This week, we made our Equality in the Federal Workplace timeline filterable by legal case so you can see everything we’ve added about a given lawsuit. Our big update is from Immigration, with special emphasis on community responses. We also have small updates from the Food Safety and Medical Research Funding teams.
Immigration
Despite winning media attention for new promises to reduce the number of DHS agents on Minneapolis streets, the administration is not “drawing down” its nationwide campaign of street violence and sudden deportation: In reality, federal immigration agents are harassing, injuring, and arbitrarily detaining our neighbors. This is our largest update since we published the Immigration timeline, with almost 50 new entries; the volume of the update reflects the pace and intensity of events on the ground and in the courts.
To pick a few examples… ICE and CBP officers have continued to assault and arrest suspected noncitizens on the basis of perceived race, imprison adults and children with pending asylum claims in cruel and potentially deadly conditions, disobey court orders, and use physical and chemical weapons on peaceful dissenters, including young children. And the Fifth Circuit Court’s extraordinary legal interpretation cleared the way for imprisonment of immigrants in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas without due process, legitimating the administration’s practice of snatching people off the street and shipping them across state lines to indefinite detention before local courts can stop them.
But for the remainder of this week’s Immigration briefing, we’re going to focus on something harder to represent on our timeline — the many and various ways that ordinary people are standing up to the administration’s attacks on their communities and on the rule of law.
Across the country, ICE agents have been dragging people out of cars and leaving those cars on the street; in Minneapolis a local tow truck driver is picking them up and returning them to families. Moms in Minneapolis have built a network to deliver food and diapers and to bring their own breastmilk to feed babies whose mothers have been taken by ICE. An airplane enthusiast with a long camera lens is counting people loaded onto ICE detention flights out of MSP. Online, people are organizing to 3D-print alert whistles and pay rent for immigrants; offline, they’re throwing block parties that inconvenience federal agents, complete with music, bonfires, and candy for the kids.
Twin Cities hip-hop icon Dessa wrote a primer at Mother Jones on building and keeping the human connections necessary for mutual aid and community defense. Barbara Rodriguez at The 19th covers — and links to — Minneapolis mutual aid projects that pay bills and provide medical supplies, dog walking, and in-home vet care for immigrants under siege. In the article, one organizer speaks of “a whiplash between rage and joy, and sorrow and community” that may be familiar to anyone doing this work. The day after federal agents killed Alex Pretti, Kelly Hayes spoke with three organizers in Minneapolis about the realities of community defense under occupation and what they’ve learned, both from other cities and in getting through this winter in Minnesota.
In San Diego, people locked in the Otay Mesa Detention Center have been throwing handwritten messages over the wall, and Aisha Wallace-Palomares reported it out at LA Taco. She also spoke with locals who show up each week to try to locate missing detainees, connect them with legal counsel, and help them get funds to buy safe and edible food and necessary supplies. We recommend reading the piece in full.
Comics creators posted a wave of support for five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, who was taken by ICE while wearing a Spider-Man backpack. Artists are making zines and comics about the effects of immigration raids on people’s lives (the Cartoonist Cooperative says #ICEOutComics!), and acclaimed designer Erik Brandt has produced some iconic ICE OUT protest graphics. 404 Media’s ICE surveillance zine sold out…so they released it into the wild as a free PDF.
About a quarter of all Minnesota voters participated in last month’s anti-ICE shutdown in Minnesota or had a loved one who did. Substantially less media attention has gone to the thousands of children and teens who have walked out of colleges, high schools, and middle schools to protest immigration raids in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington State, Washington DC, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming, despite physical attacks from police and other adults, threats of gun violence, and warnings of reprisals from officials.
Marimar Martinez, who was shot five times by a CBP agent in Chicago and survived, now plans to attend Trump’s State of the Union address on February 24, 2026.
Your neighbors are not giving up.
Food Safety
The Food Safety team added 4 new items to our timeline. Despite the Make American Healthy Again agenda’s emphasis on removing dangerous substances from food, the Trump administration has continued to deregulate food additives and potential toxins . For example, the EPA has permitted the use of harmful “forever chemicals,” which has prompted a new legal challenge from health groups. Most recently, the FDA announced it will not bar manufacturers from advertising that products contain “no artificial colors” as long as added food dyes are “natural,” which appears to mean any dye that is not petroleum-based.
Medical Research Funding
The Medical Research Funding team added 5 new entries to our timeline. NIH director Jay Bhattacharya faced intense criticism from both Republicans and Democrats in the Senate for disruptions, delays, and disinformation that are harming public health and biomedical research. Meanwhile, states and medical societies are working to fill gaps left by more than 35 datasets no longer being updated by the CDC, most related to vaccines.
How to help
Unbreaking is run in the spirit of a mutual aid cooperative, with researchers, writers, editors, and community organizers working collaboratively to create and maintain our timelines and explainers. We welcome both experts in government as well as curious and interested observers. You can learn more about our work, make a contribution, or apply to join us.
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