Your Papers, Please

Three stories about illegitimate power, and the people it targets.

Let’s start with a man named Leonardo Garcia Venegas.

He is 26 years old. He was born in the United States of America. He works construction in Baldwin County, Alabama. He carries a real ID, which is the federal government’s own gold standard for proving that you belong here. And as of May 2nd, ICE has now arrested him three times.

The first two times happened last year. Masked agents raided his construction site without a warrant. They ran past the white and black workers and grabbed the brown ones. They refused to accept his government issued ID as proof of citizenship. So he sued. The Institute for Justice filed a federal class action challenging three DHS policies: warrantless entry into private work sites, detention without suspicion, and the practice of holding someone even after they prove legal status.

While that lawsuit was already sitting in federal court, they came back.

Officers followed him home from a convenience store on May 2nd. They tried to open his locked car door without saying a single word. He held up his Alabama star ID. He told them he was a citizen. They pulled him out of his car anyway. They tackled him to the ground, shackled both of his arms and legs, and brought in a drug sniffing dog from a local police department. Eventually they let him go.

DHS released a statement. Their spokesperson said operations are highly targeted, that officers do their diligence, and that they know who they are targeting before they arrive.

If that is true, then these officers were not confused. They were retaliating. They targeted a man who sued them. Twice. Then they targeted him again. His attorney put it plainly: Leo is an American citizen who just wants to work in peace. The government’s current legal argument is that Leo may not even have standing to sue them for what they have done.

Read that again. A man they have tackled to the ground three times, in his own country, with his own ID in his hand, may not have the right to take them to court over it.

My advice to Mr. Venegas is this: get the hell out of Alabama. I say that not to minimize what is happening to him, but because it is going to keep happening. The system doing this is not broken. It is working exactly as designed right now. The only variable that changes is whose turn it is.

And that brings me to story two.

The sitting president of the United States posted more than 55 times in three hours on Monday night. None of it was about policy. None of it was about governing. It was about Barack Obama.

The meltdown included a conspiracy theory about a 2016 coup attempt, calls for Obama’s arrest, claims that Obama personally made 120 million dollars from the Affordable Care Act, accusations of committing the most heinous crimes in American history, and a fresh round of debunked wiretapping content that was thoroughly discredited years ago. He posted an AI generated image of Obama, Biden, and Nancy Pelosi swimming in a sewage filled reflecting pool. He called Obama the leader of the gang. He posted videos of Black people alongside treason accusations. Then he woke up this morning and kept going. He memed Hakeem Jeffries as low IQ. He posted a fictional federal currency with his own face on it.

Let us be clear about the facts. Intelligence briefings are not crimes. A president requesting more information about foreign interference in an election is not treason. In fact, the current president is doing exactly that right now. No charges have been filed. No charges are going to be filed.

What there is, instead, is a man with the full institutional weight of the American government behind him, spending three hours in the middle of the night posting racist content about his predecessor as an act of presidential governance.

When we allow this to be normalized, when we wake up and scroll through it like it is just another Tuesday, we are participating in the erosion of the thing we keep saying we want to protect. That is not hyperbole. That is a description of what is happening in real time.

Story three is different, and in some ways more absurd than either of the first two.

Amazon and Meta have been caught in a phenomenon that is now being called token maxing.

Here is the background. Tokens are the basic unit that AI systems use to process information. Think of them the way you used to think about cell phone minutes. Every AI response burns through tokens. They cost money. Real money. At enterprise scale, we are talking about millions and sometimes billions of dollars worth of resources.

Because these companies are under enormous pressure to prove that their AI investments are paying off, they built internal dashboards and leaderboards to track how many tokens their engineers are using each week. Amazon set a target requiring more than 80 percent of its developers to actively use AI tools every single week.

So the engineers did what people do when a number becomes a goal. They gamed the system. They asked AI questions they already knew the answers to. They built prototypes for features they had no intention of shipping. They ran AI agents on tasks they could have completed faster by hand. One engineer described throwing an entire fake project prompt away after generating it just to keep their numbers up. They did not want to be flagged as, and I want you to really absorb this phrase, insufficiently AI native.

Meta built a leaderboard called Claudonomics. It gave engineers titles like Token Legend and Session Immortal. After the press reported on it, Meta took the leaderboard down. One long-term Meta engineer suspects the leaderboard was never really about productivity at all. The suspicion is that it was designed to generate real world AI usage data that would feed back into training the next generation of Meta’s coding models. In other words, the employees were the product.

One study found that the heaviest token maxers were twice as productive as their peers. But they were burning tokens at ten times the rate. That is not productivity. That is waste dressed up in a metric.

Here is where this connects to everything else.

These are not hobbyist AI queries. This is not someone asking Claude to help write a birthday card or figure out what to cook with whatever is left in the refrigerator. These are massive enterprise systems burning through hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure, drawing power and water from communities that are actively and loudly saying no to them, all to generate numbers on a leaderboard that prove the AI investment was worth it.

We are told constantly that there is not enough. Not enough money for schools. Not enough for good paying jobs. Not enough to hire people or invest in the kinds of communities that are being asked to host these data centers while they poison the groundwater and spike the noise levels and consume the power grid.

There is always enough for another data center. There is always enough for another token budget. There is always enough for Jensen Huang of Nvidia, who sells 80 percent of the chips that process these tokens, to publicly tell engineers to negotiate token budgets the same way they negotiate salaries. He is not wrong, technically. He is just not telling you who prints the currency.

When a number becomes a goal, the goal becomes the point. Actual work, actual thinking, actual output, that all becomes secondary to hitting the metric. And when the metric looks good, Wall Street takes note. The engineers run fake projects before lunch, the stock ticks up, and the community three miles from the data center watches its water bill climb.

Three stories. One through line.

ICE arresting an American citizen three times because he is the right color to arrest and they know the system will mostly let them get away with it. A president spending three hours posting racist content in the name of governance, daring anyone to hold him accountable. And tech companies burning through the equivalent of small nation GDPs on fake AI projects to prove they are using AI.

Every single one of these is a story about illegitimate power. Power being exercised not in service of the people it is supposed to serve, but in service of itself. Its own metrics. Its own performance. Its own impunity.

You and I hold our ID to the window and say, please do not hurt us.

That is not a republic. That is a protection racket.

This is The Ignition News. Stay lit.