Happy Sunday all. Last night our candidate in a special election for an open Louisiana state House seat, Chasity Verret Martinez, won her Trump +13 district 62%-38% (+24), a 37 point overperformance. This incredible win comes just a week after Taylor Rehmet flipped +14 Trump Texas state Senate seat by 17 points, a 31 point overperformance.
These are encouraging wins in red parts of the South my friends. Voters keep sending Mr. Trump a loud and clear message!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Last night Senator Jon Ossoff gave a power campaign speech that has gotten a lot of attention. Here’s the part that has gotten the most notice, where he appears to have coined a new phrase - “It’s the Epstein class that is ruling our country.” The Epstein class. This one could stick.
Do Watch. He is a very compelling orator and you can catch the full speech here:
Funding for DHS runs out on Friday, and as of this morning, Republicans have not responded to the united Dem ten point ICE reform plan and there are no negotiations underway. Nothing has changed in Minnesota - ICE is still operating with impunity. Polls show the public is firmly behind our drive to rein in ICE, and we need to keep making our calls. We need to keep fighting.
Here’s the Dem 10 point plan. Taken together these are serious and meaningful reforms:
While I am pleased with this initial reform package, I’ve also been advocating that Democrats should force a debate about ICE narrowing their targets and focusing on criminals. Simply, as we reviewed on Friday, the public is opposed to ICE targeting non-criminals and launching a decades long mass deportation campaign; and if ICE is only targeting criminals they do no need all that extra money or additional detention capacity. ICE should be targeting criminals, and only criminals, and leave the rest of us alone.
For if we are not explicit about this point then it appears that we support the regime’s mass deportation of undocumented and legal immigrants; support the building of the detention centers; support years of ICE terror on our streets. For the terror is not just in the lawless tactics, it is also in the indiscriminate targeting and dangerous dehumanization of tens of millions of people. For it has long been the position of the Democratic Party that our solution for the 10-15m undocumented immigrants here in the country is legalization not deportation - and we need to say so. The public is very much behind us on this:
A new NYT article, “As American Views of ICE Dim, Warehouses Become a Symbol of Resistance: Plans to confine migrants in retrofitted buildings have ignited bipartisan dissent as the country has grown more critical of immigration officials” (gift link) writes about local resistance to a new planned ICE detention center in Chester, NY. It contains the following passage:
In Chester, several hundred protesters in puffer jackets gathered next to a wooded area in the dark parking lot of the senior center. One man banged on a drum while another shouted into a bullhorn as the group chanted. They placed picket signs on shrubs that faced light car traffic.
Manolin Tirado, 66, lives in Greenwood Lake, N.Y., and showed up hoisting a metal folding chair to sit out for a long night. Mr. Tirado said that he opposed the facility because he did not want Orange County to take on the financial burden of policing demonstrations held by ICE critics. Mr. Tirado said that he was also worried about immigration agents violating people’s civil rights.
“I don’t want to see American citizens jailed or have possible confrontations with law enforcement,” Mr. Tirado said. “What guarantees that they won’t pick up local Chester residents?”
In another comprehensive NYT article (gift link) on the Texas detention centers where people in Minnesota are being sent, the Times writes:
Immigrants apprehended in Minnesota are being sent to a gigantic West Texas detention center where lawyers and detainees say conditions are deplorable, then released in El Paso to find their way home.
The article begins with a story about a LEGAL immigrant from Haiti:
Judeson P. was driving through his southern Minneapolis suburb to pick up his paycheck on Jan. 22 when federal agents grabbed him from his vehicle, shoved him onto the icy pavement, shackled his arms behind his back and hauled him to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Minnesota.
The next day, handcuffed, feverish and injured, Judeson, 36, a Haitian immigrant in the country legally, at least temporarily, landed in a desolate detention camp in the desert of West Texas, only to be released six days later to an El Paso migrant shelter, with no money and no obvious way home.
“I cry every day,” he said on Friday as he sat in the shelter two days after his release. He spoke on condition that he be identified only by his first name and last initial for fear of retribution. He clutched his head in his hands and gazed at the ground. “It’s a really bad situation right now.”
And this:
Representative Veronica Escobar, a Democrat from El Paso, visited Camp East Montana five times and said that during her most recent, on Jan. 29, she met a woman who was six months pregnant and had lost 10 pounds, an elderly woman who had collapsed because of high blood pressure, and a woman who said she had H.I.V. and had not received medication. All the women were wearing snow boots and winter attire, Ms. Escobar said, the same clothes that they had been arrested in three weeks earlier.
Ms. Escobar said letters she sent to Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, and to Todd Lyons, the ICE director, have gone unanswered.
“It couldn’t be more obvious that this administration doesn’t care about human beings,” Ms. Escobar said.
The Mississippi Free Press has terrific new reporting about local opposition to a planned ICE detention facility in Byhalia, a small Mississippi town. I am going to now post large portions of the article for it does a great job capturing how ill-considered and reckless this manic, inhumane, and unnecessary race to build these “detention centers” is:
Opponents of the Marshall County ICE facility have gained an unlikely ally: Roger Wicker, the state’s senior Republican U.S. senator and the chairman of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee. In a Feb. 3 letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, the senator wrote that he had learned that ICE “is in the final stages” of acquiring the Byhalia warehouse to convert it into an ICE detention center.
“While I support the enforcement of immigration law, I write to express my opposition to this acquisition and the proposed detention center,” Wicker wrote. “This site is currently positioned for economic development purposes. It represents an opportunity for job creation, private investment, and long-term economic growth in Marshall County. The county is already experiencing meaningful growth and increased interest from employers seeking to locate or expand in North Mississippi.”
“Preserving limited, development-ready industrial sites is essential to sustaining this growth. Converting this industrial asset into an ICE detention center forecloses economic growth opportunities and replaces them with a use that does not generate comparable economic returns or community benefits,” he continued.
Sen. Wicker also raised what he called “serious feasibility concerns,” pointing to the “specialized infrastructure demands” that detention facilities require, “including transportation access, water, sewer and energy costs, staffing, medical care and emergency services.”
“From my understanding, the ICE detention facility would have a capacity exceeding 8,500 beds,” Wicker wrote. “Existing medical and human services infrastructure in Byhalia is insufficient to support such a large detainee population. Establishing a detention center at this site would place significant strain on local resources.”
Byhalia had a population of about 1,339 people as of the 2020 Census. While the small town has a family health clinic, the nearest full-service hospital is 15 miles away.
The size of the proposed facility is far larger than that of other ICE facilities currently in operation: the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, a significant detention facility that has housed many of the immigrants detained in Mississippi, as well as high-profile detainees such as Mahmoud Khalil and Kasper Eriksen, has a standard capacity of only 1,170.
Even the largest existing immigration detention facilities are a fraction of the size of the proposed Byhalia megacamp. Texas and California have the largest current ICE detention centers in the nation, with populations of fewer than 3,000.
Wicker said that his constituents have “voiced concerns regarding the public safety, medical capacity, and economic impacts this center would impose on their communities.”
No one wants these monstrosities in their community, and we have to do everything we can to prevent them from being built.
In a statement to the Mississippi Free Press on Thursday morning, an ICE spokesperson did not respond to Wicker’s specific concerns or acknowledge any specific plans for the Byhalia mega warehouse. The spokesperson did not identify themselves by name.
“We have no new detention centers to announce at this time,” the statement read in part. “Sites will undergo community impact studies and a rigorous due diligence process to make sure there is no hardship on local utilities or infrastructure prior to purchase … Detention centers will not be warehouses—they will be very well-structured facilities that meet our regular detention standards.” (LOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
But even in long-established ICE facilities, detainees have shared numerous reports of mistreatment and neglect. The Central Louisiana Ice Processing Center in Jena, Louisiana, the destination for many immigrants detained in Mississippi, has faced serious allegations of human rights violations, including deprivation of human necessities, physical and sexual abuse, and denial of medical care for urgent conditions.
Last year, an individual detained at CLIPC, which is run by the GEO Group, told the Mississippi Free Press and the Youth Media Project that he and other detainees had been sickened by contaminated water at the facility. GEO Group spokesman Christopher V. Ferreira acknowledged to the Mississippi Free Press then that a water outage had affected the facility for two days in June 2025, but said bottled water had been provided to detainees.
In ICE’s statement to the Mississippi Free Press today, the agency said that removing “criminals from the streets makes communities safer for business owners and customers.”
“ICE is targeting criminal illegal aliens, including murderers, rapists, pedophiles, gang members and more,” the statement said. “70% of ICE arrests are of illegal aliens charged or convicted of a crime in the U.S. Thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill, ICE has new funding to expand detention space to keep these criminals off American streets before they are removed for good from our communities.”
At the end of the statement, ICE also included photos of four Hispanic men and one Vietnamese man that the agency had arrested in Mississippi with criminal convictions ranging from homicide to sexually assaulting children.
But those men are not representative of the vast majority in ICE’s facilities, and the claims the agency made in its statement to the Mississippi Free Press are incompatible with the basic facts of its expanding campaign of detention—a campaign that has targeted more individuals without criminal convictions.
The need for such massive detention camps is the result of an extraordinary growth in these detentions. An analysis from Syracuse University professor Austin Kocher of the first quarter of the financial year 2026 found an increase of 11,296 single-day ICE detentions. Of that number, only 902, or about 8%, had been convicted of a crime. Additionally, 8,121 of those new detentions came from individuals without a conviction or a charge at all—individuals purely detained on allegations of immigration violations.
Even accounting for all ICE detentions, detainees with no criminal convictions or charges make up the plurality. Of those, only a small minority have been convicted of violent crimes.
Federal crime data has repeatedly found that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than U.S.-born citizens, and crime rates are even lower among undocumented immigrants.
It should be noted that our last two big special election wins came in red parts of Louisiana and Texas; and the opposition to the building of ICE detention centers we review above is coming in a red part of upstate New York and rural Mississippi. The opposition to Trump, this ongoing repudiation of him, is now regularly manifesting in Trump country, not just in swing or blue areas.
And it’s why in our ongoing fight to rein in ICE we should be working to end the violence, end the lawlessness, and narrow the targets, force ICE to focus on criminals, and leave the rest of us alone.
On Friday our friends at the Jewish Democratic Council of America learned that Fox News had refused to air an ad that’s part of a courageous new anti-ICE campaign they’ve launched:
Here’s the ad. It’s very good:
A big Hopium shout out to JDCA CEO Halie Soifer and her team for launching this timely and important effort……
Keep contacting your Congressional Reps and demand they rein in ICE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Big week ahead as DHS funding runs out on Friday!
Winning The Midterms - Support Our Candidates
Hopium’s Winning The House Campaign (2026) - $109,100 raised, $250,000 goal (new stretch goal) - Donate to all four endorsed House challengers with one click | Learn More | Enjoy our new conversations with Christina Bohannan (IA-01), Mayor Paige Cognetti (PA-08), Jo Mendoza (AZ-06), and Janelle Stelson (PA-10). Friends, we’ve hit $100,000 - thank you all!
Mary Peltola For Alaska Senate - $28,300 raised, $250,000 goal - Donate | Volunteer and learn more. Amazing start everyone!
Winning Ohio - $51,000 raised, $250,000 goal - Our new campaign splits contributions evenly among Sherrod Brown, the Acton/Pepper ticket, and the Ohio Democratic Party. Donate today and help us turn this critical 2026 battleground blue! | Watch my conversation with David Pepper, who does a great overview of the opportunities we have in Ohio this year. Note a generous donor has sent $21,000 worth of Hopium-infused contributions directly to the candidates which are not included in our on-line goal tracker.
Roy Cooper for NC Senate (2026) - $74,400 raised, $250,000 goal - Donate | Learn More | Volunteer | Enjoy my conversation with Gov. Cooper and a new, terrific one with NC Dem Party Chair Anderson Clayton
Jon Ossoff GA Senate (2026) - $121,000 raised, $250,000 goal - Donate | Learn More | Volunteer | Enjoy my inspiring conversation with Senator Ossoff
Expanding The Senate and Electoral College Maps, Winning In Red States and Red Places (2026-2032)
Hopium’s Audacious Expansion Fund - $353,900 raised, $500,000 goal (new stretch goal) - Join our new campaign to expand our map by investing in the Democratic Parties of Alaska, Florida, Iowa, Maine, and Texas. Many thanks to two generous Hopium community members who have audaciously donated $10,000 to each of our five state parties
Why We Must Invest Early, Now, And Not Wait - In three new essays (here, here, here) I discuss how one of the ways we win the 2026 midterms is by providing early support to our candidates and parties to allow them to staff up, be loud, define the terms of the debate now, before the inevitable onslaught on AI slop, Russian disinfo, and Trumpian lies funded through bribes and corruption wash across the land.
The midterms could be won or lost in these next few months - not in the fall of 2026 - and we need be fighting now with everything we got.
1 - Call Your Senators and Member Of The House And Demand They Act Upon Our Five-Part Agenda - We need to be loud people, very, very loud and make the case for our now five part agenda:
Stand with Ukraine and our European allies, and far more forcefully challenge Trump’s traitorous efforts to sell out the US and the West to Russia; demand Congress rebuke/issue a no confidence vote on his new threats to seize Greenland and his new, dangerous European tariffs;
Congress must stand forcefully for rule of law in the Caribbean and the Pacific - these illegal strikes must end; no war can be waged without Congressional approval; there must accountability for those who have broken the law, and the US must withdraw from Venezuela and cease other threats to violate the UN Charter and the sovereignty of other nations
Roll back Trump’s terrible, illegal tariffs that are re-igniting inflation, driving up prices, shifting the tax burden from the wealthy to working people, hurting small businesses and farmers, reviving tyrannical “taxation without representation,” and alienating governments and people throughout the world. To put America on a sounder fiscal course due to the enormous deficits brought by Trump’s 2025 tax cuts we should reverse the cuts to the wealthy and corporations
Defend our democracy, rule of law, and our liberties by blocking the expansion of ICE; restoring due process for immigrants across the country; vigorously defending the 1st Amendment; warring against his outrageous targeting of his domestic political opponents; ending the use of the military on our streets and the dangerous occupation of our cities; stopping the unprecedented regime corruption; and by forcing the Administration to finally comply with Congress end the rancid cover up of the Epstein crimes.
Fight Trump’s war on science, higher education and our public health; reverse - not delay - the cuts to the ACA, Medicaid and our clean energy investments; support and co-sponsor the Stand Up For Science/Rep. Haley Stevens effort to remove Robert Kennedy from HHS.
Keep working hard all. The momentum is with us, and we need to keep fighting as hard as we can - Simon
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