Anti-ICE Resistance Sprang Up Across Red States in 2025


In Texas, North Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Florida, and beyond, grassroots resistance to ICE is growing.

By Sonali Kolhatkar , 

Truthout

December 29, 2025

Protesters march through uptown after gathering at First Ward Park for the "No Border Patrol In Charlotte" rally on November 15, 2025, in Charlotte, North Carolina.Grant Baldwin / Getty Images


Grassroots organizations around the United States, with little to no support from local authorities, have spent much of the past year defending themselves against President Donald Trump’s deployments of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and the National Guard. While community defense efforts in large urban metropolises such as Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, and Portland have attracted the most media coverage, anti-ICE activity is also thriving in Republican-controlled states like Texas and North Carolina.

Many grassroots groups in conservative-leaning states are documenting their own work on Instagram, using social media accounts as hubs to update local communities on ICE activity, recruit volunteers, and announce trainings. They may face a more challenging terrain than those organizing in Democratic-controlled states, given the active collaboration of law enforcement agencies with ICE.

While red state anti-ICE organizing may be less likely to feature whistles, bullhorns, and other confrontational tactics seen in cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, common themes are emerging, consistent with organizing in liberal cities. The anti-ICE playbook in red states involves creating a hotline for residents to report ICE activity, “Know Your Rights” sessions that give people legal advice on what information they should withhold when confronted by ICE, and ICE-watch trainings for observers documenting arrests. Many groups are also ensuring that the families of those arrested and detained have legal and financial support.

The anti-ICE playbook in red states involves creating a hotline for residents to report ICE activity, “Know Your Rights” sessions, and ICE-watch trainings.

This non-comprehensive roundup of anti-ICE activities is an indication of how widespread resistance to fascism became in 2025.


North Carolina



In North Carolina cities such as Raleigh and Charlotte, a grassroots organization called Siembra NC is leading efforts to protect community members from ICE. Siembra NC was founded in 2017 in direct response to the first Trump administration and offers a hotline for residents reporting ICE arrests, as well as abusive employers and landlords. If ICE agents attempt to enter people’s home or car, Siembra NC advises locking the door and starting a livestream on social media to document the interaction.

In an Instagram post in mid-November, Siembra NC also documented its members showing up outside grocery stores in Charlotte when ICE agents arrested shoppers. Volunteers who were trained as part of Siembra NC’s “Safe to Work, Safe to School” patrols ensured that those being arrested were informed of their right to remain silent and knew not to sign any documents.


Jail Support for Immigrants Held in Missouri Offers Resistance in a Red State
Local communities resist ICE by reaching inside jails and building networks of support.
By Brian Dolinar , Truthout/TheAppeal December 6, 2025

In a piece for Teen Vogue, Siembra NC’s co-executive director Nikki Marín Baena explained how her organization began training people in the parking lots of immigrant neighborhoods on how to identify ICE agents. “After a volunteer confirmed an officer’s identity, they would alert neighbors to the agent’s presence, and our dispatch team would send a text message to our contacts in the area,” she wrote. Siembra NC’s efforts are effective. According to Baena, “in every case we worked on, when the agents realized they were being watched, they abandoned their stakeout.”

Having learned how to respond to anti-immigrant attacks in Trump’s first term, Siembra NC has published a downloadable playbook as part of its “Defend and Recruit” campaign, and on July 23, held a virtual event specifically designed for organizers in red states engaged in ICE-watch activities.


Pennsylvania



The People’s Defense Front (PDF) in Northern Appalachia, which is located in central Pennsylvania, offers community defense trainings against “police violence, landlord cruelty, white supremacists and abusive bigots.” Its Instagram account documents the August 19 arrests of 26 workers by ICE agents and state troopers. Labeling the effort as “Know Your Enemy,” PDF published photos of those armed agents and asked community members for help in identifying them.

PDF offers a Centre County Rapid Response Network hotline for community members to report ICE activity, and recruits volunteers to sign up for and get trained in conducting anti-ICE patrols. “We patrol every morning and night,” said the group in an online post, and “maintain close contact with workers and the community.”

PDF is also collaborating with the Student Committee for Defense and Solidarity (SCDS) in State College where Penn State’s campus is located, and where ICE activity was documented in July 2025. SCDS explained in a post that, “In confronting ICE through our patrols, we raise the cost of ICE’s violence with the aim to undercut their power and deter their presence in the area.”


Texas



In Dallas and Fort Worth, Vecinos Unidos DFW is holding “Know Your Rights” and ICE-watch trainings, and organizing people by neighborhoods. “People who know both how to defend their rights and how immigration agents are operating nearby are less likely to be separated from their families,” said the group on Instagram. Like many other organizations, they have a community defense hotline that people can call to report ICE activity.

Vecinos Unidos DFW also began a court watch program after immigrants were arrested when they showed up to their court dates. The grassroots organization is calling on local residents to be present at immigration hearings. “With ICE activity picking up in our area,” said Vecinos Unidos DFW on Instagram, “it’s crucial to stay vigilant and learn our rights to protect ourselves and our neighbors.” The group is also organizing people to prevent Dallas police from cooperating with ICE agents, and raising funds as mutual aid for immigrant families who have been separated by detention and deportation.


Alabama



The Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice, along with other organizations local to Birmingham, has set up an ICE-watch program called Bham Migra Watch, alerting local communities of the locations, times, and dates of ICE arrests.

In September 2025, after dozens of people were arrested in Russellville, Franklin County, on their way to work, the group urged people to call their hotline with any information or requests for legal and other help.

Bham Migra Watch also informs residents of their rights if they are approached by ICE agents, and recruits volunteers to sign up for trainings for “all Birmingham friends interested in fighting against ICE aggression,” and for those located in Montgomery and Montevallo to “fight for the community around you.”


Florida



Defensa Gulf Coast is a Florida-centered effort in and around Pensacola, describing itself as a group “formed to defend our immigrant neighbors against the racist deportation machine.” Operating out of the “Pensacola Liberation Center,” Defensa Gulf Coast has participated in efforts to shut down the notorious immigrant jail known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” and, like other groups, established a hotline to report ICE sightings.


Tennessee



An effort centered in Nashville called Music City Migra Watch is encouraging local residents to carefully document ICE activity and send it to them. The group conducts ICE-watch and court-watch trainings “meant to empower our community, build safety, and support those who need it most.” It also supports trainings in surrounding localities including Springfield, Murfreesboro, and Mount Juliet. Beyond local community defense, Music City Migra Watch is leading a boycott of Avelo Airlines, a company known for collaborating with ICE to transport arrested immigrants.


“How many of us would it take to put the focus on the attacks that will touch nearly every American, not simply those terrorizing immigrants?”


Looking Toward Resistance in 2026



Given the increasing number of U.S. citizens caught in ICE’s dragnet, organizers are warning that attacks on immigrants are just the beginning. Siembra NC’s Baena issued a challenge to those who want ICE out of their communities, saying, “How many of us would it take to put the focus on the attacks that will touch nearly every American, not simply those terrorizing immigrants?”

After a year of ICE violence, groups like hers are bracing themselves for increased staffing at the federal agency and a greater armed presence on city streets. The 2025 “Know Your Rights” sessions and trainings on anti-ICE defense offer a strong foundation for local communities to ramp up activism in many forms. “We are more ready than ever if ICE accomplishes its goal of hiring 600 percent more officers,” said Baena.

And readiness means expanding activities from the streets to the halls of power. “In 2026 we are going to switch from ‘defense’ to ‘offense,’ ensuring we don’t simply watch out for ICE agents but create the conditions necessary to hold elected officials accountable for guaranteeing dignity for everyone in our state,” Baena promised.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Sonali Kolhatkar

Sonali Kolhatkar is a monthly contributor to Truthout. She is an award winning multimedia journalist and author. She is the host and executive producer of Rising Up With Sonali, a nationally syndicated weekly television and radio program airing on Pacifica stations and Free Speech TV. She was most recently Senior Editor at YES! Media covering race, economy, and democracy, and is currently Senior Correspondent for the Economy for All Project at the Independent Media Institute, and a monthly columnist for OtherWords, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies. Her writings have been published in LA Times, Salon, The Nation, In These Times, Truthdig, and more. Her books include Talking About Abolition: A Police-Free World is Possible (Seven Stories, 2025), Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights, 2023), and Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (Seven Stories, 2006). Her first novel, Queen of Aarohi will publish in 2027 by Red Hen Press. Her website is www.SonaliKolhatkar.com.

'Big issue': Analysts reveal Trump's true intentions behind focus on Minnesota fraud

Robert Davis
December 29, 2025 

RAW STORY

President Donald Trump is not being honest about his intentions for focusing his attention on social services fraud committed in Minnesota.

The fraud cases gained renewed attention over the weekend after a right-wing influencer named Nick Shirley posted a video on X that claimed to find $110 million in child care fraud committed by Somalians in Minnesota. Trump and several MAGA voices have focused intently on the cases, using them to attack Trump's political foes like Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat.

Former Trump communications director Anthony Scaramucci and British journalist Katty Kay discussed the story on a new episode of the podcast "The Rest is Politics US." They argued that Trump's true intentions for focusing on the story is to change the subject of the 2026 midterm from the economy to immigration.

"The step-back, the bigger picture is about welfare and fraud and government and trust in government and thrown into that [is] immigration, particularly Muslim immigrants, because these most Somali immigrants will be Muslim immigrants and you've got a kind of toxic mix there of things that will be brought up," Kay said. "I can imagine the Haitian immigrants and eating the dogs and the cats was brought up in the last election campaign. This is going to resurface in the midterms."

"That's the big issue for me," Scaramucci said. "If I look at the midterms coming up and giving people a a preview of this, it's going to be about presidential approval rating. It's going to be about jobs and inflation. It's going to be about the state of the economy."

Trump's approval rating has steadily fallen since he took office in January. According to The Economist, his approval rating stands at 39%, which represents a 17-point decline since the beginning of the year.

Trump's approval rating on the economy is also hovering in the mid-30s, according to polls.

A recent AP-NORC poll found that immigration is one of Trump's strongest issues, with a 49% approval rating.

'Turned off the money spigot': Trump admin freezes all Minnesota child care funding

Matthew Chapman
December 30, 2025 
RAW STORY


Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) (Photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr)


The Trump administration is clamping down on federal funding for child care programs in Minnesota.

The announcement came from Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services Jim O'Neill, who posted the specifics to X on Tuesday evening.

"We have frozen all child care payments to the state of Minnesota," he wrote. "You have probably read the serious allegations that the state of Minnesota has funneled millions of taxpayer dollars to fraudulent daycares across Minnesota over the past decade."

As part of the crackdown, wrote O'Neill, all payments from the Administration of Children and Families "will require a justification and a receipt or photo evidence before we send money to a state," and in Minnesota specifically, Gov. Tim Walz is being ordered to provide "a comprehensive audit" of day care centers. Additionally, a fraud-reporting hotline and email address have been established.

"Whether you are a parent, provider, or member of the general public, we want to hear from you," O'Neill concluded. "We have turned off the money spigot and we are finding the fraud."

The controversy began with a right-wing freakout over a New York Times deep dive into a criminal investigation that took place in 2022 into fraud in Minnesota pandemic relief programs, where some of the perpetrators were part of the Somali diaspora community in the Twin Cities. Even though the Biden administration already cracked down on this fraud, conservative influencers went looking for more examples, and YouTuber Nick Shirley purported to uncover day care centers in Minnesota Somali neighborhoods that were taking in millions in federal money while not actually having any kids enrolled in them.

So far, experts have reacted to this report with skepticism, and a CBS News fact-check indicated that a day care at the heart of the accusations, while it was investigated by the state for code violations, actually did have kids enrolled.

'Very scary': Leah Remini says Trump's inner circle has been 'infiltrated' by Scientology

JUST TWO SCIENTOLOGISTS,

NEITHER ARE TOM CRUISE

Leah Remini talking to comedian Chelsea Handler on May 21, 2017

 (Image: Screengrab via Netflix Is a Joke / YouTube)

Carl Gibson

December 30, 2025

ALTERNET

Former Scientologist Leah Remini is warning that members of the religious group she escaped from have successfully carried out an "infiltration" of President Donald Trump's inner circle.

On Tuesday, Redstate founder Erick Erickson tweeted that there were a "lot of Scientologists hanging out in the President's orbit lately," which could be a reference to two Scientologists prominent in conservative politics. Real estate developer Grant Cardone — who spoke at Trump's Madison Square Garden rally in October of 2024 — was also given a speaking slot at Turning Point USA's annual Americafest event in Phoenix, Arizona this month.

Cardone is also a featured content creator on far-right PragerU's website, where he is described as "an entrepreneur, real estate investor and sales trainer recognized for his high-energy approach to business and personal growth." In 2011, the Village Voice reported that Cardone had reached OT VIII (Operating Thetan Level Eight), which is the highest level within the organization.

In addition to Cardone, Scientologist Patricia Duggan is also close to Trump, as he appointed her to the board of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts earlier this year. Duggan's level within the organization is not publicly known, though she is the largest single donor to the group, with the Tampa Bay Times reporting that the Church of Scientology created the donor category "Patron of Legend" just for her. Her then-husband Robert Duggan said in 2016 he donated ore than $360 million to the group.

"Yes, this is accurate, Erick, and very scary," Remini wrote in a response to Erickson's tweet. "Thank you for always being aware of the dangers of Scientology and their successful infiltration of the Trump administration and the federal government overall."

The act of infiltrating government agencies is a longstanding practice of the organization, according to a 1980 St. Petersburg Times report that won the Pulitzer Price, In the 1970s, the Church of Scientology carried out a plan dubbed "Operation Snow White" in which approximately 5,000 Scientologists sought to gain access to 136 government agencies, embassies and private organizations to purge all documents casting the organization in an unfavorable light. An IRS librarian spotted two Scientologists at its Washington D.C. office, which led to a federal raid on the group's buildings resulting in the seizure of more than 48,000 documents.

Social Security Administration ‘In Turmoil’ as New Reporting Details Damage Done by Trump Cuts

In-depth reporting from the Washington Post found the Social Security Administration is dealing with “record backlogs that have delayed basic services to millions of customers.”


Brad Reed
Dec 30, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

An in-depth report published by the Washington Post on Tuesday offers new details about the damage being done to the Social Security Administration during President Donald Trump’s second term.

The Post, citing both internal documents and interviews with insiders, reported that the Social Security Administration (SSA) is “in turmoil” one year into Trump’s second term, resulting in a customer service system that has “deteriorated.”




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The chaos at the SSA started in February when the Trump administration announced plans to lay off 7,000 SSA employees, or roughly 12% of the total workforce.

This set off a cascade of events that the Post writes has left the agency with “record backlogs that have delayed basic services to millions of customers,” as the remaining SSA workforce has “struggled to respond to up to 6 million pending cases in its processing centers and 12 million transactions in its field offices.”

The most immediate consequence of the staffing cuts was that call wait times for Social Security beneficiaries surged to an average of roughly two-and-a-half hours, which forced the agency to pull workers employed in other divisions in the department off their jobs.


Commissioner of the Social Security Administration Frank Bisignano looks on as US President Donald Trump speaks in the White House in Washington, DC on August 14, 2025.
(Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

However, the Post‘s sources said these employees “were thrown in with minimal training... and found themselves unable to answer much beyond basic questions.”

One longtime SSA employee told the Post that management at the agency “offered minimal training and basically threw [transferred employees] in to sink or swim.”

Although the administration has succeeded in getting call hold times down from their peaks, shuffling so many employees out of their original positions has damaged the SSA in other areas, the Post revealed.

Jordan Harwell, a Montana field office employee who is president of American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 4012, said that workers in his office no longer have the same time they used to have to process pay stubs, disability claims, and appointment requests because they are constantly manning the phones.

An anonymous employee in an Indiana field office told the Post that she has similarly had to let other work pile up as the administration has emphasized answering phones over everything else.

Among other things, reported the Post, she now has less time to handle “calls from people asking about decisions in their cases, claims filed online, and anyone who tries to submit forms to Social Security—like proof of marriage—through snail mail.”

Also hampering the SSA’s work have been new regulations put in place by Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency that bar beneficiaries from making changes to their direct deposit information over the phone, instead requiring them to either appear in person at a field office or go online.

The Indiana SSA worker told the Post of a recent case involving a 75-year-old man who recently suffered a major stroke that left him unable to drive to the local field office to verify information needed to change his banking information. The man also said he did not have access to a computer to help him change the information online.

“I had to sit there on the phone and tell this guy, ‘You have to find someone to come in... or, do you have a relative with a computer who can help you or something like that?’” the employee said. “He was just like, ‘No, no, no.’”

Social Security was a regular target for Musk during his tenure working for the Trump administration, and he repeatedly made baseless claims that the entire program was riddled with fraud, even referring to it as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”

Judge Slaps Down Trump Administration Scheme to ‘Starve’ Nation’s Top Consumer Protection Watchdog

“If the CFPB is not there, people have nowhere to turn when they get cheated,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren.


Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought speaks at the White House on Monday, September 29, 2025.
(Photo by Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Brad Reed
Dec 30, 2025
COMMON DREAMS


President Donald Trump and his administration have been openly plotting to scrap the nation’s top consumer protection watchdog, but a federal judge has at least temporarily put those plans on hold.

US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled on Tuesday that the US Federal Reserve must continue providing funds to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), rejecting the Trump administration’s claims that the nation’s central bank that the nation’s central bank currently lacks to “combined earnings” to fund the bureau’s operations.




‘Grave Danger’: Warnings as Supreme Court Looks Ready to Hand Trump Even More Unchecked Power

The administration had argued that the Federal Reserve should not be making payments to the CFPB because it has been operating at a loss since 2022, when it began a series of aggressive interest rate hikes aimed at taming inflation.

However, Jackson rejected this reasoning and accused the administration of using it as a cover to defund an agency that the president and top officials such as Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, had long expressed a desire to abolish.

“It appears that defendants’ new understanding of ‘combined earnings’ is an unsupported and transparent attempt to starve the CPFB of funding,” the judge wrote.

The CFPB must now be funded at least until the DC Circuit of Appeals weighs in on an ongoing lawsuit brought by the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) against Vought over layoffs at the agency that is scheduled for hearings in February.

The NTEU took a victory lap in the wake of the ruling and taunted Vought for his defeat.

“Yet another loss for Rusty Vought,” the union posted on Bluesky. “Wonder how much longer Donald is going to put up with this?”

While it will continue to receive funding for the time being, the CFPB has still seen its ability to fulfill its mission severely diminished during Trump’s second term.

A Tuesday report from Reuters claimed that the CFPB is “on the brink of collapse” given that the Trump administration, congressional Republicans, and industry lawsuits have “undone a decade’s worth of CFPB rules on matters ranging from medical debt and student loans to credit card late fees, overdraft charges and mortgage lending.”

The report also noted that, during Trump’s second term, the CFPB has “dropped or paused its probes and enforcement actions, and stopped supervising the consumer finance industries, leading to a string of resignations” at the agency.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who first drew up plans to create the CFPB in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, explained the agency’s importance in an interview with Reuters.

“I was stunned by the number of people in financial trouble who had lost a job or got sick but who had also been cheated by one or more of their creditors,” she said. “For no agency was consumer protection a first priority, it was somewhere between fifth and 10th, which meant there was just no cop on the beat. If the CFPB is not there, people have nowhere to turn when they get cheated.”

THIRD WORLD U$A

In Blow to ‘Fetal Personhood’ Push, Alabamian Serving 18 Years After Stillbirth Gets New Trial

“I’m hopeful that my new trial will end with me being freed, because I simply lost my pregnancy at home because of an infection,” said Brooke Shoemaker, who has already spent five years in prison.

Brooke Shoemaker has served five years of an 18-year sentence after a stillbirth. On December 22, 2025, an Alabama judge threw out her conviction and ordered a new trial.
(Photo: Shoemaker family via AL.com)

Jessica Corbett
Dec 30, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

While Brooke Shoemaker and a rights group representing her in court are celebrating this week after an Alabama judge threw out her conviction and ordered a new trial, her case is also drawing attention to the dangers of “fetal personhood” policies.

“Laws and judicial decisions that grant fetuses—and in some cases embryos and fertilized eggs—the same legal rights and status given to born people, such as the right to life, is ‘fetal personhood,’” explains the website of the group, Pregnancy Justice. “When fetuses have rights, this fundamentally changes the legal rights and status of all pregnant people, opening the door to criminalization, surveillance, and obstetric violence.”

Since the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling ended the federal right to abortion in 2022, far-right activists and politicians have ramped up their fight for fetal personhood policies. Pregnancy Justice found that in the two years after the decision, the number of people who faced criminal charges related to their pregnancies hit its highest level in US history.

Shoemaker’s case began even earlier, in 2017, when she experienced a stillbirth at home about 24-26 weeks into her pregnancy. Paramedics brought her to a hospital, where she disclosed using methamphetamine while pregnant. Although a medical examiner could not determine whether the drug use caused the stillbirth—and, according to Pregnancy Justice, “her placenta showed clear signs of infection”—a jury found her guilty of chemical endangerment of a minor. She’s served five years of her 18-year sentence.

“After becoming Ms. Shoemaker’s counsel in 2024, Pregnancy Justice filed a petition alongside Andrew Stanley of the Samford Law Office requesting a hearing based on new evidence about the infection that led to the demise of Ms. Shoemaker’s pregnancy, leading the judge to agree with Pregnancy Justice’s medical witness and to vacate the conviction,” the rights group said in a Monday statement.

Lee County Circuit Judge Jeffrey Tickal wrote in his December 22 order that “should the facts had been known, and brought before the jury, the results probably would have been different.”

Shoemaker said Monday that “after years of fighting, I’m thankful that I’m finally being heard, and I pray that my next Christmas will be spent at home with my children and parents... I’m hopeful that my new trial will end with me being freed, because I simply lost my pregnancy at home because of an infection. I loved and wanted my baby, and I never deserved this.”



Although Tickal’s decision came three days before Christmas, the 45-year-old mother of four remained behind bars for the holiday last week, as the state appeals.

“While we are thrilled with the judge’s decision, we are outraged that Ms. Shoemaker is still behind bars when she should have been home for Christmas,” said former Pregnancy Justice senior staff attorney Emma Roth. “She was convicted based on feelings, not facts. Pregnancy Justice will continue to fight on appeal and prove that pregnancies end tragically for reasons far beyond a mother’s control. Women like Ms. Shoemaker should be allowed to grieve their loss without fearing arrest.”

AL.com reported Tuesday that “Alabama is unique in that it is one of only three states, along with Oklahoma and South Carolina, where the state Supreme Court allows the application of criminal laws meant to punish child abuse or child endangerment to be applied in the context of pregnancy.”

However, similar cases aren’t restricted to those states. Pregnancy Justice found that in the two years following Dobbs, “prosecutors initiated cases in 16 states: Alabama, California, Florida, Idaho, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. While prosecutions were brought in all of these states, to date, the majority of the reported cases occurred in Alabama (192) and Oklahoma (112).”

“Prosecutors used a variety of criminal statutes to charge the defendants in these cases, often bringing more than one charge against an individual defendant,” the group’s report continues. “In total, the 412 defendants faced 441 charges for conduct related to pregnancy, pregnancy loss, or birth. The majority of charges (398/441) asserted some form of child abuse, neglect, or endangerment.”

“As has been the case for decades, nearly all the cases alleged that the pregnant person used a substance during pregnancy,” the report adds. “In 268 cases, substance use was the only allegation made against the pregnant person. In the midst of a wide-ranging crisis in maternal healthcare and despite maternal healthcare deserts across the country, prosecutors or police argued that pregnant people’s failure to obtain prenatal care was evidence of a crime. This was the case in 29 of 412 cases.”

When the publication was released last year, Pregnancy Justice president Lourdes A. Rivera said in a statement that “the Dobbs decision emboldened prosecutors to develop ever more aggressive strategies to prosecute pregnancy, leading to the most pregnancy-related criminal cases on record.”

“This is directly tied to the radical legal doctrine of ‘fetal personhood,’ which grants full legal rights to an embryo or fetus, turning them into victims of crimes perpetrated by pregnant women,” Rivera argued. “To turn the tide on criminalization, we need to separate healthcare from the criminal legal system and to change policy and practices to ensure that pregnant people can safely access the healthcare they need, without fear of criminalization. This report demonstrates that, in post-Dobbs America, being pregnant places people at increased risk, not only of dire health outcomes, but of arrest.”

‘A Wake-Up Call’: Scientists Find 2025 Among Hottest Years on Record

“2025 was full of stark reminders of the urgent need to cut climate pollution, invest in clean energy, and tackle the climate crisis now.”


A woman cools herself off using a fan at a bus stop showing a temperature of 37°C—or 99°F—during a heatwave in Madrid, on July 1, 2025.
(Photo by Thomas Coex/AFP via Getty Images)

Brett Wilkins
Dec 30, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

Climate change driven by human burning of fossil fuels helped make 2025 one of the hottest years ever recorded, a scientific report published Monday affirmed, prompting renewed calls for urgent action to combat the worsening planetary emergency.

Researchers at World Weather Attribution (WWA) found that “although 2025 was slightly cooler than 2024 globally, it was still far hotter than almost any other year on record,” with only two other recent years recording a higher average worldwide temperature.

For the first time, the three-year running average will end the year above the 1.5°C warming goal, relative to preindustrial levels, established a decade ago under the landmark Paris climate agreement.

“Global temperatures remained very high and significant harm from human-induced climate change is very real,” the report continues. “It is not a future threat, but a present-day reality.”

“Across the 22 extreme events we analyzed in depth, heatwaves, floods, storms, droughts, and wildfires claimed lives, destroyed communities, and wiped out crops,” the researchers wrote. “Together, these events paint a stark picture of the escalating risks we face in a warming world.”

The WWA researchers’ findings tracked with the findings of United Nations experts and others that 2025 would be the third-hottest year on record.




According to the WWA study:
This year highlighted again, in stark terms, how unfairly the consequences of human-induced climate change are distributed, consistently hitting those who are already marginalized within their societies the hardest. But the inequity goes deeper: The scientific evidence base itself is uneven. Many of our studies in 2025 focused on heavy rainfall events in the Global South, and time and again we found that gaps in observational data and the reliance on climate models developed primarily for the Global North prevented us from drawing confident conclusions. This unequal foundation in climate science mirrors the broader injustices of the climate crisis.

The events of 2025 make it clear that while we urgently need to transition away from fossil fuels, we also must invest in adaptation measures. Many deaths and other impacts could be prevented with timely action. But events like Hurricane Melissa highlight the limits of preparedness and adaptation: When an intense storm strikes small islands such as Jamaica and other Caribbean nations, even relatively high levels of preparedness cannot prevent extreme losses and damage. This underscores that adaptation alone is not enough; rapid emission reductions remain essential to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

“If we don’t stop burning fossil fuels very, very, quickly, very soon, it will be very hard to keep that goal” of 1.5°C, WWA co-founder Friederike Otto—who is also an Imperial College London climate scientist—told the Associated Press. “The science is increasingly clear.”

The WWA study’s publication comes a month after this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference—or COP30—ended in Brazil with little meaningful progress toward a transition from fossil fuels.

Responding to the new study, Climate Action Campaign director Margie Alt said in a statement that “2025 was full of stark reminders of the urgent need to cut climate pollution, invest in clean energy, and tackle the climate crisis now.”

“Today’s report is a wake-up call,” Alt continued. “Unfortunately, [US President Donald] Trump and Republicans controlling Congress spent the past year making climate denial official US policy and undermining progress to stave off the worst of the climate crisis. Their reckless polluters-first agenda rolled back critical climate protections and attacked and undermined the very agencies responsible for helping Americans prepare for and recover from increasingly dangerous disasters.”

“Across the country, people are standing up and demanding their leaders do better to protect our families from climate change and extreme weather,” Alt added. “It’s time those in power started listening.”

Trillionaires at the Gates

The arrival of our first trillionaire could well mark the date America’s oligarchy becomes unbreakable.


SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk participates in a town hall-style meeting to promote early and absentee voting at Ridley High School on October 17, 2024 in Folsom, Pennsylvania.
(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Bob Lord
Dec 30, 202

5Inequality.org


I wrote my first post for Inequality.org, “Our First Trillionaire: Only a Matter of Time,” over 12 years ago. I hoped, at the time, that the post would age poorly. After all, the presence of a trillionaire on American soil would certify that we had unquestionably reached an oligarchic concentration of our nation’s wealth.

Unfortunately, that post has aged remarkably well. If anything, I now see my forecasting as too timid.

Elon Musk’s personal wealth now sits at about $750 billion. That total represents an annual average increase of 23% over the $60 billion Bill Gates fortune of 2013. At that rate of increase, America will boast its first trillionaire at least a decade before 2039, the year I gave CNBC writer Eric Rosenbaum in 2014 as the date our nation would most likely see its first trillionaire.

Back in 2013, I worried mightily that the absence of a reliable mechanism in America’s tax system to limit the growth rate of extreme fortunes would cause the wealth share of the richest Americans to rise to ever-higher levels. Wealth at America’s economic summit, I noted, was growing at a faster rate than the nation’s aggregate wealth, and that rapid growth was bringing a disturbing arithmetic into play.

America now finds itself in a democracy-destroying downward cycle. Extreme wealth begets a political power that begets policy choices that lead to even more extreme wealth concentration.

“If the wealth of one group within a nation grows at a faster rate than the nation’s aggregate wealth,” I pointed out, “that group’s share of the aggregate wealth must increase over time. That’s a mathematical certainty. And the level of subsequent wealth concentration has no limit.”

Our country’s wealth concentration story has played out exactly that way over the past dozen years, as economist Gabriel Zucman has detailed. The nation’s top .00001%—a mere 19 households—has increased its share of America’s wealth from 0.1% in 1982 to 1.81% in 2024. Of the country’s $148 trillion total wealth in December 2024, those 19 households held $2.6 trillion. In the past year, their wealth total has increased to well over $3 trillion.

That increase has produced a stunning annual increase in the wealth share of that ultra-elite group, nearly 7% per year on average. To achieve that rate of wealth share growth, the wealth of our top .00001%—one ten-millionth of America’s households—has had to grow at an average rate nearly seven percentage points above the average annual growth rate of the country’s wealth.


Over a decade ago, I told CNBC that America’s march to oligarchy would revolve around a considerable increase in the concentration of wealth within the billionaire class. Those 19 households in our top .00001% comprise 5% of America’s top .0002% (380 households, or roughly, the Forbes 400). Their share of the wealth of that larger group of billionaires now stands at about 50% today, a quadrupling since 1982.

What has generated America’s increasingly oligarchic wealth concentration? The worst culprit, I’d argue, continues to be a federal income tax system that not only lacks a reliable mechanism to rein in the growth of massive fortunes but does the exact opposite, exacerbating wealth inequality when we most need it contained.

Specifically, our tax system applies an extremely regressive tax rate to capital gains, the principal form of economic income flowing to our billionaire class. The effective annual income tax rate on the capital gains of our richest often runs less than 5%. That reality has baked into America’s cake a continuing concentration of our country’s wealth.

In 2013, with Mexico’s Carlos Slim then the world’s wealthiest person, I contemplated the concentration of power that would accompany the arrival of American trillionaires.

“Unless basic US tax policy changes,” I noted, “the United States will be mathematically certain to reach Mexican-like levels of wealth concentration. The only questions: Who will be our Carlos Slim and how kindly will our trillionaires treat us.”

Indeed, the gap between America’s level of wealth concentration and Mexico’s has closed considerably over the past 12 years. Slim, still the wealthiest Mexican, has seen his share of Mexico’s total wealth fall since 2013. But the share of American wealth held by the wealthiest American—Gates in 2013 and Musk in 2025—has tripled.

And we saw the accompanying concentration of power become vividly visible at President Donald Trump’s second inauguration. On the inaugural stand, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg all sat center stage.

We see that same concentration in the funding of our politics. In the 2024 election, reports Americans for Tax Fairness, our billionaires collectively accounted for $2.6 billion of the $15.9 billion in total political spending, a total lopsidedly on the Republican side.

Musk alone spent about $277 million in 2024, a tiny one-thousandth of his net worth at the time, but nearly 2% of total political spending in a nation of 340 million people. At his current level of wealth, Musk could drop $1 billion by himself into the 2026 election without breaking much of a financial sweat.

But those numbers only hint at the political power our richest now wield. Billionaire control over our nation’s major media outlets far exceeds the influence of direct billionaire political spending.

The six billionaires with wealth over $200 billion all control either a major media outlet or a major social media platform. Musk, of course, owns Twitter. Zuckerberg, through Meta, controls Facebook and Instagram. Bezos owns the Washington Post. Larry Ellison’s son, David, holds a controlling interest in Paramount, the media giant that owns CBS and is seeking to acquire control of Warner Bros. Discovery. The Ellisons also have their eyes on the US operations of TikTok. Larry Page and Sergey Brin remain the largest shareholders of Alphabet, the corporate colossus that controls Google and YouTube.

What does that billionaire lock grip over our largest media translate into? Everything from a Washington Post editorial page that rails against wealth taxation to the placing of America’s most respected weekly network TV news show, “60 Minutes,” in the censorious hands of the right-wing ideologue Bari Weiss.

America now finds itself in a democracy-destroying downward cycle. Extreme wealth begets a political power that begets policy choices that lead to even more extreme wealth concentration. The challenge of breaking that cycle could hardly be more daunting.

The arrival of our first trillionaire could well mark the date America’s oligarchy becomes unbreakable. Let’s not let that happen.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.


Bob Lord
Bob Lord is Senior Advisor, Tax Policy at Patriotic Millionaires and an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow.
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We’re Renting Our Lives Away to Enrich Tech Lords and Wall Street Oligarchs

In the new, out-of-control rental economy, the product is often just bait. The real commodity, the real profit center, the real source of unending corporate cash flow is you.



An “Apartments for Rent” sign hangs in front of a building  in Miami Beach, Florida.
(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Thom Hartmann
Dec 30, 2025

Common Dreams


On Sunday, both President Donald Trump and his secretary of Housing and Urban Development told us that 50-year home mortgages may soon be a thing. While seemingly insane (you could end up paying more than three times the cost of the house and never escape the burden of debt before you die), this is just the latest iteration of one of American businesses’ most profitable scams: the rental economy.

It’s a growing threat to the American middle class that rarely gets named, even as it reshapes our lives every day. Over the past two decades, it’s snuck in quietly, disguised as convenience, efficiency, and “innovation.”
.


Big Tech Ramps Up Propaganda Blitz As AI Data Centers Become Toxic With Voters


As a result, nothing is “ours” any more. Instead, we’re renting our lives away.

There was a time when you bought things.

It’s become a never-ending extraction of money and personal data from each of us, every month, every year, time after time, over and over again until we’re financially exhausted.


You bought a house, a book, a record, a car, a word processing program. You paid once, took it home or lived in it, and it was yours. If the company went out of business, your stereo still worked. If the manufacturer didn’t get their annual payment, your computer didn’t lock you out of your own words. You could read books on your phone or pad without an internet connection to “confirm your purchase.”

That America is disappearing.

Today, almost everything that used to be a purchase has become a rental.

Take Microsoft Word. Decades ago, you bought it once and used it for years. Now it’s a monthly fee. Stop paying, and you may not even be able to open documents you wrote yourself. Adobe did the same thing. So did music, movies, and television. At first, it felt like convenience; a few dollars a month didn’t seem like a big deal.

Even the latest versions of the two major computer operating systems are essentially spyware, constantly tracking everything you do while demanding that you put all your personal information on their “cloud” servers.

Instead of buying homes, people are renting because, in part, massive New York hedge funds and foreign investors are purchasing as many as half of all the homes that come available for sale in some communities, and then flipping them into rentals. Renters can end up on the hook for their entire lives.

Even the means to get a good job—a college education—has become something you must pay for over a period of decades or even a lifetime instead of the pay-as-you-go model my generation had before Ronald Reagan gutted federal aid to higher ed. We now have almost $2 trillion in student debt—the only developed nation in the world that does this to its students—and I regularly get calls into my radio program from people in their 70s still paying off their student debt.

But this change was never really just about money. It has morphed over the past decades into a new form of corporate control over our lives and our wealth. It’s become a never-ending extraction of money and personal data from each of us, every month, every year, time after time, over and over again until we’re financially exhausted.

When you own something, you decide how it’s used. When you rent, someone else makes that choice. They can raise prices, change terms, remove features, track everything you do with it, or shut it off entirely. Your “choice” becomes compliance.

The billionaire Tech Bros and Wall Street are hoping we’ll all just roll over, sign up, and let them ding our credit cards until our dying day.

That same model has spread everywhere.

Cars used to be machines you owned. Now they’re rolling computers with features like heated seats, remote start, or performance upgrades locked behind monthly fees. Similarly, cars are increasingly leased instead of purchased. Miss your payment this month and the lender will remotely disable “your” vehicle. Your car doesn’t just take you places anymore: It reports on you.

Phones are even worse. They’re not just devices; they’re gatekeepers. Apps can be removed. Accounts can be banned. Services can disappear overnight. And because so much of modern life runs through that phone—banking, work, navigation, healthcare—being cut off isn’t an inconvenience. It’s a functional exclusion from society.

This extends from major things like our cars and homes to simple things like apps. Louise loves to play Scrabble on her phone, and would gladly pay a one-time fee for an app that doesn’t throw ads at her, track and sell her information, or demand constant interaction. Instead, since the old Scrabble app she’s used for years went to a rental model, she’s gone through a half-dozen apps, each worse than the last at demanding her interactions or throwing ads.

And to add insult to injury, layered on top of this rental business model is a vast, multibillion-dollar industry harvesting our personal information.

Every website you visit. Every app you download. Every product you register just to make it work. Your location, habits, preferences, relationships, and even emotional responses are tracked, analyzed, packaged, and sold. Most often without meaningful consent, and almost always without real alternatives.

This is not how American capitalism worked for over 250 years.

The question business leaders used to ask was simple: “What unmet needs do people have that our company can satisfy with a new product or service?” You built something useful, people bought it, and that was the deal.

Today, the question has changed: “How do we make our product so essential that people can’t function without it, then crush or buy out our competitors so there’s no real consumer choice, then charge a monthly fee forever, all while extracting user data we can sell for even more profit?”

That’s not innovation. It’s parasitism.

If everything we touch is leased, freedom is just another fee.

In this model, the product is often just bait. The real commodity, the real profit center, the real source of unending corporate cash flow is you.

And because the billionaire “Tech Bros” and Wall Street oligarchs control the products, the data, and increasingly our nation’s news and social media, they also control the content and algorithms that shape public opinion.

As a result, social media and even our news (think CBS, the Washington Post, the LA Times, Fox “News”) increasingly doesn’t just reflect reality, they engineer it to get us to think of this new rental economy as normal, as innovative, as The Way Things Should Be.

In addition to profitably amplifying outrage, profitably distorting truth, and polishing the public image of this new rental economy—all to create billions in ongoing month-after-month profits—America’s billionaire tech lords and the right-wing politicians they bankroll (thanks to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court) are manufacturing our consent (to apply Noam Chomsky’s phrase).

Thomas Jefferson warned that people are inclined to suffer evils while they are sufferable rather than abolish the forms to which they’ve grown accustomed. The billionaire Tech Bros and Wall Street are hoping we’ll all just roll over, sign up, and let them ding our credit cards until our dying day.

It’s gotten so bad that apps—which also acquire and then sell our data—have emerged that track our “subscriptions” so we can try to get it all under control. They’re advertising them on TV every day: Get this app to find out what apps are secretly extracting your cash because you long ago forgot you clicked on that link.

None of this was inevitable.

The solution is not to smash technology or retreat into the past. It’s for government to once again work for the 99% instead of the 1%. That means once again regulating money in politics, private equity, social media, data harvesting, and the out-of-control rental economy that has replaced ownership.

It means breaking monopolies, restoring regulatory independence, making education affordable, supporting home and car ownership, and reaffirming that democracy—not billionaires—sets the rules of the road.

Technology should serve human freedom, not manage it. Markets should reward service and quality of content, not extraction. People should be able to choose to pay or not to pay for things from apps to the functionality of your car or home’s HVAC system.

Nothing is ours any more. Not the road, not the floor. If everything we touch is leased, freedom is just another fee.

If we don’t act to regulate this out-of-control rental economy, we may one day realize we didn’t lose our wealth and even our democracy all at once: We simply rented our way out of it.






Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
Full Bio >

Another Hollywood star sounds off on Trump's MAGA-fied nation as he bids adieu to America

Robert Davis
December 30, 2025 

RAW STORY

Actor George Clooney and Amal Clooney host their annual fundraiser 'The Albie Awards' in London, Britain, October 3, 2025. REUTERS/Maja Smiejkowska/File Photo

Hollywood star George Clooney sounded off on Trump's MAGA-fied America in a new cover story for Variety Magazine published on Tuesday as he announced that he's leaving the country to live in Europe.

The interview was published after Clooney and his family were granted French citizenship, according to reports.

Clooney spoke to Variety about the state of the media following Paramount-Skydance-owned CBS News' hiring of Bari Weiss as its editor-in-chief. Weiss, a controversial former opinion writer at The New York Times, has been at the center of multiple controversies since taking over, including the decision to spike a story about the Trump administration's efforts to send deportees to the infamous CECOT prison in El Salvador

“Bari Weiss is dismantling CBS News as we speak,” Clooney told the outlet. “Am I worried about film studios? Sure. It’s my business, but my primary loyalty is to my country. I’m much more worried about how we inform ourselves and how we’re going to discern reality without a functioning press.”

Clooney also chimed in on recent Supreme Court rulings and the state of the Trump administration. He expressed optimism about America recovering from the Trump administration.

“Just straight up, it’s the economy, stupid,” Clooney said. “It’s more expensive now than it was when Joe Biden left office. And powerful people tend to overplay their hands. I think that cruelty, like separating children from their parents, although popular with small groups of people, doesn’t play well with most Americans.”

Read the entire Variety interview by clicking here.

George Clooney slams networks that rolled over for Trump in profane rant

George Clooney on November 2, 2025 (Image: Screengrab via CBS This Morning / YouTube)

Carl Gibson

December 30, 2025 

ALTERNET

Actor, director and producer George Clooney recently threw several jabs at media companies that settled with President Donald Trump rather than fight his lawsuits in court.

During a Tuesday interview with Variety while promoting his new film "Jay Kelly," Clooney not only spoke about the president — who he said he used to "know very well" — but about networks that he feels enabled Trump during the early part of his second term. He specifically harped on CBS, having just played legendary CBS anchor Edward R. Murrow in a stage production of the film Good Night and Good Luck (which he co-wrote, starred in and directed).

At the time of the play, CBS' parent company, Paramount, settled with Trump for $16 million after the president sued them over 60 Minutes' interview with 2024 Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. After Paramount settled, the Trump administration approved the company's proposed merger with media giant Skydance.

CBS' new owners then installed conservative columnist Bari Weiss as the new editor-in-chief of the vaunted network's news division. Weiss recently made headlines for killing a 60 Minutes segment about the Trump administration's deportations to an El Salvadoran mega-prison without due process, though a Canadian broadcaster ran the segment, which then spread virally through social media.

"Bari Weiss is dismantling CBS News as we speak," Clooney told Variety. "I’m worried about how we inform ourselves and how we’re going to discern reality without a functioning press."

Clooney also tore into ABC News, which settled with then-President-elect Trump in December of last year after he sued the network over anchor George Stephanopoulos' assertion that Trump had been found guilty of sexually assaulting writer E. Jean Carroll. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who oversaw the case, found Trump liable for sexual abuse and not assault, but clarified that the two were effectively the same thing as the public understood them. Clooney lamented that both major networks chose to concede rather than stand up for themselves.

"If CBS and ABC had challenged those lawsuits and said, 'Go f—— yourself,' we wouldn’t be where we are in the country," Clooney said. "That’s simply the truth."

Click here to read Clooney's full interview.

France grants citizenship to George and Amal Clooney and their twins Ella and Alexander

Via AP news wire

Tuesday 30 December 2025 




Call them Monsieur and Madame Clooney.

France’s government says that George Clooney, his wife Amal and their twins Ella and Alexander have been awarded French citizenship.

The naturalizations of the Kentucky-born star of the “Oceans” series of heist movies and his family were announced last weekend in the Journal Officiel, where French government decrees are published.


The government notice indicated that human rights lawyer Amal Clooney was naturalized under her maiden name, Amal Alamuddin. It also noted that George Clooney's middle name is Timothy.


The couple purchased an estate in France in 2021. In an interview with Esquire in October, Clooney described their “farm in France” as their primary residence — a decision the 64-year-old actor and his 47-year-old wife made with their children in mind.

“I was worried about raising our kids in L.A., in the culture of Hollywood,” he told the magazine. “I don’t want them to be walking around worried about paparazzi. I don’t want them being compared to somebody else’s famous kids.”

Growing up away from the spotlight in France, “they’re not on their iPads, you know?” he said. "They have dinner with grown-ups and have to take their dishes in. They have a much better life."


Representatives for George Clooney did not respond to The Associated Press’ request for comment Monday.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether Clooney retained his American citizenship. Amal Clooney was born in Lebanon and raised in the U.K. The 8-year-old twins were born in London.