10 Reasons Why ICE is Harassing Native Americans

By Zoltan Grossman

January 12, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

“Show Me Your Papers” cartoon by Lalo Alcatraz (shared as “kartoonist” on r/Chicano, 2025).

ICE and Border Patrol are increasingly detaining Native American citizens, and ignoring or refusing to treat Tribal ID cards as proof of citizenship. Just north of where ICE killed Minneapolis rights monitor Renee Nicole Good, agents have detained tribal citizens in the clearly Native neighborhood around Franklin Avenue, where the American Indian Movement was itself born to monitor police brutality. In much the same way, ICE often racially profiles immigrants who have become citizens.

Many tribal leaders are speaking out, accurately pointing out that the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act granted U.S. citizenship to Native peoples, alongside their own tribal citizenship, so ICE has absolutely zero legal basis for stopping any tribal citizen. It might be easy for non-Natives to assume that ICE is simply unaware of tribal citizens’ status, and with proper education and training they will treat Native people as equal citizens, and stop the harassment. 

The problem is that ICE already knows full well that Native Americans are citizens. 

Even when shown Tribal IDs and passports, many ICE agents have been dismissive or hostile. And unfortunately there’s a reason. The harassment and detention of Native Americans today is the latest episode in a long and deep history of colonizing Indigenous peoples at home and abroad. 

Let’s connect the dots, to show why this trend of anti-Native harassment is no accident:

1. Many of the immigrants terrorized by ICE are themselves Indigenous, including those from Guatemala and southern Mexico. In 2019, Trump evoked an “invasion” of Central American refugees in “caravans,” and mocked their pleas for asylum. Guatemalans working at the Trump National Golf Club were ridiculed by a supervisor as “donkeys” and “dogs.” Last year, Trump cut funding for Indigenous language translation in immigration enforcement, and sought to deport Guatemalan unaccompanied children. These Indigenous immigrants, many of them fleeing conflicts fueled by the U.S., have borne the brunt of ICE mistreatment.

2. Ask the Native nations whose lands were crossed by the U.S.-Mexico border, such as Tohono O’odham and Kumeyaay, how for decades they’ve faced harassment by Border Patrol and ICE (and their predecessor agencies) and constantly forced to prove their citizenship or abandon their relatives south of the border. The militarization of the border and construction of the border wall increasingly cuts them off from family ties, cultural sites and knowledge, and the ability to economically trade and support each other.  These tribes (and others bisected by the U.S.-Canada boundary) still face a constant struggle to safely cross the border.
   
3. There’s always been an overlap between anti-Native and anti-immigrant movements, and some politicians and agencies promote both forms of racism. A 2006 ICE raid on meatpacking plants was named “Operation Wagon Train.” When Elaine Willman, founder of the anti-Native Citizens Equal Rights Alliance, was on the Toppenish City Council in central Washington, she could have pitted the local Mexican immigrant population and Yakama tribal members against each other, but she instead accused tribal sovereignty of “contributing to an increase in illegal immigration.”
   
4. Trump has explicitly opposed Native sovereignty, ever since he railed against tribal casino competitors in 1993. Starting in his first term, he used “Pocahontas” as a slur, hung a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office, oil pipelines and drilling on Native lands, slashed environmental regulations and climate funds that protect Native lands, waters, and sacred sites, cut federal programs that benefit tribes, began to take tribes out of trust, and much more. Last year he drastically cut tribal college funding, and his Department of Justice tried to make the preposterous argument that “birthright citizenship” does not apply to Native Americans. Previous administrations have not been friendly to tribal interests, to varying degrees, but Trump has taken it to a higher level, especially in his second term. 

5. Department of Homeland Security recruitment ads for new ICE agents have blatantly evoked Manifest Destiny images of white supremacy that seemingly have nothing to do with immigration enforcement, including John Gast’s “American Progress” painting as “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth defending.” And just who are these newly recruited agents? Back in 2020, it was common to see armed far-right militiamen threaten anti-Trump and Black Lives Matter marches, but now these paramilitaries are notably absent at even more widespread rallies. Perhaps that’s one reason that so many ICE agents wear masks, so they won’t be unmasked as Proud Boys or Three Percenters. 

6. Anti-Indigenous theorists have usually equated tribal sovereignty with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), and posed Native self-determination as “special rights” based on race, rather than on tribes’ political status as nations. But as I noted in a recent post, in the past few years they’re refocusing on the “dangers” of the growing opposition to settler colonialism, whether in Palestine, South Africa, or North America. They’re now concentrating their ire on Indigenous self-determination as a threat to settler states’ entitlement to land, and on Native Studies in education as a threat to the national narrative of progress. The MAGA message is shifting away from race and toward place, and who controls natural resources. And it’s no accident that Trump threatens to annex resource-rich Greenland, just when it’s poised to become the first independent Indigenous state in the Americas. The puzzle begins to fit together. 

7. The connections between the colonization of Native America and the overseas extension of the American Empire long predate Trump. Western Army forts were the first U.S. military bases on foreign soil. The doctrine of “Manifest Destiny” was the template for the expansion of U.S. colonialism into the Caribbean, Hawai’i and other Pacific nations, the Philippines, and Vietnam. In his classic Facing West: the Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building, Richard Drinnon documented that the “Indian Wars,” Philippine-American War, and Vietnam War used identical tactics, and rhetoric of enemy territory as hostile “Indian country.” Drinnon concluded, “In each and every West, place itself was infinitely less important…than what the white settlers brought in their heads and hearts to that particular place. At each magic margin, their metaphysics of Indian-hating underwent a seemingly confirmatory ‘perennial rebirth.’…. All along, the obverse of Indian-hating had been the metaphysics of empire building…. Winning the West amounted to no less than winning the world.” Evoking this history, it’s no accident that the military deploys “Tomahawk” missiles, and helicopters named “Black Hawk,” “Apache,” and “Chinook.” 
8. In Latin America, the source of most immigration into the U.S., Indigenous-led movements are increasingly being targeted by U.S. military and intelligence agencies in their counterinsurgency planning. The National Intelligence Council projected in 2005 that the “demands of free markets” will “drive indigenous movements, which so far have sought change through democratic means, to consider more drastic means.” The Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO), at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, applied this emerging doctrine in Military Review, by lumping together “Insurgencies, Terrorist Groups and Indigenous Movements,” particularly in Mexico. The FMSO’s Lt. Col. Geoffrey Demarest stated in his book Geoproperty that “The coming center of gravity of armed political struggles may be indigenous populations…” and that the Internet is increasingly being used by “Indigenous rebels, feminists, troublemakers…”
   
9. The so-called “Global War on Terror” grew from Iraq and Afghanistan into Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia, in the name of combating “Islamist terrorism.” Yet within all these countries, the main targets of the wars have been “tribal regions,” and the frontier language of Indian-fighting is becoming the lexicon of 21^st-century counterinsurgency. The “Global War on Terror” has morphed into a “Global War on Tribes” (as I noted in an article with that title). Counterinsurgency doctrine views “tribal regions” as festering cauldrons of “lawlessness” and “breeding grounds” for terrorism, unless the tribes themselves are divided against each other and turned against the empire’s enemies. Robert D. Kaplan brazenly wrote in 2004 that “the American military is back to the days of fighting the Indians,” and it’s no accident that in the 2011 raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, his military codename was “Geronimo.” The “Global War on Tribes” is first and foremost a grab for the many natural resources remaining on Indigenous lands, but also a war against the very existence of “tribal regions” that are not under centralized state control, and still retain collective forms of property and social organization.
   
10. The swings of the domestic Indian policy pendulum have always been tied into foreign and military affairs: the era of allotment and boarding schools with the age of imperial conquests and “English-Only” restrictions, the Indian New Deal with nonintervention abroad, the Termination Era with the Cold War against communism, tribal self-determination with the rise of national liberation movements, and the white backlash against tribal sovereignty with the far-right swing against multicultural societies. In U.S. military interventions at home or abroad, the existence of Indigenous peoples, lands, and lifeways has always been deemed a threat to the colonial order, and Trump’s administration is making that longstanding view more open and transparent with every statement and action. Restricting the rights of Native peoples and dispossessing their lands is the original disease of colonialism, not a side effect. 

The fact that ICE and Border Patrol are now harassing and detaining Native citizens is a warning to the larger U.S. society. As federal Indian law scholar Felix Cohen wrote in 1953, “Like the miner’s canary,” U.S. treatment of Native peoples “marks the shift from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere.” Trump began his second term by demonizing Haitians, Somalis, and Venezuelans, and is taking the next step by harassing Native citizens, and will then extend the repression to all citizens. ICE started as a bludgeon against immigrants, but is becoming a test case for expanding authoritarianism against everyone. Only by showing active solidarity with both immigrant and Indigenous communities (and other targeted communities), can we block his plans. 

ICE knows that the rights of Native peoples and recent immigrants are connected, and more Americans should learn that too.  

Zoltán Grossman is a professor of Geography and Native American and Indigenous Studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and a longtime treaty rights activist. He is a past co-chair of the Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers. He was author of Unlikely Alliances: Native Nations and White Communities Join to Defend Rural Lands, and co-editor of Asserting Native Resilience: Pacific Rim Indigenous Nations Face the Climate Crisis. His courses have included “American Frontiers” and “A People’s Geography of American Empire.” His faculty website is here. Email

Zoltan Grossman

Zoltán Grossman is faculty in Geography and Native Studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, studying and teaching about the intersections of ethnic-racial nationalism, militarism, and natural resources. He is author of Unlikely Alliances: Native Nations and White Communities Join to Defend Rural Lands, and co-editor of Asserting Native Resilience: Pacific Rim Indigenous Nations Face the Climate Crisis. His website is at https://sites.evergreen.edu/zoltan/.

A look at America minus immigrants as Trump immigration crackdown reshapes daily life

Hospitals, farms, classrooms and local businesses feel the impact of fewer arrivals as labour gaps widen communities, thin out and the US economy faces slower growth pressures

Lydia Depillis, 

Campbell Robertson

 Published 29.12.25

Eugene Graham watches as protesters stand off against police at a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland, Oregon, on October 5.AP

Across the US, someone is missing.


One year into President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, construction firms in Louisiana are scrambling to find carpenters. Hospitals in West Virginia have lost out on doctors and nurses who were planning to come from overseas. A neighbourhood football league in Memphis cannot field enough teams because immigrant children have stopped showing up.

America is closing its doors to the world, sealing the border, squeezing the legal avenues to entry and sending new arrivals and longtime residents to the exits.


Visa fees have been jacked up, refugee admissions are almost zero and international student admissions have dropped. The rollback of temporary legal statuses granted under the Biden administration has rendered hundreds of thousands more people newly vulnerable to removal at any time. The administration says it has already expelled more than 600,000 people.

Shrinking the foreign-born population won’t happen overnight. Oxford Economics estimates that net immigration is running at about 450,000 people a year under current policies. That is well below the two million to three million a year who came in under the Biden administration. The share of the country’s population that is foreign-born hit 14.8 per cent in 2024, a high not seen since 1890.

But White House officials have made clear they are aiming for something closer to the immigration shutdown of the 1920s, when Congress, at the crest of a decades-long surge in nativism, barred entry of people from half of the world and brought net immigration down to zero. The share of the foreign-born population bottomed out at 4.7 per cent in 1970.

There’s little doubt that major changes are in store. Immigration has woven itself so tightly through the country’s fabric — in classrooms and hospital wards, city parks and concert halls, corporate boardrooms and factory floors — that walling off the country now will profoundly alter daily life for millions of Americans.

Grocery stores and churches are quieter in immigrant neighbourhoods. Fewer students show up in Los Angeles and New York City. In South Florida, Billo’s Caracas Boys, a Venezuelan orchestra, puts on an annual holiday concert where generations of families come to dance salsas and paso dobles. This year, the orchestra announced at the last minute that it was cancelling the show because so many people are nervous about leaving home.

The changes will also be felt hundreds of kilometres from any ocean or national border, even in the snow-washed streets of Marshalltown, Iowa.

First Mexicans, some undocumented, came to Marshalltown in the 1990s to work at the pork processing plant. After a high-profile immigration raid there in 2006, refugees with more solid legal status arrived from Myanmar, Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Now, Mexican, Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants dot the blocks around the grand, 19th-century courthouse. The population is 19 per cent foreign-born, and some 50 dialects are spoken in the public schools. The pews at the Spanish-language Mass at the local Catholic church overflow on Sundays, and, in 2021, a Burmese religious society built a towering statue of Buddha on the outskirts of town.

“You have more energy in the community,” said Michael Ladehoff, Marshalltown’s mayor-elect. “If you stay stagnant, and you don’t have new people coming to your community, you start ageing out.”


But with Trump’s crackdown on immigration gaining strength, local festivals are more thinly attended. Parents pull their children out of school when they hear about people being detained. The supervisor overseeing the construction of a high school sports stadium received a deportation letter, creating a conspicuous absence as the work finished up. The pork plant has let workers go as their work permits have expired.


Echo of past


Over the country’s first century, immigration was essentially unrestricted at the federal level. This began to change in the late 1800s, with the “great wave” of immigrants fleeing political oppression or seeking work. Starting in the 1870s and over the decades that followed, Congress barred criminals, anarchists, the indigent and all Chinese labourers.


By the turn of the 20th century, anti-immigrant sentiment was rampant.


Evidence is mixed on the effect of the 1920s restrictions on assimilation. Some researchers have found that, without newcomers arriving from their home countries, immigrants were more likely to marry American-born citizens and less likely to live in ethnically homogenous neighbourhoods.


Although the effects of the 1924 immigration restrictions are difficult to untangle from other developments — wars, technological advancements, the baby boom — wages rose for US-born workers in places affected by the immigrant restrictions. But only briefly. Employers avoided paying more by hiring workers from Mexico and Canada, countries not subject to immigration caps; American-born workers from small towns migrated to urban areas and alleviated shortages. Farms turned to automation to replace the missing labour. The coal mining industry, which was powered by immigrants now barred from entry, shrank.


And today? Construction wages have been rising, even as home building has been sluggish — a potential indication that deportations in the immigrant-heavy industry are bidding up salaries. The union representing workers in the pork processing industry sees an upside, too.


“I will certainly bring it up at the bargaining table that the way to solve a labour shortage is to pay more money,” said Mark Lauritsen, head of the meatpacking division at the United Food and Commercial Workers Union International.


The same is true in landscaping. Immigrant crews, working outside, were an easy deportation target over the summer. Come spring, said Kim Hartmann, an executive at a Chicago-area landscaping firm, the labour force could be 10 to 20 per cent smaller.


“It’s going to be much more competitive to find that individual who’s been a
foreman or a supervisor and has years of experience,” Hartmann said. “We know that drives costs up.”


Hands still matter


Many services still require humans, in person.


“If you’re an obstetrician, delivering a baby right in the moment, you need hands to lay on the patient,” said David Goldberg, a vice-president of Vandalia Health, a network of hospitals and medical offices in West Virginia.


Nearly a fifth of nursing positions are currently vacant in West Virginia — a state that is older, sicker and poorer than most — and the state faces a serious shortage of physicians in the coming years. The answer has been to look abroad. A third of West Virginia’s physicians graduated from medical schools overseas. Now that option is narrowing.


Similarly, nobody has figured out how to harvest delicate crops with machines.


“It’s not going to hop from the ground into a package without somebody’s hands being involved somewhere along the way,” said Luke Brubaker, who runs a dairy farm in Pennsylvania. To milk cows, feed them and deliver calves, he relies on more than a dozen foreign-born workers, most of them Mexican. He is not optimistic that he will be able to replace them.


Land of opportunity?


Dan Simpson, the chief executive of Taziki’s, a fast casual Mediterranean restaurant chain based in the Southeast, has been losing employees since the beginning of the year. These were not only dishwashers and cooks but also managers and assistant managers, who had come to the US with advanced degrees.


“If you zoom back, the bigger problem is that we’re tarnishing the brand of America,” Simpson said. Even if the United States opens up again, he said, “we’re going to need a campaign to fix the idea that America is not the land of opportunity.”


International students pay full-freight tuition that helps fund new programmes and basic costs at many US colleges. As international enrollment has dropped, many schools are facing budget holes.


Nearly half of the immigrants who legally came to the US from 2018 to 2022 were college-educated, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. Immigrants are far more likely than US citizens to start businesses; nearly half of this year’s Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants.


“You have an economy that is smaller, less dynamic and less diversified,” said Exequiel Hernandez, a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.


Over the longer term, low immigration will collide with one inexorable trend: an ageing population in need of care just as fewer workers are available to provide it.


New York Times News Service

MONOPOLY CAPITALI$M

Investigation Shows How Decades of Corporate Consolidation Have Devastated US Cattle Ranchers

“The marketplace is fundamentally broken,” one rancher explained.

Cattle rancher Denise McConville puts a gate back up after feeding alfalfa to her black angus cattle on September 12, 2022 in McCook, NE.
(Photo by Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Brad Reed
Dec 23, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

Even as US beef prices have continued to surge, American cattle ranchers have come under increased financial pressure—and a new report from More Perfect Union claims that this is due in part to industry consolidation in the meat-packing industry.

Bill Bullard, the CEO of the trade association R-CALF USA, explained to More Perfect Union that cattle ranchers are essentially at the bottom of the pyramid in the beef-producing process, while the top is occupied by “four meat packers controlling 80% of the market.”

“It’s there that the meat packers are able to exert their market power in order to leverage down the price that the cattle feeder receives for the animals,” Bullard said.

To illustrate the impact this has had on farmers, Bullard pointed out that cattle producers in 1980 received 63 cents for every dollar paid by consumers for beef, whereas four decades later they were receiving just 37 cents for every dollar.

“That allocation has flipped on its head because the marketplace is fundamentally broken,” Bullard told More Perfect Union.



Angela Huffman, president of Farm Action, recently highlighted the role played by the four big meatpacking companies—Tyson, Cargill, National Beef, and JBS—in hurting US ranchers.

Writing on her Substack page earlier this month, Huffman zeroed in on Tyson’s recent decision to close one of its meatpacking plants in Lexington, Nebraska to demonstrate the outsize power that big corporations have over the US food supply.

The Lexington plant employs more than 3,000 people and is capable of processing 5,000 head of cattle a day, and its closure is expected to both devastate the local economy and have a major impact on US ranchers throughout the region.

Huffman noted a report from the Associated Press estimating that the Lexington plant’s closure, combined with projected job cuts at a Tyson plant in Amarillo, Texas, could cut national beef processing capacity by up to 9%.

“Ranchers were already dealing with high costs, drought, and years of uneven prices,” Huffman wrote. “Now they face even less competition for their cattle. When there are fewer packers active in the market, ranchers have less bargaining power, and cattle prices fall even as beef prices in grocery stores stay near record highs.”

Dan Osborn, an independent US Senate candidate running in Nebraska, has made the dangers of corporate consolidation a central theme of his campaign, and on Monday he released a video explaining why he spends so much time talking about monopolies, particularly in the agricultural industry.

“If you’re a farmer, your inputs, your seed, your chemicals, you have to buy from monopolies,” he said. “Sygenta, Chinese-owned company you’ve got to buy your seed from, they control and manipulate that market. And then when your production’s over and you’re selling it, you’re selling it to monopolies as well.”



Osborn said that the trend of industry consolidation wasn’t just limited to agriculture, but is now moving forward with major railroad and media mergers.

“We need to create an economic environment in this country that favors competition,” he said. “That’s what a free market is. A free market isn’t three or four big people or big corporations controlling everything.”

Takeaways from AP's report on a beef plant closure that threatens to unravel a small Nebraska town

Meatpacking Town

Story by Jesse Bedayn
THE INDPENDENT, UK

Dec. 22, 2025

A small town in rural Nebraska is losing its biggest employer, a Tyson Foods' beef plant, which will be laying off 3,200 workers next month in a town of around 11,000 people.

Lexington, Nebraska, is expected to lose hundreds of families who will be forced to move away in search of other work. The exodus will likely cause spinoff layoffs in the town's shops, restaurants and schools.

The impact on the town and workers will be “close to the poster child for hard times,” said Michael Hicks, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at Indiana’s Ball State University.

All told, the job losses are expected to reach 7,000, largely in Lexington and surrounding counties, according to estimates from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and shared with The Associated Press. Tyson employees alone will lose an estimated $241 million in pay and benefits annually

It threatens to unravel a town where the American Dream was still attainable, where immigrants who didn’t speak English and never graduated high school bought homes, raised children in a safe community and sent them to college.

Tyson says it’s closing the plant to “right-size” its beef business after a historically low cattle herd in the U.S. and the company’s expected loss of $600 million on beef production next fiscal year.

Related video: Dread, tears as Tyson plans to lay off 3,200 workers in small Nebraska town (The Canadian Press)  

They'll be closing their facility as of January 20th, impacting Tyson workers, business owners and town leaders spoke to The Associated Press for a report on the plant’s closure.

Here are some takeaways.

Tyson’s plant is central to the town’s economy and community

Lexington sits near the dead center of the United States, surrounded by fields of corn, grain silos and cattle.

The plant opened in 1990 and was bought by Tyson a decade later, attracting thousands of workers who labor on cleaning crews and forklifts, on the slaughter floor and trimming cuts of meat.

The town nearly doubled in population and flourished with leafy neighborhoods, recreation centers, a one-screen movie theater and a good school system. Nearly half the students in Lexington have a parent who works at the Tyson plant, school officials estimated.

Many Tyson workers have lived in Lexington for decades, building community at the plant and in the town's many churches, including Francisco Antonio.

The 52-year-old father of four said he’ll stay a few months in Lexington and look for work, though “now there’s no future.” He took off his glasses, paused, apologized and tried to explain his emotions.

“It’s home mostly, not the job,” he said, replacing his glasses with an embarrassed smile.

Tyson workers, devastated by the closure, have no clear plan

Thousands of Tyson workers have mortgages, car and insurance payments, property taxes or tuition costs that they won’t have an income to pay.

For many, finding another job isn't easy, particularly older workers who don’t speak English, haven’t graduated high school and aren’t computer savvy. The last application some filled out was decades ago.

“We know only working in meat for Tyson, we don’t have any other experience,” said Arab Adan. The Kenyan immigrant sat in his car with his two energetic sons, who asked him a question he has no answer to: “Which state are we gonna go, daddy?”

“They only want young people now,” said Juventino Castro, who’s worked at Tyson for a quarter-century. “I don’t know what’s going to happen in the time I have left.”

Lupe Ceja has saved a little money, but it won’t last long. Luz Alvidrez has a cleaning gig that will sustain her for awhile. Others might return to Mexico for a time. Nobody has a clear plan.

“It won’t be easy,” said Fernando Sanchez, a Tyson worker for 35 years who sat with his wife. “We started here from scratch and it’s time to start from scratch again.”

Tears rolled down his wife’s cheeks and he squeezed her hand.

The plant’s closure will ripple through local businesses

The domino effect could go something like this: If 1,000 families leave town, said economist Hicks — who wouldn’t be surprised if it were double that — seats would be left empty in schools, leading to teacher layoffs; there would be far fewer customers in restaurants, shops and other businesses.


Most of the customers at Los Jalapenos, a Mexican restaurant down the street from the plant, are Tyson workers. They fill booths after work and are greeted by owner Armando Martinez’s mustachioed grin and bellow of “Hola, amigo!”

If he can’t keep up with bills, the restaurant will close, said Martinez, who undergoes dialysis for diabetes and has an amputated foot.

“There’s just nowhere we can go,” he said.

Many, including City Manager Joe Pepplitsch, are hoping Tyson puts the plant up for sale and a new company comes in bringing new jobs. That isn’t a quick fix, requiring time, negotiations, renovations and no guarantee of comparable jobs.

Pepplitsch, who noted that Tyson hasn't had to pay city taxes due to a deal negotiated years ago, said that “Tyson owes this community a debt. I think they have a responsibility here to help ease some of the impact."

Asked by the AP for comment about plans for the site, Tyson said in a statement that it “is currently assessing how we can repurpose the facility within our own production network.” It did not provide details or say whether it plans to offer support to the community through the plant closure.

The Independent has always had a global perspective. Built on a firm foundation of superb international reporting and analysis, The Independent now enjoys a reach that was inconceivable when it was launched as an upstart player in the British news industry. For the first time since the end of the Second World War, and across the world, pluralism, reason, a progressive and humanitarian agenda, and internationalism – Independent values – are under threat. Yet we, The Independent, continue to grow.

With GOP ‘Looking at’ Tyson’s Alleged Market Manipulation, Nebraska Candidate Osborn Says ‘Enforce the Law’

“Candidate for Senate Dan Osborn is already doing more for the people affected by the Tyson closure than the current Nebraska senators,” said a worker rights advocate.


Independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn chats with attendees after speaking during his campaign stop at the Handlebend coffe shop in O’Neill, Nebraska on October 14, 2024.
(Photo by Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Dec 12, 2025
COMMON DREAMS


Instead of “another investigation” into possible wrongdoing by meatpacking giant Tyson, independent US Senate candidate Dan Osborn is demanding that elected officials in Nebraska simply “pick up the damn phone” and demand action from the Trump administration following the company’s closure of one of the nation’s largest meat processing plants in what one antitrust expert said was a clear-cut case of market manipulation.

Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.), whom Osborn is challenging in the 2026 election, said Thursday that his team is “taking a look at any allegation of wrongdoing” by Tyson, weeks after the company announced its massive plant in Lexington, Nebraska is set to close in January—putting more than 3,000 people in a town of 11,000 out of work.

The closure comes months after Tyson boosted its stock buybacks and following an announcement that its adjusted operating income had increased by 26% compared to 2024. Tyson controls about 80% of the US beef market along with three other companies, and the Department of Justice is investigating whether the four corporations are colluding to keep beef prices high.

Despite near-record high prices in the industry, Tyson said last week it was closing the Lexington plant and scaling back operations at its facility in Amarillo, Texas to “right-size its beef business and position it for long-term success.”

Basel Musharbash, an antitrust lawyer at Antimonopoly Counsel in Paris, Texas, attended a press conference with Osborn across the street from the Lexington plant this week and said that the “legal analysis here is pretty straightforward” regarding whether Tyson has engaged in market manipulation.

“The Lexington plant accounts for around 5% of the nation’s cattle,” said Musharbash. “By shutting down a plant that slaughters such a large portion of the cattle in this region and the country, Tyson will single-handedly reshape the nation’s cattle markets from boom to bust.”

Ranchers will be forced “to accept lower prices, and Tyson will be able to make higher profits,” he said.

Osborn and Musharbash say Tyson has broken the 2021 Packers and Stockyards Act, which prohibits meatpackers from engaging “in any course of business or [doing] any act for the purpose or with the effect of manipulating or controlling prices.”



Addressing Ricketts on social media, Osborn said Tyson workers “don’t need another useless congressional report that leads to nothing. We need ACTION!”

“Tyson workers and Nebraska ranchers need you to demand that [US Agriculture] Secretary Brooke Rollins immediately initiate an action to hold Tyson accountable for any market manipulation,” he said.

The USDA told the Nebraska Examiner this week that it is monitoring “the closure of the plant to ensure compliance with the Packers and Stockyards Act,” but Musharbash said Rollins can and should “compel Tyson to either keep the plant open or sell the plant to an upstart rival who will introduce honest competition into this cartelized industry.”



“There is nothing left for Ricketts to ‘look into,’ and Nebraskans certainly don’t need some intern on Ricketts’ staff to write a research paper about this issue for the next six months while Tyson hollows out the Lexington community for its selfish gain,” added Musharbash. “Nebraska—and this whole country—deserves better leaders than this.”

Osborn pointed out Thursday that Ricketts has taken more than $70,000 in campaign donations from Tyson.

“The people of Lexington need their elected officials to fight now more than ever,” Osborn said at the press conference this week. “The law that’s been on the books for over 100 years should be enforced... So pick up the damn phone, call Brooke Rollins, and get the USDA to enforce the law.”

By visiting Lexington and speaking out against Tyson’s gutting of thousands of jobs, former Federal Trade Commission member Alvaro Bedoya said that “candidate for Senate Dan Osborn is already doing more for the people affected by the Tyson closure than the current Nebraska senators.”

'Catastrophe': Trump economy kills 1 in 3 jobs in deep-red Nebraska town

Lexington, Nebraska resident Rev. Elmer Armijo on December 12, 2025

 (Image: Screengrab via MS NOW / YouTube)

Carl Gibson

December 12, 2025

ALTERNET

Residents of Lexington, Nebraska are panicking after the town's largest employer announced it would be shutting down operations early next year.

MS NOW reported Friday from Lexington — the seat of Dawson County, Nebraska, which Trump easily carried with more than 74 percent of the vote last year. Meatpacking company Tyson employs 3,200 people in Lexington, though they will all be out of a job come January 20th, when the plant is shutting down.

"Have you ever been in a place where you can just feel the pain and the anxiety? That's what it feels like being here in Lexington, Nebraska," MS NOW reporter Rosa Flores said. "... People have described to me what's happening here by using the words 'catastrophe,' 'crisis,' the feeling of being 'collateral damage,' 'hurt,' 'anxiety,' 'agony.'"

Local business owners told Flores that sales started to plummet the moment Tyson announced it was closing the plant. Many business owners are immigrants who made the money to launch their businesses by working at the Tyson plant.

"There's another business here to my left, down the street. That woman says that people have gone into her store sobbing," Flores said. "Her sales immediately dropped 10 to 20 percent right after the announcement."

Reuters reported earlier this month that Tyson was closing the Lexington plant due to cattle supplies hitting a 75-year low in 2025. A small supply of cattle increases production costs for hamburgers and steaks. Cattle ranchers have seen dwindling herds due to drought reducing the supply of land capable of feeding cattle.

Nebraska U.S. Senate candidate Dan Osborn, who is running against Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.) next year as an independent, accused Tyson of manipulating the market by shuttering the plant. He asserted that Tyson was "destroying five percent of America’s beef processing capacity" given how much cattle gets processed annually at the Lexington plant.

Watch the segment below:

DOJ Shuttered Antitrust Probe of Meatpackers Before Trump’s ‘Performative’ Investigation Demand

“The law is clear,” said one advocacy group, “what’s been missing is the political will to use it.”


A worker helps a shopper in the meat aisle in a grocery store on July 22, 2025 in Miami, Florida.
(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Jake Johnson
Nov 17, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

The US Department of Justice shuttered an antitrust probe into the heavily consolidated meatpacking industry shortly before President Donald Trump announced that he had asked the department to investigate whether companies are unlawfully colluding to push up beef prices.

Bloomberg reported late last week that Trump administration officials “formally notified companies recently that they were closing a probe into sharp price increases” during the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The probe began during Trump’s first term and continued through the Biden administration, which used executive action to target price gouging in the meatpacking industry.

The Trump Justice Department’s decision to close the antitrust investigation came weeks before Trump, in a post on his social media platform, said earlier this month that he had instructed the DOJ to “immediately begin an investigation” into meatpacking companies. Just four corporations—Tyson, Cargill, JBS, and National Beef—control roughly 80% of the beef market in the United States.

Critics viewed the president’s announcement as a performative move intended to deflect criticism of his failure to take substantive action to bring down beef prices. Trump has falsely claimed that the prices of all grocery products are down except for beef.

The advocacy group Food & Water Watch noted that Trump’s call for a price-fixing probe came just three months after the Republican president “rescinded a Biden administration executive order meant to tackle these exact meatpacker abuses.”

“Farmers and consumers need real action to bring down prices and protect producers—not performative announcements,” said Tarah Heinzen. “If Trump is serious about investigating beef packers, his [US Department of Agriculture] must also vigorously defend the prior administration’s Packers and Stockyards Act rules.”

Farm Action, a watchdog that fights corporate abuses in the agriculture sector, said that DOJ probes of the kind ordered by Trump often “end quietly” without any meaningful action.

“For this one to matter, it must end with enforcement,” the group said last week. “If investigators uncover anticompetitive behavior, the DOJ has powerful tools to act. Under the Sherman Antitrust Act, it can take the packers to court, break them up, prosecute executives, force changes that protect farmers, and prevent further consolidation.”

“The law is clear,” Farm Action added, “what’s been missing is the political will to use it.”

With these race remarks, Trump and the GOP are raising a frightening specter from history

Judy Helgen,

 Minnesota Reformer
October 24, 2025 2:08PM ET


Flags fly near a banner depicting Donald Trump during a "No Kings" protest. REUTERS/Kylie Cooper

It’s here and it’s happening. The recent revelations about Republicans “joking” about an affinity for Nazism should wake us up to the reality of the moment. When President Donald Trump says immigrants have “bad genes” and are “poisoning the blood of our country,” he has raised the specter of eugenics that thrived in our country and of course in Germany during the 1930s. There’s a direct line from this thinking to the Holocaust.

We need look no further than Minnesota for insight into this ugly history. During the early 20th century, Minnesota and many other states passed eugenics laws to support so-called racial purification. Laws in 31 states allowed the sterilization of mentally disabled and “feeble-minded” people, epileptics and more. Minnesota passed a sterilization law in 1925, and more than 2,000 people — mostly women — were sterilized. In California around 20,000 were sterilized from 1917 to 1952.

Through the 1930s, American scientists at the prestigious Cold Spring Harbor Lab in New York promoted eugenics and maintained a Eugenics Record Office. David Starr Jordan, who wrote early major works on the fishes of North America and was president of Stanford University, was a white supremacist and supported forced sterilization programs aimed at poor Black, Indigenous and Hispanic women as well as the mentally disabled.

We know that Charles Lindbergh, the Minnesotan famous for his solo flight across the Atlantic, was a eugenicist and talked of preserving the inheritance of European blood and guarding against its dilution by foreign races. He praised Hitler. Margaret Sanger, who was the first president of Planned Parenthood, was a eugenicist.

The Minnesota Eugenics Society was founded in 1923 by Charles F. Dight, who served as president until his death in 1938. He actively promoted reproduction of the “fit” and race betterment (the State Fair held “fit family” contests).

During the 1930s, Dight communicated with Hitler, praising him for his plan to “stamp out mental inferiority among the German people” and “advance the eugenics movement.” If carried out effectively, Dight wrote, “it will make him the leader of the greatest national movement for human betterment the world has ever seen.”

Our country has had a history of restricting immigrants, e.g. the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act that limited immigrants from eastern and southern Europe and Japan.

Trump castigates immigrants as criminals and insane, even though immigrants have lower crime rates than that of American citizens.

How could the President release 1,500 convicted insurrectionists yet push to deport immigrants? He’s likely a true believer in the nonsensical race science that was predominant a century ago.

Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde, who spent a quarter-century in Minnesota, told Trump at the now famous prayer service early this year, “The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry plants and meatpacking plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals — they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation. But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors.”

Aren’t we all the immigrants or the descendants of immigrants? And don’t we all have defects?

Let us not forget: We are called to protect the vulnerable, to treat everyone as equals, to “do unto others as we would have them do unto us.”

Judy Helgen, PhD, is a retired research scientist with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. She lives in Falcon Heights.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for INTERNMENT

Trump Ripped for ‘Absurdly Low’ and ‘Racist’ Refugee Cap Prioritizing White South Africans

“Let’s call this what it is—white supremacy disguised as refugee policy,” said the head of the Haitian Bridge Alliance.

US President Donald Trump displays an article about Afrikaners as he meets with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on May 21, 2025.
(Photo by Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Oct 30, 2025
COMMON DREAMS


After months of reporting, President Donald Trump’s administration on Thursday officially announced that it is restricting the number of refugees for this fiscal year to 7,500, with most spots going to white South Africans—a policy swiftly denounced by human rights advocates and Democrats in Congress.

“This decision doesn’t just lower the refugee admissions ceiling. It lowers our moral standing,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Global Refuge. “For more than four decades, the US refugee program has been a lifeline for families fleeing war, persecution, and repression. At a time of crisis in countries ranging from Afghanistan to Venezuela to Sudan and beyond, concentrating the vast majority of admissions on one group undermines the program’s purpose as well as its credibility.”

The Trump administration’s notice in the Federal Register doesn’t mention any groups besides Afrikaners, white descendants of Europeans who subjected South Africa’s majority Black population to a system of apartheid for decades. Multiple rich Trump backers—including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, venture capitalist David Sacks, and Palantir founder Peter Thiel—spent time in the country during those years.

The 7,500 cap, initially reported earlier this month, is a significant drop from both the 40,000 limit that was previously reported as under consideration by the Republican administration, and the more than 100,000 allowed under former Democratic President Joe Biden.

Four congressional Democrats who serve as ranking members on related committees—Reps. Jamie Raskin (Md.) and Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), along with Sens. Dick Durbin (Ill.) and Alex Padilla (Calif.)—issued a joint statement condemning the new cap, which they noted is “an astonishing 94% cut over last year and the lowest level in our nation’s history.”

“To add insult to injury, the administration is skipping over the tens of thousands of refugees who have been waiting in line for years in dire circumstances to come to the United States, and it is instead prioritizing a single privileged racial group—white South African Afrikaners—for these severely limited slots,” they said. “This bizarre presidential determination is not only morally indefensible, it is illegal and invalid.”

The four lawmakers continued:
The administration has brazenly ignored the statutory requirement to consult with the House and Senate Judiciary Committees before setting the annual refugee admissions ceiling. That process exists to ensure that decisions of such great consequence reflect our nation’s values, our humanitarian commitments, and the rule of law, not the racial preferences or political whims of any one president.

The reason for this evasion is evident: The administration knows it cannot defend its egregious policy before Congress or the American people. While nearly 130,000 vetted, approved refugees—men, women, and children fleeing persecution and violence—wait in limbo after being promised a chance at safety, Donald Trump is looking to turn refugee admissions into another political giveaway for his pet projects and infatuations.

We reject this announcement as both unlawful and contrary to America’s longstanding commitment to offer refuge to the persecuted. To twist our refugee policy into a partisan straightjacket is to betray both our legal obligations and our moral identity as a nation.

“Let’s call this what it is—white supremacy disguised as refugee policy,” declared Guerline Jozef, executive director of Haitian Bridge Alliance. “At a time when Black refugees from Haiti, Sudan, the Congo, and Cameroon are drowning at sea, languishing in detention, or being deported to death, the US government has decided to open its arms to those who already enjoy global privilege. This is not just immoral—it’s anti-Blackness codified into federal policy.”

This week alone, Hurricane Melissa killed more than 20 people in Haiti, and health officials said that the Rapid Support Forces, which are fighting against Sudan’s government, killed over 1,500 people—including more than 460 systematically slaughtered at a maternity hospital—in the city of el-Fasher.

“We reject the idea that whiteness equates to worthiness,” Jozef said of Trump’s new refugee plan. She also took aim at the president’s broader anti-immigrant policy, which has included deporting hundreds of people to El Salvador’s so-called Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT).

“From Del Rio to Lampedusa, Black migrants and other immigrants of color have been criminalized, beaten, caged, and disappeared in CECOT camp in El Salvador—while their humanity is debated like a policy variable,” she said. “This moment demands our humanity, our resistance, not silence.”



Amy Fischer, Amnesty International USA’s director for refugee and migrant rights, also tied Thursday’s announcement to the broader agenda of the president—who, during his first term, faced global condemnation for policies including the forcible separation of families at the southern border.

“Setting this cap at such an absurdly low number and prioritizing white Afrikaners is a racist move that will turn the US’s back on tens of thousands of people around the world who are fleeing persecution, violence, and human rights abuses,” said Fischer. “Refugees have a human right to protection, and the international community—including the United States—has a responsibility to uphold that right.”

“This announcement is yet another attack by the Trump administration on refugees and immigrants, showing disregard for international systems meant to protect human rights,” she added. “The Trump administration must reverse course and ensure a fair, humane, and rights-based refugee admissions determination.”

The announcement came just days after Trump’s nominee to be ambassador to South Africa, far-right media critic Brent Bozell, faced intense criticism for refusing to say whether he would support or oppose repealing laws allowing Black Americans to vote during his Senate confirmation hearing.