It’s all about the November election for the next five months, as resistance groups work towards what they hope will be a massive electoral repudiation of Trumpism.

It’s time to mark your calendar for these major events:

June 14: Rise Up, Sing Out: A Concert for the First Amendment

The No Kings Coalition is behind a star-studded concert and nationwide watch parties intended as counter-programming to Trump’s cage fight obscenity on the South Lawn. Jane Fonda, Bette Midler, Rufus Wainwright, Patti Smith, and many others will headline the main event at the Town Hall in New York City. Watch parties will “create a massive night of localized, relational organizing across the country.”

The organizers explain: “Moving beyond mass street mobilizations, June 14 will serve as a critical opportunity for No Kings supporters to strategize, connect with local organizers, and prepare for the ongoing fights ahead of the midterm elections.”

Find an event near you here. Extremely expensive tickets for the concert in New York can be purchased at riseupsingout.com.

June 17-20: Juneteenth Week of Action

The civil rights leaders behind the All Roads Lead to the South National Day of Action in Alabama last month have announced the first event of what they are calling “Freedom Summer,” in honor of the historic 1964 voter registration and education campaign.

The Juneteenth Week of Action includes events in Atlanta on June 17 and a June 20 rally in Harlem.

June 27: A Nationwide Mobilization for Truth, Equality & Freedom

Ahead of America’s 250^th anniversary, organizers of this mobilization say their goal is “to repair our history rather than erase it, ensuring America lives up to its foundational ideals for all of us.” The day will feature marches, rallies, and protests across the country “to reject the whitewashing of our past and future.”

Find an event near you here. Or host one yourself. Partner organizations include 50501, the Women’s March, and Common Cause.

July 17-19: Good Trouble Lives On Weekend of Action

Adopting the phrase coined by civil rights icon Congressman John Lewis, Good Trouble events will “carry the torch of the civil rights movement by doing what Lewis loved most – organizing, educating, and taking action,” organizers say. Partner organizations include the ACLU, 50501, Public Citizen, and Common Cause. The three calls to action:

• TEACH our community members about the critical fight for our freedom to vote

• REACH out to our neighbors to bring them into this movement

• PREACH to our loved ones about the moral necessity to carry the torch of the civil rights movement

There will be a virtual training session on June 11, “to learn how you can host a voter registration event and support your community in ensuring they can exercise their freedom to vote.” Are you a lawyer? A June 17 training session will focus on “how you as an attorney can help provide legal knowledge and support for one of the nationwide voter registration events in your area.”

August 8: Unite & Rise for Voting Rights

The League of Women Voters and its partners are hosting a nationwide day of civic action in honor of the anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

“Leagues and partners will lead hundreds of activations across the country centered on increasing voter engagement, turnout, and education, with particular emphasis on young voters and community partnerships,” organizers say. Anchor events will be held in Phoenix, San Francisco, Atlanta, Detroit, and Michigan.

It’s part of the League’s Unite and Rise 8.5: An Initiative to Defend Democracy.

September 15: National Voter Registration Day

Last year, 3,200 local organizations joined forces to help Americans register to vote or update their registration on National Voter Registration Day.

October 3: Power to the People Fest

At his Washington concert last month, Bruce Springsteen announced that his guest guitarist, Tom Morello, would curate a Power to the People Fest at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, MD, on October 3. The lineup is phenomenal, including Springsteen, the Foo Fighters, Dave Matthews, Joan Baez, Public Enemy, and many more.

Organizers say the event will be “about the power everyday human beings have when they come together — through music, art, community and action — to shape our country and our planet on, and beyond, Election Day.”

In an “immersive space” called Freedom Village, nonprofits and community groups will “highlight ways to get involved through civic engagement, grassroots organizing and mutual aid.”

Portions of the proceeds will be donated to VoteRiders, and HeadCount will help fans register to vote.

Inside and Outside Delaney Hall

The vigil outside Delaney Hall, the immigrant detention center in Newark, is about to enter its third week.

Protesters are once again facing off against ICE agents. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka had sent Newark Police in to de-escalate the situation after ICE agents and New Jersey state troopers repeatedly attacked protesters. But he has now pulled back.

As a result, as AMNY reported, on Friday night ICE agents shot protesters with pepper balls, and a prison employee struck a photographer with their vehicle.

On Monday, N.J. Gov. Mikie Sherrill was finally allowed into the facility. But, she said, “I was not allowed to meet or speak directly with the detainees, which continues to raise serious questions about the real conditions of the facility and the treatment of those held there.”

Ms. Rachel, the beloved children’s YouTube star, paid a visit on Monday. “Met the sweetest children whose hearts are broken,” she posted on Instagram. “They just want their parents home again. I spoke with a 13 year old whose dad is in Delaney. ‘He’s a wonderful father’ she said, tearing up,” she wrote. “It makes no sense that their family has been ripped apart. Why are we traumatizing kids?.. I will always stand with these families.”

The American Friends Service Committee reminds us that inside Delaney Hall, detainees have issued four letters of demands. They are calling for:

• The immediate release of all detained people. They are prioritizing the elderly, pregnant, young people, and those with serious medical conditions—while insisting that all detained individuals deserve to pursue their cases outside of detention.

• Meaningful and fair review of immigration cases and habeas petitions.

• An end to coercive pressure to sign deportation or voluntary departure documents.

• An in-person meeting with Gov. Mikie Sherrill at Delaney Hall so she can observe conditions and hear directly from detained people.

More Vindication for the “Broadview Six”

Transcripts from the grand jury proceedings that resulted in the indictment of the “Broadview Six” anti-ICE protesters in Chicago were released on Tuesday, revealing jaw-dropping misconduct by federal prosecutors.

Many observers had suspected that grand jurors had been railroaded into supporting trumped-up politically-motivated charges.

Wow were they right.

The transcript for the October 9 session shows that Assistant U.S. Attorney Sheri Mecklenburg personally vouched for the credibility of the case and argued the case rather than simply presenting it, two massive violations of grand jury rules. Nevertheless, the grand jury did not indict.

A week later, she came back to try again -- and kicked several people who had expressed skepticism about the case off the grand jury, which is not allowed. (One of them told her “I heard this case like last week and I thought it was a crock of shit then and I still think it is.”)

A week after that, she admitted to having talked to two grand jurors outside the grand jury room, another gross violation of grand jury rules. The jurors finally gave in.

Did this happen because of pressure from the White House? Defense attorneys have filed a motion seeking any communications between Washington and Chicago. So stay tuned.

Last Week in the Courts

• A federal judge in Rhode Island struck down immigration policies that have halted asylum processing, frozen immigration benefits, and targeted immigrants based on nationality. Judge John J. McConnell Jr. assailed “a series of policies that threw the lives of countless immigrants living in the United States into indeterminate legal limbo.” Citing the line that if people want to immigrate to the United States they ought to “follow the law” and “do things the right way,” McConnell wrote that “This case serves as a perfect example of immigrants doing just that.” By contrast, he wrote, the government had done neither. He also slammed DHS for “pretextual concerns of ‘national security’ that mask anti-immigrant sentiments that it is forbidden from letting influence its decision-making.”

• A federal judge in Washington struck down Trump’s move to impose $100,000 fees on employers seeking visas for skilled foreign workers. Judge Leo T. Sorokin said the “payment requirement amounts to a tax, which exceeds the scope of the President’s discretionary authority.”

• A federal judge in Washington struck down an Internal Revenue Service guidance that restricted tax credits for wind and solar projects, finding it “arbitrary and capricious.” Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote that “Defendants failed to articulate a reasoned explanation for this consequential decision.”

• Two members of the publisher’s advisory board for Stars and Stripes, the military’s independent newspaper, have filed suit seeking to block implementation of a U.S. Department of Defense memo that would effectively end the newspaper’s editorial independence.

End Notes

• From Sherilyn Ifill: “The SCOTUS Project to Undo Voting Rights Protections is Nearly Complete.”

• From the Associated Press: “What to know about the growing opposition to Trump family-linked resort in Albania.”

• From the “prophetic preachers” who spoke at “Moral Monday” in Washington: “Truth In A Time Of Lies.”

It will take a massive electoral defeat to put Trumpism fully behind us.

That’s why the fall of Viktor Orban is such a talisman for democracy-loving Americans. Hungarians overwhelmingly threw out their entrenched, corrupt, authoritarian leader in April.

What can we learn from them about how to cleanse the country of ours?

I wrote a bit about this when it happened. My initial takeaway was that if Hungary is a model, then 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.

Now M. Gessen, New York Times opinion columnist and my go-to for all things Eastern European, has weighed in with a must-read piece headlined “This Is the Formula That Defeated Orban. It Would Defeat Trump, Too.”

She writes that one lesson of now-Prime Minister Peter Magyar’s success “lies in the scale, reach and relentlessness of his organizing network.“ Magyar had somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 volunteers. The U.S. population is 36 times the size of Hungary’s, so that would equate to at least a million people here.

Another lesson: “Old-fashioned in-person politics can be a powerful antidote to media fearmongering.” Magyar was a relentless campaigner.

Another lesson: “Don’t mince words.” Magyar didn’t just call Orban’s regime “corrupt,” he “called it a mafia state — a fundamentally criminal enterprise.”

Another lesson: Be an outsider. Magyar “was not a member of the old opposition, whose policies had led to the discontent that made Orban’s rise possible and whose timidity had helped perpetuate Orban’s power.”

Another lesson: Voters don’t only care about pocketbook issues. Post-election polling showed that Hungarian voters saw corruption as the most important issue by far, way more than the economy, and also frequently cited “lies,” “fearmongering, war rhetoric,” and “people got fed up.”

Gessen writes:

In other words, Hungarians seemed to see the damage that Orbanism had done to the nation as more important than any harm they felt they had suffered as individuals. They were united by a sense of moral outrage.

Gessen also gives Magyar credit for thinking big:

In his inaugural speech to Parliament, broadcast on giant screens set up around the square, Peter Magyar said that voters had handed him a mandate “not just to change the government, but to change the system. To start over.

So, here’s my takeaway: Hungary tells us the way to beat an authoritarian is with an enormous popular movement led by uncorrupted, charismatic people full of moral outrage and committed to radical reconstruction.

So does that mean the answer lies in a group like Indivisible, rather than the current Democratic party? And in someone like AOC, not someone like Josh Shapiro?

What do you think?

Day 13 in Newark

Protests outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark are in their 13^th day, while an unknown number of immigrants inside remain engaged in a hunger and labor strike to call attention to the facility’s inhumane conditions and the denial of their due process rights.

I wrote last week about how ICE had begun routinely assaulting protesters outside the facility.

In a strange turn of events, New Jersey’s Democratic Governor Mikie Sherrill on Friday sent state police to Delaney to take over from ICE, whose conduct she decried as too aggressive. ICE itself posed a threat to public safety, she said. Exactly right.

But not long after the state troopers arrived on Friday night, they broke out the riot gear and the horses, and took up where ICE had left off, firing tear gas and shooting pepper spray at protesters with little or no provocation.

On Saturday night, troopers – now using flash-bang grenades as well -- aggressively pushed protesters more than half a mile away from the facility. And early on Sunday, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka – an outspoken opponent of Delaney Hall – nevertheless declared a curfew, violating the First Amendment rights of protesters who up until then had been holding a round-the-clock vigil.

Sunday night, when several dozen entirely peaceful protesters refused to leave at nightfall, troopers again responded with violence, shooting at least two people with rubber bullets and arresting 61 people, including at least two credentialed photojournalists.

On Monday, Baraka sent Newark Police officers – notably not in riot gear or on horseback -- to take over from the troopers. Monday and Tuesday nights were calm. The curfew has also been lifted.

Meanwhile, the situation inside Delaney Hall appears unchanged.

Indivisible is hosting a Zoom briefing on “Delaney Hall and Beyond: Showing Up Strategically” Thursday at 8 p.m. ET, “for anyone looking for what to do in this moment to support the strikers and nonviolently take on Trump’s detention and deportation machine.”

This is Very Bad

A federal jury in Spokane, Washington, last week found the “Spokane Three” guilty on felony conspiracy charges for their part in a June 2025 anti-ICE protest.

Felony charges!

Jac Archer, Justice Forral, and Bajun Mavalwalla II were found guilty of “conspiring to impede law enforcement officers or injure property used in the execution of their duties.” They face up to six years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

As the Spokesman-Review reported:

The case widely examined the lines between the First Amendment and when assembly can turn into a crime. Protesters that day had showed up to Spokane’s ICE facility at 411 W. Cataldo Ave. to sit in front of a bus to prevent it from taking a group of immigrants to a federal detention center in Tacoma. The initial group that stationed themselves in front of the bus, including Archer, had intended to remain nonviolent and were prepared to be arrested.

When protesters saw agents attempting to leave out of a parking lot gate, they ran to the gate and stood in front of it. Agents then came outside, walked into the crowd and began pushing and grabbing people, pulling them towards the ground, video footage from the trial showed.

At some point, protesters slashed the tires of the transport vehicles and others linked arms around a red U.S. Customs and Border Patrol van to stop it from leaving.

As Robert Chang, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, told The Guardian: “By this logic, any protest could be a conspiracy.”

Archer’s attorney, Carl Oreskovich, told the Spokesman-Review:

I think it was an extraordinarily aggressive approach to prosecution of protests. And it certainly is going to chill people who want to utilize their First Amendment right to dissent against government actions that they don’t agree with … And it is heartbreaking to see that is the climate of the nation we live in.

By contrast, it’s a dream come true for the fascism-adjacent, like the Manhattan Institute, which as Wired reports is working hard “to classify minor protest-related crimes as ‘civil terrorism.’”

The goal is “to pass state-level legislation reclassifying minor crimes like vandalism, blocking a roadway, or trespassing during a protest as felonies that would carry 18-month prison sentences as punishment,” Wired reports.

This comes “amid a broader Trump administration effort to crack down on leftist organizations, causes, and social movements, while recasting acts of nonviolent civil disobedience as potential crimes.”

MoveOn’s Next Move

MoveOn rolled out its 2026 midterm election strategy last week. The plan is to reach out in particular to people who – for whatever reason -- voted for Joe Biden in 2020 but sat out the 2024 election when Kamala Harris was the Democratic nominee.

A Pew Research Center analysis found that 15 percent of Biden voters – or about 12 million people – did not vote for Harris. MoveOn puts that number at 19 million.

MoveOn is calling those missing voters the “skippers,” and it intends to mobilize tens of thousands of volunteers to find them and win them back. That will entail contacting and persuading skippers directly, as well as volunteering for progressive candidates, and canvassing.

“These are the most important voters for us, and the outcome of the midterms rests on bringing hundreds of thousands of them back into the fold,” MoveOn Executive Director Katie Bethell said.

Warehouse Watch

NBC News reports that DHS is “looking into selling some of the large warehouses that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had purchased earlier this year to serve as mega-detention centers for immigrants.”

DHS officials told NBC that ICE no longer needs the capacity to hold 100,000 immigrants.

ICE is currently detaining as many as 70,000 immigrants on a daily basis.

Project Salt Box reports that DHS paid just over $1 billion for the eleven warehouses it bought this year, and is unlikely to recoup anywhere near as much. “A review of state tax and land records and commercial sales data shows the government paid above the most recent valuation at every one of the sites and above recent market comparables at most of them,” the group reports. “In Socorro, Texas, ICE paid $123 million for a property last valued at about $11 million. In Flowery Branch, Ga., it paid $68 million for a site previously valued at $400,000….” The list goes on.

You’re Being Tracked

A broad coalition of grassroots, civil-rights and press-freedom groups has launched a new campaign called “Solidarity Over Surveillance” to “engage individuals, communities and organizations in the fight against corporate and government-sponsored surveillance.”

Its goals are “to stop data brokers from selling sensitive user information to law enforcement; protect dissent, privacy and anonymity in an age of AI-powered surveillance; empower people to use open-records requests to expose local and state governments’ surveillance partnerships; help mobilize local resistance to the construction of extractive data centers; and challenge the government’s weaponization of domestic-terrorism powers.”

The Past Week in the Courts

• A federal judge in Virginia blocked all activity related to Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund for insurrectionists and other political allies. Plaintiffs represented by Democracy Forward had filed suit against the fund on May 22. The issue is probably moot now that acting attorney general Todd Blanche has said the fund has been scrapped. But you never know.

• A federal judge in Washington prohibited the National Park Service from taking action against a group for displaying an “8647” flag as part of its protest encampment near the National Mall. The ruling by Judge Randolph D. Moss bodes poorly for DOJ’s preposterous indictment of former FBI director James Comey for posting a photo of seashells arranged into the same numbers. “Not every use of the slang phrase ‘86’ constitutes a threat of violence,” Moss wrote. “[T]o the contrary, it is most often used to mean that an item is no longer available or that someone or something should be removed, ejected, or thrown out.” His conclusion: “no reasonable observer could have viewed Plaintiff’s display of the flag as a threat to the President’s life or physical safety.”

• A federal judge in Denver blocked federal officials from breaking up Boulder’s National Center for Atmospheric Research by giving its supercomputing center away. The supercomputing center is a pillar of the nation’s atmospheric research. Judge R. Brooks Jackson agreed that the move was an act of political revenge for Colorado Gov. Jared Polis’s refusal to release from prison Tina Peters, a former county clerk convicted of tampering with voting machines in an attempt to support Trump’s election-rigging conspiracy theories. Ironically, Polis caved and released her last week.

• The ACLU is asking a federal judge in Tennessee to order members of the 31-agency Memphis Safe Task Force to stop retaliating against activists who are monitoring their behavior. The task force, a Trump creation, has been wreaking havoc in Memphis since September. Thousands of federal, state, and local agents aggressively patrol the city, terrorizing immigrants and people of color in particular. The request for an injunction includes declarations from community observers describing pretextual traffic stops, surveillance, bumper-rushing, and false arrests.

End Notes

• From ProPublica: “U.S. Lawmakers Demand Reforms to Immigration Officers’ Use of Tear Gas and Pepper Spray.”

• From In These Times: “How Resisting Trumpism Could Revive the U.S. Labor Movement.”

• In honor of Pride Month, from MoveOn: Buy a “Queer Joy Is Resistance” Unisex Cotton T-Shirt.

Masked federal agents are once again assaulting protesters, this time outside a New Jersey immigration detention facility.

Demonstrators have been holding a round-the-clock vigil for six days outside the Delaney Hall Detention Facility in Newark in support of immigrants inside who are engaged in a hunger and labor strike over inhumane conditions and violations of their due process rights.

ICE agents on Monday and Tuesday responded with brutality when protesters tried to block their vehicles.

On Monday, Sen. Andy Kim was among those caught in a cloud of pepper spray after he positioned himself between agents and demonstrators in an attempt to de-escalate a face-off. (See this photo from photographer Dakota Santiago, and this one from NJ.com’s Jelani Gibson.)

On Tuesday, agents used pepper spray and tasers against demonstrators. And on Tuesday night, agents viciously shoved protesters, hit them their batons, and pepper-sprayed them in the face. At least two men were thrown to the ground and arrested. Here’s some alarming video. Protesters said one of the arrested men was a medic and a veteran.

Several Democratic officials have visited the protesters to show their support, including Kim, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, and Representatives Rob Menendez and LaMonica McIver. (McIver still faces jumped-up criminal charges for a scrum outside that same facility a year ago.)

The Department of Homeland Security, under the new management of Markwayne Mullin, appears far from chastened. It has responded to the protests with a series of hostile tweets and press releases attacking “New Jersey sanctuary politicians” for “spreading smears about ICE.”

Independent journalist Amanda Moore captured the moment as detainees at Delaney Hall flashed the lights inside the facility and protesters cheered.

And Status Coup News interviewed a 10-year-old whose father is detained inside. “If they’re such big and bad,” she said, pointing at ICE agents, “why don’t they just take theirs masks off?”

Scientists Fight Back

Protect Democracy’s Allie Cashel writes:

Scientists are fighting back. A resistance that began as individual acts of courage is now taking collective shape, and what has emerged over the past several months is beginning to look like the early architecture of a movement.

For instance:

The Federal Workers Alliance for Democracy (FWAD) has built a growing coalition of workers and allies mobilizing the federal workforce to refuse compliance with dangerous and illegal orders, building networks across every federal agency in every state.

After HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismissed all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the dismissed scientists “formed the Immunization Scientific Advisory Collaborative (ISAC) and published independent, evidence-based evaluations of the reconstituted committee’s proceedings,” Cashel reports.

And graduate students have formed a nationwide coalition called Scientist Network for Advancing Policy (SNAP), which has produced more than 200 op-eds for the students’ hometown newspapers.

The CBC Responds to Redistricting

The Congressional Black Caucus is calling on major corporations across the U.S to oppose redistricting efforts intended to eliminate majority-Black U.S. House districts.

“Five years ago, more than 150 companies publicly declared that democracy and equal access to the ballot were fundamental American values,” the group’s letter to corporate leaders said. “For those companies that previously chose to speak, this moment demands continued courage and consistency.”

Last week, the caucus and the NAACP called for Black athletes to boycott public universities in states that are trying to eliminate districts held by Black lawmakers.

But most of all, the caucus is focused on voter registration and mobilization, Rep. Yvette D. Clarke, the caucus’s chair, told the Washington Post. And in the longer run, they hope to revive the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

Last Week in the Courts

• A federal judge in Tennessee dismissed the criminal case against immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, calling it the result of vindictive prosecution. Abrego Garcia is a Maryland father of three whose travails have become a focal point for the anti-immigration movement. Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. concluded Justice Department officials filed the criminal charges as retaliation for Abrego Garcia’s legal victories in his deportation case.

• Two more federal judges — in Maine and Wisconsin — have ruled against the DOJ’s demand that state’s turn over their voter registration rolls. Democracy Docket reports that the latest dismissals bring the DOJ’s record to 0-8. In Maine, Judge Lance Walker wrote that a DOJ lawyer’s argument that this was a routine request from the Civil Rights Division, not intended to create a national voter registration database, was “almost immediately undermined by the issuance of an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to compile a ‘State Citizenship List’ in order to ‘assist in verifying identity and Federal election voter eligibility.’”

• The Southern Poverty Law Center is asking a federal judge in Alabama to dismiss criminal fraud charges it argues were the result of vindictive prosecution. (The brief cites the Abrego Garcia case, above.) Meanwhile, a letter from more than 440 civil and human rights, faith, environmental, nonprofit organizations, and labor unions called the SPLC prosecution “a naked attempt to weaponize the criminal justice system to silence speech and activities this administration dislikes.”

Resistance groups are already fighting Trump’s outrageous new $1.8 billion slush-fund.

• Democracy Forward sued on behalf of a coalition of organizations and individuals who argued they would be harmed by “its implicit endorsement of dangerous conduct.”

• And CREW sued on the grounds that the slush fund “is unlawfully structured to evade transparency laws including the Freedom of Information Act and the Federal Records Act and usurps Congress’s authority to spend taxpayer money.”

A Lemon of a Case

This is what happens when inept MAGA prosecutors pursue a ridiculous case against journalists covering a protest.

Independent journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort are among 38 people charged with criminal conspiracy for a protest at a St. Paul church this winter.

As MPRNews reports, newly unsealed documents show that “U.S. Magistrate Judge John Docherty denied requests in February for five separate search warrants, including for YouTube information of independent journalists Georgia Fort and Don Lemon.”

Docherty’s ruling is really quite stunning. His conclusion:

Before the Court are five applications for search warrant by Homeland Security Special Agent Timothy Gerber. None of the five applications establish probable cause to believe that evidence of a crime will be found in the places to be searched, all of the warrant applications improperly refer the Court to material outside the search warrant application itself, and all of the warrant applications seek sealing without, however, a motion to seal or a proposed order being supplied to the Court. The applications are all DENIED.

Docherty revealed the prosecution’s absurdly broad and invasive demands:

The warrant seeks “subscriber information in any form kept,” including the names of subscribers, the mailing addresses, residential addresses, business addresses, and email addresses of subscribers, the telephone numbers of subscribers, and the Internet Protocol addresses from which the “Don Lemon Show” was accessed, among other information. There is no attempt made to explain why the compilation by the government of a comprehensive index of subscribers to “The Don Lemon Show” is evidence that a crime was committed.

An Ode to Bruce

The great labor journalist Steven Greenhouse writes in the Guardian:

The Bruce Springsteen concert I went to in Brooklyn last week was unlike any concert I’ve attended in decades. It was far more than a fabulous, joyous concert; it was also an inspiring resistance event.

From the get-go, the Boss made clear that this concert would be part of the anti-Trump resistance. It was a three-hour-long ode to the resistance and a thunderous call to Springsteen fans to step up and do more to fight for democracy and against authoritarianism. In this way, Springsteen is serving as a model for how celebrities can stand up against Trump and fight for what’s right.

Springsteen performs at Nationals Stadium in Washington tonight. I’ll be there!

Donald Trump’s former defense lawyer, now serving as acting attorney general, gave his boss two astonishingly corrupt payoffs this week: A taxpayer-funded $1.8 billion slush fund to dole out to insurrectionists and other allies, and immunity from tax audits that could have cost him more than $100 million.

Such obvious self-dealing is morally indefensible. And Trump’s assertion that he is above the law is a violation of one of the core tenets of American democracy.

Good-government and pro-democracy groups have been quick to express outrage and call for Trump to be stopped. Corruption is now inescapably a major resistance issue. And here are some questions going forward: Are Trump’s latest moves so universally offensive that they change the political calculus? Will Democrats be able to peel away any of his Republican support? And will new people join in protests and other resistance efforts?

CREW president Donald K. Sherman issued a strong statement on Monday: “Trump and the Justice Department just engaged in the most brazen act of self-dealing in the history of the presidency,” he asserted. “This is one of the single most corrupt acts in American history.”

Public Citizen co-presidents Lisa Gilbert and Robert Weissman declared that “Every member of Congress should be forced to go on record as to whether they will permit this monstrous theft of taxpayer resources.”

Two former U.S. Capitol Police officers, working with the Public Integrity Project, quickly filed a federal lawsuit seeking to dissolve the new fund. The lawsuit is blunt:

In the most brazen act of presidential corruption this century, President Donald J. Trump has created a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund to finance the insurrectionists and paramilitary groups that commit violence in his name.

The fund, styled the “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” is illegal. No statute authorizes its creation, the settlement on which it is premised is a corrupt sham, and its design violates the Constitution and federal law.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, is leading the charge for political accountability. “The whole administration now is just corruption, highway robbery every day,” he told MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow on Monday. “At this point everything must be tried in order to try to restore the rule of law in the country. We can’t leave any potential tool just sitting on the table. We’ve got we’ve got to try to attempt everything.”

Raskin said “we must start by trying to get our at least four or five Republican colleagues to come over to our side to say this is utterly lawless and authoritarian and it cannot stand.” Raskin cosigned a letter demanding documents and written answers from key administration officials and is calling for a Judiciary Committee vote to subpoena them.

And civil rights attorney Sherilyn Ifill continues to provide moral and intellectual heft to the pro-democracy movement. Last week, I recommended her essay about the fight for voting rights: “If You Want Democracy in this Country You Have to Fight White Supremacy.”

Today, in another incredibly powerful, must-read essay, she writes about how Trump’s attacks on racial equality and birthright citizenship, and his “grotesque scheme to reward January 6^th insurrectionists with payouts from the federal treasury,” all have something in common: They are violations of the Constitution’s 14^th Amendment. She writes:

The 14^th Amendment is the constitutional tool designed to constrain the very abuses of power that we are confronting at this moment. It was forged in a time of national fracture, widespread white supremacist ideology, and insurrectionist fervor. In other words, its provisions were uniquely created for such a time as this.

It is, if properly enforced, the most powerful tool we have to stave off the total collapse of democracy in this country.

Read it!

So far, the only specific protest against Trump’s new slush fund that I know of came on Tuesday night, when Stacey Young, a former Justice Department employee who founded the group Justice Connection, projected a John Adams quote on top of the huge Trump banner that hangs on the main Justice Department building.

“A government of laws, not of men,” read the quotation.

From Selma to Montgomery

Tens of thousands of people rallied for voting rights in Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, on Saturday, taking part in events under the banner of “All Roads Lead to the South.:

Signs included “No Jim Crow Maps”; “The Ballot Is The New Underground Railroad”; and “Honor King, End Racism,” Solomon Crenshaw Jr. reported for The Handbasket

Joyce Vance shared pictures in her newsletter.

Protect Democracy staffers Corey Dukes and Alison Hirsh wrote on their group’s blog:

The march from Selma to Montgomery — first trod in 1965, retraced again this weekend — was organized in a little more than a week by Black Voters Matter and a coalition of civil rights and voting rights organizations under the banner “All Roads Lead to the South.” The message was clear. The fight that produced the Voting Rights Act, and with it America’s second, imperfect attempt at a real multiracial democracy, must be refought. And the people who know that best are the ones who showed up to say so….

What is happening in the South right now is not a policy dispute or a legal technicality. It is the opening of a new front in the administration’s Deceive, Disrupt, Deny strategy to override the will of the voters and ensure the outcome they want in the 2026 mid-term elections. This is a racist power grab, locking in discriminatory congressional majorities for the foreseeable future — and it is moving fast.

They offered a list of possible next steps that is worth your time.

The aforementioned Sherilyn Ifill was there. She wrote:

What sane-thinking Americans must now understand is that to eliminate Black political power is to not only consign Black people to second-class citizenship across the South where most Black people live, it will also usher in the end of democracy in this country. It will catapult us back to the 1950s, with all of the ignominy of functioning as a half-apartheid state as part of our national identity once again. And they won’t stop at the South.

That is why it was gratifying to be part of the thousands who gathered in Selma and Montgomery, Alabama on Saturday in an act of solidarity and the shared purpose. I understand from the organizers that this gathering was only the first, and that they will plan similar mobilization efforts in other southern state capitols where legislatures are engaged in eliminating Black political representation in their states.

Other Protests

• Police tackled and arrested protesters after their regular Saturday rally outside a massive warehouse in Salt Lake City that ICE wants to turn into a detention facility. The Salt Lake Tribune reported that four people were arrested “on suspicion of interfering with police.” Police apparently followed and arrested one protester after they drove away. Other protesters followed. Police told the protesters to back up. The protesters questioned the order. Then the police started tackling, pushing, and arresting people. A video was posted on Instagram by one of the protesters.

• “About 100 rallygoers gathered on Capitol Hill Wednesday to hear from activists and members of Congress protesting the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to strike down federal protections for the voting power of minorities,” reported News of the States.

• Bishop William J. Barber II, who leads Repairers of the Breach, held a “Moral Monday Peace and Nonviolence Rally” outside the White House. Here is some video. “Every piece of policy violence has a death measurement,” he said.

• “About 50 protesters gathered outside Detroit’s federal courthouse Monday to oppose the proposed Romulus ICE detention center, urging state and local leaders to take action to block the project after a scheduled court hearing was postponed,” Michigan Live reported.

• Elder Aguilar-Macario, a Georgia high school student, was detained by ICE following a motor vehicle crash earlier this month. On Sunday, Chattooga County Democratic Party hosted a protest outside the county courthouse in support of the teen’s release, WDEF TV reported.

• “Protests took place at 28 locations across Indiana on Saturday as part of the Indiana Statewide Day of Action, a coordinated effort opposing immigration enforcement policies tied to the Trump administration and Indiana Gov. Mike Braun,” Network Indiana reported.

• Members of the Visibility Brigade hung a sign over a freeway in Boston that said “WE ARE UNDERREACTING”.

Is Civil Disobedience a Federal Criminal Conspiracy?

The answer should be obvious, but the New York Times reports:

Federal prosecutors will try to make the case this week that three activists who protested immigration enforcement last summer crossed the line from political dissent into criminal conspiracy — a legal theory that prompted the top federal prosecutor in Eastern Washington to resign rather than sign off on the charges.

Bajun Mavalwalla II, Justice Forral and Jac Archer will stand trial starting Monday on charges of conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers stemming from a June 11, 2025, protest in Spokane, Wash.

Richard Barker, the former prosecutor, told the Times: “We’re used to seeing people arrested because they refused to leave an area or they are engaging in civil disobedience. But when have we used the federal government to police that? That to me is a distinction with a difference.”

Meanwhile, in Chicago, “Prosecutors are set to try the remaining ‘Broadview Six’ immigration protesters in a rare federal misdemeanor trial next week,” Capitol News Illinois reports. “But defense attorneys are still hopeful it might be avoided after U.S. District Judge April Perry agreed to read unredacted transcripts from inside the grand jury room.”

Last Week in the Courts

• A federal judge in Washington granted a preliminary injunction requiring Trump administration officials to follow the Presidential Records Act and preserve work-related documents including text messages. A DOJ legal opinion had argued that the act unconstitutional. Judge John D. Bates disagreed, and granted the order because “plaintiffs have established a substantial risk that the government is no longer fully complying with the Records Act, at least with respect to three categories of records: electronic records created on personal rather than official devices, records created by the President or Vice President themselves, and records the President discards.”

• A federal judge in New York barred ICE from making immigration arrests at courts in New York, reversing his previous order after DOJ lawyers admitted they had misled him about an internal guidance. Judge P. Kevin Castel wrote that he acted “both to correct a clear error and prevent a manifest injustice.” As the New York Times noted: “The policy had led to remarkable scenes within the immigration courts at 26 Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan, as immigrants attending court for routine hearings were suddenly detained and, sometimes, dragged away from their families. Protesters began to attend in droves and some — including [former comptroller Brad] Lander — were arrested alongside the immigrants.”

• A federal judge in Washington has blocked the Trump administration from imposing sanctions against Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for Palestinian human rights, after she spoke in favor of war crime charges against U.S. and Israeli officials over their actions in Gaza. Judge Richard Leon wrote that “Albanese has done nothing more than speak!”

• The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office, in Minneapolis, has filed charges against ICE officer Christian Castro. Castro faces four counts of second-degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime. He fired a shot through the front door of a home that he knew was occupied, hitting a man in the leg. ICE, in a statement that is still available online, falsely claimed agents were attacked by people wielding a shovel and a broom.

• The New York Times has once again sued the Department of Defense over its press restrictions. A new requirement -- that reporters have an official escort – was adopted after the Times won a court order vacating the previous policy for press credentialing.

End Notes

• From the Houston Chronicle: “Houston woman refuses to stop protesting ICE even after being tear-gassed near Dilley detention center.”

• Also from the Houston Chronicle: “We were accidentally sent contract details for Texas’ Dilley detention center. Here’s what we found.”

• From the Washington Post: “Instead of proms and parties, she spent senior year fighting an ICE warehouse.”

• From the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights: “Over 440 Civil Rights, Faith, and Labor Organizations Call Department of Justice Indictment of Southern Poverty Law Center a ‘Naked Attempt to Weaponize the the Criminal Justice System to Silence Speech’.”

The movement starts Saturday morning in Selma at the Edmund Pettus bridge, where faith leaders will gather at sacred ground and pray.

Then, in the afternoon, outside the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery, civil rights leaders from across the country will lead an emergency protest – a kickoff for the battle to win back representation for the millions of Black voters the Supreme Court effectively disenfranchised when it gutted the Voting Rights Act on April 29.

It’s being billed as a National Day of Action for Voting Rights.

The website declares: “Same Fight. New Generation.”

But there’s something new about this fight, too. It comes as Donald Trump and the Republican Party are engaged in an authoritarian and white nationalist campaign to hold power regardless of what the people want.

So it’s even more than a battle for civil rights. It’s also a battle for democracy.

It’s simultaneously a battle for minority representation and for majority rule.

And if you’re not fired up to fight white supremacy in the name of American democracy quite yet, you sure as hell will be after you read this extraordinary essay by Sherilyn Ifill, a towering figure in the modern civil rights movement, titled “If You Want Democracy in this Country You Have to Fight White Supremacy.”

I can’t recommend it highly enough. Excerpts do not do it justice, but the core of Ifill’s argument is this:

It was the demand and sacrifice of ordinary people – civil rights lawyers and activists who forced change – many at the cost of their livelihood and their lives whose demands and sacrifices ushered in democracy our country. Once you understand this truth, then you can also understand that the decades-long resistance to the successes of the Civil Rights Movement has always been an anti-democracy movement.

That is why the effort by Trump and Republican state leadership to gerrymander Black representation out of Congress must be understood as not only an attack on Black people, but on democracy itself. If the Republican racial gerrymandering effort is successful, the U.S. will lose any claim to democracy for a generation or more.

And the forces that stand today against citizenship and political representation for Black people won’t stop there. They will not tolerate meaningful political representation for any group that opposes their oligarchical Christian nationalist ideology. They seek a one-party political system in a country ruled by authoritarians. The political oppression of Black people is not the end. It is the conduit.

What’s needed, Ifill writes, is “a strong, determined, even radical Congress,” a reformed Supreme Court, and a cultural reset that reasserts the value of a multiracial nation.

But we can’t get any of those things without power. And our opponents are moving faster than we imagined. We need to accelerate our work. That means that every American who believes in democracy, who believes in equality and humanity must decide now what they can do and what they must do.

Another extraordinary civil rights figure, the Rev. William Barber, made a similar argument on Monday, at a “Moral Monday in DC” rally. You didn’t hear a thing about it, because the legacy media ignored it completely. But Roland Martin’s Black Star Network covered it and captured it on video.

“Democracy is hard,” Barber told the crowd. “But here’s the question before this generation: What do you do when the democracy has been hijacked?” He explained:

You see, we actually have a hijacking that doesn’t believe that America started out broken and has been trying to get better. It believes America was right in its beginning when only wealthy white men were in control, and every effort since then has been a reversal.

His conclusion:

[The] attack on voting rights isn’t just an attack on Black people. It’s an attack on democracy.

See, because the same people that attack voting rights, they want vote power so that they can attack healthcare, so they can attack living wages, so they can attack public education.

And that’s why we have to say no to unholy war. And we have to say no to the violence of voter suppression. We have to say no to all policy violence.

Arguably the biggest question going forward is whether this new attack on democracy will motivate voters in the upcoming elections – and, in House races, will that make up for the advantage that Republicans in the South are now giving themselves by gerrymandering away minority representation?

Responding to the Supreme Court’s decision, the editors of The Nation wrote that the first step is to nominate strong Democrats:

Democratic primary voters need to nominate congressional candidates who are committed to advancing the agenda proposed by Representative Ayanna Pressley, the Massachusetts Democrat who said, “Congress must immediately pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and take action to restore the integrity and legitimacy of [the] Supreme Court—including expanding the court, imposing term limits on Supreme Court justices, and passing a binding Supreme Court code of ethics. Every option should be on the table.

And then, of course, come the November elections, which could not be more pivotal.

Kristen Clarke, general counsel of the NAACP, told MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow on Monday that the outrage will definitely translate into votes. “This election season, you will see turnout like you have never seen before,” she said. “It is at the ballot box where we will use our voice in the most determined fashion during this dark season.”

Could It Be Desperation?

One school of thought rattling around in progressive circles is that the forces of white supremacy and authoritarianism are acting out of desperation, as they see polls showing a supermajority of the public turning against them.

Nicholas Grossman, a political science professor at the University of Illinois, posted this on Bluesky:

The Roberts Court, the Trump White House, and the national GOP are acting like this is their one big shot. Either they secure the lasting end of US Constitutional democracy, or they’re in very serious trouble from the backlash. And they’ve already gone so far that there’s no other possibility.

Writer and organizer Micah Sifry wrote about finding hope in signs that Trump is losing supporters. He concluded:

[T]here’s no question that Trump allies in Congress and many statehouses can see their declining popularity and therefore are pulling out the stops to tilt the playing field further to their advantage. This is making the path to retaking the House much steeper, as G. Elliott Morris points out. It’s also engendering a lot of despair about how the Rs are rigging the game.

But the question I have for you, dear reader, is which trend are you choosing to fixate on? Because believing that all hope is lost is dangerous, and even more so when so many people are doing all they can to turn the tide.

The Great Rift Over the Great Writ

The numbers are staggering: Over 45,000 habeas corpus petitions have flooded federal courts since Trump took office, according to ProPublica’s Habeas Tracker. And it’s all the result of a Trump policy change that judges are overwhelmingly determining was illegal.

How big an increase is that? The TRAC research center, using a different data set, calculated that there were 86 times as many habeas cases filed this past year compared to the previous year.

Why? It used to be that undocumented immigrants who had been in the country for years and weren’t security or flight risks could be released on bond until an immigration court judge determined whether they should be deported or not. Trump’s new policy instead calls for them to be detained, indefinitely, without due process. Their only recourse is a habeas petition.

Back in February, Reuters reported that as many as 400 judges in some 4,400 habeas cases had ruled that the petitioners’ detentions were illegal.

Now Kyle Cheney at Politico is out with his own calculation. He writes:

More than 10,000 times, judges have said those detentions, typically carried out with no opportunity for detainees to plead their case, were illegal. That’s roughly 90 percent of all cases — a staggering rejection of a core piece of Trump’s immigration agenda.

That includes a majority of Trump-appointed judges.

“This isn’t how things are supposed to work in America,” wrote U.S. District Judge Gary Brown, a Trump appointee based in New York, in the case of a man whose lawful status was revoked after ICE arrested him. “Unquestionably, the laws of human decency condemn such villainy.”

Cheney’s article will make you angry. He writes:

These more than 10,000 cases include a nursing mother who was detained despite active refugee status and another mother separated from her one-year-old child and released from custody only when her son landed in the hospital. They include parents of U.S. military servicemembers, trafficking victims or witnesses, a 5-year-old boy detained by ICE on his way home from school.

So why haven’t Trump officials abandoned this clearly illegal policy? Because they are hoping that the Supreme Court will say it’s OK. They are bolstered in this belief by the decisions of two panels of right-wing appellate judges, in the 5th Circuit and 8th Circuit, who ruled in their favor.

But three other circuit panels have now ruled that the policy is illegal. Two of those rulings came in the last week.

In a 6th Circuit ruling on Monday, Judge Eric L. Clay wrote for his divided panel that “Petitioners are more than just names on a pleading.” He continued:

All appear to contribute to their neighborhoods and local communities. Many are the primary breadwinners or essential caregivers for their families, which include their children who were born here and are citizens of the United States.

His conclusion:

[N]oncitizens like Petitioners should have a forum to explain that their backgrounds and connections to their communities justify release on bond while they undergo their removal proceedings. To hold otherwise would subject long-term law-abiding residents in the United States, such as Petitioners, to the hardship of mandatory detention without due process.

In the 11th Circuit ruling issued last Wednesday, Judge Stanley Marcus wrote for his panel:

Simply put, the language that Congress has chosen to use does not grant to the Executive unfettered authority to detain, without the possibility of bond, every unadmitted alien present in the country. Nowhere in the text, structure, or history of the INA [Immigration and Nationality Act] does that reading find steady footing.

Also in Court This Week

• A federal court ruled against the second set of global tariffs that Trump imposed — after the Supreme Court overturned his first set. This time around, Trump claimed that a “large and serious balance-of-payments deficits” empowered him to impose a 10 percent surcharge on imports. The court found that Trump was unlawfully redefining the statutory term “balance-of-payments deficits” to mean “trade deficit,” which is an entirely different thing.

• In a wildly embarrassing case for the Trump administration, a federal judge in New York ruled that the DOGE Service illegally cancelled $100 million in grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Judge Colleen McMahon called it “a textbook example of unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.” But wait there’s more! DOGE staffers said it was actually ChatGPT that decided what grants were “DEI” and therefore should be cancelled. “The Government,” McMahon wrote, “cannot escape liability for DOGE’s work by scapegoating ChatGPT.”

• A federal judge in Washington, in a pair of rulings, enjoined the Federal Trade Commission from pursuing its demand that the two leading medical organizations on transgender health turn over internal documents. Chief Judge James E. Boasberg wrote that the record showed “extensive evidence of animus and wafer-thin justifications lacking evidentiary support.”

• The Cultural Landscape Foundation, a nonprofit that encourages good stewardship, is asking a federal judge to halt Trump’s efforts to resurface the Reflecting Pool and paint it blue. “The new coloration will cause the pool to resemble a large swimming pool rather than the reflective civic landscape it was designed to be, distorting the experience of the site for the millions of visitors who come to it each year,” the group wrote.

• The Constitutional Accountability Center filed a complaint alleging that Florida’s donation of property worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the Trump library violates the Domestic Emoluments Clause.

‘You Are Winning’

Rachel Maddow devoted much of the top of her MS NOW show on Monday to hailing what she declared was successful pushback to the Trump administration’s plan to establish “a huge new network of some of the largest prison facilities on earth, all specifically designed to hold people without trial and essentially outside the reach of the legal system.”

Over the last few months, I have been acutely interested in this warehouse prison plan that Trump in his wisdom has unveiled. I have been acutely interested specifically in seeing the American people everywhere -- red states and blue states, urban areas, suburban areas, rural areas, everywhere -- have been very interested in seeing the American people step up in all kinds of ways to just say no to this, to say no to building Trump a network of huge new prison camps to fill with whoever he wants.

“I can tell you tonight that if you have been part of the fight against those prison camps,” she said, calling out more than a dozen of them, “I think it’s important to take a moment to know that you are winning. You are winning this. Your pushback has worked.”

She cited an Axios article headlined “ICE targets Plan B after backlash to mega-jails plan.” Then she asked:

Why are they giving up on Plan A? Why are they giving up on the Trump prison camp warehouse idea? Because people have pushed back hard against it. And when people push back against them, generally speaking, they cave.

There are still fights ahead, as Maddow noted, including against an existing ICE facility near State College, Pennsylvania called the Moshannon Valley Processing Center. (Penn Live and Penn State University have just launched a series of stories about Moshannon and the protests there.)

And this just in: Alligator Alcatraz, the notorious jerry-built detention center in Florida, is closing down. CBS News reports that companies hired by the state of Florida to operate the center “were notified Tuesday afternoon that the facility is being shut down, with the remaining 1,400 detainees expected to be removed in the coming weeks.” As the Daytona Beach News-Journal chronicled in video, each Sunday for more than 40 weeks, 75 to 200 people have gathered outside the Florida center to protest.

Also, Project Salt Box reports that “Federal immigration officials and the State of New Jersey reached a temporary agreement Tuesday that pauses major conversion work at a proposed ICE detention warehouse in Roxbury while the government completes additional environmental review, avoiding a scheduled federal court hearing over the project.”

Not all the news is good, though. The American Prospect reports that ICE “wants to expand its concentration camp network in California with a dilapidated Bay Area prison known as the ‘Rape Club.’” That’s on account of its “lengthy history of unchecked sexual abuse.” Critics say the buildings are “falling to pieces and heavily contaminated with toxic waste.”

The Way Forward?

The American Immigration Council is out with a white paper called “Restoring Credibility and Humanity: A New Framework for Immigration Enforcement.”

It’s so different from what we have now:

Built around four pillars—compliance, safety, proportionality, and accountability—it recommends fourteen areas of reform. The plan emphasizes making rules that people living in the country can follow; law enforcement that protects communities from threats rather than treating the community as one; consequences for civil immigration violations that are “tailored, reasonable, and humane”; and holding agencies—and individual agents—accountable, up to and including by firing those who abuse their power.

End Notes

• The New York Times reports: “New York Bars ICE Agents From Wearing Masks in Broad Immigration Deal.”

• Political consultant Mujtaba Rahman writes in the Guardian that Trump’s “ever-more erratic” behavior is leading Europe’s leaders “to publicly confront the Trump administration on issues ranging from Iran to Ukraine and European sovereignty.”

• Author Saul Austerlitz asks in the Guardian: “How do we get more men to join the anti-Trump resistance?”

• Never-Trumper columnist Mona Charen writes in The Bulwark that Trump’s corruption is so wildly excessive that “we may, at long last, be passing out of the ‘LOL nothing matters’ phase of this travesty. There is good reason to believe that, finally, Trump’s unprecedented corruption is going to bite him in the ass.”

The Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act last week – a move that will effectively disenfranchise millions of Black Americans – was a major blow to people who care about multiracial democracy.

It was also a rallying cry.

Dozens of resistance figures immediately weighed in on how to respond.

On MS NOW, Rachel Maddow cast the court’s decision as part of Trump’s wider effort “to get rid of the multiracial democracy that our Constitution is supposed to protect.”

“We are now about 16 months into what has been, from day one, a concerted and intense targeting of Black Americans, specifically by this president and by this administration,” she said. “It is a war on Black America. The fight to save it is looking like it’s going to be the fight of all of our lives.”

“What should we do?” asked Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice. “Yell, loudly, for action by the one part of our government that can do something: Congress.”

Waldman called on Congress to ban partisan gerrymandering, enact new voting rights laws, and impose term limits for the Supreme Court.

Issue One policy director Michael McNulty wrote that banning gerrymandering would require “establishing clear national criteria for fair maps, requiring independent redistricting commissions in every state, and banning mid-decade redistricting. These proven, widely supported reforms would ensure voters — not politicians — choose their representatives.”

The Contrarian published a list of 15 ways to respond to the court decision, from three civil rights leaders.

“Fight Back Hard Now,” Lauren Groh-Wargo of Fair Fight urged. “We are working with existing coalitions and networks across the South alongside our national allies to push back against these cynical, racist attempts to gut Black political power and gerrymander the congressional and state maps. If we cannot block them outright, we must make the fight as long, difficult, and painful as possible for the GOP. The more we can combat its plans and expose them as the extreme and cruel measures they are, the more the public will see how GOP leaders are focused on their own power rather than meeting their needs.”

Juan Proaño of LULAC wrote that his group “will accelerate our voter registration program. We will train Spanish-language poll workers and election observers. We are building the largest Latino voter protection infrastructure the country has ever seen to challenge in real time the suppression measures that will follow this ruling.”

Common Cause vowed to continue the fight to pass state-level Voting Rights Acts — ”powerful tools that protect voters even when federal safeguards fall.” Meanwhile, the group has sued to stop Florida’s new congressional maps from going into effect. (So did a Black-led Florida group, the Equal Ground Education Fund.)

Or Is It Time for Something Different?

On Tuesday, writer and organizer Micah Sifry published something of a shot across the bow: an issue of his newsletter titled “Why ‘vote harder’ and other nostrums aren’t an answer for the Callais decision.”

Sifry criticized much of the resistance community for what he called “a crisis of political imagination.” Realistically, he said, none of their solutions will do much good – not with the current Supreme Court, and not as long as congressional elections are held in single districts under winner-take-all rules.

He and a growing number of other resistance figures support what political scientist Lee Drutman calls the “One weird trick to end the gerrymandering wars and restore fair representation for minorities.” It’s called proportional representation. Drutman wrote:

Here’s how it works. Instead of dividing a state into single-member districts where the winner takes all, you elect the whole delegation at once, proportionally. Parties present lists of candidates. Voters choose from those lists. Votes for all a party’s candidates tally up. If Party A’s list gets 40% of the votes in a five-seat district, it gets two seats, awarded to its two most popular candidates. Seats are awarded in direct proportion to the share of the votes.

Consider Louisiana, where the Supreme Court has now paved the way for Republicans to divide the state into six congressional districts, none of which would be majority Black. The result: the effective disenfranchisement of 33 percent of the electorate.

But with proportional representation, one third of the six seats would go to the candidates supported by Black voters.

And it meets the Supreme Court’s new litmus test. As Harvard Law School professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos wrote on the Election Law Blog, “PR is inherently race-neutral; in some forms, it doesn’t even require districts, and it always operates without any reference to race…. So in one stroke, PR could do a better job fighting racial vote dilution than Section 2 [of the Voting Rights Act] ever did, and do so without triggering equal protection objections.”

Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, responded to the court decision by calling on “Congress to authorize multi-member congressional districts with proportional representation systems to prevent partisan shut-outs and drown-outs across the country.”

And one major pro-democracy group has been advocating for this sort of change for several years. Protect Democracy proposes the adoption of “fusion voting” as a pathway to proportional representation – and maybe even an end to two-party gridlock.

With fusion voting, “more than one political party can nominate the same candidate and voters can vote for their preferred candidate on the ballot line of the party that best reflects their values,” the group explained. (Here’s a graphic that might make it clearer.)

“This allows minor parties with distinct platforms and constituencies to cross-nominate and turn their voters out in support of major party candidates, rather than asking their members to waste votes on a long-shot candidate,” the group argued.

In a 2025 report, the group explained that “expanding fusion voting presents a path to the kind of nascent multiparty system that could effectively advocate for change. Fusion voting could serve as a crucial stepping stone — an incremental but meaningful reform that expands votersʼ choices, strengthens democratic competition, and makes the adoption of proportional representation more plausible.”

May Day Not-So-Strong

There were high hopes that events on May Day this year, held under the “May Day Strong” banner, would significantly disrupt business as usual. The call was for “No Work, No School, No Shopping.”

It was intended as a “tactical escalation” for the resistance — “a structure test for the strength of the movement,” as Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, put it. “It is more than just showing up on a Saturday. It is attempting to gauge our economic power on a single day.”

As it turned out, there were a handful of boisterous events on Friday, but by and large, participation was slim and scattered.

And almost nobody noticed.

I don’t really know where the movement goes from here. Organizers maintained their optimism during a mass call last night. And there’s no denying the significance of millions of people coming out for No Kings rallies (on Saturdays.)

But the current organizational structure, in the current political climate, clearly does not have the ability to shut much of anything down. That would typically be the next step for a mass movement demanding attention and action.

That said, thousand of people turned out on Friday for events in Washington, D.C., marching, rallying, and briefly disrupting traffic.

In New York City, CBS News reported that thousands rallied across the five boroughs, “including outside Amazon headquarters in Midtown. On Wall Street, hundreds of climate activists blocked entrances to the New York Stock Exchange, and some arrests were made.” New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani enthusiastically addressed a heavily union crowd in Washington Square Park. “Together we will show the world what solidarity means,” he said.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that a protest “briefly shut down the departure-level roadway at San Francisco International Airport’s international terminal Friday.” Several elected officials were arrested. Hundreds of protesters also briefly shut down Oakland International Airport.

In Los Angeles, members of the Sunrise Movement briefly “took over” a Home Depot to protest the company’s support of ICE.

Hundreds of protesters rallied in Madison, Wisconsin, and organizers told the Wisconsin Examiner that 250 immigrant-led businesses across 17 cities in Wisconsin shut down for the day.

The biggest turnout by far was in Raleigh, North Carolina, where the state teachers union held a rally to protest school funding.

Brooklyn vs. ICE

The word spread in Brooklyn on Sunday night: ICE officers had taken an immigrant to a local hospital after he was injured during his capture.

Soon, hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside the Wyckoff Medical Center in Bushwick protesting ICE’s presence in the hospital — and then clashing with NYPD officers who had been called to the scene. Nine people were arrested.

Harrowing video showed ICE agents literally dragging the immigrant they had detained out of the hospital and into an ICE vehicle, as police officers cleared their way and demonstrators yelled in outrage.

One witness shared a video with independent journalist Marisa Kabas showing a police officer brutally throwing a peaceful protester to the ground.

At a news conference on Monday, Mayor Mamdani said NYPD officers were not involved in the ICE operation and were just there because of the protest. He said he had seen videos of the officer throwing the man to the ground. “That is incredibly disturbing and that is being actively investigated right now,” he said.

On Monday, at a rally outside the hospital, lawmakers and community activists called for ICE to stay out of New York.

This Week in the Courts

A slow week, for once!

• A group of detained immigrants filed a class action lawsuit challenging a new DHS policy that effectively blocks immigrants held in detention from successfully filing immigration applications. DHS rules require individuals to submit biometrics with their applications, but the agency now refuses to collect that information from people in detention centers. “DHS’ new Biometrics Policy violates the law many times over,” wrote lawyers for Democracy Forward, National Immigration Project, and the National Immigrant Justice Center.

• Environmental groups are suing to block a Trump order that would open the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument to commercial fishing.

End Notes

• From the San Francisco Chronicle: “Bay Area neighbors are turning their blocks into Trump resistance networks.”

• From WGBH: “Faith coalition protests Citizens Bank’s work with detention centers operators”.

May 1 is traditionally a day to celebrate and flex the collective power of workers, led by unions.

This year – this Friday – it is that and more, as a huge coalition of resistance groups are calling on every American to participate in a one-day stoppage of work, school, and shopping to protest billionaires, ICE, the war, and the assault on democracy.

The goal is not just to come together, like at a No Kings rally, but to disrupt business as usual – to force people to pay attention to the crises we are in and the ways to fight back.

The only way that goal will be achieved, however, is with massive union participation. So just as May Day this year is a trial run for a possible general strike, it is also a consequential test of union muscle.

Will business be disrupted in Chicago, or Philadelphia, or Los Angeles, or New York? Or will there be no noticeable effect? It will largely depend on the unions.

In Chicago, for instance, major unions are explicitly calling for an economic blackout there and are planning neighborhood rallies, school block parties, and protests against Amazon, Target and an ICE detention center before marching to Union Park for a mass rally and march through downtown and to Daley Plaza.

Philadelphia could be a hotspot. Some of us had high hopes for May Day last year as well, but pretty much the only place they were realized was in Philadelphia, where a massive crowd gathered outside city hall, and 70 unionized hotel and food service workers were arrested during a peaceful sit-in at a busy downtown intersection.

One group to watch particularly closely is the teachers’ unions. For instance, many North Carolina school districts will be closed on Friday after the state teachers union called on educators across the state to walk out of work and join a rally in Raleigh. Their May Day rally, they say, “represents the culmination of growing frustration among educators, students, and communities over the state’s continued failure to adequately invest in public schools.”

I wrote last week about how this year’s May Day is a major tactical escalation for the resistance. One organizer called it “a structure test for the strength of the movement.”

Organizer Neidi Dominguez told the Guardian there will be more than 3,000 events around the country. But at the same time, she kept expectations low. “We have a long way to go to take massive disruption actions like in other countries, where people will go on general strikes and they can shut down their country, but I think we’re getting more and more close to people having consciousness about their own power as workers,” she said.

Dana Fisher, an American University sociologist who studies protest movements, said there will be something to cheer either way:

Even if May Day Strong does not stop the economic workings of the US for the day and is not clearly noticeable to everyone, these events can still build power…. May Day Strong has the potential to expand the Resistance toolbox by exposing people across the US to a wider range of civic tactics that we can all use to channel our power and push back to autocracy.

In the Philadelphia Inquirer, columnist Will Bunch wrote that he fears the mainstream press – “already too dismissive of the pro-democracy resistance” – will spin May 1 as a step backward compared to the No Kings 3 protest that brought out eight million people. He continued:

Still, there is substantial work behind the scenes that could make the May 1 action a big enough success that it would surprise the more somnambulant general public, and maybe create some momentum for bigger and bolder actions down the road….

Don’t let the media negativity or the passivity that’s weighed down too many citizens for far too long cloud your own feelings about a Mayday signal for a fast-sinking American democracy. Look at this action as the beginning of something. Where it ends is up to us, the people.

So, people, find a May Day event near you. Don’t go to work. Don’t go to school. Don’t shop. And if you need to be psyched up, there’s a final mass call tonight at 8 p.m. ET.

Communities Not Cages

Inhumane and unwanted ICE detention centers were the focus of Saturday’s “National Day of Action” events all over the country. Protesters were particularly energetic in places that are fighting the construction of new detention centers in local warehouses.

MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow, uniquely, captured their significance.

Here’s part of what she said:

I recognize that I am part of the national media. So therefore, I am a little self-conscious about the fact that the national media has really been sucking its thumb on this story and hasn’t much caught on to it yet…. But local media have been taking notice of these fights everywhere they are happening. And local media everywhere this weekend took notice of these protests that happened in more than 180 different locations all over the country.

So check out some of those local reports from Romulus, Michigan; Tucson, Arizona; Marietta, Georgia; Portland, Maine; Salt Lake City, Utah; Hagerstown, Maryland; McHenry, Illinois; and Socorro, New Mexico.

How effective is the local opposition to converting warehouses into concentration camps? It’s so effective I can’t even keep track. But luckily Project Saltbox is doing just that.

This Week in the Courts

Today’s Supreme Court decision effectively dismantling what was left of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a huge blow to our democracy. But there were, as usual, some significant resistance victories in the courts this past week:

• The 2^nd Circuit Court of Appeals – disagreeing with the 5^th and 8^th circuits – ruled against the Trump administration’s policy of locking up most immigrants it intends to deport without access to a hearing that could lead to their release. The ruling declared the move contrary to the plain text of the law, and called it “a radical break from the past” that “would send a seismic shock through our immigration detention system and society, straining our already overcrowded detention infrastructure, incarcerating millions, separating families, and disrupting communities.” Note to the judges: That has almost all happened already.

• The Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit blocked Trump’s day-one executive order claiming the power to summarily deport asylum seekers who cross the border without allowing them to seek protection as required by Congress. The ruling concludes that Trump’s order and subsequent guidance “circumvent Congress’s carefully crafted removal procedures and cast aside federal laws that afford individuals the opportunity to apply and be considered for a grant of asylum or withholding of removal.”

• A federal judge in Arizona has thrown out a DOJ lawsuit demanding the state turn over its voter rolls. The government’s arguments were so flawed that Judge Susan Brnovich wrote that she was dismissing the case “with prejudice because amendment would be legally futile.” It’s the sixth straight loss for DOJ’s attempt to get states’ voter rolls.

• Federal prosecutors in Chicago are dismissing the conspiracy counts against the remaining four members of the “Broadview Six”, the people arrested after protesting outside ICE’s Broadview detention center in September. The judge had ordered prosecutors to turn over transcripts showing how they had explained the law in the case to grand jurors. Rather than do that, they dropped the charges.

I have written admiringly about how federal district court judges keep issuing rulings that boldly defy the Trump administration’s onslaught on the rule of law. And here’s a neat bit of analysis: Politico’s Kyle Cheney has counted “420 district judges who have ruled against ICE’s mass detention policy — now backed by the 2nd circuit — [compared] to 47 who have ruled in favor. Among Trump appointees, 51 have ruled *against* the administration to 37 in favor.”

BRUUUUUCE

Four weeks from now, Bruce Springsteen brings his “Land of Hope and Dreams” tour to Nationals Park. I can’t wait.

This wonderful essay by political strategist and Springsteen fanatic Jamison Foser describes the Boss’s “confidently, unapologetically, thoroughly political show.” Foser writes:

It’s an almost preposterously ambitious thing to try to pull off a (nearly) three-hour political rally dressed up as a rock concert, but it works. It holds up because it is sturdy. It has roots. Springsteen has been preparing himself and his audience for it for fifty years.

And here is what Springsteen generally says to close out his show:

Find a way to take aggressive, peaceful action to defend our country’s ideals. And as the great civil rights leader John Lewis said, go out and get in some good trouble. Say something. Do something. Hell, sing something. That’s all that I do. If you’re feeling helpless, hopeless, betrayed, frustrated, angry: I understand. I have felt that way too. … That’s why the E Street Band is here tonight. Because we needed to feel your strength and your hope. And we needed to bring you some strength and some hope in these times. I hope we’ve done that for you tonight. God bless Alex Pretti. God bless Renee Good. God bless you. And God bless America.

End Notes

• The New York Times explains why the American Association of University Professors is booming: “A Professor Union Grows Fast as It Ramps Up Its Fight Against Trump.”

• A former GOP Senate counsel writes in the Atlantic that “if the Madisonian republic is to endure, conservatives must reckon with our role in bringing the nation to its current breaking point, and work to reestablish the checks and balances that we helped erode.”

• Russell Berman writes in the Atlantic that Thomas Massie, the renegade Kentucky Republican, thinks that if he wins his May 19 primary against a Trump-backed challenger his victory will embolden more Republicans in Congress to stand up to the president.

• And read Nesrine Malik’s opinion column in the Guardian: “Trump’s presidency is what evil looks like: absurd, frightening, cruel.” I mean, she kind of nails it, doesn’t she?

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.”