Browsed by
Category: Human rights/civil liberties

A genocide against Ukrainians is unfolding right now

A genocide against Ukrainians is unfolding right now

Roman Sheremeta posted on X: A genocide against Ukrainians is unfolding right now. It already has a name: “Kholodomor” (exhaustion through cold) This crime is being deliberately committed by russia. In legal terms, it has a clear definition – genocide. Under Article II of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, one of the defining acts of genocide is: “Deliberately inflicting on a group of people conditions of life calculated to bring about its…

Read More Read More

U.S. secretly deporting Palestinians to West Bank in coordination with Israel

U.S. secretly deporting Palestinians to West Bank in coordination with Israel

+972 Magazine reports: The United States is quietly deporting Palestinians arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the occupied West Bank by private jet, with two such flights taking place in coordination with the Israeli authorities since the beginning of this year — part of a secretive and politically sensitive operation revealed through a joint investigation by +972 Magazine and The Guardian. Eight Palestinian men — shackled for the entire journey by their wrists and ankles — were flown…

Read More Read More

Homeland Security is targeting Americans with this secretive legal weapon

Homeland Security is targeting Americans with this secretive legal weapon

The Washington Post reports: He had decided that the America he believed in would not make it if people like him didn’t speak up, so on a cool, rainy morning in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Jon, 67 and recently retired, marched up to his study and began to type. He had just read about the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s case against an Afghan it was trying to deport. The immigrant, identified in The Washington Post’s Oct. 30 investigation as…

Read More Read More

Minneapolis resident and U.S. citizen Aliya Rahman describes being assaulted and detained by ICE

Minneapolis resident and U.S. citizen Aliya Rahman describes being assaulted and detained by ICE

  Today, U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Ranking Member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI), and U.S. Representative Robert Garcia (D-CA), Ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, held a bicameral public forum to receive testimony on the violent tactics and disproportionate use of force by agents of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). My name is Aliya Rahman, and I am a resident of Minneapolis. I am a Bangladeshi American, and a disabled person…

Read More Read More

‘We’re fighting for the soul of the country’: How Minnesota residents have come together to resist ICE

‘We’re fighting for the soul of the country’: How Minnesota residents have come together to resist ICE

The Guardian reports: Cory never expected he’d spend hours each day driving around after immigration agents, videotaping their moves. The south Minneapolis resident is “not the type of person to do this”, he said. The dangers of what he’s doing, even after the killings of two observers, largely stay out of his mind when he’s watching Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents – even when he’s gotten hit with pepper spray. In quieter moments, it occurs to him that agents…

Read More Read More

Two experienced CBP agents identified in Alex Pretti shooting

Two experienced CBP agents identified in Alex Pretti shooting

By J. David McSwane This story was originally published by ProPublica The two federal immigration agents who fired on Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti are identified in government records as Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez. The records viewed by ProPublica list Ochoa, 43, and Gutierrez, 35, as the shooters during the deadly encounter last weekend that left Pretti dead and ignited massive protests and calls for criminal investigations. Both men were assigned to…

Read More Read More

Ohio Haitians targeted for ethnic cleansing in hate campaign led by JD Vance and American Nazis

Ohio Haitians targeted for ethnic cleansing in hate campaign led by JD Vance and American Nazis

Timothy Snyder writes: In the schools and churches of Springfield, Ohio, people are making hasty preparations for a “large deportation” promised by the president. To all appearances, and according to local sources, the city is two or three days away from a federal ethnic cleansing, grounded in a hate campaign organized by the vice-president and American Nazis. The destined victims are ten thousand or more Haitians. Its origins are in racist fantasy. During the last presidential campaign, JD Vance, then…

Read More Read More

Thousands of new ICE observers hit the streets after two murders

Thousands of new ICE observers hit the streets after two murders

The Washington Post reports: Jordan’s parents didn’t want her to become an ICE watcher. But on Tuesday, after a single day of training, she climbed into her Jeep and joined hundreds of neighbors patrolling the streets of this embattled city, where federal immigration agents have shot and killed two people this month who were monitoring and attempting to disrupt their activities. “I’m not really nervous, it’s more like, I want to prevent bad things from happening in my neighborhood,” Jordan,…

Read More Read More

‘That’s him. Get him.’ Witness at an earlier shooting was arrested at the scene of Alex Pretti’s killing

‘That’s him. Get him.’ Witness at an earlier shooting was arrested at the scene of Alex Pretti’s killing

The Intercept reports: Less than 40 minutes after federal immigration agents shot and killed 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti on Nicollet Avenue in south Minneapolis, Clayton Kelly was thrown face-first onto the sidewalk, tasting snow and street grime as a federal agent’s knee drove into his back. The incident, a video of which The Intercept reviewed and corroborated with an independent eyewitness, occurred not long after Kelly and his wife arrived in the area where Pretti was killed. With protesters amassing…

Read More Read More

An immigrant who ICE says ‘ran headfirst into a brick wall’ — an echo of ‘shot while trying to escape’

An immigrant who ICE says ‘ran headfirst into a brick wall’ — an echo of ‘shot while trying to escape’

After World War One, German nationalist paramilitary groups frequently used the phrase “shot while trying to escape” (Auf der Flucht erschossen) to cover up the elimination of political opponents. During the Nazi era, this pretext was used for a range of extrajudicial killings. The Associated Press reports: Intensive care nurses immediately doubted the word of federal immigration officers when they arrived at a Minneapolis hospital with a Mexican immigrant who had broken bones in his face and skull. Immigration and…

Read More Read More

The blood-and-soil nationalism that killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti

The blood-and-soil nationalism that killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes: In the wake of poet and writer Renee Good’s killing, Donald Trump and his collaborators have done all they can to define her as an enemy of “The Homeland.” The administration claims, for instance, that Good was a “domestic terrorist,” a term it is now applying to Alex Pretti, the ICU nurse whom federal agents killed on Saturday. This rhetoric is employed to justify the state taking life, by associating the dead with national villainy. But the…

Read More Read More

What ICE should have learned from the Fugitive Slave Act

What ICE should have learned from the Fugitive Slave Act

Jelani Cobb writes: One measure of the numbing effect that the constant heedless and cruel assault on democracy and on simple reason that Trumpism has imposed upon American life is the fact that we no longer flinch at the word “unprecedented.” Now, a full decade since Donald Trump’s arrival on the national scene, we have reached a point where the violation of norms has become a norm in itself. At the same time, however, there has been a tendency to…

Read More Read More

ICE’s surveillance app is a techno-authoritarian nightmare

ICE’s surveillance app is a techno-authoritarian nightmare

Moustafa Bayoumi writes: The lethal force Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is meting out on American streets is rightly drawing loud condemnations from politicians and editorial boards across the nation and around the world. Now is the time we must start paying attention to another highly damaging part of ICE’s arsenal: the agency’s deployment of mass surveillance. I’m referring specifically to Mobile Fortify, a specialized app ICE has been using at least since May 2025. (Usage of the app was…

Read More Read More

ICE deportation flights are getting longer and crueler

ICE deportation flights are getting longer and crueler

Mother Jones reports: Just before being put on board her deportation flight, Melissa Tran’s wrists and ankles were shackled to a chain around her waist. It had been more than 10 hours since she’d been given any food or water; for the last seven she had been sitting on a bus on the tarmac. There was no company name or logo on the Boeing 767, but she soon learned the airline was called Omni Air International. She’d never heard of…

Read More Read More

India’s tech workers in crisis amid suicides, layoffs, and AI

India’s tech workers in crisis amid suicides, layoffs, and AI

Rest of World reports: On a warm night last May, Nikhil Somwanshi sent his roommate a WhatsApp message asking him to tell his family that what was about to happen next was an accident. The message triggered a frantic search for the 24-year-old machine-learning engineer in southeast Bengaluru, the city of 13 million known as India’s Silicon Valley. Somwanshi was a star student from a small village in the farm-dotted countryside. Nine months prior, he’d landed a coveted job at…

Read More Read More

Next nationwide No Kings protests on March 28 with flagship event in the Twin Cities

Next nationwide No Kings protests on March 28 with flagship event in the Twin Cities

NBC News reports: The “No Kings” nationwide demonstration that has come to symbolize the resistance to the Trump administration is returning March 28, this time with a flagship event in the Twin Cities. Organizers with Indivisible, the grassroots group behind No Kings, said it was only suitable to stage a marquee march in Minnesota in the wake of the killing of Alex Pretti by immigration agents Saturday and the shooting death of Renee Good weeks earlier. Other demonstrations are again…

Read More Read More