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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 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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2) 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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3) 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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4) 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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5) 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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6) 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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7) 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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8) Trump’s Border Chief Says Crackdown Could Ease With More Access to Jails
By Alan Feuer, Carl Hulse, Mitch Smith, Qasim Nauman and Aaron Boxerman, January 29, 2026
Federal agents detaining a man outside his home on Tuesday in St. Paul, Minn., during an immigration operation. Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
Tom Homan, President Trump’s border czar, said on Thursday that the immigration crackdown in Minnesota could wind down if federal agents gained broader access to state jails, as the Trump administration sought to respond to public outrage over agents’ tactics.
“The withdrawal of law enforcement resources here is dependent upon cooperation,” Mr. Homan told reporters at a news conference outside Minneapolis. “As we see that cooperation happen, then the redeployment will happen,” he added.
Minnesota state officials have said for weeks that they have been cooperating with immigration enforcement, noting that they routinely transfer custody of inmates based on Immigration and Customs Enforcement requests.
Mr. Homan’s comments came as the Trump administration sought to quell growing anger in Minnesota and beyond over the killings of two Americans, Alex Pretti and Renee Good, by federal agents in separate shootings in Minneapolis this month as part of the crackdown.
On Wednesday, Minnesota’s chief federal judge condemned the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency for violating nearly 100 court orders during its operation.
In his remarks, Mr. Homan presented himself as a pragmatist seeking common ground with Minnesota officials, who have publicly butted heads with Mr. Trump. He conceded that not “everything that has been done here has been perfect” and said he had met with local officials, including Gov. Tim Walz.
In response to the public anger, Mr. Trump shook up the on-the-ground leadership of the federal immigration crackdown in Minnesota and put Mr. Homan in control, but there has been little sign of major changes on the ground. Federal immigration agents appeared to press on with their aggressive operations on Wednesday, and the Trump administration’s lawyers defended their actions in court, describing the surge of federal agents there as a legitimate exercise of its power.
Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis said during a CNN town-hall meeting on Wednesday night that he and other local officials had a “productive and collegial conversation” with Mr. Homan and agreed that change was needed. But Mr. Homan did not commit to ending the federal operation “on any given timeline,” Mr. Frey said.
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9) Springsteen Releases ‘Streets of Minneapolis,’ a Song Protesting ICE
The lyrics criticize President Trump and include references to Alex Pretti and Renee Good, who were fatally shot by federal agents this month.
By Michaela Towfighi, Published Jan. 28, 2026, Updated Jan. 29, 2026
Bruce Springsteen said he wrote the song on Saturday, the same day that Alex Pretti was killed by immigration agents. Credit...Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images
Bruce Springsteen released a new song, “Streets of Minneapolis,” on Wednesday in response to two fatal shootings by federal immigration enforcement agents in the city this month.
Mr. Springsteen dedicated the song to “the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.” He said he wrote it on Saturday, the same day immigration agents killed Mr. Pretti, a 37-year-old I.C.U. nurse, during a confrontation. Ms. Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was killed by an ICE agent on Jan. 7.
The lyrics describe the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, where a surge of federal agents has led to widespread protests, with people like Mr. Pretti recording confrontations with their cellphones and blowing whistles to alert others to the presence of immigration agents.
“Their claim was self-defense, sir,” Springsteen sings of the Trump administration’s justification for the shootings. “Just don’t believe your eyes / It’s our blood and bones / And these whistles and phones / Against Miller and Noem’s dirty lies.”
Stephen Miller, a top aide to President Trump, described Mr. Pretti as an “assassin,” and Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said Ms. Good had engaged in “domestic terrorism.”
Video analysis by The New York Times has contradicted these descriptions. While Mr. Pretti was legally carrying a holstered gun, he never reached for the weapon and had been disarmed by agents before they shot him. Ms. Good had parked a vehicle in the street and was beginning to drive away when an agent standing near one of the front wheels shot her.
In the song, Mr. Springsteen also calls Mr. Trump a “king” with a “private army.”
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that “the Trump administration is focused on encouraging state and local Democrats to work with federal law enforcement officers on removing dangerous criminal illegal aliens from their communities — not random songs with irrelevant opinions and inaccurate information.”
Mr. Springsteen has used his lyrics and shows to make political statements for decades. In 2000, he released “American Skin (41 Shots)” about the killing of Amadou Diallo by four New York City police officers. This month, Mr. Springsteen dedicated a performance of his song “The Promised Land,” a working-class anthem, to Ms. Good. At that performance, he likened the administration’s actions in Minneapolis to “Gestapo tactics against our fellow citizens.”
Mr. Springsteen has been a vocal critic of Mr. Trump across his two terms, calling him the “most dangerous candidate for president in my lifetime” in an endorsement video for former Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign in 2024.
Last year, the singer released a six-track EP of songs and political commentary from performances in Manchester, England. That release begins with remarks that the United States is “in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration.”
In response, Mr. Trump wrote on social media that Mr. Springsteen “ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT” and called for a “major investigation” into the artist.
Other musicians have joined Mr. Springsteen in speaking out against ICE. After Ms. Good was killed, the singer Billie Eilish reposted a graphic online that called the agency a “federally funded and supported terrorist group,” and after Mr. Pretti’s killing, she goaded her fellow celebrities, “u gonna speak up?” The singer Olivia Rodrigo called ICE’s actions “unconscionable” in a social media post.
Tom Morello, the guitarist for Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, announced he would hold a concert in Minneapolis on Friday, saying that the proceeds would be donated to Ms. Good’s and Mr. Pretti’s families.
Last year, the rapper Bad Bunny, who is from Puerto Rico, refused to perform in the mainland United States, saying he feared that ICE would target his concerts for immigration raids. Ms. Noem has said that immigration agents will be “all over” the Super Bowl in California next month, when Bad Bunny is set to perform the halftime show.
In October, when the country star Zach Bryan released new lyrics warning that ICE agents would “come bust down your door,” Ms. Noem said the song “attacks individuals who are just trying to make our streets safe.” Mr. Bryan later said the lyrics had been “misconstrued.”
***
Streets of Minneapolis
Bruce Springsteen
Producers: Ron Aniello & Bruce Springsteen
Jan. 28, 2026
[Verse 1]
Through the winter's ice and cold
Down Nicollet Avenue
A city aflame fought fire and ice
'Neath an occupier's boots
King Trump's private army from the DHS
Guns belted to their coats
Came to Minneapolis to enforce the law
Or so their story goes
[Verse 2]
Against smoke and rubber bullets
In the dawn's early light
Citizens stood for justice
Their voices ringing through the night
And there were bloody footprints
Where mercy should have stood
And two dead, left to die on snow-filled streets
Alex Pretti and Renee Good
[Chorus]
Oh, our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
We'll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
Here in our home, they killed and roamed
In the winter of '26
We'll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
[Verse 3]
Trump's federal thugs beat up on
His face and his chest
Then we heard the gunshots
And Alex Pretti lay in the snow dead
Their claim was self-defense, sir
Just don't believe your eyes
It's our blood and bones
And these whistles and phones
Against Miller and Noem's dirty lies
[Chorus]
Oh, our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Crying through the bloody mist
We'll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
[Bridge]
Now they say they're here to uphold the law
But they trample on our rights
If your skin is black or brown, my friend
You can be questioned or deported on sight
In our chants of "ICE out now"
Our city's heart and soul persists
Through broken glass and bloody tears
On the streets of Minneapolis
[Chorus]
Oh, our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
Here in our home, they killed and roamed
In the winter of '26
We'll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
We'll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
We'll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
[Outro]
ICE out (ICE out)
ICE out (ICE out)
ICE out (ICE out)
ICE out (ICE out)
ICE out (ICE out)
ICE out
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10) Justice Dept. Playbook in Minnesota: Investigate Foes, Protect Allies
The Trump Justice Department has often cast aside normal procedures intended to seek accountability in favor of pushing prosecutors and the F.B.I. to focus on critics of the immigration crackdown.
By Alan Feuer and Glenn Thrush, Jan. 29, 2026
For nearly a year, Justice Department leaders have adopted President Trump’s strong-arm approach to the law, punishing his enemies, protecting his friends and attacking the credibility of judges, prosecutors and even the victims of law-enforcement violence.
But playing to an audience of one inside the White House has its limits, especially when an audience of millions is watching.
The two fatal shootings in Minnesota this month, captured on video, have shocked the country and spurred a backlash from Mr. Trump’s habitually acquiescent allies in Congress.
So far, however, the department has largely stuck to the playbook it has learned from the president, eschewing procedures embraced by recent administrations that are intended to foster accountability in favor of the tactical bellicosity pressed by Mr. Trump and his top aide, Stephen Miller, the architect of his hard-line immigration policy.
Attorney General Pam Bondi and her chief deputy, Todd Blanche, have resisted calls to authorize civil rights investigations into the immigration agent who killed Renee Good, a mother of three shot in early January behind the wheel of her car.
They have yet to make any final determination about whether prosecutors will investigate the killing of Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse who died on Saturday in a hail of bullets as he came to the aid of a fellow protester. They are awaiting the result of two internal inquiries by homeland security investigators with the F.B.I., according to senior federal law enforcement officials.
In the interim, Ms. Bondi and Mr. Blanche have tried to refocus public attention on the aggressive tactics of demonstrators. They have also pushed prosecutors and the F.B.I. to turn up the heat on critics of the immigration crackdown: politicians, protesters, even relatives of the victims.
This strategy has left the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis, one of the most respected in the nation, in crisis. On Tuesday, prosecutors in the office’s criminal division confronted the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, Daniel Rosen, and an aide to Mr. Blanche, over concerns that they were being asked to execute orders that went against the department’s mission and best practices, according to four people briefed on the exchange.
Some of the prosecutors suggested they were considering resigning in protest, those people said, days after six others had quit over similar concerns. Their departures would exacerbate a staffing shortfall that has already forced the department to shift prosecutors from other jurisdictions to bolster the depleted ranks in Minnesota.
On Tuesday, Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, announced one of the most aggressive actions to date, saying that the bureau would investigate an encrypted Signal chat used by local activists to monitor immigration raids. The move was immediately denounced by free-speech groups, including the libertarian Cato Institute, as unlawful and contrary to the constitutional protections afforded to political groups.
In the days after Ms. Good’s killing, federal prosecutors and agents in Minneapolis were inclined to proceed as they had under the Biden administration. They began to open a civil rights investigation into Jonathan Ross, the agent who had shot Ms. Good, taking steps like obtaining a warrant on that basis to examine the car at the center of the incident, according to people familiar with the matter.
But the department’s leadership interrupted that effort, demanding that the U.S. attorney’s office abandon its inquiry into Mr. Ross and focus instead on ties between Ms. Good’s partner, Becca Good, and local activists. The warrant issued to search Renee Good’s car for evidence of use of excessive force was scrapped and a new one was obtained to seek evidence of a potential assault on Mr. Ross.
They also put a halt to plans by prosecutors and agents to work with their local counterparts, taking the highly unusual step of retracting an evidence-sharing agreement with local authorities, claiming that leaders were too biased to conduct a fair inquiry, according to federal and state officials.
At the same time, the department opened a separate inquiry targeting elected Democrats in the state, including Gov. Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis, examining whether they had taken actions to impede immigration agents.
They also moved aggressively to charge the journalist Don Lemon in connection with a demonstration at a church in St. Paul, even though a federal judge later determined there was no evidence he had committed any crimes.
Few, if any, of these actions have been taken without the knowledge of the White House. Trump aides participated in the drafting of a threatening letter that Ms. Bondi sent to local officials last week saying the administration would wind down its immigration enforcement efforts but only in exchange for concessions — including the handing over of state voter information, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Ms. Bondi also met earlier this month with Mr. Rosen, pushing him to take a more aggressive approach, according to an official with knowledge of her actions.
The attorney general has focused much of her attention on a protest at the church service in St. Paul this month, which Mr. Lemon and his producer documented. The Justice Department has brought charges against three of the demonstrators but failed to get warrants to arrest five more, including Mr. Lemon, a frequent target of Mr. Trump’s ire.
The case has badly soured relations between the department and the chief federal judge in Minnesota, Patrick J. Schiltz, a staunch Republican who once clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia. In an extraordinary rebuke last week, Judge Schiltz fought back as the department sought to force him to issue arrest warrants for Mr. Lemon and his producer, calling the effort “frivolous” and rejecting the idea that either one had committed crimes.
Harmeet K. Dhillon, the head of the department’s civil rights division and a former Trump election lawyer, has also weighed in on the church case, despite saying little about the killings of Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti, incidents her unit would typically investigate.
“We’re going to pursue this to the ends of the earth,” she said in an interview with the podcaster Megyn Kelly. In her remarks, Ms. Dhillon also went after the federal judge who first refused to issue an arrest warrant for Mr. Lemon, noting he was married to someone who works for Keith Ellison, the Democratic state attorney general under scrutiny in a different department inquiry.
Ms. Bondi was back in Minnesota on Wednesday to oversee the filing of charges against 16 protesters accused of interfering with law enforcement officers, even as Mr. Rosen grappled with a potential staff revolt. She celebrated the move on social media by posting photos of the defendants.
At a hearing that same day, a federal judge said he was “deeply disturbed” by the post, reminding the attorney general that the defendants were presumed to be innocent.
The killing of Mr. Pretti, who was shot several times even though videos show he did not pose a threat to officers, appears to have profoundly shifted the public mood, and prompted a shake-up at the Homeland Security Department. But it has not had a major impact on the Justice Department, at least not yet.
Mr. Blanche, a former Trump defense lawyer who has an open line of communication with the president, quickly ruled out opening an investigation by Ms. Dhillon’s civil rights division into the Good shooting.
He did not rule one out after the Pretti shooting, but he also did not greenlight a civil rights inquiry and adopted what one aide called a wait-and-see approach. The department is deferring his decision until a narrow “use of force” review that homeland security investigators seem poised to conduct, meant to establish whether government employees had violated training standards, is completed.
A spokeswoman for the Justice Department said it did not automatically open civil rights investigations into law enforcement-involved shootings, as critics have claimed.
Shootings by federal agents are treated like every other case, the spokeswoman said, adding that further along the line, the department might opt to “investigate for civil rights violations if the evidence presents itself.”
But some career prosecutors believe the department is prioritizing politics over fairness. Two weeks ago, six top prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis quit their jobs after facing pressure from department leaders to close the investigation into Mr. Ross. Their departures were quickly followed by the news that Tracee Mergen, a respected F.B.I. supervisor who had opened the inquiry, had resigned for similar reasons.
Last weekend, state investigators, concerned that the Trump administration might destroy evidence of Mr. Pretti’s killing, obtained an extraordinary court order forcing federal officials to preserve the scene of Mr. Pretti’s death.
At the same time, the Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association called for a meeting with the White House in a statement saying that “communities across our state are experiencing heightened stress and uncertainty,” and that officers were “facing growing challenges.”
But there was no sign that the department planned to pull back on its aggressive approach, even as Mr. Trump floated the idea of de-escalating immigration enforcement in the state.
An aide to Mr. Blanche, Colin McDonald, has emerged as a central player in the department’s counterattack against Minnesota officials and protesters.
Mr. McDonald, who is close to Mr. Miller, has taken on a supervisory role, coordinating with top officials at the F.B.I. and the Homeland Security Department’s investigative arm to streamline and speed up prosecutions of protesters, current and former officials said.
(On Wednesday, Mr. Trump tapped him to run a White House-controlled investigation into Minnesota day care facilities.)
He has worked closely with Aakash Singh, who oversees the operations of U.S. attorney’s offices across the country, to find evidence sufficient to justify issuing grand jury subpoenas this month to Mr. Walz, Mr. Frey, Mr. Ellison and other local officials, according to people familiar the situation.
While the department’s aggressive actions have been hailed by Trump supporters, it has done little to quell growing furor over the violence on the streets of Minneapolis.
And in some instances, officials at the department and the F.B.I. have made things worse.
On the day of Mr. Pretti’s death, Bill Essayli, the top Trump-appointed prosecutor in Los Angeles, suggested that the victim’s legal possession of a handgun at the time of his killing was improper. The statement stood at odds with a pillar of Trump-era Republican orthodoxy.
“If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you. Don’t do it!” he wrote on social media.
Mr. Patel and others followed suit, drawing a rare rebuke from gun rights groups, including the National Rifle Association.
If their statements flopped badly with a broad audience, it appeared to pass muster with the man to whom both Mr. Essayli and Mr. Patel owe their jobs.
“You can’t have guns,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Tuesday as he walked to Marine One whirring on the South Lawn. “You can’t walk in with guns.”
Emily Bazelon and Hamed Aleaziz contributed reporting.
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11) Videos Show Alex Pretti in Confrontation With Agents 11 Days Before His Death
More than a week before federal agents killed Mr. Pretti, a Minneapolis nurse, different agents pushed him to the ground after he spit at them and broke a taillight on their S.U.V.
By Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Reporting from Minneapolis, Published Jan. 28, 2026, Updated Jan. 29, 2026
"As Mr. Pretti gets back to his feet, what appears to be a gun is seen tucked into the back waistband of his pants. During the later confrontation with agents in which Mr. Pretti was killed, he had a gun holstered on his hip. One agent grabbed the gun from Mr. Pretti’s holster moments before two other agents shot at Mr. Pretti."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/us/alex-pretti-kicking-ice-vehicle-video.html
The nurse who was fatally shot by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday was pushed to the ground by different agents at a protest 11 days before he was killed, according to newly unearthed videos that show him spitting and cursing at them and kicking a taillight on one of their S.U.V.s.
The footage adds to what is known about the 37-year-old nurse, Alex Pretti, who was killed by federal agents on Saturday morning after they pepper sprayed him and pushed him and a woman to the ground, a killing that set off protests in the Twin Cities and across the country.
In the earlier incident, on Jan. 13, Mr. Pretti — wearing some of the same clothing as when he was killed — can be seen running toward a street corner in the South Minneapolis neighborhood of Powderhorn where a crowd of protesters have gathered and are jeering at federal agents.
“What are you doing here?” he shouts at agents who are standing next to two of their S.U.V.s. He repeatedly curses at them and spits at one agent as the agent is getting into a vehicle. When the agents begin to drive away, Mr. Pretti kicks twice at one of the vehicle’s taillights, breaking it. That seems to prompt the agents to get back out of the vehicle and push him to the ground.
The agents, at least some of whom are with Homeland Security Investigations, a division of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, hold Mr. Pretti on the ground for about 20 seconds before letting him go and driving off.
As Mr. Pretti gets back to his feet, what appears to be a gun is seen tucked into the back waistband of his pants. During the later confrontation with agents in which Mr. Pretti was killed, he had a gun holstered on his hip. One agent grabbed the gun from Mr. Pretti’s holster moments before two other agents shot at Mr. Pretti.
Both of the officers who fired — one with Border Patrol and another with its parent agency, Customs and Border Protection — have been put on leave as part of the agency’s protocol for when agents are involved in shootings. Neither has been identified.
At least two videos showing Mr. Pretti’s earlier encounter with federal agents had been online for about two weeks. But it wasn’t until Wednesday, when a news outlet called The News Movement published another video of the confrontation and identified Mr. Pretti in the footage, that the encounter attracted attention. A representative for Mr. Pretti’s family confirmed that it was him in the video published by the news outlet.
“A week before Alex was gunned down in the street — despite posing no threat to anyone — he was violently assaulted” by federal agents, a lawyer for Mr. Pretti’s family, Steve Schleicher, said in a statement. “Nothing that happened a full week before could possibly have justified Alex’s killing.”
Mr. Pretti’s parents and sister have denounced lies that they say Trump administration officials have perpetuated about Mr. Pretti, and have described him as a good man who helped treat sick patients at Minneapolis’s Veterans Affairs hospital.
Reporting was contributed by Hamed Aleaziz, Robin Stein and Haley Willis.
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12) Haitians Are Vital to U.S. Health Care. Many Are About to Lose Their Right to Work.
Haitians are a vital source of employees for health care providers in many communities. The Trump administration is removing legal status next month for 330,000 of them.
By Miriam Jordan, Jan. 29, 2026
Miriam Jordan is a national immigration correspondent.
Vilbrun Dorsainvil said he fled Haiti in 2021 after he was threatened for speaking out about the government. He settled in Springfield, Ohio, which is home to a growing Haitian community. Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times
Vilbrun Dorsainvil was a physician in his native Haiti, but after fleeing his troubled country he couldn’t practice when he arrived in the United States. Determined to stay in medicine, he retrained as a registered nurse and now works in the cardiac unit of the only hospital in Springfield, Ohio, a city grappling with a shortage of health care workers.
He monitors patients after procedures, administers medication and comforts families during difficult moments. “Being in health care was my dream,” said Mr. Dorsainvil, 35, who came to the United States five years ago. “It hurt a little not to practice as a physician, but I was blessed that I could stay in health care.”
That blessing has an expiration date. On Feb. 3, Mr. Dorsainvil and more than 330,000 other Haitians in the United States could lose their right to work here, potentially destabilizing the health care industry in places like Springfield, where a large influx of Haitian immigrants has settled in recent years and helped fill critical health care roles.
Mr. Dorsainvil lives in the United States under a legal designation called Temporary Protected Status, which can be provided by the U.S. government to people from countries experiencing armed conflict or natural disasters. The protection allows those already in the United States to remain for a specific period of time, and it can be renewed if the U.S. government considers conditions in the country unsafe for people to return.
Haitians have been eligible for T.P.S. since an earthquake devastated the country in 2010, and the protection has been renewed because of other crises. But the Trump administration announced last year that it was terminating the status for several countries, including Afghanistan, Venezuela and Haiti.
By seeking to end T.P.S. for Haitians and many other foreign nationals, the Department of Homeland Security is vastly expanding the number of people who could be expelled from the country as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. Officials have argued that T.P.S. was intended to offer only temporary relief but has become an indefinite benefit for tens of thousands of people.
Mr. Dorsainvil is one of several health care workers named as plaintiffs in a lawsuit seeking to preserve the protected status for Haitians.
Rulings are expected in a matter of days in two lawsuits, including Mr. Dorsainvil’s, contesting the termination of T.P.S. for Haitians. Yet, even a favorable decision may offer little relief; the Trump administration is expected to appeal immediately, prolonging the uncertainty for both Haitian workers and their employers.
At least 50,000 migrants with protected status work in health care, an industry struggling to fill positions in small cities and rural areas as an aging America requires more long-term care. The industry also continues to recover from the strains created by the coronavirus pandemic, when nursing homes and senior residential facilities shed more than 400,000 employees.
People from Haiti are a particularly familiar presence in hospitals, clinics and nursing homes in states with large Haitian communities, including Florida, New York and Massachusetts. Haitians filled about 111,000 health care positions in the United States in 2023, according to an analysis of census data by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
“In a health care system facing so many disruptions, it’s shortsighted to make such policy changes” that further erode care, said Leah Masselink, an associate professor of health policy management at George Washington University. “These immigrants are highly qualified, and in positions that are hard to fill.”
Rachel Blumberg, who runs a senior care center in Boca Raton, Fla., said she was bracing for the loss of 30 Haitian employees with Temporary Protected Status who would have to be let go and could be immediately deported.
“These are individuals who have been with us five, six, seven, 10 years,” said Ms. Blumberg, chief executive of Toby & Leon Cooperman Mount Sinai Residences. “They do work that many Americans won’t do.”
“I can’t replace the relationship they have with our residents,” she added.
Asked about the health care industry’s fears of worker shortages, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, dismissed the concerns. Vice President JD Vance and Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration’s immigration policy, have said that foreign workers displace Americans and undercut their wages, which has been contested by economists whose research shows that in many industries, immigrants fill labor gaps.
In Springfield, a city of about 58,000 between Dayton and Columbus, the stakes are high.
Over the last several years, more than 10,000 Haitians have settled there, drawn by jobs in warehouses, auto-parts factories and the health care sector. They work at the hospital and the community clinic and as caregivers for seniors in a county that has been consistently rated as underserved by the federal government.
“These folks are filling jobs that are some of the hardest for us to keep staffed,” said Chris Cook, the health commissioner for Clark County, which includes Springfield.
Mr. Dorsainvil entered the United States with a tourist visa in early 2021 and settled in Springfield. When the Biden administration granted Temporary Protected Status to Haitians in May of that year, the status allowed him to enroll in a local college to pursue a nursing degree. While studying, he worked weekend shifts at an Amazon warehouse and part time as a nursing assistant at the Springfield Regional Medical Center.
Since earning his degree last year, he has worked 13-hour shifts at the hospital, where he cares for up to 50 patients a week. Last year, he bought a duplex that he shares with his brother and two cousins, all from Haiti.
Thomas Hupman, who was born and raised in Springfield, helped train Mr. Dorsainvil and said it would be a “tremendous loss” for the hospital if he had to go. “Vilbrun has knowledge and compassion, and no task is beneath him,” said Mr. Hupman, 31, who is also a registered nurse. “He is there for the patients.”
Successive administrations have granted protected status to Haitians since the 2010 earthquake, which was estimated to have killed some 300,000 people. More recently, tens of thousands fled the Caribbean nation after the 2021 assassination of the last elected president. The ensuing crisis has fueled widespread gang violence, forced residents from their homes and led to hunger.
Mr. Dorsainvil said he never planned to stay in the United States forever. He has a daughter back home who was born shortly after he fled and is now 5. “Leaving Haiti was the hardest decision,” he said. “I told myself it’s not going to be for long.”
He said he was followed by armed men and repeatedly threatened because of his family’s political opposition and his own vocal criticism of mismanagement within Haiti’s health care system. In a written declaration filed as part of his lawsuit over T.P.S., he said that several of his brothers had gone into hiding or fled Haiti after being attacked and imprisoned.
“If my country is safe enough,” he said, “with a president in office doing the right thing, I will go back.”
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13) Twix Is OK but Granola Isn’t as States Deploy New Food Stamp Rules
A dizzying array of rules govern what can be bought with SNAP dollars, confusing grocery stores and consumers.
By Julie Creswell and Linda Qiu, Jan. 29, 2026
In Iowa, food stamps can be used to purchase ice cream at a convenience store, but not a fruit cup with a fork attached. Next month, consumers in Idaho will be able to use Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits to buy a Twix candy bar, but not a flourless granola bar with chocolate chips.
And in April, government assistance can be used in Virginia to pay for sweetened iced tea and lemonade, but not some brands of sparkling, sweetened fruit juice. The opposite will be true in Texas.
The Agriculture Department, which administers SNAP benefits, is rapidly approving waivers for states to ban the purchase of soda, energy drinks and, in some states, candy or prepared desserts using food stamps. It’s part of the Make America Healthy Again push by the Trump administration, spearheaded by the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The first restrictions took effect on Jan. 1 in five states: Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Utah and West Virginia. At least 13 more states will follow suit in the coming months.
The patchwork of restrictions among states is also creating a bit of a logistical nightmare for grocers — particularly small ones — that have to customize their payment systems in each state. And there’s confusion among consumers left wondering whether the foods and treats they usually purchase with SNAP dollars will remain eligible.
Supporters hail the removal of “junk food” from the program, noting its links to obesity and chronic diseases like diabetes. But others view the changes as an attack on lower-income individuals.
“By placing restrictions on what items disabled and low-income Iowans can buy with SNAP, they are declaring that they don’t trust their constituencies to make decisions around their own health,” said Sarah Jean Ashby, a 33-year-old in Altoona with multiple chronic illnesses that have left her unable to work. She relies solely on the $217 she receives each month from SNAP to buy her groceries. “They’re saying poor children don’t deserve fruit snacks or chocolate on their birthdays.”
The ripple effect from the restrictions will also have financial implications for food and beverage manufacturers, which have experienced a decline in product demand for nearly two years.
The state SNAP restrictions are “another headwind for the industry,” said Spencer Hanus, an analyst at Wolfe Research. He noted that beverage makers had slightly more exposure to SNAP benefits, pointing to a summary from 2016 — the latest figures available — by the U.S.D.A. that showed the second-highest expenditure of recipients was for sweetened beverages, including soda.
Early in the new year, when Iowa’s new restrictions went into effect, Tiffany Carpenter strolled into a Sam’s Club near her home in Cedar Rapids to shop for groceries, nervous about what she could and couldn’t purchase with SNAP funds.
Pop-Tarts? Yes. Scooby-Doo graham crackers? Yes. But Welch’s fruit snacks? No. “These are snacks normal people buy their children,” said Ms. Carpenter, 37, who began receiving SNAP benefits two years ago when she left her job as a Starbucks barista to care full time for her autistic son and two other children. “I fear it’s a slippery slope to them banning a lot in the future.”
For retailers, the new restrictions require them to go into their point-of-sale systems and remove items that are no longer eligible for SNAP spending. Stores must also educate customers and train employees on how to delicately inform shoppers that certain items in their carts may no longer be allowed.
“It’s not the governor who is going to be standing behind the counter explaining the changes. It’s going to be an 18- or 19-year-old employee explaining complex changes to this system,” said Margaret Hardin Mannion, the director of government relations for the National Association of Convenience Stores.
Iowa’s rules are considered the most restrictive, allowing the use of SNAP benefits to purchase only food and beverages not subject to the state’s sales tax, resulting in a byzantine list of prohibited and exempted foods.
Under that definition, benefits can be used to purchase most Nature Valley granola bars because they contain flour, but not the Nature Valley protein bars that don’t. Snickers are not allowed as a candy bar, but are permitted in ice cream form because those are refrigerated and contain milk. Kettle corn can be purchased only if unpopped.
Dion Pitt, the owner of Logan Super Foods, a family-owned grocery store that serves the 1,400 people who live in Logan, Iowa, said it had taken his wife about three days walking the store’s aisles with her laptop to change the codes on hundreds of items that were no longer SNAP eligible in the store’s payment system. Despite the extra hours, he supports the state’s move to restrict some items.
“Pop, candy, that kind of stuff — it should have never been included all along,” Mr. Pitt said. “But the juices and the granola bars, I kind of wish they had left that stuff alone.”
Still, because the definition of “soft drink” or “candy” varies from state to state, the list of prohibited items will, too. While many states prohibit sugary drinks altogether, Texas and Hawaii have specific caps on the amount of sugar or sweeteners. Some states exempt 100 percent fruit juice drinks, but others allow beverages with just 50 percent juice. Hydration drinks, like some forms of Gatorade, are allowed in some states and not in others because of high sugar levels.
Candy or flavored drinks?
Some states ban the purchase of Twix bars with SNAP dollars, while others won’t allow consumers to buy Gatorade with their benefits.
“This is causing massive confusion within the retailer community, because there’s limited consistency among states’ waivers,” said Stewart Fried, a principal at Olsson Frank Weeda Terman Matz, a law firm that represents retailers on SNAP and other nutrition policy issues.
Previously, retailers could mark entire categories of products — like alcohol, tobacco and prepared hot foods — as ineligible for SNAP purchases. But now, they must determine if individual items qualify under the new restrictions.
Agencies administering SNAP in Texas and Indiana said they had launched outreach campaigns to inform retailers and SNAP participants about the new restrictions, including sending postcards and emails, conducting conference calls and hosting question-and-answer forums.
But some retailers and anti-hunger groups say states have not done enough to prepare consumers and stores for the changes. Only two — Nebraska and Oklahoma — have circulated lists of specific product codes so far, Mr. Fried said.
Indiana opted to not share product codes given the difficulty of ensuring accuracy, a spokesman for the state’s Family and Social Services Administration said.
Acknowledging “significant challenges” with implementation, the Agriculture Department said in a memo in late December that retailers would have 90 days to comply with the new restrictions. But the agency warned that two violations of the new restrictions could result in consequences, including removal from the SNAP program.
Mike Wilson, the chief operating officer of Cubby’s, a family-owned chain of 41 convenience stores and supermarkets in Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota, said it had taken about 500 hours to manually compare the affected products and make the changes to the stores’ payment systems. But it’s inevitable that something is going to be missed, he said.
“Nebraska gave us a list with 6,000 items on it, and right away we found a Monster energy drink that wasn’t on it,” he said. Mr. Wilson removed the product from the stores’ payment system, fearing it would be flagged as a failure in an inspection.
The risk of being removed from the program for repeated failures makes Mr. Wilson nervous. In some rural areas, Cubby’s has an expanded store model; in Shelby, Neb., for instance, it is the only grocery store for the community of about 700 people.
“If we make a mistake and don’t flag something that is now ineligible for SNAP funds and they take away our license, it’s not going to hurt Cubby’s. It’s a small part of our sales,” Mr. Wilson said. “It’s going to hurt the people in that community who are poor or have food insecurity. To me, that’s not fair.”
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14) In Honduras, the American Right Is Piloting Our Future
By Jean Guerrero, Jan. 29, 2026
Ms. Guerrero, a contributing Opinion writer, is a journalist and author.
Kimberly Elliott
This week, Honduras inaugurated a new president, Nasry Asfura, a construction magnate backed by seemingly strange bedfellows: members of the notorious MS-13 gang and President Trump. Mr. Trump had urged Hondurans to vote for Mr. Asfura days before MS-13 gang members posing as election observers threatened to kill anyone who didn’t vote for that candidate. Amid weeks of election uncertainty and protests, Mr. Trump warned Hondurans of “hell to pay” if they chose a different outcome. Mr. Asfura’s victory marks the success of Mr. Trump’s campaign to resuscitate a political party tainted by its widely known ties to cartels.
The story of how Mr. Trump came to intervene in Honduran politics and align himself with a foreign terrorist organization is essential for understanding the world he is trying to build. He has been meddling in multiple elections in Latin America, and recently captured Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in a military operation to have him face federal drug trafficking charges here. He’s now threatening to arrest the president of Colombia on suspicion of drug trafficking and to bomb cartels in Mexico. His actions may seem contradictory. But there is a coherent logic to them: They expand territorial power for a class of transnational elites who believe they’re above the law.
Last month, Mr. Trump pardoned one of the country’s best-known convicted drug traffickers: Juan Orlando Hernández. Mr. Hernández was the president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022; in that time, there was a steep surge in migration from that country to the United States as families fled his narco-state. In 2024, he was sentenced to 45 years in prison for his role in what the U.S. Department of Justice called “one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world.” He was convicted of conspiring to distribute hundreds of tons of cocaine, reportedly boasting of plans to “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.” In explaining his pardon, Mr. Trump relied on a conspiracy theory circulating in conservative circles: that Mr. Hernández was a political prisoner of former President Joe Biden’s. It was, in Mr. Trump’s words, a “witch hunt.”
But Mr. Trump’s real motivations are hidden in plain sight. Not long after his second inauguration, the Claremont Institute, an influential conservative think tank in California, published a call for him to pardon Mr. Hernández. So did Mr. Trump’s longtime friend and fellow felon Roger Stone in a blog post, written with Shane Trejo. Both argued that the pardon would hurt President Xiomara Castro, a democratically elected progressive and the first woman to be president of Honduras. They wrote that it would re-empower the right-wing party, presumably by rehabilitating it.
The goal, Mr. Stone wrote, was to save Próspera, a semiautonomous city on the Honduran island of Roatán. Próspera was backed by Mr. Hernández and Trump-aligned tech moguls such as Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen; corporations there pay incredibly low taxes to Honduras. It was built in a “special economic zone,” a rapidly multiplying form of territory with its own business-friendly laws, like looser environmental regulations and labor standards. (It’s what the Trump administration brokered for Gaza in its cease-fire with Israel.)
Special economic zones were pioneered in Puerto Rico, where in the mid-1900s the entire archipelago was transformed into such a zone and much of the native-born population — including most of my maternal relatives — subsequently left amid widespread unemployment. Proponents of the zones claim that they create prosperity for domestic populations. Patrick Neveling, a political economist, calls this an excuse “used to funnel a lot of state money into private hands.” In the case of Puerto Rico, its taxpayers paid for the infrastructure for transnational corporations to conduct tax- and customs-free manufacturing there, and for government-backed loans for foreign investors.
Globally, more than 5,400 special economic zones have become home to dozens of start-up cities like Próspera, corporate-led jurisdictions with their own laws. In “The Network State,” a 2022 book that was influential in Silicon Valley, the tech entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, a leading proponent of start-up cities, fantasizes that these territories will not only compete with nation-states but someday replace them.
Many Hondurans, including Ms. Castro, opposed Próspera as an affront to national sovereignty. Not long after Ms. Castro’s inauguration, the Honduran Congress repealed the law, passed by the country’s right wing, that had opened Honduras to start-up cities. This was unacceptable to the pillaging class. As Mr. Stone wrote on his blog, “May the Próspera experiment prevail, the common good be saved, and global leftism be damned by the benevolent hand of President Trump!”
The people behind start-up cities like Próspera have long been whispering in Mr. Trump’s ear about bringing their neocolonial experiments to the United States, branded as “freedom cities.” Mr. Trump has publicly advocated them. For all his rhetoric about putting America first and making America great, Mr. Trump isn’t a nationalist. He’s in league with transnational elites who lack allegiance to this or any country. While distracting voters with anti-immigrant rhetoric, he is laying the groundwork for the disenfranchisement of working people across the Americas.
MAGA Republicans often complain that the United States is turning into the “third world” because of immigration. But it’s Mr. Trump who has remade the United States in the image of the Latin America that our government and chief executives helped create with foreign interference: a place where masked men routinely leap out of unmarked vans to snatch citizens, where people are disappeared and human rights activists publicly killed, where soldiers patrol cities to crush dissent, and where organized crime and the state blend into a single machinery of power that protects the interests of the oligarchs.
At first glance, it may seem like karma: The terror that the United States wrought for generations in Latin America has come home. But the victims are not the transnational elites who have long colluded with corrupt officials to take vulnerable people’s territories and feast on their oil, fruit and precious metals. The victims are the displaced migrants forced to leave their homelands and the American workers who have to compete with their criminalized labor. This isn’t an accident. It seems to be the goal: to entrench a permanent underclass across the Americas. Mr. Trump claims that his goal is to remove immigrants from this country, but in fact he is expanding the pool of vulnerable labor for transnational elites. By stripping millions of people of legal status in the United States, Mr. Trump likely created more undocumented people than he removed last year.
In many liberal circles, it is treated as an article of faith that immigration is nothing but positive for the economy. The silence about how criminalized labor depresses wages is born out of both ignorance and fear of fueling anti-immigrant hatreds. But that silence allows people like Mr. Trump’s homeland security adviser Stephen Miller to caricature liberals as elites who want a cheap labor force. The American left needs to break its silence on this issue and articulate a politics that connects labor and immigrant rights.
Elites in both parties have long benefited from a manufactured underclass. The right-wing party in Honduras came to power in a 2009 military coup, after which the Obama administration briefly cut off aid to the country, then resumed it, including tens of millions of dollars for the military and police. In 2015, after tens of thousands of Hondurans marched against the narco-state, the U.S. ambassador, James Nealon, claimed that relations between the two countries were “perhaps the best in history.”
In the mid-2010s, protesters of the corporation- and cartel-friendly regime were kidnapped, raped and killed. This oppression and instability were partially responsible for the surge in migration from Central America which President Barack Obama confronted. But in the administration’s discussions about the “root causes” of the exodus, there was no reckoning with the role of the U.S. government or American investors.
During the Biden administration, Próspera’s backers sued Honduras for nearly $11 billion under an international tribunal governed by investor-state dispute settlement rules, in response to the country’s efforts to reclaim its sovereignty. In 2024, dozens of Democratic lawmakers asked Mr. Biden to remove liability from the corporate-friendly rules from trade agreements for Central America and the Caribbean, to protect vulnerable economies from litigious elites. But Mr. Biden failed to act. The ongoing lawsuit and similar ones threaten to bankrupt Honduras, one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere.
Human rights activists in Roatán have been fighting for years to protect their ancestral lands and resources from Próspera. But many are now afraid for their lives; at least one prominent activist recently fled the community in fear, two members of the Honduran Black Fraternal Organization told me. Everyone there knows what tends to happen to people who resist the pillaging classes in Central America: They’re killed, even the activists with international reputations such as the Honduran land defender Berta Cáceres, whose assassination in 2016 was ordered by the U.S.-military-trained president of an internationally financed hydroelectric company she was protesting.
The start-up city Próspera’s billionaire architects insist that the project creates jobs for Hondurans and boosts economic development. Some clearly believe that. They’re so sure of the backwardness of the population, they can’t help but see themselves as saviors. It’s the same attitude that Democratic elites have toward rural Americans. The truth is that the fates of working-class Americans and Hondurans are entwined.
With the return of the right-wing party to Honduras, calls for oversight are likely to be ignored. The right-wing party, an ally of Próspera, governed its citizens the way Mr. Trump and his allies envision governing Americans: through violent dispossession and exploitation. In the United States, a mirror world has already begun to form with the unleashing of multiple federal police forces that have already killed at least three citizens and a number of immigrants. These police forces do not protect the body politic; they protect the bottom line of transnational corporations that surveil and jail us for profit.
We don’t stand a chance against them until we bridge the engineered divide between America’s native-born working classes and the rural poor of Latin America, including those who are now undocumented workers in the United States.
Politicians who care to restrain the expansion of transnational corporate power need, first of all, to abandon their cowardice on amnesty. A pathway to citizenship for longtime undocumented people with no criminal records would open the door for millions of disenfranchised people in this country, many of them Mexican, to start organizing with working-class Americans. Only by expanding who counts as an American can we rebuild the solidarity necessary to confront the elites who profit from our precarity.
That doesn’t mean embracing an open-border policy that favors mass migration. What is missing from the immigration debate is a complete moral framework. This framework has to recognize not only the right to migrate but also what Miriam Miranda, a Honduran activist for the Afro-Indigenous Garífuna, calls “the right to stay.” A politics that celebrates movement while ignoring displacement serves capital, not people. Its logical endpoint is a world where we all become migrants — where communities everywhere are hollowed out again and again so that extraction can continue uninterrupted.
What Mr. Trump is doing in Latin America is not an aberration. The pardon, the blessing of a former — and likely future — narco-state in service of private power, the military strikes: This is the governing model that he and his allies are trying to globalize. A world where national sovereignty is dead, the rule of law is nonexistent for corporations, and convicted felons like Mr. Trump and Mr. Hernández run the world for the pillaging classes. MAGA was never a revolt against elites. It was the elites’ most effective instrument.
Mr. Trump’s meddling reveals what his movement is for — not borders, nations or workers but a cross-continental free-for-all where people are uprooted so profits can move freely.
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15) The Border Patrol Is the Problem. It Always Has Been.
By Reece Jones, Jan. 29, 2026
Mr. Jones is the author of “Nobody Is Protected: How the Border Patrol Became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United States.”
Bettmann/Getty Images
The violence, racial profiling and disregard for the Constitution that has burst into public view in Minneapolis is not new or unusual for the Border Patrol. This is how the agency has operated since it was created, though for decades those activities have been hidden in the remote borderlands. If you are uncomfortable with what the Border Patrol is doing in Minneapolis, you are uncomfortable with the Border Patrol, full stop.
While Immigration and Customs Enforcement has become the umbrella term for all immigration agents, the Border Patrol is the larger force with a longer history. ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations agents have the job of finding, detaining and deporting people. Border Patrol agents police areas in between ports of entry. Alex Pretti was shot by the Border Patrol; Renee Good was shot by ICE.
The Trump administration’s decision this week to replace the Border Patrol commander in Minneapolis, Gregory Bovino, suggested the problem was limited to leadership mistakes. But this move, and other possible solutions offered by the Trump administration and Democrats alike, does not adequately address the depth of the problem.
The tactics in Minneapolis have been used both on the border and beyond — to immigrants and citizens alike — during the Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden presidencies.
Today, there are about 20,000 Border Patrol agents, compared to some 1,500 agents in the 1970s. As the agency grew, it began to extend its policing methods far from the border itself. Some 50 million vehicles are screened every year at internal Border Patrol checkpoints miles from a border. From 2016 to 2020, 91 percent of drug seizures at interior checkpoints involved only American citizens. Americans have accused officers of assaulting and racially profiling them, even before Minneapolis. The Border Patrol has also raided religious and humanitarian organizations that provide aid to immigrants.
The Southern Border Communities Coalition counted 364 fatal encounters with Customs and Border Protection agents since 2010. Border Patrol agents have killed Mexican teenagers on the Mexican side of the border. In April, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights found that the U.S. government was responsible for torturing, killing and covering up the death of Anastasio Hernández Rojas while he was in Border Patrol custody.
How the Border Patrol operates can be traced back to the agency’s origins in Wild West frontier policing. The United States Border Patrol was established in May 1924, days after the signing of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which set very small quotas for immigrants from most of the world except Northern Europe. According to the Times headline at the time, the law was meant “to preserve racial type as it exists here today.”
Senator David Reed, a Pennsylvania Republican who sponsored the immigration act, explained in a 1925 Senate debate: “They have no right to go into an interior city and pick up aliens in the street and arrest them, but it is just at the border where they are patrolling that we want them to have this authority.” He reassured his concerned colleagues, “We are all on the alert against granting too much power to these officials to act without warrant.”
His promises proved empty. The first agents were hired from frontier law enforcement and brought with them a frontier ethos. One agent bragged in his memoir that he had killed 27 people, but that was just whites; he didn’t bother to count Black and brown people. Another agent, angered when a smuggler shot his partner, went to the Rio Grande and indiscriminately shot at every Mexican he could see on the other side of the river.
In the mid-20th century, Congress revisited the Border Patrol’s authorization, allowing agents to operate within “a reasonable distance” of external boundaries but leaving it up to the agency’s leadership to decide what a reasonable distance was. “Reasonable distance” was later interpreted to mean 100 miles from borders and coastlines, a decision that has remained unchanged since.
Still, at the time, the Border Patrol remained a relatively small group focused on racial policing near the Mexican border. The agency’s most high-profile moment was Operation Wetback, which ejected approximately a million people in the mid-1950s.
A decade later, the 1965 Immigration Act removed the racial national origins quotas but added new restrictions to Mexicans’ entry to the United States. The number of Border Patrol apprehensions soon increased. Moreover, the courts have allowed race and appearance to justify stops by immigration agents as long as they were paired with at least one other factor. Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s 2025 concurrence in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo confirmed again that immigration agents can use apparent race and ethnicity as a “relevant factor” to profile people far from the border itself.
The Border Patrol’s funding expanded as immigration and drugs became national issues. From 1994 to 2000, the number of agents more than doubled. Then it exploded. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the Border Patrol repositioned itself as the front line against terrorist infiltrations, even though none of the hijackers had crossed irregularly at a land border.
Founded to enforce a racist law, the Border Patrol has long held extraordinary powers to stop and interrogate citizens and immigrants alike in vast stretches of the country. The Border Patrol was not the creation of Gregory Bovino, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller or even Donald Trump. All the Trump administration has done is draw attention to what always existed. Once the Border Patrol operated primarily in the shadows of the borderlands. Perhaps before it was possible to not really know what the Border Patrol was doing, but after watching neighbors tear gassed, pepper-sprayed and beaten while exercising their right to observe police activity, it is impossible to look away.
While we grieve the killing of Alex Pretti, we must also vow to rein in the Border Patrol. That means banning the use of race in the agency’s policing, getting its agents out of American cities and sending them back to the border — and shrinking the border zone substantially.
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