House Republicans Are Going to Get Slaughtered

More seats shift toward Democrats, ICE news the mainstream media isn't telling you, and bizarre new reporting on Epstein's Zorro Ranch.

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I’ll be honest: I’m excited. I’ve covered protests that faded before they found their footing, and I know how these things usually go. So when I say that what happened yesterday felt different — genuinely, meaningfully different — I want you to understand that I’m not saying it lightly.

Nine million people. Every state. Small towns in Georgia. Protesters at the gates of Fort McNair, where Stephen Miller has been hiding. A 27-point swing in a Louisiana special election. A Democrat who just flipped a Florida district that includes Mar-a-Lago.

The Cook Political Report this week shifted 18 House races toward Democrats. The energy in crowds yesterday is the energy of a country that has made up its mind.

James Carville, who engineered Bill Clinton’s 1992 upset, went on The Daily Beast podcast this weekend and said Democrats are running 10 to 11 points ahead of their 2024 performance in special elections. His over-under for Senate seats in November is 55.

Carville called it flatly: Republicans are going to get “slaughtered.” He also warned that a man willing to overturn one election won’t hesitate to interfere with another. But nine million people in the streets is not a movement that gets suppressed. It’s a movement that wins.

Yesterday was the largest protest in American history. The billionaire press spent Saturday questioning whether it matters. We know it does. Now let’s get into the week’s news.

ICE: The Story They Don’t Want You To Read

Trump has successfully distracted the mainstream media with his illegal war in Iran. Let’s return the focus to what’s really going on.

Thirteen people have died in ICE detention so far in 2026, and we’re not even through March. Last year set a record with 31 deaths; this year is on pace to shatter it. Geraldo Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban father, died in El Paso after what ICE described as a “struggle” with security staff. The county medical examiner said it differently: homicide.

Others died by what ICE calls “presumed suicide.” This means by bedsheets, in cells, with families who say their loved ones showed no signs of depression.

One man, a Cambodian refugee, was found unresponsive in his cell the day after his arrest. A Nicaraguan man died at the same El Paso facility. His body was sent to a military hospital rather than the county medical examiner, delaying independent review.

It’s a pattern: ICE controls the information. ICE writes the death reports. ICE decides who examines the body. Measles outbreaks have since hit three separate facilities, the result of overcrowding that advocates warned about for months.

The Secret Prison Construction Program

Congress gave ICE $45 billion for detention expansion. With that money, the agency has been quietly buying industrial warehouses and converting them into mass detention centers, often without notifying local communities.

ICE paid over $100 million for a site in Maryland; $87 million in Pennsylvania; and $123 million for an 826,000-square-foot facility near El Paso. Local representatives in Georgia, Texas and Michigan told NPR they received no response from DHS.

In Social Circle, Georgia, local leaders cut off water and sewage to a planned site. In Kansas, a no-bid contract was doled out to reopen a prison a judge once called “an absolute hell hole.” Community members showed up 42 to 3 against it. The city commission voted 4-1 to approve it anyway.

A year ago, roughly 37,000 people were in immigration detention. Today that number exceeds 70,000. This is the highest in American history, a scale not seen since the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The target is 100,000 beds by year’s end.

If this reporting on ICE matters to you, please consider upgrading your subscription today. MAGA media won’t give you the truth, and we can use your help in this fight.

Citizenship Is Not Enough

At least 170 U.S. citizens have been detained during ICE raids. The ACLU filed a class-action lawsuit in Minnesota after multiple citizens were grabbed without warrants. One was Mubashir Khalif Hussen, a 20-year-old American walking to lunch in Minneapolis.

“I’m a citizen, I’m a citizen,” he repeated. Agents refused to look at his ID. He was shackled and fingerprinted before being released.

This week, the DOJ admitted in federal court that the legal justification it had been using to defend ICE’s courthouse arrests was based on a memo that doesn’t even apply to immigration courts.

This means ICE was arresting people showing up for their own hearings, operating under authority that didn’t exist. The UN’s racial discrimination committee condemned the United States this month. The State Department hasn’t responded.

Epstein: The Cover-up in Plain Sight

Three weeks ago, the DOJ released FBI files “mistakenly” withheld from the Epstein tranche. Those files contained detailed summaries of a woman’s allegations that she was sexually assaulted by both Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump when she was between 13 and 15 years old.

The question that won’t go away: why were the three summaries mentioning Trump missing from the original release, while the fourth, focused only on Epstein, was included? The DOJ called it a coding error.

Also: a new report adds a bizarre dimension. This week, an investigative journalist revealed that Epstein’s ranch in New Mexico was equipped with a private microwave communications link to a tower cluster at Sandia National Laboratories. The link is documented in FCC records.

Microwave links are infrastructure used by the NSA, CIA, and Department of Defense. They’re not typically found on a private desert ranch.

The link remains active. The current owner is Donald Huffines, a Trump ally who purchased it secretly in 2023 and whose son was hired by the Trump administration last June. Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Robert Maxwell, sold backdoored surveillance software to Sandia in 1985. His daughter’s partner then built a communications link pointed directly at it. The Huffines family terminated several FCC licenses on the property but kept that one.

Meanwhile, the House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi, with five Republicans crossing the aisle. When she met with committee members last week, Democrats walked out, saying she refused to commit to complying.

Some 2.5 million Epstein documents remain hidden. Reps. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna say that violates the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The committee has also subpoenaed the prison guard on duty the night Epstein died.

The administration that promised to expose the Epstein network is now the one protecting the files.

What This All Means to Me

I founded Raw Story because someone had to say plainly what the mainstream press wouldn’t: that the Bush administration lied us into a war. The mainstream media played along until it was too late.

Today, the cover-up looks different but the impulse is the same. ICE is writing its own death reports and deciding who examines the bodies. The Epstein files with Trump’s name on them were the only ones “accidentally” left out.

Raw America exists because someone has to say it plainly. Thirteen people have died in ICE detention this year alone. Two and a half million Epstein documents remain hidden. And the Attorney General who’s supposed to release them answers to the man whose name is in them.

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I’m glad you’re in this fight with me. We’re in it to win it.

— John Byrne

Founder, Raw America and Raw Story

Correction: The original version of this column incorrectly stated that Zorro Ranch sits at the midpoint between Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Zorro Ranch is close to each lab but not at the midpoint between the two. To Los Alamos, it is approximately 50 miles. To Sandia, it’s approximately 40-45 miles.