‘Absolutely Vile’: ICE Snatches Young Kids From Minnesota Schools, Sends Them to Texas
Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
“Targeting children—our babies—is beyond the pale. ICE is completely out of control and beyond fixing,” said Minnesota’s lieutenant governor.
Federal immigration agents have detained at least four children from Minnesota public schools over the past two weeks, including a 5-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl who were both sent to Texas detention centers that have come under fire for grotesque conditions.
Zena Stenvik, the superintendent of Columbia Heights Public Schools, held a press conference on Wednesday to provide details of the targeting of children and decry the menacing presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, who have been terrorizing and abusing communities in Minneapolis and other major US cities at the behest of President Donald Trump.
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“ICE agents have been roaming our neighborhoods, circling our schools, following our buses, coming into our parking lots, and taking our children,” Stenvik said. “The sense of safety in our community and around our schools is shaken, and our hearts are shattered.”
The superintendent said that ICE agents used 5-year-old Liam Ramos as “bait” to also arrest his father. The two were taken while in their driveway, “just having arrived home” from preschool. Both are currently at a Texas detention center.
“The middle school brother came home to a missing dad, a missing little brother, and a terrified mother,” said Stenvik. “This family is following US legal parameters and has an active asylum case with no order of deportation. I have viewed the legal paperwork with my own eyes. Why detain a 5-year-old? You cannot tell me that this child is going to be classified as a violent criminal.”
“Don’t tell us this is about ‘the worst of the worst. That’s a lie.”
Stenvik also described the arrest of a 10-year-old fourth grader who was detained by ICE agents along with her mother.
“During the arrest, the child called her father to tell him the ICE agents were bringing her to school,” said Stenvik. “The father immediately came to the school to find that both his daughter and wife had been taken. By the end of the school day, they were already in a detention center in Texas, and they are still there.”
A 17-year-old high school student, according to Stenvik, was detained by “armed and masked agents, alone.”
“The student was removed from their car and taken away,” said Stenvik.
Minnesota officials and lawmakers reacted with horror to the superintendent’s account of the arrests.
“ICE has detained children as young as five,” Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan wrote on social media. “No 5-year-old makes us unsafe. Targeting children—our babies—is beyond the pale. ICE is completely out of control and beyond fixing.”
US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) called the arrests of children “absolutely vile.”
“Don’t tell us this is about ‘the worst of the worst,’” said Omar. “That’s a lie.”
Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
dizzy: I’ve appended images for the British Fascists instead of US Fascists. Here are the US Fascists.
‘The thug in the White House doesn’t listen to grovelling’
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/thug-white-house-doesnt-listen-grovelling
US President Donald Trump listens to a question from a reporter during a press briefing at the White House in Washington, January 20, 2026…
A recent You Gov poll showed that 55 per cent of the British people are ready to kick US bases out of Britain if Greenland was attacked. The poll showed that large majorities of Labour and Green voters and even most Tories supported the position, with just 22 per cent opposed.
Stop the War Coalition vice-chairman Chris Nineham told the Morning Star: “This poll shows that ordinary people in Britain are appalled by what Trump is doing and it is the basis for a mass campaign to expel the US military from Britain, which Stop the War will be launching shortly.
“The fact is that people are opposed to the appeasement of Trump by Starmer and the European leaders but also to their mimicking of him by ramping up arms spending.”
Independent MP Jeremy Corbyn said: “US bases should have been removed the moment they invaded Venezuela — a flagrant violation of international law.
“We need an independent foreign policy based on diplomacy and peace, which looks to collaborate with partners everywhere, including the global South, on the biggest challenges facing us all, such as the climate crisis and sickening global inequality.”
…
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/thug-white-house-doesnt-listen-grovelling
Trump Pocketed At Least $1.4 Billion in First Year Back in Office in Unprecedented ‘Exploitation of the Presidency’
Original article by Stephen Prager republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
“The swamp has never been so fetid,” wrote New York Times columnist Nick Kristof.
As millions of Americans face down devastating cuts to their healthcare and food assistance, President Donald Trump and his family personally enriched themselves to the tune of at least $1.4 billion during his first year back in office, according to an analysis published by the New York Times editorial board on Tuesday, the one-year anniversary of his second inauguration.
This unprecedented profiteering, which already amounts to 16,822 times the median US household income according to the Times, is almost certainly an undercount, as many sources of the president and his family’s wealth remain hidden from public view.
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“President Trump has never been a man to ask what he can do for his country. In his second term, as in his first, he is instead testing the limits of what his country can do for him,” the board wrote. “He has poured his energy and creativity into the exploitation of the presidency—into finding out just how much money people, corporations, and other nations are willing to put into his pockets in hopes of bending the power of the government to the service of their interests.”
Relying on a series of previous analyses from other news organizations, the Times notes several of Trump’s key streams of income.
As has been widely documented, most comprehensively byReuters in October, by far Trump’s largest source of income has been his family’s investment in cryptocurrencies, which has generated at least $867 million in new wealth for the family. Other investigations suggest the true number could be several billion when accounting for unreported assets and gains that have not yet been realized.
“People who hope to influence federal policy, including foreigners, can buy his family’s coins, effectively transferring money to the Trumps, and the deals are often secret,” the Timesboard wrote.
It noted one particularly brazen transaction earlier this year, when an investment company owned by a member of the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) ruling family dumped $2 billion into the Trump family’s crypto startup World Liberty Financial, just two weeks before the White House announced that the UAE would be given access to hundreds of thousands of the world’s most advanced computer chips.
Inking real-estate deals has been another tool nations have used to buy influence with Trump. The Times cites a report from the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW), showing that the Trump Organization and its partners were planning at least 22 “Trump-branded projects around the globe” over the course of his presidency, including through hotels and golf courses in India, Oman, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Indonesia, and other nations eager to be in the US government’s good graces.
In all, since his reelection, the Times calculated that Trump has reaped at least $23 million from licensing his name overseas, at times culminating in the appearance of blatant pay-for-play. In one instance, “the administration agreed to lower its threatened tariffs on Vietnam about a month after a Trump Organization project broke ground on a $1.5 billion golf complex outside of Hanoi. Vietnamese officials ignored their own laws to fast-track the project.”
Another CREW analysis from July found that Trump visits his own properties roughly “every other day”—much more frequently than in his previous term—and that many foreign government officials have traveled to these sites to curry favor with the president.
Trump also infamously accepted a $400 million jet, described as a “flying palace,” from the Qatari government. He plans to use the plane as Air Force One during his presidency and transfer it to his presidential library after leaving office. Shortly after receiving the jet, he pledged to “protect” Qatar and announced lucrative new military and economic partnerships with the country.
Elsewhere, Amazon spent $40 million on a documentary about First Lady Melania Trump, $28 million of which will be given directly to the first lady, which the Times said is far more than has been paid for similar projects. The company’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, has critically lobbied the administration for favorable treatment regarding antitrust and defense contracts, and has seen his own wealth soar by nearly $9 billion over the past year.
But Trump’s income from media and tech companies has more commonly arrived in the form of shakedowns. He has made an estimated $90.5 million from settlements from X (formerly Twitter), ABC News, Meta, YouTube, and Paramount since his reelection, none of which, the Times argues, “were justified on the merits.”
“Mr. Trump’s hunger for wealth is brazen,” the editorial board wrote. “Throughout the nation’s history, presidents of both parties have taken care to avoid even the appearance of profiting from public service. This president gleefully squeezes American corporations, flaunts gifts from foreign governments, and celebrates the rapid growth of his own fortune.”
The report of Trump’s looting of the presidency comes as roughly 1.3 million Americans are expected to lose health insurance coverage in 2026 due to Republican cuts to Medicaid and other assistance programs, while more than 20 million are expected to pay higher insurance premiums after the GOP allowed Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire last year. Roughly 1.5 million have already dropped their health coverage this year, according to a report last week from CNBC.
Meanwhile, about 4 million low-income people—including 1 million children—are expected to see their access to food assistance either substantially reduced or totally lost in the coming years due to Republican cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
While “Drain the Swamp” has remained one of Trump’s signature phrases, portraying the president as a crusader against endemic corruption in Washington, Times columnist Nick Kristof wrote, in the wake of his paper’s new report, that under Trump’s watch, “the swamp has never been so fetid.”
Original article by Stephen Prager republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
‘Sometimes You Need a Dictator,’ Trump Says Following Threats to Cancel Election
Original article by Stephen Prager republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Trump previously said he wished he could cancel elections, but feared being called a “dictator” by his detractors. Now he’s calling himself one in front of the whole world.
After weeks of authoritarian threats to crush protests with the military, cancel elections, conquer foreign countries, and send masked agents door-to-door to round up anyone who can’t prove their citizenship, Trump on Wednesday told an already uneasy room full of world leaders that “sometimes you need a dictator.”
The offhanded comment came in the middle of a rambling speech at the reception dinner for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, in which Trump congratulated himself on a different rambling speech he’d given earlier that day at the summit.
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“We had a good speech, we got great reviews. I can’t believe it, we got good reviews on that speech,” Trump said of the widely mocked address in which he continued to demand the US take over Greenland (which he repeatedly referred to as “Iceland”) and made new tariff threats against Canada and Europe if they resist the annexation.
“Usually they say ‘he’s a horrible dictator-type person,’ I’m a dictator,” Trump continued. “But sometimes you need a dictator! But they didn’t say that in this case… It’s all based on common sense, it’s not conservative or liberal, or anything else.”
At least twice over the past month, Trump has suggested that the 2026 midterm elections should be canceled, since his party is likely to lose.
The first time he brought up the idea, on the five-year anniversary of the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, he seemed to back off the idea for fear of being called a dictator by his detractors: “I won’t say cancel the election; they should cancel the election, because the fake news would say: ‘He wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator.’ They always call me a dictator.”
But if being called a dictator was the only thing holding him back from attempting to suspend democracy, he no longer appears to care.
As political commentator Charlotte Clymer wrote on social media, “Trump is now openly referring to himself as a dictator” in front of the whole world.
Original article by Stephen Prager republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).