Democrats Push to Impeach Kristi Noem, and Ilhan Omar Is Attacked in Minneapolis

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From “The New York Times,” it’s “The Headlines.” I’m Will Jarvis in for Tracy Mumford. Today’s Wednesday, January 28. Here’s what we’re covering.

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ICE cannot be reformed. It cannot be rehabilitated. We must abolish ICE for good.

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In Minneapolis last night, Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar held a town hall meeting to address the ongoing ICE operations in the city, parts of which she represents.

And DHS Secretary Kristi Noem must resign or face impeachment.

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A few minutes after she started talking, a man jumped up from the audience, rushed forward, and used a syringe to spray Omar with a substance that smelled strongly of vinegar.

What did he spray?

I don’t know.

Oh, my god.

A security officer tackled the man, who police arrested on suspicion of assault. The US Capitol Police, which investigates threats against lawmakers, said in a statement the attack was unacceptable and would be met with, quote, “swift justice.”

Just give me 10 minutes. Just give me 10 minutes.

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As the man was hauled away, Omar insisted to her staff that she would continue the event.

Here is the reality that people like this ugly man don’t understand. We are Minnesota strong. And we will stay resilient in the face of whatever they might throw at us.

A few hours earlier.

They have to show that they can love our country. They have to be proud, not like Ilhan Omar. Did you see what —

President Trump, who has repeatedly made inflammatory, racist remarks about Omar and her Somali heritage, had mocked her at a rally in Iowa.

She’s always talking about, the Constitution provides me with the following. The Constitution — she comes from a country that’s a disaster.

And in a phone interview with ABC News after the attack, Trump, who said he hadn’t seen video of the incident, accused Omar of staging it. He said, quote, “she probably had herself sprayed, knowing her.”

Meanwhile, the backlash to the killings by federal agents in Minneapolis this month has now swept up two key administration officials. Yesterday, top House Democrats said that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem should be fired immediately and that if she isn’t, they would push to impeach her, though they would need some Republican support to do that.

And “The Times” has learned that the administration has barred Gregory Bovino, a senior Customs and Border Patrol officer, from his official social media account. Bovino had used the account to promote his work and hit back at critics. He’s been recalled from his assignment in Minnesota as the White House tries to do damage control over the aggressive immigration operations in the state. And in terms of how the administration’s immigration policies have been playing out for the whole country, new data from the Census Bureau shows that Trump’s approach has contributed to a sharp slowdown in population growth.

According to the numbers from mid 2024 to mid 2025, the US had one of the slowest growth rates in the country’s history. While part of it is America’s declining birth rate, which has been dropping for nearly two decades, other major reasons include Trump’s effective shutdown of the Southern border, how hard he’s made it to get visas, and the fact that a lot of people are simply choosing not to come to the US at all.

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This week marks the beginning of tax season in the US, when the Internal Revenue Service braces for more than 140 million tax returns to pour in and many Americans start anxiously waiting for their tax refund.

It was a really tough year last year for the IRS. They lost roughly a quarter of their staff under the Trump administration’s attempts to reduce the size of the federal workforce. More than half a dozen different people led the agency on a almost rotating basis. And so I wanted to sit down with and get to and understand the guy whose job it is to make the IRS work this year.

My colleague, Andrew Duehren recently profiled Frank Bisignano, the head of the IRS. And he says there are three key things to.

The first thing to about Bisignano is that the stakes are really high for him over the next 10 weeks because Republicans passed a big tax cut last year, and they now want people to get that money, basically. They’re hoping that people get refunds this year, notice that they’re larger than they have been in the past, and that they say, oh, Republicans got me this extra money. I like Republicans more now. And so Bisignano has this kind of political imperative this year to make it work.

The second thing to about Frank Bisignano is that he does have a lot of relevant experience in payments processing. He was the CEO of a large payment processing company right before he joined the Trump administration. He spent his whole career on Wall Street making sure money gets from point A to point B. And so there’s some confidence among current and former IRS officials that I talked to that Bisignano is someone who can make it work. And the third thing to about him is that it’s not the only job that he’s doing right now. He is also running the Social Security Administration.

He is the Senate confirmed commissioner of that agency, which is also a very large and consequential agency. I mean, when I talked to him about this, he said that, he’s done other big jobs at the same time before in his career. From what I’ve heard, he’s at the IRS roughly two days a week physically. And he flies there in his private plane from his home in New Jersey. And so yeah, it’s certainly an unusual situation as far. As I know, there’s never been someone leading the IRS and the Social Security Administration at least in modern times. And so we’ll see if he can handle both jobs at once.

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A new study published yesterday shows the staggering human toll of the war in Ukraine. According to the report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the total number of Russian and Ukrainian troops killed, wounded, or missing during four years of war has now climbed to almost 1.8 million. Since Russia is believed to undercount its casualties and Ukraine doesn’t publish official figures, researchers relied on US and British estimates, among other sources.

They found that roughly 100 to 140,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed since the war began and that Russia, which has three times their manpower on the battlefield, has suffered more losses than any major world power since World War II. About 35,000 Russian soldiers have been getting killed or injured every month. The massive loss of life comes as things have largely stalled on the front lines. In the past two years of fighting, Russia has only managed to seize an additional 1.5 percent of Ukrainian territory.

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And finally.

I never would have thought that I could sit in a car and it says, turn left, turn right.

Gladys West, a mathematician whose work was critical in developing GPS, has died at age 95. Despite the fact that many Americans rely on the tech every day, her role in it went unrecognized for nearly all of her life. West was born in a town of sharecroppers in Virginia in 1930. And when she started her career in the Navy in the ‘50s, she was one of only four Black mathematicians at the whole facility. There, she went on to lead a group that calculated the precise shape of the planet, accounting for things like tidal forces and the curvature of oceans. That helped refine the accuracy of GPS.

Flash forward to 2018, West had never even told her own children about her work, in part because some of it had been classified, and part because that just wasn’t her style. When a fellow alum from her sorority offered to help get her story out there by contacting a local newspaper reporter, West asked her, do you think anybody would care? Notably, even though GPS, the system she helped make possible, is now everywhere, West, herself, still preferred paper maps, telling “The Guardian” at one point that she was a hands-on kind of person. Those are the headlines. Today on “The Daily.”

Now it seems we are at the point where the president has realized that he might have overshot on this agenda item, where actually, he went so far, that now the optics are actually not working in his favor.

More on how the Trump administration may be changing course in Minneapolis. You can find that in “The New York Times” app or wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Will Jarvis. We’ll be back tomorrow.

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