USA

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

February 7, 2026

Yesterday two right-wing circuit judges signed off on the Trump administration’s new mass detention policy: the extraordinary assertion that vast numbers of noncitizens throughout the country can be arrested and held in detention centers without the right to release until they are deported.

As Steve Vladeck explained in December in One First, this new policy dramatically expanded the number of immigrants suddenly subject to arrest and long-term detention. U.S. judges overwhelmingly rejected the new policy; Vladeck quoted Politico’s Kyle Cheney, who reported that in more than 700 cases, at least 225 judges appointed by all modern presidents—including 23 appointed by Trump—have ruled that the new policy likely violates both the law and the right to due process.

But the administration handpicked a right-wing circuit to rule on the policy, and last night, as Vladeck explained today in One First, Judge Edith Jones and Judge Kyle Duncan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit okayed the Trump administration’s new rule denying detained immigrants the right to release on bond. That includes, as Vladeck wrote, “millions of non-citizens who have been here for generations; who have never committed a crime; and who pose neither a risk of flight nor any threat to public safety.” It is likely the plaintiffs will appeal the decision.

This policy has dramatically increased detention of immigrants. Before it, the U.S. held about 40,000 people on any given day. Now, according to Laura Strickler and Julia Ainsley of NBC News, the United States is currently holding more than 70,000 immigrants in 224 facilities across the nation, 104 more facilities than it had before Trump took office. Those detainees include children.

Private prison companies under contract with the U.S. government operate these detention facilities, including the $1.2 billion Camp East Montana located at Fort Bliss Army base in Texas, where a medical examiner recently ruled the death of detainee Geraldo Lunas Campos a homicide. The cause of the January death of Victor Manuel Díaz there remains unclear, although officials claim it was “presumed suicide.” A third man, Francisco Gaspar Andrés, died in December after being transported from the camp to an El Paso hospital for treatment for a serious medical condition.

On January 20, Judd Legum of Popular Information reported that ICE stopped paying third-party providers for medical care for detainees on October 3, 2025, and that it would not start even to process claims again until at least April 30, 2026. It told medical providers to “hold all claims submissions” until then. A source in the administration told Legum that some medical providers are now denying detainees medical care.

From 2002 to 2023, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) helped to make sure detainees had medical care if an ICE facility couldn’t provide it, with ICE paying the VA for the coverage. But in 2023, Alabama Republican senator Tommy Tuberville lied that President Joe Biden was “robbing veterans to pay off illegals,” and on September 30, 2025, a small right-wing nonprofit sued to get documents from the Trump administration about the VA’s role in detainee care. On October 3, Legum discovered, “the VA ‘abruptly and instantly terminated’ its agreement with ICE,” leaving it with no way to provide prescribed medication or access off-site care.

According to Legum, ICE said it could not provide “dialysis, prenatal care, oncology, [and] chemotherapy.” ICE officials described the loss of care as an “absolute emergency” that needed an immediate solution to “prevent any further medical complications or loss of life.” But it did not get solved.

Douglas MacMillan, Samuel Oakford, N. Kirkpatrick, and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post reported that according to ICE’s own oversight unit, Camp East Montana at Fort Bliss, Texas, has violated at least 60 federal standards for immigrant detention. The contract for the $1.24 billion project was awarded to a small business that operates out of a residential address and has, as Lyndon German of VPM News reported, “little to no publicly available record of managing immigration facilities.”

Last April, at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix, Arizona, acting director of ICE Todd Lyons told attendees: “We need to get better at treating this like a business.” He called for a deportation process “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.” In the Republicans’ July 2025 budget reconciliation bill—which they call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—they put $45 billion into additional funding for ICE detention.

In November and December, NBC News and Bloomberg reported that the Trump administration was considering “mega centers” for detaining people. Fola Akinnibi, Sophie Alexander, Alicia A. Caldwell, and Rachel Adams-Heard of Bloomberg reported that in November, ICE issued a $29.9 million contract—just below the threshold of $30 million that would require open bidding—to KpbServices LLC for “due diligence services and concept design for processing centers and mega centers throughout the United States.”

In December, Douglas MacMillan and Jonathan O’Connell of the Washington Post reported that the administration was working to put in place a national detention system that would book newly arrested detainees into processing sites before sending them to one of seven warehouses that would hold 5,000 to 10,000 people each. MacMillan and O’Connell reported that “sixteen smaller warehouses would hold up to 1,500 people each.” From there, people would be deported.

“These will not be warehouses—they will be very well-structured detention facilities meeting our regular detention standards,” a DHS spokesperson wrote to Angela Kocherga and Dianne Solis of KERA News in Texas. “It should not come as news that ICE will be making arrests in states across the U.S. and is actively working to expand detention space.”

Strickler and Ainsley reported Thursday that the Department of Homeland Security has already secured at least three facilities. It paid $87.4 million for one outside Philadelphia and $37 million for another outside San Antonio, a warehouse of nearly 640,000 square feet. ICE bought a building the size of seven football fields in Surprise, Arizona, outside Phoenix, for $70 million.

But there is increasing criticism of the new warehouses as Americans mobilize against the violence and abuse of ICE and Border Patrol.

Officials from Surprise answered concerns about the federal facility with a statement saying: “The City was not aware that there were efforts underway to purchase the building, was not notified of the transaction by any of the parties involved and has not been contacted by DHS or any federal agency about the intended use of the building. It’s important to note, Federal projects are not subject to local regulations, such as zoning.”

On Tuesday, February 3, more than a thousand people turned out for the Surprise City Council meeting to oppose the establishment of the federal detention center. One of the speakers reminded the council of Ohrdruf, the first Nazi camp liberated by U.S. troops, on April 4, 1945. He said:

“The U.S. Army brought the leading citizens of Ohrdruf to tour the facility, which turned out to be part of the Buchenwald network of concentration camps. A U.S. Army colonel told the German civilians who viewed the scenes without muttering a word that they were to blame. One of the Germans replied that what happened in the camp was ‘done by a few people,’ and ‘you cannot blame us all.’ And the American, who could have been any one of our grandfathers, said: ‘This was done by those that the German people chose to lead them, and all are responsible.’

“The morning after the tour, the mayor of Ohrdruf killed himself. And maybe he did not know the full extent of the outrages that were committed in his community, but he knew enough. And we don’t know exactly how ICE will use this warehouse. But we know enough. I ask you to consider what the mayor of Ohrdruf might have thought before he died. Maybe he felt like a victim. He might have thought, ‘How is this my fault? I had no jurisdiction over this.’ Maybe he would have said, ‘This site was not subject to local zoning, what could I do?’ But I think, when he reflected on the suffering that occurred at this camp, just outside of town, that those words would have sounded hollow even to him. Because in his heart he knew, as we do, that we are all responsible for what happens in our community.”

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

February 5, 2026

The past two days have seen a growing struggle between Democrats, who are demanding accountability from the Trump administration, and Republicans trying to hide what the administration is up to.

Last night, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) published a letter he sent to Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) John Ratcliffe. Wyden is the longest-serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and is a careful, hardworking, and dogged member of Congress. When Wyden speaks, people listen. Ratcliffe was an attack dog for Trump during his first impeachment trial and had no experience with intelligence before Trump forced his nomination to become director of national intelligence through the Senate. Now he is Trump’s appointee to the directorship of the CIA.

Wyden’s letter to Ratcliffe said: “I write to alert you to a classified letter I sent you earlier today in which I express deep concerns about CIA activities. Thank you for your attention to this important matter.” When Wired senior reporter Dell Cameron, who covers different forms of surveillance, commented, “I don’t like this,” Wyden reposted the comment.

Wyden has a long history of alerting the public in whatever way he can when something bad is going on that he cannot reveal because of its classified nature. This letter appears to be a way to alert the public while also notifying Ratcliffe that the CIA director will not be able in the future to deny that he received Wyden’s letter.

Also last night, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) sent Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SC) and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) a letter outlining demands Democrats want incorporated into a measure that will appropriate more funds for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). DHS is the department that contains Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol. Democrats insisted on stripping DHS funding out of the bills to fund the government for 2026 after ICE and Border Patrol agents began to inflict terror on the country.

Those demands are pretty straightforward, but if written into law as required for the release of funds, they would change behavior. The Democrats want federal agents to enter private homes only with a judicial warrant (as was policy until the administration produced a secret memo saying that DHS officials themselves could sign off on raids). They want agents to stop wearing masks and to have their names, agencies, and unique ID numbers visible on their uniforms, as law enforcement officers do. They want an end to racial profiling—that is, agents detaining individuals on the basis of their skin color, place of employment, or language—and to raids of so-called sensitive sites: medical facilities, schools, childcare facilities, churches, polling places, and courts.

They want agents to be required to have a reasonable use of force policy and to be removed during an investigation if they violate it. They want federal agents to coordinate with local and state governments, and for those governments to have jurisdiction over federal agents who break the law. They want DHS detention facilities to have the same standards of any detention facility and for detainees to have access to their lawyers. They want states to be able to sue if those conditions are not met, and they want Congress members to have unscheduled access to the centers to oversee them.

They want body cameras to be used for accountability but prohibited for gathering and storing information about protesters. And they want federal agents to have standardized uniforms like those of regular law enforcement, not paramilitaries.

As Schumer and Jeffries wrote, these are commonsense measures that protect Americans’ constitutional rights and ensure responsible law enforcement, and should apply to all federal activity even without Democrats demanding them.

Thune has said the demands are “very unrealistic and unserious,” and Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the second-ranking Senate Republican, called them “radical and extreme” and a “far-left wish list.” But Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) agreed that agents “need body cameras. They need to remove masks. They need proper training. They need to be conducting operations that are consistent with their mission.”

Trump’s determination to prove that he actually won the 2020 election continues to drive the administration. This morning, in a rambling and often crazed speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump told attendees: “They rigged the second election. I had to win it. I had to win it. I needed it for my own ego. I would’ve had a bad ego for the rest of my life. Now I really have a big ego, though. Beating these lunatics was incredible, right? What a great feeling, winning every swing state, winning the popular vote. The first time, you know, they said I didn’t win the popular vote. I did.”

The reality that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by about 2.9 million votes explains Trump’s lie that undocumented immigrants voted in the election.

Trump also offered yet another explanation for the presence of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard at the FBI raid on a warehouse holding ballots and other election-related materials in Fulton County, Georgia, saying that Attorney General Pam Bondi wanted Gabbard there.

Phil Stewart, Erin Banco, and Jonathan Landay of Reuters reported yesterday that a team working for Gabbard seized voting machines and data in Puerto Rico in what sources told the Reuters reporters was an attempt to prove that Venezuela had hacked the voting machines there. The reporters say that Gabbard’s team was looking at whether the government of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro hacked the election.

There is no evidence for this theory, but it has strong adherents among Trump’s followers. Legal and political analysts, including Asha Rangappa, Norm Ornstein, and Allison Gill, have noted that administration officials might force Maduro, who is currently in prison in the U.S. after a raid in which U.S. forces took him and his wife into custody, to “cooperate” on this lie. In The Breakdown, Gill notes that while Trump has no role in elections, the Supreme Court has said that he must be given deference in the conduct of foreign affairs. He has relied on that deference to justify tariffs, immigration sweeps, attacks on small boats, and so on. It is not a stretch to think he is now trying to interfere with the 2026 election by claiming elections are part of foreign affairs.

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told the Reuters reporters: “What’s most alarming here is that Director Gabbard’s own team acknowledges there was no evidence of foreign interference, yet they seized voting machines and election data anyway. Absent a foreign nexus, intelligence agencies have absolutely no lawful role in domestic election administration. This is exactly the kind of overreach Congress wrote the law to prevent, and it raises profound questions about whether our intelligence tools are being abused.”

Tonight, Matt Berg of Crooked Media reported that the FBI has “summoned state election officials from across the country for an unusual briefing on ‘preparations’ for the midterms” on February 25. A top election official from one state told Berg that it’s the “strangest thing in the world.” The FBI official who sent the email, Kellie Hardiman, used the title “FBI Election Executive.” When Berg asked the FBI for an explanation, the spokesperson wrote: “Thank you for reaching out. The FBI has no comment.”

On Monday, Dustin Volz and C. Ryan Barber of the Wall Street Journal reported that Gabbard had bottled up a May 2025 whistleblower complaint without transmitting it to congressional intelligence committees as required by law. Congress members learned about the complaint in November, but the government maintained it was too highly classified to be shared. This was deliberate obfuscation: the Gang of Eight, which is made up of the leaders from both parties in the House and Senate, and the leaders of the intelligence committees from both parties, was set up precisely so that Congress could always be informed of classified information.

Today Gabbard handed over the complaint, after heavily redacting it under claims of executive privilege—which means the president is involved.

The administration’s determination to hide the actions of its own members while exposing opponents has shown dramatically in the redactions in the Epstein files that have been released to date. Officials neglected to redact identifying information about survivors and even sexually explicit photographs of them, while blacking out the names of apparent friends and co-conspirators of the sex offender.

Trump’s name appears throughout the files, and in an attempt to center former president Bill Clinton, rather than Trump, in public discussion of the Epstein files, House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) has subpoenaed Clinton and former first lady and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton to testify under oath. He says he doesn’t have to do the same for Trump about his relationship with Epstein because Trump is answering questions for reporters.

Yesterday the Clintons agreed to testify. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton posted on social media: “For six months, we engaged Republicans on the Oversight Committee in good faith. We told them what we know, under oath. They ignored all of it. They moved the goalposts and turned accountability into an exercise in distraction. So let’s stop the games. If you want this fight, [Representative Comer], let’s have it—in public. You love to talk about transparency. There’s nothing more transparent than a public hearing, cameras on. We will be there.”

Forcing a former president to testify under threat of contempt establishes the precedent that Congress can force past presidents and their spouses and families to testify under threat of criminal charges. Scott Wong, Melanie Zanona, Sahil Kapur, and Ryan Nobles of NBC News reported that Democrats are taking note. Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) told them: “We are absolutely going to have Donald Trump testify under oath.” Maxwell Frost (D-FL), who sits on the Oversight Committee, said that forcing Clinton to testify does indeed set a precedent. “[A]nd we will follow it,” he said. “Donald Trump, all of his kids. Everybody.”

Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL)—who flusters Comer so badly Comer once cracked and told him he looked like a Smurf, a childish insult Moskowitz needled him over for months—said that after Democrats regain control of the House, Republicans will blame Comer for what comes next:

“The folks here are going to run with it everywhere. It will be crypto. It will be their business. It will be all the investments in the Middle East. It’ll be the Qatari plane…. It’s going to be the latest thing with the UAE. It’s going to be all of it…. They are giving a license to these new chairmen in January and that will be Comer’s legacy. So when [Don] Junior and Eric and their children…[are] all here, they can thank James Comer for that.”

It seems likely Trump has already figured out that forcing Clinton to testify opens up some avenues he would rather leave closed. When asked about the Clintons’ testimony at the end of the month, he answered: “I think it’s a shame, to be honest. I always liked him.” Hillary was “a very capable woman.” “I hate to see it in many ways.”

Another court case might tear away some of the administration’s obfuscation, as well. Zoe Tillman of Bloomberg reported today that U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang of the District of Maryland has denied the government’s request to block depositions of Elon Musk and two other former officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in a lawsuit charging Musk with unlawfully dismantling the agency.

Because Musk and the other two “likely have personal, first-hand knowledge of the facts relevant and essential to the resolution of this case,” Chuang said the testimony could go forward. While courts have generally said that “high-ranking government officials may not be deposed or called to testify about their reasons for taking official actions absent ‘extraordinary circumstances,’” Chuang said it was not clear that Musk and the other two were, in fact, high-ranking government officials.

At the same time, the case appeared to meet the criteria for extraordinary circumstances. The government employees who brought the case argue that Musk personally dismantled USAID when he had no authority to do so. The judge noted that the government’s failure to produce documents that explained the decisions killing the agency, as required, suggested that the decisions had been made orally, so the testimony of Musk and the other two men is crucial to the case.

Finally, the last existing arms treaty between the U.S. and Russia expired today. The New START treaty of 2011 capped the number of nuclear warheads each country could maintain. Trump’s account on social media posted that instead of extending the terms of the existing treaty, “we should have our Nuclear Experts work on a new, improved, and modernized Treaty that can last long into the future.” Until that time, though, there is no longer a cap on nuclear weapons for the U.S. or Russia.

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American