We Found That More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days.

When the Supreme Court recently allowed immigration agents in the Los Angeles area to take race into consideration during sweeps, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that citizens shouldn’t be concerned.

“If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States,” Kavanaugh wrote, “they promptly let the individual go.”

But that is far from the reality many citizens have experienced. Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched.

I’m a US citizen and a veteran. ICE arrested me for no reason.

On July 10, I was on my way to work when ICE agents engulfed my car in tear gas, smashed my driver-side window, and pepper-sprayed my face. They dragged me out, threw me to the ground, and even while I was complying, one agent kneeled on my neck and another kneeled on my back as others stood by and watched.

I spent three nights and three days in federal custody. During that time, I was never told what I was charged with, was not allowed to shower despite being covered in tear gas and pepper spray, had no phone call to my family, and no access to an attorney. I was placed on suicide watch and missed my daughter’s third birthday. No explanation. No charges. No apology. One day, I was just told, “you’re free to go.”

Federal agents knock down elderly couple during Portland protest

An elderly couple says they were charged and knocked down by federal agents as they peacefully protested on Saturday in front of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in South Portland, just blocks from their home.

Laurie Eckman, 84, said she and her husband Richard Eckman, also 84 and a Vietnam war veteran, were rushed by federal officers “for no apparent reason.” She said her husband was leaning on his walker and wearing his Vietnam veterans cap as he was pushed to the ground.

Using helicopters and chemical agents, immigration agents become increasingly aggressive in Chicago

Agents used unmarked trucks and a helicopter to surround the five-story apartment building. NewsNation, which was invited to observe the operation, reported agents “rappelled from Black Hawk helicopters.” Agents then went door to door, woke up residents and used zip ties to restrain them.

Musician playing ‘Ghostbusters’ outside ICE facility is arrested by agents: ‘Why are they targeting a clarinetist?’

Oriana Korol, 38, was playing “Ghostbusters” with her group — the Unpresidented Brass Band — during a massive protest outside the ICE facility in Oregon’s largest city Sunday evening when federal agents arrested her, her loved ones said. She has since been taken to a jail in Washington as her husband and bandmates demand answers about her arrest.

US ‘on a trajectory’ toward authoritarian rule, ex-officials warn

“The speed with which we have devolved away from a fully functioning democracy is startling to me,” Gail Helt, a former CIA analyst and a member of the Steady State, said on a call with reporters after the assessment was published on Thursday. “In most cases, it takes longer than nine months to get where we are.”

A US-funded nutrition program was helping to keep this woman’s baby alive. Days after the program was cut, he died

Earlier this year, the Trump administration froze foreign aid and cut support for programs aid groups deemed lifesaving – decisions that quickly turned into life-or-death realities for families like Usman’s. The nutrition program in Dikwa, which was funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), received a sudden stop-work order during the administration’s aid freeze, according to the nonprofit that implemented the work, Mercy Corps.

The Trump administration had previously canceled more than 80% of programs at USAID, which delivered US humanitarian aid overseas. It later essentially shuttered the agency, claiming it was engaged in waste and abuse, and moved foreign aid administration under the State Department, which critics say has not delivered on much of USAID’s legacy work.

America tips into fascism

The precise moment when and where in recent weeks America crossed that invisible line from democracy into authoritarianism can and will be debated by future historians, but it’s clear that the line itself has been crossed.

'DOGE lied': Expert floored as blistering report finds Musk team blew billions

The staff report released by the office of Sen. Richard Blumenthal (Conn.)—the ranking Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI)—only focuses on waste by DOGE that can be quantified in the here and now. It finds that in just six months of operation, DOGE wasted more than $21 billion.

This comes at "the very same time," Blumenthal said, that "the Trump administration is cutting healthcare, nutrition assistance, and emergency services in the name of 'efficiency' and 'savings,'" via the recently passed "One Big Beautiful Bill Act," which itself is projected to add $3.4 trillion to the federal deficit over the next 10 years.

Blumenthal said his investigation shows that "DOGE was clearly never about efficiency or saving the American taxpayer money."

The Trump Administration Is About to Incinerate 500 Tons of Emergency Food

Five months into its unprecedented dismantling of foreign-aid programs, the Trump administration has given the order to incinerate food instead of sending it to people abroad who need it. Nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food—enough to feed about 1.5 million children for a week—are set to expire tomorrow, according to current and former government employees with direct knowledge of the rations. Within weeks, two of those sources told me, the food, meant for children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, will be ash.

US has wasted hundreds of thousands of vaccines meant for Africa, health officials there say

Nearly 800,000 mpox vaccine doses the U.S. government had promised to donate to African countries experiencing an outbreak of the rash-causing disease cannot be shipped because they’re expiring in less than six months, according to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

Congress this week voted to eliminate funding for the United Nations Children's Fund — an organization that has been proven to save lives — including my own.

So when a smart friend pointed out the UNICEF provision to me ahead of a Senate vote on the bill, I decided to question Republican senators about it. What, I asked them, is objectionable about an organization dedicated to helping children? Is there something they could point to as an example of wasteful spending at UNICEF specifically, and not just USAID?

They had no good answers. Instead, I heard a lot of stock GOP talking points about funding for transgender operas and sex workers — none of which is supported by the work of UNICEF, which, again, is focused on helping kids.

Elon Musk’s Reign of Terror Is Only Just Beginning

What’s the worst thing that the Trump administration has done in the last four months? One could reasonably point to immigration, where masked ICE officers are ambushing people at immigration hearings, foreign students are threatened with deportation for expressing reasonable opinions, and migrants—many of whom have committed no crimes—are being disappeared to foreign gulags.

The decimation of the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, is up there, though. People around the world are starving now because of Musk’s cuts. They are dying of disease because of Musk’s cuts. They are being born with diseases they will carry with them for the rest of their lives because of Musk’s cuts. Brown University professor Brooke Nichols has estimated that Musk’s destruction of USAID has already led to 300,000 deaths, the majority of which are children.

Trump’s Aid Cuts Hit the Hungry in a City of Shellfire and Starvation

The stark consequences of Mr. Trump’s slashing of U.S. aid are evident in few places as clearly as in Sudan, where a brutal civil war has set off a staggering humanitarian catastrophe and left 25 million people — more than half of the country’s population — acutely hungry.

Death, Sexual Violence and Human Trafficking: Fallout From U.S. Aid Withdrawal Hits the World’s Most Fragile Locations

Exclusive State Department records show: As the Trump administration abandons its humanitarian commitments, diplomats are reporting that the cuts have led to violence and instability while undermining anti-terrorism initiatives.

What has DOGE done in Trump's first 100 days?

There's little evidence to support the claim that DOGE is saving agencies significant money or changing the fact that the federal government spends more money than it collects — mainly on non-discretionary programs like Medicaid and Social Security.

NPR's reporting shows the contracts DOGE has terminated and spending it has frozen largely reflect policy disagreements with the Biden administration rather than waste, fraud or abuse.

Bill Gates Accuses Elon Musk of ‘Killing Children’ by Cutting Foreign Aid

In his sharpest rebuke of the world’s richest man, a distinction he once held, Bill Gates accused Elon Musk at least twice in the past week of “killing” children in the world’s poorest countries by cutting foreign aid under the Trump administration.

A whistleblower's disclosure details how DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data

But according to an official whistleblower disclosure shared with Congress and other federal overseers that was obtained by NPR, subsequent interviews with the whistleblower and records of internal communications, technical staff members were alarmed about what DOGE engineers did when they were granted access, particularly when those staffers noticed a spike in data leaving the agency.

Meanwhile, according to the disclosure and records of internal communications, members of the DOGE team asked that their activities not be logged on the system and then appeared to try to cover their tracks behind them, turning off monitoring tools and manually deleting records of their access — evasive behavior that several cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR compared to what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do.

‘It is a wrecking ball’: Former DOGE worker describes Musk-led government-slashing effort from the inside

She described a wave of new staffers with limited knowledge of how federal agencies operate taking a bulldozer-like approach to shrinking the government — moves made with “a careless disregard for trying to understand how the work happens and what the rules and policies are.”

Musk Said No One Has Died Since Aid Was Cut. That Isn’t True.

Under PEPFAR, an outreach health worker ensured that Peter and other AIDS orphans got their medicines. Then in January, Trump and Musk effectively shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development, perhaps illegally, and that PEPFAR outreach program ended. Orphans were on their own.

The richest man in the world actively choosing to deprive orphans of live-saving medicine is unquestionably despicable.

These Words Are Disappearing in the New Trump Administration

As President Trump seeks to purge the federal government of “woke” initiatives, agencies have flagged hundreds of words to limit or avoid, according to a compilation of government documents.

Based on this list, the Declaration of Independence needs to be rewritten due to being "woke"