The outrageous lengths that Donald Trump’s law-enforcement lackeys will go to in order to find evidence that peaceful anti-ICE protesters are, in fact, organized antifa terrorists, cannot be overstated.
I wrote last week about what some folks on the right – on the right! – are concerned is turning into a new Red Scare. The news broke August 13 that over the winter, the Department of Homeland Security sent undercover agents into Minnesota churches and schools to spy on protest meetings, then stalked and profiled attendees, and subpoenaed vast amounts of record from unions and political organizations that some of the protesters belonged to. “Operation Puppet Master” was aimed at uncovering the “organized network of conspirators … who are providing material support to violent opportunists and agitators.”
But it ended up finding basically nothing. Trump’s Justice Department filed trumped-up conspiracy charges against 15 people, mostly for engaging in traditional community organizing tactics. (OK, one of them dented a van.)
Now comes another over-the-top abuse of the law by our law enforcers, in another ludicrous ongoing case – this one against 36 people who marched into a St. Paul church in January to hold a peaceful protest and the two journalists, Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, who went along to cover it.
I wrote in January that the charges were a prima facie violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press. The charges were, bizzarely, based on a law created to prosecute people who blocked access to abortion clinics. And the whole thing was an exercise in Trumpian vindictiveness. DOJ “Civil Rights” chief Harmeet Dhillon announced early on that she would pursue Lemon “to the ends of the earth,” and the White House’s official X account gloated over his arrest, posting a picture of Lemon with a chains emoji.
You may recall, as I wrote in May, that newly unsealed documents at the time showed that a magistrate judge had denied prosecution requests in February for five separate search warrants, including for detailed information on Lemon’s YouTube subscribers. The judge basically laughed the bumbling DOJ team out of court, writing: “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.”
So what now? Well, presumably under enormous political pressure, the DOJ legal team headed by notoriously incompetent lickspittle Robert J. Keenan, decided not to give up. They got DHS involved. And as The Guardian was the first to report, DHS demanded Google turn over the YouTube information -- this time using a method that didn’t require a judge’s signature.
What method was that? The summons cited 19 USC 1509, an obscure statute that gives DHS power to inspect records to assure compliance with customs regulations.
Customs regulations! Like duties, fees and taxes on imports and exports.
And according to one of the many motions to dismiss that defendants filed on Monday, DHS sent out 92 of those summonses. 92! And DHS doesn’t even have jurisdiction to investigate ostensible civil rights crimes to start with.
The summonses went to telecommunications companies, airlines, social-media and internet platforms, a state employment agency, and even the Hertz rental car company.
As a result of one summons, T-Mobile turned over the details of more than 10,000 of Fort’s calls and texts over a six-month period – and was forbidden from letting Fort know.
It’s inconceivable to me that this case will ever come to trial. But I must say that I hope it doesn’t end before we get to see the transcripts of the grand jury presentation that led to the indictments. The federal judge in charge, Laura Provinzino, ordered the prosecution to turn those over on Aug. 18, for her inspection.
I’m expecting a repeat of what happened when a Chicago federal judge reviewed transcripts of the proceedings that resulted in the indictment of the “Broadview Six” anti-ICE protesters there. That judge found stunning prosecutorial misconduct, and made the transcripts public, after which the prosecution collapsed. And defense attorneys have asked the judge to appoint special counsel to investigate the U.S. Attorney’s office and demand to see its communications from Washington.
I’d love to see how far up the chain of command the fingerprints go.
At the risk of ending this section with a downer, I do need to remind you that Trump’s prosecutors do have one horrific success under their belt. They managed to persuade two conservative federal judges in Texas that eight anti-ICE protesters there were conspirators in an antifa terror plot. The eight were sentenced to a combined 450 years in prison. One defendant shot a police officer outside the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. But several of the people sentenced to decades in prison were not remotely involved in the shooting, and one defendant, who wasn’t even at the protest, was sentenced to 30 years.
The abuse of power is a deadly serious issue.
But the Protests Continue
In Indiana, there were more than 60 protests over the weekend over inhumane conditions for detainees being held by ICE at the Miami Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison just north of Kokomo, that’s nicknamed the “Speedway Slammer” by Trump administration officials. The protest message: “End ICE Detention at Miami Correctional.”
Residents in Danbury, Conn., have reacted with shock and protests to the recent ICE surge there, with more than 50 people arrested in a week. That included an operation on the first day of school at a school bus stop in front of a large elementary school, as children were getting off the bus and parents were dropping them off. Danbury Mayor Robert Alves said ICE knows it cannot conduct operations on school grounds, so positioned themselves across the street, as well as outside daycare centers in the city. More than 60 businesses closed down today to take part in a “Day Without an Immigrant” protest, and there’s another rally early this evening.
In Memphis, residents came out to protest after ICE agents, reportedly with a search warrant to investigate gambling and drug activity, swept into the El Corralón nightclub after midnight on Sunday and rounded up 121 people, in what was likely the largest immigration raid Memphis as ever seen. Later that day, protesters gathered nearby with signs saying “NO TRUMP/NO ICE.” The Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition put out a statement: “When we say this administration is trying to reshape our nation in their narrow white nationalist vision, this is what it looks like: disappearing our families, neighbors, friends, and co-workers in the night with no regard for the devastation they leave behind.”
Protesters packed a board meeting in central Louisiana, opposing a plan to detain immigrant families and children at the site of a former military base in Alexandria.
Protesters gathered outside a hotel in Fort Myers, Fla., where a large number of ICE agents were seen checking in. They noted a recent spike in federal immigration enforcement and said there is growing community anger over aggressive profiling and surveillance.
Apparently some residents in the city of Bryan, in east-central Texas, didn’t take kindly to an ICE operation there on Saturday morning. According to a press release from the Brazos County Sheriff’s Office, ICE agents called 911, reporting that several individuals were following them, “driving recklessly, disobeying traffic signals, and attempting to block them from continuing to drive.”
At Yale, over a hundred students, faculty members, and alumni defied the university’s protest rules to hold an unauthorized demonstration urging leaders not to sign any kind of deal with the Trump administration over DEI. There are sketchy reports that such a deal is in the works. The demonstration was scheduled as counter-programming to a mandatory event for first-year students titled “The University and Democracy.” “We thought that it was quite ironic that the university was going to be lecturing in a very sterile environment to the first years who are just entering this campus about what democracy looks like … and so we wanted to offer an alternative vision of what democracy can look like on college campuses,” said Yale student Isabel Montos, who spoke to reporters after the demonstration.
The March on Washington 2026
Thousands of people participated in the 2026 “Defend the Vote” March on Washington on Friday at the Lincoln Memorial, organized by the Rev. Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King III.
It was 63 years to the day after Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps there and spoke of his dream.
“Tragically, that dream of a more just and equitable society has never been under greater threat than it is right now,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of the speakers.
Sanders continued:
Today we have a president who along with the Supreme Court members he appointed is carrying out the most significant assault on voting rights since segregation targeting virtually every aspect of the electoral system.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said:
Just as it was then, our ability to win depends on our ability to vote. Republicans know this. That is why the Supreme Court’s decision to weaken the Voting Rights Act matters so much -- because they know that when Black Americans exercise their full political power, we unlock progress for all of America.
And that is what they are trying to hold back. But there is a tide rising in this country, brothers and sisters. They can put they can put obstacles in our path, but they cannot turn us back around. And this November, the first of many tides is coming… And it is coming to fulfill the promise that hundreds of thousands of heroes carried to these grounds six decades ago. It is now our turn to summon that collective genius, to look beyond the limits of this one moment and to see further, to demand more, and to organize toward the future we know is possible. The tide is coming and this time we intend to win it all.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said:
These are challenging times in this country right now. We have a hater in the White House, a reckless and costly war of choice raging in the Middle East, a Supreme Court that’s out of control. Black unemployment is up. Black home ownership is down. And Black political representation is under assault with Jim Crow-like tactics all throughout the South. Challenging times. Wickedness in high places.
Here’s video of the entire event, and photo galleries from the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and Washington City Paper.
Horrors for Haitians
In Ohio, faith leaders are sounding the alarm that “Springfield is under siege.” The city welcomed some 10,000 Haitian refugees after they received Temporary Protected Status starting in 2010. Here legally, the refugees worked, raised families, built businesses. Now that Trump has ended their legal status, many are being deported to a country beset by gang violence and political instability. Many more are being fitted with ankle monitors, in anticipation of future sweeps.
“We are here in 2026 and they are shackled,” local NAACP President Denise Williams told the Springfield News-Sun. “Unshackle Springfield. Unshackle Springfield. Unshackle Springfield. We are not in the 1900s; we are not going back to slavery, and this is what it looks like.”
A rally to “Unshackle Springfield” brought hundreds of people into the streets on Sunday, with organizers issuing three demands for ICE: remove ankle monitors from Haitian residents, release Pastors Joubert Adrien and Juil Demano, who were detained last week, and end the racial stigmatization of Springfield’s Haitian and Black communities.
The Religion News Service reported that “During the weekend, hundreds of volunteers — Baptists, Unitarian Universalists, Mennonites, Quakers and others — packed food boxes for Haitians in hiding, held phone drives asking elected officials to release the pastors and stood outside Haitian churches on Sunday morning to advocate for Haitians’ right to worship without fear.”
Springfield community leaders and advocates on Tuesday renewed their demand for an end to the ankle monitors after the suicide of 20-year-old student Pierre Damas Bel, who friends and family say was driven to despair by the device’s stigma. “Pierre died as a result of policy. And it’s our immigration policy that took his life,” Pastor Carl Ruby of the Central Christian Church in Springfield said at a news conference.
The Week in the Courts
A federal judge in California ruled that the Trump administration clearly violated the First Amendment when it decided to revoke visas and arrest, detain, and deport noncitizens because they expressed opinions the government wants to suppress. “In March 2025, that retaliation was directed at those engaged in pro-Palestine and anti-Israel speech,” Judge Noël Wise wrote. “In September 2025, caught in the government’s net were people critical of Charlie Kirk. In May 2026, it potentially included ‘weighing in on a peace deal that’s being negotiated’ in Iran regarding the Strait of Hormuz. Tomorrow, or perhaps even today, targets may include anyone in the United States who exercises their freedom of speech to simply express opinions the government does not like.” He concluded: “This downward spiral is antithetical to our Constitution that recognizes our right to speak freely. Here you can simultaneously hate the content of a person’s speech and love the country that cherishes the freedom to allow it.”
A bipartisan coalition of 204 former federal and state judges has filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, backing Chief Judge James E. Boasberg’s continued attempt to investigate whether the Trump administration willfully violated his court order by continuing deportation flights to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador. A divided panel of judges on the appellate court ordered Boasberg to stop in April. The full bench will hear the case later this month.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s effort to interfere in the 2026 midterms by ordering the use of an unreliable, centralized database to create lists of “citizens” in every state for determining who can and cannot vote. That would “imperil millions of Americans’ privacy and voting rights,” EPIC argues.
Resistance Crop Art!
I did not know this, but one way Minnesotans express themselves is through crop art – yes, art made from local crops – which is displayed at the Minnesota State Fair’s annual crop art exhibition and competition.
This year, resistance to ICE was the dominant theme. “Humans look to art to process experience, both collective and personal, the full spectrum from joy to trauma,” a state fair officials told MPR News. “We celebrate that here. There is a broad survey of what’s on the hearts and minds of Minnesota artists today.”
The rules limit artists to the use of “seeds, stems, heads or panicles, and fruiting bodies or structures” of crop plants grown in Minnesota — from alfalfa to sunflowers.
Please enjoy this marvelous photo gallery from MPR News, and this collection of “Crop Art Tributes to the Minnesota Resistance”. Here are a few highlights:
