"Two citizens were arrested outside an ICE facility in Texas where the Trump administration is imprisoning children, including Liam Ramos, the 5-year-old from Minnesota who was arrested after coming home from preschool. He's being detained with his father. Liam's father is a legal asylum seeker who's followed proper protocols and has no criminal record."
Dilley Texas Ice Gulag
A US Army unit created to train Afghan forces will operate the Combined Jungle Operations Training Course (CJOTC) in Panama. Graduates of that 21-day course will receive the US Army's "Jungle" tab.
Outdated US Army Jungle Expert Patch
Six senators accused Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche this week of having a conflict of interest when he shut down investigations into crypto companies, dealers and exchanges and eliminated an enforcement team dedicated to looking for crypto-related fraud and money-laundering schemes. A letter written by Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Dick Durbin and Mazie Hirono and signed by Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse, Christopher Coons and Richard Blumenthal cited a ProPublica investigation that revealed Blanche owned at least $159,000 worth of crypto-related assets when he ordered an end to the work.
National leadership at the Department of Veterans Affairs initially blocked a memorial planned for Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old ICU nurse who was shot and killed by federal agents in Minneapolis. In an email obtained by The New Republic, officials at the Minneapolis VA claimed that "local leadership was instructed to pause the memorial" for Pretti, initially scheduled for Tuesday at noon. Two employees also told The Washington Post that a memorial for Pretti had been initially blocked, but another service is scheduled for next week. In response to an inquiry Wednesday about why the first memorial was canceled, Minneapolis VA Medical Center spokesperson Melanie Nelson told TNR that the organization was still working to schedule an event.
A U.S. Customs and Border Patrol employee is facing charges after a Minnesota state trooper found him passed out in his car this week, "covered in vomit," according to a report. Alfredo Mancillas Jr., 31, of Corpus Christi, Texas, was found in St. Paul "slumped over in the driver's seat" around 3:30 a.m. near Allianz Field, according to court documents reviewed by the Sahan Journal. The vehicle reeked of booze and was parked illegally in a no-parking zone. Mancillas displayed telltale signs of intoxication, including "bloodshot and watery eyes" along with visible vomit all over him, the report said. After failing a field sobriety test, the agent refused to take a breath test. He was arrested and faces charges of 3rd and 4th degree driving while impaired. Read more
Nine progressive prosecutors from cities around the US are launching a coalition to prosecute federal law enforcement officers who violate state laws called "Project for the Fight Against Federal Overreach" (AKA FAFO). Elected prosecutors from Philadelphia, Hennepin County, MN, Austin; Dallas; Pima County in Arizona, which includes Tucson; and several cities in Virginia: Fairfax, Falls Church and Arlington, Portsmouth, and Norfolk, have so far joined FAFO.
Prosecute ICE Assassins
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in a court filing Monday, defended its subpoena seeking potential witnesses and victims of antisemitism at the university and said the request is not unusual for such investigations. The commission is seeking employees' names, home addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses to further an investigation it began in 2023 over the school's treatment of Jewish faculty and other employees regarding antisemitism complaints following Hamas' attack on Israel. "The EEOC insists that Penn produce this information without the consent " and indeed, over the objections " of the employees impacted while entirely disregarding the frightening and well-documented history of governmental entities that undertook efforts to identify and assemble information regarding persons of Jewish ancestry," the university wrote in its filing.
President Donald Trump, his two eldest sons, and his family business sued the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Treasury Department over alleged leaks of their confidential tax information, court records showed Thursday. The plaintiffs seek at least $10 billion in damages, according to the lawsuit in Miami federal court.
Rock legend Neil Young gifted his entire music archive to Greenland residents.
Young, a vocal critic of President Donald Trump, said he hoped the offering "will ease some of the unwarranted stress ... you are experiencing from our unpopular and hopefully temporary government," Pitchfork reported Tuesday.
Mary Margaret Olohan @MaryMargOlohan Follow The Minnesota Star Tribune confirmed with Alex Pretti's family that the man in this video is indeed Alex Pretti. Filmed by @thenewsmovement on January 13, two weeks before Pretti was shot by ICE:
A list of 30 agents working for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) shows that 29 of them have been charged with sexual offenses, and two-thirds committed sexual crimes against children, according to a list published by the Ohio Immigrant Alliance and the Pacific Antifascist Collective. "The off-duty Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent who killed Keith Porter, Jr. has a history of racism, child abuse, and explosive tempers. Despite murdering Porter in cold blood, Brian Palacios remains free without charge and employed by ICE," the groups' website states, invoking the name of Porter, a Black 43-year-old father of two who was fatally shot by an ICE officer on New Year's Eve outside his apartment complex
Senate Democrats are finally showing a united front after federal immigration agents killed two people in Minneapolis. Read more
Alarming critics, the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Madhu Gottumukkala, accidentally uploaded sensitive information to a public version of ChatGPT last summer, Politico reported.
The Minneapolis revolt tells us this: even in Trump's America, the people have power too
After months of community resistance, the president backed down. Leadership from below succeeded when politics as usual failed Read more
The U.S. deficit with its global trading partners nearly doubled in November as the shortfall with the European Union swelled and the impact of President Donald Trump's tariffs worked their way through the economy, the Census Bureau reported Thursday. The increase in the deficit counters Trump's efforts to use tariffs to reduce imbalances around the globe. When announcing so-called reciprocal tariffs in April 2025, the White House used the level of trade deficits with varying countries as a baseline for determining the duties. As the year went by, Trump softened his stance. A framework agreement between the U.S. and the EU in August put the tariff rate at 15% on most European goods and sought to stabilize relations between the two sides.
We have to be clear about what we are witnessing from Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Minnesota.
As a combat soldier, I recognize a mission when I see one " not because it's announced, but because it's being carried out. In the span of weeks, ICE and Border Patrol operations in Minneapolis have resulted in the deaths of two Minnesotans. In over a year of combat in Iraq, my battalion of 500 soldiers did not kill a single person.
