by Jake Johnson | Jan 9, 2026 | Article, ICE, immigration, Politics and Movements: US, Portland, Prisons and Policing, Reprint
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Jan. 09, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
The mayor of Portland, Oregon told Immigration and Customs Enforcement to leave the city after federal agents shot and wounded two people on Thursday, just a day after an ICE agent killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis.
“We cannot sit by while constitutional protections erode and bloodshed mounts,” Portland Mayor Keith Wilson said in a statement. “Portland is not a ‘training ground’ for militarized agents, and the ‘full force’ threatened by the administration has deadly consequences. As mayor, I call on ICE to end all operations in Portland until a full investigation can be completed.”
The shooting took place Thursday afternoon during what the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) described as a “targeted vehicle stop” conducted by Border Patrol agents. Echoing its narrative about the deadly Minneapolis shooting—which was contradicted by video footage from the scene—DHS said the driver “weaponized his vehicle and attempted to run over the law enforcement agents.”
But Wilson said Thursday that the Trump administration could not be trusted to provide an accurate account of events or conduct an honest investigation.
“We know what the federal government says happened here,” said Wilson. “There was a time when we could take them at their word. That time has long passed.”
The man and woman shot by Border Patrol agents were reportedly married, and both were taken to a nearby hospital. Neither their identities nor their conditions were immediately made public.
Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield said late Thursday that his office was investigating the shooting to determine “whether any federal officer acted outside the scope of their lawful authority.”
“We have been
by Brad Reed | Jan 8, 2026 | Article, ICE, immigration, Minneapolis, Politics and Movements: US, Prisons and Policing, Reprint
by Stephen Prager | Jan 8, 2026 | Article, ICE, immigration, Politics and Movements: US, Prisons and Policing, Reprint
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Jan. 08, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
Just hours after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed an unarmed US citizen in Minneapolis on Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance said the agency would soon be going “door to door” across the country to escalate the Trump administration’s mass deportation crusade in the coming year.
In an interview on Fox News with host Jesse Watters, Vance boasted that during Trump’s first year back in power, the administration had gotten “2.5 million illegal aliens out” of the country, “without any of the really big marquee things that we’ve been working on.”
Notably, only about 600,000 of these have been through formal deportations, while the rest have been through what the White House claims are “self-deportations.” Despite claims to the contrary, the vast majority of those detained by ICE have had no criminal records. Many have been legal residents, green card holders, and asylum seekers following the legal process.
ICE’s budget is expected to triple in 2026 following the passage of Republican budget legislation last year that has allowed it to launch what it calls a “wartime recruitment” strategy, hiring as many as 10,000 new officers with minimal training. Last week, the Washington Postreported that the agency had earmarked $100 million toward online recruitment advertisements, meant to draw in “people who have attended UFC fights, listened to patriotic podcasts, or shown an interest in guns and tactical gear.”
Vance continued, “I think we’re going to see those [deportation] numbers ramp up as we get more and more people online and working for ICE, going door to door and making sure that if you’re an illegal alien, you’ve got to get out of this country, and if you want to
by Jake Johnson | Jan 8, 2026 | Article, Climate, Climate Change, Climate Crisis, Politics and Movements: International, Politics and Movements: US, Reprint, Trump
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Jan. 08, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
President Donald Trump on Wednesday withdrew the United States from dozens of international treaties and organizations aimed at promoting cooperation on the world’s most pressing issues, including human rights and the worsening climate emergency.
Among the treaties Trump ditched via a legally dubious executive order was the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), making the US—the world’s largest historical emitter of planet-warming greenhouse gases—the first country to abandon the landmark agreement.
The US Senate ratified the convention in 1992 by unanimous consent, but lawmakers have repeatedly failed to assert their constitutional authority to stop presidents from unilaterally withdrawing from global treaties.
Jean Su, energy justice director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement that “Trump cutting ties with the world’s oldest climate treaty is another despicable effort to let corporate fossil fuel interests run our government.”
“Given deeply polarized US politics, it’s going to be nearly impossible for the U.S. to rejoin the UNFCCC with a two-thirds majority vote. Letting this lawless move stand could shut the US out of climate diplomacy forever,” Su warned. “Withdrawing from the world’s leading climate, biodiversity, and scientific institutions threatens all life on Earth.”
Trump also pulled the US out of the International Institute for Justice and the Rule of Law, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the UN International Law Commission, the UN Democracy Fund, UN Oceans, and dozens of other global bodies, deeming them “contrary to the interests of the United States.”
The president’s move came as he continued to steamroll domestic and international law with an illegal assault on Venezuela and threats to seize Greenland with military force, among other grave abuses.
Below is the full list of international organizations that
by Brad Reed | Jan 7, 2026 | Article, ICE, Politics and Movements: US, Prisons and Policing, Reprint
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Jan. 07, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
This a developing story… Please check back for possible updates… WARNING: This post includes graphic footage of the shooting which some people may find disturbing…
Residents of Minneapolis reacted with fury on Wednesday after a woman was shot and killed by a federal immigration agent.
Emily Heller, a Minneapolis resident who witnessed the shooting, told Minnesota Public Radio that she saw a federal agent confronting a woman who was sitting in her car and telling her to leave the area during an immigration enforcement operation in the neighborhood.
“She was trying to turn around, and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent was in front of her car, and he pulled out a gun and put it right in,” Heller told MPR. “And he reached across the hood of the car and shot her in the face like three, four times.”
The identity of the woman shot by the agent has not yet been released, but US Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) wrote in a social media post that the woman was a US citizen.
The senator also said that “ICE should leave now for everyone’s safety.”
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey is also demanding that ICE leave the city, according to a post from the city’s official X account.
US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) echoed Smith and Frey’s calls for ICE to get out of Minneapolis.
“ICE must stop terrorizing our communities and leave our city,” she wrote in a social media post.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz released a statement saying that his public safety team “is working to gather information on an ICE related shooting this morning,” while vowing to “share information as we learn more.”
“In the meantime, I ask
by Sharon Zhang | Jan 6, 2026 | Article, Politics and Movements: International, Politics and Movements: US, Reprint, Trump, Venezuela
This story was originally published on Truthout on Jan. 05, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.
Major American news outlets were informed of the Trump administration’s plan to bombard Venezuela and abduct its president ahead of the operation early Saturday morning, but withheld their reporting on the operation to protect the military, Semafor reports.
Both The New York Times and The Washington Post knew about the raid before President Donald Trump approved it on Friday night at 10:46 pm, Semafor reported over the weekend.
However, according to two people familiar with the administration’s communications with the outlets, they “held off publishing what they knew to avoid endangering U.S. troops.”
The report raises major questions about the media’s role in the operation, which has been widely condemned as an illegal and authoritarian action by legal experts and foreign leaders; Semafor describes the withholding of coverage as potential “cooperation” with the military by news outlets.
Major news outlets in the U.S. have a history of coordinating with the Pentagon in order to protect military operations.
As Semafor notes, The New York Times reportedly withheld a story about the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation in 1961 before the Cuban invasion at the behest of the Kennedy administration.
There are numerous other such examples. In the mid-2000s, the Times withheld a major report on the National Security Agency’s campaign of warrantless spying on American citizens, Stellar Wind, for a year at the Bush administration’s request.
Most recently, The Atlantic withheld a potential report on a planned U.S. attack on Yemen that was the central focus of Signalgate. That attack, which the magazine’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was notified about two hours in advance, killed 15 people, including six children, one of them a newborn baby.
Goldberg noted that he wasn’t clear about the authenticity
