#stateofexception — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #stateofexception, aggregated by home.social.
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"Federal records obtained by WIRED show that over the past several months, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have carried out a secret campaign to expand ICE’s physical presence across the US. Documents show that more than 150 leases and office expansions have or would place new facilities in nearly every state, many of them in or just outside of the country’s largest metropolitan areas. In many cases, these facilities, which are to be used by street-level agents and ICE attorneys, are located near elementary schools, medical offices, places of worship, and other sensitive locations.
In El Paso, Texas, for example, the agency is moving into a large campus of buildings right off of Interstate 10 near multiple local health providers and other businesses. In Irvine, California, ICE is moving into offices located next to a childcare agency. In New York, ICE is moving into offices on Long Island near a passport center. In a wealthy community near Houston, Texas, ICE appears poised to move into an office building blocks away from a preschool.
The General Services Administration (GSA), which manages federal buildings and functions as the government’s internal IT department, is playing a critical role in this aggressive expansion. In numerous emails and memorandums viewed by WIRED, DHS asked GSA explicitly to disregard usual government lease procurement procedures and even hide lease listings due to “national security concerns” in an effort to support ICE’s immigration enforcement activities across the US."
https://www.wired.com/story/ice-expansion-across-us-at-heres-where-its-going-next/
#USA #Trump #Immigration #ICE #PoliceState #Surveillance #Militia #Paramilitary #StateOfException
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"Homan’s return has been welcomed by nearly all of the career ICE and CBP officials I’ve been in touch with, many of whom say that Trump’s deportation campaign—whose goals they largely share—will be more effective if it is more low-key and less provocative. That means returning to a focus on immigrants with criminal records (including those with nonviolent offenses such as illegally reentering the United States) and those who disobey deportation orders from immigration courts.
Homan has worked under Democratic administrations—he received an award from President Obama in 2015—and is well versed in the arguments about public safety and crime that ICE leaders have long used to defend the agency when its legitimacy has come under attack. It was Homan who, after Trump appointed him to lead ICE in 2017, famously said that officers would be freed from “the shackles” of tighter oversight. Now it’s Homan’s job to restore some of those restraints.
At the White House, Miller is still running 10 a.m. conference calls six days a week to issue orders and demand updates on the metrics that matter most to him: deportations, new-ICE-officer deployments, and prosecutions. ICE field commanders have not been waved off the ambitious arrest quotas he set last May, and they remain under orders to maintain staffing levels at 70 percent, even on the weekends, two current officials told me."
#USA #Trump #Immigration #Minnesota #Minneapolis #ICE #PoliceState #Militias #StateOfException
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"Homan’s return has been welcomed by nearly all of the career ICE and CBP officials I’ve been in touch with, many of whom say that Trump’s deportation campaign—whose goals they largely share—will be more effective if it is more low-key and less provocative. That means returning to a focus on immigrants with criminal records (including those with nonviolent offenses such as illegally reentering the United States) and those who disobey deportation orders from immigration courts.
Homan has worked under Democratic administrations—he received an award from President Obama in 2015—and is well versed in the arguments about public safety and crime that ICE leaders have long used to defend the agency when its legitimacy has come under attack. It was Homan who, after Trump appointed him to lead ICE in 2017, famously said that officers would be freed from “the shackles” of tighter oversight. Now it’s Homan’s job to restore some of those restraints.
At the White House, Miller is still running 10 a.m. conference calls six days a week to issue orders and demand updates on the metrics that matter most to him: deportations, new-ICE-officer deployments, and prosecutions. ICE field commanders have not been waved off the ambitious arrest quotas he set last May, and they remain under orders to maintain staffing levels at 70 percent, even on the weekends, two current officials told me."
#USA #Trump #Immigration #Minnesota #Minneapolis #ICE #PoliceState #Militias #StateOfException
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"Homan’s return has been welcomed by nearly all of the career ICE and CBP officials I’ve been in touch with, many of whom say that Trump’s deportation campaign—whose goals they largely share—will be more effective if it is more low-key and less provocative. That means returning to a focus on immigrants with criminal records (including those with nonviolent offenses such as illegally reentering the United States) and those who disobey deportation orders from immigration courts.
Homan has worked under Democratic administrations—he received an award from President Obama in 2015—and is well versed in the arguments about public safety and crime that ICE leaders have long used to defend the agency when its legitimacy has come under attack. It was Homan who, after Trump appointed him to lead ICE in 2017, famously said that officers would be freed from “the shackles” of tighter oversight. Now it’s Homan’s job to restore some of those restraints.
At the White House, Miller is still running 10 a.m. conference calls six days a week to issue orders and demand updates on the metrics that matter most to him: deportations, new-ICE-officer deployments, and prosecutions. ICE field commanders have not been waved off the ambitious arrest quotas he set last May, and they remain under orders to maintain staffing levels at 70 percent, even on the weekends, two current officials told me."
#USA #Trump #Immigration #Minnesota #Minneapolis #ICE #PoliceState #Militias #StateOfException
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"Homan’s return has been welcomed by nearly all of the career ICE and CBP officials I’ve been in touch with, many of whom say that Trump’s deportation campaign—whose goals they largely share—will be more effective if it is more low-key and less provocative. That means returning to a focus on immigrants with criminal records (including those with nonviolent offenses such as illegally reentering the United States) and those who disobey deportation orders from immigration courts.
Homan has worked under Democratic administrations—he received an award from President Obama in 2015—and is well versed in the arguments about public safety and crime that ICE leaders have long used to defend the agency when its legitimacy has come under attack. It was Homan who, after Trump appointed him to lead ICE in 2017, famously said that officers would be freed from “the shackles” of tighter oversight. Now it’s Homan’s job to restore some of those restraints.
At the White House, Miller is still running 10 a.m. conference calls six days a week to issue orders and demand updates on the metrics that matter most to him: deportations, new-ICE-officer deployments, and prosecutions. ICE field commanders have not been waved off the ambitious arrest quotas he set last May, and they remain under orders to maintain staffing levels at 70 percent, even on the weekends, two current officials told me."
#USA #Trump #Immigration #Minnesota #Minneapolis #ICE #PoliceState #Militias #StateOfException
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"It is true that would-be authoritarians often try to strengthen their grip on power by creating forces answerable only to themselves. These have several common characteristics. First, to encourage loyalty, they are usually paid well. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which reports directly to the supreme leader, has a far larger budget than the regular army and its officers run coercive business empires on the side.
Second, whereas regular military forces are supposed to be politically neutral, at least in democracies, unorthodox ones may be fiercely partisan. India’s Hindu-nationalist paramilitary groups (who tend to carry sticks rather than guns) are open about their support for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
Third, a strongman’s pet force is often allowed to break the law. In Venezuela it is illegal to kidnap and torture dissidents, or to stand outside polling stations shooting bullets in the air to intimidate voters, but motorbike gangs known as colectivos and sponsored by the regime have done so without fear of arrest.
Fourth, leaders who sponsor the irregular use of force nearly always claim it is to protect the public. Rodrigo Duterte won the presidency of the Philippines by promising to “forget the laws on human rights” when fighting drug dealers. He urged the police to “fatten all the fish” of Manila Bay with the corpses of criminals to make the streets safe again.
Clearly, although America is a far cry from all these places, with vastly stronger institutions, there are some echoes in ICE’s deployment, from $50,000 sign-up bonuses to the claim (since watered down) of J.D. Vance, the vice-president, that ICE agents have “absolute immunity” from prosecution for how they carry out their jobs."
#USA #Trump #Immigration #ICE #Militarism #Paramilitary #Militias #PoliceState #Authoritarianism #StateOfException
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"...ICE’s budget has more than tripled in the past year, from roughly $10 billion in 2024 to almost $30 billion in 2025. As Lindsay Koshgarian and Sarah Lazare detailed at In These Times, if ICE were a national army, it would be the 13th biggest in the world, larger than the militaries of Poland, Italy, Australia, Canada, Turkey, and Spain. Last year, the federal government received, via Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” a staggering $170 billion in new funding for immigration enforcement through September 2029. On an annual basis, Koshgarian and Lazare note, “this adds about $42.5 billion per year for immigration enforcement.”
It’s from this place we must begin any discussions of “reform.” An entity that has tripled in size with the explicit mandate to round up, deport, and terrorize immigrant communities—while punishing anyone who gets in their way—cannot be meaningfully challenged without addressing the funding source for this mandate.
(...)
What is essential to understand is that it’s from this obscene budget that ICE and CBP are able to run Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s terror campaign at scale. This injection of $170 billion last year, on top of their baseline budget, is how the DHS can scale up hiring, how they can offer $50,000 sign up bonuses to new, ideologically-motivated recruits, and produce the mass saturation of armed agents to blanket multiple cities to create the requisite tension needed for their liberal city harassment and mass deportation campaigns.The fact that progressives in Congress aren’t even advocating DHS’s budget return to its 2024 levels, or a reduction of ~66 percent, shows just how far to the right the Overton Window is. This should be a common sense, likely very popular, minimum ante to any discussion of meaningful reform—instead it’s relegated to the fringes of activist Twitter."
https://www.columnblog.com/p/senate-democrats-dhs-reforms-shaping
#USA #Trump #ICE #Militias #PoliceState #StateOfException #CivilWar #Democrats #DemocraticParty #Immigration
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"President Donald Trump has shattered the limits of executive authority by ordering the summary executions of individuals he deems members of designated terrorist organizations. He has also tested the bounds of his presidential powers by creating a secret list of domestic terrorist organizations, established under National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7.
Are Americans that the federal government deems to be members of domestic terrorist organizations subject to extrajudicial killings like those it claims are members of designated terrorist organizations? The White House, Justice Department, and Department of War have, for more than a month, failed to answer this question.
Lawmakers and other government officials tell The Intercept that the pregnant silence by the Trump administration has become especially worrisome as the death toll mounts from attacks on alleged members of “designated terrorist organizations” in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, and as Trump himself makes ever more unhinged threats to imprison or execute his political adversaries."
https://theintercept.com/2025/12/12/trump-nspm-7-domestic-terrorist-executions-antifa-boat-strikes/
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"Since September, the Trump administration has conducted an undeclared war in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, killing scores of civilians. The Intercept is chronicling all publicly declared U.S. attacks and providing a tracker with information on each strike.
The administration insists the attacks are permitted because the U.S. is engaged in “non-international armed conflict” with “designated terrorist organizations,” or DTOs. President Donald Trump has justified the attacks, in a War Powers report to Congress, under his Article II constitutional authority as commander in chief of the U.S. military and claimed to be acting pursuant to the United States’ inherent right of self-defense as a matter of international law. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has also produced a classified opinion that provides legal cover for the lethal strikes.
Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress, from both parties, say the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. The summary executions are a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies arrested suspected drug smugglers.
The Pentagon has repeatedly withheld information on the attacks from members of Congress and the American public, despite mounting questions from lawmakers about the legality of these deadly strikes.
So The Intercept is publishing a strike tracker documenting America’s newest war."
https://theintercept.com/2025/11/17/trump-boat-strikes-death-toll-caribbean-pacific/
#USA #Trump #CaribbeanSea #StateOfException #Imperialism #Venezuela #Colombia
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"Life in the early months of Trump’s second presidency hews to this framework in important respects. How else to explain that most people enjoy a sense of normalcy while, for example, foreign students like Rümeysa Öztürk and green card holders like Mahmoud Khalil can be detained for their speech. Americans and immigrants alike can be terrorized by ICE, the federal government’s unleashed immigration force, if they speak Spanish, look nonwhite, or happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The administration is sinking Venezuelan vessels and executing the civilians on board without any legal authorization—killings that look like war crimes or murder. The government demanded that Disney fire comedian Jimmy Kimmel as if the First Amendment didn’t exist. But at the same time, the Trump administration’s law-breaking in its war on immigrants, its crusade against dissent, its takeover of the machinery of the federal government, its unrestrained use of the military, have not cannibalized the broader legal system or society—at least not yet.
While these actions augur the onset of a dual state, the Trump administration hasn’t gotten us to this point alone. The Supreme Court, with its Republican-appointed 6-3 majority, has been a crucial facilitator. When the court blesses the administration’s disregard for the law while maintaining the appearance that the law still rules, it is enabling a dual state. When Jackson made explicit reference to Fraenkel, she was sounding an alarm on the court’s role in the shift toward a dual state. As Evan Bernick, a constitutional law professor at Northern Illinois University College of Law, puts it: “The reality is that the court is adjusting the law to make place for arbitrary power.”"
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/10/dual-state-supreme-court/
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‘It’s a war on the people’: El Salvador’s mass arrests send thousands into despair
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jun/08/its-a-war-on-the-people-el-salvadora-mass-arrests-send-thousands-into-despair?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other#ElSavador
#MassArrests
#ArrestingTheInnocent
#DiedInMysteriousCircumstances
#StateOfException
#Poverty -
‘It’s a war on the people’: El Salvador’s mass arrests send thousands into despair
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jun/08/its-a-war-on-the-people-el-salvadora-mass-arrests-send-thousands-into-despair?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other#ElSavador
#MassArrests
#ArrestingTheInnocent
#DiedInMysteriousCircumstances
#StateOfException
#Poverty -
‘It’s a war on the people’: El Salvador’s mass arrests send thousands into despair
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jun/08/its-a-war-on-the-people-el-salvadora-mass-arrests-send-thousands-into-despair?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other#ElSavador
#MassArrests
#ArrestingTheInnocent
#DiedInMysteriousCircumstances
#StateOfException
#Poverty -
‘It’s a war on the people’: El Salvador’s mass arrests send thousands into despair
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jun/08/its-a-war-on-the-people-el-salvadora-mass-arrests-send-thousands-into-despair?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other#ElSavador
#MassArrests
#ArrestingTheInnocent
#DiedInMysteriousCircumstances
#StateOfException
#Poverty -
‘It’s a war on the people’: El Salvador’s mass arrests send thousands into despair
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jun/08/its-a-war-on-the-people-el-salvadora-mass-arrests-send-thousands-into-despair?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other#ElSavador
#MassArrests
#ArrestingTheInnocent
#DiedInMysteriousCircumstances
#StateOfException
#Poverty -
“Export quality: the historical bloc, state of exception, and the hegemonic process in the avocado enclave of Michoacán” - Denisse Román-Burgos & Ricardo F. Macip-Ríos
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-022-09662-9
#anthropology #aiart #midjourney #academia @anthropology #Agroindustry #HistoricalBloc #StateOfException #SelfDefenseGroups #HegemonicProcess #Mexico