https://www.laborpolitics.com/p/weve-had-a-nationwide-immigrant-strike?
Monday, February 09, 2026
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.
Saturday, February 07, 2026
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.
Thursday, February 05, 2026
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.
Tuesday, February 03, 2026
Trump Wants Taxpayers to Give Him $10 Billion
Trump has sued the Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion.
In the suit, filed in Miami federal court on Thursday, Trump alleges that the IRS was responsible for the leak of some of Trump’s tax documents to press in September 2020. The leak occurred by an IRS contractor.
The leaked tax documents revealed that Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016, the year he first won the presidency, and paid no taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years.
The lawsuit claims that the leak caused Trump and his family “reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump.”
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/donald-trump-vs-donald-trump?
Robert Reich.
Monday, February 02, 2026
Cooperation /Unity in the Resistance
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Ezra Levin, the co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, one of the many groups behind the nationwide “No Kings” protests, describes himself as “a cynical political organizer.” But still, Monday night got to him.
That evening, just days after federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Indivisible and other groups, which included the ACLU, put together a “Know Your Rights” training on how to document violent incidents by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection in response to the violent occupation of Minneapolis and around the country. According to the coalition, over 200,000 viewers attended the Monday “Eyes on ICE” training, the first in a series of trainings dedicated to protesters’ First Amendment rights. These people, Levin told me, “saw secret police force assault and murder fellow Americans, and one natural response you could imagine would be people could do what the regime wants them to do, which is to be quiet and go home and not show up.”
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“But instead,” he continued, “we have, by several orders of magnitude, the largest number of people ever to attend a training to learn how to do exactly what Renée Good and Alex Pretti were doing.”
It’s against this backdrop anger that another round of “No Kings” protests is being planned for March 28, with a flagship event in the Twin Cities. Levin expects the next “No Kings” protest to see the largest turnout.
I caught up with Levin on why this moment demands such pre-planned big tentpole events like “No Kings,” the agility it takes to respond to violence from the federal government with rapid mobilizations, and more below.
When we spoke on Friday, we talked about the “No Kings” coalition being able to mobilize if federal agents shot and killed another person. The next day, Alex Pretti was killed. What happened next internally?
We had talked about this on Friday, Katie, because it was entirely predictable. We all saw what the regime was doing. They’re using violence to intimidate and bully the population into submission. The murder is heinous. The slander that followed is really chilling because it is a very clear message to foot soldiers of the regime that it does not matter how many people are taping you. It doesn’t matter how clearly what you’re engaging in is illegal. It does not matter how heinous your crime is. The response of the top levels of this regime will be the circle of bandwagons, call your victim a terrorist, and protect you from all consequences.
In response to these murders, we had 147,000 people register for the “Eyes on ICE” training planned for Monday, and these are mostly not Minnesotans. These 147,000 people saw secret police force assault and murder fellow Americans, and one natural response you could imagine would be that people could do what the regime wants them to do, which is to be quiet and go home and not show up. But instead, we have, by several orders of magnitude, the largest number of people ever to attend a training to learn how to do exactly what Renee Good and Alex Pretti were doing. [A press release from the coalition behind the training said that the number of viewers ended up totalling over 200,000.]
How did that get put together so quickly?
We’re not starting from zero. I think it’s the same way that we were able to, in 48 hours, put together 1,200 protests for “ICE Out for Good” in the wake of Renée Good’s murder, where it took us six weeks leading up to Hands Off protests in April of last year to put together 1,300 events. The point of these mass mobilizations and this broad national coalition building through “No Kings” is, yes, in part, to pull off big one-day protests. And those are important. But they’re not the whole shebang. It’s not all about just a one-day protest. We are developing organizational capacity that allows us to pull off historic levels of engagement in between these tentpole events. The “No Kings” coalition is not just Indivisible, not just 5051, or MoveOn, or Working Families Party, or ACLU. We’ve all been working together now for over a year to figure out how we can organize collectively, bringing all of our skill sets and all of our tools to tackle the same problem. Indivisible would be the wrong group to hold a Know Your Rights training. We don’t have a lot of First Amendment lawyers on staff. But the ACLU does.
What does the number of RSVPs for the training this week communicate to you?
The attendance tells me that there’s real demand for this. Look, a lot of us have been paying attention to the fascist threat for a long time. This has been what we eat, sleep, and breathe for a while. Also, we recognize that most people are not like us. Most people are not paying attention to the demise of American democracy on a daily basis. A successful movement depends on welcoming new people and meeting people where they are and accepting them when, whatever that moment is, whatever that event is, brings them into the movement—accepting them at that point and not saying ‘Where have you been up until now.’
What it tells me is that there are a lot of people who, for the last year, may have been upset about what was happening, may have opposed what was happening, but may have not been actively engaged in pushing back at the level that we’re seeing in the Twin Cities, who are now going through the process of imagining a situation in which their own personal constitutional rights are under threat. They are working through what they personally will do in that moment to defend themselves and their community. That is crazy powerful. That is an inflection point.
“When it comes to actually defending your community, you should not be looking to some talking head on TV. You should be gathering community with your neighbors and figuring it out yourself, because nobody’s going to save you but you. “
It’s different to go up to a group of ICE agents on the streets in New York, where there are 50 people within spitting distance, versus places like Tucson, Arizona. How do these trainings address how to encounter federal immigration agents in different towns and cities?
I think with the news being as inescapable as it is, it’s easy to imagine this coming to your own community. I think one of the really important lessons that we should be learning from the Twin Cities is that the opposition is not nationalized; it is very much localized. And the single best thing that you can do in this moment—we’ve been preaching this for 14 months—is not be alone. Refuse to be alone and to join in a community where you are geographically, because the challenges and opportunities available to you are based on your geography or based on what your community actually looks like.
This is a movement that is being led and directed at the local level, and I think that’s why it’s been so successful. There’s no email list at the national level that is sending in a direction. When it comes to actually defending your community, you should not be looking to some talking head on TV. You should be gathering community with your neighbors and figuring it out yourself, because nobody’s going to save you but you.
The coalition that Indivisible is a part of is launching another national mobilization: “No Kings” 3 for March 28. How do the “Eyes on ICE” trainings that y’all announced and No Kings 3 complement one another, and how are they unique?
Each “No Kings” has had a different focus, responding to the moment. “No Kings” one was an effort to provide a stark narrative contrast to Trump’s version of reality. He was throwing himself a ridiculous military birthday parade for himself, as authoritarians do. We wanted to make clear that he was small and weak and that the people were against him. The second “No Kings” was largely in response to sending the National Guard to invade and occupy American cities.
I think the third “No Kings” is a response to the secret police force that’s terrorizing American communities. I reserve the right to say that this is in response to whatever more recent atrocity the regime commits. It’s lashing out quite a bit, so we’ll see. They’re still constructing more detention camps. They’re still acquiring weapons. They’re still picking out target cities to occupy and terrorize. So, I would expect to see more, unfortunately, of the darkness that we saw in the Twin Cities over the last several weeks. But I’d also expect to see more of the kind of righteous, non-violent, organized opposition that we saw in the Twin Cities, too.
I’m incredibly proud of “No Kings” and also, protests are a tactic. Tactics should fit into a strategy. Strategy should be designed to achieve your goal. Our goal is to safeguard democracy and protect our communities from an authoritarian threat that’s seeking to submit it to power for good. Our strategy is mass, non-violent, organized people power. “No Kings” three is in the tactic within that strategy. “Eyes on ICE” training is a tactic within that strategy. Rapid response, mass mobilizations like “ICE Out For Good” are a tactic within that strategy. Pushing Democrats to unify and fight back against DHS funding is a tactic within that strategy. We need a multiplicity of tactics.
“What I found over the last 14 months is that the framework that many of these Democratic leaders have is not a framework built for this moment.”
So on Friday, we also talked about Democratic leadership—Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer—not meeting this moment. Since the killing of Alex Pretti, leading Senate Democrats have threatened to block the DHS funding bill; some Democrats are mentioning different reforms, etc. It’s a different situation than it was on Friday. What do you make of that?
My goal here is a unified, strong opposition party to the regime. That is what I would like to build. I think there is a real disconnect between some Democrats who dominate leadership in both the House and the Senate, and rank-and-file Democrats around the country who want to see a real fight back against the regime. What I found over the last 14 months is that the framework that many of these Democratic leaders have is not a framework built for this moment. The framework goes something like: second term presidents decline in popularity over time; that naturally leads to the opposition party winning seats in the midterms; our role is to not rock the boat too much; communicate as much as we can about people’s top concern, which is always the economy; and then allow political gravity to run its course so that we win in the midterms. I understand that framework. I understand how it could make sense for a certain kind of political era. I do not believe that the political era we’re in, and that’s not where the people on the ground believe we are.
We believe instead in what the anti-authoritarian experts call an “authoritarian breakthrough moment,” a moment where an authoritarian regime tries to consolidate power as quickly as possible through attacks on pillars of democracy, not just through the legislature, not through just executive functions, but media, law firms, and universities, etc. And it builds up a force across the country in order to ultimately subvert elections and prevent any kind of threat to their continued political power. And if that’s your framework, you’re not waiting for the Midterms and you’re not trying to avoid attention. You are looking for every piece of leverage you have to excite the public to the dangers that are coming, so that you can successfully push back against the authoritarian escalation.
I’m happy that they are fighting back now, and I’m not convinced that without sustained, overwhelming pressure and a threat to their continued grip on power within the Democratic ranks, they will continue to fight.
Right, it was nice to see from Dems. But you’re not sleeping with both eyes closed, ready to rest.
I’m old enough to remember last November when we were winning popular support for the shutdown fight. People wanted Republicans to give on the health care subsidies, and suddenly the Senate Democrats surrendered. Those are the same Senate Democrats. We got the same party. They’re responding to the news of the day, and when the news of the day moves on, they’ll respond to that. The question is: Is it the grassroots opposition that is driving the news of the day, or is it something else?
Tuesday, January 27, 2026
Public Sector Unions Respond to ICE/Minneapolis Murders
Across the country, federal immigration agents are targeting students, families, patients and entire communities. The recent killings of U.S. citizens and cruel actions taken against children in Minnesota make it clear that this is about this administration’s intimidation, not an immigration policy debate.
This administration rescinded long-standing guidance on protected sensitive locations that previously limited immigration enforcement actions in places such as schools, hospitals and houses of worship, spaces that must remain centers of learning, healing and refuge.
The erosion of these protections, combined with an intensified deportation and enforcement agenda, is fueling fear, destabilizing classrooms, deterring families from seeking medical care, and undermining trust in essential public institutions.
This webinar will examine the current state of immigration enforcement, the implications of these policy shifts, and what they mean in practice for educators, healthcare workers, students and families. It will also highlight the AFT’s response and resources, and showcase how our locals are showing up at this moment to keep schools, healthcare facilities and community spaces free from immigration enforcement, fear and trauma.
Click here to register for tomorrow’s webinar.
I’ll be on the call along with AFT Executive Vice President Evelyn DeJesus, Rep. Pramila Jayapal and expert speakers from the AFT, AFL-CIO, American Civil Liberties Union, League of United Latin American Citizens, Make the Road New York, Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals, and Professional Staff Congress. It’s an incredible lineup of speakers.
We’re looking forward to discussing what we can do to ensure that schools, hospitals and communities are places of care, not fear.
In solidarity,
Randi Weingarten
AFT President
Sunday, January 25, 2026
This is un-American Liam Conejo Ramos
This week in Minnesota, ICE agents took a 5-year-old boy named Liam Conejo Ramos from his driveway after he came home from preschool.
Let that sink in: A 5-year-old boy. In his own driveway. After a day of preschool. According to school officials, agents pulled the child from his father's still-running vehicle, walked him to the door of his home, and made him knock—using a kindergartner as bait to see if anyone else was inside.
When another adult begged the agents to let them care for the child, they refused. Instead, they took Liam and his father. The boy's middle school-aged brother came home to find them both gone.
Liam is now being held in a detention center in Texas – 1,500 miles from home. His family has an active asylum case with no order of deportation. His preschool teacher says he "comes to class every day and brightens the room."
This child is five years old.
Armed federal agents are stalking school buses. Using children as bait. Separating families who are following legal asylum processes. Creating terror in American communities.
This is not normal. This is not American. And this cannot stand.
We can stop this; if we work together.
We Resist Together : Or
We resist together, or we will each die alone.
https://snyder.substack.com/p/lies-and-lawlessness? Timothy Snyder,
It is not just the moral horror. It is the political logic.
People are dying in American concentration camps, unseen. And people are being executed on American streets, seen by all of us.
This is enough. The radical is the pragmatic.
The president should be impeached and convicted, as should everyone responsible for these outrages. ICE should be disbanded. So should the Department of Homeland Security. The other agencies within it should be redistributed across other departments. And the people who have killed should be investigated and brought before judges and juries.
But we have to see the logic of the killings as well as the killings themselves. The horror is a truth in itself. But it is also a sign of a political logic, one known from the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, Soviet as well as Nazi, and from attempts to replace the rule of law with personal tyranny.
It is the logic of lies and of lawlessness.
In a constitutional regime, such as ours, the law applies everywhere and at all times. In a republic, such as ours, it applies to everyone. For that logic of law to be undone, the aspiring tyrant looks for openings, for cracks to pry open.
One of these is the border. The country stops at the border. And so the law stops at the border. And so for the tyrant an obvious move is to extend the border so that is everywhere, to turn the whole country as a border area, where no rules apply.
Stalin did this with border zones and deportations in the 1930s that preceded the Great Terror. Hitler did it with immigration raids in 1938 that targeted undocumented Jews and forced them across the border.
And just what is Trump doing now? By his own admission, as well as by the admission of cabinet members, he is using ICE, nominally a border authority, to enforce his own whims on an American state of his choosing. It is not legal to attack a city because its policies work. It is not legal to threaten a state to gain information about its voters.
The border becomes the pretext to undo the law everywhere, at all times, and against anyone. It is the crack that can be opened. The wedge is the lie.
The lies begin as clichés, memes that are pounded into our heads by the government and by those in the media who repeat them, mindlessly or with malice.
One of these cliches is “law enforcement,” which is uttered over and over like a incantation. “Law enforcement” is not a noun. It is not a thing in the world. It is an action.
And action is something that we have a right to see and judge for ourselves. People enforcing the law do not wear masks. And people wearing masks who trespass, assault, batter, and kill are not enforcing the law.
They are violating it.
It is indeed the job of some local, state, and federal authorities to enforce the law. It is a disservice to them when federal employees carry out public executions. It is a greater disservice to them when such actions are defined as “law enforcement.”
The lies continue as provocative inversions, as what in On Tyranny I called “dangerous words”: these are, precisely, “terrorist” and “extremist.” These two words are known to us from history as those used by tyrants. And these are the words used by the Trump people to defame those killed by their polices.
This is their “messaging,” their banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt called it.
Or the evil of banality, as Václav Havel said. Words turned into reality with the complicity of those who hear them.
Those who actively lie are directly complicit in the deaths that just happen and in any deaths to come. But those in media who choose to treat propaganda as the story, to begin from lies rather than from events, are also complicit. The border is the crack, the lie is the wedge, and the wedge is made up of people — of us.
Words matter, uttered first or repeated. They create an atmosphere, they normalize — or they do not. We can choose to see, to call things by their proper names, to call out people who lie. We have to.
The moral horror of those killings is enough. But there is a political logic as well. And the two are connected. Those who resist the lawlessness and the lies are doing right. And they are giving a second chance to the endangered American republic.
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