Before you read this post, I want you to try to recall the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard someone say. Go ahead and hold that memory in the back of your head.
Perhaps by now you’re tiring of all of these posts on America’s measles problem that we’ve endured for over a year now. This is so passe, you might be thinking. So, you know, 1990s. And you would have been right before 2025 and the installation of a gravel-mouthed anti-vaxxer as the Secretary of HHS. Sadly, 2025 saw more cases of measles in America than at anytime in the previous several decades and a current outbreak in South Carolina, one which is already spreading to far-flung states across the country, has been left unaddressed.
In my last post on this topic, I complained that those in charge of these agencies are “barely talking about this.” Now that one of those leaders has talked about it publicly, however, I think I understand why they were kept in silence previously.
After a year of ongoing measles outbreaks that have sickened more than 2,400 people, the United States is poised to lose its status as a measles-free country. However, the newly appointed principal deputy director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Ralph Abraham, said he was unbothered by the prospect at a briefing for journalists this week.
“It’s just the cost of doing business with our borders being somewhat porous for global and international travel,” Abraham said. “We have these communities that choose to be unvaccinated. That’s their personal freedom.”
Okay, where to begin? Let’s just start by pointing out that Abraham is a long-time anti-vaxxer. He has advocated for alternative treatments to all kinds of diseases for which we have actual medicine. He has also advocated for natural immunity over vaccines on the regular. Now that this clown is nominally running the CDC, while America is facing its worst measles crises in over thirty years, the response is as flippant as, “Shit happens because, you know, immigrants.”
“When you hear somebody like Abraham say ‘the cost of doing business,’ how can you be more callous,” said pediatrician and vaccine specialist Paul Offit, in an online discussion hosted by the health blog Inside Medicine on Jan. 20. “Three people died of measles last year in this country,” Offit added. “We eliminated this virus in the year 2000 — eliminated it. Eliminated circulation of the most contagious human infection. That was something to be proud of.”
That would be idiotic even if Abraham were right. But he’s not right. As CBS points out in its post, we’ve always had occasional infections from foreign visitors and sources in America, but nothing like these outbreaks. Only 10% of infections over the last year or so came from outside the country. The rest were domestic spread. And while border policy surely has ebbed and flowed over the past 30 years, there wasn’t some drastic change made in the last year that would explain any of this away.
Now, in all fairness, Abraham has also added that getting two doses of the MMR vaccine is the most effective way to prevent a measles infection. I’m sure saying it was painful for him, but he did it. Still, because the stupidest possible people are running our country right now, the CDC is also studying the genomic makeup of measles infections from different parts of the country. But Timothy, you’re surely saying, that sounds like good science and something they’d use to help fight the disease.
Nope, wrong. They’re desperately trying to show that the outbreaks are from disparate strains to argue that it hasn’t been 12 months of continuous spread of a single strain to claim that we shouldn’t lose our elimination status.
If the CDC’s genomic analyses show that last year’s outbreaks resulted from separate introductions from abroad, political appointees will probably credit Kennedy for saving the country’s status, said Demetre Daskalakis, a former director of the CDC’s national immunization center, who resigned in protest of Kennedy’s actions in August.
And if studies suggest the outbreaks are linked, Daskalakis predicted, the administration will cast doubt on the findings and downplay the reversal of the country’s status: “They’ll say, who cares.”
Indeed, at the briefing, Abraham told a reporter from Stat that a reversal in the nation’s status would not be significant: “Losing elimination status does not mean that the measles would be widespread.”
The phrase “criminal negligence” leaps to mind. That appears to be the work product of our public health officials at the moment. Neglect and attempts to coverup for that neglect on technicalities.
Welcome back, measles. I guess you’ll be staying with us a while.
Trump was always going to target Minnesota and, specifically, the home of its most liberal residents, Minneapolis. Trump hates the state’s governor, Tim Walz. He also hates one of the state’s congressional reps, Ilhan Omar, who was born in Somalia.
This is only part of Trump’s recent hateful statements targeting Somalians, Tim Walz, and Rep. Ilhan Omar:
As an example, hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia are completely taking over the once great State of Minnesota. Somalian gangs are roving the streets looking for “prey” as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone. The seriously retarded Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, does nothing, either through fear, incompetence, or both, while the worst “Congressman/woman” in our Country, Ilhan Omar, always wrapped in her swaddling hijab, and who probably came into the U.S.A. illegally in that you are not allowed to marry your brother, does nothing but hatefully complain about our Country, its Constitution, and how “badly” she is treated, when her place of origin is a decadent, backward, and crime ridden nation, which is essentially not even a country for lack of Government, Military, Police, schools, etc…
That was delivered via Trump’s favorite outlet for his unhinged rants, Truth Social. He followed that up by making these statements where anyone could hear them during a press briefing:
“They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country,” Trump told reporters near the end of a lengthy Cabinet meeting. He added: “Their country is no good for a reason. Your country stinks and we don’t want them in our country.”
[…]
“We can go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way, if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” Trump said. “Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage.”
That put another target on Minnesota’s back. The state is home to nearly a third of the nation’s 260,000 Somalians. It’s not as though they’re here illegally, though.
Almost 58 percent were born in the U.S., and 87 percent of those born elsewhere are naturalized citizens.
Not that any of that matters to Donald Trump or ICE’s collective of masked thugs. So, these are the sort of things that are happening now in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area as Trump’s hatred becomes personified.
Federal agents used chemical irritants to push through an angry crowd that blocked their vehicles as they checked identifications in a heavily Somali neighborhood of Minneapolis on Tuesday, amid the Trump administration’s ongoing crackdown targeting the community.
City Council member Jamal Osman, a Somali American who represents the neighborhood, witnessed the confrontation, as did an Associated Press videographer.
[…]
He also said he spoke with one young Somali American who was dragged to a vehicle, detained and taken to an ICE detention center. There, officials finally looked at his U.S. passport, fingerprinted him, and released him but told him to find his own way home, about 6 miles (10 kilometers) away in snowy weather.
The DHS also made some noise about an arrest that supposedly justified the violent actions taken by ICE officers (who not only deployed chemicals but also arrested two people who were simply recording ICE officers and/or asserting their Fourth Amendment rights). But the statement seems extremely light on facts, as is often the case when DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin decides to open her mouth:
The Department of Homeland Security’s Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said in an emailed statement that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers arrested Jesus Saucedo-Portillo, whom she described as an unauthorized immigrant, on Dec. 6 while he was getting into his vehicle in a campus parking lot.
In a divergence from what school officials have said about the incident, McLaughlin said officers had a warrant and were obstructed by a university administrator and campus security during the encounter.
McLaughlin said Saucedo-Portillo “is a registered sex offender and has a previous arrest for driving while intoxicated.” A search of Minnesota court records by the Minnesota Star Tribune found no record of a DWI case under that name, and Saucedo-Portillo does not appear in the national sex-offender registry.
Some journalists who got an inside look at this operation could have tried to undercut McLaughlin’s narrative about targeted arrests and “worst of the worst.” Instead, NBC News embedded with ICE for a day and ended up generating an article headlined “ICE operation shows the difficulty of immigration arrests amid pushback in frigid Minnesota.”
The article isn’t nearly as bad as the headline, but it allows ICE and their spokespeople to flat out lie about what’s been happening all over this nation, but has most recently focused almost exclusively on cities or states run by members of the Democratic Party.
“It is not an operation targeting the Somali community,” [ICE Acting Executive Director Marcos] Charles said. “We’re looking for people that are here illegally.”
Right. And that’s why the raid that made all the headlines (and generated a handful of bullshit arrests) just happened to have occurred in a neighborhood that is primarily populated by Somalis.
Then there’s this, which is directly contradicted by NBC’s reporting, even if NBC tries to present its observations as supporting Marcos Charles’s assertion:
“The biggest misconception is that we’re out there just randomly arresting people, which we’re not,” Charles said.
[…]
During NBC News’ roughly eight hours with ICE, fewer than a dozen people were arrested despite not being the initial targets of the operation. They just happened to be at the scene when agents showed up.
Given the wording, I would assume eleven people who weren’t ICE targets were arrested. If it were less than that, I assume NBC would have used wording like “ten people” or “less than ten people.” Either way, it’s like more than one “collateral” arrest per hour, which is crazy considering this is an article involving officers griping about the cold keeping people indoors, being prevented from entering homes by property owners multiple times due to the ICE’s lack of actual judicial warrants, and double-tap home search that revealed the targeted person had already fled. The officers decided to arrest the other person there just because.
Minneapolis is pushing back, which is exactly the way it should be. Here’s an incredible recording of anti-ICE protesters shielding a Minneapolis store from being entered by ICE officers, who collectively can’t even explain why they need to enter the building. The officers are eventually shamed into leaving, and showered with nothing but expressions of love, sympathy, and offers of prayer:
Resistance works. ICE officers work best when there’s no friction. When confronted or slowed, they’re far more apt to give up and leave than continue their likely illegal actions. In some cases, being confronted results in unprovoked acts of violence by federal officers. Fortunately, nothing like that happened here.
And just because we’re talking about Minneapolis, “Minnesota Nice,” and ICE activity largely fueled by xenophobic hate, here’s a palate cleanser. I don’t agree with my dad on nearly anything political, but he’s one of the most helpful people you will ever meet. He recently made the news in Minneapolis for doing what he’s always done: pitching in wherever needed.
The president, who drapes himself in the flag so inappropriately you’d think it would be filing HR complaints on a daily basis, is now preventing some the best potential US citizens from becoming US citizens.
Ever since Trump’s unexpected second appearance in the Oval Office began, it was immediately clear the bigoted efforts he fired up during his first term were only a prelude to the incessant cruelty he’s engaged in now. Trump leveraged a tragedy into an opportunity to shut down migration efforts from 10 countries. A few days later, the DHS (via dog-killing frontmouth Kristi Noem) said the racist plague had expanded to cover another nine countries.
While this took place, Trump converted his personal animus towards political opponents into truly racist invective targeting an entire country:
President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he did not want Somali immigrants in the U.S., saying residents of the war-ravaged eastern African country are too reliant on U.S. social safety net and add little to the United States.
[…]
“They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country,” Trump told reporters near the end of a lengthy Cabinet meeting. He added: “Their country is no good for a reason. Your country stinks and we don’t want them in our country.”
Trump continues to insist there’s no better place in the world than the United States. Then he makes it clear the only people welcome to avail themselves of his version of American exceptionalism are whites who probably already live here. Everyone else from anywhere else can go fuck themselves… if they can find time to do so between being persecuted/tortured to death in their countries of origin.
Immigrants approved to be naturalized went to Faneuil Hall Thursday — known as the country’s cradle of liberty — for that long-awaited moment to pledge allegiance to the United States. But instead, as they lined up, some were told by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials that they couldn’t proceed due to their countries of origin.
The same situation is playing out at naturalization events across the country as USCIS directed its employees to halt adjudicating all immigration pathways for people from 19 countries deemed to be “high risk”.
That’s right. People who have spent years jumping through all the citizenship hoops (which includes a test 99% of natural-born American citizens couldn’t pass) are being fucked out of their effort by a bunch of racists who have been given the keys to the American Dream kingdom.
This is heartbreaking. And it’s just as heartbreaking even if you don’t often engage with recent American citizens or migrants doing everything they can to remain in this land of opportunity. And it’s obviously targeted. The whole process didn’t get shut down. It only targeted the people this administration feels are more worthless than others.
“People are devastated and they’re frightened,” Breslow told GBH News. “People were plucked out of line. They didn’t cancel the whole ceremony.”
This is where I get personal, mainly because there are still too many commenters willing to wade in and spew stereotypes and bad faith arguments all over the the comment thread.
Outside of Techdirt, I am otherwise employed. Most of my recent work experience involves manufacturing. My current job spreads that to things like meat processing and food prep. I have had the privilege to work beside some of the most wonderful people I’ve ever encountered. And few of those people were white, natural-born US citizens.
I have witnessed the sheer joy of coworkers returning from citizenship ceremonies like these. I have seen them struggle with not only the weirdness of the American language, but the subsets created by heavy industry without ever seeing any one of these amazing people express any desire to give it all up.
I have watched an absolute fireball of a young man — an El Salvadoran refugee — work 100+ hours week after week to turn his dreams into a reality. I also had the pleasure of watching this person obtain his US citizenship after being jerked around by the bureaucracy that always makes this sort of thing more difficult than it should be, even when not overseen by a cadre of white Christian nationalists. I also saw this man turn his hours of servitude to multiple employers into the most impractical of second vehicles: a 2019 Maserati GT, which is not the sort of car one would expect anyone to buy in a state that spends 4 months a year covered in snow. (To be fair, his primary vehicle is a 2014 Ford F-150.)
These immigrants are amazing. And their work ethic embodies the American ideal of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Meanwhile, the more privileged in our midst have been buying “rolling coal” flip switches and turning the American flag into something that can be brandished with ill intent, completely erasing its long history as a symbol of hope. On top of it all, there’s the new Trump administration, which sees bootstraps as Achilles tendons and immediately starts slashing away at them.
Many of the best people I know weren’t born here. The people I do know who make the most noise about patriotism are mainly hypocrites whose claims about using their Second Amendment rights to protect the rest of the Constitution are as empty as their claims that it’s always everyone but them to blame for the shithole Trump is desperate to turn this country into.
We are ruled by people who have never truly engaged with anyone who doesn’t completely align with their views and preconceptions. The real world is filled with people who are wonderful and open and giving and never ask for anything more than to be treated as fellow human beings. This administration wants those people gone and, if possible, scrubbed from history. But these are the people I would go full “ride or die” for: the people who have seen the worst the world has to offer and still remain optimistic and helpful and considerate despite having lived through things most Americans can’t possibly imagine.
The people running the government have never experienced joy. The only way they can interact with optimism is by pushing the narrative that the glass is half-empty and insisting it’s the “others” among us who have taken the best part of the glass’s content and left us to deal with what’s left over. It’s all lies. And yet it will always work because, while it’s impossible to get a majority of Americans to agree on a hero, it’s insanely easy to get most Americans to agree on a scapegoat.
More than 80 law enforcement agencies across the United States have used language perpetuating harmful stereotypes against Romani people when searching the nationwide Flock Safety automated license plate reader (ALPR) network, according to audit logs obtained and analyzed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
When police run a search through the Flock Safety network, which links thousands of ALPR systems, they are prompted to leave a reason and/or case number for the search. Between June 2024 and October 2025, cops performed hundreds of searches for license plates using terms such as “roma” and “g*psy,” and in many instances, without any mention of a suspected crime. Other uses include “g*psy vehicle,” “g*psy group,” “possible g*psy,” “roma traveler” and “g*psy ruse,” perpetuating systemic harm by demeaning individuals based on their race or ethnicity.
These queries were run through thousands of police departments’ systems—and it appears that none of these agencies flagged the searches as inappropriate.
These searches are, by definition, racist.
Word Choices and Flock Searches
We are using the terms “Roma” and “Romani people” as umbrella terms, recognizing that they represent different but related groups. Since 2020, the U.S. federal government has officially recognized “Anti-Roma Racism” as including behaviors such as “stereotyping Roma as persons who engage in criminal behavior” and using the slur “g*psy.” According to the U.S. Department of State, this language “leads to the treatment of Roma as an alleged alien group and associates them with a series of pejorative stereotypes and distorted images that represent a specific form of racism.”
Nevertheless, police officers have run hundreds of searches for license plates using the terms “roma” and “g*psy.” (Unlike the police ALPR queries we’ve uncovered, we substitute an asterisk for the Y to avoid repeating this racist slur). In many cases, these terms have been used on their own, with no mention of crime. In other cases, the terms have been used in contexts like “g*psy scam” and “roma burglary,” when ethnicity should have no relevance to how a crime is investigated or prosecuted.
A “g*psy scam” and “roma burglary” do not exist in criminal law separate from any other type of fraud or burglary. Several agencies contacted by EFF have since acknowledged the inappropriate use and expressed efforts to address the issue internally.
“The use of the term does not reflect the values or expected practices of our department,” a representative of the Palos Heights (IL) Police Department wrote to EFF after being confronted with two dozen searches involving the term “g*psy.” “We do not condone the use of outdated or offensive terminology, and we will take this inquiry as an opportunity to educate those who are unaware of the negative connotation and to ensure that investigative notations and search reasons are documented in a manner that is accurate, professional, and free of potentially harmful language.”
Of course, the broader issue is that allowing “g*psy” or “Roma” as a reason for a search isn’t just offensive, it implies the criminalization an ethnic group. In fact, the Grand Prairie Police Department in Texas searched for “g*psy” six times while using Flock’s “Convoy” feature, which allows an agency to identify vehicles traveling together—in essence targeting an entire traveling community of Roma without specifying a crime.
At the bottom of this post is a list of agencies and the terms they used when searching the Flock system.
Anti-Roma Racism in an Age of Surveillance
Racism against Romani people has been a problem for centuries, with one of its most horrific manifestations during the Holocaust, when the Third Reich and its allies perpetuated genocide by murdering hundreds of thousands of Romani people and sterilizing thousands more. Despite efforts by the UN and EU to combat anti-Roma discrimination, this form of racism persists. As scholars Margareta Matache and Mary T. Bassett explain, it is perpetuated by modern American policing practices:
In recent years, police departments have set up task forces specialised in “G*psy crimes”, appointed “G*psy crime” detectives, and organised police training courses on “G*psy criminality”. The National Association of Bunco Investigators (NABI), an organisation of law enforcement professionals focusing on “non-traditional organised crime”, has even created a database of individuals arrested or suspected of criminal activity, which clearly marked those who were Roma.
Thus, it is no surprise that a 2020 Harvard University survey of Romani Americans found that 4 out of 10 respondents reported being subjected to racial profiling by police. This demonstrates the ongoing challenges they face due to systemic racism and biased policing.
Notably, many police agencies using surveillance technologies like ALPRs have adopted some sort of basic policy against biased policing or the use of these systems to target people based on race or ethnicity. But even when such policies are in place, an agency’s failure to enforce them allows these discriminatory practices to persist. These searches were also run through the systems of thousands of other police departments that may have their own policies and state laws that prohibit bias-based policing—yet none of those agencies appeared to have flagged the searches as inappropriate.
The Flock search data in question here shows that surveillance technology exacerbates racism, and even well-meaning policies to address bias can quickly fall apart without proper oversight and accountability.
Cops In Their Own Words
EFF reached out to a sample of the police departments that ran these searches. Here are five representative responses we received from police departments in Illinois, California, and Virginia. They do not inspire confidence.
1. Lake County Sheriff’s Office, IL
In June 2025, the Lake County Sheriff’s Office ran three searches for a dark colored pick-up truck, using the reason: “G*PSY Scam.” The search covered 1,233 networks, representing 14,467 different ALPR devices.
In response to EFF, a sheriff’s representative wrote via email:
“Thank you for reaching out and for bringing this to our attention. We certainly understand your concern regarding the use of that terminology, which we do not condone or support, and we want to assure you that we are looking into the matter.
Any sort of discriminatory practice is strictly prohibited at our organization. If you have the time to take a look at our commitment to the community and our strong relationship with the community, I firmly believe you will see discrimination is not tolerated and is quite frankly repudiated by those serving in our organization.
We appreciate you bringing this to our attention so we can look further into this and address it.”
2. Sacramento Police Department, CA
In May 2025, the Sacramento Police Department ran six searches using the term “g*psy.” The search covered 468 networks, representing 12,885 different ALPR devices.
In response to EFF, a police representative wrote:
“Thank you again for reaching out. We looked into the searches you mentioned and were able to confirm the entries. We’ve since reminded the team to be mindful about how they document investigative reasons. The entry reflected an investigative lead, not a disparaging reference.
We appreciate the chance to clarify.”
3. Palos Heights Police Department, IL
In September 2024, the Palos Heights Police Department ran more than two dozen searches using terms such as “g*psy vehicle,” “g*psy scam” and “g*psy concrete vehicle.” Most searches hit roughly 1,000 networks.
In response to EFF, a police representative said the searches were related to a singular criminal investigation into a vehicle involved in a “suspicious circumstance/fraudulent contracting incident” and is “not indicative of a general search based on racial or ethnic profiling.” However, the agency acknowledged the language was inappropriate:
“The use of the term does not reflect the values or expected practices of our department. We do not condone the use of outdated or offensive terminology, and we will take this inquiry as an opportunity to educate those who are unaware of the negative connotation and to ensure that investigative notations and search reasons are documented in a manner that is accurate, professional, and free of potentially harmful language.
We appreciate your outreach on this matter and the opportunity to provide clarification.”
4. Irvine Police Department, CA
In February and May 2025, the Irvine Police Department ran eight searches using the term “roma” in the reason field. The searches covered 1,420 networks, representing 29,364 different ALPR devices.
In a call with EFF, an IPD representative explained that the cases were related to a series of organized thefts. However, they acknowledged the issue, saying, “I think it’s an opportunity for our agency to look at those entries and to use a case number or use a different term.”
5. Fairfax County Police Department, VA
Between December 2024 and April 2025, the Fairfax County Police Department ran more than 150 searches involving terms such as “g*psy case” and “roma crew burglaries.” Fairfax County PD continued to defend its use of this language.
In response to EFF, a police representative wrote:
“Thank you for your inquiry. When conducting searches in investigative databases, our detectives must use the exact case identifiers, terms, or names connected to a criminal investigation in order to properly retrieve information. These entries reflect terminology already tied to specific cases and investigative files from other agencies, not a bias or judgment about any group of people. The use of such identifiers does not reflect bias or discrimination and is not inconsistent with our Bias-Based Policing policy within our Human Relations General Order.”
A National Trend
Roma individuals and families are not the only ones being systematically and discriminatorily targeted by ALPR surveillance technologies. For example, Flock audit logs show agencies ran 400 more searches using terms targeting Traveller communities more generally, with a specific focus on Irish Travellers, often without any mention of a crime.
Across the country, these tools are enabling and amplifying racial profiling by embedding longstanding policing biases into surveillance technologies. For example, data from Oak Park, IL, show that 84% of drivers stopped in Flock-related traffic incidents were Black—despite Black people making up only 19% of the local population. ALPR systems are far from being neutral tools for public safety and are increasingly being used to fuel discriminatory policing practices against historically marginalized people.
The racially coded language in Flock’s logs mirrors long-standing patterns of discriminatory policing. Terms like “furtive movements,” “suspicious behavior,” and “high crime area” have always been cited by police to try to justify stops and searches of Black, Latine, and Native communities. These phrases might not appear in official logs because they’re embedded earlier in enforcement—in the traffic stop without clear cause, the undocumented stop-and-frisk, the intelligence bulletin flagging entire neighborhoods as suspect. They function invisibly until a body-worn camera, court filing, or audit brings them to light. Flock’s network didn’t create racial profiling; it industrialized it, turning deeply encoded and vague language into scalable surveillance that can search thousands of cameras across state lines.
The Path Forward
U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-OR, recently recommended that local governments reevaluate their decisions to install Flock Safety in their communities. We agree, but we also understand that sometimes elected officials need to see the abuse with their own eyes first.
We know which agencies ran these racist searches, and they should be held accountable. But we also know that the vast majority of Flock Safety’s clients—thousands of police and sheriffs—also allowed those racist searches to run through their Flock Safety systems unchallenged.
Elected officials must act decisively to address the racist policing enabled by Flock’s infrastructure. First, they should demand a complete audit of all ALPR searches conducted in their jurisdiction and a review of search logs to determine (a) whether their police agencies participated in discriminatory policing and (b) what safeguards, if any, exist to prevent such abuse. Second, officials should institute immediate restrictions on data-sharing through Flock’s nationwide network. As demonstrated by California law, for example, police agencies should not be able to share their ALPR data with federal authorities or out-of-state agencies, thus eliminating a vehicle for discriminatory searches spreading across state lines.
Ultimately, elected officials must terminate Flock Safety contracts entirely. The evidence is now clear: audit logs and internal policies alone cannot prevent a surveillance system from becoming a tool for racist policing. The fundamental architecture of Flock—thousands of cameras feeding into a nationwide searchable network—makes discrimination inevitable when enforcement mechanisms fail.
As Sen. Wyden astutely explained, “local elected officials can best protect their constituents from the inevitable abuses of Flock cameras by removing Flock from their communities.”
Table Overview and Notes
The following table compiles terms used by agencies to describe the reasons for searching the Flock Safety ALPR database. In a small number of cases, we removed additional information such as case numbers, specific incident details, and officers’ names that were present in the reason field.
We removed one agency from the list due to the agency indicating that the word was a person’s name and not a reference to Romani people.
In general, we did not include searches that used the term “Romanian,” although many of those may also be indicative of anti-Roma bias. We also did not include uses of “traveler” or “Traveller” when it did not include a clear ethnic modifier; however, we believe many of those searches are likely relevant.
A text-based version of the spreadsheet is available here.
Well, well, well. If it isn’t the system of checks and balances. We’ve missed you, buddy!
Long story somewhat short: ICE has been terrible for years, but it’s been much worse under Trump. During Trump’s first regime (~2016-2020), ICE got rocked by a court decision that prevented it from engaging in traffic stops just so it could arrest people for looking vaguely Mexican.
That settlement — secured with the assistance of the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) — was enacted in 2022 during the brief period between Trump Oval Office interloping.
Interlopement or not, it’s still the law of the land in Illinois. And that’s not playing well with Trump’s recent federal invasion of the Chicago area — one spearheaded by Nazi cosplayer Gregory Bovino, last seen violating the law much further south as the commander of a California-based Border Patrol unit.
Bovino chose to violate court orders so often during his short stint in Chicago, he’s been sent elsewhere by the Trump administration. It’s definitely not a sign of disapproval. It’s a vote of confidence that says the presidency will keep changing tables every time it loses a hand to the federal courts.
The Nava consent decree that forbids ICE from doing what it’s been doing in Chicago since before Trump re-grooved his ass marks in the chair behind the Resolute Desk.
And that means a lot of stops, arrests, and ensuing detentions are illegal. And because they’re illegal, people must be freed. The administration continues to act like there’s nothing in the law that prevents it from jailing people who present no flight risk or threat to public safety. That’s definitely not the law of the land and it’s definitely not the law in Seventh Circuit, which has already received notice of the administration’s appeal.
For now, however, that means a lot of people rounded up during Trump’s invasion of Chicago and ICE operations in the area preceding the anti-Democratic Party surge d/b/a “immigration enforcement” will no longer be imprisoned.
District Judge Jeffrey Cummings on Wednesday afternoon ordered the release of at least 313 people detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement between June and early October.
[…]
Cummings has ordered the Department of Homeland Security to immediately release 13 detainees held in Texas, Missouri and other states that both the government and plaintiffs agree were detained in violation of the Castañon Nava settlement that prohibits warrantless immigration arrest in Illinois.
The order [PDF] itself doesn’t limit itself to 13 people, much less the 313 people stated by this Axios article. It says the government must take a look at more than twice this number and provide some sort of evidence as to why this other 300+ should continue to be detained.
To this end, by 12:00 p.m. CST on November 14, 2025, with respect to the subset of 615 individuals discussed on the record, defendants shall provide the Court with their names and specify which of the individuals in this group have been identified by defendants as posing a “high public safety risk” if they were released.
That deadline has come and gone. And the only thing the administration has done is file motions asking for this order to be stayed until this case can be heard by the Seventh Circuit Appeals Court. It has offered nothing in defense of those arrests and continued detentions of people it’s unlikely to be able to prove must be indefinitely detained despite being arrested in violation of the Nava Agreement (2022). But it’s apparently hoping the court that didn’t feel Gregory Bovino should be forced to respect the law will have much to say about the consent decree violations it engaged in while Bovino was still running the show in Chicago.
When the Supreme Court recently allowed immigration agents in the Los Angeles area to take race into consideration during sweeps, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that citizens shouldn’t be concerned.
“If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States,” Kavanaugh wrote, “they promptly let the individual go.”
About two dozen Americans have said they were held for more than a day without being able to phone lawyers or loved ones.
Videos of U.S. citizens being mistreated by immigration agents have filled social media feeds, but there is little clarity on the overall picture. The government does not track how often immigration agents hold Americans.
So ProPublica created its own count.
We compiled and reviewed every case we could find of agents holding citizens against their will, whether during immigration raids or protests. While the tally is almost certainly incomplete, we found more than 170 such incidents during the first nine months of President Donald Trump’s second administration.
Among the citizens detained are nearly 20 children, including two with cancer. That includes four who were held for weeks with their undocumented mother and without access to the family’s attorney until a congresswoman intervened.
Immigration agents do have authority to detain Americans in limited circumstances. Agents can hold people whom they reasonably suspect are in the country illegally. We found more than 50 Americans who were held after agents questioned their citizenship. They were almost all Latino.
Immigration agents also can arrest citizens who allegedly interfered with or assaulted officers. We compiled cases of about 130 Americans, including a dozen elected officials, accused of assaulting or impeding officers.
These cases have often wilted under scrutiny. In nearly 50 instances that we have identified so far, charges have never been filed or the cases were dismissed. Our count found a handful of citizens have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors.
Among the detentions in which allegations have not stuck, masked agents pointed a gun at, pepper sprayed and punched a young man who had filmed them searching for his relative. In another, agents knocked over and then tackled a 79-year-old car wash owner, pressing their knees into his neck and back. His lawyer said he was held for 12 hours and wasn’t given medical attention despite having broken ribs in the incident and having recently had heart surgery. In a third case, agents grabbed and handcuffed a woman on her way to work who was caught up in a chaotic raid on street vendors. In a complaint filed against the government, she described being held for more than two days, without being allowed to contact the outside world for much of that time. (The Supreme Court has ruled that two days is generally the longest federal officials can hold Americans without charges.)
In response to questions from ProPublica, the Department of Homeland Security said agents do not racially profile or target Americans. “We don’t arrest US citizens for immigration enforcement,” wrote spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin.
A top immigration official recently acknowledged agents do consider someone’s looks. “How do they look compared to, say, you?” Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino said to a white reporter in Chicago.
The White House told ProPublica that anyone who assaults federal immigration agents would be prosecuted. “Interfering with law enforcement and assaulting law enforcement is a crime and anyone, regardless of immigration status, will be held accountable,” said the Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson. “Officers act heroically to enforce the law, arrest criminal illegal aliens, and protect American communities with the utmost professionalism.”
A spokesperson for Kavanaugh did not return an emailed request for comment.
Tallying the number of Americans detained by immigration agents is inherently messy and incomplete. The government has long ignored recommendations for it to track such cases, even as the U.S. has a history of detaining and even deporting citizens, including during the Obama administration and Trump’s first term.
We compiled cases by sifting through both English- and Spanish-language social media, lawsuits, court records and local media reports. We did not include arrests of protesters by local police or the National Guard. Nor did we count cases in which arrests were made at a later date after a judicial process. That included cases of some people charged with serious crimes, like throwing rocks or tossing a flare to start a fire.
Experts say that Americans appear to be getting picked up more now as a result of the government doing something that it hasn’t for decades: large-scale immigration sweeps across the country, often in communities that do not want them.
In earlier administrations, deportation agents used intelligence to target specific individuals, said Scott Shuchart, a top immigration official in the Biden, Obama and first Trump administrations. “The new idea is to use those resources unintelligently” — with officers targeting communities or workplaces where undocumented immigrants may be.
When federal officers roll through communities in the way the Supreme Court permitted, the constitutional rights of both citizens and noncitizens are inevitably violated, argued David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. He recently analyzed how sweeps in Los Angeles have led to racial profiling. “If the government can grab someone because he’s a certain demographic group that’s correlated with some offense category, then they can do that in any context.”
Cody Wofsy, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, put it even more starkly. “Any one of us could be next.”
When Kavanaugh issued his opinion that immigration agents can consider race and other factors, the Supreme Court’s three liberal justices strongly dissented. They warned that citizens risked being “grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor.”
Leonardo Garcia Venegas appears to have been just such a case. He was working at a construction site in coastal Alabama when he saw masked immigration agents from Homeland Security Investigations hop a fence and run by a “No trespassing” sign. Garcia Venegas recalled that they moved toward the Latino workers, ignoring the white and Black workers.
Garcia Venegas began filming after his undocumented brother asked agents for a warrant. In response, the footage shows, agents yanked his brother to the ground, shoving his face into wet concrete. Garcia Venegas kept filming until officers grabbed him too and knocked his phone to the ground.
Other co-workers filmed what happened next, as immigration agents twisted the 25-year-old’s arms. They repeatedly tried to take him to the ground while he yelled, “I’m a citizen!”
Officers pulled out his REAL ID, which Alabama only issues to those legally in the U.S. But the agents dismissed it as fake. Officers held Garcia Venegas handcuffed for more than an hour. His brother was later deported.
Garcia Venegas was so shaken that he took two weeks off of work. Soon after he returned, he was working alone inside a nearly built house listening to music on his headphones when he sensed someone watching him. A masked immigration agent was standing in the bedroom doorway.
This time, agents didn’t tackle him. But they again dismissed his REAL ID. And then they held him to check his citizenship. Garcia Venegas says agents also held two other workers who had legal status.
DHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about Garcia Venegas’ detentions, or to a federal lawsuit he filed last month. The agency has previously defended the agents’ conduct, saying he “physically got in between agents and the subject” during the first incident. The footage does not show that, and Garcia Venegas was never charged with obstruction or any other crime.
Garcia Venegas’ lawyers at the nonprofit Institute for Justice hope others may join his suit. After all, the reverberations of the immigration sweeps are being felt widely. Garcia Venegas said he knows of 15 more raids on nearby construction sites, and the industry along his portion of the Gulf Coast is struggling for lack of workers.
Kavanaugh’s assurances hold little weight for Garcia Venegas. He’s a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent, who speaks little English and works in construction. Even with his REAL ID and Social Security card in his wallet, Garcia Venegas worries that immigration agents will keep harassing him.
“If they decide they want to detain you,” he said. “You’re not going to get out of it.”
George Retes was among the citizens arrested despite immigration agents appearing to know his legal status. He also disappeared into the system for days without being able to contact anyone on the outside.
The only clue Retes’ family had at first was a brief call he managed to make on his Apple Watch with his hands handcuffed behind his back. He quickly told his wife that “ICE” had arrested him during a massive raid and protest on the marijuana farm where he worked as a security guard.
Still, Retes’ family couldn’t find him. They called every law enforcement agency they could think of. No one gave them any answers.
Eventually, they spotted a TikTok video showing Retes driving to work and slowly trying to back up as he’s caught between agents and protestors. Through the tear gas and dust, his family recognized Retes’ car and the veteran decal on his window. The full video shows a man — Retes — splayed on the ground surrounded by agents.
Retes’ family went to the farm, where local TV reporters were interviewing families who couldn’t find their loved ones.
“They broke his window, they pepper sprayed him, they grabbed him, threw him on the floor,” his sister told a reporter between sobs. “We don’t know what to do. We’re just asking to let my brother go. He didn’t do anything wrong. He’s a veteran, disabled citizen. It says it on his car.”
Retes was held for three days without being given an opportunity to make a call. His family only learned where he had been after his release. His leg had been cut from the broken glass, Retes told ProPublica, and lingering pepper spray burned his hands. He tried to soothe them by filling sandwich bags with water.
Retes recalled that agents knew he was a citizen. “They didn’t care.” He said one DHS official laughed at him, saying he shouldn’t have come to work that day. “They still sent me away to jail.” He added that cases like his show Kavanaugh was “wrong completely.”
DHS did not answer our questions about Retes. It did respond on X after Retes wrote an op-ed last month in the San Francisco Chronicle. An agency post asserted he was arrested for assault after he “became violent and refused to comply with law enforcement.” Yet Retes had been released without any charges. Indeed, he says he was never told why he was arrested.
The Department of Justice has encouraged agents to arrest anyone interfering with immigration operations, twiceordering law enforcement to prioritize cases of those suspected of obstructing, interfering with or assaulting immigration officials.
But the government’s claims in those cases have often not been borne out.
Daniel Montenegro was filming a raid at a Van Nuys, California, Home Depot with other day-laborer advocates this summer when, he told ProPublica, he was tackled by several officers who injured his back.
Bovino, the Border Patrol chief who oversaw the LA raids and has since taken similar operations to cities like Sacramento and Chicago, tweeted out the names and photos of Montenegro and three others, accusing them of using homemade tire spikes to disable vehicles.
“I had no idea where that story came from,” Montenegro told ProPublica. “I didn’t find out until we were released. People were like, ‘We saw you on Twitter and the news and you guys are terrorists, you were planning to slash tires.’ I never saw those spike tire-popper things.”
Officials have not charged Montenegro or the others with any crimes. (Bovino did not respond to a request for comment, while DHS defended him in a statement to ProPublica: “Chief Bovino’s success in getting the worst of the worst out of the country speaks for itself.”)
The government’s cases are sometimes so muddied that it’s unclear why agents actually arrested a citizen.
Andrea Velez was charged with assaulting an officer after she was accidentally dropped off for work during a raid on street vendors in downtown Los Angeles. She said in a federal complaint that officers repeatedly assumed she did not speak English. Federal officers later requested access to her phone in an attempt to prove she was colluding with another citizen arrested that day, who was charged with assault. She was one of the Americans held for more than two days.
DHS did not respond to our questions about Velez, but it has previously accused her of assaulting an officer. A federal judge has dismissed the charges.
Other citizens also said officers accused them of crimes and suddenly questioned their citizenship — including a man arrested after filming Border Patrol agents break a truck window, and a pregnant woman who tried to stop officers from taking her boyfriend.
“The often-inadequate guardrails that we have for state and local government — even those guardrails are nonexistent when you’re talking about federal overreach,” said Joanna Schwartz, a professor at UCLA School of Law.
More than 50 members of Congress have also written to the administration, demanding details about Americans who’ve been detained. One is Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat. After trying to question Noem about detained citizens, federal agents grabbed Padilla, pulled him to the ground and handcuffed him. The department later defended the agents, saying they “acted appropriately.”
JD Vance thinks praising Hitler and talking about putting political enemies into death chambers is harmless “kids being kids,” but criticizing Charlie Kirk is somehow deserving of state-supported punishment.
It sure looks like he’s got quite the double standard.
Yesterday, Vance defended Young Republican leaders who were caught in leaked chat logs making racist, antisemitic, and pro-Nazi comments, dismissing their behavior as harmless kids being edgy. But just a month ago, this very same JD Vance was calling for people to be reported to their employers for making far milder comments about Charlie Kirk’s death. And this week, his administration revoked visas from foreigners who criticized Kirk online.
Let’s start with what Vance said yesterday about the Young Republicans scandal. When asked about leaked Telegram messages showing Republican leaders joking about gas chambers, expressing love for Hitler, and using racial slurs more than 250 times, Vance had this to say:
The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke — telling a very offensive, stupid joke — is cause to ruin their lives. At some point, we’re all going to have to say, ‘enough of this BS, we’re not going to allow the worst moment in a 21-year-old’s group chat to ruin a kid’s life for the rest of time. That’s just not ok.
You can see that video at the end of this clip here:
JD Vance dismisses Young Republicans who in a group chat said "I love Hitler" and joked about slavery and rape as "a bunch of kids" who "told stupid jokes" and adds that "most of the stupid things I did when I was a teenager and young adult, they're not on the internet."
There are several problems with this defense. First, these weren’t “kids”—many of the participants were in their twenties and thirties, and some held high-level government positions. Peter Giunta was chief of staff to a New York assemblymember. William Hendrix worked for Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach. Michael Bartels serves as a senior adviser in the Trump administration’s Small Business Administration.
Second, these weren’t just “stupid jokes.” The leaked messages included participants saying “I love Hitler,” joking about putting political opponents in gas chambers, using racial slurs hundreds of times, and discussing rape as “epic.” One participant wrote about creating “the greatest physiological torture methods known to man” for political opponents.
But the bigger issue isn’t Vance’s factual errors—it’s his breathtaking hypocrisy.
Just last month, Vance guest-hosted Charlie Kirk’s radio show and had a very different message about “edgy, offensive” comments. When people made critical remarks about Kirk’s death, Vance urged listeners to hold them accountable:
Call them out, and hell, call their employer. We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility.
This wasn’t theoretical. Many people lost their jobs after Vance’s call to action. Apparently, their “edgy, offensive” jokes were uncivil and unacceptable, and a perfectly good reason to “ruin their lives,” but when it’s pro-Nazi (!!!) content, suddenly Vance wants to give it a pass? Come on.
And this week, Vance’s own administration took it even further. The State Department revoked visas from at least six foreigners who made critical comments about Kirk’s death on social media. The department explicitly stated as much in a tweet:
If you can’t read that, it says:
The United States has no obligation to host foreigners who wish death on Americans.
The State Department continues to identify visa holders who celebrated the heinous assassination of Charlie Kirk. Here are just a few examples of aliens who are no longer welcome in the U.S.
It then proceeded to show the posts from people whose visas it had revoked, making it blatantly clear that they were deciding to punish people in America for their speech, an unambiguous First Amendment violation. The State Department then showed social media posts from some of those whose visas were revoked, and they appeared way less “edgy” and “offensive” than anything that was revealed in that Young Republicans chat.
So let’s be clear about the double standard here: When Young Republicans joke about Hitler and gas chambers, they’re just “kids” telling “edgy, offensive jokes” that we shouldn’t ruin their lives over. But when foreigners or Americans criticize a conservative influencer—with comments that were objectively far milder than “I love Hitler”—they deserve to lose their jobs, their visas, and their livelihoods.
And, of course, this is a regular pattern from the Trump administration. Graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk was literally kidnapped off the street for writing a mild op-ed in support of Palestine. The administration has revoked over 6,000 student visas this year, sometimes targeting students who protested in support of Palestine (the State Dept. falsely said it was for “terrorist activity.”) Jimmy Kimmel’s show was taken off the air over an extremely mild joke about MAGA’s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s death.
And there are many more examples as well.
Hell, there are even more examples of Vance trying to dismiss horrible things his friends say as “kids being kids.” Remember Marko Elez, the 25-year-old DOGE bro who was found to have posted a ton of truly racist shit just last year? After the tweets came out, Elez resigned, but JD Vance quickly stepped up to defend the tweets as some form of youthful edgy indiscretion:
So, again, when it’s blatantly racist, hateful shit, Vance’s response is:
I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life.
The pattern is unmistakable: pro-Nazi, blatantly hateful rhetoric from Republican allies gets dismissed as harmless fun, while even mild criticism of conservative figures or support for Palestinian rights gets you targeted for life-ruining punishment by federal agencies.
Vance owes the American people an explanation that he will never give. When exactly are “edgy, offensive jokes” acceptable, and when do they deserve government retaliation? Because right now, it appears the only rule is that it’s all in good fun if your hateful, pro-Nazi posts are in support of the MAGA plan. And simply cannot be allowed if they call out bad behavior on the part of MAGA folks.
If joking about Hitler and gas chambers is just boys being boys, then surely criticizing a political commentator should barely register as offensive speech. Yet somehow, the people making Nazi jokes get Vice Presidential protection while their critics get federal persecution.
This is the MAGA world view: hateful neo-Nazi supporting bigotry is all cool if you’re doing so in support of team MAGA. But if you’re not on the team, then it’s fine to weaponize the entire government against your political views. This is the very blueprint for authoritarian control of speech.
Vance knows full well that he’s using a double standard here. But that’s part of his fascistic view of the world. He’s flaunting the fact that he will abuse his position to protect his friends, while eagerly punishing his political opponents for doing way less. It’s right out of the fascist playbook.
Vance finds it hilarious that he’s getting away with such a double standard, but that doesn’t mean anyone else needs to play along. Keep calling it out. And if there are any true reporters left, they should keep asking him about this double standard over and over again.
America isn’t the land of the free. We abandoned that title when we returned Donald Trump to office — the same person who refused to engage in the peaceful transfer of power in 2020 and, immediately upon his return to power, pardoned almost everyone who engaged in an attempted insurrection on his behalf.
The so-called “party of free speech” has repeatedly made it clear that the First Amendment means everyone should be subjected to their hateful speech, but will never be extended to those who oppose the current leadership and/or simply wish to document the evil acts of those currently in power.
The GOP’s extreme hypocrisy during both Trump administrations makes the usual hypocrisy expected of politicians look like a mostly-benign side effect of existing in a democratic republic. Under Trump, there’s nothing benign about the hypocrisy, which no longer contains even the minimum of plausible deniability we’ve come to expect from more competent, less bigoted politicians.
Activists, journalists, and the occasional opinionated college student have all been targeted for expressing their displeasure with this government and its policies. Turning ICE, DHS, and the DOJ into politicized weapons of administration vengeance has ensured maximum pain in return for acts that used to be considered protected by enshrined constitutional rights.
That’s no longer the case. Rights are now privileges under Trump, which means they’ll only protect people the GOP likes. For everyone else, there’s the constant threat of government retaliation — an act that has long been considered illegal by every federal court, but now is destined to become quasi-codified by a Supreme Court that is just as beholden to Trump as any of his Cabinet appointees.
This may be an exceedingly long preamble to the subject matter discussed in this post. But I don’t want any reader to skip over the reality of the current situation before they decide to start being bitchy and pedantic in the comment threads. This country is being destroyed from within by those “leading” it. These are the symptoms of deliberate internal rot. This isn’t just about some guy having his rights ignored and his life expectancy cut short by a deliberately cruel administration.
“The charges were dropped, yet he remains detained by Ice,” said José Zamora, the regional director for the Americas at the Committee to Protect Journalists, during a press conference on Tuesday morning at the Georgia capitol with Guevara’s attorneys and family. “Let’s be clear, Mario is being punished for his journalism. He is now the only journalist in prison in the US in direct retaliation for his reporting.”
The Trump administration learned only one thing from this blowback: to stock its prisons with more people in “direct retaliation” for “reporting,” ensuring Guevara could never be considered an anomaly. That it’s been unable to make these charges stick says more about the ridiculousness of its efforts than any belated recognition that locking up people for using their First Amendment rights might be a bad idea.
Guevara was placed in a detention center run by GEO Group, which has gone all starry-eyed now that ICE has billions of extra dollars to play with and needs more detainment facilities immediately from whatever government contractor is first to respond with literally any bid.
On top of that, Guevara’s phone was seized by federal officers, but as of the end of July, his legal reps had yet to see a warrant justifying its continued detention, much less any searches the government has most likely already performed.
Guevera’s case made the news, as was to be expected when the government arrests journalists (no matter their country of origin) for performing journalism. Just as predictably, the Trump administration has chosen to amp up the punishment of Mario Guevara because his very existence remains problematic for a government that occasionally has to pay lip service to long-held rights.
So, this is what the Trump administration has decided to do with El Salvadoran native Mario Guevara, who fled his country to avoid being imprisoned and tortured by local militia groups: under the cover of night, it has vanished him back to the land he fled, as The Guardian reports:
Guevara has been a media mainstay in the Atlanta area for about 20 years, after fleeing El Salvador to escape leftwing militias in 2004. Though he has a work permit and two of his children are American citizens, he has operated under the “administrative closure” of deportation orders for much of that time.
Immigration officials put him on a plane at 4am on Friday morning, family members said.
Guevara’s final destination is El Salvador, something that follows (as The Guardian reports puts it) the “longest imprisonment” of any reporter arrested for acts of journalism “in United States history.”
This latest act of betrayal of American ideals follows more than 100 days of detention, even though all criminal charges were dropped, leaving Guevara only with dubious claims about legal residency by ICE.
Speaking of ICE, immigration officers told Guevara this his documentation of public activities by public officials in public places was literally a threat to the US government in general.
Despite clearly identifying himself as press, Guevara was arrested by local law enforcement in June while reporting on a protest against the Trump administration near Atlanta. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) then took him into custody. Prosecutors quickly dropped the charges after confirming he was complying with law enforcement, and an immigration judge granted him bond. Immigration officials, however, refused to release him, claiming that livestreaming law enforcement activity makes him a threat.
This is, of course, the current administration’s stance on documenting any federal mass deportation activity. DHS and ICE have both issued statements about the supposed increasing threat to officers (mostly to justify the never-needed-before mask use by federal officers) and the DHS itself has issued guidance to other law enforcement agencies stating that filming law enforcement (itself a protected First Amendment activity) is a threatening act worthy of criminal charges.
Because Guevara managed to attract international attention with his unjustified arrest and lengthy detention, the government has decided to punish him by sending him back to the country he left because he feared for his life.
That’s extremely disheartening because it means shaming the government is no longer enough on its own to provoke change. Sure, plenty of governments decide to become even more vindictive when shamed, but that desire for revenge often results in mistakes that can be undone by federal courts. Now, it appears even the federal courts are powerless (because the Supreme Court is unwilling to oppose Trump) to right wrongs by forcing the government to pay for its mistakes.
This doesn’t mean the government shouldn’t be named and shamed for it being shitty on pretty much every conceivable level. It’s still worth doing, because every bit of exposure has the possibility to help. But we should temper our expectations for positive changes. That’s not meant to be defeatist. Every bit of resistance is worth the effort. If nothing else, we should not be deterred from documenting this rise of authoritarianism as it’s happening. The truth still needs to be told, even if those who find it inconvenient are doing all they can to erase it from the permanent record.
The Washington Post isn’t what it used to be. While the paper is still peppered with a few decent journalists trying to do good work, the outlet is being slowly strangled to death by billionaire owner Jeff Bezos, who is steadily dismantling the last vestiges of the paper’s sagging credibility in a desperate bid to mislead the public and pay homage to our mad, idiot king.
This week the paper fired its last black opinion columnist for directly quoting Charlie Kirk, a man paid by right wing billionaires to create short-form video internet propaganda where he tricks dull children into believing that minorities are inferior human beings.
Karen Attiah, WAPO’s founding Global Opinions editor, took to Bluesky to say that WAPO management fired her for “gross misconduct.” Her offense? Standing up for her own civil rights in the age of U.S. authoritarianism:
Some personal news: I've been fired from the Washington Post in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting. Thread incoming. substack.com/@karenattiah…
Attiah explains what happened here. Her offense, according to a letter sent by Post leadership obtained by Oliver Darcy, was “unacceptable Bluesky posts” that criticized “white men,” including this one that simply quoted Kirk’s own words:
The Washington Post has always had a backward and ignorant policy that tries to prevent its employees from expressing human opinions. But its worth noting that this dated relic has never applied to opinion columnists specifically hired to express their opinions. That’s before you even get to the fact that “I should be allowed to exist without being threatened by hateful bigots” isn’t an opinion.
It’s clear Attiah, who hired murdered columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2017 and was central in shaping the former WAPO’s opinion pages, was fired for the modern cardinal sin of upsetting thin-skinned Republicans and rich white authoritarian-earlobe-nibbling billionaires.
Like so many U.S. billionaire-owned major media outlets, the Post has responded to authoritarianism with the ethical equivalent of a wet farting sound. It’s painfully demonstrated the failures of consolidated corporate media, where ownership interest in tax breaks, deregulation, and rubber-stamped merger approvals trumps any interest in objective truth or educating America’s increasingly befuddled electorate.
The extraction class wants the public fighting amongst themselves about issues like race and candy gender; they certainly don’t want an informed electorate supporting things like making billionaires pay their fucking taxes. So all of our billionaire media owners (also see: the LA Times) are desperately trying to reshape reality and blunt the public backlash to their abhorrent, self-serving behaviors.
The collapse of major U.S. media institutions and repurposing of many of them as propaganda (see: CBS) very closely follows the authoritarian playbook in countries like Hungary. A functional press, healthy education system, and an informed electorate is an existential threat to rich right-wing zealots with terrible, unpopular ideas, who want to strip the country for parts in peace.
But however rich Jeff Bezos may be, the market for billionaire ass kissing and authoritarian earlobe nibbling is minimal and already extremely saturated. The paper has not only been suffering a brain drain of decent journalists and columnists, it’s been heavily bleeding subscribers since election season. And the more Bezos tries to reshape reality and informed consensus, the bigger the backlash seems to get.
The death of mainstream corporate journalism at the hands of weird rich assholes does, one would hope, open the door to more independent journalism, worker-owned journalism outfits, and direct-to-consumer newsletters (though it’s ironic Attiah’s article on her firing is being hosted at Substack, a company run by people who openly courted white supremacists to goose engagement).
If it’s not yet clear, there’s a violent information war going on. And the folks who care about things like foundational ethics, informed consensus, and the public good are losing. Badly. Not giving our money, time, or attention to companies and billionaires keen on crushing democratic norms and basic human rights seems like the very least we can do.
It’s no surprise that Donald Trump thinks El Salvador president Nayib Bukele is a fun hang. After all, Bukele has already referred to himself as the world’s “coolest dictator” — two descriptors Trump definitely aspires to. (Although he’ll take the latter in the lieu of the former…)
The party of El Salvador President Nayib Bukele approved constitutional changes in the country’s National Assembly on Thursday that will allow indefinite presidential reelection and extend presidential terms to six years.
Neat! How did this happen? Well… it looks a whole lot like what’s happening in the USA right now:
New Ideas and its allies in the National Assembly quickly approved the proposals with the supermajority they hold. The vote passed with 57 in favor and three opposed.
So, that’s the Congress part of it. Who else has been pitching in with the effort to consolidate all the nation’s power in the Executive Branch? Oh. Right.
Bukele overwhelmingly won reelection last year despite a constitutional ban, after Supreme Court justices selected by his party ruled in 2021 that it allowed reelection to a second five-year term.
Things like these once seemed like an impossibility in America. Now, they almost seem inevitable. And while it might be extremely difficult to make this happen as quickly as the world’s “coolest dictator” has in El Salvador, it’s probably neither as hard as we want to believe it is, nor would it take nearly as long as we might hope.
The groundwork for destroying the remnants of a democratic republic is already being laid by the Trump administration. If we’re hoping for an extension of our (mostly) representative democratic ideals, we’re going to need a whole lot more than the obviously faulty assumption our fellow Americans won’t be willing to get stomped in the face by a boot heel, just as long as people they don’t like get the boot heel first.
Jasleen Singh, writing for The Brennan Center, has an extremely detailed report on every effort being made by Trump and the GOP to ensure any future elections (if there are any) will be a.) limited as much as possible to people who support the GOP, and b.) so bereft of security and integrity the GOP can claim any election outcome they don’t like is fraudulent.
It all starts with Trump’s most brazen move — the pardoning of nearly every January 6th insurrectionist convicted of federal charges. This made it clear it didn’t really matter whether you were on the right side of history. It only mattered whether or not you were on Trump’s side. In doing so, he set precedent for anyone willing to follow in his footsteps, providing people engaging in criminal acts with a pretty much guaranteed get-out-of-jail-free card so long as their violence is on behalf of the GOP.
Singh’s report is as enlightening as it is horrifying, so I encourage you to read the whole thing. I’m not going to be able to do it justice with a few pull quotes because there’s just so much being done to undermine the entire election process.
It’s not just the voter suppression efforts, which have been a favorite tactic of Republicans ever since anyone other than white, male landowners were allowed to vote. Multiple aggressive redistricting efforts are underway to throw more votes to local Republicans, and in far too many cases, courts are failing to shut these efforts down.
On the other side of things, nearly anyone or any entity that provided evidence contradicting Trump’s claims about a “stolen” election has been kicked to the curb.
The president and his DOJ appointees have repeatedly threatened to prosecute the election officials who administered the 2020 election. In a March 14, 2025, speech, President Trump stated, “What a difference a rigged and crooked election had on our country. And the people who did this to us should go to jail. They should go to jail.” The president has also threatened to target nonprofit advocacy groups that play an important role in voter engagement, election monitoring, and litigation to protect the freedom to vote.
That same month, CISA paused all election security activities pending an internal review. The review was completed in March, but the Trump administration has refused to release the findings. It is unclear which CISA services have been restored, if any, despite repeatedrequests for information from members of Congress responsible for agency oversight. Reporting from April suggests that CISA is planning massive additional cuts.
The goal here is obvious, especially when combined with the deliberate culling of other forms of oversight and election integrity efforts previously provided by the federal government: make every election so insecure and bereft of external support that every election result can be questioned. Of course, results will only be questioned if they don’t go the way the GOP/Trump want them to, but that’s the entire point of this deliberate destruction of anything related to election integrity. Even those simply interested in ensuring the voting process is as secure as possible won’t actually be able to achieve these aims, perhaps leaving some of them to question the outcomes.
There’s so much more in this report. I highly encourage you to read the whole thing for yourself. But let’s dip back in for a second to witness yet another aspect of the Department of Justice the Trump administration has dismantled because it doesn’t serve the squad goals of a bunch of GOP members who were fortunate enough to be born in a country they seemingly want to turn into a country people will regret calling their home.
The DOJ has since dropped every voting case in which it had been a plaintiff at the start of this administration, and it has withdrawn its involvement in several other voting and redistricting suits. It also gutted the civil rights division of its career staff. By the end of May 2025, an estimated 250 attorneys making up approximately 70 percent of the division’s lawyers had left the department. The staff of the division’s voting section dwindled from approximately 30 lawyers down to about 6. But the division has begun hiring new attorneys. The voting section is now led by Maureen Riordan, a longtime DOJ lawyer who rejoined the department after a stint at the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a conservative organization that has for years sued election officials to try to force aggressive purges of the voter rolls.
At this point, even the most “glass is half-full” person will be forced to recognize the glass is at least two-thirds empty. There’s no “it will get worse before it gets better” going on here. It’s just going to keep getting worse unless there’s a sea change in leadership and an extremely focused effort to right this ship after Trump has deliberately run it aground for four straight years. Nostalgia is useless, as is pretending that playing by the rules will somehow return everything to normal. The other side is wiping its ass with every American ideal it can get a handle on. We’re regressing to the mean, which is never something the Leader of the Free World should be doing. If we stay on this path, we’ll be nothing more than a footnote on the wrong side of history.
