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CNN - Former President Barack Obama criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents’ conduct in Minnesota as dangerous, saying “the rogue behavior” is akin to what “we’ve seen in authoritarian countries” and “in dictatorships.”...

Obama, who has previously criticized President Donald Trump’s deployment of federal agents to US cities, called the actions of immigration enforcement agents in Minnesota “deeply concerning and dangerous.”

New Republic - A handful of Democratic governors have found an innovative way to leverage the power of spectacle against Trump by relentlessly highlighting his ICE raids, kidnappings, and paramilitary abuses, in part by encouraging countless ordinary people to join in the project of using their phones to, as the old left phrase has it, document the atrocities. And it’s working: It’s done real political damage to Trump, just as those GOP governors damaged Biden. It’s creating a cultural moment around immigration that’s perhaps more powerful than the one created by those GOP governors. And it’s forging a new way for Democrats to go on offense on this issue—if they’ll seize upon it.

The Democratic governors in question are JB Pritzker of Illinois and Gavin Newsom of California. This role was thrust upon them as stewards of the biggest, most densely populated, immigrant-heavy urban areas in the country—Chicago and Los Angeles—which are in the crosshairs of Trump’s immigration crackdown. This has created an opening to experiment with new kinds of opposition politics well suited to the information wars of the Trump years—the wars of spectacle. It’s no accident that both Pritzker and Newsom are plainly considering presidential runs in 2028. That’s incentivizing them to break through to national liberals and Democrats with novel forms of confrontation with Trump.

In short, intentionally or not, Pritzker and Newsom are engaged in a kind of shadow war over who will be perceived—by national liberals and Democrats—as the most prominent obstacle to Trump’s goal of purging the nation of as many immigrants as possible. And in a surprise, this dynamic has been a salutary thing: It’s pushing both men to create modes of pro-immigration politics that carry lessons for political battles to come. MORE