In today’s newsletter: Minnesota residents, leaders and protesters express their fears as thousands of federal officers flood the state. Iranians try to circumvent a government crackdown on Starlink satellite internet. And Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of Elon Musk’s children, sues his AI company over sexualized deepfakes.
Here’s what to know today.
'It feels like an invasion': Minnesotans stunned as federal officers flood their state
As 3,000 federal officers swarm Minnesota, residents say the weight of it all is inescapable. Officers in unmarked cars idle on neighborhood streets. Honks and whistles sound when they are near. And occasionally, the smell of chemical agents wafts by.
The sustained scale and aggression demonstrated by law enforcement appears to be at a level beyond immigration operations in other blue cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and Charlotte, all of which are larger than Minneapolis in area and population.
This is Morning Rundown, a weekday newsletter to start your day. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
Videos filmed by residents of violent arrests are proliferating on social media. Some footage provided to NBC News by activists shows officers smashing car windows or spraying chemicals point blank into the faces of residents.
“It feels like an invasion,” said one protester who asked not to be named out of fear of retaliation. The woman, a restaurant owner, said she temporarily closed her business to protect her immigrant employees. “It feels very much like a Nazi Germany situation to me. It needs to stop, and people need to know what’s going on.”
More on Minnesota:
- A class action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union accuses ICE of racially profiling three individuals in a Minneapolis immigration operation.
- Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to deploy the military in response to rising tensions between protesters and federal personnel in Minneapolis.
Under Iran's internet blackout, SpaceX's Starlink is a lifeline — if it can stay online
As Iran’s national internet blackout stretches to its second week, the satellite internet service Starlink has become a crucial lifeline for many citizens to connect with the outside world — and one that the regime appears to be trying to shut down.
The government has deployed “jamming” devices to slow down traffic, said Ahmad Ahmadian, the executive director of a nonprofit that works to get Iranians online.
Ahmadian is one of many activists trying to circumvent the Islamic Republic’s attempts to halt communication. His group and others have worked for several years to smuggle Starlink terminals into the country, with a thriving black market for them.
But until this week, many terminals hadn’t worked, Ahmadian said, as they usually require a paid subscription that often doesn’t accept Iranian money. That changed when SpaceX suddenly waived the subscription fee for people in Iran, he said.
Related news:
- The Defense Department is preparing to send additional U.S. forces and assets, including a carrier strike group, to the Middle East, a U.S. official said.
Ashley St. Clair, mother of one of Elon Musk's children, sues xAI over sexual deepfakes
Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of Elon Musk’s children, sued Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence company over nonconsensual sexual images generated by Grok AI.
St. Clair had notified xAI that users were creating illicit deepfake photos of her “as a child stripped down to a string bikini” and “as an adult in sexually explicit poses” and requested that the Grok service be prevented from creating the nonconsensual images, the lawsuit says.
