ICE To Hire Bounty Hunters. Because ‘Fascism’:
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is looking to hire bounty hunters and private investigators to track down tens of thousands of immigrants to boost arrests under Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda, according to government documents.
The agency has an “immediate need” for “skip tracing services,” which could include bounty hunters, bail bondsmen, debt collectors, process services, repossession agents and other investigators, according to procurement documents reviewed by The Independent.
ICE could spend as much as $180 million to hire private investigators for physical surveillance operations at more than 1 million homes, what the agency is calling “enhanced location research” that includes the “collection of photos and documents verifying the alien’s residence and/or place of employment.” Those documents could include a person’s utility bills and other records, documents say.
The administration has poured billions of dollars into immigration enforcement to expand arrests in the country’s interior, with Congress appropriating a record-setting sum that makes ICE one of the most well-funded policing agencies in the world, rivaling some nations’ military spending.
Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, has aimed for hiring 10,000 ICE agents by next year, or roughly doubling its footprint, with a major boost to the agency’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division.
It’s legal. The President can do anything he wants.
A Real Good Blow-By-Blow Of The Hearing On The Legality Of Lindsey Halligan’s Appointment. The judge ain’t buyin’ it:
The top line was pretty straightforward: Currie gave no indication that she thinks Halligan was lawfully appointed as interim U.S. attorney. None, zero, zilch. But it wasn’t at all clear what Currie will do about it now. Almost all of her questions were either skeptical or challenging of the Trump administration’s position. None of her questions seriously challenged either defendant.
In the course of the hearing, Judge Currie dropped a few pretty important new details into the mix, based on her having reviewed the transcript and recording of the grand jury proceedings in both the Comey and James cases:
(1) Currie confirmed that Halligan was the only government lawyer in the grand jury room in both cases. The importance of this revelation — a fact which was already suspected — is that there was no other bona fide government lawyer in the room who arguably secured the indictments on the government’s behalf, which might arguably have rendered Halligan’s unlawful appointment moot. That means it all comes down to whether Halligan was properly appointed; there’s no workaround available to the government using the presence of other prosecutors
(2) Currie said there was no way that Attorney General Pam Bondi could have reviewed the grand jury proceedings in the Comey case as she claimed to have done before she took the unusual step of purporting to ratify Halligan’s appointment after the fact in a document she signed on Oct. 31 but made retroactive to Sept. 22. That’s because the grand jury transcripts and recordings were incomplete.
(3) Currie said that the beginning and ending of Halligan’s presentation of the Comey indictment were not recorded and that for a stretch the court reporter was either absent from the room or not recording at all. It’s embarrassing and undermines the subtext of the Trump administration’s argument that the cases were handled perfectly routinely … even though Halligan is an insurance lawyer with no experience as a prosecutor who was hastily appointed by her former client Trump to beat the statute of limitations clock, which was about to strike midnight in the Comey case. In short, the new revelations further highlighted how nothing about either case is normal.
Then there’s this:
Perhaps the most compelling argument of the day came towards the end of the hearing as Abbe Lowell, the lead lawyer for James, was winding down. Lowell noted that for all the arguments about historic practice and statutory construction perhaps the best evidence was that Trump appointed interim U.S. attorneys the right way throughout his first term. It’s only changed in Trump’s second term quest to target his perceived foes for retribution, requiring that he install loyalists instead of letting judges select the interim U.S. attorney.
We Have Another Socialist Mayor!
Katie Wilson, a longtime City Hall advocate whose rise in Seattle politics came as she pushed for more progressive taxes, has been elected the city’s next mayor.
On Wednesday, Wilson took a 1,976-vote lead over Bruce Harrell. With a maximum of 1,320 ballots remaining — though likely fewer — it is mathematically impossible for Harrell to catch up.
“This campaign was driven by a deep belief that we need to expand the table to include everyone in the decisions that impact their lives,” Wilson said in a statement. “That is what we will be working to do every day as we set up this new administration.”
Few expected this election’s outcome earlier this year. Harrell entered 2025 with a broad base of endorsements and seemed to have closed off most lanes for a challenger either to his left or right.
Wilson, though, took note of a citywide vote in favor of new taxes on high-paying companies for publicly funded and owned housing and saw an opening. She declared her run for mayor shortly after.
Noticed that the News Journal is running some sort of contest to determine who Delaware’s top ‘Foodie Influencer’ is. Howzabout the cow in the Eet Mor Chick’n commercials? What, exactly, is a foodie influencer, and why would anybody other than foodie influencers care?
But, I digress.
House Passes Decoupling Legislation:
Delaware’s House Bill 255 decouples parts of the state tax code from the federal tax code. The bill, sponsored by House Majority Leader Kerri Evelyn Harris, D-Dover, passed with a three-fifths vote along party lines.
A fact sheet from the Department of Finance shows that without the decoupling legislation, the state could face a loss of about $222 million in fiscal year 2026, $107 million in FY 2027 and nearly $80 million in FY 2028. The handout also projects revenue losses and gains from different decoupling options.
Well, here’s an interesting tidbit:
How the bill amendments impact those numbers is unclear. A House spokesperson cut off Harris’ response to WHYY News to this question and ended the interview. Gov. Matt Meyer’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
I’ll hazard an informed opinion: Harris was too far out over her skis when it came to knowing what was in her own legislation. Pretty embarrassing, though. As a former staffer, I can’t imagine intervening and ending an interview with one of my bosses.
What do you want to talk about?