Federal agents are under attack as the Trump administration ramps up immigration enforcement operations, a Trump supporter targeted by the Biden administration scores a major win for free speech, and the race to develop advanced artificial intelligence is heating up.
It’s Friday, July 11, and this is the news you need to know to start your day.
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<h2>Anti-ICE Violence</h2>
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Topline: ICE agents are under attack across the United States as they carry out President Donald Trump&#8217;s deportation agenda. The rise in violence has sparked calls to tone down the rhetoric as political battles rage over immigration.
In Southern California on Thursday, feds conducted immigration raids at two Glass House Farms, a state-licensed marijuana facility that is allegedly employing illegal immigrants, including children. After getting word of the immigration operations at a cannabis farm in Camarillo, approximately 60 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles, around 500 protesters arrived to confront federal authorities. The standoff quickly turned violent as federal agents attempted to disperse the crowd with smoke canisters, and news helicopter video captured the moment when one man appeared to fire a handgun at authorities.
This week, at an ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas, a group of people clad in black, military-style clothes used fireworks to lure out ICE officers while a gunman waited in the woods. One ICE agent was shot in the neck. He’s thankfully expected to recover. Ten people linked to the attack have been <a href="https://x.com/RochelleAz/status/1942950921719394470">charged</a> with attempted murder.  
In Oregon, three more people are facing charges after they allegedly assaulted officers at an ICE facility in Portland. The officers were kicked, punched, and attacked with an &#8220;incendiary device.” In McAllen, Texas, two police officers and a Border Patrol agent were hospitalized after a gunman fired dozens of rounds into a Border Patrol facility. And also this week in San Francisco, anti-ICE protesters attacked ICE agents in an apparent attempt to stop their black van from leaving the area.
“The attack on ICE officers, you&#8217;ve covered it many times, is up nearly 700 percent now,” Border Czar Tom Homan <a href="https://grabien.com/story?id=535014">told</a> Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer. “The rhetoric against the men and women of ICE is skyrocketing, especially by members of Congress. We have senators, we have congresspeople that compare ICE to the Nazis, compare ICE to racists, and it just continues. So the public thinks, well, if a member of Congress can attack ICE, why can&#8217;t we?&#8221;
“Donald Trump&#8217;s modern day is scooping folks up off the streets,” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz <a href="https://x.com/AlphaNewsMN/status/1923906506472243685">said</a>. “They&#8217;re in unmarked vans wearing masks being shipped off to foreign torture dungeons, no chance to mount a defense, not even a chance to kiss a loved one goodbye, just grabbed up by masked agents, shoved into those vans, and disappeared.”
Some say this radical rhetoric is actually part of a larger strategy by the Democrats to provoke ICE and cut down support for Trump’s most popular issue. 
“What they’re betting, and if you believe that, the idea of trying to provoke an overreaction on the part of ICE is part of the strategy,” RealClearPolitics Chief Content Officer Andrew Walworth <a href="https://youtu.be/bZghs7pNFf4?t=383">said</a>.
The attacks may be having an effect — Trump’s overall approval on immigration appears to be <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_trump_job_approval_immigration-8659.html">falling</a>.
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<h2>Doug Mackey</h2>
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Topline: A Trump supporter who was targeted by the Biden DOJ over memes he posted online had his case tossed by an appeals court, scoring a major victory for free speech. 
Douglass Mackey had a popular pro-Trump account on Twitter, now called X, during the 2016 election. He went by the alias Ricky Vaughn, inspired by Charlie Sheen’s character in Major League. Just days after Joe Biden took office in 2021, Mackey was arrested and he was prosecuted by the Justice Department over memes he posted four years prior. One of the memes in question mocked Hillary Clinton supporters and said they could text their vote and avoid the polls. Similar jokes were made online about Trump supporters. 
The DOJ claimed this was a mass conspiracy, voter suppression, and election interference. Mackey was facing 10 years in prison. He was eventually convicted in NYC and sentenced to seven months behind bars. He was able to avoid serving jail time as he appealed the case, and on Wednesday, a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit reversed Mackey’s conviction and directed a lower court to enter a judgment of acquittal.
“I didn&#8217;t expect that it would be such a resounding victory,” Mackey told The Daily Wire. “It&#8217;s extremely rare for a case, number one, to be overturned on appeal. Number two, it&#8217;s extremely rare for the Circuit court, the appeals court, to actually overrule the jury and say, no, the verdict was wrong, you have to enter a judgment of acquittal. [It] just goes to show how weak and non-existent the government&#8217;s case against me was.”
Though Mackey was ultimately acquitted, this legal saga was more than four years of his life, which really took a toll on his family and friends. Mackey told The Daily Wire his wife was pregnant during the trial and she actually had an emergency C-section while Mackey was in New York being sentenced. On the financial side, Mackey said his legal fees totaled north of a million dollars. Moving forward, Mackey plans to file a civil lawsuit against the DOJ. 
“As the Circuit Court ruled, this case was brought without sufficient evidence,” Mackey said. “So based on that, we have to assume that they brought this case for political reasons, because why else would you bring this case? So I think it&#8217;s egregious. I think that it&#8217;s weaponization and politicized justice and I think it&#8217;s misconduct.”
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<h2>AI Arms Race </h2>
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Topline: The race to develop advanced artificial intelligence is heating up, and some tech giants are sparing no expense. Earlier this week, Meta paid $200 million to poach one of Apple’s leading AI developers for its new &#8220;Superintelligence Lab.&#8221; Meanwhile, deep fakes are becoming a major security issue.
Investment in artificial intelligence has been growing exponentially in the last decade. According to an <a href="https://edgedelta.com/company/blog/ai-investment-statistics">analysis</a> by Stanford University, nearly a trillion dollars was poured into developing tools like ChatGPT between 2013 and 2022. Many of these AI tools have been wildly successful and have been incorporated into all parts of our daily lives: individualized search and chat tools, big data analysis that quickly sequence genomes and help doctors diagnose diseases, large language models that can quickly and accurately translate text and audio into different languages &#8211; the list goes on. In 2025, global investment in AI is expected to reach $200 billion per year.
Despite overseas efforts to catch up, U.S. companies currently lead the field. There are some prominent newcomers such as OpenAI and Anthropic, but all of the Big Tech names that most people would recognize, like Amazon, Nvidia, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Apple have invested heavily in artificial intelligence. 
Apple’s AI offerings have generally underperformed relative to its competitors — there are rumors that they might outsource the integration of LLM features into Siri to other firms. However, Apple has a lot of experience building smartphones and personal computers, and much of their research has been focused on making smaller AI models that could be built into their hardware instead of relying on a connection to external servers. 
Those efforts appear to have caught Mark Zuckerberg’s attention, and he is reportedly now trying to poach their top talent with very lucrative contracts. On Monday, Bloomberg reported that Ruoming Pang, the head developer of Apple’s AI models, was leaving the company to join Meta for a cool <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/meta-reportedly-recruits-apples-head-of-ai-models/">$200 million</a>. According to industry scuttlebutt, he may be just the first of many to jump ship from Apple  – Sam Altman of OpenAI says his employees have received similar offers.
“[Meta] started making these giant offers to people on our team,” Altman <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZUG0pr5hBo">said</a>. “100 million dollar signing bonuses… so far none of my top employees have decided to take them up on it.”
Meanwhile: In May, “unknown actors” got ahold of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles’ contact list and posed as her to contact senators, congressmen, and prominent businessmen. That same month, the FBI issued a PSA warning that “if you receive a message claiming to be from a senior US official, do not assume it is authentic.”
A similar scheme was attempted in June; a cable from the State Department revealed that at least five people received text and voice messages imitating Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The Rubio impersonator created a Signal account using an official-sounding email address as his display name and reached out to at least five people, including members of Congress and foreign dignitaries. An investigation is ongoing in both cases. However, because of how ubiquitous AI voice cloning has become, it could be hard to pin down a suspect.
“Deep fake audio is extremely simple to produce,” Leah Siskind, an AI Research Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracy, told The Daily Wire. “Typically it only requires about 30 seconds of recorded audio and you can use tools that are online, that are free, that are extremely user friendly. You don’t need much technical knowledge to learn how to produce these audio fakes, and what they’ll do is they’ll use AI to train to train on, they’ll look for patterns in your accent, your tone, your pitch, your breathing patterns, all within that 30 second audio clip, and from that they’ll be able to produce a very realistic mimic of your voice.”

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Morning Brief: Anti-ICE Violence, Meme Madness, And What’s Next In The AI Arms Race

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Morning Brief: Anti-ICE Violence, Meme Madness, And What’s Next In The AI Arms Race