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Predictably, the exit of mini-Nazi Bovino did little to staunch ICE abuses - kids gassed, women dragged, skulls fractured, observers facing guns - which go on apace. But so do growing protests, testimony and court rulings against them. This week saw a spectacularly scathing one as ICE Barbie tried to strip protections from 350,000 Haitians peaceably living and working here - en route, dubbing them "killers" and "leeches." The result: "Federal judge reaches down Noem's throat, rips out her heart, and eats it raw."
Amidst a half-assed government shutdown that's funded vast venal parts of the regime but temporarily left out DHS, "metaphorically trapped on the street in its weaponized SUV," nobody's mourning the abrupt departure of former "commander" Greg Bovino, who quietly slunk back to whatever dark dank cave he crawled out of. Swapping him out in the wake of outrage over ICE's murderous abuses, it was agreed, was "like shitting your pants and then changing your shirt." "To stem a spiraling crisis, the White House replaced an asshole with a different asshole," reported Andy Borowitz, who quoted "senior asshole" Stephen Miller on what's next: "Anyone who thinks this administration is going to run out of assholes any time soon better think again. We have a very deep bench." (It includes his ignorant, hateful wife.)
The bench features Noem, Rubio, Drunk Pete and Miller himself, who's taken to not just raving that ICE stormtroopers have total immunity (NOT) but desperately advertising for them on X - "If you want to combat fraud, crime and illegal immigration, reach out. Patriots needed." It also includes Tulsi Gabbard, fresh from charging Obama with "treasonous conspiracy" in the 2016 election and running her own investigation into - as well as inexplicably joining the FBI raid on a Georgia election office aimed at - the hoary, tired, alleged steal of the 2020 election. (Really.) Finally, don't forget cartoon thug Tom Homan, Bovino's replacement, who wisely blames anti-ICE "rhetoric" for his goons shooting Renee Good in the head and Alex Pretti in the back several times, in the fine tradition of abusers everywhere who plead, "Why did you make me kill you?"
In Minneapolis, meanwhile, a county medical examiner’s office ruled the death of Pretti "homicide by multiple gunshot wounds"; it also found agents denied aid to the dying nurse by turning away a physician who offered to help. Last week, ProPublica identified his killers as Border Patrol agents Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez, at their jobs 11 and 7 years respectively, after federal officials refused to release their names. An internal federal report also found Good's killers violated policies on use of force "during every step of the encounter" - from deescalation to handling guns to moving vehicles to calling her "a fucking bitch"; law enforcement experts agreed agents made "grave tactical and legal mistakes" in a “completely uncoordinated and chaotic" assault. To date, her killers have only been put on administrative leave.
Since both murders, DHS made small, contradictory shifts. Agents were told not to engage with “agitators,” aka peaceful protesters, and to only target immigrants with criminal charges - like they said they were doing all along but obviously weren't. Yet an internal memo claims they're newly free to make random, warrantless arrests to skirt court orders that demand warrants. Experts and veterans deem them inept "fake soldiers" and brazen "mercenaries"; Mayor Jacob Frey calls them "marauding gangs...indiscriminately picking people up,” and often attacking them. When Castañeda Mondragón arrived at the hospital, agents boasted he "got his shit rocked." After scans showed he had eight skull fractures with life-threatening brain hemorrhages - and staff called bullshit - agents said he tried to flee, cuffed, and "purposefully ran headfirst into a brick wall."
”It was laughable, if there was something to laugh about," said one nurse bitterly, who described fractious ICE agents roaming the halls, harassing patients for their papers as fearful hospital staff huddled, and insisting a comatose Mondragón - who came here legally, started a construction company, and has no criminal record - be shackled to his bed. After two weeks, a judge ordered him released; with no family nearby, co-workers took him in for a long recovery. Across the state, a similar sense of siege reigns. While five-year-old Liam Ramos, grabbed in his bunny hat, was released, several more kids from his school have been detained, school officials, parents, grandparents, neighbors patrol in shifts outside at dismissal time as ICE agents prowl, and streets are littered with empty ghost cars - doors open, sometimes running - of other victims whisked away.
This week, it happened twice. Footage by Ford Fischer shows agents swarming a car of legal observers and dragging them out at gunpoint. One thug claimed they were threatening them with "hand guns," which lamely turned out to be gun motions with their hands. Yelled one enraged bystander, "Put away your weapons, you douchebags." Outside the small city of St. Peter, a woman driving behind agents filmed herself - and, preternaturally calm, phoned colleagues to call 911- as they swerved in front of her, jumped out with guns drawn, dragged her out, and shoved her into their car. She was ultimately released and driven home by the police chief, a friend, after her husband notified him (see small city), but residents were horrified by the jumpy, masked, trigger-happy scene. "This is just insane," said one. "It’s only a matter of time before (they) kill another innocent person."
- YouTube www.youtube.com
The dystopian scenes repeat elsewhere. Last weekend in Portland, OR, ICE thugs launched tear gas, flash bangs, pepper balls and rubber bullets at thousands of peaceful protesters, including children in strollers. Tim Dickinson of The Contrarian wrote, "Today I saw ICE gas little white kids in the streets (with) chemical weapons. Imagine what they’re doing to brown and black kids in the detention camps." Mayor Keith Wilson raged, “To those who continue to work for ICE: Resign. To those who control this facility: Leave...To those who continue to make these sickening decisions, go home, look in a mirror, and ask yourselves why you have gassed children." Tuesday, after the ACLU filed a complaint, a District Judge banned such barbarism to preserve the U.S, "now at a crossroads,"-as "a well-functioning constitutional democratic republic.” Jack Dickinson, the Portland Chicken, thanked him: "Cruelty is not an appropriate response to dissent."
Also in Portland, another bullshit federal narrative has fallen apart after goons shot two people a day after they murdered Renee Good. DHS described the targeted stop of a vehicle with two “vicious” Venezueland gang members; they claimed a woman in the car was previously “involved” in a shooting and the driver “attempted to run over” the officers, after which they were shot - chest, arm - and detained. (Miraculously, "The agents were uninjured.) The real story that emerged: No gang evidence, no criminal record, no car "weaponization," no fearful agents, no footage, the woman was an earlier victim of rape, theft, kidnap and feds undertook "a dirtying-up of the defendants." "The federal government cannot be trusted," said a city councilor, citing "a playbook of demonizing people" and "a pattern of victim-blaming...It’s important we push back, because it’s propaganda.”
In Chicago, they rammed the car of Dayanne Figueroa, a U.S. citizen, home-care worker and member of SEIU Local 503 on her way to pay rent and buy a birthday cake for her grandson. After side-swiping her, a swarm of agents jump out with guns drawn, break her car window, drag her out barefoot, throw her to the ground and demand to see her “papers" as she screams and struggles; she has severe asthma and is terrified of tear gas. After goons cuff her, they ransack her purse, find her passport and storm off, leaving her lying in the street with a torn rotator cuff, concussion and bruised ribs. Her daughter got her to the hospital with the help of the union, who also led a protest and created a GoFundMe for car repair and medical costs. Their goal was $10K; once they got to almost $20K they shut it down and posted, "See who else needs help now!"
As a profit-seeking, Stasi-like DHS attacks and terrorizes those it's meant to protect - see "security" - and runs chilling ads like, "Want affordable housing? Help report illegal aliens in your area. Call 866-DHS-2-ICE," Trump's polls keep plummeting, even at Fox. In deep denial, he rambles about a mythical "silent majority” who loves him, raves about "Democrat CRIMINAL ACTS," and embarks on random acts of revenge like (after three tries) arresting CNN's Don Lemon for doing journalism, aka "violating the sacred right to worship freely" - though ICE did it first - in a "coordinated attack by rioters” at a right-wing Minnesota church with an ICE pastor. As the White House gloated with racist tropes - chains! - MAGA manically joined in. Noem described “Church Riots," Erika Kirk called protesters "demonic," Rep. Mike Davis praised a "fearless" Bondi: "Nobody is above the law. Especially not today's Klansmen - like Don Lemon." Who's...black.
Nobody, except rabid cultists, is buying it. Stunning new polls show voters' support for ICE has cratered from a +13-point margin to 19 points underwater, with almost 60% opposed. A majority now want both Miller and Noem removed, ICE to focus on the border, and no funding without new limits to a too-extreme putsch against immigrants - who are, per Rep. Dan Goldman, pursuing a legal pathway, rendering the vicious Noem, famously clueless on habeas corpus, the one violating the law. The rampant abuses have spurred mass resignations from Minnesota's U.S. Attorneys Office, now decimated by half; another just quit, telling a judge, "The system sucks. This job sucks." llinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who blasts "monsters" Miller and Noem for "unleashing this havoc on American cities," argues their "horrors" are now backfiring: "They're not dividing us anymore, they're uniting Americans against the tyranny."
On Wednesday, menacing cartoon villain Tom Homan announced the removal of 700 thugs from Minnesota with a dubious, mixed message, attributing the move to better coordination with county jails - though most sheriffs won't work with ICE - while threatening that targeting criminals won’t mean ”we forget about everybody else.“ So thanks, no thanks. His news landed with an even louder thud in the wake of devastating testimony the day before from his victims and their relatives at a public forum on DHS violence and abuse hosted by Democrats Sen. Richard Blumenthal and Rep. Robert Garcia. Because Republicans control Congressional hearings and refuse to hold ICE to account, the two Dems defiantly held "shadow hearings," wrote Jay Kuo in his thorough coverage, to "preserve a clear and public record of what they have done and the crimes they have committed."
The panel of Democratic lawmakers heard harrowing accounts of victims' and families' trauma, grief and loss. Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen and Montessori teacher in Chicago, was shot five times by Border Patrol after she followed an agent’s car to warn her neighbors. DHS claimed she tried to run them over, forcing them to "fire defensively," and she was charged with felony assault. The case was quickly dismissed in court, because in truth the agents rammed her car, and the shooter later bragged in a text, "I fired 5 rounds, and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book, boys." Despite what she'd gone through, Martinez movingly used part of her time to speak for slain victims who could not tell their own stories: "I am Renee Good. I am Alex Pretti. I am Silverio Villegas González. I am Keith Porter. They should all be here. All of us should hear the truth."
In equally eloquent, wrenching testimony, Minneapolis resident Aliya Rahman, a U.S. citizen from Bangladesh with autism and a traumatic brain injury, described driving to a doctor's visit when agents smashed her window, dragged her out, and detained her without medical care until she blacked out. She, too, spoke of others: “I am here today with a duty to the people who have not had the privilege of coming home...These practices must end. Now.” Luke and Brent Ganger, brothers of Renee Good, mourned a sister who "carried peace, patience and love for others wherever she went," an "unapologetically hopeful” woman and mother who "looked for the light." Rep. Greg Casar held a 3-minute and 26-second moment of silence for Good, the time feds let her bleed out. Garcia held up photos of Trump, Vance, Noem, Miller, Homan, Bovino: “Every single one of them has to be held accountable for the crimes, the terror, the murders." Not one elected Republican showed up for the event.
- YouTube www.youtube.com
Alongside "the bravery of your average 70-year-old Lutheran lady following ICE around Minneapolis in her Subaru Crosstrek," judges are standing up for an America then-Commander-in-Chief George Washington described in 1783 as "open to receive not only the Opulent & respected Stranger, but the oppressed & persecuted of all Nations & Religions." In a truly scathing ruling, D.C. Federal District Court Judge Ana Reyes blocked Kristi Noem from stripping almost 350,000 Haitians living and working in the U.S. of their Temporary Protected Status just hours before it was set to expire. In a blistering, painstaking, 83-page order, Reyes obliterates Noem’s arguments for terminating the Haitians' TPS as "implausible and contrary to the evidence." With neither the facts nor the law on her side, she charges, Noem is likely motivated by "racial animus" that "spits in the face, in letter and spirit," of Washington's noble sentiment.
Issuing a temporary stay, Reyes said it was “substantially likely” Noem "preordained" her TPS decision based on "hostility to nonwhite immigrants." As proof, she quotes Noem's X post in December urging a travel ban "on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches and entitlement junkies," adding, “WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE." The five plaintiffs in the case "are not, it emerges, ‘killers, leeches, or entitlement junkies,'" Reyes notes. They are Fritz Miot, a PH.D candidate in neuroscience who works in California researching Alzheimer’s disease therapies; Rudolph Civil, a software engineer for a national bank in New York City who supports five relatives, one with Down syndrome, in Haiti; Marlene Noble, a toxicology lab assistant with spinal tuberculosis who hopes to work as a post-mortem forensic toxicologist; Marica Laguerre, a college economics major at Hunter College who simultaneously earned a prep school and associate degree in biology at New York's CUNY; and Vilbrun Dorsainvil, a doctor in Haiti who now works as a registered nurse at Springfield Regional Medical Center.
Over 83 carefully wrought pages - it's worth reading, or at least skimming - Reyes decimates Noem's lapses, errors, lies, willful omissions, and sloppy reasoning as she bypasses multiple legally mandated steps to do her master's racist bidding. She doesn't conduct the requisite analysis, doesn't consult Congress and other appropriate agencies, makes "gross generalizations without supporting data," ignores economic factors like the $1.3 billion Haitians pay annually in taxes, ignores key, grim country conditions - people "caught in a perfect storm of suffering" and its "staggering" humanitarian toll from earthquakes, hurricanes, gangs, human rights abuses, collapsing government, rampant rape, violence, child abductions and our own State Dept. warning: “Do not travel to Haiti for any reason” - which, Reyes notes, "does not exactly scream, as Noem concluded, Suitable For Return."
Noem has also terminated every TPS designation - 12 to date - that comes before her, blithely stripping protections from hundreds of thousands of people, most of color, from Venezuela, Afghanistan, Honduras, Nicaragua, Syria, South Sudan and other suffering countries. In each, Reyes writes, she made the same argument; in each, "A court has rejected the Government’s rather expansive view that the Secretary’s decision-making is immune from judicial review. This Court joins the chorus." Reyes concludes, "Kristi Noem has a First Amendment right to call immigrants killers, leeches, entitlement junkies, and any other inapt name she wants. Secretary Noem, however, is constrained by the Constitution and (Federal) law to apply faithfully the facts to the law. The record to-date shows she has yet to do that...Termination shall be null, void, and of no legal effect."
Reyes' fierce rebuttal echoes the righteous wrath of last week's ruling from U.S. District Judge Fred Biery, who ordered the release of bunny-hatted Liam Ramos and his father Adrian Arias from detention in Texas; their legal asylum case will now proceed through the courts. In his brief, livid decision, Biery quoted Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence - "He has sent hither Swarms of Officers to harass our People" -.decried the government's "apparent ignorance" of that document, and blasted "the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas (even) if it requires traumatizing children.” He went on, "Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned." He quoted Benjamin Franklin - "A republic if we can keep it" - before ending, "With a judicial finger in the Constitutional dike, it is so ORDERED." May Minnesota's Singing Resistance carry us through.

It’s a commonly repeated statistic that the US military is the world’s largest institutional polluter, but what exactly does that mean?
The quest to find a real answer to that question led journalist and documentary filmmaker Abby Martin and her husband and co-director Mike Prysner on a five-year journey from defense contractor conferences and international climate gatherings to the Rim of the Pacific military training exercises and the fight against the construction of a military base in Okinawa that would fill in its iconic Oura Bay.
The result is Earth’s Greatest Enemy, released this year independently through Martin and Prysner’s own Empire Files, with editing by Taylor Gill and an original score by Anahedron. The film uses personal narrative, research, investigative reporting, interviews, and live footage to detail all the ways in which the Pentagon poisons the planet, including greenhouse gas emissions, the ecocide of war, and the toxins left behind long after the fighting has stopped.
"When you combine all of this, it is completely undeniable that this force that is upheld by extreme violence is the greatest threat to all living things on Earth,” Martin told Common Dreams.
RIMPAC training exercises are shown in a still from Earth's Greatest Enemy. (Image via Empire Files)
Toward the beginning of the film, Martin sets out to explain how the Pentagon can count as the world’s largest institutional polluter, and why the numbers behind that fact actually undersell its impact.
It turns out, Martin told Common Dreams, that this statement is only based on the amount of oil the US military purchases on paper, which comes to 270,000 barrels per day. This puts its emissions at 55 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, more than 150 countries.
This itself is a staggering amount of carbon pollution.
As Martin explains in the film: “It would take the average American driver over 40 years to burn as much fuel as a single flight of a Boeing Pegasus. The US flies more than 600 of these tankers.”
"You have to look at the military as actually the institution that's actually keeping the fossil fuel infrastructure in place through brutality and violence.”
But it’s also only the tip of the melting iceberg. Through an interview with scientist Stuart Parkinson, Martin reveals how that 55 million keeps ballooning when considering life cycle emissions from military equipment and from the equipment purchased by NATO allies, projected to reach 295 million metric tons by 2028, or more than half of all countries. And that figure excludes the use of military equipment in war, or the emissions from reconstructing cities leveled by US-made bombs.
In one particularly candid interview, a major general tells Martin that it’s great to develop alternative energy sources, “but let’s not walk away from what fuels today’s national security, which is oil. You have to have it.”
And until something is developed that can completely replace oil, “I think you need to keep the alternatives in check," he says.
Statements like these give the lie to the idea that the US can have a “green military empire,” Martin said.
They also show how difficult it is to separate the US military’s carbon footprint from that of the fossil fuel industry itself.
“Everything has really been wrapped up into securing the fossil fuel, building the infrastructure for fossil fuel, and maintaining that infrastructure empire in order to maintain a fossil fuel economy,” she told Common Dreams. “So you have to look at the military as actually the institution that's actually keeping the fossil fuel infrastructure in place through brutality and violence.”
A helmet and dog tag are seen in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina in a still from the film Earth's Greatest Enemy. (Image via Empire Files)
The film also makes clear that carbon pollution isn’t the only kind of pollution the military generates.
“Once you get into the research, you realize every stone unturned is an entire other documentary because it's not just emissions, it's the totality of pollution that the military is emitting on a daily basis, the dumping of toxic waste, the legacy contamination, that alone is still killing people every day,” Martin said.
The film spends much of its run time digging into the landfill of military waste, from melted down pucks of plastic dumped off Navy boats and unused munitions exploded in the desert to decades of water contamination at Camp Lejeune, the 26 million marine mammals the US Navy is permitted to harm or kill over five years of training, and the more than 250,000 bullets left behind in Iraq and Afghanistan for every person killed.
Martin said that almost every fact or anecdote she unearthed surprised her.
"We're fighting for service members and every living person on Earth, because we are all victims of this.”
“No matter what you think you know, it's worse. It's actually worse because of how big it is and how every face is a story, every victim is a story,” she said.
One of the most devastating stories comes at the film’s beginning, as viewers spend time with Lavon Johnson, an Iraq War veteran who once starred in a US Army commercial and is now living on Veterans Row, a stretch of tents bearing American flags lined up outside the Veterans Affairs hospital in Brentwood, Los Angeles. “My life is so fucked!” he declares as he lifts his hands from the piano he furiously plays despite the nerve damage caused by exposure to hydraulic fluid while in the Army.
In the next scene, viewers see the camp being demolished by police, juxtaposed with images of war, pollution, and environmental destruction, such as soldiers breaking down doors or dumping trash off of boats, oil pump jacks working, and beachside homes collapsing into a rising tide.
Martin said she was inspired to open the film with Johnson because of a letter that late Iraq War veteran Tomas Young wrote to former President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney before he died, referring to himself and other victims of the invasion as “human detritus your war has left behind.”
“That always stuck with me, that line, ‘the human detritus,’” Martin told Common Dreams. “And that is exactly what they do to veterans. That is exactly what they do to veterans… they're churned up and spit out. They're the cannon fodder of the system. And for what?”
Prysner is an Iraq veteran who spoke out against the war, and Martin is very clear that veterans are not the target of the pairs’ critique.
“This isn't about service members,” she said. “This isn't about hating the military. This is about accountability and justice for them. We're fighting for service members and every living person on Earth, because we are all victims of this.”
The demolition of Johnson’s camp cut through with clips of war and weather disaster illustrates this point, and could serve as a sort of thesis for the film, showing that the US military ultimately turns everything it touches into detritus, including, if it’s not stopped, the planet itself.
“Everything on Earth is in Lavon’s tent,” Martin said.
People march against US militarism at COP26 in Glasgow, in a still from Earth's Greatest Enemy. (Image via Empire Files)
This sense of connection is ultimately why Martin decided to keep Earth’s Greatest Enemy as a two-hour feature documentary rather than pivoting to a documentary series, despite the fact that, the more she dug, the more she realized “it could be 10 documentaries.”
She also ran into roadblocks when seeking Hollywood distribution. While environmentalist distributors would praise the film and compare it to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, they also said frankly, “You’re never going to be able to get anyone to buy this stuff.”
But, Martin said, “I was so committed to making a movie because movies were what radicalized me,” citing inspiration from films like The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, War Made Easy, and Michael Moore's filmography.
Ultimately, her stubbornness paid off.
“After we educate everyone, I hope to decommission the military empire."
“It shows that everything from ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] to Gaza to the climate, that everything is connected,” she said. “Veterans, soldiers, the Indigenous people on the receiving end of this. If you care about cold water and good air, you can't walk away from this not being impacted. And that was the goal. The goal is to lock people in and explain the totality and to bring you down to the depths of hell.”
She added: “We have to understand those depths, and you can't get that with a 20-minute segment. You just can't. You have to go through the pain of all the victims in this community and come out the other side empowered with the truth and the resolve that we have to change this.”
Change is a large part of Martin’s motivation for making the film, by educating people about the scope of the military’s destructive force and connecting them into a broader coalition.
Martin speaks in the film about coming to political consciousness and beginning her career as a journalist during the Iraq War, meeting Prysner through their shared opposition to war and empire, and developing "profound climate anxiety" following the birth of the pairs' first child. She lamented that the climate and anti-imperialist movements have been largely siloed over the past two decades, though that is beginning to change.
Through local screenings, she said she wanted to “try to build the environmental movement with the anti-war movement together because… even though the consciousness is expanding, it's not happening fast enough. And we are simply out of the luxury of time.”
The sense of urgency has only increased with President Donald Trump’s second term. While the film does not cover this period, it points to many developments that have shaped the past 12 months, including Trump’s claim that he attacked Venezuela for oil, his imperialist push to control Greenland, and his deployment of ICE to terrorize US cities.
Toward the end of the movie, Martin includes a segment on the militarization of US policing and warns that “this is our system’s big plan for the climate crisis.” She also films a panel on “Domain Awareness and Air Superiority in the Arctic” in which the generals speaking tell US companies they have an “open invitation” to experiment in Alaska.
“We know what they want the Arctic for, and it's to pillage every last drop,” Martin said. “So if environmental organizations are not thinking this together, we have to do it for them. We have to do it for them quickly.”
So far, she has seen encouraging signs, with several Sierra Club chapters stepping up to host screenings and enthusiasm from the mainstream environmental groups, parks departments, and other city officials she has invited to attend.
But education is not her only goal.
“After we educate everyone, I hope to decommission the military empire,” Martin said.
For Martin, that doesn’t mean not having a military for self-defense, but rather decommissioning the 800 or so bases the US military maintains around the world and transforming the infrastructure into something that could help local communities in a climate-friendly way. It also means accountability for harm caused and redirecting military spending toward basic needs like housing and healthcare, and certainly not giving the Pentagon another $600 billion as Trump desires.
While that may seem like an impossible task given the current political climate, Martin maintains a sense of revolutionary optimism, encouraged by the global mobilization against the genocide in Gaza and the way that people are increasingly seeing the links between the multiple crises and struggles around the globe.
“There's so many of us,” Martin told Common Dreams. “We care about the planet. We have a vested stake in life. And that's our vision.”
“It's like they have a vision of death and destruction for profit,” she continued. “Our vision is life, and we have to fight for it with every fiber of our being. And let this movie assist you however you can do that.”
To attend a screening of Earth’s Greatest Enemy, see the schedule here. To host a screening of your own, email theempirefiles@gmail.com.
A groundbreaking new report released Tuesday details how immigrants in the United States over the last three decades have contributed a massive surplus to the nation's economy, resulting in a total of more than $14 trillion over that period due to the fact that immigrant families generate significantly more benefits to fiscal health than they take away in the form of benefits received or downside costs.
The white paper by the libertarian free-marketeers at the Cato Institute, not a left-leaning outfit, builds on an existing model developed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to create a first-of-its kind analyses to determine "how immigrants, both legal and illegal, and their children affect government budgets" in a cumulative manner.
Looking at 30 years of data, the 95-page report—titled "Immigrants' Recent Effects on Government Budgets: 1994-2023"—discovered that immigrants overall "generated a fiscal surplus of about $14.5 trillion" over those years. In part, the NASEM-Cato model shows:
The paper concludes that "the average immigrant is much less costly than the average US-born American, and that immigrants impose lower costs per person on old-age benefit, education, and public safety programs."
The findings arrive with the US embroiled in a heated debate about immigration enforcement as President Donald Trump—backed by far-right xenophobes in his inner orbit, including White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller and Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem—has unleashed violent federal agents into communities nationwide to sweep up undocumented workers and their family members.
In a video produced for social media, David J. Bier, director of Immigration Studies at Cato and one of the report's co-authors, said the analysis shows in detail why it's a lie to believe that immigrants are "sucking us dry," a familiar argument by anti-immigrant "nativists" like Miller.
For every year from 1994 to 2023, immigrants in the US paid more in taxes than they received in benefits from all levels of government. Check out the latest study from Cato’s @David_J_Bier. pic.twitter.com/0cigBbJwBq
— Cato Institute (@CatoInstitute) February 3, 2026
In summary, the report notes that immigrants produce a net fiscal benefit in the US economy because:
As shown in the figure below, the difference between taxes paid by immigrants and the public benefits they receive "has grown from $158 billion to $572 billion in real terms since 1994." Just to look at 2023, working immigrants that year paid $1.3 trillion in taxes yet received only $761 billion in benefits.

This trend, despite endless cries from far-right pundits and xenophobic lawmakers that immigrants are a drain on public coffers, has held steady for decades—with no sign of it ending in the future.
"For decades, nativists have sold America this narrative that immigrant welfare is behind our deficits and debt," said Bier. "This figure shows how absurd that is."
The report argues that "rather than treating [immigrants—both documented and undocumented] as the cause of America’s fiscal struggles, we should consider immigrants part of the solution."
Mark D. Levine, comptroller of New York City, was among the public officials pointing to the report as timely evidence that the Trump-Miller-Noem narrative about immigration is built on a foundation of falsehoods.
"MAGA’s claim that immigrants are a drain on government budgets? It’s a lie," said Levine.
The $40 million film Melania, a biography of the first lady that was purchased by Amazon, has been panned as a "bribe disguised as a documentary," an "expensive propaganda doc," and a "journey into the void."
But despite the reviews, the tech firm has poured an unprecedented $35 million into a marketing campaign for the documentary, and one government watchdog group suggested Monday that the investment by the third-richest person in the world, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is already paying off.
Bezos welcomed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to his Blue Origin facilities in Florida on Monday as part of Hegseth's "Arsenal of Freedom" speaking tour, which is aimed at overhauling the Pentagon's relationship with defense tech companies.
"Blue Origin is committed to supporting national security to, through, and from space," said Bezos at the event.
Speaking during Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s “Arsenal of Freedom” tour at Cape Canaveral, Jeff Bezos says U.S. national security now hinges on industrial speed, scale, and space-based capability.
READ MORE: https://t.co/cOUQii31TJ#amazon #jeffbezos #nationalnews #florida pic.twitter.com/uaFGaoMhnI
— KRCR News Channel 7 (@KRCR7) February 3, 2026
Blue Origin, Bezos' space exploration firm, has received billions of dollars in defense contracts to build technology that uses space lasers, nuclear-powered spacecraft, and a processing facility for satellites.
Hegseth said during his tour that Blue Origin is likely to do "plenty of winning" as the Pentagon hands out additional contracts.
Late last month, Amazon Web Services was also awarded a $581 million contract to support the US Air Force's Cloud One program.
Greg Williams, director of the Project on Government Oversight's Center for Defense Information, told USA Today that on its face, Hegseth's visits to Blue Origin as well as SpaceX, the space technology firm owned by Trump administration associate and Republican megadonor Elon Musk, were not "particularly novel."
But considering Bezos' purchase and promotion of the documentary spotlighting President Donald Trump's wife, said Williams, Hegseth's hobnobbing with the tech mogul raises new questions about Bezos' desire to curry favor with the White House.
"By spending a tiny amount of money to buy the rights," said Williams, Bezos "potentially gets a much larger return."
As such, Hegseth's visit to Blue Origin called attention to a situation of "unprecedented conflict of interest," Williams added.
US Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) summarized the apparent transaction involving the documentary rights and the government contracts: "Trump gets paid. Taxpayers get screwed."
The US Department of Justice is reportedly setting up a new program that would create a team of prosecutors who can parachute into different areas throughout the country to bring charges against protesters who have allegedly assaulted or obstructed law enforcement officers.
As reported by Bloomberg on Tuesday, a Department of Justice (DOJ) memo mandates that US attorney's offices designate some of their staff members to serve on "emergency jump teams" that can surge into areas on short notice to prosecute cases.
"A senior official instructed leaders of the nation's 93 US attorney’s offices... that they have until February 6 to designate one or two assistant US attorneys," reported Bloomberg, "who’d be available for short-term surges in unspecified areas needing 'urgent assistance due to emergent or critical situations.'"
The effort to create "jump teams" of lawyers comes as the US Attorney's Office in Minnesota has been hit with a wave of resignations in the wake of the federal government's surge of federal immigration enforcement agents into the state.
According to a Monday report from the Minnesota Star Tribune, 14 lawyers at the Minnesota US Attorney's Office have either already resigned or announced their intention to resign in just the last month, an unprecedented number of departures in such a short period of time.
Bloomberg writes that the "jump team" plan "signals the Trump administration’s attempt to offset career prosecutor attrition... with a nationwide pool of reinforcements on standby."
The plan was potentially telegraphed by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller on Saturday, when he put out a call on social media for more attorneys to come work for the Trump administration.
"If you want to combat fraud, crime and illegal immigration, reach out," Miller wrote. "Patriots needed."
Attorney Ken White, a former federal prosecutor, speculated on Sunday that Miller's call reflected "real internal problems" at the DOJ, and he predicted that one solution the administration could try would be to create a mobile legal strike force much like the one outlined in the leaked DOJ memo.
However, White argued that this approach would be far from a magic bullet to solve the administration's staffing woes.
"The impediments will be these: They will get dregs who will do a bad job," White wrote. "Federal prosecution is not rocket science but federal judges do have notably higher standards than state judges and if you MAGA your way around federal court you will get your ass handed to you."
Jonathan Booth, a law professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, also predicted that the administration's strike force plan would run into some major speed bumps.
"Imagine, you're a federal prosecutor in San Diego," he wrote in a social media post. "It's sunny, warm, you have a whole set of important cases. Then suddenly 'we need you to go to Buffalo and prosecute extremely weak misdemeanor cases.' Feel like this isn't gonna work out well."
With only five Palestinians in need of medical evacuation from Gaza permitted to leave through the Rafah crossing after it reopened on Monday, health authorities in the exclave warned that the restrictions Israel is continuing to impose at the crossing could ultimately kill thousands of Palestinians who have been waiting for years for treatment as Israeli attacks have decimated Gaza's health system.
Zaher al-Wahidi, a spokesperson for the Gaza Health Ministry, told Al Jazeera Tuesday that although the crossing has reopened—a step that has been hailed as progress under the "ceasefire" agreement reached in October—the intense screening process Palestinians are subjected to by Israeli authorities at the entry point is "too complex."
About 20,000 patients in Gaza are awaiting medical evacuation, including about 440 people whose cases are critical and need immediate treatment.
Egyptian officials had said before the crossing reopened that 50 people were expected to cross from Gaza into Egypt per day, but al-Wahidi said that if the rate of crossing on Monday continues, "we would need years to evacuate all of these patients, by which time all of them could lose their lives while waiting for an opportunity to leave."
Al Jazeera reported that people hoping to leave Gaza must register their names with Egyptian authorities, who send the names to Israel's Shin Bet for approval. Palestinians then enter a checkpoint run by the Palestinian Authority and European Union representatives before Israeli officers use facial recognition software to identify those who are leaving.
Reporting for the outlet, Nour Odeh said the crossing process has been "humiliating" for Palestinians and exemplifies the "absolute control" Israel demands over the lives of people in Gaza.
"There were strip searches and interrogations, but now there are even more extreme elements. We’re hearing about people being blindfolded, having their hands tied, and being interrogated," said Odeh. "When we talk about security screening, and a person needing urgent medical care, that person is basically being denied medical attention."
Ambulances waited for hours on Monday on the Egyptian side of the border, ready to take patients to 150 hospitals across Egypt that have agreed to treat patients from Gaza, before five people were finally able to cross after sunset.
The process, said al-Wahidi, "will not allow us to evacuate patients and provide medical services to them to give them a chance at life."
About 30,000 Palestinians have also requested to return to Gaza, having fled the exclave after Israel began bombarding civilian infrastructure and imposing a total blockade on humanitarian aid in October 2023—retaliating against Gaza's population of more than 2 million people, about half of whom are children, for a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel.
But only about a dozen people were permitted to reenter Gaza on Monday, falling far short of the daily target of 50.
The Associated Press reported that Palestinians arrived at the border crossing with luggage that they were told they could not bring into Gaza.
“They didn’t let us cross with anything,” Rotana Al-Regeb told the AP after returning to Khan Younis. “They emptied everything before letting us through. We were only allowed to take the clothes on our backs and one bag per person.”
Another woman told Tareq Abu Azzoum of Al Jazeera that she was "blindfolded and interrogated by the Israeli military on her way back to Gaza," and other said "they were intercepted by Israeli-backed militias" who demanded information about armed groups in Gaza.
For people who have waited months or years to return to Gaza, Abu Azzoum said, "the Rafah crossing has been a humiliating process instead of a day marking a beautiful reunion with family."
Palestinian political analyst Muhammad Shehada of the European Council on Foreign Relations said the process "means in practice that Israel has made the Rafah border crossing a one-way ticket. If you decide to go to Gaza, they tell you, 'Okay, you will be caged there permanently. Forget about being able to leave ever again.' If you decide to leave you will have to settle with the concept of being banished and exiled again, permanently, because the queue is so formidably long."
Palestinian analyst @muhammadshehad2 explains the restrictions that Israel has imposed at Rafah Crossing are so harsh that it would take approximately 10 years for all 150,000 Palestinians in Egypt to return to Gaza, and similarly long for the tens of thousands of patients and… https://t.co/FBy1TCAW3L pic.twitter.com/WwBA7rs4xC
— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) February 2, 2026
On Tuesday, a World Health Organization (WHO) team arrived at a Palestinian Red Crescent hospital in Khan Younis to take about 16 patients with chronic conditions or injuries sustained in Israeli attacks to the Rafah crossing. The Red Crescent had previously been told 45 people would be able to cross on Tuesday.
Al Jazeera reported that health authorities in Gaza are being forced to choose which sick and wounded patients will be permitted to get treatment first.
“We know that patients have died basically waiting for evacuation," WHO spokesperson Christian Lindmeier said, "and that’s something which is horrible when you know just a few miles or kilometers outside that border help is available."
"New Yorkers deserve leaders who believe in transformation. Leaders who understand that hope is inspired by a vision, and sustained by change."
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani opened his essay explaining his decision to endorse Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul in her run for reelection with the same words she spoke last month when the pair announced—just days after Mamdani was sworn in—that they had reached an agreement to deliver a universal childcare program for his city.
"The era of empty promises ends," Mamdani, also a Democrat, wrote at The Nation.
The universal childcare program for children aged 6 weeks to 5 years, which Hochul agreed to fund for its first two years, is "as consequential a policy victory as our movement has seen in quite some time," said the mayor, who is an avowed democratic socialist.
Although he and Hochul have "real differences, particularly when it comes to taxation of the wealthiest, at a moment defined by profound income inequality," Mandani wrote, the governor moved to provide $1.7 billion in state funding to expand the social safety net for millions of New York City families.
"We delivered this historic win together," he wrote, emphasizing that the unlikely duo, should Hochul win reelection, plan to continue engaging "in an honest dialogue that leads to results."
I'm endorsing Gov. @KathyHochul because she's someone willing to engage in honest dialogue that delivers results.Along with the movement that powered our campaign, it's how we secured a historic agreement on childcare. And we're just getting started.www.thenation.com/article/poli...
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— Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@zohrankmamdani.bsky.social) February 5, 2026 at 9:25 AM
Mamdani endorsed Hochul over Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado, who chose India Walton, a democratic socialist who ran for mayor of Buffalo in 2021, as his running mate this week. Delgado has positioned himself as a progressive challenger to Hochul, who has faced criticism from environmental justice groups for approving a fracked gas pipeline and has not thrown her support behind the single-payer New York Health Act as Delgado has.
Although Mamdani and Hochul disagree on some key issues, the mayor emphasized that he has “come to trust” the governor since she endorsed his campaign last September, when other top Democratic lawmakers like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) refused to do so.
"For too long, our politics has been defined by a familiar cycle: big promises, bitter fights, and little tangible progress. This stagnation has taken a toll," wrote Mamdani. "Those of us entrusted with the sacred oath of service must heed that call and work together to honor it. That requires not the absence of disagreement but the presence of trust. We must be able to disagree honestly while still delivering for the people we serve. Over the past six months, Gov. Hochul and I have done exactly that."
He added that in his collaboration with Hochul, he has seen a model for what the Democratic Party can be.
"At its best, the Democratic Party has been a big tent not because it avoids conflict but because it channels conflict toward progress," Mamdani wrote. "A party united not by conformity but by a commitment to structural change—and to the work required to achieve it."
"New Yorkers deserve leaders who believe in transformation. Leaders who understand that hope is inspired by a vision, and sustained by change," he wrote. "Gov. Kathy Hochul has earned my endorsement because she has chosen to govern in that spirit."
"This incident cannot be viewed in isolation from the scorched-earth policy pursued by the Israeli army," said watchdog Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.
The Lebanese president has accused the Israeli government of committing "a crime against the environment and health" for allegedly spraying the herbicide glyphosate on agricultural lands in Lebanon and Syria.
As reported by Naharnet on Wednesday, Lebanon's agriculture and environmental ministries recently conducted analysis of soil near the site where Israel had sprayed a chemical substance and found glyphosate "20 to 30 times higher than the average" in the area.
The ministries said that this level of glyphosate in the soil could cause "damage to agricultural production," while also harming soil fertility.
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun denounced the spraying as a "flagrant violation of Lebanese sovereignty," and called on the United Nations (UN) and the international community at large to take action to stop future attacks.
Al-Jazeera reported on Tuesday that the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) was warned by the Israel military on Monday to stay away from the border area because it planned to deploy a "nontoxic chemical substance" there, forcing the peacekeeping forces to cancel over a dozen planned activities.
Stephane Dujarric, a spokesperson for UN Secretary-General António Guterres, condemned Israel for preventing UNIFIL from conducting operations, emphasizing that "any activity that may put peacekeepers and civilians at risk is of serious concern."
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said on Wednesday that it has detected "Israeli aircraft spraying pesticides of unknown composition over farmland in the countryside of Quneitra in southern Syria" on January 26 and 27.
"This incident cannot be viewed in isolation from the scorched-earth policy pursued by the Israeli army," the human rights watchdog said. "It forms part of a pattern of systematic destruction of agricultural land, including the burning of approximately 9,000 hectares during recent military operations using white phosphorus and incendiary munitions."
"Corporate consultants and vendors are getting to make a killing off of Medicaid work requirements' administration machinery while our patients will lose healthcare and suffer," said one advocate.
Three of the US Senate's top critics of corporate greed and anticompetitive behavior are investigating a scheme by credit report firm Equifax that they say will allow the company to profit from Republican policies that are set to rip away healthcare coverage and food assistance from millions of Americans.
Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote to Equifax CEO Mark Begor on Tuesday with several questions about the company's anticipated profits from provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that imposed work requirements on recipients of Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.
Begor told investors last summer that the policy presented a "massive" business opportunity for Equifax, as a product owned by the company called the Work Number is used by many states to instantly verify the wages and work hours of Medicaid applicants.
At least 99 million workers across the country are covered by Equifax's database, which the company has filled with data through exclusive contracts with employers and payroll firms. Equifax has frequently imposed steep price hikes on the product and has been accused of having a monopoly on providing income data to state agencies.
North Carolina's Medicaid program was hit with a 24% price increase in 2022 and a 36% hike in 2024.
"We have very little leverage and recourse to back out," state Medicaid director Jay Ludlam told the New York Times in November.
Luke Farrell, a former employee of the US Digital Service under the Biden administration, told the Times that Equifax owns "a product that has become a core piece of the safety net. I’ve never seen another vendor do such price hikes across public benefits.”
With the new work requirements set to go into effect in January 2027, states will be required to check the database more frequently.
The OBBBA's $1 trillion in cuts to SNAP and Medicaid are projected to cause "over 5 million people to lose their health insurance and over 3 million people to pay higher grocery prices within the next few years," wrote the senators this week.
"But for Equifax, these new threats to Americans’ food assistance and health insurance coverage 'represent the chance to become a lot richer,'" they wrote, quoting the Times' article from November about Equifax's plan to price-gouge states.
The senators continued:
Because Equifax is already dominant in this market, the law’s new red tape requirements allow the company to consolidate power even further, using extractive contracts to price-gouge states, squeeze competitors, and drive up profits. In fact, Equifax is laying the groundwork to cash in by proactively building out a platform called “TotalVerify,” which is specifically marketed as a tool to help “Prepare Your Agency For H.R.1.” Equifax also pitched the platform as a “single-source” for states and government agencies to be able to verify employment, income, incarceration status, consumer address, and phone number history and claims to “help state and government agencies manage the complexities of SNAP and Medicaid programs.” Given that Equifax’s tight grip on this business has “border[ed] on a monopoly,” Equifax stands to gain even more as OBBBA’s red-tape requirements take effect nationwide.
The lawmakers noted that judging from history, the work requirements are unlikely to "be effective at anything but increasing red tape," as the vast majority of Medicaid and SNAP recipients who are eligible to work already do and states have already run "failed" experiments with Medicaid work requirements.
In 2018, Arkansas' program resulted in 18,000 low-income people losing coverage in under a year, with people who had no home internet access and those who qualified for an exemption from the work requirement most likely to lose their benefits.
"Now, President Trump and Republicans in Congress have expanded this policy in a move that will ensure more Americans get tangled up in red tape and lose essential healthcare coverage and food assistance as a result," wrote Warren, Wyden, and Sanders. "That these requirements could allow Equifax to profiteer off of this ‘solution’ [makes] them even more egregious."
Adam Gaffney, former president of Physicians for a National Health Program, summarized the senators' objections to Equifax's price-gouging practices: "Corporate consultants and vendors are getting to make a killing off of Medicaid work requirements' administration machinery while our patients will lose healthcare and suffer. Meanwhile taxpayers will fund the bureaucratic lard."
The senators demanded to know Equifax's per-query costs for each state contract for the Work Number, the number of OBBBA-related contracts it expects to bid for in 2026 and 2027, the company's lobbying expenditures over the past five years for federal, state, and local governments, and whether Equifax plans to retain a clause in its contracts that allows it the “categorical right” to change prices with 30 days’ notice.
"Equifax’s long history of anti-competitive behavior," said the senators, "raises serious concerns about the company’s potential moves to price gouge states and taxpayers."