ICE officers are leaving Minnesota as “Operation Metro Surge” comes to an end, Department of Homeland Security funding is set to run dry on Saturday, and an “illegal immigrant enclave” in Texas agrees to a $68 million settlement. It’s Friday, February 13, 2026, and this is the news you need to know to start your day. Today’s edition of the Morning Wire podcast can be heard below: Homan Announces End To ‘Operation Metro Surge’ Border czar Tom Homan announced the end of “Operation Metro Surge” in Minnesota on Thursday. Homan said he is satisfied with his meetings with local authorities and has sufficient cooperation to conclude the operation, which means officers and agents flown in from across the country will return to their home offices. More police chiefs and sheriffs are apparently on board with honoring ICE detainers, and ICE will be readily available and stationed near jails to pick up inmates, rather than forcing local jurisdictions to hold them longer than necessary. Homan added that President Donald Trump greenlit the decision. Homan’s announcement is the big step toward Trump’s softer approach toward interior immigration enforcement after the shooting deaths of two Americans by federal agents in Minneapolis. Congress Stares Down Another Shutdown Homeland Security seems poised to experience a lapse in government funding on Saturday at midnight amid an intense debate on immigration reforms. A test vote in the Senate to see if there was enough support to pass another continuing resolution failed on Thursday afternoon. The House has gone home, but members could be asked to return if a deal is reached. Democrats have not appeared pleased with the White House’s counteroffer on immigration reform. Details on that counteroffer are still fairly unclear. Democrats want an end to masking for agents and a change in warrants. Warrants are likely to be the hottest topic among the changes, as shifting from administrative to judicial warrants for many of these arrests could make the process much more difficult. Trump DOJ Settles Colony Ridge Suit A settlement has been reached in the lawsuit against Colony Ridge, the massive Texas development that became a magnet for illegal immigrants. Colony Ridge was hailed by the developers as the fastest-growing development in the whole United States. But it wasn’t just a big development. The business model that The Daily Wire helped to uncover was that its marketing strategy was aimed exclusively at illegal immigrants, or at least foreign populations. Ultimately, the Biden administration sued the developer over loans and the marketing strategy. The Trump administration is now jointly settling this lawsuit with Texas’s Republican attorney general. The settlement reached lays the groundwork not only to put an end to the scheme but also to provide a major boost to the surrounding communities affected by it. The settlement is $68 million, not payments to anyone, but payments to fix what they created at Colony Ridge.

A new report argues that activist networks and aligned legal organizations are increasingly using the court system to advance left-wing policy goals they cannot win through elections or legislation, bypassing democratic accountability and turning litigation into a tool of ideological governance. The 19-page Lawfare in America report, published by the Alliance for Consumers Action, warns that lawsuits once intended to resolve individual disputes now operate as de facto legislation. Courtrooms, the report says, have become “a primary battleground for the Left’s ongoing campaign to reshape American society,” with activists “advancing political and social agendas through strategic litigation, a practice better understood as ‘woke lawfare.’” Instead of seeking compensation for specific harms, the report argues, many lawsuits now aim to extract sweeping policy concessions through settlements and consent decrees. Those agreements often force corporations to adopt changes that far exceed existing legal requirements. According to the executive summary, activists and trial lawyers are using litigation to reshape corporate governance, employment practices, ESG policies, and broader social norms. “Settlement agreements stemming from these lawsuits routinely mandate sweeping policy reforms far exceeding compensation for alleged harms or requirements to follow existing laws,” the report states. The report examines cases ranging from diversity and inclusion mandates imposed on major corporations to environmental litigation designed to reshape entire industries. One example cited — the Obama-era EEOC case against Bass Pro Outdoor World — shows how government agencies and aligned advocacy groups “imposed comprehensive DEI recruitment and training policies that go far beyond resolving individual discrimination complaints or enforcing federal civil rights law.” Employment discrimination lawsuits, traditionally used to resolve individual claims, now serve as leverage to force companies to overhaul hiring practices, adopt mandatory diversity training, submit to external compliance monitoring, and maintain permanent reporting obligations. “This report documents how weaponized lawfare has become a preferred mechanism for achieving political outcomes without elections or democratic accountability,” the report states. “When activists fail to persuade voters or legislators, they increasingly turn to courts to achieve the result they want.” O.H. Skinner, executive director of Alliance for Consumers, said activist litigation has fundamentally distorted the judiciary’s role. “Courtrooms across America have become weaponized by radical activists as part of an ongoing campaign to reshape American society and push political and social agendas onto consumers,” Skinner said. “Only by understanding the playbook being used by woke activists can public officials begin to restore the proper role of courts in our democracy and ensure that major policy decisions are made through democratic processes accountable to the American people.” Will Hild, executive director of Consumers’ Research, said the report exposes the political motives behind what he called “divisive, radical policies” imposed through litigation rather than lawmaking. “These activists are weaponizing the court system for political gain and leaving everyday consumers behind,” Hild said. “The Leftist woke machine doesn’t care about consumers, only about power.” The report also examines environmental lawsuits against major energy and manufacturing companies that seek abatement funds, injunctive relief, and industry-wide behavioral changes never enacted by state or federal legislatures. “Courts were designed to resolve disputes, not to serve as engines for ideological policymaking,” said Jason Isaac, CEO of the American Energy Institute. “This report shows how woke lawfare uses litigation pressure to extract policy concessions that activists could not achieve through elections or legislation. The result is governance by lawsuit, regulation without representation, and lasting policy changes imposed without public consent.” The Lawfare in America report merely codifies what many conservative legal analysts have warned for years: litigation is increasingly used not to protect rights or enforce the law, but to impose sweeping social policy without legislative approval. Whether Congress or the courts push back remains an open question, but the report concludes that this strategy has already reshaped corporate behavior and government policy, and it shows little sign of slowing without a concerted response.  

The severe winter weather sweeping across the Northeast pushed New York’s homeless death toll to nineteen on Thursday. New York City mayoral candidate and long time New Yorker, Curtis Sliwa, attributes the crisis to the city’s status as a “sanctuary” jurisdiction for illegal aliens — and says he’s “never seen it worse.”  The massive influx of illegals during former President Joe Biden’s term — a fair number of whom were transported to sanctuary cities — put a strain on the already limited resources available to house the city’s homeless population, and Sliwa argued that has brought the crisis to a breaking point. “I’m watching emotionally disturbed persons and homeless people exhibit Darwinian traits. Survival of the fittest,” Sliwa said. He described encountering a homeless man with no shoes who was missing half of his foot. The man told Sliwa that both his shoes, including the one specially made for his disability, had been stolen by the “stronger” homeless. Sliwa told the Daily Wire he and his nonprofit the Guardian Angels have encountered many grim scenarios while attempting to help the homeless through the winter spell.   Sliwa said the crisis did not begin with the election of New York’s democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, but with the previous administration under Democrat Eric Adams. “A lot of this is the result of Eric Adams’ failures as mayor, in which he housed a lot of the migrants, at the expense of our own homeless,” he said. “They spent $7 billion housing migrants that we didn’t even know in hotels, motels, giving them lodging, food, clothing. Okay. But we weren’t doing likewise with our own homeless and more importantly, the emotionally disturbed who should have been brought to mental health care hospitals because they clearly are a danger to themselves and everyone else.”  In fiscal years 2024 and 2025, New York city spent $6.77 billion on funding for people seeking asylum in the United States. Financial support ranged from housing in shelters and New York hotels, prepaid debit cards to families in hotel-based, non-congregate shelters for food, legal and medical services, and relocation assistance.  Sliwa says it’s New York’s homeless who end up paying the price. “Now we’re beginning to pay the price that our own homeless, who are out on their own for many months, many years as a result of the priority being the migrants.” However, Sliwa did not entirely excuse Mamdani.  “I don’t see any of the homeless outreach workers that the mayor keeps talking about,” he said.  Mamdani’s critics however argue  the newly appointed mayor’s end to end encampment sweeps has contributed to the rising death toll. Brian Stettin, a senior adviser in the Adams’ administration, told the New York Post, “When a person is in imminent danger, there is no debate. Whatever ideological divides we should not have any impact on these policies during a ‘Code Blue.’”  Sliwa added that his organization’s hands are tied. “We’re just citizens,” he said, noting the Guardian Angels cannot carry out involuntary removals to bring people indoors. “That has to be done by the city, the police department, and other agencies—but they’re just not doing that.”

The following is an edited transcript excerpt from The Michael Knowles Show. * * * Zohran Mamdani is very, very upset because the federal government has reportedly removed the rainbow gay pride flag from the Stonewall National Monument. Here’s what Mamdani had to say: I am outraged by the removal of the Rainbow Pride Flag from Stonewall National Monument. New York is the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, and no act of erasure will ever change, or silence, that history. Our city has a duty not just to honor this legacy, but to… — Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) February 10, 2026 Credit: NYCMayor/X.com First of all, this is a bit of vindication for me because when everyone was saying that Mamdani was going to establish Sharia law in New York — saying he’s some kind of Islamist terrorist — I said, you know, would that it were so simple. In some ways it would be preferable if he were a serious Muslim; you can kind of talk to a Muslim. I think it’s worse. I think he’s not just a far-leftist but a millennial leftist who plays up the Muslim thing because of identity politics. He knows it will help win over some immigrants. There’s also a radical Left and Muslim alliance because they have a common enemy, which is America and the Church and the white man or whatever — you know, the usual enemies of the Left. And so, I said that’s true. But if push comes to shove, he’s going to side with leftism over Islam. Just like when push comes to shove, Joe Biden says he’s Catholic and he’s liberal. But when there’s a conflict between the two, he always picks liberalism. He never picks Catholicism. So his real faith is liberalism. And that was my argument with Mamdani. And I think I’m totally vindicated in that.  Now, Mamdani is very upset because Trump took the pride flags away from Stonewall. What is Stonewall? The Stonewall Inn was a filthy, truly degenerate, disease-ridden, Mafia-run bar. It was a hive of crime, decadence, and debauchery in New York City. And then, when the cops raided the filthy, illegal Mafia-run bar — not illegal because it was hosting gay people  — when that happened, a bunch of sexual deviants, including famously a trans-identifying guy, started chucking bricks at the cops. As a result, we now side with the gay Mafia bar attacking cops. That is the thing that we’ve exalted as a national monument. But because it’s a national monument, the federal government has a say over it. And Trump has come out and said, look, you can fly the US flag at federal properties, you can fly certain military flags like missing-in-action, prisoner-of-war flags, but that’s basically it. You know, the flag of the Army or the Navy or something where that’s appropriate, but that’s it. We’re not doing the BLM flag. We’re not doing the gay flag. We’re not doing the trans flag. We’re not doing the terrorist trans flag — I call that the terrorist gay flag. So the federal government said we’re not doing that. But it begs the question: why do we have a national monument to Stonewall in the first place? What do we have a national monument to weird sex stuff? And why is a liberal New York politician, the most prominent left-wing New York politician, why is he all of a sudden so concerned about tearing down monuments?  The left has spent ten years tearing down monuments to all of the men who built this country. Monuments to Christopher Columbus — there was a big push for that in New York — constantly defacing the Columbus monument in Columbus Circle. There were also attacks on even Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, Thomas Jefferson, and certainly on Robert E. Lee. WATCH: The Michael Knowles Show on DailyWire+. So all these guys — we’ve got to tear down all these monuments — and the only monument we have to keep up, the only monument we can’t tear down, is the weird sex flag on the weird sex place, which was actually a bar run by the Mafia.   Now, before Republicans get too high on our horse, I just want to point out what the libs are doing is destroying history and tearing down the traditions and fabric of our country, in some cases tangibly, which is bad. But we want to tear some things down too — maybe not in as blunt a way as the libs do, maybe not in as blunt a way as the Taliban does. We’re not blowing up the Buddha statues, okay? But we do want to tear things down in the way that you prune a garden, not the way you blow up a Buddha in Afghanistan, but the way you prune a garden. I do want to get rid of the Stonewall National Memorial. It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous that we have a monument to a Mafia-run gay bar best known for assaulting police officers and for spreading diseases. We should not have a monument to that. That’s degrading to our country. You can be nice to people who have some weird sexual behaviors. You can be nice to them. You can be somewhat tolerant of that without putting up a freaking monument to the Mafia gay bar. That’s insane. Not only should we be taking the pride flag away from that, we should be removing that as a national monument.  I don’t want monuments up to people like Malcolm X or Angela Davis. Even if they’re figures from American history, they represent bad stuff.  I don’t want monuments up to the Rosenbergs who were communist spies.  I don’t want a monument to someone like Alger Hiss. I don’t want them. I don’t want monuments to people who are bad for this country. Once again, I made this point in my book Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds about speech. The false dichotomy when we’re talking about free speech is between free speech and censorship, when really the real battle is between competing sets of standards, because all societies have standards. The same thing is true here. The real debate is not: Do we tear down the statues or do we leave them standing? The real question is: Who is worthy of a statue? Who’s worthy of a monument? Who’s worthy of veneration as a political matter?

Two Mexican Navy ships docked in Cuba on Thursday carrying humanitarian aid for the Caribbean island nation in the middle of a severe energy crisis. The ships carried hundreds of tons of food and supplies. The Mexican government said that one ship contained 536 tons of food – including milk, beans, sardines, and cookies – while the other contained about 277 tons of powdered milk, according to the Associated Press. The arrival of aid comes weeks after President Donald Trump increased pressure on the Cuban economy, threatening tariffs against any nation that supplies Cuba with oil. Cuba has since instituted increasingly strict rules around the use of its remaining fuel supplies. The aid delivers on a promise Mexico made to its ally to help as the United States bears down economically on the dictatorial regime in power in Havana. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum signaled said she would like to help Cuba more, but does not want to violate the U.S. blockade on oil. As soon as the ships return, “we will send more support of different kinds,” Sheinbaum said on Thursday, according to The Guardian. Sheinbaum is negotiating a delicate balance between the risk of angering Washington and aiding Mexico’s ally in the Caribbean. “The energy pressure that Trump is exerting on Cuba places Mexico in a dilemma that is very characteristic of its entire history of diplomatic relations with the United States and Cuba,” Cuban historian Rafael Rojas told The Guardian. “Mexico is yielding to the demands of the United States – and on the other hand it maintains its solidarity with the island.” Cuba’s energy crisis began after the U.S. arrest of former Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro in early January. After Maduro was extradited to New York for trial on charges related to drug trafficking, the United States took control of Venezuela’s oil exports, stopping exports to Cuba and cutting off Havana from its main supplier of fuel. Almost immediately after the arrest of Maduro, Washington turned its focus to Cuba. Top Trump officials such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio have advocated for Havana’s current regime to topple. “I don’t think it’s any mystery that we are not big fans of the Cuban regime, who, by the way, are the ones that were propping up Maduro,” Rubio said the day after Maduro’s arrest. Cuban agents were honeycombed throughout the Maduro regime and Cuban special forces served as the core of Maduro’s personal guard.