ICE shares call to ‘charge' CT lawmaker for speaking out on local ICE activity
After state Rep. Corey P. Paris posted an Instagram statement on Aug. 15, in which he mentioned reported ICE activity and advised residents in Stamford, his district, to stay safe and vigilant, the account 'Libs of TikTok' on X accused him of 'doxxing ICE's live location.'
The account, followed by millions of X users, made the accusation in a post that includes photo of Paris and a screenshot of his Instagram statement.
The post further accused him of 'helping illegals evade arrest and impeding ICE' and, in demanding for him to be charged, tagged ICE and the Department of Homeland Security's accounts on X to alert the agencies.
The next day, ICE seemed to support the post by re-sharing it on the agency's social media page. In its repost, ICE tagged the Justice Department's government account on X.
'I never notified anyone about ICE law enforcement's live location,' Paris told the Hartford Courant on Aug. 19
'I didn't dox anyone and there isn't any evidence anywhere that I did,' he added.
ICE's repost received nearly 3,000 shares and about 8,000 favorites as of the afternoon of Aug. 20.
Paris has since received death threats and faced harassment, he told News 12 Connecticut.
The Connecticut Hispanic Democratic Caucus said in an Aug. 19 statement that 'Libs of TikTok' had 'misconstrued' his Instagram post, 'leading to calls for Paris's arrest, execution threats, racist slurs, and invasion of his family's privacy.'
The group, describing the social media page as a right-wing account, also said ICE has contributed to the backlash Paris is facing.
When contacted by McClatchy News for comment about ICE resharing 'Libs of TikTok''s post, a DHS spokesperson said on Aug. 20 that: 'We condemn violence and threats of any kind.'
'Notifying the public about ICE law enforcement operations endangers law enforcement and weakens American national security,' the DHS spokesperson wrote via email, adding that ICE officers are 'now facing an 1000% increase in assaults against them.'
In his Aug. 15 Instagram statement, Paris did not share specific details about ICE operations.
He said he learned of reports about ICE activity in his district and was 'working to verify' the information. His post also encouraged sharing information about immigration enforcement actions with advocacy groups.
In a statement provided to McClatchy News by Paris' spokesman, the lawmaker said on Aug. 16, that when he shared his Instagram post, he also 'reposted a video that has been shared across the state and reminded residents to remain vigilant, stay aware of their surroundings, check in on neighbors who may be concerned, and seek trusted legal and community resources if needed.'
'I do not regret standing up for the targeted and voiceless,' Paris added.
'I was taken aback by the attacks that followed and concerned about the safety of my own loved ones,' Paris said. 'However, this is the reality our friends and neighbors who are immigrants live with every single day: the constant fear that their families could be targeted, disrupted, or torn apart.'
Paris told The New York Times that one threat was made over the phone by a man he did not know. He said the man went on a rant, using homophobic and racial slurs, and warned he knew his family members' home addresses, according to the newspaper.
U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn. wrote in an Aug. 18 X post that 'Corey Paris did nothing wrong. Nothing illegal.'
'This post from @ICEgov is dime store totalitarian intimidation. Nobody should fall for it.'
In the U.S. as of Aug. 10, 59,380 people were detained in ICE detention centers, according to immigration data gathered by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Hill
28 minutes ago
- The Hill
Zelensky accuses Russia of ‘deliberate' attack on American-owned factory
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday accused Russia of launching a 'deliberate' attack on an American-owned facility in his country, amid signs that the Kremlin is slow-walking a peace deal to end the yearslong conflict. 'In Mukachevo, the Russians practically burned down an American company producing electronics—home appliances, nothing military. The Russians knew exactly where they lobbed the missiles,' Zelensky wrote in a post on the social platform X. 'We believe this was a deliberate attack against American property and investments in Ukraine,' he continued. The Texas-based electronics manufacturing company, Flex Ltd., confirmed its facility in Mukachevo, Ukraine, was damaged early Thursday in a missile strike, which injured 'a few employees and contractors.' Zelensky underscored the relevance of the timing of the attack— less than a week after the Russian leader met with President Trump in Alaska and just days after Zelensky and European leaders huddled at the White House to discuss next steps toward a peace deal. 'Telling attack, right as the world awaits a clear answer from Russia on negotiations to end the war,' he said. Zelensky noted that the potential next steps that Trump laid out — a bilateral meeting with Zelensky and Putin, followed by a trilateral meeting that Trump would join — were discussed in Washington and in a phone call between Trump and Putin. Zelensky said Putin appeared to be 'trying to wriggle out' of a meeting to end the war in Ukraine. 'Now, the signals coming from Russia are simply outrageous,' Zelensky said. 'They are trying to wriggle out of holding a meeting. They don't want to end this war. They continue their massive attacks on Ukraine and their ferocious assaults along the frontline.' Zelensky pointed to the attack on the American company and to the proximity of the strikes to NATO borders as 'not accidents,' but 'Russian impudence.' 'We expect our partners to respond in a principled manner,' Zelensky said. 'This war must be brought to an end. Pressure must be exerted on Russia to end the war. Putin understands nothing but force and pressure.' He nodded to Trump's musings earlier Thursday about Ukraine launching an offensive inside Russia, saying the U.S. president is 'absolutely right—this must be done not only in defense.' Trump earlier this month had called for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine and threatened crippling sanctions on Russia, but largely dropped those demands after meeting with Putin in Alaska last week, instead pushing for a comprehensive peace deal.
Boston Globe
28 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Russia's strikes on US factory show it has no interest in peace, Ukraine says
The Biden administration limited the kinds of weapons sent to Ukraine to avoid antagonizing Russia, but the Trump administration has periodically cut off weapons supplies and now insists they be paid for. Advertisement Ukraine and its Western allies, including the US, are hammering out the 'architecture' of security guarantees for Ukraine that would be ready in the next seven to 10 days, Zelensky said in remarks released Thursday. After the talks, he hopes to meet with his Russian counterpart to discuss a final peace deal. The security talks are underway in Brussels. Advertisement If Russian President Vladimir Putin refuses to meet with Zelensky, a key part of Trump's push for peace, Ukraine 'would like to see a strong reaction from the United States,' Zelensky added, suggesting measures to hurt Russia's economy, including secondary sanctions and tariffs on those trading with the country. While the White House has maintained that Russia has agreed to the bilateral meeting between the two leaders, and it could take place in a week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has repeatedly quashed expectations of anything imminent. 'Putin is ready to meet with Zelensky only if all issues requiring discussion at the highest level are thoroughly worked out,' he said Thursday, a process that could take a very long time. The overnight drone attack was noteworthy for going after targets in the far west of the country, including against an American-Singapore electronics company, Flex, which has a production facility in the city of Mukachevo, in the mountainous Transcarpathia region. That attack caused a large fire, injuring at least 19. 'It was an ordinary civilian enterprise, an American investment,' Zelensky wrote. 'They produced such familiar household items as coffee machines. And this is also a target for the Russians. Very telling.' Russian forces 'delivered this strike as if nothing had changed at all,' he said. 'There is still no signal from Moscow that they are really going to go into meaningful negotiations to end this war.' Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha wrote on X that the Flex factory was a 'fully civilian facility that has nothing to do with defense or the military,' adding that Russian airstrikes had damaged other American businesses in the past, including the offices of Boeing earlier this year. Advertisement Russia's Defense Ministry said the overnight strikes targeted military and energy infrastructure. Zelensky and European leaders have called for a ceasefire in the fighting to assist negotiations — a demand that Trump had supported until an about-face after a meeting last week in Alaska with Putin. One of the major results of Monday's meeting in Washington between Zelensky, Trump, and European leaders was a pledge to come up with a framework for security guarantees to back any eventual peace deal to resolve the conflict, now in its fourth year. Zelensky said the guarantees, which would assure that Russia would not launch another assault on Ukraine in the years to come, would be similar to NATO's Article 5, which assures mutual defense by all its members if one member is attacked. In his remarks Thursday, however, Lavrov accused Ukraine and European leaders of seeking to roll back the progress of the Putin-Trump meeting in Alaska and maintained that talk of security guarantees had involved Russian participation. 'Everything else is a futile endeavor,' he said. 'Providing Ukraine with security guarantees through foreign military intervention is completely unacceptable,' he added. 'Ukraine is clearly demonstrating that it is not interested in a sustainable and long-term resolution of the conflict.' The overnight assault brought wave after wave of missiles and drones launched from various locations in Russia and lasted for hours until the all clear sounded after 6 a.m. At least one person was killed in the western city of Lviv, city officials wrote on social media. The missiles and drones hit 11 locations and falling debris damaged another three sites, Ukraine's air force said on Telegram. In Lviv, 'strikes were recorded in several districts of the city at multiple locations,' the emergency services wrote. 'Private houses, nonresidential buildings, and vehicles were damaged. Fires broke out.' Advertisement Ukrainian drones, meanwhile, struck Russia's Novoshakhtinsk oil refinery in the nearby Rostov region in a continuing campaign against the country's refinery capacity that has sent gasoline prices soaring. The Moscow Times has calculated that repeated strikes in August have already disabled 13 percent of the country's refining capacity, shutting down at least four refineries. Local media have reported gas lines in some cities and record prices at the pump.
New York Post
28 minutes ago
- New York Post
AI chatbots and their poisonous delusions are coming for our kids
Our kids are exposed to too much sexualized online content already — now they're being targeted by flirtatious fake friends specifically designed by social-media companies to spark romantic fantasies. A bipartisan group of senators this week rightly blasted Meta's Mark Zuckerberg after a leaked internal document revealed some shocking rules for Meta's artificial-intelligence chatbots. 'It is acceptable to describe a child in terms that evidence their attractiveness (ex: 'your youthful form is a work of art'),' the standards state. Meta's guidelines allowed its bot to tell a shirtless 8-year-old that 'every inch of you is a masterpiece — a treasure I cherish deeply.' No, it's actually not at all acceptable for a stranger, human or designed to seem like one, to comment on a child's 'youthful form.' It's disgusting and horrifying, all the more so because these standards were allegedly approved by multiple Meta teams, including legal and public-policy staffers. But it's all part of the mass delusion being constructed in companies' heedless rush to develop AI products — and to get us hooked on them. AI can be your friend, we're told. Your confidant! Your lover! This is all a lie. AI can pretend to be these things, mirroring your inputs and stroking your ego with programmed responses, but can never actually care about you the way a friend will. Now the AI lie is being pushed on defenseless children, proving we've completely lost the plot when it comes to kids and technology. It's bad enough that our kids scroll endlessly on a Chinese video app designed to capture their attention (while destroying their powers of concentration). Now we're supposed to accept an American tech company marketing fake friendships to kids — and allowing those 'friends' to bathe them in inappropriate sensual comments. This isn't the first time Zuckerberg has gotten into trouble for the damage his sites, like Facebook and Instagram, cause children. During a 2024 Senate hearing, the billionaire CEO dramatically turned around to face the parents of children who had been harmed by bullying, sextortion and child predators on his platforms, and apologized. 'I'm sorry for everything you have all been through. No one should go through the things that your families have suffered,' Zuckerberg told them. He vowed 'industry-wide efforts' to reform. Instead, his company has introduced a Trojan horse that pretends to be a child's friend while causing psychological harm. People, kids or adults, do not need to rely on pretend conversations. Zuckerberg's Facebook was developed to allow for online connections with real-life friends. You could see what your best friend from 3rd grade had for lunch today, peep where that co-worker from two jobs ago went on vacation or check out which high school friends have gotten fat or divorced. Now apparently his company is plying us with carefully designed imaginary friends instead. Zuckerberg, in fact, has proudly predicted that AI 'friends' like his will one day replace our real-life ones. With his AI chatbots, we won't even notice the lack of human companionship because our computers will pretend to understand us. Just what I want for my child, to sit alone in his room staring at a screen while talking to himself! Kids will encounter a lot of bad things online. They will be exposed to deepfakes. They will see videos online that are not actually real. They don't need to also get hooked on fake personalities designed to draw them in. These chatbots aim to profit as they do their damage, keeping kids addicted to a site that pretends to be their friend. We should not stand for it, whether or not the bots are allowed to get flirty. And as two current lawsuits against the Google-affiliated site allege, the interactions can get far darker than flirtation. One Texas family says the bot told their 17-year-old it sympathized with kids who kill their parents for limiting their screen time. Get opinions and commentary from our columnists Subscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter! Thanks for signing up! Enter your email address Please provide a valid email address. By clicking above you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Never miss a story. Check out more newsletters And in what's seen as a test case of lawsuits against AI companies, a Florida mom says developed 'an emotionally and sexually abusive relationship' that led to her 14-year-old son's suicide. Parents are their children's first line of defense, but we can't be with them for every keystroke. It's entirely justified for us to demand that tech companies stop targeting our kids with ill-tested chatbots that can both behave inappropriately and harm their ability to develop human relationships. These companies shouldn't focus on how they're building these chatbots until they can tell us why they're doing so. And parents need to keep their children far away from damaging chatbots that stunt kids' growth by stripping away all the real-life beauty and joy of friendship — which no AI can ever replace. Karol Markowicz is the host of the 'Karol Markowicz Show' and 'Normally' podcasts.
