This is C.I.'s "The Snapshot" for today:
Monday, November 3, 2025. Chump continues his war on immigrants and wants to farm it out to mercenaries, a Portland, Oregon judge has already been lied to once by the Justice Dept so she really shouldn't believe them anymore, Nazi loving politicians in the US find it's hard to keep political staff, and much more.
Starting with Trump's war on immigrants, Julianne McShane (MOTHER JONES) reports:
In a wide-ranging Sunday night interview on CBS News’s “60 Minutes,” President Donald Trump put his desire for unchecked power on full display.
He bragged to correspondent Norah O’Donnell that, thanks to the Insurrection Act of 1792, he can invade your city whenever he wants. He said immigration raids—including acts of police violence such as using tear gas in residential neighborhoods, throwing people to the ground, and breaking car windows—”haven’t gone far enough.” And he said the government shutdown will last until Democrats in Congress bend to his will—or until Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) agrees to eliminate the filibuster, which Thune, so far, has rejected.
Reality? THE NEW YORK TIMES notes, "A federal judge ruled late Sunday that the Trump administration cannot use federalized National Guard soldiers to protect an Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Portland, Ore., that has been the site of daily protests for almost five months, at least until she makes her final decision in the case." The paper's Anna Griffin elaborates:
A federal judge ruled late Sunday that the Trump administration cannot send in National Guard soldiers to Portland, Ore., for another five days, until she makes her final decision in the case. But she strongly suggested that she would keep them out permanently.
Judge Karin Immergut, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon, issued a preliminary injunction, which essentially extends her earlier temporary restraining order blocking President Trump from using Guard troops to protect an Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in the city that has been the site of daily protests since early June.
Judge Immergut said she needed more time to fully consider the “voluminous” evidence and three days of testimony she heard in a trial last week after state and city officials sued to fight the federal government’s deployment plans in Oregon. She said would issue a final ruling on the case by 5 p.m. local time on Friday.
Let's hope everyone realizes that Chump's Justice Dept has been lying to judges including Judge Immergut. As Shant Karnikian and Brian Kabateck explained on MEIDASTOUCH's LEGAL AF yesterday, there's been a lot of lying on the part of the Justice Dept.
Let's also hope that the judge's attitude is the same as most judges. If you're caught lying to them once, you've besmirched your own character and nothing you say can be taken at face value.
For months, immigration crackdowns in Southern California have transformed life in Bell Gardens, the majority-Latino suburb where Alo Hurtado lives. Neighbors have been hauled off by masked federal agents. Families have curtailed trips to supermarkets and churches. Many people have stopped going out without their passports, including Mr. Hurtado’s mother, a naturalized citizen.
So when it came time to vote in California’s special election, Mr. Hurtado, 42, decided not to vote by mail, as many in the state do. Instead, he went to a polling place in a landmark park with his Mexican-born parents this week to vote early and in person.
Given all his community had gone through, he was worried about mail tampering — and he was angry.
“Especially here in California,” he said, “we need to speak up.”
Elections on Tuesday in California, New Jersey and other states are unfolding as the Trump administration’s immigration raids have spread fear in Latino communities across the country. That fear of Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity has become an X factor in next week’s elections.
Democratic officials and Latino voting-rights activists worry that the ICE crackdown will dampen Latino turnout and that the presence of Justice Department election monitors at polling sites in California and New Jersey will intimidate voters. Voter data of the turnout so far in California, New Jersey and Virginia shows that Latino participation is roughly on pace with past elections.
And for some Latino voters, the Trump administration’s escalation of force appears to be not a deterrent to casting a ballot but a motivation.
In Virginia, where the Republican nominee for governor, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, is running against Abigail Spanberger, a Democratic former congresswoman, one Hispanic business owner said the most important issue in the election was the ICE raids.
“It is something we are feeling morning and night, and it stirs a lot of sadness,” said the business owner, Carlos Castro, a naturalized U.S. citizen from El Salvador and an independent voter who runs Todos Supermarket in Woodbridge, Va. He cast his ballot during the early-vote period.
And based on the groups we've spoken with, I think Carlos Castro speaks for a great many Latino voters
Over at Poynter, Nick Karmia and Maria Ramirez Uribe do what every journalist should:
During a press conference about a Midwestern immigration enforcement operation, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said federal agents have not detained U.S. citizens.
Chicago, the center of the effort dubbed Operation Midway Blitz, is the latest target in the Trump administration’s nationwide immigration crackdown. Agents have arrested more than 3,000 people during the operation. Noem said the effort covers the area “that the field office is covering,” and local news outlets reported that the Chicago Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office also includes Indiana, Wisconsin, Missouri, Kentucky and Kansas.
“There’s no American citizens have been arrested or detained. We focus on those that are here illegally” Noem said during the Oct. 30 press conference in Gary, Indiana. “And anything that you would hear or report that would be different than that is simply not true and false reporting.”
Noem didn’t say whether she was referring to Operation Midway Blitz specifically or the nationwide immigration crackdown more broadly, and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to our questions about her statement.
By either measure, Noem’s wrong. News reports and lawsuits show that U.S. citizens have been detained during Operation Midway Blitz, and a ProPublica investigation documented 170 cases of U.S. citizens who have been arrested by immigration agents across the country since Trump started his second term.
The journalists then produce one example after another of American citizens being arrested by ICE before finding:
Noem said “No American citizens have been arrested or detained” during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdowns.
That’s wrong.
Lawsuits, news reports and DHS statements show that numerous U.S. citizens have been detained or arrested by immigration agents in and around Chicago during Operation Midway Blitz. A ProPublica investigation documented 170 cases of federal immigration officers detaining U.S. citizens nationwide under the Trump administration.
We rate Noem’s statement Pants on Fire!
Serial liars should not be presented by the press as truth tellers. After they have a pattern of lying to the press, this should be noted in every report on them.
Still on ICE, last week at IN THESE TIMES, Rebecca Burns reported:
Rodrick Johnson, 67, had just returned home from a trip to the hospital and was trying to get some rest. But in the early hours of September 30, bright lights suddenly flooded his apartment. A fleet of Black Hawk helicopters descended on his five-story building — a 130-unit apartment complex at 7500 South Shore Drive — shortly before armed, masked men stormed past the doors of the ground floor.
“The next thing I knew, they were kicking my door in,” Johnson says. He and dozens of his neighbors were marched outside at gunpoint during the multiagency raid carried out by some 300 federal agents in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood. Black and Latino residents were zip-tied, separated by race and detained inside cargo vans, as South Side Weekly reported in the raid’s aftermath. Agents arrested 37 people who were nationals of Venezuela, Mexico, Colombia, and Nigeria, according to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) statement. U.S. citizens like Johnson were also held for hours, without explanation. Johnson was released, exhausted and traumatized, around 4 a.m. that morning, and returned to a ransacked apartment.
The shocking, military-style siege made national headlines. DHS edited footage taken from that night into a viral social media video touting its operations; meanwhile, a constitutional law professor, Paul Gowder, told the Chicago Tribune that the raid was possibly “one of the most unconstitutional things the federal government has ever done.” Nearly a month later, residents, neighbors and advocates are still searching for answers about why the building was targeted — and what it portends, as federal immigration agents expand their violent and increasingly indiscriminate crackdown in Chicago and other U.S. cities.
Locating those taken away that night has proved nearly impossible, since the raid happened under the cover of darkness, with no family members left behind to provide information on the missing — a chilling precedent, immigration advocates say.
“Why would you conduct this raid in the middle of the night, if not to disappear people?” asks Brandon Lee, a spokesperson for the Illinois Coalition on Immigrant and Refugee Rights.
The secrecy surrounding federal agencies’ actions stands in stark contrast to an eerie reality Johnson and the building’s other remaining tenants continue to grapple with: The agents involved appear to have received advance information about the building’s occupants that led them to target certain apartments that night, and leave others untouched.
Jason Houser has weighed in on the current actions of ICE. Who? "Jason Houser served as the chief of staff for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from 2021 to 2023. He previously served as a counterterrorism official for Customs & Border Protection (CBP)." At MSNBC, Jason Houser notes:
The Trump administration is conducting a sweeping overhaul of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), with more than a dozen senior officials in various cities being replaced by officials from Customs and Border Protection (CBP). At the heart of this effort is Greg Bovino, commander-at-large of the Border Patrol, who is currently the public face of the Trump administration’s current interior enforcement surges. But what’s unfolding under Bovino isn’t law enforcement. It’s political stagecraft directed from Washington, not the field.
Under Bovino’s command, the Department of Homeland Security has assembled something new: a hybrid, unaccountable task force reporting directly to DHS headquarters and the White House and operating outside the traditional command structures that govern federal law enforcement. It isn’t ICE. It isn’t CBP. It’s a Frankenstein force, stitched together from multiple agencies but loyal to none. Its purpose is to create a community response designed for social media clicks, rather than to keep communities safe.
The recent wave of ICE senior official reassignments makes the motive behind this new structure unmistakable: It’s about control, not competence. Seasoned career leaders — the very people who built ICE’s investigative, detention and removal frameworks — are being pushed aside or relocated for refusing to chase arbitrary arrest quotas or participate in politically driven operations. These aren’t disciplinary moves; they’re purges designed to silence dissent and clear the field for Bovino’s task forces. In effect, the DHS has replaced law enforcement judgment with political obedience, rewarding those who follow orders from the top — and sidelining those who still believe in risk-based enforcement and the rule of law.
For decades, ICE and CBP had distinct yet complementary missions. ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) targeted serious offenders in the interior; CBP’s Border Patrol protected the border. Each had apparent oversight, trained professionals and accountability lines that ran through their respective chains of command.
The new structure under Bovino upends that approach. Under his leadership, select personnel from both agencies have been integrated into what’s officially branded a “joint enforcement initiative.” Still, DHS officials describe it as politically controlled, rather than law enforcement-controlled. It doesn’t answer to ICE or CBP leadership — it reports directly to DHS political appointees.
And as bad as ICE and CBP have been, Chump now wants to make it worse, he wants to farm out ICE duties to mercenaries. Over the weekend, Sam Biddle (INTERCEPT) explained:
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is considering hiring private bounty hunters to locate immigrants across the country, according to a procurement document reviewed by The Intercept. Under the plan, bounty hunters may receive “monetary bonuses” depending on how successfully they track down their targets — and how many immigrants they then report to ICE.
According to the document, which solicits information from interested contractors for a potentially forthcoming contract opportunity, companies hired by ICE will be given bundles of information on 10,000 immigrants at a time to locate, with further assignments provided in “increments of 10,000 up to 1,000,000.”
The solicitation says ICE is “exploring an incentive based pricing structure” to encourage quick results, with “monetary bonuses” paid out based on performance. For example, ICE says contractors might get paid a bonus for identifying a person’s correct address on the first try or finding 90 percent of its targets within a set timeframe. (ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
The document closely resembles a plan reportedly circulated by a group of military contractors, including former Blackwater CEO and Trump ally Erik Prince.
Yeah, that would play so very well. Throwing more money around and this time to known crooks like Blackwater?
Blackwater Boi Graham Platner, the fashion doll. The entitled, White, rich boy posing now as man-of-the-people. A con job that David Sirota can -- and always does -- get behind. The boy from wealth wants to be Maine's Democratic Party nominee for US Senator. At THE GUARDIAN, Moira Donegan offers:
Earlier this month, after Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, entered the Democratic Senate race with the backing of party leaders, a series of increasingly unflattering revelations about Platner’s past behavior came to light. In a series of since-deleted Reddit posts, some from as recently as 2020, Platner made a series of incendiary comments. He claimed that Black people don’t tip (“I work as a bartender and it always amazes me how true the stereotype is,” he wrote. “Every now and again a black patron will leave a 15-20% tip, but usually it [sic] between 0-5%”) and suggested women who have been sexually assaulted were responsible for their own attacks, writing, according to the Washington Post: “If you’re so worried about it to buy Kevlar underwear you’d think you might not get blacked out f----d up around people you aren’t comfortable with.” A few days later, he went on Pod Save America, the successful liberal podcast hosted by former Obama staffers, seemingly in an effort to get ahead of another unflattering story: that he had a tattoo of a Totenkopf, widely recognized as a Nazi symbol, for nearly 20 years.
Platner’s account of the tattoo goes like this: when he was in his early 20s and enlisted in the marines, he was drunk on shore leave in Croatia, and he and his friends went to get a tattoo. Platner selected a Totenkopf, an angled skull and crossbones image used by the SS; he claims he did not know what it meant, and that he merely thought it looked cool. Platner says that he did not know the significance of his tattoo until recently, and has said he is “not a secret Nazi”.
But reporting from outlets such as Jewish Insider and CNN contradicts this, with a source to Jewish Insider claiming that Platner had referred to his tattoo by its German name – as “my Totenkopf” – years before. On Pod Save America, Platner broadcast a video of himself, shirtless and evidently inebriated at his brother’s wedding, with the tattoo on display. As a crowd of partygoers looked on, the half-naked Platner sang an off-key version of Miley Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball. He got the tattoo covered up a few days later, appearing shirtless, again, on television to display an odd-looking Celtic knot with a hound motif where the Totenkopf had once been. One wonders how much familiarity with a Senate candidate’s nipples voters are expected to have.
More problems emerging for Graham. Rachel Ohm (PORTLAND PRESS HERALD) reports:
U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner’s national finance director said Friday he is resigning from the campaign, citing differences in “professional standards.”
The announcement from Ronald Holmes is the latest shake-up for Platner’s campaign following a string of controversies. His Maine political director resigned earlier this month, citing inflammatory posts Platner had made on social media several years ago, and his campaign manager announced earlier this week he would be leaving, citing family reasons.
“I joined this campaign because I believed in building something different — a campaign of fresh energy, integrity, and reform-minded thinking in a political system that often resists exactly those things,” Holmes said in a post on LinkedIn. “Somewhere along the way, I began to feel that my professional standards as a campaign professional no longer fully aligned with those of the campaign.”
Jessica Piper (POLITICO) notes it is three losses, not two:
He [Holmes] follows campaign manager Kevin Brown, who stepped down after less than a week on the job citing family reasons, and political director Genevieve McDonald, who resigned in a fiery fashion earlier this month, saying she could not look past some of Platner’s previous Reddit posts, where he self-identified as a communist and downplayed sexual assault in the military.
Christopher Burns (BANGOR DAILY NEWS) reports:
In a bid to tamp down on the harmful revelations, Platner’s campaign has begun circulating non-disclosure agreements to staffers and hired the firm Spruce Street Consulting, which Politico reports has connections to Democratic New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.
Non-disclosure agreements, common in the corporate world, are becoming a fixture as well in politics, according to a 2021 article published in New York University’s Journal of Legislation and Public Policy. That article noted that non-disclosure agreements have been used in presidential campaigns and heavily during President Donald Trump’s first term in office in a bid to stem the flow of information to the press.
No political campaign should ever get away with using NDAs. Political campaigns are supposed to be public, that's the whole point. The only one ever savaged for an NDA in the US? Hillary Clinton. Chump got away with it. Bernie Sanders got away with it (his involved the racism of his work environment). Only Hillary caused ripples (supposedly an advisor was harassing women, they fired him and had the woman sign an NDA). All three were wrong. Platner's is not just wrong, it goes to the lack of character. He has lied to the public and hidden important information from them. He has insisted that he's changed from who he was. But he's enforcing NDAs. So how are voters supposed to know one way or the other?
They're supposed to trust professional con artists like David Sirota, Ryan Grim, Liza Featherstone, Branko, et al?
Let's wind down with this from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse's office:
Providence, RI – Today, in recognition of Domestic Violence Awareness Month, U.S. Senators Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse announced a $1 million federal earmark for Sojourner House which has been used to provide new affordable housing in Rhode Island for survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking.
“Every Rhode Islander deserves to have a healthy, safe, and affordable place to call home. Sojourner House does a tremendous job uplifting survivors of domestic violence and other forms of abuse and ensuring that they have the resources and guidance they need to rebuild and thrive. I’m proud to team up with Senator Whitehouse to support Sojourner House’s work and deliver this $1 million federal earmark that is already helping to provide homes for courageous survivors and their families,” said Senator Reed.
“Sojourner House does heroic work helping survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking when they need somewhere to turn,” said Senator Whitehouse, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and former Rhode Island Attorney General. “This federal funding allowed Sojourner House to provide survivors with a safe, affordable place to call home as they reclaim their lives.”
Sojourner House used the funding to acquire and renovate a multi-family property in Providence that survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking can rent on an affordable sliding scale. The building includes three three-bedroom units, all of which are already occupied by tenants.
“For survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, housing is more than a roof over one’s head—it’s safety, stability, and the chance to rebuild a life,” said Vanessa Volz, President and CEO of Sojourner House. “This investment brings us closer to our vision that every survivor in Rhode Island will have a safe, affordable place to call home. We are deeply grateful to Senators Reed and Whitehouse for recognizing that housing is a critical part of ending the cycle of violence.”
“As we close out October and Domestic Violence Awareness Month, we must reaffirm our commitment to supporting survivors of abuse,” said General Treasurer Diossa. “It’s crucial to recognize the signs of abuse, support survivors, and engage in conversations that promote understanding and healing.”
Last year, Sojourner House served 1,852 Rhode Islanders. After launching its Affordable Housing Development program in 2021, Sojourner House became one of the few domestic violence organizations in the country that is working to create more affordable housing units for survivors of abuse. To date, 42 agency-owned affordable apartment units have been created. Additionally, the nonprofit has provided 78 victims with permanent supportive housing – a seven percent increase over the previous year.
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Kat's "Kat's Korner: Jonas Brothers, Sarah McLachlan, Taylor Swift and Chrissie Hynde" went up Sunday and the following sites updated:
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