Mariachi band dressed Herbert Castro was sadistically mocked by an ICE prison guard who said, "If you sing me a song, I'll let you go." He has been detained since June 26th despite being married to a US citizen, living in the US since he was 4 and having just applied for a Green Card the day prior

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo had lived in Houston for 35 years. He was a husband and father of three children and owned a small business. He was shot to death by ICE agents in unmarked cars while he was picking up his work crew. Three other men, including his brother, were detained and are missing.

OPINION: "It has now been nearly a month since the fatal police shooting of 1-year-old Kohen Wiley. "Sadly, this type of senseless and avoidable tragedy happens more frequently than it should," John Shjarback writes.

A January 2026 investigation by Texas Observer revealed that these four businesses have links to Patriot Front, the white supremacist group that marched in Washington, D.C. during the America 250 weekend.

ICYMI — Kit's latest

Gee, what a coincidence. Every startup suing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has ties to Peter Thiel’s network: • Valar Atomics — backed by current & former Palantir executives & Balaji • Deep Fission — backed by a Palantir co-founder • Last Energy — backed by a former Founders Fund partner. 1/

🚨 HUGE ongoing surge of ICE arrests, with ICE directing 80% of all officers to go out into the field and round people up, aiming to hit 2,000 arrests a day; which would be more than during the Minneapolis surge. This may be why the nun in Texas got briefly picked up. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/01/u...

Please join us for a conversation calling *all of us* into a deeper & more comprehensive, integrated & effective approach to organizing against criminalization of trans & queer people in a time of rising authoritarianism & fascism. Tomorrow we’ll be talking criminalizing queer histories & archetypes

New article! On the technofascist economy and how Monopoly explains it all. "Dirty Bill" Monopoly, anyway. Read on to learn the unwritten rules: sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/the-dirty-...

“[Texas school closures are] not specific to urban or rural areas. … It’s not confined to any sort of racial or ethnic breakdown." www.texasobserver.org/school-closu...

There are so many fucked up things about this, not least of which is that they tracked down this completely anodyne post quoting a news article from January and just happened to come to her in June, when she was working a polling place.

Really hoping someone files a FOIA into this and gets some investigatory material, because there is not a single shred of doubt that her post is protected free speech under the First Amendment and agents SHOULD know that. She literally identified the source of her information as a newspaper!

The democratic socialist introduced a bill to require AI firms making < $200M annually to pay a one-time tax of 50% of stock, creating a sovereign wealth fund for taxpayers. “The principle is simple: When a public resource generates wealth, the public should share in that wealth.” trib.al/kAnuWsz

This incarceration of dads “renders thousands of children w/out their father’s care every day, not just on Father’s Day. Detained men’s grief, due to forced separation from their work and from their families, is amplified by the maddening uncertainty of not knowing when or if they will be released.”

She’s the shining light of the Show Me state; what’s it gonna take for more of the rest of us to listen to—and act on— @sarahkendzior.bsky.social’s warnings?

The solstice lands harder in Texas. Some notes from its long wind-up this year, a pair of vignettes from research trips to Silicon Valley and industrial Houston, and some great new summer reading in this week's Field Notes: fieldnotes.christopherbrown.com/p/lacewings-...

I watched this and it's excellent. ALSO, we begin my Black Abolitionists of NYC tour in front of the "Triumph of the Human Spirit" monument so I was happy to hear directly from the artist, Mr. Pace. Very good job by the Mayor's office. I encourage folks to watch. www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoUB...

After traveling through Africa and the Middle East in 1964, Malcolm X returned with a philosophy that prioritized objective justice over blind group loyalty. He understood that the greatest threat to a society is the internal refusal to acknowledge its own flaws.

Macron and Starmer last week. Martin and Carney this weekend. Our allies are firming up their alliances and strength in the wake of America’s betrayal.

After awhile, if you look with clear eyes, you can see that this cycle with the Democrats is easily understandable and predictable and you can’t just expect it to change itself because it can’t. We either make the party change, watch it continue like this, or find something else.

Each ICE operation generates roughly $196,000 in monthly losses for nearby businesses and communities. (That's 11x the government's administrative cost of a deportation.) Why? ICE activity decreases foot traffic in those public areas.

New from @gaigedavila.bsky.social: "Now, general immigration practice has become habeas corpus. Because for your client to get out of detention, to fight their case out of detention, you have to win a habeas case in most instances."

OPINION: "As I reflected this year, I found myself thinking less about gifts and more about gratitude. That shift surprised me a little, but the more I sat with it, the more it made sense. Gratitude has a way of clarifying what we truly value," Erica Powe writes. buff.ly/ptSJH3s

GEO Group, a private prison company, signed a contract to give ICE use of Delaney Hall and “support services” like security, maintenance, food services, etc. in exchange for over $60 mil/yr But it is the detainees—not GEO Group—who actually do that work, for free ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics...

a glaring omission from much of the convo about the Delaney Hall labor and hunger strike imo is the fact that *these people shouldn't be laboring in the first place* this is slavery, & even the 13th Amendment's 'punishment for a crime' exception doesn't apply! ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics...

It's depressing how easily Windrush was memory-holed. We had a whole scandal of the police bashing down the doors to drag out septuagenarian Black granddads who'd been here since they were 3 in the middle of the night in handcuffs. Everyone was horrified, but now they demand the same again.

From @josephinelee.bsky.social w/ @propublica.org. The Texas Education Agency is taking over school districts & handing the keys to associates of HISD's Mike Miles--as other districts turn schools over to Miles' ex-charter network to avoid takeover themselves: www.texasobserver.org/mike-miles-t...

Immigrant professionals drive your kids to school, your produce to HEB, your medical supplies to your hospitals--until the government decides to destabilize families and the economy for no good reason www.texasobserver.org/immigrant-dr...

Learn more about the cost of mass incarceration in the U.S. 👇 www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/mone...

A reminder that from 2017-2025, funding for immigration policing and detention swelled by 171%. That's a ton of taxpayer money that could be invested in community safety, but instead is given to ICE to tear families apart.

Fascism doesn’t spontaneously emerge. It’s the evolution of constant corruption and monopolization and takes power as the exploitation requires violence and more overt plundering. We’re at that stage. Advanced cancer of the system. Hoping and praying it heals isn’t an option. It takes action.

It's almost surreal that, just as I've been learning more about the movement toward "daylighting" paved-over springs and streams, TXDOT is planning to dump Boggy Creek (north) into a drainage pipe, like was done to Oak Springs 40 years ago. This new proposal is an environmental crime in progress.

Again, please share. In every aspect of American history you will run smack dab into the critical contributions of Black people. It’s not Black history. It’s American history. Trying to erase it is a fool’s errand. We live it every day. time.com/5836444/blac...

This is evil collective punishment.

“The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be encreased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the U.S., or any of them.” [i.e. state govs]

Large demonstrations took place in Bilbao, in Spain’s Basque Country, today, as protesters condemned the Basque police’s treatment of flotilla activists upon their arrival at the airport on Saturday, 23 May.

Rep. Ogles: "Muslims don’t belong in American society," Rep. Fine on "mainstream Muslims": "I think you should destroy them first" Sen. Tuberville: "The enemy is inside the gates". Rep. Roy posted "No more Muslims" on his social media. None of them censured by Democrats. No penalty.

‘What Kind of Life Is This?’: Five Desperate Cubans Weigh Their Odds in Texas www.texasobserver.org/what-kind-of... - via @TexasObserver

NEW: More Than 100,000 American Kids Have Had a Parent Detained in Immigration Sweeps, Report Estimates Far more American children have likely been separated from their parents during immigration sweeps than previously understood, according to a new Brookings report.

Kevin Warsh is Peter Thiel’s guy. (They’ve known each other since college.)

The recent Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais effectively killed the last remaining provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And it represents the life's work of Chief Justice John Roberts.

The ascendancy of the “white moderate” to the place of eminent reasonableness in discourse&politics was always going to lead here, as King told us plainly in 1963. We’ll just keep walking this road until we decide to unmake white supremacy - even the polite kind.

Update on ICE's "Detention Reengineering Initiative": GEO Group's CEO said today that "the warehouse project has been paused, and [DHS] is evaluating how to proceed with this initiative..." He also acknowledged that, as part of the plan, ICE is looking to buy upwards of 10 of GEO's existing jails.

It’s early but there are protesters, including UNITED HERE Local 11 and Rep. Yassamin Ansari, already gathered outside the Border Security Expo at the Phoenix Convention Center chanting “no one is illegal” and holding a noise demo as attendees gather in to hear Tom Homan give the morning keynote.

BREAKING: SCOTUS grants the Callais plaintiffs' request to issue the judgment now, meaning the ruling goes into effect and back to the district court immediately. This was done over a strong dissent from Jackson — prompting Alito (w Thomas & Gorsuch) to author an opinion concurring with the grant.

Gift link: lux-magazine.com/article/ice-...

“'I’m working, but I can’t afford to stay in the house. I’ll die there,' he said, as he lay on the sidewalk on an 88‑degree spring day."

In this May edition of Prisons, Prose & Protest, I share an exciting new Interrupting Criminalization project, recommend two podcasts about conflict resolution in movement spaces, several recent articles and essays, and more… open.substack.com/pub/prisoncu...