Retired child and adolescent psychiatrist and American expatriate in New Zealand. In 2002, I made the difficult decision to close my 25-year Seattle practice after 15 years of covert FBI harassment. I describe the unrelenting phone harassment, illegal break-ins and six attempts on my life in my 2010 book The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee.
Last week’s historic announcement from HHS and President Trump connecting Tylenol use with the autism epidemic reignited longstanding concerns over Tylenol’s toxicity. For decades, the focus has been on liver damage and accidental overdoses. But the deeper story—the one still hiding in plain sight—is more disturbing: even a single dose of acetaminophen (Tylenol’s active ingredient) measurably blunts human empathy, dulls positive emotions, and increases risk-taking behavior.
This isn’t just a matter of personal health. It’s a social and spiritual crisis. If one-quarter of U.S. adults are taking Tylenol weekly, we may be medicating away our collective capacity for compassion.
The Research That Changes Everything
In a landmark 2015 Psychological Science study, titled “Over-the-Counter Relief From Pains and Pleasures Alike,” researchers at Ohio State University gave healthy adults a single standard 1,000 mg dose of acetaminophen (Tylenol) and then exposed them to emotionally charged images—ranging from disturbing to uplifting.
The outcome was unambiguous:
Disturbing images were rated less negatively.
Uplifting images were rated less positively.
Across the board, participants reported feeling less emotional arousal, even when viewing the most extreme stimuli.
Brain research helps explain why: acetaminophen dampens activity in the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex—regions responsible for processing both physical pain and emotional resonance. These are the same circuits that allow us to feel empathy and to be moved by joy, awe, or sorrownihms703262.
The authors concluded:
“Acetaminophen attenuates individuals’ evaluations and emotional reactions to negative and positive stimuli alike… Rather than being labeled merely a pain reliever, acetaminophen might be better described as an all-purpose emotion reliever.”
2. Tylenol Reduces Empathy for Others’ Suffering
In 2016, researchers at Ohio State University published a Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience study titled “From Painkiller to Empathy Killer” (Mischkowski, Crocker, & Way, 2016). Participants who took a standard 1,000 mg dose of acetaminophen showed significantly reduced empathic concern when reading scenarios of people experiencing social or physical pain compared to those on placebo.
Neuroimaging explained why: acetaminophen dampened activity in the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex—the same brain regions that fire when we experience physical pain ourselves and when we empathize with the pain of others. In effect, Tylenol blunts the shared circuitry of compassion.
The story didn’t end there. In 2019, another study in Frontiers in Psychology confirmed the effect for positive empathy—our ability to share in others’ happiness (Randles, Harms, & Finn, 2019). After taking acetaminophen, participants reported less joy when hearing about others’ uplifting experiences. The researchers warned:
“Acetaminophen reduces affective reactivity to others’ positive experiences. Because positive empathy underlies prosocial behavior, this raises concern about the societal impact of excessive acetaminophen use.”
The Implication: Tylenol doesn’t just ease your headache—it quietly severs the neural bridges of human connection, dulling both our sensitivity to suffering and our capacity to celebrate joy with others.
3. Tylenol Increases Risk-Taking
In 2020, Baldwin Way and colleagues at Ohio State published a Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience paper showing that acetaminophen (Tylenol) not only blunts empathy but also alters how people perceive risk.
In a series of experiments:
189 college students were randomly given either 1,000 mg of acetaminophen or placebo. They then rated the danger of activities like bungee jumping, walking alone at night in unsafe areas, or having unprotected sex.
Those who had taken acetaminophen consistently judged these behaviors as less risky.
In a second test, 545 students performed the “balloon analogue risk task,” where participants inflate a virtual balloon to earn money, knowing it might burst. The Tylenol group pumped the balloons significantly more times, resulting in more bursts and more losses—clear evidence of blunted fear of negative consequences
The mechanism seems to mirror acetaminophen’s emotional numbing effects: by dulling negative affect, the drug also dulls the anxiety signals that normally restrain risky behavior.
The scale of exposure is staggering. Around 52 million Americans take acetaminophen every week. Even slight shifts in how people evaluate risk, magnified across such widespread use, could ripple through society—affecting decisions from health and safety to finances, relationships, and beyond.
The Implication: Tylenol doesn’t just dull pain and empathy. It can tip the scales of judgment itself, making dangerous choices feel less threatening. Multiply this by millions of daily users, and the “safe, everyday painkiller” becomes a silent force reshaping collective behavior.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
¼ of American adults use Tylenol weekly.
600+ medications contain acetaminophen, from cold remedies to prescription opioids
110,000 injuries and deaths per year are linked to acetaminophen
Empathy reduction is measurable after a single dose
This is not a fringe concern. It is a public health crisis with spiritual dimensions.
The Deeper Question
What happens to a society when its most common drug blunts compassion, dulls joy, and fuels reckless risk-taking?
We are not just facing an epidemic of liver toxicity. We are facing a subtle epidemic of soul toxicity. Tylenol, in numbing pain, may be numbing our humanity itself.
The time has come to ask: Is the cost of convenience worth the erosion of empathy?
Learn more about Tylenol’s long established risks in our series below :
Broken Trust: The Tylenol Cover-Up That May Have Damaged Millions of Children
Displaced Palestinians gather to receive food portions from a charity kitchen in the Nuseirat refugee camp, central Gaza Strip, October 21, 2025. (Photo by AFP)
Press TV
The Gaza Government Media Office says Israel is violating the ceasefire agreement by obstructing aid deliveries and continuing the deliberate campaign of starving Palestinians.
In a statement released on Tuesday, the office said that since the October 10 ceasefire, only 986 aid trucks have entered the besieged territory, far below the levels promised under the agreement.
“We note that the average number of trucks entering the Gaza Strip daily since the ceasefire began does not exceed 89 trucks out of 600 trucks that are supposed to enter,” it stated, noting that this reflects “the continued policy of strangulation, starvation and humanitarian blackmail practiced by the [Israeli] occupation.”
Under the ceasefire agreement between the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas and Israel, at least 6,600 trucks were expected to reach Gaza by Monday evening.
The statement emphasized that these limited deliveries fail to meet the essential living needs, including food, medical supplies, operational fuel, and cooking gas, to ensure basic, dignified living conditions.
Echoing the same warning, the World Food Programme (WFP) reported on Tuesday that food deliveries to Gaza remain far below the agency’s target of 2,000 tons per day.
Speaking to reporters in Geneva, WFP’s senior regional communications officer for West Asia, North Africa, and Eastern Europe, Abeer Etefa, said more than 530 trucks have entered Gaza since the ceasefire, carrying roughly 6,700 tons of food, enough to feed half a million people for just two weeks.
Etefa noted that the agency has been able to operate only a single distribution in northern Gaza, providing a limited supply of nutrition supplements and snacks for pregnant and nursing mothers, as well as malnourished children, while access to northern Gaza and Gaza City remains extremely restricted.
“Food remains largely out of reach for most residents,” she said, citing prohibitively high prices.
The WFP officer urged Israeli authorities to open all border crossings, particularly Rafah, emphasizing that current operations depend solely on the Karam Shalom and Kissufim crossings, which cannot serve northern Gaza.
“Sustaining the ceasefire is vital,” she added. “It is the only way we can save lives and push back on the famine in the north.”
Since famine was officially declared in the Gaza Governorate by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) on August 22, 2025, 179 people, including 37 children, have died of starvation in the besieged strip.
Gaza Health Ministry reported last month that the death toll from malnutrition due to Israel’s deliberate food blockade has reached 453 since October 2023, when Israel launched a genocidal war on the enclave.
Displaced Palestinians gather to receive food portions from a charity kitchen in the Nuseirat refugee camp, in the central Gaza Strip, October 21, 2025. (Photo by AFP)
Press TV
A ceasefire demarcation line established under a US-brokered agreement for Israel’s withdrawal has become a deadly frontier in Gaza, where Israeli forces are forcing residents from entire eastern districts and blocking their return.
The Gaza Government Media Office said on Tuesday that Israeli forces have cleared residents from all eastern neighborhoods, warning that the measure is “creating a new and dangerous reality on the ground.”
Thousands of Palestinian families have fled as the Israeli military enforces the so-called “yellow line,” introduced under US President Donald Trump’s 20-point Gaza plan, which runs from northern Gaza to the outskirts of Rafah in the south.
Israeli forces remain deployed in the Shejaiya neighborhood, parts of Al-Tuffah and Zeitoun in Gaza City, as well as in Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia in the north, Rafah in the south, and along the Gaza coast.
According to Gaza’s Civil Defense, the Israeli military directly opens fire on any Palestinian crossing the “yellow line” or even approaching it, without prior warning.
Officials in Gaza say the vast amount of debris left by months of Israeli bombardment has made it nearly impossible for residents to navigate safely or avoid the newly marked boundary.
The mass displacement has pushed thousands into overcrowded areas in central and western Gaza, including around al-Shifa Hospital, deepening the humanitarian crisis and overwhelming health facilities and shelters already on the verge of collapse.
On October 10, Israeli forces completed the first phase of withdrawal to the “yellow line” but maintained control over nearly 58 percent of the Gaza Strip.
In a statement on Sunday, Hamas condemned Israeli attacks along the line as “crimes that expose the occupation’s deliberate targeting of unarmed civilians,” and called on the United States and other mediators to pressure Tel Aviv to respect the agreement.
The Gaza media office reported that since the October 10 agreement took effect, Israel has committed at least 80 violations, killing 97 Palestinians and injuring 230 others, including women and children.
Observers have warned that what was intended as a marker for Israeli withdrawal has become a de facto border of occupation.
According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, Israel’s two-year campaign of genocide has killed more than 68,000 people and wounded over 170,000 since October 2023. The war has displaced over two million people and left almost the entire population dependent on humanitarian aid.
The Canadian Prime Minister, Mark CarneyAP Photo/Thomas Padilla; Pool
i24NEWS
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said his government would uphold the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he were to enter Canada, emphasizing that Ottawa will “act in accordance with international law.”
In an interview with Bloomberg, Carney stated that Canada “will act in accordance with international law and our international legal policy,” adding, “If he enters Canada, he will be arrested in accordance with the order of the International Criminal Court.”
The ICC, based in The Hague, last week rejected Israel’s appeal to suspend arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, citing “reasonable grounds” to believe they bear responsibility for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Gaza conflict.
Washington (QNN)- The White House and Pentagon reportedly knew that the Rafah explosion was caused by a settler Israeli bulldozer running over unexploded ordnance (UXO), contradicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim that Hamas fighters had emerged from tunnels.
According to journalist Ryan Grim from Drop Site, US officials were briefed soon after the blast that the incident resulted from an Israeli settler-operated bulldozer triggering a UXO, not a Hamas operation. Despite this, Netanyahu publicly accused Hamas and announced that he would block all aid from entering Gaza in response.
According to sources cited by Grim, after the US administration confronted Israel with its findings, Netanyahu reversed course, saying crossings would reopen within hours. The Pentagon reportedly came to the same conclusion as the White House.
Journalist Curt Mills from The American Conservative quoted a senior US administration official confirming, “Hamas did nothing. An Israeli tank hit an unexploded IED that had probably been there for months.”
The revelation adds tension to an already fragile situation in Gaza. Following the explosion, Israel launched a wave of airstrikes across the Strip, killing at least 15 innocents, including a journalist, in an attempt to justify renewed escalation.
Observers say Israel has been trying to provoke another round of fighting despite the ceasefire signed in Sharm el-Sheikh earlier this month. Recent attacks, including strikes on civilian areas have raised concerns that Israel aims to derail the truce and maintain its military pressure on Gaza.
The last two decades should have been a period of accelerating economic development for Africa, South America and much of Asia. Discoveries of abundant oil and gas supplies offered a rescue from poverty, industrial stagnation and poor access to electricity and other basic services.
Instead, they got a man-made disaster, a deliberate slowdown of growth driven not by geographical disadvantage or domestic inefficiency but by a global campaign to divert affordable fossil fuels from poor nations.
Examples abound. At the United Nations’ COP26 of 2021, more than 30 governments and a number of public financial institutions committed to the so-called Glasgow Statement, also known as the Clean Energy Transition Partnership. The objective was to end new public finance for fossil fuel projects by the end of 2022 and instead prioritize “green” energy.
The European Investment Bank stopped financing all fossil fuel projects by the end of 2021, affecting billions in planned natural gas infrastructure. Major European pension funds and commercial institutions – BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole, Société Générale – reduced or eliminated support for development projects for oil, natural gas and coal, citing targets to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.
The coercion was unequivocal: Pursue fossil fuels and lose access to Western capital. The opposition to hydrocarbons was embraced by Western nonprofit organizations and even by people who had made money from oil.
Just Stop Oil, a malicious anti-fossil fuel outfit, has been bankrolled by the Climate Emergency Fund and Hollywood filmmaker Adam McKay, maker of the alarmist movie Don’t Look Up. The fund draws heavily on contributions from Aileen Getty, heir to the Getty oil fortune, and other wealthy donors.
Rainforest Action Network, Sunrise Movement, Oil Change International, and 350.org are just a handful of so-called non-profit organizations that inject funds into domestic campaigns across the developing world.
Oilwatch Africa, openly provides support to groups working against fossil fuel expansion, offering direct financial incentives to oppose developmental projects. In August, the African Energy Chamber (AEC) explicitly accused “foreign-funded NGOs” of using litigation to block Shell’s offshore exploration in southern Africa’s Orange Basin.
The AEC described these challenges as “disruptive, meritless legal challenges” that threaten energy security, economic growth, and job creation in countries facing high unemployment and reliance on imported energy.
“Africa’s per capita energy consumption remains among the lowest globally, underscoring the urgent need for infrastructure development and policy reform,” says the Africa Energy Outlook Report 2026. “Africa’s average per capita power consumption in 2024 was 500 kilowatt/hours (kWh) per year, compared to the global average of 3,700 kWh. … Similarly, Africa today accounts for less than 5% of global oil product demand despite presenting 18% of the world’s population.”
Government budgets in the U.S. and Europe have poured millions into climate initiatives purportedly aimed at “mitigation” and “resilience.” Disguised is the redirection of funds into programs meant to deny oil and natural gas development in regions that need it most.
This is deception by opacity of process. Taxpayers and donors believe that they are funding solutions, but the effect is to derail initiatives that would vastly improve the living standards of developing nations. The current U.S. administration has stopped this, for now, by withdrawing funding commitments to climate programs abroad. But a different administration could restore the fraudulence in foreign aid.
Despite the headwind, in 2024, multiple African states pushed forward with fossil fuel development. From Nigeria’s offshore oil investments to Tanzania’s natural gas expansion, leaders prioritized their people’s needs over external pressures. This is a glimpse of the immense potential waiting to be unleashed if only these countries were free of the conditional aid and activist influence that undercuts their energy sovereignty.
Grassroots groups that oppose fossil fuels should be transparent about the sources of their funding and the trade-offs of their positions. If blocking an energy project means a village remains dark or a factory can’t open, such costs must be taken into account.
The truth: Climate policy that ignores the needs of people and contributes to generational poverty is cruel, even when presented with the gloss of environmental virtue.
Israeli forces fire tear gas as they block Palestinians from reaching their land to harvest olives, in the village of Kobar, near Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, on October 18, 2025. (Photo by AFP)
Press TV
The Israeli occupation army has seized about 17 acres of Palestinian land in the northern occupied West Bank, despite growing international condemnation of its ongoing land-grab policies.
According to a statement published on Sunday on the website of the Palestinian Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission (CWRC), the confiscated 70,000-square-meter area is located across several villages in the Nablus governorate.
“The Israeli occupation authorities have taken control of 17 acres and 147 square meters of land through a military order, affecting areas in the villages of Qaryut, Al-Lubban Al-Sharqiya and Al-Sawiya in Nablus Governorate,” read the statement.
The move is aimed at establishing a buffer zone around the Eli settlement in the area, CWRC said.
The Commission highlighted that “the Israeli authorities published the military order after the objection period had already expired.”
The military order permits objections within one week of issuance; however, the order is dated September 21, 2025.
Since the beginning of 2025, Israeli authorities have issued 53 military land seizure orders for various military purposes, the Commission further noted.
The Commission reported that Israeli authorities had seized thousands of square meters of Palestinian land and established 25 buffer zones around settlements over the past two years.
The development comes as Israeli hawkish finance minister Bezalel Smotrich has vowed an “escalation” of land expropriation in the occupied West Bank.
Last month, Smotrich announced plans to annex more than 80 percent of the occupied West Bank in a bid to block the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Smotrich, back then, called the West Bank annexation “a preventative step” against moves by many countries to recognize Palestinian statehood.
He has been one of the spearheads of Israel’s plans for settlement expansion and the annexation of the occupied West Bank.
Israel recently approved a major settlement project, called E1, which aims to split the occupied West Bank into two parts, cutting off the northern cities of Ramallah and Nablus from Bethlehem and al-Khalil in the south and isolating East al-Quds.
The international community, including the UN, considers the Israeli settlements illegal under international law.
Earlier this year, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said that the Israeli policy of expanding and consolidating settlements across the occupied West Bank amounts to “a war crime.”
The UN rights chief said Israel must evacuate all settlers from the occupied West Bank and make reparations for decades of illegal settlement.
Turk urged the international community to take meaningful action against the occupying entity.
In an advisory opinion last July, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) declared Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory illegal and called for the evacuation of all settlements in the occupied West Bank and East al-Quds.
The United States is the Israeli regime’s main international backer, granting the Zionist leaders laissez-faire to commit atrocities with impunity, including the genocide of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, their forced displacement, child-killing, and occupation and annexation of Palestinian land.
A massive Amazon Web Services outage temporarily brought down a significant number of popular internet sites and services – affecting banks, airlines, media, delivery apps and many other websites and apps.
AWS is a cloud computing provider that hosts many of the world’s most-used online services. In Amazon’s infancy, the company needed excess server capacity to ensure it had enough computing power to handle the massive amounts of traffic that came to its site during the holiday season rush. Amazon realized that during the rest of the year, it could use those servers to support other companies’ online needs, and out of that AWS was born.
Among AWS’ many offerings is DynamoDB, a database that hosts information for companies, including customer data. Amazon Monday morning said its customers couldn’t access the data stored in DynamoDB, because the Domain Name System – a kind of phone book for the internet – had encountered a problem. DNS is like an internet location engine, converting user-friendly web addresses like amazon.com into IP addresses – a series of numbers that other websites and applications can understand.
We’ve heard today from a tech expert who told us that Amazon Web Services “sits in the middle of everything.”
Lance Ulanoff, editor at the technology publication TechRadar told John Berman on CNN News Central that AWS provides a space where businesses can essentially rent the services they depend on to operate, rather than building and maintaining those services internally, which is far more costly.
“It’s like: ‘Why build the house if you’re just going to live in it?’” Ulanoff said.
Ulanoff explained that smart home devices, used by millions globally to do everything from monitor who is approaching their property to turning lights on and off, are not designed to work without the internet, despite how widely relied upon they have become.
“They just don’t work without the internet. They’re not designed that way,” he said before adding, “We’ve designed everything to work with that constant connectivity and when you pull that big plug, everything, basically becomes dumb.”
Geopolitics Prime discovered that X is systematically silencing criticism of governments, corporations, and elites. We learned it by asking Grok about X’s new algorithm.
Here’s what Grok told us:
🔴 Silencing dissent: posts that “attack power structures”—including critiques of governments, corporations, or elites—are automatically downranked.
🔴 A pro-Western bias: content on sensitive topics like Trump’s India oil deals or Israel’s actions in Gaza is penalized. The policy explicitly ranks NATO-aligned news as ‘low-moderate,’ while anti-Western content is deemed ‘severe.’
🔴 Sanitized language: X is shadow-banning the use of specific, powerful words like “genocide,” “atrocity,” “aggression,” and “war crime.”
🔴 Imbalanced enforcement: pro-Palestinian accounts face near-total deboosting, while pro-Israel accounts are only penalized for using strong anti-Hamas rhetoric.
🔴 Posting limits: any account posting more than three geopolitical threads per day receives a 24–72 hour shadowban.
This is a far cry from the “free speech absolutism” Musk championed. It’s not about principle—it’s about profit.
Federal law enforcement agents led by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement prepare to conduct an arrest in Georgia in February.Credit: Carlos Barria/Reuters/Redux
Aggression: Under President Donald Trump’s deportation mission, ICE officers are using force to detain and jail immigrants.
Impunity: The administration gutted guardrails and offices meant to rein in abusive actions.
Disappeared: Some families say they have no idea where their loved ones were jailed after immigration raids.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
When Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers stormed through Santa Ana, California, in June, panicked calls flooded into the city’s emergency response system.
Recordings of those calls, obtained by ProPublica, captured some of the terror residents felt as they watched masked men ambush people and force them into unmarked cars. In some cases, the men wore plain clothes and refused to identify themselves. There was no way to confirm whether they were immigration agents or imposters. In six of the calls to Santa Ana police, residents described what they were seeing as kidnappings.
“He’s bleeding,” one caller said about a person he saw yanked from a car wash lot and beaten. “They dumped him into a white van. It doesn’t say ICE.”
One woman’s voice shook as she asked, “What kind of police go around without license plates?”
And then this from another: “Should we just run from them?”
During a tense public meeting days later, Mayor Valerie Amezcua and the City Council asked their police chief whether there was anything they could do to rein in the federal agents — even if only to ban the use of masks. The answer was a resounding no. Plus, filing complaints with the Department of Homeland Security was likely to go nowhere because the office that once handled them had been dismantled. There was little chance of holding individual agents accountable for alleged abuses because, among other hurdles, there was no way to reliably learn their identities.
Since then, Amezcua, 58, said she has reluctantly accepted the reality: There are virtually no limits on what federal agents can do to achieve President Donald Trump’s goal of mass deportations. Santa Ana has proven to be a template for much larger raids and even more violent arrests in Chicago and elsewhere. “It’s almost like he tries it out in this county and says, ‘It worked there, so now let me send them there,’” Amezcua said.
Current and former national security officials share the mayor’s concerns. They describe the legions of masked immigration officers operating in near-total anonymity on the orders of the president as the crossing of a line that had long set the United States apart from the world’s most repressive regimes. ICE, in their view, has become an unfettered and unaccountable national police force. The transformation, the officials say, unfolded rapidly and in plain sight. Trump’s DHS appointees swiftly dismantled civil rights guardrails, encouraged agents to wear masks, threatened groups and state governments that stood in their way, and then made so many arrests that the influx overwhelmed lawyers trying to defend immigrants taken out of state or out of the country.
And although they are reluctant to predict the future, the current and former officials worry that this force assembled from federal agents across the country could eventually be turned against any groups the administration labels a threat.
One former senior DHS official who was involved in oversight said that what is happening on American streets today “gives me goosebumps.”
Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, the official rattled off scenes that once would’ve triggered investigations: “Accosting people outside of their immigration court hearings where they’re showing up and trying to do the right thing and then hauling them off to an immigration jail in the middle of the country where they can’t access loved ones or speak to counsel. Bands of masked men apprehending people in broad daylight in the streets and hauling them off. Disappearing people to a third country, to a prison where there’s a documented record of serious torture and human rights abuse.”
The former official paused. “We’re at an inflection point in history right now and it’s frightening.”
Although ICE is conducting itself out in the open, even inviting conservative social media influencers to accompany its agents on high-profile raids, the agency operates in darkness. The identities of DHS officers, their salaries and their operations have long been withheld for security reasons and generally exempted from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. However, there were offices within DHS created to hold agents and their supervisors accountable for their actions on the job. The Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, created by Congress and led largely by lawyers, investigated allegations of rape and unlawful searches from both the public and within DHS ranks, for instance. Egregious conduct was referred to the Justice Department.
The CRCL office had limited powers; former staffers say their job was to protect DHS by ensuring personnel followed the law and addressed civil rights concerns. Still, it was effective in stalling rushed deportations or ensuring detainees had access to phones and lawyers. And even when its investigations didn’t fix problems, CRCL provided an accounting of allegations and a measure of transparency for Congress and the public.
The office processed thousands of complaints — 3,000 in fiscal year 2023 alone — ranging from allegations of lack of access to medical treatment to reports of sexual assault at detention centers. Former staffers said around 600 complaints were open when work was suspended.
The administration has gutted most of the office. What’s left of it was led, at least for a while, by a 29-year-old White House appointee who helped craft Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint that broadly calls for the curtailment of civil rights enforcement.
Meanwhile, ICE is enjoying a windfall in resources. On top of its annual operating budget of $10 billion a year, the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill included an added $7.5 billion a year for the next four years for recruiting and retention alone. As part of its hiring blitz, the agency has dropped age, training and education standards and has offered recruits signing bonuses as high as $50,000.
“Supercharging this law enforcement agency and at the same time you have oversight being eliminated?” said the former DHS official. “This is very scary.”
Michelle Brané, a longtime human rights attorney who directed DHS’ ombudsman office during the Biden administration, said Trump’s adherence to “the authoritarian playbook is not even subtle.”
“ICE, their secret police, is their tool,” Brané said. “Once they have that power, which they have now, there’s nothing stopping them from using it against citizens.”
Tricia McLaughlin, the DHS assistant secretary for public affairs, refuted descriptions of ICE as a secret police force. She called such comparisons the kind of “smears and demonization” that led to the recent attack on an ICE facility in Texas, in which a gunman targeted an ICE transport van and shot three detained migrants, two of them fatally, before killing himself.
In a written response to ProPublica, McLaughlin dismissed the current and former national security officials and scholars interviewed by ProPublica as “far-left champagne socialists” who haven’t seen ICE enforcement up close.
“If they had,” she wrote, “they would know when our heroic law enforcement officers conduct operations, they clearly identify themselves as law enforcement while wearing masks to protect themselves from being targeted by highly sophisticated gangs” and other criminals.
McLaughlin said the recruiting blitz is not compromising standards. She wrote that the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center is ready for 11,000 new hires by the beginning of next year and that training has been streamlined and boosted by technology. “Our workforce never stops learning,” McLaughlin wrote.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson also praised ICE conduct and accused Democrats of making “dangerous, untrue smears.”
“ICE officers act heroically to enforce the law, arrest criminal illegal aliens and protect American communities with the utmost professionalism,” Jackson said. “Anyone pointing the finger at law enforcement officers instead of the criminals are simply doing the bidding of criminal illegal aliens and fueling false narratives that lead to violence.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the Trump pick who fired nearly the entire civil rights oversight staff, said the move was in response to CRCL functioning “as internal adversaries that slow down operations,” according to a DHS spokesperson.
Trump also eliminated the department’s Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman, which was charged with flagging inhumane conditions at ICE detention facilities where many of the apprehended immigrants are held. The office was resurrected after a lawsuit and court order, though it’s sparsely staffed.
The hobbling of the office comes as the White House embarks on an aggressive expansion of detention sites with an eye toward repurposing old jails or building new ones with names that telegraph harsh conditions: “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Florida Everglades, built by the state and operated in partnership with DHS, or the “Cornhusker Clink” in Nebraska.
“It is a shocking situation to be in that I don’t think anybody anticipated a year ago,” said Erica Frantz, a political scientist at Michigan State University who studies authoritarianism. “We might’ve thought that we were going to see a slide, but I don’t think anybody anticipated how quickly it would transpire, and now people at all levels are scrambling to figure out how to push back.”
“Authoritarian Playbook”
Frantz and other scholars who study anti-democratic political systems in other countries said there are numerous examples in which ICE’s activities appear cut from an authoritarian playbook. Among them was the detention of Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, who was apprehended after co-writing an op-ed for the campus paper that criticized the school’s response to the war in Gaza. ICE held her incommunicado for 24 hours and then shuffled her through three states before jailing her in Louisiana.
“The thing that got me into the topic of ‘maybe ICE is a secret police force’?” said Lee Morgenbesser, an Australian political science professor who studies authoritarianism. “It was that daylight snatching of the Tufts student.”
Morgenbesser was also struck by the high-profile instances of ICE detaining elected officials who attempted to stand in their way. Among them, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander was detained for demanding a judicial warrant from ICE, and U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla was forcibly removed from a DHS press conference.
And David Sklansky, a Stanford Law School professor who researches policing and democracy, said it appears that ICE’s agents are allowed to operate with complete anonymity. “It’s not just that people can’t see faces of the officers,” Sklansky said. “The officers aren’t wearing shoulder insignia or name tags.”
U.S. District Judge William G. Young, a Ronald Reagan appointee, recently pointed out that use of masked law enforcement officers had long been considered anathema to American ideals. In a blistering ruling against the administration’s arrests of pro-Palestinian protesters, he wrote, “To us, masks are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan. In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police.” The Trump administration has said it will appeal that ruling.
Where the Fallout is Felt
The fallout is being felt in places like Hays County, Texas, not far from Austin, where ICE apprehended 47 people, including nine children, during a birthday celebration in the early morning of April 1.
The agency’s only disclosure about the raid in Dripping Springs describes the operation as part of a yearlong investigation targeting “members and associates believed to be part of the Venezuelan transnational gang, Tren de Aragua.”
Six months later, the county’s top elected official told ProPublica the federal government has ignored his attempts to get answers.
“We’re not told why they took them, and we’re not told where they took them,” said County Judge Ruben Becerra, a Democrat. “By definition, that’s a kidnapping.”
The Most Revolutionary Act 