News

At least 16 files disappeared from the Justice Department’s public webpage for documents related to Jeffrey Epstein — including a photograph showing Donald Trump — less than a day after they were posted, with no explanation from the government and no notice to the public.

The missing files, which were available Friday and no longer accessible by Saturday, included images of paintings depicting nude women, and one showing a series of photographs along a credenza and in drawers. In that image, inside a drawer among other photos, was a photograph of Trump, alongside Epstein, Melania Trump and Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell.

Archived Link: https://archive.ph/Yh8Tm

The Trump administration plans to ramp up efforts to strip some naturalized Americans of their citizenship, according to internal guidance obtained by The New York Times, marking an aggressive new phase in President Trump’s immigration crackdown.

The guidance, issued on Tuesday to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services field offices, asks that they “supply Office of Immigration Litigation with 100-200 denaturalization cases per month” in the 2026 fiscal year. If the cases are successful, it would represent a massive escalation of denaturalization in the modern era, experts said. By comparison, between 2017 and this year to date, there had been just over 120 cases filed, according to the Justice Department.

Under federal law, people may be denaturalized only if they committed fraud while applying for citizenship, or in a few other narrow circumstances. But the Trump administration has shown a zeal for using every tool at its disposal to target legal and illegal immigrants, leading activists to warn that such a campaign could sweep up people who had made honest mistakes on their citizenship paperwork and sow fear among law-abiding Americans.

“Imposing arbitrary numerical targets on denaturalization cases risks politicizing citizenship revocation,” said Sarah Pierce, a former U.S.C.I.S. official. “And requiring monthly quotas that are 10 times higher than the total annual number of denaturalizations in recent years turns a serious and rare tool into a blunt instrument and fuels unnecessary fear and uncertainty for the millions of naturalized Americans.”

Archived Link: https://archive.ph/PoyjC

A father and his 6-year-old son who were separated by immigration officials in New York City have been deported to China, weeks after their case drew outrage.

The child, Yuanxin Zheng, is among the youngest migrants in New York to be taken from a parent by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials during a routine check-in. He and his father, Fei Zheng, who lived in Queens, were detained on Nov. 26; President Trump’s deportation crackdown has swept up increasing numbers of migrant families and children.

“We are happy to report we were able to remove the family back to their home country,” Ms. McLaughlin wrote in an email.

(okay pause wtf. "happy" someone getting sent to a country they fled? the fuck?)

“It is quite sad,” Ms. Spector said on Friday. “He came here wanting to give his son a different and better life than he might have had in China. That’s what they were coming for. And they had a lot to offer.”

Mr. Zheng told federal agents that he had come to America because he was afraid of being tortured in his native China.

Mr. Zheng does not have a criminal history, according to government records.

What a depressing story...

Rep. Joyce Beatty, an ex-officio board member, accused the White House of lying about having unanimous support to rename the Kennedy Center after Trump, saying she was "not allowed to speak or voice my opposition"

Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty is accusing White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt of misleading the public about the level of support behind renaming the Kennedy Center after Donald Trump.

Beatty, who has an automatic seat on the Kennedy Center board as a congressional leader, spoke out after Leavitt announced on Thursday, Dec. 18, that the board had just voted "unanimously" to change the name of the John F. Kennedy Memorial for the Performing Arts to the "Trump-Kennedy Center."

"Be clear: I was on that call, and as I tried to push my button to voice my concern, to ask questions and certainly not to vote in support of this, I was muted. Each time I tried to speak, I was muted. Participants were not allowed to voice their concerns who were online, yet it was said at the end it was a unanimous vote," she continued.

People are supporting economic boycotts to show discontent with businesses capitulating to Trump’s agenda

It’s the busiest shopping season of the year – and a time when many are trying to figure out where to ethically spend their money.

Over the first year of Trump’s second term, companies and institutions have fallen in line with the administration’s anti-DEI and anti-immigration policies. As a result, people are supporting economic boycotts to show their discontent with the businesses capitulating to the president.

Over the Black Friday weekend, the groups behind the No Kings protests – the largest days of mass protest in recent memory – put their weight behind a campaign called We Ain’t Buying It, calling on people to not shop at Target, Home Depot and Amazon during the marquee week of holiday deals.

The justice department is using a variety of tactics to try to obfuscate the US president’s connection to the sex offender

The justice department’s partial release of the Epstein files on Friday signaled how the agency is using a variety of tactics to try to bury and obfuscate Donald Trump’s connection to Jeffrey Epstein.

As the department raced towards a legally mandated Friday deadline to release its files, little emerged about what it planned to release. There never really seemed to be a doubt that the department would release the files late on Friday afternoon, deploying the well-worn Washington trick of burying unflattering news before a weekend.

Then, on Friday morning, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, went on Fox News to say that the department wouldn’t actually be releasing all of the files on Friday as required by the law. “I expect that we’re going to release more documents over the next couple of weeks, so today, several hundred thousand, and then over the next couple weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more,” Blanche said on Fox News. “There’s a lot of eyes looking at these and we want to make sure that when we do produce the materials we are producing, that we are protecting every single victim.”

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/32477353

This is in India, but coming soon to a country near you (or the one you are in already).

WHEN OREGON MUSIC teacher Susan Lewis logged onto a Zoom meeting with her boss one afternoon in August 2024, she thought she would be preparing for a sixth year teaching at Valley Catholic School. Instead, she lost her job.

Lewis was shocked, she recalled in an interview with The Intercept, as were her colleagues and students. The school did not give any explanation for why they did not renew her contract. Unbeknownst to Lewis, the pro-Israel blacklist organization StopAntisemitism had recently launched an online campaign against her, framing her social media posts about the genocide in Gaza as “using her platform to spread vile antisemitic hate online.”

She sued StopAntisemitism for defamation in an Oregon state court over the summer, and the case was elevated to federal court last month. Her suit faces long odds, legal experts told The Intercept, but serves as a rare chance to register public dissent in the courts against the group’s targeting.

“The justice department’s document dump this afternoon does not comply with Thomas Massie and my Epstein Transparency Act,” Ro Khanna, the California Democratic congressman who co-wrote the law requiring full disclosure of all of the government’s investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein by Friday, said in a video statement posted on social media.

By way of example, Khanna noted: “They released one document from a New York grand jury of a 119 pages totally blacked out! This despite a New York judge ordering them to release that document, and our law requires them to explain redactions. There’s not a single explanation for why that entire document was redacted.”

“We have not seen the draft indictment,” Khanna added, “that implicates other rich and powerful men who were on Epstein’s rape island, who either watched the abuse of young girls or participated in the abuse of young girls.”

“It is an incomplete release, with too many redactions. Thomas Massie and I are exploring all options,” Khanna said, including the impeachment of justice department officials, finding them in contempt of Congress, “or referring for prosecution those who are obstructing justice.”

Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican congressman who co-wrote the legislation, shared Khanna’s video statement on social media, with the comment that the document release by Pam Bondi, the attorney general, and Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general who previously served as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, “grossly fails to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law” that Trump signed, “just 30 days ago”.

The Trump administration continues to insist that Venezuela’s leftist government poses a serious national security threat. United States officials especially assert that Nicolas Maduro’s regime is deeply involved in the illegal drug trade coming into the United States, including the surge in fentanyl in recent years. Indeed, Trump and his associates maintain that Venezuela’s government is little more than a disguised drug cartel. Washington has invoked the argument to justify an escalating series of attacks on small boats, including fishing vessels, in waters near that country.

Contending that illegal drug trafficking constitutes a national security threat sufficiently serious enough to warrant using the US military against a sovereign country is a dubious argument. Moreover, Venezuela is not a major player in the fentanyl trade.

Unfortunately, threat inflation is nothing new. Three pro-war administrations managed to obtain sufficient support from Congress and the public for military action against tiny, distant North Vietnam, based on the absurd notion that it posed a security threat to the United States. Several recent White House occupants have engaged in similar threat inflation, with respect, to justify wars against designated US adversaries.

The disappointment was palpable. In February, a group of 15 rightwing influencers visited the White House and paraded binders labelled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1”, only to discover that they contained precious little that was new.

Ten months later, it was the world’s turn. Amid huge global anticipation on Friday, the US justice department released hundreds of thousands of pages of documents related to the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

But it soon became apparent that, once again, Donald Trump had over-promised and under-delivered. Many of the documents in the data dump were heavily redacted, with text blacked out so it was impossible to read. Norm Eisen, executive chair of Democracy Defenders Fund, said: “What they have released is clearly incomplete and appears to be over-redacted to boot.”

A US army reserve lawyer detailed as a federal immigration judge has been fired barely a month into the job after granting asylum at a high rate out of step with the Trump administration’s mass deportation goals, the Associated Press has learned.

Christopher Day began hearing cases in late October as a temporary judge at the immigration court in Annandale, Virginia. He was fired around 2 December, the National Association of Immigration Judges confirmed.

It is unclear why Day was fired. He did not comment when contacted by the AP, and a justice department spokesperson declined to discuss personnel matters.

But federal data from November shows he ruled on asylum cases in ways at odds with the Trump administration’s stated goals.

Of the 11 cases he concluded in November, he granted asylum or some other type of relief allowing the migrant to remain in the United States a total of six times, according to federal data analyzed by Mobile Pathways, a San Francisco-based non-profit.

US President Donald Trump's name was affixed to the Kennedy Center in Washington on Friday, one day after his hand-picked board members voted to rename the arts venue in spite of legal questions.

Workmen on scissor lifts added metal lettering to the building's facade, before dropping a blue tarpaulin to reveal the sign saying "The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center For the Performing Arts."

A Delaware appeals court cleared the way Friday, December 19, for tech CEO Elon Musk to receive a long-contested $56 billion Tesla pay package, reversing an earlier judgment in the long-running case.

The decision by the Delaware Supreme Court rejects a pair of judgments by Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick of Delaware's Court of Chancery and sets the stage for another windfall for the world's richest person.

In a pair of 2024 rulings, McCormick invalidated the 2018 package, which once loomed as historically large but has since been eclipsed by the billionaire's most recent Tesla package.

WASHINGTON, Dec 19 (Reuters) - Four immigrants died in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in the past week, according to the agency, as deaths in 2025 reached a two-decade high.

The four detainees, from Haiti, Nicaragua, Eritrea and Bulgaria, died between December 12 and 15, ICE notices said. While the incidents remain under investigation, ICE said two followed medical emergencies and two were believed to be the result of natural causes.

President Donald Trump, a Republican, has pushed for the mass deportation of immigrants in the U.S. illegally. To increase removals, his administration has ramped up ICE detention to record levels, with roughly 66,000 people detained as of late November.

At least 30 people have died in ICE detention this year, according to agency notices. The total for 2025 - which still has 12 days remaining - is the highest level since 2004, opens new tab, according to ICE statistics.

"ICE remains committed to ensuring that all those in its custody reside in safe, secure and humane environments," the agency said in a statement announcing one of the latest deaths.

Democrats on Thursday criticized the deaths in detention, blaming the Trump administration. "ICE has a responsibility to take care of these people, something they are clearly disregarding," said U.S. Representative Pramila Jayapal, whose district includes most of Seattle. "This is beyond horrifying."

A federal judge on Wednesday said the Trump administration could not bar members of Congress from making unannounced visits to immigration detention centers. Democratic lawmakers had sued over the lack of access, saying the visits were protected under U.S. law and necessary for oversight.

Following the judge's order, U.S. Representative Dan Goldman, a Democrat, on Friday visited an ICE holding facility in Lower Manhattan in New York City.

Newly released files show how Maria Farmer, who worked for Mr. Epstein in the 1990s, had urged the F.B.I. to investigate him. The case went nowhere for years.

North Carolina

One of the most notable contractors is Quantico Tactical, founded and owned by former Marine David Hensley. Based in Aberdeen, N.C., Quantico has received more than 50 contracts valued up to $19.3 million for fiscal years 2025-2026 providing a wide range of firearms, "less than lethal" munitions, restraints, communications equipment, and other supplies to both Border Patrol and ICE.

Other top contractors include Laboratory Corporation of America (Labcorp) in Burlington, N.C., which has contracts potentially valued up to $21.4 million for laboratory services, including at ICE detention centers, and TMC-TELESOLV of Battleboro, N.C., which has a contract valued up to $14.8 million for CBP's Trusted Traveler Program.

Duncan-Parnell, Inc., in Charlotte has a $5 million CBP contract for drones, and MacGyver Solutions, Inc. has contracts valued up to $2.2 million for Polaris and Yamaha vehicles and ATVs.

In August, Hendrick Motorsports Technical Solutions of Concord, N.C. was given a $1.5 million no-bid contract to supply 25 Chevrolet Tahoe vehicles to ICE. The company is a spinoff of Hendrick Motorsports; both are owned by Rick Hendrick, a prominent Republican donor. Media attention about the deal during the North Carolina immigration raids led to calls to boycott Hendrick's companies, which include car dealerships in the state.

Louisiana

Topping the list are two companies which stand to bring in more than $208 million making emergency detention centers for ICE. LaSalle Corrections, which manages 18 private correctional facilities in Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, received a contract worth up to $125 million to build a new detention center. The company has a checkered history: In 2023, LaSalle agreed to a $7 million settlement over a wrongful death lawsuit, and the ACLU of Louisiana has frequently battled with the company over forced hysterectomies of ICE detainees and other alleged rights abuses.

Lemoine Disaster Recovery, LLC — a building and disaster services company headquartered in Lafayette, L.A. — was awarded a contract worth up to $83.8 million, also to build an emergency ICE detention facility.

Another major contract went to People Who Think, LLC — a marketing and political consulting firm founded by Republican political advisor Jay Connaughton. The firm's $25 million contract is earmarked for an ICE recruitment campaign. Gulf South Research Group, based in Baton Rouge, pulled in several contracts totaling $21.6 million for environmental assessments and planning, including projects related to the border wall.

See article spread sheets for full lists of fiscal year 2025-2026 CBP and ICE contracts for companies based in North Carolina and Louisiana

There were rumblings about this for a while, but it looks like the Trump TikTok deal is done, and it’s somehow the worst of all possible outcomes, amazingly making all of the biggest criticisms about TikTok significantly worse. Quite an accomplishment.

The Chinese government has signed off on the deal, which involves offloading a large chunk of TikTok to billionaire right wing Trump ally Larry Ellison (fresh off his acquisition of CBS), the private equity firm Silver Lake (which has broad global investments in Chinese and Israeli hyper-surveillance), and MGX (Abu Dhabi’s state investment firm), while still somehow having large investment involvement by the Chinese.

It wasn’t subtle that the goal was always for Trump’s buddies to just basically steal a big ownership chunk of a Chinese short form video company that U.S. tech companies couldn’t out innovate. Offloading the company to his friends at Oracle and Walmart was Trump’s stated goal during the first administration, only thwarted because he lost the 2020 election. Everything else was decorative.