This story was co-published with The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. On December 31, in the waning hours of 2025, the Washington Post reported on an internal ICE document that concerned the agency’s “wartime recruitment” strategy, or rather its attempt to expeditiously swell its ranks of deportation officers. The memo, according to the Post, had in mind a pool of ideal candidates who lead a “patriotic” lifestyle and have an interest in “military and veterans affairs,” “physical training,” “gun rights organizations,” and “tactical gear brands.” The memo’s logic was easy enough to understand, since what it described, if you read between the lines, was an informal paramilitary that was waiting to be tapped. Over the last month—as a violent federal occupation has unfolded in Minneapolis, where veteran immigration agents brutally killed two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti—both the memo and the new recruits it would draw into the fold began to take up outsized space in my mind. For a long time now, the gun rights movement has been animated by the promise of a violent reckoning, a sentiment nurtured by the groups that represent it and Republican politicians, who seek to channel a wild, truculent energy into votes and profits. It seemed the promise was being fulfilled in Minneapolis, like the fatal denouement of a production that had one harbinger after another. > “Any mission, any condition, any foes, at any range.” During the 2016 election cycle, when as a reporter I attended my first National Rifle Association annual meeting, I began to see that the promised reckoning could not be delayed forever. At the convention, in Louisville, Kentucky, there was the tradeshow floor, akin to a medieval arms bazaar and containing some 520,000 square feet of guns and tactical accessories. There were seminars covering “Defensive Shooting Skills Development,” “Methods of Concealed Carry,” “Current and Emerging Threats,” and “The Bulletproof Mind For The Armed Civilian.” And there was a line of some 7,000 people, leading into an arena called “Freedom Hall,” where there would be speeches by the emerging Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, and Mark “Oz” Geist, a member of the Benghazi diplomatic compound’s security team that had come under siege in 2012. Three middle-aged white men stood in line in front of me making confident assertions about Barack Obama and “government cover-ups.” One informed the others that Obama, still president, had purchased a “$10 million mansion in Saudi Arabia,” where he and his family would flee after leaving the White House to “evade charges.” Trump would of course chase him down, the man assured everyone, while the United States reembraced frontier justice and flourished under his rule. The line then moved inside, 7,000 people took their seats, and the Republican presidential candidate promised them: “I will never let you down.” Based on the ecstatic response from the crowd, it seemed to me that the message Trump had transmitted was about power—raw power—and who would wield it during his administration.   Going back to at least the early nineties, when President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, was in office, gun rights organizations, led by the NRA, and various prominent Republicans pushed an argument for the Second Amendment that was disguised as a historical one. The right to bear arms, they said, was intended to be unfettered because its purpose was to provide citizens with the means to fight a tyrannical government that had turned against its own people. Federal agents, under Clinton, were “jack-booted government thugs,” according to a notorious fundraising letter signed by former NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre. These thugs, he said, had the power to “take away our Constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us.” It was often implied that such arguments, which grew in prominence during Barack Obama’s tenure, applied only to the Democratic Party, which posed a vague yet persistent threat to “freedom,” while the Republican party would preserve it. Republican values were antithetical to tyranny, whereas Democrats were inherently tyrannical, and therefore any actions taken by the former were in service of saving the country from the latter. In 2016, while sitting in “Freedom Hall,” I began to feel a sense of alarm that I’d never before felt. Under Trump, this contingent would feel it had permission to act against the enemy. The carrot that was dangled during each election cycle—in fundraising pitches by gun rights groups and the sale of military-style firearms to civilians—was finally being fed to the horse. There would be no more “couch commandos,” as gun industry executives referred to their most enthusiastic customers in the years after 9/11. This was the period in which soldiers were in American streets, and the industry, en masse, had seized on a marketing opportunity to blur the line between soldier and civilian.  What the industry was selling was theatrical participation, the thrill of COSPLAY, except the props were real. “As close as you can get without enlisting,” one gun company, in 2010, boasted as it advertised its “semi-auto only version of the U.S. Special Operations Command’s newest rifle.” “Any mission, any condition, any foes, at any range,” said another manufacturer about its latest assault weapon. In the ad it was equipped with a scope and propped on a tripod, as if intended for a sniper, which of course was the point. Companies were selling military-style weapons with a “combat-proven design,” that provided “versatility on the range or during patrol,” and were a symbol of “bravery on duty.” To enhance the feeling of a simulated combat experience, manufacturers of AR-style firearms cut product placement deals with video game designers. An executive at the gun company Sig Sauer told authors Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, who co-wrote the book American Gun, that featuring the weapons in games was tantamount to “seed planting.”  Buying a gun had become a way to serve at home, and serving at home came to mean preparing for Democratic tyranny. In 2015, for instance, while Obama was still president, the Pentagon prepared for a training exercise across the American Southwest called Jade Helm 15. It was here that the performative, paranoid politics of the right during the Obama years reached something of a fever pitch. Conservative bloggers and commentators created widespread hysteria by alleging that the exercise was a veil for imposing martial law, confiscating firearms, arresting dissidents, and taking over Texas. The state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, called on the Texas State Guard to monitor developments. It was “important,” he said, that Texans know their “rights” and “liberties” would not be “infringed.” The last word did not seem like an accidental allusion to the Second Amendment. For conservative elites, the preservation of power requires giving those beneath them a taste of it, without actually surrendering anything substantial, such as higher tax payments. In the meantime, they have created a shadow army, empowering them not with wealth but with the alluring prospect of crushing their opponents. A few months after the 2016 NRA convention, Trump said at a rally that Hillary Clinton “wants to abolish” the Second Amendment. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” he went on. “Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is.” Trump for much of his career had been the paragon of vapid wealth, but unlike other leaders of the right who came before him, he was signaling that he would take the army off standby, out of the realm of theater, and move the violent plot forward. The 2020 anti-lockdown Covid protests were a stark indicator of the new paradigm under Trump, who directed blame for restrictions toward Democrats such as Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer. After state lawmakers voted to extend her state of emergency, a large group of men carrying assault rifles packed the Michigan Capitol rotunda and attempted to barge into the legislature, where a line of police guarded the doors. They screamed in the faces of the officers, who looked on impassively. > The lurid fantasy at the heart of the gun rights movement is playing out, but > the leading roles, as they were previously imagined, have been reversed. As the year wore on, Trump told the Proud Boys during a televised presidential debate to “stand back and stand by.” His loss to Joe Biden then set into motion the January 6 insurrection. Oath Keepers stashed an arsenal of weapons at a hotel in Arlington, Virginia. One member imagined a scenario in which “millions die resisting the death of the 1st and 2nd amendment.” A week later, a middle-aged white man named Ian Rogers, a California resident and proud NRA member, was arrested with his best friend for planning to attack the state’s Democratic headquarters. He owned roughly 50 firearms, including four illegal automatic weapons, and had stockpiled 15,000 rounds of ammunition. Writing to me from prison last year, he said that the Democratic Party was “the greatest threat facing the United States today.” He went on, “Just as Rome was brought down by enemies within, we have such traitors amongst us now,” adding, “These people fundamentally hate the country and they will do anything to impose their vision on the nation.” Now, in Minneapolis, masked federal agents, dressed as soldiers, have fatally shot two American citizens. Both were victims of an occupation, in which the Trump administration has unleashed a savage campaign of terror against civilians. The lurid fantasy at the heart of the gun rights movement is playing out, but the leading roles, as they were previously imagined, have been reversed. The party in power is not a Democratic regime, but a Republican one, prompting accusations of hypocrisy against gun rights organizations, who have had little to say and have not called on their followers to face down tyranny in Minneapolis. Following the merciless second killing, of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse, federal officials, led by Stephen Miller and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, concocted a false narrative alleging that Pretti had murderous intentions. Pretti had a sidearm on his waist, and they shamelessly pointed to it as evidence, even though the gun was holstered, he was legally carrying it, and agents shot him after they had removed the weapon.  Officials also tried to argue that, owing to the firearm’s presence, Pretti’s death was justified. This assertion presented an existential quandary for gun rights organizations, which have spent decades working to dismantle carry restrictions. One by one, the groups issued statements about how a holstered handgun did not give law enforcement the right to kill a person. That was the wrong message, the groups said, but the tyranny of the occupation itself was treated as legitimate. Gun Owners of America stated that “the Left must stop antagonizing @ICEgov and @CBP agents who are taking criminals off the streets and play a crucial role in protecting communities and upholding the rule of law.” The NRA similarly declared, “For months, radical progressive politicians like Tim Walz have incited violence against law enforcement officers who are simply trying to do their jobs.” What is happening now, in other words, is a reminder that the argument about government tyranny was always a canard. Beneath it lurked what was really at stake, which was the right to assert control through force. Over and over, conservatives and Second Amendment stalwarts have claimed that right as their own, with Minneapolis being the latest example. The story they have told for decades is a binary one—good versus evil. In that framing, they are righteous and have but one job: Vanquish the enemy. Hold power. Save America. The same day Pretti was shot, video surfaced of federal agents pointing their weapons at civilians. “It’s like ‘Call of Duty,’” someone could be heard saying, referencing the blockbuster military-style video game series. Since then, Trump has suggested he will deescalate in Minneapolis. But whatever happens, the players have had a taste of the real thing, and there’s no going back.

As January comes to a close, it should not just become a harrowing memory. The past four weeks are a harbinger of what is to come under President Donald Trump, as the administration showed exactly the future it is building: One in which the laws are ignored, American life is cheap, and elections are hijacked by FBI raids. This month, Americans have witnessed a lurch toward authoritarianism that cannot be ignored. If January 2026 was any indication, the march toward dictatorship isn’t linear, it’s exponential.  > The Trump administration has reached a point where they believe they can > simply shoot you for opposing its agenda. On January 3, the United States captured Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, and brought him to the US to stand trial. This was illegal. It doesn’t matter that Maduro was a dictator himself; his capture was a show of lawless force. The US is now overseeing the sale of Venezuelan oil, the Qatari bank account that holds the proceeds, and the dispersal of some of that money to Venezuela. Fresh off this literal coup, Trump began saber-rattling about taking Greenland, threatening Europe that he would even take it by force. Trump backed down after Europe rebuffed him, but it’s unlikely that his desire to appear big and strong by taking territory or invading other nations is over. Trump has not shied away from siccing an army on his own people. In Minneapolis, Trump’s immigration forces encountered organized and increasing resistance from protesters in the Twin Cities. In response, the government escalated their tactics. Thus far, armed federal agents have killed two American citizens, demonstrating that the price of opposing this administration can be your life. On January 7, Renée Good told Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer Jonathan Ross, “I’m not mad at you.” Seconds later, he shot her three times, and followed that by calling her a “fucking bitch.” Outrage and a general strike across the Twin Cities followed. But the Trump administration didn’t back down. His Justice Department attempted to investigate Good, presumably to back up their smear that the mother of three with stuffies in her glove compartment was a domestic terrorist. As the protests continued, the administration grew bolder. On January 24, a group of masked Customs and Border Protection agents shot Alex Pretti in what looked like a state-sanctioned execution from a distant totalitarian country. Pretti is on his knees, surrounded by officers, holding his phone, helpless, when he is shot in the back. At least nine more shots pierced his motionless body as it lay alone on the street. The Trump administration has reached a point where they believe they can simply shoot you for opposing its agenda. Then they set about smearing Pretti, an ICU nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital, as a domestic terrorist.  The backlash was predictably fierce. When multiple Senate Democrats began announcing they would not back a DHS funding bill without reforms to ICE, the administration showed a smidge of contrition. It moved CBP commander and Nazi impersonator Greg Bovino, who defended Pretti’s murder with such brazen lies that he proved to be a liability, out of Minneapolis. Nearly a week after his killing, the administration announced it would launch a civil rights investigation into the CBP agents who shot Pretti. This is likely a PR stunt, to be run by the same Justice Department that has contorted the law to harass and smear the president’s opponents. There is no evidence that this administration has any desire to rein in or punish its immigration officers, and Americans should not be fooled by a few days of conciliatory talk. The administration is barreling full steam ahead.  For months now, ICE, CBP, and their leadership have played fast and loose with federal court orders. Bovino, for example, repeatedly lied to Sara Ellis, a Chicago-based federal judge—and she called him out for it. Notably, that was not the conduct that Bovino’s superiors had a problem with. Now, ICE appears to be disappearing people from Minnesota and refusing judicial orders to either defend the disappearances or return the people they have apprehended. On January 28, Patrick Schiltz, Minnesota’s chief federal district judge, issued an extraordinary order calling out ICE’s refusal to follow court orders. “Attached to this order is an appendix that identifies 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases” in his state alone, he wrote. “The extent of ICE’s noncompliance is almost certainly substantially understated. This list is confined to orders issued since January 1, 2026, and the list was hurriedly compiled by extraordinarily busy judges.” The violated orders are all habeas petitions, meaning the government has been asked to explain its arrest of an individual or to free that person, but it has simply refused. Schiltz continued: “This list should give pause to anyone—no matter his or her political beliefs—who cares about the rule of law. ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.” ICE, he continued, “is not a law unto itself.” But that’s exactly how this administration is determined to act. This week, I decided to look into how the Trump administration was ignoring Minnesotans’ Constitutional rights; the violations are innumerable, mounting to thousands per day. Federal agents are behaving like the First and Fourth amendments, in particular, do not apply to them; that witnessing and documenting their actions is a crime rather than a right; and that they can seize anyone they want—violently if they feel like it—rather than observe constitutional restraints on searches and seizures. The administration is not stopping at arresting protestors. On Thursday night, it arrested two journalists, prominent former CNN anchor Don Lemon and, on Friday morning, independent journalist Georgia Fort, who had both documented a protest at a church in St. Paul. Notably, both journalists are Black. “The nature of oppression in America is that they workshop it first on Black, Latino, Asian & Native people,” Sherrilyn Ifill, the former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, posted on Bluesky of Lemon and Fort’s arrests. “But it is always, in the end, coming for everyone.” As if these facts weren’t alarming enough, the DOJ’s obsession with going after the two journalists led it on an unprecedented quest to convince federal judges to issue arrest warrants that the judges found frivolous. First, the government requested eight arrest warrants related to the protest. After a federal magistrate judge in Minnesota declined to issue warrants for Lemon, Fort, and three others, the DOJ asked the chief judge, Schiltz, to issue them. He refused, and the government went to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, asking it to force Schiltz to issue the warrants. The Eighth Circuit declined. Presumably, the government decided to get an indictment from a grand jury instead, but the source of authority for the arrests remained unclear as of Friday afternoon. President Trump’s second administration has inspired a resurgence of interest in the idea of the “dual state,” a framework for authoritarianism created by German Jewish lawyer Ernst Fraenkel to explain how life for many people in Nazi Germany appeared normal even as authoritarianism took hold. Fraenkel theorized that society had been bifurcated into a normative state, in which the rule of law appears intact, and a prerogative state, in which the state ignores the law to take on its enemies or further its aims. In the 1930s, most Germans could go about their lives assuming the general laws would apply, but the targets of the state, such as the Jews, saw their rights stripped away. At bottom, however, the dual state is only a useful mirage. It lulls people into complacency because their lives continue apace, but at any moment, they can be sucked into the prerogative state where they are at the mercy of the state.  University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq, who is at work on a book about the dual state, has pointed out several examples from Fraenkel’s time as a lawyer in Nazi Germany that may seem eerily familiar to Americans in January 2026. In one, Fraenkel won a financial settlement for his client against the regime, only to discover that the money had been deposited in the government’s coffers. In another, a man was acquitted in court, only for a Gestapo officer to seize him anyway.  Over the last month, the contours of such a dual state have emerged again and again. When ICE detains people and then refuses to comply with judges’ orders—which happened at least 96 times this month, as Judge Schiltz documented—it is signaling that the targets of its raids have been taken not just into detention but into the prerogative state, where the rule of law cannot not reach them. When the government arrested Lemon and Fort even though multiple judges believed the charges were frivolous and refused to issue warrants, it refused to take no for an answer. Then there’s Juan Espinoza Martinez, who was acquitted by a federal jury of bogus charges that he ordered a hit on Bovino. Rather than let him go home, ICE picked up Espinoza Martinez, a Dreamer who has lived in the US since he was five years old. As of a few days ago, his family didn’t know where he was.  The bedrock of a democracy is the people’s ability to pick its leaders. On Wednesday, the FBI raided an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, seizing ballots from the 2020 elections. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was present at the scene, despite having no domestic law enforcement authority. She has been investigating the 2020 election, in which Trump lost to former President Joe Biden, to prove it was corrupt. But it would be naive to think that Trump’s obsession with his 2020 loss, and Wednesday’s raid, is just about the past. The administration is normalizing FBI raids on state and local election infrastructure. As election law expert Rick Hasen of the UCLA School of Law warned in Slate, the Fulton raid may be a “test run for messing with election administrators and the counting of ballots in the midterm elections in 2026.” The appearance of Gabbard at the raid is in line, Hasen points out, with election denier Cleta Mitchell’s suggestion that Trump could “declare a ‘national sovereignty crisis’ in a bid to take over the midterm elections.” Mitchell was on the famous 2020 call in which Trump demanded that the Georgia secretary of state “find” him the votes to win the state; this is not her first time trying to illegally overturn an election in Georgia. Trump attempted a chaotic and violent coup on January 6, 2021; it would be illogical to assume that he and his movement would relinquish power again. It is fitting that January was also the month that the world took a look at Donald Trump’s America and saw it for what it is: A bully that cannot be appeased any longer. Through his illegal attack on Venezuela, open designs on Greenland, not to mention murders on the seas and punitive and arbitrary tariffs, Trump has alienated longstanding allies. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called on nations to turn away from the post-World War II world order in which the United States is viewed as a leader and protector. “We are in the midst of a rupture,” he warned. America’s role at the head of international finance is also at stake, including Trump’s attempts to take over the Federal Reserve and US monetary policy, making the American dollar a risky bet for investors. The world is seeing Trump’s destruction of his own country for what it is; Americans should too. January 2026 has given us a frightening look into a future if the Trump administration continues its plans apace. ICE is buying up warehouses to convert into mass detention camps, and deploying dystopian tech tools to identify and track protestors as well as immigrants. ICE and CBP, the president’s violent paramilitary forces, have advertised their a willingness to break the law, to violate people’s rights, to ignore judges’ orders, and now to execute their critics. When they shot a defenseless man in the back in broad daylight, they showed who they were, and where they plan to go next. We’ve been warned.

The Trump administration is using an anti-Ku Klux Klan law to prosecute Minnesota activists for demonstrating against ICE at a St. Paul church. On Thursday, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had arrested Chauntyll Allen, Nekima Levy Armstrong, and William Kelly for their alleged involvement in a January 18 anti-ICE demonstration. The three protesters were charged with conspiracy to deprive rights—a federal felony under Section 241, a Reconstruction-era statute enacted to safeguard the rights of Black Americans to vote and engage in public life amid the KKK’s racial violence. Levy Armstrong and Allen are both prominent Black community organizers. Levy Armstrong leads the grassroots civil rights nonprofit Racial Justice Network and once served as the president of the Minneapolis chapter of the NAACP. Allen is a member of the St. Paul School Board and a founder of Black Lives Matter Twin Cities. (The DOJ did not immediately respond to requests for comment, nor did lawyers for Levy Armstrong, Allen, or Kelly.) An affidavit filed in support of the government’s case by a special agent with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) also claims that the protesters sought to violate the “free exercise of religion at a place of religious worship secured by the FACE Act,” a 1994 federal law designed to protect people seeking abortion services. The affidavit appears to name several other redacted defendants as participants in the conspiracy. Videos showed the group of activists disrupting the St. Paul church service with chants of “ICE out” and “Justice for Renee Good,” a reference to the 37-year-old mother of three who was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis earlier this month. Protesters selected the church because they say one of its pastors, David Easterwood, leads a local ICE field office. Reporting from PBS found that the church pastor’s personal information matches that of the acting director of the ICE St. Paul field office, and that Easterwood “appeared alongside DHS Secretary Kristi Noem at a Minneapolis press conference last October.” The HSI agent’s affidavit designates Easterwood as “Victim 1.” The document also lists several chants made by “agitators” that “terrorized the parishioners,” including “this is what community looks like” and “hands up, don’t shoot.” (According to the affidavit, one churchgoer only heard the word “shoot” and therefore feared the protesters could have guns.) The agent also characterizes Good’s death as “an officer-involved shooting as a result of her assault on an immigration officer.” A press release published by DHS on Friday called the three arrested activists “ringleaders” of a “church riot” and alleged that their actions amounted to an “attack on churchgoers’ religious freedom.” But a legal filing from Levy Armstrong’s lawyer arguing for his client’s pretrial release notes that Levy Armstrong herself is a Christian reverend. “Contrary to the charges, there was no intent to deprive anyone of their right to worship, but the desire was to initiate a debate about religious values,” her lawyer wrote. “It was a non-violent protest, which under a normal government, would not lead to criminal charges, much less federal felony charges.” All three organizers were released from federal custody on Friday. The extraordinary decision to charge the protesters with felony federal conspiracy against civil rights comes after footage of the event sparked days of viral outrage among Trump’s supporters, with right-wing websites calling the protest a “mob,” “riot,” and “attack.” The DOJ also sought to bring conspiracy charges against journalist Don Lemon, a former CNN host who was present at the protest, an effort rejected by a federal magistrate judge. “Don Lemon himself has come out and said he knew exactly what was going to happen inside that facility,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon told far-right influencer Benny Johnson during a podcast appearance on Monday. “He went into the facility, and then he began ‘committing journalism,’ as if that’s sort of a shield from being a part, an embedded part, of a criminal conspiracy. It isn’t.” The Trump administration evidently hopes to make an example of Allen, Levy Armstrong, and Kelly: “Listen loud and clear: WE DO NOT TOLERATE ATTACKS ON PLACES OF WORSHIP,” Bondi posted on X on Thursday. One of Trump’s first actions as president was to overturn a longstanding policy that restricted ICE enforcement at “sensitive areas,” including places of worship.

Two days after an ICE agent shot and killed Renée Good in Minneapolis, Rep. Roger Williams issued an ultimatum to the Trump administration’s critics in Minnesota and beyond. “People need to quit demonstrating, quit yelling at law enforcement, challenging law enforcement, and begin to get civil,” the Texas Republican told NewsNation. “And until we do that, I guess we’re going to have it this way. And the people that are staying in their homes or doing the right thing need to be protected.” > Rep. Roger Williams: "People need to quit demonstrating, quit yelling at law > enforcement, challenging law enforcement, and begin to get civil." > pic.twitter.com/r5TFLgFHy1 > > — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 9, 2026 That’s a pretty clear encapsulation of MAGA-world’s views on dissent these days. You aren’t supposed to protest. You aren’t supposed to “yell at” or “challenge” the militarized federal agents occupying your city. And anyone who wants to be “protected” should probably just stay “in their homes.” Williams isn’t some fringe backbencher; he’s a seven-term congressman who chairs the House Small Business Committee. He is announcing de facto government policy. For nearly a year, President Donald Trump and his allies have been engaged in an escalating assault on the First Amendment. The administration has systematically targeted or threatened many of Trump’s most prominent critics: massive law firms, Jimmy Kimmel, even, at one point, Elon Musk. But it’s worth keeping in mind that some of the earliest victims of the president’s second-term war on speech were far less powerful. Early last year, ICE began arresting and attempting to deport people with legal immigration status—such as Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk—who had engaged in pro-Palestinian activism or expressed pro-Palestinian views. The administration was explicit about the new policy. Troy Edgar, Trump’s deputy secretary of Homeland Security, made clear that the government was seeking to remove Khalil in large part because he’d chosen to “protest” against Israel. Asked about such cases, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that engaging in “anti-American, antisemitic, pro-Hamas protest will not be tolerated.” It should have been obvious at the time that Trump allies were laying the groundwork for an even broader crackdown. “When it comes to protesters, we gotta make sure we treat all of them the same: Send them to jail,” said Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) in March, discussing Khalil’s arrest on Fox Business Network. “Free speech is great, but hateful, hate, free speech is not what we need in these universities.” That’s pretty close to Williams’ demand on Friday that “people need to quit demonstrating.” It also sounds a lot like Attorney General Pam Bondi’s widely derided threat in September that the DOJ “will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” Hate speech—regardless of what the Trump administration thinks that means—is protected by the First Amendment. Bondi can’t prosecute people for expressing views she dislikes. And ICE can’t deport US citizens like Good. But of course, federal law enforcement has more direct ways to exert control. “The bottom line is this,” said Rep. Wesley Hunt, a Texas Republican running for US Senate, in the wake of Good’s death. “When a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life.” > Rep. Wesley Hunt: "The bottom line is this: when a federal officer gives you > instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep you life" > pic.twitter.com/JhA09qoT8r > > — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 7, 2026 Moment’s later, Newsmax anchor Carl Higbie complained to Hunt that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) had “literally told Minnesotans to get out and protest and that it is, quote, ‘a patriotic duty.'” “People are going to go out there,” Higbie warned ominously. “And what do you think is going to happen when you get 3, 4, 5,000 people—some of which are paid agitators—thinking it’s their ‘patriotic duty’ to oppose ICE?”

After an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis this week, firing his weapon as she attempted to drive away, protesters have amassed around the country, many wondering: Can that officer be taken to court? The Trump administration, predictably, says the agent, Jonathan Ross, is immune from prosecution. “You have a federal law enforcement official engaging in federal law enforcement action,” Vice President JD Vance told reporters on Thursday. “That guy is protected by absolute immunity. He was doing his job.” But what do independent attorneys say? After the shooting, I reached out to Robert Bennett, a veteran lawyer in Minneapolis who has worked on hundreds of federal police misconduct cases during his 50-year career. “I’ve deposed thousands of police officers,” he says. “ICE agents do not have absolute immunity.” Bennett says the state of Minnesota has the right to prosecute an ICE agent who commits misconduct. But, he adds, that might be difficult now that the FBI has essentially booted the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension off the case—blocking access, the BCA wrote, to “case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews necessary to complete a thorough and independent investigation.” In the conversation below, edited for length and clarity, Bennett discusses how the shooting in Minneapolis unfolded and the legal paths forward. When you watched the videos of this shooting, what did you see? You saw what could be easily identified as four ICE officers. And they’re all experiencing, to a greater or lesser extent, the same set of operative facts, the same factual stimuli. But only one officer, seeing the set of circumstances, picked up his weapon. None of the other officers did. That’s a bad fact [for Ross]. Also, the officer walked in front of the car, which counts against him in the reasonableness analysis. If you look at the recent Supreme Court case of Barnes v. Felix, that’s problematic for the ICE agent. What happened in Barnes v. Felix? It’s a shooting case where the officer walked around the car, [lunged and jumped onto the door sill], and put himself in harm’s way. You can’t bootstrap your own bad situation [to] allow a use of force. What did the court find? They sent it back to the trial court to consider it. But there’s good language in there. You said it’s bad news for the ICE agent, Ross, that his colleagues didn’t pull their weapons. Can you talk more about that? Sure, we’ve had several other cases. There was a tactical semicircle, a bunch of officers aiming their guns at a couple fighting over a knife; one officer out of the eight or nine fired his weapon, none of the others perceived the need to. And that’s important because it suggests the officer who fired wasn’t reasonable, right? Under federal law, an officer can only use deadly force if they had a reasonable fear that they could otherwise be killed or harmed. It’s an objective reasonableness standard. So it’s not whether you were personally scared out of your wits and fired your gun. It’s: Would an objectively reasonable officer at the scene have fired his weapon, believing he was in danger of death or immediate bodily harm? In Ross’ case, there was a previous incident—Ross had shot [with a Taser] through a window before at somebody in the car, and the guy hit the gas, and Ross had stuck his arm through the broken window, and he got cut [and dragged about 100 yards]. And so he was supposedly reacting to that. He’s not an objective officer at that point. The Trump administration has suggested that Ross is immune from prosecution as a federal officer. Why do you say he’s not? There’s plenty of case law that allows for the prosecution of federal law enforcement agencies, including ICE. And it’s clear under the law that a federal officer who shoots somebody in Minnesota and kills them is subject to a Minnesota investigation and Minnesota law. Now, the feds just took that away this morning, and they’ve already decided who’s at fault. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension was going to do an investigation to find out. But I can tell you, the federal code provides that when there is a state criminal prosecution of a federal officer in Minnesota or any other state, the officer has the right to remove the case to federal court. So if Ross was charged in Hennepin County, he could remove the case to the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota, have a federal judge deal with his case. The code is explicitly predicting such a prosecution could take place. If there was immunity of an absolute nature, you wouldn’t need that section, right? The administration seems to argue that Ross is protected under the Supremacy Clause, which essentially says that states can’t charge a federal officer if the officer was acting within the scope of his duties. Do you think killing people is acting within the scope of their duties? What if they decided to kill the 435,000 people in the city of Minneapolis while they were here, would the Supremacy Clause give them a free pass? I don’t think so. Also, if there was an actual independent investigation, and you apply the actual federal case law to this, and you concluded that Ross violated her rights by using excessive deadly force, he could be indicted federally. Now, nobody believes that would ever happen now: For a guy who talked a lot about rigged things, this [investigation] is rigged. Kash Patel took over the autopsy, so who knows, maybe they’ll say she died of a heart attack when she was backing up. If the officer isn’t charged criminally, the other route is a lawsuit. What are the challenges there? My team and I think there are ways to do it. I hope that her mother, or her next of kin, calls us and we’ll figure out a Bivens action or a Federal Tort Claims Act case, or something else. If you look at this case carefully, it has all the hallmarks of cases we’ve either won or settled for amounts of money no reasonable person would pay us if we weren’t going to win. It is essentially a garden variety unjustified use of deadly force case. And that’s based on the facts we know now; I bet the case is going to get better.

Tributes poured in on Sunday following the news of the death of director and actor Rob Reiner and his wife, film producer and photographer Michele Reiner. If you take a look at them, you’ll notice that many go beyond his film work and speak glowingly about his progressive activism—except for one missive from President Donald Trump. The president lashed out earlier today, claiming the filmmaker had “TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME” and hated that his administration “surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness.” > Remember when they tried to make criticizing Charlie Kirk after his murder > into a capital offense?(Yes, this is real.) > > — Joel S. (@joelhs.bsky.social) 2025-12-15T14:59:18.290Z Reiner was a co-founder of the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER), a nonprofit organization established to sponsor a federal lawsuit to overturn California’s Proposition 8 in 2009.  The ballot proposition banned same-sex marriage and added language to the California Constitution, stating “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”  Religious organizations, including the Catholic Bishops of California and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, advocated for the proposition through in-person canvassing and millions of dollars in donations.  A report from The Hollywood Reporter stated that Reiner collaborated with political strategists to establish AFER and leveraged his entertainment industry connections to secure $3-5 million in financial backing from wealthy film producers to support its legal work. AFER supported two couples—Kris Perry and Sandy Stier, and Paul Katami and Jeff Zarrillo—and argued that Prop 8 discriminated on the basis of gender and sexual orientation. Chief US District Judge Vaughn Walker overturned Prop 8 in 2010, citing that it violated both the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.   The case went all the way to the US Supreme Court due to appeals. The court decided in 2013 that the Prop 8 sponsors did not have legal standing to dispute the ruling because they could not demonstrate a “personal and tangible harm” that went beyond a “generalized grievance.” Prop 8 wasn’t just a one-off in Reiner’s progressive activism. In 1998, he led the campaign to pass Proposition 10 in California. It passed that November, authorizing a $0.50 tax on cigarettes and up to $1 on other tobacco products, such as cigars. The money generated went to First 5 California, which distributes funds to the state’s county branches in support of programs for young children, such as health care and school readiness. “I loved Rob,” Kathy Bates, who won an Oscar for her starring role in Reiner’s film, “Misery,” said in a statement to Deadline. “He was brilliant and kind, a man who made films of every genre to challenge himself as an artist.” Despite these progressive policy wins for Reiner, he was still compassionate enough to mourn people whose politics he despised. After Charlie Kirk was murdered in September, Reiner appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored. “That should never happen to anybody,” he said of Kirk’s violent and public assassination. “I don’t care what your political beliefs…that’s not a solution to solving problems.” > Rob Reiner responded with grace and compassion to Charlie's assassination. > This video makes it all the more painful to hear of he and his wife's tragic > end. May God be close to the broken hearted in this terrible story. > pic.twitter.com/07g2EFu8Ha > > — Andrew Kolvet (@AndrewKolvet) December 15, 2025 As of this writing, Reiner’s murder is still being investigated by Los Angeles police and Hollywood is left to mourn one of its most visionary activists.

Jason Stanley isn’t afraid to use the F-word when talking about President Donald Trump. The author of How Fascism Works and Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future is clear: He believes the United States is currently under an authoritarian regime led by a fascist leader. At a time when the Trump administration is putting increasing pressure on private and public universities to conform or lose funding, Stanley recently left his position at Yale University and moved his family to Canada, where he’s now the Bissell-Heyd chair in American studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. The move, he says, has allowed him to talk about the US in a way that wouldn’t have been possible if he remained in the country.  Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. “I knew that if I stayed at Yale, there would be pressure not to bring the Trump administration’s wrath onto Yale,” he says. “I knew that Yale would try to normalize the situation, escape being in the press, urge us to see the fascists as just politically different.” On this week’s More To The Story, Stanley traces the recent rise of fascist regimes around the globe, and explains why he describes what’s happening in the US today as a “coup” and why he thinks the speed and scope of the Trump administration’s hardline policies could ultimately lead to significant pushback from those opposed to the president. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: So your new book, Erasing History, focuses on what you call the rise of global fascism and specifically on the role of education in authoritarian regimes. Tell me about that. Jason Stanley: It’s really a prequel to my 2018 book, How Fascism Works. So I’m a philosopher first and foremost, so what I’ve been doing, really, I envisage a kind of trilogy eventually with the third book being what to ho, how to stop this, but How Fascism Works is about fascist politics, how a certain kind of politics works to catapult people into power when they use it as a practice, whether they might be ideologically fascist or not. I think everybody accepts that whatever the Trump machine believes behind the scenes, they’re employing techniques familiar from the Nazis. It’s the same set of scapegoats except not the Jews, but immigrants, LGBTQ citizens, opposition politicians, et cetera. So for fascist politics to be maximally effective, you need a certain kind of education system that tells people that their country is like the greatest ever. And as I show in the book, Hitler is extremely clear about this in Mein Kampf, he speaks in very clear terms about education and the necessity of having an education system where you promote the founders of the nation, the great Aryan men who founded the German nation as great exemplars and models, and you base the education around that. And hey, in the United States we already had an education like system like that. So if that is your background education system, then you can set up great replacement theory. You can say America’s greatness is because it had these great white Christian men. And so if you try to replace those men, if you try to replace white Christian men in positions of power by non-whites or women, or non-white women most concerningly from this perspective, then that’s an existential challenge to American greatness. Just for basis of this conversation, can you give me your definition of fascism? Many countries have fascist, social, and political movements, and have them in their history. The United States certainly does: eugenics, the immigration laws that Hitler so admired. And in the United States, in the black intellectual tradition you consider Jim Crow a fascist social and political movement. And Jim Crow, the second Ku Klux Klan was, ideologically very similar to German fascism particularly. But whereas in Europe you had–and this is what we think of when we think of fascism–you had a cult of the leader. So I would go with something like a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by immigrants, minorities, LGBTQ citizens, feminists, and leftists. Jim Crow South did not have a cult of the leader, wasn’t organized around a Trump figure, but what we now have in the United States is something that looks a lot closer to German fascism. You consider President Trump a fascist? Oh, yeah. And even more… I mean, if you think of fascism as a set of tactics and practices, yes. What President Trump has in his heart, I don’t know. Do you feel like America is living in an authoritarian state? Of course. I think right now, the Trump regime has decided it has enough of the levers of power that they don’t need to have public support anymore. And it is not clear to me whether or not they’re correct on that. They might be wrong. They might have just misstated the moment, and in fact, there will be civil resistance. The institutions will see that they have to unify. That might happen. Civil society is not, I think, buying the propaganda line of the regime. So I’m not saying by any means that things are lost. And in fact, the rapidity by which this has happened might actually work against this coup that is now happening. But the problem is the Supreme Court is nothing but a far-right Trump loyalists, nothing but, so everything they’re going to do, they rule almost entirely in favor of Trump. They’re not minds on that court for the most part, the conservative majority, they’re only there for the purposes of keeping Trump in power and whatever far-right machine replaces him. And things are moving quickly, they’re seizing the levers of power. But I do not think they have popular support, and I think they will have even less popular support as this proceeds. You just used the word coup. Do you think that a coup is happening in the United States? Yes, a coup is happening in the United States. Walk me through that. Why do you think it’s a coup, in the sense of, I mean, these guys were elected? I’m just curious why you use that word, that’s all. Right, let’s look at what’s happening with the boats that they’re blowing up and now in the Pacific, first in the Caribbean, now in the Pacific, they’re just simply assassinating people for no reason whatsoever. It’s completely illegal. In fact, what it now means is that Trump could just kill anyone anywhere just by saying they’re a terrorist. The way it’s going to work is they’re going to say, “Okay, these narco traffickers are terrorists. Oh, the immigrants are terrorists. Anyone protesting ICE now is a terrorist. If you’re against us blowing up boats without any legal justification or evidence, or if you are against ICE brutalizing little kids, you are a terrorist. The Democratic Party are terrorists.” So they’re trying to illegalize the opposition. What they’re doing is so far beyond what’s legal, so there’s no legality anymore. Everybody who supports Trump gets pardoned. Trump tells people, tells the military the real enemy is within, namely the opposition. The Democratic states and Democratic cities will have the military, the National Guard, the red states are essentially invading the blue states. All of this is an overthrow of the Democratic order, and it’s already happened. So you’ve been studying this for a long time. You’re watching America change or maybe kind of realize the destiny that’s kind of always been under the surface because I would argue that what we’re seeing now was set up long time ago. And it just took a little while for it to come to the surface. In seeing all that, was that a part of why you decided to leave the United States? I knew when I made the decision in March that people were going to be harshly critical. Somebody yelled at me the other day, they were like, “You are safe, you’re a Yale professor.” I just didn’t want to deal with the whole structure. I knew that if I stayed at Yale, there would be pressure not to bring the Trump administration’s wrath onto Yale. I knew that Yale would try to normalize the situation, escape being in the press, urge us to see the fascists as just politically different, and talk about polarization, which is just fascism. All the people talking about polarization are just fascism enablers. They’re almost worse than the fascists because they’re just like, “Hey, how do I keep getting money in power?” I’ll say the fascists are normal. And so I was just like, “Okay, I have this great opportunity.” And I thought that without that pressure, because I do love Yale, and so I love my time there. I love my colleagues, I love my students, I love the institution as a home to do my work, and I just felt I would be torn. I couldn’t hit hard in the way that I’m hitting hard now with you and I’m hitting hard when I go on TV and I’m hitting hard when I write my op-eds, I can say whatever I want in Toronto about the United States and about global fascism, and I’m building an institute here to create fellowships for journalists from all around the world to figure out what’s going on and how to respond to what’s going on. And I don’t think I could have done that in a university in the United States. So the Trump administration is targeting funds for private universities in hopes of pushing them into a more conservative agenda. And as of this recording, it’s closing in on a deal with the University of Virginia. You’ve called this a war. So how would you advise other universities, given where we are in the world, but also the desire within those universities to protect the institution? Everyone has to say fuck you. I mean, it’s the only way to… I mean, you could say Yale predates American democracy, which is true, but a university in a democracy is a core democratic institution. That’s why they attack universities first and the media. They’ve taken the court. Obviously, the Supreme Court is taken. So unfortunately, what you have to do, every single democratic institution has to band together and defend each other. And we’ve already had that total breakdown because starting in 2015, we had this Coke-funded movement creating a moral panic about universities, and the New York Times piled on this moral panic. You couldn’t open the New York Times for years without reading another op-ed about hysterical moral panic about leftists on campus. All the while it was a total fiction that the whole time the right-wing press from Turning Points USA’s Professor Watchlist, originally Breitbart, Campus Reform, there was this massive attack on progressives and universities where progressive professors were terrified of being targeted by the conservative students and universities completely. So the media viciously attacked universities and set the groundwork for Trumpism. So that has to stop, and the both-siderism has to stop. The whole stuff about polarization, that’s just enabling fascism. Yeah, explain that to me because you don’t like when people talk and say polarization, because the polarization, the idea that things are more toxic than they’ve ever been, and people are choosing sides, and all of that. Specifically, why don’t you like that? Because one side is led by fascists. I mean, it’s like saying the Civil War, the problem with the Civil War was polarization. It’s literally like that. History will look back at this time at figures who talk about polarization exactly like history looks back on people who called John Brown a crazy person or who said, “Oh, it’s too early for abolition. It’s, oh, terrible, polarized time.” One group thinks that slavery is good, and the other group thinks it’s bad, terribly polarized. Or Nazi Germany. One group thinks Jews should be killed, the other one thinks they’re okay, it’s Polarized. It’s nonsensical. It’s just fascism enabling. Let me ask you this: do you think Benjamin Netanyahu is a fascist? Oh, well, of course, more so than Trump even. You’ve said in the past that Jews in particular need to speak out about what’s happening and how history will look back at this time period. Why do you think it’s so important for Jewish people to speak up at this time? Well, first of all, because the genocide is being perpetrated in our name, there’s a long tradition of European Jews from which I come who do not accept, from my father’s side. My mother’s Polish Jewish and has very different views about Israel than I do, and I’m not questioning, I don’t know what it means to question the existence of a state as Israel’s there, nobody should be killed in Israel, nobody should be moved away from Israel, it’s there, but Israel should stop the practice of apartheid. Obviously, they should not commit a genocide, and it’s the first televised genocide in human history. Jan Karski spent… of the Polish Home Army spent… deeply risked his life visiting the Warsaw Ghetto, infiltrating the death camp system to spread word of what was happening in Poland with the death camp, with the Nazi death camps, and no one… Roosevelt didn’t believe him. Now we’ve got it all on social media. So Jews have to speak out about that. We have to say this is not in our name, and we have to do that in a way that makes it clear that we’re not calling for the end of… for anyone to be thrust out of Israel. Palestinians and Jews should have equal rights, and apartheid has to end. And then Jewish people have suffered fascism. I mean, Russians have suffered fascism too, but they’re still awfully fascist, so that’s what we learned from Israel as well. But my Judaism, my version of Judaism is the tradition of liberalism. And we Jews did represent liberalism, the idea that a nation cannot be based on an ethnicity or a religion, the idea that if you are in a place, that is your home, and it doesn’t matter what your religion or ethnicity is, that’s why we were killed and why we were targeted. What is it about this moment in time that we are seeing fascist movements all over the planet happening and gaining power? What is it at this moment that we’re seeing all this? Well, one thing I think is essential to see is the global nature of this. You cannot investigate Trumpism just by looking at the United States. Now we’re seeing Trump offer $20 billion to Argentina to support their far-right leader. I mean, that’s a crazy amount of money. And they’re saying, “Well, you better keep them in power.” So these are connected movements. I’ve been thinking about writing about this for months, but now it’s getting more attention now that Homeland Security has tweeted it, but remigration. It’s very clear there are powerful links between Germany’s fascist party, Alternative für Deutschland, and the Trump regime since the Munich Security Conference at least. Vance went over and met with the head of AfD and not with the Chancellor of Germany who’s a conservative. And then there was all this stuff about Germany threatening to ban AfD. That became central to the Trump regime. So when Homeland Security tweets remigration, which is not a word in the English language. It’s a word created by Martin Zellner who intended it to mean taking citizenship away from non-white, from Muslims. Right. When we look back on moments like Nazi Germany and wonder why people didn’t do something about these atrocities faster, do you think that people just at some point become complacent? Yeah. I mean, people just don’t get that under fascism or virtually any kind of authoritarianism, you can still go to the club, there are still raves, there are restaurants, there are bars. They’re like, “How could it be fascism because I can go to the restaurant and complain about the government to my friends?” So it’s like what you’re saying, a large chunk of the population are still living their regular routine, going to work, coming home, taking care of their kids, all of that, but they’re oblivious to… or they’re tuning out what’s happening to people in the margins? Yeah. I mean, we’re creating large concentration camps for immigrants. Lawyers can’t get into these places. Congress people are being blocked from their oversight role. So we now have concentration camps in the United States. We have people in masks kidnapping people off the streets. I don’t even like to say, “Oh, now it’s going to go to protesters,” which it obviously will, but because it’s bad enough that little kids are watching their parents snatched away in immigration courts, that’s bad enough. And all the people who are enabling this, all the people who are normalizing this, I don’t myself believe in hell, but I think there’s a lot of people out there who are patting their wallets, getting that extra attention by normalizing this, by saying, “Oh, maybe we need to really… This cruelty is okay, it’s part of… It’s just you disagree with it. We’re polarized.” Yeah. Well, I think that we have, in many ways, been dehumanized by the media we consume. When you look back at the civil rights struggle, when those images came on TV, it made change… Exactly. … because we were in a different place. Now, the reaction is when young people rise up, when they see images on the screen or they see what’s happening to immigrants or they’re seeing what’s happening to democracy, heads are getting cracked or they’re threatening to crack heads. I mean, I think this is what I was saying before, I’m not sure they’re going to be successful on this because I think civil society is really pushing back, and they’ve threatened people if they showed up at the No Kings demonstrations, but people still showed up, so it kind of didn’t work. What do you see for the near future for the United States? Well, I’m actually heartened by certain things, I’m heartened by the… I see that the regime has… So the regime is going hog wild. They’re soaking themselves in cruelty and corruption and illegality, and their justifications for this are not playing with the American people. Most Americans are starting to get that we’re facing a dictator, an out of control dictator. I think that what you’re going to see as people see the American Republic being cracked apart and sold for parts to the tech fascists, to anyone really. Basically, Trump is saying, “Line up behind my corruption, line up behind my brutalization of immigrants, my targeting of domestic opponents, and you’ll profit, you’ll get that $50,000 signing bonus for ICE, you’ll profit, you’ll get the government contracts, the courts will rule in your favor.” But I think it’s becoming clearer and clearer to many Americans what’s going on. The problem is fascism and dictatorship, and the regime went over its skis. So that’s where I see the hope here, that I think they went too fast. So it’s a bad time, but I think that there is a lot of civil society reaction, and so we just don’t know what’s going to happen right now. Yeah. Jason Stanley, thank you so much for taking your time to talk to me, man. This was great. Yeah, great conversation in difficult times.

In greater Los Angeles, the Trump administration’s goal of deporting millions of people is being operationalized through often violent raids that target people who appear Latino while waiting for the bus or working in low-wage jobs. A shorter way to say this is racial profiling of low-income people. Today, the Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court blessed this approach. > “We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone > who looks Latino.” The ruling, on the so-called shadow docket, is yet another in a long string of cases since the spring in which the GOP appointees have allowed the Trump administration’s power grabs. From firing federal workers and agency heads to deporting people to dangerous countries without due process, the court’s majority has waived aside precedent, clear statutory language, and even constitutional protections in order to give this president increasing power. This time, the pesky thing standing in the way was the Fourth Amendment. “The Fourth Amendment protects every individual’s constitutional right to be ‘free from arbitrary interference by law officers,'” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “After today, that may no longer be true for those who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way, and appear to work a certain type of legitimate job that pays very little.” Among the administration’s long list of recent wins, this case is particularly foreboding. It allows the government to target people because of their appearance and how they speak, as well as where they were found and what kind of work they do—factors that the district court found likely violate the Fourth Amendment. To move freely in this country, it may become increasingly important to look white. As Sotomayor, the court’s only Latino justice, wrote in dissent, the majority has created a “a second-class citizenship status” of people who may be subject to harassment. Today’s decision sets a course for the United States to become a country where masked officers pluck people from streets and businesses because of how they look. But to the court’s majority, the Latino citizen or visa holder who must now carry immigration documents or a passport every time they leave the house, and who might endure repeated harassment from federal agents anyway, is not the real victim. Instead, granting emergency relief to the Trump administration indicates the justices think the greatest harm is that the government might be forced to turn away from indiscriminate raids and put more effort into finding undocumented immigrants while this case challenging its tactics moves through the courts. As former prosecutor Ken White, a frequent media commenter, summed up the court’s holding: “Supreme Court Rules 6-3 That Fundamental Interests Of United States Of America Would Be Irreparably Harmed If It[s] Race-Based Harassment And Detention By Masked Thugs Were Even Temporarily Halted.” It has become typical that even in extraordinary opinions granting the administration new powers, the GOP appointees provide little to no explanation. On Monday, the court’s majority once again declined to explain its rationale in a written decision—possibly because it doesn’t even have a cohesive argument. But Justice Brett Kavanaugh nonetheless provided a concurrence, a kind of opinion that usually accompanies another justice’s fuller explanation. Perhaps Kavanaugh’s attempt to explain his reasoning in this case provides a partial explanation for why the majority so often remains silent: to show its reasoning would be to betray just how weak that reasoning is. Kavanaugh’s words are all we have to understand the court’s decision. And while the explanation he provides is poor, that in itself is illuminating. The only way Kavanaugh can justify the government’s actions is to put on blinders, ignore the fact-finding performed by the district court, presume the Trump administration is acting in good faith, and even ignore the actual policy that the Trump administration is applying. You don’t need to be a lawyer to see the flaws, or read the counterpoints in Sotomayor’s dissent, to see that some of what Kavanaugh writes simply doesn’t make sense. > Millions of people in Los Angeles now fear leaving their homes. Kavanaugh, for instance, claims that the plaintiffs in this case, which include citizens who have been detained by ICE during its raids as well four groups that represent immigrant and worker rights, don’t have standing to challenge the administration’s immigration enforcement in Los Angeles because individuals and association members are unlikely to be detained again. “What matters is the ‘reality of the threat of repeated injury,'” he writes, before ludicrously concluding that the plaintiffs “have no good basis to believe that law enforcement will unlawfully stop them in the future based on the prohibited factors—and certainly no good basis for believing that any stop of the plaintiffs is imminent.” That must be news to the millions of people in Los Angeles who now fear leaving their homes, not because they have done anything illegal but because simply being at work, waiting for the bus, or going to Home Depot is enough to get slammed against a wall or taken to a warehouse for questioning. If you are a Latino citizen who takes the bus to work in Los Angeles or frequents Home Depot, and ICE detains you once, what would insulate you from the same thing from happening again? Of course, the answer is nothing. Kavanaugh’s reasoning here seems to completely ignore how ICE is choosing its targets, even though that is literally the subject of the lawsuit. Kavanaugh’s rejection of the facts continues when he brushes aside the often violent reality of ICE raids, as documented by the plaintiffs, and instead dismisses an ICE stop as a minor inconvenience. “As for stops of those individuals who are legally in the country, the questioning in those circumstances is typically brief, and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U. S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States.” Sure, that’s possible. But Kavanaugh’s chipper language is belied by recent images of hundreds of people being shackled at a Hyundai plant site in Georgia, and bused 100 miles to a detention center, including reportedly people with valid work permits and citizens—even those with their immigration documents on them—where some were held for days. Evidence presented by the plaintiffs in this case demonstrated that citizens were pinned against walls and driven away for questioning. There is an indignity that goes along with always having to carry papers because of what you look like. But Kavanaugh doesn’t acknowledge any of that. To do that, he would have to acknowledge that the most-harmed party might not actually be Trump and his plans. “We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job,” Sotomayor wrote. In LA now, that is the reality, at least as long as this case continues. And there’s no reason in this opinion to assume it won’t soon be the reality for the rest of us, too.

For the last 18 months, the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank responsible for Project 2025, has been organizing to quash pro-Palestine activism in the United States, the New York Times reported this weekend. The initiative is called Project Esther—after the courageous Old Testament queen who saved the Jews from a wicked Persian king—and it recommends that government officials instruct college administrators to jettison pro-Palestine curriculum or risk losing federal funding. It also called for foreign students who took part in anti-Israel demonstrations to be deported. Overall, Project Esther says its goal is to “dismantle the infrastructure that sustains the [Hamas Support Network] and associated movements’ antisemitic violence inside the United States of America within 12 to 24 months.” In November 2023, a month after Hamas attacked Gaza and pro-Palestinian demonstrations took place across the US, the Heritage Foundation announced the precursor to the Esther Project: a coalition called the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism. This group, it said at the time, was “dedicated to combating antisemitism at home and abroad and to supporting the state of Israel.” Notably, the coalition was composed of about a dozen groups, generally not Jewish but rather evangelicals who proudly call themselves “Christian Zionists.” Many of them are big names in the world of right-wing activism: the evangelical nonprofit Family Research Council, the conservative Christian advocacy group Independent Women’s Forum, and the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute, to name a few. Last year, I wrote about how, for some Christian Zionists, Israel plays a key role in their end-times scenario of choice. To bring about the Messiah’s second coming, some believe, the Jews must return to Israel. Once that happens, however, most of the Jewish inhabitants of Israel will perish, and those who remain will finally accept Jesus and convert to Christianity. This set of beliefs is common among adherents of the New Apostolic Reformation, a network of charismatic Christians who believe that God speaks directly to modern-day prophets and apostles and that Christians are called to take dominion over the United States. They will do so by electing Christian leaders who will, in turn, appoint Christian judges, enact laws and policies that promote Christian values, and allow Christianity to be taught in public schools. Some of the Christian Zionist participants in the Heritage Foundation’s coalition appeared in another of my pieces last year. For example: > Take the Philos Project, a decade-old nonprofit with an annual budget of $8 > million whose mission is to “promote positive Christian engagement in the Near > East.” The group, which in 2020 received a $9.4 million grant from the public > charity National Philanthropic Trust, says on its website that it supports > “some variant of the two-state solution—ideally a Jewish state with a > Palestinian minority and a Palestinian state with a Jewish minority.” > > On Facebook in January, the organization’s executive director, Luke Moon, > posted a photo of himself in Israel proudly signing a bomb that was “bound for > Hezbollah.” That summer on Facebook, he posted a photo of himself wearing a > T-shirt with a picture of Jesus giving the thumbs-up sign, accompanied by the > slogan “Jesus Was a Zionist.” Philos Project leaders devoted a recent podcast > episode to debunking what they called a “conspiracy theory” that AIPAC wields > political power. Last October, the Philos Project hosted an event in Washington, DC, to recognize the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ attack on Israel. Headlining the event was then-vice-presidential candidate JD Vance. In March on Facebook, Moon posted a photo of himself meeting with Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu. Moon also announced a new group, the Conference of Christian Presidents, a group of leaders of like-minded organizations who he said would “help ensure the unique relationship between Israel and the United States goes from strength to strength.” According to the New York Times, Moon was one of the founders of the Esther Project; the others were a charismatic Christian leader and president of the Latino Coalition for Israel Mario Bramnick, senior Heritage Foundation staffer James Carafano, and Ellie Cohanim, who served as Trump’s antisemitism envoy during his first presidency. Of those four, only Cohanim is Jewish. Regent University, a Christian college in Virginia Beach, Virginia, also is included in Heritage’s task force. It’s home to the Israel Institute, a new center that says it is dedicated to “promoting robust Christian scholarship on Israel,” which was founded in part by Regent’s Robertson School of Government dean, Michele Bachmann, the former Republican representative from Iowa and 2012 presidential hopeful. Bachmann, a devoted Christian Zionist, has emerged as a firebrand on the subject of Israel and Palestine. As I wrote: > Last year, in remarks at a conference hosted by the right-wing student group > Turning Point USA, Bachmann said of Palestinians, “They need to be removed > from that land. That land needs to be turned into a national park.” In an > October 2023 appearance in Los Angeles, Bachmann theorized that “wokeness” in > Israel prevented the military from anticipating the attack. “It’s entirely > possible that perhaps the intel service in Israel also had wokeness and > decided not to pass the information along,” she said. Project Esther appears determined to ensure that Americans don’t fall prey to that same wokeness, with the goal of ensuring that all pro-Palestine groups become associated in the public consciousness with Hamas and terrorism. “The virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American groups comprising the so-called pro-Palestinian movement inside the United States are exclusively pro-Palestine and—more so—pro-Hamas,” the group’s initial report states. To silence that movement, it says, Project Esther must act strategically. “After 9/11 and more than 20 years of the global war on terrorism, the vast majority of Americans associate al-Qaeda and Islamic extremism with ‘bad,’” the report says. “This is precisely the effect Project Esther strives to generate when Americans hear ‘Hamas Supporters’ or ‘Hamas Support Network.’” The Trump administration hasn’t officially acknowledged Project Esther, although many of its initial goals have been accomplished or at least are being implemented. The government has withheld funds for Ivy League colleges and universities, for example, and it has made aggressive efforts to deport student activists. As Robert Greenway, Heritage Foundation’s National Security Director, told the New York Times, it’s “no coincidence that we called for a series of actions to take place privately and publicly, and they are now happening.”

President Donald Trump’s second term has swung a wrecking ball at diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and programs throughout the country. Few writers seem better suited to explain this unique moment in America than Nikole Hannah-Jones. A New York Times journalist and Howard University professor, Hannah-Jones has spent years studying and shaping compelling—and at times controversial—narratives about American history. In 2019, she created The 1619 Project, a series of stories and essays that placed the first slave ship that arrived in Virginia at the center of the US’ origin story. Today, the Trump administration is pushing against that kind of historical reframing while dismantling federal policies designed to address structural racism. Hannah-Jones says she’s been stunned by the speed of Trump’s first few months. “We haven’t seen the federal government weaponized against civil rights in this way” since the turn of the century, Hannah-Jones says. “We’ve not lived in this America before. And we are experiencing something that, if you study history, it’s not unpredictable, yet it’s still shocking that we’re here.” On this week’s episode of More To The Story, host Al Letson talks to Hannah-Jones about the rollback of DEI and civil rights programs across the country, the ongoing battle to reframe American history, and whether this will lead to another moment of rebirth for Black Americans. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.