Attention to the Unseen

In These Times reports: Unions and community groups gathered in front of the Hennepin County Government Center in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota this morning to announce a day of ​“no work, no school, no shopping” on January 23 to oppose the ferocious assault on the state by federal immigration authorities. “We are facing a tsunami of hate from our own federal government,” Abdikarim Khasim, a Minnesota rideshare driver, told the crowd. ​“We’re going to shut it down on the 23rd. We’re…

Read More Read More

By Nicole Foy and McKenzie Funk This story was originally published by ProPublica Immigration agents have put civilians’ lives at risk using more than their guns. An agent in Houston put a teenage citizen into a chokehold, wrapping his arm around the boy’s neck, choking him so hard that his neck had red welts hours later. A black-masked agent in Los Angeles pressed his knee into a woman’s neck while she was handcuffed; she then appeared to pass out. An…

Read More Read More

Elizabeth Tsurkov writes: Four men searched my mouth for implanted tracking devices. I had told them I didn’t have any—that, as far as I knew, such things existed only in movies. They asked if I had fillings, and I confessed that I did. They looked again. “No, you don’t,” one of them corrected me, having failed to find any glint of silver. My fillings are white. The men, wearing dark civilian clothes and balaclavas, seemed convinced that these unfamiliar fillings…

Read More Read More

  The transformation of ICE into a type of national police force, backed, in some cases, by soldiers from the National Guard, has been covered as immigration story—but these forces are reshaping democracy for all of us. This shift was evident even before the shootings in Minneapolis and Portland this week.

Adam Serwer writes: There’s a lot we don’t know about the shooting of Renee Nicole Good, who was killed yesterday by federal immigration agents deployed to Minnesota. But in the chaotic aftermath of the shooting, one thing became immediately clear: The Trump administration was lying about what happened. Shortly after news began circulating about the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement on X that “rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these…

Read More Read More

  NYT: An analysis of footage from three camera angles shows that the motorist was driving away from — not toward — a federal officer when he opened fire. The Washington Post reports: Thousands of people in Minneapolis gathered for a candlelight vigil Wednesday evening to mourn and protest the killing of Renee Nicole Good, who was shot and killed by an ICE officer in the city hours earlier as she appeared to try to drive away in her vehicle…

Read More Read More

Jan-Werner Müller writes: When a bleary-eyed Trump explained the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro this past Saturday, he invoked the Monroe doctrine: while the US president sounded like he was reading about it for the first time, historians of course recognized the idea of Washington as a kind of guardian of the western hemisphere. Together with the national security strategy published in December, the move on Venezuela can be understood as advancing a vision for carving up the world into what…

Read More Read More

Politico reports: Federal judges are increasingly exasperated by the Trump administration’s effort to lock up nearly everyone facing deportation proceedings — a draconian expansion of decades-old policies that hundreds of courts have rejected as illegal or unconstitutional. More than 300 federal judges, including appointees of every president since Ronald Reagan, have now rebuffed the administration’s six-month-old effort to expand its so-called “mandatory detention” policy, according to a POLITICO analysis of court dockets from across the country. Those judges have ordered…

Read More Read More

The murder of Renee Nicole Good:   Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey:   Minnesota Governor Tim Walz:   Jennifer Brooks writes: Renee Nicole Good. George Floyd. Different tragedies, but the same grief for a community betrayed by the people who were supposed to protect and serve. Crowds gathered again in Minneapolis on Wednesday, Jan. 7, marching through the same streets where some of them were protesting five and a half years ago after Floyd’s murder. The full force and fury of…

Read More Read More

Politico reports: Grand juries — written off for decades as a pointless anachronism — are making a comeback under President Donald Trump. “They have been resurrected,” said Thaddeus Hoffmeister, a defense attorney and University of Dayton law professor. “For a long time, many people have been questioning why we even have grand juries. Like, what’s the purpose? …They don’t do anything. They don’t protect people. And then the last couple months, we start to see that, maybe the founding fathers…

Read More Read More

The Wall Street Journal reports: Less than five hours before nighttime explosions rocked the Venezuelan capital of Caracas, an unknown trader doubled down on bets that Nicolás Maduro would soon be out as the country’s leader. The wagers on Polymarket, a popular crypto-based betting platform, netted the trader more than $400,000, a 12-fold return on investment—and fueled suspicions that someone used inside knowledge of the closely held U.S. operation to make a quick profit. Insider trading is illegal in the…

Read More Read More