ICE Uses D.C. Takeover Video to Hype Up Fascism

In a brazen show of disdain for the First Amendment, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement posted a video Sunday of eight masked agents tearing down a sign protesting the agency’s presence in Washington, D.C.

The video, which Alex Koma of Washington’s NPR member station posted about on Friday, shows the agents surrounding the banner in the District’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood—which reads “Chinga la migra (‘Fuck ICE’).” Mount Pleasant melts ICE”—before ripping it off a fence.

A masked agent then tells the camera, “We’re taking America back, baby”—a process that apparently entails disregarding D.C. residents’ rights—and, continuing in Spanish, “This is for America. The United States is number one.”

Bizarrely, the video also indicates that the agents, in removing the sign, revealed a dildo that had been perched behind it. The sex toy is blurred in ICE’s video, but it can be clearly seen in photos shared online by Koma, who reported that, according to residents, the gaggle of agents had actually left the dildo at the scene of their free speech violation.

Within hours of the banner’s removal, another sign was reportedly put in its place, which states, “No deportations in Mount Pleasant,” and “No a la migra (‘No to ICE’).” Another sign that was hung up since then reads: “They are fascists. We are artists. We melt ICE.”

ICE captioned its video: “Make D.C. Safe Again!” But it seems like the only thing federal troops accomplished was violating the First Amendment and unveiling a dildo.

MAGA loyalists are seething as President Donald Trump prepares to welcome Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy—and the European leaders he’s brought along for support—to the White House on Monday. 

Trump has had an extremely contentious relationship with Zelenskiy. He’s berated him to his face in front of millions in the Oval Office and has constantly dismissed Russian aggression and Ukrainian requests for more military aid. 

 Zelenskiy and Co.’s visit comes just days after Trump’s Alaska summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, in which the U.S. leader moved even further away from ceasefire talks, much to Putin’s delight. But the EU crew accompanying Zelenskiy has Trump’s base worried that he’ll be “cornered” into making financial concessions to the European Union he’s promised never to make. 

“A big day at the White House. We have never had so many European Leaders here at one time. A great honor for America!!!” Trump wrote Monday in a feeble attempt to frame the meeting positively for his supporters. “Lets see what the results will be??? President DJT.” 

Zelenskiy will be accompanied by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and Finnish President Alexander Stubb. 

MAGA was not pleased.

“After little Volodymir’s meltdown at the last meeting he is back but this time must be chaperoned by Europe’s regional manager caste,” author Hans Mahncke wrote on X. “The whole spectacle is so pathetic and humiliating.”

“Will Zelensky fck this peace deal up?” MAGA hardliner Gunther Eagleman chimed in. 

Trump also tried Sunday night to assuage his fans’ concerns. “The Fake News will say that it is a big loss for President Trump to host so many great European Leaders at our beautiful White House,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Actually, it is a great honor for America!!! President DJT.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed that the EU wasn’t calling in the cavalry to give Zelenskiy much-needed backup but that they were cordially invited.  

“They’re not coming here to keep Zelenskiy from getting bullied,” he told CBS’s Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation. “They are coming here tomorrow because we’ve been working with the Europeans.… We invited them to come.”

Six of Europe’s most powerful leaders aren’t coming all the way to D.C. with Zelenskiy just to hang out. It’s clear that they see Trump’s recent moves toward Putin as a real threat to Ukrainian sovereignty, and this meeting as a last chance to pull Trump away from Putin’s anti-NATO, anti-EU, and anti-Ukrainian agenda.  

Despite what Donald Trump claims, authoritarianism is scaring away diners in Washington, D.C.

During a joint press conference Monday, Trump attempted to defend seizing the nation’s capital by claiming that doing so had reignited the city’s night life. “The restaurants the last two days are busier than they’ve been in a long time,” Trump said. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

WUSA9 reported Sunday that restaurants in the nation’s capital saw a more than 25 percent dip in reservations in the days after Trump federalized the city’s police forces. Trump also deployed scores of federal forces and National Guardsmen to the city, giving them license to do “whatever the hell they want”—but apparently, that didn’t include getting a table at Le Diplomate.

Last Monday, when Trump invoked Section 740 of the D.C. Home Rule Act of 1973 to seize control of the Metropolitan Police Department, online reservation service OpenTable recorded a 16 percent decrease in reservations from the previous year. On Tuesday, as the National Guard mobilized, reservations dropped 27 percent, according to OpenTable.

The next day, reservations were down 31 percent, and the trend continued for the rest of the week. The two days Trump claimed had notably high visits, Saturday and Sunday, saw 20 and 22 percent drops, respectively.

Trump has claimed that his takeover is in response to a terrifying rise in crime—which is actually down. But the president’s sweeping law enforcement crackdown has already proven uniquely disruptive to city life.

As much as Republicans would like to make it seem that people are scared of roving criminals, it seems people are much more fearful of militarized law enforcement. The sudden decline in dining out could take a serious bite out of the city’s economy, as the district’s Restaurant Week—a week when restaurants offer discounted menus to entice new potential customers—is set to begin Monday.

This story has been updated.

President Donald Trump entered his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin hoping to attain a Russia-Ukraine ceasefire—only to promptly drop that goal, instead favoring a Putin-approved “peace agreement” with Ukrainian territorial concessions.

Over the weekend, Secretary of State Marco Rubio took to the airwaves, scrambling to defend the president’s flip-flop—and the disappointing summit more generally—on four Sunday talk shows.

On Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures, Maria Bartiromo asked Rubio why the summit hadn’t ended with a ceasefire.

“First of all, if you recall,” Rubio said, “we never said there was going to be a deal coming out of the meeting because the Ukrainians were not there.” He also mentioned that talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy are scheduled for Monday.

But prior to the summit, Trump had told Fox anchor Bret Baier, “I won’t be happy if I walk away without some form of a ceasefire.”

ABC News’s Martha Raddatz mentioned those comments on This Week: “The president went into that meeting saying he wanted a ceasefire and there would be consequences if they didn’t agree on a ceasefire in that meeting, and they didn’t agree to a ceasefire,” she observed. “So where are the consequences?”

“That’s not the aim,” Rubio said, to which Raddatz pointed out that Trump had explicitly said, “That’s the aim.” Rubio replied that more progress is necessary before Putin and Zelenskiy hopefully meet to “finalize a peace agreement.”

Kristen Welker of MSNBC’s Meet the Press asked Rubio, “Why not impose more sanctions on [Russia] and force them to agree to a ceasefire instead of accepting that Putin won’t agree to one?” (Trump had threatened to do so if the Alaska summit fell flat.)

Rubio dismissed the idea, leading Welker to ask whether Trump had made “empty threats.” Rubio replied that there are already sanctions on Russia and additional sanctions could derail peace talks.

Welker also asked the secretary of state to name “one thing that President Trump is asking Russia to give up in order to get peace.” He refused, saying the negotiations require utmost secrecy.

On CBS News’s Face the Nation, Margaret Brennan asked Rubio about the president’s ultimately empty rhetoric regarding a ceasefire in the lead-up to his meeting with Putin:

The president told … European leaders last week that he wanted a ceasefire. The president went on television and said he would walk out of the meeting if Putin didn’t agree to one. He said there would be severe consequences if he didn’t agree to one. He said he’d walk out in two minutes. He spent three hours talking to Putin, and he did not get one.

Rubio replied that the “goal here” is to reach a “peace agreement,” rather than “to stage some production for the world and say, ‘Oh how dramatic. [Trump] walked out.’” Enough progress was made, Rubio insisted, to continue moving toward an agreement (though he elided Trump’s newfound embrace of a peace agreement instead of a ceasefire).

You may recall that Trump promised to end the Russia-Ukraine War on day one of his presidency. It’s been 210 days.

Donald Trump is furious that the media won’t report on the incredible concessions he’s wrested from Russian President Vladimir Putin—oh wait, there are none.

“I am totally convinced that if Russia raised their hands and said, ‘We give up, we concede, we surrender, we will GIVE Ukraine and the great United States of America, the most revered, respected, and powerful of all countries, EVER, Moscow and St. Petersburg, and everything surrounding them for a thousand miles,’ the Fake News Media and their Democrat Partners would say that this was a bad and humiliating day for Donald J. Trump, one of the worst days in the history of our Country,” he wrote on Truth Social Monday.

“But that’s why they are the FAKE NEWS, and the badly failing Radical Left Democrats. Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!”

According to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, though, Trump has yet to nail down any actual concessions from Putin—just “concepts.” Without going into detail, Rubio said Sunday that whatever Putin had offered during the meeting hadn’t been enough for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, blaming the leader of the invaded country for the summit’s anticlimax.

Trump has been fuming for days over the media’s coverage of his do-nothing meeting Friday with Putin. “These people are sick!” he wrote in another post on Truth Social Sunday.

But as much as Trump would like to pretend, Moscow isn’t looking to cede territory—it’s looking to steal. The U.S. president claimed Sunday that Ukraine could end the fighting immediately if it were only willing to give up on reclaiming Crimea, and receiving a long-awaited NATO membership.

U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff said Sunday Putin had agreed that the U.S. could offer Ukraine an “Article Five-like protection,” instead of actual membership into the military bloc. Russia also agreed to implement a law not to “go after any other European countries and violate their sovereignty,” Witkoff said. “And there was plenty more.”

But as of yet, no ceasefire agreement or peace deal has actually materialized from the meeting—only the president’s fan fiction.