Dude was a month away from his green card interview when ICE grabbed him at a hardware store. Where he was buying supplies for his plastering business. Married to an American, been here since 2009. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Plot thickens, as many expected it would. Looks like Lutnick met with the Maroun family, who own the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit, the competitor to the new Windsor bridge. How much do we think they paid Trump for his attention to this matter?

Gretchen Whitmer said last week that Trump's tariffs have already cost Michigan 6,300 jobs. Michigan co-owns the new bridge. Mike Rogers, who lost to Slotkin by 20k votes in 2024, is running again this year lol. newrepublic.com/post/206400/...

Explainer here. The existing ambassador bridge is privately owned, expensive to use, & old. Terms for this were struck in 2017, papers signed 2018, when Trump was potus. But reneging on his own deal at the finish line is his specialty. www.detroitnews.com/story/news/p...

“House Democrats are aiming to force a vote on President Donald Trump’s Canada tariffs as early as Wednesday. Meeks (D-N.Y.) introduced the resolution last March, but House Republican leaders blocked a vote on the measure …That block expired in January….” www.politico.com/live-updates...

I didn't know I could love this dude more.

My god, this story. www.twincities.com/2026/02/08/s...

He's out. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

New interview: Alberto, the man whose 8 skull fractures ICE blamed on a brick wall says @ICEgov beat him with the same metal rod they used to smash his friend's car windows "There was never a wall" apnews.com/article/immi...

What are we doing? “He was detained without his medication and is reportedly being sent to a detention center in Texas where he may not have access to medicine to prevent his body from rejecting his new kidney….” www.the-independent.com/news/world/a...

I don’t want to laugh at a small business but also VERY funny

Rick Hasan runs the Election Law Blog. In this pod, he discusses the ways Trump is most likely to attack the midterms.

Incredible stuff from @wsj.com www.wsj.com/us-news/igno...

Guys, what the fuck am I going to do with all these Tulip bulbs.

This is well worth the read.

I am not a Schumer fan--indeed, I think he should step aside--but credit where it's due. He anticipated that Rs would not agree to a set of *extremely* normie demands, and shutting down DHS over that is good politics.

Wow.

This is most recent volley, afaik.

When I was applying to grad schools, I told my undergrad advisor I was interested in working with Prof X. He got quiet for a minute, & then said, “Hmmm. You’d probably be okay. I don’t think you’re his type.” I sat there, shocked into silence for a long minute. “So I shouldn’t go there?”

A father finally learned that his son has been released from Russian captivity.

The CIA just stopped publishing their World Factbook and took every page, including the archived copies of previous versions! This sucks. It was public domain, so I recovered the 2020 edition (the last one published as a zip file) and shared it to GitHub simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/t...

I'm not sure what to make of it, but every Somali I represent in immigration court currently (8 of them) have today had their hearings cancelled and their judges reassigned. They're now all assigned to a video judge from Louisiana and scheduled for court hearing in one month. 🧵

I think it's best for everyone to understand that the unified class project of billionaires right now is to do to white collar workers what globalization and neoliberalism did to blue collar workers.

Highlighting the speaker who stood in front of the Surprise mayor and told him to consider what the Mayor of Ohrdruf must’ve thought before he died by suicide: “He might have thought ‘how is this my fault I had no jurisdiction over this’ maybe he said ‘this site was not subject to local zoning.’”

The US immigrant population generated more in taxes than they received in benefits from all levels of government every year from 1994 to 2023. The Cato study provides the first-ever 30-year analysis of the fiscal effects of immigration on government budgets. https://ow.ly/jy8a50Y8kM3

I have confirmed the gist of this report out of federal court in Minnesota today from a source familiar. If you have more information about the District of Minnesota—either the court or the U.S. Attorney's Office—and how they are handling all of this, please reach out. I am at crg.32 on Signal.

“Though the U.S. government had been accused under previous administrations of overstepping laws and guidelines that restrict the subpoenas’ use, privacy and civil rights groups say that, under President Donald Trump, Homeland Security has weaponized the tool to strangle free speech.”

BREAKING: Judge Ana Reyes, in DC, issues a stay of DHS Sec. Noem’s decision to end Haiti’s temporary protected status (TPS) designation, a decision that was to go into effect on Tuesday and could have ended legal status for up to 350,000 people overnight. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Trump openly admitting FBI raid in Fulton County was a prelude to interfering with the midterms and attempting to seize control of state and local voting process

ICYMI this great piece from over the weekend by Moe Tkacik on how Stephen Miller is running the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department, the FBI, the remnants of the Department of Education, most of the Pentagon, and whatever's left of DOGE. prospect.org/2026/01/31/t...

The thing where ICE parks masked men in school lots is something I would not have believed unless I saw it with my own two eyes. They do it constantly. It’s purely a terror tactic and they’ve done it to schools over the region. Our schools are collapsing - often at 50% attendance or less.

Oh, they've had a brain wave. Fvcking morons.

more here

Nonviolent protest also requires discipline and self-control. It’s HARD. Your instinct as a person is to escalate or even fight. Part of why everyday Minnesotans are winning is that it’s very obvious that the side without any discipline, the side escalating to violence on a whim, is ICE.

I have spoken with several senior FBI counterintelligence officers who believe that there is a reasonably strong prospect that Tulsi Gabbard is a foreign intelligence asset.

Gretch is on Substack. “I was just elected Vice Chair of the Democratic Governors Association, and we’re playing offense in 36 governors races this November. Governors are the front line …protecting our people from decisions made in D.C…. gretchenwhitmer.substack.com/p/the-way-fo...

Chomsky—who I hated early & often, I note proudly, even when I was in my brief Marxist era—is finally getting what he deserves on X. It is glorious. This 2019 email, where Chomsky is advising Epstein on dealing with the social difficulty of being a sex criminal, is getting a huge reaction.

So it looks like Brad Karp, big shot at Paul Weiss law firm, was in pretty deep with Epstein. Now we now why they caved to Trump demands early & easily, incl. $40 mil in pro bono work.

Nobody in the metropole cared as long as their brutality was confined to the border regions. But now they have been loosed on the heartland, where they were never meant to operate, with the full marcher lord privileges and immunities they were never meant to have there.

Sight in San Francisco (from a friend)

Gonna beg media not to just repeat Trump's obviously bullshit framing in the headlines. Tell readers the truth in the headlines. Alternatives: "With Artists and Audience Fleeing, Trump Closes Kennedy Center Indefinitely" "Trump Says Kennedy Center Needs Renovation, Despite Recent $250M Renovation"

Next weekend is my birthday, please give this to me!

BREAKING: The two federal immigration agents who fired on Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti are identified in government records as Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez.

a woman reached out to donate 500,000 delta skymiles to get people home to MN as they are released from custody in TX. we're getting flights booked today. it should be enough to get at least 15 people home. delta should be doing for free since they take ICE money.

Yesterday, five-year-old Liam and his dad Adrian were released from Dilley detention center. I picked them up last night and escorted them back to Minnesota this morning. Liam is now home. With his hat and his backpack.

Here, Steven Schmidt summarizes the Bloomberg story about ICE's plan to acquire warehouses. And tbc: I don't mean to promote Schmidt. I'm not a fan, even if he's on the right side now. But I never have any luck getting around Bloomberg paywalls, so ... open.substack.com/pub/stevesch...

Two things can be true: we’re a competitive authoritarian state with all sorts of efforts to put a thumb on the scale of who has power AND we have sufficiently free and sufficiently fair elections that every month we see the party in power lose.

I don't like to talk about stories before they are fully reported, but I am writing on ICE in a Minnesota town that isn't Minneapolis. However bad you think it is, it is worse. It is a campaign of pure terror whose only strategic goal is more terror. There is no strategy other than to break people.

ICE agents claimed Mondragón “purposefully ran headfirst into a brick wall.” "But ... that could not possibly account for the [injuries]... CT scan revealed at least 8 skull fractures and life-threatening hemorrhages in at least 5 areas of his brain." abc7ny.com/post/ice-min...