In an ad during the Super Bowl on Sunday night, Amazon’s Ring touted the establishment of an AI-powered surveillance network through their camera systems, which the company whitewashed under a feel-good narrative about finding lost dogs. The ad for Ring’s free “Search Party” program urges users to “be a hero” by using their surveillance cameras to help identify lost dogs in their neighborhood.
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A cozy cafe in the heart of Minneapolis, Minnesota, has become a staging ground for Indigenous-led patrols working to keep Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) off their streets. Pow Wow Grounds, opened in 2011 by Bob Rice, has been both a gathering place for community members attempting to make sense of the scale of violence they have witnessed over the past few weeks and a place to…
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Elite consensus over the past year is that “defund” and “abolish” language from immigrant and Black Lives Matter activists of the late 2010s and early 2020s was a primary contributor to Harris’ 2024 loss to Trump. Despite this conventional wisdom lacking things like evidence, good-faith analysis, or empirical basis, it has quickly been cemented into the conventional wisdom of the Beltway and the media. The narrative, somewhat awkwardly, requires acting as if we jumped directly from 2017 to 2023, and requires ignoring that at the height of “abolish ICE,” Democrats over-performed in the 2018 primaries. And, at the height of “defund the police” rhetoric, Biden used the wave of George Floyd activism to help him capture the White House in 2020. But the story—and make no mistake, it’s simply a story—fit neatly into a left-punching, elite-serving narrative: Harris was bogged down not by a clearly sunsetting Biden clinging to power, not by veering to the center and thus depressing progressive energy, not by her continued support for the ongoing genocide in Gaza, but some vague brand association that swing voters had with Harris and anti-police and anti-ICE language in the preceding years.
This elite consensus has been, in large part, pushed out by billionaire-backed groups like Searchlight Institute, Third Way, Blue Rose’s David Shor and other influential liberal pundits. It is in this context one must examine this latest PR effort by center-left media and their allies in law enforcement to contain the populist anger over DHS abuses and their attempt to frame said abuse as an anomaly, a one-off deviation from a narrative of progress and reform after the mass
A federal judge issued an emergency order on February 2 temporarily blocking Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s latest effort to prevent Democratic lawmakers from making unannounced inspections of federal immigration jails, where at least 38 people have died since Donald Trump returned to the White House. “Unlawful secrecy has fueled the deadliest era in Department of Homeland Security…
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Ecuador’s Foreign Ministry filed a formal note of protest on Tuesday after a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent tried to enter the South American nation’s consulate in Minneapolis before being stopped by a staffer inside the building. In a statement released following the incident, the Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry said an ICE agent “attempted to enter the consulate premises,”…
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Americans are once again searching for historical analogies to explain what is unfolding around us. As authoritarianism accelerates — as government-sanctioned violence becomes more overt in immigration enforcement, in policing, in the open deployment of federal force against civilians, and in the steady erosion of civil rights — people are scrambling for reference points.
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