By LAURIE KELLMAN

The billionaire owner of The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, narrowed the topics covered by its opinion section Wednesday to defending personal liberties and the free market, a pivot away from the traditional broad focus and prompting the news outlet’s opinion editor to resign.

Bezos, who also is the founder and largest individual shareholder of Amazon, said on X that “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

The move was received by some as an indication that Bezos is making decisions for the Post with an eye toward avoiding retaliation by President Donald Trump. Bezos, though, cast the change as a modernization from the days when newspapers offered opinions on a broad range of topics. Now, he said, “the internet does that job.”

“We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” Bezos wrote in his post, adding that the new topics “are right for America. I also believe that these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion.” Opinions editor David Shipley resigned rather than lead the shift, Bezos said.

“I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t `hell yes,’ then it had to be `no.’ After careful consideration, David decided to step away,” Bezos wrote.

The pivot echoes the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page banner: “free markets, free people.”

Bezos’ move Wednesday was the latest in a series of Bezos’ changes to the legacy news outlet, an award-winning organization that broke the Watergate scandal and whose motto is, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

Weeks before the November election, Bezos announced that the Post would not endorse a presidential candidate, sparking a wave of resignations and thousands of subscription cancellations. The Post’s editorial staff had been prepared to endorse Democrat Kamala Harris before publisher Will Lewis wrote instead that it would be better for readers to make up their own minds. Bezos defended the decision by saying in “a note from our owner” that editorial endorsements create a perception of bias at a time many Americans don’t believe the media, and do nothing to tip the scales of an election.

In January, cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit after an editor rejected her sketch of Bezos and other media executives bowing before Trump — after The Washington Post editor was seen with other executives at Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago.

Some of Trump’s top allies tweeted their support for Bezos’ move.

“Bravo, @JeffBezos!” posted fellow billionaire Elon Musk. Added conservative commentator Charlie Kirk: “Good! The culture is changing rapidly for the better.”

Bezos bought the broadsheet and other newspapers in 2013 for $250 million in a surprise move viewed as a demonstration of how the Internet has created winners and losers and transformed the media landscape.

The narrowing of topics will be obvious. On the Post’s homepage Wednesday afternoon, headlines linking to opinion material included “Your showerhead is lying to you” and “What we learned about politics by talking about … wolves.”

By Tim Henderson, Stateline.org

Even as the Trump administration criticizes state and local sanctuary policies as an impediment to its deportation aims, officials touting the policies are finding there isn’t much they can do to prevent immigration arrests.

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Some states and counties are nonetheless defending their sanctuary policies as a way to slow arrests, especially for purely immigration-related offenses, and to assure residents that local leaders are not taking part in the Trump administration’s deportation plans.

Localities in Connecticut, Oregon and Washington joined a February lawsuit led by the city and county of San Francisco and Santa Clara County in California against a Trump administration executive order calling for defunding cities with sanctuary policies, calling the order “illegal and authoritarian.” California is also preparing to defend its state policies limiting cooperation with immigration authorities, based on a 2017 law that withstood a court challenge under the first Trump administration.

The laws under scrutiny generally limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities. The policies either prevent local officials from holding prisoners for immigration arrests or, alternatively, from notifying immigration authorities what time prisoners will be released, so federal agents can arrest them on immigration charges that could lead to deportation. There are generally exceptions for some serious crimes.

Chicago, Philadelphia and Seattle — all high-profile sanctuary locations — are among the cities that have seen Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests.

ICE can always find other ways to arrest a person, but it’s harder without local cooperation.

“You’re adding to the time and expense and resources ICE needs,” said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst for the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank devoted to immigration policy.

She noted a 2018 report from the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank, suggesting that deportations fell in California after a 2013 law limited cooperation with ICE for minor and immigration crimes, though they later rose again.

“There is suggestive evidence that sanctuary policies reduce deportations but many reasons to also be skeptical of big effects,” the report concluded.

Most deportation arrests happen when ICE agents get fingerprint records from jails, whether run by city governments or independently elected sheriffs as they are in many counties, and identify people subject to court deportation orders. All jails regardless of sanctuary policy send the fingerprints for federal background checks during the booking process.

Still, federal officials complain that sanctuary policies can force them to arrest people on the street where it’s more dangerous and time-consuming than a transfer of custody inside a jail.

That happened recently in heavily Democratic Tompkins County in upstate New York, where the county and the city of Ithaca reaffirmed their sanctuary policies after criticism by the Trump administration.

A man who had been held in the county’s jail since 2023 was released on a judge’s order in late January, before ICE agents could arrive to arrest him for deportation. Several agencies, including state police, later arrested him in a parking lot in a show of force, according to local press accounts.

The 27-year-old man, a citizen of Mexico, had been identified for deportation in early January because he had returned to the United States after being deported seven times in 2016. He pleaded guilty to charges of assaulting a police officer and a jail guard and was sentenced to time served.

After the ICE arrest, acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove criticized the county, writing in a Jan. 30 statement: “We will use every tool at our disposal to prevent sanctuary city policies from impeding and obstructing lawful federal operations designed to make America safe again.”

Tompkins County Attorney Maury Josephson, in a statement to Stateline, called Bove’s statement “false and offensive.” Josephson wrote that the sheriff, Derek Osborne, had notified ICE about the prisoner’s release and that federal agents “had every opportunity to come to the jail to obtain the individual in question without any need for a pursuit or other incident.”

Many sanctuary policies are mostly symbolic, meant to assure residents that the city isn’t taking part in federal immigration enforcement. Many policies say city employees will not ask about immigration status when people seek services.

Some sanctuary policies can help indirectly fight deportations by providing legal help and advice for immigrants on how to respond to questions from federal agents, said Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock, a supervisory policy and practice counsel for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

“There have been some steps forward in creating an immigration public defender system, but it’s not available at the federal level yet,” Ibañez Whitlock said. That can make it tricky when an immigration prisoner is moved to another state for detention, and they could lose their legal representation, she said.

Sanctuary policies also aim to improve public safety by assuring immigrants it’s safe for them to report and help investigate crimes. Often the policies forbid asking questions about immigration status for people seeking services.

“For us it’s simple. We are striving to create a culture of trust and security within our communities so that our residents know that they can come to the county when they are in need or when they can be of help,” said Tony LoPresti, county counsel for Santa Clara County, California, during a news conference announcing the San Francisco lawsuit this month.

“That includes feeling safe coming to local law enforcement to report crimes or to participate in investigations without fearing that they or their loved ones face deportation,” LoPresti added.

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Less than two years ago, Liam Souliere was in the crease for Penn State as the Nittany Lions came within an overtime goal of the program’s first Frozen Four trip. Less than a year ago, he earned his finance degree after playing four years at Pegula Arena.

On Friday, Souliere is likely to hear boos when he skates out onto the Lions’ home ice wearing the maroon and gold of the Minnesota Gophers. Souliere faced his former team earlier this season, shutting out the Lions in Minneapolis.

“It adds to it, but I don’t think we view it any differently. It’s just another goalie at that point,” Penn State forward Matt DiMarsico said this week. “I think we know some of the tendencies, and hopefully that will help us out this time. Definitely motivated to not let that happen again.”

There seems to be motivation everywhere this weekend as the Gophers head to State College, where they will close out the Big Ten’s regular season with games Friday (7:30 p.m. CT) and Saturday (7 p.m.).

Last weekend, while Minnesota was sweeping Ohio State at home, the Nittany Lions went to first-place Michigan State and took five of six points from the Spartans. Those results vaulted the Gophers to the top of the conference standings, meaning that if Minnesota grabs five or six points this weekend, Minnesota will win the conference title for the third time in four years.

Gophers coach Bob Motzko said his team isn’t thinking much about that bigger picture, or paying any attention to the out-of-town scoreboard and instead are focused solely on what comes first.

“Win the series against the team you play. We can’t worry about what Michigan State does,” Motzko said this week. “All we had to do last week was worry about who we were playing. And right now it’s Friday night, Penn State, we’re up two on them. We have to win the series.”

Motzko added that his advice to Souliere, who has emerged as Minnesota’s every-night goalie, is to call on his 100-plus games of college hockey experience, and to remember that the net is 4 feet by 6 feet and the puck is the same size no matter who shoots it.

“Just keep your emotions in check. That’s it,” Motzko said. “We just had a speaker in today who said, ‘The moment doesn’t care about you. You care about the moment and just stay in it.’ ”

Minnesota swept a home series with the Nittany Lions in November, which seems like a long, long time ago now. Since January, when they got healthier, Penn State has won 12 of its last 13, backstopped by junior goalie Arsenii Sergeev — honored by the conference as their first star of the week on Tuesday — and led offensively by sophomore Aidan Fink, who is making a case to be a Hobey Baker Award finalist.

Penn State is a notably motivated team this weekend, as well, sitting one point behind Michigan for the final home ice slot in Round 1 of the conference playoffs.

Motzko’s teams have won either Big Ten regular season or tournament titles in three of the past four years, and the Gophers acknowledge that the opportunity to hang another championship banner is in their thoughts.

“We care. Two big wins and that comes with a title,” said Gophers forward Brody Lamb, who scored three times against Ohio State last weekend and was honored with the Big Ten’s second star of the week. “We’ve just got to focus on our game and not think about the stage it is. But we care.”

Last week, the Texas Observer reported that James “Jim” Joseph Rodden—an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) assistant chief counsel who acts as a prosecutor for ICE in immigration court in Dallas—operates a white supremacist X account named GlomarResponder, based on an overwhelming number of biographical details that the Observer matched through publicly available documents, other social media activity, and courtroom observation.

The GlomarResponder account has routinely posted hateful statements including that “America is a White nation,” “All blacks are foreign to my people,” and “‘Migrants’ are all criminals.” 

A weekly ICE court schedule obtained by the Observer Monday morning still listed Rodden as scheduled to appear at hearings throughout the week. Rodden represents the agency in proceedings that can decide whether an immigrant is deported from the country. But, when the Observer visited the courtrooms where Rodden was scheduled to appear on Monday afternoon and Wednesday morning, other ICE attorneys were present instead. 

In a statement for the Observer’s prior story, ICE said it “will not comment on the substance of this article pending further investigation.” ICE shared the same statement in response to a request for comment for this story and did not confirm whether Rodden was still representing the agency in immigration court.

Rodden’s possible continued ICE employment comes despite calls for an immediate investigation and swift disciplinary action if necessary from three members of Congress and a complaint from a Massachusetts lawyer to the District of Columbia Bar and ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility.

Democratic Congress members Marc Veasey, Bennie Thompson, and Jamie Raskin have called on officials at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE to investigate the Observer’s findings.

In a February 24 letter to ICE Acting Deputy Director Kenneth Genalo, citing the Observer’s reporting, Veasey—who represents part of Dallas—demanded an accounting of the agency’s investigation into Rodden and information about related policies. “These allegations raise serious questions about the integrity of ICE’s prosecutorial process and its commitment to impartial justice,” Veasey wrote.

In a separate February 24 letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, Thompson—ranking member of the Homeland Security committee—and Raskin demanded that DHS investigate the Observer’s findings. The congressmen noted that “The ICE Code of Conduct prohibits personnel from engaging in behavior on or off duty that may ‘cause the public or ICE to question the reliability, judgement, or trustworthiness of its employees’ or that would ‘discredit the employee, embarrass or bring ICE into disrepute’ or ‘interfere with or adversely affect ICE’s mission.’ Anyone making racist statements and suggesting violence against immigrants is unfit to represent the United States government in immigration proceedings.” 

The Observer connected GlomarResponder, an X account with over 17,000 followers, to Rodden through an extensive review of GlomarResponder’s X posts, publicly available documents, and other social media profiles and posts, as well as courtroom observation. Two analysts with more than 20 years of combined experience in open-source intelligence reviewed the findings and found that “The depth of the investigation leaves little room for doubt.”

(Shutterstock, X)

In addition to the racist and xenophobic content the Observer previously reported, GlomarResponder has also posted apparent praise of Adolf Hitler on X. In August 2023, GlomarResponder wrote: “Based. Gott Mit Uns,” while sharing an image of and quote from Hitler. “Based” is a slang term signifying praise, and “Gott Mit Uns” is a phrase, used during various parts of German history including by the Nazi military, meaning “God is with us.” GlomarResponder has additionally posted that South Africa was “ruined by ending apartheid.” 

For the Observer’s prior story, Rodden did not respond to multiple requests for comment sent to his ICE email address. A call to a phone number associated with Rodden reached a man who declined to confirm his identity then hung up. When approached outside the Dallas immigration court and asked to confirm receipt of the emailed requests, Rodden said to “call [his] press office.” 

Rodden did not respond to an additional request for comment for this story.

J. Whitfield Larrabee, an attorney in Massachusetts, filed a complaint last week against Rodden with the District of Columbia Bar, through which a James J. Rodden holds a law license, which allows representation of ICE in immigration court in Texas. 

“As an assistant Chief Legal Counsel, Rodden functions as a prosecutor,” Larrabee’s complaint reads. “In exercising discretion to investigate or to prosecute, a prosecutor should not improperly favor or invidiously discriminate against any person. Because of Rodden’s explicit bigotry and racism, he cannot be trusted to properly exercise his discretion.”

Larrabee also sent a copy of the complaint to ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which “upholds the agency’s professional standards” and investigates possible employee and contractor misconduct.

The D.C. Bar, which declined to comment for the Observer’s prior story, would neither confirm nor deny for this story whether Rodden is under Bar investigation.

The Immigrant Legal Resource Center, a nonprofit that trains attorneys and advocates who work with immigrants across the country, also raised concerns regarding the Observer’s findings.

“With all of this clear racism and xenophobia on display, it begs the question — how many of our community members were mistreated and targeted by prosecutors like this?” the group posted on X. 

Editor’s Note: Exiting extremism can be a difficult process. If you or someone you love is caught up in hate or extremist politics, there are free resources that can help. Life After Hate and Parents for Peace are two non-profit organizations that operate help lines and provide support to help individuals and families recover from extremism.

The post Congressmen Demand Investigation of ICE Prosecutor Running Racist X Account appeared first on The Texas Observer.