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As hundreds of Minneapolis residents assembled in Whittier Park Saturday evening to demand once again that federal immigration agents leave Minnesota following the second fatal shooting of a legal observer in less than three weeks, one speaker demanded that the gathering must not simply be “another damn vigil.”

“This is a turning point,” said Edwin Torres DeSantiago of the Immigrant Defense Network.

He spoke to the crowd hours after several federal officers were filmed surrounding Alex Pretti, 37, after he attempted to help a woman one of them had pushed to the ground, and fatally shooting him.

Torres DeSantiago’s words were echoed by the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, which did not mince words about the agents of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection who have for months roamed the streets of cities including Minneapolis, Chicago, and Los Angeles, arresting immigrants and US citizens and opening fire nearly two dozen times—killing at least six people including Pretti.

The federal agents recruited by the Trump administration with flyers imploring them to choose between their “homeland” and an “invasion,” said the Lemkin Institute, “are loyal agents of Nazis and white supremacists within the Republican Party. They are behaving as enemies both of the Constitution and of the American people and they must be treated as such.”

“The United States is at a crossroads: Either the American people are able to wrest power from the current fascist leaders or those leaders will continue to radicalize, using violence and terror to dismantle democracy and commit even greater mass atrocities,” said the organization. “History is clear about this.”

The warning came as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said it would be investigating the shooting involving its own officers instead of the FBI. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension said DHS representatives had blocked them from accessing the crime scene late Saturday, even though officials had obtained a judicial search warrant.

The bureau joined the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office in filing a lawsuit to prevent the “destruction of evidence” by DHS.

Edward Ahmed Mitchell, national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, called on Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey to order the city’s police department to “take control of the scene of the latest deadly ICE shooting, launch an independent criminal probe, and protect peaceful protesters at the scene from ICE violence.”

“Calling for ICE to leave is not enough. This shooting happened on a city street in the jurisdiction of the Minneapolis law enforcement and they must lead an independent investigation into what appears to be another horrific, unnecessary execution of a Minneapolis resident,” said Mitchell. “ICE should immediately end its deadly and disastrous siege of Minnesota and turn over all evidence and information about this shooting and the prior shooting of Renee Good to local authorities.”

Meanwhile, Trump administration officials continued pushing a narrative which was contradicted by numerous videos of the shooting and the moments leading up to it, claiming Pretti had “approached” federal agents with a gun. Footage shows Pretti holding only a phone, not a firearm, and one of agents involved in wrestling him to the ground after he was pepper-sprayed reaches into the scuffle empty-handed and then pulls out a gun before the multiple shots were fired.

Pretti was armed with a gun that he was carrying lawfully and had a permit for, local authorities said.

Despite the video evidence, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem repeated almost verbatim the claim she made earlier this month when an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good in another incident that did not match the administration’s description in footage taken by bystanders: “Fearing for his life and the lives of his fellow officers around him, an agent fired defensive shots.”

Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s homeland security adviser and deputy chief of staff, said without any evidence soon after the shooting that Pretti was a “domestic terrorist” who “tried to assassinate federal law enforcement,” and Trump called Pretti a “gunman.”

The shooting came days after seven Democrats in the US House joined Republicans in passing a funding bill for DHS without securing restrictions on ICE, despite growing national outrage over federal immigration agents’ operations and Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

The bill still needs to go through the Senate and is one of several funding measures that need to pass by January 30 to keep the government open.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in a statement after Pretti was killed that “Senate Democrats will not provide the votes to proceed to the appropriations bill if the DHS funding bill is included.”

“What’s happening in Minnesota is appalling—and unacceptable in any American city,” said Schumer. “Democrats sought common sense reforms in the Department of Homeland Security spending bill, but because of Republicans’ refusal to stand up to President Trump, the DHS bill is woefully inadequate to rein in the abuses of ICE.”

Democratic senators who had been expected to support the $64.4 billion in DHS funding, which includes $10 billion for ICE, said after the shooting that they would not do so.

“I cannot and will not vote to fund DHS while this administration continues these violent federal takeovers of our cities,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.).

I believe the shots that killed Alex Pretti and Renee Good are the shots heard ‘round the world that will topple the Trump regime.

From Minneapolis to Davos, people are joining together against Trump’s tyranny.

In Minnesota, they are joining across ethnicity, race, and class against Trump’s gestapo tactics, repression, and murders. Solidarity is spreading to other cities.

In Europe, they are joining across national boundaries against Trump’s threats to their sovereignty, the European Community, and NATO.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, in a speech that drew a standing ovation from world leaders at Davos, called on “middle powers” like Canada and Europe to form a new alliance against economic coercion from the world’s great powers (by which he clearly meant Trump’s United States and Putin’s Russia).

Across America and across the world, people are realizing it’s not possible to appease America’s dictator. The only way to deal with him is to stand up to him — and the only way to stand up to him is by joining together against him.

Trump backed down from his threatened tariffs on Europe for not supporting his acquisition of Greenland, because Europe and Canada held firm.

Of course, Trump is now hitting back. He’s openly contemplating using the Insurrection Act against Americans who oppose him. He’s threatening Carney’s government with 100 percent tariffs on all Canadian products coming into the U.S. if Canada makes a deal with China. The mad dictator is losing his mind.

Europeans and much of the rest of the world have lived under dictatorships. Until now — until Trump — Americans had not.

Yet the “greatest generation” of Americans — including many of our parents and grandparents — risked their lives fighting dictators so that this country would remain free and democratic.

So far, two Americans, both age 37, have given up their lives in Minneapolis in resisting the dictator now occupying the Oval Office.

We must now join together, all of us, to peacefully and decidedly end his dictatorship.

In memory of parents and grandparents who made the supreme sacrifice — in memory of Renee Good and Alex Pretti — we must bring down this regime. The first step is a massive general strike.

We will say loudly and clearly: Enough.

Vice President JD Vance is being called out by legal experts and other critics who say he lied voluminously on Thursday in response to questions about his past claims that immigration agents enjoyed “absolute immunity,” about whether they are now illegally entering residences without warrants, and about the shooting of Renee Good.

Vance was peppered with questions during a press conference after meeting with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Minneapolis, where their conduct has been met with growing backlash in recent weeks, following the shooting of Good on January 7 by agent Jonathan Ross and other violent and unconstitutional actions that have been documented since.

Shortly after the shooting, in a rush to clear Ross of any wrongdoing, Vance made the highly dubious claim that because Ross was “a federal law enforcement official engaging in federal law enforcement action,” he is therefore “protected by absolute immunity.”

Legal scholars immediately called out the concept of “absolute immunity” as a fiction that does not refer to any recognized statute.

But despite those remarks having been widely publicized just weeks ago, when asked about them again on Thursday, Vance pretended he never made such a claim.

“No, I didn’t say—and I don’t think any other official within the Trump administration said that officers who engaged in wrongdoing would enjoy immunity. That’s absurd,” he said. “What I did say is that when federal law enforcement officers violate the law, that is typically something that federal officials would look into.”

“But of course we’re going to investigate these things,” Vance continued. “We’re investigating the Renee Good shooting. But we’re investigating them in a way that respects people’s rights and ensures that if somebody did something wrong, yes, they’re going to face disciplinary action. But we’re not going to judge them in the court of public opinion.”

In reality, the administration repeatedly said it is not pursuing a criminal investigation into Ross. According to a report from the Washington Post earlier this week, the FBI opened an initial probe into the shooting, and an agent in Minnesota found that “sufficient grounds” existed to open a civil rights probe into Ross, but DOJ officials chose not to pursue it.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche confirmed last week that the DOJ was not investigating the case. “We don’t just go out and investigate every time an officer is forced to defend himself against somebody putting his life in danger. We never do,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s officials have repeatedly “judged” the case in the court of public opinion by routinely making statements justifying the shooting, with Vance himself praising Ross for “doing his job” and others in the administration referring to Good as a “domestic terrorist.”

While it is not investigating Ross for shooting Good, the DOJ is reportedly investigating Good’s widow, Becca Good, over the couple’s involvement in monitoring and protesting ICE’s actions in Minneapolis, which prompted six federal prosecutors with the DOJ to resign in outrage last week.

Xochitl Hinojosa, a former head of public affairs at the DOJ, found Vance’s claim that the shooting was being investigated to be in total contradiction to everything else the administration has said about the case.

“Todd Blanche says no criminal civil rights investigation into the shooting of Renee Good. Vance says today they are investigating the incident,” she said. “So who exactly is investigating the incident? Because this would normally be the DOJ or the FBI.”

While those claims were self-evidently false, legal scholars noted a more “pernicious” lie by Vance in response to a question about a report earlier this week that ICE had issued a memo allowing agents to forcibly enter homes without a judge’s warrant, which has been described as a violation of the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution.

Asked if the memo, which was first reported on by the Associated Press, violated the Constitution, Vance responded that the story was “missing a whole lot of context” and that what ICE and other agencies proposed was that “we can get administrative warrants to enforce administrative immigration law.”

“Nobody is talking about doing immigration enforcement without a warrant. We’re talking about different types of warrants that exist in our system,” Vance went on. “Typically, in the immigration system, those are handled by administrative law judges. So we’re talking about getting warrants from those administrative law judges... That’s very consistent with the practice of American law.”

Rob Doar, a Minnesota-based criminal defense and civil rights attorney, said that Vance had gotten “just about everything wrong” in his explanation.

“Immigration judges are not [administrative law judges]. They don’t issue warrants,” Doar said. “ICE ‘administrative warrants’ are signed by ICE officers, not judges. They do not authorize home entry. Only a judicial warrant does.”

Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University and the co-editor-in-chief of Just Security said it was a case of “pernicious wordplay by Vance.”

The Department of Homeland Security “is doing immigration enforcement in people’s homes without a judicial warrant,” he said. “Our system—the Fourth Amendment—requires a judicial warrant.”

Joe Mastrosimone, a law professor at Washburn University in Kansas, was amazed that a lawyer of Vance’s pedigree could be so inaccurate.

“Good Lord,” he wrote on social media. “Did JD Vance actually attend and graduate from Yale Law School? He seems to be a really bad lawyer... This is really basic stuff.”

The Department of Justice appears to be outright ignoring its legal obligation to disclose files related to Jeffrey Epstein, and according to a new analysis from Julie K. Brown, this presents a dangerous situation in which "no laws are safe" from being ignored by Donald Trump.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act passed in both Chambers of Congress by overwhelming margins in November, compelling the DOJ to release of its files about its investigations into Epstein, a notorious deceased sex trafficker with links to numerous high-profile public figures. The deadline for the release of these files was Dec. 17, which was over a month ago, and so far only a small percentage of the files have been released in heavily redacted form, prompting outrage and calls for accountability from lawmakers and Epstein survivors alike.

The DOJ claimed when it released the small batch of files last month that considerable work was needed to prep the millions of files for release, specifically to make sure the names of victims and other innocent parties are not exposed. Given Trump's months-long resistance to releasing the files and his long-time friendship with Epstein, many in the public suspect that the DOJ is stalling the release of the files because they might implicate the president in the trafficker's crimes, or at least show that he was aware of them for years. Reports from last spring indicated that Trump had been informed that his name was in the files.

Brown is a veteran reporter widely credited with first bringing Epstein's story to national attention with her Miami Herald stories about his lenient plea deal from 2008. In a Substack piece published Friday, she cast doubt on the DOJ's stated reason for delaying the release of the files, suggesting that it is unrealistic that this much time would be needed for redactions if the department was not engaged in a massive cover-up.

"If all you are redacting is the names of victims, that could have been done efficiently months ago. And didn’t the DOJ already spend $1 million to scour the files last Spring?" Brown wrote. "In March, Bloomberg’s Jason Leopold reported that FBI Director Kash Patel had tasked 1,000 FBI agents to work on making the files ready for public review."

Brown further warned that if Congress allows the DOJ to keep ignoring the Epstein Files Transparency Act, as she believes it is doing, it poses a major risk for all laws in the future, as it creates a precedent for the administration to ignore any and all laws they disagree with.

"If Congressional leaders don’t respond, it means no legislation, no laws, are safe," Brown wrote. "What is to prevent others from ignoring laws passed by Congress? Are we just a nation that only complies with laws we like or agree with? If leaders of Congress do nothing, they will render all legislation they pass open to being ignored. Our founders considered the Rule of Law a cornerstone of our Democracy. It means that all people, including government officials, are equally accountable to the law. Ignoring this principle will cause significant harm to the foundations of all our institutions."

President Donald Trump and his MAGA allies are having an intense debate with critics over the role the executive branch, under the U.S. Constitution, should play in the United States' federal government. MAGA Republicans, pushing the far-right Unitary Executive Theory, claim that some federal judges are failing to honor the powers the Constitution gives the executive branch — while Trump critics believe that he is making way too many executive decisions without getting Congress' input.

Trump often justifies his executive orders by saying that he is addressing "emergencies." But conservative Washington Post columnist George Will, in his January 23 column, argues that U.S. Supreme Court rulings of the past make a strong case against using "emergency" claims to justified overreach in the executive branch.

Will focuses heavily on Justice Robert F. Jackson, a Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointee who served on the High Court from 1941-1954 and before that, was U.S attorney general under FDR.

"Today, the nation is inured to presidential claims of urgent needs — 'emergencies,' 'existential' dangers — being used for evasions of the Constitution," Will argues. "Said Jackson, our institutions for keeping the executive under the law might be 'destined to pass away,' but 'it is the duty of the Court to be last, not first, to give them up.'"

Jackson is the subject of a new biography by University of Virginia law professor G. Edward White titled "Robert H. Jackson: A Life in Judgment." And according to Will, the book "arrives amid disputes involving judicial review of governmental, and especially presidential, actions presented as urgent for national security."

"Concerning this, Jackson believed judicial deference should be high, but not unlimited," Will explains. "In 1940, before Jackson joined the Court, it ruled, 8-1, that a Pennsylvania school district could make saluting the flag mandatory. Some Jehovah's Witnesses objected to this as idolatry. The Court's opinion was written by Justice Felix Frankfurter. He thought coercing the Jehovah's Witnesses was mistaken, but he generally favored judicial restraint, and considered the school district’s objective had a rational basis: 'National unity is the basis of national security.'"

Will cites another example of Jackson's judicial outlook.

"In 1952, the Court and Jackson again confronted the task of reconciling constitutional principles and a president's claim of urgency," Will explains. "With the Korean War raging, (President) Harry Truman said an impending nationwide steelworkers strike would 'jeopardize national defense,' so he issued an executive order for government to seize and operate most mills. The companies sued, arguing that no act of Congress or constitutional provision validated Truman's action. Truman's lawyers argued that his authorization 'could be implied from the aggregate of his powers under the Constitution,' especially as commander in chief. The Court disagreed, 6-3."

Will adds, "Concurring, Jackson said that Truman's action flowed from neither an express nor implied authorization by Congress, and was against Congress' will as expressed in a 1947 labor relations law that made no provision for such presidential action."

George Will's full Washington Post column is available at this link (subscription required).

President Donald Trump spent the last several days at the World Economic Forum meeting with world leaders about his "Board of Peace," which allows him to serve as the lead organizer of rebuilding Gaza, even after the presidency in 2029. And now he's getting mocked over the board's purported logo.

Journalist Séamus Malekafzali posted the logo with his own laundry list of flaws.

"Everything about this is cut-rate. The gold coat, the UN logo just revolved to America's hemisphere, a UN replacement only made up of states that desperately want to be America's vassals, and good Lord, I am 95 percent sure this logo is AI-generated! Look at the borders!" he wrote on X.

"Besides the disgust that this is enabling the colonization of Gaza, and that the hope is to further the occupation of Greenland and the plundering of Ukraine, I have this instinctual relief at being able to finally have a map of who is sucking up to Trump the most. God, losers!" he added.

Social media users were split on whether the Great Lakes were a "smear" or mountains on the image.

Other observers caught that the longitude and latitude seemed to be a bit off. One poster noticed that there appeared to be a few giant islands in the Caribbean, with the Bahamas nearly attached to Florida. A key observer saw that the letters weren't uniform either.

A brownish smudge runs up from Mexico into west Texas and New Mexico. One commenter noted, "don’t tell me you’ve never heard of the Rio Grande fault line." However, there was also a question about the only border on the map being between the U.S. and Canada.

Columnist Luke Savage quipped, "Satire hasn't been this dead since Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize."

Cartoonist Mattie Lubchansky zoomed in on the olive branch crown and that there were pieces of leaves strewn about, calling the image "AI."

"All those billions of dollars and won't even hire a professional designer," lamented an observer.

Over the years, a long list of candidates have used anxiety over the economy to their political advantage in the United States' presidential races — from Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932 to Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980 to Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992. It was during the 1992 race, in fact, that Democratic strategist James Carville made the phrase, "It's the economy, stupid" famous.

Carville's messaging helped doom President George H.W. Bush's reelection hopes. After the Persian Gulf War, Bush's approval ratings were so high that he seemed destined for a massive reelection victory. But Clinton, with Carville's help, hammered Bush relentlessly on the early 1990s recession and defeated him, 370-168, in the Electoral College and by roughly 5.5 percent in the national popular vote.

Carville, 34 years later, is still reminding Americans that "it's the economy, stupid" and encouraging Democrats to bring a strong economic message to the 2026 midterms.

Salon's Heather Digby Parton agrees that Democrats need aggressive economic messaging in the midterms. But in an article published on January 23, she stresses that they also need to tie the economy into a broad argument against the "chaos and fear" that President Donald Trump is generating.

"However Democratic congressional candidates ultimately decide to approach this," Parton argues, "they simply cannot behave as if we are living through a time of politics as usual. A Republican majority that is allowing Trump to use tariffs as a weapon that hurts average Americans, occupy American cities with paramilitary forces, brutalize immigrants, depose foreign leaders, threaten allies, blackmail law firms and universities, defund science and education, and essentially tear up the Constitution — all in order to appease a tyrant — is simply not something they can ignore. Democrats can't pretend the only thing that matters is the economy."

The Salon journalist continues, "All of those are now kitchen table issues. People know that things are hurtling out of control, and they're talking about it. They're taking to the streets to protest in their own neighborhoods and in huge numbers all over the country. If voters aren't laying out that whole panoply of atrocities to pollsters and canvassers, it's not because they aren't feeling it — it's because they're terrified by the apparent impotence of everyone with any power to stop it."

Democrats, Parton stresses, must make the midterms a referendum on Trump's second presidency and show voters why other Republicans are partly to blame for his policies.

"According to the latest CNN poll," Parton explains, "58 percent of Americans say Trump's first year back in office has been an abject failure. The number one job for Democratic candidates is to make it clear to the American people that every single member of the Republican Party is complicit in everything he is doing — and the only way to fix that is to elect a Democratic Congress to fulfill its constitutional duty as a co-equal branch of government. From the looks of the latest polling, that's fundamentally what people want from the Democrats right now — and it shouldn't be too difficult to make the case that they’re prepared and equipped to make that happen."

Heather Digby Parton's full article for Salon is available at this link.