Same Brutal ICE. Now Stealthier.
ICE has learned how to be cruel and lawless without drawing so much attention to itself.
What approach should Donald Trump take to rigging this year’s midterms? A coalition of hardcore MAGA activists has a few ideas. The Washington Post reports that activists “who say they are in coordination with the White House” are circulating “a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.” We’re sure it’s fine. Happy Friday.
Quieter Cruelty
by Andrew Egger
This week, Senate Democrats remained united in their insistence they would not vote to fund the Department of Homeland Security until Donald Trump and Republicans agreed to real reforms of the department. As they should—since the unbelievable scope of DHS’s lawlessness and brutality are becoming more painfully obvious every day.
Last week, in Buffalo, Border Patrol agents scooped up a refugee named Nurul Amin Shah Alam. They quickly learned he was in the country legally and not deportable. So they released him—in the parking lot of a closed Tim Horton’s, miles from both his home and the county jail where they’d picked him up. (Before security-camera footage confirmed that the coffee shop’s lobby was closed, DHS spent yesterday insisting agents had taken Shah Alam to a “safe, warm location.” When I asked DHS this morning how they reconciled that with the new footage, they declined to elaborate further.) They never contacted his lawyer or his family. Shah Alam, 56, who spoke no English and was mostly blind, wandered off into the cold night. He never made it home. On Tuesday, he was found dead.
The mistreatment of Shah Alam was the most outrageous recent story of DHS mishandling custodial releases, but it was far from the first. This week, Mother Jones reported that federal agents operating in Minneapolis had routinely detained migrants with documents showing them to be in the middle of active immigration cases, visa proceedings, or even pending U.S. citizenship. These documents proved they weren’t deportable—but when ICE released them, they didn’t give them back.
“I can’t think of a client I’ve had detained that did not have their documents taken,” one immigration lawyer told Mother Jones. Another added: “As far as I can tell, it’s the practice of ICE to throw everybody’s documents into a black box and then lose it.”
Meanwhile, the evidence keeps piling up that ICE is broadly ignoring, neglecting, or mishandling judicial orders to release individual migrants in its custody. In an astonishing filing yesterday, Minnesota’s top federal judge, Patrick Schiltz, released a list of more than 200 regional judicial orders ICE had violated in recent weeks.
“The Court is not aware of another occasion in the history of the United States in which a federal court has had to threaten contempt—again and again and again—to force the United States government to comply with court orders,” Schlitz wrote (emphasis in original).
The fault, the judge added, was not with the government’s line attorneys, who had “been put in an impossible position.” It was with their administration superiors, who had surged 3,000 ICE agents to Minnesota “without making any provision for handling the lawsuits that were sure to follow.”
“One way or another,” he wrote, “ICE will comply with this Court’s orders.”
You might remember that DHS has been trying to rebrand a bit lately, having belatedly realized that its maximum-friction strategy of surging into a city, swaggering around in shock-and-awe patrols, dragging migrants indiscriminately from their homes, and roughing up and gunning down protesters was extremely exciting for their base’s biggest sickos but totally alienating for the rest of the country. For the time being, at least, our government has stopped going out of its way to flaunt its lawlessness, its unaccountability, and its brutality. They didn’t want to stop. Americans made them. There’s no denying it’s a kind of progress.
But we must not lose sight of the fact that the new status quo is hardly less outrageous. The machinery of attempted mass deportation grinds on, and the people who operate it are no less careless, callous, stupid, and unscrupulous than before. The fevered bloodlust of Dan Bovino’s Minneapolis operation has been replaced not by any humane and responsible impulse but by a cold and brutal nonchalance. Assaulting protesters and then gunning them down in the street is out; carelessly dropping a blind, helpless man in a coffee-shop parking lot to freeze to death is still very much in.
There are so many scandals—how do we choose which ones to pay attention to, and how do we help each other stay focused? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Let’s be together: Join us March 19 in Austin, Texas at the Paramount Theatre for a night of politics among friends.
The Midterms Can’t Come Soon Enough
by William Kristol
The 2026 midterm election season kicks off this coming Tuesday, March 3, with primaries in Arkansas, North Carolina, and Texas. Nine months of political labor—sometimes painful, more often, one trusts, promising—will follow. And on November 3, 2026, we the people will choose a new House of Representatives, 35 newly elected senators, and a fresh slate of governors and state legislators.
Midterms are generally the neglected stepchildren of American politics. Everyone knows about presidential elections. You mention dates like 1932 and 1980—and 2016—and people know what you’re talking about. As for years like 1974 or 1994 or 2010, well . . . those of us whose hearts go pitty-pat at their mention tend to be at best political junkies, at worst oddballs.
But the midterms get a bad rap. They can affect public policy. They can produce political stars. And they can foreshadow bigger things to come. The grand presidential contests stand out in American history like handsome swans gliding gracefully along a pond. But the ugly duckling midterms paddling away energetically underneath the surface are worth our attention as well.
A year ago, the American people decided to take a gamble on a second term for a man who had left office four years before after trying to overturn the results of the free and fair election he’d lost. They decided to overlook—or to embrace?—the demagoguery and the dishonesty, and the bigotry and the cruelty that were already so evident in his campaign. And they decided to give majorities in Congress to a political party that would submit to his authority, go along with his policies, and enable his accumulation of power.
And so here we are, with federal agents assaulting our citizens, with the federal government threatening our elections, and with our highest officials lying, bullying, and grifting without shame or remorse. The midterm elections can’t change the character of the executive branch the American people chose in 2024. But the midterms can mitigate and in some cases stop the damage. They can point to a different path ahead. They could be a repudiation of the Trumpist project. Or they could signify acquiescence to it.
The public seems to grasp the importance of the midterms. In all three states with primaries Tuesday—Texas, North Carolina, and Arkansas—turnout, especially Democratic turnout, looks to be surging.
Perhaps the most famous midterm election in American history is the 1858 senate race in Illinois, with its great series of debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Doulgas. In their fifth encounter, on October 7 in Galesburg, Illinois, Lincoln said Douglas, in adopting a position of political and moral neutrality on the future of slavery in the United States, was “blowing out the moral lights around us.” I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that a triumphant Trumpism would go a long way to blowing out the moral lights around us. The 2026 midterms will be a key moment in our accepting, or rejecting, such an outcome.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Candace Owens’s Erika Kirk Docuseries Is, Predictably, NUTS… It’s also fairly humiliating for right-wing media’s biggest stars, who may abhor Candace but can’t seem to beat her at her game, reports WILL SOMMER in False Flag.
Paramount Wins Warner Bros. What’s Next?... The battle for the famed studio is all but over, writes SONNY BUNCH—and (shocker!) cronyism won.
Zohran Knows Exactly How to Play Trump… On Bulwark+ Takes, ANDREW EGGER joins TIM MILLER to break down NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s visit to the White House.
How Three Friends Saved, and Destroyed, Hollywood…PAUL FISCHER joins SONNY BUNCH on The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood to discuss his new book, ‘The Last Kings of Hollywood.’
Quick Hits
ANTHROPIC STAYS THE COURSE: Anthropic isn’t backing down. Yesterday, we covered the Defense Department’s remarkable and head-scratchingly contradictory threats against the makers of AI platform Claude, which is currently the only AI platform used by the military in classified settings. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wanted Anthropic to drop its objections to Claude being deployed for purposes of mass surveillance or autonomous weapons systems; if it refused, Hegseth warned, the Pentagon would either make Anthropic cooperate by invoking the Defense Production Act or do the exact opposite: cancel its Anthropic contracts and ban all DoD contractors from working with them, too.
In a statement last night, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei announced that the company would not abandon its red lines. “Some uses are simply outside the bounds of what today’s technology can safely and reliably do,” he wrote in a statement. “It is the Department’s prerogative to select contractors most aligned with their vision. But given the substantial value that Anthropic’s technology provides to our armed forces, we hope they reconsider.”
The letter, which is worth reading in full, was a reminder of just how few AI capabilities Anthropic is trying to keep off the table. Amodei doesn’t even object to fully automated weapons systems in principle; he just argues that the models aren’t yet reliable enough to entrust them with so heavy a responsibility.
How the Defense Department will respond remains to be seen. So far, they’re taking it with all the tact and grace you’d expect. “It’s a shame that @DarioAmodei is a liar and has a God-complex,” Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael said. “He wants nothing more than to try to personally control the US Military and is ok putting our nation’s safety at risk.”
NETFLIX BOWS OUT: All of a sudden, the great Paramount/Netflix battle over acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery is over. Netflix announced yesterday it would not try to compete with Paramount’s latest, splashiest bid of $31 a share, way up from their opening salvo of $19 a share last September. “We’ve always been disciplined,” Netflix CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters said in a statement. “At the price required to match Paramount Skydance’s latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive, so we are declining to match the Paramount Skydance bid.”
For months, it’s seemed as though the crucial factor in this bidding war could turn out to be which side the Trump White House decided to bless. On the Paramount side, billionaire Trump allies David and Larry Ellison heavily implied in their pitches to Warner Bros. stockholders that Netflix’s offer would not survive regulatory scrutiny. As recently as this week, Trump publicly threatened Netflix to fire an alumna of the Obama White House from their board “or pay the consequences.” In the end, though, the fight came down to dollars and cents: Paramount was more willing to overpay than Netflix was.
THE WORLD’S STRANGEST BROMANCE CONTINUES: Let no one say Zohran Mamdani doesn’t understand Donald Trump. When the New York mayor made an unexpected trip to the Oval Office yesterday to pitch the president on a housing proposal, he came bearing two things the president loves: an audacious policy pitch and a shameless appeal to his ego. The AP reports:
Anna Bahr, Mamdani’s communications director, said the mayor’s team created a mock front page and headlines for Trump to look at and demonstrate what kind of reaction new federal housing investments could bring. The mock New York Daily News front page says “Trump to City: Let’s Build”—a riff on the famous 1975 cover that read “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” referring to Gerald Ford’s vow to veto financial assistance to the city. . . .
Bahr said Trump was “very enthusiastic” about Mamdani’s proposal, which would allow 12,000 new affordable homes to be built at Sunnyside Yard in Queens by securing more than $21 billion in federal grants to build a deck over the rail yard site. The mayor’s office estimates that the project could create 30,000 jobs and would be the biggest housing and infrastructure investment in more than 50 years.
“Very enthusiastic” seemed about right, going by the picture:
Even more remarkable was the policy concession Mamdani managed to get immediately. Yesterday morning, ICE officers arrested a student at Columbia University, Elmina Aghayeva, after repeatedly lying that they were searching for a missing child to gain access to her building. Mamdani brought the matter up to Trump, who promised to look into it. Within hours, Aghayeva was released.
Cheap Shots
Murder. I understand that for legal or journalistic integrity reasons Adrian Carrasquillo can't refer to what's happening in detention centers as torture, and Andrew Egger can't refer to the treatment of Mr. Shah Alam as murder. But I sure as hell can!
They murdered the man. Any reasonable person would assume that dropping off a blind man in an empty parking lot in the dead of night in the freezing cold would likely result in death.
As an old criminal law practitioner, let me correct the statement that Shah Alam was the victim of “mistreatment.” This was clearly a culpable, prosecutable homicide.