News for the Week of March 14, 2026

ICE against America

Eric Hane has a terrific piece in the indie journal Welcome to Hell World, about the popular resistance in Minneapolis.

• Officials in California are calling on DHS to return a deaf boy who was deported to Colombia.
• The number of children in immigrant detention has skyrocketed under the Trump regime.
• Minnesota Public Radio has a segment on how ICE is increasingly targeting American citizens, often for simply observing or recording them.

In the Guardian, a piece about the lifetime of trauma that accompanies childhood deportation.

Corruption

Brian Phillips offers a lengthy explainer on Palantir, the surveillance-state contractor that is providing the digital and material infrastructure for the government's attacks on US citizens.

• Marisa Kabas at the Handbasket has gained access to police bodycam footage of the DOGE invasion of the US Institute of Peace, and breaks down what it reveals.
• Flock's ubiquitous camera system has led to a glut of people being wrongfully accused and even imprisoned due to misidentification.
• Wired reports on how career privacy officers at DHS were forced out due to their refusal to follow illegal orders and concerns about the Mobile Fortify surveillance app. It's part of a pattern throughout the Trump regime.

The Phoenix New Times reports on how a cadre of MAGA loyalists made plans for deploying the military on American soil. Don Moynihan at Can We Still Govern? on how Democrats can reverse the trend of corrupt contractors determining government policy.

The War in Iran

Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense who contemptuously dismissed rules of engagement as "dumb", scrapped a Pentagon system that was built to minimize civilian casualties in the event of a conflict in his pursuit of "lethality".

• Spencer Ackerman at Forever Wars on the looming water crisis in the Gulf States.
• The US-Israeli attack on oil refineries in Tehran are an ecological and humanitarian disaster.
• Jared Kushner, who is serving as an unelected and unofficial diplomat with massive personal financial interests in the Gulf States, has become a serious national security issue.

Footage shows that a girls' elementary school in Minab, Iran, which was hit twice in the initial US-Israeli attack that killed more than a hundred schoolchildren, was struck by a Tomahawk missile. This strongly indicates that the United States was directly responsible for the strikes.

The Epstein Files

NPR reports that the Trump regime is still illegally withholding 37 pages of documents from the Epstein files that implicate him in the rape of a 13-year-old girl.

• New Mexico authorities have opened an investigation into Jeffrey Epstein's Zorro Ranch, and have established a commission to investigate past activities.

Meanwhile, The Post and Courier in South Carolina has verified a number of the details in the victim's testimony against Trump.