Winners & Losers: Melting ICE and Gerrymanders
Good things happened this week. Really!
Welcome to a Saturday night edition of Progress Report.
It’s freezing here in NYC, beyond anything we’ve experienced in decades. The president is an abject, unrepentant racist who wants to stifle the upcoming elections. ICE is still terrorizing our communities. But! There was also plenty of good news this week, which we’ll review in this newsletter. I’m keeping the Winners and Losers edition open to everyone one last time, and then it goes to paid subscribers only starting next week.
By the way, Run for Something co-founder and president Amanda Litman will join us for a live stream right here on Substack on Thursday at 8:30 pm EST. It’ll be fun!
Note: The far-right’s fascist takeover of this country is being aided by the media’s total capitulation to Trump’s extortion. Constantly layoffs at these major media organizations, at the behest of billionaires, is making it even worse. It’s never been more critical to have a bold independent media willing to speak up against the powerful. That’s what I’m trying to do here at Progress Report.
You can help keep Progress Report afloat and build that network for just $5 a month — every subscription helps!
Everyday Heroes in Minneapolis
The people of the Twin Cities continue to put up an unprecedented fight against the ICE occupation, displaying an ingenuity and generosity beyond anything the thugs in the Trump administration could have ever anticipated.
It’s an all hands on deck situation, a community effort deploying every resource available. Take Nick Benson, an airplane enthusiast who has turned his hobby into a vital counter-surveillance, providing the only reliable count of detainees being flown out of Minneapolis on ICE jets. And creativity points go to Unidos MN, one of the biggest and most active immigrant rights organizations in the Twin Cities, for their planned Bad Bunny dance party at Target on Sunday, part of their more serious campaign to push the company to restrict ICE’s presence in its stores.
Partisan brawlers
🗺️ Virginia Democrats have proposed a new Congressional map that would likely give the party 10 of the state’s 11 seats if approved by voters in a special election this spring.
“These are not ordinary times and Virginia will not sit on the sidelines while it happens,” state Senate President Pro Tempore and viral sensation L. Louise Lucas told reporters. “We made a promise to level the playing field, and today we’re keeping our promise.”
A day later, she put it more bluntly:
Virtue can transcend policy positions, so context is important: Ted Cruz cares about power, not democracy, and his complaints over the new Virginia map ring hollow after he happily went along with the Texas gerrymander that, as Lucas points out, started the redistricting arms race. On the other hand, while I’m vehemently opposed to any kind of unfair electioneering and would happily sign up for independent redistricting commissions, I understand that temporary gerrymanders in blue states are key to ultimately preserving democracy.
Currently, Democrats control six of the 11 districts on a map imposed by a court after Virginia’s bipartisan redistricting commission hit a stalemate in 2020. The new map would create a conservative vote sink in Virginia’s 9th district while reducing massive Democratic advantages in the northern parts of the state, though not nearly enough to risk losing them in November.
Vote Hub put together a look at how the new districts would have voted during the 2024 presidential election:
Newly elected Gov. Abigail Spanberger would have won eight of the 11 new districts by at least nine points. And while it’s unlikely that Democrats will produce quite as big a blowout victory this coming November, every indication is that a big blue wave is on the horizon.
A few big hurdles remain before these districts become anything more than jagged lines on a gorgeously devious map. Virginia requires a constitutional amendment to institute mid-decade redistricting, which is not a simple process. First, Democrats will have to convince the state Supreme Court to overrule a lower court judge that blocked their amendment on a technicality, and if they’re successful, they’ll then have to convince the public to approve the very partisan proposal in an April special election.
If it all works out, that’ll make nine likely additional seats for Democrats in next year’s Congress, including the five on the new California map that the Supreme Court permitted to go into effect this past week. And there may yet be more to come: Maryland’s legislature took another step toward redrawing its map to eliminate the one GOP district this week, while a court order may result in New York pairing up lower Manhattan and Staten Island to create an additional blue seat.
The Maryland situation is an interesting one: after the House passed a revised map on Monday, Gov. Wes Moore called on Senate President Bill Ferguson, a Democrat, to take it up in the upper chamber. But Ferguson has been adamantly opposed to mid-decade redistricting and on Wednesday sent it to the Rules committee, which is essentially a black hole where legislation goes to die.
That makes Maryland state Sen. Arthur Ellis another winner this week: On Thursday, Ellis tore into Ferguson on the floor of the state Senate, demanding a vote on the redrawn map and threatening to abstain from voting until that happens.
“What are you doing today when so many peoples’ rights are being trampled and we have modern protesters being murdered in the streets of America?” Ellis said. “What are you doing? Who are you pissing off? And I must say that I will try my best to get some people angry today.”
Ferguson has remained unmoved.
Melting ICE
Democratic-run cities and states continue to take action to thwart prospective incursions from the Department of Homeland Security’s shock troops.
🦀 In Maryland, the state Senate and House moved to pass identical bills that would ban cooperation agreements between local governments and federal law enforcement, known as 287(g) agreements. The measure is likely to be signed by Gov. Wes Moore this coming week, at which point it will go into effect immediately. There are currently eight municipalities in Maryland that have such agreements with ICE.
Maryland is also moving toward banning law enforcement, including federal agents, from wearing masks in most situations. The bill passed the state Senate and is now awaiting a vote in the House.
Back to Virginia, where new Gov. Abigail Spanberger ordered all state agencies to end their 287(g) agreements with ICE. This follows an earlier repeal of an executive order by former Gov. Glenn Youngkin that required state agencies to collaborate with ICE. Now, immigrant advocates and activists are pressing Spanberger to make like Maryland and ban local governments and police departments from entering into their own agreements with federal immigration enforcement.
🗽 New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani fortified the city’s protections against ICE on Friday. The new mayor signed an executive order that safeguards residents’ private data from being seized by the feds. The order also barred federal agents from entering city property without a judicial warrant. That puts parking garages, parking lots, schools, shelters, and hospitals, among other locations, off-limits to surprise raids.
Political populism
🥇 The biggest election news happened in New Jersey, where organizer and activist Analilia Mejia is on track to clinch the Democratic nomination in the special election in the state’s 11th Congressional district. It’s now being depicted in media as a rebuke to Trump and a shock to the Democratic Party, both of which are true, but unlike Axios’s framing this as a huge moment for the left, I’d say it’s more about anti-establishment populism than anything else. I wrote about the race and what it means on election night.
💸 A new poll finds that Californians continue to be overwhelmingly in favor of the one-time billionaire tax. This despite ongoing outrage and a lot of pissing and moaning from Silicon Valley maniacs, who continue to threaten to leave the state if it passes in November.
🚘 The UAW scored a huge victory in what has been an otherwise very difficult time for organized labor, reaching a first contract with Volkswagen at its plant in Tennessee. Workers voted to make the plant the first newly unionized facility in the South in a generation, and two years later, have a strong CBA in place. It includes 20% wage increases, better health care, bigger bonuses, and job security.
🙏 Thank you to whoever put this ad up at a bus stop in London.
If Elon Musk is going to force himself down our throats and demand ongoing cultural relevance, he should have to reckon with the public humiliation that he so richly deserves. Certainly deserves it more than a $1 trillion pay package.
🏳️⚧️ Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds is pushing a bill that would bar local governments from providing protections for trans and nonbinary people. Some localities have added such protections after Reynolds signed a law last year that stripped gender identity from the Iowa Civil Rights Act. Reynolds is not running for re-election this year, so one couldn’t even make the argument that she’s ginning up bigotry as an electoral distraction; instead of cynical, she is clearly just a mean, hateful person who wants to inflict as much damage as she can before she leaves the governor’s mansion and descends back down to hell.
📰 Washington Post publisher Will Lewis announced that he is stepping down on Saturday night, walking away from the rubble after blowing the place up earlier this week. Lewis oversaw the firing of around 300 of the vaunted newspaper’s 800 staffers, which shut down the sports and local desks. International coverage was also more or less obliterated. Adding insult to injury, Lewis did not bother to log onto the Zoom call where the massive cuts were announced to devastated staff. He is spending this weekend in San Francisco for the Super Bowl.
📿 Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro told clergy that she would not vote to abolish ICE in spite of the terror that the agency has inflicted on communities nationwide. Just as well, because she’s facing a serious primary challenge and just fueled an eager opposition looking for change.
Here’s a spicy exchange from the roundtable:
DeLauro said, as a legislator in the minority of a large body, she has to thread the needle carefully with what she supports and votes for.
“I would rather you vote for what is morally correct,” Davidson said.
“Don’t talk to me about my own morality,” DeLauro shot back.
“Don’t tell your constituents what they can and can’t talk to you about,” replied Rev. Nathan Empsall of the Episcopal Church of St. Paul and St. James in New Haven. “What you are voting for is not moral.”
Sister Mary Ellen Burns of Apostle Immigrant Services in New Haven agreed that ICE is “rotten to the core” and questioned whether “bargaining with the devil” was the right course of action.
“Do we want to stand on principle and then let the Republicans pass a bill with no changes?” Burns said. “Because they’re not going to vote to abolish ICE.”
“We need an exorcism of our government, and I don’t know what position is best,” Burns said.
Rev. Nathan Empsall and Sister Mary Ellen Burns, you belong in the winners’ section.
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Why are you, a progressive, writing under Substack? I'm appalled to learn that the owner allows all sorts of Nazi crap,lies, and virulent antisemitism re the Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-substack-makes-money-from-hosting-nazi-newsletters