ICE Hired Unqualified Goons After ‘Unprecedented Lowering of Standards’

Why so many are being killed and injured

Brad Reed for Common Dreams   

A whistleblower is claiming that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has dangerously lowered its hiring standards for new recruits, who were given final job offers without undergoing even preliminary vetting.

The New York Times reported on Thursday that the whistleblower, who has worked at ICE for 17 years, filed a complaint in August 2025 with the Office of Inspector General in the Department of Homeland Security that sounded alarms about what he described as an “unprecedented lowering of standards” for hiring.

According to the complaint, applicants were offered jobs before they even passed fingerprint and identity checks, which the whistleblower said created “grave national security risks” for the agency.

In an interview with the Times, the whistleblower said that ICE “chose... to be more convenient rather than thorough,” even though “there was a potential to put lives at risk and jeopardize national security.”

This is at least the second whistleblower complaint to raise concerns about the deterioration of standards at ICE.

In February, former ICE lawyer Ryan Schwank alleged in a complaint that he “received secretive orders to teach new cadets to violate the Constitution by entering homes without a judicial warrant.”

Schwank also alleged that “the legally required training program at the ICE academy is deficient, defective, and broken,” which he warned “can and will get people killed.”

ICE’s hiring standards came under scrutiny this summer after it was revealed that ICE agent David Brouillette, who fatally shot a 25-year-old Colombian immigrant named Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, had a lengthy history of allegedly abusive behavior.

Bug alert: RI still at high risk for West Nile Virus

Democrats Demand Trump Administration Halt Collection of Patients’ ER Records

The Trump war on privacy expanded to emergency rooms

By Amanda Seitz, Maia Rosenfeld, and Darius Tahir

A group of Democratic lawmakers is calling for the Trump administration to suspend a new surveillance program it quietly launched to collect the personal and identifiable health data of Americans who visit emergency rooms.

KFF Health News first reported that the Consumer Product Safety Commission — a federal agency tasked with monitoring injuries from household items — was pressuring hospitals to provide a private company with personally identifiable health information for analysis. The rollout of the program has inspired broad pushback from hospitals and privacy advocates.

The CPSC’s goal is to obtain millions of Americans’ medical records from emergency rooms for most injuries, even when a consumer product is not involved, internal emails and documents reviewed by KFF Health News revealed. The agency instructed hospitals to share detailed patient information for more than 10,000 types of injuries or conditions, such as vaccine reactions, suicide attempts, or stingray stabs.

The scope of data CPSC is collecting far exceeds the agency’s mission and should be immediately suspended, Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, who sits on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, and other House and Senate Democrats wrote in a letter to CPSC acting Chairman Peter Feldman.

U.S. Postal Service Failed to Properly Handle Some Ballots During This Year’s Primary Elections, Audit Finds

Already it begins

By Jen Fifield for ProPublica

Some U.S. Postal Service facilities failed to properly handle ballots during this year’s primary elections, according to a new audit from the agency’s Office of Inspector General. Election experts say the findings call into question the agency’s ability to meet even greater demands for the November election that are under consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The audit, which is dated Sept. 4 but has not been previously reported, found a lack of training for post office staff on how to properly and expeditiously handle mail ballots, deficiencies in how ballots were tracked and errors leading to delays, all of which risked ballots having incorrect postmarks or otherwise arriving late to election officials, which could lead to their rejection. 

The identified failures increase “the risk that Election and Political Mail is not handled, documented, monitored, and reported in accordance with Postal Service policy,” the audit said, though it noted that “most facilities we visited generally adhered to Postal Service’s election-related policies and procedures” and that nearly 99% of ballots reached election officials in a timely manner.

Is It Socialism Or Just Common Sense?

Take a look behind the red-baiting rhetoric

By Chuck Collins 

The debate over capitalism vs. socialism often looks like a battle of cartoon caricatures: Monopoly Man versus the Marx Monster.

Across the planet there are countless flavors of capitalism and socialism, unique mashups of free markets and government policies. Into this muddle wade the right-wing ideologues who fear the red “socialist” demon hiding in every corner.

If Fox News existed in the 1950s, they would’ve labeled Republican President Dwight Eisenhower a socialist for taxing the wealthy and making broad public investments to expand homeownership, enable debt-free higher education, and build infrastructure and technology that expanded the modern middle class.

Yet, what do these labelers call modern-day China, a country that mints hundreds of billionaires a year and dominates global markets with private production? Are they socialist or capitalist?

Meanwhile, social democracies, like Canada and the northern European countries, have progressive tax systems and strong social safety nets. Sweden, with its generous welfare state, has higher rates of entrepreneurship than the United States.

These countries also have higher rates of social mobility than the United States — meaning it’s easier for lower-income people to escape poverty and become stable. The American Dream, apparently, has moved offshore.

These welfare states, with their higher taxes on the wealthy, exist comfortably alongside healthy market economies. However, in the United States, whenever a politician proposes that billionaires pay their fair share of taxes so we make public investments in opportunities for everyone else, they are labeled socialist or even communist.

A miracle: Trump says something that's true!

Secretary of Homeland Security declares Joe Biden is STILL President. If only...

Trump’s $500 Healthcare Rebate Plan Called ‘An Absolute Joke’ as Premiums Skyrocket

But of course, Trump NEVER pays

Jake Johnson for Common Dreams

Donald Trump said that his administration would issue $500 rebate checks to some Americans who were purportedly “overcharged” under the Affordable Care Act, a move that would provide little to no relief to the millions of people impacted by surging health insurance premiums.

The White House said in a fact sheet that around a million Americans in 30 states would receive rebate checks, beginning next month—just weeks before the November midterms. 

Brad Woodhouse, president of the advocacy group Protect Our Care, ripped the rebate plan as “an absolute joke,” calling $500 “a drop in the bucket compared to what Americans are paying because Trump and Republicans gutted healthcare to bankroll massive tax breaks for billionaires and big corporations.”

Woodhouse was referring to a Republican budget measure, signed into law last summer by Trump, that enacted more than $800 billion in cuts to Medicaid over the next decade.

The GOP also declined last year to extend enhanced ACA subsidies that helped reduce costs for tens of millions of Americans, sending premiums skyrocketing. Some families have seen annual premium increases in the thousands of dollars, leading many to drop marketplace coverage entirely. ACA premiums are set to surge by double digits for a second consecutive year in 2027.

Mobilize the Charlestown Choo-choo Panic Team!

Amtrak will ask Providence crowd about improving rail service between New Haven and Providence

Adriana Vossari, RI & Local Government

Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA) has a special
interest in raising the alarm over what was never
a serious threat, an issue that died 10 years ago. CCA
leader Ruth Platner has tried FIVE TIMES to rev up
fear in town as a political maneuver.
- Will Collette, editor 

Providence is one endpoint of a federally funded study that could shape future capacity on the rail corridor Amtrak and MBTA trains share, and Saturday's pop-up is the nearest chance for Rhode Islanders to comment in person.

Staff from the New Haven to Providence Capacity Planning Study will set up a public pop-up in downtown Providence on Saturday, taking questions and collecting comments from noon to 6 p.m. during PVDFest. According to an event notice posted by the Town of Charlestown, the table will be on Washington Street between Mathewson and Clemence streets. The notice, which is undated, directs people who cannot attend to submit comments through the project website. PVDFest's own schedule lists the festival for September 18 and 19.

The pop-up is one piece of an Amtrak-led planning study of rail capacity along the Northeast Corridor between New Haven and Providence. The study's website says the work began in mid-2026 and will run roughly 24 months of engagement, coordination and analysis. If that schedule holds, the analysis period would extend into about mid-2028.

What the study is not, at this stage, matters as much as what it is. Amtrak said in its July 7 launch announcement that there is no preconceived preferred alignment and no preferred set of improvements. The June 2026 Outreach and Engagement Plan states that the study will not include detailed engineering, environmental permitting, land acquisition or construction. A federal environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act is not part of it either. Anything that eventually got built would require its own separate planning, design and environmental approvals.

How anti‑bribery laws apply to Trump’s promise of $5,000 payments if Republicans keep control of Congress

Just remember, though, Trump NEVER pays

Austin Sarat, Amherst College

In his keynote address to the Republican midterm convention on Sept. 9, 2026, Donald Trump promised that if Republicans retain control of Congress in November, he would authorize a US$5,000 payment to every American adult.

Trump’s offer seems to run afoul of federal laws, which make it a crime to pay for votes.

After Trump’s speech, political commentator Sam Stein posted on X: “trump openly bribing people to vote for republicans. $5k per person if republicans hold the house and the senate?”

Stein was not alone in referencing bribery. Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, issued the following statement after Trump’s speech: “Trump knows he can’t do this, and yet he’s attempting to bribe voters with the false promise of cash to help his party win an election.”

But as a scholar of political and legal rhetoric, I think it’s worth further examining what the president said and whether his promise violated any law.

An American tradition

Paying voters to support a particular candidate, or promising government jobs in exchange for votes, has a long history in the United States. It was a staple of machine politics in big cities starting in the late 19th century.

The political scholar Simeon Nichter argues that it would be better to describe these practices as examples of “turnout buying.” He notes that “observers in various U.S. cities have complained that some politicians use ‘street money’ – small, unreported cash payments ostensibly used for legal get-out-the-vote efforts such as canvassing and transporting voters – as direct payments for turnout.”

What Nichter describes has made a comeback in our era.

Recall Elon Musk’s effort to ensure a Republican victory in a 2025 state Supreme Court election in Wisconsin. He spent millions in that effort and, as The Associated Press reported, offered “$1 million to people who voted in the Supreme Court election” to encourage them to vote.

In July 2026, the Wisconsin Elections Commission found enough evidence to refer citizen complaints about Musk’s behavior to a district attorney, “which can choose,” as the AP notes, “to bring criminal charges over violating the state law against election bribery.”

A month later, a state prosecutor said he could not prove Musk’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and would not bring charges.

Trump Americanizes Putin-style corruption

Trump's thuggery will lead us to a very dark place

Sabrina Haake

Proving that a lying clock tells the truth twice a day, JD Vance recently quipped that politics have shifted so much that “if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story.” Vance was unwittingly acknowledging his own handiwork as he and his intellectually stunted boss flex Steve Bannon’s flood the zone strategy: throw crap on the wall, throw it often and fast, until the American public is too overwhelmed to pay attention.

It’s working. Eighteen months into this nightmare regime, as one corrupt move follows the next, Americans are turning away. One study found that 65% of Americans across political affiliation and age groups are consuming less news due to information overload and fatigue. It’s exactly what a corrupt administration wants.

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As Trump awards billions in no-bid federal contracts to his political donors, from the no bid multi-million dollar Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool debacle, to hundreds of millions to build a ballroom, to multi-billion dollar no bid contracts to rape and pillage our national parks, his political donors are reaping unprecedented windfall rewards.

His sons aren’t doing too poorly either. After Republicans blew a gasket over Hunter Biden serving on a corporate board, the Trump boys have cashed in big time with an Air Force contract to buy interceptor drones from Don Jr. and Eric (who have no experience in the drones business), Don Jr.’s ownership stake in a mining project that just secured $1.6 billion in government backing (ditto), and a $620 million Pentagon loan for Don Jr.’s venture capital firm. Trump’s crypto scams have caused investors to lose up to $3.8 billion while the Trumps pocketed up to $2.3 billion across the same crypto projects. Now Trump wants to personally profit from “selling” early internet access to his social media posts, which will facilitate large scale insider trading.

Meanwhile, as wealthy individuals spend millions to secure presidential pardons, and Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund for his supporters refuses to die, the Department of the Treasury just announced that it is destroying its anti-corruption database, the federal registry of shell-company ownership. It plans to destroy all the data it has already collected, to prevent future FBIs, future DOJs, and future local police departments from ever seeing the incriminating data. A true crime novelist couldn’t write this stuff as fast as it’s happening.

The question

Robert Kraft is a hypocrite

 

Saturday: Arts and Crafts in the Park

Utilities are overcharging Rhode Island heat pump owners

New report finds Rhode Island’s electric rates overcharge many heat pump customers

Conservation Law Foundation news release

Rhode Island is encouraging more families to install energy-efficient heat pumps because they can lower energy bills, improve air quality, and reduce climate pollution. 

Yet many households that make the switch aren’t seeing as much savings as they should because the state’s electric rates charge them more than it costs the utility to serve them.

A new independent analysis by Switchbox, commissioned by the Environmental Defense Fund, Conservation Law Foundation, Green Energy Consumers Alliance, Acadia Center, and Sierra Club, finds that Rhode Island’s current electric rates systematically overcharge many households that use heat pumps. The report, Heat Pump Rates in Rhode Island: Analysis of Fair Rates for Heat Pump Customers, shows those households often pay more than they should while effectively subsidizing an outdated fossil fuel heating system. 

The report recommends a dedicated heat pump rate that better reflects the actual cost of serving heat pump customers, helping more households save money while making heat pumps more accessible.