In the grand scheme of things — the wanton cruelty, the routine violations of rights, the actual fucking murders — this may only seem like a blip on the mass deportation continuum. But this report from Dell Cameron for Wired is still important. It not only explains why federal officers are approaching people with cellphones drawn nearly as often as they’re approaching them with guns drawn, but also shows the administration is yet again pretending it’s a law unto itself.

On Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security published new details about Mobile Fortify, the face recognition app that federal immigration agents use to identify people in the field, undocumented immigrants and US citizens alike. The details, including the company behind the app, were published as part of DHS’s 2025 AI Use Case Inventory, which federal agencies are required to release periodically.

The inventory includes two entries for Mobile Fortify—one for Customs and Border Protection (CBP), another for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—and says the app is in the “deployment” stage for both. CBP says that Mobile Fortify became “operational” at the beginning of May last year, while ICE got access to it on May 20, 2025. That date is about a month before 404 Media first reported on the app’s existence.

A lot was going on last May, in terms of anti-migrant efforts and the casual refusal to recognize long-standing constitutional rights. That was the same month immigration officers were told they could enter people’s homes while only carrying self-issued “administrative warrants,” which definitely aren’t the same thing as the judicial warrants the government actually needs to enter areas provided the utmost in Fourth Amendment protection.

The app federal officers are using is made by NEC, a tech company that’s been around since long before ICE and CBP become the mobile atrocities they are. Prior to this revelation, NEC had only been associated with developing biometric software with an eye on crafting something that could be swiftly deployed and just as quickly scaled to meet the government’s needs. This particular app was never made public prior to this.

ICE claims it’s not a direct customer. It’s only a beneficiary of the CBP’s existing contract with NEC. That’s a meaningless distinction when multiple federal agencies have been co-opted into the administration’s bigoted push to rid the nation of brown people.

As is always the case (and this precedes Trump 2.0), CBP and ICE are rolling out tech far ahead of the privacy impact paperwork that’s supposed to filed before anything goes live.

While CBP says there are “sufficient monitoring protocols” in place for the app, ICE says that the development of monitoring protocols is in progress, and that it will identify potential impacts during an AI impact assessment. According to guidance from the Office of Management and Budget, which was issued before the inventory says the app was deployed for either CBP or ICE, agencies are supposed to complete an AI impact assessment before deploying any high-impact use case. Both CBP and ICE say the app is “high-impact” and “deployed.”

This is standard operating procedure for the federal government. The FBI and DEA were deploying surveillance tech well ahead of Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs) as far back as [oh wow] 2014, while the nation was still being run by someone who generally appeared to be a competent statesman. That nothing has changed since makes it clear this problem is endemic.

But things are a bit worse now that Trump is running an administration stocked with fully-cooked MAGA acolytes. In the past, our rights might have received a bit of lip service and the occasional congressional hearing about the lack of required Privacy Impact Assessments.

None of that will be happening now. No one in the DHS is even going to bother to apply pressure to those charged with crafting these assessments. And no one will threaten (much less terminate) the tech deployment until these assessments have been completed. I would fully expect this second Trump term to come and go without the delivery of legally-required paperwork, especially since oversight of these agencies will be completely nonexistent as long as the GOP holds a congressional majority.

We lose. The freshly stocked swamp wins. And while it’s normal to expect the federal government to bristle at the suggestion of oversight, it’s entirely abnormal to allow an administration that embraces white Christian nationalism to act as though the only holy text any Trump appointee subscribes to was handed down by Aleister Crowley: Do what thou wilt. That is the whole of the law.

I have to admit: the first one-and-a-half paragraphs of this CNN report had me thinking the Trump administration was shedding another pretense and just embracing its inherent shittiness.

Justice Department officials are expected to meet Monday to discuss how to reenergize probes that are considered a top priority for President Donald Trump — reviewing the actions of officials who investigated him, according to a source familiar with the plan.

Almost immediately after Pam Bondi stepped into her role as attorney general last year, she established a “Weaponization Working Group” …

We all know the DOJ is fully weaponized. It’s little more than a fight promoter for Trump’s grudge matches. The DOJ continues to bleed talent as prosecutors and investigators flee the kudzu-esque corruption springing up everywhere in DC.

But naming something exactly what it is — the weaponization of the DOJ to punish Trump’s enemies — wasn’t something I ever expected to see.

I didn’t see it, which fulfills my expectations, I guess. That’s because it isn’t what it says on the tin, even though it’s exactly the thing it says it isn’t. 1984 is apparently the blueprint. It’s called the “Weaponization Working Group,” but it’s supposedly the opposite: a de-weaponization working group. Here’s the second half of the paragraph we ellipsised out of earlier:

…[t]o review law enforcement actions taken under the Biden administration for any examples of what she described as “politicized justice.”

The Ministry of Weaponization has always de-weaponized ministries. Or whatever. The memo that started this whole thing off — delivered the same day Trump returned to office — said it even more clearly:

ENDING THE WEAPONIZATION OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

Administration officials are idiots, but they’re not so stupid they don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t actually want to end the weaponization. They just want to make sure all the weapons are pointing in one direction.

Trading in vindication hasn’t exactly worked well so far. Trump’s handpicked replacements for prosecutors that have either quit or been fired are a considerable downgrade from the previous office-holders. They have had their cases tossed and their careers as federal prosecutors come to an end because (1) Trump doesn’t care what the rules for political appointments are and (2) he’s pretty sure he can find other stooges to shove into the DOJ revolving door.

The lack of forward progress likely has Pam Bondi feeling more heat than she’s used to. So the deliberately misnamed working group is going to actually start grouping and working.

The Weaponization Working Group is now expected to start meeting daily with the goal of producing results in the next two months, according to the person familiar with the plan.

Nothing good will come from this. Given the haphazard nature of the DOJ’s vindictive prosecutions efforts, there’s still a chance nothing completely evil will come from this either. It’s been on the back burner for a year. Pam Bondi can’t keep this going on her own. And it’s hell trying to keep people focused on rubbing Don’s tummy when employee attrition is what the DOJ is best known for these days.

The two murders by immigration officers during Trump’s vengeful “surge” in Minneapolis, Minnesota have grabbed most of the headlines recently. And deservedly so. The violent rhetoric used by nearly every administration official — combined with a lack of training and the explicit understanding no one will be punished by Trump for whatever’s done in Trump’s name — has delivered a day-to-day purge of minorities that this government and its supporters continue to pretend is nothing more than good, solid (immigration) law enforcement.

But before those shootings turned the nation’s attention to Minnesota, hundreds of federal officers had been turned loose in other “Democrat” states. Because officers were encouraged — by arrest quotas and the administration’s portrayal of anyone from other countries as inherently dangerous — to succeed by any means necessary, they did… even if it meant filling people with bullet holes for being on the wrong side of Trump’s version of history.

In January, two Venezuelans were shot by ICE officers. The DHS immediately claimed this was a good shoot, considering how potentially violent these recipients of bullets were.

Yesterday, two suspected Tren de Aragua gang associates—let loose on American streets by Joe Biden—weaponized their vehicle against Border Patrol in Portland. The agent took immediate action to defend himself and others, shooting them. 

After fleeing, the suspects drove nearly five miles to an apartment complex and called emergency medical services. They were transported to separate hospitals. Luis David Nino-Moncada sustained an injury to the arm while Yorlenys Betzabeth Zambrano-Contreras was hit in the chest. Nino-Moncada is now in FBI custody. These individuals are not married.  

I’ve highlighted two things from this January DHS press release. Sure, it’s all bullshit but these two sentences need to be called out.

First, just because someone managed to cross the border doesn’t mean they were “let loose on American streets” by a presidential administration.

Second, what the fuck even is this? “These individuals are not married.” Who gives a shit? What bearing does this have on anything? Or are we so far down the white Christian nationalist rabbit hole that simply co-habitating a moving vehicle is justification enough for being shot by federal officers?

Any normal administration would never have included those two sentences, even if it wanted to push the narrative that the people who were shot were dangerous enough to justify the violent reaction. Throwing this shit into the mix is just how the Trump administration does business: like two kids piggy-backed in a trenchcoat, pretending to be a full-grown adult.

And that’s enough to let everyone know very little of what is being said is true. It’s a dog whistle for racism, sexism, and making-a-bunch-of-shit-upism that is meant to appease the Bigot in Chief and make MAGA’s collective panties so wet they should be asking FEMA for flood relief grants. (I’m paraphrasing Shoresy here.)

While that may look good on the permanent DHS press release record, it doesn’t look nearly as bully-smart (I’m coining that) as the people spewing it thinks it does when it runs up against the part of the government that isn’t so easily swayed by bigoted gibberish that’s interspersed with partisan attacks and non sequiturs.

Now that these shootings are being handled in court, the narrative (and I’m being extremely gracious here in treating this froth as the equivalent of an actual narrative) is disintegrating. It turns out prosecutors and investigators can’t actually back up these wild-ass DHS claims. Forced to rely on facts, the DOJ is finding out it doesn’t have many to work with.

During the border patrol stop, the driver, Luis Niño-Moncada, “weaponized their vehicle against” officers, DHS said, prompting an agent “to defend himself and others” by shooting the occupants. Zambrano-Contreras was hit in the chest, Niño-Moncada was hit in the arm and both were hospitalized, then taken into federal custody, DHS noted. The agents were uninjured.

But court records obtained by the Guardian reveal a Department of Justice prosecutor later directly contradicted DHS’s Tren de Aragua statements in court, telling a judge: “We’re not suggesting … [Niño-Moncada] is a gang member.” An FBI affidavit issued following the incident also suggests that in the previous shooting cited by DHS, Zambrano-Contreras was not a suspect, but rather a reported victim of a sexual assault and robbery. Neither Niño-Moncada or Zambrano-Contreras have prior criminal convictions, their lawyers have said.

This is just as sloppy as the quasi-gang database the DHS has been using as an excuse to send Venezuelans to El Salvador’s CECOT hell hole. There’s no investigation going on here. There’s just the DHS claiming that any Venezuelan it shoots or otherwise brutalizes is probably a Tren de Aragua gang member.

No doubt some prosecutors are going to get shit-canned for daring to oppose the DHS’s self-serving narrative in their sworn statements to judges. Given that the DOJ really can’t afford to lose many more of these, one wonders why this administration can’t simply provide a “no comment,” rather than immediately push narratives that it has to know will be contradicted once the facts arrive at the scene.

I mean, just stating what happened in whatever exonerative form you want to use (“officer-involved shooting”), followed by the assertion that the shooting is currently under investigation would be far better than what this administration chooses to do EVERY CHANCE IT GETS.

Whatever dubious charm these statements might have held during Trump’s blustery return to office has long worn off. I suspect even many of the MAGA faithful are getting a little tired of every incident being greeted by government statements that are long on hyperbole but short on facts. Sure, there are still a number of people so fully-cooked that they can’t achieve an erection without being lied to for paragraphs at a time, but given this constant onslaught of pure garbage in response to government violence, I have to believe some of the people who very definitely voted for this are rolling their eyes every time DHS front-mouth Tricia McLaughlin opens her mouth.

The administration’s racist goon squads have absolutely been steamrolling the Constitution since Trump’s return to office. When ICE et al started roving throughout the nation looking for anyone non-white enough to be foreign, all rights were considered expendable.

The DHS made swift work of the Fifth, Sixth, and 14th Amendments by denying arrestees due process and access to legal representation. Officers grabbed people, sent them far from their home states, and shoved them into planes headed to foreign hellhole prisons as quickly as possible in hopes of nullifying the inevitable legal challenges.

The 14th Amendment got kicked while it was still down when the administration decided birthright citizenship was no longer a thing. And the entire administration simply pretends the First Amendment doesn’t apply to anyone who says things or does stuff it doesn’t like.

The Fourth Amendment got turned into a doormat last May when the DHS Office of Legal Counsel (usurping the role usually held by the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel) told federal officers they no longer needed judicial warrants to enter homes so long as they could semi-credibly claim the person they were seeking was subject to immigration court order of removal.

Now, ICE is coming for what’s left of the Fourth Amendment, as the New York Times reports:

Amid tensions over President Trump’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota and beyond, federal agents were told this week that they have broader power to arrest people without a warrant, according to an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo reviewed by The New York Times.

The change expands the ability of lower-level ICE agents to carry out sweeps rounding up people they encounter and suspect are undocumented immigrants, rather than targeted enforcement operations in which they set out, warrant in hand, to arrest a specific person.

“Amid tensions,” Polish journalists wrote in late 1939. That bit of coyness aside, there’s additional coyness in the memo issued by ICE’s acting director Todd Lyons. There’s very little in the way of legal citations. But there’s definitely a permission slip ICE agents can write for themselves when they head out to terrorize US residents.

Lyons thinks he can redefine legal terms on the fly to allow immigration officers to arrest people without warrants. The memo says “flight risk” (which allows for a warrantless arrest) is not the correct term since it can only be applied after an arrest:

Without explanation, and without any formal policy, ICE previously applied the phrase “likely to escape” as being the equivalent of “flight risk. ” This unreasoned position was incorrect. In fact, there are significant differences between the two standards in the immigration regulatory context and immigration officers should avoid conflating them. A flight risk analysis looks at whether an alien is likely to attend future immigration court hearings, appear before ERO as directed, surrender for removal, and comply with other immigration obligations. Flight risk determinations are made after an alien’s arrest, where the alien has already been identified, fingerprinted, interviewed, and may have had DNA collected.

That’s simply no good for this administration — especially when immigration forces are expected to come up with 3,000 arrests per day. Lyons says (again, without supporting legal citations) that “likely to escape” should be the standard for warrantless arrests, which is a determination agents should be able to make on their own without having to seek an arrest warrant. After all, if they go get a warrant, there’s a good chance the person they want to arrest might be a bit more difficult to find.

While the flight-risk analysis assesses whether an already identified and detained alien is likely to comply with future immigration obligations such as court appearances and appearances before ERO , the likelihood-of-escape analysis is narrowly focused on determining whether the person is likely to escape before the officer can practically obtain an administrative arrest warrant, while in the field. This on-the-spot determination as to the likelihood of escape is often made with limited information about the subject’s identity, background, or place of residence and no corroboration of any self-serving statements made by the subject.

The goalposts are moved. If an officer thinks a person they just happened to come across while performing an arrest with an actual warrant might not stick around to be arrested later, the officer can just arrest them as well, citing the lowered standard of “likely to escape.”

And what makes one “likely to escape” under this arbitrary, completely made the fuck up “legal” standard? Well, it’s a fine blend of “anything” and “everything.”

The subject’s behavior before or during the “encounter,” which covers anything from “suspicious behavior” to simply refusing officers’ commands to let them in a house (without a warrant) or yank them from a car (without a warrant). For that matter, being in a car is all that’s needed to be considered “likely to escape.” (“The subject’s ability and means to promptly depart the scene.”)

Or maybe the “subject” looks like they just may be healthy enough to leave on foot:

The subject’s age and health…

Also on the list: documents an officer “suspects” might be fraudulent (with no demand made that officers attempt to verify documents before engaging in a warrantless arrest). The list also says officers can make warrantless arrests if they suspect the person has violated any immigration law, even though they are not required to do anything at all to seek information that might corroborate their suspicions.

The end result is exactly what this administration wants it to be: a blank check for warrantless arrests that can then be justified after the fact by the officers who performed the arrest. And if they happen to be wrong, they’ll just cut the person loose, secure in the knowledge they’ll never be punished by their superiors, much less held accountable in court now that the Supreme Court has made it impossible to sue federal officers for rights violations.

Given this further erasure of civil rights, one can only assume the coming weeks will bring us DHS/ICE memos declaring the use of private homes as federal operation centers to be well within the confines of the Third Amendment. Perhaps we’ll even see some women jailed for attempting to vote during the upcoming midterms. ALL RIGHTS MUST GO!, says the administration proudly hosting this dumpster fire of a civil liberties fire sale. And once again, the party claiming to make America great continues to eliminate all the stuff that makes America America.

No doubt this will be spun as some form of Minnesota-specific obstruction, but until that happens, let’s just appreciate the fact that not all cops are willing to be appendages of the Trump administration’s bigoted migrant purge. Here are the details, courtesy of Minnesota Public Radio:

MPR News has learned that the police chief in the small southern Minnesota city of St. Peter intervened Thursday to prevent federal immigration agents from taking a local resident into detention, although the city of St. Peter denied the intervention in a statement Saturday.

It’s believed to be the first time a local police department in Minnesota intervened in a federal law enforcement action since the surge in immigration enforcement began two months ago.

It won’t be the last. But it’s sure to anger the administration, which has already made it clear it thinks local officials are to blame for the two people federal officers have murdered in Minneapolis over the past three weeks.

The person federal officers ran off the road, threatened at gun point, dragged out of the car, and arrested was someone who was merely observing what they were doing. It was one woman in one car and yet federal officers felt compelled to box her in and approach her with weapons drawn. They treated this like a felony stop, as though they were in the process of apprehending a known violent criminal, rather than one person armed with a dash cam and a cellphone.

She wasn’t doing anything illegal. She was doing what anyone could have done: recorded law enforcement officers performing their public duties. Just because ICE et al would prefer to go about their business unobserved (hence the rented cars, dummy license plates, and face masks) doesn’t make being seen by others an illegal act.

Fortunately, she had the presence of mind to tell others to call 911 on her behalf. Federal officers arrested her and drove her towards the Whipple Federal Building, presumably in hopes of getting her on the next plane to wherever the fuck before she had a chance to contact anyone.

But her 911 call derailed this:

“I couldn’t hear what was being said, but within 30 seconds after they hung up, they exited on, an exit that goes into Le Sueur… and then turned around, didn’t say anything to me, and started heading back towards St. Peter.”

The husband told MPR News that after his wife was taken into custody, he called his attorney, and soon after, he got a call from St. Peter Chief of Police Matt Grochow, whom he said he has known for years.

Shortly after that, Chief Grochow drove her home from the St. Peter police station, where the federal officers had left her.

This is frightening stuff. If her husband hadn’t managed to talk to an attorney and if that attorney hadn’t reached out to the police chief, this US citizen might still be sitting in an ICE detention center.

And if that’s not frightening enough, there’s this coda, which makes it clear this administration is willing to punish anyone who won’t immediately try to lick the boots pressed to their necks:

MPR News reached out to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security about the incident.  A spokesperson responded by asking for the woman’s name, date of birth and “A-number,” or alien number, which DHS uses to track non-citizens who are living in the United States. The woman is a U.S. citizen. To protect the woman from retaliation, MPR News did not provide that information to them. 

What the fuck. This isn’t normal. This is a rogue administration that answers to no one and has made it clear to the federal officers who serve it (rather than the public they’re supposed to be serving) that they’ll never be punished for behaving like violent, lawless thugs. Many more people are going to be brutalized, if not actually killed, by this government simply because they refuse to ignore what ICE, etc. are doing.

Let’s just clear the air right up front: this is just the government mugging Somalis because they’re currently at the top of Trump’s shitlist. Prior to last month’s escalation (and subsequent murder) because some white MAGA shitbird became famous for supposedly uncovering a whole lot of Somali-based fraud in Minneapolis, Minnesota, it’s possible ICE would have bragged about robbing money from people at an international airport.

But because this other thing (the MAGA dude) happened first — and because Minneapolis residents have proven incredibly resilient in the face of vengeful federal operations — ICE had to get out its X bullhorn and yell about taking money from people the MAGA faithful have been encouraged to hate by their dimwitted handler, Donald Trump. (For a bit of catharsis, here’s a wonderful recording of the so-called “MAGA influencer” Jake Lang being welcomed to Minneapolis by counter-protesters while he tried to get his anti-migrant hate on. It seems this mook forgot protesters burned a police station to the ground following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.)

This X post comes to us via Dom Ervolina on Bluesky. But since that post can’t be seen by people who aren’t logged in, I’m going to screenshot the X post in all of its ingloriousness, because we certainly aren’t going to be linking to and/or embedding a post from that particular den of depravity that’s overseen by a landlord who can’t seem to decide whether he should be an absentee landlord or a cheerleader for his CSAM-creating, Hitler proxy AI, Grok.

Here goes nothing:

It’s an official post by the X ICE account. Although ICE wasn’t directly involved with this airport robbery, it was first in line to celebrate it. Here’s what it says:

UNDECLARED CASH SEIZED AT MSP

On January 18, HSI St. Paul and @CBP seized $14,135 from two Somali-born U.S. citizens who were departing on international flights from MSP.

ICE and CBP remain vigilant in detecting and preventing the illegal movement of funds across borders to protect national security.

It’s accompanied by a photo of the alleged $14,135 scattered across a Formica table apparently located adjacent to (and somewhat blocking) an airport walkway.

Note that it says $14,135. $14,000 should have been enough. But the bottom right corner of the photo makes it clear federal officers weren’t satisfied until they’d rifled through these people’s wallets.

Yep, that’s $35 dollars, splayed across the table like it’s the focal point of a video produced by the least-successful SoundCloud rap artist ever.

Also, note the way this phrase is… um, phrased:

“…from two Somali-born U.S. citizens…”

You see what the government led with, right? They expect everyone who’s going to cheer whatever they do to stop reading after the “i” in “Somali” (or maybe the “n” in “-born” at best). And they expect everyone to ignore the words that follow that: “U.S. citizens.”

The rabble will get roused because it has something to do (however adjacently) with the people Trump hates and who will do all they can to stoke that hatred, even if that means the occasional bout of hypothermia. (See above link about Maga dudebro getting railed by the locals.)

Ignore the rest of the racist dogwhistling and you get nothing more than ICE celebrating the fact that the CBP stole $14,135 from US citizens.

But that’s not even the stupidest part of ICE masturbating on main. The rules for taking money out of the country are pretty simple: you must declare any amount over $10,000 to Customs. There were two people and $14,000 involved here. Even the laziest of elementary school students should be able to spot the problem here.

No matter how you slice it up, CBP cannot use a customs violation to justify the seizure of $14,000 from two people. If one person was over the limit, the other person was carrying an amount of cash that didn’t need to be declared. If both were carrying half, neither of them were violating the law.

And since the government has yet to give us more details on this, we’re left to assume the government grabbed $14,000 from two US citizens just because it thinks it can get away with it.

Now, it’s entirely possible the government will claim the two people were working together to smuggle more than $10,000 out of the country. But if it does, it should be directly and persistently challenged by the court that takes this case. If that doesn’t happen, the government will be able to steal any amount of cash from any number of passengers boarding the same plane if that total manages to clear the $10,000 mark.

And it will also assume it can free-associate connections between people boarding different flights carrying cash by pretending these unconnected people are engaged in a conspiracy to violate a customs law that seemingly only exists to allow the government to pick people’s pockets (figuratively but also LITERALLY) at our nation’s airports.

On top of that, there are the activities of other federal agencies like the DEA and ATF, who pretend any mildly significant amount of cash in travelers’ luggage must be the end result of illegal activity. And this is so fucking maddening because it has NEVER been illegal to carry cash from place to place, much less try to leave the country with an (undeclared) stack of greenbacks (under $10,000) that tend to produce better results in vacation destinations and ancestral homelands whose currency isn’t worth as much as the US dollar.

There’s no shaming the government into behaving better — not when it’s headed by some of the most shameless government officials ever to hold executive branch offices. But, for the time being, you can possibly sue them into submission. And that’s what needs to happen now. The government is engaging in racism and mouthing empty phrases about “national security” to justify its abusive xenophobia. Sure, this sort of thing predates Trump. But it doesn’t mean we should consider it acceptable just because it’s been SOP for most of this century.

Trump’s going to win the election he lost, no matter what he has to do to make that happen. Surrounding himself with a better set of sycophants this time around has really allowed him to gain some ground in his “be the despot you wish to see in the world” efforts.

His top appointees are just as willing to lie, defame, deride, and overstep the long-accepted limitations of their positions as the president himself. Now that Trump has pardoned the people who raided the Capitol on his behalf in January 2021, he’s going after everyone and everything that pissed him off about that particular election cycle.

Trump’s Revenge Time Machine is taking him and his administration back to Georgia to engage in an unprecedented seizure of voting records, as ABC News reports:

Fulton County, Georgia, officials said Wednesday that the FBI seized original 2020 voting records while serving a search warrant at the county’s Elections Hub and Operations Center.

[…]

The search warrant authorized the FBI to search for “All physical ballots from the 2020 General Election,” in addition to tabulator tapes from voting machines and 2020 voter rolls, among other documents, according to a copy of the warrant obtained by ABC affiliate WSB. 

The warrant says the material “constitutes evidence of the commission of a criminal offense” and had been “used as the means of committing a criminal offense.”  It was signed by Magistrate Judge Catherine Salinas.

It’s not surprising that Trump would attempt to extract some sort of penance from Georgia after he failed to convert that state into electoral college votes. The governor of the state, Brian Kemp, did all he could to swing the state back into Trump’s favor post-election, including being sued by the DNC for claiming (with zero facts in evidence) that the Democratic party had “hacked” his state’s voting machines.

Trump kept this issue alive by bringing Heather Honey — a fellow 2020 election denier from Georgia — into the in-group, appointing her to a high-level position in the DHS where she would [vomits] help oversee future election security efforts.

What is surprising is that any judge would sign this warrant. The allegations range from “threadbare” to “hallucinatory.”

Specifically, the warrant listed possible violations of two statutes — one which requires election records to be retained for a certain amount of time, and another which outlines criminal penalties for people, including election officials, who intimidate voters or to knowingly procure false votes or false voter registrations.

Records were seized, which means it’s unlikely records were deleted prematurely. And there’s been nothing shown to this point that any sort of voter intimidation occurred… at least not on the behalf of the Democratic Party.

This appears to be voter intimidation of a different sort. Last month, the DOJ sued Fulton County (where the raid took place) for access to 2020 election records. This followed attempts to hold Trump accountable for trying to overturn the 2020 election — acts that included Trump asking the Secretary of State to “find” the votes needed to swing the state, as well as its targeting of Fulton County DA Fani Willis, who brought election interference charges against the then-outgoing Trump.

And, for some fucking reason, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard attended the raid to seize these voting records.

Accompanying FBI agents on a raid is unprecedented for the chief of U.S. intelligence, whose job is to track threats from foreign adversaries. In her role overseeing the country’s spy agencies, Gabbard is prohibited by law from taking part in domestic law enforcement. Her predecessors took pains to keep their distance from Justice Department cases or partisan politics.

Asked about the rationale for her visit to Georgia, a senior administration official said: “Director Gabbard has a pivotal role in election security and protecting the integrity of our elections against interference, including operations targeting voting systems, databases, and election infrastructure.”

Whatever, “senior administration official.” This is Gabbard hoping to show up on Trump’s radar again, after being sidelined during actual foreign-facing activity, like the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president. Perhaps she’s tired of seeing Kristi Noem flouncing from photo op to photo op as Barbie-in-Chief of the DHS’s invasion of the United States.

I mean…

Two senior officials with knowledge of the matter said Gabbard’s presence in Fulton County was unnecessary and was not requested by the Justice Department. 

Yes, it’s another performance from the most performative administration in US history. And it will always play well because people who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like. The GOP is a flat circle, or perhaps more accurately, a human centipede.

Breaking up this endless cycle of shit ingestion and shit creation are the side effects of this sort of mutual masturbation: the constant shedding of talent from agencies that already don’t have enough of it, thanks to the administration’s constant purging of anyone who’s not MAGA enough.

The special agent in charge of the FBI’s Atlanta field office was forced out this month after questioning the Justice Department’s renewed push to probe Fulton County’s role in the 2020 election, two people familiar with the matter told MS NOW.

Paul Brown was ousted after expressing concerns about the FBI’s investigation into President Donald Trump’s longstanding and unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud in the county anchored by Atlanta, and for refusing to carry out the searches and seizures of records tied to the 2020 election, according to the sources, who spoke to MS NOW on condition of anonymity.

Remember all the shit we talked about the USSR and its efforts to rid itself of anyone but party loyalists? Well, we’re doing it right here and now, nearly 40 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The GOP says there’s nothing wrong with this as long as it’s the GOP doing it. The MAGA faithful have no problem with this as long as it’s the MAGA front doing it. And the rest of us are expected to live with it, because the opposition party still seems to believe there’s a polite, non-confrontational set of options to be deployed. Let’s hope they’ll realize that’s no longer the case long before they have to issue a strongly-worded social media post about objecting to being first against the wall.

Yeah, there’s the overt cruelty. There’s the murder of protesters. The chasing of day laborers across Home Depot parking lots. The snatching and separation of children from parents. The day-in, day-out portrayal of migrants as filthy leeches from “shithole” countries by [vomits] the Commander-in-Chief.

Then there’s everything surrounding it. The camping out at immigration courts to kidnap people who are just trying to follow the law by performing their required check-ins. The sweeping up of anyone in the area who looks a little bit foreign any time federal officers are actually engaged in a “targeted” arrest.

There’s so much of it happening every day that it’s easy to lose sight of all the victims of this administration’s cruelty. There’s a human cost that never factors into the administration’s calculations because, well, most of the upper echelon ghouls don’t actually consider these people to be “human.”

Politico’s Kyle Cheney has been tracking thousands of immigration cases since the anti-migrant surge began. What he’s collected — and this is only a small part of it — should make your blood boil. After all, you still have some pumping through your veins, even if the administration seems to be able to function on bile alone.

Consider the case of Sonik Manaserian, a 70-year-old Iranian refugee who fled religious persecution in her country, arriving in the United States in May of 1999. Her asylum request didn’t work out and she was given an order of removal in October 1999. However, she was not deported and has lived here for the past 18 years under an Order of Supervision and Unsupervised Parole (OSUP) after she was picked up by ICE in 2008. In other words, as long as she continued to check in with the immigration court, she could stay indefinitely.

That ended once Trump took office and sent his goon squads out to remove pretty much anyone he felt didn’t belong here. ICE officers arrested her at a check-in last November, without any prior notice or warrant for arrest. The government has already admitted it doesn’t really have any way to deport her to Iran since our government has no diplomatic relationship with the country for obvious reasons. ICE can’t deport her, but it also won’t release her. She’s been stuck in a detention center since this arrest — a place where she can’t receive the medical help she needs. On top of that, ICE lost the medication she had on her when she was arrested and denied her an opportunity to attend a pre-scheduled medical appointment.

Why? Because it can. Even the government can’t explain why it’s doing this to her, instead assuming it can continue to do what it wants as long as it keeps tapping the 26-year-old order of removal. The California judge handling her petition lays this all out in devastating fashion:

Respondents do not contest either of these claims—or, indeed, any of Petitioner’s other claims. Respondents’ Answer to the Petition consists of three sentences, two of which recite the procedural history of this case. The remaining sentence reads, in full, “[a]t this time, Respondents do not have an opposition argument to present.” They have not denied or contested any of the factual allegations in the Petition. They have not offered any additional facts or defenses. They have not argued that different statutes or regulations should govern this case. They have not lodged any relevant documents, despite being ordered to do so.

These are the actions of a government that feels it’s above the law. It can’t even be bothered to fake something up that might be taken as a counterargument. Instead, it hands in three sentences and moves on to address the outcome of another violation of rights in similarly cavalier fashion. Look at these assholes, the court says without actually using any of those words:

Thus, it appears that Respondents arrested a chronically ill, 70-year-old woman, who came to this country to avoid religious persecution and applied for asylum, who has lived here peacefully for 26 years and complied with all check-in requirements and other conditions of release, who has no known criminal record and poses no threat to anyone, without notice or the process required by their own regulations and without any plan for removing her from this country, then kept her in detention for months without sufficient medical care—and they do not have any argument to offer to even try to justify these actions.

Further, having acknowledged that they have no opposition to present to Petitioner’s habeas petition, have they voluntarily released her? No. Thus, Petitioner remains in custody, and her counsel, and the Court, are required to expend resources and effort to address a matter that Respondents either cannot be bothered to defend or realize is indefensible.

That’s the other “fuck you” this administration uses. There’s the overt stuff that makes headlines and whips up the frothy loyalists. Then there’s stuff like this where the government doesn’t even care enough about the people it’s illegally locking up to even toss a few paragraphs of boilerplate into the mix. This is just part of the dehumanization process: the administrative shrug. A collective GOP “so what” when confronted about the violations of the law.

“Worst of the worst” always meant “people the bigots in charge don’t like.” This ruling deals with a Mexican man who has lived here since 2006 with his wife, raising three children and, like most migrants, working hard, paying taxes, and living clean. When asked about this, the administration shrugs again — a shrug that prompts an order for his release:

Respondents make no suggestion that Audberto J. has a criminal history, and the Court concludes he has none.

There’s more in that thread and it’s all awful. There’s the Minnesota man who was arrested and tossed in a detainment center despite having active refugee status. Or how about the mother with a 5-month-old baby and recently discovered heart condition who was arrested and sent to a detention center 1,100 miles away from her child and her primary physician? Are you cool with that, Trump voters? The court certainly isn’t.

Ms. Lah has already lost important bonding and nursing time with her baby. While the Court recognizes that many families are suffering due to Operation PARRIS and other ICE actions in the District of Minnesota, there is something particularly craven about transferring a nursing refugee mother out-of-state.

It is craven. This is the government’s shrug in response to a judge asking why it sent Lah to a detention center in Houston, Texas almost immediately after arresting her.

On January 14, 2026, Respondents filed their one-page Response to Petition For Writ of Habeas Corpus and Motion to Transfer but it did not actually respond to the Petition nor follow Judge Davis’s Order to Show Cause. Respondents assert that Ms. Lah was transferred to Houston, Texas, on January 10, 2026, within hours of Ms. Lah’s arrest, “due to local detention bed space shortage.” Respondents’ Motion asserts that the transfer occurred before the Court’s Order to Show Cause enjoining removal. Respondents submitted the Declaration of Angela Minner in support of their Motion and purportedly attached documents in support. No documents were attached, and no support was otherwise provided.

In any normal world, the people handing in this sloppy work would be reprimanded by their superiors and perhaps even taken off immigration cases. That will never happen here. Not bothering to do the job right is just an easy way to do what you want while providing a minimum amount of lip service to any notions of the federal rules of procedure. If it destroys lives, harms people, or actually deports them to places where they’ll end up dead, so be it. They were never considered people by this administration in the first place.

We always knew the narrative was false. The administration’s insistence that Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TdA) was somehow an international menace always rang hollow — just another way to disappear brown people into an El Salvadoran torture prison.

For months, it’s been clear the intelligence doesn’t back the claims made by the deliberately stupid leaders of the Trump administration. A leak of intelligence information last May forced the Director of National Intelligence — personified in this administration by the always incredible (in the bad way) Tulsi Gabbard — to forcefully deny the TdA findings compiled by the Intelligence Community she supposedly oversees.

That’s on top of the sketchy system run by even sketchier federal law enforcement officers to determine who is or isn’t a member of a foreign gang like TdA. The stuff these slackers pointed to — tattoos, having any contact whatsoever with anyone else the government is pretending is a TdA member, etc. — wasn’t actually backed by any research or intelligence-gathering. Unlike MS-13 and other gangs, TdA doesn’t seem to require permanent skin ink as part of its onboarding process.

This hype about TdA was used to justify everything from the stripping of due process rights to the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to push past whatever minimal resistance was offered by courts or timid members of Congress. The administration may now be more focused on punishing Trump’s enemies, but the phrase “enemies both foreign and domestic” is still in play, which means the administration will still leverage “but their gangs” proclamations whenever possible.

But, in order to do so, the administration has to willfully ignore the growing body of evidence generated by its own agencies that contradict this narrative, as Dell Cameron and Ryan Shapiro report for Wired:

While senior administration officials portrayed TdA as a centrally directed terrorist network active across American cities, internal tasking directives and threat assessments repeatedly cite “intelligence gaps” in understanding how the group operated on US soil: Whether it had identifiable leadership, whether its domestic activity reflecting any coordination beyond small local crews, and whether US-based incidents pointed to foreign direction or were simply the work of autonomous, profit-driven criminals.

These are what the documents acquired by Wired — internal law enforcement documents marked “sensitive” and not intended for public disclosure — actually said about TdA and its alleged international efforts:

While senior administration officials spoke of “invasion,” “irregular warfare,” and “narco-terrorism,” field-level reporting consistently portrayed Tren de Aragua in the US as a fragmented, profit-driven criminal group, with no indication of centralized command, strategic coordination, or underlying political motive. The criminal activity described is largely opportunistic—if not mundane—ranging from smash-and-grab burglaries and ATM “jackpotting” to delivery-app fraud and low-level narcotics sales.

The boots on the ground can’t find anything that agrees with what’s coming out of the administration’s collective mouth on any given day. And the lack of connective tissue between TdA and the Venezuelan government makes Trump’ plan to “take over” the country look even more illegal than it already looked, back when Pete Hegseth’s Defense Department was limiting itself to murdering people in international waters.

Administration officials — especially those making the most noise about TdA = international terrorism — have always had access to this information. And they’ve deliberately chosen to ignore it because it undercuts the supposed justifications for their massive, continuous power grabs.

This is the fact-free environment that is being forced on us by an administration that has chosen to only serve itself. Here’s America’s racist grandpa expounding on his idiotic hatred of one particular nation:

Trump singled out Venezuela in particular. “I was so angry with Venezuela,” he said. “They emptied their prisons, almost entirely emptied their prisons, into the United States.”

Here’s the reality:

Over a 22-month period, CBP’s own detection methods identified no more than 83 known TdA members at the border. 

Not quite the prison flooding Trump claimed. And even after CBP engaging in some very imaginative extrapolation of this small number (by simply adding in the unproven assumption that “one-half of one percent” of all Venezuelans seeking to enter the US “had ties to TdA”) only raised that number to a little over 3,000 possible TdA gang members, which is far below the number anyone would reasonably believe amounted to an “invasion” by an international criminal cartel with a strong desire to get some terrorism on. It’s even more stupid when you add in the other intel: that most TdA activity tends to be random, low-level crimes of opportunity, rather than the sort of coordinated effort you’d find in larger, far more competent criminal cartels.

While it’s not that surprising that a presidential administration would filter out facts that don’t fit the narratives it’s trying to pitch, it’s far beyond abhorrent that a president who claims he loves America and Americans more than any president in history would consider them to be nothing more than occasionally useful rubes. But those who continue to love Trump no matter how often he lies to them have proven they don’t care what’s being said. They only care who’s saying it.

Let’s open with a joke:

Mr. Bovino said Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and Border Patrol agents were probably more experienced at handling young people than “any domestic law enforcement agency.”

“I will say unequivocally that we are experts in dealing with children,” he said. “Not because we want to be, but because we have to be.”

Granted, the punchline is weak and the person delivering it is even weaker, but for ex-Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino — he of the routine violation of court orders and a predilection for Nazi-esque outerwear — to suggest that any part of the anti-migrant hate train is good with children is laughable. That’s some gallows ass humor right there.

Trump didn’t invent separating children from parents when detaining and deporting migrants, but he was the first to turn it into the rule, rather than the tragic exception. His second administration is definitely the one filled with people whose eyes absolutely light up every time they destroy the life of an immigrant.

Here’s what Bovino was defending, while doing his best to talk around the issue. This photo is courtesy of the school that 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos attended before being arrested (along with his father) and sent to a detention center more than 1,000 miles away from their home.

That’s a federal officer holding onto the child’s backpack, as if the frightened child might make a run for freedom at any point.

Since that moment went viral, tons of conflicting narratives have been sent out into the public domain. The government has said the usual moronic, hateful stuff about the father being an illegal immigrant who abandoned his child at school when officers closed in on him. The father’s lawyer claims the father has a pending asylum claim, which doesn’t actually make him an illegal immigrant. In fact, it means he can’t be detained or deported until his case is heard.

Stumbling onto the scene following the second execution of a Minneapolis resident in the past three weeks is JD Vance, who was apparently sent out by the president to charm their critics into submission. But being charming or empathetic or otherwise projecting something resembling “normal human being” has never been one of Vance’s skills. So, while he opened up with something approaching respecting the humanity of others — that being that he has a five-year-old of his own — he soon veered in the direction of MAGA incantations to claim the child got everything that was coming to him.

In Minneapolis, Vance sought to appear empathetic toward the child. He declared that he too has a 5-year-old, and said he’d been moved by the story. However, he said he’d done “follow-up research” and discovered that the father was an “illegal alien.”

“Are they not supposed to arrest an illegal alien in the United States of America?” asked Vance, speaking of ICE. He then scoffed: “If the argument is that you can’t arrest people who have violated our laws because they have children, then every single parent is going to be completely given immunity.”

“Follow up research” of course means “handed DHS talking points.” And referring to the father as an illegal alien (repeatedly) is just a lie of convenience. And it’s probably not even an intentional lie, as Greg Sargent points out in The New Republic. It’s just Vance’s worldview — one shared by plenty of people in the administration — getting out ahead of his pathetic attempt to calm the Minnesota waters.

But an even more grotesque Trump-Vance stance here is going unnoticed. Vance simply doesn’t think it’s a misnomer to call the father an “illegal alien,” despite his asylum claim. That’s because Vance plainly doesn’t believe those awaiting asylum adjudication are here legitimately at all. He and Trump have adopted the position that legal loopholes allow them to deport asylum-seekers before their claims are heard.

Everyone Trump wants gone can be labeled an illegal immigrant. All federal officers and prosecutors need to do is strip them of their protected status, revoke their visas, void asylum applications, or dismiss pending immigration cases to convert people following legal pathways towards permanent residence into “illegals” who are supposedly “invading” our country.

And it will do this even though there are vulnerable people — children, the elderly, parents with newborns, people who are likely to be tortured or killed if deported to the countries they fled — in the mix. And then they’ll send someone who’s not quite as abrasive as Trump, Noem, Bovino, Bondi, etc. to soft-sell the horrors the administration will continue to inflict on this nation for the rest of whatever. It’s callous, malicious, and above all, evil for its own sake. It does nothing to make America greater or safer. All it does is make it whiter.