The next two weeks Democrats in Congress will be working to use the budget to set limits on ICE-to require judicial warrants, masks off and body cameras on, and to set use of force standards. John Nichols, The Nation’s executive editor, will comment.

Also: The Super Bowl is by far the biggest entertainment event of the year in the US, and this Sunday the halftime show will feature Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny, who has been demanding “ICE Out!” How did the Super Bowl halftime show become the center of resistance to ICE? Dave Zirin, The Nation’s sports editor, will explain.

We have the power to rein in ICE and protect our neighbors, Leah Greenberg argues – she’s co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, the group that organized No Kings 2 last October, the largest demonstration in American history. The key right now, she says, is for Senate Democrats to refuse to fund Homeland Security in this week’s budget vote, unless Republicans agree to put meaningful restrictions on that lawless agency.

Also: The group Standing Together says it is still possible for Israelis and Palestinians to live side by side with full equality and justice for everyone. The are the largest Jewish-Arab grassroots movement in Israel, working to create an alternative to the existing reality by building political power. Sally Abed explains -- she’s a Palestinian citizen of Israel, a leader of Standing Together, and she was elected to the Haifa city council in February 2024.

The landscape of resistance in Minneapolis, John Nichols reports, includes surprisingly powerful and effective faith groups, plus unions, neighborhood mutual aid and community safety networks, ICE observer teams, and direct action groups, plus the ACLU and its allies, as well as the outspoken mayor and the fighting state attorney general.

Also: DOGE did NOT reduce spending – at all. But it did reduce federal employment; 271,000 people lost their jobs in the federal government, according to CATO. Sasha Abramsky set out to find out what it was like for some of those people -- his new book reports on the experiences of eleven fired federal workers: American Carnage: How Trump, Musk, and DOGE butchered the US Government.

As Trump’s support collapses, he has lashed out in two directions--sending an unprecendented number of ICE agents to Minneapolis, where one of them murdered Renee Good, and sending the military to Venezuela, where he says he has seized control of the oil industry. Harold Meyerson comments.

Also: Twenty Minutes Without Trump: There’s a new TV series about how capitalism came to Communist China, 30 episodes made for Chinese TV by the great Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai, running now on the Criterion Channel. John Powers, critic-at-large on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, explains.

Trump’s attack on Venezuela is likely to weaken his political support even further, because it does nothing about affordability or health care. And it’s not at all clear the big oil companies want to spend billions restoring Venezuelan production. John Nichols comments.

Also: the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ordered the VA to provide housing for disabled vets on its land in Los Angeles, something they have refused to do for more than a decade. The ruling should end homelessness among disabled vets everywhere – Mark Rosenbaum of Public Counsel, who won the case, explains.

The year in politics: Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect comments on Trump’s collapsing support in 2025, and the rise of the resistance—in both the unprecendented national mobilizations culminating in the second No Kings Day, and the Democratic triumph in virtually all elections in 2025.

Also: the year in court: David Cole, who stepped down this year as national legal director of the ACLU, reviews the 149 rulings against Trump in federal courts this past year, and the 21 times the Supreme Court has supported his attacks on democracy.

In June, Trump sent more than 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to occupy Los Angeles and terrorize the immigrant population. But by the end of July, almost all the Guard and the Marines were gone. Bill Gallegos explains how that happened and what other cities can learn from it.

Also: Bob Dylan fans have been puzzled and troubled by his Christmas album ever since he released it in 2009. To help figure out what Dylan was doing, we turn to Sean Wilentz. He’s author of Bob Dylan in America, and he also teaches history at Princeton. (Originally recorded in January, 2005.)​

This coming Friday is the deadline for the Justice Department to turn over the Epstein files to Congress. But we already know the key fact about Epstein’s famous friends--they didn’t care that he had hired a 14-year-old girl for sex—and gone to jail for it. But why was that? Katha Pollitt comments.

Also: the hidden politics of the New York Times crossword puzzle: Natan Last explains; his new book is Across the Universe: the Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle.