January 30th National Shutdown

Today I am participating in the January 30th, 2026 national shutdown of (1) no work, (2) no school, and (3) no shopping.

The demand is singular: Stop funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Over the last few months, we've all seen the continued escalation of concerning activity from ICE, especially in Minnesota. Minnesotans recently came out by the thousands in sub-zero weather to protest the fear and danger ICE brings to their communities and the outright killings of multiple US citizens. The protest today is a larger national effort in solidarity with Minnesota and everyone across the country who has been impacted by ICE. Given the incredibly quick timeline to organize it, I'm not optimistic that this protest will be huge, but I'm hopeful it will be noticeable. Because we need more people to wake up to what is happening in this country.

I'm writing this post because not working today isn't really "visible" in my world. As a software engineer in a well-paid, non-union job, strikes don't really "work". My workplace and the projects I'm working on don't come to a screeching halt when my teammates or I take a day off. The websites I helped build will continue to run and serve scientific data to scientists across the world. Nobody outside of my team and the people who missed seeing me in a Friday meeting will even know that I'm gone because of the national shutdown event. So I've got to do something to make my participation more visible, and that something is posting to my little corner of the Internet.

For anyone not paying close attention to national events, or who is coming back to this post in future years, let me give a rather lengthy rundown on what has happened:

The GOP and Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" was passed in 2025 with a massive increase in ICE funding, with $170 billion spent on border immigration enforcement over the next five years. That is 34 billion dollars a year, which is a higher per-year spend than the military budgets of all but 14 countries. There has been a hiring spree so massive and disorganized, that a journalist appears to have gotten hired despite intentionally smoking cannabis to fail the drug test and they passed her anyway. Training has been shortened (by conflicting amounts depending on who in the administration you ask) and thousands of newly minted, lightly trained immigration enforcement officers are out in our communities.

Not that a lack of training is fully to blame here. Reene Good's killer has decades of experience. The incompetence seems to come from a culture of carelessness and vindictiveness. Things like Vice President JD Vance telling agents that they have "absolute immunity" (which isn't actually true, as states could still prosecute). What Vance was saying there is that the federal government will not investigate itself. That gives federal officers more confidence to not worry about exactly what our laws say, as they'll be protected by the federal government instead of what we've typically had in our country, which is a largely independent set of agencies that will spin up a special investigation that has wide latitude to follow the facts, independent of political pressures. Without agency independence, trust in the federal government will erode.

The vindictiveness comes from people like Steven Miller, Trump's Deputy Chief of Staff, setting quotas of 3,000 arrests a day. That sort of quota system leads to US citizens being swept up, thanks to the Supreme Court saying it's fine to target people simply because of their race or accent. But even with careful targeting of immigrants, there simply aren't that many violent immigrants floating around in our country. In fact, studies often find that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes, presumably because they don't want to get tangled up in the legal system because of their immigration status.

In addition to the massive expansion of ICE operations, the federal government has shown that it is willing to engage in blatant lying, such as Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem saying Alex Pretti was there to "perpetuate violence" and Greg Bovino, a border patrol commander who (rightfully) was demoted after all this madness, saying Pretti was there to "massacre law enforcement", or the White House social media team altering a civil rights attorney's face in photos after she had been arrested to make it look like she was crying when she was was not.

How are we to trust the federal government when we can see with our own eyes that they are lying? It's trite, but it brings to mind the quote from George Orwell's book, 1984: "The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

They are even going after journalists now. Today, they arrested journalist Don Lemon, who was at a protest to report on it, not participate. Last summer in LA, an Australian journalist was shot by rubber bullets. And recently, the FBI raided another journalist's house.

These are not normal times. We have professors who study fascism leaving the US because of what is happening.

So for all of that (and more), I'm joining today's national shutdown in hopes that an economic jolt can wake Congress up to finally stop the encroaching authoritarianism that they're allowing to fester in our nation.