Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!
Amazon Labor Union
Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.
But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:
Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!
On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.
ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.
No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
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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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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
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) What the Crackdown Has Done to Minneapolis Children
“It’s like living in fear all the time,” a teenager said about the federal raids that have shattered families.
By Corina Knoll, Feb. 4, 2026
Xochitl Soberanes, 16, right, helped care for her younger siblings while her father was detained by immigration officials. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
The morning her father called to say that he had been detained on a snowy Minneapolis road, Xochitl Soberanes was seized by an urgent and inescapable feeling. At 16 years old and the eldest of four, she would suddenly have to become the backbone of the family.
Their mother had died of pneumonia less than a year ago, so it was Xochitl who convinced her 4-year-old brother that their father was working late as they packed up belongings to go stay with a nearby aunt. That January night, a cousin found all four siblings curled up asleep in the same queen bed — cradled by Xochitl, who lay on the edge.
“We just wanted to be close together,” she said.
For weeks, the Minneapolis area has been a landscape of intense turmoil as federal immigration agents face off against furious citizens. But there is a quieter upheaval taking place behind closed doors as the city’s youngest residents attempt to grasp the altering of their neighborhoods, their schools, their sense of security.
Regardless of what they might understand about the politics embedded in their surroundings, some things are clear: The adults in their lives are weary and overwhelmed. Neighbors are scared to leave the house. Bomb threats have been called in to schools. Events have been canceled. Friends are missing from classrooms. And parents have been taken.
“I was just thinking, ‘What are we going to do without him?’” Xochitl said about the day her father, Victor, did not come home. She began to insist to her aunt that she could finish her final exams and be available to help with her siblings. Within a week, her friend, a U.S. citizen, was also detained and later released. “It’s like living in fear all the time,” Xochitl said.
It is a sentiment that many children in the area speak of — this fear that now feels innate and will continue to linger in ways they cannot yet comprehend. They live in a world where a barrage of honks and whistles signal that immigration agents are in their midst, and that something bad could happen soon.
It is not unusual for them to see agents dressed in riot gear and carrying rifles stationed on their streets. And those who have found themselves swept up unwillingly into altercations have been left to endure the aftereffects.
Destiny Jackson’s six children cannot forget the day they were driving home and found themselves in the middle of a protest. As her husband attempted to turn the car around, federal agents deployed tear gas and flash-bang grenades. An explosion lifted up their car and set off its airbags while acrid smoke crept inside. The family managed to escape the vehicle, while the littlest one, at 6 months old, required CPR.
“Some of the kids, they’re having night terrors about it,” Ms. Jackson said.
The trauma has affected each child differently. Her 11-year-old constantly checks their home’s security camera and begged his parents to buy an armored car. One of her 4-year-old twins screamed at the sight of someone holding spray-on deodorant, mistaking it for pepper spray. Her 7-year-old son shrinks when classmates refer to him as “the boy from the bombing.” The 2-year-old jumps and cries when he hears a loud noise. The baby requires nasal drops to fight the effects of the chemicals that inflamed his sinuses.
Ms. Jackson said she has tried to avoid letting her children see news reports or images of all that has taken place in their region.
“We’re trying to keep their minds as protected as we can,” she said.
There is a frenzy to the Minneapolis area, however, that cannot be hidden — one that has made those of all ages highly aware of what could go wrong.
At 9 years old, Gael De Leon carries a copy of his passport in his backpack. Although born in the United States, he is of Mexican descent, and his parents fear he is a target for immigration agents.
“I had to tell him, ‘If something happens, I know it’s going to be scary, but don’t worry because I’m going to come for you and I will find you,’” his mother, Amanda, said.
Gael has grown anxious about the possibility of being taken and does not want to ride the bus or attend school. It has not helped that children even younger than him have been whisked away.
If there was an image that put the children of Minneapolis front and center, it was that of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, with his Spider-Man backpack and his floppy-eared hat, being detained by ICE with his father. The principal of Liam’s school would later report that two more of his students had been detained.
“None of this is normal, none of this is OK, none of this makes Minnesota any safer,” Gov. Tim Walz said Tuesday, adding that Liam’s classmates had taken to making paper bunnies in his honor. “All it does is cause terror and trauma to the children.”
Liam had been sent to a facility in Texas but returned home after a judge ordered his release over the weekend. Still, state leaders said that federal agents remained focused on targeting schools.
Just hours after Renee Good was fatally shot in her car on Jan. 7, armed ICE agents led by the Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino showed up three miles away at Roosevelt High School around dismissal time. Agents quickly appeared to become aggressive, spraying chemical irritants toward students and pushing and tackling staff members.
It was a stunning display of force that made the rounds on social media and earmarked schools as another battleground. Students from across the region saw the footage as a warning of how even teenagers studying on campus were now vulnerable in the era of ICE.
“That was one of the scariest moments of my life, just knowing that they have no boundaries, and really seeing that this is not something in a movie, this is not something away from me that I can ignore,” said Ta’Khya Carlisle, 17, who attends a high school across town from Roosevelt.
Ta’Khya, a junior, lives near where ICE agents shot and wounded a Venezuelan man in the leg in mid-January, and she recalled how helicopters circled overhead that night, while unmarked vehicles roamed the streets.
“I don’t think I will ever get out of the habit of looking outside or looking into people’s cars with tinted windows,” she said. “I don’t think I will ever get over seeing somebody in any kind of authority’s uniform without my heart dropping.”
Although some have turned to therapy or counseling, it will be impossible to quantify the residual effects on children and what they have experienced the last two months.
“Students used to ask me for help navigating friendships,” Tracy Xiong, a social worker at Highland Elementary School, told reporters on Tuesday. “Now they ask me how to cope with ICE breaking apart their families and taking their friends.”
Even the smallest members of families who stick mostly to home are processing what they have witnessed. As eyes were on ChongLy Thao, the Hmong American man handcuffed and forced outside in his underwear in the bitter cold, his 2-year-old grandson was also watching. He has since had trouble sleeping, a family member said.
Last week, Xochitl, the 16-year-old, welcomed her father back home. Up until his detainment, he had appeared regularly at court dates to find a legal path to citizenship and had no criminal record. His lawyers had quickly filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus, which helped lead to his release.
Usually reserved when it comes to affection, Xochitl greeted her father excitedly with a hug. But his arrival offered only a moment of relief, she said. She soon turned to worrying about whether he might be taken away again.
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2) Professors Are Being Watched: ‘We’ve Never Seen This Much Surveillance’
Scrutiny of university classrooms is being formalized, with new laws requiring professors to post syllabuses and tip lines for students to complain.
By Vimal Patel, Feb. 4, 2026
In Texas and elsewhere, professors must share their syllabuses online. Some faculty members worry about censorship. Callaghan O'Hare for The New York Times
College professors once taught free from political interference, with mostly their students and colleagues privy to their lectures and book assignments. Now, they are being watched by state officials, senior administrators and students themselves.
In Oklahoma, a student disputed an instructor’s grading decision, drawing the notice of a conservative campus group, Turning Point USA, that has long posted the names of professors criticized for bringing liberal politics into their classrooms. The instructor was removed.
In Texas, a student recorded a classroom lesson on gender identity that led to viral outrage and the instructor’s firing. Now, Texas has set up an office to take other complaints about colleges and professors.
And several states, including Texas, Ohio and Florida, have created laws requiring professors to publicly post their course outlines in searchable databases.
The increased oversight of professors comes as conservatives expand their movement to curb what they say is a liberal tilt in university classrooms. In the last couple of years, they have found sympathetic ears in state legislatures with the power to pressure schools, and their efforts have gained momentum as the Trump administration has made overhauling the politics and culture on campuses a focus.
But all of this, some professors and free-expression groups say, is leading to a wave of censorship and self-censorship that they argue is curbing academic freedom and learning.
“We’ve never seen this much surveillance,” said John White, a University of North Florida education professor who was asked to remove words such as “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion” and “culture” from his syllabus. He said he changed his syllabus under threat of his course being canceled.
Lawmakers, and sometimes university administrators, argue that the new scrutiny and rules make for stronger universities at a time of widespread calls for more accountability.
Peter Hans, the president of the University of North Carolina system, announced in December that all 16 of its campuses, including the flagship in Chapel Hill, will create searchable databases of syllabuses starting in the fall. In a recent opinion column, he wrote that “more transparency” was the answer to increased scrutiny of higher education.
“Getting an honest, realistic look at how our faculty are trying to reach an anxious generation with depth and rigor should inspire more confidence in our public universities,” he wrote.
Conservative groups that have monitored campuses have applauded the moves. Sarah Parshall Perry, vice president of Defending Education, a group that has publicly posted college syllabuses, said more transparency will help parents and students decide which courses to take.
“Exactly what are you teaching that you’re ashamed of?” she said.
The scrutiny has been especially intense in departments like gender studies and Middle Eastern studies that touch on contested issues. Some professors say the new rules have turned teaching into a minefield in those disciplines, inviting online trolls looking for keywords and directing online mobs toward professors.
Jonathan Friedman with PEN America, a free-expression group, said in an interview that posting syllabuses so the public has a better grasp of what occurs in college classrooms may sound innocuous. But “publishing syllabi when it is coupled with this McCarthyist environment is really dangerous,” he said.
Some states, including Florida, have mandated that the syllabuses be in databases searchable by keywords. “There you see the clear aim to essentially scan and scrutinize for hot-button topics,” he said.
Professors are adapting to the new reality, in some cases looking for ways to provide only the bare minimum of information required or otherwise avoid scrutiny. One professor at a school where faculty must post their course plans said he now effectively has two syllabuses: one he will submit for public posting and another for students. He asked not to be identified for fear of retribution against his institution.
At the annual meeting last month of the American Historical Association, the largest gathering of historians, a panel titled “Queering and Gendering Your Syllabi in an ‘Anti-Woke’ Era” explored how to convey to L.G.B.T.Q. students that the course will be welcoming while avoiding online critics trolling for keywords.
A panel member, Dan Royles, a historian of modern America, said that he includes topics that indicate gay history will be covered without using words that conservatives have been trying to stamp out. For example, he notes that his class will include key events like the AIDS epidemic and the anti-gay backlash to disco.
“None of this is happening in good faith and we shouldn’t treat it as such,” Dr. Boyles said during the panel. He later added, “Minimum compliance is a good guideline here.”
Isaac Kamola, a Trinity College professor who has studied right-wing websites, said the current surveillance follows efforts by Campus Reform and Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, which began singling out professors for their perceived liberal biases over a decade ago. Turning Point included a “watch list” of professors, leading to a torrent of critical and abusive emails to those who found themselves on it.
Now that governments and universities are involved, he said, “Everybody is walking on eggshells,” Dr. Kamola said. “Faculty are walking on eggshells. Administrators are walking on eggshells. Students are walking on eggshells. And what you get is the opposite of free speech.”
Some conservatives have pointed to efforts by left-leaning faculty and students to quell speech they disagree with — so-called “cancel culture” — that similarly sought to police and quiet right-wing speech. They say it upset the traditional balance, in which relatively conservative governing boards allowed faculties free rein over intellectual pursuits.
Professors should learn that “the lecture hall is not a place to push an agenda,” said Zachary Marschall, the editor in chief of Campus Reform.
Mr. Friedman, from PEN America, acknowledged that campuses faced free-speech threats from the left in recent years, sometimes leading to career consequences. But “nowhere in that was a serious effort to use the power of government,” he said, adding, “The stakes of this are simply much higher.”
Benjamin Robinson, an Indiana University professor, is one of those under the new microscope. In his class on the history of German thought, he touches on Kant, Hegel, Arendt and Nietzsche, connecting the thinkers’ big insights — “the aha moments” — to real-life experiences and contemporary politics.
In late 2024, a student anonymously complained, saying that Dr. Robinson — who has been vocal about his pro-Palestinian views — had spoken negatively about Israel, mentioned personal experiences like being arrested at a protest at the Israeli consulate in Chicago and “repeatedly spoke against Indiana University” during his classes.
The university found in favor of the student and reprimanded the professor, citing a recent state law meant to improve “intellectual diversity” and prevent students from being subjected to political views unrelated to the course.
The university’s provost, or top academic officer, said during a faculty meeting last month that Indiana’s Bloomington campus had received 10 complaints in 2025 under the new law.
Dr. Robinson said the vagueness of the law “is utterly chilling.”
“It establishes a hostile, suspicious relationship between faculty members and their students,” he said.
Rick Van Kooten, the dean of Indiana’s liberal arts college, wrote in a letter of reprimand to Dr. Robinson that his concern was not so much the speech related to Gaza or that he brought his personal experience into a lecture. Rather, he explained, he did it repeatedly, which risks “shifting the focus away from the academic content and toward personal political narratives.”
The professor received a written warning, which he said put his employment at risk under another provision of the viewpoint diversity law, which weakens tenure and mandates periodic reviews of faculty members by trustees.
Dr. Robinson, who is Jewish, acknowledged that he referred to Israel’s conduct as a genocide in class but he insisted that he never asked students to agree with him. He said he brought up his personal experiences of activism during a discussion of Kant and the philosopher’s distinction between private and public stances.
“If I can’t appeal to people’s intuitions, what it’s like to publicly use reason versus to have a private feeling of conscience,” he said, “if I can’t evoke what that feels like, I can’t possibly teach Kant.”
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3) ICE’s New Surveillance State Isn’t Tracking Only Immigrants
By David Wallace-Wells, Opinion Writer, Feb. 4, 2026
Last April the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement pledged to run the agency with the ruthless efficiency of Amazon. Mass deportations, he said, should be “like Prime but with human beings.”
What followed has been anything but logistically impressive. But one feature of President Trump’s crackdown on immigration does seem beamed in from a seamless law-enforcement future: the suddenly ubiquitous use of facial recognition technology to identify not just those whom federal agents suspect are in the country illegally but also those who are protesting, interrupting or simply documenting the nationwide nativist dragnet.
In video after video recorded by protesters and observers in Minneapolis, you can see that the agents are also filming the observers, in a sort of mutual surveillance state, I wrote last month (and one that my colleague Tressie McMillan Cottom covered this week). But in truth, it isn’t really mutual. The Department of Homeland Security has tried to criminalize journalism by characterizing reporting as doxxing and observing as impeding law enforcement, and its agents are now threatening and sometimes assaulting people who record them — an effort to secure, in addition to the state’s monopoly on violence, a monopoly on surveillance. This may be another reason so many immigration officers are masked while on duty: They know better than we do what it means to show one’s face. In Minneapolis and elsewhere, agents now carry tools of surveillance into the field, just as they do their guns.
The most prominent of these phone-based facial recognition apps is Mobile Fortify, which ICE has claimed can deliver a definitive determination of someone’s immigration status but has already bungled IDs. As Joseph Cox of 404 Media reported, it has even identified the same woman as two people, neither of whom was her; the outlet also reported that local law enforcement officers working with the Department of Homeland Security use a different product, Mobile Identify.
There are also reports that officers are using a tool developed by Clearview AI — which the department acknowledged in a contract with the company last fall would be deployed to monitor assaults against law enforcement. Another app used by D.H.S., Webloc, reportedly allows law enforcement officers to identify particular phones and track their movements without a warrant; Tangles apparently monitors social media to make dossiers on people of interest, including location information scraped from their public social media posts.
We don’t know yet quite how all of these tools fit together or what purpose the information gathered about protesters and observers will be put to — a viral video of an ICE agent telling an observer, “We have a nice little database” and “Now you’re considered a domestic terrorist, so have fun with that,” has produced denials from the Department of Homeland Security, with a department spokeswoman telling CNN that there is “no database of domestic terrorists run by D.H.S.”
The contracts for many of these tools are relatively small, by federal expenditure standards, running just in the low millions of dollars. And surveillance technology is one area where the alarmists and the boosters tend to echo one another in describing the power of the new tools. But while it is a familiar warning from civil libertarians that surveillance tools introduced in one narrow context will quickly be deployed in other, more worrying ways, immigration agents appear already to have made that jump, turning their apps on citizens who aren’t doing anything illegal beyond expressing hostility to the vision of state power embraced by MAGA and embodied by its mostly masked immigration enforcement army.
These revelations have arrived against an unnerving backdrop of public pronouncements. In September the president issued two expansive executive orders concerning those he’s called “the enemy within,” designating antifa as a domestic terrorist organization in one and in the other purporting to investigate progressive nongovernmental organizations as anti-American groups engaged in political violence and to unleash federal law enforcement to target them.
A memo from a Department of Homeland Security official reviewed by CNN and sent to agents dispatched to Minneapolis last month asked them to “capture all images, license plates, identifications and general information” on “agitators, protesters, etc. so we can capture it all in one consolidated form.” And the official reportedly provided such a form, called “intel collection.” Last month Tom Homan, the president’s border czar, bragged to Fox News about how he was pushing to “create a database where those people that are arrested for interference, impeding and assault — we’re going to make them famous.”
But Homan, Trump, his adviser Stephen Miller and the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, haven’t conjured a new surveillance state out of whole cloth. We are now several decades into the militarization of American law enforcement and the expansion of the homeland security mandate, which have together yielded an unnerving mix of imperial impunity and national-security-style policing that the historian Nikhil Pal Singh has called a new form of “homeland empire.” Last May, researchers at Georgetown Law republished a 2022 report, “American Dragnet,” which found that ICE spent $2.8 billion on expanded surveillance capabilities from 2008 to 2021. The spending had nearly tripled since 2015, and most of the increase was invested in geolocation.
These are not the kinds of investments or tools that go wasted, with new technologies typically spreading from intelligence agencies to battlefields abroad and then to federal law enforcement agencies and eventually down the food chain to local police departments. By 2022, the researchers found, ICE had already scanned the driver’s license photos of one-third of American adults and had access to the information contained on a typical license for many more. It was tracking the movement of drivers in cities home to three-quarters of American adults and could locate three-quarters of American adults through their utility records.
This was before the Department of Homeland Security entered into an agreement with Palantir for tools enabling ICE to track self-deportations with near real-time visibility and another that allows it to map potential deportees. It was before an executive order was issued in March aimed at eliminating “information silos,” integrating data across the federal government and making it more easily available across agencies.
It was before Congress tripled the ICE budget, before the State Department acknowledged that Tufts University’s Rumeysa Ozturk had essentially been arrested because she had helped write a student newspaper opinion essay critical of the war in Gaza, before an activist was arrested after wiping his phone before federal agents had a chance to search it, before the F.B.I. began an investigation into Signal groups dedicated to tracking the activity of immigration agents in Minneapolis, before the Department of Homeland Security began bullying its critics with secretive administrative subpoenas. It was before observers of and protesters against Trump’s immigration army began reporting that federal agents were addressing them by name.
“It’s totally unprecedented, what they’re doing,” David Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute told me. “They feel like they can point their phone at anyone who walks by, at any car, at any driver and instantly find out everything they want to know about that person.”
This may not feel like a significant escalation, given how police officers routinely radio in to check the records of those they’ve pulled over, for instance. But giving indiscriminate checkpoint-style power to every agent in the field, Bier said, is “a total reshaping of law enforcement in the United States.” Instead of investigating a crime by identifying a suspect and then pursuing information about him or her, officers instead begin with someone they want to treat as a criminal and then use the technology to find a justification. “This is so far from any type of typical law enforcement activity that I can’t even think of a parallel,” he said. “It’s entirely backward, and it’s all enabled by this technology.”
“We’ve seen cases where agents show up at people’s houses. Sometimes they’re following them home. Sometimes they’re showing up another way,” said Nathan Freed Wessler of the A.C.L.U. “How did they figure out who that person is and where they live?”
“They say, ‘We want to map the insurgency,’” Bier said. But any effort like that “is transforming these people from not a legitimate target of government to people who, if they die, no one in the government is going to shed any tears. We see that with Renee Good. We see that with Alex Pretti.” Bier continued, “I mean, once you transform someone into a domestic terrorist, that’s it.”
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4) What’s Really Driving These Bogus Claims of Voter Fraud
By Stephen Richer, Feb. 5, 2026
Mr. Richer is a Republican former elected recorder of Maricopa County, Ariz., where he was responsible for voter registration, early voting and mail-in voting.
Photo Illustration by Tam Stockton for The New York Times
This week, President Trump called on his party to nationalize American elections, an unconstitutional move that he said would be justified because of the danger of noncitizens casting ballots. “These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally,” he said.
No president has so baldly proposed to intervene in state elections, but the charge that noncitizens are illegally casting ballots is sadly commonplace. Elon Musk claims on X, without evidence, that significant numbers of illegal immigrants vote. Rudy Giuliani erroneously alleged that my home state, Arizona, had allowed “probably about 250,000” votes from noncitizens in 2020, despite the fact that Arizona has long required proof of citizenship to vote in state elections.
Election officials usually respond to these allegations by pointing out that there are almost no prosecutions of fraudulent noncitizen voters. Reuters has noted that even the pro-Trump Heritage Foundation’s database of election crimes listed only 24 instances of noncitizens voting in U.S. elections from 2003 to 2023.
While these rebuttals are correct, they are incomplete: Just because something isn’t prosecuted doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Happily, there is new compelling evidence debunking the false claims. Recently, a number of states have undertaken investigations into noncitizen voting, cross-checking voter rolls with citizenship status, and found it virtually nonexistent.
When confronted with allegations on noncitizens voting in Utah, Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, the state’s top election official, initiated a monthslong review of Utah’s approximately 2.1 million registered voters. She and her team found one “confirmed noncitizen.” Just one. And that one noncitizen, while registered, had never voted.
Idaho, a state of one million voters, ran similar tests in 2024, and they found 36 “very likely” registered noncitizens. That may seem like a lot until you view it in light of claims that statewide elections are altered by such anomalies. Some, but not all, of those 36 people have previously voted, the secretary of state, Phil McGrane, said, but “out of the million-plus registered voters we started with, we’re down to 10 thousandths of a percent” of the overall count — not even close to affecting the outcome.
Louisiana’s investigation in 2025 netted some 390 noncitizen registrants, 79 of whom had voted in at least one election over the last several decades (out of 2.9 million registrants). Just a few weeks ago, Montana found 23 possible noncitizen registrants (out of approximately 785,000 people registered). And Georgia, in some ways the model for these investigations, found in its 2024 audit 20 registered noncitizens (out of 8.2 million registrations). In my four years in office in Maricopa County overseeing voter registration, I came across a total of two possible instances of noncitizens voting out of some 2.5 million registered voters.
Some politicians are trying to exploit even these small numbers. In Michigan, the Macomb County clerk, Anthony Forlini, who is running for the top election office in the state, the secretary of state, recently announced to great fanfare that he’d found 15 noncitizens on his county’s voter rolls of over 724,000 registered voters. The incumbent secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, then tasked her team with investigating the 15 files. It found that three of the people were U.S. citizens, four were previously removed from voter rolls, four were under further investigation and four do seem to be noncitizens.
These investigations affirm what is simply common sense. People largely aren’t willing to risk their status in the United States — the land of economic opportunity — for the ability to cast one more vote out of hundreds of thousands or millions in a state and hundreds of millions in the country.
The investigations also suggest that many politicians and public interest groups, all of which have access to these reports, may not actually care that much about election security. The constant talk of noncitizen voting is more likely about scoring political points and bolstering fund-raising.
Playing politics with the idea of fraudulent voters and stolen elections comes at a real cost to American confidence in our elections. It’s an affront to our democracy and to all those who work to deliver free and fair elections. It’s also an ominous sign for where things may be heading this year.
For President Trump, the myth of noncitizens voting is part of the broader story he’s concocted to avoid accepting that he lost to Joe Biden in 2020. But it also appears to be about this fall’s election. Mr. Trump may well intend to send the F.B.I. to run elections in Fulton County, Ga., or the Department of Homeland Security to seize ballot tabulators from Los Angeles County.
I don’t think it’s likely he will do so. But I also wouldn’t have predicted that the F.B.I. would take hundreds of boxes of 2020 election materials from Fulton County, as it did last week. And I certainly wouldn’t have predicted that Republicans would attempt to derail the electoral count on Jan. 6, 2021.
Everyone — Democrats and Republicans — should use the new state-level proof that noncitizen voting is virtually nonexistent to push back against the real danger to our democracy: craven politicians using the issue to undermine our free and fair elections.
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5) Surge in Immigration Cases in Minnesota Pushes Prosecutors and Judges to Brink
Remarks by a prosecutor opened a revealing window onto how the courts in the state are buckling under the weight of a deluge of cases arising from the Trump administration’s campaign.
By Alan Feuer, Mattathias Schwartz and Zach Montague, Feb. 5, 2026
Hundreds of immigrants have been arrested in Minnesota in recent weeks. Credit...David Guttenfelder/The New York Times
When it all became too much — the crippling case load, the lack of training and, most of all, the immigrants themselves who had been languishing in jail — Julie T. Le let loose in front of the judge.
Ms. Le, a prosecutor for the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota, knew that he was angry. She understood that she and her colleagues had violated his orders to release people illegally detained in the state last month. But she had already tried to quit her job, and no one would replace her, so what else could she do?
“The system sucks. This job sucks,” Ms. Le exclaimed. While she wanted to improve things, she was just one person, she explained, working around the clock to grapple with the onslaught of cases stemming from the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
“Fixing a system, a broken system, I don’t have a magic button to do it,” she said. “I don’t have the power or the voice to do it. I only can do it within the ability and the capacity that I have.”
‘The System Sucks’
A prosecutor shared a moment of candor in responding to a judge’s questions on why the Justice Department had violated his orders to release people illegally detained in January in Minnesota.
And last night I had to stay up until 2:35 a.m. just to get this documents ready for you. It’s a — I can’t say it’s a waste of my time, but I could have sent so many more email and get so many more people get ready to be released. And I am here with you, Your Honor. What do you want me to do? The system sucks. This job sucks. And I am trying every breath that I have so that I can get you what you need.
Ms. Le’s outburst on Tuesday at a hearing in Federal District Court in St. Paul was an extraordinary expression of personal frustration from a lawyer on the front lines of the White House’s aggressive immigration sweeps.
The remarks cost her her job at the Justice Department, where she had been working on a temporary basis to help handle habeas corpus petitions, or court filings that compel the government to justify holding someone in custody. But they also opened a window onto a broader problem: how the courts in Minnesota are buckling beneath the weight of a deluge of cases arising from the statewide campaign that the administration has called Operation Metro Surge.
The turmoil in the courts has demoralized prosecutors, outraged judges, exhausted defense lawyers — and left many immigrants languishing in detention in violation of court orders.
“The individuals affected are people,” said Jerry W. Blackwell, the federal judge who convened Tuesday’s hearing. “They live in their communities. Some are separated from their families.”
When agencies like the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement ignore judicial orders to release immigrants under their control, Judge Blackwell said, it is an affront not merely to personal liberty, but to the entire criminal justice system.
“The D.O.J., the D.H.S. and ICE are not above the law,” the judge declared. “They do wield extraordinary power, and that power has to exist within constitutional limits.”
The Government Is ‘Not Above the Law’
In his opening remarks, the judge criticized the administration for ignoring court orders to release immigrants under its control.
When court orders are not followed, it’s not just the court’s authority that’s at issue. It is the rights of individuals in custody and the integrity of the constitutional system itself.
The hearing was held so that Judge Blackwell could grill Ms. Le and her supervisor in the U.S. attorney’s office about why they had ignored his orders in cases in which he had determined that immigrants had been illegally detained by federal agents. While the men were all eventually released from federal custody, the judge wanted to get to the bottom of the government’s noncompliance in missing court-imposed deadlines.
Lawyers for some of the immigrants had asked him to hold the administration in contempt. And while Judge Blackwell did not immediately do so, Ms. Le, in a darkly sardonic moment, said she would not have minded if he did.
“I wish you would just hold me in contempt, Your Honor, so that I can have a full 24 hours of sleep,” she said.
“If rogue judges followed the law in adjudicating cases and respected the government’s obligation to properly prepare cases, there wouldn’t be an ‘overwhelming’ habeas caseload or concern over D.H.S. following orders,” said Natalie Baldassarre, a Justice Department spokeswoman. “The level of illegal aliens currently detained is a direct result of this administration’s strong border security policies to keep the American people safe.”
The increasingly loud warnings that the Trump administration’s immigration policies are overloading the federal judiciary extend beyond Judge Blackwell’s courtroom.
Last week, Patrick J. Schiltz, the chief federal judge in Minnesota, excoriated the administration for what he said were nearly 100 violations of court orders stemming from the Homeland Security Department’s aggressive crackdown in Minneapolis, which has led to the fatal shootings of two protesters at the hands of federal agents.
But a growing chorus of judges around the country have also raised concerns about the wave of cases brought on by the government’s immigration raids.
In the Western District of Texas, Judge Leon Schydlower noted that as of last week, 134 habeas cases related to immigrants were pending in his court, and 20 to 25 new ones were arriving each week.
In West Virginia, Judge Joseph R. Goodwin used a ruling late last month ordering the release of a Venezuelan immigrant to complain about the wider problem of immigrants being held in violation of their rights.
“Individuals are stopped during ordinary civilian activity, taken into custody for civil immigration purposes and confined in local jails without prompt hearings, without individualized findings and often far from counsel, family or community,” he wrote.
Two days after Judge Goodwin issued his order, Judge Fred Biery, of the Western District of Texas, issued his own fiery ruling that freed 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, who was arrested with his father in Minnesota. Judge Biery included a photo of Liam standing in the cold, wearing a blue bunny hat, as he was taken into custody.
But the situation has been particularly acute in Minnesota, where hundreds of immigrants have been arrested in recent weeks.
Paschal O. Nwokocha, an immigration lawyer in the state, said he and his staff had fought for weeks to keep track of their clients, refreshing an ICE detainee tracker for updates on their whereabouts. In one instance, he watched a client sent to El Paso via Torrance County, N.M., after a judge had ordered his release and return to Minnesota.
After the man was returned more than a week later, Judge John R. Tunheim noted that the government had “willfully violated the court’s orders” in failing to send the man back to Minnesota in time for a hearing.
“I feel so sorry for these lawyers because they are caught, because they can’t control what their clients are doing,” Mr. Nwokocha said, referring to the Justice Department lawyers representing the Trump administration.
At the federal courthouse in St. Paul on Tuesday, Judge Blackwell started the hearing by discussing the case of an immigrant named Oscar Olvidio Tot-Choc, whom he had ordered to be freed from custody on Jan. 15. But instead of immediately complying, ICE officials flew Mr. Tot-Choc first to El Paso and then to Albuquerque.
Finally, after repeated exhortations from the judge, Ms. Le told him that Mr. Tot-Choc would return to Minnesota as a free man on Jan. 27. Not long after, however, prosecutors asked for one more day to bring him back, saying there were “safety concerns” with his flight.
Judge Blackwell blamed overreach by the Trump administration for this chaos and confusion, saying that officials had failed to put enough legal “infrastructure” in place to “keep up with it all.”
‘It Heightens the Need for Care’
In his opening remarks, the judge added that it was the government’s responsibility to make sure its enforcement operation was operating lawfully.
If the government undertakes an enforcement operation of this scale, one that results in the detention of large numbers of people, including individuals who are lawfully present in the United States, then the government assumes a corresponding obligation to ensure that each detention complies with the Constitution and with court orders governing release. Volume, that is, the volume of cases and matters, is not a justification for diluting constitutional rights and it never can be. It heightens the need for care.
Ms. Le bore the brunt of Judge Blackwell’s complaints even though she was not a career Justice Department lawyer. She told the judge that her main job was with ICE and that in January she had volunteered — “stupidly,” she said — to join federal prosecutors in Minnesota to handle the deluge of cases filed by immigrants challenging their arrests.
Over the next several weeks, she found herself overseeing about 90 immigration cases and claimed that she had received almost no instruction on how to handle them.
“So are you telling the court that you were brought in brand new, a shiny, brand-new penny into this role, and you received no proper orientation or training?” the judge asked.
Ms. Le said it was true.
She also shared a bit of her personal history, asserting that as an Asian woman she felt sympathy for the immigrants whose cases she was handling.
‘I Am Not White, as You Can See’
Ms. Le addressed her own background as a person of color.
I am not white, as you can see. And my family’s at risk as any other people that might get picked up too, so I share the same concern, and I took that concern to heart. But, again, fixing a system, a broken system, I don’t have a magic button to do it. I don’t have the power or the voice to do it. I only can do it within the ability and the capacity that I have.
Eventually, she said, the job wore her down and she filed her resignation papers, but was asked to stay when her bosses could not find anyone to replace her.
“To be honest, Your Honor, I did put in for a request to be transferred back,” she said, “but no one was willing to come here to stand in front of you to explain and/or to help to improve the system.”
All she really wanted now was rest, she said, telling the judge that she had been working until 2:35 a.m. that day preparing for the hearing. She even made a morbid joke, saying that she might not mind being locked up for a while like the immigrants whose cases she was handling.
“I would love to undo all of this stuff because no one wants to be in jail,” she said. “And actually, honestly, you know, being in jail a day to catch up with sleep is not bad right now with all the hours I have to put into this job.”
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6) I Was Arrested for Doing My Job as a Reporter. Who’s Next?
By Georgia Fort, Ms. Fort is an independent journalist based in Minnesota, Feb. 5, 2026
Paola Chapdelaine for The New York Times
Jan. 18 was a Sunday morning. I was on my 11th straight day of covering the unrest in Minnesota after the fatal shooting of Renee Good. I was exhausted. The 14- and 16-hour days were catching up with me.
But that day, I went to work as a journalist again, documenting a small gathering of community members at Cities Church, in St. Paul, Minn. — they were there taking issue with one of the pastors of that church, who was apparently also working as the acting field director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s St. Paul field office. I was one of the journalists who documented what happened that day.
Twelve days later, I woke up to forceful knocking at 6 in the morning. The men at my door identified themselves as federal agents and claimed they held an arrest warrant for me, Georgia Fort. I began to pace back and forth, unsure if what they were holding was a legitimate warrant. I had already prepared myself for the possibility of being arrested, because of the amount of publicity around the church protest and because of threats to arrest Don Lemon, another independent journalist who covered the protest. Still, nothing prepared me for the terror of the moment. The agents continued to knock and demand that I come out. My mother was with me; through the door, she told them I would come out if we could send a copy of the warrant to my lawyer to verify its legitimacy.
By now, my 17-year-old daughter was awake and crying. She crawled out of her room, staying low, afraid that agents would see her through the window. I was trying to console her, because I didn’t want her to wake up my younger daughters. One woke up anyway; she just lay in bed, crying.
I went live to Facebook to alert the public. When my lawyer confirmed the legitimacy of the warrant, I walked outside and surrendered to the nearly two dozen agents outside my home. I couldn’t help but think: All this for one woman? I informed the agents that I was a member of the press and that this was a violation of my First Amendment rights, but they proceeded to handcuff me. Several agents wore Drug Enforcement Administration vests. It was humiliating to think what my neighbors might speculate when they saw D.E.A. agents.
I was transported in a large S.U.V. to the federal Whipple Building. There, I was fingerprinted and held in a cell in a wing that I was told was for “U.S.C.s,” or United States citizens. I asked for my lawyer several times. She was in the building, asking to see me. But, at Whipple, we were not permitted to meet or talk.
I later learned that the agents stayed outside my home for over two hours after my arrest. My daughters and my husband were stopped and questioned when they tried to leave.
Two hours after I was taken into custody, I was transferred to another facility, where my fingerprints and DNA were taken. The officers swabbed the inside of my cheek, they said to confirm my identity.
I was finally able to talk with my lawyer three hours after I arrived. I learned that I would have a hearing before a judge.
Representatives of the Department of Justice had gone before a Minnesota grand jury and received an indictment for my arrest on two charges. Count 1: Conspiracy Against Right of Religious Freedom at Place of Worship 18:241, and Count 2: Injure, Intimidate and Interfere with Exercise of Right of Religious Freedom at Place of Worship 18:248(a)(2), (b) and 2(a).
The charges I face for reporting on an event of significant public interest and concern — involving well-known Minneapolis leaders, as well as an individual apparently employed by ICE — concern not just me. They raise a far more serious question: whether journalism is still protected under the Constitution.
Journalism is a public service, and I am proud to be a public servant. Professional reporting, observing and documenting is not a crime. But the freedom to do so is at risk. In November alone, three journalists were hit with pepper balls or other less lethal munitions and subjected to chemical agents while covering an ICE arrest in St. Paul. One, a Minnesota Public Radio reporter, was taken away by ambulance. Cameras were rolling. Press credentials were visible but offered no protection. I interviewed the St. Paul chief of police about these attacks in December. He refused to acknowledge that the incidents had occurred, even though several journalists had filmed and photographed them, including me. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request a few days after the interview to obtain body-camera footage of the attack on these journalists. It was denied.
These incidents are not isolated. After the fatal shooting of Renee Good, the independent photographer KingDemetrius Pendleton was tear-gassed by federal agents and was apparently shot with a chemical munitions canister. The Star Tribune video journalist Mark Vancleave was pushed back into his car by federal agents after trying to report on an ICE arrest, which he was covering for The Associated Press. The KARE 11 anchor Jana Shortal was hit with a chemical irritant while reporting after the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti.
Having the right to film and document matters. Footage can disprove false accusations or confirm hard truths. It can exonerate or incriminate. Days after the church protest, Alex Pretti, an intensive care unit nurse, was fatally shot by ICE agents. In the minutes that followed, videos from multiple angles of the shooting were published online, and this allowed the public, the press and the authorities to review the evidence.
Each violation of press freedom plants and waters seeds of repression. The recent raid on the home of a Washington Post reporter was a dramatic escalation in press intimidation by the government. These tactics do not need to succeed to be effective in causing fear, delay and self-censorship.
What is happening in Minnesota, and what happened to me, is not part of a series of unfortunate coincidences. It is a pattern. A pattern of intimidating the press, physically harming reporters who are covering protests and, now, taking legal action against members of the media.
These attacks should be cataloged in a database, similar to how the Committee to Protect Journalists tallies global attacks on journalists.
I am a three-time Upper Midwest Emmy Award winner with 14 Regional Emmy nominations. I serve as the vice president of the National Association of Black Journalists’ Minnesota chapter. My press credentials have been recognized by both state and federal courts in Minnesota. Yet none of it prevented me from being arrested for doing my job.
A society that claims to value our democracy cannot criminalize those who document threats to democracy. Charges against journalists for doing their jobs must be dropped. Physical harm and intimidation against reporters must carry consequences. If we as a nation fail to defend that principle now, clearly and without compromise, we may soon find that there is nothing left to defend.
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7) An Elegy for My Washington Post
By Carlos Lozada, Opinion Columnist, Feb. 6, 2026
Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times
Hovering among the song lyrics, sports scores and movie quotes that clutter up my brain, there are a few key texts that I have committed to memory. The Gettysburg Address, for one. Psalm 23. The preamble to the Constitution, plus the first few sentences of the Declaration of Independence (after “the consent of the governed,” things get hazy).
And there’s another manifesto rattling around up there, one that I learned some 21 years ago, when I began working at The Washington Post. It is less known to the world, but no less vital to my worldview.
It is called “The Seven Principles for the Conduct of a Newspaper.”
These principles, about 150 words in total, were the work of Eugene Meyer, the former Federal Reserve chairman who bought The Post at auction in 1933 and who became the first of four generations of his family to run the paper. On March 5, 1935, The Post’s new owner issued his seven principles, which addressed the newspaper’s mission, its style, its leadership, its independence — in all, its spirit.
Now, The Washington Post is in crisis: Its newsroom is being decimated and its coverage ambitions curtailed, and all this after its proud, tireless journalists were reduced to the indignity of publicly pleading for their jobs, only to be ignored by an unfathomably wealthy owner. I grieve for The Post, and part of my grief is personal. I worked in its newsroom for many years and forged deep friendships there, and, as a longtime resident of the Washington area, I remain a devoted Washington Post reader.
But I also grieve for the ideals and beliefs and priorities that have sustained the institution, and that are embodied in Meyer’s principles. They make up the animating ethic of The Washington Post and, to me, of the practice of journalism. And they are at risk.
When I began working at The Post in the summer of 2005, the Meyer principles were on display in the first-floor lobby of the old Washington Post building on 15th Street in downtown D.C. I saw them every day, so soon I knew them by heart. It was my first job at a newspaper, and I wasn’t sure I could hack it, not with legendary reporters in every section and Ben Freaking Bradlee still holding court in the cafeteria. So, during my earliest weeks there, I fixated on the seven principles, as if absorbing them would ensure that I belonged.
After Donald Graham, the beloved Post chairman (and Meyer’s grandson), sold The Post to Jeff Bezos in 2013 and the newsroom moved to a sleek location on K Street, the Meyer principles followed us there, a reminder of The Post’s culture and traditions. “The values of The Post do not need changing,” Bezos said in a reassuring letter to the Post staff on the day of the announcement — but much else did. He made desperately needed investments in the paper, upgraded its website, showed respect for the newsroom’s independence and even encouraged Post reporters to cover Amazon, and Bezos himself, however they liked. He also seemed to take great pride in his acquisition. In a 2016 speech to the staff, he called The Post “swashbuckling” and praised its “swagger” and “badassness.”
“Important institutions like The Post have an essence, they have a heart, they have a core,” Bezos said, and it would be “crazy” to change it. “That’s part of what this place is. It’s part of what makes it so special.”
During my 17 years at the paper, as I moved from news editor to section editor to book critic, the Meyer principles remained a constant guide. I remember the display in the new building, elegant but a bit hard to read (the new text was made of thick brass linotype letters, and I had to squint to make it out). Never lacking in earnestness, I made a pilgrimage to the spot every week or so, just to make sure The Post’s principles stayed in my memory and on my mind.
When I left for The Times in 2022, The Post was going through some turmoil, both cultural and financial, but I was confident that its core would remain.
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Now, that confidence is shaken, if not shattered. Bezos and his publisher, Will Lewis, have cut more than a third of the newsroom, eviscerating its sports, international, local, arts and literary coverage. Even the Amazon beat reporter has been laid off. Eugene Meyer’s seven principles still hang in the newsroom, I am told, but now they are more reproach than reminder.
I hope that The Post’s current leaders stop by the display sometime, squint their eyes and take another look.
Journalism, I must admit, is a romanticized and self-congratulatory profession. My colleagues and I love to go on about our importance to the survival of the Republic, about our “craft” (that’s what we call reporting, writing and editing) and especially about our past. There is always some golden age of journalism that we look back upon with longing, that we hope to recover and that the best among us so obviously represent.
I realize that pining for the Meyer principles may seem like more wistfulness for bygone times. But what I admire about the list is precisely how straightforward it is, how shorn of embellishment and self-aggrandizement, and, despite its nine decades and counting, how relevant it remains to the goals of modern journalism.
Principle No. 1: The first mission of a newspaper is to tell the truth as nearly as the truth may be ascertained.
Principle No. 2: The newspaper shall tell ALL the truth so far as it can learn it, concerning the important affairs of America and the world.
No “my truth” squishiness here. There is a real truth and we must tell it; that is the mission of the journalist. But with that zeal comes an inherent humility, captured in the last eight words of the first Meyer principle. Truth is elusive. We may circle around it and get nearer each time, but we may never quite grasp it in full. The findings of journalism are necessarily incomplete, a fact that should inspire our efforts and limit our certainty. There is always more to the story.
That all-caps “ALL” of the second principle combines ambition with fairness: It does not simply mean that we must report on all sorts of subjects; it means we must report each story from every relevant vantage point. Then, after more of that stubborn modesty (“so far as it can learn it”), there is a call to exercise judgment on what is newsworthy (“important affairs”), only to end on ambition once again, with the imperative to cover not just our country but the globe. So much of this principle is being undercut in the decision to scale back The Post’s reporting of both “America and the world.”
Principle No. 3: As a disseminator of the news, the paper shall observe the decencies that are obligatory upon a private gentleman.
Principle No. 4: What it prints shall be fit reading for the young as well as for the old.
For me, the third principle does not just mean avoiding foul language or indecent subjects; instead, I linger on the word “private.” In my writing, do I express myself with the decency and consideration that I would expect in private, face-to-face exchanges? Or do I let the power and distance of the pen — or the microphone or the camera — loosen my standards? When I read the fourth principle, I think of my own children. I did not have kids when I joined The Post; now I have three. Will I make them proud with what I write and how I work? Will my journalism be relevant to their challenges, their lives? That relevance can make something “fit reading,” too.
No. 5: The newspaper’s duty is to its readers and to the public at large, and not to the private interests of its owners.
No. 6: In the pursuit of truth, the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifices of its material fortunes, if such course be necessary for the public good.
I was there in the Post building on Aug. 5, 2013, when Don Graham and Katharine Weymouth, the publisher and Don’s niece, told us they were selling the paper to Bezos. Some employees were in tears; most of us seemed in shock. But I took heart in Bezos’ letter to the staff that day. “The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners,” he said.
Though he did not explicitly invoke the Meyer principles, this was a near-verbatim reference to No. 5. Bezos had done his homework, it seemed, and he understood what The Post was about. The new owner also said he’d have “the courage to say follow the story, no matter the cost.” This seemed like an affirmation of the sixth principle, to pursue the truth even if the cost in our material fortune was steep.
I will not pretend to have a simple solution — or any solution, for that matter — to the business challenges afflicting America’s news media, nor do I believe that just because Bezos is rich, he is obliged to subsidize The Post in perpetuity. Yet, despite management’s preoccupation with The Post’s mounting losses, it is hard for me to imagine that economic concerns are the sole reason to eliminate more than a third of the Post newsroom, on top of previous cuts in recent years. I went to see the “Melania” documentary last weekend, for which Amazon reportedly spent $75 million overall, which includes a hefty promotional budget. Based on that viewing, I can only conclude that turning a profit on a quality product is not always Bezos’ primary motivation.
In that letter to The Post’s staff in 2013, Bezos cited “government, local leaders, restaurant openings, scout troops, businesses, charities, governors, sports” as important areas of coverage for the paper — many of the very areas that are now being shuttered or drastically scaled back.
Times change, of course, as do the preferences of news consumers. But in the terms of Principle No. 6, either the paper is no longer willing to make sacrifices in its material fortunes, or the owner’s interpretation of the public good has drastically changed.
I still have the front page of The Washington Post from Aug. 6, 2013, with the news stripped atop all six columns: “Grahams to Sell The Post.” The article about Bezos was headlined “Chief Executive Is Noted for Patience.”
Bezos’ patience appears to have run out.
Principle No. 7: The newspaper shall not be the ally of any special interest, but shall be fair and free and wholesome in its outlook on public affairs and public men.
Just days before the 2024 presidential election, Bezos chose to cancel a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee. The decision, according to Will Lewis, the Post publisher, was “a statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds.”
Yes, I suppose one could interpret the move as an affirmation of this final Meyer principle, an effort to keep the paper independent. But that conclusion becomes less tenable given Bezos’ support for President Trump, including a $1 million donation to his inauguration fund, Amazon’s presence among the donors to the White House ballroom project and Bezos’ own prominent perch at Trump’s swearing-in at the Capitol Rotunda on Jan. 20, 2025. Whether out of conviction or convenience, Bezos’ favorable outlook on this one public man is quite clear.
A former Post colleague, Ashley Parker, wrote in The Atlantic this week about “The Murder of the Washington Post.” Here, I’m attempting to write an elegy for the departed. I fear that absent the robust Post coverage I often turn to first — books, local sports, foreign dispatches, a varied and vibrant editorial page — The Post will become unrecognizable to me. It is a strange feeling to miss a place that is ceasing to exist, at least as I knew it.
I hope that The Post will endure, even thrive, as a business, but I worry that it may do so at the cost of its essence, its heart, its core. As Bezos himself said a decade ago, that would be crazy. But it could also be tempting. If we’ve learned anything during America’s deepening political strife, it is that institutional principles — those much-lamented “norms” — matter most when they are challenged. It’s easy to stick by your values when times are good. Guardrails are particularly valuable when something is slamming against them.
In her 1997 memoir, “Personal History,” Katharine Graham, the publisher who led The Post through the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, wrote that her father’s seven principles “were the heart and soul of his convictions, but how to translate them into action was the challenge.” That’s the thing about principles. How do we take them down from the wall and put them in the business model, into the paper and into the hands of readers — and make sure that we do so every day?
I realize that sympathy from someone who already left the paper may be dismissed as compassion from the cheap seats, so let me conclude instead with the most practical advice that I received when I joined The Post in 2005. It came courtesy of Steve Pearlstein, a brilliant and blunt business columnist who I edited early in my time there.
If I had a long career at The Post, Pearlstein said to me, I would have all sorts of bosses and editors at different times. And sure, those people would supervise my work, complete my performance reviews and approve my vacation schedules. But I really wouldn’t work for any of them. You work for The Washington Post, he told me. Your responsibilities and duties are to the institution, and to the principles the institution must uphold.
At The Washington Post, those principles have always been right there on the wall.
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8) Minnesota’s ICE Watchers: How Tactics of 1960s Radicals Went Mainstream
The monitoring of law enforcement has a long history, dating back to the 1960s, when leftist groups like the Black Panthers began police patrols.
By Charles Homans, Feb. 6, 2026
“'In the same way that people organize a P.T.A.,' Mr. Fahlstrom said, 'they have put those skills into ICE watch.'”
Activists have tried to block often-bellicose federal agents, which has led to frequent street confrontations. Credit...Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
In the months leading up to the 2024 election, Jill Garvey, an organizer in Chicago for liberal advocacy groups, gathered with some like-minded colleagues and, she recalled, “did some scenario planning.”
“Our sense,” she said, was that “authoritarian movements had coalesced, had singular goals, and were advancing them.”
Since then, the organization that Ms. Garvey founded shortly before Election Day, States at the Core, has hosted regular Zoom trainings in how to track and document the actions of federal immigration agents. These seminars on “ICE-watching” — referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement — now draw thousands of attendees at a time.
ICE-watching has been at the heart of the opposition to the Trump administration’s raids in Minneapolis, where activists’ unrelenting pursuit of often-bellicose federal agents has led to frequent street confrontations. In two such incidents, federal officers fatally shot Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both Minneapolis residents, killings that were captured on camera from multiple angles by observers.
The videos of these shootings and other instances of aggression by immigration officers have succeeded in doing what perhaps no other anti-Trump protest has done: draw concessions from the administration.
On Wednesday, Tom Homan, Mr. Trump’s border czar, announced the withdrawal of 700 federal agents from the city, a move that followed the reassignment of Gregory Bovino, the border patrol official who had served as the face of the Minneapolis operation.
Thousands of federal agents remain in Minnesota, and raids have continued apace. The ongoing presence in Minneapolis was justified, Mr. Homan said this week, in part by the opposition that remains there. On Wednesday, federal agents, with guns drawn, were filmed stopping a group of observers in Minneapolis and arresting them.
Ms. Garvey is quick to note the role that her organization’s trainings have played in Minneapolis — but also to acknowledge that the strategies long predate her group and others like it.
“There’s a debt of gratitude to Black liberation movements that really pioneered this,” she said. “The Black Panther Party did it.”
The resistance in Minneapolis over the past two months has not looked much like the organized opposition during Mr. Trump’s first term, when demonstrations like the Women’s March assembled crowds of historic size in Washington and state capitals to register dissent. In appearance and format, those protests took cues from the Civil Rights movement marches and the antiwar demonstrations of the 1960s.
Although large marches and vigils have occurred in Minneapolis, the most potent opposition has come from regular, neighborhood-level ICE-watch patrols, which have resulted in smaller, more direct confrontations with federal agents.,
These tactics have their own long lineage. They were adapted from the work of immigrant-rights groups in the Obama and first Trump presidencies, which borrowed strategies from “cop-watch” activism from the 1990s and 2000s, whose own roots go back to 1960s radical groups like the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement, an indigenous-rights group.
“It’s in the tradition of the AIM patrols,” said Andrew Fahlstrom, a Minneapolis activist who operates a site called Defend the 612 — a reference to the city’s area code — which directs volunteers to ICE-watching efforts in particular neighborhoods. “It’s not like anyone is inventing anything new in protecting your community.”
Both the Panthers and the American Indian Movement blended uncompromising left-wing politics with ground-level community organizing, and they embraced police-monitoring patrols as part of that project.
The Minneapolis efforts have taken shape in the crucible of a federal deployment largely despised by local residents, and brought together not only by dedicated activists, but a broader left-liberal constituency.
The participants in the Twin Cities explain their monitoring in widely differing terms: as resistance to authoritarianism, or a radical project in ground-up politics, or simple neighborliness — and sometimes all of those things at once.
The trainings focus on documenting ICE activities and alerting others to their presence, sometimes using tactics — such as blowing whistles — that shade into disruption. Activists’ guides in some cases link to resources for more directly confrontational civil-disobedience tactics.
While most of these tactics are not new, their impact and the recent support for them from mainstream Democratic officials are unusual. In Minneapolis, ICE-watchers have been the most visible neighborhood opposition in a city where local officials have chosen to file lawsuits and denounce the federal presence in interviews, but have kept their own officers and agencies clear of direct confrontation.
Tim Walz, the state’s Democratic governor, implicitly endorsed such efforts himself last month, urging state residents to “take out that phone and hit record” when encountering federal agents in public. His call echoed similar statements by JB Pritzker, Illinois’s Democratic governor, during federal immigration raids in his state in September.
Americans have divided sharply along partisan lines over the legitimacy of the anti-ICE protests. In an NPR/PBS News/Marist poll taken last week, 85 percent of Democrats said the demonstrations were “mostly legitimate,” as did 65 percent of independents. Only 25 percent of Republicans did.
In a Truth Social post on Saturday, Trump described the activists as “Lunatics, Agitators, and Insurrectionists.”
The Minneapolis organizers say the Trump administration’s strategy of aggressively deploying thousands of armed agents forced them to adapt. ICE-watching tactics took on a new relevance, superseding more familiar forms of protest.
With that relevance came new risks. In the past, “people could expect to go to a march, make a sign, put on a pink hat and come home,” Ms. Garvey said. “And that’s fine. But that’s not the era we’re in.”
Her organization — which is backed by the Hopewell Fund, a large liberal philanthropy — now trains thousands of observers a week.
After the 1965 Watts riots, Community Alert Patrol, a group founded by Black activists in Los Angeles, began monitoring law enforcement in hopes of documenting and preventing police brutality. The project was short-lived, but a young Huey Newton read an article about it and decided to pursue his own police-monitoring effort in Oakland — the origin of the Black Panther Party.
“That was the seed,” said Joshua Bloom, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh and co-author of “Black Against Empire,” a history of the Black Panthers.
The Black Panthers’ patrols, unlike the Watts efforts, were armed. State lawmakers, in response to the Panthers, banned the public from carrying loaded firearms without a permit.
The Panthers’ heyday was brief, ending in a blaze of gun battles with police and indictments. But their patrols inspired similar efforts across the country.
In 1968, the American Indian Movement, which was founded in Minneapolis and modeled on the Panthers, began fielding citizens’ patrols to monitor police.
By the 1990s, when compact video cameras became widely affordable, “cop watch” projects proliferated in cities.
The Panthers “kind of set a blueprint for everyone when it comes to community patrols, this idea of policing the police,” said Sherman Austin, a self-described anarchist activist in Long Beach, Calif., who participated in local police-monitoring efforts in the 2000s.
When the Obama administration increased detentions and deportations of undocumented immigrants, immigrants-rights activists applied the same tactics to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In Chicago, Organized Communities Against Deportations, a group founded in 2013, borrowed police-surveilling strategies from activists in Oakland. “We needed to create our own systems,” Antonio Gutierrez, the group’s strategic coordinator, said.
During Mr. Trump’s first presidency, the group’s organizers hosted “ICE watch” trainings in Chicago. Their work, Mr. Gutierrez said, focused on informing detainees of their rights and documenting the conditions of their arrests in ways that might be useful in court.
“Getting detained by ICE is usually the beginning of the fight, not the end,” he said.
Those efforts contributed to a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security charging ICE with illegal and unconstitutional arrests. A settlement, which was in effect until this month, forced ICE to issue a new policy explicitly prohibiting warrantless arrests and vehicle stops.
The widespread adoption of messaging platforms like Signal and WhatsApp added another layer of utility, offering undocumented immigrants real-time information during crackdowns to gauge the risk of picking up children at school or buying groceries.
Last year, as Mr. Trump’s aggressive immigration raids became a central project of his second term, the monitoring strategies drew a new wave of interest.
Mr. Austin, the Long Beach activist, built stopICE.net, which crowdsources and disseminates reports of federal activity nationwide. It attained prominence — and law-enforcement scrutiny — during the Los Angeles crackdown and eventually grew to half a million registered users, Mr. Austin said.
Today, the people picking up these tools, organizers say, extend well beyond the dedicated immigrant-rights activists that had previously used them.
In Mr. Trump’s first term, most Americans opposed Homeland Security’s separations of undocumented families, but most also remained at a remove from such actions.
Nikki Marín Baena, a community organizer in North Carolina, recalls monitoring immigration raids during the first Trump term.
“I remember it feeling like, ‘We are in a war that no one else is in,’” said Ms. Baena, who is the co-director of Siembra NC, a North Carolina immigrant advocacy group.
In Mr. Trump’s second term, deploying thousands of federal agents to liberal cities — which very visibly swept up U.S. citizens and activists opposing the raids — created a palpable sense of emergency among people outside of immigrant communities, Ms. Baena said.
“There’s more of a consensus reality,” she said. “You’re seeing the detentions happen.”
Her group has produced guides that activists in Minneapolis have used in the past year.
Since the Los Angeles raids, activists have tried to grapple with both the scale of the federal raids and the scale of the response. They are increasingly shifting away from coordinating ICE-watching efforts themselves. They are focusing instead on disseminating tactical guidance or connecting volunteers to neighborhood groups, usually organized on Signal.
Soon, Ms. Garvey and Mr. Fahlstrom hope, ICE-watching will simply be embedded in the neighborhoods of cities like Minneapolis, requiring little organizational support at all.
“In the same way that people organize a P.T.A.,” Mr. Fahlstrom said, “they have put those skills into ICE watch.”
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9) U.S. Seeks to Expedite Deportation of 5-Year-Old Liam Conejo Ramos
Liam was detained last month in Minneapolis during an immigration enforcement operation in which his father was also detained by federal agents.
By Jazmine Ulloa, Feb. 6, 2026
Adrian Conejo Arias and his son, Liam Conejo Ramos, in San Antonio after being released from an immigration detention center in Dilley, Texas. Credit...U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, via Associated Press
Lawyers for the federal government have filed a motion to expedite the deportation of Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old boy in a bunny hat whose image rocketed around the world after he was detained by federal agents in Minnesota last month during an immigration enforcement operation.
In an interview on Friday morning, Danielle Molliver, the immigration lawyer representing Liam and his father, confirmed the filing of the government motion, which she called “extraordinary” and possibly “retaliatory.”
A hearing in the case is set for later on Friday, and Ms. Molliver said she planned to request more time to plead the asylum case for Liam, and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, who are from Ecuador and entered the United States in December 2024.
Ms. Molliver said the family had legally entered the country through a humanitarian program. The Department of Homeland Security had charged that Mr. Conejo Arias had entered the country illegally.
A request to the department for comment was not immediately answered on Friday.
Liam’s detention last month prompted outrage in Minneapolis and beyond, and drew expressions of support for immigrant families caught in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown across the Twin Cities. Dozens of immigrant detainees at the site in Dilley, Texas, where the boy and his father had quickly been transferred, were captured in drone footage as they walked out and shouted in protest over the conditions in which Liam and other children were being held.
Less than a week ago, Liam and his father arrived back home in Minnesota after state lawmakers, lawyers and activists intervened and a federal judge ordered their release in a blistering opinion that denounced their detention as “the imposition of cruelty.”
But seeking to expedite deportation has become a common action against asylum seekers and other immigrants now battling their removal from the country in immigration courts. Since October, federal government lawyers have increasingly been asking judges to “pretermit,” or dismiss, asylum cases without hearings, asserting that applicants can seek asylum in other countries with which the United States has been working out new asylum agreements, including Honduras and Uganda.
“They are moving very fast,” Ms. Molliver said. “Their deportation could happen in a matter of weeks.”
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10) Google Workers Demand End to Cloud Services for Immigration Agencies
More than 800 employees delivered a petition to management, condemning the Trump administration’s use of Google technology in immigration enforcement.
By Tripp Mickle, Reporting from San Francisco, Feb. 6, 2026
“On Friday, more than 800 employees called on management in a petition to be transparent about how Google’s technology supports federal immigration agencies and urged the company to stop doing business with those organizations. The petition said they were ‘appalled by the violence’ and ‘paramilitary-style raids’ by immigration agents, which they accused Google of aiding. They also asked the company to take safety measures to protect employees after a reported attempt by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to enter the company’s campus in Cambridge, Mass. …Google’s immigration petition, which received more than 500 signatures in 24 hours, was organized by No Tech for Apartheid, a group of Google and Amazon workers who advocate for the elimination of the companies’ joint cloud computing contract with the Israeli military and government. The petition links to a media report by The Intercept that says Google is providing cloud services to Customs and Border Protection. It also points to Google’s partnership with Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm that developed software to track immigrants.”
Federal agents leaving the area where Renee Good was killed in Minneapolis. David Guttenfelder/The New York Times
After federal immigration agents killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Google employees lit up the company’s internal message boards with calls for the company to respond.
On Friday, more than 800 employees called on management in a petition to be transparent about how Google’s technology supports federal immigration agencies and urged the company to stop doing business with those organizations. The petition said they were “appalled by the violence” and “paramilitary-style raids” by immigration agents, which they accused Google of aiding.
They also asked the company to take safety measures to protect employees after a reported attempt by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to enter the company’s campus in Cambridge, Mass.
The petition signaled a revival of employee activism at Google and across Silicon Valley after years of relative calm. Tech workers, who have largely stayed quiet as executives cozied up to the Trump administration, are beginning to push some of the world’s biggest companies to pressure the White House to change its policies.
While signed by a fraction of the company’s roughly 190,000 workers, the new petition echoes turmoil at Google in 2018, after workers walked out over the company’s handling of sexual harassment and then protested its involvement in a Pentagon program that used artificial intelligence to improve drone strikes.
In the years since, Google’s management limited employees’ access to internal documents, scaled back all-hands meetings and cracked down on dissent. It fired 28 workers two years ago for protesting its cloud computing contract with the Israeli government.
As a result, some employees have become more hesitant to challenge management, said Matthew Tschiegg, an engineer on the cloud computing team who signed the petition. But many employees still believe in the company’s informal corporate motto: “Don’t be evil.”
“They’ve scratched or scrubbed that motto, but the ethos lives deep,” said Mr. Tschiegg, who has worked at Google for more than a decade.
Since President Trump returned to the White House, Silicon Valley executives and investors — including Elon Musk, who leads SpaceX and Tesla; Tim Cook, chief executive of Apple; and Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Meta — have lined up to support the president with donations and policy commitments. Their solidarity created the perception that the tech industry had shifted from liberal to conservative.
But Mr. Pretti’s death helped show some cracks. After that shooting, Mr. Cook, Sam Altman of OpenAI and others called on the president to draw down agents.
Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, hasn’t issued a public statement. Jeff Dean, the chief scientist at Google’s DeepMind A.I. research lab, wrote in a social media post, “Every person regardless of political affiliation should be denouncing this.”
Google’s immigration petition, which received more than 500 signatures in 24 hours, was organized by No Tech for Apartheid, a group of Google and Amazon workers who advocate for the elimination of the companies’ joint cloud computing contract with the Israeli military and government.
The petition links to a media report by The Intercept that says Google is providing cloud services to Customs and Border Protection. It also points to Google’s partnership with Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm that developed software to track immigrants.
A Google spokeswoman said the Department of Homeland Security used commercially available cloud infrastructure through Google’s customers, including basic cloud computing and storage services.
Mr. Tschiegg said employees didn’t know how Google’s technology was being used in those deals and others. The petition asks for a question-and-answer session with management about Google’s contracts with immigration authorities and clarity about whether the company will allow A.I. to be used by the government.
“It seems like they’re chasing the money,” he said. “It creates a moral and ethical dilemma.”
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11) What Is Minnesota’s Policy on Cooperating With Federal Immigration Enforcement?
The Trump administration has criticized state and local “sanctuary” policies during its Minnesota immigration crackdown. The reality on the ground is complicated. What Is Minnesota’s Policy on Cooperating With Federal Immigration Enforcement?
The Trump administration has criticized state and local “sanctuary” policies during its Minnesota immigration crackdown. The reality on the ground is complicated.
By Mitch Smith and Ernesto Londoño, Feb. 6, 2026
Federal agents clashed with Minnesotans while attempting to stop a resident as part of Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis last month. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
Months before immigration agents flooded into Minnesota, the Trump administration outlined its grievances against state and local officials in a lawsuit that accused them of engaging in “an active and deliberate effort to obstruct federal immigration enforcement.”
The claims in that lawsuit, which remains unresolved, have been echoed by President Trump and his allies in recent weeks as some 3,000 agents descended on the state, where they have arrested thousands, clashed with residents and shot three people.
The Trump administration is correct that certain state and local policies limit cooperation on immigration enforcement, yet the details of those policies are complex and vary depending on location. The Democrats who lead Minnesota have defended their limits on cooperating with federal agents as lawful and in line with the state’s values.
The reality is that Minnesota’s state and local governments have a patchwork of rules that go much further to limit coordination on immigration than in many Republican-led states, but stop short of the comprehensive statewide restrictions on cooperation in other Democratic-run states like California, Illinois and Oregon.
As political and legal fights continue, here’s what you should know about Minnesota’s immigration policies:
State prisons coordinate with ICE
Minnesota prisons routinely hand over inmates who are in the country illegally to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents when they complete their sentences.
Under Minnesota law, the state’s Department of Corrections must notify ICE officials when an immigrant convicted of a felony is set to be released. Last year, prison officials turned over to ICE 84 inmates who had finished sentences and were leaving the prison system, according to the state agency.
Prison officials said they had been exasperated — and confused — by the Trump administration’s claims that they have not cooperated.
County jails are a source of federal frustration
Federal officials have repeatedly complained that Minnesota jails release people who don’t have authorization to be in the United States with little or no effort to transfer them to federal custody. But some in the state have raised concerns about whether it is appropriate for jails to hand over people whose criminal cases are still pending.
While Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis, explicitly bans coordinating with ICE on civil immigration enforcement, there is no such ban for the rest of the state’s county jails.
Still, official opinions issued by Minnesota’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, have said that sheriffs cannot hold people wanted by ICE longer than they would otherwise be jailed. That can prove to be a logistical challenge for federal officials, who have said that Mr. Ellison's opinion had contributed to little or no cooperation at several jails.
Sheriffs in at least seven of Minnesota’s 87 counties have signed agreements to collaborate with ICE on immigration enforcement, a step that Mr. Ellison, a Democrat, has said is allowed as long as the county’s board of commissioners has signed off. A few jails in the state have contracts to provide beds for immigrants in ICE custody. But in many counties, there is no explicit policy on coordinating with ICE.
There might be room for negotiation
James Stuart, the executive director of the Minnesota Sheriffs’ Association, said sheriffs were working to address concerns raised by federal officials in hopes of seeing fewer immigration agents operating on Minnesota streets in the days ahead. He described recent meetings with Tom Homan, the White House border czar who is leading the Minnesota crackdown, as productive. Mr. Stuart is also President Trump’s nominee for U.S. marshal in Minnesota.
Conversations remain a work in progress, Mr. Stuart said, and any agreements to hold detainees for federal officials would require the approval of a county’s elected board.
Mr. Stuart said that the agreements under consideration, known as Basic Ordering Agreements, would apply to people arrested on local charges, wanted for immigration violations and slated to be released. Those people could remain in jail for up to 48 hours beyond their expected release times, Mr. Stuart said, but during that time would become federal detainees in the custody of the local sheriff rather than local detainees.
Not everyone is on board. The Hennepin County attorney, Mary Moriarty, said in a statement that she believed such agreements would violate state law. And Sheriff Dawanna Witt of Hennepin County, who runs the state’s largest jail, said on Wednesday that local jail officials should not be in the business of civil immigration enforcement.
A spokesman for Mr. Ellison’s office declined to comment specifically on Basic Ordering Agreements, saying the office “can’t provide legal punditry or speculation.”
Minnesota officials were also discussing ways to improve communication with federal officials, Mr. Stuart said.
The Twin Cities have sweeping protections for immigrants
The federal government’s complaints about Minnesota go beyond prisons and jails. Its lawsuit singles out city ordinances in Minneapolis and St. Paul, the state’s two largest cities, that bar local police officers from cooperating with civil immigration enforcement and that mostly prevent city workers from inquiring about a person’s immigration status.
Supporters of such policies say that they do not interfere with immigration enforcement, but leave that work to federal officials. Those limits, they argue, help to build trust with residents who might otherwise not feel comfortable coming forward with information about a crime.
“This clear delineation keeping police and city officials separate from civil immigration enforcement removes the chill from talking to the police,” lawyers for St. Paul said in a court filing that asked a judge to dismiss the federal government’s lawsuit.
The state government has a more piecemeal approach
On the state level, Minnesota has passed some laws granting protections for undocumented immigrants, but has stopped short of broader policies that some Democrats would prefer.
In 2023, Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, signed into law a measure allowing undocumented immigrants to get Minnesota driver’s licenses, and state law prevents officials from sharing information about a driver’s immigration status.
But Democrats have not succeeded in passing sweeping, statewide sanctuary protections similar to the local policies in Minneapolis and St. Paul and in some other states.
In 2024, Sandra Feist, a Democratic state lawmaker, introduced a bill that sought to bar local law enforcement officials from playing a role in the enforcement of immigration laws. The bill failed. A Republican-backed measure seeking to bar sheriffs from adopting policies that restrict cooperation with ICE also has not passed.
“We’re definitely not a runaway train on immigrant rights here in Minnesota,” said Ms. Feist, who is also an immigration lawyer. “Minnesota does not have political makeup to pass that type of legislation at this time.”
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12) Trump’s Immigration Policy Is 100 Years Old
The White House seems to be mining the Coolidge era for inspiration. But America is not the country it was in 1924.
By Jia Lynn Yang, Feb. 6, 2026
Jia Lynn Yang is the author of the book “One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965.”
Todd Heisler/The New York Times
The American public is now finding out what Donald Trump and his team really meant when they promised mass deportations — the upending of communities in a ferocious effort to ferret out every last undocumented person in the country, terrifying people of legal status along the way.
This audacious agenda is proving less popular by the day. When asked about Trump’s handling of immigration in a recent poll by The New York Times/Siena, he received a net negative approval rating on what used to be one of his strongest issues. Sixty-one percent said they thought the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency had “gone too far” with its tactics. This was before federal agents shot and killed a second U.S. citizen in the streets of Minneapolis.
Chastened briefly, Trump promised to “de-escalate” in Minnesota. On Wednesday, his border czar, recently dispatched to take control of the operation in Minneapolis, announced that 700 agents would be pulled from the city, though some 2,000 will remain. But however ICE changes its operations, the Trump administration, led by the president’s most influential policy adviser, Stephen Miller, is in pursuit of a radical vision for America. They want the country’s immigration policy blasted back in time — and not just to before the Biden era.
They are channeling an immigration regime instituted in 1924, when strict racial quotas — driven by fears of foreigners and a rise in eugenic thinking — led to a bottoming-out of foreign-born Americans that lasted for decades. The quotas signed into law in 1924 were not about securing the border as we understand it today, but about protecting a white, Christian character for the country.
In the years after the 1924 immigration law was passed, however, a liberal backlash took hold and created a new identity for the United States, internalized by generations of Americans since: We are a nation of immigrants.
Americans are, in fact, widely partial to immigrants — and these days even open to admitting more. Last year, as border crossings sharply fell, the share of people who wanted immigration reduced dropped to 30 percent from 55 percent in 2024, according to Gallup. A record-high 79 percent say immigration is a good thing for the country, including even Republicans, who have become more likely to take this view since Trump took office.
Today many act as if America’s identity as a nation of immigrants was written into the Constitution itself. In reality, it was the product of a political effort less than a century ago — one that was so successful at creating a new national story that it birthed the sheer ethnic diversity in this country that the Trump administration is now determined to undo.
‘Immigrants Were American History’
As recently as 50 years ago, the country’s population was almost entirely descended from people who came from Western Europe. This was by design.
At the turn of the 20th century, enormous numbers of Southern and Eastern Europeans, many of them Italian and Jewish, were arriving daily in the United States and transforming the cultural fabric of cities like New York and Boston. At a time when antisemitism was ubiquitous in American life, the sheer volume of these migrants constituted a national emergency for white Protestant Christians. Eugenicists, at the peak of their influence, warned that the foreigners were polluting the nation’s “blood plasma.”
In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed a law imposing strict ethnic quotas, allowing only a trickle of migration from Southern and Eastern Europe and banning it nearly outright from Asia and Africa. Strong preference would be given to immigrants from Western Europe, who could, it was believed, help the country restore its racial roots.
“We no longer are to be a haven, a refuge for oppressed the whole world over,” wrote Representative David A. Reed, who cosponsored the 1924 law in Congress. “We found we could not be, and now we definitely abandon that theory. America will cease to be the ‘melting pot.’” In Germany, Adolf Hitler, still on the political margins, praised America’s new immigration law as offering a bold model for his own country.
The quotas were immediately effective, and merciless. During World War II, the country’s immigration rules were so stringent that Jews fleeing the Holocaust had practically no chance of entering the United States. For more than 40 years after 1924, the number of immigrants in this country dwindled to the point where Americans could barely remember a time when there was mass migration.
But just as the country was approaching its nadir in immigration, a group of liberal leaders began a long-shot campaign to undo the discriminatory 1920s quotas. And they employed a conception of national identity that turned the anti-immigration argument on its head.
Immigrants did not make the country less American, these advocates argued. In fact, their very presence was what made this country American in the first place.
The person most responsible for this narrative was historian Oscar Handlin, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. In works of history that became remarkably popular, Handlin chronicled the waves of German and Irish immigrants, then Italian and Jewish ones. “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history,” Handlin wrote in the opening lines of his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1951 book, “The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People.”
This new conception immediately captivated much of the country. It gave the children and grandchildren of the immigrants once derided as outsiders a pride of place. More important, it proved to be just the message that would convince the country that it needed a new system of immigration.
While Handlin himself became involved in the effort to rewrite the laws, Democratic leaders began to adopt his framework. John F. Kennedy, then a senator from Massachusetts, was asked by the Anti-Defamation League to write a slim book lauding the country’s many waves of migration. The proposed title: “A Nation of Immigrants.”
This modest project would not be published until October 1964, nearly a year after Kennedy was assassinated. But in a country still in mourning, the first printing sold out. “I know of no cause which President Kennedy championed more warmly than the improvement of our immigration policies,” read the introduction written by the Kennedy family, perhaps overstating the president’s interest in the issue. Nonetheless, the book positioned itself as a powerful, posthumous plea for overturning the ethnic quotas, spoken from the grave by the country’s first Catholic president and an Irish American icon.
A year later, after a four-decade fight, immigration advocates prevailed. Led in part by Ted Kennedy in the Senate, Democratic lawmakers voted to undo the quotas with the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. The law, signed by Lyndon Johnson at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, codified that immigrants could not be discriminated against based on their race or nationality. Family members would also be prioritized.
The 1924 quotas had altered the course of the country’s demographics by effectively freezing them in place. The 1965 law unleashed a level of ethnic diversity that not even its proponents could have fathomed. Immigrants soon began arriving from every conceivable corner of the globe, and in growing numbers thanks to the priority given to reuniting families.
After the number of foreign-born residents hit a bottom around 1970, it climbed and climbed until it rebounded to nearly 15 percent, where it had been before the quotas.
Last January, the month Trump was inaugurated, it reached a record 15.8 percent.
Who Is Considered an American?
Without passing a single law through Congress, the Trump administration has revived the 1924 quotas in spirit by halting visas for people from 75 countries, a vast majority of them outside Europe. No credible evidence has been offered for why immigrants from these nations are inherently less worthy of admission than Afrikaners from South Africa, for instance, who have been given expedited refugee status. But on top of Trump’s insults against Haitian, Somali and Mexican immigrants and the Muslim travel ban from his first term, the collective implications of racial selection are clear.
Miller, the chief architect of Trump’s immigration agenda, appreciates the history of American immigration policy. We know this because of emails that have been unearthed by the Southern Poverty Law Center in which he admires the 1924 quotas and Coolidge’s anti-immigration legacy.
In one 2015 email, Miller wrote that Immigrant Heritage Month “would seem a good opportunity to remind people about the heritage established by Calvin Coolidge, which covers four decades of the 20th century,” a reference to the restrictive period between 1924 and 1965. He also complained that new museum galleries at Ellis Island would ignore the legacy of the 1924 law. “Something tells me there is not a Calvin Coolidge exhibit.”
In Miller’s eyes, the 1965 law deserves to be known as a key moment for when the country fell from greatness. In other emails, he coached a Breitbart writer to produce a piece called “Ted Kennedy’s Real Legacy: 50 Years of Ruinous Immigration Law,” timed to run on the day that a new center honoring Kennedy was to open in Boston. Miller wrote to the writer after the piece’s publication, “Just let this sink in: Kennedy was honored today, 50 years after pushing through this law, and you’re the only writer in the country who published a piece even mentioning the law and what it did.”
For conservatives like Miller, the idea of “a nation of immigrants” has lured the country into admitting far too many people, without enough vetting. Indeed, during Trump’s first term, the agency responsible for processing citizenship and naturalization removed the phrase from its mission statement.
Trump and Miller learned the last time around, though, how hard it can be to bring down the overall percentage of immigrants in the country, which only grew between 2017 and 2021. This time, their efforts are beginning to yield results: Immigration has dropped by more than 50 percent, and the percentage of foreign-born residents has fallen for the first time since the 1960s. Theirs is a long-term project, with success measured in decades.
“A nation of immigrants” is an old slogan, but its spirit has proved difficult to dislodge. America today is in many ways a nation remade by the 1965 Immigration Act, with millions of citizens descended from those who came to the country after Coolidge’s quotas were revoked.
Support for carrying out some deportations has been a mainstream political view for decades. But most American voters want to see the highly focused removal of unauthorized immigrants who are violent criminals, according to recent polling. There is far less support for deporting those who are married to U.S. citizens, or who haven’t committed any crimes.
For all the anti-immigrant vitriol from Trump these many years, people in both urban and rural America are by now largely used to living peacefully with immigrants as their neighbors, co-workers and family members. And a large majority, not only in Minneapolis, simply do not want to see their neighbors brutally removed from their homes by men in masks without warrants.
From the start of Trump’s first term, the president’s immigration agenda was always about more than the border. It was a project to rewrite who can be considered American. Because this was not the mandate that most voters gave in 2024, the administration could pay a political price in the midterms in the fall. In the meantime, it can wake up every day and treat the time remaining as a chance to press ahead, by any means and at any cost.
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12) Judge Allows Release of Evidence From Border Patrol Shooting
A Border Patrol agent shot Marimar Martinez five times. Video from the October incident in Chicago could now be released as early as Monday.
By Mattathias Schwartz and Robert Chiarito, Feb. 6, 2026
Mattathias Schwartz reported from Philadelphia, and Robert Chiarito from the Dirksen Federal Building in Chicago.
Prosecutors charged Marimar Martinez with assaulting federal officers, but later dropped the case. Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
A federal judge in Chicago will allow the release of evidence, including body camera video footage and text messages, from the October shooting of Marimar Martinez, a 30-year-old teacher’s assistant, by a Border Patrol agent in Chicago.
On Friday, Judge Georgia N. Alexakis of the Federal District Court for the Northern District of Illinois said she would allow the release of text messages from Charles Exum, the agent who shot Ms. Martinez, and video of the incident, as soon as the materials were redacted to obscure the identities of other parties. That could happen as soon as Monday, Ms. Martinez’s attorney said.
The evidence was gathered as part of the now-defunct criminal case against Ms. Martinez and had been sealed by a judicial protective order.
In its filings, the government has argued that releasing the text messages “will serve only to further sully Agent Exum, his family and co-workers.”
Ms. Martinez’s attorney, Christopher V. Parente, responded that it would be “a fully deserved self-imposed sullying,” following a “campaign of lies” against Ms. Martinez by the Department of Homeland Security. After the hearing on Friday, he praised the judge’s ruling. “You can’t call a U.S. citizen with no criminal history who’s a Montessori schoolteacher a domestic terrorist,” he said.
Ruling from the bench, Judge Alexakis said Ms. Martinez had “demonstrated good cause to warrant the release of the text messages,” because they “will counter the government’s public narrative of her and her actions.”
Friday’s court proceeding is the latest chapter in a saga that began on Oct. 4, when Ms. Martinez was driving one of two vehicles that were honking as they trailed an S.U.V. carrying federal agents and shouting, “La migra,” the Spanish term for immigration authorities. The Trump administration would later characterize these actions as “domestic terrorism.” Ms. Martinez’s attorney has compared her to Paul Revere, warning neighbors about the presence of Homeland Security officers.
Ms. Martinez’s vehicle collided with the S.U.V. on the Southwest Side of Chicago. Moments later, Mr. Exum, a Border Patrol agent, shot her five times while she was still in her car. Text messages from Mr. Exum appear to show him bragging about the shooting. “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes,” he wrote. “Put that in your book boys.”
Once released, the evidence could shed light on competing claims about the moments leading up to the shooting. A Customs and Border Protection incident report claims that Mr. Exum fired “to defend himself and his fellow agents” after Ms. Martinez “accelerated forward in an attempt to run over agents on foot.” In court filings, Mr. Parente claimed Mr. Exum opened fire “within two seconds” of exiting his vehicle.
Prosecutors charged Ms. Martinez with assaulting federal officers, but after Ms. Martinez’s legal team raised concerns about the preservation of evidence — the S.U.V. had been moved hundreds of miles away — they dropped the case.
The Homeland Security Department’s initial claims about the collision and the shooting are among many assertions by administration officials about protesters’ behavior that have been unable to withstand judicial scrutiny. A Chicago jury acquitted a man who had been accused of putting a bounty on the head of Gregory Bovino, a senior Border Patrol commander who led sweeping raids in Chicago and then Minneapolis. In another case, Judge Sara L. Ellis found that Mr. Bovino had repeatedly lied about the tactics his forces had used against protesters.
Earlier this week, Ms. Martinez testified before Democrats in Congress. “I grew up revering law enforcement,” she said. Seeing what Immigration and Customs Enforcement “was doing in our community at this time changed my view.”
Ms. Martinez, a U.S. citizen, is one of 10 people who have been shot by federal agents since the Trump administration began ramping up its arrest and deportation efforts in September. Her shooting came weeks before the Trump administration shifted its immigration enforcement effort from Chicago to Minneapolis, where two protesters have been killed by federal agents.
The case of one of those protesters, Renee Good, has echoes of Ms. Martinez’s. Government officials accused Ms. Good, who was driving, of weaponizing her vehicle against the Border Patrol agent who shot her. Mr. Trump’s claim that “she ran him over” has been disputed by state and local officials, and challenged by a New York Times analysis of cellphone video. As with Ms. Martinez, the administration quickly branded Ms. Good as a “domestic terrorist” before a thorough investigation, and despite an apparent gap with the legal definition of that term.
Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, has said that both Ms. Good and Alex Pretti, the other protester shot and killed by federal agents in Minneapolis, were engaged in “domestic terrorism.” “We were using the best information we had at the time,” she later said on Fox News regarding Mr. Pretti. The Department of Homeland Security did not directly respond when asked if Ms. Noem stood by her initial characterization. Instead, a spokesman responded with a statement criticizing “attempts to dox our law enforcement officers” and “the malicious rhetoric of sanctuary politicians.”
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