One hundred clergy members arrested at Minneapolis airport as anti-ICE protests continue
We’re getting an update that 100 clergy members were arrested while protesting federal immigration enforcement outside Minneapolis-St Paul international airport today. They were arrested by members of the airport staff and local law enforcement, according to organizers.
They added that the faith leaders “prayed together, sang songs and hymns, and shared stories of those who have been abducted by ICE while at work or commuting to and from the airport” in an effort to call on airlines companies – particularly Delta and Signature Aviation – to “stand with Minnesotans in calling for ICE to immediately end its surge in the state”.
Key events
Nekima Levy Armstrong releases video of her arrest, showing she was composed, not sobbing
The Minneapolis civil rights lawyer who was released from federal custody on Friday, Nekima Levy Armstrong, has posted video of her arrest on Thursday on the Facebook page of her nonprofit Racial Justice Network.
The video, which the nonprofit has given the Guardian permission to share with readers, offers stark proof that a digitally altered image of her arrest posted online by the White House, which was manipulated to make it look like Levy Armstrong was sobbing, was a fabrication.
Levy Armstrong was composed throughout the seven-minute encounter, shown in its entirety in the video. She faces federal charges related to an act of civil disobedience earlier this week, when anti-ICE protesters demonstrated at a church where they say one of the pastors is also in charge of the local ICE field office overseeing the immigration crackdown in the Twin cities.
[Note: The video embedded below can be seen in full-screen on all devices by clicking to expand it at the lower right of the Facebook player, after hitting the play button.]
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“I surrendered myself peacefully, deliberately, and with intention,” Levy Armstrong said in a statement. “I demanded dignity, humanity, and respect, not just for myself, but for every person who has ever been brutalized, silenced, or disappeared by unchecked government power. We stood in protest because families are being torn apart, communities terrorized, and constitutional rights trampled. And we will not be intimidated into silence.”
Judge dismisses justice department suit against Trump enemy Brad Raffensperger
A federal judge in Georgia on Friday dismissed a lawsuit filed by the US justice department seeking voter information from the state, ruling the federal government had sued in the wrong city.
US district judge Ashley Royal found the government should have sued Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in Atlanta, and not in a separate federal judicial district in Macon, where the secretary of state also has an office.
Royal dismissed the lawsuit without prejudice, meaning the justice department can refile it. The department declined to comment Friday.
Raffensperger was sued by the assistant attorney general for civil rights, Harmeet Dhillon, in December after he refused to provide the detailed voter information she demanded.
Raffensperger famously resisted a request from Donald Trump, during a recorded phone call on 2 January 2021, to “find 11,780 votes” in the state’s 2024 presidential election that could be discounted because of alleged fraud. That would have reversed Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in the state and allowed Raffensperger to declare Trump the winner by a margin of one vote.
When Raffensperger declined to do so, insisting that a review of the vote count showed that it was accurate, Trump suggested that the Republican official, and his lawyer, Ryan Germany, were guilty of “a criminal offense” for allowing votes for Biden that the president insisted, based on false conspiracy theories, were illegal to be counted.
Since Trump returned to office last year, the justice department he stacked with partisan loyalists has filed lawsuits against 24 states and the District of Columbia demanding voter information as part of its effort to collect detailed voting data, including dates of birth and driver’s license and Social Security numbers. A federal judge in California rejected the lawsuit against that state on privacy grounds, while a judge in Oregon has suggested he may dismiss the case there.
The Trump administration characterizes the lawsuits as an effort to ensure election security, but the states have resisted, citing privacy concerns and their legal mandate to oversee their own elections.
Raffensperger has been the rare Republican to decline the demand, saying Georgia law prohibits the release of voters’ confidential personal unless certain qualifications are met. Raffensperger argues the federal government hasn’t met those conditions. He says he shared the public part of the voter roll and information about how Georgia removes ineligible or outdated registrations in December.
“I will always follow the law and follow the Constitution,” Raffensperger said in a statement Friday. “I won’t violate the oath I took to stand up for the people of this state, regardless of who or what compels me to do otherwise.”
Raffensperger’s refusal to hand over the voter data has become an issue in his run for the Republican nomination for governor this year. His opponent, Georgia’s sitting lieutenant governor, Burt Jones, who has Trump’s endorsement has repeated the false claim that claim that there were 315,000 wrongly certified ballots in 2020 in Fulton County, which Biden won by more than 240,000 votes on his way to a narrow statewide victory.
Nekima Levy Armstrong, Minneapolis activist, released from custody
Nekima Levy Armstrong and Chauntyll Allen, two activists who were arrested and charged for their role in an anti-ICE demonstration that disrupted church services in St Paul, Minnesota, on Sunday, were released on Friday.
Video of the two women emerging from detention posted online showed them raising their fists and embracing their loved ones. “Thank you all for being here,” Levy Armstrong said. “Glory to God!”
A federal judge ordered their release, ruling that the government had failed “to meet its burden to demonstrate that a detention hearing is warranted, or that detention is otherwise appropriate”.
A third person arrested and charged by the federal government, William Kelly, who goes by DaWoke Farmer on social media, was also released by a US magistrate judge.
Armstrong is a former NAACP branch president, Allen, a St Paul School Board member Chauntyll Louisa Allen, and Kelly a veteran who served in Iraq and reportedly suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.
On Thursday, the White House was caught posting a digitally altered image of Levy Armstrong’s arrest on social media, which had been manipulated to falsely portray her as crying, and to darken her skin.
The deception was quickly uncovered by the Guardian and other news outlets, in part because the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, had earlier posted the original image which showed Levy Armstrong looking composed.
On Friday, the Associated Press reports, Levy Armstrong released video of her arrest recorded by her husband, Marques Armstrong, which further revealed the extent to which the White House had distorted reality to fabricate propaganda intended to embarrass the activist.
According to a transcription of the video by the AP, Levy Armstrong had even asked the agents why they were recording her detention.
“I’m asking you to please treat me with dignity and respect,” she said to the agents.
“We have to put you in handcuffs,” one agent said, while another held up a phone and appeared to record a video.
“Why are you recording?” Levy Armstrong asked. “I would ask that you not record.”
“It’s not going to be on Twitter,” the agent filming said. “It’s not going to be on anything like that.”
“We don’t want to create a false narrative,” the agent said.
At no point in the more than seven-minute video – which shows Levy Armstrong being handcuffed and led into a government vehicle – did Levy Armstrong appear to cry. Instead, she talked with agents about her arrest.
“You know that this is a significant abuse of power,” she said. “Because I refuse to be silent in the face of brutality from ICE.”
“I’m not in here to get in a political debate,” the agent filming said.
Pentagon announces deadly strike on suspected drug smugglers in eastern Pacific
In a social media post, accompanied by video, the US navy’s Southern Command just announced that it had carried out “a lethal kinetic strike” on a boat suspected of carrying drugs.
Two of three people in the boat, according to the US military, “were killed and one survived the strike”. The US Coast Guard was alerted to search for the survivor, the Pentagon said.
In the last four months of 2025, the Pentagon announced 35 such strikes, killing at least 123 people.
Anti-ICE protesters in Minneapolis rally in Target Center
Video and photographs posted on social media show that thousands of anti-ICE protesters in Minneapolis have poured into the Target Center, the arena that is home to the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves, for a rally scheduled to begin shortly.
Some of the images show that the huge overhead screen that hangs above the basketball court has the words “ICE Out of Minnesota” spelled out in giant letters.
Two weeks ago, the same screen was used to show photographs of a memorial for Renee Good, the Minneapolis woman killed by an ICE agent, when the NBA team hosted a pre-game a moment of silence for her.
While the use of the Target Center, and an online sign-up list for the rally, has been criticized by some activists outside the city, since the retailer that pays for the naming rights has been the subject of a boycott over its failure to block federal immigration agents from its parking lots and stores, protesters in the city cited the need for a warm place to hold the rally on a freezing cold day.
“People out here chasing ICE cars around all day advising people not to sign up for a ticket to the Target Center so they can go warm their toes after protesting in -20, because what if the feds get the signup list? Guys! The cold is more dangerous than the feds for protesters!” the activist Will Stancil wrote on Bluesky.
Minneapolis protester has a message for all those upset by image of boy detained by ICE: ‘Don’t Look Away’
The image of Liam Ramos, a five-year-old preschooler in Minneapolis being detained by ICE agents this week, and allegedly used “as bait” to try to trap other members of his household, has reverberated nationwide.
On Friday, one protester in the large anti-ICE march making its way through the streets of the city, held up a handmade poster with a drawing of the young boy’s blue bobbled winter hat above the words: “Don’t Look Away”.
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Trump rails against Canada on social media
While Donald Trump has no public events on his schedule today – the White House guidance for the media informs us that later this afternoon “THE PRESIDENT participates in policy time”, which sounds like, “executive time”, the euphemism his first term staff used to describe his hours of watching television – the president has been busy pursuing his new grudge against the nation of Canada on social media.
“Canada is against The Golden Dome being built over Greenland, even though The Golden Dome would protect Canada,” Trump posted this afternoon. “Instead, they voted in favor of doing business with China, who will ‘eat them up’ within the first year!” he added.
Like many of Trump’s comments, it takes an unhealthy familiarity with is shorthand and obsessions to unpack this comment from the president of the United States.
The “Golden Dome” is Trump’s hyper-Trumpy name for a fanciful missile defense shield he hopes to build to intercept missiles that could be launched at the US from China, Russia or North Korea, despite his close personal relationships with the despots ruling all three countries.
Like Trump’s slogan “Make America great again”, the concept of such a system, designed to protect the US even from weapons fired from space, seems to be borrowed from a previous Republican president, Ronald Reagan, whose Strategic Defense Initiative was better known as Star Wars.
Trump allegedly wants to take control of Greenland because of the key role that territory would play as a base for intercepting missiles aimed at the US.
Canada, which already participates in the current system for defending North America, through the North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad), had previously expressed at least some interest in taking part in the new dome, should it move from fantasy to reality.
The Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, said in May that participation had been discussed at a high level with US officials since the threat from missiles that “in the not too distant future, could come from space”, was one Canada took seriously.
“We are conscious that we have an ability, if we so choose, to complete the Golden Dome with investments and partnership, and it’s something that we are looking at,” Carney told the state broadcaster CBC at the time.
But then, this week, Carney said in a blistering speech at Davos that, in light of Trump’s threats to annex Greenland, and, possibly, Canada, his country and others needed to accept that “a rupture” in the global order overseen by the US was taking place, and they might need to fend for themselves.
That speech, and Canada’s decision to increase trade in electric vehicles with China, now that Trump’s tariffs have shattered Canada’s common auto industry with the US, annoyed Trump enough that he spent part of his largely free day attacking Canada on social media.
Thousands march through Minneapolis as anti-ICE protests continue
We’re getting more pictures from the demonstration in downtown Minneapolis today, where hundreds of shops, restaurants and businesses shut their doors in solidarity with those protesting the federal immigration surge throughout Minnesota. A reminder, this comes more than two weeks after the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent.
Senior border patrol official says detained five-year-old is in ‘least restrictive setting possible’
Gregory Bovino, a senior border patrol official, played down concerns over the five-year-old who was taken into custody on Tuesday as he and his father arrived home from preschool in the Minneapolis suburb.
“That child is in the least restrictive setting possible,” he said of Liam Ramos at a press conference in Minneapolis today. Bovino added that Liam and his father, had not been separated, and both were at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Texas.
ICE surge continues in Maine with more than 100 arrests, governor demands agents ‘show warrants’
Earlier this week, we brought you the news that the Department of Homeland Security had started a immigration crackdown in Maine, dubbed ‘Operation Catch of the Day’. Speaking to Fox News, Patricia Hyde, deputy assistant director of ICE, said the agency has compiled a list of 1,400 individuals in Maine it intends to target.
In a statement to the Guardian on Friday, DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said ICE agents had already arrested “more than 100 illegal aliens” since the operation began. The department said some of those taken into custody are “the worst of the worst” and have been “charged and convicted of horrific crimes,” but highlighted the same four examples it released earlier in the week.
Immigrant rights groups have been on alert as ICE concentrates its operation on Maine’s two largest cities, Portland and Lewiston. Organizers say agents have been targeting African nationals from Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Angola, many of them asylees who have made the coastal state home in recent decades.
On Wednesday, a local ICE sighting hotline – organized and run by Maine Immigrant Rights Coalition – said they received more than 1,100 calls, a 35% increase in calls from the previous day. Immigrants in Maine only represent about 4% of the state’s total population, most of whom have legal status to live and work in the US, according to a recent report by the Migration Policy Institute.
At a press conference in Portland on Thursday, Janet Mills, the state’s Democratic governor, said the Trump administration has not returned her calls since the operation began. She added that her office has received reports of people with no criminal record being detained and urged homeland security to be transparent in its actions, saying she would be “shocked” if federal law enforcement located 1,400 individuals with criminal backgrounds.
“If they have warrants, show the warrants,” she said. “We don’t believe in secret arrests or secret police.”
Mills also described widespread fear in schools, workplaces, and businesses that are losing employees who have either been detained or are not showing up, despite living in the state legally.
Earlier this week, a video by 28-year-old Crisitan Vaca – an Ecuadoran immigrant living in Maine with valid immigration status – went viral online. In the footage, federal agents appear outside Vaca’s home in Biddeford, 18 miles south of Portland, where he lives with his wife and young son. In an interview with the Associated Press in Spanish through a translator, Vaca said that he approached the officers when they were taking pictures outside his house.
When Vaca refused to go outside, the video shows one of the agents telling him that they will “come back for your whole family” through Vaca’s screen door.
“I have been in this country since September 2023,” Vaca, who works as a roofer, told the AP. “I have immigration status … the judge postponed my court date to another day. Now I have a new court date. I have my work permit. I have my social security number [sic].”
Local authorities also decried the scope of the federal immigration dragnet this week. Cumberland County sheriff Kevin Joyce said that on Wednesday evening one of his corrections officer recruits was arrested by ICE agents. “This is an individual that had permission to be working in the state of Maine. We vetted him,” the sheriff said of the unnamed recruit. Joyce was one of more than 100 national sheriffs who met with Trump’s border czar Tom Homan last year. “The book and the movie do not line up,” he told reporters on Thursday. “We’re being told one story, which is totally different than what’s occurring.”
According to the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project (ILAP), Maine’s only statewide immigration legal services organization, they have received several fearful calls as the crackdown continues. This includes a pregnant woman who reached out to ILAP because she was “terrified to leave her home to go to a medical appointment”. Another person called and said someone had “pulled the fire alarm in her building, desperately trying to save people from ICE”. ILAP said that they received reports of teachers escorting immigrant children home from school who had agents follow them and push their way into an apartment building lobby.
“It is clear the overall operation is anything but targeted,” said Sue Roche, the organization’s executive director. “People are being racially profiled on the streets and in their cars. As is their playbook, ICE is doing everything they can to inflict maximum cruelty and chaos.”
ILAP also noted that they’re seeing arrested people transferred out of the state to detention facilities in New England. DHS did not respond to Guardian’s request for comment about where detainees are being held since Maine does not have a dedicated immigration detention facility.
In Lewiston, it’s “hard to overstate the level of fear within the community” according to Democratic congressional candidate Jordan Wood, who is running to replace outgoing US representative Jared Golden. “I have heard that as many as 20% of students at certain schools did not show up,” Wood, who was born, raised and lives in the area, told the Guardian.
He added that the community response to the ICE surge – from ensuring immigrants know their rights to sharing where agents have been spotted – has been hugely encouraging. “It’s important to just know the community that that they’re coming after won’t stand idly by while our neighbors are terrorized,” Wood said.
At her press conference in Portland, Mills still wanted more information about the decision to target the Pine Tree State. “Why Maine? Why now? What were the orders that came from above? Who’s giving the orders?,” she said, adding that state officials have reached out to the Trump administration but still “have no answers”.
One hundred clergy members arrested at Minneapolis airport as anti-ICE protests continue
We’re getting an update that 100 clergy members were arrested while protesting federal immigration enforcement outside Minneapolis-St Paul international airport today. They were arrested by members of the airport staff and local law enforcement, according to organizers.
They added that the faith leaders “prayed together, sang songs and hymns, and shared stories of those who have been abducted by ICE while at work or commuting to and from the airport” in an effort to call on airlines companies – particularly Delta and Signature Aviation – to “stand with Minnesotans in calling for ICE to immediately end its surge in the state”.
‘You have an ally in the White House,’ Vance tells anti-abortion protesters
Carter Sherman
Reporting from the March for Life
Thousands of anti-abortion activists poured on to the National Mall for the largest annual anti-abortion gathering in the US.
“You have an ally in the White House,” Vice-President JD Vance told the marchers in his speech.
Vance rattled off a number of anti-abortion policies enacted by Trump administration, including its decision to pardon people who were convicted for blockading clinics, banning the use of fetal tissue from abortions in some government research and expanding the so-called Mexico City policy, which bans groups from receiving foreign aid if they provide abortions or promote the right to the procedure overseas.
While anti-abortion activists applauded those actions, they have grown increasingly disenchanted with the Trump administration over the last year. Abortion foes had hoped the administration would enforce the Comstock Act, a 19th-century law that, if enforced, could result in a de facto nationwide abortion ban. They had also hoped that the administration would move to curtail access to abortion pills, which have become a major avenue of abortion access in the years since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade.
However, the administration has not taken meaningful action on either issue. Trump has also repeatedly backed away from opposing abortion rights. Most Americans support some degree of access to the procedure.
“I must address an elephant in the room,” Vance said. “A fear that some of you have that not enough progress has been made, that not enough has happened in the political arena, that we’re not going far enough, that our politics has failed to answer the clarion call to life that this march represents.”
He added: “I hear you, and I understand.”
Vance also celebrated his wife Usha’s new pregnancy, suggesting that he had talked her into it.
“Let the record show: You have a vice-president who practices what he preaches,” he said. “Usha and I announced this week that we are expecting our fourth and it will be our third baby boy, so we’ll take whatever prayers you can give.”
Anti-abortion demonstrators take part in March for Life in DC
We’re getting a number of pictures from the national March for Life in DC. Despite the district preparing for severe winter weather, thousands of anti-abortion demonstrators gathered in the district. Earlier, Vice-President JD Vance addressed the crowds.
CNN has spoken to the Columbia Heights, Minnesota, school district superintendent Zena Stenvik about ICE’s detention of four students in the city, including five-year-old Liam Ramos.
A reminder that Liam was taken into custody on Tuesday as he and his father arrived home from preschool in the Minneapolis suburb. According to school officials, an ICE agent used the child to knock on the family’s front door to determine if anyone else was inside, before detaining father and son. They were later transported to Texas.
Stevnik described arriving to the scene to people crying in the street who told her the child had been taken. The father’s car was also still running, she told CNN, contradicting claims from homeland security that he had attempted to flee on foot and abandoned Liam. Stevnik also said that another adult at the home had pleaded to take care of Liam but was denied.
Vice-president JD Vance has defended ICE’s detainment of Liam, claiming the child would’ve been left to “freeze to death” if he wasn’t taken with his dad. Asked if the child would’ve been abandoned and left outside, Stevnik said, “Not a chance.” She told CNN she spoke to Liam’s mother, the school board chair and neighbors close to the family, all of whom wanted to take him.
I entered the home and the mother was distraught. She wanted Liam, she wanted to open the door. And I can’t even imagine as a mother myself how conflicted she must have been. This is what she told me, seeing her husband standing in the driveway in handcuffs saying, don’t open the door and also hearing her little one.
And she could see the ICE agent standing there at the door. So, I – I just can’t imagine as a mother what she was going through. It was heartbreaking for me to hear her. And she looked up at me and – and said, I don’t understand what’s happening. We’re not criminals. And as our – as the family’s attorney stated yesterday, they have followed everything that they’ve needed to do in terms of the legal processes.
Stevnik went on:
Here in the Twin Cities right now, it’s pretty common that people are not opening their doors because once anyone cracks open their door, the ICE agents are bursting through or even breaking doors down. So, that’s the behavior that we’re seeing. So, that’s the only behavior that we can assume would have happened.
Marc Prokosch, an attorney representing the family, has said the Ramos family had followed proper legal procedures. They have an active asylum case and entered the US at an official port of entry, he said.
The family did everything they were supposed to in accordance with how the rules have been set out. They did not come here illegally. They are not criminals.
More on this story here:
FBI director Kash Patel has conducted another purge of field office leaders and senior agents linked to the two criminal investigations of Donald Trump, MS NOW reports citing multiple people briefed on the matter.
While the exact number ousted is unclear, two people familiar with the matter told MS NOW that the special agent in charge in Atlanta has been removed, as has the acting assistant director in charge of the New York field office and a former special agent in charge in New Orleans.
What is more, two people said that as many as six agents in Miami were forced out over their connection to the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, and other agents pushed out were involved in the “Arctic Frost” investigation of Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.
