Clock Ticking on DHS Reforms - The Wednesday AM Quickie 2/4/26
This is a good breakfast. See you next week, Corey is back tomorrow. - Whitney
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THE BIG NEWS
Partial Government Shutdown Ends, Clock Ticking on DHS Reforms
Trump signed a $1.2 trillion spending package yesterday to fund most of the government through September and the Department of Homeland Security for the next two weeks, the AP and NYT reported. Now lawmakers now have 10 days to negotiate a deal on DHS reforms before regular funding for it lapses. The conditions Democrats want are pretty thin gruel, or what Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called during a floor speech yesterday “exceedingly commonsense,” according to The Guardian. They fall far short of abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a stance so popular that even Forbes and The Economist had to admit that more people want to abolish the agency than don’t. Nonetheless, Democratic leaders are demanding only “that federal agents wear body cameras and cease wearing masks, follow a code of conduct, and obtain arrest warrants for people in the country illegally.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem already said on Monday that she would immediately issue body cameras to ICE agents and every other Homeland Security officer in Minneapolis and then expand the program nationwide when funding is available.
GOP leaders are pretending that the remaining demands are unreasonable. Vampiric Kewpie doll Mike Johnson, the Senate majority leader, said yesterday that it would be too hard for federal agents to obtain arrest warrants, also known as following the law. “Imagine if we had to go through the process of getting a judicial warrant, an additional warrant, to go and apprehend people who we know are here illegally. How much time would that take? We don’t have enough judges. We don’t have enough time,” he said with his customary pantomime innocence.
Johnson and his fellow Republicans also lacked the time yesterday, or the basic human decency, to hear testimony at a Congressional forum from people immigration agents have injured, NBC News and The New Republic reported. Those who spoke included Marimar Martinez, whom Border Patrol agent Charles Exum shot five times in Chicago; Aliya Rahman, a disabled woman immigration agents dragged out of her car and who lost consciousness while in an immigration prison; and Martin Daniel Rascon, whom Border Patrol agent shot at while he was driving with his family in California. All are US citizens, a fact that’s important to note because it puts the lie to the Trump regime’s claim that its immigration terror campaign is only aimed at dangerous foreign nationals. Also at the hearing were the brothers of Renee Good, who Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross executed last month. “The government told the people they were targeting the worst of the worst,” said Martinez, a Montessori schoolteacher, “but their actions demonstrated otherwise.” Watch the hearing here.
MORE STORIES TO WATCH
French Prosecutors Raid Elon Musk’s Paris Office Over Child Sexual Abuse Material
Cybercrime unit prosecutors searched X’s Parisian office yesterday as part of their investigation into X and xAI for allegedly distributing child sexual abuse material, sexually explicit deepfakes and posts denying crimes against humanity, the AP, Financial Times and NBC News reported. Prosecutors also summoned Musk and former CEO Linda Yaccarino for “voluntary interviews” on April 20, along with X workers to testify as witnesses. Prosecutors opened the investigation after a French lawmaker alleged that X used biased algorithms; they expanded it when Musk’s chatbot Grok continuously generated sexually explicit and nonconsensual deepfakes of real women and children and posts that denied the Holocaust, which is a crime in France. A report from Reuters yesterday showed that the safety measures Musk implemented on Grok don’t work and that it continues to generate sexualized images of real people “even when users explicitly warn that the subjects do not consent.”
Department of Homeland Security Silencing Critics With Secretive Weapon
The Trump regime is using a little-known tool to intimidate people from exercising their freedom of speech, according to a story in yesterday’s Washington Post that chronicled the ordeal of Jon, a 67-year-old retiree in Pennsylvania. In October, Jon wrote an email to the Department of Homeland Security asking officials to show mercy to an Afghan immigrant they were trying to deport. Jon “begged federal officers to reconsider, telling them that the Taliban would kill him if he was returned to Afghanistan.” Within just five hours and one minute, Google emailed Jon, saying it was compelled to release information related to his Google Account to law enforcement due to a subpoena from the DHS. Neither Google nor the DHS provided him with the subpoena, which he later learned was an “administrative subpoena,” a type that federal agencies can issue without an order from a judge or grand jury. Per the Post:
Though the US government had been accused under previous administrations of overstepping laws and guidelines that restrict the subpoenas’ use, privacy and civil rights groups say that, under President Donald Trump, Homeland Security has weaponized the tool to strangle free speech.
For many Americans, the anonymous ICE officer, masked and armed, represents Homeland Security’s most intimidating instrument, but the agency often targets people in a far more secretive way.
Homeland Security is not required to share how many administrative subpoenas it issues each year, but tech experts and former agency staff estimate it’s well into the thousands, if not tens of thousands. Because the legal demands are not subject to independent review, they can take just minutes to write up and, former staff say, officials throughout the agency, even in mid-level roles, have been given the authority to approve them.
QUICKEST QUICKIES
- RFK Jr. Using Palantir AI to Eliminate Grants for Anything Related to ‘Gender Ideology’ or Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Meanwhile, Democrats “counted it as a win” yesterday when the budget Trump signed gave RFK $20 billion more than he asked for. via Politico and Wired.
- US Shoots Down Iranian Drone Nearing Aircraft Carrier in Arabian Sea “The U.S. military has deployed dozens of aircraft to bases operating near Iran and assembled about 12 warships in or near the Middle East over the past month, for what President Donald Trump has described as a pressure campaign to reach a new deal aimed at restraining Tehran’s nuclear program.” via the NYT and the Washington Post.
- Vietnamese Military Preps for Possible American ‘War of Aggression’ “Due to the US’s belligerent nature,” it may create a pretext to invade Vietnam, use unconventional forms of warfare, military intervention, and conduct large-scale invasions, the The Ministry of Defense warned. via the AP.
SOME NUMBER
$550 billion
That’s how much the Japanese government is off paying Trump – through a series of business deals – for a reduction in tariffs on Japanese goods from 25 percent to 15 percent. The Japanese government is keeping the terms of the deals secret until after a snap election on February 8; one Japanese CEO told the Financial Times that the arrangement was “a shakedown,” while a diplomat called it “street-level tactics.”
ON THE SHOW TODAY
2/4: Sam and Emma are in the studio today and their guest is Ken Klippenstein, an independent journalist covering security and US politics at KlipNews.
DON'T MISS MR CLIPS
Andrew Schulz Says The Left Was Right About Trump
Ok guy.
Trump DOJ: "It Is Not A Crime To Party With Epstein"
Except it is though when the party is sexually abusing children.
PARTING WORDS
“At Dilley, she went from full-time school to just one hour of instruction a day. She contracted a cough, which only got worse. She cried at night and asked when we would go back to our apartment in New York. She asked about her teacher and our cat every day. My daughter was once an extroverted, healthy, and happy first grader. But at Dilley, she regressed behaviorally, wetting herself after years without accidents and begging to breastfeed again despite being 6 years old. When we sought mental health care, a psychiatrist blamed me for her distress and accused me of poor parenting.
Then my daughter’s eye was injured.
A facility staff member accidentally struck her eye with a mop. Blood came from her eye. At the medical center, the injury was falsely recorded as a fall. Despite my daughter’s continued complaints of blurred vision, light sensitivity, and hearing problems, doctors dismissed us.
After over a month of delays, an ophthalmologist who evaluated my daughter warned that she may have suffered trauma to her eye and needed further evaluation, as well as a referral to an ENT specialist because the injury could also be affecting her hearing. My husband and I repeatedly begged the facility to provide this care, but officers insisted that it was not their responsibility - even though the injury had been caused by a staff member.”
-- Kelly Vargas, writing in Slate about what happened to her 6-year-old daughter during her family’s imprisonment in the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, the same concentration camp in which the government also held 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father. Liam’s family is now reunited in Minnesota after a judge demanded they be released. But Vargas and her family were deported to Colombia, where they now live in fear and have no access to the medical care they need to treat injuries sustained from the US government.
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