Double Tap
Weeks of November 21-December 4, 2025
Welcome to TRACKING THE CRISIS, a weekly round-up from The Democracy Collaborative tracking the administrative, legislative, and other actions of the Trump Administration as well as the many forms of legal and movement response from across a broad range of social, political, and economic actors. TDC is providing this service for collective informational purposes, as a tool for understanding the times during a period of disorientingly rapid flux and change in the U.S. political economy. TDC should not be understood as endorsing or otherwise any of the specific content of the information round-up.
TRUMP TRACKER: Administration actions
Venezuela braces for invasion as Trump announces ‘next phase’ of land strikes against ‘narco-terrorists’ and amps up pressure for regime change; Congress introduces bipartisan War Powers Resolution in bid to stop war. The Trump Administration is moving ever closer to war against Venezuela, having escalated its aggressive stance against Maduro over the last two weeks. Trump announced on Thursday, November 28 that land strikes against ‘narco-terrorists’ within Venezuela’s borders are set to begin “very soon,” a threat he reiterated again this week and extended to Colombia as he vowed to strike ‘any country’ he claimed made drugs for the United States market. Last week, Hegseth and Joint Chiefs chairman Dan Caine met with Caribbean leaders as the Cartel de los Soles – an alleged drug trafficking group that Trump and Rubio have accused Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro of leading – was officially designated a ‘foreign terrorist organization” by the State Department. Though experts have expressed doubt that the organization actually exists per se, noting its emergence in the 1990s as a moniker for corrupt military officials, Hegseth claimed the designation “brings a bunch of new options” for the United States including attacks within Venezuela, appearing to cite the precedent established by Obama to conduct nearly 4,000 drone strikes during the War on Terror. Maps from the Guardian and the Council on Foreign Affairs provide a visual sense of the largest U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean since the Bay of Pigs, now involving 11 U.S. warships and 15,000 troops.
Maduro responded defiantly to the threats, waving a sword against ‘imperial aggression’ as he accused the Trump Administration of using the designation as a pretext to wage war for regime change and gain control of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, which are the world’s largest remaining proven deposits. On Friday, November 28, the New York Times revealed that Trump had spoken with Maduro over the phone a week earlier and gave Maduro an ultimatum to flee the country as a last-ditch offer to avoid armed conflict, which Maduro refused. Over the weekend, Trump ‘declared’ Venezuelan airspace closed as several international airlines suspended service to and from the country, as Maduro denounced the ‘colonialist threat’ against Venezuela’s sovereignty. Maduro also denounced a ‘fraudulent’ U.S. federal court decision on Saturday ordering the ‘forced’ sale of Venezuelan oil company Citgo to a U.S. hedge fund to pay off a defaulted debt bond; PDVSA filed a joint appeal Monday with Canadian mining firm Gold Reserve, who had objected to the ‘significant conflicts of interest’ that plagued the sale process. On Monday, December 1, Trump met with top Cabinet and national security officials in the Oval Office to discuss ‘next steps’ on Venezuela amid growing bipartisan backlash from Congress over the legality and implications of the march to war, especially after Secretary Hegseth was implicated in a controversial ‘double-tap’ boat strike over the weekend that legal experts and the UN have condemned as a war crime.
On the same day, thousands rallied in Caracas in support of Maduro as he addressed the crowd saying his country wanted peace but “never a slave’s peace, nor the peace of colonies.” Reports from inside Venezuela say that the military and civilian militias are preparing to ‘wage prolonged guerrilla warfare’ in the event of a U.S. invasion, coupled with an ‘anarchization’ strategy to make Venezuela ungovernable if Maduro is overthrown. A Brazilian representative of the MST’s Internationalist Brigade said that the Venezuelan people see Trump’s threats mostly as psychological warfare, but cannot rule out a land invasion as nearly 15 million Venezuelan citizens have volunteered for militias and are prepared to take up arms with support from Latin America’s largest organized social movement if the threats are realized. On Tuesday, December 2, Pope Leo XIV issued a warning to Trump not to try to oust Maduro with military force in Venezuela, urging him to ‘find another way’ to resolve the conflict. Ranking members of the House Foreign Affairs and Human Rights Committees introduced a War Powers Resolution in the House on Tuesday, followed by a Senate resolution introduced the next day by Sens. Schumer, Kaine, Schiff, and Republican Sen. Rand Paul, who joined other GOP lawmakers in calling out the ‘craziness’ of Trump’s policy on drug traffickers after Trump pardoned ex-Honduran president and convicted drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernandez last week. Recent polls have shown that 70% of Americans, including nearly half of Republican voters, oppose military action in Venezuela.Hegseth under fire in Congress after controversial ‘double-tap’ boat strike denounced as war crime, Pentagon report on Signalgate. On Friday, November 28, the Washington Post published an exclusive report containing bombshell revelations regarding U.S. military strikes on a Caribbean boat on September 2 – the first of over 21 ‘drug boat’ strikes that have since killed 87 people over the last three months. Sources with direct knowledge of the operation revealed to the Post that the Pentagon knew at least 2 people had survived the first missile attack, and ordered SEAL Team 6 to launch a second strike to kill the survivors who were clinging on to the capsized boat – claiming Hegseth himself gave the ‘spoken directive’ to “kill them all.” The revelations are a game-changer for Trump and Hegseth’s so-called ‘non-international armed conflict’ against alleged ‘drug boats’ in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, as it proves the September 2 attack was “clearly illegal” under international law as well as the U.S. military and civil code. The revelations sent shock waves through Congress as both of the Republican-led House and Senate Armed Services Committees opened separate inquiries into the incident to determine whether Hegseth and the commander in charge of the operation, Admiral Frank M. Bradley, could be held culpable for war crimes. The incident also appears to throw the entire operation into legal question, blows open Republican frustrations with Hegseth that had been kept under wraps, and threatens to sink GOP support for Trump’s war on ‘narco-terrorists’ at the very moment Trump is pushing for an escalation of military actions on Venezuelan soil.
Military legal experts explain that deliberate attacks on ‘distressed’ or ‘incapacitated’ survivors who pose no immediate threat to U.S. personnel are forbidden under international human rights laws, laws of armed conflict, U.S. civil law, and military law, and in fact, the Department of Defense’s Law of War Manual explicitly cites “firing on shipwrecked survivors” as an example of a “clearly illegal” order that military personnel have a duty to refuse. In addition, Hegseth’s alleged order to ‘kill them all’ is considered an illegal ‘no quarter’ directive for which the entire chain of command could be held criminally liable for war crimes and/or murder. The Trump Administration has repeatedly insisted that the strikes are legally justified under the constitutional authority of the president to defend the country against designated ‘terrorist organizations’; legal experts at Just Security point out that the activity of drug cartels does not meet the legal requirements to declare armed conflict under such authorities, but even if it did, it would merely parse the difference between being court-martialed for a war crime or prosecuted for murder under U.S. civil law. UN human rights and terrorism law experts condemned the actions, saying that “those involved in ordering and carrying out these extrajudicial killings must be investigated and prosecuted for homicide.”
Reporters and lawmakers alike reacted with skepticism at the Trump Administration’s shifting and sometimes contradictory narratives of the incident, as officials attempted to manage fallout from the allegations which seem to have rattled even normally loyal Republican lawmakers who acknowledged that the legal implications were too serious to ignore. Hegseth, who has long championed a “maximum lethality” approach unfettered by laws of engagement, on Sunday denied allegations that he ever gave an order to ‘kill everyone’ in the September 2 incident, telling reporters that he ‘didn’t see’ any survivors due to ‘fire, smoke and the ‘fog of war’. But on Monday, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt read a statement confirming that Hegseth authorized Admiral Bradley to ‘conduct kinetic strikes’ on the boats while also doubling down on the Administration’s insistence that they acted within the law, as Hegseth attempted to distance himself from the incident while saying he “stands by” Admiral Bradley. Leavitt’s remarks apparently deepened simmering resentment among certain Pentagon officials who told the Washington Post that “this is ‘protect Pete’ bulls**t,” and that the White House was “throwing us, the service members, under the bus,” noting that some of Hegseth’s top civilian staff were now considering leaving the Administration. Multiple officials told the New York Times that Hegseth had approved ‘contingency plans’ that directed officials to first look to rescuing survivors, but to try again to kill them if they attempted what the Administration deemed to be a ‘hostile action’ such as trying to communicate with other cartel members. GOP Sen. Rand Paul torched Hegseth for his equivocal responses, saying Hegseth “is either lying to us… or he’s incompetent.” On Wednesday, Hegseth’s credibility dipped further after the Wall Street Journal published details on the sudden retirement of Admiral Alvin Holsley less than a year into his top role at U.S. Southern Command in October, revealing that Hegseth had ousted Holsley after months of tension that had come to a head when Holsley questioned the legality of the boat strikes.
On Thursday, December 4, Admiral Bradley appeared on Capitol Hill for a closed-door Congressional briefing with bipartisan leaders of the Intelligence and Armed Services committee. The admiral echoed Hegseth’s claim that he did not give the order to ‘kill them all’, saying that it was he who gave the order for a second strike after it appeared that the survivors were attempting to right their boat and salvage bricks of cocaine that remained inside the hull; they “might eventually have managed to float back to Venezuela” and complete their mission of delivering drugs, and thus still posed a threat to the United States. It was also assumed at the time that they were in communication with other cartel members, although Bradley confirmed that no distress call was made. Bradley and Joint Chiefs chair Dan Caine showed the full video of the attack to the panel; it appeared to satisfy top Republicans but “deeply disturbed” Democratic members on the committee, who called the footage “horrifying” and said confirmed their “worst fears about the Trump Administration’s military activities.” Rep. Jim Hines said the video, which showed the second attack incoming as the survivors clung to debris “in clear distress”, clearly showed the U.S. military deliberately attacking ‘classically shipwrecked sailors’ and was “one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service.” One Pentagon insider speaking on condition of anonymity told CNN that Bradley’s rationale was “f**king insane,” and another told the Washington Post that the military struck the boat a total of four times to kill survivors and sink the boat. Also on Thursday, the Pentagon released its long-awaited final report on the Signalgate scandal that plagued Hegseth in March, officially finding that Hegseth had ‘violated military regulations’ on the use of Signal and risked endangering the mission and the lives of U.S, troops as a result. As the Trump Administration announced its 22nd boat attack on Thursday night, killing 4 more people as military and legal experts urged the Pentagon to release the full boat attack video to the public, Rep. Shri Thanedar formally introduced articles of impeachment against Hegseth in the House.Trump unsuccessfully pushes Russia-friendly peace plan for Ukraine amid GOP revolt; Putin ‘ready’ for war with Europe as nations re-militarize, prepare to go it alone as tensions escalate. The fraying Trump-GOP coalition received yet another foreign policy shock in late November as Trump appeared to take another U-turn in his quest to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine, touting a Thanksgiving peace deal that appears to have become a “hot mess.” On Wednesday, November 19, Trump took Congress by surprise by announcing his approval of a new 28-point peace plan that had apparently been drafted in secret over the past several weeks, primarily by U.S. special envoy/Trump family business partner Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and Russian envoy Kirill Dimitriev, with only nominal consultation from Ukrainian national security adviser Rustem Umerov and Marco Rubio. The initial draft of the plan extracted heavy territorial concessions from Ukraine, including the Crimea, Donbas, and Luhansk regions in exchange for security guarantees, sparking anger amongst Senate GOP Ukraine hawks and skepticism among European leaders who were troubled by the lack of security guarantees up front. A bipartisan chorus in Congress slammed the deal, and Sen. Mitch McConnell blasted it as “rewarding Russian butchery”. JD Vance’s Yale classmate and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll was selected as the U.S. special envoy to present the plan to Zelenskyy along with an ultimatum to accept the deal by Thanksgiving or the United States would leave him to “fight his little heart out.” Zelenskyy gave a public address on Friday, November 21, saying the nation faced “one of the most difficult moments in our history” as the plan would force Ukraine to choose between “losing our dignity” or losing critical U.S. support.
The plot devolved into scandal over the weekend of November 23-24 as several GOP senators told reporters at a press conference that Marco Rubio had told them in a private phone call that the deal was essentially “Russia’s wishlist” and that he “made it very clear… it is not the U.S. plan”. Liberal press outlets even alleged the document had been directly translated from a Russian document submitted to the Trump Administration in October. Rubio denied making the statements and asserted that the plan had full U.S. support as he, Witkoff, and Driscoll flew to Geneva to do damage control and negotiate with Ukrainian and European officials to bring the plan towards a middle ground as Trump lashed out on social media at the Ukrainians’ ‘lack of gratitude’ and confusion reigned in Congress. On Tuesday, November 25, as an optimistic Rubio returned to the United States with a new draft integrating Ukrainian and European input with tentative support from Zelenskyy and the White House, Russia launched a fresh barrage of attacks on Kyiv’s energy sector, killing seven and sending the message that Moscow would not accept the new changes. On the same day, Bloomberg published transcripts of two leaked phone calls between Witkoff and Russian aides that appeared to show Witkoff coaching the Russians on how to approach Trump, and offering to do for them what they had done for Israel in Trump’s 20-point Gaza ceasefire plan. The leaks sent Republicans into a fury as they slammed Witkoff for his handling of the negotiations, also directing their anger at the Trump Administration for the extensive use of ‘secret meetings’ that characterized the process. Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon, a centrist hawk and avid Ukraine supporter, told reporters he ‘was so angry’ he had considered resigning over the issue.On Tuesday, December 2, Witkoff and Kushner flew to Moscow to meet with Putin and Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov for a five-hour marathon meeting, only to come away empty-handed and unable to break an impasse over certain red-line items for Putin, reportedly over Ukrainian territorial concessions. Ahead of the meeting, Putin accused European nations of ‘sabotaging’ the U.S.-led peace process by inserting demands that were unacceptable to Russia, and said that while Russia does not want to fight Europe, Russia is “ready” to go to war “if Europe wants it.” European nations hit back at Putin the next day, accusing Putin of “feigning interest” in a peace deal as British officials called on Putin to “end the bluster” while Ukrainian officials admonished him to “stop wasting the world’s time.” Trump, hearing reports of “productive talks” in Moscow from Witkoff and Kushner, remained optimistic that Putin was interested in peace until two things happened to dash his hopes: Russian adviser Yuri Ushakov’s comment to reporters on Wednesday saying they had gone “no further, that’s for sure” in the peace process, and that Russia sees “no resolution to the crisis” without territorial concessions; and Putin’s pledge to supply “uninterrupted fuel” to India upon his meeting with Prime Minister Modi on Thursday as the two leaders pledged building ties for joint “resilience against external pressure,” which included Trump’s 25% tariff penalty against India for buying Russian oil. Trump admitted this week that “I don’t know what the Kremlin is doing” as Putin’s moves appeared to put Trump in an awkward position.
Meanwhile on Thursday, the White House released its U.S. National Security Strategy, which slammed EU allies for their “unrealistic expectations” in the Ukrainian peace process and their alleged “subversion of democratic processes” as the talks proceeded. It also comes after a top State Department official berated NATO for putting a cap on U.S. defense firms’ participation in the EU’s €150 billion rearmament scheme. French president Macron risked sparking tensions between the United States and Europe after Der Spiegel published a leaked conference call transcript indicating that he warned Ukraine and its European allies that Trump could “betray” Ukraine in the peace negotiations by attempting to force Ukraine to accept the land concessions “without clarity on security guarantees.” Macron denied the allegations Friday, insisting that “we need the United States, and the United States needs us.”
Pentagon officials announced on Thursday that the United States wants Europe to take over the majority of NATO leadership and defense functions by 2027, and may start withdrawing its support and coordination with the bloc if the deadline is not met. European officials said 2027 was ‘too tight’ of a deadline, saying that despite massive increases in rearmament spending, European arsenals still rely on certain U.S. goods and capabilities, such as access to rare earth metals, advanced reconnaissance systems and defense-related hardware that have been key to the Ukrainian war effort. Last Friday, Britain walked away from Europe’s joint rearmament scheme after France set a £5.7 billion “pay to play” price tag for full membership and access to financing benefits offered by the scheme. U.S. NATO Ambassador Matthew Whitaker suggested that Germany can take over leadership in NATO as the country’s massive increases in defense spending put it on track to again become the biggest army in Europe for the first time since World War II; which analysts say could shift the power balance in Europe towards Berlin and Warsaw as Europe’s primary line of defence against Russia. A recent French poll showed that a majority of citizens in Germany, France, the Netherlands and several other EU member states believe there is a high chance of Russia going to war with their country in the next few years – and just under half of European respondents believe that Donald Trump is an “enemy of Europe.”Two National Guard members shot, 1 killed by Afghan ex-CIA asset; Trump freezes visa and asylum processes, expands travel ban to more than 30 mostly African and Asian countries. After months of public opposition and judicial challenges to Trump’s federalization and planned deployment of National Guard units to major, mostly Democratic-led U.S. cities, two members of the West Virginia National Guard that had been deployed to Washington, D.C. were shot a few blocks from the White House at around 2:15pm on Thanksgiving Eve, November 26, in what officials and the media called a ‘targeted’ or ‘ambush’ attack. Witnesses say Beckstrom and Wolfe were talking with other Guard members when Lakanwal shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ and shot at them with a .357 revolver, hitting the two Guard members in the head before he was tackled by other Guard members and police. One of the victims, 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom, died from her injuries the next day; while the other, 24-year-old Andrew Wolfe, remains in serious condition but is slowly showing signs of recovery. U.S. officials identified the shooter as 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national who served in a CIA-backed paramilitary unit in Afghanistan and came to the United States in 2021 through a Biden-era special immigration visa program called Operation Allies Welcome, which assisted the relocation of Afghans who worked for the U.S. government and were at risk of retaliation from the Taliban after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Lakanwal was shot by another National Guard member and is recovering under watch at a nearby hospital. He appeared virtually in court from his hospital bed on Tuesday, December 2, still unable to open his eyes as a court-appointed attorney filed a not-guilty plea on his behalf to one count of murder, two counts of assault with intent to kill, and one count of possession of a firearm during a crime of violence.
The Trump Administration moved quickly to politicize the tragedy as a justification for pausing all asylum applications and halting all visas for Afghans entering the country. On Thursday, a federal appeals court paused a lower court’s injunction halting Trump’s National Guard deployment in D.C.; the Trump Administration then announced that all National Guard units in D.C. will now be armed, and that 500 more troops will be deployed to the city. Trump cast the shooting as a result of ‘lax vetting standards’ for migrants coming from Afghanistan, which he called a “hellhole on earth” before also calling Lakanwal an “animal” and criticizing the Biden program. Government files obtained by Reuters indicated that Lakanwal was granted asylum this year under the Trump Administration and vetted due to his work with U.S. government partners in Afghanistan and lack of a previous criminal record; FBI counterterrorism experts suspect he was radicalized online after arriving in the United States. On Tuesday, December 2, Trump announced plans to expand the current 19-country travel ban to ‘more than 30 countries’ as Kristi Noem pushed for a "full travel ban" on countries she said were flooding the United States “with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.” Critics slammed the crackdown as collective punishment and condemned Trump’s use of the tragedy to mount a “broad assault on the right of refuge.”
Counterterrorism experts who track the radicalization of mass shooters said that “all sorts of people have tried this sort of lone wolf attacks,” and noted that the Trump Administration and DOGE “wiped away all of the mechanisms meant to protect American society from that” through mass layoffs of trained personnel and reassigning the lion’s share of federal law enforcement resources to immigration enforcement. The editorial boards of two Virginia newspapers penned a joint op-ed on how deploying the National Guard as an occupying force on domestic soil makes servicemembers a target for anger and resentment, making them vulnerable to disturbed people looking to commit violence. Beckstrom’s ex-boyfriend spoke out, saying she felt she had ‘no rights to do anything’ and that her deployment was ‘pointless’. A volunteer who helped Lakanwal’s family said that his behavior had ‘changed greatly’ since showing signs of depression in 2023; community advocates said they feared he had become suicidal after being ‘essentially nonfunctional’ since March of last year, spending ‘weeks on end in dark isolation’ and going on bouts of ‘reckless travel’ as he drove for miles around the country. A childhood friend told the New York Times that he had been severely traumatized by his time as a CIA-trained member of the ‘Zero Unit’ paramilitary force, a notorious Afghan intelligence unit that carried out nighttime raids and were called ‘death squads’ by human rights groups for their brutality. Veterans who served with them said that others from similar units have struggled with acclimating to U.S. society after being relocated; one former Green Beret said, “These guys didn’t want to leave Afghanistan… they left Afghanistan because the U.S. broke it and handed it back to the Taliban and they had no other choice.”Major immigration crackdowns commence in New Orleans, Minneapolis/St. Paul; Trump disparages MN Somalis in racist tirade; How the ICE surveillance state is coming for you. Residents of New Orleans and Minneapolis braced for impact as ICE operations began widespread operations in the two cities this week. In New Orleans, DHS officially launched its so-called ‘Operation Catahoula Crunch’ on Wednesday, December 3 in an urban expansion of its wider, ongoing ‘Swamp Sweep’ operation in Louisiana. Around 250 federal agents are set to descend upon the region, where DHS aims to make at least 5,000 arrests in New Orleans, Louisiana and Southeast Mississippi over the next 60 days. The operation will be overseen by Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino, who has become notorious for his aggressive use of force in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Charlotte. The crackdown starts two weeks after a consent decree intended to reform New Orleans’ police department, instituted in 2013 after a federal investigation found evidence of racial bias, misconduct and a culture of impunity, ended in mid-November, ‘freeing up’ local police to work with ICE. Louisiana’s Republican governor and Trump ally Jeff Landry has expressed full support for the crackdown, and said Monday that he is working with the Trump Administration to deploy up to 1,000 National Guard troops by Christmas to occupy the Democrat-led city through at least next year’s Mardi Gras. New Orleans mayor-elect Helena Moreno, the city’s first Latine mayor, told local reporters this week that the local immigrant population, which makes up about 10 percent of the city’s total, are beginning to avoid public spaces like churches and schools, and that the lack of information is making people “really, really scared.” Last Friday, she released guidance on her transition team’s website with know-your-rights materials in several languages, as well as links to legal resources. Newly elected councilmember Matthew Willard told CNN that the lack of information is causing “mass chaos and confusion” in the city ahead of the crackdown. On Wednesday, ICE agents were seen arresting people at big box stores and construction sites as vehicles patrolled heavily through Latine neighborhoods.
About 100 DHS and ICE agents also descended on the Twin Cities this week to carry out a “high-priority” immigration sweep targeting undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers among the nation’s largest population of Somali immigrants. The Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations notes that the overwhelming majority (95 percent) of Somalis living in Minnesota are naturalized citizens, and about half are citizens by birth, making it a normally impractical focus for immigration enforcement. However, Trump has long held a particular racial animus against Somalis, and has stepped up his rhetoric in the wake of last week’s National Guard shooting (even though the shooter was from Afghanistan) in ways that still came as a shock to a community inured to Trump’s threats. At a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Trump launched into a racist tirade against Somalis as well as Rep. Ilhan Omar, calling them “garbage” that he doesn’t want in the United States as he reiterated threats to revoke Somalis’ Temporary Protected Status in the United States. Omar responded with aplomb, writing on social media that Trump’s “obsession with me is creepy” and “I hope he gets the help he needs,” while also recasting his attacks on her community as attempts to “scapegoat and deflect” from his own failures. DHS has claimed that ICE will focus on undocumented immigrants, those with final deportation orders, and some who have been implicated in a recent social services scam that was covered by the New York Times last week. Minnesota leaders stood behind the Somali community, including Gov. Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey, who signed an executive order on Wednesday prohibiting federal agents from using city-owned parking lots or structures to stage raids. On Wednesday, local activists reported incidents of raids across the city targeting Somali neighborhoods, Southeast Asian enclaves and Latino day labor centers, detaining several U.S. citizens in the process. Councilmember Jamal Osman has advised Somalis to carry their ID, passport and/or birth certificate with them at all times, saying, “I never thought there would be a time where I will tell my community to carry their passport around because you look Somali.”
As the Trump Administration targets more U.S. cities, CNN describes the ‘shared playbook’ that communities go through when ICE comes to town – not only the chilling effects on schools, businesses, churches and public spaces engendered by the crackdowns, but also the emergent patterns of resistance and community support that are evolving as communities learn from one another. The New York Times presents a series of data visualizations tracing the dynamics of ICE arrests during city crackdowns, showing absolute and proportional spikes in arrests of people with no criminal record that occurred after the Supreme Court allowed federal agents to resume racial profiling. Another phenomenon that has arisen with city crackdowns is the buildout of AI-powered surveillance infrastructure that increasingly targets and compiles predictive data on U.S. citizens and activists along with immigrants. The Intercept reports on the FBI’s procurement of AI-enabled technologies such as facial recognition drones and license plate readers that are “built to do indiscriminate mass surveillance of all people,” compiling massive data models that can predict anyone’s daily patterns and social connections and provide law enforcement with opportunities for arrests. Truthout covers how cities and police departments are increasingly leveraging ‘public-private partnerships’ to essentially ‘outsource’ ownership and operation of surveillance technologies through private entities such as nonprofits to evade public accountability. The Guardian reports on how the FBI gained access to the private Signal chats of an activist ‘courtwatch’ group in New York; Sen. Ron Wyden called attention this week to DHS and CBP’s ‘illegal abuse’ of customs law to discover the real identities behind ICE-watcher and anti-Trump social media accounts; and federal terrorism charges were filed against a Dallas artist for transporting a box of anarchist zines (‘Antifa materials’) in his car as he drove his wife to and from a protest at which a police officer was shot.
Tracking the Money: The Trump family’s White House of Grift; Trump kids lose big on crypto, win big on government contracts. Writing in the Guardian this past Sunday, November 30, Tom Burgis reflects on how in his second term, Trump has essentially ‘ditched’ any pretense of propriety around conflicts of interest and structured his own sort of ‘political economy’ centered around Trump’s command of the most powerful political position on the planet and his sons, who manage the family businesses, as global dealmakers. The setup, as former national security adviser Ben Rhodes put it, is one where “old fashioned grift tethered to a superpower” essentially supercharges the grift. The article cites the example of the $2 billion deal between disgraced crypto master launderer Changpeng Zhao’s Binance crypto treasury firm, the UAE’s sovereign wealth fund MGX, and Trump family crypto firm World Liberty Financial. Zhao sold a $2bn stake in Binance to MGX that was paid in Trump’s stablecoin currency, and a month later received a pardon that allowed him to operate in the United States, where the passage of the GENIUS Act provided a favorable deregulated environment for the growth of the industry. While not a true quid pro quo, it was a ‘situation’ in which a single transaction on the scale of national wealth promised to net the Trump family tens of millions annually. In similar fashion, the Wall Street Journal published an extensive behind-the-scenes story this week on how the new Ukraine peace deal, co-authored in secret by Trump special envoy/business partner Steve Witkoff and Kirill Dimitriev, manager of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund RDIF, was less about peace and more about setting up a giant business deal wherein Dimitriev could leverage U.S. companies to tap into the $300 billion in Russian holdings that had been frozen in EU banks at the start of the war to finance U.S.-Russia joint investment projects and a U.S.-led reconstruction of Ukraine. The Guardian outlines Witkoff and especially Jared Kushner’s outsized role in the crafting of the Gaza ceasefire plan – not because he has any official diplomatic position in the U.S. government, but because his firm, Affinity Partners, manages the sovereign wealth funds of three of the richest Gulf states (Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar) – in other words, the kind of influence that could get Netanyahu to apologize to Qatar for bombing Doha in words that were written for him by Witkoff and Kushner. Witkoff and Kushner, who both came up in real estate, are now poised to ‘run’ Gaza’s redevelopment with former British prime minister Tony Blair.
After nearly a year, Trump has finally disclosed the list of forty-six donors who funded his transition to power. Among them are several billionaires who now hold high-level positions in the Trump Administration, including Linda McMahon and Howard Lutnick, who served as co-chairs of the transition and were subsequently appointed as Secretaries of Education and Commerce, respectively. Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, donated, as did Stanley Woodward Jr., the third-ranking official in the Justice Department. Dominick Gerace II, who was sworn in as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio in August, is also listed as a donor. The New York Times also profiled Trump Administration AI/crypto czar David Sacks this week, who like Elon Musk holds a role as ‘special government employee’ but whose function has been much more subtle, quietly coordinating Trump’s $1 million dinners and greasing the wheels for his friends’ bottom lines in the respective tech industries in which he is still heavily invested. The Revolving Door Project also notes that Sacks, as a private citizen, was able to obtain a federal bailout for the Silicon Valley Bank when it failed in 2023, and now that he is in government, may end up playing a role in the inevitable destruction that may follow from the bursting of the AI bubble.
Speaking of bubbles, it now seems apparent that crypto has become (at least for now) the biggest casualty of the October tech downturn, as last week’s ‘flash crash’ wiped $200 billion off the board and sent several currencies plunging by 70% or more as investors lose their appetite for high-risk speculative assets. Among the worst hit by the crypto crash are the Trump family crypto businesses, particularly Eric Trump’s American Bitcoin, which fell by 51 percent on Tuesday, December 2, wiping nearly 1.5 billion off the Trump family fortune in just 26 minutes. In addition, as other currencies slowly recover, Trump-owned currencies appear to be lagging far behind the average, possibly spelling the end of the Trump crypto cash machine. Trump has barely mentioned crypto in the last several weeks; perhaps he has moved on to greener pastures which may or may not be tied to the obscure drone manufacturing firm led by Donald Trump Jr., who was awarded a multi-million dollar defense contract despite having zero experience in either drones or defense contracting and yet was gifted a substantial stake in the company along with millions in dividends. This week, the Pentagon announced a $620 million loan awarded to Vulcan Elements, a startup funded by venture capital firm 1789 Capital, of which Donald Trump Jr. is a partner. The firm will apparently manufacture rare-earth magnets for defense applications such as drones and radar systems – which may or may not be related to the minority stakes in private mineral firms deemed important to national security that the Trump Administration has quietly been buying up with $10 billion in public funds and counting.
MOVEMENT TRACKER
Hundreds of New Yorkers thwart large-scale ICE raid in Chinatown, clash with NYPD. On Saturday, November 29, 2025, hundreds of protestors in New York City faced off with ICE agents who were preparing to raid Chinatown for the second time in a month. As the alert spread through social media channels, protestors arrived and began blocking the parking garage where ICE agents had been staging, blocking vehicles with their bodies as well as piles of garbage bags, pallets, and whatever they could find. The crowd swelled to over 200 protestors as ICE began to break out of the garage in their vehicles, and protestors chased after them hurling trash, planters, and other objects. 15 people were arrested, according to the NYPD, who moved in when the crowd refused to disperse. DHS claimed “violent black-clad agitators” and “rioters” were responsible for the mayhem; on Sunday, people rallied in support of the arrestees as city officials called out the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group for intervening on behalf of ICE as NYPD is barred from doing so by city law. Organizers with the New York Immigration Coalition and other community members refused to apologize for standing up to protect their immigrant neighbors. All told, the planned raid was thwarted by the mass action of hundreds of people putting their physical bodies and parts of the city’s physical infrastructure in the way of ICE operations. Mura Awadeh, a member of mayor-elect Mamdani’s transition team, said, “New Yorkers stepped up, and New Yorkers defended one another making sure that no one was taken and disappeared from their communities and their families.”
Unions and elected officials stand behind the Somali community in Minneapolis/St. Paul. As ICE began its “targeted” crackdown on Somali immigrants on Wednesday, December 3rd following Trump’s racist tirade against Somalis earlier in the week, organizations, unions, and city/state officials have rallied around the embattled community. Organizers with the Immigrant Defense Network coalition say they have trained over 2,500 people in the area for rapid response to reports of ICE activity. Organizers say the new raids are a little different, as ICE have been trying to take people away as quickly and quietly as possible before rapid response teams are able to show up. IDN volunteers have responded by organizing active patrols of targeted neighborhoods, hoping to be present at the moment an arrest happens to be able to respond. Last week, several dozen community members showed up to protest ICE agents who had surrounded a migrant’s home after the migrant rammed an ICE vehicle to escape a roadblock. Several journalists were injured in that incident as ICE agents fired pepper balls into the crowd. On Wednesday, December 3, over 100 organizers with SEIU, UNITE-HERE, Minneapolis 50501 and community/interfaith organizations marched on at the Minneapolis/St. Paul Airport to protest Signature Aviation, a private airline that workers have witnessed running deportation flights. Union members said the “labor community is proud to stand behind the immigrant community.” Minneapolis’ police chief appeared on CNN this week to say the local police department will not be cooperating with ICE, citing local laws prohibiting it and adding, “the way they are going about this… is making people terrified, and I’m concerned people who really need help will be afraid to call 911.” The IDN plans to lobby the Minnesota State Legislature this month in order to institute non-cooperation laws statewide.
New Orleans communities prepare, march against ICE; protestors removed from City Hall after demanding the establishment of ICE-free zones. Residents of New Orleans braced for the coming crackdown this week amid tensions between the city’s Democratic leadership and Republican/MAGA state officials who recently passed a bill to expand the definition of the crime of malfeasance in office to include local government officials who refuse to cooperate with ICE or hinder its operations. The ACLU has brought a legal challenge to the law on First Amendment grounds. Protestors marched in the rain on Monday, December 1 to rally communities ahead of the crackdown, while New Orleans DSA held rapid response trainings and local businesses closed or put up signs in their windows to make it known that ICE was not welcome in their establishment. Mutual aid groups organized emergency carpools for children whose parents were too afraid to leave their homes. On Thursday, several protestors who tried to speak out at a City Council meeting were removed by police after they demanded more protections and to make city properties “ICE free zones”, and then tried to shut the meeting down in protest. The City Council did decide to establish an online reporting system for people to report incidents of abuse by federal agents. Immigrant rights group Union Migrante has shared resources online on how to respond to an ICE encounter or sighting, and mutual aid groups began making and distributing whistle kits. Mayor-elect Helena Moreno blasted ICE agents for their conduct in the first days of the operation as reports began to come in; one woman, a natural-born U.S. citizen, was chased from a grocery store all the way to her home by masked federal agents. Lawyers from Protect Democracy shared a playbook compiled with the best of what they have seen in other cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. Dozens of posts in a New Orleans’s community message board alerted residents to where agents were recently spotted. Stop signs on various street corners have been graffitied to read “Stop ICE.” At one bar in the Bayou St. John neighborhood, a white shopping bag labeled “F— ICE take a whistle, protect a neighbor” sat near the entrance.
Community Defense around the country. The Guardian reports on the groundswell of activism taking place all over the country as ‘brand-new activists’ find a sense of camaraderie with communities in resistance. This article profiles various organizing groups that are onboarding hundreds of new members, from liberal groups like Indivisible to more radical grassroots organizations like NorCal Resist. In Chicago, hundreds rallied in support of the Broadview Six, who face federal conspiracy charges on account of their participation in a protest in September. In Portland, Maine, hundreds of students walked out of class to demand the return of two students and their families who were recently taken by ICE. The Intercept traveled to Appalachia and the American Southeast to find small-town rebellions all over in rural areas and the hill country, where even in traditionally conservative communities, “resistance to ICE is the rule, not the exception.” Truthout profiles a small town in rural Oregon that mobilized to resist federal plans for a potential ICE detention center in their town, an experience that is being echoed in other small towns across the country. In rural Georgia, down the street from one of the largest and most notorious ICE detention centers, activists have created a ‘safe house’ to provide refuge for those in need, host visiting families of detained loved ones and send volunteers to check on detained people whose families cannot come themselves. A new book explores the growing sanctuary school movement, profiling a network of 31 public high schools across seven states that provide “radical welcome, protection and empowerment” to migrant youth from 119 countries. Communities across the country are organizing their own rapid response networks, learning from places like Chicago and Los Angeles but adapting the model to their own local context. An immigrant rights group is using the online video game network Fortnite to build a space where kids, gamers and parents can learn and practice how to resist ICE in a virtual environment. A National Guard soldier is speaking out as growing numbers are exercising their right and duty to refuse orders; in his words, “I swore an oath to defend our constitution… seeking refuge is not an act of violence. Locking people up for it is.”
Latest Polls.
Approval Rating: Trump’s approval is currently polling at an average of 41% across all poll methods as sentiment sours on his handling of the economy; the most recent Gallup poll puts his approval at an all-time low of 36%. Trump’s approval among Independent voters has cratered to 25%, 14 points below his first weeks in office. The Harvard School of Politics shows that among young people 18-29, only 13% believe the country is on the right track.
Economy: A recent G. Elliott Morris/Strength in Numbers poll shows that many voters are failing to identify with general partisan boundaries; rather, when the poll asked open-ended questions, most Americans want their ideal political party to focus on affordability and general wellbeing, and care less about partisan/ideological issue positions.
Mass Deportation: The Independent compared polls measuring Americans’ views on deporting immigrants between September 24, 2024 and today and found that from the September 2024 level of 56% approval, just 34% of Americans approve of mass deportations today; a 22% slide over 14 months and down 4% just over the past month. This may indicate that the public is decisively turning on Trump’s signature issue as the horror stories of ICE raids spread across the country.
Upcoming Protests, Actions, and Events.
Sunday, December 7: Portland healthcare workers will be holding a ‘Healthcare Workers Defending Democracy’ protest at the Portland ICE facility. More information on the protest can be found on Mobilize.
Saturday, December 13: Refuse Fascism is holding a second ‘Surround the White House’ protest in Washington, DC. More information on this action can be found at RefuseFascism.org.
Saturday, December 13: 50501 SoCal is holding an “Unaccountable” demonstration to demand LAPD police reform. A list of demands can be found on the 50501SoCal website, and more information on the protest can be found on Bluesky.
Tuesday, January 20: The Women’s March is calling for people and communities to stage mass walkouts from work or school to “walk out on fascism and toward a free America.” More information and a pledge form can be found on Mobilize.
