Plus: ICE is using commercial data to figure out where people live, nurses strike in New York City, no one is buying public land in Colorado, and Trump probably won't stop institutional investors.
January 13, 2026 ❧ The story behind ICE’s terror in Minnesota, pro-Palestine protesters face felony charges, climate change is sinking posh London homes, and horses have 360 vision!
Plus: ICE is using commercial data to figure out where people live, nurses strike in New York City, no one is buying public land in Colorado, and Trump probably won't stop institutional investors.
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HERE & ABROAD
❧ DEEP DIVE The Right’s Fraud and Terror in Minnesota ❧
“ICE has murdered a woman on the streets of Minneapolis, and now they’re trying to lie to you about it,” opens the most recent piece by Current Affairs associate editor Alex Skopic: “The Only ‘Domestic Terrorists’ On Our Streets Are ICE Agents.” By now, everyone knows the name of that woman, Renee Good, the wife, mother, poet, and legal (very legal) observer whom right-wingers have scrambled to blame for her own murder. JD Vance said the killing was “a tragedy of her own making,” while Kristi Noem called Good a “domestic terrorist.” The ICE agent responsible, Jonathan Ross, called Good a “fucking bitch”—moments after shooting her in the face.
Brave Minnesotans are now putting their bodies and lives on the line to stand up to the agents invading their city. Federal officers have sprayed tear gas at protestors, shoved people to the ground, and tackled teachers as students were being dismissed from a high school.
In the wake of Good’s murder, you might be hearing about fraud in Minnesota, specifically fraud perpetrated by Somali-Americans within the state’s public programs. Yes, there was a real fraud, but the fraud has been seized upon by rightwing influencers, and they have disfigured the facts of the situation into a familiar shape of nativism that vaguely resembles Pete Hegseth’s hair.
Art from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 9, Issue 4
The Fraud: Fraud is in Minnesota is old news. It has been a known issue within the state’s social programs for more than a decade. In 2016, 10 day centers over billed for around $5 million. During Covid, dozens of people defrauded about $250 million from a food program called Feeding Our Future. The relevant frauds have “three common threads,” the Minneapolis Star Tribune writes. “The state was billed for services that were never provided, [Minnesota’s Department of Human Services] has failed to provide sufficient oversight and many of those implicated are from Minnesota’s Somali community.” So yes, it's true that a minuscule number of Somali Americans were involved in fraud, a negligible fraction of a community that is 80,000 strong in Minneapolis. It goes without saying that fraud is not somehow inherent to Somali people. In that case, Trump would be more Somali than anyone. The most Somali guy there is, to use the president’s parlance.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune has been reporting on the fraud cases since the beginning, and they’ve published a detailed summary of their work that easily debunks much of the right’s rhetoric here.
Art by Ellen Burch from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 9, Issue 4
The Eighth Circle of Hell: Last November, Christopher Rufo and Ryan Thorpe wrote an article of hyperbolic and false claims in the conservative publication City Journal that very much tried to make fraud a Somali problem. They claimed the fraud had totaled billions. False: the real number so far is a few hundred million, according to the Minnesota Star-Tribune. Rufo and Thorpe also claimed the stolen money was sent to Al-Shabaab, a terror group in Somalia. This is actually an old allegation, one that was disproven by auditors way back in 2018. The rest is similar crap, but crap that smells good to the wrong people. For example, 23-year-old internet demon Nick Shirley. The MAGA streamer traveled to Minneapolis and staged a 43 minute video visiting empty childcare centers as proof, he said, of fraud. In reality, some were closed because it was outside of their business hours; others were not operational. Others were open, with children inside, but understandably have a policy against opening their doors to a group of strange, angry men banging on the back entrance and filming themselves. (We live in a country where men repeatedly walk into schools and shoot children, remember?) Still, the video got millions of views. If there is anything the Trump administration loves, its views.
❧ STANFORD PRO-PALESTINE PROTESTERS BEGIN FELONY TRIAL. In Santa Clara county, five students who occupied a building on Stanford’s campus and unofficially renamed it “Adnan al-Bursh,” after a Palestinian surgeon tortured to death by Israel, are facing trial for felony conspiracy to trespass and felony vandalism. Jeff Rosen, the Santa Clara county district attorney, said it's not the protests, nor the speech, that are being litigated, but the use of fake blood—which is just PETA 101—as well as about $10,000 in property damage. These are the most severe charges given to any American pro-Palestine activists so far, and, as the Guardian alludes, their timing is more than a little suspicious. They were issued more than a year after the protest, and after the students had already been suspended for two terms and allowed to return to campus. Then the Trump administration starts cutting funding to universities and suddenly these college students are looking at up to three years in prison and up to $329,000 in restitution bills.
Art by Ellen Burch from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 9, Issue 4
❧ NURSES WALK OUT IN NEW YORK CITY. 15,000 nurses went on strike yesterday after city hospitals Mount Sinai, NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia, and Montefiore Medical Center had not “agreed to additional bargaining sessions with the union since their last meetings on Sunday,” AP Newsreports. Nurses say the hospitals are not hiring enough nurses, overwhelming those on staff to care for too many patients, and then underpaying them. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani joined the nurses on the picket line. (He’s been busy since his inauguration.)
Art from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 9, Issue 4
❧ LONDON’S PRICIEST HOMES ARE SINKING BECAUSE OF CLIMATE CHANGE. The ground underneath London is sinking, causing the homes that sit atop to warp and crack, Bloomberg reports. Well, shrinking might be a better word. The weather is hotter, the air is drier, and the clay-rich soil is contracting, shifting the foundation homes are built on. Technically, what’s happening is subsidence, the same sinking phenomenon we see along the Louisiana coastline. London’s subsidence is more pronounced in neighborhoods like Chelsea and Kensington, which are, as the Brits say, posh, but all of the city is at risk. It is something to think about as Trump pulls the U.S. out of every alliance to fight the climate crisis that matters. Last week, he left the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, a cooperative treaty between every country in the world. Except, now, the U.S.
If you haven’t read Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, let this be your sign. The Kenyan writer and intellectual, who passed away last May, stands as one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century. Rejecting English and writing in his native Gikuyu, he was an unrelenting critic of colonialism who has left behind for us a body of work that is a “living record of possibility and resistance,” Abdirashid Diriye Kalmoy writes for Current Affairs. Diriye Kalmoy’s piece is an excellent primer on Thiong’o’s writing and how he used language to reclaim “what decades of British colonialism sought to erase: African languages, epistemologies, and identities.”
❧ In More News ❧
❧ ICE IS USING COMMERCIAL DATA TO FIGURE OUT WHERE PEOPLE LIVE. “A social media and phone surveillance system ICE bought access to is designed to monitor a city neighborhood or block for mobile phones, track the movements of those devices and their owners over time, and follow them from their places of work to home or other locations,” 404 Mediareports. The systems use commercial location data, which can be searched without a warrant, obtained via Penlink. Tapping on a phone now carries more risk than ever before.
Art by Aidan Y-M from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 9, Issue 4
❧ TRUMP IS COMING FOR LANDLORDS? PROBABLY NOT. Trump announced last week that he will ban the sale of single family homes to large institutional investors. On the surface, this is a good thing. Blackstone owns 350,000 American homes and is part of a network of investors that have helped escalate rents and home prices beyond what many can afford. Yet, when given previous, concrete chances to stop these companies from treating family home addresses like stock tickers—like Sen. Ed Markey’s proposed 15 percent tax on hedge funds buying single family homes—Trump has balked, Jacobin writes. One possible reason why: Blackstone’s CEO Steve Schwarzman was an economic advisor in Trump’s first administration, and he’s still a GOP donor.
Art by Jesse Rubenfeld Y-M from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 9, Issue 4
❧ TRUMP TRIED TO AUCTION OFF PUBLIC LAND IN COLORADO TO OIL COMPANIES. NO ONE BID. After fraud and drugs, Trump uses oil as an excuse for some of his worst behavior, but his decisions are out of step with the nation’s head drillers and frackers. We all know that he kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, to get oil, but soon after, American oil executives sat next to the president in a press conference and said they were reluctant to invest in the country. Likewise, in Colorado, the Trump administration is auctioning off leases on public land so oil companies can drill, baby, drill. Again, there is little enthusiasm. The Bureau of Land Management attempted to sell 20,000 acres of land at $10 an acre and received not a single bid. Oil only runs so deep, it seems.
ANIMAL FACT OF THE WEEK
Horses have 360 degree vision!
Given their size, it might be hard to believe that horses are prey animals, but they are. Horses don’t hunt, they graze. When living wild, they have the same predators as house dogs: coyotes, pumas, mountain lions. Their vision has evolved accordingly. Horses have eyes on the sides of their head that, together, give them an almost 360 degrees view of their environment—very useful for (sorry) keeping an eye on predators who might be lurking. Or, more relevant to today’s horses, apples.
Photo by Markus Spiske, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Writing and research by Emily Carmichael. Editing and additional material by Emily Topping and Nathan J. Robinson. Header graphic by Cali Traina Blume. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.
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