As we reported last week, well over 100,000 people shut down Minneapolis on January 23rd in response to the terror of ICE and CBP agents. The next Friday, in response to a call that originated with the Somali Student Association at the University of Minnesota, businesses across the country shut down and people went to the streets in hundreds of cities, continuing the protest movement nationwide.

Even the Trump administration has been forced to make moves in response, replacing Greg Bovino with Tom Hohman on the ground in Minnesota and with Kristi Noem making the weak promise that DHS officers starting in Minneapolis and then nationwide will get bodycams when funding is available. After the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good were caught on multiple cameras, the suggestion that bodycams will solve ICE brutality isn’t fooling anyone. Half-measures and anything short of getting rid of ICE simply won’t cut it. On their website nationalshutdown.org, organizers promise that “this was just the beginning” and demand “ICE out of everywhere.”

And, we get into what the release of even more Epstein files really means. With so many rich, famous and influential figures named, what will it take to really get justice for their victims?

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Rachel was in Minneapolis last week where over 100,000 people took to the streets and reports on the mass action that happened Friday, shutting down businesses, schools and the city in response to the Trump administration’s deployment of ICE to Minneapolis and the brutal killing of Renee Nicole Good earlier this month. The next day, CBP agents killed Alex Pretti, a VA nurse, while he was pinned to the ground, firing 10 rounds in less than 5 seconds. Again the people of Minneapolis and beyond have risen up, with multiple mobilizations taking place over the weekend despite continued freezing cold temperatures. And a call for no business as usual on a national scale has come out of Minneapolis for this Friday, January 30th. High school students are preparing walkouts, and people all over the country are getting ready to shut it down for justice.

The ruling class is responding frantically to quell the mass sentiment. An open letter from dozens of Minnesota-based corporations like Target, 3M, Hormel and more calls for “an immediate deescalation of tensions.” The Trump administration has had calls they call productive with Democratic officials in Minneapolis and Minnesota governments. And Gregory Bovino, the “Commander-At-Large” of US Border Patrol, seems to be set to go back to California and slowly make his way to retirement. Even with rumored departures of some ICE and CBP forces from Minneapolis, these small changes and concessions are proving to not be enough for the masses of people.

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Mass protests have taken place across the country after an ICE agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Good in Minneapolis, executing her in her car as she tried to drive away. The shooting has ignited an extraordinary wave of resistance. In the Twin Cities and beyond, students walked out of school on Monday in protest, refusing to sit in silence while federal immigration officers operate with impunity in their cities and refusing to accept state violence in their neighborhoods as normal.

People across the United States have taken to the streets demanding accountability and justice, that ICE agent Jonathan Ross be arrested and charged and that ICE terror be stopped immediately. As we’ve seen in cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, this mass resistance has the power to effect great change. In response, Donald Trump on Tuesday claimed a “day of reckoning & retribution is coming” to Minnesota. Unions, faith groups, community organizations and more in Minnesota have called for a “day of truth and freedom” on Friday, January 23rd, asking people to refuse to work, to shop and to go to school - effectively calling for a general strike. “We are going to prove that people care for each other. That people love on one another. That community stands with and for each other,” said JaNaé Bates Imari, Auxiliary Minister of St. Paul's Camphor Memorial United Methodist Church. She went on, “Freedom is not just the freedom from constraints. It is the freedom to have safety, it is the freedom to have joy, it is the freedom to be able to thrive.”

ICE isn’t just going door-to-door terrorizing communities. It’s spying on entire neighborhoods and cities. Its operations are powered by data from multiple government sources including the IRS, Medicaid, the TSA as well as commercial location data, and the agency has contracted with surveillance company Palantir to build the so-called ImmigrationOS to target and prioritize immigration raids. Palantir has secured more than $900 million in federal contracts under the Trump administration.

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At his first court appearance in New York along with his wife Cilia Flores, Nicolás Maduro told the judge, “I am innocent. I am not guilty. I am a decent man, the constitutional president of my country.” He declared himself a prisoner of war and a political prisoner, and along with Flores pleaded not guilty to all of the ridiculous counts of narcoterrorism and gun charges against him. Outside the court on January 5th, supporters rallied and chanted, “no boots on the ground, no bombs in the air, U.S. out of everywhere.”

The attack on Venezuela that killed at least 80 people, the kidnapping of Maduro and Flores and the threats against Colombia, Mexico and Cuba are the implementation of the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, laid out in the 2025 National Security Strategy. As the State Department simply and grotesquely put it in an X post, “This is our hemisphere” is the renewed focus of the U.S. empire.

It’s a very dynamic situation that calls for urgent action. Within hours of the news of the attack on Saturday, tens of thousands of people in over 100 cities in the United States took to the streets to condemn it and the further threats made by Trump and his administration. Many more in Venezuela and around the world have mobilized against this raw act of gangster imperialism.

This is a war on multiple fronts: military, economic, political and information - and disinformation intended to sow distrust and chaos has been spreading wildly.

PLUS: We bring you an interview with Jessica Plichta, who was arrested by Grand Rapids Police Department for speaking out against U.S. intervention in Venezuela.

Read the article we mentioned in Peoples Dispatch: Venezuela’s Revolution still stands: debunking Trump’s psyop

Read more coverage in CovertAction Magazine:
CIA Played Instrumental Role in Maduro Kidnapping
On The Ground in Caracas: Venezuelans Rally to Support Government in Face of Illegal Kidnapping of President 

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As 2025 comes to an end and we enter a new year, we’re looking back on the past 12 months that sometimes feel like a never-ending cycle of bad news.

The year began with Trump’s inauguration,kicking off massive protests in cities and towns across the country that have continued throughout the year, spawning the No Kings movement as well as other national and local resistance. Instead of quietly letting the Trump administration implement Project 2025 and worse, peoples’ movements have taken action to defend education, workers’ rights, LGBTQ rights, women’s rights and more. 

It’s also been a year of fightback against war and imperialism. As Trump has had meetings with Benjamin Netanyahu and Volodymyr Zelenskyy over the last weekend of 2025, the U.S. is ramping up its attacks on Venezuela, including a possible CIA-run drone bombing earlier in December of a port facility. Even with a ceasefire agreement in place, Israel continues to bomb and displace Palestinians, and the solidarity movement continues to organize for an end to U.S. support for Israel and its genocide, connecting Palestine with Venezuela, Nigeria, Yemen, Syria and the many other countries the U.S. has bombed this year.

Going into 2026, we’re not just reviewing what happened over the last year but looking at the lessons that movements need to learn for another year of oppression - and struggle.

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To protect the huge profits of unregulated AI companies, the Trump administration is trying to bring back a punishment that was stripped from this year’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill. In a December 11th Executive Order titled “Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence,” individual states will lose access to the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment program if they establish their own regulations around the use and development of Artificial Intelligence in many circumstances. BEAD provides $42.45 billion in federal grants to U.S. states and territories to build and enable access to critical high-speed Internet connections that many people still lack.

A national set of policy and legislation for artificial intelligence would make much more sense than dozens of competing policies at the state level, but such a development doesn’t seem likely. The Executive Order also makes it clear that “It is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance the United States’ global AI dominance through a minimally burdensome national policy framework for AI” and, harkening back to the Cold War and the race to space, lays out that the United States must win “the AI race.”

Trillions of dollars are being spent in the AI economy from NVIDIA’s advanced chips to massive datacenters, the salaries of engineers who build and train new models, and AI services being forced into seemingly every product we consume. But the huge expenditures of tech and AI giants are making investors nervous about an impending bursting of the AI bubble. OpenAI alone is going to spend $1.4 trillion in the next 8 years on AI infrastructure for the government, a move that could be seen as the government bailing out a giant company yet again.

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A recent op-ed by the New York Times Editorial Board calls for the U.S. military to reinvent itself and rearm itself in new ways in the face of the Western capitalist order losing its hegemony to rising powers across the world. The very idea of returning to a multipolar arrangement without the United States at the forefront terrifies the ruling class - including those elements who are at odds with the Trump administration on specific policies, tactics or details of how things are implemented.

The Times piece reinforces the newspaper’s long role as a mouthpiece for the capitalist class and for imperialism. The op-ed isn’t aimed at the average American, though it contains plenty of fearmongering about supposed threats from its favorite boogeymen China and Russia. It’s really aimed at restoring some sense of unity with those isolationist, so-called “America First” sectors. As the neoliberal order continues its collapse, the language - and urgency - actually help expose the mislogic of imperialism itself.

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At the final Cabinet meeting of 2025, Donald Trump said that the strikes on fishing boats in the Caribbean would continue, and that “We're going to start doing those strikes on land, too” - signaling that a ground invasion of Venezuela and possibly other countries may be imminent.

On this episode, we review the lies the U.S. government has been putting forward about where drugs are coming from and why the U.S. has wanted to overthrow the Venezuelan government for decades - for access to its rich oil resources, to open up new markets for U.S. goods, and to send a message to other countries charting their own independent and socialist paths that imperialist hegemony can’t be challenged.

The time for a united movement against this war, which could also spread to Colombia and beyond, is now. And that movement must be independent of both major parties so it doesn’t repeat the mistakes of some in the 2000s by quieting down or compromising itself to appease the Democrats, and so it doesn’t get sidetracked into “America First” isolationism on the right. We also discuss some of the overt - and covert - ways that mouthpieces of imperialism will try to dissuade people from taking part in such a movement.

December 6th will be a national day of action against war in Venezuela. Find a demonstration near you at https://www.answercoalition.org/venezuela, or add yours to the list.

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On November 20th, a group of six Democratic Senators and Representatives released a video addressing American servicemembers, reminding them that they can and must refuse illegal orders that are given to them. The video comes as the Trump administration continues deploying the National Guard to cities around the country - and a day before a judge ruled that the National Guard deployment in Washington, DC was illegal. In the video, Representatives Chris Deluzio, Jason Crow, Maggie Goodlander and Chrissy Houlahan along with Senators Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin say in part, “the threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but from right here at home. Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders.”

Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth have labeled them the “Seditious Six” and called for them to be hanged. Now, the Pentagon has opened an investigation into Mark Kelly because of the video, creating the possibility that the retired Navy Captain could be recalled and face charges under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Elissa Slotkin is a former CIA analyst, and the rest have military backgrounds. Kelly is the only one who served long enough to retire, receive a pension and continue to be subject to the UCMJ. The FBI has also announced an investigation into all six.

The video and the responses of criminal investigation and even death threats reflect a severe disagreement within the ruling class on how to go forward as basic parts of the social contract are destroyed and trust in social institutions withers.

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Over 20,000 documents related to the Estate of Jeffrey Epstein have been released by the House Oversight Committee, and an unknown number more may be coming as the House of Representatives voted 427-1 on Tuesday for their release.. Donald Trump has flipflopped on whether he’d sign the bill if it passes the Senate and comes across his desk. First, he called Republicans who supported the release like Marjorie Taylor Greene and bill sponsor Thomas Massie “RINOs” - Republicans in Name Only. Then on Sunday and Monday, he signaled that he’d sign the bill if it came across his desk.

Whether the full files are ever released or not, the information we already have tells us a lot about Epstein and his connections.  Worth around $600 million when he died in prison in 2019, the sex offender who made his money as a financial advisor to the elite also influenced and interacted with people at the highest levels of government and business. In his emails and texts, he discussed opportunities and prospects in Ukraine, Israel, Syria, and even in Mongolia, sharing a document calling it China’s Ukraine. His connections and friendships with many in the upper echelons of society point to a real ruling-class conspiracy where the wealthy overlook heinous crimes in favor of maintaining their status.

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