Meltdown
Week of July 24-30, 2026
Published in conjunction with The Nation magazine, TRACKING THE CRISIS is 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. This round-up is produced by humans, not by Artificial Intelligence. TDC should not be understood as endorsing or otherwise any of the specific content of the information round-up.
TRUMP TRACKER: Administration actions
Iran war updates: After four-day pause to revive MoU, U.S. strikes resume after Iran’s ‘surprise attack’ on U.S. base in Jordan; Ukraine strikes Iranian vessel; Saudi Arabia joins regional conflict, striking Iraqi militia forces. Hopes this week that the United States and Iran would resume peace negotiations under the Islamabad MoU dissolved as kinetic strikes resumed, this time threatening to widen the war into a full-scale regional conflict. Saudi Arabia, which had been carefully hedging its security bets between all parties including those urging de-escalation, joined the conflict this week in alliance with the United States as a new front opened in the Red Sea around the Houthi blockade of the Bab el-Mandab Strait. The renewed strikes come amid warnings that U.S. stockpiles of both oil and munitions are running dangerously low, raising concerns regarding Trump’s actual capacity to maintain military pressure on Iran amid a regional expansion of the war, as well as the future of national security and global economic stability.
Over the weekend, Trump struck an upbeat tone on the state of negotiations, telling members of the press at the rebooted White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Friday that talks had resumed and that he was “willing to listen.” At the same time, the dual blockade on the Strait of Hormuz slowed commercial traffic to a crawl as CENTCOM claimed to have turned back 16 ships “trying to run” its blockade, and Iranian state media reported the IRGC had stopped four vessels in the Strait after firing warning shots.
Meanwhile, the Houthis escalated their campaign against the Saudis on Friday with drone attacks on key oil facilities in Saudi Arabia’s eastern region, severely damaging Saudi Aramco’s Jizan refinery and forcing the Saudis to shut down their 400,000-barrel-per-day processing capacity for at least a month or more. Large fires in the facility’s liquid hydrocarbon storage tanks caused by the attacks are still burning nearly a week later, sending up a massive smoke trail that can be seen from space. Simultaneous strikes on the Yanbu export terminal – the primary export route for Saudi crude that allowed Saudi Arabia to bypass the Strait of Hormuz – severely hampered Saudi Arabia’s ability to get its crude oil to global markets, sending Brent crude prices once again soaring past $100 a barrel for the first time since May.
Ukrainian missiles struck an Iranian commercial vessel in the Caspian Sea Friday, causing an explosion that killed one sailor and drawing Iran’s ire as tensions threatened to directly merge the Russia-Ukraine conflict with the war on Iran. The Iranian Foreign Ministry condemned the attack on the ship, which Ukraine claimed was carrying military equipment bound for Russia; Foreign Minister Araghchi posted Sunday on X that he had raised the issue with EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, calling the attack a “blatant violation of the UN Charter” and vowing that the attack “cannot go unanswered,” pointing the finger at possible Israeli involvement to “drag Europe into its war” in West Asia. Despite Zelenskyy’s rhetoric over the weekend attacking Iran for providing drones to Russia, and his admission that Kyiv had carried out long-range strikes in the Caspian Sea against “vessels transporting military cargo” between Iran and Russia, Araghchi posted on Tuesday that Iran had been ‘assured’ by Ukrainian FM Andrii Sybiha that the attack on the Iranian vessel was ‘unintentional’ and that neither side sought escalation, although Iran would seek ‘restitution’ for its losses.
The IRGC also claimed on Friday that U.S. military infrastructure in Erbil, Iraq had been “all but destroyed” as a result of recent attacks on U.S. assets in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region. Spokesman Mohammad Akraminia said that Tehran was now deploying new attack drones with greater accuracy, inflicting ‘serious’ damage on U.S. military capabilities throughout the region. The IRGC also warned that “any country,” including and especially Gulf States and the United Kingdom, which designated the IRGC as a terrorist organization two weeks ago, could become a “legitimate target” if they continued to support the United States in its war on Iran.
Despite the heightened rhetoric, the two sides continued to pause strikes through Sunday and Monday as Trump claimed “we are having good talks” with Iran and that the U.S. was “winning” the conflict, though few details were disclosed to the public. Iran continued to signal deep skepticism over the United States’ intentions; Deputy Foreign Minister Baghaei said messages were being exchanged, but that they remain suspicious given how Iran’s diplomacy had been “betrayed” three times now during negotiations. Iran stressed its readiness to sustain military resistance should Trump decide to continue his pattern of escalating the conflict before a deal neared resolution.
The New York Times reported Friday that Trump had paused U.S. strikes on the advice of Administration officials who raised concerns that intensifying the war could “dangerously drain” the Pentagon’s diminishing stockpile of air defense munitions, something that officials warned that Russia and China were beginning to figure into their geopolitical calculations. NBC News reported that U.S. military commanders are “picking and choosing” which attacks to engage, beginning to ‘deliberately’ let Iranian missiles and drones through its air defenses in order to conserve interceptor stocks and activating defenses only when U.S. troops are threatened. The Intercept reported that one U.S. official who spoke to the outlet on condition of anonymity said that Iran had figured out how to overwhelm depleted U.S. air defenses using a mixture of drones and advanced hypersonic missiles with precision targeting. Meanwhile, Houthi officials claimed that Saudi Arabia was ‘covering up’ the failure of its own interceptor systems, as its forces claimed more successful strikes on oil transport sites carrying crude oil from the Saudi Kingdom.
The fragile war equation in the Gulf shifted once again Wednesday as CENTCOM claimed Iran attempted a “surprise attack” on U.S. forces, firing several ballistic missiles on a U.S. airbase in Jordan that it claimed had all been intercepted. The attack, launched shortly after Trump met with Netanyahu at the White House, marks a turning point in Iran’s defense strategy from an exclusive focus on retaliatory strikes toward using preemptive escalatory actions, baiting the U.S. to further deplete its military capacity in the region. Iranian MP Fada-Hossein Maleki of the Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission told Iranwire that Iran has moved beyond deterrence and entered an “offensive phase,” saying talks were off the table and describing Trump’s statements on negotiations as his “attempt to run away from reality.”
Commentator Esfandyar Batmanghelidj noted on X that the shift may have been less about the influence of “hardliners,” as portrayed in Western media, than a more universal “pessimism about what diplomacy with the U.S. can achieve,” given that most senior figures in leadership, whether pragmatists or hardliners, now “simply do not believe a deal is possible” given the inability of the United States to execute “even the most basic confidence building measures of the MoU.” Iran analyst Trita Parsi concurred with this analysis in an interview with Al Jazeera, noting that “the Iranians have come to the conclusion, rightly or wrongly, that Trump will never be serious about diplomacy until he fully realizes that he does not have any military option.”
In a phone interview with Fox News Wednesday morning, Trump appeared audibly agitated as he told the news outlet that the United States is “going to beat the f**king s**t out of Iran.” Hours later, U.S. and Saudi forces jointly launched airstrikes on several units of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, which they claimed were allied with Tehran, carrying out attacks across seven provinces in Iraq and killing at least 20 fighters. Saudi officials claimed that drone attacks on their oil infrastructure had been traced to Iraqi origins, although Iraq’s military spokesperson claims there is “no evidence” of attacks originating from their territory. Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces militias are integrated into the government’s security infrastructure, which the government affirmed on Thursday as officials visited the sites of the attacks. Iraqi PM al-Zaidi canceled his upcoming diplomatic visit to Saudi Arabia as the Iraqi Security Council condemned Saudi Arabia’s incursions on Iraqi sovereignty.
Trump announced that new sanctions were being imposed on Iran Wednesday as he called for tightening the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports. CENTCOM reported that 20 commercial vessels had been diverted since the re-imposition of the blockade, with two other vessels boarded and two disabled by U.S. forces. Trump also threatened to hit Iran with tariffs as he claimed the blockade to be a huge ‘economic lever’ to force Iran back to the negotiating table. Al Jazeera reports that Iranian oil sales to China and Southeast Asia continued despite U.S. claims to have ‘shut down’ the Iranian oil trade.
Following the attacks, Trump announced “it’s our turn” to hit Iran as CENTCOM commenced an ‘intense’ 2-hour round of strikes overnight in which the United States launched attacks against several targets in Southern Iran, including Qeshm and Kish Islands, the city of Kazerun in the southwestern province of Fars, and at least three cities in Bushehr. Iranian media reported that a missile had struck a residential building on Qeshm Island that was home to a family of five, killing the parents and a two-year-old child as two other children were rescued after having been trapped under the rubble for hours. In retaliation for the killing of civilians, the IRGC vowed to “punish the aggressor” as it launched attacks Thursday morning against targets in Jordan and Kuwait, where a drone struck a building owned by a Chinese company and killed one worker.
Also on Thursday, Egypt reported an explosion in its port at Damietta, causing a fire to break out on a tugboat and storage ship with no casualties reported. Various media outlets reported that a drone had struck the port, but the Egyptian Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources did not immediately assign blame for the incident and made no mention of a drone attack.
Although GCC countries almost universally condemned the Iranian attack on Jordanian territory, Al Jazeera reports that the Gulf states are still trying to avoid being dragged into the widening conflict and are “working hard behind the scenes” to de-escalate the conflict and “kind of push diplomatic solutions” to the crisis, despite the increasing intransigence of the two main belligerents. On Thursday, a Qatari LNG tanker crossed the Strait of Hormuz for the first time in three weeks after coordinating with Tehran to traverse the IRGC-approved route. The New York Times reported on Wednesday that hundreds of Jordanian political, legal, and civil society leaders signed an open letter warning that Jordan’s continued alliance with the United States poses a risk to the nation’s security, urging the government to close U.S. bases and tell the U.S. military to leave their country.
Pakistan renewed its efforts Thursday to bring the United States and Iran back to the negotiating table under the original MoU, to which Islamabad is a signatory, as UN Secretary-General Guterres called on both parties to cease fighting and return to diplomacy before the conflict widens to the point where it cannot be stopped. Chinese officials denied a Reuters report Thursday that claimed Iran was set to receive air defense munitions from China via a land route through Pakistan, saying the reports are “not true and not factual at all,” adding that Beijing “always works for peace and the end of the conflict.” Pakistani military officials also “categorically rejected” the claim, saying “all such speculations are baseless and devoid of truth.”
Defense analysts inside and outside the government, however, doubt the U.S. capability to sustain kinetic warfare against Iran for much longer, given the depletion of high-end munitions stocks such as Patriot and THAAD missiles; while the United States has plenty of “dumb bombs” to use against Iran, such attacks would require flyovers of F-15 and F-35 jets inside Iranian territory, which the IRGC has repeatedly proven capable of shooting down, increasing the risk of U.S. servicemember casualties.
Independent news commentator The Hormuz Letter posted on X Thursday morning that Trump reportedly “exploded and lost his temper” during a security meeting, “shouting and cursing” out of frustration over the military options presented to him and the lack of progress toward a deal. NBC News elaborates that Trump has grown “exasperated” due to the lack of unity within his inner circle, who reportedly “can’t agree on a goal of the war… and therefore can’t plan for an endgame.” According to the report, a Trump ally told NBC that “I don’t think he believed it was going to be this difficult to get the Iranians to agree to the deal,” and added that “there was not a real strategy for how long or what they should do to get to the endpoint.”
As of this writing, Iran continues to warn countries against facilitating U.S. military operations in the Middle East, as Al Jazeera reports Araghchi spoke Thursday morning with Bulgarian Foreign Minister Velislava Petrova urging Sofia to reconsider its decision to approve U.S. operations at Bezmer Air Base. Petrova issued a statement saying the country “will not take part in the conflict” and supports diplomacy and de-escalation. Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman met with JD Vance and Trump Thursday morning to urge de-escalation and give the “Saudi perspective” on how the conflict could be resolved. The U.S. Senate has also scheduled a meeting for Thursday to consider a new War Powers Resolution aimed at compelling Trump to end active military operations in Iran and seek official Congressional approval for a declaration of war before resuming attacks.
Partying like it’s 1929: Wild swings wipe trillions off the market as AI bubble collapse, South Korean chipmakers, hedge fund margin calls and energy worries lead global tech stock rout. The deepening financial crisis appeared to hit the ‘panic’ stage this week as the AI-related tech bubble, now the largest market mania in history by volume of investment, began to collapse in terms of investor confidence as a combination of rising energy prices, stock price overvaluation fears, surging bond yields, rate hike fears, margin calls and Chinese competition sent tech stocks into a global sell-off that propelled stock indices into a tailspin.
On Tuesday, South Korea’s KOSPI index crashed over 10% in a single session, capping an over 40 percent decline from its June highs and triggering two consecutive “circuit breakers” that halted trading on the Korea Exchange across July 28 and 29 as the South Korean government scrambled to implement cooling measures and prevent an all-out financial crisis. Tech stocks on the Kosdaq – the South Korean equivalent of the NASDAQ – also triggered circuit breakers for two days in a row, only the third time ever that the emergency measures had been implemented (the previous occurrences having happened in 2020 and 2008). The meltdown erased nearly $2 trillion of value from the South Korean market, prompting investors to lay funeral wreaths outside South Korea’s National Assembly as the government instituted emergency measures to counsel despairing investors who had lost everything, including a program called the “Economic Crisis Family Suicide Prevention Plan.”
The proximate cause for these successive crashes, the worst meltdown in East Asian markets since the 1997 financial crisis, was a panic sell-off of stocks in Samsung and SK Hynix, two South Korean chipmakers that have been supplying the global AI buildout and have received huge valuation boosts from speculative investment, which one commentator dubbed the “Semiconductor Tulip Mania.”
Despite having reported record earnings, the chipmaking giants faced a huge new challenge this week as China announced that it had independently developed the capacity for Deep Ultraviolet (DUV) lithography, the primary method for making AI semiconductor chips. According to tech sector analysts, U.S. policies that had been intended to act as a kind of sanction on China’s tech sector had basically backfired, forcing Chinese companies to accelerate domestic innovation under conditions of scarcity; the result, similar to China’s debut of Deepseek last year, have been products that are highly competitive in terms of performance with those produced by advanced capitalist economies for a fraction of the cost. Chinese chipmaker CXMT debuted its own IPO this week on the Shanghai exchange, representing a technological leap that directly undercut the pricing power of the South Korean companies, prompting investors to run for the exits.
The disproportionate market share commanded by these two tech companies also heightens the risk of destabilizing the market at large. CNBC host Jim Cramer sounded the alarm this week, calling SK Hynix a “monster” whose spectre of margin-based investor ‘gambling’ has been stalking Wall Street as well as global markets, as it mirrors the outsized influence of U.S. tech giants on the U.S. economy and therefore presents a possible harbinger of what is to come when the Wall Street AI bubble pops.
On Wednesday, Wall Street suffered a meltdown as the Dow plunged over 1,100 points in the first three hours of trading after Trump-appointed Federal Reserve chair Kevin Warsh announced that Fed rates would be held steady for another three months, stoking investor fears of runaway inflation in the face of surging oil prices stoked by renewed kinetic conflict and the dual blockade of the Hormuz and Bab el-Mandab Straits. 10-year Treasury yields surged 7 basis points to above 4.6% as 30-year Treasuries held above 5% for the 14th trading day in a row, rising to 5.244% on Wednesday, its highest level since July 2007 and ensuring that borrowing costs would remain prohibitively high for the foreseeable future. Mortgage rates surged above 6.6%, hampering the already-moribund housing market and further dampening consumer spending on durable goods.
At the heart of U.S. investor anxieties is the $1.65 trillion ‘debt binge’ that has accumulated from the collective corporate bond issuance allocated to the so-called ‘Magnificent Seven’ tech companies involved in the AI hyperscaling boom, which alone have accounted for well over half of total stock market gains over the past several months and nearly 75% of U.S. GDP growth over the past year. A new report from the New York Federal Reserve indicated that the U.S. high-grade corporate bond market saw the highest level of dysfunction in nearly three years, as measured by the Corporate Bond Market Distress Index, which the New York Fed launched in 2022 to assess the total amount of risk in credit markets. At the same time, Bank of America’s July fund manager survey revealed this week that investor cash stocks are sitting at an all-time record low of just 3.6%, meaning that most of the speculative investment driving the AI bubble at present is overwhelmingly fueled by debt even at the retail level.
In Europe, lenders are pushing for mandatory payments on principal at rates not seen since the global financial crisis of 2008, offering terms of up to 5% amortization on current loans in a bid to entice investors to hold on to maturities for a few more years. This week, the crash in Korean tech stocks liquidated over 1.2 million over-leveraged retail investment accounts, prompting banking giants Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan to begin issuing margin calls on hedge funds who have placed both long and short bets on the AI boom, calling in collateral as skepticism mounts on the prospect of the industry’s ability to pay back the debt underwriting the massive capital expenditures for AI infrastructure through future profits.
AI ‘whiz kid’ Leopold Aschenbrenner, whose hedge fund Situational Awareness became the poster child for the AI boom as the largest AI-dedicated fund on Wall Street, was forced to sell his entire portfolio to private equity firm Citadel after the fund’s three largest brokers – Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, and Bank of America – issued margin calls on the portfolio that was leveraged four times over its actual capital stock. The implementation of margin calls and the reality of over-leveraged ‘gambling’ amid the stock meltdown has prompted finance industry analysts to draw comparisons to the coming crisis presaged by Wednesday’s crash not just to the dot-com crash, but also to the 1840s British railway mania and the stock market crash of 1929 that precipitated the Great Depression; several analysts warn that the value of some AI stocks could even go all the way to $0 in the event of a market correction.
Market guru Warren Buffett has been warning for months that the stock market “has turned into gambling” as he has withdrawn most of his investment positions; even “Big Short” investor Michael Burry, who made historic gains betting against the global financial crisis of 2008, told Bloomberg this week that he is not making any bets currently and is sitting on cash given the current volatility and the lack of safe options.
MOVEMENT TRACKER
Data Center backlash prompts lawsuits, demands for regulation to protect against impacts to quality of life for surrounding communities. Just before 8 a.m. Wednesday morning, a power line went down outside of Washington DC. Normally, this would be a non-event for the grid as a whole, as safety systems allow the sudden change in load-capacity balance caused by a single downed line to be accommodated in seconds. In this case, however, the line was a high transmission service line for a dense cluster of data centers in Virginia known as “Data Center Alley;” the data centers’ systems automatically responded to the brief disruption by disconnecting from the grid and switching to backup power, causing 3.1 gigawatts of load to disappear from PJM’s power grid – the largest in the United States, serving 67 million customers – in about 30 seconds. This sudden drop in load led to a surge in voltage across the grid, causing lights to flicker in tens of millions of homes for about ten minutes until the grid re-balanced. Although this event fell short of disaster, some are calling it a “canary in the coal mine” for data centers’ ever-growing strain on electrical grids.
A few hundred miles northeast of Data Center Alley, residents of the small city of Dowagiac, Michigan have filed a lawsuit against data center operator Alliance Cloud Services, LLC, a subsidiary of Hyperscale Data, alleging that the company’s data center in the area has negatively impacted the health and daily lives of residents. A recent viral video clip shows the source of the disruption: a constant, loud, high-pitched whining sound that residents say the data center has emitted 24/7 for the last two years, with some comparing the sound to ‘a vacuum with a clogged filter,’ and others calling it more simply ‘torture.’
The company has been cited and fined for violating municipal noise ordinances, but Hyperscale continues to challenge the citations by disputing the city’s noise collection methods. Hyperscale Data CEO William Horne reportedly attempted to reassure Dowagiac residents at a city council meeting by stating that the company would engage in some efforts to reduce noise, and “if they still aren't happy, and feel that their home isn’t enjoyable, then we'll buy their property from them.” Many residents say they don’t want to sell their homes, though – they just want them to be livable. One man at the city council meeting told reporters, “It makes me feel like I don’t matter. It’s almost like I’m a peasant and they’re kings. And I can’t forget that we put them there and we can remove them from there.”
Dowagiac isn’t alone. The last year has seen a wave of lawsuits against both regulators and data center developers and operators on bases of nuisance, negligence, and environmental impact. Residents of Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin filed a class action suit earlier this month against Microsoft, claiming that the company’s new $7.1 billion Fairwater Data Center, touted as ‘the world’s most powerful,’ has emitted a constant loud and low-pitched humming noise since it came online in April.
The Nashville Zoo recently gained national attention for their campaign against the proposed construction of a data center near their facilities, saying the resultant noise and light pollution would negatively impact sensitive species kept at the zoo. The County Board of Supervisors of Loudoun County, Virginia received a flood of complaints about the noise and air pollution emitted by the data center backup generators that caused Wednesday’s PJM grid surge, prompting Sterling District Supervisor Koran Saines to introduce a proposed initiative instructing county staff to find ways to regulate generator use, an authority he says county ordinances currently limit.
Flock resistance goes mainstream: Communities, vandals, patriots, and police departments united against state surveillance. Matching data centers apace in rising bipartisan unpopularity are the Flock automated license plate reader cameras currently found in more than 6,000 communities across the country, and a growing number of Americans are turning to vigilante action to fight against the devices’ presence in their communities as some legislators begin to catch up with popular sentiment.
A recent Guardian report identified at least 33 instances of Flock camera vandalism that appear to have an explicit anti-surveillance overtone, with methods ranging from planting American flags in front of the cameras to “paint bombings,” sawing down cameras, and leaving colorful messages on vandalized cameras like “hahaha get wrecked ya surveilling f*cks.” Internet figures like the anonymous “NoMark” upload videos of themselves quickly disabling cameras while websites like DeFlock map the locations of cameras nationwide.
Vandalism of the cameras is becoming so pervasive that Flock has reportedly begun to disguise them inside traffic radar boxes in some areas. Following the rash of incidents of police officers abusing Flock access to stalk ex-partners (including almost 20 officers arrested in Georgia for misusing Flock data in recent months), hacking scandals, and high-profile false identifications, more and more cities are following the LAPD’s lead by making moves to end existing contracts and cancel proposed ones.
Doing so isn’t always easy, it seems: city officials in Verona, Wisconsin reportedly had to turn to covering the town’s three Flock cameras with garbage bags when Flock employees told them that the city could not remove the cameras and the company was unable to assure they were turned off following a council vote to end the Flock contract.
The bipartisan backlash against Flock cameras seems to have finally reached Congress, as outgoing Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie announced on X on Saturday that he plans to introduce a bill to withhold federal funding from all jurisdictions that use the cameras nationwide, in a post accompanied by a reworked Gadsden flag showing a snake wrapped around a camera accompanied by the words “Don’t Flock Me.”
ACLU senior policy counsel Chad Marlow told Military.com in a recent interview, “I think that people all over the country are opposed to mass government surveillance, but for different reasons,” citing perspectives ranging from libertarian mistrust of government intrusion and MAGA “deep state” fears to progressives’ concerns over the technology being weaponized against marginalized communities.
Flock has tried to recoup its public image after the LAPD split, but the company’s load-bearing claims that the cameras are necessary for their utility in locating missing people and tracking criminal suspects are losing traction in light of increasing evidence otherwise, sometimes glaringly so: recent reporting from the Atlanta Community Press Collective found that despite the Atlanta Police Department integrating over 28,000 Flock, Ring, and similar cameras into their surveillance network between 2021 and 2025, an eightfold increase over past numbers, clearance rates for the department have remained stagnant, a sharp refutation of Flock’s 2024 claims that “one additional Flock Safety License Plate Recognition (LPR) camera per sworn officer correlates with a 9.1% increase in clearance rate,” (note that Atlanta PD currently employs around 2,000 sworn officers).
ICE resistance surges from communities to courtrooms across the country as recent shootings spark renewed calls for accountability and abolishment. Waves of protests and vigils have continued across the country in the wake of the recent ICE-related deaths of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero, and Juan Jairo Coronilla Duran. At least 33 cities had significant protests this weekend, per NBC reporting, including Houston, Gainesville, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Jose, Boulder, Atlanta, and Pasadena.
Protesters in Portland, Oregon hacked an electric road sign to read “No more ICE killings.” In Williston, Vermont, 13 protesters were arrested for attempting to block employees from entering the ICE surveillance hub in the area, a move organizers say was intended to both hinder the operations of the facility and bring public awareness to its existence.
In San Diego, protests merged with throngs of crowds gathered outside the city’s massive Comic-Con event, with one protest organizer telling Entertainment Weekly in an interview, “Comic-Con is a celebration of creativity, of love for the art, the culture, the movies that move us to do bigger things, inspire us to do right or to speak out when we must. Today, we need that courage and creativity, to speak out about the human rights crisis here at home. For Lorenzo, for Johan, for their babies that today are without their dads. This is what it means to show up for your neighbors, with creativity and courage.”
Amidst ongoing public outcry for accountability, the trend of the courts – and the revealed facts of the matter – contradicting ICE claims is also carrying along. In Houston, a judge ruled that the three direct witnesses to Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s killing must be released from ICE detention pending an investigation into the death due to their status as key witnesses. A new report from Physicians for Human Rights and the University of California, Berkeley’s Human Rights Center has found that ICE officers misused weapons hundreds of times during protests, and recent Axios reporting indicates that nearly half of all ICE-related protest arrests have ended without convictions.
On Monday, the Department of Justice finally moved to dismiss federal misdemeanor obstruction charges against Los Angeles labor leader David Huerta, one year after his arrest at a protest outside a clothing warehouse that had recently seen ICE officers detain over 40 migrant employees. The U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a statement regarding the case that, “The Department of Justice does not arrest people for peacefully protesting [...] Mr. Huerta has agreed to accept responsibility for his actions;” Huerta said in a statement of his own that, “There was never a real case, only an attempt to punish and silence me for exercising my constitutional rights. I will keep exercising my constitutional rights and protest every abuse this administration commits, and I will keep working to build a country that treats immigrant families and all workers with the dignity they deserve.”
