Liam

(cribbed and paraphrased from a FB post by Richard Ojeda)

I look at my own sons now - grown and busy building their lives - and I have to think about how much has been possible only because they got to grow up safe, protected, and never afraid of the people who were supposed to be there to help.

That’s why the story of a five-year-old boy being detained by ICE, pulled out of a car in his own driveway and held hostage in order to lure his family out of their home, hits me like I've been kicked in the stomach. No parent should ever have to imagine their kids being put in that position, and no child should ever be forced to carry that kind of fear.

I’ve been around for quite a while, I've seen what real threats look like, and a kindergartener with a backpack, wearing a bunny hat, is not one of them.

Using a child to project power or to make a point isn’t law enforcement - it’s cruelty. And it violates everything this country claims to stand for.

When my kids were little, their biggest concerns were all about being on time for the school bus and playing and wondering if they could talk me into fixing their favorite chicken enchiladas for supper - feeling loved.

Liam’s world was shattered in an instant by masked agents who decided terrorizing a child was an acceptable tool for achieving a fucked political goal.

If we allow this to be normalized - if we look away because it’s happening to someone else’s kid - then we’ve already lost something fundamental about who we are.

Terrifying times. pic.twitter.com/iN7Z3US9Xk

— Harry Eccles (@Heccles94) January 24, 2026

Today's Hawk

Where are the arrests and the seizures of massive amounts of street drugs?

• Gang members
• Drug rings
• Sex traffickers
• Coyotes

If it ever was about "illegal immigrants" or the "worst of the worst" that's long been over.

They're going after any and all brown people.

And we fuckin' told you - assholes.

A Reuters photographer captured the image of a man named Saly being taken from his house and marched into the cold by ICE agents, who didn’t bother finding out who they were arresting.

Saly’s brother-in-law shared the story on the Hmong American Experience page on Facebook.

“ICE came to my brother-in-law Saly’s apartment, broke down the door, trashed the place, handcuffed him, and put a gun to his daughter-in-law’s head. They did not allow him to put on proper clothing and forced him outside in freezing weather.”

“Saly is a naturalized US citizen. He has NO criminal record.”

“ICE drove him around for nearly an hour, questioned him, and fingerprinted him. Only after all of that did they realize he had no criminal history and no reason to be detained. They then dropped him back off at his apartment like nothing happened.”

“We believe they were looking for someone who previously lived there, but instead of asking for identification, they chose violence, intimidation, and humiliation.”

Every few hours, we get a new story of some outrageous act of violence and intimidation from these lawless thugs.

Just ONE of these stories should be enough to trigger major investigations into ICE and their withdrawal from the field — but it keeps happening over and over and over again as our rights get violated and our citizens get brutalized, terrorized, and thrown in prison for no reason.

WTF ICE?

What does it say about the system when a guy says he might get better treatment if he's deported to a place he had to flee in fear for his life?

In recorded calls, reports of overcrowding and lack of food at ICE detention centers

In early May, NPR began receiving desperate messages from family members of detainees in Florida.

It was accompanied by a screenshot of a photo of a man with swollen red eyes, with another screenshot of his full detainee information.

"Please help me. Im desperate."

The woman who sent it, Maria, was texting about her brother at the Krome Detention Center in Miami. She requested their last name be withheld for fear of retaliation against her brother, who has been held in detention for more than two months.

She told NPR he had a fever, a serious eye infection for almost two weeks, and says he was denied medication for both.

"There are a lot of sick people there, and they aren't getting medical attention," she said in a phone interview. "They are sleeping on the floor and sometimes don't get meals."

Florida has pledged to be a national model for state cooperation with President Trump's immigration crackdown. As detention centers here and across the country fill up, NPR has received an outpouring of messages about severe overcrowding and inhumane conditions in immigration facilities across the state.

More than a dozen detainees, family members and lawyers described similar issues as Maria, including detainees underfed and in ill health. Krome, which is run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has been dogged for years by allegations of inhumane conditions and investigated by the Department of Justice in 2000 on accusations of sexual abuse. This year alone, there have been two deaths at the facility: Ukrainian immigrant Maksym Chernayak and Genry Ruiz Guillen of Honduras.

This morning, a group of Krome detainees assembled in the patio to form a human "SOS" sign.

In a written statement, ICE told NPR that "a group of detainees at the Krome Service Processing Center (Krome) decided to stage a peaceful sit-in in the center's recreation area. There has been no injuries or use of force of any kind during this demonstration." It added, "U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is committed to ensuring that all those in the agency's custody reside in safe, secure, and humane environments under appropriate conditions of confinement."

Private prisons and local jails are ramping up as ICE detention exceeds capacity

"I had a client who was at Krome," says Miami based lawyer Jeff Botelho, who adds the client recently told him that "they had been sleeping on the floor for a week or two. For food, he said they were given a cup of rice and a glass of water a day. It was very concerning."

Lawyers, advocates and experts are warning that overcrowding is the new normal across the country. The federal government is holding more than 48,000 people in immigration detention, about a 20% increase since January. But deportations are not keeping pace. Experts say that's largely what's driving the overcrowding in detention centers.

"There's incredible pressure to ramp up arrests inside the interior of the United States," says Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a nonprofit immigrant advocacy group. He estimates that ICE is at 125% detention capacity. "And so far, there has been, if anything, just a slight increase in the capacity to actually deport people."

ICE told NPR that "some ICE facilities are experiencing temporary overcrowding due to recent increases in detention populations. We are actively implementing measures to manage capacity while maintaining compliance with federal standards and our commitment to humane treatment. The reality is that these accusations do not reflect ICE's policies or practices."

What do the detention and deportation numbers say? 

The increase to nearly 50,000 detainees marks a sharp increase from the number of detentions during the Biden administration, which climbed to 39,703 in January 2025.

Syracuse University professor Austin Kocher, who tracks immigration statistics, notes that immigration arrest numbers are simply not made available by local or federal officials.

ICE did not respond to NPR's questions about Florida's detention numbers so far this year.

Deportation numbers are even trickier to come by. The government says it has deported 139,000 people as of April 2025. Some experts are skeptical that those figures are accurate.

"Up until about three weeks ago or so, things were pretty consistent with what they were in terms of the end of the Biden Administration," says Tom Cartwright, who has been tracking deportation flights for years. "Typically four to five deportation flights per day."

But Cartwright says that number has increased in the last few weeks to six to seven flights a day, mostly to Central America. And while he has no way of knowing how many people are in each airplane, he calculates each plane has the capacity to carry between 120 and 150 people.

At most, that's an estimated 1,050 people being deported every day out of the 50,000 or so who are detained.

Overcrowding, illness and hunger reported  in detention facilities 

"They're serving rotten food. People are getting sick. My spouse is not eating," J. told NPR in May. His loved one was being held at Glades County Detention Center in Moore Haven, Fla. He asked that we refer to him by his first initial because he fears retaliation against his loved one.

J. is one of the many family members of detainees who called NPR to report their loved ones not receiving meals or getting rotten food. Detainees who NPR spoke to over the phone confirmed this, and many said they'd had to sleep on the floor for weeks.

The situation at Krome Detention Center is believed to have gotten so dire, Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz of Florida paid a surprise visit there last week. She told NPR that in the intake area, two to three dozen men are "crammed into the perimeter of a very tiny room for up to 48 hours. They defecate in front of each other, they eat, they sleep on stone floors. It's really inhumane."

Advocates say this situation is playing out nationally.

"We have seen a rapid deterioration over the last few months," says Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at the nonprofit advocacy group Detention Watch Network. "We're hearing reports … that there isn't enough food." She says she's increasingly been hearing accounts from people in detention going hungry. "I've heard people use the word 'starving.' "

There have been nine deaths in ICE detention since January, which is on track to be the deadliest year since 2020. At least three of those deaths have been in Florida.

Major expansion of detention facilities coming 

The Trump administration is promising to increase the rate of arrests of immigrants to 3,000 people a day. "President Trump is going to keep pushing to get that number up higher each and every single day," White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told Fox News last week.

Miller was discussing the sweeping budget bill passed by the House and now before the Senate. It would provide $75 billion over the next couple of years in additional funding for ICE, including $45 billion for detention facilities and $14.4 billion for removal operations.

"We can have, permanently, the safest, strongest, most secure system in American history," Miller told the network.

But immigrant advocates warn the measure will expand mass detention and surveillance.

"I think that it is not designed to increase the removals of people who are not legally allowed to be here," says Deborah Fleischaker, former acting chief of staff for ICE during the Biden administration. "It is designed to hold more people for longer."

Fleischaker believes ICE has historically been underfunded. But she says the bill as written "is so significant and so extreme. What they're trying to enable … I don't think it is within the imagination of the American people when they voted for Donald Trump."

Isacson of WOLA adds that the actions occurring now will multiply. "Plainclothes people using rough tactics and covering their faces to take people off the streets and sort of muscle them into vehicles," he says. "This is going to be common. And it's going to become much more common to see that all around the country military bases may have detention facilities."

"What are the chances my deportation flight will make a wrong turn?"

"I am anguished. I have not heard anything about my son."

Late in May, NPR began receiving messages from Vivian Ortega, a mother in Venezuela, regarding her son, Jhonkleiver Ortega.

Jhonkleiver Ortega came to the U.S. three years ago and was working in construction. He was picked up while driving in November 2024 for not having a license, which under Florida state law is not available to immigrants without legal status. She told us she had sold her house in Venezuela to pay for his $7,000 bond in January. When he went to his next court hearing in February, he was detained.

Vivian had heard from him infrequently, and she was terrified "he was barely eating in there."

Data trackers and policy experts say the Trump administration's goal of deporting one million migrants a year is so high that encouraging self-deportation is paramount. "The fact that [detention] is often so unsafe and unhealthy leads me to believe that there's also a desire to wear people down," says Isacson.

High-profile flights — with migrants sent to the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba, and to El Salvador's notorious detention center CECOT and, more recently, a flight headed to South Sudan — have sent a strong message. For Vivian, the possibility was a source of constant anguish.

On June 3, NPR was able to locate Jhonkleiver Ortega at Glades Detention Center in Florida. He had been to immigration court the day before. NPR was given permission by the family to record his conversation with his mother.

"They told me they had to review my asylum case," Ortega told his mother. "They told me I have to send proof that I was tortured in Venezuela. And in four months they would give me an answer. And I said I can't anymore. It's been months of this. They barely feed us here. I can't anymore. I asked to be deported. This week or next I will be on a flight to Venezuela. If they give me a call from Louisiana I'll call you before the flight."

"What?" his mother asks.

"I asked the judge what are the chances that my flight will get lost and accidentally end up in another country? And she said if that happens you call the deporter. Or email me."

This Fuckin' Guy

Here we go again. Shoulda seen this shit coming.

It's not a big stretch to think this will be used as amped-up pretext for DHS to start cracking down on Americans who speak out &/or protest.

And it's pretty weird, because we're already seeing "man-on-the-street" feedback showing Venezuelan immigrants praising Trump's "liberation" of their home country.

So the standard contradiction-packed "policy" seems to be "We're going to keep fucking with Hispanic immigrants even as we do you all a great favor so you'll support the Trump administration."

And, of course, the bonus is that the Epstein files problem will likely be ignored - at least for a while.

President Donald Trump said the United States “will run” Venezuela until a U.S.-approved transfer of power can take place, following his administration’s attack on the country and the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

“We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” Trump said at a news conference on at his Florida resort Mar-a-Lago on Saturday. “So we don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in and we have the same situation as we had for the last long period of years.”

Trump had announced earlier on Saturday that the U.S. carried out a “large-scale strike” against Venezuela, capturing Maduro and his wife, who Trump said were then flown out of the South American nation on the USS Iwo Jima.

Trump did not offer details about how the U.S. will be involved in Venezuela. His administration “will be running it with a group,” he told reporters at the news conference, standing alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Dan Caine, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and CIA director John Ratcliffe. Caine said no American lives were lost.

“We’re designating various people and we’re going to let you know who those people are,” Trump continued. “It’s largely going to be, for a period of time, the people standing right behind me.”

Asked whether the U.S. military would retain a presence on the ground in Venezuela, Trump rejoined: “We’re not afraid of boots on the ground…we’re going to make sure that country is run properly. We’re not doing this in vain.”

“We’re not afraid of boots on the ground…we’re going to make sure that country is run properly. We’re not doing this in vain.”

President Donald Trump

Trump said reconstructing Venezuela— a country of 31 million people that has endured decades of political, social and economic turmoil — could take some time.

“For us to just leave, who’s going to take over?” Trump said. “We have to rebuild their whole infrastructure…We’ll run it properly, we’ll run it professionally.”

Asked how the action in Venezuela comports with Trump and his political movement’s “America First” mantra, Trump said: “We want to surround ourselves with good neighbors…we want to surround ourselves with energy…we need that for ourselves, we need that for the world.”

The military operation

Trump made his first statement about the attack in a post to Truth Social at 4:21 a.m. In an interview with Fox News later that morning, Trump said the operation, which he watched from Mar-a-Lago, was “extremely complex” and involved a number of aircraft. The operation was supposed to take place four days ago but was delayed due to the weather, Trump said, adding, “I watched it literally like I was watching a television show.”

“Venezuela rejects, repudiates and denounces before the international community the extremely grave military aggression carried out by the current Government of the United States of America against Venezuelan territory and population,” the Venezuelan foreign minister said in a statement.

Attorney General Pam Bondi posted an unsealed indictment against Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, accusing them of “Narco-Terrorism Conspiracy, Cocaine Importation Conspiracy, Possession of Machineguns” and other charges.

“They will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts,” Bondi posted to X.

Two law enforcement sources told MS NOW that agents from the FBI’s hostage rescue team embedded with U.S. military special operators from Delta Force, a counterterrorism unit, for the mission. The FBI took custody of Maduro, the sources said.

A source familiar with operation told MS NOW that the CIA placed a small team on the ground in Venezuela in August that was able to provide detailed insight into Maduro’s pattern of life that made capturing him “seamless.” Miller, Rubio, Hegseth and Ratcliffe worked on the operation for months, the source said.

Caine said that the operation — which involved more than 150 aircraft across the Western region — infiltrated Maduro’s compound at 1:01 a.m. Eastern time, adding that Maduro and his wife surrendered.

Rubio stated that Maduro had several chances to prevent this result, but “acted like a wild man” and ensured this result.

Congressional reaction

The U.S. has built up significant military force in the region surrounding Venezuela, but Trump does not appear to have sought permission from or informed Congress of Saturday’s military action.

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, a Trump ally, acknowledged there had been no congressional approval of — or authorization for the use of military force for — prior to the U.S. action.

Lee said he spoke with Rubio, a harsh critic of the Maduro regime, who told him that Maduro had been arrested “by U.S. personnel to stand trial on criminal charges in the United States” and that the military action “was deployed to protect and defend those executing the arrest warrant.” Lee said such action would fall under the president’s “inherent authority” under Article II of the U.S constitution to protect American personnel

Rubio “anticipates no further action in Venezuela now that Maduro is in U.S. custody,” Lee said of Rubio.

Vice President JD Vance also defended the administration’s actions, saying Trump offered “multiple off ramps, but was very clear throughout this process: the drug trafficking must stop, and the stolen oil must be returned to the United States.”

He also suggested the operation was not illegal, pointing to federal narcoterrorism charges against the Venezuelan leader.

“Maduro has multiple indictments in the United States for narcoterrorism,” Vance wrote on X. “You don’t get to avoid justice for drug trafficking in the United States because you live in a palace in Caracas.”

And some Republican lawmakers cheered the action.

“Today’s decisive action is this hemisphere’s equivalent to the Fall of the Berlin Wall,” said GOP Rep. Carlos Gimenez, who was born in Cuba and represents a heavily Hispanic district in southern Florida. “It’s a big day in Florida, where the majority of Venezuelan, Cuban, & Nicaraguan exiles reside. This is the community I represent & we are overwhelmed with emotion and hope.”

Nonetheless, the operation had already sparked backlash in its early hours as questions swirl about the legal justification for the actions targeting Venezuela.

“No matter the outcome, we are in the wrong for starting this war in Venezuela,” said Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., an Iraq war veteran, on X.

“Secretaries Rubio and Hegseth looked every Senator in the eye a few weeks ago and said this wasn’t about regime change. I didn’t trust them then and we see now that they blatantly lied to Congress,” posted Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J. “Trump rejected our Constitutionally required approval process for armed conflict because the Administration knows the American people overwhelmingly reject risks pulling our nation into another war.”

Sen. Jim Himes, D-Conn., Ranking Member on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement that he has seen “no evidence” that Maduro’s presidency “poses a threat that would justify military action without Congressional authorization, nor have I heard a strategy for the day after and how we will prevent Venezuela from descending into chaos.”

Himes added, “Secretary Rubio repeatedly denied to Congress that the Administration intended to force regime change in Venezuela. The Administration must immediately brief Congress on its plan to ensure stability in the region and its legal justification for this decision.”

The United States has for months been building up military forces off the coast of Venezuela, and has targeted dozens of boats in the region in what the White House says is a war against illegal narco-trafficking. It has also intercepted oil tankers in the region in a bid to cut off the country’s largest economic asset.

Trump had previously warned of ground operations in Venezuela, and the CIA recently struck a dockyard in the country.

Earlier this month, the House narrowly rejected a war powers resolution that would have directed “the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities within or against Venezuela that have not been authorized by Congress.” In response to the CIA’s drone strike on the Venezuelan dockyard, Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., the bill’s sponsor, described the actions as “illegal hostilities” and reiterated his view that the “American People don’t want another endless war over oil.”

Similar resolutions have stalled in the Senate, where the 60-vote threshold means even steeper climb.

“The illegality of Trump’s insane war in Venezuela is out of control,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, posted on X on Dec. 30. “Remember, this has NOTHING to do with stopping drugs from entering America. Venezuela produces cocaine bound for Europe. This is war mongering distraction.”

- and -

The madness of going to war with Venezuela

Trump's saber-rattling on Venezuela is reaching disturbing new highs, and any action could cause chaos in the region.

President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is escalating to disturbing new levels, and the prospect of a military intervention is looking more possible than ever. Such an intervention would not only be an unacceptable act of aggression against a nation that poses no threat to the U.S., it could also destabilize the region while undermining Trump’s own foreign policy and political agendas.

On Saturday, the U.S. military conducted its 21st known strike on an alleged drug-trafficking boat, in the eastern Pacific. The next day, the State Department designated Cartel de los Soles as a foreign terrorist organization and declared that Maduro was its head — a move that Trump suggested would allow him to strike Maduro’s assets and infrastructure within Venezuela. On the same day, the USS Gerald R. Ford, the largest aircraft carrier in the world, arrived in the Caribbean.

Maduro is “a convenient villain” for Rubio’s crusade against left-wing authoritarian leaders in Latin America and for Trump’s quixotic war on drugs.

All of this comes after the U.S. government doubled its reward for the arrest of Maduro to $50 million and Trump admitted that he recently authorized the CIA to take covert action in Venezuela. The president now says he is open to talking directly to Maduro but hasn’t ruled out deploying troops on the ground in Venezuela.

This evidence suggests that the Trump administration is pursuing regime change in Venezuela. The New York Times even reported in October that U.S. officials “have been clear, privately, that the end goal is to drive Mr. Maduro from power.” This could take several forms; Trump appears to be creating possibilities for multiple approaches, perhaps in an attempt to apply maximum pressure on Maduro to seek a negotiated exit from power. But military action is a nontrivial possibility: Trump has deployed major U.S. assets to the Caribbean — there are now about 15,000 troops in the region, including special operations forces. A Marine expeditionary unit is conducting nighttime training this week in Trinidad and Tobago, just 7 miles from Venezuela. Right-wing commentators are already champing at the bit for military action.

Much of this saber-rattling reflects Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s growing influence over Trump’s foreign policy in the Americas. Rubio is an ultrahawk with a track record of supporting regime change via war, including in Latin America. In 2019, he encouraged Trump to back Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó’s unsuccessful efforts to oust Maduro from power. As George Washington University’s Alexander Downes and Boston College’s Lindsey O’Rourke point out, Rubio appears to have won a monthslong internal debate within the Trump administration about how to approach Venezuela. Key to Rubio’s victory was finding a way to reconcile military intervention-backed regime change with Trump’s right-wing nationalism.

Rubio achieved this by rendering Venezuela a threat to U.S. sovereignty by blaming it for the U.S.’s drug problems. This is both a deceptive and an absurd pretext for war. It’s deceptive because Venezuela has virtually no role in the fentanyl trade, and Drug Enforcement Administration data suggests that only about 8% of U.S.-bound cocaine gets to the country through a “Caribbean corridor” (most of that passing through Venezuela). And it’s absurd because there is no evidence in the U.S.’s decadeslong failed war on drugs that a militarized response to drug trafficking reduces demand or the flow of drugs. “Drug supply-reduction efforts, including those that deploy military assets and use of force, have no lasting impact when they leave in place the ungoverned territory and unpunished corruption that allow organized crime to thrive, fueled by the massive profits of supplying demand for prohibited substances,” wrote the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights organization, in a recent report.

International law does not permit a state to go to war with another state because of drug trade flows from that state. A military strike on Venezuela would be a reprehensible act of aggression, and yet more proof that the “peace president” narrative was always a farce. Downes and O’Rourke, who are experts on regime change, explain that airpower alone would be unlikely to dislodge Maduro, and that the level of manpower needed for a ground deployment to achieve regime change would be huge and undermine Trump’s promises to avoid protracted foreign conflicts.

And even if U.S. military action led Maduro to step down, Downes and O’Rourke point out that “regime change instead often begets further violence — for example, it dramatically increases the likelihood of civil war in target countries.” If Trump wants to reduce the flow of Venezuelan migrants into the U.S., regime change achieved by military force could easily achieve the opposite effect.

Covert actions by the CIA — such as assisting armed dissidents, pursuing efforts to assassinate Maduro or attempting to instigate a coup against him through efforts like encouraging military defections — could also exacerbate Venezuela’s considerable problems and increase the likelihood of civil conflict. If they were to fail — all the more likely given that Trump has openly discussed them — they could also trigger new levels of repression within the country.

Maduro is a brutal and incompetent authoritarian who has ruined a once affluent and lively democracy, but that doesn’t mean ousting him by violent, nondemocratic means is prudent or just. As Francisco Rodríguez, a senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told me in an interview in October, Maduro is “a convenient villain” for Rubio’s crusade against left-wing authoritarian leaders in Latin America and for Trump’s quixotic war on drugs. But the outcome of their efforts would likely do nothing to advance Trump’s stated policy agenda on drugs and migration while ushering in a new era of war and instability in the Western Hemisphere.

A few last things:

1. I can imagine the MAGA rubes being led to believe they're in for another Trump Dividend Check - The Venezuelan Oil Check - to go with the $1776 check, and the DOGE Check, and the Trump Tariff Check, and the What-The-Fuck-Is-Wrong-With-You-Idiots Check.
2. We've told the world that we are (again) totally down with whatever any country thinks they can get away with. Anything goes - knock yourself out - have an orgy.
3. If you think there won't be pressure to put American boots on the ground, I've got a pair of breeding mules to sell you.

A Thought

Names and places and uniforms change,

but the story of cruelty and abuse doesn't.

A Quote And More

"It was not Hitler or Himmler who abducted me, beat me, and shot my family. It was the shoemaker, the milkman, the neighbor, who received a uniform and then believed they were the master race."

--Karl Stojka, Auschwitz survivor

If you're not a jerk who likes to shit on people, how do you justify this? What has you thinking it's OK to put your neighbors thru this?

Due Process, Bitch

Amendment 5:

...nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law

Amendment 14:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.



Trump administration cannot expand rapid deportations, US appeals court rules

REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab
Nov 22 (Reuters) - A federal appeals court on Saturday declined to clear the way for U.S. President Donald Trump's administration to expand a fast-track deportation process to allow for the expedited removal of migrants who are living far away from the border.

A 2-1 panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit declined to put on hold the central part of a ruling by a lower-court judge who had found that the administration's policies violated the due process rights of migrants who could be apprehended anywhere in the U.S.

U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb in an Aug. 29 ruling sided with an immigrant rights group and blocked the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from enforcing policies that exposed migrants to the risk of rapid expulsion if the administration believed they had been in the country for less than two years.

The administration asked the D.C. Circuit to stay that ruling while it appealed.
But U.S. Circuit Judges Patricia Millett and J. Michelle Childs said the administration was unlikely to succeed in showing its systems and procedures adequately protected migrants' due process rights under the U.S. Constitution's Fifth Amendment.

The judges, both appointees of Democratic presidents, cited "serious risks of erroneous summary removal" posed by the administration's effort to expand the fast-track deportation process away from the borders to cover the entire U.S.

While the court largely left Cobb's order in place, it stayed part of it to the extent it required changes to how immigration authorities determine if someone has a credible fear of being sent back to his or her country of origin.

U.S. Circuit Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee, dissented and called Cobb's ruling "impermissible judicial interference."

The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The administration's appeal on the merits is scheduled to be heard on December 9.

For nearly three decades, the expedited removal process has been used to quickly return migrants apprehended at the border. In January, the administration expanded its scope to cover non-citizens apprehended anywhere in the U.S. who could not show they had been in the country for two years.

The policy mirrored one the Trump administration adopted in 2019 that Democratic President Joe Biden's administration later rescinded. The Trump policy also was challenged by the immigrant rights advocacy group Make the Road New York.

About That DHS Fuckery

We checked DHS’s videos of chaos and protests. Here’s what they leave out.

Trump administration videos purporting to show the triumph of recent immigration operations used footage that was months old or recorded thousands of miles away, an analysis found.

The Department of Homeland Security posted a swaggering montage to social media in August declaring it had triumphed in its takeover of Washington, D.C. It showed footage of federal agents fighting what a DHS official called a “battle for the soul of our nation” and working “day and night to arrest, detain and deport vicious criminals from our nation’s capital.”

There was one problem. Several of the clips had been recorded during unrelated operations months earlier, in Los Angeles and West Palm Beach, Florida. The official’s sound bite about deportations in D.C. played over a clip from May showing detainees on a Coast Guard boat off the coast of Nantucket, the Massachusetts island 400 miles away.

Officials in President Donald Trump’s administration have used similarly misleading footage in at least six videos promoting its immigration agenda shared in the last three months, a Washington Post analysis found, muddying the reality of events in viral clips that have been viewed millions of times.

Some videos that purported to show the fiery chaos of Trump-targeted cities included footage from completely different states. One that claimed to show dramatic examples of past administrations’ failures instead featured border crossings and smuggling boats recorded during Trump’s first term.

The Post provided DHS a detailed list of videos featuring misleading footage. DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin did not dispute the errors or explain what had happened but said the videos were a small percentage of the more than 400 that the agency has posted this year. “Violence and rioting against law enforcement is unacceptable regardless of where it occurs,” she said.

The Post sent the same details to the White House. Abigail Jackson, a spokeswoman there, did not comment on the errors but said “the Trump administration will continue to highlight the many successes of the president’s agenda through engaging content and banger memes on social media.”

DHS’s video operation now includes in-house photographers and videographers who routinely capture the action of ICE raids and protest responses for videos that administration officials have widely promoted online. In a video DHS posted to X this month, a man in a Border Patrol flak jacket, his camera held aloft, can be seen jogging to catch up with officers putting a detainee into an SUV.

The administration’s intense digital strategy has helped grab Americans’ attention and shape discussion around current events, with some of its videos now capturing bigger audiences on social media than mainstream news reports. A White House video claiming Chicago was “in chaos,” which used footage from other states, has been viewed more than 1.4 million times across Instagram, TikTok and X.

But John Cohen, a former DHS official who worked on federal law enforcement and intelligence issues under both Democratic and Republican administrations, said the mix of misleading and polarizing content could weaken the administration’s ability to build trust with the American public long-term.

During his time in government, Cohen said, law enforcement and security officials worked to ensure that “any message or content we were putting out was absolutely accurate,” fearing misleading information would push people to start tuning them out during national emergencies.

“If people come to believe that what you’re saying is inaccurate or not based on an objective evaluation of a threat or emergency situation, they’re not going to pay attention or listen to you,” said Cohen, who now works at the nonprofit Center for Internet Security. “The goal of a law enforcement organization should be to de-escalate. And the way you de-escalate is by providing accurate information.”

‘Soul of our nation’

The misleading example about the “battle for the soul of our nation” was offered in the form of a news-style video featuring DHS deputy assistant secretary Micah Bock. A collection of video clips showcased how the operation had worked to safeguard the “hallowed halls” of Washington, the “heart of our republic,” according to Bock.

But The Post’s analysis, which used reverse-image searches, geolocation tools and other techniques to find the clips’ original sources, found that stretches of the footage had been filmed in different places or times than DHS had presented.

Some footage came from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation in L.A., according to The Post’s analysis, which matched it to a DHS press release.

Other clips came from an ICE video showing officials conducting “routine daily operations” in February in West Palm Beach. The footage had been uploaded to the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, a public repository of military and law enforcement video run by the Defense Department.

A third set of video clips came from federal operations in May on the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, which ICE said led to 40 arrests. The Nantucket Current, a small local news outlet, had published photos and videos onto its website and Instagram while reporting on the arrests, during which agents detained undocumented immigrants at traffic stops and loaded them onto a patrol boat for removal.

DHS’s X account reposted the Current’s video that month. So did White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who added, “Bye bye! 👋”

“The visual of it was really jarring to see,” said Jason Graziadei, the Current’s editor in chief. “Typically when you see ICE arrests, they don’t involve a Coast Guard boat and life jackets.”

‘Antifa terrorists’

BTW - I'm kinda hard-pressed to think of anyong I've ever met who didn't at least partly identify as anti-fascist.

Are people just not thinking this shit thru?

How is anybody who claims to love our little Constitutional Republic not against fascism? 

The video wasn’t the only DHS release to use a journalist’s footage without credit — or to get its location wrong.

The freelance journalist Ford Fischer was scrolling through X earlier this month when he saw a DHS video overlaid with a message saying “antifa terrorists” had stormed federal facilities in Portland, Oregon. But he recognized the footage because he’d captured it himself days earlier, outside an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois.

The video, which The Post verified, had been cropped to remove Fischer’s watermark. And it seemed to bolster Trump’s claim that the Oregon city was overwhelmed by violent leftists who were “burning [it] to the ground.”

But Fischer had recorded the footage 1,700 miles away, at a prominent protest zone outside Chicago, where federal agents routinely scuffle with protesters seeking to block an ICE facility’s gate.

Fischer said he worried the video’s misleading description could warp Americans’ understanding of how the government was interacting with the public. He also questioned how the mistake was made in the first place: In Broadview, Fischer said, he saw multiple DHS officials gathering video of the scuffles, including one holding a camera-stabilizing tool known as a gimbal commonly used by professional videographers and influencers.

“They seem very media-savvy and very focused on the production of these slick high-end videos,” he said. “But it creates a sense of concern about how the work is being used and how it’s being disconnected from the original source.”

‘Resounding in their thankfulness’

Footage from the Broadview clashes was misused in another DHS video in September seeking to champion federal agents’ move into Memphis. In the video, Bock said the Tennessee city’s communities had been “abandoned to crime and lawlessness” and that residents had been “resounding in their thankfulness” when DHS moved in.

But in the video, Bock spoke over clips showing armed guards outside the ICE facility in Illinois, more than 500 miles away. The video, which was bookended by footage showing Memphis landmarks and its mayor, gave no indication it was recorded in a different state.

‘Decimated our way of life’

Beyond getting its places wrong, the DHS videos have also given incorrect dates.

In a video from this month saying Trump had “secured our nation,” DHS shared clips it said showed how past administrations’ failures had let in criminals who “decimated our way of life.” One showed a middle-of-the-night crossing of the Southern border, while another showed a smuggling boat.

The video did not mention, however, that both scenes had played out in 2019, the third year of Trump’s first term. The border-crossing video was posted to DVIDS and came from a Border Patrol checkpoint in Arizona. The boat clip — which DHS labeled as coming from New York — was taken from a Coast Guard interception in international waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles away, a DVIDS entry shows.

‘Chicago is in chaos’

The White House has made notable errors in its own video operation, posting a video this month that claimed “Chicago is in chaos” and said the city “doesn’t need political spin — it needs HELP.”

The video, however, recycled footage from a months-old ICE operation in Florida, not far from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club. A fact-checker at Agence France-Presse also found other clips in the video had come from operations in Arizona, California, Nebraska, South Carolina and Texas, some of which had been recorded during President Joe Biden’s time in office.

In a statement to the Daily Beast, which first reported the mismatch, a spokesman for Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) made a joke about one of the video’s more notable telltale details. Chicago, he said, isn’t known for its palm trees.

‘I really appreciate you guys’

In one case, ICE posted a photo that many people suspected was false but was mostly accurate.

Earlier this month, ICE’s X account shared a photo of a woman holding a sign outside its facility in Portland that read, “I really appreciate you guys!” Many users argued the image was a fake, saying the strange angles of her arm, the odd contours of the sign and the visual artifacts around the edges of her body suggested the image had been doctored or generated by artificial intelligence.

DHS shared surveillance video of the scene with The Post showing the woman with the sign was real. But an examination of the footage by The Post and independent analysts also found that the photo had been retouched in a way the agency did not disclose. On the sidewalk under the woman’s feet, someone had written, “Chinga la migra” — a Spanish-language curse against the immigration authorities. Most of the message was removed in the image shared by ICE, save for two of the letters visible behind her legs.

The flawed clips show the risks for the administration as it pushes to build support and capture attention through the social media and online-video feeds many Americans now view as their sources for news.

The department has invested in a nationwide social media ad campaign warning undocumented immigrants they should leave the country or be “hunted down.” It also recently bought a $28,000 Skydio X10D drone to add to its aerial recording fleet; ICE this month posted a drone video of protesters clashing with officers onto its Facebook page.

Some of that real-world footage has been used in the department’s trolling memes and dark jokes around mass deportation. One clip, showing a home’s door being blown off as part of a Chicago ICE operation, was used in a video splicing together detained immigrants with Pokémon soundtracked to the cartoon’s theme song, “Gotta Catch ’Em All.”

The White House explained the administration’s strategy of online irreverence in March by telling The Post it would help “reframe the narrative” around immigration and push back against criticism “in the harshest, most forceful way possible.”

But the pattern of misleading clips in their news-style videos amount to more than just minor editing errors, said Eddie Perez, a former director for civic integrity at Twitter, now called X. Instead, they suggest that the administration has worked to undercut criticism by pumping out videos that could deceive Americans about the scale or success of their policies, transforming government channels into propaganda tools.

“What we are witnessing is the collapse of government accountability through communication based on facts,” he said. “They’re not trying to communicate actions and outcomes. They’re acting like filmmakers, trying to make people laugh, to make them feel scared, to inspire certain emotions regardless of the truth.”

DHS hasn’t let the criticism slow them down. Officials there have continued to frequently post immigration and protest videos in a newscast-like format, often by including an official criticizing the “fake news hoaxes” of media reporting and explaining why viewers should turn to them for the real truth.

“If you lie or smear our brave men and women of @ICEgov law enforcement, you WILL be debunked,” DHS said in an X post on Sunday. “Watch here for the FACTS.”

Slowly But Surely Escalating

Trump and that little butt plug Stephen Miller are pushing hard to get people riled up enough to hit back in a big enough way to "justify" a crack down.

So far so good, but it's pretty tense in Chicago. I can only hope they'll keep the lid on it.

One thing that really stands out for me from Miller's assertions - "Harboring illegal aliens":

Somewhere right now, in America, there's a young

Hispanic girl hiding in an attic, writing in her diary.

A Quote

Cesar Chavez

It was never about grapes or lettuce.

It was always about people.

--Cesar Chavez

From Out Of The past

This whole big brouhaha is not something we've never seen before.

This clip could be as recent as yesterday, but it's from 13 years ago.

We have to stop being the stoopid country.

Some Data

The law-n-order gang used to spend a lot of time whining about illegal tactics by a tyrannical government. But now - cue the crickets.

MAGA freaks puff up their chest and say idiotic things like "I just want those immigrants to do it the right way" with absolutely no sense of how fucking stupid they sound.

Fake lord have mercy.

One in Five ICE Arrests Are Latinos on the Streets with No Criminal Past or Removal Order

On August 11, Deportation Data Project released new data from the government that cover through July 28. The analysis was updated using the new data below. The new data differ somewhat, but the general conclusions remain unchanged.

Illegal profiling accounts for a substantial portion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests in 2025. While ICE has other tactics to arrest peaceful immigrants—such as during immigration hearings, appointments, and check-ins—ICE agents are deliberately targeting workers in heavily Latino jobs and neighborhoods, sometimes based on its community tip line where residents claim to “see” illegal immigrants in their areas, but more often based on nothing at all.

This policy is a threat to the rights of all people in the United States.

ICE Is Arresting Thousands of People with No Reason to Target Them

New data obtained from ICE by the Deportation Data Project drives home how frequently Latino immigrants are arrested off the streets without any recent prior contact with law enforcement. The screenshot below shows what the data look like. Each row represents an individual arrest and provides details about the arrest method, criminal history, and citizenship status. The most notable aspect of the new data is that they provide the exact location of each person’s apprehension.

The key takeaway is that ICE is arresting thousands of people in random locations—what it calls “non-specific” or “general” areas—who had no prior contact with law enforcement: the telltale sign of illegal profiling. Normally, ICE makes arrests only after the suspect has been identified in some other way. For instance, they were arrested by local police and their name was checked against the government data, or they were going to an appointment related to their status, so ICE knew they would be there. But in these cases, ICE is arresting people who weren’t going to appointments or committing criminal offenses that would put them on ICE’s radar, as well as people who had not been ordered removed from the country, giving ICE a reason to seek them out.

Example of Detailed Records for Individual ICE Arrests, June 2025
ICE arrests spreadsheet showing nonspecific arrests

Since January 20 through the end of July, ICE has conducted over 16,000 street arrests of immigrants who had no criminal convictions, charges, or removal orders. Incredibly, over half (nearly 9,000) occurred in June and July alone: about 90 percent of them were immigrants from Latin America.

Street arrests refer to arrests in non-specific locations and exclude anyone in jails, prisons, offices, courts, police departments, detention centers, facilities, or anyone otherwise in the custody of any agency. Because ICE rarely sends agents to specifically arrest noncriminal immigrants whom it cannot promptly remove, and because it is difficult to locate and identify people who have not committed crimes or gone through removal proceedings, this is the likely population of people ICE has targeted through illegal street profiling. Most of these arrests do not have a “fugitive operations” designation, which are the agents who would normally track down specific people.

These types of arrests without charges, convictions, or removal orders on the streets increased from 4 percent of a relatively small number of arrests in December to 19 percent of a massive number of arrests in July. Again, nearly one in five ICE arrests is a Latin American on the streets without a criminal history or a removal order.

Although some street arrests of noncriminals did take place before, it is not believable that ICE could suddenly identify this many people on the streets without profiling them when they weren’t previously identified by law enforcement.

ICE’s Illegal Profiling Is Well Documented

As Tom Homan described it, ICE and Border Patrol are detaining people “based on the location, their occupation, their physical appearance, their actions like…the person walks away.” According to the Wall Street Journal, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told ICE in mid-May to stop “develop[ing] target lists of immigrants” and just “go out on the streets” and arrest people “right away” at Home Depots or 7‑Elevens. At the same time, ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations acting leader Marcos Charles told his agents to “turn up the creative knob up to 11 and push the envelope…If it involves handcuffs on wrists, it’s probably worth pursuing.”

The results of the White House’s May order are clearly evident when looking at the rolling weekly totals for street arrests of Latinos without criminal convictions, pending charges, or removal orders. Although we know that there was profiling happening even before May, the mid-May spike is different. The weekly totals increase sharply after the inauguration from a pre-inauguration weekly total of 118, but then they fall and level off at around 450 until mid-May. After Miller’s meeting, however, street arrests of immigrants without removal orders, criminal convictions, or charges increased more than threefold, from 450 to over 1,318 in June.

In any case, we know ICE is involved in illegal profiling because a July 11 district court ordered ICE to stop these activities in the Los Angeles area, and the appeals court upheld that order this week. The ruling has had a dramatic effect on the number of arrests in Los Angeles, confirming that it was profiling. It reduced these street arrests by 83 percent.

How is this happening on the ground? Here’s a description of ICE’s activities in the district court order that attempted to block this conduct in Los Angeles:

Officers approach suddenly and in large numbers in military style or SWAT clothing, heavily armed with weapons displayed, masked, and with their vests displaying a generic “POLICE” patch (if any display at all). Agents typically position themselves around individuals, aggressively engage them, and/​or shout commands, making it impossible for individuals to decline to answer their questions. When individuals have tried to avoid an encounter with agents and officers, they have been followed and pushed to the ground, sometimes even beaten, and then taken away.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals describes a specific incident:

Vasquez Perdomo and Osorto sat on the bench, and Villegas Molina stood next to them. Suddenly, four unmarked cars pulled up and surrounded them. The cars were large and black with tinted windows and had no license plates. The doors opened and men in masks with guns started running at them aggressively. One of the men had a “large” military-style gun. The masked men wore regular clothes, they had no visible badges, and they did not identify themselves.

Vasquez Perdomo, Osorto, and Villegas Molina were afraid they were being kidnapped. Vasquez Perdomo tried to move away but was immediately surrounded by several men with guns. They grabbed him, put his hands behind his back, and handcuffed him. Then, one of the men asked him for identification. Vasquez Perdomo said in English, “I have the right to remain silent.”

…Osorto did not know the men were government agents. Terrified, he tried to run. The men yelled “stop” but did not identify themselves as law enforcement officers. Soon, one of the men caught up to Osorto, pointed a taser over his heart, and yelled, “Stop or I’ll use it!” Osorto stopped immediately, and the man handcuffed him. The unidentified, masked, and armed men put Vasquez Perdomo, Osorto, and Villegas Molina into separate cars and drove them to a parking lot where they interrogated them further. Eventually, the men chained each plaintiff at the hands, waist, and feet and took them to a Los Angeles detention center. The men never identified themselves to the plaintiffs…

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) also relies on its community tip line, where people can claim to “see” illegal immigrants. ICE Special Agent Rebecca González-Ramos told NPR that ICE knows that some accusations against employers come from “competitors” seeking “a lot of revenge,” but she sees that as an opportunity. In Maine, Border Patrol responds to sightings of “possible illegal aliens” and then makes arrests. In Florida, Fox News reported on a “first of its kind” operation that started with a tip line complaint in a retirement community:

ICE moves from house to house, approaching workers. ICE describes the interaction as a consensual and optional conversation since they did not have a warrant. Agents question their legal status and those who couldn’t provide valid immigration documentation were fingerprinted….Tampa agents talked to 361 construction workers yesterday, but arrested 33.

In other words, ICE admits that its profiling was accurate less than 10 percent of the time. Although ICE claims the encounters are “consensual,” they are not. Workers who try to leave are threatened or tackled. One landscaper accosted by Border Patrol outside an IHOP was pepper-sprayed, tackled, and beaten after he “refused to answer questions” and tried to walk away—and that’s according to DHS. He was the father of three US Marines and had no criminal history. Yet another landscaper was tackled inside a California surgical center, and although the agency initially claimed in a press statement that his arrest was part of a “targeted operation,” its court affidavit stated the agents were doing a “roving patrol” and he was not identified as “illegal” until later, after his arrest. He also had no criminal history.

ICE Profiling Targets US Citizens and Legal Immigrants

It is no surprise that US citizens are also being tackled and arrested. Here’s a case just minutes away from the others where, after tackling the US citizen, the agents shrug and say, “Why were you running?” ICE tackled and arrested a US citizen and veteran, George Retes, and detained him for three days following a worksite raid in California. US citizen Leonardo Garcia Venegas, who was tackled by agents at a jobsite in Alabama in May, said they dismissed his REAL ID as fake. The casual dismissal of identification is also a common refrain in these racial profiling cases of US citizens.

Agents tackled a 32-year-old US citizen, Andrea Velez, on her way to work in June. The 4’11” woman was then accused of assaulting the ICE agent by putting her hand out as the agent ran her over. The agents claimed that they were chasing some other people to figure out if they were in the country illegally when they crashed into her. They asked Velez about her legal status after literally picking her up and carrying her away. These bogus assault charges against US citizens are becoming a disturbingly common tactic to justify racial profiling mistakes. Fortunately, the charges against Velez and several others were dismissed. Another US citizen, Job Garcia, was also tackled and beaten in a similar manner and was detained for 24 hours.

An American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawsuit regarding these tactics in Los Angeles involves US citizens detained by DHS for questioning. As the appeals court decision upholding the lower court’s ban on these tactics in the city explained:

Jason Brian Gavidia is a U.S. citizen who was born and raised in East Los Angeles and identifies as Latino. On the afternoon of June 12, he stepped onto the sidewalk outside of a tow yard in Montebello, California, where he saw agents carrying handguns and military-style rifles. One agent ordered him to “Stop right there” while another “ran towards [him].” The agents repeatedly asked Gavidia whether he is American—and they repeatedly ignored his answer: “I am an American.” The agents asked Gavidia what hospital he was born in—and he explained that he did not know which hospital. “The agents forcefully pushed [Gavidia] up against the metal gated fence, put [his] hands behind [his] back, and twisted [his] arm.” An agent asked again, “What hospital were you born in?”

Most of that incident is recorded on video. Another US citizen named in the lawsuit was arrested and removed from his job because he did not carry his passport, only his driver’s license.

A separate ACLU lawsuit involves a legal permanent resident who was arrested by Border Patrol when going to work in California’s Central Valley, and a judge in that part of the state also issued an order blocking these illegal tactics. As the appeals court notes in its decision, stops are unconstitutional when they are based on broad criteria that would sweep up numerous innocent people. Setting aside the unconstitutionality of these detentions and arrests, however, the Immigration and Nationality Act itself prohibits ICE and Border Patrol from even interrogating anyone about their right to be in the United States without a warrant or reasonable basis to believe that they are an “alien.”

Mass deportation is a socially and economically damaging goal regardless, but it’s certainly not a goal for which we should sacrifice a sliver of our liberty or the Constitution. Only time will tell whether ICE and Border Patrol can continue to get away with these tactics.

Undocumented My Ass

DHS has an extra $150B for their budget, and they've been spending it lavishly on 50-thousand-dollar signing bonuses for new ICE agents, who'll start at $100K a year.

They're buying fleets of cars and vans, helicopters and airplanes and weapons and gear.

All for the purpose of rounding up brown people. And when I say "all", I mean it's a safe bet that some of it is coming off the top and going straight into the boss's pocket.

Anyway, we're spending way more than we should - way more than we need to be spending.

So let's do something radical and make the whole mess a lot more cost-effective.

Let's send those ICE guys out to find all those undocumented people and - uh - you know - document them.

Boston Legal

Say What?

ABC News headline:

Why Is Summer Tourism Down In The US?

U.S. Tourism Will Lose Up To $29 Billion As Visitors Plummet Amid Trump Policies

While tourism is booming across the rest of the world, the U.S. is a notable loser this year as tens of millions of international visitors are choosing to travel elsewhere—costing the economy up to $29 billion—and risking millions of jobs.

-more- (pay wall)