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American munitions makers are working to increase production capacity. Although Congress didn’t much bend to the White House’s last-minute request for a munitions-funding boost, defense executives say it’s enough to persuade them to pour more of their own funds into boosting production, Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams and Thomas Novelly reported Monday.
“We’ve been getting the demand signals from the customer set long before now, whether that’s the amount of munitions that have been expended around the world, or just the stock of ammunition,” said Rylan Harris, who leads business development for Northrop Grumman’s armament systems business unit. “We’ve been seeing those demand signals already, which has helped us focus a lot of our investments in increasing capacity.” Read on, here.
Related: South Korea’s Hanwha Defense USA announced last week that it will spend $1.3 billion to build a factory at the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas to make ingredients for explosives, propellants, and munitions.
Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker, chair of the Armed Services Committee, praised the development. “We need to bring new entrants into the American defense industrial base to increase competition and guard against single sources of supply, particularly on key programs like energetics and munitions. This agreement demonstrates how smart partnerships with allies can expand production against our mutual adversaries while reinforcing our domestic industrial base,” Wicker said in a statement Monday.
DOD launches science-and-innovation board as the U.S. cuts research. The new Science, Technology, and Innovation Board, which is a merger of the decade-old Defense Innovation Board and the 70-year-old Defense Science Board, is meant to “streamline” the department’s approach to the hardest technological and scientific national-security challenges. But it comes on the heels of Trump-administration cuts that could hinder those efforts. Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports. Story, here.
Additional industry reading:
Welcome to this Tuesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1917, the U.S. broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, which had announced a turn to unrestricted submarine warfare around the British Isles.
New: Despite months of pleading by far-right influencers and Fox pundits, the U.S. military won’t send active-duty troops to Minnesota after all, the New York Times reported Monday. Airborne soldiers in Alaska and military police in North Carolina had been put on standby to deploy during aggressive ICE raids throughout Minneapolis last month, which triggered weeks of voluminous demonstrations from locals.
Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act amid the unrest. But after the deaths of two American citizens at the hands of immigration agents on Jan. 7 and 24, the U.S. military’s Northern Command “quietly ordered the active-duty troops on standby to stand down,” a U.S. official told the Times.
In Oregon, a 53-year-old man was arrested after asking people at gunpoint if they’re a U.S. citizen. Among other actions along Interstate 5, he reportedly triggered a series of accidents before he was taken into custody by police on Thursday.
He shot at one victim. “That first shooting reportedly set off a series of crimes in which [the assailant] asked about another victim’s national loyalties, switched lanes and directions on the freeway, crashed into at least one victim’s vehicle and tried to steal a series of vehicles—including an ambulance that was responding to the scene,” the Roseburg, Oregon, News Review reported Monday. “No one was injured by the shooting, although at least one alleged victim was treated” at a local hospital for injuries from the collision.
Related reading:
A whistleblower complaint alleging wrongdoing by Trump’s intelligence chief has been “stalled” for months, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday. It’s reportedly “locked in a safe” somewhere because it concerns Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and its disclosure could cause “grave damage to national security,” according to an official.
“The complaint was filed last May with the intelligence community’s inspector general, according to a November letter that the whistleblower’s lawyer addressed to Gabbard,” the Journal reports, two months after lawmakers were told about the broad contours of the case. That November letter “accused Gabbard’s office of hindering the dissemination of the complaint to lawmakers by failing to provide necessary security guidance on how to do so.”
The complaint itself is reportedly “so highly classified that [the whistleblower’s attorney] said he hasn’t been able to view it himself.” A spokesman for Gabbard called the complaint “baseless and politically motivated.” As for the delay, the Journal reports “A representative for the inspector general said the office had determined specific allegations against Gabbard weren’t credible, while it couldn’t reach a determination on others.”
It’s unclear exactly why the process has stalled for nine months, especially since sensitive facilities for sharing classified intelligence—SCIFs—have been available in Washington for decades. Experts called the delay unprecedented and noted the intelligence community’s “inspector general is generally required to assess whether the complaint is credible within two weeks of receiving it, and share it with lawmakers within another week if it determines it is credible.” That would have been nearly eight months ago.
But Gabbard had time to visit Atlanta after an FBI raid on an election center last week, where Trump spoke directly to agents through Gabbard’s phone after they seized ballots from the 2020 election, the New York Times reported Monday.
The raid was “extraordinary,” but the phone call “was even further outside the bounds of normal law enforcement procedure” and “a major departure from past practice,” the Times reports. That’s because “Rather than going to senior department or F.B.I. officials, Mr. Trump spoke directly to the frontline agents doing the granular work of a politically sensitive investigation in which he has a large personal stake.”
Expert reax: “The DNI’s job is intelligence, not domestic law enforcement and Gabbard’s insertion into a federal criminal matter is virtually certain to be in violation of the law,” said Joyce Vance, former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama.
One possible consequence: Trump’s “conversation with the agents would probably become part of an effort to have the case dismissed as a vindictive prosecution.”
Experts are also concerned Trump may be planning “to contest the results of this year’s congressional midterms,” the Times reports. Trump fanned the flames of that potential constitutional crisis Monday when he suggested on former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino’s podcast “we should take over the voting in at least 15 places” and “Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
Trump also repeated his conspiratorial, unsupported claims that he won the 2020 election in his conversation Monday with Bongino. “We have states that are so crooked, and they’re counting votes—we have states that I won that show I didn’t win. Now you’re going to see something in Georgia where they were able to get with a court order, the ballots, you’re going to see some interesting things,” Trump said. (Politico and NBC News have more.)
Worth noting: “Multiple prior investigations—including one at the end of Mr. Trump’s first term by the same F.B.I. office and federal prosecutors working at the time for the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Atlanta—found no evidence to support his false claims of significant voter fraud,” the Times added to the bottom of their report about Gabbard’s appearance in Atlanta last week.
In still more conflict-of-interest reporting, top UAE officials bought a “secret stake” in Trump’s “fledgling cryptocurrency venture for half a billion dollars” just four days before Trump’s inauguration last January, the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday. “The deal with World Liberty Financial, which hasn’t previously been reported, was signed by Eric Trump, the president’s son.”
But just a few months later, “the administration committed to give the tiny Gulf monarchy access to around 500,000 of the most advanced AI chips a year—enough to build one of the world’s biggest AI data center clusters…The agreement was widely viewed as a coup for the emirate’s ruling family, overcoming longstanding U.S. national security concerns and allowing the country to compete with the most powerful economies in the world at the cutting edge of AI advances.”
But no one had yet publicly known the UAE bought that secret stake on Jan. 16, giving them 49% ownership of Trump’s crypto firm. And as part of that deal, “At least $31 million was also slated to flow to entities affiliated with the family of Steve Witkoff, a World Liberty co-founder who weeks earlier had been named U.S. envoy to the Middle East, the documents said.”
The deal is “unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company,” the Journal writes.
Why it matters: “Trump family businesses made $187 MILLION from this deal, and just months later he gave the UAE some of our most top-secret AI tech,” Maryland Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen said in a statement. “They are selling our national security to the highest bidder,” he said. “Foreign countries are bribing our president to sell out the American people.”
Former White House ethics lawyer Ian Bassin: “I used to advise people not to even accept a free cup of coffee from someone who had interests before them. And staff followed those rules. I can’t even find the words to describe the scale of Trump’s corruption here.”
Developing: Cuba may have only two to three weeks of oil left as Trump works to implement more regime change in the region with another oil blockade, the Financial Times reported Monday.
Recall that the White House is hoping to topple Cuba’s leaders by the end of the year, officials recently told the Wall Street Journal. That accounts for the pressure Trump has put on Mexico to halt oil shipments to Cuba, “which it supplied in exchange for medical services from Cuban doctors,” as the Times reported Saturday. Those stopped in early January. Trump signed an executive order last week promising tariffs on any nation that sells oil to Cuba. The Associated Press has a tiny bit more on these developments, reporting Sunday from Air Force One, here.
From the ruins of America’s failed invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan, Trump’s Venezuela oil plans are following a few legal precedents and creative workarounds learned during those conflicts, argue former State Department counsel Scott Anderson and former Treasury Department official Alex Zerden, writing Monday in Lawfare.
After some lengthy rehashing of State Secretary Marco Rubio’s testimony last week before the senate, which we flagged in Thursday’s newsletter, Anderson and Zerden write this in summary: “At its highest level, the contours of the Trump administration’s policy towards Venezuelan assets follow a familiar and reasonable policy logic,” however Trump’s “shameful record of self-enrichment” makes close “scrutiny all the more important, as there is still room in these arrangements for genuine corruption.”
Analysis: When it comes to Trump’s foreign policy, the president can best be described as a “Predatory Hegemon,” argues Harvard’s Stephen Walt, writing Tuesday in Foreign Affairs. Here’s a loose outline of his argument:
There are many examples of this throughout history, Walt argues. For example, “The desire to extract wealth from colonial possessions was a central ingredient in the Belgian, British, French, Portuguese, and Spanish colonial empires, and similar motives influenced Nazi Germany’s one-sided economic relations with its trading partners in central and eastern Europe and the Soviet Union’s relations with its Warsaw Pact allies.”
The big problem, he argues: “This strategy is not a coherent, well-thought-out response to the return of multipolarity; in fact, it is exactly the wrong way to act in a world of several great powers” because “predatory hegemony contains the seeds of its own destruction.” After flagging several inflated and inaccurate claims by Trump, Walt warns in closing, “To be sure, the United States is not about to face a vast countervailing coalition or lose its independence—it is too strong and favorably positioned to suffer that fate. It will, however, become poorer, less secure, and less influential than it has been for most living Americans’ lifetimes.” Continue reading, here.
By the way, here’s Trump speaking at a black-tie event Saturday for a club that began meeting in 1913 to celebrate the birthday of the legendarily treasonous Army Gen. Robert E. Lee: “We’re not going to invade Greenland. We’re going to buy it,” Trump told the meeting of CEOs known as the Alfalfa Club, according to the Washington Post.
“It’s never been my intention to make Greenland the 51st state. I want to make Canada the 51st state. Greenland will be the 52nd state. Venezuela can be 53rd,” Trump said.
Additional reading: “Judge calls Justice Department’s statements on slavery exhibit display ‘dangerous’ and ‘horrifying,’” the Associated Press reported Saturday from Philadelphia.
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Shutdown begins as Congress hopes to keep duration minimal. The Senate on Friday evening approved a spending package that ensures nearly all agencies are funded through fiscal 2026, but the agreement came too late to stave off an appropriations lapse, Eric Katz of Government Executive reports.
With House lawmakers in recess until today, funding cannot be restored until the afternoon at the earliest. But that vote isn’t expected until at least Tuesday, according to The Hill and Reuters.
Recap: Senate Democrats and the White House came to an agreement late Thursday to fund the vast majority of federal agencies, while providing a two-week stopgap continuing resolution to the Homeland Security Department. Democrats want more restrictions placed on DHS’s immigration enforcement as part of that agency’s funding bill.
Possible DHS reforms include the removal of masks by federal law enforcement personnel, mandated use of body cameras, a requirement for third-party warrants to enter homes, the end of roving patrols in metropolitan areas by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and more uniform restrictions on use of force by federal agents. Democrats plan to negotiate over those items with the White House while the two-week DHS continuing resolution is in effect.
“Border czar” Homan’s rhetoric of war. Top Border Patrol official Tom Homan said there are still “around 3,000” immigration agents with either ICE or CBP in Minnesota. “They’ve been in theater—some of these people have been in theater for eight months,” Homan said at a press conference Friday. “So there’s going to be rotations of personnel. Hopefully less now that we have some agreements, maybe we can make it more efficient and safe. But they’ve been in theater a long time.”
Homan also said he hopes immigration agents don’t kill anymore people in Minnesota. “The President, one of the words he said to me, I came up here, he said he didn’t want to see anybody die,” he told reporters. “The less interference, the less rhetoric,” he said. “I buried ICE agents throughout my career, and the saddest thing I’ve ever done is hand a folded flag to a wife or a child. I don’t want to see anybody die. Even the people we’re looking for. I don’t want to see anybody die.”
“When we go find that bad guy, when we find that bad guy, many times it’s with others,” Homan said. “But we’re going to enforce immigration law…We’re going to do target enforcement operations and we’re going to prioritize the public-safety threats and national-security threats. That is what we’re here to do.”
Update: ProPublica has ID’d the two immigration agents who killed VA nurse Alex Pretti nine days ago. Their names are Jesus Ochoa, 43, and Raymundo Gutierrez, 35.
Why name these agents? “We believe there are few investigations that deserve more sunlight and public scrutiny than this one, in which two masked agents fired 10 shots at Pretti as he lay on the ground after being pepper-sprayed,” the news outlet said in an editor’s note. “The Department of Justice said it is investigating the incident, but the names of the two agents have been withheld from Congress and from state and local law enforcement.”
“The policy of shielding officers’ identities, particularly after a public shooting, is a stark departure from standard law enforcement protocols,” ProPublica said, citing lawmakers, state attorneys general, and former federal officials in this break from precedent. “Such secrecy, in our view, deprives the public of the most fundamental tool for accountability.” Story, here.
ICE agents in Minnesota ran a woman from Ecuador off the road, causing her to crash, and “in the course of her arrest” hurt her enough that she required seven days in the hospital. Politico’s Kyle Cheney flagged that development on social media Sunday.
In a separate encounter some likened to actions of a drug cartel, immigration agents tracked down an observer in her car, raced ahead of it in three unmarked cars and then stopped suddenly before jumping out and surrounding her vehicle with their guns drawn just outside of St. Peter, Minn., on Thursday. The scene was recorded on the U.S. citizen’s dash camera and shared with Minnesota Public Radio, which posted it to YouTube.
They opened her car door, dragged her out and handcuffed her on the ground before putting her in their vehicle and driving off. They traveled about 20 minutes before one of the agents received a phone call, and they exited the freeway and dropped her at the St. Peter police station. The police chief then “spoke with her, had her get into his squad car, and took her home,” MPR reports. Homeland Security officials put out a statement two days later calling the woman an “agitator” who ran stop signs while allegedly “stalking and obstructing law enforcement.”
Another Border Patrol agent was found drunk in his car and covered in vomit early Tuesday morning in St. Paul. After failing a sobriety test, he was later arrested and charged with 3rd and 4th degree driving while impaired, a local outlet, the Sahan Journal, reported Thursday.
A judge in Texas sharply criticized federal officials and agents when ordering the release of asylum seeker Adrian Conejo Arias and his five-year-old son Liam this weekend. Both were detained earlier this month in Minnesota when agents detained Liam and used him as bait to arrest his father as well.
“Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned,” the judge wrote in the order.
Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1943, German forces surrendered at Stalingrad, ending a battle that broke the Wehrmacht’s offensive capability. Total Nazi and Soviet casualties are estimated at 2 million and up.
Federal agents now have even broader power to arrest people without a warrant, according to an internal ICE memo the New York Times obtained late last week. The updated directive “centers on a federal law that empowers agents to make warrantless arrests of people they believe are undocumented immigrants, if they are ‘likely to escape’ before an arrest warrant can be obtained.”
Previously similar conditions had been applied to those allegedly posing a “flight risk,” but now they’re much wider—which would seem to make “the general premise of ever getting a warrant pointless,” one expert told the Times.
ICE agents surrounded another American in her car, broke her window, pulled her out and gave her a concussion, bruised ribs and a torn rotator cuff during a violent encounter Thursday in Salem, Oregon. Her local union said she was running errands when she was assaulted by four federal agents who demanded her “paper” while she was driving alone in Salem.
“The agents emptied her purse, discovered her passport, then left Maria there without seeking medical attention for her,” the union said in a statement Saturday. After the encounter, she called the police, who told her she should call the FBI since federal agents were the ones who assaulted her. The Salem Reporter has a bit more. Meanwhile to the south in Eugene, “protesters broke windows and tried to get inside the Federal Building near downtown” on Friday, the Associated Press reports. “City police declared a riot and ordered the crowd to disperse.”
Portland’s mayor is demanding ICE leave the Oregon city after agents fired rubber bullets, pepper balls and tear gas at demonstrators, including children, at a Saturday protest the mayor described as peaceful. “Federal forces deployed heavy waves of chemical munitions, impacting a peaceful daytime protest where the vast majority of those present violated no laws, made no threat, and posed no danger to federal forces,” Mayor Keith Wilson said in a statement Saturday evening.
“To those who continue to work for ICE: Resign. To those who control this facility: Leave,” the mayor said. “Through your use of violence and the trampling of the Constitution, you have lost all legitimacy and replaced it with shame,” he added. He also said the city is “moving swiftly to operationalize an ordinance that went into effect this month, imposing a fee on detention facilities that use chemical agents. As we prepare to put that law into action, we are also documenting today’s events and preserving evidence. The federal government must, and will, be held accountable.”
Bigger picture: “It appears the crime rate of CBP agents and offices was higher PER CAPITA than the crime rate of undocumented immigrants,” journalist Garrett Graff testified Friday after reviewing decades of public data as part of Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker’s Illinois Accountability Commission. Over the last decade, the arrest rate alone for CBP officers and agents (.5%) is higher than the arrest rate of undocumented immigrants in the United States (.4%), according to data from the National Institute of Justice.
“Criminality is so rampant inside CBP that it has seen one of its own agents or officers arrested every 24 to 36 hours since 2005,” he testified Friday. “According to CBP’s own discipline reports, over the 20 years from 2005 to 2024—the last year numbers are available—at least 4,913 CBP officers and Border Patrol agents have been arrested themselves, some multiple times.” But it doesn’t end there. “CBP’s arrest and misconduct rate is FIVE TIMES higher than other federal law enforcement agencies,” Graff reports.
“US federal law enforcement has never experienced a scandal as big, as far-reaching, destructive, and as far-lasting as the wave of corruption and criminality that has overtaken CBP and the Border Patrol since 2005,” Graff writes in his 50-page analysis of these historical trends. “It is a scandal that has played out the way too many Washington scandals do: With no single headline-grabbing crisis moment ever provoking action—just a steady drip-drip of allegations, misdeeds, and missed opportunities.”
Why bring all this up? “Congress is debating right now what, if any, changes it will attempt to force on the way that ICE and CBP operate—these next two weeks are one of the biggest opportunities we have as a nation to change what we see happening in our country,” Graff says.
After all, before Trump took office last January, “ICE and CBP managed to go about its work in such a way that didn’t cause ordinary law-abiding US citizens to fear for their lives; ICE or CBP agents didn’t routinely operate wearing masks and deploy teargas daily against US citizens; the entire school systems of major US cities didn’t have to close in fear of CBP and ICE operaGons targeting neighborhoods, and professional sports leagues like the NBA didn’t have to cancel games because of ICE and CBP violence in major American cities. Something big has changed.” Read more, here.
Also: ICE confirmed Sunday there is a measles outbreak at its 2,400-person holding facility for immigrants in Dilley, Texas, San Antonio’s News4 reported. The facility now holds about 1,200 people, including 400 children, according to the San Antonio Current.
Additional reading:
Pentagon taps six to lead critical technology areas. “The six CTAs are department-wide imperatives designed to maintain American military dominance — and now, each one will have accountable leaders leading the tangible ‘sprints’ under each CTA. Each sprint will be designed to deliver advanced capabilities to our warfighters rapidly and at scale,” the Pentagon said in Thursday-night social-media posts. DefenseScoop rolls them up, here.
SOUTHCOM gets a new commander. It’s Marine Lt. Gen. Francis Donovan, who had been serving as vice commander of U.S. Special Operations Command until he was approved by voice vote of the Senate on Friday evening. Donovan’s predecessor, Adm. Alvin Holsey, abruptly resigned last year in the wake of reported concerns about the Trump administration’s bombing of alleged drug boats. DefenseScoop has a bit more, here.
Space Force stands up NORTHCOM element. It’s the latest cocom component established by the newest service branch, which stood up its SOUTHCOM component late last year. Air & Space Forces mag has a bit more, here.
Russian drone kills a dozen civilians ahead of peace talks. Associated Press: “A Russian drone strike on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro hit a bus carrying mineworkers and killed at least a dozen people, Ukrainian authorities said Sunday, hours after President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that the next round of peace talks between Russian and Ukrainian delegations will take place on Wednesday and Thursday.” Read on, here.
Israel air strikes kill dozens in Gaza. At least 32 people were killed in air strikes in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, according to the region’s civil defense agency, which is operated by Hamas. “Palestinians have described these strikes as the heaviest since the second phase of the ceasefire, brokered by US President Trump last October, came into effect earlier this month,” the BBC reported. “The Israeli military confirmed that a number of strikes were carried out in response to what it said was a Hamas violation of the agreement on Friday.” More, here.
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The U.S. may be headed for another government shutdown. Lawmakers are tussling over terms to keep the government open ahead of a funding deadline this evening at midnight. A bipartisan deal had been reached Thursday afternoon after the White House and Senate Democrats announced an agreement to separate Homeland Security funds from a five-bill package the full Senate could take up on Friday.
“Republicans and Democrats in Congress have come together to get the vast majority of the Government funded until September, while at the same time providing an extension to the Department of Homeland Security,” President Trump said on social media just after 6 p.m. ET.
But shortly before midnight, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., torpedoed the compromise because it would repeal a provision allowing lawmakers like Graham to sue for $500,000 if their phone records were collected as part of former special counsel Jack Smith’s probe into interference in the 2020 general election. He also told reporters he didn’t want DHS funded only through Feb. 13, as the compromise plan instructed, while bipartisan negotiations continued over possible reforms affecting immigration agents—including “an end to roving patrols, a ban on face masks and a requirement to wear body cameras,” Reuters reports.
Senate leader John Thune’s forecast: “Tomorrow’s another day and hopefully people will be in a spirit to try to get this done,” he said as he left the Capitol Thursday night, according to The Hill. Senators are expected to return beginning at 11 a.m. ET. “Hopefully by sometime tomorrow we’ll be in a better spot,” Thune said.
Another hiccup: House Speaker Mike Johnson said his chamber won’t act any earlier than Monday, which he said Thursday night means, “We may inevitably be in a short shutdown situation,” the New York Times reports.
Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1933, Adolf Hitler took office as the Chancellor of Germany.
Dozens of military lawyers have been temporarily assigned as federal prosecutors to support law-enforcement surges in Minneapolis and other cities, Defense One’s Tom Novelly reported Thursday.
This month alone, the Justice Department requested about 40 lawyers, a U.S. official said. It’s a novel arrangement that’s stretching an overworked judge advocate general corps and drawing concern from legal experts.
Expert reax: “The government has used JAGs to help prosecute offenses unrelated to military bases in a handful of cases over the years, but we’ve never seen JAGs used at this scale in civilian criminal cases with no military connection,” said Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor. “Not only does the scale raise serious concerns about taking JAGs away from their regular duties, but it also raises the question of why the Department of Justice is having so much trouble trying these cases itself.”
Second opinion: Steven Lepper, a retired Air Force judge advocate general, said he has serious doubts about the administration’s new use of the military lawyers. “The fact that there is no military nexus here between the kinds of cases that JAGs serving as special assistant U.S. attorneys are going to help prosecute essentially puts these JAGs in a role where the fundamental question ought to be whether doing that is a violation of Posse Comitatus,” he said. Continue reading, here.
Nationwide protests and walkouts are planned Friday in 46 states across the country in response to the deaths of American citizens Alex Pretti and Renee Good at the hands of immigration agents in Minneapolis this month. The plans come on the heels of “last Friday’s protests when thousands marched through Minneapolis in the bitter cold, urging an end to President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown in their city,” Reuters reported Friday from Minneapolis.
Panning out: “After weeks of videos showing aggressive tactics by heavily armed and masked officers in Minneapolis, American approval of Trump’s immigration policy has fallen to its lowest in his second term,” the wire service writes.
Footage circulated Thursday of a woman in Minnesota who walked outside to warm the car for her kids and was abducted by federal agents. The video shows her calling someone on the phone to look after her children, who were left alone in the house.
Meanwhile in D.C., police arrested 54 religious demonstrators who sat inside the Hart Senate Office Building as several held banners that read “Do Justice, Love kindness, Abolish ICE.”
The view from Minnesota: “It’s an armed force that’s assaulting, that’s killing my constituents, my citizens,” Gov. Tim Walz said in an interview with The Atlantic this week. “I mean, is this a Fort Sumter?” Walz asked, referring to the South Carolina fort where Confederate forces fired the first shots of the Civil War in 1861.
Some Americans have observed that unrest today echoes the tumultuous 1960s, which saw several assassinations—including President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy, Malcomb X and Martin Luther King Jr. Those observers point to the attempted assasination of Trump, the assassination of Charlie Kirk and two Democratic lawmakers from Minnesota last year, as well as the two Americans killed in Minneapolis this month. Other historians have pointed to Germany in 1933 with the rise of police state tactics and concentration camps. And still others have pointed to a time when congressional decorum and gridlock was far worse than it is today: America in the 1850s, after congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which tackled an overhyped problem and targeted northern sanctuary cities and helped collapse the country and ignite a civil war in 1861, as Walz mentioned.
Trump’s deportation raids have inspired at least two protest songs in America: “Join ICE,” by Jesse Welles, and “Streets of Minneapolis,” by Bruce Springstein, which was released this week after the deaths of Pretti and Good. Shock over their deaths has reached as far as the Danish island of Greenland, where some residents who said they were warm to the idea of becoming a U.S. territory under Trump now said they’ve changed their mind, the New York Times reported Thursday.
On social media Thursday night, Trump called Pretti an “agitator and, perhaps, insurrectionist” after footage was posted online Wednesday showing Pretti spit at an agent and kick the tail light off of a government vehicle on Jan. 13. The agents then exited their vehicle and tackled him to the ground, breaking one of his ribs. The incident occurred one week before DHS agents tackled and disarmed him before shooting him to death on Saturday.
Related reading:
A secretive Air Force spy drone was used in the U.S. military’s operation to capture Venezuela’s leader earlier this month, Lockheed Martin’s CEO confirmed, marking a rare disclosure of the aircraft’s operations, Defense One’s Tom Novelly reported Thursday.
James Taiclet confirmed that RQ-170 Sentinel stealth drones were part of the Jan. 3 Venezuelan mission, dubbed Operation Absolute Resolve, on a Thursday earnings call. “Lockheed Martin products once again proved critical to the U.S. military’s most demanding missions,” Taiclet said. “The recent Operation Absolute Resolve included F-35 and F-22 fighter jets, RQ-170 Sentinel stealth drones, and Sikorsky Black Hawk helicopters, which helped ensure mission success while bringing the men and women of our armed forces home safely.”
Taiclet’s mention of the spy drone is the first disclosure of the aircraft’s operations in roughly half a decade. In 2021, the 432nd Wing at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada briefly mentioned the unit had “successfully deployed and redeployed RQ-170 Sentinel forces” in a news release. While the use of the surveillance drone in the Venezuela operations was not surprising to some Air Force analysts, one expert said the disclosure of the mission from Lockheed Martin was abnormal. Read on, here.
And lastly this week: Experts have questions about the White House’s new National Defense Strategy, including whether there’s an implementation plan to go with it, Defense One’s Meghann Myers reported Thursday.
One consideration: While there are always some tensions or contradictions in an NDS, because they’re written by a group of people, this latest document seems to go in several directions at the same time, said Becca Wasser, a CNAS adjunct senior fellow.
The thesis of the NDS is that the rules-based international order was a far-fetched fantasy. It’s a favored worldview of Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s policy chief and key NDS author, Myers reports.
The strategy proposes to replace that framework with what the Trump administration has coined the “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine: “American military dominance” in the Western Hemisphere that denies “adversaries’ ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities” there.
“What is interesting about that, though, is that, of course, it doesn’t say much about what this is,” said Dustin Walker, policy director at Anduril. “What is replacing that order, what are the sort of higher-order strategic objectives that we are pursuing here?” He added, “You don’t really hear much about sort of procurement priorities. I think Golden Dome is literally the only specific capability area mentioned in the document. So you don’t have a lot of guidance for force design and development here. There’s no description of the budget or sort of investment profile that’s going to be required to do this.”
Second opinion: The document may not even be “worth the paper it’s written on because the president’s going to do whatever he wants and he’s not going to even try to adhere to it, which might be why it was released with such little fanfare,” said Stacie Pettyjohn, a CNAS senior fellow with the Center for a New American Security, which hosted a Wednesday discussion on the strategy. Continue reading, here.
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President Trump’s National Guard deployments across the country have already cost $589 million, and could rise to more than $1 billion by the end of the year if staffing trends and mission scope do not change, according to a new report from the Congressional Budget Office.
Current deployments are costing about $93 million a month, and the price for 1,000 Guard troops deployed to any American city costs between $18 and $21 million per month.
Rewind: Trump has sent or tried to send troops to six U.S. cities so far. “The Democrats run most of the cities that are in bad shape,” he claimed during a speech at a virtually unprecedented gathering of military leaders at a Marine base in Quantico, Va., this fall. “What they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles—they’re very unsafe places and we’re going to straighten them out one by one.”
“It’s a war from within,” the president told his generals. “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military National Guard.”
Trump ordered Guard troops to Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland last year, but judges eventually blocked those deployments after state officials filed suits in court. The matter eventually rose to the Supreme Court, which stepped in to block the Chicago deployment in late December. That decision prompted the president to pull out-of-state soldiers he’d sent to Oregon and Illinois, as well as other soldiers and active-duty Marines in California.
Guard troops remain deployed in Memphis, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C. Some state lawmakers have requested Guard troops for Charlotte, but no troops have been sent there yet. Those in New Orleans have been tasked through February; those in Memphis are expected to remain through September; and those in Washington were recently extended through the end of the year.
Trump offered false and exaggerated crime statistics to justify his Guard mobilization for D.C. and a takeover of the local police in August. He’s claimed the troop mobilizations will reduce crime in some of the cities where they deployed.
But he also “federalized” Guard troops to provide logistical support during deportation operations in Los Angeles. That tasking triggered a lawsuit in California after troops protected federal agents carrying out arrests and, on at least two occasions, detained civilians. A judge later found those actions violated the Posse Comitatus Act, a statute against using the military for civilian policing.
Background: The idea of sending out-of-state Guard troops to help enforce deportation was first floated by a top Trump advisor. In 2023, Stephen Miller told Charlie Kirk, “In terms of personnel, you go to the red-state governors and you say, give us your National Guard. We will deputize them as immigration-enforcement officers. The Alabama National Guard is going to arrest illegal aliens in Alabama and the Virginia National Guard in Virginia. And if you’re going to go into an unfriendly state like Maryland, well, there would just be Virginia doing the arrest in Maryland right, very close, very nearby.”
The Republican governors of Ohio, West Virginia, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana sent hundreds of their Guard troops to D.C. after Trump’s announcement in August.
The two statutes Trump has relied upon to deploy Guard troops have been 10 U.S.C. 12406 (Title 10) and 32 U.S.C. 502(f) (Title 32). Title 10 authorizes federalization during a foreign invasion, a rebellion or when laws can’t be carried out with ordinary law-enforcement resources. Title 32 allows the president or defense secretary to ask governors to activate state Guard forces for federally funded missions. Under Title 32, these troops are controlled by the state governor, but their operations are federally funded and regulated.
At least four cities have made it clear they do not want Guard troops sent by the White House. That includes Boston; Detroit; New Haven, Conn.; and Seattle. Relatedly, the state of Washington passed a new law in April blocking out-of-state military troops that might be sent by other governors to enforce Trump’s immigration policies after Republican governors said in December 2024 they would use “every tool at our disposal,” including using their Guard forces, to help advance that goal beyond their state borders. (Montana, Texas, and Idaho have similar laws on the books.)
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Welcome to this Thursday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1947, six RD4 Skytrain cargo planes launched from the carrier Philippine Sea for a two-month mission to map some 150,000 square miles of Antarctica.
Will Venezuela’s Delcy Rodriguez obey the White House? One day after Secretary of State Marco Rubio threatened the Venezuelan leader in Senate testimony, Reuters says U.S. intelligence reports have indicated that she may not be disposed to cooperate with Trump-administration officials’ public statements that “they want the interim president to sever relations with close international allies like Iran, China and Russia, including expelling their diplomats and advisers from Venezuela.” More, here.
The U.S. has so far sold Venezuelan oil for $500 million, and pocketed $200 million of that money, Rubio told lawmakers Wednesday. According to Rubio, “They have pledged to use a substantial amount of those funds to purchase medicine and equipment directly from the United States.” As for the other $200 million, Rubio claimed it would eventually be transferred to a U.S. Treasury account. When asked what U.S. law authorized that deal, Rubio replied that Venezuela had agreed to it. “We haven’t finalized what that audit process would be. We’ve only made one payment and that payment we did, and retrospectively will be audited,” Rubio said, and described the idea as “simply a way to divide revenue so that there isn’t systemic collapse while we work through this recovery and transition.”
Some lawmakers were particularly skeptical of that plan. “You are taking their oil at gunpoint, you are holding and selling that oil,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told Rubio. “You’re deciding how and for what purposes that money is going to be used in a country of 30 million people…I think a lot of us believe that that is destined for failure.”
“I think it’s funky. I think it may not even be permissible,” said Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii.
How long will it continue? “I can’t give you a timeline of how long it takes,” Rubio said. “It can’t take forever. I get it. We all want something immediately. But this is not a frozen dinner you put in a microwave and in two and a half minutes it comes out ready to eat.”
Democrats weren’t the only ones pressuring Rubio on Wednesday. “I do think the administration could get Congress to be a better partner by informing us better,” Sen. John Curtis, R-Utah, said. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, also confronted Rubio about whether or not the Maduro abduction constituted an act of war. “Would it be an act of war if someone did it to us? Nobody dies, few casualties, they’re in and out, boom, it’s a perfect military operation. Would that be an act of war?” Paul asked. “Of course it would be an act of war,” he told Rubio.
ICYMI: A new “non-kinetic” cell helped with the Venezuela mission, reports Nextgov’s David DiMolfetta. Developed in the past few months, it’s a new U.S. military unit that helps integrate cyber, electronic-warfare, influence, and other such effects into missions, especially specialized ones. Read more, here.
Update: The U.S. military is still carrying out a flurry of airstrikes against militants throughout Somalia, David Sterman of the New America think tank pointed out Wednesday in his counterterrorism tracker. “Quite possible that January ends with more strikes in Somalia in a single month than conducted by any non-Trump president in any single year,” he wrote on social media. He added, “Not there yet but four days to go. Plus possible multiple strikes by clarifications to come. Plus press releases often lag by a few days.”
Golden Dome alert: The technology for the satellites being developed to detect and track enemy missiles isn’t as ready as Space Force’s Space Development Agency says it is, which has already led to extra work and delays, the Government Accountability Office reports. GAO also says SDA isn’t keep the broader military informed about its progress. “Consequently, SDA is at risk of delivering satellites that do not meet warfighter needs,” its report says. Read that, here.
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And lastly: Reax to Trump’s “We have never really asked anything” of our allies. “On the contrary, our allies fought alongside us in Afghanistan precisely because we asked them to,” wrote former Army infantryman and Afghanistan veteran Micah Ables in Defense One. “After we were attacked on 9/11, we invoked Article 5, becoming the first—and so far, still the only—nation to ever ask for military assistance under the auspices of NATO’s collective defense commitment.”
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Update: Two federal officers discharged their weapons during the fatal encounter that culminated in the death of an American citizen Saturday in Minneapolis, several news outlets, including the Associated Press, reported Tuesday. Bystander videos collected during the confrontation suggested as much, but the detail was formally submitted in accordance with a law mandating congressional notification within 72 hours of a person’s death while in Customs and Border Protection custody.
CBP’s notification does not mention the deceased citizen “attacking officers or threatening them with a weapon—as the administration first described the incident,” NPR reports. This is notable because Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was quick to describe the victim Alex Pretti and his actions Saturday as “domestic terrorism,” and claimed he was “attacking” officers and “brandishing” a weapon before they shot him 10 times. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller also described Pretti as a “would-be-assassin” and a “domestic terrorist.”
Part of a pattern: “In six violent encounters, evidence contradicts Trump immigration officials’ narratives,” Reuters reported in a special analysis Tuesday spanning events in Minneapolis, Chicago and Texas.
Why it matters: “Every minor inconsistency adds up, and at some point, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to believe almost anything” immigration officials say, U.S. District Court Judge Sara Ellis said in November after Homeland Security officials claimed on social media that Border Patrol commander-at-large Gregory Bovino was hit with a rock by a protester. Five days later in court, Bovino admitted it “almost” hit him.
Trump on Bovino: “He’s a pretty out-there kind of a guy” and “maybe it wasn’t good” to send him to Minneapolis, the president told Will Cain of Fox Tuesday. He also said taking Bovino out of Minneapolis is not a “pull back” of deportation operations there; rather “it’s a little bit of a change,” he said.
Trump also claimed “these are paid insurrectionists” in Minneapolis, without providing evidence for the allegation. He also said he was pleased that inflation and affordability are not in the headlines at the moment.
Meanwhile in Minneapolis, a man sprayed a frequent target of Trump’s criticism, Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, with a foul-smelling liquid during a town hall event Tuesday, which did not harm the lawmaker. Police quickly arrested the man and charged him with third-degree assault. Reuters has more.
Trump’s response: “I don’t think about her. I think she’s a fraud. I really don’t think about that. She probably had herself sprayed, knowing her.”
In case you missed it: A Latino congressman from Florida was punched in a “racist attack” in Utah Friday night, the Guardian reports. The attacker shouted, “We are going to deport you” before striking Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost at the Sundance film festival, the Salt Lake Tribune reports.
By the way, the Trump administration’s social-media output echoes white-supremacist messaging, the New York Times reported Tuesday. That includes “a flurry of posts” from the White House, Department of Labor and Department of Homeland Security featuring “images, slogans and even a song used by the white nationalist right.”
An ICE agent tried to enter the Ecuador embassy in Minneapolis on Tuesday, which is not allowed as embassies are viewed as sovereign territory and protected under diplomatic immunity. An eyewitness told Reuters, “I saw the officers going after two people in the street, and then those people went into the consulate and the officers tried to go in after them.” The incident triggered Ecuador’s Foreign Ministry to send a “note of protest” to their U.S. counterparts in Quito.
Developing: The U.S. is sending an ICE unit to Italy for the Winter Olympics, and the decision has already “set off concern and confusion” across the Atlantic, the Associated Press reported Tuesday from Milan.
The opening ceremony is slated for next Friday, Feb. 6. The U.S. forces attending are part of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit, which has often assisted with security at Olympics abroad. “Agents from HSI conduct investigations into anything that has a cross-border nexus from human smuggling to fentanyl trafficking to smuggling of cultural artifacts,” AP explains. Its agents “are stationed in embassies around the world to facilitate their investigations and build relations with local law enforcement in those countries.”
The HSI personnel are separate from ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations forces patrolling American streets and arresting alleged immigrants. “That distinction, however, wasn’t immediately clear to local media Tuesday,” AP reports. That concern followed a “news report that aired Sunday showing an Italian news crew being threatened in Minneapolis by ICE agents.” More, here.
Italy and many of America’s European allies acknowledge they are often in a precarious position when it comes to pushing back against certain unilateral decisions from the Trump administration, as Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni said last week in the wake of Trump’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. At that event, Trump announced he wanted to make Greenland a U.S. territory—but said he won’t use military force to do it—and again criticized many NATO members for not spending 5% of their GDP on their militaries. After discussions with Trump last week, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte seems to have satisfied Trump’s Greenland concerns for now.
Meloni was asked for her opinion about Italians possibly “taking our distance” from Trump’s recent rhetoric of annexation and disdain for European defense spending before she replied rhetorically, “So what should Europe do then—shut down American bases, tear up trade deals, boycott McDonalds?”
To be clear, “The guiding pillars of our foreign policy are the EU and the Atlantic alliance,” Meloni said. “Of course, I don’t always agree with everything my allies say. The interests of nations don’t always perfectly overlap.” Still, “I think international law must be fully defended,” she said, and added, “But I don’t understand what you’re asking when you say Italy must distance itself from the United States.”
Developing: Trump’s tariff threats seem to be motivating Europe to finalize a trade deal with India that began 19 years ago, the Financial Times reported Tuesday. “India and the EU will also unveil a defence pact that Brussels hopes will tilt India away from its close ties to Russia,” though it’s unclear just yet precisely what’s included in the details of that agreement.
For what it’s worth: “The EU is India’s largest trading partner in goods, with bilateral trade worth about $136bn in the year to the end of March 2025,” FT reports, citing statistics from the Indian government.
Bigger picture: The deal “is being finalised at a time of rising protectionism, geopolitical fragmentation and growing use of trade as a strategic tool,” Ajay Srivastava of the Global Trade Research Initiative told FT.
Those points were dominant themes in last week’s address at Davos by Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney. And while he never mentioned Trump by name, the U.S. president took offense to Carney’s message of solidarity for the world’s “middle powers” and issued a thinly-veiled threat the following day, saying, “They should be grateful to us, Canada. Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.”
Carney, on Tuesday: “I meant what I said in Davos,” the prime minister replied when asked if he dialed down his rhetoric from last week in a phone call with Trump on Monday. “Canada was the first country to understand the change in U.S. trade policy that he had initiated, and we’re responding to that,” Carney said.
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Welcome to this Wednesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds into its flight, killing Navy Cmdr. Michael Smith and six other crew members.
Rubio threatens Venezuelan leaders: “We are prepared to use force to ensure maximum cooperation if other methods fail.” In an opening statement released ahead of his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote, “We will closely monitor the performance of the interim authorities as they cooperate with our stage-based plan to restore stability to Venezuela.”
Delcy Rodríguez “is well aware of the fate of Maduro,” Rubio wrote. “She has committed to opening Venezuela’s energy sector to American companies, providing preferential access to production, and using revenues to purchase American goods. She has pledged to end Venezuela’s oil lifeline to the Cuban regime and to pursue national reconciliation with Venezuelans at home and abroad.”
Rodríguez: The U.S. threatened to kill Venezuelan leaders if they did not cooperate after American troops captured President Nicolás Maduro on Jan. 3, The Guardian reported Friday after “her remarks appear[ed] in a leaked recording of the nearly two-hour meeting that was held in Venezuela seven days after the US attack.”
ICYMI: The U.S. military conducted another airstrike in another alleged drug-trafficking boat off the coast of Latin America. It happened Friday as “the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations,” military officials at Southern Command said in a press release.
The strike killed two more people and left one survivor, which it tasked Coast Guard forces with retrieving, SOUTHCOM said.
Update: The U.S. has killed at least 126 people over the course of 36 known strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats in the waters around Latin America since September. The U.S. attack on Caracas during the Jan. 3 abduction of killed nearly 80 others, including 32 from Cuba and 47 from Venezuela.
And U.S. troops have seized at least seven crude oil tankers allegedly linked to Venezuela since that operation began in December. The latest occurred last Tuesday with the apprehension of Motor Vessel Sagitta, according to SOUTHCOM.
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Trump’s national defense strategy is unlike anything that’s come before it, and may not be sustainable, according to experts who spoke to Defense One’s Meghann Myers. “I don’t think it will be a lasting change,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “Right at the very beginning, they basically say they don’t believe in a rules-based international order. And I don’t think that there is a consensus in the United States about that.” Indeed, more than half of Americans recently surveyed on U.S. leadership abroad support more engagement rather than less, including more than 60 percent of Republicans. Read on, here.
CSIS’ Mark Cancian has posted his own analysis. “Many changes are indeed substantial, even radical, and reportedly received pushback from military leaders during the drafting process. Others, however, may not be as significant as they first appear, and there is some continuity with previous strategy documents. The document also constitutes a different reading experience, departing from the analytic tone of previous strategy documents and often adopting the tone of a political rally.” Read that, here.
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Similarly, details of a NORAD exercise in Greenland this month were not disclosed.
Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino has reportedly been ordered to leave the city of Minneapolis, the Associated Press and The Atlantic reported Monday evening, citing a person close to the decision as well as Homeland Security Department officials, respectively.
Before federal immigration agents surged into Minneapolis beginning last month, the city had been calm, and its roughly 600 police officers had few problems as they performed their duties. Indeed, “The Minneapolis Police Department went the entire year last year recovering about 900 guns from the street, arresting hundreds and hundreds of violent offenders, and we didn’t shoot anyone,” Chief Brian O’Hara told CBS News on Sunday.
But after Bovino and 2,000 immigration enforcers arrived three weeks ago, three Americans were shot by federal agents on the city’s streets, and two have been killed, O’Hara reminded viewers Sunday.
“This is not sustainable,” he said. “This is taking an enormous toll, trying to manage all of this chaos on top of having to be the police department for a major city. It’s too much.”
The White House’s “border czar” Tom Homan will now take over in Minneapolis, which is about 300 miles from the Canadian-U.S. border. And Homan—who was reportedly accused of taking a $50,000 bribe in an FBI sting operation in 2024—will begin by meeting with Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, President Trump said on social media.
Homan’s visit comes three days after Bovino claimed the latest American shot dead by federal agents had planned to “massacre” law enforcement officers, despite multiple videos from the confrontation that did not support Bovino’s claim. The man who was killed Saturday was a 37-year-old ICU nurse from the Department of Veterans Affairs named Alex Pretti. His killing “ignited political backlash and raised fresh questions about how the operation was being run,” AP reports.
Bovino will now “return to his former job in El Centro, California, where he is expected to retire soon,” Nick Miroff of The Atlantic reports, and says Bovino’s “sudden demotion is the clearest sign yet that the Trump administration is reconsidering its most aggressive tactics” as it continues its effort to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, as the president promised on the campaign trail. But that ambition has not been without its violent and often indiscriminate stumbles, as recent developments in Minnesota have revealed.
Also new: “Minnesota’s top federal judge says ICE has been violating court orders repeatedly—detaining noncitizens or rushing them to Texas despite judges’ commands,” Politico’s Kyle Cheney reported Monday evening.
In response, the judge ordered ICE acting director Todd Lyons to appear in court Friday, declaring, “The court’s patience is at an end.” He also threatened Lyons with contempt for ICE’s repeated violation of court orders.
And on Capitol Hill, the chiefs of ICE, Customs and Border Protections, and Citizenship and Immigration Services have been called to testify on Feb. 12, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, announced Monday on social media. Paul chairs the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs.
Related: Two legal experts just shared a list of “10 Questions the Trump Administration Needs to Answer About Minnesota” published Tuesday at Just Security. Queries include:
Rhetoric watch: Several senior White House officials—including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller—have asserted that Alex Pretti was a “domestic terrorist.” That was “not a slip of the tongue or an impulsive idea. Instead, it appears to be part of the administration’s campaign to demonize opposition to its anti-immigrant policies as ‘domestic terrorism,’ and to weaponize powers of the federal government against such perceived political opponents,” warn legal fellow Tom Jocelyn and former Defense Department special counsel Ryan Goodman, writing Monday in Just Security.
Developing: The FBI says it will begin investigating Minnesota citizens who use the Signal messaging app to track ICE movements. FBI Director Kash Patel announced the move Monday on a podcast with conservative activist Benny Johnson. NBC News reports Patel’s remarks “quickly drew skepticism from free speech advocates who said the First Amendment protects members of the public who share legally obtained information, such as the names of federal agents or where they are conducting enforcement operations.”
Second opinion: “Given this administration’s poor track record of distinguishing protected speech from criminal conduct, any investigation like this deserves very close scrutiny,” Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told NBC.
New: Employees at the Minnesota Department of Corrections have taken a stand against misinformation from the Homeland Security Department. They recently created a webpage, “Combatting DHS Misinformation,” Minnesota Corrections official Safia Khan said in a post on LinkedIn Monday because officials in the Trump administration have been “distorting facts, mislabeling state custody transfers as ICE arrests, and justifying armed federal deployments based on fabrications.”
“We are witnessing the machinery of propaganda operate at scale,” Khan wrote. “So we fought back with facts. We released proof, footage, and records showing that ICE arrests being touted on federal websites were, in reality, routine, pre-scheduled state-to-federal custody transfers, not a result of Operation Metro Surge.”
“The Department of Corrections alone has identified at least 68 false claims, and we have made every one of them public,” said Khan, and emphasized, “Our team didn’t seek this fight but we have met it with clarity and resolve.”
Update: The U.S. woman who was shot five times by ICE in Chicago last fall is asking a judge to share evidence from her case, which is under a protective order that her lawyer says “keeps the entire country in the dark” about how federal agents use deadly force against American citizens. The Chicago Sun-Times has more about the case of Marimar Martinez, who was shot, criminally charged, and finally cleared when U.S. attorneys dropped the case on Nov. 20, when Martinez’s lawyers challenged feds’ evidence in the case.
A note of clarity on legal accountability for federal agents who kill U.S. citizens: “A series of decisions by the Supreme Court has made it all but impossible to hold federal officers liable for damages in federal lawsuits for violating our constitutional rights—such as in a February 2020 decision involving a Border Patrol agent who shot and killed an unarmed teenager without provocation,” law professors Barry Friedman and Steve Vladeck explained for readers in the New York Times on Monday. “Instead, the historical backstop for a lack of federal accountability, going all the way back to the founding, has been state law.”
However, “the ability to prosecute federal law enforcement officers who commit state crimes in the course of their duties would turn on whether a reasonable officer in their position would have believed that their actions were necessary to fulfill their duties,” Friedman and Vladeck note. “That standard may be appropriately strict, to maintain federal authority when it is needed (think of federal protection for civil rights protesters in the 1960s), but at least based on the videos so many of us have seen, it should not be impossible.” Read more (gift link), here.
A Minnesota newspaper published a visual explainer on the health effects of chemical irritants used by federal authorities. Review that emblem of our current milieu over at the Star Tribune.
ICYMI: Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed Saturday that “chaos” in Minnesota would end if state officials would hand over the state’s full voter roll—including Social Security numbers, drivers license data, and party affiliations. She sent a letter proposing this to Gov. Tim Walz, calling the handover a “common sense” solution to the state’s problems.
This escalation is part of a pattern, Abby Vesoulis and Ari Berman warned Monday, writing for Mother Jones. “These requests and lawsuits are part of a decadeslong history of right-wing activists seeking private voter data to advance the unproven narrative that there is rampant noncitizen voter fraud proliferating across the US. That the DOJ is now using its considerable resources to promote the same repeatedly debunked theory represents a major escalation of these tactics.”
Meanwhile, users say TikTok is stifling posts about the Minneapolis shooting just “days after a deal to spin off the U.S. business to new investors was finalized,” the Washington Post reported Monday.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced an investigation into the claims as well, which began over the weekend—and which TikTok officials attributed to a power outage at a data center, NBC News reports.
Consider the case of national-security law professor Steve Vladeck, who on Sunday “recorded a video on TikTok about why DHS’s arguments for the power to enter homes without judicial warrants in immigration cases are bunk.” That was a supplement to his highly-recommended Monday newsletter, “One First,” which tackled that subject this week.
Nine hours after posting his explainer to the platform, “TikTok still says my video is ‘under review,’ and can’t be shared,” Vladeck said on a different social media platform. So he shared a link to that video—which you can find here—on the alternate platform instead.
Update: After a roughly 24-hour review period, TikTok finally posted his Sunday video on Monday.
Related reading: “TikTok alternative Skylight soars to 380K+ users after TikTok US deal finalized,” TechCrunch reported Monday.
Welcome to this Tuesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1945, the Soviet Red Army liberated the concentration camp at Auschwitz, a key development in revealing the Holocaust to the world. Since 2005, the UN and its member states have held ceremonies on this day to honor the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of other victims of Nazism.
International observers are closely watching Iran, where the U.S. Navy has dispatched an aircraft carrier strike group as authorities in Tehran continue their deadly crackdown amid unrest that’s been brewing for weeks.
New York Times: “Officials in the Middle East are increasingly worried the United States will strike Iran in the coming days, an attack that could trigger a cycle of retaliation against U.S. bases across the region by Iran and its proxy groups.”
Lincoln has reached CENTCOM’s AOR. As of Monday, the Abraham Lincoln carrier group was in the Central Command’s area of responsibility in the western Indian Ocean, a U.S. official told the Times. “If the White House were to order attacks on Iran, the carrier could, in theory, take military action within a day or two. The United States has already sent a dozen F-15E attack planes to the region to strengthen strike aircraft numbers, according to U.S. officials.” Read on, here.
Adds The Guardian: “The US fleet including several guided-missile destroyers are not yet in final position but are already in striking range of Iran. It is by no means certain that further US attacks on Iran will reignite the street protests, as many Iranians opposed to the clerical leadership in power since 1979 are also opposed to externally imposed regime change.” More, here.
ICYMI: “Bombing Iran would shore up its regime,” Rosemary Kelanic, who leads the Middle East Program at Defense Priorities, opined last week in Defense One. “External attacks stir up nationalism and redirect public anger outward, a ‘rally-around-the-flag’ effect long documented by political scientists.” Read on, here.
Dubai standing down: The UAE said Monday it is “not allowing its airspace, territory, or waters to be used in any hostile actions against Iran, and to not providing any logistical support in this regard,” according to a statement from the foreign ministry.
In other regional activity, Iranian ships have been supplying jet fuel to the military junta in Myanmar, which took over following a coup in February 2021. Just a few days later, the junta’s war planes conducted a fatal air attack on a school, which killed two people and wounded nearly two dozen others. Investigative journalists from Reuters followed the path of Iranian tankers from ports near Iraq, through the Hormuz Strait and to destinations inside Myanmar this past fall to make their case in a multimedia presentation published Monday.
Panning out: The Myanmar junta has attacked “more than 1,000 civilian locations in 15 months,” according to Reuters. “Iran has also dispatched cargoes of urea, a key ingredient in the junta’s munitions, including the bombs it drops from drones and paragliders.”
Why it matters: “Taken together, the Iranian deliveries to Myanmar’s military have helped shift the dynamic of the five-year civil war, which pits the junta against an array of rebel groups, none of whom have a conventional air force or a ready supply of weapons as powerful as the bombs and missiles launched by fighter jets. And for Iran’s embattled government, the trade has brought in new revenue and influence as sanctions tighten and old allies lose power,” four Reuters journalists explain. Worth the click, here.
Developing: China is investigating Xi’s top military deputy, Reuters reported Saturday, and expanded their coverage on Monday. According to the New York Times, “General Zhang’s downfall is of a different magnitude from the dozens of other generals who have been toppled in Mr. Xi’s unrelenting campaign against perceived corruption and disloyalty over the past three years. His fate has astonished even longtime experts who thought that they had taken full measure of Mr. Xi, China’s most powerful and imperious leader in generations.”
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Trump said he would raise tariffs on South Korea on Monday. “Autos, Lumber, Pharma, and all other Reciprocal TARIFFS” would be raised to 25 percent from 15 percent, he declared on his social media platform, because he believes Seoul is not moving quickly enough to implement the bilateral trade deal agreed in October over gilded gifts. It’s not clear whether or when the tariff increase will actually happen, notes CNN, which adds, “Trump’s ability to increase across-the-board tariffs on goods from South Korea or other countries could be hindered by the outcome of a landmark tariff case currently before the Supreme Court.”
Related: Secret recordings show that Sen. Ted Cruz ridiculed Trump’s tariff policies in meetings with donors last year, Axios reports.
Effect on warships? It’s not immediately clear how increasing tariffs might affect Trump’s promise to help South Korea build nuclear submarines, nor the signed and prospective deals meant to garner Korean help in building warships for the U.S. Navy.
Lastly today, Navy shipbuilding stands to get $27 billion in funding in 2026, Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reports off last week’s compromise bill. “House and Senate appropriators backed the White House’s shipbuilding goals with an additional $6.5 billion in funding for fiscal year 2026—including adjustments to fix accounting errors resulting from last year’s budget reconciliation. The compromise bill, released last week, allots a total $27.2 billion for shipbuilding, with increases across several efforts.” Read on, here.
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Minnesota authorities have activated the state National Guard at the request of the Hennepin County sheriff, Gov. Tim Walz announced Saturday.
The soldiers were issued reflective vests so they would not be mistaken for federal agents. They were filmed Sunday at a federal building passing out donuts, coffee, and hot chocolate to citizens protesting Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations throughout Minneapolis. Walt activated the Guard after the sheriff cited “the potential for continuing and growing conflict” following the second fatal shooting of an American citizen by federal agents in Minneapolis in just over two weeks.
Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive-care-unit nurse with the Veterans Affairs Department, was killed Saturday after filming federal agents during an arrest Saturday in Minnesota.
Pretti held a phone in his right hand as the confrontation began when he was shoved by an immigration agent, then pepper-sprayed and tackled to the ground by other agents as they struck him with a spray can. The immigration officials then spotted an undrawn handgun on Pretti’s waistline and removed it before shooting him to death with 10 shots in the span of about six seconds.
Observers filmed the shooting from multiple angles, which have been closely analyzed by visual forensics teams from several major news outlets, including the New York Times, Bellingcat, the Washington Post, the Associated Press and Reuters.
Pretti was a legal gun owner with a permit to carry; at no time did video show that he had drawn his weapon. Instead, he is shown with a phone in his right hand, with his left hand open to defend against the pepper spray before the federal agents pulled him to the ground. The Times reports Pretti appeared to physically resist as the agents worked to pin him as another agent struck him repeatedly. That’s when they spotted his gun, removed it from his waist, and shot him to death.
The encounter lasted 25 seconds from the moment he was sprayed to the sound of the first shots. The agents then walked away, abandoning Pretti’s body and the scene of the crime. Bystanders then took it upon themselves to secure the site, cordoning off the bloody space with several large trash cans nearby.
“If an 18-year-old Marine did that in the middle of a war zone, he would be court-martialed, because it is murder,” said former Marine and Iraq-war veteran Rep. Seth Moulton in a video posted Saturday. “It looked like an execution,” observed historian Heather Cox Richardson.
The Trump administration quickly began denigrating Pretti, and released “a torrent of claims that are either contradicted by video footage or unsupported by any evidence presented so far,” as CNN’s fact-checker Daniel Dale reported Sunday. Stephen Miller, President Trump’s deputy chief of staff, was particularly aggressive—referring to Pretti as “an assassin” and a “domestic terrorist [who] tried to assassinate federal law enforcement.” Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino claimed Pretti “assaulted federal officers,” and “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and FBI Director Kash Patel alleged Pretti “attacked” officers.
Noem also claimed Pretti was “brandishing” a gun, though he is not seen doing so at any point during the roughly 30-second encounter. However, “I don’t have any evidence that I’ve seen that suggests that the weapon was brandished,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told CBS on Sunday.
FBI Director Patel also claimed, “You cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want,” and, “No one who wants to be peaceful shows up at a protest with a firearm that is loaded with two full magazines.” Online observers found this to be puzzling if not disingenuous, as Sarah Longwell of the conservative news site The Bulwark noted while sharing at least 10 instances of Trump supporters appearing to do precisely what Patel was talking about at protests around the country going back to 2017.
The National Rifle Association even pushed back on that sentiment, writing on social media Saturday, “Responsible public voices should be awaiting a full investigation, not making generalizations and demonizing law-abiding citizens.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth weighed in, tweeting, “Thank God for the patriots of @ICEgov — we have your back 100%. Shame on the leadership of Minnesota — and the lunatics in the street. ICE > MN”. Responded Tom Nichols of The Atlantic: “Hegseth’s apparent desire to get involved in the Minnesota debacle is dangerous not only to the lives of innocent Americans, but to American democracy itself. The military should not be involved in domestic policing. Cops and border agents and soldiers are different from one another, and they are kept separate in a democracy for good reason. And most important, the Pentagon’s top official should not use his office to identify elected leaders who disagree with the president as enemies who will destroy the nation.”
President Trump blamed Pretti’s death on “Democrat run Sanctuary Cities and States” that he said “are REFUSING to cooperate with ICE, and they are actually encouraging Leftwing Agitators to unlawfully obstruct their operations to arrest the Worst of the Worst People!” he said in a social media post Sunday afternoon. “Tragically, two American Citizens have lost their lives as a result of this Democrat ensued chaos,” Trump claimed.
Worth noting: The raids in Minnesota appear to be more about instilling compliance rather than deporting immigrants. Consider: Texas is reported to have just over 2 million undocumented immigrants, and Florida is believed to have about 1.6 million, according to 2023 data from the Pew Research Center. But Minnesota, which did not vote for Trump in the last three elections, had only about 130,000. Yet it’s Minnesota where DHS sent more than 2,000 federal agents on its aggressive deportation blitz, “Operation Metro Surge” in December 2025.
And in another move echoing America in the 1850s, Trump called on “Congress to immediately pass Legislation to END Sanctuary Cities, which is the root cause of all of these problems,” he said Sunday. “American Cities should be Safe Sanctuaries for Law Abiding American Citizens ONLY, not Illegal Alien Criminals who broke our Nation’s Laws.”
Protests erupted inside an immigrant detention center in Texas where a five-year-old and his father were sent after being abducted in Minnesota. Families were heard inside shouting “Libertad!” or “Let us go,” according to a video taken Saturday by Eric Lee, an immigration attorney who was there to visit a client at the facility in the town of Dilley. “The message we want to send is for them to treat us with dignity and according to the law. We’re immigrants, with children, not criminals,” one immigrant told the Associated Press in a phone interview after the video surfaced.
Monitoring for possible invocation of the Insurrection Act: Despite Trump’s claims last week, demonstrations in Minneapolis after Pretti’s death “still fall far short of the mass violence that has historically justified invoking the Insurrection Act,” writes Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice. “By way of comparison, riots in LA in 1992 killed 63 people and caused $1 billion in property damage, while riots in Detroit in 1967 killed 43 people and destroyed 400 buildings. Nothing that protesters in Minneapolis have done comes close to these examples. And in both LA and Detroit, the governors requested federal military assistance.”
“If Trump were to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minneapolis, it would undoubtedly be to enable ICE’s brutal operation, which is leaving a wake of destruction and death and poses an ongoing threat to public safety,” she says. “Far from keeping the peace, such a deployment would be sure to inflame tensions, leading to more protests—and thus more ICE violence. It would escalate rather than defuse the situation in Minneapolis.”
Can observing ICE agents land you on the Trump administration’s “domestic terrorist” list? One agent in Maine seemed to allege as much. He was recently asked why he was photographing a legal observer’s car when he replied, “Because we have a nice little database and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist. So have fun with that.” (Hat tip to Ken Klippenstein)
Developing: Pretti’s death could have further implications for federal employees, raising the chances of a government shutdown by Friday. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in response to the shooting that his party would not agree to a six-bill funding package next week if it contains DHS appropriations.
Half of the 12-annual must pass spending bills for fiscal 2026 have already cleared Congress, but the remaining six are still pending before the Senate, as Eric Katz of Government Executive reports. The House already approved them. In addition to DHS, those measures would fund the departments of Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, State and Treasury, as well as other related agencies. They are currently operating under a stopgap continuing resolution that is set to expire Jan. 30. Lawmakers could opt to fund just those agencies and negotiate separately over DHS, though such an approach would require new votes in both the House and Senate.
Additional reading:
Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1942, elements of the Army’s 133rd Infantry Regiment landed at Belfast Harbor in Northern Ireland—the first U.S. troops to deploy for the defense of Europe during World War II.
The Pentagon dropped the National Defense Strategy late on Friday, a time usually reserved for news that an organization wants to keep quiet. The 34-page document follows the release of a classified interim NDS rushed out last March, some two months after the new administration was sworn in. Work on the formal NDS began last May.
Like the interim version, the new one reflects a huge shift from previous administrations’ strategies, which focused on Mideast-based terrorist groups, loosely organized authoritarian states, and peer competitors, particularly China. Instead, the NDS focuses on homeland defense and Western Hemisphere. And while the interim one appeared to drop focus entirely on Russia, according to Hegseth’s early-2025 testimony, Russia returns in the new version. Read the NDS here; and coverage of it from, e.g., WSJ, Politico, and Associated Press.
Also on Friday: Air Force officials announced the revival of a deployment scheme abandoned three years ago. While the original Air Expeditionary Wing concept quickly assembled airmen and aircraft from across the service to deploy for conflicts, AEW 2.0 aims to give the team up to 18 months to train together, according to officials and a news release. The move is the latest Trump-administration shift away from Biden-era efforts to orient the force to confront China. Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reports, here.
Space Force probably needs twice as many guardians, vice chief says. The service’s budget and the number of operational U.S. military satellites have doubled since its founding, Gen. Shawn Bratton noted. The Space Force, which consists of about 10,000 guardians and 5,000 civilians, is adding about 500 troops a year—but that’s not enough. “We’ve got to pick up the pace. We need to grow on the military side, probably around 1,000 a year, something like that, for the next decade,” Bratton said. “I think we really need to double the size.” Novelly has more, here.
In case you missed it, Trump launched his “board of peace” club last week on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum. Representatives from 23 nations stood beside him during the “signing ceremony” Thursday in Davos, Switzerland. (We listed the participants in our Friday newsletter.)
However, “nearly half of the countries on it are banned from entering the US under his travel ban,” the UK’s Independent reported Friday.
Another detail we missed last week: Trump on Thursday floated invoking NATO’s Article 5 for the U.S. border to “free up” CBP agents for more crackdowns elsewhere stateside. The president reposted that threat over the weekend in the wake of Alex Pretti’s death.
Expert reax: “In watching Trump over the past year, I’ve come to realize that the usual tools international observers bring to foreign policy analysis—political science, economics, sociology, and the like—are not nearly as important as psychology, both individual and social,” American political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote Saturday in an essay on Substack entitled, “After Davos.”
“I would liken Donald Trump to a ten-year-old boy who has discovered a flame thrower in his parents’ backyard, and has come to realize that he can burn up anything he wants with it. He’s now actively looking for other things he can set on fire.” Trump, Fukuyama said, “is a destroyer of institutions who wants to replace them with his own preferences, which inevitably benefit him personally.”
“There is one big problem with this psychological evolution,” he cautions. “Trump has consistently overestimated the power of the United States relative to other countries,” Fukuyama writes. “His overestimation of American power may continue as he tries to run Venezuela by remote control and extract oil from it. What is not clear is how he would use the military against a big player like China.”
Fukuyama adds: “Trump’s enduring legacy is not an institutional structure, but rather a highly toxic culture that has been adopted by many of the president’s followers and will live on after he is gone.” His advice? “In the wake of Davos, Europeans need to move in the opposite direction. They need to strengthen the European Union if it is to be taken seriously by the United States, China, Russia, or any other power. This will require two things.” Read on, here.
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