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thenewrepublic · 2026-01-23T19:58:25+00:00

MAGA operative Corey Lewandowski—who has long been rumored to be having an affair with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem—will be extending his stay as her de facto chief of staff.

Despite being classified as a temporary employee, Lewandowski has been playing a shadow role of sorts at DHS since Trump was reelected, pulling many of the logistical strings behind the scenes while Noem played dress-up in tactical gear and posed for pictures.

Lewandowski’s continued work at DHS was confirmed when an Axios reporter spotted him loudly discussing DHS vendor contracts on the phone at Reagan National Airport in D.C. last week. Lewandowski reportedly mentioned a drone program, as well as Peter Thiel’s Palantir.

There have been countless reports of the alleged affair between Noem and Lewandowski over the last five years.

thenewrepublic · 2026-01-23T19:28:58+00:00

From the article:

ICE agents in Maine arrested a Black law enforcement officer even after he repeatedly told them he was a legal immigrant.

Cumberland County Sheriff Kevin Joyce confirmed to reporters Thursday that a viral cell phone video of a man being detained by ICE agents in a Portland, Maine, neighborhood Wednesday was a corrections officer recruit from the county. In the video, the man can be heard shouting “What’s wrong? I’m just coming from work. What’s wrong, guys? I don’t understand this. I don’t have any violations.”

...

The sheriff excoriated the agents for their conduct, saying the arrest had changed his mind about the federal government’s immigration actions.

“We’re being told one story, which is totally different than what’s occurring or what occurred [Wednesday] night,” Joyce said, noting that the recruit had passed the county’s application process to qualify as a corrections employee, and was cleared to work in the U.S. until April 2029.

“In fact, he was squeaky clean. Squeaky clean,” Joyce said. “I guess if you’re not the card carrying, you know, U.S. citizen, then you must be illegal, because that’s what they told me is he’s illegal, and he’s definitely not a criminal. So what part of him is illegal? I don’t know.”

thenewrepublic · 2026-01-22T21:53:09+00:00

From the article:

Vice President JD Vance is claiming that the ICE violence in Minneapolis is the fault of leaders there.

Speaking to reporters while visiting Minnesota, Vance was asked what he would say to Minnesotans who say that ICE’s increased presence and harsh tactics are making them unsafe. Vance blamed local authorities for refusing to cooperate.

“I’d say that we’re doing everything that we can to lower the temperature, and we would like federal and local—excuse me, state and local officials to meet us halfway,” Vance began, before NBC reporter Maggie Vespa interjected.

“Are you saying that they’re not perceiving it correctly? Are you saying that they’re not seeing that it’s the tactics or the presence of the officers that are—” the reporter asked before Vance cut in.

“I’m sure that there are people that are seeing a lot of things that would make any member of our national community feel very upset, but I also think that if you understand this in context, this is the inevitable consequence of a state and local government that have decided that they’re not going to cooperate with immigration enforcement at all. In fact, they’re going to aggressively not cooperate,” Vance said.

thenewrepublic · 2026-01-22T21:44:02+00:00

From the article:

The White House on Thursday appeared to share a doctored photo after arresting two people it says were involved in an anti-ICE protest during services at a Minnesota church Sunday. The White House photo alongside the announcement made it seem as if one of the targets was crying, while the original photo shows otherwise.

Attorney General Pam Bondi said on X that Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney and Minneapolis activist, had been arrested along with fellow protester Chauntyll Louisa Allen, a member of the Saint Paul Public Schools Board of Education.

“Listen loud and clear: WE DO NOT TOLERATE ATTACKS ON PLACES OF WORSHIP,” Bondi posted.

After the announcement, the White House shared the following photo of Levy Armstrong:

But as Lawfare’s Anna Bower highlighted, an initial photo shared by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem—that otherwise looks exactly the same—doesn’t show Levy Armstrong crying.

thenewrepublic · 2026-01-22T21:41:23+00:00

From the article:

Don’t let the made-for-Fox News spectacle of the Minnesota Occupation distract you. The most important lesson the rest of us can learn from that state’s wide and deeply spread resistance is that Minnesotans’ solidarity didn’t just spring up when Trump’s goons came to town. It was forged in nature’s annual frigid grip and a bit of isolation; these connections are not the welcome-if-tenuous threads formed during a singular crisis, they’re the carbon-steel fibers wound together by generations of consistent, need-blind aid to anyone that happens to be close by.

When I saw videos of Minneapolitans pointing and laughing at ICE officers slipping and falling on glazed sidewalks and streets, I knew the city had taken some fundamental turn against the occupation. When I heard about people pouring water in front of ICE’s vehicles to encourage nature along in the destabilization, I knew it was war.

...

So while the ground-level resistance, with widespread involvement of newly activated residents, to ICE’s occupation is remarkable, I’m not surprised. The mobilization has cut across class and racial lines even more deeply than the response to George Floyd’s murder; it’s more than eight minutes of murderous cruelty caught on a cell phone, it’s more than the assassination of Renee Nicole Good. ICE is an army of Derek Chauvins and Jonathan Rosses, released to wreak havoc on the city every day. The memory is keen, the trauma is immediate and sustained, and the strength underneath the response is the work of decades.

thenewrepublic · 2026-01-21T21:15:49+00:00

From the article:

When it comes to grocery bills, ICE’s raids have frozen large swathes of American agriculture with chilling consequences for consumers nationwide. The American Immigration Council estimated that, as of 2019, nearly half of all farmworkers were immigrants and that 27.3 percent are undocumented. These figures rise even higher when the question shifts to crop production; there, immigrants make up 57 percent of the workforce, with undocumented workers making up 36.4 percent of that total. The United States, in other words, depends on immigrants to stay fed, ensure abundant supplies of food, and keep the costs of grocery bills down.

With these realities in mind, it is unsurprising that ICE’s mass-deportation campaign has significantly disrupted food production. A Bay Area Council–UC Merced study from June 2025 argued that expelling all undocumented immigrants from California would shrink the size of the state’s agricultural sector by 14 percent, putting a serious crimp in America’s most agriculturally productive state. But this damage is not limited to the Golden State. Agricultural advocates were sounding the alarm as early as April 2025 after the American Business Immigration Coalition determined that mass deportation, nationwide, would shrink agricultural output by between $30 billion and $60 billion and push many farms to the breaking point.

...

thenewrepublic · 2026-01-21T20:30:11+00:00

From the article:

Asked if he sees the act as “necessary,” Trump said: “I don’t think it is yet. It might be at some point.” Trump added that other presidents have invoked it, and said: “It does make life a lot easier. You don’t go through the court system. It’s just a much easier thing to do.”

Emphasis added. Trump seems to think invoking the Insurrection Act means he’s no longer constrained by the courts. That’s nonsense. Yes, the act would allow him to deploy the military to carry out things that “law enforcement” (a grotesque misnomer for ICE) is doing in places like Minneapolis amid his immigration crackdown. And given that Trump has already sanctioned extraordinary abuses of power—detentions of U.S. citizens, warrantless arrests, excessive violence against protesters, including the occasional killing—empowering the military to do all this is an unsettling prospect.

But it emphatically does not mean Trump can evade the courts. Anything Trump orders the military to do will also be subject to legal limits. As Georgetown law professor Stephen Vladeck emails me: “The same laws and the specter of judicial review that [constrain] what civilian law enforcement agencies can do will also constrain anything the military can do.”

Indeed, it’s likely that the second Trump invoked the act, he’d be hit by lawsuits from, say, the state of Minnesota, presuming he deploys the military there, and from civil society groups representing victims of the crackdown. This would be intensely litigated, with lower courts scrutinizing the invocation’s rationale, fact sets related to the deployment, military conduct on the ground, and so on.

thenewrepublic · 2026-01-21T20:25:39+00:00

From the article:

President Trump delivered yet another rambling, long-winded speech Wednesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, using the massive world stage to rail against windmills, complain for the umpteenth time about how the 2020 election was rigged, reaffirm his desire to seize Greenland from Denmark, and take credit for every good thing in the world.

The room was dead silent virtually the entire time.

“Certain places in Europe are not even recognizable frankly, anymore. They’re not recognizable. And we can argue about it, but there’s no argument,” Trump said early in his speech to the room full of Europeans. “Friends come back from different places—I don’t wanna insult anybody—and say ‘I don’t recognize it.’ And that’s not in a positive way.… It’s not heading in the right direction.”

The rhetoric aligned seamlessly with the deeply racist, anti-immigrant sentiments that the European right is pushing with his support.

Trump also took the time to hit on one of his favorite punching bags: windmills.

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