JANUARY 30, 2026

Whom Is ICE Actually Recruiting?
ICE has lowered standards to facilitate a massive hiring spree. Many of the new recruits are plainly unqualified. Are some also white supremacists or domestic terrorists? “More than doubling ICE’s ranks has meant cutting training from 13 weeks to six, raising the maximum age cap from 40 to none at all, scrapping the college degree requirement, and adding a $50,000 signing bonus. Now pretty much anyone can become an ICE agent. During Donald Trump’s first term… there were still guardrails that kept the president from assembling his own paramilitary force.” Not now. The Nation

‘The Biggest Act of Union-Busting in U.S. History’: Trump’s War on Federal Workers Stirs a Movement
With 300,000 employees gone and collective-bargaining rights eliminated, the administration has hobbled organized labor. Did it also start a movement? For a growing rank-and-file movement of mostly younger union members, which works across agencies and is known as the Federal Unionists Network (FUN), the shutdown presented an unusual opportunity. Like the progressive upstarts challenging the old-guard leadership of the Democratic Party, FUN is pushing the national unions to fight the Trump administration more vigorously. With the shutdown, FUN saw a chance to show that the fate of federal workers is inexorably bound up with the public’s welfare. NYT

DC, region hit by utility increases despite protests – but 55 million customers have opted out of corporate power
Despite a wide-ranging outcry from the [D.C.] community, industry experts, and even landlords, the PSC in November 2024 largely approved Pepco’s latest proposed rate increase. Commissioner Richard Beverly wrote a blistering dissent in which he said the other two commissioners were essentially approving the case “because Pepco said so.” The effects of the rate increase were immediate and expected. Following a cold winter, the additional 5% bump on bills slammed DC residents, with some customers seeing their bills double or triple. Even in bleak times, the pursuit of profits by Pepco (and utilities like it) is relentless. The District is not an outlier: Regulators across the country rubber-stamp requested rate increases, despite the lack of economic logic. Fortunately, there is an alternative for all of us. In towns and cities across the country, utilities are not controlled by shareholders—instead, they are governed by the communities that they serve and run on a not-for-profit basis. Public power is a proven model that altogether supplies electricity to about 55 million Americans. Common Dreams

History of struggle from Reconstruction to today offers lessons – and strategies.
Today’s struggle against fascism and reaction can draw on past struggles in U.S. history. Rishi Awatramani in In These Times discusses the successes (and weaknesses) of the post Civil War Reconstruction effort to rebuild American society on a democratic basis rooted in racial justice; of the New Deal Coalition and the Communist Party’s Popular Front strategy during the 1930s to overcome the Depression; and Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition with its challenge to emerging neo-liberalism and the reactionary offensive launched by the Reagan Administration.

Those under attack by ICE all need support in struggle – not only “the saints”
Andrea Pitzer writes about the need to combat ICE and police dragnets not only by defending the innocent, but also defending those whom society would condemn — that is the way to challenge the entire ideological framework used to justify mass deportations, mass incarceration. See the “Innocence Trap: Survival should not require sainthood” in her Degenerate Art Substack post.

The Blood-and-Soil nationalism that killed Alex Pretti and Renee Good
The [white-nationalist vilification] campaign against Good is different—because The Homeland takes particular and perverse interest in women deemed insufficiently reverent of hearth and home. In defending the undocumented, Good violated the sanctity of The Homeland, which is to say that she questioned the divine promise of American soil to a mythical and singular people. For The Homeland is not “The State” or even “The Country.” The Homeland is not defined by simple geography. It exists beyond laws and norms. It is unconcerned with traditional American concepts like “liberty,” “freedom” or “pluralism.” The Homeland is that piece of earth providentially deeded to The Volk. The Homeland’s borders are drawn in untainted blood, its sanctity exemplified in proper gender conduct and the fulfillment of gender roles. It is The Homeland that ICE venerates in its recruitment posts festooned with victorious white settlers and vanquished indigenous Americans. Ta-Nehisi Coates in Vanity Fair