📣 287(g) agreements effectively turn state and local law enforcement into extensions of ICE. Currently, 12 law enforcement agencies in NY have active contracts in place.
This is unacceptable.
A photograph of a big flower with pointy long white petals arranged like a multi-pointed star, with a little purple pollen fuzz in its middle
Today’s flower 🌱🌻 #1395
Clematis
A photograph of a small thin tree in a plastered frontyard, focusing on its clusters of white delicate flowers
Today’s flower 🌱🌻 #1399
Pear
Up close with pink clusters of blossoms on a tree with light green leaves in between and moss-covered branches
Double Pink Kwanzan Cherry Tree + Moss 😍
#vancouver #canada 🌎
A Rohingya refugee died in Buffalo, NY, after Border Patrol agents dumped him on the street this winter. Outrage has focused on federal actions, but local police contributed heavily to the tragedy.
Emahunn Campbell and I write about what went wrong:
legaldefensefund.substack.com/p/refugees-d...
Time to start polishing the old resume…
Yeah, this checks out.
What a disgrace. @cristianfarias.com per our Trump v. Moti discussion yesterday.
Congratulations to two of my very favorite @brennancenter.org people, Amos Toh and @emileayoub.bsky.social on publishing an important, timely, and painstakingly researched report.
Read it to learn how our military spends money on AI, and AI companies spend money to court our military.
Both things can be true:
The Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic is an abuse of executive power.
The daylight between the Pentagon and Anthropic is less than you think.
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/01/t...
Personal news: I am leaving national security to lobby Congress for a total ban on the right of German tourists to sue over matters of spiciness. DMs are open for those who wish to fund my new firm. We will pursue this sole issue, and I will retire when successful.
gothamist.com/food/theres-...
If I had a dollar for every person who asks how defense attorneys sleep at night, I’d be able to pay my student loans. If I had a dollar for every person who asks how prosecutors sleep at night, I could maybe buy a pack of gum. Broken society.
What's with the wild numbers about threats to ICE? 1200% more here, 8000% there. A new review shows only one agent has died during immigration enforcement since 2003, of a heart attack.
The work is dangerous: for the public when DHS agents escalate violence.
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
www.npr.org/2023/11/15/1...
There it is: Noem out, Mullin in
The Defense Department spent $38,000,000 LESS on FOIA in FY 2025 than it did in 2024.
This is a 37% decrease.
Other agencies do not report nearly the same drop in spending, in fact many spent more in 2025 than 2024.
pclt.defense.gov/Portals/140/...
Twelve years later, the NYPD is still not in compliance with the court orders from Floyd v. New York, the lawsuit that found the city's stop-and-frisk practices unconstitutional (by @reuvenblau.bsky.social, @thecity.nyc) www.thecity.nyc/2026/02/26/n...
new: highlands reit, a small chicago-based real estate firm, is renting an empty prison it owns in colorado to ice and private prison giant geo group.
highlands is part of a network of private contractors hoping to get a cut of the $45 billion allocated to warehouse immigrants through 2029.
Administrative burdens: Policymaking by other means
Police contractor Axon hopes to profit from outrage over ICE abuse by selling ICE a body-worn camera for every agent. Any accountability upsides are outweighed by giving ICE thousands of hours of video it can feed into surveillance tools and edit into propaganda.
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
In the past year, metro Atlanta saw more evictions than all of New York City—despite having *one-quarter* the renters.
Multiple Atlanta apartment complexes averaged an eviction a day.
"The numbers are mind-blowing," said Grace Hartley of Princeton's Eviction Lab.
You can't sue the government if postal workers accidentally drop the glassware you ordered or lose a letter from your pen pal
The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that this means you also can't sue if postal workers refuse to deliver your mail because you're Black
ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/posta...
1/ The dispute between Anthropic and DOD over the limits of using AI in warfare is escalating. I’ll have more to say on what these limits should be in a @brennancenter.org report out next month. But for now, here’s what you need to know, and what’s truly at stake 🧵:
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/t...
Aggressive charging decisions of two Northern CA district attorneys to go after student protestors read a lot like the federal crackdown on justice movements under the antifa executive order and NSPM-7.
As always, a conviction is an afterthought. The charges alone can chill dissent.
Disheartening.
I can't get over this number: in 2007, there were 360,000 newspaper jobs. Now, there are 80,000. "My local paper sucked!" Sure. What sucks even more? The void. "I get all my news from the Guardian!" No, the Guardian doesn't report on your town council, your school board, local cops.
Very Serious academic discipline
Columbia economics professor telling students they *must* use AI for reading assignments, for coding assignments, for lecture supplements.
Why not just let AI run a simulation of a college education and call it a day? You can get a little NFT diploma and show it off to your ChatGPT girlfriend too.
One fun angle here is how rote the warrant process is. Warrants are reviewed and approved in private.
They are approved in almost every instance—like very close to 100%. One study found the median approval time is 3 minutes.
Strong protection or rubber stamp?
harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-13...
Definitely the former.
