UK's PM Starmer faces new crisis as paedophile-linked peer and former comms chief suspended from Labour - demands for resignation may be off the table for now, but elections in a few months could change everything again.
Just to clarify: as far as we know, Starmer had nothing to do with Epstein. And now he has to fear for his job.
Politicians in the US, some of whom appear dozens of times in the files, continue undisturbed as if nothing had happened.
As of yesterday, members of Congress who sit on the House or Senate Judiciary Committees can see unredacted versions of the Epstein files the Department of Justice (DOJ) has already released. As Herb Scribner of Axios explained, the documents are available from 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM on computers in the DOJ building in Washington, D.C. The lawmakers cannot bring electronic devices into the room with them, but they are allowed to take notes. They must give the DOJ 24 hours notice before they access the files.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act required the DOJ to release all the Epstein files by December 19. Only about half of them have been released to date, and many of them are so heavily redacted they convey little information. After members of Congress complained, on Friday, January 30, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said they could see the unredacted documents if they asked.
In a letter dated the next day, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) immediately asked for access on behalf of the Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee, saying they would be ready to view the files the following day, Sunday, February 1.
After viewing the files briefly yesterday, Raskin told Andrew Solender of Axios that when he searched the files for President Donald Trump’s name, it came up “more than a million times.” Raskin suggested that limiting members’ access to the files is part of a cover-up to hide Trump’s relationship with the convicted sex offender, a cover-up that includes the three million files the DOJ has yet to release despite the requirements of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. One of the files he did see referred to a child of 9. Raskin called it “gruesome and grim.”
Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) added: “There’s still a lot that’s redacted—even in what we’re seeing, we’re seeing redacted versions. I thought we were supposed to see the unredacted versions.”
Material that has come out has already shown members of the administration and their allies are lying about their connections to Epstein. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who lived next door to Epstein for more than ten years, said in October that he had cut ties with Epstein in 2005 after visiting his home and being disgusted. The files show that in fact, Lutnick not only maintained ties with Epstein but also was in business with him until at least 2018, long after Epstein was a convicted sex offender. Members of both parties have called for Lutnick to resign.
Testifying today before the Senate Appropriations Committee, where members took the opportunity to ask him about his ties to Epstein. Lutnick acknowledged that he had had more contact with Epstein than he had previously admitted, but maintained: “I did not have any relationship with him. I barely had anything to do with him.” But even Republicans expressed discomfort with Lutnick’s visit with his family to Epstein’s private island.
Khanna called for Lutnick to resign. “In this country, we have to make a decision,” he said. “Are we going to allow rich and powerful people who were friends and had no problem doing business and showing up with a pedophile who is raping underage girls, are we just going to allow them to skate? Or, like other countries, are we going to have…accountability for the people who did that?”
In the U.S. there has been little fallout so far for those in the files except the resignation of Wall Street lawyer Brad Karp, senior partner for Paul Weiss—the first law firm to cave to Trump’s demands last March. Material from the files shows that Karp plotted with Epstein to get a woman they disliked charged with a crime and deported.
In Europe the revelation that a leader had ties to Epstein has abruptly ended careers. The former British ambassador to Washington, Peter Mandelson, was fired and has created a crisis for Prime Minister Keir Starmer for appointing him. Two senior Norwegian diplomats are under investigation for gross corruption from their ties to Epstein; one of them, Mona Juul, resigned Sunday from her position as ambassador to Jordan and Iraq. Slovakia’s national security advisor Miroslav Lajčák resigned after messages between him and Epstein showed them talking about women while also discussing Lajčák’s meetings with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov.
Poland announced it was launching an investigation into whether Epstein was tied to Russian intelligence. “More and more leads, more and more information, and more and more commentary in the global press all relate to the suspicion that this unprecedented paedophilia scandal was co-organised by Russian intelligence services,” Polish prime minister Donald Tusk said. “I don’t need to tell you how serious the increasingly likely possibility that Russian intelligence services co-organised this operation is for the security of the Polish state. This can only mean that they also possess compromising materials against many leaders still active today.”
Yesterday, Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving 20 years in prison for sex trafficking, testified by video before the House Oversight Committee. She refused to answer any questions, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Her lawyer said she is “prepared to speak fully and honestly” if Trump grants her clemency.
Todd Lyons, the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement; Rodney Scott, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection; and Joseph Edlow, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, all part of the Department of Homeland Security, testified today before the House Committee on Homeland Security. As Eric Bazail-Eimil of Politico reported, Lyons defended the actions of ICE agents, saying they are properly enforcing immigration laws and that they are the real victims of the encounters that have left protesters dead or injured because the protests put agents in danger. Most Republicans backed them up, saying the Democrats are trying to stop the removal of criminals.
Democrats asked the men about federal arrests of U.S. citizens and the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti and demanded changes at ICE and Border Patrol. Funding for the Department of Homeland Security will run out on February 13, and the administration officials warned members of Congress that a shutdown would disrupt their operations and thus endanger national security. Representative James Walkinshaw (D-VA) later told a reporter: “Look, all of this comes from Stephen Miller’s sick and twisted, deranged Great Replacement theory. Whether these folks here…know it or not, they’re…just pawns in Stephen Miller’s sick and twisted scheme.”
Daniel Klaidman, Michael Kaplan, and Matt Gutman of CBS News reported that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit after a federal raid on a popular horse racing venue in Wilder, Idaho, led to the detention of 105 undocumented immigrants as well as the temporary detention of 375 U.S. citizens or lawful residents. Only five arrests ended in criminal charges, all for unlicensed gambling.
Answering allegations that agents had used zip ties on children, both the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) field office in Boise and Homeland Security spokesperson Trisha McLaughlin flatly denied the allegations. “ICE didn’t zip tie, restrain, or arrest any children,” she said. “ICE does not zip tie or handcuff children. This is the kind of garbage rhetoric contributing to our officers facing a 1,300% increase in assaults against them and an 8,000% increase in death threats.” But after photographic evidence of zip-tie bruises on a 14-year-old female U.S. citizen as well as personal testimony, the FBI changed their assertion to say no “young” children were zip-tied.
Court documents unsealed today show that the FBI raid on the warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia, that led to the seizure of 700 boxes of ballots and other election related items was based on debunked claims of fraud from 2020 election deniers. As Ashley Cleaves and Matt Cohen of Democracy Docket explained, the affidavit that informed the search warrant came from Kurt Olsen, one of the lawyers who worked with Trump to overturn the 2020 election and whom Trump has recently appointed director of election security and integrity. In the affidavit, Olsen recycled a number of debunked theories.
Legal analyst Joyce White Vance notes that, aside from the merits of the case, it appears that the statute of limitations has run out on any potential election crimes stemming from 2020. She goes on to expose the weakness of the case itself and, finally, to point out that both the General Assembly and the Georgia State Election Board that said there was no intentional fraud or misconduct in the counting of the Fulton County ballots in 2020 were Republican led. White suggests the raid was “less about bringing a meritorious criminal prosecution against specific individuals and more about casting suspicion over Fulton County’s voting system and ability to conduct a fair election.”
Today the National Governors Association cancelled its annual bipartisan meeting with the president that usually involves a business meeting and a dinner. Trump had disinvited two Democratic governors, Jared Polis of Colorado and Wes Moore of Maryland, prompting the rest of the Democratic governors to refuse to attend. “Democratic governors have a long record of working across the aisle to deliver results and we remain committed to this effort. But it’s disappointing this administration doesn’t seem to share the same goal. At every turn, President Trump is creating chaos and division, and it is the American people who are hurting as a result,” the Democratic governors wrote. “If the reports are true that not all governors are invited to these events, which have historically been productive and bipartisan opportunities for collaboration, we will not be attending the White House dinner this year. Democratic governors remain united and will never stop fighting to protect and make life better for people in our states.”
Moore is the vice-chair of the NGA. Yesterday its chair, Oklahoma’s Republican governor Kevin Stitt, wrote: “Because NGA’s mission is to represent all 55 governors, the Association is no longer serving as the facilitator for that event, and it is no longer included in our official program.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters: “I just spoke with the president about this. It is a dinner at the White House. It’s the ‘People’s House.’ It’s also the president’s home, and he can invite whomever he wants to dinners and events here at the White House.”
In Washington today, a grand jury refused to indict six Democratic members of Congress for breaking a law that makes it a crime to “interfere with, impair, or influence the loyalty, morale, or discipline of the military or naval forces of the United States.” Senators Mark Kelly of Arizona, a retired Navy captain and astronaut; Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, a former CIA analyst; and Representatives Jason Crow of Colorado, a former Army Ranger; Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania, a former Navy officer; Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire, a Navy veteran; and Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, a former Air Force officer, recorded a video last November reminding service members that they must refuse illegal orders.
Trump called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”
Although the bar for an indictment is so low that grand juries almost always return one, the Trump administration’s attempts to harass those he perceives as opponents have been so outrageous that grand juries have repeatedly refused to go along. The New York Times called today’s refusal “a remarkable rebuke.”
The White House has deleted a social media post in which the vice-president, JD Vance, referred to the Armenian genocide, prompting anger from members of the Armenian diaspora as well as opposition politicians across the US.
The post was made during Vance’s two-day trip to Armenia to mark a visit by Vance and his wife, Usha Vance, to a memorial for the up to 1.5 million Armenians killed by Ottoman troops more than a century ago. The now-deleted post on Vance’s official X account said he was visiting the memorial to honour “the victims of the Armenian genocide”.
It marked the first time the Trump administration had used the word genocide to describe the massacres. An aide to Vance later told reporters that the message had been posted in error on social media by staff who were not travelling with Vance.
It was the second time in the past week that the administration cited staff error to explain its social media content; last week, after Donald Trump sought to dismiss the uproar over a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, the US president said it had been erroneously posted by a staffer.
We need the world to stage something like the Berlin Airlift, with many countries running the US blockade and delivering petroleum to Cuba.
On February 12, 1809, Nancy Hanks Lincoln gave birth to her second child, a son: Abraham.
Abraham Lincoln grew up to become the nation’s sixteenth president, leading the country from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865, a little over a month into his second term. He piloted the country through the Civil War, preserving the concept of American democracy. It was a system that had never been fully realized but that he still saw as “the last, best hope of earth” to prove that people could govern themselves.
“Four score and seven years ago,” he told an audience at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in November 1863, “our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Lincoln dated the founding of the nation from the Declaration of Independence rather than the Constitution, the document enslavers preferred because of that document’s protection of property. In the Declaration, the Founders wrote that they held certain “truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….”
But in Lincoln’s day, fabulously wealthy enslavers had gained control over the government and had begun to argue that the Founders had gotten their worldview terribly wrong. They insisted that their system of human enslavement, which had enabled them to amass fortunes previously unimaginable, was the right one. Most men were dull drudges who must be led by their betters for their own good, southern leaders said. As South Carolina senator and enslaver James Henry Hammond put it, “I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much-lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that ‘all men are born equal.’”
In 1858, Abraham Lincoln, then a candidate for the Senate, warned that arguments limiting American equality to white men were the same arguments “that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.” Either people—men, in his day—were equal, or they were not. Lincoln went on, “I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it…where will it stop?”
Lincoln had thought deeply about the logic of equality. In his 1860 campaign biography, he permitted the biographer to identify six books that had influenced him. One was a book published in 1817 and wildly popular in the Midwest in the 1830s: Capt. Riley’s Narrative. The book was written by James Riley, and the full title of the book was “An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig Commerce, Wrecked on the Western Coast of Africa, in the Month of August, 1815, With the Sufferings of Her Surviving Officers and Crew, Who Were Enslaved by the Wandering Arabs on the Great African Desart [sic], or Zahahrah.” The story was exactly what the title indicated: the tale of white men enslaved in Africa.
In the 1850s, on a fragment of paper, Lincoln figured out the logic of a world that permitted the law to sort people into different places in a hierarchy, applying the reasoning he heard around him. “If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B.—why may not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A?” Lincoln wrote. “You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly?—You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own. But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.”
Lincoln saw clearly that if we give up the principle of equality before the law, we have given up the whole game. We have admitted the principle that people are unequal and that some people are better than others. Once we have replaced the principle of equality with the idea that humans are unequal, we have granted approval to the idea of rulers and ruled. At that point, all any of us can do is to hope that no one in power decides that we belong in one of the lesser groups.
In 1863, Lincoln reminded his audience at Gettysburg that the Founders had created a nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” but it was no longer clear whether “any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” During the Civil War, the people of the United States were defending that principle against those who were trying to create a new nation based, as the Confederacy’s vice president Alexander Stephens said, “upon the great truth” that men were not, in fact, created equal, that the “great physical, philosophical, and moral truth” was that there was a “superior race.”
In the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln called for Americans to understand what was at stake, and to “highly resolve…that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
In a ceremony at the White House yesterday, surrounded by coal industry leaders, lawmakers, and miners, President Donald J. Trump was presented with a trophy that calls him “the undisputed champion of beautiful, clean coal.” At the event, Trump signed an executive order directing the Defense Department to buy billions of dollars of power produced by coal and decried “the Radical Left’s war on the industry.” Anna Betts of The Guardian noted that Trump also announced the Department of Energy will spend $175 million to “modernize, retrofit, and extend” the life of coal-fired power plants in West Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, and Kentucky.
As Lisa Friedman pointed out in the New York Times last month, the United States has been the largest polluter since the start of the industrial era, but emissions of carbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas, have been declining since 2007. Trump maintains that climate change is a “hoax” and has withdrawn the U.S. from the main global climate treaty. Since he took office in January 2025, U.S. emissions have increased 1.9% largely because of the renewed use of coal, the dirtiest of the fossil fuels.
Today, the Environmental Protection Agency revoked the scientific finding that has been the basis for regulating emissions from cars and power plants since 2009. That finding, called the endangerment finding, reflects the consensus of scientists that greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas endanger the health and general welfare of the American people.
The Trump administration says scientists are wrong about the dangers of climate change and that the regulations hurt industry and slow the economy. It claims ending the rule will save Americans $1.3 trillion, primarily through cheaper cars and trucks, but it did not factor in the costs of extreme weather caused by climate change or the costs of pollution-related health issues.
Last year, Josh Dawsey and Maxine Joselow of the Washington Post reported that at a campaign event at Mar-a-Lago in April 2024, then-candidate Trump told oil executives they should raise $1 billion for his campaign. In exchange, Trump promised he would get rid of Biden-era regulations and make sure no more such regulations went into effect, in addition to lowering taxes. Trump told them $1 billion would be a “deal,” considering how much money they would make if he were in the White House.
Tyler Pager and Matina Stevis-Gridneff of the New York Times reported on Tuesday that Trump’s threats to stop the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge between Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario, came just hours after billionaire Matthew Moroun, whose family operates a competing bridge, called Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Moroun has tried to stop the construction of the new bridge for decades.
The $4.7 billion construction cost of the Gordie Howe bridge has been fully funded by Canada although the bridge is partly owned by Michigan and will be operated jointly by Canada and Michigan. The new bridge will compete with the Ambassador Bridge—the one the Moroun family operates—for about $300 million in trade crossing the border daily.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that “This is just another example of President Trump putting America’s interest first.”
This afternoon, Dustin Volz, Josh Dawsey, and C. Ryan Barber of the Wall Street Journal reported that the whistleblower complaint of last May involved another country’s interception of a conversation between two foreign nationals who were discussing Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, issues related to Iran, and perhaps other issues. Kushner runs Affinity Partners, an investment fund that has taken billions of dollars in funds from Arab monarchies. He does not have an official role in the U.S. government but appears to be acting in foreign affairs as a volunteer.
The Wall Street Journal reported on the existence of the whistleblower complaint on February 2, 2026, reporting that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard had bottled it up for political reasons, taking it not to Congress but to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. On February 3, Gabbard released a highly redacted version of the complaint to the Gang of Eight, the top member of each party in the House and Senate and the top member of each party on the House and Senate intelligence committees.
It may or may not be related that in early April 2025, the administration abruptly fired National Security Agency director General Timothy Haugh and his deputy, hours after dismissing several staffers at the National Security Council. At the time, conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who is close to Trump, posted on social media that Haugh and his deputy “have been disloyal to President Trump. That is why they have been fired.”
In Talking Points Memo, editor Josh Marshall has been exploring the contours of what he calls the Authoritarian International, which he identifies as “a host of authoritarian governments around the world, the princelings of the Gulf monarchies, the sprinkling of European right-ravanchist governments, the rightward portion of Silicon Valley (which accounts for a larger and larger percentage of the top owners if not the larger community), the Israeli private intel sector, various post-Soviet oligarchs and, increasingly, the world’s billionaire class.”
Marshall notes that those in this world are not just antidemocratic. They are constructing a private world in which deals are done secretly without any democratic accountability, mixing national interest with individual financial interest. The model operates in part by maintaining control over key figures thanks to compromising material on them. Marshall points out that the system can be oddly stable if everyone has something on everyone else.
Marshall’s description dovetails neatly with former Federal Bureau of Investigation director Robert Mueller’s 2011 explanation of the evolving organized crime threat. Organized crime had become multinational, he said, “making billions of dollars from human trafficking, health care fraud, computer intrusions, and copyright infringement [and] cornering the market on natural gas, oil, and precious metals, and selling to the highest bidder.” He explained: “These groups may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called ‘iron triangles’ of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat.”
To protect this system, transparency must be prevented at all costs.
The administration seems to be illustrating this principle as it denies the right and duty of Congress to conduct oversight of the government. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has refused to release all the Epstein files to the public as Congress required when it passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Yesterday Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared before the House Judiciary Committee, but it was clear she was not there to answer lawmakers’ questions or explain why she had not released the files.
Nor did she acknowledge the survivors of Epstein’s sexual assaults and sex trafficking, many of whom were in the audience and noted that she had not met with them. When Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) urged her to apologize to the survivors for the sloppiness of the release that had left many survivors’s names, identifying information, and even sexually explicit photos unredacted while covering the names of perpetrators, Bondi accused Jayapal of theatrics and, as Glenn Thrush of the New York Times reported, of dragging the hearing “into the gutter.”
Instead, she came prepared with a book of insults to aim at Democrats and met questions with attacks on the questioners and praise for Trump. Republican Thomas Massie (R-KY), who has been instrumental in pressuring the White House over the Epstein files, posted on social media: “A funny thing about Bondi’s insults to members of Congress who had serious questions: Staff literally gave her flash cards with individualized insults, but she couldn’t memorize them, so you can see her shuffle through them to find the flash-cards-insult that matches the member.”
Bondi was not only stonewalling but also demonstrating the tactics of authoritarian power, turning her own shortcomings into an attack on those trying to enforce rules. Even more ominously, Kent Nishimura of Reuters captured a photograph of a page of the book with a printout titled: “Jayapal Pramila Search History.” It appeared to be the files Representative Jayapal accessed after the DOJ made some of the Epstein files available at DOJ offices earlier this week.
This is a shocking intrusion of the executive branch into surveilling members of the legislative branch and weaponizing that information. The top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), said he will ask for an investigation of this “outrageous abuse of power.”
Bondi’s performance drew widespread condemnation from outside the administration, and even Republicans seemed to realize she was toxic: Scott MacFarlane of CBS News noted that in the committee hearing, Republicans didn’t use all their time to question her but simply yielded their time allotted to ask questions back to the committee.
But Bondi appeared to be playing to Trump, as she made clear when she veered into the bizarre claim that what the committee should be talking about was not the Epstein files but rather the booming stock market. Last month, Josh Dawsey, Sadie Gurman, and C. Ryan Barber of the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was complaining to aides that Bondi is weak and ineffective. Yesterday’s performance pleased him.
This morning, Trump’s social media account posted: “AG Pam Bondi, under intense fire from the Trump Deranged Radical Left Lunatics, was fantastic at yesterday’s Hearing on the never ending saga of Jeffrey Epstein, where the one thing that has been proven conclusively, much to their chagrin, was that President Donald J. Trump has been 100% exonerated of their ridiculous Russia, Russia, Russia type charges…. Nobody cared about Epstein when he was alive, they only cared about him when they thought he could create Political Harm to a very popular President who has brought our Country back from the brink of extinction, and very quickly, at that!”
An Economist/YouGov poll released Tuesday shows that 85% of U.S. adults agree with the statement “There are powerful elites who helped Epstein target and abuse young girls. They protected him and need to be investigated.” Only 3% of American adults disagree. Fifty percent of American adults think Trump “was involved in crimes allegedly committed by Jeffrey Epstein,” while only 29% think he wasn’t.
Executive Summary
Over the past year, the Trump Administration has dramatically expanded the use of third country deportations—in which it deports migrants to countries that are not their own—transforming a narrow and rarely used practice into a standing system of global removals.
Through a growing web of bilateral arrangements, the United States is convincing foreign governments to take in people with no connection to their country, largely through financial payments or pressure. In some cases, the Administration is sending migrants thousands of miles only for them to later be returned to their home country at additional taxpayer expense.
The Administration justifies these deals as necessary because home countries refuse to accept their nationals, but evidence contradicts these claims. In practice, third country deportations have produced little measurable benefit while imposing significant financial and diplomatic costs on the United States.
The Administration has pursued these arrangements through opaque negotiations, including with corrupt governments, without meaningful oversight or accountability. Tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds have been sent to foreign governments, yet Congress and the public have few details on the terms of these deals, how funds are being used or what the United States is offering in return.
This Senate Foreign Relations Committee Minority report documents the Trump Administration’s expanding use of third country deportations. It is based on a review of agreements through January 2026, staff travel to relevant countries and meetings and communication with current U.S. officials, foreign government officials, human rights organizations, deportees and attorneys.
At midnight tonight, most of the agencies and services in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will run out of funding, as popular fury over the violence and lawlessness of federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Border Patrol made Senate Democrats refuse to agree to fund DHS without reforms. And yet, because the Republicans lavished money on ICE and Border Patrol in their July 2025 budget reconciliation bill—the one they call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—those agencies will continue to operate. The 260,000 federal employees affected by the partial shutdown will come from other agencies in DHS, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Transportation Security Agency (TSA), and the Coast Guard.
A measure to fund DHS passed the House by a majority vote, but in the Senate, the filibuster allows the Democrats, who are in the minority, to make demands before the measure can pass. On February 4, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) sent Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) a letter outlining demands Democrats want incorporated into a measure to appropriate more funds for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Those demands are pretty straightforward. The Democrats want federal agents to enter private homes only with a judicial warrant (as was policy until the administration produced a secret memo saying that DHS officials themselves could sign off on raids, a decision that runs afoul of legal interpretations of the Fourth Amendment). They want agents to stop wearing masks and to have their names, agencies, and unique ID numbers visible on their uniforms, as law enforcement officers do. They want an end to racial profiling—that is, agents detaining individuals on the basis of their skin color, place of employment, or language—and to raids of so-called sensitive sites: medical facilities, schools, childcare facilities, churches, polling places, and courts.
They want agents to be required to have a reasonable policy for use of force and to be removed during an investigation if they violate it. They want federal agents to coordinate with local and state governments and for those governments to have jurisdiction over federal agents who break the law. They want DHS detention facilities to have the same standards as any detention facility and for detainees to have access to their lawyers. They want states to be able to sue if those conditions are not met, and they want Congress members to have unscheduled access to the centers to oversee them.
They want body cameras to be used for accountability but prohibited for gathering and storing information about protesters. And they want federal agents to have standardized uniforms like those of regular law enforcement, not paramilitaries.
As Schumer and Jeffries wrote, these are commonsense measures that protect Americans’ constitutional rights and ensure responsible law enforcement, and should apply to all federal activity even without Democrats demanding them. Democrats said White House offers were insufficient to address their concerns, although the White House did not make its position public. Before they left Washington yesterday for a ten-day break, senators refused to fund DHS in its current state.
Before the vote, administration officials appeared to try to soften the image of the federal agents who have terrorized Americans, arrested citizens and legal immigrants as well as undocumented immigrants, and shot people. Trump’s immigration advisor Tom Homan, who took over in Minneapolis after Border Patrol agents acting under the leadership of then-commander Greg Bovino shot and killed a second American citizen in that city, told reporters yesterday that that administration will end its surge of federal agents into Minneapolis, saying it had achieved “successful results” including 4,000 people arrested. Agents will remain in the city, he said, but the surge of thousands of agents will end. Torey Van Oot of Axios adds that more than a dozen federal prosecutors resigned after the Department of Justice declined to investigate the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and support for Trump’s handling of deportations cratered as Americans saw children tear-gassed and citizens shot.
Acting director of ICE Todd Lyons told the House Homeland Security Committee on Tuesday that the agency is training agents adequately before they go into the field and that once there, they are properly enforcing U.S. immigration laws. “And,” he added, “we are only getting started.”
But Lyons’s claim that federal agents are adequately trained was belied on Wednesday when the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) abruptly closed the airspace over El Paso, Texas, for what it initially said would be ten days. Such a closure would shut down all flights below 18,000 feet, including medical helicopters, and is rare enough that the comparison media used was to the closure of airspace after 9/11. Confusion reigned, since no one had notified even the mayor of El Paso, a city of 700,000 people. Shortly afterward, the FAA reopened the airspace.
Administration officials immediately said the problem was drones flown into the area by drug cartels, though such drone flights are common. Then the media reported that the Defense Department had been testing out a new antidrone defense system without signoff from the FAA on danger to civilian planes. Then it turned out that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had permitted U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of Border Patrol, to use an antidrone laser near Fort Bliss, where detainees are housed at Camp East Montana. Someone then used the laser without informing the FAA. And then it turned out that the “drones” agents used the laser to shoot down were actually party balloons.
That the Defense Department is loaning a military weapon to CBP is itself concerning, but that a weapon powerful enough to cause the closure of El Paso’s airspace was in the hands of someone who mistook balloons for cartel drones is also a problem. So, too, of course, is that the administration’s initial impulse was to lie about what happened.
In his testimony, Lyons maintained that ICE is indeed prioritizing the removal of undocumented immigrants with records of violent crime, enabling Republicans to claim that Democrats who want to rein ICE in are deliberately endangering public safety. Camilo Montoya-Galvez of CBS News reported this week that documents from DHS itself show that fewer than 14% of the nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested in Trump’s first year had either convictions or charges for violent crimes, with fewer than 2% either charged with or convicted of homicide or sexual assault.
Leah Feiger of Wired reported today that ICE has been quietly and aggressively expanding across the United States in the past months. It has bought or leased new facilities in nearly every state, many of them outside of the country’s largest cities, although they are concentrated in Texas. Feiger reports that DHS asked the General Services Administration (GSA), which manages government properties, to ignore competitive bidding rules and hide lease listings out of “national security concerns.”
Douglas MacMillan and Jonathan O’Connell of the Washington Post reported today that ICE officials are planning to spend $38.3 billion to buy warehouses across the country. ICE will retrofit sixteen of them to become processing centers that can hold 1,000 to 1,500 detainees at a time before funneling them into eight megacenters that can hold up to 10,000 detainees each.
The administration has dramatically changed ICE policy to assert the right to imprison noncitizens until they are deported, even if they are applicants for asylum. Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) made an unannounced oversight visit to the ICE field facility in Baltimore, Maryland, yesterday. He saw “60 men packed into a room shoulder-to-shoulder, 24-hours-a-day, with a single toilet in the room and no shower facilities. They sleep like sardines with aluminum foil blankets.” Mike Hixenbaugh at NBC News today narrated the life of a Russian family in the U.S. seeking asylum. For four months, they have been incarcerated at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas, where there is little medical care and the food is often spoiled with mold or worms.
In a statement, a spokesperson for DHS accused the media of “peddling hoaxes” about poor conditions in detention centers.
But DHS has lied about so many things that no one should take their words seriously. In January, when an ICE agent shot Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in Minneapolis, DHS claimed that he had driven away from a “targeted traffic stop,” crashed into a parked car, and run. When an ICE agent caught up with him and Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna, DHS said, the men had attacked the agent with a snow shovel and a broom handle. DHS said an agent had then fired on the men “to defend his life.” The men escaped but were later captured and charged with assault.
Yesterday, the Justice Department dropped the charges, saying “newly discovered evidence” suggested the allegations were false. Aljorna’s lawyer explained: “It is my understanding that the video surveillance evidence that captured the incident was materially inconsistent with the federal agent's claims of what happened.”
Last night, in a deep expose of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her advisor Corey Lewandowski, Wall Street Journal reporters Michelle Hackman, Josh Dawsey, and Tarini Parti described a department in chaos. Noem and Lewandowski—who the authors say are having an affair and essentially run the department together—are using DHS for their own aggrandizement with an eye to elevating Noem to the presidency. The reporters detailed the focus on image, the decimation of ICE by firing or demoting 80% of the career field leadership that was in place when they arrived, the apparent steering of contracts to allies, and Noem and Lewandowski's excessive demands, including “a luxury 737 MAX jet, with a private cabin in back, for their travel around the country.” DHS is currently leasing the $70 million plane but is in the process of buying it.
DHS and the violence of federal agents have exacerbated rather than silenced opposition to the Trump administration, causing a crisis for it as the American people increasingly turn against it. Trump is adamant that Republicans must win the 2026 elections and so is calling for new election laws, claiming that Democrats can win elections only through the illegal votes of undocumented immigrants.
This ties DHS and American elections together. Today Noem told reporters in Arizona that Congress must pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE America, measure to secure U.S. elections, lying that noncitizens are voting for Democrats and thus enabling them to win elections. This is an old saw Republicans have used since 1994, the year after the Democrats passed the Motor Voter Act, and it has been repeatedly debunked. Indeed, when reporters asked for an example of noncitizen voting, she said she couldn’t point to a case but assumed it happened. The bill not only would require voters to show either a passport or a birth certificate with the name matching theirs in order to register, but would also require states to purge their voting rolls every month. The measure passed the House Wednesday but must overcome a filibuster to pass the Senate.
Jen Fifield of ProPublica and Zach Despart of ProPublica and the Texas Tribune reported today that DHS has been using an electronic tool called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE), previously used to check eligibility for public benefits, to find noncitizen voters in a database made up of confidential data from different government agencies. That information includes confidential data from the Social Security Administration, accessed by the Department of Government Efficiency. Republican secretaries of state in twenty-seven states have agreed to use SAVE to check their voter rolls.
But Fifield and Despart report that the system makes "persistent mistakes,” frequently assessing naturalized citizens as noncitizens. The system automatically refers those individuals to DHS for possible criminal investigation, and in certain states, individuals have had to prove their citizenship to be reinstated as voters. “This is not ready for prime time,” county clerk Brianna Lennon of Boone County, Missouri, told the reporters. “And I’m not going to risk the security and the constitutional rights of my voters for bad data.”
And so Trump clearly thinks he must take matters into his own hands. Although the Constitution is quite clear that it is Congress, and Congress alone, that can make laws, today his social media account announced he intends to change the nation’s voting laws all by himself. The account posted: “The Democrats refuse to vote for Voter I.D., or Citizenship. The reason is very simple—They want to continue to cheat in Elections. This was not what our Founders desired. I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future. There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not! Also, the People of our Country are insisting on Citizenship, and No Mail-In Ballots, with exceptions for Military, Disability, Illness, or Travel. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP”
Today, ICE protesters carried a giant U.S. Constitution through the streets of Minneapolis, demanding that federal agents honor the rights the Framers established with that foundational document.
