Moving Goalposts
Week of May 23-28, 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
United States strikes Iranian targets in ‘self-defence’ as deal nears, then collapses; Trump threatens Oman, says “no one” will have control over Strait of Hormuz; Israel pushes beyond ‘Yellow Line’ in Lebanon and advances towards Beirut. The United States and Iran traded small-scale attacks amid negotiations this week, Iran accusing the United States of breaking the ceasefire after the United States carried out “defensive” strikes on Iranian targets as a deal to end the war appeared close before collapsing yet again. Over the weekend, Trump indicated that the two sides were close to reaching at least a baseline agreement, saying that a ‘memorandum of understanding’ in talks to end the war had “largely been negotiated.” According to a U.S. official speaking to Axios, the agreement as of Sunday, May 24, involved a 60-day ceasefire in which Iran could freely sell oil, the U.S. blockade would be lifted, the Strait of Hormuz would be re-opened, and negotiations would continue on Iran’s nuclear program. The initial framework would also end war on all fronts, including Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon. However, the U.S. and Iranian narratives soon diverged once again, with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying that the deal would result in a ‘completely open’ Strait of Hormuz, while Iranian media reported that the Strait would remain under Iran’s control. Iran also objected to Rubio’s remarks at a press conference in New Delhi on Sunday labelling Iran as the “world’s leading sponsor of terrorism,” retorting that U.S. and Israeli military actions are the primary drivers of regional instability and threats to maritime security. Iran also asserted that as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty it has the right to develop a peaceful nuclear program under the supervision of the IAEA.
With both sides keen to paint a deal to end the conflict as a victory, Iran celebrated its gains in the emerging agreement by drawing parallels to a third-century historic battle against a Roman invasion of Persia, where the “invader” Emperor Valerian was forced to settle on Persia’s terms. While the emerging agreement was welcomed by Pakistani mediators as well as European officials, it drew forceful criticism from hawkish Republicans and Democrats in Congress, saying Trump was making a “disastrous mistake” in offering concessions to Iran’s core demands that would constitute a “nightmare for Israel”; Israeli media slammed the agreement as a “failure,” saying that the deal as described would “amount to an American capitulation and reflect Israel’s declining standing with the Trump Administration.” By the end of the day, Iran’s Tasnim news agency said Washington was blocking key elements of the agreement, leaving open the “possibility” that the talks could be “cancelled.” Iran pointed out the ‘consistent’ manner in which the United States would abruptly change its demands or make new demands any time negotiations appeared close to an agreement; the two main sticking points that emerged on Sunday, according to state media, were over the release of Iran’s frozen assets, which Washington once again tied to the surrender of nuclear material, and the inclusion of Lebanon in the demand to ‘end war on all fronts.’
On Monday, May 25 – normally celebrated as Lebanon’s ‘Resistance and Liberation’ national holiday commemorating the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the territory in 2000 – festivities struck a subdued and tragic chord as Israel dramatically escalated its offensive push into Lebanese territory, issuing displacement orders for 10 villages in southern Lebanon as a swarm of IDF drones hovered over Beirut. Israeli far-right politicians Ben-Gvir and Smotrich called for a resumption of ‘intense war’ despite the extension of the official ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon that had been negotiated last week. Lebanese president Joseph Aoun noted in his official Liberation Day remarks how this year’s holiday was occurring under renewed Israeli occupation and deadly attacks, and reiterated that “the path to a complete Israeli withdrawal remains a steadfast national demand, one that the Lebanese state is working to achieve through negotiations… not concessions or surrenders, but rather a reaffirmation of Lebanon’s exclusive right to protect its land and sovereignty and extend its authority through its army and legitimate security forces.” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Baghaei warned that ‘Zionist entities’ are “doing their best to undermine the agreement… and they may have a bearing on U.S. officials,” noting that a cessation of hostilities in Lebanon was a firm red line for Iran. On Monday night, explosions were heard in the southern Iranian port city of Bandar Abbas, as U.S. media confirmed the launching of “self-defensive” strikes against “missile launch sites and boats attempting to lay mines in the Strait of Hormuz,” killing 4 IRGC officers within Iranian territorial waters.
Leaders from the Iranian delegation traveled to Qatar on Monday night to continue discussions with mediators as Rubio said more work needed to be done on the “specific language” of the agreement. Meanwhile, Iranian military officials warned that “any new aggression against Iran will be met with a ‘far more severe’ response that extends beyond the region.” Also on Monday, Iran asserted that instead of charging ‘tolls’ for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, it would be charging ‘environmental fees’, bringing it more in line with existing waterway arrangements made within international law. Israel intensified its attacks across southern Lebanon, launching over 100 attacks overnight across the Tyre and Nabatieh areas and killing or injuring dozens of civilians, including children. The United States launched new attacks on the southern Iranian province of Hormozgan on Tuesday, prompting the Iranian Foreign Ministry to accuse America of breaching the ceasefire, showing the U.S. government’s “malice and hypocrisy” towards Iran. Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei also warned Tuesday that countries in the region (specifically the Gulf states) will no longer be a ‘safe haven’ for the United States and its military bases, calling on Muslim states and international governments to “pursue shared interests” in creating a new regional and global order based on “friendship and cooperation for the common good.”
On Wednesday, Iranian state TV announced that Tehran had received a draft of an ‘initial unofficial framework’ for a memorandum of understanding with the United States, in which Washington agrees to “withdraw its military forces from the vicinity of Iran and lift its naval blockade in exchange for Tehran restoring commercial transit through the Strait of Hormuz to pre-war levels within one month.” It also noted that traffic management and shipping routes through the Strait would be overseen by Iran in coordination with Oman. In addition, given the lack of trust in U.S. undertakings, Iran would not proceed without first receiving “tangible verification” of the agreement’s good faith, and that any agreement reached within 60 days would be ratified by a binding UN Security Council resolution. When asked about the Hormuz portion of the framework by reporters at his Cabinet meeting Wednesday, Trump retorted by making a threat against Oman, one of the longest-standing U.S. allies in the region, saying that “Nobody is going to control [the Strait]. It’s international waters, and Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we will have to blow them up.” He also said at the meeting that he is “mandatorily requesting” that GCC countries, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, and Oman, sign on to the Abraham Accords as part of the ceasefire deal, which analysts have interpreted as a desperate attempt to either appease Israel or demonstrate some kind of “win” for his hawkish domestic critics in Congress given that the United States has little leverage left to force Iran into any further concessions. Nevertheless, Trump took a harder line Wednesday on the prospect of a deal, saying that the United States would not ease sanctions as part of a deal, even if Iran agreed to give up its enriched uranium. Later on Wednesday, the U.S. Administration announced sanctions on the newly formed Persian Gulf Strait Authority as the IRGC announced at least 26 vessels had successfully crossed the Strait in coordination with the Iranian government and armed forces, vowing to respond to any disruption of commerce.
Overnight on Thursday, Israel launched an all-out assault on the Lebanese city of Tyre after issuing a forced displacement order for the city’s nearly 200,000 residents, including strikes on Palestinian refugee camps on the outskirts of the city. Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said “nothing can justify” the Israeli attacks and murders of civilians, which he characterized as “collective punishment condemned by all international norms and laws”. Hezbollah retaliated by launching at least 37 drone strikes on Israeli positions in southern Lebanon, breaching IDF lines south of the Litani River. The IRGC intercepted and turned back a U.S. tanker attempting to cross the Strait of Hormuz with its transponder turned off, prompting the U.S. to resume strikes on Bandar Abbas early Thursday morning; CENTCOM claimed it had struck a military facility, although Iranian media said missiles had hit a barren field. In response, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps says it launched an attack on an American airbase in Kuwait, warning of “more decisive” action should U.S. “aggression” continue. On Thursday, the White House confirmed that U.S. and Iranian negotiators have agreed on a memorandum of understanding, which is currently awaiting Trump’s approval.
Bank of America report warns the “Door to Doom” has opened on Wall Street as multiple potential catalysts of historic global economic crisis metastasize. Multiple indicators of extreme fragility in global financial markets have reached critical levels as of this week, prompting major financial institutions to ring the alarm bells warning of an impending market crash on a scale that is being compared to, or could even exceed, the major financial crises of the past century (including the Great Recession of 2007-2008, the dot-com crash of 2001, the oil shocks of the 1970s, and the Wall Street Crash of 1929). Earlier this month, Bank of America CIO Michael Hartnett issued a five-alarm warning in a letter to investors titled ‘The Boom Loop’, which highlighted at least five potential ‘breaking points’ for the global financial system (see below). This week, Jamie Dimon, head of JP Morgan Chase and a key shot-caller on financial trends, issued urgent warnings of an impending “negative growth shock.” The European Central Bank’s latest Financial Stability Review, while previously maintaining a positive outlook, now warns of “vulnerabilities… that can amplify stress in financial markets” due to the wartime oil shock, AI bubble and private credit risks. Many economists see the inflationary process precipitated by the Iran war oil shock not as a causal phenomenon of these crises, but as a proximal catalyst that has exacerbated processes that have been signaling critical weaknesses in the global economy since before Trump’s election. While the ECB and many commentators in the financial press draw parallels to the oil shocks of the 1970s, Michael Hudson notes that “what many fail to recognize is that the economy today is in a much tighter corner than it was in the 1970s… we do not have what Volcker once described as an overheating economy driven by excessively high employment and rising wages… there is far less room to maneuver.” Below are five major factors fueling fears of an economic ‘polycrisis’.
Bond Market: 30-year yields for U.S. Treasuries and multiple international currencies breach the 5% ‘Maginot Line’ for the first time since 2007, as sovereign wealth funds dump U.S. Treasuries at an unprecedented pace. One of the major red flags cited in the Bank of America report concerns the bond market, specifically as the benchmark 30-year yield rate for U.S. Treasuries topped the critical threshold of 5% last Tuesday, a ‘flashing red’ indicator of impending financial crisis. Hartnett’s report calls the 5% threshold the “Maginot Line” of bond yields, the breaching of which exponentially increases the possibility of a “massive deleveraging shock” in international equities, which historically has triggered losses of up to 20%. Combined with the wartime spike in oil prices, bond yields also surged to historic highs across Europe and Asia, pushing 30-year yields for Canada, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands and Switzerland all to 12-month highs, the yield for the UK pound sterling to its highest level since 1998, and breaking the all-time record for the Japanese yen. Economists note that unlike previous crisis eras where bonds have played a ‘safe haven’ role for capital, sovereign bond volatility has risen around the globe simultaneously, an unprecedented phenomenon at least proximally driven by inflation angst triggered by the Iran war oil shock but also tied to bearish fears over AI and rising levels of sovereign debt, especially among OECD countries.
Amid the waning influence of the petrodollar and fears over soaring U.S. debt as a result of the Iran war, foreign holders of U.S. Treasuries have also been dumping their dollar holdings at unprecedented rates to trim their exposure to U.S. debt; and in some cases like Turkiye (which sold off nearly all of its Treasury holdings), to repatriate capital and save their own dollar-pegged currencies from tanking. According to the latest data released by the Treasury International Capital system, China and Japan, two of the biggest holders of U.S. Treasuries, led the retreat by shedding nearly $90 billion of their dollar holdings in March 2026 as the war drove up energy costs in Asia, driving down market demand for U.S. bonds and contributing to the spike in long-term yields. A sustained period of elevated long-term yields raises the costs of borrowing across the board, putting additional stress on inflation-beleaguered U.S. consumers by raising interest rates for home and auto loans, credit cards, and other types of consumer debt and further weakening economic activity.
Shadow Banking/Private Credit: Investment flows go upside down for the first time as funds court derivatives market and public-sector institutions, pension funds to stay afloat. Last week marked a watershed moment in the slow-developing ‘shadow bank run’ on private credit as industry reports indicated that investor outflows from private credit exceeded inflows for the first time in the first quarter of 2026. Bloomberg reports that total redemption requests, mainly from individual retail investors, topped $15 billion in Q1 2026, while other reports cite nearly $20 billion in redemption requests during the same period; many major private equity firms enforced hard limits on withdrawals to keep the funds solvent, trapping at least $5 billion of investor capital in illiquid, dubiously valued ‘cockroach’ loan assets with increasing exposure to potential major losses as a painful process of real asset price discovery and revaluation ensued. As private credit default rates hit a two-year high, several private credit funds are coming under increased scrutiny from regulators – including those held by the world’s largest private equity firms such as BlackRock, which is now being probed by the DOJ due to concerns over potential fraud and overvaluation, especially of portfolios with large stakes in dubious loans to the software and AI sectors that some investors have called ‘almost criminal’. Regulators are also looking to probe the largely opaque valuation methods of private credit loans in the wake of major ‘cockroach’ scandals such as the MFS mortgage fraud scandal in the UK which left HSBC holding a $400 million bag of “fraud-related, secondary, securitization exposure” to toxic assets.
Major commercial banks and sovereign wealth funds are scrambling to reduce billions of dollars’ worth of exposure as private credit firms attempt to stem losses and retain whatever capital they can by turning to “unthinkable” strategies such as ‘cross-trading’ to transfer liquidity between funds held by the same firm for different investors, and secondary trading of troubled loan assets through securitized derivatives such as credit default swaps, collateralized loan obligations and other financial instruments considered anathema after the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. Banks and private credit firms are also teaming up to court institutional sources of long-term investment, such as public and sovereign wealth funds, public pensions, and life insurance companies, to infuse fresh capital into struggling private credit vehicles. Regulators are struggling to keep up with oversight over at least $413 billion in ‘affiliated investments’ held by ‘in-house’ life insurance entities linked to the same private equity firms that hold troubled private credit funds. Citi and BlackRock have teamed up for a high-stakes push to court up to $17.5 billion in sub-investment grade European direct lending deals, while KKR and Capital Group court wealthy European and Asian investors with a new ‘public-private’ fund that allows access to private credit with the added benefit of a ‘liquidity cushion’ bolstered by public fixed-income markets.
Since Trump’s August 2025 executive order opened the door for private equity to access the once-firewalled retirement funds of public employees, unions, and working Americans, the industry has pushed to attract more large institutional pension and public funds into the private credit sphere. They now make up an estimated 10% of capital investment into the sector after a surge in institutional investment in late 2025 and early 2026. In Texas, the Permanent School Fund, a $60 billion state sovereign wealth fund that provides funding for public schools, was revealed this week to be the ‘whale’ behind an Apollo Capital Management/State Street-backed ETF, infusing about $347 million into a private credit fund that had struggled to attract individual retail investors. AllianceBernstein Holding LP is teaming up with Brookfield Asset Management and Carlyle Group Inc. to offer private credit investments to everyday retirement savers through a product designed especially for 401(k) and other workplace-defined contribution plans. In California, public employees are sounding the alarm after revelations that the CEO of the nation’s biggest public retirement fund, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), is steering the fund towards up to 17% exposure to private credit as well as paying exorbitant fees for opaque valuations of private equity holdings. A report released this week detailing the results of an independent investigation commissioned by a nonprofit group acting on behalf of beneficiaries of the $630 billion CalPERS fund concluded that “its 2.4 million members are imperiled by secrecy, chronic underperformance, understated investment costs and conflicts of interest,” especially with regard to its investments in private credit and private equity “zombie fund” partnerships. Other public pension funds across the nation have nearly doubled investments into private credit in recent months, as have been compiled in a report from the American Investment Council.
Stocks: AI bubble drives Shiller-CAPE Ratio to 40:1, seen only twice in modern history, before the 1999 and 1929 crashes; BofA compares stock speculators’ irrational exuberance to the Mississippi Bubble of 1720. At the same time that the dire conditions of oil-driven inflation and the bond market are making headlines, stock markets have been moving in the opposite direction, holding a euphoric rally as stock valuation trends show the sharpest divergence from bond market performance since just before the dot-com crash in 1999. GDP growth data recently released for the first quarter of 2026 showed that real GDP grew at an annualized rate of 2.0% in the first quarter, of which 75% was driven by the AI industry. Fuelled initially by hedge funds (which bought into tech and especially chip-maker stocks last week at its fastest pace this year) and the subsequent wave of individual traders exiting cautious cash positions to brave the market once again amid the rally, just ten tech stocks – all AI hyperscalers and AI-related semiconductor and chipmaking companies – drove nearly 70% of the S&P 500’s 16% gain during its 28-session rally between March 30 and May 8, 2026. As AI companies raise hundreds of billions of dollars for massive planned buildouts of data centers, Wall Street is increasingly leveraging its investments in AI, borrowing on margin and trading credit derivatives in order to keep up with the industry’s capital fundraising demands. Meanwhile, the actual buildout of AI datacenters is running into multiple issues – political headwindsslowing the pace of data center construction to a crawl, hard power limits on existing grid infrastructure, overproduction and hoarding of idle semiconductor chips, and an overproduction of computing power, suppressing the potential price of AI usage – that raise serious investor questions about if and when positive returns can eventually be realized.
The Shiller-CAPE ratio, a metric comparing stock price valuations with the ‘cyclically adjusted price to earnings ratio,’ is currently estimated to be 40:1 for the current AI-driven stock market, a level of overvaluation only seen twice before in modern history: in the NASDAQ at the peak of the dot-com bubble in 1999, and before the great Wall Street Crash of 1929. Nobel laureate Robert Shiller, who conceived of the metric as a measure of ‘irrational exuberance’ in the market, has predicted zero to negative actual returns for the S&P 500 over the next 10 years as data center borrowing tops the list of Wall Street systemic risks and investors brace for a market correction of up to 50% within the next six months. In his Bank of America report, Hartnett issued a rare contrarian sell warning based on the extreme concentration and dependency of stock gains in AI, highlighting the current speculative frenzy in semiconductor stocks, which as of last Friday had been trading at 62% above its 200-day moving average. The only comparable data to the current spread, Hartnett wrote, was found in the French market at the peak of the notorious Mississippi Bubble of 1720, which nearly flattened the French economy once it burst, sending the nation into a decades-long depression and setting the stage for the French Revolution.
Demand Destruction: Major retailers cut earnings as discretionary consumer spending collapses and the crisis of affordability hits higher income strata. First-quarter earnings reports from major retailers Lowe’s, Home Depot, Kroger, and Walmart provided significant data on the crisis of affordability afflicting U.S. consumers as the price of gas skyrockets and inflation has effected a decline in real wages and purchasing power. Lowe’s CEO Marvin Ellison described a ‘clear divide’ emerging in their customers’ shopping patterns, with higher-income households continuing to spend on modernization and lower-income households sticking to maintenance essentials as DIY projects have declined overall due to housing market challenges. Home Depot’s earnings have dropped at least 4% monthly since last year as the stalled housing market has put large renovation projects on hold. While Walmart reported strong revenue growth of about 7.3% in Q1 2026, much of it came from global e-commerce and advertising sales, as U.S. sales lagged behind its stock price-to-earnings ratio, indicating a slowdown in casual and discretionary shopping. The majority of Walmart’s recent growth in market share has also come in large part from higher-income shoppers, including households earning over $100,000 per year, reflecting what is being called a “flight to value” phenomenon where affluent consumers are ‘trading down’ on everyday essentials and general merchandise to save money amidst persistent inflation and economic uncertainty. The latest polls on consumer sentiment suggest a grim picture among working people in the United States: two-thirds of respondents to a CBS News poll reported feeling financially stressed, while a majority said that ‘soaring gasoline prices are causing hardship.’ A long standing University of Michigan survey shows consumer confidence at an all-time low; Bank of America’s data is showing that the gap between higher-income earners and everyone else has opened to its widest level since 2015; wage growth for higher-income households increased by 5.6% over last year, while lower-income wages increased by just 1% and middle-income earners saw only 2% growth over last year. In contrast, inflation reached 3.8% in April, its highest increase in at least three years.
Interest Rates: Steepening inflation curve plus a moribund labor market puts Fed in a pickle as Warsh assumes chairmanship. Generally tasked with a dual mandate of stimulating job growth and curbing inflation through the mechanism of setting interest rates, central banks like the U.S. Federal Reserve are often faced with a conundrum during times of ‘stagflation,’ whereby steepening inflation and a troubled labor market pull those mandates in opposite directions. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh, hand-picked by Trump and sworn in this week to replace Jerome Powell, who Trump saw as an adversary for his refusal to cut interest rates on command, will face pressure to either keep rates steady or even hike interest rates as soon as he takes up his new position. Central bank orthodoxy will generally point to raising interest rates to curb inflation over stimulating growth in the labor market, although such rate hikes have not generally led to the avoidance of acute market contractions, but more often contributed to accelerating the onset of recession and financial crisis. As economist Michael Hudson opines this week, “the media and many investors view interest rates as rising so as to compensate investors for the risk of inflation. The reality is that higher interest rates will increase the economy’s inability to cope with the breakdown that already is in progress.”The spike in bond yields precipitated by the global oil shock has already raised the cost of borrowing without central bank intervention; further rate hikes, while increasing yields on certain financial instruments for wealthy investors, risk further demand destruction, loan defaults, and job losses across a wide swath of the real economy as small businesses and industries are wiped out amid consumer slowdowns and decreased access to credit. As Hudson notes, hiking interest rates “is supposed to slow the economy and create a ‘reserve army of the unemployed’ to keep wages down by causing economic distress. But the U.S. economy is not in a boom or even thriving. It and other economies are already in distress as a result of the looming oil and energy crisis. In addition to companies scaling back their production, commercial real estate and homeowners face real estate mortgages falling due. Rising interest rates will push the cost of refinancing these mortgages and other debts beyond the ability of debtors to pay out of their falling income.”
On the other hand, if Warsh follows Trump’s desires and cuts interest rates in a manner similar to what the Federal Reserve under Obama did with its Zero-Interest Rate Policy following the 2008 financial crisis, Hudson notes that while it may have saved asset prices and eased bond markets, it did very little for the average consumer or aggregate demand, instead leaving the economy “so highly debt-leveraged that there is little room for an economic downturn caused by the interruptions of OPEC’s oil and gas trade.”Other orthodox instruments such as injecting liquidity into the system via quantitative easing has become, at best, less effective at devaluing the dollar over time, and at worst, could trigger a deflationary spiral or an unexpected consequence due to the international de-dollarization process underway as petrodollar hegemony weakens in the face of the Iran war. Hudson and other heterodox economists have called for a rethinking along the lines of stimulating demand from the bottom up through a debt jubilee and/or other forms of demand stimulus. As he concludes, “the future will call for thinking about the unthinkable. It requires recognition that debts that can’t be paid, won’t be.”
MOVEMENT TRACKER
New Jersey lawmaker pepper-sprayed by ICE in standoff amid hunger and labor strike at Delaney Hall ICE facility, as public outrage grows concerning harmful conditions at privately-run ICE detention centers. A tense standoff between ICE agents and protestors supporting a detainee-led mass hunger and labor strike at the Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, New Jersey resulted in chaos on Monday, May 25 as ICE agents used chemical agents on protestors, including pepper-spraying U.S. Senator Andy Kim as he attempted to de-escalate the situation. On Friday, May 22, around 300-400 detainees at Delaney Hall began a hunger and labor strike to protest conditions at the privately-run facility. A letter from detainees released earlier this month described the ‘physical and psychological torture’ endured inside ICE custody, including being given substandard food and denied access to medical care and legal representation. Detainees reported widespread sickness as COVID-19 and influenza run rampant throughout the facility, affecting “individuals from the LGBTQ+ community with diagnoses of illnesses such as HIV, cancer, diabetes, heart problems, among others, who are not receiving proper medical attention for the aforementioned conditions.” The letter states that the constitutional rights of detainees, many of whom had been in the process of obtaining legal status while contributing to their local economies, are routinely violated in ICE custody. The letter calls upon New Jersey’s Democratic politicians, including Governor Mikie Sherrill and Senators Cory Booker and Andy Kim, to visit the center and speak with detainees inside; and also includes the demand to “close Delaney Hall and free every person in there.” A local immigrant advocacy group, Eyes on ICE, organized a round-the-clock vigil outside the facility in solidarity with the strikers inside.
On Sunday, May 24, tensions at the facility boiled over as word spread that ICE was planning to transfer one of the strike organizers, Martin Soto, whose pregnant wife, Gabriela Soto, had been organizing protests outside the facility. Gabriela attempted to visit her husband on that day and spotted a man being put into a white van as she stood in the visitation queue. Other visitors told her it was her husband being transferred to a different facility, and she ran to the vehicle, “banging on the door” as she was “not letting that happen.” Other protestors joined Gabriela Soto to form a blockade at the gates of the facility to try to prevent Martin Soto from being transferred, chanting “Free Martin!” and “Free them all!” The human blockade continued well into the early hours of Monday, May 25, when ICE began to move a caravan of vehicles outside the facility which the protestors attempted to block; ICE agents began shoving the protestors to the ground, pepper-spraying at least one protestor as they began to move the vehicles out. A DHS spokesperson said that after agents “dispersed around 70 agitators,” they successfully transferred Martin Soto to a nearby facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Gabriela Soto told NJ.com that “because I started this protest outside to close Delaney Hall” on Friday, translating calls from detainees and organizing others, “they were retaliating on him” by transferring him to another facility; “they know if they move him, maybe it shuts him up,” Soto said. “But they won’t shut me up.”
On Monday, May 25, New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill joined protestors outside the facility and attempted to gain entry into the facility, which was denied despite her having contacted ICE for access the day before. She was joined by U.S. Senator Andy Kim, who had “personally called [Department of Homeland Security] Secretary Markwayne Mullin [to] get his intervention” to allow entry to the facility. After visiting the center, Kim said he walked out to find that federal agents had brought out an ‘armored vehicle’ to create a barricade to keep protestors away from the facility’s entrance. Kim “tried to get between the ICE officers and the crowd to de-escalate” when ICE informed him they were going to use the vehicles to push through the crowd. Kim said he had “tried to arrange a situation where people wouldn’t get hurt, but ICE just continued on” as he saw people being “tackled and brought to the ground.” He again tried to put himself between ICE and the crowd, when agents “started shooting at us with pepper balls and pepper spray.” Kim denounced the ‘chaos inside and outside’ the facility as indicative of the “lawlessness of the Trump Administration,” saying the conditions he found inside were “inhumane.” Protests continued into Tuesday as reports from the Guardian noted that “the air surrounding the facility is putrid, smelling like sewage and chemicals, which only seemingly worsened as the weather warmed up.” Also on Tuesday, attorneys filed a suit in federal court aiming for the immediate release of Soto on human rights grounds, alleging that “at this point, petitioner’s detention no longer resembles ordinary civil immigration custody” and “has evolved into escalating punitive confinement marked by retaliatory termination of all family visitation, threats of solitary confinement… attempted movement during active federal habeas proceedings, and profound psychological harm inflicted upon a pregnant United States citizen spouse and medically vulnerable children.”
New Jersey Representative Rob Menendez, who had waited outside the facility for over 12 hours before being allowed in for an oversight visit, said the conditions inside would “shock the conscience of any American.” Geo Group, the private contractor running the facility, has a 15-year, $1 billion contract with the Department of Homeland Security to run the facility, with terms that include paying detainees as little as $1 a day for manual labor at Delaney and other ICE detention centers around the country that have generated similar complaints of inhumane treatment. These include the Adelanto detention facility in California, where detainees launched a hunger strike last week, and a facility in Aurora, Colorado. In January, Senator Jon Ossoff issued a report on human rights abuses at ICE detention facilities based on an inquiry that included dozens of interviews with people detained at different centers run by Geo Group throughout the country. DHS continues to officially deny that hunger strikes are taking place at either facility, even though border czar Tom Homan said he would obtain a court order to force-feed detainees if their conditions became medically dangerous. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin dismissed the hunger strikes, saying “only a handful” were refusing to eat because they wanted “ethnic food,” and said that they could “go back to their country and get whatever food they want.” The American Immigration Council has outlined the current status of Congressional oversight of ICE facilities and DHS efforts to maintain a veil of secrecy around conditions in ICE custody.
A grassroots anti-surveillance movement grows against the AI-powered technological dragnet used by ICE, DHS and other federal and local police agencies. Over the last several months, ICE and DHS have acquired tens of millions of dollars in sophisticated, AI-powered surveillance technology, developed by private firms like Palantir and Israeli spy company Paragon, which the agencies say is for targeting criminals and undocumented immigrants. However, increasing number of U.S. communities are realizing that the all-encompassing technologies, which include traffic ‘safety’ cameras, phone and app-based surveillance, AI face recognition software, social media scrapers, stealth glasses, drones hovering over anti-Trump protests, and even the software running modern cars, have the potential to be turned against anyone, citizen or non-citizen alike. As the Trump Administration’s new counter-terrorism strategy takes aim at “anti-American ideologies,” defined so broadly as to include common views held by up to half the U.S. population, communities and activists are beginning to find ways to fight back against the massive surveillance network now being used by local police departments as well as federal agencies.
Communities all over the country – in both Red and Blue states – are beginning to push back against the nationwide network of Flock cameras, which connect to AI-powered Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) systems that can track and record any driver’s daily movements around the neighborhoods in which they live and work. Local movements to get rid of Flock systems used by law enforcement agencies are exploding amid privacy concerns, a rash of scandals around misuse of the technology, and a growing backlash against AI in general also fuelled by the anti-data center movement. Cities such as Flagstaff, Arizona, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Springfield, Oregon, and Santa Cruz, California are voting to end local law enforcement contracts with Flock. Residents are organizing anti-Flock groups such as Flock Off in Ithaca, New York and Eyes Off Eugene in Oregon. California DSA has created a toolkit for communities wishing to organize anti-Flock campaigns. Crowdsourcing efforts such as Deflock.me and HaveIBeenFlocked.com are mapping locations of Flock cameras around the country. Still others have engaged in subtle and not-so-subtle sabotage to physically disable the cameras themselves.
In the wake of the ICE occupation of Minneapolis and the resistance movement that grew around it, communities across the country are also organizing around inventive ways to outsmart the surveillance dragnet. Politico reports on activists using social media and encrypted apps to track ICE vehicles and agents, while ‘hacktivist’ collectives have sprung up to combat ICE’s surveillance arsenal directly. Civil lawsuits such as Chatrie vs. United States have revealed information about the extent and nature of dragnet technologies such as geofencing, providing valuable data to hacktivists developing counter-technologies to evade or resist them. Wired reports this week that federal government officials have grown worried that the nationwide backlash to AI data centers is fuelling “anti-tech extremism” among a wide swath of the population, while conservative think tanks such as the Brookings Institution agree with communities that ICE’s use of surveillance technologies accelerates the loss of public trust in federal institutions. Tech employees at major firms such as Thomson Reuters are organizing to prevent their company’s products from being used to surveil the American populace. A new nationwide network of creators, hacktivists, and advocacy groups held a “Take Back Tech” convention in Atlanta last month to tackle the issue of surveillance and organize against the misuse of technology. Anti-surveillance activism spans the political spectrum; although 42 Democrats voted with Republicans to renew the FISA Act last month, MAGA mavericks Lauren Boebert and Thomas Massie introduced the “Surveillance Accountability Act” to protect U.S. citizens from warrantless spying.
2024 DNC “autopsy” report released, revealing “incomplete” and “inconclusive” analysis riddled with mistakes and untruths and light on policy prescriptions. After months of secrecy, the Democratic National Committee’s 2024 ‘autopsy’ report attempting to detail what went wrong with the 2024 election was released to the public last Thursday. DNC chair Ken Martin admitted that the 192-page report was missing certain sections and was ultimately “incomplete and inconclusive,” saying in a statement that “I am not proud of this product; it does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards. I don’t endorse what’s in this report, or what’s left out of it. I could not in good faith put the DNC’s stamp of approval on it.” The full report, obtained and made public by CNN, was put together by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera, and largely focused on issues such as the lack of support from Biden for Kamala Harris once he had conceded the nomination, as well as inaccurate assumptions about the voting habits of swing states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania. The report admitted that “Not Trump” was not enough to carry the Democratic ticket in 2024, but made no mention of more substantive issues such as the Gaza genocide, which IMEU Policy Project polling suggests cost Harris a critical number of votes, especially among younger voters. Harris deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty wrote in the Bulwark that “for many voters watching the horrific, painful footage out of Gaza, it became a moral question – one we didn’t have a good answer for.” Al Jazeera notes that overall, the report was light on policy prescriptions in general, which will be a larger issue going into the midterms as voters struggle with policy-driven issues such as affordability, AI, surveillance, and the effects of the Iran war as well as climate change, which 65% of voters polled in April believe has affected the cost of living even though the issue has all but disappeared from mainstream political discourse.
Current Polling.
Donald Trump breaks records. Trump broke five different ‘unwanted’ polling records this week, including record-high disapproval ratings in both Fox News and New York Times/Siena polls; net approval among Republicans dropping to a new low in Fox News’ latest polling data; Republican dissatisfaction with Trump’s handling of the economy hitting a new high in AP/NORC data; his weakest-ever approval rating among Millennial voters in a YouGov/Economist poll; and his ratings on the economy and inflation falling to record lows among a cluster of polls, with widening net negative scores.
Iran War. According to Nate Silver’s ‘Silver Bulletin,’ approval ratings for the Iran war continue to dip to a net negative of -22.8, down from -9.0 when the war began. Around 58.8% of Americans oppose the war, while 36% continue to support the U.S./Israeli position.
Congress. The current generic Congressional midterm ballot stands at a +6.9% margin favoring Democrats, slightly better than they fared at the same point in the 2018 midterm cycle. In firmly red states like Texas, Florida, and Ohio, the margin stands around R+4%, within a competitive range for challengers like James Talarico in Texas. However, data from YouGov/The Economist shows that far more Americans disapprove than approve of the job handling of Democrats in Congress, by a 56% to 28% margin, and net favorability for Congressional leaders responsible for executive oversight is dismal, especially for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (-33%), Majority Leader John Thune (-27%), and House leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Mike Johnson (tied at -17%). A majority (62%) of Americans disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job, with 41% of Americans believing that most members of Congress are corrupt.
