FlaglerLive

When Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained Liam Conejo Ramos, a 5-year-old boy who is an asylum seeker, in Minneapolis on Jan. 20, 2026, the photos quickly became a flash point in the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement activity. Exposure to severe immigration enforcement experiences during childhood carries long-term, significant consequences: These children are twice as likely to suffer from anxiety in young adulthood.

In fast-moving crises, early official statements often become the scaffolding on which public judgment is built. Sometimes those statements turn out to be accurate. But sometimes they do not. When the public repeatedly experiences the same sequence – confident claims, partial disclosures, shifting explanations, delayed evidence, lies – the damage can outlast any single incident.

There is no question that ICE fits the definition of a paramilitary police force. It is a police force under the control of the federal government, through the Department of Homeland Security, and it is heavily militarized, having adopted the weaponry, organization, operational patterns and cultural markers of the regular military. The United States is nearly alone among established democracies in creating a new paramilitary police force in recent decades.

When various figures in the Trump regime suggested that CBP agents had been justified in shooting Alex Pretti because he was carrying a holstered weapon, they provoked outrage from gun rights activists. And, significantly, many of these people are usually on the same page as the White House about pretty much anything.

While political polarization has many potential causes, existential anxiety– humanity’s inherent confrontation with mortality, moral responsibility and search for meaning–has received less attention. Higher levels of existential anxiety are associated with indicators of poor mental health, such as symptoms of depression or among those who have experienced a life-threatening event. It is also associated with aggression.

A federal judge heard arguments on Jan. 26, 2026, as the state of Minnesota sought a temporary restraining order to stop the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operation in the state. The administration has sent some 3,000 immigration agents to Minnesota, and attorneys for the state have argued, in part, that it amounts to an unconstitutional occupation, on 10th Amendment grounds.

More than a year after a ceasefire nominally ended active fighting, much of southern Lebanon bears the ecological scars of war. Avocado orchards are gone and beehives destroyed. So, too, are the livelihoods they supported. Fields and forests have disappeared under Israel’s white phosphorus shelling. This destruction indicates a grave breach of international environmental law and raises the question of whether Israel committed war crimes in Lebanon by deliberately targeting natural resources and engaging in environmental warfare.