US President Donald Trump signed an executive order Feb. 6 sanctioning the International Criminal Court (ICC) for issuing warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant. The order imposes significant sanctions on ICC officials and their immediate families, including the blocking of property and assets and suspension of entry into the United States. The order asserts that the ICC has improperly claimed jurisdiction over the US and Israel, and that the ICC's actions endanger US personnel and threaten US sovereignty and national security.

Mexico has launched a massive deployment of 10,000 troops to cities and towns on the border with the United States. Videos and photos posted on social media by Mexico's Secretariat of National Defense (SEDENA) showed military and National Guard troops lined up boarding transport planes and rows of army trucks rolling out in the predawn darkness Feb. 4 from bases in Mexico City, Tlaxcala and other cities. Large contingents were also mobilized to Mexico's southern border in the Yucatan. The response—dubbed "Operativo Frontera Norte"—is part of an agreement reached the previous day between US President Donald Trump and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum postponing trade tariff threats for a month. (El Paso Times, Peninsula360)

US fighter jets launched from the USS Harry Truman in the Red Sea on Feb. 2 struck a hidden base of the local ISIS franchise in the interior mountains of Somalia's northern autonomous enclave of Puntland. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the "initial assessment is that multiple operatives were killed" in these first US air-strikes under the new Trump presidency. The strikes were carried out with the cooperation of the governments of both Puntland and Somalia, whose President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud expressed his "deepest gratitude." The Puntland Dervish Forces have for some five years been fighting the self-declared "Islamic State Somalia" in the enclave's Cal Miskaad mountains. (AFP, Garowe Online, Garowe Online, Hiiraan Online, LWG)

In Episode 263 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg deconstructs the moves by the unconstitutional Trump regime to consolidate a dictatorship over the United States—attempting to seize autocratic control over the bureaucracy, and (in a case of fascist pseudo-anti-fascism) weaponizing concern with anti-Semitism to suppress free speech while institutionalizing indifference to (and consciously enflaming) all other forms of racism. And this as Elon Musk (a private-sector oligarch given extra-legal power over government functions) tells a rally of the Nazi-adjacent Alternative für Deutschland that Germany has "too much of a focus on past guilt." It took Hitler mere weeks to establish a dictatorship after coming to power, whereas with Mussolini it took some three years. We shall soon find out how long it will take in the United States—unless the country can find the wherewithal to resist.

President Trump has ordered the construction of a 30,000-bed facility to hold migrants at the notorious US naval facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as part of his mass deportation campaign. The US base has been used to house terrorism suspects since 2002, becoming synonymous with torture and unlawful imprisonment. The US has secretively detained refugees and migrants intercepted at sea at Guantánamo Bay for decades, but the facility has not previously been used for people apprehended on US soil or at this scale.

Five Quaker groups filed a lawsuit Jan. 26 to stop immigration agents from conducting raids on houses of worship. The complaint alleges that the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) policy that allows Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to conduct searches and arrests at schools and religious institutions violates the First Amendment to the US Constitution.

In Episode 262 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg contrasts the intransigent resistance to the attempted power-grab by would-be right-wing strongman Yoon Suk Yeol in South Korea (and Robert Fico in Slovakia) with the craven capitulation to the consolidating Trump regime in the US—despite the unconstitutionality of his very presidency, the fascist stench from his team of oligarchs, and despite the emergence of evidence that points to actual hacking of the vote to effect his victory.

During his first days back in office, Donald Trump rapidly started implementing his hardline migration agenda, including by declaring a state of emergency at the US southern border. The move allows his administration to access billions of dollars to expand the building of a border wall and to deploy the military and national guard to the area. Around 1,500 active duty soldiers are already being deployed. Trump also reinstated the controversial "Remain in Mexico" program from his first administration. This policy, which requires people to wait for asylum appointments in Mexico, helped to create a now-perennial humanitarian crisis in northern Mexico. The Trump administration has also shut down CBP One—a cell phone app for scheduling asylum appointments—leaving thousands of people stranded in Mexico, and suspended the US refugee resettlement program, as well as cancelling travel plans for refugees who had already been approved to enter the country. Trump's promised mass deportation of millions of undocumented people has yet to get underway, but his administration has begun laying the groundwork for expanded immigration raids—potentially including on schools, churches, and hospitals—and has threatened to prosecute any local officials who don't comply.