https://archive.ph/nmQMb

The complaint was filed last May with the intelligence community’s inspector general, WSJ reported in its description of a November letter to Gabbard from Bakaj. It’s understood to also implicate another federal agency and to raise potential claims of executive privilege, suggesting possible White House involvement.

Members of the House and Senate intelligence panels first learned of the complaint in November, six months after it was filed, when a copy of Bakaj’s letter was shared with them, WSJ reports. Since then, Democratic staffers have tried unsuccessfully to learn more about it, congressional aides told the newspaper.

The complaint is so highly classified that Bakaj hasn’t been able to view it himself; a spokeswoman for Gabbard’s office confirmed that the complaint involved Gabbard but dismissed it as “baseless and politically motivated.”

Jon Queally
Feb 02, 2026

Progressive critics of Senate Minority Chuck Schumer had fresh reasons to speak out Sunday after the powerful New York Democrat said that “one of many of [his] jobs” in the US Senate was to fight for ongoing taxpayer-funded military and financial assistance to the Israeli government, a position that has been the focus of growing protest among rank-and-file party members and the public at large in the face of Israel’s brutal genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza.

“I have many jobs as [Senate] leader... and one is to fight for aid to Israel — all the aid that Israel needs,” Schumer said at a gathering of Jewish leaders and community members in New York on Sunday.

According to Jacob Kornbluh, who provided footage of the remarks while reporting for The Forward, Schumer told the audience that his support for Jewish security funding will only continue growing under his leadership, calling it his “baby.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42563660

“It’s not a lack of training issue, it’s a culture of violence and lawlessness issue.”

Updated 7:53 AM EST, Feb. 1, 2026

GREELEY, Colo (AP) — Like many Donald Trump voters, Miranda Niedermeier is not opposed to immigration enforcement. She was heartened by initial moves from the Republican president in his second term that she saw as targeting immigrants who were in the United States illegally and had committed crimes.

But Niedermeier, 35, has steadily become disillusioned with Trump. Never more so than in recent weeks, when federal immigration officers killed two U.S. citizens during Trump’scrackdownin Minneapolis.

“In the beginning, they were getting criminals, but now they’re tearing people out of immigration proceedings, looking for the tiniest traffic infraction” to deport someone, said Niedermeier. She said she is horrified because the administration’s approach is not Christian.

On Friday, I testified in front of Governor J.B. Pritzker’s “Illinois Accountability Commission,” the state government body he set up after the Trump administration’s “Operation Midway Blitz” attack on Chicago last summer and the precursor of the even larger federal occupation of Minneapolis that we’re experiencing now. The body’s goal is to both document what happened to Chicago, with an eye on future prosecutions, understand the role of various Trump officials in this federal occupation, and offer recommendations about how to fix immigration enforcement going forward.

I was called as the commission’s expert witness on the history of problems, corruption, and training within CBP and ICE — a story I’ve covered for more than a dozen years, as regular readers of this newsletter know. To prepare, I spent the last week re-reading and re-familiarizing myself with DHS scandals and waves of corruption and mismanagement — and found myself horrified anew.

[...]

As I told the commission, “US law enforcement has never experienced a scandal as big, as far-reaching, destructive, and as far-lasting as the wave of corruption and criminality that has overtaken CBP and the Border Patrol since 2005. It’s a story that too much of the public still doesn’t know and too many policymakers still don’t understand.”

From the testimony given to the hearing:

What I hope you will take away from my testimony today is that the problems, abuses, scandals, and controversies involving CBP and ICE that have been on display over the last year in far too many American cities and social media feeds — from deadly shootings and agent brutality to the routine abuse of Constitutional and civil rights and liberties — is entirely consistent with long-identified problems in CBP and ICE that have gone ignored and uncorrected both by a generation of Congress and multiple Democratic and Republican administrations alike.

These are not aberrations — these incidents are the entirely foreseeable consequence of specific funding and management decisions and how the nation has approached immigration enforcement since 9/11 and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.

In particular, CBP has been likely the deadliest and certainly the most troubled federal law enforcement agency for the better part of two decades now. Since 9/11, the culture of ICE and CBP has meant that the agencies have been what you might call a fascist-secret-police-in-waiting, troubled agencies simply waiting for an ambitious would-be authoritarian.

Video of the statement can also be seen here:

https://www.youtube.com/live/Cu7uMFfFpIk?t=1995

Jan. 31, 2026

According to a Saturday report in the New York Times, concern over ICE’s brutality has grown to such an extent that many Minnesota residents, including both documented immigrants and US citizens, have started wearing passports around their necks to avoid being potentially targeted.

CNN on Friday reported that ICE has been rounding up refugees living in Minnesota who were allowed to enter the US after undergoing “a rigorous, years-long vetting process,” and sending them to a facility in Texas where they are being prepared for deportation.

Jan. 31, 2026

The Times reported on Friday that the memo, which was signed by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Acting Director Todd Lyons, “expands the ability of lower-level ICE agents to carry out sweeps rounding up people they encounter and suspect are undocumented immigrants, rather than targeted enforcement operations in which they set out, warrant in hand, to arrest a specific person.”

In the past, agents have been granted the power to carry out warrantless arrests only in situations where they believe a suspected undocumented immigrant is a “flight risk” who is unlikely to comply with obligations such as appearing at court hearings.

However, the memo declares this standard to be “unreasoned” and “incorrect,” saying that agents should feel free to carry out arrests so long as the suspect is “unlikely to be located at the scene of the encounter or another clearly identifiable location once an administrative warrant is obtained.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Sunday he will move to close Washington’s Kennedy Center performing arts venue for two years starting in July for construction.

Trump’s announcement on social media follows a wave of cancellations since Trump ousted the previous leadership and added his name to the building. Trump made no mention in his post of the recent cancellations.

Democrat Taylor Rehmet won a special election for the Texas state Senate on Saturday, flipping a reliably Republican district that President Donald Trump won by 17 points in 2024.

From the founding of America, gun laws were written in racially tinged ink. In the colonial South, militias and slave patrols were created to control Black people and suppress rebellion. As early as 1704, organized slave patrols roamed Southern colonies, arming white men and tasking them with the perpetual surveillance and disarmament of enslaved populations. By the mid-18th century, this system was codified into law: As legal historian Carl Bogus recounts, between 1755 and 1757, Georgia law required every plantation’s armed militia to conduct monthly searches of “all Negro houses for offensive weapons and ammunition.”

Gun ownership in America did not initially materialize as a personal right to self-defense so much as an underpinning of white security. As slave revolts spread across the Atlantic world — culminating in the first successful Black revolution in Haiti — lawmakers moved to further codify these fears. Colonial statutes explicitly barred Black people from keeping or carrying weapons, embedding racial hierarchy directly into early American gun policy. As historian Carol Anderson told Democracy Now!, each slave revolt triggered “a series of statutes that the enslaved, that Black people, could not own weapons.”

After the Revolutionary War, the newly formed United States was deeply suspicious of a standing federal army. But for the planter South, another fear loomed larger: maintaining the internal security of a slave society. As Anderson contends, the Second Amendment functioned as a political “bribe to the South to not scuttle the Constitution.” George Mason warned placing militias under federal control would leave slaveholding states “defenseless,” not from foreign invasion, but from enslaved people. The compromise was an assurance that slave patrols and local armed forces would remain intact and beyond the reaches of federal interference.

One of the emails, with the subject line "bill," suggests that Bill Gates had requested antibiotics for a sexually transmitted disease to "surreptitiously" give to his now ex-wife, Melinda French Gates. Another email said Boris had helped Bill Gates "get drugs," and helped facilitate "illicit trysts" between the billionaire Microsoft founder and "Russian girls" as well as "married women."

Bystanders say they are determined to keep recording federal agents’ actions: ‘There will be absolutely no accountability unless people are documenting’

Rachel Leingang and Maanvi Singh in Minneapolis
Thu 29 Jan 2026 10.00 EST

The killing of Alex Pretti by a federal officer on Saturday, less than three weeks after the killing of Renee Good, brought heightened attention to the brutality observers and bystanders are facing in Minneapolis as they witness and document immigration enforcement. Volunteer observers told the Guardian they have been subjected to violence since the beginning of Operation Metro Surge in early December.

Observers who had been detained by federal agents and released, many without charges, told the Guardian they were denied access to medical care, phone calls and lawyers.

Renee Good died on January 7. Twenty-four days later, her killer walks free. Jonathan Ross calmly murdered a woman, then he and his crew blocked anyone from giving her medical aid as she died. Minneapolis police were on scene the entire time. They watched Ross leave. They didn’t stop him. They didn’t arrest him. They didn’t intervene while a woman bled out two blocks from her home.

Crosspost from https://beehaw.org/post/24518047