SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
For Immediate Release
February, 12 2026, 11:31am EDT
Contact:
CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper,Phone: 202-744-7726,E-Mail:,ihooper@cair.com
CAIR-MN Welcomes End of ICE Siege of Minneapolis as ‘Community Victory,’ Warns of Lasting Harm and Ongoing Risks
MINNEAPOLIS
The Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-MN) today welcomed the announced end of the ICE siege of Minneapolis as a “hard-fought community victory,” while warning that the impacts of the operation will continue to be felt by families and communities across the state.
MEDIA ADVISORY: CAIR-MN will hold a news conference today to respond to the announced withdrawal.
WHO: CAIR-MN, Community Activists, Faith Leaders, Elected Officials
WHEN: Today, Thursday, Feb. 12, 1:30 PM CT
WHERE: Minneapolis City Hall, Minneapolis, MN CONTACT: Jaylani Hussein, Executive Director, CAIR-MN, 612-406-0070, jhussein@cair.com; Suleiman Adan, Deputy Executive Director, CAIR-MN, 612-408-7183, sadan@cair.com
Federal officials confirmed today that “Operation Metro Surge,” which brought thousands of immigration agents into Minnesota and resulted in thousands of arrests, is being wound down following months of public pressure, protests, and national scrutiny. The operation sparked widespread backlash after aggressive enforcement tactics and fatal shootings of U.S. citizens during raids, which intensified community fear and demands for accountability.
“Today’s announcement reflects what happens when communities organize, speak out, and refuse to accept fear as public policy,” said Jaylani Hussein, Executive Director of CAIR-MN. “This is a hard-fought community victory. But it comes after real trauma, real harm, and the loss of life. That cannot be ignored.”
“This moment belongs to the community,” Hussein added. “Faith leaders, organizers, tenants, youth, and everyday residents stood together and demanded dignity. That collective action forced change. And we will remain vigilant.” CAIR-MN cautioned that the federal government has made clear enforcement will continue beyond Minnesota and that the policies behind the operation remain in place nationwide.
“The withdrawal of agents does not undo the damage,” said Suleiman Adan, Deputy Executive Director of CAIR-MN. “Families remain separated. Communities remain traumatized. Trust in institutions has been shaken. And today’s rhetoric from federal leadership signals that similar operations could continue elsewhere.”
CAIR-MN is calling for immediate next steps:
- Full transparency regarding arrests, detentions, and use-of-force incidents.
- Independent investigations into harm and loss of life during the operation.
- Legal and mental-health support for impacted families.
- A permanent end to large-scale militarized immigration enforcement in Minnesota communities.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is a grassroots civil rights and advocacy group. CAIR is America's largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization. Its mission is to enhance understanding of Islam, protect civil rights, promote justice, and empower American Muslims.
(202) 488-8787LATEST NEWS
'How Small They Are': Mamdani Takes Apart MAGA's Vision of America in July 4 Address
"At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power for themselves by turning us against one another."
Jul 03, 2026
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Friday delivered a speech commemorating the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America that drew a sharp contrast with President Donald Trump's vision for the country.
Speaking from New York City Hall, Mamdani recounted how his city had long served as a refuge for people from across the globe who came seeking a new life an opportunity.
It was these immigrants who ultimately shaped New York and made it into what it is today, said Mamdani—who is an immigrant and among the rising number of democratic socialists who have recently won at the ballot box.
The mayor then moved to the present day, where he took aim at the anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies emanating from Trump and his MAGA movement.
"The story of America has been written by those who have so often been told by those with power and influence and wealth that they were anything but exceptional," Mamdani said. "For generation after generation, we have been told that when the world has sent its people to our shores, it has not sent its best."
Mamdani took aim at the ideology espoused by many rich and powerful people who see America as "an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal."
"America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes," the mayor continued. "America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit."
"How small they are," Mamdani remarked. "How weak, how unoriginal. At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power for themselves by turning us against one another."
The mayor then pivoted to a more hopeful tone by arguing that "time and again, including 250 years ago, those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress."
Mamdani insisted that the greed shown by American oligarchs and the division sown by its current political leadership are "not all we see when we look for America."
"We see it too in the nurse who works a double shift and then stops on her way home to check on her ailing neighbor," he said. "Yes, we see in America corporate landlords for whom negligence is a business model. We see it too in the father who tucks his children into bed in a ceiling stained with leaks, who wakes before dawn to go to work, and who still believes this country can do better by his family."
In his conclusion, Mamdani paid tribute to "those ideals upon which our nation was built," which he described as "strong enough to endure any authoritarian regime, but only if we reach for them."
"Ours is a nation working each day towards the perfection in which it was conceived," he said. "A nation striving each day to better itself. Therein lies the work of America: The striving, the bettering, the reaching towards perfection. What a privilege each of us has to live in a nation that every one of its inhabitants can shape."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Get the Flock Out': Nationwide Backlash Grows Against AI-Powered Surveillance Tech
Since 2021, 82 Flock contracts have been canceled across 28 US states—39 of them during the first five months of this year alone.
Jul 03, 2026
Resistance is mounting across the United States against the increasing use of surveillance tech company Flock Safety's cameras, with a growing number of cities canceling contracts as the artificial intelligence-powered license plate readers are quietly being installed in thousands of locations nationwide.
State and local police departments first used the Atlanta-based company's automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems for standard law enforcement purposes, but they are now being employed for a much broader range of uses, including immigration-related searches and other actions supporting US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during the Trump administration's deadly anti-immigrant crackdown.
“We have cameras that are used for everything from illegal dumping to drug houses to hotels that are just big problems,” Flock Safety engineer Kevin Cox told prospective customers during a demonstration of the company's Condor Camera, according to a Thursday report in The Washington Times.
“There are endless, endless uses for what we can do with these things," Cox added.
Those uses include spying on constitutionally protected protest activity and enforcing abortion bans by tracking pregnant people's travel across states—even ones in which the medical procedure is legal.
The ACLU—which recently launched a "Get the Flock Out" campaign to "fight creepy ALPR cameras"—says there are currently between 80,000 and 100,000 Flock devices installed nationwide that conduct more than 20 billion scans per month. More than 5,000 law enforcement agencies use the cameras, and some of them keep their locations a secret.
Automatic license plate readers track our every move and funnel our personal information into enormous databases that police can access to spy on us without a warrant.Surveillance company Flock Safety is the largest provider of these cameras — it's time we get all of them out of our communities.
[image or embed]
— ACLU (@aclu.org) June 28, 2026 at 11:15 AM
"Flock's ALPR cameras aren't like your normal traffic cameras," the ACLU explained. "This surveillance technology records and tracks every car that comes into view, and then an AI algorithm catalogs the make, model, color, license plate number, bumper stickers, and even scratches. This personal information is then uploaded into a nationwide database that any law enforcement agency with a Flock contract can search—with few regulations or oversight on how they use what they find."
The backlash against creeping state surveillance has even transcended the partisan divide.
“I think our country is in a kind of uniquely anti-surveillance environment right now, which is to say that, in a time where it seems there is nothing that is not partisan, opposition to government surveillance is nonpartisan," ACLU privacy and surveillance attorney Chad Marlow told The Washington Times on Thursday.
There is growing action—both legal and otherwise—to end the use of ALPRs across the country.
According to the public information project Ban Flock Cameras, 82 Flock contracts were terminated across 28 states between August 2021 and May 2026, with 39 of those cancellations occurring in the first five months of 2026 alone.
Even Amazon-owned Ring announced earlier this year that it would stop doing business with Flock Safety.
Susie O'Hara, a member of Santa Cruz, California's nominally nonpartisan City Council, told WBUR earlier this year that she grew increasingly concerned about local use of eight Flock cameras last year after learning that police were sharing data gleaned from the cameras with the company's national network without city officials' knowledge, a violation of state laws banning the practice.
O'Hara became increasingly convinced that Santa Cruz should cancel its Flock contract after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good, a US citizen, in Minneapolis in January.
"I have goose hbumps on my arms thinking about the absolute chaos that was happening in Minneapolis," she said. "And just the absolute insanity of what we were seeing... It was totally clear to me that we should in no way consciously be in this system at all—just no way."
Less than a week after Good's killing, the Santa Cruz City Council voted to terminate the city's Flock contract, becoming the first municipality in California to do so.
“For us, the threat to our civil liberties was greater than any benefit we could get from the flawed product,” Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley told KQED at the time.
Chad Kemp, who represents District 32 on the nonpartisan Dane County Board of Supervisors in Wisconsin—which in April voted to stop funding two dozen cameras leased from Flock—told The Washington Times that “there’s a public safety issue here, but there is also a privacy issue."
"There are serious concerns about individuals who can be monitored without their knowledge, or if it is even constitutional or ethical to track people without a warrant," he added.
At the national level, US Reps. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) last year launched an investigation into the use of Flock cameras to track pregnant people across state lines for abortion care and to conduct unauthorized immigration enforcement operations.
Krishnamoorthi and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) have also urged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Flock Safety "for failing to implement cybersecurity protections, allowing Americans’ personal data to be exposed to hackers, criminals, and spies to steal."
Their demand came after the cybersecurity firm Hudson Rock revealed that hackers stole passwords and data from at least 35 Flock customer accounts.
In May, US Reps. Jesús "Chuy" Garcia (D-Ill.) and Scott Perry (R-Pa.) introduced a bipartisan amendment to a bill that would prohibit state and local governments receiving federal highway funds from using ALPRs for purposes other than electronic toll collection.
It's not just Flock. Axon, Vigilant Solutions—a subsidiary of Motorola Solutions—Genetec, PlateSmart, Innova Systems, Rekor, ELSAG, Perceptics, Jenoptik, and other firms market ALPRs to law enforcement agencies, private companies, and others.
"It doesn't matter which company has its creepy cameras in your neighborhood," the ACLU said, "they all have the same problems: a lack of transparency, oversight, and regulation into how they collect, store, and use our data, and how to hold public and private actors accountable if they abuse it."
Keep ReadingShow Less
‘Fitting Metaphor’: Giant Falling Panel Nearly Crushes Dancers on Trump’s 250th Anniversary Stage
One journalist called it "the kind of thing somebody can genuinely be prosecuted for if someone dies, which is not uncommon if you slap it together like this."
Jul 03, 2026
In what some described as a "fitting metaphor" for the state of the US, a large panel fell from the stage at President Donald Trump's 250th anniversary extravaganza, nearly crushing a group of young dancers during a rehearsal.
A video of the falling piece of debris was posted to social media Thursday by the independent journalist Aaron Parnas, who wrote, "The stage is falling apart at the rehearsal for Freedom 250's July 4th celebration."
The giant panel interrupted a patriotic dance number, making a loud crash and sending bits of dust and shrapnel flying just feet behind the troupe of what appeared to be about two-dozen performers on the event's Salute to America stage, where many of the festival's biggest acts are taking place.
“We’re grateful to report that everyone is safe,” a Freedom 250 representative said. “We take the safety of our performers, crew, volunteers, and guests extremely seriously.”
He added that "additional safeguards and senior technical oversight are now in place as preparations continue.”
HuffPost deputy editor Philip Lewis said it was "literally a miracle no one was hurt."
From a scourge of algae in the reflecting pool, to the rash of headline acts bailing from their performances, to the persistent low attendance, and empty booths, the festivities—commandeered by the Trump-aligned Freedom 250 operation—has been seemingly marred by one indignity after another.
Power outages have led the supply of ice cream to become liquefied by the heat, and a faulty generator has led the giant Ferris wheel to run only intermittently.
A model of the president's planned "Arc de Trump" has been mocked as "a sad, peeling mess" by Margaret Hartmann of New York Magazine, who noted the creasing vinyl, cracking wood, and caulk oozing out the sides. The mid-festival addition of a series of improvised columns did little to stop it from being referred to as a "Temu arch."
Other buildings were haphazardly overlaid with vinyl covers designed to look like three-dimensional pieces of classical architecture.
An interim report published Thursday by Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee emphasized the festival's dual role—in addition to being a monument to Trump's ego—as yet another opportunity for his donors and allies to profit.
Through the newly created Freedom 250 group, the report alleges, Trump has used the event to sell sponsorship packages promising VIP access, speaking roles, private receptions, and photo opportunities with the president.
It also points to federal contracts for Trump-connected event vendors, official merchandise sales through a Trump campaign vendor, and event-registration data routed through a firm founded by former Trump digital strategist Brad Parscale.
The company in charge of the State Fair's production is Event Strategies, Inc.—a firm run by a group of longtime Trump aides. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, it has received taxpayer funds through the National Park Foundation, though it remains unclear how much the company has made.
It's also unclear what, if any, oversights may have led to the dangerous stage mishap. However, the use of an opaque private charity to fund the festival appears to have enabled corner-cutting elsewhere.
According to the Democratic report, the UFC arena on the White House South Lawn “bypassed layers of [National Park Service]-mandated environmental review,” allowing the commercial fighting organization headed by Trump pal Dana White to save time and money, which led to a lawsuit last month seeking to stop the event.
Journalist Ryan Grim said that if there have indeed been safety rules flouted, the falling panel is "the kind of thing somebody can genuinely be prosecuted for if someone dies, which is not uncommon if you slap it together like this."
Many found the short video deeply resonant—a microcosm of the unprecedented elite enrichment that has taken place during the second Trump administration, subsidized by bone-deep cuts to social safety net programs that have made life more precarious for millions of people, including many children.
Political commentator J Aubrey said that it was "hard to imagine a more fitting metaphor for our rapidly decaying society."
There is, unnervingly, still plenty of time for a deadly incident to occur at the fair.
The president's Independence Day celebration is slated to culminate in the launching of 850,000 firework shells from near the reflecting pool and several other sites along the Potomac River.
The National Park Service has projected the display would cause “very unhealthy” conditions around central DC, including particulate pollution that can harm those with asthma, according to documents uncovered by The Washington Post.
Soaring temperatures have also put Washington under severe drought, turning the surrounding area into a potential tinderbox. DC Water has said it was coordinating with federal officials in the case that a forest fire breaks out.
"It only takes one small spark landing in dry vegetation under the right conditions to start a fast-moving wildfire," April Newman, a public information officer at Cal Fire, told Axios.
Trump himself, who recently turned 80 years old and is rumored to be in poor health, is also not immune to the dangers.
The president declared that on Independence Day, "when it's going to be approximately 107 degrees out... I'm going to make a really long speech."
That speech, scheduled for 9:45 pm ET, will take place on the Salute to America stage.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular