Lessons from Minneapolis : Sanders

Sisters and brothers - 

The national TV cameras are largely gone from Minneapolis now. 

If the Department of Homeland Security keeps its word (maybe they will, maybe they won’t) the ICE army will soon be withdrawn from the city. 

But one thing remains certain. The pain and psychic trauma for that community continues.

Earlier this week, I met with a number of Minnesotans from different immigration activist groups in the state including teachers, union members and faith leaders.

They told me about the fear instilled in the children. Car windows being smashed by lawless ICE agents. Helicopters flying above creating a war zone environment. Hard-working parents being dragged off. Two innocent people murdered in cold blood.

I heard stories about masked federal agents kicking down doors without court orders and sending 5-year-old children to detention centers. 

I heard stories about people being picked out of their homes, their workplaces and their schools while people who tried to help were being stalked and threatened. 

I heard stories about children afraid to leave their houses and a school teacher who told me that kids are not showing up at school for fear of being detained. In fact, there are countless kids who went hungry as a result of missing school lunch programs. 

I learned that more than 3,000 people have been detained in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area and many of their own families do not even know where they are.

That’s the very bad news created by Trump’s so-called “immigration policy” and implemented by his domestic ICE army.

The good news is that grassroots organizations in Minnesota came together with an extraordinary sense of solidarity, fought back and inspired the nation. They created a political reality which forced Trump (for the moment at least) to tone down his policies and his rhetoric.

Now, the brave people in the Minneapolis area are beginning to rebuild their lives and their communities. And these grassroots organizations, who have been on the front line fighting against Trump’s authoritarianism and brutality, need our help. 

So I am asking you to make a contribution to Friends of Bernie Sanders today. Every single dollar we raise from this fundraiser will be distributed to grassroots organizations in Minnesota who are fighting for justice and are helping the families impacted by Trump's raids - the hungry kids, the scared parents, and all those who are struggling at this difficult time.

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What Trump has done in Minnesota is repellent to the American people in every single way. People in this country want democracy and justice, not authoritarianism.

People want investments in schools, education, and affordable housing -- not a domestic army invading and occupying cities across our nation. 

Now is the time to stand together with those in need and provide a helping hand. 

In solidarity,

Bernie Sanders

 

Defend the Constitution

 Bishop Soto Offers Public Witness Opportunity-Ash Wednesday

In response to federal actions in Minnesota, our California Catholic Bishops have issued a Statement on Recent Violence, Public Trust, and the Call for Peace and Accountability, expressing their concern that what is unfolding in American cities "may unravel the essential social covenants that protect us all from violence and abuse." Parishioners may read the full statement on the diocesan website.

You are invited to join Bishop Soto and other local faith leaders at the Moss Federal Building, 650 Capitol Mall, for an Ecumenical Ash Wednesday Service, on February 18 from 5:00 to 6:00 PM.  According to the diocese, "these liturgies are opportunities for us to publicly witness to our faith and the need for conversion to the Gospel of Life and Dignity, both personally and socially." 

ICE Grows and Grows

A parallel fascist army is created. 

ICE Is Expanding Across the US at Breakneck Speed. Here’s Where It’s Going Next Leah Feiger February 10, 2026 Wired Federal records obtained by WIRED show that over the past several months, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have carried out a secret campaign to expand ICE’s physical presence across the US. Photo-illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images,    Documents show that more than 150 leases and office expansions have or would place new facilities in nearly every state, many of them in or just outside of the country’s largest metropolitan areas. In many cases, these facilities, which are to be used by street-level agents and ICE attorneys, are located near elementary schools, medical offices, places of worship, and other sensitive locations. In El Paso, Texas, for example, the agency is moving into a large campus of buildings right off of Interstate 10 near multiple local health providers and other businesses. In Irvine, California, ICE is moving into offices located next to a childcare agency. In New York, ICE is moving into offices on Long Island near a passport center. In a wealthy community near Houston, Texas, ICE appears poised to move into an office building blocks away from a preschool. The General Services Administration (GSA), which manages federal buildings and functions as the government’s internal IT department, is playing a critical role in this aggressive expansion. In numerous emails and memorandums viewed by WIRED, DHS asked GSA explicitly to disregard usual government lease procurement procedures and even hide lease listings due to “national security concerns” in an effort to support ICE’s immigration enforcement activities across the US. “GSA is committed to working with all of our partner agencies, including our patriotic law enforcement partners such as ICE, to meet their workspace needs. GSA remains focused on supporting this administration’s goal of optimizing the federal footprint, and providing the best workplaces for our federal agencies to meet their mission,” Marianne Copenhaver, GSA associate administrator for communications, tells WIRED. “GSA is following all lease procurement procedures in accordance with all applicable laws and regulations.”

Trump Wants to Make Voting More Difficult

View as web page Here we go again. Some in Congress are trying to make it harder for Americans to vote, and they’re calling it “election integrity.” The SAVE America Act would force people to produce extra citizenship documents just to register and vote in federal elections. Let’s be clear: only citizens can vote now. That’s already the law. This bill isn’t fixing a real problem; it’s creating new ones for eligible voters. The SAVE America Act would: Disenfranchise voters by creating huge new burdens on registering and voting, causing confusion, delays, and discrimination at the polls. Paperwork becomes a paywall. Not everyone has a passport or a perfect birth certificate sitting in a drawer. Replacing documents costs time and money. When voting starts to feel like a trip to the DMV that never ends, regular people get pushed out. Disproportionately impact communities of color, seniors, women, young people, rural voters, and low-income families, making disparities in accessing the ballot even worse, It hits Latinos first and hardest. Hyphenated names, two last names, accent marks; our names tell our stories, but in databases they trigger “mismatches.” Intimidate and suppress voters — particularly naturalized citizens and communities of color — from participating in elections. It scares mixed-status families. When voter rolls start talking to immigration databases, people worry. Even citizens think twice if it could bring heat to their household. That’s not integrity; that’s intimidation. This is how voter suppression looks in 2026; not with literacy tests, but with red tape. Voting is how we fight for better schools, safer neighborhoods, fair wages, and real opportunity. When politicians make voting harder, they’re not protecting democracy; they’re protecting their own power. This is a moment when your voice actually counts. Offices track calls. Staff log every message. When the lines light up, lawmakers pay attention. Call Congress and Be Heard Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121 Ask to be connected to your U.S. House Representative. Find your representative here. If you hit voicemail, leave a message. It still gets counted. How to do it in 60 seconds Dial: 202-224-3121 Say: “Please connect me to Representative [Last Name].” When connected, give your name and city (ZIP if asked). Deliver your message; short, clear, firm. What to Say “My name is ___, I’m a constituent from ___, and I urge you to oppose the SAVE America Act. It creates new barriers for eligible citizens and makes voting harder for working families, seniors, and naturalized citizens. We should protect voting rights, not put paperwork between citizens and the ballot. Thank you.” Optional add-on (10 more seconds) “Will the office commit to voting NO on the SAVE America Act?” “Please record my position and let me know the member’s stance.” After You Call Forward this to five friends or family members and ask them to call Share the number (202) 224-3121 in a group chat Remind people to identify themselves as constituents and to call both of their elected officials

 

Trump's Occupying army retreats

 

The occupying army retreats The announcement of ICE’s withdrawal from Minnesota, like that of the British from Boston 250 years ago, marks a victory for people power. Today’s announcement by Trump border czar Tom Homan that the administration was ending its deployment of ICE and Border Patrol agents in Minnesota encountered two distinct but ultimately complementary reactions from Minnesotans. Skepticism: “I’ll believe it when I see it,” said Elliott Payne, president of the Minneapolis City Council. And celebration of Minnesotans’ tenacious resistance: “They thought they could break us, but a love for our neighbors and a resolve to endure can outlast an occupation,” said Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. By now, the persistence of Twin City residents to demonstrate against the occupation, to line the city’s sidewalks with people recording ICE’s every move with their phones, to patrol neighborhoods warning of the approach of ICE and Border Patrol thugs, and to bring food to their neighbors who fear to leave their homes, all amid weather that was at times subzero, has earned them a page in history books. I daresay it will become the stuff of American legend, inasmuch as our legends generally celebrate American citizens defending democratic values against autocrats, fascists, and totalitarians. We don’t have a lot of legends about the triumph of such Americans over forces that occupied our cities, however, because we don’t have a lot of cities that have been occupied by such forces. As events would have it, however, the standout example of Americans outlasting and defeating such an occupation is about to have its 250th anniversary. It came in March of 1776, when patriot militias drove British troops out of Boston, who’d occupied that city since 1768 to quell Bostonians’ efforts to establish a modicum of control over their own affairs.

Following the Battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775, patriot militias—in advance of the formation of an American army—besieged British forces within Boston and neighboring Charlestown, both of which connected to the Massachusetts mainland by narrow necks of land that were easily blockaded. As in Minneapolis, the forces hemming in the British were infuriated civilians, the Massachusetts militia having been joined by militia forces from the other New England colonies. (Only after several months did the Continental Congress establish and enroll them in an American army, which George Washington then arrived to command.) In late 1775 and 1776, the patriot forces managed to bring artillery to the hills surrounding the city from faraway Fort Ticonderoga, in upstate New York, which had the capacity not only to bombard the British forces, but their ships in the harbor as well. With that, the British were compelled to withdraw. It took seven more years, of course, for all British forces to withdraw from the new nation, and it will likely take today’s patriots at least three more years to end the rule of Mad King Donald and his successors, which has thus far been defined not just by its war on immigrants and people whose skin color makes them look like some immigrants, but also on American cities and suburbs, where immigrants and liberals and Democrats reside. But as was the case during our Revolution, interim victories will hasten that day. On the heels of today’s announced Minnesota withdrawal, congressional Democrats appear poised to block funding for the Homeland Security Department, which is set to run out tomorrow. That could be, and surely should be, an interim victory, too, but many more (and more decisive) victories are required to end the rush to authoritarianism that Trump has engineered. Taking Congress in November’s election, of course, is by far the most important looming battle. As the siege of Boston continued through 1775 and 1776, the New England militias were joined by militias even from the Southern colonies. I suspect we’ll see a kindred rise in urban and blue-state solidarity today. Yesterday, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass ordered L.A.’s police to record the actions of ICE and the Border Patrol, since we can’t rely on the feds recording their own savagery. And in the wake of today’s announced retreat of ICE from Minnesota, Minneapolis Mayor Frey and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that they’d be meeting to discuss lessons learned—resistance lessons learned—from the experience of Frey’s city, and how they can be applied to New York. That might be the topic for a conclave of America’s mayors should someone have the smarts and credibility to call one. As Trump is plainly determined to commemorate the 250th anniversary of our Revolution by having an alien force of louts and thugs occupy America’s cities, so those cities should commemorate that anniversary by demonstrating the same kind of patriot resolve that created those American cities—as distinct from subservient colonial cities—250 years ago. Now as then, mad kings and their mercenaries have no place in our democratic republic. Harold Meyerson Editor-at-Large

Immigrant Workers - Confront the Lies

https://youtu.be/4u_HwUn4bYQ?si=HGJCaGhmTdbNb2aE

I hope you’ll watch this week’s video to see Julie Su describe the abuses immigrant workers face on the job and break down what we must do to protect them from exploitation.

Robert Reich, 

Call for NATION WIDE strike : ICE Out

https://www.laborpolitics.com/p/weve-had-a-nationwide-immigrant-strike?

We’ve Had a Nationwide Immigrant Strike Before. We Can Do It Again.

The 2006 “Day Without an Immigrant” offers urgent lessons for beating ICE today

Major Corporations Finance ICE, And, what you and I can do about it.

Many of you tell me you feel powerless in the face of Trump’s reign of terror. You view and read horrific news reports about what ICE and Border Patrol are doing, but you don’t know how you can reduce or stop this horror. 

Robert Reich,

Let me assure you: You’re not powerless. In fact, you have enormous power. 

Start with ICE and Border Patrol detention facilities, now holding some 70,000 people in 224 facilities across the country that reportedly are rife with abuses. Last year, deaths in ICE custody reached a 20-year high. The first days of 2026 brought more deaths. Medical neglect, isolation, and overcrowding are routine. 

CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America) is the largest owner and operator of ICE and Border Patrol detention centers. It has a record of abusing detainees. Among the detention centers CoreCivic lists on its website is the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia. In December, The Intercept reported that there were at least 15 medical emergency calls to 911 from the Stewart facility every month since the start of the second Trump administration.

If you’re as outraged about this as I am, here are five things you can do now. 

1. You and I are paying CoreCivic through our tax dollars. You can demand that our senators and representatives in Congress not fund the Department of Homeland Security until these abuses stop. 

At this moment, congressional Democrats are trying to condition their votes for the Department of Homeland Security’s spending bill on placing guardrails around ICE and Border Patrol. 

You might contact your senators and representatives and urge them not to vote for funding of the Department of Homeland Security. Or at the least, demand that in order to receive funding, their agents cannot wear masks, must wear identification, cannot use racial profiling, must have search warrants, cannot use lethal force, and must give arrestees due process, and that those detained must receive adequate medical care and accommodation. 

You can reach your senators and representatives through the U.S. Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121.

2. You may own CoreCivic indirectly. You can withdraw your savings from institutional investors that are financing it. 

CoreCivic is a public-held corporation, meaning that it’s listed on the stock exchange. We may not own its shares directly, but many of us entrust our savings to institutional investors such as Black Rock and Vanguard, which own significant shares in CoreCivic. 

Black Rock accounts for 16 percent of CoreCivic’s total shares. Vanguard Group Inc. holds 12 percent. They are CoreCivic’s largest shareholders. As such, they have the most influence (other than the federal government’s Department of Homeland Security, if DHS were acting responsibly) over how CoreCivic runs its detention facilities. 

Find out if your savings are held by one or both of these two giant institutional investors. (Check with your broker or look at the reports they send you.) If they are, you might instruct your broker to withdraw your savings from them and put them in another institution that doesn’t hold shares of CoreCivic. 

3. You may support the Democratic Party, specifically the Democratic Governors Association — which has been accepting donations from CoreCivic. You can contact the DGA and tell it to stop accepting such donations. 

A Politico review of campaign finance records published Saturday shows that the Democratic Governors Association has taken in hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from CoreCivic. These are not charitable contributions by CoreCivic, but attempts by CoreCivic to influence state legislation. 

From 2017 through at least 2025, the DGA took in $1,246,050 over 46 donations from CoreCivic. The most recent publicly reported donation to the DGA came in May 2025, according to records, around the same time White House officials began pressuring ICE to ramp up arrests.

The Republican Governors Association has undoubtedly taken in as much if not more donations from CoreCivic, but I’m assuming that more of us are affiliated with, or at least more influential in, the Democratic Party than the Republican. 

You can contact the Democratic Governors Association and tell them to stop taking donations from CoreCivic. You can reach them by writing to the Democratic Governors Association, 1300 Eye Street NW, Suite 1200 West, Washington, D.C. 20005. Or telephone them at (202) 772-5600.

4. You can also express your outrage directly to CoreCivic — and tell them you refuse to support them with your tax dollars or your investment savings. Write them directly at CoreCivic, 5501 Virginia Way, Suite 110, Brentwood, TN 37027. And phone them toll-free at 1-800-624-2931.

5. In addition to your power as a taxpayer, investor-saver, and voter, you’re also powerful as a consumer. Although you don’t purchase CoreCivic’s detention services directly, you buy from corporations that every day enable CoreCivic, ICE, and Border Patrol to do their nefarious work. 

For example, ICE’s latest recruitment ads — built around music and language drawn straight from far-right neo-Nazi memes and aimed at extremists who are most fervent about guns, tactical gear, and vigilantism — are being distributed by and are profiting two companies you probably use all the time: YouTube and Google.

Meanwhile, AT&T, Home Depot, Amazon, and Microsoft are providing ICE and Border Patrol with cloud computing, surveillance software, and logistical support that’s central to how they function. This corporate collaboration makes large-scale enforcement possible.

And Verizon — through a 10-year, $176 million contract with the Department of Homeland Security, including ICE — supplies the communications infrastructure that facilitates raids, detention centers, and deportations.

Without these corporate partners, ICE could not carry out violent raids, operate sprawling detention centers, or deport people at scale. These corporations are enabling violence on the streets and death behind barbed wire.

Yet these corporations also spend billions of dollars each year on their brand images and public relations in order to attract your consumer dollars. None wants to be seen as underwriting civilian killings like those of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. None wants its brand associated with record numbers of deaths in custody. None wants to be linked to detention sites with names like “Alligator Alcatraz” that are rife with abuse. 

Your consumer dollars are critical to these corporations. So, at the least, you can demand that they stop profiting from their collaborations with ICE. (Click on the word “demand” in the previous sentence to send them a message.) 

And tell Verizon to end its contracts with ICE and stop profiting from violence, detention, and abuse. 

You can go a step further and boycott the giant corporations now helping ICE. See here.

In these and many other ways, you are powerful. As a consumer, saver-investor, taxpayer, and voter, you keep these corporations going. 

Together, we’re even more powerful. We need not tolerate their complicity in the inhumane acts now being done by ICE, Border Patrol, and Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. 

You are not powerless. You can take action now. Please do. 

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Trump and the MAGA Fascists Begin to Steal the 2026 Elections

 Trump Tries to Rig the 2026 Elections.

Apparently concerned that even racism won’t help keep Republicans in office, Trump is trying to rig the system.

Yesterday the Office of Personnel Management issued a final rule to strip civil service protections from about 50,000 federal employees, enabling the administration to replace nonpartisan civil servants hired for their skills with loyalists. Trump tried to do this at the end of his first term, but his successor, President Joe Biden, reversed the plan immediately upon taking office. The United States has had a nonpartisan civil service since 1883. When the government proposed the reintroduction of the political system the U.S. had before then, 94% of 40,000 public comments opposed the change. Only 5% supported it.

The Republicans are also trying to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, which would require a document proving citizenship in order to register to vote and in order to vote. Only Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont, and Washington have “enhanced” driver’s licenses that would meet the requirement. In all other states, voters would need either a passport or a birth certificate.

Half of Americans don’t have a passport, others don’t have their birth certificates, and the names of married women who took their husband’s last name and transgender Americans would not match their birth certificates. All of these groups tend to vote for Democrats. The bill also calls for state officials to purge voter rolls. The Brennan Center for Justice found that if the measure passes, about 21 million Americans could lose their votes.

Heather Cox Richardson.   Letters from an American 

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-6-2026?

The 2026 elections will be critical tests for the resistance.  It will be easier to win in 2026, than if the Trump/Magas continue to consolidate power until 2028. 

 

Public School Parents are An Important Part of the Resistance.

Welcome to the Resistance, Public School Parents

Jessica Grose
February 4, 2026
The New York Times

 Fear and disruption is touching nearly every parent and child in places like Minnesota and Maine. And everyday people who otherwise describe themselves as not especially political are stepping up for their fellow parents and children.

 

The terror for children, parents and teachers in Minnesota started even before Operation Metro Surge sent thousands of heavily armed, masked federal agents into the streets. The school year began with a shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in South Minneapolis, where two children died and at least 24 others were injured. Local families barely had time to process those deaths — only five years after the killing of George Floyd rocked their city — before their daily lives were upended by the chaotic presence of federal officers harassing citizens under the guise of immigration enforcement.

A teacher named Sarah in the Twin Cities told me that her school received a bomb threat after Renee Good’s killing, ostensibly for being too supportive of immigrants. “I kind of forgot about it because we went on with our day, teaching,” Sarah, who is a mother, told me, acknowledging how absurd it was that lockdowns and the shadow of violence were now unremarkable fixtures of the public school experience in Minnesota. (Like many people I spoke to for this story, she requested that I use only her first name because she feared retaliation against or further targeting of her school.)

Two things became clear as I talked to parents, educators and school board members in Minnesota and Maine, where there was an Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdown called Operation Catch of the Day in January targeting immigrants from Somalia.

The first is that the fear and disruption touch nearly every parent and child in these places. A Minnesota woman named Alli, who has a child on the autism spectrum, told me that because she and her child are not white, she is worried about him having a meltdown in public and attracting immigration enforcement. She wondered aloud to me, “Can we go to swim class tonight,” or should they just stay home to avoid being hassled and potentially traumatized?

The second is that everyday people who otherwise describe themselves as not especially political are stepping up for their fellow parents and children. We know public schools are often a hub of local connection, but what stands out is how far schools have extended their care into the community. Fellow parents are offering rides, food, grocery delivery and money to the families affected. They’re patrolling the sidewalks in front of schools to keep an eye out for ICE vehicles in the deep northern freeze.

Educators like Valley View Elementary School’s principal, Jason Kuhlman, are taking students to visit their detained parents at the Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis. Valley View is where Liam Conejo Ramos — the prekindergartner in a bunny ears hat whose photo while being detained by federal agents has become an icon of the crackdown’s cruelty — is a student and where at least 25 other families have had a parent or guardian apprehended.

“We gave them hugs,” Kuhlman told my newsroom colleague Sarah Mervosh, of two children he took to see their detained mother. “We’re crying; they’re crying.” Later he found out that the three were taken to a detention center in Texas.

It struck me that these parents and teachers, mourning together, are treating all children as their own.

When parents across the country leave the house for school drop-off or errands, they have to figure out whether the route they are taking is safe by checking Signal and WhatsApp chats and social media posts and recalculate if they think agents are lingering. If they are immigrants or the relatives of immigrants, they are afraid of being targeted and detained even if they are here legally.

Alexandra, a stay-at-home mother of two children in a suburb of Minneapolis, is married to an immigrant from the Caribbean. Though her husband is naturalized, she explained that he will no longer do pickups and drop-offs at school, and she doesn’t take her children to places like Mall of America because she is afraid they will be targeted because of the color of their skin. “I’m terrified when he leaves by himself that he won’t come home,” Alexandra said of her husband. “He travels anywhere he goes with his passport. It’s like my body is on constant alert, knowing that anywhere I turn, something could happen and my kids could see that and it would affect them for the rest of their lives.”

Even the littlest children notice that their friends are missing from class and have questions. On Jan. 27, 21.3 percent of public school students in Portland, Maine, were absent, according to Sarah Lentz, the chair of the city’s school board. That’s about three times the average for a typical day in January. Attendance dropped so much in the Twin Cities that public schools are now offering remote learning as an option for children too scared to go in person.

A few years ago, I wrote an article about how public school is for care: that so many educators and counselors are going above and beyond their job descriptions to give children whatever they may need when they walk through the door, from food to clothing to emotional stability. That is part of the mission of public schools — to take the children as they are, whoever they are. Lentz told me that Portland schools have long served recent immigrant communities and that the school district has worked with multiple food organizations for decades. “We send bags of culturally relevant food home on the weekends for kids and their families that need it,” she said, including halal options.

Among the greatest critics of public schools seem to bemembers of the Trump administration who have not set foot in them for decades, if at all. They do not acknowledge that schools, for all their imperfections, are highly functioning civic centers providing so much more than academics. It also occurs to me that the organizing on behalf of all children in Minnesota and Maine schools might be one reason the people running the Education Department want to defund public schools.

The heroism of ordinary people helping one another is profound and a silver lining of this preventable tragedy. But we should not lose sight of the real fear and anxiety, which won’t disappear overnight, even as the federal government claims to be backing off in Maine and Liam and his father have been returned to Minnesota from their detainment in Texas.

Every person I spoke to in Minnesota and Maine said that the disruption to their children’s lives was much worse than with Covid. At least then they knew that they would be safe when they were inside. The parents I spoke to who were organizing grocery drop-offs and driving other people’s children to school were afraid of being followed by ICE agents to immigrants’ homes or back to their own.

“These actions are going to have lifelong impacts on our kids, whether they’re experiencing it, whether they’ve witnessed it firsthand or they just saw it on social media,” said Anil Hurkadli, a Minneapolis-based independent educational consultant who served in the Department of Education under President Joe Biden. Whenever this ends, Hurkadli said, it’s going to take the entire community to help the children recover.

In an essay he wrote for The Minnesota Star Tribune, Hurkadli pointed out that during immigration crackdowns in Florida and California in the past few years, test scores fell among children who were affected. It’s nearly impossible to learn when students are afraid that their parents will be taken away.

For those of us who do not live in Maine or Minnesota, the past two months should serve as a warning. The targets are ultimately arbitrary — far from the southern border and hardly the states and cities where the most undocumented immigrants live. ICE raids continue all over the country, even if the presence of federal officers is not as disruptive or violent as it has been in these states.

Just because it’s not our children today doesn’t mean it won’t be tomorrow.

End Notes

• There was a public education bright spot last weekend when Leigh Wambsganss — a Texas Republican who was a proponent of book-banning efforts and far-right school board takeovers in Texas — lost a state legislative special election in the Fort Worth area to a Democrat, Taylor Rehmet. Wambsganss far outspent Rehmet in the district, which President Trump won by 17 points in 2024. This suggests to me that even in heavily Republican districts, parents do not want a far-right agenda in their public schools and are sick of the divisiveness.

Jessica Grose newsletter.  A journalist and novelist offers her perspective on the American family, culture, politics and the way we live now.