Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk appeared to support a targeted immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota that made international news. “It is pure evil for people to stop the arrest of child predators,” Musk wrote on X, responding to reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested a U.S. citizen who wouldn’t cooperate with agents during an operation seeking two convicted sex offenders. The Department of Homeland Security said the U.S. citizen, later released, resided at the address of the two offenders and would not identify himself to the ICE agents. It is pure evil for people to stop the arrest of child predators https://t.co/WRLVMXIvop— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 19, 2026 Musk and President Donald Trump had a public falling out last summer after he headed the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative. Musk’s comments on the immigration operation come after a viral Reuters photo of the agents arresting a man wearing shorts and Crocs with a blanket thrown over his shoulders on a snowy day in St. Paul. “Marching half-naked elderly people out into the snow, your tax dollars at work,” author and columnist Jill Filipovic wrote on X above a post sharing the photo. Yesterday in St. Paul, ICE conducted a targeted operation of 2 convicted sex offenders. One of the criminal targets had convictions for sex with a minor and sexual assault. The other target had convictions for sex assault with penetration in the first degree, domestic violence,…— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) January 19, 2026 According to the DHS account of the incident, federal agents on Sunday went to the address of the two convicted sex offenders. Their convictions include sex with a minor, sexual assault, domestic violence, sex assault with penetration in the first degree, and violating a protective order. “Both also have convictions for failure to register as sex offenders. They both have final orders of removal from an immigration judge,” according to DHS. Upon arriving at the home, agents found ChongLy Thao, 56, inside, according to Reuters. But Thao refused to identify himself or be fingerprinted, according to DHS, so he was taken into custody to determine his identity. He was later released. “He matched the description of the targets,” DHS said in a statement on X. “As with any law enforcement agency, it is standard protocol to hold all individuals in a house of an operation for safety of the public and law enforcement.” The two convicted sex offenders remain “at large in St. Paul,” according to DHS. The department has pledged to provide “the public with photos and descriptors to help us locate and apprehend these public safety threats.” Thao is a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in Laos, according to Reuters. His family later published a statement calling the ordeal “unnecessary, degrading, and deeply traumatizing,” and a relative of the family told Reuters that one of the two convicts ICE had targeted had previously lived at the residence but had moved out. The incident comes less than two weeks after an ICE-involved shooting in Minneapolis left 37-year-old Renee Good dead, leading to widespread anti-ICE protests in the Twin Cities. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey have demanded federal immigration officials leave the community. Despite opposition in the Twin Cities, the Trump administration has deployed hundreds more immigration enforcement agents to the area. In the past six weeks, federal immigration officials have “arrested 3,000 criminal illegal aliens including vicious murderers, rapists, child pedophiles, and incredibly dangerous individuals,” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced Monday. A total of 10,000 criminal illegal aliens have been arrested in Minneapolis over the past 12 months, according to Noem, who calls the operation a “victory for public safety.” The post Elon Musk Weighs in on Minnesota ICE Operation appeared first on The Daily Signal.

President Donald Trump has delivered a sharp policy reversal from the Obama-Biden era during his first year back in office, solving problems from border security to the economy to foreign conflicts, The Daily Signal’s Rob Bluey said on Fox Business Network. “It sure is a different time in America,” Bluey told host Liz MacDonald on “The Evening Edit.” “We could probably extend or double or triple that list for all of the problems that Donald Trump has helped solve, and he was left a mess as you indicated from Barack Obama and Joe Biden.” Bluey pointed to improvements across multiple policy areas. He’s not alone in noting the stark difference from his Democrat predecessors. Axios’ Mike Allen called Trump the “Eraser-in-Chief” for undoing the policies of former President Joe Biden. “As Trump approaches this one-year anniversary on Jan. 20, I think the United States is much better off with him as the leader,” Bluey said. “Our country—certainly both from a domestic standpoint and foreign standpoint—is in a much better spot today than it was when Joe Biden left office.” Border Crisis: Fixed When MacDonald raised the contrast between the “far-left madness” of the Biden years and the relative stability under Trump, Bluey focused on border security as a prime example of policy sabotage. “Joe Biden had the tools at his disposal to close the U.S.-Mexico border,” Bluey said, noting that federal law gave the president the authority Trump had successfully used in his first term. “On day one, Biden wiped away all of those policies and left us with the situation we’re in now.” Bluey also criticized Democrat governors for refusing to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. “If you want to talk about anybody who’s responsible for the chaos in our country, it’s people like Tim Walz in Minnesota, who if they just cooperated with Donald Trump and enforced the law, maybe we wouldn’t have these out-of-control protests happening in Minneapolis,” he said. Anti-Trump Media Bias MacDonald asked Bluey about the media’s role in downplaying Trump’s achievements. “They share a ton of blame, because Donald Trump doesn’t get the credit that he deserves,” Bluey responded, pointing to consistently negative headlines despite policy successes. Today, Trump marks the one-year anniversary of his return to the White House on Jan. 20, 2025, the first president since Grover Cleveland to serve two nonconsecutive terms as president. Cleveland, the first Democrat elected after the Civil War, served from 1885 to 1889 and again from 1893 to 1897. The post How Trump Solved the Mess Obama and Biden Left Behind appeared first on The Daily Signal.

On the anniversary of President Donald Trump’s second term inauguration, here are five ways he has dismantled the deep state in Washington. 1. Reinstating ‘Schedule F’ On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order to reinstate Schedule F, which makes it easier for the president to fire bureaucrats. This reclassified about 50,000 career civil servants in “policy-influencing” roles as at-will employees. The executive order said that accountability was lacking in the federal bureaucracy. “In recent years, however, there have been numerous and well-documented cases of career Federal employees resisting and undermining the policies and directives of their executive leadership,” the order said.  “Principles of good administration, therefore, necessitate action to restore accountability to the career civil service, beginning with positions of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character.” 2. DOGE The Department of Government Efficiency reportedly reduced federal employment by about 271,000 jobs. DOGE also provided a list of 9,474 contracts and vehicles that have been terminated by the department. In the spirit of DOGE, the Trump administration cut off the funding streams for immigration groups that moved illegal aliens across the country. The Environmental Protection Agency clawed back extravagant grants to climate alarmist groups. The State Department shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development. Congress finally cut off funding for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service. 3. Shutdown Cuts During the recent government shutdown, Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought cut $8 billion of blue state energy projects. “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled,” Vought said. In addition, the Department of Transportation sent letters to the Chicago Transit Authority informing it that two projects receiving a total of $2.1 billion in federal funding were under administrative review, for race and sex-based contracting practices that potentially violated the Constitution. 4. Investigating ‘Deep State’ Abuses In July, a CIA report found that John Brennan, the agency’s director in the Obama administration, overrode internal concerns to claim that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. The agency’s current director John Ratcliffe ordered the review. It found that evidence used by Brennan to show that Russian President Vladimir Putin was aiding Trump in the 2016 election was rushed, restricted in its access, and disseminated too widely for a highly classified report.  “Central to the judgment that Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win was one highly classified CIA report,” the report said. “Brennan had tightly restricted access to this information within CIA; it had been collected in July but not disseminated in CIA serialized reporting until the week of 19 December.” The review notes that “media leaks” indicated intelligence agencies “had already reached definitive conclusions risked creating an anchoring bias” before “work on the assessment even began.” The post Four Ways Trump Has Dismantled the ‘Deep State’ Since Inauguration appeared first on The Daily Signal.

California’s biggest union is once again up to no good. Dissatisfied with the piles of cash they’ve already stolen from California high-earning taxpayers, who are subject to a 14.4% income tax rate (the nation’s highest), double digit sales taxes, and the second-highest tax burden in the country, the SEIU is now clamoring for a “one-time” 5% tax on the net worth of “billionaires” to fund health care for illegal immigrants.  Yes, you read that right. Tax the rich even more to pay for ballooning costs of failing, state-run health care. The initiative that voters will likely decide upon in November is the pinnacle of progressive envy. It’s not enough that the top 1% of taxpayers already fund half of the state budget. They’re greedy for more, and the initiative’s new authority to tax net worth is a harbinger of unprecedented government intrusion into our lives. We can first look to the retroactivity clause, which ensures that any taxpayer who did not have the foresight to flee the state by Jan. 1, 2026, will be subject to the tax if voters approve it in November. Progressives are well aware of the millions of people, trillions of dollars, and multiple congressional districts that have already left California for the freer shores of Florida, Texas, Tennessee, and other zero-income tax states. This time around, the victims of their tax hikes won’t have the chance to vote with their feet. The initiative also singles out the most successful entrepreneurs who built their companies from nothing into unimaginable success. For many founders, the tax could be well over 5%. Take Larry Page of Google. He and his co-founder, Sergey Brin, own 11.3% of the parent company, Alphabet. But these shares are not publicly tradable; they are “supervoting” shares that give the founders 52.3% of voting rights on the board.  Under the initiative’s language, it is highly likely they would be taxed on 52.3% of the value of Alphabet ($4 trillion), leaving them with a $200 billion tax bill. That’s nearly half of their net worth, not 5%. Page and Brin would likely have no choice but to convert their supervoting shares to typical Class A, publicly traded stocks just to afford their tax bill, and in doing so relinquish control of the company they single-handedly built, hungry and penniless, in a rented garage. This is the result of deep philosophical corrosion that has infected Sacramento and the Democratic party for decades. The progressives behind this initiative genuinely hate the rich, not for being rich, but for their achievements—for their productivity, for their independence, for building productive companies that change the world for the better—despite the enormous personal and social benefit of products like Instagram or ChatGPT, or the millions of employees whose jobs wouldn’t exist without the single-minded determination of successful founders. But even as Silicon Valley entrepreneurs at the forefront of the AI revolution suffer immediately, the ultimate consequences of this initiative will be felt by the middle class. For the first time in the history of the world, a government entity could gain the authority to peer behind the veil into your net worth—to audit the total value of every asset you own, every bit of your personal property, tangible and intangible, realized and unrealized. Every couch, car, appliance, home, pet, piece of art and renovated bathroom. The dangers of granting such omniscience and power to the tax collector cannot be understated. The United States could force billionaires to liquidate every asset they have, force them into homelessness, and give every penny to the government, and they still couldn’t fund the federal government for more than a single year. The real money—$170 trillion of it—is locked up in the middle class. Once the billionaires are penniless, who do you think the czars of the welfare state will go after next? Be forewarned: the progressive Left is targeting the billionaires—first. Then they’ll come for you. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post California’s ‘Billionaire Tax’ is a Trojan Horse appeared first on The Daily Signal.

THE CENTER SQUARE—The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Tuesday in a case over whether states can prevent concealed carry holders on private property that is open to the public. Wolford v. Lopez challenges a Hawaii law that prevents concealed carry permit holders from bringing handguns to beaches, bars, restaurants that serve alcohol and gas stations without the owners permission. The Hawaii law stems from the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, where justices struck down a New York law requiring concealed carry holders to display the need to defend themselves. “The Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the court’s 2022 decision. Thomas further elaborated that gun restrictions should only be upheld if they are consistent with the “historical tradition” of the United States. In 2023, Hawaii implemented a law making it a misdemeanor for concealed carry holders to bring a gun on private property. The misdemeanor carries a sentence of up to a year in prison. Hawaii residents with concealed-carry permits challenged the state’s law. The residents, alongside a gun-rights group, argued that the government has no imperative to prohibit citizens from carrying concealed weapons in public spaces. “There is no comparable historical—or even modern-day—tradition of allowing the government to create a no-carry default rule for private property open to the public,” lawyers for the residents wrote to the Supreme Court. Lawyers for the gun-rights group also pointed to the disproportionate effect Hawaii’s law will have on rural areas with parks and beaches. “These bans are applicable to hundreds of thousands of acres of public land throughout Hawaii, even though the State allows hunting with firearms in many areas of these parks and forests,” lawyers wrote in a petition to the court. In a brief to the Supreme Court, Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez said the state instituted its law to protect citizens from hosting armed individuals on private property. Lopez points to a longstanding history of limiting the right of Hawaiian citizens to carry weapons in public spaces. “Property owners in Hawai’i could assume that—unless they made express arrangements to the contrary—firearms would not be carried onto their property, even if it was open to the public,” Lopez wrote in a brief to the nation’s highest court. Lawyers for Hawaii also argue that the Second Amendment, at the time of the nation’s founding, did not include the right to enter private property with a weapon. “The Founders recognized a property owner’s right to exclude,” the lawyers wrote. “Accordingly, at the Founding, a person had no right to enter private property with a gun unless he had the owner’s express consent or an implied license based on local law or custom.” In lower court litigation, Hawaii pointed to a 1771 New Jersey law and an 1865 Louisiana law that explicitly required consent before entering a private property of any kind with a gun. Lower courts upheld Hawaii’s arguments on the basis of these laws. “The overall purpose of all the laws was plainly to protect a property owner’s right to exclude firearms,” lawyers for Hawaii wrote. “Variation in the specific reasons why owners might wish to preclude guns—from preventing unwanted hunting to promoting safety, comfort or self-defense—does not undermine the basic fact that laws that vindicate the fundamental right to exclude are well within the tradition of American firearm regulation.” Lawyers for the concealed-carry holders argued Hawaii relied on faulty evidence to assert other laws were similar to the state’s ban. They argued certain public spaces, like beaches and public parks, would not be considered in the original bans, which fundamentally alters the state’s argument. “Under that approach, ‘the original understanding of the Second Amendment,’” the lawyers wrote, referencing a lower court judge’s opinion, “‘Would not apply to any new types of public spaces that would develop in the future.’” Gun rights and gun control advocates will be watching as the justices hear arguments in one of the court’s most consequential Second Amendment cases of the year, with a decision expected by July. Originally published by The Center Square. The post US Supreme Court to Hear Second Amendment Case Tuesday appeared first on The Daily Signal.