Sameer Ashar

Defend the sacred

Powerful work

I’m Not Done With You | Mary Turfah You cannot harm a corpse, though you can use it to harm others.

In Gaza, Israel takes truckloads of Palestinian bodies for DNA testing, to make sure they are not Israeli. They seldom return them. Mary Turfah examines what they are doing with the dead, how it structures Israeli power, and why they get away with it.

The Difference That ICE Watchers Are Making in Minnesota

Good piece by @chashomans.bsky.social tracing the lineage of ICE-watching to BPP and AIM www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/u...

Also the work of @marissaesque.bsky.social, e.g. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Prefigurative legality in action

mitpress.mit.edu/978026253978...

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

For those commenting on the agents' surnames.

This was the search that yielded Laura Rosenbury?

Every social theory undergirding Trumpism has been broken on the steel of Minnesotan resolve. The multiracial community in Minneapolis was supposed to shatter. It did not. It held until Bovino was forced out of the Twin Cities with his long coat between his legs. The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.

Last week in Minnesota, I watched ordinary people risk their lives to protect their neighbors. In the process, they not only won a significant—though not final—victory against authoritarianism, they proved virtually every MAGA social theory wrong. (gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

America's "dual state" is a racial state ICE's terrors draw on an American traditions of racial violence

David French argued Renee Good's murder is an example of the US having two sytems of law: orderly for friends & belligerent for foes. @victorerikray.bsky.social corrects him: US law has always promised fascism for non-whites & those who stand with them.

groupthreat.com/p/americas-d...

EMERGENCY RENT FUND: Support Workers in Minnesota Rent is due FEBRUARY 1st. Support our Emergency Rent Fund for Minnesotan workers and families facing eviction due to ICE Raids. We are calling for a rent moratorium, but regardless of if that happens ...

Trusted friends in Minneapolis tell me that this fund is supporting many people but does not have enough money. If you can give, please do: chuffed.org/project/1671...

It’s always funny when palantir employees discover that they work at palantir

Introducing Shift Notes Send me notes about work

new year, new project

Enforcement Regime | Michael Macher Trump's immigration crackdown marks a dramatic change in the domestic security apparatus, yet its origins lie in a longstanding bipartisan consensus.

I wrote about the longstanding dynamics that produced our terrifying present for @phenomenalworld.bsky.social.

Video shows Minneapolis ICE shooting that left woman dead An ICE agent is claiming self-defense after shooting and killing a woman in Minneapolis. Eyewitnesses tell a different story.

"Witnesses said a doctor was at the scene and tried to help the woman who had been shot, but the ICE agents refused to let the doctor in to help. Up to 15 minutes later, an ambulance arrived but was blocked by ICE vehicles that had occupied the street."

Important question. See @tonyabrito.bsky.social @ksabbeth.bsky.social Jessica Steinberg, Lauren Sudeall, Racial Capitalism in the Civil Courts for one among many exemplary answers in poverty law, race and law, and LPE literatures: columbialawreview.org/content/raci...

And, separately, it will be important as public anger rightly increases, for all the Minnesota and national Democrats--who boosted ICE, celebrated arming and growing ICE, taunted Republicans for being too weak on immigration enforcement, and bragged about building this fascist infrastructure--to...

“For institutions, private and public, that have power consolidation as a primary goal, it is useful to have a language for speaking about the technologies that they are using to structure people’s lives and experiences which discourages attempts to understand or engage those technologies.”

The Moral Stupefaction of the American Public Trump’s actions are illegal, yes. Worse than that, they are wrong—precisely what the legality debate is meant to obscure.

“The longer Americans indulge this preference for the language of the law over morality, the weaker their moral voice becomes. They lose the ability to say, forthrightly, that what the Trump administration has done is cold-blooded murder for which they and their partisans should be ashamed.”

This is the clearest articulation of what is happening to entire domains of research for no reason except anti-intellectualism:

“It took us a long time to create the institution and put a lot of work into that, but it's vastly, vastly easier to destroy an institution than to create it,” Marks said

Madison not only thought noncitizens had constitutional rights, he wrote that deportation was such a severe punishment that the federal government had no power to do it absent a war or jury trial guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment

“the task before us is to remake the very social relations from which these fundamental problems emerge“

Parent advocates have been fighting school pushout since the first school desegregation order went into effect. This early history can teach us so much today. I’ve been thinking about writing this article since litigating desegregation cases at @legaldefensefund.bsky.social and it’s finally out!

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"The entire project of the US right wing, is re-establishing the permissions structures [for] the persecution and dehumanization of hundreds of millions of people, specifically so that violence, whether vigilante, interpersonal or state violence, can be used to discipline... everyone it sees fit."

If tomorrow they made being undocumented a felony, it wouldn’t justify any of this. Things that are harmless or even good can be criminalized.

The right figured out long ago that if you contest something it is then contestable.

LPE 2.0: A New Association to Meet the Times As the Trump administration attempts to suppress critical inquiry and operate outside of conventional legal boundaries, the work of LPE scholars, organizers, and practitioners has never been more…

This has been a labor of love! Read on to learn about the new, democratic, membership-based structure. Join as a member — and come to our first annual conference in Richmond in Feb! 😊