Contributing Writers

We speak with Mother Jones voting rights correspondent Ari Berman about the shocking FBI raid on an elections hub in Fulton County, Georgia. Federal agents were seeking records related to the 2020 presidential election, which President Donald Trump continues to falsely claim he won despite his loss to Joe Biden that year. During his efforts to overturn the election results, Trump pressured local officials to “find” him an additional 11,780 votes.

The Justice Department on Friday released an additional 3 million pages of documents related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The Trump administration says it was the final release of Epstein files, even though some 2 million more documents remain unreleased. The latest batch reveals new details about Epstein’s connections to the rich and powerful, including Hollywood figures, tech billionaires, public officials and more.

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in hundreds of demonstrations across the United States this weekend as protests continue against the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant crackdown. Democracy Now! was in the streets of Minneapolis on Friday speaking with protesters who marched in subzero temperatures.

As protests continue in Minnesota over the federal government’s immigration crackdown, former CNN anchor Don Lemon and independent journalist Georgia Fort now face federal charges stemming from their reporting on a January 18 demonstration at a St. Paul church, where a senior ICE official works as a pastor. The two journalists were released Friday without bail following initial court hearings and could face fines or prison time if convicted.

The latest reliable estimates of the death toll in Iran’s recent nationwide protests are growing, potentially reaching the tens of thousands. Some estimates place the number of civilians killed by government forces at 30,000 or more. We play a rare eyewitness account of the deadly massacre of protesters in Rasht, Iran, and speak to the Iranian filmmaker and political dissident Sepideh Farsi, who says U.S. military intervention “would only worsen the situation.

An estimated 350,000 Haitian immigrants are set to lose their temporary protected status, or TPS, on February 3, 2026, after President Trump signed an executive order to revoke their TPS shortly after coming into office. TPS holders live and work in the United States legally. During the 2024 presidential election, candidates Donald Trump and JD Vance spread racist invective about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Illinois.

The families of two men from Trinidad killed in an October U.S. missile strike in the Caribbean are suing the Trump administration for wrongful death and extrajudicial killing. The families of 26-year-old Chad Joseph and 41-year-old Rishi Samaroo say the two men were returning home from fishing and farming in Venezuela, not smuggling drugs as the Trump administration has claimed without evidence. Four others on the same boat were also killed.

In the aftermath of the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, Venezuela has agreed to submit a monthly budget to the Trump administration, which will release money from an account funded by oil sales. It’s a deal for the interim government led by Delcy Rodriguéz that historian Greg Grandin calls “governing under the blade.” In a further shift away from the nation-building foreign policy of the past several decades of U.S.

The latest reliable estimates of the death toll in Iran’s recent nationwide protests are growing, potentially reaching the tens of thousands. Some estimates place the number of civilians killed by government forces at 30,000 or more. We play a rare eyewitness account of the deadly massacre of protesters in Rasht, Iran, and speak to the Iranian filmmaker and political dissident Sepideh Farsi, who says U.S. military intervention “would only worsen the situation.

An estimated 350,000 Haitian immigrants are set to lose their temporary protected status, or TPS, on February 3, 2026, after President Trump signed an executive order to revoke their TPS shortly after coming into office. TPS holders live and work in the United States legally. During the 2024 presidential election, candidates Donald Trump and JD Vance spread racist invective about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Illinois.

The families of two men from Trinidad killed in an October U.S. missile strike in the Caribbean are suing the Trump administration for wrongful death and extrajudicial killing. The families of 26-year-old Chad Joseph and 41-year-old Rishi Samaroo say the two men were returning home from fishing and farming in Venezuela, not smuggling drugs as the Trump administration has claimed without evidence. Four others on the same boat were also killed.

In the aftermath of the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, Venezuela has agreed to submit a monthly budget to the Trump administration, which will release money from an account funded by oil sales. It’s a deal for the interim government led by Delcy Rodriguéz that historian Greg Grandin calls “governing under the blade.” In a further shift away from the nation-building foreign policy of the past several decades of U.S.

The latest reliable estimates of the death toll in Iran’s recent nationwide protests are growing, potentially reaching the tens of thousands. Some estimates place the number of civilians killed by government forces at 30,000 or more. We play a rare eyewitness account of the deadly massacre of protesters in Rasht, Iran, and speak to the Iranian filmmaker and political dissident Sepideh Farsi, who says U.S. military intervention “would only worsen the situation.

An estimated 350,000 Haitian immigrants are set to lose their temporary protected status, or TPS, on February 3, 2026, after President Trump signed an executive order to revoke their TPS shortly after coming into office. TPS holders live and work in the United States legally. During the 2024 presidential election, candidates Donald Trump and JD Vance spread racist invective about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Illinois.

The families of two men from Trinidad killed in an October U.S. missile strike in the Caribbean are suing the Trump administration for wrongful death and extrajudicial killing. The families of 26-year-old Chad Joseph and 41-year-old Rishi Samaroo say the two men were returning home from fishing and farming in Venezuela, not smuggling drugs as the Trump administration has claimed without evidence. Four others on the same boat were also killed.

In the aftermath of the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, Venezuela has agreed to submit a monthly budget to the Trump administration, which will release money from an account funded by oil sales. It’s a deal for the interim government led by Delcy Rodriguéz that historian Greg Grandin calls “governing under the blade.” In a further shift away from the nation-building foreign policy of the past several decades of U.S.

We speak with Congressmember Delia Ramirez following an attack on her colleague, Congressmember Ilhan Omar, who was sprayed with an unknown foul-smelling liquid while speaking at a town hall event in Minneapolis on Tuesday. “This is a direct influence of what you’re seeing from this president,” Ramirez says, criticizing Trump’s policies and his long history of attacking Omar in particular.
Ramirez also discusses her efforts in Congress to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

ICE and CBP are using facial recognition technology to facilitate President Trump’s mass deportation campaign. With a smartphone app, immigration officers can scan faces of people they encounter and quickly search those faces against 200 million images stored in several government databases that are “notoriously error-filled,” according to Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.

Democracy Now! speaks with Congressmember LaMonica McIver of New Jersey, who is facing up to 17 years in prison stemming from an incident last May when she and two other Democratic congressmembers sought to inspect Delaney Hall, a private prison run by the GEO Group under contract with ICE. The federal government claims McIver assaulted an immigration officer. “I’m not going to let them bully me out of doing my job. I’m just not,” says McIver, who describes conditions at the prison as dismal.

Liam Ramos, the 5-year-old from Minnesota who was detained last week after coming home from preschool, is being held in the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. Congressmembers who visited Liam report that has been depressed and hasn’t been eating well. Javier Hidalgo, legal director at RAICES, has worked with families at the detention center for years.

We speak with Congressmember Delia Ramirez following an attack on her colleague, Congressmember Ilhan Omar, who was sprayed with an unknown foul-smelling liquid while speaking at a town hall event in Minneapolis on Tuesday. “This is a direct influence of what you’re seeing from this president,” Ramirez says, criticizing Trump’s policies and his long history of attacking Omar in particular.
Ramirez also discusses her efforts in Congress to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

As President Trump shakes up the leadership of his immigration crackdown in Minnesota following the killing of ICU nurse Alex Pretti by Border Patrol agents, we examine the expanding role of the agency in interior enforcement.
Independent journalist Todd Miller says the Trump administration’s immigration operations in U.S. cities are an “extension” of “policies and practices that we’ve been seeing in the U.S.