New York City Comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander was dragged from the hallways of a Lower Manhattan immigration court and detained by masked ICE agents on Tuesday. It is still unclear if Lander will be charged with anything.

In videos circulating on social media, Lander can be seen with his arms linked to an immigration court defendant as ICE agents attempt to remove him from the building. Lander and his staff can be heard repeatedly asking for a judicial warrant, saying he’d let go of the defendant once he saw one. ICE did not oblige, and instead detained him, pressing him against a wall and cuffing his hands behind his back. It’s clear from the video that ICE agents determined that the mayoral candidate was obstructing their work. If Lander is charged, it would suggest that any attempt to protest or even document ICE actions could be construed as an arrestable offense. It’s clearly already one worthy of detainment.

“You do not have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens,” Lander said multiple times while ICE tightened the handcuffs.

Hi, this is Meg Barnette, Brad's wife.

While escorting a defendant out of immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza, Brad was taken by masked agents and detained by ICE.

This is still developing, and our team is monitoring the situation closely. pic.twitter.com/jekaDFjsT1

Lander’s detainment has been met with shock and condemnation. Multiple city leaders, including Lander’s wife, Megan Barnette, and fellow mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, held a press conference immediately following the incident.

“NYC Comptroller Brad Lander was just arrested by Trump’s ICE agents because he asked to see a judicial warrant,” Mamdani wrote on X. “This is fascism, and all New Yorkers must speak in one voice. Release him now.”

“ICE just arrested Brad Lander, the NYC Comptroller and one of the leading candidates for Mayor, without grounds. He was conducting routine immigration court work, escorting individuals from hearings,” New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Bluesky. “He asked ICE for their warrant—well within his legal rights. This is political intimidation.”

“I feel really rattled and scared, and my husband is a candidate for mayor, is an elected citywide official, is U.S. citizen,” Barnette said. He “has a U.S. passport, and I know in all likelihood he is OK. And all of the other folks in that building are risking having their families torn apart with inadequate explanation. And it’s an abomination.”

ICE maintains that Comptroller Lander was obstructing an arrest by linking arms with the defendant and asking to see a warrant.

Dissent against Donald Trump is bubbling within his administration—but people are too scared to act on it.

Some White House staffers no longer believe that Trump is fit to be president, according to Miles Taylor, who served as Department of Homeland Security chief of staff during Trump’s first term. They believe that the president is “still the same man, but worse and emboldened,” Taylor said on the Court of History podcast. He noted that staffers described Trump as “deeply impulsive, but impulsive without checks and balances around him.”

“If I was sitting with Donald Trump right now, I would say, ‘I have friends in your White House, and some of them are … [lying] very, very low, but share some of the same concerns that I had during the first Trump administration,’” Taylor said.

Taylor drew national attention in 2018 when he anonymously penned an op-ed for The New York Times claiming to be part of the internal “resistance” against Trump’s agenda, lumping himself in with a group of senior officials who did not believe Trump was fit for the nation’s highest office. He has since written several books assessing Trump’s behavior in the White House that revealed intimate insider accounts.

“The people around [Trump] aren’t trying to talk him out of doing bad things—if anything, they are demonstrating fealty at every turn to the leader, and that’s resulting in a lot of bad decisions getting made,” Taylor said.

This has proven true since the inauguration: The president has developed a real soft spot for public deference, whether it’s receiving ultra-lavish gifts from Qatar to warm trade negotiations, a $45 million military parade to jointly celebrate his birthday and the Army’s 250th anniversary, or Cabinet meeting round-robins focused on gushing about Trump’s performance.

The president’s second-term quest to nix Washington’s so-called “deep state” and replace it with an army of MAGA yes-men has so far been successful, and the result is a Trumpian loyalty more akin to a religion than a political ideology. It all became particularly evident in April, when Trump wheeled out his “Liberation Day” tariff plan using figures that nobody in his vicinity had dared to notify him were founded on bad math.

And the problem may only get worse as time goes on.

“Now, most of the folks I know are on, of course, the national security side of the [White] House, and some of them still think that they can keep their hand on the wheel. And I would prefer some of those people in the posts I’m thinking about than others who might replace them,” Taylor noted. “But I think people of conscience in this administration know that they are an endangered species.”

Donald Trump demanded “unconditional surrender” Tuesday in a series of escalating threats on Iran.

“We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “Iran had good sky trackers and other defensive equipment, and plenty of it, but it doesn’t compare to American made, conceived, and manufactured ‘stuff.’ Nobody does it better than the good ol’ USA.”

The Israeli military had previously announced Monday that its strikes had crippled Iran’s air defenses, allowing Israel to drop bombs directly over Tehran instead of using long-range missiles. Trump’s ominous post—which worryingly conflates Israeli forces with American—comes as a reminder that to the United States, war is first and foremost a business enterprise, which could explain his decision to completely ignore intelligence from his own government that determined Iran was not close to obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Trump then decided to up the ante by threatening Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei directly.

“We know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding,” Trump wrote in another post on Truth Social. “He is an easy target, but is safe there—We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now. But we don’t want missiles shot at civilians, or American soldiers. Our patience is wearing thin. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Three U.S. officials told

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