 8, Vice President JD Vance took the message a step further, opening the door even wider for ICE agents engaged in violent confrontations, declaring in the wake of the shooting death of Renee Good the day before:
The precedent here is very simple. You have a federal law enforcement official engaging in federal law enforcement action. That’s a federal issue. That guy is protected by absolute immunity.
For his part, President Trump’s initial reaction to the escalation of violence in Minneapolis in the aftermath of the Good’s has been to say that he may invoke the Insurrection Act and send in military forces to enforce the law.
In an email, Deborah Fleischaker, a former assistant director for regulatory affairs and policy and later acting chief of staff at ICE during the Biden administration, disputed the scope of Miller’s and Vance’s claims:
ICE agents have qualified immunity, not absolute immunity. Qualified immunity already provides ICE agents with significant protection against legal action, and the concept of absolute immunity seems to me to be unconstitutional and un-American.
The claim that ICE agents have absolute immunity sends a message, however, that the administration will defend law enforcement actions, regardless of what they might be. Law enforcement agents see that message, which could embolden agents to become more aggressive as a result.
In an article on Jan. 14, “The Trump Administration Can’t Stop Winking at White Nationalists,” Eric Levitz, a senior correspondent at Vox, captured the administration’s explicit appeal to members of the radical right.
“The administration,” he wrote,
opted to associate its immigration agenda with a Nazi slogan: Adolf Hitler’s regime famously advertised its rule with the tagline “One people, one realm, one leader.” Three days after Renee Good’s killing, Trump’s Department of Labor tweeted, “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American.”
Under Trump, Levitz went on to say,
the official accounts of federal agencies have repeatedly referenced white nationalist memes and works.
On Jan. 9, the Department of Homeland Security posted, “We’ll have our home again,” a lyric from an anthem adopted by the neofascist group the Proud Boys and other white nationalist organizations. This was accompanied by a link where one could sign up to join ICE.
Last August, D.H.S. shared an ICE recruitment poster beneath the phrase “Which way, American man?” — an apparent reference to the white supremacist tract, “Which Way, Western Man?” which argues that “race consciousness, and discrimination on the basis of race, are absolutely essential to any race’s survival. … That is why the Jews are so fiercely for it for themselves … and fiercely against it for us, because we are their intended victim.”
In October, the U.S. Border Patrol posted a video on its Facebook page of agents loading guns and driving through the desert, as a 13-second clip of Michael Jackson’s song “They Don’t Care About Us" plays — specifically, the lines “Jew me, sue me, everybody do me, kick me, k*ke me.”
Just as the administration is turning ICE into a welcoming home for right-wing extremists, it has eroded the barriers to violence by weakening enforcement of rules and reducing training.
In a recent interview with Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker, Fleischaker described these trends. “As somebody who has watched ICE for many, many years,” she told him, “what they’re doing now is unprecedented.” She continued:
And, to the extent that I thought cooperation was important — very important, previously — ICE now doesn’t seem to be following the typical rules of engagement.
And I personally would be less inclined to cooperate in some of these ways that I think are really fundamentally important simply because of the ICE overreach.
Fleischaker noted:
There were always people within ICE who thought that they were being unfairly constrained. And I think that the Trump administration has empowered that line of thinking, and those people, and taken off the shackles.
And so ICE is feeling unconstrained in the way that it conducts enforcement. There are certainly people there now — not new recruits, people who’ve been there for years — who are thrilled with the direction that ICE has been moving in.
How has training changed?
Obviously, just the very idea that they’ve chosen to make the basic training for ICE recruits 47 days because Trump is the 47th president tells you how seriously they take it.
They are just looking to make training easier and faster as the number of agents continues to grow. And I think that that’s a very scary outcome.
What did Fleischaker say scared her?
We’re seeing unconstrained immigration enforcement, and I think that that has a lot of bad outcomes. And I think that it is, to be honest, not in support of public safety. Law-enforcement officers are supposed to be public-safety officers. This, to me, feels like it is not only not supporting public safety but it is reducing public safety in the sort of unconstrained, aggressive, nontargeted mechanism that they’re using to conduct immigration enforcement.
A Washington Post article on Dec. 31, “ICE Plans $100 Million ‘Wartime Recruitment’ Push Targeting Gun Shows, Military Fans for Hires,” showed how the Department of Homeland Security is seeking out those who want to subjugate and subordinate.
Drew Harwell and Joyce Sohyun Lee, reporters for The Post, wrote that the administration is using “ads targeting people who have attended UFC fights, listened to patriotic podcasts or shown an interest in guns and tactical gear.”
The department uses social media to appeal to prospective ICE agents, they wrote, “with calls for recruits willing to perform their ‘sacred duty’ and ‘defend the homeland’ by repelling ‘foreign invaders.’”
The ICE hiring website, Harwell and Lee wrote, “portrays immigration as an existential threat. ‘America has been invaded by criminals and predators,’ reads the website, which includes an image of Uncle Sam. ‘We need you to get them out. You do not need an undergraduate degree.’”
ICE abuses have revealed the crucial importance of alternative media — including Vox, Axios, Noah Smith’s Substack and 404 Media — in describing in great detail the accumulating body of evidence pointing to a federal agency run amok.
On Dec. 8, for example, an Axios reporter, Monica Eng, listed 12 of ”the biggest disputed allegations by D.H.S. officials and the evidence or court actions that overturned them.”
Here is one:
Both D.H.S. officials and Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino publicly stated, and he repeated under oath, that he threw tear gas at a crowd in Little Village after he was hit or almost hit with a rock. Video evidence directly contradicted it.
During his three-day deposition, Bovino admitted he was not hit until after deploying tear gas, then that same day presented a new justification — that a rock “almost hit” him before he gassed the crowd.
On the final day, Bovino admitted he had been “mistaken” and confirmed no rock hit him until after he launched the first canister.
And here is another:
Border Patrol agent Charles Exum claimed that Miramar Martinez rammed her car into his vehicle on Oct. 4, after which he shot her five times. Court documents show Exum later bragged about the shots and drove the car to Maine.
By Nov. 20, U.S. States Attorney Andrew Boutros’s office dropped felony assault charges against Martinez, whose lawyer said she was the one who was rammed and the victim of unjustified force.
Not to be outdone, on Jan. 10, Smith described the “consistent record of brutality, aggression, dubious legality and unprofessionalism in Trump’s second term”:
Here’s a video of ICE agents in Arkansas beating up an unarmed U.S. citizen. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting two U.S. citizens in a Target. Here’s a story about a similar arrest. Here’s a video of an ICE agent brandishing a gun in the face of a protester. Here’s the story of ICE agents arresting a pastor who complained about an arrest he saw. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting an American citizen and punching him repeatedly. Here’s a video of ICE agents threatening a bystander who complained about their reckless driving. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting a man for yelling at them from his own front porch. Here’s a video of ICE agents making a particularly brutal arrest while pointing their weapons at unarmed civilians nearby. Here’s a story about another ICE killing, this one in Maryland, under dubious circumstances. Here’s a video of ICE agents savagely beating and arresting a legal immigrant. Here’s a video of ICE agents storming a private home without a warrant. Here’s a video of ICE agents pulling a disabled woman out of a car when she’s just trying to get to the doctor.
It may seem tangential, but any reasonable review of this increasing hostility between federal agents and the public should take into account the possibility of anabolic steroid use (or abuse). Legal and illegal steroid use has become increasingly common among law enforcement officials, although testing and punitive actions are very rare, despite the threat of excessive force and violence by government officials.
The Drug Enforcement Administration describes anabolic steroids as “synthetically produced variants of the naturally occurring male hormone testosterone that are used in an attempt to promote muscle growth, enhance athletic or other physical performance and improve physical appearance.”
In some individuals, according to the agency, “anabolic steroid use can cause dramatic mood swings, increased feelings of hostility, impaired judgment and increased levels of aggression (often referred to as ‘roid rage’).”
John Hoberman, a historian at the University of Texas, Austin, and the author of “Dopers in Uniform: The Hidden World of Police on Steroids,” described the effects of steroid abuse on police behavior:
These drugs can produce emotional instability in armed men who are in a position to act out their drug-fueled anger, irritation and aggressive urges on civilians. Anabolic steroids appeal to men who join police forces in order to achieve dominance over others.
I asked Hoberman during a phone interview how widespread the use of anabolic steroids is in law enforcement. He replied:
My impression from having covered this since 2005 is that it’s very widespread. There are 1,800 departments in this country, and to the best of my knowledge, not one tests. The unions are going to cry bloody murder, because it’s a privacy invasion. The police chiefs do not want to catch somebody.
Would his estimate of widespread usage apply to ICE?
Hoberman said, “This is Trump’s goon squad, for Christ’s sake.”
There are no scientific measures of steroid use in law enforcement, although there is extensive anecdotal evidence.
A 2010 series by Amy Brittain and Mark Mueller in The Star-Ledger found, for example, that hundreds of police and emergency responders had acquired illicit steroid prescriptions from one New Jersey doctor, Joseph Colao:
In just over a year, records show, at least 248 officers and firefighters from 53 agencies used Colao’s fraudulent practice to obtain muscle-building drugs, some of which have been linked to increased aggression, confusion and reckless behavior.
Six of those patients — four police officers and two corrections officers — were named in lawsuits alleging excessive force or civil rights violations around the time they received drugs from him or shortly afterward.
Others have been arrested, fired or suspended for off-duty infractions that include allegations of assault, domestic abuse, harassment and drug possession. One patient was left nearly paralyzed after suffering a stroke his doctor attributed to growth hormone prescribed by Colao.
The reporters also found that employees paid for the prescriptions through their government health care programs and that police magazines carried ads for steroids.
In 2007, Susan Donaldson James, then a reporter for ABC, wrote:
From Boston to Arizona, police departments are investigating a growing number of incidents involving uniformed police officers using steroids. So-called juicing has been anecdotally associated with several brutality cases, including the 1997 sodomizing of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima in New York City.
Jones quoted Gene Sanders, a police psychologist in Spokane, Wash., who estimated that “up to 25 percent of all police officers in urban settings with gangs and high crime use steroids — many of them defensively. ‘How do I deal with people who are in better shape than me and want to kill me?’ said Sanders, who worked as a street cop in Los Angeles in the 1970s and saw steroid use soar in the 1990s.”
Let me turn back to Ellis’s order in the civilian complaint case that I mentioned at the outset. In challenging the interpretations of events by the Department of Homeland Security and ICE, she wrote:
Repeatedly shooting pepper balls or pepper spray at clergy members shocks the conscience.
Tear gassing expectant mothers, children and babies shocks the conscience.
Shooting a pepper ball at a protester from about five feet away shocks the conscience.
Pointing a gun at someone for exercising their First Amendment rights shocks the conscience.
Videotaping while driving into concerned neighbors standing in the street shocks the conscience, particularly when the agent later explains it just happened despite “driving slowly.”
Tackling someone dressed in a duck costume to the ground and leaving him with a traumatic brain injury, and then refusing to provide any explanation for the action, shocks the conscience.
”Turning to Bovino,” Ellis went on, “the court specifically finds his testimony not credible”:
Bovino appeared evasive over the three days of his deposition, either providing “cute” responses to plaintiffs’ counsel’s questions or outright lying.
When shown a video of agents hitting Rev. Black with pepper balls, Bovino denied seeing a projectile hit Rev. Black in the head. In another video shown to Bovino, he obviously tackles Scott Blackburn, one of plaintiffs’ declarants. But instead of admitting to using force against Blackburn, Bovino denied it and instead stated that force was used against him.
Ellis’s conclusion?
Overall, after reviewing all the evidence, the court finds that defendants’ widespread misrepresentations call into question everything that defendants say they are doing in their characterization of what is happening at the Broadview facility or out in the streets of the Chicagoland area during law enforcement activities.
This is not happening just in Chicago. On Friday, U.S. District Judge Kate M. Menendez issued a ruling similar to Ellis’s, in another case concerning citizen complaints against ICE, charging abusive behavior in Minnesota.
“Plaintiffs have established an ongoing, persistent pattern of defendants’ chilling conduct,” Menendez wrote, noting that “that conduct includes the drawing and pointing of weapons, the use of pepper spray and other nonlethal munitions, actual and threatened arrest and detainment of protesters and observers and other intimidation tactics.” On Monday, the Trump administration announced that it would appeal Menendez’s ruling.
In the meantime, will the judge’s injunction requiring ICE to end unconstitutional treatment of protesters prove effective?
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, called the ruling a “dishonest, left-wing narrative.” She added, “Here’s the truth: Federal agents have acted lawfully to protect themselves and ensure the integrity of their operations when individuals attempt to intervene.”
In other words, ICE can do no wrong.
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11) Trump’s E.P.A. Has Put a Value on Human Life: Zero Dollars
The Environmental Protection Agency has stopped estimating the dollar value of lives saved in the cost-benefit analyses for new pollution rules.
By Maxine Joselow, Reporting from Washington, Jan. 21, 2026
“Last week, the E.P.A. stopped estimating the monetary value of lives saved when setting limits on two of the most widespread deadly air pollutants, fine particulate matter and ozone. Instead, the agency is calculating only the costs to companies of complying with pollution regulations.”
Los Angeles smog in 1979. For decades, government agencies have used a theoretical value of human life when calculating the costs and benefits of new regulations. Bettmann/Getty Images
Government officials have long grappled with a question that seems like the purview of philosophers: What is the value of a human life?
Under both Democratic and Republican administrations, the answer has been in the millions of dollars. The higher the value, the more the government has required businesses to spend on their operations to prevent a single death.
But for the first time ever, at the Environmental Protection Agency the answer is effectively zero dollars.
Last week, the E.P.A. stopped estimating the monetary value of lives saved when setting limits on two of the most widespread deadly air pollutants, fine particulate matter and ozone. Instead, the agency is calculating only the costs to companies of complying with pollution regulations.
“The Trump administration is saying, literally, that they put zero value on human life,” Marshall Burke, an environmental economist at Stanford University, said in an email. “If your kid breathes in air pollution from a power plant or industrial source, E.P.A. is saying that they care only insofar as cleaning up that pollution would cost the emitter.”
It’s a drastic change to the way the government weighs the costs of curbing air pollution against the benefits to public health and the environment. It could lead to looser controls on pollutants from coal-burning power plants, oil refineries, steel mills and other industrial sites across the country, resulting in dirtier air.
And it appears to shelve a powerful tool, known as the value of a statistical life, that agencies have used for decades in the cost-benefit analyses that justify new regulations.
The E.P.A. has used the tool to assign a dollar value to the lives saved by clean-air rules, causing the benefits of these rules to dwarf the costs by at least a 30-to-1 ratio. That has allowed it to defend pollution controls that companies would otherwise challenge as too costly.
Other federal agencies have used the metric to justify regulations affecting everything from safety features on cars to cancer warning labels on cigarette packs.
Brigit Hirsch, an E.P.A. spokeswoman, said in an email that the agency was still considering the health effects of fine particulate matter and ozone, but was no longer assigning them a dollar value in cost-benefit analyses. “We’re not putting a dollar value on those impacts right now,” she said. “That does not mean E.P.A. is ignoring or undervaluing them.”
Ms. Hirsch did not comment on whether the agency would stop using the value of a statistical life for all regulations beyond clean-air rules. But in general, she said, “saying we aren’t attaching a dollar figure to health effects is like saying we aren’t putting a price tag on clean air or safe drinking water. Dollars and cents don’t define their worth.”
For the past 30 years, the E.P.A. has pegged the value of a statistical life at around $11.7 million. Although experts have recommended increasing the value, the agency has updated the metric only to account for inflation and wage growth.
The value of a statistical life is a sensitive subject in Washington. Lower values have led to outcry from public interest groups, while higher values have drawn complaints from a range of industries, including oil and gas drillers, truck drivers and toy manufacturers.
Some critics have raised moral objections to using the tool at all, saying a human life is priceless. But supporters say its use has helped prevent hundreds of thousands of premature deaths from air pollution, which kills more Americans each year than vehicle crashes.
The biggest driver of those deaths is fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, which refers to particles less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, small enough to enter the bloodstream. Another silent killer is ozone, a smog-causing gas that forms when emissions from power plants, factories and vehicles mix in the air on hot, sunny days.
A robust body of research has linked long-term exposure to both pollutants to premature death as well as asthma, dementia, and heart and lung disease. Even moderate exposure to PM2.5 can damage the lungs about as much as smoking, studies show.
But in a document posted online on Monday, the E.P.A. claimed that the economic benefits of reducing PM2.5 and ozone were too uncertain. The E.P.A. said that it would stop tabulating these benefits “until the agency is confident enough in the modeling to properly monetize those impacts.”
Some regulatory experts had mixed reactions to the move.
“On one hand, the administration does make some valid points that E.P.A. statements have implied a false precision in the past,” said Susan Dudley, who led the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs during President George W. Bush’s second term and now teaches at George Washington University. “On the other hand, the way to rectify that is not to stop quantifying the health effects altogether.”
Others were less circumspect in their criticism.
“If the rationale is that benefits are uncertain, well, costs are uncertain, too,” said Alan Krupnick, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future, a nonprofit research group. “Considering costs without considering benefits is like trying to cut a piece of cloth with one blade of the scissors: The cut is likely going to be inaccurate and rough.”
Michael Greenstone, an environmental economist at the University of Chicago, said the change could result in dirtier air, undercutting the gains made since Congress strengthened the Clean Air Act in 1970. Steep reductions in PM2.5 pollution have added 1.4 years to the average American’s life expectancy since 1970, according to research by the University of Chicago’s Air Quality Life Index project.
“Clean air is one of the great success stories of government policy in the last half-century,” Dr. Greenstone said. “And at the heart of the Clean Air Act is the idea that when you allow people to lead longer and healthier lives, that has value that can be measured in dollars.”
Dr. Greenstone and other economists said the value of a statistical life has often been misinterpreted as the value that the government assigns to a single person’s life. But it is actually the value that the government assigns to slightly reducing the risk of death for a large group of people.
To determine this value, government economists have turned to studies on the labor market, which show that workers demand higher wages before agreeing to perform jobs with greater risks of workplace fatalities.
Say that employers must pay lumberjacks an additional $1,000 a year to perform work that generally kills one in 1,000 workers. It follows that most Americans would forgo $1,000 a year to avoid that risk and that 1,000 Americans would collectively forgo $1 million to avoid the same risk entirely. Therefore, in this example, the value of a statistical life would be $1 million.
Tweaking the tool raises thorny ethical and philosophical questions, said W. Kip Viscusi, an economist at Vanderbilt University whose research on the value of a statistical life has been cited by many agencies.
“Should the government place the same dollar value on everybody’s life?” Dr. Viscusi asked. “Should rich people’s lives be valued more? Should old people’s lives be valued less?”
The American Petroleum Institute, a trade group for major oil and gas companies, has urged the E.P.A. to consider using a lower value for older people. In a 2018 public comment, the group wrote that most of the lives saved by stronger ozone standards would be “among the elderly population — not individuals in their highest earning years.”
Scott Lauermann, a spokesman for the institute, said in an email that the group was still reviewing the E.P.A.’s new approach but that it appreciated the agency’s focus on “sound science.”
In 2003, during George W. Bush’s first term, the White House proposed that the E.P.A. use a 37 percent lower value of a statistical life for people older than 70. But the backlash was intense: Older Americans and environmentalists protested what they called a “senior death discount” at E.P.A. hearings. The AARP, a nonprofit group that advocates on behalf of older Americans, ran ads featuring an older woman with a “37 percent off!” tag hanging from her glasses.
The Bush administration ultimately abandoned the idea, and the “environmental critics won the P.R. battle,” said John D. Graham, who led the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the time and now teaches at Indiana University Bloomington.
“My students tell me I should have started by pushing a premium on the value of saving the lives of children, since they have so many high-quality years of life ahead of them,” Dr. Graham said in an email. “In hindsight, that might have been a better approach.”
Dr. Viscusi said that if other agencies followed the E.P.A.’s latest approach, they would leave Americans more vulnerable to a range of threats to their lives and livelihoods.
“Whether it’s highway safety, job safety or consumer product safety, the biggest benefits of regulations are from saving lives,” he said. “If saving lives is made irrelevant, it will undermine the justification for all forms of protective policies.”
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12) The Heritage Foundation Wants to Send American Women Back Half a Century
By Jessica Grose, Opinion Writer, Jan. 21, 2026
Eleanor Davis
In the very first paragraph of the Heritage Foundation’s lengthy new policy paper, “Saving America by Saving the Family,” the authors go all the way back to 1776 for inspiration. “In understanding their crowning achievement, Americans must recognize that the founding fathers were, quite literally, fathers: Fifty-four of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence married and had a total of 337 children among them — an average of six each.”
Reading this, I wondered: Are they counting the six children Thomas Jefferson had with Sally Hemings — whom he enslaved and who could not legally refuse unwanted sex — or not? What kind of example is that supposed to set?
That’s just the opening salvo of this confused, retrograde report, which leaves out a lot of important details from its rose-colored history of marriage and family in the United States. It’s a curious set of guidelines for the future, since it seems mired in culture war battles from the 20th century, unable to face the past 60 years of change.
The Heritage Foundation — the think tank behind Project 2025, which has had an outsize influence on executive branch policy in the second Trump administration — seems to want to take a time machine back to when women were financially dependent on men and gay marriage was not legal, but the authors can’t decide exactly how far back they want to go. They call the report “a culturewide Manhattan Project that marshals America’s political, social and economic capital to restore the natural family.” (“Natural,” in their parlance, is the marriage of a man and a woman.) Comparing their natalist dreams to the creation of the nuclear bomb suggests that they believe they can achieve their goals only through destruction.
The report’s authors know they can’t tell all women to be stay-at-home mothers (returning the country to 1960s employment levels for women) because that would contradict their other goal, to dismantle the welfare state and put even more work conditions on parents receiving government aid. So instead, they throw a few tiny bones to modern working parents: encouraging remote work, conceding that affordability of child care is a major problem and saying it would be nice if more corporations offered paid family leave out of the goodness of their hearts.
But the bulk of the paper is about ways to whittle down government support for anybody who isn’t part of a traditional married family, ideally with a male breadwinner. For example, the report tells families it is less than optimal for their kids to go to day care as infants but offers only an extension of unpaid family leave, a few cash payments and tax credits as a policy salve. “According to N.I.H. studies,” — the studies they link to are from 1998 and 1999 — “by age 2, toddlers with a history of many hours in nonparental care exhibited more behavioral problems (such as aggression and disobedience) than did children reared primarily at home.”
This report’s authors want women to think they have been sold a bill of goods by liberals who told them they could have it all. There are passages in the report complaining about the ’60s feminists Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan and claiming that second-wave feminism destroyed the family.
The authors quote a Daily Mail article from 2008, which they credit to Rebecca Walker, the daughter of the feminist writer Alice Walker, to support their argument about how “rabid” feminists ruined marriage and motherhood. Rebecca Walker told me, “These are words taken out of context from a piece I did not write and publicly renounced. Obviously, I fully reject the Heritage Foundation weaponizing my name and any of my personal family history in support of their regressive and unconstitutional war against women and families in our country and beyond.”
Not content with quoting a questionable, nearly 20-year-old article, at one point the report’s authors valorize the fictional “Brady Bunch” for its family’s large brood and frugality. (“All of the kids shared a single bathroom!”)
It is telling that the Heritage Foundation issued a grand statement about how welfare wrecked marriage and children two days after the Trump administration froze $10 billion in funding for needy families in five Democratic-led states, which includes $2.4 billion for the Child Care and Development Fund.
At first, the administration froze child care funds only for Minnesota, after a YouTube video by the conservative creator Nick Shirley about day care fraud in Somali-run centers went viral. (The Times and local outlets had already been reporting on welfare scandals in the state, and some of his claims were undermined by The Minneapolis Star Tribune.)
But just as the administration used the pretext of Shirley’s video to sic Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Minneapolis — with ongoing, tragic results — it also used the pretext of the video to cut funding to states Trump sees as the opposition, despite showing no evidence of fraud in California, Colorado, Illinois or New York.
This comes after other attempts by the Trump administration to withhold or cancel Head Start (which provides free child care for children 5 and under from low-income families) funding all over the country in 2025. The stop and start of federal grants continues to cause chaos for programs. “Rather than making life easier and more affordable for our families, Donald Trump is stripping away child care from Illinois families who are just trying to go to work,” Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois said this month.
When I read policy screeds like the one from Heritage, I always marvel at how we agree on some of the problems American families face but have completely different solutions. The Heritage Foundation states that housing affordability and a paucity of stable jobs for young people may be contributing to the downturn of family formation. The authors note that young Trump-voting men rank children “as their No. 1 measure of life success,” citing NBC News polling from September. That group ranks marriage as No. 4, far higher than any other group, including Trump-voting young women, who rank children sixth and being married ninth, which is where young men who voted for Harris rank marriage.
Instead of looking at these stats and thinking that maybe there’s a deeper problem if only conservative men are bullish about having children, the authors look at the stats and think: If our government only pushed religion and traditional marriage harder legally and culturally, everyone else would fall in line.
But even they can’t fully commit to the argument that Americans are somehow underrating “the natural family,” as they spend large chunks of the report listing the many, many ways the government favors married couples. “Federal tax law provides married couples with substantial advantages unavailable to unmarried partners,” they note, along with inheritance and immigration laws and Social Security, retirement and military benefits; the list goes on. The federal government spends $150 million a year on Healthy Marriage & Responsible Fatherhood grants, with little to show for them.
While I do not think measuring happiness is useful or accurate or the right metric here, the Heritage Foundation’s authors use it to bolster their arguments: They claim marriage and churchgoing will make citizens happier. Yet year after year, the Nordic countries — Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden — dominate the 10 happiest countries, according to the World Happiness Report. These countries are secular and are generous welfare states. Their marriage rates aren’t particularly high, and cohabitation is common.
Further, the authors claim that over the past 60 years, “casual sex, abortion, childlessness by choice and no-fault divorce became normalized, while marriage and the natural family became stigmatized.” Stigmatized? Moms “dominate influencer marketing,” according to PRWeek, and if the authors bothered to pay attention to what’s happening this century, they might be aware that one of the past year’s biggest cultural moments was when Taylor Swift, a Kamala Harris voter, and Travis Kelce, a professional football player, got engaged.
I have interviewed men and women of different political backgrounds about their family goals. Many are delaying or having fewer kids because they are worried about paying for college, about paying for their retirement and about job stability. They also worry about paying for birth in the best of circumstances, because even for women with employer-provided insurance, the average out-of-pocket payment for a hospital birth is nearly $3,000, more than what is in Trump’s newborn accounts. They worry about their kids dying in school shootings. Women worry about dying in states with anti-abortion laws that prevent pregnant women from getting adequate medical care.
These are problems of the present and future, and they will need new and inventive solutions. Even a majority of G.O.P. primary voters in a 2025 Bipartisan Policy Center/Cygnal poll said the government has a role to play in helping parents get access to safe and reliable child care.
Instead of figuring out a real way to make life easier for families, all the Heritage Foundation does is propose razing what little government support exists while scolding young people for their decadence because they want fewer children and more bathrooms.
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13) I’ve Covered Police Abuse for 20 Years. What ICE Is Doing Is Different.
By Radley Balko, Jan. 21, 2026
Mr. Balko is the author of “Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces” and the criminal justice newsletter The Watch.
Mark Peterson for The New York Times
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.
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.
The surge of federal forces into Minneapolis (like smaller, earlier surges into Los Angeles; Portland, Ore.; Washington; and Chicago) isn’t about law enforcement at all. It is about an administration declaring — explicitly, at times — that the purpose of federal law enforcement isn’t to uphold the rule of law or promote public safety but to enforce the will of a single man.
We started to see this in the way the Trump administration responded to previous shootings by immigration officers, including of Carlitos Ricardo Parias in Los Angeles and Marimar Martinez in Chicago. Administration officials quickly declared those shootings justified — and righteous — with hyperbolic language similar to that used after Ms. Good’s killing. Those claims would also later be disproved by witnesses’ accounts and other evidence. The government eventually dropped the charges against Ms. Martinez. A judge dismissed Mr. Parias’s charges with prejudice, meaning they can’t be brought again.
In fact, nearly all of the administration’s responses to deaths in custody, shootings or other accusations of abuses have used maximalist language to venerate immigration officers, dehumanize their victims and villainize anyone who doesn’t support the Trump administration. There are no disinterested parties. No innocent bystanders. People are either criminal immigrants or radical leftists who deserve what happens to them, or they are heroic, patriotic federal cops incapable of mistakes. There is no humanity for the civilians and no humility for the officers.
Last week, after federal agents dragged Aliya Rahman, a U.S. citizen, from her car and arrested her, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson referred to her as an agitator who was obstructing immigration operations. She was trying to get to a doctor’s appointment at the Traumatic Brain Injury Center. When immigration officers used pepper spray and possibly flash grenades on a vehicle with a family inside, sending three children to the hospital, the department posted to social media, “It is horrific to see radical agitators bring children to violent riots. PLEASE STOP ENDANGERING YOUR CHILDREN.” The family was headed home from a child’s basketball game.
In addition to such language, the administration has embraced fear tactics long associated with totalitarian regimes. Until now, law enforcement officers in the United States rarely masked their faces, save for during specialty operations like SWAT raids. For most agencies, this isn’t a written policy; it’s just been accepted that masked policing isn’t consistent with a democratic society. We want law enforcement officers to see themselves as accountable to the community. And we want community members to see officers as approachable, so they’ll cooperate. Masks undermine both. They instill fear in the community and encourage a menacing aura of infallibility among officers.
Instilling fear is a drawback only if your goal is public safety. This administration has made clear that it doesn’t want marginalized communities — immigrants, Somali U.S. citizens, residents of Latino neighborhoods and so on — to feel safe. It wants them living in fear. This is why they mask. It’s why they shatter car windows. It’s why Stephen Miller, the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda, went on cable news to assure federal immigration officers, incorrectly, that they have complete immunity from criminal or civil liability and why, after Ms. Good’s death, Department of Homeland Security social media accounts reiterated Mr. Miller’s claim.
The administration has resurrected tactics that professional policing groups have deemed dangerous or counterproductive. ProPublica recently reported on 40 incidents over the past year in which federal immigration officers used potentially fatal chokeholds that are banned by most police agencies. Federal agents have shot into cars at least 10 times since September. This, too, is prohibited by most big city police agencies, in part because it’s too easy to mistake a driver’s intent.
Videos from cities where Mr. Trump has sent federal agents have shown agents attempting to stop fast-moving vehicles with techniques that most police departments prohibit or reserve for rare confrontations involving exceptionally dangerous people. They’re now being used against people suspected of immigration violations or who are irritating officers with their protest. Mr. Ross was involved in a previous incident in which he reached into a car and used a stun gun on a person while the car was in motion — reckless tactics that should have gotten him fired.
It’s clear that immigration officials are routinely breaking the law. There’s persuasive evidence that they’ve been explicitly racially profiling people in Minneapolis and elsewhere. (The Supreme Court effectively permitted profiling people by race and other factors in a September ruling.) They’ve been requiring U.S. citizens to produce proof of their citizenship on demand — also a violation of federal law. And we’ve seen U.S. citizens dragged from their cars, homes and workplaces, then arrested or detained.
We’ve seen the unlawful arrest and incarceration of Somali refugees who have legal permission to be here, warrantless raids on private homes and reports that detainees are being denied access to lawyers. And we’ve seen routine excessive force against protesters, from casual use of chemical irritants to physical violence to firing less lethal munitions at them from close range. These are all violations of the law. Not only is there no indication that the administration has investigated any of this, but the videos it posts to social media even seem to celebrate it.
All of which brings us back to Ms. Good. Over the weekend, the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, said on Fox News that there will be no federal investigation into her killing. The administration has already said the F.B.I. will not share the evidence it collected with the local police so they can conduct their own investigations, either. This is the very definition of a cover-up. It’s just being done in plain sight.
There are still important, unanswered questions about what Mr. Ross and other agents did in the moments leading up to Ms. Good’s death and whether he was legally justified to use lethal force. Those questions will now be much more difficult to answer.
We conduct these investigations not just to determine whether an officer should be charged with a crime. We also conduct them to determine if a shooting was necessary — and if it wasn’t, if there are policy changes that could prevent similar shootings.
In refusing to investigate Ms. Good’s death, the Department of Justice is, at a minimum, indicating that it doesn’t believe that preventing similar deaths is all that important. But the real explanation may be more sinister. Since she was killed, we’ve seen multiple videos in which immigration officers refer to her death to threaten people lawfully observing or recording them. The real motivation appears to be to make all the other Renee Goods out there, the liberal “wine moms” watching over immigration raids, to wonder if they might be next.
The Department of Justice instead opened a federal investigation into Ms. Good’s partner, specifically into whether she obstructed federal agents in the moments before the shooting and if she has any ties to activist groups. This prompted six federal prosecutors to resign. The administration then announced it had opened criminal investigations into whether Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota and Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis obstructed immigration enforcement. The department subpoenaed them and three other Minnesota leaders on Tuesday.
It’s one thing to tank or slow-walk an investigation. It’s quite another to publicly declare that no investigation will happen on any level and then announce that you’ll be investigating the victim’s partner and supporters instead. Both paths are unethical and corrupt. Undermining an investigation at least pays lip service to the idea of accountability and public trust. The administration’s actions in Ms. Good’s case are a declaration that there will be no accountability and that it would prefer to instill fear rather than trust.
We can still stop these abuses of power, but we need to be clear about what we’re facing. This is no longer a conversation about law enforcement or immigration policy. This is about authoritarianism.
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14) ICE Arrest of a Citizen, Barely Dressed, Sows Fear in Twin Cities
A Hmong immigrant, who is a U.S. citizen, was released after being questioned for an hour. Federal officials said they had been seeking sex offenders.
By Maia Coleman, Reporting from St. Paul, Minn., Published Jan. 20, 2026, Updated Jan. 21, 2026
It was over in a flash.
Masked federal agents descended on a one-story home in St. Paul, Minn., on Sunday and dragged a man wearing nothing but his underwear and slip-on shoes from his doorstep, through an icy snowbank and into an idling S.U.V.
Tires screeched. Whistles sounded. Neighbors shrieked in the background. And then the agents and the man were gone.
The arrested man was identified as ChongLy Scott Thao, a Hmong immigrant and naturalized U.S. citizen with no criminal record, according to his family. He was released about an hour later without being charged, they said.
The images of the diminutive, barely clad man being led away through freezing temperatures spread instantly. The Department of Homeland Security said Mr. Thao’s arrest was made amid an attempt by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain convicted sex offenders. But in a community on edge, the operation quickly came to represent what critics call a callous and brutal enforcement campaign.
It has also has touched off panic on St. Paul’s east side, where a large population of Hmong people has lived for decades. Neighbors in the area have described a surge of immigration raids in recent days targeting people of Asian descent.
The Department of Homeland Security said on Monday that the arrest had been part of a targeted operation seeking two sex offenders who lived at the address with Mr. Thao. On Tuesday, they identified two men from Laos and said both are wanted for sexual assault. It was unclear on Tuesday whether the two men were the intended targets of Sunday’s raid, or were connected in some way with Mr. Thao.
Local officials and Mr. Thao’s family have disputed the department’s account, describing instead a chaotic case of mistaken identity and an incursion of armed agents who forcibly removed a U.S. citizen from a residence without presenting a warrant or allowing him to show identification.
“ChongLy was taken outside in freezing weather wearing only underwear and Crocs, placed into an SUV, and driven around for nearly an hour while being questioned,” Louansee Moua, Mr. Thao’s sister-in-law, wrote in a description of the event on a GoFundMe page fund-raising for Mr. Thao’s legal fees and other costs.
The family declined to comment further on the arrest on Tuesday. But in an earlier interview with The Associated Press, Mr. Thao said the agents did not explain or apologize for the arrest. “They didn’t say sorry or anything,” he said.
Mayor Kaohly Her of St. Paul, who said she knows the Thao family personally, said that available evidence showed that agents had the wrong person and were offered information to confirm that. “And they just ignored that information,” she said.
Dana Haberman, a neighbor who witnessed the raid, said roughly 10 vans carrying federal agents appeared on the street. The agents, some of whom carried rifles and riot shields, walked up the front steps to Mr. Thao’s home and knocked several times, waiting about a minute, before using a battering ram to break down the door, he said.
“Seeing this elderly man being taken out like that,” Mr. Haberman said, “the frustration is palpable.”
Once inside, the agents pointed guns at Mr. Thao’s family and handcuffed him, as his 5-year-old grandson watched from the couch, his family said in the GoFundMe page. Minutes later, under heavy snowfall, he was taken away with only a red blanket draped over his shoulders, according to Mr. Haberman and videos of the raid. Agents escorted him into a black S.U.V., which soon sped off.
Mr. Thao was driven around for almost an hour while the agents questioned him. After fingerprinting him and running his information, they returned him home, Ms. Moua said.
In its statement on Monday, homeland security said that Mr. Thao had refused to be fingerprinted or facially identified and that he had matched the description of the two sex offenders they were seeking. “It is standard protocol to hold all individuals in a house of an operation for safety of the public and law enforcement,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the department, wrote on social media. It did not appear that any other members of the family were arrested on Sunday.
Mr. Thao is not listed in the Minnesota registry of sex offenders.
The ordeal has been particularly painful for Hmong residents in the Twin Cities, many of whom fled Laos as refugees after supporting the United States in its fight against communism during the Vietnam War. The Twin Cities has one of the largest concentrations of Hmong immigrants in the United States.
Mr. Thao’s mother, a nurse, served as head of two hospitals during the conflict in Laos, according to the family, and she treated many American soldiers.
In St. Paul, Mayor Her said that some Hmong vendors have reported that business is down nearly 70 percent, with many patrons too afraid to leave their homes.
The entire city has felt the impact of the federal immigration crackdown, she added. Local schools have begun delivering food and supplies to families too afraid to leave their homes, Mr. Haberman said. Restaurants have limited their hours or closed entirely, and one school district is transitioning to remote learning for several days next week.
“This is just a complete injustice to our residents,” Ms. Her said.
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15) You Can’t Denaturalize Me
By Carlos Lozada, Opinion Columnist, Jan. 21, 2026
Armando Arorizo
The Trump administration is eager to strip naturalized Americans of their citizenship, and the reasons seem to vary wildly.
Official grounds include fraudulent citizenship applications, financial wrongdoing, violent crime and ties to gangs or drug cartels. But the president has also added justifications that are more subjective and idiosyncratic. “I’d do it in a heartbeat if they were dishonest,” he said in a recent interview with The Times. Or if they “complain” too much or “cause trouble” or if they “hate our country.” The administration is even setting a quota for how many denaturalization cases it hopes to take up: 100 to 200 per month.
This escalation of what had become an uncommon practice — the United States denaturalized an average of 11 citizens per year from 1990 to 2017 — would do more than reaffirm the hypocrisy of a president and a party that long claimed to support lawful immigration. It reveals a willful misunderstanding of what it means to become an American citizen, of all that propels people to leave the place where they were born and to embrace a new one, this one, as their own. And it reiterates the administration’s zeal to redraw the limits of belonging in this country.
When you redefine who gets to be American, you are also redefining what it means to be America.
Naturalization is not merely a bureaucratic transaction. It is not just about filing paperwork or applying for a blue passport. It is the commitment to an idea, the culmination of a personal and political transformation, the fulfillment of a long-held ambition. I became an American citizen in 2014, at age 43, when I stood in a federal building in Maryland and swore an oath to “support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States against all enemies.” But I’ve slowly been becoming one all my life.
You could seize the certificate of naturalization that I received that day from the Department of Homeland Security, which attests that I have “complied in all respects with all of the applicable provisions of the naturalization laws” and am “entitled to be admitted as a citizen of the United States,” and declare it invalid. But you would not denaturalize me.
You could go back to when I filed my application, and you could search for fraud or for a fleeting error that you can pretend is fraud, a wrong date or a missing accent mark or a typo, and you could try to use that to take back my citizenship. Still, you would not denaturalize me.
You could take the form letter I received from a prior American president (“We embrace you as a new citizen of our land, and we welcome you to the American family”) that hangs above my desk at home, and you could bust the frame apart and rip the paper into pieces, and even then you would not denaturalize me.
To denaturalize me, you would have to do more than revoke my papers. You would have to revoke my life. You would have to unmake every step along the path that brought me here from Peru, first as a child, later as a young man. You’d have to identify the convictions and experiences that have bound me to the United States and pry them out of me, all of them.
That is not possible, even for a government with such powers and resources as ours.
To denaturalize me, you would have to go back to my early childhood in the 1970s, to when my family had just arrived in California, green cards in hand, and you would have to keep me from hearing the confidence and certitude with which my father spoke about the United States. He simply called it “este país”: this country.
In este país, he said, I would have opportunities. In este país, I could educate myself and earn a good living. In este país, I was free to think for myself. How many times, during my earliest years in this country, did I hear him go on and on about this country?
To denaturalize me, you’d have had to make him unsay it — or you’d have to make me forget it.
You’d have to come with me, in the 1980s, when my family returned to live in my native Lima, where my American-accented Spanish earned me the schoolyard nickname “gringo.” I soon shed the accent and polished my Spanish, but the name stuck throughout my high school years. Even in my native land, my bond with America marked me. To denaturalize me, you’d have to change that name, break that bond.
To denaturalize me, you’d have to keep me from reading, in my early teens, my father’s copies of John Jakes’s eight-volume American Bicentennial series, improbably heroic stories of American valor and sacrifice, stories that showed me that America means a daily choice between high-minded principles and self-serving impulses, between a welcome and a slap. You’d have to undo my continued reading, in the decades since, of American politics and history, a fixation that I’ve come to understand as part of my effort to claim a spot.
To denaturalize me, you’d have to keep me from returning to the United States at age 17; from educating myself in American universities, as my father had hoped; from making a home here; from seeing my children born in America’s capital. You’d have to nullify my votes in U.S. elections, undo my travels throughout the country and erase my years of writing — sometimes admiring, often critical — about the American experience. And you’d have to retract my old arguments with my father about whether este país was living up to its promise.
“American” is not just the legal status I’ve obtained; it is the life I have lived. I am a Peruvian citizen by birth, but I am an American citizen by choice. I voted with my feet. My U.S. citizenship does not just mean that I am a naturalized American; it means that America has become second nature. It is embedded in me, and it cannot be stripped away, not without doing violence to the whole.
If you cannot denaturalize me, you can instead try to de-Americanize America. Even more so than the president he so obsequiously serves, Vice President JD Vance seems intent on achieving this. On various occasions, he has downplayed the ideals that define this country, favoring instead the notion of America as a geographic entity reserved for a certain kind of people.
“America is not just an idea,” he said in a speech at the Republican National Convention in 2024. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” He spoke of his family’s cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky and of the many generations laid to rest there, generations that built this country.
“That’s not just an idea, my friends,” he said. “That’s not just a set of principles. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.”
Why would the vice president of the United States, the same man who swore an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” speak so dismissively of the principles that are meant to govern the nation? Certainly, people will fight for their home, but even more so, they’ll fight for the right to live freely in that home. Absent that right — that abstraction — what exactly are we defending?
Without the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence, without equality before the law, without the consent of the governed, America would be a place like any other, neither distinctive nor exceptional. It would cease to be este país.
By exalting the place over the idea, by diminishing the creedal nature of America, Vance shows us who he thinks really belongs here. If you’re not from the place, if you can’t point to generation upon generation that has lived here before, you are somehow a lesser American. He hails Americans who can trace their ancestors to the Revolutionary era or the Civil War, and he warns that we cannot just “swap” in what he calls “low-wage serfs” from elsewhere.
In recent social media posts, federal agencies have underscored their adherence to this worldview. “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American.” That one’s from the Department of Labor. The same Department of Homeland Security that issued my citizenship certificate 11 years ago now posts this message: “The stakes have never been higher, and the goal has never been more clear: Remigration now. Help Arrest Them. Help Deport Them.” And an Immigration and Customs Enforcement recruitment ad promises, “We’ll have our home again,” a partial echo of a song favored in white-nationalist circles.
Our home. One heritage. Arrest them. Remember who you are. All citizens may be Americans, but apparently some are more American than others.
By contrast, the Constitution of the United States does not establish hierarchies of citizenship. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and the state wherein they reside,” the 14th Amendment reads. That “all” is encompassing; it does not parse lineage or landholdings. “All” means all.
When Vance, in an almost childlike desire to please his boss, banged on the table in approval at a cabinet meeting last month after the president demeaned Somali Americans in Minnesota as “garbage” who “come from hell” and “do nothing but bitch,” the vice president made clear what kind of Americans he believes are the real thing. Real Americans don’t point out America’s tensions and contradictions, Vance has argued; they must simply express “gratitude” for what they’ve been granted — as if quiescence and deference were traditional American values.
Pick up the Declaration of Independence, however, and you’ll see that America’s founders bitched plenty. They complained of a tyrannical leader who “obstructed the administration of justice” and “excited domestic insurrections amongst us.” They assailed that monarch for “cutting off our trade with all parts of the world,” for “quartering large bodies of armed troops among us” and for “protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states.”
They also criticized that leader, by the way, for “obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners.”
This administration is hardly the first that has sought to denaturalize foreign-born citizens. Throughout its history, the United States has listed various criteria for such action. A fraudulent application, the lack of “good moral character” and race have been relevant criteria. (People of Indian descent, for example, were deemed racially ineligible for naturalization in the 1923 Supreme Court ruling in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind.) Anarchists, such as Emma Goldman, lost their citizenship, as did some members of the German American Bund during World War II. At other times, voting in foreign elections, marrying a foreigner or taking up residence abroad too soon after acquiring American citizenship have been reasons for denaturalization.
Who do members of the current administration wish to denaturalize? Essentially, foreign-born citizens they do not like. In his Times interview, the president seized on Ilhan Omar, a Somali American member of Congress from Minnesota, calling her a “disaster” and a “troublemaker” who does nothing but “complain, complain, complain.” She should “absolutely” lose her citizenship, he said.
When President Trump says he would denaturalize citizens who “hate our country,” it helps to remember how frequently he conflates love of America with love for him. In defending his pardons of the Jan. 6 rioters, he said, “These were people that actually love our country.” And he once branded Democratic lawmakers as traitors to the United States just because they did not clap for him at a State of the Union address. “Can we call that treason?” the president asked. “Why not? I mean, they certainly didn’t seem to love our country very much.”
The administration’s actions aim to curtail the breadth of Americanness, to place its perceived enemies beyond a zone of not just patriotism but also legitimacy. If you work for the wrong government agency, speak the wrong language, support the wrong party, hail from the wrong city or state or country, read the wrong history or hold the wrong political positions, then you inhabit a different America, one with fewer rights and protections, one where the consent of the governing, not of the governed, matters most. The overwhelming presence of federal immigration agents in Minneapolis — outnumbering even the city’s police officers — is but one example of these new rules. Once confined to that zone of illegitimacy, you are not a citizen but a traitor, not a protester but a domestic terrorist, not a newcomer but an eternal outsider.
Is it worth it? Is purging America of immigrants so crucial that in the process you must unmake America itself? Or is this how you intend to denaturalize me — by turning the country I joined into one I cannot recognize?
The tragedy is that immigrants know well and hold dear the same American principles that the president and vice president so readily downplay or violate. Many of us were drawn here and sought citizenship here because of those ideals. We studied them; we believe in them; we’ll cling to them in whatever language we speak. We are duty bound to uphold them; unlike native-born citizens, we took an oath to do so. Their endurance gives meaning to the sacrifices we made to get here.
You could strip all immigrants out of this country but not without doing violence to the whole.
Naturalization is not a moment; it’s a life. Even the Department of Homeland Security understands this, or it once did. When I became an American citizen, I received, along with my certificate, a sheet of paper labeled “Important Information for New Citizens.” It covered not just my rights but also my responsibilities as an American, listing them side by side, in bullet points. “Our system of government relies on an active and engaged citizenry,” it reads. “Your efforts will help ensure that America’s promise of freedom, democracy and liberty is secured for generations to come.”
The first right the sheet lists is the freedom to express myself; the first responsibility is to defend the Constitution, that old American blueprint so full of abstractions. Other responsibilities span the daily life of a citizen: Stay informed. Participate in the democratic process and in the life of my community. Respect the law and the rights of others. There’s nothing about constant expressions of gratitude or sufficient applause for a leader and certainly nothing requiring mindless subservience. With good reason: Obeisance and docility have never struck me as particularly American qualities.
The last responsibility listed on the sheet is to “defend the country if the need should arise.” That need, I believe, is now arising.
America is not the plot you own or the ancestry you claim; it is what you are and what you strive to become. Citizenship is not about where you live in America or how long you’ve lived in America. It is about how you live in America.
That is why there is something deeply unnatural about denaturalization. That’s why you cannot denaturalize me. Not so long as this country is still este país.
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