Kristi Noem, while governor of South Dakota, supplemented her roughly $130,000 salary by secretly accepting $80,000 donated to a political nonprofit she was affiliated with, records show.

She never disclosed this income on federal ethics forms.

propublica.org/article/kristi-…

#News #KristiNoem #DHS #Ethics #USPolitics #Government #Nonprofit

Kristi Noem Secretly Took Personal Cut of Political Donations

A dark money group paid $80,000 to Noem’s personal company when she was governor of South Dakota. She did not include this income on her federal disclosure forms, a likely violation of ethics requirements, experts say.

^ProPublica

Sticking with the Trumpenreich invasion of LA for just one more moment, I'd like to take a look at the intentional fascist intimidation tactics employed by Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, or at least her security team, against the US Senator from California, Alex Padilla. This event received extensive coverage in the mainstream media, but I believe it's important to take note of here for two reasons; one which was discussed in liberal media circles, and one that got far less coverage because our establishment is instinctively allergic to calling US cabinet officials "liars" even when everyone knows they're lying.

Let's get into the weeds:

truthout.org/articles/senator-…

Sen. Alex Padilla Tackled to the Ground, Handcuffed at Noem Press Conference

"Video of the incident that circulated on social media showed Padilla attempting to ask Noem a question when multiple men began grabbing and shoving him.

“I’m Senator Alex Padilla. I have questions for the secretary,” Padilla says, struggling to speak as he’s manhandled. He seemingly begins to make a comment about the “rotating” set of people supposedly convicted of crimes that the Trump administration is parading around in attempts to justify their brutal, sweeping anti-immigrant campaign.

As he’s speaking, the officers forcibly remove him from the room, with Padilla yelling “hands off.” Grabbing his arms, chest, and clothes, they shove the senator into a hallway, where they force him to the ground and handcuff him."

First of all, this is outrageous, intentional, fascist political intimidation and Senator Warren is absolutely right when she says the DHS Secretary should resign. Not that Noem will, because Trump purposely stacked his regime full of nazis who don't know the meaning of the word shame this time, and Kristi really fits that description; after all, this *is* a woman who bragged about murdering a puppy because she thought it would help her political career. The fact is however there are only 100 United States Senators, and while Capital Hill may be a city within a city, it's not a particularly large city. Every single person in that room, including Noem, her security detail, and the press corps, knew who Alex Padilla was the entire time. Furthermore, while Noam might have a TV star's face thanks to her surgeon, she's a very poor actor, and watching her during this widely-recorded moment makes it clear she's fully aware of what's going on the whole time. The assault, and it was an assault, by Noem's security detail on a Democrat sitting US Senator representing the community the Trumpenreich is currently invading, was completely intentional; Noem, and through her Trump, meant to send a message.

As the article goes on to detail, this fascist bullshit is firmly part of a larger Swine Emperor and GOP quest to criminalize their political opposition, specifically the Democratic Party. This is occurring not only in rhetoric, but in deed. The regime is investigating Act Blue, a Dem-aligned fundraising org, they've arrested both a Democrat Mayor, and a Democrat Congresswoman for attempting to conduct oversight on an ICE facility, federal agents burst into NY Democrat Jerry Nadler's office, cuffed an employee, and accused his staff of harboring "criminals." They're working hard to get Americans used to seeing Democrat officials aligned against Trump, in handcuffs on the six o'clock news, and I suspect that's not an accident.

All of which then brings us to Kristi Noem's bald-face lie, that Senator Padilla "burst into the room," "lunged at her,' and "did not identify himself." Let's roll the tape:

theguardian.com/us-news/live/2…

CBS video of Padilla interrupting Noem with a question appears to undermine her claim that he lunged at her

"Just three seconds into the incident, Padilla could be seen standing, with his left hand raised slightly in a rhetorical gesture, trying to continue with his question, as a security officer placed his hands on the senator’s chest and back and began pushing him away from the front of the room.

There is no visual evidence in the clip to suggest that Padilla was moving in Noem’s direction when he started speaking, or was ever within 10-15ft (3-3.5 metres) of her."

So, actually Padilla was already in the room, he never got within 12 feet of Noem and certainly didn't lunge, and he clearly identified himself in a room he didn't have to. I'm sorry for the Zapruder film treatment here, but I want to establish that Kristi Noem is unquestionably, and intentionally lying about something she knows is being recorded live, because that's the most important thing about this incident.

Noem knows she's lying, she knows you know she's lying, and she knows the camera knows she's lying, but in true fascist fashion she's claiming the power to force you to accept that lie as valid; and a media pretending she could just be stupid and mistaken, would make Orwell weep.

#Fascism #Trump #USPol #DHS #InvasionOfLA #KristiNoem #AlexPadilla #GOP

Sen. Alex Padilla Tackled to the Ground, Handcuffed at Noem Press Conference

“If this is how this administration responds to a senator … imagine what they’re doing” to everyday Americans, he said.

^{Sharon Zhang (Truthout)}

If, as many local officials in California have suggested, Trump's goal was to create a powder keg that justifies even more authoritarian repression in LA, it's abundantly clear the regime and its Gestapo were working to create that power keg long before Trump illegally deployed what is now 4,000 National Guardsmen and 700 US Marines to the extremely diverse sanctuary city. Take for example the assault, arrest, and smearing of Service Employees International Union President David Huerta during the Friday ICE raids in densely populated portions of LA and the surrounding area.

Whether the Gestapo pigs who assaulted Huerta on camera while the extremely popular labor leader was merely observing the unlawful Gestapo raids targeting workers in his city knew it or not, their fascist piggery was almost certainly the inciting moment for widespread nonviolent protests that broke out across the greater LA area; a day and a half later, Trump would be illegally deploying National Guard troops on the streets of downtown Los Angeles.

commondreams.org/news/david-hu…

'This Is What Fascism Looks Like': Beloved Labor Leader David Huerta Arrested

"The union included remarks from Huertas, who said, "We all collectively have to object to this madness because this is not justice. This is injustice."

"This is about something much bigger" than his own arrest, said Huertas. "This is about how we as a community stand together and resist the injustice."

According to a statement released by the Department of Homeland Security, approximately 44 individuals were "administratively arrested" in a series of raids at retail stores in the Los Angeles area, while one individual, identified as Huertas, was arrested "for obstruction" of federal officers.

"This is what fascism looks like," said California State Senator Scott Wiener, a Democrat. "Secret police raids. Injuring protesters. Arresting labor leaders."

As the article notes, Huertas is the president of a 750,000 member strong union in California that represents an absolutely massive number of Latinex workers in the state; if the feds were looking to avoid protests, this was the last guy they wanted to assault. Which makes the fact that they did so on camera, and then tried to lie about it later all the more revealing. This is from a Guardian update posted after Huertas was released on bond:

theguardian.com/us-news/live/2…

"In an affidavit supporting the criminal complaint against Huerta, an officer alleged that the union leader was arrested after another officer tried to push him out of the way of a law enforcement vehicle being blocked by protesters on a sidewalk. The officer who witnessed the incident claimed that he saw Huerta “push back, and in response, the officer pushed HUERTA to the ground. The officer and I then handcuffed HUERTA and arrested him.”

However, video of the arrest shared on social media by US attorney Bill Essayli seems to show that the officer shoved Huerta to the ground without being pushed by the labor leader. Huerta’s head was knocked into a concrete curb by the officers and he was hospitalized on Friday."

If you watch the video the government's own attorney shared, it is utterly impossible for the regime to credibly argue that Heurta is a violent protestor or criminal element, and even the regime's argument about "obstruction" seems to revolve around not stepping out the way for a truck full of kidnapped Angelino workers to be driven through; yet they're trying anyway. I believe that's because the facts don't matter to Trump, this arrest in particular merely provided him with the excuse he needed to declare war on LA and by extension, Governor Gavin Newsom.

If it seems like I'm laser focused on the Gestapo raids broadly targeting brown workers in LA on Friday, it's because this is unquestionably the inciting incident that lead to the Trump regime's ongoing fascist invasion of LA and contrary to Downmarket Mussolini and his minion's lies, the Trump administration was completely responsible for these inciting incidents. It was Kristi Noem who demanded vastly more migrant arrests, it was Stephen Miller who gave the order to target retail businesses and public districts, it was ICE officials who told the Gestapo to violate civil rights and start snatching people up for being brown, it was the Trump regime who targeted a sanctuary city in a sanctuary state run by the current 2028 Democrat nomination frontrunner for this spectacle, and it was Trumpenreich officials who responded to nonviolent protests by declaring a violent insurrection was occurring in LA to pave the way for Trump's deployment of US military forces to the city. They had the means, they created the opportunity, and the motives are transparently fascist; Trump snatched it up as an excuse to declare war on his perceived opposition immediately, as if it was planned that way, because it was.

#Fascism #LA #ICE #Trump #KristiNoem #StephenMiller #DHS #Invasion #USPol #Gestapo #Newsom #PoliceState #Nazis

Mayor says Los Angeles being used as ‘test case’ by federal government – as it happened

Mayor says ‘nothing warranted’ the intervention and that cannot ‘emphasize enough the level of fear and terror that is in Angelenos right now’ due to Ice raids

^{Kate Lamb (The Guardian)}

In order to understand the true story of the Trump regime's invasion of LA, and broad resistance to the regime's white nationalist agenda by labor class Angelinos, you have to start with a story I briefly touched on last week about a change in ICE enforcement strategy mandated right from the top of the Trump administration. In response to direct pressure from DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to massively increase the number of migrants arrested per day, and instructions from unofficial director of nazi shit Stephen Miller to target commercial businesses and public locations, ICE officials ordered agents to engage in acts that all but ensured widespread racial profiling, a massive number of civil rights violations, and militarized abductions in American communities; including, crucially, no warrant arrests that aren't strictly illegal, but immigration officials know aren't allowed to be used the way they're instructing Gestapo goons to use them right now, either.

theguardian.com/us-news/2025/j…

US immigration officers ordered to arrest more people even without warrants

"If it involves handcuffs on wrists, it’s probably worth pursuing,” another message said.

The instructions not only mark a further harshening of attitude and language by the Trump administration in its efforts to fulfill election promises of “mass deportation” but also indicate another escalation in efforts, by being on the lookout for undocumented people whom officials may happen to encounter – here termed “collaterals” – while serving arrest warrants for others.

The emails, sent by two top Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officials this past Saturday, instructed officers around the country to increase arrest numbers over the weekend. This followed the Department of Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, and the White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, pressing immigration officials last month to jack up immigration-related arrests to at least 3,000 people a day."

Okay so please keep in mind that this article was published on June 4th, which is two days before fascist ICE raids touched off what will then eventually become the Trumpenreich invasion of LA. A significant portion of this article is devoted to talking about ICE's hypothetical but still quite illegal sounding efforts to meet the regime's Nazi-esque migrant arrest quotas, and the circumstantial legality of collateral immigration arrests. It's an illuminating discussion for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that every legal observer quoted in the article warns that warrantless arrests can be abused in precisely the unlawful ways ICE would use them in LA later that week; it is however irrelevant to our larger discussion except in to note that ICE swarming businesses and arresting all the brown people because they might be "illegals" is not how this power is supposed to be used, and doing so is a clear violation of civil rights.

What's important here is that the article provides a comprehensive picture of an agency desperate to meet a fascist mass deportation quota, whose leadership then directly instructs its Gestapo agents to engage in activities they know will result in unlawful arrests and civil rights violations; because the agency was already sanctioned for doing these same things which surprise, resulted in unlawful arrests and civil rights violations. This, when combined with the increased migrant arrest quotas, and Miller's instructions to stop focusing on actual criminals and get directly into communities to snatch up foreign-looking people, inevitably resulted in the fascist outrages that touched off the battle for LA, with heavily armed and armored Gestapo goons storming businesses in the fashion district of Downtown LA and other high traffic urban areas to round up anyone brown enough to fit the description, in broad daylight. Indeed, the combination of instructions given to both ICE officials and Gestapo foot soldiers could not have resulted in any other outcome and the regime was prepared to capitalize on the outrage it would cause; that's why they were so quick to respond to completely justified popular pushback with cries of insurrection and orders to send in the national guard. Furthermore, given the national scope of DHS and ICE's authority what we just saw happen in LA is clearly an outcome they intend to replicate all across the country; seemingly targeting sanctuary cities in blue states in particular out of political reasoning and ideological spite.

The invasion of LA wasn't spontaneous, it was engineered; and that engineering started at the very top of the Trump regime. This shitshow wasn't ever about public safety; it's a reproduceable battleplan for a war the regime just chose to start at a time, and in a place of its choosing - and they chose LA.

#Fascism #DHS #ICE #Gestapo #Trump #MassDeporatations #CivilRights #Migrants #HumanRights #LA #WhiteNationalism #EthnoState #StephenMiller #KristiNoem #ArrestQuotas #Racism

US immigration officers ordered to arrest more people even without warrants

Exclusive: Ice officers told to get ‘creative’ with arrests, including of undocumented people encountered by chance

^{José Olivares (The Guardian)}

In writing about the Trump regime's fascist assault on foreign student anti-genocide protestors, a lot of what we talk about is the domestic social costs these authoritarian actions and a failure to oppose them produce. I don't mean to be callous, because injustice and repression against any part of the opposition to fascism, is injustice and repression that harms us all; to say nothing of the personal costs to the students targeted for having the audacity to think conducting an ongoing genocide in an open air concentration camp is morally wrong. If you want to know why the regime is pursuing these fascist, repressive policies however, and why the administration before them was happy to lay the groundwork that is today enabling Trump to target anti-genocide protests under the false banner of "fighting antisemitism," I must unfortunately conclude that the answer is "probably, because it's working."

How else can you explain political and military leaders in Israel all but admitting they intend to finish off the genocide they've been conducting against Palestinians in Gaza, without much notice in the American media environment, and amid a collapse in popular resistance to the genocide, even as polling indicates a strong shift in American sympathies away from Israel and its crimes against humanity in Gaza?

commondreams.org/news/israel-t…

'Only Hellfire': Israel Says Lifesaving Aid, Troop Withdrawal Off the Table for Gaza

"Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Wednesday that the U.S.-backed genocidal policy of blocking lifesaving humanitarian aid from entering the Gaza Strip will continue, and that Israel Defense Forces troops will remain in the embattled Palestinian enclave indefinitely.

"Israel's policy is clear: No humanitarian aid will enter Gaza, and blocking this aid is one of the main pressure levers preventing Hamas from using it as a tool with the population," Katz said. "No one is currently planning to allow any humanitarian aid into Gaza, and there are no preparations to enable such aid."

I want to be clear, I'm not saying there's no active resistance to the genocide going on in America, only that the regime's fascist repression is contributing to a climate of fear that's suppression discussion about and resistance to Israel's crimes against humanity in the broader culture. And let's be fair here, the still quite bipartisan nature of support of *this* particular application of fascist terrorism in the American ruling establishment makes opposing Israel's genocide in Gaza perhaps one of the most dangerous acts of anti-fascism a person can undertake in this political moment. When Trump kidnaps a Maryland father and traffics him to a torture prison in El Salvador, the oppositional political and media apparatus in this country are quick to condemn him and demand action. When Trump starts black bagging student protest leaders and shipping them to nightmare jails in politically favorable court districts, that same establishment equivocates, says nothing at all, or sometimes outright supports that repression. Take for example former Biden antisemitism Envoy Deborah Lipstadt:

forward.com/news/712297/studen…

Student protesters being deported are not ‘martyrs and heroes,’ says former antisemitism envoy

"I’m not opposed to the administration rescinding the student visas of some of the people that they’re rescinding the student visas of,” she said. “But I just think it should be done properly, according to the laws of the country.”

So uh, you got that? The fascism is fine, but god-damnit there are *rules* people! Please keep in mind that this woman is one of the foremost authorities in the world on The Holocaust, so we can presume she knows she's protecting fascists to support a genocide. I assume, but don't know, that she holds no special place in her heart for the Klepto Kaiser, so I can only surmise that she's just a hardcore Zionist and a big fan of bombing children and hospitals.

Look friends, I know that this is a really bad time to ask people to stick their necks out to oppose a genocide, but Israel just bombed literally the last hospital in Gaza and it barely made the evening news. The regime, and indeed much of the larger ruling class establishment that supports settler colonialism, and profits from the genocide by various means, wants to create an environment where speaking out against the genocide in Gaza and Israel's settler colonial massacres is just criminal and subversive enough to stop most of us from doing it. This will then allow them to easily pick off a much smaller number of people who are brave enough and otherwise able to resist the genocide directly. It is vital that we counteract that by keeping the genocide on our lips, and our outrage about crimes against humanity in the discourse; they can't arrest us all - and Gaza, is running out time.

#Fascism #Israel #Gaza #Genocide #Imperialism #SettlerColonialism #Media #Trump #Palestine #ICE #CrimesAgainstHumanity #DHS #Propaganda #Protest

'Only Hellfire': Israel Says Lifesaving Aid, Troop Withdrawal Off the Table for Gaza

"Israel's defense ministers can't stop publicly confessing to war crimes," said one U.S. journalist.

^{brett-wilkins (Common Dreams)}

The shuttered DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties “was one of the very few tools we had to check ICE, to hold ICE accountable,” immigration lawyer Sophia Genovese said. “Now you see them speeding to complete authoritarianism.”
propublica.org/article/homelan…

#News #ICE #CivilRights #Immigration #Law #Trump #DHS #Deportation #Border

Trump’s Shuttering of DHS Civil Rights Office Freezes 600 Cases

The closure of the 150-person office, which protected the civil rights of both immigrants and U.S. citizens, strips Homeland Security of its internal guardrails as the Trump administration turns DHS into a mass-deportation machine, analysts say.

^ProPublica

It's interesting to listen to US officials are still trying to grapple with Luigi Mangione's folk hero status.

Here's the Biden administration's Secretary of Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

#DHS #Mayorkas #luigimangione #Biden

TSA Wants To Scan Your Face At The Airport. Here Are Your Rights.

#News #TSA #privacy #biometrics #security #HumanRights #SurveillanceCapitalism #HomelandSecurity #DHS #Airport
washingtonpost.com/technology/…