Citing Threat of ‘Authoritarian Regime,’ Judge Orders ICE to Stop Tear-Gassing Protesters in Oregon

In “a well-functioning constitutional democratic republic,” said US District Judge Michael Simon, “free speech, courageous newsgathering, and nonviolent protest are all permitted, respected, and even celebrated.”

ILLEGAL USE OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS

Federal agents deploy pepper balls, tear gas, and flashbang grenades on hundreds of people who marched from Portland City Hall to a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility to protest against the agency’s actions in Portland, Oregon on February 1, 2026.
(Photo by Sean Bascom/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Feb 04, 2026

COMMON DREAMS

Warning that President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrant communities, protesters who speak out for civil and human rights, and journalists who are reporting on the president’s mass deportation campaign has placed the nation at a “crossroads,” a US judge on Tuesday temporarily barred federal agents from launching tear gas, projectiles, and other chemicals at demonstrators in Portland, Oregon.

US District Judge Michael Simon in the District of Oregon ruled that for at least the next 14 days—a period that could be extended—federal agents with the Department of Homeland Security or other agencies can no longer use chemical or projectile munitions like tear gas or pepper balls unless the specific target poses an imminent threat of physical harm to a law enforcement officer or someone else.

Officers are also prohibited from firing any munition at a person’s head, neck, or torso except in cases where deadly force would be justified, and from using a less lethal munition if doing so would endanger someone who doesn’t pose an imminent threat.

Simon emphasized that he arrived at the ruling in order to preserve the United States’ status as “a well-functioning constitutional democratic republic.”

In such a country, wrote Simon, free speech, courageous newsgathering, and nonviolent protest are all permitted, respected, and even celebrated.“

“In an authoritarian regime, that is not the case,” he continued. “Our nation is now at a crossroads. We have been here before and have previously returned to the right path, notwithstanding an occasional detour. In helping our nation find its constitutional compass, an impartial and independent judiciary operating under the rule of law has a responsibility that it may not shirk.”

The ruling pertains to the vicinity of the Portland Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Building, which has been at the center of protests against the agency’s arrests and detention of immigrants in the Portland area.

Simon handed down the ruling days after thousands of residents assembled near the building to speak out against Trump’s anti-immigration agenda, in which a majority of the people who have been detained in recent months have had no criminal records despite the president’s claims that ICE is targeting the “worst of the worst” violent offenders. DHS agents have shot at least 13 people since September, and have killed two—Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. An off-duty ICE agent also fatally shot Keith Porter in Los Angeles.

The protest on Saturday in Portland was nonviolent and family-friendly, with children and senior citizens among those who gathered to speak out against the killings, deportations, and detentions.

But ICE agents nonetheless deployed tear gas at the crowd. They did so again the next day when hundreds of protesters rallied at City Hall and marched to the ICE Building. DHS claimed the protesters “threw objects at law enforcement and rocks at cameras.” lreported that it had not verified those claims.





The ACLU, which filed a legal complaint to the judge Sunday night on behalf of protesters who had been affected by ICE’s use of tear gas, said Tuesday that “not only are DHS’s extreme actions violating protesters’ First Amendment rights, but they also pose an imminent risk that officers will seriously maim or kill someone, as they have done repeatedly within the last few weeks in other parts of the country.”

Kelly Simon, the legal director for ACLU of Oregon, said that “it has been inspiring to see Oregonians rising together with love, nonviolence, and creativity to oppose the Trump administration’s cruelty.”

“The Department of Homeland Security’s pattern of violently retaliating against protesters and documenters flies in the face of any notion of order, safety, or freedom,” she said. “This ruling affirms that, in Oregon, we still love our neighbors and believe in the power of our constitutional freedoms, including the freedoms of assembly, speech, and the press, to build a better future for all of us.”

In its filing, the ACLU described several alleged acts of violence and excessive force by federal agents against peaceful protesters and journalists, including the use of a chemical impact munition against an 84-year-old woman who was “peacefully holding a sign on a public street” when she was hit in the head. She walked home “soaked in blood” and was later diagnosed with a concussion at an emergency department.

A freelance journalist was also allegedly shot in the groin with projectile munitions and suffered bruises, and on another occasion was maced in the face by an officer.

Jack Dickinson, a protester who has been dubbed the Portland Chicken for the chicken costume he’s worn at anti-ICE demonstrations, said he was “grateful that Judge Simon agreed that cruelty is not an appropriate response to dissent.”

“Since June, the Trump regime has subjected people in Portland to chemical weapons and violence because they are offended by our words,” said Dickinson. “This administration should hear our grievances and halt their barbaric treatment of our communities. Until then, I hope Portland will continue to show up and exercise our First Amendment rights. Our voices are needed most in times like now.”

Federal agents’ use of tear gas and other chemicals also prompted a separate lawsuit recently, with a property management company joining a group of residents in an apartment building about 100 feet from the ICE building suing DHS because tear gas has clouded their homes for months—forcing some to sleep wearing gas masks.

One resident said she was also struck by rubber bullets that left her with welts and bruises.

Lawsuits challenging federal agents’ deployment of chemicals and munitions have also been filed in Minnesota and Chicago.

An evidentiary hearing is scheduled for March 2 in Simon’s courtroom regarding the question of whether the court should grant a preliminary injunction, further limiting the use of tear gas and other weapons against protesters and journalists.

Tennessee to test Stephen Miller’s plan of enlisting states for immigration enforcement

George Chidi
Wed, February 4, 2026 

THE GUARDIAN

Stephen Miller, deputy White House chief of staff for policy, speaks to members of the media outside the White House on 6 October 2025.Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images(Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images)More

The power to enforce immigration law rests with the federal government. But Trump adviser, Stephen Miller, has a vision for states working in coordination with federal immigration officials, and he’s attempting to test it out in Tennessee.

Earlier this month, the Knoxville News Sentinel reported that Miller had been meeting in Washington DC with Tennessee speaker of the house, Cameron Sexton, to craft model legislation for states around the country.

A few weeks later, the speaker announced a suite of eight bills that would turn state and local police officers, judges, teachers, social workers and others into an auxiliary extension of the federal immigration system. It makes the presence of an undocumented person with a final deportation order a state crime in Tennessee. And it mandates that officials report the presence of undocumented persons to ICE, while criminalizing disclosure of information about immigration enforcement activities to the public.

“The president’s behind us,” said Knoxville-area representative and deputy speaker, Jason Zachary, on a video taken from a talk with a conservative group, describing Sexton’s contact with Miller. “The president has promised his support on social media for us, and we are being told Tennessee will go first.”

Last year, Tennessee also established an immigration enforcement division under its department of safety and homeland security, and made the records collected by the chief immigration enforcement officer exempt from Tennessee’s already limited public records access laws. Confidentiality extends to records for grant programs administered by the department, preventing watchdogs from examining what local law enforcement agencies do with federal grant money for immigration enforcement.

Legislation filed on 15 January doesn’t just extend that confidentiality; it demands it. A state or local official, including judges, “negligently” releasing identifying information of officers involved in immigration enforcement would face a felony and removal from office.

Senate Bill 1464, criminalizing disclosure, appears to be aimed directly at Freddie O’Connell, the Nashville mayor who issued an executive order last year to track and publish ICE contacts in the city. O’Connell briefly published the names of some ICE agents as part of the effort.

“It’s really alarming,” said Lisa Sherman-Luna, executive director of the advocacy organization Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition. “We have folks in office who are really creating infrastructure for the secret police, with zero accountability, total impunity, legitimizing the way that ICE is behaving, wearing masks or civilian clothes, not identifying themselves, and giving these guys license to behave in whatever way they desire without an ability for the public to hold them accountable.”

But the most controversial and legally impactful proposal would require local school systems to verify lawful status for K-12 students. Those without legal residency would be charged tuition. Others could be denied enrollment.

The Tennessee state senate passed a version of this bill last year, but the state house paused movement while looking for guidance from Washington on how it might affect federal education funding.

The legislation directly challenges Plyler v Doe, a landmark 1982 US supreme court case that establishes a constitutional right for undocumented children to an education at public expense, setting up revisitation of the decision in the Roberts court.

“We’re not clear where the supreme court is going to land on certain issues,” Sherman-Luna said. “And the state legislature doesn’t care that things are unconstitutional. They’re betting on the supreme court ruling in their favor, and they’re trying to change the constitution through these kinds of laws.”

The day the speaker filed the legislative package – eight days after an ICE agent killed Renee Good and set off massive protests in Minneapolis – Sexton held a press conference in Nashville to describe the merits of his legislative proposals.

“Look at Minnesota,” Sexton said. “Is Minnesota holding those individuals accountable? Are they holding them accountable for blocking streets? No. You can’t block streets in Tennessee. You’re going to be held accountable or you’re going to go to jail. And Minnesota is just a wild, wild west. They allow people to do anything. It’s actually a detriment to law enforcement. They’re making it less safe to be a police officer or a federal agent in Minnesota.”

Sexton’s office has not responded to requests for comment.

One of the bills requires courts and local law enforcement to cooperate with ICE. This would presumably outlaw efforts by local prosecutors and police to arrest federal immigration agents for violating state law.

In a continuation of the state’s longstanding conflict with its more progressive cities such as Memphis and Nashville, the legislation would allow Tennessee’s attorney general to withhold state funds and shared sales tax revenue from non-compliant municipalities. Tennessee does not have a state income tax but relies on the second-highest sales tax rate in the country, making this a potent financial threat.

“DC does not want to fix the problem, and so here we are using a broken system,” said John Ray Clemmons, the state representative from Nashville and chair of the Democratic caucus in Tennessee. “And DC is trying to tell us how to target the people who are a result of that broken system, more or less.”

Clemmons questions the priorities of Republicans. “It’s lazy to ride the coattails of this administration on immigration, instead of actually addressing the problems people are facing, like ending the grocery tax, expanding access to healthcare, ensuring rural hospitals aren’t closing, fully funding public schools,” he said.

But Republican lawmakers rest much of their argument for the legislation on assertions that undocumented migrants cost Tennessee taxpayers millions.

“Rural communities like mine are paying the price for illegal immigration,” said Ken Yager, senate Republican caucus chairman, in a release. “It places a real strain on local resources and drains taxpayer dollars that should be reinvested right here at home to strengthen our communities.”

The proposed legislation requires monthly reporting about non-citizens receiving public benefits such as housing or medical services, and for those reports to be coordinated with the Department of Homeland Security. A “comprehensive report detailing the total cost of illegal immigration to Tennessee taxpayers, including schools, hospitals, prisons, and social services” would be published annually, according to an information sheet sent by legislative offices in January.

Bills in consideration would also require state and local governments to verify lawful status before issuing taxpayer-funded benefits. If someone’s immigration status cannot be verified, it requires the agency to refer the contact to ICE and Tennessee’s centralized immigration enforcement division.

One bill requires that state contractors use E-Verify, a federal internet-based system allowing employers to electronically confirm the employment eligibility of new hires. The proposed bills would require proof of lawful status for licensed professions, including teachers, nurses and contractors. It also requires driver’s license examinations to be conducted in English, with one-time exceptions, and restricts licenses for some non-citizens.

This model legislation carries the prospect of broad economic effects from state level immigration policies. Critically, the proposal would criminalize the use of a commercial driver’s license (CDL) by an operator without lawful immigration status. The Trump administration has attacked the issuance of CDLs in California, New York and other Democratic-controlled states to undocumented drivers. Transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, is withholding some federal funds and has threatened to block California from issuing CDLs to anyone over the state’s practices.

The legislation sets up the prospect of Tennessee state troopers checking the immigration status of out-of-state drivers passing through the state. As model legislation, a line of states from Indiana to Texas implementing the policy could create a deportation hazard for undocumented cross-country truckers.

Immigration activists are organizing in Tennessee to oppose restrictive state-level legislation, but are under resourced, Sherman-Luna said. The political focus on federal races and chaos in Washington DC draws money and attention from red state fights, she said.

Terrible history shows what Trump's migrant 'camps' really are — and what comes next

Thom Hartmann
February 5, 2026 

COMMON DREAMS

As people testified before Congress on Tuesday about the brutality and violence they’d suffered at the hands of ICE, that massive paramilitary organization was shopping for giant warehouse-style facilities they can retrofit into what they euphemistically call “detention centers.”

Cable news people call them “prison camps” or “Trump prison camps,” but look in any dictionary: prisons are where people convicted of crimes are held. As Merriam-Webster notes, a prison is:
“[A]n institution for confinement of persons convicted of serious crimes.”

Jails are where people accused of crimes but still waiting for their day in court are held, as Merriam-Webster notes:

“[S]uch a place under the jurisdiction of a local government for the confinement of persons awaiting trial or those convicted of minor crimes.”

But what do you call a place where people who’ve committed no criminal offense (immigration violations are civil, not criminal, infractions)? The fine dictionary people at Merriam-Webster note the proper term is “concentration camp”:
“[A] place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard.”

The British originated the term “concentration camp” to describe facilities where “rebel” or “undesirable” civilians were held in South Africa during the Second Anglo‑Boer War (1899–1902) to control and punish a rebellious population.

They were facilities where the “bad elements of society” were “concentrated” into one location so they could be easily controlled and would lose access to society and thus could not spread their messages of resistance against the British Empire.

The Germans adopted the term in 1933 when Hitler took power and created his first camp for communists, socialists, union leaders, and, by the end of the year, Hitler’s political opponents. They Germanized the phrase into “Konzentrationslager” and referred to the process of their incarceration as “protective custody.”

The first camp was built at Dachau just weeks after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, and by the end of the year there were around 70 of them operating across the country.

When Louise and I lived in Germany in 1986-87, we visited Dachau with our three children. The crematoriums shocked our kids, but even more so because this was simply a “detention facility” and not one of Hitler’s death camps (which were all located outside Germany to ensure deniability).

The ovens at Dachau were for those who had been worked to death or killed by cholera or other disease, much like the 35+ people who’ve recently died in ICE’s concentration camps.

When American friends would visit us and we’d take them to Dachau (we lived just an hour up the road) they’d invariably be surprised when I told them that by the time of the war there were over 500 substantial camps and an additional few hundred very small ones all over the country.

“How could the people not know what was going on?” they’d ask.

The answer was simple: the people did know. These were where the “undesirables,” the “criminal troublemakers,” and the “aliens” were held, and were broadly supported by the German people. (It wasn’t until 1938, following Kristallnacht, that the Nazis began systematically arresting and imprisoning non-political Jews, first at Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.)

By the end of his first year, Hitler had around 50,000 people held in his roughly 70 concentration camps, facilities that were often improvised in factories, prisons, castles, and other buildings.

By comparison, today ICE is holding over 70,000 people in 225 concentration camps across America, and Trump, Homan, Miller, and Noem hope to more than double both numbers in the coming months.

In Tennessee, the Guardian reports that Miller has been coordinating with Republican leaders to create legislation that would turn every local cop, teacher, social worker, and helper in the state into an official agent of ICE and criminalize efforts by cities to refuse cooperation. It also makes it a felony crime to identify any of ICE’s masked agents or disclose conditions within the concentration camps to the public.

Germans didn’t have the benefit of warnings from a fascist history they could look back on; much of what Hitler did took them by surprise, as I’ve noted in previous articles.

In 2026 America, however, operating with the benefit of historical hindsight, entire communities are rebelling at Trump’s effort to beat Germany’s 1933-1934 prisoner numbers.

In city after city, Americans are organizing to deprive ICE of their coveted spaces, putting pressure on companies not to sell and on cities and counties not to permit any more concentration camps.

Because immigration violations are labeled “civil,” people in ICE concentration camps are stripped of many of the normal constitutional protections that apply to people in criminal incarceration. This has created a legal black hole that ICE and the Trump regime exploit, where indefinite imprisonment, abuse, and medical neglect flourish with little to no oversight or accountability.

Human rights organizations like the ACLU describe pervasive patterns of abuse in ICE detention: hazardous living conditions, chronic medical neglect, sexual assault, retaliation for grievances, and extensive use of solitary confinement.

Detainees who have committed no crime other than being in the United States without documentation report being shackled for long periods, packed into freezing, overcrowded cells under constant fluorescent light, and denied hygiene and timely care. Meanwhile, GOP-aligned private prison companies are making billions off the program.

Inspections and oversight are inconsistent: one recent investigation found that as detentions and deaths surged in 2025, formal inspections of facilities actually dropped by over a third. ICE regularly refuses to allow attorneys, family members, and even members of Congress to access their concentration camps; the issue is now being litigated through federal courts.

History shows us that once a nation builds a mass detention apparatus, it never remains limited to its original targets. Future generations of Americans — our children and grandchildren — won’t ask us whether ICE followed civil detention statutes: they’ll want to know why we allowed concentration camps to exist in America at all.

Germany’s concentration camps didn’t start as instruments of mass murder, and neither have ours; both started as facilities for people the government’s leader said were a problem. And that’s exactly what ICE is building now.

History isn’t whispering its warning: it’s shouting.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

This dark history uncovers the roots of Trump's racist paramilitary police

Thom Hartmann
February 4, 2026

COMMON DREAMS


People are reflected in a federal agent's sunglasses in Minneapolis. REUTERS/Tim Evans

ICE thugs dragged a Minnesota woman out of her car and assaulted her, stopping only when local police showed up, leaving her with cuts and bruises from being dragged on the ground. Her “crime” was following and tracking Trump’s violent, racist, masked federal modern-day Klan goons.

Joe Scarborough expressed the shock and outrage of most Americans, when he said:
“This is so out of control, and it looks like a paramilitary force from the third world! And so [the] police chief — not Antifa, Republicans, not Antifa, liars on the right — she calls the police to ask for help in America from paramilitary-type officers. It’s disgusting!”

What Scarborough and most Americans probably don’t know — particularly since Ronald Reagan gutted civics education — is that this is nothing new for America.

Between the 1830s and the 1860s the American South ceased to be a democracy altogether, more closely resembling a Nazi-style race-based fascist oligarchy.

Thus, Trump and today’s Republican Party aren’t offering something new. They’re simply resurrecting the old Confederacy — something factions within the GOP have demanded for years — dressing it up in the trappings of modern politics and media.

They’re not so much expressing nostalgia for Dixie as much as they’re engaging in a deliberate effort to bring back the very systems that tore our nation apart the last time the morbidly rich tried to end our democratic republic and replace it with an early fascist form of neo-feudalism.

At the heart of the old Confederacy was neofascist oligarchy, as I laid out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. A tiny elite of plantation owners controlled the politics, law, and the economy across the entire region; by the mid-1850s democracy in the Old South was entirely dead. Even white people who spoke up against the system risked losing their lives.

That same racist, fascist goal animates today’s GOP politicians, who fight tooth and nail to defend the interests of white men, billionaires, and giant corporations while undermining any effort to preserve genuine democracy.

Taxes on the morbidly rich are cut to the bone, while working people and the professional middle class carry the burden.

Government subsidies in the hundreds of billions now flow to “friends of the administration,” while towns, industries, and communities that refuse to go along with Trump and his lickspittles are punished both by the withdrawal of federal support and the brutal attacks on their people by armed, masked ICE punks.

And, it appears, they’re rehearsing now to use those same terror tactics this November to intimidate voters of color in the relatively small handful of states and congressional districts where control of the House and Senate will be decided this fall.

They don’t need to attack or control the entire country; half a dozen cities, or maybe a dozen, and they will definitely keep control of the Senate and probably the House.

It looks like Black Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, a crucial state for Democrats, are next on their list.

Both Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows and Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) can see this coming, with Warner saying:
“I’m deeply concerned about the potential for Trump to send ICE agents to polling places to intimidate voters in this year’s elections.”

For years, white supremacist groups have worked to infiltrate and evangelize within our military and police departments; now, thanks to Trump, Miller, and congressional Republicans there’s an entire federal agency — with a massive budget — devoted exclusively to their beloved racial enforcement.

They’re so into using the racial profiling Brett Kavanaugh legalized with his so-called “Kavanaugh stops” that (Minneapolis-area suburb) Brooklyn Park’s Police Chief Mark Bruley publicly said that several off-duty police officers from local departments — every single one a person of color — have been stopped by ICE agents even though they were U.S. citizens and not suspected of any immigration violation.

One reported incident involved an off-duty dark-skinned Brooklyn Park officer who was “boxed in” by federal agents, had agents draw weapons and demand “paperwork” proving her citizenship, and had her phone knocked out of her hand when she attempted to record the encounter. Once she identified herself as a police officer, the agents immediately left without apology, Bruley said.

The chief said multiple local officers have had similar experiences, including two from the St. Paul Police Department who said they were pulled over in situations that seemed outside legal authority for immigration agents, and one who was pulled over on two different occasions for driving while brown. All were people of color.


These actions resemble the old Slave Patrols that terrorized both Black people in the South and abolitionists in that region (mostly poor, working-class white men, many unemployed) who argued for an end to slavery (and its free labor competition).

In the old South — like in American cities today occupied by ICE — opposing the oligarchs and their one-party segregationist regime was treated as a threat. If you spoke up for labor rights, racial justice, or democratic reforms, your name was put on informal but very real blacklists that circulated among police, employers, banks, and political bosses.

Enforced by White Citizens Councils and the masked, deputized agents of the Klan — that era’s version of ICE — that meant you’d experience harassment, bogus arrests, firings, evictions, and sometimes even execution. Dissent wasn’t just frowned on in the Confederate South: it was systematically tracked and punished.


This wasn’t some kind of random bigotry. It was a coordinated public-private system of control where business elites, politicians, and law enforcement worked hand-in-glove to intimidate anybody who dared challenge their power.

Police routinely stopped “known troublemakers,” arrested activists on phony charges, and looked the other way when intimidation or violence against the activists erupted.

Terror and even death were always waiting in the wings if someone didn’t get the message.

The result was a regional police state in all but name: one-party rule, oligarchic power, racial caste enforcement, political surveillance, and intimidation as daily governance.


Even after the Civil War, in the Jim Crow South, challenging this racialized fascist system didn’t just make you unpopular; it put you on a list. And once you were on it, the machinery of repression could crush you anytime they chose.

From Stephen Miller’s rhetoric to Pete Hegseth’s purge of dark-skinned officers to Kristi Noem strutting for the camera in front of El Salvadoran prisoners, the racism and naked authoritarianism of the Trump regime is the cornerstone of their support by their racist, white supremacist MAGA base.

To his base’s delight, Trump is deleting the stories of Black heroes from our museums and cemeteries, restoring the names of slave-owning Confederate generals to our military bases, and bringing back their statues. Outside of a few tokens, his administration is almost entirely all-white with 13 white billionaires in his cabinet.


Today’s Republican Party — something Dwight Eisenhower would recognize as what he fought against in Europe — is based on and sustained by racism, male supremacy, cheap labor, corporate cronyism, propaganda, a devotion to a mythic white past, immunity for powerful white men, a race-based form of religious fundamentalism, dynastic families, the censorship of schools and libraries, isolationism, violent policing of people of color, and the embrace of foreign dictatorships.

In every one of those, it’s a virtual clone of the Confederacy with the exception of explicit chattel slavery, although legal slavery is enthusiastically practiced in the prisons of most Red states under the rubric of the 13th Amendment, which legalizes slavery against a person convicted of a crime.

As we see red states eagerly embracing gerrymandering and voter suppression, the danger is not simply that Trump may rig an election, or that Republicans may pass bad laws.

The real danger is that this model of governance, rooted in the Confederacy and funded and refined by generations of American oligarchs (particularly since the Brown v Board SCOTUS decision roused Fred Koch to fund the John Birch Society and their “Impeach Earl Warren” billboards), is becoming normalized across Republican-controlled states and increasingly in the federal government.

All of these threads tie together into a single tapestry. As Barry Goldwater or John McCain would have been the first to tell you, what Trump and the GOP are selling today is not new and not even remotely conservative in any meaningful sense.

It’s the Confederate model updated for the 21st century: a system of oligarchy, racism, patriarchy, cheap labor, monopoly, propaganda, religious control, violence, censorship, judicial capture, and economic extortion. Trump, Vance, Miller, Johnson, and their billionaire and GOP cronies aren’t looking forward to a better or freer future but backward to a mythic past where a narrow wealthy white male elite could rule unchecked, enjoying Cognac and a cigar (and the occasional underage girl) in an exclusive men’s-only club.

Under Trump, today’s Republican Party has become feudalistic, pseudo-royalist, and anti-democratic, and proclaims that they always will be.

America fought both a Civil War and a World War to defeat this system of government, and now we’re confronting it — again — here at home as the GOP slides deeper and deeper into autocratic capture.

Hopefully, these rightwingers won’t force us into a second civil war, won’t start a foreign war, and their motion toward full-on fascism can be stopped this fall at the ballot box. If not, America is in for a world of hurt.

Double-check your voter registration, wake up your friends and neighbors, and show up on March 28th for the next No Kings Day. See you there!

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

Unmask ICE

Dean Baker

 February 5, 2026

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

There are more than 700,000 state and local law enforcement officers. There are tens of thousands more who work for agencies like the FBI, the National Parks, and the Treasury Department.

Except on rare occasions, like a SWAT raid on a drug gang, almost none of these officers cover their faces and hide their identities. Why does Kristi Noem’s ICE team feel this need?

Noem claims that ICE is going after the “worst of the worst” — murders, rapists, child sex traffickers, and the like. But this is just an absurdly crazy lie, like her claim that Trump has saved hundreds of millions of lives by blowing up the boats of alleged drug traffickers.

For those who need orientation to reality, the United States has roughly 340 million people. In Noem’s counterfactual, most of us would have died in the last six months from drug overdoses if Trump had not blown up those boats.

Noem is clearly a person who is not just open to exaggerating and outright lying, she is someone who makes up absurd tales that have nothing to do with reality. This is the case with her story that ICE is going after the worst of the worst.

To be clear, some of the people ICE is looking to deport are in fact murderers, rapists, and other really bad guys. But when ICE identifies these people, it has no problem getting the cooperation of state and local law enforcement. There is no one in New York, Minneapolis, Chicago or any other sanctuary city or sanctuary state that is objecting to enforcing the law against violent criminals, whether citizens or immigrants.

The issue of non-cooperation only comes up when ICE is looking to deport immigrants, many of whom have legal status, who are working at the ordinary jobs that have brought tens of millions of people to the United States in recent decades. These are people working in construction, as housekeepers in hotels, as home health care workers, and many other jobs that are mostly low-paying and physically demanding.

The claim of the Trump administration is that, even though your average local cop can go unmasked to arrest someone charged with multiple murders, ICE agents need to wear masks and conceal their identities when nabbing a dishwasher in a restaurant. That may make sense in Trumpland, but in reality land, it’s goddamn nuts.

There is nothing resembling a legitimate reason for ICE agents needing masks to conceal their faces and to hide their identities. This is about Donald Trump creating a secret police force that is unaccountable to anyone, and which openly boasts that it is not bound by the Constitution.

If the Democrats, and really any elected official with a commitment to democracy, want to be taken seriously, they need to demand that the ICE agents take off their masks. There are many other things that need to be done to protect the country from Trump’s attacks on democracy, but unmasking ICE is a simple and essential first step. There literally is no argument on the other side.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

Dean Baker is the senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. 

ACLU Calls On UN to Initiate ‘Urgent Action’ Protocols Over Trump’s Authoritarian Abuses in Minnesota

Federal law enforcement officials “have ignored basic human rights in their enforcement activity against Minnesotans, especially targeting Somali and Latino communities,” said the ACLU.

Federal agents clash with protestors outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 15, 2026.
(Photo by Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Brad Reed
Feb 04, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


The ACLU revealed on Wednesday that it has asked a United Nations committee to initiate “urgent action” protocols over the Trump administration’s human rights abuses in Minnesota.

The national ACLU, alongside the ACLU of Minnesota, said that it reached out to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) on Tuesday and asked it to “use its early warning and urgent action procedure in response to the human rights crisis following the Trump administration’s deployment of federal forces in Minneapolis and the St. Paul metropolitan area.”



Trump’s DHS Sued to End Lawless Stops and Arrests in Minnesota



Report Details Trump’s Rapid Escalation Toward Authoritarianism in First Year of Second Term

In its submission, the ACLU alleged that federal immigration officials “have ignored basic human rights in their enforcement activity against Minnesotans, especially targeting Somali and Latino communities,” and it called on CERD to “issue a decision under its early warning and urgent actions procedures to intervene and investigate the US’ grave violations of its human rights obligations.”

Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU’s Human Rights Program, said that the US government is in violation of international human rights treaty obligations under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), which prohibits “the use of racial and ethnic profiling, extrajudicial killings, and unlawful use of force against protesters and observers.”

Teresa Nelson, legal director of the ACLU of Minnesota, explained the urgency in getting the international community to intervene in the US government’s operations in her state.

“The Trump administration’s ongoing immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota are being carried out by thousands of masked federal agents in military gear who are ignoring basic constitutional and human rights of Minnesotans,” Nelson said. “Their targeting of our Somali and Latino communities threatens Minnesotans’ most fundamental rights, and it has spread fear among immigrant communities and neighborhoods.”

‘Occupation Has to End!’ Rep. Omar Argues After Homan Says Most Agents Will Stay in Minnesota

Jessica Corbett,

 Common Dreams
February 4, 2026 


U.S. Representatives Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) hold a press conference at Karmel Mall, after the fatal shootings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S., January 28, 2026. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

President Donald Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, announced Wednesday that 700 immigration agents are leaving Minnesota, but with around 2,000 expected to remain there, Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, whose district includes Minneapolis, declared that the drawdown is “not enough.”

As part of Trump’s “Operation Metro Surge,” agents with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have invaded multiple Minnesota cities, including Minneapolis and Saint Paul, and committed various acts of violence, such as fatally shooting Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

In a pair of social media posts about Homan’s announcement, Omar argued that “every single ICE and CBP agent should be out of Minnesota. The terror campaign must stop.”

“This occupation has to end!” she added, also renewing her call to abolish ICE—a position adopted by growing shares of federal lawmakers and the public as Trump’s mass deportation agenda has hit Minnesota’s Twin Cities, the Chicago and Los Angeles metropolitan areas, multiple cities in Maine, and other communities across the United States.

In Congress, where a fight over funding for CBP and ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, is playing out, Omar has stood with other progressives in recent votes. The bill signed by Trump on Tuesday only funds DHS through the middle of the month, though Republicans gave ICE an extra $75 billion in last year’s budget package.


During an on-camera interview with NBC News’ Tom Llamas, Trump said that the reduction of agents came from him. After the president’s factually dubious rant about crime rates, Llamas asked what he had learned from the operation in Minnesota. Trump responded: “I learned that maybe we can use a little bit of a softer touch. But you still have to be tough.”

“We’re really dealing with really hard criminals,” Trump added. Despite claims from him and others in the administration that recent operations have targeted “the worst of the worst,” data have repeatedly shown that most immigrants detained by federal officials over the past year don’t have any criminal convictions.

Operation Metro Surge has been met with persistent protests in Minnesota and solidarity actions across the United States. Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said Wednesday that “the limited drawdown of ICE agents from Minnesota is not a concession. It is a direct response to Minnesotans standing up to unconstitutional federal overreach.”

“Minnesotans are winning against this attack on all our communities by organizing, resisting, and defending our constitutional rights. But this moment should not be a victory lap,” Hussein continued. “It must instead be a call to continue pushing for justice. The deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal immigration agents remain uninvestigated, and communities and prosecutors alike have raised grave concerns about violations of their oaths and the Constitution. This is not the time to pull back, it is the time to deepen our resilience, increase our support for one another, and keep fighting for our democracy and accountability until justice is served.”

The Not Above the Law coalition’s co-chairs—Praveen Fernandes of the Constitutional Accountability Center, Kelsey Herbert of MoveOn, Lisa Gilbert of Public Citizen, and Brett Edkins, of Stand Up America—similarly said that “Tom Homan’s announcement that 700 federal immigration agents will be withdrawn from Minnesota is more a minor concession than a meaningful policy shift.”

“The vast majority—approximately 2,000 federal agents—remain deployed in the state, and enforcement operations continue unabated,” the co-chairs stressed. “This token gesture does nothing to address the ongoing terror families face or the constitutional crisis this administration’s actions have created.”

“The killings of Minnesotans demand real accountability,” they added. “Families torn apart by raids and alleged constitutional violations deserve justice. Real change means the complete withdrawal of all federal forces conducting these operations in Minnesota, full accountability for the deaths and violations that have occurred, and congressional action to restore the rule of law. The American people deserve better than political theater when constitutional rights hang in the balance.”

On Tuesday, the state and national ACLU asked the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination to “use its early warning and urgent action procedure in response to the human rights crisis following the Trump administration’s deployment of federal forces” in the Twin Cities.

“The Trump administration’s ongoing immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota are being carried out by thousands of masked federal agents in military gear who are ignoring basic constitutional and human rights of Minnesotans,” said Teresa Nelson, legal director of the ACLU of Minnesota. “Their targeting of our Somali and Latino communities threatens Minnesotans’ most fundamental rights, and it has spread fear among immigrant communities and neighborhoods.”