April 7 Update: ICE Undercuts Fed Narcotics Trial; South Africa & the Modern Mercenary; Trump's Chickenshit Club; TSA's Deportation Program; Anduril's Smoke & Mirrors; Newsrooms Revolt over AI; California Journalism's Beating Heart
Happy Spring to you all, if one can call it that. We're in the midst of yet another hot war with no end in sight, since the Epstein Files are apparently bottomless and there's no way out of the current morass that the increasingly senescent occupant of what's left of the White House can conscience. Meanwhile, Israel is waging war on Lebanon yet again, has killed more than a thousand in the expanding West Bank pogrom, and is in the process of permanently expanding into Lebanon and (further into) Syria.
Back at home - well, the federal government is in a partial shutdown as the Democrats refuse to keep funding the Border Patrol, Customs & Border Protection or Immigration & Customs Enforcement until Trump et al agree to place limitations on the wide-ranging, violent, lawless and lethal 'at large' enforcement operations that roiled Minneapolis earlier this year. What could go wrong? Well, it's a miracle that just one fatal airline accident has taken place so far (LaGuardia Airport in Queens earlier this year). The Forest Service is being gutted as well, right as the Western United States has a record-low snowpack for this time of year thanks to climate change-driven warm spells. Should be a fire season for the ages.
I've been silent on here yet again since February, but that is directly due to this beast of a project my colleagues at WIRED and I just wrapped on the Border Patrol tactical units that wrought havoc in Chicago last Fall during Operation Midway Blitz. Through a combination of use of force reports, body camera video and other sourcing, my colleagues and I were able to identify the most violent Homeland Security unit in Chicago last fall, many of whom were spotted in Los Angeles, Boston, North Carolina, and Minneapolis during the Trump Administration's immigration sweeps. I wrote about those tactical units in February right on the heels of Alex Pretti and Renee Good's murders. There will be more from this line of coverage in the weeks and months to come - my colleague Maddy Varner's article yesterday on the 'challenge coins' these goons sell each other is a good example. My editor Andrew Couts and I also recorded a video about our reporting process, for anyone interested in the nuts-and-bolts of this work.
Once again, BORTAC, the Special Response Teams and the militarization of immigration enforcement are a prime example of Imperial Feedback. This reporting figures directly into the final, post-9/11 segment of my ongoing book project about counterinsurgency warfare and police militarization. By supporting my work on this topic (which oftentimes starts at Bleeding Edge, like this line of reporting did earlier in the winter), you all are contributing tremendously to my long-term work.
In other news, I published part III of my Zohran & the NYPD trilogy in The Baffler at the beginning of March, which documents the fledgling mayor's struggles to come to terms both with a gargantuan agency rife with violence and corruption as well as an oligarch police commissioner whose Zionist, reactionary politics are seeming polar opposites of Mamdani's beliefs. It's an...awkward shotgun wedding that the TrueAnon crew gave me almost three hours to navigate in Mid-March. I'll post the full audio later this week for paid subscribers.
That same behind-the-paywall deal, of course, will go for episode 5 of Big Terror, where Jake Hanrahan and I went long on the criminalization of protest in the United States and Western Europe over the past quarter-century. Future episodes will center on the rise of the surveillance-industrial complex (yes, Palantir, but more) and the creation of the American Gesta...sorry, the Department of Homeland Security.
Enough about me. Let's get to it.
BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM
-One consequence of Homeland Security's zero-sum immigration enforcement: law enforcement cannot tackle serious crime the same way they could before Steven Miller decided he wanted to remove tens of millions of people from the United States because of the color of their skin and their heritage. The LA Times' excellent James Queally documents one of the worst court-side fuckups I've read about since the current regime took office: a major drug trafficking prosecution that fell apart once ICE deported the star witness, a former accomplice who flipped and gave federal investigators the heart of their case. It's not just the reassignment of investigators from the FBI, DEA and other non-immigration agencies to enforcing the new Juan Crow: there are many more such cases out there.
-Blackwater, Triple Canopy and the other American private military corporations from the Forever Wars era now dominate our popular conception of what it means to be a mercenary. However, the profession in its modern form began in Apartheid-era South Africa, where veterans of the anti-Communist 'border wars' formed Executive Outcomes, a firm that promised clients "warfare in a box." Benjamin Fogel authored a beautiful essay in The Baffler that excavates the history of his own country's guns for hire and how they modernized the 'soldiers of fortune' trade that was a constant in post-colonial Africa.
-The 'Chickenshit Club' is the brutally apt sobriquet ProPublica editor Jessie Eisinger coined for white-collar federal prosecutors during the Obama years. Notoriously reticent to prosecute financial or corporate crimes because such actions may short-circuit lucrative future employment opportunities or create unnecessary social friction in the cloistered world of the high-end legal profession, the 'cops of Wall Street' aren't even making a show of going through the motions anymore. The Boston Globe reports that white-collar prosecutions (4,000 last year) are less than half of what they were in the late 1990s. It certainly isn't that fraud or extortion have decreased in recent years. If anything, this is the most poignant example of a president reshaping the federal government in their image.
-ICE agents were moved into American airports over the last month during the ongoing partial government shutdown, raising concerns over the expanding powers of an agency that Trump appears to be using as his own praetorian guard for everything from immigration enforcement to policing election booths. On the first day of their posting to transit facilities, a woman and her daughter were detained by ICE at San Francisco International Airport, to the horror and anger of passersby. Later reporting revealed the Transportation Security Administration tipped ICE off to her presence on a flight from SFO to Miami after checking passenger manifests against a separate database of people with outstanding removal orders. Now, Reuters uncovered information that more than 800 people have been arrested as a result of TSA notifications to ICE since the start of the Trump Administration. Yet one more way in which the United States is being reshaped by an unaccountable agency bloated with cash and operating in perpetual violation of the courts and the law.
-If you read the business press, get your news primarily through the Frankstein that is Elon Musk's Twitter or even the general-interest publications, 'defense tech' startup companies like Anduril Technologies may seem like the future of warfare. Backed by arch-Fascist Peter Thiel and run by Palmer Luckey, a young Trumper who made his fortune building virtual reality headsets and then selling that technology to Facebook before anyone knew it was an absolute lemon, Anduril builds 'smart' border technology (LIDAR-equipped cameras with automated movement sensors) as well as armed drones for use on land, sea and air. HOWEVER - despite lucrative contracts steered its way by the Trump Administration, Anduril has serious issues with workplace safety, its assembly line, and environmental harm for the land surrounding production facilities. WIRED's Paresh Dave went long on the topic, much to the ire of Luckey and his fanboys.
-There's a brewing revolt against the use of Artificial 'Intelligence' in newsrooms. The hallucination-prone, sycophantic technology, which has trouble counting words, parsing data from simple spreadsheets, or discerning real information from fake citations it cooks up, is not (yet?) fit for purpose in a modern news-gathering operation. Yet executives from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times to ProPublica to the Associated Press are forcing reporters and editors to adopt AI, accuracy or potential legal risk be damned. Thankfully, the journalists at the McClatchy newspaper chain (the Miami Herald, Sacramento Bee, Charlotte Observer etc) are revolting and refusing to follow the crowd. Expect more fights over AI in journalism in the immediate future - ProPublica's union voted to authorize a strike earlier this Spring over management's refusal to bargain over AI guidelines for editorial products (seems likely at last glance). I can also tell you from first-hand knowledge that a similar fight is brewing at the New York Times. Remember folks, Terminator is not the future we are promised.
-Last but not least: my favorite resource for California news is Rough & Tumble, a bare-bones headline aggregator that provides a quick and dirty snapshot of the stories of the day in the Golden State. The LA Times did a lovely profile of Jack Kavanagh, the retired television reporter who has run the website since the mid-1990s and kept reporters from Eureka to Chula Vista up to speed. It's a lovely tribute to one of the unsung heroes of journalism and a lesson that not everything needs fancy bells & whistles or gimmicks. Consumers want information in a clean, digestible format. Even in 2026, no one does it better than Kavanagh.
BOOK - Once upon a time (less than two years ago), American law enforcement actually investigated and prosecuted far-right extremists for violence, harassment, racial abuse and conspiracy. The second Trump administration, as I predicted in January 2025, has repurposed the American counter-terrorism to focus on its ideological opponents, with the recent Prairieland trial as a bellwether moment.
While we are most certainly in the midst of yet another pendulum swing, it's worth keeping in mind that Anti-Fascists were responsible for tracking, identifying and outing hundreds of Neo-Nazis, modern Klansmen, would-be Tim McVeighs and the David Duke/George Lincoln Rockwell acolytes of the 2010s Neo-Fascist revival. My colleague Christopher Mathias's recent book, To Catch a Fascist (Atria, 2026), documents the work of anonymous activists who infiltrated Patriot Front, which essentially is the last major Neo-Fascist group left standing from the Charlottesville-era movement. It's a rollicking read, with phenomenal detail and a terrific historical arc that connects our contemporary moment to battles with the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction and the Progressive era. Not one to miss.
FILM - Emile de Antonio's tour de force documentary about the Vietnam War, In the Year of the Pig (1968), is hands down my favorite film about that hideous conflict. No other film, nonfiction or scripted, comes close to capturing the carnage, sadism, and calculated venality of the "American War", as it's known in that Southeast Asian country. Worthwhile viewing, as the current occupant of LBJ's office caterwauls about invading a nation that dwarfs mid-Twentieth Century Vietnam in size, population and military capability.
MUSIC - Amongst the late-Twentieth Century American musicians who burned too bright for their own good, Gil Scott-Heron (the son of Glasgow Celtic's first black player, for what it's worth) stands apart. Not only for his innovative transformation of spoken-word poetry into arguably the earliest expression of rap, but for his vocal range, arrangements and cutting social commentary. It's also as relevant as well: the most recent manned mission to space is winding down as wealth disparity and homelessness runs rampant in the United States; the feds have repealed prohibitions on no-knock warrants; and every event, from revolution to slop entertainment to full-blown conventional warfare, is live.