News for the Week of February 28, 2026

Chris Braak

— 3 min read
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War with Iran

Independent national security reporter Spencer Ackerman on the regime's illegal attack on Iran and its relationship to the Global War on Terror. More from him in the Nation.

  • As many predicated would happen, the conflict has begun to engulf other Gulf states almost immediately.
  • For some reason, Melania Trump, who is not an American official and does not hold an elected or even appointed political office, presides over a meeting of the UN Security Council today (Monday).
  • Though Anthropic refused the Pentagon's demands to allow them to use their AI tools for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, OpenAI does not appear to have any similar qualms.

More than a hundred schoolgirls are reported killed in a bombing in Minab in the early hours of the attack on Iran. There are images and video floating around on the internet; it is brutal and horrifying.

ICE's War on Children

While American military operations kill children overseas, ICE and DHS continue their war against children at home. At the Dilley concentration camp in Texas, guards have stolen letters, paper, and writing materials from children in retribution for their attempts to let people know what the conditions in the camp are like.

Immigrant families around the country are struggling to explain ICE to their children – and assembling resources to help them understand when the agency finally comes for them.

Gulag Nation

The regime has declared operations in Minnesota are coming to an end, but ICE is still there terrorizing the community. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is planning on using $45 billion in federal funds to expand a network of concentration camps across the country.

Will Bunch with the Inquirer has more on the regime's plan for nationwide concentration camps. Wired reports on recovering embedded metadata from DHS documents, revealing some of the architects of the detention plans. Project Saltbox has built a visual tracker of where ICE is building warehouses across the country.

Corruption

A new report indicates that Operation Metro Surge has cost Minnesotans $106 million in lost wages. Meanwhile, contractors with ICE have been making out like bandits: four of the top ten contractors have seen their revenues triple.

  • A former GEO Group executive was given an "ethics waiver" to serve in the Trump administration so he could hand out contracts to his former company.
  • Trump is continuing with his plan to sue the government he now represents for $10 billion; he's also attempting to illegally transfer $10 billion in government funds to his "Board of Peace" – essentially a private slush fund under his control.
  • Lackeys in the regime are also profiting; a firm tied to DHS head Kristi Noem secretly received $220 million in advertising contracts.
  • And Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran president who was tried and convicted for taking bribes and facilitating the smuggling of 400 tons of cocaine into the us, was not only pardoned by the president, but paid a special tactical team from the Bureau of Prisons to chauffeur him to the Waldorf-Astoria.

All this while Russell Vought and Elon Musk together conspired to destroy USAID, which used a fraction the national budget to save potentially millions of lives. The death toll from this transfer of wealth – from suffering people into the hands of the administration's cronies and secret police – will be enormous.

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