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Fast Food CEO Steps Down as Labor Nominee
Statement released by Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter
WASHINGTON
"Today, fast food mogul Andy Puzder announced he will bow out of the running to be Labor Secretary. The controversial CEO of Hardees and Carl's Jr. had attracted criticism from a wide range of groups opposed to his corporate ties and unsavory views on labor.
"Puzder is in no way qualified to set our nation's labor standards or to lift up our workers, and apparently even he knows that. Puzder opposes the minimum wage and rules to protect workers. Installing him as Labor Secretary would have had extremely negative consequences for the safety of poultry workers and USDA inspectors who have had to endure intolerable conditions in plants that have been under investigation by OSHA.
"The Department of Labor should be just that--a voice for America's workers, not America's corporations. Like the rest of Trump's cabinet, Puzder was an inappropriate choice. Of course, who the President taps to replace him is anyone's guess."
Food & Water Watch mobilizes regular people to build political power to move bold and uncompromised solutions to the most pressing food, water, and climate problems of our time. We work to protect people's health, communities, and democracy from the growing destructive power of the most powerful economic interests.
(202) 683-2500LATEST NEWS
Architect of DHS Calls Out the Agency's 'Lawlessness, Fascism, and Cruelty'
John Mitnick, a conservative attorney who helped build the Department of Homeland Security and served as its general counsel during Trump's first term, says the agency has become a monster.
Jan 26, 2026
One of the architects of the Department of Homeland Security says the agency he helped create has turned into a monster.
Following this weekend's fatal shooting of 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse Alex Pretti by a federal immigration agent in Minneapolis, the second this month, John Mitnick—a conservative lawyer who served under both Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump—took to social media to express his fury at the agency's conduct.
"I helped to establish DHS in 2002 and 2003 and later had the Homeland Security portfolio as a White House counsel and served as general counsel of the department," said Mitnick on Saturday. "I am enraged and embarrassed by DHS’s lawlessness, fascism, and cruelty. Impeach and remove Trump—now."
Mitnick, a former Republican candidate for Congress, served as an associate general counsel for science and technology at DHS from 2002-04, during the agency's infancy. An agency webpage credits him as someone who "assisted in establishing the department as an attorney in the Transition Planning Office."
After the Bush presidency, Mitnick served in a number of private-sector roles, including as senior vice president, general counsel, and secretary at the Heritage Foundation—the influential right-wing think tank that would go on to author much of the second Trump administration's agenda.
He returned to DHS in 2018, when he was confirmed by the US Senate as general counsel to the department under Trump. The New York Times explained that "part of Mr. Mitnick’s job as general counsel was to push back against policies that could put the Homeland Security Department in a legally dubious position."
In an ominous precursor to Trump 2.0, Mitnick was forced out of his role as DHS counsel in 2019 after pushing back against a policy to release detained migrants into Democratic-led sanctuary cities as part of a political stunt, as opposed to border towns.
That policy was spearheaded by none other than Stephen Miller, who was then serving as a senior adviser to Trump, who has become arguably the most powerful single figure in his second White House and the brains behind his "mass deportation" agenda.
Multiple White House sources described Miller as the driving force behind Mitnick's ouster as part of a larger "purge" of officials who refused to cosign orders they felt were legally questionable.
In contrast with other officials who have stated that they regret their involvement in creating DHS, believing it paved the way for Trump's authoritarianism, Mitnick contested on Saturday that "the name [of the agency] is not responsible for the conduct."
"Laws do not apply themselves; it takes officials of integrity and good character devoted to the rule of law to apply them," he said. "Current DHS leadership is devoid of those qualities."
Within hours of Pretti's shooting—just as they did following the shooting of 37-year-old mother Renee Good weeks ago—White House officials raced to absolve the agents involved of any wrongdoing while casting the victim as a dangerous terrorist threat, even as video evidence directly contradicted their claims.
Miller specifically described Pretti as a "would-be assassin" who sought to kill agents despite zero evidence of this being the case, other than the fact that he was legally carrying a handgun, while Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem baselessly described his actions as “domestic terrorism," prompting calls for her impeachment.
In the Guardian, columnist George Chidi described it as part of "a pattern... emerging, in which the Trump administration prioritizes the vilification of the dead victim as to blame for the incident over preserving the neutrality of any investigative process."
Polls show that the American public has rapidly grown hostile to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the wake of its rampage across Minnesota, which—in addition to the extrajudicial killings of two US citizens—has involved cases of explicit racial profiling, unconstitutional "citizenship checks," and extreme uses of force against protesters, legal observers, and detainees.
A YouGov poll published Sunday found that just 20% of American adults found Pretti's shooting to be justified. That same poll found that a record high 46% of Americans now want to abolish ICE, compared with just 41% who want to maintain it. This includes 19% of Republicans, a higher percentage than ever recorded during Trump's second term.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said that if ICE's conduct has so disturbed even a lifelong conservative functionary like Mitnick, it's a sign of how far the agency has truly gone.
"Beyond helping establish DHS itself in 2003, Mr. Mitnick was a Senate-confirmed Trump choice for general counsel for DHS in his first term, and is not a man for hyperbole," Reichlin-Melnick said. "So bear that in mind when you see him calling out DHS's 'lawlessness, fascism, and cruelty.'"
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'Fucking Insane': Journalist Finds at Least 2,300 Illegal ICE Detentions Since July
"This is what 'mass deportations' looks like. Neither due process nor basic humanity," said one lawyer. "Don't look away."
Jan 26, 2026
In yet another display of the Trump administration's disregard for the US Constitution, there have been at least 2,300 cases in which federal judges have ruled that immigration officials illegally detained people without bond or due process since just July, according to one journalist.
Politico reporter Kyle Cheney shared some of the cases he's tracked in a thread on the social media platform X late Saturday. "This is one that stands out," he said of Sonik Manaserian, an Iranian woman of Armenian ethnicity who is a member of the Baha'i faith.
According to an order out of the Central District of California in Manaserian's case, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) "arrested a chronically ill, 70-year-old woman, who came to this country to avoid religious persecution and applied for asylum, who has lived here peacefully for 26 years and complied with all check-in requirements and other conditions of release, who has no known criminal record and poses no threat to anyone, without notice or the process required by their own regulations and without any plan for removing her from this country, then kept her in detention for months without sufficient medical care—and they do not have any argument to offer to even try to justify these actions."
Cheney's thread came just hours after Customs and Border Protection (CBP) fatally shot legal observer and nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, less than three weeks after ICE officer Jonathan Ross similarly killed Renee Good in Minnesota's largest city.
"Minnesota courts have been inundated with these cases since the beginning of Operation Metro Surge last month," said the journalist, noting a Friday order in which a judge freed Audberto J., a Mexican man residing in the state, "where he and his wife have lived and raised three children together over the last 20 years."
While the Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that its immigration enforcement operations are targeting "the worst of the worst," like the vast majority of immigrants actually seized by agents with the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in recent months, Audberto J. has no criminal history, according to the order.
"Yet another ruling from Friday, freeing a man detained by ICE in Minnesota who suffered severe head injuries during his arrest and has been hospitalized since. The man claims ICE has required him to be shackled in the hospital, against the wishes of doctors," Cheney noted. "Here's another Minnesota ruling that just came in tonight: A federal judge is threatening DHS with contempt for transferring a petitioner out of the state despite a court order enjoining the administration from doing so."
The journalist added to the thread on Sunday, as judges in Minnesota continued issue to rulings. In one of those cases, "Judge [Katherine] Menendez—who issued last week's injunction against ICE's retaliatory use of pepper spray—just ordered the release of a Kenyan woman arrested while picking up seizure medication at CVS."
Sharing the thread, American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick stressed "this is what 'mass deportations' looks like. Neither due process nor basic humanity. Don't look away."
Immigrant Defenders Law Center co-founder and CEO Lindsay Toczylowski said that "as you read this excellent thread, let it sink in that one of the most pervasive issues for people in ICE detention is lack of access to counsel which means in most cases people have no shot at filing these challenges to their illegal detentions in federal court."
The Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution states in part that no person shall "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law," and protects various rights in legal proceedings. The Trump administration has also faced intense criticism recently for its disregard of rights protected by the First, Second, and Fourth amendments.
Cheney was praised by other journalists for "such good shoe-leather reporting," as "PBS NewsHour" correspondent Lisa Desjardins put it. Lawfare senior editor Roger Parloff suggested that he "should get a Pulitzer for this thread."
John Yarmuth, a former newspaper editor and Democratic congressman from Kentucky, said that "this is a great example of a journalist doing his very critical job. Now it's up to government officials to act to correct these injustices. AND be shamed and replaced if they don't."
Last Thursday, seven Democrats in the US House of Representatives voted with nearly all Republicans to pass a multibillion-dollar DHS funding bill. Pretti's killing has increased pressure on all senators to reject it. While immigration agents' deadly and illegal actions have fueled calls to "abolish ICE," some lawmakers are demanding reforms at the agency and across the department.
Pointing to Cheney's findings, anti-monopoly lawyer Basel Musharbash said: "This is fucking insane. What reforms are supposed to fix an agency that commits 2,300 adjudicated constitutional violations in just six months? And those are just the ones that made it to court!"
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Minnesota AG Keith Ellison Calls Trump Officials' Response to Alex Pretti Killing ‘Flat-Out Insane’
"Alex Pretti was killed by DHS agents in broad daylight in front of all of our eyes," said Ellison. "Both the rule of law and the sense of justice we all carry within us demand a full, fair, and transparent investigation into his death."
Jan 26, 2026
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison on Sunday condemned the Trump administration's response to federal agents' killing of intensive care nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis over the weekend as "flat-out insane," noting that video footage of the shooting discredits the narrative rushed out by top officials.
"This is their employee who they trained—apparently, allegedly,” Ellison, a Democrat, told the Washington Post in an interview. "So for them to jump out there and say, ‘He’s done nothing wrong, the victim is a bad person,’ is flat-out insane and is a complete break with what we consider to be reasonable law enforcement behavior. It fails every test of professionalism.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claimed following the shooting that Pretti "approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun," aiming to "maximum damage and massacre law enforcement." DHS Secretary Kristi Noem declared that "this is a violent riot when you have someone showing up with weapons and are using them to assault law enforcement officers.”
Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, described Pretti as a "would-be assassin."
Video footage of the killing quickly exposed the Trump administration's narrative as a demonstrative lie.
"I think that reasonable people watching the video could conclude that [Pretti] had a gun and a holster, that it was taken off of him in plain view on the video, and that after that, he was shot," Ellison told the Post. "I think that a person who saw those things would not be hallucinating."
Ellison is set to appear before a federal judge on Monday as part of Minnesota's lawsuit against the Trump administration over Immigration and Customs Enforcement activities and deadly abuses in the state.
"I share the intense grief and anger of so many that another Minnesotan—Alex Pretti, 37 years old, an ICU nurse who served veterans—was fatally shot during the Trump administration’s Operation Metro Surge," Ellison said in a statement. "On Monday, my office and I will be in court arguing to end this illegal and unconstitutional occupation of our cities and the terror and violence it’s inflicting. This must stop. Now.”
"The federal government appears to have taken measures that directly led to the destruction of evidence."
In a filing submitted hours after Pretti's killing, Ellison and other Minnesota officials asked a federal court to prevent DHS and the Trump Justice Department from concealing or destroying evidence related to the shooting.
"According to reports, federal personnel may have seized cell phones, taken other evidence from the scene, and detained witnesses," the filing states. "It is unclear whether federal personnel otherwise processed the scene—let alone how carefully. Then just a few hours after the shooting, federal personnel left, allowing the perimeter to collapse and potentially spoiling evidence."
"From a law enforcement perspective, this is astonishing," the filing continues. "The federal government’s actions are a sharp departure from normal best practices and procedure, in which every effort is taken to preserve the scene and the evidence it contains... [T]he federal government appears to have taken measures that directly led to the destruction of evidence."
The US District Court for the District of Minnesota granted the request for a temporary restraining order, ruling that the Trump administration is "enjoined from destroying or altering evidence related to the fatal shooting involving federal officers that took place in or around 26th Street and Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis on January 24, 2026, including but not limited to evidence that Defendants and those working on their behalf removed from the scene and/or evidence that Defendants have taken into their exclusive custody."
Ellison applauded the court's decision, saying in a statement that the ruling protects the integrity of Minnesota's investigation into Pretti's killing.
“Alex Pretti was killed by DHS agents in broad daylight in front of all of our eyes," said Ellison. "Both the rule of law and the sense of justice we all carry within us demand a full, fair, and transparent investigation into his death. We will not settle for less."
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