acab

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/40193

When Border Patrol agents who took part in Operation Midway Blitz left Chicagoland last November, then-Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin asserted “we aren’t leaving Chicago.” The same day, reporters with the Sun-Times warned a government source told them that federal immigration agents may return in strength come spring. But as McLaughlin said, they never really left.

Source

From Truthout via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/37346

Immigrant communities across the United States have been facing an escalating wave of attacks. In response, from Los Angeles to Chicago and beyond, tens of thousands have taken to the streets, organized rapid-response networks, and refused to let their neighbors, coworkers, and friends be taken away. Nowhere has this been clearer than in Minneapolis, where thousands mobilized in the dead of winter to block ICE operations, forcing ICE to scale back its operations. As Trump’s attack on immigrants continues, we have to go on the offensive to fight not only against the violent detentions and deportations, but also challenge the very system that maintains immigrants in precarity.

Our fight has immediate, concrete demands: abolish ICE, end deportations and detention centers, and reunite families that have been torn apart. At the center of this struggle, however, we have to put the fight for full rights for all immigrants, including full democratic rights and citizenship for all.

The fight for full rights for all immigrants is the civil rights struggle of our time. Just as the Civil Rights movement wasn’t satisfied with simply softening the edges of Jim Crow and fought for the full equality of Black Americans, our fight can’t settle for moderating the worst expressions of Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda or maintaining the tiered system that keeps immigrants excluded from the social and political fabric of the country that they live, work, and build their lives in. Immigrants deserve more than the bare minimum of not being persecuted or terrorized; they deserve the same rights and opportunities as everyone else living in the United States. Winning those rights would place the entire working class in a stronger position to defend itself and fight for better conditions for all.

Immigrants Are Essential

The attacks on immigrants has been one of the core pillars of the second Trump administration. From describing migrants as criminals and invaders to pushing mass deportations and expanding immigration enforcement, Donald Trump has run a campaign to vilify immigrants with the hopes of sowing distrust and discontent among one another. Immigrants are routinely blamed for economic hardship, crime, and social instability, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This narrative is not only false; it is dangerous. It fuels policies that separate families, criminalize communities, and justify the expansion of agencies like ICE that terrorize immigrant neighborhoods and anyone who stands in solidarity with them.

The reality is that immigrants are not a burden on the United States, but are essential to its economy and social fabric. Nearly 48 million immigrants live in the United States out of a population of roughly 335 million. In 2023 alone, immigrants generated about $1.7 trillion in economic activity and paid roughly $652 billion in local, state, and federal taxes.

Undocumented immigrants—estimated to number between 11 and 14 million people, or roughly 3 to 4 percent of the total population—are denied even the most basic rights and protections. Yet they remain deeply embedded in the country’s economy and communities. In 2023, undocumented immigrants held approximately $299 billion in spending power and contributed close to $90 billion in taxes.

Behind these numbers are the workers who keep the country running. Immigrants pick the food that ends up on American tables, build homes, care for the elderly, stock warehouses, drive trucks, and clean offices long after the workday ends. Entire industries—from agriculture to logistics to care work—depend on immigrant labor.

Yet despite their indispensable role in society, immigrants continue to face relentless attacks and are continued to be denied basic civil and democratic rights.

Minneapolis Showed the Way

Trump’s targeting of immigrants has not gone unchallenged. The brutality of his attacks has sparked an outpouring of resistance across the country. In Los Angeles last summer, people mobilized in force to fight against the deployment of the National Guard. In Chicago, workers and community members fought against similar deployments to protect their neighbors.

In Minneapolis, we saw thousands mobilized to defend their neighbors when immigration enforcement operations threatened to tear families apart. Despite crippling cold, community members organized protests and rapid-response networks to prevent ICE from taking people from their homes and workplaces, showing the power of a people mobilizing together from below. Under pressure from community defense efforts, labor action, student walkouts, mutual aid networks, and sustained protests, immigration enforcement agents were forced to withdraw from the area.

But the danger has not disappeared. Despite pulling back its operations in many places, ICE still remains and has gone on the offensive again on new fronts. Hundreds of agents remain in Minnesota, for one, and the broader deportation apparatus is still intact, with the agency planning for new and bigger detention facilities. Thousands of immigrants taken during these operations are still missing, either in detention or deported, and separated from their families and communities. Meanwhile, the federal government continues to redirect enforcement elsewhere, leaving immigrant communities across the country vulnerable to new waves of raids and arrests.

At the same time, Democratic leaders have offered little relief. Politicians who claim to support immigrant communities have largely cooperated with the federal enforcement system or failed to challenge it in any meaningful way. In Minnesota, Democrats such as Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, despite symbolic words of solidarity, have done little to actually support immigrants. Indeed, while Walz’s state forces arrested people protesting ICE operations, Frey vetoed an eviction moratorium that would’ve protected immigrants who had lost income because they sheltered in place during the raids.

Across the country, Democrats and Republican are working together to increase the collaboration between ICE and local law enforcement. At the same time that Trump is terrorizing immigrants with deportations, furthermore, he and the bipartisan regime have also made clear the economy needs to keep exploiting their labor. While the bipartisan regime continues to fund the expansion of ICE detention centers, the H-2A visa program is being amended to meet labor shortages in agriculture. Indeed, despite all their attacks on immigrant rights, both parties are united in finding ways to guarantee the continuation of a cheap labor force.

This reality points to a clear conclusion: managing or moderating the harshest expressions of Trump’s immigration agenda is not enough. We have to challenge and dismantle the very system it stands on.

Abolish ICE & Full Democratic and Civil Rights for All

Central to Trump’s attacks on immigrants has been the deputization of ICE to carry out his program. ICE is one of the central instruments used to criminalize immigrants and fracture communities. It also has become an extension of Executive Branch’s authoritarian policies, with a budget that is larger than the military budget of entire nations. Ending detention centers, shutting down the deportation pipeline, and dismantling ICE would represent a decisive step toward protecting immigrant families. Just as urgently, those who have already been taken must be returned to their communities. Families must be reunited, and those unjustly detained must be released.

We can’t stop there. To bring an end to the deportations and so that every immigrant can live with dignity and equal rights, we have to put the fight for full rights for all immigrants at the very center of our struggle.

At its core, this is has to be a fight for basic democratic freedoms. Indeed, Trump’s attacks are only the latest and most vicious chapter in a long and ongoing assault on immigrants. Even before Trump, millions of immigrants have lived as a permanent underclass within the country that they help build every day. They are denied the right to vote, barred from numerous public benefits, face severe limits to their rights to organize and are constantly excluded from full participation in the political and social life of their schools, workplaces, and communities. The fear of retaliation is a constant presence that shapes their daily existence. Trump has used that fear as a weapon, but the system that maintains immigrants as second-class citizens in the country not only predates him, but will also outlast him, unless we fight to dismantle it.

This is why the fight for full rights for all immigrants must include the right to assembly and free speech. Immigrants face constant threats to these rights everyday. Workers who speak out against exploitation risk retaliation not only from employers but also from immigration authorities. The ability to organize, protest, and demand better conditions is undermined when millions of people live under the constant threat of detention or deportation.

And it must include the demand for citizenship for all. This is not something Congress or either of the two parties will hand down — it can only be won through massive struggle, the kind that builds in every workplace, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city, until it becomes a national force. The level of mobilization required is not unlike that of the Civil Rights movement: coordinated, from below, and unrelenting.

In the history of the United States, a central demand of the colonial elite in their struggle for independence from Britain was the principle of “no taxation without representation.” Yet today that basic right is denied to millions. Immigrants contribute billions of dollars in taxes while being denied the most basic political rights. They work, raise children, build communities, and participate fully in the country’s social and economic life, yet they remain excluded from the democratic process.

Winning full citizenship rights would not only address this injustice—it would strengthen the entire working class. This is precisely why the labor movement must be at the center of this fight.

The Labor Movement Must Be at the Center of This Fight

The fight for immigrant rights cannot be separated from the fight for workers’ rights. Unions represent millions of workers, including large numbers of immigrants, and they have the power to challenge the system of raids, deportations, and intimidation that keeps immigrant workers vulnerable. When immigrant workers are denied rights, employers use that vulnerability to drive down wages, weaken organizing, and divide the working class.

Those divisions are not abstract—they play out inside workplaces every day. Employers constantly create layers within the same workplace—between drivers and warehouse workers (like at UPS), full-time and part-time staff, permanent employees and temporary workers, and union and non-union workers. Race and immigration status are often used to reinforce these divisions, with immigrant and racialized workers disproportionately pushed into the lowest-paid, most precarious positions. These divisions are tools used by employers to weaken solidarity, justify unequal pay and conditions, and make it harder for workers to organize collectively. When workers are separated into different tiers, it becomes easier for companies to pit one group against another while keeping wages low and working conditions poor for everyone. The fight for full rights for all immigrants is intrinsically tied to our right to work and unionize.

Our unions, thus, have to be at the forefront of the struggle for full rights for all immigrants. Leaders of major unions have to use their platforms to demand the abolition of ICE, an end to deportations, and full democratic rights and citizenship for all immigrants.

But instead, figures such as Shawn Fain of the United Auto Workers, who even speaks of working-class unity on both sides of the border, and Sean O’Brien, the President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, have either upheld Trump’s attacks, such as defending his tariffs, or stayed conspicuously silent as Trump has reversed immigration protections or as ICE has raided workplaces and torn families apart. It is a glaring contradiction, especially these policies continue to separate the struggles of U.S. workers from that of immigrants and the working class around the world. This silence only reinforces the divisions that employers and politicians rely on to weaken workers’ power.

Indeed, for Fain, who has been championing a general strike in 2028, the fight for immigrants rights needs to be the center of the campaign. Any aspirations of “shutting it all down” will remain hollow as long as millions of immigrant workers are excluded from that project. There is no working-class unity worthy of the name that leaves immigrants behind. In that, it is urgent that Fain calls and puts the vast resources of the UAW towards organizing that fight, complete with assemblies and open meetings to defend immigrants from ICE and openly demanding full rights for all.

Similarly, O’Brien continues to tout his desire to unionize Amazon, but any real attempts to do so must account for the tens of thousands of immigrant workers who are constantly under threat. On the contrary, the Teamsters leader has not only brokered and overseen a UPS contract that maintained the structural divide between warehouse workers and drivers, but has also backed Trump’s new DHS Secretary, Markwayne Mullin, who is going to oversee further attacks on immigrant workers, and did nothing to protect Haitian and Venezuelan workers at Amazon who lost TPS protections and were consequently fired because of it. The struggle to unionize the logistics giant is inseparable from the fight for full rights for all immigrants.

When unions stand up for immigrant rights—including the demand to abolish ICE and win full civil rights for all—they strengthen the power of the entire working class.

The events in Minneapolis showed us that possibility. When immigration enforcement threatened members of the community, divisions within our class melted away. Workers from different sectors showed up for one another. People mobilized in droves to defend their neighbors regardless of their immigration status. It showed that unity across the working class can flourish if we prepare along these lines. At the height of the backlash against the ICE surge in Minneapolis, furthermore, an assembly of hundreds of workers and community members not only voted for a day of “no work, no school, no shopping” on May Day, but also resolved to form strike committees across workplaces to make it real.

The experience in Minneapolis points toward what we need nationwide. The fight for immigrant rights must become a fight taken up by unions, community organizations, students, and social movements together. It requires consciously rejecting the divisions that are imposed in our workplaces and across society. Everything that we win will come from organizing and strengthening this fight from below: workers, students, and communities linking their struggles, building the committees and assemblies that can coordinate action across neighborhoods, cities, and industries.

When workers — immigrant and non-immigrant alike — stand together to demand the abolition of ICE, an end to deportations, and full right for all, including the right to citizenship, they challenge the system that keeps the working class fragmented and weak. Building that kind of unity will not come from politicians or cautious statements by union leaderships. It will come from organizing and fighting from the ground up, in every workplace, school and neighborhood, building the kind of power that no raid, no detention center, and no deportation machine can withstand.

From Left Voice, we put our pages to the service of this struggle. We invite you to write, share your experiences, and contribute analysis that can help sharpen and expand this fight. We encourage artists, and creators to produce visuals and media that can bring these demands to life across social media and beyond. Take this discussion into your unions, workplaces, schools to expand on the fight for immigrant rights.

The post The Movement to Abolish ICE Must Fight for Full Rights for All Immigrants appeared first on Left Voice.

From Left Voice via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/35085

FBI agents remove evidence from a private home in Arcadia, Calif., on March 8, 2012. Photo: Gary Friedman/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

It was a Saturday in February, and I was checking my email inbox on my phone for no particular reason, during a conference. A Mother Jones reporter had written a note, so I opened it.

It’s not so unusual for me to receive press inquiries ­— I am a feminist writer who touches on hot-button issues — but this particular email I never could have predicted. It was about an infamous federal case against people arrested in connection to a protest against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Last July 4, a group of people had gathered for a demonstration against ICE’s Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas. It was a noise demo during which a police officer was shot. Some 18 people were arrested and charged for the protest.

Prosecutors had introduced my analysis of feminism’s relationship to horror cinema as “evidence of ideologically driven intent.”

The government’s indictment against the Prairieland protesters stood as a chilling development in President Donald Trump’s war on dissent: It was the first time that terrorism-related charges had been brought against people for allegedly being part of an “antifa cell.”

Did I have any thoughts, the Mother Jones reporter wanted to know, on the prosecution using an essay by me in a terrorism trial?

Excuse me?

The essay in question: a film review I wrote in 2019 about the horror movies “Hereditary” and “Midsommar.”

I blinked twice, rubbed my eyes, and then began digging around on the internet to understand.

To my astonishment, prosecutors had introduced my seven-year-old analysis of feminism’s relationship to horror cinema as “evidence of ideologically driven intent” the previous day.

Although I published the piece in “Commune” magazine, the review had been printed in zine format — and that was what authorities seized from the Dallas home of one of the defendants, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, last summer.

“Guilt by Literature”

The appearance of my review in the trial is a brazen attempt at conjuring “guilt by literature” — just one of the tactics prosecutors have used to criminalize speech and use First Amendment-protected speech as a legal weapon against the Trump administration’s political enemies.

Nobody, by the way, is suggesting that Estrada shot or conspired to shoot the officer. He stands accused of two crimes: attempting to conceal documents “by transporting a box containing numerous Antifa materials” and conspiracy to conceal those zines. He faces up to 20 years in prison.

[

Related

The Feds Want to Make It Illegal to Even Possess an Anarchist Zine](https://theintercept.com/2025/11/23/prairieland-ice-antifa-zines-criminalize-protest-journalism/)

Estrada isn’t himself facing terror charges, but he being tarred with the label by his association with this so-called “antifa cell.” What Estrada’s case most acutely represents is the way the President Donald Trump conflates antifa and terrorism to do things like criminalize the transportation of zines — in other words, simple First Amendment protected activity.

Trump pulled this off by deeming antifa a “major terrorist organization” — a legal designation that doesn’t even exist for domestic groups — ignoring the fact that antifa is an orientation, not a group.

The feds, as Natasha Lennard notes, tend to try to evidence such charges by collecting circumstantial evidence of individual crimes alleged to have taken place “in the context of” legal protest activity — even when there is no direct link between those charged and the alleged crimes.

The charge may or may not stick — often they don’t — but the lawfare from above serves a terrorizing end in itself, she explains, since “the lengthy prosecutions hamper protest movements and chill dissent.”

Why My Review?

I need to ask: Why my review? And the truth is I don’t really have a great answer.

There is a rich irony here: My little horror movie review was introduced to prove a conception of antifa that — like many of the monsters we scream at in horror flicks — isn’t quite real.

The title of my essay — which is to say, of the zine seized from the accused’s house in Dallas — is “The Satanic Death-Cult Is Real.” It refers to the fictional demon-worshipping ceremony in the final scene of “Hereditary” as well as, at the same time, to the all-too-real, madness-inducing logic of the private nuclear household.

From my ego’s standpoint, it’s painful to assume that anyone is refusing to read beyond my titles before reacting. (It’s a tragically common occurrence: I’m the author, after all, of books about the communization of care with titles like “Full Surrogacy Now” and “Abolish the Family.”)

It seems that the FBI didn’t read beyond the cover of what it calls my “booklet.”

It seems, though, that the FBI didn’t read beyond the cover of what it calls my “booklet.” That was the description of my review-in-zine-form when it appeared in an itemized receipt for seized property, alongside cellphones, computers, weapons, and other bits of technology — for the sole reason that it is willing to throw anything, no matter how absurd, at anti-ICE activists to paint them as vile terrorists.

When the Mother Jones reporter messaged, I replied immediately, from my phone, in a state of agitation. It ought to be surprising, I pointed out, that possession of a printout of some film criticism could be brandished as evidence of a treasonous conspiracy against the United States government, yet — in 2026 — it is not.

“Perhaps,” indeed, I wrote, “there is an element of truth in the state’s preposterous linking of the mere implication of having read antifascist culture writing about the private nuclear family in [director] Ari Aster’s oeuvre with the alleged crime of belonging to a cell of an organization — antifa — that, as we all know, doesn’t even exist.”

[

Related

Wearing All Black at Protests Makes You Guilty of Terrorism, Prosecutors Tell Jury](https://theintercept.com/2026/03/12/antifa-ice-protest-texas-trial-terrorism/)

Thankfully, however, organized antifascism does exist. I proudly accept the notion that any of my writings have helped in any small way to stoke the desire to practice antifascism, courageously and practically, as those blocking and protesting the brutality of American stormtroopers are doing all over the world.

If nothing else, I’m grateful that the FBI seized my book review and that prosecutors hauled it out in this ridiculous trial, because it gave me the opportunity to express my full solidarity with the Prairieland defendants.

The post I Wrote a Movie Review. Cops Took It From A Protester’s Home to Make the Case That He’s a Terrorist. appeared first on The Intercept.

From The Intercept via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/33882

A new report from the Marshall Project reveals that the daily number of kids in ICE detention has increased sixfold under the second Trump administration. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, host Mansa Musa speaks with Shannon Heffernan and Anna Flagg of The Marshall Project about the the human cost of Trump’s mass deportation campaign, and about the horrifying reality inside the South Texas Family Processing Center—the “black box” facility in Dilley, Texas, where children are subjected to substandard food, medical deprivation, and prolonged detention beyond legal limits.

Guests:

• Anna Flagg is a senior data reporter at The Marshall Project and works with data to report on detention, deaths in custody, crime, race, policing and immigration. Her reporting has appeared in The Marshall Project, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, ProPublica, Politico, The Guardian, The Associated Press, Al Jazeera, and others.
• Shannon Heffernan is a staff writer at The Marshall Project whose work focuses on prisons and jails across the US, as well as sexual and gender-based violence, immigration and mental health, and how arts and culture shape (and are shaped by) crime and punishment.

Additional links/info:

• Anna Flagg & Shannon Heffernan, The Marshall Project, “‘Why is this happening to us?’ Daily number of kids in ICE detention jumps 6x under Trump”
• Maximillian Alvarez, TRNN, “Texas’ one-of-a-kind concentration camp for children and families”

Credits:

• Producer / Videographer / Editor: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars, I’m your host Mansa Musa. Why is this happening to us? Daily numbers of children in ICE detention jump, six times under the Trump administration. Today we are joined by two esteemed journalists reporting for the Marshall Project, Shannon Heffernan and Anna Flagg, who recently covered the horrifying stories of the rise in child detention under the Trump administration. Welcome to Rattling the Bars.

Shannon Heffernan:

Thank you so much for having us.

Mansa Musa:

All right, so first let’s start with you, Shannon. Introduce yourself to our audience and tell me a little bit about yourself.

Shannon Heffernan:

My name is Shannon Heffernan. I’m a staff writer at the Marshall Project. I’ve covered prisons and jails for over a decade and lately have been focusing on detention, particularly collaborating with Anna to talk about child detention.

Mansa Musa:

Introduce yourself to our audience.

Anna Flagg:

Yeah. Hi, I’m Anna Flagg. I’m a data reporter at the Marshall Project, also covering immigration, criminal justice. Been working with Shannon on family detention and covering these issues of these children in ICE detention.

Mansa Musa:

And our audience be mindful this. A lot of times main media are given a warning, like warning sensitive information is coming out. I’m giving you a warning that what we’re about to talk about is not about adults. We’re talking about children. We’re talking about people, children that go to elementary school. We’re talking about children that’s in kindergarten. We’re talking about children in prenatal care. This is horrifying information. We’re going to start with you, Anna. You did the numbers on the number of children that’s being detained and the fact that they’re being detained by astronomical numbers. Tell our audience how you come about the numbers and what these numbers mean.

Anna Flagg:

Yeah. There’s a group called the Deportation Data Project that has been requesting ICE records of detentions and arrests and a bunch of enforcement actions that they’ve been taking. And they’ve been routinely requesting those and then publishing those online for reporters and the public to see in general. And I think that’s just such a good service. And we’ve been making use of that data a lot. We looked at detentions of everybody since, I think it was the end of 2023. And we kind of measured the number of children that had been detained on a daily basis since then up till the end of the dataset, which is currently at the middle of October 2025. And we found that the number of children in ICE detention had gone up significantly. It had increased sixfold and since Trump took office. So on average today, there are about 170 children in ICE detention.

And you can compare that to previously under the Biden administration when it was about 25. So it’s a huge increase.

Mansa Musa:

These numbers have … And they’re constantly growing?

Anna Flagg:

We’re not sure because the administration has been pretty slow and not very transparent about releasing the information. So what we know, the only things that we know are the information that they release. So

Mansa Musa:

That

Anna Flagg:

Data has not been updated since October of last year. There’s other statistics that show the general population of family detention centers like Dilly. So you can get some information from that because you know that there are a certain number of people in detention in the family facility, and you know that some of those are going to be children, but you don’t know how many of them are children.

Shannon Heffernan:

We do have some indicators though by looking at things like arrest and the number of rests that are happening and the numbers Anna was mentioning, that it is likely that those numbers have grown. Now, again, we won’t know for certain because we have also heard about some releases happening at Dili, families being let out. So hopefully we’ll have a better sense of what that actually looks like in terms of daily numbers soon.

Mansa Musa:

Okay. And since we are on that, that was my next question anyway. Can you describe the conditions at Daily? And they call it the Immigration Processing Center in Texas. And who runs it? Is it private owned and specifically who’s incarcerated there? Is undocumented people being brought from other parts of the country?

Shannon Heffernan:

Yeah. So yes, people are being brought up from all over to Dili. It’s not just people in the Texas area. We’ve seen folks go from Chicago when they were doing the raids there. We’ve seen folks go from Minneapolis when the raids were happening there. In terms of the conditions, we’ve heard a lot of troubling information from people who have been detained inside Dilly. We’ve heard complaints of poor medical care. We’ve heard complaints that the water smells and taste foul. And we’ve heard complaints about food that it’s contaminated with worms and mold, but the type of food they give is not appropriate for children, that children are losing weight because they’re not getting appropriate food. I should say that CoreCivic, and I’ll talk a little bit more about them here shortly. The company that runs it has basically said to us, we’re under multiple levels of oversight.

We treat these families well and referred us to ICE for any further information who has not answered our detailed list of questions. You asked about CoreCivics. I’ll also address that. CoreCivic’s a private company. They’re one of the largest private detention companies in the United States, and they run the Deli Detention Center.

Mansa Musa:

And CoreCivic also in the District of Columbia, they’re building a halfway house for the DC Code Defenders, so they got their hand in all things locking people up. Shannon, talk about the different color uniforms that the children are wearing. What’s the significance of it?

Shannon Heffernan:

Yeah. To be honest with you, I’m not familiar with the particular color of uniforms they use at that facility. I have seen different color systems at other facilities, but I unfortunately am not familiar with the particulars at Dili.

Mansa Musa:

Do you know how much money CoreCivic gave to Trump’s campaign?

Shannon Heffernan:

Yeah, we do know that they did make donations to the Trump campaign, particularly his inaugural fund. I will say that the amounts of money they gave, we don’t really have any indications that this was like a pay for play kind of situation. They are one of the larger organizations, and I could see a lot of other reasons that this partnership might happen just in terms of the infrastructure CoreCivic already had under their belt. But yeah, there’s no doubt that they’re turning quite a bit to private companies to operate the detention of immigrants. This is different than what you see in the criminal justice space where so much of it is done by public institutions.

Mansa Musa:

Right. And in June 26th of 2025, it was reported that there were more than 400 children in ICE detention. Can you give us some background information on that, that number and what’s behind it today?

Anna Flagg:

Yeah. So when we were looking at the numbers of children being held over time, what we saw was when Trump took office at first, it kind of stayed stable and then it started rising, rising, rising, rising. And it got very high around the summer of 2025. That was probably around when it peaked, and that’s when you’re referring to when there were a few days in June when there were more than 400 kids in ICE detention. And then we saw it go down a little bit after that. Then it went up a little bit more. And generally, it has stayed pretty high, relatively high, much higher than it was in the previous months under Biden. So we don’t know much about the particulars of those children who were there at the time that it was at its peak, but we do know that probably over a hundred kids every day are being held in ICE detention and these facilities are not really designed for children to stay there, especially for long periods of time.

Mansa Musa:

Do you have any read on where they’re coming from? I know we acknowledge that they bring them from all over the country, but is it a concentration in a particular part of the country like Chicago, California, or is it just wherever it’s a heavy ice present like in Minneapolis, whether it’s a heavy ice present, they taking children?

Anna Flagg:

I mean, I think one thing that we’re able to see from our data is that there’s a lot more enforcement on the interior of the country now. So a lot of kids are getting picked up that way rather than at the border where they may be attempting to cross or they might be unaccompanied. There’s so much more enforcement on the interior of the country now. That’s why we’re seeing a lot more families and children getting pulled in. And I think that seems to be driven by these quotas for high numbers of deportations that the administration is asking for.

Shannon Heffernan:

And I’ll just add, you mentioned these areas where there’s been high presence from ICE like Chicago and Minneapolis, where they’re doing these sort of big raids or they might rate a whole apartment building like they did in Chicago. And we definitely have heard stories of children being caught up in that, and a lot of that’s been more high profile. But where we’ve also seen a lot of the arrest happening, and I think that this is important to note, is people showing up at their court hearings or their ICE check-ins. People who are literally complying with the rules they’ve been given, and that is the moment at which they are taken with their children to Dili.

Mansa Musa:

Children are actually being detained by ICE for people that’s in compliance with whatever order they’ve been given. So what’s the impact of that in terms of people’s abilities to try to be consistent with the procedure from y’all information? Are people reluctant to come to court?

Shannon Heffernan:

I don’t have data on that, but what I do know is anecdotally, I’ve heard about that from a lot of folks, a lot of fear and some really hard decisions they’re making about, do I show up at this court date? Do I show up and comply? Both choices are feeling really risky to folks right now. And a lot of people I’ve heard anecdotally before going to their hearings or doing things like making plans with their friends and family about like, okay, if this goes bad, here’s what I want to happen to my kids, which is a very tough emotionally, financially decision to make.

Mansa Musa:

Because of this, has the courts turned to virtual in order to prevent children from being taken or from innocent people being rounded up? That’s

Shannon Heffernan:

Not something I am particularly familiar with. I have seen other people who serve children switching to virtual services, whether that be schools or communities trying to support people not having to leave their homes by doing things like laundry pickup or grocery drop off. That doesn’t mean the courts aren’t doing it. It’s just not an area that I’ve seen aren’t familiar with.

Mansa Musa:

And your number crunching and it’s doing the data, what’s the relationship between the number of children being rounded up versus the number of children being detained as a result of coming to court with their parents? Have you been able to make a distinction between the two that in essence, where are most of the children being gathered up?

Anna Flagg:

Yeah, I mean, that’s a really good question and that’s something that’s, I think, a little bit hard to get from the data. I think the main thing that we’re seeing in terms of how the kids are getting brought in is just this increased enforcement in the interior because when there’s more enforcement inside the country as opposed to at the border, you’re targeting families that have lived here for a long time. There are kids and there are aunts and uncles, and it’s kind of a way of bringing in an entire family into the enforcement. And these are people who have lived in the community, they have jobs there, they have friends, they have communities, they go to school. And that’s sort of anecdotally, I think also to Shannon’s point, it’s hard to see this from the data.

Mansa Musa:

Right. And okay, in terms of like you wrote about how long children are being held in detention based on what the courts say, how long they should be held, how’d you come to this conclusion that you say that over a thousand children were held 20 days beyond the court order, unpack that for our audience?

Anna Flagg:

So that is something that is in the data because the data includes the time that the child was booked in and the time that the child was booked out. So you can tell how long they spent in the custody of ICE. And we looked at those lengths of stay and how those changed over time and what they are looking like now under the Trump administration. And what you can see is that … So according to the guidance that is given to ICE, they’re really never supposed to take a child into custody. But when they do take a child into custody, they need to try to get that child out as soon as possible. And then the guidance on children that are not with their families is they should be released within 72 hours. And if children are detained with their families, they need to be released within 20 days.

And so that’s what ICE is supposed to do. They’re supposed to release the kids as soon as possible and not more than 20 days. So what we saw when we looked at how many kids were getting let out after one day, two days, three days, 20 days was actually a big bump around that 20-day mark, which suggests that what ICE is doing is actually holding kids as long as they can under this court settlement as a way of keeping them in detention for a long time. And I think ideally their goal is to deport people straight out of detention. And then in that thousand cases that we saw, kids were actually being held longer than that 20-day limit.

Shannon Heffernan:

Yeah. And some as many as several months, I think is worth noting. Some as many as several months. And you think about those conditions, we’ve heard that the education offerings are very poor. It’s not for many hours a day, it’s not a good match for the child. And so those months are very precious at a young age when you’re talking about a developing mind. And what we know from research is it can have long-term effects on a child’s emotional wellbeing, on their education, and on their physical health.

Mansa Musa:

Because we know that ICE is not in the business of childcare. We know they primarily in the business of rounding adults up. The children, for lack of better word, is collateral damage as it relates to what they’re doing. I think that the bigger picture here is that because they not in the business of childcare, they don’t have no mechanism for what to do with the children. Once they get them, they not going to put them in foster care in the United States and give them that type of environment where, to your point, Shannon, there will be an environment where it’d be more conducive to them at least being stable. They’re going to leave them in a detention environment like what they do in prison is like warehousing. I

Shannon Heffernan:

Will say there are some children who are, we don’t know how many, this is a number Anna and I would love to get out at. There are some children who are ending up in the foster care system.

So you can imagine this choice as a parent to the degree they have a choice they don’t always. “Do I take with my child with me in detention and try to ensure that we stay together if I am deported? Do I allow them to stay with a family member or go into the foster care system so they’re not detained, but risk we may be separated?” I mean, I think that’s a very difficult choice that families are wrestling with and the lawyers and advocates I speak to don’t feel like either of those situations are really keeping the children safe.

Mansa Musa:

Has a lawsuit been filed about the way they’re doing this, mainly with the children?

Shannon Heffernan:

So there’s an ongoing legal settlement called Flores that was decided decades ago, and it basically provides guidance for what’s supposed to happen. This was a lawsuit that was filed on behalf of a child that was detained. It’s important to note that the Trump administration is not the only administration that has detained children. This

Mansa Musa:

Has

Shannon Heffernan:

Been a practice that has happened before despite us now seeing a spike. And that settlement, to go back to it, is supposed to provide guidance on what kinds of treatment children are supposed to get. That’s where that 20-day limit comes from.

Mansa Musa:

But

Shannon Heffernan:

The Trump administration, like previous administrations, is trying to say that they should not be under the settlement anymore. They’re trying to get out from that legal guidance so that they’re able to operate without the guardrails of the Florida settlement offers.

Mansa Musa:

So it’s already been established that they can’t keep them longer than 20 days, but the Trump administration is ignoring that?

Shannon Heffernan:

Yeah. So that 20-day limit, it’s a little confusing because it’s not necessarily a hard line on either side of it. It’s a guidance. But yeah, I think that there’s … If you look at the court filings, the people on the Florida side representing the children have again and again and again, said the government is not complying with the settlement in multiple ways, including that 20-day limit.

Mansa Musa:

And talk about Operation Midway Blitz and how did it impact the children?

Shannon Heffernan:

Yeah. So I live in Chicago, which is where Operation Midway Blitz happened. This was the government’s name for sending multiple federal agents to the city of Chicago to detain immigrants. And that is certainly wind it down. There’s not as many agents here as there used to be. They’ve been sending them to places like Minneapolis where they’ve also gotten word that that will be winding down. That does not mean that immigration enforcement is not happening here still. It does still happen here, but it’s not quite at the level it was happening before, but they could ramp it up again. I think that’s one of the things where people are kind of closely watching where and if there’ll be another surge and what city that will be. We do know that children were detained as part of Operation Midway Surge, I’m sorry, Operation Midway Blitz, and also with the ramp up of ICE enforcement in Minneapolis.

So these surges we do definitely see affect children. And I should say it’s not just the children who are detained that we see being affected. You think about school districts like we’ve seen in Minneapolis where multiple children are detained from that district. That has a collateral effect on their fellow students who are witnessing that, on siblings who might

Mansa Musa:

Be

Shannon Heffernan:

Left behind, on neighborhood kids who see that. I think as a child, if you witness something like that or you’re aware of something like that, it’s likely to have a psychological effect on you. So there’s a ripple effect beyond the individuals that are just detained.

Mansa Musa:

As you were saying, I was thinking about on a societal level, how this impact the psychic of the whole nation. This is coming into this country, into the psyche of our children there when they hear ICE is in the area and it’s all because under the pretense that campaign promise that Trump made was that he getting worse to the worst, that the worst of the worst, immigrants, undocumented people come into this country, commit all the crime in the world, therefore I got to get rid of them and then turn around and put a quote out how many people you want to round it up a day. So the people you rounding up is people that are here. The only crime they committed is, if it’s a crime, they not documented and you interfere with their ability to become documented. But talk about, both of y’all can weigh in on this here, and this is just from y’all viewpoint, the families in the detention, outside advocate.

How do y’all see the outside advocacy? Because when Ramos, the little boy, everybody got … When we seen that, and that shocked the consciousness of the nation say everybody that had an issue with whatever was going on, they in their mind couldn’t phantom a child with a hoodie on, an innocent child being taken by ICE. How do y’all see the advocacy and the protests against that? And do you see this taking shape throughout the country as this thing unfolds? Yeah.

Shannon Heffernan:

I mean, I think we’ve definitely seen a surge of interest since that picture was taken of Liam Ramos. We were reporting on this before, and then we were reporting after that image, and we’ve definitely seen a difference in the type of attention that it got. I think what’s really important to note is there are many, many children like him.

Mansa Musa:

He

Shannon Heffernan:

Happened to be the one that was caught in a compelling photograph. And I think that’s important to note in part because these detention facilities are closed places that the public can’t freely go. You’re not going to get a generally news photographer in there or cell phone footage for someone. And because it becomes that kind of black box, I think it’s something that can sometimes, we’re seeing a moment of interest right now, but sometimes be harder to get interest in because you don’t have those images. And so one thing I would really encourage listeners to think about is when you see that image of a child like Liam, remembering how many other children there are like that and remaining engaged even when you don’t have those sort of immediate images, making sure you’re staying informed about things that might be happening to the degree we can be informed in detention in these places where we have less visibility.

Mansa Musa:

Anne?

Anna Flagg:

Yeah. I think that story about Liam really showed how much the American public does care about children and how children are being treated and the idea of an immigrant child that young being taken into detention. And so it’s exactly like Shannon said, I think it’s incumbent on us to understand how many other kids like that are also experiencing the same thing and not forget that because I think the public made it clear that they do care about this issue.

Mansa Musa:

We talked about this, but is there any litigation currently in existence to try to get some kind of ruling on the tension of children?

Shannon Heffernan:

Well, you have the ongoing floor settlement. You also have people filing their own petitions. You’ve seen this reported in the media. There’s been a huge rise in the number of people filing petitions to get released saying that their detention is unfair. So you’re seeing a lot of legal activity around this right now, and in many cases actually saying the courts be favorable to the family. So I think that’s one thing we’ll be really watching and tracking closely is how that continues, what happens if some of this stuff possibly makes its way up into higher courts. Yeah, that’s definitely something we’ll be watching very, very closely.

Mansa Musa:

And as we close, Anna, you got any last words that you want to say something?

Anna Flagg:

No, I would just say that this is an issue that I think … Well, I think that just to repeat myself from before, I think Americans really do care about it and as much division as there is about immigration policy and how it should be enforced, I think the issue of children being detained and experiencing any kind of immigration enforcement actions is something that Americans really care about and can agree. So I think that’s a place to start when we’re trying to find some sort of agreement.

Mansa Musa:

And if our audience want to follow your work, how do they do that?

Anna Flagg:

You can go to the Marshall Project and both of us are listed there.

Shannon Heffernan:

And we would love to hear from listeners about what they’re seeing on the ground. This is an issue we’re continuing to watch. So if you’re in one of these communities being affected, please always feel free to reach out to us about what questions you have and what information you’d like to see revealed, as well as any tips you have for things that you think need to be covered by the media.

Mansa Musa:

In regard to the conditions of the children, do you think that, and we seen like when Liam Ramos was handcuffed, do you think that in order for it to really shake the nation’s conscious to earthquake proportion, that if one of these children happened to die in custody, or do y’all know, have any of them died in custody?

Shannon Heffernan:

I am not aware of any children that have died in immigration custody. I know that is a major fear that a lot of the advocates and lawyers have with the quality of medical care they say they’re seeing inside the facility. My hope would be, and I don’t think this is a political message, I don’t think anybody wants to see a child die. And my hope would be that that is not necessary in order for something to get attention and care.

Mansa Musa:

And we want to remind our audience that as I open up, we’re talking about children and regardless of what we think children are innocent and oftentimes adults impose their will on children and take their innocence from. But these children that we’re talking about, their innocence is being taken from them by virtue of them not being documented in a country that has a statue of liberty in coming into the country saying, “Welcome with open arms.” But when they get here, they’re not being welcomed with open arms, they’re being welcomed with the presence of ICE agents. They’re being traumatized. We ask that you really look at this and ask yourself, when you look at your child as you put in the bed at night, how would you feel if somebody knocked on your door and just say, “I’m going to leave you where you at, but I want to take your child.” You would be horrified.

That’s what the parents are going through of these children. But more importantly, the impact that this particular repression is having on these children is traumatizing these children forever and it’s traumatizing the society norms forever. We ask that you continue to evaluate this information and give us your comments on what you think. We thank Shannon and Anna, we thank you for coming on today, and we really greatly appreciate you taking time out to educate our audience on the importance of understanding this particular story.

Shannon Heffernan:

Thank you so much for having us. We appreciate your

Mansa Musa:

Time. Thank you. And we ask that you continue to support the real news and rattling the bars, because guess what? We actually, the real news.

From The Real News Network via This RSS Feed.

Outnumbered the fascists. Police failed to break our line. They got bundled into taxis & fucked off home. Got a pic that goes crazy hard out of the whole equation. Lovely Saturday, over all.

https://bsky.app/profile/spice8rack.bsky.social/post/3mgibaaperk2l

Headline: NYPD Arrests Man in Washington Square Park Assault on Officers

The New York City Police Department has arrested 27‑year‑old Gusmane Coulibaly in connection with a violent incident earlier this week in Washington Square Park where uniformed officers were struck with snow and ice.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/30069

Demands for accountability are mounting after internal records revealed this week that an officer with Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations fatally shot Ruben Ray Martinez, a 23-year-old US citizen, almost a year ago in South Padre Island, Texas.

"While Martinez's death was reported in local media at the time, the reports did not identify HSI involvement or disclose that a federal agent fired the shots through the driver-side window," Newsweek reported, citing publicly available information and records obtained by American Oversight through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

"It shouldn't take 11 months and a FOIA lawsuit to learn that the government killed someone," American Oversight said on social media late Friday. Separately, the watchdog noted that "the details sound similar to the death of Renee Good," a 37-year-old US citizen and mother of three fatally shot by officer Jonathan Ross last month in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Good's killing, and two Customs and Border Protection agents' subsequent fatal shooting of 37-year-old US citizen and nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, have fueled outrage over President Donald Trump's mass deportation agenda, resulting in a congressional funding fight that has partially shut down the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees both agencies.

ICE's internal report on the Texas shooting states that HSI agents were helping redirect traffic at the site of a major accident early on March 15, 2025. Martinez and his passengers aren't named, but the document claims that the driver of a blue four-door Ford "failed to follow instructions," including verbal commands to stop and exit the vehicle.

Instead, the driver "accelerated forward, striking a HSI special agent who wound up on the hood of the vehicle. Upon observing this, HSI group supervisory special agent utilized his government-issued service weapon, discharging multiple rounds at the driver through the open driver's side window," according to the ICE report—a version of events that a DHS spokesperson echoed in a Friday statement added to the Newsweek article, which was initially published Wednesday.

The DHS spokesperson also said that the incident remains under investigation by the Texas Department of Public Safety's Ranger Division, whose press secretary, Sheridan Nolen, confirmed that "this is still an active investigation by the Texas Rangers, and no other information is currently available."

Back in March LAST YEAR, ICE shot and killed a US citizen teenager through his car window, and it never admitted its role. ICE claims it was assisting traffic control (!?!) when the driver didn't follow its instructions. Fake cops. How many other killings are they concealing?

[image or embed]
— David Bier (@davidjbier.bsky.social) February 20, 2026 at 9:35 AM

Charles Stam, a lawyer for the Martinez family, told the New York Times that the 23-year-old was the driver in the ICE report. Stam and another attorney, Alex Stamm, also said in a statement that eyewitness accounts of the scene don't match the document.

"It is critical that there is a full and fair investigation into why HSI was present at the scene of a traffic collision and why a federal officer shot and killed a US citizen as he was trying to comply with instructions from the local law enforcement officers directing traffic," the lawyers said.

The Times also reached Martinez's mother, Rachel Reyes, who said her son worked at an Amazon warehouse in San Antonio and was out to celebrate his birthday. According to her: "He was a good kid. He doesn't have a criminal history... He never got in trouble. He was never violent."

Reyes challenged the federal government's narrative about her son, telling the newspaper: "What they're saying is different from what they told the family, so that's adding insult to injury... They are making it sound different. I don't appreciate their language."

In a Friday interview with the Texas Tribune, American Oversight executive director Chioma Chukwu also called out the government: "What they're telling the public is very different than what they're doing behind closed doors. The only reason why we're able to make these connections and really call into question the public statements that they're making to mislead the public is because we're able to get our hands on these documents... That should deeply concern everyone."

The revelations this week have generated concern. André Treiber, the Democratic National Committee's Youth Coordinating Council chair, wrote on social media Friday evening that "ICE murdered a Texan last March and we are only just learning about it now. They are once again offering the excuse that this was done in self-defense, but forgive me if I am extremely skeptical after they've been caught lying about that exact same thing multiple times already."

Another death. Another truth coming out late. Another failure of accountability.Ruben Martinez should still be alive.ICE has killed multiple people, and we're still uncovering cases after the fact. This is what unchecked power looks like. It must stop.

[image or embed]
— MoveOn (@moveon.org) February 20, 2026 at 12:45 PM

Federal lawmakers also sounded the alarm on Friday. Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas) declared that "Americans deserve immediate answers and an independent investigation of the shooting." Another Texas Democrat, Congressman Joaquin Castro, similarly called for "a full investigation," including into the monthslong "cover-up."

US Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), whose Chicagoland district has also faced a recent ICE invasion, pointed to other deaths tied to the agency, including those of Silverio Villegas Gonzalez, who was shot by ICE in the Chicago suburb of Franklin Park last September; Keith Porter Jr., who was shot by an off-duty agent on New Year's Eve in Los Angeles, California; and Linda Davis, a special education teacher in Savannah, Georgia, who was killed in a Monday car crash that involved a man fleeing ICE.

"For a whole year, DHS hid that they murdered Ruben, a young man in Texas, after a traffic stop. Just like they did with Silverio, Renee, Keith, Alex, and Linda, they lied and avoided accountability," said Ramirez, who supports abolishing ICE. "How many more people have to be executed before my colleagues realize that reforms are not enough?"

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/29197

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has deported 2-month-old Juan Nicolás to Mexico—along with his 16-month-old sister, mother, and father—following the infant's hospitalization for respiratory issues and vomiting, which he suffered after spending more than three weeks in a Texas detention center run by the notorious private prison firm CoreCivic.

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), who has been pushing the Trump administration to release Juan and his family, confirmed late Tuesday that they were deported after speaking with the family's attorney, who told the lawmaker that ICE removed them from the US "with only the money that they had in their commissary—a total of $190." Castro wrote that "to unnecessarily deport a sick baby and his entire family is heinous."

"My staff and I are in contact with Juan’s family," Castro added. "We are laser-focused on tracking them down, holding ICE accountable for this monstrous action, demanding specific details on their whereabouts and well-being, and ensuring their safety."

According to Migrant Insider's Pablo Manríquez, Juan Nicolás "has been fighting respiratory illness in a facility where measles recently walked through the door, where mothers report struggling to get clean water for formula, where sick children cycle through ibuprofen and basic antibiotics until they deteriorate badly enough that someone finally calls an ambulance."

"Which is what happened Monday night. An ambulance came," Manríquez wrote. "It was, depending on how you look at it, either a rescue or an admission of guilt."

Juan's mother told Castro that the baby is suffering from bronchitis. "We are all deeply concerned that Juan and his mom will be deported and that Juan’s health will continue to deteriorate," the Texas Democrat wrote Tuesday afternoon. "His life is in danger because of ICE’s monstrous cruelty."

Univision journalist Lidia Terrazas crossed into Mexico and located Juan and his family in the hours following their deportation. The reporter later posted a photo with Juan on Instagram.

🚨BREAKING: The great @LidiaTerrazas has found Juan Nicolás, the two-month-old ICE deported today to Mexico.

Update coming tomorrow at https://t.co/HpQYb2bjiA https://t.co/enYyUH0KzO pic.twitter.com/vP2tqMqvNd
— Pablo Manríquez (@PabloReports) February 18, 2026

The number of children held in ICE detention has skyrocketed during President Donald Trump's second White House term, rising more than sixfold. A recent analysis by The Marshall Project found that "on some days, ICE held 400 children or more."

"They are literally being treated as prisoners," Castro said after spending more than two hours inside the CoreCivic facility in Dilley, Texas last month. "This is a monstrous machine."

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/29028

As advocates including US Rep. Joaquin Castro demanded the immediate release of a 2-month-old baby, Juan Nicolás, who has been detained with his mother at Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Dilley, Texas for close to half of his young life, the infant was rushed to a hospital early in the morning on Tuesday after suffering from respiratory issues and vomiting in recent days.

Lidia Terrezas, a reporter for Univision, spoke to officials at the Dilley detention center and reported in an Instagram video that Juan Nicolás had been transported via ambulance at about 7:00 pm Central time. KABB Fox News 29 in San Antonio reported Tuesday morning that the baby had been "treated and released."

"It's unclear what happened for them to take him to the hospital," said Terrezas. "It is my understanding that he was taken by ambulance. So at some point the decision was made that he should be taken to a hospital immediately."

View this post on InstagramA post shared by Lidia Terrazas (@lidiaterrazasnews)

The reported hospitalization came two days after the baby had "a medical episode at approximately 3:00 am Saturday," according to the San Antonio Current, and hours after Castro (D-Texas) provided an update about the infant's condition after being detained at Dilley nearly a month ago.

"He's been sick consistently," said Castro in a video posted on X. "He was vomiting, he's been having respiratory issues. They came to check on him when he was having these issues, but they couldn't take him to see a doctor because there was no doctor in the early morning hours at Dilley."

During an earlier visit to Dilley, Castro saw the facility's medical wing, complete with beds for children and families who need medical attention at the center built to hold up to 2,400 people—but witnessed no actual medical providers working there.

"These kids should be released, and these folks who have committed no crime should not be in this trailer prison," said Castro.

Dilley Update: Maria Isabella (7) released on her birthday but Juan Nicolás (2 mo) remains imprisoned in Dilley. Please keep speaking up! #FreeOurChildren #DilleyTrailerPrison pic.twitter.com/lIDRLnsUOG
— Joaquin Castro (@JoaquinCastrotx) February 16, 2026

In his earlier medical episode, Juan Nicolás was described as "choking on his own vomit."

"This baby in particular is very vulnerable," said Castro Monday. "For those of you that are parents... you know how vulnerable kids are at the age of 2 months. And so I have been pressing [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] hard to let Juan Nicolás go free... They are on notice that he has been sick, that they don't have the medical capacity to treat him properly, and that his life, if this continues, could be in danger."

CoreCivic, the private prison company that runs Dilley, claims the medical wing is fully staffed and offers 24/7 care, according to NBC News Channel 4 in San Antonio.

But Castro's report of the facility's failure to provide medical care is not incongruous with numerous reports of medical neglect at other detention centers where ICE is detaining tens of thousands of people, including about 170 children on any given day, on average.

Detainees have reported being unable to access medical care at facilities including Krome North Service Processing Center in Florida; North Lake Processing Center in Michigan, where an immigrant named Nenko Stanev Gantchev was found dead in his cell in December; and Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas, where at least three people have died in 44 days recently.

El País reported on Monday on medical neglect of children at Dilley. A 5-year-old boy suffered acute appendicitis "with severe pain," according to the newspaper.

"The staff member responsible for attending to him told his mother to come back in three days if the pain continued," reported El País. "He lay on the floor in agony for hours until, after they saw him vomiting, he was finally taken to a doctor and eventually underwent surgery. After he was discharged from the hospital, it was difficult to obtain the medication he had been prescribed."

The 1997 Flores Agreement set a 20-day maximum for children to be held in immigration detention, but with Juan Nicolás detained for about three and a half weeks, according to Castro, the baby is one of hundreds of children who have been held at Dilley for at least a month.

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/29037

When two women knocked on the door of Jesus Emmanuel Flores-Aguilar, begging for help with their car, the father of six didn't hesitate to help. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents ensured that his good deed would not go unpunished.

Minutes after Flores walked out of his home in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, on Thursday and got to work looking under the hood of the car, three unmarked SUVs sped toward him, tires screeching behind him.

A horde of officers hopped out, raced toward Flores, and tackled him to the ground, footage recorded by a neighbor shows.

By Friday, Flores was already in an ICE detention facility in Texas, awaiting deportation.

“They lied to my dad that they needed help with their car,” said Flores’ son Miguel, who—like his siblings—is a US citizen. “I mean, they figured out that he was a mechanic. You know, my dad’s a generous guy, he’s willing to help anybody.”

Though he is undocumented, Flores, who is from Mexico, has lived in the US for more than 15 years.

In a statement to the Independent, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), claimed that Flores was "a criminal illegal alien [from] Mexico and former Vatos Locos 13 gang member who was removed TWICE from this country, a felony." She added that "his criminal history includes an arrest for felony assault."

Fox 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul previously reported that when it searched for Flores' criminal history, it found only parking violations.

The vast majority of those who have been swept up in President Donald Trump's "mass deportation" campaign have not had any criminal records. According to data from DHS on January 25, just over 74% of those held in ICE detention have no criminal convictions.

"The main reason he came here to the United States and was willing to come back is to give us a better life, and that’s what he’s done. He’s sent me and my sister to college," Miguel told Fox 9. "There’s no other reason to deport my dad, he’s a hard-working individual."

Miguel’s father was the victim of the sort of deceptive tactics that have become a hallmark of ICE arrests and have often been deployed during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis and the surrounding area.

As the Associated Press reported earlier this month, ICE has regularly relied on what the agency calls "ruses" to pursue targets.

According to Minnesota's large network of citizen observers, agents have shown up at construction sites in hard hats and yellow vests to lure laborers into their clutches. They've disguised themselves as delivery drivers or electricians to trick home and business owners into coming outside. They've been filmed leaving scenes with Mexican flag decals on their bumpers and stuffed animals on their dashboards. And in some cases, they've even posed as anti-ICE activists.

These tactics are not new. An agency memo from 2006 described them as "an effective law enforcement tool that enhances officer safety" and claims they are used "to prevent violators from fleeing and placing themselves, officers, and innocent bystanders in a potentially dangerous situation."

But Naureen Shah, the director of immigration advocacy at the ACLU, argues that they have only sown chaos.

“If you have people afraid that the electrical worker outside their house might be ICE, you’re inviting public distrust and confusion on a much more dangerous level,” she told the AP. “This is what you do if you’re trying to control a populace, not trying to do routine, professional law enforcement.”

These tactics became more common during Trump's first term, prompting a lawsuit from the ACLU, which claimed they violated the Fourth Amendment.

In August, a settlement banned agents from misrepresenting their identity and purpose in Los Angeles, but the practice continued elsewhere in the US.

Shah said ICE appears to be using these tactics in Minnesota to a "more extreme degree than we’ve seen in the past."

Jesus' arrest comes as Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, who was put in charge of Metro Surge, said the operation was drawing to a close, with thousands of agents leaving the Minneapolis area.

However, this and other incidents in recent days have left residents on edge.

During the operation, CBS News Minnesota reported that Flores had been hunkered down in his home for weeks, hoping to avoid arrest.

Miguel said his family fears they may never see their father again.

Flores had already been deported once, 15 years ago. Miguel said lawyers have told him that getting his father out of detention would be a long shot.

Because immigration offenses are handled in civil court, Flores is not entitled to a government-paid public defender, as in criminal cases.

Miguel said his family is in desperate need of money, not just to pay for a lawyer but also to cover the cost of living and his siblings' medical expenses. Flores' wife, Dionicia, has described her husband as the family's "lifeline."

"This unexpected situation has left our family shocked, scared, heartbroken, and searching for answers," Miguel wrote. "Jesus is leaving behind four children who depend on him every day. My older brother, who is 25 years old and was diagnosed with autism from a very young age, my little brother—9 years old—who was born with a whisper in the heart, my other little brother who is 6 years old is in therapy and requires extra care and support and was diagnosed with autism, and lastly my little sister who is 7, who is in need of multiple surgeries and ongoing medical care."

In just three days, the family's fundraising campaign has received more than $13,000.

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/28168

Judges across the country have ruled more than 4,400 times since the start of October that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has illegally detained immigrants, according to a Reuters investigation published Saturday.

As President Donald Trump carries out his unprecedented "mass deportation" crusade, the number of people in ICE custody ballooned to 68,000 this month, up 75% from when he took office.

Midway through 2025, the administration had begun pushing for a daily quota of 3,000 arrests per day, with the goal of reaching 1 million per year. This has led to the targeting of mostly people with no criminal records rather than the "worst of the worst," as the administration often claims.

Reuters' reporting suggests chasing this number has also resulted in a staggering number of arrests that judges have later found to be illegal.

Since the beginning of Trump's term, immigrants have filed more than 20,200 habeas corpus petitions, claiming they were held indefinitely without trial in violation of the Constitution.

In at least 4,421 cases, more than 400 federal judges have ruled that their detentions were illegal.

Last month, more than 6,000 habeas petitions were filed. Prior to the second Trump administration, no other month dating back to 2010 had seen even 500.

(Graphic by Reuters)

In part due to the sheer volume of legal challenges, the Trump administration has often failed to comply with court rulings, leaving people locked up even after judges ordered them to be released.

Reuters' new report is the most comprehensive examination to date of the administration's routine violation of the law with respect to immigration enforcement. But the extent to which federal immigration agencies have violated the law under Trump is hardly new information.

In a ruling last month, Chief Judge Patrick J. Schiltz of the US District Court in Minnesota—a conservative jurist appointed by former President George W. Bush—provided a list of nearly 100 court orders ICE had violated just that month while deployed as part of Trump's Operation Metro Surge.

The report of ICE's systemic violation of the law comes as the agency faces heightened scrutiny on Capitol Hill, with leaders of the agency called to testify and Democrats attempting to hold up funding in order to force reforms to ICE's conduct, which resulted in a partial shutdown beginning Saturday.

Following the release of Reuters' report, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) directed a pointed question over social media to Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE.

"Why do your out-of-control agents keep violating federal law?" he said. "I look forward to seeing you testify under oath at the House Judiciary Committee in early March."

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/27152

Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, at least one of whom works on counterterrorism, went to the home of a former member of a climate activism group for questioning last week, potentially signaling a new escalation in the Trump administration’s promise to criminalize nonprofits and activist groups as domestic terrorists.

Two FBI agents, one from New York’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, told a former member of Extinction Rebellion NYC they wanted to ask him about the group at his home upstate on Friday, an attorney for the group told The Intercept. The visit followed a prior attempt to reach him at his old address.

The FBI’s apparent probe of Extinction Rebellion NYC comes as the Justice Department ramps up its surveillance of activists protesting immigration enforcement and the Trump administration creates secret lists of domestic enemies under Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7.

“I believe this to be a significant escalation of the criminal legal system against XR and find it very troubling,” said Ron Kuby, the Extinction Rebellion attorney. “This is usually the way we find out an actual investigation is underway and is often followed by other visits and other actions.”

The former Extinction Rebellion member, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear for his safety, said that the visit came after a phone call in January from a special agent that he assumed was a scam.

“I was skeptical the phone call was really from the FBI, but after I declined to speak with the agent, she said that she was standing outside my door,” he said. She was actually at the activist’s former address, which he said made him additionally dubious. But last week, when the agents showed up at his current address, he said he saw the agent’s business card through his door.

Kuby confirmed that the agent’s business card information corresponded to a current member of the FBI’s New York Joint Terrorism Task Force. A text message from the agent, reviewed by The Intercept, shows she identified herself and stated that she was at the former member’s house to question him about Extinction Rebellion. Her name, title, and phone number match a known special agent on the task force, according to court records.

Reached by The Intercept, a public affairs officer for the New York FBI field office said, “Per longstanding DOJ policy, we cannot confirm or deny the existence or nonexistence of any investigation.”

The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Extinction Rebellion NYC is a chapter of a loose international climate justice movement that does highly public direct actions, like an April Earth Day spray-painting over the presidential seal inside Trump Tower in Manhattan. Kuby said none of the group’s actions are violent or rise above the level of misdemeanors, and would not typically be of interest to federal counterterrorism investigators.

The former member said he had not been involved in any Extinction Rebellion actions in two years and hadn’t participated in anything that he thought would send the FBI to his door.

“They repeatedly pursued this member and traveled hundreds of miles – this suggests a real investigative effort.”

“All of our actions are incredibly public,” he said. He recalled that the agent said she had some questions about Extinction Rebellion NYC, and that he wasn’t in any trouble, before the activist declined to speak and closed his door.

Why the FBI’s counterterrorism task force would investigate Extinction Rebellion is unknown, Kuby said.

“Often, the FBI starts with former members of a group, or less central people, to begin investigations,” Kuby said. “The fact that they repeatedly pursued this member, and traveled hundreds of miles from his old address in NYC – this suggests a real investigative effort.”

Trump’s September presidential memorandum, dubbed NSPM-7, called for the National Joint Terrorism Task Force and its local offices to investigate a broad spectrum of progressive groups and donors for “anti-fascism” beliefs.

[

Related

Longtime Paid FBI Informant Was Instrumental in Terror Case Against “Turtle Island Liberation Front”](https://theintercept.com/2025/12/16/fbi-informant-turtle-island-terror-plot/)

A November FBI internal report obtained by The Guardian revealed that there were multiple active FBI investigations related to NSPM-7 in 27 locations, including New York, where the agent investigating Extinction Rebellion works. Trump’s directive instructed Joint Terrorism Task Forces to proactively investigate groups and activists with vague language that civil liberty watchdogs say could easily criminalize protected speech and protest.

FBI agents also visited several activists affiliated with Extinction Rebellion and other climate groups in the Boston area last March, according to a local news report. The reasons for those visits remain unclear, and the activists involved said nothing came of them. The FBI’s Boston Division declined to comment to the press at the time.

After Extinction Rebellion NYC members protested New York Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi’s town hall at a Long Island synagogue last month, objecting to his vote to increase ICE funding, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon posted on X that she would be investigating the protest to see “whether federal law has been broken.”

None of the activists involved in the Suozzi protest have been contacted by federal investigators, representatives for the group told The Intercept. Suozzi did not reply to messages.

In 2023, then-Florida Senator and current Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote a letter to then-FBI Director Christopher Wray and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas asking them to bar members of Extinction Rebellion in the U.K. from the U.S. in response to a report that the group planned to protest at federal properties.

“Among other things, the group will allegedly block highways and disrupt federal properties, but violence and terrorist acts cannot be discounted given the group’s past threats,” Rubio wrote in the 2023 letter. He also used similar language in proposed legislation against “antifa” protests in 2022.

Nate Smith, an Extinction Rebellion activist who took part in the Suozzi protest, objected to characterizations of the group’s activism as terrorism.

“Is petitioning an elected official at a public event what makes America great, or a federal offense?” Smith said. “I get if you don’t like it. That’s half the point, but ‘terrorism’?”

There have also been scattered reports of FBI agents visiting anti-ICE protesters around the country. While the FBI’s interest in Extinction Rebellion remains unclear, the group pointed to Trump’s NSPM-7 directive.

“We did not anticipate that we would be among the first groups of those who speak inconveniently to be targeted,” Extinction Rebellion NYC said in a public statement. “We did not anticipate the level of capitulation from our country’s hallowed institutions and political opposition.”

The post FBI Counterterrorism Agents Spent Weeks Seeking a Climate Activist — Then Showed Up at His Door appeared first on The Intercept.

From The Intercept via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/27268

Anonymous Red Phoenix correspondent | Portland, OR– On the morning of Feb. 5, Portland Police Bureau and federal agents killed a man named Erik D. Sherrer, who was wanted for a previous incident at a nearby grocery store. Over 100 officers from both the Portland Police and Federal Government descended on a low-income housing complex to serve a warrant, deployed two breaching charges to the door, and gassed an entire complex to force Sherrer from his apartment and into the hallway, where he was killed by a SWAT team.... Read More ›

From The Red Phoenix via This RSS Feed.

I was out of work for two weeks at Outlier because the pigs took my laptop when they impounded my van and everything I own. When I finally got a laptop and was able to log back in they wanted me to do this assessment, with a deadline of midnight. And of course because I'm septic with pneumonia again (again, thanks pigs) I failed the assessment.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/26248

On Friday, legal observers on an encrypted group call in Minneapolis received a desperate plea. A fellow observer was following federal agents who’d just loaded her friend into an unmarked vehicle. Now, she herself was boxed in.

“Please help,” the woman said, again and again, her voice rising to a scream.

Then, her pleas stopped.

By the time support arrived, the observer was gone. All that remained was an empty SUV, engine running, abandoned in the middle of the city’s snow-lined streets.

Referred to locally as abductions, it was at least the fourth such disappearance of the day — the third in a span of less than 30 minutes.

The observers call themselves commuters. They are locals who have organized to resist “Operation Metro Surge,” a massive U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol campaign targeting Minnesota’s undocumented population, by monitoring federal operations in the Twin Cities. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees both agencies, has called the incursion the largest immigration enforcement operation in history.

“She was so scared. The terror in her voice was really, really horrible.”

Three days before the commuters were taken, the new head of Metro Surge, Trump administration border czar Tom Homan, announced a “drawdown” of 700 federal officers and agents. The president had tapped Homan to head the mission a week earlier, appointing the former ICE acting director to take over from Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, whose heavy-handed tactics culminated in three shootings in three weeks, including the killings of U.S. citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti.

Homan has vowed to take a more “targeted” line of attack in Minnesota. His announced drawdown has fueled speculation that the civil rights abuses and unlawful arrests documented in viral videos and court filings during Bovino’s tenure may be coming to an end. On the ground, the feeling is quite different.

In a message circulated among commuters Friday, the community group Defrost MN, which uses crowdsourced data to track federal immigration operations, warned residents of an “uptick in abductions” — which refer to arrests of both immigrant community members and legal observers — following Homan’s takeover and an increase in the number of government personnel and vehicles involved in those operations.

“National attention on Minnesota has waned with the departure of Bovino and rhetoric by Homan that things are de-escalating,” the group noted, but recent data and reports from commuters in the field did not support those conclusions. Despite orders to the contrary, the group continued, “Agents continue to draw their weapons and deploy chemical agents against observers.”

Meanwhile, the deportation pipeline out of Minnesota continues to flow, with 66 shackled passengers loaded onto a plane the night of Homan’s address — the highest total in nearly two weeks — according to evidence collected at the Minneapolis St. Paul Airport.

Friday’s mid-afternoon disappearance of multiple commuters in quick succession provided visceral evidence that, despite the change in leadership, the struggle between President Donald Trump’s federal agents and residents continues.

Commuter Kaegan Recher was among those who hurried to the scene of the observer who disappeared while on call.

“She was so scared,” Recher told The Intercept. “The terror in her voice was really, really horrible.”

Response to a Siege

In Minneapolis and St. Paul, as well as the surrounding suburbs, tens of thousands of immigrant families are relying on churches and mutual aid for food and financial support. People have not left their homes for weeks. Local schools have reverted to Covid-era online measures to support immigrant students too terrified to come to class. Those students who still attend in person are transported by U.S.-born neighbors and family friends. Campuses at all grade levels are patrolled by volunteers in fluorescent vests, an effort aimed at deterring federal agents’ practice of targeting parent pick-up and drop-off sites.

[

Read our complete coverage

Chilling Dissent ----------------](https://theintercept.com/collections/chilling-dissent/)

Conservative estimates from local healthcare providers suggest emergency room and clinic visits in the Minneapolis area are down by 25 percent. City leaders report local businesses are losing upwards of $20 million a week. Immigrant-owned businesses have been devasted, with revenue losses hovering between 80 to 100 percent and many closing their doors for good.

These are the conditions commuters respond to. Their focus is two-fold: to document and alert. Some participate on foot, others by bicycle, many by car. They patrol neighborhoods, reporting suspicious vehicles, the license plates of which are run through a crow-sourced database of known or suspected Department of Homeland Security vehicles. When confirmations are made, commuters follow, honking their horns while observers on foot blow whistles at the passing vehicles. The Intercept has observed several such interactions in recent weeks.

Typically, federal agents try to lose the tail. If they are traveling in a caravan, one vehicle may drive slowly ahead of a commuter, allowing others to speed away. If commuters outnumber the agents, the maneuver can be difficult. Unable to shake their noisy entourage, agents will often head for the highway and, if the pursuit continues, retreat to federal headquarters.

Most commuters are careful to keep a distance between their vehicles and those of the agents. Sometimes, the authorities will pull over and stop. The commuters will stop behind them. Both vehicles will sit idling, waiting for the other to move, then carry on.

[

Related

Federal Agents Keep Invoking Killing of Renee Good to Threaten Protesters in Minnesota](https://theintercept.com/2026/01/14/ice-minneapolis-protests-renee-good/)

Occasionally, agents, heavily armed and frequently masked, will exit their vehicles and warn commuters to cease their pursuit. Some commuters do; others don’t. Sometimes, commuters come upon agents at a home, a business, or an apartment complex. Given the heated state of affairs — two Americans dead, immigrants living in terror, children unable to attend school, and sweeping social and economic impacts — the encounters are often raw with emotion. Nearly everything is recorded, by agents and commuters alike.

As these interactions have become a familiar, legal experts have noted that following and filming law enforcement is protected under the Constitution. With the federal government asserting sweeping and highly contested immigration authorities, they say those efforts are more important than ever.

The Trump administration has taken a different view. Officials argue Minnesota is infested with “agitators” impeding law enforcement. Mounting evidence suggests they are mobilizing resources to put their resistance down.

Homan’s Takeover

Much of the recent media attention surrounding Metro Surge has focused on Homan’s reduction in forces, a move the border czar has linked to Minnesota expanding ICE’s access to jails, thus reducing the number of federal personnel needed to meet the administration’s immigration arrest quotas.

With some 2,000 officers and agents still on the ground, the current federal contingent is still 13 times larger than the agencies’ normal footprint, outnumbering the Minneapolis Police Department three to one.

[

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While Minnesotans Rejoice Over Greg Bovino’s Ouster, His Replacement Is a Deportation Hard-Liner](https://theintercept.com/2026/01/28/greg-bovino-tom-homan-ice-deportation-trump-minneapolis/)

While reducing the number of federal agents dominated headlines, it isn’t the only talking point Homan has driven home since taking over.

Homan spent much of a press conference last week describing how ICE’s full withdrawal hinges on the public acquiescing to the agency’s mission, which, he stressed, is to achieve the president’s promise of “mass deportations.” The immediate goal in Minnesota is a complete federal drawdown, Homan explained, “but that is largely contingent on the end of the illegal and threatening activities against ICE and its federal partners that we’re seeing in the community.”

In the past month, Homan told reporters, 158 people have been arrested for interfering with federal law enforcement, a crime for which penalties range from one to 20 years in prison. Of those cases, he claimed, 85 have been accepted for prosecution. The rest are still pending.

In most cases, people arrested for interfering with ICE are taken to the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, a seven-story edifice that is part of Fort Snelling, the historic site of government-run concentration camp during the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862.

Typically, commuters and other legal observers are held for around eight hours before being released. During that time, U.S. officials collect a range of identifying information. With ample evidence that the Department of Homeland Security is amassing a growing catalogue of the president’s critics, and with Homan himself advertising his desire to include people who follow ICE’s activities in a government “database,” community concern is running high over what, exactly, the Trump administration is doing with its information on U.S. citizens.

In his address last week, Homan described an evolving effort by federal officials, including creation of a “multi-agency surge task force” and a new “unified joint operations center” that will allow the agency to “leverage joint intelligence capabilities to effectively target threats.” He emphasized that there would be no reduction in security elements — often militarized tactical teams — assigned to guard deportation operations against “hostile incidents, until we see a change in what’s happening with the lawlessness in impeding and interfering and assaulting of ICE and Border Patrol officers.”

Homan reminded the press that he’s long warned that the “hateful extreme rhetoric” of the president’s opponents would lead to bloodshed. Now, he said, “there has been.” Without acknowledging whose blood had been spilled, or by whom, Homan implored local leaders to urge calmness and “end the resistance.”

“One Warning”

Recher, the commuter who responded to Friday’s observer disappearances, has been in the streets monitoring ICE’s operations since early January. His busiest week was after Homan took over. He’s since noticed that agents have been less prone to immediately jump out of their cars with guns drawn — a welcome change — but that a similarly unsettling directive appears to have gone out regarding ICE’s engagement with the public.

A video he shot Friday appeared to confirm as much, with a deportation officer telling Recher that he and his colleagues have been ordered to give commuters a single warning before taking them into custody.

“You just got one warning, that’s it,” the officer said. “What we’re told, that’s all you need.”

“I hear more and more about abductions of observers.”

Recher heeded the officer’s warning. He received the panicked and disturbing call for help from the vanished commuter soon after.

“I hear less and less about successful abductions, which I’m glad,” he said. “But I hear more and more about abductions of observers.”

For Recher, like so many others following ICE’s operations in Minnesota, the point of commuting is the thousands of immigrant families living in hiding across the Twin Cities. It is an effort to push back against the pervasive fear at the heart of the Trump administration’s occupation.

“How do you justify terrorizing an entire community?” he asked. “It is the most un-American thing I’ve ever experienced in my entire life.”

The post “Uptick In Abductions”: ICE Ramps Up Targeting of Minneapolis Legal Observers appeared first on The Intercept.

From The Intercept via This RSS Feed.

Let's see, kidnaps babies, kicks dogs, punches old women....check, check, check.

All because of a broken headlight and an unpaid fucking $270 fine.

That fucking pig said "oh well you shouldn't have been driving while suspended" like it's nothing.

I used to not really be into the whole ACAB thing. But now I fucking hate cops. That fucking pig destroyed my life in the blink of an eye. I hate her with all my entire fucking soul. I hope she gets End of Watch'd.

What April has been through is a nightmare — and yet, in a way, she’s one of the lucky ones. Her video only has a couple hundred-thousand views, not 3.3 million, like the girl in Washington who was arrested after drunkenly falling asleep at a Taco Bell drive-through. She only offers small talk, not futile attempts at seduction, like the young woman in New Jersey who became an online celebrity for flirting through an arrest. And she only experiences a talking-to before she’s handcuffed, not the 15-minute embarrassment of a failed field sobriety test, like most drunk drivers online. The unlucky ones have been watched and mocked millions of times; they have been ogled, insulted, and abused. They are mostly women, mostly between 18 and 25, and mostly powerless to stop their online humiliations. So far, YouTube channels featuring such videos have generated over a billion views and counting.

..

I asked the uploader why the majority of his videos featured women, when some 80 percent of DUIs are committed by men. “I cannot control what others want to watch,” he replied, “or what the algorithm ultimately chooses to promote.” Was he concerned, I asked, that his videos might haunt their subjects long after posting, particularly in the era of AI facial-recognition tools? He told me “basic information regarding who got arrested” has always been public, and he compared his videos to police blotters, long a gossipy feature of local papers. I later ask Chief Caggiano about that comparison. He doesn’t buy it. “There’s a distinct difference between the two,” he says. “Say there’s a drunk driver, and they throw up on themselves, they urinate on themselves. That doesn’t show up in the police blotter — but that’ll show up on the video.”

..

well, it's not even cops here who are the problem, it's the chuds and youtube

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/25426

Members of Congress are demanding answers from Meta after it ran advertisements by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that they say included imagery and music intended to appeal to white nationalists and neo-Nazis.

In a letter sent to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Reps. Becca Balint, D-Vt., and Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., questioned how the social media company approved an ad campaign from the Department of Homeland Security featuring the song “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” which is popular in neo-Nazi spaces. The lawmakers urged Meta to cease running the ad campaign on its social media platforms and asked whether the company would commit to ending its digital advertising partnership with DHS.

The Intercept was first to report ICE’s use of the song in a paid post recruiting for the agency, which published shortly after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis.

[

Related

DHS Used Neo-Nazi Anthem for Recruitment After Fatal Minneapolis ICE Shooting](https://theintercept.com/2026/01/13/dhs-ice-white-nationalist-neo-nazi/)

The lawmakers also questioned imagery contained in the ads that extremism researchers said echoes far-right “reclamation” narratives long associated with racist violence and accelerationist ideology.

“Businesses are not on the sideline at this moment and it is important they also know how they are contributing to what is happening in Minnesota and across the country,” said Balint. “A lack of change is not neutrality but complicity.”

Meta did not respond to a request for comment. The Department of Homeland Security, which has not responded to the congressional letter, defended its recruitment messaging in a statement to The Intercept.

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin rejected comparisons between the ads and extremist propaganda, arguing that criticism of the campaign amounted to an attack on patriotic expression.

“By Reps. Becca Balint and Pramila Jayapal’s standards, every American who posts patriotic imagery on the Fourth of July should be cancelled and labeled a Nazi,” McLaughlin said. “Not everything you dislike is ‘Nazi propaganda.’ DHS will continue to use all tools to communicate with the American people and keep them informed on our historic effort to Make America Safe Again.”

McLaughlin also accused critics of “manufacturing outrage” and said the controversy had contributed to a rise in assaults against ICE personnel. “It’s because of garbage like this we’re seeing a 1,300% increase in assaults against our brave men and women of ICE,” she said.

[

Related

Judge Censored an ICE Agent’s Face Over “Threats.” His Info Was a Google Search Away.](https://theintercept.com/2026/02/03/ice-dox-unmask-safety/)

McLaughlin did not provide evidence to support the claim. Similar assertions by the Trump administration about sharp increases in assaults against immigration agents are not reflected in publicly available data.

The most controversial ad in the campaign was a paid DHS recruitment post that published less than two days after the fatal shooting in Minneapolis. It paired immigration enforcement footage with the song “We’ll Have Our Home Again” by Pine Tree Riots. Popular in neo-Nazi online spaces, the song includes lyrics about reclaiming “our home” by “blood or sweat.” In the ad, it played as a cowboy rode a horse with a B-2 Spirit bomber flying overhead.

The ad featured a scene of a B2 bomber flying over a man on horseback. Screenshot: @DHSgov/X.com

After publicly rebuking allegations that the song had neo-Nazi ties, DHS later removed the recruitment post from its official Instagram account, according to a review of the page and reporting by other outlets. The department did not announce the deletion or respond to questions about why it was taken down. DHS did not address the song’s documented circulation in white nationalist spaces or its appearance in the manifesto of a 2023 mass shooter.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch project has separately documented the song’s origins and circulation within organized white nationalist networks. The song was written and performed by Pine Tree Riots, a group affiliated with the Männerbund, which the SPLC has previously identified as a white nationalist organization. Hatewatch also found that the song has circulated widely in extremist online spaces and appeared in recruitment efforts by far-right groups.

Balint and Jayapal framed the controversy as bigger than a single post. They accuse Meta of profiting from a large-scale digital recruitment campaign relying on themes that would stand out to white nationalists. They questioned what safeguards existed to prevent extremist-linked content from appearing in government advertising, and whether recent changes to Meta’s hate-speech policies allowed the company to run the ads.

The letter details the scale of the recruitment push. According to the lawmakers, DHS spent more than $2.8 million on recruitment ads across Facebook and Instagram between March and December of last year, and paid Meta an additional $500,000 beginning in August. During the first three weeks of last fall’s government shutdown, ICE spent $4.5 million on paid media campaigns, the lawmakers write. The letter also cites reporting showing DHS spent more than $1 million over a 90-day period on “self-deportation” ads targeted at users interested in Latin music, Spanish as a second language, and Mexican cuisine.

Balint and Jayapal argue that such spending has been made possible by an influx of funding for ICE. A decade ago, ICE’s annual budget totaled less than $6 billion. Under new federal appropriations enacted last year, the agency has roughly $85 billion at its disposal, making it the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the United States. According to analysts cited by lawmakers, its budget is bigger than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined.

The lawmakers pointed to what they described as a deterioration in internal oversight and hiring standards, including waived age limits, large signing bonuses, and reports of recruits being rushed into the field without adequate training. They argued that the combination of rapid expansion, aggressive recruitment, and weak platform safeguards poses risks to public safety.

“It is important that we scrutinize how that funding is being used, particularly if it is being used to attract certain demographics for hiring while pushing others to the periphery, or out of our society,” Balint said.

The letter asks Meta to disclose the scope and duration of its advertising agreement with DHS, provide any communications related to the recruitment ads, and explain what restrictions apply to paid government content under its policies.

Meta’s Community Standards prohibit content that promotes dehumanizing speech, harmful stereotypes, or calls for exclusion or segregation targeting people based on protected characteristics, including race, ethnicity, national origin, and immigration status.

The policies also state that Meta removes content historically linked to intimidation or offline violence and applies heightened scrutiny during periods of increased tension or recent violence involving targeted groups. The members of Congress questioned whether those standards were enforced consistently for paid government advertising tied to DHS recruitment.

“There are a whole host of safeguards that should be considered,” Balint said. “But at a minimum, they need to abide by their own community guidelines.”

[

Related

Deportation, Inc.](https://theintercept.com/2025/12/19/deportation-abrego-garcia-ice-immigration/)

Balint said the inquiry is ongoing and could expand beyond the recruitment campaign itself. “I am certainly going to continue looking into how private groups are profiting off of or contributing to the untenable dynamic with ICE that is putting our communities at risk,” she said.

Since the recruitment campaign became the subject of public scrutiny, DHS and ICE have not made additional posts using the same song, imagery, or music across their official social media accounts.

The post Lawmakers Call on Meta to Stop Running ICE Ad Featuring Neo-Nazi Anthem appeared first on The Intercept.

From The Intercept via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/24986

The cars sat abandoned at the side of the road. Their engines idling, with hazard lights flashing, according to a witness who captured video of the incident on his phone. The occupants of the vehicles had been taken away by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers late last month in what a local immigrant rights group calls “fake traffic stops.” During these encounters, ICE vehicles reportedly employ red and blue flashing lights to mimic those of local law enforcement agencies, duping people into pulling over.

When family members arrived on the scene in Eagle County, Colorado, their loved ones had already been disappeared by federal agents. But what they found inside the vehicles was disturbing: a customized ace of spades playing card — popularly known as a “death card” — that read “ICE Denver Field Office.”

“We are disgusted by ICE’s actions in Eagle County,” Alex Sánchez, president and CEO of that immigrant rights group, Voces Unidas, told The Intercept. “Leaving a racist death card behind after targeting Latino workers is an act of intimidation. This is not about public safety. It is about fear and control. It’s rooted in a very long history of racial violence.”

During the Vietnam War, U.S. troops regularly adorned Vietnamese corpses with “death cards” — either an ace of spades or a custom-printed business card claiming credit for their kills. A 1966 entry in the Congressional Record noted that due to supposed Vietnamese superstitions regarding the ace of spades, “the U.S. Playing Card Co. had been furnishing thousands of these cards free to U.S. servicemen in Vietnam who requested them.”

Official U.S. military film footage, for example, shows ace of spades “death cards” being placed in the mouths of dead Vietnamese people in South Vietnam’s Quảng Ngãi province by members of the 25th Infantry Division. Similarly, Company A, 1st Battalion, 6th Infantry of the 198th Light Infantry Brigade left their victims with a customized ace of spades sporting the unit’s nickname “Gunfighters,” a skull and crossbones, and the phrase “dealers of death.” Helicopter pilots also occasionally dropped custom calling cards from their gunships. One particular card read: “Congratulations. You have been killed through courtesy of the 361st. Yours truly, Pink Panther.” The other side proclaimed, “The Lord giveth and the 20mm [cannon] taketh away. Killing is our business and business is good.”

A customized playing card left behind after an immigration raid in January in Eagle County, Colo., includes the address of an ICE field office. Photo: Voces Unidas

The cards found in Eagle County harken back to this brutal heritage. The black and white 4×6-inch cards look like an ace of spades with an “A” over a spade in the top left and bottom right corners. A larger ornate black and white spade dominates the center of the card. Above it reads “ICE Denver Field Office.” Below it is the address and phone number of the ICE detention facility in nearby Aurora.

Sánchez said his organization took possession of identical cards found in two separate vehicles by two different families. “These were not from a doctored deck of cards. These were designed with this legacy in mind. They were printed on some sort of stock paper and cut in the dimensions of a card,” he explained. Basic templates for ace of spaces playing cards are readily available as clip art for purchase online.

A DHS spokesperson told local NBC affiliate 9News that ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility will “conduct a thorough investigation and will take appropriate and swift action.” ICE’s Denver Field Office did not respond to questions posed by The Intercept about the office’s use of the cards, the meaning behind them, and its agents’ tactics.

“You realize — of course — that in Spades, the ace of spades is the trump card,” said a federal official of the Bridge-like card game, alluding to the possibility that the death card is also an homage to President Donald Trump. That official, who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity, because they were not authorized to speak to the press continued: “These guys are not too subtle, to be honest.”

Sen. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo., recently took to the Senate floor to denounce the use of the malicious ICE calling cards. “They found ‘death cards’ [left in] the cars of their family members who were taken away by ICE agents,” he said. “These cards … have a history of being used by white supremacist groups to intimidate people of color. ‘Death cards’ is what they call them.”

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Sánchez expressed worry that similar acts of intimidation are happening elsewhere but may not be reported, noting that while Voces Unidas became aware of the death cards in the course of their work, investigating such incidents is not a core focus of his organization, which provides legal assistance to immigrants.

“When people call us, they call us to get an attorney out to them at a detention center,” Sánchez explained. “In the process, we sometimes hear about these details. But it isn’t a priority. Our job is not to investigate cards. Our job is to provide legal aid.” He noted that the community served by Voces Unidas in the western slope of rural Colorado does not trust local law enforcement officers, elected officials, or mainstream human rights groups. “They’re calling organizations that they trust. And unless those trusted organizations are doing civil rights reporting or are going in-depth in providing emergency assistance, it’s very difficult to find out the details of such incidents,” he explained. “So I would be surprised if we’re the only community where this has happened. We just might not know it.”

Neither ICE nor its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, returned a request for comment about the use of the death cards in Colorado or elsewhere in the U.S.

This isn’t the first time that immigration agents have used similar imagery during the Trump administration’s ongoing deportation campaign. This summer, for example, a Border Patrol agent taking part in immigration raids in Chicago wore the image of a skull with a spade on its forehead affixed to his helmet below another unidentified but apparently unofficial patch. Customs and Border Protection did not respond to a request for comment.

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Recently, The Interceptpublished a guide to official and unofficial patches worn by immigration agents. These included a shoulder patch worn by personnel from the St. Paul, Minnesota Field Office, where Jonathan Ross — the ICE agent who shot Renee Good — works. The St. Paul office’s Special Response Teampatch was spotted on the camouflage uniform of a masked ICE officer during a raid of a Minneapolis Mexican restaurant last year. The circular patch depicts a bearded Viking skull over an eight-prong wayfinder or magical stave — a Nordic image called a “Vegvisir.” The symbol has sometimes been co-opted by far-right extremists.

Another ICE officer in Minnesota was spotted wearing a patch reading “DEPLORABLE,” a term some devotees of then-candidate Donald Trump adopted in 2016 after Hillary Clinton said half of his supporters belonged in a “basket of deplorables,” since they were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, [and] Islamophobic.”

ICE and DHS failed to respond to repeated requests for comment about these patches.

The ace card has a long and macabre history. A British tax on playing cards, which specifically required purchasing aces of spades from the stamp office, resulted in the hanging of a serial forger of the “death card” in 1805. Legend has it that “Wild Bill” Hickok held the Dead Man’s Hand — aces and eights, including the ace of spades — when he was gunned down in Deadwood in Dakota Territory in 1876. In 1931, murdered Mafia boss Giuseppe Masseria was photographed with the ace of spades clutched in his hand. By that time, it was firmly entrenched in culture as the “death card.”

The U.S. use of death cards in Vietnam was immortalized in the 1979 film “Apocalypse Now” in a scene in which Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore, played by Robert Duvall, places unit-branded playing cards, reading “DEATH FROM ABOVE,” on the bodies of dead Vietnamese people. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency developed a set of playing cardsto help troops identify the most-wanted members of the Iraqi government. President Saddam Hussein, who was eventually captured and executed, was the ace of spades.

Last year, the official Instagram account of Border Patrol’s San Diego Sector used the 1980 Motörhead song “The Ace of Spades” as the soundtrack of a video of its canines practicing attacks on people. “Our Patrol-K9s are trained to take down violent threats,” reads the accompanying caption.

The post Federal Agents Left Behind “Death Cards” After Capturing Immigrants appeared first on The Intercept.

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