ICE in airports & polling places

ICE officers have been spotted in over a dozen US airports since President Donald Trump called for their deployment there last weekend. Border czar Tom Homan has said the main purpose of sending agents to airports isn’t to make arrests or conduct immigration enforcement at airports. But they’ve made arrests at airports anyway.

Know your rights if you encounter ICE at the airport. According to advocates, ICE can’t search your personal belongings if they don’t have a warrant, you can ask them if you’re free to go after they stop you, and you have the right to remain silent. But advocates say exercising these rights in an airport setting can be tricky — asking if you’re free to go and then leaving might mean walking out of the airport and missing your flight, or remaining silent and risking being pulled for further questioning could lead to the same thing. That’s one reason why these deployments have raised concerns.

Why are ICE agents at airports in the first place? Republican lawmakers have refused to meet Democrats’ demands that the Department of Homeland Security (ICE’s parent agency) implement more accountability measures or force agents to literally just follow the law. As a result, Democrats have refused to fund DHS, resulting in a partial government shutdown. But TSA is also under DHS, so the partial shutdown has led to many TSA agents quitting or calling out from work rather than working without pay. So, Trump called for deploying ICE agents at airports to help. (It’s not actually helping.)

Former White House strategist and current ghoul Steve Bannon is among a growing number of conservatives saying that ICE’s deployment at airports could be used as a test case for sending ICE to polling locations. Non-citizen voting is extremely rare, which would make ICE’s presence at polling places unnecessary if ending non-citizen voting was actually the goal. Instead, their presence will likely intimidate people out of voting — particularly people of color, especially since the Supreme Court gave ICE the green light to racially profile people.

Federal law pretty emphatically bans “any troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held, unless such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.” Still, there’s no guarantee that Trump and his allies will follow the law or that courts will force them to follow it. But when our institutions have failed to protect us from ICE, neighbors have stepped up via grassroots resistance and mutual aid. And some institutions are trying to protect us from this. Officials in many blue states are preemptively moving to explicitly bar ICE agents from election sites.

On top of all this, there’s the SAVE America Act, which would require voters to prove their citizenship before they vote, using documents that millions of Americans don’t have easy access to. Translation: This is a voter suppression bill. It would also heavily restrict mail-in voting, even though Trump, his wife and their son all voted by mail. Contrary to the president’s lies, fraud rates in federal elections are very low, including among mail-in ballots. And although mail-in voting is a bit more popular with Democratic voters, it’s also very popular with Republican ones.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the man overseeing the US-orchestrated deaths of over 1,900 people and counting in Iran, gave a press briefing last week. He recounted a meeting with families of service members killed in the conflict, and said he heard “the same from family after family. They said, ‘Finish this. Honor their sacrifice. Do not waver. Do not stop until the job is done.’”

But Charles Simmons, the father of Tech. Sgt. Tyler Simmons who was killed in the conflict, said he never had such an exchange with Hegseth. Instead, he remembers saying, “I just certainly hope the decisions being made are necessary.” Still, Simmons was complimentary of Hegseth and his interaction with the Defense Secretary overall.

In the same remarks, Hegseth said, “May Almighty God continue to bless our troops in this fight” and asked Americans to “pray for them, every day, on bended knee, with your family, in your schools, in your churches, in the name of Jesus Christ.” Hegseth’s Christian nationalism has become a point of scrutiny, especially since the US attacked Iran. He’s defended the Crusades in the past, he’s part of a church network that bars women from leadership positions and advocates for criminalizing homosexuality. Those beliefs have seeped into how he governs. He’s overseen the banning of trans troops, reviews of women in combat rolls and the rollback of DEI initiatives.

Market veterans are raising eyebrows at how conveniently-timed stock trades have lined up with announcements from Donald Trump. Take, for instance, a rush of trading activity in oil markets minutes before Trump posted about productive talks with Iran. Or how someone placed a bet that would pay off if Nicolás Maduro was removed from power, less than an hour before the US captured Maduro.

There’s no hard evidence of leaks, but The Wall Street Journal reported that some market veterans think people are learning about Trump’s announcements before the president makes them, and using that knowledge to make money on through stock trading and predictions markets.

Betting platforms announced new restrictions to try and address these concerns. Members of Congress have introduced legislation that would ban their colleagues, the president, the vice president and political appointees from betting in predictions markets.

Users will still be able to access the virtual reality world, but Meta won’t be adding new VR apps to its digital universe. The same day that the tech giant announced this, it laid off hundreds of employees. A company spokesperson confirmed to The Seattle Times that the cuts affected Meta’s VR division.

This started in 2014, when The Company Formerly Known As Facebook bought another company called Oculus VR for $2 billion. Five years later, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors that VR was taking longer to take off than he had hoped. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Zuckerberg convinced investors that users stuck at home were bound to fuel a boom in VR tech that would allow them to meet up with people in the metaverse.

Still, it didn’t take off. So after burning through 80 billion real US dollars on a fake world, Meta is now shifting its focus to AI. The company also plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on equipment for AI and environmentally hazardous data centers while, again, laying off about 10% of the people hired to make Zuckerberg’s ill-fated metaverse dreams come true. (Executives cutting off people’s livelihoods after making obviously poor business decisions is something of a sore point for us former Posties at LNI.)