Politics and views in the United States.

ICE plans a new detention center in Indiana. President Trump considers 'taking over' the D.C. police, and Israel's PM says he'll take total control of the Gaza Strip. 

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to 2025 Talks, where we're following our democracy in historic times. 100,000 beds would create more efficiencies and allow ICE agents to arrest more bad people on the street.

And with us hiring at a massive rate, more boots on the ground, we're arresting more criminals, which means we need more beds.

Orders are Tom Homan says he's eager to get more ICE detention centers running as the agency ramps up immigration arrests.

What he's calling the Speedway Slammer planned for Indiana would add 1,000 beds, part of state and federal partnership to add 80,000 migrant detention spots.

A federal judge is halting construction of Florida's Alligator Alcatraz for two weeks to determine if the work violates environmental laws.

Meanwhile, a new report from Georgia Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff found hundreds of cases of human rights abuses at ICE detention centers nationwide, including mistreatment of children and pregnant women, sexual abuse, and denial of legal representation.

This comes after three New York lawmakers were trapped inside an ICE center in Brooklyn.

While attempting to visit the Metropolitan Detention Center, three Democratic members of Congress were themselves detained for about 45 minutes.

During their visit, officials put the prison into lockdown, blocking them from touring or leaving the site.

A separate report from the Prison Policy Initiative finds almost 60,000 migrants detained at the centers, but around 26,000 more are in local jails, typically brought in by the U.S. Marshal Service.

Wanda Bertram with the Prison Justice Group says local government contracts with the marshals are being used to aid in mass arrests.

No matter what they have been used to do in the past, holding people who are awaiting trial for other federal crimes, they are currently being used, no doubt about it, to hold immigrants or trumped up immigration-related crime.

Most detained migrants have no criminal record and only face civil charges.

ICE leadership says these cases would not have previously been treated as crimes.

In line with efforts to run Washington, D.C. directly, President Donald Trump says he'll try to overturn the law-granting home rule and take over the city's police.

Citing an attempted carjacking of a former administration employee, he says crime in the Capitol is out of control.

What a shame.

The rate of crime, the rate of muggings, killings, and everything else, and that includes bringing in the National Guard, maybe very quickly, too.

In fact, the number of violent crimes has fallen by a quarter in the last year, reaching a 30-year low.

At the same time, the administration is pulling nearly $90 million from New York State's counterterrorism and public safety funding.

Critics note this comes a week after four people were killed in a mass shooting in Midtown Manhattan.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel will take complete control of the Gaza Strip as a way to rid Palestine of Hamas's leadership, and according to the Times of India, the White House won't try to block it.

Humanitarian groups charge Gaza is now in full-blown famine, and Georgia Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock says Netanyahu is weaponizing starvation.

"It is wrong to starve children to death.

It is wrong to starve people to death.

Yet in this moment we are witnessing a famine unfold among children and innocent men and women in Gaza, the world's largest open-air prison."

After delays and demands to work out deals, Trump's tariffs on all U.S. trading partners are in effect.

With higher or lower exceptions for individual products, most imports from the European Union, Japan and South Korea face a 15 percent import tax.

Imports from Taiwan, Vietnam and Bangladesh face 20 percent tariffs.

I'm Edwin J. Vieira for Pacific Network and Public News Service.

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