2025-11-04 05:17:40
For the second time in a little over a week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers reportedly shot someone in Los Angeles, California. This time, it was a US citizen who ICE officers shot from behind while he was driving a car, according to a report from the Los Angeles Times.
“He was telling them, ‘Excuse me. Can you guys please, you know, please wrap this up.’ And immediately, the masked agent pulls out a gun.”
The victim was a 25-year-old named Carlos Jimenez, who is a father of three. He was shot after getting out of his car to tell ICE agents, who had pulled over a vehicle, that children would soon be gathering in that spot for the school bus, his lawyer, Cynthia Santiago, told the newspaper. The agents’ cars had blocked a southern lane on the road and jutted into a second lane, according to the LA Times. “He was telling them, ‘Excuse me. Can you guys please, you know, please wrap this up.’ And immediately, the masked agent pulls out a gun and exchanges some words,” Santiago told the newspaper.
The lawyers allege that Jimenez then got in his car, reversed because he was afraid, and was shot in the back of his right shoulder, where a bullet remains lodged. “Use of deadly force is to be used as a last resort,” Santiago said. “Coming out to communities with guns drawn is the opposite.”
ICE, for its part, has offered a more sinister characterization of the events. Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), told the LA Times that Jimenez “attempted to run officers over by reversing directly at them without stopping” and that the shots were “defensive.” Jimenez was charged in federal court with assault on an officer and released on bond Friday.
In the ICE agent’s criminal complaint, filed in federal court on Friday, he claims Jimenez “engaged in a verbal altercation with the officers” and that the complaining officer then told Jimenez to leave and grabbed his pepper spray. As this unfolded, the complaint claims, Jimenez pulled his car forward and to the left, and then apparently turned and “rapidly accelerated in reverse.” One of the officers at the scene apparently “feared that the [Jimenez’s car] would hit [the officer]” and the car they had previously pulled over.
There does not yet appear to be any publicly available video of the incident. Jimenez’s condition was not immediately clear.
There have been other recent reports of immigration officers shootings. Between August and October, ICE officers reportedly shot into four cars—one in LA less than two weeks ago; two in Chicago, including one that was fatal; and one in San Bernardino.
McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, told the LA Times that the latest incident is “another example of the threats our ICE officers are facing day in and day out as they risk their lives to enforce the law and arrest criminals.”
But what it more likely indicates is even more proof that, as my colleague Noah Lanard wrote last week, ICE seems to pose a far greater danger to civilians than the other way around—contrary to the agency’s claims that they require the National Guard’s protection.
As he wrote:
A Mother Jones review shows that there is little evidence that ICE agents face such severe and widespread danger compared with other law enforcement agencies that they need military personnel to come to their aid or to break from centuries of public accountability by hiding behind masks.
The Trump administration has provided almost no information to back up its statements about rising assaults, which makes its claims hard to assess. But details about ICE officers who’ve died on the job are readily available on the agency’s website.
Those records show that none of ICE’s agents have ever been killed by an immigrant in the agency’s more than two-decade history. Instead, the leading cause of death by far among ICE officers is COVID-19. According to ICE’s data, the second leading cause of death is cancer linked to 9/11. (The pandemic and cancers connected to the September 11 terrorist attacks account for 75 percent of the deaths in ICE’s history.)
2025-11-04 01:53:09
After dramatic losses in federal court last week, the Trump administration on Monday agreed to tap an emergency pot of money to partially fund SNAP, the nation’s largest anti-hunger program. But the administration refused to use additional sources of funding that could provide full payments to SNAP beneficiaries in November. SNAP funding had lapsed on Saturday in the midst of the prolonged government shutdown, the first time in the program’s 61-year history that scheduled payments were not issued.
Monday’s developments follow two federal court rulings on Friday ordering the government to use the emergency funding to keep partial SNAP benefits flowing to the nearly 42 million Americans who depend on the program. The dual decisions amounted to a scathing rebuke of the Trump administration’s vehement insistence that it could not legally fund SNAP amid a government shutdown, an argument that US District Judge John McConnell said had unlawfully and “needlessly plunged SNAP into crisis.”
“There is no question that the congressionally approved contingency funds must be used now because of the shutdown,” McConnell said in his ruling. “In fact, the President, during his first term, issued guidance indicating that these contingency funds are available if SNAP funds lapse due to a government shutdown.”
Despite Monday’s announcement, significant challenges for SNAP beneficiaries—many of whom are senior citizens, Americans with disabilities, households with incomes below the poverty line, and, more recently, federal workers who have been furloughed or laid off—remain, as the shutdown appears on track to beat 2018’s record for the longest in US history. That’s largely because SNAP’s contingency funding is roughly $2 billion short of what is needed to fully cover November’s payments, and officials warn that these partial payments will likely take weeks to distribute.
Monday’s move is also unlikely to put an end to efforts by administration officials, Republican leaders, and right-wing media to use the high-stakes fight over SNAP funding to attack beneficiaries. They have characterized SNAP users as lazy and out to take advantage of federal assistance, even though nearly 40 percent of recipients are children, and millions work full-time jobs. Still, that hasn’t stopped high-ranking Trump officials from peddling harmful stereotypes, including Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, who on Friday called SNAP an “extremely corrupt program.”
2025-11-03 11:06:42
In a wide-ranging Sunday night interview on CBS News’s “60 Minutes,” President Donald Trump put his desire for unchecked power on full display.
He bragged to correspondent Norah O’Donnell that, thanks to the Insurrection Act of 1792, he can invade your city whenever he wants. He said immigration raids—including acts of police violence such as using tear gas in residential neighborhoods, throwing people to the ground, and breaking car windows—”haven’t gone far enough.” And he said the government shutdown will last until Democrats in Congress bend to his will—or until Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) agrees to eliminate the filibuster, which Thune, so far, has rejected.
Here are some of the biggest takeaways from Trump’s comments on domestic policy:
Trump blamed the shutdown on the Democrats
As the federal government shutdown enters its fifth week—on pace to be the second-longest in history after the one that stretched from December 2018 into January 2019—O’Donnell had a straightforward question for Trump: “What are you doing as president to end the shutdown?” His answer? Blaming the Democrats.
“The Republicans are voting almost unanimously to end it, and the Democrats keep voting against ending it,” Trump said. “They’ve lost their way,” he added. “They become crazed lunatics.” Senate Democrats have said they will vote to reopen the government if the legislation includes an extension of Obamacare subsidies; without those, the health policy think tank KFF has estimated, average monthly premiums on people who get their insurance through the ACA marketplace would more than double.
Trump also claimed Obamacare is “terrible,” adding, “We can make it much less expensive for people and give them much better health care.” But, yet again, he failed to outline his alternative. (Remember his “concepts of a plan“?)
He defended Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s violent tactics
Citing videos of ICE officers tackling a mother in court, using tear gas in a residential neighborhood in Chicago, and smashing car windows, O’Donnell asked Trump if some of the raids have “gone too far?” Trump gave what may have been his most direct answer of the interview: “No, I think they haven’t gone far enough,” he said. “We’ve been held back by the judges, by the liberal judges that were put in [the federal courts] by Biden and by Obama.”
“You’re okay with those tactics?” O’Donnell pressed.
“Yeah, because you have to get the people out,” he replied.
He bragged that he can send the military into any city, at any time
O’Donnell asked Trump what he meant when, at a speech in Japan last week, he said: “If we need more than the National Guard, we’ll send more than the National Guard.” Trump has already sent guard troops into Washington, DC; Los Angeles; Portland, Ore.; Chicago; and Memphis, Tenn.
Trump seemed delighted to remind O’Donnell and viewers of what he sees as his vast power: “Well, if you had to send in the Army, or if you had to send in the Marines, I’d do that in a heartbeat. You know you have a thing called the Insurrection Act. You know that, right? Do you know that I could use that immediately, and no judge can even challenge you on that. But I haven’t chosen to do it because I haven’t felt we need it.”
This is not the first time Trump has threatened to use the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to override federal law that prohibits the military from acting as law enforcement, in order to “suppress rebellion.” But the law has not been used in more than three decades and is widely seen by legal experts as having a frightening potential for abuse.
“So you’re going to send the military into American cities?” O’Donnell pressed. “Well, if I wanted to, I could, if I want to use the Insurrection Act,” Trump responded. “The Insurrection Act has been used routinely by presidents, and if I needed it, that would mean I could bring in the Army, the Marines, I could bring in whoever I want, but I haven’t chosen to use it. I hope you give me credit for that.”
He claimed he has been “mild-mannered” when it comes to political retribution
In only nine months, Trump has made good on his long-running promise to prosecute his political enemies, including former FBI Director James Comey, former National Security Advisor John Bolton, and New York Attorney General Letitia James. “There’s a pattern to these names. They’re all public figures who have publicly denounced you. Is it political retribution?” O’Donnell asked.
Trump promptly played the victim: “You know who got indicted? The man you’re looking at,” he replied. “I got indicted and I was innocent, and here I am, because I was able to beat all of the nonsense that was thrown at me.” (He was, indeed, found guilty in New York last year on 34 felony counts in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case.)
Despite posting a Truth Social message in September demanding that Attorney General Pam Bondi speed up the prosecutions, just days before Comey was indicted and a couple weeks before Bolton and James were, Trump insisted he did not instruct the Department of Justice to pursue them. “No, you don’t have to instruct them, because they were so dirty, they were so crooked, they were so corrupt,” he said, proceeding to praise the work of Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel.
“I think I’ve been very mild-mannered,” Trump continued. “You’re looking at a man who was indicted many times, and I had to beat the rap, otherwise I couldn’t have run for president.”
He think he’s “better looking” than Zohran Mamdani
Trump insisted that the frontrunner in New York City’s Tuesday mayoral election, 34-year-old self-described Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani, is a “Communist.” When O’Donnell asked Trump what he makes of comparisons between himself and Mamdani—”charismatic, breaking the old rules,” as O’Donnell put it—Trump replied: “I think I’m a much better-looking person than him.”
He then reiterated his threat to withhold federal funding from his home city if Mamdani wins over ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo. “It’s going to be hard for me as the president to give a lot of money to New York, because if you have a Communist running New York, all you’re doing is wasting the money you’re sending there,” Trump said.
He claimed that he is “not a fan of Cuomo one way or the other,” but added, “If it’s going to be between a bad Democrat and a Communist, I’m going to pick the bad Democrat all the time, to be honest with you.”
2025-11-03 02:47:25
Where’s Obama, you ask? The better question may be, where’s Trump?
Former President Barack Obama spent Saturday supporting Democratic candidates in three of the most consequential races of this week’s elections. President Donald Trump, on the other hand, spent the weekend partying and golfing at Mar-a-Lago—a reflection of what has been his uncharacteristically reserved approach to Tuesday’s vote.
Obama delivered speeches in support of two congresswomen-turned-gubernatorial candidates: Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia. In both, he lauded the candidates, criticized their opponents—former state assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli and current Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, respectively—and characterized votes for the Democrats as acts of resistance against the Trump administration.
“If you meet this moment, you will not just put New Jersey on a better path,” Obama said at the Newark rally for Sherrill, a former Navy helicopter pilot and federal prosecutor who currently represents the state’s 11th Congressional district. “You will set a glorious example for this nation.” In Norfolk, Virginia, he delivered a similar message about Spanberger, a former CIA officer who served three terms in Congress: “If you believe in that better story of America, don’t sit this one out. Vote. Vote for leaders like Abigail who believe it too. Vote for leaders who care about your freedoms and who will fight for your rights.”
Trump, meanwhile, spent Friday night hosting a Great Gatsby–themed Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago, just hours before tens of millions were set to lose access to food stamps.
Also on Saturday, the former president called New York City mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani—again—to wish him luck on election day and offer to be a “sounding board” in the future, the New York Times reported, citing two people familiar with the call. According to the Times:
Mr. Obama said that he was invested in Mr. Mamdani’s success beyond the election on Tuesday. They talked about the challenges of staffing a new administration and building an apparatus capable of delivering on Mr. Mamdani’s agenda of affordability in the city, the people said.
[…]
Mr. Obama spoke admiringly about how Mr. Mamdani has run his campaign, making light of his own past political missteps and noting how few Mr. Mamdani had made under such a bright spotlight.
“Your campaign has been impressive to watch,” Mr. Obama told Mr. Mamdani, according to the people.
According to the Times, Mamdani told Obama that his 2008 speech on race inspired the mayoral candidate’s own recent speech on Islamophobia in response to comments made by his main opponent, ex–New York governor Andrew Cuomo. If he is elected, Mamdani would be the city’s first Muslim mayor—a fact that his critics, especially those on the right, have used as the basis for an onslaught of Islamophobic attacks against him for months now. Mamdani and Obama also reportedly discussed meeting in Washington DC at some point in the future.
Dora Pekec, a spokesperson for Mamdani, said in a statement to the Times that the candidate “appreciated President Obama’s words of support and their conversation on the importance of bringing a new kind of politics to our city.” The former president first called Mamdani back in June, after his primary upset, the Times reported.
Trump, meanwhile, spent Friday night hosting a Great Gatsby–themed Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago, just hours before tens of millions of low-income Americans were set to lose access to food stamps due to the ongoing government shutdown and Republicans’ refusal to use contingency funds used to keep the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) operating in the interim. And on Saturday, Trump golfed and ranted on his Truth Social platform—but made no mention of Tuesday’s elections. While Trump endorsed Ciattarelli in the spring and participated in a telephone rally for him this week, he only voiced support for Earle-Sears last month and has yet to formally endorse her.
Spokespeople for the White House did not respond to questions about Trump’s activities this weekend and why he has not more strongly backed the Republican candidates. But polls may provide the answer: The Democrat candidates are leading in both Virginia, which is set to elect its first female governor regardless of who wins, and New Jersey, where the current Democratic governor is term-limited and no party has held the office for three consecutive terms since 1961.
2025-11-02 01:07:39
Normally, the 42 million Americans who rely on food stamps (formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) begin to receive money they can use to purchase certain groceries on the first day of each month.
But today, amid the 32-day-and-counting government shutdown, those funds weren’t there for the vast majority of recipients. (Governors in Virginia and Vermont pledged to use state funds to keep the program going for their respective residents, though both said brief delays were probable as they worked out technological challenges.)
This is the first time in the program’s 61-year history that this has happened. Not because there have never been long government shutdowns, but because past administrations (including the first Trump administration) used contingency funds to keep SNAP operating while Congress worked out its budget disputes.
After the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) released a memo indicating it would not use the contingency funds during this shutdown, more than 20 states sued, arguing that withholding already appropriated funds was illegal. A handful of cities and several nonprofit organizations filed a similar suit Thursday.
On Friday, two judges indicated support for their arguments.
In Rhode Island, US District Judge John McConnell issued an oral decision, affirming the plaintiffs’ argument that the Trump Administration “needlessly plunged SNAP into crisis,” and therefore has to use the reserve funds.
“There is no doubt that the six billion dollars in contingency funds are appropriated funds that are without a doubt necessary to carry out the program’s operation,” McConnell said, according to NBC News.
In a separate federal ruling Friday, US District Judge Indira Talwani wrote that the 20-plus states “are likely to succeed on their claim that Defendants’ suspension of SNAP benefits is unlawful.”
These rulings will not protect SNAP benefits forever. While $9 billion is needed to cover November benefits alone, there is only estimated to be between $5 and $6 billion dollars in reserve funds. President Donald Trump has since asked the courts for guidance on how to proceed with limited funds.
“Even if we get immediate guidance, [funding] will unfortunately be delayed while States get the money out,” President Donald Trump wrote on social media Friday. “If we are given the appropriate legal direction by the Court, it will BE MY HONOR to provide the funding.”
In the meantime, food banks—like the one I visited in the greater Washington, DC, area earlier this week—have seen demand skyrocket as the 1 in 8 Americans who normally count on SNAP continue to face uncertainty about how much money will be deposited onto their debit-like benefits cards, and when.
For this, the administration places full blame on Democrats, stating on the homepage of the USDA’s website that “Senate Democrats have now voted 13 times to not fund the food stamp program…Bottom line, the well has run dry.”
But the latter part is not quite true. Contingency money for SNAP exists. Trump chose not to use it—at least, not until the courts made him.
2025-11-01 22:28:41
Earlier this week, Tucker Carlson welcomed prominent white nationalist Nick Fuentes onto the former Fox News host’s video podcast.
As my colleague Kiera Butler described their conversation: Fuentes “made the case for the importance of Americans ‘to be pro-white,’ sang the praises of brutal Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, and bemoaned the problem of ‘organized Jewry in America.'”
Much of their friendly chat involved lambasting Republicans who support Christian Zionism—the belief among some evangelicals that Christians should support the state of Israel. Carlson said that Republican Christian Zionists like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee were “seized by this brain virus.”
“I dislike them more than anybody,” Carlson added.
Butler has written extensively about Christian Zionism, and how, at its core, the movement does not embrace adherence to Judaism:
Once the Messiah arrives, many Christian Zionists are convinced that Jews will convert en masse to Christianity; in many versions, those who don’t convert will perish.
But this was not the reason Carlson and Fuentes disavowed Christian Zionism. Rather, Fuentes has routinely espoused antisemitic views, even expressing disbelief in the Holocaust.
“Six million cookies? I’m not buying it,” he said in 2019, for example, comparing baked goods to the six million Jews killed by Nazis. In 2022, Fuentes said that all he wanted was “revenge against my enemies and a total Aryan victory.”
But perhaps just as striking as Fuentes’ beliefs, or that Carlson gave him a massive platform from which to share them, was that Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts posted his own video later in the week on X, unapologetically supporting Carlson’s decision to have Fuentes on the show in the first place.
As conservatives split over Fuentes’ appearance, Roberts described the critics as a “venomous coalition” whose “attempt to cancel [Carlson] will fail.”
“Conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington,” said Roberts, whose organization published Project 2025, a blueprint of sorts for Trump’s second term in the White House. (To this, former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell replied: “Last I checked, ‘conservatives should feel no obligation’ to carry water for antisemites and apologists for America-hating autocrats.”)
Carlson “always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation,” Roberts concluded his full-throated defense.
Roberts’ response only deepened the right’s rift over the Fuentes-Carlson interview. “Siding with Hitler and Stalin over Churchill is not conservative or consistent, no matter what Tucker claims,” conservative author Bethany Mandel wrote on X. “In deciding to side with him, Kevin Roberts has shifted the foundations on which the Heritage Foundation was built.”
The onslaught of negative feedback prompted Roberts to clarify his views about Fuentes with an X post Friday afternoon: “[T]he Heritage Foundation and I denounce and stand against his vicious antisemitic ideology, his Holocaust denial, and his relentless conspiracy theories that echo the darkest chapters of history,” Roberts said, before making a point to say antisemitism has “blossomed on the Left,” too.
But it’s not so easy to put the genie back in the bottle. As of Saturday morning, Roberts’ video supporting the objectionable Carlson-Fuentes interview has far more views (15.9 million) than the original interview itself (4.7 million).
