Scientists Say Clean Energy-Powered Data Centers Could Save Trillions in Climate, Health Costs

“In a future with immense data center growth, ratepayers shouldn’t be forced to subsidize Big Tech’s profits at the expense of their own health, climate, and pocketbooks,” said a Union of Concerned Scientists analyst.


Rural Michigan residents rally against a planned $7 billion data center in Saline on December 1, 2025.
(Photo by Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Jan 21, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

As ratepayers and environmentalists continue sounding the alarm over a push to rapidly build data centers to support artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency across the United States, scientists stressed Wednesday that powering such facilities with clean energy could save trillions of dollars in climate and health costs over the coming decades.

“US electricity demand could increase by 60% to 80% between 2025 and 2050, with data centers accounting for more than half of the increase by 2030,” according to the new Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) report, Data Center Power Play. “Estimates of the cumulative electricity costs attributable to data centers from 2026 to 2050 range from $886 billion to $978 billion.”





“Without stronger clean energy policies, the additional fossil fuel generation used to power data centers results in an increase in annual US power plant emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) of 19% to 29% (229 to 342 million metric tons—MMT) by 2035,” the document warns. “Restoring federal clean energy tax credits would reduce total US power plant emissions of CO2 by 33% between 2026 and 2035, even if data center demand more than doubles.”

Reviving those tax credits is just one of the “forward-looking policies” for which the report advocates. It also calls for “establishing binding emission reduction targets and carbon-free electricity standards, adopting strong power plant carbon standards, and providing incentives to increase transmission capacity.”

The report further pushes for making large electricity customers, including data centers, cover additional costs and requiring utilities to not only conduct long-term planning for data center load growth but also meet that growth with new low-carbon or zero-carbon generation.

“State and federal policymakers should require data center companies and utilities to negotiate power purchase agreements and grid interconnection terms in public proceedings rather than behind closed doors and nondisclosure agreements,” the publication argues. “Policymakers should also require data center companies and utilities to publicly report power needs, onsite and induced emissions, water use, and other data—and to do so with enough advance notice for communities to make informed decisions.”

In a statement, Mike Jacobs, senior energy analyst at UCS and author of a recent report about costs being pushed onto the public, highlighted that “data centers are already secretly increasing peoples’ electricity bills.”

“While some utility companies and data center developers are intentionally misdirecting scrutiny, others are willfully ignorant about their roles in passing costs onto consumers,” he explained. “In a future with immense data center growth, ratepayers shouldn’t be forced to subsidize Big Tech’s profits at the expense of their own health, climate, and pocketbooks. State utility regulators have clear authority to assign costs to those that cause them—it’s time they require data center developers to pay their fair share for energy needs that can dwarf that of entire cities.”

The new report emphasizes that “additional policies to nearly decarbonize the power sector by 2050 would help limit future damages from extreme heat, drought, wildfires, flooding, and other climate impacts. These policies would also deeply cut harmful air pollutants that contribute to respiratory ailments, heart attacks, other illnesses, and mortalities.”



UCS found that “the cumulative global climate benefits from reducing US heat-trapping emissions total $1.3 trillion to $1.6 trillion between 2026 and 2035, growing to $8 trillion to $13 trillion by 2050. Cumulative health benefits from reducing local air pollution range from $120 billion to $220 billion by 2050.”

The report’s lead author, UCS director of energy research Steve Clemmer, said Wednesday that “the climate and health benefits and net cost savings of building clean energy to meet future electricity needs are obvious and enormous, but they will not materialize without political support and responsible management of data center load growth.”

Julie McNamara, associate policy director for the Climate and Energy Program at UCS, took aim at Big Oil-backed President Donald Trump, whose administration “has repeatedly worked to derail clean energy deployment precisely when we need it most.”

“With surging demand from data centers, the need for plentiful, affordable power has never been higher,” she said. “Yet instead of clearing the path for the fastest, cheapest, cleanest resources to deploy, President Trump is sidelining renewables just to boost the interests of the fossil fuel industry. People will pay the price: in higher bills, in dirtier air, in lost local investments, and in worsened climate impacts.”

We’re All on One Planet; Let’s Act Like It

What recognizing “one planet” really means is showing a wide-open reverence for everything and everybody on it, including everything we don’t understand.



A protester is seen during a climate change demonstration holding a placard that says,” There is no planet B.”
(Photo by Ronen Tivony/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Robert C. Koehler
Jan 23, 2026

Common Dreams

Let’s put Immigration and Customs Enforcement and, indeed, war itself—the smugly violent certainty of militarism—into the largest perspective possible. I suggest this as the only way to maintain my sanity: to believe that we, that our children, actually have a future.

This is one planet. Every living being, every pulse of life, every molecule of existence, is intertwined. I’m not in any way suggesting I understand what this means. I simply see it as our starting point, as we acknowledge and embrace the Anthropocene: the current global era, basically as old as I am, in which natural and human forces are intertwined. The fate of one determines the fate of the other.




‘We Are Running Out of Time’: 2025 Keeps Hot Streak Alive for Global Temperatures

If that’s really true, we have to start thinking beyond the mindset that brought us here. We are truly creating the future by what we do. Our lives are no longer about simply exploiting the present for our limited self-interests or perpetrating us-vs.-them violence on what amounts to ourselves.

I began by mentioning ICE because it’s so blatantly in the news these days, exemplifying the minimalist thinking of US (and global) leaders, as they claim exclusive ownership of bits and pieces of the planet.

The Trump administration is in a weird way proclaiming its belief in “one planet,” but this planet includes only them: basically white, politically obedient Americans.

As Julia Norman writes, for instance, the Department of Homeland Security is in the process of accumulating industrial warehouses around the country “...in an effort to expand the administration’s capacity to execute its mass deportation agenda—a system Secretary Noem recently aptly described as ‘one of the most consequential periods of action and reform in American history.’”

“After the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ allocated an additional $45 billion specifically to ICE for building new immigration detention centers through 2029—a budget 62% larger than the entire federal prison system—DHS gained unprecedented financial capacity to expand its system of terror on a massive scale.”

She adds: “Private contractors such as GEO Group continue to operate facilities housing the vast majority of ICE detainees, positioning themselves to make substantial profit as the administration moves to double detention capacity to 100,000 beds with tens of billions in federal spending. GEO Group and CoreCivic have already reported soaring revenues under Trump’s second term, with executives describing the expansion as ‘pivotal’ and ‘an unprecedented growth opportunity.’ In this system, human confinement has been transformed into an investment strategy.”

There’s an enormous irony here. The Trump administration is in a weird way proclaiming its belief in “one planet,” but this planet includes only them: basically white, politically obedient Americans. What recognizing “one planet” really means is showing a wide-open reverence for everything and everybody on it, including everything we don’t understand.

As I wrote in a column nearly a decade ago, the Anthropocene has come about by a combination of extraordinary technological breakthroughs and cold indifference to their consequences: human evolution, you might say, outside the circle of life. But here we are nonetheless.

The primary causes of the geological shift, according to the Guardian, are the radioactive elements dispersed across the planet by nuclear bomb tests, along with such things as plastic pollution, soot from power stations, concrete, and even the bones left by the global proliferation of the domestic chickens.

“None of this is good news,” I wrote. “Short-sighted human behavior, from nuclear insanity to agribusiness to the proliferation of plastic trash, has produced utterly unforeseen consequences, including disruption of the stable climate that has nurtured our growth and becoming over the last dozen millennia. This is called recklessness. And mostly the Anthropocene is described with dystopian bleakness: a time of mass extinctions. A time of dying.”

But dystopian bleakness is not the spiritual endpoint here. As Our Planet tells us: “The habitats that make up our planet are connected and reliant upon each other. The astonishing diversity of life on earth depends on these global connections.”

“This is a critical moment for our planet. We have changed it so much we have brought on a new geological age—the Anthropocene. The age of humans. For the first time in our history, the global connections that all living things rely upon are breaking. But if we act quickly, we have the knowledge and the solutions to make our planet thrive again.”

There is, in the collective human soul, a deep love for the planet. I understand how naïve it will sound if I just cry: “C’mon, world! No more war!”So I’ll hold off on that and simply address, well, the media, the antiwar protesters, whoever might be reading this. Yes, we should abolish ICE, defund and think beyond militarism, question the sanctity of the imaginary lines (aka, borders) all across our planet. But we should not do so merely out of fear. Let’s do so, rather, in the deep (dare I say religious?) awareness that humanity and Planet Earth are evolving together. And we’re hovering at a moment of extraordinary change.

Let me know what you think: What should we do next? What are we already doing right?

MURDEROUS ZIONIST CENSORSHIP

Will Bari Weiss Condemn Israel’s Killing of CBS Contributor in Gaza?

Abdul Raouf Shaat is among the more than 200 media workers killed by Israeli forces in Gaza since October 2023.


Relatives and colleagues mourn journalists Anas Ghneim, Mohammed Salah Qashta, and Abdul Raouf Shaat, who were killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis on January 21, 2026.
(Photo by Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Brett Wilkins
Jan 22, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

A cameraman and CBS News contributor was among three journalists killed Wednesday by Israeli forces while working in Gaza, prompting some observers to ask when—or if—Bari Weiss, the network’s pro-Israel editor-in-chief, would condemn the attack.

Anas Ghneim, Mohammed Salah Qashta, and Abdul Raouf Shaat were using a drone to record aid distribution by the Egyptian Relief Committee in al-Zahra in central Gaza when, according to eyewitness accounts, an airstrike targeted one of the group’s vehicles accompanying the journalists.

“The Israeli army criminally targeted this vehicle,” Egyptian Relief Committee spokesperson Mohammed Mansour told AFP.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claimed its troops “identified several suspects who operated a drone affiliated with Hamas in the central Gaza Strip, in a manner that posed a threat to their safety,” and then “struck the suspects who activated the drone.”

Israeli officials often claim—almost always without conclusive evidence—that journalists, aid workers, and other civilians it kills are Hamas “terrorists.”

CBS News said that Shaat, a 30-year-old newlywed, “worked for years as a cameraman for CBS News and other outlets.”

Among those outlets were Agence France-Presse, which issued a statement condemning the attack and remembering Shaat as a “kind-hearted colleague, with a gentle sense of humor, and as a deeply committed journalist.”

“AFP demands a full and transparent investigation into his death,” the agency said. “Far too many local journalists have been killed in Gaza over the past two years while foreign journalists remain unable to enter the territory freely.”



Shaat’s CBS News colleagues in London remembered him as a “brave journalist” who was “deeply loved by everyone who knew or worked with him.”

However, one prominent CBS figure has so far been conspicuously silent on Shaat’s killing. As of Thursday afternoon, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss has said nothing publicly about the incident. Weiss is a self-described Zionist whose outlet Free Press—now a division of CBS following its acquisition by Paramount Skydance—is staunchly pro-Israel and has shown indifference toward Palestinian suffering.


For example, FP called the officially declared Gaza famine, which claimed at least hundreds of lives, a “myth” and published other reporting on Gaza that critics said fueled genocide denial.



Paramount Skydance chairman and CEO David Ellison and his father, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, are also both reportedly close to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

Standing in stark contrast with Weiss and CBS News, media advocacy groups were quick to denounce the journalists’ killings. The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate blasted what it called a “deliberate assassination” and “a war crime and a crime against humanity under international humanitarian law.”

Condemnation also came from groups including Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

“CPJ condemns Israel’s strike on a clearly marked civilian vehicle in central Gaza that killed freelance photojournalists... amid an ongoing ceasefire,” CPJ regional director Sara Qudah said in a statement. “Israel, which possesses advanced technology capable of identifying its targets, has an obligation under international law to protect journalists.”




While it is difficult to know precisely how many journalists have been killed in Gaza—where Israel bans foreign reporters from entering—CPJ says at least 208 Palestinian media workers have been killed there. RSF says the number is at least 220. The United Nations puts the figure at over 260.

The deadliest Israeli massacre of media professionals in Gaza occurred last August 10, when six journalists were killed in a tent bombing outside al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. Later that month, an Israeli “double-tap” strike on Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis killed at least 21 people, including five journalists.

According to Gaza officials, Israeli forces have committed more than 1,200 violations of the ceasefire with Hamas since it took effect last October, killing over 460 Palestinians including upward of 100 children. Officials said at least 11 Palestinians were killed by Israeli attacks on Gaza late Wednesday and into Thursday, including the three journalists, three children, and a woman.

Since the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, Israel’s US-backed genocidal war on Gaza has left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing, and around 2 million others forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened.

Israel also continues to restrict the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, causing preventable deaths. For example, at least 10 children and infants have died of cold-related causes this winter, according to local officials.

VP Vance Compares US Economy Under Trump to... ‘Checks Notes’... the Titanic

“Let him talk,” said one observer of the vice president. “He’s his own iceberg.”


US Vice President JD Vance speaks at an industrial shipping facility in Toledo, Ohio on January 22, 2026.
(Photo by Jim Watson-Pool/Getty Images)

Brett Wilkins
Jan 22, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


US Vice President JD Vance left observers scratching their heads Thursday after he touted the Trump administration’s economic policies by comparing them to the doomed ocean liner Titanic.

Speaking at an event in Toledo in his home state of Ohio under a banner reading, “Lower Prices, Bigger Paychecks,” Vance addressed the worsening affordability crisis by once again blaming former Democratic President Joe Biden—who left office a year ago—for the problem.

“The Democrats talk a lot about the affordability crisis in the United States of America. And yes, there is an affordability crisis—one created by Joe Biden’s policies,” Vance said. “You don’t turn the Titanic around overnight. It takes time to fix what was broken.”

Responding to Vance’s remarks, writer and activist Jordan Uhl said on X, “The Titanic, a ship that famously turned around.”

Other social media users piled on Vance, with one Bluesky account posting: “Let him talk. He’s his own iceberg.”

Podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen asked on X, “Does he know what happened to the Titanic?”

One popular X account said, “At least he’s admitting what ship we’re on.”

In an allusion to the Titanic‘s demise and the Trump administration’s deadly Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdown, another Bluesky user quipped, “Ice was the villain of that story too.”

Puns aside, statistics and public sentiment show that Trump has utterly failed to tackle the affordability crisis. The high price of groceries—a central theme of Trump’s 2024 campaign—keeps getting higher. And despite Trump’s claim to have defeated inflation, a congressional report published this week revealed that the average American family paid $1,625 in higher overall costs last year amid tariff turmoil, soaring healthcare costs, and overall policies that favor the rich and corporations over working people.

A New York Times/Siena College poll released Thursday found that 49% of respondents believe the country is generally worse off today than it was when Biden left office a year ago, while only 32% said the nation is better off and 19% said things are about the same. A majority of respondents also said they disapprove of how Trump is handling the cost of living (64%) and the economy (58%).

“You know, a thing about a phrase like ‘lower prices, bigger paychecks’ is that you can’t actually fool people into thinking that you’ve delivered these things if they can look at their own bank account and see it’s not true,” Current Affairs editor Nathan J. Robinson wrote on X.

“I know the Trump administration’s standard strategy is to just make up an alternate reality and aggressively insist that anyone who doesn’t believe in it is a domestic terrorist,” Robinson added, “but personal finances are really an area where that doesn’t work.”

WHY WORKERS NEED UNIONS

‘Senseless Betrayal’ of Workers as Trump Agency Scraps Anti-Harassment Guidance With No Public Input

“Trump-installed Chair Andrea Lucas orchestrated this rescission through the back door, refusing to issue the opportunity for public comment.”

GET IT THROUGH COLLECTIVE BARGAINING


Andrea Lucas, chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, testified during a Senate hearing on June 18, 2025.
(Photo by Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Jake Johnson
Jan 22, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

The Trump administration, quietly and with no public input, voted Thursday to scrap federal guidance aimed at clarifying and bolstering anti-harassment protections on the job, a move that rights advocates condemned as yet another destructive attack on workers.

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which President Donald Trump targeted last year by firing two of its Democratic commissioners before their terms were up, voted 2-1 to rescind the anti-harassment guidance approved under the Biden administration.

Unlike the approval process, which garnered tens of thousands of public comments, the decision by Republicans on the EEOC to completely scrap the guidance was made without any feedback from the American public.

Noreen Farrell, executive director of Equal Rights Advocates (ERA), said in a statement that the Trump administration is “abandoning millions of workers who face harassment on the job and sending a clear message that this administration will not lift a finger to protect them.”

“Trump-installed Chair Andrea Lucas orchestrated this rescission through the back door, refusing to issue the opportunity for public comment,” said Noreen Farrell, executive director of Equal Rights Advocates (ERA). “Requests for meetings to discuss the rescission, including ERA’s request, were canceled. This administration does not want to hear from the workers it is abandoning.”

“The Trump administration’s rescission of the EEOC workplace harassment guidance is about weaponizing a civil rights agency against the very people it was created to protect,” Farrell added.

Ahead of Thursday’s vote, Lucas was vocal in her opposition to the portions of the 2024 guidance that clarified the illegality of workplace harassment based on gender identity. Under Lucas’ leadership, the EEOC last year moved to drop virtually every lawsuit the agency had filed in the previous year over discrimination against transgender workers.

Late last year, Lucas reportedly received a green light from the Trump White House to pursue the complete rescission of the 2024 guidance—not just the sections related to sexual orientation and gender identity, which had already been vacated by a federal court.

Commissioner Kalpana Kotagal, the EEOC’s only Democrat and the lone vote against rescinding the guidance, lamented that “instead of adopting a thoughtful and surgical approach to excise the sections the majority disagrees with or suggest an alternative, the commission is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.”

“Worse, it is doing so without public input,” Kotagal added.

“This move will leave the commission enforcing guidance from a time when gay marriage was illegal and most people didn’t have internet at home.”

US Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), a senior member and former chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, said in a statement that the guidance rescission “is a senseless betrayal from an administration doing everything it can to make working people’s lives harder at every turn.”

“While this move doesn’t change the underlying law, this administration is turning back the clock decades by abandoning robust enforcement of sexual harassment in the workplace—this hurts everyone and helps no one,” said Murray. “Andrea Lucas is openly waging war on the independence and basic mission of the EEOC—and this move will leave the commission enforcing guidance from a time when gay marriage was illegal and most people didn’t have internet at home.”

“Whether it’s protecting sexual predators in the Epstein files, promoting alleged abusers to the highest offices in government, or getting rid of basic standards to protect workers against harassment, this administration has proven time and again that they couldn’t care less about workers, women, or victims of abuse,” the senator added. “Under Trump, the EEOC is taking the side of abusers over working people just trying to do their jobs. We can’t let this get swept under the rug.”

TODAY

Fury Over ICE Brutality and Lawlessness Fuels Push for Minnesota ‘General Strike’

Organizers hope to have “tens of thousands of workers in the street in the Twin Cities” for the day of action.


A protester was pinned to the ground by federal agents and a chemical irritant was sprayed directly into his face, Wednesday, January 21, 2026, in south Minneapolis, Minnesota.
(Photo by Richard Tsong-Taatarii/The Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty Images)

Brad Reed
Jan 22, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Momentum for a planned general strike-like event in Minnesota is building amid increasing outrage over the actions of federal immigration officials in the state.

Schools and businesses across Minnesota are planning to stay closed on Friday as part of the “ICE Out! Statewide Shutdown” day of protest.




Minneapolis Labor, Community Leaders Join Call for Jan. 23 General Strike to Demand ICE Out



‘You Are Murderers!’ ‘Get the F*ck Out!’: Fury at ICE Agents Boils in Minneapolis

The event was first announced last week by a broad coalition of local labor unions and faith leaders with the goal of forcing federal immigration agents to leave their cities and towns.

Bashir Garad, chairman of the Karmel Mall Business Association and the owner of a Minneapolis-based travel company, told the Minnesota Star-Tribune that the planned shutdown is gaining “momentum and support from a wide variety of communities.”

“Already, thousands of businesses have declared that they will shut down this Friday,” Garad added, “and tens of thousands of workers and students have pledged to march in the streets, rather than go to work or school.”

Hundreds of Minnesota businesses have announced plans to shut their doors so far, according to running list posted by Bring Me the News, which also lists dozens of other businesses that are remaining open while vowing to donate at least a portion of sales on Friday to nonprofit groups such as the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota and the Immigrant Rapid Response Fund.

Keiran Knutson, president of Communications Workers of America Local 7520, told Payday Report that organizers are hoping to “have tens of thousands of workers in the street in the Twin Cities” protesting against the actions of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

In addition to the events taking place in Minnesota, Payday Report has published a map showing solidarity strikes occurring in 120 different cities across the US.

The planned Friday strike is the culmination of weeks of resistance against federal agents carried out by Minnesota residents.

In a Wednesday thread posted on Bluesky, author Margaret Killjoy explained how people throughout Minneapolis have banded together to track the movements of ICE and CBP agents and to provide help to their immigrant neighbors.

“First thing this morning, I saw cars following an ICE vehicle down the street, honking at it,” she wrote. “Later, we didn’t drive more than three blocks before we found people defending a childcare facility... Half the street corners around here have people—from every walk of life, including Republicans—standing guard to watch for suspicious vehicles, which are reported to a robust and entirely decentralized network that tracks ICE vehicles and mobilizes responders.”

Taken as a whole, Killjoy said that she had “never seen anything approaching this scale” of what activists have pulled off in Minneapolis.

Minneapolis-based attorney Will Stancil, who has become one of the most high-profile legal observers following and documenting actions by ICE and CBP agents, argued on Thursday that the Trump administration is committing deliberately cruel acts with the hope of inciting violence.

In particular, Stancil pointed to federal agents’ decision to abduct a 5-year-old child and use him as bait to lure out and detain his immigrant father as a deliberately provocative action.

“They clearly believed that Minneapolis would riot after they killed one of us,” Stancil wrote, in reference to Renee Good, a Minneapolis resident who was gunned down by an ICE agent earlier this month. “We didn’t, we organized. We followed them, we monitored them. We alerted our neighbors. We fought them in the courts. And now they’re desperate, so they’re brutalizing us, without a hint of legitimate government purpose.”

5 Top ICE ‘Corporate Collaborators’ Saved $19 Billion in Taxes Under Trump: Report

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

Protestors rally against Palantir’s cooperation with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) deportation regime on June 13, 2025 in Los Angeles.
(Photo by Madison Swart/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images)

Brett Wilkins
Jan 21, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

A campaign launched Wednesday by an economic justice coalition highlights how five major US corporations saved a collective $19 billion in annual tax cuts under President Donald Trump, while also aiding in his Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations.

Americans for Tax Fairness’ (ATF) “ICE Corporate Collaborators: Exposed” campaign details how five corporations that “received massive tax breaks paid for by healthcare cuts” under Republicans’ so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) are now “making money through contracts to help the Trump administration terrorize communities” as part of the president’s deadly anti-immigrant purge.



Trump’s Lax Approach to Antitrust Helps Spur Banner Year for Corporate Mergers



Trump Unleashes Feds on US Cities While Giving Free Rein to Corporate Criminals

“Today we launched our corporate accountability campaign to give citizens the information they need to hold giant corporations accountable for their complicity in the Trump administration’s mass deportation policies,” ATF executive director David Kass said in a statement.

The report notes that five companies—Amazon, AT&T, Home Depot, Microsoft, and Palantir—“helped ICE track, detain, and deport families” while they saved a total of $19 billion in annual corporate taxes under the OBBBA, and their CEOs “collectively received an estimated $124 million in personal tax giveaways.”



Amazon’s cloud computing services, the authors wrote, “have become vital to ICE’s crackdown on immigrants, with their data storage being used for mass surveillance and deportation.”

AT&T, which received $382 million in Department of Homeland Security contracts between 2022-24, “serves as the digital backbone for Trump’s deportation machine.”

Home Depot “has appeared to be collaborating with Trump’s ICE mass immigration sweeps on their property, putting thousands of customers and employees’ safety at risk.”

Microsoft—which gave the Trump Inaugural Committee $750,000 in 2024—has received at least $45 million in homeland security-related contracts in recent years.

Palantir has partnered with ICE to use the company’s artificial intelligence system to identify, track, and deport suspected undocumented immigrants—and is reportedly helping the government build a database of Americans’ private information in likely violation of multiple laws.

These and other companies have been the target of protests and boycott campaigns. These can work—Spotify stopped running ICE recruitment ads and Avelo Airlines ended its contract for deportation flights amid public pressure.

ATF estimates that Palantir CEO Alex Karp—who “received an estimated cumulative ordinary income of $3.3 billion from 2019 through 2024”—personally saved an estimated $85.7 thanks to the OBBBA’s tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans.

Karp is followed by Microsoft’s Satya Nadella ($25.4 million in estimated tax savings), Amazon’s Andy Jassy ($6.9 million), AT&T’s John Stankey ($3.2 million), and Home Depot’s Edward Decker ($2.9 million).

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

“As Trump and his billionaire-backed GOP majority cut billions in healthcare, Medicaid, and SNAP benefits, Americans face steep hikes in the cost of living to pay for tax giveaways to large multinational corporations and the billionaires that run them,” he added. “The American people will not be silent.”

Dems scolded by their own as ICE funding bill barely passes House

Robert Davis  Matt Laslo
January 22, 2026 

 RAW STORY


A federal agent holds a crowd-control weapon, following an incident where a civilian's car was hit by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Nicole Good, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S., January 12, 2026. REUTERS/Tim Evans

Some Democrats erupted on Thursday after the GOP-controlled House of Representatives voted to pass a bill to continue funding President Donald Trump's immigration regime.

The House passed a bill that will keep Immigration and Customs Enforcement funded through at least Sept. 30 by a 214-213 margin, according to the House Clerk's office. Democrats all voted against the bill because of misgivings about the Trump administration's deportation operations.

The vote all but guarantees that the government will avoid at least a partial shutdown ahead of the Jan. 30 funding deadline.

Some Democrats told Raw Story they are furious with the way the party fought against the bill.

Rep. Juan Vargas (D-CA) said he thought Democrats would "fight much harder than this" to defeat the bill.

"What we're seeing right now is people being yanked off the streets, people being disappeared in a sense, and to allow that to continue by basically having the same funding in place, I think it's wrong."

The bill passed by the House keeps ICE's funding level at $10 billion per year. House Democrats had sought a significant reduction in funds following the deadly shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis.

Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-CA) also warned that the situation with ICE appears likely to get worse before it gets better. He referred to the no-knock warrants ICE has been serving across the country, including to U.S. citizens.

"It's just gotten so much worse," Gomez said. "In Minnesota, you're seeing people of any background, you're seeing [ICE] go to their house, just pull up and ask them for ID."

Matt Laslo has covered Congress since 2006, bringing Raw Story readers the personalities behind the politics and policy straight from Capitol Hill. Based in Washington, D.C., Matt has been a long-time contributor to NPR, WIRED, VICE News, The Daily Beast, Rolling Stone, and Playboy. More about Matt Laslo.

INSURRECTION ACT

'It's terror at this point': Explosive warning as Trump weighs nuclear option in Minnesota

Matt Laslo  Martin Pengelly
January 22, 2026

RAW STORY

Federal agents detain locals in Minneapolis, Minnesota. REUTERS/Leah Millis


WASHINGTON – As Vice President JD Vance prepared to visit Minneapolis on Thursday, a prominent Democratic congresswoman, herself a top target of Donald Trump’s racially tinged attacks, railed against federal immigration agents deploying “horrifying” and “terrifying” tactics in her home city.

“It’s occupation … it’s terror at this point,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) told Raw Story.

Omar was speaking at the Capitol on a day of drama around the passage of new funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which houses agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

Agents of ICE and other DHS bodies have been running amok in Minneapolis and other parts of Minnesota as the Trump administration implements its brutal immigration agenda.

On Jan. 7, in Minneapolis, an ICE agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, a U.S. citizen and mother of three who was observing federal operations.

Trump, Vance, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and other senior officials immediately attacked Good and praised the agent who killed her, Jonathan Ross.

Federal agencies refused co-operation with state and local investigators as fears spread that Good’s killing would be covered up, her killer not brought to justice.

Amid rising protests in Minneapolis, there has been another shooting, wounding a man in the leg, and multiple instances of protesters met with violence by federal agents.

The Trump administration has launched investigations into local Democratic leaders, including Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey.


Trump has also floated invoking the Insurrection Act, a rarely used measure that allows the president to deploy regular army troops to deal with civil unrest.

Vance was due to speak in Minnesota on Thursday evening. The administration said he would “reinforce the White House’s unwavering support for federal immigration officials,” hold a roundtable discussion with community leaders, and stage a news conference.

Raw Story asked Omar if she was worried that Vance’s visit risked “tossing gasoline on an already burning fire?”

“Minnesotans have been very level-headed in their approach,” Omar said. “They understand the stakes, and they are not taking the bait in escalating this in any kind of way that would jeopardize the safety of their neighbors.”

In another high-profile incident in Minneapolis, federal agents recently took into custody a 5-year-old boy, seeking to gain access to family members.

“It's one of the most horrifying stories to come out of Minnesota,” Omar told Raw Story. “I mean, to have this child be used in a way to coerce others to come out is really terrifying. And you know, we've heard that they took him and his father to San Antonio [in Texas] before they took them to a more permanent place.”

“Does that show that they are escalating tactics?” Raw Story asked.

“They are,” Omar said. "It's an occupation, I think is a light word to use. It's terror at this point. I think they have a desperate need to show that they are able to do something there.”

Omar was born in Somalia and emigrated to the U.S. — making her a prime target for frequent racist attacks from the right, including from Vance and Trump.

Trump has said Omar should be jailed or deported.

Right-wing invective about Somali Americans and cases of childcare benefit fraud in Minnesota have added fuel to Trump’s attacks.

Omar said: “Obviously, the Somalis are not in the crossfire of [the ICE raids] because, you know, nearly 60 percent of Somalis in Minnesota are US-born. Almost 99 percent of us are citizens. So when they couldn't find Somalis, I think they're taking their anger out on the Latino and Asian community, and it is, like I said, pure terror.”

On Thursday, the House was considering a new funding measure for the Department of Homeland Security. If it does not pass, the House will risk another government shutdown, just two months after the end of the longest such funding pause in history.

Omar said: “The alternative is finding a way to pass legislation that reins in the terror that ICE and Border Patrol is causing in our communities. They have no business being in American cities. Their mission has been to occupy, to terrorize and to intimidate communities.”

Speaking of her Minneapolis constituency, she said, “I have businesses that are reporting severe losses. It is unjustifiable to shoot an American citizen in the face, to have masked men jumping out of unmarked cars, asking American citizens for their papers.

“And this is not just happening in Minneapolis, it's happening across Minnesota, and we cannot normalize this terror that our communities are feeling, and we have to take a stand.”

Omar called the DHS funding bill “a joke” and said, “Real accountability means that they follow what the laws of this country are, and they are moving the goal post every single minute.

“They have authorized for ICE agents to go into people's homes, violating the Fourth Amendment without a judicial warrant. You can now live with federal agents that are deputized by our government constantly violating the Constitution.”

Nonetheless, most observers said the DHS funding measure would pass, with swing-state Democrats likely to support Republicans in voting for the bill.

 
‘The Fourth Amendment Literally Exists to Prevent This’: Memo Claims ICE Can Forcibly Enter Homes Without Judicial Warrants

“Every American should be terrified by this secret ICE policy authorizing its agents to kick down your door and storm into your home,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, demanding congressional hearings.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal officers approach a residential building in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 13, 2026.
(Photo by Octavio Jones/AFP via Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Jan 21, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


“The United States government is looking for ways around that pesky Fourth Amendment,” an investigative journalist said of Wednesday reporting by the Associated Press on an internal US Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo claiming that ICE agents can forcibly enter a private residence without a judicial warrant, consent, or an emergency.

The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution states, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”




Hours After US Citizen Shot Dead by ICE, JD Vance Says ‘Door-to-Door’ Operations Are Coming



No, Says Rights Coalition, Recording ICE Agents Is Not Illegal

ICE’s May 12 memo, part of a whistleblower disclosure obtained by the AP, says that “although the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has not historically relied on administrative warrants alone to arrest aliens subject to final orders of removal in their place of residence, the DHS Office of the General Counsel has recently determined that the US Constitution, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the immigration regulations do not prohibit relying on administrative warrants for this purpose.”

The January 7 disclosure was sent to the US Senate by the group Whistleblower Aid, which is “keeping the whistleblowers’ identities anonymous even from oversight investigators,” according to the document. It notes that despite being addressed to “All ICE Personnel,” the seemingly unconstitutional memo “has not been formally distributed to all personnel.”

Instead, it “has been provided to select DHS officials who are then directed to verbally brief the new policy for action. Those supervisors then show the memo to some employees, like our clients, and direct them to read the memo and return it to the supervisor,” the disclosure details. “Newly hired ICE agents—many of whom do not have a law enforcement background—are now being directed to rely solely on” an administrative warrant drafted and signed by an ICE official to enter homes and make arrests.

Asked about the May 12 memo, signed by acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told the AP that everyone DHS serves with an administrative warrant has already had “full due process and a final order of removal,” and the US Supreme Court and Congress have “recognized the propriety of administrative warrants in cases of immigration enforcement.”

However, as Whistleblower Aid senior vice president and special counsel David Kligerman stressed in a Wednesday statement, “no court has ever found that ICE agents have such legal authority to enter homes without a judicial warrant.”

“This administration’s secretive policy advocates conduct that the Supreme Court has described as ‘the chief evil against which the wording of the Fourth Amendment is directed’—that is the warrantless physical entry of a home,” he noted. “This is precisely what the Fourth Amendment was created to prevent.”

“If ICE believes that this policy is consistent with the law, why not publicize it?” he asked. “Perhaps they’ve hidden it precisely because it cannot withstand legal scrutiny. Policies which impact fundamental constitutional rights, particularly one which the Supreme Court has called the greatest of equals among the Bill of Rights, should be discussed openly with the American people. It cannot be undone by hidden policy memos.”

Other lawyers, journalists, and critics responded similarly to the AP‘s reporting on social media. Alejandra Caraballo of the Harvard Law Cyberlaw Clinic declared that “the Fourth Amendment literally exists to prevent this.”

Bradley P. Moss, an attorney specializing in litigation related to national security, federal employment, and security clearance law, said, “Remember when the Fourth Amendment was still a thing?”

American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick wrote: “It has been accepted for generations that the only thing which can authorize agents to break into your home is a warrant signed by a judge. No wonder ICE hid this memo!”

“This is the Trump administration trashing the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution in pursuit of its mass deportation agenda,” he continued, highlighting a footnote that suggests “they won’t even rule out authorizing home invasions with no judicial warrant for people not even ordered removed!”

“In short, this secret memo explains SO MUCH of what we’ve been seeing over the last months, including this raid of a home in Minneapolis where ICE officers presented no judicial warrant before breaking in the door,” he said. “Turns out they were secretly told they don’t need one!”

While Reichlin-Melnick shared photos of a scene in which armed immigration agents used a battering ram to enter a Minneapolis home and arrest a Liberian man, federal agents also recently broke down the door of a residence in neighboring Saint Paul, Minnesota, and arrested ChongLy “Scott” Thao, a US citizen who was later freed.



The AP reporting and responses to the leaked memo came as the Trump administration on Wednesday surged immigration agents to Maine for what it dubbed “Operation Catch of the Day,” mirroring the federal deployment to not only Minnesota—where ICE officer Jonathan Ross fatally shot Renee Good, a US citizen, in her vehicle earlier this month—but also Illinois and California.

US Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), ranking member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, opened an inquiry into reports of unconstitutional detentions of US citizens by immigration agents in October and on Wednesday demanded answers about the new whistleblower disclosure.

Blumenthal sent lists of questions and requests for records to Lyons and US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem as well as Benjamin C. Huffman, director of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers. The senator also wrote to Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chair Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), urging them to call the ICE and DHS leaders to testify before their panels.

“Every American should be terrified by this secret ICE policy authorizing its agents to kick down your door and storm into your home,” Blumenthal said in a statement. “It is a legally and morally abhorrent policy that exemplifies the kinds of dangerous, disgraceful abuses America is seeing in real time.”

“In our democracy, with vanishingly rare exceptions, the government is barred from breaking into your home without a judge giving a green light,” he continued. “Government agents have no right to ransack your bedroom or terrorize your kids on a whim or personal desire. I am deeply grateful to brave whistleblowers who have come forward and put the rights of their fellow Americans first.”

“My Republican colleagues who claim to value personal rights against government overreach now have an opportunity and obligation to prove that rhetoric is real,” the senator added. “They must hold hearings and join me in demanding the Trump administration answer for this lawless policy.”

Expert Who Ran Simulations on ‘How Civil Wars Start’ Warns Minnesota Is Exactly What It Looks Like

“If we keep having these crises, one of them is going to get really ugly.”


Federal immigration officers confront protesters outside Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 15, 2026.
(Photo by Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Brad Reed
Jan 21, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Experts are warning that the Trump administration’s ongoing crackdown in Minnesota could quickly get out of hand and could even result in a second US civil war.

Claire Finkelstein, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, wrote in a Wednesday column published by the Guardian that she and her colleagues at the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL) conducted a tabletop exercise in October 2024 that simulated potential outcomes if a US president were to carry out law enforcement operations similar to the ones being conducted by the Trump administration with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Minnesota.



‘Minneapolis Is the Test Case’: Trump Threatens Insurrection Act to Put Down Protests


“In that exercise, a president carried out a highly unpopular law-enforcement operation in Philadelphia and attempted to federalize the Pennsylvania’s National Guard,” Finkelstein explained. “When the governor resisted and the guard remained loyal to the state, the president deployed active-duty troops, resulting in an armed conflict between state and federal forces.”

Finkelstein noted that such a scenario is alarmingly close to what’s currently going on in Minnesota, where Gov. Tim Walz has placed his state’s National Guard on standby and President Donald Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would give him broad powers to deploy the military on US soil.

The simulation also projected that the judiciary would be of little help to any state that found itself in the president’s crosshairs.

“We concluded that in a fast-moving emergency of this magnitude, courts would probably be unable or unwilling to intervene in time, leaving state officials without meaningful judicial relief,” Finkelstein explained. “State officials might file emergency motions to enjoin the use of federal troops, but judges would either fail to respond quickly enough or decline to rule on what they view as a ‘political question,’ leaving the conflict unresolved.”

Steve Saideman, a political scientist at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, argued that the situation now is even more dire than the one Finkelstein and her colleagues imagined in their simulation.

In a post on Bluesky, Saideman argued that the US is “hours or days away from civil war.”

“This might sound extreme,” he acknowledged, “but if Walz has the Minnesota National Guard blocking ICE operations, the usual response of the federal government to governors using National Guard against feds is to call out the Army... What happens if the Army confronts Minnesota National Guard? We have no idea. But one real possibility is: bam.”

Saideman added that, given the nonstop chaos of Trump’s presidency, it’s only a matter of time before it eventually boils over into real civil conflict.

“If we keep having these crises, one of them is going to get really ugly,” he said. “Crises under Trump are street cars—there is always another one coming along. We have gotten lucky thus far, but if a citizen shoots at ICE or if the Minnesota National Guard tussles with ICE, things may escalate very quickly.”

In a New York Times column published on Monday, Lydia Polgreen argued it was no longer a stretch to equate what is going on in Minnesota with a war being waged by the federal government against one of its own states.

“It might not yet be a civil war, but what the White House has called Operation Metro Surge is definitely not just—or even primarily—an immigration enforcement operation,” wrote Polgreen. “It is an occupation designed to punish and terrorize anyone who dares defy this incursion and, by extension, Trump’s power to wield limitless force against any enemy he wishes.”