Why the GOP loves to use ‘communism’ as an attack

 

Any bogeyman to distract from their buffoon of a president

  

by Oliver Willis

Daily Kos Staff  

Saturday, July 18, 2026 at 5:00 PM MDT

 

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog

Rim Country Gazette Blog 

Explaining the Right is a weekly series that looks at what the right wing is currently obsessing over, how it influences politics—and why you need to know.

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Speaker Mike Johnson released an urgent warning to Americans on Tuesday: The communists are coming.

"We’re fighting right now in Congress over whether we’re going to maintain our status as a constitutional republic or we’re going to trade that in, dismantle the foundations and go down this dark road of death to communism. That is the question on the ballot this fall,” Johnson ominously warned.

Now of course, if people are really worried about the government taking control of industries, pushing to limit freedom of expression, or engaging in the dismantling of long-held institutions, the guilty party is the Republican majority of which Johnson is a key member.

But Republicans are harping on the communist threat. Casual viewers of the party’s quasi-official media mouthpiece, Fox News, are now being fed a steady diet of propaganda insisting that Democrats are the hammer-and-sickle party.

The right will claim that the election of Zohran Mamdani to be New York City mayor last year and the surprise wins of candidates affiliated with democratic socialism in Democratic primaries this year are evidence of looming red behavior.

But that’s not it. Republicans are all abuzz about socialism because the party’s political prospects look dire this fall. President Donald Trump’s approval ratings are in the thirties, Americans are experiencing surging energy prices, and Trump and other Republicans are engaged in open corruption while cutting vital government programs.

They need something, and in a pinch, socialism has always been a big, giant emergency button for the right to push.

They love to push the emergency button in the months before an election. The right has for years whipped up panic ahead of elections, gambling that exaggerating one threat or another, and associating the problem in the public’s mind with the Democrats, will pay dividends.

Back in 2002, while the country was still reeling from the 9/11 attacks, Republicans began the drumbeat that would lead to eventual war with Iraq. Under then-President George W. Bush, Republicans kept up a steady argument that if Democrats expressed skepticism about an Iraq War, they were on the side of the al-Qaida terrorists who attacked the country.

President George W. Bush signs a resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq, Oct. 16, 2002, in the White House. Left to right, Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., Sen. John Warner, R-Va., Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Rep. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., Speaker the House Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del. AP

Of course, there was no connection between al-Qaida and Iraq, and Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, but before all of that was laid bare, Republicans held on to power and bucked historical trends—keeping control of Congress in that year’s election.

In 2014, President Barack Obama was well into the final phase of his second term, and Republicans needed something to get the troops whipped up before the midterm races. Fearmongering about an outbreak of Ebola virus and the Obama administration’s efforts to help an American afflicted by the ailment hit a fever pitch.

For added effect that year, Republicans and the affiliated conservative movement also argued that Obama was not doing enough to fight the terror group ISIS. An example of how far-reaching this meme became showed up in the official magazine for the pro-gun zealots at the NRA. 

While ISIS operated in the Middle East and concerned itself largely with issues in that region of the world, the NRA told supporters they had to worry about ISIS hanging outside their homes and they had to “vote your guns” by backing Republicans that fall.

Four years later, with Trump in the White House in 2018, Republicans needed a shiny object to distract the public from the many ways Trump was failing in the presidency (this should sound familiar). 

That year, Trump led the way in promoting the notion that a caravan of migrants was rocketing toward the U.S-Mexico border, and Republicans needed to get the vote to stop the caravan.

It didn’t exist, and Republicans got a thumping at the polls.

A demonstrator protests outside the state capitol, May 31, 2020, in Minneapolis, following the death of George Floyd, who died after being restrained by Minneapolis police officers on May 25.AP

By 2020, Trump was facing rising public anger about police brutality following the killing of George Floyd. Responding to protests for racial justice and the likely rebuke of Trump, who explicitly endorsed racist police abuse, Republicans tried to argue that they were for “law and order” as the Democrats purportedly embraced anarchy.

The tactic didn’t work and by the time Congress was ready to certify the results of that year’s election, Republicans showed off how little they cared for “law and order” when Trump incited the riot at the Capitol, meant to overturn a Democratic election.

In 2022 and 2024, Republicans (with a mighty assist from Fox News) tried to argue that traditional values were under constant assault from the mere existence of transgender people. The party argued that Democrats were in the throes of promoting radical social change via the party’s acceptance of transgender equality, and Republicans successfully got voters to turn out in opposition to a crusade that wasn’t happening.

This is why the communism gambit sounds so familiar. The playbook is well worn and dog-eared by this point in history. All signs are that the tactic won’t work this year, but that never stopped the right from building itself up into a frenzy over something that isn’t happening.

...as in "deranged"?

Maine Mourns Yet Another Senseless ICE Killing: ‘A Man Was Lynched Here’

 

Demonstrators outside of an ICE field office in Scarborough, Maine, on July 14. (photo: Joseph Prezioso/Getty)

 

"Abolish this rogue agency, and fire the people who let it run wild."

 

Naomi LaChance / Rolling Stone 

17 July 26

There is a bloodstain, several feet long, on the crosswalk and down the curb at the intersection of Pool Street and Hill Street in Biddeford, Maine. 

It is not roped off by crime scene tape. It has a red tint, but it could be mistaken for some kind of spill. Someone has written “This Is Blood” in white chalk, because why would someone in Maine know what it looks like when blood pools in the street and dries?

On the corner, three women are arranging flowers, candles, and rosaries. Across the street, in front of a pawnshop and a laundromat, protesters are gathered with signs: “ICE Out.” All around, journalists are standing in front of camera setups.

The blood belongs to Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a 25-year-old immigrant from Colombia who lived on the block. On Monday, he was shot and killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. 

The Department of Homeland Security claimed in a statement that the agent who killed Guerrero discharged his weapon in the name of “public safety.” It was the fifth vehicle-related killing by ICE agents in the past year and the second in the past week. ICE confirmed that Guerrero was not their intended target. Guerrero’s father, Omar Duran, said his son was in the country legally. He is survived by his wife and three-year-old daughter.

“He had a great vision for getting ahead, so many dreams to fulfill,” Duran told Noticias Caracol, a Colombian news outlet, in Spanish. “My son is a wonderful son — I don’t know why they did that to him.”

Down the street, at a small park, a woman in a white dress chants “ICE Out” over and over again into a loudspeaker, a relentless call and response with the handful of other protesters. The flags in the park are at half-mast. Cars honk their support as they drive by.

On a fence there is another memorial. “A man was lynched here yesterday,” reads one of the signs. “Maine grieves,” reads another. On the edge, almost hidden: “There will be trials.” Here, too, are dozens of flowers and candles.

It was supposed to be very hot Tuesday, in the 90s. There is an eerie feeling in the air, though, like when a storm is about to come, but no storm has come to wash away the blood.

Maine’s congressional lawmakers wrote a letter to the Department of Homeland Security calling for an investigation. “The facts surrounding this tragedy remain a matter of significant local concern and necessitate a thorough, objective accounting,” Independent Sen. Angus King, Republican Sen. Susan Collins, and Democratic Reps. Chellie Pingree and Jared Golden wrote in the letter. “Given the gravity of the situation and the understandable anxiety within the Biddeford community, we urge you to prioritize this investigation.”

The person leading the chant in the park is Mary MacLeod, who lives in Buxton, Maine, and works in marketing. “It’s just very, very sad that we are devolving into a nation of cruelty,” she tells Rolling Stone, “and that cruelty is becoming so normal that we sort of are living with it and accepting it, and people who are cruel depend on that. They’re wearing us down, so that cruelty becomes the norm, and it can’t be, because it’s destroying the best of us, including the young man who was murdered yesterday, who came to this country to better himself, had a young family, and by all accounts, is a really lovely person. That’s what this country was built on, and now we’re destroying it literally and figuratively.”

“The city was built by French Canadians, like my grandfather,” a man in a Red Sox shirt and matching hat, Ryan, interjects. An English explorer arrived in what would come to be called Biddeford in 1616. It became a mill town that attracted French Canadian, Irish, and other European immigrants. In 1880, about half the population of Biddeford was foreign born. According to the Maine Historical Society, the first recorded mosque in America was built in Biddeford by Albanian immigrants.

MacLeod is not affiliated with any activist groups. “I brought the bullhorn because my husband had it. I had never used it before, and I’m also not particularly outspoken when it comes to politics. If someone’s going to try to shout me down, I generally speaking just shut up and just walk in the other direction. I’m not interested in having this kind of argument with people. But in this particular case, I thought it was important to bring out the old bullhorn to get a message out loud and clear. But it does seem like these days it’s the loudest voices that are heard. So I figured, ‘OK, so you fight fire with fire and bring a bullhorn.’”

A boy sits at the corner of Pool and Hill on the stoop of the pawnshop, which appears to be closed. “I actually saw him get shot. I just turned 14 last week,” I hear him say to a protester.

I introduce myself and ask if he wants to talk. He sinks a little when I tell him I am a journalist. He does not want to talk, and I do not want to pressure a child into discussing something he witnessed that will likely change his life forever. He leaves after a little while.

One of the women arranging flowers at the memorial says her family members knew Guerrero, and she had seen him a couple of times. “He was a good guy. He worked really hard,” she says. According to The New York Times, Guerrero was a food delivery driver and a late-night cleaner at a veterinary clinic.

“It’s scary … scary being brown here,” she says of the ICE presence in Maine. She grew up in Maine and says it has not always felt this way.

Twenty minutes north in Portland, about 100 people gather in Monument Square to protest the murder. “ICE pulled the trigger,” activist Cecil Carey of the Party for Socialism and Liberation says into the microphone, “Collins gave the gun,” the crowd responds.

Collins has voted for and pushed for increased ICE funding. On June 5, she voted for the Secure America Act, which gives ICE and Customs and Border Protection $69.5 billion through 2029. The money for ICE is focused on hiring new officers and carrying out immigration enforcement operations like deportation.

“There is a straight line from Senator Collins to the lawlessness we saw yesterday,” Maine Senate candidate Nirav Shah said in a statement. “It’s clear that Susan Collins is never going to hold ICE accountable because she is the one bankrolling it. If Mainers want accountability, there is only one way to get it: retire Susan Collins, abolish this rogue agency, and fire the people who let it run wild.”

On Tuesday, Collins called for an end to “non-urgent vehicle stops” by ICE. The Trump administration obliged, but the president appeared to reverse the decision Wednesday on social media: “We CANNOT give up one of ICE’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” he wrote.

Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner dropped out of the race earlier this month following sexual-assault allegations, and the party is now organizing to choose a new candidate.

“Susan Collins is the villain,” Todd Chretien of the Democratic Socialists of America tells the crowd. “We have four months to get rid of her, and we’re going to have several candidates who are willing to do that. I would advise you to choose wisely.”

 

The Real Message of Trump's Address to the Nation

 

 "We are facing the biggest test of our

democracy since the Civil War" 

By Robert Reich 

Friday,  July 17, 2026

https://substack.com/@robertreich 

The real message to be drawn from Trump’s address to the nation last night is that he will call into question the votes of every state and city that chooses a Democratic senator or representative in the 2026 midterm elections. He’ll push Republican governors and mayors not to certify the results. He’ll demand recounts and audits.

We’ve been here before, but this time he’s even less restrained than he was in 2020 and is surrounded by people who will do his bidding.

His address tonight was absurd. It was riddled with so many lies that I’m reluctant to dignify them with rebuttals, but you should have them.

He mentioned a newly-declassified investigation into a voter registration group in Muskegon, Mich. that apparently had invited fraudulent registrations in 2020 — but Trump didn’t mention that the applications had been caught and none of them had resulted in any ballots being sent out incorrectly. The F.B.I. closed the investigation, stating “the investigation to date did not identify a criminal violation or a priority threat to national security.”

He alleged, once again, that foreign powers have hijacked votes, or that federal or state officials plotted to rig either the 2020 election. But no evidence has ever emerged showing that vote counts have been manipulated or corrupted. Intelligence reports, state audits of vote tallies and lawsuits have repeatedly affirmed official results in 2020 and other years. Nothing suggests China manipulated votes. Instead, U.S. intelligence assessment says China “probably also continued longstanding efforts” to gather information on U.S. voters and public opinion and to use that information to influence U.S. policy “as it has during all election cycles since at least 2008.”

The most significant foreign influence operations occurred in the 2016 presidential election and were conducted by Russia, in favor of Trump, according to the Mueller report. To the extent that this and other reports appeared to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Trump’s victory, they have had the effect of fueling his distrust of U.S. intelligence agencies.

Despite his repeated assertions that U.S. elections are not secure, Trump during his second term has significantly cut the budget of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, including its election work. That’s because Trump grew contemptuous of the agency, and the government’s election security work generally, after it validated the integrity of the 2020 election.

So the entire performance last night was fake — an extension of his Big Lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him.

It was also a commercial for the “Save America Act,” which would make it harder for many American citizens to vote. Voters would have to prove their citizenship in person upon registering to vote, with documents such as an enhanced form of REAL ID (a state ID card compliant with federal regulations) that indicates American citizenship; a birth certificate; a passport or military identification card.

An estimated 9 percent of eligible voters, or 21.3 million Americans, either do not have documents that prove their citizenship, such as passports and birth certificates, or cannot retrieve them in a day or less, according a study by the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at University of Maryland and the Brennan Center for Justice. And 45 states do not issue the kind of enhanced driver’s license indicating citizenship status that would be needed to verify voting eligibility.

The point is that American democracy is acutely endangered by a sociopath who will stop at nothing to get the results he wants.

This means that you and I and every other patriotic American have to do whatever we can to ensure free and fair elections, and fight Trump’s torrent of lies and authoritarian moves.

If you’re anything like me, you’re warn out by Trump. You’d like nothing better than to tune him out. I get it. But American democracy is seriously on the line here. We must keep up — and accelerate — the fight.

Trump address is pre-text for fascist coup against free, fair elections.

 

If he declares a national emergency, we must take to the streets in protest, register and make sure everybody votes.   Press release from  Defend Our Courts    Tonight at 9pm ET, Trump is scheduled to give his national address to the nation. While we don’t know exactly what he will say, we have been getting hints:  According to reporting over the past week, Trump plans to claim that newly uncovered foreign intelligence proves the 2020 election was stolen by China. He then plans to declare GA Democratic Senators Ossoff and Warnock “illegitimate” and use his Chinese fraud claim to have them removed. This is recycled garbage. But for MAGA, the claim doesn't need to be true, it just needs to be useful. In February, we wrote to our supporters about a bombshell Washington Post report confirming the existence of a draft executive order that MAGA operatives had been coordinating on directly with the White House. According to the report, the order would declare a "national emergency" to justify expanding Trump's power over elections, including banning mail-in ballots and voting machines. And the pretext for the entire plot? Yup, you guessed it: Chinese election meddling. Trump’s speech tonight has been in the works for months, maybe even years. It’s pre-text for a fascist coup against free and fair elections. The end of Democracy in America. Whatever happens tonight, one thing is sure, we need to make this election too big to rig. That means every one of us in the streets—protesting, rallying, registering freedom-loving Americans to vote, and getting them to the polls. And it means courts strong enough to hold the line against Trump's fascist takeover of our elections.

Texas ICE Killing Darkens: Trump Admin Pressuring Witnesses to Self-Deport

 

ONE BAD HOMBRE: White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller in Washington, D.C. on May 21. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)

 

"The authors of these conditions are Donald Trump and Stephen Miller."

 

 Greg Sargent / New Republic

12 July 26

After a federal agent killed an undocumented Mexican man in his van during a traffic stop in Houston on Tuesday, the government rushed to follow a familiar template. Just as it has after other shootings, the Department of Homeland Security released a statement insisting that the man, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, had “weaponized his vehicle” against the officer, who then justifiably opened fire. DHS offered no evidence of this.

But it appears three other people were in the van with the now-deceased man, and they presumably could recount their version of what happened: the victim’s brother and two employees of the dead man’s construction business. They were detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the encounter, and we haven’t heard from them publicly about what happened.

Now, in another potentially dark turn in the saga, those three men are under pressure from immigration officials to agree to self-deport, Juan Proaño, a representative for the families and CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, claimed in an interview with The New Republic.

Proaño—who regularly confers with the family members of the victim and the three detainees and organized a press conference on their behalf earlier this week—said the family members were able to reach the three detainees, who then related this situation.

“They’re being pressured to sign self-deportation orders,” Proaño told me. “They’re currently in detention. These men hold the key to what actually happened.” Under self-deportation, detained migrants agree to leave the country voluntarily within a prescribed time period.

According to DHS, officers tried to stop Salgado Araujo’s vehicle as part of a targeted operation, after which the undocumented Salgado Araujo “attempted to evade arrest.” DHS claimed Salgado Araujo “refused to follow multiple verbal commands” before trying to “run over” an ICE officer, who then fired “in self-defense.” Salgado Araujo, struck in the abdomen, was transported to the hospital, where he died.

Yet Salgado Araujo, 52, had been in the United States for 35 years, raised a family, and didn’t immediately seem prone to attempting vehicular manslaughter of federal law enforcement. A business owner himself, he and his passengers were driving to a job: The encounter occurred at the early hour of 6:50 a.m. ICE reportedly hasn’t presented evidence of its version of events and didn’t provide any video camera footage.

But other video of the encounter, reported on by NBC News—which doesn’t include the shooting itself—shows several other men lying face down on the ground along with Salgado Araujo, who is lying wounded with two officers crouched over him and one radioing for help.

The three men are Salgado Araujo’s brother, Victor Hugo Salgado Araujo, and two workers, Daniel Tirado Pantoja and Jose Trinidad Rojas Pliego, Proaño told TNR. Family members who are in touch with them confirmed the pressure to sign self-deportation orders, Proaño says, adding that some of the men may be inclined to do so to avoid longer-term detention.

“We want full public disclosure of the eyewitness accounts of what actually happened on the day that Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed,” Proaño said. The pressure to self-deport, Proaño added, looks like “an effort by DHS to get rid of the only eyewitnesses to what happened.” Asked for comment, ICE emailed a statement that didn’t address the three men’s status and referred questions to the FBI.

There are other reasons to doubt that Salgado Araujo would attempt to kill an officer. NBC reports that DHS hasn’t said that the man has a previous criminal record. And Salgado Araujo’s son, Ronaldo Salgado, says that the family had actually been preparing for the possibility that he might be picked up by law enforcement, given increased ICE activity in Texas. The family had a plan, according to The Washington Post: He would comply if arrested, refrain from signing anything, and wait for the family to try to get him released.

A family man, Salgado Araujo also helped send his three U.S. citizen sons to college, as The Bulwark’s Adrian Carrasquillo reports. He was far along in the process of applying for legal protections, having even submitted fingerprints. And while Salgado, the victim’s son, is calling for a full investigation, the FBI’s local office is said to be focused mainly on establishing that an assault on a federal officer took place (the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general is also probing the event).

A big question now, says Radley Balko, a criminal justice reform expert who writes about ICE abuses on his Substack, is whether these men are advised by lawyers to speak out about what they saw. (Proaño told TNR he doesn’t believe they have legal representation yet.)

“You don’t pressure witnesses to a shooting to self-deport if your goal is to get to the bottom of what happened,” Balko said. “You pressure them to self-deport when you want to make sure that nobody learns what actually happened.”

Balko pointed out that with previous ICE shootings, the government has taken unabashedly heavy-handed steps either to suppress the truth of what happened or to rewrite it to cast the victims as instigators of violent confrontation.

For instance, a number of federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned in protest over a Justice Department push to criminally investigate the actions of shooting victim Renee Good, and over DOJ’s refusal to include state officials in probing the shooting itself. And Balko notes that in a different ICE shooting in Minneapolis, a migrant eyewitness was flown to a detention center hundreds of miles away, potentially to prevent him fom testifying.

“There is precedent for this,” Balko said of ICE’s apparent response to the Texas shooting.

All this comes as ICE is embarked on a massive new escalation of deportations nationwide. Yet in this case, ICE is very eager to keep the removal operations out of the news. The last thing Republicans want with the midterms approaching is another big backlash akin to what met ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis.

Yet as we’ve seen again and again, ramping up this level of paramilitary force—and unleashing it to violently extract longtime residents and business owners from deep within local communities—of necessity creates the tinderbox conditions that make deadly shootings a matter of when, not if. The authors of these conditions are Donald Trump and Stephen Miller.

In Texas, this has now resulted in an unspeakable tragedy. What remains to be seen is whether we’ll ever learn the full, horrifying story.

Miller terrorizes while the old man obligingly dozes off.

 

ICE Is Now Even WORSE and what WE ALL need to do about it

  Its arrests have doubled, its budget has tripled, its illegalities have multiplied.

Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich. (photo: Steve Russell/Toronto Star)

 

Robert Reich / Robert Reich's Substack11 July 26 

11 july 26

If you’re like me, you don’t want to think about anything Trump is doing that you don’t have to think about. The horrific domestic police called ICE, for example, appears to have quieted down. So we can erase it from our minds, right?

Wrong. ICE has not quieted down. It’s even worse. It’s just become less visible.

ICE has quietly doubled its immigrant arrest quota. It’s now arresting 2,000 people per day.

But you’re not hearing about it because the new head of the Department of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, has decided to quietly spread ICE agents around the country instead of targeting one Democratic-controlled city at a time.

Rather than fueling media spectacles, lawsuits, and community backlash, ICE is now going about its ruthless business in more hushed tones.

But every day, more of our neighbors — and more people who are in the United States legally — are being swept up at immigration check-ins, traffic stops, workplaces, and public spaces. Raids have intensified in Los Angeles, San Diego, Houston, Dallas, McAllen, Brownsville, New York City, Newark, Passaic, Plainfield, Milwaukee, Waukesha, Nashville, Charlotte, Chicago, and even in Minneapolis.

Local media continue to report what’s happening, but the national media seem to have lost interest. Among raids reported by local media are:

• ICE’s cold-blooded murder yesterday, July 7, of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Texas.
  


• The mass arrest of more than 30 workers at the Scholar Crafts plant in Birmingham, Alabama.
  


• Raids at two laundromats in Madison, Wisconsin.
  


• Courthouse immigration arrests in South Florida.
  


• A Mexican father arrested while driving to a soccer game in Salt Lake City.
  


• Arrests of dairy farm workers in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia.
  


• Arrests of several workers across Montana.
  


• Dozens of arrests in Kansas City during its hosting of World Cup games.
  


• The arrest of a 56-year-old Catholic nun on her way to Mass in McAllen, Texas.
  


• The arrest of at least three people during immigration check-ins at New York City courthouses last week in violation of federal court orders explicitly barring such arrests.

  And so on.
  

Refugee communities are bracing for additional ICE raids in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision revoking Temporary Protected Status of asylum seekers from Haiti and Syria, which could affect at least 356,000 people. (Haitian asylum seekers in Springfield, Ohio, are expecting “the mother of all ICE raids” after Stephen Miller voiced enthusiastic support for “finally removing all those Haitian illegal immigrants.”)

Community groups in Texas expect increased crackdowns after the conviction of eight activists on domestic terrorism charges following an incident last year in which a police officer was shot during an anti-ICE protest outside the Prairieland Detention Center. A ninth defendant in that case, Ines Soto, was sentenced last week to 50 years in prison for “providing material support to terrorists” because he had transported political pamphlets in his car.

Fifteen Minnesota protesters also pled not guilty last week to conspiracy charges stemming from protests in January. Activist and healthcare worker Isaac Sant, one of the accused, said the trial was “a naked attempt to silence our voices, to squash dissent and to have a chilling effect on organizing here in the Twin Cities,” which, he noted, “is not going to work.”

Meanwhile, ICE’s budget has tripled. The House narrowly voted in June to direct roughly $70 billion to the Department of Homeland Security for ICE and Border Patrol — more than three times its last annual budget. The money comes with few stipulations on how and when it should be spent. It includes:

• $38 billion for ICE to hire, pay, train, and equip its officers and agents. That includes $7 billion for Homeland Security Investigations and $31 billion for immigration enforcement work like hiring more attorneys, supporting local law enforcement who coordinate with ICE, and technology like body cameras;
  


• $22 billion for Border Patrol to pay, train, recruit, and equip agents and personnel. That includes $13 billion specifically for immigration enforcement work;
  


• $5 billion for border security technology and screening, including artificial intelligence.
  

ICE is now using facial recognition technology and has already scanned thousands of immigrants’ and protesters’ faces. This kind of street-level surveillance raises profound legal questions about what are in effect warrantless searches.

The Department of Homeland Security appears to be creating a vast database of people who merely object to its actions.

How else to explain how federal agents tracked down Rochester resident David Streever last month when he was visiting New York City with his daughter? They gave Streever a warning notice alleging that he had potentially violated the law when he wrote a three-paragraph email to Todd Lyons, former head of ICE, criticizing ICE’s mass deportation program and comparing Lyons to a Nazi.

Similarly, during New York State’s primaries in June, ICE agents arrived at a polling site in Syracuse to question Paigelynne Gonyea, a poll worker. Gonyea, an American citizen, says the agents were concerned about an Instagram post she supposedly made in January identifying Jonathan Ross as the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good during the federal incursion in Minneapolis this winter.

Well, I’m criticizing ICE for these violations of the First Amendment rights of Americans. Come arrest me for my public criticism!

The Trump regime continues to open new detention centers, including a 528-bed holding facility for migrant families and unaccompanied children next to an airport hub in Alexandria, Louisiana, to speed up deportations. ICE is calling the facility a “staging area,” not a detention center, and says people would only be there a few days at most. But immigration advocates worry that children could be held at the new facility for weeks or months.

ICE is bigger and worse than ever, although the major media have stopped reporting on it. Not only is ICE’s reign of terror intimidating many undocumented immigrants and their families — preventing them from seeking the healthcare they need or attending school or going to court — but ICE is also sweeping into its maw many American citizens who are protesting Trump’s police state.

Hence, my request to you:

1. Please continue to protect the vulnerable in your communities. Make sure they have Red Cards / Tarjetas Rojas from the Immigrant Legal Resource Center informing them of their rights.

2. Report ICE sightings to your local Rapid Response Network (RRN) to ensure the community is alerted and those affected receive legal support. You can also submit and track anonymously and locally using the ICE Activity Tracker. (When making a report, be sure to note the specific location — intersections or addresses — the number of agents, the types of vehicles, and whether anyone is being detained. Document the activity if it can be done safely from a distance.)

3. Report all ICE activities in your area to your local newspaper, radio, and other local media. Take videos of what ICE is doing — again, doing it safely and from a distance. Share with your local media and ask them to pass it on to their affiliated national broadcast networks.

4. Alert your members of Congress. (Again, to connect directly with the office of your representative or senators, call the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 (or the House direct switchboard at (202) 225-3121). An operator will answer and route your call after you state the name of the lawmaker you wish to reach. Before calling, you can look up your specific representatives using your ZIP code on the House Finder Service or search for your elected officials on Congress.gov.)

5. Above all, do not be intimidated by ICE and the police state Trump and his assistant Stephen Miller are creating. Its purpose is to intimidate. We have a responsibility to one another and to future generations to resist it with the same sort of courage and commitment to democracy our founders summoned just over 250 years ago. 

"Goons" is too kind for these hooligans.  They are depraved cowards, selling their souls for money.
 

Russians Are Growing Anxious and Angry

 

GOOD GUYS GAINING GROUND: The war has come home to Russia and it is everyone’s problem. (photo: Getty)

 

The war has come home: "All we can hope for now is that [Putin] dies.” 

 

The Economist

 09 July 26

 

 

In midsummer the Moscow railway stations that serve southbound routes are usually bustling with holiday-makers. For the past four years stressed parents and children gazing toward the distant promise of the sea have mingled with men in uniforms. 

This summer the stations feel entirely different. Trains heading towards Crimea are spookily empty, the khaki is more prominent and there is a pervading sense of anxiety. As is the case everywhere in Russia, the talk is of petrol shortages, drone strikes, internet outages and the threat of a new round of mobilisation.

Not since reservists were first mobilised to fight in Ukraine in 2022 have Russians felt so unnerved. On July 2nd the Public Opinion Foundation (fom), a pollster close to the Kremlin, reported that 55% said their colleagues and relatives felt anxious, up from 40% last year. 

Russia’s social contract, whereby citizens stayed out of politics and the authorities left them alone, has been broken. The war has come home and is everyone’s problem. Drone attacks, once confined to the border cities of Kursk and Belgorod, now threaten much of the country. On July 6th Ukrainian drones struck Russia’s largest refinery in Omsk, some 2,500km from the front line.

Petrol is being rationed across the country. Drivers wait two or three hours to buy the maximum daily allowance of 20 or 30 litres. Petrol stations have run dry. In Crimea and Novorossiysk, a city on the Black Sea, authorities have banned retail petrol sales; only officials, public services and businessmen connected to fuel operators may fill up. 

Two oil facilities near Novorossiysk have been destroyed. Valery, who owns a grocery shop in the city, expects fuel shortages to have a knock-on effect on food deliveries and other logistics. Food prices have already been affected: in June the cost of potatoes rose by 4.5% from a month earlier. Some farmers say they will not be able to harvest their crops if fuel shortages continue.

In the Rostov region, in southern Russia, the owner of several stalls that sell local produce says she dreams of having her own fuel tanker. “They can all go to hell with their ideas and grand ambitions,” she says. “They” include Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelensky, Emmanuel Macron and local governors. “We used to live just fine. Now all you do is scramble from one problem to the next.”

Elena Panfilova, who conducts focus groups in Moscow, says the mood is turning from frustration to seething hatred of authorities. It is not just the fuel shortage and internet outages that make people angry, but the widening gap between reality and the Kremlin’s rhetoric. “The only way out is to stop [hostilities],” says Valery. “We have been hearing upbeat reports that ‘Russian troops are confidently advancing along the entire front line’ for all four years. Yet if you look at the maps, everything is bogged down in a swamp.”

Mr Putin continues to insist that the war is mostly going to plan. In a recent interview, reading his answers from an autocue, he said: “Everything is operating steadily and with a substantial margin of resilience.” His bare acknowledgment of the change in circumstances suggests he may still be deciding on his next course of action. Many Russians fear that instead of cutting his losses and scaling down, he will double down on the conflict.

Talk of mobilisation has intensified. In early June Sergei Gurulev, a deputy in parliament, wrote on social media that a decision to mobilise in autumn had already been made. Later he deleted his post, claiming it had been hacked. 

“It always happens like this: first there are rumours that something bad will happen, then the authorities start denying it, and then it happens,” says another Sergei, who works for an advertising firm in Nizhny Novgorod, east of Moscow. He is thinking of moving to the countryside, where it would be harder for recruiters to find him: “Going to the office will become suicide.” Many of his colleagues are considering fleeing the country. Talk of emigration is at its most persistent since 2022.

Tests for another round of mobilisation may be under way in the Penza region, south-east of Moscow. Since mid-June locals have been reporting that men are being grabbed in public and in door-to-door sweeps, taken to assembly points and forced to sign contracts with the army. 

Noticeably fewer men are now on the streets. “The atmosphere in the city is terrible,” says Elena, a resident. “I forbade my husband from leaving the house. When I go out, I lock him from the outside. We keep the curtains drawn all day.” Andrey Surkov, Penza’s military commissar, claimed the raids were simply to hunt for draft dodgers and deserters.

Bolshier brigades

Dissent is becoming more open. On June 25th a former soldier posted an appeal to Mr Putin on Instagram, saying soldiers were being tortured for refusing to hand over their earnings to commanders or to carry out suicidal missions, with many eventually “zeroed out” (killed). 

“Vladimir Vladimirovich, pay attention to this. Invite me to meet you. Otherwise the army will turn its weapons on the Kremlin.” The man was predictably arrested, but by then the video had gained 20m views. 

From soldiers to street merchants, discontent is rising. As Sergei in Nizhny Novgorod says, “Nobody understands what all this is for, other than perhaps to satisfy Putin’s ego. If people protest, they go to jail. All we can hope for now is that he dies.”

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