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Category: Human rights/civil liberties

Hundreds of clergy descend on Minneapolis to join the resistance against ICE

Hundreds of clergy descend on Minneapolis to join the resistance against ICE

Religion News Service reports: Around 200 faith leaders fanned out across the city on Thursday (Jan. 22) to observe and document the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with some clergy confronting Department of Homeland Security agents, adding a visible religious presence to widespread efforts to counter the president’s mass deportation campaign in the region. The faith leaders, who are in Minneapolis as part of a larger convening focused on religious pushback to ICE, deployed to neighborhoods with significant immigrant…

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100 clergy arrested protesting against ICE at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport

100 clergy arrested protesting against ICE at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport

The Wall Street Journal reports: During demonstrations in Minneapolis on Friday, roughly 100 clergy members were arrested at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Mostly Christian clergy and faith leaders rallied at the airport, where they claimed planes were flying detained migrants out of the state as part of ICE’s “Operation Metro Surge,” according to Justin Lind-Ayres, a Lutheran pastor in Minneapolis. The MSP Airport Police Department confirmed officers made arrests, but didn’t immediately confirm how many. Protesters at the airport, some…

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Trump’s stormtroopers are terrorizing Minnessotta and they won’t stop there

Trump’s stormtroopers are terrorizing Minnessotta and they won’t stop there

Don Moynihan writes: We use words like “police state.” Then we see it happen. To watch is not the same as to experience it, of course. Of being afraid to leave your house. Or having a classmate, co-worker, or family member disappear. But the images make it more real. It removes any illusion that it could not happen here. It is happening here. We see it happening here, if we are willing to look. In recent weeks, the paramilitary occupation…

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What images of a detained five-year-old boy reveal about Trump’s brutal ICE crackdown

What images of a detained five-year-old boy reveal about Trump’s brutal ICE crackdown

Robert Tait writes: As symbols of the indiscriminate disproportionality of the Trump administration’s militant anti-immigrant crusade in Minneapolis, the images are hard to surpass. One recent image shows the innocent figure of Liam Ramos, a five-year-old preschooler wearing a blue bobbled winter hat, standing next to a black vehicle with a dark-clad adult figure standing behind him, whose hand is proprietorially placed on his backpack. A second picture depicts the same child at the door of a house, with what…

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The correct response to Dachau was not to suggest the guards needed better training

The correct response to Dachau was not to suggest the guards needed better training

Andrea Pitzer writes: Events are moving so quickly that it’s worth stopping to assess where we are. The U.S. government is currently building massive detention facilities, already detaining tens of thousands of people there and elsewhere, with incompetent and deeply racist secret police sweeping undocumented all kinds of people—immigrants, those with their paperwork in order, and US citizens alike—off the street. We’re hearing grass-roots calls to abolish ICE, while opposition leadership instead speaks mostly about affordability issues. When they do…

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New Hampshire bishop warns clergy to prepare for ‘new era of martyrdom’

New Hampshire bishop warns clergy to prepare for ‘new era of martyrdom’

The Associated Press reports: A New Hampshire Episcopal bishop is attracting national attention after warning his clergy to finalize their wills and get their affairs in order to prepare for a “new era of martyrdom.” Bishop Rob Hirschfeld of the Episcopal Church of New Hampshire made his comments earlier this month at a vigil honoring Renee Good, who was fatally shot on Jan. 7 behind the wheel of her vehicle by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer. The Trump…

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What life is like under federal occupation in Minneapolis

What life is like under federal occupation in Minneapolis

Don Moynihan shares this account from someone living and working in Minneapolis who wishes, for their safety, to remain anonymous: I am writing as an ordinary citizen of Minneapolis/St Paul ─ one of America’s 20 largest metro areas. I have kids in the public schools, own a house, go to work every day, pay taxes, volunteer in my community (e.g., coaching youth sports, helping in the schools). I am certainly not a radical of any kind. I had never done…

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ICE plans $100 million ‘wartime recruitment’ push targeting gun shows, military fans for hires

ICE plans $100 million ‘wartime recruitment’ push targeting gun shows, military fans for hires

The Washington Post reports: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials are planning to spend $100 million over a one-year period to recruit gun-rights supporters and military enthusiasts through online influencers and a geo-targeted advertising campaign, part of what the agency called a “wartime recruitment” strategy it said was critical to hiring thousands of new deportation officers nationwide, according to an internal document reviewed by The Washington Post. The spending would help President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation agenda dominate media networks and…

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Fighting fascism in America during a genocide in Palestine

Fighting fascism in America during a genocide in Palestine

Amahl Bishara writes: “These times make me think of 1933,” my neighbor commented as our sons zoomed down a hill on their bikes. This was a common sentiment in the early months of President Donald Trump’s second term — how to stop a leader with fascist tendencies who had gained power through a democratic process. But it wasn’t our usual neighborhood conversation. Rümeysa Öztürk, a graduate student at Tufts University, where I teach, had recently been kidnapped by masked U.S….

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Most of Iran shuts down as government grapples with protests and economy

Most of Iran shuts down as government grapples with protests and economy

  The New York Times reports: Businesses, universities and government offices stayed closed on Wednesday across most of Iran under a government-ordered shutdown, as the president struggled to address public frustration that has fueled mounting protests over the faltering economy and the government. The one-day shutdown in 21 of Iran’s 31 provinces, including Tehran, the capital, came as President Masoud Pezeshkian on Wednesday appointed a new central bank chief, the former economy minister Abdolnaser Hemmati. The president acknowledged that it…

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Trump will stop at nothing to ensure the political dominance of White people in America

Trump will stop at nothing to ensure the political dominance of White people in America

Regina Davis Moss writes: “We’ve dropped (the price of) the infertility drugs to make lots of Trump babies, I’m hoping by the midterms.” That bizarre remark was made recently by Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. After four years of the first Trump administration and nearly one year into the second, many of us have become desensitized to this kind of commentary – but not Black women. We know the quiet part spoken out…

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Marco Rubio is using real censorship to fight fake censorship

Marco Rubio is using real censorship to fight fake censorship

Mike Masnick writes: The U.S. government just banned five people from entering the country because it doesn’t like their speech. This ban, according to the State Department, is necessary to protect free speech. If that sounds insane to you, congratulations on your reading comprehension. On Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s State Department announced the “Announcement of Actions to Combat the Global Censorship-Industrial Complex,” which will take “decisive action against five individuals who have led organized efforts to coerce American…

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‘We ain’t seen nothing yet’ — Trump’s mass deportations expected to ‘scale up dramatically’ in 2026

‘We ain’t seen nothing yet’ — Trump’s mass deportations expected to ‘scale up dramatically’ in 2026

Wired reports: When Donald Trump won a second term as US president a year ago, members of violent militias and far-right extremist groups who had spent years boosting the lie that the 2020 election was rigged were ready to assist the president with delivering on one of his main campaign promises: mass deportations. “I’m willing to help,” Richard Mack, a former sheriff who founded the far-right Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, told WIRED at the time, claiming he was…

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How Trump upended the rules-based global order

How Trump upended the rules-based global order

Patrick Wintour writes: ‘The old world is dying,” Antonio Gramsci once wrote. “And the new world struggles to be born.” In such interregnums, the Italian Marxist philosopher suggested, “every act, even the smallest, may acquire decisive weight”. In 2025, western leaders appeared convinced they – and we – were living through one such transitional period, as the world of international relations established after the second world war crashed to a halt. During such eras, Gramsci more famously wrote, “morbid phenomena…

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Trump officials move to screen visa applicants’ social media posts for ‘anti-American’ speech

Trump officials move to screen visa applicants’ social media posts for ‘anti-American’ speech

The Washington Post reports: The Trump administration is widening efforts to screen visa applicants for online speech considered dangerous and “anti-American” as the government moves to restrict legal migration and remove people from places the president has called “garbage.” The State Department earlier this month expanded new regulations requiring foreign students and people on academic and cultural exchange programs to disclose five years of their social media histories and make all of their posts public. All applicants for H-1B employment…

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Echoes of Eichmann: The industrialization of mass deportation

Echoes of Eichmann: The industrialization of mass deportation

The Washington Post reports: The Trump administration is seeking contractors to help it overhaul the United States’ immigrant detention system in a plan that includes renovating industrial warehouses to hold more than 80,000 immigrant detainees at a time, according to a draft solicitation reviewed by The Washington Post. Rather than shuttling detainees around the country to wherever detention space is available, as happens now, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement aims to speed up deportations by establishing a deliberate feeder system,…

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