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ICE Barbie Targets Family of 5-Year-Old Boy That ICE Abducted
New Republic • Feb 6, 2026

ICE Barbie Targets Family of 5-Year-Old Boy That ICE Abducted

After releasing 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos from immigration detention, the Department of Homeland Security is now trying to deport his family as fast as possible.The agency filed a motion Wednesday to end asylum claims and expedite deportation proceedings for Liam’s family, immigration lawyer Danielle Molliver told MPR News. She described the DHS’s latest motion as “retaliatory.”Last month, federal immigration agents used Liam as bait to try to arrest someone in the child’s house. They detained both Liam and his father, who had been bringing him home from school. While images of Liam surrounded by masked federal agents ignited a national firestorm, the father and son were moved to a processing facility in Texas for deportation. A federal judge ordered them to be freed, finding that there wasn’t enough probable cause to detain them. The family had entered the U.S. legally and applied for asylum upon arrival. “It’s really frustrating as an attorney, because they keep throwing new obstacles in our way. There’s absolutely no reason that this should be expedited. It’s not very common,” Molliver said. A hearing for Liam’s case is scheduled for Friday, but Molliver has requested more time to respond. There have been mounting reports that asylum cases are being routinely dismissed by immigration judges, and lawful asylum-seekers are being taken into ICE custody for expedited removal. ICE attorneys at immigration hearings are increasingly asking judges to dismiss asylum cases, and the Trump administration has instructed judges to grant quick dismissals. At the same time, the Trump administration has purged dozens of immigration judges and sought to recruit so-called “deportation judges” to help ramp up the government’s soft ethnic cleansing. Liam’s father, Adrian Conejo Arias, told MPR News that the family still lives in fear of being deported. “The government is moving many pieces, it’s doing everything possible to do us harm, so that they’ll probably deport us. We live with that fear too,” Conejo Arias said during an interview conducted in Spanish and translated by MPR News.

AIPAC Spending Is This Close to Backfiring in a Democratic Primary
New Republic • Feb 6, 2026

AIPAC Spending Is This Close to Backfiring in a Democratic Primary

Progressive Analilia Mejia is on the verge of a huge upset win in a special election in New Jersey’s 11th congressional district to replace Mikie Sherill, elected governor of the state last year.Meijia, who helped run Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, is leading Tom Malinowski in the Democratic primary by less than 500 votes as of this writing, upending a race in which the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spent tons of money. AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project, dumped $2.3 million into the race to attack the early frontrunner Malinowski, an odd course of action considering that it had supported Malinowski in the past. Malinowski’s crime in AIPAC’s eyes was supporting conditions on aid to Israel, a position that is gaining traction among House Democrats as public polling shows increasing numbers of Democrats and Americans opposing Israel’s massacre of Gaza. Mejia, endorsed by leading progressives including Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is on the verge of capitalizing on AIPAC’s gamble. Mejia’s stance on Israel goes even further than Malinowski, as she has called Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide and pledged not to make any visits to Israel on AIPAC’s dime. Three days after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, Mejia said, “Every fiber of my being is horrified beyond words at what is furthering in Gaza. Yet again we see how oppression & dehumanization leads to despair & unthinkable destruction.” Two weeks later, Mejia called for a ceasefire in Gaza, well before many other Democrats. But Israel and Gaza wasn’t even a central issue in her campaign, taking a backseat to cost-of-living issues. That’s not unlike New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign last year. He too ran a campaign centered around affordability, and his pro-Palestinian stance resulted in millions of dollars spent against him to no avail.Will Mejia eke out an upset win over Malinowski? If so, it would show that AIPAC, long feared on Capitol Hill, is losing its touch.

Splinter: Trump Crushed U.S. Tourism
Jezebel • Feb 6, 2026

Splinter: Trump Crushed U.S. Tourism

American tourism may be permanently debilitated because Trump and the GOP made everyone else around the world realize that there are plenty of other places they’d rather visit than a country run by the biggest antisocial freaks on the planet.

MR FUN | 2/6/26
The Majority Report • Feb 6, 2026

MR FUN | 2/6/26

Trump Holds NY Funding Hostage to Get More Things Named After Himself
New Republic • Feb 6, 2026

Trump Holds NY Funding Hostage to Get More Things Named After Himself

President Trump is holding hostage billions of dollars in funding for a New York infrastructure project, and won’t release it unless he gets New York’s Penn Station and Washington, D.C.’s Dulles International Airport named after him.The Hudson Tunnel project is a plan to construct new and improved rail tunnels connecting New York City and New Jersey, expanding service along the country’s busiest rail route. Trump froze funding for that and $18 billion worth of other important projects in a spiteful move meant to kneecap a blue city during the government shutdown in October.It was last month that Trump offered Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer the deal of a lifetime: Name Penn Station and Dulles Airport—two iconic northeast travel hubs—after him, and he’d unfreeze the funding for the Hudson Tunnel project. Schumer rejected that offer immediately, according to Punchbowl News. With no name change and no funding, the committee leading the tunnel project may have to lay off around 1,000 workers and stop the project.Moments like this remind us that Trump is an egotistic, withering old billionaire first, and president second. His name is still very much his brand, and he wants to plaster it everywhere he can—from the Kennedy Center to TrumpRx, to Trump coin, to Penn Station and Dulles. And like a petulant child, he’ll dangle a landscape-changing project in front of Democrats until he gets his way.

Trump’s FBI Sends Ominous Note to Election Officials About Midterms
New Republic • Feb 6, 2026

Trump’s FBI Sends Ominous Note to Election Officials About Midterms

The nation’s top spy agency is already prepping for election season.The FBI called on officials from all 50 states to attend a briefing on midterm election “preparations,” reported Crooked Media’s Matt Berg. The meeting is expected to take place in late February, though exactly what the meeting will be about is still unclear.Berg obtained an email that was issued to various state officials earlier this week offering specifics. He acquired the note via a public records request. “Dear Chief Election Officials,” the email begins. “To prepare for the 2026 US midterm elections, your election partners at the FBI, DOJ, DHS, USPIS, and the EAC would like to invite you to a call where we can discuss our preparations for the cycle, as well as updates and resources we can provide to you and your staff.“The call will be on Wednesday, February 25 (2-3pm EST) and will be for Chief Election Officials,” it continues. “You may designate a proxy to attend in your place if you are not available. On Wednesday, March 4, we will hold a similar call for members of the EAC’s Local Leadership Council.“We look forward to speaking with you in support of the 2026 midterm elections,” it ends.The note is signed by Kellie Hardiman, who refers to herself as the “FBI Election Executive.”A top state election official described the note to Berg as “the strangest thing in the world.”Another unidentified state official told NBC News that the message was “unusual and unexpected,” especially considering Hardiman was a relative unknown prior to her mass email, as was her position.“No one has heard of this person—and we’re all wondering what an ‘FBI Election Executive’ is,” said the official, who was granted anonymity by the outlet to speak candidly.Hardiman titled herself as an intelligence analyst in a 2024 interview with the fashion blog The Style That Binds Us, specifying that she had spent her entire 20-year career at the FBI in that role.A spokesperson for the FBI was unwilling to explain Hardiman’s letter, telling Berg that the “FBI has no comment.” The note has only served to ramp up tension over the upcoming midterm elections. Earlier this week, Trump told former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino during an interview that Republicans should “take over and nationalize” elections in several states.“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” Trump said. “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many—15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

Trump Posts Racist AI Video of Barack and Michelle Obama as Apes
New Republic • Feb 6, 2026

Trump Posts Racist AI Video of Barack and Michelle Obama as Apes

President Donald Trump shared a wildly racist video of former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes during a late-night posting spree on Truth Social. In yet another erosion of America’s and Trump’s authority on the world stage, the president shared a video on Truth Social late Thursday that ended with a short clip of the Obamas’ laughing heads superimposed on the bodies of apes, while the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” plays in the background. The video bore a watermark tag of the same account behind the AI-generated video of Trump dropping a massive load of shit on protesters from a fighter jet.Most of the 62-second video was actually focused on a conspiracy theory that voting machines in certain battleground states had been rigged to favor Joe Biden. It was only the final seconds that contained racist drivel. The Bulwark’s Tim Miller hit back at speculation that Trump hadn’t meant to share the racist clip. “It was intentional and Trump has been making racist attacks on the Obamas for like 20 years now hope that clears it up for you,” he wrote in a post on X.Ben Rhodes, a former speechwriter for Obama, wrote on X: “Let it haunt Trump and his racist followers that future Americans will embrace the Obamas as beloved figures while studying him as a stain on our history.”California Governor Gavin Newsom’s press office also slammed the video. “Disgusting behavior by the President. Every single Republican must denounce this. Now,” a post on X read.White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed concerns about the video Friday morning. “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” she wrote in an emailed statement to Variety. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”Leavitt also shared the full video, which depicted Hillary Clinton as a boar and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries as a meerkat—but those two were noticeably absent from the clip Trump shared.After roughly 12 excruciating hours, Trump deleted the post on Friday. But the damage has already been done.Trump normally uses his Truth Social account to post presidential proclamations, appeals to foreign leaders, or screeds against his enemies. But on Thursday, Trump shared a video of a dog being summoned by a can of whipped cream, and another clip of Bruce Lee from Enter the Dragon (1973). He also endorsed “a true friend, fighter, and WINNER,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has become something of a model leader for those on the contemporary right after he systematically weakened his country’s free press, replacing it with a state-controlled propaganda machine.This story has been updated.

Democrats SLAM Trump Over Election Takeover Plot
1:36:51
Pod Save America • Feb 6, 2026

Democrats SLAM Trump Over Election Takeover Plot

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