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border militarization
Leaked DHS Memo Reveals ICE Claiming Expansive New Warrantless Arrest Powers
"This memo bends over backwards to say that ICE agents have nothing but green lights to make an arrest without even a supervisor’s approval," said one former ICE official.
Jan 31, 2026
An internal legal memo obtained by the New York Times reveals that federal immigration enforcement agents are claiming broad new powers to carry out warrantless arrests.
The Times reported on Friday that the memo, which was signed by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Acting Director Todd Lyons, "expands the ability of lower-level ICE agents to carry out sweeps rounding up people they encounter and suspect are undocumented immigrants, rather than targeted enforcement operations in which they set out, warrant in hand, to arrest a specific person."
In the past, agents have been granted the power to carry out warrantless arrests only in situations where they believe a suspected undocumented immigrant is a "flight risk" who is unlikely to comply with obligations such as appearing at court hearings.
However, the memo declares this standard to be “unreasoned” and “incorrect,” saying that agents should feel free to carry out arrests so long as the suspect is "unlikely to be located at the scene of the encounter or another clearly identifiable location once an administrative warrant is obtained."
Scott Shuchart, former head of policy at ICE under President Joe Biden, told the Times that the memo appears to open the door to give the agency incredibly broad arrest powers.
"This memo bends over backwards," Shuchart said, "to say that ICE agents have nothing but green lights to make an arrest without even a supervisor’s approval."
Claire Trickler-McNulty, former senior adviser at ICE during the Biden administration, said the memo's language was so broad that "it would cover essentially anyone they want to arrest without a warrant, making the general premise of ever getting a warrant pointless."
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, noted in a social media post that the memo appears to be a way for ICE to "get around an increasing number of court orders requiring [US Department of Homeland Security] to follow the plain words of the law which says administrative warrantless arrests are only for people 'likely to escape.'"
The memo broadens the terms, Reichlin-Melnick added, so that "anyone who refuses to wait for a warrant to be issued" is deemed "likely to escape."
Stanford University political scientist Tom Clark questioned the validity of the memo, which appears to directly conflict with the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, which requires search warrants as a protection against "unreasonable searches and seizures."
"So, here’s how the law works," he wrote. "People on whom it imposes constraints don’t get to just write themselves a memo saying they don’t have to follow the law. Maybe I’ll write myself a memo saying that I don’t have to pay my taxes this year."
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As Trump Attacks the Republic, the Cowardly Democratic Party Still Won't Fight to Win
With few exceptions, the Democratic Party apparatus is coasting, playing “it safe,” and expecting that the Trumpsters will deliver the Congress to it in November.
Jan 31, 2026
“How’s the Democratic Party’s ground game in Pennsylvania?” I asked a friend several weeks before the 2024 presidential election. He replied optimistically that there were far more door knockers this year than in 2022.
It turned out these door knockers were just urging a vote for the Democrats without putting forth a compelling agenda attached to candidate commitments on issues that mean something to people where they live, work, and raise their families. There was no Democratic Party “Compact for the American People.” Then-President Joe Biden visited Pennsylvania, which went Republican, many times, with his most memorable message being that he grew up in Scranton.
Once again, the vacuous, feeble Democratic Party is relying on the Republicans and the cruel, lawless dictator Donald Trump to beat themselves to gain control of the Senate and the House.
Legendary reporter Seymour Hersh on Thursday made the case for the Republicans taking themselves down, to wit: “I have been told by an insider that the internal polling numbers are not good …” and that “anxiety in the White House that both the House and the Senate might fall to the Democrats is acute. Trump’s poll numbers are sliding… The public lying of cabinet members in defense of ICE has not helped the president or the party. Trump hasn’t delivered on the economy, except for the very rich, and he hasn’t made good on early promises to resolve the disastrous war between Russia and Ukraine.”
Their aversion to building their own momentum to answer the basic questions “Whose side are you on?” and “What does the Democratic Party stand for?” remains as pathetic as it was in 2022 and 2024.
GOP operatives are assuming the Democrats will take back the House by a comfortable number and now think the Senate, where the GOP holds a three-seat majority. There are six seats in play. The GOP’s biggest fear is that their negatives continue to increase, propelled by a pile of unpopular Trumpian actions, ugly behavior, and corruption. The combination of all these things could create a critical mass and produce a landslide comparable to the Reagan-led victory in 1980. In this election, the Republicans defeated seemingly unbeatable Senate veterans like Sen. Warren Magnuson (D-Wash.), Sen. Gayord Nelson (D-Wis.), and Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho), and gave the GOP control of the Senate.
So, what is the Democratic Party doing during this GOP slump? It is Déjà vu all over again. The Dems are furiously raising money from commercial special interests and relying on vacuous television and social media ads. They are not engaging people with enough personal events, and they are not returning calls or reaching out to their historical base—progressive labor and citizen leaders. Most importantly, they are not presenting voters with a COMPACT FOR AMERICAN WORKERS. Such a compact would spark voter excitement and attract significant media coverage.
Their aversion to building their own momentum to answer the basic questions “Whose side are you on?” and “What does the Democratic Party stand for?” remains as pathetic as it was in 2022 and 2024. Ken Martin, head of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), recently quashed a detailed report he commissioned about why the Democrats lost in 2024. He has refused to meet with leaders of progressive citizen organizations. We visited the DNC headquarters and could not even get anyone to take our materials on winning issues and tactics. We offered the compiled presentations of two dozen progressive civic leaders on how to landslide the GOP in 2022. This material is still relevant and offers a letter-perfect blueprint for how Democrats could win in 2026. (See winningamerica.net). (The DNC offices are like a mausoleum, except for visits by members of Congress entering to dial for dollars.)
Imagine a mere switch of 240,000 votes in three states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin) would have defeated Trump in 2024. That margin would have been easily accomplished had the Democratic Party supported the efforts of AFL-CIO and progressive union leaders who wanted the Dems to champion a “Compact for Workers” on Labor Day, with events throughout the country. (See letter sent to Liz Shuler, President of AFL-CIO, on August 27, 2024).
The compact would have emphasized: raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 per hour, benefiting 25 million workers, and increasing Social Security benefits frozen for over 45 years, which could have benefited over 60 million elderly, paid for by higher Social Security taxes on the wealthy classes. The compact would also include: a genuine child tax credit that would help over 60 million children, cutting child poverty in half; repeal of Trump’s massive tax cuts for the super rich and giant corporations (which would pay for thousands of public works groups in communities around the nation); and Full Medicare for All (which is far more efficient and lifesaving than the corporate-controlled nightmare of gouges, inscrutable billing fraud, and arbitrary denial of benefits).
Droves of conservative and liberal voters would attend events showcasing winning politics, authentically presented, as envisioned for the grassroots Labor Day gatherings, suicidally blocked by the smug, siloed leaders of the Democratic Party in 2022 and 2024.
Clearly, this is a party that thinks it can win on the agenda of Wall Street and the military-industrial complexes. (See Norman Solomon’s book The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy. It can be downloaded for free at BlueRoad.info.) The Democratic Party scapegoats the tiny Green Party for its losses again and again at the federal and state levels to the worst Republican Party in history—BY FAR.
It is fair to say that, with few exceptions, the Democratic Party apparatus is coasting, playing “it safe,” and expecting that the Trumpsters will deliver the Congress to it in November.
The exceptions are warning about this hazardous complacency, such as adopting James Carville’s ridiculous advice just to let the GOP self-destruct (though recently he also has urged a progressive economic agenda). There are progressive young Democrats challenging incumbent corporate Democrats in the House. They are not waiting for a turnover in the party’s aging leadership. They believe the country can’t wait for such a transformation. Our Republic has been invaded by the Trumpsters, who are taking down its institutional pillars, its safety nets, and its rule of law. Our democracy is crumbling by the day.
As for the nonvoters, disgusted with politics, just go vote for a raise, vote for health insurance, vote for a crackdown on corporate crooks seizing your consumer dollars and savings, and vote for taxing the rich. That’s what your vote should demand, and these are the issues that should be conveyed to the candidates campaigning in your communities.
Tell the candidates you want a shakeup, not a handshake. (See, the primer for victory, “Let’s Start the Revolution: Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country that Works for the People” 2024).
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ICE Is Indefensible, Irredeemable, and Illegitimate
Minneapolis is showing us all how to deal with a rogue, murderous agency that has lost the consent of the governed.
Jan 31, 2026
Another American citizen has been murdered in the streets of Minneapolis at the hands of a federal immigration enforcement agent. This victim, a 37-year-old ICU nurse named Alex Pretti, was killed on January 24 while tending to the injuries of a woman agents had pushed to the ground. The previous victim, Renee Good, was a 37-year-old mother of three who was executed in her car on January 7.
In both of these cases, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claimed the agents were acting in self-defense. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem immediately issued a statement accusing Good of “domestic terrorism.” Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller denounced Pretti as “a would-be assassin” who “tried to murder federal law enforcement.” These statements, released before any investigation took place, seem intended to halt any investigation at all and make the “official” story the only one that counts.
But anyone who’s watched the videos of these killings knows that neither of them were in self-defense. Good’s car was pointing away from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross when he put three bullets in her. Her last words were, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” Pretti was lawfully carrying a holstered gun, but he was unarmed and down on the ground when a Customs and Border Protection agent emptied a magazine into him.
The executions of Good and Pretti are only the tip of the iceberg. In Minnesota alone, ICE’s reign of terror has included blinding a young man with a nonlethal round, shooting teargas into a car filled with children, and abducting children as young as 5 years old. Videos of these incidents and countless others, filmed daily by ordinary Americans around the country, show the unforgivable violence that President Donald Trump, ICE, and Border Patrol are unleashing on the American people.
The Evolution of ICE, From Bad to Worse to Gestapo
Formed in 2003 by the Bush administration in the aftermath of 9/11, ICE is a relic of the War on Terror, founded when there was widespread fear of al-Qaeda entering the country through the Mexican border. Its purview is fairly broad, covering more than 400 statutes related to immigration, trade, and customs.
The agency’s evolution into a paramilitary organization, deployed in high numbers on American streets, is new to President Trump. His second administration quickly began a mass recruiting campaign for ICE, offering generous salaries and high sign-on bonuses and appealing specifically to white nationalists. Then Trump green-lit the agency’s escalating use of violence and intensified its presence in American communities, all while Congress increased its budget astronomically.
Now the agency acts as an invading and occupying force, loyal solely to Trump and not to the law, the Constitution, or any state or local governing bodies. Its actions have put it in conflict not only with American citizens but with local law enforcement and, in some states, even the National Guard. Some of ICE’s violent, unconstitutional, and immoral tactics include:
- A racially targeted, Gestapo-style “show me your paperwork” approach to enforcement. Rather than using investigative police work to go after the “worst of the worst,” as Trump once pledged, ICE agents simply stop whoever they think looks like they might not have been born here. They are raiding job sites, restaurants, public areas, schools, and even impersonating police and going door-to-door, apparently trying to meet Miller’s 3,000-deportations-a-day quota. At least 170 US citizens have been swept up in raids like these, some of them violently assaulted and detained for days.
- Arresting people in the midst of immigration hearings. Republicans often say they don’t mind immigrants as long as they do it the “right way.” But ICE has stalked immigration courts to capture people doing just that, deporting them right in the middle of trying to get their paperwork sorted.
- Detaining and disappearing people into concentration camp-like detention centers. The most notorious facility currently used by ICE is CECOT in El Salvador, a supermax gulag with brutally inhuman conditions and a chilling reputation for torture. But in America, conditions may be no better. Amnesty International condemned Florida’s secretive Alligator Alcatraz as “cruel, inhuman, and degrading.” Detention facilities are refusing to provide medical care. Detainees sometimes disappear entirely, leaving their lawyers and family members unable to reach them or find out if they’re alive. In 2025, at least 32 people died in ICE custody that we know of.
- Compiling a mass surveillance database and labeling Americans domestic terrorists. ICE partners with Palantir, a nefarious tech and AI company co-founded by billionaire Trump-ally Peter Thiel, to not only track immigrants but also to keep records on Americans who oppose them. This effort is closely tied to NSPM-7, a presidential memo that effectively sets the table for Trump to declare any political or ideological opponent an enemy of the state. One ICE agent told a woman recording him in Maine, “We have a nice little database, and now you're considered a domestic terrorist.”
- Killing Americans in broad daylight. The executions of Good and Pretti were not mistakes or accidents brought about by poor training. They were immediately backed up by the administration as good and proper responses, with Vice President JD Vance even declaring the agents have “absolute immunity.” ICE agents have since invoked these incidents to threaten Americans, with one saying, “Have y’all not learned from the past couple days?... Is this how you want to die?” This is terrorism, plain and simple—violence and intimidation to achieve their authoritarian political goals.
For a MAGA true believer, all this is forgivable because, in their minds, anyone without the right paperwork is a criminal, anyone who protects them is also a criminal, and any violence the state uses against criminals is justified. In reality, undocumented immigrants commit violent and drug-related crimes at a much lower rate than the native-born population, and simply being here without the proper authorization is codified as a civil offense, not a crime.
Not all of these abuses are brand new. Immigration activists have long blasted ICE and US immigration policy, especially under former President Barack Obama. But the scale, violence, regularity of abuse, and lack of accountability have turned the situation into a five-alarm fire. ICE is acting well outside its statutory duties, committing crimes and terrorizing communities to carry out its mission as handed down by Trump, Noem, Miller, and other MAGA extremists.
Skating on Thin Ice With the American People
If there is a silver lining in any of this, it's that people are fed up with it. Residents in Minneapolis have turned out en masse to protest ICE. They are protecting one another through constant filming, as well as blowing whistles to alert neighbors to the presence of ICE agents. On January 23, tens of thousands of Minnesotans marched down the streets in the state’s biggest general strike in 100 years. They shuttered businesses and halted labor with the understanding that the best way to combat the system is to hit it in the only spot it truly feels pain: its pockets.
Most elected officials aren’t yet close to representing the energy and anger of the people. Democrats like Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) still speak of reforming ICE rather than abolishing it. But there have been increasing calls for things like the impeachment of Kristi Noem, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has deployed the National Guard to, hopefully, protect his state’s residents.
In the battle for hearts and minds, at least, MAGA is losing. Even on Fox News, they are struggling to uphold the narrative. In an interview with FBI Director Kash Patel, far-right pundit Maria Bartiromo was incredulous that Alex Pretti posed a threat and said: “There is outrage across the country… Someone is dead at the hands of border patrol.” At this point, only the most diehard MAGA faithful seem to be buying the administration’s talking points.
Essential immigration and customs functions can be reallocated to other agencies, but there is no need for storm troopers to go door-to-door demanding to see people’s papers under threat of violence. It is rank Nazism.
While these recent excesses might give the Trump administration a black eye in the public view, it’s only part of a larger struggle being waged. This violence and chaos is not an accidental byproduct. The administration doesn’t care about casualties, and they aren’t interested in making nice. It’s about seeing how far they can go, how much power they can grab, and then defying the American people to do something about it.
Recall who we’re dealing with here. Stephen Miller is widely believed to be in charge of the administration’s law enforcement and border policy. He’s the most brazenly fascistic senior member of the administration and, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, has an “affinity for white nationalism.” Meanwhile Greg Bovino, the commander of US Border Patrol and the only field agent who goes out unmasked, essentially cosplays as an SS agent.
Amid the chaos in Minneapolis, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a mafioso-style letter to Gov. Walz telling him that all he had to do to “bring back law and order to Minnesota” was hand over his state’s voter data in exchange for ICE withdrawal. This alone shows that their goals go far beyond immigration reform or enforcement. They’re interested in a complete takeover, which requires that they muddle election integrity and identify and track enemies of the regime. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said of Bondi’s letter: “This is blackmail. This is the way organized crime works. They move into your neighborhood, they start beating everybody up, and then they extort what they want.” So far, it hasn’t worked.
In the Declaration of Independence, the founders wrote that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Through their actions and violent abuses, ICE have lost that and then some. Americans are right and justified in their filming, protest, and even obstruction of ICE. Now we need to go further.
At the political level, sorting all this out means removing ICE from streets, eliminating their overly broad national security powers, canceling their partnerships with big tech, prosecuting the Trump administration officials responsible for these abuses, and throwing out of office the Democrats who funded it. In plain language, we need to abolish ICE. Essential immigration and customs functions can be reallocated to other agencies, but there is no need for storm troopers to go door-to-door demanding to see people’s papers under threat of violence. It is rank Nazism.
Once that’s done, we need to take a much broader look at our use of state violence. It’s no coincidence that the killing of two white people is causing cracks in the dam. This is the way we’ve been treating less fortunate people for decades, from the militarized police killings of Black Americans to the genocide we funded in Gaza. As a nation we remained largely indifferent to those atrocities. Wake-up calls are always welcome, but America can’t go back to sleep if and when this stage of the violence is contained.
The lesson is that the worst our government does can be done to any of us at any time, and we all need to work to curtail it. Minnesotans are showing us the way with their fearless solidarity and general strike. Trump’s campaign against blue states and his occupation of Minneapolis look like the early stages of a civil war. It needs to be stopped now, and the perpetrators held to account before their power has the chance to grow an iota.
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The Other Heroes on the Streets of Minneapolis? Citizen Journalists
Without their presence at the scene and steadiness under pressure, the public and the rest of the media would be ignorant of a pivotal aspect of the story unfolding in Minneapolis.
Jan 31, 2026
On Sunday afternoon, CNN anchor Jake Tapper was interviewing US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hours after Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti. Suddenly, CNN cut away to live coverage of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s press conference. Noem declared that Pretti had “attacked our officers” while “brandishing” a handgun and planned “to kill law enforcement.” When a reporter tried to ask a question about her claim, she interrupted to say, “That is no claim. It is the facts.” When another reporter noted that the White House had just called Pretti a “domestic terrorist,” Noem forcefully agreed.
By this time, bystanders’ videos of the shooting were appearing online and on news outlets. When Tapper resumed his interview with Ocasio-Cortez, the representative said that Noem and the Trump administration were “asking the American people to not believe their eyes… to instead hand over your belief into anything that they say. I’m not asking the American people to believe me, or her, but to believe themselves.”
Any journalist who’s been paying attention knows that Noem’s boss, President Donald Trump, often doesn’t tell the truth. Trump launched his political career by asserting without evidence that America’s first Black president wasn’t born in the United States, which would have meant Barack Obama was in power illegally. After losing the 2020 election, Trump said he had no plans to leave office because, he insisted, he had actually won. Trump repeats that lie to this day, along with his claim that the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol to keep him in power was a day of “peace” and “love.”
But in spinning their latest web of lies, Trump and his aides didn’t reckon with the ingenuity and courage of Minnesotans who witnessed Border Control officers shooting Pretti—and Renee Good before him—and recorded the encounters on their cell phones. Without that evidence, the government’s version of the facts would have had the upper hand in shaping the public narrative. With that evidence, however, it’s obvious that “Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked,” as Pretti’s “heartbroken but also very angry parents” wrote in a statement the next day. “He had his phone in his right hand, and his empty left hand is raised above his head trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down.” Likewise, bystander videos of Renee Good’s shooting show that she was turning her vehicle away from ICE agent Jonathan Ross when he fired three deadly shots through her windows.
Whether they know it or not, the bystanders who recorded these videos are citizen journalists. They are ordinary people, not trained in conventional journalism, and they were bearing witness to events of utmost importance to their community and country. And they were doing so under dangerous conditions, as was also exemplified by 17-year-old Darnella Frazier, who on May 25, 2020, bravely kept her cell phone focused on police officer Derek Chauvin throughout the nine minutes and 29 seconds that Chauvin’s knee was choking the life out of George Floyd.
The events of recent days have shown that citizen journalists, though not a substitute for professionals, can be an invaluable complement. Without their presence at the scene and steadiness under pressure, the public and the rest of the media would be ignorant of a pivotal aspect of the story unfolding in Minneapolis. We’d be hearing only the government’s version of the truth, which, given the Trump administration’s history of flagrant falsehoods, deserves extreme skepticism. Absent these videos, it is all but inconceivable that the editorial boards at three of America’s most influential newspapers—The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal—would be stating that the administration’s narrative defies belief or that the administration itself would be trying to walk back its initial slanders of Pretti.
All parts of the modern information system, from legacy newsrooms to social media influencers, can now present a fuller account of what is happening in Minnesota and let viewers and readers draw their own conclusions. And we can explore urgent questions raised by these videos, such as: How many more people might ICE agents have killed when no cameras were recording? Working in tandem at this critical moment for American democracy, citizen and professional journalists can fulfill the essential mission the nation’s founders envisioned for a free press: to inform the people and hold power to account.
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