SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
donald trump
'What People Have Feared': ICE Impersonator Zip-Tied Woman and Stole $1,000
"Any criminal can now put on a mask, say he is from ICE, and conduct any crime," one group warned.
Jun 10, 2025
"This is what people have feared."
That was how American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick responded on social media Monday to reporting that a man impersonating a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent zip-tied a woman working as a cashier at a cash-only auto repair shop in Philadelphia and stole around $1,000 on Sunday afternoon.
The incident comes as Republican U.S. President Donald Trump tries to deliver on his campaign promise of mass deportations, sparking protests, including in Los Angeles, where Trump has deployed Marines and federalized the California National Guard—a move the state's Democratic governor and attorney general are challenging in court.
"Expect many, many more stories like this. The Trump administration is a criminal enterprise, emboldening street crimes and white collar crimes."
"He kept saying he is immigration officer," the 50-year-old cashier in Philadelphia, a legal U.S. resident who is from the Dominican Republic, toldFox 29's Steve Keeley. Showing the journalist her bruises, she said that the man tied her arms behind her back, and "every time I tried to turn around to look at his face, he twisted me around roughly."
Although the shop is next to the Philadelphia Police 15th District, it took over two hours before the victim could connect with law enforcement. Police said in a Tuesday statement that the man, who escaped in a white Ford cargo van with red dashes around the middle, remains at large.
Police released surveillance photos of the van and the man, described as a white male in a "black baseball cap with U.S. flag on the front, black sunglasses, black long sleeve shirt, wearing gloves, black tactical vest with 'Security Enforcement Agent,' and dark green cargo pants."
In response to Keeley's social media posts about the robbery, journalist Ryan Grim said early Tuesday that "this type of crime is now possible because ICE agents insist on going around like masked thugs."
Author and Philadelphia native Robert A. Karl warned: "Expect many, many more stories like this. The Trump administration is a criminal enterprise, emboldening street crimes and white collar crimes."
The social media account of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota's Senate District 45 similarly said: "Any criminal can now put on a mask, say he is from ICE, and conduct any crime (including kidnapping and rape) and people are expected to just stand aside? Actual law enforcement DOES NOT conceal their identity and act like street thugs while doing their job. This must stop!"
Keep ReadingShow Less
The L.A. Awakening: Repression, Resistance, and the Possibility of Radical Democratic Renewal
It is increasingly clear that the real threat lies not with the person crossing a border, working a warehouse shift, or marching in the street—but with the structure that enriches itself by sowing division and suppressing dissent.
Jun 10, 2025
The crackle of tear gas canisters and the rumble of tactical boots on asphalt echoed through Los Angeles this week as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), backed by federal agents and U.S. Marines, descended upon protestors decrying a sweeping series of immigration raids. What began as a protest against ICE quickly exploded into a broader protest. Progressive community members of all types flooded intersections, blocked freeways, and surrounded detention centers in a show of mass resistance. Federal forces responded with mass arrests, tear gas, and brute force—but the crowds didn’t disperse. They stayed. They returned. They grew.
The targets of the raids revealed the intent. ICE didn’t go after exploitative bosses or the companies violating labor laws. Instead, they rounded up garment workers, day laborers, and food delivery drivers—those whose labor keeps the city alive but whose status makes them vulnerable. Meanwhile, as Congress quietly pushed forward legislation providing major tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy, the manufactured “immigration emergency” shifted public attention away from growing inequality and back toward fear and division. The raids were less about enforcement than they were about distraction—shaping a narrative, channeling anger, and justifying control.
But this time, the usual script isn’t working. Instead of dividing people, the spectacle has clarified the real lines of conflict. Communities once siloed by race, language, or status are joining together—seeing the true threat not in each other but in those who profit from their separation. Warehouse unions, immigrant rights groups, tenant associations, and progressive local officials are increasingly aligned. A shared understanding is taking hold: the enemy is not the worker next to you—it is the elite profiting from your instability.
The movement taking shape in LA is not just a response to injustice. It is the beginning of something more ambitious: a challenge to the foundational myths of American political life.
This is also a stark illustration of the imperial boomerang in motion: the tools of empire—surveillance, militarized policing, psychological control—returning home. What was once deployed to suppress resistance abroad is now turned inward. But rather than subdue, this backlash is catalyzing a broader awakening. The brutality in Los Angeles has illuminated the deeper architecture of repression, drawing new political lines that unite across race, status, and geography. From LA to Gaza, the common thread is clear: state violence serves elite power, and the response from below is no longer fragmented. It is building into a global resistance that sees through the old divisions and names its adversary plainly—oligarchy.
Oligarchic Backlash and the Authoritarian-Financial Complex
President Trump’s activation of the National Guard under Title 10 and his readiness to deploy Marines from Camp Pendleton was never about public safety. It was a choreographed assertion of power meant to produce fear and reaffirm control. Helicopters circled. Tactical units patrolled neighborhoods. Cable news cycled images of property damage while ignoring the scenes of solidarity unfolding at the ground level.
This is how the authoritarian-financial complex operates—a system in which political repression and economic extraction are not separate but interdependent. Moments of unrest become business opportunities: more riot gear, more surveillance contracts, more privatized detention. Each crackdown funds the next. Each protest becomes another justification to expand the reach of state and corporate power.
Nowhere, perhaps, is the fusion of political repression and economic opportunism more blatant than in the machinery of immigration enforcement. The so-called “immigration crisis” has become a lucrative engine for private interests, with for profit prison companies expanding detention capacity well beyond ICE’s funded limits. The recent spike to over 48,000 detainees—far exceeding official capacity—is not a logistical error; it’s a business model. These companies are not just building prisons, they are lobbying for policies that fill them. Trump’s push to detain 100,000 people, coupled with doubled arrest quotas for ICE agents, has created an insatiable demand for space, surveillance, and services. Private contractors now profit not only from detention but from the entire apparatus of deportation—transportation, medical care, legal processing, and data collection—embedding their profit margins deep into the logic of state violence.
This financialization of immigration control explains why enforcement is not designed to succeed, but to persist. The spectacle of militarized raids and mass detentions serves a dual function: it energizes a political base while funneling billions in public money to politically connected firms. It’s no coincidence that watchdog agencies overseeing detention conditions were recently gutted, just as complaints of medical neglect and overcrowding mount. Nor is it accidental that local police forces, through programs like 287(g), are being deputized into ICE’s mission—blurring the line between civil enforcement and criminal policing, eroding community trust, and diverting resources from genuine public safety. This is not about border security; it’s about embedding a permanent state of exception, where fear and control are monetized, and immigrant lives are raw material for profit.
In Los Angeles, this convergence was unmistakable. While federal agents arrested undocumented workers, not one exploitative employer faced charges. The very actors enabling and profiting from illegal labor practices were shielded. The crackdown revealed the true purpose of enforcement: to preserve a system of racialized labor and elite impunity. But instead of breaking public resolve, the repression fueled it. Community leaders who might once have stood apart are now strategizing together. City council members are now publicly calling Trump’s actions “purposefully inflammatory”. The backlash is becoming organized—and political.
Anti-Oligarchic Backlash
The tactics on display in LA were not improvised. They were imported—from battlefields, occupied zones, and foreign policy handbooks. For decades, the U.S. honed its techniques of control overseas. Now, the same playbook—complete with unmarked vehicles, psychological warfare, and militarized response teams—is being applied domestically. This is the imperial boomerang: tactics of colonial dominance turned inward.
But as with foreign occupations, brute force rarely produces lasting submission. Instead, it deepens opposition. In LA, it is catalyzing an unprecedented alignment. Labor unions are holding joint press conferences with immigration organizers. Neighborhood coalitions are coordinating transportation and legal aid for arrestees. Local politicians are being forced to publicly clarify their loyalties: will they support their constituents, or will they remain silent in the face of elite-led repression?
Street actions are converging with union demands, tenant struggles, and local policy fights. Coalitions are being built not around identity alone, but around material interest and shared opposition to oligarchic control.
Mayor Karen Bass’s denunciation of the federal intervention sharpened the political meaning of the crackdown. Framing Los Angeles as a "test case" for the erosion of local authority, Bass exposed the authoritarian logic at work: not the restoration of order, but the imposition of federal dominance through manufactured crisis. Bass’s warning cuts through the noise: Los Angeles wasn’t descending into chaos—it was pushed. The ICE raids didn’t restore order; they shattered it, unleashing fear across communities, including among legal residents. This wasn’t enforcement—it was the imperial boomerang in action. Tactics honed abroad to control foreign populations are now being used at home to fracture civic life and neutralize dissent. Under the guise of national security, federal power bypassed local authority, transforming the city into a living laboratory for domination.
Governor Gavin Newsom’s decision to sue the Trump administration marks an even sharp escalation in the standoff, transforming the crisis into a battle over who holds real authority in a democratic society. By calling the federal deployment of the National Guard “illegal” and “unconstitutional,” Newsom exposed the move as a naked power grab—an attempt to override state control and impose federal force without consent. His defiance was visceral: “Arrest me,” he dared Trump’s border czar. This isn’t just legal pushback—it’s political resistance at the highest level, signaling that California won’t quietly submit to Washington’s manufactured chaos.
The backlash in Los Angeles is not isolated. Across the country, cities like San Francisco have become flashpoints for parallel demonstrations, where thousands marched peacefully in solidarity with immigrant communities and in defiance of federal raids. The widespread mobilizations—from San Francisco’s Mission District to streets in New York, Atlanta, and Seattle—underscore that this is not merely a local crisis but a national awakening. What is unfolding is a geographically diffuse yet politically unified resistance to the authoritarian-financial complex—one that links neighborhoods, cities, and struggles under a shared call for justice and accountability.
More profoundly, this moment is giving rise to a new sense of political identity. An identity not based on citizenship or party, but on a shared understanding of how power operates. It is increasingly clear that the real threat lies not with the person crossing a border, working a warehouse shift, or marching in the street—but with the structure that enriches itself by sowing division and suppressing dissent. The very tools of imperial control that were meant to fragment and subdue are now forging a unified opposition—turning the boomerang's trajectory from division into solidarity, from repression into resistance against the oligarchy itself.
Reclaiming Democratic Power
The movement taking shape in LA is not just a response to injustice. It is the beginning of something more ambitious: a challenge to the foundational myths of American political life. People are beginning to realize that democracy, as it has been practiced, too often serves as a tool of preservation—not transformation. But this moment is shifting that understanding.
The bipartisan oligarchy is cracking, and a new political line is emerging—between those who serve concentrated power and those who challenge it.
As political theorist Camila Vergara argues, real democracy must be plebeian—built from below, driven by those excluded from traditional power. In LA, that principle is being tested. Street actions are converging with union demands, tenant struggles, and local policy fights. Coalitions are being built not around identity alone, but around material interest and shared opposition to oligarchic control.
This uprising is also forcing a reckoning within the Democratic Party. For too long, party leaders have paid lip service to justice while quietly enabling enforcement budgets and border expansion. Now, protestors are demanding clarity: who are you with? Those who remain silent risk political irrelevance. The bipartisan oligarchy is cracking, and a new political line is emerging—between those who serve concentrated power and those who challenge it.
A new democratic force is awakening. And it is not going back to sleep.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Sudan Crisis and America's Complicity: When Corruption Fuels Atrocity
The world is watching. So are the people of Sudan. The question is whether the United States will choose complicity—or conscience. We must act now.
Jun 10, 2025
In a world deluged with crises—each vying for our limited attention—the catastrophe unfolding in Sudan has remained largely invisible to the American public. Yet, by almost any measure, it is among the most severe humanitarian emergencies of our time. Over 30 million people—two-thirds of Sudan’s population—now require humanitarian support. More than 12 million have been displaced, and famine threatens to claim countless lives. This is not a distant tragedy; it is a crisis in which American policy and the interests of American capitalists are deeply entangled.
Now, Congress is poised to vote on a set of resolutions that could finally interrupt the United States’ role in fueling this disaster. You can call your Senator and ask them to support S.J.Res.51, S.J.Res.52, S.J.Res.53, and S.J.Res.54—the Joint Resolutions of Disapproval by Senator Chris Murphy et. al. that would block more than $3.5 billion in proposed arms sales to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar. The Congressional Switchboard is at 202-224-3121.
This legislation is likely to come up this week and that makes this a rare moment of real leverage for American activists and concerned citizens. The urgency is clear: unless Congress acts, the U.S. risks deepening its complicity in Sudan’s suffering.
At the epicenter of Sudan’s unraveling is the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group whose origins trace back to the notorious Janjaweed militias involved in the Darfur genocide in the early 2000s. The RSF has been implicated in a series of systematic atrocities: targeted ethnic violence, mass killings, forced displacement, and widespread sexual violence. Investigations by the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International have all pointed to the same grim conclusion: the RSF’s actions constitute war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and, in the assessment of the U.S. State Department, genocide.
The mechanics of how these atrocities are sustained have already come into focus. According to Amnesty International, recently manufactured Emirati armored personnel carriers are now in the hands of the RSF. Flight data and satellite imagery have revealed a pattern: cargo planes departing from the UAE, landing at remote airstrips in Chad, and then offloading weapons and equipment that would soon appear on the front lines in Sudan. A New York Times investigation concluded that the UAE was “expanding its covert campaign to back a winner in Sudan, funneling money, weapons and, now, powerful drones” to the RSF.
What makes this all the more alarming is that the UAE is one of America’s closest military partners—and a major recipient of U.S. arms. Despite repeated assurances to Washington that it would not arm Sudan’s belligerents, the UAE has continued these transfers, as confirmed by the Biden Administration in one of its last acts as well as by members of Congress.
There is, however, another angle to this story—an angle that speaks to the corrosion of U.S. foreign policy by incredibly narrow financial interests. President Donald Trump and his family have cultivated deep financial ties with both the UAE and Qatar. The UAE has invested $2 billion in a Trump family crypto venture; Qatar has bestowed a $400 million on that luxury aircraft everyone’s heard about, intended for the U.S. presidential fleet, in a gesture that blurs the line between diplomacy and personal favor. These transactions are not just unseemly; they are emblematic of this new era in which U.S. foreign policy is increasingly shaped by the private interests of a handful of oligarchs.
To call this “kleptocracy” is not hyperbole. The intertwining of arms sales, foreign influence, and personal enrichment undermines both U.S. standing and the interests of the average American. Each weapon sold, each deal brokered, risks making the United States more complicit in the suffering of Sudan’s civilians.
To call this “kleptocracy” is not hyperbole. The intertwining of arms sales, foreign influence, and personal enrichment undermines both U.S. standing and the interests of the average American.
The Sudan crisis is a reminder that America’s actions abroad are neither abstract nor inconsequential—and all the uniqueness of the Trump 2.0 administration hasn’t changed that. U.S. policies still reverberate in the lives of millions. As citizens, we have a responsibility to demand that our leaders act not out of expedience or self-interest, but out of a sense of justice and human dignity. With a congressional vote imminent, the window for meaningful action is open—but it is closing fast.
The world is watching. So are the people of Sudan. The question is whether the United States will choose complicity—or conscience. Please call your Senators today at 202-224-3121.Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular