ICE Tries to Turn Zohran Mamdani’s Win Into Chance to Poach From NYPD

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is hoping to lure New York City police officers to join its ranks by suggesting their current employer doesn’t really respect them.

An advertisement ICE posted to social media Thursday attempted to lure law enforcement officers away from the city they’ve supposedly sworn to protect.

“NYPD OFFICERS: Join an agency that respects you, your family, and your commitment to serving in law enforcement,” the post read. It included a link to a recruitment page, claiming that the country had been “invaded by criminals and predators.”

The Trump administration’s effort to poach from the NYPD’s head count comes as the law enforcement agency has only recently stopped struggling with hiring and retention, after significantly reducing education and age requirements.

Meanwhile, ICE has struggled with its own recruitment “shit show,” as the agency flounders to achieve White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s quest to hire 10,000 so-called “Homeland Defenders” by January. Increased recruitment efforts have reportedly placed an immense strain on ICE officials, who have had to turn away more than 200 new recruits who were improperly vetted.

This latest ad comes in the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s stunning victory in New York City’s mayoral election, meaning that the democratic socialist is set to inherit the NYPD’s multibillion-dollar surveillance state apparatus. Mamdani has presented a new vision for public safety by planning to establish the Department of Community Safety, which will handle nonemergency 911 calls in the place of armed police officers, putting mental health, homelessness, and prevention outreach in the hands of an entirely separate agency.

In the wake of Mamdani’s victory, Donald Trump seems adamant that New York City should fall to ruin, and on Thursday he threatened to gut the city’s federal funded infrastructure projects, including “bridges, and tunnels, and all of the things that were being planned for New York.”

But ICE operations would still continue there, he said. “They have killers in New York, we want to get them out,” Trump said. But his administration’s latest efforts to strip the ranks of the NYPD reveals the government is far more interested in deporting immigrants than addressing crime.

South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace’s explicit rant about the abuses of her ex-fiancé have come back to bite her.

Patrick Bryant filed a defamation suit against the Lowcountry lawmaker Friday, noting in a social media statement that he would no longer “stay quiet” regarding Mace’s “completely false accusations.”

Mace, however, did not take the news well.

“What kind of guy sues his own rape victim and sues women he filmed without their knowledge, permission or consent for YEARS? Who does that?” Mace posted Friday morning. “Can’t wait for a court hearing on this!!! Put me in coach—I’m ready to testify, under oath—this guy should be rotting in a jail cell—not suing his victims!!!

“HOLD THE LINE,” she added.

Mace put Bryant on full blast during a House Oversight Committee hearing in May, when she alleged that he was a “predator” who had taken videos of her during the course of their relationship without her consent. (In a shocking turn of events, Mace showcased what she described as her “naked silhouette” during the hearing.)

The South Carolinian also mentioned that in 2023, she discovered a trove of hidden camera nude images of women that she argued were taken by Bryant, similarly without those women’s consent. She then posted images of the other women during the hearing, though she said she had gotten permission to do so.

It was all in an effort to advance two pieces of legislation that she had introduced months prior, centered on further prohibiting “video voyeurism” and expanding a “civil right of action for victims.”

But people close to Mace weren’t so sure that her vulnerability was completely altruistic. In an April deposition tied to a Charleston County civil case, Mace’s former political adviser Wesley Donehue claimed that the salacious, dredged-up material was all part of a bogus extortion attempt by Mace to “gain 100 percent ownership” of homes the former couple had in Washington and South Carolina’s Isle of Palms.

President Trump seems to love corrupt politicians.

On Thursday evening, the president pardoned Glen Casada, the former Tennessee state House speaker, as well as one of his aides, of corruption charges, claiming that the Biden administration “over-prosecuted” the two of them.

Casada and his former chief of staff Cade Cothren were sentenced in September for running a scheme to get lawmakers to use their taxpayer-funded mail business. Prosecutors said that Cothren launched Phoenix Solutions with the support of his boss and another Tennessee state representative, Robin Smith, to set up a mailer program for legislators.

The company had a fictional “Matthew Phoenix” listed as its head, and Casada and Smith received $52,000 in taxpayer money from the company’s activities. The company wasn’t Casada’s only misdeed, either: He resigned in 2019 due to many scandals, including sending sexually explicit text messages about women to Cothren, sending racist text messages, and using cocaine inside a legislative office building.

It’s yet another controversial presidential pardon on Trump’s already long list. In this case, it’s a fellow Republican. Since being sworn in, Trump has pardoned the January 6 rioters who sought to overturn the 2020 election on his behalf, a crypto billionaire who cut a deal with the Trumps, a corrupt electric car magnate, and numerous others.

Trump even commuted the sentence given to notorious liar and former Representative George Santos, convicted on multiple counts of fraud and corruption. It seems that to the president, crimes don’t matter if you’re an ally or are useful to him. It’s not surprising, considering Trump’s own numerous corrupt activities.

MAGA Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is still one of the few GOP members to rebuke President Trump and his lies in any meaningful way.

Taylor Greene spoke freely in an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Thursday night.

“The president says there’s virtually no inflation, and that grocery prices are going down,” Collins asked the Georgia representative. “Do you agree with him on that?”

“No, I go to the grocery store myself. Grocery prices remain high. Energy prices are high. My electricity bills are higher here in Washington, D.C., at my apartment, and they’re also higher at my house in Rome, Georgia, higher than they were a year ago,” MTG said. “Affordability is a problem, and I’m a mom. My kids are 22, 26, and 28. That’s the generation I worry about the most, and they’re having a very hard time.”

One of the most unhinged people in all of Congress comes across as genuine, while the president—on the same evening—told Americans that he wanted to stop hearing about their affordability issue. While Trump tells bold-faced lies about the state of the economy, MTG is raising concerns about a future that her kids and their kids can afford.

“You’re not gonna convince [Americans] to go to the polls and vote by bailing out Argentina. And you’re not gonna convince them to go to the polls and vote by continuing to fund foreign wars and foreign countries and foreign causes,” Taylor Greene continued. “You’e gonna get them to go to the polls and vote when you show up to work and actually fix the problems that they face every single day.”

Donald Trump badly botched the pronunciation of Kazakhstan, a decades-long U.S. ally, while seated right next to the country’s president during a White House dinner with Central Asian leaders Thursday evening.

Like some unaired scene out of Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2006 flick Borat, Trump slipped that “Ka-ZACK-a-stan” had joined the Abraham Accords, adding a syllable and stressing the wrong one in the country’s name while announcing supposedly new diplomatic ties between Kazakhstan (which is actually pronounced Kahz-uck-stan) and Israel.

“This evening, I’m also delighted to report that Ka-ZACK-a-stan has officially agreed, and that’s official now, as of about 15 minutes ago. A tremendous country with a tremendous leader, has officially joined the Abraham Accords,” Trump said, mere feet away from President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. “And I just want to thank you, Mr. President. It’s a great honor. It’s a tremendous honor to have you. Really great.”

The pronunciation was, in part, a win for the White House. In September, Trump managed to mispronounce the “Abraham” in Abraham Accords, insisting during a White House meeting with  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Jews—or “the real people”—pronounce it as “Abraaaham.” The misstep was so awkward that Netanyahu jumped to correct him, clarifying that the name is actually pronounced in Hebrew as “Avraham.”

Just how much Kazakhstan’s new status will materially change its relationship with Israel is unclear, however, since the countries have had “full ties” since 1992, including shared embassies in their respective capitals, according to The Times of Israel. 

It does, however, give Trump some new material to prattle about. Trump created the series of agreements at the end of his first term as a method to thwart Iran’s nuclear program. The Abraham Accords have since been signed by the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco. 

The Atlantic Council, an American think tank focused on international affairs, said in a statement that Kazakhstan’s inclusion on the Abraham Accords was “no great breakthrough” but rather a “failed attempt” to revive the Abraham Accords “brand.”

“It is clear that the Trump administration is trying to kill two birds with one stone with this statement—to prove that the Abraham Accords ‘brand’ is still alive (especially in preparation for the visit of the Saudi crown prince to Washington) and to poke a finger in the eye of Chinese ambitions in the Eurasian space,” argued Danny Citrinowicz, a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council with 25 years of experience with Israel Defense Intelligence.

“But the truth is that without significant progress on the political track between the Palestinian Authority and Israel, Saudi Arabia will not join the Abraham Accords, regardless of the accession of other countries,” Citrinowicz continued. “And without Saudi Arabia, it is very unlikely that additional Muslim countries will join these agreements.”

Tokayev appeared unbothered by the massive flub. Making direct eye contact with Trump, the Kazakhstani leader lathered praise on the U.S. president, claiming he was a “statesman sent by heaven,” while reiterating the administration’s propaganda that Trump had solved eight wars (some of which never even happened).