Valerie Braman

Today should be your 38th birthday.. When you lose your son you lose more than a child you lose a piece of your heart and your joy. Life is forever altered, and nothing can ever fill that space. Yet in my soul, he remains, my precious boy, forever loved. His laughter, his smile, and his love are woven into who I am. My love for him will never fade. Yor are my pride and my joy - you've made a change that cannot be broken..

Alex's mom on his 38th birthday.

There is no amount of money in the world that would lead me to fight a Vietnamese refugee that grew up in Louisiana

(Also I really want to try a Korean style Po’ Boy)

This has nothing to do with fraud.

The agents Trump allegedly sent to investigate fraud are shooting protesters and arresting children. His DOJ is gutting the U.S. Attorney’s Office and crippling their ability to prosecute fraud. And every week Trump pardons another fraudster.

Two Things for Sure The BAFTAs tried it.

"I didn’t apologize for having MS or being disabled, neither of which I have control over. I apologized because my actions caused harm and offense. I apologized because it was the right and respectful thing to do. I apologized because even with my disability, I’m still part of the human family"

An ICE agent shot and killed Ruben Ray Martinez, a US citizen and San Antonio resident, in March 2025. Then ICE and the Texas Department of Public Safety covered it up. He was 23 years old. I am calling for a full investigation into this shooting, including why there was an 8-month cover up.

This is what ICE does every day. Hunt little kids who are here legally. They get sent to a place called the “baby jail” in Texas. Very little of it ends up on video like this. But it’s routine. And disgusting.

#OtD 13 Feb 1913 82-year-old labour activist Mother Jones was arrested in West Virginia for supporting a coal miners' strike. Convicted in a military court and sentenced to 20 years in prison, she was pardoned after serving 85 days. More on the Mine Wars: workingclasshistory.com/2018/06/09/w...

The US government will not stop sharing Nazi propaganda And their supporters are loving it.

Individually, each post could easily be dismissed, but taken together, they seem to form something more deliberate: a stream of repurposed Nazi propaganda for the everyday person’s feed.

Page 1 of a child’s handwritten letter, written in Spanish in a cursive script. Translation: “Hello I am Ender and I am 12 years old, I have been at this center  for 2 months. I arrived here for an immigration appointment and I don’t think they should grab immigrants who are innocent, like instead of grabbing criminals because I mean they prefer to lock up children than look for people who really shouldn’t be in the U.S. They told me I could only be here 21 days but I have already spent more than 60 days waking up eating the same repetitive meals, going outside and that the majority of guards never pay attention to people, eating dinner  always the same as the day before, seeing people cry every day for the same reasons, trying to sleep in that horrible uncomfortable bed, going to the doctor and that the only thing they tell you is to drink more water and the worst thing is that it seems like the water is what makes people sick here…”

Page 2 of a child’s handwritten letter, written in Spanish in a cursive script. Translation: “…going to wait for the bad answers from the judges, hearing the bad news from people who no longer have hope, having to share a room with minimum 3 families, and all that so they send us back to our countries.” Below the text is a drawing in pen of three women, titled “My family” and labeled with “Mama,” “Sister,” and “me” in Spanish.

5/ “I have already spent more than 60 days waking up eating the same repetitive meals…going to the doctor and that the only thing they tell you is to drink more water and the worst thing is that it seems like the water is what makes people sick here…”

From 12-year-old Ender, detained 60+ days

“I Have Been Here Too Long”: Read Letters from the Children Detained at ICE’s Dilley Facility Hundreds of children are currently being held with their parents at an immigration detention center in Dilley, Texas. In letters and drawings, eight kids convey the pain of feeling trapped with no end...

Please take the time to read what the children detained in Dilley wrote me in their own words: www.propublica.org/article/ice-... 10/

*Green card application in process and work permit, married to US citizen
*Lived in US for 20 years, no criminal record
*In detention for five months with no charge, despite judge approving release
*He disputes ICE claim that he signed forms agreeing to deportation

Screenwriter Chris Morgan: In Fast & Furious 7 I wrote about the God’s Eye device - able to connect to any camera in the world- as a cautionary tale

Jeff Bezos: At long last we have created the evil God’s Eye device that almost kills the whole Toretto family in Fast & Furious 7

Just a quick update from the Twin Cities. (Please forgive the unsolicited message). THINGS ARE NOT BETTER IN MINNEAPOLIS. The media is mostly moving on, Trump is focused on other stuff, BUT NOTHING HAS CHANGED ON THE GROUND. More than 2,000 DHS thugs continue to roam the streets, abducting people 24/7, assaulting legal observers with impunity, and routinely denying 1st, 4th, and 5th amendment rights. Drones and helicopters are overhead every day. Hundreds and hundreds of terrified families have not left their homes since mid-December ... relying on the community to bring them food and help with rent and other necessities. (Those people are NOT violent drug cartel sex offending murderers, as DHS would tell you. Most are legal residents or citizens.) If anything, things have just become more stressful and intractable (think trench warfare as a suitable metaphor): The resistance is better organized and numerous, but DHS has become more clever and better at disguise... and the county sheriff's office is increasingly supporting them . Do not let anyone tell you that Homans (the new person in charge of the occupation) is making anything better. Do not let anyone tell you that 700 ICE agents leaving the city has made much of a difference; the remaining force (again, ~2,000) is still larger than the entire city's police force (which is legally unable to do anything). Please call your congressional reps ... especially if there is any chance the administration might listen to them.

A desperate plea sent to me by a Minneapolis resident who's been on the front lines since the beginning of the ICE occupation:

From Big Lots to warehousing humans: ICE plan sparks fear in Schuylkill County | Will Bunch A massive warehouse in Tremont, Pa., that once moved cheap goods will now detain migrants in a $119 million ICE deal.

It can happen here - in Pa. coal country

I went to tiny Tremont, Pa. to see how a former Big Lots warehouse for cheap goods would become an island in a U.S. gulag archipelago, warehousing 7,500 human beings from ICE raids

My special report on an American nightmare www.inquirer.com/opinion/ice-...

IMAGE: a stylized cell phone with flames coming out of it. TEXT: Delete the Starbucks app off your phone. Seriously. Starbucks is the biggest violator of labor law in modern history. We have the power to tell them union-busting is bad for business. Don't shop at Starbucks until they do better by their baristas!

If Starbucks won’t respect workers at the bargaining table, they don’t deserve our clicks or orders.

Our call to action is simple:

📱 Delete the Starbucks app. #DeleteTheApp

bit.ly/deletetheapp

Pinned lizzie johnson @lizziejohnsonnn · Aug 19, 2021 Almost three years ago, my editor called me early one November morning. A wildfire had sparked near a town called Paradise, he said. Could I go? (1/13) 0:02 / 0:10 lizzie johnson @lizziejohnsonnn · 47m I was just laid off by The Washington Post in the middle of a warzone. I have no words. I'm devastated. Quote lizzie johnson @lizziejohnsonnn · Jan 25 Waking up without power, heat, or running water. (Again.) But the work here in Kyiv continues. Warming up in the car, writing in pencil — pen ink freezes — by headlamp.

A publisher who lays off a reporter whose pen is freezing because she's covering a frigid war zone while dodging missiles is not an editor you want to work for, in a more perfect world

The Washington-Baltimore News Guild strongly condemns the layoffs announced today at The Washington Post. These cuts represent yet another blow to a newsroom that has already been pushed to its limits and a disservice to the readers who rely on The Post for rigorous, independent journalism.

A staggering statement from former Washington Post editor Marty Baron: "This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world's greatest news organizations."

I went to college with Aliya. Here, she speaks to Congress about being assaulted by ICE in Minneapolis, pulled violently out of her car, and taken to detention, where she blacked out.

"You have no reason to believe you will make it out alive if you already being called a body."

Businesses such as Microsoft are increasingly nudging their employees to utilize AI to get more done. Others are forcing the issue. One of the biggest firms to take the more aggressive path is Meta Platforms, which at the end of December had 78,865 employees. At a companywide meeting last month, Meta leaders briefed employees on a new performance review and bonus system closely tied to their AI usage, according to a recording of the meeting. For instance, the company’s AI-powered performance tracker, Checkpoint, looks at how many lines of code are generated by software engineers using AI tools, along with over 200 other data points. They include the number of errors or bugs associated with engineers’ code; the amount of code an engineer wrote themselves without AI. Checkpoint is supposed to reduce the time it takes to prepare performance reviews, according to the meeting recording. It uses data from tools employees already use, such as Google Workspace to provide a summary of an employee’s work. “To be clear, this is not an activity tracker—it’s an impact-evidence starter,” said one HR leader during the meeting. Managers then evaluate employees’ impact based on these checkpoint summaries and assign a rating. To help employees accomplish such goals, Meta has expanded their access to AI models made by other firms, such as Google’s Gemini 3 Pro and OpenAI’s GPT-5, alongside Meta’s own Llama models. Employees use such models for coding and other tasks.

Meta now forcing all employees to use AI tools and tying it to employee performance, according to @theinformation.com.

HR said "this is not an activity tracker—it’s an impact-evidence starter"

That's a fun way to rebrand workplace surveillance.

This is just insane. It’s only a matter of time before DHS kills another innocent person here.

(clip via MPR and @davidjbier.bsky.social on X)

❤️

the arrest of journalists in minneapolis, including don lemon, is more evidence that the only move the administration knows how to make is to use force, and does not know how to respond when that force is met with defiance and indifference.

How ICE Already Knows Who Minneapolis Protesters Are

A Minnesota woman observing ICE agents in her car was cornered on one-way streets. An agent approached, called her by name—citing facial recognition. Days later, her Global Entry and TSA privileges were revoked, with no explanation.

Walz says Trump compared Minneapolis surge to Venezuela mission The Minnesota governor tells MS NOW’s Jacob Soboroff that the reference shows where Trump’s head is. The White House denies that.

Walz told me that when he spoke to Trump on the phone the president compared the immigration operations in Minneapolis to the military mission he ordered in Venezuela. www.ms.now/news/walz-sa...

As @hebagowayed.bsky.social and I wrote in our Guardian article on abolishing ICE, this is Homan threatening to gun down Americans for using their free speech rights to accurately describe ICE as fascist secret police.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

This is what letting RFK jr go wild on health looks like

Brett Banditelli is my treasured friend, even though I’m not coming to see him in person this week. (Again.)

Five SBWU members celebrate their union win

BREAKING: Last night, the Schuylkill Yards Starbucks location won their union... officially making EVERY Starbucks in West Philadelphia unionized!

CONGRATULATIONS to the baristas who are organizing to win a better future for workers everywhere ✊🔥