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The Military Suppliers Behind Immigration Raids
Bloomberg (no paywall): “In the final weeks of the 2025 fiscal year, the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement agencies went on a spending spree to outfit officers as they fanned out across American cities: $12.2 million for rifles, $11.3 million on tasers and $3.7 million worth of chemical munitions and less lethal materiel. Those were among a slew of weapons, ammunition and protective equipment made or sold by companies that have seen a huge spike in revenue from the Department of Homeland Security, including several that usually sell their products to the military.
Take Geissele Automatics, a Pennsylvania-based weapons manufacturer that contracts with both the Department of Defense and DHS. It agreed to sell $9.1 million of precision long guns and accessories to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and $3.1 million of rifles to Customs and Border Protection in September – two of the company’s biggest ever deals with the federal government. (Geissele Automatics founder William Geissele declined to comment, citing a nondisclosure agreement.)
That same month, as the Trump administration started focusing its immigration crackdown on Chicago, ICE agreed to spend a total of almost $140 million on weapons, ammunition and other equipment for their officers. Of that, more than $7 million was designated for training purposes to support the massive hiring surge the administration has promised. CBP put in orders for another $65 million worth of such gear, ranging from uniforms to gas masks and body armor.
The result has been on full view in Chicago’s neighborhoods and other cities across the country, where armed and masked officers from federal law enforcement agencies have been arresting immigrants and citizens alike, shooting protesters with pepper balls and tossing canisters of tear gas into crowds…”
Donald Trump’s War on Free Speech & the Need for Systemic Resistance
Free Press: “We took the freedom of speech away.” President Trump in opening remarks at his “antifa roundtable” (October 2025) Download the Report Key Findings Timeline of Attacks
“This Free Press report examines the Trump administration’s hostile relationship with dissent and free expression in 2025. It analyzes how President Trump and his political enablers have worked to undermine and chill the most basic freedoms protected under the First Amendment. While the U.S. government has made efforts throughout this nation’s history to censor people’s expression and association — be it the exercise of freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly, or the right to petition the government for redress — the Trump administration’s incessant attacks on even the most tentatively oppositional speech are uniquely aggressive, pervasive and escalating. Attacks on dissent have unfolded as a daily barrage of headlines. These come in countless forms: violent physical attacks on reporters covering protests against ICE, law enforcement targeting and detaining foreign students for months due to their political speech, the White House firing and the Justice Department prosecuting government servants who refuse to comply with Trump’s personal vendettas. While each attack is noteworthy and often an unprecedented show of censorship, the sheer volume of chilling attacks has helped ensure that even the most egregious assaults quickly fall out of the news cycle and public consciousness.
The administration’s censorial tactics are spurring tremendous resistance across political and geographic lines, with a majority of people worried about the government’s attacks on free speech. Anti-democratic figures in and around the White House face growing public opposition to their authoritarian campaign and are doubling down to muzzle criticism, suppress dissenting voices and weaken scrutiny of their own legally questionable defiance of constitutional safeguards. And despite Trump’s claims that he’s protecting people and defending free speech, his aggressive attacks on dissent say otherwise.
To create this report, Free Press examined original reporting on more than 500 actions — including verbal threats, arrests, lawsuits, regulatory actions and military deployments — by Trump, the Trump White House, Trump-appointed federal regulators, the National Guard, law-enforcement agencies and other branches of government.
We focus exclusively on federal actions that implicate the First Amendment, with such examples becoming nearly all-encompassing as Trump seeks to silence dissent. We reviewed commentary and interviewed constitutional lawyers, civil-society leaders and historians. We have catalogued nearly 200 of the most potent examples of the federal government’s attacks on the First Amendment in our Timeline of Attacks. We have observed related anti-democratic attacks at the federal level as well as state and local actions that compound the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine broad democratic principles.
Each threat scenario deserves rigorous scrutiny in its own right. Due to the overwhelming volume of threats to and attacks on the First Amendment since Trump took office, this report captures and reveals the repeating patterns of censorship and analyzes the hallmarks of this administration’s censorial campaign.”
