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2026-01-31 07:06:50

As January comes to a close, it should not just become a harrowing memory. The past four weeks are a harbinger of what is to come under President Donald Trump, as the administration showed exactly the future it is building: One in which the laws are ignored, American life is cheap, and elections are hijacked by FBI raids. This month, Americans have witnessed a lurch toward authoritarianism that cannot be ignored. If January 2026 was any indication, the march toward dictatorship isn’t linear, it’s exponential. 

On January 3, the United States captured Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, and brought him to the US to stand trial. This was illegal. It doesn’t matter that Maduro was a dictator himself; his capture was a show of lawless force. The US is now overseeing the sale of Venezuelan oil, the Qatari bank account that holds the proceeds, and the dispersal of some of that money to Venezuela. Fresh off this literal coup, Trump began saber-rattling about taking Greenland, threatening Europe that he would even take it by force. Trump backed down after Europe rebuffed him, but it’s unlikely that his desire to appear big and strong by taking territory or invading other nations is over.

Trump has not shied away from siccing an army on his own people. In Minneapolis, Trump’s immigration forces encountered organized and increasing resistance from protesters in the Twin Cities. In response, the government escalated their tactics. Thus far, armed federal agents have killed two American citizens, demonstrating that the price of opposing this administration can be your life. On January 7, Renée Good told Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer Jonathan Ross, “I’m not mad at you.” Seconds later, he shot her three times, and followed that by calling her a “fucking bitch.”

Outrage and a general strike across the Twin Cities followed. But the Trump administration didn’t back down. His Justice Department attempted to investigate Good, presumably to back up their smear that the mother of three with stuffies in her glove compartment was a domestic terrorist. As the protests continued, the administration grew bolder.

On January 24, a group of masked Customs and Border Protection agents shot Alex Pretti in what looked like a state-sanctioned execution from a distant totalitarian country. Pretti is on his knees, surrounded by officers, holding his phone, helpless, when he is shot in the back. At least nine more shots pierced his motionless body as it lay alone on the street. The Trump administration has reached a point where they believe they can simply shoot you for opposing its agenda. Then they set about smearing Pretti, an ICU nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital, as a domestic terrorist. 

The backlash was predictably fierce. When multiple Senate Democrats began announcing they would not back a DHS funding bill without reforms to ICE, the administration showed a smidge of contrition. It moved CBP commander and Nazi impersonator Greg Bovino, who defended Pretti’s murder with such brazen lies that he proved to be a liability, out of Minneapolis. Nearly a week after his killing, the administration announced it would launch a civil rights investigation into the CBP agents who shot Pretti. This is likely a PR stunt, to be run by the same Justice Department that has contorted the law to harass and smear the president’s opponents. There is no evidence that this administration has any desire to rein in or punish its immigration officers, and Americans should not be fooled by a few days of conciliatory talk. The administration is barreling full steam ahead. 

For months now, ICE, CBP, and their leadership have played fast and loose with federal court orders. Bovino, for example, repeatedly lied to Sara Ellis, a Chicago-based federal judge—and she called him out for it. Notably, that was not the conduct that Bovino’s superiors had a problem with. Now, ICE appears to be disappearing people from Minnesota and refusing judicial orders to either defend the disappearances or return the people they have apprehended. On January 28, Patrick Schiltz, Minnesota’s chief federal district judge, issued an extraordinary order calling out ICE’s refusal to follow court orders. “Attached to this order is an appendix that identifies 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases” in his state alone, he wrote. “The extent of ICE’s noncompliance is almost certainly substantially understated. This list is confined to orders issued since January 1, 2026, and the list was hurriedly compiled by extraordinarily busy judges.” The violated orders are all habeas petitions, meaning the government has been asked to explain its arrest of an individual or to free that person, but it has simply refused.

Schiltz continued: “This list should give pause to anyone—no matter his or her political beliefs—who cares about the rule of law. ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.” ICE, he continued, “is not a law unto itself.”

But that’s exactly how this administration is determined to act. This week, I decided to look into how the Trump administration was ignoring Minnesotans’ Constitutional rights; the violations are innumerable, mounting to thousands per day. Federal agents are behaving like the First and Fourth amendments, in particular, do not apply to them; that witnessing and documenting their actions is a crime rather than a right; and that they can seize anyone they want—violently if they feel like it—rather than observe constitutional restraints on searches and seizures.

The administration is not stopping at arresting protestors. On Thursday night, it arrested two journalists, prominent former CNN anchor Don Lemon and, on Friday morning, independent journalist Georgia Fort, who had both documented a protest at a church in St. Paul. Notably, both journalists are Black. “The nature of oppression in America is that they workshop it first on Black, Latino, Asian & Native people,” Sherrilyn Ifill, the former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, posted on Bluesky of Lemon and Fort’s arrests. “But it is always, in the end, coming for everyone.”

As if these facts weren’t alarming enough, the DOJ’s obsession with going after the two journalists led it on an unprecedented quest to convince federal judges to issue arrest warrants that the judges found frivolous. First, the government requested eight arrest warrants related to the protest. After a federal magistrate judge in Minnesota declined to issue warrants for Lemon, Fort, and three others, the DOJ asked the chief judge, Schiltz, to issue them. He refused, and the government went to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, asking it to force Schiltz to issue the warrants. The Eighth Circuit declined. Presumably, the government decided to get an indictment from a grand jury instead, but the source of authority for the arrests remained unclear as of Friday afternoon.

President Trump’s second administration has inspired a resurgence of interest in the idea of the “dual state,” a framework for authoritarianism created by German Jewish lawyer Ernst Fraenkel to explain how life for many people in Nazi Germany appeared normal even as authoritarianism took hold. Fraenkel theorized that society had been bifurcated into a normative state, in which the rule of law appears intact, and a prerogative state, in which the state ignores the law to take on its enemies or further its aims. In the 1930s, most Germans could go about their lives assuming the general laws would apply, but the targets of the state, such as the Jews, saw their rights stripped away. At bottom, however, the dual state is only a useful mirage. It lulls people into complacency because their lives continue apace, but at any moment, they can be sucked into the prerogative state where they are at the mercy of the state. 

University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq, who is at work on a book about the dual state, has pointed out several examples from Fraenkel’s time as a lawyer in Nazi Germany that may seem eerily familiar to Americans in January 2026. In one, Fraenkel won a financial settlement for his client against the regime, only to discover that the money had been deposited in the government’s coffers. In another, a man was acquitted in court, only for a Gestapo officer to seize him anyway. 

Over the last month, the contours of such a dual state have emerged again and again. When ICE detains people and then refuses to comply with judges’ orders—which happened at least 96 times this month, as Judge Schiltz documented—it is signaling that the targets of its raids have been taken not just into detention but into the prerogative state, where the rule of law cannot not reach them. When the government arrested Lemon and Fort even though multiple judges believed the charges were frivolous and refused to issue warrants, it refused to take no for an answer. Then there’s Juan Espinoza Martinez, who was acquitted by a federal jury of bogus charges that he ordered a hit on Bovino. Rather than let him go home, ICE picked up Espinoza Martinez, a Dreamer who has lived in the US since he was five years old. As of a few days ago, his family didn’t know where he was. 

The bedrock of a democracy is the people’s ability to pick its leaders. On Wednesday, the FBI raided an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, seizing ballots from the 2020 elections. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was present at the scene, despite having no domestic law enforcement authority. She has been investigating the 2020 election, in which Trump lost to former President Joe Biden, to prove it was corrupt.

But it would be naive to think that Trump’s obsession with his 2020 loss, and Wednesday’s raid, is just about the past. The administration is normalizing FBI raids on state and local election infrastructure. As election law expert Rick Hasen of the UCLA School of Law warned in Slate, the Fulton raid may be a “test run for messing with election administrators and the counting of ballots in the midterm elections in 2026.” The appearance of Gabbard at the raid is in line, Hasen points out, with election denier Cleta Mitchell’s suggestion that Trump could “declare a ‘national sovereignty crisis’ in a bid to take over the midterm elections.” Mitchell was on the famous 2020 call in which Trump demanded that the Georgia secretary of state “find” him the votes to win the state; this is not her first time trying to illegally overturn an election in Georgia. Trump attempted a chaotic and violent coup on January 6, 2021; it would be illogical to assume that he and his movement would relinquish power again.

It is fitting that January was also the month that the world took a look at Donald Trump’s America and saw it for what it is: A bully that cannot be appeased any longer. Through his illegal attack on Venezuela, open designs on Greenland, not to mention murders on the seas and punitive and arbitrary tariffs, Trump has alienated longstanding allies. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called on nations to turn away from the post-World War II world order in which the United States is viewed as a leader and protector. “We are in the midst of a rupture,” he warned. America’s role at the head of international finance is also at stake, including Trump’s attempts to take over the Federal Reserve and US monetary policy, making the American dollar a risky bet for investors. The world is seeing Trump’s destruction of his own country for what it is; Americans should too.

January 2026 has given us a frightening look into a future if the Trump administration continues its plans apace. ICE is buying up warehouses to convert into mass detention camps, and deploying dystopian tech tools to identify and track protestors as well as immigrants. ICE and CBP, the president’s violent paramilitary forces, have advertised their a willingness to break the law, to violate people’s rights, to ignore judges’ orders, and now to execute their critics. When they shot a defenseless man in the back in broad daylight, they showed who they were, and where they plan to go next. We’ve been warned.

2026-01-31 04:27:14

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced on Friday that his administration has secured a more than $5 million settlement with three delivery app companies. The money, which includes both backpay and civil penalties, will go to nearly 50,000 delivery workers who Uber Eats, Fantuan, and HungryPanda underpaid in 2023 and 2024. 

As part of the new deal, Mamdani said that Uber has also agreed to reinstate up to 10,000 workers who were wrongfully deactivated. 

Mamdani made the announcement at a Long Island City food hall flanked by delivery workers. I spoke to the mayor briefly before the event and asked how he sees the settlement as supporting his affordability agenda.

“We have to lower costs to make this a more affordable city,” Mamdani said. “We also have to ensure that New Yorkers are earning what they’re owed. And the law, for far too long, especially when it comes to delivery workers, has been considered to be a suggestion as opposed to a requirement.”

During the interview, I also asked Mamdani about what he believes the city can do to ensure that New York’s largely immigrant delivery workers are protected from another potential threat: ICE.

“We have to inform every single New Yorker—and that includes delivery workers—of their rights,” the mayor said.

“When you get a knock at the door,” he added, “[and] someone tells you that they are an ICE agent, you do not have to let them in your home unless they provide you with a judicial warrant signed by a judge. It’s not instinctive. It has to be informed. It has to be taught. It has to be shared.”

The new settlement comes after the Mamdani administration sued a delivery app called Motoclick and its CEO earlier this month for allegedly violating minimum wage requirements for workers. The city said that the app used “shocking tactics” such as “charging workers a $10 fee for canceled orders and deducting the entire cost of refunded orders from workers’ pay.” (The lawsuit aims to shut down the company in addition to getting backpay for workers.)

The efforts to protect delivery workers are being spearheaded by New York’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection and its new commissioner, Samuel Levine. I asked Levine, who previously worked under Mamdani transition co-chair and former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, if he thought the lawsuit against Motoclick and the warning letters recently sent to delivery to ensure compliance with gig worker laws played a role in the city’s ability to secure the settlements announced on Friday.

“I think it does,” Levine said. “My general view…is that companies only will come to the table if you’re prepared to actually take them to court.” He added, “If they perceived [DCWP] as an agency that wasn’t actually prepared to go to the mat for workers, I’m not sure these settlements would have been reached.”

Along with the settlements, a new set of laws protecting delivery workers took effect on Monday after being passed by the city council last year. One set of laws expands minimum pay protections to cover workers who deliver groceries for companies like Instacart. Mamdani has embraced those protections, which were passed by the city council last year over the vetoes of former Mayor Eric Adams. 

The law also now requires that customers be offered a tipping option when checking out. That is particularly significant in light of a recent report from DCWP that found that moving the tipping option until after checkout reduced UberEats and DoorDash delivery workers’ tips by more than $550 million.

Gustavo Ajche, a co-founder of Los Deliveristas Unidos, a worker-led collective founded during the pandemic, told me he’s been doing delivery work since coming to New York from Guatemala in 2004. He’s now mostly delivering for Uber and DoorDash.  

Ajche is optimistic about Mamdani. “Fighting for better conditions for all workers can be a reality,” he explained. “Because he’s not playing a game—like used to be the case. Because as we were dealing with the last mayor, it’s like, one day he’s with us and the next day, eh.”

2026-01-31 03:56:51

Last April, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. promised that his agency would find the cause of autism “by September.” That didn’t pan out, but this week he appears to be trying again—by stacking a decades-old committee devoted to “innovations in autism research, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention” with his friends and fellow travelers in the anti-vaccine and pseudoscience world. 

Much like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which Kennedy overhauled last fall with a full slate of new appointees after firing all the old members, he filled the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC), which was first established in 2000 to help set the federal agenda for autism research, with Kennedy’s allies in the anti-vaccine movement. Many of the 21 new members have previously worked in some capacity with Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine advocacy group that Kennedy founded. Others are parent advocates with little to no apparent scientific training. In keeping with IACC requirements, the committee has three autistic members; one of them is a high school senior. Many of the new committee members have been involved with movements that claim there is a biomedical “cure” for autism, a stance that is opposed by most autistism self-advocacy groups.

A few of the other committee members have an unusual specialty in common. Several have relationships with organizations that promote “spelling to communicate” a controversial technique that claims to help non-speaking autistic people communicate with the use of letter boards. However, several expert organizations, including the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and the Association for Science in Autism Treatment, warn that there’s scant scientific evidence that spelling to communicate works, that unconscious influence might be exercised by the person interpreting the speller’s apparent messages—often a parent or a caregiver—and that focusing on spelling might discourage caregivers from using more evidence-based interventions. 

Here’s a non-exhaustive guide to some of Kennedy’s controversial picks:

Tracy Slepcevic is an “integrative health practitioner” who claims that she cured her son’s autism. In 2022, she was a speaker at Reawaken America, a MAGA-meets-evangelical Christian tour convened by former Trump national security advisor Mike Flynn. As Kiera Butler wrote at the time:

Last year, Slepcevic was a featured speaker on the ReAwaken America tour where she hawked her new book, Warrior Mom: A Mother’s Journey in Healing Her Son With Autism, with an introduction by Andrew Wakefield. In December, Slepcevic was interviewed by [far-right live streamer] Stew Peters. She told Peters the story of her son’s “recovery” from autism with supplements and diets. In January, Michael Flynn promoted Slepcevic’s book, tweeting “check out this e-book for only $.99 cents on how one Mama Bear nurtured her son back to health from autism resulting from a jab!”

In 2024, as our colleagues David Corn and Dan Friedman reported, Slepcevic and her husband, Steve Slepcevic, hosted a fundraiser for Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Steve was also present at the rally at the Capitol that preceded the insurrection of January 6, 2021. 

Toby Rogers is an anti-vaccine activist and fellow at the Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research, a libertarian think tank founded in 2021 which opposed Covid safety measures during the pandemic. Rogers has said he believes that vaccines are the primary cause of autism, and he often uses extreme rhetoric to express this view. Vaccines, he has said, are “genocidal,” and vaccine makers, he argued in an article last year on the Brownstone Institute website, “enslave society.” He believes that “no thinking person vaccinates.” In a 2024 tweet, Rogers argued that Anthony Fauci was “in the same league as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. He must be arrested and prosecuted.” He also has a habit of waxing conspiratorial on X. Earlier this month, for example, he mused, “What if the entire Covid disaster—the design and release of SARS-CoV-2, lockdowns, masks, social distancing, censorship, the suppression of effective meds, Remdesivir, the toxic Covid shots, etc.—was engineered by AI to increase the power of AI?”

Ginger Taylor is a former marriage and family therapist-turned-anti-vaccine activist who “writes on the politics of autism, health, vaccination, informed consent and both corporate and government corruption from a biblical perspective.” She previously served on the “Spiritual Advisory Committee” for Children’s Health Defense. The founder of a Maine-based anti-vaccine group, she also runs NoDeception.org, a website on vaccines and Christianity where she writes about “the removal of religious exemptions to vaccine mandates” and what this “means for the Body of Christ.”

Elena Monarch is a neuropsychologist who does not appear to specialize in autism; rather she runs an independent clinic in Massachusetts for people who suffer from Lyme disease and the controversial strep-related neurological condition PANS/PANDAS. Fellow committee-member Sylvia Fogel, who has opposed efforts to eliminate religious exemptions for routine childhood vaccination requirements, works as a psychiatrist at the same practice. Monarch appeared at events with Kennedy during his presidential campaign, and Fogel was a recent guest on a Children’s Health Defense podcast.

John Gilmore is, like many of the others on the committee, a longtime anti-vaccine activist. He’s the co-founder of the Autism Action Network, which he created after his now-adult son was, according to him, injured by a vaccine. He, too, has ties to Children’s Health Defense and co-authored an editorial in 2021 with Mary Holland, the organization’s legal counsel and current CEO.  (On Children’s Health Defense’s website, Holland is quoted as saying, “It is wonderful news that there are now people on this committee who are truly motivated to solve many of the existential autism issues, including prevention, treatment, education, employment opportunities, long-term care and housing.”)

Walter Zahorodny, Ph.D., is an associate professor of pediatrics at Rutgers University’s medical school. He appeared onstage with Kennedy during his first-ever press conference as HHS Secretary in April 2025. As Mother Jones reported at the time, Zahorodny has ties to researchers who deal in autism-related pseudoscience. He appeared in a 2018 video for the organization SafeMinds, which has falsely suggested that autism is caused by mercury exposure in vaccines. (In the video, Zahorodny didn’t take a position on mercury exposure, but instead talked about what he described as an increase in autism prevalence.) Zahorodny also co-authored a study in 2020 of autism rates in Black and Hispanic children with Cynthia Nevison, a University of Colorado climate scientist who is also a contributor to Children’s Health Defense.

Dan Rossignol is a family medicine doctor who runs autism clinics in Florida and California. Rossignol has advocated for “chelation” therapy, a debunked autism treatment. In 2010, he was sued by the father of a child for using “dangerous and unnecessary experimental treatments” on his son. (The outcome of that suit is unclear.)

Two people on the panel are nonverbal communicators. One of them, Minnesota community college student Caden Larson, communicates with spelling and serves on the board of an organization called the Spellers Freedom Foundation. Another person on the board, Elizabeth Bonker, an autism advocate, uses typing to communicate and is the executive director of Communication 4 ALL, a group which advocates for typing-based communication for nonverbal students, saying that they should be provided access to “spelling on a letterboard or typing on a keyboard with a communication partner.”

Honey Rinicella is the executive director of the Medical Academy of Pediatrics and Special Needs (MedMAPS). While the organization looks, from a certain angle, like a professional medical body, it often shares decidedly pseudoscientific ideas that aren’t supported by actual medical organizations. Several of its experts previously worked with Defeat Autism Now! (DAN) , a program created by the Autism Research Institute that advocated for unproven “biomedical” interventions to “cure” autism, including massive doses of supplements and chelation therapy, a process that removes heavy metals from the blood; there is no evidence that either approach “treats” autism, and both have the potential to cause serious harm. (The Autism Research Institute stopped promoting DAN in 2011.)

Today, MedMAPS contributors often promote the idea that autism and other neurodevelopmental delays could be caused by vaccines; contributors have also made other pseudo-medical, vaccine-skeptical claims, including promoting the false idea that Covid vaccines were actually “gene therapy.” MedMAPS also uncritically cites other anti-vaccine, pseudomedical groups with anodyne names, including the National Vaccine Information Center. 

Katie Sweeney is another self-proclaimed “autism warrior mom” who works as an executive support manager for MedMAPS, meaning that two people from the same pseudomedical organization are now serving on the IACC. 

Krystal Higgins is the executive director of the National Autism Association, a small nonprofit whose board consists of people whose children have autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions. The organization has expressed skepticism about vaccines: in a 2012 statement to a Congressional committee — before Higgins was the executive director — the NAA claimed that vaccines “can cause immune and/or inflammatory injuries to  the brain that  eventually manifest as an autism diagnosis,” which is not a thesis that is shared by any mainstream medical body. (Today, the NAA’s website does not seem to take a specific position on the debunked vaccine-autism connection.)

The organization also advocates for assisted communication, including S2C (Spelling 2 Communicate) and RPM (Rapid Prompting Method) both of which are controversial in mainstream medical bodies. The American Speech-Hearing-Language Association says, of RPM, “There is no scientific evidence supporting the assertion that messages produced using RPM reflect the communication of the person with a disability.” Higgins is, per her bio on HHS’ website, “a certified Spelling to Communicate (S2C) practitioner, and is a devoted mother to an adolescent with complex medical needs.” 

In all, Kennedy’s selections are another startlingly blatant effort to stack HHS with people who distrust vaccines and, in many cases, have devoted long careers to promoting debunked medical misinformation about them, as well as people who promote unproven “cures” and treatments for the condition. In a statement, Alison Singer, the president of the Autism Science Foundation (ASF), a body that focuses on funding actual scientific research and evidence-based autism interventions, called the new committee “a complete and unprecedented overhaul, with no continuity from prior committees and a striking absence of scientific experts.” 

“The IACC, created through the efforts of the broad autism community’s work with Congress and sustained for more than two decades by the dedicated service of leading scientists, advocates, and public servants, has been fundamentally compromised,” ASF added in its statement. “The current committee has been hijacked by a narrow ideological agenda that does not reflect either the autism community or the state of autism science. By sidelining rigorous, evidence-based inquiry, this shift will stall scientific progress, distort research priorities, and ultimately harm people with autism and all who love and support them.” 

2026-01-31 03:43:20

More federal prosecutors in Minnesota have resigned or are preparing to do so, in part because the Trump administration has asked them to file criminal charges against anti-ICE protesters without appropriate evidence, according to multiple people with knowledge of the situation.

The prosecutors, at the US Attorney’s Office in Minnesota, have been deluged with allegations of protesters assaulting Homeland Security agents. The administration is pressuring them to file charges even when agents have not turned over body-cam footage to support the charges, and when information exists to suggest the officer may have assaulted the protester first, according to the sources, who declined to be named for fear of retribution. “That’s historically not how we do things,” one told me. Traditionally, “you see the evidence first and then decide what to charge; you don’t charge and then see the evidence. It’s a horrible way of doing business.”

On Friday, the Justice Department announced that former CNN anchor Don Lemon and three others had been arrested for allegedly violating federal law during a protest at a church in St. Paul this month. The day before, US Attorney Daniel Rosen, who leads the Minnesota office, announced that 16 protesters had been charged with assaulting federal officers and federal property. The office’s attorneys are also being asked to focus on cases that accuse activist groups of conspiring to impede the work of immigration agents, my sources said.

What’s more, my sources told me, the office has not opened a single case against any immigration officer in the Twin Cities since the federal surge began in December, despite a proliferation of videos that show agents dragging people from their cars, pepper-spraying individuals in the face at close range, beating protesters, and, of course, killing two people.

A group of attorneys from the office’s criminal division met with Rosen earlier this week to express their concerns, particularly about the Justice Department’s lack of a civil rights investigation into the Border Patrol officers who killed Alex Pretti on January 24—instead, the Department of Homeland Security was given the green light to investigate itself. Attorneys were visibly upset after the meeting; some could be seen crying, according to a person familiar with the situation.

It was highly unusual for the Justice Department to be sidelined in such an investigation. “There’s certainly no indication from DHS that they are going to do it in a fair, aggressive, and just manner,” another person told me.

Many prosecutors walked out of the meeting with Rosen “feeling demoralized and pissed,” the source added. “The people who work there really care about doing the right thing, and they really care about justice. When there’s a very clear nonrecognition of that, that’s gut-wrenching. And they are tired. And it compounds the fact that many of them are Minneapolis residents whose neighbors are hiding out.”  

In the videos, Pretti, an ICU nurse, appeared to be directing traffic and recording federal agents on his phone in Minneapolis before he was pepper-sprayed and wrestled to the ground by multiple agents. Footage of the encounter shows he was shot repeatedly as officers restrained him. Pretti possessed a legal firearm, which DHS officials misleading implied he’d brandished at the agents, though the video evidence clearly contradicts that suggestion. Pretti kept his gun holstered and out of sight—and he never reached for it. It also appears that one of the agents confiscated the gun before Pretti was shot.

On Friday, the Trump administration seemed to reverse course: Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the Justice Department would step in and investigate Pretti’s killing. But Blanche included a caveat: “I don’t want to overstate what is happening,” he told reporters. “I don’t want the takeaway to be there is some massive civil rights investigation. I would describe it as a standard investigation by the FBI.”

The announcement may be too little, too late. “It’s better than no investigation, but I still have reservations about how it will be handled,” one of my sources said. “That should have been such an obvious decision, so it feels weird celebrating it as a win. And it doesn’t address the broader concern about selective prosecutions more generally.”

“It will feel like window dressing until it’s evident they’ve put experienced unbiased attorneys on the matter, and I’m just not sure there are any left at the Civil Rights Division at main Justice to do that,” noted another source. “There’s such a loss of trust with DOJ’s actions that DOJ doing now what seems to be the right thing—or half the right thing—just doesn’t go very far in my mind.”

The myriad frustrations of the staffers at the Minnesota US Attorney’s Office has fueled a new wave of departures from an office that was already hemorrhaging personnel. At least five attorneys, including the office’s second-in-command, Joseph Thompson, had resigned on January 13, less than a week after ICE officer Jonathan Ross killed Renée Good and the Justice Department ordered the office to investigate Good’s wife rather than focus on the shooter.

Another seven staffers have since resigned or have notified the office of their intention to do so, according to a source with knowledge of the departures. Six are prosecutors—including a senior litigation counsel in the criminal division, the deputy chief of narcotics cases in Indian Country, and the chief of the office’s civil section. The seventh was a victim witness coordinator. Yet more resignations are expected. Other staffers are retiring sooner than planned.

Five senior prosecutors at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in DC—a unit that investigates police killings—also resigned shortly after Good was killed. “It’s a big deal, and this is fairly unprecedented,” Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor now based in Los Angeles, told me after the first wave of resignations. “You have so many leaving, and frankly on principle: We are living in unique times where prosecutors are being asked to do things they’ve never had to do before. That’s not what they signed up for.”

The Minnesota US Attorney’s Office had experienced some departures in the final months of the Biden administration. But since Trump got reelected, more than 50 out of about 135 staffers have left. The office had fewer than 30 prosecutors prior to the latest wave of resignations, less than half of the proper head count, according to Anders Folk, a former acting US attorney in Minnesota, who left in 2021.

“We are down to a skeleton crew,” one source told me.

The remaining attorneys have resisted the Justice Department directive to focus on Good’s wife, one of my sources said. Still, they are so flooded with cases related to the immigration enforcement surge that they have had almost no time to handle other cases, including long-term investigations into drug trafficking, gang violence, child abuse, and crimes on Native American reservations.

“Virtually all the other work has essentially stopped or slowed so dramatically,” another source confirmed. Attorneys in the criminal unit have been instructed to resolve those other cases as quickly as possible—including by proffering lenient plea deals they wouldn’t have considered before.

Ironically, prosecutors have even had to slow-roll the sprawling fraud investigation that the Trump administration used as pretext to send a surge of federal officers to the Twin Cities. Thompson, the office’s second-in-command, was overseeing that investigation when he resigned.

Immigration officers have reportedly arrested about 3,000 people locally since Operation Metro Surge launched. Now the administration is sending reinforcements to help with the US Attorney’s Office caseload, including assistant US attorneys from other districts and military attorneys known as Judge Advocates General (JAGs). But the pace is relentless, and the office has lost seasoned prosecutors with decades of institutional knowledge.

Many prosecutors are still exercising their discretion and, despite the pressure, are not charging protesters without sufficient evidence of a criminal violation. But one source I spoke with worried that, as more senior attorneys bail out, cases will be left to relatively inexperienced temporary and junior attorneys who may be more vulnerable to pressure from above.

“They may be phenomenal people,” the source said, “but they don’t have the judgment or the ability to stand up to a senior agency head in a meeting; they’re probably going to file the complaint, when a more experienced senior person would say no.”

2026-01-31 03:31:42

On Friday, former CNN anchor Don Lemon was arrested in Los Angeles for covering a protest that disrupted services at Cities Church in Minneapolis on January 18. The arrest drew widespread attention because of its infringement on Lemon’s First Amendment rights; journalism groups, including the National Association of Black Journalists, condemned it.

What got lost in the flurry of coverage was the connection between Cities Church and a Christian nationalist movement that has gained increasing clout and has strong connections to the Trump administration. Cities Church was founded in part by a pastor named Joe Rigney, a close associate of Doug Wilson, whose Christian nationalist fiefdom centered in Moscow, Idaho, has gained a national following.

Wilson is outspoken in his ultra-conservative beliefs. Well into his seventies, he is the unofficial patriarch of the TheoBros, a loose network of mostly millennial, extremely online Christian nationalist pastors, podcasters, and shitposters.

As I wrote about Wilson in 2024:

He has argued that the master-slave dynamic was “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence,” called the trope of the dominant man and a submissive woman “an erotic necessity,” and opined that women never should have been given the right to vote. When I asked him about his most provocative statements, he compared himself to a chef who cooks with jalapeño peppers: “Some of my enemies online have combed through my writings, have gathered up all the jalapeños, and put them on one Ritz cracker,” he told me.

Wilson and his movement have ties to the Trump administration. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth attends a Tennessee church in the denomination that Wilson founded, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, and he has been spotted at Wilson’s newest CREC church in Washington, DC.

In a piece last week for the Christian publication World, Rigney—the pastor at Cities Church and author of the recent book The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits—wrote that he served for eight years at Cities Church before leaving for his current role at Wilson’s flagship Idaho church. In the piece, Rigney accuses Lemon of breaking the law by disrupting a religious gathering and calls on his fellow Christians to “grow in our ability to resist such intimidation.” He adds that Christians should “learn the tactics of God’s enemies and resist them with fortitude and joy, refusing to appease and placate the lawless mob.”

2026-01-31 03:10:22

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:

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.