Because South Dakota governor Larry Rhoden is forever obligated to serve Kristi Noem and Kristi Noem is forever obligated to serve Donald Trump, he and his GOP buddies are making America MAGA again, starting with his home turf.
Non-citizens have never really disrupted voting. But they’re the convenient scapegoat for a party that’s justifiably worried it’s going to lose its majority during the mid-terms. Multiple efforts are being made all over the nation to disenfranchise anyone that’s not part of Trump’s most rabid voting base. Pretending people not allowed to legally vote are somehow flipping elections for the Democratic Party is more than merely obnoxious. It’s actually harming the democratic process.
Here in South Dakota, two laws have been passed in recent weeks with the express purpose of keeping non-white people from showing up to vote. The first, passed at the beginning of this month, allows any rando to claim a person they saw voting shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
Voters in South Dakota will soon be able to challenge other voters’ citizenship.
Republican Gov. Larry Rhoden signed legislation into law last week that authorizes challenges by individuals and election officials.
[…]
State law already allows challenges to a voter’s registration up to the 90th day before an election, if a person is suspected of lacking South Dakota residency, voting in another state or being registered to vote in another state. The new law adds citizenship as a justification for a challenge.
Challenges may be filed by the South Dakota Secretary of State’s Office, the auditor in the county where the voter is registered, or a voter in the same county. The challenge must be in the form of a signed, sworn statement and must include what the law describes as “documented evidence.”
Now, we can all see what the law is. But we all know how it will be applied. State employees with access to voter rolls will raise challenges against anyone with a foreign-sounding last name. While it’s unlikely few citizens will actually file challenges, they’ll certainly feel comfortable accosting anyone standing in line to vote whose skin is darker than their own. Given the inevitability of these responses, it’s easy to see the law accomplishing exactly what it’s supposed to: limit the number of non-white voters at the polls during the mid-terms and beyond.
But that’s not the only suppression effort signed into law this month. There’s also this one, which raises the bar for participating in the democratic process with the obvious intention of limiting participation to the sort of voters the GOP thinks with vote for it:
New voters in South Dakota will have to prove that they are United States citizens in order to cast a ballot in state and local races under a bill signed on Thursday by Gov. Larry Rhoden.
The new law, which does not apply to South Dakotans already on the voter rolls, comes amid a national push by Republicans to tighten voting rules and root out voting by noncitizens, which is already illegal and believed to be rare.
“This bill ensures only citizens vote in state elections, keeping our elections safe and secure,” said Mr. Rhoden, who is seeking election to a full term this year and is facing a crowded Republican primary field.
It’s already illegal in South Dakota to vote if you’re not a citizen. This bill addresses a completely imaginary “problem.” And it forces voters to provide a passport, birth certificate, and other documents proving citizenship before they’re allowed to vote. While it may be easy for many people to present these documents, the simple fact is that they’ve never been asked to do this before, and anyone who’s not aware this law has been passed will be denied the opportunity to vote because the GOP decided to move the goalposts during an election year.
Non-citizens voting in South Dakota has never been an issue. The fact that 273 non-citizens were recently removed from the state’s voting rolls may seem a bit sketchy but there’s a good reason there might be a few hundred non-citizens with voter registrations:
Noncitizens can obtain a driver’s license or state ID if they are lawful permanent residents or have temporary legal status. There’s a part of the driver’s license form that allows an applicant to register to vote. That part says voters must be citizens.
The problem is that this is all on the same form. The voter registration part of the form has a signature line, which many applicants will fill out and sign even if their intention is only to get a drivers license or ID card, especially since it appears before the final signature block for the entire application.
If applicants are not asked to affirmatively state their intention to register to vote (as the Department of Public Safety employees ask now, along with asking applicants to write “vote” on the form to signal their affirmation), their applications might be processed, along with the voter registration applicants didn’t realize they enabling.
The Secretary of State’s office (the office that’s supposed to be reviewing voter registrations for eligibility) threw the Department of Public Safety under the bus:
Rachel Soulek, director of the Division of Elections in the Secretary of State’s Office, placed blame on the department in her response to South Dakota Searchlight questions about the situation.
“These non U.S. citizens had marked ‘no’ to the citizenship question on their driver’s license application but were incorrectly processed as U.S. citizens due to human error by the Department of Public Safety,” Soulek wrote.
That’s not what happened. Their ID applications were processed and the Soulek’s department failed to catch the inadvertent errors. And it doesn’t really even matter who’s at fault because despite the errors, this is still a non-issue.
Soulek said only one of the 273 noncitizens had ever cast a ballot. That was during the 2016 general election.
A handful of clerical errors that resulted in a single illegal vote in the past decade cannot be a rational basis for a new law. And there’s a good chance the sole vote was made in error, rather than maliciously. After all, if the state told this person they could vote, who were they to question that determination?
This is nothing more than state governments stepping up to do what Trump can’t. His SAVE Act is stalled and lots of last-minute gerrymandering at the behest of the president is tied up in court. His loyalists are doing what they can to make his perverted dreams a reality in states that are most likely to lean Republican in the first place, which makes all of this as pointless as it is stupid. But the underlying threat to democracy remains, ever propelled forward by the people who claim to love America the most.
Roughly a year ago — as Trump was trying to turn anti-genocide protests into deportable antisemitism — his administration made it clear it was only willing to support white people with antisemitic views. The administration threw some anti-Israel filters into the mix for DHS vetting of incoming migrants, blending them with the anti-Trump filters that equated opposing Trump and his open bigotry with hating America.
One of the white Afrikaners brought into the US as refugees by the Trump administration this week has a history of antisemitic social media posts, despite the White House using alleged antisemitism as a rationale for deporting pro-Palestinian protesters.
Charl Kleinhaus posted on X in 2023 that “Jews are untrustworthy and a dangerous group.” In another post last fall, he shared a rightwing, nationalist YouTube video that was later removed, titled: “‘We’ll shoot ILLEGAL Immigrants!’ – Poland’s Illegal Islamic immigrant solution,” with clapping emojis.
Trump apparently believes white South Africans are so extremely persecuted (after decades of subjugating Black South Africans), they deserve to avail themselves of everything offered by the Land of the Free. Trump wants incoming whites so badly he’s willing to rewrite the rules to flood the zone with new bigots.
The U.S. aims to process 4,500 refugee applications from white South Africans per month, far above President Donald Trump’s stated refugee program cap, and is installing trailers on embassy property in Pretoria to support the effort, a U.S. contracting document said.
The new target, contained in a previously unreported document from the U.S. State Department dated January 27, signals a push to ramp up admissions from South Africa, while refugee applications from other areas have been severely curtailed.
Notably, this isn’t a free pass for any South African. The document apparently extends this to whites only, which is a hell of a thing to do in this day and age. I have to imagine even the most racist of Afrikaners might balk a bit at boarding a plane where non-whites are being ejected over whatever country the plane flies over on its way to Land of Opportunity.
No one ever said this administration is clever. But it’s not accurate to call it stupid. It’s something else entirely: a collection of shitbirds who are so contemptuous of everyone else in the nation that it will stroke itself off publicly and shrug off complaints with non-sequiturs liberally peppered with phrases like “leftist media” or “activist judges.”
This administration will not only piss down your leg and tell you it’s raining, but swing by later to bitch about people “illegally” benefiting from the uninvited precipitation. It’s shit stacked on shit stacked on shit topped off by wedding cake figurines standing on the necks of fallen lawn jockeys.
If you want this to be your nation, please get the fuck out. Get your Fourth Reich on elsewhere, you absolute mooks. And I dare you explain how THIS isn’t pure racism, especially when you’ve gone all in on the “get the foreigners out” purge this government has been engaged in since Trump returned to the Oval Office.
As a condition of the deal, the two companies have promised to be more racist and sexist. More specifically, they’ve promised the FCC they’ll eliminate already fairly pathetic corporate programs acknowledging that systemic racism and sexism exist. The FCC posted this handy infographic on social media that breaks down all of their lies about the deal in an easily digestible way:
Literally none of those claims are true. These deals never result in any of these benefits. There’s more than forty years of concrete evidence proving it. Consolidation across U.S. telecom has consistently resulted in spotty service, high prices, and routinely abysmal customer service.
Cox and Charter don’t directly compete, but their large scale, size, and political influence ensures they’ll have more power than ever to lobby against robust competition more generally.
The debt from the kinds of deals is also always predominately paid off by labor and consumers in the form of mass layoffs and higher prices. These deals never meaningfully serve the public interest, but our captured regulators, consolidated telecoms, and shitty press work together to help pretend otherwise.
The FCC explains the “DEI” provisions this way in their news release:
“Charter has committed to new safeguards to protect against DEI discrimination and has reaffirmed the merged entity’s commitment to equal opportunity and nondiscrimination. Specifically, Charter commits to recruiting, hiring, and promoting individuals based on the factors that matter most: skills, qualifications, and experience.”
You’re not told what these “safeguards” actually are. Just that Cox and Charter won’t try to give minorities or women a leg up in country full of systemic hatred and intolerance because that might be unfair to a dude.
The Trump administration has repeatedly tried to insist that simply acknowledging that systemic racism and sexism exists — or doing literally anything about it — is somehow discriminatory to white men. This is diseased white supremacist thinking; the sheer delusional hubris to think this way, let alone integrate this ignorance into already problematic pro-monopoly policy, is the mind garbage of simpletons.
If you pop around and read the news coverage of this deal (see: this piece from Reuters or this piece at CNN), you’ll notice the consolidated corporate press helps sell the lie that more consolidation somehow serves the public interest. These kinds of stories will parrot the companies’ claims, ignore their history of monopolistic predation, and even downplay the mandated racism as a droll policy bullet point.
CNN author Jordan Valinsky even went so far as to write this sentence with a straight face:
“The transaction is contingent on regulatory approval and could be a litmus test for President Donald Trump’s views on major companies combining.”
Trump’s FCC has rubber stamped every single shitty telecom merger that has crossed its desk. We know Trump loves harmful consolidation, provided he can personally get something from it. A cornerstone of GOP policy has been to coddle monopoly power for literally fifty fucking years! Across every industry in America. None of this is really up for debate. Any “litmus” test was failed long ago.
If this country is going to have any sort of real future, it has to seriously come to grips with the fact that it’s broadly too corrupt to function in the public interest (across government, media, policy, and culturally). If future federal and state governments don’t make antitrust and corruption reform a central pillar of all policy in every sector, we’re quite literally cooked.
There’s not a single conservative left in the GOP. The ideals that were formerly considered “conservative” — small government, fiscal responsibility, etc. — have been replaced by white Christian nationalism, water-carrying for would-be autocrats, and immense amounts of deficit spending for the sole purpose of making America whiter.
That’s not the same as making it “greater,” no matter how Trump and his cohorts choose to spin it. Instead of asking themselves whether or not they’re actually making America worse, they just get on the bullhorn and blare racist invective on main.
Here’s Kristi Noem, engaging in the sort of thing most GOP politicians have managed to limit to PAC fundraisers behind closed doors:
Here’s her December 2025 X post in full:
I just met with the President.
I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.
Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS.
WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.
Lovely, eh? But she’s only doing what the Supreme Leader wants her to do. After all, the guy running the nation is no better. Actually, he’s worse, since he’s supposed to hold himself to a higher standard than his own political appointees.
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.”
Counterpoint: this administration stinks and we don’t want them in our country. Every smear leveled against migrants by the Trump administration is a lie, starting with the “worst of the worst” posturing, continuing all the way down to the suggestion migrants add nothing to this country while dangling from the government teat the entire time.
It’s insanely ignorant to claim immigrants are more likely to be criminals than US citizens. That has never been true. Neither have the claims made by Trump and Noem. If there’s anyone capable of reducing the deficit, it’s migrants rather than the most powerful political party in the nation.
Cato Institute continues to expose the government’s lies about migrants by doing nothing more than simply looking at the data. While Trump continues to pretend immigrants are robbing the country blind and that levying tariffs will make average Americans richer, Cato is delivering the facts. And the facts say that the best thing this country could do for both the economy and national deficit is bring in as many migrants as possible.
Every year from 1994 to 2023, immigrants have paid more in taxes than they received in benefits.
Immigrants generated nearly $10.6 trillion more in federal, state, and local taxes than they induced in total government spending.
Accounting for savings on interest payments on the national debt, immigrants saved $14.5 trillion in debt over this 30-year period.
Immigrants have always paid more than their “fair share” in taxes. Tax cheats like Donald Trump are the kind of people who always insist otherwise while preaching to the ignorant faithful. Of the $14.5 trillion in debt reduction created by our nation’s migrant population, more than a third of it ($6.3 trillion) was generated by non-citizens — people who are here illegally or have yet to become naturalized citizens and/or permanent residents.
The upshot of the data is this: without immigrants, this nation would be so far underwater that it would threaten the future of the nation itself:
Without the contributions of immigrants, public debt at all levels would already be above 200 percent of US GDP—nearly twice the 2023 level and a threshold some analysts believe would trigger a debt crisis.
Both Kristi Noem and Donald Trump should be made to eat every word of this next paragraph, as painfully and protractedly as possible:
Immigrants accounted for more US income and generated more revenue for the government because they were, on average, over 12 percentage points more likely to be employed than the US-born population. This means that even if immigrants earn lower hourly wages, they can still account for more total income per capita than the US-born population by working cumulatively more hours. This higher employment rate was driven by the fact that immigrants were, on average, 20 percentage points more likely to be of working age. Immigrants usually arrive in the US as young adults and often leave before retirement.
Calling immigrants “leeches” and “entitlement junkies” is nothing but naked bigotry. It has fuck all to do with the actual facts — facts this government has access to but chooses to ignore in favor of blowing its handful of racist dog whistles repeatedly.
And yet again, let’s take the latest look at the fact that is perhaps the most uncomfortable for a regime that repeatedly infers that being a migrant means being a criminal worthy of speedy ejection:
It’s BOGO time at the migrant facts warehouse: by committing fewer crimes migrants are less of drain on public resources than US citizens, who are spending more time behind bars than their “illegal” counterparts. And lest we forget, racists think the reason migrants commit less crime than American citizens is because we have Black American citizens. Cato has already dismantled this counterargument, even after factoring in the blatant racism this collection of “but for the Black people” asshats think will allow them to double-down on their bigotry:
A persistent criticism of Cato’s paper in this series is that the native-born incarceration rate is only higher because black native-born Americans have a high incarceration rate (see Table 1 from our paper). It’s certainly true that black native-born Americans have the highest incarceration rates of any ethnic or racial group in any immigrant category. However, the high black American incarceration rate does not overturn our results. It merely narrows them. Immigrants have lower incarceration rates even without considering black native-born rates….
Excluding black native-born Americans and black immigrants reduces the native-born incarceration rate by 27 percent, from 1,221 to 891 per 100,000 in 2023 (see Table 1 for reference). Excluding black immigrants barely reduces the legal immigrant incarceration rate to 312 per 100,000, but increases the illegal immigrant incarceration rate to 626 per 100,000. Excluding blacks increases the illegal immigrant incarceration rates because their rate is below that of the rest of the population. The legal and illegal immigrant incarceration rate gap with natives also narrows to 65 percent and 30 percent lower, respectively. Excluding only black native-born Americans and keeping black immigrants in the sample, which doesn’t make sense but critics have brought it up, produces almost identical results.
This government can continue to stoke the flames of hatred. But it will never have the facts to back its hateful rhetoric. Of course, that hardly matters to this government and its top officials. But it should matter to everyone else who’s not part of the Executive Branch circle jerk. Migrants are better equipped to make this country great than the people who think merely existing here as the offspring of white people makes them the superior breed.
One recurring theme of this era: folks who actually choose to stand up to this bumbling kakistocracy of hateful failsons usually tend to win if they stick together. Those that prematurely bend the knee in abject cowardice (like say, CBS, countless law firms, or numerous university administrators) will hopefully be remembered for it.
It happened again this week, when the Department of Education (DOE) was forced to back off of their illegal effort to permanently enshrine intolerance and ignorance across U.S. education standards.
More specifically, the DEO was forced to suspend their “Dear Colleague” directive that sought to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in schools and higher education. That directive, initially implemented in February of 2025, threatened to cut funding for institutions practicing “DEI,” (falsely) claiming it violated the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling on affirmative action.
One of its core claims, as we’ve seen at other agencies like the FCC, is that even acknowledging well documented systemic racism and sexism is somehow unfair to white men. It’s just the dumbest, lamest bullshit, from some of the shittiest human beings to ever govern (and if you’re well-versed in American history, that’s really saying something).
The American Federation of Teachers filed suit against the administration shortly thereafter, alongside an ACLU FOIA lawsuit forcing disclosure of documents highlighting the Education Department’s flimsy legal reasoning. Numerous court rulings subsequently found the Trump administration ignored the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and tried to rewrite federal civil rights policy illegally.
“Upon the U.S.’s concession that the directive and subsequent certification requirement are vacated – meaning they are formally nullified – the district court issued a final ruling today, permanently invalidating the directive and preventing the government from enforcing, relying on, or reviving it. As a result, the challenged guidance is no longer in effect and cannot be enforced against anyone, anywhere nationwide.”
It’s worth reiterating that a lot of University administrators were abject cowards (or avid supporters of intolerance) and immediately threw minority and marginalized populations under the bus at the first indication of a stiff breeze, causing no manner of disruption to grants and scholarships. I’m not sure it’s even possible to functionally calculate the read harm caused to people.
It’s something you’d like to think they might be held actually accountable for by their colleagues:
Thousands of institutions abandoned programs, ended or rewrote scholarships, closed down clubs and publications, all in pre-emptive compliance. And you know why?Mostly because they wanted to do it if they thought they could blame someone else for it.
Any way you slice it, the sheer hubris of believing you can permanently eliminate equality, kindness, and diversity through illegal mandate by a dim, half-insane king remains historically stupid and deserves bottomless historic ridicule and derision.
But as we keep seeing, if people want to organize and meaningfully challenge this pathetic and increasingly unpopular administration, they usually win. As Trump’s health and influence fades, hopefully we’ll see a corresponding jump in courage.
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.
