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Thursday, February 26, 2026

'Sick and pathetic': Analysts outraged by Republicans' latest attack on trans people

Robert Davis
February 25, 2026

RAW STORY

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA), flanked by House Republican leadership and activists, speaks during a press conference after the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a bill requiring proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote and when voting, ahead of the November midterm elections, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 11, 2026. REUTERS/Kent Nishimura TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

The latest attack against the transgender community by Republicans in Kansas incited outrage among analysts on Wednesday night.

The Kansas Division of Vehicles sent letters to transgender people on Wednesday, saying that their driver's licenses would be considered invalid as of Thursday because of a new state law, Erin In The Morning reported. That law also said transgender people caught driving with an invalid license can be charged with a class B misdemeanor, carrying up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine.

"The letter ... states that under House Substitute for Senate Bill 244, Kansas-issued driver's licenses and identification cards must now reflect the credential holder's 'sex at birth,'" according to the report.

Political analysts and observers were outraged by the report. They shared their reactions on social media.

"These people are really sick and pathetic," Dean Baker, economist at the Center for Economic Research, posted on Bluesky. "They must be worried about the size of their penis. How else can someone be so worried about trans people?"

"This is bigotry, pure and simple," Bill Kristol, editor-at-large for The Bulwark, posted on Bluesky.

"It also strikes me as a direct violation of the Civil Rights Act as interpreted by the Bostock decision," historian Brad Proctor posted on Bluseky.

"Kansas wants to pay millions in damages?" retired lawyer Rex Smith posted on Bluesky.

Read the entire report by clicking here.

Sunday, February 22, 2026

Senate Dems Push Trump DOJ to Reveal All Talks With Lobbyists About Ouster of Antitrust Chief

The removal of Gail Slater “raises significant concerns about this administration’s commitment to enforcing the antitrust laws for the betterment of consumers and small businesses,” the lawmakers warned.

Attorney General Pam Bondi testifies before the House Judiciary Committee on February 11, 2026.
(Photo by Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Jake Johnson
Feb 16, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

A group of Democrats in the US Senate is pressuring President Donald Trump’s Justice Department to hand over any and all communications between the agency and corporate lobbyists related to last week’s ouster of antitrust chief Gail Slater, which came weeks before the scheduled start of the closely watched Live Nation-Ticketmaster trial.

In a Saturday letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi—herself a former corporate lobbyist—the Democratic lawmakers raised concerns about the timing of Slater’s departure, pointing to Live Nation-Ticketmaster’s ongoing “attempts to evade responsibility by convincing Justice Department leadership to settle the case on terms favorable to the company, rather than fans, artists, and independent venues.”

Warren Says Trump DOJ Ouster of Antitrust Chief ‘Looks Like Corruption’ as Lobbyists, Wall St Rejoice

‘Pure Corruption Reigns’ at Trump DOJ as Top Antitrust Official Gail Slater Ousted

Slater’s ouster as head of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division less than a year after she was confirmed in a bipartisan vote, wrote Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and six other Democratic lawmakers, “raises significant concerns about this administration’s commitment to enforcing the antitrust laws for the betterment of consumers and small businesses, including seeing through its cases against monopolies.”

The antitrust suit against Live Nation, Ticketmaster’s parent company, was launched in 2024 by the Biden administration and a coalition of state attorneys general. Their complaint accuses Live Nation of unlawful anticompetitive conduct that “allows them to exploit their conflicts of interest—as a promoter, ticketer, venue owner, and artist manager—across the live music industry and further entrench their dominant positions.”

Semafor reported earlier this month that Live Nation executives and lobbyists “have been negotiating with senior DOJ officials” in an effort to “avert a trial over whether the company is operating an illegal monopoly.” Those negotiations are reportedly being held outside of the antitrust division previously headed by Slater, who was ousted days after Semafor published its story.

The American Prospect reported that Kellyanne Conway and “MAGA influencer” Mike Davis are among those lobbying the Justice Department on behalf of Live Nation.

In their Saturday letter, the Senate Democrats called on the Justice Department to provide “the dates of each meeting with any representatives of Live Nation-Ticketmaster and the individuals present from the Justice Department, White House, or Live Nation-Ticketmaster for each meeting” and “all communications” between the DOJ and Live Nation-Ticketmaster regarding the dismissal of Slater or her deputies.

One of those deputies, Roger Alford, unloaded on the Bondi-led Justice Department weeks after his firing last summer for “insubordination.” According to Alford, the DOJ is “now overwhelmed with lobbyists with little antitrust expertise going above the antitrust division leadership seeking special favors with warm hugs.”

Alford pointed specifically to the merger settlement deal that the Justice Department cut with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Juniper Networks last year. Bondi’s chief of staff reportedly overruled Slater’s team to push through the settlement.

The Live Nation-Ticketmaster antitrust challenge could be “the next casualty” of the lobbyist-infiltrated DOJ, Alford warned.

Thursday, February 19, 2026

As Trump Marches US Toward Iran War, Critics Ask: Where’s the ‘Pushback’ From Dems and Media?

“It’s astonishing that we’re building up for a significant military clash, and Congress isn’t involved, no real case is being made to the public, and the average American has no clue.”

US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and US House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) depart a press conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on January 8, 2026.
(Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

Stephen Prager
Feb 18, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Amid reports that President Donald Trump is pushing the US toward a “massive” war in Iran, critics have found themselves shocked by the lack of “pushback” from top Democrats and mainstream media institutions.

Barak Ravid reported for Axios on Wednesday that, with a deal between the US and Iran appearing increasingly out of sight, “the Trump administration is closer to a major war in the Middle East than most Americans realize” and “It could begin very soon.”

‘The Tankers Just Keep Coming’: US Military Movements Spike Fears of Imminent Attack on Iran

US Military Told Mideast Ally That Trump Attack on Iran is ‘Imminent’: Report

Sources told the outlet that “A US military operation in Iran would likely be a massive, weeks-long campaign that would look more like full-fledged war than last month’s pinpoint operation in Venezuela.”

“Such a war would have a dramatic influence on the entire region and major implications for the remaining three years of the Trump presidency,” Ravid wrote.

However, with Congress on recess and the media largely distracted by a whirlwind of other issues, he noted, “there is little public debate about what could be the most consequential US military intervention in the Middle East in at least a decade.”

As columnist Adam Johnson pointed out on social media, Trump’s sabre-rattling toward Iran was underway well before Congress left town.

Despite this, Johnson said, the “two most powerful Democrats in the country,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), “have once again not leveled a single word of substantive pushback,” as was the case when Trump conducted strikes against Iran over the summer.

He said the top Democrats have only acknowledged Trump’s threats “when asked by reporters” and have made only “process criticisms” rather than criticizing the merits of the war itself.

Last month, as Trump threatened to carry out massive strikes in retaliation for Iran’s brutalization of protesters, Schumer limited his criticism to the fact that Trump had not consulted Congress.

“It has to be debated by Congress. Something like that, the War Powers Act, the Constitution, requires a discussion in Congress. We’ve had no reach-out from the administration at this point,” he told reporters.

More recently, Jeffries—a member of Congress who is briefed on national security matters—was asked on CBS’s Face the Nation what he knew about the war plans or what he would want to know.

He did not answer that question, but vaguely lamented that Trump “has been slow to provide information... to the Gang of Eight members of Congress” and “hasn’t provided a significant amount of information to Congress in general.”

“When it comes to sanctions, perma-war, and bombings, we do not have an opposition party,” Johnson said. “We have sleepy AIPAC-funded hall monitors paid to get wedgies and vaguely object after the craters are smoking in the ground.”

New York Times columnist David French agreed: “It’s astonishing that we’re building up for a significant military clash, and Congress isn’t involved, no real case is being made to the public, and the average American has no clue. If this gets serious, it will be a shock for lots of people.”

There is little hunger in the American public for a war with Iran. A YouGov survey from early February found that 48% said they strongly or somewhat opposed military action in Iran, compared with just 28% who supported it and 24% who weren’t sure.

Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said in an interview with Democracy Now! on Wednesday that, despite the public’s broadly anti-interventionist attitudes, “their voices are more or less not being heard in the mainstream media.”

“We’re seeing exactly what we saw during the Iraq War, in which a large number of pro-intervention Iraqi voices were paraded through mainstream media in order to give the impression that not only is this something that is supported by the overwhelming majority of the Iraqi society, but also that this is the morally right thing to do,” Parsi said.

Drop Site News founder Ryan Grim said that when compared with the invasion of Iraq, which was built up over the course of more than a year through persistent propaganda to get the public on board, the Trump administration’s effort to sell a war with Iran is laughable.

“We don’t even get the respect of being lied into war anymore,” he said. “He’s just going to do it.”

Trump inches close to 'pulling the trigger' on 'full-fledged war': 'Could begin very soon'

Alexander Willis
February 18, 2026
RAW STORY

As a fleet of U.S. warships barrel toward Iran, the Trump administration appears poised to “pull the trigger” on a “full-fledged war” at any moment, and may do so sooner than “most Americans realize,” Axios reported Wednesday.

“Trump's military and rhetorical buildups make it hard for him to back down without major concessions from Iran on its nuclear program,” writes Axios’ Mike Allen in the outlet’s report Wednesday.

“It's not in Trump's nature, and his advisers don't view the deployment of all that hardware as a bluff. With Trump, anything can happen. But all signs point to him pulling the trigger if talks fail.”

The Trump administration met with Iranian officials in Geneva, Switzerland on Tuesday in the hopes of reaching a deal to avoid further escalations, but according to Vice President JD Vance, those talks stalled due to Iranian officials refusing to “acknowledge” some of President Donald Trump’s “red lines.”

Now, according to sources who spoke with Axios on the condition of anonymity, the United States could be engaged in “a major war in the Middle East,” and “very soon,” Axios reported.

Both the USS Gerald Ford and the USS Abraham Lincoln – two massive aircraft carriers that each carry dozens of aircraft and crews of up to 5,690 – are currently near Iran, BBC Verify and AntiWar.com have reported.

With the aircraft carriers are dozens of warships and hundreds of fighter jets. And, according to Axios, more than 150 military cargo flights have “moved weapons systems and ammunition” to the region. Within the past 24 hours as of Wednesday morning, the Trump administration has also moved 50 additional fighter jets to the region.

Trump's conspiratorial 2011 Iran warning resurfaces as war reports swirl

Robert Davis
February 18, 2026

RAW STORY

U.S. President Donald Trump walks to deliver an address to the nation at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S. June 21, 2025, following U.S. strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/Pool

One of President Donald Trump's old warnings about Iran resurfaced on Wednesday as reports indicate that he is pondering war with the country

In 2011, Trump claimed that then-President Barack Obama would strike Iran to ensure he was elected for a second term. The post at the time was quite controversial, as the former president was facing a stiff re-election campaign while the country was still recovering from the Great Recession.

That post was retweeted on Wednesday, at a time when Axios reported that Trump had deployed more than 150 cargo flights to move weapons and ammunition into the region. The U.S. military has also sent 50 fighter jets, including F-35s, F-22s, and F-16s, to the area.

Last year, the Trump administration conducted a secret strike against three of Iran's nuclear facilities. Trump claimed afterwards that the facilities were "totally destroyed," although some analysts disagreed with that claim.

People in Trump's orbit, like conservative talk show host Mark Levin, have been pushing the president to strike Iran again.

The president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and special envoy Steve Witkoff held negotiations with Iranian representatives on Tuesday, Axios reported. U.S. officials told the outlet that they are unconvinced that the two countries can close the "gaps" that exist between them.

Far-right influencer melts down over Trump's push to war with Iran: 'Completely betrayed!'

Nicole Charky-Chami
February 18, 2026

RAW STORY

Far-right white nationalist and Nazi sympathizer Nick Fuentes lost it on Wednesday amid growing national concern that America is moving closer to war with Iran.

Fuentes wrote on X about what he expected to happen if a war were to break out between the U.S. and Iran under President Donald Trump.

"If Trump brings us to war in Iran you can forget about 2026 and you can forget about a ticket with Vance or Rubio in 2028. This is literally Iraq 2.0. The GOP has utterly and completely betrayed America First," he wrote.

As military movement heightens in the Arabian Sea and more American air defense are repositioned closer to the Middle East, a Trump administration adviser reportedly told Axios, “I think there is 90% chance we see kinetic action."

MAGA has been divided over the Trump administration's international focus throughout the first year of Trump's second term. Fuentes' most recent comment signifies his growing disdain over the Trump administration's pivot to international security versus the MAGA coalition's central push for "America First" policies.

Sunday, February 15, 2026

‘Corruption Couldn’t Be More Obvious’: Trump Stacks Key Panel With Crypto and Gambling CEOs

“President Trump has given up on caring about protecting working class Americans and has given the keys to our economy to billionaire scammers.”

Cryptocurrency coins, including the $Trump meme coin and bitcoin, seen in a photo illustration in Brussels, Belgium, on February 8, 2026.
(Photo by Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Brad Reed
Feb 13, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Alarms are being raised amid reports that President Donald Trump is stacking a key regulatory committee with CEOs of online prediction markets, cryptocurrency firms, and sports betting apps.

As reported on Thursday by the right-wing Daily Wire, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is launching a new initiative called the Innovation Advisory Committee, which CFTC Chairman Michael Selig said would be tasked with ensuring “the CFTC’s decisions reflect market realities so the agency can future-proof its markets and develop clear rules of the road for the Golden Age of American Financial Markets.”

Among the members of the committee are Tarek Mansour, CEO of online betting market Kalshi; Brian Armstrong, CEO of cryptocurrency hub Coinbase; Christian Genetski, president of the FanDuel sports betting app; and Matt Kalish, president of sports betting app DraftKings North America.

Emily Peterson-Cassin, education fund policy director at Demand Progress, said the committee’s composition has deeply concerning implications for the future of the US economy.

“The corruption couldn’t be more obvious,” said Peterson-Cassin. “It’s hard to see the CTFC succeeding at its mission to prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis when it is influenced from the inside by a rogues’ gallery of billionaire CEOs responsible for monetizing and gamifying virtually every aspect of everyday life.”

Peterson-Cassin added that the latest move shows that “President Trump has given up on caring about protecting working class Americans and has given the keys to our economy to billionaire scammers.”

The creation of the Innovation Advisory Committee wasn’t the only news made by CFTC this week, as Barron’s reported on Monday that the commission’s enforcement division based in Chicago has now been completely gutted, as its entire litigation team has either resigned or been laid off.

One laid-off former CFTC attorney told Barron’s that the gutting of the office will make it much easier for financial scammers to rip off Americans.

“If I was a different person I would launch a crypto scam right now,” said the attorney, “because there’s no cops on the beat.”

Warren Says Trump DOJ Ouster of Antitrust Chief ‘Looks Like Corruption’ as Lobbyists, Wall St Rejoice

“Every antitrust case in front of the Trump Justice Department now reeks of double-dealing,” said Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

US Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) speaks during a Senate Banking Committee hearing on February 5, 2026.
(Photo by Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Jake Johnson
Feb 13, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

US Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Thursday raised alarm over what she described as the highly suspicious circumstances surrounding Gail Slater’s ouster as the Trump administration’s top antitrust official, a move that was cheered by Wall Street investors and lobbyists working to shield corporate monopolists.

“It looks like corruption,” Warren (D-Mass.) said in a statement after Slater announced her departure on Thursday following a behind-the-scenes power struggle with pro-corporate Trump officials. “A small army of MAGA-aligned lawyers and lobbyists have been trying to sell off merger approvals that will increase prices and harm innovation to the highest bidder.”

‘Pure Corruption Reigns’ at Trump DOJ as Top Antitrust Official Gail Slater Ousted

“Every antitrust case in front of the Trump Justice Department now reeks of double-dealing,” the senator added, noting that Live Nation—the owner of Ticketmaster—saw its stock price surge following news of Slater’s removal.

“Americans’ top concern is affordability, but one of Trump’s few bipartisan-supported nominees—the top law enforcement official responsible for stopping illegal monopolies and protecting American consumers—was just ousted,” said Warren. “Congress has a responsibility to unearth exactly what happened and hold the Trump administration accountable.”

In recent weeks, Live Nation has been in talks with top Justice Department officials to avoid an antitrust trial that’s supposed to begin next month. The negotiations have reportedly bypassed the DOJ antitrust division previously headed by Slater, who was once viewed as the leader of a supposedly burgeoning “MAGA antitrust movement” but was abandoned by her top ally within the Trump administration, Vice President JD Vance, and forced out.

Influence peddlers reportedly on Live Nation’s payroll include Mike Davis—who welcomed Slater’s departure in a post on social media—and Kellyanne Conway, a former adviser to President Donald Trump. The American Prospect noted that Davis “reportedly earned a $1 million ‘success fee’ for getting DOJ to drop its challenge to the $14 billion Hewlett Packard Enterprise-Juniper Networks merger,” a settlement in which Attorney General Pam Bondi’s chief of staff overruled Slater.

“Davis also earned at least $1 million by persuading the Justice Department to allow a merger between Compass and Anywhere Real Estate, the two largest real estate brokerages by volume in 2024, despite objections from antitrust division attorneys,” according to the Prospect.

One of Slater’s deputies who was fired from the antitrust division last year later alleged that lobbyists are effectively dictating antitrust policy at the DOJ under Bondi’s leadership.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), the former chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights, said Thursday that Slater’s removal represents “a major loss for bipartisan antitrust enforcement.”

“She received significant bipartisan support in the Senate and has continued important cases brought by administrations of both parties, including winning a landmark monopolization case against Google and preparing the vital case to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster for trial next month,” said Klobuchar. “Her departure raises significant concerns about this administration’s commitment to enforcing the antitrust laws for the betterment of consumers and small businesses, including seeing through its cases against monopolies.”

Tuesday, February 10, 2026

Trump’s push to have donors fund his $400 million White House ballroom might cost him the whole project

Isabel Keane
Tue, February 10, 2026
THE INDEPENDENT

A federal judge will soon decide whether President Trump can rely on private donations to fund a $400 million White House ballroom project, with critics questioning the lack of transparency in the arrangement.

President Donald Trump’s plan to have private donors fund his new $400 million White House ballroom may cost him the entire project, as a federal judge will soon decide whether the administration is allowed to rely on fundraising to bypass congressional approval.

U.S. District Judge Ricard Leon says he may rule this month on a lawsuit filed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in December to halt the ballroom’s construction, according to the Washington Post.

Trump has argued that using private donations to pay for the project keeps the burden off taxpayers, but critics say the plan highlights a lack of transparency about how the expansion is being funded.

Democrats and watchdog groups have raised questions about the arrangement, which relies on donations from big corporations and businesses. The donations are then routed through a nonprofit intermediary, which also profits, having received millions of dollars in fees, according to the Post.

The Trump administration has already found a lengthy list of donors, including Big Tech giants Amazon, Apple, Google, HP and Microsoft — as well as other well-known companies like Coinbase, Lockheed Martin, Palantir Technologies and T-Mobile.

A federal judge will soon decide whether President Donald Trump’s administration is allowed to rely on private donations to fund its new $400 million ballroom expansion, according to a report (Getty Images)More

Trump has previously said that using donations to fund the project keeps taxpayers from fronting the bill (AFP via Getty Images)

Most of the donors have declined to say how much they’ve given. However, the watchdog group CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) says at least 22 companies involved in the project failed to disclose their donations in lobbying filings.

During a hearing for the lawsuit brought by the National Trust for Historic Preservation held in January, Leon shared his reservations about proceeding without congressional approval. He also questioned whether Trump possessed the statutory power to dismantle the East Wing and build a ballroom in its place without explicit oversight or authorization from Congress.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, is urging the Trust for the National Mall, a nonprofit managing the project’s donations, to clarify its role and share information about the donations it has received.

The organization declined to provide details to the Post about the gifts, but said it collects between 2 and 2.5 percent of each donation as part of a management fee. A spokesperson said the fee is standard practice.

The White House has declined to specify how much money has been raised for the project, which has doubled in cost from its initial estimate of $200 million last summer.

Soon after plans for the ballroom were announced, the East Wing was demolished without and public review process. (Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

“President Trump is generously donating his time and resources to build a beautiful White House ballroom, a project which past presidents only dreamed about,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle said. “Since announcing this historic plan, the White House has been inundated with calls from generous Americans and American companies wishing to contribute.”

In October, Trump hosted an opulent gala dinner for some of his sponsors in the East Room of the White House — which coincided with the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, lasting 43 days.

Soon after plans to replace the East Wing with a new ballroom were announced, demolition began without any extensive public review process. The ballroom is projected to be approximately 90,000 square feet, and the attached “New East Wing” complex will include a new office for the First Lady, a movie theater and commercial kitchen.

“No president is legally allowed to tear down portions of the White House without any review whatsoever — not President Trump, not President Joe Biden, and not anyone else,” the lawsuit filed in December says.

However, in December Leon declined to immediately pause construction of the project, and Trump’s Department of Justice is moving to ensure that doesn’t change.

Trump was sued in December by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which is challenging the legality of the project (Getty Images)

A DOJ filing asked a federal judge overseeing the lawsuit to stay any injunction on the construction over alleged “national security” concerns, ABC News reported.

"[A]s the Secret Service attested, halting construction would imperil the President and others who live and work in the White House," the administration argues in the filing.

The Trump administration said it will also be submitting a second classified statement from the Secret Service to further support its argument that stopping construction at the site will "endanger national security and therefore impair the public interest."

The filing claims that leaving the project incomplete would be a risk to national security. The DOJ filing comes after Judge Leon first made it clear he was skeptical of Trump’s claim that he could use private donations to fund the ballroom’s construction.

White House press secretary contradicts Trump and says it was president’s idea to rename Penn Station after himself

Mike Bedigan
Tue, February 10, 2026
THE INDEPENDENT

White House press secretary contradicts Trump and says it was president’s idea to rename Penn Station after himself

Key takeaways

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt contradicted Donald Trump's claim that he did not ask to rename New York's Penn Station after himself.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt appeared to contradict claims by Donald Trump that he had not asked to rename New York’s Penn Station after himself.

“It was something the president floated in his conversation with Chuck Schumer,” Leavitt said Tuesday, in response to a question about why the president was interested in changing the name of the building. “Why not?”

Her remarks come following reports last week that Trump said he would unfreeze millions of dollars in federal funds for a $16 billion New York infrastructure project if Senator Schumer agreed to rename New York's Penn Station and Virginia's Dulles International Airport after him.

On Friday, Trump claimed that it had in fact been the Senate Minority Leader’s idea to rename the two buildings.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt appeared to contradict claims by Donald Trump that he had not asked to rename New York’s Penn Station after himself (REUTERS)

“He suggested that to me,” the president told reporters on his way to Mar-a-Lago for the weekend. “Chuck Schumer suggested that to me, about changing the name of Penn Station to Trump Station. Dulles Airport is really separate.”

Shortly after the exchange was reported Schumer posted an angry rebuttal online.

"Absolute lie. He knows it. Everyone knows it," Schumer wrote. "Only one man can restart the project and he can restart it with the snap of his fingers."

As of Tuesday night, Schumer has not yet responded to Leavitt’s claims online. The Independent has contacted the New York senator’s office for comment.

Trump froze $200 million in federal funding for the project, the Gateway Tunnel Project in New York City, in October, even though the funds had already been approved by Congress.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reacted angrily to a suggestion by Donald Trump that he had suggested renaming the station after the president (Getty Images)

Work on the tunnel, which would join New York and New Jersey and ultimately replace other aging infrastructure linking the states, now cannot continue due to Trump's refusal to unfreeze the federal funding.

The Gateway Development Commission, which is overseeing the project, sued the federal government over the funding freeze last week. Judge Jeannette Vargas in Manhattan ruled against the Trump administration and ordered it to release the funding on Friday, the same day as Trump made his comments about Schumer.

But soon after, the Department for Transport applied for a temporary restraining order against the ruling while it appealed, arguing that there would be no “obvious mechanism” for recovering the money if it was forced to do so. Work on the project had not been restarted as of Tuesday and a hearing is set for Wednesday to determine the next steps.

The Independent has contacted the White House and the Department of Transport for comment.

Construction on the Gateway Tunnel Project may have to pause this week as funding runs out (Getty Images)

The Trump administration never offered any specific reason for why it froze the funds and blamed Democrats for refusing to negotiate to get the project restarted.

New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill hit out at the administration’s delays.

"I took the president to court on Friday, and I won. The court demanded release that money, and he has yet to do so," Sherrill said Monday, per CBS. "Here we are, all this equipment waiting to be put to work, all of you not on the job, because the president of the United States cares more about politics than he does about working men and women in this country."

Sherrill said that delays to the New Jersey Transit system were tied to her funding demands.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York also reacted angrily to the reported naming deal in a post on X.

Robert Wyatt, Red Eccentric

By David Hobbs
01.29.2026

English eccentricity has historically functioned as a conservative idea, but experimental musician Robert Wyatt shows it can be repurposed in the service of Marxism.

Drummer Robert Wyatt performs live on stage with Matching Mole at the Roundhouse in London in 1971. (Credit: Fin Costello via Redferns.)

In April 2012, I went to see Tony Herrington interview the musician Robert Wyatt at Café Oto in Dalston. All these years later I can still remember quite a lot of what he said, for example about his admiration of Miles Davis, who he often strived to imitate (‘Would Miles be trying to flog CDs and t-shirts on the door after his concerts? Would he fuck!’), and about how his wife, the artist Alfreda Benge, had saved his life (‘That didn’t seem like a figure of speech, either,’ said my girlfriend at the time, as we made our way home). I also remember Wyatt’s bemused reaction to the tendency of some critics to describe his work as being distinctively English, despite the internationalism that is so clearly central both to his music and his outlook more generally.

As well as ‘English’ (or sometimes ‘British’), there is another term that is habitually applied to Wyatt, often at the same time and by the same people: both the Guardian and the BBC have dubbed him a ‘Great British Eccentric’. Wyatt’s musical output can be whimsical and even strange, so the epithet is not completely undeserved. At the same time, though, the term ‘eccentric’ seems vaguely dismissive, as if Wyatt was not only a highly original artist, but oddly wayward, with only a tenuous connection to the rest of us.

Exploring the eccentricity of Wyatt’s music offers a way of elucidating this concept’s broader implications. This is worth doing because the idea of English eccentricity is profoundly political. By understanding it, we on the British Left can gain a new perspective on our predicament, including both the difficulties that we face and the resources that remain available to us. At the same time, though, the aim of this article is to clarify the significance of Wyatt’s contribution. By thinking seriously about him, and by using him to think about the world, I mean to pay tribute to someone whose career has combined political commitment and integrity with creativity in a way that is extremely rare.
Blues in Bob Minor

Wyatt was born in Bristol in 1945, but grew up in London and Canterbury. His parents were middle-class, bohemian types: Honor Wyatt was a BBC journalist and radio broadcaster from a prominent artistic family; George Ellidge was a music critic and a classical pianist. When they met in Majorca during the early 1930s, as participants in the island’s expatriate literary scene, Honor and George were both married to other people, and for the first six years of his life Wyatt was raised by his mother alone. By the time he and his father were reunited, George had retrained as an industrial psychologist.

It was through him that Wyatt was first exposed to Jazz. George favoured the music of Fats Waller and Duke Ellington, in particular, but this influence was both compounded and counterbalanced by that of Wyatt’s half-brother Mark, George’s son from his previous marriage, whose tastes were more modern. Wyatt began learning the trumpet and then graduated to percussion. Meanwhile, other young beatniks were appearing all over the country. Canterbury, in fact, was a hotspot, and in 1966 Wyatt formed the band Soft Machine, named after the novel by William Burroughs, with three fellow Jazz fans: Mike Ratledge, Daevid Allen, and Kevin Ayers.

The group soon found themselves at the hedonistic forefront of the British counterculture. As with the Grateful Dead in the US, their semi-improvised, exploratory performances resonated strongly in the era of high psychedelia. In 1968, at the crest of the hippy wave, they joined the Jimi Hendrix Experience on two North American tours. By now, though, Wyatt was drinking heavily, and this eventually led to him being sacked from the band. More serious still, he suffered a life changing injury, a fall from a fourth story window in which he was paralysed from the waist down.

Wyatt’s career as a progressive rock drummer was over, but this was also the start of a new chapter. With no band anymore, Benge became his key collaborator. While occasionally referenced in Wyatt’s songs, she was far more than just a muse, contributing both lyrics and artwork for his releases, playfully surrealist work that is now hard to conceive of separately from the music, and vice versa. Wyatt’s later output was also strongly shaped by his political commitments, which grew in depth and coherence after the accident. This marked the beginning of what might be called his ‘red period’, something which was to last for the rest of his creative life.

It was in 1979 that Wyatt officially became a communist. In some ways this was the logical conclusion of his leftist upbringing, followed by his exposure to politically radical elements within the counterculture. Still, Wyatt stands out among his generation of post-war left-wingers because of his decision to join the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), rather than one of the Trotskysist groups that were generally more popular with this cohort. His anti-racist and internationalist commitments seem to have played a key part in this decision: he was particularly inspired by the prominence of Communist leaders like Joe Slovo in Umkhonto we Sizwe (‘Spear of the Nation’), the armed wing of the African National Congress.

With Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party mere months from taking power, though, Wyatt was out of step with the times. ‘It was certainly a lost cause,’ he remembered to his biographer Marcus O’Dair, ‘The Party, I mean, not the aspiration or the analysis. But it was a lost cause for a reason. By then, the CP, like the Labour Party — like the entire left, in fact — was either trying to deny its past or, in a Blairish way, dressing to the left while fighting tooth and nail for the Right.’

Wyatt himself was certainly no revisionist. In ‘The Age of Self’, a track from the album Old Rottenhat (1985), he refutes the arguments of the influential circle around Marxism Today to insist on the continued relevance of a politics centred on class struggle: ‘It seems to me if we forget our roots and where we stand,’ runs the chorus, ‘the movement will disintegrate like castles built on sand.’ One of the verses singles out Martin Jacques, the editor of Marxism Today, for playing with ‘printer’s ink’, even as ‘the workers round the world still die for Rio Tinto Zinc’ (a British-Australian mining company).

If this approach to songwriting seems hectoring or dogmatic, it combines with the other aspects of Wyatt’s style, especially his restless experimentalism, to great effect. For a sympathetic or even just an open-minded listener, Wyatt’s most explicitly political work has much to offer. Indeed, while his solo career was punctuated by periods of depression, its peaks included several highly acclaimed records, notably Rock Bottom (1974), Cuckooland (2003), and Comicopera (2007). He retired from music in 2014.
The Peculiarity of the English

The Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács supplies the starting point for a theory of eccentricity in his book on the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Less than a hundred pages long, Solzhenitsyn (1969) comprises two essays, one focussing on A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), and the other comparing The Cancer Ward (1966) with The First Circle (1968). Lukács, one of the twentieth century’s most prominent Marxists, might be expected to treat the right-wing Solzehnitsyn with some hostility, but in fact he was full of praise, presenting him as the inheritor of a ‘critical realism’ whose most successful exponent, fifteen years dead by the time of writing, was Thomas Mann.

The discussion of eccentricity here is incidental to Lukács’ main argument, a brief aside prompted by his close reading of The First Circle. Nevertheless, his insistence on this concept’s wider social significance is arresting:

… [O]ne is used to regarding eccentricity, or the making of unimportant whims into the point around which life revolves, as a psychic peculiarity of certain people. This approach is wrong […] For eccentricity is a certain attitude on the part of the subject which arises from the specific nature of reality and the potentiality of his own social praxis. More precisely, it arises from the fact that a character may well be inwardly capable of denying certain forms of the society in which he is forced to live […] in such a way that his inner integrity (which they threaten) remains intact; however, the conversion of this rejection into a really individual praxis […] is rendered impossible by society and therefore he must remain enmeshed in a more or less abstractly distorted inwardness. In this process his character acquires crochety eccentricity.

For Lukács, eccentricity consists in a kind of inverted dissent. It is not that he politicises this concept, exactly: instead, what Lukács emphasises is the failure of eccentricity to become political, its inability to develop into ‘a really individual praxis’. While it does entail a refusal (the subject’s negation of ‘certain forms of the society in which he is forced to live’), this defiant gesture is made in a totally unconducive context, hemmed in by the overbearing reality of the status quo. The eccentric thus emerges as simultaneously heroic and pathetic, a Don Quixote figure who, unwilling or unable to accept the world as it is, must pay the price of becoming ridiculous.

Why, then, should eccentricity be so closely associated with Englishness, if only by the English themselves? To answer this question, Lukács’ theorising must be grounded in history. Indeed, to understand the deeper significance of the idea of English eccentricity requires us to confront another key component of the national ideology: the idea of Britain as a fundamentally conservative, non-revolutionary society.

This claim will already be familiar to many readers. Not only does it circulate widely in centrist and right-wing discourses, but it also echoes in some of the British Left’s foundational texts. For example, it plays an important role in ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, the 1964 article in which Perry Anderson first advanced the influential complex of ideas that has since become known as the ‘Nairn-Anderson Thesis’.

In the mid-1960s, the journal New Left Review became the venue for a highly significant reinterpretation of British history. Anderson, its lead editor, along with the Scottish theorist Tom Nairn, wanted to understand why Britain seemed to have entered a period of relative economic decline. Drawing on the theoretical perspective developed by Antonio Gramsci in his prison notebooks, they alighted on the following explanation: unlike other European countries, Britain had never fully modernised its politics and culture. More specifically, the British bourgeoisie had failed to make good on its historic task of displacing the aristocracy and thereby instituting a capitalist republic. Britain’s revolution, better known as the English Civil War, was premature and incomplete: in its wake it left a lopsided polity full of feudal atavisms that continued to frustrate historic progress.

There is not space here to account for the various criticisms that have been levelled at the Nairn-Anderson thesis, though this includes important contributions from Ellen Meiksins Wood and, more recently, David Edgerton. What matters is Anderson’s insistence that ‘capitalist hegemony in England has been the most powerful, the most durable and the most continuous anywhere in the world’. Paradoxical as it may seem, for him the failure of the bourgeoisie to become fully dominant ultimately strengthened the hand of British capitalism against its opponents. This is because this failure led to a situation in which there was no coherent liberal ideology for the working class to seize upon and transform, preventing the emergence of a revolutionary tradition alike to those of mainland Europe.

This part of Anderson’s argument, too, has been challenged, nowhere more vociferously than in E.P. Thompson’s essay ‘The Peculiarities of the English’ (1965). Among other things, Thompson takes Anderson to task for omitting the 1920s and 1930s from his account. This was the historic height of the British communist movement, which, though never strong in numbers, functionated like the ‘alter ego of the Labour and trade union Left’. To ignore this fact was, for Thompson, akin to writing Wuthering Heights without a Heathcliff, creating a version of British history that lacked an awkward and otherworldly but nonetheless central antagonist. In fact, Thompson saw the CP as just one part of a long tradition of British radicalism, seriously underplayed by Anderson, that reached back to the Social Democratic Federation and the National Council of Labour Colleges, and forward to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Anderson’s case, then, is somewhat overstated. Still, the fact that Britain’s radical left could conceivably be overlooked by him is itself symptomatic. Even Thompson was forced to admit that the passing of a motion in favour of unilateral disarmament at the Labour Party conference of 1960 was an exceptional moment of triumph in a period marked by general retreat. While 1968 saw the beginning of a resurgence in Republican politics in the north of Ireland, followed in the 1970s by a reinvigorated trade unionism and the spread of movements for Black, gay and women’s rights, it remains true that, compared to countries like France and Italy, in Britain capitalism continued to be relatively secure.

Hence the significance of English eccentricity. While other countries could muster revolt and even revolution, here, where the grip of capital was especially tight, it sometimes seemed as though the best that we could manage was to be strange. This futile form of individualised dissent was even celebrated as an amiable vice, like binge drinking or griping about the weather. The English eccentric is an avatar of enduring resistance, yes, but most of all this figure registers the confidence with which such resistance has been nullified and contained by the powers that be.
The Politics of Nonsense

One reason why Wyatt has been deemed eccentric, then, is because of his stubborn refusal to conform to this hostile political climate. From the perspective of the status quo, he appears as a quixotic ‘Yesterday Man’, or, as another of his song titles has it, an ‘Anachronist’, still espousing a revolutionary politics that even his supposed comrades in the modernising wing of the Communist Party considered outdated. Defensively, but with an assurance and ease that speaks to the immense power of British capitalism and its beneficiaries, Wyatt was rendered eccentric because of his Marxism.

But there is far more than this to Wyatt’s multi-layered oddness. Eccentricity was not only something projected onto him as a way of neutering the political tradition with which he was allied: it was also something that he actively embraced. There are various aspects of Wyatt’s creative output that might usefully be viewed through this lens, from his engagement with Jazz to the persistent theme of ‘madness’, which is especially prominent on Cuckooland. Most revealing of all, however, is his reworking and revolutionising of the literary genre of nonsense writing.

‘There has never been a strong surrealist tradition in England,’ writes the British essayist Adam Phillips, ‘but there has of course been a unique tradition of nonsense.’ Instead of the continental movement led by André Breton, whose participants volubly self-identified as revolutionaries in their proselytising manifestoes, and were often sympathetic to (or actually members of) the French Communist Party, in conservative Britain there was only Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’ and Alice in Wonderland. Indeed, Phillips’ remarks seem to echo Nairn and Anderson’s assessment of British political history as a whole: just as they positioned the English Civil War as a ‘premature’ version of the French Revolution, nonsense writing appears here as a relatively feeble anticipation of the more developed revolt against rationalism that was yet to break out in mainland Europe.

Nevertheless, while nonsense writing is not as ideologically developed as Surrealism, its political dimensions have certainly not gone unnoticed. Nonsense is often seen to embody an anarchic sensibility that rejoices in flaunting rules, inverting power relationships and generally turning the world upside down: the main antagonist in Alice in Wonderland is, after all, the Queen of Hearts, a bloodthirsty, despotic monarch (‘Off with their heads!’). The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Lecercle, on the other hand, characterises nonsense as a ‘conservative-revolutionary genre’, blending an excessively strict adherence to linguistic norms with wild negations of rationality (think of how the grammatical propriety of Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’ is combined with a richly suggestive but ultimately impenetrable lexicon). In this way, Lecercle sees nonsense writing as foregrounding the same dialectic that lies at the heart of all human communication: the fact that even as we speak language into existence, this language also shapes, moulds and ‘speaks’ us in turn.

Nonsense thus emerges from the same stunted and foreclosed form of opposition as eccentricity. In such an unconducive environment as late-nineteenth-century Britain, revolt degrades into whimsy. While the Surrealists wanted to bring the unconscious out onto the barricades, Alice’s battle with the Queen of Hearts is safely contained within her dream on the riverbank. Likewise, Lear’s nonsensical poetry is ultimately ordered into strict taxonomies. The ‘lands where the Jumblies live’ and the adventures of the Owl and the Pussy-Cat are pointedly confined to far off places. That’s not the way we do things here.

‘The Duchess’, a song from Wyatt’s 1997 album Shleep, serves to demonstrate the influence of nonsense on his work, though in truth this can be felt almost everywhere. Sung to the tune of ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’, its lyrics combine punning, paradox and playful opacity in a way that strongly recalls Lear’s poetry:

Oh my wife is tall and short
She won’t do what she ought
She never lies, but then again
She lies down all day long.

As in nineteenth-century nonsense writing, it is immediately clear that Wyatt’s wordplay is laden with destabilising social implications. The speaker is presumably identical with the duke of the original nursery rhyme. While his grace has no discernible difficulties taking charge of ‘ten thousand men’, though, women seem to be a different matter. The duchess is composed of contradictions (‘tall and short’, ‘old and young’, ‘sour and sweet’), and in this way she seems to lie beyond his verbal grasp. She is also contradictory in the sense of talking back to and disobeying her husband. In the second stanza she even silences him completely, if only for a moment:

Oh my wife is fat and thin
She’s generous and mean
She’s –––––, and
Her secret’s safe with me

In the recording, Wyatt mumbles and hums his way through the third line. As if to demonstrate her ‘meanness’, the duchess confiscates his words, taking control of the song’s very form. Later she is emphatically identified with the criminalised working class (‘on her evenings off she blackmails toffs’), and perhaps more specifically with sex workers (‘she hangs out down the port’). Once again, her greeting (‘hello sailor, how’s your dad?’) suggests a bold rejection of aristocratic respectability, combined with an unabashed sexual confidence.

Nor is all this counterbalanced, as in traditional nonsense writing, with more conservative elements. The most that could be said in this regard is that the duchess retains her title, and by extension her affiliation with the aristocracy. But the strict metre of ‘Jabberwocky’ is nowhere to be seen, and the delivery and instrumentation are markedly undisciplined. The song barely hangs together. Keyboards, violins, saxophone and voice all occasionally seem out of key, moving at different tempos. At the end the vocals simply tail off as the accompaniment dissolves into electronic squelching and frenetic scales on the piano. The overall effect, however, is not unpleasant. Throughout the song we grow accustomed to the dissonance, which never builds to a crescendo. Like much of Wyatt’s work, ‘The Duchess’ is radical without being alienating, combining experimentation with palpable human warmth.

The crux of Wyatt’s approach to nonsense, then, is to preserve and heighten its progressive implications, while stripping away any residual deference towards established forms. If the fact that this genre first emerged at the same time as Marxism seems to hint at a deeper radicalism, then Wyatt’s music makes good on this promise, allowing it finally to achieve its revolutionary potential. Here and elsewhere, the literary tools furnished by this tradition are unequivocally deployed by him in the service of a socialist and feminist sensibility.
Dialectics of Eccentricity

Wyatt’s music itself seems to enact the same critique of English eccentricity that I have extrapolated from Lukács, Anderson, and Thompson. His work de-sublimates the politics that underlie this concept, making explicit what is at stake in the eccentric’s denial of ‘certain forms of the society in which he lives’. Wyatt’s communist eccentricity reveals the strangeness attributed to this figure as a way of stigmatising non-alienated ways of being and ensuring that they do not become sufficiently widespread to threaten the status quo.

On the other hand, Wyatt’s engagement with the tradition of nonsense writing complicates this picture. As much as the idea of eccentricity is a way of containing his intolerably un-English politics, it also appears to offer him a set of tools that can be adapted to advance precisely the same project. Wyatt’s eccentricity, in other words, is dialectical: it is both a formidable weapon wielded against him by those who would defend the prevailing social arrangements, but also something that he succeeds in using against the system itself, in turn.

It can be risky to reduce art to a set of political lessons or a mechanism through which to develop analysis and strategy. Nevertheless, Wyatt’s music has something important to teach the British Left. While some lament our apparent inability to be ‘normal’, assimilating into the imagined style and values of working-class people, Wyatt’s example might encourage us, on the contrary, to embrace oddness. After all, collectivist politics must inevitably appear strange in a place like this, where capital has held sway for so long. Perhaps the only way to get beyond communist eccentricity is to go through it.

Contributor

David Hobbs holds a PhD from the University of Manchester on prison writing and the British New Left.

Monday, February 02, 2026

‘You Have Lost All Legitimacy’: Portland Mayor Demands ICE Leave City After Tear Gassing Kids

“To those who continue to make these sickening decisions, go home, look in a mirror, and ask yourselves why you have gassed children.”

ICE deploys pepper balls, tear gas, and flashbang grenades on hundreds of people in Portland Oregon on February 1, 2026.
(Photo by Sean Bascom/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Brad Reed
Feb 02, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

The mayor of Portland, Oregon demanded that federal immigration enforcement officials leave his city after they were seen lobbing tear gas and flash bang grenades at demonstrators.

As reported by The Oregonian on Sunday, Portland Mayor Keith Wilson reacted with outrage after seeing federal agents deploying tear gas and firing rubber bullets at thousands of protesters who on Saturday marched to a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in the city’s South Waterfront neighborhood.

Portland Mayor Decries Mounting Bloodshed, Tells ICE to Get Out After Federal Agents Shoot Two

Wilson called the agents’ attacks on protesters a vast overreaction to a “peaceful daytime protest, where the vast majority of those present violated no laws, made no threat, and posed no danger to federal forces” stationed at the facility.

“To those who continue to work for ICE: Resign. To those who control this facility: Leave,” Wilson said. “Through your use of violence and the trampling of the Constitution, you have lost all legitimacy and replaced it with shame.”

The mayor also heaped scorn on federal agents for employing such tactics when several children were present in the crowd.

“To those who continue to make these sickening decisions, go home, look in a mirror, and ask yourselves why you have gassed children,” he said. “Ask yourselves why you continue to work for an agency responsible for murders on American streets. No one is forcing you to lie to yourself, even as your bosses continue to lie to the American people.”

Erin Hoover Barnett, a former Oregonian reporter who attended the demonstration, told the paper that she saw “what looked like two guys with rocket launchers” who started dousing the crowd with tear gas on Saturday.

“To be among parents frantically trying to tend to little children in strollers,” she said, “people using motorized carts trying to navigate as the rest of us staggered in retreat, unsure of how to get to safety, was terrifying.”

A Portland protester identified only as Robin gave an account similar to Barnett’s during an interview with local news station KPTV.

“About eight or 10 of them came out with guns whatever kind of guns they have and flash bombed just started throwing them at the crowd just exploding everywhere,” said Robin. “It was like a war zone. It felt like we were under attack. I definitely got hit. I had to run around the corner and pour a bunch of water on my face.”

One local protester identified only as Celeste told local news station KOIN 6 that she was out on the streets because she wanted to “fight tyranny.”

“What’s happening in our streets with ICE is ridiculous,” said Celeste. “It’s illegal. It’s got to be stopped. And no one’s going to stop it. Except we the people. We’ve got a tyrant in the White House, and no one will stop him but us.”

Dem senator blasts Fox host to her face on ICE: 'It is disappearing legal residents!'

Alexander Willis
February 1, 2026

RAW STORY

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) speaks to the members of the media on the day of a briefing for senators on the situation in Venezuela, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., January 7, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) shut down a Fox News host Sunday after being asked whether the Trump administration’s proposed changes to its immigration enforcement operations were “reasonable,” arguing instead that mass deportations had turned the United States into a “dystopia.”

“Does that sound like a reasonable step to you?” asked Fox News’ Shannon Bream, referencing Border Czar Tom Homan’s proposal to ramp down immigration enforcement operations in exchange for state and local governments’ cooperation.

“People who are in jail [that] are going to be released by a state or locality, ICE has said we’ve got a detainer on this person, we think they’re removable, let one agent go into the jail versus what we’re seeing on the streets of Minneapolis?”

Visibly taken aback, Murphy scoffed at Bream’s use of the word "reasonable," and argued the Trump administration immigration enforcement operations to be anything but.

“C’mon, are we still pretending that ICE is going after dangerous people? They aren’t! Right now, 70% of the people that they’re detaining have absolutely no criminal record,” Murphy fired back.

Over 73% of the more than 328,000 migrants arrested under the second Trump administration had no criminal record, though Bream interjected to repeat the Department of Homeland Security claim that in actuality, 70% of migrants arrested by federal immigration officers had criminal records. That claim, made by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, has been thoroughly debunked by independent analyses.

Murphy went on to condemn the Trump administration outright for its mass deportation operations, declaring them to be an “emergency” that he and his Democratic colleague intended on addressing immediately.

“What is happening in Minnesota right now is a dystopia; ICE is teargassing elementary schools, it is disappearing legal residents into cars, it is murdering American citizens,” Murphy said.

“ICE is making this country less safe, not more safe, today. That is an emergency, that’s why, today, 60% of the American people vehemently disagree with what ICE is doing and we have to address that emergency right now.”

US National Protests Continue Against ICE and Trump

Sunday 1 February 2026, by Dan La Botz

President Donald Trump continues ICE raids, arrests of journalists, and seizing election records, as the public turns against him. All of this is about the mid-term election in November, which Republicans could lose. [1]

Tens of thousands protested Trump’s immigration policies this past weekend after the murder of two U.S. citizens by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. There were demonstrations in hundreds of cities. Huge protests in Minneapolis. A massive march in frigid New York City. Militant demonstrations against ICE in Los Angeles where activists threw objects at L.A. police who protected an ICE facility. High school and college student walkouts in California and Florida.

At the same time, the country has been shocked by the unprecedented arrest of journalist Don Lemon, formerly of CNN, and award-winning journalist Georgia Fort. In St. Paul, Minneapolis’ twin, city on January, 18, they followed activists who confronted a pastor who is also an ICE agent in his church. The two were later arrested by FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents, accused of organizing the protest, and charged with violating the congregants’ right to freedom of worship. Not surprisingly, given Trump’s racist regime, both journalists are Black.

In an equally startling development in January, FBI agents searched a Fulton County, Georgia, election center for ballots from the 2020 election. Trump has falsely claimed that that election, which he lost, was stolen. The government claims it is investigating voter fraud but this is clearly about gathering voter information and intimidating votes. Attorney General Pam Bondi has sued Minnesota and 23 other states for their voter records, she said the chaos in Minneapolis could end if the state turned over its voting records.

Another injustice appalled the country: the arrest in Minneapolis and transportation to the Dilly Detention center in Texas of five-year-old Liam Ramos, shown in videos with his Spiderman backpack and his hat with bunny ears, DHS claimed the child had been abandoned, though he lived with his mother and his father, the latter also arrested and both sent to the Dilly. There inmates protested in the prison yard shouting “Let us out.” Supporters also came to protest outside the prison but were driven away by police using tear gas and beating them. A judge has ordered the boy and his father to be released.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey have demanded that ICE end its “invasion” and be removed entirely. But Trump and Border Czar Tom Homan refused to withdraw any of the 3,000 agents in Minneapolis. The city brought suit against ICE seeking an injunction, but a federal judge refused.

But the country has reached a turning point. The videos of the killing on January 24 of Alex Pretti, the nurse who carried a pistol for which he had a permit, clearly showed that ICE had murdered him. Trump officials called him a terrorist. No one believed it. Democrats, Republicans and conservative gun-rights activists criticized Trump. Political polls show that Americans, Democrats, Republicans, and independents, reject ICE’s violent attacks on immigrants and citizens alike. January polls showed that over 60% of voters oppose ICE’s tactics.

In Congress, Democrats pressured Republicans in an attempt to cut the budget for the Department of Homeland Security. Democrats have demanded the unmasking of immigration agents, an end to ICE’s indiscriminate sweeps through communities, that they obtain judicial arrest warrants, and that they adhere to strict use-of-force guidelines. Still, it is not clear if the Democrats can win those demands.

There is now a national movement against ICE, and it is growing. And Trump could lose control of Congress.

1 February 2026

Footnotes

[1] Photo: Day of Truth & Freedom, Downtown Minneapolis, January 23. (Lone Shaull CC BY 4.0)

Dan La Botz
Dan La Botz was a founding member of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). He is the author of Rank-and-File Rebellion: Teamsters for a Democratic Union (1991). He is also a co-editor of New Politics and editor of Mexican Labor News and Analysis.

From Maine to Minnesota and Beyond, Tens of Thousands March to Demand ‘ICE Out!’

“We want to show solidarity,” said one employee at a worker-owned bakery in Los Angeles. “We’ve seen historically that strikes work. I hope the violence stops. I want ICE out of our communities.”

People march in Minneapolis as part of the “National Shutdown” protest against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on January 30, 2026.
(Photo by Alex Wroblewski/AFP via Getty Images)

Brett Wilkins
Jan 30, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Popular outrage over President Donald Trump’s deadly campaign targeting immigrants and their defenders sparked a National Shutdown day of protests across the United States on Friday, as people from coast to coast took to the streets demanding an end to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “reign of terror.”

“No school, no work, and no shopping,” the National Shutdown said on its website. “The entire country is shocked and outraged at the brutal killings of Alex Pretti, Renee Good, Silverio Villegas González, and Keith Porter Jr. by federal agents.”

Undeterred by Freezing Temps, Statewide Minnesota Strikes Demand ‘ICE Out Now’

“While Trump and other right-wing politicians are slandering them as ‘terrorists,’ the video evidence makes it clear beyond all doubt: They were gunned down in broad daylight simply for exercising their First Amendment right to protest mass deportation,” the campaign continued.

“Every day, ICE, Border Patrol, and other enforcers of Trump’s racist agenda are going into our communities to kidnap our neighbors and sow fear,” the protest organizers added. “It is time for us to all stand up together in a nationwide shutdown and say enough is enough!”

One week after an estimated 50,000 protesters marched in downtown Minneapolis for the “ICE Out of Minnesota: Day of Truth and Freedom” rally, at least tens of thousands of people braved subzero wind chill temperatures to protest the ongoing Operation Metro Surge blitz in the Twin Cities.

Rock icon Bruce Springsteen—who this week released a song called “Streets of Minneapolis” to pay tribute to activists fighting Trump’s assault on immigrants and American democracy—made a surprise appearance at a benefit concert for the families of Good and Pretti.

Maine Public Radio reported that over 150 businesses, mostly in the Portland area, closed their doors Friday amid Operation Catch of the Day, during which ICE enforcers have arrested hundreds of people in the Pine Tree State.

“Today, the working class of Portland has sent a clear message to those in power: Your power is derived from our labor, and we are not afraid to withhold our labor for the safety of our neighbors,” South Portland retail worker Keeli Parker told MPR.

In Chicago—where ICE’s Operation Midway Blitz prompted a special commission appointed by Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker to recommend the prosecution of federal agents who violate people’s constitutional rights—Nick Mayor, co-owner of Brewed Coffee in the Avondale neighborhood, told the Chicago Sun-Times that the cost of closing his business for the day “pales in comparison to the cost of what is happening to other people and their families, with their lives getting taken and torn apart.”

More than 1,000 people packed into Washington Square in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah, where protesters chanted slogans including “Power to the people, no one is illegal,” and, “No justice, no peace, we want ICE off our streets!”

Three hundred miles southwest of Salt Lake City in St. George, Utah, dozens of demonstrators rallied in the city center, holding signs reading, “ICE Out” and “the wrong ICE is melting.” One disapproving motorist yelled, “Go back to California” while driving by, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.

In Los Angeles, Proof Bakery, a worker-owned cooperative in Atwater Village, also shut its doors for the day.

“We want to show solidarity,” Proof Bakery worker-owner Daniela Diaz told KABC. “We’ve seen historically that strikes work. I hope the violence stops. I want ICE out of our communities.”

Hundreds of high school students walked out of their classrooms in Asheville, North Carolina, where sophomore Henry Pope told the Mountain XPress, “We reject the ICE terror that’s sweeping across our communities.”

“We reject everything this far-right, billionaire administration stands for, and we need justice to be brought to Jonathan Ross and every other killer ICE agent in this country,” Pope added, referring to the officer who fatally shot Good earlier this month.

Kelia Harold, a senior at the University of Florida in Gainesville, rallied on campus with around 100 other students.

“Instead of sitting on my own and being helpless, it really helps to come out here,” she told the New York Times, noting Pretti’s killing.

“If that could happen to him,” she said, “I don’t see why it couldn’t happen to anyone else.”