United States | News & Politics

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/42986211

Feb. 2, 2026

It’s been two months since the federal government began what it calls “Operation Metro Surge” in Minnesota. Besides spreading fear amongst immigrants and many documented instances of violence and racial profiling, the surge has led many Minnesotans to jump into action.

The Immigrant Defense Network helped band together more than 100 organizations to assist struggling families and defend immigrants’ constitutional rights. In January, the network registered an average of 2,000 volunteers per week to train as constitutional observers. A constitutional observer is a trained community member who observes and documents federal law enforcement activity to help ensure constitutional rights are followed.

The rejection was a remarkable rebuke, suggesting that ordinary citizens did not believe that the lawmakers had committed any crimes.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7608497

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/26242

Corporate profits in the US have surged in recent decades, with subscription-based businesses reporting some of the biggest revenue growth as more Americans use streaming services and sign up for "subscribe and save" models in a quest for ease and convenience.

While promising consumers that subscribing to a service will save them money and time, subscription-based businesses have made canceling the services increasingly difficult, contributing to Americans spending 60% longer on the phone with customer service lines than they did two decades ago.

And although corporations hardly need the extra money, making cancellations more arduous for customers can boost their revenue by anywhere from 14% to over 200%, according to the think tank Groundwork Collaborative, which released a report Monday on what it calls "the annoyance economy."

The labyrinthine processes that millions of Americans face each year when they try to cancel subscription services is just one part of the annoyance economy, according to Groundwork, which detailed the seemingly endless time, money, and patience people spend "just trying to get basic things done"—as well as efforts by corporations and the Trump administration to make sure it stays that way.

While millions are struggling with the rising costs of groceries, healthcare, housing, childcare, and just about everything else, the report explains how—thanks to corporate greed and a White House intent on enabling it—Americans are also shelling out at least $165 billion per year in fees as well as lost time.

In addition to cancellation processes, the annoyance economy includes the $90 billion people across the US spend every year on junk fees when they buy concert tickets, make hotel reservations, and order food delivery; rental application fees that keep people from even attempting to move to new housing that could put them closer to work or school; and administrative healthcare tasks like obtaining coverage information and resolving questions about premiums and deductibles.

"While seemingly minor, these little annoyances add up," wrote Groundwork policy fellow Chad Maisel and Stanford University economist Neale Mahoney, the authors of the report, who cited a 2019 survey that found 1 in 4 respondents delayed getting healthcare or avoided it altogether specifically because of the administrative tasks they had to complete in order to get an appointment and make sure it was covered.

"All told, American workers collectively spend about $21.6-billion-worth of time each year dealing with healthcare administration, between calls, claims, explanations, and paperwork, according to a recent analysis."

Another new poll from Data for Progress found that nearly 80% of Americans reported "at least a little frustration" when coordinating their healthcare and filling out health insurance paperwork.

"All told, American workers collectively spend about $21.6-billion-worth of time each year dealing with healthcare administration, between calls, claims, explanations, and paperwork," reads the report, citing another recent analysis. "Polling confirms this: More than 1 in 3 Americans report dealing with health insurance headaches more than 20 times per year."

With frustration over health insurance companies' practices increasingly common, reads the report, "policymakers are missing important opportunities to take on a handful of egregious and particularly annoying practices."

Lawmakers could require insurance companies to make it easy for patients to fill out and submit claims online—instead of downloading, printing, and physically mailing claim forms with itemized receipts as Cigna requires patients to do.

Congress could also create a "healthcare sludge unit" to monitor and root out "needless friction throughout the healthcare experience."

Such a project could leverage tools "like 'blind shopper' experiments, public feedback lines, and direct engagement with industry to surface and fix barriers that waste patients’ time and erode trust."

The report also takes on the spam texts and calls that have become all-to-familiar to anyone with a cellphone.

"Text messaging, once reserved for conversation with friends and family, now resembles our email spam folders, dominated by unsolicited offers from companies, politicians, and fraudsters," wrote Maisel and Mahoney, who shared that on the day they wrote about spam in the report, "one of us received five spam calls, a text from 'Victoria' offering a $500-a-day job, and two breathless fundraising messages from political candidates we’ve never supported—or even heard of."

Those spam communications were some of the more than 130 million scam and illegal marketing calls Americans receive each day and the nearly 20 billion texts that were sent each month over the past year—leading "virtually all respondents" to Data for Progress' poll to report that the calls and texts are at least "a little frustrating" and 68% call them "very frustrating."

State and federal lawmakers could and should take action against spam calls and texts, said Maisel and Mahoney. Congress should modernize the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which was passed in 1991—well before companies began inundating Americans' inboxes with the newest robocalling and texting software.

"If a platform automatically dials from a stored list of numbers, it’s now exempt from the TCPA’s rules," reads the report. "The result: far more robocall and spam text operations can legally target people without their consent. Congress should update the definition of autodialer to include any callers and texters who automatically contact stored numbers, unless there’s real human involvement in sending each message."

Former President Joe Biden's Federal Communications Commission tried to close the "lead generator loophole,” which allows third-party marketers to collect people's contact information and sell it to dozens, sometimes hundreds, of businesses, but companies sued over the FCC's action and won in court.

President Donald Trump could issue an executive order directing federal agencies "to leverage all available resources and authorities to end robocalls and spam texts once and for all," said Maisel and Mahoney.

But the authors noted that the Trump administration's mass layoffs across the government would make enforcement more difficult.

"The Department of Justice also needs to prioritize enforcement against bad actors," they wrote. "While the FCC can levy fines for violations, it cannot pursue their collection without the DOJ. Of the eight robocalling forfeiture orders referred by the FCC, the DOJ has pursued only two for collection."

In the case of the hoops consumers are made to jump through in order to cancel subscriptions and services, the report emphasizes that the federal government has made significant inroads before to help the public.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) intervened in 2023 and stopped Toyota Motor Credit from continuing its practice of routing all consumer calls through a hotline "where representatives were instructed to keep promoting products until a consumer asked to cancel three times, at which point they were told cancellation was only possible by submitting a written request."

Under the Biden administration, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was lauded by consumer advocates for its click-to-cancel rule in 2024, requiring sellers to “make it as easy for consumers to cancel their enrollment as it was to sign up."

But Trump's FTC last year delayed implementation of the rule after industry groups said that "it would take a substantial amount of time to come into compliance.” A federal appeals court then effectively killed the rule altogether.

While the fees that gradually trickle out of Americans' bank accounts into the annoyance economy are often small individually, the report emphasizes that they add up—and the consequences of these business practices and the government's failure to stop them "extend beyond wasted time and money."

"When life is reduced to jumping through an endless series of hoops—just to fix a billing error, secure a refund, or cancel a subscription—it breeds cynicism and disengagement," reads the report. "If the government can remove even a few of those obstacles, we can show the American people that someone is paying attention and begin the long process of rebuilding public trust."

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

US Sen. Bernie Sanders is headed to LA to support a 5% tax on California billionaires to support the state's healthcare system.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42981002

Isn't Stone Wall's whole thing about being the start of LGBT Pride?

As early as 2021, government officials were alerted to the presence of potentially dangerous chemicals known as PFAS in pants used by wildland firefighters, according to emails obtained by ProPublica.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio may be intentionally misleading Trump on Cuba policy to push for regime change, risking the lives of millions. Is Rubio putting his own agenda above diplomacy and the well-being of the Cuban people?

Ocasio-Cortez said the precedent set by the Gaza genocide has endangered civilians across the globe.

Archived version: https://archive.is/newest/https://truthout.org/articles/aoc-says-cuba-blockade-part-of-new-era-of-depravity-ushered-by-gaza-genocide/

Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein's co-conspirator, invoked her Fifth Amendment rights after being called to testify in front of the House Oversight Committee.

Saying he had advised his client not to testify, Maxwell's attorney David Oscar Markus bluntly said in a statement that "Maxwell is prepared to speak fully and honestly if granted clemency by President Trump," according to NBC.

"Only she can provide the complete account" Markus said, per NBC. "Some may not like what they hear, but the truth matters. For example, both President [Donald] Trump and [former] President [Bill] Clinton are innocent of any wrongdoing. Ms. Maxwell alone can explain why, and the public is entitled to that explanation."

The inter-American branch of a global labor federation representing tens of millions of workers issued a statement Monday condemning the Trump administration's intensifying economic assault on Cuba and threats of regime change, calling such actions "war by other means" and violations of international law.

"They are incompatible with peace, the human right to dignity, and the principle of national sovereignty," said Public Services International (PSI) Inter-America as the Trump administration's blockade of oil imports fueled a worsening humanitarian crisis for the island nation, bringing rolling blackouts, straining hospitals, and causing shortages of food and other necessities.

The labor federation said Monday that the Trump administration's policies are an extension of the catastrophic, decades-long economic US blockade on Cuba, "which constitutes a violation of the United Nations Charter and has been condemned year after year by the overwhelming majority of the international community."

"Recent actions by the Trump administration have further exacerbated an already US-manufactured humanitarian crisis," PSI Inter-America said, pointing to the White House's blockade of Venezuelan oil shipments to Cuba and threats of economic retaliation against any country that provides the island nation with fuel.

"These measures deliberately deepen suffering and place lives in danger," the union federation said. "The blockade itself causes avoidable hardship, illness, and death among the Cuban people every year. Its intensification follows months of sanctions, seizures, and interference targeting Venezuelan oil shipments, further depriving Cuba of essential energy supplies."

The federation called on all of its affiliates worldwide and trade unions in the Americas to:

• Stand in active solidarity with the people of Cuba and publicly oppose the US blockade by raising their voices in protest, in every possible arena, to condemn this arbitrary and immoral measure;
• Demand that their governments take immediate and concrete action to defend international law, continue trade relations with Cuba, and ensure the delivery of all contractual and humanitarian goods;
• Advocate in all multilateral bodies for continued support for Cuba in the face of this ongoing economic aggression.
• Mobilize members to contact elected representatives through coordinated phone calls, emails, and letters demanding an end to the blockade;
• Press national labor centers to carry these demands forward on behalf of the entire labor movement;
• Organize and collect humanitarian and solidarity aid for Cuba; and
• Where possible, organize delegations to Cuba, including participation in the May 1 demonstrations in Havana and the Solidarity Conference on May 2, and consider earlier solidarity visits.

During a news conference on Monday, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum condemned the Trump administration's escalating economic warfare against Cuba as "deeply unjust" and vowed to "continue supporting Cuba"—even as her government halted oil shipments to its ally amid the US president's threats.

"You cannot strangle a people in this way," said Sheinbaum, who this past weekend authorized a shipment of more than 800 tons of humanitarian aid to Cuba, including food and other necessities.

"No one can ignore the situation that the Cuban people are currently experiencing because of the sanctions that the United States is imposing in a very unfair manner," the Mexican president added.

Charles Fox
Special to ICT

PHILADELPHIA — Jeremy Johnson delivered a short but gracious speech to the hundreds of people gathered at the Penn Museum’s Harrison Auditorium, but he felt a void, a need to collectively honor and bless the reason they were there.

The honor song that followed — in an Indigenous language rarely heard in Philadelphia — called out in the Lenape language to the spirit that had once enveloped the mid-Atlantic homelands and the past generations that preceded him.

It was an impromptu decision, a song that flowed from his heart and matched the emotions of the day, a reclamation of the land, filled with pride and defiance. But it also signaled there was something different about the museum exhibit they were about to unveil.

For not only were Native Americans part of the opening celebration at the Penn Museum, but Johnson and seven other Native consulting curators contributed beyond the auditorium walls to shape an exhibit depicting Native people in the present day.

“I had a sense of humility because the reason I was standing there was because of the resilience and strength of my grandmas and grandpas, and to be even able to sing that song was because of what they had done,” Johnson, the cultural education director for the Delaware Tribe of Indians, also known as Lenape, told ICT later.

“It was meant to honor what was going on there [at the museum] and the people there,” he said, “but it was really a recognition of those who came before me, who have set this path up and allowed us to keep continuing these ways.”

He was joined by other Native speakers, including three other consulting curators and contributing artists, as well as Tewa Dancers from the North, in November to initiate a weekend of activities for the opening of the Penn Museum’s new exhibit, “Native North America Gallery: Rooted in Resilience, Resisting Erasure.”

Given that Native Americans and museums have always had an uneasy relationship, it was unusual not only for the celebratory atmosphere but also for the Native participation.

The Tewa Dancers from the North from the Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo (formerly San Juan Pueblo) in northern New Mexico performed at an opening day of a new exhibit, “Native North America Gallery: Rooted in Resilience, Resisting Erasure,” on Nov. 22, 2025, at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. Credit: Charles Fox/Special to ICT

But this exhibit is different. The new gallery is planned to be up for the next 10 years and follows the success of the museum’s previous exhibition, “Native American Voices: The People Here and Now.”

The museum and its curators hope the gallery will broaden the historical narrative that is presented in Philadelphia during the semiquincentennial celebration of the United States, and serve as a model for other museums struggling to incorporate Native voices in their corridors.

“We hope that some folks will come up here to the Penn Museum to check out the exhibit, maybe it will help put some context into what they’re celebrating as far as the 250th goes,” said Dr. Joseph Aguilar, a tribal historic preservation office board member for the San Ildefonso Pueblo and one of the consulting curators.

“Maybe it will give them some perspective like, ‘Hey, there’s this other history that also needs to be celebrated and acknowledged.’”

Ushering in the future

Native Americans rarely have gotten a say in what manner they were depicted in museums, especially in a state they were forced to leave in the 18th century. Museums often portray Indigenous people as primitive, defeated curiosities of the past rather than as a present-day populace with a rich cultural tradition.

The past actions of museums have been clouded by the unauthorized expropriation and display of sacred objects and human remains.

Barry King, Powhatan Renape Nation, visits the new exhibit, “Native North America Gallery: Rooted in Resilience Resisting Erasure,” at the Penn Museum on opening day on Nov. 22, 2025 in Philadelphia. King, who once worked as an educator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was particularly interested in seeing the Delaware (Lenape) portions of the exhibit. The background images are of tribal homelands. Credit: Charles Fox/Special to ICT

The Penn Museum at the University of Pennsylvania has tried to distance itself from the past practices of museums with the new exhibit, which opened Nov. 22, 2025. It coincides with the upcoming 250th birthday of the United States in July as all Philadelphia museums and cultural institutions are gearing up for the expected influx of visitors for this year’s celebration.

The museum, a Philadelphia archaeology and anthropology institution founded in 1887, has been ahead of other museums with its recent practices. While other museums have pulled exhibits and closed galleries to comply with a change in regulations under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, known as NAGPRA, the Penn Museum has taken a different approach.

For the current exhibit, the museum tapped the eight Native consulting curators from different tribes to create a gallery that emphasizes the Native people and cultures that have thrived across the United States despite a historic agenda to erase their culture and language.

In addition to Johnson and Aguilar, the other consulting curators are RaeLyn Butler, secretary of culture and humanities, Muscogee (Creek) Nation; Beau Carroll, lead archaeologist, Tribal Historic Preservation Office, Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians; Christopher Lewis, cultural specialist, Zuni Pueblo; Mary Weahkee, archaeologist, Santa Clara Pueblo; Dr. Nadia Sethi Alutiiq, art historian and museum consultant, Homer, Alaska; Darlene See, cultural heritage director, Huna Indian Association, Tribal House Management Kaach.adi Clan Tlingit.

The curators were able to shape the exhibit by helping determine its focus, what display items were appropriate, and ensure that Native people were depicted in the present day.

The exhibit hopes to “tell the past while ushering in the future,” Jill DiSanto, the museum’s public relations director, told ICT..

It marked a first for Johnson.

“Most of the work with museums in the past has been extractive of our cultural knowledge, or at worst, simply exploitative of our knowledge and our items,” Johnson said. “This is the first we collaborated on … to really get our story out there. Not just the historical presence, the pre-contact that is usually focused on in exhibits, but to really use the items here to tell the story of the people and to show that we are a living, thriving community still to this day.”

RaeLynn Butler, another of the Indigenous consulting curators and secretary of culture and humanities for Muscogee (Creek) Nation, agrees.

RaeLynn Butler, secretary of culture and humanities for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, stands by the exhibit she helped curate for the Penn Museum, “Native North America Gallery: Rooted in Resilience, Resisting Erasure,” which opened Nov. 22, 2025. She was one of eight Indigenous consulting curators who helped shape the exhibit. Credit: Charles Fox/Special to ICT

“There’s been too much emphasis on objects and not enough on the culture and people,” Butler told ICT. “The difference here is to bring the ancient up to modern times. We want people to know there are 574 tribes in the United States…and that we are still here today. I think that’s always the message. and I think that this exhibit is a perfect example of including tribal nations in the telling of the history of these items and personal belongings.”

She noted in an earlier press conference, “We’re living, grieving, strong cultures, and that’s what is so exciting about these exhibits, to see people’s faces and to hear their voices and the language. That helps people when they walk away to understand these are living communities of people and that’s an important message.”

NAGPRA changes

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was passed by Congress in 1990 to establish protocols for the return of human remains and other objects to their specific tribes.

In January 2024, the federal regulations were strengthened with new rules requiring museums and government agencies to obtain permission from Native American tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations before displaying sacred and funerary objects.

ICT REPORTS: NAGPRA crackdown sends museums reeling

“Among the updates we are implementing are critical steps to strengthen the authority and role of Indigenous communities in the repatriation process,” then-Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, Laguna Pueblo, said at the time. “Finalizing these changes is an important part of laying the groundwork for the healing of our people.”

The changes left some museums scrambling to comply. The Field Museum in Chicago and Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University were forced to remove objects or cover displays, while the American Museum of Natural History in New York City closed its Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains Halls.

The Penn Museum had anticipated the new NAGPRA regulations, however, and had been acting accordingly before planning the new exhibit, officials said.

“I think many of those displays were really old and outdated, so they may have included items such as funerary objects or sensitive items that today tribes would not agree or want to have on display,” said Dr. Lucy Fowler Williams, the Penn Museum’s co-curator of the Native North American Gallery and associate curator-in-charge. “We were already tuned into what is sensitive for tribes and what would be appropriate to show… It’s not to say we’ve got it all perfect or anything, but we’ve just been working in this mode for a long time.”

An empty case at the entrance to a new exhibit at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia represents artifacts and other items that have been repatriated back to tribes or deemed inappropriate to display. . The museum brought in eight Native consulting curators to help develop the latest exhibit, “Native North America Gallery: Rooted in Resilience, Resisting Erasure,” which opened Nov. 22, 2025. Credit: Charles Fox/Special to ICT

The Native co-curators worked with the Penn Museum to decide which items were appropriate for display and which were not for public viewing. An empty case at the start of the gallery symbolically represents those items in the museum’s collection that were deemed to have been obtained inappropriately or were considered inappropriate for display. Many of those items have been repatriated back to their tribes.

“The inclusion of an empty display case is a deliberate intervention — not an act of censorship,” Aguilar said in a museum press release.

“It serves as a thoughtful prompt for visitors to reflect on the fraught relationship between museums and Indigenous communities,” he said. “In its absence, the object becomes an act of Indigenous sovereignty.”

Lucy Fowler Williams, left, associate curator and senior keeper of American collections at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, stands with Megan Kassabaum, Penn Anthropology professor and co-curator, at a new exhibit, “Native North America Gallery: Rooted in Resilience, Resisting Erasure,” which opened Nov. 22, 2025. Credit: Charles Fox/Special to ICT

Williams said the collaboration built positive relationships between the museum and tribes.

“I think that what is so important about the NAGPRA law is, they [ tribes] do have a great and a vested interest in the materials that we house,” Williams said. “And they have the right now to reclaim some of those items through repatriation. But this also sets up building positive relationships and moving forward together, to work together to find common ground and work together on projects that we both know are important to help regain those histories that the museum is interested in, and the communities are even more interested in.

“It’s taken us a long time to figure out that you can do it better together.”

‘More than fluff’

The gallery, which features approximately 260 historic and contemporary items, is arranged to represent the four corners of the country: the Delaware (Lenape) in the Northeast, the Eastern Band of Cherokee and Muscogee (Creek) in the Southeast, the Pueblo in the Southwest, and the Tlingit and Alutiiq people of Alaska in the Northwest.

Quay Hosey, Delaware (Lenape), stands beside a tàkhwèmpës (blouse), hémpsi tëpèthun (wrap-around skirt) and kaduna (leggings) she created specifically for a new exhibit at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. She incorporates the traditional elements of her ancestors with the styles inspired by neighboring tribes after they were forcibly moved west.The exhibit, “Native North America Gallery: Rooted in Resilience, Resisting Erasure,” opened Nov. 22, 2025, with the help of eight Native consulting curators and contributing artists. Credit: Charles Fox/Special to ICT

The exhibit includes a floral beadwork collar from the Lenape; a Tlingit Naaxein (Chilkay blanket) ceremonial robe; a contemporary glass sculpture, “Emerging from Raven,” by Tlingit artist Preston Singletary; a San Juan Pueblo robe created by Ramoncita Sandoval in 2001; Cherokee stickball equipment and rag dolls, and a pot ring and ring basket woven from yucca grass by Native consulting curator Christopher Lewis, a cultural specialist with the Zuni Pueblo. Lewis studied ancient baskets, textiles, wood, and feather work in the Penn Museum and other museums to create modern items using ancient techniques.

The words of Delaware artist Holly Wilson that accompany her sculpture, “I’m More than Fluff,” summarize the objective of the exhibit.

Delaware (Lenape) artist Holly Wilson’s sculpture, “I’m More than Fluff,” is among the items on display at a new exhibit at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. The exhibit, “Native North America Gallery: Rooted in Resilience, Resisting Erasure,” opened Nov. 22, 2025. Credit: Charles Fox/Special to ICT

“I am more than the view that my people are frozen in time, lost to a romanticized ideal of who Native Americans were, we are more, and we are still here,” according to an informational sign posted at the exhibit. “I am not this fluff: I am here: I am loud and larger than life.”

Focusing on the stories of the people first, Wilson told ICT, “tells a different story and looks at things in a different way.”

“So much of the time it’s the history of the objects and there’s nothing connecting them to the people,” she said. “So, it’s been very emotional and powerful.”

In addition to historic items and works commissioned by contemporary artists, the gallery also features interactive stations focusing on language, stories and artistic techniques, with displays about traditions, cultural items, and the hardships caused by European contact.

Oklahoma road trip

In July, four members of the Penn Museum staff, including Williams and Penn Anthropology professor Dr. Megan Kassabaum, co-curator of the exhibit, traveled to Oklahoma to spend three days with members of the Delaware Tribe.

They brought with them four items: a floral Lenape beaded collar, a woman’s traditional red blouse, a dance staff, and an ancestral stone atlatl weight, which is a decorative stone used as a counterweight on a spear.

This floral beadwork collar from the Lenape, circa 1850-1900, is among more than 250 cultural items on display in a new exhibit at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia from eight tribes across the country. The exhibit, “Native North America Gallery: Rooted in Resilience, Resisting Erasure,” opened Nov. 22, 2025. Credit: Charles Fox/Special to ICT

“We made two presentations to the tribal community members, during which time they were all invited to look closely, study, and handle the items made by their ancestors,” Williams said. “From my perspective, it was incredibly moving and important for them to see these items and to see us making the effort to go there to meet them. We hope to do more of this kind of work to try to create opportunities that strengthen the communities and the next generation, and to continue to build meaningful relationships with tribes when possible.”

Johnson, the Delaware Tribe’s cultural education director, said the items connected the past and present.

“People got to experience it and touch it and examine it, so it really went against a lot of the curatorial practices,” Johnson said. “In the two hours that we were able to spend with this beaded collar, we learned more in that time than anyone else has learned with it being behind glass for the last 100 years.”

Johnson continued, “These items have a life, and they aren’t meant to just be stuck in time. They’re really meant to be cared for and utilized wit

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/42986107

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/42986100

Feb. 7, 2026

This activity is coupled with mass protests that have included rallies by tens of thousands and walkouts by high school students after federal goons murdered in cold blood two of these volunteer observers — U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti. In response, the Trump administration is trying to diffuse the growing resistance through cosmetic changes.

On February 4, White House “border czar” Tom Homan announced that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would reduce by 700 the number of agents deployed to Minnesota. State officials, immigrant rights and community groups, and those involved in resisting the DHS “Operation Metro Surge” since early December reacted with skepticism.

Former Rep. Tom Malinowski concedes NJ-11 Democratic primary to Analilia Mejía. AIPAC's dark money influence highlighted in race.

• https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/07/savannah-guthrie-video-kidnapping-mother
• https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/10/savannah-guthrie-missing-mom-nancy

The multicolored flag was quietly taken down recently from a flagpole at the National Park Service-run site

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7617949

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/26473

When U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi declared that she would seek the death penalty against Luigi Mangione — the first capital prosecution announced during Donald Trump’s second term — legal experts immediately raised the alarm. The decision was more propaganda than judicial process, with Bondi broadcasting the news in a press release and Instagram post before Mangione was even indicted.

“One of my biggest questions is whether the Department of Justice followed its own policies in making this decision,” Robin Maher, head of the Death Penalty Information Center, told The Intercept at the time. The answer was no. “I’ve been handling capital cases for over 20 years, and I’ve never seen anything like it,” a defense attorney in the Southern District of New York, told Vanity Fair. “There’s a very detailed process that is supposed to be followed that is spelled out in the [DOJ] Justice Manual, and for the attorney general to just preempt that process is unheard of, as far as I know.”

It was perhaps foreseeable, then, that the capital case against the alleged murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson might wither under scrutiny. The presiding judge tossed the death-eligible charge against Mangione last month — another high-profile setback for an administration whose mounting authoritarianism has driven out scores of DOJ prosecutors and overwhelmed the federal courts.

Yet while Mangione received frenzied attention from the start, Bondi has continued her heedless push for new death sentences mostly under the radar. To date, according to data collected by the Federal Capital Trial Project, Bondi has authorized federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty against at least 30 defendants in 24 cases.

This doesn’t include cases in which Bondi has promised to seek death but has not yet filed an official notification, known as a “Notice of Intent.” After Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal allegedly gunned down two National Guard officers in Washington, D.C., Bondi vowed to “do everything in our power to seek the death penalty against that monster who should not have been in our country.” But prosecutors told a federal judge last week that none of the charges they have filed allow them to seek the death penalty.

Trump had always vowed to ramp up the death penalty when he returned to the White House. After carrying out 13 executions in his first term, he started his second term furious over President Joe Biden’s decision to spare the lives of 37 people on federal death row. Under Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland paused federal executions and halted new capital prosecutions almost entirely.

Trump’s response was a bloodthirsty executive order on Inauguration Day calling on prosecutors to seek the death penalty as often as possible. Before long, Bondi was fast-tracking capital prosecutions, running roughshod over procedural guardrails and upending the process that is supposed to govern such decisions at the Justice Department.

“What we’re seeing with the death penalty is exactly what we’re seeing with the extrajudicial use of violence.”

This ham-fisted approach has largely backfired. Federal judges have taken the death penalty off the table in at least nine of Bondi’s 30 individual authorizations so far — an emblem of the DOJ’s recklessness. “Prosecutors are supposed to have a firm basis to seek the death penalty before they decide to authorize it,” said Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Project. “When you see a string of cases being deauthorized because they’re not legitimate death penalty cases, that tells you that prosecutors are overreaching.”

For its part, Trump’s DOJ has argued that prosecutors have no obligation to its own protocols — and judges have no authority to enforce them. The rules and procedures that govern capital prosecutions are a mix of law and policy that Bondi is happy to dismantle, sowing chaos and curtailing defendants’ rights.

Trump’s death penalty agenda is inextricable from the violence he has unleashed in Minneapolis and beyond. The cases pursued by Bondi reflect Trump’s wish to punish immigrants, people of color, and perceived political enemies — regardless of their alleged crimes. More than two-thirds of Bondi’s death penalty authorizations have been filed against defendants who are Black, Latino, Asian, or Native American, with Black people comprising the largest share. And two-thirds target jurisdictions that, like D.C., don’t have the death penalty — states like Vermont and Maryland, as well as territories like Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

But perhaps most revealing are the authorizations driven by Trump’s spiteful fixation on undoing the work of his predecessor. Of the 30 defendants Bondi has sought to punish with a death sentence, 15 are people whose cases were previously handled by Biden’s DOJ, in which Garland decided against seeking death*.* Such decisions, known as “no-seeks,” are filed in the vast majority of death-eligible cases. Yet Trump’s DOJ has systematically sought to reverse Biden’s no-seeks – an unprecedented move that has disrupted countless federal prosecutions.

The push has not gone very well so far. At least eight of the 15 authorizations in which Bondi reversed a no-seek have been thrown out by the presiding judge, with more likely to follow. Most of these cases have proceeded as non-capital trials. But one is pending before a circuit court, with DOJ lawyers insisting the judge did not have the authority to rule as he did.

“What we’re seeing with the death penalty is exactly what we’re seeing with the extrajudicial use of violence,” said Dunham. “There’s a belief that because the Trump administration wants to, they can do it — and the law be damned.”

The extraordinary push to reverse Biden’s no-seeks was spelled out in a memo sent to DOJ employees on February 5, 2025, the day after Bondi was confirmed. Written as a rebuke of Biden, Bondi vowed to restore the death penalty to its rightful place. “This shameful era ends today,” she wrote.

The memo included a sweeping order to the DOJ’s Capital Review Committee — the set of federal prosecutors who make death penalty recommendations to the attorney general. Within 120 days, the committee was to review every pending case in which Biden’s DOJ had declined to pursue the death penalty. “This group shall reevaluate no-seek decisions and whether additional capital charges are appropriate,” she wrote.

[

Related

Despite Declining Support for the Death Penalty, Executions Nearly Doubled in 2025, Report Says](https://theintercept.com/2025/12/15/death-penalty-executions-2025/)

Attorneys general have routinely reviewed cases inherited from prior administrations. In pending capital cases, a new AG has the discretion to take death off the table. Garland withdrew dozens of death penalty authorizations brought by his predecessors, while continuing prosecution of people like Robert Bowers, who was sentenced to death in 2023 for slaughtering 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue.

Reversing a no-seek, however, is virtually unheard of. While the 1994 Federal Death Penalty Act requires prosecutors to provide a reason to withdraw a Notice of Intent, the law did not account for a scenario in which they would decide against seeking death only to later change their minds. While prosecutors can amend charges against defendants in “superseding indictments”—making it possible that a prosecution could become a capital case — the law holds that they must give notice that they will seek the death “a reasonable time before the trial.”

It wasn’t immediately clear how many cases fit the scope of Bondi’s ordered review. But one anonymous DOJ official gave the Associated Press an estimate of 459. The order to “reevaluate” hundreds of cases in just a few months was far-fetched — and seemingly rigged against certain people from the start. Bondi’s memo instructed the Capital Review Committee to pay “particular attention” to specific types of defendants: undocumented immigrants, people affiliated with “cartels or transnational criminal organizations,” and those whose alleged crimes occurred “in Indian Country or within the federal special maritime and territorial jurisdictions.”

These marching orders fit neatly into Trump’s broader agenda. But from a practical standpoint, reversing no-seeks would make a mess of prosecutions headed for a trial or plea deal. For lawyers, judges, and families on both sides, the result would be chaos and delay. For defendants, it would be an assault on their right to due process.

Capital cases and non-capital cases proceed along distinctly different tracks from the start. People facing the death penalty are entitled to specific legal protections, including the appointment of an experienced capital defense attorney known as “learned counsel,” who must immediately investigate their client’s life to uncover mitigating evidence – factors like mental illness, generational trauma, poverty, and childhood neglect or abuse. In death penalty cases, this evidence often decides whether a defendant lives or dies.

Mitigating evidence is not reserved for sentencing, however. Under well-established DOJ protocols, prosecutors weighing the death penalty must solicit such evidence from defense lawyers. The process generally begins with the local U.S. Attorney’s Office and — should prosecutors recommend the capital case move forward — culminates in a presentation before the Capital Review Committee in Washington, D.C.

Most federal cases never make it this far. But the DOJ’s Justice Manual makes clear that the meeting is a fundamental part of the process. “No final decision to seek the death penalty may be made if defense counsel has not been afforded an opportunity to present evidence and argument in mitigation,” it reads.

The whole undertaking is time-consuming for defense attorneys and costly for the courts, which must budget for the significant resources a capital case demands: the appointment of learned counsel, as well as a mitigation specialist, psychological experts, and investigators. In part for this reason, prosecutors are expected to give notice early if they plan to pursue a death sentence, by a deadline set by the presiding judge. Once the government gives word that it will not seek death, a defendant is no longer entitled to the additional resources.

In the cases subjected to Bondi’s memo, defense lawyers had been preparing for ordinary trials, without the legal and investigative tools afforded to capital defendants. They had not been doing what capital defense attorneys are obligated to do: prioritize the penalty phase of the trial, to prevent a client from being sentenced to die. “If you’re in a no-death case and it suddenly becomes a death case, the entire life history of the defendant becomes relevant when it wasn’t relevant before,” Dunham explained.

A proper mitigation investigation can take years. “In cases involving foreign nationals — who are being disproportionately targeted by the Trump administration — it not only takes years, it takes investigations in foreign countries,” Dunham points out.

Nonetheless, within days of the Bondi memo, defense teams began hearing from the Justice Department that they should prepare for a meeting with the Capital Review Committee.

It would not take long for judges to push back.

In May 2025, a federal judge in Nevada rejected the government’s first attempt to undo a no-seek. The Biden DOJ had notified defense lawyers that they would not seek the death penalty, only for prosecutors to reverse course 12 days before the trial was set to begin. Although Bondi’s memo had suggested that no-seek reversals would be based on “additional capital charges,” prosecutors offered nothing to justify their move. There was no new evidence or major developments, U.S. District Judge Miranda Du wrote in a scathing order. “The government may not now unilaterally derail the course of proceedings with regard to this matter of clear procedural and constitutional weight.”

Soon afterwards, a Trump-appointed judge in Maryland tossed Bondi’s authorizations against three men accused of committing crimes as part of MS-13. “The government assured the Defendants and this Court, in writing, that it would not seek the death penalty,” wrote U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher. “This Court will not cast aside decades of law, professional standards, and norms to accommodate the government’s pursuit of its agenda.”

The judges highlighted a glaring problem with the DOJ’s attempts to justify its actions. “Taken to its logical conclusion,” Du wrote, “the government’s position would mean that defense counsel and the Court would have to continue to treat every single capital-eligible case as a death case … lest the government attempt to reverse its decision at the last minute.”

This would be untenable for obvious reasons. It could also bankrupt the judiciary. If a no-seek could be revoked at any moment, judges could never safely withdraw the additional resources defendants were required to receive. All death-eligible defendants would be entitled to enhanced funding and resources until trial. According to the National Association of Federal Defenders, the resulting cost would be “incalculable,” with the average number of cases requiring such resources ballooning from an estimated seven per year to “roughly 150 additional cases annually.”

“Jurors may be understandably hostile to a federal government that doesn’t respect local views and decisions.”

These warnings came at an auspicious time. As Bondi ramped up prosecutions over the summer, the program that pays private court-appointed attorneys to represent indigent clients in federal cases ran out of money, leaving lawyers working without pay. Then came the federal shutdown. Those most heavily impacted were the very same legal teams facing the wave of new death penalty cases. “Federal capital defense lawyers are under tremendous pressure to secure the time, resources, and funding they need to adequately defend these cases,” said Maher, the director of the Death Penalty Information Center.

The situation was especially senseless given how few capital prosecutions actually culminate in a death sentence — let alone an execution. Public opinion has largely turned against capital punishment, with juries increasingly refusing to send people to death row. “Securing federal death sentences will be a very difficult task given the low level of public support for the death penalty and rising concerns about federal overreach and abuse,” Maher said. It will be harder still in places that have rejected capital punishment. “Jurors may be understandably hostile to a federal government that doesn’t respect local views and decisions.”

All of this made the Trump DOJ’s targeting of U.S. territories especially vexing. In Puerto Rico, whose Constitution banned capital punishment more than 70 years ago, U.S. prosecutors have failed to win a single death sentence despite some 19 authorizations over three decades. Yet Bondi, who has authorized at least one new death case in Puerto Rico, is determined to expand such efforts to a jurisdiction that has never seen a death penalty case: the U.S. Virgin Islands.

One year before the Bondi memo, federal prosecutors filed a no-seek in the case of Richardson Dangleben Jr., charged with killing a St. Croix police detective on the Fourth of July. Garland’s DOJ “intends to proceed with either a non-capital trial or plea agreement in this matter and will not seek the death penalty,” the local U.S. Attorney wrote in February 2024. This confirmed what prosecutors had told Dangleben’s defense attorney, Federal Public Defender Matthew Campbell, more than six months earlier. At the time, this was to be expected. The U.S. Virgin Islands, Campbell would later point out in an affidavit, “had no history of authorizing or carrying out capital sentences.”

In February 2025, however, Campbell got word that federal prosecutors might seek the death penalty after all. The presiding judge, U.S. District Judge Robert Molloy, swiftly appointed learned counsel, who warned that Dangleben’s defense had already been severely compromised. “If this were a capital case from its inception, we would have hired a mitigation specialist and we would have been preparing a mitigation packet for the Department of Justice from day one,” she said in a phone conference. Instead – more than a year and a half after prosecutors said that they would not seek the death penalty – the lawyers were scrambling to present before the Capital Review Committee in a matter of weeks.

In May, the DOJ filed a Notice of Intent to seek the death penalty.

The authorizations in the Virgin Islands didn’t stop there. Over the next few months, the government filed Notices of Intent against two more men, co-defendants Enock Cole and Jiovoni Smith. As in Dangleben’s case, prosecutors had previously said that they would not seek death only to reverse course after Trump returned to office. Even more shocking was an authorization in a third Virgin Islands case, that of Rosniel Diaz-Bautista. In his case, the DOJ had apparently decided to seek a death sentence “without granting the defense any opportunity to submit mitigating evidence, make a mitigation presentation, or otherwise participate in the capital-authorization process,” as Campbell wrote in a court filing. This was “wholly unprecedented in the thirty-plus year history of the modern federal death penalty.”

Judges struck down all four authorizations. Ruling in Dangleben’s case, Molloy — a Trump appointee — echoed the federal judges who had previously refused to allow the DOJ to reverse its no-seeks. Prosecutors had said “unequivocally” that they would “proceed with either a non-capital trial or plea agreement in this matter,” he wrote. The trial “will proceed as a non-death penalty case.”

But prosecutors appealed Molloy’s ruling to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which took the case. Just days before Dangleben’s trial was set to start, Molloy abruptly canceled it.

Luigi Mangione appears in Manhattan Criminal Court for an evidence hearing, Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2025, in New York.  Photo: William Farrington/New York Post via AP, Pool

In December, lawyers on both sides of Dangleben’s case appeared before a panel of Third Circuit judges in St. Croix for oral argument. It was the first time an order rejecting one of Bondi’s no-seek reversals was being tested before an appellate court. The judges have yet to rule. But if the DOJ prevails, it would potentially turn decades of case law on its head.

The National Association of Federal Defenders filed an amicus brief in support of Dangleben, warning that the government was trying to erode the authority of district courts with arguments that were “novel and extreme.” DOJ lawyers were increasingly claiming that judges lacked the power to enforce the deadlines prosecutors were supposed to follow when deciding whether to seek death — or to hold them to those decisions.

The panel seemed perplexed by the whole situation. “Do you have any cases where a no-seek notice was filed, whether formal or informal, and then the case proceeded to trial as a death case?” a judge asked William Glasser, one of two lawyers representing the Trump administration.

“Your Honor, I’m not aware of any off the top of my head,” Glasser replied.

“So this would be the first,” the judge said. He could see why some prosecutors might wish to change their minds after filing a no-seek, say, upon uncovering new evidence. But that didn’t happen in this case.

Glasser pushed back. The government “reevaluated” the evidence, he said, and decided it merited death after all. “Was it really a reevaluation?” another judge asked. “Or was it more a policy change?”

Glasser insisted that the DOJ’s actions were not as disruptive as they appeared. The panel seemed skeptical. “District court judges have not only the right but the duty to set up an orderly process,” one judge said. In Dangleben’s case, prosecutors filed their Notice of Intent just four months before the trial date.

“Four and a half months, your Honor,” Glasser clarified. But in any given case, he maintained, a trial date could simply be pushed back.

“There’s a level of game theory and gamesmanship here that seems to be inimical to what we want in trials generally and especially homicide trials,” one judge remarked. Perhaps more concerning, there was no “limiting principle” to the government’s position: The DOJ was essentially saying it could change its mind on a whim and everyone else would have to adapt.

Glasser suggested that courts could just appeal to the government’s willingness to be reasonable. “I’ve seen district judges saying to the government, ‘Look, tell me if you’re going to [bring a superseding indictment]. I need to know that for planning purposes.’ And that’s perfectly legitimate.”

Can judges really count on the government to honor such a claim?

Yes, Glasser said.

The judge asked the obvious question: Then why can’t they count on the government when it says, “We’re not seeking the death penalty?”

Glasser gave a lengthy response. But the real answer was obvious to anyone who has watched Trump’s assault on the courts. The real answer is that the DOJ can’t be trusted at all.

The post Pam Bondi Is Pushing Death Sentences for People Spared By Her Predecessor appeared first on The Intercept.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Under questioning from Democrats Tuesday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick acknowledged that he had met with Jeffrey Epstein twice after his 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a child, reversing Lutnick’s previous claim that he had cut ties with the late financier after 2005.

Lutnick again downplayed his relationship with the disgraced financier who was once his neighbor in New York City as he was questioned by Democrats during a subcommittee hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee. He described their contact as a handful of emails and a pair of meetings that were years apart.

“I did not have any relationship with him. I barely had anything to do with him,” Lutnick told lawmakers.

But Lutnick is facing growing scrutiny, including calls for his resignation, from lawmakers after the release of case files on Epstein contradicted Lutnick’s claims on a podcast last year that he had decided to “never be in the room” with Epstein again after a 2005 tour of Epstein’s home that disturbed Lutnick and his wife

"Congress must not accept this unjustifiable, $10.3 billion giveaway," said the office of Sen. Ron Wyden, who is leading the repeal effort.

"Employees are going absolutely apeshit in internal Slack about how completely awful it was."

Archived version: https://archive.is/20260210195042/https://www.404media.co/marc-benioff-jokes-ice-is-watching-salesforce-employees-who-traveled-to-the-u-s/

One critic blasted the impending move as "an obvious example of what happens when a corrupt administration and fossil fuel interests are allowed to run amok."

They’re being labeled a “threat vector” and agent of foreign adversaries