ICE’s Own Report Found It’s Not Giving Detainees Sufficient Care
https://newrepublic.com/post/217724/damning-report-conditions-dozens-died-ice-detention
ICE’s Own Report Found It’s Not Giving Detainees Sufficient Care
A damning investigation exposed the circumstances in which dozens of people died in ICE custody.
The San Francisco Chronicle obtained internal reports on the deaths of 29 immigrant detainees who died between January 2025 and January 2026. In the 29 cases the Chronicle reviewed, 23 immigrants died after receiving medical care the agency itself found was deficient.
ICE investigators determined that detention staff “deviated from safe limits of practice,” or “did not provide medical care within safe limits of practice” for the 23 detainees.
In at least eight of the cases, medical staff failed to perform CPR correctly, or at all. In only three of the cases, investigators determined that the deficient medical care did not directly contribute to the person’s death.
The agency continues to insist that there has been no spike in detainee deaths, though 2025 saw the most immigrant detainee deaths since 2003. So far in 2026, 31 immigrants have died in ICE detention.
During President Donald Trump’s second term, ICE has subjected tens of thousands of people—including U.S. citizens, lawful immigrants, and immigrants with no criminal convictions—to overcrowded rooms, unsanitary conditions, and insufficient food and water.
In many cases, immigrants report having been denied adequate medical care. Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff released a report in October 2025 documenting at least “85 credible reports of medical neglect” at U.S. detention centers. In January, ICE announced that it had stopped paying for immigrant detainees to receive health care—and wasn’t planning on paying again for months.
For the Trump administration, the cruelty is part of the point. The Department of Homeland Security even rejected plans to construct immigration detention facilities that were more humane.
Trump Promotes Stephen Miller as He Doubles Down on Extreme Agenda
Donald Trump is refusing to learn a lesson from the elections, which left the Republican Party in shambles.
Stephen Miller will be taking over as White House chief of staff beginning Monday.
Trump made the announcement on Truth Social Friday afternoon, saying that “Susie Wiles, who has done an outstanding job, will be moving over to the Trump Political Operation. I want to thank her for her service as Chief of Staff — She has done a great job! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
Miller, previously the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, is receiving the promotion after serving in both Trump administrations. He is well-known for his hardline, xenophobic, and racist views on immigration, which led to violent and deadly mass deportation policies in Trump’s second term.
Trump’s decision to elevate Miller suggests that he is unrepentant about much of the negative attention brought by ICE’s violence even after Republicans were dealt historic losses in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Earlier this week, Miller was the target of leaks from Republicans and Trump administration officials over how his deportation plans were going too far, with even one anecdote about First Lady Melania Trump complaining to the president about people she knew being deported. Wiles reportedly tried for months to steer Trump away from Miller’s approach, according to The New York Times.
Ultimately, though, Wiles is the one on her way out. She tendered her resignation Thursday night, as Trump has partly blamed her for the GOP’s devastating election losses, Wired journalist Hugo Lowell reported. Rumors that she would be made into a scapegoat for the elections had been floating around for weeks.
In a statement posted on X, Wiles said, “Serving President Trump in the White House has been the honor of a lifetime. I’m so proud to have been a part of what we’ve accomplished together from securing our border and cutting taxes to strengthening our economy and putting America First. More than anything, I’m grateful for the extraordinary people I’ve had the privilege of working alongside. While my role may be changing, my commitment to the President and the mission never will.”
Promoting Miller now is a clear message to Democrats after their massive election victory.
The death of nurse Alex Pretti at the hands of ICE agents in January caused a sea change in Americans’ thoughts on immigration, and gave Democrats the edge this November. ICE heavy-handed tactics continued, though. ICE agents have shot at least 25 people in Trump’s second term, according to the Times. On top of that, dozens of immigration detainees have died in ICE custody due to inhumane conditions encouraged by Miller.
But Trump clearly doesn’t care about any of that, and wants to double down on the most brutal part of his second term by elevating his most vile staffer, giving Miller the run of the White House. Any thoughts of Trump moderating or working with Democrats in the final two years of his presidency have been dashed by this move, and Democrats should receive the message loud and clear.
In response to Miller’s appointment, Democratic Representative Robert Garcia, who will be taking over the House Oversight Committee next year, said “Stephen Miller should lawyer up.”
This story has been updated.
U.S. Hits Bonkers Measles High as RFK Jr.’s CDC Hides Death Totals
The U.S. has confirmed its highest number of measles infections since 1991.
The U.S. is on the cusp of losing its measles elimination status.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed 5,182 measles infections nationwide Friday, the highest case load of the disease that the country has experienced since 1991. Forty-five states have been affected.
But public-facing federal datasets have not kept up with state reporting. The agency has acknowledged just four measles deaths so far this year, while Pennsylvania on its own has reported six. Health agencies in New York and Wisconsin each reported at least one additional death.
Measles hasn’t been a national concern since 2000, when the long-term use of a vaccine proved so effective at minimizing risk and exposure to the disease that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared measles eradicated from the United States. That status is up for reassessment this month. If it’s determined that a singular viral strain has circulated the country for 12 months, the U.S. will no longer qualify for the label.
The virus’s dormancy has been challenged by anti-vaxers, who have opted against medicating their children in fear that vaccinations could cause autism (a thoroughly debunked conspiracy). One such conspiracist, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has refused to combat the ensuing measles outbreak with vetted science—instead, he has issued guidance that the illness can be treated by simple vitamins.
In April, Kennedy fell short of offering a full-throated endorsement of the MMR vaccine that has historically been used to treat measles, telling CBS News that his agency was focused on finding treatments for unvaccinated individuals while falsely claiming that the jab had not been “safety tested” and was not effective for long-term prevention. As of 2025, there are no known effective treatments or cures for measles other than vaccine prevention.
The return of historically eradicated diseases is thanks to a growing movement of anti-vax parents who refuse to provide their children with the same public health advantages that they received in their youth, mostly in fear of giving their children autism. The researcher who sparked that myth with a fraudulent paper lost his medical license and eventually rescinded his opinion. Since then, dozens of studies have proven there’s no correlation between autism and vaccines, including one study that surveyed more than 660,000 children over the course of 11 years.
But America’s is not the first measles response that Kennedy has bungled. Under Kennedy’s stewardship, the anti-vax nonprofit Children’s Health Defense had its own questionable history with the disease. Preceding a deadly measles outbreak on Samoa in 2019, the organization spread rampant misinformation about the efficacy of vaccines throughout the nation, sending the island’s vaccination rate plummeting from the 60–70 percent range to just 31 percent, according to Mother Jones. That year, the country reported 5,707 cases of measles as well as 83 measles-related deaths, the majority of which were children under the age of five.
Democrats Put Tech Giants That Courted Trump at the Top of Target List
Democrats have a plan to use their power in Congress to go after all of Trump’s tech buddies.
Democrats are eyeing investigations into some of America’s largest corporations that tried to curry favor with President Trump.
The Washington Post reports that now that Democrats won back control of Congress, they are planning to probe powerful entities in Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and the first targets could be Apple, Meta, and Elon Musk and all of his companies.
The House is already preparing to investigate how President Trump used Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok in the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, according to the Post. House Democrats are also looking at Apple’s hosting of tracking apps used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and at Meta for demanding that local governments sign nondisclosure agreements regarding data centers.
Corporate lawyers in Washington, D.C., are scrambling to meet with corporate executives to offer advice on the impending high-profile public investigations. Many firms are preparing pitches to attract Musk as a client, as he is not only the world’s richest man, but also holds billions in government contracts, has a close relationship with Trump, and led the disastrous Department of Government Efficiency initiative.
One lawyer at a major D.C. firm told executives in a private online meeting Thursday that “this is a new era.”
“If your company is caught up in this oversight, it’s likely to be much more highly publicized,” the lawyer said, according to the Post.
Dozens of corporations and CEOs donated to Trump’s transition fund, his inauguration fund, and his White House ballroom project. Where that once may have protected them from regulations and investigations from the Trump administration, with this new Congress, the opposite is true. Trump also made millions investing in many companies and publicly praised companies that did him favors.
“Lawyer up,” wrote Democratic Representative Robert Garcia, the next chair of the House Oversight Committee, in a brief statement on election night.
Stunning Map Shows Just How Much the Country Swung Left in Elections
Practically everything is blue.
Want to see just how far left the United States shifted in Tuesday’s midterm elections? Look no further.
A map produced by Ground News using data from civicAPI showed just how far each U.S. county’s margin moved from the 2024 presidential election to the 2026 House vote. A whopping 94 percent of U.S. counties shifted left in Tuesday’s midterm elections.
Jurisdictions in all 50 states reported an average 13-point shift toward Democratic House candidates. No state showed an overall shift toward the Republicans in the House, although there were a handful of districts that moved right.
The states that showed the largest shifts toward Democratic House candidates were New Jersey, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming. The states that saw the smallest leftward shifts were South Dakota, Vermont, and Oregon.
The map indicated that even in states where Democratic candidates did not win, such as West Virginia, Indiana, and Kentucky, there were still heavy leftward shifts among voters.
Voters under 30 swung sharply toward the Democratic Party, according to the AP Voter Poll, a survey of more than 100,000 voters across all 50 states. Republicans appeared to lose most—if not all—of President Donald Trump’s gains with Hispanic and Black voters in 2024. Moderate and lower income voters also turned up to support Democratic candidates.
Trump Official Doug Burgum Has Been Pushing Data Centers for a Reason
The interior secretary stands to personally profit from his push for data centers on public lands.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has been pushing to build artificial intelligence data centers on public lands since he first joined President Trump’s Cabinet. A Friday report from ProPublica shows that Burgum might feel so strongly about the centers not because of worries about China or the future—but because he has somewhere between $18.1 million and $64.4 million invested in artificial intelligence companies.
Burgum’s 2026 financial disclosure document shows that the vast majority of his wealth is held with Arthur Ventures, the investment firm he co-founded. While Burgum’s Senate confirmation ethics agreement forced him to resign from Arthur Ventures, he still maintained his financial interests at the firm. According to an analysis by public lands advocacy group Save Our Parks that was shared with ProPublica, Arthur Ventures invests between $18.1 million and $64.4 million in AI companies—meaning that Burgum is pushing an unpopular policy that will personally enrich him. Burgum has blamed the mass rejection of data centers on a “foreign psyop.”
The Trump administration, of course, denies ProPublica’s reporting.
“Secretary Burgum has met his federal ethics and financial disclosure obligations,” a U.S. Department of the Interior spokesperson said. “Any suggestion that his office decisions are driven by personal investments are false and completely unsupported.”
Yet Burgum isn’t the only Trump administration member who stands to personally profit from his investments in AI and data centers. According to a ProPublica review, over 380 administration members or their spouses have investments in or other financial ties to Nvidia, 320 have ties to Alphabet, and over 240 are invested in Meta Platforms—all while the administration allows states to construct data centers and inject their technology into every level of everyday life unfettered.
“Like every other goon in this administration, Data Center Doug is in it for himself,” California Representative Jared Huffman wrote online. “He wants to cover our public lands with AI data centers that will make him and Trump’s tech buddies richer.”
Amy Acton Says She Won’t Speak to Vivek Ramaswamy After Beating Him
Ohio’s governor-elect perfectly capped off her historic win.
Dr. Amy Acton is washing her hands of Vivek Ramaswamy and his dirty campaign tactics.
Ohio’s first female governor-elect told CBS Mornings Friday that she has “no intention” of speaking to the losing Republican after he produced a disturbing political advert featuring her estranged mother.
“It was sad, I would like to say I didn’t expect this but there was no low my opponent wouldn’t sink to,” Acton said, noting that Ramaswamy’s other attack ads were filled with “lies” and “vitriol.”
“I heard that he did leave you a congratulatory phone call,” said host Gayle King. “Have the two of you spoken since election night or at all?”
“Gayle, I think we can’t normalize behavior like this. It was so beyond the pale. So I have no intention of speaking to him. I do believe that leaders’ words matter, and we need to hold folks accountable,” Acton said.
As the days ticked down to the midterm election, Ramaswamy hatched a crackpot plan to damage Acton’s credibility by weaponizing the sexual assault she suffered during her childhood against her. Ramaswamy used Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur, as part of a smear campaign to paint the Ohio Democratic gubernatorial nominee as a liar.
He moved forward with the ad spot against the advice of his team, and while ignoring publicly available information demonstrating that Arthur abandoned her children to skip town with her husband—Cledith “Bud” Arthur—who was indicted for allegedly raping Acton when she was a young girl.
The biological daughter of that man lent credibility to Acton’s account of the abuse days after the smear campaign was leaked. Speaking through tears during an interview with the Daily Mail, the Youngstown, Ohio–based woman said that Arthur had also raped her late sister, Christine, years before he married Acton’s mother.
Acton has been very public about her broken family and childhood struggles. Over the years, she has discussed the horrific sexual abuse she endured from her stepfather (which she told The Youngstown Vindicator occurred between the ages of nine and 12), and also shared her experiences with homelessness in her youth. In a March 2020 profile by The Toledo Blade, Acton said that she spent one of her childhood winters living in a tent outside Youngstown.
Ramaswamy—a biotech billionaire that attended one of Ohio’s largest private high schools—saw those stories as potential political fodder, and attempted to utilize them for his own personal gain. But in doing so, he ultimately hurt himself.
The 41-year-old MAGA acolyte has since become a bit of a political pariah that is unwelcome on either the left or the right, as Democrats and Republicans alike condemned the low blow.
Trump Aides Are Eying the Exits After Disastrous Elections
The rats continue to jump ship.
Donald Trump’s midterm bust has even his White House aides eyeing the exit.
“There is no holding back on the desire to leave now,” one former White House official told MS NOW Friday. “Some are making calls to try and jump ship.”
What happened on Tuesday has been described by some Republicans as an “extinction-level” event, as Democrats scooped up areas of the country that have been historically seen as deep-red, according to the news outlet. A White House official told MS NOW that the election results had amounted to “the worst-case scenario.”
But as Trump approaches the lame duck portion of his second term, some members of his staff are looking for an off-ramp out of MAGA world.
“In this current trajectory, there’s no shot this is salvageable,” a former White House official in touch with current staffers told MS NOW, speaking on the matter of the MAGA agenda. “What is the president’s focus these last two years? It’s probably renovations.”
Trump has obsessed over his legacy throughout his second term, a fixation easily illustrated by the long list of vanity projects he’s cooked up instead of fulfilling the difficult job of steering the nation. So far, Trump has razed the White House East Wing, started construction on a $600 million ballroom (the price of which keeps growing), proposed a 250-foot “Triumphal Arch,” gutted the Lincoln bathroom, transformed the Palm Room from a lush green foyer into a sterile lobby, and mowed down Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s famous Rose Garden.
The administration also spent more than $16 million on an unsuccessful and rushed renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, took a sledgehammer to the Harry S. Truman Bowling Alley, indiscriminately axed trees in the Washington area, and destroyed the Kennedy Center in a futile attempt to attach Trump’s name to the living memorial.
“There is no holding back on the desire to leave now,” the former official continued. “Some are making calls to try and jump ship.” Others are reportedly seeking out legal counsel as a “precaution,” the official told MS NOW.
Another former official summed up the current atmosphere succinctly: “pain.”
“Everybody’s going to start infighting,” they told MS NOW.
Two Top Justice Department Officials Jump Ship on the Same Day
Top Trump officials are fleeing after Republicans’ complete wipeout this election.
On the heels of assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon’s departure Thursday, two more leading officials from the Department of Justice are resigning.
Politico reports that John Eisenberg, the assistant attorney general in charge of national security, and Jason Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, are both leaving the DOJ. Eisenberg oversaw cases relating to espionage, leak investigations, and terrorism, and was also involved in the prosecution of former Trump national security adviser (turned Trump critic) John Bolton earlier this year for illegally retaining classified materials.
Quiñones oversaw an investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan over his statements to Congress about Russian interference in the 2016 election. Quiñones was also overseeing the prosecution of former Cuban President Raúl Castro. In a statement, Attorney General Todd Blanche said that “We are grateful for Jason’s leadership in combating violent crime, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and transnational crime. Jason has served the Department multiple times over his distinguished career, and we thank him for his service to this country,” Blanche said.
Blanche also announced Eisenberg’s resignation, noting that this was his “second tour of duty serving President Trump as a national security official and advisor.”
Democrats’ resounding victory in Tuesday’s midterm elections seems to have scared officials in the DOJ, who may now be targets of investigations in a Democratic-controlled Congress next year. Subpoenas and other oversight tools are already being prepared against the DOJ.
Democrats will also be able to look into the administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, President Trump’s business dealings, corruption surrounding presidential pardons, and deals with foreign governments—and those are just the tip of the iceberg. Dhillon, Eisenberg, and Quiñones are likely the first of many to jump ship, and they should probably consider lawyering up.
This story has been updated.
America’s Ugliest Car Is Coming to an End
Farewell to the Cybertruck.
The era of Elon Musk’s Cybertruck is finally coming to an end: After years of persistently weak sales, the technocrat’s polarizing mini tanks are officially headed out of production.
Musk announced Friday that Tesla’s Texas plant would cease production in the middle of next year in order to build CyberCab, the company’s self-driving taxi.
Since launching Cybertruck in 2023, Tesla has consistently struggled to meet the vehicle’s sales target of 200,000 per year. In the third quarter of 2026, the company only sold 8,300 “other models,” which includes the Cybertruck. Ahead of the vehicle’s initial release, Musk fretted on an earnings call: “We dug our own grave with Cybertruck.”
Musk’s metal monstrosities became the unfortunate symbol of Donald Trump’s second term, after Musk bought the president’s way back into the White House in 2024. Musk spent twice as much to buy this week’s midterm elections for Republicans, but he’d have been just as well off if he’d lit the cash on fire.
The announcement comes as Tesla’s shares declined 11 percent Thursday, following a Democratic sweep in the midterm elections that flipped both chambers of Congress blue. Evidently, investors are concerned that Musk could face new congressional probes and harsher regulations. The aggregate market cap losses for Tesla and SpaceX came to more than $420 billion since Tuesday’s close, CNBC reported.
Musk has used his proximity to Trump to boost his many businesses, including Tesla cars, which Trump showed off at the White House like a hacky used car salesman. In some cases, the administration even pressured foreign governments into approving Musk’s products.
Democrats have signaled they plan to investigate Musk’s shady leadership of the defunct Department of Government Efficiency, his companies’ lucrative contracts with the federal government, and his alleged role in cutting Ukraine’s Starlink access, perhaps on behalf of his close friend Russian President Vladimir Putin.
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