DHS Picks Fight With Reporter Who Exposed ICE’s Shoddy Hiring

The Department of Homeland Security attempted to discredit a journalist Wednesday and was quickly embarrassed.

On Tuesday, Slate published a bombshell article by Laura Jedeed outlining how she had somehow slipped through ICE’s screening process to be offered a job by the agency despite failing to complete any of the required paperwork, including a background check. The next day, DHS tried to claim Jedeed’s article was “such a lazy lie.”

“This individual was NEVER offered a job at ICE,” the agency posted on X. “Applicants may receive a Tentative Selection Letter following their initial application and interview that is not a job offer. It just means they are invited to submit information for review, similar to any other applicant.”

Minutes later, Jedeed, who has contributed to The New Republic in the past, was ready with receipts.

“You sure about that?” Jedeed posted in a quote of DHS’s post, including video of the ICE Recruitment and Hiring Portal, which she could only access if she had been offered a position at the agency.

Jedeed wrote that she never expected to receive an actual job offer when she began her story, as she’s a journalist who writes for left-leaning publications and believed ICE would catch on soon enough. ICE’s recruitment strategies were already considered questionable prior to Jedeed’s article, but now their screening practices can be described as practically nonexistent. Disturbingly, Jedeed has exposed why so many ICE agents seem to be comfortable with flouting the law and engaging in wanton violence: They’ll take anybody.

ICE agents are reportedly asking Minnesota residents to tell them where their Asian neighbors live, as Vice President JD Vance’s promise of “door to door” ICE raids is being realized. And somehow, people on the right are still mad when ICE gets compared to Nazi storm troopers.

Elizabeth Lugert-Thom, a resident of St. Paul, warned in a Facebook post last week that two federal officers had asked her to identify the Hmong and Asian households in her North End neighborhood, according to The Chicago Tribune.

Lugert-Thom said that the officers who’d knocked on her door were not displaying their badges clearly, and did not identify themselves before they began questioning her about a picture of someone they were searching for.

“They said, ‘This is for your safety. We need to find this person,’” Lugert-Thom recalled to the Tribune in a story published Monday.

Lugert-Thom told the ICE agents she didn’t “know anything about that.” In response, she said they asked, “Well, what about the Asian families?”

Lugert-Thom said she was evasive with her answers and did not direct the officers to any of her neighbors. In her Facebook post, she wrote that she’d been “asked to identify Hmong/Asian households in my neighborhood.”

She told the Tribune she’d posted about the interaction on Facebook because “I was a bit shaken and a bit shocked of what I was asked to do.”

It’s hard not to see the similarities between ICE’s door-to-door campaign in Minnesota and the actions of officers during another totalitarian dictatorship that sought to weed out members of ethnic groups their leader blamed for all the nation’s ills.

So far, at least 100 people have been detained by ICE and sent to Texas for deportation processing, The New York Times reported Tuesday. Most of them have been Somali immigrants, but others have hailed from Myanmar and Eritrea. Immigration forces have continued to arrest refugees who entered the country legally and were in the midst of legally obtaining citizenship before the Trump administration suspended all green card processing.

The number of Asian immigrants arrested by ICE surged between February and July 2025, tripling from 1,054 arrests during the same period of the Biden administration to 3,705 arrests, according to one study. The number of noncriminal detainees outnumbered those with criminal convictions by two to one.

White House deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser Stephen Miller delivered an unsettling affirmation to the thousands of federal agents violently attacking and abducting people in neighborhoods across the country.

“To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties, and anybody who lays a hand on you, or tries to stop you, or tries to obstruct you, is committing a felony,” Miller declared Tuesday on The Will Cain Show on Fox. “You have immunity to perform your duties and no one—no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist—can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties.”

“The Department of Justice has made clear that if officials cross that line into obstruction, into criminal conspiracy against the United States or against ICE officers, then they will face justice,” he added.

The Department of Homeland Security then made sure to amplify Miller’s message.

Miller’s message comes just one week after ICE agents shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, and as a growing number of federal agents descend on the city.

The Trump administration is closing their eyes, plugging their ears, and screaming about immunity as loudly as they can while their ICE agents beat, maim, and kill people protesting their militant mass immigration raids. Miller’s proclamation will only give these agents—many of them deeply partisan and inexperienced volunteers—even more power to continue their violence.

“REMINDER: To all members of the Trump administration. The incitement and engagement in state violence against the American people is a serious crime. Donald Trump will leave office long before the five-year statute of limitations expires,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said on X, although it’s unclear what exactly he plans on doing at this moment in time. “You are hereby put on notice.”

“Miller will be directly responsible for the next American that an ICE agent kills,” Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan chimed in. “This is a greenlight for abuse and has no basis in actual law.”

The State Department is taking the drastic step of suspending visa processing for people from 75 countries.

The move, Bloomberg reports, includes countries already subject to bans by the Trump administration, such as Afghanistan, Iran, and Somalia, but also countries with diplomatic relations with the United States, such as Nigeria and Brazil. Now people from nearly a third of the world’s 200 countries won’t be able to travel to the U.S., hurting an already struggling tourism industry ahead of the World Cup later this year.

The full list of countries subject to the freeze is: Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Bhutan, Bosnia, Brazil, Burma, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Colombia, Côte d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dominica, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Fiji, Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Republic of the Congo, Russia, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, and Yemen.

The pause will go into effect January 21 and is certain to upend job, education, and vacation plans. In a statement, State Department spokesperson Tommy Piggott said, “The State Department will use its long-standing authority to deem ineligible potential immigrants who would become a public charge on the United States and exploit the generosity of the American people.”

“Immigration from these 75 countries will be paused while the State Department reassess immigration processing procedures to prevent the entry of foreign nationals who would take welfare and public benefits,” the statement said.

In December, Customs and Border Patrol announced that visa applicants would have to submit five years of social media history, as well as biometric information, including face, fingerprint, iris, and even DNA. One month before that, the Trump administration issued new guidelines ordering visa officers to deny immigrants who have obesity or other health issues.

Tourism to the U.S., especially from Canada, was already declining prior to these measures, thanks in large part to ICE activity. These new visa restrictions will throttle foreigners who wish to travel to the U.S. even with the violence practiced by Trump’s immigration agents. One would think that the White House would want more tourists to help the economy, but apparently it doesn’t care.

The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that candidates for office have standing to challenge how a state counts votes—in a major blow to mail-in voting, a particular target of Donald Trump’s.

In a 7–2 decision, all six of the court’s conservative justices and one liberal justice sided with Representative Michael Bost, a longtime Trump ally, who alleged that the Illinois State Board of Elections had violated federal law by counting mail-in ballots received within two weeks of Election Day.

In the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the court agreed counting ballots after Election Day threatened election integrity. “Rules that undermine the integrity of the electoral process also undermine the winner’s political legitimacy. The counting of unlawful votes—or discarding of lawful ones—erodes public confidence in election results and the elected representative,” Roberts wrote.

In a concurring opinion, conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett warned that the ruling wrongly lowered the bar for candidates to challenge state laws.

“By holding that a candidate always has an interest in challenging vote counting rules, even if those rules do not impose a competitive disadvantage on him, the Court today relieves candidates of having to show any real harm,” Barrett wrote.

In a dissenting opinion, liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the court had undermined the democratic process and opened up a can of worms by creating a harm-free, status-based standing. She was joined in her opinion by liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

“By carving out a bespoke rule for candidate-plaintiffs—granting them standing ‘to challenge the rules that govern the counting of votes,’ simply and solely because they are ‘candidate[s]’ for office, ibid.—the Court now complicates and destabilizes both our standing law and America’s electoral processes,” she wrote.

The recent anti-mail-in-ballot push has clearly been influenced by Trump’s whims. Despite having voted by mail in the past, Trump has railed against the practice as part of his baseless claims of sweeping election fraud.

This story has been updated.

Senator John Kennedy shared some revealing information about his fellow GOPer Lindsey Graham in his new book, confirming Graham’s hawkish sensibilities and his penchant for alcoholic beverages.

“If you want to stump Lindsey, just ask him to name a country he wouldn’t bomb,” Kennedy wrote in his book, How to Test Negative for Stupid: And Why Washington Never Will.

Then Kennedy moved on to the drink.

“Invite him to dinner, and you don’t know if he’ll sit down for an intelligent conversation or get drunk and vomit in the fish tank. But that’s why I like him.”

This isn’t the first time Graham’s drinking has come up. In 2015, New York magazine wrote that Graham “likes a drink so much he thinks drinking more might just solve the problems in Washington.” And just last month, he appeared visibly drunk while answering questions at a news conference in Charleston, South Carolina.

Senator Elissa Slotkin said Monday that she has learned federal prosecutors are investigating her for a video she made in November, along with other congressional colleagues, urging members of the military to disobey illegal orders.

Slotkin said she found out about the investigation from Jeanine Pirro, appointed by President Trump as the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Pirro had emailed the Senate’s sergeant at arms requesting an interview with Slotkin or her personal attorney, according to The New York Times. Pirro’s office declined to confirm or deny the investigation to the Times.

Slotkin, a former CIA analyst, helped to organize the video, along with five other Democratic members of Congress who served in the military: Senator Mark Kelly and Representatives Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, and Chrissy Houlahan. They each urged service members to refuse illegal orders, drawing anger from President Trump, who accused them of sedition and suggested they be executed.

The investigation of Slotkin follows Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s attempts to target Kelly, censuring him and going after his military pension. In response, Kelly has sued Hegseth on free speech and due process grounds.

While Slotkin isn’t a military veteran, a Justice Department investigation could result in criminal charges. Is the Trump administration willing to try and punish Slotkin merely for exercising her free speech rights?

Multiple military officials have sought legal counseling in the wake of President Donald Trump’s escalating (and illegal) military operations in the Caribbean.

Steve Woolford, a resource counselor with the GI Rights Hotline, told HuffPost that calls for advice started coming in at the end of September, after the U.S. military had killed 17 people in a series of extrajudicial strikes on boats the government claims—but won’t prove—are smuggling drugs.

The official, who Woolford said had an important role in approving the strikes, questioned whether what they were doing was a “legal military operation.”

Woolford recalled the reluctant service member saying, “‘This doesn’t look like what the military is supposed to be doing, and the military is doing it.’” Woolford referred the member to legal counsel.

“They didn’t want to be doing it,” he told HuffPost.

In October, another service member reached out to Woolford to express concern that they would be ordered to participate in future boat strikes.

Since then, the calls from concerned service members have only become more common. Hours after the U.S. military’s large-scale operation to kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Woolford said the hotline received three calls from service members. One expressed concerns that the operation was unlawful, and another described it as “imperialist.”

While Woolford referred his worried callers to The Orders Project, a group providing legal advice to military service members, nonprofit Vice President Brenner Fissell said that he’s received no calls from officers involved in the strikes.

“People are really scared of at all stepping out of line,” Fissell told HuffPost. “I mean, when you see someone like [Admiral Alvin] Holsey lose his position, and he’s one of the top five people in the military, do you really want to reach out?”

Holsey, who has served as commander of the U.S. Southern Command for only a year, offered in December to resign from his position after he questioned the strikes’ legality, sources told CNN.

The number of calls to Woolford may continue to rise, as the U.S. military continues to wade into Trump’s illegal war. Michael Schmitt, a former Air Force lawyer, told HuffPost that capturing Maduro had triggered the Geneva Conventions, raising the stakes of U.S. strikes on vessels linked to Venezuela. “These individuals involved in mere criminality are civilians who are not directly participating in the hostilities, and therefore not legally targetable,” he said.

Service members stuck executing these strikes were left in a “terrible bind,” he said.

A 21-year old anti-ICE protester has been left permanently blinded in California after a Department of Homeland Security agent shot him in the face with a nonlethal round at point-blank range on Friday.

Kaden Rummler can be seen on video rushing to help a fellow protester at Civic Center Plaza in Santa Ana before being shot by a federal agent. He crumples to the ground in a heap, covering his face before an officer drags him away by his hoodie. Rummler’s aunt said he was left with a fractured skull and shards of plastic, glass, and metal stuck all throughout his eyes and face, and would have died if not for the six hours of surgery he went through.

“That could have cost him his life,” Jeri Rees told the Los Angeles Times. “But now, for the next six weeks, he can’t sneeze or cough because it could do a lot of damage.… The other officers were mocking him, saying, ‘You’re going to lose your eye.’”

This is one of countless instances of excessive, brutal force being used against U.S. residents in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Rummler’s blinding happened just two days after ICE shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis.

Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin described the scene as “a highly coordinated campaign of violence where rioters wielded shields,” but had no comment on the use of excessive force from her agents. A spokesperson from the Santa Ana Police Department said the only coordinated violence they saw were demonstrators throwing orange cones.

The FBI searched the home of a Washington Post reporter on Wednesday, as part of what government officials said was an investigation into the sharing of government secrets, The New York Times reports.

Hannah Natanson has been covering the White House’s efforts to cut down the federal workforce and reshape the civil service to support President Trump’s agenda. In her work, she spoke to several government employees frustrated with the Trump administration. The Post said that the bureau was investigating a government contractor accused of illegally holding onto classified materials.

Federal agents searched Natanson’s home as well as her personal devices. The search warrant stated that the investigation concerns Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a system administrator in Maryland with a top-secret security clearance accused of accessing classified intelligence reports. Perez-Lugones allegedly took the reports home, and they were found in his lunchbox and basement, according to an FBI affidavit.

Natanson told the Post that a phone and a smartwatch were taken by agents. While Trump and other administration officials have a reputation for being hostile to the press, a search of a reporter’s home is extremely rare.

This story has been updated.