‘Racial Equity’ Group Funded by Minnesota Taxpayers Asks for Donations To Bail Fund Freeing Anti-ICE Agitators

A racial equity” and “restorative justice” nonprofit funded by Minnesota taxpayers is calling for donations to a new bail fund that’s helping free anti-ICE agitators and illegal immigrants detained in Minneapolis.

The Legal Rights Center, which Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison led for five years, is promoting the People’s Bail Fund of Minnesota through Know Your Rights MN, a Legal Rights Center project that provides legal information and resources for activists. The project’s website was updated Thursday to include a link to the bail fund, which only secured nonprofit status last week and is actively “accepting requests for ICE protest cases,” according to its Instagram account.

The Legal Rights Center received nearly $5.7 million—roughly two-thirds of its total revenue—in grants from the government between 2021 and 2024, according to the Minnesota attorney general’s office. It doesn’t indicate whether that’s from federal, state, or local sources, but the nonprofit’s website lists the state among its financial backers. At least $400,000 of that funding came in the form of sub-grants from the Minnesota Department of Public Safety. In 2024, for example, the department awarded the Legal Rights Center a $45,000 award for work aimed at “ending racial disparities and improving outcomes in the juvenile justice system.” A state agency also promotes the organization.

The Legal Rights Center’s move to solicit donations for the People’s Bail Fund of Minnesota came amid escalating protests and riots across Minneapolis in response to a surge of ICE agents in the Twin Cities. The evening before Know Your Rights MN’s website was updated, Minnesota governor Tim Walz (D.) urged residents to resist ICE, accusing the agency of waging a “campaign of organized brutality.” In recent weeks, roughly three dozen agitators have been arrested, with charges ranging from assaulting law enforcement to refusing lawful orders to disperse. DHS has taken more than 3,000 criminal illegal aliens—including murderers, rapists, and pedophiles—into custody, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced Monday.

Radical groups organizing the anti-ICE protests have received millions of dollars from the Left’s premier foundations and dark money networks, including George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation, Tides Foundation, and the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the Washington Free Beacon reported. The Legal Rights Center itself received nearly $460,000 from the New Venture Fund, a behemoth left-wing dark money charity, between 2021 and 2024.

Other funding to the nonprofit includes $30,000 from the Pohlad Family Foundation in 2020 to protect “community during protests,” another $30,000 from the Minneapolis Foundation in 2024 to “foster resilience,” and $4,000 the same year from the Hennepin County Bar Association.

The Legal Rights Center also partners with the Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, whose parent organization is a radical left-wing group that defended Hamas’s Oct. 7 assault on Israel. During the wave of pro-Hamas demonstrations following the terrorist attack, the group was explicit about its role, stating that its jail support hotline connects arrestees with “bail payment coordination.”

Know Your Rights MN’s website, which was overhauled Thursday in partnership with the anti-ICE “abolitionist design & production studio” Blackbird Revolt, provides guidance on protest activity, interactions with law enforcement, and propaganda pushing for an end to cash bail. It offers “legal empowerment workshops” for audiences as young as elementary school students, as well.

The People’s Bail Fund of Minnesota isn’t the only organization that frees detained immigrants and other arrestees Know Your Rights MN began promoting after updating its website. It also touts the Black Immigrants Bail Fund, the LGBTQ Freedom Fund—which has never freed a Minnesotan, according to its website—and the Repro Legal Defense Fund, which “covers bail and funds strong defenses for people who are investigated, arrested, or prosecuted for self-managed abortion.”

The People’s Bail Fund of Minnesota, meanwhile, is “dedicated to supporting communities affected by injustice and criminalization,” according to its website. The group has been posting bail for Hennepin County misdemeanor cases since it launched in July. It began operations just two months after the new executive director for the Minnesota Freedom Fund—the bail fund promoted by former vice president Kamala Harris amid the 2020 George Floyd riots that freed violent criminals—announced that his group would shift away from “transactional bail and immigration bond payments” toward broader “community power-building” efforts.

The Legal Rights Center, People’s Bail Fund of Minnesota, and Walz did not respond to requests for comment.

Jessica Costescu, Washington Free Beacon

Waiting for an Atrocity

With the attack on the Cities Church, the Minnesota Nice lefties have crossed a clear line. They’re no longer tribunes of the people, defenders of the oppressed, or speakers of truth to power. No…. now they’re living a dream. They’re giving full expression to their fantasy lives as Bolsheviki storming the Winter Palace, Red Guards liquidating the bourgeoisie, and Khmer Rouge cutting down everybody they come across, with all that implies — terror, violence, destruction, and bloodshed.

So we hear the cries of “why won’t Trump do something…” Why doesn’t he make his move? Why doesn’t he send in the 101st the way Ike did? Why doesn’t he federalize the state National Guard? Why doesn’t he declare martial law, clean out the streets, and send the cosplay Bolshis back to their dorms?

The answer to that it simple: he needs an atrocity.

Now, from our point of view, this has already happened, and in spades. Since the Renee Good shooting  (in which as we know, though too many others don’t, an ICE agent was run down and sent to the hospital) we have seen plenty. We have seen ICE officers attacked with shovels, iceballs, bottles, and explosives. We’ve seen hotels besieged and shut down. We’ve seen ordinary citizens stopped, interrogated, and threatened in the streets for driving a doubleplusungood SUV (more Red Guard cosplay here.) We’ve seen government vehicles wrecked and looted, including the theft of an FBI rifle – by a Tren de Agua member, no less. We’ve seen the lefties assault and severely beat one of their own. (He was rescued by ICE agents. Of course he was.) And we’ve seen a church disrupted in the middle of services, its congregation and pastor abused and threatened, with Don Lemon, that stalwart successor to Edward Murrow, present to lend legitimacy. What more do we need?

Well, here’s the thing. We’ve seen all that. But the man in the street, your average American, hasn’t.

He hasn’t seen it because the Minneapolis uprising has been carefully curated by the media to look exactly the opposite of what it is. Hired leftist thugs and TdA members have been masked by images of ICE officers presented as neo-Nazi thugs tormenting the innocent. This past weekend, the media was full of reports that the DoJ was deliberately hiring “white supremacists’ to serve in ICE. This is all that they hear. And keep in mind that many of our gentle fellow citizens are, to put it kindly, subnormal. The ones who believe exactly what they hear until they hear something else, and then believe that. There’s a lot of them, and they have the vote.

If Trump was to send in the troops at this point, the Morlock vote would hear that this was the second coming of fascism, that Trump had shown his true colors, that end of democracy was nigh and could be stopped only by heroic figures like Tim Walz and Ilhan Omar. The media would continue riding this straight up until November.

So that’s why we need an atrocity. That’s why we need something so horrifying, so ghastly, so grim as to be impossible to cover up or ignore. That may sound cynical, and it may sound cold, but that’s the world as it is, and it ain’t any other way.

And we will see it come. The Left has the bit between its teeth and is rampaging. All the wannabe Ches and Pol Pots gathered from around the country have sniffed blood and are ready to indulge all their bloodyminded fantasies. The beatings, the savagery, the descent into precivilized barbarity justified by perverse rhetoric and erudition, are coming to life. Their moment has arrived. They can sense it out there in the darkness, nearly within reach – their own, private version of a boot stamping a human face. It’s been five years since the new “Summer of Love” in which Minneapolis itself was put on the rack, the citizens terrorized, entire blocks burnt out. Long enough for it to be viewed with nostalgia. Now they are going to revive it, to relive it, to outdo it.

When they do, that’s when the hammer comes down. That’s when the troops already on alert take to the streets to restore the order that the citizens of Minneapolis, along with Walz, Frey, and Omar, have thrown aside. I’m not sure how Don Lemon will handle that. But I can guess.

J.R. Dunn, American Thinker

Five simple steps are all it takes to reclaim control of your news feed.

Gone are the days when you type hot-button topics — say “latest on border security” or “ICE protests” — into Google and are forced to sift through the same list of mainstream left-wing propaganda while the sources you trust are intentionally buried.

In an act nothing short of miraculous, Google recently handed power back to the user with a new tool called the Preferred Sources feature. With a few clicks of a button, you can personalize your news-related search results so that your most pressing questions are met with the unfiltered answers you value.

Ready to make it happen? Here’s how to flip the script on Google’s algorithm, transforming it from gatekeeper to your personal servant in just five simple steps.

Step 1: Go to google.com and sign in using your Google account information. Note: You must have a Google account to use the Preferred Sources feature.

Step 2: Search a current news topic (e.g. Iran protests, Trump tariffs, border security updates). You will see articles from mainstream sources, like CNN, NPR, USA Today, AP, Reuters, etc.

Step 3: Directly to the right of the “Top Stories” header at the top of your Google search page, you will see an icon that looks like overlapping boxes with a star in the middle. Click or tap that icon to open the Preferred Sources pop-up.

Step 4: In the text box, type theblaze.com. When it appears in the results, check the box next to it and click “Reload results.”

Step 5: Refresh your Google page — you’ll start seeing boosted results from Blaze News where relevant.

You can add as many sources as you want (no limit) and remove them any time by unchecking the boxes in the same menu.

Stick it to Big Tech and its echo chambers by utilizing Google’s Preferred Sources feature. The power to choose who you listen to has always been rightfully yours, but those who seek to shape and steer the narrative have kept it hidden behind algorithms designed to favor certain voices over others — until now.

Add your trusted sources today, and experience news that serves you.

The Blaze

The government has no business running these [auto] companies because the government does not know how to run these companies. That’s not government’s job.”

–Carly Fiorina, businesswoman and former CEO of Hewlett-Packard

How refreshing–and true!

I would only add: Government has no moral right to run these companies. In other words, government has no right to force some members of the population to work for the sake of others. Tyranny is tyranny, whether it’s forcing people who have health care to pay for the medical care of those who don’t, or whether it’s forcing people who don’t have gold-plated benefits to work to pay for those who demand they continue to get them (which is what federal ownership of the once private American auto companies is all about).

Bottom line? Government has no right to force some to live for the sake of others.

It’s either a free country, or it’s not. If we’re all free, then government stays out of the business of business. Until or unless the time comes when both political leaders and voters get this, our slide into socialism, and ultimately dictatorship, will continue.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

For much of modern political history, the most dangerous words in public policy have not been shouted slogans but soothing reassurances. They are the claims that certain policies are “compassionate,” “progressive,” or “humane,” offered without any serious accounting of how they actually affect the people forced to live under them. This pattern is particularly evident in the agenda of today’s Democratic Party, whose policy choices increasingly produce chaos and danger while being marketed as moral advances.

The central flaw is not malice so much as indifference to consequences. The pursuit of ideological purity has replaced the traditional liberal concern for social order, public safety, and the rule of law. The predictable result has been a deterioration of civil society — one that falls most heavily on those with the least ability to protect themselves.

Consider first the party’s enthusiastic support for “criminal justice reform” in the form of progressive prosecutors and judges who are openly hostile to enforcement. Across major cities, voters have been urged to elect district attorneys who treat incarceration as a moral failure rather than a necessary tool of public safety. These officials routinely decline to prosecute entire categories of crimes, downgrade felonies to misdemeanors, or release repeat offenders back into the communities they have already victimized.

The human cost of this experiment is rarely discussed by its advocates. It is not the affluent professionals living behind security systems and gated communities who bear the brunt of rising crime. It is working-class neighborhoods, disproportionately minority, where small businesses are looted, elderly residents are assaulted, and parents fear letting their children walk to school. When law enforcement retreats, predatory behavior does not politely stand down. It fills the vacuum.

Closely related is the push for cashless bail. The theory is appealing: no one should be jailed simply for being poor. But the reality is that bail exists not as punishment but as a mechanism to ensure court appearance and to protect the public from demonstrably dangerous individuals. When bail is eliminated or sharply restricted, judges are often forced to release offenders with lengthy arrest records — individuals who quickly reoffend, sometimes violently.

Again, the costs are borne by ordinary citizens, not by the policymakers who champion these reforms. A person assaulted by someone who should never have been released receives little comfort from learning that the system was trying to be fair. Fairness without safety is a luxury belief — affordable only to those insulated from its consequences.

California’s move to eliminate life without parole through measures such as the Youth Rehabilitation and Opportunity Act illustrates the same pattern. The idea that violent criminals should automatically be given new chances based on age or shifting social theories ignores a fundamental reality: some individuals have demonstrated, repeatedly and conclusively, that they are a permanent threat to others. A legal system that refuses to recognize this is not enlightened; it is reckless.

Public safety is further undermined by sanctuary city policies and categorical opposition to immigration enforcement. The claim is that shielding illegal immigrants from federal authorities fosters trust. But in practice, it has meant protecting criminal illegal aliens — people who have already violated immigration law and then gone on to commit additional crimes.

Here again, the victims are overwhelmingly members of minority communities. When a repeat offender is released because local officials refuse to cooperate with federal enforcement, it is not an abstraction. It is a real person harmed, often by someone who had already been identified and could have been removed. To describe this as compassion is to redefine the word beyond recognition.

At the same time, the Democratic Party has embraced policies that deliberately blur long-standing boundaries in the name of social progress, such as allowing biological males into women’s private spaces. This is presented as a matter of inclusion, but it requires dismissing legitimate concerns about privacy, safety, and fairness — particularly for women and girls. A society that refuses to acknowledge obvious biological differences in policy design is not advancing justice; it is indulging ideology at the expense of reality.

Perhaps most revealing is the party’s response — or lack thereof — to the surge of antisemitic harassment and intimidation on elite university campuses. Jewish students have been threatened, blocked from facilities, and subjected to rhetoric that would be instantly condemned if directed at any other protected group. Yet institutional leaders and many elected officials have responded with moral ambiguity, procedural evasions, or outright silence.

This selective outrage exposes the underlying principle at work. Victimhood is not determined by harm suffered but by ideological alignment. Groups deemed politically inconvenient are afforded fewer protections, even when facing open hostility.

All of this unfolds alongside a relentless push for gun control legislation that would leave law-abiding citizens more vulnerable, not less. Criminals, by definition, do not obey gun laws. Disarming potential victims while simultaneously weakening policing and sentencing is not a safety strategy — it is an invitation to predators. The right to self-defense is most meaningful precisely when the state fails to provide protection. To curtail that right while engineering such failures is a profound moral contradiction.

What explains this pattern? One possibility is ideological romanticism — the belief that crime, violence, and disorder are primarily products of social injustice and that removing constraints will somehow redeem human behavior. This view has been repeatedly falsified by history, but it remains attractive to those insulated from its costs.

Another explanation is political calculation. Chaos can be useful. Social disorder creates dependency, fear, and a demand for centralized control. A population that feels unsafe is more easily persuaded to surrender liberties in exchange for promises of protection, even when those promises have already proven empty.

There is also a deeper cultural shift at work: a growing hostility toward the very idea of standards. Law enforcement, borders, prisons, sex distinctions, and even moral clarity are treated as relics of an oppressive past. But a society that abandons standards does not become freer — it becomes governed by force, often exercised by the least scrupulous.

The lesson is an old one. Good intentions do not guarantee good outcomes. Policies must be judged by what they do, not by how virtuous they sound. A political movement that consistently produces more crime, more fear, and more fragmentation while claiming moral superiority deserves skepticism, not deference.

Order is not the enemy of justice. It is its prerequisite. And a society that forgets this lesson will relearn it the hard way — at the expense of its most vulnerable citizens.

Jim Cardoza is the author of The Moral Superiority of Liberty and the founder of LibertyPen.com. Read more of his essays there.

By Kirsten Fleming

For years, activists have used language to create an alternative reality, one rewired to suit the transgender minority.

One where non-trans people are “cisgender” and gender is “assigned at birth” by physicians — a phrase so outrageous, it evokes the image of doctor with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, pulling an F or M out of a bingo spinner.

It’s been a full scale effort from the left to blur the sex binary and subjugate anyone daring enough to call it out as nonsense. In fact, the act of “misgendering” once resulted in bans from Twitter. (Those censorious polices are what led Elon Musk to buy the platform in 2022.

During her 2022 Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) to define “woman.”

“No, I can’t … I’m not a biologist,” Brown said without an ounce of shame. She knew she was risking alienating the base.

Wielding control of cultural institutions and corporate culture, activists as well as also regular old well-intentioned liberals tried to create a new reality in which sex is not immutable and identity takes priority over science.

The goal is just to establish a biological reality,” Hawley said. “You just said a moment ago that science and evidence should control, not politics. So let’s just test that proposition. Can men get pregnant?”

The doc, who presumably knows a thing or two about the reproductive system in humans, dug in — to the detriment of her reputation.

For years, activists have used language to create an alternative reality, one rewired to suit the transgender minority.

One where non-trans people are “cisgender” and gender is “assigned at birth” by physicians — a phrase so outrageous, it evokes the image of doctor with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, pulling an F or M out of a bingo spinner.

It’s been a full scale effort from the left to blur the sex binary and subjugate anyone daring enough to call it out as nonsense. In fact, the act of “misgendering” once resulted in bans from Twitter. (Those censorious polices are what led Elon Musk to buy the platform in 2022.)

During her 2022 Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) to define “woman.”

“No, I can’t … I’m not a biologist,” Brown said without an ounce of shame. She knew she was risking alienating the base.

Wielding control of cultural institutions and corporate culture, activists as well as also regular old well-intentioned liberals tried to create a new reality in which sex is not immutable and identity takes priority over science.

But this isn’t 2022 anymore. No one fears the social-justice mob or cancellation. Call us transphobes. Call us bigots. Deployed to dismiss a point of view and avoid a conversation about real facts that would disrupt their worldview, these labels have zero impact.

Our society is no long buckling under the tyranny of the pronoun police.

If the left wants to continue to wander the political desert for another four years, rudderless and obsessively clinging to a fantasy, by all means.

One cannot change their sex, nor can a man give birth. Only those with common sense are willing to admit it.

Who funds the groups harassing ICE agents in Minnesota?

The left’s premier foundations and dark money networks have given millions, records show.

(A.J. Colores – Unsplash)

January 18, 2026

byLaw Officer

Share and speak up for justice, law & order…

(The Washington Free Beacon) — When the Trump administration sent some 2,000 immigration agents to the Twin Cities area, they were met by activists who trailed their movements and harassed them outside their hotels. The activists are members of radical groups that together have received millions of dollars from the left’s premier foundations and dark money networks, including George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation, the Tides Foundation, and the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a Washington Free Beacon review found.

At the center of the unrest is the Sunrise Movement, a left-wing group founded to fight climate change that has since directed its local chapters to fight the Trump administration. For Sunrise Twin Cities, that means tormenting ICE agents on the ground. The group holds in-person “action trainings” on how to “stop ICE & build a revolution.” It also maintains a running list of the Twin Cities hotels housing ICE agents and organizes late-night “noise demonstrations” aimed at making it “impossible” for those hotels to operate.

Unidos, an “immigrant-led, BIPOC majority, multiracial, state-wide organization,” leads a “rapid response” network through its affiliate group, Monarca. That network includes a 24/7 hotline that Twin Cities residents can call to report ICE activity. The group’s trained “responders” are then dispatched to the area in an attempt to prevent ICE agents from making arrests. Like Sunrise, Unidos is backed by the Ford Foundation, which sent the group $400,000 in 2024. The left-wing dark money juggernaut Sixteen Thirty Fund sent Unidos $150,000 between 2021 and 2022, tax filings show.

Sunrise is bankrolled by a who’s who of deep-pocketed left-wing organizations. Open Society Foundations has sent it $2 million since 2019, according to its grant database. Half of the money supported general “social welfare activities.” The Ford Foundation contributed $150,000 in 2024 and $550,000 in 2025, while the MacArthur Foundation—the 12th-largest private charity in America—gave $250,000 in 2024, according to tax filings and grant disclosures. Sunrise says it generally rejects “checks that come with expectations of input on our strategy.” It also says donations go to support its local chapters with “materials, housing, technology, food, travel, training expenses, and more.”

Sunrise Twin Cities has collaborated with two other local groups to drive anti-ICE demonstrations: Unidos MN and Defend the 612.

Who funds the groups harassing ICE agents in Minnesota?

The left’s premier foundations and dark money networks have given millions, records show.

(A.J. Colores – Unsplash)

January 18, 2026

byLaw Officer

Share and speak up for justice, law & order…

(The Washington Free Beacon) — When the Trump administration sent some 2,000 immigration agents to the Twin Cities area, they were met by activists who trailed their movements and harassed them outside their hotels. The activists are members of radical groups that together have received millions of dollars from the left’s premier foundations and dark money networks, including George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation, the Tides Foundation, and the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a Washington Free Beacon review found.

At the center of the unrest is the Sunrise Movement, a left-wing group founded to fight climate change that has since directed its local chapters to fight the Trump administration. For Sunrise Twin Cities, that means tormenting ICE agents on the ground. The group holds in-person “action trainings” on how to “stop ICE & build a revolution.” It also maintains a running list of the Twin Cities hotels housing ICE agents and organizes late-night “noise demonstrations” aimed at making it “impossible” for those hotels to operate.

Sunrise is bankrolled by a who’s who of deep-pocketed left-wing organizations. Open Society Foundations has sent it $2 million since 2019, according to its grant database. Half of the money supported general “social welfare activities.” The Ford Foundation contributed $150,000 in 2024 and $550,000 in 2025, while the MacArthur Foundation—the 12th-largest private charity in America—gave $250,000 in 2024, according to tax filings and grant disclosures. Sunrise says it generally rejects “checks that come with expectations of input on our strategy.” It also says donations go to support its local chapters with “materials, housing, technology, food, travel, training expenses, and more.”

Sunrise Twin Cities has collaborated with two other local groups to drive anti-ICE demonstrations: Unidos MN and Defend the 612.

Unidos, an “immigrant-led, BIPOC majority, multiracial, state-wide organization,” leads a “rapid response” network through its affiliate group, Monarca. That network includes a 24/7 hotline that Twin Cities residents can call to report ICE activity. The group’s trained “responders” are then dispatched to the area in an attempt to prevent ICE agents from making arrests. Like Sunrise, Unidos is backed by the Ford Foundation, which sent the group $400,000 in 2024. The left-wing dark money juggernaut Sixteen Thirty Fund sent Unidos $150,000 between 2021 and 2022, tax filings show.

Defend the 612 offers similar “ICE Watch Welcome & Orientation” trainings for those in the Twin Cities interested in “documenting ICE activity.” It also offers “Community Response Resources” that provide guidance on “Tracking Federal Agents.” This includes a list of known ICE vehicles operating in the Twin Cities—or a list of “License Plates of Abductors,” as Defend the 612 describes federal immigration agents.

The group accepts donations through Cooperation Cannon River, a Minneapolis-based “social and environmental justice” nonprofit that has received funding from Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, the left-wing dark money giant Tides Foundation, and the Solutions Project, a grantmaking organization founded by actor Mark Ruffalo.

Another group that operates its own ICE sighting hotline, Copal MN, has received $50,000 from the Tides Foundation and an additional $185,000 from the Sixteen Thirty Fund.

The groups’ funding sources underscore the extent to which Democratic billionaires prop up some of the more radical left-wing activism across the country.

Such activism surged in Minneapolis after the Jan. 7 death of 37-year-old Minneapolis resident Renee Good. Good was blocking a neighborhood road when agents ordered her to get out of her SUV. Instead, she drove forward. An ICE agent positioned in front of her car fired three shots, killing her.

Good’s wife, Becca Good, was on the scene and told Good to “drive” as the agents approached the SUV. Becca Good reportedly followed an Instagram page, “MN Ice Watch,” that describes itself as an “autonomous collective documenting & resisting against ICE, police, & all colonial militarized regimes.”

Last June, the page posted training slides that it described as a “basic introduction to de-arresting,” a tactic in which activists pressure police to release arrestees. One slide calls for “totally surrounding the officers who have the arrestee or otherwise blocking them and/or their vehicle and chanting ‘Let them go!’ and the like until the LEOs [law enforcement officers] cave to the mounting pressure.” A second slide calls for “pulling and pushing an officer off of an arrestee and/or breaking their grip on an arrestee,” a move the slide says is “probably the most risky as it requires physical contact with an officer.”

MN Ice Watch does not appear to be organized professionally and does not list a fundraising page. But it does maintain ties to Sunrise Twin Cities, Unidos, and Defend the 612. Sunrise Twin Cities and Defend the 612 tagged MN Ice Watch in a post listing local hotels that house ICE agents. Unidos, meanwhile, is one of the 184 accounts MN Ice Watch follows on Instagram.

The State of Minnesota has also promoted Unidos through its Minnesota Council on Latino Affairs, a state agency that includes the group on its list of “community resources.” But Monarca, the “rapid response network” led by Unidos, has attempted to lower its profile amid increased national attention—it recently set its website to private.

Sunrise, Unidos, and Defend the 612 did not respond to requests for comment. Nor did the Ford Foundation, Tides Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, or the Sixteen Thirty Fund. An Open Society Foundations representative said the group stood by its grantmaking decisions.

“The Open Society Foundations support the fundamental freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, including the rights to free speech and peaceful protest that are hallmarks of any vibrant democracy,” a spokesperson said.

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This article was originally published by The Washington Free Beacon and reprinted here with permission. 

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Sunday said it’s “very unlikely” that the Supreme Court will overturn President Donald Trump’s use of emergency powers to impose tariffs, with a potential decision from the court looming as early as this week.

“I believe that it is very unlikely that the Supreme Court will overrule a president’s signature economic policy,” Bessent said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “They did not overrule Obamacare, I believe that the Supreme Court does not want to create chaos.”

In June, the Supreme Court upheld a key Affordable Care Act provision that set up a panel to recommend preventive care services that insurers must provide at no cost to patients.

Bessent’s comments come one day after Trump said he would impose a new slate of tariffs on goods coming from Europe until “a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.”

Trump did not specify in his Truth Social post which statute he was invoking to impose the tariffs, though the move appears to mirror the “liberation day” duties he has imposed on dozens of nations under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

The tariffs on goods from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Finland will begin at 10% on Feb. 1, Trump said. They will then escalate to 25% on June 1, Trump said.

The Supreme Court is set to rule on Trump’s use of the IEEPA to impose tariffs before the end of its term, but a decision could come as soon as this week. IEEPA gives the president wide latitude to use economic tools in response to an “unusual and extraordinary threat.”

Bessent said Trump’s new tariffs on Europe regarding Greenland are a response to an emergency.

“The national emergency is avoiding a national emergency,” Bessent said. “It is a strategic decision by the president … he is able to use the economic might of the U.S. to avoid a hot war.”

Trump has long sought to acquire Greenland, the Arctic territory of Denmark, and has ratcheted up his pressure campaign for a U.S. takeover of the island in recent weeks. Leaders in Greenland, Denmark and across Europe have widely rejected Trump’s demands to take over the island.

European leaders of countries targeted by the new tariffs responded on Sunday.

“Tariff threats undermine transatlantic relations and risk a dangerous downward spiral. We will continue to stand united and coordinated in our response,” the leaders of Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom said in a joint statement.

“We stand in full solidarity with the Kingdom of Denmark and the people of Greenland. Building on the process begun last week, we stand ready to engage in a dialogue based on the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity that we stand firmly behind,” the statement read.

Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen and Greenland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Vivian Motzfeldt at the White House last week in a meeting that Rasmussen described as “frank but constructive.”

After the meeting, the group said the U.S. and Denmark would establish a high-level working group to chart Greenland’s future.

The Trump administration claims that a U.S. acquisition of Greenland is critical to national security to counter the expansion of Russia and China in the region.

CNBC has reached out to the White House and the Treasury Department to clarify what statute Trump is using to impose the new European tariffs.

CORRECTION: Vivian Motzfeldt is Greenland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. A previous version of this article misstated her title.

This story is developing. Please check back for updates.

Garrett Downs, CNBC

Jerry Rogers, American Greatness

ICE isn’t creating chaos; politicians and activists are—by turning routine detentions into viral outrage, provoking mobs, escalating encounters, and manufacturing danger for political gain.

Over and over again, we’re told to be outraged.

An individual is detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He is later released. And before the facts can catch their breath, Democratic politicians and activist megaphones are already screaming ‘abduction’, ‘fascism’, and ‘state violence’. Cue the mob. Cue the cameras. Cue the chaos.

It plays out over and over again.

Remember the viral video of a woman screaming ‘I’m a U.S. citizen’ as ICE agents pulled her from a car in the Florida Keys? The media and politicians pounced – ICE ‘arrested an American citizen’. Turns out this person was detained by ICE because she refused to identify herself and was driving her boyfriend’s vehicle. Afterwards, reports disclosed that the boyfriend was in the country illegally. She chose not to comply. Perhaps she wanted the situation to escalate? Much of the debate about ICE has become political theater.

Let’s slow this down and apply something increasingly rare in modern politics: the facts.

ICE detains individuals pursuant to its lawful authority. That happens every day. Sometimes people are held. Sometimes they’re released. Detention and release are not evidence of wrongdoing by law enforcement—they are the process. But in today’s political climate, process doesn’t matter. Optics do. Rage does. And outrage is politicized and monetized.

What does make these encounters dangerous is not ICE. It’s the reckless rhetoric that surrounds them.

When Democratic elected officials tell people that law enforcement officers are ‘kidnappers’ or ‘stormtroopers’, when they suggest citizens have a moral duty to interfere with federal agents, they are not encouraging peaceful protest—they are inciting confrontation. And when mobs take that cue and physically obstruct officers doing their jobs, the risk to everyone involved skyrockets.

This is not complicated.

What happens? Lawful orders are given. They’re ignored. Resistance follows. A crowd interferes. Officers are forced to manage a volatile situation that never needed to exist in the first place.

If individuals simply comply with lawful commands—no dramatics, no resistance, no posturing—these could be routine encounters. No drama; no chaos, no violence. If the mob allows officers to do their work instead of inserting themselves into a federal enforcement action, there would be no spectacle, no video clips, no political fundraising emails.

But compliance doesn’t trend on social media.

What we’re witnessing is a dangerous feedback loop. Politicians inflame tensions with extreme language. Activists show up looking for confrontation. Law enforcement is placed in an impossible position. Then, when things escalate—as they predictably do—the very people who lit the fuse rush to the microphones to condemn the explosion.

That’s not leadership. That’s negligence.

No one is above the law, but justice isn’t served when the law is deliberately obstructed either. ICE officers are not free agents; they operate under rules, supervision, and due process constraints. Pretending otherwise may be politically useful, but it is factually false—and dangerously so.

If Democrats truly cared about safety, about de-escalation, about justice, they would stop encouraging resistance and obstruction. They would tell their supporters the truth: you don’t get to decide, in the moment, which laws you’ll obey and which officers you’ll recognize as legitimate.

These incidents don’t have to happen. They are not inevitable. They are manufactured—by irresponsible rhetoric, by mob interference, and by a political class more interested in chaos than consequences.

And the next time it happens—and it will—remember who made it dangerous.

The U.S. Geological Survey said a new assessment shows the Permian Basin in Texas contains an estimated 1.6 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil and 28.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the Woodford and Barnett shale formations. The findings highlight major untapped energy potential deep beneath West Texas and southeastern New Mexico.

According to the USGS, the two formations could also yield about 813 million barrels of natural gas liquids. At current consumption levels, the oil alone would supply the United States for roughly 10 weeks, while the natural gas could meet national demand for about 10 months.

The Woodford and Barnett shales lie far deeper than many other Permian formations, in some areas as deep as 20,000 feet below the surface. While these depths once made development difficult, advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have made production increasingly viable.

“The U.S. economy and our way of life depend on energy, and USGS oil and gas assessments point to resources that industry hasn’t discovered yet,” USGS Director Ned Mamula said. “In this case, we have assessed that there are significant undiscovered resources in the Woodford and Barnett shales in the Permian Basin.”

USGS geologist Christopher Schenk said modern drilling techniques have transformed what is possible. “The shift to horizontal drilling with fracking has revolutionized oil production, and we’ve changed with it,” he said.

The Permian Basin already accounts for more than 40 percent of U.S. oil production. Industry analysts say targeting deeper formations like the Woodford and Barnett could extend the basin’s lifespan as shallower areas mature.

Major producers including ExxonMobil, Diamondback Energy, Occidental Petroleum, and SM Energy are already testing or developing wells in these formations. The USGS noted the resources remain “undiscovered,” meaning they have not yet been confirmed by drilling but are considered recoverable with current technology.

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