ICE may be watching your TikToks. 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is preparing to build a 24/7 social media surveillance team in an effort to deport even more people. On Friday, Wired reported on planning documents showing that ICE is looking to hire 30 new private contractors to comb every major social media app to gain more info on where to stage their draconian, often violent raids.  

Targeted platforms will include X, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Reddit, but more niche sites could be on the list as well. The program will be run out of two sites, The National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center in Williston, Vermont, and the Pacific Enforcement Response Center in Santa Ana, California.

ICE—whose main surveillance database is made by data company Palantir and last year signed a $2 million contract with Israeli spyware company Paragon—may also use AI in its hunt, according to federal contracting records. 

This is far from ICE’s first time engaging in dystopian levels of surveillance. But this 24-hour AI surveillance, adding to already present privacy issues in America, only points to this kind of program being used on citizens and noncitizens alike. 

Read more at Wired.

A third of the White House complex has been furloughed so far due to the government shutdown—but exactly whom the Trump administration has deemed mission critical provides a clearer picture on their near-term agenda.

All 45 staffers at the Department of Government Efficiency, for instance, were apparently too valuable to lose, as the agency was completely unscathed by the temporary employment suspension, according to a numerical breakdown of the furloughs obtained by Politico.

The Office of Management and Budget also escaped largely unscathed, maintaining 437 of its 530 employees.

The document obtained by Politico indicates DOGE’s workers and 49 employees at OMB are “exempt from the shutdown because their compensation comes from a source other than annual appropriations,” according to Politico.

Both departments gained fame earlier this year when their joint work supported a mass reorganization of federal employees, nixing thousands of civil servants from their roles across the executive branch.

Practically every other department in the White House complex will fare much worse, with some losing more than half of their staffers, according to the document.

The shutdown-induced damage has been seismic across the executive branch. So far, the shutdown has furloughed more than half a million federal employees, according to a New York Times monitor. That includes 89 percent of the Environmental Protection Agency, 87 percent of the Education Department, and 71 percent of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Forty-five percent of the civilian work force of the Defense Department has also been temporarily let go.

The president has been crystal clear in blaming Democrats for the critical congressional failure this week, publicly promising to target liberals in a forthcoming mass firing. On Tuesday, the Trump administration issued ideological messaging via executive agency heads to thousands of federal employees, in potential violation of the Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch and the Hatch Act.

As federal agencies trumpet blatantly political messages blaming the “radical left” for the current government shutdown, FBI Director Kash Patel had a trainee fired for simply putting a gay pride flag on their desk.

In a letter dated Wednesday, Patel cited President Donald Trump’s Article 2 power to dismiss a trainee who the director said had “exercised poor judgment with an inappropriate display of political signage” while working in Los Angeles, where the trainee had been assigned during the Biden administration.

Although the letter did not cite a specific infraction, three people familiar with the incident told MSNBC the trainee was fired for displaying a pride flag on their desk.

Under previous administrations, displaying a pride flag at one’s desk would not violate any FBI policy, two bureau veterans told CNN. But since entering office, Trump has taken significant efforts to eradicate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and to make it easier to discriminate in the workplace—summoning a flurry of lawsuits.

And federal employees have responded in kind. One person told MSNBC that FBI agents had warned colleagues after Trump entered office that the president’s loyalists in the bureau were searching through internal files for lists of LGBTQ employees. Even before Trump’s inauguration, agents and prosecutors warned one another to be careful about revealing their sexual orientation or support for the LGBTQ community to their new superiors.

Earlier this month, Trump claimed that he had “no problem” with banning the progressive pride flag, which includes the colors of the transgender flag, after Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s boyfriend claimed that “a lot of people are very threatened” by it. Wednesday’s firing comes as members of the Trump administration escalate rhetoric baselessly linking the........

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