Massachusetts police training materials classify Moms for Liberty as 'hate group' alongside Antifa
The Massachusetts Municipal Police Training Committee added the conservative-leaning parental rights group to the ranks of organizations like Antifa in an instructor lesson plan titled "Freedom and Hate: Speech, Crimes and Groups."
A portion of the in-service training slideshow reads in part, "Members [of Moms for Liberty] use parents' rights as a vehicle to attack public education and make schools less welcoming for minority and LGBTQ+ students."
The group's co-founder Tina Descovich pushed back against the messaging, which was first reported by The Daily Wire.
"It's very concerning to me that the people that have been charged with protecting us and keeping us safe have been trained… that we are a threat, that we're a danger, and that's very concerning to the safety of my members," she told "Fox & Friends First."
Descovich said her group consists of "the very best moms and dads across the country" who volunteer and advocate for change to provide a better educational environment for children in public schools.
She blamed the Southern Poverty Law Center during her appearance.
The left-leaning civil rights group designated Moms for Liberty and 11 other groups as "anti-government extremist groups" in its annual 2022 Year In Hate and Extremism report.
The MPTC training materials cited SPLC's extremist label.
"The fact that the Southern Poverty Law Center has added our organization to their hate map has absolutely led to things like this training, like police being trained, that we are an anti-government extremist group or that we are equivalent to groups like Antifa that are burning down whole neighborhoods."
Moms for Liberty obtained the MPTC's materials through a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request.
Fox News Digital reached out to the MPTC for comment but did not receive a response.
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Los Angeles Times
a day ago
- Los Angeles Times
California took center stage in ICE raids, but other states saw more immigration arrests
Ever since federal immigration raids ramped up across California, triggering fierce protests that prompted President Trump to deploy troops to Los Angeles, the state has emerged as the symbolic battleground of the administration's deportation campaign. But even as arrests soared, California was not the epicenter of Trump's anti-immigrant project. In the first five months of Trump's second term, California lagged behind the staunchly red states of Texas and Florida in the total arrests. According to a Los Angeles Times analysis of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement data from the Deportation Data Project, Texas reported 26,341 arrests — nearly a quarter of all ICE arrests nationally — followed by 12,982 in Florida and 8,460 in California. Even in June, when masked federal immigration agents swept through L.A., jumping out of vehicles to snatch people from bus stops, car washes and parking lots, California saw 3,391 undocumented immigrants arrested — more than Florida, but still only about half as many as Texas. When factoring in population, California drops to 27th in the nation, with 217 arrests per million residents — about a quarter of Texas' 864 arrests per million and less than half of a whole slew of states including Florida, Arkansas, Utah, Arizona, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia and Nevada. The data, released after a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the government, excludes arrests made after June 26 and lacks identifying state details in 5% of cases. Nevertheless, it provides the most detailed look yet of national ICE operations. Immigration experts say it is not surprising that California — home to the largest number of undocumented immigrants in the nation and the birthplace of the Chicano movement — lags behind Republican states in the total number of arrests or arrests as a percentage of the population. 'The numbers are secondary to the performative politics of the moment,' said Austin Kocher, a geographer and research assistant professor at Syracuse University who specializes in immigration enforcement. Part of the reason Republican-dominated states have higher arrest numbers — particularly when measured against population — is they have a longer history of working directly with ICE, and a stronger interest in collaboration. In red states from Texas to Mississippi, local law enforcement officers routinely cooperate with federal agents, either by taking on ICE duties through so-called 287(g) agreements or by identifying undocumented immigrants who are incarcerated and letting ICE into their jails and prisons. Indeed, data show that just 7% of ICE arrests made this year in California were made through the Criminal Alien Program, an initiative that requests that local law enforcement identify undocumented immigrants in federal, state and local prisons and jails. That's significantly lower than the 55% of arrests in Texas and 46% in Florida made through prisons or jails. And other conservative states with smaller populations relied on the program even more heavily: 75% of ICE arrests in Alabama and 71% in Indiana took place via prisons and jails. 'State cooperation has been an important buffer in ICE arrests and ICE operations in general for years,' said Ariel Ruiz Soto, a Sacramento-based senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. 'We've seen that states are not only willing to cooperate with ICE, but are proactively now establishing 287(g) agreements with their local law enforcement, are naturally going to cast a wider net of enforcement in the boundaries of that state.' While California considers only some criminal offenses, such as serious felonies, significant enough to share information with ICE; Texas and Florida are more likely to report offenses that may not be as severe, such as minor traffic infractions. Still, even if fewer people were arrested in California than other states, it also witnessed one of the most dramatic increases in arrests in the country. California ranked 30th in ICE arrests per million in February. By June, the state had climbed to 10th place. ICE arrested around 8,460 immigrants across California between Jan. 20 and June 26, a 212% increase compared with the five months before Trump took office. That contrasts with a 159% increase nationally for the same period. Much of ICE's activity in California was hyper-focused on Greater Los Angeles: About 60% of ICE arrests in the state took place in the seven counties in and around L.A. during Trump's first five months in office. The number of arrests in the Los Angeles area soared from 463 in January to 2,185 in June — a 372% spike, second only to New York's 432% increase. Even if California is not seeing the largest numbers of arrests, experts say, the dramatic increase in captures stands out from other places because of the lack of official cooperation and public hostility toward immigration agents. 'A smaller increase in a place that has very little cooperation is, in a way, more significant than seeing an increase in areas that have lots and lots of cooperation,' Kocher said. ICE agents, Kocher said, have to work much harder to arrest immigrants in places like L.A. or California that define themselves as 'sanctuary' jurisdictions and limit their cooperation with federal immigration agents. 'They really had to go out of their way,' he said. Trump administration officials have long argued that sanctuary jurisdictions give them no choice but to round up people on the streets. Not long after Trump won the 2024 election and the L.A. City Council voted unanimously to block any city resources from being used for immigration enforcement, incoming border enforcement advisor Tom Homan threatened an onslaught. 'If I've got to send twice as many officers to L.A. because we're not getting any assistance, then that's what we're going to do,' Homan told Newsmax. With limited cooperation from California jails, ICE agents went out into communities, rounding up people they suspected of being undocumented on street corners and at factories and farms. That shift in tactics meant that immigrants with criminal convictions no longer made up the bulk of California ICE arrests. While about 66% of immigrants arrested in the first four months of the year had criminal convictions, that percentage fell to 30% in June. The sweeping nature of the arrests drew immediate criticism as racial profiling and spawned robust community condemnation. Some immigration experts and community activists cite the organized resistance in L.A. as another reason the numbers of ICE arrests were lower in California than in Texas and even lower than dozens of states by percentage of population. 'The reason is the resistance, organized resistance: the people who literally went to war with them in Paramount, in Compton, in Bell and Huntington Park,' said Ron Gochez, a member of Unión del Barrio Los Angeles, an independent political group that patrols neighborhoods to alert residents of immigration sweeps. 'They've been chased out in the different neighborhoods where we organize,' he said. 'We've been able to mobilize the community to surround the agents when they come to kidnap people.' In L.A., activists patrolled the streets from 5 a.m. until 11 p.m., seven days a week, Gochez said. They faced off with ICE agents in Home Depot parking lots and at warehouses and farms. 'We were doing everything that we could to try to keep up with the intensity of the military assault,' Gochez said. 'The resistance was strong. … We've been able, on numerous occasions, to successfully defend the communities and drive them out of our community.' The protests prompted Trump to deploy the National Guard and Marines in June, with the stated purpose of protecting federal buildings and personnel. But the administration's ability to ratchet up arrests hit a roadblock on July 11. 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'Sanctuary cities are going to get exactly what they don't want: more agents in the communities and more work site enforcement,' Homan told reporters two weeks after the court blocked roving patrols. 'Why is that? Because they won't let one agent arrest one bad guy in the jail.' U.S. Border Patrol Sector Chief Gregory Bovino, who has been leading operations in California, posted a fast-moving video on X that spliced L.A. Mayor Karen Bass telling reporters that 'this experiment that was practiced on the city of Los Angeles failed' with video showing him grinning. Then, as a frenetic drum and bass mix kicked in, federal agents jump out of a van and chase people. 'When you're faced with opposition to law and order, what do you do?' Bovino wrote. 'Improvise, adapt, and overcome!' Clearly, the Trump administration is willing to expend significant resources to make California a political battleground and test case, Ruiz Soto said. The question is, at what economic and political cost? 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UPI
3 days ago
- UPI
DOJ requests judges unseal more evidence in Epstein and Maxwell cases
Attorney General Pam Bondi requested that the judges in the Jeffrey Epstein New York criminal case and the Ghislaine Maxwell case unseal more evidence. File Photo by Yuri Gripas/UPI | License Photo Aug. 8 (UPI) -- The Department of Justice asked New York judges to unseal more evidence in the Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell criminal cases, but it still wants to shield "personal identifying information." This is an expansion of Attorney General Pam Bondi's earlier request to courts to unseal five days of grand jury testimony in relation to the cases. In July, a Florida judge refused to unseal transcripts related to a criminal case brought against Epstein for sex charges in the early 2000s. That case was resolved in a controversial plea deal that saw the billionaire financier serve about a year in prison. The latest request is about Epstein's 2019 criminal case in New York, which was dropped after he died by suicide in his jail cell. It also asks to unseal grand jury evidence in Maxwell's case, which ended in her conviction and sentence of 20 years in prison. The request to shield personal identifying information could protect others from being tied to the case. "Any effort to redact third party names smacks of a cover up," victim Annie Farmer said through her lawyer in an Aug. 5 letter to the court. Farmer testified for the prosecution in Maxwell's 2021 criminal trial. "To the extent any of Epstein's and Maxwell's enablers and co-conspirators who have thus far evaded accountability are implicated by the grand jury transcripts, their identities should not be shielded from the public," Farmer's lawyer, Sigrid McCawley, added. She added that victims' identifications should be redacted. The new request comes after the judges handling the requests -- Richard Berman for the Epstein case and Paul Engelmayer for the Maxwell case -- told the department to specify their positions. The department requested to have until Aug. 14 to notify everyone who's name appears on the evidence and update the judges. Usually, grand jury proceedings and evidence are kept secret. Meanwhile, advocacy group Democracy Forward filed suit Fridy against the Justice Department and the FBI for records on their handling of the Epstein investigation. It wants records about senior administration officials' communication about Epstein documents and any correspondence between Epstein and President Donald Trump. The group says it submitted requests under the Freedom of Information Act for the records related to communications about the case in late July that have not yet been fulfilled. "The court should intervene urgently to ensure the public has access to the information they need about this extraordinary situation," Skye Perryman, president and CEO of the group, said in a statement. The federal government often shields records on criminal investigations from public view. Maxwell earlier this week opposed the Justice Department effort to unseal the grand jury testimony. She said it would compromise her privacy and her potential to appeal. Also earlier this week, the House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., subpoenaed the Department of Justice, former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and several others for documents and testimony about Epstein.
Chicago Tribune
3 days ago
- Chicago Tribune
New lawsuit on Jeffrey Epstein case seeks records of Trump administration communications
WASHINGTON — A legal organization challenging President Donald Trump's administration on multiple fronts filed a new lawsuit on Friday seeking the release of records detailing the handling of the sex trafficking investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. The group Democracy Forward sued the Justice Department and the FBI for senior administration officials' communication about Epstein documents and any regarding correspondence between him and Trump. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, appears to the be first of its kind. The group says it submitted requests under the Freedom of Information Act for the records related to communications about the case in late July that have not yet been fulfilled. 'The court should intervene urgently to ensure the public has access to the information they need about this extraordinary situation,' said Skye Perryman, the president and CEO of the Democratic-aligned group, in a statement. The federal government often shields records related to criminal investigations from public view. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment. Democracy Forward has filed dozens of lawsuits against Trump's Republican administration, challenging policies and executive orders in areas including education, immigration and health care. The Epstein case has been subject to heightened public focus since the Justice Department said last month it would not release additional documents from the case, despite assurance from Attorney General Pam Bondi. The decision sparked frustration and anger among online sleuths, conspiracy theorists and elements of Trump's base who had hoped to see proof of a government cover-up. The Trump administration has sought to unseal grand jury transcripts, though that has been denied by a judge in Florida. U.S. District Judge Robin Rosenberg in West Palm Beach said the request to release grand jury documents from 2005 and 2007 did not meet any of the extraordinary exceptions under federal law that could make them public. A similar request for the work of a different grand jury is pending in New York. The House Oversight Committee has also subpoenaed the Justice Department for files on the investigation, part of a congressional probe that lawmakers believe may show links to Trump and other former top officials. Since Epstein's 2019 death in a New York jail cell as he awaited trial for sex trafficking charges, conservative conspiracists have stoked theories about what information investigators gathered on the wealthy financier and who else knew about his sexual abuse of teenage girls. Trump has denied prior knowledge of Epstein's crimes and says he cut off their relationship long ago, and he has repeatedly tried to move past the Justice Department's decision not to release a full accounting of the investigation. But lawmakers from both major political parties have refused to let it go.
