Independent Media

The latest reliable estimates of the death toll in Iran’s recent nationwide protests are growing, potentially reaching the tens of thousands. Some estimates place the number of civilians killed by government forces at 30,000 or more. We play a rare eyewitness account of the deadly massacre of protesters in Rasht, Iran, and speak to the Iranian filmmaker and political dissident Sepideh Farsi, who says U.S. military intervention “would only worsen the situation.” She warns that President Trump’s interest in U.S. military action on the country is “for business,” and “not for Iranian people.”

An estimated 350,000 Haitian immigrants are set to lose their temporary protected status, or TPS, on February 3, 2026, after President Trump signed an executive order to revoke their TPS shortly after coming into office. TPS holders live and work in the United States legally. During the 2024 presidential election, candidates Donald Trump and JD Vance spread racist invective about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Illinois. Now ICE is reportedly planning to begin extensive raids on Haitian American communities like Springfield. “We are living under a cloud of terror,” says Guerline Jozef, the co-founder and executive director of Haitian Bridge Alliance. Her organization is mounting a legal challenge against the Trump administration’s revocation of TPS.

“I’m anxious every day,” says Maryse Balthazar, a former journalist in Haiti who fled the country after its devastating 2010 earthquake. She now works as an elder care nurse in Florida. She worries about being separated from her U.S. citizen daughter, and for the safety of her son, also a TPS holder, if he were deported to Haiti, a country currently struggling with organized crime and political unrest. Balthazar says that if she were to lose her TPS, “it will be like another earthquake to me.”

The families of two men from Trinidad killed in an October U.S. missile strike in the Caribbean are suing the Trump administration for wrongful death and extrajudicial killing. The families of 26-year-old Chad Joseph and 41-year-old Rishi Samaroo say the two men were returning home from fishing and farming in Venezuela, not smuggling drugs as the Trump administration has claimed without evidence. Four others on the same boat were also killed. In all, at least 125 people have been killed in the unprecedented U.S. bombings of civilian boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean. It’s “the latest example of the Trump administration’s total mockery of, contempt for the post-World World II human rights consensus, where nations are constrained by law and not mere might,” says attorney Baher Azmy, who is representing the Joseph and Samaroo families in their lawsuit. He calls their deaths “killings for sport and spectacle,” adding that they are part of a wider pattern of federal overreach that can be seen in the administration’s domestic crackdown on protesters and journalists. Azmy warns that the excessive use of force by federal agents in Minneapolis may be “a dry run” for “deployment of troops during elections.”

In the aftermath of the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, Venezuela has agreed to submit a monthly budget to the Trump administration, which will release money from an account funded by oil sales. It’s a deal for the interim government led by Delcy Rodriguéz that historian Greg Grandin calls “governing under the blade.” In a further shift away from the nation-building foreign policy of the past several decades of U.S. power, “what the United States is planning for Venezuela is basically to run the country as a vassal state,” he says. “This is an arrangement with transactional details that we’ve never seen before.”

• Senate Democrats & Trump Reach Deal to Split Off Funding DHS to Avert Shutdown
• Minneapolis Mayor Calls for Nationwide End to "ICE Siege"
• "No, No. Not at All": Trump Denies He Plans to Pull Back Federal Agents from Minnesota
• Protesters Call for National Shutdown Today to Protest ICE
• Sen. Collins Claims DHS Has Paused Operation Catch of the Day
• Financial Times: Private Companies Reaped $22B in Contracts with ICE & CBP Last Year
• Iran's Top Diplomat in Turkey as Trump Keeps Threatening to Attack Iran
• U.S. Lifts Some Sanctions on Venezuela After Interim Leader Signs Bill Opening Door for Private Oil Firms
• Trump Threatens to Impose Tariffs on Nations Who Provide Oil to Cuba
• Trump Claims Russia Will Pause Attacks on Ukrainian Cities
• Illinois Sheriff's Deputy Sentenced to 20 Years in Prison for Shooting Sonya Massey
• Trump Taps Kevin Warsh to Be Federal Reserve Chair
• Trump & Sons Sue IRS & Treasury for $10B over Tax Return Leaks
• Journalists Don Lemon & Georgia Fort Arrested for Covering Church Protest in St. Paul

ICE and CBP are using facial recognition technology to facilitate President Trump’s mass deportation campaign. With a smartphone app, immigration officers can scan faces of people they encounter and quickly search those faces against 200 million images stored in several government databases that are “notoriously error-filled,” according to Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “It’s being used on the street in ways that are dangerous, that are totally unprecedented in this country, and that are, frankly, blatantly illegal,” he adds.

Democracy Now! speaks with Congressmember LaMonica McIver of New Jersey, who is facing up to 17 years in prison stemming from an incident last May when she and two other Democratic congressmembers sought to inspect Delaney Hall, a private prison run by the GEO Group under contract with ICE. The federal government claims McIver assaulted an immigration officer. “I’m not going to let them bully me out of doing my job. I’m just not,” says McIver, who describes conditions at the prison as dismal. “There was an entire riot at the same detention center because detainees were not getting food.”

Liam Ramos, the 5-year-old from Minnesota who was detained last week after coming home from preschool, is being held in the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. Congressmembers who visited Liam report that has been depressed and hasn’t been eating well. Javier Hidalgo, legal director at RAICES, has worked with families at the detention center for years. “We often hear about food with bugs or worms in it, half-frozen food being given, guards yelling at parents if their kids are making too much noise or they’re asking for an extra apple,” says Hidalgo. “Reform is inadequate. It just needs to be shut down.”

When attorney Eric Lee visited the detention center, he observed immigrant families holding a protest to demand the release of immigrant children. “The Democratic Party is as equally responsible as Trump for creating the infrastructure of mass family and adult detention in this country, and it is necessary that this protest movement stay a hundred miles away from the Democratic Party and develop its orientation to the working class,” says Lee, whose clients have been detained at the ICE jail since June.

• DHS Places Two Agents Who Killed Alex Pretti on Administrative Leave
• Trump Claims Congressmember Omar Staged Attack Against Herself
• Congressmember Castro Meets with 5-Year-Old Liam Ramos and His Father at Dilley Detention Center
• Autopsy Finds Cuban Immigrant in ICE Custody Died of Homicide
• DHS Urges FEMA Staff to Avoid Phrases Like "Watch Out for ICE" to Prevent Memes
• Senate Democrats Threaten to Block Funding for DHS
• FBI Raids Election Office in Georgia's Fulton County
• Federal Reserve Leaves Interest Rates Unchanged, Resisting Trump's Pressure to Lower Them
• Secretary of State Rubio Refuses to Rule Out Further U.S. Attacks on Venezuela
• Trump Threatens Another U.S. Military Strike on Iran
• Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Sets Doomsday Clock to 85 Seconds to Midnight
• Russia Launches Wave of Attacks Across Ukraine
• Spain Announces Amnesty for Nearly 500,000 Undocumented Immigrants
• Dozens Confirmed Dead Due to Extreme Cold Weather Conditions Across the U.S.
• Bruce Springsteen Releases New Song "Streets of Minneapolis"

We speak with Congressmember Delia Ramirez following an attack on her colleague, Congressmember Ilhan Omar, who was sprayed with an unknown foul-smelling liquid while speaking at a town hall event in Minneapolis on Tuesday. “This is a direct influence of what you’re seeing from this president,” Ramirez says, criticizing Trump’s policies and his long history of attacking Omar in particular.

Ramirez also discusses her efforts in Congress to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Ramirez says Noem’s agency is “rotten from the inside out” and must be completely dismantled. “You have an agency killing people, executing them, lying about it, and then talking about investigating themselves while operating with impunity.”

As President Trump shakes up the leadership of his immigration crackdown in Minnesota following the killing of ICU nurse Alex Pretti by Border Patrol agents, we examine the expanding role of the agency in interior enforcement.

Independent journalist Todd Miller says the Trump administration’s immigration operations in U.S. cities are an “extension” of “policies and practices that we’ve been seeing in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands now for decades,” characterizing Border Patrol culture as one of rampant abuse and impunity.

We also speak with Jenn Budd, a former Border Patrol agent who quit in 2001 and is now an immigrant rights activist. She disputes the claim that recent violence by CBP staff is a result of insufficient training. “The management of the Border Patrol has been corrupt for many generations, and then after 9/11 we just gave them money with little accountability and let them design their own accountability systems,” says Budd.

Minnesota Congressmember Ilhan Omar was sprayed with an unknown liquid Tuesday during a town hall event in Minneapolis. Omar has long been a favorite target of President Donald Trump and his supporters, and the attack on her comes just days after Florida Congressmember Maxwell Frost was punched by a Trump supporter while attending the Sundance Film Festival.

“It’s truly heartbreaking, this moment we find ourselves in,” Omar said when she resumed her remarks, discussing the Trump administration’s violent immigration crackdown. “But if we know anything about U.S. history, it’s that everything is temporary, and we will find our way out of this.”

As outrage grows across the country over the Trump administration’s deadly immigration crackdown in Minnesota, we speak with reporter Drew Harwell, who recently reported on the government’s effort to hire thousands more ICE agents. According to an internal strategy document uncovered by The Washington Post, the federal government plans to spend $100 million over a one-year period in a “wartime recruitment” push, including online targeting of UFC fans, gun-rights supporters, military enthusiasts and more. Meanwhile, the administration’s online messaging has repeatedly echoed white nationalist slogans.

“They’re spending a lot of money on it, so you’re just seeing it everywhere on social media now. And the question is: Who are they trying to attract?” says Harwell.

• Congressmember Ilhan Omar Attacked at Town Hall in Minneapolis
• CBP Report: Two Federal Officials Fired Weapons at Alex Pretti in Fatal Shooting
• Federal Judge Temporarily Blocks Trump Admin from Deporting Liam Ramos and His Father
• 5-Year-Old Girl Deported to Honduras Despite Being U.S. Citizen
• Dozens of Anti-ICE Protesters Arrested in Manhattan After Occupying Lobby of Hilton Hotel
• ICE Agents to Join U.S. Delegation to the Winter Olympics in Italy
• CNN: Trump Admin Planning to Establish a CIA Presence in Venezuela
• Families of Two Trinidadian Men Killed in U.S. Strikes Sue Trump Administration
• Trump: "Cuba Will Be Failing Pretty Soon"
• Justice Department to Finish Releasing Epstein Files Soon
• South Carolina Measles Outbreak Reaches Nearly 800 Cases

As calls grow to defund and abolish ICE, author Alec Karakatsanis warns that activists should take care to not fall for “copaganda,” which “takes ordinary people who are outraged over what’s happening and converts them into supporting meaningless reforms that actually don’t reduce the size or power or budget of these bureaucracies.” Karakatsanis is the author of Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News. He breaks down many of the myths about crime and policing that arose in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests over the past decade, including the reformist myth of police body cameras and the so-called crime wave. Police-tracked crime, “contrary to what you have been told in the news every single day for the last several years, is actually down,” says Karakatsanis, but fearmongering mainstream media narratives are “designed to make people so afraid that they support repressive institutions that infringe on their own liberty, that don’t make them safer, but that give people in power in our society more ability to control and manipulate.”

ICE is asserting federal immigration officers have the power to forcibly enter homes without a judicial warrant. “That’s just not true,” says legal scholar Stephen Vladeck, who says the claim directly violates the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. “What we’re really seeing here is an effort to twist a handful of old cases that have recognized circumstances in which the government doesn’t need a judicial warrant to enter a home.” Vladeck also encourages witnesses to share video evidence of federal agents’ abuses to support future prosecution efforts.

A federal judge in Minnesota heard arguments Monday in a lawsuit filed by city and state officials to halt Trump’s deployment of thousands of federal immigration agents to Minnesota. “The federal government cannot coerce us into doing it their way,” says Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who is part of the group that brought the lawsuit. As the Trump administration continues to obstruct local investigations into the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minnesota this month, we speak to Ellison and Georgetown University law professor Stephen Vladeck to discuss state and federal jurisdiction over investigations and potential prosecutions. Ellison also responds to the announcement that “border czar” Tom Homan is headed to Minnesota to replace U.S. Border Patrol “commander-at-large” Gregory Bovino as the public face of Trump’s immigration enforcement surge.

• Trump Admin Removes Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino from Minnesota
• Minnesota GOP Gubernatorial Candidate Drops Out of Race, Citing Trump's Immigration Crackdown
• Partial Government Shutdown Likely as Senate Dems Refuse to Back Funding Bill over DHS Funding
• Immigrant Families Protest Inside ICE's Detention Facility in Dilley, Texas
• Immigration Agents Detain 2-Year-Old Girl in Minnesota and Her Father
• Israel Recovers Remains of Last Hostage Held in Gaza
• U.N. Says 37,000 Palestinians Forcibly Displaced in the Occupied West Bank in 2025
• Human Rights Activists News Agency: Iranian Security Forces Killed 5,777 Protesters in Anti-Gov't Protests
• ICC Rules Former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte Can Stand Trial
• South Sudan's Military Orders All Civilians and U.N. Personnel to Evacuate Jonglei State
• Over 30,000 Kaiser Permanente Healthcare Workers Go on Strike

Tens of thousands of Minnesotans braved the bitter cold in Minneapolis on Friday to demand ”ICE out.” The march was organized by faith and labor leaders and was accompanied by calls for an economic blackout. Seven hundred businesses reportedly closed in solidarity. Democracy Now!’s John Hamilton filed a report from the streets. John Reuss, an English teacher, said his students are afraid. “The fear is so tangible,” said Reuss. “If we do not shut it down right now, your city is next.”

Civil rights attorney, minister and activist Nekima Levy Armstrong, who was arrested by federal officials for participating in an anti-ICE demonstration at Cities Church in St. Paul, was released from federal custody on Friday. “They have altered the facts, just as they altered my image as a way of trying to criminalize nonviolent, peaceful protests and lawful dissent against their unlawful and unjust actions,” says Armstrong, noting images posted by the Trump administration that digitally altered her to make it appear as if she was sobbing during her arrest.