Defang ICE → Save the MidtermsThe fight over ICE isn’t just about civil rights. It’s about free and fair elections, too.
It’s been a big 24 hours for Donald Trump. Yesterday, he sued the Treasury Department and IRS for $10 billion over an employee’s leak of his tax returns. Then, late last night, the Justice Department, clearly fulfilling Trump’s wishes, arrested former CNN anchor Don Lemon on charges that he violated federal law when he live streamed a protest at a church in St. Paul. Then, this morning, the president announced his nominee for chairman of the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh, in what’s seen as the next step in his efforts to influence the ostensibly independent body. So, there you have it. Our institutions are crumbling. Our First Amendment rights are going wobbly. We’ve brought charges against a journalist covering the protests in Minneapolis while we still don’t know the names of the officers who killed Alex Pretti. And the president is sucking up all the taxpayer money he can. Happy Friday.
It’s the Elections, Stupidby William Kristol As I write this morning, there are two processes whose outcomes are unknown: We don’t know how the Senate funding deal is going to play out in the coming weeks, and we don’t know how Donald Trump’s efforts to manipulate and corrupt the 2026 elections are going to play out in the coming months. The two may seem distinct, but they are in fact closely related. On Wednesday, Kash Patel’s FBI seized 2020 voting records from the elections and operations hub in Fulton County, Georgia. This operation was allegedly justified by a law requiring election records to be retained for a certain amount of time. But Fulton County was already retaining those records under a state court–ordered seal. A hearing in less than two weeks’ time was scheduled in state court to arrange for the transfer of records to parties in a lawsuit challenging the 2020 election. So the preservation-of-records rationale for the FBI operation was entirely pretextual. The other statute cited by Patel’s FBI to justify the operation is a prohibition on intimidating voters or producing false votes or false voter registrations. These statutes have criminal penalties. The purpose of the FBI’s action in Georgia was to establish a precedent for further federal intervention in state and local elections to ensure Trump’s version of “election integrity,” and to intimidate state and local officials from resisting such efforts. And of course Trump’s Justice Department has been trying all year to get unprecedented federal access to state voter rolls. They’ve lost court cases in this effort, but are by no means giving up. Thus the already notorious letter from Attorney General Pam Bondi to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz suggesting there could be some pullback of ICE activities in Minneapolis if the state handed over sensitive voter registration records to the federal government. But it’s not just the FBI and DOJ that would be instruments for the Trump administration’s intervention in elections. Remarkably, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was present for the FBI’s ballot-seizing. As the Wall Street Journal reported, Gabbard has been mobilizing the intelligence community to find support for Trump’s allegations that the 2020 election was stolen with the help of foreign governments. Two officials told the Journal that Gabbard’s effort is designed to shape the midterm elections. On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt basically confirmed this: “President Trump and his entire team are committed to ensuring a U.S. election can never, ever be rigged again. Director Gabbard is playing a key lead role in this important effort.” The Office of National Intelligence spokesperson further explained that DNI Gabbard “has a vital role in identifying vulnerabilities in our critical infrastructure and protecting against exploitation” and “to support ensuring the integrity of our elections.” Along those lines, Trump has been reposting various kooky claims of foreign election interference in 2020 to help lay the groundwork for the big push in 2026. Late Wednesday night, he reposted a claim that Italian military satellites had been used to hack into U.S. voting machines to flip votes from Trump to Joe Biden. Trump is laying the predicate for claiming not just massive domestic fraud but foreign interference in our elections, requiring dramatic intervention by the national security apparatus of the federal government. Which brings to the national security agencies with the troops—the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. In December 2020, Trump was captivated by Sydney Powell’s and Michael Flynn’s plan to use the military or federal law enforcement to seize voting machines in several states. They even presented Trump with draft executive orders they claimed would grant him the authority to do so. Trump’s aides managed to block the plan, despite the president’s repeated expressions of interest. Earlier this month, Trump said that he regretted ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines. But, he explained, he was doubtful the Guard was “sophisticated enough in the ways of crooked Democrats, and the way they cheat, to figure that out.” This time Trump presumably intends to have at his disposal a Pete Hegseth–directed military “sophisticated” enough to ensure he or his chosen successor don’t lose an election. And surely the ever-expanding ICE and Border Patrol forces would be ready and willing to help. They could intimidate likely Democratic voters ahead of time. And they could affect the counting of the ballots. They could do these things in 2026, and of course in 2028, when these agencies will have grown much larger and more powerful unless they are curbed before then. That’s why curtailing the funding and operations of the agencies of DHS is not just a civil liberties issue to deal with in the next few weeks. ICE and the Border Patrol pose a threat not just to our civil liberties but to our political liberties. Dealing with the threat to our political liberty, in particular to free and fair elections, is the fight—for the rest of 2026, and then for 2027 and 2028. New ICE, Same as the Old ICEby Andrew Egger Yesterday, White House border czar Tom Homan, who assumed command of the Minneapolis ICE operation this week, held a press conference to speak about the federal government’s new enforcement priorities there. Compared to the preening and peacocking of his predecessor, Border Patrol “commander-at-large” Greg Bovino, Homan was plainly trying to project an air of modesty, competence, and cooperation with Minnesota officials. But beyond the new tone, it remains to be seen whether ICE’s operations will actually look much different in practice, especially since many of the facts on the ground remain the same: The federal officers are still the largely new, poorly trained, militancy-minded force they were last week. It’s clear, for instance, that ICE hasn’t yet stopped sparking meathead confrontations and then lying about them after. On Tuesday—Homan’s first day in Minnesota—agents allegedly pursuing an illegal immigrant on foot attempted to barge into the consulate of Ecuador. A consular employee prevented their entrance, repeatedly insisting they could not carry out an enforcement operation on territory belonging to Ecuador’s government. Throughout the encounter, which was captured on video, the ICE agent was belligerent and hostile: “If you touch me, I will grab you,” he said repeatedly. Yesterday, in a statement to Fox News, an ICE spokesman seemed to share the agent’s view that it was the consular employee who was out of line: “Unknown to the ICE officers at the time, the building housed the Consulate of Ecuador, however, the building was not clearly marked as the Ecuadorian Consulate.¹ . . . The Consulate employees protected this public safety threat illegal alien.” Beyond Minneapolis, reports keep pouring in of brutal enforcement operations against immigrants across the country. In Portland, Maine yesterday, masked federal agents boxed in an asylum seeker’s car, shattered his window, spraying glass over the car seat of his one-month old baby, dragged him into their car, and drove off—leaving his wife, who does not have a driver’s license, and their baby on the side of the road in the cold. Hassane Barry, the arrested asylum seeker, has no known criminal history in America. The administration seems to be betting that they can recoup some popularity by giving mass deportations a Homan face. But that seems like a bad bet—and perhaps the first time the administration has misunderstood the televisual aspects of their policies. The main problem wasn’t Bovino and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and White House ghoul Steven Miller insulting Renee Good and Alex Pretti—though their comments didn’t help. The main problem was that the unjustified killings were caught on camera, along with countless other examples of thuggishness by ICE and Border Patrol agents against not just immigrants but anyone they deemed an enemy. And that’s a problem it’s not clear Homan or anyone else can fix.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Quick HitsPEW, THOSE NUMBERS STINK: The gold-standard American Trends Survey from Pew came out yesterday, and the numbers were eye-poppingly bad for Trump. There’s not enough space here to list all the ways in which he’s unpopular—really, that’s not an exaggeration, check out the full report—so we’ll satisfy ourselves with some crosstabs on his overall job approval:
After ten years in which Trump’s worst abuses, scandals, embarrassments, and felonies haven’t moved the needle more than a degree or so, it’s good to see voters clocking what’s going on in the country. But every point Trump and his ilk lose in the polls gives them more reason to spend more time and energy over the next three years making sure they don’t pay an electoral price for their mismanagement of the government—for example, by siccing the FBI on election offices and using the intelligence community to substantiate conspiracy theories. The only poll that matters, says the old saw, is the one on election day. —Benjamin Parker ANOTHER WAR ‘ENDED’: Yesterday during his cabinet meeting, Donald Trump announced an apparent success in his peacemaking efforts in Ukraine: “I personally asked President Putin not to fire into Kyiv and various towns for a week and he agreed to do that.” It was, he added, “very nice.” Since the Kremlin wasn’t saying anything and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky only made a vague statement about security for Ukrainian cities “during this extreme winter period,” no one was quite sure the agreement existed. Well, now we know: According to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, the pause applied only to Kyiv—and had already started a few days ago and was set to expire on Sunday. Overnight, Russia launched a missile and more than 100 drones at various Ukrainian cities and towns. “Very nice,” indeed. The recent Russian strikes, targeting energy facilities in a brutal winter, have been a horrific new phase in Putin’s reign of terror against Ukrainian civilians. Over a million people have faced blackouts, sometimes lasting for days, the cold made worse by frozen water pipes. Heroic repair efforts are often quickly undone by new strikes. Ukrainians have shown amazing resourcefulness and spirit. In addition to generators and gas stoves, state emergency services have set up mobile “Points of Invincibility”—tents with power banks. Yet not everyone can be saved. On January 13, a 90-year-old woman, Yevhenia Besfamilny, was found frozen to death in her Kyiv apartment. She was a Holocaust survivor whose parents were killed in the Babyn Yar massacre. Two weeks later, Vladimir Putin took part in a somber ceremony commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of the siege of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg)—even as his war machine was inflicting some of the same horrors on innocent people in Ukraine. —Cathy Young ‘MELANIA’ MANIA: Melania—the Amazon MGM Studios-financed documentary about the fashion model-cum-first lady—starts its theatrical run today. As reports on its attendance numbers start rolling in, it’s worth keeping some simple box office math in mind to determine whether the film is a success or failure. A film needs to earn roughly twice its marketing and production budget after accounting for the theater’s cut to break even at the box office. (This is before video-on-demand sales, etc.) MGM paid $40 million for the rights to make Melania and has reportedly spent $35 million on marketing. That means it needs to make roughly $150 million to break even. According to the-numbers.com, exactly zero documentaries have grossed $150 million domestically. Worldwide, three documentaries have eclipsed that number: Michael Jackson’s This Is It, a 34-minute IMAX documentary on the Grand Canyon, and Fahrenheit 9/11. In other words, for Amazon Studios to make its money back, Melania will have to be one of the most successful documentaries of all time. One can’t help but wonder if Amazon and Jeff Bezos believe this investment will pay off in other ways. —Sonny Bunch Cheap Shots
1 Two different signs above the Consulate door plainly read “Consulate of Ecuador,” one in English, one in Spanish. It’s unclear how Ecuador might have more “clearly” marked its building to the satisfaction of ICE. You’re a free subscriber to The Bulwark—the largest pro-democracy news and analysis bundle on Substack. For unfettered access to all our newsletters and to access ad-free and member-only shows, become a paying subscriber.We’re going to send you a lot of content—newsletters and alerts for shows so you can read and watch on your schedule. Don’t care for so much email? You can update your personal email preferences as often as you like. To update the list of newsletter or alerts you received from The Bulwark, click here. Having trouble with something related to your account? Check out our constantly-updated FAQ, which likely has an answer for you.
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Defang ICE → Save the Midterms
January 30, 2026
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