For a lot of the participants in No Kings Day 3, picking the right protest sign was a real dilemma: With so many horrors to be outraged about, how do you pick just one?

Two upcoming events are aimed at more specific targets.

This Saturday, April 25, will be a day of action against ICE.

And on May Day – next Friday – the spotlight will be on economic issues. May Day will also represent a major tactical escalation for the resistance: Its goal is to disrupt “business as usual” through a call for “No School. No Work. No Shopping.”

On April 25, ‘Communities Not Cages’

ICE detention centers are the focus of Saturday’s “National Day of Action.” Many of the organizers are operating under the banner of the Disappeared In America campaign.

“Cruelty against immigrants has been a cornerstone of Trump’s authoritarian agenda,” Indivisible wrote in an email to members. “Over the past year, we’ve seen this cruelty up close as the regime’s secret police raids our neighborhoods, separates families, and rips apart communities. But behind the scenes, the Department of Homeland Security has also been quietly working to scale up their ability to detain and disappear people in massive numbers.”

Sporadic but alarming reports from inside existing detention centers have revealed inhumane treatment. And at least 17 people have died in ICE custody since January.

Now, according to an ICE memo, the agency intends to spend $38.3 billion to build 24 new detention facilities, including eight large-scale detention centers that could hold 7,000 to 10,000 detainees at a time. By comparison, there were approximately 60,000 immigrants in ICE detention last month.

Grassroots movements opposed to the conversion of warehouses in their areas have had some startling successes in cancelling sales and suing to stop work. The Associated Press reported last week that fierce local opposition was a factor in Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s decision to review his predecessor’s warehousing plan.

The message to Mullin and local governments on Saturday will be clear. Here is Indivisible’s summary of the demands:

1. Cancel the warehouse detention plan and stop every conversion immediately.

2. Reject all public funding, permits, and local resources that enable ICE to expand detention.

3. Require full transparency and real community consent before any federal detention action moves forward. Decisions about detention cannot be made behind closed doors.

You can find the closest event to you here. Here’s a map. The hashtag is #CommunitiesNotCages. This toolkit for organizers is full of useful information.

‘This May Day, It’s Workers Over Billionaires’

The organizers of Mayday Strong say that on May 1 this year “workers, students, and families” will “rally, march, and take action across the country to demand a nation that puts workers over billionaires, with many refusing business as usual through No School. No Work. No Shopping.”

It’s a largely economic message. Labor unions are heavily involved.

But perhaps most importantly, it’s on a weekday. And the goal is not just to protest, but to disrupt. It’s a big step forward – if it works.

“May Day is a structure test for the strength of the movement,” Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, told podcaster Katie Phang earlier this month. “It is more than just showing up on a Saturday. It is attempting to gauge our economic power on a single day.”

He continued: “It is a tactical escalation. But I think if we’re serious about what this regime is trying to do, we need to develop these tactics.”

Here, via the NEA, are the demands:

• Stop the billionaire takeover and rampant corruption of the Trump administration.

• Protect and defend Medicaid, Social Security, and other programs working people rely on.

• Fully fund public schools, healthcare, and housing for all.

• Stop the attacks on our communities, including policies targeting immigrants, people of color, Native people, people with disabilities, and those who identify as LGBTQ+.

Organizers say they were inspired by the one-day economic blackout in Minneapolis-St. Paul in January protesting the invasion of their state by masked and thuggish federal agents. Hundreds of businesses closed. Some 50,000 protesters marched through downtown Minneapolis.

Union officials like Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, are hoping that by stressing economic issues and affordability, the event will attract a more politically diverse crowd. This is what she had to say during an organizing call after No Kings 3.

We’ve been told this story for a long time, that our country is so divided. But when I look at the numbers, I’m looking at the 87% of Americans who say we’re in a cost-of-living crisis. I look at the 90% who are stressed out about the price of groceries. And so whether people have a D or an R or an I or whatever next to their name, rent is still too high. Your paycheck still doesn’t stretch to the end of the month, and you’re still worried that the boss or the people running this country don’t give a damn about your family.

So that is our common ground.

Organizers say there will be hundreds of rallies, marches, teach-ins, and labor actions across the country. Find one near you here. And here’s a map.

So Many Ways to Resist

• 404 Media reports that shareholders in Thomson Reuters last week “demanded the company’s board launch an investigation into whether its products have contributed to human rights violations, specifically with regards to Thomson Reuters’ ongoing sale of peoples’ personal data to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.” The company sells ICE access to its investigative tool Clear, which 404 Media says is integrated with ICE tools, including one that ICE uses to find neighborhoods to target.

• The Providence Journal reports that “Anti-ICE activists from throughout the Northeast plan to descend upon Citizens Bank’s headquarters during the company’s annual shareholder meeting on April 23 in Providence. Protesters say they want the bank to cut ties with CoreCivic and the GEO Group, two private prison companies that operate U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers.”

• Democracy Now reports that “dozens of military veterans and their family members were arrested Monday as they nonviolently occupied the Cannon House Office Building to protest the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran, while demanding a meeting with House Speaker Mike Johnson. At least 62 people were arrested, including elderly and disabled activists.”

• The Centre Daily Times in Pennsylvania reports that “About 40 protesters marched to the State College Municipal Building on Monday evening, demanding Borough Council pass a binding ordinance prohibiting collaboration with ICE.”

• Maryland Matters reports that hundreds of protesters rallied outside the federal courthouse in Baltimore even as the judge inside blocked further construction on a planned Washington County immigration detention center.

• And you might just see me here! Public Citizen and Common Cause are among the groups holding a protest tomorrow – Thursday, April 23, from 5:30 pm to 7:00 pm ET – outside the building formerly known as the U.S. Institute of Peace. Inside, David Ellison – who is awaiting regulatory approval of Paramount’s bid to purchase Warner Bros. – will be holding a corrupt gala dinner to “honor” Trump.

House Passes Good Immigration Bill

The first pro-immigrant bill to pass Congress this legislative session would provide a three-year period of protection and work authorization for 350,000 Haitian immigrants who otherwise would risk deportation on account of the Trump administration’s temporarily blocked termination of their Temporary Protected Status.

The bill highlights Republican division over the Trump administration’s immigration policies. The vote was 224-204, with 10 Republicans joining all Democrats in voting yes.

Trump has vowed to veto the bill if it makes it past the Senate.

This Week in the Courts

• A federal judge in Oregon struck down Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s attempt to impose far-reaching restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors. Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai’s ruling was epic. “Unserious leaders are unsafe,” he wrote. “This case highlights a leader’s unserious regard for the rule of law. This case demonstrates how disregard for the rule of law does not merely result in an abstract infraction. Rather, and tragically, this case is one of a long list of examples of how a leader’s wanton disregard for the rule of law causes very real harm to very real people.”

• In another searing opinion, a federal judge in New York warned of potential sanctions against DHS for issuing arrest warrants against two immigrants after they were arrested. “Police and law enforcement cannot operate as roving bands, detaining individuals, figuring out the reasons later, and papering over their failures afterwards,” Judge Sanket Bulsara wrote. “This practice of after-the-fact arrest warrants can be called many things – illegal, improper, and unconstitutional, among them. But whatever label one wishes to apply, the practice is fundamentally at odds with and offensive to lawful, constitutional behavior in this country.”

• I noted above that a federal judge in Maryland blocked further construction on a planned immigration detention center there. “This case provides a crystal-clear example of a federal agency failing to comply with the basic requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act,” Judge Brendan Hurson wrote. “Had DHS done so, it likely would have found that the rapid transformation of a cargo-processing facility with four toilets and two water fountains into a temporary residence and workplace for hundreds, if not thousands, would jeopardize the health and safety of the surrounding ecosystem in myriad ways, most notably through the likely over-taxing of the sewer system.”

• A federal judge in Washington, D.C., clarified that his previous order to stop construction of Trump’s White House ballroom (the above-ground part) still holds, even though construction on the underground portion, which has national security implications, may continue. Judge Richard Leon blasted the government for its attempt “to tum this exception on its head and unreasonably insist that the entire ballroom project may proceed.”

• A federal judge in Rhode Island dismissed the Department of Justice’s lawsuit to force Rhode Island to provide unfettered access to its voter registration rolls – the fifth straight loss in such cases for DOJ. Judge Mary S. McElroy wrote that voting laws do not allow the government “to conduct the kind of fishing expedition it seeks here.”

• A federal judge in Illinois ruled that the Trump administration coerced Facebook and Apple to remove ICE-tracking apps in violation of the First Amendment. Judge Jorge Alonso noted that then-Attorney General Pam Bondi “made public statements taking credit” for the move.

End Notes

• A new investigation from ProPublica and Frontline: “A Protester Threw a Snowball. Federal Agents Responded With Tear Gas and Pepper Balls.”

• Justin Florence for Protect Democracy, on how Peter Magyar’s Tisza Party in Hungary built infrastructure and enlisted 50,000 people as election monitors to thwart Viktor Orban’s attempt to steal the vote.

• From newsletter author G. Elliott Morris: “New poll: 55% support impeaching Trump”.

• From AL.com: An Alabama woman is acquitted after her arrest for wearing an inflatable penis costume to a “No Kings” protest.

For the American resistance to Donald Trump, the fall of Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban on Sunday was a moment of celebration, envy, and learning.

Orban had entrenched his power so thoroughly in his 16 years of political dominance – destroying judicial independence, controlling the media, eliminating academic freedom, enriching his cabal – that, until quite recently, he seemed invulnerable.

He was everything Donald Trump wanted to be.

But now, his massive electoral defeat is an object lesson in how to restore a democracy.

What’s needed, if Hungary is a model, are at least these three things:

• A blowout election, which is fueled by

• A focus on corruption – on how well the oligarchs are doing while everyone else suffers

• And the promise not just to restore democratic checks and balances but to bring to justice those who, in Hungarian prime minister-elect Peter Magyar’s words, “plundered, looted, betrayed, indebted and ruined” his country.

Here in the United States, a blowout election may seem unlikely given the extreme partisan tribalism that divides our country. But if Hungary is indeed an example, it appears that the way to motivate voters across party lines is with a more aggressive, principled, and insurgent pro-democracy agenda than anything the current Democratic leadership is offering right now.

Lessons From a Victory

Anne Applebaum wrote in the Atlantic that Magyar’s “construction of a broad, diverse, and patriotic grassroots social movement” overcame the illusion of illiberal permanence:

Orbán’s loss brings to an end the assumption of inevitability that has pervaded the MAGA movement, as well as the belief—also present in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric—that illiberal parties are somehow destined not just to win but to hold power forever, because they have the support of the “real” people. As it turns out, history doesn’t work like that. “Real” people grow tired of their rulers. Old ideas become stale. Younger people question orthodoxy. Illiberalism leads to corruption. And if Orbán can lose, then his Russian and American admirers can lose too.

Over at Protect Democracy’s blog, Michael Angeloni and Ben Raderstorf wrote (even before the election) that Magyar’s campaign “suggests a clear pro-democracy political playbook to emulate:”

1. Build a multigenerational political campaign that leverages grassroots anti-corruption energy and a genuine reform agenda.

2. Construct a broad-spectrum opposition singularly focused on voter discontent with the regime and refuse to engage in the autocrat’s culture-war narratives.

3. Unite behind a singular, charismatic leader with credibility to bridge disparate opposition factions.

“America can do this too,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote in her newsletter. Her prescription for Democrats is to “come up with platforms that make people feel respected and cared for as they also address the distress and difficulty that cuts to social assistance, corruption, brutality, and neglect by the Trump administration have created.”

In an interview with the Contrarian, Princeton autocracy expert Kim Lane Scheppele credited Magyar’s campaign with focusing attention on how “Orban’s getting rich from corruption while public services are going downhill.” She continued: “You could just transport this to United States right now, right? It’s the campaign promise you need.”

Writer and organizer Micah L. Sifry relished Orban’s defeat in his newsletter, but, he warned:

Look closer, though, and Magyar’s rise offers a clear warning to Democrats who think merely being anti-Trump will deliver their party a convincing mandate in 2026 and 2028. Magyar was a renegade from Orban’s Fidesz party who took a brave risk and told the public the truth about the regime’s corruption. Then he created a non-party movement called “Rise Up Hungarians” and brought it into a relatively new centrist, pro-European, and populist party, Tisza. As a new party, Tisza was unblemished by corruption and could make that its central issue, while sidelining the other opposition parties as too much part of the old system. To me, what Magyar’s rise suggests is that an independent, populist truth-teller (think Ross Perot) could do very well in the 2028 presidential election. Or, maybe a Democratic renegade—but one thing we know from past elections is the Democratic establishment is still strong enough to block such contenders.

On her MS.NOW show on Monday, Rachel Maddow credited Magyar with setting out a clear agenda for pro-democracy reform. “I think it’s a salient lesson for the Democratic Party in the United States in thinking ahead about their electoral platform,” she said. She urged Democrats to back “a program of re-democratizing the United States that undoes and bans permanently the things Trump has been trying to do to turn our country into a strongman state, to undo our constitutional republic.”

The Spirit of 76

Historian of tyranny Timothy Snyder has published the text of the speech he gave at No Kings 3 on March 28 in Cincinnati.

What does it mean, he asked, to be commemorating 250 years of the American republic?

To an uncanny degree, what the Trump people in this 250th year are doing is repeating the abuses that the American founders complained about: arbitrary taxation; taxation without representation; imperial attitudes; wars without consent. The point… is not that the founders were right about everything, but that they were rebels in their time (I was borrowing this from Frederick Douglass and his famous speech “What to a slave is the Fourth of July?”).

To honor the origins of our republic doesn’t mean going back to the eighteenth century. It means being rebels in our own time. It means demanding freedom, aiming for something radically better in the future.

So the way that the Trump people are trying to rule us is about ending the republic. For the republic to survive, it has to be better -- we have to have liberation that includes schools, and health care, and justice, and opportunity, excludes mass incarceration, and concentration camps, and ethnic cleansing, and senseless, criminal wars. We have to be able to speak together rather than have our conversations determined by oligarchs and algorithms. We have to work together rather than allowing ourselves to be isolated.

The Horror of Warehousing People

Grassroots movements opposing the construction of ICE detention facilities inside warehouses are having growing success.

The Associated Press credits the fierce opposition against these facilities with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s decision to review his predecessor’s warehousing plan. The New York Times writes about how “In a Deep Red Town, Locals Vent Over a Planned ICE Detention Center.”

Meanwhile, reports from inside existing facilities are exposing horrifying, inhumane conditions for detainees.

Sarah Stillman writes in the New Yorker about “how the suffering of children, including infants and toddlers, has become central to the Trump Administration’s immigration-enforcement strategy.”

Reporters, immigration lawyers, and human rights advocates continue to collect horrific, isolated anecdotes about detainee treatment.

But as Robyn Barnard of Human Rights First asked Stillman: “If these are the horrors we know about, what are the ones we still don’t know about?”

The Need for More Exposure

The eyewitness accounts and social media videos of public acts of violence by federal agents against immigrants and citizens helped foment a national revulsion to Trump’s immigration policies.

But what happens behind closed doors is, by design, out of public view. Indeed, ICE fought long and hard to block members of Congress from making unannounced visits to detention facilities.

ICE lost, and members do have access now. That leads to sporadic but highly disturbing reports from inside.

In Arizona, after a surprise inspection Thursday of the Mesa Immigration and Customs Enforcement holding facility, three Democratic representatives said they were horrified that immigrants were being stuffed into holding cells “like sardines,” the Arizona Mirror reported.

“I’ve never experienced anything like this in my entire life,” Rep. Adelita Grijalva told the Mirror. “It is frightening in there,” Grijalva said. “It is disgusting.”

The trio is now demanding answers from DHS.

Can you get your member of Congress to start making snap inspections? Is there any way you can communicate directly with a detainee?

Let’s push for more people to pierce the veil of secrecy around these detention sites and let the world know about these assaults on human dignity being conducted in our name. The public needs to start demanding improved conditions.

Anti-ICE Protesters Vindicated

Here is some great reporting by A.C. Thompson and Gabrielle Schonder for ProPublica and Frontline: “Caught in the Crackdown: As Arrests at Anti-ICE Protests Piled Up, Prosecutions Crumbled.”

ProPublica and FRONTLINE combed through social media, court records and news stories. Reporters identified more than 300 protesters and bystanders who were arrested by federal agents during immigration sweeps and were accused of crimes such as assaulting or interfering with law enforcement.

But over and over those accusations fell apart under scrutiny. Our reviews of court files found that statements made by the arresting officers were repeatedly debunked by video footage. In more than a third of the cases, prosecutors quickly dismissed charges that couldn’t be substantiated, refused to file charges at all, or lost at trial. The tally of cases that end this way will likely climb as many of the arrests remain unresolved.

It’s full of stories that will make your blood boil.

Come 2029, god willing, federal agents who abused protesters and then lied about could face prosecution for civil rights violations

Christy Lopez, a former Justice Department attorney who spent years investigating misconduct by law enforcement, told the reporters that the federal agents’ behavior “is on par with the worst protest policing and just law enforcement that I’ve seen from any department, even in their worst days.”

And here’s another one to add to the list: The Los Angeles Times reports that a Cal State professor is feeling a sense of “righteous indignation” after his acquittal by a federal jury on charges of assault on a federal officer with a deadly or dangerous weapon. He lobbed a cannister of tear gas back at agents who were rounding up hundreds of farmworkers at a southern California cannabis farm in July.

This Week in the Courts

• A federal judge in Massachusetts dismissed a DOJ lawsuit demanding that the state turn over unredacted voter registration rolls. It was the fourth loss for DOJ, with zero wins, out of 30 active voter-roll cases, Democracy Docket reported. Judge Leo Sorokin wrote that the statute DOJ cited to support its action -- Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 -- actually prohibited it.

• You may recall that a few weeks back, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., enjoined the Pentagon from enforcing a new policy that banished real journalists from a Pentagon workspace in favor of those “willing to publish only stories that are favorable to or spoon-fed by department leadership.” Judge Paul L. Friedman has now ruled that the Pentagon violated his order when it responded not by letting those journalists in, but by banishing everyone. In his ruling, the judge quoted from a New York Times interview in which a defense official bragged that “We used more words to say the same thing.”

• You may recall that last week, the American Historical Association filed suit challenging a memorandum from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel that declared the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional and advised Trump that he “need not further comply with its dictates” regarding the preservation of official documents. Now the plaintiffs have asked Judge Beryl Howell for an immediate injunction preventing any such destruction. The government refused to provide written assurances that no official records would be destroyed in the interim, they wrote, leading to “a clear danger that official government records of the highest importance will be irretrievably lost absent relief.”

• The Department of the Interior has agreed that the National Park Service will fly the rainbow Pride flag at the Stonewall National Monument in Manhattan, settling a lawsuit filed in February after the flag was taken down. As the New York Times reported, it’s a “rare instance of the Trump administration’s backing down from its nationwide attack on diversity initiatives.”

MAGA Joins the Resistance?

I would be remiss in not welcoming to the resistance a number of MAGA influencers who have turned against Trump in the last week, thanks to his increased signs of mental instability. As Status News reported:

• “The 25th Amendment needs to be invoked. He is a genocidal lunatic. Our Congress and military need to intervene. We are beyond madness,” wrote far-right extremist Candace Owens.

• “How do we 25th Amendment his ass?” Alex Jones, the notorious conspiracy theorist and ardent Trump supporter, asked on his Infowars show.

• And Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host turned podcaster, denounced Trump for his expletive-laced Easter message, calling it “vile” and suggesting he might be the Antichrist. Still others, including Megyn Kelly and Matt Walsh, turned on Trump in strikingly harsh terms after he threatened to wipe out the entire Iranian civilization.

End Notes

• Gustavo Arellano writes in his Los Angeles Times column: “Pope Leo isn’t afraid of President Trump. We shouldn’t be, either.”

• The New York Times reports that demonstrators blocked traffic by sitting down in the middle of Third Avenue in midtown Manhattan on Monday, protesting against arms sales to Israel.

• From WCCO TV in Minnesota: “Columbia Heights school welcomes back nearly 200 students who pivoted to virtual learning during ICE surge.” *sniff*

Donald Trump’s demented threats against Iran, amidst his utter debacle in the Middle East, have suddenly accelerated the resistance view that the most important and urgent question in the world is how to remove him from power.

Calls for his impeachment and removal — or the application of the 25th Amendment — are growing louder in the political discourse.

Such steps remain well out of reach politically, given the Republican party’s control of Congress and continued subservience to Trump’s will. But some fractures in the MAGA coalition are appearing.

And the more we talk about it, the more possible it gets. So listen:

• Sen. Ed Markey: “25th amendment. Impeachment. I will support any avenue to remove Donald Trump from office. We cannot leave this man in charge of America’s nuclear weapons as he threatens to end an entire civilization.”

• Rep. Pramila Jayapal: “Donald Trump threatening the destruction of an entire civilization is madness. He is completely unfit to serve as President of the United States. Invoke the 25th Amendment. Or Republicans must stand up with us to impeach him. We cannot allow him to set fire to the world.”

• Sen. Ron Wyden: “Donald Trump is deranged. He must be impeached and removed from office. Republicans who don’t stop him will have blood on their hands, and anyone who carries out an order to bomb civilian targets will be complicit in war crimes and will be held accountable.”

• Rep. Jamie Raskin: “Donald Trump’s deranged threat to destroy “a whole civilization” in Iran is a threat to commit war crimes and genocide. Republicans in Congress must prevail upon VP Vance, now campaigning for Putin’s puppet Viktor Orban in Hungary, to return to the U.S. and invoke Section 4 of the 25th Amendment.”

• Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “This is a threat of genocide and merits removal from office. The President’s mental faculties are collapsing and cannot be trusted. To every individual in the President’s chain of command: You have a duty to refuse illegal orders. That includes carrying out this threat.”

• Rep. Ilhan Omar: “Donald Trump must be removed from office for threatening war crimes and genocide. Speaker Johnson: bring the House back into session. Invoking the 25th Amendment and impeachment must be on the table, but Congress should also move on a War Powers resolution to stop Trump.”

• Rep. Jasmine Crockett: “We are watching a dangerous and unfit President drag this country toward catastrophe — and Republicans refuse to act. Invoke the 25th Amendment. Do your fucking job.”

• Rep. Rashida Tlaib: “After bombing a school and massacring young girls, the war criminal in the White House is threatening genocide. It’s time to invoke the 25th Amendment. This maniac should be removed from office.”

• Rep. Ro Khana: “If the United States Congress has any life left in it, every member of Congress and senator must be calling for Trump’s removal today based on the 25th Amendment.”

And it’s not just the usual suspects. Axios reports that “More than 85 House Democrats had called for President Trump to be impeached or removed via the 25th Amendment as of Tuesday evening.”

Back in December, Rep. Al Green’s impeachment resolution failed to advance in December, although 140 Democrats did vote in favor of bringing it to the floor.

Practically speaking, the most promising approach to at least limiting Trump’s power is through the War Powers Resolution, which in theory checks a president’s power to engage in hostilities.

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries told CNN’s Anderson Cooper last night that “a two-week ceasefire is insufficient” and that House Democrats will move for a War Powers vote to end the war as soon as the House is in session next week.

“All we need are a handful of Republicans to join us,” he said.

All he actually needs is for all the Democrats to vote with him. A resolution calling for a pullout from Iran within 30 days nearly passed in early March, 212-219, after two Republicans voted for it but four Democrats voted against it. (Jared Golden of Maine, Greg Landsman of Ohio, Henry Cuellar of Texas, and Juan Vargas of California – any of them belong to you?)

Of course the Senate would need to pass such a resolution as well. It failed to do so in March by a 47-53 margin. And then Trump, who calls it a war but officially says it is not a war, would veto it.

Incidentally, there are at least 60 antiwar protests scheduled for this afternoon across the nation.

Looking to the Midterms

The most surefire way to comprehensively stymie Trump, of course, is for Democrats to win back control of one or both houses of Congress in the elections to be held in 209 days.

Sadly, that will take more than just votes. It will also require fights to protect the vote and to count the vote.

Wired, for instance, just published an ominous article detailing how “Trump and his allies are quite openly engaged in a concerted and widespread effort to undermine trust in elections and, seemingly, to lay the foundations for baseless claims of rigged midterm elections in November.”

Protect Democracy has a comprehensive and scary new report about Trump’s attack on elections titled Executive Override. As Ben Raderstorf writes for the group’s blog, “The report describes a coordinated strategy already underway to spread disinformation and conspiracy theories; tilt the electoral playing field and manipulate election outcomes; and, if necessary, try to overturn unfavorable results.”

Happily, this report also identifies five major roadblocks standing in the administration’s way. “These are the pillars of American democracy that make it much harder to corrupt and steal legislative elections in the United States than it was in Russia, Hungary, or Venezuela,” Raderstorf writes.

As for what you can do? Raderstorf writes:

Counter disinformation. Vote. Help others vote. Strengthen community connections. Volunteer as poll workers. Be prepared to mobilize peacefully if a critical moment demands it….

Democracy only survives if we’re active participants in it — that’s always been true, and it’s never been more urgent than right now.

Brennan Center president Michael Waldman, similarly, writes that “we can now see that Trump and his allies are pursuing five distinct tactics. And for each aggressive move, a countermove is in motion to defend our elections.”

One of the Trump tactic Waldman identifies is the possible use of immigration forces or troops to intimidate voters or disrupt balloting. He writes:

That’s where citizen engagement comes in. Civil society groups are beginning to mobilize: clergy, veterans, and more. The League of Women Voters has announced plans to mobilize tens of thousands of volunteers to poll watch, walk people to the polls, and generally ensure calm and safety for voters. Others are doing the same. The business community can help encourage poll workers. We need a community mobilization like the one we saw in Minneapolis, neighbor helping neighbor, in the event of mischief.

Here’s a website summoning people – especially younger ones – to become poll workers.

What might well be the canonical list of all the things you do to protect the elections was published last year by Marc Elias, the all-star election lawyer who also founded the essential Democracy Docket website.

1. Educate Yourself

2. Share What You Learn

3. Run for Something

4. Volunteer for a Campaign

5. Join or Support Pro-Democracy Organizations

6. Become a Trained Poll Worker

7. Engage Your Elected Officials

8. Vote in Every Election

9. Stay Engaged

10. Support Independent, Pro-Democracy Media

Victory in Utah

Here’s a grassroots victory to celebrate, in Utah!

For a while it looked like a Republican-led bid to restore the state legislature’s power to gerrymander voting districts had gathered enough signatures to get on the November ballot. (In 2018, Utah voters had voted for a measure that put an independent commission in charge.)

But news broke that signature-gatherers used deceptive tactics to lure people to sign. So a pro-democracy group called Better Boundaries launched a campaign urging voters who had been misled to remove their names from the petitions they had signed.

More than 10,000 Utahns have now removed their names. Ballot rules require a certain threshold of signatures in at least 26 of 29 state senate districts, and in at least one key district the signature-removals were enough to drop the number below the threshold.

In a Democracy Docket video, Better Boundaries executive director Elizabeth Rasmussen celebrated the victory. “We’ve had less money, less institutional power than anyone else,” she said, “but the voters are smart, they know what they want, so just remind them of what they’ve approved and the reasons why and they’ll show up.”

Big Warehouse News

The Associated Press brings us great news:

The Department of Homeland Security is pausing the purchase of new warehouses intended to house immigrants as it scrutinizes all contracts signed under former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, according to a senior Homeland Security official…

The official also said that warehouse purchases that were already made are also being scrutinized.

Why? At least in part thanks to the resistance:

The plan was hatched during Noem’s tenure but immediately ran into intense opposition around the country by residents and communities opposed to such large Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities in their neighborhoods.

Many objected on moral grounds to ICE’s presence in their neighborhoods, while others questioned whether the facilities would be a drain on local resources, such as sewer and water systems.

Retrofitting work has stopped at one facility that I know of. The Baltimore Banner reports that ICE is “reconsidering the precise scope” of a massive facility planned for a warehouse in Washington County. In a response to a lawsuit filed by the Maryland Attorney General’s Office, ICE said it will conduct additional environmental analysis before making a final decision on its plan.

The essential Project Saltbox website writes that the political struggle is ongoing:

The Enforcement and Removal Operations arm of ICE — the agency actually tasked with running the facilities — has grown increasingly resistant to the program.

But Stephen Miller, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and his principal Homeland Security advisor, is pressing hard to keep it alive.

I never bet against Stephen Miller.

Meantime, as Project Saltbox also reports, Democratic lawmakers this week opened an investigation into the private companies helping build the immigration detention network.

This Week in the Courts

• A federal judge in California demanded that the Trump administration stop violating a 40-year-old court order protecting the due process rights of unaccompanied immigrant children in government custody. Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald revoked a Trump administration memo that encouraged border officials to coerce children by threatening them with “prolonged” detention and other consequences if they sought to speak with a relative or attorney.

• A federal judge in Massachusetts blocked the Department of Education’s demand for seven years of student data from every university, including race, sex, GPA, and test scores on every applicant. Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV wrote that the requirement was promulgated in a “rushed and chaotic manner” in order to meet a Trump deadline, and “epitomizes arbitrary and capricious agency action.”

• Trump’s March 31 executive order purporting to govern mail-in voting and create a federal voter database has prompted at least three lawsuits, led by Democratic congressional leaders, the League of Women Voters, and the League of United Latin American citizens. The thing is that the Constitution explicitly states that only Congress and the states can set the rules for elections.

• The American Historical Association filed suit challenging a memorandum from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel that declared the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional and advised Trump that he “need not further comply with its dictates.” The lawsuit argues that the memo defies binding Supreme Court precedent and asserts “by fiat” that Trump “is legally free to destroy records of his official government conduct, or even spirit away the records for his own future personal use.”

Concentration Camps Around the World

Author Andrea Pitzer writes in her newsletter about the Trump administration’s creation of an international network of concentration camps – and what you can do about it.

“People worried about America pushing concentration camp–style detention overseas might feel particularly helpless, not knowing how to take action,” she writes. “But there are still things that can be done.” Such as:

Try to address the harm at earlier stages. So one way to keep those detained from being deported to a third country—and perhaps deported at all—is to make sure they have legal representation. Few things are as critical as this. Groups like the National Immigrant Justice Center, which works in the Midwest, exist all over the country, and help to make sure that detainees get lawyers….

[S]upport journalism that does reporting about detention and deportation of immigrants. ProPublica has been doing an extraordinary job of late, and independent journalists like Gillian Brockell have newsletters tracking different aspects of ICE movement and operations….

Visit the Third Country Deportation Watch website, and follow the stories uncovered so far. Tie these faraway places to the warehouse conversions happening here at home, and declare that the U.S. should not be in the business of running or creating concentration camps anywhere on the planet.

End Notes

• From the Philadelphia Inquirer: “These Philly groups protest Trump and ICE with song, continuing the tradition of music as resistance.”

• Charles Sennott, co-founder of Report for America, writes in his newsletter with one example of how “Independent local media lifts voices of resistance to the Trump administration.”

• An in honor of Tax Day, this article from the New York Times seems to imply that withholding a symbolic amount of your taxes as a protest won’t get you in trouble. At least not big trouble.

The third No Kings Day was a glorious national declaration of dissent. A record-breaking estimated 8 million people turned out across more than 3,300 events, sharing a powerful sense of connection and taking a forceful stand against Trump’s authoritarian rule — and for peace, democracy, and human rights.

There’s another mass event just a month from now, on May 1. More on that further down.

But right now, the big question is: How do you translate the energy of a mass protest into an effective, ongoing political force?

And this time, organizers are being specific about what you need to do next. They are asking you to host a local organizing meeting sometime between now and April 12 and make plans to take action in your community. Here is an excellent, detailed community gathering toolkit.

Leah Greenberg, co-founder of Indivisible, explained it this way on an organizing call last night:

We talk about the 3.5% of the population that is needed to mobilize to successfully stop dictatorship…. But that figure is not about a single day. It is about getting people into ongoing, sustained civic engagement everywhere in the country. That is what actually defeats dictators….

No action alone is going to fix things, but together it all creates that tapestry of defiance that is necessary and builds the muscles we are going to draw on as we face challenges ahead….

So our top ask for you tonight is a little more complicated than usual, because there is no one simple website to go to or single action to take. This is not about building a national email list or a simple digital action. It is about the work of getting into a relationship and information in real life. Our ask is that sometime in the next couple of weeks, you get into a room with people in your community to talk about what you can do together, to be part of that tapestry of defiance and to build towards that 3.5%.

Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, an activist who emceed the call for No Kings, said:

If you boil it down, our ask for you tonight is to go forth and gather with your people. My hope is that how you define your people is expansive in this moment. I want you to talk with them. I want you to listen to them, and I want you to collectively develop what’s next. Organizing is bringing people together across their differences to be able to take collective action together. I want you to be doing what makes the most sense in your community.

The No Kings “What’s Next?” web page outlines four forms of action:

• Build power locally: grow sustained organizing in your community

• Protect our neighbors: stand up to ICE abuses and threats

• Escalate and innovate: strengthen nonviolent and lawful actions that refuse business as usual

• Defend our elections: protect the vote and enforce the results

Still not concrete enough for you? I feel you. That’s why I loved it when Henderson riffed on some specific possible group activities:

You can build mutual aid action infrastructure, whether it’s a backpack and school supply drive with your local teachers union or a hot meal train for immigrant communities. Whether it’s building a community food market… or maybe it’s a parent swap for childcare …

You could ask neighbors to join a community WhatsApp or Signal group chat to be able to communicate urgent alerts, community support needs, and foster direct connections between community members.

You could participate and spread the word about Ice Watch trainings….

You can get down with warehouse fights. Check out Project Saltbox and the Communities Not Cages toolkit….

You can be hosting Fourth Amendment workplace drives to prepare staff for potential ICE raids. You could be opposing efforts to roll back rights and protections for trans people… supporting the visibility effort, [and] keeping them safe.

You could join local Election Protection Coalition efforts. You could rock with the Freedom Trainers like I do and get trained in noncooperation. Did you know that there are 300 -- at least 300 -- nonviolent tactics that you could be taking to slow down and stop this authoritarian threat in a neighborhood that you are in?

So there’s your to-do list!

The No Kings 3 Experience

Spend some time with these wonderful photo galleries of No Kings 3 from the Associated Press and Getty Images, and as collected by The Atlantic. Reuters’s photo gallery comprises of 47 signs.

Getty also has some great videos. This CNN video focuses on inflatables and other strong visual elements:

Here’s video of Bruce Springsteen, one of the headliners of the No Kings flagship event in the Twin Cities, performing his protest song, “Streets of Minneapolis.” He had a few words to say before he sang:

This reactionary nightmare and these invasions of American cities will not stand. You gave us hope. You gave us courage. And for those who gave their lives: Renee Good, mother of three, brutally murdered, Alex Pretti, VA nurse, executed by ICE, shot in the back and left to die in the street without even the decency of our lawless government investigating their deaths. Their bravery, their sacrifice, and their names will not be forgotten.

Writer and activist Rebecca Solnit wrote a lovely appreciation of the day:

One thing striking about this round of #nokings protest is that people recognize that it’s all connected, because women’s rights, immigrant and refugee rights, trans rights, voting rights, racial justice, public health, environmental and climate issues, the rule of law, and accountability are all under attack by the same players…

There’s fierce joy in feeling far from alone, and something magical can happen and has, again and again, when thousands of individuals feel part of a greater whole, feel the power of solidarity and the possibility that arises from it when they become civil society incarnate. I’m a believer in the almost sacred space of the street and the power of what happens there….

I believe that coexisting with strangers in public is a foundation, of democracy, an embodied participation in literal public life that underpins the capacity to participate in political public life.

Tim Dickinson reported from Portland for the Contrarian:

Portland protesters turned the tables by laughing in the face of fascism, donning chicken suits and inflatable frog costumes, and refusing to cower before an authoritarian president whose exercise of extra-constitutional power hinges on fear, passivity, and submission.

On Saturday — amid the compounding traumas of unaccountable ICE violence, the illegal, unprovoked war with Iran, an economy rigged for billionaires, and a kakistocracy that is eviscerating core investments in science and social services — the people of Portland proved they can still gather to lift each other up, spread courage, and build the solidarity that’s needed, when the only way out of this morass is to get through it together.

Some guy on Bluesky who goes by the name of an ancient fish posted a lovely thread on the righteous anger at his local event. It starts:

Walking thru the “Ultra Normie” No Kings rally in my extremely rural, white town and there are Patagonia wearing moms carrying signs that say “DEAD PEDOPHILES DONT REOFFEND” and “ICE GETS THE WALL” and I hi fived an old guy with a sign that said MY DADDY FOUGHT NAZIS AND SO WILL I” this is wild

Dana Fisher, an American University professor who studies civic engagement, headed a team that collected surveys from 198 random protesters at the main event in Washington,. D.C.. She writes:

What was different at No Kings 3 was that war was one of the top motivations listed: 73% of participants reported peace/anti-war as a motivation for joining, making it the third most common motivation behind immigration (76%), and Trump (75%).

At the Twin Cities rally, John Nichols observed for The Nation, speakers and performers repeatedly expressed opposition to the war. Especially Sen. Bernie Sanders:

Sanders was scathing in his analysis of US militarism. “Let’s be honest,” he declared. “The American people were lied to about the war in Vietnam. We were lied to about the war in Iraq. And we are being lied to today about the war in Iran. This war must end immediately.”

May Day!

“No School. No Work. No Shopping.” That’s the ambitious goal of May Day Strong, the group organizing events for May 1:

On May 1st, we are declaring: workers over billionaires. May 1 will be a day of rallies, marches, teach-ins, walkouts, and a refusal of business as usual with: no work, no school, no shopping.

We think this is especially important because this will be the first national test of what we can pull off when we call for widespread refusal to participate in business as usual. Successful movements innovate, trying new tactics to achieve their goals. And we know that in order to successfully push back on authoritarianism, we need to not just protest—we need to be willing to withdraw our participation from systems that uphold authoritarianism.

Here’s a May Day events map.

Another Big Week in the Courts

• A federal judge in Washington, D.C., ordered that construction be halted on the proposed ballroom that Trump razed the East Wing of the White House to make room for. Judge Richard J. Leon wrote that the president is the steward of the White House. “He is not, however, the owner!” The judge said Trump had failed to identify any law that allowed him to demolish the East Wing and build the ballroom. “[N]o statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims to have,” Leon wrote. Now it’s up to Congress.

• Another D.C. federal judge ruled that Trump’s executive order cutting off funding to NPR and PBS is “unlawful and unenforceable.” Judge Randolph D. Moss wrote that “the First Amendment draws a line, which the government may not cross, at efforts to use government power—including the power of the purse—’to punish or suppress disfavored expression’ by others.”

• A federal judge in Boston blocked the Trump administration’s mass termination of the legal status of over 900,000 Venezuelan, Cuban, and Haitian immigrants who entered the country lawfully, using an app introduced by the Biden administration that granted them humanitarian parole. Judge Allison D. Burroughs wrote that an April 2025 email from DHS telling them to depart the U.S. “immediately” violated a process “mandated by statute and by their own regulations.”

• A federal judge in D.C. ruled that Trump is not immune from civil liability for his actions related to the January 6 insurrection. Judge Amit P. Mehta concluded that Trump’s speech at the Ellipse was political, not official, and therefore not subject to the immunity for official acts granted by the Supreme Court.

• FBI agents who worked on Trump probes filed a class action lawsuit saying they were fired as an act of political retribution, in violation of their First and Fifth Amendment rights.

A Report From Rural Minnesota

This extraordinary article from Emma Janssen for the American Prospect magazine is a gut-wrenching and awe-inspiring look at the resistance to ICE in rural Minnesota. Go read the whole thing. Here are a few paragraphs:

These residents balance their day jobs with going to the Mexican grocery store to pick up food for families, patrolling the town’s poorer streets where ICE agents tend to pop up, and preparing to show up to an active raid or abduction at the drop of a hat….

You can’t always tell who is part of these networks, and that’s what makes them powerful. They’re fresh out of college—and retirees. They’re longtime protesters—and “apolitical” people who suddenly realized they couldn’t sit idly by any longer. They’re pastors and imams, brewery owners and teachers.

A few things are universal: They are scared, exhausted, and they say that the news of a drawdown just isn’t their reality.

More Must Reads

• Reuters reports: “Pope Leo says God rejects prayers of leaders who wage wars.” Coincidentally, or not, the New York Times reports: “Roman Catholic Churches See a Surge of New Converts.”

• In an excellent invitation to wrestle with a tough question, The Nation asks: “What Are Your Obligations When Your Country Is the Villain?”

• A ProPublica photographer who lives in Minneapolis asks his neighbors to say in their own words why they continue to stand up against ICE: “This Is What It Means to Be Minnesotan.”

• From the Chicago Sun Times: “Mayor Johnson unveils ‘Abolish ICE’ snowplow”.

• WTOP News asks and answers the question: “Why is there a golden toilet on the National Mall?”

The list of grievances that fall under the banner of “No Kings 3” is, by necessity, a long one.

Each of the millions of protesters who will rally in over 3,000 locations across the country on Saturday, March 28, will be adding their voice to a massive, collective roar of defiance. But their chants and their signs will reflect the wide range of resistance to tyranny.

Many will focus on Trump’s abuse of power, his undermining of the rule of law, and the cover-up of the Epstein files. Others will decry his attacks on human rights, civil rights, and voting rights. Immigration will be a huge issue -- both Trump’s mass-deportation agenda and the murderous ICE invasion of American cities. Some will call attention to his gutting of the government, his cossetting of his fellow oligarchs, and his regressive environmental policies.

But No Kings 3 is, unexpectedly, taking place in a time of war. It is a war only a mad king would launch, and only a mad king would love.

Trump attacked Iran, unprovoked, based on his “feelings”. He bypassed Congress, which is the only branch of government the Constitution vests with the authority to declare war. He is now bombing people and sinking boats “for fun.” His announced goals are incoherent and contradictory and ever-changing. He makes apocalyptic threats and then withdraws them. His is spoon-fed cherry-picked news by his acolytes.

And now we appear to be mired in a war that is costing the lives of servicemembers, killing innocent people, terrorizing entire populations, destabilizing the globe, tanking the economy, and arguably strengthening Iran’s own tyrannical regime.

The American public overwhelmingly opposes the war – by a 65 to 31 margin, according to a recent poll – driving Trump’s overall approval level down to 36 percent.

There’s been remarkably little anti-war outcry so far. But that could all change on Saturday.

The message, I hope, will be clear: That this war must end now, and that this deranged man must be stopped.

No Kings 3 will almost certainly be the largest one-day political protest in U.S. history. It might also turn out to be the largest anti-war protest the country has ever seen.

Come Out and Bring a Friend

There is, I feel safe in saying, a No Kings 3 event somewhere near you. You can find one here.

Molly Lee, a maker of handcrafted soap in Portland, has posted nine delightful Facebook reels encouraging attendance, including this one, titled “No Kings for beginners.”

And don’t let your participation in the resistance end when you go home. MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow had a rousing segment on No Kings 3 on her Monday show. It included an interview with Indivisible co-founder Ezra Levin, who told her: “The day after No Kings, democracy won’t suddenly be saved. Trump will still be in the White House. This illegal and unconstitutional war will still be going on. His secret police force goon squad will still be terrorizing American communities.”

Levin continued: “So we need to build. This is why it’s important to be organizing where you are… to start organizing your own community for what comes next.”

The flagship No Kings 3 rally will be held in St. Paul, Minnesota. The lineup includes Bernie Sanders, Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, Keith Ellison – and Bruce Springsteen.

Springsteen will perform his new protest song, “Streets of Minneapolis,” which includes these lyrics:

We’ll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
Here in our home they killed and roamed
In the winter of ’26
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis

I hope he also does “War”:

War, huh
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing
Say it again

Why You Should Go

“I hope you will join in. Everything is at stake,” writes University of Toronto professor and tyranny expert Timothy Snyder. He continues:

Protest changes the atmosphere. For authoritarians to win, they need their supporters to be active, the majority to be silent, and their actions to seem normal. Protest shows that their supporters are in the minority, that the majority will not be silent, and that it is the people who set the standards….

Protest wins elections. In the situation that we are in now, the opposition must win elections to halt the shift to a one-person, one-party authoritarian regime. And although these elections will be difficult, they can be won. But winning them means building a big, active coalition, of which the opposition party is just one part. Protestors are another part. The groups we build together are what make the difference.

Protest brings joy. It feels good to be active and to be with other people. It dispels the loneliness we might experience when we are alone or online. When we realize that we are with millions of others, we feel we can make a difference, because we are making a difference: in the world, and in ourselves.

Activist and former labor secretary Robert Reich writes that on Saturday, “we will proclaim our refusal to submit. We will march against this vile regime in larger numbers than have ever protested in America.” He continues:

This alone won’t bring down Trump, of course, but it will show lawmakers on both sides of the aisle the breadth and depth of the opposition to him. This is essential to strengthening their backbones against him.

It will also show each of us that we’re not alone. It will show hope and determination all around us.

Daniel Hunter, the co-founder of Choose Democracy, was the guest on this week’s episode of the National Catholic Reporter’s “The Nonviolent Jesus Podcast.” “This is a good moment,” Hunter said. “We’re getting ready to take on the biggest supervillain the world has ever seen. Every action, everything we’re doing — it’s all adding up right now.”

Home of the Brave, a group largely made up of never-Trumpers, says they have spent $1 million to place this full-page ad in 300 newspapers around the country.

What Comes Next?

There’s a call tonight to prepare for the next big event, on May 1: the May Day Strong “After No Kings” Mass Call starts at 8 p.m. ET.

May 1 comes on a Friday this year. Organizers are calling for “no school, no work, no shopping” to “demand a nation that puts workers over billionaires.”

There’s also a call next Tuesday, March 31, about “What’s Next After No Kings 3?”

Speakers will discuss the importance of local organizing to prepare for the midterms – to protect the vote and vote out Republicans – as well as monitoring ICE in your community, mutual aid, and other activities.

This Week in the Courts

• A federal judge in Washington, D.C., enjoined the Pentagon from enforcing a new policy that effectively banished real journalists in favor of those “willing to publish only stories that are favorable to or spoon-fed by department leadership.” Judge Paul L. Friedman wrote: “A primary purpose of the First Amendment is to enable the press to publish what it will and the public to read what it chooses, free of any official proscription. Those who drafted the First Amendment believed that the nation’s security requires a free press and an informed people and that such security is endangered by governmental suppression of political speech. That principle has preserved the nation’s security for almost 250 years. It must not be abandoned now.”

• A federal judge in Massachusetts granted a motion to block a new Trump administration policy that mandated the warrantless arrest and potentially indefinite detention of lawfully admitted refugees. HIAS argued in an amicus brief that “Because refugees are already subjected to an exhaustive vetting process, and because those who have already arrived in the United States are deeply involved in rebuilding their lives and recovering from persecution and displacement, it is unwarranted, costly, unnecessary, inefficient, and extraordinarily cruel to arrest and detain them to conduct additional screenings.”

• Minnesota state and county officials sued DOJ and DHS for blocking their investigations into the shooting by federal agents in January of Renee Good, Alex Pretti and Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis. Good and Pretti were killed, Sosa-Celis was injured. The suit alleges that in at least one case, the decision to stonewall local investigators “was made at the highest levels of DOJ.” The suit says that Minnesota courts issued search warrants for evidence related to Good’s death, including one for her car, but the FBI won’t let them near it.

• Two former FBI agents sued to get their jobs back after being fired last year for having worked on an investigation that led to Trump’s indictment for election interference. “Plaintiffs’ terminations were unlawful because they were based on a perception that Plaintiffs were not political supporters of President Trump,” the suit alleges.

I take great succor from the court cases I’ve chronicled here on Heads Up News. But Duncan Hosie, a legal scholar at Stanford, writes in a New York Times op-ed that “The Courts Cannot Save Us From Trump.”

“Placing too much faith in the courts in this moment mistakes litigation for resistance,” Hosie writes. “It risks obscuring the greater importance of the political battlefields where the most significant opposition to the administration’s constitutional abuses can and should take place.”

No to Concentration Camps

NPR has published a fabulous resource for those who want to protest ICE facilities or want to learn about those protests: “Mapping ICE’s expanding footprint, and the communities fighting back.”

The state of Michigan and the city of Romulus sued to block the conversion of a suburban Detroit warehouse into an immigration detention center. “DHS’s plan has thrown the Romulus community into disarray,” the suit says.

The state of New Jersey and the town of Roxbury sued to block the conversion of a warehouse there into a 1,500-person immigration detention center. The warehouse is fit for “packages, not people,” the suit says.

In Evanston, Illinois, on Friday, interfaith ministers and others announced their campaign to stop Chicago real estate firm Highlands REIT from contracting for an immigration center in Colorado.

Protesters gathered outside Utah Gov. Spencer Cox’s mansion on Tuesday to protest an immigration center planned for a Salt Lake City warehouse.

One possible attack vector for protesters is how wildly ICE is overpaying for its warehouses. ICE bought the massive Salt Lake City warehouse at a price that one local industrial expert told the Building Salt Lake website was “unheard of.” The broker said the price for such buildings is typically between $100 and $110 per square foot, while ICE paid around $174 per square foot.

I previously noted that it was a mystery why DHS bought a massive warehouse in Social Circle, Georgia, outside Atlanta, for $129 million -- $100 million more than the $29 million purchase price in 2003.

Cui bono?

See you on Saturday!

Organizers estimated that about five million people attended the first No Kings Day events on June 14 of last year, and about seven million came out for No Kings 2 on October 18.

With 10 days to go until No Kings 3 on March 28, organizers are expecting the biggest turnout yet – nine million people, or maybe more. That would make it the largest single-day protest in recent American history.

That’s getting closer and closer to what’s widely considered the magic number: 12 million protesters, or 3.5 percent of the U.S. population. A study of hundreds of 20th-century movements found that, as a general rule, no government can withstand a challenge of 3.5 percent of its population without either accommodating the movement or falling apart.

“We are firing on all cylinders to build toward 3.5% on March 28,” Moveon leaders said in a fundraising email.

But success won’t only be measured by the number of people who show up. It will also be measured by the number of people newly recruited to the resistance, and the extent of protesters’ commitment to continued nonviolent action through local organizing committees.

Local action will be key in the coming months, especially as Donald Trump tries to steal the midterm elections, organizers say.

“It won’t be successful if it’s just Saturday and we all go home,” Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, said in an interview with Wajahat Ali on the Left Hook podcast.

“When he tries to sabotage the midterm election we’re going to have to do a lot more than just show up on a Saturday,” Levin said. “We’re going to have to organize and push back with massive nonviolent pressure akin to what we saw in the Twin Cities.”

The most essential purpose of No Kings 3, he said, is “to grow our ranks.”

The flagship rally on March 28 will be held in Minneapolis. But there will be protests almost everywhere. There are already over 3,000 individual events scheduled. (Find one near you.)

Just for example, there are going to be more than 40 protests in Connecticut alone, 12 in the Houston area, five in the East End of Long Island, and 60 across Oregon.

There will be rallies, marches, festivals, and bridge brigades. People in the Tucson area will be staging an eight-mile “corridor of democracy.”

The ACLU will lead an online training about the Constitutional right to peacefully protest and about best practices for reducing risks when attending protests, at 8 p.m. ET tonight.

And there’s a No Kings “Kickoff call” tomorrow (Thursday) at 8 p.m. ET.

What About the War?

One big question hanging over No Kings 3 is how much of an impact the U.S. war on Iran will have on the protesting. It may be a huge factor. Earlier this week Indivisible posted a social media call linking No Kings with an antiwar message: “No wars of aggression. No terrorizing our communities or yours. No tyrants, no conquests, no kings.”

The war also has the potential to expand the anti-Trump resistance to include former MAGA followers who feel betrayed by the mockery Trump has made of his anti-war campaign rhetoric.

So far, protests against the war have been muted. An essay in the Nation by Rutgers professor Eric Blanc explored why. He identified several possible factors including:

• Americans Feel Powerless

• People Are Hoping the War Ends Quickly

• Trump Is Doing So Many Horrible Things

• No Draft

But he suggested that No Kings 3 – and Mayday Strong events planned for May 1 – could enliven an anti-war movement. He wrote:

Most immediately, each of us—and each of the organizations we belong to—can commit not only to attending the March 28 No Kings demonstrations but to going all in to reach out to our neighbors, coworkers, fellow students, and co-congregants to join as well.

The Legal Resistance Strikes Again and Again

You could well be excused for concluding that the Trump administration is just one big criminal enterprise, based on the seemingly endless string of court rulings that his major initiatives are illegal.

Among that latest major legal blows:

• A federal judge in Massachusetts temporarily blocked HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from making radical changes to the childhood immunization schedule and restricting access to COVID-19 vaccines. “There is a method to how these decisions historically have been made – a method scientific in nature and codified into law through procedural requirements,” Judge Brian E. Murphy wrote. “Unfortunately, the Government has disregarded those methods and thereby undermined the integrity of its actions.”

• The chief judge on the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C., quashed the Justice Department’s subpoenas targeting Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. “A mountain of evidence suggests that the Government served these subpoenas on the Board to pressure its Chair into voting for lower interest rates or resigning,” Judge James E. Boasberg wrote. “On the other side of the scale, the Government has produced essentially zero evidence to suspect Chair Powell of a crime; indeed, its justifications are so thin and unsubstantiated that the Court can only conclude that they are pretextual.”

• A federal judge in Washington, D.C., ordered the parent agency of the Voice of America to reinstate more than 1,000 Voice of America employees who were put on leave a year ago as part of the administration’s efforts to dismantle the agency. “The Court can hardly imagine the defendants have a non-arbitrary justification for these actions,” Judge Royce C. Lamberth wrote.

• A federal judge in Illinois temporarily blocked the Trump administration from pulling back $600 million in public health funds from four blue states. Judge Manish S. Shaw ruled that the administration’s AI-generated explanation for the cuts was not credible, and that the states were illegally targeted at “states with sanctuary jurisdictions.”

• A federal judge in Massachusetts indefinitely paused the termination of Temporary Protected Status for more than 1,000 Somali immigrants who would have faced deportation otherwise. DHS wanted their status revoked as of today. These immigrants entered the country legally under the program that offers refuge for nationals of designated countries that are confronting such things as ongoing armed conflict or environmental disaster. Judge Allison D. Burrough’s ruling was procedural, intended to allow time for briefings and deliberation.

• A federal judge in Rhode Island ordered the Department of Veterans Affairs to reinstate a union contract covering 320,000 VA employees. Judge Melissa R. DuBose wrote that the termination of the contract “seems substantially motivated by the Plaintiffs’ history and frequency of vocally opposing changes to labor policies” and therefore qualifies as a First Amendment retaliation claim.

• A federal judge in Maryland temporarily blocked construction work on an immigration detention center that the DHS had planned to begin operating in an empty Washington County warehouse next month. Judge Brendan A. Hurson cited concerns about the facility’s potential environmental impacts.

• Federal prosecutors in Chicago dropped criminal conspiracy charges against two members of the “Broadview Six” – the six people arrested after protesting outside ICE’s Broadview detention center in September. Lawyers for the remaining four members, who have complained of “improper influence” on the prosecution from federal officials, want the charged dropped against them, too.

These lawsuits don’t just vindicate our rights, they bring essential information to light. Case in point, I wrote two weeks about the federal judge in Oregon who barred ICE from conducting warrantless “dragnets” in the state. Sam Levin of the Guardian writes that ICE officers who were compelled to answer questions about their conduct under oath during the trial revealed that they “used a custom-made app to identify neighborhoods and people to target, and had daily arrest quotas they sought to meet during operations.”

What Up With ICE Warehouses?

• I already mentioned the federal court ruling that temporarily blocked construction work on a Maryland warehouse that ICE intends to use as an immigration detention center. That case was filed by Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown.

• The city government of Social Circle, Georgia, where residents have loudly opposed the transformation of a local warehouse into a massive ICE detention center, has cut off water and sewer services to the building.

• DLR Group, one of the largest architecture firms in the world, will no longer do any work for ICE detention or deportation facilities, the CEO announced after an outcry from employees, Mother Jones reports.

• And now Congress may weigh in. NOTUS reports that “Senators from both parties are hoping that the Department of Homeland Security’s approach to acquiring and converting warehouses into large-scale detention centers will change under new leadership.”

Resistance Hero: Joaquin Castro

The New York Times published a gripping article about Texas congressman Joaquin Castro and his continued efforts to free families from the Dilley Immigration Processing Center – the “sprawling prison fashioned out of trailers, which serves as the country’s largest family immigration detention site.”

Dilley “has become a symbol of the indiscriminate nature of the administration’s crackdown,” Annie Karni wrote. “And Mr. Castro, a seven-term Democrat from San Antonio, is on a crusade to close it.”

Castro “has been highlighting the plight of its most sympathetic detainees in a bid to shame immigration authorities into releasing them — and in the process, calling attention to the cruel consequences of the president’s immigration agenda.”

It’s been five months since around six million Americans took to the streets for the No Kings 2 protest on October 18, and things have only gotten worse.

Trump’s push for dictator-like powers continues to grow, and now threatens the midterm elections.

Federal agents invaded and occupied Minneapolis for nearly three months – and murdered two U.S. citizens who were observing them -- before a powerful people’s movement chased most of them out. But brutal abductions continue throughout the country.

And just now, Trump has mired the country in a dangerous war in Iran without explaining why – and without a plan. He is truly deranged.

Nearly half of Americans – 49 percent -- now strongly disapprove of the job Trump is doing. (Another five percent somewhat disapprove.)

The next No Kings Day — No Kings 3 – is March 28, only a couple weeks away.

Organizers are hoping to far exceed the turnout at No Kings 2.

“Over 2,200 events are already planned across all 50 states, Washington D.C., and a dozen countries, with the flagship gathering in Minneapolis–St. Paul,” the 50501 Movement states on its website.

“When our families are under attack and costs are pushing people to the brink, silence is not an option,” declares NoKings.org. “We will defend ourselves and our communities against this administration’s unjust and cruel acts of violence. America does not belong to strongmen, greedy billionaires, or those who rule through fear. It belongs to us, the people.”

There’s an event near you

What can you do in the meantime?

“The movement grows one conversation at a time. March 28 will be the largest in history only if each of us commits to trying to get more people to join,” 50501 explains. The group suggests that you text three people today to invite them to join you.

Writer and organizer Micah Sifry offers this advice in his Connector newsletter:

Right now, as you are reading this, make a list of the people who you know who didn’t march in No Kings 1 or 2, and commit to contacting each one before March 28. If you are into writing postcards, take a break from postcarding for candidates and instead write to your own people. You may think that emailing or texting people is enough, but a personal phone call or door-knock will be far more effective.

There are also a series of online training sessions you can sign up for.

Two Victories, Maybe

Kristi Noem is gone! Trump fired her as DHS secretary!

“It feels good to see someone in this administration pay a price for cruelty and incompetence,” writes Joan Walsh in the Nation.

Independent journalist Ken Klipperstein thinks you should take a bow:

The media will credit her fall to some shady no-bid contract she was behind, her use of a private jet, or administration rivals like Stephen Miller and whatever boring DC drama. But the real reason is obvious: public activism.

The revolution is here, as I wrote last month, and the people of Minneapolis, Chicago and Los Angeles deserve credit for forcing Donald Trump to reassess the nature of his immigration war, and creating a massive shift in public opinion.

I’ve got to say that I’m skeptical, both about why she was fired and about how much difference it will make.

Then again, the New York Times sees a significant change in DHS’s strategy already happening:

After months of high-profile, militarized immigration raids in major American cities, the Trump administration has scaled back its deportation strategy, leading to a dip in arrests last month, according to three federal officials and internal government data.

In recent weeks, immigration agents have focused on conducting more targeted enforcement operations, rather than indiscriminate street sweeps, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy.

Those arrests have been less visible and chaotic than the campaign that led to violent clashes with protesters — including the fatal shootings of two American citizens in January — and generated intense political blowback against President Trump.

The Habeas Revolution

Mother Jones’s Isabel Dias has a wonderful article on something I’ve been tracking here for months now: “24,403 Lawsuits and Counting: How Habeas Corpus Became the Front Line of Immigration Defense.”

This is all happening because of Trump’s cruelty. His administration abandoned decades of humane precedent and stopped allowing detained immigrants to have bond hearings, which could lead to their release. So now, “Instead of negotiating immigration law with government attorneys in the immigration courts overseen by the Department of Justice,” Dias writes, immigration lawyers “are pleading for federal judges to step in and uphold the basic constitutional rights of thousands of immigrants held in government custody.”

The result has been an amazing rebellion by federal district court judges in defense of the Constitution. “As the number of habeas corpus petitions challenging mandatory detention soared, so did the wins for detained immigrants,” Dias writes. Since September, “federal judge after federal judge has rejected the Trump administration’s reading of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The repudiation has been nearly unanimous. As many as 400 judges — including Trump appointees — in some 4,400 cases have arrived at that consensus, according to a Reuters review of court records.”

Trump Also Losing Lawsuits Over His Defunding Campaign

The New York Times identified 198 lawsuits in the past year “that challenge how Mr. Trump has leveraged federal funding to carry out his agenda without the consent of Congress.”

He keeps losing them:

When plaintiffs have sought immediate relief, district court judges have temporarily blocked the administration’s actions 79 percent of the time, signaling plaintiffs’ likely success on the merits. In the 26 instances where district judges have issued partial or final rulings, the administration lost 23.

That’s the good news. The bad new is that the article is mostly about how Trump “has proceeded undeterred by losses in court.”

That reflects “a new kind of reality in Washington, one where the president wields far more control over spending, and where his opponents aren’t entitled to the services of their federal government.”

This Week in the Courts

• The 350,000 Haitians who arrived in the U.S. legally under Temporary Protected Status can breathe easier. A federal appeals court this week agreed with a district judge’s ruling that saved them from mass deportation — at least for now. The 2-1 ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., concluded that “The government’s failure to meet its burden of demonstrating irreparable harm alone justifies denying emergency relief that would upend the status quo and increase uncertainty while this appeal proceeds.”

• The residents of a low-income housing complex across the street from a frequently protested Portland ICE facility can also breathe easier. A federal judge ordered DHS agents to stop deploying tear gas and other chemical munitions against protesters that could seep into the complex, unless they face an “imminent threat to life”. Judge Amy M. Baggio agreed with residents that ICE’s use of chemical munitions had been “so excessive — so enveloping” that it violated their rights.

• Did federal agents in Minnesota detain people solely based on their race? They sure did, a federal judge in Minnesota has ruled. In fact, they did so routinely. Judge Eric Tostrud, a Trump appointee, concluded that “Defendants have adopted a policy authorizing federal immigration officers to conduct investigatory stops based on ethnicity or race without reasonable suspicion that the individuals were violating immigration laws. The evidence from individual encounters is compelling and troubling.”

• It’s never a good sign for the Trump administration when a ruling starts with a disquisition praising the Framers for “throwing off the fetters of despotism.” And indeed, a chief federal judge in Pennsylvania soundly rejected Attorney General Pam Bondi’s attempt to unilaterally install three people – unconfirmed by the Senate – to replace Alina Habba, who was previously disqualified as U.S. attorney for New Jersey. Judge Matthew W. Brann wrote: “One year into this administration, it is plain that President Trump and his top aides have chafed at the limits on their power set forth by law and the Constitution. To avoid these roadblocks, this administration frequently purports to have discovered enormous grants of executive power hidden in the vagaries and silences of the code.”

• The Trump administration tried to effectively eliminate meaningful review of immigration judge decisions, but a federal judge has blocked the policy from taking effect. Judge Randy Moss found that the Department of Justice had failed to follow proper procedure.

• A federal judge ruled that Kari Lake had illegally served as acting CEO of the United States Agency for Global Media. Judge Royce C. Lamberth’s summary judgement makes the actions taken by Lake since March 2025 legally void. That includes her attempt to fire hundreds of Voice of America employees.

• A federal judge has been asked to block Trump from closing and razing the Kennedy Center. “This is a case about the ongoing desecration and impending destruction of a cherished national monument,” the lawsuit says.

In Minnesota

A Brandi Carlile concert in Minneapolis raised over $600,000 for families affected by ICE.

The Minnesota Reformer published a profile of Jason Chavez, the Minneapolis council member who joined the front lines of the resistance to ICE:

For Chavez, the battle is personal: Two of his uncles were deported during Operation Metro Surge — one in December, another in January.

One, who had a work visa and co-owns a Richfield pizza shop, was detained by ICE while making a delivery, Chavez said.

“You have to have conversations with your loved ones, saying that we just live in a government system that dehumanizes people,” Chavez said. “But if I’m able to ever change that, one way or another, I’m going to — and I’m going to make sure that the voices of our community are not left off the table.”

A Bluesky user named Wendy posts that “I’ve been photographing anti-ICE and related yard/window/tree/street signs around Minneapolis. The variety of commercial and especially handmade signs is amazing, as is the urge for people to let their neighbors know they care and are furious in ways big and small.” Check them out.

Warehouses for People

Maybe you or a friend need a wonderful six-minute primer on DHS’s plans to acquire massive warehouses and turn them into detention centers for immigrants. Austin Kocher, a Syracuse University professor, has you covered.

Concerned residents of Social Circle, Georgia, rallied against the proposed ICE facility in their small town. Protesters in Roxbury, New Jersey, took to the street to express outrage about a planned facility in their town.

Schuyler Mitchell of Mother Jones hung out with Roxbury protesters. She spoke to Chris Lenox, who lives across the street from the warehouse with his wife and two kids.

“To have it in our backyard, it’s horrible,” Lenox told her. “I was thinking about putting my house up for sale. How am I going to sell my house with this crap in my backyard?”

The Washington Post reports that DHS is feeding talking points to Republicans as opposition to ICE warehouses swell. Like: “If there’s a new facility going in here, Merrimack residents should be celebrating, not protesting.”

The whole enterprise is inevitably going to be rife with corruption and failure. Another hint of that: The Washington Post reports that DHS “is turning to a crop of relatively untested businesses to rapidly build and operate the facilities.” And the New York Times examines the detailed plans for the giant Social Circle facility and finds that “the initial designs raise health, safety and security concerns.”

Take It Home, Rebecca Solnit

New York Times journalist David Marchese interviewed writer and activist Rebecca Solnit, who has a new book out, “The Beginning Comes After the End; Notes on a World of Change”, which Kirkus describes as “A convincing vision of a brighter future.”

Here’s the key excerpt, where Marchese asks a question that is either profoundly stupid or a softball, I’m not really sure which:

Marchese: I would like to hear your perspective on whether any of the strategies or tactics against Trump and Trumpism have maybe been counterproductive? Because I wonder if, you know, calling him and the movement “fascist, sexist, racist,” has, sort of, alienated people who, might otherwise be brought into the progressive fold. So do you think there have been any sort of missteps over the last 10 years?

Solnit: That’s the least of our problems. They are racist. They are authoritarian, they are misogynist. They are homophobic. And tiptoeing around it protects them and not the targets of the hatred and discrimination. I just get so tired of the idea that progressives have gone too far in asserting that, like, every human being deserves human rights, when people are being shot in the streets of Minneapolis. We are facing such horrific brutality that politeness is not really the problem to start with. I think we got into this situation, in part, by a lot of people in the mainstream thinking it was more important to be nice and polite than call things by their true names. This is really extreme stuff. If we need to use extreme language to describe it, let’s be truthful, let’s be accurate and let’s be bold. And there’s a wonderful historian, scholar of nonviolence named George Lakey, who says polarization is good. That’s when you have clarity. Sometimes people have to pick sides. You do not get authoritarians to behave better by being meek and gentle and polite. You get it by being strong. You got me all worked up. I feel like it probably didn’t take that much.

Well, it’s grim out there.

I normally try to find something to cheer about every week in this newsletter – some act of resistance, or new wave of protest, or sign of growing solidarity.

But now, on top of everything else, we’re at war. Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are bringing vast amounts of death and destruction to Iran, possibly resulting in a protracted regional tragedy. It weighs on me, and likely weighs on you, too.

And what a screwed-up war, at that. Trump can’t even come up with a credible rationale for it. There was no debate and no attempt to build public support.

The lack of a public campaign also meant there was no time to build up much of an antiwar movement.

And with so many grievances against Trump already, it may have been hard for many people to summon the energy to protest this one, too.

So while there have been many antiwar protests across the nation in the last five days, turnout has not exactly been huge. Some celebratory rallies were bigger.

Several hundred protesters took to New York’s Times Square on Saturday. The Guardian interviewed one of them, healthcare worker Christina Perez, who likely spoke for many.

“It’s like constant salt in the wound. You never know what you’re going to wake up to,” she said. “Unfortunately, I’m not surprised… We’re being distracted from the things that really matter because you’re constantly being inundated. Americans have legitimate grievances, but there’s never money to solve those things and always money for war.”

Here are reports from antiwar protests on Saturday in Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; San Francisco; Philadelphia; Minneapolis; Providence; Greensboro, North Carolina; Alameda, California; Princeton, New Jersey; and Fargo, North Dakota.

There was another round of small protests on Monday. See reports from New York and Los Angeles.

And of course there’s more to come, including protests scheduled for Saturday, March 7. Look to Mobilize, ANSWER and Indivisible, among other groups, to find events near you.

Here’s one March 7 event in Contra Costa, California, that’s a combo protest: No War in Iran -- Release the Files.

Groups including Common Cause, Indivisible, the ACLU, and Moveon are asking members to write letters and sign petitions telling Congress to stop the war.

And here a gift link to a thought-provoking New York Times opinion piece by Peter Beinart, headlined “No Empire. No Kings.” Beinart writes:

Donald Trump’s foreign policy vision is imperialism. It’s a global outlook that closely resembles Mr. Trump’s governing style at home — both feature spectacular violence and contempt for the restraints of law.

Noting the extent of the public opposition, Beinart sees the potential for a powerful anti-imperialist movement. He writes:

A revived anti-imperialist movement can rally a diverse group of Americans — progressives who oppose attacking Iran because it violates international law as well as America Firsters who oppose the war because they think America’s moral obligations end at the country’s borders.

While Mr. Trump peddles a fantasy of omnipotence in which the United States assassinates foreign leaders and bombs fishermen, anti-imperialists can help Americans adapt to an era in which they have less power. They can embrace a multipolar world because they don’t want America to be imperial Rome.

So stay tuned. I’ll keep watching.

Another Big Week in the Courts

Federal district court judges are testy about ICE not following their orders:

• A West Virginia federal judge, granting a detainee’s habeas petition, issued a “final notice” to ICE to stop keeping detainees in custody without due process. “Continued detention without individualized custody determinations, after this court’s repeated holdings that such detention violates the Fifth Amendment, will result in legal consequences,” Judge Joseph R. Goodwin wrote. See this Politico article: “Judges in a Trump stronghold condemn ICE tactics.”

• The top federal judge in Minnesota also threatened criminal contempt charges against officials who continue to violate court orders involving due process violations for detainees. “The Court is not aware of another occasion in the history of the United States in which a federal court has had to threaten contempt—again and again and again — to force the United States government to comply with court orders,” Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz wrote. “One way or another, ICE will comply with this Court’s orders.”

• A federal judge in New Jersey ordered the release of a detainee and demanded that the government stop arresting people and detaining them indefinitely without a hearing, as hundreds of other judges have ruled as well. Judge Zahid N. Quraishi wrote that the government’s conduct has slid downward into “manifest recklessness.” He declared: “It ends today.”

• A federal judge in New Jersey, ruling in a habeas case, slammed ICE for 17 different violations of court orders not to transfer detainees out of the jurisdiction. Judge Michael E. Farbiarz is now requiring ICE and the U.S. Attorney’s office to each submit declarations in every habeas case acknowledging no-transfer orders.

• And as MPR News reports, a federal judge in St. Paul summoned U.S. Attorney Dan Rosen and a top deputy to his courtroom on Tuesday, to explain why ICE failed to follow court orders to return personal belongings to detainees. Judge Jeffrey Bryan said he would decide soon whether to hold the two men in contempt of court.

In other stunning immigration-related cases:

• A federal judge in Minnesota has blocked the DHS’s policy of arresting and detaining refugees who were lawfully admitted here. Citing the country’s “solemn promise to refugees fleeing persecution that after rigorous vetting, they would be welcomed to the United States and given the opportunity to rebuild their lives” and “achieve the American Dream,” Judge John R. Tunheim wrote that “The Government’s new policy breaks that promise — without congressional authorization — and raises serious constitutional concerns. The new policy turns the refugees’ American Dream into a dystopian nightmare.”

• A federal judge in Boston ruled that the Trump administration’s policy of deporting immigrants to third countries is unconstitutional. “This case is about whether the Government may, without notice, deport a person to the wrong country, or a country where he is likely to be persecuted, or tortured, thereby depriving that person of the opportunity to seek protections to which he would be undisputedly entitled,” Judge Brian E. Murphy wrote. He concluded that there are “basic questions that the Constitution permits a person to ask before the Government takes away their last and only lifeline.”

• A federal judge in Oregon has barred ICE from conducting warrantless “dragnets” in the state. Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai wrote that “Defendants do not — and could not — argue that this practice is lawful. Rather, they argue that there is no such practice, and that the myriad cases presented to this Court are mere coincidence.” He wasn’t buying it. “The practices are intended to strike fear across large numbers of people throughout Oregon,” he wrote. “The persistent intensity of regular ICE immigration enforcement operations may very well have the intended effect of normalizing this level of violence. If this normalization continues, then even greater harm will be inflicted.”

• A federal judge in Washington, D.C., struck down DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s continued efforts to block members of Congress from making unannounced visits to detention facilities. Judge Jia Cobb had already struck down two of Noem’s previous moves. Cobb writes: “If anything, the strength of the Court’s irreparable harm finding has become even greater over the intervening months, given that ICE’s enforcement and detention practices have become the focus of intense national and congressional interest.”

In other lawsuits against Trump:

• A federal appeals court rejected the Trump administration’s request to delay the fight over tariff refunds for importers, now that the Supreme Court struck down declared the tariffs illegal.

• A federal judge in Washington, D.C., found that the Internal Revenue Service violated federal law “approximately 42,695 times” when it shared confidential taxpayer addresses with ICE last year.

All Is Not Well in Minnesota

The Minnesota Star Tribune reports that “Nearly three weeks after federal officials announced that Operation Metro Surge was over, close to 650 federal agents remain in Minnesota, Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem testified at a Senate Judiciary hearing March 3.”

That’s about four times the number that border czar Tom Homans said would stick around after promising a full drawdown.

“Were we not surprised to find that the Trump administration lied? Absolutely not,” Erika Zurawski, a co-founder of the group Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee, told the Tribune.

So where are all these agents? Some of them are in small towns in Minnesota like Shakopee.

Stephen Rodrick writes movingly about Shakopee in a Rolling Stone article headlined: “A Small Town Transformed by ICE Occupation.” The town is in the third month of an ICE occupation.

Protests still continue outside the Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, which has been used as a detention center. On Sunday, 38 protesters were arrested after Sheriff’s deputies issued dispersal orders for an unlawful assembly outside the Whipple building.

And the New York Times ran an insightful article headlined “Military Veterans Protesting ICE See Crackdown Through Different Lens,” based on veterans who have been on the front lines of protests in the Twin Cities.

Air Force veteran Tom Kendall told the Times: “I can’t speak for all the veterans, but a lot of us feel that we protected America once, we’ll protect America again.”

Sara Teig, an Army reserves veteran, told the Times that military-style coordination by federal agents in Minnesota reminded her of tactics she had seen during her time in Afghanistan and Kuwait. “Seeing the same practices at home felt like something of a betrayal, she said.”

And here’s some good accountability news out of Minneapolis: MPR News reports that “Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty says her office is investigating 17 alleged incidents of excessive force by federal immigration agents, and she’s asking the public to submit tips and evidence.” One incident involves Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino’s use of chemical irritants on protesters.

Great Things to Read

• From the Washington Post: “D.C. students walk out of school and fill the city’s streets to protest ICE.”

• From Vox, (part of a series): “US democracy has repaired itself before. Here’s how we can do it again.”

• From Religion News Service: “Outside US Capitol, hundreds of United Methodists call for dismantling ICE.”

• From 12 News in Phoenix: “West Valley sushi shop owner released from ICE detention after eight months.”

• From the Bulwark: “Inside the Plan to Stop/Melt ICE at the Polls.”

• From Religion News: “Catholic bishops: Trump’s assault on birthright citizenship affronts Catholic teaching.”

• From the Contrarian: “’We Will Abolish ICE’: The New Protest Songbook.”

This year, for an increasing number of Christian faith leaders, observing Lent has brought with it the obligation to speak out against the inhuman cruelty the Trump administration has inflicted on the country’s immigrants.

Lent, the 40-day period of reflection and repentance leading up to Easter, began on Ash Wednesday last week.

Let’s start with Pope Leo, who has consistently been a proponents of immigrant rights. In his message for Lent this year, the pope encouraged more empathy with immigrants:

It would be a good Lenten exercise for us to compare our daily life with that of some migrant or foreigner, to learn how to sympathize with their experiences and in this way discover what God is asking of us so that we can better advance on our journey to the house of the Father….

This Lent, God is asking us to examine whether in our lives, in our families, in the places where we work and spend our time, we are capable of walking together with others, listening to them, resisting the temptation to become self-absorbed and to think only of our own needs….

Let us ask ourselves …[w]hether we show ourselves welcoming, with concrete gestures, to those both near and far. Whether we make others feel a part of the community or keep them at a distance.

In a statement issued yesterday, a group of 18 Catholic bishops and archbishops primarily from U.S. border regions was not nearly so subtle. They sternly urged a wholescale reversal from Trump’s immigration policies “in a manner that protects the God-given human dignity and rights of the human person.” Their list of recommended new policies:

• The right to apply for asylum at the border should be honored.

• Sensitive locations should be protected.

• Immigration enforcement should not focus on those who are contributing to the nation.

• Immigrant families should be kept together.

• Due process should be restored in the immigration system.

• The use of tactics to intimidate and create fear in the community should be halted.

• Detention standards should be enforced and vulnerable groups should not be detained.

• Congress and the administration should fund reintegration programs for deportees.

Among the specific asks:

The use of masks, random stops without probable cause, roving patrols, and physical abuse of immigrants and others has been well documented. Such tactics can intimidate immigrants, even those with a legal basis to remain in the US, and prevent them from asserting their rights. We urge that the use of these tactics be stopped.

Parts of their statement recalled a blistering November message from the entire U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that is worth reading in its entirely if you haven’t already. It said, in part:

We are disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement. We are saddened by the state of contemporary debate and the vilification of immigrants. We are concerned about the conditions in detention centers and the lack of access to pastoral care. We lament that some immigrants in the United States have arbitrarily lost their legal status. We are troubled by threats against the sanctity of houses of worship and the special nature of hospitals and schools. We are grieved when we meet parents who fear being detained when taking their children to school and when we try to console family members who have already been separated from their loved ones.

Since then, bishops leading the conference have mourned the victims of violence at the hands of federal immigration agents, and decried plans to greatly expand detention. “The thought of holding thousands of families in massive warehouses should challenge the conscience of every American,” Bishop Brendan J. Cahill wrote. “Whatever their immigration status, these are human beings created in the image and likeness of God, and this is a moral inflection point for our country.”

On Ash Wednesday, the archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Blase Cupich, led an outdoor Mass and candlelight vigil for more than 3,000 people expressing solidarity with vulnerable immigrants. Two priests and a nun, who had to sue to get access, gave ashes to detainees at the notorious Broadview ICE facility outside Chicago. And Cardinal Joseph Tobin, the archbishop of Newark, held two Masses inside that city’s detention facility.

And it’s not just Catholics, of course.

On Ash Wednesday, some 400 prominent Christian leaders issued “A Call to Christians in a Crisis of Faith and Democracy,” citing the need “for repentance and resistance, courage and conviction, faith and fortitude”:

We are facing a cruel and oppressive government; citizens and immigrants being demonized, disappeared, and even killed; the erosion of hard-won rights and freedoms; and a calculated effort to reverse America’s growing racial and ethnic diversity– all of which are pushing us toward authoritarian and imperial rule. What confronts us is not only an endangered democracy and the rise of tyranny. It is also a Christian faith corrupted by the heretical ideology of white Christian nationalism, and a church that has often failed to equip its members to model Jesus’s teachings and fulfill its prophetic calling as a humanitarian, compassionate, and moral compass for society….

We call on all Christians to join us in greater acts of courage to resist the injustices and anti-democratic danger sweeping across the nation. In moments like this, silence is not neutrality—it is an active choice to permit harm.

Writing for Sojourners, the Christian organization dedicated to social justice, author Kaya Oakes called on Trump supporters to repent for Lent.

Lent is a time for prayer, but also for action, and the action should cost you something and require real sacrifice. It is not enough to give up sweets or coffee and claim you’ve been changed, particularly when you’ve enabled a person like Trump.

Oakes asks the obvious question:

But what does repentance look like for the reformed supporter of Donald Trump? Is it even possible?

Then she answers it, at least sorta:

[F]or those trying to repent for their time in the MAGA movement, the most important lesson from Lent may be almsgiving…. It means meeting people face to face, hearing their pain, and understanding the role you may have played in it….

That doesn’t mean anyone who regrets throwing their support behind Trump should be forced to march through the streets in sackcloth (although many of us might confess to imagining just that), but repentance must involve a person facing up to the consequences of what they’ve done and committing to living differently, for good.

And for good measure, the progressive Christian organization Faithful America is asking everyone to give up supporting pro-Trump corporations for Lent.

The Children Shall Lead Us

Students continue to walk out of their schools to protest ICE all across the country. Increasingly, they’re doing so despite the prospect of punishment.

A little Googling turned up walkouts at high schools in Los Angeles, Bowling Green, Wisconsin, Fox Lake and Huntley, Indiana, and Chelsea, Michigan. Also at a middle school in Fitchburg, Massachusetts.

Students also walked out at ten Virginia Beach high schools, but 150 students at one of the schools were indefinitely suspended.

In Redlands, California, 150 students who walked out of their schools were punished with a suspension of extracurricular privileges until they attended Saturday school or performed four hours of community service.

Over 300 students at a high school in Prince William County, Virginia, were suspended for three days after leaving campus during an anti-ICE walkout.

A student walkout in Olathe, Kansas, ended in a melee, apparently after anti-ICE protesters confronted a group of students carrying pro-Trump signs. Four students were reported injured, and four were arrested .

The most outrageous walkout incident took place in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, where police chief Scott McElree, in plainclothes, suddenly began attacking a group of about 35 student protesters as they walked down the street. He even put one girl in a chokehold. Other students tried to fend him off. Police then arrested five of them and charged them with aggravated assault. Three were detained in juvenile hall for four days before being released; two others may still be in custody, it’s not clear.

Community members are calling for the chief to resign and the charges against the students to be dropped. The Bucks County district attorney is investigating.

At least two rallies for the “Quakertown Five” are scheduled for later this week.

There’s also a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for the students’ legal defense. It had an original goal of $18,000. It’s at $96,745 last I checked.

Concentration Camp Update

The Trump administration’s plans to set up an archipelago of new detention centers including massive new warehouses for people, should, as Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch wrote, horrify every American.

But they also face widespread, bipartisan, and very effective local resistance.

Project Salt Box’s ICE Warehouse Purchase Tracker at this hour shows 12 warehouse sales cancelled, compared to nine that have been acquired.

The latest news is that the on-again-off-again plan for a new prison camp in Lebanon, Tennessee, is off again, after pushback from leaders of both parties, including Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn.

After two months of public debate, DHS is trashing its plans for a detention facility in Merrimack, New Hampshire, WMUR reports.

DHS did buy a massive warehouse in Social Circle, Georgia, outside Atlanta. But the city manager of Social Circle says he’s not going to turn the water on unless his concerns are addressed.

Incidentally, it’s a mystery why DHS paid $129 million for the warehouse. That’s a cool $100 million more than the $29 million purchase price in 2003.

In Maryland, Attorney General Anthony G. Brown filed a lawsuit this week to stop the construction of a massive federal immigration detention center in Washington County.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, writes that if ICE gets its way, “the system of detention which has existed for generations may be fundamentally transformed into something even more sinister and more prone to abuses than ever.”

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie and concentration-camp expert Andrea Pitzer, both of whom have been leaders in calling out the inhumanity of DHS’s plans, discussed how these camps instill terror on the society as a whole. Read it.

Bringing Out the Best in People

• The Guardian profiled Ashley Fairbanks, the founder of the Stand With Minnesota website that has raised almost $20 million for Minnesotans affected by the ICE raids.

• Current Affairs published a feature on the extraordinary network of mutual aid in Minnesota “that supports vulnerable community members who are sheltering in place to avoid abduction by ICE and Border Patrol agents.” One collective, The People’s Laundry, is staffed by volunteers who wash clothes free of charge for those without access to laundry services.

• And the Philadelphia Inquirer profiled José Hernández, a Bucks County man who delivers groceries to immigrants worried about attracting ICE attention.

This Week in the Courts

• Here’s another barnburner ruling, this one challenging the Trump administration’s “mandatory detention” policy, which denies detainees the chance to seek release on bond. A federal judge in California ordered DHS to give newly-arrested immigration detainees notice that they may be eligible for bond -- and then give them access to a telephone to call an attorney within one hour. “Respondents have far crossed the boundaries of constitutional conduct,” wrote Judge Sunshine Sykes. She called DHS’s argument “shameless” and wrote that it “seeks to erode any semblance of separation of powers.” But, she wrote, “Respondents can only do so in a world where the Constitution does not exist.”

• In a must-read order releasing a man from ICE detention, a federal judge in West Virginia declared Trump-era immigration-enforcement methods unconstitutional from start to finish. Judge Joseph R. Goodwin wrote: “Antiseptic judicial rhetoric cannot do justice to what is happening. Across the interior of the United States, agents of the federal government—masked, anonymous, armed with military weapons, operating from unmarked vehicles, acting without warrants of any kind—are seizing persons for civil immigration violations and imprisoning them without any semblance of due process…. It is an assault on the constitutional order. It is what the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent. It is what the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment forbids.”

• A federal judge in Minnesota has found the Trump administration in civil contempt for sending an ICE detainee to Texas in direct violation of his order not to remove the man from Minnesota. ICE eventually released the man without his belongings in El Paso. Judge Eric Tostrud ordered the government to refund the $568 the man’s cousin paid for a plane ticket home.

• Four children being held in federal shelters while their asylum requests are under consideration are named in a federal lawsuit asking that they be reunited with their family members. Such children previously were released under the care of their parents or other sponsors. But now, when re-arrested by DHS, they languish in detention for months. The four represent hundreds of children in similar circumstances, as described in this November ProPublica article.

• Lawyers for two Maine residents who lawfully observed and recorded DHS operations in public -- and were threatened and called “domestic terrorists” as a result – have filed a class action suit calling for an end to DHS’s unconstitutional surveillance and intimidation of Americans exercising their First Amendment right to bear witness to immigration operations in their communities.

• Fifteen states led by Democrats are suing the Trump administration, seeking to reverse its latest vaccine recommendation for children, which would reduce the number of diseases prevented by routine shots to 11, down from 17. “Public health decisions must remain grounded in truth and facts,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta.

Democracy Is Not a Losing Political Issue

I’ll leave you with this think piece from Vox’s Zack Beauchamp, who spent six months researching how to fight democratic backsliding.

He concluded that, contrary to what most Democratic leaders think, “Democracy is in fact a powerful motivating factor: When people are convinced that there’s a threat to their political freedoms, they can be motivated to go to extraordinary lengths to defend them.”

His message:

For the United States to make it out of its own crisis, we need to take this lesson to heart: not marginalize discussion of Trump’s threat to democracy, but bring it to the fore.

This newsletter regularly takes note of federal district court judicial rulings that boldly defy the Trump administration’s onslaught on the rule of law.

It’s an astonishing record of legal and moral resistance.

And in the past several months, judges have been getting more pointed in the rulings. Just in my two prior newsletters, for instance, I wrote about a number of forceful statements from judges who:

• Blocked part of Trump’s executive order attempting to make over the election process. (“Put simply, our Constitution does not allow the President to impose unilateral changes to federal election procedures.”)

• Blocked the mass deportation of 350,000 legal Haitian immigrants. (“Kristi Noem has a First Amendment right to call immigrants killers, leeches, entitlement junkies, and any other inapt name she wants. Secretary Noem, however, is constrained by both our Constitution and the [Administrative Procedures Act] to apply faithfully the facts to the law in implementing the [Temporary Protected Status] program.”)

• Ordered federal agents to stop arresting and detaining refugees in Minnesota who were lawfully admitted to the United States. (“At its best, America serves as a haven of individual liberties in a world too often full of tyranny and cruelty. We abandon that ideal when we subject our neighbors to fear and chaos.”)

• Dismissed the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Michigan over the state’s refusal to give it an unredacted list of registered voters. (“The presumption of regularity that has been previously extended to Plaintiff that it could be taken at its word—with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes—no longer holds.”)

• Excoriated ICE for defying almost 100 court orders in the previous month. (“This list should give pause to anyone—no matter his or her political beliefs—who cares about the rule of law.”)

• Raged against the way DHS treats people with civil violations as hardened criminals. (“This is not what civil enforcement looks like in a humane system of government under law.”)

Now comes Reuters, with an astonishing report that more than 400 federal judges -- in 4,421 separate cases -- have ruled since the beginning of October that ICE is holding people illegally as it carries out its mass-deportation campaign.

“The decisions,” Reuters wrote, “amount to a sweeping legal rebuke of Trump’s immigration crackdown.”

Most of the rulings have found that Trump’s “mandatory detention” policy is unconstitutional. For the past six months, the administration has insisted on indefinitely detaining immigrants without due process, when historically they have been able to be released on bond and return to their families pending a final court ruling.

And yet, as Reuters notes, these rulings haven’t stopped the conduct in question. Indeed, the administration received a green light just last week when two far-right judges on a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit ruled that Trump did in fact have the authority to continue the policy.

But the district judges may yet win out. (History will certainly vindicate them.) Other appeals courts are likely to address the issue in the coming weeks. There might be an en banc hearing in the Fifth Circuit. And Politico reports that even within that circuit, some district judges have found a workaround. Eventually, it will likely be up to the Supreme Court.

It’s important to note that the district court judges defending the rule of law against Trump come from across the political spectrum, including judges appointed by Ronald Reagan and by Trump himself.

The same cannot be said of Republican-appointed jurists serving on the appeals courts and the Supreme Court, who have routinely rubber-stamped even the administration’s most extreme actions.

The Hits Keep on Coming

Meanwhile, those district court judges continue to rule against Trump, vociferously. Just in the past week:

• A judge in Washington, D.C., blocked the Pentagon from punishing Sen. Mark Kelly for urging troops to reject unlawful orders. Leon wrote: “This Court has all it needs to conclude that Defendants have trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms and threatened the constitutional liberties of millions of military retirees.” Leon also used 14 exclamation points in his ruling, including for such phrases as “Horsefeathers!” and “Please!”

• A Pennsylvania judge ruled that the Trump administration must restore a slavery exhibit it removed from a historic site in Philadelphia. Judge Cynthia Rufe wrote: “As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims—to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts. It does not.”

• The chief judge of the D.C. District Court, who previously found that the Trump administration had denied due process to Venezuelans who were deported to El Salvador last March in defiance of his court order, has now ordered the government to start allowing them to return to the US for immigration proceedings if they choose to. Judge James E. Boasberg expressed frustration with the government’s unwillingness to ensure the men had hearings on their habeas corpus claims. He wrote: “Apparently not interested in participating in this process, the Government’s responses essentially told the Court to pound sand.”

• A Minnesota judge ordered the Trump administration to stop blocking detainees being held at the Whipple federal building from calling attorneys to obtain legal representation. Judge Nancy E. Brasel wrote: “The Constitution does not permit the government to arrest thousands of individuals and then disregard their constitutional rights because it would be too challenging to honor those rights.”

• A Massachusetts judge blocked a Trump policy that would have given the Department of Homeland Security free rein to conduct raids and enforcement actions at and around houses of worship. Judge F. Dennis Saylor wrote: “The prospect that a street-level law-enforcement agent—acting without a judicial warrant and with little or no supervisory control—could conduct a raid during a church service, or lie in wait to interrogate or seize congregants as they seek to enter a church, is profoundly troubling.”

• An Illinois judge ruled that the Trump administration could not rescind $600 million in public health grants previously allocated to four Democratic-led states. Judge Manish S. Shah wrote that using funding to execute an unrelated policy objective is “likely unlawful.”

• A Maryland judge ruled that ICE cannot re-detain Kilmar Abrego Garcia because it has bungled its attempts to deport him thus far. The government “made one empty threat after another to remove him to countries in Africa with no real chance of success,” District Judge Paula Xinis wrote. “From this, the Court easily concludes that there is no ‘good reason to believe’ removal is likely in the reasonably foreseeable future.”

• And for good measure, two immigration judges terminated deportation proceedings against two Columbia University -- Rümeysa Öztürk and Mohsen Mahdawi – who Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed posed a threat to foreign policy because they advocated for Palestinian human rights.

Against Warehousing

Resistance continues to grow in localities where ICE is planning to buy warehouses to use as massive detention centers. (See my Feb. 4 newsletter: “NIMBY, but for concentration camps.”)

And the wins keep on piling up.

The Dallas News reports:

The owner of a Dallas County warehouse that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had planned to use as a mega detention center said Monday it will not sell or lease the property to the federal government.

“God answered our prayers,” Hutchins Mayor Mario Vasquez said after learning of the company’s decision.

KCUR reports:

Platform Ventures, the development company that owns a south Kansas City warehouse that federal agents toured last month to consider for an immigrant detention center, announced today that it is not moving forward with the sale.

Opposition is revving up in Berks County, Pennsylvania, after ICE spent $87.4 million on an empty warehouse to use as an immigration detention center.

Spotlight PA reports:

In the days since the sale became public, local leaders, as well as Democrats Gov. Josh Shapiro and U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, have criticized the move. They’ve voiced many of the same concerns as residents, citing a lack of transparency and existing infrastructure, as well as the damage it could do to the local tax base.

“It is a bipartisan issue,” said Debra Fisher. “It doesn’t matter your affiliation. If you live here, you’re going to have to deal with it.”

ICE also purchased a 1.3 million square-foot warehouse in Pennsylvania’s Schuylkill County for nearly $120 million.

The state government “is warning federal officials that it will not issue required state permits for two planned immigration detention centers if initial reporting about the facilities is accurate,” Spotlight PA reported.

There’s even resistance to letting ICE set up new office space. Michigan Advance reports that Southfield, Michigan, residents and officials are pushing back against ICE plans to open a new office for administrative and legal purposes.

“As ICE moves into this new office space, this legal and administrative office, some might argue that it’s just administrative,” Rabbi Nate DeGroot told the Advance. “‘What’s the harm,’ they might say. To which I would respond, abductions can only happen with coordination coming from offices like this one right here, a murder can only be covered up by lawyers working in offices like this one right here, a presidential paramilitary force can only operate with a command center like this one right here.”

Student Walkouts Continue

The student walkouts I wrote about last week continue to sweep the nation – in Asheville, North Carolina, and Palm Beach County, Florida, and McHenry County, Illinois, and Norman, Oklahoma, and Burlington, Vermont, and Harrisonburg, Virginia, and Shawnee, Kansas, and the Chicago area, and the University of Oregon, and Stanford University. You get the picture.

The New York Times has now taken note of the movement, with a special focus on how Texas students continue to walk out despite threats from Gov. Greg Abbott,

A Community Rallies After Kids Go Running From ICE

The video, which went viral, is horrifying. Fourth- and fifth-grade students in South New Jersey were waiting at their bus stop when ICE launched a raid nearby, and the students fled in terror.

The community rallied the next day for an anti-ICE protest, as NBC10 reported.

And another viral video emerged from that rally, showing neighborhood resident Joseph Zobel getting emotional about the significance of what he had seen.

“I’ve never protested before in my entire life, but” – and he starts to tear up – “I watched fourth- and fifth-grade kids run away from our own government. I never want to see that again. And I’m not going to stand by and watch my neighbors run away scared.”

As columnist Will Bunch wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the two videos “revealed how both the terrorizing tactics of masked immigration cops and the powerful reaction from often nonpolitical Americans, dubbed ‘neighborism,’ are spreading far beyond the Minnesota tundra where this battle was initially met.”

As for Minnesota…

It’s too early to say for sure whether border czar Tom Homan’s pledge to remove almost all federal agents from Minnesota will be fulfilled. There are mixed reports.

But J. Patrick Coolican, editor-in-chief of the independent news organization Minnesota Reformer, thinks it’s not too early to celebrate. He wrote:

What happened here will be studied by social scientists and historians as one of the great victories of nonviolent resistance in recent times. Minnesotans showed that brutality and sheer numbers could not overcome communities that were united in their opposition to the usurpers.

Meet the Singing Resistance

Writer and organizer Micah Sifry wrote on Monday:

Last week, over the course of two nights, about six thousand people logged into a Zoom seminar to learn how to join Singing Resistance, a grassroots network of local groups showing up in the streets, at faith centers, and outside ICE buildings to sing out against rising authoritarianism. On the weekend of February 28/March 1, we will see the first fruit of their efforts. My gut tells me this could be big.

As many as 2,000 people gathered outside a Minneapolis hotel housing ICE agents on Feb. 1, singing their hearts out. The Singing Resistance group explained in an Instagram post:

We’re inspired by Otpor!, the Serbian civil resistance movement who overthrew dictator Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. Otpor! members were regularly arrested and beaten by police, after which, they would show up to police stations and officers’ houses chanting “You may not join us today, but you can join us tomorrow”. In the final hours of their revolution, hundreds of thousands of people from across Serbia marched on Belgrade. Milosevic ordered the police and military to fire on massive crowds of protestors, and they refused. They were done being on the wrong side of history.

Here are some more examples from Minneapolis. And it’s spreading. WISHTV reported from Indianapolis, where about 200 people gathered on Sunday to sing in what they called a “love letter” to Minnesota and immigrant communities.

Want to start your own group? Here’s a toolkit and the songbook, which contains simple tunes with original lyrics. One song goes like this:

Ooh it’s okay to change your mind
Show us your courage
leave this behind

Ooh it’s okay to change your mind
And you can join us
Join us here anytime

No Kings Update

The map for March 28 No Kings events is now live. Find one near you.

After months of resistance actions seemingly dominated by older adults, a wave of student activism is sweeping across the nation, with many thousands of young people walking out of classes to protest ICE.

The uptick in activity started on Jan. 30, as students in high schools, colleges, and even middle schools responded to a call for a national shutdown first issued by the Black Student Union at the University of Minnesota.

“Students are always at the heart of movements for justice across the world,” the organizations supporting the shutdown explained. “On January 30th, we will organize walkouts across the country and stand in solidarity with immigrant communities in Minnesota and everywhere else!”

Thousands of students heeded the call. And after January 30, the walkouts continued to spread – even in the face of threats from officials in some states, most notably Texas and Florida.

In Texas alone, just over the last few days, there have been student walkouts in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, the Austin area, San Antonio, and San Angelo.

As a particularly large walkout in Dallas just yesterday, students chanted “No Trump, no ICE, no fascists in our streets” and “ICE out, no justice no peace.” KERA public radio reported:

High school junior Landry Cannon, one of the organizers, said the students demanded U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers get out of Dallas.

“The atrocities they’ve been committing are not American ideals,” he said amid loud, chanting students. “This is what democracy looks like in our country, and we’re using our First Amendment rights to express what we believe.”

WFAA reported, also from Dallas:

Some students said the consequences did not deter them.

“I don’t think any punishment would have stopped me from coming out here today and being part of my school doing this. It’s powerful,” said Paola, a junior at Booker T.

For Paola, the issue is personal. She said her cousin, who was seeking asylum, was detained and deported.

“He and his wife and his child were here on asylum. They were here legally,” Paola said.

She said the protest reflects fears many students carry.

“As children, we should not be scared. But we are,” she said.

But for Paola, scared does not mean silent.

“If you feel like people are watching or even listening, trust me when I say they are,” she yelled over the megaphone to her classmates, as they cheered.

KVUE reported from Pflugerville, just outside Austin:

Eli Gutierrez, a junior at Weiss High School, described how they used social media to organize their walkout.

“Started on Instagram, and people started reposting, reposting, reposting, using the power of social media in a good way,” he said. “We’re all coming together, making an impact.”…

“Obviously, you saw Alex Pretti, Renee [Good] in Minnesota. Taking lives, man. This is ridiculous. So, we’re just here making a change,” he said.

In Florida, Central Florida Public Media talked to students about walkouts at all three Brevard County high schools last Friday:

Loren, a Satellite High School student, said she and her fellow protesters won’t be silenced, despite the district and the school board chair threatening disciplinary action. Fearing retribution, she asked that only her first name be used.

“There’s so many Hispanic people at our school that are afraid, and just it’s ridiculous what’s happening. There’s no reason for it, and there’s no reason to stop us from coming out here, other than you disagree,” Loren said.

The reporter also spoke to Nate, a Viera High School senior:

“I think it’s just they’re trying to scare us into submission and to silence our voices,” Nate said. “If we don’t use our voices to stand up for what we feel is right, whether you agree with us or not, I just think nothing’s gonna change. And we’re gonna have to live in this world when we grow up.”

Chalkbeat Indiana reported from Southport High School, outside Indianapolis, where the punishment for protesting was swift:

Southport students said that when they returned to school Tuesday, counselors and administrators began to call them down to dole out one-day out-of-school suspensions.

[Derek Stanley, a junior] said the prospect of his first-ever suspension from school initially made him nervous, but he was ultimately fine with the result.

“I’ve seen both in person and online people saying how scared they are. I wanted to speak about it,” Stanley said. “I’m glad I prioritized speaking out what I believe is right over three hours of school. Looking back, I would’ve regretted not doing it.”…

“One of the greatest things about America is we have a right to speak out and protest. I wanted to take a stand for what I believed in, ” said Ava Miller, a Southport junior who was suspended for the walkout. “Seeing what the world is like right now, I want to act on behalf of everyone being silenced.”

The Fresno Bee reported from the central valley of California

Sophia Nash, a senior at Clovis High, said she and some friends organized the protest because they were really upset with the deportation crackdown. “I think for a lot of us, this felt like a breaking point. One of my teachers was mentioning how a lot of people aren’t willing to protest or speak up until it’s their families, it’s their friends,” Nash said. “I think at our school, we waited too long to get involved, but we didn’t want to wait anymore. We didn’t want people to start getting deported or shot in our city.”

I’ve also seen reports of student walkouts in big cities and small towns alike, including Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Denver, Baltimore. Salt Lake City, Baton Rouge, Brooklyn, all over Seattle, Detroit, Little Rock, Louisville, suburban Chicago, Racine, Wisconsin, all over Georgia, Traverse City, Michigan, Lexington, Kentucky, Claremont, California, Fargo, North Dakota, North Texas, Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Goshen, Indiana.

Some Skirmishes

There were a small handful of violent incidents affecting the walkouts, caused by police and hecklers.

• At a walkout from East Aurora High School, outside Chicago, a viral video showed one police officer using a flying tackle to subdue one student before arresting a total of three, for unclear reasons. The Aurora Police Department charged them with resisting an officer, obstructing and improper walking in the roadway, and, in one case, for aggravated battery. Demonstrators gathered outside the police station on Tuesday night, demanding that the charges be dropped, and that the officers be investigated for excessive use of force.

• In the Austin suburb of Buda, in another viral video, a man wearing a MAGA cap attacked students after one of them kicked his truck. He assaulted two girls before being trounced and chased away by the crowd. He was later arrested and charged with two counts of assault.

• And a girl who had walked out of Fremont High School in Fremont Nebraska was slightly injured after being hit by an SUV displaying a Trump flag. The driver had stopped to harass the protesters before driving off and hitting the student. This was also caught on video.

College Campuses Waking Up?

College campuses have been disappointingly quiet even as the nation turns so sour on the way Trump is pursuing his immigration vendetta.

But maybe that’s changing, too – with a mix of protests and civil disobedience.

The New York Times reported last week that “A dozen Columbia University faculty and staff members and students were taken into custody on Thursday after blocking traffic on Broadway for nearly an hour as they protested President Trump’s immigration crackdown and demanded that Columbia provide more protections for international students.”

Over 1,000 people gathered on the Arizona State University campus in Tempe on Jan. 30, reports KJZZ.

Some college students are specifically protesting the presence of Customs and Border Protection recruiters at campus career fairs, Insider Higher Ed reports.

Three people were arrested by Ohio State Police while protesting CPB recruiters at an annual Ohio State University ​​career fair on Tuesday. The Brigham Young University student newspaper reports that students, alumni. and community members gathered to protest outside the university’s winter career fair. Students at Utah Valley University and the University of Georgia have also protested DHS’s presence at career fairs.

There have also been anti-ICE protests at Cornell University, Carnegie Mellon University, Howard University, the University of Toledo, Brown University, and the University of Illinois.

Where Does This Lead?

Some resistance organizers see student action as a big step toward a full national strike. In a video call last week titled “How we build a general strike,” Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, said that it “tends to be true throughout history that students often are able to pave the way for other sectors of society to mobilize because students are able to respond quickly, see the urgency of the situation and by students striking we allow other sectors to strike too.”

Gulag Update

I wrote last week about the growing resistance to ICE buying massive warehouses across the country to use as prison camps.

Once again, Rachel Maddow’s coverage on MS NOW is a must watch.

She called attention to the ICE Warehouse Purchase Tracker from a group called Project Salt Box. Last I checked, the tracker showed seven warehouses bought, six warehouses canceled, and 11 warehouses still for sale.

It’s not only warehouses, though. Wired reports on government documents that “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.”

Concentration camp expert Andrea Pitzer writes in her newsletter with advice on how to fight. This is seriously truncated:

• Confer with public officials and companies that own local facilities to collaboratively bar any active cooperation and establish penalties.

• Where negotiations for facilities are underway, fight the leases, fight the purchases of the facility by getting the word out on the ground and demanding response from elected officials at every level.

• Where the acquisitions can’t be blocked—and the federal government does have staggering powers in this arena—communities are looking into ways to target the employees and contractors, from security services, food services, and maintenance.

• If a given facility comes online, documenting activity as these facilities is critical, and keeping up a presence that shows local opposition as well.

• Work to find out who is detained in the facility…. Try to keep everyone aware of what is actually happening inside… Share personal stories of the detainees as you are able to get them.

Pitzer concludes:

We’re in a race now. We need to act before the administration has the personnel and the detention facilities to broaden the scope of its actions.

Meanwhile, in Minneapolis

It doesn’t appear to be getting any better.

The Intercept reports:

In a message circulated among commuters Friday, the community group Defrost MN, which uses crowdsourced data to track federal immigration operations, warned residents of an “uptick in abductions” — which refer to arrests of both immigrant community members and legal observers — following Homan’s takeover and an increase in the number of government personnel and vehicles involved in those operations.

In one 30-minute stretch, three legal observers were reportedly arrested.

The Minnesota Star Tribune writes about “The unexpected resistance to ICE in Minnesota: The soccer moms of Signal”:

Like many of the volunteer moms, Linsey Rippy, of Coon Rapids, never considered herself very political before last year.

“As a mom, we want to fix it,” she said. “You see the photos of the children — the little boy with his bunny hat — and you want to do everything you can to fix it. Because you’re just looking at that photo and thinking ‘that’s a child. That’s my child.’”

Minnesota Public Radio reports that “Twin Cities health care workers describe ‘fear,’ ‘intimidation’ due to ICE in hospitals.”

This Week in the Courts

It’s been another banner week for judicial opinions.

• In Oregon, U.S. District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai dismissed DOJ’s lawsuit against Michigan over the state’s refusal to give it an unredacted list of registered voters. Based on DOJ’s conduct, he reached an extraordinary conclusion: “The presumption of regularity that has been previously extended to Plaintiff that it could be taken at its word—with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes—no longer holds.”

• That same judge ruled that federal immigration agents in Oregon must stop arresting people without warrants unless there’s a likelihood of escape. "Due process calls for those who have great power to exercise great restraint," he said. "That is the bedrock of a democratic republic founded on this great constitution. I think we're losing that."

• In West Virginia, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Johnston used a ruling that an immigrant had been wrongly jailed to make an important statement. “A threat to anyone’s constitutional rights is a threat to us all,” he wrote. “Today, immigrants are being detained without due process. Tomorrow, under the Government’s interpretation of the law, American citizens could be subject to the same treatment. This Court will not allow such an unraveling of the Constitution.”

• And also in West Virginia, Judge Joseph R. Goodwin raged against the way DHS treats people with civil violations as hardened criminals. “This is not what civil enforcement looks like in a humane system of government under law,” he wrote. “The Constitution does not permit such cruelty as a condition of civil enforcement.”

So Much More to Read

• Daniel Altschuler asks in the Guardian: “Why haven’t American elites stood up for Minnesota?” “These elites understandably feel they have a lot to lose, but the cost of silence in this moment is simply too high,” he writes.

• Jack Rakove, a historian of the American revolution, asks in the Washington Monthly: “How are we to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary under these conditions?” His answer: By resisting an abusive government.

• Mallory Carra writes in the Guardian: “All the world’s enraged: a new era of ‘resistance theater’ is rising as Trump attacks the arts.”

• Sean Hollister writes for the Verge: “This whistle fights fascists.” Two bestselling romance novelists have helped create a group that’s shipped a half million free 3D-printed whistles to 49 states. One of them tells Hollister: “So many people were so upset and they didn’t know what to do, and we could say, here is something you can do.”

Another major front in the resistance has opened up over the last few months as ICE begins buying massive warehouses around the country to use as prison camps — and local residents and leaders push back and in some cases stop them.

Unlike a lot of the burgeoning efforts that I write about here, this one has gotten some excellent national coverage, particularly from Rachel Maddow at MS NOW.

So I strongly encourage you to watch this segment from Maddow’s Jan. 27 show where, among other things, she calls for more national media attention. (It worked!)

“Everywhere the Trump administration tries to put new camps -- new ICE facilities and ICE prison camps, they’re being pushed back,” she said. She then cited examples:

• In Durant, Oklahoma, city leaders responded to ICE inquiries by passing an ordinance requiring city approval for any jail or detention center.

• In New Jersey, the Morris County township council approved a resolution opposing an ICE detention facility inside a vacant half-million square foot warehouse in Roxbury.

• In Hutchins, Texas, the mayor, city council, and county commissioner have all said they won’t allow a facility in their town.

• In New York State, officials in Republican-leaning Orange County responded to public outcry by vowing to block a proposed a “processing site” in Chester.

• In Kansas City, Missouri, the city council responded to ICE plans there by passing a 5-year ban prohibiting non-municipal detention centers.

Maddow followed up this past Monday with another wonderful segment, which she wrote up here.

She explained that massive public pressure led a company to back off its plans to sell a warehouse in Ashland, Virginia, to ICE.

And she quoted from a marvelous opinion column in the Kansas City Star, which urged the company selling a warehouse to ICE to “say, plainly, that you don’t want your legacy tied to masked men hauling people out of their homes and into warehouses on the edge of town.”

To its credit, it was the Washington Post that set public opposition in motion in December when it revealed ICE’s plans to renovate industrial warehouses to hold more than 80,000 immigrant detainees at a time. It listed the 23 sites ICE was pursuing.

The Post followed up last week with a story about the pushback:

In at least 15 communities, residents have staged protests or packed town council meetings, overwhelming local elected officials with questions about the proposed facilities. Locals have shown up at locations identified on the unconfirmed ICE list, which has circulated on social media, with cameras to document tours.

(Here’s a version of that list.)

The Associated Press published a strong, detailed story about the public pushback against ICE plans. Bloomberg reported that several sales are taking place despite public opposition.

Courier reporter Camaron Stevenson lists which facilities have signed leases, have been stalled by community efforts, are opposed by community, and are in the preliminary stages.

Whither the War in Portland?

Here’s a story that isn’t getting nearly enough national attention: Federal agents in Portland were so consistently and brutally attacking peaceful protesters that a judge ordered them to stop on Tuesday.

In a humdinger of a temporary restraining order, federal district judge Michael H. Simon wrote:

In a well-functioning constitutional democratic republic, free speech, courageous newsgathering, and nonviolent protest are all permitted, respected, and even celebrated. In an authoritarian regime, that is not the case. Our nation is now at a crossroads. We have been here before and have previously returned to the right path, notwithstanding an occasional detour. In helping our nation find its constitutional compass, an impartial and independent judiciary operating under the rule of law has a responsibility that it may not shirk. For that reason, and as more fully explained below, the Court grants Plaintiffs’ motion for a temporary restraining order.

The ruling was necessary, he wrote, because federal agents were clearly not going to stop anytime soon otherwise:

The Court finds that the repeated shooting and teargassing of nonviolent protesters at the Portland ICE Building will likely keep recurring against Plaintiffs and the members of the putative class. Defendants’ violence is in no way isolated. Similarly, statements made by DHS officials and senior federal executives show that the culture of the agency and its employees is to celebrate violent responses over fair and diplomatic ones.

As it happens, the ruling came right after a particularly violent weekend. Federal agents responded to a peaceful protest on Saturday as if they were under attack from a hostile army.

“[S]cores of nonviolent protesters were hit with chemical munitions fired by federal officers responding to some demonstrators directly outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility,” Oregon Public Broadcasting reported. Tear gas drifted into a large crowd of demonstrators “made up of families, including children and elderly people” who were “forced to scatter after they were hit by the thick chemical mist.”

Independent journalist Marisa Kabas wrote movingly about the attack:

In the immediate aftermath, Ty noticed a man squatting next to a bike trying to rinse out his child’s eyes. “The kid’s eyes were red and they were blubbering, not screaming, crying out or talking. The parent was flushing the kid’s eyes out and wiping their face, people were offering them water. Multiple medics were checking in on them.”

He added, “It’s just weird to see a toddler in a pink onesie getting their eyes washed out from tear gas, you know?”

The Associated Press reported:

Portland Mayor Keith Wilson said the daytime demonstration was peaceful, “where the vast majority of those present violated no laws, made no threat and posed no danger” to federal agents.

“To those who continue to work for ICE: Resign. To those who control this facility: Leave,” Wilson wrote in a statement Saturday night. “Through your use of violence and the trampling of the Constitution, you have lost all legitimacy and replaced it with shame.”

Meanwhile, in Minneapolis

The federal retreat from Minneapolis is taking place in baby steps.

Trump’s new top man in the Twin Cities, border czar Tom Homan, said today that about a fourth of the federal agents currently occupying the city will be withdrawn immediately – but that 2,000 will remain, pending a “decrease of the violence, the rhetoric and the attacks against ICE and Border Patrol.”

By his definition, that may never happen.

He also said federal agents would focus more on “targeted operations,” rather than the large sweeps of people based on their location or race, as championed by Greg Bovino, the former Border Patrol leader in Minneapolis.

We shall see.

It’s not like they’ve changed their stripes. Early on Tuesday, immigration officers with their guns drawn arrested at least one observer who had been tailing them in an SUV. And children still live in fear.

The resistance, however, continues to be amazing, despite the dangers.

The Washington Post reported that “More than 34,000 Minnesotans have signed up to be trained as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement observers with various activist groups in recent weeks, many of them since Jan. 7, when a federal agent shot and killed Renée Good, a poet and mother of three, after an encounter with an ICE convoy in South Minneapolis.”

And The 19^th News has brought us one of the most emotionally infuriating and inspiring stories of the occupation. This is how it starts:

A newborn in Minneapolis hadn’t eaten for a day and a half.

Her mother had risked going into work to get just enough money for more diapers when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents stopped her car and took her away. At home waiting for her were her 16-year-old daughter and the baby — just barely 3 months old.

With their mother gone, the teenager tried to feed the baby, who was exclusively breastfed, formula to no avail. So they called Bri.

There’s also some inspiration from elsewhere in Minnesota:

• The police chief in the small southern Minnesota city of St. Peter intervened last week to prevent federal immigration agents from arresting a local resident.

• Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) reports: “As immigration crackdown spreads beyond Minneapolis, the small town of Northfield resists.”

• And also from MPR: “Pursued by federal agents, suburban ICE observers remain resolved.”

Protests Around the Nation

Friday was another big day for anti-ICE protests, as the Washington Post reported.

Here are scenes from Chicago, Portland, Maine, and Knoxville, Tennessee.

Thousands of nurses and their supporters turned out for a series of vigils for Alex Pretti outside VA hospitals around the country last week. Here’s the vigil in New York City.

Also, as the Star Tribune reports, “More than 100 bike rides honoring Alex Pretti have been organized nationally and internationally since a local bike shop’s call to action following the killing of the 37-year-old Minneapolis resident.”

In the Courthouses

It’s been quite a week for powerful, outrage-filled statements from district court judges. And that’s in addition to the Oregon ruling mentioned above.

I am so relieved for the 350,000 legal Haitian immigrants who were facing mass deportation this week because Kristi Noem decided to end their Temporary Protected Status.

In an absolutely extraordinary ruling, Washington, D.C., Judge Ana Reyes, stayed Noem’s decision, which she wrote was “motivated, at least in part, by racial animus.”

She concluded her ruling thusly:

There is an old adage among lawyers. If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither, pound the table. Secretary Noem, the record to-date shows, does not have the facts on her side—or at least has ignored them. Does not have the law on her side—or at least has ignored it. Having neither and bringing the adage into the 21st century, she pounds X (f/k/a Twitter).

Kristi Noem has a First Amendment right to call immigrants killers, leeches, entitlement junkies, and any other inapt name she wants. Secretary Noem, however, is constrained by both our Constitution and the APA to apply faithfully the facts to the law in implementing the TPS program. The record to-date shows she has yet to do that.

Minnesota federal Judge Patrick Schiltz excoriated ICE for defying almost 100 court orders in the last month. He wrote:

Attached to this order is an appendix that identifies 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases. 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. Undoubtedly, mistakes were made, and orders that should have appeared on this list were omitted.

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.

Another federal judge in Minnesota ordered federal agents to stop arresting and detaining refugees in Minnesota who were lawfully admitted to the United States. Judge John R. Tunheim wrote:

It is also essential to emphasize that the refugees impacted by this Order are carefully and thoroughly vetted individuals who have been invited into the United States because of persecution in the countries from which they have come. They are not committing crimes on our streets, nor did they illegally cross the border. Refugees have a legal right to be in the United States, a right to work, a right to live peacefully—and importantly, a right not to be subjected to the terror of being arrested and detained without warrants or cause in their homes or on their way to religious services or to buy groceries. At its best, America serves as a haven of individual liberties in a world too often full of tyranny and cruelty. We abandon that ideal when we subject our neighbors to fear and chaos.

And Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., issued a permanent injunction blocking part of Trump’s executive order attempting to make over the election process. She wrote:

The Framers of our Constitution recognized that power over election rules could be abused, either to destroy the national government or to disempower the people from acting as a check on their elected representatives…. Accordingly, they entrusted this power to the parts of our government that they believed would be most responsive to the will of the people: first to the States, and then, in some instances, to Congress…. They assigned no role at all to the President. Put simply, our Constitution does not allow the President to impose unilateral changes to federal election procedures.

Resistance in Non-Political Spaces

I loved this essay by Melissa Ryan, in her Ctrl Alt Right Delete newsletter. She put out a call for stories about non-political spaces becoming hubs for organizing, and here are some of the examples people shared:

• A group chat of strangers formed to support a mutual friend after surgery evolving into a mutual aid hub to support vulnerable neighbors and share information.

• Book clubs and knitting groups meeting to make ICE whistle kits for mass distribution.

• PTAs and parent groups working to identify vulnerable families and help with school transportation, grocery runs, and other forms of support.

• A local gaming group of men changing its long-held no-politics stance to encourage conversations about organizing, sending support to Minneapolis, and acts of resistance from the gaming community as a whole.

• Hosting a weekly gathering where anyone can drop by for soup, ICE whistles, and call scripts.

So Much More to Read

• From the New York Times: “Northern Command Tells N.C., Alaska Troops to Stand Down on Possible Minnesota Deployment.”

• From the Baltimore Beat: “How Baltimore organizers are preparing to fight back against ICE.”

• From the American Prospect: “‘No Sleep for ICE’ Campaigns Expand.”

• From NPR: “A red hat, inspired by a symbol of resistance to Nazi occupation, gains traction in Minnesota.”

• From Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mona Charen: “Trump backs down when there’s resistance. So keep fighting.”

Minneapolis is still under siege by federal agents, and there is no sign that the Trump administration is repudiating its cruel and barbaric immigration policies. But the Trumpers are on the defensive now. They’ve defenestrated Border Patrol brute Greg Bovino. They’re backing away from (and blaming each other for) the outrageous lies they initially spread about Border Patrol shooting victim Alex Pretti.

The dynamic has shifted, and “Operation Metro Surge” has effectively failed.

It’s an extraordinary victory for the residents of the Twin Cities – and for the resistance.

And while it’s far from over, it is proof that people power is not theoretical, it is real. It can force change. It can alter the course of history.

It has also inspired some marvelous writing.

If you haven’t already, you should read Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer’s essay on how “Minnesota proved MAGA wrong.” He wrote:

The federal surge into Minneapolis reflects a series of mistaken MAGA assumptions. The first is the belief that diverse communities aren’t possible: “Social bonds form among people who have something in common,” Vance said in a speech last July. “If you stop importing millions of foreigners into the country, you allow social cohesion to form naturally.” Vance’s remarks are the antithesis to the neighborism of the Twin Cities, whose people do not share the narcissism of being capable of loving only those who are exactly like them.

A second MAGA assumption is that the left is insincere in its values, and that principles of inclusion and unity are superficial forms of virtue signaling. White liberals might put a sign in their front yard saying IMMIGRANTS WELCOME, but they will abandon those immigrants at the first sensation of sustained pressure.

And in Trump’s defense, this has turned out to be true of many liberals in positions of power—university administrators, attorneys at white-shoe law firms, political leaders. But it is not true of millions of ordinary Americans, who have poured into the streets in protest, spoken out against the administration, and, in Minnesota, resisted armed men in masks at the cost of their own life.

“There is no such thing as other people’s children”, Minneapolis resident Erik Hane wrote for the Hell World newsletter:

They made a mistake in picking Minneapolis. They came here believing that the same old lines of division that animate their entire political project—race, culture, class—would be reason enough to keep people in their homes while they went about their violent work. Instead we are out there in every place they are, showing them that every person in this city is one of our own, that there is no such thing as other people’s children, that collectively we are not afraid of staring them in the eye. They can sense this. We can see them re-running calculations in their heads, every time we turn them away by being willing to stand there, get in the way, observe and document their evil. This enrages them. As we saw this morning, they are now killing us for it….

ICE is feverishly looking for some top-down reason this is happening. They are trying to infiltrate, but you cannot infiltrate a city’s collective character. They want to find the “orchestrators,” the “paid activists,” the political professionals scheming up the city’s response to their crimes. They won’t find any, because there are none. It’s parents worried about the safety of their daycare and schools. It’s neighbors worried about the family down the street. It’s anyone with a conscience—which is to say, it is everyone. And we are going to win.

Writer and activist Rebecca Solnit wrote in her must-read newsletter about how “This Cold Winter, Love Is a Superpower”:

One of the striking developments about the extremism of Trumpian violence, lying, and abuse of power is its recruitment power – but for the opposition. A lot of mild-mannered moderates are now ferociously against ICE, the attack on immigrants, and in some cases the whole Trump Administration. Each attack of a constituency is a recruitment drive – against the administration, both by those in the constituency and those who care about its members, be it women serving in the military, or federal workers trying to do their job ethically, or medical professionals, or scientists, or educators….

They have made a massive gamble, and I believe they are losing that gamble. One part of it is as I have written before about the nature of power itself: that they have most or all of it, because they do not understand the powers of civil society and the power of nonviolent resistance and noncooperation. Another part is about human nature; they seem to assume that most of us are selfish and timid and will not resist once we see their capacity to dominate and do violence, that we do not care about anything much beyond our individual selves, or that we will see them as winners and admire winning so much we’ll come on over…. [T]hey suffer from failure of imagination. The thing they cannot imagine is us.

Former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama released statements after the shooting death of Pretti. Obama wrote that “every American should support and draw inspiration from the wave of peaceful protests in Minneapolis and other parts of the country. They are a timely reminder that ultimately it’s up to each of us as citizens to speak out against injustice, protect our basic freedoms, and hold our government accountable.”

But, surprisingly, it was Clinton’s statement that soared, and met the moment:

In recent weeks, we’ve watched horrible scenes play out in Minneapolis and other communities that I never thought would take place in America. People, including children, have been seized from their homes, workplaces, and the street by masked federal agents. Peaceful protesters and citizens exercising their constitutional right to observe and document law enforcement have been arrested, beaten, teargassed, and most searingly, in the cases of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, shot and killed.

All of this is unacceptable and should have been avoided. To make matters even worse, at every turn, the people in charge have lied to us, told us not to believe what we’ve seen with our own eyes, and pushed increasingly aggressive and antagonistic tactics, including impeding investigations by local authorities.

Over the course of a lifetime, we face only a few moments where the decisions we make and the actions we take will shape our history for years to come. This is one of them. If we give our freedoms away after 250 years, we might never get them back.

It is up to all of us who believe in the promise of American democracy to stand up, speak out, and show that our nation still belongs to We the People.

More worthy reads (and one listen):

• In an Atlantic essay titled “Welcome to the American Winter,” Robert F. Worth chronicled the “meticulous urban choreography of civic protest.”

• Kerry Howley wrote for New York about “Your Friendly Neighborhood Resistance.” Her conclusion: “The impulse to drive hostile invaders from your home lives in your body in a place too deep to name.”

• “The People of Minnesota Are Stronger Than the Federal Government That Seeks to Break Us,” Saint Paul City Council member. Molly Coleman wrote in the Balls & Strikes newsletter.

• “Minneapolis May Be Trump’s Gettysburg,” wrote New York Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie.

• “Minnesota is the Beginning of an American Color Revolution,” wrote economist Paul Krugman. “Do Americans really have what it takes?” he asked. “Yes, they do — in Minnesota and, I believe, in the rest of the country.”

• Bruce Springsteen has released a new song called “Streets of Minneapolis.” “It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.”

Minneapolis as a Model

No reasonable person wants the horrible things that happened in Minneapolis to happen again anywhere. But is there a Minneapolis model for the resistance?

National security expert Juliette Kayyem sparked a fascinating conversation on that topic on Bluesky. Here’s the thread. Here are excerpts:

Kayyem: “I have begun to think that Minnesota pushback to ICE was unique and a model because it gave people something to do. It wasn’t about just going out in streets for rallying purposes. People had a mission: videos, whistles, information and communication flow to communities. They had something to do.”

Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible: “100%. I honestly believe political leaders ask too little of people. The thinking is you need an extraordinarily low bar - so ask people for money or to sign something. People want to be part of something and they’re eager to do real meaningful work in defense of their community and their rights. The political system largely treats people like small-dollar ATMs that vote every 2 years. Everybody gets deluged with emails asking for money. It feeds cynicism and burnout. Rarely do you get a ‘help me organize our community’ email. We were founded in no small part out of utter disgust at how the political ecosystem responded to Trump’s first election. Lots of fundraising emails and bullshit. All our digital comms has been built to be as close to the antithesis of that that we can manage.”

Civil rights icon Sherrilyn Ifill: “Correct.”

Levin: “The smothering out of the obama grassroots energy is my roman empire - I think about it all the time. I was an idealistic recent college grad and I remember a massive celebration call for volunteers after the win with a promise to continue the momentum. Then...nothing. We got the Tea Party instead.”

Bluesky poster Matt Jordan: “This reminded me of how, at a certain point in his campaign, Mayor Mamdani asked people to stop donating money and start volunteering time, which lead to a historic number of door knocks across the five boroughs.”

Giving people a lot of concrete things to do, in their communities, seems like the key. Indivisible is particularly focused on that goal.

So What’s Next?

The National Nurses United union is holding a national week of action, including vigils every night this week, “to honor Pretti and all who have been murdered by ICE, as well as demand that Congress vote to immediately abolish this violent, racist, and lawless agency that poses a dire public health threat to all of our communities.”

The grassroots group 50501, among others, is calling for a National Shutdown on Friday, along the lines of the mass action last Friday in the Twin Cities. It’s intended to be a day of “no school, no work and no shopping.” But so far I see little indication it will reach critical mass, at least outside the Twin Cities.

Minneapolis ICE protesters were chanting on Tuesday: “Shut it down for Alex, shut it down for Renee, shut it down for every immigrant terrorized. Shut it down until ICE is no longer on our streets!”

Student unions and campus labor organizations at the University of Minnesota are calling for a second general strike, complete with walkouts, teach-ins, and coordinated protests at federal facilities.

The Next No Kings Day: March 28

Mark your calendars: the next No Kings Day will be March 28. There will be a flagship event in the Twin Cities.

In the meantime, Indivisible announced:

The No Kings coalition will be running ongoing ICE watch trainings to prepare as many Americans as possible to non-violently protect themselves and their neighbors from an increasingly fascist secret police. Our first Eyes on ICE training brought in over 200,000 people. We hope to train millions….

Though we will be fundraising to help cover the costs of No Kings Day, today we encourage you to donate to a mutual aid group in your area.

Join a local group — an Indivisible group or another local organizing hub, to build community and protect your neighbors.

It Wasn’t Just Minneapolis

Organizers say a staggering 50,000 people attended the massive rally and march in downtown Minneapolis on Friday that took place despite subzero temperatures.

The next morning, the brazen and unprovoked killing of observer Alex Pretti by Border Patrol agents galvanized crowds across the nation.

As the Guardian reported, there were large protests on Saturday afternoon and evening not just in Minneapolis but also in New York City, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Boston, Providence, Rhode Island, and elsewhere.

This was the scene in Chicago, New York, and Washington.

And there was a significant act of civil disobedience in New York on Tuesday. The Associated Press reported that “Dozens of protesters were arrested Tuesday after they occupied the lobby of a Hilton Garden Inn in Manhattan, accusing the hotel of housing federal immigration officers.”

Is Maine the Next Minnesota?

ICE invaded Maine a week ago – another blue state with a significant Somali population.

Gov. Janet Mills said on Thursday that ICE’s presence was disrupting schools and businesses, and she complained that federal agencies are keeping her in the dark.

The New York Times reported on Tuesday that “anxiety and anger were palpable” in Portland.

On Friday, protesters gathered in a Portland square to demand “ICE out of Maine.”

Maine’s attorney general declared that “With the federal government now surging federal agents into Maine under the banner of immigration enforcement, evidence of constitutionally-deficient, excessive, and intimidating enforcement tactics is quickly emerging in our own state.”

The office set up a dedicated email address for Mainers to share information about possible civil rights violations.

The Maine Monitor reported that “A federal agent fired paintball-like projectiles at the cars of at least two people observing them in a Home Depot parking lot on Friday.”

And human rights activist Faisal Khan told Maine Morning Star that “more and more people are waking up; more and more people are speaking out, not only in protest but really showing support to the marginalized communities that are being targeted right now.”

She added: “There is an effort in this country to define who belongs and who does not… to convince people that if it is not happening to them, it is not their problem. But here is what they miscalculated: they underestimated community. They underestimated neighbors who will drive each other to work. They underestimated networks that would deliver groceries. They underestimated people who refused to look away.”

All eyes remain on Minneapolis, where the authoritarian, racist thuggery of the Trump administration continues to run head-on into omnipresent grass-roots resistance.

While Democratic leaders in Washington drone on about affordability, ordinary Minnesotans are taking to the streets, sometimes at great personal risk, to engage in what has effectively become a new civil rights movement.

And Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol prima donna, is the new Bull Connor.

The New York Times spoke to “several legal scholars and criminal justice experts” who said the conduct of federal agent in Minneapolis “evoked the attacks by police officers in Birmingham, Ala., on civil rights protesters in 1963.”

David Rudovsky, a University of Pennsylvania law professor, told the Times: “I think about the civil rights movement in the South and how Southern law enforcement reacted with hoses, dogs and lynchings.”

Times reporter Stephanie Saul liked the conduct of agents in Minneapolis to the “[i]mages of Birmingham’s police dogs sinking their teeth into protesters,” which “shocked the world.”

“The constitutional principles at risk are the same,” she wrote.

The sense of impunity is also the same.

As independent criminal justice journalist Radley Balko wrote in a Times op-ed, Trump administration officials aren’t even pretending to care about the brutality that culminated in the unprovoked shooting of Renee Good earlier this month.

“The lies this administration is telling about Ms. Good aren’t those you deploy as part of a cover-up,” he wrote. “They’re those you use when you want to show you can get away with anything. They’re a projection of power.”

An outraged federal judge in Minnesota last week temporarily enjoined federal agents from retaliating against peaceful observers and protesters, finding clear violations of their First and Fourth Amendment rights, particularly when agents subjected them to “chemical irritants, intimidation, including by pointing firearms at them, detention, and arrest.”

Judge Kate M. Menendez wrote:

Plaintiffs have established an ongoing, persistent pattern of Defendants’ chilling conduct. The dozens of declarations by similarly situated nonparties detail similar, if not more egregious, injuries to rights suffered at the hands of federal law enforcement officers for engaging in protected activity. And although the Court is resisting relying broadly on media reports of recent developments, it cannot ignore the almost-nonstop press reporting of continuing protest activity met with continuing aggressive responses by immigration officers operating in the Twin Cities. Taken as a whole, the record adequately illustrates that Defendants have made, and will continue to make, a common practice of conduct that chills observers’ and protesters’ First Amendment rights.

But the Justice Department is appealing the injunction, and it’s unclear how much it has affected the conduct of federal agents thus far.

As of Jan. 16^th, the day of the ruling, there was no sign of restraint -- quite the opposite. As Minneapolis Public Radio reported:

Six weeks into the immigration enforcement surge in the Twin Cities, observers say federal agents are employing violence more frequently and with little apparent restraint against citizens and noncitizens…

Anna Hall, a staff attorney at the nonprofit Legal Rights Center. “They’re acting with impunity, and they believe that they have the right to do that.”

This kind of response isn’t new to immigrants. The difference now, Hall said, is that many white people acting as ICE observers are also having their basic constitutional rights violated.

State and local officials in Minnesota are suing to end the ICE surge entirely, and the ACLU is suing specifically to end the racial profiling and unlawful arrests.

The Washington Post took notice of the extent of the resistance earlier this week, reporting:

[T]housands of civilians, many of them U.S. citizens with no deportation risk, have organized themselves into a highly coordinated campaign to thwart those officers. The sounds of car horns and whistles, megaphones and profane chants have become the soundtrack to daily life in the Twin Cities’ most diverse neighborhoods. Residents posting cellphone videos on TikTok, Instagram and X make up a collective online photo album of a city under stress.

Minneapolis resident Scott Meslow wrote for the Verge about his experiences:

The presence of ICE is not an abstraction to the people who live here. It’s a constant threat requiring constant vigilance. Our public schools were closed because the state government could not guarantee students would be safe. Many stores and restaurants, including 80 percent of immigrant-owned businesses, are not open, protecting both staff and patrons from the threat of an ICE raid. Many nonwhite Minnesotans — regardless of whether they are citizens or not — are essentially sheltering in place, skipping grocery runs and doctors’ appointments to stay at home, where ICE (theoretically) needs a judicial warrant to harass them.

There is a right-wing trope, frequently employed by Trump, that anyone who resists ICE must be a paid protestor. Of course, the reality is the opposite. Many of us have families, most of us have jobs, and all of us have bills to pay. None of that has changed, but the task of protecting our community still requires many, many unpaid hours. As a white U.S. citizen, I’m one of the “lucky” ones: ICE may still detain me, as they have many other lawful protesters, but I’m much less likely to be actively targeted. I’ve also been lucky in another sense: So far, I haven’t run into any truly bad situations with my young children in tow. But I expect that luck to run out soon.

Meslow concluded:

None of what I’m doing is enough. But all of it, I reassure myself, is better than nothing. The most heartening thing about this deeply disturbing moment is seeing how consistently and forcefully Minnesotans of all demographics have been pushing back. It has been galvanizing and radicalizing in ways I’m not sure anyone outside the city can truly understand.

A Minneapolis resident posted on Bluesky:

Minneapolis and Saint Paul have basically mobilized into a war economy of mutual aid and non-violent defense. I’ve never seen anything like it, even during Covid. People who barely vote are guarding their schools from ICE and doing the shopping for neighbors in hiding.

Even some local law enforcement officials in Minnesota are joining the resistance.

And New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote optimistically:

Faced with an angry public but committed to a rigid agenda of nativist brutality, the president and his coterie of ideologues are playing the only move they seem to have: wanton violence and threats of further escalation. They think this will break their opposition.

But looking at the ironclad resolve of ordinary Minnesotans to protect their homes and defend their neighbors, I think the administration is more likely to break on their opposition and learn, as the British did in Boston, that Americans are quite jealous of their liberties.

‘ICE Out of Minnesota’

Friday could be a seminal moment in this new civil rights movement.

Minnesota unions, religious groups, and ordinary citizens are planning a massive statewide strike and economic boycott.

The Ice Out of Minnesota website declares:

It is time to suspend the normal order of business to demand immediate cessation of ICE actions in MN, accountability for federal agents who have caused loss of life and abuse to Minnesota residents and call for Congress to immediately intervene.

Friday, January 23rd will be a statewide day of non-violent moral action, reflection: no work, no school, no shopping — only community, conscience, and collective action.

There will be a unified, statewide pause in daily economic activity. Instead, Minnesotans will spend time with family, neighbors, and their community to show Minnesota’s moral heart and collective economic power. This means:

• No work (except emergency services)

• No school

• No shopping or consumer spending

There will be a peaceful march and rally in downtown Minneapolis at 2:00pm.

The weather forecast is brutal, with below-zero temperatures expected all day Friday along with windchill temperature descending into the 30s below zero.

A Non-Traumatic Anecdote

The St. Paul Pioneer Press reported:

At 1 p.m. Friday, ABC News aired an interview with Abigail Adelsheim-Marshall, who owns St. Paul’s Mischief Toy Store with her parents Dan Marshall and Millie Adelsheim. She discussed the store’s decision to distribute free whistles that citizens have been using to alert neighbors of the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

“She delivered a very strident anti-ICE message, which we’re incredibly proud of,” said Dan Marshall. “Three hours later, two plainclothes ICE agents came into our store and served us with a Notice of Inspection.”

The agents were asking for I-9 documents — which prove people are legal to work in this country — from the store’s employees.

The store posted the letter on Facebook, along with a message:

We’re still handing out free whistles. And we just got in hundreds of new yard signs.

Keep resisting, Minnesota. We love you.

Marshall told the Pioneer Press that in the first three hours after opening on Saturday, they sold 250 anti-ICE yard signs – and will donate $5,000 to local nonprofits.

Some Last Words From M. Gessen

New York Times opinion columnist M. Gessen wrote about the authoritarian decline in the first year of Trump’s second term, and then concluded:

Of course, the United States is not Russia — or Hungary or Venezuela or Israel or any of the many other democracies that have turned or are turning themselves into autocracies. But now is the time to focus on the similarities and try to learn from the ways other countries have cracked down on protest, eviscerated their electoral systems, limited their media freedom and built concentration camps. The only way to keep the space from imploding is to fill it, to prop up the walls: to claim all the room there still is for speaking, writing, publishing, protesting, voting. It’s what the people of Minnesota appear to be doing, and it’s something each of us needs to do — right now, while we still can.

Political scientists have long wondered about how ordinary Americans would respond to life in a police state. Would they simply accept it as the new normal? Or would they resist?

This hypothetical question is no longer hypothetical. And it has now been resoundingly answered by the people of Minneapolis.

Thousands of masked thugs in paramilitary gear have occupied their city, snatching people off the street and attacking anyone who gets in their way, ostensibly under the color of law. They terrorize citizens with pepper spray and tear gas, and, in the case of 37-year-old mother Renee Good, shoot to kill.

But the people of Minneapolis have not bent the knee. They are resisting.

Wherever the invaders appear, so do citizens with whistles and phone cameras, jeering them and telling them to go away. Thousands of residents have attended protests and vigils, joined support groups, delivered food to those afraid to leave their homes, gathered outside schools to protect their children.

As horrifying as it is to watch our government’s brutality and cruelty in the street of Minneapolis, it is even more inspiring to see good people driving armed goons out of their neighborhoods, standing up for each other, expressing their humanity, and refusing to give up their liberty without a fight.

Resistance is growing even as the federal occupation appears to be focusing less on immigration enforcement and more on trying to intimidate observers, protesters, and political opponents.

The people of Minneapolis have given us hope.

Minneapolis resident Taylor Carik wrote about his experience in the city for Liberal Currents:

Many people have rhetorically asked, “If you were given a chance to fight back against the fascists, what would you do?” Many people in Minnesota have answered with organizing and observing. To their credit, hundreds of experienced and newly minted activists and some City Council members have been on the front lines trying to channel people’s frustrations and fears into action….

The growing community safety support in the Twin Cities not only includes parents and neighbors providing meal delivery and monitoring ICE vehicles approaching, it includes the contemporary versions of old school telephone trees to share much needed information. It’s also observers bearing witness to the actual violence and disregard by ICE.

It’s those of us who live here, whether natives to Minnesota, or long-time immigrants, or first-generation immigrants, or recent to the state in search of a better and more protective community, who will be the difference between a brake on or the acceleration toward domestic military police state (a surge by any other name.)

Robert Reich published a note he received from Phillip Cryan, a former student who lives in Minneapolis:

The horror, grief and fear we are all experiencing every day, watching our neighbors get hauled away by reckless, cruel, masked paramilitaries; trying to protect one another; and knowing that what they did to Renee Nicole Good could happen to any of us, is generating this: unexpected, heartfelt new connections of not just solidarity but real love. At a massive, simply-incomprehensible scale. Good people coming together in all our fear and vulnerability and care and kindness and bravery, discovering the transformative power of our love for one another.

The New York Times reported on Wednesday:

Participants say they have been propelled into action with two goals in mind: an urge to protect their neighbors, many of whom are in the country without authorization but have no criminal backgrounds, and also to push back against what they see as a violent and overreaching federal government….

Ashley Lopez, who works in education and lives in the city of West St. Paul, has become active in anti-ICE neighborhood groups only in the week since Ms. Good’s death.

“Because of what happened to Renee, I felt like we had nothing to lose anymore,” said Ms. Lopez, who has joined patrols that blow whistles and set off their own car alarms if they see ICE agents. “Why should she be the only one who put herself in danger?”

MS NOW spoke with Andrew Fahlstrom, a leader with a citizen monitoring group called Defend the 612.

Fahlstrom said he thinks the raids are meant to instill fear. But instead of driving people underground, residents continue to sign up as monitors. As of Saturday, more than 4,000 had volunteered.

“Renee Good could have been any one of us. She wasn’t doing anything different than what thousands of people on the street were doing. People are committed. People are showing up. People are taking to the streets to protect each other. I’m not afraid. I’m here to make sure that we protect each other. And that’s what we’ll do every day as long as we can,” Fahlstrom said.

There have been many organized protests, as well. Thousands of demonstrators marched through Minneapolis’s frigid streets on Saturday for Renee Good. Minnesota Public Radio reported that “Many in the crowd said they were inspired by the actions their fellow Minnesotans have taken to oppose ICE.”

Protests continued Tuesday night, including a loud gathering outside a local hotel where ICE agents were said to be staying, and a rally outside Minneapolis’s federal building, where agents deployed flash-bang grenades, making downtown look like a war zone.

Captured on Video

Videos captured by brave observers and shared on social media have frequently driven the narrative.

The New York Times, for instance, reported on Tuesday:

Images circulating on social media over the past two days and verified by The New York Times show agents approaching a car at a gas station, seeking out the immigration status of the driver and demanding that he open the door. When he doesn’t, they break the window of the car and remove him. Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol official, yells at bystanders to back up….

In another video, Elliott Payne, president of the Minneapolis City Council, is seen being shoved by an agent.

Mr. Payne said in an interview Tuesday that federal agents with assault rifles and combat gear were patrolling the streets in convoys. At night they shine lights from the vehicles onto pedestrians, he said.

“This is a military occupation, and it feels like a military occupation,” Mr. Payne said.

According to Mr. Payne, federal agents scream obscenities at residents and repeatedly holster and unholster their weapons. “It’s like living in a war zone,” he said.

What Observing Is For

Sociologist Nicole Bedera posted a enlightening thread on Bluesky, explaining the profoundly humanitarian motivation of the people who follow immigration enforcements around and record them:

I’m seeing lots of people on here misunderstand the purpose of ICE watch. It’s de-escalation. And it’s grounded in the social science of violence.

Among perpetrators of violence, there is a very small share who are independently motivated to violence. But the vast majority of perpetrators commit violence to seek approval and status from others. This is particularly true among men who use violence to affirm their masculinity.

The goal of ICE watch is to surround that second type of perpetrator with people who *disapprove* of their actions.

It will make them less likely to be violent and we’ve seen that, in some cases, that includes rethinking their original plan to tear a family apart too.

The success of ICE watch interfering with ICE’s mission is almost certainly why DHS keeps sending more agents to Minneapolis.

They used to execute their raids with just a few agents. Now they need 6-12 to even begin to disrupt the social pressure to be nonviolent.

I’m just echoing others who have already said this, but it’s a good thing that it takes so many ICE agents to make a single arrest. It makes the whole operation slower and more resource-intensive.

It can be hard to see the success of prevention efforts because we can’t see inside the minds of the people who changed their behavior because of those efforts. But there are a lot of reasons to believe ICE watch is working. And it’s also part of why ICE watch is generally safer than it sounds.

Here, case in point, is video of federal agents getting run out of a Minneapolis neighborhood by residents on Monday.

A Spontaneous Memorial

This wonderful Rolling Stone article describes the scene around a makeshift memorial for Good that sprang up Thursday at the intersection where she was killed on Wednesday, “covered in flowers, candles, and handmade signs surrounding a large wooden cross.”

Early that morning, Minneapolis resident Amber Mattern, pushing her young child in a stroller down the street, was overcome with emotion. “It’s scary,” she says, eyes fixed on the growing memorial. “Our leadership is supposed to be for the people and that doesn’t seem to be the case.” She carried a handmade sign that read “Rest In Power, Renee,” which she later left at Good’s memorial. “I just want something to be done and I feel like we have to come together. We have to stand up.”…

Minneapolis’ Somali-American community, a major target of recent ICE operations, mobilized large numbers of volunteers to administer hospitality and mutual aid. All afternoon and evening, a procession of women moved through the crowd to keep people fed, hydrated, and caffeinated. A woman moved back and forth between the intersection, passing out steaming styrofoam cups of tea carefully balanced in her hands. Another woman presented a tray of freshly baked sambusas to anyone who looked hungry. “So many of us fear to take our children to school,” she tells me. “All Minnesotans feel unsafe, this is not about color.”

Protecting the Children

A lot of the organizing has centered around protecting schools:

MPR reporter Jon Collins posted on social media:

People who aren’t in Minnesota might not know that if you drive or walk past pretty much any school, there’s going to be a group of people, parents and childless, standing guard to make sure the kids are safe from feds. It’s pretty remarkable. And very disturbing.

The Wall Street Journal reported:

Organized into “sanctuary school teams,” the volunteers—many of them moms already involved at their schools—use Google documents to divvy up tasks, such as delivering groceries to immigrant families. Volunteers are on hand at drop-off and pickup with whistles to blow in case ICE agents show up.

Area students have participated in several walkouts. About 500 high school students walked out of Roseville High School Monday morning.

And the Sahan Journal reported:

Hundreds of Roosevelt High School students walked out of school Monday afternoon, days after Border Patrol agents detained a special education assistant at the Minneapolis school and deployed chemical irritants on a crowd that included dozens of students.

A Matter of Faith

NPR reported on how communities of faith “are at the forefront of resistance, organizing public witness, mutual aid and political action rooted in long-standing religious commitments.” The article described a singing vigil that wound through the streets of south Minneapolis, near the site where Good was killed:

The lyric “We belong to them, and they belong to us” echoed in the cold January air.

The procession of several hundred people included one man holding a hand-lettered sign that read “Jesus was an immigrant” and others carrying large, homemade crosses. One older woman navigated the icy streets while using a walker. Another pushed her Pomeranian in a dog stroller. Parents held the hands of their small children.

The vigil began at San Pablo Church and paused along the route at sites where federal agents had recently detained people. Organizers said they hoped to bring comfort to a neighborhood shaken by violence and cowed by fear. As they walked along the Lake Street business corridor, cars honked in support. On side streets, residents emerged onto their front porches, some wrapped in blankets, to wave or applaud.

The National Weekend of Action

All around the country, people gathered over the weekend to mourn and protest Good’s killing, under the slogan “ICE Out for Good.”

Indivisible reported that “In under 48 hours, you organized nearly 1,200 marches and vigils in all 50 states and DC for Renee Nicole Good. There are more of us than there are of them — and We the People won’t stop demanding accountability for ICE’s killing of Renee.”

There were protests in New York City, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Boston, even Fairbanks, Alaska, where the temperature hit -30 degrees Fahrenheit.

The Week in the Courts

• A federal judge is preparing to rule later this week on a lawsuit filed in December asking her to bar ICE officers in Minnesota from taking retaliatory action against observers and protesters. This could be huge.

• State and city officials in Minnesota filed a federal lawsuit on Monday to halt the ICE surge there entirely. “The unlawful deployment of thousands of armed, masked, and poorly trained federal agents is hurting Minnesota,” state Attorney General Keith Ellison said in a statement. “People are being racially profiled, harassed, terrorized, and assaulted. Schools have gone into lockdown. Businesses have been forced to close. Minnesota police are spending countless hours dealing with the chaos ICE is causing. This federal invasion of the Twin Cities has to stop, so today I am suing DHS to bring it to an end.”

• Chicago and the state of Illinois filed a similar lawsuit on Monday. “The Trump administration has unleashed an organized bombardment on the State of Illinois and the City of Chicago, causing turmoil and imposing a climate of fear,” the suit alleges. “Though Defendants describe this assault as ‘immigration enforcement,’ the reality is that uniformed, military-trained personnel, carrying semi-automatic firearms and military-grade weaponry, have rampaged for months through Chicago and surrounding areas, lawlessly stopping, interrogating, and arresting residents, and attacking them with chemical weapons.”

• A federal judge in Seattle struck down most of the provisions in Trump’s executive order on election integrity against vote-by-mail states Washington and Oregon. The judge found that Trump’s efforts violated the separation of powers.

• A federal judge in New York granted a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration’s decision to freeze $10 billion in child-care and family assistance to blue states.

Walkouts Planned

Free America is calling for a mass walkout on the first anniversary of Trump’s inauguration. “On January 20 at 2 PM local time, we will walk out of work, school, and commerce because a Free America begins the moment we stop cooperating with fascism.”

FreeDC is organizing a walkout gathering from 1 to 3 p.m. at Freedom Plaza.

Minnesota labor and community groups have announced a day of ​“no work, no school, no shopping” on January 23 “to oppose the ferocious assault on the state by federal immigration authorities.”

End Notes

• From the Los Angeles Times: “Anti-ICE protester blinded by federal agent during demonstration in Santa Ana, family says.”

• In the Nation: “Want to Stop ICE? Go After Its Corporate Collaborators.”

• From New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg: “The Resistance Libs Were Right.”

Thousands of Americans took to the streets on Saturday and Sunday, outraged by Donald Trump’s military attack on Venezuela and the abduction of its president, Nicolás Maduro.

The anti-war Answer Coalition, which organized some of the emergency protests, listed over 150 demonstrations in big cities and small towns alike, from New York to Decorah, Iowa.

Protesters chanted “Hands Off Venezuela” and “No Blood for Oil.” They decried the attack as a clear violation of U.S. and international law and an act of imperialism.

In New York City, hundreds gathered in Times Square on Saturday. One protester, Manolo De Los Santos, told the Wall Street Journal: “I feel this country is going back to its worst instincts as an imperialist nation.”

The crowd then marched to Trump Tower on Columbus Circle, amNY.com reported. PIX11 News has video. (A “No War! No Kings!” rally and march starting at Central Park is scheduled for Jan. 11.)

In Chicago, ABC7 News reported on Saturday that “The entirety of Federal Plaza in the Loop was packed with large crowds of protesters pushing back against the Trump administration.”

Chicago journalist Dave Byrnes posted video from the march, which took place in below-freezing temperatures.

In Philadelphia, more than 100 people marched from Philadelphia City Hall to a U.S. Armed Forces recruitment center on Saturday, WHYY reported.

“Congress needs to take back its power,” David Gibson, one of the protest organizers, told WHYY. “They’re supposed to represent the people. We’re the ones who are supposed to decide whether or not to go to war.”

CBS News reported: “Hundreds of demonstrators gathered in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday, where, despite heavy rain, they made sure their voices were heard as they denounced the military action taken in Venezuela overnight.”

In Washington, D.C., hundreds of protesters gathered outside the White House on Saturday and then on Tuesday outside the Kennedy Center, where Trump was speaking to a Republican congressional retreat.

In Grand Rapids, a protest organizer was recorded on camera being arrested immediately after being interviewed by WZZM, a local ABC affiliate. Jessica Plichta, a 22-year-old preschool teacher, organized the rally with Grand Rapids Opponents of War.

“It’s our tax dollars that are also being used to commit these war crimes,” Plichta said in the interview. Then she was arrested.

“When a bystander asked why, an officer said it was for obstructing a roadway and failure to obey a lawful command from a police officer,” WZZM reported.

Plichta was released after several hours in jail, with no charges filed.

OPB News reported from Oregon that more than 200 protesters gathered in Portland, and more than 100 attended a rally in Eugene. Hundreds of protesters briefly stopped traffic in downtown San Francisco. A crowd of protesters formed at Seattle’s waterfront, KOMO News reported. Here’s some video. Protesters also gathered in Sacramento, in Charleston, S.C.

Several resistance groups issued statements opposing the attack.

“Trump’s attack on Venezuela and kidnapping of Maduro is wildly illegal, immoral and irresponsible,” said Leah Greenberg, co-founder of Indivisible. “The power to declare war belongs to Congress and the American people. Trump has once again taken power that’s not his. He is attempting to drag the country into war by decree, all while treating the presidency like a throne. Congress must act immediately to stop these illegal strikes and hold the Trump regime accountable. No Kings, No War.”

The Resistance in 2026

What to expect in the year ahead? A major focus of the resistance will, of course, be the November elections, which could put Democrats in charge of Congress.

And before then, there will be any number of primary campaigns that will help define what exactly the Democrats would do with that power. Specifically: How hard would they fight? Because inside the resistance, there is enormous frustration with the current Democratic leadership.

Meanwhile, the powerful grassroots opposition to Trump’s mass deportation campaign will continue.

But what remains unclear is how many people can the resistance mobilize, how often, and to what effect?

For months now, resistance leaders have been talking about supplementing mass protests with what they call “noncooperation.” That means boycotts, walkouts, maybe even some form of general strike.

And in what could be an indicator of stepped-up activity, the Women’s March and 50501 are calling for a Free America Walkout on January 20, at 2 p.m. local time. “We will walk out of work, school, and commerce because a Free America begins the moment we stop cooperating with fascism,” the organizers write. “Walk out to block the normal routines of power, and make the stakes real.” There’s a mass organizing call on Jan. 13.

Anti-ICE Protests All Over

Watch for more major protests in the Minneapolis area in the coming days. As PBS reports, “The Trump administration has launched what officials describe as the largest federal immigration enforcement operation ever carried out, preparing to deploy as many as 2,000 federal agents and officers to the Minneapolis area for a sweeping crackdown tied in part to allegations of fraud involving Somali residents.”

And news reports Wednesday morning indicated that a federal agent shot and killed a woman who was protesting immigration operations in her car. A witness told MPR News that the agent “reached across the hood of the car and shot her in the face like three, four times,” she said.

Federal agents, who began arriving in the area in early December, were already getting an angry reception there. A march in the heart of south Minneapolis’ immigrant business corridor drew thousands of people on Dec. 20, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported.

A massive Chicago Tribune review of that city’s experience with immigration enforcement cited the powerful protest movement that ensued:

And so a city came together. Its residents marched down streets and made noise at the sight of federal agents roaming neighborhoods. People came out of their houses to point cameras at attempted apprehensions or heated interactions between agents and citizens. In some moments, they locked arms to block the agents’ vehicles, forming a human chain. In many other instances, locals hustled through their blocks in Revere-esque fashion to give warning: ICE is coming.

These actions often came with a price. There were bruises from pepper balls and fits of sickness, of respiratory stress from the tear gas. But more than that there came to be the shattering of illusions and the loss of an inherent faith that what they witnessed could not happen in America. And that if it did, it certainly couldn’t happen on their street, or right outside their door.

In Florida, as the Guardian reported:

Every Sunday afternoon, convoys of protesters from all over Florida, and others from out of state, descend on the notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration jail in the Everglades to stand vigil for those held inside.

Citizens of Roxbury Township in suburban New Jersey are up in arms after a Washington Post report that DHS wants to repurpose warehouse space there as an immigration detention center. Dozens of protestors filled a town council meeting, voicing their concerns, and about 150 people came out to a protest in sub-freezing temperatures on Jan. 3.

And LULAC, the League of United Latin American Citizens, has put out a call for witnesses to report “federal agents engaged in any illegal or unconstitutional activity including warrantless arrests, excessive force, racial profiling, and targeting of immigrant communities”:

LULAC will review the photos and videos received and, as appropriate, report to the proper oversight agency. Where civil rights violations occur, we will refer to legal counsel for possible legal action.

Recent Action in the Courts

• A federal judge in Seattle granted a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration’s defunding of Head Start and the enforcing of a ban on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in the program.

• A Washington, D.C., federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s attempts to limit members of Congress from visiting detention facilities operated by ICE.

• A federal judge in Rhode Island granted a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking Trump administration attempt to shift funding away from proven solutions to homelessness.

• A federal judge in Washington, D.C., ordered the Trump administration to keep funds flowing to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

• A federal judge in Albany has dismissed the Trump administration’s challenge to New York State’s “Green Light Law” permitting undocumented immigrants to obtain state-issued standard drivers licenses

• Public Citizen has sued the IRS and the Treasury Department over changes to tax credits that discriminate against solar and wind energy projects. The suit says the changes were made “with no reasoned explanation, evidentiary support, or statutory grounding.”

• The American Federation of Teachers and a Chicago-area nonprofit have filed a lawsuit challenging the U.S. Department of Education’s decision to terminate $60 million in funding for community schools in the middle of approved, multi-year projects.

• Rep. Joyce Beatty has sued Trump and others to stop the renaming of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. She is an ex officio trustee of the Kennedy Center.

How About Those Judges

Politico reports:

Federal judges are increasingly exasperated by the Trump administration’s effort to lock up nearly everyone facing deportation proceedings — a draconian expansion of decades-old policies that hundreds of courts have rejected as illegal or unconstitutional.

More than 300 federal judges, including appointees of every president since Ronald Reagan, have now rebuffed the administration’s six-month-old effort to expand its so-called “mandatory detention” policy, according to a POLITICO analysis of court dockets from across the country. Those judges have ordered immigrants’ release or the opportunity for bond hearings in more than 1,600 cases.

And a Chicago Tribune story revealed “a broader pattern of disconnect between the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s rhetoric of the dangers to agents during Operation Midway Blitz versus the reality borne out in the federal courts.”

A Tribune analysis found that “time and again, Trump’s DHS claimed horrific abuses at the hands of protesters. Yet time and again, their allegations of abuse did not withstand the scrutiny of judicial review.”

End Notes

• “All the Kennedy Center cancellations since Trump’s name was added,” from the Washington Post.

• Rachel Maddow draws a parallel between Trump’s plans for incarcerating immigrants in camps and the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II -- but this time Americans are speaking out and standing up.

• One Illinois couple’s “New Year’s Trump resistance resolutions.”

• Stopice.net has launched a Stop ICE Plate Tracker, the first national website dedicated to documenting ICE license plates.

• And in case you missed it, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote on Dec. 26 that “Trump Is Getting Weaker, and the Resistance Is Getting Stronger.”

(Happy Holidays and Happy New Year! Heads Up News will resume on Jan. 7)

Resistance groups are looking ahead to 2026 and making plans.

MoveOn intends to mobilize more people. A lot more people. Katie Bethell, MoveOn’s executive director, said in a call this week that mobilizations like No Kings “need to grow.”

“Seven million people in the street in October was amazing,” she said. “What an accomplishment! The largest single protest day in America! And next year, we need to double that. We need to triple that to fight back against what’s happening in this country.”

Indivisible is turning a lot of its attention to the Democratic primaries and then the general election.

“Ready to turn the page on failed Democratic leadership?” the organization asks. “The clock is ticking, and we don’t have time for dead weight in the Democratic Party. It’s time to clean house.”

The goal is to elect Democrats who will “fight like an actual opposition party to an authoritarian regime.”

I wrote a couple weeks ago about Public Citizen’s 2026 plans for litigation, investigation, and advocacy in areas including Trump’s grift, health care, corporate subsidies, immigrant rights, and open government.

The leadership team at Protect Democracy is optimistic. “We are going to win,” Isaac Gilles and Ian Bassin wrote last week. Trump, they believe, “is losing the race against time and has failed to sufficiently consolidate power before becoming deeply unpopular, which was the recipe we knew would be necessary to prevent a full-on collapse into autocracy.”

They acknowledge that “extreme danger still exists for our democracy, and many communities in our country still live in daily terror from the regime’s abuses,” but they argue that “we can now see a path to defeating the autocratic assault and turning this crisis into opportunity.”

Protect Democracy’s goals for 2026 include protecting electoral infrastructure and processes from interference, and “protecting an open civic landscape in which all Americans can dissent, organize, share and receive accurate information, make arguments for and against political platforms, express and provide support for political candidates, and compete for power free of intimidation and censorship.”

Democracy Forward, which filed dozens of lawsuits against the Trump administration in 2025, has more coming. “Our hallmark at Democracy Forward is being ready for what’s next,” the group says in its “2025 Impact Report”:

We are prepared to fight for democracy in our communities, in our courts, online, and everywhere in between. And, we are launching ground breaking initiatives to bring more people into the fight for democracy — and to reimagine what our nation can look like if the government truly works for and serves all people.

I’m particularly enthusiastic about the group’s new DemocracyWorks250 initiative. Its goal is “to reimagine the foundations for an American government that serves all people with integrity, innovation, and accountability – and to match that vision with the work required to build an innovative model for governing.”

I think it’s none too early for the pro-democracy community to start developing specific plans for a post-Trump America: a ready-to-implement guide to rebuilding a government and constitutional order that are more robust and more responsive to the people’s needs.

And I hope to report fairly extensively in the coming year on the people and groups who are doing that thinking and planning.

Vibe Shift?

In my Dec. 3 newsletter, I wrote about the “vibe shift” in New York City as protesters were on offense rather than defense, boxing in ICE agents before they could even get out of a garage.

I suspect something similar may be coming to the national resistance in 2026: Not just more and bigger protests, but also noncooperation, including mass boycotts, walkouts, and civil disobedience.

Lee Morgenbesser, an Australian government professor, wrote an insightful essay on Sunday in The Conversation, arguing that “Mass protests are laudable, but insufficient.”

He offers seven lessons “from those who have resisted authoritarian rule around the world.”

He advises, for instance, that there should be many more protests, more often. “The Democratic Party needs to use its national infrastructure to launch sustained mass protests. Otherwise, it risks becoming a mere bystander to Trump’s authoritarianism.”

He recommends “spontaneous protests” – such as at the Supreme Court, the next time it rules in Trump’s favor.

He urges someone to “create a mobile app that provides citizens with real-time information on every company tied to the administration, so people can make more informed consumer choices.”

His other lessons:

• Embrace the power of comedy

• Carry out civil disobedience

• Tell stories of courageous individuals

• Prepare for flawed elections

Minnesota Rejects ICE

I wrote last week about the many acts of resistance documented in the Minneapolis area. They continue. Now with snowballs. Which, to ICE agents, are apparently terrifying.

Minnesota Public Radio reports:

A pair of ICE agents found themselves surrounded by outraged neighbors and activists during an attempted immigration arrest in south Minneapolis on Monday afternoon.

Observers said the officers were attempting to arrest a woman in a traffic stop north of Lake Street and Pillsbury Avenue at about 1 p.m. Video shared with MPR News shows agents restraining a woman on her stomach on the icy ground, then dragging her on the road towards their vehicle as bystanders and activists hurled insults and snowballs in their direction.

The agents used pepper spray, pepper balls and tasers on bystanders, according to the videos. One agent is seen wildly swinging a baton to keep protesters at bay before apparently getting hit by a colleague’s pepper spray.

The agents’ supervisor called Minneapolis Police and the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office to rescue them. “They’re surrounded and they’re being attacked,” the supervisor said. (The sheriff’s office posted audio of the call on Facebook). “We only have a few officers but we have 60 to 70 agitators that are fighting us,” the supervisor said.

The sheriff’s office noted drily: “Upon arrival, our deputies did not witness any attacks or any agents needing medical attention.”

ICE released a statement on Tuesday saying that agents arrested two U.S. citizens for assaulting federal officers, WCCO reported. ICE claimed that “officers sustained multiple injuries, including cuts,” which seems unlikely, given that it was snowballs — and taking into account their track record of lying.

On Saturday in Chanhassen, just southwest of Minneapolis, federal agents tried to detain two men working at a construction site, trapping them on the roof in subzero temperatures. It turned into a standoff.

As Fox 9 reported, a “large crowd surrounded and confronted” the ICE agents. People in the crowd gave the men blankets, warm drinks and food. “It’s mind-blowing that people are out here, -20 plus degree weather, building houses for our community members, and they’re being targeted by ICE,” one member of the crowd told Fox9. Here’s the raw video.

MPR reports: “One worker was eventually brought down with a boom lift and taken into an ambulance. A Mercado Media livestream shows an ICE agent joined in the ambulance. It also shows the second worker came down around 1 p.m. and left the scene without being detained.”

And on Thursday night, activists targeted a hotel southwest of Minneapolis that was said to be hosting ICE agents. Video here and here.

The Star Tribune reported:

At 7 p.m. Thursday, more than 100 people gathered outside the Homewood Suites by Hilton in Edina to protest the hotel reportedly hosting ICE agents.

They came with drums, loudspeakers, megaphones and car horns and a goal to make as much noise as possible.

“Our main goal is to let these hotels know that we don’t tolerate their collaboration with ICE,” said Megan Newcomb, an organizer with the Sunrise Movement, which focuses on climate policy and investment in working-class communities. “We’re also here to let these ICE agents know that we don’t want them here.”…

The hotel is the third that protesters have appeared outside of in the last week. At least one demonstration occurred in early-morning hours.

The Scene in Chicago

Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino, who has become the face of violent immigration raids, is back in Chicago along with about 200 agents, Block Club Chicago reported. He arrived in a caravan, which “frequently blew red lights, blocked roads and cut in front of busy traffic as some protesters in trailing cars followed suit.”

“It’s going to be a merry Christmas in Chicago,” Bovino told Block Club reporters.

Immigration enforcement “was notably subdued and there were fewer confrontations with less violence” while Bovino was gone, Block Club reported.

On Tuesday, Bovino paraded around, holding a long gun to his chest, as agents rousted and arrested random brown-skinned people. The Chicago Tribune called it “a seemingly made-for-television jaunt” and reported:

The agents made several arrests in supermarket parking lots and tamale stands — detaining a man who has lived in the U.S. for about 20 years and was described as hardworking and humble by his daughter — while goading angry residents who confronted them and threatening to unleash tear gas.

So, yes, Chicago resident are leaping back into action, reprising what had been an effective resistance when Bovino was there from September to November.

In the New Republic, Melissa Gira Grant writes from “Inside Chicago’s Neighborhood ICE Resistance”:

The one response that has been genuinely effective has come from community members—ordinary residents who have come together, trained one another, and connected across neighborhoods to form groups like the Southwest Side Rapid Response Team. They have eyes on the street, the trust of their neighbors, and the ability to intervene practically instantaneously, sharing information with the ICE-activity hotline that operates across the state. They can record evidence and pass it along in seconds to rights groups, news media, and social media. Blending protest and direct action, they are offering something concrete to Chicagoans who want to express their opposition to Donald Trump’s war on immigrants.

The Scene in New York

Hunter Walker, a reporter for Talking Points memo, spent two months reporting on the effect of Trump’s mass deportation agenda in New York. What he found is this:

Across the city, there is something of a modern underground railroad with programs offering services to migrants including food, clothing, and free clinics that provide advice and assistance with legal proceedings. Volunteers are also accompanying migrants as they face the gauntlet of masked ICE agents waiting in the halls of the courts downtown.

Stories in the series so far:

• “Inside the Secret Network Offering Sanctuary to Immigrants Amid Trump’s ICE Onslaught”

• “The Undocumented Underground Is Fighting Back Inside New York’s Notorious Immigration Court”

• “Underground Legal Clinics Offer a Lifeline to Migrants Facing Mass Deportation”

• “Secretive Rapid Response Networks Are Operating in Communities ‘Terrorized’ By ICE Raids”

The Scene Around New Orleans

Before he left the New Orleans area, Bovino stormed down the streets of Kenner, Louisiana, hounded by protesters blowing whistles and shouting to warn residents not to leave their homes. Here’s video.

MS NOW’s Alex Tabet rode around New Orleans with the Reverend Jane Mauldin, a 71-year-old Unitarian pastor who spends her free time monitoring vehicles she believes are ICE and Border Patrol officers to alert residents when federal agents are in their area.

“I want my children and my grandchildren, and their grandchildren to have a democracy in our country,” Mauldin said. “If we don’t act right now, I’m afraid that could be lost. So I have to act.”

The Scene in Los Angeles

The last of the California National Guard are out of Los Angeles, thanks to a court order issued last week. The Los Angeles Times reported:

Dozens of California National Guard troops under President Trump’s command apparently slipped out of Los Angeles under cover of darkness early Sunday morning, ahead of an appellate court’s order to be gone by noon Monday.

Meanwhile, the Nation looks back at “How LA Defeated Donald Trump”:

LA showed the country that resistance and solidarity work: When people organize and stand firm, even a president bent on repression can be pushed back. If Trump thought Los Angeles would be the model for his authoritarian power grab, what he got instead was the template for defeating it.

The Scene in Oregon

The Oregonian reports that an estimated 1,600 middle and high school students walked out of classes Friday morning in Hillsboro, near Portland, to protest ICE activity in their communities.

“We never expected this many people,” a Hillsboro High School junior named Diego, who helped organize the protest, told the Oregonian:

 “This means a lot to all of us, those who were impacted by ICE, the terrorism that ICE has been inflicting on our community,” Diego told the crowd at Shute Park. “My parents work so hard, and now they’re living in fear because of what’s going on. My two uncles, they were detained two weeks ago. I’m doing this for them and for everyone else who has been taken.”

Several nearby high schools led smaller walkouts earlier last week.

The Scene in Massachusetts

The Boston Globe reports:

On a frigid night, protesters Tuesday held an “ICE Tea Party” on the Boston waterfront to protest US Immigrations and Custom Enforcement policies and action.

They dumped ice into Boston Harbor, a moment of dramatic irony on the 252nd anniversary of the Boston Tea Party of 1773….

“We descend from Immigrants and Revolutionaries,” read a battle cry beamed onto the side of the brick meeting house Tuesday.

The Scene in San Francisco

Rabbis and priests engaged in civil disobedience on Tuesday in San Francisco. CBS San Francisco reports:

Protesters chained themselves together in front of a federal immigration services building in San Francisco on Tuesday morning, prompting authorities to shut down the building for the day.

Dozens of religious leaders were taken away in handcuffs after blocking the front doors of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field offices on Washington Street near the city’s Financial District. Protestors blocked the entrance for about five hours, beginning at about 6 a.m. until federal police arrived.

Bipartisan Resistance!

It’s a first. A bipartisan majority of the House voted to reverse a Trump executive order. As Politico reports

The House on Thursday voted 231-195 to pass a bill that would restore collective bargaining rights for federal workers, a first step toward reversing the sweeping changes President Donald Trump enacted earlier this year.

Twenty Republicans joined all Democrats to advance the Protect America’s Workforce Act....

The legislation would roll back Trump’s March and August executive orders that stripped collective bargaining protections for large swaths of the federal workforce.

Nativity Scene Update

Last week, I mentioned the nativity scene at the Lake Street Church of Evanston, in which the Baby Jesus is zip-tied. Well, the Chicago Tribune reports:

Vandals decapitated and smashed the statue of Mary in an Evanston church’s outdoor Nativity scene Friday, and the church responded, according to an associate minister, by replacing it with a sign saying Mary was beaten and dragged away in front of her son and is being held in immigration detention.

End Notes

• Yaqiu Wang writes in the Guardian: “I’m a Chinese pro-democracy activist. Here’s how to find courage to oppose Trump.”

• “Trump Immigration Cruelty Fuels Surge in New Candidates,” writes Adrian Carrasquillo in the Bulwark.

• Steven Levitsky, Lucan A. Way, and Daniel Ziblatt, experts in competitive authoritarianism, write about “The Price of American Authoritarianism” in Foreign Policy. “The outcome of this struggle remains open,” they say. “It will turn less on the strength of the authoritarian government than on whether enough citizens act as though their efforts still matter—because, for now, they still do.”

• And I’ll leave you with these words, attributed to the late great Rob Reiner: “Speaking out is a patriotic act. Democracy doesn’t defend itself. It requires participation, vigilance, and courage from ordinary people.”

Federal agents descended on Minneapolis last week after Donald Trump’s racist comments about the Somali people who make up a large and vibrant community there.

The city’s response has been inspiring.

Watch this video of South Minneapolis neighbors chasing away federal agents who had detained an East African man. A crowd of people is seen blowing whistles, filming the officers, and chanting “leave our neighbors alone”. The federal agents, some of whom carried rifles, eventually left without taking anyone into custody.

Listen to Lucia Webb, who was on her second day doing ICE watch -- following immigrations agents in her car -- when she was boxed in by four SUVs and surrounded by masked men. One agent threatened her with arrest for “impeding.” “You cannot do what you’re doing,” the agent said. “Yes, I can,” Webb replied.

“There’s a lot of us. There’s more of us than there are of them,” Webb said in an interview with Minnesota Public Radio. “People underestimate the power that is already in their community and in their networks. We’re all here. We’re all doing it.”

Consider what happened at the Hola Arepa restaurant, where general manager Naomi Rathke confronted the federal agents who had entered her restaurant — and made them leave. Watch the video.

“They said, ‘We don’t need a warrant.’ I said, ‘Yes, you do,’” Rathke told WCCO news. The restaurant’s owner later shared tips for restaurants visited by federal agents on Instagram.

Read this article from Minnesota Public Radio:

A 55-year-old woman who is an American citizen was arrested early Tuesday after confronting ICE officers over the arrests of three of her neighbors in the Willard Hay neighborhood of north Minneapolis.

Susan Tincher was awakened a little before 6:30 a.m. by alerts on her phone that an ICE arrest was happening in her neighborhood. She walked over alone and asked one of the officers across the street from the home that was being raided if they were ICE. She said the officer told her to “get back.” Tincher refused, and said multiple agents approached her.

Tincher, a white woman in her mid-50s who stands 5’ 4” tall, insists she was at speaking distance from the agent and said that she did nothing to “impede” their actions.

“Pretty soon they were throwing me on the ground and handcuffing me and putting me in their unmarked truck,” Tincher said, estimating that the whole interaction just took a few seconds. “There were other watchers, who were asking me what my name was and everything, so I identified myself to them, then I started yelling, ‘Help!’ because I was being kidnapped.”…

Tincher has marks on her neck and wrist from where agents restrained her. Agents cut off her wedding ring and held her in leg shackles at Whipple Federal Building for about five hours, where she saw about seven other detainees.

Tincher said she’s even more motivated after her arrest to volunteer to support immigrants in her community.

“I’m just so concerned about our neighbors, our peaceable neighbors, being abducted, and the worries their families are going through,” Tincher said. “I just don’t want this to be happening in our country.”

Students and staff at Augsburg University in Minneapolis tried to stop ICE agents from detaining a student in a university parking lot on Saturday. The agents pulled weapons and threatened the students and staff with arrest, Augsburg University President Paul Pribbenow told Minnesota Public Radio.

Here’s video of students at Burnsville High School, just south of Minneapolis, walking out of classes, chanting “No more ICE.”

Unicorn Riot, a non-profit media organization based in Minneapolis, has a wonderful rundown of resistance actions. It includes this video by independent journalist Louie Tran showing residents confronting ICE agents in the parking lot of an apartment complex. The agents tried to drive away amid heavy snow, got stuck in traffic, and used pepper spray against protesters – and the videographer -- as they tried to get away. Here’s another angle, which also shows a protester getting hit by an ICE SUV.

The Associated Press reported that “Federal agents used pepper spray to push through an angry crowd that blocked their vehicles as they checked identifications in a heavily Somali neighborhood of Minneapolis on Tuesday.” In fact, an AP photographer captured it all on video.

City Council Member Jamal Osman, a Somali American, told the AP that federal agents also went to a city-owned senior housing complex. “There, he said, a group of mostly white young people he called ‘heroes’ blew whistles to sound the alarm and confronted the agents, who responded with pepper spray.”

“Thank God so many people showed up there,” Osman told the AP. “(The agents) couldn’t get out of there because people showed up with their cars and whistles.”

Surveillance and Anger in New Orleans

Federal agents in New Orleans are evidently alarmed. They’re now watching the people watching them. The AP reports:

State and federal authorities are closely tracking online criticism and protests against the immigration crackdown in New Orleans, monitoring message boards around the clock for threats to agents while compiling regular updates on public “sentiment” surrounding the arrests, according to law enforcement records reviewed by The Associated Press.

That same article includes yet more evidence that agents are not targeting “the worst of the worst”:

DHS and Republican leaders have framed the crackdown as targeting the most violent offenders. But the records reviewed by the AP identify only nine of the 38 people arrested in the first days as having criminal histories that rose beyond traffic violations — information the intelligence bulletins warn “should not be distributed to the media.”

New Orleans City Council President J.P. Morrell said the stated goals of the operation to arrest violent offenders did not align with the reality of what is taking place.

“There’s literally no information being given to the city of New Orleans whatsoever,” Morrell said. “If the goal was for them to come here and augment existing law enforcement, to pursue violent criminals or people with extensive criminal histories, why wouldn’t you be more transparent about who you’ve arrested and why?”

Morrell and other officials have said the crackdown appears to be a dragnet focused on people with brown skin.

Other city leaders are furious, too. Another AP article reports:

New Orleans’ mayor-elect said Friday that a federal immigration crackdown launched this week is already causing harm as encounters between masked agents and residents, including some caught on video, has prompted public backlash in the blue city.

Frustrated city officials pointed to the case of Jacelynn Guzman, a 23-year-old U.S. citizen who was walking back to her Louisiana home from a trip to the grocery store on Wednesday when a truck pulled up beside her and two masked federal agents approached her, according to security footage obtained by The Associated Press.

Independent journalist Hamilton Nolan reports on what he calls “a fairly spectacular underground intelligence service” in New Orleans run by the immigrant support group Union Migrante.

Every day they blast out multiple sightings, photos, and videos, all verified and confirmed. Over time, it is likely that this kind of community intelligence will save lives and prevent some families from being torn apart. And, on a much shallower level, it is just satisfying to watch a video of an activist filming agents desperately trying to be inconspicuous in a parked SUV, walking by them and drawling, “I’m with Neighborhood Watch. You guys good? You guys need any help?”

The View from New York

Hunter Walker writes for Talking Points Memo about his two months spent reporting on the effect of Trump’s mass deportation agenda in New York:

Across the city, there is something of a modern underground railroad with programs offering services to migrants including food, clothing, and free clinics that provide advice and assistance with legal proceedings. Volunteers are also accompanying migrants as they face the gauntlet of masked ICE agents waiting in the halls of the courts downtown.

New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani shot a must-watch public service spot over the weekend. “We can all stand up to ICE if you know your rights. If you encounter ICE, these are the things that every New Yorker should know,” he said. He proceeded to explain them as clearly as I’ve seen anywhere.

Mamdani added: “New Yorkers have a constitutional right to protest, and when I’m mayor, we will protect that right.”

This was the scene at one of two huge training sessions for New Yorkers on how to protect their neighbors from ICE on Saturday.

And the New York Times reports that “Hundreds of people gathered at a Queens playground on Sunday to protest the federal government’s forced separation of a 6-year-old migrant boy from his father after the two were arrested last month amid President Trump’s deportation crackdown.”

Nativity Scenes Spark Controversy

I noted in last week’s newsletter that a Catholic church in Dedham, Massachusetts had replaced the baby Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in its nativity scene with a sign saying “ICE was here.”

The Archdiocese of Boston was not pleased. It told CBS News on Friday that “The Church’s norms prohibit the use of sacred objects for any purpose other than the devotion of God’s people. This includes images of the Christ Child in the manger, which are to be used solely to foster faith and devotion.” The archdiocese called for the display to be removed because of its “divisive political messaging.”

But as the New York Times reported, the Rev. Stephen Josoma of the St. Susanna Parish is standing firm, for now.

And at a news conference, the Boston Globe reports, Josoma responded to the archdiocese by saying that “any divisiveness is a reflection of our polarized society, much of which originates with the changing, unjust policies and laws of the current US administration.”

ICE acting director Todd Lyons also criticized Josoma’s nativity scene, telling Fox News that it was “absolutely abhorrent.”

Meanwhile, Josoma has been outdone. The Chicago Tribune reports on the nativity scene at the Lake Street Church of Evanston. It depicts:

Mother Mary wearing a respirator mask to protect herself from tear gas. Baby Jesus with zip-tied hands, wrapped in a thin blanket that looks like aluminum foil. Masked centurions with sunglasses and green vests labeled “ICE.”

In The Courts

• A federal judge in San Francisco ordered the Trump administration on Wednesday to end the deployment of California National Guard troops in Los Angeles. Judge Charles R. Breyer wrote: “The Founders designed our government to be a system of checks and balances. Defendants, however, make clear that the only check they want is a blank one. Six months after they first federalized the California National Guard, Defendants still retain control of approximately 300 Guardsmen, despite no evidence that execution of federal law is impeded in any way — let alone significantly.”

• Public Citizen is suing to stop the Trump administration from completely defunding the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

• The developer of ICEBlock, an iPhone app that notifies users of ICE sightings, is suing the Trump administration for violating its free speech rights by demanding that Apple remove the app from its store.

• CBS News reports: “A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed assault charges against a manager of the Laugh Factory comedy club in Chicago stemming from a confrontation with Border Patrol agents in Lakeview, after federal prosecutors revealed a grand jury refused to indict him.”

End Notes

• Illinois has a new law on the books that restricts immigration enforcement outside state courthouses and makes it easier to sue federal agents who have “knowingly violated Constitutional rights during civil immigration enforcement operations.”

• Der Spiegel profiles Louisiana lawyer Christopher Kinnison and his lonely fight against Trump’s deportations.

• This video shows federal agents pepper-spraying a crowd that included newly-elected Rep. Adelita Grijalva, as she confronted ICE agents who were raiding a Mexican restaurant in Tucson. They also fired some sort of munition at her feet. The Washington Post has more.

• And here’s a handy boycott list from USA Today: “These are the companies that rolled back DEI amid Trump backlash.”

There was a remarkable scene outside a federal government garage in New York City’s Chinatown on Saturday morning.

Dozens of masked federal agents had gathered inside in preparation for a raid.

Hundreds of New Yorkers wouldn’t let them out.

“As the agents’ vehicles moved to leave, protesters blocked them, forming a barricade at the mouth of the garage with their bodies and piling mounds of garbage bags beside them. The standoff continued for the better part of an hour as more and more protesters arrived,” the New York Times reported. .

“By the early afternoon, nearly 200 people had gathered on the street outside, chanting and yelling at the agents, who peered out from inside the garage.”

Here’s video from early in the confrontation.

The federal agents called the New York Police Department for help. The crowd continued to grow. Here’s video from Getty Images.

NYPD officers tried to clear the way for the federal agents to leave, arresting several protesters and spraying others with chemicals.

“Just after 1:15 p.m., the confrontation erupted into chaos when agents burst from the garage in their vehicles and protesters chased them down Canal Street, hurling planters and trash cans after them,” the Times reported.

The agents fled the city and headed to New Jersey.

As the Times concluded: “The confrontation, which appeared to foil the raid, underscored the numerous challenges the federal government faces in trying to stage raids in a dense city like New York, where pushback from protesters in a largely liberal city appears inevitable.”

Independent journalist Talia Jane, who reported on the confrontation in real time on Bluesky, wrote afterwards:

The vibe shift today is, I think, due to the fact that New Yorkers were on the offensive instead of the defensive. Usually with protests, demonstrators have to defend the space, defend their right to march, etc. They get beat up and pushed around and antagonized into chaos and trauma.

Instead, demonstrators spent today jamming up operations for ICE and the NYPD….

People refused to go easily with any order. You want us to move back? You’ll have to make us. Even the tiniest thing, like adjusting a barricade to latch into another one, was met with enthusiastic resistance. Cop pushing a barricade into people? Barricade gets pulled away from him.

It doesn’t hurt that there were massive dumpsters full of stuff for protestors to play with but the consideration to grab things at all - those instincts were like the guiding light of god shining down on people. It wasn’t chaos for the sake of it. It was tactical, strategic, intentional.

A clarity of thought seemed pervasive through the crowd, not from training together or even knowing each other. I think it was having a shared goal that is inherently disruptive (block ICE) that made the steps to that end collectively understood and embraced.

City officials – including the police chief – expressed outrage over the federal agents’ conduct.

ABC7 News reported that “the special agent in charge of the New York Homeland Security Field Office Ricky Patel called NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch later in the afternoon to apologize for what happened. Tisch told Patel it was ‘unacceptable’ and put federal agents and police officers in harm’s way -- and if this activity continues someone will get hurt.”

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani reiterated his opposition to immigration raids in the city, saying: “When I met with the president, I made very clear that these kinds of raids are cruel and inhumane, that they are raids that do nothing to serve the interests of public safety, and that my responsibility is to be the mayor to each and every person that calls this city their home, and that includes millions of immigrants, of which I am one.”

City comptroller Brad Lander said the police officers shouldn’t have sided with the federal agents. “I really do want to ask the NYPD to remember who you’re sworn to protect and serve, and it is the people of New York City,” he said. “And yesterday, the people who were protecting and serving New Yorkers were the protesters who showed up.”

And Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition and a member of Mamdani’s transition team, told Time Magazine on Sunday that the confrontation was a sign of what’s to come:

“New York City is unlike any other place in this country or even the world, and what you have seen yesterday and time and again is that New Yorkers of all stripes, across all creeds, are not going to allow a rogue, lawless, violent and horrific agency to continue to mess with their neighbors,” he told Time. “I think the message here is that we’re all walking each other home together.”

New Orleans is Next

Immigration sweeps are expected to begin imminently in southern Louisiana. Protests have already begun.

Katie Schwartzmann and Conor Gaffney, lawyers from Protect Democracy, are offering a “playbook for the federal immigration surge in New Orleans” based on the lessons of Chicago.

Their advice:

Before deployment happens, pre-bunk bogus federal justifications. The administration claims that its enforcement operation will target only those immigrants convicted of crimes. That is false. Every resident can do the work of truth-telling: Speak to your neighbors, your city council members, and your social circles to debunk that lie loudly and repeatedly.

Document federal abuses. The most damning evidence in Chicago’s litigation came from residents filming federal violence on their phones and sharing far and wide on platforms like TikTok, Reddit, X, and others. Treat this not just as social media content, but as a shared civic duty.

Force the issue. When neighborhoods stand united to say, “We don’t need federal help,” it makes it impossible for the administration to claim they are here to “save” the city.

Keep it peaceful. Portland protesters used humor, showing up in costumes that successfully deflated federal attempts to portray them as threats. Nonviolent resistance from a broad cross-section of the community demonstrates that opposition comes from ordinary Americans defending their city, not from fringe agitators.

Where’s the Anti-War Movement?

Politico newsletters are typically breathless tip sheets, but Monday’s Politico Nightly newsletter actually raised a fascinating question: “Is the anti-war movement poised for a comeback?”

Intern Riya Misra wrote:

With rising criticism on the right and the left surrounding the possibility of a U.S. military intervention, not to mention residual anger over the deployment of troops to U.S. cities, it’s raised the prospect of a Trump-era rebirth of the anti-war movement that sparked in the 1960s, and again in the 2000s.

Her Q&A with New University history professor Jeremy Varon, whose new book examines the movement to stop the War on Terror, is worth reading in full. An excerpt:

What might an anti-war movement look like in the Trump era?

First off, it would have to make the case for its own existence by arguing that Trump already is at war, even if it doesn’t feel like the major armed conflicts of the past. There’s the strikes against alleged “narco-terrorists” on the high seas and threats against the Venezuelan government. There’s also the use of the military in domestic anti-immigrant operations, and threats to use the military to suppress dissent. Trump seems to want another Kent State, in which the National Guard shoots demonstrators, prompting chaos and additional lethal force.

A successful movement would contest the use of the military action for drug interdiction, for law enforcement, and at the whims of a trigger-happy president. It would say: “We don’t want to be a nation that assassinates people without any due process for alleged offenses normally punished by time in prison. That’s war crime stuff. We don’t want the army to squelch the free speech. That’s dictator stuff.”

Building a mass movement around such appeals is a tall order. For Trump, “stupid wars” are simply ones the U.S. can’t easily “win.” So he goes after soft, largely defenseless targets, like alleged drug runners or vulnerable immigrants and those who protect them. The dream is war with zero losses, one-way “lethality.” The calculation is that the public will care only so much if no Americans die. History supports that calculation. Large swaths of the U.S. public turned against the Vietnam and Iraq wars only when sizable numbers of U.S. troops got killed.

An anti-war movement today can’t simply warn of “another Vietnam,” like Iraq became. Trump wants to avoid that, too. So the trick is to get Americans to see three things: First, that who a nation kills, and why, is the measure of its soul; war crimes are un-American, a stain on our soul, and our soul matters. Second, that questions of who has the authority to kill, within what constraints and with what oversight, are not mere legal abstractions or wonky, institutional detail. It’s life and death, for someone, with great bearing on whether America is a constitutional republic or a rogue state. Third, and most important, that all lives have dignity and worth and are worthy of due process — including hapless civilians running drugs, undocumented migrants, and foes of whatever the current policies.

Public Citizen’s Legal Plans for 2026

In an end-of-the-year email, Public Citizen outlined its goals for the coming year, which include continuing to mobilize the American people and build massive nationwide coalitions.

The group filed 22 lawsuits against the administration in 2025, and expects to file even more in 2026.

These are some of the areas the group is monitoring for more litigation, investigation, and advocacy:

Trump’s Grift
Trump’s shady business dealings in this term are even more egregious than in his first term. We are exploring litigation opportunities around a range of schemes that benefit Trump and his family financially, including a possible plan to siphon off a share of government drug purchases.

Health Care
We are adding staff to monitor the chaos at the Department of Health and Human Services under Robert F. Kennedy Jr. We anticipate even more health policy-focused litigation in the coming year. We are tracking efforts to weaken Medicare and shovel money to for-profit insurers, among other key issues.

Corporate Subsidies
The cronyism of the Trump regime and its readiness to deploy taxpayer dollars to subsidize allied corporations knows no bounds. We are monitoring a major new initiative to throw massive subsidies at coal plants, tech companies, and more.

Immigrant Rights
The regime’s rabid cruelty toward immigrants means that anti-immigrant animus is informing all kinds of governmental activity — not just involving ICE, but also at the IRS, the Department of Education, the Department of Labor, and more. We’ll build on our existing docket of cases challenging the administration’s illegal and unconstitutional actions targeting immigrants.

Open Government
We expect to file a significant number of lawsuits under the Freedom of Information Act, forcing the disclosure of information that the regime is trying — illegally — to keep secret.

Recent Legal Action

• A federal judge in Denver last week ordered federal immigration officers to stop making arrests in Colorado without a warrant unless the detainee posed a flight risk. Judge R. Brooke Jackson noted that some immigrants had been held for as long as nearly 100 days instead of being released on recognizance, despite no probable cause that they might flee.

• A federal judge in Washington issued a similar order for D.C. on Tuesday. “Put simply, immigration enforcement officers may conduct a warrantless civil immigration arrest only if they have probable cause to believe that a person is both in the United States unlawfully and an escape risk,” Judge Beryl A. Howell wrote. She cited statements from Stephen Miller and other top administration officials to the effect that agents are using a much lower, “reasonable suspicion” standard.

• A federal judge in Boston has blocked the Trump administration from depriving Planned Parenthood and local affiliates that perform abortions of Medicaid funding. The ruling applies in the 22 states and Washington D.C., which filed the lawsuit in July.

• A federal judge in Washington has blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to skirt federal privacy laws that protected taxpayers’ sensitive information. The court’s stay will prevent the IRS from sharing data on millions of taxpayers with ICE.

End Notes

• In a news conference on Monday, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly spoke at length about his willingness to stand against Trump, who he cast as a bully. The Arizona Republic said the speech seems likely to “raise the senator’s profile as a prominent symbol of Democratic resistance to Trump and his agenda.”

• A new group called CommonLoop is proposing to create a nonprofit social media platform “where every dollar from advertising and sponsorship supports charitable missions and research. “

• A Catholic church in Massachusetts has replaced the baby Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in its nativity scene with a sign saying “ICE was here.” Father Stephen Josoma of the St. Susanna Parish in Dedham, told Boston.com that it’s a church tradition to use the nativity scene to “hold the mirror up to what’s happening, and this year, it seemed to be, my God, it seemed to be right there in front of us.”

Welcome to an abbreviated version of Heads Up News, in honor of Thanksgiving.

Here are some of the people and groups I’m thankful, from this past week alone:

• The neighbors and activists calling themselves “constitutional observers” who flooded into the street outside an ICE enforcement action in St. Paul, Minn., on Tuesday, holding phones in the air to record what was unfolding – and sticking with it even after getting pepper-sprayed by St. Paul police.

• The 30 people, most of them young, who participated in an act of civil disobedience on Saturday, getting themselves arrested for blocking the entrance to the Krome immigration detention center in Miami. “As young people, we refuse to accept a future where our friends and family can be disappeared without notice,” Manu Guerrero told WLRN News.

• The group of 70 people – mostly grandmothers – who show up weekly to commissioner meetings in a deep-red Ohio county to protest officials’ agreement with ICE. (And the Cincinnati Enquirer, for giving the story the front-page treatment.)

• Chicago federal Judge Sara L. Ellis, whose 233-page opinion and order issued on Thursday cited multiple examples of why ICE and Border Patrol statements were “simply not credible.” (Read my Press Watch column about how it’s past time for journalists to stop granting any credibility to statements from the Department of Homeland Security.)

• Chicago federal Magistrate Judge Gabriel Fuentes, who after presiding over the dismissals of five cases against protesters outside the Broadview ICE facility, severely scolded prosecutors for bringing the cases in the first place.

• The Rev. David Black, who was shot in the head and body with pepper balls as he was praying outside the ICE detention center in Broadview, Illinois, in September, and who last week told Religion News: “I’m seeing almost a revival of Christianity through what’s happening at Broadview in Chicago.”

• The Mesa, Ariz., community members who successfully demanded the release of longtime activist Martin Hernandez after police arrested him for trespassing while he was filming immigration enforcement activity.

• Public Justice, the nonprofit legal advocacy organization that filed a class-action lawsuit on Thursday against the sky-high civil penalties imposed on undocumented migrants as a way to compel them to depart the country.

• Gabe Gonzalez (profiled here by NPR), the cofounder of a community defense network in the Chicago neighborhood of Rogers Park, whose guiding principle is to make the work of immigration enforcement as inefficient as possible.

• Clifford “Buzz” Grambo (profiled here by Mother Jones), a veteran who patrols the streets of Baltimore on his electric scooter to keep his neighbors safe and make federal agents uncomfortable.

• The protesters who held a rally outside a court hearing for Kilmar Abrego Garcia in Greenbelt, Md., on Thursday.

• Faith leaders in Charlotte, who as Religions News reports, “are rushing to do what they can to protect and support immigrants in their communities,” including training hundreds of people in how to respond to immigration enforcement actions by filming them and blowing whistles.

• Adrian Carrasquillo, whose “Huddled Masses” newsletter for The Bulwark has relentlessly chronicled immigration and the people fighting back against ICE occupation. See his latest post on “How everyday people are reminding the nation what it means to be American.”

• Chicago’s Marimacha Monarca Press art collective, which designed and printed the laminated signs showing up on Chicago light poles that read “ICE secuestró alguien aquí” and “ICE abducted someone here,” with a date and time of the federal immigration arrest written in marker.

• The Purple People Resistance of Huntsville, Alabama; NevCo Mad As Hell of Nevada City; the Good Trouble Gang of Sacramento; the Badass Feminists of Gainesville, Florida; the I Scream Social Club of Tampa; Sharp Objects 502 of Louisville, Kentucky; Coffee Compassion Action! Of Cincinnati; Be There York of York, Pennsylvania; and the Circle of Cheyenne Citizen Warriors & Friends of Cheyenne, Wyoming -- some of the more than 320 Visibility Brigades that, as Micah L. Sifry reports in his newsletter, are now active in 46 of the states (plus DC). “Every week, they get together to stand on nearby highway overpasses holding custom letter boards spelling out a message of protest and defiance,” Sifry explains.

Happy Thanksgiving.