The Absurdity and Barbarity of the “Immigration Debate”: Breaking Free of the “Colonial Framework”

Andrew Jackson led armed forces into what is now Alabama on a homicidal mission against Creek Indians. Refusing to discriminate between the armed and helpless; men and women; adults and children, his agents of genocide murdered eight hundred Indigenous people. It was such a “successful” attack that Jackson feared his military superiors would not trust the veracity of his account. Given the mores and incentives of prevailing US culture ,they would assume that he was exaggerating to receive promotion, accolades, and other professional benefits.

To gather evidence, he had his men slice off the noses of each fatality, and place them in handmade wicker baskets that, in an act of grave robbery, they stole from the villages of the murdered Natives. Jackson would later receive the award of becoming president. The US celebrates and honors his legacy with the placement of his face on the twenty-dollar bill; currency functioning, without intention, as a nifty metaphor for the dark side of American “progress” and affluence.

A portrait of Jackson’s face also adorns a wall in the Oval Office, where Donald Trump, while claiming to advance the legacy of his “populist” predecessor, decides what cities to strike with his secret police force, what immigrants to accost, abuse, and assign to overseas torture chambers, and what excuses to offer, no matter how flimsy, for the cold-blooded execution of American citizens in the middle of residential streets.

Jackson’s war crimes amount to a straw of hay in a haystack. Through a series of official massacres, the awarding of lucrative bounties for private killers responsible for the deaths of Indigenous people, and forced removal programs, most infamously the “Trail of Tears” on which 16,000 Natives died due to starvation, freezing conditions, and preventable diseases, the US, a nation no small amount of patriotic politicians and academics tell us was founded on the ideals of freedom and equality, eliminated 96 percent of the Native population, while confiscating 98 percent of their ancestral lands.

These lands included most of the minerals and resources, from fertile ground for agriculture to timber, and eventually, natural gas and oil, that allowed the US to become the wealthiest nation since the fall of the Roman Empire. Of crucial significance is the Indigenous land that settlers would transform into cotton plantations, making viable the entire system of chattel slavery for Africans.

Like a pack of wolves tearing into the flesh of mutilated deer, the US appetite for expansion was ravenous, its thirst for the spoils of bloody conquest unquenchable. From 1846 to 1848, the US fought a war with Mexico, declaring that it had a God-given right to their land. Not bothering to obtain notarization from the office of real estate in Heaven, American forces invaded Mexico, treating the people who had already lived there as brush to clear on a ranch. 

The result of the “Manifest Destiny” policy of invasion was Mexico’s cessation of what the world now calls Texas, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and the southern part of California. Novelist Carlos Fuentes referred to the borderline between Mexico and the US as a “scar.” Immigration activists have often said, “We didn’t cross the border. The border crossed us.”

There is a word that applies to the US slaughter of the indigenous population, the expropriation of natural resources, and the violent theft of land from its neighbor to the south: colonialism. This is also the word missing from the immigration “debate” in current US discourse. Its absence renders said debate as absurd, degrading it from an opportunity for clarity, edification, and leadership into insipid chatter for officials and pundits who take for granted that the white figures of authority who inherited the benefits and advantages of the colonial system have the right to impose their will on any given situation, no matter the human costs or social consequences.

The willful failure to acknowledge the legacy and influence of colonialism creates a culture that functions according to the colonial mindset. One of the main features of this mentality is suspicion, if not outright contempt, for the population caught in the crosshairs. They are the problem, not the men or the system aiming the weapon.

And so, we arrive at the hideous point of escalation when an agency founded as recently as 2003 under the name, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has murdered an American citizen in broad daylight. Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, attempted to steer her vehicle away from an ICE checkpoint, not unlike the stations of armed interrogation in occupied cities of war, when a masked ICE officer fired three bullets directly into her vehicle.

If the Trump administration did not order ICE to patrol, raid, and terrorize Minneapolis, the city where the shooting occurred, Renee Good would be alive. Blaming individuals, no matter how psychopathic, misses the point, but in case anyone was prepared to resort to the “bad apple” theory, the vice president of the United States, JD Vance put that notion to rest. Standing at a podium in the White House, like a vampire whose eyeliner protects him from the sun, he said, “The precedent here is very simple. You have a federal law enforcement official engaging in federal law enforcement action. That’s a federal issue. That guy is protected by absolute immunity.”

Acting and retired prosecutors, as well as legal scholars, have rejected Vance’s “absolute immunity claim.” Legalities aside, Vance’s heartless assertion is politically useful, as it concedes governmental responsibility for Good’s death. Her murder wasn’t merely the act of a rogue agent, but the predictable consequence and logical endpoint of official US policy. Vance requested prayers for the killer, but not the victim’s family.

The victim, like the millions of Indigenous people before her, the Mexican fatalities of the Mexican-American war, and immigrants who ICE separates from their families, assaults, and intimidates, are not human beings. They are colonial subjects, whose removal, as in the Indian Removal Act that led to the “Trail of Tears,” and exclusion, as in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which codified oppressive measures against Chinese immigrants, is essential to the maintenance of colonial society.

Renee Good was white, but her shared identity with the dominant culture did not provide her with any protection. Like the white allies who police beat nearly to death at Selma, she had crossed over to the other side, becoming a traitor to her race and class. After receiving training as an ICE observer through her aptly named church, St. Joan of Arc, she pledged solidarity with immigrants, vowing to use the agency of her citizenship to monitor, and to the extent that it was possible, mitigate the destructive immigration policies of US power. One protestor in Minneapolis asked on television, “If they killed a white woman in front of witnesses, how are they treating Black and brown people behind closed doors?”

She could find the answer to her question in Louisiana, where thousands of former detainees of ICE detention centers have spoken to journalists, the ACLU, and the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Center about widespread physical abuse, sexual harassment and assault, medical neglect, and arbitrary and retaliatory solitary confinement. Inhumane conditions include cockroach-infested food, filthy drinking water, lack of feminine hygiene products, and the use of painful shackles.

ICE sadists target women for the worst forms of violence and humiliation, advancing the colonial tradition of reserving particularly intense hatred for those who bear and most often nurture children, and therefore, protect and promote the future of their people. 

Beginning in the 1920s and extending through the 1970s (not exactly ancient history), federal and state programs across the US sterilized Black, Latina, and Indigenous women, either through force or without their consent during other surgical procedures.

As many as 150,000 women, according to documentation obtained through a federal lawsuit, were victims of genocidal eugenics. Outside the continental United States, American officials enhanced its imperial relationship with Puerto Rico by sterilizing nearly one third of Puerto Rican women between the ages of 20 and 49. The program persisted into the 1960s. Depriving despised women of the ability to conceive children became so common that Fannie Lou Hamer, herself a victim of involuntary sterilization, referred to it as “the Mississippi appendectomy.”

The first words that the ICE agent who killed Renee Nicole Good spoke after observing her vehicle crash into a telephone pole were, “fucking bitch.” The derogation is an echo from the killing fields of Indigenous land, the Trail of Tears, and the operating rooms where thousands of women, under anesthesia and unable to speak, suffered the theft of their potential for motherhood.

The mainstream media’s indifference to the Louisiana story, along with the general public’s relative silence in the face of daily ICE actions against Latino immigrants, provokes the painful, but necessary inquiry into the morality and priorities of the American people. Vance’s admission of federal responsibility for Renee Good’s murder reflects onto the citizenry. Despite the Trump regime’s best efforts, the US is still a democracy. As a result, the people, or “demos,” are culpable in Good’s murder, ICE’s systemic abuse of detainees, and the ongoing violation of human rights from border to border.

Camilo Pérez-Bustillo, a law professor and member of the leadership team at Witness at the Border, an immigrant advocacy and ICE-tracking organization, has dedicated his life to the cultivation of solidarity, anti-racist organization, and the elevation of consciousness within a dormant democracy. When I spoke to Pérez-Bustillo, he said, “Colonialism and imperialism provide a useful framework for connecting what is happening in Minneapolis, other cities, Venezuela, and at the border. It is not only theoretical or rhetorical. It is also concrete and material.”

“The poison of rhetoric from the White House,” as Pérez-Bustillo calls it, is intended to “not only dehumanize Renee Nicole Good, but also demonize and criminalize what she represents.” Through his work and connections with Witness at the Border, Pérez-Bustillo was able to confirm that Good received training as a “legal ICE observer.” To disparage such civil and lawful activism as “domestic terrorism,” as Vance has done repeatedly, is to spotlight that Good enrolled into the resistance against, to use Pérez-Bustillo’s words, “the colonial occupation of American cities.”

“To understand the deployment of ICE as an occupational force in our communities is the same way that the Black Panthers understood white police in Black neighborhoods,” Pérez-Bustillo said. He then referred to the civil rights movement more broadly, quoting Dr. Martin Luther King’s Riverside Church address against the Vietnam War: “The bombs that fall in Vietnam explode at home.”

In a rhythmic reprise of the late 1960s, the Trump regime’s imperial incursion into Venezuela, murder of 40 Venezuelans in their capture of Nicolás Maduro and promise to expropriate the country’s oil forms of a figure eight knot with the domestic war against immigrants of color. The white nationalist obsession with countering an increasingly multicultural American demography, in which whites have become a minority in many cities and several states, harmonizes with the Trump administration aim to establish hemispheric dominance through the installation of right-wing governments in South America.

The “Donroe Doctrine,” as Trump calls it to remind everyone that the malevolence of modern fascism is on par with its stupidity, is a more aggressive and brazen iteration of Ronald Reagan’s murderous interventions in Latin America, Bush the elder’s capture of Noriega in Nicaragua, and W. Bush’s attempted coup in Venezuela.

If Donald Trump is fentanyl to the body politic, there were plenty of gateway drugs. Perhaps there is no issue on which the inducement of psychosis that functions as US politics is more destructive than immigration. 

Through a series of military aggressions, typically producing high death counts, ruination of local economic orders, and termination of homegrown political movements, the US created the very conditions that birthed the so-called “migrant crisis” of mass immigration across the southern border.

To maintain economic domination and political influence in the region, the US toppled governments in Guatemala, Chile, Nicaragua, and Ecuador. With subterfuge and subversion, often using tactics of violence, the US has also “intervened” in the affairs of El Salvador, Panama, and the Dominican Republic, while the CIA, with Operation CHAOS, undermined several political independence movements in Puerto Rico.

Add exploitative “trade deals,” and it becomes clear that many of the Latino immigrants to the US are merely following their wealth in search of the freedom that colonial forces on the ground in their own countries had obliterated. When they arrive, they can find employment with a multinational corporation, performing backbreaking and unsanitary labor for miserly wages, then contend with a political movement that targets them for hate crimes and harassment.

To underline the racist intent of the Trump regime, and to trace a clear connection between the colonial founding of the US and present-day policy, ICE recently detained five Native Americans in Minneapolis. Agents also tried to gain entry to Little Earth, an urban Native housing project. This is the equivalent of a cat burglar calling the police to arrest the residents of the house he plans to rob.

Camilo Pérez-Bustillo makes it clear that it is only an escape from the “colonial framework” that will emancipate the US from its cycle of violence and generate a genuine transformation in political policy and morality. The inability to break free of the ideological restrains of the colonial mentality explains why, according to Pérez-Bustillo, nearly everyone across the mainstream political spectrum “concedes that undocumented immigrants, or at least many of them, constitute a threat to the United States, and concedes the necessity of militarization of the border.”

“A decolonial framework can liberate us from the limits of our discourse,” Pérez-Bustillo said. As ICE spreads terror in American cities, with tactics that now include homicide, it is helpful to remember that “Abolish ICE” was once a popular slogan and movement on the left. All Republicans and most Democrats treated the position as it was a manifesto for the demolition of indoor plumbing…

As millions of people struggle for freedom and self-determination, they await an extinction event for colonialism. The murder of Renee Nicole Good, like the deaths of immigrants whose names the powerful never even utter, becomes yet another tragic means of marking the time until there is transformation of our political ecology. It is a transformation that depends upon the propulsion of mourning; the alchemy of pain into action.

For the entire essay: The Absurdity and Barbarity of the “Immigration Debate”: Breaking Free of the “Colonial Framework” - CounterPunch.org

This essay also ran on the author’s Substack, Absurdia Now. 

-David Masciotra is the author of six books, including Exurbia Now: The Battleground of American Democracy and I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters. He has written for the Progressive, New Republic, Liberties, and many other publications about politics, literature, and music. His Substack is Absurdia Now.

 

His best friend was killed by a crate of food, and that's why The Twilight Zone exists

Rod Serling was born on Christmas Day, 1923, in Syracuse, New York. As a kid, he was that child—the one who never stopped talking. He'd narrate entire radio dramas in his basement, performing every character for hours. His family learned to stay quiet during car rides just to see if he'd notice the silence. He never did.

By high school, he was 5'4", wiry, relentlessly energetic. The day after graduation in 1943, he walked into an Army recruiting office. He wanted to fight Nazis. He dreamed of being a tail gunner on a B-17, raining destruction from the sky.

His eyesight wasn't good enough. So, he chose the paratroopers instead. Even that was a fight—at 5'4", he was considered too small. The rules were clear. Serling talked his way in anyway, convincing officials that courage had nothing to do with height.

They sent him to Camp Toccoa, Georgia—a place designed to break men. Every morning at five, soldiers ran a seven-mile hill at a 45-degree angle in full gear. The ones who couldn't make it got sent back to regular infantry.

Private First Class Serling made it. More than that—he thrived. He took up boxing, fought 17 bouts as a flyweight with a wild, berserker style that terrified opponents. He broke his nose twice. He picked fights with tankers and infantrymen just to prove his size didn't matter.

In April 1944, his orders came. He'd be shipping out—not to Europe, but to the Pacific. He'd be fighting the Japanese, not the Nazis. He was disappointed. But he went. What Serling didn't know was that his commanders had a problem with him. He was creative, mouthy, bad at following orders he thought were stupid. He wandered off. He didn't take care of his equipment properly. He got on people's nerves. So, they transferred him to the demolition platoon nicknamed "The Death Squad" for its extraordinarily high casualty rate.

His sergeant later said it plainly: "He screwed up somewhere along the line. He got on someone's nerves." Then added, with brutal honesty: "He didn't have the wits or aggressiveness required for combat." But Serling ended up there anyway, clearing pillboxes and disarming traps while Japanese soldiers tried to kill him.

In February 1945, Serling and 1,500 paratroopers jumped onto Tagaytay Ridge near Manila. They marched into a city where 17,000 Japanese troops had been ordered to fight to the death. The battle was horrific. Serling's regiment suffered a 50% casualty rate.

Once, Serling found himself staring down the barrel of a Japanese rifle at point-blank range. He froze. Another paratrooper shot over his shoulder, killing the enemy soldier and saving his life. During a victory celebration, Japanese forces began shelling the area. Serling saw a wounded woman in the open and rushed forward under fire to carry her to safety. His sergeant put him in for the Bronze Star.

He was wounded twice—shrapnel tore through his wrist and knee. The knee injury would cause him pain for the rest of his life. His wife would grow accustomed to hearing him fall on the stairs when it buckled. By the time the fighting ended, only 30% of his original regiment had survived. But the injury that scarred him most deeply wasn't physical.

It was watching his best friend die.

His name was Melvin Levy—a Jewish private from Brooklyn. He was the platoon comedian, the guy who kept everyone's spirits up, who found humor even in hell. During the fighting on Leyte, after weeks of brutal combat, the exhausted paratroopers were pinned down in muddy foxholes, surrounded by enemy forces, running low on ammunition.

Then they heard it: U.S. Army planes approaching. Supply drop. Heavy crates began falling from the sky—fifty-pound boxes of K-rations, a hundred or more, dropped without parachutes from low altitude to reach troops in dense jungle terrain. The men knew the drill. When you hear the planes, you take cover. If one of those crates hit you, it would kill you instantly.

Most of the men scrambled into their foxholes. But Melvin Levy stayed out in the open. He was doing what Melvin Levy always did—making jokes, trying to get a laugh, lifting everyone's spirits. He stood there watching the crates fall, performing an impromptu comedy routine.

"It's raining chow, boys!" Levy shouted, tears of joy rolling down his cheeks. "It's raining chow!" He was laughing. Joking about where the food would fall. Then one of the crates landed on his head. It killed him instantly.

The soldiers watched it happen. Rod Serling watched it happen. One moment, his best friend was telling jokes. The next moment, he was dead killed not by an enemy bullet, not in combat, but by food intended to keep him alive. The absurdity was unbearable. The randomness was crushing. Serling led the funeral services for Levy. He placed a Star of David over his grave. And he never, ever forgot.

When Serling came home in 1946, he was 21 years old. He'd earned the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star, and the Philippine Liberation Medal. He wore a paratrooper bracelet on his left wrist—he'd wear it every single day for the rest of his life.

But he also came home with nightmares. Flashbacks. Insomnia. His daughter Anne would later remember hearing him wake up screaming in the middle of the night, dreaming that the enemy was coming at him. Serling said it himself: "I was bitter about everything and at loose ends when I got out of the service. I think I turned to writing to get it off my chest."

He enrolled in college on the G.I. Bill. While there, he wrote a short story called "First Squad, First Platoon" about his war experiences. In it, he used real names—including Melvin Levy, whom he described as "the humorist of the squad—the wag, the wit, the guy who lived for laughs." He recreated the moment of Levy's death exactly as it happened.

The story wouldn't be published until 2024—nearly 80 years later—when it was discovered in Serling's archives. But the trauma that inspired it shaped everything he would create.

After college, Serling moved into television writing. He wrote about social issues—racism, prejudice, intolerance, war. But network executives and sponsors kept censoring him. His topics were "too controversial." Too political. Too angry.

Frustrated, Serling realized something brilliant: if he wrapped his social commentary in science fiction and fantasy, he could say things that would never be allowed in realistic drama. In 1959, he created The Twilight Zone.

Over five seasons, Serling wrote 93 of the show's 156 episodes—an astonishing output. The series explored fate, irony, moral ambiguity, and the unpredictability of existence. Again and again, Serling returned to the same theme: In the blink of an eye, everything can change. Life can end absurdly, randomly, without warning or justice.

Episode 19 was called "The Purple Testament." It's set in the Philippines, 1945. An American lieutenant gains the supernatural ability to see which of his men will die next—a mysterious glow appears on their faces. One of the soldiers who dies in the episode is named Levy. Melvin Levy.

Serling honored his friend by name, giving him a place in television history, ensuring that the man who made soldiers laugh in hell would never be forgotten. The episode ends with the lieutenant seeing the glow on his own face. He knows he's about to die. And he does—killed not in combat, but by random artillery fire.

Just like Melvin Levy. Death in The Twilight Zone is rarely heroic. It's absurd. Random. Unfair. Because that's what Rod Serling learned in the Philippines: death doesn't care about justice. It doesn't care about bravery or cowardice, guilt or innocence. Sometimes a man tells jokes to lift his friends' spirits, and a crate falls from the sky and kills him. 

That's the world. That's the twilight zone between logic and madness, between what should happen and what does.

Serling rarely spoke publicly about the war. When asked why he wrote, he'd deflect, joke, intellectualize. But his daughter understood. "My father said when he came home that he would never, ever again injure another living thing."

Yet he was proud of his service. He wore that paratrooper bracelet every single day—through decades of success, through battles with network censors, through heart attacks and declining health.

Rod Serling smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, trying to cope with stress and memories that never left him. On June 28, 1975, during open-heart surgery, he suffered a heart attack on the operating table.
He died two days later at age 50.

But what he created outlived him. The Twilight Zone has never gone off the air. It's been rebooted, reimagined, studied, celebrated. Stephen King, Jordan Peele, J.J. Abrams—they all cite Serling as an influence. And at the heart of it all—behind every twist ending, every moment of cosmic irony, every character who faces the absurd cruelty of existence—is a 21-year-old paratrooper standing in a jungle in the Philippines, watching his best friend get killed by falling food.

That moment, that unbearable randomness, that split second where fate decided who lived and who died for no reason at all—that became art. Rod Serling took the worst thing he'd ever seen and transformed it into 156 episodes exploring what it means to be human in an irrational universe.
He took trauma and made it transcendent.

And every time you watch The Twilight Zone, every time you experience that unsettling feeling when reality tilts sideways and reveals something darker underneath—you're experiencing what Rod Serling felt in 1944 when his friend stopped telling jokes and never spoke again.

Melvin Levy died in the Philippines. But Rod Serling made sure the world would never forget that death matters, that randomness is terrifying, and that even in absurdity, there can be meaning.
That's not just television history. That's one soldier honoring another the only way he knew how—by turning horror into art, and making sure we'd never stop thinking about it.

"In the time of Trump, 'Don’t take the bait' is a rule that’s almost as important as 'Do not obey in advance."

 

Following the shooting death of Renee Good and other incidents where agents played fast and loose with the rights of both American citizens and immigrants, ICE seems to be doing everything it can to be an accelerant to the tensions. 

Wednesday evening, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said that federal agents were trying to arrest a man from Venezuela who was in the country illegally, when he fled from agents. She said he “began to resist and violently assault the officer,” and was joined by two other men who attacked the agent with a snow shovel and broom handle. McLaughlin said the agent feared for his life and shot the man they’d been trying to arrest in the leg.

There are obviously questions about this scenario, including how an agent ended up alone and whether a reasonable agent would have thought his life was at risk. As The New York Times put it, “The federal government’s narrative could not immediately be verified.” A crowd of about 200 people gathered after the shooting, and according to the police chief, engaged in illegal acts, including throwing fireworks at police. 

After agents from ICE’s sister agency, CBP, showed up in what the Times called a large, military-style vehicle, protesters “swarmed the vehicle and yelled and threw snowballs at agents.” Retreating agents fired tear gas-type canisters, and agents who arrived subsequently sprayed chemical agents against the protestors who moved toward them. A protester lobbed fireworks toward the agents as they left.

Agents could have de-escalated the tension at any point in these developments, but did not. That forces us to ask why—is there a deliberate effort to provoke protestors into acts of violence? We don’t know the answer to that question for certain, but a social media post by the president this morning gave some hint.

Trump threatened to use the “INSURRECTION ACT” due to attacks on “the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job.”

No surprise. We’ve always known he was looking for an excuse to do this. We’ve discussed insurrection act here before. I wrote to you about it back in April, in a piece that also discusses the importance and effectiveness of peaceful protest. 

“Trump might try to take advantage of minor incidents, or even plants who engage in violence, to impose the Insurrection Act and use the military to put a halt to Americans who are out on the streets exercising their First Amendment rights.”

So as difficult as it may become to show restraint, it’s essential that we don’t take Trump’s bait as we protest. If he’s going to impose the Insurrection Act, as he likely will at some point, we don’t want to give him any cover for it. Each of us can help by sharing this message with those around us and making sure they share it forward.

Here’s what you need to know about the Insurrection Act:

Normally, the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the use of the military for domestic law enforcement. It explicitly outlaws using the armed forces to enforce the law within our borders, unless that action is expressly authorized by the Constitution or an act of Congress.

Enter the Insurrection Act, which permits a president to deploy the military in American cities and on our streets in very narrow circumstances involving insurrection, rebellion, or extreme civil unrest. Even in those circumstances, the military can only be used for “emergency needs” towards the goal of reestablishing civilian control as quickly as possible. This is where lawsuits may come in, especially since governors and local leaders are not only not asking for federal intervention, but in the case of Minnesota, explicitly asking the feds to leave.

Typically, the Act is only used at a Governor and/or local officials’ request. The exceptions to that are 60 years ago and come from the heart of the civil rights era, when presidents sent troops to states like Mississippi and Alabama to protect people’s lives and liberty, like college students integrating state universities, not sending troops in to traumatize a civilian population trying to peacefully exercise its First Amendment rights.

But the Act’s language is broad and gives presidents plenty of discretion to, for instance, use the military to arrest American citizens engaged in protest, if a president calls what’s going on an insurrection, rebellion, or civil unrest. 

And in an 1827 case, Martin v. Mott, the Supreme Court ruled that it is up to the president to decide whether the Insurrection Act should be invoked and that the courts may not review his decision. Although more recently, courts have intimated that a president’s assessment needs to pass the smell test, we should still expect to see them give broad deference to his decisions.

There are reports that federal agents are unrepentant following Good’s death at the hands of one of their number. Minnesotan Patty O’Keefe, an American citizen, was arrested and detained by ICE. While they were transporting her, she says one of the agents said to her, “You’ve gotta stop obstructing us. That’s why that lesbian bitch is dead.”

NBC is reporting that in its rush to hire; ICE is deploying new agents to the field without adequate training. An AI program they were using flagged new hires with no law enforcement experience as trained agents and surged them out to offices. 

The article says this was the case with “many” of them. The president directed ICE to hire 10,000 new officers by the end of 2025 and offered new recruits $50,000 signing bonuses using money allocated to the agency by Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” DHS says those agents have been identified and are receiving training in the field.

It’s not just Minnesota. Geraldo Lunas Campos died at an ICE detention center in El Paso, Texas, on January 3. The Washington Post reports it has listened to a recording of a call between a staffer in the coroner’s office and Mr. Campos’ daughter, where she is told that pending the results of a toxicology report, “our doctor is believing that we’re going to be listing the manner of death as homicide.” At the time of his death, the agency said, “staff observed him in distress,” but did not offer a cause of death. 

The Post reports that “a fellow detainee says he witnessed … Campos being choked to death by guards.” The El Paso facility is described as “a colossal makeshift tent encampment on the Mexican border.” Not only have the people being housed there reported “substandard conditions and physical abuse,” ICE inspectors found over 60 violations of federal standards for detaining migrants in just 50 days dating back to last September.

In new reporting this week, ProPublica found more than 40 episodes over the past year where immigration agents used life-threatening maneuvers, like the banned chokehold, on immigrants, citizens, and protesters. The reporting notes that the “agents are usually masked, their identities secret. The government won’t say if any of them have been punished.” ProPublica noted that the incidents they are aware of are not a complete accounting of incidents like this that may have occurred.

This is now about far more than Minnesota. This is about all of us. “Don’t take the bait” doesn’t mean that the threat isn’t serious, because it obviously is. This is about being smart as we head into the midterm elections. 

Nothing has the potential to discourage people from voting like the risk of being pulled out of their car by armed men as they head to their polling places, as ICE did earlier this week to a woman who was on her way to a doctor's appointment. If Trump deploys the military while voting is underway, the damage could be significant. Donald Trump is well aware of that, and we need to be too.

In an interview with Reuters on Wednesday, Trump had this to say: “It’s some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms.” He boasted that he had accomplished so much that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.” 

We’ve moved on from claiming he won an election he lost to saying elections are unnecessary. This is a president unfettered by laws, norms, and even the oath he swore to uphold the Constitution. So let’s be prepared. And don’t take the bait.

Thanks for being here with me at Civil Discourse. If you appreciate explanations and analysis like this, I hope you’ll consider a paid subscription. Your support makes the newsletter possible.

We’re in this together,

-Joyce Vance

 

Appeasement

 

The Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado has presented her gold Nobel peace prize medal to Donald Trump after meeting him in the White House, nearly a fortnight after he ordered the abduction of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro.

Machado, who received the award last year for her struggle against Maduro’s “brutal, authoritarian state,” told reporters on Thursday she had made the gesture in recognition of the US president’s “unique commitment [to] our freedom.”

Several hours later, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Machado “presented me with her Nobel peace prize for the work I have done. Such a wonderful gesture of mutual respect.”

What have the peace prize organizers said?  Earlier in the day, they posted on X: “A medal can change owners, but the title of a Nobel peace prize laureate cannot!”

 

"Trump’s massive tax cut for his fellow billionaires"

 

Something truly awful may be happening to our economy — at least for average Americans — as the result of Trump’s billions in tax breaks for billionaires, looting of our treasury and economy, $38 trillion national debt, and his corrupt embrace and promotion of foreign autocracies and digital currencies. If it happens, it’s going to hurt many of us, all while making Trump’s billionaire buddies massively richer.

I remember the look on Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s face when the economy crashed in 2008. The former Goldman Sachs CEO’s hands trembled as he stood at a podium and confessed that the GOP’s banking deregulation had blown up the American financial system and very nearly the global economy.

Millions of Americans lost their homes, their jobs, and their retirements that year, but the barons of Wall Street lost nothing — except a brief moment of embarrassment — and then paid themselves tens of billions in bonuses.

About $430 billion was initially shoveled out the federal door and into the banks in just one month. And, tragically, both Bush and Obama decided that not one top donor executive should go to prison, and not even one major bank was broken up. We coughed up $430 billion to make them whole. And now, it appears, the banksters are at it again.

According to a new report from Lever News, over the past few months the Federal Reserve has quietly extended more than $420 billion in emergency support to Wall Street’s biggest banks in near silence, with minimal scrutiny, and no serious conditions attached. This isn’t an accident: it’s the predictable end point of a system that punishes working people for falling behind and rewards billionaires for their political connections.

As headlines today warn of layoffs spreading through U.S. manufacturing (100,000 job losses since Trump took office) and the Federal Reserve is quietly extending hundreds of billions of dollars in emergency support to Wall Street, it’s worth remembering a sobering but basic rule of history: when economies break, the rich make out like bandits. That’s because recessions are basically shopping sprees for people like Trump and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet.

When Wall Street banks crashed the American economy in 2008, home prices (and, thus, homeowner equity) collapsed by 21%. Over 10 million Americans lost their homes to banking predators like “Foreclosure King” Steve Mnuchin, and tens of millions of others were underwater. The stock market plummeted by over 50% in the last year of Bush’s presidency. On October 9, 2007 the Dow was at its all-time peak of 14,164 but by March 5, 2009, it had collapsed to 6,594.

While millions of Americans lost their jobs and were wiped out as the Bush Crash started today’s homelessness crises, the top 1 percent saw it as one of the finest buying opportunities of the new century. Working-class people were desperately unloading stocks in their 401Ks at a loss just to pay the bills, as wages plummeted in the face of a loose labor market. But the morbidly rich were doing great.

Between 2009 — the bottom of the Bush Crash — and 2012 when the recovery finally began under Obama, the top 1 percent of Americans saw their income grow by over 31 percent. Fully 95 percent of all the income increases in the country were seized by the top 1 percent of Americans during that period.

As the economy recovered, rich people who’d used their increased income to buy stocks at the market bottom rode the S&P 500 up by 462 percent to 2020. A billion dollars invested in 2009 became $4.62 billion in just 11 years, a period during which the combined wealth of American billionaires went up by over 80 percent.

Then they did it again 10 years later! The Trump/Covid Crash of 2020, “mismanaged” in a way to create maximum pain for working people, presented America’s morbidly rich with another brand new and huge opportunity to get richer on top of a crisis brutalizing the rest of America. The market collapsed under Republicans and Trump, and working people, now out of work, were again selling their stocks at a loss just to pay the mortgage and buy food. But for the wealthy, it was a gift from God.

March 16, 2020 — just after Trump declared a pandemic and lockdown — the Dow sustained the largest single-day crash in its entire history. For the investor class, Trump and his billionaire buddies, this was an even better opportunity than the Bush crash of 2008! Fewer than three months later, on June 4th, we learned that the seven richest people in America had seen their fortunes increase by fully 50 percent.

And with Trump’s massive tax cut for his fellow billionaires, they could keep most all of it: by that time the average American billionaire was paying less than 3 percent in income taxes (a situation that persists to this day). Just during that one single terrible pandemic year of 2020, the Institute for Policy Studies documents, U.S. billionaires saw their net worth surge 62 percent by $1.8 trillion. Average billionaire wealth worldwide increased 27% in that one year alone.

American billionaires’ real taxes have fallen by 79 percent since Reagan’s election in 1980, and a 2012 analysis found that as much as $32 trillion is safely squirreled away in tax-fraud offshore shelters, about the same amount as their tax avoidance has left us as a national debt. Which is why average Americans should stop pretending that downturns are random acts of God. They’re predictable outcomes of Republican policy choices that get repeated over and over again — ten of the last eleven recessions happened when a Republican was president — and this one is being engineered in plain sight.

Deregulation weakens guardrails. Trade chaos disrupts production. Inequality hollows out demand. And when the system finally buckles, the losses to average working-class people mean huge profits for the morbidly rich. So no, this warning isn’t fringe: it’s historical and empirical. And it’s being quietly confirmed by the behavior of the people like Warren Buffett — now sitting on $314 billion in cash — who know the markets best and are waiting for the crash to cash in.

So, get ready. Reduce your debt as much as possible, nail down your employment and assets, prepare your garden, and get ready to live simply as Trump crashes our economy again just like he did in 2020, and then tries to use that as an excuse to consolidate his power while he and his billionaire buddies again make off like the bandits they are.

Louise’s Daily Song: “They’re Looting the Economy Again”

Listen now · 3:49

Insightful interpretation of the news. Sharp analysis. No corporate strings. Subscribe for free or become a paid subscriber to keep it going. The Hartmann Report

 

"Free speech and independent media are essential"

 

The FBI search of a Washington Post reporter’s home on Jan. 14, 2026, was a rare and intimidating move by an administration focused on repressing criticism and dissent. In its story about the search at Hannah Natanson’s home, at which FBI agents said they were searching for materials related to a federal government contractor, Washington Post reporter Perry Stein wrote that “it is highly unusual and aggressive for law enforcement to conduct a search on a reporter’s home.”

And Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, told The New York Times the raid was “intensely concerning,” and could have a chilling effect “on legitimate journalistic activity.”

Free speech and independent media play a vital role in holding governments accountable by informing the public about government wrongdoing. This is precisely why autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin have worked to silence independent media, eliminating checks on their power and extending their rule. In Russia, for example, public ignorance about Putin’s responsibility for military failures in the war on Ukraine has allowed state propaganda to shift blame to senior military officials instead.

While the United States remains institutionally far removed from countries like Russia, the Trump administration has taken troubling early steps toward autocracy by threatening – and in some cases implementing – restrictions on free speech and independent media.

Trump sued the New York Times in 2025 for $15 billion for what he called ‘malicious’ articles; a judge threw out the case. Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Public ignorance, free speech and independent media; ignorance about what public officials do exists in every political system. In democracies, citizens often remain uninformed because learning about politics takes time and effort, while one vote rarely changes an election. American economist Anthony Downs called this “rational ignorance,” and it is made worse by complex laws and bureaucracy that few people fully understand.

As a result, voters often lack the information needed to monitor politicians or hold them accountable, giving officials more room to act in their own interest. Free speech and independent media are essential for breaking this cycle. They allow citizens, journalists and opposition leaders to expose corruption and criticize those in power. Open debate helps people share grievances and organize collective action, from protests to campaigns.

Independent media also act as watchdogs, investigating wrongdoing and raising the political cost of abuse – making it harder for leaders to get away with corruption or incompetence. Public ignorance in autocracies: Autocrats strengthen their grip on power by undermining the institutions meant to keep them in check.

When free speech and independent journalism disappear, citizens are less likely to learn about government corruption or failures. Ignorance becomes the regime’s ally – it keeps people isolated and uninformed. By censoring information, autocrats create an information vacuum that prevents citizens from making informed choices or organizing protests.

This lack of reliable information also allows autocrats to spread propaganda and shape public opinion on major political and social issues.

Most modern autocrats have worked to silence free speech and crush independent media. When Putin came to power, he gradually shut down independent TV networks and censored opposition outlets. Journalists who exposed government corruption or brutality were harassed, prosecuted or even killed. New laws restricted protests and public criticism, while “foreign agent” rules made it nearly impossible for the few remaining independent media to operate.

At the same time, the Kremlin built a vast propaganda machine to shape public opinion. This control over information helped protect the regime during crises. As I noted in a recent article, many Russians were unaware of Putin’s responsibility for military failures in 2022. State media used propaganda to shift blame to the military leadership – preserving Putin’s popularity even as the war faltered.

The threat to independent media in the US: While the United States remains far from an autocracy, the Trump administration has taken steps that echo the behavior of authoritarian regimes. 

Consider the use of lawsuits to intimidate journalists. In Singapore, former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and his son, Lee Hsien Loong, routinely used civil defamation suits to silence reporters who exposed government repression or corruption. These tactics discouraged criticism and encouraged self-censorship.

President Donald Trump has taken a similar approach, seeking US$15 billion from The New York Times for publication of several allegedly “malicious” articles, and $10 billion from The Wall Street Journal. The latter suit concerns a story about a letter Trump reportedly signed in Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book.

A court dismissed the lawsuit against The New York Times; that’s likely to happen with the Journal suit as well. But such lawsuits could deter reporting on government misconduct, reporting on the actions and statements of Trump’s political opponents, and the kind of criticism of an administration inherent in opinion journalism such as columns and editorials.

This problem is compounded by the fact that after the Jimmy Kimmel show was suspended following a threat from the Trump-aligned chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, the president suggested revoking the broadcast licenses of networks that air negative commentary about him.

Although the show was later reinstated, the episode revealed how the administration could use the autocratic technique of bureaucratic pressure to suppress speech it disagreed with. Combined with efforts to prosecute the president’s perceived enemies through the Justice Department, such actions inevitably encourage media self-censorship and deepen public ignorance.

The threat to free speech: Autocrats often invoke “national security” to pass laws restricting free speech. Russia’s “foreign agents” law, passed in 2012, forced nongovernmental organizations with foreign funding to label themselves as such, becoming a tool for silencing dissenting advocacy groups. Its 2022 revision broadened the definition, letting the Kremlin target anyone who criticized the government.

Similar laws have appeared in Hungary, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. Russia also uses vague “terrorist” and “extremist” designations to punish those who protest and dissent, all under the guise of “national security.”

After Charlie Kirk’s murder, the Trump administration took steps threatening free speech. It used the pretext of the “violence-inciting radical left” to call for a crackdown on what it designated as “hate speech,” threaten liberal groups, and designate antifa as a domestic terrorist organization.

The latter move is especially troubling, pushing the United States closer to the behavior characteristic of autocratic governments. The vagueness of the designation threatens to suppress free expression and opposition to the Trump administration.

Antifa is not an organization but a “decentralized collection of individual activists,” as scholar Stanislav Vysotsky describes it. The scope of those falling under the antifa label is widened by its identification with broad ideas, described in a national security memorandum issued by the Trump administration in the fall of 2025, like anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity. This gives the government leeway to prosecute an unprecedented number of individuals for their speech.

As scholar Melinda Haas writes, the memorandum “pushes the limits of presidential authority by targeting individuals and groups as potential domestic terrorists based on their beliefs rather than their actions.”

-Konstantin Zhukov, Assistant Professor of Economics, Indiana University, Institute for Humane Studies, from The Conversation

 

"Republicans need to decide whether they want to be complicit in Trump’s descent into depravity. Democrats must force them to make that choice in full view of voters"

Untrained ICE agents ready to use force at the slightest provocation (or none at all) have been brutalizing Americans, with hundreds more undisciplined thugs ready to deploy in Minneapolis and elsewhere. The epidemic of government-initiated violence goes far beyond a few isolated incidents in blue cities.

The Wall Street Journal reported: The Wall Street Journal has identified 13 instances of agents firing at or into civilian vehicles since July, leaving at least eight people shot with two confirmed dead. 

According to court records and lawyers, only one civilian was armed—with a concealed weapon that was never drawn—and at least five of those shots were U.S. citizens. Several federal officers reported injuries, including bruised ribs, a dislocated finger and a bite wound.

The lack of training and shoot-first ask-no-questions-later mentality have turned our streets into something out of 1930’s fascist Europe. ICE and other federal agents disregard accepted, safe law enforcement practices. 

“The Minneapolis shooting shares characteristics with others the Journal reviewed: Agents box in a vehicle, try to remove an individual, block attempts to flee, then fire,” the Journal reported. Despite decades of research to develop “accepted standards” for conducting traffic stops, ICE agents feel empowered to fire at civilians who tick them off. When tragedy strikes, the Trump regime smears and investigates the victim.

Illinois and Minnesota have had enough. The two states filed lawsuits on Monday against Department of Homeland Security, ICE, the Border Control, and specific officials including DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and CPB agent Gregory Bovino; challenging the violent, abusive actions of the immigration agents.

The complaint in page after page meticulously lays out incidents of abusive conduct, violation of First Amendment rights, and lawlessness. The states seek relief based on, among other grounds, the First and Tenth Amendment and the Administrative Procedures Act. 

Their demands include halting the surge of agents in their states (which interfere with states’ health, education, and safety powers); barring arrest of those who have not violated immigration law (unless there is probable cause they committed a crime or threaten others); limiting certain biometric data gathering; protecting the feds from, in essence, overtaking local and state policing; allowing ICE to operate in sensitive places (e.g., schools, hospitals) only in limited circumstances; and preventing use of physical force to disperse crowds engaged in First Amendment-protected activity. The states also want to stop agents from pointing firearms at individuals who pose no threat to others and/or masking their identities.

The federal probe is so corrupted that federal prosecutors at Main Justice and in Minnesota federal prosecutors have quit. “At least five senior prosecutors in the criminal section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced their resignations this week, believing that the Trump administration has undermined the work and mission of the section, according to four people familiar with the personnel moves,” the Washington Post reported. 

On Tuesday, another batch of federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned, reportedly over directions to investigate the victim and freeze out state investigators. The whitewash is so blatant and clumsy that no one will believe the results of the phony “investigation.”

Frankly, it is stunning that lawsuits are necessary to bring about such basic restraints that, until now, most federal and state law enforcement officials have widely followed. And given the extent of Trump regime violence and public outrage, it is inconceivable that Democrats would miss the opportunity to use the upcoming the spending deadline to halt unrestricted flow of hundreds of billions to a rogue DHS.

Democrats should rally around proposals such as those from Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and from Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Cal.) and Jasmine Crockett (D-Tex.) in the House to condition spending on increased oversight of ICE and on requirements that agents have warrants, wear body cameras, do not mask themselves, and stop using force indiscriminately. Democrats can bring the same attention and pressure to bear on Republicans as they did in the healthcare fight: Get on the right side of the issue or face the wrath of voters.

That strategy is entirely doable, if Democrats maintain their nerve. They must remember that the political landscape has changed dramatically since the end of the Oct.-Nov. shutdown: Trump is far weaker than he was even a couple months ago.

Trump’s approval ratings have continued to plummet, and both Houses have rebelled against Trump (with a War Powers Act vote in the Senate, an ACA vote in the House, and on votes to release the Epstein-Trump files in both). 

Even Republicans have begun denouncing him on the malicious prosecution of Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell. (At least two Republicans said they would oppose confirming any Fed nominee until Trump backs off a malicious prosecution of Powell.)

Trump is not the only one with diminishing leverage. Contrary to legacy media punditry, Senate Republicans now face loss of their majority. Even before the latest Powell and ICE debacles, I have argued — based on Democrats’ November sweep, the sinking popularity of “concerned” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Democrats’ recruitment of key candidates (e.g., Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Roy Cooper in North Carolina), and key Republican retirements (e.g., Iowa Sen. Joni “We are all going to die” Ernst) — that Democrats’ chances to win back the majority have been underestimated. On top of the latest Trump blunders, former congresswoman Mary Peltola announced she is running to challenge Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska).

No one should doubt that the Senate is in play. Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, and Alaska are winnable; Iowa and Texas are competitive; and Democrats’ defense of Minnesota, Michigan, and Georgia look far safer. Republicans could very well lose both the House and the Senate, bringing Trump’s reign of chaos, terror, and lawlessness to a screeching halt.

Accordingly, while the country is in an uproar about ICE’s brutal onslaught (and getting hit with enormous healthcare insurance premium hikes), Dems should use the pending funding deadline to turn up the heat on both the ACA extension and ICE restrictions. 

Trump is already in trouble on his unilateral, forever wars, so war powers resolutions on Greenland, Iran, etc. can be dealt with separately. Pro-democracy voters need to keep the pressure on Democrats to press their advantage and to warn Republicans that siding with Trump will result in their wipe-out in November.

Democrats can increase their chances for success if they begin to tie the disastrous results to individual senators. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) could have voted to prevent you from losing healthcare. He refused. Sen. X voted to allow ICE to run wild, killing Americans on the street, so hold her responsible for the deaths that followed. Stressing specific members’ responsibility for Trump’s horrors will both encourage them to join Democrats on the ACA and ICE as well as lay the groundwork for the midterms.

The first two weeks of 2026 have put on display Trump’s crazed desperation. His frenzy to secure his authoritarian rule in the face of plunging popularity suggests he understands that a blue wave midterm will bring his regime to a screeching halt.

Therein lies the danger of an unhinged, vengeful narcissist enabled by sycophants and morally vacuous toadies in Congress, the press, business, and universities. His actions become more outrageous, his lies more outlandish. But in his absurd overreach — going to war against Venezuela, defending the stone-cold killing of an American mom, prosecuting the Fed chairman — he also has demonstrated to anyone outside his cult that the midterms are not just about healthcare and high prices.

Trump has made this about chaos, insanity, war, violence, and simple decency. Republicans need to decide whether they want to be complicit in Trump’s descent into depravity. Democrats must force them to make that choice in full view of voters.

The Contrarian is reader-supported. Thank you for getting us through our first year! To support independent journalism, help with litigation efforts, and keep this opposition movement lively and engaged through 2026, please join the fight as a paid subscriber.

 Share