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us immigration and customs enforcement
Lawsuit Challenges Trump's Illegal Spying and Retaliation Targeting ICE Monitors
“The federal government cannot build secret dossiers on people because they exercise their First Amendment right to peacefully observe, document, or criticize its actions," said the head of Democracy Forward.
Jul 24, 2026
A coalition of privacy and civil liberties advocates filed a federal lawsuit Friday accusing the Trump administration of secretly collecting and keeping personal information about people who monitor US Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, arguing that the practice violates federal privacy law and threatens constitutionally protected speech and association.
The lawsuit—filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia—was brought by individuals and advocacy groups represented by Democracy Forward.
The plaintiffs—the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and legal observers Nicole Cleland, Jacquelyn Ivey, and Anna Walker—argued that the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and other federal agencies created and maintained databases of people who observed, documented, or protested immigration enforcement activities without providing notification or safeguards, as required under the Privacy Act of 1974.
That law was passed after the exposure of illegal government surveillance, including longtime former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover's infamous COINTELPRO program, under which the FBI, in addition to conducting unlawful spying, funded and armed murderous far-right militants to terrorize anti-Vietnam War protesters, anti-nuclear weapons activists, civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King, Jr., and other leftists.
“The federal government cannot build secret dossiers on people because they exercise their First Amendment right to peacefully observe, document, or criticize its actions," Democracy Forward president and CEO Skye Perryman said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. "That is exactly the kind of government surveillance Congress sought to prevent when it enacted the Privacy Act after some of the darkest chapters in our nation’s history."
The lawsuit accuses the Trump administration of collecting the names, photographs, vehicle information and license plate numbers, social media accounts, and other identifying information about legal observers, volunteers, journalists, clergy, and community members engaged in First Amendment-protected activities during the government's deadly anti-immigrant crackdown.
"When the Department of Homeland Security dramatically ratcheted up its immigration enforcement, people across the country—of all ages and backgrounds—did what anyone is supposed to do when they disagree with government action: They exercised their First Amendment rights," the suit states. "They peacefully protested. And, as matters here, they observed and recorded how law enforcement agents acted in public."
DHS is using facial recognition technology, body cameras, license plates, mobile devices, and other surveillance tools to identify, track, and punish people who legally observe immigration enforcement in public. This is a clear violation of the Privacy Act. We’ll see them in court.
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— Democracy Forward (@democracyforward.org) July 24, 2026 at 10:36 AM
"In response, DHS decided to record the Americans who were peacefully observing its agents, adopting a secret Protester Surveillance Policy enabling its agents to first collect records on Americans engaging in First Amendment exercise and then maintain them in DHS systems, where they can be used to retaliate against those Americans," the complaint continues.
"Beginning sometime in 2025, DHS deployed a dragnet of drones, bodycams, face-scanning apps, license plate scanners, and camera phones to, as one memo instructed, 'capture all images, license plates, identifications, and general information on hotels, agitators, protestors, etc., so we can capture it all in one consolidated form,'" the document notes.
"DHS agents have not been shy about gathering this information or its purpose," the plaintiffs contended. "In Maine, DHS agents told multiple observers that they were being added to a database of 'domestic terrorists.' In Chicago, agents routinely used facial irecognition scans on members of the public."
"In Minneapolis, observers simply watching agents on public streets have been led by those agents to their own houses, despite never having interacted with an agent—a practice so common that it has been named 'being driven home by ICE,'" the suit says. "And across the country, DHS agents have approached observers and addressed them by their full names, even though those observers never identified themselves to the agents or showed them any form of identification."
"As a result of its Protester Surveillance Policy, DHS has recorded and retaliated against each individual plaintiff," the filing alleges. "It’s bad enough that DHS publicly collected information on Americans engaged in lawful First Amendment exercise. But worse, DHS also decided to maintain the information in one or more of its systems, enabling it to later retaliate against observers and protestors—including by canceling Trusted Traveler status," which includes Transportation Security Administration Pre-Check and Global Entry.
The plaintiffs are asking the court to declare the DHS surveillance policy unlawful, end it, and ban the agency from continuing to collect and keep records of individuals’ protected First Amendment activities.
“Now more than ever, those of us who have the privilege to speak out have a responsibility to defend the rights of everyone in our communities,” Walker said in a statement. “When people are punished for exercising their First Amendment rights, we begin losing the democratic principles that protect all of us. Every American should be alarmed by retaliatory action against one’s free speech."
Cleland said: “I believe government accountability starts with transparency. People should be free to peacefully observe and document what their government does in public without worrying they’ll be tracked or retaliated against. This case is about protecting that right for everyone.”
EPIC deputy director John Davisson warned, “When our government compiles secret dossiers on everyday people for exercising their constitutional rights, it sends a chilling message: If you speak up, watch your back."
"If every protest, every recording, every act of dissent opens us up to surveillance and retribution, privacy and free speech are at risk of collapse," he added. "But the laws of this nation don’t permit that, and we won’t either.”
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LA Must Stop Bidding for Mega Sports Events
The city’s FIFA World Cup experience raises questions about the costs and benefits of hosting.
Jul 22, 2026
The FIFA World Cup is over, but with the 2027 Super Bowl and 2028 Olympics on the horizon, Los Angeles’ mega-event spree is just beginning. Paul Krekorian, a former LA City councilmember and now head of the mayor’s Office of Major Events, has declared the World Cup a triumph for the city.
“Even some of the naysayers about the ’28 [Olympic] games,” he told The New York Times, “will have to look at the unmitigated success of the World Cup here in Los Angeles and say, 'OK, now I understand what you’ve been talking about, when you talk about the benefit of major events. Now I get how this is beneficial to Angelenos.'”
As one of those so-called “naysayers,” I disagree. LA’s World Cup experience reinforces concerns about the city’s ongoing efforts to bring one sports mega event after another to the region. Hosting major events always gobbles up public resources that could otherwise be directed toward pressing needs, while host cities under pressure to sparkle on camera often violate residents’ rights.
The people paid to organize these big events, like Krekorian, love to repeat myths about mega-event benefits while pooh-poohing questions about the costs. But saying, "No" to more mega events is saying, "Yes’ to a city that puts residents ahead of corporate sponsors. It’s saying, "Yes" to a city that puts long-term planning ahead of last-minute scrambling.
The host committee’s human rights listicle fails to acknowledge that mega events’ own massive security apparatuses often threaten residents’ rights and safety.
Bidding to host one major sports event after another is the explicit goal of the LA Sports and Entertainment Commission (LASEC), a little-known but influential organization that acts as the local host committee for both the FIFA World Cup and the Super Bowl.
As LA’s World Cup host committee, LASEC has refused to publish the host city contract with FIFA. That means Angelenos do not know who exactly is paying—and how much they’re paying—for the significant additional city and county-run security, transportation, and sanitation services that come with hosting. Refusing to disclose that information is shady business. What is LASEC hiding? (Probably at least the fact that taxpayers are footing a large bill.) If LASEC leaders show such little regard for basic transparency, why should residents allow them to continue shaping the region’s commitments?
Because World Cup hosts have a record of violating human rights as they prepare for and host the mega event, each 2026 host committee was supposed to develop a plan to proactively protect human rights. LA’s long-overdue “plan” turned out to be a list of existing laws and hotlines. Several local advocacy groups have concluded that human rights were an afterthought for LASEC.
The host committee’s human rights listicle fails to acknowledge that mega events’ own massive security apparatuses often threaten residents’ rights and safety. On the day of the first game in the US, for example, snipers in military fatigues sat on rooftops about a mile from the temporarily renamed “Los Angeles Stadium,” pointing rifles down in the direction of Black and Latino kids playing soccer at a street festival. Over LA’s eight game days, the area around the stadium was teeming with local, state, and federal police. Some prevented local residents from accessing their own homes; some hassled and ticketed street vendors; and others monitored the area’s extensive (and expanding) AI-powered surveillance systems, technology that has been denounced by privacy and human rights organizations. Before and during the World Cup, federal agents conducted multiple raids on a LA city park, one where homelessness and drug use are visible. The raids allegedly targeted drug trafficking networks but have had the effects of displacing vulnerable individuals and disrupting essential harm reduction services. It seems likely these spectacular policing operations were timed with the park’s World Cup watch parties in mind.
The militarization of relatively small urban areas for the World Cup offers us just a taste of the much larger, more invasive operations Angelenos can expect to see with the 2028 Olympics, as police forces try to “secure” more of the region. Unfortunately, like LASEC, LA28 is showing little appetite to take human rights seriously. Its own months-late “human rights strategy” suggests unsheltered Angelenos will be displaced from event areas, a recipe for trampling on human rights. The strategy does not mention Immigration and Customs Enforcement once, even though ICE will be a core part of Olympic security operations. While there were few reports of ICE around the Los Angeles Stadium for the World Cup, ICE arrests surged across LA and the nation while we consumed the beautiful game. ICE’s efforts will be more concentrated on LA for the Olympics.
Krekorian talks up the benefits of hosting major events. The meager “legacy” projects promoted by LA’s World Cup Host Committee—26 community grants, two volunteer days, and one soccer clinic—reflects a paradigm shift from past World Cup and Olympic host cities that promised large-scale urban transformation as legacy projects. While it’s good that LA leaders aren’t overpromising at the same scale and public expense, we’re now left with a new question: Without marquee legacy investments, what justifies the financial and social costs of hosting?
LASEC argues that mega events bring lasting economic benefits, but these claims have been consistently debunked by economists. The assertion that events generate a long-term tourism boost? There’s little evidence of that for already popular destinations like LA. The promise of a short-term bump in tourist spending? Mega events attract sports-loving tourists but actually deter other potential visitors. So while attendees spend a lot of money at stadiums and multinational hotels, other cultural attractions and businesses struggle during big events. Just ask the Louvre about the Paris 2024 Olympics. During this World Cup, much like for the 2022 Super Bowl, the owners and staff of several local businesses near the Los Angeles Stadium told me game days were bad for business, as their regular customers stayed away to avoid chaotic traffic.
Beyond one-off grants and volunteer days, LA’s World Cup “legacy” boils down to intangibles, like the moments of collective effervescence and the sense of witnessing history. These intangibles are why I love watching the World Cup. But they do not justify the costs of hosting.
LASEC is unwilling to be transparent with the public and uninterested in grappling seriously with human rights concerns. This World Cup has not demonstrated that mega events generate substantive benefits that warrant the immense expenditure of city and county resources. LA must put a stop to LASEC’s plans to continue diverting public resources to one mega event after another.
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Are We Already Living in Trump's Police State?
The unaccountable killings, the show trials, the informant bounties, the door knocks over emails, the leader’s praetorian guard, the captured press, the rewritten history, and now the reach for the ballots themselves: Every component is now built, tested, and humming.
Jul 12, 2026
Tuesday morning in Houston, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo did what he’d done nearly every morning for 35 years. He woke at 5:00 am, kissed his wife goodbye, loaded his van, and drove off to pick up his construction crew in Magnolia Park, the neighborhood that’s anchored Houston’s Mexican American community for a century.
He’d raised three sons in that city; they became a teacher and two engineers. He had no criminal record, and he was partway through the legal process of getting a work permit, biometrics and fingerprints already done.
By 7:00 am he was lying face down on Canal Street with a bullet in his abdomen, crying out for help in Spanish while a federal agent knelt over him talking on the phone. He died at Ben Taub Hospital, the same hospital where two of his sons were born. The Harris County medical examiner has ruled the manner of his death a “homicide.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) says he rammed their vehicle and “weaponized” his van to run down an officer, who fired in self-defense. His family says he almost certainly thought the unmarked cars tailing him were thieves after his work tools, because the men following him wore no insignia identifying them as law enforcement.
What we still have, and what the DDR and the Third Reich did not, is one more election in which the machine’s operators can be stripped of their power by the people they’re trying to frighten.
The League of United Latin American Citizens says photographs of the vehicles show little visible damage, which is a strange thing for a van that supposedly rammed a law enforcement vehicle hard enough to justify lethal force. David Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute reviewed newly surfaced footage and concluded it appears to show ICE initiating contact with Salgado Araujo’s vehicle, not the other way around; Norm Ornstein looked at the same evidence and called it “cold-blooded murder.”
The federal government has released no body camera footage, no dash camera video, and no photos of the damage it claims exists. The three eyewitnesses who were in the van, including Salgado Araujo’s own brother, are in ICE custody and can’t speak out. The Harris County District Attorney is trying to investigate, but her office says access to key evidence “remains under federal control.”
The president of Mexico announced this week that her government will pursue legal action against the United States over the killing. The historical inversion packed into that sentence is complete: Mexico is now appealing to international bodies to protect its citizens from American police violence.
Which brings us to the question people keep asking me on my radio show and on social media: “Are we in a police state yet?” And the question underneath it, the one that really matters: “How would we know?”
I lived in Germany for years, working with Salem International, some of that time in the little village of Höchheim hard up against the East German border, where the guard towers and the death strip were part of the landscape you saw on your way to buy bread.
I crossed through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin in 1986 and felt what a mature police state does to ordinary people: the lowered voices indoors, the glance over the shoulder before anybody said anything real. (If you’ve never experienced that world, watch the brilliant film The Lives of Others; it captures the East German surveillance state better than anything else on film.)
My spiritual mentor and employer in Germany, Gottfried Müller, had been an intelligence officer in Adolf Hitler’s army who renounced Nazism, was captured by the British in Iran, and spent most of the war in prison; he devoted the rest of his life to peace work.
And my dear old friend Armin Lehmann, who was the teenage Hitler Youth courier in the Führerbunker who delivered the news to Hitler that the war was lost (I still have a picture of him with Hitler, that’s on the cover of his book), spent his last decades in America as a peace activist.
Both men told me essentially the same story about how it began. It started getting scary, they noted, when the regime began to explicitly come after verbotener Gedanke, “forbidden thought.” For example, the radio stations, they said, used to encourage ordinary Germans to call in—to the shows and to the police—and “out” their neighbors who weren’t sufficiently loyal to the regime. Informing became one of the highest expressions of patriotism.
The Germans even have a word for the process by which their entire society was brought into line during 1933 and 1934: as Timothy Snyder notes, it’s Gleichschaltung, a coordination, a synchronization.
Germany didn’t become a police state in a day, and there was never an announcement.
There was just a series of Fridays, each one slightly worse than the last, until one day the question, “Are we in a police state?” had become dangerous to ask out loud.
So instead of waiting for an announcement that’s never coming, let’s do what Herr Müller would have done and run through the inventory necessary to create a fascist police state:
1. A police state is a nation where the police answer to the leader rather than to the law, and where nobody outside the leader’s circle is permitted to hold them accountable. It’s a nation where they can arrest, beat, torture, imprison, and even kill with both anonymity and impunity.
In January, ICE officer Jonathan Ross reportedly shot Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, through the window of her car in Minneapolis, and Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, on a public street days later. Within hours, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was calling both dead Americans “domestic terrorists,” a slander she refused six times under oath to retract.
Murder is a state crime, and in America state investigators have always worked police shootings alongside the feds. Not this time. The FBI agreed to a joint investigation with Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension the morning Good was killed, then reversed itself the same day after President Donald Trump declared Minnesota officials “crooked.”
Federal agents physically blocked state investigators holding a valid judicial warrant from the scene of the Pretti shooting. Federal prosecutors who wanted to pursue the Good case as a civil rights matter were pressured until they resigned. Today, Good’s car sits shrink-wrapped and unexamined in an FBI warehouse in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, and the state has been forced to sue the federal government just to learn the names of the agents who killed two of its citizens.
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty called the categorical withholding of all evidence “unprecedented in American history.” Now the same machinery has closed around the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. It won’t be the last time.
2. A police state imprisons its dissidents, and it makes the sentences spectacular so everyone else gets the message.
On June 23, federal judges in Fort Worth sentenced eight members of a local book club who held a July 4, 2025 protest outside the Prairieland ICE detention center to a combined 450 years in prison, a figure the Justice Department bragged about in its own press release. Benjamin Song, who fired at an officer after the officer drew his weapon on the crowd, got 100 years.
Maricela Rueda, a doula and mother who was acquitted by the jury of every violent count against her, got 70 years in prison. Five others who were likewise acquitted of the attempted murder and firearms charges got 50 years apiece, because prosecutors persuaded the jury that wearing black and using the Signal messaging app constituted “material support for terrorism.”
And Daniel Sanchez Estrada, a Denton teacher and poet who wasn’t even at the protest, got 30 years for moving a box of anti-fascist political zines at his wife’s request, literature the prosecutors admitted was protected by the First Amendment.
For comparison, Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years for orchestrating the seditious conspiracy of January 6, and Trump pardoned him anyway. In this America, leading an armed attempt to overthrow the government earns you a pardon, while a book club that protests ICE earns its members what amounts to life without parole.
3. A police state criminalizes thought itself, as well as any expression of or action on that thought, no matter how “otherwise legal” it may be.
Last September, Trump signed NSPM-7, a national security directive that names “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” as “indicators of domestic terrorism” and calls anti-fascism the “organizing rallying cry” of domestic terrorists. Consider how many of the roughly 75 million Americans who voted against Trump it could plausibly cover.
In December, then-AG Pam Bondi ordered every federal law enforcement agency to mine five years of data for anything “Antifa-related” by average Americans and hand it to the FBI, and directed the bureau to publicize its domestic terrorism call-in tip line and establish a cash reward system for informants.
The FBI has since retooled its roughly 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces and their 4,000-plus personnel toward the American “left” and stood up a new Joint Mission Center that’s investigating the funding of anti-Trump protest movements and payment of bounties while actual crime fighting goes begging.
When Herr Müller and Armin told me about German radio hosts urging listeners to inform on their neighbors, I thought I was hearing history, but it turns out I was hearing a forecast, and the American version pays cash.
4. A police state knocks on your door in reaction to your opinions, should you dare to express them out loud or in print.
In January, a Rochester software professional named David Streever sent a three-paragraph email to then-ICE Director Todd Lyons after watching the videos of ICE killings in Minneapolis.
“You are a monstrous human being and will go down in history as America’s Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher,” he wrote. “You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.”
The email contains no threat of any kind, just a prophecy about a man’s conscience, the kind of furious letter Americans have been writing to powerful officials since before there was a Constitution to protect the practice.
Five months later, two federal agents rang his doorbell while he was in Finland with his 7-year-old daughter and handed his wife a document headed “WARNING NOTICE” and “YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW.” When he flew home, an agent showed up at his New York City hotel, a hotel whose location his wife had never disclosed, meaning Homeland Security found him anyway.
He’s now suing with the help of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which could, like the Southern Poverty Law Center and multiple DC law firms, cause the Trump regime to put FIRE in their crosshairs next.
That same week, federal agents confronted Paigelynne Gonyea while she was working the polls during New York’s primaries, over an Instagram post about the already-publicly-identified officer who killed Renee Good. Federal agents questioned this poll worker, at her polling place, during an election, about her opinion of a federal agent who killed an American citizen on live video for the world to see.
5. A police state builds a security force loyal to the leader and his oligarch cronies rather than the nation.
Pentagon documents reviewed by The Washington Post describe a new National Guard “quick reaction force” of roughly 23,500 troops across all 50 states, trained for domestic riot control, with the first units ordered ready by last January 1 and the rest by April, timed neatly to the midterms.
Trump has claimed “unfettered authority” to deploy troops into American cities, boasting, “I could send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, I can send anybody I wanted,” while governors are cut out of the chain of command and Pete Hegseth has barred military personnel from even talking to Congress without approval.
Vladimir Putin built exactly this in 2016; he called it Rosgvardiya, and its job was never national defense but regime preservation. Hitler built his version too, and it started small, as a “protection detail,” which in German is Schutsstaffel. History remembers it as the SS.
6. A police state needs a compliant press, and you don’t have to nationalize the networks when you can simply arrange for a friendly morbidly rich oligarch to buy them.
Last month the Justice Department approved Paramount’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, placing CNN, CBS News, HBO, and two major studios under David Ellison, Larry Ellison’s nepo-baby and a Trump ally who, The Wall Street Journal reported, privately assured administration officials he’d make “sweeping changes” at CNN if he got that network, too.
7. A police state rewrites the past, because people who remember accurate history make poor subjects. As George Orwell wrote of fascism, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
In March of last year Trump signed an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” and the sanitizing began: The National Park Service was ordered to strip signs and exhibits about slavery from national parks, including “The Scourged Back,” the famous photograph of the whip-scarred back of a man named Peter who escaped enslavement in Louisiana, and materials about John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry.
In Philadelphia, the administration went to court to replace the interpretive panels at the President’s House telling the story of the nine human beings George Washington enslaved there.
Trump himself complained that the Smithsonian was “OUT OF CONTROL” because its museums discussed “how bad Slavery was,” and this past weekend, on the Fourth of July no less, the White House released a report declaring that the National Museum of American History “cannot be trusted” to tell America’s story, faulting its director for, among other sins, wanting to move the museum away from an “America First mentality.”
That’s the same slogan under which 20,000 American Nazi sympathizers rallied at Madison Square Garden in 1939 beneath swastikas and a three-story portrait of George Washington, a chapter of our history this crowd would clearly prefer you never learn.
Herr Müller and Armin lived through the original version of this, too: Within months of taking power the Nazis had burned the books, purged the universities and museums of “un-German” scholarship, and rewritten the textbooks so that German children would grow up inside a glorious past that never existed. Control what people remember and you control what they’ll accept.
8. And finally, a police state controls the vote.
In January, FBI agents raided Fulton County’s election warehouse and seized more than 650 boxes of 2020 ballots and voter rolls on an affidavit that omitted the state findings debunking its own claims, with then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on scene and Trump personally on the phone with the agents.
On Tuesday, the same day Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed, the Justice Department sent letters to the election chiefs of all 50 states threatening each of them individually with criminal prosecution if noncitizens are found on their rolls, giving them five days to respond, this after the department lost 11 straight court cases trying to seize those very rolls.
On Thursday, citing last week’s Supreme Court decision giving him essentially unlimited firing power, Trump removed from office all of the members of the Federal Election Assistance Commission, an independent, bipartisan agency that, along with the now-paralyzed Federal Election Commission, have the power to call out election fraud; illegal campaign tactics and spending; and vote-rigging when it’s committed by candidates, parties, or state or local officials. Both are now effectively shut down.
And when senators asked, under oath, whether ICE agents would be kept away from polling places this November, both Kristi Noem and her successor and former plumber Markwayne Mullin refused to rule it out, while the White House press secretary said she “can’t guarantee” it and Steve Bannon openly muses that ICE at the airports was a “test run” for ICE at the polls.
So, are we in a police state yet?
Armin and Herr Müller taught me that we’re asking the wrong question—or at least at the wrong moment—because nobody ever wakes up one morning and notices, “Gee, I guess I’m inside a police state…”
Instead, a police state gets assembled around you, one component at a time, while officials assure you that each component is perfectly normal and even necessary to “maintain order” or, more insidiously, to “preserve freedom.”
Milton Mayer, in his 1955 book They Thought They Were Free, described how good, decent Germans came to accept fascism. He was a Chicago reporter who, following World War II, went to Germany to interview 10 “average Germans” to try to learn how such a terrible thing could have happened and, hopefully, thus prevent it from ever happening here.
The stories he heard are so familiar to me, as I heard the same things over and over when living in Germany in the 1980s while talking with people who’d kept their heads down through the 1930s and early 1940s just to survive day-to-day:
“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people,” a German college professor told Mayer, “little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security....”
As Mayer’s professor friend noted, and Mayer recorded in his book:
This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter...
To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop… [O]ne no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.
In this conversation, Mayer’s friend suggests that he wasn’t making an excuse for not resisting the rise of the fascists but was simply pointing out what happens when you keep your head down and just assume that ultimately the good guys will win:
“You see,” Mayer’s friend continued, “One doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next…"
"But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D."
“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.”
In a police state, everything seems the same, Mayer’s friend told him. You still go to work, cash your paycheck, have friends over, go to the movies, enjoy a meal out. The regime even backs down from time to time, making things seem ever more normal. Little victories, you tell yourself.
Except, as the German professor told Mayer, they’re not. One day, he said, you inevitably realize that:
The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.
But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.
So, here we are. The unaccountable killings, the show trials, the informant bounties, the door knocks over emails, the leader’s praetorian guard, the captured press, the rewritten history, and now the reach for the ballots themselves: Every component is now built, tested, and humming.
But what we still have, and what the DDR and the Third Reich did not, is one more election in which the machine’s operators can be stripped of their power by the people they’re trying to frighten.
That’s precisely why they’re working so hard on the machinery of that election, and precisely why the single most subversive act available to a free American this year is to vote, and to help everyone you know do the same.
So call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your senators and representative to defend state authority over elections; demand independent investigations of the killings of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo; and put a statutory ban on federal agents at the polls.
Check your registration right now at vote.org, because voter roll purges are already happening in red states.
Sign up to be a poll worker in your county; they want poll workers intimidated, and the answer to that is more of us, not fewer.
Program the Election Protection hotline into your phone, 866-OUR-VOTE, and share it.
Support the people fighting this in court, from FIRE to the Blue state attorneys general.
And if this piece helped you see the machinery used to construct a police state more clearly, please share it and support independent media like my Hartmann Report, because a free press that can’t be bought by billionaires is one component of democracy they haven’t figured out how to seize.
At least not yet.
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'Abolish ICE,' Says Mamdani After Agent Kills Houston Man Lorenzo Salgado Araujo
Salgado "called Houston home for 35 years," said New York's democratic socialist mayor. "On Tuesday, an ICE agent shot and killed him."
Jul 09, 2026
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Thursday renewed his call to "abolish ICE" after a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot a man in Texas earlier this week.
"Lorenzo Salgado Araujo called Houston home for 35 years. On Tuesday, an ICE agent shot and killed him," Mamdani said on social media. "His family learned of his death from a video before anyone bothered to knock on their door."
"New York City stands with the Salgado family in demanding a full, independent investigation and real accountability," the mayor added. "To the Salgado family and any immigrant family in this city living in fear: We grieve with you, and we will continue to stand beside you in the pursuit of justice."
More than 1,000 people gathered in Houston's East End on Wednesday evening to denounce ICE and remember Salgado, a 52-year-old married father of three originally from Mexico who, according to relatives, was in the process of legalizing his status in the United States.
Salgado's son, school teacher Ronaldo Salgado, said that his father had "dedicated his life to giving his family the American dream."
Salgado was driving in the Magnolia Park neighborhood to pick up his construction crew on Tuesday morning when an unidentified ICE agent fatally shot him during an enforcement operation. ICE claimed that Salgado tried to evade arrest and threatened agents with his vehicle, but his family, civil rights advocates, and community leaders strongly dispute that account, pointing to surveillance footage and eyewitness accounts that they argue undermine the agency's narrative.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told The New York Times late on Thursday that neither Salgado nor any of his three passengers were the targets of ICE enforcement, but that they drew agents' attention because one of them resembled a wanted man from Guatemala.
Democratic lawmakers and civil rights groups have joined Salgado's relatives in demanding an independent investigation of his killing.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced Thursday that her government plans to file criminal complaints in the United States in connection with 14 Mexican nationals who died in ICE custody. Sheinbaum added that Salgado's killing "is not only sad and regrettable, but also appears to have been targeted."
On-duty officers from ICE and other Department of Homeland Security agencies have fatally shot at least four other people during President Donald Trump's deadly second-term crackdown on undocumented immigrants: Silverio Villegas González of Mexico and US citizens Ruben Ray Martinez, Renee Good, and Alex Pretti.
At least dozens of people have also died in ICE custody or shortly after being released during Trump's second term. Last month, ICE announced that it was rescinding a 2021 Biden administration policy requiring congressional notification and an investigation whenever a detainee died within 30 days of their release.
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'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.
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— 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."
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Rep. Joaquin Castro Says ICE Tried to Deport Families to Venezuela After Massive Quakes
"I am calling on the Trump administration to halt all deportations to Venezuela and to shut down the Dilley trailer prison," the Texas Democrat said.
Jul 01, 2026
Congressman Joaquin Castro on Wednesday accused US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials of moving to deport families to Venezuela immediately after last week's devastating earthquakes that rocked the country, killing nearly 2,000 people and wounding more than 10,000 others.
"Just hours after the devastating earthquakes in Venezuela that killed over 1,900 people, ICE attempted to deport children and families from the Dilley trailer prison to Venezuela," Castro (D-Texas) said on social media, referring to the Camp East Montana detention center at Fortb Bliss in El Paso, Texas.
"They were woken up in the middle of the night and sent to Arizona on their way to Venezuela," the congressman continued. "The families were ultimately sent back to Dilley, but worry that they could be deported at any time. It is unthinkable to send children and families, who have committed no crimes, into a country plunged into chaos by natural disaster."
Castro noted that "last week, 146 men, women, and children were deported back home to Venezuela hours before the earthquakes—many are suspected to have been killed."
On June 24, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake centered in San Felipe, Yaracuy—about 100 miles west of Caracas—was followed less than a minute later by a 7.5-magnitude temblor, whose epicenter was also in Yaracuy. Tens of thousands of people are still missing, an estimated 1,000 buildings are destroyed, and basic essential services like water and electricity remain offline in many affected areas.
"These actions are cruel and un-American," Castro said of the post-quake deportations. "I am calling on the Trump administration to halt all deportations to Venezuela and to shut down the Dilley trailer prison."
Camp East Montana, the nation's largest immigrant detention center, is operated by private prison profiteer Amentum Services Inc., which “has a history of health, safety, and other violations of federal law,” according to the consumer advocacy watchdog Public Citizen.
Kyle Virgien, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Prison Project, called Camp East Montana “nothing short of a civil rights catastrophe.”
The ACLU and other groups are suing ICE and other federal agencies and officials over what the plaintiffs call "inhumane" conditions at the camp.
“Since the day it opened, the facility has repeatedly made headlines for horrific rights violations and even the deaths of three detained people, yet ICE has still evaded accountability for its conduct,” Virgien said.
Castro, who has visited Camp East Montana several times, said after touring the facility in May that “when we look back at this era in American history, we will look back in shame… of the human rights abuses, most particularly against children."
Activists, including Japanese Americans interned by the US during World War II—one of which was located at Fort Bliss—have called for the closure of Camp East Montana and other ICE facilities, which many have compared with the concentration camps in which they were imprisoned in the 1940s.
After the earthquakes, advocates have also renewed demands for the US to end its economic sanctions, which have devastated Venezuela's economy and have been blamed for the deaths of tens of thousands of Venezuelans.
Earlier this year, President Donald Trump ordered an illegal invasion of Venezuela and the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro, who the US administration accuses of dubious narcoterrorism-related crimes.
While the Trump administration has issued narrow exemptions from sanctions to companies seeking to profit from Venezuela’s political crisis and copious natural resources—primarily oil—these waivers have not delivered broad relief to the people who need it most.
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'This Is Corruption': Trump Bought Stock in Taser Maker Just Before ICE Contract Notice
"There's a reason why Trump fired the ethics watchdog who oversaw corruption and conflicts of interest in the executive branch," said one critic.
Jun 29, 2026
US President Donald Trump bought up to $5 million worth of stock in the corporation that makes Taser electroshock guns, police body cameras, and policing software two weeks before his administration announced the solicitation of a $220 million contract apparently tailored to the company's product and services, CNBC revealed Monday.
CNBC's Luke Falcon reported that Trump disclosed the purchase of between $1-5 million in Axon Enterprise stock on February 10. Two weeks later, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced it was seeking a five-year, $220 million deal for 17,800 conductive energy weapons, unlimited cartridges, and support services.
Axon Enterprise stock skyrocketed over 22% immediately following ICE's announcement, although they're down more than 25% this year.
According to Falcon:
If finalized, the purchase would more than quadruple ICE’s current Taser arsenal, replacing about 4,300 devices in the field, according to the February notice.
The notice refers to an upgrade to the “T10,” Axon’s “Taser 10" model, to replace ICE’s older “X26P/X2 Tasers,” which are also Axon-made. It also specifies features associated with Taser 10, including a 45-foot range and 10 individually targeted probes—all specifications and capabilities that procurement experts say effectively foreclose other bidders.
"The concern is that [Trump] bought into a company whose business could grow if his own administration expands immigration enforcement," Jordan Libowitz, vice president for communications at the liberal-leaning watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told CNBC.
Deborah Fleischaker—a former acting ICE chief of staff during the Biden administration who is now a senior immigration policy adviser at the Latino advocacy group UnidosUS—told Falcon that the timing of Trump's purchase "raises red flags."
“It is not smart to buy stock in a company that was impacted by the decisions you would be making at the agency,” she said. “I would have stayed far, far away from actual impropriety, or the appearance of impropriety.”
The ICE contract notice came as the agency and other Department of Homeland Security divisions were set to reap tens of billions of dollars in new funding thanks to Republicans' so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
White House spokesperson Anna Kelly insisted that "there are no conflicts of interest" and that Trump's investments are managed by independent third parties.
"But the sequence raises a public integrity question: A president with a newly disclosed financial interest in a law enforcement technology company led an administration expanding immigration enforcement when one of its agencies sought a major purchase of products closely associated with that company," The Intellectualist contended on Monday.
Campaign for New York Health executive director Melanie D'Arrigo said on social media Monday: "Trump bought up to $5 million in stock of a company seeking an ICE contract that specifies products unique to that company. This is corruption. There's a reason why Trump fired the ethics watchdog who oversaw corruption and conflicts of interest in the executive branch."
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee and several watchdog groups have published running lists of dozens of instances of alleged and proven conflicts of interest and other corruption that have enriched Trump and his family by billions of dollars during his second term in office alone.
On Sunday, The New York Times reported that Trump and US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick reached a billion-dollar agreement with Kazakhstan to develop of one of the world's largest untapped deposits of tungsten, a key metal used to make missile warheads, fighter jets, computer chips, and other products.
According to the Times, within weeks of the deal taking shape, investors associated with Dominari Securities—a firm partly owned by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, the president's sons—acquired a 20% stake in an entity connected to the Kazakhstan tungsten project. Lutnick's sons also reportedly raised capital for one of the project's investors, a role for which they stand to make millions of dollars.
"The corruption is breathtaking," former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich said Monday on social media in response to the Times report.
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'Criminalizing Dissent': Alarm Grows Over Extreme Prison Terms for Texas ICE Protesters
“Now anyone engaged in basic protests with the wrong political beliefs can be labeled a domestic terrorist, when they have no intention of violence," said one attorney.
Jun 26, 2026
Alarm and outrage mounted this week following a federal judge's lengthy prison sentences for a group of activists falsely accused by the Trump administration of being members of a nonexistent "North Texas Antifa Cell," with some observers calling the extreme punishments—including 30 years for moving a box of constitutionally protected pamphlets—a test case for criminalizing dissent.
Eight members of the "Prairieview Nine"—part of a larger group of activists who staged a July 4, 2025 protest outside a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Alvarado, Texas—were sentenced Tuesday in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas in Fort Worth to between 30-100 years imprisonment.
Benjamin Song, who was convicted of shooting Alvarado Police Lt. Thomas Gross, was sentenced to 100 years for attempted murder of a law enforcement officer and lesser offenses, including discharging a firearm during a violent crime, conspiracy to use and using an explosive, and rioting. Song, a former US Marine, contends that he shot Gross in self-defense after the officer drew his gun first.
The “explosives” in question were fireworks brought to the July 4 protest to show solidarity with people detained by ICE.
Savanna Batten, Zachary Evetts, Autumn Hill, Bradford Morris, and Elizabeth Soto got 50 years each for rioting, providing material support to terrorists, and conspiracy to use and using an explosive.
Maricela Rueda was sentenced to 70 years for rioting, providing material support to terrorists, conspiracy to use and using an explosive, and conspiracy to conceal documents. Those documents were leftist pamphlets protected by the First Amendment.
Rueda's husband, Daniel “Des” Rolando Sanchez Estrada, was hit with a 30-year prison sentence for conspiracy to conceal documents for moving a box full of the pamphlets after speaking with his wife. He did not attend the protest.
Judge Reed O’Connor, an appointee of former President George W. Bush and a favorite of right-wing judge shoppers, told the court that the lengthy sentences are meant to “send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology” with the defendants, according to one observer of Tuesday’s proceedings.
The Prairieland sentences were more severe than the longest prison term for the average US murderer or rapist, as well as for the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrectionists—all of whom were later pardoned by President Donald Trump—as well as for convicted child sex trafficker and Jeffrey Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.
"What happened on Tuesday, it’s shocking to all of us, devastating to the families, 50- to 100-year sentences," Sufia Khalid, deputy director of the National Security Criminal Defense Center at the Muslim Legal Fund of America and lawyer to one of the Prairieland defendants, told Democracy Now! on Thursday. "Those are essentially life sentences for all of the young people in this case, largely of whom were engaged in nonviolent protest at an ICE detention facility."
A group of anti-ICE protesters in Texas were sentenced to 30 to 100 years in jail on Tuesday, after federal prosecutors accused them of being an "antifa terror cell."
The activists attended a protest and noise demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE jail in Alvarado, Texas.… pic.twitter.com/QxFMPaGsvj
— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) June 25, 2026
Khalid noted that the Department of Justice (DOJ) invoked a rarely used "material support for terrorism" statute that "does not require any connection to a domestic terrorist organization or any kind."
"Any American can be targeted that way now. It does not require ties to antifa or to any domestic terrorist organization," she said. "That’s a dangerous precedent, and what allowed them to stack these charges so high on Tuesday."
The DOJ hailed “the first sentencing of defendants affiliated with antifa following... Trump’s executive order designating the group as a domestic terrorist organization in September 2025" in the wake of the assassination of white supremacist influencer Charlie Kirk—which had nothing to do with antifa, a decentralized and leaderless international ideology opposing fascism that's more of a mindset than a movement.
Later that month, Trump also signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), a directive titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” that focuses exclusively on left-wing activities and mandates a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”
Khalid pointed to the pardoned January 6 insurrectionists, who "were involved in rioting, carrying massive arsenals of weapons, lots of discussions ahead of time—that didn’t exist in this case—about targeting law enforcement, wanting to kill members of Congress, [and] actually storming the Capitol."
"So, we have a massive, unwarranted sentencing disparity here," she said. "What happened in the court in Fort Worth was unconstitutional and should concern everybody in this country in the direction that it is taking us."
Mark Osler, a law professor and sentencing expert at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, told The Guardian on Friday that "the 30-year sentence for Estrada is probably the one that for most people will come closest to shocking the conscience, simply because this is an activity that took place after the harm occurred."
"What happened in the court in Fort Worth was unconstitutional and should concern everybody in this country in the direction that it is taking us."
Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, underscored during a Friday interview in an episode of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting's Counterspin podcast titled "Criminalizing Dissent" that Estrada "wasn't even at the protest."
"He's somebody who allegedly transported a box of pamphlets because his wife was at the protest," Stern said. "And he believed, according to prosecutors, that the box of pamphlets might implicate his wife... so he was concealing evidence."
"Evidence of what?" he continued. "This wasn't a how-to manual... They were zines. They said nothing about this protest, about the Prairieland detention facility, about shooting this police officer... So when they say that he concealed evidence by moving these zines, evidence of what? It's evidence of an ideology. It's evidence of somebody's reading habits."
"And now they're on the same plane as terrorists, as [Islamic State], according to this administration," Stern added. "It's all pretty absurd. But at the end of the day, we have a Constitution that prohibits people from being locked up for what they think, write, or read, as long as they are not inciting imminent violence. So hopefully the appellate courts will reverse these convictions. But the law is only as good as the people who enforce it."
Jeremy Busby, an incarcerated journalist, wrote on the eve of Estrada's trial that the "homespun zines at issue contain no plans for any shooting, and under normal circumstances, they would clearly be deemed constitutionally protected speech under the First Amendment."
"But the government’s concealment theory only makes sense if it views merely having the literature as criminal," he argued. “Criminalizing possession of literature is a miscarriage of justice, whether in prison or at a protester’s husband’s parents’ house. If the Trump administration is allowed to send Estrada to prison for the crime of possessing literature, members of society at large can be subjected to the same pernicious rules as the incarcerated.”
Amber Lowrey, the sister of Prairieland defendant Savanna Batten—who was sentenced to 50 years behind bars for material support for terrorism and conspiracy to use and using "explosives" (fireworks)—told The Guardian before Batten's trial that the Trump administration just wants "to make an example of people and silence anyone who... opposes the government."
"They want to silence dissent, criminalize dissent," she added.
Trump administration prosecutors have also invoked NSPM-7 in the case of 15 organizers with the groups Direct Action Minnesota and Black Cat Workers, who are accused of impeding the Department of Homeland Security’s anti-immigrant crackdown in Minneapolis, where US citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti were separately killed earlier this year by ICE and Border Patrol officers.
"We live under a fascist state where ICE agents can murder us with impunity, yet we can go to prison for 50 years for protesting," socialist commentator and journalist Ryan Knight said Thursday on X. "The unjust sentences of the Prairieland protesters violate the First Amendment and infringe on our rights to fight back against a tyrannical government."
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US News Outlet Sues Trump Admin Over Refusal to Release 'Secret List of Activists'
“The government is not allowed to selectively hide information about its actions that impact protected First Amendment activity,” said a member of the legal team representing The Intercept in its legal challenge.
Jun 24, 2026
The progressive US media outlet The Intercept filed a lawsuit on Wednesday seeking to compel the Trump administration to hand over documents related to claims by federal officials of a secret database used to track protesters and others dubiously deemed "domestic terrorists."
The Intercept is asking the US District Court for the Southern District of New York to force the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to release material sought via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request it filed on February 23.
“It’s not illegal to monitor the activity of immigration agents inside your community,” Intercept editor-in-chief Ben Muessig said on Wednesday. “What is illegal is the US government’s secret list of activists—and its refusal to turn over information about that database to the American public.”
The Intercept's FOIA request came amid mounting evidence that, "by using photos, video, license plates, hotel check-in information, and more to create a database of lawful protestors, the government may be taking concerning action affecting the rights of those exercising their First Amendment rights," as plaintiff's counsel Democracy Forward noted in a statement announcing the lawsuit.
The Intercept's complaint cites a video posted on social media on January 23 that shows a federal immigration agent telling a legal observer in Maine during a protest against the deadly US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) anti-immigrant crackdown that "we have a nice little database, and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist."
According to the lawsuit:
In a court hearing regarding immigration enforcement actions in Minnesota, attorneys for the state of Minnesota reportedly included an exhibit of a recording of a federal agent saying, “Well, this person is gonna have a hard time traveling from now on" after taking a photo of an ICE observer's license plate. The press has reported that “a memo sent earlier this month to agents temporarily assigned to the city asked them to ‘capture all images, license plates, identifications, and general information on hotels, agitators, protestors, etc., so we can capture it all in one consolidated form.'"
Democracy Forward noted that "in a separate court case, a civilian observing ICE submitted a declaration stating that her [Transportation Security Administration] PreCheck and Global Entry were revoked three days after an encounter with immigration enforcement officials."
"Additionally, at least one prominent supporter of transgender rights has reportedly had her Global Entry and US passport canceled in the past few months," the group added.
Not included in the lawsuit are remarks made by White House "border czar" Tom Homan during a January interview with Fox News, during which he said that he aimed to “create a database where those people that are arrested for interference, impeding, and assault" and "make them famous.”
Democracy Forward president and CEO Skye Perryman said Wednesday, "The government is not allowed to selectively hide information about its actions that impact protected First Amendment activity."
"The surveillance and retaliation being reported would be egregious violations of core constitutional principles," she added, "and we are honored to represent a storied news organization as it fights to demand the public have access to the information we need to protect our democracy.”
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Report Details 'Human Rights Crisis' Wrought by Trump ICE Surge in Minnesota
“The federal government sent hordes of masked, armed agents to grab people off the street, whisk them away in shackles, and abuse those who sought to bear witness,” Human Rights Watch said of the deadly blitz.
Jun 18, 2026
Human Rights Watch on Thursday published a scathing report detailing how President Donald Trump "caused a human rights crisis" in Minnesota by ordering the deadly federal invasion of the Twin Cities in service of the administration's mass deportation agenda.
HRW called Operation Metro Surge, launched by Trump last December, "an unprecedented deployment of thousands of federal immigration agents and officers to the state of Minnesota," including members of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
"The Trump administration claimed that Operation Metro Surge was designed to keep Americans safe and often stated that it was targeting noncitizens with violent criminal histories," the report states. "But the operation itself caused significant harm, and nearly two out of three immigrants arrested by ICE during Operation Metro Surge had no prior US criminal history whatsoever."
At least three people have been killed in connection with the operation. ICE agent Jonathan Ross fatally shot Renée Good, a 37-year-old US citizen, in Minneapolis on January 7. A week later, 36-year-old Nicaraguan detainee Victor Manuel Díaz, who was arrested during the operation, became the third person to die at the notorious East Montana concentration camp in Texas. On January 24, CBP officer Raymundo Gutierrez and Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa shot and killed nurse Alex Pretti, 37, also in Minneapolis.
"Federal agents shot a third Minneapolis resident and pulled guns on dozens more," the report continues. "Agents also violently smashed car windows without justification, physically threw people to the ground who were not resisting arrest, and deployed chemical irritants and flash-bang grenades on dozens of occasions, sometimes at close range and without warning, resulting in injuries, including to journalists."
Furthermore, federal agents "unlawfully arrested and detained hundreds; engaged in racial profiling, harassment, and surveillance; and terrorized Minnesotans, chilling their rights to freedom of expression and assembly, and impacting their rights to education and health, among others," HRW said, adding that "residents faced further abuses when they collectively acted to protest, prevent, and stop these violations of their rights."
The HRW report calls for an immediate end to abusive federal enforcement operations in Minnesota; independent investigations into alleged unlawful killings, racial profiling, arbitrary arrests, excessive force, and other rights violations; and full accountability for officials responsible.
“The federal government sent hordes of masked, armed agents to grab people off the street, whisk them away in shackles, and abuse those who sought to bear witness,” Reagan Williams, HRW's crisis and conflict researcher, said in a statement. “Minnesotans mobilized to protest, to document abuse, and to provide critical aid to one another. National-level action is needed to ensure accountability, end ongoing abuses, remedy the harm, and prevent another crisis of this scale.”
“Operation Metro Surge put the violent and abusive practices of these agencies on full display,” Williams added. “We have clear proof of how they operate when impunity prevails, and we need to urgently chart a new way forward through accountability and structural reforms that put an end to these abuses.”
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