United States | News & Politics

Sat 17 Jan 2026 08.00 EST

Two protesters have been blinded by so-called “less-lethal” munitions deployed by federal officers during an anti-ICE protest last week in Santa Ana, California, according to reports.

Widely seen video recorded at the Santa Ana protest showed a homeland security agent shoot Kaden Rummler, 21, in the face with a less-lethal munition at a distance of only a few feet. Doctors found glass shards and plastic fragments in his skull and a fragment of metal lodged just shy of his carotid artery.

Wed 21 Jan 2026 21.24 EST

When she arrived, Stenvik said the father’s car was still running and the father and son had already been apprehended. An agent had taken Liam out of the car, led the boy to his front door and directed him to knock on the door asking to be let in, “in order to see if anyone else was home – essentially using a five-year-old as bait”, the superintendent said in a statement.

Stenvik said another adult living in the home was outside during the encounter and had pleaded to take care of Liam so the boy could avoid detention, but was denied. Liam’s older brother, a middle schooler, came home 20 minutes later to find his father and brother missing, Stenvik said. Two school principals from the district also arrived at the home to offer support.

Marc Prokosch, an attorney representing the family, said the family has an active asylum case and shared paperwork showing the father and son had arrived to the US at a port of entry, meaning an official crossing point.

“The family did everything they were supposed to in accordance with how the rules have been set out,” he said. “They did not come here illegally. They are not criminals.” He said there was no order of deportation against them and he believes the father and son have remained together in detention.

Wed 21 Jan 2026 16.08 EST

The tactics of the federal force, too, have grown more aggressive and indiscriminate. Armed officers have appeared at schools, daycares, churches and mosques. Masked agents are stopping residents at traffic lights, or on their walk to the grocery store, demanding – at gunpoint – that they prove their citizenship.

The agents are targeting not only undocumented immigrants, but also those with legal immigration status and valid visas, US citizens and tribal citizens. On Tuesday, a group of local law enforcement officers said even their agents were being pulled over, reporting that off-duty police officers of color had been stopped and questioned at gunpoint by the administration’s immigration force.

A medical examiner has determined that an Cuban migrant held in solitary confinement at an immigration detention facility in Texas died as a result of homicide.

Lawyers, journalists, and others are alarmed by an internal US Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo claiming that ICE agents can forcibly enter a private residence without a judicial warrant, consent, or an emergency.

Just a year and a half ago, Senator Rand Paul sponsored a bill that would make it illegal for federal government employees to ask internet companies to remove any speech. Now, in a NY Post op-ed, Paul proudly announces that he did exactly that—formally contacting Google executives to demand they remove a video he didn’t like.

"While masked officers terrorize communities—smashing into cars, harassing citizens, and inflicting violence with impunity—Trump’s corporate backers are laughing their way to the bank."

“These masked men with no regard for the rule of law are causing long-term damage to our state and to our country,” said the mayor of Lewiston.

On Wednesday, nine Democrats voted with Republicans to hold Bill Clinton in contempt of Congress, while three Democrats voted to hold Hillary Clinton in contempt.

If the full House votes in favour, the Department of Justice would decide whether to prosecute the charges, which is a misdemeanour offence punishable by a fine up to $100,000 (£74,500) and imprisonment up to a year.

In a statement, Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer urged the full House to hold the Clintons in contempt, saying his committee had sent a "clear message" that "no one is above the law, and justice must be applied equally—regardless of position, pedigree, or prestige".

The Clintons had contended the subpoenas - a legal orders to provide testimony - were "nothing more than a ploy to attempt to embarrass political rivals, as President Trump has directed".

US justice department’s website shows the disgraced former CEO petitioned Donald Trump over fraud conviction

Sixteen years after the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, the consumer watchdog group Public Citizen says it "paves the way for demagogues like Donald Trump to seize power."

A Republican-led House committee voted on Wednesday to advance contempt of Congress resolutions against former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, escalating a high-profile investigation into the late financier Jeffrey Epstein and setting the stage for potential votes by the full House next month.

Fearing primaries for abetting Trump’s crackdown, top Democrats are turning away from a deal they crafted to avoid another government shutdown.

Archived version: https://archive.is/newest/https://theintercept.com/2026/01/21/democrats-ice-funding-compromise/

A federal judge previously issued an injunction meant to prevent immigration agents from detaining and pepper-spraying peaceful observers.

Attacking a peaceful protest is a crime, whether or not there is an injunction. This is a signal to ICE thar they will be protected as they commit crimes and levy war against Americans

Forget Greenland; the American public are the real target

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/46040257

In practical terms, smartphones generate at least three kinds of digital exposure.

The first is identification risk, including through facial recognition technology. When you post footage, you may be sharing identifiable faces, tattoos, voices, license plates, school logos or even a distinctive jacket. That can enable law enforcement to identify people in your recordings through investigative tools, and online crowds to identify people and dox or harass them, or both.

That risk grows when agencies deploy facial recognition in the field. For example, ICE is using a facial recognition app called Mobile Fortify.

Facial recognition accuracy also isn’t neutral. National Institute of Standards and Technology testing has documented that the technology does not perform equally across different demographic groups, meaning the risk of misidentification is not evenly distributed across groups. For example, studies have shown lower recognition accuracy for people with darker skin color.

Second is the risk of revealing your location. Footage isn’t just images. Photos and video files often contain metadata such as timestamps and locations, and platforms also maintain additional logs. Even if you never post, your phone still emits a steady stream of location signals.

This matters because agencies can obtain location through multiple channels, often with different levels of oversight.

Agencies can request location or other data from companies through warrants or court orders, including geofence warrants that sweep up data about every device in a place during a set time window.

Agencies can also buy location data from brokers. The Federal Trade Commission has penalized firms for unlawfully selling sensitive location information.

First announced by faith leaders and unions on Jan. 13, Minnesota businesses have begun announcing plans to join the action.

This is shaping up to be the first US general strike in living memory.

In a video posted online last week, two detectives with the Miami Beach Police Department were filmed questioning Raquel Pacheco, a former candidate for statewide office and longtime resident of the seaside resort city, over a post she made criticizing what she said was Mayor Steven Meiner’s hypocrisy around Israel and Palestine.

“This Facebook post was protected speech, and it’s not a close question — not remotely,” said Daniel Tilley, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. “In context, the actions and statements by government officials here are likely to have a chilling effect on those who would otherwise voice their critique of the government.”

Pacheco’s comment came in response to a post by Meiner in which he called out New York City for alleged antisemitism after Mayor Zohran Mamdani rescinded his predecessor’s controversial executive orders on Israel. Meiner post echoed the Israeli government’s response to Mamdani.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/41943750

Britain Rodriguez, 31, a resident of Orange County, said he was standing at the bottom of some steps with other demonstrators when federal officers above opened fire at them, hitting him in the face.

“I remember hitting the ground and feeling like my eye exploded in my head,” he said.

In a video his girlfriend shared with The Times, Rodriguez can be seen on the ground, holding his face as he screams in agony before demonstrators escorted him from the area.

“I can’t see, I got shot in the eye, I can’t see,” Rodriguez says before noticing blood on his hand. “I’m bleeding.”

Rodriguez and his girlfriend, Ale, who declined to give her last name, said the officers gave no warning before firing at them.

Archived at https://archive.ph/D90dN

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/41943811

Minnesota resident Will Stancil is a lawyer, policy researcher, and onetime candidate for the state’s house of representatives who has long been a voluble progressive presence on X and Bluesky. Over the past week, Stancil has become a mainstay of citizen patrols, tracking ICE agents around the city in his Honda Fit and sharing his experiences with his 100,000-plus followers. On Friday, I spoke with Stancil about what he has witnessed over the past few days.

...

Do the videos we’ve seen — of violent arrests, of agents deploying flash-bangs and tear gas on bystanders — capture the full extent of what’s happening?

No. In the private rapid-response channels, people will share many, many videos, and they don’t want to bring them public because they don’t want to be identified. People are worried. So there’s lots and lots more private stuff that is never circulating. The other thing is I think it’s really difficult to capture. The last few days have been calmer. But for the first week or so, it was really hard to convey the unrelenting pace of this stuff. I had a journalist come ride along — he just published an article about it. I had been talking about how crazy it was, and I could tell he was a little bit skeptical. He thought, Okay, maybe we’ll see an ICE car. In a two-hour ride, we chased four ICE convoys onto the highway, saw someone violently abducted alive in front of us, then saw a separate ICE convoy tear-gas a major commercial intersection for no reason at all. In two hours.

We have these rapid-response channels. I mean, I got to the point where — and this is very difficult to do — but I got to the point where I mute them or turn them off or leave them when I come home in the evening because getting the constant updates — as much as I want to be informed of my community, if I’m not out there and can’t do anything about it, I am a raw nerve all day and night. I come home and I just have to lie on the couch and just shut everything off and shut my brain off because you’ll go insane hearing about what all they’re doing.

Archived at https://archive.ph/fiwGH