#civil-liberties

#civil-liberties

Hill is one of nine people currently standing trial for events stemming from a small protest that took place on July 4, 2025, at the Prairieland Detention Center just outside of Dallas, in which a police officer was non-fatally shot. According to participants, the protest was meant to be a noisy but peaceful show of solidarity with ICE detainees held in the prison.

This morning at approximately 6:30 a.m., federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security entered a Columbia Residential building and detained a student. Our understanding at this time is that the federal agents made misrepresentations to gain entry to the building to search for a 'missing person.'

In the United States, we haven't yet seen rifles aimed at large crowds, but we do observe masked federal agents detaining protesters in unmarked vehicles, flashy ICE raids staged like military operations and pardons for political violence all clear warning signs. Ignoring this is the first step toward complacency, which can kill liberty. Fascism is often misunderstood. It is not just political oppression; it is a set of traits, as scholars and observers point out,

Last week, two Democrats in the Senate hosted a " bicameral public forum to receive testimony on the violent tactics and disproportionate use of force by agents of the Department of Homeland Security." Here in Minnesota, we continue to deal with the thousands of immigration enforcement agents who have unleashed unspeakable violence on our state. Flights leave daily with men, women, and children, some of whom are citizens, green-card holders, or asylum-seekers with pending cases, to detention centers with a prevailing culture of abuse. Countless other legal observers and protesters, including myself, have been handcuffed and detained for hours without being charged with a crime, or intimidated with weapons and threats.

While the authority is legally limited to foreign intelligence, it can sweep in Americans' texts, emails and phone calls when they communicate with overseas targets. Those incidental collections - which have sometimes been followed by unauthorized searches of Americans' communications - have been extensively documented by government oversight bodies in recent years. The findings fueled reforms adopted when Congress last renewed the authority in April 2024.

After several years of suspension, political parties in Burkina Faso have been formally dissolved by the military government, which has also seized all their assets in a move analysts say is a major blow for democracy in the West African nation. In a decree issued on Thursday, the government, led by Captain Ibrahim Traore, scrapped all laws which established and regulated political parties, accusing them of failing to comply with guidelines.

When I first saw the video of the killing of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital, I immediately thought of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Federal agents shot Pretti after he tried to help a woman they had thrown to the ground and pepper-sprayed. Jesus tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves and help those in need. "Do this and you will live," he says. Not in Donald Trump's America.

How do you stop someone from killing someone else? In most societies, we do so with warnings, promises, and contracts. We make laws to make ourselves feel safe. It's important to feel safe, because reality is terrifying. In Minneapolis this weekend, we saw reality: a group of men with guns, in a semicircle, firing a barrage of shots into a man's body lying on the ground.

It is easy to dunk on this title and dismiss it to the land of headlines already adjudicated by Betteridge's Law, and I am not going to fight back against its undefeated winning streak, but I do think there is value in asking simple questions that you can answer with provable reality. A lot of people dunked on the Wall Street Journal's front-page story about how data revealed that-like