
Former U.S. Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino led the Trump administration’s militarized immigration crackdowns in Chicago, Los Angeles and Minneapolis. Bovino was eventually removed from his position in January after immigration agents under his command killed 37-year-old VA nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. We speak with Amanda Moore, a reporter who focuses on far-right extremism and state violence. She spent months following Bovino and the immigration crackdown in the United States for Mother Jones and other outlets. “[Border Patrol] would snipe us with rubber bullets from rooftops by the detention centers,” says Moore. We also get a comment from reporter Charles R. Davis about other right-wing figures in the Trump administration.

We get an update on protests at Newark, New Jersey’s Delaney Hall, an ICE facility owned and operated by the private prison company GEO Group, where hundreds of immigrant detainees have been on a hunger and labor strike for the past week demanding their immediate release. New Jersey Congressmember Analilia Mejía recently toured the facility and spoke to people who described being arrested and detained after attending routine ICE check-ins, being held for months in appalling conditions even after signing voluntary deportation orders, and being hospitalized after they were beaten and pepper-sprayed by armed ICE agents. “What we need to understand is that this is a for-profit model, and they are failing human beings,” she says. “The reality is that this is a rogue administration that has handed undue power to agencies, to ICE agents and to entities like GEO Group [that] are now acting with impunity.” Meanwhile, says Li Adorno, a community organizer with the immigrant rights group Movimiento Cosecha, protests outside the facility in solidarity with the strike have grown increasingly contentious. Local investigative journalist Bob Hennelly explains that the Trump administration’s targeting of Newark for immigration enforcement has escalated since federal agents arrested and charged Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and New Jersey Congressmember LaMonica McIver with trespassing after inviting them into Delaney Hall last May. Hennelly says “there’s a much broader implosion of the administration of law in New Jersey … [and] a collapse of federal law enforcement in Newark.”

Social media posts by the Department of Homeland Security recruiting for ICE contained so many white supremacist themes that they could endanger the public, Colorado law enforcement officials warned, according to internal records obtained by The Intercept.
Supporters of a Maryland bill that would prohibit police from wearing face coverings while on duty said they are confident the measure can survive legal challenges like the one that struck down a similar law in California.
Following violent and indiscriminate sweeps of immigrant communities across the United States, the number of people in ICE detention has increased 75% since President Trump returned to the Oval Office. Yet, as the number of lawsuits against the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign skyrockets, the federal government has continued to jail people indefinitely. Although judges across the U.S. have handed down more than 4,400 rulings of illegal detentions of immigrants since October, very few of these rulings have been acted upon. Reuters reporter Brad Heath says the unprecedented “pile-up” of tens of thousands of cases is straining the capacity of the rapidly shrinking staff at the Department of Justice and further delaying the release of immigrants from ICE jails.
The majority of Americans quite seriously want it, Congressman. Legit law enforcement isn't afraid of it.