Attention to the Unseen

Garrett Graff writes: This week, Congress is debating what reform might be acceptable for the masked fascist secret police currently occupying major American cities in Democratic-run states — a supposedly civilian law enforcement agency that, in any other country, US journalists wouldn’t hesitate to label breezily “a right-wing paramilitary militia loyal to the regime that is staging a terror campaign against separatist regions led by key figures of the political opposition.” Today, the leaders of ICE and CBP will be…

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By Pratheek Rebala and Jeff Ernsthausen, ProPublica, and Perla Trevizo, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune This story was originally published by ProPublica The Trump administration’s push for mass deportations has resulted in more than 18,000 challenges in federal court from immigrants claiming their detention is illegal, more than were filed under the last three administrations combined — including President Donald Trump’s first term. So far this year, immigrants are filing on average more than 200 of these cases, known as…

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Wired reports: Federal records obtained by WIRED show that over the past several months, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have carried out a secret campaign to expand ICE’s physical presence across the US. Documents show that more than 150 leases and office expansions have or would place new facilities in nearly every state, many of them in or just outside of the country’s largest metropolitan areas. In many cases, these facilities, which are…

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The Guardian reports: It started as a cheeky response on social media to the US secretary for homeland security. Months later, however, a Europe-based project to unmask US immigration and custom enforcement (ICE) agents has racked up millions of views and mobilised hundreds of volunteers. “What we’re doing is a reaction to a problematic regime,” said Dominick Skinner, the Netherlands-based Irish national behind the website ICE List, of its mission to remove the anonymity that many of the armed federal…

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The New York Times reports: An immigration judge has found there were no grounds to deport a Turkish graduate student whose arrest by masked agents last year was an early salvo in the Trump Administration’s crackdown on migrants. The decision by the judge, Roopal Patel, came last month and was disclosed in federal court by lawyers for the student, Rumeysa Ozturk, this week. It effectively means that the government has no legal justification to deport Ms. Ozturk, a graduate student…

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Fintan O’Toole writes: Donald Trump’s desire to name everything from the Kennedy Center to the Gulf of Mexico after himself (“I wanted to call it the Gulf of Trump,” he declared in January) can seem almost comically childish. But it has become a killing joke: his regime brands those it executes “terrorists” and drags their names through the dirt. This renaming is an assertion of absolute power, and the United States is at a moment when Trump’s claim to dominion…

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The Irish Times reports: For five days, [Seamus] Culleton was held in a small cell overflowing with other detainees, then flown to a Buffalo, New York, Ice facility. In Buffalo he was interviewed by an Ice agent, who asked if he would sign a form agreeing to his deportation. Culleton said he refused, and instead ticked a box where detainees can state they wish to contest their arrest. He wrote down that his grounds for contesting were that he was…

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CBS News reports: Less than 14% of nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in President Trump’s first year back in the White House had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security document obtained by CBS News. The official statistics contained in the DHS document, which had not been previously reported publicly, provide the most detailed look yet into who ICE has arrested during the Trump administration’s far-reaching deportation operations…

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Eric Levitz writes: Ever since the United States entrusted its presidency to a would-be insurrectionist in January 2025, many Americans have feared for the integrity of their nation’s future elections. And not without reason. President Donald Trump made his contempt for democracy clear on January 6, 2021. Shortly after retaking office last year, he pardoned the rioters who’d stormed the Capitol in his name, gutted the agency that protects America’s voting infrastructure from cyberattacks, attempted to unconstitutionally deter the counting…

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