“In Congress, where a fight over funding for CBP and ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, is playing out, [Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan] Omar has stood with other progressives in recent votes. The bill signed by Trump on Tuesday only funds DHS through the middle of the month, though Republicans gave ICE an extra $75 billion in last year’s budget package.”

“The top ten metropolitan areas, including Seattle’s, generate an astonishing 90 percent of the US GDP, and 88 percent of its employment. The modern economy would collapse without them. Without this kind of economic power, you don’t have an Idaho, or a Wyoming, or a Montana. You don’t have a billionaire class. Yet cities are now under violent attack from the GOP, the party that represents the ruling class, because they’re too blue, because they have policies that are supposed to protect the rights of immigrants, and so on. Yet ICE has only one mission: make the lives of city people miserable. This is the paradox of all American paradoxes and it has seemingly backfired.

“ICE is now facing resistance from the deeper city, from the community, from networks of care, from nurses, one of whom it killed…

“What ICE has done is actually strengthen, rather weaken, the bonds between urban dwellers. Indeed, the social meaning of the city, which…is still massively underrepresented in state and national politics, has become more pronounced. This is not to say modern cities are perfect. We have a heap of racial, housing, and gender issues to work through. But many of these problems come from the market of the modern city. What we are seeing now (in Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, Minneapolis), and what must continue…is the movement toward the stabilization of urban fellow feeling and, eventually, its expansion into state and national politics. The Dems, in a word, are failing our cities. Now is the time to change that.”

“Teachers slipping to work under cover of darkness. The windows of a school building papered over to stop onlookers from peering in. Classrooms more than half-empty in an eerie echo of the pandemic five years ago.

“These are just a few of the scenes that have been reported out of Minnesota schools in recent days amid President Donald Trump’s “Operation Metro Surge,” which has flooded Minneapolis, St. Paul, and surrounding towns with immigration agents who school officials say have left the area feeling like an occupation zone.”

“We speak with Mother Jones voting rights correspondent Ari Berman about the shocking FBI raid on an elections hub in Fulton County, Georgia. Federal agents were seeking records related to the 2020 presidential election, which President Donald Trump continues to falsely claim he won despite his loss to Joe Biden that year. During his efforts to overturn the election results, Trump pressured local officials to “find” him an additional 11,780 votes. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was on the scene Friday despite having no domestic law enforcement authority. The raid comes amid an ongoing federal probe into the 2020 election.

“The fact that they seized 700 boxes of ballots was incredibly disturbing and sets a chilling precedent for how Trump might try to interfere in the 2026 election,” says Berman, who ties the raid in Georgia to the administration’s pressure on Minnesota to hand over voter rolls. “This is now a multifront, concerted effort to try to interfere in the midterm elections.”

Trump ran on a promise to lower costs on day one, but a year into his presidency, the real beneficiaries are his billionaire donors. Instead of making life more affordable for everyday Americans, Trump has used the presidency to enrich himself and his billionaire allies, while making the largest cuts to Medicaid and food assistance in history and leaving working families behind.

As families struggle with rising costs, Trump has effectively turned the White House into a slush fund, running the federal government like a personal ATM.

“A good rule of thumb when looking at a Republican-drafted bill or campaign is that its name is directly the opposite of whatever it is meant to achieve. If there is something about ‘protecting women’ in the title, for example, then it’s probably actually about controlling women or bullying transgender people. The same is true of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) Act, which would change the way US citizens register to vote. The purpose of the bill doesn’t seem to be to safeguard democracy but to help destroy it through stealth disenfranchisement.

“If it became law, the Save Act would require Americans to provide a birth certificate, passport, or other citizenship document to register or re-register to vote. Per one Brennan Center Study, more that 21 million American citizens, many of whom are engaged voters, do not have easy access to these documents. While just over 8% of self-identified white American citizens don’t have these documents readily available, the Brennan Center found the number is nearly 11% among Americans of color.

“Of course the Save Act isn’t being presented as a way for Republicans to sneakily sway the midterms in their favour as confidence in Trump dips. Rather, it’s being presented as a way to stop fraudulent voting. “[W]e all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections,” house speaker Mike Johnson said during a press conference about the act when it was first introduced in May 2024. “But it’s not been something that is easily provable.” I think we all know, intuitively, that it’s not easily provable because that claim is nonsense.”

A “no work, no school, no shopping” blackout day of protest was kicked off by community leaders, faith leaders and labor unions on Friday in protest against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) surge in the state.

The “Day of Truth & Freedom” protest comes in the wake of the killing of Renee Good, the unarmed woman killed by a federal immigration officer in Minneapolis earlier this month.

Nationwide, immigrants with no criminal record continue to make up the largest group in US immigration detention, which is at record levels.

[Democracy Now] speak[s] with activist, civil rights attorney and ordained minister Nekima Levy Armstrong about her role in a protest at a St. Paul church on Sunday, where one of the pastors, David Easterwood, also leads a local ICE field office in the Twin Cities area. “I believe that if someone professes to represent the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to preach it, that they should not be allowing ICE agents to drag people out of their homes,” Levy Armstrong tells Democracy Now! She spoke from an undisclosed location after Trump officials vowed to investigate and possibly arrest the demonstrators.

“I recently met a widowed 71-year-old woman still working two jobs and living at an extended-stay hotel because even two jobs don’t pay her enough to afford rent,” [journalist Brian Goldstone] wrote…“This is what ‘one more year of work’ looks like in America.”

Economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research noted that [Dr Mehmet] Oz doesn’t seem to understand that most Americans don’t have the kinds of cushy gigs he’s enjoyed for decades.

“I’m sure everyone would be happy to work another year if work meant getting paid millions of dollars to spout utter nonsense on Fox, CBS, and other right-wing outlets,” Baker remarked…

The leading French economist Gabriel Zucman is urging European governments to inflict financial pain on American billionaires in response to US President Donald Trump’s effort to seize control of Greenland, a mineral-rich island that some of Trump’s rich campaign donors see as a potentially massive profit opportunity.

“Access to the European market—by billionaires and the companies they own—should be made conditional on paying a wealth tax: in effect, a tariff for oligarchs. If Elon Musk, for example, wants to keep selling Teslas in Europe, he should have to pay it. If he refuses, Tesla would lose access to the European market.”

Participation in [Minneapolis] neighborhood watch groups has surged alongside ICE’s presence and ramped up even more since Renee Good’s recent killing by an ICE agent in the city on 7 January. With each passing day, animosity is building.

“It’s very clear that the Trump administration is looking to disguise what is a blatant campaign of cruelty, under this illusion of ‘we’re going after the bad guys,’” said city council member Robin Wonsley. “It couldn’t be further from the truth.”

And yet, the notion that community members must protect and provide for one another, whether because of state violence or state failures, is not new. The police killing of George Floyd in 2020, and the uprising that ensued, also spurred neighborhood-level organizing in Minneapolis.