cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/80274

ICE watchers across the country who watched federal agents shoot people in the streets and fought to drive ICE from their cities are turning their new skills against the next authoritarian threat from the Trump administration: election interference.

Volunteers who showed up a few months ago asking, “Where do I buy a whistle?” are now trained and committed members of an “ICE Watch” movement, said Zach Mueller, whose anti-authoritarian group States at the Core started hosting trainings earlier this year. “They’re not in the normal cast of characters that have been showing up to rallies over the last several decades,” said Mueller. Now, they’re planning to fan out to their local polling places and defend their neighbors’ rights to vote.

The ICE-watchers-turned-poll-watchers are preparing for the worst despite a temporary win the voting rights movement secured last week, when the Supreme Court upheld a decision to block a Trump administration rule that would have let the U.S. Postal Service refuse to deliver ballots from states that don’t share their voter rolls with the federal government, among other new constraints, which advocates warned would lead to chaos and uncounted votes. While that plan was foiled for the midterms, other electoral threats abound.

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Federal Agents Are Intimidating Legal Observers at Their Homes: “They Know Where You Live”](https://theintercept.com/2026/03/05/ice-cbp-minnesota-surveillance-intimidation-observers/)

“There are 100 different scenarios that you can run through,” said Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible. “Could be ICE at the polls, could be Trump getting every Republican to swear to sabotage the results … Could be something after the fact, seizing ballot boxes or refusing to acknowledge the results. Who knows?”

What is clear, Levin said, is, “If you think that some Democratic politician is going to have some neat trick in the back pocket that they going to pull when it happens, you’ve got another thing coming.”

Federal interference at the polls is illegal. Despite lawsuits seeking to block federal immigration officers from poll sites, administration officials have continued to threaten their presence anyway. Earlier this month, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that immigration agents could be deployed at polling places if there is a “threat” or if they’re serving a warrant. And President Donald Trump has previously said that federal agents and the National Guard could be sent to polling locations.

Levin’s organization, which co-sponsors the No Kings protests, has launched “election protection” training programs to help people prepare to mobilize for different election sabotage scenarios, including federal immigration agents at the polls, and Mueller’s group has expanded its trainings to include election protection trainings known as “Beyond ICE Watch.”

“Ultimately this is going to come down to: Do you have a sufficient number of people organized and prepared to push back when shit hits the fan, or don’t you?” said Levin.

“The only thing that has changed anything over the last 22 months has been normal, everyday people deciding they weren’t going to put up with this shit.”

In the past two years, Levin said, an elite class composed of “media and business and law firms and universities” and parts of the Democratic establishment, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., have capitulated to the authoritarian whims of the Trump administration.

“The only thing that has changed anything over the last 22 months has been normal, everyday people deciding they weren’t going to put up with this shit,” said Levin. “They organized, they reached out, they formed communities, and they pushed back.”

Last year, the Save America Movement, a nonprofit political and pro-democracy organization that rose up in opposition to Trump, launched “liberty vans” in Los Angeles.

The vehicles are staffed with organizers trained in documenting and deescalating violence from federal law enforcement agents. “Our perspective was that if everybody in America knew what it felt like to be in Los Angeles during that summer, nobody would be OK with this,” said Mary Corcoran, who serves as the group’s executive director.

The project later expanded to other cities including Chicago, Charlotte, and Minneapolis.

“ICE is a new X factor in this election.”

Now, Corcoran plans to deploy a similar strategy in battleground states. The group is working with major civil and labor rights figures like Rev. Al Sharpton and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten to send volunteers — including trusted community leaders like clergy members — trained in deescalation, documentation, and local voting laws to precincts with large Black, Latino, and Asian populations in North Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, and Michigan.

[

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ICE Poses a Real Threat to Our Elections](https://theintercept.com/2026/03/06/democrats-dhs-ice-reform-midterm-election-integrity/)

Corcoran said the precincts they chose are all electoral power centers with large minority and immigrant populations. “If they were successful in intimidating even 10 percent of those voters from coming back this midterm cycle, it could easily swing the outcome statewide,” she said.

Corcoran is hopeful that people knowing they will not be alone at the polls will help them feel safer, but she acknowledges that this election cycle will be a new test. “Voter intimidation has always been around,” she said. “But ICE is a new X factor in this election.”

For the NAACP, voter intimidation is a familiar threat, even if the players have changed, explained Dominik Whitehead, the group’s head of membership. “Much of this we’ve seen before,” said Whitehead. In Georgia and other battleground states in 2024, there were at least 227 bomb threats targeting polling locations and election-related offices, many of them in Black precincts.

The NAACP is “going to defend democracy and ensure voters have access to the ballot box, as we have done for the last 117 years,” said Whitehead. But like Corcoran, he acknowledges that these are “different times.”

ICE has “no jurisdiction” to prevent anyone from voting, something the NAACP has been including in their messaging to voters, he said. However, Whitehead said that they’re still anticipating the agency’s presence. He said the NAACP is “working closely with immigrant organizations” and focusing their election monitoring efforts in places like Michigan, Florida, and Texas, where they expect threats against Muslim, Latino, and Black Caribbean immigrant communities.

[

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How Did the Feds Get Into Anti-ICE Activists’ Signal Messages?](https://theintercept.com/2026/06/17/signal-messages-minneapolis-ice-protests/)

Voting by mail has already begun in several key states, including Alabama, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. For Mueller and States at the Core, the real test will come after Election Day.

“There is a real question mark in my mind about what is the reaction from the authoritarian movement to this election,” said Mueller. “And it’s worth thinking more about how folks are planning, not just for the lead-up version to this, but what happens on November 4th and afterwards.”

The Trump administration’s attacks on mail-in voting, for example, will likely become an issue again. Concurring with the Supreme Court’s decision to stop the new rule, Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that his issue with the new rule was its timing.

The post They Trained to Protect Immigrants From ICE. Now They’re Prepping to Defend the Midterm Elections. appeared first on The Intercept.

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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/80278

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to arrive in New York City on Thursday for the UN General Assembly – where he is expected to defend his warmongering in Iran and Gaza in a speech during the afternoon. Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, has presided over the nearly three-year-long genocide in Gaza – which has killed at least 75,000 Palestinians…

Source

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From Truthout via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/79963

Germany’s Left Party on Sunday made history by winning the 2026 Berlin state election, putting its lead candidate, socialist Elif Eralp, in position to become mayor of the country’s largest city.

In all, the Left Party won 26% of the overall vote in the election, with the center-right Christian Democratic Union capturing 19% and the far-right Alternative for Germany winning 16% of the vote.

The two other center-left parties—the Greens and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)—won 14% and 12% of the vote, respectively.

A Sunday report from Bloomberg News described the Left Party’s victory in Berlin as a “Mamdani moment,” in reference to democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s upset 2025 win in the New York City mayoral race.

Like Mamdani, Eralp and her party put affordability at the center of their campaign, with a particular emphasis on the rising cost of housing in the city.

As described by Euronews in a Monday report, Eralp “called for tighter regulation of rents, more social housing, and further moves towards bringing large housing portfolios into public ownership.”

The Euronews report also noted the connection to Mamdani, citing a quote from Eralp last year arguing that “if a left-wing candidate can win in New York, then there’s no reason it can’t happen in Berlin.”

According to a Saturday report in The Washington Post, the Left Party recently sent a delegation to New York City to learn about Mamdani’s campaign and even met with some of the mayor’s advisers to talk political strategy.

Liza Pflaum, the head of digital communications for the Left Party and a member of the delegation, told the Post that while her party had already embraced “a clear focus on issues relevant to affordable living” two years ago, it also was “explicitly inspired… by Zohran Mamdani’s campaign.”

While the Left Party received the most votes in the election, it did not receive enough to form an outright majority, meaning it will need coalition partners to form a government.

The Greens and SPD have indicated they are willing to form a coalition with the Left Party, but have claimed the party has allowed antisemitism to flourish in its ranks—an allegation that conservatives have made against left-wing candidates and political leaders in the US as well.

Progressives have warned against the conflation of antisemitism and criticism of Israel.

Eralp has disputed accusations of antisemitism in her party, which have focused on comments about the Israel Defense Forces at a campaign event and the presence of “an allegedly militant activist” at an election victory party.

“I will do everything to ensure that Jewish people—just like Muslims, queer people, and everyone in our city—can feel safe,” said Eralp.

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From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/80010

A coalition of state attorneys general led by California’s Rob Bonta reportedly reached a deal on Monday to let Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery proceed, an outcome that press freedom advocates and antitrust campaigners condemned as a disaster for journalism, entertainment industry workers, and American democracy.

The deal, which is set to be formally announced later Monday, will pave the way for the creation of one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, helmed by the son of a billionaire megadonor to President Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

If the merger is finalized, the resulting media behemoth would control nearly 30% of both wide-release theatrical film distribution and basic cable channel licensing in the US. The combination would also put CNN under Ellison’s control, heightening press freedom concerns that have intensified since Paramount’s takeover of CBS.

“The AGs’ capitulation marks a new low.”

“Today, billionaires have yet again bribed, censored, and bullied their way to the top,” Alvaro Bedoya, senior adviser at the American Economic Liberties Project, said in a statement. “As a result, a billionaire media conglomerate closely allied with the president will soon own one of its closest rivals, including some of the nation’s most critical news outlets. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund will co-own those outlets, too.”

Bedoya criticized Bonta and California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, who privately pushed the state attorney general’s office to settle the lawsuit out of court. Xavier Becerra, the frontrunner to succeed Newsom, also called for a settlement, citing Paramount’s threat to leave California if its proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. was blocked.

“People want champions who are not afraid of rich bullies. Newsom, Becerra, and Bonta did not meet that mark," said Bedoya. "The people who work in the film and TV industry and the small businesses who support it will suffer as a result. And so will everyone who values dissent in our democracy.”

Jessica González, co-CEO of the advocacy group Free Press, also denounced Bonta for reneging on “his promise to enforce the law and protect consumers and workers.”

“Hundreds of thousands of people called on our state AGs to stand up to the Ellisons, who have engaged in a campaign of corruption and extortion to pave the way for this unlawful merger. We can no longer rely on the federal government to enforce the law and protect regular people. That much is clear. But the AGs’ capitulation marks a new low. It’s a sad day for all of us who have been opposing this merger because it will cut jobs and raise prices, all as it consolidates the media even more to enable authoritarians.”

Actor Mark Ruffalo, an outspoken opponent of the merger who was subjected to what critics called a corporate “smear campaign” because of his stance, trained his ire on California’s governor in response to news of the settlement.

“Gavin Newsom hands huge win to Trump and his billionaire cronies,” Ruffalo wrote on social media.

The trial was scheduled to begin in March of next year. In its original lawsuit against the proposed merger—filed shortly after the Trump Justice Department dropped its investigation of the proposed purchase—the coalition of 12 attorneys general warned the deal would “combine two of Hollywood’s five major film distributors and two of the five major basic cable channel owners, extinguishing competition between Paramount and Warner Bros. and inflicting substantial harm on movie theaters, basic cable distributors and, ultimately, audiences nationwide.”

The settlement deal reached Monday also reportedly includes the lawsuit filed by the Writers Guild of America, which represents TV screenwriters and others in the entertainment industry.

Bloomberg reported that the attorneys general of New York, Connecticut, and other states that had pushed back during settlement talks were able to secure “independent editorial boards for CBS and CNN as part of the deal”—though it’s unclear how such boards would function.

“The terms are said to include a financial penalty if the company fails to make good on a promise to distribute 30 films per year in theaters,” Bloomberg added.

This news is deeply disappointing and a massive betrayal of everyday workers and small businesses.

David Ellison is willing to make big promises, like 30 films a year, because he knows he doesn’t actually have to stand by it.

We’ve seen it before with past mergers: Promises… https://t.co/yAYXusKiRM
— American Economic Liberties Project (@econliberties) September 21, 2026

The Los Angeles Times noted that Paramount’s purchase of Warner Bros. “will be heavily leveraged.”

“The company’s bankers have lined up nearly $80 billion in debt to finance the merger. [Paramount CEO David] Ellison’s father, billionaire Larry Ellison, late last year agreed to backstop the $47-billion in equity needed to complete the acquisition. Royal families from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi have agreed to chip in $24 billion for an equity stake by assuming some of Ellison’s financial commitments.”

González of Free Press warned Monday that “consolidating the media in the hands of friendly oligarchs is right out of the authoritarian playbook.”

“What’s exceedingly clear is that our laws and our political system are not strong enough to resist the pressure and manipulation of corrupt billionaires," said González. "We need to strengthen democratic systems of government, including getting money out of politics, and pass laws that break up big media conglomerates. We need to ensure that a few billionaires can’t drown out the masses to dictate bad policy.”

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From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/79714

Cedrick Frazier’s blunt message for Minneapolis voters practically jumps off his yard signs: “PROSECUTE ICE. VOTE FRAZIER.”

The slogan reflects the city’s deep anger over the killing of two U.S. citizens by federal officers in January. It also reflects Frazier’s belief that the backlash gives him the edge in the race to serve as Minneapolis’s top prosecutor.

Frazier, a public defender turned state representative, is vying with former federal prosecutor Anders Folk in the race to become Hennepin County Attorney. The county, which includes Minneapolis, was beset by violence and chaos this winter amid a Trump administration immigration crackdown known as “Operation Metro Surge.”

Before the killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, the contest was shaping up as a referendum on so-called progressive prosecutions — fallout from a debate that began six years ago after George Floyd was murdered by former police officer Derek Chauvin.

Now it has morphed into something more. Either Frazier or his opponent will likely decide whether to prosecute the federal immigration agents who killed Good and Pretti. Those stakes give the race national implications, Hamline University political science professor David Schultz said.

“People are going to be looking at this race and asking: What does it tell us about holding law enforcement accountable?” he said. “If you hadn’t had Metro Surge, if you hadn’t had George Floyd, Derek Chauvin, it would be: Minneapolis is holding an election for county attorney — no big deal.”

Walking the Block

A county attorney in Minnesota has broad responsibilities that range from general counsel for local government to prosecuting crimes to pursuing child support cases.

Voters, however, only wanted to talk about one thing as Frazier canvassed the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis earlier this month: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s winter invasion. Without prompting, two voters in two blocks thanked him for his campaign promise to go after ICE.

The reminders of Minneapolis’s turbulent decade are everywhere in the city. A couple blocks away from a campaign field office, one building is still tagged with “#JUSTICE4GEORGE” graffiti. Within a short drive, the memorials for Good and Pretti are overflowing with flowers and handwritten tributes.

In an interview with The Intercept, Frazier was careful to say that he has not made any decisions about cases involving federal agents. Any explicit statement to that effect could be used to throw him off the case.

“But I don’t see it any different than saying we’re going to go after crime,” Frazier said. “We’re just making it very clear and very explicit that if you come here, regardless of what your title is, and if you violate the law here, there will be accountability for that.”

A native of the South Side of Chicago, Frazier moved to rural Minnesota for college and never left the state. He has three daughters and went from serving as a Hennepin County public defender to state representative for New Hope, a suburb of Minneapolis.

The 47-year-old built strong connections with the state affiliate of the Democratic Party and Minnesota’s powerful labor movement. His day job outside of his part-time legislative position is as an attorney for the state’s main teacher union.

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If he is elected, Frazier will likely face crucial decisions about whether to file or continue pursuing charges in the Good and Pretti killers. The sitting county attorney, Mary Moriarty, began the investigation into those killings with the aid of state Attorney General Keith Ellison, but she could leave the ultimate charging decision up to her successor. Frazier says he has no confidence in parallel federal investigations.

“I have no trust whatsoever in a Donald Trump-led Department of Justice actually getting us any justice or accountability for what happened here,” he said.

“Tagged With Trump”

His opponent, Folk, brings a strikingly different resume and support base to the race.

A Minnesota native and 49-year-old first-time candidate who served in the U.S. Marine Corps, he worked his way up through the ranks at the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis, where some of his most notable early cases focused on Somali American men accused of traveling to the Horn of Africa to fight for the designated terror group al-Shabaab.

After a stint at a national law firm, he returned to the U.S. attorney’s office in 2018 to serve as first assistant. He was briefly the interim top prosecutor after the resignation of the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in 2021. During that stint, he signed Chauvin’s indictment on federal civil rights charges connected to the murder of George Floyd.

In 2022, he left public service and became a partner at the white-shoe law firm Jones Day, which has helped corporations fight union campaigns.

His blue-chip resume attracted support from wealthy campaign donors and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who endorsed him early on.

Folk, whose campaign declined a request for an interview, leans on his prosecutorial experience to make the case that he is best suited to prosecute federal officers.

“These are cases we’ve never done here in Minnesota,” he said in an interview with Minnesota Public Radio last month. “These are going to be cases we’re doing for the first time in the history of this state. And I think it just really speaks to how critical it is to have that deep experience doing federal criminal prosecution work because that’s where these cases are all going to end up.”

While campaigning on his experience at the U.S. attorney’s office, however, his job as a federal prosecutor also presents a liability. Frazier routinely notes that Folk rejoined the office when Trump was president. That association has hurt Folk as much as anything else, said Schultz, the Hamline law and politics professor.

“He is tagged with Trump, he is tagged with the federal prosecutor’s office,” Schultz said.

“It’s guilt by association.”

Mary Moriarty’s Shadow

Frazier took 36 percent of the vote in the nonpartisan primary last month to Folk’s 23 percent. That lead makes him the “heavy” favorite but not the inevitable winner, Schultz said.

Folk’s supporters have bristled at the claims that he was a Trump lackey. In the run-off, Folk played up his connections to the Biden administration.

Yet Folk has played the guilt-by-association game, too, by tying Frazier to the current county attorney, Mary Moriarty.

Moriarty ran as an outspoken progressive when voters were outraged over her predecessor’s handling of Floyd’s murder. She promised to transform the office with a restorative approach and fresh reviews of past incidents of police brutality.

She followed through on those pledges but drew political flak for the way in which she went about it.

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Former Democratic allies, including state Attorney General Keith Ellison, castigated her over her handling of a case where two teen boys were accused in the killing a young mother and she sought to prosecute them as juveniles. Democratic Gov. Tim Walz eventually took her off the case and handed it to Ellison, a move she called undemocratic.

With her political fortunes sinking, Moriarty decided not to run again last year, well before Operation Metro Surge began. During the election, Frazier’s critics have sought to cast him as her second coming.

Folk quickly name-checked Moriarty when he was asked about his differences with Frazier in a recent radio interview.

“Not unlike my differences with Mary Moriarty, I’m somebody who has stood up in court and prosecuted for the people of the state of Minnesota,” Folk said. “And Cedrick Frazier has never done that. He has never been a prosecutor and has no experience there.”

Frazier chooses his words carefully when he talks about Moriarty’s legacy. He has positioned himself as more progressive than Folk and promised to continue some priorities, such as the police accountability project. Yet he has sought to distance herself from Moriarty on other issues. Though Moriarty changed the office’s policies to avoid charging juveniles as adults, Frazier says he is open to the possibility of such charges.

“I don’t know why it’s fair for him to say I’m going to be Mary Moriarty 2.0, but we can’t truthfully, truthfully say and talk about the fact that you worked under Donald Trump and you’re a partner at Jones Day,” Frazier said.

The family of the woman slain by the two teens said they felt betrayed by Moriarty’s decision to charge them as juveniles instead of adults. Frazier said that he will be more skillful in talking to community members than Moriarty. He will bring the same approach to killings perpetrated by law enforcement officers, he said.

“I’m going to have use-of-force experts right there with me, helping to inform me when I make those decisions,” he said. “And I’ll be very clear: If the case can’t be charged, I will go out and I will have that tough conversation with the community.”

The post Decision on Charging Renee Good and Alex Pretti’s Killers Looms Over Minneapolis DA Race appeared first on The Intercept.

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