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Mayors Describe ICE Presence in Their Cities
As federal immigration enforcement agents continue to clash with protesters in cities around the country, U.S. mayors gathering last week in Washington, D.C., said they’re anxious about what might be coming next. “We were told the actions would be precise. They were not,” said Edina, Minnesota, Mayor Jim Hovland.
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Turmoil at FEMA Adds to the Revolt Against Kristi Noem
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s handling of the killing of Alex Pretti follows sustained criticism of her management of FEMA. Lawmakers, disaster response experts, and disaster survivors say her policies have all but halted the agency’s disaster spending, thus slowing emergency response and delaying recovery funding.
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The Legacy of the Arab Spring, to Date
The Arab Spring did not simply unsettle Arab regimes. It disrupted an entire geopolitical equilibrium that had been quietly accepted for decades. What appeared at first as a series of domestic uprisings ultimately rewired regional alignments, altered great-power postures, normalized intervention, and reshaped how instability itself is managed and exploited.
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Mexico and U.S. Look for New Deal in Long-Running Battle Over 80-year Old Water Treaty
Mexico and the US’s growing dispute over water rights further complicates an already strained relationship that must tackle existing challenges related to drug trafficking, security, migration and trade wars. Water is just the latest issue to rise to the top of the tension table.
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I’m a Former FBI Agent Who Studies Policing, and Here’s How Federal Agents in Minneapolis Are Undermining Basic Law Enforcement Principles
As a policing scholar and former FBI special agent, I believe the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti illustrate how some federal agents are engaging with the public in a way that undermines established principles of policing and constitutional law.
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The Second Amendment Is Meaningless If the Government Can Kill You for Exercising It
The law is not supposed to make Americans choose between their lives and their constitutional liberty. The Second Amendment gives people the right to bear arms, and the Fourth Amendment promises to stop the government from killing them for doing so. People should demand better of a government that voices their rights one day before insisting, a couple of days later, that civilians can be killed for exercising them.
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FBI’s Search of Georgia Election Center Is “Dangerous,” Experts Warn
The search warrant, which sought 2020 election ballots, tabulator tapes, digital data and voter rolls from Fulton County, marked what experts described as a significant escalation in President Donald Trump’s breaking of democratic norms.
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Allfare: China’s Whole-of-Nation Strategy
To analyze how states exert their influence, scholars often compartmentalize actions into rigid analytical frameworks, which obscures the holistic scope of the challenge.
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ICE Not Only Looks and Acts Like a Paramilitary Force – It Is One, and That Makes It Harder to Curb
ICE and CBP meet many but not all of the most salient definitions of a “paramilitary force.” Both are also not subject to the same constitutional restrictions that apply to other law enforcement agencies. ICE and CBP thus bear some resemblance to the informal paramilitaries used in many countries for “regime maintenance,” carrying out political repression along partisan and ethnic lines, even though they are official agents of the state.
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State Lawmakers Stand Ready to Help ICE — or Impede It
Tensions rise nationwide over aggressive enforcement tactics and deadly encounters. As lawmakers convene for this year’s state legislative sessions, immigration has surged to the top of the agenda.
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The Trump Administration’s Cyber Strategy Fundamentally Misunderstands China’s Threat
The adoption of an offense-first strategy is a dangerous miscalculation. It will not diminish Beijing’s campaigns, and it coincides with a significant deterioration of cyber defenses that have kept U.S. networks and Americans safe.
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Beware: Government Using Image Manipulation for Propaganda
Last week DHS posted a picture of a woman arrested by ICE in Minneapolis. A short while later, the White House posted the same photo – except that version had been digitally altered to darken the woman’s skin and rearrange her facial features to make it appear she was sobbing or distraught. This incident of darkening an arrestee’s skin to reinforce stereotypes and stoke racial prejudice raises the question of whether the administration feels emboldened to manipulate other photos for other propaganda purposes.
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License to Kill? The Legal Black Hole of Federal Misconduct
The killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by ICE agents reveals a disturbing reality: everyday Americans falling victim to a system that enables—or even encourages—gross misconduct. To understand how we got here, we have to look at the bolted-shut doors of the American courthouse—a legal regime designed to ensure federal agents remain untouchable.
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Democratic AGs Stress Importance of Citizen-Generated Evidence in Challenging ICE
Cellphone video has emerged as a powerful rebuttal to Trump’s – and Trump officials’ — version of events, at a time when the federal government has restricted state and local investigators from accessing potential evidence to pursue their own investigations into excessive force and fatal shootings by immigration agents in their jurisdictions.
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Repeated Government Lying, Warned Hannah Arendt, Makes It Impossible for Citizens to Think and to Judge
Politics is not a seminar in absolute clarity, and competing claims are always part of the process. Democracies can survive spin, public relations and even occasional falsehoods. But Hannah Arendt’s observations show that it is the normalization of blatant dishonesty and systematic withholding that threatens democracy. Those practices corrode the factual ground on which democratic consent is built.
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The long view
A Turning Point: U.S. Recognizes Agriculture as a Domain of Defense
The US has legitimized the role of food supply in national defense. It has recognized that in a world of rupture, a nation that cannot feed itself cannot defend itself. A new policy effectively ends the era of agriculture functioning solely as a commercial sector.
Social Media’: The Changing Tech of Terror
In the wake of the white noise generated by mainstream social media channels and apps, a new trend of ‘anti-social media’ has emerged in recent years, which seeks to abandon mainstream platforms, reduce screen time, and seek private, intimate, or even ‘analogue’ communication to avoid algorithm-driven polarization, surveillance and loneliness. But some of these so-called anti-social media platforms have also become off-the-wall mediums for disseminating extremist propaganda.
The Trump Administration’s Cyber Strategy Fundamentally Misunderstands China’s Threat
The adoption of an offense-first strategy is a dangerous miscalculation. It will not diminish Beijing’s campaigns, and it coincides with a significant deterioration of cyber defenses that have kept U.S. networks and Americans safe.
Allfare: China’s Whole-of-Nation Strategy
To analyze how states exert their influence, scholars often compartmentalize actions into rigid analytical frameworks, which obscures the holistic scope of the challenge.
ICE Not Only Looks and Acts Like a Paramilitary Force – It Is One, and That Makes It Harder to Curb
ICE and CBP meet many but not all of the most salient definitions of a “paramilitary force.” Both are also not subject to the same constitutional restrictions that apply to other law enforcement agencies. ICE and CBP thus bear some resemblance to the informal paramilitaries used in many countries for “regime maintenance,” carrying out political repression along partisan and ethnic lines, even though they are official agents of the state.
How the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks Shaped ICE’s Immigration Strategy
The immigration enforcement response to 9/11 set the stage for ICE’s aggressive conduct. Under this way of thinking, if the homeland is under threat, then those who challenge immigration enforcement are “domestic terrorists.” Investigations into ICE officers are muted, for the officers are protecting the homeland against existential danger. Severe tactics to detain immigrants and condemn protesters – and violate U.S. citizens’ constitutional protections — become not only permissible but also advisable.