Dan Rather, the much-admired journalist who had a stellar career at CBS News, was outraged by the arrest of Don Lemon and Gloria Fort, two journalists who were arrested for doing their job in Minneapolis.
Journalist Don Lemon outside the federal courthouse in Los Angeles after his arrest. Credit: Getty Images
Rather writes on his blog at Substack:
If you dispatch two dozen federal law enforcement officers to arrest a single journalist, you’re doing more than apprehending a suspect, you’re sending a message. The message is this: no journalist is safe in America, no journalist can freely report without fear of retribution.
We have crossed yet another red line with Donald Trump. In case there was any doubt, this weekend’s actions against former CNN anchor Don Lemon confirm we are now living under an increasingly authoritarian regime.
If we don’t have the right to freely and independently gather information and report the truth as we see it, then we might as well crumple up the Constitution, along with the Bill of Rights, and toss them in the trash. This is not just about Lemon, a longtime professional with whom I have worked, know well, and respect. This is about a foundational American freedom that was just kicked to the curb.
The president has long hated Lemon because he was on to Trump from the jump. But he also checks a lot of the wrong boxes for Trump and his rabid MAGA base. He is gay, black, and a mainstream journalist — three strikes in Trumpworld. So in this time of ceaseless retribution and revenge, why not make an example of him?
Lemon wasn’t the only one arrested. Another journalist, freelance reporter Georgia Fort of Minneapolis, was also charged.
This all stems from a demonstration at a church in Minneapolis by anti-ICE protesters. Why were the protesters in a church? One of the pastors is an ICE official. The government claims Lemon and Fort were participants in the protest, not journalists covering the event.
Three federal judges didn’t think there was enough evidence presented by Trump’s Department of Justice to make a case. It took persuading a federal grand jury to finally bring charges.
Lemon and Fort will have their day in court. Abbe Lowell, a renowned defense attorney, is Lemon’s lawyer.
In a statement, Lowell said, “Instead of investigating the federal agents who killed two peaceful Minnesota protesters, the Trump Justice Department is devoting its time, attention, and resources to this arrest, and that is the real indictment of wrongdoing in this case. This unprecedented attack on the First Amendment and transparent attempt to distract attention from the many crises facing this administration will not stand.”
Trump pulls stunts like this because he doesn’t care about norms, never mind the Constitution. He wants to throw a bone to his base while unnerving those dedicated to finding the truth, a notion the president believes is not just unnecessary but a hindrance to his despotic agenda.
When Fort was released from jail in Minneapolis, she said in a statement, “Do we have a Constitution? That is the pressing question.”
The First Amendment to the Constitution protects freedom of the press, among other protected rights. Yet days ago, independent journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were arrested in Minneapolis for committing an act of journalism.
Arresting journalists for doing their job happens within a national context in which the major media are being bought up by billionaires and small-town media are struggling to survive. Late night comedians have been harassed , even canceled, because they dare to make fun of our Not-so-great leader. Trump’s erstwhile bestie Elon Musk bought and controls Twitter. His pals the billionaire Ellisons bought CBS.
In a healthy democracy, journalists are not handcuffed for doing their jobs. They are not dragged into courtrooms for showing up, asking questions, and bearing witness. They are not treated as threats simply because they point a camera toward power and refuse to look away.
Yet here we are.
This week, Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were arrested and charged under federal law with civil rights violations, including conspiracy to interfere with religious freedom and interfering with the exercise of First Amendment rights at a place of worship, while covering protests at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota. Not for committing violence. Not for inciting chaos. But for documenting what was happening, for talking to people on the ground, for doing exactly what journalism has always existed to do.
And that reality should stop us cold.
Because when a government begins going after journalists, history tells us something is deeply wrong.
We have only targeted journalists in this country during our most shameful chapters. During moments when fear outweighed principle. When those in power decided that controlling the narrative mattered more than the truth.
That is not coincidence. It is pattern.
Authoritarian systems do not begin by jailing everyone. They begin by isolating voices. They begin by making examples. They begin by teaching the public that speaking up carries a cost.
And journalists are always near the top of that list.
Why?
Because journalists give voice to the people.
They do not create dissent. They reveal it. They do not manufacture outrage. They document it. They do not invent injustice. They expose it.
When a journalist shows up, they bring sunlight. And sunlight makes lies harder to sustain.
Trump sees Don Lemon as a threat.
Not because Lemon suddenly changed who he is, but because his audience has changed.
Since leaving CNN, Lemon’s reach has exploded across social media. Younger people who never sat down to watch cable news are now watching his clips, sharing his reporting, and engaging with his long-form conversations. He is reaching people Trump cannot easily reach or control.
And Trump cannot shut Don Lemon down by calling his boss anymore.
The same is true for Georgia Fort.
They are independent.
They are not owned by a corporate parent that can be pressured behind closed doors. They cannot be silenced with a phone call.
The most threatening thing to an authoritarian regime is an independent reporter with a microphone.
The state is now alleging that Don Lemon interfered with parishioners’ right to worship.
But the truth runs in the opposite direction.
His presence protected that right.
Without reporters on the scene, there is no independent record of what happened. No documentation of how protesters were treated. No documentation of how parishioners were affected. No documentation of whether law enforcement actions were proportional or excessive.
Lemon did what journalists are supposed to do. He spoke with protesters. He also spoke with the pastor. He interviewed parishioners who were frustrated and hurt by the disruption. He allowed multiple sides to be heard in real time.
That is not interference.
That is accountability. That is transparency. That is how you protect rights, not undermine them.
Rights do not survive in darkness. They survive in public view.
Heather Cox Richardson pays attention to the rhetoric of President Trump’s close advisor Stephen Miller. She hears echoes of the Confederacy. Miller thinks that immigrants should never be allowed to be on a path to citizenship. If that had been the policy when his great-grandparents arrived from Belarus in the early 20th century, little Stephen would be a serf, a slave, or a laborer, not a well-educated white nationalist advising the President to expel millions of immigrants and close the door to others.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller posted on social media this morning:
“Plenty of countries in history have experimented with importing a foreign labor class. The West is the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights, including welfare & the right to vote. All visas are a bridge to citizenship. In America, for generations now, the policy has been that anyone who would economically benefit from moving to the US can do so, exercise the franchise in the US and their children, the moment they are born, will be full American citizens with all the rights and benefits therein.”
After his call for a “labor class” excluded from citizenship and a voice in government, Miller went on to reject the idea that Haitians living and working legally in Ohio should be described as part of Ohio communities. Calling out Democratic former senator Sherrod Brown, who is running for the Senate again this year, for including them, Miller posted: “Democrats just flatly reject any concept of nationhood that has ever existed in human history.”
History is doing that rhyming thing again.
In 1858, Senator James Henry Hammond (D-SC), a wealthy enslaver, rose to explain to his northern colleagues why their objection to human enslavement was so badly misguided. “In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,” he said. Such workers needed few brains and little skill; they just had to be strong, docile, and loyal to their betters, who would organize their labor and then collect the profits from it, concentrating that wealth into their own hands to move society forward efficiently.
Hammond called such workers “the mud-sill of society and political government.” Much like the beams driven into the ground to support a stately home above, the mudsill supported “that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.” The South had pushed Black Americans into that mudsill role. “We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves,” he said. The North also had a mudsill class, he added: “the man who lives by daily labor…in short, your whole hireling class of manual laborers and ‘operatives,’ as you call them, are essentially slaves.”
But Hammond warned that the North was making a terrible mistake. “Our slaves do not vote,” he said. “We give them no political power. Yours do vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositories of all your political power. If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than ‘an army with banners,’ and could combine, where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided…by the quiet process of the ballot-box.”
Hammond was very clear about what he believed the world should look like. Black Americans should always be subordinate to white men, of course, but white women, too, were subordinate. They were made “to breed,” as “toy[s] for recreation,” or to bring men “wealth and position,” he had explained to his son in 1852. Hammond’s promising early political career had been nearly derailed when he admitted that for two years he had sexually assaulted his four young nieces, the daughters of the powerful Wade Hampton II (although he insisted he was being wronged because he should get credit for showing any restraint at all when faced with four such “lovely creatures”).
If women and Black people were at the bottom of society, southern white men were an “aristocracy” by virtue of their descent from “the ancient cavaliers of Virginia…a race of men without fear and without reproach,” “alike incapable of servility and selfishness.” By definition, whatever such leaders did was what was good for society, and any man who had not achieved that status was excluded because of his own failings or criminal inclinations.
The southern system, Hammond told the Senate, was “the best in the world…such as no other people ever enjoyed upon the face of the earth,” and spreading it would benefit everyone.
The next year, rising politician Abraham Lincoln told an audience at the Wisconsin state fair in Milwaukee that he rejected Hammond’s mudsill theory. Lincoln explained that Hammond’s “mud-sill theory” divided the world into permanent castes, arguing that men with money drove the economy and workers were stuck permanently at the bottom.
For his part, Lincoln embraced a different theory: It was workers, not wealthy men, who drove the economy. While men of wealth had little incentive to experiment and throw themselves into their work, men on the make were innovative and hardworking. Such men could—and should—rise. This “free labor” theory articulated the true meaning of American democracy for northerners and for the non-slave-holding southerners, who, as Lincoln reminded his listeners, made up a majority in the South. “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him,” he explained.
In the election of 1860, southern Democrats tried to get voters to back their worldview by promising they were reflecting God’s will and by using virulent racism, warning that Black Americans must be kept in their place or they would destroy American society.
But, in a nation of immigrants and men who had worked their way up from day laborers to become prominent men, Lincoln stood firm on the Declaration of Independence. He warned that if people started to make exceptions to the idea that all men are created equal, they would not stop. They would “transform this Government into a government of some other form.” “If that declaration is not the truth,” Lincoln said, “let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out!” To cries of “No! No!” he responded: “[L]et us stand firmly by it then.”
Miller’s white nationalism is not the concept on which this nation was built. The United States of America was built on the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the sweat and blood of almost 250 years of Americans, often those from marginalized communities, working to make those principles a reality.
The hierarchical system Miller embraces echoes the system championed by those like Hammond, who imagined themselves the nation’s true leaders who had the right to rule. They were not bound by the law, and they rejected the idea that those unwilling to recognize their superiority should have either economic or political power.
The horrors of the Epstein files show a group of powerful and wealthy men and women who sexually assaulted children and showed no concern either for their crimes or that they might have to answer to the law. The public still does not know the extent of the horrors or the human-trafficking business in which Epstein and others were engaged. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters yesterday that the Department of Justice was not releasing any item from the Epstein files that showed “death, physical abuse, or injury.”
“You [know] the biggest problem with being friends with you?” Dr. Peter Attia wrote in an email to Epstein in response to an email with the subject line “Got a fresh shipment.” Attia answered his own question: “The life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can’t tell a soul.”
Trump echoed Hammond in a different way tonight on Air Force One as he traveled to Florida. Asked by a reporter how he would handle being on both sides of his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, he suggested that taking the money of the American people into his own hands would enable him to use it for the public good. “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself,” he said. “We could make it a substantial amount, nobody would care because it’s gonna go to numerous, very good charities.”
Another story tonight indicated the degree to which the president sees himself as part of a wealthy caste that is above the law. Sam Kessler, Rebecca Ballhous, Eliot Brown, and Angus Berwick of the Wall Street Journal published a blockbuster report showing that four days before Trump’s 2025 inauguration, men working for an Abu Dhabi royal signed a secret deal with the Trump family to buy 49% of their brand-new cryptocurrency venture World Liberty Financial. The investors would pay half immediately, sending $187 million to entities held by the Trump family and at least $31 million to entities held by Steve Witkoff, a co-founder of World Liberty Financial whom Trump had named U.S. envoy to the Middle East weeks earlier.
The deal was backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who is the brother of the president of the United Arab Emirates and oversees more than $1.3 trillion that includes the country’s largest wealth fund. Tahnoon has wanted access to U.S. AI technology, but the Biden administration blocked access out of concern it could end up in Chinese hands. The Trump administration, in striking contrast, has committed to allowing the United Arab Emirates to buy about half a million of the most advanced AI chips a year.
Federal agents acting for the Trump administration are trying to enforce the authority of those like Miller, tear-gassing, arresting, and killing American citizens. Thousands marched peacefully in Portland, Oregon, today but, as Alex Baumhardt of the Oregon Capital Chronicle recorded, “federal officers outside the ICE facility in Portland…indiscriminately threw loads of gas and flash bangs” at marchers, including children. Portland, Oregon, city councillor Mitch Green reported: “I just got tear gassed along with thousands of union members, many of whom had their families with them. Federal agents at the ICE facility tear gassed children. We must abolish ICE, DHS, and we must have prosecutions.”
Tim Dickinson of The Contrarian wrote: “Today I saw ICE gas little white kids in the streets of Portland with chemical weapons. Imagine what they’re doing to brown and black kids in the detention camps.”
And yet, in another echo of the 1850s, MAGA Republicans are reversing victim and offender, blaming the people under assault for the violence. Trump officials insist that community watch groups and protesters are engaging in “domestic terrorism.” Greg Jaffe and Thomas Gibbons-Neff of the New York Times flagged that Representative Eli Crane (R-AZ) told right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson on Monday that those people protecting their neighbors from the violence of federal agents want “revolution.” “They want to fundamentally remake and tear down the institutions and the culture of this country.”
In an order requiring the release of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, asylum seeker Adrian Conejo Arias, from detention, U.S. District Judge Fred Biery noted that in their crusade against undocumented immigrants, U.S. officials are ignoring the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. “[F]or some among us,” the judge wrote, “the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.”
Judge Biery signed the order after saying he was putting “ a judicial finger in the constitutional dike.” Under his signature, he posted the now-famous image of the little boy detained in his blue bunny hat and Spiderman backpack, along with the notations for two biblical passages: “Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these,’” and “Jesus wept.”
Tonight, voters flipped a seat in the Texas Senate from Republican to Democratic in a special election. Democrat Taylor Rehmet, an Air Force veteran and machinist, defeated right-wing Republican Leigh Wambsganss for a seat that Republicans have held since the early 1990s. Robert Downen of Texas Monthly noted that in the final days of the campaign, the Wambsganss campaign spent $310,000 while Rehmet spent nothing, and Daniel Nichanian of Bolts Mag posted that overall, Wambsganss spent nearly $2.2 million more than Rehmet in the campaign. Both Texas governor Greg Abbott and Trump himself publicly supported Wambsganss.
And yet, as G. Elliott Morrisof Strength in Numbers noted, voters flipped a district that Trump won in 2024 by 17 points to Rehmet, electing him by a 14.4-point margin. After removing the minor-party candidates in the vote, the swing from the Republican in 2024 was 32 points toward the Democrats. In Texas.
—
Notes:
James Henry Hammond, Speech on the Admission of Kansas, March 4, 1858, in Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James H. Hammond of South Carolina (New York: John F. Thrown & Co., 1866), pp. 301–322.
Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), pp. 37–104, 312–314.
Garry Rayno, veteran journalist, reports on the latest Republican plan to defund public schools in New Hampshire. They are moving quickly to enact a plan that will fatten rich districts and impoverish poor districts. They have already passed a voucher plan without income limits; the overwhelming majority of students taking vouchers were already attending private schools. in other words, state welfare for the rich.
Rayno writes in IndepthNH.com:
What’s the hurry?
Last week the Senate was in a hurry to pass two bills that will significantly harm the majority of school districts and students in public schools, while property wealthy districts and well-to-do families will benefit, all in the name of school choice.
The plan is to have the House agree Thursday to the amended version of House Bill 751, which would allow a New Hampshire public school student to enroll in any other public school in the state rather than the school where he or she lives.
The Republican controlled House is expected to concur or agree to the Senate amendment, sending the bill to Gov. Kelly Ayotte’s desk for her action.
The bill would go into effect immediately instead of next school year as Senate Bill 101 would do, which is nothing more than an attempt to cut short the beating a similar plan has already taken at deliberative sessions in annual school district meetings around the state.
Something this complicated needs more than a few weeks to implement or it will create chaos and uncertainty.
As it stands, the open enrollment plan would make property poor school districts donor communities to property wealthy communities while increasing per student costs for the poorer districts and lowering the per student costs for the wealthier districts.
This really is Robin Hood in reverse.
And this bill is way more financially harmful to poorer communities than a $5,000 grant through the Education Freedom Account program as school districts would owe other districts tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
The open enrollment plan would exacerbate the already alarming inequities between the schools in property wealthy communities and those in property poor cities and towns.
To add insult to injury, any shifting of schools for children from poor families will be out of reach because their parents cannot afford transportation or the difference in per student costs they would have to pay if their school district spends less per student than the school their child wants to attend.
The best and well-to-do will be able to go to schools in Bedford, Bow, Amherst, New Ipswich, Rye, Hanover, etc. but the majority of students will be in school districts with declining state aid as it follows the child after the first year and their parents will face ever increasing property tax bills.
This plan is not something that should be fast-tracked, unless you want to destroy public education, which is the goal of the Republican majority in the Legislature.
Under the plan, school districts would have to determine the capacity of the school and the grade levels and update the information each month.
Unlike current law, school districts do not have to vote to approve participating in open enrollment because the state says they shall participate.
The parents of a student living outside the district could apply to attend a different school anywhere in the state if there is a vacancy and the student has not been a disciplinary problem or been expelled from his or her resident school or has a history of chronic absenteeism.
Receiving schools are prohibited from making admission decisions based on “grade or age levels, pupil needs, areas of academic focus, aptitude, academic or athletic achievement.”
Now for the fun part, the home district of the student would pay the receiving district its average per pupil costs, which are determined annually by the Department of Education.
If the sending district’s per-pupil costs are less than the receiving school’s, the parents would have to make up the difference.
It appears if the sending school’s per-pupil costs are more than the receiving school’s, that amount of money would be sent to the receiving school.
Remember the outrage over donor communities, over property taxes raised in one community being sent to another community’s schools, this will make property poor communities donor towns to property wealthy communities who most likely have nicer facilities, better paid teachers and more activities and programs for their students.
It is still exporting property taxes raised in one community to another community’s school district.
The likely scenario is that students whose parents have the economic ability will be enrolled in the better school districts in the state.
That will do two things: It will provide more revenue to a school district that already has a significant tax base, while lowering the money for the student’s home district.
It also will increase the cost per student for that district because there will be a lower number of students, while decreasing the per-pupil costs for the receiving district because there are more pupils.
Analysis by Reaching Higher NH indicates over time, the per-pupil cost of the sending district will be more than the receiving district.
The organization uses the towns of Newport and Sunapee and the scenario of five students leaving Newport each year for Sunapee schools over a five-year period.
The per-pupil cost in Newport is $29,290 and the cost in Sunapee is $31,464.
Newport would have to send Sunapee $146,450 and each family would pay $2,174 to make up the difference, and Sunapee nets $157,320.
The bill allows districts to negotiate to lower the tuition by 80 percent and if that occurs each parent would have to pay $8,032.
During the five-year period, Newport’s per-pupil costs would rise to about $34,000 per pupil and Sunapee would go down to about $29,800.
“Within four years, and after the migration of 20 students, Newport’s cost per-pupil has surpassed Sunapee’s cost per-pupil. The good news for transferring parents is they no longer have to pay out of pocket to cover the difference. The bad news for Newport and its taxpayers is that the bill from Sunapee keeps getting larger, since the cost of open enrollment is tied to the sending district’s cost per pupil,” according to the analysis on the group’s website.
The state school aid, as little as it is, about 22 percent, would follow the child to Sunapee after the first year because the child is now included in the Average Daily Attendance of the Sunapee school district not Newport’s.
What this plan does not do is add one cent to state public education aid, although New Hampshire provides the least amount of state aid of any state in the country including Mississippi or Alabama.
While New Hampshire pays 22 percent, the national average is 47 percent, which is more than double.
If New Hampshire paid the national average, about $1 billion dollars would come off of local property tax bills.
But even with two recent court cases finding the state has failed to live up to its constitutional obligation to provide its students with an adequate education and to pay for it, lawmakers have yet to do anything to address that, any more than they have in the three decades since the original Claremont lawsuit ruling.
Instead Republican lawmakers have voted to ban books; divisive concepts; diversity, equality and inclusiveness’ made record keeping more onerous and repetitive; will spend $112 million this biennium mostly benefiting kids already in religious and private schools, or homeschooled; sought a statewide school budget cap; failed to provide enough money for special education and building costs, sending the bill to local property taxpayers; cut businesses taxes largely benefiting multinationals and large corporation; eliminated the state’s only progressive tax on interest and dividends; and everything else they could do to destroy public education, as they appear to agree with the chair of the House Education Policy and Administration Committee Kristin Noble, R-Bedford, that public schools are leftist indoctrination centers.
This open enrollment plan is the latest in a long line of distractions from the one thing the legislature legally has to do: Pay for a constitutionally adequate education for the state’s students.
Supporters of the open enrollment plan call it a market approach to education. That would be fine if there were a level playing field, but there is not.
The education funding system they don’t want to change has sentenced the students and taxpayers of the property poor communities to higher taxes and a less than adequate education creating an economic death spiral.
Yet those who can afford a private or religious school education are given state subsidies at taxpayer expense that include season passes to Gunstock and tuition to religious summer camps.
The Legislature’s first job should be to provide an adequate education to the state’s students and pay for it. That should be the first priority, not an afterthought.
The state of Minnesota asked a federal judge to stop the federal militarization in Minneapolis. In a much-anticipated ruling, she said no. The judge, appointed by Biden, said that a previous ruling about federal tactics had been overturned, and she thought it was a signal that any ruling favoring the state would be overturned.
A federal judge has rejected a bid by state and local officials in Minnesota to end Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration’s massive deployment of thousands of federal agents to aggressively enforce immigration laws.
In a ruling Saturday, U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Menendez found strong evidence that the ongoing federal operation ”has had, and will likely continue to have, profound and even heartbreaking, consequences on the State of Minnesota, the Twin Cities, and Minnesotans.”
“There is evidence that ICE and CBP agents have engaged in racial profiling, excessive use of force, and other harmful actions,” Menendez said, adding that the operation has disrupted daily life for Minnesotans — harming school attendance, forcing police overtime work and straining emergency services. She also said there were signs the Trump administration was using the surge to force the state to change its immigration policies — pointing to a list of policy demands by Attorney General Pam Bondi and similar comments by White House immigration czar Tom Homan.
But the Biden-appointed judge said state officials’ arguments that the state was being punished or unfairly treated by the federal government were insufficient to justify blocking the surge altogether. And in a 30-page opinion, the judge said she was “particularly reluctant to take a side in the debate about the purpose behind Operation Metro Surge.”
The surge has involved about 3,000 federal officers, a size roughly triple that of the local police forces in Minneapolis and St. Paul. However, Menendez said it was difficult to assess how large or onerous a federal law enforcement presence could be before it amounted to an unconstitutional intrusion on state authority.
“There is no clear way for the Court to determine at what point Defendants’ alleged unlawful actions…becomes (sic) so problematic that they amount to unconstitutional coercion and an infringement on Minnesota’s state sovereignty,” she wrote, later adding that there is “no precedent for a court to micromanage such decisions.”
“If that injunction went too far, then the one at issue here—halting the entire operation—certainly would,” the judge said in her Saturday ruling.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison signaled his team would continue fighting to end the federal operation, writing in a statement that “this case is in its infancy and there is much legal road in front of us.”
“We know that these 3,000 immigration agents are here to intimidate Minnesota and bend the state to the federal government’s will,” he said. “That is unconstitutional under the Tenth Amendment and the principle of equal sovereignty. We’re not letting up in defending our state’s constitutional powers.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi on X called the decision “another HUGE” win for the Justice Department in its Minnesota crackdown and noted that it came from a judge appointed by former President Joe Biden, a Democrat.
“Neither sanctuary policies nor meritless litigation will stop the Trump Administration from enforcing federal law in Minnesota,” she wrote.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey have both called for federal agents to leave the city as the chaos has only intensified in recent weeks.
“This federal occupation of Minnesota long ago stopped being a matter of immigration enforcement,” Walz said at a press conference last week after two Customs and Border Patrol agents shot and killed 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti. “It’s a campaign of organized brutality against the people of our state. And today, that campaign claimed another life. I’ve seen the videos from several angles. And it’s sickening.”
Backlash from Pretti’s killing has prompted Trump to pull back on elements of the Minneapolis operation.
Two CBP agents involved in the shooting were placed on administrative leave. CBP Commander Greg Bovino was sidelined from his post in Minnesota, with the White House sending border czar Tom Homan to the state in an effort to calm tensions. Officials also said some federal agents involved in the surge were cycling out of state, but leaders were vague about whether the size of the overall operation was being scaled back.
“I don’t think it’s a pullback,” Trump told Fox News on Tuesday. “It’s a little bit of a change.”
The image of ICE arresting the child wearing his Spiderman backpack and his bright blue hat with bunny ears spread across the Internet. He and his father were arrested and sent to a detention center in Texas. Today, a federal judge ordered ICE to release them both.
A federal judge on Saturday ordered the release of a 5-year-old boy and his father from immigration custody, condemning their removal from their suburban Minneapolis neighborhood as unconstitutional.
The image of Liam Conejo Ramos, wearing a Spider-Man backpack and an oversize fluffy blue winter hat as he was detained by officers earlier this month, spurred outrage at a moment when many were already incensed by the Trump administration’s harsh immigration tactics in Minnesota and elsewhere across the country.
In a blistering opinion, Judge Fred Biery of Federal District Court for the Western District of Texas condemned “the perfidious lust for unbridled power” and “the imposition of cruelty.”
The boy’s father, Adrian Conejo Arias, was also arrested and the pair were taken to an immigration detention center outside San Antonio.
Judge Biery, who was appointed to the bench by President Bill Clinton, said both Liam and his father must be released from custody by Tuesday. His brief but fiery ruling chastised the government’s “ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence” and called for “a more orderly and humane policy than currently in place.”
At the bottom of his three-page ruling, he included the photo of Liam, standing in front of a car, as well as two Bible verses. It was ordered, he wrote, “with a judicial finger in the constitutional dike.”
In the year 2000, health officials declared that measles had been eliminated in the United States, thanks to a successful program to vaccinate all children against the disease.
But, thanks to Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who is now Secretary of Health and Human Services, measles is back.
RFK Jr. is often described as a “vaccine skeptic.” He would be more accurately described as a fierce opponent of vaccines.
South Carolina reported nearly 800 cases last Tuesday, and the number is likely to grow.
With 789 cases reported as of Tuesday, the South Carolina outbreak surpassed a massive outbreak in Texas, which reached 762 cases before it ended in August last year. Two children died during the outbreak in Texas…
“It breaks my heart to see that my state is the number one outbreak currently in the United States since the 1990s,” Dr. Anna Kathryn Rye Burch, a pediatric infectious diseases physician with Prisma Health in South Carolina, told CNN Wednesday. “We have this amazing vaccine that would help protect us all from getting the measles, and we are just seeing that people aren’t as excited about getting that vaccine anymore. This is why we’re seeing measles come back into the United States…”
Measles was declared eliminated in the US in 2000, meaning there has not been continuous transmission for more than a year at a time.
Before 2025, there were an average of about 180 measles cases reported each year since elimination, according to US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. The US reported more than 2,200 confirmed measles cases in 2025 — significantly more than there have been in any year since 2000.
The Trump fascists have many problems in Minnesota. One of them is the Chief U.S. District Judge of Minnesota, Patrick J. Schiltz, appointed by President George W. Bush.
Judge Schiltz believes in his oath of office. He believes in upholding the Constitution. That spells trouble for Trump’s military occupation of Minneapolis.
“My hope is to be the Benjamin Harrison of chief judges: one that no one remembers,” he told his hometown paper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, in 2022.
Four years later, the mild-mannered George W. Bush appointee — known for his conservative jurisprudence, his clerkship with late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and his mentorship of future Justice Amy Coney Barrett — has been thrust into an increasingly pitched legal confrontation with President Donald Trump’s immigration forces.
It’s a role that will be remembered.
Schiltz, 65, has publicly aired his fury over the Trump administration’s mistreatment of noncitizens arrested in Operation Metro Surge, the Department of Homeland Security’s mass deportation push in the Twin Cities. He blasted the Justice Department for its criticism of his courthouse colleagues and labeled as “frivolous” the administration’s effort to compel him to issue an arrest warrant for former CNN anchor Don Lemon and others involved in last week’s church protest in St. Paul.
The clash is slated to reach a climax Friday, when Schiltz plans to haul into his Minneapolis courtroom Todd Lyons, the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to grill him about the rampant violation of court orders that Schiltz and his colleagues say has poisoned the trust between the administration and the court.
The hearing raises the prospect that a top federal official could be sanctioned for his agency’s failures to obey the courts. And at the very least, he’ll be forced to begin accounting for an extraordinary number of cases — more than 2,000, according to Politico’s Kyle Cheney — in which judges have ruled that ICE has illegally detained people…
In a court order, Schiltz cited “dozens of court orders with which respondents have failed to comply in recent weeks….”
Schiltz acknowledged his move was extraordinary, but he added that “the extent of ICE’s violation of court orders is likewise extraordinary, and lesser measures have been tried and failed.”
“The Court’s patience is at an end,” he added….
The order follows a pair of letters Schiltz sent last week that featured similarly exasperated language, this time about people who were arrested for protesting at a St. Paul church where they claimed a pastor was a top local ICE official..
In that case, Schiltz derided what he cast as an effort by the Justice Department to ignore the usual process in order to bring charges in a politically charged case.
A magistrate judge found there was no probable cause to charge five of the eight people DOJ wanted to charge, including former CNN anchor Don Lemon, who has said he was acting in his capacity as a journalist. The DOJ quickly asked for the district court to intervene. Schiltz said he surveyed a wide variety of colleagues, and everyone who responded could think of no precedent for such a request. Then when Schiltz didn’t rule fast enough, the DOJ sought the intervention of an appeals court, which ultimately declined.
In his letters, Schiltz cited “the defiance of several court orders by ICE, and the illegal detention of many detainees by ICE (including, yesterday, a two-year old).”
He wrote at one point: “The government has also argued that I must accept this as true because they said it, and they are the government.”
The judge also criticized the government for characterizing the situation as a national security-related emergency, noting it had declined to bring the cases to a grand jury that could have decided on charges quickly.
(The administration has failed to get grand juries to indict in a number of such politically charged cases in which the evidence appeared thin.)
Schiltz’s first letter, in particular, is remarkable.
CNN legal contributor Steve Vladeck wrote Sunday, before the judge summoned Lyons, that his letters were must-reads when it comes to understanding the Trump DOJ’s manipulation of the legal process.
“Were it not for Chief Judge Schiltz’s actions here, we might not know about any of this backstory — or, even worse, the Eighth Circuit might have simply acceded to the government’s entirely one-sided account of what happened and granted unprecedented relief,” Vladeck wrote.
He argued that other judges should lay these things bare just like Schiltz did. And now Schiltz’s summoning of Lyons puts these issues even more squarely in the spotlight.
On Friday, a judge with impeccable conservative credentials is set to hold an extraordinary hearing putting the top ICE official in a Republican administration on the spot about its disregard for court orders.
And it could be a big moment in an already bad week for the administration’s Minneapolis crackdown.
However, Judge Schiltz cancelled the hearing after ICE met one of his stipulations, releasing an immigrant named Juan T.R., as per his order. The Court had previously demanded the release of Juan by January 15. ICE ignored the court’s order. Judge Schiltz wanted to know why. When Juan was finally released, Judge Schlitz canceled the hearing.
In his statement canceling the hearing, Judge Schiltz made clear his impatience. He wrote:
Attached to this order is an appendix that identifies 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases. The extent of ICE’s noncompliance is almost certainly substantially understated. This list is confined to orders issued since January 1, 2026, and the list was hurriedly compiled by extraordinarily busy judges. Undoubtedly, mistakes were made, and orders that should have appeared on this list were omitted.
This list should give pause to anyone—no matter his or her political beliefs—who cares about the rule of law. ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence. The Court warns ICE that future noncompliance with court orders may result in future show‐cause orders requiring the personal appearances of Lyons or other government officials. ICE is not a law unto itself. ICE has every right to challenge the orders of this Court, but, like any litigant, ICE must follow those orders unless and until they are overturned or vacated.
FOX News thought they did a gotcha on Judge Schlitz when they discovered that he had donated to immigrant legal groups. AHA! A closet liberal!
But he stopped them in their tracks with his response. FOX said:
A Minnesota-based federal judge who threatened to hold Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Todd Lyons in contempt of court has donated to a nonprofit that gives legal support to illegal immigrants.
Judge Patrick Schiltz, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, and his wife were listed in a 2019 annual report for the organization, the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, which routinely condemns the Trump administration and advertises free legal advice for immigrants, refugees and people detained by ICE.
Schiltz told Fox News Digital in a statement he has “donated for many years to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota.
“I have also donated for many years to Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid. I believe that poor people should be able to get legal representation,” Schiltz said.
Donald Trump has done many things that are unprecedented. He is the first President to be impeached twice. He is the first convicted felon to be elected President. He is the first President to encourage a violent insurrection to overturn the election that he lost.
So many firsts.
But this one takes the cake. It’s the biggest grift of all. It’s the definition of chutzpah.
In the 250 years of this nation’s history, no President has ever sued the government for damages to his reputation.
NBC News reported:
The lawsuit, filed Thursday at a federal courthouse in Miami, says Trump is suing in his personal capacity, not as president. The other plaintiffs include two of Trump’s sons — Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump — and the Trump Organization.
“Defendants have caused Plaintiffs reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump, and the other Plaintiffs’ public standing,” the complaint says.
The Treasury and IRS did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday night.
A former IRS contractor, Charles Littlejohn, was sentenced to five years in prison in 2024 after he pleaded guilty the year before to leaking Trump’s tax records to The New York Times. The Times published exclusive reporting in 2020 that showed Trump had paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017.
Trump is also suing the Justice Department for $230 million its investigations of his role in the January 6 insurrection and his withholding of documents.
How vigorously do you think Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Attorney General Pam Bondi will fight their boss in court?
Would taxpayers have standing to sue to oppose any settlement?
The study found that students who had been consistently taught by teachers using “the science of reading” were gaining basic literacy skills, but were limited in their comprehension of what they read. They could read the words, but they couldn’t step back and explain what they had read.
Let’s back up for a few minutes and see this new study in historical perspective. The “science of reading” was based on the recommendations of the National Reading Panel. That panel was established by Congress in 1997 to determine the best, most effective ways to teach reading. Most of its 14 members were academics. In 2000, the panel released its report, callled Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment. It recommended that effective reading instruction should include:
Phonics: Explicit, systematic instruction in letter-sound correspondences.
Fluency: Guided oral reading to encourage automaticity.
Vocabulary: Direct and indirect instruction of word meanings.
Comprehension: Teaching specific strategies for understanding text.
When George W. Bush became President in 2001, his education agenda featured the findings of the National Reading Panel. Dr. Reid Lyon, the organizer of the panel, became President Bush’s advisor. Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation included $6 billion for reading instruction, based on the recommendations of the National Reading Panel, as well as an independent evaluation of its results.
Independent evaluators reviewed the progress of students in the districts that implemented the panel’s recommendations.
In 2008, they published their conclusions:
Reading First had a statistically significant positive impact on multiple practices promoted by the program, including the amount of instructional time spent on the five essential components of reading instruction (phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension) and professional development in scientifically based reading instruction.
Reading First did not produce a statistically significant impact on student reading comprehension test scores in grades one, two, or three.
Reading First had a statistically significant positive impact on first graders’ decoding skills in Spring 2007.
After the $30 million study, involving four major research organizations, reported that “the science of reading” improved decoding skills but not comprehension, enthusiasm for the NRP report waned.
But the NRP report found a second life less than a decade after it seemed to have faded.
Emily Hanford, a journalist who worked for American Public Media, began researching early literacy in 2016. Her 2022 podcast Sold a Story maintained that the source of poor literacy skills could be traced to the work of Marie Clay and Lucy Calkins, both of whom were advocates of balanced literacy, which did not incorporate the findings of the NRP.
Hanford became an advocate for “the science of reading” and the revival of phonics.
Many states enacted legislation mandating “the science of reading” and banning “three-cuing” and other elements of Calkins’ program.
“The science of reading” is unquestionably the dominant mode of teaching reading today.
Harkay wrote:
Four school districts in major urban areas using the science of reading found while students are grasping basic literacy skills, limitations toward deeper comprehension still exist, according to a new study.
The “Robust Reading Comprehension” report, conducted by nonprofit research organization SRI, examined literacy instruction in districts in Texas, Maryland, North Carolina and Virginia that have been using materials rooted in the popular phonics-based literacy approach for at least five years.
Through numerous classroom observations, teacher surveys and interviews with district officials in Aldine Independent School District, Baltimore City Public Schools, Guilford County Schools and Richmond Public Schools, researchers found a majority of reading lessons lacked “depth” – meaning foundational skills were mainly limited to working on single words rather than reading them in sentences.
Comprehension lessons in later elementary grades also mainly focused on completing a task, such as identifying a main character, rather than using a text for discussion and understanding its purpose.
“You’re not able to really think about the unpacking of a complicated sentence. You’re not thinking about really intentional vocabulary instruction or the building of kids’ word knowledge over time,” said Dan Reynolds, one of the lead authors of the report. “Ultimately, how should we be framing kids to read? Are we teaching our K-4 kids that reading is just tasks? Are we teaching them that they just need to label stuff and fill out graphic organizers?”
In recent years, nearly every state has passed science of reading laws, including many that have limited the type of programming and instructional materials a school can use – a move that has drawn some criticism that it’s too restrictive and that the instruction faces its own limitations.
The report defined surface literacy skills as a student’s ability to complete tasks and understand texts based on their literal meeting while robust instruction would further push a child to understand, evaluate and synthesize what they had read for its significance.
The study said its “comprehension observations alone are more rigorous than nearly all studies conducted in the last 50 years.” It’s not expected to be representative of reading instruction across the country, Reynolds said, but “we have four big districts in four different states, and we saw this pattern happening in all four of them with three different curricula.”
The study also found that teachers struggled with implementing comprehension-focused learning materials and said many times the curriculum was too dense, required substantial planning or may not have been developmentally appropriate. Professional development opportunities for these educators were also limited.
Researchers reported less than a quarter of observed comprehension lessons were engaging in robust learning. More than two-thirds of the lessons focused on “surface-level” comprehension.
“It seems that these curriculums are designed to build knowledge and they don’t develop meaning, and so then why read about the Civil War or about insects?” said Katrina Woodworth, director at SRI’s Center for Education Research & Improvement. “The point is to both teach reading and to build students’ knowledge base so that they have more scaffolding for future learning of both content and meaning.”
The SRI researchers also found that many review tools that measure comprehension don’t make a distinction between surface-level and robust instruction and skills. So, while educators are tasked with meeting a baseline standard, like having a child compare and contrast a text, it may be “unintentionally encouraging teachers to focus on surface-level goals,” the report said.
Without distinction, it weakens instruction for students and can later manifest as a skills disadvantage, Reynolds said.
“Districts had done so much to get the kids all the way there [with literacy], but it was losing voltage in the end,” Reynolds said. “If we can actually shift the way that districts are thinking about improving their comprehension instruction, they can take that all the way home and deliver really high quality comprehension instruction because so many pieces are already in place.”
Reynolds and one of his fellow co-authors, Sara Rutherford-Quach, said they saw glimpses of “magic” in the classroom when students understood a passage in wide-ranging contexts, which is the type of instruction they’re hoping to see districts incorporate more of in early grades.
“The kids were way more engaged,” Rutherford-Quach said. “Surface-level is important and necessary in some cases, … but it really is fundamentally different when you start talking about meaning and making it matter to the kids, and you see that they’re invested in it.”
Reynolds added that it’s unlikely robust comprehension could make up 100% of lessons in the classroom, but “we are thinking that if we can shift that needle from 24% robust lessons up to 50 or 60, then that would be a real catalyst for comprehension growth.”
The report recommended district leaders create “a shared vision for robust comprehension and define what it means for students, teachers, schools and the district,” and align how to best measure the extent of learning. It also called for better professional learning structures that could help model and rehearse robust comprehension work.
Previous reporting from The 74 found the percentage of recent high school graduates who lack “robust” comprehension skills is the highest it’s ever been, according to 2023 data. The sooner districts can engrain literacy skills that go beyond just explicit tasks, the easier it will be as they continue through the K-12 system, Reynolds said.
“I see the distinction between surface level and robust comprehension as critical to comprehension in fifth grade, but I also see it in the kids when they’re in 12th grade. Surface level comprehension and robust comprehension is the difference between a two on the AP exam and a three,” he said.
One evaluation in 2008. Another evaluation in 2026. Same conclusions. What have we learned?
The ultimate expert, Jeanne Chall, had it right. A former kindergarten teacher who became a renowned Harvard professor, she was commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation to review the research on reading. In her 1967 book, Learning to Read: The Great Debate, she concluded that the best approach was: both. Start early with phonics, she said, then transition to excellent children’s literature. If we continued to swing from extreme to extreme–from phonics to whole word, from whole word to phonics–she predicted, we would forever be trapped in that pendulum.
Diane Ravitch's blog 