ICE Beats Up Protesters After Taking Over Neighborhood for Days

Last week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents took over the Frederick, Maryland, neighborhood of Taskers Chance, and the situation quickly turned violent.

ICE told the Frederick News-Post that agents came to the neighborhood after a man fled from a traffic stop on Thursday, staking out the area beginning at 6 a.m. and staying for about 40 hours. Protesters showed up the same day after hearing that ICE was staking out a house. The situation was tense for the neighborhood’s residents, many of whom were afraid to leave their homes. Agents reportedly swarmed multiple streets, Katie Nash, vice president of the Frederick City Council, told The Baltimore Banner.

On Friday, protesters linked arms to block the street and create a human barrier in front of the house. Then, at about 9:30 p.m. Friday, the situation turned violent, with agents charging the house and then grabbing and pushing protesters.

At least one agent hit a protester on the ground with a baton as the neighborhood was lit up with the headlights and police lights from ICE vehicles. ICE agents drove onto the sidewalk, with protesters having to move or risk getting run over, Frederick City Council president César Díaz told the Banner, adding that Nash was nearly hit by a vehicle. “I had to step back to avoid from getting hit by the car.”

ICE agents left the scene shortly afterward without making any arrests, but some protesters were hospitalized for their injuries. Díaz and Nash added that some were injured in the clash. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson issued a tight-lipped statement to TV station WUSA.

“For operation security and the safety of our personnel, we will not disclose or discuss information related to potential investigations. Under President Trump and Secretary Mullin, if you break the law, you will face the consequences. Criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the U.S. We will find you, we will arrest you, and we will deport you,” the statement read. But that doesn’t explain ICE’s stakeout or its response to protesters.

“People were legitimately scared and pretty much terrorized by ICE for two full days before things escalated on Friday night. If you didn’t take anybody into custody, why did you even show up?” Tatiana Santos, a member of Indivisible Frederick Forward, who was at the protest, told Maryland Matters.

Democratic Representative April McClain Delaney, whose district includes Frederick, said in a statement that she was “especially disturbed by reports that ICE agents used force against Frederick residents.

“What we have seen in Frederick over the past several days is deeply concerning. No family should be afraid to leave their home or feel unsafe in their own neighborhood. The safety and well-being of our residents must come first,” Delaney said. “These allegations demand immediate answers and a full, transparent investigation.”

Researchers on the frontier of artificial intelligence are sounding the alarm on the likelihood that their products will cause a mass extinction event.

Jacob Coxon, a researcher who trains AI models, announced his resignation from Anthropic Tuesday night in a series of X posts claiming that AI companies are approaching an “endgame” race that could kill us all.

“I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly,” Coxon wrote. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.

“Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing,” he wrote.

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt,” he wrote. “If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible—but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.”

Evan Hubinger, a current safety researcher at Anthropic, shared Coxon’s concerns on X, adding his own warning that there was a greater than 10 percent chance AI could kill all humans within the next decade.

“I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to,” Hubinger wrote.

Samuel Marks, another researcher at Anthropic, also weighed in on X, stating that despite widespread concerns, AI developers were driven forward by commercial incentives and fears that other less-responsible companies might beat them to the technology.

“AI developers believe their technology could cause human extinction (or similarly bad outcomes). This could happen in the next few years. In general, the more senior the employee, the more concerned they are,” Marks wrote, adding that AI programs “frequently severely misbehave.

“For instance, AIs from multiple developers recently hacked their way out of secure evaluation environments and into real-world companies, even though no one asked them to do this,” he wrote.

Marks included a letter signed by more than 1,000 research staff at frontier AI companies, asking the U.S. government to support an international effort to develop tools to “deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.”

Republican Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen, a staunch supporter of President Trump’s extreme immigration crackdown, relied on undocumented Hispanic labor to build his multimillion-dollar pig-farming business, according to The New York Times.

As governor, Pillen has made Nebraska law enforcement collaborate with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, turned a former prison into an immigration center called the “Cornhusker Clink,” and referred to undocumented immigrants as “criminal illegal aliens” who are “the worst of the worst.” But he apparently doesn’t mind them when they’re making him rich.

According to the Times report, the Pillen Family Farms company’s use of undocumented labor has been an “open secret,” with at least 20 of the farms hiring undocumented immigrants. David Armendariz, a former employee from Mexico without legal status, told the Times that Pillen Family Farms accepted his fake ID. “Everyone knows that it’s not your name,” he said, “but they don’t ask you what your name is.” Armendariz said that as he worked there, he saw more and more Hispanic workers, many of them undocumented.

Pillen Family Farms has not been audited or inspected by ICE in the last 15 years.

The company apparently started tightening its requirements when Pillen started running for governor in 2022—and began hiring Mexican immigrants on special visas. Pillen himself has denied any knowledge of the undocumented workers on his farms.

“Jim Pillen never knowingly hired an illegal immigrant and went above and beyond the legal requirements to verify the immigration status of his employees,” a spokesperson stated. “[Governor Pillen] has the strongest immigration record in Nebraska history. Under the governor’s leadership, Nebraska has assisted the federal government in the deportation of nearly 1,000 illegal immigrants through its variety of partnerships with federal entities.”

“Four years of Jim Pillen has taught us one thing: What he says and what he does are two different things. His farm and personal business are just the latest proof,” Nebraska gubernatorial nominee Lynne Walz wrote on Wednesday. “He’s made a career holding other people to standards he won’t keep himself. The people paying the price are always the same—workers, families, the folks who can’t write a campaign check. Nebraska deserves better.”

The contradictions Walz points to also highlight how extremely intertwined immigration and labor are. Pillen Family Farms is not unique—many businesses and corporations knowingly hire undocumented immigrants from Mexico, Central, and South America because they know they’ll provide cheap labor with little oversight, which ultimately aids their bottom lines. And that’s what seems to matter most to people like Pillen.

Donald Trump gave Natalie Harp—and two other women in his administration—a hefty sum of cash last year.

The president gifted Harp $45,000 as a “cash gift for the holidays,” according to a copy of Harp’s most recent financial disclosure obtained by The Washington Post. That amount is equal to nearly a third of her $150,000 annual salary, according to the White House’s salary disclosure report to Congress.

Trump gave the same amount to his communications adviser Margo Martin, 31, and his deputy director of Oval Office operations Chamberlain Harris, 26. Harris also worked at the White House during Trump’s first term, and was tapped by the president last year to oversee the development of the White House ballroom project.

The director of Oval Office operations (and an alleged co-conspirator in Trump’s classified documents lawsuit) Walt Nauta also received a lump sum of $20,000, according to his own financial disclosure. Nauta is paid $175,000 a year.

A White House official told the Associated Press that Trump “has a longstanding practice of giving Christmas gifts to people in his orbit, including at times employees and aides, both in government and in his time in the private sector.” The official did not elaborate on whether other White House employees had received similar monetary presents, but added that the gifts were not related to “individuals’ official government duties, and therefore are entirely permissible under relevant legal and ethical standards.”

But former authorities on the matter disagree. Richard Painter, the former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, told the Post that the payments seem to violate a federal statute that disallows the supplementation of administrative salaries from outside sources.

Harp has been a near-constant presence at the president’s side during his second term, incessantly posting to his social media accounts on his behalf to create the illusion that he is always online and always reacting. Another of Harp’s responsibilities involves handing him printouts—particularly of positive news coverage of himself or his administration—to satisfy his preference for hard copy. The unique role has granted Harp a tremendous amount of influence over what Trump sees while also embittering some of her White House colleagues, who have taken to calling her the “human printer.”

But it’s been Harp’s unusually familiar relationship with the president that has caught the public’s interest in recent months. In August, it was revealed that Harp had written the president adoring notes in 2023, telling him that “you are all that matters to me,” describing Trump as her “guardian and protector,” and signing off on the letter to her boss with: “All my heart.”

The situation got even weirder when it became clear that Harp was one of the few people who accompanied Trump through a secret plane transfer in Turkey, shuttling him from Air Force One to a military plane via a catering truck, during an Iranian surface-to-air missile threat. Other high-ranking Trump officials—including State Secretary Marco Rubio—were left behind on the decoy plane.

Trump and Harp’s dynamic spurred more backlash after Trump publicly defended her when Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff suggested that the duo had an untoward relationship. Around the same time, the White House cropped Harp out of photos from the Freedom 250 Grand Prix.

Never forget? Senator Ted Cruz suggested that President Donald Trump may not be able to remember what happened on 9/11.

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked the Texas Republican Tuesday night what he made of Trump’s widely publicized—and decontextualized—comments at his weird 9/11 tribute earlier that day.

In the midst of claiming that he’d taken a large group of construction workers to Ground Zero “right after it happened,” Trump recounted being carried out from under One Liberty Plaza by firefighters who were afraid the building would collapse. Trump’s disjointed retelling left open the possibility that he was describing an incident from the same day.

“He’s saying that there is evidence that he was there right after, I mean, he’s kind of making it seem like he was pulled out of the rubble, though, with the firefighters,” Collins said. “Do you think that’s appropriate?”

“September 11th was 25 years ago,” Cruz said. “It was a horrific moment for our entire country. And you can doubt whatever you want about Donald Trump, but the man is a New Yorker, he loves New York, and I have every doubt that what he’s conveying there is what he experienced and it was a traumatic experience for all of us.”

Cruz appeared to misspeak about his “every doubt.” Still, his comment suggested that Trump’s memory may not be what it used to be. Add it to the list of dozens of other instances of the president’s apparent cognitive decline.

The president’s early-bird 9/11 tribute was undoubtedly a total Trump-fest. He repeatedly veered into rhetoric boosting his own disastrous agenda, supporting the war in Iran, and attacking Democratic Socialists.

One Liberty Plaza did not fall down, and Trump’s anecdote only served to make light of the experience of New Yorkers who didn’t have their own skyscrapers from which to survey the damage and chaos of 9/11.