CBP is increasingly just another military branch in terms of equipment and technology, but crucially one that can easily be and routinely is deployed on U.S. soil against civilians, with a far looser oversight structure

Dirty secret here is that the NYDN is almost certainly still profitable, just not profitable *enough* for the vulture fund that owns it

Just going to note again, because somehow we've all completely retconned this and I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, that pound-for-pound Biden had one of the most draconian border security regimes of any U.S. president ever, second only to Trump, *many of whose policies he inherited and kept*

TODAY: @felipedlh.bsky.social on the life of a dandy, and those just imitating fashion. "What I find both amusing and irksome is that traditional menswear is an ostensible point of propriety for these wannabe authoritarians and they don’t even care about it at all." flaminghydra.com/r/883cbc3f?m...

Internal Revenue Service improperly shared confidential tax information of thousands of individuals with immigration enforcement officials, according to three people familiar with the situation, appearing to breach a legal fire wall intended to protect taxpayer data.

Even if this was true — which it’s obviously not given the oceans of available evidence — it doesn’t matter. Imagine if cops in an open carry state detained every person who seemed to have a firearm on the argument they could easily prove they had a permit post-detention. Mullins would lose his mind

You could argue I think convincingly that this guy has been involved in some Nuzzi-level ethical lapses except over a much longer period of time and yet we're still here listening to his bullshit

NEW: ICE has a plan to lease offices across the US as part of a secret, months-long expansion campaign. Today, @wired.com is publishing dozens of those locations. Many are near schools, medical offices, and places of worship. Vital work from @leahfeiger.bsky.social that I'm proud to publish.

I wrote last week about the dangers of normalization and political debates rooted in premises already engineered by the authoritarians, when premise is often just as important as the discussion itself

they’re calling it My Most Personal Essay Of All Time and i’m literally never doing it again gabydelvalle.substack.com/p/accidents-...

Seeing people sharing this a lot and going to make a purely technical, not moral, point to clear up what seems to be a common misunderstanding: having a work permit does not necessarily mean someone has broader legal status or entered the country lawfully. It does seem like he may be undocumented

During October's ICE raid in NYC's Chinatown, I saw an IRS criminal division agent standing guard on a corner. A majority of that agency had been detailed to ICE ERO. For @slate.com, I wrote about the phenomenon of federal agents from once-specialized agencies absorbed into this national police blob

It is perhaps a good time to check if your university, city, retirement account, etc hold CoreCivic stock, and if they do, make your feelings about that known

1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken. Hundreds of kids are still detained. We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵

It's just kind of crazy that a technology that would have been too extravagantly, insanely intrusive for even most of the mid-century dystopian fiction writers now gets cute advertisements during the superbowl

on the balance i think partisan gerrymandering is bad but the only way it ends is if democrats weaponize it against republicans everywhere they can. wiping out republican lawmakers in blue states might bring the GOP to the table to end the practice.

Racist meme is not good, but also who can just post from Trump's account? What if someone posts something that crashes the markets? Or starts a war?

The practicalities have somewhat obscured the broader point that it’s insane for an executive agency to dictate that any group of people are just outside the Fourth Amendment. So stop and frisk is legal against a permanent resident? Agents can summarily kick down the door of a foreign journalist?

Satisfying in a way to see the bitcoin project careen to its obvious conclusion but I feel for normies who heard from trusted interlocutors that this was the investment of the future and they’d be left behind without it. The Winklevii and the banks will be fine; others will lose their life savings

I was right about the politics of this then and I’m right now. The best time to do this was 2024, the next best time is now. It is the moment of possibility

Informative piece

Have increasingly little patience with people who choose to tune out of politics, which is really the majority of the population. It was irksome in earlier times but is just inexcusable now; their ignorance is a poison, regardless of rationale

I’m glad each of these contacts is being reported out but also did this guy just like email people all Day (when he wasn’t engaged in horrific crimes)?

Good day to reread what I found to be an eye-opening work by @greenwell.bsky.social

It really is bewildering how some people will talk about journalism, as something crucial that they’re owed but also must be provided for free, which by extension means they are demanding journalists should toil without pay, something they’d never think to demand of their electrician or doctor

In Altered Carbon, a character who's in a class of unfathomably rich oligarchs that now live forever laughs at the idea that humans should die sometime and says "Oh, Mr. Kovacs, haven't you heard? God is dead. We have taken his place." This is the basic perspective of contemporary mega-billionaires

Good example of what an institution the size of WaPo can do that is very difficult to replace. Local, worker-owned publications & nonprofits do excellent accountability work but I don’t imagine any could set up an ME bureau, with staff across the region, logistics, legal and security support, etc

This cannot be something a civilian law enforcement agent is allowed to wear in the US — and an agency that has a culture that tolerates this cannot be saved.

There’s the whole taxation question, but somewhat separate from that is just how much energy, ingenuity, and sheer strive could be reallocated to every other human endeavor if we could accept the extremely wealthy being almost imperceptibly less comfortable

Again, this is FALSE. Administrative warrants are NOT signed by an immigration judge (or any judge at all). They are generated and signed by ICE officers themselves with no external oversight whatsoever. Here is a blank sample warrant. Note who signs off on it; an "immigration officer."

Not big on going over how reporters phrase things with a fine-tooth comb but I do worry about speed of normalization. "Negotiations over requiring judicial warrants to enter homes" this is already a constitutional requirement. "Non-protesters have been impacted" it is not suddenly illegal to protest

Going to be a lot of hand-wringing about hypocrisy but I think a lot of supposed conservatives were always pretty clear that they meant *people we like* get to carry guns, protest, and have due process rights, and people we don't like are outside that

Glad Hochul is proposing a state ban on immigration agents entering private homes without judicial warrants, though it seems absurd that a state would have to bar something the Constitution already prohibits. Still, these are good steps (and a drum I've been banging for the better part of a year)

Once more, there is no incentive whatsoever for them to think twice about reflexive surveillance of critics. The absolute worst case scenario for them is a judge slaps them down and then they just move on to the next hundred subpoenas. The power has to be taken away completely

I dunno, man. I feel like DHS may be using the law to stifle our ability to petition the govt about our grievances. I think the venerated-by-the-right-when-convenient Founding Fathers had some thoughts on that. Might have even written them down in the Constitution.

Gonna wade into the conversation about use of force here for a sec to say, as I’ve been saying for almost a year, that it shouldn’t really be a conversation about regular people using it. MN community resistance has been incredibly successful in its nonviolence 1/5

The thing is now everyone knows that Musk is not only a moron and a nazi who engineered cumulative millions of deaths through DOGE, but also desperately, wretchedly wanted to be best friends with modernity’s most prolific sex criminal, and still he will enjoy immeasurable comfort and power

Crazy to say this in 2026 for all manner of reasons but one bewildering takeaway of this fiasco is how easily our supposed intellectual titans can be dazzled by jingling keys. He made billions through likely extortion and then used the money to wrap himself in mystique. There’s no great mystery here

If no one is being prosecuted for the child sex trafficking can we at least get some prosecutions for all the other crimes?

If no one is being prosecuted for the child sex trafficking can we at least get some prosecutions for all the other crimes?

Not only is this insane it’s historically ridiculous. All visas are absolutely not a path to citizenship and the U.S. has long has huge underclasses of disenfranchised immigrant workers

I am by and large annoyed by the perennial "this is a distraction from the Epstein files" formulation but I do kind of think the journalist arrests have a little bit to do with that

I don't know if it's that complicated. One of the undercurrents of the second Trump term is there increasingly aren't separate, differentiated, or specialized federal law enforcement agencies. Everything is sucked into the amorphous blob of the Trump's national police, to do as he wants with it

Am I correct that this is the first time federal agents have arrested a journalist exclusively and explicitly for news-gathering? I know about Guevara's deportation, but there was an immigration rationale there. Öztürk was detained for the op-ed, but I don't know if she'd identify as a journalist

We got Palantir's user guide for ELITE, the tool they made for ICE: www.404media.co/here-is-the-...

Do any experts on federal judicial contempt follow me on here? Would love to talk, DM me or Signal in pinned message

NEW: Meet the private-equity firm -- and its billionaire immigrant CEO -- making millions off some of ICE's cruelest deportation flights. After a five-month investigation, my story for @motherjones.com: www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Don’t know about this exact circumstance but will say I’ve run into the completely counterproductive tendency to exclude press in some supposed progressive circles (often by the same people who will then complain bitterly about lack of coverage)

If what ends up happening is MN officials agree to aggressive 287(g) or other cooperation agreements to stop the occupation, that is a terrible Faustian bargain that is closer to total loss than any kind of victory. It sets the precedent that the feds can force your city to play ball at gunpoint

It’s easy to forget since he’s still a high public official but Homan straight up took $50,000 in cash from undercover agents on camera and then nothing happened