01/28/26

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, January 28th.

Lego Day!

Here’s a fun fact – with just six standard 2x4 LEGO bricks of the same color, you can make 915,103,765 combinations, including side-to-side, upside down, and edge-to-edge connections.

That’s wild!

And now, the news.

Deportations in America

-via NBC News, The Guardian, and ABC News

Starting off, of course, with the continued coverage of just the general racism and white supremacism of this administration… on Tuesday a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order to block the Trump administration from removing or transferring 5-year-old Liam, who as you may remember, the government kidnapped last week, as well as his father, from the Texas Immigration Processing Center.

This was likely done to prevent the administration from deporting the boy and his dad, even though they were in the middle of the legal asylum process, and had not missed any appointments, when ICE picked them up and tried to use the 5-year-old as bait to lure more people out of his home before kidnapping him.

And it’s not like they haven’t done it before – A five-year-old US citizen from Austin, Texas was deported to Honduras, a country she’s never known, with her mother earlier this month.

ICE says they were acting on a deportation order from 2019, which was issued before the girl was born.

“Well what were they supposed to do? Leave her behind?”

Yes! First of all, what they could have done is not force the woman out of the country. They could, you know, fix the immigration system by fixing the immigration system. They found a woman here illegally, but she wasn’t doing a criminal crime. She was doing a civil crime. No worse than jaywalking. Why not say, “you have a choice. You can now get on the pathway to citizenship. OR, if you choose not to, then we’re going to have to deport you. But you can, right now, choose to stay in this country and we will help you become a citizen”?

By the way, she was trying to be here legally. Yes, she did indeed receive a deportation order. However, she separated from her daughter’s abusive father and, while in the US, applied for a U visa, which is for non-citizen victims of domestic abuse. There is a significant backlog of those applications and, at the time of her deportation, her case was still pending.

But here’s the other thing – when parents are arrested, kids are not also arrested. They either stay with another family member or they’re sent to foster care.

These people are out here acting like they had no other choice but to deport a five-year-old US citizen… you have choices a’plenty! You just didn’t want do those choices because this five-year-old is brown and the only person, this is on record, the only person that the president of the United States has not had an issue with is Stephen Miller. He’s the one running this whole thing and he has said that if he had it his way, there would only be 100 million Americans and they’d all look like him.

Which is a walking jump scare.

A waking nightmare.

That man is 40 years old. Did you know that? He is younger than me. That’s what happens when your insides look like your outsides.

Dude can’t eat garlic.

He tried to shapeshift into a bat once and even the bats were like – you’re a creep. Go away.

He looks like the monster you’d see in the mirror when you wipe away the fog from the mirror in the shower. But of course, he doesn’t show up in mirrors.

He is a white supremacist and that’s the only person Donald Trump has never had a bad thing to say about. And that’s who’s running the show.

So yes, in any other crime if a parent is being arrested the child would be placed with another adult in the family or foster care. Here, however, that child must also be deported. Because the crime has nothing to do with immigration status and only to do with being brown.

As Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem continue on their reign of terror, they’re now going (ironically) international. With their place to have ICE agents help with security at the Milan winter Olympics.

Let’s check in to see how Italy feels about this. Milan’s Mayor told local media:

"This is a militia that kills, a militia that enters into the homes of people, signing their own permission slips. It is clear they are not welcome in Milan, without a doubt."

Huh. On the fence I guess.

Just kidding, obviously they’re not on the fence, but I want you to understand how we’re being seen in other countries.

Because Italy’s foreign minister said the ICE officials in Italy wouldn’t be like the ones in Minnesota. They’d operate in a different way. But the way he explained the difference is jarring. "It's not like these are the people on the streets of Minneapolis. It's not like the SS are about to arrive."

He’s literally saying that the ICE officials in Minneapolis are nazis.

The games start a week from Friday. We’ll see what happens.

In the meantime, here at home, House Democratic leaders are now saying that if Trump doesn’t fire Kristi Noem, they will launch impeachment proceedings against her. Noem, however, is saying everything she’s done has been done: “direction of the president and Stephen.”

Okay well the president isn’t going to fire himself (if only wishing made it so), and he’s not going to fire his favorite little fascist. So…

I mean, do we really think he’s going to stand up for a woman??

Imagine!

And then just one more thing before the whoosh – in Pima County, Arizona a man was shot by Border Patrol after authorities say he fired at a federal helicopter.

The sheriff’s office is leading the investigation. There’s not much information.

This is one of those incredibly important moments where we can’t jump to conclusions and need more facts. I’m not saying we can depend on this administration for facts, but actual real facts will come out and we need those.

Boat Strike Suit

-via AP News

The families of two Trinidadian nationals who were killed in last October’s boat strikes, led by Pete Hegseth and filed a complaint in what is thought to be the first wrongful death case to come from the three dozen strikes on boats that Hegseth claims, without offering any proof so far, are drug smuggling boats.

Per the suit: “These premeditated and intentional killings lack any plausible legal justification. Thus, they were simply murders, ordered by individuals at the highest levels of government and obeyed by military officers in the chain of command.”

Listen, Pete Hegseth is not going to get fired from this suit. He’s not going to go to jail from this suit. He should! He for sure should!

But maybe, just maybe… they will finally have to show some evidence or, what is more accurate, their lack of evidence, in these murders.

Ilhan Omar Attack

-via NBC News

At a town hall on Tuesday, a man lunged at House Rep. Ilhan Omar, yelling “you must resign,” and attempted to spray her with a currently unknown substance before he was stopped and removed from the building.

She continued with her town hall and said in a statement that she is okay.

And that’s it. That’s the news.

I’m proud of LEGO. You know why? Because they’re out here saying six 2x4 bricks can make 915,103,765. That’s ambitious. We should all be ambitious like that.

They also insist on being called LEGO. All caps, so plural.

They’re confident.

But more than LEGO, because you are also ambitious and confident, and I wish there 915,103,765 of you… I’m proud of you.