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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) The Best Weapon You Have in the Fight Against ICE
By Julia Angwin, Ms. Angwin, a contributing Opinion writer, is an investigative journalist, Jan. 26, 2026
We are in a phone war. Ever since cameras became embedded in cellphones, people have been using their devices to bear witness to state violence. But now, the state is striking back.
I don’t think it is any coincidence that Alex Pretti was holding his phone when he was shot to death by federal agents in Minneapolis. Or that Renee Good’s partner was filming a federal agent seconds before he killed Ms. Good. Agents have repeatedly knocked phones out of the hands of observers. They have beaten people filming them and followed them to their homes and threatened them. Of the 19 shootings by federal agents in the past year identified by The Trace, a news outlet that investigates gun violence, at least four involved people who were observing or documenting federal agents’ actions.
Courts have long granted citizens a First Amendment right to film in public. But this right on paper is now being increasingly contested on the streets as federal agents try to stop citizens from recording their activities.
“We are seeing a pattern of them intimidating people who are just trying to observe,” said Alicia Granse, a staff attorney at the A.C.L.U.’s Minnesota chapter, which is suing the Department of Homeland Security for using violent tactics to suppress residents’ right to free speech. A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction in the case this month, prohibiting ICE from retaliating against peaceful observers and protesters in the state. But that injunction was lifted on Wednesday by an appeals court.
Government officials have openly equated filming an agent with violence in statements and in court testimony. In July, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that violence against agents includes “videotaping them where they are at, when they are out on operations.”
The nation’s founders worried that if the state had a monopoly on weapons, its citizens could be oppressed. Their answer was the Second Amendment. Now that our phones are the primary weapons of today’s information war, we should be as zealous about our right to bear phones as we are about our right to bear arms. To adopt the language of Second Amendment enthusiasts, perhaps the only thing that can eventually stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a camera.
More than 25 years ago, the science fiction writer David Brin foretold this exact crossroads. In his 1998 book “The Transparent Society,” he painted two alternate snapshots of a futuristic city festooned with tiny, ubiquitous cameras. In one scenario, the government uses the devices to monitor residents in an Orwellian police state. In the other, citizens can look at the live footage from any camera to watch out for one another and to keep tabs on the police, resulting in a just and fair society. The difference between oppression and liberation, he wrote, is, “Who will ultimately control the cameras?”
Of course, our administration and its enforcers are also wielding phones to their advantage as they build their counternarratives in our social-media age. The Trump administration is waging a propaganda campaign through videos on social media showcasing its mass deportation operations. In December, when ICE launched its onslaught in Minnesota, the agency posted a video on X showing a montage of brown-skinned men being chased, tackled and handcuffed by ICE agents, set to the soundtrack of Foreigner’s “Cold as Ice.” The post accompanying the video said, “Minnesota’s weather is cloudy with a 100% chance of ICE.” An analysis of footage by The Daily Northwestern suggested that agents were filming protesters in a Chicago suburb with what appeared to be Meta’s Ray-Ban sunglasses equipped with cameras.
The smartphone camera is a potent weapon because it offers the promise of future accountability. Even if the person filming is killed, the camera can preserve evidence of a crime that could be prosecuted in the future. A desire to evade such accountability is why governments engaged in violent repression often shut off internet access and thus prevent witnesses from sharing video and photos — as Israel has done regularly during its Gaza bombardment and Iran recently did during its massacre of thousands of protesters.
The best defense is to double down on documentation. Those who can afford the personal risk should keep filming. And those who can’t risk being on the front lines can support those doing the documenting in other ways. The brave citizens of Minnesota and elsewhere are fighting back, monitoring federal agents using chokeholds, chemical agents and excessive force on immigrants, observers and protesters. As Gov. Tim Walz recently urged Minnesotans: “Carry your phone with you at all times,” in order to “help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans.” Videos captured by bystanders in Minneapolis have already allowed news outlets to debunk the government’s claims that agents shot Mr. Pretti because he was brandishing a gun.
We need to question whenever the government asks us to put away our phones — especially when it comes to filming people we pay with our tax dollars.
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2) Judge Orders ICE Chief to Appear in Court Over Immigration Crackdown
The chief federal judge in Minnesota ordered the head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to appear in court on Friday to explain why he should not be held in contempt for violating court orders.
The summons for the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement came as protests grew in Minneapolis following the fatal shooting by federal agents of a U.S. citizen over the weekend. Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
The top federal judge in Minnesota has summoned the head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to personally explain this week why he should not be held in contempt of court as judicial scrutiny of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown grows.
The order by Judge Patrick J. Schiltz — which he acknowledged was “an extraordinary step” — adds to the administration’s legal fights while it also faces public and political pressure over the aggressive tactics of its agents, who have shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in three weeks.
Mr. Trump shook up the leadership of the Minnesota enforcement operation on Monday by planning to pull its director of on-the-ground enforcement, Gregory Bovino, according to two U.S. officials. That came after two days of outrage over the killing of Alex Pretti, who was shot and killed by federal agents over the weekend. Mr. Trump said he was sending Tom Homan, his border czar, to oversee the operations and that Mr. Homan would report directly to him.
The order by Judge Schiltz, issued late Monday, summons the ICE acting director Todd Lyons to appear before him on Friday and explain why he should not be held in contempt for violating court orders arising from the Trump administration’s crackdown. “The court’s patience is at an end,” he wrote. But the judge did give Mr. Lyons an out: He said he would cancel the hearing if ICE quickly released an immigrant whom he said had been wrongly detained by agents.
The crackdown has prompted a flood of legal challenges, including from state and local officials who asked another federal judge on Monday to declare that the surge of some 3,000 immigration agents had effectively become an unconstitutional occupation. The Trump administration also defended itself on Monday at a hearing over the state’s effort to investigate the death of Mr. Pretti.
The shooting of Mr. Pretti — who was killed while being pinned down by agents, according to videos of the encounter — sparked outage across the political spectrum, including among some Republicans who have called for the Trump administration to change course.
Mr. Trump met on Monday with Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, and Corey Lewandowski, her top aide, in the Oval Office for more than two hours, according to two people briefed on the meeting. The president did not suggest in the meeting that Ms. Noem and Mr. Lewandowski were at risk of losing their jobs, those people said. But it was another sign of Mr. Trump’s concern about the reaction to the killing of Mr. Pretti and the fatal shooting of another Minneapolis resident, Renee Good, by a federal agent on Jan. 7.
Here’s what we’re covering:
· Change in tone: Mr. Trump struck a cooperative tone after a call on Monday with Gov. Tim Walz, whom he has blamed for the violence in Minnesota, saying on social media that they “seemed to be on a similar wavelength.” Mr. Walz’s office described the phone call as “productive” and said it had touched on topics Mr. Trump’s post did not mention, including efforts to ensure independent investigations into the killings of Mr. Pretti and Ms. Good, and the possibility of reducing the number of federal agents deployed in Minnesota.
· State investigation: A federal judge didn’t immediately rule on Monday on the request by Minnesota investigators to extend a temporary order barring the federal government from destroying evidence in the killing of Mr. Pretti. State officials want the judge to compel federal cooperation with a state investigation into Mr. Pretti’s death, after local law enforcement was initially denied access to the scene and evidence.
· The victim: Administration officials quickly branded Mr. Pretti as a “domestic terrorist” even as videos of the encounter contradicted their narrative. Mr. Pretti’s friends, family and colleagues denounced what they said were “sickening lies” by the Trump administration. They described Mr. Pretti, an intensive care unit nurse, as a happy and generous man who loved biking and walking his dog.
Tyler Pager contributed reporting.
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3) A Shocked Nation Watches Minneapolis Killings: ‘Something Needs to Change’
Scenes from the violent unrest in Minneapolis played on a loop in many American households over the weekend, prompting reflection about where the nation is heading.
By Dan Barry, Jan. 27, 2026
A memorial formed at the spot where Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents in Minneapolis. David Guttenfelder/The New York Times
The wintry whiteout that swept across half the United States over the weekend could not erase what the country had just seen unfold in Minneapolis. No amount of snow could block out the images: furious protesters clashing with masked officers, clouds of tear gas wafting through neighborhoods — and for the second time in three weeks, video of an American citizen being shot dead by a federal agent.
And for the second time in three weeks, the Trump administration’s account of a deadly shooting contradicted what many in the country believe they saw. Federal officials described both victims as “domestic terrorists” intent on harming federal agents; critics of the administration, and many others, said such a description was belied by the video evidence.
Scenes from the violent unrest in Minneapolis played on a loop throughout the weekend, overshadowing the extreme weather and two N.F.L. playoff games. The images conveyed the unmistakable sense of consequence, of a watershed moment, prompting reflections about what the nation stands for, and where it is heading. Minneapolis seemed close, no matter where one lived.
In Georgia, a high school teacher anticipated the questions his students would ask about the latest shooting death. In Indiana, broadcasts of the violence dampened a 97th birthday celebration. In Iowa, a married couple, on an outing with their autistic son, disagreed about what had happened, while in Wisconsin, a supporter of President Trump marveled at what she considered the stupidity of some protesters.
And in Rhode Island, a snowbound student at Brown University cried when he saw the video from Saturday of immigration officers pepper-spraying Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old registered nurse, wrestling him to the cold Minneapolis ground, and shooting him to death.
“I didn’t get any sleep last night,” the student, Jack DiPrimio, 23, said on Sunday. “The video was just replaying over and over again in my head.”
The weekend’s turn of events in Minnesota began with a campaign promise. Since returning to office a year ago, President Trump has sought to make good on his vow to rid the country of undocumented immigrants he describes as criminals.
Agents for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have carried out sweeps in a succession of Democrat-controlled cities, all the while being dogged by protesters. Critics have denounced the operations as cruel, often unconstitutional, fraught with mistaken or improper detentions — even un-American.
In December, ICE turned to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area with a focus on its large Somali community. The Trump administration has blamed an ongoing fraud scandal in Minnesota, involving billions of dollars in federal funding, on the state’s Somali immigrants, whom Mr. Trump demonized as “garbage” in comments widely denounced as bigoted.
Then, on Jan. 7, an ICE agent fired three times into an S.U.V. as it was pulling away from a confrontation, killing the 37-year-old driver, Renee Good. Federal officials have maintained that the agent acted in self-defense, while state and local officials have disputed that account of the fatal moment, which was filmed from several angles.
Tensions continued to escalate all month, with furious protests, arrests and the shooting and wounding of a Venezuelan man by an immigration officer.
Then: Saturday.
Mr. Pretti, a nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital with no criminal record, was using his cellphone to record a protest when he stepped between a woman and an immigration agent who was pepper spraying her. As he, too, was hit with pepper spray, several agents threw him to the ground and, in the ensuing scrum, saw that he had a gun, which he never drew and was legally carrying.
They opened fire, in a brutal scene that was witnessed, recorded and quickly shared.
As the inclement weather brought much of the country to a standstill, many people could not help but see the disturbing video, hear the Trump administration’s rushed justifications — including the unsubstantiated claim by Gregory Bovino, a senior Border Patrol official, that Mr. Pretti had been out to “massacre law enforcement” — and ruminate.
In Crown Point, Ind., more than a dozen family members gathered Saturday night to celebrate the 97th birthday of Jerry Weber. But they found themselves glued to the television and the disturbing reports from Minnesota, including another shooting death.
“It’s kind of like living in your own world and living in a second world at the same time,” said Mr. Weber’s son, Gerry Weber, a civil rights attorney. “We drove through a snowstorm to get to our family’s house and celebrate dad’s birthday, and then we’re back to the television, watching America fall apart.”
Mr. Weber had flown in from the Atlanta area, where Ray Brown, 40, who teaches advanced-placement U.S. history at Northview High School, in Johns Creek, Ga., was also trying to process what was happening in Minnesota — and how he would respond to questions from his students about the constitutionality, and propriety, of the government’s actions.
The teacher said that he tries to give his students, many of whom are from immigrant families, the space to question why certain federal departments exist.
“I’m going to have to present a very diplomatic view,” Mr. Brown said. “Which is revolting to hear myself say, because I think that taking a life is wrong, no matter what.”
In many frozen corners, people expressed admiration for the protesters in Minneapolis, as well as a resolve to follow their lead.
In south-central Pennsylvania, Brandie Kessler, a communications professional, spent Saturday night at the home of her in-laws just outside of Harrisburg. After arriving, she made a mordant comment to her mother-in-law as they sat in the living room.
“I said, kind of sarcastically, ‘I guess I need to prepare my own obituary in case there’s something that happens at a demonstration here,’” Ms. Kessler, 42, recalled. “In case I go out to peacefully protest — which I am completely entitled to do — and I’m gunned down.”
On Sunday morning, with snow blanketing the rolling landscape outside, Ms. Kessler felt frustrated, even disoriented, by what was happening, and not just in Minnesota. The polarization. The violence. The deaths.
“I don't know everything there is to know about what happened in Minneapolis,” Ms. Kessler said, her voice breaking. “But I know what I saw. I don’t know how someone could watch the same thing and say everything is OK.”
Sandi Lipinski, a sales director in Waukesha, Wis., was not suggesting that everything was OK, but after going to church and running a few errands on Sunday, she shared a decidedly different view.
She said she supported President Trump’s efforts to detain and deport undocumented immigrants. And she expressed little sympathy for protesters who are following ICE agents around and sometimes taunting them.
“They are going to carry guns and use cars as weapons, then they run the risk of getting killed,” Ms. Lipinski, 62, said. “That’s just stupidity. They should stay home or go to work or go to school and stay out of the street and let everybody do their own jobs.”
Other stunning developments unfolded last week, including the Trump administration’s resolve to acquire Greenland. But the crisis in Minnesota seemed to dominate the nation’s collective thoughts.
In Waterville, Maine, Nancy Smith sat behind the counter of her store, Smitty’s Book Cellar, and thought about Minnesota — and the similar ICE operation that started last week in her own state. “I don’t want the same things to happen here,” Ms. Smith, 55, said. “I don’t want the same things to happen anywhere.”
In Atlanta, Jamie Christy, a 30-year-old lawyer who heads her neighborhood’s Young Republican chapter, did not see the video of Mr. Pretti’s shooting until taking a lunch break on Sunday. Soon she was replaying it again and again, at full and partial speed, to see what could have necessitated the use of deadly force.
“It’s completely unjustified,” she said.
And at an upscale mall in West Des Moines, Iowa, where the temperature was in the single digits, a married couple, Jennifer Stitz and Don Caves, finished their food-court meal on Sunday evening while trying to find common ground on Minnesota and the country. Mr. Caves’s 18-year-old son, Carsten, sat nearby, playing a game on a tablet.
Mr. Caves, a high school Bible teacher, and Ms. Stitz, an accountant, both voted for Mr. Trump in 2024. But as they discussed the shooting deaths in Minneapolis, their viewpoints diverged.
Mr. Caves, 62, said that the shootings were “absolutely terrible,” but he maintained that Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti had put themselves in harm’s way.
“I just don’t understand why people would interfere in other people doing their job, especially law enforcement,” Mr. Caves said. “Get out of their way. They’ve got guns.”
He said he supported peaceful protest, but added: "Don’t get in the way between point A and point B, the good guys going and getting the bad guys. And that’s the situation that our officers have been facing.”
Ms. Stitz, 54, listened quietly — and then disagreed.
She said she was troubled by both deaths in Minneapolis. Mr. Pretti, she said, had “every right” to carry a gun, and ICE agents could have simply let Ms. Good drive away and then trace her through her license plate. Both victims, she said, had the right to protest.
“This is not China or a communist country where, you know, you get killed for protesting,” Ms. Stitz said. She added: “Something needs to change, is what I feel.”
The mall was closing. The couple gathered up their leftover food and, with Mr. Caves’s son, headed out into the night’s unforgiving cold.
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4) New Video Analysis Reveals Flawed and Fatal Decisions in Shooting of Pretti
A frame-by-frame assessment of actions by Alex Pretti and the two officers who fired 10 times shows how lethal force came to be used against a target who didn’t pose a threat.
By New York Times, January 27, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000010668660/new-video-analysis-reveals-flawed-and-fatal-decisions-in-shooting-of-pretti.html
When federal agents shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday, officials said he approached agents with a handgun, intending to massacre them. “An individual approached U.S. Border Patrol agents with a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun.” “This looks like a situation where an individual arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.” But a Times analysis of video footage from the scene in the moments when two officers opened fire, clearly contradict federal government statements. Pretti does not appear to pose a threat to agents. In fact, at several critical junctures, he is outnumbered and under their control. Here are the key moments that reveal what happened. We see Pretti walking about, filming a group of protesters who are speaking with a federal agent. He’s holding a cell phone in one hand. The other hand is empty. It’s just over 30 seconds before the shooting when a protester is pushed to the ground. Pretti steps between her and the agent who’d shoved her, briefly putting his hand on the agent’s waist. The agent pepper-sprays Pretti’s face. We can see Pretti is still holding his phone in one hand while holding his other hand up to protect himself against the spray. Contrary to statements by federal officials, he’s made no threatening movements towards agents. Pretti, who had a firearms permit, carries a gun holstered on his right hip, but he doesn’t reach for it. And it appears agents are unaware the gun is even there. He reaches toward the protester, apparently trying to help her up, while agents begin grabbing him from behind. He tries to pull away, and again he makes no threatening movements towards the agents. But agents pull him backwards and force him to the ground. Then shots ring out. [gunfire] Now we’ll slow things down, so each moment is clear. Here is Pretti. Several agents are restraining him. And this is the Border Patrol agent who will shoot him first. This appears to be when agents first notice that Pretti is carrying a firearm and yell that he has a gun. Watching the same moment from a different angle, the agent who first pepper-sprayed Pretti beats him several times with the spray canister. We can see that both of Pretti’s arms are pinned down by his head. This agent in gray reaches to remove Pretti’s weapon from his hip, as this agent unholsters his gun, nudges the agent in gray out of the way and fires. [gunfire] Let’s rewind and focus on the agent who shoots first. Just seconds before he fired, he was facing away from Pretti and focusing on an entirely different situation as he tries to spray a nearby woman with an irritant. The spray appears to malfunction, and the agent turns as he adjusts it. That’s when someone yells that Pretti has a gun. And around five seconds after fully turning his attention toward Pretti, the agent draws his weapon and shoots. [gunfire] His arm visibly recoils at the first shot. The firearm has clearly been removed from the scrum when the first shots are fired toward Pretti at close range. [gunfire] The officer who disarmed Pretti can be seen reacting to the sound of the first shot, looking back toward the skirmish. The shooter was standing behind Pretti and not under direct threat, contradicting statements from Homeland Security officials that he fired defensive shots. He also has a vantage point to see the gun pulled from the scene, but it’s unclear if he did and whether he thought a weapon was still on Pretti. He then fires three more shots from behind Pretti, whose arms are down as he appears to brace himself against the pavement. In one hand, he still holds his phone, and in his other, his glasses. The agent in gray, who removed Pretti’s gun, carries it across the street. Pretti is disarmed and falling to the ground. But the agent who first pepper-sprayed Pretti and later beat him with a canister, also pulls out his gun. From a distance, despite the fact that Pretti is lying motionless on the ground, these two agents fire six more shots. Neither is under threat. [screaming] [gunfire, screaming] In total, the agents fire 10 shots in five seconds. After the shooting, an agent kneeling next to Pretti’s body asks where the gun is — — showing that not all of the officers seem to know the weapon had been removed. Agents appear to begin giving medical aid. About 31 seconds elapsed from the time agents first physically engaged Pretti to the moment the last shot was fired.
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5) What Minneapolis Means for the Country and Its Politics
Our reporter who spent time in the city weighed in on how the chaos is changing the political landscape.
By Katie Glueck, Published Jan. 26, 2026, Updated Jan. 27, 2026
A memorial in Minneapolis for Alex Pretti, the man killed by federal agents. Credit...Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
A young asylum-seeking family, terrified to go outside or even to look out of the window. Parents of elementary schoolers, struggling to explain to their children why their Latino classmates were staying home. Another fatal shooting of a U.S. citizen by federal agents.
These are some of the painful and extraordinary scenes my colleagues in Minneapolis are documenting during the federal immigration crackdown there.
It’s a fast-moving, fluid and unpredictable situation, as the sudden move to reassign Greg Bovino shows.
But increasingly, one thing seems clear: The country is now paying attention.
Moderate Democratic lawmakers have called for Kristi Noem, who leads the Department of Homeland Security, to step aside or to be impeached. At least some Republicans have broken with the Trump administration in expressing grave concerns or, in some cases, urging a full independent investigation into the fatal shooting on Saturday.
Former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, who rarely weigh in on the day-to-day moves of the Trump administration, cast the moment as an inflection point for the country, with core American values and freedoms under real threat. And over a weekend when many Americans were snowed in, plenty of people around the country who don’t usually post about politics took to social media to talk about Minneapolis.
To make sense of all of this, I turned to my colleague Charles Homans, who just wrote a deeply reported piece capturing how the Trump administration’s immigration operations are stoking fear and chaos across Minneapolis.
It’s well worth reading in full. In the meantime, here’s our conversation, edited and condensed:
Katie Glueck: In your story, you mentioned that many of the people pushing back aren’t what we might usually think of as activists. Who are they, and how would you describe them politically?
Charles Homans: I was struck by what a broad cross-section of Minneapolis liberals and progressives I saw participating in one way or another in the resistance to the federal deployment. The Twin Cities are overwhelmingly Democratic and have a real culture of political engagement.
But participation is not the same as activism. Most of these people were not in the streets in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, for instance, and a lot of them were very ambivalent about the aftermath of his killing in the city. What you are seeing now is a much broader kind of engagement, where even people who are not attending protests or following federal immigration agents with their phones are doing little things through their schools and churches, or with local businesses, to stand in the way of the federal operation.
KG: You also wrote about the parents — particularly those with kids attending schools with larger Latino populations, it sounded like — whose “latent politics had been supercharged by a very parental mix of fear and fury.” What does that look like in practice? Is this a newly engaged political demographic?
CH: In Minneapolis, I think these are people who were pretty politically engaged to begin with. One big question I have, which is a good subject for further reporting, is whether this is the same farther out into the exurbs, where you start getting into constituencies who are more politically mixed and maybe less political in general, but confronting similar circumstances. The raids have happened there, too. They’ve just been less well-documented.
KG: Watching from New York, at least, the events in Minneapolis seem to have broken through with parts of the public in a way I’m not sure I’ve seen in the second Trump administration. Is that your sense, too?
CH: It does feel that way. You always want to be careful about over-interpreting these moments in the moment itself. But even before the first fatal shooting by a federal agent in Minneapolis this month, polls had shown approval of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s tactics really tanking, especially among independents.
Americans have contradictory and ambivalent views about immigration, and what should be done to control it. The administration’s tactics and messaging have forced voters to think harder about that question.
Clearly the biggest factor here is the video that Minnesotans have been gathering. There’s the footage of the shootings themselves, and the administration’s false or misleading accounts of what happened — which have been easy to see through even for people who are not especially engaged.
KG: How does this moment in Minneapolis compare with the protests there after the murder of George Floyd?
CH: I asked a lot of people in Minneapolis about that, and the consensus, which I think is true, was that they are extremely different. The George Floyd protests, riots and ensuing debate about defunding or reorganizing the Minneapolis Police Department produced a deep division within the Twin Cities’ Democratic majority that was never really healed.
But pretty much none of these people disagree about the federal deployment. And amid all of the fury and alarm of the present moment, there is a very palpable sense of relief among a lot of these people that they are on common ground, at least for now.
KG: You mentioned the Defund the Police movement, something Democratic leaders came to see as a huge political liability nationally. Is there any concern among Democrats you talked to that scenes of unrest, or pushes to abolish ICE, could backfire for them politically?
CH: Minneapolis’s mayor, Jacob Frey, has clearly been trying to keep the Minneapolis Police Department out of the mix as much as possible. And for now, the balance of violence in the footage coming out of the city lies clearly on the side of the federal agents, who have shot and killed two people in the midst of what has been extremely angry but overwhelmingly nonviolent resistance.
It does seem that so far, this has kept a lot of the ghosts of 2020 at bay. What is clear on the street in Minneapolis is that this is really a tightrope walk, and I think it is much more so since the second fatal shooting.
KG: Anything I didn’t ask you about on the political front that you think is important for people to understand about Minneapolis?
CH: I wrote about this in another piece this month, but I do think that Minnesota’s particular political history, of which the state’s liberals are very proud, is very relevant to how Minneapolitans see what they are doing now, and the stakes of what they are doing. They see themselves as fighting for a civic ideal that is directly under attack by the federal government.
Why the Trump administration wants Minnesota’s voter rolls
A curious demand stuck out in Attorney General Pam Bondi’s letter to Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota over the weekend laying out what must happen to restore “law and order” to the state: Hand over your voter rolls.
My colleague Nick Corasaniti, who covers voting rights and elections, explains why the Trump administration is seeking voters’ private data from states across the country, and the concerns surrounding the effort.
One Number
65 percent
That’s the percentage of American voters who believe a middle-class lifestyle is out of reach for most people, a New York Times/Siena poll found. It reflects the nation’s pessimistic mood as another midterm election year kicks off.
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6) Kyle Rittenhouse Is Once Again a Lightning Rod Online
After the death of Alex Pretti, some people are posting about a different young man who brought a gun to a protest and the treatment he received from law enforcement agents.
By Nathan Taylor Pemberton, Published Jan. 26, 2026, Updated Jan. 27, 2026
Kyle Rittenhouse has been celebrated on the right as a symbol of Second Amendment rights. Credit...Grace Ramey/Daily News, via Associated Press
As Americans vented, grieved and, in some cases, justified the killing of Alex Pretti by federal immigration officers over the weekend, they turned, as they often do, to social media.
In the hours after the shooting, as the Trump administration rushed to push a narrative that Mr. Pretti was a “domestic terrorist” who possessed a weapon and an intent to cause harm, the name Kyle Rittenhouse began to circulate online.
A young man who arrived armed with an AR-15-style rifle to defend a local business during a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020, Mr. Rittenhouse was once a symbol of patriotism and Second Amendment rights for many on the right. Some of his supporters, among them President Trump, helped fund his legal defense when he was brought up on — and later found not guilty of — charges of intentional homicide for shooting three protesters and killing two.
After the killing of Mr. Pretti, Mr. Rittenhouse has become a prism through which observers across the political spectrum are filtering the actions by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents in Minneapolis.
For those on the left, Mr. Rittenhouse is a figure who highlights what they believe is a staggering display of hypocrisy by MAGA conservatives and administration officials who have tried to paint Mr. Pretti, an I.C.U. nurse, as a violent activist on the streets of Minneapolis.
Some liberals have posted images of Mr. Rittenhouse gripping a rifle as a pointed reminder that conservatives, not that long ago, once forcefully defended the right to bear arms on the streets of America. Mr. Pretti was carrying a 9 mm handgun, according to federal officials, when he entered a zone of civil unrest.
“Kyle Rittenhouse showed up to a protest like this and Republicans called him a hero,” Isaiah Martin, a former Democratic candidate for Congress in Texas, wrote on X on Saturday.
For many on the right, the simple fact that Mr. Pretti had a weapon in his possession justified the actions of the federal agents, who fired at least 10 shots at Mr. Pretti in five seconds after appearing to have disarmed him. (Officials with the Minneapolis Police Department have said that Mr. Pretti had a permit to carry a weapon.)
To support their line of thinking, conservatives have also invoked Mr. Rittenhouse, citing his actions as an example of what to do during an encounter with law enforcement officers.
“Be Like Kyle,” read one post, accompanied by another image of Mr. Rittenhouse from 2020, shown with his hands in the air as he surrendered to law enforcement officers. (This surrender came after Mr. Rittenhouse shot the three protesters on the street.)
On X, MAGA influencers like Matt Walsh, a right-wing pundit who championed Mr. Rittenhouse in 2020, and Jack Posobiec, a pro-Trump loyalist, once again held up Mr. Rittenhouse’s actions as an example of how, in their view, people should interact with officers.
“Do not fight with police while armed,” Mr. Posobiec wrote in post on Monday.
Mr. Walsh argued that Mr. Pretti was an “armed leftist, who had set out to “deliberately interfere” with federal agents, unlike Mr. Rittenhouse, who he said was working in tandem with law enforcement officers.
Elected Democrats have also brought Mr. Rittenhouse into the conversation about Mr. Pretti.
In a widely shared clip taken from her appearance on Jake Tapper’s CNN show this past weekend, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, referred to Mr. Rittenhouse as she inveighed against Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who called Mr. Pretti a “domestic terrorist.”
Ms. Noem’s comment, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said, was “rich” in irony coming from “the same party and administration that praises Kyle Rittenhouse.”
On Facebook, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, also invoked Mr. Rittenhouse, describing him as an “armed vigilante” who was once labeled a “hero by Trump and Far-Right extremists.”
Earlier on Monday, Mr. Rittenhouse, now 23, weighed in on his newfound status as a liberal cudgel. In a post on X, he accused Mr. Jeffries of using his name “as rage bait” to “stoke the flames.”
Mr. Rittenhouse did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this article.
It’s clear that Democrats, and their supporters, are reveling in the right’s apparent inconsistencies. One administration official who has become a subject of left-wing scorn is Kash Patel, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. A former podcaster and right-wing activist, Mr. Patel was a vocal supporter of Mr. Rittenhouse who celebrated his acquittal as a “victory for the Second Amendment.”
Those remarks offered yet another split-screen for social media feeds when, this week, Mr. Patel asserted that protesters were not necessarily guaranteed the right to bear arms.
“You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want — it’s that simple,” Mr. Patel said during an interview with Fox News. “You don’t have a right to break the law.”
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7) Administration Social Media Posts Echo White Supremacist Messaging
A flurry of posts from the White House, Department of Labor and Department of Homeland Security have included images, slogans and even a song used by the white nationalist right.
By Evan Gorelick, Jan. 27, 2026
The posts have referred to neo-Nazi literature, ethnic cleansing and QAnon conspiracies, mused about deporting nearly a third of the U.S. population, and promoted lyrics from an anthem bellowed by the far-right militants of the Proud Boys.
Their authors are not on society’s fringe. They are in the offices of the White House and the departments of Homeland Security and Labor, using official government accounts.
To some people, the administration’s posts sound patriotic. Others might sense at most a faint dog whistle to extremists. Some posts may just look odd. But those well-versed in the abstruse codes of right-wing extremism hear klaxons.
This month, the White House and the Department of Homeland Security jointly posted a recruitment ad for Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Instagram, Facebook and X, overlaid with the words “WE’LL HAVE OUR HOME AGAIN.”
That’s also the name of a song, written by members of a self-described “pro-White fraternal order,” that has been embraced by the Proud Boys and other white-nationalist groups. Hundreds of explicitly neo-Nazi and white-supremacist accounts have shared the song on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app, since 2020. The white supremacist who killed three Black people at a Jacksonville, Fla., dollar store in 2023 included lyrics from the song in his writing.
“There are two types of people to whom these messages will quickly look familiar,” Oren Segal, a vice president for counterextremism at the Anti-Defamation League, said of the panoply of postings, “white supremacists, and those who study white supremacists.”
A Homeland Security spokeswoman, Tricia McLaughlin, said that if the ICE recruiting post were actually about the song, it “would be a problem” and “morally repugnant.” But, she said, the post had no relation to the white-supremacist anthem.
“There are plenty of references to those words in books and poems,” she said, adding that she was “in charge of everything” posted on the department’s social media accounts.
But when the post was opened on Instagram’s mobile app, audio from the chorus of the song played in the background. After a reporter pointed this out, Ms. McLaughlin said The Times was participating in a left-wing conspiracy theory.
“I’m telling you it’s not there,” she said.
Less than 40 minutes after the interview on Thursday, the Instagram post — including audio from the song — disappeared from social media. Posts on X and Facebook, which did not include an audio component, are still visible.
It was The Times, Ms. McLaughlin said, that was “mainstreaming racism” by tying the agency’s post to the white nationalist anthem.
Richard Hanania, a political scientist who once wrote for white-nationalist publications under a pseudonym before moderating his views, said such accusations were part of the game.
“They do everything up to the line; it’s kind of clever,” he said. “‘We’ll Have Our Home Again’ is a white-nationalist song.” He added that to his knowledge, no other groups would use it.
In the past month, government agencies have made dozens more social-media posts that include iconography associated with far-right extremist groups.
As President Trump escalated his campaign to seize control of Greenland this month, the White House’s X account posted an image of a crossroads, with a sun-drenched White House on the left and Russia and China to the right. The caption read, “Which way, Greenland man?” Last year, an ICE recruitment post on Homeland Security’s X account asked, “Which way, American man?”
The slogans echo the title of a 1978 book — “Which Way Western Man?” — that white-supremacist groups treat “as foundational,” said Robert Futrell, a sociologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The book claims that Jewish people are plotting to destroy Western civilization, that Adolf Hitler was right and that violence against Jews is justified.
This month, the Labor Department posted a noir-style image with the words “TRUST THE PLAN.” That’s also a central catchphrase of QAnon, an internet conspiracy theory that falsely claims the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles, and that Mr. Trump has been chosen to sunder it.
On New Year’s Eve, the White House’s X account posted a photo of Mr. Trump alongside the word “remigration.” That is a decades-old European concept centered on the expulsion of nonwhite people and immigrants deemed “unassimilated,” said Wendy Via, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.
Tens of thousands of Germans protested the concept two years ago after the country’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland party secretly met with neo-Nazis to discuss plans to implement it. (More than a dozen AfD politicians have reposted Mr. Trump’s “remigration” photo on X.)
Also this month, the Labor Department posted a video captioned “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage.” That phrase resembled a German slogan used by Nazis during World War II, “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer,” or “One People, One Realm, One Leader.”
The Department of Labor did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, dismissed any connections between the government posts and extremism.
“It seems that the mainstream media has become a meme of their own: the deranged leftist who claims everything they dislike must be Nazi propaganda,” she said, adding, “Get a grip.”
Those who study the online right said one or two posts might be coincidental. But “when you add it all together,” said William Braniff, director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, “it’s much harder to dismiss.”
Other experts were equally certain the apparent allusions were not an accident.
“These people used to be in the dark corners of the internet,” said Jessie Daniels, a sociologist at Hunter College who has studied online extremism for 30 years. “Now, they are holding public office.”
Part of the draw of the posts could be their potentially secret codes and numerological clues, especially in the recruitment images. They appear to be an appeal to “a very specific segment” of Americans, young men who live online and are disaffected by what they see as unwanted changes in American life, said Peter Simi, a Chapman University sociologist who studies extremist groups.
Shirin Sinnar, a Stanford law professor who studies the legal treatment of political violence, said “they are plainly trying to recruit a segment of the population that’s moved by this rhetoric.”
For years, Mr. Trump and his campaign have dealt with and rejected accusations that officials in the Trump inner circle were surreptitiously appealing to racists and antisemites. A Twitter post by the candidate in 2016 depicting Hillary Clinton beside a Jewish star, before piles of money, had previously appeared on a message board known for antisemitism and white supremacy.
Mr. Trump’s final campaign commercial that year featured grainy images of George Soros, the liberal American financier; Janet L. Yellen, then the chairwoman of the Federal Reserve; and Lloyd C. Blankfein, then the chairman of Goldman Sachs — all of them Jewish — as Mr. Trump warned darkly about the “global special interests.”
“It’s just a straight line between these ideas and the modern Trump administration,” Mr. Hanania said.
The Trump administration is “mobilizing these people and having them flood Twitter and create this environment that they’re winning,” he said. “The fact that the media and liberals react so strongly to this is kind of a badge of honor.”
Scott Greer, a right-wing podcaster and writer who considers himself part of the “online right” that these posts are ostensibly targeting, is not so sure of the administration’s motivation. Some on the Internet-obsessed right think the posts “are meant to bamboozle them into liking Trump,” he said. For his part, he added, even though some of the posts go “too far with what the normal, not-so-online MAGA base may be for,” he now thinks they reflect the broader trend of politicians “taking this more irreverent tone and using memes from the right and left.”
“We accept it as more a normal part of politics,” he said.
Many Republican leaders vehemently denounce antisemitism, and the Trump administration has put pressure on universities and other parts of American society to protect Jews from hate speech and attacks. But in recent months, some members of the party have openly wrestled with whether to reject some Trump supporters who have made antisemitic, bigoted or extremist remarks.
When asked in December whether far-right extremists and conspiracy theorists should be embraced as part of the Trump coalition, Vice President JD Vance declined to rule them out. In contrast, Mr. Trump said of antisemites in an interview this month with The Times, “I think we don’t need them,” emphasizing, “I think we don’t like them.”
Still, most of the social media posts remain, despite the scrutiny over possible allusions to extremism.
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8) Trump’s Fantasies Are Killing Us
By Carlos Lozada, Opinion Columnist, Jan. 27, 2026
Mark Peterson for The New York Times
Just days before a winter storm overwhelmed much of the United States with snow and ice, President Trump addressed the World Economic Forum in Switzerland and declared that America was “the hottest country anywhere in the world.”
The hottest. It’s an adjective Trump likes to use, whatever the weather. Nearly 40 years ago, when he published “The Art of the Deal,” he described his efforts to promote Trump Tower in Manhattan. “We positioned ourselves as the only place for a certain kind of very wealthy person to live — the hottest ticket in town. We were selling fantasy.”
Yes, hotness is a fantasy and, decades later, Trump is still selling it. The American economy, for example, is “booming” and “exploding” and “surging” and “soaring” its way to the “fastest and most dramatic economic turnaround in our country’s history,” as he put it in Davos last week. In fact, the economy remains much like the one he inherited from the Biden administration, with low unemployment but persistent concerns over affordability.
Trump continues to sell the fantasy that he settled eight wars, that he has brought down prescription drug prices by mathematically impossible proportions and, of course, that he won the 2020 election, with the president now pledging to prosecute people for the imaginary crime of rigging it.
He must sell these past fantasies to prop up his latest one: the fantasy of a popular and successful presidency. “People are doing very well,” Trump said in his Davos speech. “They’re very happy with me.” Yet a New York Times/Siena national poll in mid-January found that more than half of registered voters disapprove of Trump’s job performance and more than half believe that the United States is headed in the wrong direction.
Above all, Trump’s insistence that we are the hottest country in the world is disproved by the reality of ICE. While half the country agrees with deporting immigrants who are here unlawfully, 63 percent of those polled disapprove of how Immigration and Customs Enforcement is handling the task. The poll was taken after the killing in Minneapolis of Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, by an ICE agent, but before the killing of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive-care nurse, by Customs and Border Protection agents.
In both cases, Trump administration officials immediately denigrated the slain American citizens as domestic terrorists — yet another fantasy.
Fantasies have long defined Trump’s approach to politics: the birther lies about Barack Obama, the size of the crowd at his 2017 inauguration, the invocation of “alternative facts,” the suggestion that something must be true if “many people” are saying it, the reimagining of Jan. 6 as a “day of love.” JD Vance let the veil slip briefly during the 2024 campaign, when he said he was willing to “create stories” to harness media attention around his preferred issues (then, it was the notion that Haitian immigrants were eating their neighbors’ pets).
Fantasies are alluring because they are not just about belief; they are about allegiance. The interpretation that suits your side is the one you’ll accept or embrace, no matter video footage that indicates otherwise. When fantasies involve life and death, as in Minneapolis, the stakes only rise, and the cost of abandoning your side seems impossibly high.
Protests against ICE and its state-terror tactics have spread from Minneapolis to cities across the country, including Boston, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Omaha, San Antonio, Seattle and Washington, D.C. Our politicians endlessly debate the wisdom of putting “boots on the ground” in foreign conflicts, but many Americans are rejecting those boots on the ground in their own cities and neighborhoods. The news that broke Monday night that Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol official who has done so much to inflame the situation in Minnesota and elsewhere, is expected to leave Minneapolis, is a sign that the administration hopes to limit the damage, if not shift its strategy.
In a moment like this one, there is something especially ridiculous about Trump’s claims to national hotness. They remind me of Paris Hilton’s vacuous “that’s hot” catchphrase, or of Will Ferrell as the villain Mugatu in the 2001 movie “Zoolander,” stroking his poodle and declaring a male model to be “so hot right now.”
Trump has even ruminated about whether he was hotter as a young man or as president. “I was sort of like a hot guy,” he said at a 2024 campaign rally. “I was hot as a pistol. I think I was hotter than I am now, and I became president. OK? I don’t know. I said to somebody, ‘Was I hotter before or hotter now?’ I don’t know. Who the hell knows?”
For Trump, hotness is not just about economic success or poll numbers. It’s not just about how good you look. It’s about whether others are looking at you, about remaining the unceasing focus of the country and the world. To get there, and to stay there, you must create spectacle, stoke controversy, even if it means deploying masked federal agents, a virtual paramilitary force, to America’s cities, and letting them round up our neighbors and kill our citizens.
To stay hot, you must keep raising the temperature, because deep down every politician, like every celebrity, realizes that hotness is fleeting — it’s a vibe, a fad, a meme. The administration knows it and admits it. As a Trump aide put it when the White House was caught manipulating the image of an arrested Minnesota protester to make it look as if she was crying: “Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue.”
But being a “hot” country does not make you a good country. Or a decent one. Or one worthy of respect or emulation. We have gone from being a country where immigrants come to pursue their dreams to one where leaders rule by imposing their fantasies. That’s not hot. It’s just sad.
Exactly 10 years and one day before federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Trump boasted: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s like, incredible.” Now that his administration is in fact shooting people in the middle of the street, was that statement a fantasy? Or will he be proven right?
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9) Trinidadian Families File Wrongful Death Lawsuit Over Boat Strike by U.S. Military
The case tests the Trump administration’s argument that its extrajudicial killings of people suspected of smuggling drugs at sea have been lawful.
By Charlie Savage, Jan. 27, 2026
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy.
A memorial held by family members of Chad Joseph, one of two Trinidadian men whom the U.S. military apparently killed in a boat strike in the fall, in Las Cuevas, Trinidad and Tobago, in October. Andrea De Silva/Reuters
Relatives of two Trinidadian men the U.S. military apparently killed in a boat strike filed a wrongful-death lawsuit on Tuesday, bringing the first legal challenge in an American court to President Trump’s policy of targeting vessels suspected of smuggling drugs at sea.
The lawsuit was filed in Federal District Court in Boston by the mother of one of the men, Chad Joseph, and the sister of the other, Rishi Samaroo. It said they vanished after telling their families they were about to take a boat home from Venezuela in mid-October. Mr. Trump announced on Oct. 14 that the military had attacked such a boat and killed six people.
“These premeditated and intentional killings lack any plausible legal justification,” the complaint said. “Thus, they were simply murders, ordered by individuals at the highest levels of government and obeyed by military officers in the chain of command.”
The lawsuit, brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights, names the U.S. government as a defendant, rather than trying to hold any particular official accountable as an individual. It seeks monetary damages in an amount to be determined at trial.
The White House and the Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.
“Chad was a loving and caring son who was always there for me, for his wife and children, and for our whole family. I miss him terribly. We all do,” Mr. Joseph’s mother, Lenore Burnley, said in a statement. She added, “We hope that speaking out will help get us some truth and closure.”
The strike was the fifth of 36 such attacks to date, killing at least 126 people. The Trump administration has claimed the killings are lawful — and not murders — because Mr. Trump “determined” that there is a formal state of armed conflict with a secret list of 24 drug cartels and gangs he has deemed terrorists.
Outside experts in laws governing the use of lethal force broadly dispute that theory. Congress has not authorized any such armed conflict, and the administration has not explained how trafficking drugs amounts to the kind of armed attack on the United States that can give rise to one.
There are generally steep hurdles to suing the U.S. government, especially for noncitizens abroad who are not covered by the Constitution. But the lawyers for the Trinidadians pointed to two statutes about offenses at sea, so-called admiralty law, and argued that the provisions opened the door to judicial review of whether the killings were lawful.
The lawsuit invoked the Suits in Admiralty Act of 1920, which waived governmental immunity for lawsuits over alleged offenses at sea, and the Deaths on the High Seas Act of 1920, which created a cause of action for lawsuits brought by close relatives of people who were wrongfully killed.
The complaint also invokes the Alien Tort Statute, a 1789 law that allows foreign nationals to sue in U.S. court over violations of international human rights law. This part of the case argues that “the customary international law norm prohibiting extrajudicial killing is well-defined and universally recognized.”
The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has issued a classified memo that is said to approve the boat strikes as lawful based on accepting Mr. Trump’s assertion that there is an armed conflict with various drug cartels and criminal gangs. The memo says the presumed drugs aboard such vessels are a lawful military target, according to people who have read it, based on the idea that cartels could use the proceeds to fund their purported warfare.
The lawsuit denies that there is a legal state of armed conflict, regardless of what Mr. Trump asserts he has “determined,” while also arguing that even if there were one, the killings would still be unlawful attacks and war crimes.
“These killings were wrongful because they took place outside of armed conflict and in circumstances in which Mr. Joseph and Mr. Samaroo were not engaged in activities that presented a concrete, specific and imminent threat of death or serious physical injury, and where there were means other than lethal force that could have reasonably been employed to neutralize any such threat,” it argued.
It added: “Alternatively, even if the United States’ lethal strike against Mr. Joseph and Mr. Samaroo occurred during an armed conflict — which it did not — the strike was a wrongful act because it constituted an intentional killing of civilians who were not members of an organized armed group engaged in an armed conflict with the United States and were not directly participating in military hostilities against the United States,” which would make it a war crime.
In mounting a formal challenge to the policy, the case joins a complaint against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth filed in early December before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an arm of the Organization of American States that investigates human rights abuses in the Western Hemisphere. It was filed by the family of a Colombian man apparently killed in a boat attack on Sept. 15, Alejandro Carranza.
But the United States has not ratified any of the inter-American human rights conventions and does not consider the commission’s findings to be binding. By contrast, the new lawsuit puts the legal dispute before the federal judiciary.
The two rights groups handling the lawsuit were also involved in litigation over a decade ago on behalf of the relatives of two American citizens killed in drone strikes in Yemen. Those citizens were Anwar al-Awlaki, a member of Al Qaeda’s Yemen branch who was deliberately targeted, and his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who was killed when the United States was targeting someone else.
The Obama administration offered an array of defenses, including invoking the state secrets privilege and arguing that targeting decisions in the congressionally authorized military conflict against Al Qaeda was a “political question” that courts had no ability to second-guess. A Federal District Court judge dismissed the case in 2014, finding that lawsuits against national security officials focused on constitutional rights had not been permitted under such circumstances.
The Trinidadian lawsuit is different. The relatives of the men who were killed are suing the government as a whole, not specific national security officials. It relies on congressional statutes permitting such lawsuits, not judicial doctrine over when constitutional rights can be vindicated in court. There is no congressional authorization for any armed conflict. And the Trump administration has not sought to hide the attack, instead boasting of it.
Brett Max Kaufman, an A.C.L.U. lawyer on the case who also worked on the failed attempt to obtain judicial review of the Awlaki killings, acknowledged the difficulty of persuading courts to review government killings abroad but expressed optimism.
“The maritime claims we’re bringing here are straightforwardly available through acts of Congress, and the government has already boasted of its culpability for killing these men,” he said. “The government’s ordinary playbook to short-circuit judicial review in these kinds of cases should be thrown out the window.”
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10) ‘The Biggest Act of Union-Busting in U.S. History’: Trump’s War on Federal Workers
With 300,000 employees gone and collective-bargaining rights eliminated, the administration has hobbled organized labor. Did it also start a movement?
By Dan Kaufman, Jan. 27, 2026
Dan Kaufman, a contributing writer for the magazine, has been reporting on labor for 15 years. For this article, he interviewed more than three dozen people, including union officials and organizers, federal workers, members of Congress and policy experts.
“In 2023, only a quarter of eligible federal workers were union members. (Federal unions are ‘open shop,’ meaning no one is required to belong or pay dues, even though the union is legally obligated to represent all the workers in their bargaining unit.) And since 1962, when federal workers were first granted collective-bargaining rights, they have been explicitly prohibited from striking, significantly reducing their leverage in negotiations. Trump didn’t just end collective-bargaining rights; he also eliminated automatic payroll deductions of dues, depriving unions of much-needed funds to contest the administration’s policies.”
Illustration by Tim Enthoven
Two days into the government shutdown in October, Ellen Mei, who administered SNAP benefits at the United States Department of Agriculture, appeared on MSNBC. Mei, who was also president of her union chapter, warned viewers that millions of Americans might struggle to access food assistance, a problem exacerbated by staff reductions earlier in the year. She was promptly notified she would be fired. She told me she is fighting the decision with the help of a union lawyer, in part to rally her co-workers. “I don’t know if morale can go that much lower,” she said. “Especially after we lost half the people in our office. There’s so little hope left. I’m trying to show that we’re not taking this.”
Since the start of his second term, Trump has cut the federal work force by more than 300,000 people. In March, he signed an executive order stripping more than a million federal workers of their collective-bargaining rights. The order invoked a provision of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act that exempts the government from extending bargaining rights to workers at agencies whose “primary function” is national security. It affected more than 30 agencies and agency subdivisions, including the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S.D.A. — but not, paradoxically, many workers actively involved in national security, such as Border Patrol agents, whose union endorsed Trump in the 2024 election.
A week before the shutdown, Russell Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, urged federal agencies “to use this opportunity” to further dismantle the federal work force. Soon Trump was threatening to withhold back pay from furloughed federal employees, in defiance of a 2019 law he signed in his first administration. “I would say it depends on who we’re talking about,” he told reporters. “There are some people that really don’t deserve to be taken care of.”
As they had all year, federal labor unions were struggling to find a way to respond. The federal government is the largest employer in the country, with more than two million civilian workers, who might perform coastal restoration, ensure food safety or administer Social Security benefits. The American Federation of Government Employees, or A.F.G.E., the largest federal labor union, relied on tactics it had used for decades: lobbying and filing lawsuits.
But for a growing rank-and-file movement of mostly younger union members, which works across agencies and is known as the Federal Unionists Network (FUN), the shutdown presented an unusual opportunity. Like the progressive upstarts challenging the old-guard leadership of the Democratic Party, FUN is pushing the national unions to fight the Trump administration more vigorously.
With the shutdown, FUN saw a chance to show that the fate of federal workers is inexorably bound up with the public’s welfare. The group hoped to capitalize on the outcry over cuts to government jobs and services that have had an impact on blue and red states alike. (More than 80 percent of federal employees live outside the Washington metropolitan area.) Members held rallies to encourage Senate Democrats to keep up their filibuster as lawmakers sought to pressure the administration to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies. FUN also staged actions to draw attention to the services under threat, drawing on a labor strategy known as “bargaining for the common good.” At a food drive outside the U.S.D.A., more than 100 federal workers donated some 1,600 pounds of food and $20,000 for food banks.
But as the shutdown wore on, Everett Kelley, A.F.G.E.’s president, had become increasingly worried that it was federal workers who needed those donations. In late October, he woke up to reports of federal employees standing in a food-bank line. Not long after, he volunteered to serve food at a church mission in Maryland. “I saw little children of federal employees coming through this line,” Kelley told me. To him, it was as if federal employees were being held hostage by both parties for their own ends. On Oct. 27, Kelley effectively called on Democrats to end their filibuster.
To FUN members, A.F.G.E.’s willingness to capitulate was emblematic of the problems with Kelley’s approach: a narrow focus on the short-term hardships of its members at the expense of the larger political battle. “I get why any union would be hesitant to embrace this kind of fight, especially in the face of an administration that has shown it is completely willing to pursue aggressive political and legal retaliation,” Chris Dols, FUN’s co-founder, told me. “That’s why it has to come from below. That’s our entire project. How do we give voice to federal unionists who are willing to take some risks that the unions aren’t willing to?”
Two days before the shutdown ended, Kelley lashed out at FUN during a meeting of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. executive council, which comprises more than 50 leaders from its affiliated unions, suggesting that the group’s continued support of the Democratic filibuster was undermining A.F.G.E. “He didn’t go into great detail, but it was intense,” one union president recalled, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to talk candidly about an internal meeting. At the time, the Department of Transportation was canceling a significant percentage of flights across the country because of a shortage of air traffic controllers, and pressure was building on the administration. The union president shared FUN’s position and speculated that many others on the council did, too. “It was just at the point of maximum pressure,” he said, noting that polling showed the public blamed Republicans more than Democrats for the shutdown.
Kelley credited A.F.G.E. for kick-starting the process that reopened the government. But to Dols and other members of FUN, the union merely provided Democrats with cover to justify giving in. Kelley told me that members who wanted the filibuster to continue were “few and far between.” But many A.F.G.E. workers I spoke with felt betrayed by his decision. Mae apGovannon, a member of A.F.G.E. and a FUN activist who reviews disability claims at the Department of Veterans Affairs, was enraged. “I felt like my voice had been taken away,” they said.
The shutdown — and the response to it — exposed the underlying weakness of federal unions, which have been largely moribund for decades. Before Trump’s second term, many federal workers rarely thought about their unions, if they belonged to them at all. In 2023, only a quarter of eligible federal workers were union members. (Federal unions are “open shop,” meaning no one is required to belong or pay dues, even though the union is legally obligated to represent all the workers in their bargaining unit.) And since 1962, when federal workers were first granted collective-bargaining rights, they have been explicitly prohibited from striking, significantly reducing their leverage in negotiations.
Trump didn’t just end collective-bargaining rights; he also eliminated automatic payroll deductions of dues, depriving unions of much-needed funds to contest the administration’s policies. In August, A.F.G.E. was forced to lay off 30 percent of its staff as money dried up. “A.F.G.E. punches below our weight because we have failed to organize members appropriately for a long time,” says Dave Casserly, an A.F.G.E. member and an attorney for the Department of Labor, who emphasized he was speaking in his personal capacity and not for the department. “The union was sold to them as if it were selling them their job insurance. So, once we’re not providing that anymore, they have no reason to be a member of the union.”
Trump’s executive order was “the biggest act of union-busting in U.S. history,” Joseph McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown University, told me. Roughly 80 percent of unionized federal workers lost their bargaining rights. McCartin views it as far more radical than when Ronald Reagan broke the air traffic controllers union following its 1981 strike. “The Reagan administration never tried to uproot collective bargaining root and branch,” he says. “It never challenged the idea that collective bargaining had a place in government.”
Federal workers already had the fewest collective-bargaining rights of any unionized employees. They are not only barred from striking; they are not even allowed to assert the right to strike. Nor can they bargain for higher wages or benefits. “The crisis is that federal workers have ended up with a system that most other union members would not accept to begin with,” says David Kusnet, a former staff member of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, one of the country’s largest public-employee unions.
In many countries, labor unrest has often served as a political counterweight. A wave of public-employee strikes in France, in 1995, essentially shut down the country for weeks, forcing the conservative government to abandon several proposed cuts to the welfare state. And in 2024, South Korea’s second-largest union called for a general strike in the wake of the president’s declaration of martial law, a move that helped persuade him to back down.
“If we could strike — I’m not implying anything — I think it would make a big difference,” Kelley, the president of A.F.G.E., told me. Federal workers have struck before, notably in 1970, when 200,000 postal workers staged a wildcat strike that won them higher wages and the right, unprecedented for employees of the federal government, to bargain for wages and benefits. But the legacy of the 1981 air traffic controllers strike, and the Reagan administration’s harsh reprisal, continues to cast a pall on the labor movement. (In 1980, there were 187 major strikes; in 2024, there were 31.)
Liz Shuler, the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., who represents 15 million private- and public-sector workers, told me that internal data shows workers are not ready for a general strike. “We are not there,” she said. “There’s a lot of deep education and mobilization that’s happening within our unions to get us ready for a moment where we might need to strategically call for a one-day strike or a strike in a particular industry.”
McCartin says that Shuler and other labor leaders have been too risk-averse, given the stakes. “I would say that labor leaders, for the most part, have drawn the wrong lessons from PATCO,” he said, referring to the air traffic controllers’ strike. “One of the lessons that they seem to have drawn is that any confrontation with a sitting president in which federal workers are at issue is going to go badly for the union movement, and that any use of collective action leaves it vulnerable to what happened to PATCO. I think they have failed to understand the difference in the context between the current moment and that time. And they have an all-or-nothing approach: We can’t strike, therefore, what can we do except turn to the courts? I think that there was a lack of a plan, of doing something in between.” He noted that in 2019, Trump ended a monthlong government shutdown after 10 air traffic controllers called in sick.
McCartin believes that the more recent shutdown revealed deep stagnancy in the federal labor movement. There was, he said, “a failure to rise to the moment, but a failure that was long, long in the making. The preparations needed to be happening over a period of years.”
Chris Dols, of FUN, says one reason for that failure is structural. “One of the biggest weaknesses of the federal sector is how carved up we are,” he told me. FUN was founded in 2023 to build a federal labor movement that could operate across agencies and unions. Dols, who until recently was president of a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers local, explained that the corps, for instance, has units that are part of A.F.G.E., while others are represented by the National Federation of Federal Employees (N.F.F.E.), and still others are in the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers. They needed to be able to speak — and act — as a group.
Federal unions have also gained renewed support from many of their members in the wake of Trump’s attacks. By February of last year, A.F.G.E. was the fastest growing union in the country; its membership was at an all-time high, though still significantly less than half of the eligible workers. (Many union locals with activist leaders have higher participation.) Since Trump banned the automatic collection of dues, more than half of A.F.G.E. workers have chosen to continue paying those fees through alternate means.
The situation mirrors a larger paradox for labor: Unions have almost never been more popular (nearly 70 percent of the public approves of unions, according to a recent Gallup poll) and have never been weaker (union membership is at an all-time low and falling lower). In 2024, only 9.9 percent of all private- and public-sector workers belonged to a union, a figure that may fall to barely 9 percent once Trump’s executive order is reflected in the numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“We’re at a dangerous point,” McCartin says. “Unions will survive this era. And they will survive, even, in some form, in parts of the federal government. But whether the union movement survives as a significant force in our country, whether it survives as a pillar of upholding a democratic political culture, as it has for most of the 20th and into the 21st century, remains to be seen. There will be something called the A.F.L.-C.I.O. after Donald Trump leaves office, but will it be only a shadow of what it once was? I think that, unfortunately, is a scary possibility.”
Mark Smith, a FUN co-founder, is president of the union local that represents health care workers at the San Francisco V.A. Health Care System. The V.A., which has the largest civilian work force of any federal agency, has been among the hardest hit by Trump’s executive order: It lost nearly 400,000 union members, around 2.6 percent of the country’s entire unionized work force. Many of the members in his local, Smith told me, opposed Everett Kelley’s call to end the filibuster. “People were pretty heartbroken by that,” he said. He was also disappointed by Randy Erwin, president of the N.F.F.E., of which his union is a part. Erwin gave a fiery speech denouncing Trump’s threat to withhold pay as unconstitutional, only to later fail to connect the plight of federal workers to broader political issues. For Smith, the fate of the V.A.’s workers and the wider public were deeply entwined, even if neither group was fully aware of it.
Smith has been working to drive home this point since the day after Trump’s second inauguration, holding emergency labor-education meetings for his members, many of whom had no idea what a union even was. When I met him last spring, he was frantically setting up a picket at the San Francisco V.A. Medical Center. Several dozen workers, vets and citizens had gathered, holding signs that read: “Save Our V.A., Let Us Work.”
Smith wasn’t always a labor activist. “I grew up conservative,” he told me. “It’s funny now that I’m the president of the union, because I didn’t know what a union was. If I had known, I probably would have thought, Oh, those lazy union workers.” Smith was raised in Alberta, Canada, on his father’s cattle ranch, in a region dominated by the energy industry. (His mother is from upstate New York; he is a dual citizen.) As a child, he had “antisocial” tendencies, which got him into numerous hockey brawls and, at times, trouble with the police. “I was a mediocre player, more of a fighter,” he said. He held up a clenched fist, which had a sunken knuckle. “My mom tells me: ‘Oh, union president — you’ve found a prosocial outlet for your antisocial streak.’”
Smith has a wiry frame, a shaved head and a close-cropped beard. A tattoo on his right arm shows a stick and a bag, memorializing his “hobo days,” several years in his 20s that he spent hitchhiking across Canada, Mexico and the United States. Interspersed with his travels were dozens of jobs: roofer, sewage-truck swamper, concrete pourer, oil rig roughneck. Eventually he went back to school to become an occupational therapist.
For the first seven years that Smith worked at the V.A., he was not involved with the union. “My conditions were good, basically,” he said. “I didn’t really see the union as a tool.” But during the pandemic, staffing and equipment shortages became more acute, with damaging consequences for both workers and patients. That motivated Smith to run for union steward. “Labor was all I talked about for a while,” he said. “My girlfriend told me: ‘You’ve got some real convert energy now.’”
Not long after, Smith joined with Dols and others to create FUN. Both were soon galvanized by the prospect of Trump’s re-election. “Our unions weren’t even talking about it,” Smith said. The group remained tiny, a loose-knit collective of roughly 200 people, until Trump’s victory. It has since grown to a network of 20,000 people and garnered the support of powerful labor leaders like Liz Shuler, of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. (who has spoken at FUN events); Sara Nelson, the president of the flight attendants union; and Shawn Fain, the president of the United Auto Workers. Last February, FUN staged its first mass mobilization, a Save Our Services Day of Action in 35 cities across the country, which included speeches by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani, then a long-shot mayoral candidate, in Manhattan’s Foley Square.
Smith is one of roughly 100 FUN activists who lead a union local. Last spring, 60 percent of eligible workers were members of Smith’s local, a much higher rate than for most federal unions. “There’s an old labor saying: ‘The best organizer is a bad boss,’” Smith told me. “People aren’t just sad they might lose their jobs. They’re pissed.”
Trump’s executive order was held up for some agencies by litigation until early August, when an appellate court in San Francisco lifted a lower court’s injunction. One rationale the court gave was that the order was motivated by national security, not by “retaliatory animus,” as plaintiffs had argued — even though the White House’s own fact sheet claimed that canceling collective-bargaining rights was necessary because the affected unions were “hostile” to Trump’s agenda.
A few days later, the secretary of the V.A., Doug Collins, terminated the agency’s contracts with five of its major unions, including Smith’s. Smith then received notice that the local’s office had to be cleared out immediately. He had filed his first grievance there, for a group of workers who hadn’t been paid properly for on-call duty over several years. He got them a few hundred thousand dollars in back pay. Without a union contract, such a victory would be almost impossible.
Smith told me that he spent the day trying to convince bewildered colleagues they still had a union. “The last six months have felt like psychological warfare,” he said, stressing that he was speaking only in his personal capacity and not on behalf of the V.A. “There’s lots of confusion, there’s lots of fear. Everyone is feeling a little bit hopeless and wondering if this is ever going to end.” But, he emphasized, a union was more than a contract; his union existed for 45 years before it won collective-bargaining rights. “This feels like the fight of this generation,” he said.
When I spoke to Smith again recently, he admitted how difficult that fight had become. “People are dropping off in dues, the longer that we go without collective-bargaining rights,” he said. “It’s a slow drip.” Smith worries that as V.A. membership in the N.F.F.E. dwindles, other workers, whose economic motivations align more closely with Trump’s agenda, have gained power. Workers at Geo Group, a private-prison company that has received billions of dollars in contracts to expand and maintain ICE facilities, now comprise one of the fastest growing sections of the N.F.F.E. (Some federal unions include both public- and private-sector locals.) In an editorial in the Bergen Record, N.F.F.E.’s president, Randy Erwin, defended the reopening of an ICE detention facility in Newark and criticized those who had protested outside it as “misguided.”
On Aug. 28, Trump released his Labor Day proclamation, calling the American worker “the living embodiment of the American Dream.” Just moments before, he had signed an executive order that stripped half a dozen more agencies of their collective-bargaining rights. Still, Smith and Dols saw signs of hope for labor, even in some unlikely places. In early December, the House passed the Protect America’s Workforce Act, a bipartisan bill that would restore collective-bargaining rights to federal employees. Twenty Republicans voted in favor of the act, perhaps the clearest sign yet of a backlash against the decimation of federal labor rights, though it’s unlikely to pass the Senate.
“I’ve always believed in collective bargaining,” Mike Lawler, a Republican congressman from New York and a co-sponsor of the bill, told me. “I fundamentally believe that when the government enters into an agreement, you have to uphold that agreement. You can’t just wipe it away with the stroke of a pen.” Representative Rob Bresnahan, a Republican who also supported the bill, told me that for him his “North Star is always Northeastern Pennsylvania.” He emphasized that his district is home to 10,000 federal workers — who are employed at a V.A. hospital, an army depot and a federal prison, among other places. “When it came down to the Protect America’s Workforce Act, I thought about my friends, my family, my neighbors. And I thought about my district. So for me it was the prudent thing to do.”
Around the same time, Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah, a Republican, signed a bill repealing one of the most restrictive labor laws in the country, which banned collective bargaining for the state’s public workers. Cox signed the bill into law earlier in 2025, but teachers, firefighters and police officers spearheaded a successful referendum campaign to repeal it, pushing the state legislature and Cox to do so preemptively.
The Trump administration, however, has continued to double down. In October, it made indefinite a federal hiring freeze in place since January of last year. Two months later, The Washington Post reported that the V.A. would be cutting as many as 35,000 unfilled health care positions. A spokesman told The Post that the jobs were being eliminated because they were “no longer needed” and had been empty for more than a year. He left unmentioned the severe staffing shortages of doctors and nurses documented by the V.A.’s inspector general in August. (Collins later called The Post’s story “fake news.”)
The budget deal that ended the shutdown lasted only through January. Congressional Democratic leaders, however, were showing little appetite for another shutdown, with House members agreeing to a new spending package even as the administration was threatening to cut off all funding to states with so-called sanctuary cities. But after the killing of Alex Pretti, a V.A. nurse and an A.F.G.E. member, by Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis, many Senate Democrats said they would not vote for any deal that included additional money for the Department of Homeland Security. FUN, Dols told me, would support a shutdown over funding for D.H.S. given what was at stake. Whether or not a shutdown happens, entire agencies — the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — have already been effectively dismantled. “This administration has been shutting down the government piece by piece all year long,” Dols said. “And those are permanent shutdowns.”
For Dols, the Republican support of the collective-bargaining bill suggests the tide might be turning. “There are cracks in the Republican MAGA coalition, even if we need a lot more,” he said. But there were cracks in the unity of federal unions, too. In mid-January, FUN staged a rally outside the Senate building, cosponsored by all the major federal unions, to push the Senate to restore collective-bargaining rights. The day before, A.F.G.E. pulled out. Dols downplayed the defection. No one else dropped out, and hundreds of workers from across the federal sector — even dozens of A.F.G.E. members — showed up. More important than the rally, there were at least 100 new organizing drives of nonunionized employees across the federal sector last year. “The federal labor movement has been a sleeping giant for a long time,” Dols said. “Trump woke it up.”
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11) Board of Peace Set to Hand Trump Sweeping Powers Over Gaza
A draft resolution revealed some of the plans for the new international body, which met for the first time last week amid criticism from some U.S. allies.
By Adam Rasgon and Natan Odenheimer, Reporting from Tel Aviv, Jan. 27, 2026
President Trump would have sweeping powers over the future governance of the war-ravaged Gaza Strip and the well-being of its people, under a plan drafted by the new international group he leads, laying out how it would operate.
The group, the Board of Peace, met for the first time in Davos, Switzerland, last week, as member states including Azerbaijan and Qatar, signed its founding charter, which calls for securing “enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict.”
Much about the Board of Peace has so far been unclear, but a draft resolution, a copy of which was obtained by The Times, would allow the chairman, Mr. Trump, to nominate senior officials who will help administer Gaza, and assign responsibilities.
Those officials include a “high representative” for Gaza, tasked with overseeing a Palestinian body administering the enclave, and the commander of an international stabilization force, which is intended to help provide security. Mr. Trump would also have the power to approve resolutions and suspend them in urgent cases.
The resolution is dated Jan. 22 — last Thursday — and has not been signed by Mr. Trump, which would bring it into force, according to three officials who were briefed on the resolution and verified the authenticity of the obtained copy. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, adding that the resolution was currently under discussion.
It was not clear whether the draft was the final text of the resolution.
The document resembles a United Nations Security Council resolution, and appears to be an effort by the Board of Peace to formalize some of its plans for Gaza.
The notion of establishing a Board of Peace for Gaza was first set out in Mr. Trump’s 20-point plan, announced last September, for ending the 2-year war between Israel and Hamas that devastated the Palestinian enclave.
In November, the U.N. Security Council granted the Board of Peace a mandate as part of U.S.-led efforts to sustain the cease-fire in Gaza.
The assumption was that the board would focus solely on Gaza, but the Trump administration said this month that it would address conflicts elsewhere, although the scope of that remains unclear.
Though some countries have enthusiastically joined the new international organization after being invited by Mr. Trump, others, including close U.S. allies like France and Britain, have refused. Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said his country would not join because the board excluded the Palestinian Authority and because the body was “outside the framework of the United Nations.”
Leaders of nations that signed onto the project would make up the Board of Peace, with Mr. Trump as chairman, with the power to name his successor, and below that would be an executive board.
On Jan. 16, the White House announced the names of seven people who would make up the executive board, including Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, and Tony Blair, the former British prime minister. The board is tasked with helping implement the 20-point plan for Gaza.
Yet the draft resolution said that Susie Wiles, the president’s chief of staff, and Martin Edelman, a New York-based real estate lawyer, would also be part of the executive board. It is the first time their names have been mentioned publicly in relation to the Board of Peace.
The draft resolution “makes clear the United States is in charge of Gaza, with all other countries and entities playing a support role,” said Michael Ratney, a former U.S. consul general in Jerusalem.
Mr. Ratney described the resolution as having “uncertain legal standing,” but went on to say that “Gazans are desperate and anything that stands to improve their lives, including the 20-point plan, is worth pursuing.”
According to the draft resolution, the Board of Peace will coordinate the reconstruction of Gaza, an immense project that is expected to cost tens of billions of dollars and take years, and facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid there. It also calls for the establishment of “humanitarian zones” in the enclave where people would be able to safely access relief.
The draft resolution refers to some of the complicated challenges facing Gaza.
For instance, it stipulates that people and organizations with “a demonstrated history of collaboration, infiltration or influence” with Hamas would not be involved in administering or rebuilding Gaza.
Tens of thousands of civil employees and security officers have served in the Hamas-run government, including medical professionals, rank-and-file police officers and rescue workers.
The draft resolution also details the role of Nickolay Mladenov, a former U.N. envoy to the Middle East peace process, who was named by the White House as the first high representative for Gaza.
According to the resolution, Mr. Mladenov will closely supervise the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, a body of Palestinian technocrats appointed to administer the territory and oversee the police force, and direct all of its “day-to-day activities.”
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12) As Minneapolis Rages, Legislators Move to Restrict ICE in Their States
Efforts to curtail federal law enforcement tactics began last year, but with the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, Democratic lawmakers are pushing harder.
By David W. Chen, Jan. 28, 2026
Eric Lee for The New York Times
After the deaths of two American citizens in Minneapolis at the hands of federal agents, Democratic legislators across the country, aided by libertarian groups, are redoubling their efforts to restrict and challenge federal immigration tactics in their states.
A Colorado bill that was introduced in mid-January would enable individuals to sue federal law enforcement officials for civil rights violations.
In Delaware, a bill similar to one that was filed in New York last spring would prevent commercial airlines from receiving jet fuel tax exemptions if they transport people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement without warrants and due process.
And in the wake of the killing on Saturday of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, a California lawmaker said he would sponsor two bills, one to require that any shooting by ICE agents be subject to an independent state investigation, and another to bar ICE from using state properties as a staging area for federal operations.
Ever since the second Trump administration embarked on its large-scale deportation effort, Democratic-leaning states have proposed — and passed, in some instances — countermeasures, such as banning masked or unidentified law enforcement officers. Last month, a dozen legislators from seven states announced that they would coordinate legislation in 2026 to complement the litigation already being used by Democratic attorneys general to challenge immigration policies.
But after the killings of both Mr. Pretti and Renee Good, a resident protesting ICE’s presence in the Twin Cities, those endeavors have gained more urgency, according to lawmakers and immigration rights groups.
“I do think that we are starting to see legislators who, last session, were afraid of being a thorn in the side of an ascendant Trump administration — they were so afraid of poking the bear,” said Naureen Shah, who leads the American Civil Liberties Union’s immigration and advocacy work. “The tide is now turning, and maybe they feel that they’ve got nothing to lose.”
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, questioned the motives of all those state-level Democrats.
“Democrats don’t care about the rule of law,” she said. “If they did, they would support the president’s law-and-order agenda, which includes enforcing federal immigration law. Instead, Democrats are openly undermining the rule of law to protect criminal illegal aliens.”
Some states that are controlled by Republicans have gone the opposite direction. A new bill in the South Carolina legislature would mandate that all county sheriffs enter into formal agreements to work with ICE. Tennessee Republicans want government agencies to check the legal status of all residents as a condition of receiving public assistance, and also to verify the immigration status of elementary and secondary school students, despite a decade-old Supreme Court ruling that forbade it.
With most state legislatures back in session, patterns are emerging out of the dozens of bills that are active or being discussed, said Gaby Goldstein, the founder of State Futures, which organizes progressive lawmakers nationally and tracks legislation.
Many are related to rule-of-law concerns and civil rights protections.
The Colorado proposal, for instance, mirrors ones in California, Washington, Wisconsin and elsewhere that seek to establish a private right of action, which would give individuals or organizations the ability to file civil lawsuits for constitutional violations in state court, rather than on the federal courts, said State Senator Mike Weissman, the bill’s primary sponsor and a lawyer by trade. He represents the Denver suburb of Aurora, which Mr. Trump has said has been “taken over” by Venezuelan gangs. His bill would take aim at civil immigration enforcement, he said, “not police officers doing ordinary work.”
Though the legislation would apply to ICE and other branches of the Department of Homeland Security, he emphasized that the bill focuses on conduct that would violate constitutional rights rather than on employees of any particular branch of government.
“I mean, to use a crazy example, if Trump starts mobilizing park service employees to go crack heads and violate the Fourth Amendment, they’re going to find themselves answerable as well,” he said.
He has been working with the Institute for Justice, a libertarian group that has long battled against federal overreach. One of its cases involves a construction worker in Alabama of Mexican descent who, despite being a U.S. citizen and showing his REAL ID, was detained twice by masked agents.
Under current legal standards, Anya Bidwell, a senior attorney for the Institute for Justice, said individuals find it hard to sue state and local officials, and all but impossible to sue federal ones, who have broader immunity. And with the Supreme Court and Congress showing no appetite to step in, she said it is incumbent upon a state to “protect its own citizens.”
“Power works in a way that once you have it, you try to accumulate more and more and more of it,” she said. “And it’s really important to be able to fight back and to be able to enforce the rights that are guaranteed to us as individuals. That really shouldn’t be a partisan issue.”
That sensibility is also guiding State Senator Anthony Broadman, a first-term Democrat who represents a swing district in Bend, Ore., and is trying to appeal to conservatives who might remember when they were the ones outraged by federal recklessness.
Oregonians, Mr. Broadman said, still remember the armed sieges in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon, he said, “where conservatives have been harmed by the federal government.” So he hopes to introduce a bill similar to the one in Colorado that would apply to federal constitutional violations, but would not be limited to immigration.
“It’s not just liberals and immigrants who get hurt by the United States, when they violate people’s rights,” he said.
Other targets of state-level Democratic bills include banning agreements that delegate some federal immigration powers to state and municipal law enforcement agencies (Hawaii, Massachusetts, Vermont) and banning masked or unidentified law enforcement officers (Maryland, Arizona, Virginia).
A bill in Washington would limit the ability of federal immigrant agents to enter child care centers, health care facilities and election sites without a warrant or court order. And in Maryland, one lawmaker wants to prevent ICE agents who were recruited by the Trump administration from later working for any state law enforcement agencies.
Democrats are also hoping to gain more traction on bills introduced last year that would use fiscal tools to clamp down on immigration tactics, such as by restricting public contracting with companies that work with ICE.
Lawmakers in Maryland and New York have proposed that if the federal government withholds money that the state is owed, in defiance of court decisions, then they would place liens on federally owned properties.
The Trump administration has already begun to fight back. The Department of Justice sued Illinois in December after the Democratic governor, JB Pritzker, signed a law making it easier for state residents to sue immigration agents. Federal lawyers argued that the law placed the agents in physical harm and at financial risk.
One state whose legislature is not scheduled to meet until Feb. 17 is Minnesota. But already, legislators are hammering out bills in response to Ms. Good’s death, such as prohibiting or limiting ICE agents from entering sensitive places such as hospitals, schools and group homes, said State Senator Erin Murphy, the chamber’s top Democrat, a nurse by training.
Another proposal — which she believes has not been introduced elsewhere — would require that federal agents operating in Minnesota meet the same kind of training requirements now in place for local law enforcement — including providing first aid. ICE agents appeared to reject offers to aid Ms. Good after she was shot, including from a man who identified himself as a doctor.
There are no Republican co-sponsors yet for any of the proposed bills. But Ms. Murphy did note that Representative Marion Rarick, who represents a reliably Republican district about 45 minutes northwest of Minneapolis, had posted on Facebook that “ICE must stop racial profiling and violating civil rights as has been experienced and documented by LAW ENFORCEMENT. Full stop. No excuses. Just stop.”
Laurel Rosenhall contributed reporting
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13) Miller Suggests Federal Agents May Have Diverted From ‘Protocol’ Before Pretti Shooting
The comments by Mr. Miller, the influential White House deputy chief of staff, came after days of blaming Alex Pretti, who was fatally shot by federal agents.
By Max Kim, Jan. 28, 2026
Stephen Miller at the White House on Tuesday. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
Stephen Miller, a top aide to President Trump, has suggested that federal agents “may not have been following” protocol before the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, after days in which he and other Trump administration officials portrayed the shooting as justified.
Mr. Miller said in a statement that the White House had provided “clear guidance” to the Department of Homeland Security that federal agents deployed to Minnesota as part of the administration’s immigration crackdown be used to protect “arrest teams” from people he described as “disruptors.”
“We are evaluating why the CBP team may not have been following that protocol,” Mr. Miller said in the statement, referring to agents from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a law enforcement agency under the department. The statement was provided to The New York Times on Wednesday by a White House spokesperson and was reported earlier by CNN.
While Mr. Miller did not elaborate, his comments came as the Trump administration faces escalating blowback for Mr. Pretti’s killing.
Shortly after the shooting, Mr. Miller, the highly influential deputy White House chief of staff, characterized the 37-year-old Minneapolis resident in a social media post as a “domestic terrorist” and an “assassin” who had “tried to murder federal agents,” without providing evidence. He accused Democratic leaders who had condemned the killing of inciting insurrection.
Other Trump administration officials offered similar accounts. The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, claimed that Mr. Pretti had brandished a gun and appeared intent on inflicting “maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.”
A New York Times analysis of videos of the shooting contradicted those accounts. The analysis shows that Mr. Pretti was holding a phone — not a gun — when federal agents pinned him to the ground before shooting him. A preliminary review by U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s internal watchdog office also did not say that Mr. Pretti had brandished a gun.
In his statement on Wednesday, Mr. Miller said the Homeland Security Department’s initial assessment of the killing of Mr. Pretti was “based on reports from CBP on the ground.”
The Trump administration’s comments about the killing of Mr. Pretti, who worked as a nurse in the intensive-care unit at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Minneapolis, have stirred widespread public anger and prompted more protests in the city over the aggressive federal immigration crackdown.
Mr. Trump told Fox News on Tuesday that he might “de-escalate” the campaign but later, at a rally in Iowa, made incendiary remarks that falsely described thousands of people arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minnesota as “hardened, vicious, horrible criminals” and anti-ICE demonstrators as “paid insurrectionists.”
Mr. Trump and his aides have made similar justifications for the killing of Renee Good, the 37-year-old Minneapolis woman fatally shot on Jan. 7. by the ICE agent Jonathan Ross, who the president said had acted in self-defense. Local and state officials in Minnesota have contested those accounts. A New York Times analysis of that shooting shows no indication that Mr. Ross had been run over.
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14) Minneapolis May Be Trump’s Gettysburg
By Jamelle Bouie
Opinion Columnist, Jan. 28, 2026
Julia Demaree Nikhinson/Associated Press
It was clear after the killing of Renee Good on Jan. 7 that “Operation Metro Surge” — the Trump administration’s pretextual immigration crackdown in Minnesota — was a failure. Far from cowing the people of Minneapolis, Good’s death at the hand of an ICE officer stiffened their resolve and led even more Minnesotans to join the fight against the president’s masked paramilitaries.
A less fanatical White House might have used that moment to stage a tactical withdrawal, to pull back on the assault and recalibrate in the face of stiff resistance. But in the actually existing Trump administration, immigration policy is dictated by rigid ideologues. They met Good’s death with insults, slander and the promise of further repression.
Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said that Good was engaged in “domestic terrorism.” The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, called Good a “deranged lunatic.” Vice President JD Vance said that her actions were “an attack on law and order” and “an attack on the American people.” He also said that the officer who shot Good was protected by “absolute immunity.” (He later backtracked from this claim, insisting instead that he said the opposite, video evidence notwithstanding.)
We know what happened next. On Saturday, officers with Customs and Border Protection detained, beat, shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old I.C.U. nurse who had been observing and filming ICE and C.B.P. operations. Like Good’s death, Pretti’s was caught on camera, and like Good’s death, it was egregious. Images and video of Pretti’s killing exploded on social media. Before the White House could even respond there were protests on the ground, demands for accountability, calls to abolish ICE and palpable discontent from across the political spectrum. And when the administration did address the killing, it returned to the same lies and distortions it used to try to discredit Good.
“This individual went and impeded their law enforcement operations, attacked those officers, had a weapon on him and multiple dozens of rounds of ammunition, wishing to inflict harm on these officers, coming, brandishing like that,” Noem said, as if video of the confrontation did not exist. Similarly, Stephen Miller, the president’s homeland security adviser, called Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and accused Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota of “flaming the flames of insurrection for the singular purpose of stopping the deportation of illegals who invaded the country.”
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By Sunday, officials in the Trump administration had begun to backpedal. By Monday, they were doing everything they could to appease the public’s anger. First, administration officials announced that they would remove Gregory Bovino, the highly visible field commander for Customs and Border Protection, from the area. Homeland Security said it would remove some C.B.P. agents from Minnesota, and President Trump said that he would withdraw ICE officers as well. “At some point, we will leave,” he said. “We’ve done, they’ve done, a phenomenal job.”
This was no longer a defeat; it was a rout. Not only had the White House failed to achieve its strategic objective — both the mass removal of immigrants from the Minneapolis area and the suppression of the administration’s political opponents through force and the fear of force — it had also lost significant ground with the public on its most favorable issue.
When Trump took office last January, he had a net eight-point advantage on immigration according to an average computed by the pollster G. Elliott Morris. Now he has a net 10-point disadvantage. Individual polls show an even starker decline: Trump is 18 points underwater on immigration, according to the latest poll from The New York Times and Siena University. Sixty-one percent of respondents also said the tactics used by ICE have gone too far. And Trump’s overall approval has dropped below 40 percent in recent polls from YouGov, Reuters and The Economist.
The president is so clearly in retreat in the wake of Pretti’s death — especially coming as it did on the heels of Good’s — that even congressional Democrats have abandoned their usual defensive posture for something more aggressive. Senate Democrats have promised to filibuster an upcoming funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security if it doesn’t include a serious effort to rein in ICE and C.B.P. Representative Hakeem Jeffries, who leads Democrats in the House, has pledged to impeach Noem if she doesn’t resign. There are signs, too, of infighting within the administration. “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done at the direction of the president and Stephen,” Noem said in remarks reported by Axios, referring to Miller.
Gettysburg was supposed to be the blow that forced the United States to negotiate an end to the Civil War. Gen. Robert E. Lee would demonstrate the superiority of his Army of Northern Virginia — on Union soil, no less — and prove to key European powers that the Confederacy was here to stay so as to push them off the sidelines. The Gettysburg campaign was, in other words, a strategic offensive meant to advance the overall goals of the rebellion if not win the conflict altogether.
What Lee did not anticipate was the iron resolve, the ferocious tenacity, of the Union defenders. There was Brig. Gen. Gouverneur K. Warren, whose quick thinking brought reinforcements to a small, rocky hill at the left flank of the Union line — Little Round Top — where Col. Joshua Chamberlain and the 385 men of the 20th Maine held their position against a fierce Confederate offensive. There was the lone brigade of New Yorkers, led by George S. Greene, who fended off attacks on the right flank, suffering significant losses but successfully holding Culp’s Hill. And there were the soldiers of the Army of the Potomac’s II Corps, who successfully repelled Lee’s frontal assault on the Union center.
The result was a catastrophic defeat for the Confederacy. Lee lost the initiative and would spend the rest of the war fighting on the defensive, unable to wage another strategic campaign. The Confederacy would not win foreign recognition, leaving it helpless against a Union blockade. And even with the tremendous loss of life — the Union Army suffered more than 23,000 casualties over three days of battle — the Northern public would be reinvigorated by victory, ready to continue the fight.
ICE and C.B.P. still roam the streets, and Trump’s authoritarian aspirations have not dimmed. But surveying the wreckage of Operation Metro Surge — of this reactionary administration’s crushing defeat at the hands of another band of tenacious Northerners — it does look to me like MAGA’s Gettysburg.
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15) Ring Denies Rumors That Its Footage Is Used by ICE. Here’s What to Know.
By Jon Chase, Published January 28, 2026
Jon Chase is an editor of smart-home coverage. For the past two decades, he has tested and reviewed hundreds of devices.
Following a surge in immigration enforcement actions in recent weeks, rumors have swirled, claiming that Amazon-owned Ring, which has sold tens of millions of smart cameras and video doorbells in the US, has been providing federal immigration law enforcement with access to user data.
That unsubstantiated claim, frequently reposted on social media along with calls to disable or destroy Ring devices, also asserts that Ring’s service is integrated with Flock Safety, a company that markets license-plate scanning devices and software and has come under scrutiny due to purported use of its services for immigration enforcement.
Some of Ring’s products, including cameras, home security systems, and lighting devices, have been or are Wirecutter picks. In the past we have paused recommending Ring products at various times following what we considered systemic lapses in its security and privacy policies.
And so, with this new round of rumors swirling, we contacted Ring for clarification and independently investigated the concerns ourselves.
Here’s what you should know.
Ring did announce a partnership with Flock Safety. But it hasn’t taken effect yet. Ring announced in October 2025 that the partnership would allow Ring-device owners to voluntarily share their own footage, which could be viewable to local law enforcement agencies that use the Flock network. However, that integration has not yet launched, and Ring has not specified when it will.
Ring and Flock Safety both say that they don’t allow federal agencies to have direct access to user data. Ring confirmed to Wirecutter, and Flock states on its website, that access to user data is restricted to local law enforcement and is supplied only with permission of the device owner.
Note that with Flock, at least, federal law enforcement may still gain access. A 404 Media article in May 2025 detailed instances of local law enforcement agencies’ cooperating with federal agencies, including immigration enforcement, by performing data lookups on Flock’s network of cameras.
Ring says that any access to user content (such as video recordings) or non-content (data such as a user’s name, address, and other profile info) can be requested only by local law enforcement using the company’s Community Requests service. Users can simply not reply to requests or can completely opt out of receiving such requests.
Ring provided Wirecutter with the following statement:
“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement cannot initiate Community Requests. Ring has no partnership with ICE, does not give ICE videos, feeds, or back-end access, and does not share video with them. Like all companies, Ring may receive legally valid and binding demands for information from law enforcement, such as search warrants, subpoenas, or court orders. We do not disclose customer information unless required to do so by law, or in rare emergency situations when there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury. Outside of that legal process, customers control which videos are shared with law enforcement.”
All camera makers may be compelled by law to share access to specific recordings. That’s what the latter half of Ring’s statement is getting at. Ring — and any other company that sells security cameras, including Eufy or TP-Link — may be subject to a legally binding action, such as a subpoena, search warrant, or court order. While some of those may be challenged, ultimately a company may be required to produce user data, even if the user has previously opted out of video-sharing options like Ring’s Community Requests. And while a company may notify a customer that their recordings or other data have been shared, it may be prevented from doing so due to legal restrictions.
How often does this happen? Amazon publishes an information-request transparency report for Ring every six months. In the most recent report, covering January through June 2025, the company received 2,099 search-warrant information requests, 270 subpoenas, 56 court orders, and another 2,590 information-preservation requests.
Of those, Ring eventually shared content (meaning video, audio, or other data) for 977 of the requests and non-content data in 1,448 instances. Of all those affected users, just 599 of them were notified of the request or data sharing.
For context, this number of requests for user content represents a fraction of a percent of Ring’s ownership base, which the company states is “in the tens of millions.”
Companies may contact authorities during a time-sensitive emergency. All of the camera makers that produce devices that are Wirecutter picks, including Ring, state that they may contact law enforcement if they become aware of a time-sensitive emergency.
What exactly does that mean in practice? Ring told Wirecutter: “On rare occasions, Ring will provide information to law enforcement on an emergency basis when there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury, such as a kidnapping or an attempted murder. These emergency requests are reviewed by trained professionals who disclose information only when that standard is met. This process is not specific to Ring and is something many other companies follow.” (For more information, view Ring’s Law Enforcement Guidelines.)
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16) What Americans Really Mean by ‘Affordability’
A few key necessities are driving dissatisfaction, particularly among the young, our poll finds.
By Nate Cohn, Jan. 28, 2026
Bess Adler for The New York Times
What is the affordability crisis all about?
Is it just a new buzzword for longstanding economic discontent? Is it a mirage, with Americans living better than ever but in shock at high prices? Or is there something the usual economic data is missing?
The latest New York Times/Siena University poll doesn’t definitively answer these questions, but it offers some important clues. Most of all, it suggests that “affordability” is about the rising price of entry for a middle-class life: buying a home; paying for child care, college and health care; saving for retirement, and so on.
These are familiar issues in American politics, but they add up to an entirely different problem under the all-encompassing label of affordability. The difficulty of purchasing a ticket to the middle class has created a sense that the economy isn’t working, even when the economy isn’t so bad by usual measures like growth or unemployment. Indeed, it may not even be useful to think about affordability as a problem with the “economy” or even “inflation” as conventionally understood. And it helps explain why the young people struggling to secure a middle-class life have expressed so much more dissatisfaction with the economy than older voters.
By a two-to-one margin, voters say a middle-class life is out of reach for most Americans. Whether voters are being realistic or not, their expectations aren’t being met: A majority say they can’t afford the life they think they ought to be able to afford. With numbers like these, it’s easy to see why affordability is poised to be one of the big issues in the midterm campaign. (You can read the full story on the poll here.)
When we asked voters what they were most worried about affording, they usually didn’t mention the costs of goods that surged in the wake of the pandemic, like gas, cars and food. Instead, they mentioned major expenses like housing, retirement and health care.
Overall, 51 percent of voters named one of those major middle-class essentials, from housing to raising children, compared with just 23 percent who named their monthly bills or other expenses, like groceries, utilities, gas or cars. Another 10 percent said something else — including vacations, Formula One tickets, taxes and legal representation — while a relatively affluent and older 16 percent of voters said they didn’t worry about affording anything.
Voters were also much likelier to say that the cost of these big-ticket necessities has “gotten so high that it has become unaffordable” than to say the same about other items, like food, utilities and transportation.
The significance of these big-ticket items helps explain a lot about the affordability issue, including the disconnect between the overall economic numbers and public opinion.
Usually, the strength of the economy is measured by economic growth or the number of jobs. But while concerns about housing or health care costs are undoubtedly economic — and while housing and health care represent big sectors of the economy — this is not a problem with “the economy” as ordinarily defined. They’re so different that you could craft solutions to help the economy or even inflation and still not make a dent in affordability. Indeed, the cost of these middle-class essentials has been rising for decades, even through periods of low inflation.
What makes these items so different? One factor is that they have relatively inelastic supply and demand: People still need medical care or a home in a recession; it takes a long time to train a new doctor or build a home. In part as a result, a tighter monetary policy to tame inflation, for instance, doesn’t do much to slow the growth of the cost of insurance or medicine. Higher rates can even make it more expensive to get a student loan or a home mortgage — something not measured by the Consumer Price Index.
The importance of the big-ticket necessities also helps explain the extraordinary dissatisfaction of younger adults. On question after question, they offer far more pessimistic evaluations than older age groups about the state of the economy and affordability. In recent years, they swung decisively toward Donald J. Trump, in no small part because they were upset over rising prices, and already seem to have swung back, even though they have to pay as much for eggs, gas and cars as anyone else.
What makes young people unique is that they’re the ones trying to buy a ticket to the middle-class life. The higher cost of housing or raising a family could make a young person’s most important life goals feel far out of reach. This has less of an effect on older people, who have already paid for many of these costs, have Medicare, and benefit from higher home values if they own a home.
Overall, a majority of voters under 45 say the cost of having a family “has gotten so high that it has become unaffordable.” Only 24 percent of respondents 18 to 29 said they thought they could afford the life they thought they “should be able to afford,” compared with 63 percent of voters over age 65. Similarly, only 27 percent of young respondents said they had achieved a middle-class lifestyle, compared with 66 percent of older voters.
The usual economic data doesn’t necessarily measure this specific challenge for young adults. While the economic data suggests that Americans’ incomes have kept pace with higher costs overall in recent decades, they haven’t kept up with housing, child care, health care and educational costs. These costs are borne disproportionately by young families, but the Consumer Price Index represents the average consumption patterns for the entire adult population — and less than half of households have a child under 18. Real median incomes might not have gone up to the same extent, or perhaps even at all, for a household trying to start or raise a family.
Housing stands out as the problem that’s most on the minds of young people. In an open-ended poll question, around half of them said they worried most about affording housing, more than every other item combined, including retirement, health care, education, bills, cars and food. Only 36 percent of young people said the home they would like was “within reach” (or they already owned it), compared with 76 percent of those over 65.
Despite their dissatisfaction, young people did not report feeling much worse financially than older voters: 64 percent of young people said their financial situation was secure, compared with 74 percent of those over 65. This suggests their primary problem isn’t the increasing burden of monthly staples, like food or gas, which would tend to strain all age groups in fairly similar ways.
Instead, younger people are frustrated because they’re being pushed further from realizing ambitions that older people attained long ago.
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