Leon County Indivisible
Activism for Busy People
In filing on Tuesday night, the organizations said the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees FEMA, could eliminate more than 10,000 positions in the months ahead.
The court filing said that FEMA management was directed to plan for a 50 percent staffing cut and that a spreadsheet attached to the email called for a 15 percent cut for “Permanent Fulltime” staff, a 41 percent for “Disaster Fulltime” staff and an 85 percent cut in“Surge Workforce.”
ormer Sen. José Javier Rodríguez’s bid for Attorney General now has the backing of a man who once held the job — in addition to other major government posts.
Bob Butterworth, a fellow Democrat who served as Attorney General under four Governors from 1987 to 2002, said Rodríguez “has demonstrated a thoughtful and steady approach to the law, with a clear focus on protecting Floridians and upholding the responsibilities of the Attorney General’s office.”
Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.) announced Tuesday that he’s retiring after almost two decades in Congress, making him the third Florida Republican to opt against seeking reelection in the House.
Alex Vindman, who became a key player along with his twin brother in President Donald Trump’s first impeachment, announced on Tuesday that he is running for the U.S. Senate as a Democrat in Florida.
The Trump administration is planning to use artificial intelligence to write federal transportation regulations, according to U.S. Department of Transportation records and interviews with six agency staffers.
Gregory Zerzan, the agency’s general counsel, said at that meeting that President Donald Trump is “very excited about this initiative.” Zerzan seemed to suggest that the DOT was at the vanguard of a broader federal effort, calling the department the “point of the spear” and “the first agency that is fully enabled to use AI to draft rules.”
Zerzan appeared interested mainly in the quantity of regulations that AI could produce, not their quality. “We don’t need the perfect rule on XYZ. We don’t even need a very good rule on XYZ,” he said, according to the meeting notes. “We want good enough.” Zerzan added, “We’re flooding the zone.”
The Senate Democratic Caucus met late Sunday and agreed to block $64.4 billion in funding for the Department of Homeland Security (which includes $10 billion for ICE) unless several key conditions are attached to restrain ICE thuggery and mayhem. The long-delayed show of Democratic spine came after the latest ICE murder, of VA intensive care nurse Alex Pretti.
Detailed language on the conditions is to be finalized today.
Venezuela is in an underreported hunger crisis that is getting worse by the day, and the Trump administration’s de facto alliance with the unelected and unpopular Chavismo government is only adding to the risks of a disaster. Francisco Rodríguez, the respected Venezuelan economist who has sounded the alarm, warns: “Food stocks are running dangerously low. You need an emergency plan for Venezuela. You need to get the World Food Program and other humanitarian organizations in there right away.”
k. Trump took thousands of documents, more than 300 marked classified, with him to Mar-a-Lago in 2021. For months, he rebuffed polite requests by the FBI to cooperate with an inquiry. Finally, they raided the place. Naturally, Trump turned this into a deep-state persecution, and his willing propagandists complied in pushing that lie.
Then the roulette wheel of fate gave the case to the hackiest federal judge imaginable. She tossed the case. And she has spent her time since then making sure that the public never learns any more details about what Trump did. Next up, she’ll surely agree to the motion filed by a lawyer who played a willing role in helping Trump and Pam Bondi wreck the Justice Department.
And even if somehow Cannon denies the motion and Volume II somehow gets released? Well, it’s Bondi who’ll decide how much of it we get to see!
A new video published on social media contradicts the Department of Homeland Security’s account of why federal agents killed 37-year-old Minneapolis man Alex Pretti in broad daylight on Saturday.
Here is a preschooler wearing a Spider-Man backpack, just like all of our kids, as the hand of a much larger masked ICE agent holds onto his backpack, as if he were a flight risk. An oversized blue hat with bunny ears partially covers his face as he stares ahead blankly. Liam and his father will eventually be sent to an immigration detention center just outside San Antonio, but not before, as school officials reported, federal officers attempted to turn the child into “bait” by persuading him to knock on his own front door to see if there were other family members they could apprehend inside. Speaking to federal agents in a closed-door meeting, Vice President JD Vance defended ICE’s actions.
The idea that a right-wing goon squad can somehow be reformed through the magic of Powerpoint presentations is squarely rooted in the fear among the Beltway-brained that proposing to abolish this rogue agency is going to cost Democrats a winnable election. I’m not sure where these fears find their foundation given that when “Abolish ICE” was in vogue, Democrats did great: They won in 2018 and 2020 and surprisingly overperformed in 2022. Then they got to 2024 and lost, not long after they took a rightward turn on immigration in an attempt to prove that they could be tougher on migrants than Trump was, as if his main failing was that his draconian immigration policies weren’t dressed up in enough management consultant–speak.
This has been an extraordinarily tumultuous year. Relentless assaults on democracy, the rule of law, and our justice system have tested the very foundations of our constitutional government. In response, Lawyers Defending American Democracy intensified our efforts, as more fully described in our 2025 Year-End Report, Meeting the Moment in an Unprecedented Year.