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First Draft: Randy Too Racist for Republicans?
Zeteo • Feb 18, 2026

First Draft: Randy Too Racist for Republicans?

GOP leaders have nothing to say about the biggest Islamophobe in Congress, at least one famous Republican can still admit slavery was bad, and Trump just deported a sick baby.

Transcript: Minneapolis Mayor to Trump: You Will Never Break Us
New Republic • Feb 18, 2026

Transcript: Minneapolis Mayor to Trump: You Will Never Break Us

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 18 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent. Donald Trump and his border czar, Tom Homan, are claiming that they’re winding down their occupation of Minneapolis and shifting to a more targeted set of operations. It remains to be seen whether that will actually happen or not, but what’s already clear is that the occupation has done immense and lasting damage to that city. Today we’re talking to the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, about what ICE is still doing on the ground right now, what the road back is going to look like, and what really happened between local officials and the Trump administration that led to this promise to wind things down. Mayor Frey, thanks so much for coming on with us today.Mayor Jacob Frey: Thanks so much for having me. Sargent: So, Mayor, a new report in Politico finds that top ICE officials knew as early as March 2025 that use-of-force incidents were soaring among ICE agents. Data at the time indicated that in 2025, such incidents had quadrupled over a comparable period in 2024.Mayor, this is well in advance of the decision to send enormous amounts of federal agents into Minneapolis. And there are no signs ICE took real steps to rein in officers. And, of course, your city paid the price. Your reaction to that?Frey: None of this is at all surprising. Directing agents to use tactics that might ultimately result in a use of force, in fact, will likely result in a use of force. I don’t think it’s entirely wild to see those use-of-force numbers go dramatically up.You’ve got to understand that a lot of these directives are there from the top. It was a decision at some point to bring thousands—tens of thousands—of agents in without a whole lot of training. It was a decision to not ensure that basic constitutional conduct was met. It was a decision to send thousands of ICE agents and Border Patrol into a city like Minneapolis without a clear objective and without tactics that could safely have you arrive at that objective. And so, no, none of this is surprising at all.Sargent: Well, Mayor, the other day, Trump border czar Tom Homan announced that he’s ending the so-called “surge” in Minneapolis. And he said that more than 1,000 agents have left the area and hundreds more will depart in upcoming days. He said a “small security force” will remain.Mayor, are you in the city of Minneapolis okay with what Homan is saying to you both publicly and privately and what he’s doing right now? Is he giving you what you hoped for?Frey: Of course we support an end to Operation Metro Surge. So to the extent that the numbers of federal agents are decreasing substantially in Minneapolis, we support that reduction. To the extent the conduct is changing, we support that shift in conduct—because let’s be real, we have these roving gangs of agents walking down the street indiscriminately picking people up on the basis of Are you Somali? or Are you Latino? and then largely indiscriminate pickups thereafter.So the conduct needed to change; the numbers need to dramatically change. We need ICE out of our city. And so, again, I will believe it when I see it as far as the actual end to Operation Metro Surge, but it is my understanding that we are going in the right direction.Sargent: Right. But just to pick up on what you said there, what exactly is happening right now as we speak? Trump officials have been talking a good game about engaging in more targeted enforcement—seemingly meaning going after, or not going after, non-criminals anymore and only targeting criminals. You mentioned that there is a desire to see less profiling. Right now, who is ICE going after? Is ICE still arresting undocumented immigrants with no criminal records in Minneapolis? Frey: We can’t provide confirmation on the level of documentation for anybody at this point who has been arrested or detained. That’s just not information that we get on a regular basis. That being said, yeah, over the last 24 hours—at least in Minneapolis, the city where I’m the mayor—the number of ICE actions has gone down.Sargent: And do you see a difference in the operations themselves? You mentioned that you want to see them not doing those types of sweeps and not doing this type of profiling. Are you seeing a decline in those things, or a disappearance in them, or are those things still happening?Frey: You know, it’s somewhat subjective, in that obviously we don’t have access to every single action that has taken place. What I can tell you is that over the last, at least 24 hours, the number of actions in Minneapolis has gone down.Sargent: Well, I’m hearing from some people on the ground there that ICE is still harassing schools. Even today, there’ve been some reports—both online and privately to me—that we’re seeing ICE kind of do these weird “roving maneuvers” at schools. Is that right? And what’s the plan to deal with ICE’s activities going forward?Frey: So, I have heard over the last 24, 48 hours of a number of actions that took place in other cities, surrounding suburbs, and exurbs. And so, again, I can’t speak with intelligence to them. That being said, in Minneapolis, yeah, it has gone down.Does that mean it’s been eliminated entirely? No. Again, we will believe it when we see it as far as the removal of these thousands of ICE agents and the end to Operation Metro Surge. As of recent...it appears to be going in the right direction based on the information and the data points that I’ve got.Sargent: I’ve heard that federal agents have at times almost stalked people for the “crime” of filming them and monitoring them. There’s been this talk about ICE keeping a database on protesters and all that. I know that this is anecdotal and subjective, but what’s the reality that you guys have been experiencing? Are you getting reports of agents kind of stalking people for simply monitoring them? Frey: We have certainly gotten reports that people were being stalked, monitored, harassed, hunted down—you know, whatever other superlatives that you want to attach to those words. But the most important word here is unconstitutional.The most important facet here is that the things that were happening, you can’t do—not just in Minneapolis, not based exclusively on any sort of, like, ethical obligation—but you can’t do that because it’s against the Constitution of the United States of America. You can’t simply detain somebody because they look like they’re Somali, or they look like they’re Latino or Southeast Asian. You can’t grab somebody only to find out that they’re a United States citizen and then return them hours or days later. That’s not how it works in the United States.You can’t weaponize the Department of Justice to go after local people to coerce them to enact a national agenda based on a change of localized policies. I mean, that’s the kind of stuff that we’re seeing here. And you should be pissed off about this—not because you’re a Democrat, but because you’re an American. You should be pissed about this if you care about the endurance of our republic and these foundational underpinnings of our democracy. Like, this is what we’re about. This is what it means to be an American.And so, yeah, there were these roaming gangs of ICE agents and Border Patrol that were operating throughout Minneapolis. I mean, you’ve seen this on video. You can believe your own two eyes. Again, are we seeing a decline? It appears to be so. But as far as an end to Operation Metro Surge, we’ll believe it when we see it.Sargent: And so what’s the plan? Presuming that if it does continue, are you guys putting together some kind of contingency plan to deal with that?Frey: Yeah, we’ve got contingency plans on contingency plans at this point. We’ve been operating in an emergency-management mode for a couple of months now. We’ve made sure to have what’s called our National Incident Management System in place. We’ve got what’s called our MAC Group, which is the overarching command structure.And so, yeah, we’ve got a ton of plans if they stay. We’ve got plans if they leave. We need to revitalize our city and get everything back and moving again. And that’s a big part that just needs to happen. We need to get the lights in these businesses turned on and the doors flung open. People need to feel comfortable and safe going back to work and being a customer in the businesses that they love.And I’ll also mention that we’ve got litigation that is taking place, preemptively and responsively. And if for some reason they decide to stay, we’ve got other options that are before us.Sargent: Right. And here’s another element of this that I think is confusing to a lot of Democrats and liberals nationally: Tom Homan’s claim that he’s pulling out of Minneapolis now that he’s “secured a deal” to access local jails. He said that on CBS. That’s been, sort of, the line of the administration—that they’ve gotten success there. What’s the real story? What has been agreed to, exactly? Frey: So I speak for Minneapolis. In Minneapolis: nothing. We haven’t changed any policy. We had a separation ordinance when this whole operation began. We have a separation ordinance now, which says that our cops—our public officials—do not enforce federal immigration law, and we don’t coordinate with agencies as they are doing that.So that was our position. That’s always been our position. And it hasn’t changed a lick. The jails are under a different jurisdiction. That being said, I don’t think the sheriff changed her policy either.Sargent: Yeah. That’s what I was going to ask you about. You must be in touch with the people who control the policies on the jails as well. Is it your understanding that there’s been any change in policy?Frey: My understanding is that there has not been.Sargent: Yeah. So a person might wonder whether Tom Homan is kind of “declaring victory and going home,” if that makes sense.Frey: Yeah. And again, I don’t want to speak for the sheriff; there may be some nuance to this. But any of the things that we agreed to in Minneapolis are things that we would have done with or without ICE. I mean, I’ve said this a thousand times over: If this is about safety, truly, we’re on board.You want to catch murderers and rapists? You want to arrest, prosecute, and charge people that have made our city less safe? Yeah, by all means. But why does the focus have to be on where you’re from? Why can’t it be on the crime that you committed?If the focus is on a crime, then we do work with federal partners. We have extensively worked with federal partners—the FBI, the DEA, the ATF, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office—to successfully drive down crime, for instance, on the North Side to record-low shootings. We are, right now, seeing record-low shootings on the North Side of the city, which has traditionally had too many shootings.And so, yeah, by all means, we do partner when it makes sense. But no, certainly, we do not want to be engaging in the kind of conduct that we have seen over these last couple of months from this federal administration.Sargent: Right. I mean, I think that for most people who are observing this situation, it seems obvious that what ICE is doing—or has been doing, anyway—has nothing to do with targeting criminals. It’s a completely indiscriminate and very broad net that they’re casting. They’re going after people based on appearances, ethnicity, and suspicion.And so one big question, I guess—and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this—is whether ICE will now actually go after criminals and not after non-criminals. What’s your anticipation there? How important is that to you?Frey: Well, I’m never going to predict what ICE is going to do next, because I do not know. Obviously, ICE has done “ICE stuff” for decades in Minneapolis and throughout the country. What we’ve seen over the last couple of months is not ICE doing normal ICE stuff.What we’ve seen over the last couple of months is something wildly different that has terrorized a city, that has led to the detention of United States citizens, and that has ripped apart families. And we’re talking about dragging a pregnant woman through the street and detaining a five-year-old kid who has done nothing—not to mention the extraordinary economic impact: $203 million worth of economic impact in January alone.We’ve had businesses that have closed; small and local businesses have lost more than $80 million in revenue, and hotels have lost quite a bit of revenue. Minneapolis had been on this phenomenal comeback, and obviously we’re going to get right back to it. But for those who say that this ICE invasion was somehow necessary for either the safety or the economic strength of our city, it’s had the exact opposite effect.Sargent: My understanding is the stuff you just said is based on fresh data assessing the impact of the ICE invasion of Minneapolis. Is that right?Frey: Yes.Sargent: This is new information. What’s the full range of the info? Is there any other info you can share? Frey: Let’s see: I’ve got $203 million in economic impact broadly. Small businesses: $80 million. Hotel cancellations: it’s more than $5 million—I mean, I imagine it’s definitely up in the tens of millions.More than 75,000 additional people are facing some form of food insecurity. Thousands of schoolchildren are in need of support services. The city alone has spent about $6 million, mostly in overtime for police. So the impact here is staggering. The impact is very real; it’s tangible; it’s monetary. And countless people throughout our city are feeling that impact.And at the same time, you’ve got a national audience here. I’m sure there’s a lot of people that have been inspired by the incredible Minneapolis community that has stood up for their neighbors in beautiful fashion. I’m sure there are people that have been inspired by the tens of thousands of those that are peacefully protesting—the people that are bringing groceries to a family that is otherwise terrified to go outside, or standing watch over a daycare.If you are looking to help those incredible people out—if you’re looking to stand with Minneapolis—come here. We want to have you. Go shop at some of these awesome Latino-owned businesses. It’s like the easiest ask I could possibly make: Go buy some tamales and eat them. Go buy a beautiful dress; go buy some insurance. I mean, all from some of these Latino-, Somali-, and Southeast Asian-owned businesses...they need your help and they need your support.Stay in a hotel room; spend all your money. Well, have a great time. I mean, I am not from Minneapolis. I grew up on the East Coast, but I ran the Twin Cities Marathon, and I fell in love with this beautiful “City in a Park,” which it is. I moved out here; I’ve got my whole life here. If you want to help, come check out Minneapolis. We’ll roll out the red carpet for you.Sargent: Well, I’ve been up there, and I can attest to its beauty and its way of life as well. All of us here on this show and tons and tons of people nationally have been enormously inspired by what regular people did in that city and what they accomplished in bonding together against this invasion.Can I ask, just for clarification purposes: What’s the source of that data? Where does it come from? Is this a city impact study of some kind? Frey: Yeah, that’s our City of Minneapolis emergency-management study, I believe.Sargent: So it sounds like, just to go big picture, Minneapolis has been deeply wounded in a semi-permanent way by the ICE presence there. I mean, let’s face it: Your city was attacked. It came under fire from an army of heavily armed paramilitary militia members directed by Donald Trump.Can you talk a little bit more about what you think the damage is and how long it’s going to last? And what have you, kind of, concluded about what really happened here?Frey: So, you’re right. The economic impact has, of course, been devastating. The impact on people’s lives, on the mental health of our kids—yeah, obviously a big impact. But I don’t like to use the, kind of, “wounded victim” narrative here, because the people here are tough as hell. I mean, we get knocked down seven times, and we get back up eight.The city, again, before this Operation Metro Surge, was on a massive comeback. Crime was down in virtually every neighborhood, in virtually every category of the city. Business was up. You know, we had a whole lot of great stuff going on. I know that we’re going to get back to that in the immediacy—the very short aftermath following this end to Operation Metro Surge.And there’s a lot of pride right now. So while people are hurt and tired—you’ve had people that have been taken away, family members of immediate families and our collective family—and when that happens, there’s a serious impact, and we’re going to do everything possible to move forward, to recover, and to get justice in every sense of the word. And there is this pride, though, that people do feel right now in who we are and what we are overcoming.Sargent: Mayor, speaking of justice, there was an effort by local officials—you included—to sort of get brought into the investigation into what happened with Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Can you update us on that? What’s going on with those investigations? Is the city getting to be a part of that? What’s the status of all that?Frey: So it was recently announced that the FBI pulled out, and they would not let the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension partner with them in an investigation of Alex Pretti’s killing. And that is deeply concerning, because if you aren’t hiding from anything, then don’t hide from it.The Bureau of Criminal Apprehension at the state level is a very reputable group of experts—legal and law enforcement. This is not like some radical, “way out there” group. This is a group of lawyers and cops, largely. And they have done this work before. They have conducted investigations that have both led to a charge and a lack thereof. So they’re the ones that should be conducting this investigation.At the very least, they should be at the table reviewing all of the evidence that the FBI is seeing. The fact that they are not calls into question the credibility of the investigation itself.Sargent: Is it your sense that the Trump administration simply can’t be trusted to do a fair investigation of this? I mean, after all, they did rush out at the very outset—right after both of these murders—to say that the agents had essentially operated impeccably. Is there any ground, from your point of view, for confidence in any federal government investigation into these shootings?Frey: I think there’s good reason to not trust the way that these investigations are being conducted at this point. Certainly, I don’t want to dictate a conclusion any more than somebody else should, but when you start the investigation out saying, one, that the agent acted purely in self-defense; and two, you say that the victim was a “domestic terrorist”; and three, that’s the level of government that’s going to be running the investigation...you’ve got a problem.I’m not saying that I should be running the investigation. I certainly have an opinion on what happened and why, because I’ve got two eyes—I saw a bunch of videos, you know, I have an opinion, obviously. I have tried not to dictate a conclusion myself. But when you’ve got the entity that is doing the investigation dictating a conclusion? Yeah, that certainly calls it into question.Sargent: Mayor, to close this out, Donald Trump said the other day he had been in touch with you and the governor, and he seemed to suggest that he had made nice with you guys. Have you talked to Donald Trump recently, and is he saying anything remotely conciliatory about what happened?Frey: I’ve not talked to President Trump recently. We had a good and productive conversation back a couple of weeks ago when we did speak. I’ve talked with Border Czar Homan on several occasions, also productive.Look, it seems to be moving in the right direction. We need to—for the sake of our city, for the sake of our residents—we need to keep it moving there. And again, you know, to be very clear: No deal was struck. The policies that we had coming in are exactly the policies that we’ve got going right now.Sargent: Mayor Frey, we all wish your city the best. Thank you so much for coming on with us.Frey: Thanks so much for having me.

Transcript: What Today’s Democrats Can Learn from Jesse Jackson
New Republic • Feb 18, 2026

Transcript: What Today’s Democrats Can Learn from Jesse Jackson

This is a lightly edited transcript of the February 17 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.Perry Bacon: We’re going to talk about Jesse Jackson today. He passed away today, obviously, as you probably saw. We’re going to talk about his life, his legacy, and a little bit about politics of today and what things he did in the 1980s and 1990s might tell us about the future. So Danielle, thanks for joining me.Danielle Wiggins: It’s great to be here. Thank you for the invitation.Bacon: So I want to start with sort of the politics part, for lack of a better way to say that. You wrote this essay in Boston Review that came out earlier this month, and you argued that Democrats today, who are trying to think about where they should go and what they should do, should take some lessons from the ’84 and ’88 campaigns of Reverend Jackson. Talk about what you mean in that context.Wiggins: Yeah, so I wrote that essay in response to a piece by Jacob Grumbach and Adam Bonica that basically argued that the Democrats should abandon what is an increasingly failing policy of moderation, which I happen to agree with. And I came at it through this historical lens by thinking about Jesse Jackson’s critiques of the Democrats’ initial turn to the center in the 1980s during the Reagan era.And I show how Jesse Jackson understood very early on that the people who would be most harmed by moderation, by compromising with conservatism, by compromising with the Reagan administration; the people that would be most harmed by that would be poor minority people, people who were already victims of Reagan’s cuts to social programs and his general politics of moderation.And so I suggest that he offered an alternative vision to the centrist sort of politics that was being proposed by moderate Democrats in the Democratic Leadership Council in the mid-1980s. And it was based really on a social democratic, populist agenda that sought to unite what he called the Rainbow Coalition.He also used the allusion of a quilt. He liked using metaphors quite a bit as the country preacher, but it would unite these disparate groups—obviously racial minorities who he had been organizing for most of his career, but also dispossessed farmers, displaced workers, gay and lesbian populations who were being harmed by Reagan’s ignoring of the AIDS crisis.He also included immigrants and the disabled and environmentalists and young people in this coalition that he called the Rainbow Coalition that was united by a shared grievance and a shared experience of harm by what he called “economic violence.” And he described economic violence as these policies and practices of austerity that really were creating and deepening the wealth gap in the United States in the 1980s. And so he believed that this coalition could be mobilized.And many of them—if we think about African Americans in particular—were demobilized in the Reagan era. They were very turned off by the Jimmy Carter administration and his failure to keep the promises that he had made about full employment and his walking away from a more robust urban economic development program.So they were demobilized by the Carter era and were falling out of political participation, particularly at the national level. And so Jackson believed that these people who had been dejected and demobilized and didn’t see themselves as part of the political populace anymore could be mobilized and could create a coalition that would be powerful enough to defeat Reaganism.Bacon: Let me stop you to say this in the most reductive way possible, ’cause I’m a journalist. In some ways, Jackson was an early critic of a lot of the sort of what we call, like, neoliberal economic policies.And today, in some ways, the Democratic Party has sort of caught up to him. You see Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or AOC—even Biden at times. You’re seeing a Democratic Party that’s moved away, at least pre-2024. From 2018 to 2024, you saw a move toward what Jackson was talking about. He’s critiquing neoliberalism. Is that a good way to think about it?Wiggins: Yeah, of course he wouldn’t call it neoliberalism; I think he would call it a milquetoast sort of moderation that was abandoning sort of the “New Politics” approach of the 1970s—meaning a sort of political coalition building that centered people that had previously been marginalized prior to the Voting Rights Act.But yeah, absolutely. He was criticizing the rising power of corporations in the Democratic Party, the rising professionalization. And as I said before, he was very critical of the tendency to moderate and weaken core Democratic Party policies and principles to appeal to this mythic, mainstream centrist voter who was imagined by these Democratic Leadership Council members as white, middle-class, suburban Sun Belt [voters].Bacon: And to read your essay, I assume we’re in the same place again. Your essay argues the Democrats can win by mobilizing the marginalized and having a real agenda for humans or people. And we’re again at this point where I don’t know who the DLC of today is. We have a lot of consultants and so on.So they would come to you with this, like: The median voter is a white man who’s over 50 and who doesn’t have a college degree, who thinks Democrats are too woke and who may [like] Trump a lot.So how do you respond to that? Because we’re still having the same argument today. Because in the ’80s, Reverend Jackson could not win, in part because he faced the sort of white, centrist argument: We’re too left, the special interests have taken over the party. So how do you respond to that today? ’Cause we’re having the same version of the same arguments today.Wiggins: Yeah, well, I would definitely cite the work of Jacob Grumbach and …Bacon: Adam Bonica.Wiggins: Yes. Who have shown, using social scientific—they’re political scientists so they have the data to suggest that that tack is not working anymore.They argue that it worked in the 1990s—that the tactic of triangulation worked, Bill Clinton being the most famous example, but they also show that it worked on local and state-level races as well. But they have shown that that isn’t working anymore. So there’s social science, there’s political scientific data to suggest that that is a losing game.But I think as a historian, I would argue that that has never worked for people at the margins.Bacon: It was always bad for Black people, even if it helped Bill Clinton win the election, maybe. Or we can debate that.Wiggins: Exactly. So Bill Clinton, you know, the “first Black president,” I guess—very popular among African American voters. But, this is the expansion of the carceral state under Clinton, the evisceration of welfare, a distancing from the legacy of civil rights within a Democratic Party, or a kind of reformulation of it.And so my argument would be that it’s never worked and that it has come at the expense of Black, poor, and other marginalized people.I’ve also been, like many other people, very attuned to the Zohran Mamdani campaign and seeing a lot of echoes of the Jackson campaign in that campaign, particularly in how he was communicating with people and the way that he sort of mobilized a very clear moral vision that people could grab onto and become excited about.And so I think that New York is an exceptional space, but I do think that that campaign does give credence to the sort of movement-based; a campaign that’s driven by a moral vision of what is right and what is wrong, and who is taking from whom, and is very clear about who our enemies are.I do think that he has shown that there can be a model for that that can be obviously shaped to other spaces, particular conditions, but has shown that that Jacksonesque model can work in this post-2024 era.Bacon: Let me move away from electoral policy a little bit, and I guess I’ve come to learn... you’re a historian, that’s why I want to ask you this. I used to think of the civil rights movement as, like: Brown v. Board is the start, and it ends maybe when King dies or something like that. And then Black Power takes over, and that turns off white people and so on. That’s the very simplistic story you learn even in college.And I think there’s been  more historical writing that I’ve read, and I think more people read, about the fact there’s been a “Long Civil Rights Movement” that sort of started at the beginning of the twentieth century, or really right after Reconstruction. You could probably say that lasts until now, or extends to Black Lives Matter.But I want to talk about Jesse Jackson’s part of that. In my childhood, in the 1980s and the 1990s, Jesse Jackson is probably the most prominent Black figure for, like, two decades [for] a certain reason. Talk about his role. Talk about the civil rights movement of, say, 1975 to 2000, and what Jesse Jackson’s doing.Wiggins: Yeah, and I think it’s important that you brought up the “long movement” paradigm and how historians rooted it in the 1920s and 1930s, where there’s a very clear economic critique that is paired with the racial critique or the critique of racial discrimination. And so the activists of the 1920s and 1930s were criticizing racial capitalism; the ways in which race and class intertwine to create a particular form of oppression that creates surplus.Anyway, I say that because that is what Jesse Jackson brings back or really foregrounds in the 1970s. Of course, he is mentored by Martin Luther King. He kind of elbows his way onto the staff of the SCLC in 1965 in Selma, which has a complicated relationship with the other Southern Christian Leadership Conference members, but he’s mentored by King at this time that King is really starting to foreground the economic critique, as well. When he is starting to talk about defeating the three evils: racism, militarism, and capitalism.So Jesse Jackson begins as someone who is fighting for Black economic rights and Black economic empowerment. His role in the SCLC was to run Operation Breadbasket in Chicago, which would organize these consumer boycotts against companies that refused to hire Black people or invest in Black communities. And he’s quite successful in winning thousands of jobs for people, for Black people, in Chicago. He leaves the SCLC for reasons that I won’t go into, creates his own Operation PUSH—or Operation People United to Save Humanity. And they’re still engaged in those boycott practices, as well.And so his vision of the next stage of civil rights is what he would call, or he and others would call, the “dollar rights” or “green power,” which was pairing Black economic empowerment with a political power empowerment, as well. And so he is threatening to boycott major corporations like Anheuser-Busch, a lot of liquor companies, Miller, and he is demanding not only that they hire Black people at all levels but that they invest in Black communities, that they invest, they put their money in Black banks, that they hire Black subcontractors. And so this in ...Bacon: The ’70s, ’80s, right?Wiggins: The 1970s and ’80s, yeah. He continues this into the 1990s, as well—really into the 2010s there are these boycotts that come up, but he’s also calling for Black people in the boardroom. So at all levels he’s trying to promote this agenda of Black economic empowerment, and that’s how he understands the next wave of the civil rights movement. That we’ve gone from political rights to economic rights. Now he comes to understand the limitations of that, and that’s part of the reason why he begins to organize a political campaign, an independent political campaign.Bacon: So in the ’80s, what is he doing when he’s not running for president? Wiggins: He’s still continuing to work with Operation PUSH, and then Operation PUSH becomes the National Rainbow Coalition. So he’s still engaged in these kind of economic boycotts, trying to get Black people on board. He’s also the Jesse Jackson that I grew up with—a ’90s kid—he would come in when there was this moment of racial crisis.Bacon: That’s what I remember most.Wiggins: Yes. An instance of police brutality. I remember him coming in with the Jena Six case in 2005 to 2006. And so he also starts doing that where he, along with Al Sharpton, they swoop in and bring attention and money to these local organizing into local issues. So he is also doing that in addition to running for president. He is also engaged in foreign policy, as well. He is on the forefront of negotiating against apartheid in South Africa. He has his hand in a lot of different places.Bacon: He ever actually run a church, by the way?Wiggins: Not really. No. His church was, his church was Operation Breadbasket, and it was Operation PUSH and it was the Rainbow Coalition.Bacon: So one thing in your book you talk about is—and there’s a Lily Geismer book that sort of hits—he loses these campaigns, and the neoliberalism of the party takes over, and he does some of the … he joins in some of the corporate partnerships, private ... he sort of moves to the right a little bit as the party does, right?Wiggins: Yeah, it was always kind of there for Jesse Jackson. I mean, remember he’s saying that the next stage of the civil rights movement and Black empowerment is the dollars—economic empowerment. So he is already saying that the key to Black advancement is going to the corporations directly. Not going to the state anymore.Bacon: Yeah.Wiggins: Because it’s a hostile state, unless—he runs for president to change that. But he is, and this is part of what my book is about is a long Black tradition of what we could call privatism and working to improve the conditions of Black people’s lives and Black communities through the private sector. So not only through the private home and Black private organizations but also by partnering with corporations to start Black schools and to pay for civil rights organizing and to pay for legal defense. And so he’s really just continuing this tradition of corporate partnerships and what we would call public-private partnerships.Bacon: We’re talking the 1980s, 1990s—the idea that the government’s going to spend more money is off the table. Clinton has literally said, the era of big government is over. So you sort of know that’s not on the table. And you knew the kind of spending we’d seen in the Biden years was not going to happen then, right?Wiggins: Yeah. Black people knew before anyone else that the era of big government was over, and that was the Black condition. They were prepared for that. And so they had techniques, they had ways of raising money, they had ways of supporting Black organizations that are very old, that they bring back and intensify in the 1980s and 1990s. So when Jesse Jackson is seemingly engaged in these neoliberal practices of corporate partnerships and urban development programs and these pro-growth what we think of as like centrist initiatives, he is pulling from another tradition entirely that happens to dovetail quite neatly with what the neoliberal Democrats are doing. But it is coming from a different point of view, and it’s toward a different end as well.Bacon: He’s a big defender of Clinton during the impeachment stuff, right?Wiggins: Yes. I wonder how much of that is because of his own personal scandals that are happening around this time. But he tended to defend Clinton in public. Even if they had their disagreements, he did close ranks behind him, so we can understand him as supporting the Democratic candidate but at the same time also, knowing his personal history, that there might have been some personal reason why he was doing that.Bacon: So how do you view this 1990s moment where the Democratic Party is trying to move? This is all part of the centrism story. You think it is both economic, it’s also like moving away from racial justice essentially.Wiggins: Yes. I see the Sister Souljah moment as Clinton obviously making clear that he knows how to handle Jesse Jackson. That’s how it was reported, that he wouldn’t be beholden to Jesse Jackson’s demands. Because there is this narrative that the Democratic establishment was building that Jesse Jackson had this cult of personality that could sway Black people to do whatever.Like you had the political adviser or something like that. ignoring all the critiques and, you know, yeah. The complicated relationship that many Black Americans had with him as a candidate, as a person. But he wanted to show that he could handle Jesse Jackson, that he would not be beholden to him. That he was willing to publicly embarrass him.But I also think he wanted to demonstrate—or he kind of demonstrated, I don’t know if this was his intent—that he was not willing to hear the critiques of this new hip-hop generation who had more pointed and perhaps less polished critiques of white supremacy or the existing political systems of oppression that were framed in a more confrontational way. Than the civil rights generation who are still coming from that church and protest politics sort of approach.And so when I think of the Sister Souljah moment, I think of this new young generation. People who are further being demobilized and disengaged. But that sort of confrontational approach I think does make a comeback in the mid-2010s with the Movement for Black Lives, which is very much a youth-led... I guess it would be the post hip-hop generation, but definitely [a] comeback [of] that same sort of energy.And, and we see again how... how the Clinton administration—not the Clinton administration, Bill and Hillary Clinton themselves—had to negotiate that energy in new ways where they couldn’t do a Souljah moment anymore.Bacon: They know they couldn’t do that. They really want[ed] to. So the early 2000s, I think, I’m a ’90s kid too, but I think by the 2000s it is both. When something bad happens in America for Black people, Sharpton or Jesse Jackson—mm-hmm—show up. Sharpton as maybe supplanting him, and if there’s only one Black leader, Sharpton as maybe [the one].So I want to talk about though Barack Obama coming along, because I think at the time I probably interpreted Jesse Jackson as being envious of Barack Obama when he is criticizing him and so on. That might have been correct, but there may be a difference of political ideology. Did Jesse Jackson recognize Barack Obama’s neoliberal commitments and lack of leftist commitments, maybe more than other people did?Wiggins: Yeah, I would definitely say that. I mean, that famous hot mic quote where I think I can’t remember where Jesse was being interviewed, but he was caught on a hot mic. I don’t know if I can say this on this live...Bacon: But you can go ahead and say it for—yeah.Wiggins: Yeah. It’s... I don’t... something to the effect of: “I don’t like how Barack is talking down to Black people on these faith-based initiatives. It makes me want to cut his...”Bacon: ...I remember I covered this. Obama, whenever he would go to a Black crowd, would give a sort of speech about how there’s racism. But we need to sort of focus on making sure our kids go to school on time. We don’t throw garbage.He would never talk about this in a white crowd. In a Black crowd he gave all these sort of, yeah, personal responsibility lectures. That felt annoying if you were a... most people are not throwing garbage out their... out of their houses at the time.. So, and Jesse Jackson responded to that saying Obama should not lecture Black people whenever he’s in front of them.Wiggins: Yeah. Kind of the “Cousin Pookie” sort of thing.Bacon: “Cousin Pookie, you need to vote.” Yeah.Wiggins: Yeah. And so it’s an interesting moment because Jesse Jackson was also engaged in that moralizing disciplinary sort of language. Less so when he ran for president. But if we think about the kinds of speeches he was giving about the problem of ... he’s one of the people that popularizes the idea of Black-on-Black crime. He’s one of the first to use it.He, you know, would always be decrying “babies making babies” and, you know, have this moralizing approach to Black social problems. He did not do that as a candidate. I think that was the issue that he had with Obama.Bacon: He thought Obama was doing it. He thought Obama was attacking Black people to win white votes.Wiggins: Yeah, yeah, that’s what I would say. And that he would only do it to Black people. That he would not do that in front of white audiences. And of course Obama was engaged in this long tradition of castigating poor Black people and their “immoral behavior.”But I think Jesse Jackson understood that that was not the time and space. That’s not what a presidential candidate, I think, should be doing. That’s not what a Black presidential candidate should be doing. We should be pouring into people and building them up.And I encourage everyone. to go back and listen to his ’84 Democratic National Convention or his ’88 one. They’re both excellent. But that is not the vision that he was trying to create as a candidate. As a candidate, he was really trying to mobilize and inspire people and, you know, help them understand that they mattered, that they could participate in the political process by supporting Jesse Jackson and that they had a voice.He wasn’t trying to shoot people down. If he did that outside of his candidacy as the Reverend Jesse Jackson. But as a candidate, he was trying to continue the work of Dr. King and building this, you know, “Beloved Community” that was built on, you know, supporting people and working to create the conditions for them to improve their lives rather than, you know, yelling at them or scolding them for doing the best that they could in the conditions that they were living in, as Obama was doing.Bacon: Let me finish by talking about the 2010s you made reference to earlier. So in some ways this... this movement of young activist[s] says: We don’t want to have a... we don’t want to have a universal leader. We really don’t want... want to have a... a male universal leader. And we don’t want... and... and we want to have a diffuse movement.That is a critique of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton almost [in a] word that that’s... and, and so yeah, I think that’s what that was going. Right?Wiggins: Yeah.Bacon: And so connect Jesse Jackson and Black Lives Matter to me. If you can in any way. Are they in tension with each other? I mean, the movement was not church-based. It’s not pastor-based. It’s not male-led. It’s not single-person-led. But the policy differences are not that. So talk about they’re both critiquing. “Racial capitalism” is a good phrase you used early on. So talk about these movements and where Jesse Jackson and Black Lives Matter.Wiggins: Yeah, I see Black Lives Matter, the Movement for Black Lives, as sort of a correction of Jesse Jackson’s movement, but an improvement of it. I think that there were Black feminist organizers who were quite critical of the sort of politics of male charisma that Jesse Jackson relied upon.And I see the Movement for Black Lives as being in the tradition of that Black feminist and queer organizing as well; that they identify similar problems. I do think that they come to similar or different solutions.I think Jesse Jackson … I would not describe him as “left.” He still believed in the possibility of improving capitalism to work, you know, [in a] less discriminatory way. Whereas I think the Movement for Black Lives is more on the left, but they identify the same problems of “economic violence.”I think the Movement for Black Lives has developed a fuller critique [based on] and expanded beyond the limitations of Jesse Jackson’s church-based, Black liberal sort of reading of the problems. But I do understand them not necessarily in tension, but maybe in a “productive tension,” I’ll say that.But they definitely emerged in response to the sort of Black male leader-centered movement politics that had developed since really... I mean, I was about to say since the death of King, but really including that vision of civil rights.Bacon: A couple things. So there’s a lot of op-ed writing today, and I think we have a good piece in TNR talking about how the ’84 and ’88 campaigns of Jesse Jackson were this kind of economic populism that is coming back. And maybe it should have not been abandoned in the first place.But your overall picture is that Jesse Jackson was not a leftist social democrat every day of the week. His policy views were more complicated, and some of them were more “liberal Obama-ish” than “Bernie Sanders-like,” is a way to say that. Right?Wiggins: Yeah. I love thinking about Jesse because he was really quite complicated and he had a vision, but it was limited in ways. Even his movement was limited in ways.But I do think that the fact that he had a clear moral vision of what is right, what is wrong, who are the enemies of the working class that is far, far more productive than a lot of the sort of politics or the approach of Democrats in the present day.So even if he wasn’t to the left and he wanted to, you know, reform capitalism and make it more democratic than other people that were to the left of him ... he still, on the spectrum that we currently have … he is still quite radical. And his ’84 and ’88 platforms would be reviving some of those ideas, would be a step in the right direction for today’s Democrats.Bacon: My final question is not about Jesse Jackson in some ways, but you’re a historian. If we have a “Long Black Freedom Movement,” talk about 2014 to 2025. Do we have a movement of Black Lives that ended it, or it’s continuing?We’re not having the mass protests. We had a period of mass protests; we don’t have them now. People ask me all the time: What happened to Black Lives Matter? And it’s tricky. ’Cause I think a lot of those people are, like, working on Zohran’s campaign or working for the Working Families Party… they are doing stuff. But how do you see Black activism today, thinking about the history that you study?Wiggins: Yeah, it’s hard for me to answer that question without acknowledging the ways in which Black radical activism in particular is being policed and suppressed. I’m a scholar of Atlanta. I’ve been keeping up with the protests to stop the construction of the police training facility or what is referred to as “Cop City.”Bacon: “Cop City.” OK. Sorry.Wiggins: “Cop City.” If we take that as a case, they’re throwing RICO charges at them and domestic terrorism charges. So I think it’s important to foreground the counterinsurgent measures that we’ve seen. You know, not even before Trump came back into office, but really since 2020, 2021.So this is a moment, perhaps, where Black activists needing to reimagine and reframe what the movement looks like in a “mask off” fascist state. To put it crudely, I think the counterinsurgency has been intensified. And so that is shaping what the future will look like.Bacon: I’m still a little skeptical of this idea of “leaderless” movements, but is there “leader-full”? I’ve never been on board with that. But what’s your thought about that?Because Jesse Jackson is a product of the “there must be three or four identified people that speak for Black folks” era. And we’re now in an era where we’re trying to avoid that. And at times I do want Sherrilyn Ifill to be appointed to be the leader of Black people.And we go to her. Somebody who is smart and thoughtful and respected. There are moments where I don’t want it to be a man, but I wish it was somebody.Wiggins: I don’t know. I’m a historian, so I’m always thinking about history in the past and this group-centered leadership paradigm that’s articulated by folks like Ella Baker.There is an opportunity to maybe return to those foundational ideas about what leadership should look like, because you’re right that a completely “leaderless” movement … it makes it difficult to organize on a national or even regional scale. At the same time, we know very well the limits of a charismatic leader–led movement. So I do think that there is kind of a “Third Way” or a middle ground.Bacon: We’re not for “Third Ways” except for this. OK. Right.Wiggins: This one “Third Way” is OK. That is grounded in those Black organizing traditions. Group-centered leadership, participatory democracy. The way that Black labor unions were organizing in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s as well.Now is a time to return to the elders. Talk to the elders while they’re still here, and resuscitate some of those practices because they face the same issues. Right?Bacon: Sure.Wiggins: The student activists of SNCC were also very critical of having this Martin Luther King as the face of the movement.Bacon: Sure. Yeah.Wiggins: Called “De Lawd,” as Stokely Carmichael would say. And so people have been thinking through these aren’t new ideas. So it’s a good moment to return to that moment because it’s also a moment of repression as well. So there’s a lot that we can gain from engaging with those older debates about who and how to lead.Bacon: Danielle, this is great. I appreciate it. Drink some water now. Went over my time, and thank you. A great book, and I want to encourage you to read—Danielle has a book out called Black Excellence. It talks about the post–civil rights struggles in Atlanta, but also throughout the country. Again, Black Excellence. Danielle Wiggins is a professor at Georgetown. Thanks for joining me. Thanks everyone who came on. Bye-bye. Wiggins: Thank you.

Shia LaBeouf Has Tweeted
Jezebel • Feb 18, 2026

Shia LaBeouf Has Tweeted

After getting wasted, beat up, and arrested in New Orleans, LaBeouf had a two-word response. 

Angry Trump Humiliated as Effort to Prosecute Dems Backfires Again
New Republic • Feb 18, 2026

Angry Trump Humiliated as Effort to Prosecute Dems Backfires Again

Let’s start with some good news: Donald Trump’s efforts to jail his Democratic enemies have thus far mostly been marked by ham-fisted, buffoonish failure. The targeting of people like Senator Adam Schiff, former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and six Democratic lawmakers who produced a video that displeased the angry, ailing despot have, for now at least, largely faltered.Yet—after all, there’s always bad news in the Trump era—a dynamic has kicked in that is oddly helpful to him. Thanks to the knee-slapping, comic-relief-inducing nature of these failures, the authoritarian abuses underlying them risk being seen as less threatening than they actually are. That could potentially disarm us for the next round, which will surely come.Case in point: Trump’s efforts to indict those six Democrats, who all spoke in a video posted late last year that warned military service members and officials against carrying out illegal orders. After that video was posted, Trump raged that they were “traitors” who should be “ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL,” leading the FBI to reach out to the lawmakers to set up interviews.But last week, federal prosecutors failed to secure an indictment against the lawmakers, who include Senators Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin and four House members. Indeed, the grand jury unanimously rejected the indictment—a major embarrassment for Trump and Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., a central player in Trump’s efforts to prosecute his enemies. As NBC News’s Ryan Reilly notes, it’s rare for grand juries not to indict, so the inability to persuade even one juror represents a remarkable implosion.Yet details of how this indictment came together should caution us against letting Trump and Pirro’s pie-in-the-face antics distract from how grave an abuse of power this truly was—and continues to be.Here’s what happened: After the FBI communicated with the Democratic lawmakers, prosecutors in Pirro’s office reached out to them to follow up. Slotkin’s attorney, Preet Bharara, directly asked prosecutors what statute the Democrats had allegedly violated to prompt the criminal inquiry, according to sources familiar with these discussions. The prosecutors could not name any statute, the sources told me.“What is the theory of criminal liability?” is the question that was posed to the prosecutors, one source said, adding that “no answer was forthcoming.”And so, when the news broke that Pirro had tried—and failed—to secure an indictment, this was particularly shocking to the lawyers, the sources said. That’s because her prosecutors had failed to name any violated statute, yet they forged ahead with the effort to indict anyway. It has not been definitively confirmed what statute they used in that failed effort. Bharara hinted at all this in a letter to Pirro in early February. “The prosecutors we spoke to in your office, though courteous, could not articulate any theory of possible criminal liability or any statute that they were relying on or that could have been violated,” Bharara wrote.Yet this whole process appears to have been considerably more corrupted than this letter’s lawyerly language suggests, as the sources recount. First, the failure to name a relevant statute when directly asked to do so by the lawyers for the accused suggests prosecutors didn’t think a criminal prosecution was warranted or doubted there was probable cause to think the Democrats had committed a crime. In fact, one source familiar with these discussions tells me the prosecutors’ general tone in them suggested they were making the sort of inquiry that normally comes at the very outset of the investigative process.“They characterized the state of play as very preliminary—as very, very early,” one of the sources told me, speaking about the prosecutors. The U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment on these claims.For the Justice Department to seek an indictment so soon after conversations like those suggests something or other prompted the rush to indict, perhaps a word from on high that—let’s go way out on a limb here—had little to do with facts and law. Legal experts tell me it’s odd for prosecutors to fail to state any theory of criminal liability and then attempt an indictment anyway so quickly.“That is irregular,” Kristy Parker, counsel at Protect Democracy and a former federal prosecutor, told me. “Typically, when someone is the target of a criminal investigation, it’s unusual to dissemble with the target’s lawyer about what the charges might be that close to an indictment. It’s not how federal prosecutors are supposed to conduct themselves.”Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports that Pirro brought in two outsiders to prosecute the case against the Democrats, one of whom is a dance photographer who worked for Pirro decades ago. Together they have very little DOJ experience, suggesting they may have been tapped to carry out cases that career prosecutors might be reluctant to attempt—special projects, as it were, for the benefit of the Audience of One.The sum total of all this is jarring. “It seems at least to suggest that the prosecutors were not the ones calling the shots, and that what they thought they were doing got run over by their bosses,” Georgetown law professor Stephen Vladeck told me. “DOJ’s credibility depends on public faith that prosecutions are brought when the law justifies it, not when the political leadership of the administration demands it.” Trump’s case against these lawmakers is absurdly weak. In declaring that members of the military are not obliged to follow illegal orders, the Democrats were merely stating what the law says. Despite Trump’s suggestion that this constituted an effort to foment military rebellion against the commander in chief, the Democrats didn’t even name any particular order that was supposed to be illegal. Also, the video is constitutionally protected speech to begin with.In a hard-hitting assessment of the DOJ’s targeting of Trump’s enemies, Politico columnist Ankush Khardori notes that it has produced a string of embarrassing pratfalls. Those include the stalling-out efforts aimed at James, Comey, and Schiff, and even a baseless effort to prosecute Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, essentially for making Trump angry, which has backfired, sparking widespread criticism. The failed prosecution of Democratic lawmakers, Khardori writes, is Pirro’s “highest-profile flop to date.”Yet the stakes here remain extraordinarily high. Anyone targeted in this way must sink enormous time and money into self-defense. This threatens to stifle dissent among lawmakers, institutions, and prominent individual critics who might muzzle themselves rather than face investigation and potential prosecution. Indeed, it probably already has. It’s easy to get seduced by the Keystone Kops vibe to all this. But these Keystone Kops continue to wield the enormous power of the federal criminal justice bureaucracy, and they have tethered it to the chaotic whims of a Mad King who thinks that being a Democrat who criticizes him is a prosecutable crime. That they’ve failed so far is heartening. But all indications are that Trump will continue demanding these prosecutions until one of them succeeds—or, possibly, until many more than one does.

The Mom-and-Pop Contractors Helping ICE Rapidly Expand
New Republic • Feb 18, 2026

The Mom-and-Pop Contractors Helping ICE Rapidly Expand

Assault training. Blast-resistant window film. Sniper programs. Iris scanners. With tens of billions of dollars in new funding, ICE can’t seem to spend money fast enough, and first-time contractors from across the country are getting in on the cash bonanza, offering Immigration and Customs Enforcement everything from weapons instruction to office furniture. Rest assured, the heavy hitters in ICE’s increasingly militarized world are still getting plenty of cash. The bulk of ICE’s funding is going to the agency’s top contractors—billion-dollar private prison firms like GEO Group and CoreCivic, defense contractors like Palantir, and advisers like Deloitte. But many mom-and-pop contractors are signing up to work with ICE, as well. These first-time contractors, often with scant internet presence or public track record, offer critical tools and training to help ICE rapidly expand. Their contracts show how, even as ICE’s masked agents launch raids in American cities and public opposition skyrockets, some Americans are still looking to cash in.Castle Hill Partners inked its first ever contract with ICE in September 2025. The company, run by husband and wife Michael Hill and Leonora Castillo, won a $2.2 million no-bid contract to customize more than two dozen ICE vehicles. ICE said that it didn’t have time to put the contract out for competitive bidding because the vehicles were going to be used by newly recruited officers, making the work “urgent.”“The unusual and compelling urgency is driven by the immediate need to equip and deploy newly recruited officers,” the agency wrote, adding that officers would have to remain “idle” if not for Castle Hill’s work.The company does not do the customization itself. In an interview with The New Republic, Hill said that his expertise is in contract management—something like match-matching. “People who would like to do something but can’t, and people who want to have something done but can’t,” he said, “I can put things together.” The couple seem like an odd choice for a contract involving ICE vehicles. Besides never having signed a federal contract before, they have no apparent experience with vehicle customization, and their recent ventures seem to be focused on real estate investments. In a YouTube video, they sat for an interview offering advice for aspiring investors. Although they both seem to be conservative, sharing pro-Trump and anti-liberal memes online, neither appears to be a major political donor, according to public records. Hill said a lawyer had advised them not to speak publicly about the contract.But the public attention tied to becoming an ICE contractor may be dissuading the couple from seeking more federal work. Hill said he was not sure he would want another federal contract. He has been feeling “uncomfortable,” he said, from “being the focus of a lot of attention. I’m a very private person.”If his company doesn’t sign up for more ICE contracts, others surely will. The agency is currently awash with money. The One Big Beautiful Bill that Congress passed in July nearly tripled ICE’s budget, earmarking about $75 billion of new money for ICE through 2029. Last month, ICE boasted that it had “more than doubled our officers and agents from 10,000 to 22,000”—a 120 percent increase in personnel in less than a year.Many of the first-time contractors are offering training. Reticence Group, a small company based in Texas, agreed in July to give “specialized pistol and rifle” training to ICE officials in a $23,000 deal. Its Instagram account says it offers training that “pushes limits.” The company’s website is no longer online, and its phone number is disconnected. Public records show the company is owned by Brian Stahl, a longtime police officer who is now running in the Republican primary in Texas’s 6th congressional district. In a recent podcast appearance, Stahl expressed a complex view of ICE’s deportation campaign. While he said that he believed ICE was targeting “violent illegal criminals”—which ICE’s own data shows is not true, as more than 60 percent of the people detained by ICE last year had no criminal history—he also said the country needs to make it easier for law-abiding immigrants to become citizens. “They are productive members of this country, they pay taxes, they haven’t had any run-ins with law enforcement,” he said. “There has to be a way for us to figure out how we can streamline that process for them.”The Reticence Group and Stahl’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment.Another first-time contractor, Target Down Group, was awarded $30,000 in September to provide sniper training to ICE’s Special Response Teams. It was an SRT agent, Jonathan Ross, who shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis last month. Target Down Group’s president is Dan LaLota, retired Marine and self-described “scout sniper instructor,” who is also the brother of Nick LaLota, the Republican congressman from New York. Dan LaLota told Wired, which first reported on this contract, that his brother had nothing to do with the contract and that he was “not at liberty to discuss what business I have with a stranger like yourself.” He did not respond to The New Republic’s requests for comment.ICE also awarded a no-bid contract to Path Consulting, a firm with no apparent web presence or prior federal contracts. It won its $35,000 contract to give ICE “dynamic target assault training.” In its justification for the contract, the agency said the five-day training would involve live fire and close-quarters combat, and the firm would help develop new “standard operating procedures.” ICE claimed in a document discussing the no-bid contract that it had worked with Path Consulting before. Federal databases do not show any prior contract between the two. (The company did not respond to requests for comment.) But it is possible that the firm previously subcontracted with some other company. That was the case with Office Concepts Arizona, an office furniture company that notched its first contract with ICE in August, providing cubicles and other furniture for an agency office in Phoenix. Its $24,000 agreement was the first time the company signed a contract with the federal government. But Office Concepts has sold furniture to numerous federal agencies as a subcontractor, according to the company’s owner, Amber Davis. That’s why its name did not appear on the federal contracts, despite having prior experience with federal agencies.The office furniture contract highlights that, in its rapid expansion, ICE’s needs include the quotidian as well as the combative. Fulcrum Contracting, a small Texas-based firm run by the husband-and-wife team Jorge and Alejandra Jaramillo, recently accepted a $209,000 contract to install a generator at ICE’s El Paso Service Processing Center, where the agency holds hundreds of immigrants. Elsewhere, in Arizona, the company American Defense Structures was paid $81,000 to install security film on the windows of an ICE building. The company’s website says that its window film can “prevent breaking, smashing, blast damage” and is bullet-resistant.Not all first-time contractors are small outfits. The firm BI2 Technologies agreed in September to provide ICE access to its “iris biometric recognition technology.” The Massachusetts-based company has sold these systems to state prisons and sheriff’s offices, but there is no record of a prior federal contract. It says its mobile iris scanner “enables law enforcement agencies across the country to positively identify individuals in seconds from virtually anywhere.” The technology connects to what the company describes as the nation’s only iris biometric database, which holds highly detailed data on the eyes of millions of people, including American citizens.The $4.6 million contract provides ICE with hundreds of iris scanners and access to the database. The agency wrote that the technology would help it “quickly and accurately identify individuals encountered during ICE operations,” with no suggestion that it would avoid using the technology on citizens. As ICE deploys its new iris scanners, potentially wielded by officers with new assault training, driving newly decked-out ICE trucks, there are still plenty more opportunities for companies looking for a piece of the immigration agency’s largesse. Just on Friday, the agency posted a notice looking for a company to provide “armed and unarmed transportation” to sites throughout the East Coast. And regardless of how long the current partial government shutdown lasts, ICE still has access to the billions of dollars that Congress allocated last summer. Its money won’t run out anytime soon.

The Four Ways Trump Plans to Delegitimize this Fall’s Elections
New Republic • Feb 18, 2026

The Four Ways Trump Plans to Delegitimize this Fall’s Elections

Even as diversionary battles flare across the political landscape—immigration raids, diplomatic blunders, legal losses in court, and the lingering Epstein fallout—Donald Trump is making his move where it matters most: elections.The administration is pressing aggressively to obtain voter rolls and election materials from states across the country, particularly in roughly 15 battleground states, while Trump openly calls on Republicans to “federalize” the conduct of federal elections. This is not a theoretical replay of 2020. The effort is operational now through four means: formal Justice Department demands, active litigation, seized election materials, and scheduled federal briefings with state officials.The Constitution gives the president no operational role in administering elections. Article 1, Section 4—the elections clause—assigns authority over the “Times, Places and Manner” of federal elections to the states, subject to congressional regulation. The executive branch is not part of that structure. As U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly recently put it when rejecting one of Trump’s attempts to reshape election procedures, the Constitution gives “no role at all to the President” in setting election rules.Yet in recent months—and intensifying in recent weeks—the Justice Department has demanded full, unredacted voter rolls from states nationwide, including sensitive personal data, such as partial Social Security numbers and birth dates.The department invokes the National Voter Registration Act, or NVRA, which requires states to make “reasonable efforts” to maintain accurate rolls. But the scope and scale of these requests are unprecedented. DOJ is not merely seeking confirmation that states are conducting routine list maintenance. It has demanded expansive voter-roll data, historical election materials, and back-end administrative records far beyond what is necessary to assess statutory compliance—including information that could be used to scrutinize or challenge individual registrations.Many states have refused. DOJ has responded with more than 20 lawsuits, but it has yet to secure a decisive victory. Earlier this month, a federal judge in Michigan dismissed the department’s attempt to obtain that state’s voter data, ruling that the statutes cited do not authorize such sweeping demands. Efforts in Oregon, California, and Georgia have also stalled or been rebuffed.The pushback has crossed party lines. Oklahoma’s Republican election chief wrote that his office could not legally provide confidential data under state privacy law. Kentucky’s State Board of Elections asked why the DOJ needed driver’s license numbers and other sensitive identifiers merely to evaluate list maintenance.Yet the pressure has not abated. According to reports, the administration has given states 45 days to remove voters whom the DOJ deems ineligible. That compressed timetable sits uneasily alongside the NVRA’s deliberate notice-and-wait framework, which reflects Congress’s recognition that voter list maintenance is error-prone.DOJ has indicated it intends to compare state voter rolls against the federal SAVE immigration database. That system has historically produced false positives, including naturalized citizens misidentified as noncitizens because federal records were outdated. Large-scale data matching inevitably generates errors—common names, outdated addresses, clerical discrepancies. The statute’s safeguards exist precisely because eligibility determinations require care. A 45-day clock all but guarantees that mistakes will fall hardest on eligible voters.Voter rolls are not abstract spreadsheets. They contain names, addresses, party affiliations in some states, and voting histories. In legitimate state hands, they are administrative tools. In the wrong hands, they become instruments for advancing allegations of fraud or irregularity.The possession of comprehensive voter data enables mass eligibility challenges in targeted counties, cross-referencing registration rolls against other databases to flag supposed inconsistencies, singling out demographic concentrations for public allegations, and launching investigations that generate damaging headlines even if they produce no indictments.Most such claims might ultimately fail in court. But often they will not be fully tested because of the ticking clock after an election. The objective need not be victory on the merits. It may be delay, uncertainty, and public doubt—especially in close races.Recall Trump’s 2020 instruction to DOJ: “Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen.” In 2020, he lacked the institutional control and data access he sought. Today, the federal government is attempting to secure both.The effort extends beyond litigation. DOJ has sent sweeping letters to states demanding voter-roll data on accelerated timelines. Attorney General Pam Bondi reportedly floated easing immigration enforcement in Minnesota in exchange for access to voter rolls—an extraordinary linkage that underscores how central voter information has become to the administration’s strategy.Federal agencies—including the FBI, DOJ, the Department of Homeland Security, the Postal Inspection Service, and the Election Assistance Commission—have invited chief election officials from all 50 states to a nationwide call to discuss “preparations” for the midterms. New Hampshire’s Republican secretary of state publicly questioned the purpose of the meeting, noting that election administration has historically remained a state responsibility.None of this guarantees a constitutional breakdown. The American election system is highly decentralized. Thousands of bipartisan workers administer elections across roughly 9,000 jurisdictions. Courts have thus far rejected the most sweeping legal theories advanced by the administration.But the risk is narrower, and therefore more plausible. Armed with extensive voter data from battleground states, federal officials could mount targeted interventions in competitive districts: issuing “analyses” that cast doubt on results, filing litigation to delay certification, and encouraging congressional actors to treat uncertainty as justification for intervention.Once the federal government has comprehensive voter data in hand, it is too late to restore the status quo. In a landslide election, it would not matter. But Trump is betting on a race close enough that confusion, coercion, and data-driven doubt could tip the balance. That is why now is the moment—not on the threshold of the election or after the votes are counted—for vigilance and strong resistance.What can be done to stop this? There are legal countermoves that the states could be launching. The same constitutional design that makes centralized takeover difficult also supplies tools to blunt accumulated leverage.Election lawyers across the political spectrum—including Marc Elias and others who have spent years litigating voting rights cases—have outlined practical steps states and Congress could take now to reduce the opportunity for manipulation. Many of those proposals do not expand power. They clarify it.Start with voter challenges. States are not required to maintain open-ended procedures that allow private actors—or federal officials armed with imperfect data—to trigger mass eligibility disputes. The NVRA contemplates deliberate, notice-driven list maintenance, not bulk database-driven purges. States can narrow challenge procedures to prevent strategic misuse of federal data comparisons.Certification is even more critical. The vulnerability exposed in 2020 was not the casting of ballots themselves, but the postelection phase. Statutes can make explicit what should already be clear: Once statutory conditions are met, certification is ministerial. Laws can provide expedited judicial remedies to compel compliance and impose consequences for refusal. Delay loses its potency when ambiguity is removed.Congress, for its part, has authority under the elections clause not to federalize the administration of elections but to impose guardrails on federal actors. It could codify blackout periods for election-related investigative steps. It could require that any search warrant or subpoena involving elections be approved by the Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney in the affected district, preventing jurisdictional maneuvering. It could restrict federal law enforcement presence near polling and counting sites. These are structural protections, not partisan weapons.None of these measures are dramatic. All reinforce the constitutional allocation of authority. The system’s resilience depends less on rhetoric than on whether those guardrails are put in place before Trump’s playbook is tested in a close race.

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