News for the Week of February 14, 2026

ICE's War on Children

In Minnesota, and throughout the country, ICE's brutal raids are traumatizing children. Rewire News reports from Minneapolis about the devastation being wrought in Minnesota schools.

• Kelly Vargas writes at Slate about what she, her husband, and their six-year-old daughter experienced at the Dilley camp.
• Jacob Soboroff at MSNow reports on an ICE raid to kidnap a two-year-old child and her father.
• Despite claims of an end to Metro Surge and a drawdown of ICE in Minneapolis, the agency is still terrorizing the city and surrounding areas.

ProPublica published this devastating piece on the conditions of the children still being held in the Dilley camp. This week, officials at the camp conducted a raid and confiscated the letters and writing materials that the children were using to tell their stories.

Concentration Camps

Spotlight PA has a story on ICE spending $87 million on a warehouse in Berks County, PA, to be turned into a new concentration camp.

• The Minnesota Reformer reports on the tools ICE is using to surveil its political opponents.
• Prisoners at the Otay Mesa camp in California have been forced to throw notes over the fence in order to get word to people on the outside.
• There is a possible tuberculosis outbreak at Camp East Montana, in El Paso.
• In New York City, after a judge's order to clean up the squalid conditions at a detention facility, ICE moved detainees to a different floor and pretended the order didn't apply.

Wired reports on the rapid expansion of ICE facilities across the country, identifying plans for camps and offices. Andrea Pritzker, author of 2014's One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, lays out the reality of what ICE is building in the US.

Corruption

The Appeal reports that private prison company CoreCivic, one of the major contractors for the ICE camps, is also donating generously to members of Congress.

• After dismantling USAID, and potentially killing tens of thousands of people, administration apparatchik Russel Vought has repurposed budget money for a massive security detail.
• According to Senator Chris Murphy, a UAE investor secretly gave Trump $187 million dollars, in exchange for access to sensitive defense technology.
• The biggest beneficiaries of MAGA's so-called "populism" have been wealthy families and GOP donors.

Don Moynihan reports that the Trump administration has finalized its Schedule F rule, which will allow it to replace almost all civil servants with political employees, and provides a good rundown of what this could mean.

The Epstein Files

David Dayen at the American Prospect reports on the intersection between political corruption and the sexual depravity enabled by the Epstein Class.

• John Phelan, Trump's laughably unqualified Navy secretary, best known for his collection of pornographic art, has been revealed as a sometimes travel companion of Jeffrey Epstein.
• A distressingly large number of people in the higher education administrative class appear to have been associates with the late sex-trafficker.
• Pam Bondi's hearing with the Judiciary Committee was an embarrassment for her, and for our country.

The specifics of Epstein's crimes, and the many business, academic, and political luminaries that enabled, supported, and participated in those crimes, are heinous. The files themselves also reveal coordination on ideas that eventually reveal themselves in the real world: Jill Filipovic reports on the plot against American women.