Who Will Be ICE’d Next?
Donald Trump’s paramilitary force of losers keeps brutalizing Americans, the latest in Iran, and it’s awfully lucrative to call the president a pedophile protector?
🎂 On this day in 1929, Martin Luther King Jr. was born. Actually, to be accurate, I should say Michael King Jr. was born. His father changed both their names after a trip to Germany inspired by the Protestant reformer Martin Luther.
Good morning! Peter here, with a small point of pride to share before we get to the harrowing news of the day. I just learned that an essay I wrote for the New York Times about (of all things) Hooters is now being taught at Harvard. Yes, you read that right. Students at the “school in Cambridge” are assigned to review the piece as part of a freshman writing section. AI, disinformation, illiteracy, and the general TikTokification of American culture may be weighing on journalism, but the craft persists!
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ dozens of US citizens and non-citizens alike have been beaten and maimed by ICE in the week since Renee Nicole Good was murdered, the FBI raids the home of a Washington Post reporter, the death toll continues to rise in Iran, and the Senate fails to hold Donald Trump accountable for his lawlessness in Venezuela.
🚨 Don’t miss our LIVE in-person event in DC: Join Mehdi, Swin, Ro Khanna, Joy Reid, Jim Acosta, Sarah Matthews, and Miles Taylor for a powerful evening at the Howard Theatre in Washington, DC, to mark one year of Trump, on Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2026!
COLD AS ICE
Kaden Rummler will never properly see again.
He will never get to watch the sunrise as most of us do. He will never fully glimpse the sight of rolling waves or falling leaves. He will never bear witness to the faces of his future children as he deserves.
On Friday, the 21-year-old was shot in the face at point-blank range at an anti-ICE protest and nearly left permanently blind.
“You’re going to lose your eye,” federal agents reportedly mocked him as he lay bleeding on the ground.
Video of the incident shows Rummler sprinting to assist a fellow protester in Santa Ana, California, before an officer fires a less-lethal round just inches from his nose. Rummler immediately collapses, his face covered in blood. A DHS goon then drags him like a ragdoll from the assembled crowd by the hood of his sweatshirt.
Rummler’s aunt reports he has a fractured skull, shards of metal and glass in both of his eyes, and almost certainly would have died if not for the extensive surgery he underwent soon after the shooting.
This all took place, I must remind you, less than a week after Jonathan Ross riddled Renee Nicole Good’s face with three bullets – an action that a mere 36% of Americans, according to a Data for Progress poll conducted for Zeteo, consider justified.