The two most prominent progressives in Congress have outstripped the contributions of years past in 2025 as they ride the momentum of primetime attention progressives have received in recent months.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has raised $19.8 million from the start of the year through September, FEC filings reveal — dwarfing contributions from the 2023-2024 election cycle. She raised $15.2 million in those two years.

In similar fashion, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has collected $19 million in 2025. That’s more than half of what he raised between 2019-2024. 

The pair’s windfall has dovetailed with issues of national focus that have heightened progressives’ visibility. The government shutdown, the race for New York City mayor and persistent questions about the party’s direction have all given figures like Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders a platform to make their case — even as the rest of the party has struggled to offer an alternative vision to Republican momentum. 

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Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who also aligns with the leftward-leaning flank of the party, believes donors within the Democrat base are looking for something else and are willing to spend to show it. 

“More than seven million people showed up on No Kings Day,” Warren said, referring to a series of protests against the administration that took place over the weekend in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere. “They are deeply worried about the direction that Donald Trump is taking this country, and they want a way to fight back. Political contributions are part of the way to being in the fight.”

Warren suggested that support might be reciprocal to the Trump administration’s aggressive pursuit of its priorities in its first nine months in a way that wasn’t as prescient before the election.

“It’s beyond anything we’ve seen in modern history,” Warren said. “Folks might be excused for not having anticipated it.” 

FROM AOC TO ZOHRAN MAMDANI, THE DEMOCRATS ARE PEDDLING FAR-LEFT POLITICS

Progressives could also be seeing more support in Congress because of what’s happening on the outside. Sanders pointed to Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for New York City mayor, as one example of progressives finding the right faces to represent their movement and generate momentum.

“He’s got 80,000 volunteers knocking on doors. He’s generated a lot of excitement. He’s exactly the type of candidate we need all over this country,” Sanders said.

New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani speaks during an interview on “The Story with Martha MacCallum” on Fox News, Oct. 15, 2025. (Evan Agostini/AP)

Republicans have leaped at the opportunity to paint the visibility of progressives as emblematic of where the party is headed.

In one such case, GOP figures have made the case that the current government shutdown, now in its 23rd day, is a way for Senate Democratic leadership to keep the far-left base from cannibalizing more central figures in the party. 

That’s a refrain House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has used repeatedly since the government went into a shutdown on Oct. 1 after lawmakers failed to reach an agreement over spending legislation.

“This shutdown is nothing more than political cover for Chuck Schumer and the Democrats. They are worried about the Marxist flank in the Democrat Party. The Marxists are about to elect a mayor in New York City. That’s Chuck Schumer’s state, and he’s terrified that he’s going to get a challenge from his far left,” Johnson said earlier this month. 

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As lawmakers debate a government funding extension, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., awaits the arrival of the leader of the Orthodox Christian Church, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew at the Capitol on Sept. 17, 2025. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

When asked if progressives are undergoing a watershed moment, Sanders said that they have simply adjusted to the country’s political landscape.

“The platform changes every day with the changing world,” Sanders said. “It’s a tough situation.” 

Like with cigarettes, la migra should come with a warning label: Proximity to ICE could be hazardous for your health.

From Los Angeles to Chicago, Portlandand New York, the evidence is ample enough that wherever Trump sends in the immigration agency, people get hurt. And not just protesters and immigrants.

That includes 13 police officers tear-gassed in Chicago earlier this month. And, now, a U.S. marshal.

Which brings us to what happened in South L.A. on Tuesday.

Federal agents boxed in the Toyota Camry of local TikToker Carlitos Ricardo Parias — better known to his hundreds of thousands of followers as Richard LA. As Parias allegedly tried to rev his way out of the trap, an ICE agent opened fire. One bullet hit the 44-year-old Mexican immigrant — and another ricocheted into the hand of a deputy U.S. marshal.

Neither suffered life-threatening injuries, but it’s easy to imagine that things could have easily turned out worse. Such is the chaos that Trump has caused by unleashing shock troops into U.S. cities.

Rather than take responsibility and apologize for an incident that could’ve easily been lethal, Team Trump went into their default spin mode of blaming everyone but themselves.

Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that the shooting was “the consequences of conduct and rhetoric by sanctuary politicians and activists who urge illegal aliens to resist arrest.”

Acting U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli chimed in on social media soon after: “I urge California public officials to moderate their rhetoric toward federal law enforcement. Encouraging resistance to federal agents can lead to deadly consequences.” Hours later, he called Times reporter James Queally “an absolute joke, not a journalist” because my colleague noted it’s standard practice by most American law enforcement agencies to not shoot at moving vehicles. One reason is that it increases the chance of so-called friendly fire.

Federal authorities accuse Parias of ramming his car into agents’ vehicles after they boxed him in. He is being charged with assault on a federal officer.

Time, and hopefully, evidence, will show what happened — and very important, what led to what happened.

The Trump administration keeps claiming that the public anger against its immigration actions is making the job more dangerous for la migra and their sister agencies. McLaughlin and her boss, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, keep saying there’s been a 1,000% increase in assaults on immigration agents this year like an incantation. Instead of offering concrete figures, they use the supposed stat as a shield against allegations ICE tactics are going too far and as a weapon to excuse the very brutality ICE claims it doesn’t practice.

Well, even if what they say is true, there’s only one side that’s making the job more dangerous for la migra and others during raids:

La migra.

It turns out that if you send in phalanxes of largely masked federal agents to bully and intimidate people in American cities, Americans tend not to take kindly to it.

Who knew?

We’re about to enter the sixth month of Trump’s plan to rid the country of undocumented immigrants. Sycophants are bragging that he’s doing the job, but they’re not caring to look at the mess left in its wake that’s becoming more and more perilous for everyone involved. They insist that those who are executing and planning raids are professionals, but professionals don’t make constant pendejos out of themselves.

Professionals don’t bring squadrons to chase after tamale ladies or day laborers, or stage flashy raids of apartments and parks that accomplish little else than footage for propaganda videos. They don’t go into neighborhoods with intimidation on their mind and ready to rough up anyone who gets in their way.

A ProPublica investigation showed that ICE has detained at least 170 U.S. citizens this year, many whom offered proof that they were in this country legally as la migra cuffed them and hauled them off to detention centers.

Professionals don’t lie like there’s a bonus attached to it — but that’s what Trump’s deportation Leviathan keeps doing. In September, McLaughlin put out a news release arguing that the shooting death of 38-year-old Silverio Villegas González in Chicago by an ICE agent was justified because he was dragged a “significant distance” and suffered serious injuries. Yet body cam footage of local police who showed up to the scene captured the two ICE agents involved in the incident describing their injuries as “nothing major.”

Closer to home, a federal jury in Los Angeles last month acquitted an activist of striking a Border Patrol agent after federal public defender Cuauhtémoc Ortega screened footage that contradicted the government’s case and poked holes in the testimony of Border Patrol staff and supervisors. Last week, ICE agents detained Oxnard activist Leonardo Martinez after a collision between their Jeep and his truck. McLaughlin initially blamed the incident on an “agitator group … engaged in recording and verbal harassment,” but footage first published by L.A. Taco showed that la migra trailed Martinez and then crashed into him twice — not the other way around.

Professionals don’t host social media accounts that regularly spew memes that paint the picture of an American homeland where white makes right and everyone else must be eliminated, like the Department of Homeland Security does. A recent post featured medieval knights wearing chain mail and helmets and wielding longswords as they encircle the slogan “The Enemies are at the Gates” above ICE’s job listing website.

The Trump administration has normalized racism and has turned cruelty into a virtue — then its mouthpieces gasp in mock horror when people resist its officially sanctioned jackbootery.

This evil buffoonery comes straight from a president who reacted to the millions of Americans who protested this weekend at No Kings rallies by posting on social media an AI-generated video of him wearing a crown and dropping feces on his critics from a jet fighter. And yet McLaughlin, Noem and other Trump bobbleheads have the gall to question why politicians decry la migra while regular people follow and film them during raids when not shouting obscenities and taunts at them?

As I’ve written before, there’s never a nice way to conduct an immigration raid but there’s always a better way. Or at least a way that’s not dripping with malevolence.

Meanwhile, ICE is currently on a hiring spree thanks to Trump’s Bloated Beastly Bill and and has cut its training program from six months to 48 days, according to The Atlantic. It’s a desperate and potentially reckless recruitment drive.

And if you think rapidly piling more people into a clown car is going to produce less clown-like behavior by ICE on the streets of American cities, boy do I have news for you.

Former special counsel Jack Smith is standing by his 2023 decision to subpoena several Republican lawmakers’ phone records, calling the move “entirely proper” and consistent with Justice Department policy.

Smith said through his lawyers in a letter obtained by Fox News Digital that the subpoenaed data, known as toll records, belonging to eight senators and one House member were carefully targeted to support his investigation into President Donald Trump’s alleged subversion of the 2020 election.

“As described by various Senators, the toll data collection was narrowly tailored and limited to the four days from January 4, 2021 to January 7, 2021, with a focus on telephonic activity during the period immediately surrounding the January 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol,” Smith’s lawyers wrote Tuesday to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.

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Toll records do not reveal the contents of phone calls but instead reveal when calls were made and to whom.

Smith’s lawyers said that although Grassley, who brought the subpoenas to light, has not reached out to Smith, they felt compelled to write to the chairman to address claims from Republicans that Smith improperly spied on lawmakers.

Grassley responded to the letter, saying he would continue an unbiased probe into Arctic Frost, the name of the FBI investigation that led to Smith’s election-related prosecution of Trump.

“I’m conducting an objective assessment of the facts&law like he says he wants So far we exposed an anti-Trump FBI agent started the investigation/broke FBI rules &only REPUBLICANS were targeted SMELLS LIKE POLITICS,” Grassley wrote on X.

The targeted senators included Republican Sens. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Josh Hawley of Missouri and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. 

In addition to the eight senators, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told Fox News’ Sean Hannity Tuesday that he recently discovered Smith also attempted to subpoena his toll records but that his phone company, AT&T, did not hand them over.

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Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. (Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)

The Republicans have broadly claimed they were inappropriately spied on, and compared Arctic Frost to the Watergate scandal.

Smith’s lawyers emphasized the normalcy of seeking out phone records and said that public officials are not immune from investigation.

Smith brought four criminal charges against Trump alleging he illegally attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election, but he dismissed the charges after Trump won the 2024 election, citing a DOJ policy that discourages prosecuting sitting presidents. 

Former special counsel Robert K. Hur testifies before the House Judiciary Committee March 12, 2024, in Washington.  (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Former special counsel Robert Hur sought toll records during his investigation into former President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents. The DOJ subpoenaed phone records of former Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez, who is serving prison time after he was convicted in 2024 of corruption charges.

The first Trump administration subpoenaed phone records of Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., and then-Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and dozens of congressional staffers from both parties as part of a leak investigation.

Former DOJ inspector general Michael Horowitz warned in a report about the leak probe that lawmakers’ records should only be subpoenaed in narrow circumstances because it “risks chilling Congress’s ability to conduct oversight of the executive branch.”

Smith’s lawyers also disputed FBI Director Kash Patel’s accusations that he attempted to hide the subpoenas “in a lockbox in a vault,” noting that the former special counsel mentioned subpoenaing senators’ records in a footnote of his final special counsel report.

“Moreover, the precise records at issue were produced in discovery to President Trump’s personal lawyers, some of whom now serve in senior positions within the Department of Justice,” Smith’s lawyers said.

Read Smith’s letter below. App users click here.