United States | News & Politics

Let’s just clear the air right up front: this is just the government mugging Somalis because they’re currently at the top of Trump’s shitlist. Prior to last month’s escalation (and subsequent murder) because some white MAGA shitbird became famous for supposedly uncovering a whole lot of Somali-based fraud in Minneapolis, Minnesota, it’s possible ICE would have bragged about robbing money from people at an international airport.

And to be clear: ICE was so indiscriminate that they were firing chemical weapons through the windows of occupied apartments.

Trump's words echo Mussolini's, and it could be his downfall.

The complaint was filed last May with the intelligence community’s inspector general, WSJ reported in its description of a November letter to Gabbard from Bakaj. It’s understood to also implicate another federal agency and to raise potential claims of executive privilege, suggesting possible White House involvement.

Members of the House and Senate intelligence panels first learned of the complaint in November, six months after it was filed, when a copy of Bakaj’s letter was shared with them, WSJ reports. Since then, Democratic staffers have tried unsuccessfully to learn more about it, congressional aides told the newspaper.

The complaint is so highly classified that Bakaj hasn’t been able to view it himself; a spokeswoman for Gabbard’s office confirmed that the complaint involved Gabbard but dismissed it as “baseless and politically motivated.”

Tulsi Gabbard’s role in brokering the call and President Trump’s decision to directly press frontline agents on the inquiry are outside the bounds of typical procedure, The Times has learned.

Despite a historic recruitment drive that added 12,000 agents in recently, the agency's administrative backbone appears to be buckling, with employees desperate enough to turn to the Reddit to detail their struggles.

In raw, unfiltered Reddit posts now spreading beyond law-enforcement circles, ICE officers describe going a month or more without a paycheque, struggling to secure medical cover for sick children, and watching promised bonuses quietly stall.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42566993

archive article: https://archive.is/vpCD7

The Trump administration’s final tranche of Epstein files released to the public included dozens of unredacted nude images and photographs of young women’s faces, according to The New York Times.

Jon Queally
Feb 02, 2026

Progressive critics of Senate Minority Chuck Schumer had fresh reasons to speak out Sunday after the powerful New York Democrat said that “one of many of [his] jobs” in the US Senate was to fight for ongoing taxpayer-funded military and financial assistance to the Israeli government, a position that has been the focus of growing protest among rank-and-file party members and the public at large in the face of Israel’s brutal genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza.

“I have many jobs as [Senate] leader... and one is to fight for aid to Israel — all the aid that Israel needs,” Schumer said at a gathering of Jewish leaders and community members in New York on Sunday.

According to Jacob Kornbluh, who provided footage of the remarks while reporting for The Forward, Schumer told the audience that his support for Jewish security funding will only continue growing under his leadership, calling it his “baby.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42557238

The mayor of Portland, Oregon, demanded U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement leave his city after federal agents launched tear gas at a crowd of demonstrators — including young children — outside an ICE facility during a weekend protest that he characterized as peaceful. 

Witnesses said agents deployed tear gas, pepper balls and rubber bullets as thousands of marchers arrived at the South Waterfront facility on Saturday. Erin Hoover Barnett, a former OregonLive reporter who joined the protest, said she was about 100 yards (90 meters) from the building when “what looked like two guys with rocket launchers” started dousing the crowd with gas.

“To be among parents frantically trying to tend to little children in strollers, people using motorized carts trying to navigate as the rest of us staggered in retreat, unsure of how to get to safety, was terrifying,” Barnett wrote in an email to OregonLive.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42557728

Maher Tarabishi’s family had hoped he could be present to say his final goodbyes to his son, Wael.

Maher, Wael’s primary caretaker, has been in federal detainment since October, separating him from his son as he battled severe health complications from a serious and rare inherited disorder.

But despite the family’s public pleas for Maher’s temporary release, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials denied their request, his attorney said

Archived at https://archive.ph/cPhmi

Jan. 31, 2026

The Times reported on Friday that the memo, which was signed by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Acting Director Todd Lyons, “expands the ability of lower-level ICE agents to carry out sweeps rounding up people they encounter and suspect are undocumented immigrants, rather than targeted enforcement operations in which they set out, warrant in hand, to arrest a specific person.”

In the past, agents have been granted the power to carry out warrantless arrests only in situations where they believe a suspected undocumented immigrant is a “flight risk” who is unlikely to comply with obligations such as appearing at court hearings.

However, the memo declares this standard to be “unreasoned” and “incorrect,” saying that agents should feel free to carry out arrests so long as the suspect is “unlikely to be located at the scene of the encounter or another clearly identifiable location once an administrative warrant is obtained.”

Jan. 31, 2026

According to a Saturday report in the New York Times, concern over ICE’s brutality has grown to such an extent that many Minnesota residents, including both documented immigrants and US citizens, have started wearing passports around their necks to avoid being potentially targeted.

CNN on Friday reported that ICE has been rounding up refugees living in Minnesota who were allowed to enter the US after undergoing “a rigorous, years-long vetting process,” and sending them to a facility in Texas where they are being prepared for deportation.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Sunday he will move to close Washington’s Kennedy Center performing arts venue for two years starting in July for construction.

Trump’s announcement on social media follows a wave of cancellations since Trump ousted the previous leadership and added his name to the building. Trump made no mention in his post of the recent cancellations.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42530526

Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez are both officers with Customs and Border Protection, ProPublica reports

Government documents have identified the two federal officers who fatally shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis as Jesus Ochoa, a border patrol agent, and Raymundo Gutierrez, an officer with Customs and Border Protection (CBP), according to ProPublica.

According to those records, Ochoa, 43, and Gutierrez, 35, were the agents who fired their weapons during the confrontation last weekend that resulted in Pretti’s death.

The shooting sparked widespread demonstrations and renewed demands for criminal inquiries into federal immigration enforcement actions. Immediately following Pretti’s killing, the Trump administration repeatedly pushed false claims about the shooting.

Before Trump sent Kilmar Ábrego García to CECOT, Bukele arrested a U.S. citizen for his tattoos. The Biden administration didn't intervene.

Archived version: https://archive.is/20260201131304/https://theintercept.com/2026/02/01/american-citizen-el-salvador-cecot-prison/

California’s private insurers are abandoning homeowners and dodging payouts while padding executives’ pockets. A public disaster insurance system would cover everyone automatically, spread risk fairly, and invest in disaster prevention.

A plan for immigration raids this week on thousands of Haitians in Springfield, Ohio shows that nothing has changed.

Democrat Taylor Rehmet won a special election for the Texas state Senate on Saturday, flipping a reliably Republican district that President Donald Trump won by 17 points in 2024.

From the founding of America, gun laws were written in racially tinged ink. In the colonial South, militias and slave patrols were created to control Black people and suppress rebellion. As early as 1704, organized slave patrols roamed Southern colonies, arming white men and tasking them with the perpetual surveillance and disarmament of enslaved populations. By the mid-18th century, this system was codified into law: As legal historian Carl Bogus recounts, between 1755 and 1757, Georgia law required every plantation’s armed militia to conduct monthly searches of “all Negro houses for offensive weapons and ammunition.”

Gun ownership in America did not initially materialize as a personal right to self-defense so much as an underpinning of white security. As slave revolts spread across the Atlantic world — culminating in the first successful Black revolution in Haiti — lawmakers moved to further codify these fears. Colonial statutes explicitly barred Black people from keeping or carrying weapons, embedding racial hierarchy directly into early American gun policy. As historian Carol Anderson told Democracy Now!, each slave revolt triggered “a series of statutes that the enslaved, that Black people, could not own weapons.”

After the Revolutionary War, the newly formed United States was deeply suspicious of a standing federal army. But for the planter South, another fear loomed larger: maintaining the internal security of a slave society. As Anderson contends, the Second Amendment functioned as a political “bribe to the South to not scuttle the Constitution.” George Mason warned placing militias under federal control would leave slaveholding states “defenseless,” not from foreign invasion, but from enslaved people. The compromise was an assurance that slave patrols and local armed forces would remain intact and beyond the reaches of federal interference.

cross-posted from: https://pawb.social/post/39029007

New Hampshire Republicans are attempting to do away with a 50-year-old property tax exemption for households and businesses with solar, contending that the policy forces residents without the clean energy systems to unwittingly subsidize those who have them. Supporters of the exemption, however, say this argument is misleading, insulting, and at odds with New Hampshire’s tradition of letting communities shape their own local governments.

The focus of the debate is a bill proposed in the New Hampshire House this month by Republican Representative Len Turcotte and several co-sponsors in his party. The measure would repeal a law, established in 1975, that authorizes cities and towns to exempt owners of solar-equipped buildings from paying taxes on whatever value their solar systems add to their property. As of 2024, 153 of the state’s municipalities — roughly two-thirds — had adopted the exemption, one of the only incentives offered in support of residential solar power in the state.

CBS wellness bro Peter Attia appears in the Epstein files, joking about Epstein's "outrageous" life that Attia couldn't tell anyone about