United States | News & Politics

Richard Luscombe
Fri 26 Dec 2025 11.00 EST

It is a ritual that began in August, a month after the opening of the remote detention camp celebrated by Donald Trump for its harsh conditions, and hailed by Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, as a model for the president’s aggressive detention and deportation agenda.

The open air vigils continued, and grew in size, through the brutal heat and torrential rains of the south Florida summer. They endured through a federal judge’s order in August that “Alligator Alcatraz” should close, and a subsequent reversal by an appeals court; the protesters’ voices grew louder at alleged human rights abuses and violence inflicted on detainees.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/40754419

Donny’s feeling the heat. Keep the fire going. Let’s make 2026 the year of accountability

President Donald Trump has called on the Justice Department to release the names of all Democrats tied to Jeffrey Epstein, as he called the controversy over the so-called Epstein files a “witch hunt” and a “Democrat inspired hoax.”

“Now 1,000,000 more pages on Epstein are found. DOJ is being forced to spend all of its time on this Democrat inspired Hoax,” Trump wrote Friday on Truth Social. 

“When do they say NO MORE, and work on Election Fraud etc. The Dems are the ones who worked with Epstein, not the Republicans. Release all of their names, embarrass them, and get back to helping our Country! The Radical Left doesn’t want people talking about TRUMP & REPUBLICAN SUCCESS, only a long ago dead Jeffrey Epstein - Just another Witch Hunt,” he added.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/politics/p/1607888/us-measles-cases-surge-to-highest-level-in-30-years

This year's spikes in measles cases could cause the U.S. to lose its "elimination status" by next year after the CDC reports nearly 2,000 cases and 50 outbreaks nationwide.

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers in Yakima, Washington, spent Christmas Eve arresting a man in a Walmart parking lot—even taking his already purchased groceries for themselves.

Four ICE officers in masks and tactical gear can be seen in a video surrounding a man with a car full of food while he loads it into his car. A woman watching the arrest asked ICE if she could take down the phone number of the man’s wife to let her know her husband had been detained. The ICE agents refused.

“No, guess he should’ve complied,” an agent said.

The rapper made a surprise appearance for the final day of the AmericaFest 2026 summit

"Nothing more Christian than to be a hateful wretched fuck on Jesus’ birthday," quipped one critic.

Media backlash erupts as tabloid’s 'controversial' label sparks outrage, while supporters hail Mamdani's inauguration picks as a clear stand for Palestinian rights

Good news, bad news for President Trump ... the bad news is the Kennedy Center Honors award show he hosted saw its TV ratings tank with him at the helm ... but the good news is this means he won't be quitting the presidency to become a full-time M.C.

And they stand to make millions more in cash bonuses for surveilling and tracking immigrants in service of ICE’s deportation machine.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7140094

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/15577

Eight months after the acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement saidd at a border security conference that the Trump administration aims to carry out its mass deportation operation with the same efficiency as Amazon's package deliveries, a draft document from ICE officials on Wednesday provided never-before-seen details of how the agency plans to do that using massive warehouses repurposed to hold tens of thousands of people.

The Washington Post reported on a draft solicitation document, a version of which ICE plans to send to private detention companies this week.

The proposal calls for contractors to help renovate industrial warehouses across the country, setting each up to hold up to 10,000 people detained by immigration agents at a time—albeit in facilities that will likely have poor ventilation, climate control, plumbing, and sanitation systems.

Warehouses, said physician and journalist Dr. Carolyn Barber, "are built for boxes, not humans."

🧊 WAREHOUSING HUMANS 😲ICE plans to herd their captives "into one of seven large-scale warehouses holding 5,000 to 10,000 people each, where they would be staged for deportation." www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

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— JJ in DC (@jjindc.bsky.social) December 24, 2025 at 7:43 AM

ICE aims to modify the warehouses and create separate housing units with showers and bathrooms, dining areas, medical units, recreation areas, and law libraries, according to the document.

The agency's new facilities will “maximize efficiency, minimize costs, shorten processing times, limit lengths of stay, accelerate the removal process, and promote the safety, dignity, and respect for all in ICE custody," the solicitation said.

But considering acting ICE Director Todd Lyons' comment last April that the administration should treat deportations "like a business... Like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings," rights advocates said the plan to house people in massive storage facilities was "beyond dehumanizing."

"It is as if they don't see immigrants as people but just things to be warehoused like Amazon packages," said Philip Mai, co-director at the Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University.

ICE and other federal agencies have been transporting detainees around the country this year to whichever detention facilities have space, but under the new plan, seven large warehouses in Louisiana, Virginia, Texas, Arizona, Georgia, and Missouri would be used as deportation "staging" facilities for 5,000-10,000 people each.

Sixteen smaller warehouses would each hold up to 1,500 people, allowing the government to detain 80,000 people in immigration facilities at a time—up from about 68,000 who were in detention in early December.

ICE data shows that about 48% of the people currently being detained have no criminal convictions or current charges, the Post reported.

Jonathan Cohn, political director for the advocacy group Progressive Mass, suggested that ICE's claims that it will build facilities that prioritize detainees' "dignity" ring hollow, considering the plan's details.

"They want to build a network of concentration camps," he said simply.

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7140100

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/15570

Top White House adviser Stephen Miller on Tuesday threw an angry fit at CBS News' "60 Minutes" for its leaked segment about the Trump administration sending immigrants to an El Salvadoran torture prison.

During an interview on Fox News, Miller accused "60 Minutes" of coddling people he described as violent criminals, even though records obtained by the program showed that only a fraction of the men the administration sent to El Salvador's notorious Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) were convicted of violent offenses, and nearly half had no criminal histories.

"They know that these are monsters, who got exactly what they deserved," said Miller, referring to Venezuelan men who said they were subjected to relentless torture and abuse during their imprisonment at CECOT. "Because under President Trump, we are not going to let little girls getremovedd, and murdered anymore."

Miller then encouraged CBS News boss Bari Weiss to purge producers and reporters who leaked details about her decision to spike their CECOT story to other media outlets.

"Every one of those producers at ’60 Minutes’ engaged in this revolt, fire them," Miller said. "Clean house, fire them!"

Miller: Every one of those producers at 60 minutes who engaged in this revolt, clean house and fire them, that's what I say. pic.twitter.com/YGXm30o2nR
— Acyn (@Acyn) December 24, 2025

Weiss' decision to pull the CECOT segment has reportedly sent morale at CBS News spiraling downward, with one insider telling Vanity Fair that the mood at the network now is "dismal," "confused,” “demoralized,” and "super fucked" over the move.

Compounding the frustration, the insider said, is the fact that the segment has already been leaked. and has been viewed widely online, including on a Canadian streaming app, rather than on CBS.

"I mean, it’s already out there, so now we just look like idiots," they said.

The spiking of the CECOT story was further criticized by former New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan, who wrote a Tuesday column in the Guardian slamming Weiss for "her apparent willingness to use her position to protect the powerful and take care of business for the oligarchy."

Sullivan noted that Weiss reports directly to Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison, the son of Trump ally Larry Ellison, who recently made a hostile bid to buy Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD) after Netflix announced that its own $72 billion offer to buy up the media company had been accepted.

This is relevant, Sullivan said, because Ellison will need assistance from Trump-appointed federal regulators for his bid to succeed.

"The Ellisons surely wouldn't want to antagonize anyone at this critical moment," Sullivan explained. "And notably, if Paramount prevails, they would control [WBD-owned] CNN, and could do there what they’re doing at CBS News—they could install new editorial leadership that’s more agreeable. Trump has complained bitterly for years about CNN; this matters to him."

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7141096

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/15600

The journalist who initially revealed that President Donald Trump's administration killed shipwrecked survivors of its first known boat bombing reported Tuesday that the admiral in charge consulted with a US military lawyer before ordering another strike on the two alleged drug traffickers who were clinging to debris in the Caribbean Sea.

Just days after Trump announced the September 2 bombing on social media, Intercept journalist Nick Turse exposed the follow-up strike that killed survivors, citing US officials. The attack has sparked fresh alarm in recent weeks, since late November reporting from the Washington Post and CNN that Adm. Frank "Mitch" Bradley ordered the second strike to comply with an alleged spoken directive from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to kill everyone on board, which Hegseth has denied.

After the first strike, "Bradley—then the head of Joint Special Operations Command—sought guidance from his top legal adviser," according to Turse. He interviewed several sources familiar with the admiral's recent classified briefing to Congress, former members of the Judge Advocate General's (JAG) Corps, and ex-colleagues of the JSOC staff judge advocate to whom Bradley turned, Col. Cara Hamaguchi.

As Turse reported:

How exactly [Hamaguchi] responded is not known. But Bradley, according to a lawmaker who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a classified briefing, said that the JSOC staff judge advocate deemed a follow-up strike lawful. In the briefing, Bradley said no one in the room voiced objections before the survivors were killed, according to the lawmaker.

Five people familiar with briefings given by Bradley, including the lawmaker who viewed the video, said that, logically, the survivors must have been waving at the US aircraft flying above them. All interpreted the actions of the men as signaling for help, rescue, or surrender.

Bradley, now the chief of Special Operations Command, declined to comment, the reporter noted. SOCOM also declined to make Hamaguchi available, though the command's director of public affairs, Col. Allie Weiskopf, said: "We are not going to comment on what Admiral Bradley told lawmakers in a classified hearing. He did inform them that during the strike he sought advice from his lawyer and then made a decision."

Tuesday's reporting caught the attention of the former longtime executive director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), Kenneth Roth, who has stressed that not only is it "blatantly illegal to order criminal suspects to be murdered rather than detained," but "the initial attack was illegal too."

— (@)

Various other experts and US lawmakers have similarly condemned the dozens of strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean since September—which as of Monday have killed at least 105 people, according to the Trump administration—as "war crimes, murder, or both," as the Former JAGs Working Group put it after the Hegseth reporting last month.

"Extrajudicial executions," declared public interest lawyer Robert Dunham on social media Wednesday, sharing Turse's new report and tagging the groups Amnesty International USA, HRW, and Reprieve US, as well as the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and independent experts who report to the UN Human Rights Council.

Those experts on Wednesday rebuked Trump's recent aggression toward Venezuela, including not only the boat strikes but also threats to bomb the South American country and attempts to impose an oil blockade. They said that "the illegal use of force, and threats to use further force at sea and on land, gravely endanger the human right to life and other rights in Venezuela and the region."

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

By MEE staff
Published: 23 Dec 2025 21:03 GMT
Last update: 24 Dec 2025 14:18 ET

Nearly 50 Democratic members of Congress called on US President Donald Trump to address Israeli ceasefire violations in Gaza and to withhold US assistance if attacks continue.

The letter said Israel's "bombardment against civilians, destruction of property and insufficient delivery of humanitarian aid" were jeopardising the ceasefire that the US, Egypt and Qatar brokered in October.

"It's imperative that we hold the Israeli government accountable for its actions," 49 Democratic members of the House of Representatives said.

The letter was spearheaded by Representatives Mark Pocan and Madeleine Dean. It was also endorsed by the Jewish advocacy groups J Street, the New Jewish Narrative and Win Without War.

Archive: [ https://archive.ph/R9FaM ]

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to allow the Trump administration to deploy National Guard troops in the Chicago area to support its immigration crackdown, a significant defeat for the president’s efforts to send troops to U.S. cities.

The justices declined the Republican administration’s emergency request to overturn a ruling by U.S. District Judge April Perry that had blocked the deployment of troops. An appeals court also had refused to step in. The Supreme Court took more than two months to act.