Category: Police / Law Enforcement / ICE

And About “Political” Violence-

Comments welcome!

A state lawmaker was assassinated last year. Who is keeping others safe?

Grace Panetta

This story was originally reported by Grace Panetta of The 19th. Meet Grace and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Political violence is on the rise — making the job more dangerous for state lawmakers and posing new challenges for state law enforcement officials. 

Every high-profile act of violence sets off new waves of threats and fears of more — the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in September sent chills down the spines of elected officials throughout the country. But Utah, where he was killed, was already ahead of the curve on addressing threats to lawmakers and high-profile public officials.

Nine years earlier, it had set up a new unit to track and prevent violence against public officials.

The unit follows a four-step process, said Taylor Keys, a spokesperson for the state Department of Public Safety: It receives and identifies reports of threats and concerning behaviors, gathers the facts, assesses the individual’s risk of posing a real physical threat, and then manages the risk with intervention and case management. 

In the days after Kirk’s assassination at Utah Valley University, Utah lawmakers reported receiving an uptick in threats. Keys said the agency “regularly reviews” security measures and safety plans for lawmakers and “will continue to leverage new technologies, training, and security features in the coming years to safeguard lawmakers.”

But many states aren’t as proactive and prepared as Utah. Most state legislatures are in session only part-time, and many of the state enforcement agencies charged with protecting them are stretched thin and lack standardized procedures for reporting threats, collecting data and conducting regular training. 

A spate of high-profile violent attacks over the past year threw this reality into stark relief. 

Last April, an arsonist attempted to burn down the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion in an attack targeting Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro. In June, a gunman assassinated former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, before wounding state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette. Republican Indiana state lawmakers who resisted a White House-led push to redraw congressional lines in the state reported receiving threats. And Kirk’s killing rankled lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

And for some lawmakers, the environment is becoming untenable: Two recent reports show that harassment, abuse and violence are leading factors driving women and younger legislators, especially, to exit office. 

State legislatures shape consequential policy and serve as a critical pipeline for higher office. But serving in office and entering the pipeline to power poses increasingly high risks to personal safety, especially for groups already underrepresented in the halls of power. While being a state lawmaker is a part-time job with a part-time salary in most states, lawmakers can’t opt out of being a full-time public figure.

“Elected and appointed officials live in a risk environment by nature of their job and their outward, public-facing positions,” said former Lt. Col. Tim Cameron of the Wyoming Highway Patrol, who spoke to The 19th in 2025 before he retired from the agency after more than 46 years in law enforcement. “Within the last year and a half to two years, that’s moved into a threat environment.”  

The 19th spoke with experts and reached out to state-level law enforcement agencies in all 50 states to capture a comprehensive picture of the scope of political violence against state lawmakers and how law enforcement is responding. Officials in a dozen states told The 19th how they identify and respond to threats, what data they collect, and how they’re adapting their responses and procedures to an ever-evolving landscape.

How did states respond? Jump to their answers here.

As political violence is on the rise, many states are scrambling to keep pace. Political violence, Cameron said, was a major topic of discussion at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference he attended in 2025.

“Anyone charged with executive protection is really looking closely at what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, and looking to utilize technology to leverage that in every way they can,” he said. “So it is going to be a challenge moving forward. And nobody has enough people.”  

A February report from the nonprofit organization Future Caucus, based on interviews and surveys with 89 young lawmakers in 31 states, found that threats of violence “have become a serious deterrent to both candidate recruitment and retention,” especially for women, lawmakers of color and LGBTQ+ lawmakers. 

“This is a four-alarm fire,” said Layla Zaidane, the president and CEO of Future Caucus, which supports young state lawmakers in bridging divides and working on policy across the political aisle. 

“They can stomach the low pay. They can stomach no staff. They can handle even trying to figure out the toxic polarization and transcending that,” Zaidane said of young lawmakers. “But political violence was the thing that, when you add it all together, was the decider of: ‘I don’t know if I’m going to run again, I don’t know if this is worth it.’”

The rise in violent incidents is having an outsized impact on women, who make up half of the United States population but account for only a third of state lawmakers; even fewer women of color are represented in the political arena. 

And when it comes to hyperpolarization and the increasingly toxic and hostile climate in state capitols, “women bear the brunt of this, multi-fold, compared to their male peers,” said Aparna Ghosh, the founder and executive director of the Ghosh Innovation Lab, a nonpartisan organization that conducts research and builds tools to support diverse and representative state legislatures.

A report the Ghosh Innovation Lab published last summer, based on 60 interviews and a nationally representative survey of over 300 women legislators, concluded that the assassination of Hortman “exposed a crisis that has been building for years.” Women lawmakers, the report found, “face systematic harassment, threats, and violence that compromise their safety, well-being, and democratic participation.” 

The report found that 93 percent of women lawmakers said they experienced some form of harm or abuse in office, 59 percent said it disrupted their legislative duties and 32 percent said it impacted their desire to stay in office.   

“It’s not just about an incident, but it’s about the everyday things that add up that push them out of office,” Ghosh said. “This is a huge problem for democracy, because this constant harm that women are facing is eroding the intent to run for office, so it’s eroding democracy in some way.”

Black and white photo of an empty legislative chamber with rows of wooden desks and chairs. A bright red, spray-painted target symbol is scrawled across one desk in the foreground.
(Emily Scherer for The 19th)

In the wake of Hortman’s assassination, several states have weighed legislation that would allow lawmakers to have their home addresses and other identifying information removed from public records. And as federal campaign spending on security expenses has continued to climb into the millions, 25 states now officially or informally authorize state candidates to use campaign funds for personal security, according to an analysis from the nonpartisan Vote Mama Foundation.

The role of law enforcement has also come under scrutiny, with the Ghosh Innovation Lab report concluding that state capitols and law enforcement “systematically fail to protect women legislators.”

The top safety shortcomings identified by women legislators surveyed for the report were a lack of training in handling threats (53 percent), the absence of a panic button for reporting incidents (46 percent) and unclear reporting procedures (42 percent). They also cited inadequate technological solutions, insufficient legal support, buildings feeling overly exposed, too few security officers and poor coordination with law enforcement.  

“Whatever training they’re getting is their own responsibility, and that’s part of where the system breaks down,” said Ghosh. “It’s two things: One is that we’re not a proactive system, we react to incidents, that is one huge thing. And the second is it feels like safety and security is a legislator problem, not an institutional problem.”

At the federal level, the U.S. Capitol Police (USCP) protects members of Congress, often in coordination with local law enforcement, and issues regular public assessments indicating that threats against federal lawmakers are on the rise. 

But far less is known about the risk environment and security landscape for state lawmakers.

States have widely varying levels of security for their state capitol complexes and different open carry rules. A 2024 review from the Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau found that 39 states use metal detectors in their capitol buildings, 31 use X-ray machines to scan packages and belongings and 10 require visitors to have photo identification.  

Many states have dedicated capitol police forces, specialized units within state police or highway patrols responsible for protecting lawmakers and executive officials, or both. Local sheriff’s offices and police departments also respond to reports of threats from state lawmakers.

“The big problem is that there’s no standardization in the protocols and processes, and this is the gray zone where the system breaks down,” Ghosh said.   

To get a clearer picture of the protection landscape, The 19th asked these questions to state agencies responsible for protecting state lawmakers in all 50 states: 

  1. What steps should a lawmaker take if they receive a threat?
  2. What are the agency’s processes for identifying and responding to threats?
  3. Does the agency collect data or produce threat assessments on threats to public officials, including state lawmakers? If not, are there plans to start collecting that data and/or to make it public, as the U.S. Capitol Police does?
  4. Has the agency implemented or plans to implement any additional security measures, safety plans or training for state lawmakers/capitol protectees in the wake of the Hortman and Kirk shootings? 

Representatives of law enforcement agencies in 27 states responded to The 19th’s inquiries. Representatives of agencies in four states declined to comment, and 19 did not respond to requests for comment. Of the agencies that responded, many declined to share specific security plans or details but said they were committed to ensuring the security of state elected officials and those working at and visiting state capitol complexes.  

The basics are the same: All agencies said lawmakers should immediately report a threat to a state, capitol or local law enforcement agency. But where lawmakers report threats can vary depending on whether the legislature is in session and the nature of the threat: a lawmaker might report a threat to the state capitol police or the highway patrol if the legislature is in session, or to their local police or sheriff’s department if they’re in their home county. 

All the law enforcement officials emphasized that keeping evidence of threats is important. 

Chris Loftis, a spokesperson for the Washington State Patrol, also said lawmakers should preserve “all evidence, including emails, voicemails, and social media posts” and are “advised not to engage directly with the individual making the threat.”

States use different methods to identify and trace threats. Many said they work with other agencies to monitor, identify and respond to threats. New York State Police spokesman Beau Duffy said the agency has a team of social media analysts who identify threats. Sgt. Ricardo Breceda of the New Mexico State Police said they use a variety of sources, including law enforcement databases. 

“Our response depends on the nature and severity of the threat and can range from routine follow-up investigations to the activation of specialized tactical teams if necessary,” Breceda said. 

Some officials and courts have found that some harassing and abrasive rhetoric directed at public officials falls under the First Amendment’s free speech protections, a finding that has at times frustrated lawmakers. Zaidane pointed to a 2021 case in which a man charged with making a threat to a Michigan state legislator’s office was acquitted after his lawyer said he was “just blowing off steam.” 

“I think, at a minimum, better enforcement of laws and coordination with law enforcement would make lawmakers feel like the system has their back,” Zaidane said. “Like there are still bright lines that we should not cross in America and that we are committed to upholding those.”

Another thing lawmakers want more of, Ghosh said, is data.

For over 20 years, the U.S. Capitol Police has published annual public threat assessments detailing the number of threats they investigate. In new data released in January, the USCP’s Threat Assessment Section reported investigating nearly 15,000 “concerning statements, behaviors, and communications” against lawmakers, their families, staff and the U.S. Capitol complex in 2025, marking the third consecutive year the USCP has investigated more threats. 

But most state law enforcement and state capitol security agencies either don’t collect or don’t publish such statistics. Utah is one of just a few states in the country that collects statewide data on threats to state lawmakers and produces assessments. The lack of comprehensive data from official sources makes it difficult to know the scope and scale of political violence against state lawmakers. 

“They want that kind of tracking and monitoring system,” Ghosh said of women lawmakers. “They want security briefings annually.”

Some state agencies told The 19th they don’t have a full picture of how threats are reported and investigated across their states because jurisdictions respond differently to threat reports. Several others said they do centrally collect that data but don’t release it for security reasons. 

“We collect data, but sometimes we’re not aware of the other complaints that potentially could be made to the sheriff of whatever respective county,” said Cameron of the Wyoming Highway Patrol. 

Some state agencies share data with other law enforcement authorities, including through fusion centers. 

Ghosh said women lawmakers also want more official safety training from law enforcement — many told her that they spend thousands of dollars out of pocket for self-defense and security training. 

“They want systems to back them up and say, ‘We’re going to prepare you for what’s coming,’ even if it doesn’t happen,” Ghosh said. 

Many states are working to expand security as well as training for lawmakers in the wake of the Minnesota shooting, though most declined to share specifics. 

Cameron said that in Wyoming, the conversation about improving protective operations “never stops.” The state Highway Patrol has a trooper focused on protective intelligence who attended a threat intelligence course at the U.S. Marshals Service headquarters in Crystal City, Virginia, and investigates threats against lawmakers, he said. 

“We’re constantly training our people. We recently instituted a special response team, more or less a SWAT unit, but they’re cross-trained to do executive protection,” he added. “Sometimes we’ll activate some of those members, so our [executive protection division] has additional personnel, either for advanced work or on site work or escort work.”

He said he’d like to see more adoption of drones and drone technology, an area where law enforcement in the United States is “behind,” to protect the state capitol and lawmakers. 

Ghosh said the women lawmakers she’s spoken to need three things to carry out their work: to feel prepared, protected and nurtured.  

“It’s simple things, right?” she said. “Their safety needs to feel well supported and ready to do the work that they’re meant to do. They want these three things, and when it breaks down is when they’re unable to do this work.”

From Joyce Vance In Regard To The Accused WHCD Shooter:

What You Need To Know About the Charges Against the Correspondents’ Dinner Attacker

Joyce Vance

Today, the government charged Cole Tomas Allen with attempt to assassinate the president, interstate transportation of a firearm, and discharging a firearm during a crime of violence. Prosecutors asked a judge in the District of Columbia to detain Allen in custody pending trial.

The charges filed against Allen differ from what U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro suggested they would be over the weekend, but, as we discussed, that was to be expected, with charging decisions remaining fluid as officials learn new information. A prosecutor indicated that the attempt to assassinate Trump was made with a 12-gauge pump action shotgun, but that Allen was also carrying a .38 caliber semi-automatic pistol, three knives, “and other dangerous paraphernalia.”

This is a criminal complaint, issued by a judge based on an agent’s affidavit, attesting to probable cause. The government will almost certainly follow up with a grand jury indictment in the next week or two. If they don’t, the judge will hold a preliminary hearing within 14 days if Allen remains in custody, 21 days if he’s released (which isn’t happening here), to determine whether probable cause exists. Federal prosecutors almost never go this route because it requires them to put their evidence on full display at this early stage in the proceedings, and unlike grand jury proceedings, where the defense doesn’t have a role, it permits cross-examination of the government’s witnesses. Expect a grand jury indictment shortly.

The lead charge here is “attempt” to assassinate the president, in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1751, so we need to understand a little bit about that crime and what prosecutors will have to prove. An attempt is referred to as an inchoate, or incomplete crime. With attempt charges, the key questions center around whether the defendant had the intent to commit the underlying crime and whether he took a substantial step—more than mere preparation—toward completing it. Here, based on the details in the government’s affidavit, which we’ll get to in a moment, its case looks solid. Allen evidenced an intent to kill the president. And the government has plenty of evidence to argue he went beyond “mere preparation” and took a substantial step toward committing the offense, since he was armed and running for the door to the ballroom, at the point when he was arrested.

The penalties for attempt and for the underlying offense are almost always the same under federal law, and that’s true here, with the statute providing for up to life imprisonment upon conviction.

Allen is also charged, as we expected last night, with violating 18 USC 924(c), which prohibits using a firearm “in furtherance of” a crime of violence. It carries a 10-year penalty if the firearm is fired, which is how Allen is charged. The complaint adds in one count of 18 U.S.C. 924(b), which makes it a crime for anyone who intends to commit a felony to transport a firearm across state lines. The punishment for that crime is up to 10 years in prison.

In order to get the complaint, the government had to provide the judge with a sworn affidavit from a federal agent. The 7-page affidavit provides some interesting details about the government’s evidence, but contains standard language advising the judge that “This affidavit is intended to show merely that there is sufficient probable cause for the requested complaint and does not set forth all of my knowledge about this matter.”

On March 2, President Trump announced he would attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, according to the affidavit. Allen then:

  • Made a hotel reservation at the Washington Hilton on April 6 for the night before, the night of, and the night after the dinner.
  • Traveled by train from his home near Los Angeles to Chicago, and from Chicago to Washington, D.C.
  • Checked into the Washington Hilton hotel the night before the dinner and remained there overnight.

We also get detail that we’ve been lacking until now about what happened when Allen approached the security checkpoint ahead of the ballroom. The affidavit recites that, “ALLEN approached and ran through the magnetometer holding a long gun. As he did so, U.S. Secret Service personnel assigned to the checkpoint heard a loud gunshot. U.S. Secret Service Officer V.G. was shot once in the chest; Officer V.G. was wearing a ballistic vest at the time. Officer V.G. drew his service weapon and fired multiple times at ALLEN, who fell to the ground and suffered minor injuries but was not shot. ALLEN was subsequently arrested.” Both of the firearms in Allen’s possession were purchased in California, which explains the transportation charge.

The affidavit also gives us a look at Allen’s full “manifesto,” some parts of which will have legal significance for the prosecution. He begins with a series of apologies to family and friends, including one that confirms his intent to kill:

“I apologize to everyone who was abused and/or murdered before this, to all those who suffered before I was able to attempt this, to all who may still suffer after, regardless of my success or failure.”

And he specifies who his targets are, “Administration officials (not including Mr. Patel): they are targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest.” He writes that Secret Service agents, hotel security, Capitol police, and the National Guard are “targets only if necessary,” if they get in his way, and that hotel employees and guests are “not targets at all.” This careful delineation will be used by the government to establish his intent to assassinate the president. Although he doesn’t mention Trump by name, he writes: “And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” an apparent reference to the president.

The government will offer the manifesto as evidence of the intent they have to show to convict on the attempt charge. He signed the manifesto “Cole ‘coldForce’ ‘Friendly Federal Assassin’ Allen.”

At the end, he seems to have added a rant about what he says is the Secret Service’s incompetence after he arrived at the hotel, discussing the absence of security or suspicion when he entered the hotel, before writing, “Like, if I was an Iranian agent, instead of an American citizen, I could have brought a damn Ma Deuce [This is a nickname for the M2 Browning, a heavy machine gun] in here and no one would have noticed s–t.”

The government brought its charges promptly, they appear to be based on solid evidence, and a career prosecutor was in the courtroom today, handling the case. All of which is as it should be.

Unfortunately, it’s also now all about the ballroom, after the president did a lightning-fast pivot at his hasty press conference after the incident Saturday night to say it was why the ballroom he is building at the White House is needed. We’ve already discussed why that doesn’t make sense—the president is an invited guest to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, not the host. The dinner celebrates the freedom of the press, as in their freedom from government control, making the controversial ballroom about the last place on earth it would be appropriate to hold the dinner, unless the press association wanted to make a mockery of that treasured freedom.

But that didn’t stop certain senators from deciding taxpayers need to foot the bill for the construction project Trump has previously said he’s using private funding to complete.

In 1786, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.” Political violence is horrific and deserves the condemnation from both sides of the political spectrum this incident is receiving. It’s fortunate that this incident did not result in any loss of life. There still needs to be a careful after-action report to ensure any mistakes that were made are not repeated. What this cannot become is an excuse to muddy up the freedom of the press or restrict any of the other constitutional rights Americans enjoy.

(snip; about subscribing)

We’re in this together,

Joyce

Looking At This Week With Joyce Vance

The Week Ahead

April 26, 2026

Joyce Vance

Stay with me tonight. This one runs a little long, but it’s all information you’ll need.

It’s likely that much of this week will be overshadowed by investigation into what happened Saturday night at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where Cole Thomas Allen, a 31-year-old California man with a master’s degree from Cal Tech, approached the ballroom at the Washington Hilton armed with a shotgun, a handgun and knives, and attempted to sprint through the magnetometer security checkpoint. He was stopped there. A Secret Service agent was shot, but was fortunately protected by a bulletproof vest. It’s not clear who shot him.

The White House Press Corps, still dressed in tuxedos and ball gowns, trooped into the press briefing room at the White House to hear from the President, who appeared, flanked by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel, and others. They, too, were still in tuxedos from the event.

It’s not clear who the “designated survivor” for the event was. CBS’ Margaret Brennan pointed out Sunday morning that “Five of the top six officials in the presidential line of succession were in attendance: Vice President JD Vance, House Speaker Mike Johnson, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.”

Trump was in good spirits as he spoke, complimenting the press and laughing about the speech he had hoped to give after dinner. It was a much more affable Trump than we’ve seen in the course of the last year as he interacted with members of the media he has often been sharply critical, or dismissive of, during his first year in office. Trump went on the attack against the press even before his January 2025 inauguration, as we discussed at the time.

This was a different Trump who spoke in a very measured fashion, far more measured than usual, almost as if he saw this incident as providing the opportunity for a reset. He respectfully took questions from reporters like CNN’s Kaitlin Collins and NBC’s Garrett Haake. He was kindly toward the press; that’s the only way to characterize it. Whether that was a momentary blip or it suggests he will try to convince the media to rebuild its relationship with him remains to be seen. He did say that the Correspondents’ Dinner would be rescheduled within a month, without seeming to understand that the Correspondents’ Association puts on the dinner and controls the event.

At the press conference, Trump was asked why this keeps happening to him—this was the third attempt on his life since he announced his run for the presidency ahead of the 2024 election. He responded that he “has studied assassinations” and that it’s the “people who do the most” that assailants go after, using Abraham Lincoln as an example. Trump said that it “only happens to impactful people” and that he didn’t want to say he “was honored” by the repeated attempts on his life, but he let the implication hang in the room.

But he did not abandon politics. As he began his comments, Trump said the incident demonstrated why the ballroom he is building at the White House is needed.

Trump reiterated his comments in a Sunday morning post on Truth Social, claiming presidents have been demanding a ballroom like the one he’s building for 150 years.

His amen corner all took up the chant on Twitter, on cue.

But, as we noted above, the dinner is run by the Correspondents’ Association, not the White House. There is no reason to believe they would use a White House ballroom for a dinner designed to celebrate freedom of the press and its independence from government. Trump can make the argument he needs a safe space to entertain, but it’s a disconnect from the event last night.

Miles Taylor commented on Threads that “The WHCD shooter will be used to justify things that have nothing to do with the WHCD shooter. Mark this moment.” That seems likely.

The immediate investigation will focus on whether the shooter was a lone wolf, as it appears, or whether there is an ongoing threat. There is reporting today that Allen was a member of a group called The Wide Awakes, who appear, based on their web presence, to be committed to “radically” reimagining the future, but look to be a group of creative, peaceful people. Law enforcement will want to determine whether someone or something radicalized Allen and directed him toward violence.

There are sure to be, and there should be, questions about the Secret Service and how this happened. Asked about that during the press conference, Trump responded that he was “very impressed by the Secret Service.” But this is the third time a would-be assassin has gotten close to Trump, and one would have expected them to tighten ranks after the first attempt. Trump, however, does not seem to have viewed any of it as a failure by the Service and he was complimentary of the D.C. police, as well, in a phoner on Fox News.

It’s important to note that the Secret Service stopped Allen at the perimeter they had established. They succeeded in that sense. The real question will be whether the perimeter should have been set further back. I’ve attended the dinner multiple times and one observes layers of security that require guests to walk up the hill to the circular drive in front of the Washington Hilton before entering the hotel, but there are parties and receptions occurring in advance of the perimeter before entering the ballroom area, and, as we now know, Allen avoided scrutiny as a guest who checked into the hotel the day before the dinner. There are real questions that will have to be confronted here to ensure protection for future dinners, to say nothing of the scads of parties that happen in connection with this dinner, and other national events that are held at the Hilton.

Late Saturday evening, D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro announced that Allen would be arraigned on Monday. She said he will be charged with one count of assault on a federal officer using a dangerous weapon and two counts of using a firearm during a crime of violence. That could be fluid as officials learn new information. But the charges she identifies are found at 18 USC 111, which carries a 20-year maximum penalty, and 18 USC 924(c), which carries a 7-year penalty if a firearm is brandished and a 10-year penalty if it’s fired.

The motive seemed to be coming into focus throughout the day as some of Allen’s anti-administration writings were released. On Meet the Press, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said authorities believed the suspect may have been targeting Trump administration officials, including Trump himself. The basis for that belief appears to have been examination of electronic devices and some writings. But Blanche told CNN’s Dana Bash they were still looking at the motive.

As I heard seasoned journalists, many of them friends, discuss how frightening the shooting was on air Saturday night and Sunday morning, I couldn’t help but reflect on how much worse it is for America’s children. How many of them still suffer a lingering sense of trauma from the moment a shooter crashed into their classroom or their place of worship? If there’s ever been a time to pass sensible gun control laws, it’s now. If we’re going to play politics, as Trump did with immediately pivoting to justifying his ballroom, let’s play that kind and make some good trouble.

There will be in court developments in other matters to track, as well, this week:

This Wednesday will be the last regularly scheduled day for the Supreme Court to hear oral argument this term. The Court will take up two consolidated cases, Mullin v. Doe and Trump v. Miot, and consider whether the Trump administration acted properly when it revoked protected status for Syrians and Haitians living in this country. The cases involve decisions from New York and Washington, D.C., barring the administration from stripping more than 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians of protected legal status that protects them from deportation.

The cases hit the court just last month, on March 16. The Court allowed the lower courts’ decisions to remain in place, preventing deportations, determining that it would hear the case promptly, allotting an hour for oral argument. This has all happened very quickly, with the final brief being filed just last week on Monday.

There is also news on the voting front. Friday evening, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves announced that he was calling a special session of the legislature so that new maps could be drawn.

This redraw would be limited to state Supreme Court districts. A federal court found Mississippi’s state Supreme Court districts violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and required the legislature to pass a remedial map. But it failed to do so during the regular session. A court hearing was scheduled for this week, and the court would have likely adopted its own map. So the Governor is calling this special session in hopes the court will hold off until the legislature has time to act.

In the election last November, voters ended the Republican supermajority in the legislature, but Republicans still hold a majority of the seats in both chambers and should be able to pass a map of their own devising. So the governor likely believes a map that comes out of the legislature will be superior to one created by the court.

And finally, the SAVE Act isn’t quite dead yet. We need to stay alert to any resurgence and be prepared to call our members of Congress to demand they resist its resuscitation. Trump is again demanding that his party end the filibuster and pass the Act, saying that not doing so will “lead to the worst results for a political party in the HISTORY of the United States Senate.” It reads as an acknowledgment that only voter suppression can save the Republican Party in the midterm elections.

Utah Senator Mike Lee followed up on Trump’s command with this tweet. Lee is not up for reelection until 2028. But he, too, seems to sense that this will be a dangerous election for Republicans. The SAVE Act is one of the last-ditch efforts Republicans have to suppress the vote and hold onto power this year and again in 2028. There is no mention of crafting policies designed to win the hearts and minds of American voters. It’s just about keeping eligible American citizens from voting. We must do everything we can to resist that.

If you’ve found this useful, it’s exactly the work I do every week—reading the filings, tracking the arguments, and explaining what it means before it becomes obvious. The headlines will keep coming, but understanding them takes more than a glance. That’s what this space is for. My goal is to give you clear, careful analysis you can rely on. If that’s the kind of work you value, I hope you’ll choose to subscribe.

We’re in this together,

Joyce

Take A Look!

Saturday, April 25, Is the “Communities Not Cages National Day of Action to Stop ICE Warehouse Detention”

ICE Death Toll Climbs To Horrific Heights

 

4th Amendment Workplaces

When ICE Shows Up, These Businesses Will Be Ready

Across the U.S., training, resources and hotlines have emerged to help workplaces exercise their rights in the case of an ICE raid.

By: Emily Nonko

Last April, at the James Beard Foundation’s Chef Action Summit, food industry leaders gathered to discuss the political and economic landscape with one concern hanging grimly in the air: undocumented and immigrant workers were increasingly afraid to come into work after ICE raids ramped up at the outset of Trump’s second term. 

But it just so happened the summit took place in Asheville, North Carolina, where activists had already asked, “What would it take to make this the safest state for immigrants in the south?” as Andrew Willis Garcés, senior strategist with the immigrant justice organization Siembra NC, puts it.

One answer: 4th Amendment Workplaces, a framework developed by Siembra NC and launched at the summit to help restaurants and other businesses train up on legally vetted protocols to defend employees against ICE. The idea quickly took hold — there are now over 1,000 4th Amendment Workplaces across North Carolina, with 4th Amendment Workplace resolutions passed in three cities and similar efforts underway across 12 states. 

It’s emerged as perhaps the most powerful workforce training to help businesses prepare for ICE raids, but it is not the only one. Across the country, training, resources and hotlines have been developed for workplaces, alongside an effort to harness the wider labor movement as a force against ICE. 

Though the ICE raids that make the news often take place on the street, workplaces are in fact a frequent target. “We’ve seen ICE this year go into workplaces more than a lot of other kinds of places where people are gathered,” Willis Garcés explains. “With workplaces, there’s usually an open door you can walk through.”

According to the American Immigration Council, ICE publicly reported at least 40 worksite enforcement actions resulting in over 1,100 arrests within the first seven months of the current Trump administration. Businesses employing noncitizen workers — restaurants, car washes, automotive shops, bakeries, nail salons — are typically targeted. ICE has also scaled up large raids at workplaces like meatpacking and manufacturing plants. 

These raids often represent legal violations, which 4th Amendment Workplaces raise awareness around. The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” without a warrant based on probable cause — that is, reason to believe that a crime may have been committed.

In North Carolina, volunteers canvas businesses across the state to share what it means to be a 4th Amendment Workplace: identify invalid ICE warrants, secure private employee areas, document unconstitutional actions and defend all workers, no matter their immigration status. Resources include a workplace guide, organizing toolkit, posters signaling opposition to unconstitutional search and seizures, employee handouts and tips for designating private employee areas. 

Workplaces can request dedicated training, in which organizers help business owners and employees develop workplace-specific protocol, and lead them through roleplaying scenarios. “We help you think through … what would you do right after the fact? What would you do to preserve footage, how do you support families left behind, what’s the immediate triage that needs to happen [after a raid]?” explains Willis Garcés.

Scuppernong Books of Greensboro was an early adopter, participating in training, promoting itself as a 4th Amendment Workplace, hiring a lawyer, regularly keeping staff informed of ICE response protocol, even publishing a book on how to resist ICE. Co-owner Steve Mitchell says it is “absolutely essential” for business owners to step up on behalf of employees, especially if the owners are white and legally protected residents: “It’s important for people like us to say that this isn’t right, and we’re going to stand on this side of the issue.”

Even though there hasn’t been a heavy ICE presence in Greensboro, the bookstore’s work with Siembra NC “gives us some sense of confidence,” Mitchell says. “Whether that’s misplaced or not, it at least helps us know what our rights are in that situation.” He adds that using Siembra’s model has made the business feel connected to a broader network of activists.

Willis Garcés describes that model as “plug and play,” easily adaptable outside the state and across a variety of workplaces. Siembra NC recruited small businesses first, with the goal of expansion into higher-targer workplaces like factories and farms.

Today, some North Carolina farmers display giant vinyl banners about their constitutional rights, a riff on Siembra NC’s signage. In Oregon, organizers dubbed themselves “Baddies for the Fourth.” In Minneapolis, the 4th Amendment Workplace was a central demand in a public-pressure campaign around Target. 

There have been other efforts to develop localized training. In New York, Nonviolent Peaceforce trains mostly within the city’s Asian American community, which it has worked with since the pandemic. Last year, ICE raids erupted across the city’s Chinatown.

Nonviolent Peaceforce’s in-person training happens with trusted community partners and focuses on de-escalation and self-regulation tactics, alongside scenario and role-playing. “We came to develop scenarios really at the request of community members who felt that they really needed to know what it was like to be in the moment,” says Roz Lee, head of the organization’s U.S. efforts. She says simple tactics to slow things down — like introducing yourself, asking ICE agents their name, asking for a warrant and taking time to inspect it — can shift a potentially intense and traumatic interaction. 

Other groups have tied the urgency around ICE to larger labor organizing efforts. Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) emerged to help non-unionized labor organize in response to COVID-19. More recently, EWOC developed resources for resisting ICE, which are tied to broader workplace organizing tactics like facilitating conversation among employees, building a committee and planning collective action together. 

“These steps are very universal, whether you work in an office, in a kitchen, at a nonprofit,” says Wes Holing, an EWOC organizer. “If you’re talking about bread-and-butter issues, or you’re talking about a workplace that’s safe from ICE, you’re still ultimately fighting for a place that respects you as a person.” 

This January, EWOC partnered with Twin Cities Democratic Socialists of America to hold a No-Work Workshop to train workers on their rights and protections to participate in the Anti-ICE General Strike. It was part of a much larger mobilization among Minneapolis residents and businesses responding to Operation Metro Surge.

The city mobilized far beyond one-off trainings; instead, an entire ecosystem emerged. “The sheer volume, the sheer magnitude of mobilization … it felt like every single person I knew was extremely active,” says Mike Urbanski, who helps lead legal observer training with Monarca. Monarca is a project under the immigrant justice organization Unidos MN, which canvassed businesses in Twin Cities’ immigrant communities. They’d then direct people to Monarca’s ICE hotline as well as its two-hour, in-person training, which focuses on “upstander” legal observation tactics.

Monarca’s trainings were also shared through social media, word of mouth and within community spaces and houses of worship. “We could post a training with 1,000 people in Minneapolis and fill it within four or five days,” Urbanski says, “And most of those people would come, and another 100 people would just show up.” 

The Workers Solidarity Circle also canvassed and shared resources among Twin Cities businesses, channeling that energy into the Minneapolis Worker’s Assembly this February, which brought together over 300 unionized and non-unionized workers across sectors. “It was about building working class power and coordinated strike action, to really push people into action and not wait on managers, bosses or labor officials to save us,” says organizer Aminah Sheikh.

Now that Operation Metrosurge has wound down, organizers have turned their attention to this upcoming May Day: organizing strike committees, holding strike trainings, conducting labor education and committing unions and community organizations to strike on May 1st. Sheikh says there is a growing realization that workers must build political power far beyond their workplace. 

“Listen, in order for us to really stop — abolish — ICE, like people are saying, from the grassroots,” she says, “then we need to do economic disruption.” 

The 5-Year FISA Sec. 702 Vote:

It’s a little late in the day, but I’ve been away. I’d set this up for the morning, but it is pretty important for those of us in the USA. The FISA 702 bill reauthorization regarding warrants for surveillance of US citizens was defeated after being brought forward nefariously.

(Note: I’m not on Bluesky. I love that anyone can click onto a post, and go look at it without having to sign in. So, please click below, and go read each little post, because again, this is important.)

In a dramatic scene that unfolded in the wee hours this morning, members of the House defeated a ploy by the administration and Speaker Johnson to ram through a 5-year reauthorization of FISA Section 702. Here’s what happened, and what will/should happen next. 1/20— Liza Goitein (@lizagoitein.bsky.social) April 17, 2026 at 10:34 AM

A Good Reason To Question The Propriety Of Capital Punishment

Because these things happen all the time: laws that are wrong, and poor investigative practices with witnesses.

Can Penn & Teller Magically Get SCOTUS To Consider Wrongful Conviction Appeal?

Charles Flores has been on Texas’s death row for over two decades for a crime the state knows he didn’t commit.

Robyn Pennacchia

Charles Don Flores has sat on Texas’s death row for 27 years for the murder of Elizabeth “Betty” Black in 1998, during the commission of a robbery. The problem is, he did not kill Elizabeth “Betty” Black. That’s not just conjecture or me believing in someone’s innocence; even the state of Texas does not claim that he killed her. The man who actually did kill her was also sent to prison for the crime and was released over a decade ago, but Flores was sentenced to the death penalty for supposedly participating in the crime. Texas, you see, has a law called the “law of parties” that holds every participant in a crime responsible for everything that happened during its commission. So, for instance, if you drive the getaway car and your accomplice kills someone during the commission of a robbery, you are held equally responsible, even if you didn’t even know it happened.

There was no physical evidence, no DNA connecting Flores to Black’s murder. There is, in fact, no evidence whatsoever beyond his identification by a single neighbor who didn’t pick him out of two photo line-ups and initially said both men she saw where white with an average build and long hair, while Flores, clearly Latino, was a bigger guy with short hair.

So why is he there again? Because that neighbor, Jill Barganier, was later “hypnotized” by a cop who had never hypnotized anyone before. A cop who hinted, repeatedly, at the suspect having short or shaved hair, who told her she would continue to remember even more things about the robbery after the hypnosis. By the time she made it to court — after she had seen Flores’s picture on TV and in the news on many occasions — she was able to point to him in court as the accomplice of the the man who killed Betty Black.

There’s a lot that’s wrong with this case, obviously, but the hypnosis part is what caught the attention of magicians Penn & Teller, who recently submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court asking them to consider Flores’s case. Why? Because, they say, what the officer did is no different than what they do in their Vegas show every night.

“I am bringing this to you with the utmost humility,” Penn Gilette told The New York Times. “I am carny trash. I am uneducated. If you want to say I have a position of expertise, it is that I have lied to people onstage and gotten them to believe it. And I think I could do what that police officer did.”

The brief reads:

Despite the fact that Mrs. Barganier described the passenger in the car she saw at the scene of the crime as a white man with long hair, she was fed repeated suggestions by law enforcement that the passenger had “neatly trimmed” or “short, shaved” hair; she was told by the officer-hypnotist that she would remember more after the hypnosis session; and months later— after photos of Mr. Flores appeared in the press and she saw him seated at the defense table at trial— suddenly she identified him as the passenger. It is of little surprise that she was confident in her in-court identification when she saw this now-familiar face and believed she had produced it from her memory: That is exactly what the officer told her would happen. But it was not real. Some of the same cognitive techniques Penn & Teller use on stage to trick audience members’ memory and alter their perception explain how the investigative hypnosis session induced Mrs. Barganier to abandon all previous descriptions of the suspect and instead point to Mr. Flores.

On the tape, the officer keeps telling her that her memory is like a videotape that she can rewind and fast-forward at will. And it’s very tempting to believe that. It’s very tempting and comforting to believe that our brains are always recording whether we are aware of it or not and that, with the help of something like hypnosis, we can access those recordings. Certainly no one wants to believe that someone can more or less just jump into your brain and make you believe you saw things you didn’t see.

Our minds have a tendency to fill in the gaps if we don’t remember everything that happened in a particular situation, they explain, and memory retrieval process distorts memories — things they take advantage of as magicians.

By manipulating an audience’s memory—both in its formation and its recall—Penn & Teller get the audience to convince themselves that things have happened when, in reality, those things never occurred. That is all well and good for purposes of entertainment. But the same suggestion-based memory manipulation was also on display in the investigative hypnosis of Mrs. Barganier. And the officer-hypnotist left her believing that new things that came to mind later were true “memories” she could testify about, not merely things her brain subsequently filled in.

They can tell you exactly how he did it, as well.

The suggestion inherent in the investigative hypnosis of Mrs. Barganier is obvious: The officer/hypnotist asked her multiple questions about whether either suspect had short, shaved, neatly cut, or trimmed hair—even as Mrs. Barganier reiterated that both had long, wavy hair. The officer then showed Mrs. Barganier a photo lineup in which every photo was of a Hispanic male with short hair. Mrs. Barganier again did not identify Mr. Flores from that photo lineup. But she then also saw his photo in news coverage of the case prior to trial. Combined with the assurances of the officer-hypnotist that she would remember more as time went on, she was primed to “remember” Mr. Flores at trial. And she was particularly primed to do so because she was understandably motivated to assist police in finding the person who had committed a violent murder next door to her home. Pet. 6. Moreover, Mrs. Barganier’s certainty that her belated, in-court identification of Mr. Flores was correct (“over 100%” positive, as she testified), is not surprising. As Penn & Teller have observed, it is “very difficult for the audience to contradict the ideas that they themselves have constructed.”

The truly appalling thing about all of this is that the state of Texas actually knows that they are right about hypnosis being junk science. Just a few years ago, the state banned investigative hypnosis from being submitted as evidence in court. Of course, that was well after Flores was convicted and it had been used in over 1,800 trials over the course of four decades. In 2013, the state also enacted a “junk science” law, allowing for individuals to appeal for a new trial if the forensic science used to convict them has been found, upon further study, to be bullshit. This includes “evidence” like bite mark analysis, fiber analysis, bloodstain pattern analysis and 911 call analysis (one of the scariest ones, in my opinion, given that people have such wildly varying reactions in any kind of emergency).

It has not been going well.

Yet, Texas is fighting against Flores’s appeal and still hopes it will get to execute him. Because it’s Texas, and they really, really like executing people there.

There is a lot that is frustrating about our criminal justice system, but somewhere near the top is definitely the stubborn refusal of many involved with it to correct things when they’ve made a mistake. We see it over and over again, and it’s bad enough when it happens with someone serving any kind of sentence, especially a long one, but it’s unconscionable when we’re talking about the death penalty. There are no take-backs with the death penalty, and nothing anyone, even a magician, can fix once someone is dead.

Inadvertent Compliance

with the surveillance state.

How Citizen Surveillance Ate San Francisco

When a homeless man attacked a former city official, footage of the onslaught became a rallying cry. Then came another video, and another—and the story turned inside out.


Just when the people of San Francisco thought they’d seen every video—the sidewalk drug runners, the Louis Vuitton mob heisters, the men selling stolen laptops, the smash-and-grabbers snatching a camera from a Prius in traffic, the porch pirates porch pirates porch pirates into infinity, all indexed in the “Lawless San Francisco” section of the great internet video store—yes, just then: Stig Strombeck took out his cell phone camera on April 5 and hit Record.

It was around 7 pm, and Strombeck was on his way to his second job. He’d parked on Lombard Street. Not the famously crooked section up over the hill, but the wide gauntlet that jets toward the Golden Gate Bridge through the Marina district: the preppy hood of woo girls and boat guys and early-career Gavin Newsom and largely law-and-order Democrats. (“Everyone likes to shit on San Francisco, and San Franciscans like to shit on the Marina,” one resident told me. “It’s a victimless crime.”) But lately, even in the Marina, there was no escaping the rest of the city’s problems. The previous November, in a manicured playground just two blocks from where Strombeck was walking, a father said his 10-month-old baby had ingested fentanyl and had to be revived by Narcan—a San Francisco nadir that, to the presumable relief of civic boosters, hasn’t surfaced on film.

On the Lombard sidewalk, Strombeck pulled headphones from his ears and trained his camera on a disturbing scene playing out in the lot of a Shell gas station. Here’s the video: A bear of a middle-aged guy, 5’11”, 230 pounds, faces a rakish, apparently homeless man in his twenties who is wielding a 3-foot-long pole. The older bear of a guy holds his arms up like a boxer as the younger one jockeys with the pole, falls backward off a curb, then lithely spins back to his feet. The older guy blots his eyes and yells, “You’re going to jail, motherfucker.” The younger one, who wears a bright red stocking cap, whacks the bear of a guy across his face, sending him careening to the side. A male voice off camera says “Dude!”—the unmistakable Greek chorus of Wtf, this is insane. The younger guy looks toward the camera. The video stops.

⚠️ WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
The following videos contain graphic content, which some readers may find disturbing.

(see it, embedded on the page, linked in the title above; there are also several .gifs at various points throughout this. I can’t grab ’em, plus it’s easier to just read on the page)

Strombeck stowed his phone, but the action kept spilling into other frames. A daycare’s security cam showed the red-capped figure maniacally chasing the now bloodied man down the Lombard sidewalk before bashing him again. A neighbor pointed his camera down from his third-floor window as the younger guy strode below with the pole in one hand and what looks like the older man’s baseball cap in the other, pumping his arm, looking amped. Another video of the attacker that appears to be shot from a passing vehicle was uploaded to the crime-alert app Citizen, which pinged a software engineer sitting on his couch a few blocks away, who ventured over and filmed the crimson drips and Rorschach splotches of blood leading down the sidewalk. (Strombeck would later testify that by the end of the attack, the big guy was covered in “the most blood I’ve ever seen.”)

The following day, a Marina local named Joan wrote on Nextdoor that she was the mother of Don Carmignani, the man who’d been bludgeoned by the pole: “I want to thank all the neighbors that videoed what was happening & got involved to stop it. If they were not there my son would be dead!” Don was in the hospital, she wrote, with a skull fracture and a broken jaw. City politicians tweeted prayers and a call for more cops. Local news identified Carmignani as a former city fire commissioner, a lifelong San Franciscan and father of two. The assailant: 24-year-old Garret Doty, a recent arrival from Louisiana.

Reports said the attack kicked off when Carmignani asked some homeless people to move away from his elderly parents’ door, which they were blocking. In one TV newscast, a reporter mentions an allegation, from one of Doty’s companions, that Carmignani used “bear spray” during the altercation. The segment then cuts to a close-up interview of Doty’s homeless friend—a striking, red-bearded man named Nate Roye, speaking from under a filthy shearling hood—saying that Doty attacked because Carmignani had been “disrespectful.”

“Is that enough to beat him up?” the journalist asks, incredulously.

“Yeah, sometimes,” Roye replies, with a decisive nod.

San Franciscans know the larger drama that this episode advances, and you probably do too: Tech’s glittering citadel, fallen, with the footage to show it. Within some 40 hours of the Marina attack, in another swank part of the city, a widely admired tech executive named Bob Lee, the former CTO of Square and a founder of Cash App, had staggered past surveillance cameras while bleeding from several stab wounds and later died at the hospital. The two maulings—a beaten fire commissioner, a slain tech executive—upcycled to the national news, putting San Francisco under the national surveillance to which it’s become accustomed, with particularly lip-licking schadenfreude on the right. Here again was Newsom’s and Nancy Pelosi’s doom-looping dystopia, where remote-working techies and fleeing billionaires have ceded the city to IRL Grand Theft Auto.

Carmignani, his family, his attorney, and some witnesses provided images that flickered through the reports and social media: Strombeck’s video from the gas station. A laundromat’s street cam view of Doty grabbing the metal bar out of a trash bin and taking a practice swing. The daycare cam. In the neighborhood itself, the vigorous uptake of these images inspired a kind of hope. Marina residents—forever wary of being pegged as pearl-clutching Karens—thought they finally had their irrefutable proof of how clearly things had gotten out of hand. “Somebody got beat up. It was on camera multiple, multiple places,” one told me. “Like, the best evidence!”

But within days, the clarity crumbled. In the case of tech executive Bob Lee, police arrested not a person off the street but a tech entrepreneur whose sister had been hanging out with Lee. And in private, within the police department, the Carmignani attack was veering off narrative too. A police sergeant, sorting through the symphony of surveillance clips that captured the face-off, played the bodycam footage from a cop who had been interviewing Carmignani’s girlfriend after the attack. The officer asks whether she’d been inside when Carmignani went out to “confront” the guy. She says yes. Then from the ambulance, Carmignani interrupts her, barking a command through his broken jaw, seeming to thicken the plot:

“Don’t say nothing to nobody. Don’t say nothing to any cop, no one.”

In San Francisco there’s always another video. New York and London are known for being blanketed with government-run CCTV coverage, but surveillance here is different: It is as privatized as it is pervasive, a culture of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, at scale.

In the city where Nextdoor’s offices sit right in the gritty Tenderloin, sharing Ring cam footage of porch thieves is a bonding exercise between neighbors who’ve never met. All over town, local nonprofits oversee neighborhood-wide networks of cameras funded in part by donations from crypto entrepreneur Chris Larsen. (“That’s the winning formula,” Larsen told The New York Times in 2020. “Pure coverage.”) Platoons of Waymo self-driving cars circulate the streets like Pac-Man ghosts, gathering up videofeeds that cops snag for evidence. You can watch a resident’s live cam to see who’s on the corner of Hyde and Ellis, right now.

True-crime video has become San Francisco’s civic language, the common vocabulary of local TV news broadcasts, the acid punch line to a million social media posts. The feeds intensified during the pandemic, when commuterless streets erupted with synthetic opioid use and property crime. Since then, the city has found itself hobbled through successive breakdowns—a police shortage, a 34 percent office vacancy rate, a federal injunction severely limiting the city from clearing homeless camps. No one seems to be solving San Francisco’s problems, the feeling goes, so by God, people are going to film the dysfunction and post the footage.

A guy who goes by the handle JJ Smith is probably the most vivid personification of this drive. A longtime resident of the Tenderloin whose brother died of a fentanyl overdose in 2022, Smith—not his real name—films unhoused people as he tries to cajole them into considering treatment. Then he posts the footage on X, where he has about 19,000 followers.

In happier cases, he’ll document when people check into a program and come out clean on the other side. But much of Smith’s footage is far grimmer: coroners rolling sheet-draped corpses out of residential hotels; a cold open on a woman’s face as she OD’s on a sidewalk. Smith explains that he’s just given the woman Narcan, pulling you into morbid suspense combined with an awful feeling of Are we really supposed to be seeing this? Other times, Smith dispenses a tough love that edges into trolling, like the time he snatched away a coat draped over a woman’s head so he could scold her for smoking drugs next to a park where his kids play.

People shrug off statistics, Smith says, but “when you’re actually seeing it, it really gets to you.” Supporters credit him with recording a humanitarian crisis. Critics tweet at him, even chide him on camera: He’s exploiting people who have no privacy with footage they haven’t consented to. (Hey, he says, it’s a public sidewalk.)

Some of the discomfort with Smith, who says he knows many of the people he films, stems from the simple fact that, by now, he’s part of a social media bandwagon. Even presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis once stopped by the Tenderloin to shoot a video. Today, Smith is joined by other accounts like FriscoLive415 and Tenderloin Tube—a cadre that lives somewhere on the border between citizen journalists and dystopic paparazzi. Consider the live birth video. Last spring, a Twitter account that typically posts store-looting vids showed something else: an infant, just born and naked, on a Tenderloin sidewalk, its dazed mother trying to pick the baby up. The event is morally excruciating, but so is its existence here, on X, overlaid with the account’s watermark as the video travels the internet to 1.5 million views, churned into headlines like “Caught on Video: Homeless Woman Gives Birth in Broad Daylight on Tenderloin District Sidewalk.”

(snip-a bit more on the page. Of course, there are twists!)

Surprise inspection catches shocking state of ICE immigrant prison