Minnesotans Still Fighting ICE Terror - The Monday AM Quickie (2/9/26)
I started To Catch a Fascist by Christopher Mathias this weekend and can’t put it down. It’s so good. - Whitney
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THE BIG NEWS
Nothing Has Changed in Minnesota as ICE Continues Terror Campaign
Donald Trump’s placating statements last week that immigration thugs could use “a softer touch” and that he had personally ordered 700 of them to leave Minnesota changed nothing about conditions on the ground, HuffPost reported. Agents are still disappearing multiple people every day, still drawing guns on observers, still hunting children at school, and still targeting Black and brown people. They are still trying to evade notice by impersonating “construction workers, delivery drivers and in some cases anti-ICE activists,” the AP reported. They are still trying to blend into the community by driving vehicles with stuffed animals on the dashboards, Mexican flag decals on the bumpers, and lumber or tools in the truck bed.
“It does not at all feel like a lessening this week,” said Kristen Stuenkel, an education director for Columbia Heights public schools, the district of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, whom federal agents sent with his father to an immigration prison in Texas. A judge ordered their release last month; the Department of Homeland Security is now trying to deport the family ASAP with expedited removal. “On Tuesday, ICE was in the parking lots of all of our schools,” Stuenkel said.
Minnesotans are still fighting back. They’re tracking ICE agents as they move through the Twin Cities, building street blockades to slow them down, and protesting loudly and visibly, the Star Tribune reported. They have maintained a constant presence at the Whipple Federal Building, where nearly 1,000 people gathered on Saturday afternoon to mark the passage of a month since agent Jonathan Ross executed legal observer Renee Good. Far-right outside agitator and January 6 traitor Jake Lang was there, “screaming into a microphone” from the safety of a U-Haul truck. The day before, local authorities arrested the Florida bigot after he filmed himself kicking down an ice sculpture in front of Minnesota’s capitol that said “Prosecute ICE.” Local police declared an unlawful assembly at Whipple, ordered protesters to leave, attacked those who did not comply, and arrested at least 50.
Also on Saturday, Becca Good appeared in public for the first time since Ross executed her wife, NBC and the NYT reported. Becca Good issued a statement via her attorney, saying that “Renee was not the first person killed, and she was not the last,” and that there are many more people enduring the same government-backed trauma than her family and the family of Alex Pretti, another legal observer immigration agents executed. “You know my wife’s name and you know Alex’s name, but there are many others in this city being harmed that you don’t know – their families are hurting just like mine, even if they don’t look like mine.”
“They are neighbors, friends, coworkers, classmates. And we must also know their names,” she added. “Because this shouldn’t happen to anyone.”
MORE STORIES TO WATCH
‘World’s Most Notorious Pedophile’ Not Running a Sex Ring, FBI Concluded
The Federal Bureau of Investigation found little evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was running a sex trafficking ring for the global elite, the AP found in a review of internal Justice Department records. The FBI concluded that videos, photos and financial documents seized from Epstein’s homes showed no victims being abused, implicated no one else in crimes, and showed no connection to criminal activity. The bureau also decided that the claims Epstein’s accusers made did not merit investigation and referred them to local law enforcement. That dismissive response is endemic among the elites of America, where there have been few genuine, lasting consequences for associating with Epstein or participating in his criminal enterprise. Not so in other parts of the world.
In the UK, for example, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, stepped down on Sunday because he helped get Epstein’s friend, Peter Mandelson, the ambassadorship to the United States, the NYT reported. Starmer fired Mandelson last year over his contact with Epstein; new documents show they were even closer than Mandelson initially acknowledged. Now Mandelson would like everyone to leave him alone and stop asking questions about his role in the international sex-trafficking ring that preyed on vulnerable children. He sent a secret memo late Friday evening to all media across the UK via the Independent Press Standards Organisation, which regulates newspapers and magazines, citing clauses within the Editor’s Code meant to protect grieving families and people suffering harassment from the press. Editors at Scotland’s The National said they “believe it is strongly in the public interest to publish this memo” and did so in full:
CONFIDENTIAL – STRICTLY NOT FOR PUBLICATION: Ipso has asked us to circulate the following advisory:
Ipso has today been contacted by a representative acting on behalf of Peter Mandelson.
Mr Mandelson’s representatives state that he does not wish to speak to the media at this time. He requests that the press do not take photos or film, approach, or contact him via phone, email, or in-person. His representatives ask that any requests for his comment are directed to [REDACTED]
We are happy to make editors aware of his request. We note the terms of Clause 2 (Privacy) and 3 (Harassment) of the Editors’ Code, and in particular that Clause 3 states that journalists must not persist in questioning, telephoning, pursuing or photographing individuals once asked to desist, unless justified in the public interest.
Please do not hesitate to contact me to discuss any Code issues on [REDACTED] or out of hours on [REDACTED].
[IPSO official]
Good luck with that, guy. Cops searched two of Mandelson’s properties over the weekend and the UK government is planning to release documents about his appointment to the ambassadorship “in a matter of days.”
Landslide Victory for Japan’s Right-Wing, Trump-Aligned PM
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi expanded her party’s majority in a snap parliamentary vote Sunday, winning a supermajority in the lower house and giving her more power to “deepen ties with the US,” according to the AP and Wall Street Journal. Takaichi’s Liberal Democratic Party won 316 seats in the lower house, which has 465 seats total and is the more powerful of the two-chamber parliament. The Japan Innovation Party, an ally of the LDP, won 36 seats. The win will allow Takaichi to advance her right-wing agenda that includes increasing Japan’s military capabilities “as tensions grow with China.”
QUICKEST QUICKIES
- Progressive LA Council Member Announces Last-Minute Mayoral Run Nithya Raman, once an ally of incumbent Karen Bass, said Los Angeles is “at a breaking point” and that elected leaders must stop making decisions about spending “based on political calculations” rather than what is best for Angelenos. via ABC and Politico.
- ‘Take the Vaccine, Please,’ Mehmet Oz Begs as Measles Cases Skyrocket The former talk-show host, who runs the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and answers to anti-vax crusader RFK Jr., said yesterday that the measles vaccine is “a solution for our problem.” No sh*t, buddy, tell your boss. via the AP.
- Trump Reaches Interim Trade Deal with Fellow Fascist Modi Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised he’d buy no more Russian oil, the sin that had earlier prompted Trump to saddle Indian imports with a 50 percent tariff. Modi also said he “intends” to buy from the US $500 billion “of energy, aircraft and aircraft parts, metals, technology products and coking coal over the coming five years,” about double its current spending. via the Financial Times.
- Everybody Hates The Vances Sports fans at the Winter Olympics booed fake povvo JD Vance and his pregnant Republican wife, former Brett Kavanaugh law clerk Usha Vance; US networks hid the moment but news outlets elsewhere let er rip. via The Guardian.
SOME NUMBER
40 million
That’s how many US households get their drinking water from private wells and are especially vulnerable to contamination from forever chemicals, which accumulate in the blood, kidneys and liver and are linked to higher risk of cancer and developmental delays in children. Municipal water supplies are contaminated, too, despite the regulations, the AP reported. Overall, government estimates “suggest as much as half of US households have some level of PFAS in their water – whether it comes from a private well or a tap.”
DON'T MISS MR CLIPS
The Level Of Incompetence Is Breathtaking
RETIRE.
Leaked Recording Reveals Dark Truth About Epstein And Israel
Major US news outlets ignored that Virginia Giuffre, the prominent and brave survivor of Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring, who died by suicide last year, claimed in a lawsuit that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak raped her. She also wrote in her memoir that Epstein trafficked her to a “well-known prime minister” who “raped me more savagely than anyone had before.” She did not include his name in her book, but he’s the only prominent prime minister she named in the lawsuit. She described his sadism in detail: “He repeatedly choked me until I lost consciousness and took pleasure in seeing me fear for my life. Horrifically, the Prime Minister laughed when he hurt me and got more aroused when I begged him to stop,” Giuffre wrote. She begged Epstein not to send her back to him. “I got down on my knees and pleaded with him. I don’t know if Epstein feared the man or if he owed him a favor, but he wouldn’t make any promises, saying coldly of the politician’s brutality, ‘You’ll get that sometimes.’”
PARTING WORDS
“They were very racist people. No one insulted them, neither me nor the other person they detained me with. It was their character, their racism toward us, for being immigrants.”
– Alberto Castañeda Mondragón, discussing how Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minnesota beat him so viciously that they fractured his skull in eight places and left him with five life-threatening brain hemorrhages. The beating was unprovoked; as of last week, he could no longer remember his daughter. Agents said that Mondragón injured himself by running into a wall, a claim nurses called “laughable, if there was something to laugh about.”
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