ICE Arrests Soldier’s Wife at Military Base, Then Tries to Deport Her
Annie Ramos, a 22-year-old Honduran-born college student and the wife of an active-duty US Army staff sergeant, was detained by ICE on April 2 at Fort Polk in Louisiana, just days after the couple’s wedding. Ramos was brought to the US as a toddler and has lived here nearly her entire life. She has no criminal record and was in the process of adjusting her immigration status through marriage. She had gone to the base with her husband to enroll in military spouse benefits when military police handcuffed her, held her in an interrogation room, and turned her over to ICE because of a deportation order issued when she was 20 months old after her family missed an immigration hearing.
After five days in detention, Ramos was released on April 7 under ICE supervision with a GPS ankle monitor and weekly check-ins while her deportation case moves forward. Her husband is still preparing for a nine-month deployment to Poland later this year. Ramos said after her release that she wants to finish her degree and continue building a life in the only country she has known since infancy.
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/05/us/ice-detains-military-wife-soldier-deployment.html
https://apnews.com/article/59ce5951fb284f95b836d0b07d6b0718
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-soldier-newlywed-wife-detained-louisiana-military-base/
https://people.com/army-wife-detained-by-ice-days-after-wedding-speaks-out-after-release-11945459
New International Target for the War on Terror: “The Far Left“
In a meeting with top diplomats last month, State Department counterterrorism official Monica Jacobsen urged US allies to reorient their counterterrorism efforts against the far left. Even as it faces evermore threats and retaliation on the global stage, the Trump administration is prioritizing a sweeping international campaign to clamp down on “antifa” activity, starting with designating four left-wing groups in Europe as “terrorist organizations” last November and, most recently, prosecuting the Prairieland 19. “It is important to recognize [the far left’s] actions as political terrorism rather than mere protest or criminality,” Jacobsen said.
Translation: desperate to hold onto its slipping power and legitimacy, the imperialist regime is not satisfied with merely criminalizing dissent. It aims to spread the War on Terror at home and abroad by manufacturing a legal avenue to surveil, intimidate, and wage war on perceived enemies of empire and get other countries to buy into it. Here in the US, senior counterterrorism director Sebastian Gorka wants this to include anyone from undocumented migrants to trans activists. Gorka has also repeatedly stressed that “there are no lone wolves,” threatening to investigate and prosecute even the most dubious of ties between Americans and far left groups abroad in the absence of any credible threat.
The State Department intends to host a May workshop in The Hague and a July summit in Washington to train foreign law-enforcement officials to target the far left while strengthening ties with far right leaders. However, there seems to be low interest to join this initiative, even among US allies.
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/us/politics/5-takeaways-trump-antifa.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/us/politics/trump-administration-far-left-terrorism-groups.html
Venezuelan National Assembly Begins Privatization of Venezuela’s Mining Sector
On Thursday, April 9th, the Venezuelan National Assembly threw open the doors for the infiltration of foreign (especially US) capitalists into the Venezuelan mining sector. The law gives private, foreign, companies considerable latitude to exploit Venezuelan mineral resources at the expense of the Venezuelan government and people – the $8 Billion in revenue this will generate through 2036 will be funneled up north, to the US, right alongside Venezuela’s mineral riches and oil. The Venezuelan masses won’t see a single bolívar.
This move is supported by the majority of the Venezuelan ruling class; Venezuelan GDP (Gross Domestic Product – a measure of the size of a given economy) has declined from $393 billion USD in 2010, to $119 billion today, and this has been accompanied by a concomitant fall in profits for the Venezuelan capitalist class. Corruption, crime, and neglect contributed to this decline, but the lion’s share of the blame is down to US sanctions, as well as to a series of legal disputes with US firms whose assets in Venezuela were nationalized by Nicolás Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez. Venezuela now “owes” these firms billions of dollars.
The deregulation, privatization, and institution of a special wing of the Venezuelan national guard meant to protect mineral extraction enterprises will give US capitalists a shiny new opportunity to exploit and pillage Venezuela and its people, accompanied by an uptick in profits for the Venezuelan capitalist class – a windfall for which they have betrayed their country to the US empire. A further reorientation of the Venezuelan state away from welfare and towards protecting capitalists will exacerbate conditions for Venezuelan workers, especially indigenous people, who were already bitterly exploited under Maduro; Indigenous people make up the majority of Venezuelan miners, often exploited in horrific conditions in mines which ravage and pollute their ancestral lands in the Venezuelan Amazon. The ramping up of mining operations, fueled by an influx of foreign capital, can only savagely increase the exploitation of the Venezuelan people – especially indigenous miners.
Sources:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=VE
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/world/americas/venezuela-economy-rodriguez.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/01/us/politics/us-lifts-sanctions-rodriguez.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/05/world/americas/venezuela-mining-access-burgum.html
US Admitted 4,496 White South African Refugees Since October… and Nobody Else
In the past several months, Trump has welcomed a few thousand refugees into the US. A somewhat odd fact, given the mass kidnappings and deportations of immigrants taking place, who may also fall under refugee status. Besides three from Afghanistan, the rest of the total of 4,499 admitted are white South Africans. Trump has claimed these Afrikaners are “victims of illegal or unjust discrimination,” another bold statement, considering the history of South African apartheid, where white Afrikaners—a la Elon Musk—reigned supreme until 1994.
Just last year, Trump cut the quota for refugee admissions from 125,000 per year to just 7,500. The South African government has criticized this decision to prioritize white South Africans, as well as the rhetoric that white farmers, specifically, are “targets of persecution and ‘genocide’.”
These statements and actions have been called out for what they are—Trump “’mobilising a supremacism’ and trying to protect white victimhood as a dog whistle,” according to Ebrahim Rasool, the South African ambassador in the US; because of his accurate claim, Trump expelled him from the US.
In reality, the violence that farmers in South Africa face isn’t racially targeted—Black farmers also face attacks from armed assailants, ranging from livestock theft to murder.
A South African Minister offered some insight into the exact numbers: “The country does not release crime figures based on race, but in May, in order to debunk these claims, Police Minister Senzo Mchunu gave a breakdown of killings on farms. Mchunu said that between October 2024 and March 2025, there were 18 farm murders across South Africa. Sixteen of the victims were black, while two were white.’’
On top of those statistics, “72% of private farmland is still in white hands, according to the government’s 2017 Land Audit report. That’s despite white people making up just 7.3% of the population,” not to mention that decades of apartheid and disenfranchisement have held Black South African farmers back. Looking at the family history of white farmers, you learn facts like how “[South African Farmers, like] Morgan Barrett, who is white, [are able to employ] their own security guards, if they can afford it. He owns a 2,000-acre farm which has been in his family for six generations.”
Sources:
Behind Enemy Lines 