katya schwenk

We got a draft of the supposed "ban" on Wall Street buying single-family homes that the White House has been pushing. It actually just bars states from regulating these investors. www.levernews.com/gop-housing-...

The Watchdog Designed To Keep ICE In Check Is Being Quietly Erased Trump largely dismantled ICE’s civil rights oversight office. Now, as Congress clashes over Homeland Security funding, its fate hangs in the balance.

🚨NEWS: Trump quietly dismantled ICE's civil liberties enforcement office as the agency faces 6,000 complaints, according to court records reviewed by @levernews.com.

Without the office, Congress-mandated ICE reforms could go unenforced.

Dems have not been pressing to reverse the cuts.

Real Estate Brokers Are Profiting From Warehouse Sales to ICE Lucrative deals selling empty warehouses to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the Trump administration’s mass deportation machine are being quietly facilitated by a handful of powerful real esta...

"Flint Development is involved in another property deal with ICE, in El Paso... Flint Development recently stripped information about its executive team from its website; those details were available as recently as December, before its dealings with DHS became public..."

jacobin.com/2026/02/ware...

A Rooster dispatch from Feb. 2023: "East Palestine is what the future looks like."

It holds up, I think.

www.rooster.info/p/east-pales...

Attorneys got a quick paycheck, a private-equity backed company in charge of distributing money to residents misallocated tens of millions of dollars, all while Norfolk Southern continued to rake in huge profits.

The Derailment That Never Ended Three years after the East Palestine disaster, everybody’s gotten paid — except the victims.

In November, I went to East Palestine, Ohio, to understand how the "historic" $600 million settlement over the 2023 derailment has so badly failed residents, but made some lawyers and shady companies very rich. www.levernews.com/the-derailme...

Here is the User Guide for ELITE, the Tool Palantir Made for ICE 404 Media is publishing a version of the user guide for ELITE, which lets ICE bring up dossiers on individual people and provides a “confidence score” of their address.

New from 404 Media: here is the user guide for ELITE, the tool Palantir made for ICE. A map shows people on a map; ICE clicks them, brings up their dossier. ICE uses to find which neighborhoods to target. We obtained it, you can now read the document for yourself: www.404media.co/here-is-the-...

🚨 SCOOP: Three years after a train full of toxic chemicals derailed in East Palestine, the lawyers have been paid. The company hired to run the settlement has taken its fees.
But many of the people who were told relief was coming are still waiting.

It remains stunning to me that Dems still feel that bodycams are at all a suitable answer to the horrors of ICE rn. Jonathan Ross filmed the murder on his own phone!

How Democrat-Backed ICE “Reforms” Became A $20 Million Bodycam Giveaway Federal disclosures show body camera giant Axon lobbied for months as lawmakers carved out millions for the technology.

Democrats allowed the ICE funding bill to pass the House w/ basically no resistance on Thurs, but boasted it included $20 million for bodycams (nevermind that ICE has $75 billion at its disposal!)

Wrote ab how this is just a giveaway to Axon: www.levernews.com/how-democrat...

Via @katyaschwenk.bsky.social on Twitter/X account.

I'm sure Susan Collins' "concern" will fend off the pending chaos and death as Maine becomes the next Minnesota.

Shadow Contractors Are Training ICE’s Attack Teams ICE is spending big on firearms, munitions, and politically connected weapons training firms to further militarize its forces.

while ICE has slashed training requirements for new recruits, it's also bringing in sketchy private security firms to train its elite tactical units (like the one Jonathan Ross is a member of) on "advanced techniques once exclusive to military protection units" www.levernews.com/shadow-contr...

Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods 404 Media has obtained material that explains how Tangles and Webloc, two surveillance systems ICE recently purchased, work. Webloc can track phones without a warrant and follow their owners home or t...

New: we've obtained material explaining how an ICE surveillance system, called Webloc, works. Draw shape on a map, see all phones available there, follow them home. All without warrant

“This is a very dangerous tool in the hands of an out-of-control agency.” www.404media.co/inside-ices-...

Worth noting, amid the global scrutiny on Grok, that the USPTO conducted a study last year on how to address deepfakes & privacy issues with AI on a federal level.

Grok’s Inside Man In Washington A former X exec who worked on Elon Musk’s embattled Grok chatbot got a “highly unusual” carveout to keep his company shares while working as the U.S. Patent Office’s “chief AI officer.”

A broad and "highly unusual" conflict of interest waiver was just issued to a former Grok employee now working as a senior official at the Dept. of Commerce. It allows him to keep his shares as he works at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office to craft AI policy. www.levernews.com/groks-inside...

Yes, it's on my radar! I haven't had time to dig in yet but seems like there's a lot there... This is a great thread

Screenshot of header of National Protective Services website, with its private security license number and alarm company registration number.

Earlier this week, ICE awarded skip tracing contracts worth $1.1 BILLION to companies to help it locate some 1.5 million immigrants.

Half of those companies have little to no federal contracting experience. National Protective Services is one of them. 🧵

Airlines Are Collecting Your Data And Selling It To ICE An aviation industry clearinghouse is collecting passenger information from billions of past and future flights and selling it to Trump’s immigration enforcers.

2) In May, @katyaschwenk.bsky.social wrote about
the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC) that owns the Travel Intelligence Program providing "real-time travel data access to law enforcement.” Granular data, flight itineraries, passenger name, and financial info–39 months of past & future travel.

This is, more than anything, just another way to further entrench mercenary firms in our immigration system. If this passes, which it is likely to, it will be difficult to roll it back, further strengthening the power & influence of these actors.

Defense Bill Opens Door To Guns-For-Hire At The Border The must-pass legislation that just passed the House would, for the first time, allow the Pentagon to send private military contractors to the border.

The final defense bill passed yesterday by the House will allow the Pentagon to send defense contractors to the U.S.-Mexico border. I wrote about this unprecedented proposal in September: www.levernews.com/defense-bill...

Unaccompanied minors are among the most vulnerable in our care. They need zealous advocacy, not government efficiency metrics. Urge your elected officials to press HHS to maintain current services.

www.levernews.com/trump-is-poi...

Grief and Glocks “Angel moms” spin tragedy into anti-immigrant propaganda.

I wrote for @readlux.bsky.social on nativist mothers and border vigilantes lux-magazine.com/article/ange...

Advocates warn the proposed refashioning of the program is "unlawful and dangerous," requiring lawyers to share sensitive info w/ the govt about the children they represent.

This comes as ICE increasingly targets unaccompanied children.

Trump Is Poised To Privatize Legal Aid For Migrant Children Internal documents suggest Trump aims to undercut a key program for unaccompanied children and potentially outsource those legal services to a for-profit ICE contractor and Angelina Jolie’s NGO.

🚨The Trump admin is sabatoging a critical program that provides legal defense for unaccompanied migrant children.

An internal letter signed by dozens of legal nonprofits that we reviewed warns that the program may soon be farmed out to an ICE technology vendor. www.levernews.com/trump-is-poi...

In Feb., a group led by Erik Prince, founder of the mercenary firm Blackwater, proposed ICE create a “skip tracing team” of contractors to locate immigrants targeted for deportation.

Great piece by @katyaschwenk.bsky.social on how those plans are developing, plus new info in the quoted thread.

amazing stuff

& I found at least one of the defense contractors named in the Prince memo (which proposed a "skip tracing team" to locate targets) has business ties to a vendor who was just awarded a $7 million skip tracing contract by ICE.

Inside ICE’s Plans For A Bounty Hunter Army Military contractors called for — and are now getting — contracts to help carry out Trump’s mass deportations, with a bounty for every immigrant they track down.

Wrote about the new revelations in recent weeks about ICE's plans to send out bounty hunters to track down immigrants, which appear to be pulled from the mass deportation blueprint crafted by Erik Prince & various other military contractors. www.levernews.com/inside-ices-...

Already today, Israel has:

-Conducted a drone strike on Khan Younis in Gaza

-Shot & wounded two others near Khan Younis

-Killed 5 Palestinians in Gaza City

-Fired on & wounded a several others near Jabalia

All in violation of the “ceasefire.”

after being sued for violating human trafficking law, the GEO Group has brought this case to SCOTUS, a window into a decades-long battle by private contractors for legal immunity. this is what you get when you outsource more &more core govt operations to powerful private firms