Pastor Shot in the Head by ICE Sues Trump Over First Amendment

A Chicago pastor is suing the Trump administration after ICE agents shot him in the head with pepper balls. 

Last month, Reverend David Black, the senior pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, was shot right in the face with a pepper ball by an ICE agent standing on a rooftop above him while he was protesting at the Broadview ICE facility. Black can be seen with his arms spread wide, praying at the masked, armed agents above him, before being shot in the head at least twice and falling to his knees. Black said he could hear ICE laughing at him when it happened.  

The video has now gone viral. 

“I invited them to repentance,” Black told Religion News Service. “I basically offered an altar call. I invited them to come and receive that salvation, and be part of the kingdom that is coming.”

The lawsuit hinges on ICE infringing upon protesters’ First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and religion, as agents have displayed “a pattern of extreme brutality” aimed to “silence the press and civilians.”

Black is not the only clergy member involved in the lawsuit. Unitarian minister Beth Johnson was “fired upon without warning or justification as she and other protesters and clergy members stood on the sidewalk singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ and other traditional songs of protest,” according to the lawsuit. United Methodist pastor Hannah Kardon was also shot at with pepper balls. 

It’s obvious in the video that Black—standing out among the crowd in his preacher’s garb—was absolutely a target, and it’s likely that the other faith leaders can say the same. 

The Trump administration accuses Black of trying to “dictate crowd-control policy in ways that would tie the hands of federal law enforcement officers,” while online MAGA has dismissed him as “antifa” for his vocal support of equal rights in Chicago. 

Donald Trump’s reckless social media use could imperil his administration’s already flimsy case against James Comey, the former FBI director and enemy of Trump who was indicted last month on evidently politically motivated charges.

On Wednesday evening, The Wall Street Journal revealed a striking detail about the president’s September 20 Truth Social post ordering Attorney General Pam Bondi to make haste in prosecuting Comey and other MAGA enemies, i.e., Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

As many suspected, that message was actually meant to be sent privately to the attorney general.

“Trump believed he had sent Bondi the message directly,” the Journal reports, “and was surprised to learn it was public.” Chagrined, the attorney general called the White House, and Trump provided a balm in a subsequent post praising Bondi.

“The misfire provided a window into how, through command and chaos, Trump has executed a wholesale transformation of the Justice Department,” the Journal reports. It also raises a host of legal troubles for the department’s case against Comey.

As former federal prosecutor Preet Bharara told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki following the revelation, this could pose “a big problem, legally and substantively” for Trump and the DOJ, giving Comey and the others mentioned in the message “viable motions to dismiss indictments.”

Comey’s attorney is reportedly looking to dismiss the case for “vindictive prosecution.” His trial is set for January, but before that, he can file a request to dismiss charges, on the ground that they were brought due to animus rather than legitimate legal reasons. As CNN’s Aaron Blake noted, if the Journal’s reporting is accurate, “it’s not inconceivable that an errant DM from Trump could be a big reason why Comey’s case is dismissed for vindictive prosecution.”

Though motions for vindictive prosecution are rarely successful, Bharara noted that Comey already has a better-than-average case for one, given Trump’s long record of public animosity toward him. What’s more, Bharara notes that the Journal’s reporting strongly suggests that additional communications between Trump and DOJ officials have taken place, which could help further determine the vindictiveness of the prosecution.

If the defense team acquires such messages in discovery, “that’s very, very bad for the prosecution,” he observed. Even worse would be if messages were deleted, which could potentially lead to an “adverse inference,” or the assumption that destroyed evidence would have been unfavorable to whoever destroyed it.

Further, Bharara said, “There is an argument that those communications and the destruction thereof by themselves are a basis to dismiss an indictment.”

A self-described journalist briefed the president and top U.S. officials Wednesday on the threat of the “homeless industrial complex.”

During a White House roundtable on antifa, Jonathan Choe, a reporter for Turning Point USA’s newsroom Frontlines, claimed that political extremism on the ideological left intersects with the “homeless drug crisis.” As evidence, he shared a recent report from the Discovery Institute, a conservative propaganda mill that, among other things, has advocated for ending classroom instruction on evolution.

The complex, according to those on the right who believe it’s real, is effectively a vast network of nonprofits and their beneficiaries who guzzle up federal funds intended for the homeless.

“In many cases, the homeless industrial complex is running cover for antifa, and antifa is benefiting from American tax dollars, and they’re essentially being used as the muscle,” Choe said.

He then pointed to Stop the Sweeps, a franchise-like, community-coordinated campaign that aims to prevent state violence against homeless encampments. People actually wanting to help the homeless is, apparently, not believable for Choe. Instead, he told the president and his allies that this organization’s ultimate intention was to create a P.R. crisis for law enforcement.

“What they’re doing quietly, is they’re bringing in antifa militants to manufacture a crisis to make the police look bad,” Choe said. (Of course, police don’t have to brutalize and violently evict the homeless.)

Some recent actions by supposed “antifa militants” include tossing a bucket of paint, protesting ICE facilities, and flag burning.

But Choe didn’t stop at antifa—instead, he lumped the famously decentralized antifascist organization in with the Democratic Socialists of America, placing a target on the back of a bona fide political party.

“These far-left, progressive groups tend to be aligning themselves with antifa,” Choe said. “There is a deeply embedded connection between the homeless housing nonprofit game in America, connected to antifa, and the far-left activists.”

For years, Donald Trump and his allies have pushed the idea that violent, far-left radicals are wreaking havoc in cities across the country, but their rhetoric has been noticeably devoid of evidence. To quell the noise, members of the House Intelligence Committee asked the CIA and FBI in 2020 to investigate false intelligence campaigns and find proof of the anti-fascist group’s “invasion.” Despite reports contradicting Trump’s rhetoric, the noise did not die down.

The reality is that homelessness is on the rise in the United States. An unprecedented national housing shortage, coupled with shallow social safety nets, has turned into an equally unprecedented rise in those experiencing homelessness. Rates spiked by 18 percent in 2024 compared to the year before, per data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. But those figures are apparently just a launch pad for building more confounding conspiracies, as showcased by the work of the president’s cadre of far-right influencers.

Did MAGA activist Jack Posobiec just accidentally compare President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler?

During a Wednesday roundtable discussion on antifa populated by pitiable right-wing shills, the conspiracy theorist took a moment to claim that the so-called domestic terrorist group had historical roots in Germany.

“Antifa is real. Antifa has been around in various iterations for almost a hundred years, in some instances, going back to the Weimar Republic in Germany,” Posobiec whined.

Indeed, there were multiple groups that opposed fascism in the Weimar Republic and voiced strong opposition to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, including the Communist Party of Germany’s Antifaschistische Aktion group and the Iron Front, which partnered with the Democratic Socialists. Posobiec seems to think that comparing modern-day antifascists opposing Trump’s reign to these groups opposing Hitler should demonstrate how terrible antifa is—when in fact, it did just the opposite.

Posobiec, perhaps better known as the Pizzagate guy, fancies himself a historian but appears blind to the most obvious comparison to the present day.

The antifascist groups in Weimar Germany were staunchly ideologically opposed, with little connecting them other than their opposition to authoritarianism. Ironically, that’s the case for many of the so-called members of antifa, which is short for “anti-fascist” and is a movement, not a group. The so-called organization lacks a central structure and is instead a loose network of individuals and groups who act separately under the banner of opposing facism.

Posobiec previously co-wrote a book called Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them). The book supposedly tracks the opponents of conservatism throughout history, and endorses a modern-day McCarthyism to root out the “radicals” from American institutions. It’s worth noting that Vice President JD Vance provided a glowing promotional blurb about the book.

“On a base level, unhumans seek the death of the successful and the desecration of the beautiful,” Posobiec and his ghostwriter claimed, later adding, “Take the path of the hunter, and with one singular voice, we are going to make them the prey.”

In the end, Posobiec is a facism fanboy who likes to vote in a swing state he doesn’t even live in, and Trump’s roundtable on countering antifascism is exactly the political farce it presents as.

“We took the freedom of speech away,” President Donald Trump boasted in his opening remarks at his “antifa roundtable” Wednesday.

The remark came as Trump touted an August 25 executive order seeking to crack down on the practice of flag burning, a form of protest that the Supreme Court has previously ruled is protected by the First Amendment.

“We’ve made it a one-year penalty for inciting riots. We took the freedom of speech away, because that’s been through the courts,” Trump said before making other addled statements about his unconstitutional stance on flag burning.

It was a jarring admission—perhaps a Freudian slip—from a president who is, indeed, evidently intent on eliminating free speech.

Supreme Court precedent firmly establishes flag burning as a form of First Amendment–protected symbolic speech. And for what it’s worth, Trump’s executive order did not specify a one-year jail sentence. It did, however, direct the attorney general to prosecute flag burners under existing laws—this being a tacit acknowledgment that his desired ban would unambiguously run afoul of the First Amendment.

After claiming credit for rolling back freedom of speech, the president went on to seemingly admit that he cannot completely ban flag burning, but expressed his hope to clamp down on the practice—which he says stirs up violence, as if by magic—nonetheless.

“What has happened is, when they burn a flag, it agitates and irritates crowds—they’ve never seen anything like it—on both sides, and you end up in riots,” he said. “So we’re going on that basis. We’re looking at it not from the freedom of speech, which I always felt strongly about, but never passed the courts.”