Patriots Should Avoid the Anti-ICE Super Bowl

Townhall 

NFL leadership has sided against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), by promoting the Puerto Rican rapper who ranted against ICE on national television Sunday. Bad Bunny declared at the Grammy Awards, “Before I say thanks to God, I’m going to say ICE OUT.”

The ICE OUT slogan was developed by a coalition of Leftist groups, including the ACLU, to resist the enforcement of federal immigration laws. Nearly every artist at the Grammy ceremony except Trump-supporting Nikki Minaj wore a pin with those words.

The following day Roger Goodell, Commissioner of the taxpayer-subsidized NFL, defended his bad choice by absurdly praising Bad Bunny as “one of the greatest artists in the world.” He’s featuring Bad Bunny at the halftime show during the Super Bowl, and claiming that the offensive performer “will use his platform to unite people.”

It doesn’t “unite people” for the NFL to impose a strident “ICE OUT” advocate on more than 100 million Americans watching the Super Bowl. Trump is one of many who have criticized this selection of a Spanish-speaking, Trump-hating entertainer from Puerto Rico.

The New England Patriots are once again playing in this year’s Super Bowl, but patriotic Americans shouldn’t support the NFL while it features opponents of our own law enforcement agencies. Our economy would save an estimated $5 billion if everyone tuned out, because an estimated 39 million Americans will miss or be late for their jobs the following Monday after watching the annual extravaganza. 

Taxpayers are also subsidizing Minnesota schools that are training agitatorsagainst ICE, and providing them with anti-ICE resistance manuals. A “De-Arrest Primer” is being distributed to instruct Leftists how to physically interfere with ICE as they try to arrest illegal aliens.

The liberal media have identified two Hispanic men, a Border Patrol agent and an officer of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, as those who fired their guns at Alex Pretti, after he was discovered to be carrying a handgun while scuffling with officers. These officers have many years of law enforcement experience, in doing a dangerous job to protect our country.

Video of the scene shows that an agent found a handgun in Pretti’s possession and alerted others. As the agent took the handgun away from Pretti during a struggle, an initial shot rang out, perhaps from a misfire, and then two agents acted swiftly to protect the lives of their colleagues and bystanders.

A liberal narrative of this law enforcement response to an armed man scuffling with officers has gone unrebutted for too long. If the DOJ is doing an investigation, then it needs to exonerate the agents soon before everyone believes propaganda from the Left.

Let’s not forget that it was two heroic Border Patrol agents who risked their lives to confront the shooter at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman had just killed 19 children and two teachers. For 77 minutes no policeman confronted the gunman who had barricaded himself in a classroom, but two off-duty Border Patrol agents arrived and entered the school while risking their own lives.

Gunfire sprayed upon them, with one bullet ripping through the baseball cap on one of the agent’s heads. Undeterred, the Border Patrol agents quickly killed the shooter before he could cause further bloodshed.

Someone who brings a gun to a fight with police is taking a risk of being shot. The gun could misfire, which would trigger gunfire at the suspect, or simply learning of the gun could create a reasonable fear by an officer trained to protect himself and others from the gunman.

With the publicizing of the names of the federal agents by the media, Leftists in charge of Minneapolis may be planning to bring murder charges against them. Such a charge could lead to a conflict between state and federal authority that has not been seen since the Civil War.

Federal courts have the authority to block a state prosecution, but have only done so a handful of times in American history. A federal court can also order the release of someone being held in a state prison while awaiting a trial in state court.

Liberal states are already refusing to extradite criminal defendants accused of providing a telemedicine abortion where it is prohibited by state law. Conservative governors could take a similar path by shielding ICE agents from prosecution by the Leftist mob in Minnesota.

ICE and the Border Patrol cannot do their jobs to protect Americans against illegal aliens if rogue prosecutors in Minnesota are allowed to prosecute federal agents who defend themselves against agitators who harass and impede them. Congress should reaffirm the immunity of federal agents from any state prosecutions based on the use of force to put down the resistance.

Podcast thread for Feb 4

 

bleh

The Second Amendment Has Come a Long Way

American Thinker 

Over the past twenty years, the interpretation of the Second Amendment—which guarantees American citizens the right to bear arms—has been shaped by many significant cases. What is clear through all of them is the strong acknowledgment of the citizen’s right to bear arms as an individual right. Right-to-carry laws, whether enacted by state or federal agencies, have had to respect the importance of this individual right.

When the right to bear arms was established in 1791, there was a strong need for America to quickly form militias to supplement the army and defend the republic. This was the initial motivation for the amendment. However, the Founding Fathers also understood that an armed citizenry could act as a safeguard against tyranny. As Thomas Jefferson told William Stephens Smith: “What country can preserve its liberties if the rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms.”

This column will examine four landmark rulings by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) that have pushed back against laws—either arbitrary or claimed to be in the interest of public safety—that infringe on the Second Amendment. It will also explore the questions raised by two upcoming cases before SCOTUS.

The first ruling, by the Supreme Court in June 2008, was in District of Columbia v. Heller, and it involved owning a gun that could be used if self-defense was needed. Dick Heller, a special police officer, lived in a high-crime neighborhood. However, he couldn’t keep a ready-to-fire gun at home because one of the provisions of the D.C. Firearms Control Regulations Act of 1975 required licensed firearms to be kept “unloaded, disassembled, or locked away” at home. Interpreting the Second Amendment for the first time in nearly 70 years, the court ruled in Heller’s favor, establishing that gun rights, while not unlimited, are rooted in individual — not collective — rights. It confirmed an individual’s right to own a firearm for self-defense within the home.

The second ruling, in McDonald v. City of Chicago, came from the Supreme Court in 2010 and was, in a sense, a follow-up to Heller. Otis McDonald, a 76-year-old retired maintenance engineer, lived in Morgan Park, a neighborhood that had been taken over by gangs and drug dealers. His house had been broken into a few times, and he was once threatened by thugs while he was out walking. He owned licensed shotguns but found them too cumbersome to use against burglars or criminals, so he wanted to buy a handgun. However, Chicago gun laws, besides restricting gun ownership, prohibited handguns altogether.

When he filed a lawsuit, the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled in favor of the city council. However, upon hearing his appeal, the Supreme Court observed that the privileges clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protects the right to bear arms from infringement by laws enacted by any level of government. As a result, the city was required to change its gun laws, and the Second Amendment gained broad protection against arbitrary government decisions at all levels.

The third ruling, in one of the most important gun law cases ever, was in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association (NYSRPA) v. Bruen, and related to the Sullivan Act (1911), which requires applicants for concealed carry licenses to prove a specific need, such as a particular threat or extraordinary danger, in order to keep their weapon concealed. Two NYSRPA members had applied for unrestricted carry licenses but were denied. They sued Kevin Bruen, the superintendent of the New York State Police, claiming violations of the Second and Fourteenth Amendments.

When the case reached the Supreme Court, it ruled in June 2022 that the requirement for a “proper cause” was unconstitutional: anyone seeking a permit to carry a concealed weapon is entitled to one if they meet certain legal criteria and should not be required to prove a special need. The SCOTUS affirmed that there is a right to carry guns outside one’s home, and that a state cannot create regulations that selectively restrict who can carry based on discretionary criteria.

The court also required that lower courts base their decisions on the historical context of the Second Amendment and what was considered constitutional at the time America was founded. Federal courts have referenced the Bruen decision, which heavily relies on textual and historical criteria, when ruling on nearly 3,000 Second Amendment cases, and it marked the beginning of a significant expansion of Second Amendment rights.

The fourth SCOTUS ruling, in June 2024, invalidated a federal ban on bump stocks—spring-loaded attachments that enable a semi-automatic rifle to mimic automatic fire to some extent. The issue was that the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco, and Explosives (ATF) suddenly classified bump stocks as machine guns, effectively banning them since possessing machine guns is illegal.

The change was made in response to a 2017 shooting in Las Vegas, where a man used semi-automatic rifles with bump stocks to rapidly fire hundreds of rounds into a crowd at a music festival. Firearm owners were required to destroy their bump stocks or surrender them to the bureau. Michael Cargill, a veteran and gun rights activist, surrendered his bump stocks but sued Attorney General Merrick Garland, challenging the bureau’s authority to create such a rule.

The Supreme Court ruled that the ATF exceeded its statutory authority; not only that, the ATF repudiated its own “previous guidance that bump stocks did not qualify as machineguns.” After a detailed examination of how bump stocks work and pointing out inconsistencies in the ATF’s own definitions and claims, the court declared the federal ban invalid.

Now, regarding the upcoming cases, the first is United States v. Hemani, which asks: Does the federal law that bans possession of firearms by someone who is an “unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance” violate the Second Amendment? During a search of Ali Danial Hemani’s house in Carrollton, Texas, FBI agents found a Glock pistol, 60 grams of marijuana, and 4.7 grams of cocaine. One of the charges against him was possession of a firearm as an unlawful user of a controlled substance, even though he was neither intoxicated nor using drugs at the time.

Hemani has requested the Supreme Court to dismiss the charge, while the Department of Justice has filed for a writ of certiorari, asking the court to clarify the circumstances under which the government can impose restrictions on unlawful users of controlled substances. To clarify, this case tests the very limits of the Second Amendment. Hearings are ongoing, and a decision might be expected in June or July.

In the second case, Wolford v. Lopez, three Maui residents and the Hawaii Firearm Coalition, a gun rights group, are challenging Hawaii’s Attorney General over the state’s Act 52, which bans firearms on private property without the owner’s permission. Wolford was heard by the Supreme Court in January 2026.

The ruling could establish a precedent on a key issue: Can property owners — such as businesses or homeowners – decide whether someone can carry firearms on their property? In America, the right to property is considered as vital as the Second Amendment, so developments in this case are being closely watched. A decision is expected soon.

The Founders guaranteed citizens the right to bear arms because it is rooted in the natural rights of self-defense and resistance to tyranny. It cannot be taken away. As Samuel Adams asserted: “The Constitution shall never be construed to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.”

Social psychosis in Minneapolis

When protesters start to believe they’re bulletproof, we have a problem.

American Thinker 

The recent cases of Renee Good and Alex Pretti have been described in many ways: tragic, reckless, heroic, foolish, principled, misguided.  But one descriptor has been missing from the public conversation: symptomatic.

Good’s refusal to comply with law enforcement officers’ demands and especially her final words to officers — “I’m not mad at you” — suggest that she was oblivious to the risk she was facing.  In that moment, Good was suffering from a delusion.  She sincerely believed that nothing bad could happen to her.  Pretti appears to have suffered from a similar delusion when he waded into conflict with law enforcement officers while wearing a gun on his belt.  These delusions did not arise from personal mental health issues.  They were symptomatic of a social psychosis — a witch’s brew of moral panic, identity fusion, and mass sociogenic illness.

Few of us in the United States have lived through genuine periods of sociogenic illness, but that does not mean they have not happened here.  The Salem Witch Trials are the best known example, but the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II and the Red Scare of the 1950s also meet the textbook definition of a type of sociogenic illness known as a moral panic.  I was born in the midst of the Red Scare, and I know that its delusional thinking was alive and well at the grassroots level well into the 1960s.  On the day that President Kennedy was assassinated, our next door neighbor, a member of the John Birch Society, told my mother that Kennedy’s murder was part of a communist plot — this, long before Lee Harvey Oswald’s involvement with Fair Play for Cuba or his defection to the Soviet Union were known.  Evidence was not needed.  It was a fact.  The commies did it.

It appears that we are in the midst of another moral panic, one emerging from the demonization of Donald Trump, his supporters, and anyone who carries out his policies, including law enforcement officers.  For many liberals, disagreements over policy have morphed into a deep-seated belief in their intellectual and moral superiority to Trump and his minions.  The reason that Good and Pretti acted irrationally is that they were so convinced of their intellectual and moral superiority that they refused to view the law enforcement officers as a threat, as if their moral righteousness literally made them bulletproof.  In short, they did not respect the officers surrounding them.  This delusional lack of respect convinced them that such inconsequential human beings could not harm them.  Why, you could even be nice to them and tell them you are not mad at them.  They could never intrude upon your godlike domain.

Moral panic alone does not explain the behavior of individuals who act immune to bullets.  For that, we must look to another phenomenon.  In 2024, psychologists William B. Swann, Jr.; Jack W. Klein; and Ángel Gómez identified a phenomenon called identity fusion — a state in which a person’s political identity becomes so tightly bound to his sense of self that he will take extreme risks to defend it.  Fused individuals typically display moral absolutism, perceived invulnerability, and disregard for personal safety.  This phenomenon is visible in the Minneapolis cases with painful clarity.

Unfortunately, identity fusion is not confined to the Land of 10,000 Lakes.  The belief that one is morally untouchable, that one is “safe” because one is “right,” is spreading through social contagion.  This is why the Minneapolis tragedies matter.  They are symptoms of a broader phenomenon that is affecting millions.

Irrational at its base, this social psychosis cannot be defeated at the ballot box or argued out of existence in the marketplace of ideas.  It needs to be studied by independent researchers, perhaps with funding from the National Institutes of Health.  If found to be a public health crisis, the surgeon general should address it.  Until then, social and political commentators should be mindful that what they are witnessing is far deeper and more complex than most of the issues they normally address.

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Thank Your Local ICE Agents For Their Service

Even when some make wrong decisions, ICE and CBP agents broadly deserve our honor and respect.

The Federalist

We have all seen the attacks against Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minnesota by people who claim to be just “protecting our neighbors.”

These “neighbors” include murderers, rapists, sex traffickers, and thieves, all of whom are deemed more worthy of protection than the federal employees seeking to enforce the laws of the United States. They have been subjected to an escalating campaign of vilification, personalized hostility, abuse, and assaults. They are Nazis! Gestapo!

As I see and read of these attacks on line agents, I have a sense of deja vu — flashbacks to the abuse inflicted upon many members of our military who served in Vietnam in the ’60s and early ’70s.

Like the ICE agents today, the great majority were attempting to do two things that sometimes were at odds with each other: 1) discharge their duty under highly dangerous conditions and then 2) return home alive. I’ll never forget the abuse heaped upon those who returned after choosing to serve in Vietnam rather than dodge the draft, flee to Canada, or hide behind phony physical ailments. We have seen this act before, only it is much worse now.

A Flashback to the ’60s

Today, the “Thank you for your service” mantra addressed to military veterans is ubiquitous. But this is a change from the Vietnam era. Most people alive today have no personal memory of how returning combat veterans were treated then.

To understand why Vietnam veterans were treated so vilely, look no further than John Kerry’s 1971 statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a speech that launched his political career. In it, Kerry painted a grotesque picture of the American soldier. He claimed that those who served in Vietnam were “a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence.” He told Americans that their soldiers’ crimes were “what threaten this country.”

According to Kerry, these barbarisms were “accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam,” and they were “not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.”

And what exactly did we soldiers do? Well, listen to him.

Kerry told everyone in America that we were monsters who …

…had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war…

When Kerry’s portrayal of such “monsters” was televised and widely circulated, is it any wonder Vietnam soldiers became the object of widespread derision, harassment, and prejudice?

Because of slanders spread by the likes of Kerry, a significant number of Americans adopted their disdain, even hatred, for soldiers. A small number of ill-disciplined soldiers committed atrocities at My Lai, so we all were branded as “baby killers” by many of our fellow citizens. Young men were frequently harassed or denied service at bars and restaurants because they had short hair that marked them as members of the military. Curses and insults were routinely thrown at servicemembers or their uniforms.

At the so-called “anti-war” rallies on college campuses, students the age of the average infantryman in Vietnam routinely waved enemy flags and chanted, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh. The NLF is doing to win.” You win a war when you kill the enemy soldiers. So these students — our chronological peers — were rooting for our deaths. They wanted our enemies to win.

And, yes, random people sometimes thought it was cool to spit on returning veterans. A cottage industry of sorts has grown up to deny that this ever happened, but my friends personally experienced it. Wikipedia characterizes this as a “persistent myth,” but the same page cites instances where it did happen, while speculating about possible reasons for the spitting. Most of the denials are based on the lack of police reports or criminal charges.

What utter nonsense. There is about a zero percent chance that a veteran walking through an airport after spending a year or more in Vietnam would delay his return home by searching for a cop to report an irritating but non-life-threatening incident and potentially getting involved in the judicial system over it.

Today’s War on the Troops Is Worse

Today, we see the same hatred spewed at the front-line law enforcement agents who are trying to do their duty under stressful and dangerous conditions. They are my focus here, not their higher-ups, some of whom have rushed out with demonstrably inaccurate descriptions of deadly events. That happened in Vietnam, too, from Robert McNamara on down.

Their opponents have doubled down on Kerry’s playbook. As during Vietnam, public figures unapologetically fan the flame. The governor, the state attorney general, the Minneapolis mayor, the local congressional representative, and numerous other politicians, movie stars, and left-wing media shills have encouraged attacks against ICE agents by slandering them as Nazis, Gestapo, and kidnappers of 5-year-olds. In the middle of these highly charged conditions, they have urged the “protesters” to take to the streets, confront the agents, and help build the promised criminal prosecutions against them. They and their supporters assure us that when they regain power, they will hold Nuremberg-type trials for agents who have given and obeyed orders. The agents will get all the due process afforded to Derek Chauvin.

A direct result of public figures promoting this insurrection has been widespread and highly organized “protests” — many of which are actually unlawful obstruction, harassment, assault, or vandalism — against not only senior leadership but all agents.

When agents try to apprehend someone who has damaged government property or assaulted agents, the demonstrators “put their bodies on the line” to interfere, as Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan instructed them to. Here is Flanagan rousing the troops by claiming “Donald Trump and his minions” are “stealing food off of the table from seniors and children” and “kidnapping” “our neighbors.”

Of course, Flanagan also tells demonstrators to be “nonviolent.” Riiiiiiiight. Fat chance. Here are some of her followers after absorbing her ersatz caution:

They storm hotels where they think agents might be sleeping. At night, they bang on drums and blast air horns to make sure the agents can’t sleep. If agents manage to get away for a meal in a restaurant, the network sends out alerts, and mobs assemble in minutes to drive out the agents amid shouting, whistle–blowing, assaults, and other disruptive behavior.

The mobs try to identify individual agents. When successful, they dox and threaten the agents and their families. Democrat politicians aid their doxing tactics by threatening to shut down the government if agents are allowed to try to protect themselves by concealing their faces and identities.

When ICE contacted local police to request protection, the latter refused to show up. Although there seems to have been some improvement in the past few days, for weeks there was zero effort by local authorities to protect agents, control chaos, or prevent riots.

In short, amid utter chaos and lawlessness, the mobs have displayed their hatred of agents for the “crime” of attempting to perform their assigned duties. In the ’60s and ’70s, we were all baby killers; now all the line agents are Nazis working for the Gestapo. And Democrats have aided and abetted it all.

‘The Perfect Is the Enemy of the Good’

This Voltairean aphorism is true of any complex military or law enforcement operation. The best generals make mistakes, as do sergeants and captains. No military campaign is conducted perfectly. For all the respect we now give Vietnam and especially World War II veterans, soldiers in all wars made plenty of mistakes. Some were the result of good-faith but imperfect decisions. Others stemmed from ill-discipline and emotional reactions to the stress of combat. We know the evil that U.S. troops did at My Lai, and any serious student of history knows that some members of the “Greatest Generation” did things that would see them court-martialled today.

Yet those imperfections do not cause us to slander and attack all veterans of any wars. We honor them despite the excesses or even crimes of some.

ICE and Customs and Border Protection, with tens of thousands of agents each, are no different. Are they perfect? No. But the great majority of both leaders and line agents are doing their best under trying and dangerous circumstances.

Even when some make wrong decisions, ICE and CBP agents broadly deserve our honor and respect. They do not deserve to be denigrated as Nazis.

So if you see any federal agents in your town or city, don’t get in their way, but thank them. Let them know they have support. A short “We appreciate what you do,” will go a long way to help tamp down tensions. Do your share.

Colorado Public School Gives Class to Children on How to Follow and Doxx ICE Agents

Townhall 

A presentation was allegedly given at a Jefferson County, Colorado public school instructing students on how to document ICE agents conducting operations.

The information included the often-used acronym “S.A.L.U.T.E.” to instruct their children on how to ensure full documentation of the activity of federal agents, essentially equipping them to work as “ICE watchers” like Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Children were told to gather information like number of officers, appearance, location, and the equipment of officers that students might observe.

“Remember: document and record everything,” one slide of the presentation read. The presentation also “informed” students that “ICE leadership has given officers the go-ahead to violate the [C]onstitution.”

Another slide provided students with links to “ICE Trainings” and a Signal group chat similar to those used by agitators in Minneapolis to track and eventually surround ICE officers conducting lawful enforcement in the city.

Some of these “trainings” so-called “ICE watchers” have spread around have also included information on how to pressure and even assault officers so that illegal aliens or their brothers-in-arms can escape arrest.

Fliers were also seemingly hung in the hallways to spread the information to students who may have missed the class.

The school district isn’t the first set of radical activists getting kids involved in the dangerous “occupation.” CNN recently ran a grotesque profile on two high school aged brothers who have spent their days working as “ICE watchers” in Minneapolis with their parents’ gleeful approval.

Media’s Bogus Minneapolis Narrative About to Be Nuked As DHS Turns on the Cameras

RedState 

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem announced Monday that all immigration officers working in Minneapolis will start wearing body cameras as an added layer of protection for those officers and, presumably, against the false narratives being pushed by the left after a series of deadly officer-involved incidents in the sanctuary city.

In a post on X, Noem said the body cameras would be deployed "effective immediately," and confirmed she had spoken with White House Border Czar Tom Homan, who is now leading the Trump administration's immigration efforts in Minneapolis, and the heads of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) before making the announcement. She also noted that the body camera program would be "expanded nationwide" if funding allows.

I just spoke with @RealTomHoman @ICEDirector @CBPCommissioner. Effective immediately we are deploying body cameras to every officer in the field in Minneapolis. 

As funding is available, the body camera program will be expanded nationwide. We will rapidly acquire and deploy body cameras to DHS law enforcement across the country. 

The most transparent administration in American history—thank you @POTUS Trump. 

Make America Safe Again 🇺🇸

As RedState has been reporting, the administration surged federal law enforcement resources into Minneapolis last month after well-organized anti-ICE groups, such as ICE Watch, began aggressively interfering with immigration operations. One agitator, Renee Nicole Good, was shot and killed January 7 after she drove her two-ton Honda Pilot at agents who were attempting to detain her for disrupting an immigration raid. In that case, one of the officers involved captured the altercation on his cell phone, which shed light on what truly happened – including the fact that Good hit one of the officers with her vehicle – and nuked the left's narrative that she was "just a mom" who innocently happened upon the scene after dropping her son off at school.

Video from the vantage point of the officers involved in the January 24 shooting death in Minneapolis of Alex Pretti, another anti-ICE protestor who decided to interfere with lawful immigration enforcement operations, has not yet been made public. There are, however, videos taken by Pretti's fellow agitators and other bystanders that show how the altercation unfolded; the Department of Justice has launched a civil rights investigation into Pretti's death.

Use of body cameras by police officers has become more common in recent years for both the protection of the officers wearing them and the preservation of unbiased evidence in law enforcement encounters. Often, that evidence is contrary to narratives being pushed by the left and their partners in the media.

President Trump weighed in on Noem's decision, saying he was "okay" with it.

“They generally tend to be good for law enforcement because people can’t lie about what’s happening,” he said in the Oval Office Monday, adding, “If she wants to do the camera thing, that’s OK with me.”

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D) had a somewhat different take, saying in an X post, "This should have been the case long before they killed two Americans." He added, "Border patrol agents should never have been sent in masks and camo to wreak havoc and aimlessly run around a state 1,500 miles from the Southern border."

US plastic surgeons organization recommends delaying gender-affirming surgery until patient is 19

 

The ASPS, which represents more than 11,000 physicians globally, found that there is low certainty in the risk-benefit ratio for gender-related surgical interventions for minors.

By Misty Severi

The American Society of Plastic Surgeons published a position statement Tuesday recommending surgeons delay gender reassignment surgeries until a patient is 19-years-old, which earned praise from the Trump administration.

The release cites a Department of Health and Human Services article last year that highlights a “rapid expansion and implementation of a clinical protocol that lacked sufficient scientific and ethical justification," when it comes to pediatric gender-affirming care.

The ASPS, which represents more than 11,000 physicians globally, agreed with HHS that there is low certainty in the risk-benefit ratio for gender-related surgical interventions for minors. 

“Available evidence suggests that a substantial proportion of children with prepubertal onset gender dysphoria experience resolution or significant reduction of distress by the time they reach adulthood, absent medical or surgical intervention,” the ASPS’s statement reads. “Evidence regarding adolescent onset presentation, which has become increasingly common since the mid-2010s, is more limited but similarly does not allow for confident prediction of long-term trajectories.”

Although the statement recommends postponing gender reassignment surgeries until the patient is no longer a minor, it does not give specific guidance when it comes to the use of hormonal gender-affirming care such as puberty blockers, even as it cites “substantial uncertainty” about the long-term benefits and harms of puberty blockers.

The nine-page report received praise from the Trump administration, including HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for taking a stand that helped "protect future generations of American children from irreversible harm." 

“When the medical ethics textbooks of the future are written, they’ll look back on sex-rejecting procedures for minors the way we look back on lobotomies," Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Administrator Mehmet Oz added. "I applaud the American Society of Plastic Surgeons for placing itself on the right side of history by opposing these dangerous, unscientific experiments.”

The announcement by the ASPS comes just days after a New York jury awarded $2 million in damages to 22-year-old Fox Varian in the first malpractice suit from a detransitioner to go before a jury. She underwent gender-transition surgery at age 16, according to The Free Press.    

Misty Severi is a news reporter for Just The News. You can follow her on X for more coverage.

Schumer Threatens To Shut Down Government So Republicans Can’t Stop Noncitizens From Voting

The Federalist 

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) threatened Monday to shut the government down unless Republicans drop their efforts to secure elections and keep noncitizens from voting.

Schumer said in a post on X: “The SAVE Act is nothing more than Jim Crow 2.0. It would disenfranchise millions of Americans. Every single Senate Democrat will vote against any bill that contains it. Speaker Johnson should tell SAVE Act Republicans to stand down or else this shutdown will be on them.”

The Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act would amend the 1993 National Voter Registration Act to require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. While the House previously passed the legislation (including with the support of four Democrats) it has stalled in the Senate. But as Congress debates a new spending bill ahead of a possible shutdown, Senate Majority Leader John Thune suggested there could possibly be efforts to vote on the SAVE Act as a standalone bill in the Senate.

While noncitizen voting is already illegal, current federal law is largely toothless. Prospective voters check a tiny square box on a federal voter registration form attesting under penalty of perjury that they are a citizen. Such an insecure system has led to thousands of noncitizens to either register to vote or even vote.

Such a system has led to people like Clayton County, Georgia resident Melanie Pickett to vote multiple times despite being a noncitizen. A Bahamian native, Pickett admitted in December that after getting a driver’s license, she started receiving voting-related information in the mail. Pickett said she “maybe” voted three times. Similarly, a Georgia audit found 20 noncitizens registered to vote — nearly half of which cast a ballot in previous elections, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Pennsylvania previously found 11,198 noncitizens to registered to vote despite, as Democrats have made clear, it being illegal for noncitizens to vote, according to the Washington Times. Oregon’s Secretary of State found nine noncitizens who had voted in past elections after discovering “more than 300 noncitizens were erroneously registered to vote.”

Meanwhile, Alabama’s Republican Secretary of State Wes Allen announced in January that his office found 186 noncitizens who were registered to vote, 25 of whom had allegedly cast ballots illegally.

When elections are decided on razor-thin margins, like that of Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks who won her 2020 election by just six votes, then every mote matters. But that doesn’t mean that every vote should count — like those cast by noncitizens, which is why the SAVE Act is so important.