The NHL also pointed WIRED to its partnerships with Pride organizations around the US, Canada, and Australia, as well as pro-inclusivity organization You Can Play, which it’s been working with since 2013. The league said it will be hosting its third annual Pride Cup in 2026.

NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman has said he “binged” Heated Rivalry in one night and told reporters that all NHL teams do a Pride night. However, as the New York Times reported, that is no longer the case, with a couple of teams opting for more general inclusivity events.

Teresa Fowler, an associate professor at Concordia University of Edmonton and Tim Skuce, an associate professor at Brandon University, have both been researching hockey culture in Canada for years. Fowler is candid when she speaks about the league’s embrace of Heated Rivalry, which she feels is performative.

“Where’s your gay friend on your team? You know what I mean?” she says. “It just seems so hypocritical when people are saying, ‘Yeah, we would welcome them,’ and yet, the person who they call their brother, you know, that they would do anything for, is too afraid to bare their soul.”

Fowler and Skuce published a study on hockey culture in 2023, interviewing 21 elite players from the junior A level and higher, many of whom they say were current or former NHL players. Fowler says she’s also worked with younger players, including U18 players and youth hockey. One of the main issues they pointed to that fosters a toxic culture in sport was hazing.

“They would make players dress up like women, and then go into a shopping mall and sing ‘My Little Teapot.’ They would have notches in their belts for sexual conquest. But then, of course, there’s the more physical [hazing rituals]: drag your testicles across the rink naked, get in bathrooms naked,” Fowler says. “It’s just gross. It makes no sense to me how this is team bonding, none whatsoever. Those rituals are sexism rituals, misogynistic rituals, where you’re constantly demeaning women.”

In 2022, a Globe and Mail investigation revealed that Hockey Canada, the sport’s national governing body, had in part used players’ registration fees to cover uninsurable liabilities, such as sexual assault settlements; last July, five former Canadian Junior Hockey players were acquitted of sexually assaulting a woman at a hotel room in London, Ontario.

Hockey Canada did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

Skuce, who played university and AAA hockey, says a lot of the men he’s interviewed said they “felt uncomfortable” with the hazing but “they didn’t want to say anything about it.” Team belonging is predicated on going along with what’s happening.

Skuce says he wants to see a shift away from humiliation-based hazing rituals to ones that are more “inclusive.”

With the Olympics taking center stage, there’s once again the potential for a spotlight on trans people in sports—a culture war issue Browne says has created a “moral panic.” He coauthored the 2025 book Let Us Play about the issue.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operation in Minnesota is pushing the United States court system to its breaking point.

Since Operation Metro Surge began in December, federal immigration agents have arrested some 4,000 people, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The result is an avalanche of cases filed in the US district court in Minnesota on behalf of people challenging their imprisonment by federal immigration enforcement agents. According to WIRED’s review of court records and official judicial statistics, attorneys filed nearly as many so-called habeas corpus petitions in Minnesota alone as were filed across the US during an entire year.

The bombardment of cases filed in federal court in Minnesota and other states is the result of two Trump administration policies: a dramatic increase in the number of people being detained, and the elimination of a key legal mechanism for securing their release. The result is a US court system in collapse: Judges, immigration attorneys, and federal prosecutors are all overwhelmed, while the people at the center of these cases remain behind bars, often in states thousands of miles from their home—many after judges have ordered their release.

“I’ve never said the word habeas so many times in my life,” says Graham Ojala-Barbour, a Minnesota immigration attorney who has been practicing for over a decade. Ojala-Barbour says that when he goes to sleep, his dreams are about habeas petitions.

Exhaustion is endemic. On February 3, one now-former special assistant US attorney, Julie Le, begged a US judge in Minnesota to hold her in contempt so she could finally rest. She was listed on 88 cases, according to data obtained via PACER, the US court records database. Daniel Rosen, the US attorney for the district of Minnesota and head of Le’s office, previously told that judge in a letter that they were “struggling to keep up with the immense volume” of petitions and had let at least one court order demanding the return of a petitioner slip through the cracks. Le did not respond to a request for comment. In response to a request for comment, the Minnesota US Attorney’s Office sent an automatic reply stating that they currently lacked a public information officer.

Le was reportedly fired after the February hearing, where she told the judge, “This job sucks.”

In response to a request for comment, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said, “The Trump administration is more than prepared to handle the legal caseload necessary to deliver President Trump’s deportation agenda for the American people.”

As hard as the workload may be for US attorneys, the situation is far more dire for people detained by immigration authorities. In court filings, people who have been detained describe being packed into cells that were so full that they couldn’t even sit down before being flown to detention centers in Texas. One described having to share cells with people who were sick with Covid. Others said agents repeatedly pressured them and other detainees to self-deport.

McLaughlin told WIRED, “All detainees are provided with proper meals, water, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers. All detainees receive full due process.”

Ana Voss, the civil division chief for the Minnesota US Attorney’s Office, has been listed as one of the attorneys defending the government in nearly all the habeas petition cases filed in Minnesota since Operation Metro Surge began. Before December, the majority of cases associated with Voss were about other issues, such as social security and disability lawsuits. Since then, habeas petitions for immigrant detainees have dramatically overtaken all other matters.

On Tuesday, WIRED published details of ICE’s planned expansion into more than 150 office spaces across the United States, including 54 specific addresses. If you haven’t read that yet, you should, not least because there’s probably one not far from you.

ICE has designs on every major US city. It plans to not only occupy existing government spaces but share hallways and elevator bays with medical offices and small businesses. It will be down the street from daycares and within walking distance of churches and treatment centers. Its enforcement officers and lawyers will have cubicles a modest drive away from giant warehouses that have been tapped to hold thousands of humans that ICE will detain.

Normally a leasing frenzy like this would happen out in the open; it would involve multiple bids, renovations of selected spaces, all the process and bureaucracy that makes government work slow but accountable. Not so here. The General Services Administration, which manages federal government properties, was asked to skip standard operating procedures in favor of speed and discretion. Internal documents reviewed by WIRED make clear that these locations, and the way in which they were acquired or planned, were intended to be a secret from the start.

They should not be. Which is why we published them.

ICE has more than $75 billion at its disposal, along with at least 22,000 officers and agents. Its occupation of Minneapolis is not an anomaly; it’s a blueprint. Communities deserve to know that they might be next. People have a right to know who their neighbors are, especially when they amount to an invading force.

What we’ve reported so far fills in only part of the puzzle. It shows what ICE had planned as of January, not beyond. More than 100 addresses remain unknown, some of them in high-concentration states like New York and New Jersey. The specific nature of the work being done in some of these offices remains unclear, as is how long ICE plans to be there.

The need to resolve these questions is urgent as ICE continues to metastasize. At the same time, the Department of Justice has become increasingly aggressive in its dealings with journalists, and has repeatedly claimed that revealing any identifying information about ICE agents or their activities is “doxing.” In Minnesota and beyond, ICE and CBP agents have treated observers as enemies, arresting and reportedly harassing them with increased frequency. The DOJ has been quick to label any perceived interference with ICE activity as a crime.

The Trump administration moves quickly by design, banking on the inability of courts, lawmakers, and journalists to keep pace. WIRED will continue to report on this story until we have the answers.

Knowing where ICE will go next is not the same as stopping the agency’s campaign of cruelty and violence. But it gives communities time to prepare for a surge of immigration enforcement in their streets. It gives legislators both locally and nationally insight into the unchecked scope of ICE. And it signals to the administration that it cannot act with impunity, or at the very least total secrecy.

So please, go look where ICE is setting up shop near you. And know that there’s plenty more of this story to tell.

This is an edition of the Inner Loop newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.