Brendan Carr was dragged before Congress last week for some light questioning about all the terrible, illegal bullshit he’s been up to. While the hearing mostly focused on FCC independence and Carr’s failed bid to try and censor Jimmy Kimmel, it didn’t touch on the other extremist nonsense Carr’s been up to, including his assault on public media and destruction of consumer protection.
While his higher profile targets have gotten all the attention, the Associated Press has a very good story you should read about Carr’s efforts to bully a Bay Area radio station (KCBS) after it accurately informed locals about the goonish behavior of masked ICE agents.
As our already struggling, highly consolidated, and under-funded media outlets tend to do, KCBS immediately folded under federal existential threat, just as Carr hoped:
“KCBS demoted a well-liked anchor and dialed back on political programming, people said. For months, reporters were dissuaded from pursuing political or controversial topics and instead encouraged to focus on human interest stories, according to the current and former staffers.”
When staffers did try to cover more political fare, they say the tone was heavily scrutinized and the content was watered down to a bland gruel to avoid upsetting Republicans:
“Doug Sovern, a veteran political journalist at the station, said he was sidelined after Carr announced his investigation.
“‘Chilling effect’ does not begin to describe the neutering of our political coverage,” said Sovern, who retired in April. He said his retirement was not related to the controversy.”
As Carr was distracted by his other extremist projects, like failing to censor Kimmel, some of the scrutiny eased and the station regained the confidence to at least report on things like the No Kings protest. But the bullying appears to have had its intended effect. At one point, a KCBS reporter says he was denied the opportunity to interview Katie Porter because management felt it would upset Donald Trump:
“In the weeks after the immigration story, Seelig asked Sovern to cancel an interview he had set up with California gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter out of fear she would say something negative about Trump, he said.”
For its part, feckless station management is trying to pretend that nothing happened:
“There has been no change in policy or editorial direction at KCBS,” the station added. “We remain committed to providing our Bay Area listeners with trusted news, including our political coverage, that is balanced and objective.”
Carr first targeted KCBS with a letter of inquiry, which prompted the station’s corporate owner, Audacy, to immediately shift into CYA mode, reviewing the political statements and social media posts of reporters for any hint of “political bias” (by which they of course mean criticism of right wing ideology and policy).
It’s another example of how journalism doesn’t really align particularly well with the goals of consolidated corporate power, which in turn weakens it to exploitation by bad actors (like, oh, authoritarians). That’s a major reason why the U.S. desperately needs independent media, worker-owned media, and publicly-owned media, the latter of which Carr is also trying to destroy through sham investigations.
Again, it’s important to step back and view this all as an incredible, generational, and extremely successful right wing and corporate joint project to dismantle real journalism, accountability, and informed electoral consensus. This isn’t something that just popped up with Trump, though it did help enable Trumpism.
None of it has been remotely subtle, and the campaign results in a U.S. press that’s utterly and comically incapable of being honest with itself (or its audience) about what’s actually happening. This is, to be clear, the exact trajectory seen in countries like Russia or Hungary that stumbled face-first into permanent autocratic rule.
If there’s anything the GOP/MAGA party can’t stand, it’s people who won’t fall in line. It openly courts fascism while still pretending its ultimate concern is the protection of (certain) civil liberties. It cheers on politically motivated prosecutions while still making mouth noises about “activist judges.” It’s a land of contrasts, to be sure. But the US — under this leadership — certainly isn’t “a place of honor.”
Today, Governor Larry Rhoden announced Operation: Prairie Thunder – a comprehensive, targeted public safety initiative to protect South Dakotans, especially in the Sioux Falls metro area.
“We are keeping South Dakotans strong, safe, and free. When it comes to safety, one of our biggest opportunities to move the needle is right here in Sioux Falls, and that’s where Operation: Prairie Thunder comes in,” said Governor Larry Rhoden. “We are taking decisive action to hold criminals accountable and protect our communities.”
Whew. Sounds like a lot. This July announcement claimed all kinds of good things would be happening in terms of crime prevention and enforcement. But it was actually just more of the usual “war on drugs” stuff: saturation patrols, a few more helicopters in the air, and a concentrated effort to round up anyone who may have given law enforcement the slip while paroled or on probation.
But the part that meant the most is this:
The comprehensive effort to support ICE’s work includes:
Equipping the South Dakota Highway Patrol to assist with ICE’s actions to keep America safe – a partnership that the Governor previously obtained;
Activating six SDNG soldiers to assist ICE with administrative functions; and
Enabling DOC to work with ICE to deport offenders and transfer violent offenders for federal incarceration and assist ICE with processing and transportation of illegal alien criminals.
In other words, it was just a convenient excuse to roll hard with local law enforcement while riding shotgun with Trump’s bigots-in-masks kidnappers.
Since this announcement, “Prairie Thunder” has moved past Sioux Falls and into other towns, including Yankton, Belle Fourche, and Huron. Press releases and appearances from Governor Rhoden claimed this saturation+ICE had been a huge success.
Troopers jailed 75 people in total across the two operations, according to the release — 42 on drug charges and 33 on non-drug charges — and 19 people were charged with drug offenses but not detained.
The patrol interviewed 25 people on behalf of ICE, the release said, 21 of whom were held for the federal agency.
But a lot of locals in a red-coded state weren’t convinced this had anything to do with real crime. The towns targeted by “Prairie Thunder” weren’t exactly hotbeds of criminal activity. Huron, in particular, is the state’s most diverse city, which raised obvious questions about why it was next on list after the Thunder had rolled through the state’s most-populous city, Sioux Falls.
[T]he November patrols raised concerns for the city’s Hispanic community, according to Republican state Rep.Kevin Van Diepen, who’s also a former police chief.
He said many residents believed that ICE — not state law enforcement — was behind the saturation patrols in the city of 14,000.
The governor had never announced this unexpected expansion of the program to other South Dakota cities. But it’s clear that Prairie Thunder is still an ongoing program. The city of Brookings (pop. 23,377) decided it wasn’t going to play nice with ICE or the governor’s desire to keep all of this under the radar. An extremely short post on the city’s official website let every resident know what was headed their way, as well as making it clear the city had no desire to pitch in with ICE’s deportation efforts:
The City of Brookings has been made aware that Operation Prairie Thunder, an anti-crime task force with the State of South Dakota, will be in the Brookings area Dec. 17-19. The City of Brookings will not be participating in these operations.
The governor voiced his disapproval with the city of Brookings Friday afternoon, suggesting that the broadcasting of when and where stings, saturations or any other temporary, concentrated policing will take place undermines law enforcement operations — and the men and women carrying out that work.
“For security reasons, we are not going to comment on operational specifics. It’s unfortunate that the City of Brookings would jeopardize an anti-crime operation and put the safety of our officers at risk by publishing this information,” he said in a statement provided to The Dakota Scout. “In South Dakota, we enforce the rule of law.”
This is dumb for several reasons. First, even the mayor of Sioux Falls issued statements distancing himself and his city’s police officers from ICE activity related to “Prairie Thunder.” So, even at the initial flash-point of the operation, politicians knew it would be bad for political business to be thought of as complicit in ICE raids.
Second, saturation patrols are often announced ahead of time by the cities and law enforcement agencies engaging in them. We hear radio announcements for these patrols ahead of every major holiday. Local cops also let people know ahead of time if they’re going to be running sobriety checkpoints. None of these notifications have ever been portrayed as “jeopardizing anti-crime operations” by local politicians.
Finally, go fuck yourself, Governor Rhoden. What ICE does has almost nothing to do with the “rule of law.” And the administration overseeing ICE only cares about the “rule of law” when it needs to get the Supreme Court to sign off on its latest constitutional violations. You’re nothing but a Kristi Noem understudy, which means you’re incapable (or unwilling) of doing anything that doesn’t align exactly with the New MAGA Order.
If ICE wants to perform a bunch of crimes of opportunity in Brookings, it should still be able to do so even if its officers are being filmed, insulted, or otherwise treated like the pariahs they are. You serve the state, not Donald Trump and his fleeting whims. If it won’t hurt your brain too much, try to remember that now and then.
Trump was always going to target Minnesota and, specifically, the home of its most liberal residents, Minneapolis. Trump hates the state’s governor, Tim Walz. He also hates one of the state’s congressional reps, Ilhan Omar, who was born in Somalia.
This is only part of Trump’s recent hateful statements targeting Somalians, Tim Walz, and Rep. Ilhan Omar:
As an example, hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia are completely taking over the once great State of Minnesota. Somalian gangs are roving the streets looking for “prey” as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone. The seriously retarded Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, does nothing, either through fear, incompetence, or both, while the worst “Congressman/woman” in our Country, Ilhan Omar, always wrapped in her swaddling hijab, and who probably came into the U.S.A. illegally in that you are not allowed to marry your brother, does nothing but hatefully complain about our Country, its Constitution, and how “badly” she is treated, when her place of origin is a decadent, backward, and crime ridden nation, which is essentially not even a country for lack of Government, Military, Police, schools, etc…
That was delivered via Trump’s favorite outlet for his unhinged rants, Truth Social. He followed that up by making these statements where anyone could hear them during a press briefing:
“They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country,” Trump told reporters near the end of a lengthy Cabinet meeting. He added: “Their country is no good for a reason. Your country stinks and we don’t want them in our country.”
[…]
“We can go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way, if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” Trump said. “Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage.”
That put another target on Minnesota’s back. The state is home to nearly a third of the nation’s 260,000 Somalians. It’s not as though they’re here illegally, though.
Almost 58 percent were born in the U.S., and 87 percent of those born elsewhere are naturalized citizens.
Not that any of that matters to Donald Trump or ICE’s collective of masked thugs. So, these are the sort of things that are happening now in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area as Trump’s hatred becomes personified.
Federal agents used chemical irritants to push through an angry crowd that blocked their vehicles as they checked identifications in a heavily Somali neighborhood of Minneapolis on Tuesday, amid the Trump administration’s ongoing crackdown targeting the community.
City Council member Jamal Osman, a Somali American who represents the neighborhood, witnessed the confrontation, as did an Associated Press videographer.
[…]
He also said he spoke with one young Somali American who was dragged to a vehicle, detained and taken to an ICE detention center. There, officials finally looked at his U.S. passport, fingerprinted him, and released him but told him to find his own way home, about 6 miles (10 kilometers) away in snowy weather.
The DHS also made some noise about an arrest that supposedly justified the violent actions taken by ICE officers (who not only deployed chemicals but also arrested two people who were simply recording ICE officers and/or asserting their Fourth Amendment rights). But the statement seems extremely light on facts, as is often the case when DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin decides to open her mouth:
The Department of Homeland Security’s Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said in an emailed statement that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers arrested Jesus Saucedo-Portillo, whom she described as an unauthorized immigrant, on Dec. 6 while he was getting into his vehicle in a campus parking lot.
In a divergence from what school officials have said about the incident, McLaughlin said officers had a warrant and were obstructed by a university administrator and campus security during the encounter.
McLaughlin said Saucedo-Portillo “is a registered sex offender and has a previous arrest for driving while intoxicated.” A search of Minnesota court records by the Minnesota Star Tribune found no record of a DWI case under that name, and Saucedo-Portillo does not appear in the national sex-offender registry.
Some journalists who got an inside look at this operation could have tried to undercut McLaughlin’s narrative about targeted arrests and “worst of the worst.” Instead, NBC News embedded with ICE for a day and ended up generating an article headlined “ICE operation shows the difficulty of immigration arrests amid pushback in frigid Minnesota.”
The article isn’t nearly as bad as the headline, but it allows ICE and their spokespeople to flat out lie about what’s been happening all over this nation, but has most recently focused almost exclusively on cities or states run by members of the Democratic Party.
“It is not an operation targeting the Somali community,” [ICE Acting Executive Director Marcos] Charles said. “We’re looking for people that are here illegally.”
Right. And that’s why the raid that made all the headlines (and generated a handful of bullshit arrests) just happened to have occurred in a neighborhood that is primarily populated by Somalis.
Then there’s this, which is directly contradicted by NBC’s reporting, even if NBC tries to present its observations as supporting Marcos Charles’s assertion:
“The biggest misconception is that we’re out there just randomly arresting people, which we’re not,” Charles said.
[…]
During NBC News’ roughly eight hours with ICE, fewer than a dozen people were arrested despite not being the initial targets of the operation. They just happened to be at the scene when agents showed up.
Given the wording, I would assume eleven people who weren’t ICE targets were arrested. If it were less than that, I assume NBC would have used wording like “ten people” or “less than ten people.” Either way, it’s like more than one “collateral” arrest per hour, which is crazy considering this is an article involving officers griping about the cold keeping people indoors, being prevented from entering homes by property owners multiple times due to the ICE’s lack of actual judicial warrants, and double-tap home search that revealed the targeted person had already fled. The officers decided to arrest the other person there just because.
Minneapolis is pushing back, which is exactly the way it should be. Here’s an incredible recording of anti-ICE protesters shielding a Minneapolis store from being entered by ICE officers, who collectively can’t even explain why they need to enter the building. The officers are eventually shamed into leaving, and showered with nothing but expressions of love, sympathy, and offers of prayer:
Resistance works. ICE officers work best when there’s no friction. When confronted or slowed, they’re far more apt to give up and leave than continue their likely illegal actions. In some cases, being confronted results in unprovoked acts of violence by federal officers. Fortunately, nothing like that happened here.
And just because we’re talking about Minneapolis, “Minnesota Nice,” and ICE activity largely fueled by xenophobic hate, here’s a palate cleanser. I don’t agree with my dad on nearly anything political, but he’s one of the most helpful people you will ever meet. He recently made the news in Minneapolis for doing what he’s always done: pitching in wherever needed.
After years of struggling to find enough workers for some of the nation’s toughest lockups, the Federal Bureau of Prisons is facing a new challenge: Corrections officers are jumping ship for more lucrative jobs at Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
This is one of the unintended consequences of the Trump administration’s focus on mass deportations. For months, ICE has been on a recruiting blitz, offering $50,000 starting bonuses and tuition reimbursement at an agency that has long offered better pay than the federal prison system. For many corrections officers, it’s been an easy sell.
Workers at detention centers and maximum-security prisons from Florida to Minnesota to California counted off the number of co-workers who’d left for ICE or were in the process of doing so. Six at one lockup in Texas, eight at another. More than a dozen at one California facility, and over four dozen at a larger one. After retirements and other attrition, by the start of November the agency had lost at least 1,400 more staff this year than it had hired, according to internal prison data shared with ProPublica.
“We’re broken and we’re being poached by ICE,” one official with the prison workers union told ProPublica. “It’s unbelievable. People are leaving in droves.”
The exodus comes amid shortages of critical supplies, from food to personal hygiene items, and threatens to make the already grim conditions in federal prisons even worse. Fewer corrections officers means more lockdowns, less programming and fewer health care services for inmates, along with more risks to staff and more grueling hours of mandatory overtime. Prison teachers and medical staff are being forced to step in as corrections officers on a regular basis.
And at some facilities, staff said the agency had even stopped providing basic hygiene items for officers, such as paper towels, soap and toilet paper.
“I have never seen it like this in all my 25 years,” an officer in Texas told ProPublica. “You have to literally go around carrying your own roll of toilet paper. No paper towels, you have to bring your own stuff. No soap. I even ordered little sheets that you put in an envelope and it turns to soap because there wasn’t any soap.”
The prisons bureau did not answer a series of emailed questions. In a video posted Wednesday afternoon, Deputy Director Josh Smith said that the agency was “left in shambles by the previous administration” and would take years to repair. Staffing levels, he said, were “catastrophic,” which, along with crumbling infrastructure and corruption, had made the prisons less safe.
Smith said that he and Director William Marshall III had been empowered by the Trump administration to “confront these challenges head-on.” “Transparency and accountability are the cornerstones of our mission to make the BOP great again, and we’re going to expose the truth and hold those responsible accountable.”
ICE, meanwhile, responded to a request for comment by forwarding a press release that failed to answer specific questions but noted that the agency had made more than 18,000 total tentative job offers as of mid-September.
The bureau tried tackling the problem with a long-term hiring push that included signing bonuses, retention pay and a fast-tracked hiring process. By the start of the year, that effort seemed to be working.
Kathleen Toomey, then the bureau’s associate deputy director, told members of Congress in February that the agency had just enjoyed its most successful hiring spree in a decade, increasing its ranks by more than 1,200 in 2024.
“Higher staffing levels make institutions safer,” she told a House appropriations subcommittee.
But the costly efforts to reel in more staff strained a stagnant budget that was already stretched thin. Toomey told Congress the bureau had not seen a funding increase since 2023, even as it absorbed millions in pay raises and retention incentives. As inflation and personnel costs rose, the bureau was forced to cut its operating budgets by 20%, Toomey said.
And despite some improvement, the staffing problems persisted. In her February testimony, Toomey acknowledgedthere were still at least 4,000 vacant positions, leaving the agency with so few officers that prison teachers, nurses and electricians were regularly being ordered to abandon their normal duties and fill in as corrections officers.
Then ICE rolled out its recruiting drive.
“At first it seemed like it was going to be no big deal, and then over the last week or so we already lost five, and then we have another 10 to 15 in various stages of waiting for a start date,” an employee at one low-security facility told ProPublica in October. “For us that’s almost 20% of our custody staff.”
He, like most of the prison workers and union officials who spoke to ProPublica, asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation — a concern that has grown since the agency canceled the union’s contract in September following an executive order. Now union leaders say they’ve been warned that without their union protections, they could be punished for speaking to the media.
After the contract’s cancellation, many of the current staff who had originally spoken on the record asked to have their names withheld. Those who still agreed to be identified asked ProPublica to note that their interviews took place before the agency revoked the union agreement.
Earlier this year, Brandy Moore White, national president of the prison workers union, said it’s not unprecedented to see a string of prison staffers leaving the agency, often in response to changes that significantly impact their working conditions. Prior government shutdowns, changes in leadership and the pandemic all drove away workers — but usually, she said, people leaving the agency en masse tended to be near the end of their careers. Now, that’s not the case.
“This is, from what I can remember, the biggest exodus of younger staff, staff who are not retirement-eligible,” she said. “And that’s super concerning to me.” ICE’s expansion has even thrown a wrench into BOP’s usual training program for rookies. Normally, new officers have to take a three-week Introduction to Correctional Techniques course at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers in Georgia within their first 60 days on the job, according to the prisons bureau’s website. In August, FLETC announced that it would focus only on “surge-related training,” pausing programs for other law enforcement agencies until at least early 2026, according to an internal email obtained by ProPublica. Afterward, FLETC said in a press release that it was “exploring temporary solutions” to “meet the needs of all partner agencies,” though it’s not clear whether any of those solutions have since been implemented. The centers did not respond to emailed requests for comment.
At the same time, the effects of the budget crunch were starting to show. In recent months, more than 40 staff and prisoners at facilities across the country have reported cutbacks even more severe than the usual prison scarcities.
In September, Moore White told ProPublica some prisons had fallen behind on utility and trash bills. At one point, she said, the prison complex in Oakdale, Louisiana, was days away from running out of food for inmates before the union — worried that hungry prisoners would be more apt to riot — intervened, nudging agency higher-ups to address the problem, an account confirmed by two other prison workers. (Officials at the prison complex declined to comment.) Elsewhere, staff and prisoners reported shortages — no eggs in a California facility and no beef in a Texas lockup where staff said they were doling out smaller portions at mealtimes.
Earlier this year, a defense lawyer complained that the Los Angeles detention center ran out of pens for prisoners in solitary confinement, where people without phone or e-messaging privileges rely on snail mail to contact the outside world. One of his clients was “rationing his ink to write letters to his family,” the attorney said. The center didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Personal hygiene supplies have been running low, too. Several prisoners said their facilities had become stingier than usual with toilet paper, and women incarcerated in Carswell in Texas reported a shortage of tampons. “I was told to use my socks,” one said. The facility did not answer questions from ProPublica about conditions there.
Fewer staff has meant in some cases that inmates have lost access to care. At the prison complex in Victorville, California, staff lodged written complaints accusing the warden of skimping on the number of officers assigned to inmate hospital visits in order to cut back on overtime. (The complex did not respond to a request for comment.) In some instances, the complaints alleged, that left so few officers at the hospital that ailing inmates missed the procedures that had landed them there in the first place.
Chyann Bratcher, a prisoner at Carswell, a medical lockup in Texas, said she missed an appointment for rectal surgery — something she’d been waiting on for two years — because there weren’t enough staff to take her there. She was able to have the procedure almost two months later, after another cancellation.
Staffers say several facilities have started scheduling recurring “blackout” days, when officers are banned from working overtime in an effort to save money. Instead, prison officials turn to a practice known as “augmentation,” where they direct teachers, plumbers and medical staff to fill in as corrections officers.
“That’s why I left,” said Tom Kamm, who retired in September from the federal prison in Pekin, Illinois, after 29 years with the bureau. “My job was to try to settle EEO complaints, so if somebody alleged discrimination against the agency it was my job to look into it and try to resolve it.”
When he found out earlier this year that he would soon be required to work two shifts per week as a corrections officer, he decided to retire instead.
“I hadn’t been an officer in a housing unit since like 2001 — it had been like 24 years,” he said. “I had really no clue how to do that anymore.”
Augmentation isn’t new, but staff and prisoners at some facilities say it’s being used more often than it once was. It also means fewer medical staff available to address inmates’ needs. “Today we had a Physical Therapist as a unit officer so all of his PT appointments would have been cancelled,” Brian Casper, an inmate at the federal medical prison in Missouri, wrote in an email earlier this year. “Yesterday one of the other units had the head of Radiology for the unit officer so there would have been one less person doing x-rays and CT scans.” The prison didn’t respond to emailed questions.
When the government shutdown hit in October, it only made the situation worse, exacerbating the shortages and increasing the allure of leaving the bureau. While ICE agents and corrections officers continued bringing home paychecks, thousands of prison teachers, plumbers and nurses did not.
The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the domestic policy megabill that Trump signed into law on July 4, could offer some financial support for the agency’s staffing woes, as it will route another $5 billion to the prisons bureau over four years — $3 billion of which is specifically earmarked to improve retention, hiring and training. Yet exactly what the effects of that cash infusion will look like remains to be seen: Though the funding bill passed more than four months ago, in November the bureau declined to answer questions about when it will receive the money or how it will be spent.
The cost-effectiveness of relying on AI is pretty much beside the point, at least as far as the cops are concerned. This is the wave of the future. Whatever busywork can be pawned off on tireless AI tech will be. It will be up to courts to sort this out, and if a bot can craft “training and expertise” boilerplate, far too many judges will give AI-generated police reports the benefit of the doubt.
The operative theory is that AI will generate factual narratives free of officer bias. The reality is the opposite, for reasons that should always have been apparent. Garbage in, garbage out. When law enforcement controls the inputs, any system — no matter how theoretically advanced — will generate stuff that sounds like the same old cop bullshit.
And it’s not just limited to the boys in blue (who are actually now mostly boys in black bloc/camo) at the local level. The combined forces of the Trump administration’s anti-migrant efforts are asking AI to craft their reports, which has resulted in the expected outcome. The AP caught something in Judge Sara Ellis’s thorough evisceration of Trump’s anti-immigrant forces as they tried to defend the daily constitutional violations they engaged in — many of which directly violated previous court orders from the same judge.
Contained in the 200+ page opinion [PDF] is a small footnote that points to an inanimate co-conspirator to the litany of lies served up by federal law enforcement in defense of its unconstitutional actions:
Tucked in a two-sentence footnote in a voluminous court opinion, a federal judge recently called out immigration agents using artificial intelligence to write use-of-force reports, raising concerns that it could lead to inaccuracies and further erode public confidence in how police have handled the immigration crackdown in the Chicago area and ensuing protests.
U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis wrote the footnote in a 223-page opinion issued last week, noting that the practice of using ChatGPT to write use-of-force reports undermines agents’ credibility and “may explain the inaccuracy of these reports.” She described what she saw in at least one body camera video, writing that an agent asks ChatGPT to compile a narrative for a report after giving the program a brief description and several images.
The judge noted factual discrepancies between the official narrative about those law enforcement responses and what body camera footage showed.
AI is known to generate hallucinations. It will do this more often when specifically asked to do so, as the next sentence of this report makes clear.
But experts say the use of AI to write a report that depends on an officer’s specific perspective without using an officer’s actual experience is the worst possible use of the technology and raises serious concerns about accuracy and privacy.
There’s a huge difference between asking AI to tell you what it sees in a recording and asking it to summarize with parameters that claim the officer was attacked. The first might make it clear no attack took place. The second is just tech-washing a false narrative to protect the officer feeding these inputs to ChatGPT.
AI — much like any police dog — lives to please. If you tell it what you expect to see, it will do what it can to make sure you see it. Pretending it’s just a neutral party doing a bit of complicated parsing is pure denial. The outcome can be steered by the person handling the request.
While it’s true that most law enforcement officers will write reports that excuse their actions/overreactions, pretending AI can solve this problem does little more than allow officers to spend less time conjuring up excuses for their rights violations. “We can misremember this for you wholesale” shouldn’t be an unofficial selling point for this tech.
And I can guarantee this (nonexistent) standard applies to more than 90% of law enforcement agencies with access to AI-generated report-writing options:
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment, and it was unclear if the agency had guidelines or policies on the use of AI by agents.
“Unclear” means what we all assume it means: there are no guidelines or policies. Those might be enacted at some point in the future following litigation that doesn’t go the government’s way, but for now, it’s safe to assume the government will continue operating without restrictions until forced to do otherwise. And that means people are going to be hallucinated into jail, thanks to AI’s inherent subservience and the willingness of those in power to exploit whatever, whenever until they’ve done so much damage to rights and the public’s trust that it can no longer be ignored.
ICE continues to be increasingly awful as it chases arrest and deportation quotas it will never meet. The administration’s desire to rid this nation of as many migrants as possible is generating new nastiness on a daily basis.
This bit of hideousness will likely have been subsumed several times over by the time you read this, but that doesn’t mean it should pass by unnoticed. The “worst of the worst” applies more to ICE officers and officials than it does to most of the people it sweeps up. This case is no exception. (h/t Kyle Cheney)
Guatemalan native Faustino Pablo Pablo has been in the United States since 2012, following all the rules of the lengthy asylum process. He received a ruling from a US immigration judge that said it “more likely than not” he would be “tortured” by (or with the permission of) the Guatemalan government if he was forced to return. The ruling made it clear Pablo Pablo could be removed to another country but was absolutely not to be sent back to Guatemala.
From 2013 to 2025, Pablo Pablo complied with every aspect of his order or release, including making regular check-ins to ICE’s ERO (Enforcement and Removal Operations) office. Then this happened:
On November 5, 2025, ICE detained Pablo Pablo at a “regular check-in appointment” without notice or explanation. Pablo Pablo’s attorney promptly contacted ICE to share, inter alia, receipt of his withholding of removal to Guatemala. On November 17, 2025, the Enforcement and Removal Operations (“ERO”) component of ICE transported Pablo Pablo to El Paso, Texas, “for staging of removal to Guatemala.”
That from the recent order [PDF] issued by federal judge David Guaderrama. The judge definitely isn’t happy with ICE, which is hardly surprising since the government basically admits it did the wrong thing willfully.
Once it became clear Pablo Pablo was challenging his (illegal) deportation, ICE accelerated the removal process:
On November 20, 2025, [Pablo Pablo] filed an additional motion, asking that Respondents be enjoined from transferring him outside of the Western District of Texas during the pendency of his habeas petition. The same day, at 5:00 AM MST, ICE transported Pablo Pablo to the airport. At 6:00 AM, ICE placed him on a flight direct to Guatemala By the time the Court ordered Respondents not to remove Pablo Pablo, he had arrived in Guatemala City.
That led to the court demanding some answers from the government. And while the government was responsive (in the legal sense), it doesn’t appear to be all that concerned about Pablo Pablo’s whereabouts or well-being.
Respondents conceded that Pablo Pablo “was subject to withholding of removal to Guatemala at the time he was removed, and therefore the physical removal was unlawful.” To rectify the error, Respondents stated that Pablo Pablo’s return flight had been “tentatively scheduled” for December 4, 2025.23 On December 4, 2025, Respondents provided an update that “Petitioner was not returned to the United States.” As far as the Court is aware, Pablo Pablo currently remains in Guatemala.
But then the government argued that the judge no longer had jurisdiction over Pablo Pablo’s habeas petition because… the government no longer had custody of Pablo Pablo. This is ridiculous, says the judge.
For reasons squarely outside of Pablo Pablo’s control, his attention has shifted from challenging his detention to challenging the blatant lawlessness of his removal. In other words, “[t]he removal itself lies at the heart of the wrongs.”
You’ll notice the words “blatant lawlessness of his removal” are not in quotes. This is a judge talking directly to ICE and the government’s legal reps, telling them exactly what he thinks about their actions. This isn’t an indirect slam cribbed from precedent.
And the judge is right to be angry. As Kyle Cheney’s report for Politico notes, this is something ICE has been doing repeatedly since the beginning of Trump’s second term.
The administration has acknowledged several other improper deportations, including a man sent to El Salvador despite a court-approved settlement agreement barring his deportation while his asylum claim was pending, a man who was sent to Mexico despite immigration officials’ acknowledgment that they had no record of a “credible fear” interview to determine whether he might face persecution, a man deported to El Salvador — where he remains incarcerated — despite a federal appeals court order barring his deportation, and a transgender woman deported to Mexico despite an immigration court order finding she was likely to be tortured there.
And even though the government admitted it had engaged in a “blatantly unlawful” removal when questioned by the court, the DHS remains defiant. Assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin issued a statement that basically says that Pablo Pablo is more wrong than ICE is:
“This illegal alien from Guatemala has a final order of removal from an immigration judge issued in 2015. He received full due process. One thing is certain: he is not going to be able to remain in the U.S. We will deport him to another country.”
McLaughlin also said this in her statement, which yet again undercuts the “worst of worst” narrative that gets trotted out every time ICE starts ramping up raids.
If a judge finds an illegal alien has no right to be in this country, we are going to remove them. Period.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a criminal with a lengthy rap sheet or someone who spent more than a decade here doing everything the government asked of him and, apparently, being a law-abiding non-citizen. Either way, this administration wants you gone.
When most people think about immigration enforcement, they picture border crossings and airport checkpoints. But the new front line may be your social media feed.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has published a request for information for private-sector contractors to launch a round-the-clock social media monitoring program. The request states that private contractors will be paid to comb through “Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, VK, Flickr, Myspace, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, Reddit, WhatsApp, YouTube, etc.,” turning public posts into enforcement leads that feed directly into ICE’s databases.
The request for information reads like something out of a cyber thriller: dozens of analysts working in shifts, strict deadlines measured in minutes, a tiered system of prioritizing high-risk individuals, and the latest software keeping constant watch.
I am a researcher who studies the intersection of data governance, digital technologies and the U.S. federal government. I believe that the ICE request for information also signals a concerning if logical next step in a longer trend, one that moves the U.S. border from the physical world into the digital.
The Customs and Border Protection agency also searches social media posts on the devices of some travelers at ports of entry, and the U.S. State Department reviews social media posts when foreigners seek visas to enter the United States.
What would change isn’t only the scale of monitoring but its structure. Instead of government agents gathering evidence case by case, ICE is building a public-private surveillance loop that transforms everyday online activity into potential evidence.
Private contractors would be tasked with scraping publicly available data to collecting messages, including posts and other media and data. The contractors would be able to correlate those findings with data in commercial datasets from brokers such as LexisNexis Accurint and Thomson Reuters CLEAR along with government-owned databases. Analysts would be required to produce dossiers for ICE field offices within tight deadlines – sometimes just 30 minutes for a high-priority case.
ICE frames the project as modernization: a way to identify a target’s location by identifying aliases and detecting patterns that traditional methods might miss. Planning documents say contractors cannot create fake profiles and must store all analysis on ICE servers.
The United States isn’t alone in government monitoring of social media. In the United Kingdom, a new police unit tasked with scanning online discussions about immigration and civil unrest has drawn criticism for blurring the line between public safety and political policing.
Around-the-clock surveillance doesn’t just gather information – it also changes behavior.
Research found that visits to Wikipedia articles on terrorism dropped sharply immediately after revelations about the National Security Agency’s global surveillance in June 2013.
For immigrants and activists, the stakes are higher. A post about a protest or a joke can be reinterpreted as “intelligence.” Knowing that federal contractors may be watching in real time encourages self-censorship and discourages civic participation. In this environment, the digital self, an identity composed of biometric markers, algorithmic classifications, risk scores and digital traces, becomes a risk that follows you across platforms and databases.
What’s new and why it matters now
What is genuinely new is the privatization of interpretation. ICE isn’t just collecting more data, it is outsourcing judgment to private contractors. Private analysts, aided by artificial intelligence, are likely to decide what online behavior signals danger and what doesn’t. That decision-making happens rapidly and across large numbers of people, for the most part beyond public oversight.
ICE’s request for information is likely to evolve into a full procurement contract within months, and recent litigation from the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center against the Department of Homeland Security suggests that the oversight is likely to lag far behind the technology. ICE’s plan to maintain permanent watch floors, open indoor spaces equipped with video and computer monitors, that are staffed 24 hours a day, 365 days a year signals that this likely isn’t a temporary experiment and instead is a new operational norm.
What accountability looks like
Transparency starts with public disclosure of the algorithms and scoring systems ICE uses. Advocacy groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union argue that law enforcement agencies should meet the same warrant standards online that they do in physical spaces. The Brennan Center for Justice and the ACLU argue that there should be independent oversight of surveillance systems for accuracy and bias. And several U.S. senators have introduced legislation to limit bulk purchases from data brokers.
Without checks like these, I believe that the boundary between border control and everyday life is likely to keep dissolving. As the digital border expands, it risks ensnaring anyone whose online presence becomes legible to the system.
The Trump administration is so sure it can get away with anything that it’s willing to try anything. That misapprehension of the situation has resulted in at least 200 rulingsagainst the administration’s anti-immigrant efforts. Still, the regime persists with its attempts to brute force constitutional rights out of existence.
Like it or not, MAGA faithful, immigrants have rights. They have the rights natural born citizens have access to, which is certainly something the Trump administration doesn’t think is true, even though it is.
The administration got a big win from the Supreme Court in terms of violating Fourth Amendment rights. In a solo concurrence, Justice Kavanaugh made it clear the majority believed there is nothing wrong with rounding up people simply because they look a bit more brown than white on the outside.
Meanwhile, ICE pretends it’s still targeting criminals, even when all data says otherwise. It continues to claim it’s going after known criminals but its paperwork doesn’t match its public statements. If it was really going after criminals, it should be able to obtain arrest warrants. The fact that it rarely has anything more than administrative warrants (self-issued warrants without judicial backing) in its possession at any given time contradicts its assertions about its alleged “targeted” enforcement efforts.
The Trump administration continues to get railed on the regular by federal courts. The latest is no exception:
A federal judge in Denver on Tuesday ordered federal immigration officers to stop making arrests in Colorado without a warrant, unless the detainee posed a flight risk, the latest in a string of lower-court decisions rebuking President Trump’s immigration enforcement tactics.
[…]
In Colorado, Judge Jackson, an appointee of President Barack Obama, found that immigration agents had acted unlawfully by arresting and detaining immigrants — some for as long as 100 days — without showing the required probable cause that they posed a threat of fleeing.
This decision aligns itself with several others. Unfortunately, the body of judicial work ruling against Trump’s anti-immigration programs hasn’t really changed anything. Many rulings have been appealed. What has yet to be heard by the Supreme Court has often been given a pass by appellate judges.
And even if a court rules definitively against Trump, there’s no reason to believe this administration will act in accordance with the ruling. Emil Bove — the former DOJ lawyer who told prosecutors to tell the courts to fuck themselves if they opposed Trump — is now sitting on the Third Circuit. Other rulings delivered by federal courts have been immediately stayed by appellate courts who normally would have allowed things to play out at the lower level before undercutting their findings.
What’s happening here affects a lot of rights beyond the immediate recognition of Fourth Amendment incursion. These warrantless arrests are often followed by indefinite detentions that involve violations of Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
This government is plain nasty. It has zero interest in the rule of law. It wants to be the bully on the block at all times. If the system of checks and balances rears it head, the administration will either ignore the concerns raised or engage in unprecedented attacks on the judiciary itself. Pointing out the incompetency of Trump administration thugs is about as useless as criticizing the GPA of the person beating your skull to pulp with a baseball bat. The end result is the same. Any legitimate points raised mid-beating won’t do anything to reduce the CTE trauma. It’s best to assume bad faith from the beginning because this is the administration’s sole operating speed.
Current Third Circuit Appeals Court judge and former Trump lawyer Emil Bove made it clear — on more than one occasion — that DOJ lawyers should tell the courts “fuck you” if they tried to shut down any anti-migrant operations.
That message apparently reached several receptive ears. Earlier this year, a federal judge ordered the administration to halt flights to El Salvador and to return immigrants who hadn’t been given access to their due process rights. The government went on to pretend this had never happened. It did at least not continue to send planes to El Salvador, but it refused to order those already in the air to turn around and return to the United States.
Thanks to a filing by the DOJ, we now know who made the final call to say “fuck you” to Judge James Boasberg, who issued both a verbal and written order demanding the flights to El Salvador be halted.
This is the angle the administration is taking to pretend it didn’t need to recall flights it had hastily sent aloft in anticipation of Boasberg’s ruling:
At approximately 6:45 PM on March 15, 2025, the Court orally directed counsel for the Government to inform his clients of the Court’s oral directives at the hearing, including statements directing that any removed class members “need to be returned to the United States.” By that point, two flights carrying individuals designated under the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) had already departed from the United States and were outside United States territory and airspace.
At approximately 7:25 PM, the Court memorialized its temporary restraining order in a written order, as the Court had indicated at the hearing it would do. The written order enjoined Defendants “from removing” class members pursuant to the AEA. The written order, unlike the oral directives, said nothing about returning class members who had already been removed.
A government acting in good faith might have taken steps to return the planes already in the air as a precautionary step to avoid generating contempt of court allegations. This government never acts in good faith. It allowed the planes to continue heading towards El Salvador even though it had received a verbal order “directing that any removed [migrants] need[ed] to be returned to the United States.”
It instead let the planes continued to fly until it had received a written order, which it then decided to interpret as permission to allow these flights to continue.
But someone had to make the final call to blow off Judge Boasberg’s first order and pretend the second order wasn’t meant to be read in the spirit of his first order. And that person would be Kristi Noem, who is now defending her actions with the usual Trump admin horseshit about keeping America safe from dangerous brown people:
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Sunday confirmed that she instructed the federal government to carry out the deportation and transferring Venezuelan detainees to El Salvador despite a court order halting the flights.
“The decisions that are made on deportations, where flights go, and when they go are my decision at the Department of Homeland Security,” Noem told NBC’s Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press.” “And we will continue to do the right thing and ensure that dangerous criminals are removed.”
Bullshit. That was never the case. The Trump administration doesn’t care whether or not the migrants it’s ejecting as as fast as it can are actually “dangerous criminals.” The latest data shows only 5% of those detained by ICE have criminal records that contain violent crimes. 73% of those detained have no criminal record at all.
Rather than err on the side of caution when confronted with a discrepancy between what was said and what was written by the judge, Kristi Noem signed off on the interpretation that allowed the administration to do what it was always going to do anyway. And in doing so, she’s made it clear this government will engage in actionable contempt that springs from its literal contempt for the system of checks and balances.
Boasberg previously found probable cause to start contempt proceedings over the administration’s deportations, an action that was paused for months until an appeals court last week cleared the way for him to charge forward.
This is something, at least. Its usefulness in forcing the administration to play by the rules has yet to be seen. So far, nothing really has had any deterrent effect on an administration that continues to expand the boundaries of executive power on a daily basis.
Trump’s war on Chicago appears destined to end in a whimper. While he kicked off his invasion of Chicago with memes and a call to arrest J.B. Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson, his out of control federal agents have reportedly begun to leave the area. That suburban ICE facility you’ve heard so much about?
Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Johnson in a hearing Tuesday said there are currently only four people being held at the Broadview facility, a drastic reduction that comes weeks after detainees there testified they had been crammed into rooms filled with more than 100 people for multiple days.
The decline in population comes as federal immigration agents sent to the area as part of the Trump Administration’s “Operation Midway Blitz” enforcement efforts have begun leaving Chicago ahead of a possible return in the spring.
Good, get the fuck out of here.
But while the feds were playing war against the domestic enemy of Chicago, they certainly did plenty of damage. Raids disrupted neighborhoods, businesses, and even parade celebrations. The terror in pockets of the city and surrounding area was palpable. Oh, and CBP fucking shot a lady, claiming that she had rammed the cars of federal agents, was armed with a firearm, and boxed agents in putting them in danger. Here is what the DOJ said occurred back in October:
“After striking the agents’ vehicle, the defendants’ vehicles boxed in the agents’ vehicle, the complaint states,” prosecutors said in a statement when charges were announced last month. “The agent was unable to move his vehicle and exited the car, at which point he fired approximately five shots from his service weapon at Martinez, the complaint states.”
Sounds pretty bad. Really bad, even. Certainly not the sort of thing that the DOJ would just want to drop a month or so later, right?
Andrew S. Boutros, the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, filed court documents Thursday morning to dismiss the charges.
So, how did we go from prosecutors stating that Martinez rammed federal vehicles with her car, boxed them in alongside other drivers, was armed, and that all of that is what led to a CBP agent shooting her several times in “self defense”? That one is easy, actually: CBP was lying about what happened.
Martinez’s lawyer, Christopher Parente, indicated during proceedings that he saw the bodycam footage from CBP agents and that it clearly shows that the CBP car swerved into Martinez’s vehicle, not the other way around.
“When I watched the video after this agent says, ‘Do something, b—-,’ I see the driver of this vehicle turn the wheel to the left. Which would be consistent with him running into Ms. Martinez’s vehicle, okay,” Parente said. “And then seconds later, he jumps out and just starts shooting.”
The gun that DOJ referenced everywhere but in the actually charging documents? Yeah, Martinez has a handgun for which she is licensed to conceal and carry in Illinois, and that firearm never made it out of her purse in this entire incident. CBP had no idea she was armed until after she’d been shot.
Oh, and the CBP agent gleefully bragged about just how efficiently he put holes in Martinez’s body.
During a Nov. 5 court hearing, CBP Agent Charles Exum, identified as the agent who shot Martinez, was questioned by Parente about text messages he sent to friends and family after the incident in which he appeared to boast about his shooting skills.
“I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book, boys,” one of those messages said.
When pressed by Parente about the text messages during his testimony, Exum said, “I am a firearms instructor and I take pride in my shooting skills.”
Parente then asked, “So you’re bragging that you shot her five times and gets seven holes, five shots? Are you literally bragging about this?”
Exum responded, “I’m just saying five shots, seven holes.”
And I’m just saying that such assholery is obviously part of the reason the government didn’t think it could win this case.
But what this case should do, if nothing else, is serve as exhibit A in every single conversation anyone anywhere has in which someone points to statements by the government as justification for any of the fascistic bullshit the Trump administration is pulling currently. The feds lie. They lie regularly. And while DOJ can do its best to silently slink away from this whole episode, you can be damned sure civil litigation is already being drawn up.
