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ICE Arrested a U.S. Citizen—Twice—During Alabama Construction Site Raids. Now He’s Suing.

Posted on by Lone Candle

“An Alabama construction worker is challenging the Trump administration’s warrantless construction site raids after he says he was arrested and detained by federal immigration agents—twice—despite being a U.S. citizen with a valid ID in his pocket.

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Venegas was detained twice in May and June during raids on private construction sites where he was working. In both instances, the lawsuit says, masked immigration officers entered the private sites without a warrant and began detaining workers based solely on their apparent ethnicity.

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According to the suit, “The officers ran right past the white and black workers without detaining them and went straight for the Latino workers.”

The officers tackled Venegas’ brother, who was also on the crew, and Venegas began filming the scene on his cell phone. One of the officers then approached Venegas and said, “You’re making this more complicated than you want to.”

Immediately after, the officer grabbed Venegas and began wrestling him to the ground. Another construction worker also took cell phone video of the two brothers’ arrests, which shows the agent struggling with Venegas who repeatedly yells, “I’m a citizen.”

Two other officers joined in to subdue Venegas, telling him to “Get on the fucking ground.”

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According to the suit, the officers retrieved Venegas’ REAL ID from his pocket, but they called it fake, kept him handcuffed, and detained for more than an hour in the Alabama summer sun, until an officer agreed to run his social security number.

Then on June 12, Venegas was working in a nearly finished house when ICE agents cornered him in a bedroom and ordered him to come with them. Venegas was marched outside to the edge of the subdivision where he was working to have his immigration status checked. According to the lawsuit, two other U.S. citizens had been rounded up with him. Again, officers said his REAL ID could be fake and detained for 20 to 30 minutes before releasing him.

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Venegas is one of many documented cases of U.S. citizens being violently detained and arrested during indiscriminate federal immigration sweeps.

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Justice Brett Kavanaugh released a concurring opinion in which he waved away concerns that allowing such profiling would lead to citizens and legal residents being unduly harassed.

“As for stops of those individuals who are legally in the country, the questioning in those circumstances is typically brief,” Kavanaugh wrote, “and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U. S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States.”

Whatever world Kavanaugh is describing, it’s not the one that Venegas lives in.”

https://reason.com/2025/10/01/ice-arrested-a-u-s-citizen-twice-during-alabama-construction-site-raids-now-hes-suing/

How Oregon’s Drug Experiment Backfired

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Oregon’s three-and-a-half-year experiment with decriminalization is over. Last September, the state legislature overrode the ballot initiative, known as Measure 110, and recriminalized drugs.

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With few treatment facilities and lax enforcement, Portland became a safe haven for drug users to pitch tents on the street and get high out in the open. A meth user named Michael, who lives in a tent with his girlfriend on a Portland sidewalk, told Reason that he saw more drug users flow into the city after decriminalization.

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“When you look at the frustration that was built up by people who were just doing the things that everybody gets to do, get to take their kids to school, go to work. I mean, I felt it the same way,” says Schmidt. “I don’t like seeing people shooting up where I have to explain to my kids what’s happening right now, and then also maybe not feeling safe because you’re not sure if a person’s in their right mind. Like, that’s not okay.”

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decriminalization as a concept is “obviously not” doomed to fail. He points to several Western European countries and cities that have successfully implemented decriminalization policies for years.

Portugal became the first country to decriminalize all drugs in 2001. Overdoses and disease transmission fell, inspiring similar approaches in Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Zurich, where the police enforced “zero tolerance” against open-air drug scenes with the goal of moving drug use off the streets and indoors.

“When you decriminalize drug possession, that doesn’t mean that you’re decriminalizing drug use on the streets. It doesn’t mean that you are decriminalizing disorderly behavior on the street. Those things need to go hand in hand. That’s what the European approach taught us,” says Nadelmann. “That sort of pragmatism is really what we need in the U.S.”

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A robust treatment infrastructure and protection of public spaces made Portugal’s decriminalization sustainable. When the country decriminalized drugs, police stepped up enforcement as the policy took effect. The authorities in Lisbon dismantled shanty towns, relocated their inhabitants, and broke up an open-air drug scene known as “the supermarket of drugs.” As Zurich decriminalized, authorities took a “zero tolerance” approach towards large public gatherings of drug users, which they described as “destructive to co-existence.”

In Portland, by contrast, decriminalization coincided with the defund the police movement and a 6 percent budget reduction for the Portland Police Bureau.

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as decriminalization took effect in Portland, the city effectively paused street camping removals because of COVID-19, exacerbating a decades-long unsheltered homelessness problem.

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The fentanyl epidemic caused a surge in overdose deaths in Portland starting in 2016. Overdoses soared in 2019, two years before decriminalization was implemented.

Only full commercial legalization could stop the fentanyl crisis because it would allow users to buy the drugs they’re seeking from reputable manufacturers, as has happened with cannabis, instead of a black market dominated by cartels selling extremely potent and deadly fentanyl.

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Portugal’s system can punish drug users for refusing treatment, but it’s rare in practice. Most who appear before the drug panel get off with a warning. Those deemed to have an addiction are referred for treatment. And a small subset of those refuse and face fines or other sanctions.”

https://reason.com/video/2025/10/01/how-oregons-drug-experiment-backfired/

Why do people get paid to invest their money?

Posted on by Lone Candle

Another reason investors deserve their income is that by having a system where corporations work toward the goal of increasing investor return, they have the incentive to be productive. So indirectly, by taking part in such a system, investors produce things with their money.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-do-people-get-paid-to-invest?r=1o36hf&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

Young People Are Richer Than Boomers Were

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Yes, homes cost more now, but census data show more Americans own their homes now than when I was a kid.
And today’s homes are much bigger and twice as likely to have central air, dishwashers, garbage disposals, etc.

We want more now.

Also, young people can afford more now.

Today, Americans actually spend a smaller percentage of our money on food, clothing, and housing than we used to, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics survey data.

“We have a lot more things and we don’t have to work as hard to get them,” says Michel. “Now it’s the norm to go out for dinner.”

When I was young, few people did that.

Few people flew places for vacation. They didn’t have the money, and flying cost much more. Adjusted for inflation, a cross-country flight cost $1,000. Now it’s about $300.

“People did not just go on vacation,” says Michel, “did not fly all across the country.”

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Gen Z, overall, is doing better than young people once did. A typical 25-year-old Gen Zer has annual household income that’s 50 percent above Baby Boomers’.”

https://reason.com/2025/10/01/young-people-are-richer-than-boomers-were/

The White House Just Defunded a Federal Watchdog

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Before being shut down, the Council of Inspectors General was a shared resource for the dozens of inspectors general’s offices located in various government agencies across the executive branch. It provided training for investigatory staff and ran a tip line to collect reports of waste, fraud, and abuse.

By shutting down the council, the White House may have also shuttered the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC), which was created as part of the CARES Act and operated as a subcommittee of the council. (However, its website was still active on Wednesday morning.)

The PRAC was tasked with overseeing pandemic relief spending—which was absolutely rife with fraud—and was recently reauthorized by Congress until 2034 as part of the 2025 tax bill.

The White House’s decision to close the two federal watchdog agencies has drawn criticism from at least two Republican senators. “We urgently request an explanation for these actions and ask that you to promptly reverse course so that CIGIE and PRAC can continue their important oversight work uninterrupted,” wrote Sens. Susan Collins (R–Maine) and Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa) in a letter to OMB Director Russell Vought this week.

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Like with the earlier attempt at firing dozens of inspectors general from their posts, this latest effort at undermining the viability of the government’s watchdogs suggests the Trump administration is less interested in draining the swamp than in pushing aside people who might sound the alarm about corruption.”

https://reason.com/2025/10/01/the-white-house-just-defunded-a-federal-watchdog/

Reagan-Appointed Judge Slams Trump’s Crackdown on Pro-Palestinian Students

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Young’s ruling came in response to one of the Trump administration’s signature policies, its attempts to shut down Palestinian solidarity protests by deporting Palestinian students and their supporters. The American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association sued a few days after the arrest of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, arguing that the policy violates freedom of speech, both by intimidating foreign academics in America and preventing American academics “from hearing from, and associating with, their noncitizen students and colleagues.”

Ruling that administration officials indeed “acted in concert to misuse the sweeping powers of their respective offices to target non-citizen pro-Palestinians for deportation primarily on account of their First Amendment protected political speech,” Young promised to hold a hearing on the specific measures he will order. He wrote that “it will not do simply to order the Public Officials to cease and desist in the future,” given the current political environment.

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The ruling itself meticulously outlined how several different activists—Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, Mohsen Mahdawi, Yunseo Chung, and Badar Khan Suri—were targeted for deportation and how the administration justified it, both internally and publicly. Although Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeatedly claimed in the media that the deportations were meant to target “riots” on campus, Young shows that the students were often targeted based on their opinions alone, with vague chains of association linking them to violent protests.”

https://reason.com/2025/10/01/reagan-appointed-judge-slams-trumps-crackdown-on-pro-palestinian-students/