A group of survivors of abuse by Jeffrey Epstein released an advertisement that will air during the Super Bowl imploring for the full release of millions of government files revealing the connections between Epstein and many famous politicians and celebrities.

BREAKING: The Epstein survivors are releasing this ad on this Super Bowl Sunday to send the message that they will not “move on” from the largest sex trafficking scandal in the world. #standwithsurvivors pic.twitter.com/JehYZa1hGw

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) February 8, 2026

The ad was posted on X by journalist Jim Acosta. It comes a day before Congress is expected to be able to finally read unredacted versions of the Epstein files, according to a letter by a Justice Department official obtained by MS Now.

During his address to God at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, Rep. Jonathan Jackson, a democrat from Illinois, called on President Donald Trump to be “invested in the elevation of suffering” of people in this country, including “the families preparing to bury their loved ones in Minneapolis.” 

Rep. Jackson, son of civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson, asked God to “remind” the president “that he has the power to turn mourning into dancing or to reduce the country into a cosmic elegy of chaos and suffering” as Trump stood just feet away, his eyes fluttering open and shut during the prayer. 

The representative’s prayer provided an uninterrupted moment in a crowded room to call attention to the ongoing and violent federal immigration operation in Minneapolis, which, as Jackson noted, included agents fatally shooting two US citizens: Renée Good and Alex Pretti. 

Both men were on stage for the 74th National Prayer Breakfast, an event that every president has attended since Dwight D. Eisenhauer. It was Trump’s sixth time speaking at the breakfast, and his address lasted over an hour and 15 minutes.

In that address, Trump falsely claimed that he won the popular vote in the 2016 election, joked that “I really think I probably should make it” into heaven, and defended his Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, who is facing increasing calls for her to be fired or impeached, among other boilerplate talking points for the president. 

Rep. Jackson has been a critic of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s operations and was a part of the group of Illinois lawmakers who were denied entry into an ICE processing facility during the summer, before being granted access late last year. He’s faced pushback, though, for buying stock in Palantir, a major ICE contractor. The representative, according to NOTUS, “regretted buying this stock and that he asked his financial adviser to get rid of his Palantir holdings.”

Elsewhere in Rep. Jackson’s prayer about Trump, he asked God to “increase the stature of his wisdom,” to “lead this president into greater levels of compassion,” and to “give him greater clarity, greater courage, and greater capacity to do what is right.”

“For the sake of this nation, for the sake of this world, we pray that goodness and mercy would announce themselves in his life in new and powerful ways,” Rep. Jackson said, adding, “remind him that we are all Americans, all made in the image of God and that none of us are free unless all of us have our freedoms protected.”

A federal judge issued a last-minute temporary stay on Monday to block the Trump administration’s attempt to remove temporary legal protections for up to 350,000 Haitian immigrants across the United States.

In a brutal 83-page takedown, Judge Ana C. Reyes of the US District Court for DC specifically laid into a December X post from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem that claimed foreign “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies” are ruining the vision of the founding fathers.

“The plaintiffs are five Haitian TPS holders,” Reyes wrote. “They are not, it emerges, ‘killers, leeches, or entitlement junkies.’ They are instead: Fritz Emmanuel Lesly Miot, a neuroscientist researching Alzheimer’s disease, Rudolph Civil, a software engineer at a national bank, Marlene Gail Noble, a laboratory assistant in a toxicology department, Marica Merline Laguerre, a college economics major, id., and Vilbrun Dorsainvil, a full-time registered nurse.”

I just met with the President.

I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that's been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.

Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign…

— Kristi Noem (@KristiNoem) December 1, 2025

“One of those (her word) ‘damn’ countries is Haiti,” Reyes continued. “Three days before making the above post, Secretary Noem announced she would terminate Haiti’s TPS designation as of February 3, 2026.”

Reyes said that it was therefore “substantially likely” that Noem had moved to end TPS status for Haitians due to “hostility to nonwhite immigrants.”

Temporary Protected Status is a designation that allows people who have moved to the US from countries enduring ongoing armed conflicts, environmental disasters, or epidemics to legally work and reside in the US. It was set to expire on Tuesday, meaning many Haitian immigrants who came to the US legally would be subject to deportation. 

As of March 2025, the US provides TPS protections to roughly 330,000 Haitians, according to the National Immigration Forum. Former President Barack Obama designated Haiti for TPS after a magnitude-7.0 earthquake struck the country in January 2010, in which an estimated 220,000 people died and over 300,000 were injured. 

As Isabela Dias wrote last year: “The Trump administration has moved to end TPS for Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Hondurans and canceled a humanitarian parole initiative, known as CHNV, that had allowed more than 500,000 migrants from four countries, including Venezuela, to come to the United States and work for up to two years.” In fact, as Reyes notes, “Noem has terminated every TPS country designation to have reached her desk—twelve countries up, twelve countries down.”

Bigotry toward immigrants has long been a cornerstone for Donald Trump and his followers. During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump repeated unfounded claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating other residents’ pets. The rhetoric resulted in dozens of bomb threats [link please]. Springfield, a city with fewer than 60,000, is home to about 15,000 Haitians. In 2018, Trump called Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations “shithole” countries.

Since Reyes’ ruling, Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant secretary for public affairs at the DHS, posted on X that the department would take the case to the Supreme Court. 

“Haiti’s TPS was granted following an earthquake that took place over 15 years ago, it was never intended to be a de facto amnesty program, yet that’s how previous administrations have used it for decades,” McLaughlin wrote. “Temporary means temporary and the final word will not be from an activist judge legislating from the bench.”

It took over a week for Mia Ives-Rublee, a wheelchair user and senior director of the Center for American Progress’s disability justice initiative, to be able to move more than a block past her home after one of the country’s most extensive winter storms in years hit her home of Washington, DC, at the end of January.

“Living in a city that you know has the resources, and still dealing with these issues, shows just how poorly cities are ready to deal with accessibility issues,” Ives-Rublee told me.

When sidewalks in her area were cleared, she said, the snow was moved into curb cuts, making it practically impossible for people with mobility devices to cross the street.

Disabled people are uniquely impacted by climate events, including that system of snowstorms, which impacted more than half the United States. The failure of even some of the best-resourced cities to adequately clear snow so that disabled people with mobility devices can safely get around is both an infrastructure failure and a policy choice, leaving those people stuck in one area and stripping them of their autonomy.

“People with a range of disabilities need clean sidewalks for safe mobility, and many in the disability community experience restricted access to food and healthcare when public infrastructure becomes unusable in the aftermath of extreme weather events,” sociologist Angela Frederick, the author of Disabled Power, told me. “For community members with disabilities, the impact of extreme weather can go on and on, even after life has returned to normal for others.”

A 2015 study published in the Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation looked at the challenges that Canadians with wheeled mobility devices faced during the winter months. More than 90 percent reported that their devices got stuck in the snow, that they slipped on the ice, and that they had difficulty using ramps. 99 percent said that using sidewalks and roads became problematic.

Living in Arkansas, Bailey Hunter, a wheelchair user, is less used to dealing with the snow. Hunter has not always used a wheelchair, and January’s snowstorm was the first time she had to be out and about with one in winter weather. She was unable to go to work for five days because the snow was not properly cleared.

“You have no autonomy, because you can’t physically move on the snow,” Hunter told me. “You can’t push yourself, you can’t do anything.”

And while losing access to the community can be burden enough, being snowed in can also be dangerous for disabled people.

“This isn’t just about us being able to get outside, but it’s actually a safety hazard,” Ives-Rublee continued. “If I need to go to the hospital, or if I need to go to the doctor’s office, I can’t do that with the snow being how it is.”

Videos of the killing of Alex Pretti by federal agents last Saturday ricocheted around the world, allowing ordinary viewers to see for themselves, second by second, how the deadly skirmish unfolded. The video evidence from the scene immediately shredded the Trump administration’s claims, which smeared Pretti as a “domestic terrorist” and a “would-be assassin.”

Senior Reporter Nathan Halverson wanted to ask a federal law enforcement officer—someone trained in handling quick-moving altercations while armed—what a trained professional saw in the video. So Halverson sat down with a former FBI agent to help us understand the visual evidence and how a proper investigation should play out from here. 

Now retired, Ken Bagchi asked that we keep his face off camera because of his previous undercover work and to protect the active agents he worked with who remain in the field.

“I’m having the hardest time reconciling what it looks to me to be a victim lying face down on the ground, and agents are not within reach of them…understanding what you would say is the imminent threat of death or serious injury at that point, to justify continuing to shoot,” he said. “We should not fear information. We should not fear facts. We should not fear interviews. We should not be afraid for people to give a statement under penalty of perjury, saying, ‘I am swearing this to be true and this is what I saw happen.’”

The Education Department spent an estimated $28 to $38 million on attempted staff cuts last year at its Office of Civil Rights, according to a report from the US Government Accountability Office released Monday. 

The department initiated a reduction in force last March, pushing nearly 50 percent of its more than 4,000-strong workforce onto administrative leave. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon called the cuts a “commitment to efficiency, accountability, and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most: to students, parents, and teachers.” 

Later that month, Donald Trump signed an executive order stating that the Secretary of Education should “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities.”

At the Office of Civil Rights (OCR), which enforces federal civil rights laws in schools and other institutions that receive Education Department funding, close to half its 575 employees were put on leave in March. In October, they were officially laid off. In November, they were taken off the payroll. The department’s cuts were challenged in court, and in December, some fired staff were told to return to work.

This back-and-forth doesn’t scream “efficiency.” And the cuts to OCR did not, in fact, save money. 

But they did have real consequences: From the beginning of the layoffs in March to September 23, Americans filed more than 9,000 federal complaints about discrimination in education. Of the 7,000 cases resolved, about 90 percent were thrown out.  

From Trump’s first inauguration through the end of 2017, OCR reached a resolution agreement in more than 30 racial harassment cases. From his second inauguration through the end of 2025, it resolved only two, a review of public OCR data by NPR found. In 2017, the office reached about ten times as many agreements in disability cases than in 2025. And while even Trump’s first-term OCR resolved about 60 sexual harassment cases and 15 sexual assault cases in 2017, it did not reach a single agreement on either kind of case in 2025.

The Department of Education declined to comment regarding the cost of its staff cuts and the stark increase in civil rights complaint dismissals, citing the temporary government shutdown.

“Every child in America should be able to get a good education no matter where they live, what their religious beliefs are or whether or not they have a disability,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who commissioned the GAO report. “Instead, the Trump administration fired half of the Education Department employees working to protect the civil rights of students and wasted as much as $38 million in taxpayer dollars by preventing investigators from doing their jobs. That is unacceptable.”

Donald Trump announced on Sunday night that the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will close its doors for two years while it undergoes renovation, following artists calling off performances and ticket sales nosediving.

The cultural institution is scheduled to close on July 4, “in honor of the 250th Anniversary of our Country,” to undergo “Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding” and become “the finest Performing Arts Facility of its kind, anywhere in the World,” the president posted on Truth Social. 

But it remains unclear what renovations need to be completed. The Kennedy Center underwent a $250 million expansion in 2019. 

In his announcement, the president stated that “financing is completed, and fully in place.” The One Big Beautiful Bill Act set aside $257 million for “necessary expenses for capital repair, restoration, maintenance backlog, and security structures” for the Kennedy Center—possibly, as he previously stated, to adorn the building with “24 karat gold” similar to his remodeling of the Oval Office.  

Trump noted that his decision will be “totally subject to Board approval”—a Board that he took over after kicking out many Joe Biden appointees, handpicking replacements, and declaring himself chairman last February. 

In December, the president renamed the Kennedy Center “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” As I wrote then, only Congress holds the authority to rename the building. President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 signed a law that designates the arts institution as a “living memorial” to the late President Kennedy.

Members of Kennedy’s family condemned the decision to close the cultural center. The former president’s niece, Maria Shriver, ridiculed Trump Sunday on X, writing a “translation” of his announcement: “It’s best for me to close this center down and rebuild a new center that will bear my name, which will surely get everybody to stop talking about the fact that everybody’s canceling… right?”

Translation: It has been brought to my attention that due to the name change (but nobody’s telling me it’s due to the name change), but it’s been brought to my attention that entertainers are canceling left and right, and I have determined that since the name change no one wants… https://t.co/BDsjQeOAC9

— Maria Shriver (@mariashriver) February 2, 2026

“He can change the name, shut the doors, and demolish the building. He can try to kill JFK,” Jack Schlossberg, Kennedy’s grandson, wrote the same night on X. “But JFK is kept alive by us now rising up to remove Donald Trump, bring him to justice, and restore the freedoms generations fought for.”

In a Monday statement, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which has jurisdiction over public buildings, and an ex-officio member of the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees, said Trump’s year-long attempt to “commandeer the Kennedy Center as a clubhouse for his friends and political allies and install leadership who will satisfy his every whim” has led to the destruction of the cultural institution. 

“With his hostile takeover leading to artists’ withdrawals and declining ticket sales, he is covering up his failures by shuttering a national landmark that belongs to the American people,” Whitehouse continued. 

Whitehouse launched an investigation into corruption at the Kennedy Center under Trump-appointed interim president Richard Grenell following the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee obtaining documents revealing millions of dollars in lost revenue and luxury spending. According to Whitehouse’s Monday statement, Grenell has not provided financial transparency, despite public promises to do so.

A Democrat and union leader won a special election on Saturday to represent a Texas state Senate district that Donald Trump carried by 17 points in 2024. 

GOP Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick called the result, a 57-43 victory for Taylor Rehmet, “a wake-up call for Republicans across Texas” in an early Sunday post on X. Republicans currently hold every statewide elected office in Texas.

“Our voters cannot take anything for granted,” Patrick continued, calling out low voter turnout in special elections. 

According to the Texas Tribune, Patrick gave $300,000 to the campaign of Rehmet’s opponent, Leigh Wambsganss, through his PAC, Texas Senate Leadership Fund. Trump also posted multiple get-out-the-vote messages on behalf of Wambsganss on Truth Social in the days leading up to the election.  

Rehmet, an Air Force veteran and the leader of his local machinist’s union, spent $242,174—nearly 10 times less than Wambsganss—according to campaign finance reports reviewed by Fort Worth Report. 

“It’s clear as day that this disastrous Republican agenda is hurting working families in Texas and across the country, which is why voters in red, blue, and purple districts are putting their faith in candidates like Taylor Rehmet,” Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement. “This overperformance is a warning sign to Republicans across the country.”

Wambsganss is the chief communications officer for Patriot Mobile, a cell phone company that calls itself “America’s ONLY Christian Conservative Wireless Provider.” Wambsganss and Patriot Mobile have helped Republicans place candidates supporting conservative Christian policies on North Texas school boards. This represents part of the state’s push for book bans and dedicated time for prayer in class. 

Last November, Rehmet earned nearly 48 percent of the vote, just three percentage points shy of an outright election win, leading to Saturday’s runoff. In that election, he ran against two Republicans, who together split 52 percent of the vote. Rehmet’s victory in the run-off was that much more significant because he faced only Wambsganns.

Rehmet’s win adds to the recent record of Democrat victories in statewide elections—including gubernatorial wins in New Jersey and Virginia. 

While Democrats have celebrated Rehmet’s win as a harbinger of what’s to come in this year’s midterms, some political observers have cautioned that the result may not signify a broader Republican reckoning.

A federal judge on Saturday ordered the release of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos from an immigration detention facility outside San Antonio. Ramos, in the blue bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack, who became another symbol of the cruelty of ICE agents, was detained by federal agents earlier this month in a suburban Minneapolis neighborhood—an incident that has since drawn immense outrage.

Judge Fred Biery of the Federal District Court for the Western District of Texas has ruled that the detention of Ramos and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, was unconstitutional. They are both asylum seekers. 

In a scathing opinion, the judge wrote that the father and son “seek nothing more than some modicum of due process and the rule of law,” adding that immigration agents were “traumatizing children.”

The father and son’s case “has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children,” the judge noted.

Biery wrote of the detainment: “Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency.”

According to school officials in Minnesota, on January 20, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained the father as he and Liam were on their way home from school pickup. Agents then reportedly used the child as “bait” to knock on his front door to see if anyone else was home, Zena Stenvik, the superintendent for the Columbia Heights Public Schools district, said. A photo of a federal agent holding onto the backpack of Liam went viral, sparking intense criticism.

Writing in the Washington Post, Phillip Kennicott noted, “This is an image of universal moral urgency, akin to a small number of photographs that once upon a time had the power to change our behavior, away from cruelty or indifference and in the direction of basic decency.”

The father and son were quickly sent to the Texas detention center, where Liam reportedly has been sick, according to his mother. 

Judge Biery accused the federal government of “ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence” and “that pesky inconvenience called the Fourth Amendment.” At the end of the ruling, he includes that now indelible photo of Liam with two Bible verses. Matthew 19:14, which quotes Jesus: “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.”

And John 11:35, “Jesus wept.”

Veterans, people aging out of foster care, and parents of teenagers are just a few of the groups who will face dire consequences from work requirements for people receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, that are taking effect for several states across the country on Sunday, February 1. 

Expected to impact millions of Americans and cause around two million recipients to stop receiving benefits altogether, these changes stem from President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that passed in July. The GOP bill will reduce SNAP funding by approximately $186 billion over 10 years—a cut of around 20 percent. 

SNAP currently helps provide food to more than 42 million Americans each month—more than two–thirds of whom are elderly, disabled, or children. To qualify for SNAP, households must be at or below 130 percent of the poverty line —which, as of 2026, stands at $15,960 for a single person, $27,320 for a three-person household, and $38,680 for a five-person household.

Typically, adults who are eligible for SNAP can receive benefits for three months within a 36-month period before needing to fulfill additional work requirements, such as getting employment or attending a work training program. Many groups of people are granted exceptions to the work requirements depending on their abilities and life circumstances. The updated requirements, however, target some of these groups. 

Starting Sunday, February 1, in several states around the country able-bodied individuals between the ages of 18 and 65 without dependents must be working or attending a work program for 80 hours or more per month to receive benefits. Before the GOP bill’s passage, the age limit for work requirements was 55. And, while parents and household members with dependents under the age of 18 were previously exempt from the requirements, moving forward those exceptions will only apply to families with dependents under the age of 14. 

Certain other groups facing unique challenges were also able to receive benefits without fulfilling certain requirements, but will now be forced to comply with the new rules. These groups include veterans, people ages 24 and under who recently aged out of foster care, and people who are unhoused. 

According to a Congressional Budget Office report from August 2025, these new provisions could reduce participation in SNAP by roughly 2.4 million people in an average month from 2025 to 2034. 

The power of individual states to provide benefits during difficult hiring periods is also being affected. State leaders can only temporarily extend benefits beyond three months if the unemployment rate in an area is at least 10 percent, per the updated rules. The national unemployment rate is, according to a January report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, around 4.4 percent.

According to the Trump administration, these new rules are aimed at eliminating what they say is fraud and “reflect the importance of work and responsibility,” as detailed on the United States Department of Agriculture website. The USDA is the agency that funds SNAP. Yet, according to an April 2025 report from the Congressional Research Service, “SNAP fraud is rare.” Sometimes, an occasional error may occur through bureaucratic mistakes such as duplicate enrollments—though this does not constitute fraud, the report explained. 

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has lauded the new rules, saying in an interview with Fox Business on Friday that “the American dream is not being on [a] food stamp program.” She added, “That should be a hand up, not a handout.” 

People who receive SNAP benefits repeatedly have faced uncertainty recently, including during the longest government shutdown in American history last year, when millions of Americans didn’t receive their food benefits. Unlike during other government shutdowns, the Trump administration opted not to use contingency funds to keep SNAP operating while Congress worked on a deal. 

The administration last year also threatened to withhold federal funding for food stamps for more than 20 Democratic-led states that refused to hand over sensitive personal data—such as Social Security numbers, birth dates, and home addresses—about their recipients, reportedly in an effort to root out fraud. Democratic leaders refused, in part, because they worried this data would be used for immigration enforcement. 

Some people who are legally in the country but are not citizens have had access to SNAP benefits. These rules have also changed in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” The GOP move will affect scores of people legally present in the US, including those who came to the country under asylum and refugee laws or had urgent humanitarian needs, such as being survivors of domestic violence or human trafficking. The new work guidelines risk adding more confusion to the mix.

“These work requirements aren’t really about promoting work. They’re about dehumanizing people and attacking the ‘other,'” Joel Berg, CEO of the nonprofit Hunger Free America, told ABC News. “Most SNAP recipients are pro-work, and most SNAP recipients are already working, or children, or people with disabilities, or older Americans. So all this is sort of a diversionary debate.”

And now, he explained, “more Americans will go hungry.”

Many thousands of protestors across hundreds of demonstrations around the country on Friday once again took to their streets to tell President Donald Trump’s federal immigration agents a simple message: Get out of our towns and cities. 

Friday’s nationwide mobilization is only the most recent in a string of demonstrations demanding justice for those targeted in the Department of Homeland Security’s ongoing, and violent, operations. Many of them focused on the brutality in Minnesota, including the killings of two US citizens, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, by federal agents, and the apprehension of Liam Ramos, the 5-year-old boy with the Spider-Man backpack and the blue hat, who is currently sick in a Texas detention center after being picked up by DHS officials. 

There’s no clear sign of when agents will leave the Twin Cities, as a US District judge on Saturday declined to order the Trump administration to immediately scale back its operations. As the Washington Post reported, she argued “Minnesota and the Twin Cities had not definitively shown that the administration’s decision to flood the state with agents was unlawful or designed to force local officials into cooperating with the administration’s objectives.” And, even if some agents leave Minneapolis, scores of immigration officials around the nation continue to target people in their cars, at home, and while working. 

In addition to protests, the widespread actions included refraining from economic participation—no shopping, no working—and a school walkout, organized by students around the country. 

Here are just some of the places where immigrants and their allies—many of them schoolchildren—took to the streets across the US:

Twin Cities

Protests in Minnesota have continued unabated for weeks as locals face subzero temperatures, yet come out en masse around the Twin Cities area.

California

Demonstrations took place in major California cities, including Los Angeles, where prominent journalist and former CNN anchor Don Lemon was arrested by federal agents late Thursday night in connection with his appearance at a church protest in St. Paul, which he reported on earlier this month.

New York City

Starting at Foley Square near City Hall, a large crowd of demonstrators marched toward Washington Square Park. Earlier this week, dozens of protestors were arrested after going into the lobby of a TriBeCa hotel where they said federal agents were being housed.

Miami

Chicago

Boston

Livingston, Montana

As with previous nationwide mobilizations, residents of smaller cities or towns gathered near the side of a road to protest. These are demonstrators in Livingston, Montana.

Colorado

Charlotte, North Carolina

Washington, DC

---

And, demonstrations are not just in the United States. Anti-ICE protests in cities around the world, including Paris and Milan, took place this week in solidarity with demonstrators in the United States. Those in Milan were focused on protesting the possible presence of ICE at the Olympic Games.

There’s another US-based nationwide mobilization planned for March 28. That action is being organized by the No Kings coalition, which has put on several mass demonstrations across the nation in the past year. Though it is unclear if another cross-country day of outrage will take place before then, as people remain ready to respond to whatever news alert about DHS comes across their phones next.

Students at the University of Minnesota, united with hundreds of groups across the country, are imploring people, young and old, to join a general strike on Friday. No school, no work, no economic participation, all toward the goal of ceasing funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

The strike comes after weeks of the Department of Homeland Security occupying the Twin Cities and targeting immigrants at school, work, and home. And after federal agents on this campaign shot and killed two US citizens, Renée Good and Alex Pretti.

As a part of the nationwide mobilization, students around the country are walking out of school to stand against President Donald Trump and DHS’s violent operations targeting American towns and cities. 

Here’s a look:

I passed these amazing kids in Chamblee walking out of school to protest ICE. Bravo, future, bravo. #walkoutGA #walkout #studentprotest #protest #abolishICE

— MollyRoseWalker (@mollyrosewalker.bsky.social) 2026-01-30T06:33:42.793Z

HAPPENING NOW: KNOXVILLE/KNOX COUNTY students walk out to protest ICE (H/T @votegloriaj.bsky.social )

— The Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler.bsky.social) 2026-01-30T16:07:59.407Z

Happening right now. Many schools, workplaces & businesses are joining in on a national day of protest called “ice out day of action.” Here are teachers and students at San Mateo high school before school this morning. Many students will walk out at lunch to join nearby schools pic.twitter.com/NdsChcPImO

— Will Tran (@KRON4WTran) January 30, 2026

@yvonnebravo1

Agua Fria High School District students are walking out today, joining high schools nationwide. They’re speaking truth to power and demanding action on immigration because silence is no longer an option! ✊🏼

♬ original sound – Greatest Hits Ever!

TODAY: Thousands at UCLA walk out of class, calling for solidarity with Minnesota and to demand ICE out of California. The walkout was organized by UCLA’s student government along with the Afrikan Student Union and other student clubs and organizations.

— BreakThrough News (@btnewsroom.bsky.social) 2026-01-29T00:27:25.320810254Z

@telemundo.az

En ASU los estudiantes protestan contra ICE como parte del Día de Paro Nacional. #tempe #asu #paronacional #walkout @valentinasr_news

♬ original sound – telemundo.az – telemundo.az

BREAKING: Hundreds of Asheville High School students walk out of class to demand a general strike, joining the national shutdown today to protest ICE operations and Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda.

— BreakThrough News (@btnewsroom.bsky.social) 2026-01-30T17:33:36.473017581Z

Happening now: Hundreds of students from Urban School of San Francisco walk out in protest of ICE.

— The San Francisco Standard (@sfstandard.com) 2026-01-30T21:14:48.042Z

Not your mother's protest here in Portland. High Schooler are out in force as part of the national strike.

— Tim Dickinson (@timdickinson.bsky.social) 2026-01-30T21:14:25.654Z

Today, hundreds of students from Webster Groves High School and Kirkwood High School joined a national walkout protesting ICE. I spoke to one freshman who said that seeing so many students around her gave her hope. @ksdknews pic.twitter.com/ZSZdwsONCE

— Justina Coronel (@JustinaCoronel) January 30, 2026

The scene outside Crockett HS in Austin this morning. Hundreds of students walked out of class to protest ICE enforcement. @cbsaustin pic.twitter.com/gTVBSUXoZ3

— Andrew Lamparski (@andrewlamparski) January 30, 2026

@detroitfreepress

Students at Detroit’s Cass Technical High School walked out at 2:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 30, 2026, to protest U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after a series of high-profile killings by the agency in Minneapolis and elsewhere.   It’s one of several walkouts planned across metro Detroit and the United States, all while many small businesses closed for the day to participate in a national shutdown general strike following the ICE officers’ killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. The agency was involved in the killings of at least six others last year, according to a tally compiled by the liberal American Prospect magazine and based on news articles.   Other businesses said they would remain open, but issued anti-ICE statements. Detroit and Oak Park pizzeria Pie Sci wrote on Facebook that it does not support “the harm caused by current immigration enforcement practices” but will remain open.   “Every day, ICE, Border Patrol and other enforcers of Trump’s racist agenda are going into our communities to kidnap our neighbors and sow fear,” the national shutdown organizing website reads. “It is time for us to all stand up together in a nationwide shutdown and say enough is enough!”   Read more using the link in bio. 📹 Video by Violet Ikonomova, DFP. #protests #detroit #michigan #ice

♬ original sound – Detroit Free Press

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

“No work. No school. No shopping. Stop funding ICE.” That’s the rallying cry behind the campaign for a nationwide general strike on Friday, seeking to galvanize opposition to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

This week, I went to the University of Minnesota, my alma mater, to speak to some of the students behind the effort that lists hundreds of endorsements from organizations and celebrities like Pedro Pascal and Hannah Einbinder.

Events are planned across the country, from New York to San Francisco, where businesses are announcing they won’t open their doors.

“We can do even more,” said Austin Muia, the vice president of the Black Student Union. “We want to bring it to the national stage and see it happen all over the country. We want everyone to feel that solidarity that we felt last week.”

“Let’s try to get people from the East Coast, West Coast, from the South,” said Pamela Gray, founder and president of the university’s Liberian Student Association.

Federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse and U.S. citizen, a day after the first general strike that sent thousands of Minnesotans marching in the frigid Minneapolis winter.

Students began organizing almost immediately for a second general strike, using their website to call on other states to join Minnesota in protesting Trump’s violent and increasingly unpopular immigration crackdown.

In 2017, at the height of the #MeToo movement, six actresses told the Los Angeles Times that a prominent Hollywood director was sexually violent toward them. 

Natasha Henstridge said he forced her to give him oral sex. Olivia Munn said that he masturbated in front of her, then lied to others that they’d had sex. Jaime Ray Newman shared that he’d sexually harassed her on a flight. According to Katharine Towne, the director followed her into the bathroom at a party after making unwanted advances. Jorina King detailed hiding from him in the bathroom; seemingly in exchange for a speaking part in a film, she said that he went into her trailer and asked to see her breasts. Eri Sasaki said that, on set, he repeatedly asked her to enter a bathroom with him, and when she declined, he allegedly said: “Don’t you want to be famous?”

They were talking about Brett Ratner, who on Thursday will stand next to Melania Trump to celebrate the premiere of Melania, his eponymous documentary about the First Lady.

In a 2018 interview about the #MeToo movement, the First Lady told ABC News, “I support the women—they need to be heard. We need to support them. And also men, not just women,” adding that accusers “cannot just say to somebody … ‘I was sexually assaulted’ or ‘You did that to me.’ Because sometimes the media goes too far and the way they portray some stories, it’s not correct. It’s not right.”

Ratner, who was ushered out of Hollywood following the allegations, returns to the industry as the film’s director. He denies all sexual violence allegations against him and has not been charged or held liable in court. 

Melania: 20 Days to History details the weeks leading up to the 2025 inauguration. Its Thursday premiere at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—to which President Donald Trump recently affixed his name—follows a black-tie White House screening for around 70 people—including Mike Tyson, Queen Rania of Jordan, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, Apple CEO Tim Cook, New York Stock Exchange CEO Lynn Martin, and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. Jassy, according to the Hollywood Reporter, personally greenlighted Amazon spending $40 million to acquire the doc. The company is reportedly spending another $35 million on marketing. 

Thursday’s event is the culmination of a yearlong re-integration into directing for Ratner, who directed the Rush Hour franchise and produced Horrible Bosses, among many other credits. His return is thanks in large part to President Trump—who, according to reporting from Semafor, personally pressured Paramount head and close ally Larry Ellison to revive Rush Hour 4—and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is reportedly friendly with the director and brought him as a guest to the United Nations. (Ratner emigrated to Israel in 2023.) With Trump and Netanyahu’s support, Ratner is now set to direct another documentary—this one on the Abraham Accords, a diplomatic agreement from Trump’s first term involving normalization of relations between Israel and several Arab countries.

After the 2017 allegations, Ratner was dropped by Warner Bros., which had a $450-million co-financing deal with his production company. Biopics he had in the works on Hugh Hefner and Milli Vanilli were put on hold and dropped, respectively. The fourth installment of Rush Hour, now once again moving ahead, was also halted. 

His directing and producing career had been snuffed out—until the Trump family stepped in. Less than a month after Trump, who has been held liable in court for sexual abuse and has been accused of sexual misconduct by dozens of women, returned to office, Ratner was granted the director role on Melania’s documentary. 

Ratner, like the president, was also captured in a photograph in the portion of the Epstein files that has been released. The undated image shows him hugging a shirtless Jean-Luc Brunel, the French modeling agent and close Epstein associate who died by suicide in a prison in France in 2022. 

“As millions of Americans and thousands of Epstein survivors continue to demand the full release of the Epstein files, Trump and his abuser buddies have instead chosen to release a vanity project wanted by no one,” said Elisa Batista of survivor advocacy group UltraViolet Action in a statement about Melania.

In his return to directing, Rolling Stone reports, Ratner has been difficult to work with, according to some workers involved in producing Melania. While no new sexual misconduct allegations have come out, one crew member put it like this: “I feel a little bit uncomfortable with the propaganda element of this…but Brett Ratner was the worst part.”

Amid multiple national crises, President Donald Trump spent Thursday morning posting—not for the first time—about how his predecessor Barack Obama should be arrested, and how Georgia election workers should be prosecuted, in both cases citing unsubstantiated claims. 

Trump’s fixations on going after Obama and Georgia aren’t new, but they now come at a moment of intense backlash across the country over his administration’s violent campaign targeting both immigrants and citizens in Minneapolis and nationwide. 

Trump shared a screenshot of a “breaking” social media post that accused the former president of attempting a “coup” and working with “CIA agents to manufacture false intelligence” and “erode Americans’ confidence in our democracy and President Trump’s LANDSLIDE VICTORY” in 2016. In that election, Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by a margin of nearly three million.

In another post sharing a screenshot, Trump switched to talking about 2020: “TRUMP WON BIG. Crooked Election!” he wrote over a post about the Georgia election results. During his second run for the presidency as a Republican, Trump lost the nation and the state of Georgia. In the more than five years since, Trump has repeatedly falsely claimed that he won the state—and attempted to interfere with election results, as when, in 2021, Trump pressured Georgia’s RepublicanSecretary of State Brad Raffensperger in a phone call to “find 11,780 votes.”

The latest escalation took place Wednesday, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation executed a warrant in Fulton County, Georgia, to seize records from the 2020 presidential vote in a move that legal experts called a historic attack on democratic norms.

That search happened not far from Fulton County Jail, where Trump was booked and had his mugshot taken in 2023 after being indicted by the county’s District Attorney Fani Willis on charges related to efforts to overturn the 2020 vote in Georgia.

As the Trump administration continues to violently occupy Minnesota, the role of the defense tech firm Palantir—which continues to sell its data mining, automation, and surveillance technology to ICE—is coming under increasing scrutiny. A new tool, launched Thursday, follows the money making it happen.

Palantir Payroll, the product of an effort by the campaign Purge Palantir, compiles data from FEC filings to account for the two-way cash flow: from the government to Palantir via contracts, and from company executives to elected officials. 

The campaign’s Jacinta González, head of programs at the progressive communications shop MediaJustice, says the tool helps bring to light Palantir’s business model to “operate in the shadows” through lobbying and political donations.

Palantir makes roughly half of its revenue through government sales, including a $30 million deal last April to build an “Immigration OS” to facilitate ICE’s “selection and apprehension operations of illegal aliens,” according to the Washington Post.

According to internal communications reviewed by WIRED, Palantir then began a six-month pilot supporting ICE in three major areas: “Enforcement Operations Prioritization and Targeting,” “Self-Deportation Tracking,” and “Immigration Lifecycle Operations focused on logistics planning and execution.” The program was renewed in September for an additional six-month period. 

Earlier this month, 404 Media reported that Palantir is working on a tool for ICE that “populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a ‘confidence score’ on the person’s current address.” The tool reportedly obtains many target addresses from the Department of Health and Human Services—the White House granted ICE access to data on Medicaid enrollees last summer.  

González has been organizing against immigrant detentions and deportations since the George W. Bush administration, under which ICE was founded; she says she’s seen over time how ICE adopted surveillance technology and data, and that Palantir Payroll “gives us the clarity to be able to demand something different.” 

There are other valuable kinds of collective action around ICE’s suppliers, González says—she has seen students kicking out technology corporations holding recruiting events on campus and organizing at investor briefings within the financial sector—but even fundamental information about those firms’ funding and relationships with ICE can fly under the radar.

In fact, as a Monday report in Wired notes, Palantir’s own employees—some of whom are openly disturbed by the firm’s ICE collaboration—rely on outside news reports for information on their employer’s practices. CTO Akash Jain reportedly responded to one query about Palantir’s work with ICE by saying that the company does “not take the position of policing the use of our platform for every workflow.”

That attitude defines the company’s leadership. As Sophie Hurwitz wrote in Mother Jones last February, CEO Alex Karp said on an investor call following stock price surges that the company “is here to disrupt…and, when it’s necessary, to scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them.” Since Palantir’s founding in 2003—the same year as ICE—by Karp and right-wing megadonor Peter Thiel, its tech has also reportedly been used to help make “kill lists” for the Israel Defense Forces.

González says that successive governments, Democrats included, have let the Palantir-DHS relationship grow entrenched: Since 2013, Palantir has provided ICE with the systems it currently uses to look through people’s information through a network of federally and privately-owned databases.

Elected officials, meanwhile, continue to take Palantir’s money. The top six Palantir-funded politicians—via the company’s corporate PAC or individual contributors employed there—are Donald Trump, Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), and Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.)

The campaign includes a pledge for elected officials to commit to refusing Palantir-linked donations in the lead-up to the midterm elections. 

“The only way that we’re able to win against a company that has as much power and influence as Palantir, is if as many people get involved as possible,” she said.

Last night, CNN’s Anderson Cooper broadcast an exclusive interview with the woman who was first seen in early videos posted of federal agents killing Alex Pretti last Saturday. Stella Carlson was standing close to the deadly skirmish, and ended up as the citizen with the best vantage point to record the shooting—holding her camera phone through it all, and capturing the now-indispensable video that has ripped to shreds the administration’s lies about what happened.

“I am grateful that I was in a position to be there for my community.”

This interview is astonishing. And after watching so many astonishing videos of what has transpired in Minneapolis, this one has stayed with me. Carlson’s bravery is inspiring, as is how she articulates something I hold dear as a journalistic aspiration: the power of bearing witness when no one else will.

“I am grateful that I was in a position to be there for my community,” she told Cooper. “To stop the lies and the madness, and allow there to be proof.”

“Were you scared?” Cooper asked.

“I was terrified, but I was more worried about this not being documented.”

Carlson, who was described by Cooper as a children’s entertainer, a face and body painter, and an airbrush artist, didn’t choose this role. She’s not a journalist or a human rights activist. She is a person who cared about her community. Recording this brutality was foisted on her by Trump’s siege of her city, and she described it as something akin to a calling. She was there to protect her neighbors, she said, “as best I can with my whistle and my phone, which really feels not great.”

“And yet you stood there with a phone, and you documented this,” Cooper gently pressed. “You didn’t run away.”

And then her response, which struck me the most. A gut punch:

“I am not one to run when I’m afraid. I just—no way was I going to leave Alex by himself undocumented, like, that wasn’t an option. I mean, obviously somebody was just executed in the street. I knew I was in danger. We all were, but I wasn’t going to leave… I knew that this was a moment, and we all have to be brave, and we all have to take risks, and we’re all going to be given moments to make that decision… I’m grateful to myself, and I’m grateful to anybody who was supportive to me after to make sure I could get to safety and get that video uploaded to the right people.”

That is heroism, pure and simple. There were other videos of the killing. But Carlson’s was the clearest. What record would have existed had she not been there?

And what record would exist without all the journalism happening in Minneapolis. I’ve been moved while reading comments from you, our Mother Jones community, thanking us after watching dispatches by our digital producer Sam Van Pykeren, who has been relentlessly chronicling the reactions and realities on the ground in a set of emotional, viral videos. This is not to show off, but to double down on the importance of showing up, speaking to real people, and yes, bearing witness, like Carlson.

“Thank you, Sam, for being there and reporting the truth,” one said. Another: “Thank you for keeping our eyes open.”

I hope you can check out not only Sam’s videos, but also the full range of Minneapolis and ICE reporting from the frontlines of Trump’s immigration crackdown on the site right now, documenting both the brutality and the resistance.

Here’s just a sampling from our reporters over the last day or so: Kiera Butler’s look at how right-wing influencers are working to make women love ICE. Russ Choma’s revealing article about Tom Homan’s record as he takes over Minnesota operations. From Minneapolis, reporter Julia Lurie filed a stunning dispatch about the community coming together in the wake of Alex Pretti and Renée Good’s killings (with gorgeous photography by Madison Swart), describing a city under assault but also a resilient city creating mutual aid networks that will outlast federal occupation. She also interviewed a US Army vet, outraged by these new attacks on a country he once defended. Samantha Michaels published a devastating story, with a video on a warrantless ICE raid that tore apart a Memphis family. Noah Lanard analyzed how Greg Bovino proved too openly fascistic—even for Trump.

There’s much more to read and watch and interact with. And there is more to come.

“Nobody’s here for us,” Stella Carlson said during her gripping CNN interview. “So this is what we can do.”

After Congresswoman Ilhan Omar was attacked at a Minneapolis town hall on Tuesday night and sprayed with an unknown substance from a syringe, President Donald Trump suggested that she may have orchestrated the incident. 

“No. I don’t think about her. I think she’s a fraud. I really don’t think about that,” Trump said when asked if he had seen the video of the attack. “She probably had herself sprayed, knowing her.” 

Oh, but he does think about her. The attack on Omar took place the same night Trump mentioned her while delivering a speech in Iowa ahead of this year’s midterm elections. 

“We need people to come in legally, but they have to show that they can love our country—not hate our country,” Trump said Tuesday regarding immigration policy. “Not like Ilhan Omar.”

He continued: “She comes from a country that’s a disaster… It’s not even a country, okay. It barely has a government. I don’t think it does. They’re good at one thing. Pirates.” 

Trump on Omar: "She's always talking about 'the Constitution provides me w/ the following.' She comes from a country that's a disaster. It's not even a country. They're good at one thing – pirates. But they don't do that anymore bc they get same treatment from us as the drug dealers. Boom Boom Boom"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-01-27T23:13:41.283Z

Omar was born in Somalia’s capital of Mogadishu and fled the country with her family during the Somali Civil War. She spent four years in a refugee camp in Kenya before moving to the US in 1995. Omar and her family eventually settled in Minnesota, home to the largest Somali communities in the country.

Trump has targeted Somali immigrants since at least last November when he promised to end Temporary Protected Status for Somalis living in Minnesota, linking all communities to fraud in the state. 

But Omar has continued to fight back.

“ICE cannot be reformed, it cannot be rehabilitated, we must abolish ICE for good, and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem must resign or face impeachment,” Omar said during the Tuesday town hall, just before the man attacked her.

She wound up to strike back at the man before he was subdued by security. Omar was not injured, and, later on Tuesday night, she wrote on X, “I’m ok. I’m a survivor so this small agitator isn’t going to intimidate me from doing my work.” 

The man was arrested and booked at the county jail for third-degree assault, according to Minneapolis police spokesperson Trevor Folke.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) assaulted during town hall meeting: "Here's the reality that people like this ugly man don't understand; we are Minnesota strong and we will stay resilient in the face of whatever they might throw at us." pic.twitter.com/Ud5l3yP4lQ

— CSPAN (@cspan) January 28, 2026

And Omar continued her speech after a short break. “I learned at a young age, you don’t give in to threats,” Omar told the audience. “You look them in the face and you stand strong.”

The incident involving Omar isn’t the only recent example of heightened threats and attacks. A man allegedly assaulted Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fl.) last week. Frost said that the man punched him after saying that Trump would deport him. 

And according to data from the US Capitol Police released on Tuesday, investigated threats—which include “concerning statements, behaviors, and communications directed against Members of Congress, their families, staff, and the Capitol Complex”—rose from 9,474 in 2024 to 14,938 in 2025.

Ezra Levin, the co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, one of the many groups behind the nationwide “No Kings” protests, describes himself as “a cynical political organizer.” But still, Monday night got to him. 

That evening, just days after federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Indivisible and other groups, which included the ACLU, put together a “Know Your Rights” training on how to document violent incidents by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection in response to the violent occupation of Minneapolis and around the country. According to the coalition, over 200,000 viewers attended the Monday “Eyes on ICE” training, the first in a series of trainings dedicated to protesters’ First Amendment rights. These people, Levin told me, “saw secret police force assault and murder fellow Americans, and one natural response you could imagine would be people could do what the regime wants them to do, which is to be quiet and go home and not show up.” 

“But instead,” he continued, “we have, by several orders of magnitude, the largest number of people ever to attend a training to learn how to do exactly what Renée Good and Alex Pretti were doing.”

It’s against this backdrop anger that another round of “No Kings” protests is being planned for March 28, with a flagship event in the Twin Cities. Levin expects the next “No Kings” protest to see the largest turnout.

I caught up with Levin on why this moment demands such pre-planned big tentpole events like “No Kings,” the agility it takes to respond to violence from the federal government with rapid mobilizations, and more below.

When we spoke on Friday, we talked about the “No Kings” coalition being able to mobilize if federal agents shot and killed another person. The next day, Alex Pretti was killed. What happened next internally?

We had talked about this on Friday, Katie, because it was entirely predictable. We all saw what the regime was doing. They’re using violence to intimidate and bully the population into submission. The murder is heinous. The slander that followed is really chilling because it is a very clear message to foot soldiers of the regime that it does not matter how many people are taping you. It doesn’t matter how clearly what you’re engaging in is illegal. It does not matter how heinous your crime is. The response of the top levels of this regime will be the circle of bandwagons, call your victim a terrorist, and protect you from all consequences.

In response to these murders, we had 147,000 people register for the “Eyes on ICE” training planned for Monday, and these are mostly not Minnesotans. These 147,000 people saw secret police force assault and murder fellow Americans, and one natural response you could imagine would be that people could do what the regime wants them to do, which is to be quiet and go home and not show up. But instead, we have, by several orders of magnitude, the largest number of people ever to attend a training to learn how to do exactly what Renee Good and Alex Pretti were doing. [A press release from the coalition behind the training said that the number of viewers ended up totalling over 200,000.]

How did that get put together so quickly? 

We’re not starting from zero. I think it’s the same way that we were able to, in 48 hours, put together 1,200 protests for “ICE Out for Good” in the wake of Renée Good’s murder, where it took us six weeks leading up to Hands Off protests in April of last year to put together 1,300 events. The point of these mass mobilizations and this broad national coalition building through “No Kings” is, yes, in part, to pull off big one-day protests. And those are important. But they’re not the whole shebang. It’s not all about just a one-day protest. We are developing organizational capacity that allows us to pull off historic levels of engagement in between these tentpole events. The “No Kings” coalition is not just Indivisible, not just 5051, or MoveOn, or Working Families Party, or ACLU. We’ve all been working together now for over a year to figure out how we can organize collectively, bringing all of our skill sets and all of our tools to tackle the same problem. Indivisible would be the wrong group to hold a Know Your Rights training. We don’t have a lot of First Amendment lawyers on staff. But the ACLU does. 

What does the number of RSVPs for the training this week communicate to you? 

The attendance tells me that there’s real demand for this. Look, a lot of us have been paying attention to the fascist threat for a long time. This has been what we eat, sleep, and breathe for a while. Also, we recognize that most people are not like us. Most people are not paying attention to the demise of American democracy on a daily basis. A successful movement depends on welcoming new people and meeting people where they are and accepting them when, whatever that moment is, whatever that event is, brings them into the movement—accepting them at that point and not saying ‘Where have you been up until now.’ 

What it tells me is that there are a lot of people who, for the last year, may have been upset about what was happening, may have opposed what was happening, but may have not been actively engaged in pushing back at the level that we’re seeing in the Twin Cities, who are now going through the process of imagining a situation in which their own personal constitutional rights are under threat. They are working through what they personally will do in that moment to defend themselves and their community. That is crazy powerful. That is an inflection point.

“When it comes to actually defending your community, you should not be looking to some talking head on TV. You should be gathering community with your neighbors and figuring it out yourself, because nobody’s going to save you but you. “

It’s different to go up to a group of ICE agents on the streets in New York, where there are 50 people within spitting distance, versus places like Tucson, Arizona. How do these trainings address how to encounter federal immigration agents in different towns and cities?

I think with the news being as inescapable as it is, it’s easy to imagine this coming to your own community. I think one of the really important lessons that we should be learning from the Twin Cities is that the opposition is not nationalized; it is very much localized. And the single best thing that you can do in this moment—we’ve been preaching this for 14 months—is not be alone. Refuse to be alone and to join in a community where you are geographically, because the challenges and opportunities available to you are based on your geography or based on what your community actually looks like. 

This is a movement that is being led and directed at the local level, and I think that’s why it’s been so successful. There’s no email list at the national level that is sending in a direction. When it comes to actually defending your community, you should not be looking to some talking head on TV. You should be gathering community with your neighbors and figuring it out yourself, because nobody’s going to save you but you. 

The coalition that Indivisible is a part of is launching another national mobilization: “No Kings” 3 for March 28. How do the “Eyes on ICE” trainings that y’all announced and No Kings 3 complement one another, and how are they unique?

Each “No Kings” has had a different focus, responding to the moment. “No Kings” one was an effort to provide a stark narrative contrast to Trump’s version of reality. He was throwing himself a ridiculous military birthday parade for himself, as authoritarians do. We wanted to make clear that he was small and weak and that the people were against him. The second “No Kings” was largely in response to sending the National Guard to invade and occupy American cities. 

I think the third “No Kings” is a response to the secret police force that’s terrorizing American communities. I reserve the right to say that this is in response to whatever more recent atrocity the regime commits. It’s lashing out quite a bit, so we’ll see. They’re still constructing more detention camps. They’re still acquiring weapons. They’re still picking out target cities to occupy and terrorize. So, I would expect to see more, unfortunately, of the darkness that we saw in the Twin Cities over the last several weeks. But I’d also expect to see more of the kind of righteous, non-violent, organized opposition that we saw in the Twin Cities, too. 

I’m incredibly proud of “No Kings” and also, protests are a tactic. Tactics should fit into a strategy. Strategy should be designed to achieve your goal. Our goal is to safeguard democracy and protect our communities from an authoritarian threat that’s seeking to submit it to power for good. Our strategy is mass, non-violent, organized people power. “No Kings” three is in the tactic within that strategy. “Eyes on ICE” training is a tactic within that strategy. Rapid response, mass mobilizations like “ICE Out For Good” are a tactic within that strategy. Pushing Democrats to unify and fight back against DHS funding is a tactic within that strategy. We need a multiplicity of tactics. 

“What I found over the last 14 months is that the framework that many of these Democratic leaders have is not a framework built for this moment.”

So on Friday, we also talked about Democratic leadership—Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer—not meeting this moment. Since the killing of Alex Pretti, leading Senate Democrats have threatened to block the DHS funding bill; some Democrats are mentioning different reforms, etc. It’s a different situation than it was on Friday. What do you make of that?

My goal here is a unified, strong opposition party to the regime. That is what I would like to build. I think there is a real disconnect between some Democrats who dominate leadership in both the House and the Senate, and rank-and-file Democrats around the country who want to see a real fight back against the regime. What I found over the last 14 months is that the framework that many of these Democratic leaders have is not a framework built for this moment. The framework goes something like: second term presidents decline in popularity over time; that naturally leads to the opposition party winning seats in the midterms; our role is to not rock the boat too much; communicate as much as we can about people’s top concern, which is always the economy; and then allow political gravity to run its course so that we win in the midterms. I understand that framework. I understand how it could make sense for a certain kind of political era. I do not believe that the political era we’re in, and that’s not where the people on the ground believe we are. 

We believe instead in what the anti-authoritarian experts call an “authoritarian breakthrough moment,” a moment where an authoritarian regime tries to consolidate power as quickly as possible through attacks on pillars of democracy, not just through the legislature, not through just executive functions, but media, law firms, and universities, etc. And it builds up a force across the country in order to ultimately subvert elections and prevent any kind of threat to their continued political power. And if that’s your framework, you’re not waiting for the Midterms and you’re not trying to avoid attention. You are looking for every piece of leverage you have to excite the public to the dangers that are coming, so that you can successfully push back against the authoritarian escalation. 

I’m happy that they are fighting back now, and I’m not convinced that without sustained, overwhelming pressure and a threat to their continued grip on power within the Democratic ranks, they will continue to fight.

Right, it was nice to see from Dems. But you’re not sleeping with both eyes closed, ready to rest.

I’m old enough to remember last November when we were winning popular support for the shutdown fight. People wanted Republicans to give on the health care subsidies, and suddenly the Senate Democrats surrendered. Those are the same Senate Democrats. We got the same party. They’re responding to the news of the day, and when the news of the day moves on, they’ll respond to that. The question is: Is it the grassroots opposition that is driving the news of the day, or is it something else? 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.       

Yesterday I published a story about what was quickly becoming a surprising site of capital R Resistance: the Letterboxd review page for the $75 million documentary film, Melania.

Comments were profane, fun, silly, unprintable. I included some of my favorites. The point I was making was this: Even before the movie’s release this Friday, it has become a lightning rod for anger, not least because Melania Trump’s oligarchic private premiere gala at the White House came the same day Alex Pretti was shot dead in the streets of Minneapolis amid her husband’s disastrous siege of the city. A real let-them-eat-cake moment.

But as my colleague Arianna Coghill went to promote the story today on our social media channels, she discovered the reviews have been wiped from the site entirely.

Sad.

So I sent an email to the Letterboxd press team asking why. What terms were violated? When did that happen? Even though the reviews appeared before the official release of the film, how is Letterboxd to know reviewers hadn’t seen the film itself?

They haven’t gotten back to me, and I’ll share their response when they do.

Update, Tuesday, January 27, 5:45 p.m.: Letterboxd just got back to me (they are based in New Zealand), attributing the erasure to an innocuous, automated back-end update:

This was an automatic update, caused by a previously incorrect premiere date. Letterboxd pulls through film data from TMDB, a user editable database for movies. The official premiere date was corrected on TMDB, automatically updated on the film’s main page on Letterboxd, thus preventing all reviews from appearing on the film page until its premiere. This happens from time to time on film pages through the automated sync, with no manual intervention required from the Letterboxd team.

So there you have it. Friday’s official release of the Amazon-MGM doc will provide would-be reviewers a fresh opportunity to contribute to Letterboxd’s thriving message boards.

Here’s what I had previously pointed out about the site’s publicly available rules and regulations:

Letterboxd’s Terms of Service prohibit using the site to “game the Service’s mechanics,” “alter consensus,” or “participate in orchestrated attacks against films or filmmakers.” Letterboxd also asserts the “absolute discretion” to remove any post. Any account can be suspended for “any reason or no reason whatsoever, with or without notice.”

Letterboxd is also pretty clear in its FAQ: “Letterboxd is for reviews of films you’ve seen, not those you want to see,” and it encourages people to flag “pre-release reviews,” which, it says, “we’ll remove at our discretion.” It also says its undisclosed platform magic helps ensure its ratings are less vulnerable to being abused in online campaigns “to accurately represent the global consensus for each film”—but says people are welcome to report those suspected of waging such a campaign.

I guess we’ll have to wait until Friday, when the “global consensus” will begin to take shape—I suspect somewhat quickly.

Meanwhile, as if pocketing $28 million for just 20 days of being followed by filmmakers wasn’t grifty enough, Melania went on Fox News this morning to sermonize about “unity” after the Pretti killing—beneath a banner promoting her new film, bearing her own name.

Subtle.

.@FLOTUS: "We need to unify. I'm calling for unity. I know my husband, the President, had a great call yesterday with the Governor and the Mayor… If you protest, protest in peace. We need to unify in these times." ❤️ pic.twitter.com/oj3skxpAYf

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) January 27, 2026