An update on my article from November about the private prison company and ICE contractor Geo Group asking the Supreme Court for immunity from lawsuits: the court unanimously said no yesterday. Here's my earlier piece in @newrepublic.com about the case: newrepublic.com/article/2020...

"An Associated Press reporter was beaten by the police and detained along with three other journalists on Tuesday in Cameroon while reporting on a secretive Trump administration program to deport migrants to the Central African country, according to two of the people detained." (gift link)

The Mom-and-Pop Contractors Helping ICE Rapidly Expand — my latest for @newrepublic.com, tracing the small-time firms that are signing up to work with ICE, despite everything newrepublic.com/article/2064...

SCOOP: Ring’s controversial, AI-powered “Search Party” feature isn’t intended to be limited only to dogs, the company’s founder, Jamie Siminoff, told Ring employees in an internal email obtained by 404 Media.

The current person in charge of ICE's procurement for detention is a GEO Group executive who ran the company's immigration detention portfolio. He was granted an "ethics waiver" from DHS allowing him to hand out contracts to GEO in his new role.

"The collapse of that ethos would be a hell of a story. But AP never replaced me, and after the bloodbath at the Post, I just don’t think anyone’s there any more to report it." www.courtwatch.news/p/the-rabbit...

Big news for the private prison company GEO Group, ICE's biggest contractor: its CEO is stepping down after little more than a year and company founder George Zoley is replacing him. I profiled Zoley and his for-profit prison firm for @fastcompany.com last year: www.fastcompany.com/91396722/the...

A for-profit immigrant prison run by the company CoreCivic

The Washington Post just laid off its entire award-winning photo team. They were our eyes in places we'll never see. It's a horrifying loss at a time when lying governments, propaganda and AI slop are on the rise.

Democracy dies in oligarchy.

DHS Secretary says filming ICE is illegal and amounts to doxxing. They’re absolutely wrong. Recording law enforcement in public spaces is protected by the First Amendment — and courts have affirmed that right time and again. Watch @freedom.press’s @trevortimm.bsky.social explain.

New territory. Must read story from a colleague. www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...

Want to know who the governor is meeting with? How she's spending her workdays? Good luck. Hochul's office won't release any of her calendars from the past 15 months. Great FOIL reporting recently by @nysfocus.bsky.social & @chrisbragg1.bsky.social nysfocus.com/2026/01/20/h...

For the avoidance of doubt, releasing the names of federal officers who shot and killed an American citizen is not in any way shape or form doxing.

Filming the police isn't a crime.

"Government invasion into a reporter’s home and the seizure of journalistic materials is exactly the kind of scenario our First Amendment was conceived to protect against."

Until this week's FBI raid on Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson's house, the Justice Department had “never executed a search warrant at the home of a reporter in a national security leak case,” notes @rcfp.org's Gabe Rottman. [via @cnn.com]

This morning, the FBI executed a search warrant at a @washingtonpost.com reporter’s home. @rcfp.org President Bruce D. Brown called it “a tremendous escalation in the administration’s intrusions into the independence of the press.” Read his full statement: www.rcfp.org/fbi-search-w...

What an excellent response to a government that doesn't respect the First Amendment. www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/...

"Recording law enforcement is not illegal. It is not obstruction. It is a constitutionally-protected activity that district & appellate courts have affirmed." - @attorneynora.bsky.social @timkarr.bsky.social's latest on Pressing Issues on the right to record: pressingissues.org/recording-ic...

These were terrible rules aimed at restricting press coverage of NYC government, and their rescission is great news for helping New Yorkers learn what their government is up to

Also: this happened earlier. Feds apparently pepper sprayed the inside of a journalist's empty car.

New: we've obtained material explaining how an ICE surveillance system, called Webloc, works. Draw shape on a map, see all phones available there, follow them home. All without warrant “This is a very dangerous tool in the hands of an out-of-control agency.” www.404media.co/inside-ices-...

Here's the ICE agent "defending himself" by shooting into the driver's side window of a car that's pulling *away* from him. Put this photo on the front page of every newspaper in America.

From an email to one of our faculty members.... Not even Plato can escape censorship at Texas A&M!

NOTE: This news immediately followed a Supreme Court order this morning denying the paper's shadow-docket efforts to block an injunction issued by the Third Circuit that was enforcing an NLRB unfair labor practices order relating to the paper's health insurance plans.

One of my core beliefs is that, in the era of AI reporting will become more and more important than it's ever been. Hopefully, the market, institutions, consumers all recognize that.

Julie K. Brown is a reporter for the Miami Herald who did groundbreaking work on Epstein beginning in 2018, including groundbreaking work on the disgusting coverup by Alex Acosta. Her travel itinerary was released with some of the Epstein files. It appears the DOJ was monitoring her in 2019.

Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:

Remarkable findings by a federal judge regarding federal agents

Judge Boasberg schedules a contempt hearing for the week after Thanksgiving, continuing his investigation into the Trump admin's sudden deportations to El Salvador

🔴 Scolding a U.S. reporter for asking questions about MBS ordering a fellow journalist to be bonesawed to death signals to dictators everywhere that they can murder journalists with impunity. Read our full statement below:

Maybe too obvious to mention, but a president who cared about American freedom wouldn't say he's a "friend" of the guy who murders journalists he doesn't like

Happening now: Private prison company Geo Group is arguing in the Supreme Court for immunity from a lawsuit filed by immigrant prisoners who say they were forced to work in Geo's prison for no pay. Read my article about the case in @newrepublic.com newrepublic.com/article/2020...

At the Supreme Court this morning, America's biggest for-profit prison company is asking for immunity from lawsuits. It's fighting claims from immigrant prisoners that it forced them to work "like slaves" at its prisons. I wrote about the case for @newrepublic.com newrepublic.com/article/2020...

It's impossible to overstate how much of what ICE is doing on the ground reflects this completely preposterous conflation of hostile *speech* and hostile *conduct.* The First Amendment protects—or, at least, is supposed to protect—the former up and until it's a "true threat," which none of this is.

And our Canal Street story on how local policing and the First Amendment get flipped inside-out when its done by feds in masks, accountable to who knows who, from elsewhere -- nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/10/27/u...

Such a great story, with all the screenshots: www.documentcloud.org/documents/26... Amazingly, Halligan goes on and on about what she admits is Anna's "reporting," but then when she finds out Anna's going to report on the convo, Halligan says it was off-the-record because "you're not a journalist"!

NEW: New York Focus reporters have had their public records requests take as long as 1,266 days — and counting. Despite promising greater transparency, Hochul vetoed a bill to speed up New York's notoriously slow public records process.

Pentagon Press Association: "Make no mistake, today, Oct. 15, 2025 is a dark day for press freedom"

"Abusing their right to protest" is quite a claim to make for an elected official who's bound by the First Amendment

This second requirement is key: agents with their faces covered and no way to individually identify them can't be held accountable by the public for anything illegal/unconstitutional they may do

Judge issues temporary restraining order against DHS in Chicago, affirming attacks on press during ICE protests "clearly violate" constitution. ln further win for transparency, agents also required to wear badges or other visible ID with unique number.

This is the obvious absurdity of pulling ICEBlock. It is obviously legal, protected speech for anyone to say, in any forum, “I just witnessed some police activity at location X”. Indeed, people have been doing this regularly on social media since its inception.

Here's the kicker: Geo’s chairman, George Zoley, is an immigrant himself. He arrived here as a child from Greece. @michaellinhorst.bsky.social looks at the company—and man—at the heart of Trump’s hard-line immigration machine. 6/6 www.fastcompany.com/91396722/the...

When you hear about someone arrested or swept up in an immigration raid, there’s a good chance they’ve ended up at a facility run by Geo Group, the nation’s largest for-profit jailer of immigrants and one of ICE’s biggest contractors. 🧵👇 1/6 www.fastcompany.com/91396722/the...

1/ DEVELOPING: A journalist was rushed to New York-Presbyterian Hospital following another incident with an ICE agent at 26 Federal Plaza, an immigration court in NYC. The last I heard, he was getting X-rays for his lower back.

Judge Young: "This case ... squarely presents the issue whether non-citizens lawfully present here in United States actually have the same free speech rights as the rest of us. The Court answers this Constitutional question unequivocally 'yes, they do.' 'No law' means 'no law.'"

AAUP v. Rubio is out, and look at how it starts. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

BREAKING: Judge William Young, a Reagan appointee, delivers the most scathing legal rebuke of the Trump era, ruling that Trump and his cabinet illegally targeted pro-Palestinian students for deportation to "strike fear" into First Amendment protesters. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...