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      MyPillow founder defamed Smartmatic election tech company, judge rules

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      MyPillow founder Mike Lindell defamed the election technology company Smartmatic with false statements that its voting machines helped rig the 2020 presidential election, a federal judge in Minnesota ruled recently.But US district judge Jeffrey Bryan deferred until future proceedings the question of whether Lindell – one of the country’s most prominent propagators of false claims that the 2020 election was a fraud – acted with the “actual malice” that Smartmatic still needs to prove to collect any damages.The judge said there are “genuine fact disputes” as to whether Lindell’s statements were made “with knowledge that they were false or made with reckless disregard to their falsity”. He noted that the defense says Lindell has an “unwavering belief” that his statements were truthful.The statements cited by the judge in his ruling on Friday arose from Lindell’s criticism of the results of the 2020 election in California’s Los Angeles county, which Democratic challenger Joe Biden carried with 71% of the vote over Republican incumbent Donald Trump. The results in LA county helped Biden secure the state’s 55 electoral votes as his electoral college victory sent him to the White House and ended Trump’s first presidency.The county used Smartmatic’s computerized touchscreen ballot-marking devices and was the company’s only customer for the 2020 election. Lindell alleged the machines were rigged to change Trump votes to Biden votes.The judge ruled there were 51 specific times when Lindell falsely claimed – in documentaries he produced and through various media and personal appearances – that Smartmatic interfered with the results.“The court concludes that, based on the record presented, no reasonable trier of fact could find that any of the statements at issue are true,” Bryan wrote.Smartmatic attorney Erik Connolly said they will be seeking “nine-figure damages” from Lindell and MyPillow for “spreading lies” about the company.“Smartmatic did not and could not have rigged the 2020 election,” Connolly said in a statement. “It was impossible, and everything that Mr Lindell said about Smartmatic was false.”Smartmatic has been on a winning streak, having reached settlements in 2024 with two conservative news outlets, including Newsmax and One America News Network. The Florida-based company also still has an active case against Fox News.Lindell also has made similar claims against Dominion Voting Systems. He lost a case involving the Denver-based company in June when a jury ruled that he defamed a former Dominion employee by accusing him of treason. The jury awarded $2.3m in damages.Lindell told the Associated Press shortly after the Smartmatic ruling was filed that he hadn’t seen it – but that it was “the most bizarre thing I’ve ever heard”.Lindell went on to call Smartmatic “one of the most corrupt companies in the world”, and he vowed to keep fighting until its voting machines are “melted down and turned into prison bars”. He said he will take his crusade to eliminate voting machines in favor of paper ballots all the way to the US supreme court if he has to.Lindell, known as the “MyPillow guy” for his bedding company, also said he recently re-established residence in Minnesota as a step toward a likely run for governor against the incumbent Democratic governor, Tim Walz. While MyPillow is based in the Minneapolis suburbs, Lindell had been living until recently in Texas.Lindell and MyPillow have faced a number of legal and financial setbacks in recent years, but he won a victory in July when a federal appeals court ruled he did not have to pay a $5m arbitration award to a software engineer who disputed data that Lindell claimed proved China interfered in the 2020 election. The court said the arbitration panel overstepped its authority. More

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      in US Politics

      The abortion pill is safe. But why should Trump let facts get in the way of his agenda? | Moira Donegan

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr’s health department is conducting a new review of mifepristone, the drug used in the majority of American abortions, claiming that a new study from a conservative thinktank has raised concerns about its safety.Mifepristone, which was approved by the FDA 25 years ago this month, has repeatedly been proven safe and effective for use terminating pregnancies in both multiple medical trials and in widespread patient use over the past quarter of a century. The report cited by Kennedy, meanwhile, comes from the Ethics and Public Policy Center – a group that applies “the Jewish and Christian traditions” to modern law and pushes back “against the extreme progressive agenda while building a consensus for conservatives” – and was not peer reviewed. The study has been heavily criticized by medical experts for its methodology and lack of transparency regarding how it obtained and analyzed its data. The report appears to have dramatically inflated the rate of serious adverse health outcomes in patients who took mifepristone – in part by seemingly conflating the bleeding that occurs in the normal course of a medication abortion with hemorrhaging, and in part by relying on unclear terminology. The Ethics and Public Policy Center report classified “serious adverse events” as occurring in almost 11% of mifepristone patients. More reliable studies, subject to data transparency, peer review, and a more rigorously honest set of definitions, have found that such adverse health events happen in fewer than 0.5% of users. In a meta-analysis of more than 100 studies, the vast majority found that more than 99% of people who use mifepristone have no serious complications.Mifepristone is safe. But why let the facts get in the way of the Trump administration’s political agenda? The review of mifepristone marks the second time in less than a week that the Trump administration has marshalled false medical claims and junk science in an effort to constrain the freedoms of pregnant women and curtail their access to relief. On Monday, in a bizarre, rambling and frequently nonsensical press conference, the president appeared alongside Kennedy Jr to claim, falsely, that Tylenol use during pregnancy can cause autism in the resulting children, and to instruct pregnant women to avoid the painkiller and instead “tough it out”.The Trump administration has long been under pressure from the anti-abortion movement – which, not satisfied by the end of Roe v Wade (in a decision delivered to them by Trump’s appointees, hand-selected for the purpose), has continually pushed the administration to further limit access to abortion. Donald Trump has seemed unwilling to directly attack abortion, appearing to think that the issue is a political loser for him. But his administration has already curtailed access nationwide. His massive domestic spending bill included a provision barring most abortion providers from receiving Medicaid reimbursements for any services they provide – abortion related or not – for a year, a move that makes it dramatically more expensive for clinics to offer abortion services. As a result, clinics are already shutting their doors in Democratically-controlled states like California. In Wisconsin, where the battle for abortion legalization led to a fantastically expensive state supreme court race and massive voter mobilization, the state Planned Parenthood affiliate made the decision to stop providing abortions in order to retain access to the Medicaid funding they need to stay open – even though that enormous political effort succeeded in re-legalizing abortion in the state.But that’s not enough for the anti-choice right. Three Republican-controlled states – Missouri, Idaho and Kansas – are suing the FDA, seeking to reverse changes to mifepristone regulations that allowed the drug to be prescribed via telemedicine and sent through the mail, and to restore other restrictions on the drug. Texas, Florida and Louisiana are seeking to join and expand that lawsuit to further restrict mifepristone. The new regulations, which have been endorsed by leading health experts, have made mifepristone dramatically more accessible in the years since the Dobbs decision, as women living in states that ban abortion seek out ways to have the medication prescribed and mailed to them by physicians abroad or in Democratically controlled states.Kennedy’s move against mifepristone could restrict access even further. Compared with surgery, the pill is a more accessible, safer and less resource-intensive way for clinics to provide abortions. It does not require a surgical room or very much of a provider’s time; patients can take the pills and have their abortions in the comfort and privacy of their own homes. Getting rid of the abortion pill, or making it harder to access, would put even more strain on abortion providers who are already having a difficult time keeping their heads above water.Even more tragically, the move could be devastating for women’s health and lives. In the pre-Roe era, when abortion was illegal and mifepristone had not yet been invented, many women in need of abortions sought out surgical procedures on the black market. But surgery is much riskier than taking a pill, and many of these women experienced injuries and infections that killed or permanently maimed them. There is exactly one reason why the US has not yet seen a return to those bad old days of unsafe surgical abortions and mass female death: that reason is mifepristone. The drug saves women’s dreams and dignity by allowing them to control their own reproduction; it saves their lives by allowing them to avoid a dangerous surgery in an illegal market. Even in liberal states, abortion has become much harder to access than it was before Dobbs; that alone is an injury to women’s citizenship and status. With mifepristone under threat, it looks like the Trump administration is threatening their lives, too.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in US Politics

      Kamala Harris’s election memoir shows just how deluded the Democrats still are | Nesrine Malik

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      Watching the Kamala Harris presidential campaign unfold last year, I remember thinking, and writing, about how striking it was that she had been rehabilitated almost overnight into a political titan. Authoritative accounts of her before that moment portrayed a lo-fi vice-president, who, even according to people who had worked to get her there, had “not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country”. Another striking feature of her campaign was how it leaned into vibes and spectacle rather than substance, or building faith in Harris as a clean break from an unpopular and visibly deteriorating Joe Biden. Her new book, 107 Days, a memoir of the exact number of days she had to win the presidency, goes a long way in explaining why that was. In short, Harris – and those around her, including supportive media parties – got high on their own supply.This was not the intention, but 107 Days is a hilarious book. The kind of “you have to laugh or else you’ll cry” type of hilarity. As the second Trump administration unfolds in ever-more disastrous ways, Harris and the other timeline that was possible had she won take on a calamitous, mythical quality. Here she comes, alerting us to the fact that her defeat was no fateful tragedy, but a farce. There was no hidden, better version of Harris that was muzzled and limited by circumstance. There was only a woman with a formidable lack of self-awareness and a propensity to self-valorise.The book reveals a politician who is all about the machinery of politics, rather than one with conviction spurred by a sense of duty, or a coherent and specific set of values that differentiate her. The “not a thing that comes to mind” answer she gave when asked during the campaign if there was anything she would have done differently to Biden was not caution, but the truth. There is no sign here that she would have liked to meaningfully diverge on Gaza, for example, other than to introduce more parity in the rhetoric of compassion. Or any indication that she would have liked to grasp the nettle on economic policy and make more of her accusation that Donald Trump’s economic agenda “works best if it works for those who own the big skyscrapers”.This dearth of a unique Harris agenda explains why she often seemed so vague, skittish and rambling. How does she receive the news she will be the candidate? By reminding herself (and us) that she had the best “contact book” and “name recognition”, as well as the “strongest case”. She tries to cloak her ambition, saying “knew she could” be president, but only because she “wanted to do the work. I have always been a protector.” It’s fine to have ambition to be the president of the United States! Every cardinal dreams of becoming pope, as Cardinal Bellini of Conclave said. Even he did himself, to his shame, when he lamented upon the discovery of his ambition: “To be this age and still not know yourself.”My abiding feeling reading was: oh God, this was all just as bad as it looked. The celebrity-packed campaign roster was not, in fact, panicked desperation, but the preference of the candidate and her team. They thought that such a range of characters would show that Harris was “welcoming everyone into the campaign” – as if the power of celebrity could do the unifying work of coalition-building, rather than her own programme and politicking. The immersion in the filmic, the celluloid of US politics is so complete that there is a line about Jon Bon Jovi performing for her and it being a good omen, because he performed for a candidate who won in The West Wing. The media loved her. “And behold,” Harris quotes a Washington Post writer, praising her approach to Gaza, “she had her boat through the impossible strait.” Jon Favreau said Harris was “a sight to behold” at the Democratic convention.I lost count of the number of descriptions of crowds exploding, roaring, on fire. The audience applause to Harris’s Saturday Night Live appearance was some of the loudest ever heard. She replays her greatest hits, revealing a politician captured by the reverie of rapturous self-selecting crowds and buzzy studios, fatally unable to connect to the voters outside the bubble, who had soured on the Democrats and were checking out, or voting for Trump.View image in fullscreenBiden pops up often, a self-involved and petty figure, snapping at her heels and distracting her. But she is loyal, she tells us – often. So loyal that she couldn’t disparage him in the way that people needed her to (“People hate Joe Biden!” she is told by a senior adviser). But not so loyal that she doesn’t more artfully disguise that she wants you to know the man was a real drag who mentioned her too late in his speeches, and then called her before her big debate with Trump to unsubtly threaten her if she bad-mouthed him. But what is most telling, and alarming, is what she reveals about the Democratic establishment, and therefore what hope there is of an awakening among its ranks. One that could pose a meaningful challenge to Trump now, and Trumpism in the future. The 107 days were short, but they were a concentration of a process in which the party and its candidate had to dig deep quickly to unearth the most compelling and defining vision for the American people. The result was to take no risks, offer continuity and scold dissenters as Trump enablers, but with style. It wasn’t enough, and will never be.The answer to the question “what went wrong” isn’t “we didn’t have enough time” to establish Harris. It was that Harris, even now, with all the time to reflect and be honest with herself, is a politician who invests too much in presentation, and entirely exculpates herself of failures because she was dealt a bad political hand. What can you say besides, “to be this age and still not know yourself”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion

      Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist More

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      in US Politics

      Trump news at a glance: more than 100,000 federal workers to quit on Tuesday in largest ever mass resignation

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      More than 100,000 federal workers are to formally resign on Tuesday, the largest such mass event in US history, as part of a Trump administration program designed to make sweeping cuts to the federal workforce.With Congress facing a deadline of Tuesday to authorize more funding or spark a government shutdown, the White House has also ordered federal agencies to draw up plans for large-scale firings of workers if the partisan fight fails to yield a deal.Workers preparing to leave the government have described how months of “fear and intimidation” left them feeling like they had no choice but to depart.“Federal workers stay for the mission. When that mission is taken away, when they’re scapegoated, when their job security is uncertain, and when their tiny semblance of work-life balance is stripped away, they leave,” a longtime employee at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) told the Guardian. “That’s why I left.”Here are the key stories at a glance.US set for largest mass resignation in history as Trump continues deep cutsThe Trump administration is set to oversee the largest mass resignation in US history on Tuesday, with more than 100,000 federal workers set to formally quit as part of the latest wave of its deferred resignation program.Read the full storyTrump to meet with US congressional leaders in last-ditch effort to avoid shutdownDonald Trump has reversed course and is purportedly planning to host a bipartisan gathering of the top four US congressional leaders at the White House on Monday afternoon in a last-ditch effort to avoid a looming government shutdown, the House speaker and the US president’s fellow Republican, Mike Johnson, said on Sunday.Read the full storyEx-Trump lawyer says president using Comey indictment to conceal being ‘criminal’The indictment of former FBI director James Comey is part of a concerted effort by Donald Trump to “rewrite history” in his favor, a former senior White House lawyer claimed on Sunday as he warned of more retribution to come for the president’s political opponents.Read the full storyEric Adams drops out of New York City mayoral raceThe mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, announced on Sunday that he was abandoning his faltering bid to win re-election, just over a month before election day. Adams, who was trailing in the polls, was elected as a Democrat but ran for re-election as an independent after he was indicted on federal corruption charges, which were then dropped by the Trump administration in exchange for his cooperation on immigration raids.Read the full storyChildren left short of clean water and sleep amid ‘prolonged’ detention by Ice, watchdogs allegeChildren, including the very young, have been spending weeks or months in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention facility in a remote part of Texas where outside monitors have heard accounts of shortages of clean drinking water, chronic sleep deprivation and kids struggling for hygiene supplies and prompt medical attention, as revealed in a stark new court filing.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Settled legal precedent in the US is not “gospel” and in some instances may have been “something somebody dreamt up and others went along with”, the US supreme court justice Clarence Thomas has said.

      Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and personal lawyer to Donald Trump, has settled a long-running defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems over lies he told about the result of the 2020 presidential election.

      Democratic US senator Dick Durbin on Sunday renewed demands to meet with Trump administration immigration officials after days of clashes between federal officers and protesters at an immigration jail in his home state of Illinois.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on Saturday 27 September. More

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      in US Politics

      Oregon sues to block ‘illegal’ deployment of 200 national guard troops to Portland

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      The state of Oregon filed a lawsuit in federal court on Sunday seeking to block the deployment of 200 national guard troops to Portland, arguing Donald Trump’s characterization of the peaceful city as “war ravaged” is “pure fiction”.Oregon’s governor, Tina Kotek, said at a news conference that she had been notified by the Pentagon that the US president had seized control of the state’s reservists, claiming authority granted to him to suppress “rebellion” or lawlessness.“When the president and I spoke yesterday,” Kotek said, “I told him in very plain language that there is no insurrection, or threat to public safety that necessitates military intervention in Portland.”A Pentagon memorandum dated Sunday and signed by the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, obtained by the Washington Post, said: “200 members of the Oregon National Guard will be called into Federal service effective immediately for a period of 60 days.”Trump’s action, in asserting federal control of the state’s national guard troops, is clearly “unlawful”, Oregon’s attorney general, Dan Rayfield, said, given that it was not taken in response to a foreign invasion or mass anarchy, but one small protest by dozens of activists outside a single Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) field office in Portland.“Let’s be clear, local law enforcement has this under control,” Kotek, said. “We have free speech demonstrations that are happening near one federal facility. Portland police is actively engaged in managing those, with the federal folks a the facility, and when people cross the line, there’s unlawful activity, people are being held accountable.”The state’s lawsuit notes that the president’s false claims about the Ice facility being “under siege”, and life for Portland resident being “like living in Hell”, appear to be based on a single Fox News report broadcast earlier this month, which mixed social media video from a conservative journalist of the current protest with video of much larger protests in 2020, in another part of the city.“The problem is the president is using social media to inform his views,” the attorney general said, either because he was trying to mislead the public intentionally, or is “relying on social media gossip” about the actual conditions in a US city.Kotek added that she had tried to inform Trump, during a phone conversation on Saturday, that he had been badly misled about current conditions in Portland, which is once again a vibrant and peaceful city a half-decade on from the pandemic-era racial justice protests.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“What I said to the president is: ‘I don’t understand what information you have.’ When he says to me that the federal courthouse is under attack, that is absolutely not true,” Kotek said. Video featured in the recent Fox News report on Portland did show images of a 2020 protest outside the federal courthouse in downtown Portland that were wrongly described as recorded during the current anti-Ice protest.“Some demonstrations happening at one federal facility, that are being managed on a regular basis by local law enforcement, if that is the only issue he’s brining up, he has been given bad information,” Kotek said.“We cannot be looking at footage from 2020 and assume that that is the case today in Portland.” More

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      in US Politics

      Ex-Trump lawyer says president using Comey indictment to conceal being ‘criminal’

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      The indictment of former FBI director James Comey is part of a concerted effort by Donald Trump to “rewrite history” in his favor, a former senior White House lawyer claimed on Sunday as he warned of more retribution to come for the president’s political opponents.Ty Cobb, who defended Trump’s first administration during the Mueller investigation into his 2016 campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia, also told CBS that he doubted Comey would be convicted, if the case ever reached trial.Trump’s moves, he said on the Sunday morning show Face the Nation, were “wholly unconstitutional [and] authoritarian” and an attempt to hoodwink future generations.“Trump wants to rewrite history so that the next generation may not know that he incited a violent insurrection, refused to peacefully transfer the power of the presidency after losing an election, stole classified documents and showed them to friends and guests at Mar-a-Lago, and that he was a criminal,” Cobb said.“He’s a convicted felon. All, anybody involved in those events that offended him, they’re in real danger.”Cobb, a distant relative of the baseball legend with the same name, has become a vocal Trump critic since serving as his liaison to special counsel Robert Mueller, and said his role as lawyer for the administration, not as a personal attorney to the president, allowed him to call “balls and strikes” now.He laid out why he thought the indictment against Comey, for allegedly lying to Congress, was fatally flawed; and assailed Trump’s appointment of a White House aide with no prosecutorial experience to pursue the case, after he fired a federal prosecutor, Erik Siebert, when he declined to bring charges.“So, you have the rewriting history stuff. The US attorney that he appointed, his personal lawyer Lindsey Halligan, her role previously in the administration was, you know, trying to eliminate the theory that, you know, America had slaves, at the Smithsonian,” he said.“She was there to whitewash the Smithsonian and paint America as something that it isn’t. America needs to learn from the mistakes and lessons that we’ve had, and one of the biggest mistakes that America ever had was re-electing President Trump.”Cobb’s front-row seat to the machinations of Trump’s first term has made him an in-demand commentator on the workings of the second, and he told CBS he does not like what he sees.“Former attorney general [Robert] Jackson, the Nuremberg prosecutor, highlighted in 1940 that the most important thing at the justice department when he was attorney general was that people not target individuals, that they merely pursue crimes,” he said.“Griffin Bell years later said essentially the same thing [and] emphasized how politics and favor have no business at the justice department. It’s all about even-handedness.”Cobb said Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, has “wholly abandoned that and is now merely doing the president’s bidding when he says, ‘Prosecute my enemies, now’”.But the case against Comey, he said, was flimsy at best, and would almost certainly collapse.“The grand jury rejected one of the counts, the top count, actually, in the indictment, approved two, but by a very slim margin, 14 out of 23 in a process where there’s no defense attorney in the room, and the standard is merely probable cause,” he said.“The next courtroom that this will be assessed in, if it gets to trial, requires unanimity from 12 people, and there will be a vigorous defense. I don’t see any way in the world that Comey will be convicted. And I think there’s a good chance, because of the wholly unconstitutional, authoritarian way that this was done, that the case may get tossed out well before trial.”Separately, without mentioning Trump, his appointed FBI director Kash Patel contradicted a recent social media claim by the president that nearly 275 of the bureau’s agents were planted among the pro-Trump crowd that carried out the 2021 US Capitol attack.Patel reportedly issued a statement to Fox News Digital, according to the outlet, in which he said FBI agents at the scene of the attack were only sent to the scene after the mob attacked the Capitol in a desperate attempt to keep Trump in office despite his losing the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden.Issued Saturday night, the statement from Patel did make it a point to say that was not “the proper role of FBI agents”, among other things.In yet another bizarre social media episode for Trump, he posted – and then deleted – an artificial intelligence video in which his likeness was promoting magic medical beds that a far-right conspiracy claims can cure any ailment. The video depicted Trump touting a card guaranteeing access to new hospitals equipped with such beds. More

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      in US Politics

      Eric Adams drops out of New York City mayoral race

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      The mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, announced on Sunday that he is abandoning his faltering bid to win re-election, just over a month before election day, delivering the message in a social media video set to the strains of My Way.Adams, who was trailing in the polls, was elected as a Democrat but ran for re-election as an independent after he was indicted on federal corruption charges, which were then dropped by the Trump administration in exchange for his cooperation on immigration raids.In his video statement, seated on the steps of the mayor’s residence beside a photograph of his late mother, Adams said that it had been impossible for him to mount a winning campaign, blaming “constant media speculation about my future” and a decision by the city’s campaign finance board’s decision to withhold millions of dollars in matching funds over suspicious donations.View image in fullscreenHe also acknowledged that he had lost the trust of some New Yorkers after being charged with corruption but claimed the charges were unjust. “I was wrongfully charged because I fought for this city, and if I had to do it again, I would fight for New York again” Adams said, without explaining how allegedly obtaining illegal campaign contributions and luxury travel from foreign nationals for himself was in the best interest of New Yorkers.The mayor will serve the remainder of his term in office, which ends on New Year’s Eve, and his name remains on the ballot for the November election since the deadline to remove it has passed.The withdrawal of Adams narrows the race to lead the country’s largest city to a three-way contest between the Democratic nominee, Zohran Mamdani; the former governor, Andrew Cuomo; and the Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa.Three weeks ago, when Adams had insisted that he would stay in the race, amid reports that he had been offered an ambassadorship by the Trump administration if he would drop out to make it easier for Cuomo to defeat the democratic socialist frontrunner, Mamdani, the mayor was scathing about the former governor. “Andrew Cuomo is a snake and a liar,” Adams told reporters. “Andrew has had a career of pushing Black candidates out of races.”After Adams announced the end of his campaign on Sunday, Cuomo nonetheless praised him for “putting the well-being of New York City ahead of personal ambition”.Without mentioning Mamdani by name, Cuomo added: “We face destructive extremist forces that would devastate our city through incompetence or ignorance, but it is not too late to stop them.”Mamdani, a New York state assembly member who defeated Cuomo to win the Democratic nomination earlier this year, did not immediately comment on the mayor’s withdrawal.Earlier on Sunday, he posted video on Instagram of an influential Black pastor welcoming him to address the congregation of a Black Christian megachurch in East New York. The pastor, A R Bernard, pointed out to congregants that, if elected, Mamdani would not be the first democratic socialist mayor on the city, since the late David Dinkins, the city’s first Black mayor, was also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.Sliwa, the Republican nominee, said last week that he had turned down multiple offers of millions of dollars to end his own campaign.Recent polls of the four-way contest have shown Mamdani leading Cuomo by more than 20 points, with Sliwa and Adams far behind. When pollsters asked likely voters for their preferences in a race without Adams, Mamdani still led Cuomo by a sizable margin. More

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      Illinois senator demands to meet with Ice amid clashes at immigration facility

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      After days of clashes between federal officers and protesters at an immigration jail in his home state of Illinois, Democratic US senator Dick Durbin on Sunday renewed demands to meet with Trump administration immigration officials.Durbin wrote on X that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) must be “accountable for its actions” amid the administration’s “cruel immigration crackdown”. The post on Sunday morning came after Saturday night protests and arrests at an immigration detention center in Broadview, Illinois.For the preceding few days, federal officials have arrested protesters at the Broadview facility as Ice operations have escalated in Illinois.Durbin, along with Illinois representative Delia Ramirez and other Democrats, have been pressing for a congressional oversight visit to the Broadview facility for weeks in connection with reports of poor conditions.According to a letter written by Durbin and Ramirez on Friday, Democratic members of Congress have been unable to access the Broadview facility nor meet with immigration officials, as they have requested.Durbin and Ramirez informed Ice earlier in September of an upcoming oversight visit to the facility, which members of congress are allowed to do. But Ice in Chicago told Durbin and Ramirez they were “unable to support a visit”, according to the letter, and instead offered a meeting to the Democratic delegation. Ice on Friday postponed that meeting “to an unconfirmed date in October”, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.The Democratic pressure on Ice comes as protesters have clashed with officials at the Broadview site in recent days. On Saturday night, officials deployed pepper spray and rubber bullets and arrested a number of protesters outside the controversial immigration jail.In one video posted online on Saturday night, US border patrol officials, who have been dispatched to the area to assist in the Ice operations, can be seen deploying what is colloquially referred to as teargas on protesters standing outside the facility.On Sunday afternoon, a CBS Chicago reporter posted on Instagram that an Ice official “took a direct shot” at her car, saying that the official deployed gas into her open window. “Been puking for two hours,” the reporter said, adding that there were no protesters at the time and that she was just driving by the facility to check out the scene.Another local reporter in Chicago posted on X that the village of Broadview has opened a criminal investigation into that matter.View image in fullscreenThe Trump administration has called the protesters “rioters”, accusing them of inciting violence. On Saturday afternoon, Ice posted on X: “Rioters will not deter Ice from its law enforcement mission. All those assaulting or obstructing will be held accountable. Full stop.” In another post on Sunday morning, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said 11 people were arrested outside the Ice facility – and that officials had confiscated two guns during the arrests.In response, the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, decried the force used by federal officials at the site. He also called on protesters and bystanders to “document what you see with your phones and cameras”.“The suggestion that chemical agents like tear gas or pepper spray could be used indiscriminately against peaceful demonstrators, or even first responders, is unacceptable and not normal,” Pritzker posted on X. “By observing and recording peacefully, we can ensure that any violations of the law are brought to light and those responsible are held accountable.”Tensions in the Chicago area have been escalating in recent weeks after the Trump administration and DHS launched an operation they dubbed Midway Blitz. The operation led to an increase in the number of federal officials in the area targeting immigrants.Already, the operation has led to a number of scandals for Ice and the Trump administration. Earlier in September, Ice shot and killed an immigrant they were trying to arrest in the Chicago area. Despite DHS saying an officer was “seriously injured” by the immigrant before the shooting, video later released seemed to contradict DHS’s claims.A recent court filing by immigrants rights groups has also claimed that US citizens have been rounded up during the immigration enforcement operations in the area.DHS says it launched Midway Blitz to target immigrants in the state, alleging that Pritzker and his “sanctuary policies” – a term meant to describe limitations on local police’s cooperating with federal immigration agents – welcomed undocumented immigrants.The Trump administration has made immigration enforcement arrests a top priority since it returned to office in January after Joe Biden’s presidency.Top DHS officials, in fact, instructed Ice to arrest at least 3,000 people daily throughout the US. As the Guardian reported on Friday, due to the Trump administration’s intense escalation, immigrants with no criminal record are now the largest group in Ice detention. More