More Immigrants Detained by ICE Recount Harsh and Cruel Treatment; Mother Jones, January 18, 2026

Katie Herchenroeder, Mother Jones; More Immigrants Detained by ICE Recount Harsh and Cruel Treatment

"As the Trump administration’s deportation campaign continues to bring fear and upheaval to Minneapolis, more immigrants are sharing their stories of detainment and harsh treatment when being apprehended at their homes, while driving, and at work. Tensions continue to rise as federal immigration agents target people who they claim are in the country without legal status, as well as protestors filling the streets to demand accountability for Homeland Security’s often violent tactics, including ICE agent Jonathan Ross’ killing of Renée Good in her car. 

This week, according to reporting from the Minnesota Star Tribune, federal agents detained three workers from a family-owned Mexican restaurant hours after the agents themselves dined at the establishment. The agents reportedly followed the workers after the workers closed up for the night and took them into custody. That was not the first time ICE agents have gone to a local business as customers before arresting someone who works there. 

During a Saturday press conference, a recently released man described a different form of callousness by ICE. Garrison Gibson, 38, said that agents showed up to his house multiple times, eventually smashing open the door with a battering ram. After armed agents took him from his home Gibson says, they reveled in his detainment. 

“They took trophy pictures with their personal phones,” he said, adding, “like one stood by me on the right side of me. One stood on the left side of me. And they went, like, thumbs up and took pictures with their personal phones.”"

Trump Has Another Justification for the Shooting of Renee Good: Disrespect; The New York Times, January 12, 2026

Luke Broadwater and Katie Rogers , The New York Times; Trump Has Another Justification for the Shooting of Renee Good: Disrespect

"President Trump has added another justification for the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minnesota: She behaved badly.

“At a very minimum, that woman was very, very disrespectful to law enforcement,” Mr. Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday evening."

Can James Talarico Reclaim Christianity for the Left?; The New York Times, The Ezra Klein Show, January 13, 2026

Ezra Klein

Produced by Marie Cascione,

The New York Times, The Ezra Klein Show; Can James Talarico Reclaim Christianity for the Left?

"One of my obsessions over the last few years has been the role of attention in modern American politics: the way attention is a fundamental currency, the way it works differently than it did at other times when it was controlled by newspaper editorial boards. So I’ve been particularly interested in politicians who seem native to this attentional era, who seem to have figured something out.

We’ve talked a lot about how the Trump administration uses attention, how Zohran Mamdani uses attention. But somebody who has been breaking through over the past year in a very interesting way is James Talarico, a state representative from Texas.

Talarico is a little bit unusual for a Democrat. He’s a very forthright Christian politician. He roots his politics very fundamentally in a way you don’t often hear from Democrats in his faith.

Archival clip of James Talarico: Because there is no love of God without love of neighbor.

But Talarico began emerging as somebody who was breaking through on TikTok, Instagram and viral videos where he would talk about whether or not the Ten Commandments should be posted in schools, as a bill had proposed:

Archival clip of Talarico: This bill, to me, is not only unconstitutional, it’s not only un-American, I think it is also deeply un-Christian.

And the ways in which the Bible’s emphasis on helping the poor and the needy had been perverted by those who wanted to use religion as a tool of power and even greed:

Archival clip of Talarico: Jesus liberates, Christian nationalism controls. Jesus saves, Christian nationalism kills.

What was really surprising to many people is that he ended up on Joe Rogan’s podcast — the first significant Democrat that Rogan seemed interested in, in a very long time.

Archival clip of Joe Rogan: You need to run for president. [Laughter]. Because we need someone who’s actually a good person.

Now Talarico is running for Senate in Texas. He’s running in a primary with Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett for what will be one of the most important Senate elections in the country.

So I wanted to have Talarico on the show to talk to him about his faith, his politics and the way those two have come together in this attentional moment to allow him to say things in a language and within a framework that people seem to really want to hear, that people seem hungry for: a language of morality, and even of faith, at a time of incredible cruelty. And at a time when the radicalism of faith seems to have been perverted by the corruption of politics...

I think as somebody who is outside Christianity, and as such, is always a little bit astonished by the radicalism of the text and the strangeness of it — God incarnated in a human being, that human being is tortured and murdered and rises again as a lesson in mercy and forgiveness and transcendence. There’s all manner of violence I’m doing to the story there. And the structure of the New Testament, to me, is: Jesus goes to one outcast member of society after another.

Then I look up into this administration, in particular, and I see people who are incredibly loud in their Christianity and also incredibly cruel in their politics. Put aside the question of what borders you think a nation must have — you can enforce that border in all manner of ways without treating people who are coming here to escape violence or to better their family’s life cruelly.

You can do it without the memes we see them make on social media of a cartoon immigrant weeping as she’s being deported. Of the A.S.M.R. video of migrants shackled to one another, dragging their chains, with the implication being that the sound of that should soothe you.

It is the ability to insist on your allegiance to such a radical religion, and then treat other human beings with such, genuinely, to me, unmitigated cruelty that I actually find hard, at a soul level, to reconcile.

Scripture says you can’t love God and hate other people. That’s in John 1. You can’t love God and abuse the immigrant. You can’t love God and oppress the poor. You can’t love God and bully the outcast. We spend so much time looking for God out there that we miss God in the person sitting right next to us, in that neighbor who bears the divine image. In the face of a neighbor, we glimpse the face of God.

The Commandment to love God and love thy neighbor is not from Christianity — it is from Judaism. And all Jesus is clarifying, as a kind of radical rabbi, is that your neighbor is the person you love the least.

The parable of the good Samaritan may be the most famous of Jesus’ parables. I think we forget in our modern context how shocking it was. Because today, being a good Samaritan just means helping people to the side of the road — which is good, you should do that. But for listeners in the first century, the Samaritans were not just a different religious group. The Samaritans were their sworn enemies.

And so he is pushing the boundaries on how we define “neighbor” and who we’re supposed to love.

Loving our enemies? Again, it has become trite in a culture dominated by Christianity, but none of us actually do that. None of us actually loves our enemies, even if we say we try to. So yes, I share the same revulsion: that Christians in the halls of power are blatantly violating the teachings of Christianity on a daily basis and hurting our neighbors in the process."

The Trump Vibe Shift Is Dead; The New York Times, December 21, 2025

EZRA KLEIN, The New York Times; The Trump Vibe Shift Is Dead

"In January, I made a prediction: “I suspect we are at or near the peak of Trump vibes.” Now, as this long year grinds to its end, I think it can be said more declaratively: The Trump vibe shift is dead. And there are already glimmers of what will follow it...

Political backlash always seeks the opposing force to the present regime. Closed and cruel are on their way out. What comes next, I suspect, will present itself as open, friendly and assertively moral. But it will also need to credibly offer what Trump and Trumpism have failed to deliver: real solutions to the problems Americans face."

Christianity Today Editor Slams Trump’s “Disgusting, Immoral Behavior”; The New Republic, December 15, 2025

Hafiz Rashid, The New Republic; Christianity Today Editor Slams Trump’s “Disgusting, Immoral Behavior”

"The editor-at-large of Christianity Today magazine on Monday sharply condemned Donald Trump’s deranged post about the murders of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele.

Russell Moore, formerly the magazine’s editor in chief, called out Trump’s post blaming Reiner for the murders “through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.” Moore called Trump’s comments “vile, disgusting, and immoral behavior.”"

'Bad for our country.' Trump doubles down on attack of late Rob Reiner; USA TODAY, December 15, 2025

Joey Garrison, USA TODAY; 'Bad for our country.' Trump doubles down on attack of late Rob Reiner

"President Donald Trump doubled down on his widely criticized attack of the late film director Rob Reiner, expressing no regret nor offering an apology for comments that even some Republican supporters have since denounced.

"I thought he was very bad for our country," Trump said on Dec. 15 when asked whether he stands by his social media post about Reiner from earlier in the day."

Born Deaf and Blind, She’s Caught in Trump’s Anti-Diversity Crusade; The New York Times, December 15, 2025

Sonia A. Rao

Visuals by Jamie Kelter Davis

, The New York Times ; Born Deaf and Blind, She’s Caught in Trump’s Anti-Diversity Crusade

[Kip Currier: Another heartbreaking example showcasing the seemingly endless cruelty and indifference of this administration to vulnerable human beings.

What reasonable, compassionate person would cut programs like the Wisconsin Deafblind Project?

What person of faith can justify believing that federal and state governments shouldn't step up to help the "least among us" and families who are in need?

Yet millions can be allocated for building a ballroom addition to the White House and green-lighting tax breaks for billionaires to buy more mansions, super-yachts, and islands?]

[Excerpt]

"Casey and Leah Garner wanted a big family. The Wisconsin couple had dreamed of having at least six children by the time they were in their 30s. But after years of struggling with infertility, they decided to adopt.

At the hospital three years ago, meeting the newborn who would become their daughter, Mr. Garner was the first to notice the tiny flaps of skin where her ears should be. Annie, the child they were adopting, was deaf.

Over the next few months, as they got to know their daughter, the Garners would discover more challenges, including poor vision, a developmental disability and weak muscles...

He discovered the Wisconsin Deafblind Project, a state program for the families of children with combined vision and hearing loss. It made a tremendous difference as they learned to parent Annie, the Garners said.

They met other families experiencing the same thing. A mentor taught them sign language. Annie got sensory toys and Braille books. And she even made a best friend with a similar condition.

Then in September, the Trump administration canceled the five-year, $918,000 grant for the program, which supports about 170 children in Wisconsin like Annie. It also ended a $10.5 million grant used to recruit and retain special education teachers in the state."

Detainees at ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ facing ‘harrowing human right violations’, new report alleges; The Guardian, December 4, 2025

Richard Luscombe, The Guardian; Detainees at ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ facing ‘harrowing human right violations’, new report alleges

"Detainees at the notorious Florida immigration jail known as “Alligator Alcatraz” were shackled inside a 2ft high metal cage and left outside without water for up to a day at a time, a shocking report published on Thursday by Amnesty International alleges.

The human rights group said migrants held at the state-run Everglades facility, and at Miami’s Krome immigration processing center operated by a private company on behalf of the Trump administration, continue to be exposed to “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” rising in some cases to torture.

The cage, known to detainees as “the box”, is used by guards for the arbitrary punishment of trivial or non-existent offenses, according to the report compiled from interviews with detainees and advocacy groups, and a site visit to Krome made by Amnesty workers in September."

Torture and Enforced Disappearances in the Sunshine State: Human Rights Violations at “Alligator Alcatraz” and Krome in Florida; Amnesty International, December 4, 2025

Amnesty International; Torture and Enforced Disappearances in the Sunshine State: Human Rights Violations at “Alligator Alcatraz” and Krome in Florida

"This report presents Amnesty International’s findings from a research trip to southern Florida in September 2025 to document:

• Human rights impacts of federal and state migration and asylum policies on mass detention and deportation
• Access to due process and
• Detention conditions since President Trump took office on January 20, 2025.

In particular, it focuses on detention conditions at the Krome North Service Processing Center (Krome) and the Everglades Detention Facility, also known as “Alligator Alcatraz.”

Krome is an ICE detention facility located in Miami-Dade County on the edge of the Everglades. In 2025, the facility has faced heightened scrutiny after reports of severe overcrowding and several deaths. Amnesty International documented delays in intake procedures, overcrowding in temporary processing areas, inadequate and inaccessible medical care, alarming disciplinary practices including the use of prolonged solitary confinement, and challenges in access to legal representation and due process at Krome.

“Alligator Alcatraz” opened in July 2025 with the capacity to detain around 3,000 people. Amnesty International’s research concludes that people arbitrarily detained in “Alligator Alcatraz” are being held in inhuman and unsanitary conditions, including overflowing toilets with fecal matter seeping into where people are sleeping, limited access to showers, exposure to insects without protective measures, lights on 24 hours a day, poor quality food and water, and lack of privacy.

Amnesty International considers that detention conditions at both facilities amount to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. The use of prolonged solitary confinement at Krome and the use of the ‘box’ at “Alligator Alcatraz” amount to torture or other ill-treatment.

Amnesty International calls on the Government of the United States to:

• End its cruel mass immigration detention and deportation machine
• Stop the criminalization of migration
• Bar the use of state-owned facilities for immigration custody detention
• Ensure thorough investigations into all deaths, abuses, and allegations of torture in custody, and
• Comply with international human rights law and standards."

‘They decided to kill us with cold’: Ukrainians struggle against Russian assault on power network; The Guardian, November 22, 2025

Luke Harding in Chernihiv. Photographs by Alessio Mamo, The Guardian ; ‘They decided to kill us with cold’: Ukrainians struggle against Russian assault on power network

"Ukraine is now facing its coldest and most difficult winter since 2022. Blackouts have become a part of everyday life, not just in far-flung hamlets but in the capital, Kyiv, as well. In an interview this month between the Guardian and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the lights failed in the president’s palace. Cafes, restaurants and shops function as best as they can, against a noisy hum from pavement generators.

Chernihiv is the worst-affected region, together with Sumy and Kharkiv, which also border Russia. “We are without power for 14 hours a day. Today it went off at 5.30am, came back at 10.30am and disappeared at 13.30. Some districts have no power at all,” Ivanivna said. During blackouts the lift in her nine-storey apartment building doesn’t work. Nor does the electric pump that supplies water. “There’s [no water] above the fourth floor,” she said.

She and her friend Liudmyla Mykolayivna are regular visitors to an “invincibility point” – a warm tent located in a shopping centre car park. It offers power sockets, Starlink internet and tea and coffee...

Two weeks ago, the Russians destroyed one of Chernihiv oblast’s last generation units...

“The Russians are trying to make a total blackout for the civilian population. There’s nothing military here. It’s deliberate genocide against peaceful people,” Serhii Pereverz, the firm’s deputy director, said...

Public anger over the lack of electricity has grown amid a major government corruption scandal. Earlier this month, detectives arrived at the Kyiv apartment of Zelenskyy’s friend and former business partner Timur Mindich. Mindich had left hours earlier, escaping to Poland, amid claims that he organised a large-scale bribery scheme featuring the state nuclear agency Energoatom. Other alleged beneficiaries included ministers – two of whom have resigned – and senior officials.

Andriy Podverbnyi, a Chernihiv journalist, said local residents were angry at the revelations. “Corruption has always been a problem in post-Soviet countries. Even so, the news was an unpleasant surprise. For the guys on the frontline and for those living with no or little power, it’s like a knife in the back,” he said. He added: “The scheme was primitive. The people involved were clearly confident they wouldn’t get caught.”...

Kulieva said her family did not intend to leave, despite the war and the fact the Russians next door – once regarded as “brothers” – had betrayed Ukraine. “People here are amazing. There’s incredible unity. The more time you spend in this community, the more you value people around you,” she said. She added: “I believe we will overcome our economic and political problems. The most important thing is to stay human. And to carry on raising our children in this spirit.

“It’s not hard to live without a light in your home. It’s hard to live without a light in your heart.”"

Pope Leo Doesn’t Want to Be the Anti-Trump. But He Is.; The New York Times, November 16, 2025

DAVID FRENCH, The New York Times; Pope Leo Doesn’t Want to Be the Anti-Trump. But He Is.

"Serving the most marginalized is fundamental to the Christian faith. By one count, more than 2,000 scriptural passages mandate or endorse service to the poor and the work of justice.

In May, just after the pope’s election, I wrote that the most important American in the world was no longer named Donald Trump. The president has less than four years left at the center of the international stage. The pope will present a global moral witness for years to come, and it’s a moral witness that is fundamentally incompatible with the cruelty and corruption of Trumpism.

If you examine the new pope’s pronouncements, there is a consistent through line. He defends human dignity and condemns government brutality. In addition to his defense of the human rights of migrants, he’s decried Russian abuses in Ukraine, and he’s called for a cease-fire, hostage release and compliance with international humanitarian law in Gaza.

His concern for human dignity extends to the world of technology and commerce as well. On Nov. 7, for example, he posted on social media: “Technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation. It carries an ethical and spiritual weight, for every design choice expresses a vision of humanity. The Church therefore calls all builders of #AI to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work—to develop systems that reflect justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life.”

The pope’s comment drew an immediate rebuke from Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist and Trump supporter, who posted (and then deleted) a meme mocking the pope’s statement.

Each of the pope’s statements is part of a consistent ethic of life. I love the Catholic writer Mark Shea’s description of what this ethic means — that “all human beings, without any exception whatsoever, are made in the image and likeness of God and that Jesus Christ died for all human beings, without any exception whatsoever. Therefore each human person — without any exception whatsoever — is sacred and is the only creature that God wills for its own sake.”"

What happened to mercy?; The Washington Post, November 13, 2025

Thomas Banchoff , The Washington Post; What happened to mercy?

"Decades ago, Pope John Paul II made a plea for mercy. His 1980 encyclical “Dives in Misericordia” (“Rich in Mercy”) emphasized God’s forgiving love toward humanity and decried a widespread tendency to “remove from the human heart the very idea of mercy.” Instead of mercy, John Paul saw a rise in “spite, hatred and even cruelty.”

Mercy is painfully scarce in our politics today. When the Right Rev. Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, appealed to President Donald Trump from the pulpit in January to show mercy toward the vulnerable, the president bristled and demanded an apology. In the months since, his administration’s policies have been rife with cruelty, from eliminating life-giving aid programs abroad to threatening to withhold food assistance for more than 40 million Americans."

The Blue Wave Cometh?; The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times, November 7, 2025

Ezra Klein

Produced by Annie Galvin and Claire Gordon

, The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times; The Blue Wave Cometh?

"Klein: [Laughs.] So this Judith Shklar essay that you’re mentioning — I want to read another part that you had sent me because I think it gets at this conversation we’re having in an interesting way, as well as at something that I am trying to get at when I talk about love or respect or politics as a difficult but worthwhile act.

Virtues are hard to carry out. That is why they are virtues. If they were easy, they wouldn’t be virtues.

So Shklar writes:

Courage is to be prized since it both prevents us from being cruel, as cowards so often are, and fortifies us against fear from threats both physical and moral. This is to be sure not the courage of the armed, but that of their likely victims. This is a liberalism that was born out of the cruelties of the religious civil wars, which forever rendered the claims of Christian charity a rebuke to all religious institutions and parties. If the faith was to survive at all, it would do so privately. The alternative then set and still before us is not one between classical virtue and liberal self-indulgence but between cruel military and moral repression and violence and a self-restraining tolerance that fences in the powerful to protect the freedom and safety of every citizen, old or young, male or female, Black or white. Far from being an amoral free-for-all, liberalism is in fact extremely difficult and constraining. Far too much so for those of us who cannot endure contradiction, complexity, diversity and the risks of freedom.

I do find something very inspiring in that.

Retica: I hoped you would. [Laughs.]

Klein: Not just that liberalism should be about trying to protect against fear, about cruelty, but this idea that it actually takes tremendous courage, that it takes tremendous self-discipline, that it is a part of yourself that you are honing and working on and strengthening — a muscle you are strengthening.

There’s something Obama has been saying as he’s been back on the trail in the last couple of weeks that I found interesting. He said it, too, in his interview with Marc Maron: that for a lot of us, none of what we believed has been hard. We didn’t grow up at a time when it was hard to believe in political freedom, hard to speak our mind. There was no risk to any of it — not really. There have been at other times in our history — Jim Crow, the Red Scare, World War II.

He said: It has not asked that much of us to believe in political freedom, to believe in liberalism. And all of a sudden it does. And right now we’re seeing who is willing to have that asked of them — who’s willing to believe some of these things when it’s hard.

And his point was that a lot of the leaders in civil society, business leaders and so on, have performed very poorly in this era. They’ve bent the knee — particularly compared with the first era of Trumpism.

Now they go give Donald Trump golden gifts in the White House. They are very much willing to pay to play. And not just pay money, but pay out in terms of other people’s freedoms. Pay out in terms of other people’s safety. Pay out in the kind of society that, if you had explained it to them a couple of years ago, they would have told you they did not want to live in that."

‘Homie’: DHS Ridicules Dad They Plan to Deport to Tiny African Nation; The Daily Beast, September 6, 2025

 Jack Revell , The Daily Beast ; ‘Homie’: DHS Ridicules Dad They Plan to Deport to Tiny African Nation

[Kip Currier: This is unacceptable aberrant and abhorrent behavior for U.S. government leaders and agencies like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to demean and torment human beings in this way. But as has so often been said of the Trump administration, the cruelty is the point: these actions are part of a broader stratagem. This behavior is an authoritarian tactic to dehumanize specific individuals and groups of people. The objectives of this systematic, intentional dehumanization are to (1) normalize cruelty, (2) undermine the rule of law, and (3) break down our democratic institutions. Political writer Hannah Arendt explains these strategies in her seminal 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism. The book is freely accessible through the Internet Archive via https://archive.org/details/TheOriginsOfTotalitarianism .

Remember, too, that DHS Head Kristi Noem is the same person who told us in her 2024 autobiography No Going Back that she shot and killed her own 14-month old wire-haired pointer dog, Cricket, with premeditation and deliberation. This is not a good person, a positive role model, or someone who exercises sound judgment and well-reasoned decision-making. 

And this is clearly not someone who should be influencing policy and leading a government agency.]

[Excerpt]

"Maryland dad Kilmar Abrego Garcia has learned where the Department of Homeland Security has decided to deport him next. 

In an email obtained by Fox News, lawyers for the DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement informed Abrego Garcia’s legal team on Friday that his new intended destination is the tiny African nation of Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland. 

Ridiculing Abrego Garcia’s legal claim of fear of persecution or torture—a core asylum principle—in many of the nations the government has considered deporting him to, the DHS wrote on social media that “Homie is afraid of the entire western hemisphere”."

The cruel human cost of the ‘land swap’ idea for Ukraine; The Washington Post, August 14, 2025

Anna Husarska, The Washington Post; The cruel human cost of the ‘land swap’ idea for Ukraine

[Kip Currier: The callous nonchalance and indifference with which Trump speaks of the suffering that Ukraine has endured -- and continues to face -- at the hands of Putin is both galling and appalling. Note, too, that this is the same person who reportedly called Sweden's finance minister recently in pursuit of a Nobel Prize for Peace: transactionalism and grandiosity are at Trump's very core.]

[Excerpt]

"On Monday, President Donald Trump elaborated on what kind of deal might emerge from his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage this week. “There’ll be some land swapping going on. To the good, for the good of Ukraine. Good stuff, not bad stuff.

“Also, some bad stuff for both,” Trump conceded.

Let us imagine a different kind of swap. Suppose Cuba invaded the United States, occupied most of Florida (justifying it with the claim that there are many Cubans living there) and three-quarters of Texas — and then agreed to withdraw from Texas if the United States gave it the whole of Florida. Would this qualify as a swap? And would it be “to the good” of the United States?

It is unjust to reward territorial aggression with territorial concessions. And such concessions would certainly set evil precedents in an increasingly chaotic world. But while these big questions are important, we must also not lose sight of the human costs such a “swap” would put on the Ukrainian people. Immediately ceding whatever territory Ukraine still holds in Donetsk region, as Russia is reportedly demanding, would be disastrous for the hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians still trying to live in a war zone."