Apple Caves to Pam Bondi and Takes Down ICE Tracking Apps

Apple has taken down apps that alert people to the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in their area after pressure from Attorney General Pam Bondi.

The primary ICE tracking app, ICEBlock, was intended to “keep people safe” in the midst of President Trump’s immigration crackdown. But Bondi saw it differently, arguing that it placed already masked ICE officers in danger.

“We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store—and Apple did so,” Bondi said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “ICEBlock is designed to put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs, and violence against law enforcement is an intolerable red line that cannot be crossed. This Department of Justice will continue making every effort to protect our brave federal law enforcement officers, who risk their lives every day to keep Americans safe.”

Now, thanks to Apple once again bowing down to the Trump administration, its users will have to resort to other measures if they want to know where ICE is or may be.

Tracking apps were blamed after last month’s attack on an ICE facility in Texas that killed two detainees. ICEBlock’s founder, Joshua Aaron, was unconvinced.

“You don’t need to use an app to tell you where an ICE agent is when you’re aiming at an ICE detention facility. Everybody knows that’s where ICE agents are,” he told the BBC.

President Donald Trump’s obsession with posting AI slop to mock House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has reached a new low.

Amid an ongoing government shutdown, Trump posted a computer-generated video on Truth Social Thursday night that showed him sitting across from Jeffries in the Oval Office, with two red “Trump 2028” hats sitting on the desk between them.

That initial image was from the president’s meeting with Democratic leaders earlier this week, in which Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had drawn a hard line over cutting funding for health care subsidies.

The new image Trump shared sprang to life as he tossed a third red hat onto Jeffries’s head, and then pointed and laughed like a petulant child. In the background, the Village People’s “YMCA” could be heard, a favorite of Trump’s.

The AI-generated video managed to evaporate any trace of nuance from the fruitless meeting that the president had transformed into a photo op to highlight his power, which he clearly views as limitless. Clearly, one cannot actually expect any good-faith negotiations from such a witless bully.

This week, Trump has been posting a storm of AI-generated videos to mock Jeffries, hounding him with racist memes and inspiring other Republicans to join in. Weirdly, Trump seems to have no problem posting AI deepfakes of himself—images of the president have a tendency to feel surreal, even when they’re legitimate—but in some cases, it appears that the commander in chief can’t tell the videos aren’t actually real until it’s too late.

You may recall the Nazi porn scandal that plagued the Republican lieutenant governor of North Carolina last September. For the second year in a row, the cooler months have ushered in a Republican Nazi porn scandal, this time beleaguering a candidate for lieutenant governor in Virginia.

Republican nominee John Reid faces fresh scrutiny surrounding a Tumblr blog, allegedly linked to him, that contained pornographic content. Reid denies ownership of the profile, which has the same username as other social media accounts of his: “JRDeux.”

It was previously reported that “JRDeux” reposted users’ photos that, per The Washington Post, ranged “from explicit photos of male genitalia to images typical of a racy underwear ad.” When that news broke, Reid, who is gay, persisted with his campaign despite Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin urging him to drop out.

On Wednesday, American Journal News unearthed additional details about the “JRDeux” Tumblr profile. In October 2015, the blog reposted an image of “a male college student in underwear,” which was published by a Nazi fetish account with a racial slur in its username; it contained the phrase “obedient n—.”

The user described himself as a “subservient n— who knows his place in society” and who was seeking “superior white men” in the Washington, D.C., area. According to American Journal News, the Nazi fetish account also posted sexual images including swastikas and white supremacist slogans, but “JRDeux” only shared the one underwear post.

“JRDeux” also shared posts from an account called “slaveandy,” devoted to content about sexual slavery.

According to Reid, the whole story was concocted to smear his sexuality.

Virginia Democrats, however, are calling on Reid to suspend his campaign.

“The accounts that Reid appears to have promoted and engaged with are full of hateful, racist, bigoted imagery,” said Virginia Delegate Mike Jones. “John Reid’s track record shows he is comfortable with white supremacy. Now, it looks like he’s fine with it showing up on his social media feed.”

“The news of the racist, antisemitic online content linked to John Reid on a social media account is appalling and shameless,” said state Senator Adam Ebbin. “They reveal John Reid has a disturbing level of comfort with disgusting, dehumanizing ideologies.”

The scandal echoes that which dashed the 2024 gubernatorial campaign of former North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson. Last year, CNN reported that an account linked to Robinson had boasted about being a “Black Nazi,” among other shocking posts, on a pornographic forum.

Free-speech grifter Bari Weiss will soon be named editor in chief of CBS News, multiple outlets reported Thursday, and her right-wing, genocide-denying blog The Free Press will be acquired by Paramount Skydance for about $150 million. Paramount will make the official announcement in the coming days.

This move comes soon after CBS was acquired by David Ellison, son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. Oracle, of course, recently made headlines for getting control of TikTok’s U.S. assets, as the group’s CEO also seeks to “embed the love and respect for Israel in the American culture.”

Weiss gained notoriety for her controversial exit from The New York Times in 2020, when she claimed she was targeted by her co-workers for being insufficiently woke after she defended a grotesque and incendiary op-ed from Senator Tom Cotton urging President Trump to use the military against Black Lives Matter protesters. She took that momentum all the way to establishing The Free Press, becoming a symbol for right-wingers who are more afraid of people of color, LGBTQ folk (and trans people specifically), and student protesters than they are of President Trump’s authoritarian agenda.

Weiss’s The Free Press notably recently made headlines for a repugnant, cruel attempt at a “gotcha” article claiming that viral images of gaunt, malnourished Palestinian children in Gaza should actually be disregarded as pro-Hamas propaganda because the children pictured already had preexisting conditions like cerebral palsy—as if that in any way explained their starvation. If anything, as most people pointed out, Israel’s genocide only exacerbated their health conditions.

Now Weiss, who wants to be a martyr in the woke wars and who oversaw countless stories denying the suffering of Palestinians, will be in control of one of the country’s largest media conglomerates, as the larger media landscape shifts rightward.

Mexican American GOP lawmakers have been largely silent on MAGA’s sombrero memes this week.

President Donald Trump on Monday shared a video featuring House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Truth Social, using AI to depict Jeffries wearing a mustache and sombrero while mariachi music plays and Schumer trashes Democrats.

The president’s allies (including the official Republican Party) have gleefully seized on the absurd video, making and sharing their own memes of Democratic lawmakers in sombreros. Some Latino advocacy groups have condemned Trump for using stereotypes to demean Mexicans.

But most Mexican American Republicans in Congress—Representatives Brian Mast, Tony Gonzales, David Valadao, Juan Ciscomani, Monica De La Cruz, and Gabe Evans—have not addressed the memes publicly as of this writing Thursday afternoon.

Representative Anna Paulina Luna is the only Mexican American Republican to comment on the meme, and in fact, she can’t seem to stop. The Florida representative has even changed the profile picture on her congressional X account to a portrait of herself in a digitally added sombrero.

Luna dismissed “fake outrage” over the memes on Wednesday, and later told Fox News host Jesse Watters that the joke inspired her to purchase red sombreros for Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

On Wednesday evening, Luna shared a photoshopped picture of JD Vance donning a sombrero and mustache. On Thursday, she posted a photo of herself, Vance, and Jeffries in sombreros, asking her followers, “Who wore it better?”

On the Democratic side of the aisle, many members of Congress of Mexican descent have reacted to the memes.

Senator Alex Padilla and Representative Teresa Leger Fernández seized on the moment to criticize Trump’s childish posting habits and pin blame for the ongoing government shutdown on Republicans.

“Democrats came to the White House to keep the government open. The President answered with a racist AI video,” Padilla wrote on X. “Anyone searching for an answer on who owns this shutdown—look no further.”

Fernández accused Trump of “acting like a 6-year-old,” saying, “The problem is that when he acts like a 6-year-old, it’s not like you can just get mad at him and say, ‘Stop drawing mustaches on people.’ People will die because of their decisions.”

Representative Jimmy Gomez responded to the memes with an AI-generated movie poster featuring Donald Trump and the late notorious sex criminal—and former Trump associate—Jeffrey Epstein. “Every time Donald Trump puts up a racist AI generated video of Hakeem Jefferies or any of my colleagues, I’ll put [up] a new movie poster about Trump and Epstein,” he wrote.

Senator Ruben Gallego responded to Republican Senator Ted Cruz’s sombrero meme by highlighting the 2021 scandal in which the Texas senator took a trip to Cancún, Mexico, while a winter storm left millions of his constituents freezing without power and heat.

Posting an image of Cruz in the airport—with a photoshopped sombrero and mustache, of course—Gallego wrote, “Cancun Cruz knows a thing or two about Mexico and a lot about raising health care costs for 24 million Americans.”