A source familiar with the matter tells me CHCI chairman Darren Soto (D-FL) was unaware of the donation from Palantir, that it was brokered by CEO and President Marco Davis, and that as soon as Soto learned of the donation, Soto ordered Davis to return the money.

WASHINGTON — The Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute is canceling Palantir Technologies’ sponsorship of Thursday’s 49th Annual Awards Gala and returning the company’s money, Rep. Darren Soto, D-Fla., told fellow lawmakers in a group message shared with Migrant Insider.

Soto chairs CHCI’s board. The reversal comes after Migrant Insider reported that Palantir — the company that built ICE the ImmigrationOS platform used to target immigrants for arrest and deportation — had sponsored at least one table at the gala, where Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is scheduled to present Rep. Nydia Velázquez, D-N.Y., with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Velázquez went “ballistic” on learning that Palantir would be sponsoring the event where she is being honored, according to a person familiar with her reaction.

Ocasio-Cortez’s office said Monday it was hearing about the sponsorship for the first time from a reporter and would look into it.

Earlier, Migrant Insider put a single written question to Soto, CHCI President and CEO Marco A. Davis, and Cristina Antelo, the Ferox Strategies lobbyist who registered to represent Palantir in March: Will you share the details of the Palantir sponsorship of CHCI? None of them replied.

The institute has not said publicly what tier Palantir bought, what it paid, or who approved it. Those questions remain unanswered, as does whether CHCI has any written policy governing which corporations may sponsor its events.

Velázquez, who announced in November that she will not seek reelection, is being honored Thursday for a 33-year career in the House.

On Monday, Migrant Insider asked three people one question: what did Palantir pay CHCI? Nobody answered. Tuesday, the sponsorship was canceled and the money sent back. That’s the whole business model. One reporter, one question, one afternoon — and a deportation contractor loses its seat at a gala honoring a 33-year champion of immigrant families. Nobody assigned that. No editor approved it. Paid subscribers did. Subscribe. The next question is already in the drafts folder.

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WASHINGTON — Palantir Technologies, the company that built ICE the software it uses to decide who gets deported, has sponsored at least one table at Thursday night’s Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute Awards Gala, where Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is scheduled to present Rep. Nydia Velázquez, D-N.Y., with a Lifetime Achievement Award, according to a source familiar with the sponsorship.

Ocasio-Cortez found out from a reporter.

“This is the first we’re hearing of [the Palantir donation],” said a spokesperson for Ocasio-Cortez, who said their team would “look into it.”

Migrant Insider put one question, in writing, to the three people who would know the answer — Rep. Darren Soto, D-Fla., who chairs CHCI’s board; Marco A. Davis, the institute’s president and chief executive; and Cristina Antelo, the lobbyist who registered to represent Palantir in March:

Will you share the details of the Palantir sponsorship of CHCI?

None of them replied.

The Payday

A table at the CHCI gala is not a ticket purchase. It is a sponsorship tier, with a $25,000 price tag, that buys a company recognition in the program and a seat inside the largest gathering of Latino political and corporate power in the country.

There is no published policy on who may buy one. No stated exclusion for federal contractors. No disclosure requirement matching sponsors to tiers. An institute insider says Palantir’s money would have been refused in past years.

“I don’t know why Darren is doing this,” said the insider, who declined to be named on the record for fear of retribution from Soto and the organization. “I know they have told Cristina ‘no’ in the past when she wanted to give them money for her shady clients, so I don’t know why this year is different.”

The Institute

CHCI was founded in 1978 by members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus as a 501(c)(3). In 1981, federal regulators barred organizations like it from fundraising on government property, an acknowledgment that the arrangement was already uncomfortable. The wall that went up then was thin. Everything since has been built against it.

The chair is a sitting member of Congress. Soto also serves as vice chair of policy for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and sits on the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology — whose published jurisdiction includes cybersecurity, communications privacy and data security, and all aspects of that jurisdiction related to the Department of Homeland Security. He sits on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade, which covers consumer privacy and data security.

Ferox Strategies registered to lobby for Palantir in March under issue codes including Homeland Security, Defense, Science and Technology, and Health. The stated purpose: educate policymakers about security and data privacy.

Those are the same words. The man chairing the board that took Palantir’s table sits on the panel that writes law on the subject Palantir is paying to be heard on. Nothing in CHCI’s structure treats that as a problem.

Soto’s own immigration record makes it stranger, not simpler. He voted against the Laken Riley Act in January 2025, telling Florida Phoenix he had “a big problem with people merely being accused and deported.” He is not a Democrat who went soft on ICE. He is a Democrat who voted to protect immigrants from ICE and chairs a board with no mechanism to keep ICE’s contractor out of the room.

The Revolving Door

Antelo ran CHCI. She served as its interim chief executive and later sat on its board of directors. She is a founding member and past president of the Hispanic Lobbyists Association. Her Palantir registration lists her covered government position as legal fellow for the Senate Democratic Steering Committee.

Nothing prohibits a former CHCI chief executive from later selling a client access to CHCI. No cooling-off period. No recusal. The institution that trained her is now a market she serves.

Davis, who has run CHCI since May 2019, came from the other side of that market entirely — leadership development at UnidosUS, fellowships at Ashoka, the Obama administration’s White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics, the venture philanthropy New Profit. He represents CHCI on the board of the Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility, a group whose purpose is holding corporations accountable to Latino communities.

He also runs a fundraising machine. CHCI reported $12.9 million in revenue in 2024 against $11.7 million in expenses, with roughly $30.1 million in assets. The gala pays for the internships. The internships are the mission. Corporate tables are how the internships get paid for, and the institute has never published a line about which corporations are too far.

The Cost

ICE is paying Palantir $30 million for ImmigrationOS, a platform built to track self-deportations, select targets for arrest and speed up what the contract calls the immigration lifecycle. Palantir took in $1.855 billion from the federal government last year and spent more than $6 million lobbying Washington, a company record.

Politico Influence reported in March that Palantir hired Antelo and fellow Ferox lobbyist Debra Dixon to repair relations with congressional Democrats the company considered abysmal.

“Democrats don’t like the [deportation] raids, they don’t like ICE, they don’t like Trump, and they’re trying to take it out on the tool that ICE is using,” Antelo told Politico. She told O’Dwyer’s there is “a massive perception-versus-reality gap with Palantir.”

Antelo will talk to Politico about Palantir. She will talk to O’Dwyer’s about Palantir. She would not tell Migrant Insider what Palantir paid the institute she used to run.

AOC, the Democrat handing out Thursday’s top award has spent her career arguing the opposite of Antelo’s pitch. In June 2025, Ocasio-Cortez joined Sens. Ron Wyden, Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey in demanding answers from Palantir CEO Alex Karp about reports the company was building the IRS a searchable mega-database of Americans’ tax records.

June 2025 Wyden Aoc Palantir Letter

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In May, she signed a second letter, led by Reps. John Garamendi and Ted Lieu of California and signed by roughly 30 Democrats, demanding answers about ICE’s use of Palantir tools to surveil U.S. citizens.

April 2026 Letter Re Oversight Of Palantir Data Surveillance Contracts

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Thirty Democrats put their names to that. One of them is presenting Thursday’s top award. None of them had a say in who paid for the room.

This is a story powerful people don’t want told about how money corrupts another former advocacy stronghold of pro-migrant Washington. For more reporting like this, subscribe to Migrant Insider:

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On Thursday, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that was illegal — and warned that the Trump administration’s reading of immigration law would mean Congress had quietly ordered “the single largest mass detention of human beings in our nation’s history.”

The 2-1 decision in Lopez Garcia v. Guadian is the administration’s ninth consecutive loss in the federal appeals courts since the 8th Circuit sided with it in March. It also completes the map. All 11 numbered circuits have now answered whether ICE can jail longtime residents without bond simply because they entered the country without inspection, however long ago. Nine said no. Two said yes.

Garcia V Guadian

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In Houston, the answer is no. In Baltimore, it is yes. Until the Supreme Court settles it, geography is due process.

‘We decline to do so’

Judge Nicole Berner, a Biden appointee, wrote for the majority, joined by Senior Judge Barbara Milano Keenan, an Obama appointee. The court held that Section 1226(a) — the law that lets an immigration judge weigh release on bond — governs people who have lived inside the country for years. Section 1225(b)(2)(A), the mandatory-detention provision, is for people arriving at the border.

For nearly three decades, the court noted, all three branches of the federal government read the law that way. Then, on July 8, 2025, ICE issued interim guidance flipping it, and the Board of Immigration Appeals adopted the new reading in Matter of Yajure Hurtado. By the majority’s count, federal trial courts have since sided with detainees in more than 20,000 individual cases.

The government conceded that its theory would have made roughly 2 million people subject to mandatory detention when the law passed in 1996. The estimate today is 6 million. The court found no sign Congress meant any of it. Congress “does not, one might say, hide elephants in mouseholes,” the majority wrote — borrowing a line from the late Justice Antonin Scalia, a detail aimed squarely at the six conservatives across First Street from the Capitol.

The majority called the dispute “a textbook case for constitutional avoidance,” the principle that courts should not read an ambiguous law in a way that tramples the Fifth Amendment due process rights of millions of people living and working in the United States.

Then Berner reached back. “Mass detention of marginalized individuals without due process harkens back to some of the darkest moments in our country’s history,” she wrote, citing the 1892 Geary Act’s detention of Chinese immigrants and the internment of nearly 120,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II. Those detentions, she wrote, “were limited in scope in comparison to the mandatory detention that the Government urges us today to find that Congress established thirty years ago in an ambiguously worded statutory provision.”

“We decline to do so.”

The men in the case

Lopez Garcia came to the United States from Guatemala as a child in 1996. Juan Jose Rivera left El Salvador in 2005, at 26, and has lived and worked here for two decades. He has never been arrested or charged with a crime. ICE picked him up near his Washington home on Oct. 2, 2025 — one week before agents took Lopez Garcia.

Both men were held at the Caroline Detention Facility in Virginia without a bond hearing. The government never argued either was a danger or a flight risk. Had either man been detained just four months earlier, the court wrote, “he would have been provided a bond hearing before an immigration judge.”

U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles in Alexandria ordered those hearings on Nov. 14, 2025. Immigration judges found neither man dangerous nor likely to flee. Both walked out on bond that month.

The dissent

Judge Allison Jones Rushing, a Trump appointee, argued the text is plain: anyone in the country without lawful admission is an “applicant for admission” who must be held. Thirty years of the government doing otherwise, she wrote, “tells us nothing about the meaning” of the mandatory-detention statute. She would have denied both men’s petitions.

The fine print

The win is a hearing, not a release. The 4th Circuit corrected the trial judge on one point: at a bond hearing, it is the detained person — not the government — who must prove he is neither dangerous nor a flight risk.

Next up: the Supreme Court

The Justice Department is not waiting. In late June, Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the justices to take up the administration’s 6th Circuit loss and uphold the policy nationwide. The court has separately agreed to hear Genalo v. Black, which asks whether people held under the criminal-offense mandatory-detention provision are constitutionally owed a bond hearing once their detention becomes unreasonably prolonged. The justices open their new term Oct. 5.

Twenty states and the District of Columbia filed in support of Lopez Garcia and Rivera, including Virginia and Maryland. The ACLU argued the case for the two men.

In the 10 states covered by the 5th and 8th Circuits — Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi; Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota — the law still says no. Nine justices will decide which answer the whole country lives under.

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A Marine. A combat veteran. A U.S. citizen born in Michigan, held three days for possible deportation before federal authorities figured out what his passport already said. Kent County changed its jail policy in January 2019 to make sure it didn’t happen again: no more holds for ICE without a warrant signed by a judge.

That May, a state senator from Potterville named Tom Barrett moved to make counties pay for exactly that kind of decision.

Barrett, now the freshman Republican congressman from Michigan’s 7th District, chaired the Michigan Senate’s corrections budget subcommittee in 2019. Under his gavel, the panel advanced budget language withholding jail reimbursement funding from any county that limited communication or cooperation with federal immigration authorities. Democrats objected. So did the Michigan Department of Corrections.

Barrett defended it as routine.

“I think this is good to require, good to maintain, and I think it should be expected of all of our law enforcement that they work in a cooperative and collaborative fashion,” Barrett told The Detroit News. “And this boilerplate just ensures that cooperation is encouraged.”

The money at stake was not abstract. It reimbursed counties for housing felons in local jails instead of shipping them to state prison. Kent County was drawing about $1.1 million a year. Wayne County, about $1.5 million. Corrections spokesman Chris Gautz warned the language could reach cases “completely unrelated to the immigration issue,” and that people who could have served time near home would end up in prison instead.

The penalty had a name in plain English: cut the jails, or hold people for ICE.

The county he now represents

The 2019 reporting listed the Michigan counties running policies that would have triggered the penalty. Kent. Wayne. Kalamazoo. Washtenaw. And Ingham.

Ingham County is Lansing and East Lansing. It is the population center of Michigan’s 7th Congressional District — the seat Barrett has held since January 2025.

Ingham’s sheriff’s office announced in 2017 that it would no longer hold people past their original booking period on federal immigration detainers, saying administrative ICE warrants lack proper judicial authority and calling immigration a civil matter between the individual and the federal government. Sheriff Scott Wriggelsworth framed it as a jail-management and legal call, and said ICE could simply come pick people up on release day. WKARWILX

That is the policy Barrett’s boilerplate was written to punish. Two years later, he ran for Congress in the district that jail serves.

The freshman with the checkbook

The vote Barrett cast this June was the same argument with four more zeros.

He voted for the Secure America Act, which passed the House 214-212 and funds ICE and Customs and Border Protection through 2028 — $38 billion for ICE, $26 billion for Border Patrol, and $5 billion in DHS contingency money. In a statement, Barrett said “the historic progress we made to secure the southern border was jeopardized” by a refusal to fund the agencies.

Michigan advocates saw the bill differently. More agents means more families missing a breadwinner and more employers watching workers disappear into detention — a second family separation crisis, one Lansing-area advocate told WLNS.

The race

Barrett flipped MI-7 in 2024, 50.3 percent to Curtis Hertel’s 46.6 percent. Cook Political Report rates the seat competitive and describes a far more hostile environment for him this cycle. His opponent is William Lawrence, the Sunrise Movement co-founder who won the August Democratic primary over more moderate candidates.

Immigration enforcement is already inside the race — including inside a high school. In February, a Barrett campaign staffer filed a public records request seeking emails from an East Lansing High School teacher connected to a January student walkout over ICE, along with correspondence between the school’s political action club and Lawrence.

Barrett’s office has worked to soften his profile on immigration this year. The record from Lansing is harder to soften. He called it boilerplate. Boilerplate is the language nobody is supposed to read.

This story sat in a 2019 Detroit News clip for seven years while everyone covering MI-7 walked past it. Migrant Insider found it because this is the only beat we work. Become a paid subscriber and we'll keep reading the boilerplate nobody else does — then send this to one voter in Lansing.

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Two hundred seventeen members have now done that on Discharge Petition No. 25, Migrant Insider has learned. One more name and the American Dream and Promise Act gets a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives, and Speaker Mike Johnson can do nothing about it but watch.

The petition belongs to Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Texas. The bill is H.R. 1414. It would keep some undocumented people from being deported and give others a way to adjust their status — the kind of legislation that polls well in every district in this country and yet has died unceremoniously in every Congress that touches it.

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WASHINGTON — The last confirmed sighting of the woman who called herself the abogada de los milagros was on a screen.

It was June 10, the day Luz Legal shut down for good, and according to three former staffers who spoke to The Seattle Times, Alexandra Lozano — who had surrendered her Washington law license two weeks earlier and was therefore supposed to have nothing to do with the firm — was on the company chat, on the email chain, and helping lead a virtual meeting. Then the offices in Tukwila and Yakima and Fresno and Berwyn went dark, the signage came off the glass, and the woman went with them.

Eleven weeks later, nobody in the American legal system can say where Alexandra Lozano is.

Not her own attorney, Angelo Calfo, who according to the Latin Times did not respond to requests for comment on the newest allegations against his client. Not the plaintiffs’ lawyers, whose amended com…

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Here is a summary of my responses in the video:

• No Kings Marches: The next march is slated for October, with more details expected to roll out this month.

• Prison Divestment Efforts: Organizations like the National Prison Divestment Campaign, the Prison Industry Divestment Movement, and the Divest/Invest toolkit are actively targeting institutional and Wall Street capital tied to for-profit detention operators.

• DC Photography & Hypothetical Brunch: If down to the last frame on a 35mm roll, the shot would be a black-and-white frame of Trump resigning; at a South Bend brunch with Amy Coney Barrett and Pete Buttigieg, the icebreaker would be asking them to pose for a campus photo shoot to be commissione…

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That case is one of five decisions and rules issued out of Falls Church between Aug. 14 and Aug. 28 that, taken together, rewrote the practical rules of deportation defense — who gets a bond hearing, how long you get to find a lawyer, how many times you can ask a court to look again, and what it costs to try. None of it required a vote in Congress. Almost none of it was covered outside practitioner listservs. Here are the five, in the order they will hurt:

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Roll Call 14 would have shielded Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients from detention and deportation, with exceptions. Ciscomani, R-Ariz., voted before it. He voted after it. On the DACA amendment itself, he simply didn’t show up on the board — a silence that, bracketed by two clean voting records, reads less like an accident than a decision.

It’s a decision Ciscomani has now made twice. First on the floor of the House. Then, according to the Arizona Daily Star, at least five more times (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) — in response to five separate news inquiries asking a single question: does he still support a pathway to citizenship for DACA recipients?

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That’s not a metaphor. On August 18, USCIS’s benefits-verification system flipped a switch and declared thousands of Temporary Protected Status work cards “no longer valid” — effective immediately, no transition window, no public announcement beyond an agency alert most Americans will never see.

It’s one of five immigration actions taken by federal agencies in the last seven days that have drawn real estate in law-firm newsletters and trade publications, and essentially nothing from the outlets people actually read. Here’s what happened, and what it means for the people it hits.

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A Ninth Circuit panel — Judges Margaret McKeown, Michelle Friedland and Eric Miller — unanimously denied the government’s emergency motion to stay a preliminary injunction over conditions at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California’s High Desert, lifting the administrative pause it had granted while it considered the case. The order was first flagged Thursday by POLITICO’s ace courts reporter Kyle Cheney.

The government’s core argument was simple: don’t blame us, blame GEO Group, the private prison company that runs the infamously foul Adelanto day to day. The panel wasn’t having it.

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As many of you know, I’ve begun embracing a lot of the old ways of doing things this year, mostly in an effort to reduce my screen time. I bought some fully restored typewriters for correspondence and dispatches. I also began shooting 35mm film photography.

For those of you who don’t know, a little over a decade ago I was a professional photographer for a hot minute.

Anyway, the mailbag post is just to ask any question you want. It can be about immigration, Congress, politics, art … whatever’s on your mind. I’ll pick some of the best questions and answer them in a subsequent post. How’s that sound?

To ask your questions, just drop them in the comments below or hit me on Signal at pab.202. And as always, stay safe out there, fam.

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WASHINGTON — Six members of Congress want the FBI to explain, in writing, why federal agents are allowed to draw a loaded gun on a U.S. citizen sitting in her own car and then lie about why they did it.

That’s the blunt ask behind a letter sent Wednesday to Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Acting ICE Director David Venturella — demanding an immediate FBI investigation and a DOJ Civil Rights Division review into the ICE agents who boxed in Carolina Molina’s car in Falls Church, Virginia, on Aug. 10 and pointed a firearm at her head.

Reps. Don Beyer, Suhas Subramanyam and James Walkinshaw of Virginia signed the letter. So did Rep. Robert Garcia, ranking member of the House Oversight Committee; Rep. Bennie Thompson, ranking member of Homeland Security; and Rep. Jamie Raskin, ranking member of Judiciary — the three committees with jurisdiction over ICE. They gave DOJ and DHS…

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OPT has been in the crosshairs of conservatives for years. They claim the program takes jobs away from American workers and allows unfettered legal immigration. Support for the program, by contrast, brings together progressives, businesses, and industry, who argue that it’s a lifeline for top talent to stay in America and support cutting-edge innovation.

As MAGA fights against all forms of immigration, mass deportation raids by ICE and the deaths of migrants in custody are getting the most attention. But the challenge to OPT is an underrated threat to documented law-abiding immigrants. If successful, the assault could have massiv…

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The masked ICE officer who stepped out of an unmarked SUV on Monday and pointed his service weapon at Carolina Molina — a U.S. citizen, seated behind the wheel of her own car, in a parking lot off Columbia Pike in Falls Church — is Martin Lagunas, according to two DHS sources who spoke to Migrant Insider on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the incident publicly.

“This is the same kind of behavior that led to the murder of two American citizens,” Senator Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) tweeted about the incident.” “Trump’s violent goon squad is out of control. We need to completely clean house and rebuild from the bottom,” he added.

DHS has not named Lagunas in any public statement. The agency’s official line after the encounter went viral described the officers as agents who feared for their safety during a “targeted immigration enforcement” operation. But Molina’s video shows her car is stationary as Lagunas points his weapon at her window and accuses her, on camera, of nearly running his team over — a lie ICE agents made after the killing of Renée Good in Minneapolis in January.

Confirming a name investigators wouldn’t

Lagunas, 40, was first publicly identified by Elgin-area ICE watchdog Ismael Cordová-Clough one week ago, and independently verified through voice and visual analysis — including a distinctive arm tattoo and a frayed “POLICE” patch worn across multiple encounters — in reporting by Unraveled Press. Migrant Insider’s DHS sources corroborate that identification.

Unraveled’s reported that Lagunas is a Chicago native who led an Enforcement and Removal Operations team first documented making arrests outside Chicago’s immigration court at 55 E. Monroe Street in May 2025, and later during protests outside the ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois — the epicenter of last fall’s Operation Midway Blitz demonstrations.

That same team surfaced again in Minneapolis in January, four days after ICE agent Jonathan Ross fatally shot the 37-year-old Good — the case Molina herself invoked at a Wednesday press conference, saying, “I think my life was in danger at that point. It wasn’t until after I was like, this was a whole Renée Good situation again.”

The “weaponized vehicle” playbook

DHS’s account of the Virginia stop — that Molina “attempted to harm officers by weaponizing her vehicle” — repeats a pattern the agency has leaned on before, per Unraveled’s reporting: almost identical language was used to justify the fatal shootings of Silverio Villegas González in Franklin Park, Illinois, and Good in Minneapolis — claims that video and body-camera footage in both cases failed to support.

Molina saids the gun in her face made her start filmimg. “I think that’s why I took my cell phone out and started recording, because I’m like, ‘yo, this guy is really pointing a gun at my head.’ Like that’s insane,” she said.

DHS’s statement on the incident does not mention Lagunas by name: “The operation was targeting criminal illegal aliens, whose crimes included a hit and run and drug trafficking, and illegal aliens with final orders of removal. Fearing for their safety, ICE officers conducted a vehicle stop of the driver. Necessary background information of the driver was taken and she could face criminal prosecution as a result of her actions.”

The Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office confirmed this week it is reviewing the footage. Rep. Don Beyer and Rep. Suhas Subramanyam have publicly demanded consequences for the agents involved.

Online Footprint

Four days before the Virginia stop, back in Minneapolis, Lagunas told a driver he’d blocked in with his own vehicle: “You’re not gonna like the outcome of this, sir. I guarantee you’re not going to like the outcome.” On the day Renée Good died, he’d posted about her death on his own Facebook page. The caption was one word: “FAFO.”

This is a developing story. If you have information about Lagunas or other ICE agents caught on video committing atrocities in our country, let us know at tips@migrantinsider.com or on Signal at pab.202.

This story is why you pay for Migrant Insider — we go find the name while everyone else is still calling him 'the masked agent.' Subscribe, and send this to the one person in your life who still thinks this story is about a car.

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The Department of Homeland Security published a procurement notice this month laying out its intent: outfit U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers with what the paperwork calls “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices.”

Sold under the brand name G.L.O.V.E. — Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter — the equipment is headed for both of ICE’s operational wings, Enforcement and Removal Operations and Homeland Security Investigations, on an expedited deployment target of March 2027. The budget ceiling: $10 million to $20 million. The contract mechanism: sole-source, no-bid, awarded without competition to a Lexington, Kentucky, defense and law enforcement vendor.

If it closes, it will be the largest commercial deal in Compliant Tec…

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That’s the detail that undoes State Sen. Aisha Wahab’s defense. Not the racist comment itself — “Call ice on the Mexican girl she don’t belong here” — but the picture attached to the account that posted it, a picture that matches the man Wahab called her “toughest critic, but also my biggest cheerleader” in a 2023 tribute on her own campaign page.

Nine days before Californians decide who finishes out former Rep. Eric Swalwell’s term, Wahab, D-Calif., is running from a question that has a one-word answer: yes or no. Was that her father? And if it was, is she willing to say, out loud, that what he wrote was wrong?

She has had two chances to answer. She has answered neither.

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Cunningham, the Republican nominee for New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District, is building his campaign around a hometown story — a South Valley kid, born and raised in one of Albuquerque’s most heavily Hispanic communities, roughly 82% Hispanic by the numbers. But on camera, in the same weeks federal agents were killing citizens in Minneapolis, Cunningham described the people caught up in ICE operations — including bystanders who might be family or coworkers — as expendable.

“They got to go, so they are collateral damage to a system that put ICE in the position where they have to go locate this person,” Cunningham said, describing what happens when agents raid a home or workplace and find others present. “Chances are there’s…

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Back in two weeks. Deuces, fam.

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