FOOD 4 THOUGHT
This is where we pause to dig beneath the surface with articles that spark conversations to make you think about what really matters.
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WHY NO ANSWERS TO THESE QUESTIONS?
Monday, September 7, 2026 | New York banned local police from working with ICE last month, and no Westchester department has said whether it ever had an agreement to give up.
By Jim Jockle, The Westchester Brief, September 7, 2026
New York's Local Cops, Local Crimes Act banned local police departments from holding cooperation agreements with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, effective August 25, 2026. The law bars 287(g) agreements, which let local officers carry out federal immigration duties, including holding someone in jail past their release date at ICE's request. Any department that already had one was required to end it by the deadline.
A new state Office of Immigrant Trust, created this spring by Governor Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James, is enforcing the law. In late July, it sent letters to 12 local law enforcement agencies across New York that held 287(g) agreements, ordering them to terminate by the deadline. The state has not published that list.
After the deadline passed, the Attorney General's office subpoenaed counties that had not complied: Nassau, Rensselaer, Broome, and Steuben. Westchester is not among them. Fifteen county sheriffs elsewhere in the state have sued to block the law, arguing it interferes with federal authority.
That leaves Westchester's status unresolved. Westchester County Police, White Plains, New Rochelle, and Mamaroneck have not confirmed, on the record, whether they held a 287(g) agreement before the ban, and none of them appears on the enforcement-letter list or the subpoena list.
Why it matters: County Executive Ken Jenkins has publicly backed the law, arguing immigrant communities are more likely to report crime when they trust that local police are not an arm of federal immigration enforcement. That argument only holds if residents actually know where their own department stands, and right now, nobody outside those departments and the Attorney General's office does.
Quick Hits
Wayfair's First New York Store Lands at Ridge Hill
Wayfair confirmed its first New York retail store will open at Ridge Hill in Yonkers in early 2027. The store spans about 114,000 square feet across 19 departments, making it only the company's third large-format store anywhere. For a county watching legacy retailers close their doors, a national e-commerce brand choosing Westchester for its first New York footprint is a real signal.
One More Thing
Do you think a Westchester police department should have to publicly confirm whether it ever held a 287(g) agreement with ICE? Reply and tell us what you think.
Listen to The Westchester Brief daily on all podcast platforms.
Visit: www.iliveheremedia.com
Email: [email protected]
Instagram: @iliveheremedia
Don't miss an episode. Forward this to a neighbor and ask them to subscribe.
Monday, September 7, 2026 | New York banned local police from working with ICE last month, and no Westchester department has said whether it ever had an agreement to give up.
By Jim Jockle, The Westchester Brief, September 7, 2026
New York's Local Cops, Local Crimes Act banned local police departments from holding cooperation agreements with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, effective August 25, 2026. The law bars 287(g) agreements, which let local officers carry out federal immigration duties, including holding someone in jail past their release date at ICE's request. Any department that already had one was required to end it by the deadline.
A new state Office of Immigrant Trust, created this spring by Governor Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James, is enforcing the law. In late July, it sent letters to 12 local law enforcement agencies across New York that held 287(g) agreements, ordering them to terminate by the deadline. The state has not published that list.
After the deadline passed, the Attorney General's office subpoenaed counties that had not complied: Nassau, Rensselaer, Broome, and Steuben. Westchester is not among them. Fifteen county sheriffs elsewhere in the state have sued to block the law, arguing it interferes with federal authority.
That leaves Westchester's status unresolved. Westchester County Police, White Plains, New Rochelle, and Mamaroneck have not confirmed, on the record, whether they held a 287(g) agreement before the ban, and none of them appears on the enforcement-letter list or the subpoena list.
Why it matters: County Executive Ken Jenkins has publicly backed the law, arguing immigrant communities are more likely to report crime when they trust that local police are not an arm of federal immigration enforcement. That argument only holds if residents actually know where their own department stands, and right now, nobody outside those departments and the Attorney General's office does.
Quick Hits
Wayfair's First New York Store Lands at Ridge Hill
Wayfair confirmed its first New York retail store will open at Ridge Hill in Yonkers in early 2027. The store spans about 114,000 square feet across 19 departments, making it only the company's third large-format store anywhere. For a county watching legacy retailers close their doors, a national e-commerce brand choosing Westchester for its first New York footprint is a real signal.
One More Thing
Do you think a Westchester police department should have to publicly confirm whether it ever held a 287(g) agreement with ICE? Reply and tell us what you think.
Listen to The Westchester Brief daily on all podcast platforms.
Visit: www.iliveheremedia.com
Email: [email protected]
Instagram: @iliveheremedia
Don't miss an episode. Forward this to a neighbor and ask them to subscribe.
____________________________
THIS IS WHAT (SOME) AMERICANS ARE MADE OF...
‘Modern-Day Miracle’ — Airman Shot Down over Iran Details Extraordinary 50-Hour Rescue Behind Enemy Lines
By Joshua Klein, Breitbart, September 14, 2026
‘Modern-Day Miracle’ — Airman Shot Down over Iran Details Extraordinary 50-Hour Rescue Behind Enemy Lines
By Joshua Klein, Breitbart, September 14, 2026
Photo: Centcom
A U.S. Air Force officer whose F-15E was shot down over Iran has revealed how he prayed while plummeting toward the ground at up to 100 mph before surviving a broken back and other injuries — and 50 hours behind enemy lines as Iranian forces hunted him — in an ordeal he described as a “modern-day miracle.”
The weapons systems officer, identified only by his mission call sign “Dude 44 Bravo” because of Iranian security threats, spoke publicly for the first time Sunday in a 60 Minutes interview that included newly declassified footage of the extraordinary U.S. operation launched to bring him home.
Bravo was flying in the back seat of Dude 44, a two-seat F-15E Strike Eagle, during an April 2 mission to strike industrial facilities tied to Iran’s drone and missile programs south of Isfahan when the $30 million fighter was hit by an Iranian shoulder-fired missile.
“The best way I’ve been able to describe that moment was getting hit by a freight train,” Bravo told CBS News correspondent Norah O’Donnell.
Bravo and the pilot, call sign Alpha, initially tried to save the badly damaged aircraft before Alpha made the decision to eject them.
“I will be thankful, to my dying day, for my pilot and crewmate, Alpha, for saving our lives and ejecting us,” Bravo said.
But the missile had also damaged Bravo’s parachute.
“At one point when I looked up and saw no parachute, that was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen,” he recalled. “So I paused, right then. And I prayed, ‘Lord, your will be done. But if I’m getting through this, I need help.’”
Bravo effectively free-fell toward the Iranian desert, with experts later estimating from his account and injuries that he struck the ground traveling somewhere between 70 and 100 mph.
The impact broke his back, arm and shoulder. He also suffered a sprained ankle and cuts to his head and face.
Asked how he survived, Bravo answered: “A modern-day miracle.”
“I believe that it’s a testament to God’s provision in my life to bring me through that moment in a way that didn’t prevent injuries, but prevented any catastrophic injuries that would have affected my ability to survive,” he said.
Bravo had landed roughly five miles from Alpha in rugged high-desert terrain and immediately began moving away from his landing site as Iranian forces mobilized to capture the downed Americans.
Iranian media publicized the wreckage, rewards were offered for the airmen’s capture, and armed groups were seen searching for them. U.S. military sources told 60 Minutes that Iranian forces eventually came within several hundred meters of Bravo.
“There was clear intent out of the Iranian ground force to come find those two guys,” Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine said.
U.S. Central Command chief Adm. Brad Cooper said American forces were tracking roughly 1,500 Iranian personnel within a ten-mile radius.
Badly injured and surrounded by steep cliffs, Bravo concluded his best chance was to go up. Despite his broken bones, he climbed toward a ridgeline roughly 7,000 feet in elevation to conceal himself and evade the search.
Asked how he found the strength, Bravo offered a blunt answer.
“Never let a lack of motivation put you on Iranian TV.”
The United States meanwhile launched a massive effort to recover both men. War Secretary Pete Hegseth said that when he was awakened with news that the F-15E had gone down, his attention immediately turned to whether the airmen were alive and whether Iran knew where they were.
“Whether they’re alive or not, we’re gonna go get ’em,” Hegseth said.
Alpha was located first and recovered roughly six hours after the shootdown in a daring daylight raid that came under intense Iranian fire.
“It was a gun fight all the way in and all the way out,” Hegseth said. “But they got Alpha back.”
Bravo remained missing.
As darkness fell, he finally established communications from a concealed position, telling U.S. forces he was injured but moving and sending another three-word message: “God is good.”
“When I got to the moment where I could review and think about all that I’d gone through, I sent, ‘God is good,’ as a recognition of all that he had brought me through,” Bravo said.
An effort to retrieve him that night was considered but ultimately delayed, leaving the wounded airman to endure another full day in the cold mountain desert with almost no water and no food.
As Breitbart News reported at the time, the CIA played a pivotal role in the hunt for Bravo, using classified capabilities to help pinpoint his location while mounting a deception campaign intended to divert Iranian search teams away from where he was hiding.
The newly declassified footage aired Sunday shows U.S. bombers and drones striking Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) forces near Bravo’s position to clear the way for his extraction.
The scale of what followed was extraordinary.
Cooper said approximately 92 U.S. personnel entered Iran for the second rescue operation — the first American boots on Iranian soil in 46 years — while several hundred personnel operated in the air and an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 supported the mission overall.
Asked about sending nearly 100 Americans onto Iranian soil to rescue a single airman, Caine made clear the size of the force was never the limiting consideration.
“I think what you need to know is we would have sent more to go get the back-seater,” he said.
Two large search-and-rescue aircraft landed at a makeshift desert airstrip, from which smaller Little Bird helicopters launched toward Bravo’s mountain position.
Declassified footage shows two Air Force pararescue operators, known as PJs, reaching the wounded officer on the ridgeline.
“The moment a PJ showed up to me on that ridgeline was one of the greatest moments of my life,” Bravo said.
Asked what he told his rescuers, Bravo recalled two words: “Let’s go.”
But getting Bravo into American hands did not end the operation. The landing gear of the rescue aircraft became stuck in the desert sand, suddenly leaving more than 90 of America’s most elite service members stranded inside Iran.
A clandestine Air Force unit was ultimately brought in to evacuate Bravo and the rescue force. The United States then destroyed the marooned aircraft and equipment left behind to prevent the technology from falling into Iranian hands.Fifty hours after Dude 44 was shot down, Bravo finally reached safety as the sun rose on Easter Sunday.
The rescue was first detailed extensively by Breitbart News in April, when President Donald Trump hailed it as an “Easter miracle” and vowed that the United States would “never leave an American warfighter behind.”
Bravo, now telling the story in his own words for the first time, said he never doubted that Americans were coming for him.
“It’s what we do,” he said. “I have great faith in my creator. And second only to that is my faith in the men and women of the United States military.”
And asked what he wanted Americans to take from the operation, Bravo turned the focus away from himself.
“This is not a story about what I went through,” he said. “Instead, it’s a story of the teamwork, the training, of the faith, of the decisions and the leadership to do something that will live in history as an example of what America’s willing to do, in order to uphold our promise and leave no man behind.”
Joshua Klein is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaKlein.
The weapons systems officer, identified only by his mission call sign “Dude 44 Bravo” because of Iranian security threats, spoke publicly for the first time Sunday in a 60 Minutes interview that included newly declassified footage of the extraordinary U.S. operation launched to bring him home.
Bravo was flying in the back seat of Dude 44, a two-seat F-15E Strike Eagle, during an April 2 mission to strike industrial facilities tied to Iran’s drone and missile programs south of Isfahan when the $30 million fighter was hit by an Iranian shoulder-fired missile.
“The best way I’ve been able to describe that moment was getting hit by a freight train,” Bravo told CBS News correspondent Norah O’Donnell.
Bravo and the pilot, call sign Alpha, initially tried to save the badly damaged aircraft before Alpha made the decision to eject them.
“I will be thankful, to my dying day, for my pilot and crewmate, Alpha, for saving our lives and ejecting us,” Bravo said.
But the missile had also damaged Bravo’s parachute.
“At one point when I looked up and saw no parachute, that was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen,” he recalled. “So I paused, right then. And I prayed, ‘Lord, your will be done. But if I’m getting through this, I need help.’”
Bravo effectively free-fell toward the Iranian desert, with experts later estimating from his account and injuries that he struck the ground traveling somewhere between 70 and 100 mph.
The impact broke his back, arm and shoulder. He also suffered a sprained ankle and cuts to his head and face.
Asked how he survived, Bravo answered: “A modern-day miracle.”
“I believe that it’s a testament to God’s provision in my life to bring me through that moment in a way that didn’t prevent injuries, but prevented any catastrophic injuries that would have affected my ability to survive,” he said.
Bravo had landed roughly five miles from Alpha in rugged high-desert terrain and immediately began moving away from his landing site as Iranian forces mobilized to capture the downed Americans.
Iranian media publicized the wreckage, rewards were offered for the airmen’s capture, and armed groups were seen searching for them. U.S. military sources told 60 Minutes that Iranian forces eventually came within several hundred meters of Bravo.
“There was clear intent out of the Iranian ground force to come find those two guys,” Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine said.
U.S. Central Command chief Adm. Brad Cooper said American forces were tracking roughly 1,500 Iranian personnel within a ten-mile radius.
Badly injured and surrounded by steep cliffs, Bravo concluded his best chance was to go up. Despite his broken bones, he climbed toward a ridgeline roughly 7,000 feet in elevation to conceal himself and evade the search.
Asked how he found the strength, Bravo offered a blunt answer.
“Never let a lack of motivation put you on Iranian TV.”
The United States meanwhile launched a massive effort to recover both men. War Secretary Pete Hegseth said that when he was awakened with news that the F-15E had gone down, his attention immediately turned to whether the airmen were alive and whether Iran knew where they were.
“Whether they’re alive or not, we’re gonna go get ’em,” Hegseth said.
Alpha was located first and recovered roughly six hours after the shootdown in a daring daylight raid that came under intense Iranian fire.
“It was a gun fight all the way in and all the way out,” Hegseth said. “But they got Alpha back.”
Bravo remained missing.
As darkness fell, he finally established communications from a concealed position, telling U.S. forces he was injured but moving and sending another three-word message: “God is good.”
“When I got to the moment where I could review and think about all that I’d gone through, I sent, ‘God is good,’ as a recognition of all that he had brought me through,” Bravo said.
An effort to retrieve him that night was considered but ultimately delayed, leaving the wounded airman to endure another full day in the cold mountain desert with almost no water and no food.
As Breitbart News reported at the time, the CIA played a pivotal role in the hunt for Bravo, using classified capabilities to help pinpoint his location while mounting a deception campaign intended to divert Iranian search teams away from where he was hiding.
The newly declassified footage aired Sunday shows U.S. bombers and drones striking Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) forces near Bravo’s position to clear the way for his extraction.
The scale of what followed was extraordinary.
Cooper said approximately 92 U.S. personnel entered Iran for the second rescue operation — the first American boots on Iranian soil in 46 years — while several hundred personnel operated in the air and an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 supported the mission overall.
Asked about sending nearly 100 Americans onto Iranian soil to rescue a single airman, Caine made clear the size of the force was never the limiting consideration.
“I think what you need to know is we would have sent more to go get the back-seater,” he said.
Two large search-and-rescue aircraft landed at a makeshift desert airstrip, from which smaller Little Bird helicopters launched toward Bravo’s mountain position.
Declassified footage shows two Air Force pararescue operators, known as PJs, reaching the wounded officer on the ridgeline.
“The moment a PJ showed up to me on that ridgeline was one of the greatest moments of my life,” Bravo said.
Asked what he told his rescuers, Bravo recalled two words: “Let’s go.”
But getting Bravo into American hands did not end the operation. The landing gear of the rescue aircraft became stuck in the desert sand, suddenly leaving more than 90 of America’s most elite service members stranded inside Iran.
A clandestine Air Force unit was ultimately brought in to evacuate Bravo and the rescue force. The United States then destroyed the marooned aircraft and equipment left behind to prevent the technology from falling into Iranian hands.Fifty hours after Dude 44 was shot down, Bravo finally reached safety as the sun rose on Easter Sunday.
The rescue was first detailed extensively by Breitbart News in April, when President Donald Trump hailed it as an “Easter miracle” and vowed that the United States would “never leave an American warfighter behind.”
Bravo, now telling the story in his own words for the first time, said he never doubted that Americans were coming for him.
“It’s what we do,” he said. “I have great faith in my creator. And second only to that is my faith in the men and women of the United States military.”
And asked what he wanted Americans to take from the operation, Bravo turned the focus away from himself.
“This is not a story about what I went through,” he said. “Instead, it’s a story of the teamwork, the training, of the faith, of the decisions and the leadership to do something that will live in history as an example of what America’s willing to do, in order to uphold our promise and leave no man behind.”
Joshua Klein is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaKlein.
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JAMAICA HOMELESSNESS AND THE FOOLISH FALLACY OF 'HOUSING FIRST'
Joe Lonsdale Has a Different Answer to America’s Homelessness Crisis
The Cicero Institute is challenging a homelessness establishment that has spent decades accommodating dysfunction rather than confronting it.
by Lipton Matthews, The American Spectator, August 30, 2026
Joe Lonsdale Has a Different Answer to America’s Homelessness Crisis
The Cicero Institute is challenging a homelessness establishment that has spent decades accommodating dysfunction rather than confronting it.
by Lipton Matthews, The American Spectator, August 30, 2026
I was born in Jamaica and lived there for most of my adult life, and if there is one thing that never stopped grating on me, it was the parlous state of the streets. The country is, in places, quite dirty, and the beggars are everywhere as a fixed feature of daily life. Homeless people sleep in doorways and on the steps of banks, and nobody who owns those buildings seems to particularly care. You step around them on your way to the ATM the way you’d step around a puddle. And if you complained about any of it, you were quickly labelled anti-poor, for preferring a pristine environment.
Some years ago, a telecommunications company aggravated the problem by sponsoring vendors with stalls in Half Way Tree, even though the space was never meant to be a vending facility. But such is the course of things in a Third World country, where hooliganism is venerated as resistance and suicidal empathy prevents people from correcting the poor. Half Way Tree, once seen as upscale Jamaica, became a dump. Go to Half Way Tree Square on any given afternoon and you’ll see the whole ecosystem laid out at once: vendors hawking phone cards and fried food, beggars working the crowd, and vagrants simply parked on the pavement, indifferent to the traffic of commerce moving around them.
The U.S. is still a first world country. But it is one that a significant number of its own citizens desperately want to drag down to Third World conditions.
Then there are the self-styled “loadermen,” who insert themselves as your escort into a taxi whether you asked for the service or not, then turn around and demand a fee from the driver for the privilege. This behavior is tolerated all in the name of the offenders being poor, as though poverty were a license rather than a circumstance. Squatting, meanwhile, isn’t a fringe problem. It’s a national crisis, one that successive governments have never had the stomach to confront honestly, and more than one politician has found it politically convenient to side with squatters rather than enforce property rights. I don’t live in Jamaica anymore, and I can’t say I miss that particular texture of life.
What I didn’t expect was to be reminded of it in London. I was walking around the city recently with a friend who lived there in his youth, and he was genuinely dismayed by the public camping he saw. He said it, only half-joking, as evidence that the country was slipping into disarray. I told him, honestly, that whatever London’s problems, Jamaica was worse. He didn’t quite believe me, but it’s true. What he was reacting to as a novelty, I’d lived with as wallpaper. That conversation is what got me thinking about how differently societies choose to respond to the same underlying phenomenon, and it’s why the current fight over American homelessness policy has caught my attention.
The billionaire Joe Lonsdale, the Palantir co-founder, has become the most consequential, and most criticized, figure in that fight. His think tank, the Cicero Institute, has spent less than $15 million a year pushing a very different theory of homelessness: that public camping and sleeping on the streets should be discouraged rather than accommodated, and that cities and states which tolerate it are choosing decline. Twenty-one states have pondered outlawing public camping and other anti-homelessness measures touted by the institute, and Cicero-modeled legislation has already been signed into law in a number of them.
The institute has also come under fire for its closeness to the Trump administration, which has leaned on Cicero’s research in redirecting federal homelessness funding away from housing subsidies and toward mandated treatment programs. When critics raise this, the more useful question isn’t whether Lonsdale is unpopular in certain circles. It’s whether what the Cicero Institute is actually pushing for will make our streets, and the people on them, safer. That’s the question that should settle the argument, not the fact that a wealthy man is behind it.
The real fight, though, is philosophical. Cicero is explicitly opposed to “Housing First,” the dominant policy paradigm of the last two decades, which holds that people should be moved into stable housing before, not after, their addiction or mental health issues are addressed. The logic is that housing is the precondition for stability, not the reward for it.
I find this idealism hard to take seriously as policy. Addiction and untreated mental illness are among the primary drivers of chronic homelessness, and a program that hands over a lease while treating everything else as optional is, in practice, subsidizing the behavior that put someone on the street in the first place. Housing First sounds compassionate in a seminar room; it’s much harder to defend once you’ve watched it fail to change outcomes at scale. The government has no obligation to underwrite dysfunction indefinitely, and pretending otherwise is exactly the kind of idealism that has let American cities rot from the inside.
San Francisco is the clearest evidence of that rot. Whole blocks have become genuinely unlivable, not because housing is scarce in some abstract sense, but because unmanaged homelessness cultivates the antisocial behavior that comes with it: open drug markets, theft, public disorder, precisely because so much of the affected population is dealing with active addiction. A policy framework unwilling to say that plainly, and hesitating to compel treatment as a condition of help, is not a serious framework.
Whatever one thinks of Lonsdale personally, Americans should be glad that someone with his resources is willing to say the unfashionable thing and back it with money and legislation, rather than mouthing the same idealistic banter that has governed, and failed, this issue for 20 years. This is, in fact, the qualitative difference between Jamaica and the United States: the existence of people like Lonsdale who are willing to spend their capital, political and financial, actually fixing a problem rather than performing sympathy for it. The U.S. is still a first world country. But it is one that a significant number of its own citizens desperately want to drag down to Third World conditions, not out of ignorance of what that looks like, but in service of an ideal of anti-bourgeois revolution, in which squalor is treated as evidence of moral seriousness and order is treated as evidence of complicity.
Some years ago, a telecommunications company aggravated the problem by sponsoring vendors with stalls in Half Way Tree, even though the space was never meant to be a vending facility. But such is the course of things in a Third World country, where hooliganism is venerated as resistance and suicidal empathy prevents people from correcting the poor. Half Way Tree, once seen as upscale Jamaica, became a dump. Go to Half Way Tree Square on any given afternoon and you’ll see the whole ecosystem laid out at once: vendors hawking phone cards and fried food, beggars working the crowd, and vagrants simply parked on the pavement, indifferent to the traffic of commerce moving around them.
The U.S. is still a first world country. But it is one that a significant number of its own citizens desperately want to drag down to Third World conditions.
Then there are the self-styled “loadermen,” who insert themselves as your escort into a taxi whether you asked for the service or not, then turn around and demand a fee from the driver for the privilege. This behavior is tolerated all in the name of the offenders being poor, as though poverty were a license rather than a circumstance. Squatting, meanwhile, isn’t a fringe problem. It’s a national crisis, one that successive governments have never had the stomach to confront honestly, and more than one politician has found it politically convenient to side with squatters rather than enforce property rights. I don’t live in Jamaica anymore, and I can’t say I miss that particular texture of life.
What I didn’t expect was to be reminded of it in London. I was walking around the city recently with a friend who lived there in his youth, and he was genuinely dismayed by the public camping he saw. He said it, only half-joking, as evidence that the country was slipping into disarray. I told him, honestly, that whatever London’s problems, Jamaica was worse. He didn’t quite believe me, but it’s true. What he was reacting to as a novelty, I’d lived with as wallpaper. That conversation is what got me thinking about how differently societies choose to respond to the same underlying phenomenon, and it’s why the current fight over American homelessness policy has caught my attention.
The billionaire Joe Lonsdale, the Palantir co-founder, has become the most consequential, and most criticized, figure in that fight. His think tank, the Cicero Institute, has spent less than $15 million a year pushing a very different theory of homelessness: that public camping and sleeping on the streets should be discouraged rather than accommodated, and that cities and states which tolerate it are choosing decline. Twenty-one states have pondered outlawing public camping and other anti-homelessness measures touted by the institute, and Cicero-modeled legislation has already been signed into law in a number of them.
The institute has also come under fire for its closeness to the Trump administration, which has leaned on Cicero’s research in redirecting federal homelessness funding away from housing subsidies and toward mandated treatment programs. When critics raise this, the more useful question isn’t whether Lonsdale is unpopular in certain circles. It’s whether what the Cicero Institute is actually pushing for will make our streets, and the people on them, safer. That’s the question that should settle the argument, not the fact that a wealthy man is behind it.
The real fight, though, is philosophical. Cicero is explicitly opposed to “Housing First,” the dominant policy paradigm of the last two decades, which holds that people should be moved into stable housing before, not after, their addiction or mental health issues are addressed. The logic is that housing is the precondition for stability, not the reward for it.
I find this idealism hard to take seriously as policy. Addiction and untreated mental illness are among the primary drivers of chronic homelessness, and a program that hands over a lease while treating everything else as optional is, in practice, subsidizing the behavior that put someone on the street in the first place. Housing First sounds compassionate in a seminar room; it’s much harder to defend once you’ve watched it fail to change outcomes at scale. The government has no obligation to underwrite dysfunction indefinitely, and pretending otherwise is exactly the kind of idealism that has let American cities rot from the inside.
San Francisco is the clearest evidence of that rot. Whole blocks have become genuinely unlivable, not because housing is scarce in some abstract sense, but because unmanaged homelessness cultivates the antisocial behavior that comes with it: open drug markets, theft, public disorder, precisely because so much of the affected population is dealing with active addiction. A policy framework unwilling to say that plainly, and hesitating to compel treatment as a condition of help, is not a serious framework.
Whatever one thinks of Lonsdale personally, Americans should be glad that someone with his resources is willing to say the unfashionable thing and back it with money and legislation, rather than mouthing the same idealistic banter that has governed, and failed, this issue for 20 years. This is, in fact, the qualitative difference between Jamaica and the United States: the existence of people like Lonsdale who are willing to spend their capital, political and financial, actually fixing a problem rather than performing sympathy for it. The U.S. is still a first world country. But it is one that a significant number of its own citizens desperately want to drag down to Third World conditions, not out of ignorance of what that looks like, but in service of an ideal of anti-bourgeois revolution, in which squalor is treated as evidence of moral seriousness and order is treated as evidence of complicity.
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MIKE DAVIS SPEAKS OUT ON FOX NEWS
MIKE DAVIS: After SCOTUS fumbles birthright citizenship, we need sensible census solutions
Congress can limit census counts to citizens and lawful permanent residents, countering the birthright citizenship ruling
By Mike Davis, Fox News
MIKE DAVIS: After SCOTUS fumbles birthright citizenship, we need sensible census solutions
Congress can limit census counts to citizens and lawful permanent residents, countering the birthright citizenship ruling
By Mike Davis, Fox News
The briefcase of a census taker is seen as she knocks on the door of a residence, Aug. 11, 2020, in Winter Park, Fla. Eleven small cities in Illinois and Iowa are the only municipalities so far to have signed agreements with the U.S. Census Bureau for a second count of their residents in 2024, the first year the special censuses can be conducted, in a repeat of what happened during the 2020 census. (AP Photo/John Raoux, File)
The Supreme Court just punched America in the gut. In Trump v. Barbara, five justices stole We The People’s most crucial sovereign power of deciding who becomes fellow citizens by illegally constitutionalizing birthright citizenship for the children of Chinese birth tourists, Islamic terrorists, and other illegal immigrants who hate America. That's bad enough. But the rot goes deeper: illegal aliens and temporary visa holders are counted in the census – the process that determines how many U.S. House seats each state gets. That drives the Electoral College, which decides the presidency. This is a rigged game, and it has to end in time for the 2030 census.
Here's how the Fourteenth Amendment actually works: Section 1 grants birthright citizenship to anyone born in the United States and "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" -- a provision enacted after the Civil War for the children of the freed slaves, not so Chinese babies born in America can return to Beijing for the rest of their lives, mail in their votes, and even later run for U.S. president. Section 2 apportions House seats based on "the whole number of persons" in each state. The government has made a mess of both.
Foreign diplomats and invading soldiers are excluded from both citizenship and the census; that much makes sense. But illegal aliens have been counted in the census since Jimmy Carter's administration, and the Barbara decision now pretends these Chinese and other foreign children simply born here are full American citizens. Temporary visa holders – students and workers – are counted too, and their kids get citizenship under Barbara as well. Meanwhile, birth tourists aren't counted in the census, but their children are now citizens. So a woman who flies in for a week to watch a World Cup game, gives birth, and flies home has produced an American citizen, but she herself isn't a "person" for census purposes.
That’s lunacy.
The current system is a constitutional embarrassment, thanks to five Supreme Court justices – Chief Justice John Roberts, Professor Amy Coney Barrett, and the three liberal women – who put their vanity over our sovereignty. Why does a Chinese birth tourist's child qualify under the more restrictive citizenship standard, while the mother doesn't qualify under the less restrictive census standard? Why do visa holders count as census "persons" while tourists don't, even though both came here legally—unlike illegal aliens, who count for everything?
This incoherent reasoning will lead to devastating outcomes.
Congress has the fix. The Equal Representation Act limits census counts to American citizens and lawful permanent residents. That definition tracks the correct reading of "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" from United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) and aligns Sections 1 and 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment. "Persons" in Section 2 means inhabitants, or individuals lawfully and permanently domiciled here. Illegal aliens and visa holders don't qualify. The Supreme Court signaled as much in Franklin v. Massachusetts (1992), noting that the Framers understood "persons" to mean permanent inhabitants even when the text didn't use that word explicitly.
President Trump could act by executive order, but Congress must act by statute to lock in this understanding.
Trump's term ends in January 2029. That means the next president will oversee the 2030 census. If that president is a leftist, then Trump’s executive orders will get reversed overnight. Legislation doesn't. Pass the Equal Representation Act, get Trump's signature, and dare the Supreme Court to overturn it. In doing so, we will at least partially correct the Court’s catastrophic error in Barbara – where the Supreme Court woefully handed out American citizenship to Chinese birth tourists like cotton candy at a foreign carnival.
The Census Bureau is also long overdue for a cleanup. In 2020, Democrats netted roughly half a dozen House seats and Electoral College votes through what was, at minimum, staggering incompetence. Trump v. Slaughter confirmed the president can remove executive branch officials wielding executive authority. That power extends to the Census Bureau's chief operating officer, who runs more of the operation than the director.
The stakes go beyond politics. The census drives federal Medicaid funding to states. That means illegal aliens and visa holders don't just influence who controls Congress. They determine how much money flows to needy Americans. That’s ludicrous, and sanctuary states exploit it deliberately. The Framers and ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment never imagined illegal immigration, birth tourism, or temporary visa schemes at this scale. We The People, the sovereign citizens of America, certainly never consented to any of this.
And consider the national-security dimension. China, our primary geopolitical enemy, has sent 1.5 million Chinese birth tourists to the United States. Their Chinese children are now citizens under Barbara. China could flood this country with workers and students on visas, pad the census count, and manufacture political representation in Congress — all without firing a shot. Not to mention, again, these Chinese kids can mail in their votes in American elections from Beijing and even run for president of the United States. China has already run a years-long election interference campaign against this country, as detailed in materials President Trump recently declassified. We are handing our enemies a lever to pull inside our own republic.
Benjamin Franklin said that we have a republic if we can keep it. Even with five narcissists in robes on the Supreme Court who put themselves over our sovereignty, national security, and country, Congress can and must pass the Equal Representation Act. The Supreme Court must uphold it. The alternative is a census permanently distorted by hostile foreigners who have no lawful claim to shape the course of American democracy.
Keeping the republic means fixing our census. Now.
Here's how the Fourteenth Amendment actually works: Section 1 grants birthright citizenship to anyone born in the United States and "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" -- a provision enacted after the Civil War for the children of the freed slaves, not so Chinese babies born in America can return to Beijing for the rest of their lives, mail in their votes, and even later run for U.S. president. Section 2 apportions House seats based on "the whole number of persons" in each state. The government has made a mess of both.
Foreign diplomats and invading soldiers are excluded from both citizenship and the census; that much makes sense. But illegal aliens have been counted in the census since Jimmy Carter's administration, and the Barbara decision now pretends these Chinese and other foreign children simply born here are full American citizens. Temporary visa holders – students and workers – are counted too, and their kids get citizenship under Barbara as well. Meanwhile, birth tourists aren't counted in the census, but their children are now citizens. So a woman who flies in for a week to watch a World Cup game, gives birth, and flies home has produced an American citizen, but she herself isn't a "person" for census purposes.
That’s lunacy.
The current system is a constitutional embarrassment, thanks to five Supreme Court justices – Chief Justice John Roberts, Professor Amy Coney Barrett, and the three liberal women – who put their vanity over our sovereignty. Why does a Chinese birth tourist's child qualify under the more restrictive citizenship standard, while the mother doesn't qualify under the less restrictive census standard? Why do visa holders count as census "persons" while tourists don't, even though both came here legally—unlike illegal aliens, who count for everything?
This incoherent reasoning will lead to devastating outcomes.
Congress has the fix. The Equal Representation Act limits census counts to American citizens and lawful permanent residents. That definition tracks the correct reading of "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" from United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) and aligns Sections 1 and 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment. "Persons" in Section 2 means inhabitants, or individuals lawfully and permanently domiciled here. Illegal aliens and visa holders don't qualify. The Supreme Court signaled as much in Franklin v. Massachusetts (1992), noting that the Framers understood "persons" to mean permanent inhabitants even when the text didn't use that word explicitly.
President Trump could act by executive order, but Congress must act by statute to lock in this understanding.
Trump's term ends in January 2029. That means the next president will oversee the 2030 census. If that president is a leftist, then Trump’s executive orders will get reversed overnight. Legislation doesn't. Pass the Equal Representation Act, get Trump's signature, and dare the Supreme Court to overturn it. In doing so, we will at least partially correct the Court’s catastrophic error in Barbara – where the Supreme Court woefully handed out American citizenship to Chinese birth tourists like cotton candy at a foreign carnival.
The Census Bureau is also long overdue for a cleanup. In 2020, Democrats netted roughly half a dozen House seats and Electoral College votes through what was, at minimum, staggering incompetence. Trump v. Slaughter confirmed the president can remove executive branch officials wielding executive authority. That power extends to the Census Bureau's chief operating officer, who runs more of the operation than the director.
The stakes go beyond politics. The census drives federal Medicaid funding to states. That means illegal aliens and visa holders don't just influence who controls Congress. They determine how much money flows to needy Americans. That’s ludicrous, and sanctuary states exploit it deliberately. The Framers and ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment never imagined illegal immigration, birth tourism, or temporary visa schemes at this scale. We The People, the sovereign citizens of America, certainly never consented to any of this.
And consider the national-security dimension. China, our primary geopolitical enemy, has sent 1.5 million Chinese birth tourists to the United States. Their Chinese children are now citizens under Barbara. China could flood this country with workers and students on visas, pad the census count, and manufacture political representation in Congress — all without firing a shot. Not to mention, again, these Chinese kids can mail in their votes in American elections from Beijing and even run for president of the United States. China has already run a years-long election interference campaign against this country, as detailed in materials President Trump recently declassified. We are handing our enemies a lever to pull inside our own republic.
Benjamin Franklin said that we have a republic if we can keep it. Even with five narcissists in robes on the Supreme Court who put themselves over our sovereignty, national security, and country, Congress can and must pass the Equal Representation Act. The Supreme Court must uphold it. The alternative is a census permanently distorted by hostile foreigners who have no lawful claim to shape the course of American democracy.
Keeping the republic means fixing our census. Now.
____________________________
The $30 Billion Screen Experiment That Failed Our Children
By Tracy Beanz & Michelle Edwards, The Highwire, June 9, 2026
James Welsch teaches American politics at a high school in Maine. His classroom runs almost entirely on screens — students write blog posts, trade articles, pull up videos mid-discussion. A few years ago, he noticed something wrong with the writing. Essays submitted digitally had grown choppy. Whole passages looked copied. The fluency he expected wasn’t there. So he changed the routine. In some courses, Welsch now requires students to write first drafts by hand.
He is not alone in noticing. He is just one of the first to admit it out loud.
American schools spent roughly $30 billion on education technology in 2024 — ten times what they spent on textbooks the same year. The goal was to modernize instruction, close equity gaps, and prepare students for a digital future. What happened instead is now making its way through Congressional testimony, international research, and the quiet policy reversals of school districts from Kansas to North Carolina that would rather not talk about how much they spent on devices that are sitting in carts at the back of classrooms.
In January 2025, neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath sat before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation and said what the ed-tech industry had spent years hoping no one would say under oath: Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to score lower than their parents on numeracy, literacy, and creativity. He had the data — Program for International Student Assessment scores showing a direct correlation between classroom screen time and cognitive decline. IQ scores in Western nations rose for over a century. They reversed right around when the devices arrived.
International research backs him up. Studies consistently find that students comprehend text more deeply on paper than on a screen, make more connections, and score significantly higher on reading comprehension tests when they read in print. An OECD analysis found that the more time students spend on computers during the school day, the lower their test scores — and that students using devices more than six hours a day scored two full letter grades lower than those who used no computers at all.
Other countries figured this out before we did and are already reversing course. Sweden — one of the first nations to replace textbooks with screens, back in 2009 — is now investing to put paper textbooks back in the hands of every student, after concluding that attention spans shortened and learning did not improve. France, Italy, the Netherlands, and China have introduced nationwide restrictions on devices in schools. South Korea passed a law in 2025 banning phones and smart devices during class hours entirely.
The research driving these reversals is not coming from one corner of the world. Ongoing studies led by Norwegian researchers, involving academics in 30 countries, have found that the shift to screen-based reading replaces deep comprehension with shallow skimming — readers scan for keywords and believe they are absorbing the material when in fact they are not. The researchers warn that crucial skills, including the ability to empathize and critically analyze texts, may be compromised by a wholesale move to tablets. Their conclusion is pointed: it is vital that teachers be allowed to decide which blend of learning suits their students, rather than schools making a blanket, top-down decision to go fully digital across every subject and every grade.
Here in the United States, schools are starting to follow — quietly, and without much appetite for examining how it happened. McPherson Middle School in Kansas pulled Chromebooks from daily use in December 2025, moving to laptops only for specific teacher-directed activities. North Carolina’s largest school district announced it needed to move away from its one-to-one laptop policy. Maine — which was among the first states to adopt a laptop-for-every-student program in 2002 — saw no improvement in test scores after fifteen years of the initiative.
“This technology can be a tool,” said McPherson’s principal, Inge Esping — who won Kansas’s middle school Principal of the Year award for 2025. “It is not the answer to education.”
That sentence should have been the starting point of this conversation, not the reluctant conclusion of it. We spent $30 billion to find out what a teacher with a stack of textbooks and a whiteboard could have told us for free: reading on paper works, writing by hand works, and replacing those things with screens did not make our children smarter. It made them the first generation in recorded history to be less cognitively capable than the one before them — and the bill for the devices that caused it is still being paid off in school districts across the country.
Tracy Beanz is an investigative journalist, Editor-in-Chief of UncoverDC, and host of the daily With Beanz podcast. She gained recognition for her in-depth coverage of the COVID-19 crisis, breaking major stories on the virus’s origin, timeline, and the bureaucratic corruption surrounding early treatment and the mRNA vaccine rollout. Tracy is also widely known for reporting on Murthy v. Missouri (Formerly Missouri v. Biden), a landmark free speech case challenging government-imposed censorship of doctors and others who presented alternative viewpoints during the pandemic.
By Tracy Beanz & Michelle Edwards, The Highwire, June 9, 2026
James Welsch teaches American politics at a high school in Maine. His classroom runs almost entirely on screens — students write blog posts, trade articles, pull up videos mid-discussion. A few years ago, he noticed something wrong with the writing. Essays submitted digitally had grown choppy. Whole passages looked copied. The fluency he expected wasn’t there. So he changed the routine. In some courses, Welsch now requires students to write first drafts by hand.
He is not alone in noticing. He is just one of the first to admit it out loud.
American schools spent roughly $30 billion on education technology in 2024 — ten times what they spent on textbooks the same year. The goal was to modernize instruction, close equity gaps, and prepare students for a digital future. What happened instead is now making its way through Congressional testimony, international research, and the quiet policy reversals of school districts from Kansas to North Carolina that would rather not talk about how much they spent on devices that are sitting in carts at the back of classrooms.
In January 2025, neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath sat before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation and said what the ed-tech industry had spent years hoping no one would say under oath: Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to score lower than their parents on numeracy, literacy, and creativity. He had the data — Program for International Student Assessment scores showing a direct correlation between classroom screen time and cognitive decline. IQ scores in Western nations rose for over a century. They reversed right around when the devices arrived.
International research backs him up. Studies consistently find that students comprehend text more deeply on paper than on a screen, make more connections, and score significantly higher on reading comprehension tests when they read in print. An OECD analysis found that the more time students spend on computers during the school day, the lower their test scores — and that students using devices more than six hours a day scored two full letter grades lower than those who used no computers at all.
Other countries figured this out before we did and are already reversing course. Sweden — one of the first nations to replace textbooks with screens, back in 2009 — is now investing to put paper textbooks back in the hands of every student, after concluding that attention spans shortened and learning did not improve. France, Italy, the Netherlands, and China have introduced nationwide restrictions on devices in schools. South Korea passed a law in 2025 banning phones and smart devices during class hours entirely.
The research driving these reversals is not coming from one corner of the world. Ongoing studies led by Norwegian researchers, involving academics in 30 countries, have found that the shift to screen-based reading replaces deep comprehension with shallow skimming — readers scan for keywords and believe they are absorbing the material when in fact they are not. The researchers warn that crucial skills, including the ability to empathize and critically analyze texts, may be compromised by a wholesale move to tablets. Their conclusion is pointed: it is vital that teachers be allowed to decide which blend of learning suits their students, rather than schools making a blanket, top-down decision to go fully digital across every subject and every grade.
Here in the United States, schools are starting to follow — quietly, and without much appetite for examining how it happened. McPherson Middle School in Kansas pulled Chromebooks from daily use in December 2025, moving to laptops only for specific teacher-directed activities. North Carolina’s largest school district announced it needed to move away from its one-to-one laptop policy. Maine — which was among the first states to adopt a laptop-for-every-student program in 2002 — saw no improvement in test scores after fifteen years of the initiative.
“This technology can be a tool,” said McPherson’s principal, Inge Esping — who won Kansas’s middle school Principal of the Year award for 2025. “It is not the answer to education.”
That sentence should have been the starting point of this conversation, not the reluctant conclusion of it. We spent $30 billion to find out what a teacher with a stack of textbooks and a whiteboard could have told us for free: reading on paper works, writing by hand works, and replacing those things with screens did not make our children smarter. It made them the first generation in recorded history to be less cognitively capable than the one before them — and the bill for the devices that caused it is still being paid off in school districts across the country.
Tracy Beanz is an investigative journalist, Editor-in-Chief of UncoverDC, and host of the daily With Beanz podcast. She gained recognition for her in-depth coverage of the COVID-19 crisis, breaking major stories on the virus’s origin, timeline, and the bureaucratic corruption surrounding early treatment and the mRNA vaccine rollout. Tracy is also widely known for reporting on Murthy v. Missouri (Formerly Missouri v. Biden), a landmark free speech case challenging government-imposed censorship of doctors and others who presented alternative viewpoints during the pandemic.
____________________________
____________________________
The Solution To The Immigration Problem That No One Is Talking About
By Matt Walsh, DailyWire.com, January 30, 2026
Whenever clear battle lines are drawn on some major national issue, and the Left is busy canonizing martyrs and blowing their little whistles every day, one of the hardest things to do is step back and reassess all of your available options at a strategic level.
At the moment, for example, it’s very easy to conclude that the main dispute in this country concerns ICE raids. You might think that the Left opposes ICE raids, and the Right supports them. You might conclude that, at the highest levels of government, the debate is between bleeding-heart Leftists who don’t want young Juan to be separated from his parents, on the one side, and hard-nosed Right-wingers who simply want the law to be enforced, on the other.
But there’s a very good reason to believe that this divide doesn’t actually exist at all. And here’s why: Neither major political party has even suggested taking a very simple and straightforward step that would instantly result in the departure of millions of illegal aliens from this country, without the need for a single ICE raid. There wouldn’t be any need for “family separations,” or federal agents with masks, or anything like that.
All you have to do is take this one step, and you’ll solve the vast majority of the problem that both parties claim to be concerned about.
I’m talking about getting rid of the “Individual taxpayer identification number,” or ITIN.
In case you’re not familiar with the concept, an ITIN takes the place of a social security number if you’re an illegal alien (or anyone else without a valid social security number). With an ITIN, an illegal alien can obtain credit. They can open savings accounts and checking accounts at a bank. They can start a business with an Employer Identification Number. They can work as independent contractors. They can obtain driver’s licenses in many states. They can apply for mortgages, too.
The ITIN has been around for a long time now — since the 1990s. But there was never any vote in Congress to establish it. Instead, the IRS unilaterally created the idea of ITIN, in order to make it easier for illegal aliens to pay taxes (and to pay into the Social Security system). The idea was that, since the IRS was required by law to tax everyone’s income, the agency had the authority to create the ITIN system and allow illegal aliens to use it.
And on top of that, the IRS wouldn’t alert immigration officials about anyone using an ITIN, in order to encourage illegal aliens to register. So the IRS pitched the idea as a win-win. The United States would collect more tax revenue, and more funding for Social Security (which the illegal aliens wouldn’t be able to tap into). And in turn, illegal aliens could get tax refunds, as well as child tax credits.
What’s happened since the 1990s, of course, is that this rationale — as flimsy as it was — completely collapsed. The ITIN system was premised on the idea that we’d have a secure border. But if the federal government allows foreigners to enter the country at will — as the Biden administration did — then ITIN allows for massive distortions in the market.
There are dozens of lenders that allow foreigners with ITINs to get home loans — from PNC Bank to Wells Fargo to First National Bank. If you’re on the market for any kind of home, including a mobile home, then you’re competing with every foreigner with an ITIN.
Here’s just one example I pulled from X:
By Matt Walsh, DailyWire.com, January 30, 2026
Whenever clear battle lines are drawn on some major national issue, and the Left is busy canonizing martyrs and blowing their little whistles every day, one of the hardest things to do is step back and reassess all of your available options at a strategic level.
At the moment, for example, it’s very easy to conclude that the main dispute in this country concerns ICE raids. You might think that the Left opposes ICE raids, and the Right supports them. You might conclude that, at the highest levels of government, the debate is between bleeding-heart Leftists who don’t want young Juan to be separated from his parents, on the one side, and hard-nosed Right-wingers who simply want the law to be enforced, on the other.
But there’s a very good reason to believe that this divide doesn’t actually exist at all. And here’s why: Neither major political party has even suggested taking a very simple and straightforward step that would instantly result in the departure of millions of illegal aliens from this country, without the need for a single ICE raid. There wouldn’t be any need for “family separations,” or federal agents with masks, or anything like that.
All you have to do is take this one step, and you’ll solve the vast majority of the problem that both parties claim to be concerned about.
I’m talking about getting rid of the “Individual taxpayer identification number,” or ITIN.
In case you’re not familiar with the concept, an ITIN takes the place of a social security number if you’re an illegal alien (or anyone else without a valid social security number). With an ITIN, an illegal alien can obtain credit. They can open savings accounts and checking accounts at a bank. They can start a business with an Employer Identification Number. They can work as independent contractors. They can obtain driver’s licenses in many states. They can apply for mortgages, too.
The ITIN has been around for a long time now — since the 1990s. But there was never any vote in Congress to establish it. Instead, the IRS unilaterally created the idea of ITIN, in order to make it easier for illegal aliens to pay taxes (and to pay into the Social Security system). The idea was that, since the IRS was required by law to tax everyone’s income, the agency had the authority to create the ITIN system and allow illegal aliens to use it.
And on top of that, the IRS wouldn’t alert immigration officials about anyone using an ITIN, in order to encourage illegal aliens to register. So the IRS pitched the idea as a win-win. The United States would collect more tax revenue, and more funding for Social Security (which the illegal aliens wouldn’t be able to tap into). And in turn, illegal aliens could get tax refunds, as well as child tax credits.
What’s happened since the 1990s, of course, is that this rationale — as flimsy as it was — completely collapsed. The ITIN system was premised on the idea that we’d have a secure border. But if the federal government allows foreigners to enter the country at will — as the Biden administration did — then ITIN allows for massive distortions in the market.
There are dozens of lenders that allow foreigners with ITINs to get home loans — from PNC Bank to Wells Fargo to First National Bank. If you’re on the market for any kind of home, including a mobile home, then you’re competing with every foreigner with an ITIN.
Here’s just one example I pulled from X:
Credit: Triad Financial Services/@Triad_FS/X.com
It’s from “Triad Financial Services,” which is based in Florida. And it states:
Smarter financing for manufactured home buyers. Individual taxpayer identification numbers (ITINs) are now accepted for all chattel programs — gold, silver and bronze.
The advertisement also promises that “low down payments” are available and that a 550 credit score is more than acceptable.
And although it’s not supposed to work like this, an ITIN can function like a work authorization, too. Until recently, according to various social media posts and videos, you could use an ITIN to sign up for many major food delivery services.
It’s from “Triad Financial Services,” which is based in Florida. And it states:
Smarter financing for manufactured home buyers. Individual taxpayer identification numbers (ITINs) are now accepted for all chattel programs — gold, silver and bronze.
The advertisement also promises that “low down payments” are available and that a 550 credit score is more than acceptable.
And although it’s not supposed to work like this, an ITIN can function like a work authorization, too. Until recently, according to various social media posts and videos, you could use an ITIN to sign up for many major food delivery services.
Screenshot: Uber/DoorDash
For their part, DoorDash has denied this — they say they require a social security number — but there are plenty of screenshots where their representatives have told people in the past that they only need an ITIN to create an account.
So if you take away the ITIN system — which the IRS can do, instantly — then you achieve two immediate benefits. First, you lower the price of housing — particularly starter homes — for American citizens. It’s simple economics. If fewer people are trying to buy homes, the price will go down. You also lower competition for a lot of jobs. Second, you give illegal aliens a very good reason to self-deport, since they won’t have anywhere to live. (And they won’t have any bank that will accept their money, either.)
It’s true that there’s a very small number of people living in this country who might want to use an ITIN for tax purposes, even though they aren’t illegal aliens.
If an American citizen marries a foreigner who doesn’t have a work authorization for some reason, they might need an ITIN to file a joint tax return. Or a wealthy foreign investor might make money in the United States, and he needs an ITIN to pay taxes on his investments.
These are rare scenarios. And the IRS can easily distinguish these scenarios from an illegal alien who resides in the United States, and who wants an ITIN to purchase a home. So why is no one in Congress, in either party, suggesting a change like this?
Why is everyone fine with an arbitrary system that was invented in the 1990s, which enables illegal aliens to act like they have social security numbers?
Why are we talking about a crazy ICE nurse, and not any kind of systemic issue like this?
As best I can tell, the only Republican who’s proposing any kind of meaningful legislation on this front is a state lawmaker from Utah named Trevor Lee. This is from a local news station in the state.
A bill introduced by Rep. Trevor Lee that would end the driving privilege card program for immigrants is currently in the House Rules Committee, waiting to be discussed. A driving privilege card is issued to undocumented immigrants without lawful presence status. It is a Class D license that allows the holder to drive a motor vehicle but cannot be used as identification by any Utah government entity, according to the Driver License Division. These cards can also be issued to individuals who are paroled in the U.S.
This is obviously a good idea, but you have to ask: Why are states giving “driving privilege cards” to illegal aliens in the first place? Why would we do *anything* to make life easier for people who broke our laws to enter this country? Why hasn’t Congress passed a federal law banning this practice, nationwide?
To be clear, most Republicans are not taking Trevor Lee’s approach. Instead, the most prominent GOP politicians in Washington — the Republicans with actual power in Congress — are currently taking the Democrats’ position on illegal migration.
For their part, DoorDash has denied this — they say they require a social security number — but there are plenty of screenshots where their representatives have told people in the past that they only need an ITIN to create an account.
So if you take away the ITIN system — which the IRS can do, instantly — then you achieve two immediate benefits. First, you lower the price of housing — particularly starter homes — for American citizens. It’s simple economics. If fewer people are trying to buy homes, the price will go down. You also lower competition for a lot of jobs. Second, you give illegal aliens a very good reason to self-deport, since they won’t have anywhere to live. (And they won’t have any bank that will accept their money, either.)
It’s true that there’s a very small number of people living in this country who might want to use an ITIN for tax purposes, even though they aren’t illegal aliens.
If an American citizen marries a foreigner who doesn’t have a work authorization for some reason, they might need an ITIN to file a joint tax return. Or a wealthy foreign investor might make money in the United States, and he needs an ITIN to pay taxes on his investments.
These are rare scenarios. And the IRS can easily distinguish these scenarios from an illegal alien who resides in the United States, and who wants an ITIN to purchase a home. So why is no one in Congress, in either party, suggesting a change like this?
Why is everyone fine with an arbitrary system that was invented in the 1990s, which enables illegal aliens to act like they have social security numbers?
Why are we talking about a crazy ICE nurse, and not any kind of systemic issue like this?
As best I can tell, the only Republican who’s proposing any kind of meaningful legislation on this front is a state lawmaker from Utah named Trevor Lee. This is from a local news station in the state.
A bill introduced by Rep. Trevor Lee that would end the driving privilege card program for immigrants is currently in the House Rules Committee, waiting to be discussed. A driving privilege card is issued to undocumented immigrants without lawful presence status. It is a Class D license that allows the holder to drive a motor vehicle but cannot be used as identification by any Utah government entity, according to the Driver License Division. These cards can also be issued to individuals who are paroled in the U.S.
This is obviously a good idea, but you have to ask: Why are states giving “driving privilege cards” to illegal aliens in the first place? Why would we do *anything* to make life easier for people who broke our laws to enter this country? Why hasn’t Congress passed a federal law banning this practice, nationwide?
To be clear, most Republicans are not taking Trevor Lee’s approach. Instead, the most prominent GOP politicians in Washington — the Republicans with actual power in Congress — are currently taking the Democrats’ position on illegal migration.
____________________________
Fashion Notes: Melania Trump Screens New Film ‘Melania’ in Dolce & Gabbana
By John Binder, Breitbart News, January 26, 2026
By John Binder, Breitbart News, January 26, 2026
First Lady Melania Trump hosted a private screening at the White House over the weekend of her upcoming film Melania, releasing January 30 in theatres across the United States, which documents the 20 days leading to her husband’s inauguration last year.
On Saturday, Melania Trump welcomed Melania director Brett Ratner, Queen Rania of Jordan, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Mike Tyson, Fiat heiress Azzi Agnelli, and famed fashion photographer Ellen Von Unwerth, who shot the promotional campaign for the film, to the White House for the screening, among others.
Black and white desserts were served to guests, as well as custom black and white popcorn boxes made specifically for the screening, while an orchestra played Melania’s Waltz, a song created by renowned composer Tony Neiman for the film.
“Last evening marked a truly magnificent occasion,” Marc Beckman, Mrs. Trump’s longtime advisor, wrote on X. “The First Lady hosted an intimate, private black-tie screening of her new film at the White House, shared among close friends and family. The evening was defined by extraordinary warmth, grace, and a palpable sense of love – an atmosphere as moving as it was unforgettable.”
For the screening, Mrs. Trump chose a casual Dolce & Gabbana tuxedo ensemble — in keeping with her film’s color narrative, which consists of black, white, grey tones, and camel — and reminiscent of her official first lady portrait, a shoot that is featured in Melania.
Mrs. Trump paired the stretch poplin tuxedo shirt with velvet tuxedo pants from the Italian fashion house, which has become a staple of her White House wardrobe. The shirt retails for $975 while the pants retail for about $600.
A silk, Italian-made Dolce & Gabbana cummerbund, retailing for $525, cinched Mrs. Trump’s waist as black sequined Christian Louboutin So Kate pumps glistened in the light. The stilettos are no longer available for purchase.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at [email protected].
On Saturday, Melania Trump welcomed Melania director Brett Ratner, Queen Rania of Jordan, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Mike Tyson, Fiat heiress Azzi Agnelli, and famed fashion photographer Ellen Von Unwerth, who shot the promotional campaign for the film, to the White House for the screening, among others.
Black and white desserts were served to guests, as well as custom black and white popcorn boxes made specifically for the screening, while an orchestra played Melania’s Waltz, a song created by renowned composer Tony Neiman for the film.
“Last evening marked a truly magnificent occasion,” Marc Beckman, Mrs. Trump’s longtime advisor, wrote on X. “The First Lady hosted an intimate, private black-tie screening of her new film at the White House, shared among close friends and family. The evening was defined by extraordinary warmth, grace, and a palpable sense of love – an atmosphere as moving as it was unforgettable.”
For the screening, Mrs. Trump chose a casual Dolce & Gabbana tuxedo ensemble — in keeping with her film’s color narrative, which consists of black, white, grey tones, and camel — and reminiscent of her official first lady portrait, a shoot that is featured in Melania.
Mrs. Trump paired the stretch poplin tuxedo shirt with velvet tuxedo pants from the Italian fashion house, which has become a staple of her White House wardrobe. The shirt retails for $975 while the pants retail for about $600.
A silk, Italian-made Dolce & Gabbana cummerbund, retailing for $525, cinched Mrs. Trump’s waist as black sequined Christian Louboutin So Kate pumps glistened in the light. The stilettos are no longer available for purchase.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at [email protected].
____________________________
Scott Presler on How Republicans Can
Win theMidterm Elections
Grassroots organizer and Early Vote Action founder Scott Presler joins PragerU CEO Marissa Streit to explain how he believes elections are really won—and what young Americans truly care about. They discuss why so many passionate Americans still aren’t registered to vote, how Scott recruits new voters, and how to turn the frustration of disaffected Americans into a force for good.
Win theMidterm Elections
Grassroots organizer and Early Vote Action founder Scott Presler joins PragerU CEO Marissa Streit to explain how he believes elections are really won—and what young Americans truly care about. They discuss why so many passionate Americans still aren’t registered to vote, how Scott recruits new voters, and how to turn the frustration of disaffected Americans into a force for good.
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Photo: Kerem Yucel/MPR
The ICE Uproar is a Conspiracy Calculated to Fool Americans
By Andrew Cherkasky & Katie Cherkasky, New York Post, Published Jan. 14, 2026 & Updated Jan. 15, 2026, 6:39 a.m. ET
The chaos erupting in Minneapolis isn’t an organic protest movement, and it certainly isn’t spontaneous.
It’s coordinated. It’s calculated. And it’s deadly.
Ordinary Americans are being played — manipulated into dangerous confrontations by politicians and rabble-rousing activists.
The indoctrination has convinced them that federal immigration law is illegitimate, that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have no authority to operate, and that physically confronting federal officers is not only justified, but moral.
It’s a weaponized form of Trump Derangement Syndrome — and federal prosecutors should call it what it is: criminal conspiracy.
After federal courts in September upheld ICE’s authority to make detentive stops, the opposition didn’t accept the ruling.
They escalated, moving from rhetoric to coordinated action.
What’s followed, in Minneapolis and elsewhere, no longer looks like civil disobedience, but like a concerted effort to obstruct federal law enforcement through misinformation, agitation and street-level interference.
Every bloody confrontation is the foreseeable result of deliberate instruction and escalation.
The activist infrastructure behind this effort matters.
Local leaders like Gov. Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey didn’t merely criticize President Trump’s policies.
They systematically delegitimized federal authority by portraying ICE’s lawful acts as an invasion — knowing full well that federal immigration enforcement is exclusive, constitutional and mandatory.
Their statements ran in parallel with activist messaging, reinforcing the same false claims and producing predictable, dangerous results.
“ICE watch” operations run through nonprofits and allied groups are organizing alerts, neighborhood monitoring and coordinated resistance.
Indivisible Twin Cities, which has financial ties with leftist billionaire George Soros, is part of the “ICE watch” effort in Minneapolis, The Post has reported.
So is Defend the 612, a group funded by a host of progressive nonprofits, according to the Daily Signal.
They’re raising money, training participants and synchronizing their tactics.
You don’t need matching jackets to have a conspiracy under the law; you need agreement, purpose and acts in furtherance.
That’s what the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO, is for.
When elected officials make false claims while aligned activist groups organize crowds to provoke obstruction of federal law, the line between protest and conspiracy collapses.
Immigration law is federal law. Under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, no city, governor or local official has the authority to nullify it.
When leaders claim otherwise, they aren’t expressing opinions, but knowingly misrepresenting the law.
And those lies predictably produce violence.
For the Democratic politicians behind this madness, the hypocrisy is staggering: Their party spent years going full-bore against Jan. 6 protesters.
Wielding wall-to-wall outrage, they professed absolute moral certainty that political belief is no defense to obstructing federal authority — and they jailed people up and down the chain to prove it.
Turns out that rule is still in effect.
Under federal law, obstructing justice and assaulting or threatening federal officers is a crime.
Coordinating efforts to do so raises even more serious exposure.
Every snowball thrown at a federal officer is a crime potentially punishable by prison time — and everyone who encouraged it is complicit.
And all this uproar is based upon a fantasy so detached from reality it borders on parody: that immigration law somehow expired because it went unenforced; that violating it long enough transmutes illegality into virtue; and that deportation — of convicted criminals or apparently anyone at all — is immoral by definition.
There is no statute of limitations on removability. There is no amnesty by neglect.
No country in history has ever functioned without border enforcement — and enforcing the law is not radical or cruel, but the bare minimum of governance.
The most tragic part is watching people fall for it, believing that they’re heroes on the “right side of history.”
In reality, they’re calculated casualties in a political war.
The people who fed them these lies aren’t standing where they stand when the arrests are made, when the charges are filed, and when the consequences arrive.
Accountability must move upstream: not just for those breaking the law in the streets, but for the officials who lied to them, coordinated the pressure campaign and knowingly sent them into harm’s way.
If these leaders truly believed in change, they’d tell the truth: Laws are made in Congress, not nullified in the streets through criminal activity.
Yet they choose deception, because outrage mobilizes faster than honesty.
The anti-ICE movement isn’t resistance. It’s exploitation.
And it’s looking an awful lot like a deliberate conspiracy.
Andrew Cherkasky (@CherkaskyLaw) and Katie Cherkasky (@CherkaskyKatie) are military veterans, former federal prosecutors and current criminal defense attorneys.
By Andrew Cherkasky & Katie Cherkasky, New York Post, Published Jan. 14, 2026 & Updated Jan. 15, 2026, 6:39 a.m. ET
The chaos erupting in Minneapolis isn’t an organic protest movement, and it certainly isn’t spontaneous.
It’s coordinated. It’s calculated. And it’s deadly.
Ordinary Americans are being played — manipulated into dangerous confrontations by politicians and rabble-rousing activists.
The indoctrination has convinced them that federal immigration law is illegitimate, that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have no authority to operate, and that physically confronting federal officers is not only justified, but moral.
It’s a weaponized form of Trump Derangement Syndrome — and federal prosecutors should call it what it is: criminal conspiracy.
After federal courts in September upheld ICE’s authority to make detentive stops, the opposition didn’t accept the ruling.
They escalated, moving from rhetoric to coordinated action.
What’s followed, in Minneapolis and elsewhere, no longer looks like civil disobedience, but like a concerted effort to obstruct federal law enforcement through misinformation, agitation and street-level interference.
Every bloody confrontation is the foreseeable result of deliberate instruction and escalation.
The activist infrastructure behind this effort matters.
Local leaders like Gov. Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey didn’t merely criticize President Trump’s policies.
They systematically delegitimized federal authority by portraying ICE’s lawful acts as an invasion — knowing full well that federal immigration enforcement is exclusive, constitutional and mandatory.
Their statements ran in parallel with activist messaging, reinforcing the same false claims and producing predictable, dangerous results.
“ICE watch” operations run through nonprofits and allied groups are organizing alerts, neighborhood monitoring and coordinated resistance.
Indivisible Twin Cities, which has financial ties with leftist billionaire George Soros, is part of the “ICE watch” effort in Minneapolis, The Post has reported.
So is Defend the 612, a group funded by a host of progressive nonprofits, according to the Daily Signal.
They’re raising money, training participants and synchronizing their tactics.
You don’t need matching jackets to have a conspiracy under the law; you need agreement, purpose and acts in furtherance.
That’s what the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO, is for.
When elected officials make false claims while aligned activist groups organize crowds to provoke obstruction of federal law, the line between protest and conspiracy collapses.
Immigration law is federal law. Under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, no city, governor or local official has the authority to nullify it.
When leaders claim otherwise, they aren’t expressing opinions, but knowingly misrepresenting the law.
And those lies predictably produce violence.
For the Democratic politicians behind this madness, the hypocrisy is staggering: Their party spent years going full-bore against Jan. 6 protesters.
Wielding wall-to-wall outrage, they professed absolute moral certainty that political belief is no defense to obstructing federal authority — and they jailed people up and down the chain to prove it.
Turns out that rule is still in effect.
Under federal law, obstructing justice and assaulting or threatening federal officers is a crime.
Coordinating efforts to do so raises even more serious exposure.
Every snowball thrown at a federal officer is a crime potentially punishable by prison time — and everyone who encouraged it is complicit.
And all this uproar is based upon a fantasy so detached from reality it borders on parody: that immigration law somehow expired because it went unenforced; that violating it long enough transmutes illegality into virtue; and that deportation — of convicted criminals or apparently anyone at all — is immoral by definition.
There is no statute of limitations on removability. There is no amnesty by neglect.
No country in history has ever functioned without border enforcement — and enforcing the law is not radical or cruel, but the bare minimum of governance.
The most tragic part is watching people fall for it, believing that they’re heroes on the “right side of history.”
In reality, they’re calculated casualties in a political war.
The people who fed them these lies aren’t standing where they stand when the arrests are made, when the charges are filed, and when the consequences arrive.
Accountability must move upstream: not just for those breaking the law in the streets, but for the officials who lied to them, coordinated the pressure campaign and knowingly sent them into harm’s way.
If these leaders truly believed in change, they’d tell the truth: Laws are made in Congress, not nullified in the streets through criminal activity.
Yet they choose deception, because outrage mobilizes faster than honesty.
The anti-ICE movement isn’t resistance. It’s exploitation.
And it’s looking an awful lot like a deliberate conspiracy.
Andrew Cherkasky (@CherkaskyLaw) and Katie Cherkasky (@CherkaskyKatie) are military veterans, former federal prosecutors and current criminal defense attorneys.
____________________________
SUBURBAN ALERT: Soccer Moms are Taking up a Dangerous New Hobby — Becoming ICE Saboteurs
By Kirsten Fleming, New York Post, Published Jan. 12, 2026, 7:35 p.m. ET
During the riots of 2020, many of the agitators who burned down cities and assaulted cops were shadowy Antifa types and anti-social wackos, mostly male and in their 20s or early 30s.
But as anti-ICE protests ramp up across the country, we’re seeing a new archetype of trained instigators: regular moms and women of all ages, who are forming reckless resistance groups to disrupt and antagonize federal law enforcement.
The escalation of tactics resulted in the tragic shooting death of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent last week. The mother of three was reportedly an anti-ICE “warrior” trained to physically intervene in arrests.
She had been using her SUV to block ICE as her wife filmed the altercation, in the minutes before her death.
A decade ago, bored females were radicalized by Multi-Level Marketing scams, selling unsightly leggings from Lularoe or Rodan + Fields moisturizer.
Now many are finding their purpose and identity through aggressive activism: becoming anti-ICE social media influencers, undergoing training as “legal observers,” and creating physical chaos to obstruct federal law enforcement.
It’s as naive as it is dangerous.
Since Good’s death last week, there are videos of women punching ICE vehicles in Minneapolis, aggressively confronting agents. Some are acting out for the cameras, obviously hoping for social media cred or perhaps communion with other social justice types in their neighborhoods.
One mother who brought her baby to a protest in Minneapolis told a reporter she wanted her to “feel the energy.”
Across the country, training on how to disrupt ICE operations is being staged in houses of worship and community centers. Last month, NY1 reported that over 1,300 attendees showed up to a Brooklyn church to become newly minted agitators.
The piece described them as “armed with whistles, know your rights cards and their training, these New Yorkers are now better prepared to respond to any ICE action.”
In a Charlotte, North Carolina, church, a video of one such session showed a group of mostly women role-playing ICE agents arresting someone as they recorded the mock altercation.
It was absurd.
“I’m here tonight to try to learn what I can do. I’ve never participated in this kind of direct action before,” said Charlotte resident Donna Lanclos.
Whether these women have been marching since the pink pussy hat days circa 2017 or are newbies like Lanclos, they have essentially been deputized — and duped. They’re manipulated by community organizers, deep-pocketed political organizations and politicians, appealing to their mama bear instinct to protect.
Politicians like US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey have called on residents to stay involved.
Cea Weaver, who was tapped by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to head his Office to Protect Tenants, was on a panel in October urging PTAs, public schools and tenant associations to become “sites of resistance” against ICE and the National Guard.
In late November, as protesters flooded Canal Street, throwing garbage cans at ICE agents, New York state Sen. Julia Salazar (D-Brooklyn) explicitly lauded the uncivil disobedience, noting its hazards.
“Grateful to all of the New Yorkers who quickly mobilized, put their safety on the line, and protected their immigrant neighbors against ICE’s expected raids,” she wrote on X.
No responsible leader should be calling for regular citizens to “put their safety on the line” for their chosen cause. People like Salazar are only feeding delusion.
But their constituents, convinced that fascism has descended, are heeding the call.
Or maybe ones who can make a quick buck.
Angie Vargas, a self-professed “soccer mom” in California who makes videos of her trailing ICE vehicles in her car, has more than 226,000 TikTok followers and a fawning profile in The Nation. She set up a GoFundMe that’s raised over $123K.
“All donations will be used by me personally and responsibly to sustain this ongoing advocacy,” she wrote.
In another video making the rounds, a woman argues with law enforcement on an active police scene as they tell her to leave for her safety. She insists on videoing the interaction. The kicker? She had her 6-year-old son in the car.
There is a foolish sense that being a woman, or specifically a white woman, will shield them from consequences. In November, a group of 14 suburban moms were arrested after sitting in the road outside an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois, reportedly telling a local outlet they were using their “privilege as white women.”
But if that were the case, Good wouldn’t be dead. These women are in over their heads, and unless common sense starts to prevail, it will only result in more deaths.
By Kirsten Fleming, New York Post, Published Jan. 12, 2026, 7:35 p.m. ET
During the riots of 2020, many of the agitators who burned down cities and assaulted cops were shadowy Antifa types and anti-social wackos, mostly male and in their 20s or early 30s.
But as anti-ICE protests ramp up across the country, we’re seeing a new archetype of trained instigators: regular moms and women of all ages, who are forming reckless resistance groups to disrupt and antagonize federal law enforcement.
The escalation of tactics resulted in the tragic shooting death of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent last week. The mother of three was reportedly an anti-ICE “warrior” trained to physically intervene in arrests.
She had been using her SUV to block ICE as her wife filmed the altercation, in the minutes before her death.
A decade ago, bored females were radicalized by Multi-Level Marketing scams, selling unsightly leggings from Lularoe or Rodan + Fields moisturizer.
Now many are finding their purpose and identity through aggressive activism: becoming anti-ICE social media influencers, undergoing training as “legal observers,” and creating physical chaos to obstruct federal law enforcement.
It’s as naive as it is dangerous.
Since Good’s death last week, there are videos of women punching ICE vehicles in Minneapolis, aggressively confronting agents. Some are acting out for the cameras, obviously hoping for social media cred or perhaps communion with other social justice types in their neighborhoods.
One mother who brought her baby to a protest in Minneapolis told a reporter she wanted her to “feel the energy.”
Across the country, training on how to disrupt ICE operations is being staged in houses of worship and community centers. Last month, NY1 reported that over 1,300 attendees showed up to a Brooklyn church to become newly minted agitators.
The piece described them as “armed with whistles, know your rights cards and their training, these New Yorkers are now better prepared to respond to any ICE action.”
In a Charlotte, North Carolina, church, a video of one such session showed a group of mostly women role-playing ICE agents arresting someone as they recorded the mock altercation.
It was absurd.
“I’m here tonight to try to learn what I can do. I’ve never participated in this kind of direct action before,” said Charlotte resident Donna Lanclos.
Whether these women have been marching since the pink pussy hat days circa 2017 or are newbies like Lanclos, they have essentially been deputized — and duped. They’re manipulated by community organizers, deep-pocketed political organizations and politicians, appealing to their mama bear instinct to protect.
Politicians like US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey have called on residents to stay involved.
Cea Weaver, who was tapped by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to head his Office to Protect Tenants, was on a panel in October urging PTAs, public schools and tenant associations to become “sites of resistance” against ICE and the National Guard.
In late November, as protesters flooded Canal Street, throwing garbage cans at ICE agents, New York state Sen. Julia Salazar (D-Brooklyn) explicitly lauded the uncivil disobedience, noting its hazards.
“Grateful to all of the New Yorkers who quickly mobilized, put their safety on the line, and protected their immigrant neighbors against ICE’s expected raids,” she wrote on X.
No responsible leader should be calling for regular citizens to “put their safety on the line” for their chosen cause. People like Salazar are only feeding delusion.
But their constituents, convinced that fascism has descended, are heeding the call.
Or maybe ones who can make a quick buck.
Angie Vargas, a self-professed “soccer mom” in California who makes videos of her trailing ICE vehicles in her car, has more than 226,000 TikTok followers and a fawning profile in The Nation. She set up a GoFundMe that’s raised over $123K.
“All donations will be used by me personally and responsibly to sustain this ongoing advocacy,” she wrote.
In another video making the rounds, a woman argues with law enforcement on an active police scene as they tell her to leave for her safety. She insists on videoing the interaction. The kicker? She had her 6-year-old son in the car.
There is a foolish sense that being a woman, or specifically a white woman, will shield them from consequences. In November, a group of 14 suburban moms were arrested after sitting in the road outside an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois, reportedly telling a local outlet they were using their “privilege as white women.”
But if that were the case, Good wouldn’t be dead. These women are in over their heads, and unless common sense starts to prevail, it will only result in more deaths.
____________________________
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