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Last month, two ICE agents showed up to David Streever’s front porch in Rochester, New York, over one strongly worded email he sent to former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Todd Lyons. Now he’s suing the Department of Homeland Security for First Amendment violations.Two agents with Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of ICE, rang Streever’s doorbell on June 23 and left a “WARNING NOTICE” with his wife, which said he was possibly in violation of federal law and that Lyons was “requesting that you promptly remove and/or discontinue the aforementioned behavior.”Streever was in Finland with his daughter at the time. When they returned, federal agents even came to the JFK Airport hotel he stayed at that night and left a note for him at the front desk.The visit came five months after Streever initially sent the email. The lawsuit, filed Monday by the nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, highlights that.“If someone is really threatening a government official, you don’t wait five months to act on it,” Adam Steinbaugh, senior attorney at FIRE, said. “The fact that authorities didn’t respond immediately shows that David presented no threat. This pursuit is designed to intimidate lawful speech, pure and simple.”Streever’s January email to Lyons followed ICE’s killing of Americans Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis.The subject line was “What’s next,” and Streever warned Lyons would be haunted by the shootings.“You will seek to lose yourself, to escape the burden of knowing the truth about yourself,” he wrote. “But wherever you go, you will find yourself. You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.” He also equated Lyons with a Nazi.Streever sent the email on January 26, two days after Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents in Minnesota, and 19 days after Good suffered the same fate.The lawsuit argues that Streever’s email was speech protected under the First Amendment of the Constitution.“Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is actively threatening that freedom, tracking down and retaliating against speakers like Plaintiff David Streever because he exercised his fundamental right to criticize one of the highest-ranking law enforcement officers in the United States,” the suit reads. “ICE’s issuance of formal ‘WARNING NOTICE’ documents to critics who engage in protected speech—and its decision to have federal agents deliver those warnings in person—can have only one purpose: to systemically chill ICE’s critics and coerce them into silence.” Streever said his email came from frustrations with ICE’s violent tactics.“Like many Americans, I was deeply upset after the shootings in Minnesota and I felt compelled to do something,” Streever said in a statement. “Writing an email to the head of ICE seemed like the least I could do to express my sense of outrage. I never dreamed it would lead to a knock on my door by federal officers or descending on my hotel in the dark of night.”It certainly shouldn’t have. Yet this pattern of speech repression has become all too common under the Trump administration, as it has attacked or threatened to attack people for anything that threatens its ideology, whether writing op-ed columns in support of Palestine or criticizing Charlie Kirk.

“The more I read, the more embarrassed I am for everyone involved.” Secondhand humiliation was the looming theme of a group chat on July 3, as friends and I, like the rest of the world, took in the details that emerged from Taylor Swift’s wedding to Travis Kelce inside Madison Square Garden. There was the […]

This year’s World Cup has been unusually thrilling on the field, even by the tournament’s high standards for drama, and has largely gone off without a hitch, despite prior concerns about stadium travel logistics for fans and whether the obscenely expensive matches would sell out. But the Cup has not been without off-field controversy, thanks largely to the Trump administration’s xenophobia. The U.S. blocked a FIFA referee from Somalia from entering the country, and did not allow the Iranian national team to stay in the country for more than one night before its two matches in Los Angeles, forcing them to be based in Tijuana, Mexico (for Iran’s third match, in Seattle, the team was allowed to arrive two nights beforehand, though the team had to leave the country soon after each of their games concluded).Yet those moves, and the unavoidable reality that the principal host nation is run by an authoritarian president, somehow have not sullied the World Cup, which, at its best, serves as a potent display of multiculturalism and global togetherness. Hundreds of thousands of fans from all over the world have been welcomed to the U.S., whose national team includes players who have spent most of their lives living abroad, principally in Europe. No player better represents that World Cup than Folarin Balogun, a star striker at Monaco in France’s top league and the U.S. team’s highest scorer in this tournament. Balogun is a U.S. citizen only because his mother was deemed too pregnant to fly back to England from the U.S. In other words, as many have pointed out, he is precisely the type of birthright citizenship case that Trump wishes to abolish.The team last week won its first knockout game in 24 years because of a goal from Balogun, but he was later given an unduly harsh red card, which triggered a series of events that have engulfed FIFA in particular, and the World Cup in general, in a typically Trumpian controversy that may sour the event from here on out.That red card carried a one-match ban for Balogun, with no chance to appeal, thereby keeping him out of Monday night’s game against Belgium in the round of 16. But on Sunday, FIFA announced that it had effectively lifted his punishment, allowing him to play while on probation of sorts. Why did FIFA do this? Because they can, mostly. There is a statute in their rule book that allows them to suspend red cards whenever they want, a power they used ahead of this tournament so that several players—notably global superstar Cristiano Ronaldo—could play in opening matches that they otherwise would have had to sit out. FIFA has a long history of bending the rules in the interest of providing the best possible on-field entertainment.Which is just another way of saying that FIFA doesn’t care nearly as much about the integrity of the sport as it does about money. The success of the U.S. Men’s National Team is important to FIFA because the U.S. is the tournament’s main host and source of revenue. Because of the cost of tickets and the Trump administration’s nativist immigration policies, U.S. residents are also the people buying the most tickets. So it’s in FIFA’s financial interest to keep the U.S. happy. FIFA surely knew that wiping out Balogun’s red card, even though the ref’s decision was widely considered wrong, would be controversial—but it bet that ultimately people would forget about it because during World Cups, the on-field action almost always prevails over off-field issues. That might have been the case here, except for one thing: Trump. The Balogun reversal has grown into an international incident largely because, as The New York Times reported on Sunday, the president intervened on behalf of the USMNT with a call to FIFA president Gianni Infantino. By Monday, Trump was patting himself on the back. “I asked for a review by FIFA. I spoke to a man who’s highly respected.… I’m the one who got them to do it,” he said at a press conference. “It was not Biden, Biden was asleep!”The Royal Belgian Football Association appealed the decision, but FIFA on Monday afternoon rejected it. The Union of European Football Associations, Europe’s governing body, has come to Belgium’s defense, turning this into a nasty proxy fight. The USMNT is caught in the middle.The reversal of Balogun’s suspension is part of a long history of FIFA inserting itself to protect its own interests. But what makes this decision different, and what has elevated it into a profound crisis, is Trump’s involvement. Even with the USMNT’s on-field success, the administration has largely kept quiet, at least by its standards. Administration officials, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have attended games, but the president has been relatively quiet.But that was never going to last. Trump had long planned to not just attend the Cup final but to hand the trophy to the captain of the winning team. The controversy over Balogun’s suspension, it seems, was too good for him to stay away, especially since it allowed him to take credit for an outcome that FIFA probably would have arrived at without the U.S.’s intense lobbying campaign. This is also an opportunity for Trump to recite his familiar list of grievances—and not just against Biden. In the press conference on Monday, Trump said, referring to Belgium, “If they beat us [with Balogun], they can be really proud. The other way, if they beat us, we’ll say—I say it was rigged, just like the election was rigged in 2020, but I won’t get into that.” We have grown used to rolling our eyes when Trump says such things, but for him to utter this familiar lie in the context of the World Cup makes one’s blood boil anew. Trump has now poisoned a USMNT that had, until this point, remarkably good vibes. This was a team that you could get behind regardless of your political allegiance. It was also a team that was truly multicultural, and that, like most of this tournament, has not fallen victim to America’s toxic politics or FIFA’s blatant corruption. No more. FIFA’s opaque, rotten bureaucracy has aligned with Trump’s megalomania for a perfect storm that has the power to wreck this World Cup, at least for fans of the underdogs in red, white, and blue.

I recently had the chance to send a message to the President of Ireland, Her Excellency Catherine Connolly. President Connolly is a vocal supporter of Palestine and remains one of the few European heads of state to explicitly accuse Israel of carrying out a genocide in Gaza. She has a long history of this advocacy; [...]

The bizarre affinity of Trump for the great progressive president The post Trump and Teddy Roosevelt: Lost in the Badlands appeared first on The American Prospect.

Season after season, year after year, the tides have come in and out of New York Harbor. Long before the name “New York” had ever been spoken, Lenape dugouts crossed these currents. It was on these waters that tall masts crested the horizon, captained by explorers like [Giovanni da] Verrazzano and [Henry] Hudson, after whom [...]

Over the last four years, Colombia has emerged as one of the most vocal advocates for the world to transition away from fossil fuels. Under the leadership of leftist politician and economist Gustavo Petro, it became the first major oil-and-gas producer to commit to halting all new fossil-fuel expansion. In April, the nation hosted a first-of-its-kind meeting of [...]