Democrats Aren’t Reining in ICE. Here’s How They Could. ICE is out of control. Democrats have numerous ways to restrain the agency, from barring ICE from domestic spying and terminating its contracts with tech companies to creating and fully funding an ind...

Notably, none of this is even *in the conversation* as lawmakers discuss how to use maybe the only chance they'll have for a long time to make serious reforms to DHS. They fear a secret police forming, but don't want to touch its existing architecture slowly being built.
jacobin.com/2026/02/demo...

A number of obvious ways lawmakers could rein in ICE: from barring it from domestic spying & terminating contracts w/ Palantir & other privacy-shredding tech firms, to halting its buying of detention centers & selling them off + making an independent watchdog to investigate abuses.

ICE Won’t Stop Shoving Guns in People’s Faces Renee Good’s murder was the deadly culmination of the past year in which ICE and other federal agents pointed their guns and even shot at US citizens in dozens of cases around the country.

It's by no means an exhaustive list. But it shows that, as trigger-happy agents increasingly view anyone & everyone as a bodily threat they're justified in potentially shooting, what happened to Good was only a matter of time - and won't be the last case.
jacobin.com/2026/01/ice-...

Other times, agents appeared to be claiming fear to justify trying to kill someone. In August, agents shot a car 3 times, nearly hitting an 18-year-old citizen, claiming his dad had hit two officers and they feared for their life. Two different videos showed no one was hit.

Agents' own tendency to panic seemed to be the issue at times. That includes a case in Portland where agents blocked an ambulance w/ an injured protester. When the driver put it in park and it rolled forward slightly, a terrified agent freaked out & threatened to shoot the driver.

In fact, I found at least six incidents of DHS agents pointing guns at kids. One was at a raid on a race track where they zip tied families. Three involved agents breaking into homes in cases of mistaken identity. One of the kids they pointed a gun at was 3 months old.

Many incidents happened in Chicago. Several were detailed in judge Sarah Ellis's ruling limiting use of force. Others included agents pulling guns on:
- a state rep
- bystanders at a raid
- someone filming
- a pregnant woman (!)

One deserves special mention, as the ICE agent's conduct was so bad, local police arrested & charged him. He was walking in the middle of the road, then held up a teenager in a car, claiming he nearly hit him (he didn't), and charged him w/ a crime (ICE can't do traffic enforcement).

Many were in CA:
- A policeman stops, seeing a man pointing a gun at a woman - he's an ICE agent mad she followed him.
- A masked agent points a gun at demonstrators at a raid.
- An agent points a gun at a pastor at a church.

I found more than two-dozen instances in the past year of fed. immigration agents drawing their guns on or otherwise threatening deadly force against people they didn't arrest. Most were US citizens, usually people protesting ICE. Many mirrored the Renee Good killing.🧵:

How January 6 Is Being Used to Crush Dissent on the Left Rather than grapple with the political forces behind the Capitol siege, lawmakers have instead pushed a spate of anti-protest laws across the country.

The most significant legacy of January 6?

Rather than grapple with the political forces behind the Capitol siege, lawmakers have instead pushed a spate of anti-protest laws across the country.

@bmarchetich.bsky.social wrote in 2022 about the crackdown on dissent.

You’re Being Lied to About Graham Platner We read Graham Platner’s whole Reddit archive. The vilification of the Maine candidate for Senate doesn’t square with what he actually wrote in his posts.

There are so many posts, and often written in that same crude style, that you could single out any number of them to paint whatever picture you wanted. But as a whole, they more or less align with the image Platner's given the public about who he is.
jacobin.com/2025/10/plat...

6. Speaking of military service, Platner repeatedly made clear his time fighting US wars had shaped his worldview, and left him disillusioned & cynical about both what he called US "imperial adventures" and the system as a whole.

5. A good e.g. of the contradictions of Platner's posts: he could share what most people would consider an offensive story about a military game of gay chicken one moment, and condemn homophobia the next. He used Reddit to give his fellow service members help & advice.

4. Gun rights aside, Platner, a veteran, shared a host of conventionally progressive views, albeit expressed in the hyper-vulgar style of what he called "our crude and offensive world" of military service.

3. In spite of the single, unflattering quote about rural voters that has been picked out, most of Platner's posts see him railing against liberals who look down on rural Americans, and insisting they'd be potential progressive allies if Democrats soften on gun control.

2. Platner often talked about his left-wing views and, even more frequently, angrily railed against fascism and armed far right groups, which he viewed as a growing threat that might require self-defense. He plainly is not a secret far right extremist.

1. Platner frequently expressed outrage & anger at the US military's mistreatment of Afghan civilians, and often pushed back against other users' racism, or angrily criticized what he viewed as instances of racism in the news.

Had a look through 100s & 100s of Graham Platner's old Reddit posts. The picture being painted based on a handful of them has little to do with what's in the archive - when it comes to his politics, his views on race, his attitudes to rural voters, and much else. A🧵:

Israel’s Gaza War Is One of History’s Worst Crimes Ever Israel’s war in Gaza combines a staggeringly high death rate, shocking violence toward children, unparalleled physical destruction, and now a world-historical famine. The world has, by objective measu...

It's not just the rate of killing, how indiscriminate it is, the violence toward kids & civilians, the annihilation of its ecosystem, its almost total physical destruction, the famine, or the tonnage of bombs. What's unique about Gaza is it's *all* of it.
jacobin.com/2025/08/isra...

4th, the scale & intensity of bombing. The 70k tons of bombs (a lowball) dropped on Gaza are 6x Hiroshima bombs, but on an area 1/2 the size of Hiroshima and with 6x its population. It's worse than any war going back decades. And Israel used the most destructive possible bombs.

3rd the physical destruction: most of its homes, roads, hospitals, schools, cultural heritage sites, vital infrastructure, cropland & livestock, fishing sector. Basically everything that makes organised life possible in Gaza has been almost completely destroyed.

2nd, the extraordinary violence toward children, both statistically & anecdotally, and the famine we're now watching:

I don't know if people really understand how bad what Israel has done to Gaza is. So here's a collection of stats (often conservative undercounts) that make clear how much worse this is than anything we've seen in recent history.🧵

1st, the death rate & proportion of civilians killed:

A Judge’s Conflict of Interest Over Jeffrey Epstein Documents A judge who sealed a slew of Jeffrey Epstein–related documents that could implicate others is the same Chevron-connected judge who threw the book at Steven Donziger. She has another potential conflict...

Comes after Dershowitz claimed federal judges "are protecting people" by sealing material.

Preska's seal orders have been vacated and the material is now set to be reviewed. Will Preska be the one to again decide what does & doesn't go public?
jacobin.com/2025/07/epst...

Among other things, the judge, Loretta Preska, bought an $8.7 million Manhattan penthouse on discount from a former exec at Bear Stearns, the firm Epstein was arguably most closely associated with.

This is only the latest conflict-of-interest controversy for Preska:

NEW: A federal judge who sealed a slew of Epstein-related docs is also, through her husband's Wall St-representing law firm, connected to financial institutions tied up in the Epstein scandal. She's also the judge who imprisoned Steven Donziger after he beat Chevron.

Of Course Trump Doesn’t Want to Release the Epstein Files Not only was Trump intimately close to Jeffrey Epstein, but there is a wealth of reporting tying the billionaire pedophile to intelligence circles. Trump is once again protecting the elites he claimed...

All of this was reported mostly in mainstream outlets from 2019 on. You will hear that Epstein's intel ties & his possible blackmail of the elite is just a crazy conspiracy theory cooked up by MAGA, but that is not true.
jacobin.com/2025/07/jeff...

A brief compilation of the reporting & evidence we have of not just Trump's relationship with Epstein, but Epstein's intel ties - including a CBS News producer told by Maxwell that Epstein had tapes of both Trump & Clinton.

A Tale of Two BBBs The enactment of Donald Trump’s horrendous Big Beautiful Bill is an indictment of the Democrats’ decision to split their agenda into two separate bills in 2021. It’s a reminder that Build Back Better’...

In general, when you look at everything Trump & the GOP did to get their BBB over the line, you can't help but suspect they simply cared more about the agenda it contained than Biden & the Dems did about theirs.
jacobin.com/2025/07/trum...