September, 13 2018, 12:00am EDT
Trump's Hurricane of Lies
"On the eve of landfall of Hurricane Florence, Trump is doubling down on the lies. Just this week, he heralded his response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico as an 'unsung success' and insisted that 3,000 people did not die in the disaster, contrary to official reports.
"As North Carolina braces for Hurricane Florence in areas with open hog manure pits and coal ash piles that are likely to flood drinking water sources, Trump's hurricane of lies is just the first load of toxic crap about to be unleashed this week.
WASHINGTON
"On the eve of landfall of Hurricane Florence, Trump is doubling down on the lies. Just this week, he heralded his response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico as an 'unsung success' and insisted that 3,000 people did not die in the disaster, contrary to official reports.
"As North Carolina braces for Hurricane Florence in areas with open hog manure pits and coal ash piles that are likely to flood drinking water sources, Trump's hurricane of lies is just the first load of toxic crap about to be unleashed this week.
"We, like most people, are weary of the lies. The people of Puerto Rico and those along the Eastern seaboard who are evacuating from their homes--including one of our own staff members in North Carolina--deserve far better.
"Beyond the lies, the policies themselves are simply shameful. Trump recently cut FEMA's budget to fund his immoral immigration agenda. His priorities are not serving the majority of Americans and will only lead to further disaster. We are in a fight for our lives, and we are going to continue to fight Trump's toxic policies on climate change, pollution, factory farms, infrastructure, trade and more."
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.
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50+ Groups Condemn Trump Admin for Trying to Sabotage Independent Probe of Alex Pretti Killing
"The Trump administration is sending a clear message: federal law enforcement can kill with absolute impunity."
Feb 24, 2026
A broad coalition of organizations on Tuesday accused the Trump administration of trying to sabotage a genuine investigation into the killing of Alex Pretti, the intensive care nurse who was fatally shot by federal immigration enforcement agents last month.
In a statement released by the Not Above the Law Coalition, the groups pointed to recent reporting about the FBI denying Minnesota law enforcement officials access to evidence gathered in relation to the Pretti shooting as proof that the administration has no intention of conducting an independent investigation into his death, which has been ruled a homicide by the Hennepin County medical examiner.
"By blocking Minnesota's investigation and attempting to shield agents from accountability," said the groups, "the Trump administration is sending a clear message: federal law enforcement can kill with absolute impunity. This move attempts to place federal agents above the law and beyond the reach of justice."
The groups noted that the administration was breaking with decades of standard practices by not cooperating with local police and prosecutors to investigate Pretti's death, and they warned it could set a dangerous precedent for future shootings carried out by federal officers.
"We demand immediate action," they concluded. "Mandatory independent investigations for all federal use of deadly force, recognition of state authority to investigate federal misconduct, federal cooperation with local investigators, and real consequences for constitutional violations. Without accountability, we allow federal forces to operate with impunity and face no consequences for taking American lives."
Included among the statement's signatories were the ACLU, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Common Cause, Indivisible, Public Citizen, and the Revolving Door Project.
The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) said last week that it was continuing its probe into Pretti's killing, even without the assistance of federal investigators.
“The BCA will present its findings without recommendation to the appropriate prosecutorial authorities for review," the agency vowed.
In addition to investigating the Pretti killing, the BCA is also conducting probes into the fatal shooting of Minneapolis mother Renee Good and the shooting of Venezuelan immigrant Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis.
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty last week similarly said that her office was not getting any help from the federal government in its investigation into the Pretti shooting, though she said her team was continuing to gather evidence and interview witnesses.
Moriarty emphasized that her office, which is currently working with the Minnesota BCA in its investigation, can bring criminal charges against federal immigration officers if it has enough evidence to do so, even without the cooperation of the Trump administration.
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Praising Denver and Other Cities for Leading the Way, Sanders Renews Call for National Data Center Moratorium
"We need serious public debate and democratic oversight over this enormously consequential issue," said the senator. "The time for action is now."
Feb 24, 2026
Although Denver Mayor Mike Johnston is a vocal supporter of artificial intelligence and has pushed to adopt AI-driven products to power the city's infrastructure, he joined City Council members on Monday in announcing a moratorium on the construction of massive AI data centers—the latest sign, said US Sen. Bernie Sanders, that the push to stop corporations from building the energy-guzzling, pollution-causing facilities is not "radical, fringe, and Luddite" as some claim.
Johnston, a Democrat, and other local officials across the country who are pushing to block the construction of data centers "are right," said Sanders (I-Vt.). "Data centers will have a profound impact on land and water use, and will drive up electricity costs."
As grassroots community groups and experts have warned, AI will also "likely have a catastrophic impact on the lives of working-class Americans, eliminating tens of millions of blue- and white-collar jobs in every sector of our economy," said the senator, who proposed a nationwide moratorium on AI data centers in December.
He renewed that call after Johnston and the Denver City Council announced the city would halt any plans for new data centers for at least several months and would require projects that are already permitted or under construction to follow new guidelines once they're finalized by local officials.
"We need a federal moratorium on AI data centers," said Sanders.
Johnston said in a statement that he believes "data centers power the technology we depend upon and strengthen our economy," but stressed that "as this industry evolves, so must our policies."
"This pause allows us to put clear and consistent guardrails in place while protecting our most precious resources and preserving our quality of life," said the mayor.
The city plans to review regulations for data centers that would target “responsible land, energy, and water use as well as zoning and affordability for ratepayers.”
Soaring electricity bills across the country have been linked to the build-out of data centers, which have cropped up as President Donald Trump has pushed to preempt state and local regulations on AI. As CNBC reported last year, residential utility bills rose 6% in August nationwide, but much higher price hikes were reported in states with high concentrations of data centers, like Virginia (13%) and Illinois (16%).
Sanders' office issued a report last October showing that AI, automation, and robotics could replace nearly 100 million jobs over the next decade, including 40% of registered nurses, 47% of truck drivers, 64% of accountants, and 89% of fast food workers.
And a study published in Nature Sustainability last year found that data centers could consume as much water as 10 million Americans and emit as much carbon dioxide as 10 million cars.
At a forum last week at Stanford University, Sanders joined Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) in warning that the expansion of AI data centers is meant to increase the wealth of billionaire tech moguls with no regard for how working Americans are affected.
“The question that we should be asking day after day… is who is pushing this revolution, who benefits from it, and who gets hurt?” Sanderss said.
In Denver, the moratorium was announced ahead of a planned community meeting scheduled for Tuesday evening at Geotech Environmental, where neighbors are planning to speak out against the 170,000-square foot DE3 data center being built in the Globeville-Elyria-Swansea (GES) area by the Denver-based company CoreSite.
The burden that will be placed on locals if the project is completed "is not accidental," reads a petition by the local grassroots community organization GES Coalition. “It is the outcome of colonial dispossession and extraction, then decades of zoning, redlining, highway construction, and industrial siting that concentrated pollution next to working-class homes alongside the legacy of the Vasquez Boulevard/I-70 Superfund site, a 4.5-square-mile smelting contamination footprint affecting multiple neighborhoods."
Meanwhile, state legislators have introduced at least two bills regarding AI data center development. One, House Bill 1030, would offer sales and use tax exemptions for data center builders—and would slash state general fund revenue while also triggering a $106 million reduction in tax credits for low-income households.
Another, Senate Bill 102, would require data centers to use renewable energy sources and ensure their energy use does not raise rates for consumers.
Grassroots efforts to block the construction of data centers have taken off in places including Saline, Michigan; Port Washington, Wisconsin; and Tucson, Arizona, where community members successfully blocked plans for a new center owned by Amazon.
State lawmakers in Maine, South Dakota, and Oklahoma are also considering moratoriums or limits on new data centers.
"We need serious public debate and democratic oversight over this enormously consequential issue," said Sanders. "The time for action is now."
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Former ICE Lawyer Says Agency Is Teaching Recruits to 'Violate the Constitution'
"Never in my career had I ever received such a blatantly unlawful order," said Ryan Schwank, who blew the whistle last month on a "secretive" ICE memo directing agents to enter homes without judicial warrants.
Feb 24, 2026
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is "lying to Congress and the American people" and directing new recruits to "violate the Constitution," according to a whistleblower who testified on Capitol Hill Monday.
Ryan Schwank, a former ICE lawyer who worked at the federal government’s law enforcement training academy, stepped down from his post last week after submitting a whistleblower complaint about an agency policy directing agents to enter homes and arrest people without a judge's warrant.
"I swore an oath to uphold the Constitution," Schwank said at a joint forum on ICE's constitutional violations hosted by Senate and House Democrats. "I followed that oath for four-and-a-half years, working side by side with ICE officers. And I followed it when I resigned on February 13, 2026, a little over a week ago, so I could speak to you today."
He had joined ICE in 2021 as a senior lawyer for the agency, tasked with advising agents on immigration laws and the Constitution. In September 2025, amid President Donald Trump's "surge" in recruitment to carry out his "mass deportation" crusade, Schwank became an instructor for new recruits at the ICE Academy at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia.
"On my first day," Schwank said, "I received secretive orders to teach new cadets to violate the Constitution by entering homes without a judicial warrant."
Schwank said he was “instructed to read and return a memo" that claimed ICE agents had this power in the presence of his supervisor. “Before I was shown this memo, my supervisor warned me that two previous ICE instructors had been dismissed because they questioned senior ICE management over the legality of the memo.”
That memo, which was sent to US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials in May, was revealed to the Senate last month through a whistleblower disclosure by Schwank and another official whose identity has not yet been made public.
“The acting ICE director authorized the very conduct that DHS—in 2025 legal training materials—has called ‘the chief evil against which the wording of the Fourth Amendment is directed’—that is, ‘physical entry of the home’ without consent or a proper warrant,” Schwank said.
His testimony confirms previous reporting from the Associated Press, which found that these orders were distributed in a highly unusual way: DHS officials like Schwank were shown the memo before being required to return it to their supervisors and relay the information verbally to new recruits without showing them the directive.
Under this new directive, the whistleblower report said “newly hired ICE agents—many of whom do not have a law enforcement background—are now being directed to rely solely on” an administrative warrant drafted and signed by an ICE official to enter homes and make arrests.
“No court has ever found that any law enforcement has this type of authority to enter homes without a judicial warrant under such circumstances,” said David Kligerman, the senior vice president and special counsel for Whistleblower Aid, the group that sent the disclosure to Congress.
“Never in my career had I ever received such a blatantly unlawful order—nor one conveyed in such a troubling manner,” Schwank said on Monday. “I was being shown this memo in secret by a supervisor who made sure that I understood that disobedience could cost me my job. ICE is teaching cadets to violate the Constitution, and they were attempting to cloak it in secrecy.”
Schwank also said that top ICE and DHS officials were deceiving Congress and the public when they claimed that the new officers and agents brought on as part of the agency's hiring spree were receiving the same basic training as in the past, even as agency syllabi showed that their training hours had been slashed by about 40%.
Testifying before Congress earlier this month, ICE's acting director, Todd Lyons, said that while hours have been cut, “The meat of the training was never removed."
"This is a lie,” Schwank said. “ICE made the program shorter, and they removed so many essential parts that what remains is a dangerous husk. No reasonable person would believe a training program suddenly cut nearly in half could meet the minimum legal requirements.”
The Trump administration has said the reduction of ICE training by more than 240 hours was mostly the result of eliminating Spanish-language classes.
However, according to dozens of pages of internal documents released by Senate Democrats, which were reviewed by the New York Times, the agency's February syllabus had also eliminated classes about the proper use of force, handling the property of detainees, filling out paperwork alleging someone is in the United States without authorization, taking a "victim-centered approach," and "integrity awareness training."
The number of exams agents must take has also been drastically reduced, from 25 in 2021 down to just nine. Some of the exams no longer required are ones on "Judgment Pistol Shooting” and “Determine Removability,” which the Times said was "a reference to how agents decide if people they encounter have legal status in the United States."
Schwank’s testimony comes after immigration agents shot and killed three United States citizens in recent weeks, causing heightened scrutiny of ICE and other DHS agencies. Since Trump's second inauguration on January 20, at least 32 people have been shot by agents, resulting in nine deaths.
In areas where ICE has been surged, such as Minnesota—which was swarmed by around 3,000 agents late last year—numerous instances have been documented of what appear to be uses of unnecessary force, racial profiling, and violations of constitutional rights.
“I am here because I am duty-bound to report the legally required training program at the ICE academy is deficient, defective, and broken,” Schwank said. “Deficient training can and will get people killed... It can and will lead to unlawful arrests, violations of constitutional rights, and fundamental loss of public trust in law enforcement.”
Schwank's testimony came as a partial shutdown of DHS entered its second week, after Democrats refused to fund the agency without significant reforms to ICE, including requirements that they obtain judicial warrants and carry out their duties without masks.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who chaired Monday's panel, said he hopes Schwank's testimony will encourage other whistleblowers to come forward.
“We know about the Trump administration’s decimation of training for immigration officers and its secret policy to shred your Constitutional rights because of the brave Americans who are speaking out today,” Blumenthal said. “They are coming to Congress because we have the responsibility to not only bear witness to these crimes, but to do something to make sure they don’t happen again.”
“To anyone else who is repulsed by what you’re seeing or what authorities are asking you to do, please know that you can make a real difference by coming forward," he added. "You’ll meet a moral imperative. Our door is open, we are here for you when you are ready, and we will do everything within our power to protect your rights.”
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