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IHIP News: 🚨 Epstein Files NIGHTMARE Drop for TRUMP! He's Getting BLACKMAILED?!
16:55
I've Had It Podcast • Feb 2, 2026

IHIP News: 🚨 Epstein Files NIGHTMARE Drop for TRUMP! He's Getting BLACKMAILED?!

Justice Department Tries to Redact Trump’s Face in Epstein Files
New Republic • Feb 2, 2026

Justice Department Tries to Redact Trump’s Face in Epstein Files

The Department of Justice made a lame attempt to cover up Donald Trump’s face in a photo in the latest trove of Jeffery Epstein files. The photo appears to be of Trump making a speech at an event. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon sent it in a text message to Epstein in 2019. In it, a small portion of Trump’s head, including his ear, are still visible next to a black box covering the rest of his face. Why attempt to cover up this photo? On its own, it doesn’t incriminate Trump in any of Epstein’s crimes, and previous file releases have already established that Bannon and Epstein had a long correspondence. It seems as though it was an attempt to conceal Trump, although he is still identifiable underneath the black box. The rest of the files contain multiple references to Trump, his Mar-a-Lago estate, and his family members. They also contain interviews with Epstein’s victims, some of whom refer to the president. The government has only released half of its total Epstein records, despite being required by law to release all unclassified files by six weeks ago. Trump continues to deny a close relationship with the convicted sex trafficker, despite mountains of evidence that one existed. It seems that the DOJ and Attorney General Pam Bondi are assisting the president in trying to minimize the obvious.

Is Tulsi Gabbard Stalling a Giant Whistleblower Complaint Against Her?
New Republic • Feb 2, 2026

Is Tulsi Gabbard Stalling a Giant Whistleblower Complaint Against Her?

A whistleblower’s lawyer accused Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard of burying their client’s complaint about her, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. In a letter sent to Gabbard’s office in November, attorney Andrew Bakaj accused the director of preventing a complaint detailing her wrongdoing from reaching lawmakers. The complaint, which was originally filed with the intelligence community’s inspector general in May, is so highly classified that Bakaj himself has not been able to review it. Typically, an employee is able to share a complaint alleging wrongdoing directly with lawmakers, as long as the director of national intelligence instructs them on how to securely transmit it. But months after the complaint was originally filed, it reportedly remains locked away in a safe, a person familiar with the matter told the Journal. “From my experience, it is confounding for [Gabbard’s office] to take weeks—let alone eight months—to transmit a disclosure to Congress,” said Bakaj in a statement. In addition to accusing Gabbard of wrongdoing, the complaint reportedly implicates “an office within a different federal agency” and raises potential claims of executive privilege, officials told the Journal. One official warned that disclosure of the complaint could cause “grave damage to national security.”The intelligence community’s inspector general determined that the specific allegations against Gabbard weren’t credible, but it could not make a determination about the other claims, according to a representative for the federal watchdog. Bakaj said he was never informed that any determination was reached. Last week, Gabbard was spotted lurking around a federal raid at the Fulton County, Georgia, election office. Having been completely sidelined from the typical responsibilities of the director of national intelligence, Gabbard has apparently spent months leading an investigation into President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Transcript: Trump ICE Rants Get Truly Weird as Crushing Fox Poll Hits
New Republic • Feb 2, 2026

Transcript: Trump ICE Rants Get Truly Weird as Crushing Fox Poll Hits

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 2 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent. Donald Trump seems to be in deep denial about how unpopular his ICE raids have become. He let out a long, strange, rambling tirade to reporters about how the “silent majority” is still behind what ICE is doing. He also lied uncontrollably about the protesters, about crime in Minneapolis, and much more. Interestingly, this comes as a poll from none other than Fox News just delivered Trump some very bad news on this front. It finds that even his base voters are turning against ICE in a big way as well. Are we in the middle of a watershed moment on public opinion when it comes to immigration? We’re talking about this with Lia Parada, an immigration advocate who’s worked on these issues for a long time and now represents groups losing their status under Trump. Lia, nice to have you on. Lia Parada: Thanks for having me on, Greg. Sargent: All right. So let’s first listen to this really strange rant from Trump. Donald Trump (voiceover): We’ll say it very plainly, elections have consequences. The people want law and order. And we have a silent majority. You know, we have a silent majority of people. They don’t go and riot and everything else, but they like what we’re doing. They like having a safe city. I get calls every single day. Every person I see working in the White House, people I don’t know—many people work here—and they say, ‘I’d like to thank you, sir, you’ve made Washington so great. We walk to work.’ They walk to work. Every person in his building. I mean, virtually every time I see somebody, they thank me because a year and a half ago they lived in hell and now they can walk to work and they’re totally safe. Nothing’s going to happen.Sargent: Lia, let’s start with the funny part first. Trump actually says that “the people in the building” compliment what he’s doing for D.C.—meaning the people who work in the White House. And he presents this as if it means something in terms of public opinion. That’s pretty wild, isn’t it?Parada: Yeah, we’re really grasping at straws here for public opinion when you’re citing the support of your court—of the “King’s Court”—to say that he’s on the right side of this.Sargent: Yeah, I mean, these are people who spend all day every day sucking up to him and manipulating him. And so he actually thinks it means something for them to say, Sir, you’ve done a wonderful job cleaning up D.C.; I can now walk to work, sir.Note that Trump there also floated this idea that the “silent majority” is behind the ICE raids. But it’s clear that some inside the White House political operation are telling Trump, Sorry, sir, you’ve lost the public on this, sir. Yet it looks like he and Miller do still believe this. What do you make of that, Lia?Parada: I really think that this is what they have left to justify a strategy that they are completely locked into. He has locked himself into this position; he has locked arms with Stephen Miller. This was a key part of his campaign—we all saw the “Mass Deportation Now” posters—and then his signature legislation awarded this agency more money than most militaries of other countries. And so they are desperate to justify what is happening right now. And they are seeing that the “vocal majority” are 100 percent against what they’re saying. Sargent: I think that’s a critical point that we should dwell on a sec. They are locked into this in the sense that they have gotten Congress to appropriate truly enormous sums of money for this operation. And that is now being spent. They’re scaling up ICE in a major way. They’re buying—who knows what the hell—equipment, weaponry?They’re talking about buying warehouses now to put people in detention, even though right now the detention system is absolutely maxed out at, I think, over 60,000. This is something that is becoming kind of a non-controllable carceral state—a real kind of juggernaut that can’t really be controlled anymore. And I think they’re on the verge of losing control of this. It reminds me a little bit of what happened with the buildup of the War on Terror bureaucracy under George W. Bush. Does that sound right to you?Parada: That sounds exactly right. This is a runaway train. They have lost control. Even when Trump tries to be surgical in enforcement actions, that is not what happens on the ground. And by doing so, they’re organizing the opposition. This police state is actually creating opposition. I wouldn’t even say across party lines; I’d say regardless of party lines.I just met with some organizers in Roxbury, New Jersey, where a town council of all Republicans stood up and said that they were opposing the warehouse being opened up there. And then in Hanover, in Virginia—everything is frozen in Virginia right now; I can barely get out of my driveway—literally hundreds of people turned out to a town council meeting. And the vote out of the town council in a really deep-red part of Virginia was that, no, they do not want the warehouse.And so the videos that—I don’t know what the administration thought they would accomplish by taping all of the abuses—but by doing so, they are turning people against what is happening because it’s no longer viewed as reasonable or “law and order.” It is like a terrifying police state that no one thinks they are safe under.Sargent: Just to be clear for listeners, you’re talking here about these warehouses that ICE is now scaling up. There’s one in Jersey, one in Virginia that you’re saying that local town councils oppose.Parada: Yes. And these are like majority-Republican town councils. Sargent: Yeah, that’s fascinating. And in fact, that brings me to the new Fox News poll, which finds that 59 percent of voters say that ICE is being “too aggressive” in its deportations. And get this: 71 percent of independents say the same.55 percent of overall voters disapprove of Trump on immigration, versus 45 percent who approve. That puts him 10 points underwater. And again, 71 percent of independents disapprove. That’s really something. Lia, you’ve been following public opinion on immigration for a long time. This seems a little like something new, doesn’t it?Parada: Absolutely. And I was working as an advocate during family separation under the first Trump administration, and I really thought that that was the most—the highest, most impactful watershed moment. And I really think that we haven’t reached the heights of what opposition will look like, just because we know that they are not going to stop what they’re doing.And everyday Americans are actually now paying attention because—I mean, whether you’re talking about the Second Amendment or “big government,” which is typically a Republican/independent talking point, that’s been thrown into this conversation. So we’re talking about sick children in abusive detention conditions, American veteran nurses being shot in broad daylight, broadcast all over social media—and they haven’t even spent a fraction of the funds that they have to carry out this, this overall agenda.Sargent: Right. It’s going to get bigger. I was absolutely shocked when I looked at these additional numbers in the Fox poll: 50 percent of rural whites say ICE is too aggressive, and 55 percent of whites without a college degree say the same. That’s reaching very deep into Trump’s base.Lia, we’ve been told for a long time that Democrats need to understand that immigration is a big reason they’re losing working-class voters, particularly white ones. But here they’re turning on Trump over immigration. Now, I get that part of this is a passing reaction to the horrors we’re seeing in the news and all that, but it sure looks like there’s an opening for Democrats to reach out to these voters on this. Do you think there’s an opening like that? And what should Democrats do? Parada: There’s an opening, and there’s always been an opening. I think that really in the past, what Democrats have failed to do is really understand the nuance of the issue. I am not surprised to hear that rural voters are against what’s happening. You know what’s also in rural America? Farmworkers who are people of faith that they go to church with. Immigrants are a part of our nation, a part of our community. And so when they see things happening to their neighbors, they recoil against it.What—I really think that the balanced approach on immigration is really where most of America is at. They want to see secure borders. They want to understand that there is a lawful, reasonable process for folks. So they don’t want to see the process—the system—being taken advantage of, whether it is children and families being disappeared or seemingly quote-unquote “open borders.”And so this is a huge opportunity for Democrats. And I hope that they won’t take this moment and ... think that they are just going to win a short-term messaging battle and move on to other issues. They will fight for solutions that matter. As a Latina who worked really hard in these last few electoral cycles, I had calls where it’s like, Don’t come to me with that immigration reform talk about Democrats; no one believes that that’s something that they care about. They only use it as a talking point when elections come around. And so this is a challenge for Democrats to take this moment seriously—to really understand what the opposition is about. You can’t just retweet something and walk away and not come back to the issue. They truly have to invest in the solutions and, like, organizing around it as well.Sargent: Yeah. And I want to add here that I think that what Democrats need to be doing right now is taking this opportunity to say, “There’s another way to do this,” right? And that sort of entails saying something a lot more than just, “My God, paramilitary ICE officers are killing Americans and that’s horrible.”It also entails saying, “You know what? Mass deportations—Trump’s mass deportations—are a failure.” And I think Democrats can say that and say that what we need to be doing now is giving people who have lived in this country a long time, who don’t have a criminal record, who have jobs and so forth—giving them a way to get right with the law. There’s an opening to make that case now. And I want to hear that from Dems.Sargent: And you know, I was actually surprised to see—we all watched with bated breath what Senator Fetterman was going to say with this DHS funding debate. And he actually had a reasonable response, which is: I want to see ICE do what its job is, but I don’t want to see families harmed. And also, people who have been here for a long time should be on a pathway to citizenship.Which as of maybe two, three years ago, that was what the standard policy position was for Democrats. And they abandoned it to follow “border security” and honestly just fell into the Republicans’ trap.Parada: Well, just so listeners understand where this is coming from, Senator Fetterman has been extremely disappointing to a lot of Democrats because he seems to be lurching to the right in many ways. And so for him to be saying that is a real statement. He’s the Pennsylvania senator; he does pretty well in rural areas. And for him to say that a path to citizenship is the way forward for all these people rather than deportations is promising—and more Democrats need to say that.Parada: And it’s really important that they do that because we can’t just—as you said—we can’t just respond to the moment that we’re in and leave it at that and hope that public opinion will shape itself. They have to lead the narrative and lead with solutions and start talking about: what is the opposite of mass deportation?What is the opposite of taking people who’ve been here a long time—whether they be DACA holders, TPS holders, some sort of semi-legal status. Rip them out of their communities and deport them? Or give them a process to come forward and be permanent members of our society and go through a process to make them U.S. citizens?That doesn’t exist now. And that is why we’re caught in the worst of all worlds. And we’re seeing what actually happens when America buys into what the far-right strategy is on immigration.Sargent: There is absolutely an opening to remake this case. So let’s listen to a little bit more of Trump. Donald Trump (voiceover): But do these people really want to have rapists? Do they really want to have drug dealers and people from prisons and murderers? Do they really want to have them in the community? You know, it’s really insurrectionists and agitators and they’re paid. And you can tell a lot of reasons. Some of them are professionals, you know, with their mouth. But they’re also, you look at the signs, the signs are all professionally made. They have signs that are gorgeous. In fact, I want to get the sign because I’m the big … I need a lot of signs for different things and I want to find out whoever does their signs, they do a beautiful job. You know, everybody has this beautiful sign with brand new wood. It’s like leather handles… they have a leather handle on the bottom.Sargent: What strikes me here is how they’re just running out of arguments. They just keep repeating over and over that everyone in Minneapolis is a criminal and that all the protesters are—it’s like they’re not even trying to win this argument anymore. It’s like they’ve basically given up on winning back the middle of the country on the issue. What do you make of that?Parada: I think it’s hilarious that he’s caught up on the “quality” of poster signs as his response to the very real, organic, grassroots opposition to what’s happening in Minneapolis and across the country. I myself have seen that most of the public opposition is not organized by advocacy groups. It is everyday people who are coming out and speaking out against what’s happening.I am a pop-culture aficionado and I have just been so entertained by folks who are like, Click here to learn why I didn’t date this person. Then you click on it and it’s like, Call your senator, abolish ICE. And that’s gone viral. And that really speaks to the moment we’re in.It is so different from the first Trump administration, partly because many of the organizations are on the ground helping day-to-day people and are being targeted by the administration. And so it’s created a whole new world of champions for immigrants in their communities. And it’s been really amazing to see. And so all he has is to talk about the posters.Sargent: This time there’s more energy around immigration than we’ve seen among the sort of broad center left in a long time. Usually the right is the place where all the energy is on immigration. And this is something new, I think, as well. There’s gotta be, though, a real effort to convert that into votes for Democrats, don’t you think?Parada: I really believe that all the mobilizing that’s happening to call your member of Congress will turn into energy to turn people out to vote. Democrats need to have a message that keeps the support there, that sustains it, that supports where people are at. But what is happening on the ground is just so appalling to people that it doesn’t feel like it’s just about immigration—it feels like it’s more about sustaining our democracy.It’s really like ... “I can’t believe this is our country” is pretty much what I hear across the board. It’s not like, “How do I feel about immigrants?” And so I think that they have used immigration as a means to hack away at the Constitution and our democracy. And people are seeing it and are just completely motivated by it and horrified that this is our country.We are exceeding where we were at family separation. When family separation was happening, it was wall-to-wall coverage. Cindy McCain was on TV saying that it’s outrageous and they needed to stop what they were doing.... I think the volume and the intensity of the opposition is so much larger now than it was under family separation.But also, it’s so much more impactful, like the human harm that is happening. Families are being separated, children are being harmed, detention centers are opening across the country, citizens are being beat up for fighting for their rights or just being a person of color driving to work in Minneapolis. And so it’s so much bigger in many ways—the impact of the policy itself, the gargantuan policies—and that also leads to a broader opposition because it impacts so many more people.Sargent: Lia Parada, it was a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on. I sure hope Democrats can convert this into a big change moment.Parada: I feel the same way. Thanks for having me on, Greg.

A Truth From Iran to Minneapolis: Weak Governments Kill Protesters
New Republic • Feb 2, 2026

A Truth From Iran to Minneapolis: Weak Governments Kill Protesters

“This is not who we are,” many well-meaning public officials said last week in various statements. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials’ assassination of 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti has been a shock to the American system, causing even sleepy Democrats to call for abolishing ICE and firing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.But this shocked response obscures a much more troubling truth: As horrifying as Pretti’s murder was, it was not an anomaly. The killing of mother-of-three Renee Good just 17 days prior, also in the streets of Minneapolis, was not an anomaly. The problem is bigger than Minneapolis, bigger than ICE, and bigger than Trump. And it’s not just a matter of police brutality in general. Violence against protesters is on the rise in the United States and all over the world, reflecting a horrifying escalation of authoritarianism and an elite disregard for basic democratic freedoms. Amnesty International cites “misuse of force” by the state as one of many trends making it harder, around the world, to “stay safe while making your voice heard.” In 2024, an international group of researchers—affiliations included University of California–Berkeley and the European University of Madrid—found a global rise in the use of dangerous weaponry against protesters.In Iran early this month, at least 5,200 people and possibly many more were killed by government forces during widespread protests. Raha Bahreini, an Iran expert for Amnesty International, has called it “a state-orchestrated massacre,” unprecedented even for this repressive regime. (As horrific as this situation is, it is rich for President Trump to threaten the Iranian regime with bombing for killing protesters, while his masked goons kill people on the streets of Minneapolis.) It’s easy to recognize Iran’s government as a totalitarian one, and Trump’s disregard for democratic freedoms is also well known. Trump seems proud of his disregard for such freedoms, threatening protesters with “very heavy force” and consistently labeling them, without evidence, as domestic terrorists. But violent crackdown on protest is not limited to these obvious bad actors.  More than 2,000 climate and environmental protesters have been killed around the world since 2012, University of Bristol researchers found in 2024—including in Atlanta, where Manuel Esteban Paez TerĂĄn, known as “Tortuguita,” was killed by state troopers in 2023, the first time an environmental protester had been killed in the U.S. In 2024, although protests had reached their lowest point since 2020, the rate of police intervention in protests was higher than it had been in years, especially at protests related to Palestine.  I asked Oscar Berglund, one of the Bristol researchers who co-authored the paper on the attacks on environmental protesters, why he thought this was happening. He attributes it to the fact that many of these protests—whether over racism, economic inequality, or climate change—have serious traction. Recent years  have seen “an increase in protest, and some of that protest has shifted public opinion quite dramatically,” he said. The violence is a sign of the protesters’ success—that ruling elites know that the protesters aren’t just a bunch of marginal kooks but may be speaking for, and influencing, millions more. Berglund also had another general observation that seems resonant, whether in Tehran or in Minneapolis. “Repression often increases when efforts to legitimize ‘things as they are’ have been less effective,” he said. “States with decreasing legitimacy will therefore resort to repression.”Sarah McLauglin, a senior scholar at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, affirmed Berglund’s analysis: “From Tiananmen decades ago to Tehran today,” she said, “ governments have violently cracked down on public protest because they understand that protest has power—perhaps even enough power to unseat public officials.” She thinks protest is, if anything, growing more powerful as a social force because it is so easily disseminated on social media, “where information can travel faster than the state can respond. That’s exactly what happened after the killing of Alex Pretti, where the immediate narrative conveyed by U.S. officials fell apart” because people could see with their own eyes, on their phones, what had really happened. In past eras—putting aside moments of great upheaval, like revolutions or wars—there has often been a sense that protest is futile, performative, a waste of time. Paradoxically, the recent killings and violence against protesters may suggest the opposite: that protest is, in fact, effective. Today, around the world, the threats to protesters are multiplying—but so is the support. Protesters’ concerns are not seen as niche or silly but, rather, are broadly shared. From protests to polls, the ruling class is increasingly confronted by the possibility that there is, in fact, a global consensus against injustice, for democracy, for climate action, and for basic humanity. These movements aren’t going away. That’s encouraging, suggesting that we can someday unseat these bad actors. It’s also terrifying, because as our governments continue to desperately spiral into illegitimacy, they may kill more and more of us. Yet as we’re seeing from Minneapolis to Tehran, an amazing number of people are confronting both these realities right now—and choosing hope.

Why This Might Be a Grim Week for the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio
New Republic • Feb 2, 2026

Why This Might Be a Grim Week for the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio

You will recall, I’m sure, the story of the Haitian community of Springfield, Ohio, that arose during the most recent presidential campaign. It started in July 2024, when JD Vance—just days before Donald Trump tapped him as his vice presidential nominee—began railing against this community of about 15,000 people, saying Springfield had been “overwhelmed” by their arrival. The lies and calumnies escalated until September, when, on the basis of an unverified and untrue internet rumor, Vance charged that Haitians were stealing and eating people’s pets. “Reports now show,” he wrote, “that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who should not be in this country.”Many of the Haitians in Springfield have been living under a program called Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, which the United States grants to certain immigrant groups from countries under extreme duress. In this case, the duress took the form of a 2010 earthquake that killed some 200,000 people. Things got worse still during a period of unrest following the assassination of President Jovenel Moises in 2021.TPS is just what the name says: temporary. And for a portion of this community, that protection expires at midnight on Tuesday. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, surprise surprise, revoked TPS status for some 300,000 Haitians nationwide last year, setting this February 3 as the date. After that, they will no longer be able to work or live legally in the United States. What is the Trump administration going to do?It’s a question that has the Haitian community of Springfield quaking. Carl Ruby, a Springfield pastor, told a local television station last week: “They are making preparations to stay inside, not to come out of their homes. They are afraid for their children. Just yesterday, I had some Haitians in our church give me power of attorney in case they become separated from their children so we can take care of them. They are afraid.”Immigration and Customs Enforcement, we have been told, is “moderating” its behavior and procedures under Tom Homan (no one’s idea of a moderate). I guess we’ll see this week how true that is. In any case, Pastor Ruby is not alone, and is not remotely a hysterical voice. Even Republican Governor Mike DeWine has taken a reasonably admirable stand here. DeWine said Friday, “These people are working, and they are hard workers, so I think from a public policy point of view, it is a mistake. It is not in the best interest of Ohio for these individuals who are working and who are workers to lose that status. Having said that, this is not my decision. This is a decision for the federal government, for the president of the United States.” (DeWine also defended the community back during the campaign, when Vance was spreading his racist, fascist lies.)There is good reason for concern. As Timothy Snyder detailed on his Substack Sunday, Trump picked up Vance’s baton with a vengeance. In his September 10 debate with Kamala Harris, he said: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what is happening in our country, and it’s a shame.” As Snyder wrote: “One of the moderators pointed out that there was no evidence for any such claim. Trump then said that he had seen ‘people on television’ complaining that their dogs had been eaten. There were no such television reports.”Trump later went further. Three days after the debate, speaking to reporters in Los Angeles, he said: “We’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country. And we’re going to start with Springfield and Aurora [Colorado].”I don’t know about you, but if I were a Haitian in Springfield living here under TPS, seeing those words, and watching generally the mayhem that ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents have been wreaking upon this country, yes, I’d be worried.Last Friday, MS NOW’s website reported that, “according to four people familiar with the discussions,” ICE operations in Springfield could begin this week. The matter now rests in the lap of U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes. She is expected to make a decision, perhaps before Tuesday, on whether the Trump administration acted lawfully in ending TPS for the Haitians. She is a Biden appointee and is herself an immigrant, from Uruguay. These facts give us reason to hope she’ll rule against the administration. Emily Brown of Ohio State University’s immigration law clinic told Cleveland.com that based on her questioning during arguments, her “educated guess” was that Reyes “is likely to find that the termination was unlawful, and she is likely to block it.”Let us pray that this is so. And let us use this story as a reminder of how fascist lies against a beleaguered racial minority work. You really should read Snyder’s full post, which I linked to above. He dives deeply into the whole sordid history of how this lie got its pants on, including its promotion, once Vance took it up, by a neo-Nazi group.Snyder’s headline is stark: “Ethnic Cleansing in Ohio?” Is that overstating what could happen? Maybe. And yet, here’s a portion of the official definition of ethnic cleansing by a U.N. commission appointed to study what happened in the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia: “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.”  It is at best debatable. But that just leaves us asking: How in the world has it come to pass that in the United States in the year 2026, we even have to debate whether our country might start engaging in ethnic cleansing?  

The Second Amendment Failed Alex Pretti
New Republic • Feb 2, 2026

The Second Amendment Failed Alex Pretti

Alex Pretti’s killing at the hands of federal agents last week is an American tragedy. It has also exposed the fallacies and fault lines that shape how Americans live with widespread access to guns.Put simply, the Supreme Court has handed down two irreconcilable lines of precedent over the past 20 years. The first is that Americans have a sacred constitutional right to carry guns in public. The second is that that police officers can kill people carrying guns in public with little risk of facing any legal consequences for doing so.In 2008, the court first held that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to bear arms. The case, District of Columbia v. Heller, involved a man who wanted to keep a fully assembled handgun in his home for self-defense, which was prohibited by D.C. law at the time. In a 5–4 ruling, the court’s conservative justices sided with him.“The enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the court, referring to concerns by D.C. and other parties that the ruling would fuel gun violence. “These include the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home.”The Supreme Court revisited the Second Amendment in 2022 to strike down New York’s restrictive law on issuing concealed-carry permits. It marked the first time that the high court had directly addressed the Second Amendment’s scope outside the home. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the court, took an expansive view of it.“This definition of ‘bear’ naturally encompasses public carry,” he explained. “Most gun owners do not wear a holstered pistol at their hip in their bedroom or while sitting at the dinner table. Although individuals often ‘keep’ firearms in their home, at the ready for self-defense, most do not ‘bear’ (i.e., carry) them in the home beyond moments of actual confrontation. To confine the right to ‘bear’ arms to the home would nullify half of the Second Amendment’s operative protections.”Later this year, the Supreme Court is poised to rule on the lengths that states can go when restricting gun ownership in public. Wolford v. Lopez involves a Hawaii law that forbids gun owners from bringing firearms on private property accessible to the public—restaurants, stores, gas stations, and so on—without the property owner’s explicit permission. Most other states allow gun owners to carry their weapons in those locations unless the property owner explicitly says otherwise.Gun rights advocates have warned that the default-property rule, as the state calls it, would make it nearly impossible to carry a gun in Hawaii since most businesses would refuse consent. That argument appears to have persuaded most of the conservative justices at oral argument earlier this month. At one point, Justice Samuel Alito chastised a lawyer arguing for the state of Hawaii for allegedly trying to turn the Second Amendment into a “second-class right.”Running parallel to these rulings, however, is a consistent signal from the Supreme Court that law enforcement officials can kill people who pose a personal risk to them largely without risk of legal consequences.A federal law known as Section 1983 allows people to sue state and local officials for violating their federal constitutional rights. Since the 1960s, the Supreme Court has substantially narrowed Section 1983 claims by inventing the doctrine of “qualified immunity.” In general terms, officers are only liable if their conduct violates a “clearly established right,” which can be interpreted with great particularity and narrowness by lower courts.These hurdles are often highest in police use-of-force cases. As one justice wrote in a 1986 case, qualified immunity “provides ample protection to all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.” The court also views police-involved cases with great deference toward officers’ subjective views about the situation at hand. In a 1989 case, the high court noted that police officers are entitled to great deference because they are “often forced to make split-second judgments—in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving—about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation.”This deference is particularly high in use-of-force cases where the other side is armed. In a 2018 case, for example, the Supreme Court sided with a police officer who shot a woman holding a knife simply because she “did not acknowledge the officers’ presence or drop the knife.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who dissented, raised broader concerns about the court’s approach in similar cases. She warned that the court’s “one-sided approach” to qualified immunity “transforms the doctrine into an absolute shield for law enforcement officers, gutting the deterrent effect of the Fourth Amendment.”“The majority today exacerbates that troubling asymmetry,” Sotomayor wrote. “Its decision is not just wrong on the law; it also sends an alarming signal to law enforcement officers and the public. It tells officers that they can shoot first and think later, and it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished.” This is particularly true in situations where someone is armed: All of the major qualified-immunity cases involve either unarmed people or people with unconventional weapons like knives and swords because someone carrying a gun is such an obvious threat to police officers in that context. Pretti’s case is also unusual because it was so thoroughly documented by observers from multiple angles, which easily refutes the claims that he was a threat. Had it not been filmed, the federal government’s original claims would have been the only narrative of what had happened.For federal agents like those who killed Pretti, the threshold for accountability is far higher. Section 1983 can’t be used to sue federal officials, and Congress has not passed a similar statute to fill the gap. In the 1960s, the Supreme Court held that plaintiffs could sue federal agents for civil rights violations under the Fourth Amendment without relying on an act of Congress, but the court has effectively abolished this option since then.In theory, these agents could be criminally prosecuted for murder or for civil rights violations by state and federal officials. Or, as the Trump administration has shown, they simply could not be. The identities of the agents responsible for Pretti’s death are not publicly known. Since they wore masks, journalists and activists have been unable to identify them. And the Trump administration has refused to cooperate with local law enforcement agencies in Minnesota that have sought to investigate Pretti’s death. Unless the White House relents, Americans might not learn who shot Pretti until a new administration takes office and releases the names.This outcome is particularly disturbing because Pretti’s actions were completely lawful. He had a license to carry his concealed weapon under Minnesota law and did not wield or brandish it against the ICE agents in question. He did not use force against any of the officers, nor was he an immediate threat to them. (They outnumbered him by more than a half-dozen to one.) Multiple videos even show one of the agents disarming Pretti before he was fatally shot at close range.Nonetheless, the Trump administration’s response to Pretti’s death was to effectively declare that ICE agents were justified in killing him simply because he possessed a gun. The White House and the Department of Homeland Security initially described him as a “would-be assassin” and a “domestic terrorist.” Even after the video evidence proved them wrong, they stuck to their underlying rationale.“You can’t have guns,” Trump told reporters on the White House lawn earlier this week. “You can’t walk in with guns. You just can’t. You can’t walk in with guns. You can’t do that. But it’s just a very unfortunate incident.” Other Trump administration officials shared the same sentiment.“You cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want,” FBI Director Kash Patel said in an interview last Sunday. “It’s that simple.” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem echoed that sentiment to reporters. “I don’t know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign,” she claimed.Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent also offered a forceful rebuke of Pretti’s lawful possession of a firearm, during an interview with ABC News’s Jonathan Karl. “I am sorry this gentleman is dead, but he did bring a 9 mm semiautomatic weapon with two cartridges to what was supposed to be a peaceful protest,” Bessent said. Karl noted that Pretti was an ICU nurse who worked at the VA and, more relevantly, that he hadn’t brandished the weapon at all.“But he brought a gun!” Bessent testily replied. “He brought a gun to a protest!” When Karl noted that the Second Amendment existed, Bessent suggested that it didn’t apply in this scenario. “I’ve been to a protest,” the treasury secretary replied. “Guess what? I didn’t bring a gun, I brought a billboard.”This absolutist approach drew some ire among gun rights groups like the National Rifle Association. “The NRA unequivocally believes that all law-abiding citizens have a right to keep and bear arms anywhere they have a legal right to be,” the organization posted on its official Twitter account earlier this week in an thinly veiled rebuke of the Trump administration.Bill Essayli, a federal prosecutor in California, posted on Twitter that the Pretti shooting was completely justified. “If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you,” he claimed. “Don’t do it!” The NRA directly responded to him by calling his claim “dangerous and wrong” in a quoted post. “Responsible public voices should be awaiting a full investigation,” the group warned, “not making generalizations and demonizing law-abiding citizens.”This state of affairs is not at all what gun rights groups had promised us. Other wealthy liberal democracies impose all sorts of restrictions on guns. In some European countries, civilians generally can’t own or possess them at all. Gun rights advocates have insisted, however, that the Second Amendment prevents Americans from making the same policy choices.As a result, the widespread availability of guns has had dire consequences. The Pew Research Center estimated last year that 46,728 people had died in the United States from gun-related injuries in 2023, which the center described as the most recent year “for which complete data is available.” That figure is likely an undercount, since the underlying Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data only counts deaths where a gunshot was the primary factor.Countries without widespread gun access also have murders and suicides, of course. But the availability of firearms likely plays a role in America’s higher rates. According to Pew, guns were used in four out of every five murders committed in the U.S. in 2023 and played a role in more than half of the roughly 27,000 suicides that year. It is impossible to know how many more people would be alive today if America had more restrictive laws, but the number would surely be much greater than zero.Even those who do not own guns must live with the consequences of their ubiquity. An entire generation of Americans has now grown up with mass-shooter drills in case their K-12 school happened to become the latest in a long chain of tragedies. The average American can likely recite the names of more mass-shooting locations than World War II or Civil War battlefields: Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Uvalde, Virginia Tech, and onward.In response to this regular churn of gun carnage, Americans have been told by gun rights advocates—both implicitly and explicitly—that these are acceptable losses for our society to bear. They defined the individual right to bear arms, which is only about 18 months older than the iPhone, as an intrinsic part of the nation’s social contract. One of the bluntest assessments came from Charlie Kirk, an influential conservative activist who frequently opposed gun-control proposals.“I think it’s worth it,” Kirk said in 2023, during a public event where he was asked about his support for gun rights. “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”Kirk’s critics widely shared this comment after he was assassinated by a sniper on a Utah college campus last fall. In one sense, his analysis wasn’t completely flawed. (As seen earlier, it perhaps intentionally echoed Scalia’s opinion in Heller.) Every constitutional right comes with policy trade-offs. The First Amendment’s strict protections for free speech also mean that the government can’t simply criminalize hate speech and Holocaust denial. Life would be easier for Democratic presidents if they could simply shut down Fox News. Police would probably solve more murders if the Fourth Amendment didn’t require them to get warrants.Americans generally accept those trade-offs, often on a subconscious level, because they generally prefer to live in a free and open society where their rights are less likely to be infringed. To paraphrase Kirk, that is a prudent and rational deal. The problem with his formulation was that, even if you accept his premise, the Second Amendment doesn’t work.State legislatures and courts often describe the Second Amendment as a right to bear arms for lawful purposes like hunting and personal self-defense. But Kirk and other gun rights commentators also often suggested that the Second Amendment is necessary as a bulwark against government tyranny. The apparent implication is that if the government ever infringed upon our “God-given rights,” Americans could simply kill those who were responsible.Trump, a master of turning the implicit into the explicit, voiced this sentiment in stark terms in 2016 about Hillary Clinton, his Democratic rival for the presidency that year. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” Trump told a rally in North Carolina on the campaign trail. “Although the Second Amendment people—maybe there is, I don’t know.” When Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke proposed a mandatory AR-15 buyback program in 2019 to stop mass shooting, conservative commentators likened it to an “incitement of violence” and a call for “civil war.”The United States is now awash in firearms, with all the resultant deaths, injuries, and other harmful social effects to achieve surely modest gains in personal self-defense. The Second Amendment has plainly failed to deter tyranny in any meaningful way. To the contrary, many of the most vocal gun rights advocates have been cheering on the Trump administration instead of rising up against it. And the Supreme Court’s rulings have failed to protect an individual right to bear arms because its other decisions make it all but impossible to hold government agents accountable for killing people who exercise it. It shouldn’t have taken the death of Alex Pretti to illuminate what was already plain as day.

Democrats Should Take Control on Immigration
New Republic • Feb 2, 2026

Democrats Should Take Control on Immigration

Last week, Senate Democrats made a deal with Senate Republicans to fund the Department of Homeland Security for only two more weeks while they hash out new accountability measures for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents, in the wake of Alex Pretti’s shooting and other acts of brutality. It was the least they could do to address Americans’ growing concerns about the way the Trump administration is threatening daily life in Minneapolis and elsewhere, killing citizens, and kidnapping people as young as 2 for deportation based only on their skin color and accents.This DHS funding battle, however, is part of a bigger question Democrats must answer as they fight to regain power. Large sections of the Democratic base are now echoing calls to “abolish ICE.” Some Democratic leaders, like New York Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, are pushing back against this with much more tepid, unwieldy, and frankly pretty weak ideas to “restrain, reform, and restrict” the agency. Others are pointing out that ICE is just over 20 years old, formed as part of the security theater fever after 9/11, and that the United States had immigration enforcement before it was created. Dismantling an agency that at least eight people have died interacting with this year doesn’t seem that outrageous.Up to now, the Democratic Party has been reluctant to wade into immigration, believing that President Donald Trump and the Republicans have an advantage on the topic. But that’s only partly true if investigated through a very narrow lens in the last presidential election. Most of the public doesn’t support the mass deportations Trump has carried out. There’s room to shape and reform public opinion on immigration and come out ahead, especially if Democrats make the issue part of their overall messaging on how to rebuild the U.S. post Trump.Following Trump’s second inauguration, Republicans quickly lost whatever advantage they had on immigration. Most voters believe Trump’s policies and the way he’s enacted them have gone too far. Even before the election, most voters didn’t like the most extreme things that Trump said. They believed American institutions like Congress and the courts would put the brakes on his administration. They were disappointed.By June, the Democratic research group Way to Win found that voters responded to messages emphasizing how Trump’s actions, lack of due process for immigrants, and the administration’s refusal to be reined in by the courts were a threat to all of us. These can fit into larger points about Trump’s disregard for the rule of law.Before the most recent events in Minneapolis, Democrats thought affordability would be their winning message in the 2026 midterms. But talking about the affordability crisis can include a pro-immigration message too. Americans generally like immigration and think immigrants make the United States a better place. In the run-up to 2024, Republican rhetoric about the border being “out of control” and a surge in migration under President Joe Biden had increased concern about the amount of immigration to the U.S. That concern has since waned. In June, one Gallup poll found a record high of 79 percent of Americans saying immigration is a good thing.Most people can see in their own communities that immigrants strengthen local economies. They start new businesses at higher rates than those born here, and studies have found they don’t pull down wages, as conservatives often claim. In fact, without immigrants in the workforce, we’re likely to see labor shortages and continued inflation. All of that is before the cost of continuing to fund ICE is taken into account. It’s hard to find a more wasteful way to spend government money than sending hastily hired, poorly trained agents into American cities.Trump’s immigration policies and ICE are extremely unpopular, and voters increasingly want someone in power to stand up to them. There’s room for Democrats to change the story on immigration; in fact, continuing to ignore it and act as though economic issues are separate from what’s happening on the ground—many Minneapolis restaurants and small businesses have closed until ICE operations cease—rings false to those of us watching.Over the next two weeks, there’s room for the minority party to be braver than simply requesting restraint from an agency and federal government apparatus that continues to ignore the rules already in place. It could actually shut the government down to force Trump’s hand; it could demand an end to deportations until the Trump administration agrees to abide by the courts; it could demand less funding for ICE and more for the overwhelmed immigration courts that are the actual path to citizenship for people who come here; and, even more importantly, it could demand negotiations on the immigration reforms it’s been trying to make since Barack Obama was in office. Democratic leaders have the upper hand now and could use it to change the policy conversation about what immigration means to Americans. It’s the smart and strategic path. It’s also the least they could do—to partly match the bravery and effort of regular people organizing and putting their bodies on the line in cities around the country.

Trump Tirade Over Protests Goes Off Rails as Crushing Fox Poll Hits
New Republic • Feb 2, 2026

Trump Tirade Over Protests Goes Off Rails as Crushing Fox Poll Hits

Donald Trump appears in deep denial about how widely hated his ICE raids have become. He let out a strange, rambling tirade to reporters about how the “silent majority” is still behind what ICE is doing, bizarrely citing approval of the raids among his own White House employees to make the case. In another rant, he lied uncontrollably about the protesters, about crime in Minneapolis, and more. Interestingly, this comes as a poll from none other than Fox News finds Trump deeply underwater on immigration. It also finds that very large majorities of independents think ICE is being too aggressive. Incredibly, even majorities of rural whites and non-college whites—loyal base voter groups—think the same. We talked to pro-immigrant organizer Lia Parada, who represents groups losing lawful status under Trump. She recounts what she’s seeing out there, shares details about surprising new signs of opposition to ICE, and explains how Democrats can seize this moment to effect a more durable shift in public opinion. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

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