#stateofexception — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #stateofexception, aggregated by home.social.
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"The Department of Homeland Security is expanding its efforts to identify Americans who oppose Immigration and Customs Enforcement by sending tech companies legal requests for the names, email addresses, telephone numbers and other identifying data behind social media accounts that track or criticize the agency.
In recent months, Google, Reddit, Discord and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, have received hundreds of administrative subpoenas from the Department of Homeland Security, according to four government officials and tech employees privy to the requests. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Google, Meta and Reddit complied with some of the requests, the government officials said. In the subpoenas, the department asked the companies for identifying details of accounts that do not have a real person’s name attached and that have criticized ICE or pointed to the locations of ICE agents. The New York Times saw two subpoenas that were sent to Meta over the last six months.
The tech companies, which can choose whether or not to provide the information, have said they review government requests before complying. Some of the companies notified the people whom the government had requested data on and gave them 10 to 14 days to fight the subpoena in court."
#USA #Trump #SocialMedia #DHS #ICE #Surveillance #PoliceState #BigTech #StateOfException #Authoritarianism
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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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"ICE, resistance, and 'capitalism without humans' w/ Sarah Jaffe
On January 7th, Renee Nicole Good, a 37 year old prize winning poet and mother of three was murdered in Minneapolis by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Jonathan Ross. Sarah Jaffe has reported extensively on protests and organising in Minnesota and in today's episode we spoke about the political background to the current situation in the twin cities of Minneapolis and St Paul. We talked about the central role of the Somali community in resistance and union organising (and how this has drawn the ire of Donald Trump). And we talked about longer recent history of protest in the region that includes the state's central role in the Black Lives Matter movement. We also spoke about the entwinement of the tech industry, the surveillance state, and the border regime, and how protesters in some US cities have sought to target tech company assets that are believed to be aiding ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. SHOW NOTES: From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire"#USA #Trump #Immigration #Capitalism #ICE #PoliceState #StateOfException #Minnesota #Minneapolis
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"Federal agents who were wrestling a man to the ground in Minneapolis early Saturday secured a handgun he was carrying moments before shooting him multiple times, according to a Washington Post analysis of videos that captured the incident from several angles.
As many as eight agents were attempting to detain Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, videos show. One emerged from the scrum holding Pretti’s gun, and less than a second later, the first of what appear to be 10 shots was fired. It is not clear from the video whether the other agents realized Pretti — who local authorities believe had a permit to carry the weapon — had been disarmed.
Pretti was the third person in recent weeks to be shot, and the second to be killed, by federal agents in Minneapolis, the epicenter of nationwide upheaval sparked by the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2026/01/25/minneapolis-shooting-video-gun/
#USA #Trump #ICE #Minnesota #Minneapolis #Immigration #PoliceState #StateOfException
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"I have been thinking about what it was about the ICE phenomenon that felt chillingly familiar to someone who grew up under repressive regimes. It wasn’t the deployment of huge numbers of forces, nor was it even the violence. It was the sense that anything could happen to anyone, not just those expressly identified as the legitimate targets of crackdown. The abiding experience of living with authoritarianism is the sense not of imminent assault, but of the constant possibility that suddenly, you could be in trouble. At a traffic incident where the officer didn’t like your tone, at a gathering that was deemed to violate a curfew and then forcibly dismantled, or even on social media where a mindless post could affect your ability to leave the country. It is a state of effacement of all civil rights, and a swelling of government into a volatile, capricious overlord, as safe or scary as the single enforcer in front of you who happens to be vested with its power.
The US has passed through that veil. But there are warning signs in the UK. The relentless portrayal of immigrants as a threat to safety and social cohesion. The same glamorisation of the imagery of crackdown, now a feature of government propaganda as ministers attend Home Office immigration raids. The same expansion of powers and discretion to the police to include ever wider definitions of what a public order infraction is, such as factoring in the “cumulative impact” of pro-Palestine rallies. The transformation of protest into dissidence.
(...)
Throw in one charismatic and mendacious political leader, and a rightwing press amplifying all the necessary fever dreams of a country in crisis, and you are on a path to passing through that veil. It can happen in Britain too, just with fewer guns."https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/19/ice-crackdown-britain
#USA #Trump #Immigration #Deportation #ICE #PoliceState #StateOfException #Surveillance #UK
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"Bovino’s mere presence — accompanied by his previous threat to return again in the spring and detain even more people — would renew the sense of alarm in a metropolitan area that has been demonstrably changed by the 64-day federal incursion and evoke memories of the most surreal autumn in recent local history.
The tear-gassing of Chicago neighborhoods. The rousing of suburban mothers in bathrobes, drawn into streets to yell at agents and shame them. The attempted deployment of the Texas National Guard, on Trump’s command, only for a federal judge to order the troops to stand down almost immediately upon their arrival in Illinois.
The agents who pointed guns and other weapons at bystanders. The arrests of more than 4,500 people in a mission, the Department of Homeland Security said targeted “the worst of the worst.” The reality is that most of them were people with brown skin who were at the right place — their landscaping jobs, the hardware store, a Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru — at the wrong time."
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/12/28/chicago-immigration-operation-midway-blitz-2/
#USA #Trump #Immigration #Deportation #ICE #NationalGuard #Chicago #PoliceState #StateOfException
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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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"Life in Gaza for the past two years has been a process of losing everything visible — our families, homes, streets. It also means losing what cannot be seen: the private space of the mind, the intimacy between people, and the ability to speak without fear of being monitored by a machine. A poll conducted just weeks before the October cease-fire by the Palestine-based research organization Institute for Social and Economic Progress found that nearly two-thirds of Gazans believed they were constantly watched by the Israeli government. This is the dystopian consequence of technology, supplied in part by American companies, being placed into the hands of authorities who have virtually unlimited control over a captive population they have openly villainized. It is the culmination of decades of monitored occupation, a totalitarian nightmare spliced with genocidal terror, a system that is already evolving and growing for whatever comes next. The old admonition of authoritarian regimes everywhere — If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to be afraid of — has no meaning in Gaza.
My father was always suspicious, distrusting things most people treated as harmless. When neighbors bought smart TVs, he wouldn’t. “It’s another way they can see inside,” he said. He answered the phone in our Gaza City home only after a long pause, as if to catch the person he presumed was listening, and he would angle his chair away from the window when he spoke. Some of his fears came from stories he had heard years before I was born — stories that belonged to another generation but shaped his and then mine. My grandparents had been displaced from their home in Jaffa by Zionist forces in 1948, when Israel was created, and never saw it again. U.N. registration cards and aid lists became their new proof of existence as refugees."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/watched-tracked-targeted-israel-surveillance-gaza.html
#Surveillance #CivilLiberties #Israel #Palestine #Gaza #PoliceState #StateOfException
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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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"President Donald Trump’s military occupations of U.S. cities have cost nearly half a billion dollars, according to an expert estimate provided exclusively to The Intercept.
The current $473 million price tag now includes $172 million spent in Los Angeles, where troops arrived in June; almost $270 million for the occupation of Washington, D.C., which began in August; nearly $15 million for Portland, Oregon, which was announced in September; and more than $3 million for Memphis, Tennessee, and almost $13 million for Chicago, which both began last month.
The National Priorities Project, a nonpartisan research group, tallied these totals from open-source information and costs-per-day estimates supplied to The Intercept by the office of Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.
The skyrocketing price of Trump’s occupations come as the president threatens to deploy additional troops to more American cities to quell dissent and turn America into a full-blown police state. Trump recently said he could “send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines — I could send anybody I wanted” into urban America — while threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act, one of the executive branch’s most potent, oldest, and rarely used emergency powers. He has specifically threatened to surge troops into Baltimore, New York City, Oakland, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Seattle to put down supposed rebellions and to aid law enforcement agencies, despite falling crime numbers and pushback by local officials. Troops are also expected to be deployed to New Orleans later this month.
Despite the Trump administration’s unprecedented use of the military within the U.S., it has kept even basic details about domestic troop deployments, including the costs, secret."
https://theintercept.com/2025/11/11/cost-trump-national-guard-military-occupation/
#USA #Trump #NationalGuard #Militarism #Authoritarianism #StateOfException
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"The Trump administration has made a series of startling admissions about the people it is killing in its undeclared war against suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. Trump officials acknowledged in separate briefings provided to lawmakers and staffers on Thursday that they do not know the identities of the victims of their strikes, and that the War Department cannot meet the evidentiary burden necessary to hold or try survivors of the attacks. Such victims who find themselves in the water are now deemed “unprivileged belligerents,” a murky designation under international humanitarian law.
Since September 2, the U.S. military has been attacking boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing more than 60 civilians. The Trump administration insists the slayings are permissible because the U.S. is engaged in “non-international armed conflict” with “designated terrorist organizations,” or DTOs. Two government officials told The Intercept that the administration secretly declared a “non-international armed conflict” weeks if not months before the first attack of the campaign.
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."
https://theintercept.com/2025/10/31/trump-venezuela-boat-strikes-unprivileged-belligerants/
#USA #Trump #Venezuela #InternationalLaw #StateOfException #RuleOfLaw
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"De momento, sabemos que Trump ha establecido un marco de amenazas internas que incluye a inmigrantes, antifascistas, gobernadores rebeldes y Zohran Mamdani, el próximo alcalde de Nueva York. Sabemos que se ha deshecho de todo secretario, funcionario y miembro del partido incapaz de invalidar resultados o de “encontrar votos” cuando sea necesario. Sabemos que destruyó la Comisión Presidencial de Integridad Electoral, un consorcio de prestigiosos académicos, expertos en ciberseguridad y funcionarios estatales entrenado para proteger las elecciones de 2020, y que está construyendo una propia.
Pero el gesto más significativo podría ser el cráter que ha dejado en el ala este de la Casa Blanca, una residencia con contrato de cuatro años renovable una sola vez, para levantar un salón de baile dedicado a recepciones palaciegas, gracias a donaciones de las grandes tecnológicas, la industria de las cripto, los dueños del Manchester United y Benjamín León, que viene a España como embajador para corregir nuestro presupuesto de Defensa. Con una fachada neoclásica, obviamente. Pronto Roma habrá olvidado lo que significa la libertad y caerá finalmente bajo una tiranía tan bárbara y arbitraria como las del Este."
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"For the last month, the Trump administration has kept Chicago under siege. Customs and Border Protection agents arrested a 15-year-old U.S. citizen earlier this week after unleashing tear gas into a crowded residential neighborhood. Earlier in October, masked federal agents raided a five-story apartment building in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Chicago and zip-tied naked children as they dragged their parents away.
The Trump administration claims that Chicago is unsafe and needs order, despite the fact that the city experienced its lowest homicide rate in 60 years this summer. But instead of investing in underfunded schools or attempting to eradicate poverty, which have been shown to increase public safety, the administration is pouring millions into the militarization of American cities and fighting a court battle to federalize the National Guard in Chicago.
The Trump administration’s war on immigrants has had a disastrous impact on the city’s children, Chicago teachers told The Intercept.
“The smoke bombs that they dropped in front of school right at dismissal, the detainment of grown-ups after they drop off their children, or as they’re picking them up. All of that is violent. All of that is traumatic,” said Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union. “And for the first time, that is what many students in this city are experiencing.”"
https://theintercept.com/2025/10/19/chicago-schools-ice-national-guard-trump/
#USA #Trump #Chicago #ICE #Immigration #Deportation #StateOfException #Schools #NationalGuard #PoliceState
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"An Intercept analysis finds that almost all Republican-led states — 23 of the 27 with Republican governors — have been involved in deploying National Guard troops in support of Trump’s war on immigrants and his urban occupations. In a least 19 states with Republican governors, Guard members are assisting Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations. National Guard troops from two additional red states have deployed to the nation’s capital, along with D.C. Guard members and soldiers from six of those 19 states assigned to help ICE. Another two Republican-led states have sent troops to aid Trump’s further militarization of the southern border.
Trump doesn’t hide the fact that he is targeting Democratic strongholds. “Almost all of these cities, most of these cities are Democrat-run,” Trump said on Monday, threatening that he might invoke the Insurrection Act — one of the executive branch’s most potent, oldest, and rarely used emergency powers — to facilitate the military occupations of Portland, Oregon, and Chicago against the wishes of the Democratic mayors and governors of those cities and states."
https://theintercept.com/2025/10/09/republican-governors-national-guard-trump/
#USA #Trump #NationalGuard #StateOfException #PoliceState #Surveillance #Republicans #GOP #DemocraticParty
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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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"Three different defense officials who spoke with The Intercept called Trump’s speech “embarrassing.” The same defense officials took Hegseth to task for gathering the military’s top commanders from around the world for a rant little different than his social media posts. One called Hegseth’s address “garbage,” using a term the war secretary used during his speech. Another said: “We are diminished as a nation by both Hegseth and Trump.”
“We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”
Trump used his address to take aim at cities he claimed “are run by the radical left Democrats,” including San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. “We’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room,” he said. “That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.” He continued, “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”
“We will be a fighting and winning machine,” Trump said during a stream-of-consciousness address that meandered from sleepy word salads to tirades about tariffs, President Barack Obama’s ability to quickly descend stairs, President Joe Biden and the autopen, the press, his own supposed prowess at ending wars, the odds he will win the Nobel Prize, and his hope that the U.S. will get back to building warships of a bygone era."
https://theintercept.com/2025/09/30/trump-hegseth-generals-admirals-military-meeting/
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"The order for the generals and admirals to assemble next week came as the White House budget office instructed federal agencies to prepare reduction-in-force plans for mass firings during a possible government shutdown as Congress faces a stalemate on negotiations with the government funding deadline approaching.
A memo from the Office of Management and Budget, first reported by Politico, indicates that agencies are directed to “use this opportunity to consider reduction in force (RIF) notices for all employees in programs, projects, or activities.”
OMB told agencies to identify programs, projects, and activities where discretionary funding will lapse on October 1 and no alternative funding source is available. In those cases, OMB directed agencies to begin drafting RIF plans that would go beyond standard furloughs and permanently eliminate jobs in programs not consistent with President Donald Trump’s priorities in the event of a shutdown.
An anonymous OMB official told Politico that military operations, along with Social Security, Medicare, veterans benefits, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and air traffic control would continue in the event of a shutdown."
https://theintercept.com/2025/09/25/hegseth-military-generals-admirals-washington-dc/
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"The Trump administration has deployed roughly 35,000 federal troops within the United States this year, according to exclusive figures provided to The Intercept by official military sources. That marks a 75 percent increase on the previous count offered by The Intercept in July.
These occupation forces, drawn from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and National Guard, have been operating under Title 10 authority, or federal control, in at least five states — Arizona, California, Florida, New Mexico, and Texas — in service of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda.
The true number of federal troops deployed may be markedly higher. When asked directly, Northern Command, which oversees military operations in North America, said it has no running tally of how many troops have operated under Title 10. The Office of the Secretary of War has, for weeks, dodged questions about the total number, refusing to say if they even know it themselves. The increase of 15,000 troops since July could reflect better accounting, as opposed to a marked spike in Title 10 deployments over the last two months, but it’s impossible to know for certain due to efforts by the Department of War to conceal basic information about the forces.
Experts say that the increasing use of military troops in the interior of the U.S. represents an extraordinary violation of Posse Comitatus, a bedrock 19th-century law banning the use of federal military forces to execute domestic law enforcement that is seen as fundamental to the democratic tradition in America. The deployments continue to nudge the United States closer to a genuine police state."
https://theintercept.com/2025/09/17/trump-total-military-troops-deployed-cost/
#USA #Trump #Militarism #PoliceState #Militarization #StateOfException
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"The Republican governors of West Virginia, South Carolina, Ohio, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee announced, in the last several days, that they will send National Guard troops to assist Trump’s efforts to “federalize” D.C. Those forces will join the nearly 900 D.C. National Guard troops already activated by Trump and deployed in the capital.
Approximately 500 National Guard members from West Virginia had arrived in the capital by Monday afternoon, according to a defense official who spoke to The Intercept on background. Around 300 troops from South Carolina were en route, the official said. (South Carolina’s Gov. Henry McMaster only publicly authorized the deployment of 200 Guard members.) All told, around 2,100 troops will soon be deployed.
The Intercept asked Hanna Homestead of the National Priorities Project, a nonpartisan research group, to estimate the possible expense of this operation. Her analysis finds that the cost of Trump’s troop deployment in Washington could exceed more than $1 million per day, based on the deployment of around 2,100 Guard members to D.C.
“It’s unconscionable that the Trump administration would hand the military a blank check of over a million dollars a day to occupy D.C. while stripping access to health care and food aid from millions of families across the country,” Homestead told The Intercept. “The daily cost of the D.C. troop deployment is more than four times what it would cost to operate affordable housing for D.C.’s entire unhoused population. The government’s priorities could not be more clear.”
Homestead based her calculations on recent National Guard deployments where the total number of troops, cost, and deployment length are publicly available but cautioned that government secrecy makes it impossible to account for all variables including lodging, transportation, equipment usage, and other expenses."
https://theintercept.com/2025/08/20/trump-federalize-washington-dc-military-troops-cost/
#USA #Trump #WashingtonDC #StateOfException #PoliceState #NationalGuard
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"After six years, he is still wildly popular, with a national approval rating of over 80 percent. Much of the diaspora is devoted to him as well. While the idealized version of him — an efficient, eloquent leader who has reduced crime in the country and is committed to fighting corruption — sounds great, the reality is that he is a mercurial and unrestrained politician who controls every institution at the expense of the country’s democracy.
Now he has become President Trump’s jailer, welcoming deportees from the United States to be imprisoned in El Salvador’s brutal prison system. Venezuelan and American families, whose loved ones have been sent to these prisons, are now going through what many families here have gone through since Mr. Bukele came to power — feeling the terrifying arbitrariness of his regime, his self-interested way of ruling, his cruelty. Many are now realizing what some of us have warned people about for years: that even if Mr. Bukele has ironically called himself the “coolest dictator in the world,” he’s a dictator nonetheless.
The so-called Bukele model of national security is built on thousands of cases like that of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran immigrant who was improperly expelled to El Salvador in March. In 2022, Mr. Bukele declared a state of exception — still in effect — to weaken the country’s powerful gangs and lower the soaring crime and murder rate.
It has also eroded Salvadorans’ constitutional rights, and thousands of people with no criminal records have been arrested in a sweeping operation that eventually dismantled the gangs’ territorial control and drastically reduced homicides. Since the state of exception began, around 80,000 people have been arrested and imprisoned in El Salvador. Mr. Bukele admitted last year that 8,000 innocent people were arrested and released in the sweep, but civil society groups say the number is much higher."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/04/opinion/el-salvador-bukele-prisons.html
#ElSalvador #Bukele #StateOfException #Dictatorship -
‘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 -
Sabotage of forest machinery and property fires have occurred in La Araucania and Biobio regions, where logging companies explote territories stole to the Mapuche people.
Chile Extends State of Exception For 19th Time In Central Zones -
“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