Politics

‘Our cities are no longer safe’: GOP mayors condemn Trump immigration enforcement

Published

5 months ago

January 29, 2026

A number of Republican mayors are condemning the Trump administration’s hardline immigration enforcement tactics in Minnesota, as they call on the president to pull back from Minneapolis and worry their cities might be next.

“It’s roiling the country,” Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt told Blue Light News. “We’re all sort of feeling the angst of our residents and the fear that our city will be next and that chaos is going to inevitably creep across the entire country.”

Fresno, California, Mayor Jerry Dyer said in an interview that “too much damage has been done” with the crackdown and “the trust in communities has been lost.”

And Burnsville, Minnesota, Mayor Elizabeth Kautz, warned that the agency’s current tactics meant “our cities are no longer safe.”

The remarks from the trio of moderate-leaning GOP mayors who have broken with Trump in the past came at the annual gathering of the nonpartisan U.S. Conference of Mayors, held blocks from the White House. Holt chairs the conference.

The Republican leaders’ calls for Trump to deescalate after the fatal shootings of two Minnesotans by federal agents show the GOP’s deepening fissures over the administration’s aggressive immigration agenda, even as the mayors and Republicans broadly offered support for the president’s overall goal. And their alarm comes as ICE ramps up operations in other states, including Arizona and Maine.

The escalating immigration enforcement crackdown hung over the annual gathering, dominating conversations among leaders who are scrambling to prepare their cities for ICE sweeps and allay anxious and outraged residents.

Dyer on Wednesday said federal agents need to receive more training in deescalation tactics — a practice that the Fresno mayor, who served in law enforcement for 40 years, including 18 as the city’s police chief, said is integral for local police departments. He also said federal agencies should only work in communities where they have the cooperation of local leaders.

“I don’t believe that agencies should be deployed into cities against the will of local government and without the cooperation of local law enforcement,” Dyer said. “That’s a recipe for disaster, and I believe that’s somewhat of what we’re seeing today.”

And he urged other Republicans to speak out against federal immigration agents’ recent tactics.

“The Republican Party in general cannot rubber-stamp everything a party does or this administration does,” Dyer said. “Too many people today are turning a blind eye when they should be speaking out in opposition.”

It wasn’t just big-city GOP mayors who were concerned with the administration’s response: Kautz’s town of 64,000 people is in Minneapolis’ south suburbs.

Kautz, who said she now carries her passport in public, called for ICE to use judicial warrants, arguing that while violent criminals need to be off the street, it needs to be done “through proper channels, the rule of law, due process [and rooted] rooting in the Constitution.” In Minnesota, “that is not our experience.”

A new POLITICO poll found that more than 1 in 3 Trump voters said that while they support the goals of his immigration agenda, they disapprove of the way he is implementing it.

Holt, who runs one of the most conservative large cities in the U.S. but backed Kamala Harris over Trump in 2024, warned that Trump’s interior enforcement was a failure.

“The president can feel, generally, that his policies at the border have been largely supported by a majority of Americans,” Holt said. “But what he’s doing inside the border seems to be not working.”

Politics

Iran set to progress at World Cup

Published

21 minutes ago

June 27, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Iran’s adventure through a World Cup beset by geopolitical complexity and logistical complications will likely continue after the team landed a frenetic 1-1 draw against Egypt. The high-stakes encounter kicked off hours after a tenuous peace between Washington and Tehran was threatened by American strikes on Iranian military installations along the Strait of Hormuz. Read the full story from Seattle by Sasha Issenberg and Sophia Cai here.

Politics

The “Pride Match” that wasn’t

Published

2 hours ago

June 27, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

SEATTLE — As a lesbian who was born in Egypt, Noha Mahgoub could have chosen to dress for what local organizers branded a “Pride Match” in colors associated with either her sexual orientation or her country of origin. The 43-year-old Democratic legislative aide — one of the top staffers in Washington state government — chose the latter, arriving in a red Egyptian national team jersey, a black hat emblazoned with YALLA and red-white-and-black tricolor facepaint.

“I’ve seen Pride shirts, I’ve seen Pride face paintings,” she observed from a concourse minutes before national anthems began echoing around Lumen Field. “It’s been really great, but I’m seeing a lot more Egypt and Iran and people cheering for their countries and singing their songs.”

Indeed, despite FIFA’s announcement that rainbow flags would be permitted in the stadium, few were visible as the match began. Instead, the stands rippled with the colors of the two Middle Eastern countries on the field, including many of the pre-revolutionary lion-and-sun flags that FIFA has attempted to ban under a stadium code of conduct that prohibits political displays.

Mahgoub had seen Egypt’s national team in person only once before, as a child while the team was angling to qualify for the 1990 World Cup. Since then, Mahgoub and her family relocated to Washington state, where she said the local Egyptian-American community has become enlivened by new arrivals coming to work at Seattle-based tech companies.

“You know how it is, you start calling everybody your cousins — a lot of cousins that I wasn’t related to,” Mahgoub said. “Well, I think a lot of them are here.”

Politics

Why Belgium’s prime minister isn’t cheering on the Red Devils

Published

5 hours ago

June 27, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Ah, Belgium. The country of fries, chocolate, Kevin De Bruyne and, some might say, chronic political division.

Beyond Brussels, a mighty international melting pot, the country is split between Dutch-speaking Flanders, French-speaking Wallonia and a small German-speaking community. Those linguistic divisions are mirrored in its politics: Belgium has separate party systems on either side of the language border, as well as a highly devolved federal structure that gives significant powers to its regions.

Today, Belgian politics is as fragmented as ever. It took 234 days to form a federal government after the June 2024 election (yes, you read that right). The delay was driven largely by the fact that no camp came close to winning a majority, forcing months of negotiations between parties with sharply different ideological and linguistic bases.

Flemish nationalism has also become a growing force, shaped by two right-wing nationalist parties: the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), which wants to transform Belgium into a looser confederal state and ultimately give Flanders far greater autonomy, and the far-right Vlaams Belang, which openly campaigns for Flemish independence.

So, you might think the 2026 World Cup would offer Belgium’s leader a rare opportunity to rally and unify the country behind a shared national symbol, right?

Wrong.

Prime Minister Bart De Wever, who hails from the N-VA party, has expressed almost no public support for the Red Devils, Belgium’s national soccer team.

That contrasts with leaders in nearby countries that also qualified for the World Cup. The leaders of the Netherlands, Germany and France have all publicly backed their squads, whether on social media or through public appearances.

The reason may be simple: De Wever just doesn’t care for the sport.

A Belgian official told Blue Light News: “The prime minister is not a soccer fan, so he doesn’t seek to project that image publicly. To do otherwise would not be authentic.”

Flemish media have indeed reported that the prime minister has little interest in soccer. In a podcast appearance a few years ago, he said the sight of people “going totally crazy in a group in the stands” left him feeling “ice cold.”

But politics is likely part of the story too. De Wever has led the Flemish nationalist N-VA since 2004. Throughout his political career, he has argued that Flanders should have far greater autonomy and that Belgium should evolve into a confederal state. For a politician with that background, overt displays of Belgian national unity probably don’t come naturally, and in fact contradict emphasis on Flemish autonomy.

This is not the first time the N-VA’s relationship with the Red Devils has attracted attention. In 2015, after Belgium reached No. 1 in the FIFA world rankings, Francophone Socialist Party leader Laurette Onkelinx asked the Chamber of Representatives to applaud the team. All parties joined in, except the N-VA.

During Euro 2016, the N-VA had to deny it instructed ministers and MPs to avoid publicly celebrating the Red Devils so as not to appear too Belgian, after rumors circulated in Belgian media.

One of De Wever’s few comments about this year’s World Cup concerned Belgium’s official tournament song. His complaint: It did not contain a single word of Dutch.

“My staff have confirmed to me that not a single word is sung in Dutch. That is, to put it mildly, not elegant,” he said, in keeping with his ideologies of promoting Flanders, when asked about the song during a parliamentary committee hearing.

Sport is often treated as a vehicle for national unity. In New Zealand, Belgium’s opponent in today’s match, elite teams have successfully woven elements of Māori culture into their sporting traditions, most famously through the prematch haka, which has helped create a shared cultural identity that connects Māori and non-Māori New Zealanders.

In Belgium, however, this World Cup has not yet become that kind of unifying project. At least not from the very top.