@kalish
LGBTQ+ Rights Reporter @huffpost.com they/them • writing at the speed of trust 🏳️⚧️ levi.kalish@huffpost.com Reach me securely here: levikalish@proton.me Signal @levikalish.01 https://tips.hushline.app/to/LKalish
"It's not artificial intelligence. It's African intelligence."
Michael Geoffrey Asia, the secretary general of the Data Labelers Association in Kenya tells @jasonkoebler.bsky.social about the notoriously brutal and underpaid work of training AI.
Watch now: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH65...
a facebook post from Ashon Crawley on February 13, 2021. It reads: i am sympathetic to folks that say *the* reason why the black panther party of self defense was a threat was because of the breakfast program. i am also sympathetic to the folks that say that is too reductive, that they were more than a breakfast progrum.* i think it’s in the middle: the BPP was a threat because they practiced care. and care showed up *as* a breakfast program, yes, but also as health clinics, as armed defense, as reading groups. care work as political organizing. care as the grounds for its emergence. care. one reason i’ve focused on care in my own work for years now is because black feminist thought informs my own, and black queer critique. and because care is often considered the antithesis of “serious things” and i’m just fundamentally against this. if care is soft or frilly or whatever, we need to have a preferential option for softness. care is something white supremacist capitalist patriarchy cannot give nor withhold, even when it tries to privatize care as an industry that is primarily about making money and exploiting workers. care is not private property, it only exists when it is shared. care is the antithesis and alternative to white supremacy, to riff on cedric robinson, because it must be. but it is so much more. it exceeds the logic of reactive response to practices of violence. it precedes the violence and political economy of extraction and exploitation. care, even if soft, ain’t easy. it takes courage. and conviction. and clarity. (i’m a former preacher, so the alliteration is a throwback lol.) you only have care when you share it. and sharing it is difficult precisely because the political economy of racial capitalism wants us to privatize and hoard what we consider it to be. care. let it flower and bloom. selah. 🌸💕
Five years ago @ashoncrawley.bsky.social posted a thing about care that feels really timely again. www.facebook.com/ashon/posts/...
ICE has now spent over half a BILLION dollars just on purchasing warehouses around the country to convert into detention camps.
If these mega-camps are utilized to the full capacity ICE intends, they'll be the largest prisons in the country, with little real oversight. www.ajc.com/politics/202...
For the Interept, I reported from Uganda about the effects of USAID cuts on LGBTQ people, HIV prevention activists and sex workers—and tried to tell the story from the POV of these important but criminalized communities. Please read and share.
theintercept.com/2026/02/09/t...
A must-read if you haven't already:
@kalish.bsky.social interviewed a dozen people, and sorted through 1,000+ pages of court documents and other records, to present a ton of new reporting re: ICE's cruel treatment of trans detainees.
www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-...
This is 18-mo-old Amalia waving to me when she was detained.
She was hospitalized with a respiratory infection while at ICE’s Dilley facility for immigrant families.
She’s one of dozens of detainees who I spoke to via video and phone calls, letters and an in-person visit. 🧵1/
1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken.
Hundreds of kids are still detained.
We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵
That Super Bowl halftime show was beyond incredible, and fun. Here’s the story of how it came together, complete with beautiful photos from @d-jacks.bsky.social.
www.wired.com/story/bad-bu...
NEW: It’s difficult to account for the abuses trans immigrants face in ICE custody after Trump destroyed safeguards, oversight agencies, and data about detainees.
But 3 trans migrants told me what it’s really like: Medical neglect. Solitary confinement. Harassment. www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-...
When I was investigating CRCL with records obtained by @pogo.org, we found many cases of ICE is misgendering people and threatening to take away their gender affirming medication without justification.
Stephen Miller’s DHS has gutted this office www.pogo.org/investigates...
BREAKING: A 5th Circuit panel has backed ICE's mass detention policy, a decision that clears the way for the administration to lock up people who are in immigration proceedings
It's a 2-1 ruling
Majority: Jones (Reagan), Duncan (Trump)
Minority: Douglas (Obama)
s3.documentcloud.org/documents/26...
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Alberto Castañeda Mondragón says his memory was so jumbled after a beating by immigration officers that he initially could not remember he had a daughter and still struggles to recall treasured moments like the night he taught her to dance. But the violence he endured last month in Minnesota while being detained is seared into his battered brain. He remembers Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents pulling him from a friend’s car on Jan. 8 outside a St. Paul shopping center and throwing him to the ground, handcuffing him, then punching him and striking his head with a steel baton. He remembers being dragged into an SUV and taken to a detention facility, where he said he was beaten again. He also remembers the emergency room and the intense pain from eight skull fractures and five life-threatening brain hemorrhages.
ICE told nurses this Minneapolis man “purposefully ran headfirst into a brick wall.”
What actually happened is that they pulled him from a car, beat him so viciously with a steel baton that he had 8 skull fractures, 5 life-threatening brain hemorrhages, and couldn’t remember he had a daughter.
As my friend Isa says:
“Now we only hear about the harm after the fact,” Isa Noyola, the director of the Border Butterflies Project, a group that assists LGBTQ+ asylum seekers at the U.S. southern border, told HuffPost. “We will never know the depths of the harm happening inside detention centers.”
A HuffPost investigation found how the Trump administration systematically destroyed safeguards for detainees, subjecting them to abuse and neglect.
I wanted to know the backstory of the executive order that defined "man" and "woman"—the foundation for the Trump admin's targeting of trans people.
So I took a deep dive into the conservative strategy & distorted feminism behind it. And I talked to the author.
www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
lots of people (on Both Sides™) had fun with Trump's “transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison” debate line without stopping to think, even for one second, about the humanity of the actual people involved
An trans woman from Iran said she was pulled aside at the border after agents became suspicious of her forehead.
In a solitary cell, the woman faced serious medical neglect. Staff asked her if she had ever "raped" a child.
Lawyers say this level of cruelty is new.
www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-...
“I represent everything that Trump hates,” said Arely Westley, the 2024 recipient of the RFK Human Rights Award.
“I’m an immigrant, I’m a trans person and I’m an activist. I think I was the perfect target for his administration.”
www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-...
Arely Westley received the RFK human rights award in 2024 for her advocacy for trans migrants. She was close to getting a visa and ICE said it wanted to loosen her supervision.
But shortly after Trump's return, ICE detained her and denied her serious medical care.
www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-...
ICE has failed to provide adequate medical care for people in custody. But for trans ppl, the lack of care has been compounded by Trump's anti-trans policies.
Two women went months without care for vaginal infections, even when ICE admitted it couldn't treat them.
www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-...
NEW: It’s difficult to account for the abuses trans immigrants face in ICE custody after Trump destroyed safeguards, oversight agencies, and data about detainees.
But 3 trans migrants told me what it’s really like: Medical neglect. Solitary confinement. Harassment. www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-...
can’t not hear and see:
Marimar Martinez, shot by federal agents in Chicago, testifying in Washington today:
Ultimately, Petitioners may, because of the arcane United States immigration system, return to their home country, involuntarily or by self-deportation. But that result should occur through a more orderly and humane policy than currently in place. Philadelphia, September 17, 1787: "Well, Dr. Franklin, what do we have?" "A republic, if you can keep it." With a judicial finger in the constitutional dike, It is so ORDERED. SIGNED this 31st day of February, 2026. 7um Jing FRED BIERY UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE Credit: Bystander Matthew 19:14 John 11:35 There is also the photo of the boy from the viral stories included.
Federal judge has ordered the release of Liam Ramos (the bunny hat boy) and his father. A brief and rather remarkable order. Clearly written to be shared widely, so please do. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
“bari weiss’s wife in the epstein files” is simply too perfect
If you've given biometrics to TSA (Pre-Check and Global Entry members) and you plan to attend a protest, you should wear a medical mask.
