Comment or reply to share your thoughts or pieces I should be reading.

Apparently I’ve had a lot of thoughts about the specific pieces I’m sharing this week. Maybe that means I’ll spare you some words up here…

Everyone is hyper focused on ICE, as a short hand for ICE and CBP, and all the fascist terror/clown squads operating in both focused occupations and the regular background level kidnappings across the country. And somewhat rightfully so, they are the largest of the domestic fires we are fighting right now.

But even as the viral man attending his first protest in NJ said he doesn’t want kids to be afraid of their own government was unifying, my initial reaction that many other folks flagged too was, “Yes and our kids have long been afraid of their government, not to mention our killing of other countries’ children.” Because ICE’s tactics are not new, they’re new in white neighborhoods.

Unidentified, armed, (almost always) men screeching to a halt in unmarked cars, pointing guns every which way and screaming at you is an unfamiliar experience in upper middle class and white neighborhoods. A few neighborhoods over, where redlining was the norm, this experience is so familiar it has a widely known name: Jump out boys.

The warnings we failed to heed on local police, have been nationalized and scaled up, still targeting people of color and those skirting poverty just trying to survive, but also willing to enact violence on white and well off people if they get in the way.

Reading

“Reforms” Didn’t End Police Violence in 2020 and They Won’t End ICE Violence Now by Lydia Pelot-Hobbs

Black people have been warning us. White folks have been choosing not to listen. Are we running out of time where that’s a choice?

Underlying these demands are two key assumptions: First, that ICE can be reformed into a fair and just agency through greater oversight and professionalization. And second, that the problem with ICE is its arrest, detention, and deportation of the “wrong” kinds of people — U.S. citizens, immigrants without criminal charges (or at least those with nonviolent charges), and children.

The mainstream Democratic Party position, as summed up by Democratic Congressman Troy Carter, is that the goal should not be to abolish ICE, but to “abolish ICE as we know it today.” Under this logic, the problem with ICE is not the state violence inherent in immigration enforcement, detention, and deportation but the spectacle of state violence.

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It is no coincidence that the Democratic establishment’s policy proposals are eerily similar to what they espoused in the face of the 2020 uprisings against police violence. Seeking to defang and delegitimize organizers’ demand to defund the police, Democrats pushed forth training and oversight alongside short-lived lip service to Black Lives Matter as the pragmatic answer to stopping police-perpetrated killings. The liberal conceit that racism and brutality can be trained out of law enforcement has been a hallmark of the Democratic narrative since at least the Kerner Commission response to the 1960s urban uprisings.

Yet such an approach has proven over and over again to not stem the tide of police violence but to validate the centrality of policing in U.S. society. As African American Studies Professor Naomi Murakawa has documented, “In the six months following the murder of George Floyd, state lawmakers enacted nearly one hundred laws addressing use of-force standards and police accountability” — an unprecedented wave of legislative actions.

Despite the optics of these reforms, they have not stopped the police from killing people. Research from Mapping Police Violence has demonstrated that since 2020, police-perpetrated killings in the U.S. have only grown: from 1,163 in 2020 to 1,314 in 2025. And these numbers do not include the harder to track (but still important) forms of law enforcement violence such as harassment, brutality, and sexual assault. Oversight and training do not reduce law enforcement violence but shore up the legitimacy of police at the exact moment that the public clamors for meaningful change.

Quakertown parents, groups demand release of students in police clash by Jess Rohan, Danielle Camilli, Jo Ciavaglia

In case the connections in the piece above weren’t clear enough. The Quakertown police attacked students at a protest, and then arrested a bunch of students when it didn’t go so well for the cops. They then followed up by not releasing the kids, and hanging up on parents trying to speak to their children at the youth prison (which of course is a phrase that shouldn’t exist).

The typical Liberal/Dem position on an incident like this will be to say the children should have known better than to immediately and completely comply with the police.

Those people are wrong, and should be pushed out of our party. A badge and a gun doesn’t mean you get to assault children with impunity. The whole incident starts with a grown man putting hands on a child driven by some sort of ego/power trip. The police claim it’s because the girl walked in the street. If that’s even true, they could have sent her a ticket in the mail, or, I dunno, not done shit about it like they would have done if it was their white dude golf buddy jaywalking.

"Parents and community members are outraged by reports that officers used physical force against minors and escalated what began as a student demonstration into arrests and criminal charges," read a statement ahead of the press conference. "It is especially disturbing that the police chief was directly involved in the physical confrontation with a student."

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The protest began after Quakertown High School canceled an on-campus walkout due to safety concerns. Dozens of students decided to leave the school, being told they would not be let back in, and take their protest, including signs and chants into the borough’s downtown business district.

The protest was widely captured on student video that was shared to social media. Those videos also show police intervention, including a man now identified as police chief Scott McElree entering the crowd, grabbing and shoving a student and placing another student in a chokehold.

Quakertown police need to answer for protest violence, arrests: Groups

Civil rights groups and parents gathered in front of the Quakertown Police Department Saturday demanding answers for the violent confrontation Friday.

Advocates warn of worsening conditions in ICE custody as detainees take extraordinary risks to be heard by Alexandra Martinez

Legal limits on prolonged immigration detention have existed for more than two decades. In 2001, the Supreme Court ruled that the government cannot detain immigrants indefinitely and identified six months as a reasonable benchmark for how long people should be held while their case moved forward.

Yet detention times appear to be lengthening as the system expands. With the number of people in ICE custody surpassing 70,000 for the first time, agency data from mid-January shows that at least 7,252 people had been detained for six months or longer (more than double from December 2024, when 2,849 people had been in custody for at least six months) and 79 had been held for more than two years.

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“The system is meant to break you down,” Pillay said. “Chaos and confusion are instilled in the system.”

Advocates warn of worsening conditions for ICE detainees

Detainees risk retaliation to get out messages about what they’re experiencing, including inadequate medical care and limited communication

What Exactly Is a ‘Concentration Camp’? by Jamelle Bouie

A totally normal conversation that totally not imploding empires regularly have.

So in the period you’re talking about in the Middle East with U.S. actions, we see a pre-emptive war, right? It was not a necessary war. It was a war of choice. And you see waterboarding, right? Very specific tactics. You see this same kind of detention. You see torture. You know, Gitmo rose out of that same phenomenon as well. So you see this proto-concentration camp that is between domestic soil and foreign soil. It’s slowly being brought into the U.S.

I think there is this feeling of recognition, right? Oh, wait, we know what this constellation of things is. And it approaches a concentration camp society. We’ve been on this road for some time.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/opinion/concentration-camp-andrea-pitzer.html

A Cautionary Note to Fellow Dems From an AIPAC Target by Tom Malinowski

Malinowski highlights exactly why he lost, attempting to slice and nuance away issues that face overwhelming opposition within his own party, and independents. In fact, the contention that attacking him about ICE is not about Palestine, encapsulates his complete misunderstanding perfectly.

AIPAC’s definition of “pro-Israel” has been to the far right of even Republican voters for at least two decades, if not longer. Malinowski knows this, as while he was at Human Rights Watch, he allowed for calls to support Palestinian human rights, even while watering down those reports before allowing them to be made public.

But now, in 2026, Malinowski attempts to make the same distinctions on Israel that infuriate huge majorities of voters on ICE. Saying “pro-Israel, anti-Netanyahu” is no different than saying “pro-ICE, anti-Trump” a position supported by less than half the country, 15% of Democrats, and 30% of Independents. Those numbers are also in the ballpark of is Israel doing the right things around Palestine type polling in the US. But surveys of Israelis, particularly those with full legal rights in Israel (which unfortunately is only Jewish Israelis), show the opposite. 70-80% of respondents say that Netanyahu’s war crimes and crimes against humanity are “just right” or haven’t gone far enough. These are not popular positions in the US, nor anywhere in the world, outside of Occupied Palestine.

So it is not that the US, or US politicians, have “abandoned” our ally Israel. Netanyahu, and the Israeli Government, and it’s citizens have abandoned human rights, and it’s international allies. That’s not antisemitic that’s the facts of ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide. Pro-Israel, anti-Netanyahu is pro-genocide, just slower, with less social media virality. It’s Pro-ICE, but do it quietly, the “right way” according to Hillary Clinton’s view of Obama and Clinton’s disgusting deportation legacies.

That is why Tom Malinowski lost, not because he broke with AIPAC, but because Mejia has a long history of standing against the oppressive, apartheid, occupying forces both at home and abroad. Malinowski lost the 2026 NJ-11 Primary when he left HRW in 2013, starting an ongoing slide on his originally moderate stance on human rights to align with increasingly marginal, violent, and deadly human rights policy in Palestine, and in Parsippany–Troy Hills.

But if AIPAC’s definition of “pro-Israel” now demands blind a embrace of and funding for policies that even most Americans with a lifelong commitment to Israeli security cannot in good conscience support—like the violent expulsion of West Bank Palestinians from their homes—and if it requires smearing even the most moderate elected officials who ask questions about those policies, the number of Americans (and the number of members of Congress) who pass its test will be too small to sustain any kind of relationship with the Jewish state.

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The best political move for Democrats would be to embrace—loudly and unequivocally—the popular position on these issues (which happens to be the principled one, too). They should be pro-Israel, but anti-Netanyahu. They should campaign on stopping crypto scams and corruption and on regulating AI before it upends our lives. They should tell the super PAC groups either to move to the mainstream, or come out honestly as part of the MAGA coalition. And then they should let the Republicans own the baggage.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/a-cautionary-note-to-fellow-democrats-aipac-super-pac-politics

Exclusive: Senior DHS officials double down on arresting and detaining refugees in new memo by Chris Geidner

In the “New Policy” section of the memo, Edlow and Lyons declare that refugees who do not obtain LPR status — obtain a green card — after a year either need to return to DHS or DHS will arrest and detain them for “inspection and examination for admission as an LPR.”

Then, the new policy states, “DHS may maintain custody for the duration of the inspection and examination process.“

https://www.lawdork.com/p/exclusive-senior-dhs-officials-double

https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/dynamic/render?isViewInBrowser=true&productCode=JBO&sendId=215624&uri=nyt%3A%2F%2Fnewsletter%2Fbf42252b-e24d-5c98-821b-f975951ff5f6

Man Opposing Data Center Arrested for Speaking Slightly Too Long by Matthew Gault

This hits a bit close to home. There’s no way any of these charges actually hold up, but that’s not the point. The point is to make people worry about what will happen if they speak up. Not to mention these Town Councils or other elected boards tend to spend hours blathering on talking back and forth between themselves, while looking down on any residents who bother to try to come before them and participate in the conversation.

When he went over this three minutes, police officers and an unidentified city official rushed to his position. Blanchard put down the microphone and approached the city councilors to hand them some of his documents. The police follow. Immediately, someone in the crowd said “Freedom of speech.” There is an exchange of words at the table where the councilors are seated that’s impossible to hear over cheers from the crowd.

“On what grounds? I said on what grounds?” Blanchard said as the cheers subsided.

“Arrest him,” an unidentified man in a blue vest said.

The police officers immediately put Blanchard’s hands in handcuffs.

Man Opposing Data Center Arrested for Speaking Slightly Too Long

An Oklahoma man tried to talk about a data center coming to his community. Police arrested him when he went a few seconds over his time limit.

The Last Idiot Who Earnestly Believes in the American Experiment by Mike Somes

Some time before I was born, America’s finest comedic minds decided it would be really funny if we all pretended that there was no greater idea than the notion that all people had inalienable rights, and that there could be no cause more noble than any effort to protect those rights for others. I, perhaps the biggest Bozo in the United States, totally missed that they were kidding.

I commend the Andy Kaufmanesque commitment to the bit. Without cracking a smile, adults I respected taught me about a thing called the American Revolution, and how it gave rise to a new kind of society where people could converse freely, even going so far as to criticize their leaders, and this would help uncover a more truthful and better way of living.

The Last Idiot Who Earnestly Believes in the American Experiment

Still left out of the joke, even now.