I’ve admired your reporting for awhile, especially around USAID and USIP. I finally subscribed today.

Welcome! We F1 people are fun!

But USAID is wasteful.

Make it make sense.

Thank you for continuing to report on this. At a time when so many people have moved on from the early actions of the regime, I’m grateful for your dedicated work.

Thank you for telling these stories.

We’ve done a lot of work with immigration attorneys The work is always challenging. The past year has been excruciating and moral injury real. Thank you for the work you’re doing.

This trauma is why KonTerra Counseling is offering a support group for immigration legal professionals www.konterracounseling.com/immigration-...

Important thread. 👇🏻

You spelled “abolish ICE” wrong.

What we found is bleak. Attorneys told us they’re struggling to get information in to or out of ICE and Customs and Border Protection facilities, which are holding nearly 69,000 people this month. And detainees often are forced to choose between remaining in crowded, squalid conditions or leaving the country immediately. Judges in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles have ordered the government to facilitate attorney-client communications at Homeland Security buildings. But attorneys say that doesn’t always happen. Even if detainees get the option, some worry they’ll be punished if they take it.

Lawyers can't reach clients in ICE detention. I've heard it anecdotally, but scale of issue is horrifying.

Bloomberg Law is a legal trade pub so many may miss this. Screenshot from their CA newsletter summarizes "bleak" situation for justice and rule of law.

news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/l...

Ian Austin, an Army veteran, was arrested for protesting ICE in Minneapolis. But he’s continued protesting. Senior reporter @julialurie.bsky.social spoke to him.

“When they say, ‘Why would you be out here?’ How the fuck could I not be out here?” he says. “My nation is under attack."

Since July, I've tracked at least 2,300 cases in which federal judges have ruled ICE has illegally detained people without bond or due process.

This is one that stands out:
storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

ICE Out - Fundraising Nail Polish **Shipping Update** Shipping will continue once more ingredients have arrived for this polish. Orders should go out in about 2 weeks. Ice Out is a blurple based polish with a blue/aqua shift and pink ...

If you're a nail polish person, the MN-based small polish maker Atomic Polish is selling Ice Out, and 100% of the proceeds of it are going to the Immigrant Rapid Response Fund

One thing that irks me: people keep calling the folks on the streets in Minneapolis protestors. They are not generally there to protest, they are there to observe and document. This is the product of organizing and mutual aid. It is telling that these acts of citizenship are seen as protest!

ICE is now responsible for 66% of the homicides in Minneapolis this year.

Wait, I thought NGOs were part of the radical left cabal?

Beautiful thread. Read the replies.

Seems right…

A reminder that the US killed 80 people in Venezuela, and it would be nice if the US media cared enough to think that the life of a grandmother in Caracas whose building is destroyed by a US bomb matters as much as the life of a person in the US.

Twitter thread in Spanish by José Mario de la Garza, a human rights lawyer in Mexico, translated using Google Translate: 1. Overthrowing a dictator sounds morally right. No one mourns a tyrant. But international law wasn't built to protect the good, but to restrain the powerful. That's why it prohibits force almost without exception: not because it ignores injustice, but because it knows that if each country decides whom to "liberate" by force, the world reverts to the law of the strongest. 2. The problem is not Maduro. The problem is the precedent. When military force is used to change governments without clear rules, sovereignty ceases to be a limit and becomes an obstacle. Today it is “overthrowing a dictator”; tomorrow it will be “correcting an election,” “protecting interests,” “restoring order.” The law does not absolve dictatorships, but neither does it legitimize unilateral crusades.

Cont’d: 3. The uncomfortable question is not whether a tyrant deserves to fall, but who decides when and how. Because history teaches something brutal: removing a dictator is easy; building justice afterward is not. And when legality is broken in the name of good, what almost always follows is not freedom, but chaos, violence, and new victims. The law exists to remind us of this, even when it makes us uncomfortable.

Maduro isn't the problem: he's the face of the problem. Removing him from power would be merely opening the door. Behind him is the machine: Rodríguez, Cabello, the military command, the operators of repression and plunder. If you only change the person at the top and leave the system intact, what follows isn't democracy: it's a reshuffling. And there's something even more difficult: Chavismo didn't just capture institutions, it captured daily life. Economy, media, bureaucracy, employment, fear, favors, blackmail. A country can't be "de-Chavistaized" by decree or by an electoral miracle. The real transition begins when that network is broken without setting the country ablaze. The challenge is enormous, and it's also a moral one: to unite without vengeance, but without impunity. Targeted justice for those most responsible, truth for the victims, guarantees that the rest will dismantle the system, and a plan for people to live again—not just survive. Because freedom doesn't come with a new president: it comes when the state ceases to be a threat.

Best thing I’ve read this morning, from a human rights lawyer in Mexico. Translation is in the ALT-text.

🧵👇🏻

While I was in prison, I was the food procurement clerk. It was my job to work with the first cook to design the daily food menu and then make sure the men were fed on a budget of $2.60 per person per day.

How I helped make the best Christmas prison meal, a thread.

What a beautiful story. Thank you for the reminder of all the places love exists.

I have not felt more patriotic than at the naturalization ceremonies of my spouse and Bonus Child. It is the best of who and what America is.

And most native born citizens don’t understand what is involved.

The cruelty is outrageous.

Accompanying my spouse and Bonus Child through the naturalization process entirely reoriented my relationship with patriotism. The ceremony is profoundly moving and the communal joy is life-giving.

These actions are deeply cruel and we should shame members of this regime to the end of their days.

And, I will not be lectured about manners and civility from this regime.

Apple Pie Cake (Milk Bar-style) Inspired by the famous Milk Bar Apple Pie Cake, you'll fall for this dreamy cake layered with apple cider soaked brown butter vanilla cake, apple filling, buttery pie crumbs, and cheesecake filling.

We’re a cake - not a pie - household and love Christina Tosi’s Milk Bar Apple Pie Cake. Her cookbook is the best source for the recipe but here’s a decent copycat houseofnasheats.com/apple-pie-ca...

Three German universities offering post-docs for researchers "who cannot conduct or continue their work in the USA appropriately because of actual political pressure. "
www.uni-konstanz.de/zukunftskoll...

Small business owner here. Our premiums (non-ACA) were due to increase 36% this year. We negotiated down to 29%. The decrease is cold comfort for our team whose work has already been turned upside down due to the foreign aid freeze.

Prominent Afrikaners refuse to be 'pawns,' and hit back at Trump's claims about South Africa Prominent Afrikaners are pushing back after President Trump announced no U.S. officials will attend the G20 in Johannesburg, rejecting his claims of "white persecution" in South Africa as false and politically driven.

Prominent Afrikaners are pushing back after President Trump announced no U.S. officials will attend the G20 in Johannesburg, rejecting his claims of "white persecution" in South Africa as false and politically driven.