Weekly Member Update - January 26, 2026
Ron Haviv, The New Republic
As we write this, 10,000 new soldiers are being trained by the Department of Homeland Security to invade American cities, courtesy of the Big Beautiful Bill enacted this past summer by the Mad Orange King and his Republican sycophants who control Congress. These 10,000 new stormtroopers will join the 3,000 already terrorizing the streets of Minnesota, and the thousands more in Maine and in communities across the Country, including here in the Capital District. We also now know that the “training” these goons are receiving includes guidance authorizing ICE to illegally enter homes without a judicial warrant in violation of the Fourth Amendment. These are the facts that race through our heads as we watch the federal government’s unlawful occupation of Minnesota and wonder when our own time will come.
If you didn’t know it before, the events of January 2026 in Minnesota and elsewhere have clearly demonstrated what we are confronted with in our American Republic. For the second time in 17 days, federal agents have executed an American citizen on the streets of Minneapolis because those citizens have had the temerity to exercise rights guaranteed to them by the US Constitution in the vicinity of ICE and Border Patrol. As we saw first with the murder of Renee Good and now with the killing of Alex Pretti, the first impulse of the representatives of the Trump Regime — Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Tom Homan, JD Vance, Greg Bovino and the like — is to lie to our faces about what we have seen and heard in countless videos streaming across our televisions and electronic devices. The murdered are “domestic terrorists” and their actions are nefarious “assaults upon law enforcement.” According to Noem, Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot Renee Good in the head three times, was acting “defensively” and was hit by Good’s vehicle so severely that he required medical attention at a local hospital. Yet, we all saw Ross calmly stroll away after ending Renee Good’s life in front of her spouse and dog. According to Bovino, the Border Patrol agents who shot Pretti 10 or more times while he was face down on the ground were themselves the “victims” who deserve praise for “taking [Pretti] down.” Yet, we all saw ICE agents beat, disarm and then execute Pretti. The lies emanating from federal government officials never remotely align with the reality we see, but still the lies persist, an Orwellian gaslighting of unimaginable proportions.
But lies are all the Regime has, along with their capacity for violence. Trump campaigned on conducting the largest mass deportation in American history, assuring his gullible supporters that he would be targeting only the “worst of the worst.” This has proven to be a baldfaced lie completely at odds with what we have all witnessed, from ChongLi Thao and Liam Ramos to Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk. Even the stated rationale for the federal occupation of Minnesota — social services fraud — is a transparent pretext for the gutter racism against Somali-Americans and Trump’s personalist crusade against his political opponents. That pretextual lie was laid bare by Attorney General Pam Bondi over the weekend, as she wrote to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and offered to end the federal occupation once the State capitulates to her demands, which includes granting the Department of Justice access to Minnesota voter registration records. Minnesota has refused this attempted extortion, of course, but as renowned lawyer Marc Elias has pointed out, Bondi’s demand for voter data is simply another predicate for a future lie to undermine confidence in elections which Republicans will lose.
Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
It is tempting to ascribe the federal government’s cavalcade of lies to the pathologies of Donald Trump himself. The Mad King lies likes he breathes, after all, his pathetic grandiosity and preening narcissism are the hallmarks of what passes for his noxious personality. But that would be an oversimplification, because violence and lies are the twin pillars of authoritarianism itself. Trump’s personal narcissism may provide him with the shamelessness necessary to spew lies at every turn, but his authoritarian project needs those lies to justify the Regime’s violent oppression and, as we have witnessed in Minnesota, the violent oppression will itself beget new lies that themselves prompt further state violence. It’s a cruel and self-sustaining cycle that can only be interrupted with repeated and vehement proclamations of the truth. As Elias advises, “authoritarianism prevails not because people stop believing the truth, but because they stop saying it aloud. If we wish to remain free, we must refuse that silence.”
While Minnesota has torn the mask off of the fascism overtaking our Nation, it has also given us hope and a blueprint for resistance. There has been some excellent reporting from Ana Marie Cox, Emily Witt and others about the herculean resistance operations by the People of Minnesota. Wine moms transforming into rapid response legal observers, grandparents leading mutual aid food pantries and laundering efforts, neighbors demonstrating with resilience and persistence. As we contemplate those 10,000 new and poorly trained DHS stormtroopers moving into more of our cities, including our own, we look to Minnesota and know that this is the work we all will need to do. On the streets and blocks where we live and sleep. At the schools that our children attend. Groups of vigilant neighbors connected to one another and to other like-minded groups in an ever-expanding network of concentric circles in order to defend ourselves against the indiscriminate violence being used against us by a federalized goon squad.
Tonight at 8:00, Indivisible is holding an Eyes on ICE: Document and Record training and we encourage you all to attend. We are also working with our Greater Capital Region Coalition partners on developing additional training programs to help prepare our neighbors for an ICE surge we hope will never come. Remember as well that our next Member Meeting is coming up on February 9 at The Love Albany Center. News broke this week that Amazon’s Ring camera systems would be partnering with Flock camera systems, the AI-powered license-plate readers that have proliferated across the Country, thereby making video recorded on homeowners’ Ring cameras available to ICE. Our February Member Meeting will feature a public forum on Flock cameras, how they work, where they are, how the data is retained and, more importantly, how this data is being funneled to federal agencies such as ICE to target and track immigrant communities. Flock cameras have been quietly installed throughout the Capital Region in recent years; our public forum will help give you the tools you need to fight further expansion of Flock surveillance and to call on public officials to to remove the Flocks that already exist.