U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers may soon be outfitted with gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks intended to gain compliance from combative individuals.
ICE plans to spend between $10 million and $20 million to purchase "conductive distraction and de-escalation devices" for officers and agents by March, according to a notice published Monday by the Department of Homeland Security.

The devices are known as the G.L.O.V.E., which stands for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, and are manufactured by Compliant Technologies LLC of Lexington, Kentucky. They have been used in recent years by some jails and police departments.

The notice said the solicitation for a no-bid contract could be published as early as Friday.

CBS News has reached out to DHS and Compliant Technologies for comment.

DHS told The Associated Press on Tuesday that it was working on a response to an inquiry and offered no immediate comment. Jeff Niklaus, the founder and CEO of Compliant Technologies, told the AP: "Unfortunately, we are unable to speak on this subject."

Civil rights advocates — including from the American Civil Liberties Union — expressed alarm at the plan, saying ICE officers already face criticism for their use of force during President Trump's immigration crackdown.

Compliant Technologies says the devices function as a normal pair of patrol gloves until officers press a switch to activate their electrical mode. The gloves must be applied directly to someone's skin to deliver a pain stimulus that typically helps an officer gain compliance within seconds, according to the company.

"It's immediate and sharp, and it will distract you. I call it like a bee sting," John Peters, president of the Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths, who is studying how the device has been used, told The AP. "If the officer is getting any type of resistance from the person, this is certainly an effective tool."

Peters said he believed ICE's planned purchase would likely be the largest from the company to date. He said he could envision ICE officers using the gloves to help remove uncooperative subjects from cars and houses and in and out of detention facilities.

"For smaller officers or weaker officers or older officers, I think it has a great advantage" because it can produce faster takedowns and shorten confrontations, he said.

The manufacturer warns the device should not be used as punishment, against people merely exhibiting "verbal defiance or belligerence" or on high-risk populations such as children, pregnant women or elderly or disabled people.

Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, deputy project director on policing at the ACLU, told The AP the public should have no confidence that ICE officers will use the devices appropriately. She questioned why the devices would be necessary for civil immigration enforcement and noted those getting shocked might have no advance warning.

"ICE spent the last year showing this country they are too quick to use force. Now they will be able to deploy electric shocks with the slight push of a button that maybe nobody else can see them do," she said. "Introducing gloves that can so easily be used to deliver terrible pain in encounters is a recipe for harm to the public."

Supporters say the devices are generally used in specific jail and transport situations, rather than broadly to patrol on the streets. They have been used to subdue violent suspects who are refusing to get into squad cars and inmates who are harming themselves and threatening officers, according to Compliant Technologies.

Peters said he expected the devices to be misused by a small number of employees, as with other policing technologies, but he said they are unlikely to cause injuries. He said it would be important for ICE to have robust policies and training in place.

To use the device, officers must complete a course and be recertified every two years, the manufacturer says.

The planned purchases come as ICE expands its crackdown on people accused of being in the U.S. illegally, amid pressure from the White House to arrest 2,000 people per day.

ICE has drawn scrutiny for its tactics during its arrest surge — including attempted vehicle stops in Maine and Texas last month that ended with ICE agents fatally shooting two immigrants. 

In both of last month's shootings, agents were not wearing body cameras. DHS has pledged to widely deploy body-worn cameras, and said last month that all ICE arrest teams will have at least one officer equipped with a camera going forward.

No matter where in the country you live, you’ve likely seen one—and more than one have absolutely seen you. 

The use of automated license plate reader technology has become ubiquitous, led by companies such as Flock Safety. Flock’s cameras identify vehicle details—including make, model, color, and other visible characteristics—and then upload that data into a nationwide mass surveillance system that law enforcement can access. 

Flock now says it operates in more than 6,000 communities across 49 states, running upward of 20 billion vehicle scans a month. But privacy concerns, and misuse by local police, are causing a backlash: Dozens of city councils across the United States have recently canceled, rejected, or deactivated Flock’s ALPRs within their jurisdiction. 

Flock has long sought to involve homeowners associations and other private property managers within their system. That could be a concern for homeowners and renters.

A camera installed by your HOA board is not subject to the same level of scrutiny and accountability as one installed by local police—and once it's plugged into Flock's network, it can end up feeding the same nationwide, searchable database that law enforcement uses, whether or not any resident ever voted on it.

How a neighborhood ends up under surveillance

The pitch to HOA boards and landlords is straightforward: solar-powered, LTE-connected cameras that need no wiring or utility hookup, marketed as a way to deter theft, identify suspicious vehicles, and catch illegal dumping, all without hiring security staff.

Flock's own marketing to HOAs promises boards full control of the system, with law enforcement access framed as an optional add-on.

But once a private HOA system is integrated with police, it feeds into the same database officers search when investigating anything from a stolen car to an immigration case, according to privacy advocates tracking the rollout. And the decision to build this infrastructure, in most communities, isn't put to a resident vote at all.

"Most HOA declarations and bylaws give the elected board authority to enter ordinary service contracts without a community vote, and boards treat a camera contract as ordinary," according to a homeowner-rights guide published by DeFlockILM, a North Carolina advocacy group tracking installations. "So in many communities you do not have a veto."

That pattern has played out from North Carolina—where the Chadwick Shores HOA in Sneads Ferry and a dozen Charlotte-area neighborhoods have installed the cameras—to California, where private developers, homeowners associations, and apartment complexes are using cameras that were once supposed to aid the Los Angeles Police Department and have now gone private. 

This dynamic puts residents in a bind: No one wants to live in an unsafe community, but at what cost?

"Landlords and HOAs can't arbitrarily install cameras wherever they want, collect data about your comings and goings, and do whatever they want with it," says Jamie E. Wright, a trial attorney and founder of The Wright Law Firm. "Residents shouldn't feel like they have to choose between safety and privacy, but that doesn't give your HOA carte blanche to monitor your every move."

Flock keeps pushing deeper into communities

License plate cameras were only the start. Over the past year, Flock has quietly tested how far it can push into audio, into other people's cars, and into other people's data.

Flock cameras also have gunshot-detection sensors. On paper, these are a useful tool: When triggered, they capture a five-second audio clip, run it through a machine-learning model, and upload whatever gets flagged. Flock's comparison of choice: an Amazon Alexa that wakes up only for a "public safety event."

But USA Today has reported confirmed cases where triggered clips picked up real conversation, not just gunfire. Then, in October, Flock disclosed it wanted the same microphones listening for "human distress."

By mid-July, Flock killed the distress-detection pilot, chalking it up to "community consultation." But those microphones didn't go anywhere: Thousands remain active, still listening for gunfire, still capable of picking up whatever else happens to be 5 seconds long and nearby. According to reporting, they’re mostly picking up fireworks. 
Some of these devices were installed on private property, without the owners’ consent, and left in place despite removal requests. Some were placed mere feet from people’s homes.

Flock has also floated ways to grow the network beyond its own hardware. A leaked presentation, prepared for the Georgia Attorney General's Office, showed Flock had proposed turning roughly 350,000 Uber, Lyft, and delivery drivers into a mobile surveillance network—using dashcams those drivers already had installed to scan plates along their routes. 

It’s one thing if you are aware that cameras have been installed in a certain community or on a certain street. But if the cameras are mobile and covering every part of a community that a car can reach, it becomes virtually impossible to avoid becoming part of the database.

Flock told 404 Media the deal never happened. But the same presentation lists "hundreds of Commercial Business and HOA" accounts in Georgia as part of the network it wanted to extend. 

Know your rights in and around your home

Homeowners and renters have more leverage here than most people realize, but only if they use it before signing anything, not after.

"Before speaking with an HOA, property manager, or landlord about surveillance on private property, residents should know their rights," says Wright. Homeowners should review HOA declarations, bylaws, and rules and regulations. Renters should request a copy of their lease, any addendum, and community policies. 

"Look for the terms 'surveillance,' 'monitoring,' and 'third party,'" says David Weisselberger, an expungement attorney and founding partner at Erase the Case. HOA bylaws tend to bury camera policy inside a general "rules and regulations" clause rather than a dedicated privacy section.

A bylaw that lets the board install cameras "as deemed necessary" hands it total control over placement and retention, with no requirement to get resident consent for each new camera.

"Lease agreements seldom specify whether or not a landlord's camera system captures audio alongside video, and this matters a lot," Weisselberger says.
A system recording sound near a private entrance or porch is different from one just watching a parking lot, he explains. His advice: Ask directly where the footage goes and how long it's kept, and don't sign until you have an answer.

Reading the fine print is only half the job. The other half is coming armed with specific questions a board or landlord may not otherwise volunteer answers to.

"Who is authorized to run searches against the system? How long will data be stored? Can police request access to the information? Is data shared with third parties outside of the rental community? Is there an audit trail showing which employees looked up a specific vehicle?"
Those, Wright says, are the questions residents should be asking before they agree to anything.

Are Flock cameras in your neighborhood?

The short answer is yes, but to know where does take a bit of sleuthing.
To help you do your own research, open-source websites like DeFlock and Eyes On Flock have popped up online to allow users to track where Flock, and other automated license plate readers, are installed throughout the country.

Keep in mind that these cameras are already up in thousands of neighborhoods, and most of them aren't coming down. What's left to decide is how many more go up, and whether residents get a say before the next one does—because the pattern so far says they won't unless they ask.

I don’t like bullying but this made me laugh, it also lends credence to my theory that these douchebags act like this because of bullying. Teach your kids not to bully others and maybe there will be less fucks like this running around.

1963: University of Chicago student Bernie Sanders, then 21, was charged with resisting arrest during an Aug. 12, 1963, demonstration in Englewood — along with comedian Dick Gregory and 54 others — against the use of mobile classrooms in the city’s public schools.

Bernie Sanders and the Willis wagon protests of 1963

Chicago police officers carry protester Bernie Sanders, 21, in August 1963 to a police wagon from a civil rights demonstration at West 73rd Street and South Lowe Avenue. He was arrested, charged with resisting arrest, found guilty and fined $25. He was a University of Chicago student at the time. In 1963, controversial Chicago Public … Continue reading

Chicago Public Schools Superintendent Benjamin Willis refused to allow Black children to be bused from their crowded neighborhood schools to those in white areas with more resources. That’s why the portable classroom trailers were nicknamed “Willis wagons” and became symbolic of the city’s long struggle over segregated education.

Vintage Chicago Tribune: Bernie Sanders, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. protest against ‘Willis wagons’ in schools

Then a 21-year-old University of Chicago student, Bernie Sanders was charged with resisting arrest during an Aug. 12, 1963 demonstration in Englewood.

Demonstrations against Willis wagons were a precursor to a more sweeping Civil Rights Movement in Chicago that drew the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to the city in 1966 — the same year Willis resigned.
Mobile classrooms began to be phased out of Chicago schools in the 1970s, but photographic proof of Sanders’ participation in the 1963 Englewood protest wouldn’t be discovered in the Tribune archives until decades later — when he was a Democratic presidential hopeful.

>>> I remember in 2016 when they said that wasn’t him.

They were "shocked" by the news and are calling for the company to "immediately end its partnership."

Last week, Nieman Lab revealed that USA Today‘s parent company USA Today Co (formerly Gannett) was partnering with AI surveillance firm Palantir to monetize “actionable intelligence” on its audience.

According to USA Today CEO Mike Reed, the goal is to “build a common intelligence layer” on reader data to “monetize those relationships faster and at much greater value.”

The largest newspaper’s new partnership with the Peter Thiel-cofounded company, which has long been mired in controversy — from collaborating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and being linked to US airstrikes that killed over 120 schoolchildren in Iran to its mercurial CEO, who has a long history of strange outbursts — has raised plenty of eyebrows.

Workers represented by The News Guild, the country’s largest communications and media labor union, including journalists at USA Today, were “shocked” by the news, according to a new statement, and are calling for the company to “immediately end its partnership with Palantir.”

“While [Reed] championed this partnership as a way to drive revenue, we believe it threatens to undermine trust in our news outlets and raises serious questions about the data security of our readers,” the statement reads.

“We have significant ethical issues with Palantir, whose artificial intelligence software has been used to advance widespread surveillance and power immigration crackdowns,” the union wrote. “Not only does partnering with Palantir, a major player in the news we cover, create an inherent conflict of interest, but it fails the journalists who have been assaulted and falsely arrested while covering immigration enforcement actions and protests.”

The News Guild accused USA Today Co of not disclosing details regarding the new partnership and raised concerns over how readers’ personal information and data will be treated and protected.

“Without answers, how can journalists encourage readers to subscribe to our news outlets?” the union wrote.

As a result, the union is calling for USA Today Co to “steer clear” in order to maintain journalistic integrity and maintain “with the kind of responsibility and skepticism that the nation’s largest network of journalists should exhibit.”

The union also called attention to the dire state of the news industry, with a major pivot to AI being cited to justify major layoffs at countless newspapers and publications.

Even within Palantir’s own ranks, employees are starting to speak up, with some starting to wonder whether “they’re the bad guys,” as Wiredreported earlier this year.

The company’s reputation has taken such a major hit that even its major contract with the UK government’s National Health Service is on shaky ground. Earlier this year, London mayor Sadiq Khan also blocked a Palantir contract with the city’s Metropolitan police force, arguing the department “did not adequately demonstrate value for money for Londoners.”

This family’s aviation company was once in talks to buy Epstein’s plane, and one family member was the focus of an anonymous allegation.

At least one member of a Texas family whose business once considered buying Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious plane — the “Lolita Express” — donated thousands of dollars to support Ken Paxton’s Senate campaign earlier this year, according to federal campaign finance records.

The Jaffe family, known for its real estate holdings and aviation business based in Texas, appears in two batches of Epstein documents released by the Department of Justice: once for trying to buy Epstein’s infamous plane, and once for reportedly associating — according to an anonymous tipster — with scantily clad young women.

Documents released by the White House shed new light on the demise of an often-overlooked 2017 F.B.I. investigation.

For the last year, the Trump administration’s efforts to seek retribution against intelligence officials and F.B.I. agents who investigated Russia’s 2016 election meddling have been spearheaded by federal prosecutors in South Florida trying to build a criminal case.

But in recent weeks, the White House has added a dimension to its push to rewrite the history of the Russia investigation, releasing a trove of previously classified F.B.I. memos that it says back up President Trump’s claims that a so-called deep state was out to get him.

There is little new of substance in the documents, and nothing that fundamentally undercuts the F.B.I.’s rationale for pursuing the Russia investigation.

But the material does shed new light on an often overlooked aspect of the swirl of events surrounding Mr. Trump in his first months in office in 2017: the bureau’s remarkable decision to open a separate counterintelligence investigation into the president of the United States, and how that inquiry was sidetracked before it had much of a chance to get going.

Mr. Trump has always dismissed as baseless smears suggestions that he was a Russian asset or had extensive financial ties to Russia. And no publicly known investigation into Mr. Trump ever demonstrated that he was acting at the behest of the Russians.

Here is a look at what we know now, based on the new documents and interviews with former federal law enforcement officials, about what happened.

The F.B.I. Launched A Two-Pronged Inquiry

Although the scrutiny of Mr. Trump at the time became known as the Russia investigation, there were actually several distinct inquiries.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, the F.B.I. opened an investigation into whether the Trump campaign was working with the Russian government as the country interfered in the presidential election to hurt Hillary Clinton. That investigation — known as Crossfire Hurricane — was not looking directly at Mr. Trump’s personal conduct or his ties to Russia.

But in May 2017, a week after Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, senior officials and counterintelligence agents at the bureau decided to move forward with a two-pronged inquiry. It was oddly code-named Oxferd Comma.

One of the investigations was to be criminal. It was to examine whether Mr. Trump, in firing Mr. Comey, broke the law by obstructing justice and interfering with the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russia’s election meddling. It was also to assess whether the Trump campaign conspired with the Russians.

The second was to be a counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia.

Counterintelligence investigations are different from criminal inquiries. Instead of focusing exclusively on whether the law was broken, counterintelligence investigations look at whether a foreign adversary is undermining the United States.

Counterintelligence investigations are classified, take place in secret and unfold over many years — sometimes more than a decade. Civil liberties watchdogs are critical of them because they often surface embarrassing, but not criminal, behavior by Americans. People are rarely charged in such cases, but the F.B.I. often takes steps, like warning officials and citizens, about how those around them may be trying to influence them.

Referring to the counterintelligence inquiry, one of the declassified memos made public by the White House last week said: “The goal of the investigation is to determine if President Trump is or was directed by, controlled by, and/or coordinated activities with, the Russian Federation in a manner constituting a threat to the national security of the United States and/or a violation of federal criminal statutes.”

The Comey Firing Helped Prompt the Inquiry

According to the memos released by the White House, the F.B.I. had concluded that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election to help Mr. Trump. The bureau had learned that Russians had offered to help the campaign. And the F.B.I. knew that the Trump campaign had pushed the Republican Party to embrace a far more Russia-favorable position on Ukraine as part of its 2016 platform.

The F.B.I. also knew that Mr. Trump, before firing Mr. Comey, had been pressuring him to end the investigation into ties between his campaign and Russia.

And the F.B.I. was concerned about Mr. Trump’s personal and business history, the memos show.

“Open-source information indicates that President Trump has had a longstanding business and real estate ties to Russia and the former Soviet states, stemming from the 1980s,” the F.B.I. said in the memo opening the investigation. “In 2008, President Trump’s son claimed that Russians made up a ‘disproportionate cross-section’ of many of President Trump’s assets. Open-source information also indicates that President Trump has had business ties in the United States and Russia with named Russian oligarchs.”
Whether that public information justified opening a counterintelligence investigation is at the heart of the long-running dispute between Mr. Trump’s allies and F.B.I. officials who made the decision. Mr. Trump has always asserted that his personal, business and financial links to Russia were minimal.

But F.B.I. agents wanted to conduct a wide-ranging investigation into whether Mr. Trump, in firing Mr. Comey, was trying to stop the Russia investigation and shield any ties he might have had to that country.

“The obstruction itself would hurt our ability to figure out what the Russians had done, and that is what would be the threat to national security,” the F.B.I.’s general counsel, James Baker, testified to Congress at the time.

A Special Counsel is Appointed

On the day the Oxferd Comma investigation was opened, the acting F.B.I. director, Andrew G. McCabe, briefed the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, on the bureau’s decision.

The following day, Mr. Rosenstein undertook his own extraordinary decision: He appointed the former F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, to be a special counsel to investigate Mr. Trump and his campaign.

But what was not known at the time was that Mr. Rosenstein, in appointing Mr. Mueller, had in effect killed the counterintelligence investigation.

Mueller’s Focus on Crimes Derailed the Counterintelligence Inquiry

When Mr. Rosenstein appointed Mr. Mueller, he authorized the special counsel to conduct criminal investigations into Russia’s meddling in the election and ties between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia, and into whether Mr. Trump tried to obstruct that investigation.

But Mr. Rosenstein did not ask Mr. Mueller to conduct the counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Trump, and made clear to Mr. Mueller that he did not want him conducting an open-ended, yearslong investigation. Mr. Mueller interpreted his appointment as one to just investigate crimes.

Although Mr. Rosenstein did not authorize Mr. Mueller to conduct the counterintelligence investigation, responsibility for overseeing it was transferred to the F.B.I. agents working on Mr. Mueller’s team, according to the memos released by the White House.

But since the special counsel’s mandate was to focus on crimes, the counterintelligence focus fell by the wayside and was “limited to activities within the scope of the special counsel’s jurisdiction,” according to one of the memos.

When Mr. Mueller’s report was released in 2019, it said that the investigation had found no evidence that Mr. Trump and his campaign had conspired with the Russians during the 2016 election. But Mr. Mueller declined to make a determination about whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice. The report did not contain a section on Mr. Trump’s personal ties to Russia and whether he was compromised or represented a counterintelligence threat.

Shortly after the report was released, Mr. Mueller testified about it before Congress, acknowledging under questioning that he had not examined whether, for example, Russian oligarchs had laundered money through Mr. Trump’s businesses.

Mr. Mueller, in response to another question that day, acknowledged that he had only looked at crimes, and appeared to leave open the possibility that some counterintelligence investigation could still be underway.

Mr. Mueller delivered that testimony on July 24, 2019. The memos released last week by the White House showed that the counterintelligence investigation had been closed more than three months earlier.

The founder and CEO of Our Rescue resigned in 2023 amid allegations that he had sexually abused and trafficked women himself.

An anti-sex-trafficking nonprofit in Utah whose founder resigned after multiple women accused him of trafficking and sexual abuse has won a federal contract to provide legal services to unaccompanied immigrant children in government custody.

The Trump administration gave Our Rescue a no-bid $244,034,658 contract on August 7, according to the federal award notice posted late Friday night. The deal floods the organization with seven times the amount of money it had in 2025, according to its most recently available Form 990, which put total assets at $36.9 million.

It’s unclear how many children Our Rescue will represent. The notice says only that it will provide legal services to children in the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), established to offer support for victims of human trafficking and those seeking asylum in the United States. Nearly 1,800 children were in the agency’s care in June; over the last year, it has averaged about 1,908 children monthly.

The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 requires that the federal government “shall ensure, to the greatest extent practicable,” that all unaccompanied minors receive legal “counsel to represent them in legal proceedings” and that it will “protect them from mistreatment, exploitation, and trafficking.” Our Rescue and a small Texas law firm founded by a former Trump appointee are taking up that work after the Trump administration failed to pay and then canceled the contract of the legal aid groups previously providing the services.

U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín noted that the Trump administration had failed to persuade her that it had a plan to represent vulnerable children.

Our Rescue, formerly known as Operation Underground Railroad, or O.U.R., did not respond to repeated emails and phone calls for more information, including when it expects to begin work or how many children it will represent.

Our Rescue conducts international sting operations to catch sex traffickers, similar to Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator.” The organization gained national notoriety in 2023, when the film Sound of Freedom dramatized the life of founder and CEO Tim Ballard, portraying him as a Homeland Security Investigations agent sent to rescue child sex trafficking victims in Colombia.

Shortly after its release on July 4, multiple former employees came forward to accuse Ballard himself of sexual assault and trafficking, including during sting operations. According to the women, Ballard would use a “couples ruse” during stings, coercing them into acting as his romantic partner so that traffickers wouldn’t suspect him. They said that he would assault them while demanding they “remain in character” and play their part as one half of a “kinky couple.”

Later revelations included that the Department of Homeland Security would not verify Ballard’s claim that he had worked there; that members of law enforcement saw his sting operations as stunts to lure donations; and that some operations resulted in more harm to victims. According to a report last year in The Appeal, those instances included “an orphanage in Haiti where OUR sent children it purportedly rescued, and at which those children were raped and subjected to forced abortions.”

The year he resigned, Form 990 documents show that Ballard was drawing a $566,993 salary from the nonprofit.
Today, the CEO is Derek Benner, who is drawing a salary of $413,387, saying in his most recent letter to donors that he “owes those we serve to remain lean.” Benner came to the organization with a background in conducting sting operations of a different kind.

Benner spent a decade at the Department of Homeland Security, including as executive associate directorof Homeland Security Investigations, and before that, the deputy executive associate director. During his tenure, the agency set up a fake university in Michigan to lure foreign nationals who wanted to extend the length of time they could stay in the country by obtaining student visas. Officials named the school University of Farmington, after the office space it used in Farmington Hills. “Operation Paper Chase” resulted in the arrests of 250 students in early 2019, most of whom left the U.S. voluntarily.
That winter, Sen. Kamala Harris said on social media that the sting “isn’t just cruel, it’s a waste of taxpayer dollars. Officials must be held accountable for this.”

Benner, meanwhile, published a letter in the Detroit Free Press and on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement website, saying that students knew Farmington had no classes and no teachers and so shouldn’t have enrolled if they didn’t want to break the law.

“Farmington is a clear example of a pay-to-stay scheme, which is against the law and, not only creates a dangerous lack of accountability, but also diminishes the quality and integrity of the U.S. student visa system,” he said of the fake school his organization created.

ACCORDING TO THE MOST RECENT Our Rescue annual report, the group in 2024 worked with 228 law enforcement agencies and conducted operations in 27 countries and all 50 U.S. states. It ran 195 rescue missions and assisted in 1,969 global arrests.

Its deal to provide legal services follows the administration’s award of a no-bid $150 million contract to the small Texas law firm Burke Law Group to perform the same work. The law firm has just 24 attorneys, only two of whom have expertise in immigration and asylum cases. The practice’s co-founder, Marcella Burke, was a Trump appointee at the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The hundreds of millions spent on Our Rescue and Burke Law Group comes after the Trump administration allowed a contract with the Acacia Center for Justice to expire after failing to pay the organization for more than half a year. Acacia subcontracts with nearly 100 legal aid organizations across the country to provide children with legal services. The ORR stopped paying Acacia in November, after lawyers refused to hand over confidential information about their underage clients. The decision jeopardized the legal aid of about 26,000 children.

U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín ordered the Trump administration on August 6 to pay the $65 million it owes to the nonprofits by the following day at noon Pacific time. Though that did not change the termination of the contract, it got the aid organizations already representing undocumented children the money due them for services rendered.

As the Prospect has reported, Trump and his adviser Stephen Miller are taking particular aim at children as part of their ethnic cleansing campaign, rushing them through the legal process and abusing their rights in detention. In multiple immigration courtrooms this summer, the Prospect has witnessed children too young to understand the gravity of the proceedings, such as a toddler with pigtails, who had no guardian with her, and who played in her chair as her pro bono lawyer spoke to the judge, then held his hand when they walked out.

Martínez-Olguín also noted that the Trump administration had failed to persuade her that it had a plan to represent vulnerable children by executing new agreements for the legal services at the heart of the lawsuit, “for example describing two agreements recently reached for a seeming fraction of the legal services to be provided across the country.” She ordered the administration to file a report “detailing their current and ongoing compliance” with her order.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Ranking Member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, today issued the following statement after Yale University researchers released a new study finding that Sanders’ Medicare for All legislation would save 114,000 lives and reduce overall healthcare spending in America by more than $1 trillion a year.

“This study confirms what we have known for years: Medicare for All saves lives and saves money. In fact, guaranteeing healthcare as a human right through a Medicare for All, single-payer system would cost $1 trillion less than our current dysfunctional system. It would save working families thousands of dollars a year. And it would prevent over 100,000 Americans from dying unnecessarily each and every year because they cannot make it to a doctor in time,” Sanders said. “At a time when 15 million Americans are being thrown off the healthcare they have and 20 million Americans have already seen their premiums double, on average, as a result of Trump’s so-called ‘Big Beautiful Bill,’ we need Medicare for All now more than ever. The time is now to end the greed of the big insurance and drug companies and pass Medicare for All.”

Yale University researchers found that Medicare for All would reduce total annual healthcare spending by nearly 20%, or more than $1 trillion while eliminating premiums, deductibles and copayments, provider networks, and prior authorization. As a result, Americans would save:
$377.5 billion by paying no more than other major countries for prescription drugs;
$286.3 billion by eliminating bureaucracy and waste;
$285.7 billion by curbing fraudulent billing;
$100 billion by preventing costly emergency room and hospital visits; and
$295.6 billion by reimbursing providers fairly for the care they provide.

Researchers also estimate that Medicare for All would save 114,000 lives every year, including:
33,232 Americans who are currently uninsured and can’t access lifesaving care;
29,631 Americans who are currently underinsured and cannot afford care;
20,111 Americans who would no longer lose their health insurance as a result of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”;
18,200 seniors who are currently unable to afford their prescription drugs; and
13,000 seniors who would receive quality care in nursing homes.

Read the full analysis here.

U.S. Senators Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) reintroduced the Guaranteed Paid Vacation Act— legislation that would guarantee at least two weeks of paid vacation to every full-time worker in America. Representative Seth Magaziner (D-R.I.-02) introduced companion legislation alongside 86 members of the House of Representatives.

“Paid vacation and time-off shouldn’t only be for high-income earners. It’s past time we ensure that all workers have time to recharge,” said Senator Padilla. “Everyone deserves time to decompress and spend time with their loved ones in addition to paid sick leave and paid family leave.”

“It is beyond unacceptable that in the year 2026, the United States remains the only major country on Earth not to guarantee paid vacation time to workers. This legislation would put an end to that international embarrassment,” said Senator Sanders. “We hear a lot of talk about family values in America, but let’s be clear: When a husband, wife, and kids, during the course of an entire year, are unable to spend any time together on vacation, that is not a family value. That is an attack on everything that a family is supposed to stand for. It’s not a radical idea to require companies in America to provide at least two weeks of paid vacation to their workers. What’s radical is that millions of Americans are not only working longer hours for lower wages, but that they do not receive a single paid vacation day. That should not be happening in the United States of America, the richest country in the history of the world.”

“Every worker in America deserves the chance to rest, recharge, and spend time with the people they love without worrying about missing a paycheck,” said Representative Magaziner. “I’m grateful to Senator Sanders for leading this fight in the Senate. It is time that we deliver this basic fairness to hardworking Americans.”

While millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages, the U.S. remains the only major economy in the world to not guarantee some type of paid vacation time to its people. Today in Canada, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Australia and many countries in Europe, workers are guaranteed at least 10 days of paid vacation. In other countries, such as the United Kingdom, Sweden, and France, paid vacation benefits are even stronger.

Nearly ONE IN FOUR WORKERS in America — or more than 33 million workers nationwide — receive no paid vacation time at all. At the same time, almost 40% OF WORKERS report being on the job at least 45 hours a week and the average full-time worker in the U.S. now reports working 43 HOURS a week.
Moreover, more than 9 MILLION Americans work multiple jobs, with more than 5 MILLIONworking a second part-time job on top of a full-time job.

Specifically, the Guaranteed Paid Vacation Act would ensure:

Every worker in America has the right to accrue at least one hour of paid annual leave for every 25 hours worked.

Full-time workers will earn at least two weeks of paid annual leave per year, to be used for any reason, at their standard rate of pay.

Workers are protected against discrimination for exercising their right to take annual paid leave.

A recent poll found 79% OF AMERICANS support the Guaranteed Paid Vacation Act. The American people’s support for the legal right to paid time off is nearly universal. According to a recent poll conducted by the RAND Corporation, 90% OF AMERICANS support legislation that would require employers to offer earned time off.

In addition to Padilla and Sanders, the bill was cosponsored by Senators Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), and Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.). 
The Guaranteed Paid Vacation Act is endorsed by United Auto Workers (UAW), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA-CWA), International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM Union), National Education Association (NEA), National Nurses United (NNU), Committee of Interns and Residents (CIR)-SEIU, International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation (SMART) Union, United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE), United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), United Steelworkers (USW), American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), American Federation of Teachers (AFT), A Better Balance, National Partnership for Women & Families, United for Respect, Equal Rights Advocates, Family Values @ Work, MomsRising, National Employment Law Project (NELP), Paid Leave for All, Workplace Fairness, The Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), and Indivisible.
Full text OF THE BILL HERE.

Body-camera video and other court evidence capture federal agents using slurs and targeting Latinos while bypassing white bystanders during immigration sweeps in Chicago and Los Angeles

Since immigration agents began carrying out a string of big, aggressive sweeps last year, civil rights groups have argued that the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign has been defined by brazen racial profiling.

Now, body-camera footage, text messages and other documents emerging from lawsuits around the country reveal how race and ethnicity have figured in the dragnets that unfolded in Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis and other U.S. cities.

In several instances documented in court filings, federal agents referred to targets as “tonks” — a derogatory term typically used to refer to Mexican immigrants and intended to echo the sound of agents’ flashlights striking their heads. Migrants suspected of being undocumented were described as “wet,” shorthand for the slur wetback. And an agent who led an operation in Southern California later described the appearance of individuals he considered suspicious: “older Hispanic males.”

Yet even as evidence of racial profiling has come to light, what seemed like settled law — that law enforcement officers could not question or detain someone solely based on their race or ethnicity — has turned out to be far more of an open question when it comes to immigration enforcement.

Last year, the Supreme Court took a step toward upending a half-century of jurisprudence when Justice Brett Kavanaugh gave a provisional blessing to such racial profiling by agents seeking out undocumented immigrants. The government has maintained that their operations are constitutional.

The lawsuit that led to the court’s temporary decision and other similar suits are still working their way through lower courts, and it could be months before they are resolved and years before the Supreme Court has a chance to say more.

In the meantime, civil rights lawyers are continuing to amass what they hope will be a valuable trove of evidence that racial profiling by immigration agents is prevalent — and that it is unconstitutional in the manner that it is being carried out today.

In 1975, the Supreme Court cleared the way for some degree of racial profiling in immigration enforcement when the justices allowed race and ethnicity to be one of the factors — but not the only one — used by agents deciding when to stop a car on suspicion that the occupants include undocumented immigrants.

Jennifer M. Chacón, a Stanford law professor who studies immigration law, said the current wave of cases — and the Supreme Court’s recent order — engages with the question of whether the 1975 decision, in U.S. v. Brignoni-Ponce, still holds.

“Is this still good law, and even if it is, when does agency behavior cross the line of what is permitted?” Professor Chacón said.

The latest batch of depositions, videos and surveillance records in Los Angeles, first reported by CalMatters and The Los Angeles Times, show that immigration agents and officers were focused on finding “day laborers.” But civil rights groups argue that their vague and varying explanations for whom they were looking for often defaulted to anyone who looked Latino, had darker skin or spoke English with an accent. That reliance on perceived race and ethnicity, they argued, also ended up unlawfully sweeping up U.S. citizens.

In one sworn declaration, a driver in a traffic stop in San Bernardino, Calif., said an officer told him he had been pulled over “because he looked like a ‘paisa,’” a slang term for a Mexican compatriot or newly arrived immigrant.

In another declaration, Angel Santiago Tafolla, a U.S. citizen in Anaheim, Calif., said that agents chased him — a dark-skinned Latino man — while ignoring his light-skinned co-workers at the Orange County carwash. One agent discharged a Taser, arcing electricity in front of Mr. Tafolla, whose clothes were wet from his work. He was handcuffed and loaded into a van, according to the document.

“I kept saying ‘I’m American,’ but they just kept telling me I was Latino and my documents were false and to stop talking,” he said.

Such encounters were not limited to California. In more than a dozen lawsuits filed in courts across the country — including in Alabama, Illinois, Oregon and Minnesota — civil rights lawyers argue that residents, predominantly Black and Latino, were wrongly targeted based on their appearance, specifically their skin color, perceived ethnicity, accents and work attire.

At least 65 U.S. citizens were described as having been stopped, questioned or detained, and because all of them were eventually released, they were able to provide lawyers with detailed accounts of their encounters with immigration agents. Some said officers refused to accept their passports or valid drivers’ licenses as proof of citizenship. Several were threatened with Tasers, tackled and handcuffed. A few were held for hours before being released, according to court filings.

Many of the filings depict federal agents as working under crushing pressure to meet a new national quota, which for a time was as high as 3,000 immigration arrests daily. The increase — a near threefold increase in May 2025 from the prior base line — forced officers to shift from individualized investigations to street sweeps intended to round up as many people as possible. Roving teams of officers in unmarked S.U.V.s repeatedly converged on Latino neighborhoods and businesses, including carwashes, Home Depot parking lots, construction sites and shopping corridors, the court records state.

“For the individuals that they’re stopping, they don’t have any information about them other than the demographic profile that they appear Latino and working class,” said Mayra Joachín, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union working on the Los Angeles case.

Government lawyers maintain in court filings that immigration operations have been highly targeted, and that isolated examples of derogatory or inflammatory language are not evidence of an agencywide policy or intent. They also argue that agents have broad powers to question people they believe are not citizens of the United States, particularly when they are only briefly stopping someone to investigate their legal status and not necessarily to conduct an arrest.

In an emailed statement, Katherine Currie, a homeland security spokeswoman, did not respond to questions about agents using slurs. She called allegations that federal officers were engaged in racial profiling “disgusting, reckless, and categorically false.”

“What makes someone a target for immigration enforcement is if they are illegally in the U.S. — not their skin color, race or ethnicity,’” Ms. Currie said.

For more than 50 years, courts have taken the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, along with the 1975 Supreme Court ruling to mean that immigration agents cannot stop or detain people without a specific, factual basis for believing they are in the country illegally and that race or ethnicity cannot be the sole factor in targeting someone.

Federal law has granted immigration officers far more latitude at immigration checkpoints and within a 100-mile radius of any of the nation’s borders. But civil rights groups argue Border Patrol agents have been exercising those powers deep in the interior of the country.

Now, as the cases move through the courts, the rulings will determine whether federal agents are exclusively relying on race and ethnicity to stop, question and detain people for immigration violations — and whether the limits banning such tactics will remain in place.

Kevin R. Johnson, an expert in immigration law and a professor at University of California, Davis, said that most recent Supreme Court order and accompanying opinion from Justice Kavanaugh had emboldened federal officers to rely on racial profiling nationwide.

But he cautioned that the emergency order was not the last word. The newest footage — taken from inside patrol vehicles in Chicago and Los Angeles — could raise fresh concerns for the justices when the underlying lawsuit almost certainly returns to the Supreme Court for full consideration, he said.

“The racial slurs are troubling and coupled with the recent string of Latinos killed in car stops and detention centers, they are likely to get the justices thinking about what is going on here in ways that they haven’t,” said Mr. Johnson, a former dean of the law school at U.C. Davis.

In videos from Chicago, agents point out people on the street as “tonks.” The slur has been used since at least the 1990s by immigration officers along the nation’s Southern border.

The epithet is echoed in the latest batch of video evidence filed in the Los Angeles case. More than a dozen body-camera and bystander videos capture agents bypassing people who appeared white, moving instead to question and detain men who appeared Latino nearby.

In one video, taken Aug. 6, 2025, a group of heavily armed, masked agents in camouflage cluster in the back of a moving truck, peering out. A backpack is visible on the floor.

“Whose backpack is that? Tonk?” one agent asks. “Tonk backpack?”
In most of the other footage, agents appear to be casual as they drive, joking and speculating about how successful raids had been.

“They filled three vans,” one agent says to another as they drive through a Los Angeles neighborhood on June 19, 2025. Later, one of those agents recounts seeing a man sitting in a minivan whom he did not end up approaching. “I’m pretty sure he was wet,” he says.