The Roundup: Too much ICE
The government is cracking down. The people are standing up.
The last couple weeks have been quite a ride. We’ve seen an alarming escalation of rhetoric, brinksmanship, bigotry, and violence from the Trump administration, and an inspiring show of solidarity and determination from regular, everyday people.
On Friday, protesters braved near-zero temperatures all over the country to demand an end to the Trump administration’s occupation of Minneapolis and other cities. Meanwhile, despite the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, groups that train ICE watchers are reporting surge of volunteers, including more than 200,000 people who have since signed up for training by Indivisible.
Over the weekend, a Democrat in Texas won a special election for the state legislature by 14 points in a district Trump one by 17 — despite being outspent 6-1. I can’t remember ever seeing a 31-point turnaround in a special election before. And Trump’s poll numbers continue to hit record lows.
At the same time — and despite claims that they’re “de-escalating” — Trump’s paramilitary deportation forces are as violent and lawless as ever. As is his lurch toward authoritarianism.
It’s been a crazy couple weeks for me personally as well. We got smacked with a nasty ice storm here in Nashville that knocked out power for most of the city just as frigid temperatures set in. Trees and power lines snapped and fell all over town.
We were fortunate enough to find a dog-friendly hotel to escape the cold. A week later, many are still without power, and could be that way for another week. If you’re so inclined, you might consider giving to The Remix Way, one of the groups delivering hot meals to people without power.
Just before the storm hit, Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti. As is often the case after such a high-profile incident, I started getting requests for interviews. I bring this up just to say thanks to my subscribers. Your support helped ensure that I had a place to stay, access to wifi, and a spot to do my interviews. Without it, I wouldn’t have been able to talk about the history and context for this madness. So thank you.
Here’s a quick rundown of a hectic ten or so days:
I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times arguing that what we’re seeing from Trump’s federal forces isn’t about law enforcement or immigration — it’s about authoritarianism.
I did an interview with Reveal about my work on police militarization and the way in which Trump is assembling his own paramilitary muscle, one more dangerous than anything I predicted.
Here’s an interview I did with The Bulwark about the government’s brazen violations of protesters’ and ICE watchers’ First Amendment rights.
My interview with NPR’s On the Media focused on the lack of accountability for immigration officers.
Here’s an interview I did with the public radio syndicated show Background Briefing.
I talked with Slate about why immigration enforcement has become so violent.
And here’s an interview with Crooked Media.
Finally, I joined Joseph Cox of 404 Media on Jon Stewart’s podcast, The Weekly Show. I watched The Daily Show religiously back in the 2000s, so talking to Stewart was a surreal thrill. (Also, he was smitten with our dog Oscar.)
What I’m reading
The two best reports from Minneapolis that I’ve seen are by Adam Serwer for The Atlantic, and by Kerry Howley for New York.
The Wall Street Journal published a stunning account of how a United Arab Emirates prince gave the president of the United States $500 million via his cryptocurrency company, just before the president dismissed national security restrictions and allowed the UAE to access sensitive AI technology. The prince also gave about $30 million to entities affiliated with Steve Witkoff, the co-founder of Trump’s crypto company, and whom Trump has named a “U.S. envoy to the Middle East.”
The key to holding immigration officers accountable may be in getting states to pass laws allowing for lawsuits in state court. I don’t think this is sufficient, but for the moment, it may be all we really have.
The administration was widely expected to start arresting Haitian immigrants in Springfield this week, and was stopped only by a last-minute court order. These are immigrants who came here legally, and despite the vile lies from the vice president and others, are hardworking members of the community. Here’s a particularly wrenching angle on this story: Residents at a senior center, including Holocaust survivors, have been asking how they can hide their Haitian caregivers from federal law enforcement.
The ICE raids crushed economic activity in Little Village, the once-bustling Mexican-American neighborhood in Chicago. The occupation of Minneapolis is having a similar effect.
The case against Don Lemon and the other three journalists arrested last week is garbage.
ICE is using facial recognition technology to track, monitor, and threaten protesters and people trying to hold them accountable. Keeping a database of people who have legally protested or monitored agents is illegal. Combined with the masking of the agents themselves, it also demonstrates a government that enforces anonymity for its armed, paid agents, but not for private citizens who criticize it. The word for this is authoritarian.
Here’s a sharp and insightful essay from Alan Elrod on MAGA’s treatment of Renee Good and Alex Pretti as “race traitors.”
Donald Trump has filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. As with Trump’s lawsuit against the FBI, we are in completely uncharted territory here. The two top officials at the Department of Justice, which would normally litigate or negotiate the settlement for such a lawsuit, both formerly worked as Trump’s personal, private attorneys. So Trump effectively controls both the complaining and responding sides of his lawsuits.
Despite waning authority and public support — and demands for more transparency — the U.S. Supreme Court is making itself even more secretive.
The FBI raid of the Georgia elections office is a five-alarm fire. That Tulsi Gabbard was present is especially alarming. Gabbard has no law enforcement authority, and has been spreading batshit crazy conspiracies about the 2020 election for months. Despite his denials, it’s also now clear that Trump was directly involved. Look for them to manufacture evidence to support their insane claims that Venezuela, Switzerland, Italy, and who knows who else somehow collaborated to steal the election for Biden. It can’t hurt that they now have the former head of Venezuela in custody, and that Trump has explicitly threatened the current leader with similar treatment if she doesn’t do what he demands. This could then become the pretext upon which Trump tries to send in troops or seize ballots during or after the midterms. Our decentralized elections (which Trump is openly trying to take over) will make that difficult. But they’re clearly going to try.
Meanwhile, the WSJ reports that there’s a whistleblower complaint against Gabbard that’s apparently so explosive that no one knows quite what to do with it. So it’s just been languishing for months. The implication is that it may provide evidence that Gabbard is compromised. Which of course wouldn’t be the first time Trump has appointed a compromised ally to a highly sensitive intelligence position.
The administration looks to be ramping up its political prosecutions, with reports of “daily meetings” to strategize over which of Trump’s enemies they might target with criminal investigations.
Trump’s lawless paramilitaries
Among the many ways this administration’s mass deportation campaign is flagrantly violating the law: They have stopped reporting deaths at detention facilities.
They also haven’t reported deaths or serious injuries during arrests, though here they aren’t required by law to do so. That includes the eight people who have died already in 2026.
The men who murdered Alex Pretti: Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez.
In Salem, Oregon, immigration agents pulled over a Latina woman, shattered her window, and threw her to the ground. When they found her passport, which verified that she is a U.S. citizen, they . . . just drove off.
We talk a lot about ICE, but Trump’s deportation are currently overseen by Border Patrol, and it’s the most violent and lawless police agency in the federal government.
A federal judge found that the Department of Homeland Security has violated at least 96 court orders — just this year, and just in Minnesota.
Federal officers gassed a peaceful pro-immigration rally in Portland.
Read Garrett Graff’s sobering account of the corruption, abuse, and lack of accountability inside ICE and Border Patrol.
ICE agents claimed that a man shattered his own skull after intentionally running into a wall while trying to flee them while handcuffed. Doctors at the intensive care unit say that couldn’t possibly explain the severity of his injuries.
ICE has issued another dubious legal memo, this time claiming expanded powers to arrest people without a warrant.
Immigration attorneys say the Trump administration is illegally preventing them from speaking to their clients.
As the administration continues to illegally prevent members of Congress from inspecting detention facilities, reports from inside those facilities continue to reveal barbaric, inhumane conditions, which appear to be getting worse as DHS packs more people into these buildings. There was just a measles outbreak at the facility in Dilley, Texas.
At least 14 federal prosecutors in Minnesota have now resigned in protest of the Trump administration’s lawlessness.
The abduction and unconscionable treatment of Liam Conejo Ramos was not a fluke. It’s just one instance of this administration’s routine abuse of children who are legally seeking asylum with their families. Since Trump’s inauguration, DHS has booked at least 3,800 children into federal detention centers.
In Maine, agents shattered the window of a car with an infant inside. They detained a man with no criminal history, leaving a woman and the baby in the car exposed to freezing weather. A witness: “There was a car seat in the back with one of those baby blankets you get at the hospital. There were broken glass shards all over it. I carefully pulled back the blanket and there was just this tiny peanut of a baby. He was crying.” The Trump administration is carrying out these deportations in Maine under the name “Operation Catch of the Day.”
Here’s a remarkable still frame from a horrifying video, taken about an hour south of Minneapolis. These agents were apparently angry that an ICE watcher — a U.S. citizen — was recording them from her car. So they cut her off with a dangerous maneuver, then emerged from their car, masked, with guns drawn and pointed at her. They then pulled her from her car and arrested her. She was released when her husband, a lawyer, was able to get in touch with a local police chief — with whom he was friendly. You all know this by now, but it is not illegal to record law enforcement officers in public spaces. So what you’re seeing here is a crime. In any other administration, it would be a massive scandal. But because the entire point of this operations is to terrorize these communities, we’re growing accustomed to videos like this one. And because agents are free to mask themselves, and it’s near certain that they’ll never be held accountable.
Here’s another video from an ICE watcher — another U.S. citizen — who was stopped. They shattered her window, pulled her from her car, and arrested her. She told a local news station that they had been following her for days. She says they also forced her to urinate in a parking lot. This is video also depicts crimes by immigration officers.
And another. I’ll just state again: It is not illegal to watch, record, follow, or track immigration officers. It *is* illegal to threaten, punish, or point a gun at them when they've done nothing illegal. If all these people were doing is observing, this is a crime.
“You raise your voice, I erase your voice.”
Video
As if all of this wasn’t bad enough, we lost comedy icon Catherine O’Hara. RIP.
The core cast of those wonderful Christopher Guest movies are in their late 70s now. Seems like a great time to express our gratitude for the delightful gifts they created for us.
We re-watched A Might Wind after O’Hara’s death. And man, does her passing make this seen hit differently:
Recommend
I’ve been really enjoying Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend. As you might guess, that’s Conan O’Brien’s podcast. The guests the people you would expect — Will Arnett, Paul Rudd, Kumail Nanjiani — and also some you might not — Matthew Rhys, Kesha, Werner Herzog.
The show is mostly free of politics, which makes it a nice escape right now. But it would also be wrong to say that it — or O’Brien — is apolitical. It’s just a bit more subtle. In addition to the celebrity interviews, for example, there’s a running feature in which he and his producers conduct video interviews with fans and everyday people all over the world. It’s part of his gentle, goofy, Conan-esque way of fostering some empathy — of pushing back against the ugly nativism and bigotry that dominates our politics right now.
O’Brien has been doing this for a while. He often took his late night show on TBS overseas, but to atypical places like South Korea, Qatar, Ghana, and Armenia. When Donald Trump started blathering about his border wall, O’Brien took the show to Mexico. When Trump first started talking about buying Greenland in 2019, O’Brien went to Greenland.
But my favorite bit came after Trump’s “shithole countries” garbage. O’Brien responded by taking the show to Haiti. He then broadcast a beautiful tribute to Haiti’s people, culture, and tragic history. It’s genuinely moving, mostly because rather than lecturing or preening, he simply let Haitian people tell their own stories — interspersed with his own self-deprecating shtick, of course.
Those episodes won him an Emmy in 2018, and also spawned the travel show Conan O’Brien Must Go, which I also very much recommend.
Last year O’Brien won the Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. He may be the last person to win that award for a while. That seems fitting, though. Twain himself was an avid globetrotter, and wrote one the most poignant observations about why travel is important and necessary:
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
Other than Anthony Bourdain and Rick Steves, few celebrities have embodied that spirit better than O’Brien.
It probably helps that I share O’Brien’s offbeat sense of humor. It also helps that he seems to be a genuinely kind and decent human being.
Photo
Boat vendors in Thailand:
Dog
From before and after the ice took down half our tree limbs (all three videos were shot by my wife):
I just paid my annual subscription renewal and was second guessing whether I really needed this, BUT am glad that I did after reading this.Proud to support you and this newsletter.
I recommend the Richard J. Evans trilogy on the rise of the Third Reich, esp. the first two volumes, for a good look at how an authoritarian government established itself in what had been a democracy. Bring strong drink.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/DXG/the-third-reich-trilogy/