2026-01-30 20:30:00
Just before being put on board her deportation flight, Melissa Tran’s wrists and ankles were shackled to a chain around her waist. It had been more than 10 hours since she’d been given any food or water; for the last seven she had been sitting on a bus on the tarmac.
There was no company name or logo on the Boeing 767, but she soon learned the airline was called Omni Air International. She’d never heard of it, nor of Stonepeak, the private equity firm that purchased Omni in April 2025, nor of its billionaire CEO, who was an immigrant himself. She had no idea that Omni’s ICE work had quadrupled since the sale, or that its flights were getting longer and, because of that, crueler.
There were 10 female deportees clustered in coach, with about 180 men seated behind. Tran noted a variety of accents and ethnicities, and wondered how many stops were planned and how long she’d be shackled. When an ICE-contracted guard walked by, she asked about their flight time.
“Where are you from?” he responded. Vietnam, she said—though she hadn’t been there since her family fled when she was 10. The Maryland mother of four had long put a 2001 theft conviction behind her, becoming a health care worker and small-business owner, but at an ICE check-in three days earlier, she was arrested and flown to detention in Alexandria, Louisiana.
The guard winced: “Sorry, you’re the last stop.” He told her she wouldn’t arrive in Hanoi until Thursday. It was Monday night in Louisiana.
Stonepeak, which manages $80 billion in investor funds, specializes in recession-resistant infrastructure investments—utility companies, airports, toll roads, shipping and logistics firms. Forbes estimates its Australian-born co-founder, Michael Dorrell, is worth $8.5 billion, a fortune made through his “bet on boring,” as one podcast interviewer recently put it.
“It matches my personality,” Dorrell jokingly agreed. The 52-year-old’s one public extravagance appears to be real estate, purchasing a $34 million waterfront mansion in Coral Gables, Florida, a $41 million Manhattan townhouse from David Koch’s widow, and a $150 million private island paradise in Palm Beach, less than two miles from Mar-a-Lago, all in the last few years.
Information about Stonepeak’s acquisition of Air Transport Services Group, Omni’s parent company, is scarce, comprising just two press releases: one from the day before the 2024 election announcing a $3.1 billion all-cash sale, and another five months later announcing its conclusion.
Both emphasized ATSG’s subsidiaries in cargo transport (including planes leased to Amazon), ground services, aircraft leasing, and maintenance, with only passing mention of its charter airline, Omni, described as “a leading supplemental provider of passenger transport for the US Department of Defense and other agencies.” Nowhere do they say that for years, Omni has been the only large-jet airline flying shackled passengers on long-haul ICE flights to Africa and Asia.
Like Dorrell, Omni has a knack for staying under the radar, even as it profits from Trump’s migrant crackdown; Omni, ATSG, and Stonepeak did not respond to detailed questions. But since the sale, Omni has flown thousands of deportees delivered to its planes by ICE.
Last May, Omni transported migrants whom ICE had expelled to Panama months earlier to their countries of origin in Africa and Asia, despite many having valid asylum claims and credible fears of what could happen after returning. It took dozens of Russians to Egypt in August and December, where they were forced on planes to Moscow. At least one antiwar dissident was taken by Russian authorities upon arrival, according to witnesses, and is now missing.
Since September, Omni has transported more than 47 migrants to Ghana, a country where they had no ties. At least some—perhaps all—had US court orders barring deportation to their countries of origin, including a 21-year-old survivor of female genital mutilation and a grandmother from Sierra Leone who had been in the United States for three decades. Ghana’s government forced many to return to their home countries anyway, or to cross the border into Togo without identification, rendering them effectively stateless.
“You don’t have to torture people. They’re not going anywhere—they’re on a plane.”
Omni transported about 100 Iranian asylum seekers to Qatar in September and Kuwait in December, where they were put on Tehran-bound planes. One passenger told the New York Times he was so afraid of going back he attempted suicide the day of his flight.
On October 24, Omni flew an Alabama father to Laos who was expelled by ICE despite a court order barring removal because he had a valid claim to US citizenship. On November 17, the airline transported 50 Ukrainians to Poland who were then taken to Ukraine, despite domestic and international law prohibiting repatriation to war zones.
These stories are likely the tip of the iceberg. In the eight months following Stonepeak’s acquisition, public flight data suggests Omni carried out 77 trips under ICE subcontracts, making 194 stops in 42 countries, including authoritarian regimes like Cambodia, Cameroon, China, Cuba, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Laos, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, and Vietnam. Over the same period in 2024, records suggest Omni flew only 20 ICE trips to just 14 countries.
It is unclear how much the nearly fourfold jump is based on changing corporate strategy and how much is just increased demand. Overall, ICE removal flights began climbing last April and are up 41 percent under Trump, according to Human Rights First.
But beyond facilitating potential human rights abuses, Omni’s flights themselves are becoming increasingly inhumane. In 2024, only six trips lasted more than 24 hours, with the longest lasting 38 hours. But of the 77 trips carried out between Stonepeak’s mid-April purchase and the end of 2025, 31 lasted between 24 and 50 hours before the final stop. Migrants onboard until then would have spent all that time, and likely more, shackled. A man deported to Laos in October told me he was shackled for 73 hours after his Omni plane unexpectedly returned to Louisiana, which flight data confirms. He and nearly 200 others were kept restrained overnight before a second takeoff; at least 20 elderly deportees were so weak from sleeping on the floor that they needed to be pushed across the tarmac in wheelchairs and carried to their airplane seats, he said.
Flight data shows an Omni ICE flight out of El Paso made a similar return in December before restarting its deportation journey. An immigration attorney told me a Vietnamese client onboard was shackled for more than 80 hours.
Shackling people for long periods “is dangerous on so many different levels,” said Judy Melinek, a forensic pathologist whose research backed a congressional enquiry about the safety of detained migrants. It is painful and can cause swelling, bruising, cuts, and permanent nerve damage. Shackled passengers are at a “very high” risk of developing blood clots in their legs that can be deadly if they travel to the heart or lungs, Melinek said, because ICE’s guards control when, and if, they can drink water or move around.
Migrants have also said they sometimes soil themselves in their seats. Even when permitted to use the lavatory, many say it is difficult to adequately clean themselves while shackled. Migrants on Omni flights to Africa have reported verbal and physical abuse by ICE agents and guards, and being put in straitjacket-like devices and hoods for minor infractions.
“You don’t have to torture people,” Melinek said. “They’re not going anywhere—they’re on a plane.”
ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not answer detailed questions, including whether they track injuries or deaths caused by their practices on deportation flights. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin insisted shackling is “in line with established legal standards” and “an essential measure to ensure the safety and well-being of both detainees and the officers/agents accompanying them.”
It’s hard to know how much Stonepeak makes off this misery, especially now that ATSG is privately held and no longer releases earnings reports. A 2023 pricing sheet from ICE’s flight broker lists the aircraft in Omni’s fleet as costing at least $20,475 per flight hour, plus expenses. This does not appear to include a “special high risk” fee added to Omni’s African and Asian flights.
An ICE document obtained by Quartz shows the agency paid Omni $33,500 an hour for a 2019 flight to Bangladesh, India, and Vietnam. With expenses, the trip cost $1.8 million, prompting a flight broker to complain Omni could charge high prices because other airlines “are discouraged by the potential of public backlash.”
Omni’s sale to private equity might appear to have insulated it from public pressure, but according to Pitchbook, a private market data broker, most Stonepeak investors are nonprofits and public pension funds, including many based in blue states. A representative for one of the largest, the New York State Common Retirement Fund, said it had not been aware of Omni’s role in deportation flights but had “contacted Stonepeak to seek additional information and understand how these serious issues are being addressed.”
Melissa Tran was shackled on her Omni flight for 42 hours, during which she said her wrists became “dented” and red. While stopped in Romania, India, and Nepal, guards allowed passengers to stand and stretch—one row at a time, one minute per row.
“My body was aching,” she said, adding that she never slept, because “every time I closed my eyes, I thought about my children” and would sob. She only glimpsed an Omni flight attendant once, up in first class, serving guards and ICE agents, who were mostly indifferent—though the guard who spoke to her about the flight said he would pray for her.
Still, she said, “I felt like I was less than an animal.”
2026-01-30 20:30:00
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
After a tumultuous year under the Trump administration, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has adopted a new, almost unrecognizable guise—one that tears up environmental rules and cheerleads for coal, gas-guzzling cars, and artificial intelligence.
When Donald Trump took power, it was widely anticipated the EPA would loosen pollution rules from sources such as cars, trucks and power plants, as part of a longstanding back and forth between administrations over how strict such standards should be.
“The notion you could be excused from a black letter law just by asking for it was startling to me—I thought it was a spoof. “
But in recent weeks, critics say the EPA has gone far further by in effect seeking to jettison its raison d’etre, forged since its foundation in 1970, as an environmental regulator. The EPA is poised to remove its own ability to act on the climate crisis and has, separately, unveiled a new monetary worth assigned to human lives when setting air pollution regulations. The current new value? Zero.
“The EPA was designed to protect public health and the environment and did a remarkably effective job of that,” said William Reilly, who was EPA administrator under a previous Republican president, George HW Bush.
“That record is now at risk and we will see the degradation of air quality in major cities. The administration seems to conceive the purpose of the agency as solely promoting business, which has never been the agency’s mission. That’s revolutionary—it’s not been seen before.”
A vivid illustration of this, Reilly said, was when the EPA asked businesses last year to simply email a request to be exempt from air pollution rules. “The notion you could be excused from a black letter law just by asking for it was startling to me,” he said. “I thought it was a spoof. But it did happen.”
After returning to the White House, Trump vowed to “unleash” oil and gas drilling and the burgeoning AI industry by sweeping away environmental regulations that the president says only serve a “globalist climate agenda” and a “scam” clean energy sector.
The EPA under its current administrator, Lee Zeldin, has zealously followed this lead—initiating 66 environmental rollbacks in the first year, according to a tally compiled by green group Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
This list includes paring back limits on pollutants such as mercury and soot coming from cars and power plants, cancelling grants for renewables and aid for communities blighted by toxins, squashing clean water protections, and deleting mentions of the climate crisis from the EPA website.
Two particular reversals have shocked former EPA staff and could fundamentally transform the agency. Last year, the agency announced it would rescind the so-called “endangerment finding,” a landmark 2009 determination affirmed by the US Supreme Court and outside experts that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide harm human health.
Removing the finding would essentially demolish all climate-related regulations issued by the federal government, a move cheered by pro-fossil fuel companies and Republican-led states that have urged Trump to take drastic action to remove any restraints on global heating.
Then, this month, the EPA said that it would no longer consider the cost to human health from two common air pollutants—but would still weigh the cost paid by industry for regulatory compliance.
EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has said he wants to thrust “a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.”
This will hide the outsized economic as well as health benefits of reducing pollution—the EPA had previously calculated that reducing emissions of tiny soot particles, harmful to lung, heart, and brain functions when inhaled, would deliver $77 in benefits for every $1 spent by businesses to comply.
“This move ignores the incredible success we’ve had in reducing air pollution while growing our economy,” said Jenni Shearston, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. “It appears the EPA is putting more importance upon the cost to industry than the cost to the public. I’m worried this will mean more air pollution will be emitted as a result.”
An EPA spokesperson said the agency was “taking steps to update” the consideration of human health in regulatory decision making, adding that “legal decisions about standards are guided first by scientific evidence of health risk, not by whether benefits can be assigned a precise dollar value.” They did not clarify how EPA will model these impacts in the future.
The spokesperson also defended the decision to roll back the endangerment finding, a decision they said “is the legal prerequisite used by the Obama and Biden administrations to justify trillions of dollars of greenhouse gas regulations.”
Reilly’s criticism was an example of the “out-of-touch, elitist thinking that failed American taxpayers and held back real environmental progress,” and it was a “propagandist narrative by outlets parroting far-left talking points” to suggest the agency will no longer assess the public health costs of pollution, the spokesperson added.
Zeldin, a Republican who was previously a New York congressman, has been an enthusiastic public champion for the Trump administration, appearing dozens of times on Fox News. However, unusually for an EPA administrator, Zeldin appears to be spending less time than predecessors telling Americans about efforts to cut their exposure to toxic air and water.
Instead, the EPA chief has said he wants to thrust “a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion,” called for a revival of coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, and demanded drivers opt for gasoline, rather than cleaner electric, cars.
In a novel move for an environmental regulator, Zeldin has even taken it upon himself to ensure that “making the United States the artificial intelligence capital of the world” is a core priority for his agency. When asked on Fox in September whether he agreed with Trump’s attempt to shut down clean energy projects, Zeldin replied: “I am for whatever President Trump is advocating for.”
The EPA’s 16,000-strong workforce, meanwhile, has been shrunk through firings and early retirements by a quarter, with entire divisions of the agency—such as the EPA’s scientific arm, the Office of Research and Development—slated for closure. Enforcement actions against rule-breaking polluters have plummeted.
“We no longer use EPA’s authorities to safeguard our water resources—we use them to protect the interests of industry.”
The changes amount to “a war on all fronts that this administration has launched against our health and the safety of our communities and the quality of our environment,” said Matthew Tejada, the former director of the EPA’s environmental justice program.
“It is an attempt to completely eliminate EPA and just leave a symbolic husk,” said Tejada, who is now senior vice-president of environmental health at NRDC.
Hundreds of EPA staff have revolted at this agenda, signing an open letter last summer accusing the administration of “recklessly undermining” the agency’s mission and promoting a “culture of fear”—a protest that led to 140 staffers being suspended from work.
“He answers to capital and nothing else,” Justin Chen, president of AFGE Council 238, which represents EPA employees, said of Zeldin. “The EPA isn’t fulfilling it’s mission and won’t be able to again until the boot is taken off the neck of dedicated civil servants to do their job.”
Anonymous testimonials taken from EPA staff by the union suggests a widespread sense of despair has taken hold. “To say that this year has been hard, insulting, demeaning, horrific, stressful…all would be a gross understatement,” said one.
Another said Zeldin’s tenure had been “Orwellian.” A third staffer, who works on Great Lakes water quality, added: “We no longer use EPA’s authorities to safeguard our water resources—we use them to protect the interests of industry.”
The EPA’s transformation will not immediately plunge the US back into the era that predated the agency’s foundation under Richard Nixon 55 years ago, a time when US cities were routinely shrouded in thick, choking pollution, lead was found in paint and gasoline, and rivers were so riddled with chemicals that they caught fire. But the next three years of the Trump administration threaten to erode much of the progress made since this time, warned Jeremy Symons, a former EPA policy adviser.
“EPA’s current leadership has abandoned EPA’s mission to protect human health and safety. Human lives don’t count. Childhood asthma doesn’t count. It is a shameful abdication of EPA’s responsibility to protect Americans from harm,” he said. “Under this administration, the Environmental Protection Agency is now the Environmental Pollution Agency, helping polluters at the expense of human health.”
The EPA said it rejects this criticism, pointing to a list of what it says are 500 environmental “wins” achieved in the first year of Trump’s term, including a “historic new agreement with Mexico to permanently tackle the Tijuana River sewage crisis, major action to regulate high-risk phthalate chemicals, accelerated enforcement to block foreign polluters, and billions of dollars directed toward reducing lead in drinking water.”
“Contrary to the suggestion that the administrator’s focus is misplaced, talking about affordable energy and technology leadership directly supports the EPA’s mission,” the EPA spokesperson said. “Clean air and water depend on stable infrastructure, reliable energy, and innovation that allows us to reduce pollution more efficiently. By cutting red tape, improving oversight, and ensuring sound use of taxpayer dollars, the Trump EPA is building the foundation for long-term environmental and economic health.”
2026-01-30 19:30:00
It was Soren Stevenson’s third day in office on the Minneapolis city council when, in the middle of a strategic planning session, Mayor Jacob Frey rushed out of the room. Soon, the council learned why: Federal agents had shot and killed Renée Good. Stevenson hurried down to the site of the killing, on the edge of the ward he represents. The ward—one of the city’s most diverse areas, with mix of Latino, Somali, Black, and white residents—also includes the site of George Floyd’s murder.
For Stevenson, who is 31, the brutality is personal. Six days after Floyd’s murder, heeding the call for white bodies at the front of the protests, Stevenson was standing near a closed freeway ramp, arms linked with other protesters, when police fired rubber bullets without warning. Stevenson was shot in his left eye, and would lose his eye and most of his sense of smell. The city settled Stevenson’s subsequent lawsuit for $2.4 million.
Stevenson, whose background is in affordable housing, hadn’t considered running for office before the incident. But the experience served as an inflection point: He felt “a duty to be a part of building a public safety system in Minneapolis that treated everyone with dignity.”
When we spoke from his office last week, he was still learning his way around City Hall. His office walls were bare, and his office phone and email had just recently been set up. A few days later, agents would kill Alex Pretti.
Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Let’s start in 2020. How did you decide to get involved with the protests after George Floyd’s murder?
“’Force’ is a nice way of saying, ‘Ending someone’s life.’ A nice way of saying, ‘Shooting someone in the face and maiming them, breaking people’s bones, kicking people’s teeth out.'”
I had just graduated. It was Covid, I had lost one of my jobs. And at the time, Americans had been watching a steady stream of Black men be murdered by the police and no justice coming from it, getting no accountability. I was just one person who decided, “I’m not going to rest until George Floyd gets justice.” And I was joined by millions of other Americans. We were just sick and tired of seeing our neighbors, our fellow Americans, our fellow Minnesotans, be killed, and we weren’t going to go quietly.
I joined the protests, and six days later, I was at a peaceful protest before curfew, and a Minneapolis Police officer shot me with a rubber bullet. I lost my left eye and most of my sense of smell. And that put me on the trajectory to where we are.
How did that experience shape your understanding of the use of force against protesters?
It gave me a personal understanding of force. Is not this academic thing—it’s real human lives. It’s real stories. It’s real pain. It’s real blood. “Force” is a nice way of saying, “Ending someone’s life.” A nice way of saying, “Shooting someone in the face and maiming them, breaking people’s bones, kicking people’s teeth out.” And in the case of Renée Good, killing her.
What parallels do you see in the aftermath of the deaths of Good and Floyd?
“Something that has been really powerful is the organizing that’s happening around the schools: People patrolling schools, posted up on different corners, dropping kids off at school, taking them back, bringing groceries, taking people to appointments.”
The thing that I’ve been noticing the most is the way that the city ignited itself when our neighbor was murdered. When George Floyd was murdered, people got involved: street protests, starting organizations, neighborhood watches. I was somebody who stayed up on my porch. There was a Black church across the street from me, and I just stayed up part of the night, until my shift ended and my roommate took over, to make sure that it didn’t get burned down. After the murder of Renée Good, we’ve gone into overdrive. We remember how to look out for each other. We’re connected to our neighbors. A lot of people are like, “Hey, I haven’t seen you since the uprising. But here we are. We’re back.”
What has that reignition looked like lately?
Rapid response is a big one. [Saying] “ICE is at this place, come now,” and people show up quickly and are confronting ICE officers. That has worked to protect our neighbors. Every second that an ICE officer is bothered about someone blowing a whistle in their face is a second that they’re not taking one of our neighbors, and that’s time well spent. That’s a quote from [Minnesota Rep.] Aisha Gomez.
And something that has been really powerful in my ward is the organizing that’s happening around the schools: People patrolling schools, posted up on different corners, dropping kids off at school, taking them back, bringing groceries, taking people to appointments.
Speaking of which—what are you hearing from your constituents about how ICE is impacting kids?
“They thought that they were going to break our city. They were going to make us look bad.”
It’s having a huge effect. Elementary schools being battlegrounds is—I mean, just take that sentence in again. Elementary schools are battlegrounds. ICE is showing up to high schools and harassing students [when they’re] let out. We have a hybrid option available. A lot of kids who are afraid to go out, or whose parents are unsafe to go out—they’re at home doing hybrid learning. And I think any parent will know, school from home is not the vibe. We’re doing this because we have to—because a lot of families aren’t safe to leave their homes—but we’re not happy about it.
Why do you think ICE has targeted Minneapolis?
Minneapolis does not have the largest immigrant population of cities across the country, or remotely the most undocumented folks. I think the Trump administration picked a fight that they’re going to lose, and I don’t think that they knew they were going to lose. They thought that they were going to break our city. They were going to make us look bad. And while damage is being done to families across the city and across the state, ultimately, we are going to be successful because we are strong, and we’re organized, and we’re going to band together, and there’s more of us than there are of them.
What makes you say the Trump administration is going to lose?
“We are deciding right here in Minneapolis—in this country—are we going to have a democracy going forward, or are we not?”
They thought that they were going to come in here and play into this, “Minneapolis is a dangerous place that’s got all this fraud, yada yada,” and use racism against the Somali community or the Latino community. And I think they thought they were just going to come in, create some bad optics for the city, and leave. But in fact what’s happened is they’ve come in and they’ve found that we’re not just insane people who are going to light our city on fire. We are people who care about each other, and we want our neighborhoods to be thriving and successful. They’re getting a different fight than they expected. And we live here—it’s not like we can just quit at any point, because we’re going to continue to live here—but this invasion from ICE is temporary. It will end at some point, and we’re going to still be united. We’re going to still be looking out for each other when they’re gone.
For people who aren’t here, this can feel like a faraway problem. What are the stakes here?
This is really a question about: Do we want to have a democracy going forward or not? Are we going to accept that Donald Trump and the federal government can have completely unaccountable soldiers—secret police—who can do whatever they want to anyone at any time, or are we going to have a democracy where the government is by and for the people? Truly, I see this as a moment when we are deciding right here in Minneapolis—in this country—are we going to have a democracy going forward, or are we not? The stakes are no greater and no smaller than that.
2026-01-30 06:51:28
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.”
2026-01-30 04:58:08
My heart was in my throat as I watched the video emerging late Tuesday. A disturbed, angry man had just rushed Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar during a town hall in Minneapolis and assaulted her. He sprayed her in the chest with vinegar from a syringe, then was tackled by security and arrested. Omar reacted defiantly, kept her cool and carried on with the event. She was quickly hailed for her fortitude. All I could think was, thank God she’s not dead.
Initial media coverage referred to the attack by 55-year-old suspect Anthony Kazmierczak as “bizarre,” but it is worse than that. In more than a decade of reporting on violence prevention, I’ve studied many stalking cases and assassinations and the recognizable behaviors that precede them: the stewing grievances and desperation, the preparation, the final moment of action. The next assailant will just as easily have a knife or a gun.
In this era of surging political violence, even worse yet was the reaction from the president of the United States. ABC News correspondent Rachel Scott asked Donald Trump on Tuesday night if he’d seen the video. His response was to disparage Omar as “a fraud” and suggest the attack was staged: “She probably had herself sprayed, knowing her.” (There is zero evidence of that, and the perpetrator appears to have shared Trump’s acrimonious views of Omar.)
America has felt on a precipice this cold January. Minneapolis has been ground zero, culminating with the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by masked agents carrying out Trump’s mass deportation operations. Minnesotans have mounted an inspired campaign of mutual aid and constitutionally protected protest. A growing majority of Americans are with them.
Trump’s rhetoric may sound ignorant and unhinged, but more importantly, it is calculated.
But Trump continues to direct contempt and rage at immigrants in so-called blue cities—and at Omar, long a top target of his vitriol. Last November, he responded to an unrelated terrorist attack on National Guard soldiers in the nation’s capital by railing against “hundreds of thousands of Somalians” in Minnesota, claiming they “are ripping off our country and ripping apart that once great state.” Days later, he called Omar, who is Somali American, and her community “garbage” during a live-broadcast cabinet meeting. As Trump declared they should “go back to where they came from,” many in the room applauded and Vice President JD Vance pounded the table enthusiastically.
Trump was at it again in the very hours before Kazmierczak assaulted Omar. During a speech in Iowa on Tuesday, Trump said Omar exemplified immigrants who “hate our country.” Those who want to stay here, he said, “have to show that they’re not going to blow up our shopping centers, blow up our farms, kill people.”
That may sound ignorant and unhinged, and it is those things—but more importantly, it is calculated. Trump made anti-immigrant demagoguery the core of his 2024 reelection campaign, and he has exploited political violence throughout his first year back in office, as I documented recently. He does so, political historian Matt Dallek told me, to rile up his base and further justify his extreme policies, including the violent and lawless actions of ICE: “The narrative he creates says to all his supporters that what he’s doing is ‘destroying the enemy within,’ that he’s taking care of the scourge that he promised to address. I think it’s a mistake to discount just how powerful that can be.”
Powerful politically—and unpredictable as to where and when it will unleash more violence. That also has been a hallmark of Trump’s political career: stochastic terrorism, a tactic of incitement that allows room for deniability but makes violent attacks more likely. We don’t yet know much about Kazmierczak’s motive. (As of late Wednesday, the FBI had taken over the investigation, and it was unclear whether Kazmierczak yet had any legal representation.) But we do know, according to media reporting and interviews with his brother, that he was a right-wing Trump supporter with a long history of mental health problems and “a hatred of the Somali community.” A federal criminal complaint made public on Thursday included allegations that Kazmierczak had told “a close associate” years ago that “somebody should kill” Omar.
Minnesota was the site of another grim example last summer, when a pro-Trump extremist hunted two Democratic state lawmakers at their homes, fatally shooting former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband and wounding Sen. John Hoffman and his wife. Trump’s response to that horror was no less appalling, ranging from mockery to conspiracy theory.
A new report from the US Capitol Police, released coincidentally on Tuesday, shows that threats against members of Congress have continued to soar. In 2025, the agency’s threat assessment section investigated nearly 15,000 “concerning statements, behaviors, and communications” targeting federal lawmakers, a more than 50 percent increase from the prior year.
GOP lawmakers “know how much worse his rhetoric has made things,” said a federal law enforcement source.
Omar has long faced a deluge of threats and has sometimes been assigned a 24-hour security detail from the Capitol Police, according to the New York Times. That added protection is at the discretion of the House speaker, but for the past year Republican Speaker Mike Johnson has not offered it to Omar, the Times reported. After the attack on Tuesday, Omar made a formal request for extra protection and Johnson agreed, the Times noted.
A federal law enforcement source familiar with Capitol Police operations told me that, as a matter of close protection, the attack on Omar was a catastrophic failure with an “extremely lucky” outcome. Even though Omar reportedly will now have additional security, the Capitol Police have been heavily strained on this front. Moreover, lawmakers from Trump’s party “know how much worse his rhetoric has made things,” said the source, who has direct knowledge of conversations in which some lawmakers have admitted that “they can’t or won’t go against” Trump, because they fear for their political standing or the safety of their families. Several Republicans who have quit Congress in recent years have cited such reasons, including former Trump devotee Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The role of politics or ideology in an attack is often murky, the source emphasized. But the danger manifest again on Tuesday remains high, especially with Republican leaders cowing to Trump’s unrelenting politics of fear and contempt. “What does that mean for those individuals out there who are brittle, are in a tough place in life and have a lot of anger?” the source said. “Silence in the face of this can also be taken as permission.”
2026-01-30 02:25:08
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.
