News of the Week of February 7, 2026

ICE in Minnesota

Liam Conejo Ramos is home, but his school (from which two more children were abducted) was closed this week due to a bomb threat, and ICE vans camping in the parking lot.

• Human rights observers in Minneapolis continue their fight against ICE.
• Refugees fled torture in their home countries, now hounded by ICE.
• The Trump administration is trying to expedite the asylum claim for Liam Conejo Ramos and his family, as retaliation for the nationwide objection to his capture.

The Law Dork blog has a good rundown of specific ongoing legal efforts around the deployment of ICE in Minnesota.

ICE Nationwide

Last weekend, labor unions in Portland staged a demonstration against ICE; it was intended as a peaceful march, and many members brought their families, including their children.

ICE responded with an unprovoked attack with tear gas.

• Alissa Azar provided a first-person account of the attack via Bluesky.
• Elsewhere, DHS has asserted the right to read your emails in response to even mild criticism, and continues to lie about the people that they shoot.
• Despite currently holding 70,000 people in detention, largely without cause, the regime is moving forward with plans to build an even larger network of detention centers.
• It will not surprise you that the conditions in these detention centers are abominable, and would be inhumane even if the people detained were violent criminals.

ProPublica has collected letters written by children being detained at the Dilley concentration camp in Texas. Conditions there are bad, and getting worse. Radley Balko discusses how ICE became essentially a fascist paramilitary.

Corruption

Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, is the subject of a whistleblower complaint that is apparently so damaging that the intelligence community isn't sure how to share it with Congress.

• Gabbard was also present at an FBI raid in Fulton County, Georgia, during which the regime seized voting records from 2020.

The Epstein Files

Last week, the DoJ released a new tranche of documents from the Epstein case, despite being well past the deadline for full disclosure. While many images of the victims in the case were not redacted, most of the images and names of the perpetrators were, a strong indication of who the DoJ is trying to protect.

• At least one person who was revealed in the files as having an extremely close and disgusting friendship with Jeffrey Epstein was Peter Attia, one of the hand-picked contributors at the revamped CBS.

Garbage Day has a solid initial rundown of the sorts of things that have appeared so far. Very little of it is legally actionable, but there is a shockingly large number of people in power – almost exclusively men – who maintained a close friendship with Epstein after his conviction for sex trafficking a minor.

Julie K. Brown also has a clear explanation of what sex-trafficking really is, and how it worked with Epstein and his cohort.