Donald Trump is the only president in American history to have been impeached twice. That is a simple fact of history.
I can imagine it’s a fact that Donald Trump doesn’t like very much. He might even be embarrassed over it. But it’s a fact that remains no matter what the fragile ego in chief desires.
But with this administration on a blitz to erase all kinds of American history, largely over concerns about so-called DEI and “woke” content, it seems that Dear Leader has a couple of personal asks to add to this Orwellian project.
President Donald Trump’s photo portrait display at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery has had references to his two impeachments removed, the latest apparent change at the collection of museums he has accused of bias as he asserts his influence over how official presentations document U.S. history.
The wall text, which summarized Trump’s first presidency and noted his 2024 comeback victory, was part of the museum’s “American Presidents” exhibition. The description had been placed alongside a photograph of Trump taken during his first term. Now, a different photo appears without any accompanying text block, though the text was available online. Trump was the only president whose display in the gallery, as seen Sunday, did not include any extended text.
Donald Trump is the only president in American history to have been impeached twice. That is a simple fact of history.
Now, I wouldn’t have thought it possible to Streisand Effect something so monumental in our shared history, given its high profile nature, but here we are anyway. Trump’s exact impeachment from his first term is now back in the news, fodder for active discussion purely because his shakey psyche needed to remove references to it in America’s museum.
And, hey, I suppose it’s worth remembering that those impeachments happened over half a decade ago. There are some number of people who have no doubt had a political awakening between then and now. People who paid very little to politics due to their age. Children who are now at an age to actually understand how our government works and what mechanisms like impeachment votes mean. Youngsters who perhaps didn’t grasp the gravity of events such as January 6th, or who didn’t understand the importance of a president attempting to have another sovereign nation perform political dirty tricks in exchange for military assistance.
“The museum is beginning its planned update of the America’s Presidents gallery which will undergo a larger refresh this Spring,” the gallery statement said. “For some new exhibitions and displays, the museum has been exploring quotes or tombstone labels, which provide only general information, such as the artist’s name.”
For now, references to Presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton being impeached in 1868 and 1998, respectively, remain as part of their portrait labels, as does President Richard Nixon’s 1974 resignation as a result of the Watergate scandal.
And, the gallery statement noted, “The history of Presidential impeachments continues to be represented in our museums, including the National Museum of American History.”
Donald Trump is the only president in American history to have been impeached twice. That is a simple fact of history.
The museum can try to explain this away as normal maintenance all they like. Nobody is buying it. The AP post notes that they reached out to the Trump administration asking if they had requested this change, but did not receive a response. A response is plainly not needed. Of course they did. It’s not as though Trump himself has shied away from authoring plaques for presidential portraits in the past.
At the White House, Trump has designed a notably partisan and subjective “Presidential Walk of Fame” featuring gilded photographs of himself and his predecessors — with the exception of Biden, who is represented by an autopen — along with plaques describing their presidencies.
The White House said at the time that Trump himself was a primary author of the plaques. Notably, Trump’s two plaques praise the 45th and 47th president as a historically successful figure while those under Biden’s autopen stand-in describe the 46th executive as “by far, the worst President in American History” who “brought our Nation to the brink of destruction.”
And so the president is all too happy behave as the shit-poster in chief. He’s cruel. He’s an egomaniac. He’s in charge. But none of that changes the following:
Donald Trump is the only president in American history to have been impeached twice. That is a simple fact of history.
The Trump administration has spent months shrieking about EU “censorship” while actively censoring people themselves. While I’ve long been a critic of parts of the DSA, Americans—particularly MAGA officials—keep crying wolf over the DSA’s non-censorial aspects, then turn around and abuse their own power to silence speech they dislike. They seem to get a thrill out of the hypocrisy.
Want to see how differently the US and EU actually handle government overreach on speech? Look at what happened to two would-be censors: Thierry Breton and Brendan Carr.
If you don’t recall, Thierry Breton is the former EU Commissioner for the Internal Market, which made him the lead enforcer of the DSA, a role he took to gleefully, regularly threatening tech companies if their actions didn’t comply with what Breton wanted them to do.
He got so drunk on his own power that he demanded Elon Musk not platform Donald Trump. Clear attack on basic free speech principles, exactly the kind of censorial overreach that validates MAGA complaints about the DSA.
The system worked. Someone abused their power, the system caught it, corrected it, removed him. That’s how institutions are supposed to respond to overreach.
Now, let’s come over to this side of the Atlantic. Remember Brendan Carr? The same FCC chair who threatened to abuse the power of the FCC to punish Disney for not kicking Jimmy Kimmel off the air? That temporarily worked. Disney pulled Kimmel off the air that very day and only brought him back the next week after they saw millions of cancellations of Disney+ as the public protested.
Unlike Breton, Carr actually succeeded. He used his government position to censor speech he didn’t like, and it worked. And what happened to him? Nothing. He’s still there, still threatening TV and radio stations whenever they say things that upset Trump or MAGA. No consequences, no correction, just more threats.
Now, with the US government banning Breton from getting a visa to ever come to the US again as “punishment” for his “censorship” effort that failed and got him fired, it seems like maybe people should be asking why Trump and Rubio are punishing Breton and not Carr.
Carr succeeded where Breton failed. Carr is still in power and still threatening. Breton got fired and now banned from the US.
Of course, we all know how this double standard works. Carr is allowed to do this because he’s abusing his powers to stifle speech Donald Trump doesn’t like. Breton must be punished because he tried to stifle speech Trump does like.
There’s nothing more sophisticated to it than that, but the similar nature of both politicians’ attempts to abuse the law to silence speech they didn’t like is notable. Frankly, I don’t think either the US or the EU should have anyone who has the power to abuse laws to enable censorship.
But only one system actually responded to the abuse of power by removing the abuser. And it wasn’t ours.
The contrast here reveals something more troubling than simple hypocrisy. When Breton overstepped, EU institutions checked him immediately. When Carr overstepped, US institutions… did nothing. No real pushback from Congress (Ted Cruz whining doesn’t count), no internal accountability, no consequences whatsoever. The system that’s supposed to prevent government censorship just sat there and watched it happen.
So when you hear the next MAGA official shrieking about EU censorship, remember: the EU’s institutions worked. They caught the abuse, stopped it, and removed the abuser. Our institutions failed. They enabled the abuse, rewarded it with continued power, and are now punishing the guy from the system that actually worked.
That’s not a story about two bad actors. That’s a story about which democratic system still has functioning antibodies against authoritarian overreach—and which one doesn’t.
The murder of Renee Nicole Good by ICE officer Jonathan Ross has certainly created quite the divide between the reality-based majority of the population who doesn’t want masked unaccountable federal law enforcement goons invading cities they have no business being in and shooting people for saying “dude, I’m not mad at you” and trying to drive away… and the fantasy-land MAGA folks who are bending over backwards to justify the murder.
Late last week the video from Ross’s phone was released (why Ross was filming Good is a whole separate issue, but shows how Homeland Security is much more focused on producing memes, not doing actual law enforcement), which MAGA cultists pretended exonerated Ross. It did no such thing. It made him look way, way worse.
He deliberately placed himself in front of the vehicle. He walked around the car filming Good and her partner. As can be clearly seen in the video, Good turned steering wheel of her car all the way to the right such that the car was not heading towards Ross and could not hit him. And he shot her three times anyway, once through the windshield and twice through the open driver-side window. Even if you could (and you can’t) argue the first should was potentially justified if he thought the car was coming towards him, the fact that he easily stepped aside and then continued firing shows that it was not justified at all.
And, of course, his first words after murdering a woman in broad daylight in the middle of the street was: “fucking bitch.”
So her last words: “Dude, I’m not mad at you.” His first words after murdering her: “fucking bitch.”
And then, of course, there’s what was discussed last week: how the MAGA faithful immediately began lying and claiming she was a “domestic terrorist” with multiple people trying to twist the story to claim she somehow “deserved” this.
One of the leaders of the goons, “border czar” Tom Homan, (who appears to have gotten away with taking $50,000 in a paper bag from federal officials pretending to be business owners seeking favors from Donald Trump) went on Meet the Press on Sunday and talked about how Democrats need to stop calling ICE murderers or they’ll have no choice but to murder again:
Homan: "We gotta stop the hateful rhetoric. Saying this officer is a murderer is dangerous. It's just ridiculous. It's gonna infuriate people more which means there's gonna be more incidents like this."
The transcript is as ridiculous as it is chilling:
We gotta stop the hateful rhetoric. Saying this officer is a murderer is dangerous. It’s just ridiculous. It’s gonna infuriate people more which means there’s gonna be more incidents like this, because the hateful rhetoric is not only continuing, it’s gonna be double down or triple down.
It’s the classic abuser’s lament: if you didn’t want me to hit you, why were you so mean to me.
First of all, the ones ramping up the “hateful rhetoric” have been the MAGA faithful. They’re the ones spreading baseless conspiracy theories, insisting that Good was a “domestic terrorist” or a “paid agitator.” This is the same thing Homan, Gregory Bovino, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, and Donald Trump have been doing for months, encouraging ICE to see the public as enemies to be fought, not a public they are supposed to be protecting.
Second, if federal agents are so fragile that people calling them names means they’re going to murder people, they shouldn’t be federal agents at all. They shouldn’t be allowed to handle firearms, frankly.
This is textbook authoritarian blame-shifting: create the conditions for violence through dehumanizing rhetoric, then blame the victims when violence inevitably occurs. And it’s not just Homan. The entire MAGA ecosystem is working overtime to justify this murder and preemptively excuse the next one.
Case in point: Fox News columnist Dave Marcus, who wrote this weekend that “wine moms” protesting ICE’s occupations, invasions, and law breaking is somehow a criminal conspiracy of “wine moms.”
Say what?
Marcus’s piece is transparently absurd—he’s claiming that citizens exercising their First Amendment rights to criticize federal agents constitute a criminal conspiracy—but he gives away the real game a few paragraphs in. Good and these other “wine moms'” actual “crime” wasn’t obstructing justice. It was mocking ICE agents in a manner that hurt their feelings:
The video of Good and her partner heckling and, let’s be honest, goading ICE officers with an obnoxious smugness that makes most people’s skin crawl, is just one of many.
It’s difficult to think of something more “obnoxiously smug” than a Fox News columnist insisting that after an ICE agent murdered a woman in broad daylight for protesting ICE’s actions… we should blame protesting women.
We see these self-important White women doing it in video after video after video, taunting cops, insulting journalists or even bystanders, often with a weird and disturbing glee.
The inclusion of “journalists” in that list is also telling in multiple ways. First off, the MAGA world is way more famous for “insulting journalists.” Hell, it’s part of Trump’s daily activities to insult and taunt journalists. I can’t find any example of Marcus complaining about that. But it sounds like if wine moms make fun of him for his journalism, well, that just means they deserve to be shot in the face?
But, more to the point: obnoxious smugness, heckling, and even goading federal officers is textbook First Amendment-protected speech. Criticizing government officials, even obnoxiously, is perhaps the core function of the First Amendment. Marcus seems to have confused “speech that annoys federal agents” with “criminal conspiracy.” And he’s using his own confusion to justify murder.
All of this, of course, is coming straight from the top. Late yesterday, Donald Trump told the press gaggle on his plane that murdering Good was acceptable because “the woman and her friend were highly disrespectful to law enforcement” and that “law enforcement should not be in a position where they have to put up with this stuff.”
Q: "Do you believe that deadly force was necessary?"Trump: "It was highly disrespectful of law enforcement. The woman and her friend were highly disrespectful of law enforcement…Law enforcement should not be in a position where they have to put up with this stuff."
Yes, he is literally justifying murder by his personal police force by claiming that being “highly disrespectful” (i.e., engaging in First Amendment-protected speech) makes the use of deadly force “necessary.”
Also note how Trump himself reveals that all the retconning nonsense by his MAGA faithful that the shooting had nothing to do with how Good spoke to Ross was all pretext. This was always about whether or not you kiss the boot in front of you. If you don’t—if you are “highly disrespectful”—Trump and his cronies think they can shoot you. And if you complain about it, they can shoot more people.
The state sponsored murders of wine moms will continue until morale improves.
You can see how fragile and pathetic these men are. They are so desperate to subjugate and suppress people who disagree with them politically. They seemed to think that once they were in power, the public would love and admire them for their power. Instead, the vast majority of Americans see them for what they are: pathetic, insecure man-babies in way over their heads.
So, now their only recourse is to ramp up the threats. To say that if you actually call out their criminal actions, such as murder, for what they are, they’ll just be forced to murder more critics and protestors.
They will never take responsibility for their own actions. They will never reflect on their own culpability. Because to reflect would require admitting what everyone already knows: they have no argument. They have no legal justification. They have no constitutional authority for what they’re doing.
All they have is the authoritarian’s playbook: dehumanize your critics, commit violence, blame the victims, and threaten more violence if the criticism doesn’t stop. It’s the logic of every tinpot dictator in history, now being deployed by federal law enforcement on American streets.
There is no question that they’ll murder again. Homan has already promised they will. And it’s why we need to keep exercising our First Amendment rights to speak out against this authoritarian nonsense, rather than capitulating and letting them win.
Late last year, most major U.S. telecoms were the victim of a massive, historic intrusion by Chinese hackers who managed to hack into U.S. communications networks and then spy on public U.S. officials for more than a year completely undetected. The “Salt Typhoon” hack was so severe, the intruders spent another year rooting around the ISP networks even after discovery. AT&T and Verizon, two of the compromised companies, initially didn’t think it was worth informing subscribers this happened.
“The attacks are the latest element of an ongoing cyber campaign against US communication networks by the Ministry of State Security, China’s intelligence service. One person familiar with the attack said it was unclear if the MSS had accessed lawmakers’ emails.”
Which means that they almost definitely had access to confidential lawmakers’ emails, something it will take our Keystone-Cops-esque government another six months to admit.
It can’t be overstated what a complete and massive hack this was. The Chinese government had broad, historic access to the sensitive phone and email conversations of a massive number of sensitive U.S. public and government figures, for years. Thanks, in large part, to big telecoms like AT&T leaving key network access points “secured” with default administrative usernames and passwords.
Last June, NextGov reported that lawyers at big telecoms had started advising their engineers to stop looking for signs of Salt Typhoon intrusion because they were worried about bad press and liability. Due to this coverup and a lack of transparency by the dying U.S. government, it’s likely we still don’t know the full scope of the intrusions.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has responded by gutting government cybersecurity programs (including a board investigating the Salt Typhoon hack), dismantling the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) (responsible for investigating significant cybersecurity incidents), and firing oodles of folks doing essential work at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
The Chinese hacked into most of our sensitive systems and spied on powerful people, across the entirety of U.S. governance, for years. The companies involved covered it up and the Trump administrations’ “fix” was to destroy our cybersecurity protections and corporate oversight.
The press, with scattered exception, yawned and put the story on page four.
This generational damage to U.S. IT infrastructure will likely take decades to recover from, and we can’t even begin the process of a proper, competent audit (assuming we’re even capable of that) until Trump is removed from office. Even then, course correcting may not be possible without fixing Trump’s domination of the Supreme and 5th and 6th Circuit courts, which have proudly declared all corporate oversight to be illegal.
Saturday, January 3rd, 2026. The President of the United States stood in his private club in Palm Beach, Florida, and announced that America had toppled Venezuela’s government and would now “run” the country indefinitely.
Not from the Oval Office. Not in consultation with Congress. From Mar-a-Lago, in front of gilded chandeliers and club members, Donald Trump pointed to the men standing behind him—his Secretary of State, his Defense Secretary, his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs—and said: “The people standing right behind me, we’re going to be running it.”
Running a nation of thirty million people. Indefinitely. Without congressional authorization. Without a declaration of war. Without even the pretense that constitutional constraints apply.
When asked about the legal basis, Trump cited oil rights he claims were “stolen” from American corporations decades ago. When asked about resistance, he promised a “second wave” of military action. When asked who would govern Venezuela, he gestured at his cabinet and said they would decide.
This is the anti-Lincoln moment. Not because Trump expanded executive power—Lincoln did that too. But because Lincoln used emergency authority to preserve the constitutional framework, while Trump uses it to declare himself outside constitutional constraint entirely.
Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus to save the Union. Donald Trump announced imperial conquest to extract oil. One defended the regime. One destroys it. Trump isn’t like Lincoln. He’s the structural opposite—doing exactly what Lincoln would have fought against.
Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. Expanded executive war powers. Asserted federal authority over states claiming sovereignty. This is historical fact.
But watch what else he did.
He submitted the habeas suspension to Congress for ratification—which they gave. He accepted that courts could review his actions. He ran for re-election during war and accepted he might lose. He yielded power when constitutional process demanded it.
Lincoln’s logic was always this: the constitutional framework faces existential threat from secession, and extraordinary measures to preserve it are justified—within constitutional bounds and subject to eventual constitutional accountability.
The key word is preserve. Lincoln expanded executive power to save the framework that makes constitutional government possible. Secession would have destroyed the Union. No Union, no Constitution. No Constitution, no self-government. The emergency power served constitutional continuation.
And crucially, Lincoln submitted to the framework even while defending it. Congress could check him. Courts could review him. Elections could remove him. His question wasn’t “How do I escape accountability?” It was “How do I preserve the system that holds me accountable?”
That’s emergency power in a constitutional republic. Extraordinary measures, constitutional purpose, ultimate accountability.
Trump’s Imperial Declaration
Trump’s announcement Saturday inverts every principle Lincoln defended.
No Congressional authorization under Article I, Section 8. No declaration of war. No emergency requiring immediate action to prevent attack on American territory or citizens. Just the President deciding to wage war, seize another nation’s government, and announce indefinite occupation.
“Venezuela unilaterally seized and sold American oil, American assets and American platforms,” Trump said from his club. “The socialist regime stole it from us… Now we’re taking it back.”
This isn’t emergency power to preserve constitutional framework. This is imperial conquest announced as resource extraction. This is the President declaring he will “run” a foreign nation to compensate American corporations for assets nationalized decades ago.
The New York Timesgot it exactly right: the events “evoked memories of a bygone era of gunboat diplomacy, where the U.S. employed its military might to secure territory and resources for its own advantage.”
Trump hung a portrait in the White House featuring himself alongside William McKinley—the president who seized the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. Now he’s acting out McKinley’s imperial playbook, but without even the pretense of Congressional authorization that McKinley obtained.
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress—not the President—the power to declare war. This isn’t ambiguous. This isn’t a gray area. The Founders explicitly rejected giving war powers to the executive because they had just fought a revolution against monarchical power.
Lincoln understood this. Even while expanding executive authority to suppress rebellion, he sought Congressional authorization, submitted to Congressional oversight, and accepted that courts and elections could check him.
Trump’s position, articulated by his defenders, is different: Congressional authorization is irrelevant when the cause is just. Maduro is evil. Venezuela’s people are suffering. Sometimes you have to crack a few eggs. Constitutional process is pedantry when outcomes are good.
This is not Lincoln’s emergency power. This is Carl Schmitt’s sovereignty: the sovereign is he who decides on the exception. The strong leader acts decisively. Constitutional constraint is obstacle, not obligation. Emergency is permanent condition justifying permanent exception.
Lincoln used emergency power within constitutional framework to preserve that framework from destruction. Trump uses emergency claims to declare himself outside constitutional framework—to wage war, seize governments, and extract resources without Congressional authorization, without declaration of war, without even the pretense that constitutional constraints apply to him.
This isn’t isolated. This is the pattern.
When election results constrain him, he claims fraud, attempts to prevent certification, and incites assault on the Capitol.
When courts rule against him, he calls the judiciary illegitimate and promises to ignore adverse rulings.
When Congress investigates, he refuses subpoenas, claims absolute immunity, and purges inspector generals.
When the Constitution limits war powers, he wages war unilaterally from his private club while his defenders mock proceduralism.
Every emergency claim serves the same purpose: eliminate the constraint. Never preserve the framework. Always escape accountability.
His defenders make it explicit. Marco Rubio, now Secretary of State and National Security Adviser, said of Venezuela’s interim leader: “We think they’re going to have some unique and historic opportunities to do a great service for the country, and we hope that they’ll accept that opportunity.”
Translation: do what we want, or face second-wave military action. This isn’t partnership. This isn’t liberation. This is imperial diktat backed by armada.
Trump himself was clearer: America will extract Venezuela’s oil, and the partnership with the United States will make“the people of Venezuela rich, independent, and safe”—if they comply. If they resist, he warned: “We’re not afraid of boots on the ground.”
This is conquest. Announced from Mar-a-Lago. Without Congressional authorization. In explicit pursuit of seizing another nation’s resources for American corporate benefit.
Lincoln would have recognized this instantly as what he fought against. This is executive power divorced from constitutional constraint. This is sovereignty claiming exception to law itself.
We’re not in normal politics. Normal politics is policy disagreement within shared constitutional framework. Should taxes be higher? How should we conduct foreign policy? What’s the right balance of regulation?
This is regime crisis. One side claims constitutional constraints don’t apply when emergency or good outcomes justify exception. The other side keeps pretending we’re having normal policy debate.
When the President wages war without Congress, that’s not “foreign policy I disagree with.” That’s constitutional violation requiring constitutional response.
When the President announces from his private club that his cabinet will “run” a foreign nation of thirty million people indefinitely, that’s not “aggressive foreign policy.” That’s declaration that constitutional war powers don’t constrain him.
When his defenders argue the violation doesn’t matter because Maduro is evil and outcomes are good, that’s not “different political philosophy.” That’s rejection of constitutional constraint as governing principle.
Every act of “let’s debate the Venezuela policy” is collaboration with framework destruction. Not because debate is bad, but because they’re not proposing policy within the framework—they’re eliminating the framework while we debate.
You can’t defeat “constitutional constraints are optional” by following constitutional constraints politely while the other side wages war from private clubs. You can only defend the framework by using every power that framework provides.
This is the regime crisis I wrote about in the manifesto. This is what happens when democratic constraint disappears. This is what Lincoln fought to prevent.
And this is what defense of the republic requires us to stop.
We cannot treat this as normal politics.
Lincoln preserved the framework. Trump declares himself outside it.
Your grandparents knew which side they were on when the republic was threatened. They fought. They won. They built the middle class and the democratic alliance that kept the peace for seventy years.
We will do it again.
2026 begins now.
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. This is an abridged version of a version originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
Renee Nicole Good was a 37-year-old award-winning poet, a mother of a six-year-old, and a wife who had recently moved to Minneapolis. That all ended yesterday when a masked ICE agent murdered her in broad daylight, shooting her multiple times at close range in the head. She had stuffed animal toys in the glove box of her SUV that rammed into another car after she’d been killed for no reason at all.
We have video of what happened. Multiple angles. The Trump administration is lying about every single detail anyway.
Donald Trump kicked off with a blatant lie, claiming that Good “viciously ran over the ICE officer.”
Known liar, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, called Good a “violent rioter” who “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.”
Kristi Noem made up a complete fantasy:
It was an act of domestic terrorism. What happened was, our ICE officers were out in enforcement action, they got stuck in the snow because of the adverse weather that is in Minneapolis, they were attempting to push out their vehicle, and a woman attacked them and those surrounding them and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle.
Not a single one of them is telling the truth. They are flat out lying.
Here’s what actually happened. The folks at Bellingcat put together a top down view showing the murder, pieced together from multiple videos:
Using imagery online of the shooting by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, we’ve created an animated sequence which highlights the approximate positioning of officers and vehicles at the scene. The red dot represents the agent who fired the shots. Yellow dots are other agents who arrived at the scene.
This morning (after equivocating all day yesterday, as I’ll discuss below), the NY Times put out a video using multiple bystander videos, showing that the ICE agent (1) was not hit (2) was not in the path of the vehicle and (3) was absolutely fine afterwards (contradicting claims from the administration that he was run over and in the hospital). See it here:
From all the evidence, it’s clear that Good had stopped and when ICE agents started demanding she move, she started to pull around the ICE vehicle in front of her. She paused to let another vehicle drive by her. As that happened (for no apparent reason) the ICE agent who eventually murdered her walked around the right side of her car to the front. As he does that two other ICE agents approach the car, with one telling her to exit the car while another yells for her to move. She then proceeds to try to drive away from the ICE agents. The one who had stepped in front of her car steps aside and then just starts madly firing at her head.
He murdered her. And Trump and his cronies are lying about it with video evidence directly contradicting every word.
This isn’t the first time ICE has killed someone. This is actually the ninth such shooting by an ICE agent since September, every single one of which involved an ICE agent blatantly violating policy by firing into a vehicle. This is at least the second outright murder, as opposed to attempted murder.
While ICE conveniently took down its page describing this (got something to hide?), the official policy is that “firearms shall not be discharged solely to disable moving vehicles.” Also, “discharging a firearm from a moving vehicle is prohibited.” There are some limited exceptions, but they appear to apply solely to a case where the car is driving directly at an ICE agent.
ICE shouldn’t even be in Minneapolis. It shouldn’t be anywhere. It shouldn’t exist. Nor should it ever have existed, as many of us have warned for many, many years. When we first started writing about ICE over 15 years ago, it was already a lawless organization.
This murder of an American citizen on a quiet street—someone who was just there to observe and monitor ICE agents kidnapping people—exemplifies why ICE is fundamentally incompatible with a free society. We’re talking about a masked federal police force, operating in secret, with no apparent limits, no meaningful rules, and no consequences for violence. They’re engaging in lethal force against anyone—citizens and non-citizens alike—because they’ve been given implicit permission by the White House to do whatever they want. MAGA folks mock the Gestapo comparison, but what else do you call an unaccountable secret police force that operates with impunity, murders citizens in broad daylight, and then lies about it with the full backing of the state?
Further, as detailed in the Court’s factual findings, agents have used excessive force in response to protesters’ and journalists’ exercise of their First Amendment rights, without justification, often without warning, and even at those who had begun to comply with agents’ orders…. While the Court acknowledges that some unruly individuals have been present during these gatherings, their presence among “peaceful protestors, journalists and legal observers does not give Defendants a blank check to employ unrestricted use of crowd control weapons,” and, in many of the instances in which agents deployed less lethal munitions, they did not direct the force anywhere near such bad actors…. Agents’ “use of indiscriminate weapons against all protesters—not just the violent ones—supports the inference that federal agents were substantially motivated by Plaintiffs’ protected First Amendment activity.”
Judge Ellis also called out DHS’s systematic lying—the same pattern we’re seeing now:
While Defendants may argue that the Court identifies only minor inconsistencies, every minor inconsistency adds up, and at some point, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to believe almost anything that Defendants represent
And yes, they will lie in the face of directly contradictory video evidence. Judge Ellis again:
Presumably, these portions of the videos would be Defendants’ best evidence to demonstrate that agents acted in line with the Constitution, federal laws, and the agencies’ own policies on use of force when engaging with protesters, the press, and religious practitioners. Buta review of them shows the opposite—supporting Plaintiffs’ claims and undermining all of Defendants’ claimsthat their actions toward protesters, the press, and religious practitioners have been, as Bovino has stated, “more than exemplary.”
A federal judge warned us six weeks ago that DHS and ICE would likely kill people and lie about it even when video proved them wrong. Yesterday proved her right. Again.
I had a few other stories I planned to write up on Wednesday, not to mention taking care of some other work, and I spent most of the day just unable to do anything, feeling sick to my stomach.
Yes, this happens in America (and elsewhere), but it shouldn’t. This is fucked up.
As 404 Media points out, this has become the standard course of action by the Trump admin these days.
This is a pattern. Some event happens as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, DHS rushes out a misleading, wrong, or incendiary statement that does not reflect reality, and it becomes another piece of ammo for the X.com grifters, right wing media ecosystem, or people who just love the idea of others being hurt.
And, again, why the fuck is ICE even in Minneapolis anyway? Because a small-time MAGA grifter YouTuber made a misleading video a few weeks ago claiming day care centers in Minneapolis were running a scam. His “evidence”? The day cares had locked doors and wouldn’t let him in with his cameras—which is what day cares do when random people show up demanding entry.
Noem is claiming that ICE had to be in Minneapolis based on her lies that the city is “dangerous” and full of “criminals” who don’t belong there. But as multiple people have pointed out there has been only one murder in Minneapolis in 2026.
It was the one committed by this ICE agent yesterday.
The Trump MAGA DHS position is that if you don’t immediately submit in every possible way, they will frame you as a “threat” who they can kill with impunity. Defector’s summary is exactly right:
Now that the Trump administration has shown it will immediately make up a flagrant lie in an attempt to justify the summary execution of a U.S. citizen, on video, in broad daylight—and will outright valorize the ICE agent who drew his pistol and killed a civilian for the crime of moving her vehicle a few feet—the message is clear, to ICE agents and everyone else: Nothing constrains these agents except whatever inhibits any individual one of them, personally, from brutalizing and murdering any person who disobeys them….
In the eyes of the state and its agents, all of the rest of us are walking around with a standing presumption, not just of guilt, but of murderous intent. Anything but total and immediate submission is domestic terrorism. It’s punishable by whatever the masked and unidentified government agent pointing a gun at your face decides to dish out.
And, of course, the compliant media is playing its part. Both the NY Times and the Washington Post initially embraced the view-from-nowhere approach of claiming the events around the shooting are “disputed.”
Come the fuck on. Five hours later and the headline is still about a disputed shooting. Just a basic lack of courage to acknowledge the obvious.
The old journalism joke is that if one person tells you it’s sunny outside and the other says it’s raining, you don’t report that the weather is disputed. You go the fuck outside and check. We have the video here. Multiple angles. It shows exactly what happened. But the Times and Post were treating the administration’s obvious lies as equally valid to the documented evidence because… why? Because acknowledging that a federal agency will murder a citizen and then lie about it in the face of video evidence is too uncomfortable? This isn’t neutral journalism—it’s active complicity in state violence. When the media treats documented murder and transparent lies as a “dispute,” they’re telling every ICE agent that there will be no accountability, no matter how clear the evidence.
Yes, eventually, this morning, both the NY Times and the Washington Post published more thorough investigations, showing that the administration is lying. But they let the “dispute” stand for 24 hours, allowing the administration to set the narrative that will live on. And even now they’re using equivocal language. The Post’s story talks about how the video evidence “raises questions about” what the admin is saying, rather than just coming out and saying that they’re LYING.
And I won’t get into how state media like Fox News is reporting on this: focusing on whatever it could dig up about Good to mock her, as if anything in her personal life or views somehow justifies her being murdered. Or all the GOP elected officials going on TV trying to pretend that she might have deserved to have been murdered in the street.
Yes, I know that in these tribal times so many people are playing the team sports thing of just immediately defending their cult leader. Going on X and looking around, you see just an overwhelming flood of absolute bullshit from MAGA folks cracking jokes (remember when they wanted people fired for joking about Charlie Kirk’s murder?) and trying to spin the story, knowing full well it’s all bullshit.
But some are seeing through it. A neighbor near where the murder happened, who identified himself as “right leaning,” admitted that the situation shook him, as “this is not how we’re supposed to be doing things in America.”
Really worth watching this interview with a bystander who witnessed the ICE shooting in Minneapolis: "I'm pretty right-leaning. But seeing this, this is not how we're supposed to be doing things in America.”
He’s right. And it is beyond disgusting that so many powerful forces in our government and the media are trying to twist and manipulate the story to justify an out of control ICE.
The only appropriate response here is to shut down ICE. Shut down DHS. Yes, there are important and necessary roles in DHS, but they existed without DHS before it was formed two decades ago, and we can redistribute those roles elsewhere in the federal government. But we don’t need ICE. We don’t need a secret federal police that goes around in masks kidnapping and murdering people.
It’s about as un-American as you can imagine.
This murder has at least appeared to wake some politicians from their slumber. We’ve seen multiple Democratic politicians, especially in Minnesota, speak out as forcefully as I’ve seen politicians speak out in years, telling ICE to get the fuck out of Minneapolis and calling out the administration’s lies directly. That matters. When officials with actual power are willing to name the truth—that ICE murdered a citizen and the administration is lying about it—it creates space for others to do the same.
But also thousands came out to memorialize Renee Nicole Good, in the freezing cold in a Minneapolis January. Hundreds turned up at a training session for legal observers, even as hundreds more are already patrolling Minneapolis, observing ICE’s illegal actions, and doing so knowing that ICE and DHS won’t hesitate to shoot them dead.
That’s what a movement looks like when institutions fail. Not waiting for someone to save us, but showing up in the freezing cold to say: you will not do this in our name. You will not kill our neighbors without witness. You will not lie about it unchallenged.
I’m going to leave this post up for a while before we post anything else. This matters more than the usual tech policy stories right now.
There are plenty of things going on that are infuriating. Ever day this administration finds new ways to spit on the Constitution. We’re still dealing with the illegal invasion of Venezuela, and apparent plans to attack multiple other nations around the Western Hemisphere.
But Renee Nicole Good’s murder cuts through all of that noise. A masked federal agent murdered an American citizen in broad daylight for no reason at all. The administration lied about it with video evidence directly contradicting every word. The media called it “disputed.” And thousands of people said no.
The institutional guardrails have failed. The courts warned us this would happen and it happened anyway. The media won’t hold power accountable. So the work falls to us—to show up, to document, to refuse to accept the lies, to make the cost of this violence too high to sustain.
ICE must be abolished. This cannot stand. And anyone who makes excuses for what happened yesterday has chosen a side, and it’s not the side of America or freedom or anything resembling justice.
Renee Nicole Good was a poet, a mother, and a citizen murdered by her own government for the crime of existing near an ICE agent having a bad day. Remember her name. Remember what they did. And remember that they lied about it even with the cameras rolling.
Last year we noted how the Trump organization had cooked up a half-assed wireless phone company. It was barely even a “phone company”; it was just a lazy marketing rebrand of another, half-assed, MAGA-focused, mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) named Patriot Mobile, which itself just resells T-Mobile service.
The centerpiece of this effort was supposed to be a “bold” new $500 Trump T1 smartphone the Trump org claimed would be “proudly designed and built in the United States” and released sometime last August. Not only was the device never going to be made in the States (all mention of that was quickly stripped from press materials), the August launch date came and went with no Trump phone.
With 2025 over there’s still no sign of the device. And the delay is being blamed on the government shutdown, despite the fact this device doesn’t have anything to do with the government (outside of trying to make a lazy buck off the Presidency):
“Though Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump — the president’s two oldest sons — initially said that the gold-coloredsmartphone would come out in August, a Trump Mobile customer service representative told Business Insider that the phone won’t be shipped until the end of January 2026, a delay they partially attributed to the recent government shutdown.”
The phone, had it actually become available, appears to just be a sloppy reskin of a much cheaper sub-$200 phone produced in China; ironic coming from the MAGA folks who’ve spent the last decade whining about the national security threats posed by Chinese companies like Huawei and TikTok. The delays are also quite likely caused by either rank incompetence or the pointless tariffs, which they obviously can’t admit.
This was such a lazy grift that not only is there no phone, the Trump Mobile X account hasn’t posted since August. Despite the endless delays, the company is still taking $100 down payments from rubes. Normally here is where regulators might step in to penalize the company for its empty promises, but since Trump has destroyed what was left of U.S. consumer protection, that’s obviously not happening.
The project is run by the Presidents’ two sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, who clearly can’t even grift competently and continue to make third world dictatorships seem like an upgrade over our dim, clumsy-ass nepobaby kakistocracy.
I’ve criticized Chuck Schumer plenty over the years, generally for being bad on tech policy, but also for not understanding the moment we’re living through. Yes, he’s the leader of a minority party with zero power, but that doesn’t mean he’s powerless. Yet he acts as if he is.
And if he can’t figure that out, it’s time for someone else to do it.
Let’s start with what just happened. As I detailed yesterday, Trump ordered military strikes on a sovereign nation and kidnapped its president without Congressional authorization—a clear violation of the War Powers Act and, you know, the basic constitutional requirement that Congress, not the president, has the power to declare war. And don’t buy the claim that it’s okay because this was just “law enforcement”: the Senate Judiciary Committee—including Republican chair Chuck Grassley—has pointed out that the White House refused to brief them, claiming it’s a military action and not law enforcement.
There is no way to describe this other than a massive breach of basic international order and the separation of powers our Constitution established. It’s yet another in a long line of efforts by Donald Trump to act as sovereign king of the US, rather than the elected executive of a single branch of a government with three co-equal branches.
Any opposition leader in such a world should seize the moment, call out the blatant unconstitutional and illegal behavior and make that the story. Over and over and over again.
But not Schumer. He starts out by needlessly granting the premise that Maduro is bad, and that’s unnecessary. Whether he’s terrible and an illegitimate dictator is besides the point. That doesn’t give Trump the authority to do what he did. But even if you want to start there, you have to follow it up with a serious condemnation. Instead, Schumer goes meekly with the idea that it was “reckless.”
“Maduro is an illegitimate dictator, but launching military action without congressional authorization, without a credible plan, but what comes next is reckless,” Schumer said.
And then he makes clear that his entire strategy is to hope that the Republican elected officials in Congress will come to their senses and push back against Trump, something that anyone who has been awake for more than a few days in the last decade knows will never happen.
Schumer pressed troubled Republicans to back the passage of the bipartisan War Powers Resolution, which he introduced alongside Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and other lawmakers last month. The resolution will be brought to the Senate floor for debate next week, Schumer promised, telling reporters “we’re going to be pushing our Republican colleagues to stand up for the American people to get this done.”
“We have heard from some Republicans in private conversations, chairs, talking to their ranking members, that they have some — they are troubled by this,” Schumer said, adding that he’s in talks with ranking Democrats on relevant committees on how to respond to the administration’s action against Maduro.
There it is. The classic Chuck Schumer move: “We’ve heard from some Republicans in private that they’re troubled by this.” Oh, how wonderful. Some Republicans are “troubled.” They’re always troubled. They’re perpetually troubled. They furrow their brows and express deep concern and then vote with Trump anyway. EVERY FUCKING TIME. This has been the pattern for nine years now, and Schumer keeps acting like this time will be different.
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York dismissed the idea that there could be another government shutdown at the end of the month as Congress stares down a new funding deadline of Jan. 30.
Appearing on ABC News Sunday,Schumer was definitive in responding “no” when asked if the country was headed toward another shutdownand went on to say that “good progress” is being made toward passing funding bills for the 2026 fiscal year.
“Democrats want to fund the appropriations, the spending bills, all the way through 2026,” Schumer said. “We want to work in a bicameral, bipartisan way to do it and the good news is our Republican appropriators are working with us.”
Read that again. The Democratic leader, faced with a president who just launched an illegal war, publicly announced that he won’t use the one bit of actual leverage he has—the threat of a government shutdown—to force accountability. He just… gave it away. For free. He told Republicans “don’t worry, we won’t actually fight you on this, we’re committed to being ‘reasonable.’”
This is political malpractice of the highest order.
Now, I can already predict some of the replies to this. “What do you expect Schumer to do? Democrats don’t have power! They can’t stop this!” And look, I get it. Democrats are in the minority in the Senate. They don’t control the House. They don’t control the executive branch. In terms of the formal mechanisms of power, they’re largely shut out.
But you know who else was in the minority? Mitch McConnell for most of Obama’s presidency. And he didn’t just sit around hoping Democrats would come to their senses. He built a movement. He shaped a narrative. He made obstruction itself into a political strategy that energized his base and put constant pressure on the majority. He understood something fundamental: being an opposition leader isn’t just about counting votes. It’s about building public pressure, shaping the discourse, and making your opposition pay a political price for their actions.
Here’s what a real opposition leader would do in this moment:
Make the illegality of Trump’s actions the story. Every single day, Democrats should be holding press conferences explaining in great detail how this is illegal and unconstitutional and just generally offensive to American values. They need to keep banging the drum on the only bit that matters: the President cannot do this under the Constitution and the law. The message should be simple and repeated until everyone is sick of hearing it: “The president launched an illegal war without Congressional authorization, in violation of the Constitution and the War Powers Act. This is not normal. This is not acceptable. This cannot stand.”
Make reporters ask Republicans about it in every single interview. Make them defend the indefensible. Force them to either break with Trump or publicly embrace illegal military action. Don’t let them hide behind vague statements about being “troubled.”
Frame this as a constitutional crisis, not a partisan fight. This isn’t hard. Tell a story that isn’t political or partisan, but that hits at fundamental values. America shouldn’t be engaging in dangerous regime change adventurism for oil (as Trump has repeatedly admitted, even as his Fox News minions pretend its about fentanyl, a drug that Venezuela has nothing to do with). Don’t let Trump and MAGA frame the debate.
Frame the whole issue around fundamental American values that transcend party: the rule of law, constitutional limits on executive power, Congress’s role in decisions about war. Make it clear that this has nothing to do with whether you like Maduro (spoiler: nobody does), but about whether we’re a nation of laws or a nation where the president can do whatever he wants. Americans across the political spectrum understand that distinction, even if their representatives pretend not to.
Create real consequences. Schumer has more leverage than he thinks. Yes, he can threaten a government shutdown—and no, that’s not crazy. Sometimes you have to be willing to fight. But beyond that: refuse to move any of Trump’s nominees until he complies with the War Powers Act. Literally yesterday, a bunch of Democrats (obviously with Schumer’s approval) voted to confirm a new assistant Secretary of Defense. Why? Why would they do that at this moment?
Demand daily briefings on Venezuela and the legal justification for the strikes. Hold public hearings showcasing the legal scholars and national security experts who agree this was illegal. File lawsuits. Encourage state attorneys general to file their own challenges. Make noise. Make trouble.
Inspire and mobilize their base. This is perhaps the most important thing, and the thing Schumer is absolutely the worst at. Millions of Americans are watching this unfold with horror and feeling helpless. They want someone to fight. They want someone to tell them this matters and that there’s something they can do about it. Give them that. Hold rallies. Organize protests. Create a “Restore the Constitution” campaign that gives people something to be for, not just against. Build a movement of Americans who believe the Constitution still matters. Stop hoping those “troubled” Republicans will suddenly grow spines and start building public pressure that makes their continued acquiescence politically toxic.
Shape the narrative about what comes next. Trump’s supporters still want to claim this is about drugs, but Trump himself keeps admitting it was totally about stealing Venezuelan oil and making his donors at the large oil companies rich. Make that the whole fucking story. Connect it to the broader pattern of Trump’s transactional, lawless approach to foreign policy. Paint a picture of where this leads if unchecked. How are Democrats not calling this out over and over again? Keep showing the clips of Trump promising he was against foreign wars, against regime change.
There are so many opportunities and Schumer is letting them all go by because he doesn’t want to feel embarrassed to bump into a GOP Senator at the gym.
Prepare for 2026 and beyond. Even if Schumer can’t stop this action, he can make Republicans pay a political price for enabling it. Identify the vulnerable Republicans who will face tough races in 2026 and 2028. Run ads in their districts highlighting their refusal to stand up to an illegal war. Make them defend their votes. Build a case to the American people that Republicans have abandoned the rule of law. Turn this into a major campaign issue.
None of this requires having a Senate majority. It doesn’t even require getting Republican senators on board, though it could help if Schumer picked off a few Republicans. What it requires is recognizing that an opposition leader’s power doesn’t come solely from their vote count. Mitch McConnell understood this. Newt Gingrich understood this.
The job of the opposition leader, especially in moments like this, is to be oppositional. To fight. To make noise. To create consequences even when you don’t have the votes to block something outright. And that time is now.
Instead, Schumer is doing what he always does: magical wishcasting: hoping against all evidence that Republicans will be reasonable. On top of that, giving away his leverage before negotiations even start, and treating politics like a genteel debate club where everyone follows the unwritten rules. But those rules are gone. Trump lit them on fire years ago. And continuing to pretend they exist is just enabling the erosion of constitutional democracy.
I understand the impulse to be the “adults in the room.” To pretend that acting this way shows that Democrats can govern responsibly: that they won’t play games with government funding, that they’ll work across the aisle. In normal times, that’s potentially admirable. But these aren’t normal times. When a president launches an illegal war, captures a foreign leader, and faces no consequences, you’re not in “normal times” anymore. You’re in a constitutional crisis (the latest in a long line of constitutional crises Trump has kicked off, without much in the way of consequences).
In a constitutional crisis, being the adult in the room should mean fighting back with every tool you have. And Schumer has failed to do that over and over and over again in the last year, enabling Trump to continue to push the boundaries further and further. All while Schumer twiddles his thumbs and waits for the GOP to come around? What is he thinking?
The most frustrating part is that this isn’t even particularly difficult or risky politically. Polls consistently show that Americans don’t want more military interventions abroad. There’s broad skepticism of foreign entanglements. Standing up and saying “the president can’t just launch wars on his own” isn’t some far-left position—it’s basic constitutionalism that should command widespread support. This is a fight Schumer could easily win in the court of public opinion. But he has to actually try.
If Chuck Schumer can’t do these basic things—can’t recognize the moment we’re in, can’t build a movement, can’t shape the narrative, can’t use the tools he has to create political pressure—then he’s not the right person for this job. The Senate needs an opposition leader who understands that leadership means leading, not just reacting and hoping. It needs someone who can inspire people to fight, not someone who tells them to keep calm and hope Republicans will do the right thing.
Democracy doesn’t save itself. Constitutional norms don’t restore themselves. They require people willing to fight for them, especially when it’s hard and especially when the outcome is uncertain. Right now, when it matters most, Chuck Schumer isn’t fighting. He’s hoping. And hope, as we’ve learned over the past nine years, is not a strategy.
It was a chilly afternoon in January, just a week after President Donald Trump returned to the White House, when I met Yineska, a Venezuelan mother who had been living in the United States for nearly two years. Trump’s election, she told me, had put her in a bind. On his first day back in office, Trump announced that he planned to end the humanitarian parole program that had allowed her, her children and more than 100,000 other Venezuelans to come to the United States in recent years. She feared that the new life she had worked so hard to build was about to unravel.
I went to her home and we talked for hours in the small kitchen. She told me about her two boys, Sebastián and Gabriel, and about Eduard, her partner, who worked as a cook in a restaurant nearby in Doral, Florida, a city beside Miami. She described how difficult it had been to leave her family and small business behind in a once-thriving part of Venezuela, now hollowed out by years of economic decline. The journey to the U.S. was grueling. It took almost seven months for Yineska, her boys and a nephew to cross the dangerous Darién Gap and then Mexico before reuniting with Eduard in Miami.
They managed to rent a safe space to live on the edge of Doral, found work and enrolled the boys in school. Yineska’s oldest was excited about getting an American high school diploma. And then, with the swipe of his pen, the president threatened to take away the stable lives they had finally begun to build. I could hear the fear in her voice as we spoke.
I introduced myself to Yineska because I knew she wasn’t alone. I’m a journalist and filmmaker at ProPublica, and I moved to the U.S. from Venezuela nearly a decade ago. I was fortunate to arrive with a visa that allowed me to work legally.
As I watched Trump’s second presidential campaign, I sensed what might be coming. His return to office would thrust so many Venezuelans who had recently settled in the U.S. between two storm clouds: an American government turning against them and a repressive regime back home that offered no future. Many of my Venezuelan friends saw something entirely different. They believed his return would be a blessing for our community, that he would cast out only those who had brought trouble and shield the rest.
When I left Yineska’s house that first night, I wrote in my notebook: “This is a good family. A working family. They represent so many Venezuelans who came here seeking safety and opportunity — and, in many ways, they represent me, too.”In her story, I saw the chance to highlight the quiet anxiety growing in some corners of Doral that the sense of safety we had found in America could disappear overnight.
Doral is the heart of the Venezuelan diaspora in the U.S. About 40% of those who live there emigrated from my country to escape the deep economic, political and social collapse that has unfolded in the nearly 12 years President Nicolás Maduro has been in power. His authoritarian grip and the country’s unraveling economy caused nearly 8 million people to flee, mostly to other Latin American countries and the Caribbean. It’s the largest mass displacement in the Western Hemisphere’s recent history.
When I came to the U.S., most Latinos were facing the first waves of Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. At the time, Trump called Mexican people “bad hombres.” Venezuelans, by contrast, were not viewed negatively. Trump took a hard line against Maduro, imposing heavy economic sanctions meant to weaken his autocratic hold on power. The stance earned Trump broad support among Venezuelan exiles in the U.S., especially in South Florida and in Doral. In the final days of his first term, Trump recognized the danger Venezuelans faced if they were forced to return and issued a memorandum that temporarily shielded those already in the U.S. from deportation.
In the following years, President Joe Biden opened several temporary pathways that allowed more than 700,000 Venezuelans to live legally in the U.S. His administration granted humanitarian parole to Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, like Yineska and her sons, allowing them to reside and work in the U.S. for up to two years if they passed background checks and secured financial sponsors. He also expanded Temporary Protected Status to Venezuelans already living here, which prevented them from being sent back to an unstable Venezuela and granted them work permits.
After securing humanitarian parole and entering the U.S. in April 2023, Yineska and her two sons made their way to Florida to reunite with Eduard. He was in Miami and had applied for TPS. Traveling with Yineska was a nephew who applied for asylum. All of them entered the U.S. legally.
Even as some in the community benefitted from Biden’s policies, many Venezuelans counted themselves among the Latinos who argued that the Biden administration was giving asylum-seekers preferential treatment and not carefully vetting those entering the country. They said that lax oversight had allowed criminals, including members of the Venezuelan gang known as Tren de Aragua, to cross into the U.S. They also wanted Biden to take a stronger stance against Maduro. In 2024, the Venezuelan American vote helped Trump win handily in Miami-Dade County.
Since Trump returned to the White House, that loyalty has been shaken. His administration has targeted Venezuelans in some of its most dramatic and punitive operations. In February, the federal government flew more than 230 Venezuelans to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador where men described being beaten and berated. The administration branded them “the worst of the worst.”
My colleagues found that the U.S. government knew the vast majority had not been convicted of any crime here. Its own data indicated that of the 32 men with convictions, only six were for violent crimes. In response to that reporting, Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin insisted, without providing evidence, that the deportees were “terrorists, human rights abusers, gang members and more — they just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.”
At the same time, the Trump administration has sought to end legal protections for families like Yineska’s. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in April that Temporary Protected Status “was only supposed to be used in times of war or storm or destruction in the home countries of these migrants. It was completely abused.”
“It’s as if you’re standing on a rug that’s pulled from under you,” Yineska told me during one of our many conversations in her kitchen. For Venezuelan families like hers, the idea of “temporary relief” feels detached from reality. They have followed the rules and envisioned a future for their children. To tell them that their safety has an expiration date while their home country remains mired in the same crisis they fled — and is now in the crosshairs of the U.S. military — is a painful contradiction.
Venezuelans I spoke with, including Yineska and Eduard, said migrants who break the law should face consequences, but those who follow the rules should have an opportunity to stay. And even as they confront the administration’s crackdown, many still cheer Trump’s hard-line stance against Maduro because they see a glimmer of hope that Venezuela might finally move toward a brighter future, something Venezuelans everywhere — myself included — dream of. But the future is dimming for those in Doral with temporary status. I see the impact every day. Restaurants are quieter. More apartments are listed for rent. The energy that once defined this community isn’t the same.
I am now a U.S. citizen, but this milestone feels bittersweet as I watch friends pack their belongings to seek opportunities abroad. Few plan to return to Venezuela.
As the hostility of the administration pressed down on people like Yineska and her family, they worried they, too, would be forced to pack their bags. My new film, “Status: Venezuelan,” follows them as they weigh fear against hope, struggling to decide whether to fight for the life they have built or leave everything behind.
It’s hilarious that a single Salvadoran migrant has made the Trump administration look so pitiful. During one of its first purge efforts, the administration deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia and another 100-plus migrants to El Salvador’s infamous CECOT prison.
Since then, the administration has done nothing but lose when it comes to Abrego Garcia. He not only managed to get returned to the US, but he’s successfully pushing back against the bullshit prosecution the DOJ cooked up to punish him for daring to stand up for his rights.
At this point, the DOJ is almost out of options. The Tennessee judge overseeing the attempted prosecution has not only allowed Abrego Garcia to go free on bail, but has taken setting a trial date completely off the docket until the government can provide an argument for engaging in the prosecution that isn’t just “because he pissed us off.”
The timeline of this prosecution strongly suggests the government can’t contradict Abrego Garcia’s vindictive prosecution allegations. Abrego Garcia’s first experience with US law enforcement happened in November 2022 when he was pulled over for speeding by Tennessee Highway Patrol officers. The locals referred the case to Homeland Security Investigations based on “suspicions of human trafficking.” Garcia, however, was free to go and didn’t even get a speeding ticket.
On March 12, 2025, he was arrested and interviewed by HSI. The decision was made to deport him. Although the 2022 traffic stop was discussed, Abrego Garcia still wasn’t charged with any crime beyond being in the country illegally. HSI closed its human trafficking investigation on April 1, 2025. Again, no charges were brought.
Three days after that, a Maryland court ordered Abrego Garcia returned to the US because his due process rights had been violated. More litigation ensued with the Supreme Court finally weighing in on the issue on April 10. Then this happened:
[O]n May 21, 2025, a Middle District of Tennessee grand jury presented a two-count indictment against Abrego arising from the November 30, 2022 traffic stop. An arrest warrant issued, prompting the United States to return Abrego from El Salvador. Abrego was arrested on June 6, 2025, and was brought to this District.
So far, the government has turned over 3,000 pages to the court. Abrego Garcia hasn’t seen many of these because the government claims almost everything it has provided are privileged communications. The court says that may be true in some cases, but it hardly matters because what it has seen so far undercuts the sworn statements the DOJ has previously made in this case. The government has argued (not very convincingly) that this can’t possibly be vindictive prosecution because the acting US Attorney Robert McGuire did all of this on his own without any input from the rest of the administration.
The central question after Abrego established a prima facie case of vindictiveness is what information in the government’s control sheds light on its new decision to prosecute Abrego, after removing him from the United States without criminal charges. These documents show that McGuire did not act alone and to the extent McGuire had input on the decision to prosecute, he shared it with (Associate Deputy Attorney General Akash] Singh and others.
Specifically, the government’s documents may contradict its prior representations that the decision to prosecute was made locally and that there were no outside influences. For example, Singh contacted McGuire on April 27, 2025, to discuss Abrego’s case. On April 30, 2025, Singh asked McGuire what the potential charges against Abrego would be, whether the charging document would reference Abrego’s alleged MS-13 affiliation, and asked for a phone call before any charges were filed. In a separate email on April 30, 2025, Singh made clear that Abrego’s criminal prosecution was a “top priority” for the Deputy Attorney General’s office (Blanche). He then told McGuire to “sketch out a draft complaint for the 1324 charge [making it unlawful to bring in and harbor certain aliens].”
On May 15th, McGuire emailed his staff that “DAG (Blanche) and PDAG would like Garcia charged sooner rather than later.” Then, on May 16, 2025, counsel of record Jacob Warren emailed Singh and reported, “if the DAG (Blanche) does want to move forward with the indictment on Wednesday, we think it would be prudent to loop in the press office ASAP.” Finally, on May 18, 2025, Singh emailed McGuire and others, and instructed them to “close[ly] hold” the draft indictment until the group “g[o]t clearance,” to file. The implication is that “clearance” would come from the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, not just McGuire.
The upshot is this: the government can assert all the privilege it wants to, but the system of checks and balances means it can’t bypass constitutional rights just by denying criminal defendants access to anything that might support their arguments.
The Court recognizes the government’s assertion of privileges, but Abrego’s due process right to a non-vindictive prosecution outweighs the blanket evidentiary privileges asserted by the government.
For now, the government is barely managing to hang onto a case it’s probably going to end up losing. All the power of the government — especially this government which has repeatedly expressed its disdain for courts, judges, and orders it doesn’t like — is meeting an unexpectedly immovable object. And if Abrego Garcia walks away from this a free man, he’s going to make it clear that even the cadre of thugs currently inhabiting White House cabinet positions still have soft, white underbellies that can be exposed.
