@jkunze.bsky.social
Posting about #Baltimore politics, environment, infrastructure, housing, bikes, & now #LongCovid.
DHS’s Immigrant Tracking Tech Lays the Ground for Authoritarian Surveillance
14.10.2025 17:32 — 👍 23 🔁 16 💬 2 📌 0
“I spent three nights and three days in federal custody. During that time, I was never told what I was charged with, was not allowed to shower despite being covered in tear gas and pepper spray, had no phone call to my family, and no access to an attorney.” - George Retes, U.S. citizen and veteran.
12.10.2025 12:01 — 👍 11892 🔁 6150 💬 348 📌 347
Leo questioned a world where the wealth of the elite grows "exponentially" while many "millions of people die of hunger or survive in conditions unfit for human beings." He also criticized "ideologies that defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation," with false promises "that a free-market economy will automatically solve the problem of poverty." Leo described a "new tyranny," which shuns any kind of oversight and where the economy is structured "in such a way that sacrifices are demanded of the masses in order to serve the needs of the powerful." The poor, he wrote, are only allowed "drops that trickle down." The pope openly challenged "prosperity theology" and called Christians to the practice of giving charity. "It will not solve the problem of world poverty, yet it must still be carried out, with intelligence, diligence and social responsibility," he wrote. Popular movements that challenge "the empire of money," invite people to take on the cause to combat poverty alongside the poor, instead of on their behalf, and "make history," the pope said. It our duty, Leo said, to "make their voices heard, albeit in different ways, in order to point out and denounce such structural issues, even at the cost of appearing foolish or naïve."
Pope Leo is spitting.
www.npr.org/2025/10/09/n...
They are used for energy production, but they pollute more than coal plants! It's the worst option for managing waste.
journals.plos.org/climate/arti...
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
The new trash cans around Harbor Point are labelled "landfill."
Welcome to the fight against trash incineration, Harbor Point?
UPDATE: Kilmar’s lawyer announces he has been taken into ICE custody.
25.08.2025 12:13 — 👍 387 🔁 180 💬 15 📌 37
Here in Baltimore this morning, where clergy and activists have gathered in support of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who is set to check in with ICE this morning.
Heavy faith presence in addition to, just, a lot of people for 6:45am.
Kilmar himself is about to speak.
This week's bad HoCo Board of Appeals decision contradicts last month's Hearing Examiner ruling supporting the community's appeal against the "chemical recycling" pilot, essentially ending the appeal before it begins.
Catch up with last month's news here:
Text on white background. "Community speak out! with the Stop Grace Coalition. Thursday August 21, 8:15-9am. Join us for donuts and coffee! In front of the George Howard Building, 3430 Court House Dr #100, Ellicott City, MD 21043. Speakers will commence at 8:30am." A picture of a judge's gavel crossed out with a red X.
URGENT: join the Stop Grace Coalition tomorrow to speak out against a bad Board of Appeals decision this week.
This decision blocks discussion of future risks & past harms that are key for protecting the community against WR Grace's proposed "chemical recycling" pilot project.
The phrase "biblical principles of wealth creation" would have made Jesus beat you with a table just for THINKING it
28.07.2025 18:39 — 👍 303 🔁 80 💬 0 📌 0
Read the new community-led research showing $100 million worth of health damages every year from waste incineration in #Baltimore here:
28.07.2025 16:06 — 👍 0 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
It's time for #Baltimore City AND County to invest in #ZeroWaste alternatives & close the trash incinerator once and for all.
Watch @wmar2news.bsky.social's coverage of Friday's rally here:
On Friday, South Baltimore Community Land Trust & allies rallied in front of the BRESCO trash incinerator to demand action:
#Baltimore's 2 incinerators cause $100 million worth of health damages to the region every year. We can't afford it!
@zacblanchardd11.bsky.social @ceejhaction.bsky.social
“The more they streamline its use, the more they streamline its abuse. When an officer says, ‘papers please,’ you could choose to say nothing and face the consequences; with face recognition, your options are diminished,” EFF’s @maassive.bsky.social told @404media.co.
17.07.2025 18:53 — 👍 98 🔁 43 💬 1 📌 4This new policy basically means all immigrants have no due process rights and can be detained indefinitely. Once again like the student detentions and like CECOT, the Trump administration is using immigration detention, which both parties built up, as a testing ground for its authoritarianism...
15.07.2025 04:04 — 👍 673 🔁 364 💬 3 📌 6Did BPD deploy surveillance drones at the 6/20 protest, violating their own policies and scrubbing it from public flight logs?
15.07.2025 13:09 — 👍 2 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
Alt: Screenshot of the 9/20/2023 Board of Estimates agenda, item “SB-23-13113 - Sole Source - Contract Number 08000 Drones and a GPS Mapping Package.” The amount is $ 38,152.45. The description reads “The BCPD has a requirement to get additional Drones with GPS Mapping Package compatible with existing Drones and Mapping package. DiCarlo Precision Instruments is the sole source vendor of Drones and a GPS Mapping Package meeting the requirements.”
Screenshot of website linked in post, with pictures of six drones available from DiCarlo Precision Instrument Inc.
In 2023, BPD purchased drones from DiCarlo Precision Instruments, Inc.
Members of the public at the protest on 6/20 reported to us that the drone they observed surveilling the protest and returning to BPD matched the drones available from DiCarlo.
www.dicarlotech.com/products/uav
ALT: flight logs for June 2025 BPD drone use arranged in a chart. Two entries for 6/20/2025 are highlighted: SWAT High Risk Search Warrants for Norfolk Ave and Edison Highway, both in completely different areas of the city than the protest in Upton.
Drone flight logs are posted on BPD’s “New Technology Initiatives” page. Despite reports by members of the public seeing a drone fly low over the protest, then return to BPD, there is no drone flight on 6/20 in Upton in the logs.
www.baltimorepolice.org/resources-an...
Alt: Screenshot of linked document. “Prohibited Actions. 17. Units shall not use their sUASs for reasons other than those approved by BPD. 18. Units shall not use their unit’s sUASs to other unauthorized BPD units or aid with the use of sUAS’s during missions that are outside the scope of their approved unit’s duties. 19. BPD units that are not approved for the use of sUASs shall be prohibited from borrowing, inviting, or testing sUASs from other entities or individuals, including approved BPD units, during law enforcement activity.
BPD using a drone for a reason other than those listed in the previous post is prohibited.
www.baltimorepolice.org/transparency...
Alt: Screenshot of page 1 of linked document, headlined “Baltimore Police Department Approved Units for Small Unmanned Aircraft System (sUAS)” and listing circumstances when SWAT may use drones.
Alt: Screenshot of page 2 of linked document, listing circumstances when the Crime Scene Unit may use drones.
Per BPD policy, units must go through an approval process to begin using drones. Only two units are currently authorized to use drones - SWAT and the Crime Scene Unit - and only for specific purposes. Protest surveillance isn’t one of them.
public.powerdms.com/BALTIMOREMD/...
A picture of a gray quadcopter drone with prominent cameras on a white background.
On June 20, protesters seeking justice following the BPD killing of Bilal Abdullah reported seeking a drone hovering overhead before it flew back to BPD officers nearby.
If BPD used a drone for surveillance of the protest, that was a significant breach of their own policy and promises.
🧵
"The effort to improve policing with thoughtful reform & ever more money has led us directly to terrifying, open fascism, & laid the groundwork for a vicious, unrelenting police state."
www.everythingishorrible.net/p/we-need-to...
wrote about how defund the police just seems like a better and better idea given our current fascist nightmare. www.everythingishorrible.net/p/we-need-to...
15.07.2025 13:11 — 👍 61 🔁 14 💬 2 📌 3
ICE raids push immigrant communities into the shadows, hindering environmental justice efforts, Amal Ahmed reports. Noncitizens may no longer feel safe showing up to public meetings to fight harmful local policies, advocates say.
prismreports.org/2025/07/10/i...
In a few months, Klein and Thompson will headline an Abundance conference organized in part by the Foundation for American Innovation, a conservative think tank that helped co-author Project 2025.
12.07.2025 12:12 — 👍 8 🔁 3 💬 1 📌 0For the past 20-plus years, virtually every worst-case scenario civil liberties advocates warned would happen again in the internet era—from commercialize surveillance to the rights-erasing chilling effect—has come true.
12.07.2025 02:43 — 👍 198 🔁 58 💬 4 📌 0
Federal courthouse in greenbelt with people milling about outside. A woman holds a sign that reads "Gestapo ICE 2025"
HAPPENING NOW: Hello again from Greenbelt, Maryland, where an ICE official is set to be questioned about the Trump administration's plans to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia if he's released from criminal custody in Tennessee.
I'm here for @lawfaremedia.org.
Follow along 🧵⬇️
We should all be yelling at our state officials about the complete insanity of posting vital emergency information *exclusively* on Twitter/X and/or Facebook in 2025.
There is absolutely NO good excuse for this.
Many, many people don’t use those platforms. Many never did.
Ordered Deported on 14-Year-Old Charge Walter Baer, a civil engineer of Portland, Oregon, was arrested April 9, 1934, and held for deportation to Germany on the charge of having committed crimes involving "moral turpitude." Baer had designed a sewage disposal plant for the city of Portland as part of a public works program for unemployment relief. His plans were approved by a sixty-seven percent majority in a special public referendum, and a six million dollar bond issue was voted. Powerful
DEPORTATION LAWS RUN RIOT 69 industrialists who opposed the plan sued to have the bonds declared invalid. They also dug up the fact that Baer had served prison sentences after being convicted for forgery in 1919 and again in 1921. This was shortly after he had served in the army on the Mexican bor-der. For fourteen years he had lived an exemplary life; he had married a woman of Oregon pioneer stock and had three American-born children. Against the claim of the Labor Department that he was born in Germany, Baer stated he was born in the United States and was taken to Germany at the age of eighteen months and returned here at the age of six.
In the fight against his deportation, Baer was supported by unemployed groups, the sports fishermen, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Council for Social Action, newspapers and church and labor groups. How-ever, the Labor Department and the courts declared that his deportation was "mandatory." After he had been sent to Ellis Island, the Supreme Court of Oregon ruled that the bond issue was valid, that the Baer Plan was correct and sufficient and that the other plans submitted were of no value. Walter Baer faces deportation to Germany not because of the crimes he committed fourteen years ago but because political enemies used his record as a means of getting rid of him for their own ends.
In 1934 a group of rich, well-connected Portlanders tried to get a local leftist they disliked deported to Hitler's Germany (a country he never lived in and claimed he wasn't born in). He would have likely been imprisoned or put to death by Hitler's regime.
16.03.2025 17:12 — 👍 962 🔁 333 💬 16 📌 37
