Prepared for the Office of Public Affairs (OPA)
U.S. Department of Homeland Security

Editorial Note: The DHS Daily Briefing is a collection of news articles related to Department’s mission. The inclusion of particular stories is not intended to reflect their importance, nor is it intended to endorse the political viewpoints or affiliations included in news coverage.

The Washington Post [4/2/2025 6:51 PM, Daniel Wu, 31735K] reports a federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Tuesday to restore funding to organizations that represent around 26,000 unaccompanied minors in immigration hearings after the administration abruptly terminated funding for the groups last month. The Departments of the Interior and Health and Human Services on March 21 canceled parts of a contract with the nonprofit Acacia Center for Justice, which had been funding the work of 11 organizations now suing the government. The disruption threw legal aid groups into disarray, said Alvaro Huerta, an immigration attorney in Southern California whose law center is one of the plaintiffs in the case. A 2008 federal law meant to protect human trafficking victims requires the government to ensure “to the greatest extent practicable” that children who enter the United States illegally without a parent or guardian have counsel in legal proceedings. Without representation, children — some of whom are victims of trafficking or abuse — are left to navigate the complex immigration court system themselves. Cases and hearings can also stall if minors have no one helping them follow their court schedules. “These are children who are fleeing gang violence, sexual violence, human trafficking and extreme poverty,” Huerta said. “They don’t understand our immigration system. They need someone to explain this to them and to help them navigate it.” Legal aid groups argued in their lawsuit that the contract’s cancellation jeopardizes children facing deportation and has forced several organizations to lay off or furlough attorneys. The legal services they provide to protect unaccompanied children from abuse and human trafficking are required by law, the lawsuit says. The New York Times [4/2/2025 7:19 AM, Isabella Kwai, 145325K] reports that the halt in funding, according to a complaint filed by the groups, had put some 26,000 children at risk of being cut off from their lawyers and disadvantaged them in adversarial immigration proceedings. The government had argued that the funding was discretionary and that it was not obligated to provide legal representation for the children. But Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín of San Francisco disagreed, saying on Tuesday that by terminating the funding, the government had potentially violated its obligations to protect children from human trafficking. Under a law combating human trafficking, which the nonprofit groups argued the government had violated, the government must, to the “greatest extent practicable,” provide legal representation to minors. Children represented by the nonprofits, according to the groups’ complaint, have arrived in the United States to flee violence, poverty and other dangers. Many of them are from Central America. Most do not speak English or have the means to hire a lawyer. Nearly two-thirds of unaccompanied children had representation when they appeared in U.S. courts during the 2024 fiscal year, according to official data. Children who have lawyers attend their hearings 95 percent of the time, while those without representation attend only 33 percent of the time. Thousands of children in recent years who have missed their court dates have been ordered to be deported. The AP [4/2/2025 5:17 PM, Janie Har, 2K] reports that the order took effect Wednesday and runs through April 16. “The Court additionally finds that the continued funding of legal representation for unaccompanied children promotes efficiency and fairness within the immigration system,” she wrote. But aid providers said Wednesday they are not sure if they can expect federal dollars to begin flowing again. The Acacia center provides legal services for unaccompanied migrant children under 18 through a network of legal aid groups that subcontract with the center. Eleven subcontractor groups sued, saying that 26,000 children were at risk of losing their attorneys and that the government has an obligation to come up with a plan for transferring pending cases. Acacia is not a party to the lawsuit, but Bilal Askaryar, a spokesperson, said Wednesday that it has received no notice from the government on what to do next. “We’re still stuck in this impossible situation where the attorneys that work with these vulnerable kids have no clarity,” he said. Alvaro M. Huerta, an attorney with the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, said they are waiting to hear from the government on how it intends to comply with the order. Meanwhile, legal aid providers do not know if they can rehire staff or take on new clients, he said.

Reported similarly:
The Hill [4/2/2025 11:44 AM, Ashleigh Fields, 52868K]
ABC News [4/2/2025 10:21 AM, Laura Romero, 52868K]
CBS Austin [4/2/2025 10:48 AM, Alexx Altman-Devilbiss, 602K]
Yahoo! News [4/2/2025 10:08 AM, Rachel Uranga, 52868K]

FOX News [4/2/2025 2:02 PM, Greg Norman, 46189K] reports U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is ending the Biden-era practice of offering a third gender option on its forms, with a Homeland Security official declaring there "are only two sexes -- male and female." The agency announced Wednesday that it is "updating the USCIS Policy Manual to clarify that it only recognizes two biological sexes." "President Trump promised the American people a revolution of common sense, and that includes making sure that the policy of the U.S. government agrees with simple biological reality," Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. "Proper management of our immigration system is a matter of national security, not a place to promote and coddle an ideology that permanently harms children and robs real women of their dignity, safety, and well-being," she added. The Washington Times [4/2/2025 12:27 PM, Stephen Dinan, 261K] reports U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said it was carrying out President Trump’s executive orders and returning to its own traditional practice, which until the Biden change last year had recognized only two sexes. “There are only two sexes — male and female,” said Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary at Homeland Security, who said the new policy is a recognition of “simple biological reality.” Ms. McLaughlin said. The move comes almost a year to the day after the Biden administration added an “X” option to the sex section of USCIS forms. That, the agency said, meant the applicant adhered to “another gender identity” beyond male or female. The Daily Wire [4/2/2025 5:00 AM, Mary Margaret Olohan, 4672K] reports "Effective immediately," USCIS is revoking the policy and "now returning to its historical policy of recognizing two sexes to ensure that the information USCIS collects in this category provides a meaningful and useful basis for identification," a document shared with The Daily Wire reads. The decision will impact a variety of key documents that the USCIS handles, including green cards, employment authorization documents, certificates of naturalization, and more, a DHS official shared.

Reported similarly:
Newsmax [4/2/2025 7:33 PM, Solange Reyner, 500K]

Fedscoop [4/2/2025 2:00 PM, Rebecca Heilweil] reports that members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency now have access to technical systems maintained by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, according to a recent memorandum viewed by FedScoop. The memo, which was sent from and digitally signed by USCIS Chief Information Officer William McElhaney, states that Kyle Shutt, Edward Coristine, Aram Mogahaddassi and Payton Rehling were granted access to USCIS systems and data repositories, and that a Department of Homeland Security review was required to determine whether that access should continue. Coristine, 19, is one of the more polarizing members of DOGE. He previously used the online moniker “bigballs” and provided assistance to a cybercrime ring through a company he operated while he was in high school, according to other news outlets. Coristine worked for a short period at Neuralink, Musk’s brain implant company, and was previously stationed by DOGE at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The memo, dated March 28, asks DHS Deputy Secretary Troy Edgar to have his office review and provide direction for the four DOGE men regarding their access to the agency’s “data lake” — called USCIS Data Business Intelligence Services — as well as two associated enabling technologies, Databricks and Github. The document says DHS CIO Antoine McCord and Michael Weissman, the agency’s chief data officer, asked USCIS to enable Shutt and Coristine’s access to the USCIS data lake in mid-March, and Mogahaddassi requested similar access days later. McElhaney informed Andrew Davidson, the acting deputy director of the agency, and Aaron Calkins, chief of staff, about both requests, and they agreed to provide access. The document described the data lake as “a cloud-based centralized repository of data ingested from disparate USCIS applications and source data” and noted that the system was accessed through Databricks, “an analytics platform that connects disparate sources of data into a unified system.” Near the end of March, the DHS CIO informed USCIS that Rehling was assisting Mogahaddassi and also needed access to the USCIS data lake through Databricks. Mogahaddassi had also sought access to the agency’s GitHub. A source familiar with the matter told FedScoop that the USCIS Data Business Intelligence Services (DBIS) system contains the Electronic Immigration System (ELIS) and the Central Index System (CIS), along with others, and essentially provides DOGE with the agency’s electronic immigration data. The person emphasized that the systems accessed by these DOGE representatives can include asylee and refugee data.

CNN [4/2/2025 9:22 PM, Gabe Cohen and Priscilla Alvarez, 24052K] reports Homeland Security officials are discussing using FEMA funds, intended to provide housing and other aid to migrants, for immigration enforcement, according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions. The so-called Shelter and Services Program was the target of Republican attacks during the 2024 presidential campaign and drew the ire of Elon Musk earlier this year, ultimately resulting in the firings of four employees. This week, FEMA notified recipients that it was terminating grants associated with the program, arguing that the payments “no longer effectuate the program goals or agency priorities,” according to a termination letter obtained by CNN. “The individuals receiving these services often have no legal status and are in the United States unlawfully, such as those awaiting removal proceedings. This, in turn, provides support for illegal aliens and is not consistent with DHS’s current priorities,” Acting FEMA Administrator Cameron Hamilton said in termination letters distributed to grant recipients this week. The grant program was established in 2019 to aid cities sheltering migrants, but who administered it changed over the years. The Emergency Food and Shelter Program, a component of FEMA, administered the program, and later FEMA administered the funds in partnership with US Customs and Border Protection. No final decision has been made on repurposing SSP funding for immigration enforcement, according to sources. “Secretary Noem has directed FEMA to implement additional controls to ensure that all grant money going out is consistent with law and does not go to fraud, waste or abuse, as in the past,” Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told CNN in a statement. “The open borders gravy train is over, and there will not be a single penny spent that goes against the interest and safety of the American people.”

Washington Examiner [4/2/2025 11:30 AM, Ross O’Keefe, 2296K] reports that a federal judge in California on Tuesday temporarily blocked a Trump administration policy that ended legal funding for migrant children. Without the ruling, thousands of children would face greater obstacles to remaining in the United States. The Trump administration canceled a contract with the Acacia Center for Justice, which provides legal help to migrant children under 18 through subcontractors. Several subcontractor groups sued over the order, arguing that 26,000 children were at risk of losing their attorneys. "The Court additionally finds that the continued funding of legal representation for unaccompanied children promotes efficiency and fairness within the immigration system," she wrote. While the government argued that it has no obligation to provide legal representation for children in the country illegally, San Francisco Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín said that the order could violate a 2008 anti-trafficking law. The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 was a bipartisan law that protected children entering the country alone and ensured "to the greatest extent practicable" that they have legal representation in proceedings and to "protect them from mistreatment, exploitation, and trafficking." The stay will begin on Wednesday and run through April 16.

FOX News [4/2/2025 2:06 PM, Breanne Deppisch, 46189K] reports that the Trump administration told the Supreme Court on Wednesday that the president’s authority to protect the nation is under siege from lower court rulings, using a final brief in a high-stakes deportation case to accuse federal judges of imperiling the executive branch’s core powers. In the filing – the last before justices are slated to rule on President Donald Trump’s use of a 1798 immigration law to deport Venezuelan nationals – administration lawyers outlined what they call a pattern of judicial overreach and mounting efforts by federal courts to rein in the president’s agenda. "A single district court cannot broadly disable the President from discharging his most fundamental duties, regardless of the order’s label, and irrespective of its duration," U.S. Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris said Wednesday in the filing. Lawyers for the Trump administration urged the court to vacate a pair of lower court orders handed down by U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg and by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which they argue have "rebuffed" Trump’s immigration agenda, including its ability "to protect the Nation against foreign terrorist organizations and risk debilitating effects for delicate foreign negotiations."

Miami Herald [4/2/2025 4:10 PM, Staff, 3973K] reports the Trump administration has fired back at a federal judge in San Francisco who stopped it from revoking deportation protections this month for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans in Florida and other states, saying the judge has no authority to block the decision and that it should be addressed on an emergency basis by a higher appeals court. In a court motion filed Tuesday, administration lawyers asked U.S. District Judge Edward M. Chen to put his ruling on hold by Friday, so that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco can consider the revocation order issued by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in February. The administration’s goal, though not stated in the filing, would be to fast-track a review of Noem’s revocation order by the U.S. Supreme Court, which is dominated by conservative justices, three of whom were appointed by President Donald Trump during his first term in the White House. If the secretary’s order is ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court, the Venezuelan nationals with Temporary Protected Status in the United States would not be allowed to pursue their lawsuit in San Francisco. Lawyers for the Trump administration argued that Noem has the exclusive power to revoke the Biden administration’s TPS order for Venezuelan nationals in the United States and that the plaintiffs don’t have rights under their "equal protection" argument to challenge her authority. The judge said he is halting to the revocation of TPS on a nationwide basis, because Homeland Security’s actions affect Venezuelan TPS holders across the country.

Alabama Public Radio [4/1/2025 4:54 PM, Staff, 22K] reports supporters of an Iranian University of Alabama student are speaking out with their dollars. A now closed GoFundMe site includes close to twenty six thousand dollars for the legal defense of Alireza Doroudi. Donors sent amounts ranging from five to three hundred dollars. It’s been just over a week since ICE agents arrested the engineering doctoral candidate. Doroudi’s arrest came just before Iran officially rejected a White House offer of face-to-face negotiations over that country’s nuclear program. Friends and family of Alireza Doroudi aren’t the only ones looking for answers. Officials in Minnesota are seeking answers in the case of a University of Minnesota graduate student who’s being detained by U.S. immigration authorities for unknown reasons. University leadership said Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained the student Thursday at an off-campus residence. Officials said the school was not given advance notice about the detention and did not share information with federal authorities. The student’s name and nationality have not been released. As the case remained largely a mystery, state and local leaders called on federal authorities to explain their actions. "My office and I are doing all we can to get information about this concerning case," Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar said in a post on the social media site X. "We’re in contact with the University and understand they had no prior warning or information that led to this detainment.” She said that international students are "a major part of the fabric of life in the school and our community.” The detained student is enrolled in business school at the university’s Twin Cities campus. University officials said the school is providing the student with legal aid and other support services. The university’s graduate labor union organized a protest Saturday outside the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in downtown Minneapolis. Organizers said they stood in solidarity with international students facing uncertain futures as the new Trump administration pursues an immigration crackdown that has targeted people with ties to American colleges and universities. "An increasing number of international students are being detained without due process across the country," leaders of the University of Minnesota Graduate Labor Union-United Electrical Local 1105 said in a statement. "These constitutional violations are part of a larger plan to continue stripping our rights away from us, starting with immigrants. It will not stop there.”

FOX News [4/3/2025 4:00 AM, Audrew Conklin, 46189K] reports federal authorities have detained college students and professors at schools across the United States since the Trump administration began its crackdown on alleged Hamas sympathizers and those with expired visas. The administration is now facing legal challenges in at least two separate student detention cases, though that number will likely increase in the coming months. "They are not just random acts of law enforcement," national security and human rights lawyer Irina Tsukerman told Fox News Digital of the arrests. "They are part of a comprehensive domestic national security strategy that also involves investigation of universities for facilitating illegal activity, including acts of antisemitism and general violence, material support for terrorist organizations, and other violations that caused tremendous inconvenience, distress, and even terror to students, staffers, and the general population alike." Tsukerman noted that President Donald Trump signed executive orders to combat antisemitism on college campuses and illegal immigration soon after taking office, so the arrests "should have come as no surprise." Rasha Alawieh, a 34-year-old Brown University assistant professor and physician specializing in kidney transplants from Lebanon, was detained and deported earlier this month at Boston Logan International Airport while coming back from a trip to Lebanon. Alawieh had an H1-B visa, according to her attorneys, but allegedly expressed support for and attended the funeral of a slain Hezbollah leader responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans. "Last month, Rasha Alawieh traveled to Beirut, Lebanon, to attend the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah – a brutal terrorist who led Hezbollah, responsible for killing hundreds of Americans over a four-decade terror spree," Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to Fox News Digital on March 17. "Alawieh openly admitted to this to CBP officers, as well as her support of Nasrallah." "A visa is a privilege, not a right – glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be denied. This is commonsense security," McLaughlin added. Federal authorities alleged that they also conducted a search of Alawieh’s phone and found "sympathetic photos and videos" of Hezbollah leaders, as well as materials showing "various other Hezbollah militants" in a deleted folder.

CNN [4/2/2025 6:00 AM, Gloria Pazmino and Sabrina Souza, 908K] reports that, not long after the October 2023 Hamas attacks in Israel and subsequent war in Gaza, Ross Glick’s inbox flooded with tips, photos, video and information about students and faculty members participating in pro-Palestinian protests on US college campuses. As many protesters rallied against Israel’s military response and demanded a ceasefire, Glick – a pro-Israel activist – focused on the emails and would temporarily join New York-based Betar USA, a self-described Zionist advocacy group with a motto of "Jews fight back." The tips would become part of Betar’s effort to compile information and expose certain protesters that Glick claims wanted not just to support Palestinians but also to incite violence and hatred toward Jews. Now, as the Trump administration has begun arresting and trying to deport several noncitizen students and academics – some of whom were pro-Palestinian protesters – Betar says it’s been telling the administration whom to look for. Betar says it shared with the government a list of noncitizen protesters and activists it believes should be deported. It says the effort is in response to President Donald Trump’s January executive order, which promised to "combat antisemitism" on college campuses. An accompanying administration fact sheet said the government could seek to deport noncitizen "Hamas sympathizers," participants of "pro-jihadist protests" and people accused of antisemitic acts. "Our research, our information, the massive amount of video and photos that we have gathered – we create our dossiers and our reports. We hand them over, we make recommendations," Glick, who left his executive director post at Betar about a month ago after helping establish its research operation, told CNN in a recent interview. Betar – which the Jewish civil rights group Anti-Defamation League put on a list of groups that it says promote extremist or hateful ideologies, an action Betar calls a baseless smear campaign – has been open about flagging noncitizen protesters for possible deportation. "We submitted the names of hundreds of protesters and activists to the Trump administration/DHS urging ICE to deport them under the executive orders," Daniel Levy, a spokesperson for Betar, told CNN in March. Besides claiming to give this information to the government, Betar – and other pro-Jewish groups – have posted online the names, pictures and other information of noncitizen pro-Palestinian protesters who they allege expressed Hamas support or Jewish hate. Whether the government is using that information is unclear. Meanwhile, the tactics of Betar and other groups, including Canary Mission, have drawn various concerns.

New York Times [4/3/2025 3:00 AM, Terence McGinley, 330K] reports that, during President Trump’s first term, Miriam Jordan, a national immigration correspondent at New York Times, spent a lot of time along the U.S.-Mexico border. That’s where Mr. Trump’s immigration policies were playing out. This time around, Ms. Jordan has been traveling across the country to places far from the border, where Mr. Trump’s promises of a wide-scale crackdown and mass deportations have shaken immigrant communities. She traveled to Ohio, where thousands of Haitians living under Temporary Protected Status were thrust into the national spotlight during the election. She reported from Denver, where some Venezuelans have been planning to leave the country on their own terms, rather than risk being detained by immigration agents and deported in shackles. Across the country, she has found a demand among immigrants for pocket-size “red cards,” which list their legal rights in case they are approached by federal agents. “Before, I spent a lot of time talking to recent arrivals. Now I’m focusing on people who are living in the country, many of whom have been here for decades,” Ms. Jordan, who is based in Los Angeles, said during an interview with Times Insider. She discussed that pattern and, more broadly, how her work has changed since the first Trump term. This exchange has been edited and condensed.

New York Times [4/2/2025 6:12 PM, Ana SwansonAlan Rappeport and Tony Romm, 145325K] reports President Trump unveiled his most expansive tariffs to date in a ceremony at the White House on Wednesday, saying he will impose a 10 percent tariff on all trading partners except Canada and Mexico, as well as double-digit tariffs on dozens of other countries. The move was a significant escalation of Mr. Trump’s trade fight and is likely to ripple through the global economy, driving up prices for American consumers and manufacturers while inciting retaliation from other nations. While Mr. Trump had been saying for weeks that he would impose “reciprocal tariffs,” his announcement went far beyond what many economists and analysts had expected. The tariffs will apply to more than 100 trading partners, including the European Union, China, Britain and India. Under Mr. Trump’s plan, the United States will impose a staggering new 34 percent tariff on Chinese goods — on top of the 20 percent tariff that he had imposed on Beijing in recent months — a 20 percent tariff on imports from the European Union and a 24 percent tariff on goods from Japan. India will face a 26 percent tariff on its exports to the United States. Business groups, trade experts, many economists, and Democratic and even a few Republican lawmakers swiftly rebuked the tariffs, while some industries scrambled to understand how they would be affected. Officials from several countries protested, with some contemplating retaliation. In a slight reprieve, the new tariffs will not apply to products that Mr. Trump has already hit with separate levies, including steel and aluminum and vehicles and their parts. Energy and “other certain minerals that are not available in the United States” will also be excluded.

CBS 7 [4/2/2025 10:37 AM, Ben Popken, 4K] reports that since his reelection, President Trump has followed through on campaign promises to impose tariffs on America’s biggest trading partners—Canada, China, and Mexico—in an attempt to further his terms on trade, borders, and drug trafficking crackdowns. But the tariff threats, reversals, deals, and reprisals are leaving consumers, businesses, and economists experiencing whiplash about what’s going to happen next. Tariffs are import taxes on foreign goods, but it’s not foreign companies who pay them. When the United States slaps a tariff on Chinese steel, American businesses that import the material pay up. Fees are collected by Customs and Border Protection agents at ports of entry, and into Treasury coffers. When tariffs rise, those companies face a choice: If they can’t find domestic sources for necessary goods, they must eat the cost and watch their profits shrink, or pass the rising fee on to consumers through higher prices. While the rationale behind Trump’s approach to tariffs may be to increase revenue, balance trade, and assert dominance over rival countries, those outcomes are far from certain. Tariffs not only run the risk of raising prices, but in some cases, they also up the ante for U.S. exports by creating a game of brinkmanship. [Editorial note: consult video a source link]

CBS Austin [4/2/2025 6:11 AM, Jamel Valencia, 602K] reports President Donald Trump is doubling down on his tariff policies, defending them as vital for America’s long-term economic prosperity. In a post on TruthSocial, Trump stated that while there might be some short-term pain, the country is heading toward a "Golden Age” with "spectacular" results. "This will be the Golden Age of America! Will there be some pain? Yes, maybe (and maybe not!)," Trump wrote. "But we will make America great again, and it will all be worth the price that must be paid." The president has made tariffs a cornerstone of his second term, arguing they will bolster U.S. manufacturing and reduce reliance on foreign imports. Notably, Trump imposed a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum imports, seeking to strengthen domestic industries. Additionally, imports from China are subject to a 20% tariff due to the country’s role in fentanyl production. While Trump’s tariffs have received praise from some supporters as necessary for economic reform, others, including trade experts and economists, warn of negative consequences. Critics argue that the tariffs could lead to higher prices for consumers and disrupt supply chains, while proponents contend that they are useful negotiation tools for trade and border security. The Republican president has pointed to corporate investments in the U.S. as evidence of the success of his tariff policies. On Friday, Trump highlighted Apple’s decision to invest $500 billion in U.S. manufacturing, crediting the tariffs for encouraging companies to bring production back to American soil. "I think you’re going to have a country that’s going to boom," Trump said, referencing a conversation he had with Apple CEO Tim Cook. "He told me, ‘I would have never done it if you had lost the election and I would have never done it if there wasn’t a tariff system.’" Trump is also set to implement reciprocal tariffs, including a 25% tariff on goods from Mexico and Canada, two of the United States’ largest trading partners. The reciprocal tariffs, slated to take effect on April 3, will apply to countries that impose tariffs on U.S. exports. Trump has repeatedly criticized the U.S. for allowing other nations to levy tariffs on American goods without repercussions.

Reuters [4/3/2025 2:56 AM, Staff, 41523K] reports countries across the world, including some of America’s closest allies, condemned President Donald Trump’s announcement of reciprocal tariffs and some pledged counter-measures while hoping the White House would be open to negotiations. China urged the United States to immediately cancel its latest tariffs and vowed to safeguard its own interests, threatening to spiral the world’s largest economies deeper into a trade war that is likely to upend global supply chains. "This is not the act of a friend," said Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia, a nation often described as America’s "deputy sheriff" in Asia. "The (Trump) administration’s tariffs have no basis in logic and they go against the basis of our two nations’ partnership." Leaders in Japan, New Zealand, Taiwan and South Korea, all major U.S. allies in the region, blasted Trump’s move. "We need to decide what is best for Japan, and most effective, in a careful but bold and speedy manner," said Trade Minister Yoji Muto, when asked whether Japan would retaliate. Trump said on Wednesday that he would impose a 10% baseline tariff on all imports to the U.S. and higher duties on dozens of other countries. Among close U.S. allies, Japan was targeted with a 24% rate, South Korea with 25%, Taiwan with 32% and the European Union with 20%. The UK, Australia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia and most of South America were let off with the minimum 10%. "The consequences will be dire for millions of people around the world," said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. "We are ready to respond, we are preparing further packages of measures to protect our interests." Trump announced China would be hit with a 34% tariff, on top of the 20% he previously imposed earlier this year, bringing the total new levies to 54% and close to the 60% figure he had threatened while on the campaign trail. The U.S. move disregards the balance of interests reached in multilateral trade negotiations over the years and the fact that it has long benefited greatly from international trade, Beijing’s commerce ministry said in a statement. "China firmly opposes this," it said. "There are no winners in trade wars, and there is no way out for protectionism." However, several leaders pressed for talks with the White House, seeking exemptions or a retreat on duties, while von der Leyen said she agreed with Trump that the global trading system had "serious deficiencies".

Reuters [4/2/2025 7:02 PM, Emily Green and David Ljunggren, 41523K] reports Mexico and Canada avoided fresh tariffs on Wednesday with President Donald Trump exempting the United States’ top trading partners from his new 10% global tariff baseline, although previous duties remain in place. Goods from Mexico and Canada that comply with the USMCA trade agreement between the three countries will largely remain exempt from tariffs, except for auto exports and steel and aluminum which fall under separate tariff policies. Trump previously imposed 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada for not doing enough to curb migration and fentanyl trafficking, but later issued a carve out for USMCA compliant goods. "For Canada and Mexico, the existing fentanyl/migration ... orders remain in effect, and are unaffected by this order," the White House fact sheet said. "In the event the existing fentanyl/migration ... orders are terminated, USMCA compliant goods would continue to receive preferential treatment, while non-USMCA compliant goods would be subject to a 12% reciprocal tariff." Some analysts said Canada and Mexico appeared to have avoided the worst-case scenario. "Mexico and Canada are almost certainly sighing relief after today’s announced tariffs," said Michael Camunez, chief executive of Monarch Global Strategies, which advises firms doing business in Mexico. "The North American partners were shielded from what clearly could have been a very bad day.” Candace Laing, president and CEO of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement: "We hope that today’s positioning regarding Canada by the U.S. is part of a path to real negotiation, ultimately leading to long-term partnership.”

Bloomberg [4/2/2025 5:44 PM, Spencer Van Dyk, 1492K] reports that Canada will be exempt from the sweeping reciprocal tariffs U.S. President Donald Trump is implementing on most other countries, though 25 per cent tariffs on some Canadian goods remain in place, and 25 per cent tariffs on all foreign-made automobiles are coming into effect as of midnight. Prime Minister Mark Carney — who put his election campaign on pause to meet with his Canada-U.S. Relations Council and cabinet to craft a response to the tariffs — told reporters on Parliament Hill the federal government will “act with purpose and with force” during this crisis. Trump laid out the details of his long-anticipated reciprocal-tariff regime in the White House Rose Garden on Tuesday afternoon. “Reciprocal. That means they do it to us and we do it to them,” Trump said. “Very simple. Can’t get any simpler than that.” “It’s our declaration of economic independence,” the president also said, before continuing to address the crowd while holding a chart listing the tariffs other countries have in place on American products. Canada was not listed on the board.

AP [4/2/2025 2:08 PM, Stephen Groves, 10355K] reports that the Senate passed a resolution Wednesday night that would thwart President Donald Trump’s ability to impose tariffs on Canada, delivering a rare rebuke to the president just hours after he unveiled sweeping plans to clamp down on international trade. The Senate resolution, passed by a 51-48 vote tally with four Republicans and all Democrats in support, would end Trump’s emergency declaration on fentanyl trafficking that underpins tariffs on Canada. Trump earlier Wednesday announced orders — his so-called “Liberation Day” — to impose import taxes on a slew of international trading partners, though Canadian imports for now were spared from new taxes. The Senate’s legislation has practically no chance of passing the Republican-controlled House and being signed by Trump, but it showed the limits of Republican support for Trump’s vision of remaking the U.S. economy by restricting free trade. Many economists are warning that the plan could cause an economic contraction, and GOP senators are already watching with unease as Trump upends the United States’ relationship with the rest of the world. Trump earlier Wednesday singled out the four Republicans — Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Rand Paul of Kentucky — who voted in favor of the resolution.

Roll Call [4/2/2025 7:45 PM, Olivia M. Bridges, 503K] reports four Republicans joined Democrats in the Senate to pass, 51-48, a joint resolution Wednesday that would effectively end President Donald Trump’s steep tariffs on Canadian goods in a vote that revealed GOP resistance to the administration’s sweeping trade agenda. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., was a co-sponsor of the measure offered by Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va. Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and former Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, along with Paul, voted in support of the resolution. Republicans had previously been largely uncritical of Trump’s trade agenda. “It is crucial that we remain a dependent and vibrant global trading partner, particularly with Canada,” Collins said, raising concerns about the impact on aquaculture, manufacturing, tourism and other industries. “These tariffs on Canada would jeopardize current jobs and also block future ones.” Trump’s tariffs have caused turmoil in Canada, where many consumers and shops are boycotting American products and refusing to travel to the U.S. Passenger bookings from Canada to the U.S. are down 70 percent from last year, according to OAG Aviation Worldwide Ltd., a group that provides data on aviation. There is also concern that the tariffs could impact U.S. national defense capabilities. Kaine’s measure would end Trump’s national emergency that was the basis for his decision to impose a 10 percent tariff on Canadian energy products and potash and 25 percent tariffs on all other products that don’t enter the country under the 2020 U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement on trade. The president’s executive order declaring the emergency said the intent was to get Canada to address the flow of fentanyl and immigration crossing the border to the U.S. Collins said that less than 1 percent of fentanyl was trafficked through Canada in fiscal 2024. U.S. Customs and Border Protection said 43 pounds of fentanyl were seized at the northern border in fiscal 2024, and 12 pounds so far in fiscal 2025. By contrast, almost 21,150 pounds were seized at the southwestern border in 2024 and almost 6,000 pounds were seized so far in 2025. “I commend him for taking far stronger actions to halt this dangerous and deadly flow than did the previous administration,” Collins said about Trump. “I do not, however, agree with his invoking the powers of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose tariffs on Canadian goods and products.” Kaine and other Democrats said Trump is misusing his emergency powers under the 1977 law. “Congress wanted to give the president tools to deal with adversaries, nations that were enemies, cartels, rogue states, dictators. IEEPA was not designed to be used against allies,” Kaine said on the floor. “It does not say that the president’s actions against adversaries should include tariffs.” The president took to his social media platform Truth Social overnight to criticize Republicans willing to vote for Kaine’s bill. He singled out Paul, Collins, Murkowski and McConnell. “They are playing with the lives of the American people, and right into the hands of the Radical Left Democrats and Drug Cartels,” Trump wrote. “The Senate Bill is just a ploy of the Dems to show and expose the weakness of certain Republicans, namely these four, in that it is not going anywhere because the House will never approve it and I, as your President, will never sign it.

Reported similarly:
The Hill [4/2/2025 7:39 PM, Alexander Bolton, 12829K]
USA Today [4/2/2025 8:56 PM, Riley Beggin, 75858K]

Washington Examiner [4/2/2025 11:16 AM, Emily Hallas, 2296K] reports that President Donald Trump called on four Senate Republicans known for bucking the White House to vote down a congressional resolution attempting to end his steep tariffs against Canada. Ahead of the Senate’s Wednesday vote on the resolution, the White House fears Democrats will be able to pull enough votes from Republicans to pass the anti-tariff resolution. Trump accused Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) of "playing with the lives of the American people and right into the hands of the Radical Left Democrats and Drug Cartels." The resolution, introduced by Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), is co-sponsored by a Republican, Paul. This week, Collins said she would support the resolution. While McConnell and Murkowski have not signaled they would back it, they have publicly criticized the 25% tariffs against Canada set in place by Trump on Feb. 1 that went into effect on March 4. The White House used a national security justification in issuing the emergency declaration, arguing the tariffs were a necessary tool to incentivize Canada to increase border security to limit the amount of fentanyl flowing into the United States. Trump said the resolution was "just a ploy of the Dems to show and expose the weakness of certain Republicans" and urged residents from the senators’ states to contact the lawmakers and "get them to FINALLY adhere to Republican Values and Ideals."

CBS News [4/2/2025 3:02 PM, Jennifer Jacobs and Kelly O’Grady, 51661K] reports that President Trump is considering announcing the creation of what he calls the "External Revenue Service" on Wednesday as the White House launches his new trade agenda and collects tariff revenues from around the globe, according to sources familiar with the planning. Mr. Trump is also aiming to again alter Washington’s trade relationship with Beijing, and will likely charge tariffs on low-value merchandise shipped from China to individual U.S. consumers. Details of Mr. Trump’s final decision were unclear as of Wednesday afternoon. Mr. Trump has considered attaching a fee of $25 on low-value packages from China, one of the sources told CBS News. White House spokespeople didn’t answer requests for comment. It wasn’t clear what levy the president chose. Currently, a U.S. loophole allows duty-free shipments of Chinese goods worth less than $800. It has enabled Chinese e-commerce companies such as Shein and Temu to skirt import fees. The practice has undercut other retailers, including American firms, that must pay those fees when buying product in bulk. The so-called de minimis exemption is limited to one shipment per person per day. The changes, if adopted, would put a pinch on the online shopping habits of American consumers seeking clothing, household products and other goods from China at ultra low prices. The president is scheduled to hold an event in the Rose Garden at 4 p.m. to herald his tariffs strategy.

Reuters [4/2/2025 1:36 PM, Staff, 41523K] reports that a U.S. federal court in Brooklyn, New York has indicted Jose Adolfo "Fito" Macias Villamar, leader of Los Choneros, one of Ecuador’s most violent drug trafficking and transnational criminal organizations, on international drug and gun charges, the Department of Justice said in a statement on Wednesday. Macias disappeared in January last year from the Ecuadorean prison where he was serving a 34-year sentence for various crimes including drug trafficking and murder. Ecuadorean authorities have tied Macias’ criminal group Los Choneros to extortion, murder and drug trafficking and accuse the group of controlling Ecuador’s crime-plagued and overcrowded prisons. The government of President Daniel Noboa had offered a reward of $1 million for information leading to Macias’ capture.

The Washington Post [4/2/2025 6:19 PM, Shayna Jacobs, 31735K] reports that a judge dismissed a corruption indictment against Mayor Eric Adams on Wednesday after a controversial push by the Justice Department to terminate the case, while denying a request by federal officials for the option of reinstating the charges because it could appear that Adams was beholden to government demands. The judge’s decision, which ends the case as Adams seeks reelection, also discredited the rationale of a top Justice Department official for pursuing the dismissal. That official, Emil Bove, said the former head of the Manhattan federal prosecutor’s office was politically motivated in bringing the case in September, but did not cite compelling evidence. U.S. District Court Judge Dale Ho wrote that “the timing of this case is entirely consistent with prior public corruption prosecutions” and that the Justice Department’s “‘appearance of impropriety’ rationale is not just thin, but pretextual.” Ho’s statement echoed the widely held view of legal experts and members of the public that there was an apparent deal between Adams and the federal government calling for the mayor to cooperate with President Donald Trump’s immigration and public safety demands. The Justice Department’s decision led to the resignations of several federal prosecutors, including the former interim head of the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan who inherited the case and who alleged that officials in Washington and Adams engaged in a “quid pro quo.” The AP [4/2/2025 6:06 PM, Jennifer Peltz and Michael R. Sisak, 602K] reports that the judge, though, denied prosecutors the option to refile the charges after the mayoral election. Judge Dale E. Ho’s order to dismiss the case “with prejudice” spares Adams from having to govern in a way that pleases Trump or potentially risk having the Republican’s Justice Department revive the charges. The judge said he wasn’t opining on the merits of the case, but that courts can’t force prosecutors to move forward. Still, he expressed qualms about the government’s move, saying “there are many reasons to be troubled” by its reasoning. “Everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions,” Ho wrote. He said he found it “disturbing” that public officials might get special treatment from prosecutors by complying with policy goals. He rejected an alternative the Justice Department had sought — dismissing the case “without prejudice,” which would have left room for the charges to be refiled. [Editorial note: consult audio at source link] The Miami Herald [4/2/2025 11:16 AM, Doug Cunningham, 3973K] reports Ho dismissed the case "with prejudice," a legal term meaning the charges cannot be brought back later based on the same evidence. Ho’s order said he dismissed with prejudice rather than granting Justice Department’s motion to dismiss without prejudice because it "would create the unavoidable perception that the Mayor’s freedom depends on his ability to carry out the immigration enforcement priorities of the administration.” Ho noted in the dismissal decision that Adams, while still under prosecution threat, announced he would allow "Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to operate at the Rikers Island Jail Complex, an act that appears to be contrary to New York City law."

Reported similarly:
New York Times [4/2/2025 2:45 PM, William K. Rashbaum, Benjamin Weiser, Jonah E. Bromwich, and Dana Rubinstein, 145325K]
CNN [4/2/2025 4:18 PM, Lauren del Valle and Kara Scannell, 22131K]
Washington Examiner [4/2/2025 10:30 AM, Ross O’Keefe, 2296K]

Washington Examiner [4/2/2025 10:06 AM, Jenny Goldsberry, 2296K] reports that a federal judge ruled against the Trump administration’s request to transfer pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil’s case to Louisiana, where he is being held. This is the second time a federal judge has rejected the Justice Department’s efforts to litigate Khalil’s case in Louisiana after a Manhattan-based judge transferred the case to New Jersey two weeks ago. "The case as filed can go forward only here. The other 93 districts, where the Petitioner was nowhere to be found, are out of the question," U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz wrote in his ruling Tuesday. Farbiarz, a Biden appointee, based his ruling on the fact that Khalil was held in New Jersey shortly after his arrest. Khalil had his green card revoked over his participation in several anti-Israel protests in which there was a distribution of Hamas propaganda. His deportation is on pause, per U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman’s ruling two weeks ago. Furman was the first to reject the DOJ’s efforts to transfer the case to Louisiana, ruling he did not have jurisdiction over it. Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin classified Khalil’s arrest as part of President Donald Trump’s recent executive order targeting campus antisemitism.

NPR [4/2/2025 5:22 PM, Adrian Florido, 29983K] Audio: HERE reports the government sent Mahmoud Khalil to Louisiana, where his case could’ve been harder to fight. His lawyer’s fast work may have kept it out of the most conservative federal circuit in the country.

AP [4/2/2025 7:31 PM, Ben Finley, 24727K] reports that in the 22 days since Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia was mistakenly deported to a notoriously violent prison in El Salvador, his young son has sought comfort in the scent of his missing father’s clothes. “He shows me how much he missed Kilmar,” Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, said in court documents. “He has been finding Kilmar’s work shirts and smelling them, to smell Kilmar’s familiar scent.” Abrego Garcia, 29, who worked as a sheet metal apprentice and was pursuing his journeyman license, was pulled over in an Ikea parking lot and arrested on March 12, with his 5-year-old son in the car. An immigration judge in 2019 had granted him protection from being deported back to El Salvador, where Abrego Garcia was likely to face persecution by local gangs. He had a legal work permit issued by the Department of Homeland Security, his lawyer said. Yet he was sent back to his native El Salvador, which President Donald Trump ‘s administration acknowledged on Monday was an “administrative error.” Despite this, White House officials have argued against bringing him back, alleging without showing proof that he has ties to the MS-13 gang. The administration further says it lacks the power to seek his return from El Salvador’s government, noting that a U.S. court could at best order the White House to “entreat — or even cajole — a close ally.” Abrego Garcia’s mistaken deportation has outraged many while raising concerns about the expulsion of noncitizens who were granted permission to be in the United States.

New York Times [4/2/2025 4:43 PM, Alan Feuer, 145325K] reports lawyers for a Maryland man who was inadvertently deported last month to a notorious Salvadoran prison despite an order that he could remain in the United States angrily urged the judge overseeing his case on Wednesday to force the Trump administration to bring him back as soon as possible. In a court filing, the lawyers for the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, furiously took issue with almost every aspect of the case. To start, they said, Trump officials had acknowledged on Monday night that they had made an “administrative error” by flying Mr. Abrego Garcia to El Salvador on March 15 even though a U.S. immigration judge had already determined that he might face torture there. The lawyers also expressed shock that the administration was maintaining that it had little power to get Mr. Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national whose wife and child are both American citizens, out of custody. The case of Mr. Abrego Garcia, 29, is the latest flashpoint in a multifront and increasingly bitter battle between immigration lawyers and the White House, which in recent weeks has been escalating its efforts to deport hundreds of migrants using both traditional and highly unorthodox methods. The case has raised questions not only about how a man whom a judge had granted permission to remain in the United States could have ended up on a plane to El Salvador, but also about why the Trump administration has apparently done nothing to correct its mistake.

Reuters [4/2/2025 10:20 AM, David Shepardson, 52868K] reports that the Senate Commerce Committee may subpoena the U.S. Army to obtain a report detailing why it routinely failed to use a safety system known as ADS-B on helicopter flights around Reagan Washington National Airport, its chair said on Wednesday. An army Black Hawk helicopter did not have the system operating during a routine training mission when it collided with an American Airlines regional jet on January 29 near the airport, killing 67 people. The army last week refused a request from senators for the memo. Committee chair Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican, and Senator Maria Cantwell, the top Democrat on the panel, had demanded the army turn over the report by Friday. Cruz said if the army continued to withhold the document, the committee planned to issue a subpoena. "It begs the question, what doesn’t the army want Congress and the American people to know about why it was flying partially blind?" Cruz said. "This is not acceptable." The army did not immediately comment Wednesday but said earlier this week that it would respond directly to the lawmakers. The FAA said on Monday it sent notices last week to NASA, the Justice Department, the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security requiring ADS-B use near Reagan National except in cases such as "active national security missions."

Reuters [4/2/2025 2:36 PM, A.J. Vicens, 41523K] reports that a prominent Indiana University professor whose abrupt firing and disappearance drew interest in the cybersecurity community has not been detained and there are no pending criminal charges against him or his wife, a lawyer representing him told Reuters. Attorney Jason Covert’s statement is the first official word about the fate of the professor, XiaoFeng Wang, and his wife, Nianli Ma, since March 28, when the FBI and Department of Homeland Security carried out simultaneous searches on two homes associated with the couple, which was the same day the university terminated his employment. The couple’s disappearance from public view in the days after the operation fed swirling rumors about whether the couple were detained or arrested, and questions as to what could have caused such a heavy law enforcement operation. The professor, who studied in China in the 1990s before coming to the U.S. and establishing himself as a prominent researcher in cybersecurity and privacy studies, has been a professor at Indiana University since 2004 and has been recognized by both the university and the cybersecurity community as a top mind in the space. The FBI’s Indianapolis field office "conducted court-authorized law enforcement activity," an FBI spokesperson told Reuters. The spokesperson would not answer questions about the nature of the allegations against Wang or when additional information would become available. DHS did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Yahoo! News [4/2/2025 11:32 AM, James Tutten, 52868K] reports that a proposal that would require small businesses to use the E-Verify system to check someone’s immigration status is now moving forward in the Florida legislature. The Republican-controlled committee voted to support the measure. If passed, businesses with 25 or more employees would need to use E-Verify to determine if people are eligible to work. “Costs are up right now. We don’t have a workforce to support Florida’s growing population, in ag, tourism or healthcare. We are very reliant on immigrant labor,” said state Rep. Anna Eskamani. So far, a similar bill has not been heard in the state Senate. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

CBS Miami [4/2/2025 11:06 PM, Staff, 51661K] reports immigrant-advocacy groups Wednesday filed a potential class-action lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a new Florida law aimed at cracking down on undocumented immigrants. The Florida Immigrant Coalition, the Farmworker Association of Florida and two individual plaintiffs filed the lawsuit in federal court in Miami. It challenges a law (SB 4-C) that passed during a February special legislative session. The law, in part, created state crimes for undocumented immigrants who enter or re-enter Florida. The lawsuit contends the law violated what is known as the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution because immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility. "Under this novel system, the state of Florida has created its own immigration crimes, completely outside the federal immigration system," the plaintiffs’ attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans for Immigrant Justice wrote. "State police will arrest noncitizens for these entry and re-entry crimes; state prosecutors will bring charges in state courts; and state judges will determine guilt and impose sentences. The federal government has no control over, nor any role at all in, these arrests and prosecutions." The lawsuit also alleges a violation of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause because it "impermissibly regulates people’s entry into Florida, and it imposes unacceptable burdens on interstate and foreign commerce." Law stemmed from February special session The February special session came as Republican lawmakers and Gov. Ron DeSantis said they were trying to help carry out President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. The law targeted in the lawsuit was one of two immigration bills passed during the special session. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

The Hill [4/2/2025 8:24 PM, Lauren Irwin, 18752K] reports a Texas man was arrested for “making terroristic threats” against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem, the Dallas Homeland Security Investigations arm said Wednesday. Robert King, a U.S. citizen, was taken into custody in McKinney, Texas after he made the threats, the agency said in a post on X. “King’s alarming social media posts included intentions to ‘open fire’ if agents are seen in his neighborhood,” the group said in a post with a photo of a man in handcuffs and several officers with their faces blurred. The arrest comes just days after Noem responded to another online post about the Trump administration and ICE’s work to deport migrants across the country. In a post on X on Sunday, Noem said “If you threaten or attempt to harm a law enforcement officer we will find you and prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law.” In a statement to The Hill, a DHS spokesperson reiterated Noem’s post. “Like Secretary Noem said: If you threaten or attempt to harm a law enforcement officer we will find you and prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law,” the spokesperson said. “Promises made, promises kept.” The Hill has reached out to ICE for more information.

Reuters [4/2/2025 5:56 PM, Andrew Goudsward] reports U.S. authorities arrested an alleged leader in a local MS-13 gang who had been a fugitive for nearly four years after being charged in a conspiracy linked to 11 murders, the Justice Department said on Wednesday. Joel Vargas-Escobar was arrested in Westbury, New York late on Tuesday and is being transferred to Nevada, where he was initially charged in a 2021 federal indictment. Prosecutors are seeking to put him on trial with three co-defendants, who are all alleged members of the gang, according to court documents. Vargas-Escobar, identified as a leader of the "Parkview" clique of MS-13 that operated out of Nevada and California, is facing racketeering, murder and gun charges, according to the indictment. He has not yet entered a plea. The indictment directly links Vargas-Escobar to two murders in 2017.

Yahoo! News [4/2/2025 9:06 AM, Hailey Smalley, 52868K] reports that critics say new legislation in the Montana House criminalizing the "harboring" of people with an unknown immigration status could put hospitals, churches and community organizations at risk. Rep. Lukas Schubert, R-Evergreen, introduced House Bill 896 after the House voted down similar legislation earlier in the session. The bill adds new definitions to Montana’s obstruction of justice law, making it illegal to harbor or assist a person who "has entered the United States in violation of law." Representatives from religious and nonprofit organizations across the state opposed the bill at an April 1 House Judiciary Committee, arguing that the legislation’s broad reach would hamper the provision of key social services to all Montana residents, regardless of immigration status. "What happens on the ground is that we’re providing services to people, humans who may or may not be in a legal status," said Kelsen Young, the director of the Montana Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence. Young said the bill would make the coalition’s services, along with the services provided by hospitals, churches and other community organizations, illegal, as staff are unable to verify the immigration status of everybody they serve.

CBS News [4/2/2025 8:46 PM, Adam Yamaguchi, Somitra Butalia, 51661K] reports that, on the U.S. side of the border between San Diego, California, and Tijuana, Mexico, there is a section in between double fencing that is used by U.S. Customs and Border Protection as a makeshift holding facility to process migrants who cross into the U.S. illegally. It’s here that Bri Stensrud of Colorado Springs recently brought a group of 15 women to the border for the first time to meet with some of those migrants. Stensrud is director of Women of Welcome, a nonprofit migrant aid group made up of evangelical women from across the U.S. who are attempting to help asylum seekers, something they say is a Biblical calling. "The Bible doesn’t say anything about U.S. immigration policy," Stensrud told CBS News. "But it does have a heck of a lot to say about God’s heart for the immigrant." Stensrud describes herself as an abortion-rights opponent and staunch conservative. But she says one particular experience clouded her views on immigration. "Visiting an unaccompanied migrant shelter, I met two young girls, 11 and 13, who were mothers, and that was shocking to me because I had a young daughter at home, and no child chooses to be a mother at that age," Stensrud said. "So I immediately realized what America is being told was not the full story." She says the story the U.S. is being told is that "those who are coming to the border all have nefarious reasons for coming. They are the worst of the worst of every country. And that’s not what I saw." White evangelical Christians helped deliver President Trump his November victory, and a campaign that was built on his promise to stem illegal immigration. He won the support of about eight in 10 voters in that voting bloc, which represented about a quarter of the total electorate, according to CBS News exit poll data. "I think any time a more conservative evangelical engages in the issues of immigrants and immigration as a whole, you do feel like you’re in a very lonely spot," Stensrud said. That prompted Stensrud to create a space that’s a little less lonely for other conservative women. And her group gives them a firsthand experience of the realities at the border. On this particular day, the Women of Welcome brought by Stensrud met with migrants from Mexico and Turkey who were being held in the makeshift processing area, providing them with snacks, water and information on what would happen next. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

Latin Times [4/2/2025 12:51 PM, Demian Bio] reports Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said her administration has more names of top cartel operatives set for extradition to the U.S. as she steps up cooperation with the Donald Trump government. The statement comes after Mexico handed over almost 30 prisoners to the country, a group that included top cartel leaders such as Rafael Caro Quintero and Los Zetas leaders, the Treviño Morales brothers. It also follows a meeting with Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem in which the U.S. official gave Sheinbaum a list of President Donald Trump’s priorities for combating illegal immigration and cartels. Mexico has intensified its efforts to crack down on drug cartels on its side of the border, responding to ongoing threats from the Trump administration to impose tariffs on local goods if it failed to do so. However, Noem said there is more that needs to be done.

Border Report [4/2/2025 4:59 PM, Julian Resendiz, 117K] reports tariffs are not the only concern for American companies doing business in Mexico these days. An increasing number of U.S. subsidiaries and their Mexican partners are living with the threat of extortion, hijacking of trucks and attempts by criminals to coerce employees into tolerating illicit activities including drug trafficking, a new report states. That activity south of the border could intensify if the governments of Mexico and the United States put such pressure on cartels that they feel it’s no longer cost-effective to stay away from American interests. The most common targets are truck drivers, but executives in charge of vendor networks and supplies also are being targeted by organized crime.

Roll Call [4/2/2025 8:15 AM, Chris Johnson, 503K] reports that the prison in El Salvador where the Trump administration has sent alleged gang members for detention has a reputation for human rights violations and corruption, with civil rights groups challenging the removals calling it "one of the worst prisons in the world." In court cases, the American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward filed declarations from experts that describe how prisons in El Salvador, and specifically Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, go beyond the generally accepted standards for penalizing and imprisoning convicted criminals. The director of prisons there was indicted by the United States for arranging meetings in prison for negotiations with MS-13, a violent gang, and deemed corrupt by the U.S. Treasury Department for helping to develop a scheme to embezzle millions of dollars from the prison commissary system, one expert’s testimony points out. "Deportees who are imprisoned in El Salvador are highly likely to face immediate and intentional life-threatening harm at the hands of state actors and a secondary threat of violence from incarcerated gang members," Sarah C. Bishop, a professor at Baruch College who has studied the Salvadoran prison system, said.

New York Times [4/2/2025 5:04 AM, M. Gessen, 145325K] reports “It’s the unmarked cars,” a friend who grew up under an Argentine dictatorship said. He had watched the video of the Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil’s abduction. In the video, which Khalil’s wife recorded, she asks for the names of the men in plainclothes who handcuffed her husband. “We don’t give our name,” one responds. “Can you please specify what agency is taking him?” she pleads. No response. We know now that Khalil was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security. Those of us who have lived in countries terrorized by a secret police force can’t shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity. “I never realized until this moment how much fear I carried with me from my childhood in Communist Romania,” another friend, the literary scholar Marianne Hirsch, told me. “Arrests were arbitrary and every time the doorbell rang, I started to shiver.” It’s the catastrophic interruption of daily life, as when a Tufts University graduate student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was grabbed on a suburban street by half a dozen plainclothes agents, most of them masked. The security camera video of that arrest shows Ozturk walking, looking at her phone, perhaps to check the address where she was supposed to meet her friends for dinner that night, when an agent appears in front of her. She says something — asks something — struggling to control her voice, and within seconds she is handcuffed and placed in an unmarked car. It’s the forced mass transports of immigrants. These are not even deportations, in the way we typically think of them. Rather than being sent to their country of origin, Venezuelans were sent to El Salvador, where they are being imprisoned, indefinitely, without due process. It’s the sight of men being marched in formation, their heads shaved, hundreds of people yanked from their individual lives to be reduced to an undifferentiated mass. It’s the sight, days later, of the secretary of homeland security posing against the background of men in cages and threatening more people with the same punishment.

Newsweek [4/2/2025 8:00 AM, Andrew King, 52220K] reports that, in the past year, America has suffered devastating cyberattacks, exposing infrastructure perilously unprepared for the digital age. The brazen Chinese state-sponsored Salt Typhoon infiltration of the U.S. Treasury and leading telecom networks revealed the systemic risks in a dangerously outdated, fragmented, and interconnected digital ecosystem devoid of accountability. Salt Typhoon operated undetected for 18 months within AT&T and Verizon networks, compromising call logs and recordings of millions of Americans, including President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. We urgently need a dedicated Cyber Force—an independent, elite service empowered to unify cyber defenses, counter foreign aggressors, and restore strategic deterrence. In December 2024, Chinese hackers launched an audacious cyberattack on the U.S. Treasury, exploiting third-party software vulnerabilities. This breach compromised over 3,000 sensitive files, including crucial records from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS), handing China insights into circumventing U.S. financial scrutiny, and threatening the integrity of our economic backbone. Currently, our cyber defense is disastrously fragmented across multiple entities—U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM), NSA, Department of Homeland Security, CISA, FBI, and the private sector. This results in bureaucratic gaps and inexcusable paralysis given the urgency and complexity of modern cyberwarfare. The U.S. faced a similar inflection point in 2019, when it created Space Force to address growing threats in a new domain. That model worked—and it can work again. Today, we face a dire shortage of 700,000 cybersecurity professionals, according to the ISC² Cybersecurity Study. Former CYBERCOM General Paul Nakasone called recruiting cyber talent the nation’s "greatest challenge.” The Space Force demonstrated that a prestigious, mission-driven agency could attract elite human capital. A Cyber Force can replicate Space Force’s success, signaling a profound national commitment and galvanizing technologists eager for purpose-led service securing our digital frontier.

The Hill [4/2/2025 2:00 PM, Michelle Van Cleave, 12829K] reports that how can anyone be so careless with the nation’s security? That is the question everyone is asking after reports surfaced last week that President Trump’s national security leaders discussed imminent attack plans over a chat app known to be intercepted by foreign intelligence services. But then we have the counterintelligence nightmare known as "DOGE." Whatever else the Department of Government Efficiency might be, it is a gift to America’s adversaries. Here, in one place, is a doorway into the inner workings of the U.S. government, the vast troves of personal data entrusted by Americans to federal agencies, the cyber infrastructures that underlie everything the government does and the algorithms that will shape the future of how things get done. It is all being prodded and pulled apart by a raft of mostly young men with energy and creativity and zero government experience. If DOGE had been built with careful forethought, all employees would have undergone background investigations to make sure they were not vulnerable to coercion or manipulation. Experienced "red teams" would have tested for vulnerabilities in DOGE operations and designed rigorous security regimes to protect them. Or perhaps the risk in creating something like DOGE at all would have been deemed too great. But here we are, two months too late and counting.

Wall Street Journal [4/2/2025 12:54 PM, Mark R. Warner, 646K] reports given the dizzying pace of events in Washington, Americans can be forgiven for wondering which issues are worth paying attention to, and which are like one of national security adviser Mike Waltz’s disappearing Signal messages—here today, gone in a second. More than a week after news broke that President Trump’s top advisers were using an unclassified messaging app to discuss details of a planned military strike, there’s still much we don’t know about this security breach. Any rank-and-file enlisted military or intelligence officer who so carelessly jeopardized our national security would lose his security clearance and his job. A nearly identical incident earlier this year involving a Homeland Security employee who accidentally included a journalist on an email chain with even less sensitive information resulted in that employee immediately losing her security clearance and being placed on leave. It’s disturbing that, despite the potential ramifications of this breach, no one has been held accountable for mishandling classified information—not Mr. Waltz, who initiated the group chat and who, we learned this week, has a habit of discussing sensitive government matters using unsecure channels; not Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who gambled with the airmen’s lives by sharing the details of weapons, targets and timing nearly three hours before military operations were scheduled to begin; and not Tulsi Gabbard, who as Director of National Intelligence is tasked with keeping our nation’s secrets safe from adversaries but appears to have lied about the incident when questioned before the Senate Intelligence Committee. The White House is obviously eager to move on from this episode, but we still have no idea if the officials in that Signal chat were using personal or government-issued phones. In her testimony Ms. Gabbard declined to answer this question, citing the alleged existence of a White House review into the matter. This lack of transparency and accountability is deeply damaging to the intelligence-sharing relationships upon which our security depends. Israel—one of our best sources of intelligence in the Middle East—is reportedly furious that the breach exposed a source on the ground in Yemen. There is nothing that requires Israel, or any of our allies, to share this kind of intelligence with the U.S. These relationships depend on mutual trust. Other countries may now be reluctant to share information knowing that the Trump administration can’t be relied on to protect sensitive sources and methods.

USA Today [4/2/2025 5:06 AM, Elvia Díaz, 75858K] reports what’s worse than admitting a potentially deadly deportation mistake? Laughing it off. You already know that President Donald Trump and his folks never own up mistakes. That ought to tell you the magnitude of admitting in court that the administration erroneously sent a man to El Salvador prison hell. “This removal was an error,” an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official wrote in a statement to a federal judge about deporting Kilmar Abrego Garcia under the Alien Enemies Act invoked by Trump. Abrego Garcia, who lived in Maryland under protective immigration status, was on one of three flights to El Salvador in mid-March, using rarely invoked war powers. Federal Judge James Boasberg stopped further deportations under the Alien Enemies Act pending review, which unleashed Trump’s fury. The president called for impeaching the judge, prompting a rare rebuke from U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts. But back to Trump’s human trafficking. Yes, let’s call it that because it is. Nobody denies that the president has the power to deport those living in the United States illegally. Does he need war powers to do it, though? Certainly not. And, even worse, should Trump and his folks make up things or ignore court orders to put them behind bars here or send them to notorious prisons abroad and get away with it? I say hell no.

FOX News [4/2/2025 9:05 AM, Michael Dorgan, 46189K] reports the Trump administration has deported more than 100,000 illegal migrants in the 10 weeks since President Donald Trump returned to the White House on Jan. 20, according to a New York Post report citing a Department of Homeland Security official. The large totals mean the president is on course to fulfill a key campaign promise of carrying out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history. Both Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol officials have made around 113,000 arrests and carried "north of" 100,000 deportations, the New York Post reported. "He’s doing what he was voted in to do. Point blank!" an ICE source told the outlet. Fox News Digital reached out to ICE and Homeland Security to confirm the figures but didn’t immediately hear back. Border czar Tom Homan has vowed to deport criminal illegal migrants, particularly those who pose national security threats, although it’s not known how many of those deported had committed crimes while in the U.S. The deportations come as the Trump administration has simultaneously reduced the number of illegal border crossers to record lows. The latest U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) numbers show that during March, the southwest border saw the lowest number of crossings ever, with just 7,180 recorded.

Daily Caller [4/2/2025 10:06 AM, Jason Hopkins] reports the Trump administration is standing by its deportation of an illegal migrant from El Salvador, alleging that the individual is a member of the “brutal” MS-13 gang and is believed to be involved in human trafficking. In a Monday court filing, the Trump administration acknowledged that Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national who unlawfully entered the United States, was recently removed from the country due to an administrative error. However, a top Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official argued that Garcia should be kept in law enforcement custody — regardless of whatever country that may be. “The individual in question is a member of the brutal MS-13 gang — we have intelligence reports that he is involved in human trafficking,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Whether he is in El Salvador or a detention facility in the U.S., he should be locked up,” McLaughlin continued. The statement follows Garcia’s transfer in March to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), a maximum security mega-prison in El Salvador that was built to hold documented MS-13 gangbangers and other members of notorious crime syndicates. His placement into the famous prison has sparked outrage from Democrats and other critics of the Trump administration.

NPR [4/3/2025 4:14 AM, Martin Kaste, 29983K] reports the federal government has added hundreds of thousands of immigration arrest warrants to a national database used by local police, meaning cops are more likely to know if someone is wanted by ICE. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

Washington Post [4/3/2025 5:00 AM, Maria Sacchetti and Artur Galocha, 31735K] reports that, more than two decades ago, El Mansouri and other masked men burst into a family’s home in Oklahoma City. As they pointed guns at the heads of the parents and demanded money, the couple’s six-year-old son crawled under a kitchen cabinet and called 911. "They’ve got a gun. I’m scared," the boy told the operator, according to the Oklahoman. "Please come.” Shortly after President Donald Trump took office, state records show that the Republican governor of Oklahoma commuted El Mansouri’s sentence of more than 100 years to time served so the federal government could deport him to Morocco. Immigration enforcement agents took him into custody Feb. 5. The next day, the White House touted the arrest on social media and claimed that the administration’s actions "make America safe again.” El Mansouri was catapulted overnight from a forgotten inmate into a notorious criminal — an example that the White House publicity machine uses to justify Trump’s calls for the largest mass-deportation campaign in U.S. history. El Mansouri’s lawyer says her client, a college-educated software engineer, had fallen into an opioid addiction, committed a crime and was punished — but has overcome his addiction, taken anger management classes and apologized to the victims, who did not object to releasing him so he could be sent home. "I apologize sincerely for the people and the state of Oklahoma," El Mansouri, bespectacled and wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, told the state parole board five days before Trump took office. "I just hope that the victims will find it in their hearts to forgive me one day.” Many criminals removed from prisons, not American streets. The Trump administration has roared into cities and towns over the past two months, often with cameras and celebrity live-streamers in tow, to arrest thousands of immigrants they say pose a threat to Americans. Trump said officers are "achieving the great liberation of America" from criminals; his border czar, Tom Homan, said the arrests are making neighborhoods safer; and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem has taken credit for getting "these scumbags off of American streets.”

Yahoo! News [4/3/2025 4:38 AM, McKenzie Funk, 52868K] reports the deportation flight was in the air over Mexico when chaos erupted in the back of the plane, the flight attendant recalled. A little girl had collapsed. She had a high fever and was taking ragged, frantic breaths. The flight attendant, a young woman who went by the nickname Lala, said she grabbed the plane’s emergency oxygen bottle and rushed past rows of migrants chained at the wrists and ankles to reach the girl and her parents. By then, Lala was accustomed to the hard realities of working charter flights for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She’d learned to obey instructions not to look the passengers in the eyes, not to greet them or ask about their well-being. But until the girl collapsed, Lala had managed to escape an emergency. Lala worked for Global Crossing Airlines, the dominant player in the loose network of deportation contractors known as ICE Air. GlobalX, as the charter company is also called, is lately in the news. Two weeks ago, it helped the Trump administration fly hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador despite a federal court order blocking the deportations, triggering a showdown that experts fear could become a full-blown constitutional crisis. In interviews with ProPublica, Lala and six other current and former GlobalX flight attendants provided a window into a part of the deportation process that is rarely seen and little understood. For migrants who have spent months or years trying to reach this country and live here, it is the last act, the final bit of America they may experience. All but one of the flight attendants requested anonymity or asked that only a nickname be used, fearing retribution or black marks as they looked for new jobs in an insular industry. Because ICE, GlobalX and other charter carriers did not respond to questions after being provided with detailed lists of this story’s findings, the flight attendants’ individual accounts are hard to verify. But their stories are consistent with one another. They are also generally consistent with what has been said about ICE Air in legalfilings, newsaccounts, academic research and publicly released copies of the ICE Air Operations Handbook. That morning over Mexico, Lala said, the girl’s oxygen saturation level was 70% — perilously low compared with a healthy person’s 95% or higher. Her temperature was 102.3 degrees. The flight had a nurse on contract who worked alongside its security guards. But beyond giving the girl Tylenol, the nurse left the situation in Lala’s hands, she recalled.

Houston Chronicle [4/2/2025 7:00 AM, Matt deGrood, 1769K] reports a Tufts University student asked if she could call the police when she was approached by six people with their faces covered, before being told they were the police. Rumeysa Ozturk, 30, was then taken into federal custody and quickly moved to an ICE detention center in Louisiana, where she became the latest in a growing number of students who’ve had their visas revoked for participating in Palestinian protests. The Houston region hasn’t yet seen any high-profile student arrests during the second President Donald Trump administration. But a video purportedly taken during a raid on a Spring business did show law enforcement in unmarked vehicles, with their faces covered and refusing to give names or badge numbers. With federal immigration officials under orders to ramp up deportations, here are things to know about your rights: Gabe Perez, a Galveston-based immigration attorney, said despite recent headlines, ICE agents must possess a warrant from an immigration judge to arrest someone and the person being detained is within their rights to ask to see it. People shouldn’t open a door unless they’re given a warrant matching their legal name and address signed by an immigration judge, Perez said. Many agents have been trying to execute administrative warrants, but those aren’t enforceable. If the information on the warrant doesn’t match their name or address, people also aren’t obligated to answer the door, Perez said. When the information does match, people should still be careful about signing anything or answering any questions until they can talk to an attorney, Perez said. Reaching out to an attorney anytime someone is worried about their rights is critical, Perez said. Several immigration nonprofit groups in Houston are providing those concerned about ICE agents with red cards put together by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.

NBC News [4/2/2025 4:30 PM, Albinson Linares, 44742K] reports these days, fear doesn’t leave him alone, the Honduran immigrant and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) informant said, even when he’s working in construction or at home with his family. He spends sleepless nights, watching his daughters and praying that the Trump administration doesn’t deport him to Honduras, where he claims death awaits him for his collaboration with U.S. authorities. Immigrant informants like the Honduran man and others who’ve spoken publicly about their cases say that without the protection of a visa or legal immigration status, they’re always at risk of deportation and potential danger if they’re sent away. Though the Honduran informant doesn’t have a visa or green card, he was able to obtain protection under the Convention Against Torture (CAT) — a measure that prevents deportation to a person who runs a real risk of being tortured in their home country. However, experts consulted by Noticias Telemundo confirmed that current laws that allow for deportations to third countries apply to cases of deportation suspension and CAT protection. This, despite the fact that in many cases international criminal networks have tentacles throughout Latin America.

NPR [4/2/2025 1:38 PM, Tonya Mosley, 29983K] reports that on March 25, Rumeysa Öztürk, a 30-year-old Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University, had just stepped out for dinner when she was arrested on the street by six federal agents in masks and plain clothes. Though Öztürk held a valid F-1 student visa, it had been revoked, reportedly without warning. A judge ordered her to be detained in Massachusetts, but authorities moved her to a detention center in a remote part of Louisiana. Öztürk’s case is not an isolated one. After last year’s protests over the war in Gaza, the Trump administration said it would crack down on "Hamas sympathizers on college campuses." And ICE agents have descended on college towns across the country in recent weeks. Students have been arrested at Columbia, the University of Minnesota and the University of Alabama. Boston College law professor Daniel Kanstroom has studied the impact of immigration policy over the last 25 years. He says that the rounding up of students who are here legally is designed to "send a message, ... to scare people." "This is a horrible thing to see," Kanstroom says of Öztürk’s arrest. "One would think that tactics like this would be limited to the most extreme cases — SWAT teams or hostage situations — but to see a graduate student in Somerville, Mass., pulled off the street; it had to be terrifying." [Editorial note: consult audio at source link]

Vermont Daily Chronicle [4/2/2025 2:21 PM, Guy Page] report a Turkish student at Tufts University was detained by federal authorities last month and then was moved through Vermont en route to a Louisiana detainment facility, according to media reports. Rumeysa Ozturk was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last week, and was eventually brought to the St. Albans ICE office, then flown out of state from Burlington International Airport, according to federal documents revealed in media reports. At his press conference today, Gov. Phil Scott was asked whether Vermont could, or should, try to prevent federal authorities from using Vermont as a venue for processing students detained for speaking out in support of Palestinians and, the federal government says, terrorist group Hamas. Scott said he found the action deplorable. “We should be ashamed that it has come to this level. This person should be allowed to do that. It [speaking out] is a constitutional right,” Scott said. Scott noted that Sen. Leahy fought to have the office located in Vermont and that there’s not much the State of Vermont could do. Federal authorities disagreed. “Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated. This is commonsense security,” said Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin on her X page. At least 29 Americans died in the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

AP [4/2/2025 7:18 AM, Staff, 24727K] reports a Tufts University doctoral student from Turkey who was detained by immigration authorities had been moved to Vermont by the time a federal judge ordered authorities to keep her in Massachusetts, lawyers for the U.S. government said. Rumeysa Ozturk, 30, was taken by immigration officials as she walked along a street in the Boston suburb of Somerville on March 25. She was put on a plane the next day and moved to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in remote Basile, Louisiana. On Friday, a federal judge in Boston, responding to a petition filed by Ozturk’s lawyers, said Ozturk can’t be removed from the United States “until further order of this court.” But on Tuesday, lawyers for the Justice Department argued that the judge lacks jurisdiction to decide Ozturk’s case. They said Ozturk’s lawyers had to file her petition in the jurisdiction where she was confined, The Boston Globe reported. They said the case should be dismissed or transferred to Louisiana, and that any challenge belonged in immigration court. Ozturk’s lawyers have said that her detention violates her constitutional rights, including free speech and due process. It asked the judge to order that she be immediately returned to Massachusetts and released from custody. Rallies in support of Ozturk were held in Boston and at Tufts University on Tuesday. Ozturk is among several people with ties to American universities who attended demonstrations or publicly expressed support for Palestinians during the war in Gaza and who have recently had visas revoked or been stopped from entering the U.S. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson confirmed the termination of Ozturk’s visa last week, saying investigations found Oztruk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group. The department did not provide evidence of that support.

CBS Boston [4/2/2025 11:29 PM, Staff, 51661K] reports Tufts University has issued a declaration of support for international graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was taken into custody by the Department of Homeland Security last week. Ozturk was apprehended outside her off-campus apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts on March 25 while she was on her way to a Ramadan iftar dinner. She was walking on the sidewalk when masked agents took her into custody and put her in an unmarked vehicle. In court documents filed on Ozturk’s behalf, Tufts University President Sunil Kumar asked for the Turkish student’s release without delay so she can return to complete her studies and finish her degree. Court documents indicate the State Department revoked Ozturk’s student visa on March 21 on grounds of alleged involvement in activities supporting Hamas. However, the university said at the time of her detention, Ozturk was in "good immigration standing." Kumar said that evening, Tufts University police received a courtesy notification from Somerville police that an individual detained by federal authorities might be a Tufts student. It was confirmed through records that it was Ozturk. About an hour later, Ozturk’s record in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System was updated to note her visa was terminated, according to Kumar. "Prior to that, and at the time of her detention, Ms. Ozturk was in ‘good immigration standing’ according to her record in SEVIS, and both Ms. Ozturk and Tufts had followed the governing regulations for students on visas," the statement from Kumar said. The university received a notice via email the next morning, March 26, that Ozturk’s visa was canceled because she was a "non-immigrant status violator." After she was taken into custody, a DHS spokesperson said, "investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas," but did not provide evidence. Ozturk, a third-year doctoral student, was one of several authors of a March 2024 op-ed that urged Tufts to acknowledge the Palestinian genocide. Kumar said the opinion piece was not in violation of any Tufts policies and no complaints were made about it. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

Univision [4/2/2025 5:44 AM, Staff, 5325K] reports a Boston judge held in contempt a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent who detained a suspect while he was on trial. ICE agent Brian Sullivan detained Wilson Martell Lebron as he was leaving the courthouse last week. But a Boston municipal court judge on Monday issued a ruling against Sullivan, arguing that by taking him into custody, he had deprived Martell Lebron of his rights to due process and a fair trial. "This is a case of violating a defendant’s right to be present at his trial and confront the witnesses against him. It couldn’t be more serious," Judge Mark Summerville said from the bench. Join our WhatsApp channel for free: click here to keep up with the news and not miss any updates. Summerville dismissed the charge against Martell Lebron of making a false statement on his driver’s license application. After that, the judge filed the contempt charge against Sullivan, which could lead Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden to review the case to determine whether charges should be filed. "It’s reprehensible," said Ryan Sullivan, one of Martell Lebron’s attorneys. "Cops have the job of making sure justice is served. Prosecutors have the job of ensuring that justice is done. In my view, there is no greater injustice than for the government to detain someone, without identifying themselves, and prevent them from exercising their constitutionally guaranteed right to a jury trial." An ICE spokesman did not return a call seeking comment. President Donald Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, and Republicans in Congress have accused the city of Boston of a lack of cooperation in deporting people accused of violent crimes. Mayor Michelle Wu, a Democrat seeking re-election this year, said she wants Boston to be a welcoming place for immigrants and that the city’s policies limit cooperation with immigration authorities. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

CBS Boston [4/2/2025 6:02 PM, Neal Riley, 51661K] reports Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden said he is weighing whether to bring charges against an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent after a defendant was detained outside a Boston courthouse last week in the middle of his trial. Wilson Martell-Lebron, who is from the Dominican Republic and was living with family in Massachusetts, was on trial for allegedly pretending to be someone else in his driver’s license application. His lawyers say ICE agents who did not identify themselves put him in a pickup truck as he was leaving court, and he’s now being held at a detention facility in Plymouth. On Monday, Boston Municipal Court Judge Mark Summerville held ICE agent Brian Sullivan in contempt, ruling that he was "violating the defendant’s right to be present at trial and confront witnesses against him." It’s up to Hayden to decide whether any charges should be filed against the agent. The judge dismissed the charge against Martell-Lebron of filing a false statement after he was detained.

Reported similarly:
FOX News [4/2/2025 4:23 PM, Louis Casiano, 46189K]

Yahoo! News [4/2/2025 5:03 AM, Rachael Devaney, 52868K] reports a Provincetown man is in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in Plymouth after pleading not guilty in Orleans District Court in June 2024 to allegations that he indecently assaulted a woman in Provincetown. Nicholas Rose, 66, pleaded not guilty at his arraignment in Orleans District Court on June 24, 2024, on charges of indecent assault and battery on a person 14 or over, kidnapping, and indecent exposure, according to court documents. Rose was ordered by Judge Robert A. Welsh, III, to be held at the Barnstable County Correctional Facility in Bourne in lieu of paying the posted bail amounts. Police brought the charges forward after a woman alleged that Rose assaulted her with his fingers on June 1, 2024, around 12:30 a.m. in an alley behind a bakery on Commercial Street, according to a Provincetown police report. The next day, the woman wasn’t able to identify her assailant in a photo lineup, according to the report. Since then, the proceedings in district court Court have been underway. Rose is scheduled for an April 11 hearing at which his lawyer will argue a motion to suppress evidence, according to court documents. On the day of Rose’s arraignment, in 2024, though, a docket entry in the court file in Orleans District Court states that Rose has an ICE warrant. The entry continues with "declines to post bail at this time." On Feb. 28, 2025 — nine months later — Rose’s attorney filed a motion for a speedy trial while Rose was held at the Plymouth House of Correction, court records showed. In a March 4, 2025, docket entry, Rose is listed as detained in the custody of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the Plymouth jail. Rose is currently being held in ICE custody, his attorney Bradford Stanton confirmed. Stanton said he does not know when ICE took Rose into custody. Stanton said he’s unsure if Rose will actually be around to stand trial. "ICE may never let him go," said Stanton. "He may be deported long before I can ever get this case before a jury. That is the sad reality of our system right now."

CBS News [4/2/2025 2:22 PM, Alex Sundby, 51661K] reports that a mother and her three children were detained last month in an immigration operation in northern New York state near the U.S.-Canada border, according to an immigrant advocacy group. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said the operation was "just plain cruel" and called on the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to return the family to the state. The operation and outcry from officials come as the Trump administration carries out its controversial immigration crackdown throughout the country. Federal agents carried out the New York operation last Thursday at a dairy farm in the town of Hounsfield, according to CBS affiliate WWNY-TV. The Department of Homeland Security told the news station ICE and other federal law enforcement agencies had started conducting operations in parts of New York to enforce immigration law on March 24. WWNY-TV reported eight people were detained at the farm, according to officials. An immigrant advocacy group, the New York Immigration Coalition, said the mother and her children were detained in the operation and sent to a detention facility in Texas. The group didn’t identify the mother or her children, but its leader said their case had been working its way through the U.S. immigration system.

NBC News [4/2/2025 7:43 AM, Patrick Smith, 44742K] reports New York Governor Kathy Hochul, advocacy groups and local school leaders have expressed shock and alarm over the detention of three children and their mother as President Donald Trump’s administration continues efforts to deport hundreds of non-citizens without any court proceedings or criminal charges. The New York Immigration Coalition, a nonprofit that campaigns for immigrant rights, confirmed that the unidentified family — one of whom is in the third grade — was detained by ICE at a dairy farm in Sackets Harbor, New York. The family was then taken to the Karnes County Detention Facility in Texas, some 1,800 miles away, the nonprofit said. "It is horrifying that these children and their mother were snatched from their home and disappeared," Murad Awawdeh, the group’s president and CEO, said in a statement. He added that the family was "correctly navigating the immigration system and attending their immigration court hearings." Trump and border czar Tom Homan were, he said, "acting fully outside the law." Both ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to NBC News’ request for comment. Sackets Harbor is a town in Jefferson County on the shores of Lake Ontario, 10 miles west of Watertown. On Saturday, a rally is being planned in Sackets Harbor to call for the family’s release. NBC affiliate WPTZ of Plattsburgh, New York, reported that ICE agents searched the farm last Thursday for Marcell Meyer, who was charged with possessing images of child sexual abuse. It is not clear how that arrest relates to the family’s detention, but it appears agents were originally there to find Meyer.

Univision [4/2/2025 4:07 PM, Staff, 5325K] reports federal immigration agents detained a mother and her three children at a home in upstate New York without a warrant during an operation not originally targeted at the family. The children, who are third-, tenth-, and eleventh-graders in the Sackets Harbor School District, were transported with their mother to Texas. The family had been following established immigration procedures, regularly attending their court dates as part of their regularization process, according to Senator Luis Sepúlveda. Local authorities and civil society organizations continue to question the legality of the procedure and demand answers about the justification for this intervention, which has separated a family from their community.

Yahoo! News [4/2/2025 6:21 PM, Ricardo Kaulessar, 52868K] reports U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has plans to reopen Delaney Hall in Newark to process detained immigrants as part of President Donald Trump’s deportation push. The city of Newark is saying "not so fast.” The city filed a lawsuit in Essex County Superior Court on Tuesday to "cease occupancy [and] construction, and permit entry for inspection" of the facility located on Doremus Avenue, in an industrial area on the outskirts of Newark. In February, ICE announced that it had reached an agreement with the owner of the 1,196-bed building, the GEO Group, to make Delaney Hall the first detention center to open during Trump’s second presidency. ICE said the center would help fulfill Trump’s "mandate to arrest, detain, and remove illegal aliens from our communities.” Trump has been adamant about achieving the mass deportation of 11 million people, some of whom could end up being held at Delaney Hall. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka speaks to a crowd gathered in opposition to ICE on Tuesday, Mar. 11, 2025, after ICE released a statement last week announcing the opening of Delaney Hall in Newark, NJ as a detention center. The GEO Group had been seeking legal means to get the facility reopened. Last year, the company sued Gov. Phil Murphy and state Attorney General Matthew Platkin to stop enforcement of a state law passed in 2021 that prohibits local jails from entering into new contracts to house federal immigration detainees. Newark’s lawsuit against the GEO Group (called the "GEO Re-Entry Group" in the document) said that the prison company, the second largest in the United States, did not file any construction permits with the city. GEO Group also did not seek a certificate of continued occupancy that would be required as a result of "the recent change in tenants at the property," according to the lawsuit, which said city officials were stopped by security when they attempted to inspect the facility on March 31. According to the suit, city officials at their March 31 visit observed "electrical work" and "plumbing work" had been done in a new annex structure for the facility built in the parking lot, both requiring a permit.

Yahoo! News [4/2/2025 7:37 PM, Alex Woodward, 52868K] reprots the wife of a Salvadoran man Donald Trump’s administration admits was mistakenly deported to that country’s notorious prison says she is "very scared" for her husband’s safety. "I’ve seen news of that prison, and I know they take criminals there. And my husband’s not a criminal," Jennifer Vasquez Sura told CBS News. Her husband Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador on March 15, joining dozens of mostly Venezuelan immigrants on removal flights after Donald Trump secretly invoked the Alien Enemies Act to summarily deport alleged Tren de Aragua gang members. Two of the planes were sent to El Salvador under that wartime authority, and a third plane was supposed to only be carrying immigrants with court orders for their removal. Abrego Garcia was on that plane — something administration officials have called an "oversight.” In 2019, a judge had blocked Abrego Garcia’s removal after credible testimony that he fears violence and death in his home country, which he fled in 2011 when he was 16 years old. Under that order, he is allowed to remain in the United States legally, and must attend regular check-ins with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. His most recent appearance was in January, according to court documents. He has no criminal record in either the United States or El Salvador, according to his attorney. He has been living in Maryland with his wife and five-year-old child, both U.S. citizens, and helping raise two children from a previous relationship.

CNN [4/2/2025 7:19 PM, Lauren del Valle, 22131K] reports a federal judge is set to consider motions to release Georgetown University fellow Badar Khan Suri on bond while litigation continues over his revoked visa. Khan Suri’s attorneys have also asked the court to compel ICE to transfer him back to the federal district in Virginia where his petition was filed. The hearing is scheduled for April 11. After his arrest March 17, according to the bond motion, Khan Suri was held in a staging facility in Louisiana before being driven days later to a detention center in Alvarado, Texas, where he’s now being held. The Indian national has been housed in a crowded detention center and had no access to accommodations for Ramadan, Khan Suri’s attorneys say in the filing. “Rather than experiencing the holy month of Ramadan with his wife and children, in the company of their community and practice of prayer and rituals that usually mark the month for the family, Dr. Khan Suri languishes in federal detention in a crowded unit, sleeping on the floor, without access to religious accommodations,” the filing says. Before his arrest, Khan Suri was a postdoctoral fellow in Georgetown’s Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding with a contract through December 2026. According to the motion for his bail, Khan Suri’s scholarship, research and teaching position have been “indefinitely suspended.” A letter from Georgetown’s dean of the School of Foreign Service, filed with the bond motion, says the institution would consider resuming Khan Suri’s position with his contract if his visa is reinstated. It also says Khan Suri posed no threat to the Georgetown campus. “During his time on campus, I am not aware that Dr. Suri has engaged in any illegal activity, nor has he posed a threat to the security of our campus. He has been focused on completing his research on South Asia and teaching his students,” the March 24 letter from Joel Hellman says. The Justice Department has asked the court to defer decision on the motion to return Khan Suri to the district until it rules on the government’s motion to dismiss or transfer the case. Tuesday, DOJ attorneys filed a motion to dismiss or transfer the case, arguing the federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, does not have jurisdiction over the case because Khan Suri wasn’t detained in the district when his petition was filed. He was already in Louisiana when the petition was filed, amid his transfer to Texas, DOJ attorneys say.

Miami Herald [4/2/2025 5:30 AM, Ana Ceballos, 3973K] reports Florida troopers patrolling the state’s roadways are being told to arrest and jail undocumented immigrants on offenses like driving without a valid driver’s license as a way to help push more people on the path to deportation, according to state guidelines obtained by the Herald/Times. "Every effort should be made to take the subject into custody and deliver them to a county jail," Bill Milton, the chief attorney for the Florida Highway Patrol, wrote in the March 6 memo. The previously unreported guidelines also say troopers can detain people who are not suspected of committing a crime for up to an hour, an amount of time that raises questions about potential violations of a person’s constitutional protection against unreasonable seizure. The legal guidance lays out how the state is telling troopers they must handle encounters with immigrants who are wanted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement while they remain without the federal authority to carry out immigration arrests. It also shows how the state agency — whose mission is to create a safe driving environment in Florida — is trying to make headway in how it can help in President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, even as the federal government is slow to grant troopers the federal authority they are seeking to more directly participate in federal immigration enforcement efforts. Gov. Ron DeSantis last month said state troopers who are granted federal authority would be able to help "assist with deportations." Dave Kerner, the executive director for the state agency, said troopers would be able to arrest immigrants who are in the country illegally during traffic stops, even in cases when they are not committing a crime.

Yahoo! News [4/2/2025 6:04 PM, Staff, 52868K] reports in March 2025, a rumor circulated online that a 500-person-capacity Miami detention center was housing 4,000 detainees for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. One Facebook post (archived) – which users had shared more than 16,000 times as of this writing – claimed the center had "slowly begun the process of killing [detainees]" by giving them only one cup of water every 24 hours. No recent data is available regarding the number of detainees housed at the Krome North Service Processing Center (also known as the Krome Detention Facility) west of Miami. We wrote to ICE seeking recent data, and we will update this story if we receive a response. If the center’s population correlates with national data, however, it’s likely the number of detainees housed at Krome has ballooned since U.S. President Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025. In March, ICE reported that it made 32,809 enforcement arrests in the first 50 days of Trump’s presidency, compared with 33,242 of these at-large arrests in all of 2024.

Miami Herald [4/2/2025 6:22 PM, Sara Schilling, 3973K] reports a Little League coach arranged to meet up with a 13-year-old girl for sex acts, but the "girl" was an undercover sheriff’s deputy and the coach is now headed to prison, federal prosecutors in Florida said. Joseph Rocco Quaranta, 48, from Dunnellon, was sentenced to 10 years in prison, plus a lifetime of supervised release, in connection with attempted enticement of a minor to engage in sexual activity, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida said in an April 1 news release. Quaranta pleaded guilty in November, prosecutors said. Quaranta is accused of engaging "in a sexually explicit conversation" with the deputy, who was posing as a 13-year-old girl, and arranging to meet "to engage in sexual activity," prosecutors said. Quaranta was arrested after he showed up at the meeting place, according to prosecutors. Quaranta responded to a post an undercover deputy made on an escort website purporting to be a girl named Stevie, an affidavit said. Quaranta’s sentencing "serves as a reminder that predatory action against children will not be tolerated, and we will use every resource at our disposal to ensure that justice is served," David Pezzutti, an official with Homeland Security Investigations, said in the news release.

Chicago Tribune [4/2/2025 6:25 PM, Laura Rodríguez Presa, 5269K] reports the attorney representing two Venezuelan siblings announced Wednesday that one of the brothers will be released from ICE custody under supervision in order to donate his kidney to his ailing younger brother, an asylum-seeker in Cicero. The attorney, Peter Meinecke, and The Resurrection Project, a nonprofit advocacy group representing the case, told the Tribune that José Gregorio González, 43, would likely be released this week from detention in Clay County Detention Center in Indiana, though details were still unclear. His brother, Alfredo Pacheco, 37, is facing terminal renal failure. Last month, the Tribune was the first to report that González had been arrested by the U.S. Immigration and Customs authorities and was awaiting deportation. Earlier this week, the local ICE agency denied González a request for a stay of removal, which ultimately delays the deportation process while legal proceedings or appeals are pending. And the family was awaiting a request for humanitarian parole.

Washington Post [4/2/2025 5:17 PM, Kim Bellware, 31735K] reports that a Venezuelan man who came to the United States to donate a kidney to his ailing brother but faced deportation before he could undergo surgery will be temporarily released from custody, “allowing him to save his brother’s life,” immigration advocates said Wednesday afternoon. José Gregorio González was detained last month outside Chicago, sparking outcry from his community and immigration advocates. Family supporters said José Alfredo Pacheco’s life was on the line if González was deported before he could donate the organ, while immigration advocates worried what a case like González’s signaled about the ability of detainees to appeal deportations on humanitarian grounds in the Trump era. The terms of González’s release, including where he can stay and how long he can recover in the United States, were not immediately clear Wednesday. “This marks a victory for humanity and compassion,” Erendira Rendón, chief programs officer for Chicago-based the Resurrection Project, which is representing Gonález’s case, said in a statement Wednesday. ICE officials did not respond to a series of questions about González’s case, including whether he had specific terms to his supervision and who granted his appeal amid reports the Department of Homeland Security is seeking to dramatically limit parole.

Miami Herald [4/2/2025 1:08 PM, Paul Walsh, 3973K] reports that a jailed University of Minnesota student from Turkey alleges in a court petition that federal agents illegally arrested him last week and stripped him of his student visa. Dogukan Gunaydin, 28, filed the petition in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis on Sunday. It names as respondents President Donald Trump and Cabinet members, in connection with his apprehension outside his St. Paul home by Homeland Security agents and the revocation of his visa because of a drunken driving offense. There is no indication that U.S. Immigration and Customs and Enforcement (ICE) targeted Günaydin for any protest activities in opposition to White House policies, as has been the case for other international college students as part of a broader federal crackdown. DWI arrests are a common way for unlawful immigrants to catch the attention of ICE, and the agency has prioritized such cases recently amid Trump’s push for mass deportations. "Mr. Gunaydin has committed no crime that is cause for termination of his student status or that renders him deportable," his petition asserted. It pointed out that he "has attended no protests and written no politically driven publications… Neither Mr. Gunaydin nor his counsel has been provided with any documentation or indication that he may be facing a charge related to national security or foreign policy."

Reported similarly:
CBS Minnesota [4/2/2025 7:16 PM, David Schuman, 51661K] Video: HERE

Minnesota Public Radio [4/2/2025 7:54 PM, Matt Sepic, 60K] reports a federal judge in St. Paul on Wednesday gave immigration officials two days to say why they’re detaining a University of Minnesota graduate student. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Doğukan Günaydin outside his St. Paul home on March 27. After Günaydin filed suit against ICE, President Donald Trump, and other government officials, U.S. Magistrate Judge Douglas Micko ordered the government to explain why it’s continuing to keep Günaydin jailed. Micko wrote that the government’s answer should include documentation "to establish the lawfulness and correct duration of Doğukan G.’s detention.” Günaydin, 28, is studying for a master’s degree at the Carlson School of Management and received his bachelor’s degree from St. Olaf College. The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement Monday that Günaydin was arrested "after a visa revocation" related to a drunk driving conviction. MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all. But in the lawsuit, immigration attorney Hannah Brown argues that the visa revocation is invalid in part because agents arrested Günaydin seven hours before DHS revoked his permission to remain in the United States. She also argues that the DWI conviction is not a legal basis to deport her client.

Univision Austin [4/2/2025 6:24 PM, Staff, 5325K] reports following a search of a residence in Hays County, at least 40 individuals, suspected of being members of the Tren de Aragua gang, were arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The ICE office in San Antonio reported that it has been investigating the Aragua Train operation in Hays County for a year. The investigation culminated in a search warrant for the residence, where 40 people, including minors, were found, and an undisclosed amount of narcotics was also seized. The FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the San Antonio Police Department, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and other federal, state, and local agencies collaborated on the investigation. The search was executed by the DPS Special Response Team. State and federal prosecutors will evaluate potential charges facing those arrested. FOX News [4/2/2025 2:33 PM, Cameron Arcand, 46189K] reports "In recent days, [FBI San Antonio] developed intelligence regarding a possible gathering of suspected members or associates of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TdA) in Hays Co. Early Tuesday morning, a search warrant was executed by [Texas Department of Public Safety’s] Special Response Team at a residence in the area — resulting in more than 40 arrests," Texas DPS posted to X. "For more than a year, law enforcement — including DPS, FBI, federal, state and local partners — have been investigating suspected TdA members, and Tuesday’s operation is a result of this collaborative effort to make Texas communities safer," the agency continued. Charges from Texas and the U.S. government have not been announced yet, as they are still "currently under investigation." They noted that minors were also taken into custody and there were drug seizures as a result of the search warrant executed. The arrests were met with praise from some Texas officials.

Newsweek [4/2/2025 7:07 AM, Billal Rahman, 52220K] reports a Texas mother who has lived in the United States for nearly four decades was detained in her driveway by federal immigration agents, leaving her family devastated and fighting for her release. Exclusive footage obtained by Newsweek shows Angela Cristina Gonzalez Cardona, 50, hugging her son, who is autistic, moments before masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents take her away outside her home in Laredo. Her daughter, Claudia Gonzalez, told Newsweek Angela was preparing to leave for work in the early morning hours when ICE agents suddenly surrounded her vehicle. Claudia claimed that ICE agents said that they "wouldn’t leave empty-handed.” Newsweek has contacted ICE for further comment. Claudia, who was not present at the scene, shared details of the incident based on what her family had recounted. "She was pulling out of her driveway, and her boyfriend got out to move the trash cans. They parked in front and behind her and then started harassing my mom’s boyfriend. They tried to take him, but he was telling them he was a U.S. citizen and showed his Texas ID," she said. The officers then turned their focus to Angela, questioning her about her immigration status, Claudia said. She said that her mother explained that she was from El Salvador and had documentation proving she was legally allowed to remain in the U.S. while awaiting a decision on her Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) application. VAWA is a federal law designed to provide protections for immigrant victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, and other crimes. Under VAWA, eligible individuals may apply for legal status without the need for their abuser’s cooperation. This law is a critical safeguard for many immigrant survivors of abuse who are otherwise at risk of deportation. Despite her explanations, ICE agents allegedly refused to let her retrieve her documents and asked for information about another individual they claimed to be searching for. When she told them he no longer lived there, her boyfriend offered to take them to the individual in question, but they refused, according to Claudia. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

AP [4/2/2025 12:49 PM, Ureil J. Garcia , 24727K] reports that the state Senate on Tuesday passed a proposal that would require some Texas sheriffs to enter into agreements with the federal government to help identify undocumented immigrants accused of crimes. Senate Bill 8, filed by Republican state Sens. Joan Huffman of Houston and Charles Schwertner of Georgetown, would require sheriffs in counties with more than 100,000 residents to request a 287(g) agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The bill would also create a $20 million fund to give grants to sheriff’s offices in counties with fewer than 1 million residents that enter into agreements with ICE. The grants would help cover costs a county would incur as part of a 287(g) agreement, such as detaining a person in jail for potential immigration violations. The bill, which passed on a 20-11 vote, also allows the state Attorney General’s Office to sue a sheriff if the state believes that a sheriff is not complying with the law. The bill was amended to allow the attorney general to file such lawsuits in the sheriff’s county rather than in Travis County, where government-related lawsuits are typically filed. Travis County is also one of the state’s more liberal counties. The bill now moves on to the state House of Representatives.

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Telemundo [4/2/2025 6:55 PM, Staff, 11K]

AP [4/2/2025 2:52 PM, Colleen Slevin, 48304K] reports that the second of two men who escaped from a Colorado immigration detention center during a power outage last month was arrested Tuesday after being found on a bus in Denver, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said. Originally suspected of shoplifting and resisting arrest, the 24-year-old from Venezuela had been picked up by ICE in February and is accused of ties to Tren de Aragua, a gang that gained global notoriety after U.S. President Donald Trump put it at the center of his efforts to deport immigrants accused of crimes. Geilond Vido-Romero was caught while riding a bus on Colfax Avenue, the city’s main east-west street, said the U.S. Marshals Service in Denver, which helped in the arrest. In a social media post, the agency said he was a "suspected Tren de Aragua (TdA) associate." Vido-Romero apparently walked out of doors that opened during a power outage on March 18 at ICE’s privately-operated detention center in Aurora, Colorado. A man from Mexico who escaped at the same time, Joel Gonzalez-Gonzalez, 32, was found three days later in nearby Adams County where he had been previously held in jail. A U.S. Marshals spokesperson did not immediately respond to a telephone call or email seeking more details about Vido-Romero’s arrest and ties to the gang from Venezuela, which started in a prison there. Vido-Romero was originally arrested Feb. 26 by police at the Park Meadows mall after a running from officers in the parking garage, according to an arrest affidavit. ICE said it found him in the nearby jail and arrested him the next day. He does not have an attorney listed as representing him in that case.

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FOX News [4/2/2025 7:03 PM, Louis Casiano, 46189K]

AZCentral [4/2/2025 8:02 AM, Daniel Gonzalez, 4457K] reports that, as Republican Arizona lawmakers push forward state legislation aimed at helping President Donald Trump ramp up his federal mass deportation agenda, some pro-immigrant advocacy groups are trying to figure out how to fight back. They are building a grassroots "resistance" movement modeled on experience gained battling Arizona’s 2010 immigration enforcement law Senate Bill 1070 and former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s immigration sweeps, which prompted protests, boycotts, lawsuits and voter registration campaigns. "During those very dark times of SB 1070 and Sheriff Joe Arpaio, we saw communities across the state stand up and voice their opposition," said Victoria Lopez, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona. "And we’re seeing that now, at the state level and at the federal level." Lopez was speaking to about 100 people at a March 31 event at South Mountain Community College to discuss ways of resisting mass deportations. The meeting was organized by the ACLU of Arizona and Living United for Change in Arizona, or LUCHA, a group that advocates for working-class families. Lopez said Arizona served as a testing ground for immigration enforcement measures, including SB 1070 and Arpaio’s immigration sweeps, that paved the way for the immigration crackdown that took place during Trump’s first term. "Arizona has long been known as a laboratory for some of the harshest, most cruel, anti-immigrant laws," Lopez said. Now Republicans are pushing forward more immigration enforcement measures at the Republican-controlled state Legislature intended to help the Trump administration carry out the largest mass deportations in U.S. history, Lopez said.

AP [4/2/2025 7:50 PM, Staff, 1769K] reports federal immigration agents arrested 37 people Wednesday during a raid at a roofing business in northern Washington. Officers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations and Customs and Border Patrol arrived at Mt. Baker Roofing’s warehouse around 7:30 a.m. in Bellingham, a city near the Canadian border. "They (law enforcement) arrived wielding their guns like they were going to shoot us, like we were criminals," Tomas Fuerte told Cascadia Daily News, speaking in Spanish. "They corralled us into a room in the back of the building. They had a list and pictures of everyone who was undocumented and took them away.” The people detained were taken away in two buses, Fuerte said, adding that he has never seen such a raid in his 12 years at the company. ICE spokesperson David Yost said in a statement that the officers executed a federal search warrant "based on an ongoing criminal investigation into the unlawful employment of aliens without legal work authorization in violation of federal law.” The 37 people who were arrested had "fraudulently represented their immigration status and submitted fraudulent documents and/or information to seek employment," Yost said.

Reported similarly:
Yahoo! News [4/2/2025 7:12 PM, Will Wixey, 52868K]

KTLA [4/2/2025 2:56 PM, Iman Palm] reports California State Superintendent Tony Thurmond announced Wednesday that he will present a bill that aims to limit the presence of ICE agents on school campuses. Under President Trump’s executive order, ICE is now allowed to target migrants at sensitive locations, like schools and churches, for arrests and potential deportations. Senate Bill 48, authored by State Senate Lena Gonzalez (D- Long Beach) and sponsored by Thurmond, will "address safety concerns of immigrant families and protect school funding that is projected to decline in some parts of the state as attendance is suppressed as undocumented individuals fear deportation consequences at school," a news release said. The bill is in direct protest to Trump’s calls to lead mass deportation efforts at schools and houses of worship.

ABC News [4/2/2025 5:14 AM, Armando Garcia, Laura Romero, and Peter Charalambous, 34586K] reports that, over the last month, the Trump administration has sent over 200 alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador to be detained in a notorious mega-prison with a track record of human rights abuses. An official with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has acknowledged that "many" of the men lack criminal records in the United States -- but said that "the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose" and "demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.” The families of some of the men -- who learned about their whereabouts by seeing them in promotional videos shared by the El Salvadoran and United States governments -- have denied any gang affiliation in court filings and shared their stories with ABC News. They said that they fear for the safety of their loved ones and do not know if they will ever return. Escalona was detained by U.S. authorities last year when he tried to enter the United States to seek asylum with his partner Yorely Bernal Inciarte and their one-year old baby. The family was immediately separated, with Escalona sent to a detention center in El Paso, Texas. On Sunday, Escalona was deported to El Salvador under Title 8, with authorities alleging he was a member of Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua -- an accusation his family denies. "They are liars," said Raida, Inciarte’s mother, of the Trump administration. "I cannot believe that half of Venezuela is Tren de Aragua. That can’t be.”

FOX News [4/2/2025 10:53 AM, Julia Bonavita, 46189K] reports that a Chinese national has been sentenced to federal prison for exploiting a little-known loophole in an effort to ferry a dozen illegal migrants to a U.S. territory. Zhongli Pang, 36, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to transport illegal immigrants and conspiracy to defraud the United States after attempting to smuggle 12 Chinese nationals to the territory of Guam, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced on Tuesday. "The arrest of Mr. Pang is a testament to HSI’s continued efforts to deter the extremely dangerous and unlawful movement of illegal aliens within the CNMI," Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Special Agent in Charge Lucy Cabral-DeArmas said. "By holding criminals accountable, HSI works with state and local authorities to thwart future violations, ensuring the safety of our communities through continuing partnerships.” Pang attempted to exploit a little-known loophole allowing Chinese visitors to travel to the Northern Mariana Islands without a visa, according to prosecutors. However, Chinese migrants will occasionally take advantage of the visa waiver to sail to Guam, where a U.S. visa is required. The DOJ and an attorney for Pang did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment. A federal judge sentenced Pang to three months in federal prison with credit for time served and 50 hours of community service.

Newsweek [4/2/2025 10:13 AM, Billal Rahman, 52220K] reports that Republican lawmakers are pushing for restrictions on dual citizenship for members of Congress. "Dual citizens elected to the United States Congress should renounce citizenship in all other countries," Rep. Thomas Massie said in a statement. Republicans are looking to reshape U.S. citizenship laws to align with their agenda, with several lawmakers supporting changes to how dual citizenship is handled in Congress. At the same time, ending birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants has emerged as a central focus of the administration’s hard-line immigration agenda, especially after President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at challenging the long-established legal precedent. Republican Rep. Thomas Massie said in a statement to Fox News Digital on Monday that he does not believe individuals holding citizenship in foreign countries should serve in the U.S. legislature. Massie introduced the "Dual Loyalty Disclosure Act," with GOP Representatives Andy Biggs, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Clay Higgins serving as original cosponsors. Massie said in a press release that dual citizens elected to serve in Congress should consider renouncing their foreign citizenship. "At a minimum, they should disclose their citizenship in other countries and abstain from votes specifically benefitting those countries," Massie said. "If we are going to continue to allow Members of Congress to acquire and retain citizenship in other countries, they should at least be required to disclose to voters all countries of which they consider themselves to be citizens," he added.

Washington Post [4/2/2025 12:45 PM, Tobi Raji, 31735K] reports that Christina Schoendorf’s clients at United Community Ministries in Alexandria, Virginia, come from around the globe, but they have one thing in common: They all want to become U.S. citizens. In 2023, the Department of Homeland Security awarded United Community a nearly $200,000, two-year grant to help immigrants, such as those from Afghanistan and Ivory Coast, prepare for citizenship. Through the Citizenship and Integration Grant Program (also known as the Citizenship and Assimilation program), Schoendorf had hoped to expand the organization’s services to help an additional 120 people become naturalized. “They work very hard. They work more than one job. They have families, they have responsibilities, but on top of that, they are trying to do what it takes to become a U.S. citizen,” Schoendorf said of the prospective Americans she works with. But the group’s plan was thrown into disarray this past week when DHS abruptly canceled the grant program, eliminating more than $22 million in federal funding. United Community is among the dozens of community and faith-based groups, public libraries, and adult education and literacy organizations that received notices Thursday informing them that their work “no longer effectuates the program goals and the Department’s priorities.” The decision to cut the grant program came in response to a directive from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem to “restrict grant funding to sanctuary cities,” a senior DHS official said in a statement to The Washington Post.

Newsweek [4/2/2025 2:56 PM, Nick Mordowanec, 52220K] reports legal officials associated with one national group are urging people from the United States to reconsider traveling internationally because of growing ambiguity in immigration laws. The Trump administration has been aggressive in its revamping of the immigration system, which in recent weeks has resulted in various countries advising caution to citizens traveling to the U.S. on visas or green cards after recent apprehensions. Administration officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, have filmed video messages posted through U.S. Embassy social media pages across the world, warning that visas or other forms of identification do not guarantee stays if individuals act unruly or "undermine national security." The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is warning people traveling internationally outside the U.S. or those entering the country to be wary of phone searches by federal immigration authorities—whether individuals have full citizenship or not. CAIR-Massachusetts Executive Director Tahirah Amtul-Wadud told Newsweek that the seemingly increasing ambiguity in U.S. immigration law is getting worse.

Telemundo 48 [4/2/2025 2:31 PM, Andres Brender and Catalina Ruiz, 34K] reports that are you an international student or DACA recipient unsure whether you can travel abroad and re-enter the country without any issues amid the current immigration situation in the United States? In this new guide on Immigration and Your Rights, we clarify your doubts on this topic. If you are a DACA recipient, you may leave the country as long as you have travel authorization through Form I-131, which is issued by USCIS. And if you are an international student with an F-1 visa, you can leave and return to the US under certain conditions so that your immigration status is not affected. In addition to notifying your school or university, you must have a valid passport and F-1 visa upon return. However, given the current situation, immigration experts, such as Ángel Rodríguez, recommend that DACA recipients and international students refrain from leaving the country unless it is truly urgent or necessary. "Every time you re-enter the United States, you have to understand that you risk having your case reviewed by Immigration," Rodríguez explained. For this reason, the attorney recommended doing so "only for school or work-related emergencies." And if you plan to travel within the United States, this is his advice: "Anti-immigrant states are not recommended because they could still cause problems at airports... Immigration is attentive to the people who board their flights," Rodríguez stated.

CBS Philadelphia [4/2/2025 3:22 PM, Tom Dougherty, 51661K] reports a Temple University student had their visa revoked by the Department of State, according to a letter President John Fry sent to the university’s community. Fry said that at this time, only one student had their student visa revoked by the State Department. It comes after Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last week that 300 student visas were revoked, claiming "we have a right" to rescind visas of students who participate in campus protests. The Trump administration’s crackdown on students with visas and green cards has raised legal questions about due process and the First Amendment. According to Fry, the university informed the student of their change in visa status, and the student opted to return home. Fry said the university has helped provide legal counsel to the student and has spoken with officials from their home country. Fry said there have been no reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Customs and Border Protection agents on campus. The university has a protocol in place for what employees, students, or clinical patients should do if they come across ICE agents.

Philadelphia Inquirer [4/2/2025 2:37 PM, Susan Snyder, 2629K] reports a Temple University student whose visa has been revoked has chosen to self-deport, the university said in a campus message Wednesday. The university said the visa was "revoked at the discretion of the United States Secretary of State," but did not release details about the student or the student’s home country, why the visa was revoked, or if the student had participated in pro-Palestinian campus protests. But it comes amid the federal government’s efforts to deport students who have been involved in pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, as well as for other reasons. Martyn J. Miller, Temple’s assistant vice president of global engagement, said he was not aware of any protest activity by the Temple student or any other violations that would have affected the student’s status. While the student received an email notification about the visa revocation, the student was given no reason, he said.

Minnesota Star Tribune [4/3/2025 12:32 AM, Elliot Hughes and Jp Lawrence] reports a few days after an international student was detained by immigration authorities, five other students at Minnesota State University, Mankato have seen their student visas terminated. The development was announced in a statement late Wednesday by the university’s president, Edward Inch. He said neither the university nor the students received notification of the termination of their records within the Student Exchange Visitor Information System by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The changes were only discovered after the university “ran a status check.” Jameel Haque, a professor of history and the director of the school’s Kessel Peace Institute, attended an assembly Wednesday in which Inch revealed the developments. He said the students have not been detained by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Instead, they have been asked to self-deport within 60 days. Inch said in his statement that the university is assisting with immigration attorney referrals to the affected students and is connecting with all other international students to inform them of their rights and resources available to them. In the last week, two university students in Minnesota have been detained by ICE – an unidentified student at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and another, Doğukan Günaydin, at the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus. It is unclear why the Mankato student was detained. But earlier this week, Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement that Günaydin’s arrest was not because of activism but because of a prior drunk driving conviction. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last week that 300 student visas had been revoked and argued the country had a right to do so for students who “participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we’re not going to give you a visa.”

NBC News [4/2/2025 4:57 PM, Chloe Atkins, 50804K] reports several international students at Colorado universities have had their visas revoked by the Department of Homeland Security, according to the universities. Between the University of Colorado and Colorado State University, 10 students have had their F-1 visa, which allows foreign students to study at universities in America, rescinded as of Tuesday evening. The University of Colorado said four international students were impacted. Meanwhile, six students at Colorado State University had their visas terminated, according to the school. “We are focused on supporting the success of all of our students, including international students. Each one of our students are seeking to advance their careers and the lives of their families, and we understand the anxieties that visa revocations cause to impacted students," the University of Colorado said in a statement. Colorado State University said the "affected students are advised to immediately contact the embassy of their home country" and "we are working with our state and federal elected officials to ensure that our students are informed of all their options." The universities declined to provide additional information or the students’ identity, citing privacy reasons. A year ago, Ozturk co-wrote a student newspaper op-ed criticizing the university’s response to demands that it “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and “divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.” Authorities also detained Badar Khan Suri, a graduate student from India, who was teaching at Georgetown University on a student visa. Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said Suri was “actively spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media” and had "close connections to a known or suspected terrorist, who is a senior advisor to Hamas.” Khalil, Ozturk and Suri do not face known criminal charges. CBS News [4/1/2025 9:05 PM, Austen Erblat, Anna Alejo, 51661K] reports CU said this impacted students at its Boulder and Colorado Springs campuses and the visas were revoked by the Department of Homeland Security. It’s not yet clear if any of the students whose visas were revoked in Colorado are accused of any crimes or why their visas were revoked. The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that 300 student visas have been revoked. Many, if not all, of those revocations were related to students who participated in campus protests, despite questions about due process and First Amendment objections. "If you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student, and you tell us that the reason why you’re coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op-eds, but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we’re not going to give you a visa," Rubio said. "If you lie to us and get a visa, then enter the United States, and with that visa, participate in that sort of activity, we’re going to take away your visa."

Reported similarly:
Colorado Public Radio [4/2/2025 4:27 PM, Allison Sherry and Ben Markus, 574K]

Yahoo! News [4/2/2025 10:47 PM, Danny Peterson, 52868K] reports an international student at the University of Oregon had their F-1 visa terminated by federal authorities last week, UO confirmed to KOIN 6 News. As originally reported by The Oregonian, the student’s nonimmigration visa was terminated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, citing "unspecified criminal charges.” A UO spokesperson confirmed to KOIN 6 News that the student’s visa was terminated on Friday, March 28. The spokesperson said the university was not notified of the termination or given any advanced warning about the situation. "The university is required to inform students when their F-1 visa status is terminated and that they are given 15 days to leave the country unless they have another legal pathway for remaining," said Angela Seydel, a UO spokesperson. "We are working to understand more about this situation and are committed to handling this matter with care and respect for the student’s privacy. When a student’s visa is revoked, the university offers any assistance we can provide.” The spokesperson went on to say the university wasn’t given any details about the reason for the terminated visa, nor did they bring the individual to the attention of federal authorities and weren’t involved in any decisions regarding their status. "We recognize that this situation may raise questions and concerns in our community," the university spokesperson said. KOIN 6 News reached out to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security but has not heard back.

The AP [4/2/2025 3:02 PM, Megan Janetsky] reports the U.S. State Department revoked the visas of members of a Mexican band after they projected the face of a drug cartel boss onto a large screen during a performance in the western state of Jalisco over the weekend. U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, who was U.S. ambassador to Mexico during the first Trump administration, said late Tuesday on X that the work and tourism visas of members of Los Alegres del Barranco were revoked. The controversy broke out over the weekend when the face of Nemesio Rubén "El Mencho" Oseguera layered over flames was projected behind the band, originally hailing from Sinaloa, during the concert. Finger pointing ensued among the band, concert producers and the venue. Yahoo! News [4/2/2025 9:16 AM, Vanessa Buschschlüter, 52868K] reports El Mencho, whose real name is Nemesio Oseguera Ramos, is the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), one of the most feared transnational drug trafficking gangs. The CJNG is one of eight criminal groups which the Trump administration recently declared "foreign terrorist organisations" as part of its strategy to "ensure the total elimination" of these groups in the US. In a post on X, Landau wrote "in the Trump Administration, we take seriously our responsibility over foreigners’ access to our country". He added that "the last thing we need is a welcome mat for people who extol criminals and terrorists". The band fell foul of both the US and the Mexican authorities on Saturday when they displayed an image of El Mencho during their concert in the Mexican city of Zapopan. It was projected while they played a song which praises him as "a man of war who loves his family" and extols his exploits as the leader of the "cartel with four letters", a thinly veiled reference to the CJNG. Narcocorridos, songs praising drug cartel leaders, are not uncommon in Mexico. Many bands playing norteña music - a genre characterised by catchy lyrics often sung to a polka-inspired rhythm and accompanied by an accordion and the twelve-stringed bajo sexto - are paid by drug barons to compose these songs. Some bands rely on income early in their careers from being hired to play at private parties, many of which are hosted by people involved in or with connections to the cartels. The song praising El Mencho is not the only narcocorrido in Los Alegres del Barranco’s repertoire. An earlier song entitled The 701 is about the leader of the Sinaloa cartel, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, and how he rose to number 701 in Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s richest people. Composed before El Chapo was jailed, it describes him as "the world’s most wanted man" who is not only rich because he has "many banknotes" but also because he "can count on the friendship of the people", the song claims. The concert at which the band projected the image of El Mencho came just weeks after relatives searching for disappeared loved ones came across a ranch that has been described by the authorities as a "training and extermination camp" for the CJNG.

FOX News [4/2/2025 5:01 PM, William La Jeunesse, Lee Ross, 46189K] reports Trump administration officials tell Fox 85 miles of new border wall is expected to go up this year with plans for hundreds of miles more in 2026 and beyond. "Our absolute intent is to build as much wall as we need to get the border under control," says Border Patrol Chief Michael Banks. He recently boasted on X "back in business" with photos of one project along the Rio Grande in Texas. Over the past week, Fox has spotted work crews plugging gaps in the existing wall line east of Yuma, Ariz., and in a rugged area of San Diego known locally as "Smuggler’s Gulch." Other planned projects for this year include Jacumba, Calif., where, during the Biden administration, thousands of migrants – many from China – were seen crossing over the rugged landscape to then claim asylum. Most of whom were then released into the country to await further proceedings. That location and many others along the border are now much quieter than in recent years. In October, the San Diego sector averaged 451 illegal crossings every day. In March, under President Trump, that average daily number fell to 39.

CBS Austin [4/2/2025 5:53 PM, Kristine Frazao, 602K] reports the new reality at the southern border has been captured in the headlines in border cities and towns. The Los Angeles Times this week reported the "California-Mexico border once overwhelmed, now nearly empty." Last month, The Texas Tribune reported the same about migrant shelters. Now, U.S. Customs and Border Protection is using two words to describe the situation few thought possible: "Operational control.” "Operational control is what we’re trying to achieve. Trying to detect anyone and everything coming across the border illegally and have situational awareness of what’s going on in our area of responsibility," Jeffrey Stalnaker, who is the San Diego Border Patrol Chief, said in an interview with Fox News. The month of March just three years ago saw more than 222,000 southwest border encounters. The numbers hovered just below 200,000 the last two years, until March of 2025, with just 7,180. The Trump administration has made clear the border is essentially closed, bringing on the U.S. military to help. That’s part of the show of force here in the El Paso sector. The visual, the optics of vehicles like it’s a deterrent factor," Border Patrol Agent Orlando Marrero Rubio told KFOX.”

Washington Examiner [4/2/2025 4:18 PM, Anna Giaritelli, 2296K] reports March recorded the lowest number of illegal immigrant arrests at the southern border in nearly six decades, a point that Republicans proudly attributed to the Trump administration’s immigration policies. The number of immigrants arrested while attempting to illegally enter the United States last month stood at roughly 7,200 compared to 137,000 in March 2024, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data. However, immigration analysts called the government’s portrayal of the March statistics as the lowest in history a mischaracterization. The Washington Office on Latin America’s Defense Oversight program director, Adam Isacson, said monthly data is only available going back to 2000, so it is not accurate to say March was the lowest month of all time.

CBS New York [4/2/2025 12:45 PM, Hunter Geisel, 51661K] reports that a former New York City councilman who previously served a decade in prison for his role in bribery and fraud schemes was arrested at Miami International Airport over the weekend for possessing child pornography. According to court documents obtained by CBS News Miami, Daniel James Halloran was arrested on child porn possession and transportation charges on Saturday after being stopped by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) when he arrived at MIA from a flight that originated in Cuba. Halloran, 54, a Republican who represented the 19th District in Queens, was found guilty in 2014 by a federal jury of bribery and fraud for his involvement in a scheme to bribe GOP leaders so that New York State Sen. Malcolm Smith — a Democrat — could run for the Republican line in the 2013 NYC mayoral race. After his conviction, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison. According to the court documents, Halloran arrived Saturday at MIA on an American Airlines flight from Cuba on his way home to New York. Upon arrival, a CBP officer referred him for a secondary inspection. During the inspection, CBP officers examined Halloran’s personal property, including his iPhone and iPad, which he provided the passcodes to unlock. According to the court documents, the hidden folder on Halloran’s phone had approximately 1,362 videos. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

Reported similarly:
Yahoo! News [4/2/2025 12:31 PM, Muri Assuncao, 52868K]

Miami Herald [4/2/2025 9:56 AM, David Goodhue, 3973K] reports that several people got away from U.S. Border Patrol agents Wednesday morning, prompting a large search in the Lower Florida Keys. Witnesses describe a chaotic situation on U.S. 1 and the Seven Mile Bridge, with Monroe County sheriff’s deputies, Florida Highway Patrol troopers and state fish and wildlife police rushing to Big Pine Key to look for the escapees. Monroe County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Adam Linhardt said initial reports were that two people were in custody as of 11:30 a.m., and one person is still on the loose. But he deferred questions about the exact number of people involved to the Border Patrol. The Border Patrol told the Miami Herald it was still gathering information about the situation.

Telemundo 48 El Paso [4/2/2025 4:05 PM, Staff, 11K] reports the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office has identified three individuals involved in the robberies at Ulta Beauty stores. In one case, Sheriff’s deputies responded to a robbery on February 18, 2025, after two suspects stole approximately $1,900 worth of makeup and fled in a white GMC Acadia with Chihuahua, Mexico, license plates. Authorities identified the suspects as Aileen Rodriguez Escareno, 20, a U.S. citizen, and Jesus Alonso Reyes Guevara, 25, a Mexican citizen. Both suspects are linked to other robberies in El Paso, according to authorities. A subsequent investigation revealed that U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded Rodriguez and Guevara entering the United States in the same vehicle approximately 40 minutes before the robbery. Detectives issued arrest warrants for both suspects. On March 31, 2025, U.S. Customs agents identified Aileen Rodriguez Escareño as she attempted to enter the United States across the Paso del Norte Bridge in the same vehicle used in the robbery. Agents arrested Rodriguez, who was subsequently booked into the Paso County Center Jail. The vehicle in which Rodriguez was traveling was seized. Guevara remains at large. In a separate incident, Sheriff’s deputies responded to another robbery at the same Ulta Beauty location on March 4, 2025. A suspect stole approximately $500 worth of merchandise, including a hair dryer, before fleeing in a Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck with New Mexico license plates. The Texas Department of Public Safety was able to use its facial recognition system to identify the suspect from the footage as 42-year-old Adan Gutierrez.

The Texas Tribune [4/2/2025 3:03 PM, Alejandro Serrano, 1487K] reports the Texas Department of Public Safety, working with federal agencies on a joint investigation into a Venezuelan gang, arrested more than 40 people and seized drugs after serving a search warrant on an undisclosed Hays County residence, the state agency and the FBI announced Wednesday. A DPS and FBI news release said the warrant was executed after FBI agents "developed intelligence" earlier this week about a gathering of individuals tied to Tren de Aragua, a gang that started in Venezuelan prisons and has become a target of state and federal officials. DPS did not elaborate on how the dozens of detained people may be linked to the gang. It was not clear what potential crimes authorities believe the individuals had committed to be taken into custody. State and federal prosecutors plan to review evidence obtained during the execution of the search warrant to determine potential criminal charges, according to DPS and the FBI. The Austin American-Statesman [4/2/2025 3:53 PM, Elizabeth Zavala] reports that a task force of federal, state and local authorities has arrested more than 40 people in Hays County who are accused of being members of the notorious Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Hays County sheriff’s deputies, working with agents from the FBI, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Homeland Security Investigations, made the arrests Tuesday morning. The suspects, who included minors, were apprehended at or near a Hays County residence, and narcotics were seized, officials said in a statement Wednesday. FBI and ICE agents, along with the Texas Department of Public Safety, the San Antonio Police Department and other local law enforcement agencies have worked for more than a year to investigate and develop intelligence on the transnational gang, authorities said in the statement. They obtained a search warrant ahead of Tuesday’s arrests.

Reported similarly:
KXAN [4/2/2025 3:33 PM, Andrew Schnitker]

UPI [4/2/2025 2:21 PM, Doug Cunningham, 1546K] reports Brownsville, Texas, border agents said Wednesday they confiscated 259 pounds of marijuana in two separate smuggling attempts Tuesday. U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement, "The first occurred just after midnight as agents observed multiple individuals carrying large bundles north from the Rio Grande. Agents apprehended three individuals and located four bundles of marijuana nearby totaling 107 pounds with an estimated value of $85,700. A fourth individual absconded back to Mexico." The second incident happened at roughly 5 a.m. when agents took three more suspects into custody and seized six bundles of marijuana. Border patrol put the dollar value of the marijuana at $85,700 in the first incident and $121,688 in the second. The people arrested were turned over to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

El Paso Times [4/2/2025 4:32 PM, Daniel Borunda] reports El Paso County sheriff’s detectives arrested a woman and continue looking for other suspects in shoplifting thefts of thousands of dollars worth of cosmetics from the Ulta Beauty store at Eastlake Marketplace, officials said. Detectives arrested Aileen Rodriguez Escareno on Monday, March 31, after she was flagged by U.S. Customs and Border Protection for a warrant while she was driving into the U.S. at the Paso Del Norte Bridge in Downtown El Paso, sheriff’s officials said. She was arrested and her vehicle was impounded. Rodriguez, 20, and Jesus Alonso Reyes Guevara, 24, are accused of stealing about $1,900 worth of makeup on Feb. 18 from the Ulta Beauty store at Eastlake Marketplace, a sheriff’s news release stated. Aileen Rodriguez Escareno was arrested on March 31, 2025, on a theft charge for allegedly stealing $1,900 worth of cosmetics from the Ulta Beauty store at Eastlake Marketplace on Feb. 18, 2025, in El Paso County, Texas. After their photos were distributed to law enforcement agencies, they were identified by the El Paso Police Department because they are allegedly linked to other thefts in El Paso. Rodriguez is a U.S. citizen and Reyes is a Mexican citizen. In a separate case, sheriff’s detectives are searching for a man who allegedly stole $500 worth of merchandise, including a hair dryer, on March 4 from the same Ulta Beauty store at Eastlake Marketplace, officials said. The theft suspect was identified as Adan Gutierrez, 42, of Chaparral, New Mexico, by a Texas Department of Public Safety crime analyst using a facial recognition system, sheriff’s officials said.

Border Report [4/2/2025 7:43 PM, Melissa Luna, 117K] reports another man was arrested this week after he was caught hiding narcotics in his rectum while trying to cross the Ysleta Port of Entry in El Paso, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). CBP says officers working at the Ysleta bridge seized around one-third of a pound of fentanyl after a 41-year-old man was hiding the drugs in his rectum. The man, a U.S. citizen who arrived from Mexico was crossing the border as a pedestrian just after 7 p.m. this past Monday, March 31. An officer selected the man for a secondary exam following a short interview and a CBP drug sniffing dog searched the man and alerted to the presence of narcotics, CBP said. Officers continued their inspection and discovered that the man had hidden drugs concealed within his anal cavity, CBP said. CBP says the man would not consent to a medical exam and a Homeland Security Investigations special agent obtained a search warrant shortly after midnight on Tuesday, April 1. An X-ray was then conducted on the man confirming a presence of a foreign object concealed internally, CBP said.

BorderReport [4/2/2025 8:19 PM, Anna Ashcraft, 117K] reports U.S. Border Patrol agents from San Diego stayed with two stranded and injured Mexican women in the Otay Mountain wilderness and built a makeshift shelter until they could be airlifted to safety, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reports. U.S. Border Patrol agents responded to a rescue call from Mexican authorities just after midnight on Friday for two Mexican women who had crossed the border into the United States illegally and were in distress with injuries and depleting food and water supplies. One of the women was reportedly pregnant as well. CBP reports Border Patrol agents found the women 6 miles east of the Otay Mesa Port of Entry in a remote canyon in the Otay Mountain wilderness. When agents reached the women, they found both were unable to walk because of ankle injuries. However, because of the cold weather and dense fog that night, the medical evacuation helicopter was unable to fly. Once weather conditions improved, a San Diego Sheriff’s Department helicopter extracted the women the next morning and took them to a nearby fire station for medical examination. Once their injuries were cleared, the women were taken to a Border Patrol station for processing and removal from the United States, according to CBP.

Reported similarly:
NewsNation [4/2/2025 10:24 AM, Anna Ashcraft]

BorderReport [4/2/2025 8:15 PM, Danielle Dawson, 117K] reports one person is dead and another injured after falling from the border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border near San Diego late Monday night, authorities confirmed. The two appeared to have been attempting to enter the U.S. unlawfully when the fall occurred. According to a Border Patrol spokesperson, San Diego Sector agents first encountered the pair around 11 p.m. after the suspected tumble from the 30-foot barrier. One was found to be unresponsive when agents arrived and was later declared dead by medical professionals, the spokesperson said. The other migrant was transported to a nearby hospital for treatment of their injuries. Their current condition remains unknown. Border Patrol says the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Office of Professional Responsibility is currently investigating the incident.

USA Today [4/2/2025 7:52 AM, Zach Wichter, 52868K] reports there are some technological innovations I’m deeply skeptical of, things like Venmo or 23andme don’t sit well with me. I don’t want a third-party company getting access to my bank account or my DNA. I’ll stick to Zelle and a hand-drawn family tree, thanks. That being said, other new tech? I’m all in on. When I fly, I rarely even have to take out my ID anymore now that I’ve opted in for touchless TSA Precheck and biometric boarding on international flights. In 2025, my face is my ID, and this experience is only likely to become more common in the future. “Passengers don’t want to spend too much time finding out where my wallet is, where my phone is and such,” Krishna Sampigethaya, chair of the Cyber Intelligence and Security Department at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University told me. He said biometric ID can actually be more secure from a flight safety standpoint than a traditional boarding pass, though he acknowledged there are some data privacy concerns with this new tech. Still, I have a driver’s license and a passport, and I’m enrolled in Global Entry and TSA Precheck, so the government already has my face data. I may as well take advantage of the convenience. At a high level, with both biometric boarding and touchless ID at airports, a camera scans your face rather than a Transportation Security Administration officer or a gate agent verifying your personal data against your boarding pass. It leads to faster processing times at security, and faster boarding on international flights. Some airlines like Delta also use touchless ID at bag drop, which speeds things up there, too.

CBS News [4/2/2025 12:36 PM, Kris Van Cleave, Kathryn Krupnik, and Kelsie Hoffman, 51661K] reports that the May 7 deadline is looming to have a Real ID, which will be required to get into government buildings and through airport security. Congress mandated the switch to Real IDs after 9/11. The new IDs are more secure and harder to counterfeit. But after several lengthy delays, millions of Americans still don’t meet the requirement that’s just over a month away. The Transportation Security Administration told CBS News they are seeing about 81% compliance at checkpoints, meaning people are showing up with a Real ID or their passport. That means nearly 2 out of every 10 people passing through a security checkpoint at an airport do not have the proper documents that will soon be needed. "Everybody is responsible for presenting the proper travel documents when they come to the checkpoint," said TSA spokesperson Patricia Mancha. Mancha explained what will happen if people don’t have a compliant ID on May 7, saying, "there’s going to be a phased approach of enforcement, but people may experience travel delays.” TSA has not announced what phased enforcement will look like, but valid passports or military IDs are also accepted. According to the Department of Homeland Security, all 50 states, Washington D.C. and the five U.S. territories are issuing Real ID compliant driver’s licenses and IDs. People can still get a Real ID after the May 7 deadline. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

Reported similarly:
San Francisco Chronicle [4/2/2025 6:06 PM, Aidin Vaziri, 5046K]

Washington Post [4/2/2025 7:08 AM, Ben Noll, 31735K] reports strong and warm winds of up to 50 mph gusted in from the south, causing thousands across southwestern Tennessee to lose electricity as of Wednesday evening, the early rumblings of the major storm poised to inundate millions in the Mid-South with heavy rain through Saturday. Ahead of the anticipated deluge, all had appeared normal in this city, even as local officials warned of tornadoes and flooding. Outdoor furniture, traffic cones and road signs remained outside. A handful of tourists snapped photos of the neon signs of Beale Street, known as the home of the blues. Construction continued even as the first bursts of heavy rain began passing through, interrupted by pockets of sunshine that pushed temperatures into the 80s and increased atmospheric instability ahead of the coming storms. It was the quiet before the potentially catastrophic and life-threatening extreme weather event expected to affect more than 40 million people across the country, as national weather officials issued rare high-level warnings and states began to take action. On Wednesday evening, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee declared a state of emergency and requested an emergency declaration to secure federal assistance ahead of the storms, and several tornado warnings and severe thunderstorm warnings were issued. The National Weather Service office in Memphis also warned of “generational flooding.” In neighboring Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear also declared a state of emergency Wednesday, urging residents to take the storm seriously. “We’re under some of the most serious weather threats I’ve seen,” he said in a statement. Missouri’s State Highway Patrol reported storm or tornado damage in Washington County late Wednesday, sharing photos of several obliterated and overturned vehicles in fields strewn with rubble. A high risk for excessive rainfall — the highest level that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issues — covered parts of five states from Thursday into Friday, with the Weather Prediction Center calling the event an “extreme flooding scenario” because of its multiday nature. And some areas in the central and Mid-South region that could get hit by tornadoes may be in flood zones in the coming days. The National Weather Service in Little Rock wrote that “extensive, rare and at times catastrophic flash flooding is likely if forecast rainfall totals are realized” and that “flash floodwater levels may reach areas that rarely or have never flooded before.” Up to three Aprils’ worth of rain may fall in a matter of days, with widespread rainfall amounts of 6 to 12 inches from northeastern Texas to southwestern Ohio by Sunday. Rainfall amounts in the hardest-hit places will probably exceed a foot, causing river and roadway flooding, with concerns for some of the flooding to develop very quickly. NOAA also issued its highest warning level for severe thunderstorms on Wednesday, with a Level 5 out of 5 spanning six states and over 2.5 million people across the Mid-South. The potential exists for numerous tornadoes, some of which are likely to be strong and long-track, rotating for dozens of miles.

New York Times [4/3/2025 3:29 AM, Yan Zhuang and Alexandra E. Petri, 145325K] reports multiple tornadoes were reported across parts of the South and the Midwest on Wednesday, as a powerful storm that is expected to linger for days swept into the region. Injuries were reported in Kentucky, Arkansas and Missouri, including a child in critical condition, and one person was rescued from a collapsed warehouse in Indiana, officials said. The tornadoes knocked down trees, disrupted power, and damaged homes and businesses. Tornado watches and warnings were in place early Thursday in a diagonal line stretching hundreds of miles northeast from Arkansas to Illinois. Some of the warnings were issued near Memphis, Louisville and Nashville. More than 300,000 customers were without power early Thursday in Indiana, Ohio, Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Kentucky and Tennessee. Over half were in Indiana. Tens of millions of people in a wide swath of the South and Midwest stretching from Texas to Michigan were also under flood watches and warnings. Eighteen tornadoes had been reported since Wednesday morning across Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky and Missouri, according to the National Weather Service. Nine were in Missouri. In Arkansas, the Division of Emergency Management said it had received reports of tornadoes on the ground. Four injuries were reported in Craighead County, and 22 counties across the state reported storm damage to homes, trees, power lines and roads, officials said. In Indiana, emergency workers freed a woman who had been trapped after a warehouse for the kitchenware company Sur La Table collapsed in the town of Brownsburg, local officials said. In Kentucky, four people in a van in the path of a tornado were injured in Ballard County, including an eight-year-old boy who was in critical condition, said Travis Holder, the director of the county’s emergency management office. A tornado also narrowly missed the Weather Service’s office in the city of Paducah, knocking out its main power supply, the agency said on social media.

Miami Herald [4/3/2025 1:31 AM, Mike Heuer, 3973K] reports tornadoes on Wednesday struck the central United States, including damaging property in Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Indiana and Oklahoma, with torrential rain spurring flash flooding. Tornado watches affecting 17 million people were in effect for Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Mississippi and Tennessee until at least midnight CDT, CNN reported. In a watch, forecasters have high confidence of large, destructive tornadoes. More than 1.4 million people were under a flash flood warning in those states. Multiple days of rain could trigger "generational" flooding in Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee and Mississippi, forecasters warned. Nearly 400,000 people were without power, according to Poweroutage.us. Flights also were affected, including at two major hubs, according to FlightAware. At Chicago O’Hare International Airport, there were 448 cancellations and 13,07 delays through 9:30 p.m. CDT and at Dallas-Forth International with 115 cancellations and 1,146 delays. Near Potosi, Mo., about 72 miles southwest of St. Louis, a tornado destroyed homes and structures, according to troopers. No deaths were reported and there were some minor injuries. Cars were overturned. On Wednesday morning, a tornado knocked over eight train cars, damaged the roofs of several houses and inflicted "varying degrees of damage" to businesses in the Springfield area, the NWS said in a post on X. No injuries were reported, the post said. The EF-1 tornado traveled 17 miles in 12 minutes, NWS said. Accuweather.com reported at least one person was injured after a suspected tornado tracked through Stoddard County, Mo., in the southeastern corner of the state, according to the Storm Prediction Center 219 miles from Springfield.

Reuters [4/3/2025 1:37 AM, Brad Brooks, 41523K] reports tornadoes ripped across a wide swath of central and southern United States on Wednesday, destroying homes and businesses and bringing down power lines and trees. The National Weather Service said there had been at least 15 reports of tornadoes in at least four states by late Wednesday. Eight people have been injured across Kentucky and Arkansas, including one critically injured in Kentucky’s Ballard County, local officials said. Late Wednesday, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared a state of emergency across the state due to the storms, which also brought hail and torrential rain. The NWS said millions of people were under alerts for tornadoes and flash floods and that dangers would continue into early Thursday. Violent storms are forecast to ravage the country for several days, the NWS said, with Wednesday just "the beginning of a multi-day catastrophic and potentially historic heavy rainfall event." "The word for tonight is ‘chaotic,’" said Scott Kleebauer, a NWS meteorologist. "This is a large expanse of storms migrating slowly to the east, stretching from southeast Michigan down into southeastern Arkansas." The town of Nevada, Missouri, was hit by a tornado. Writing on social media, the state’s Emergency Management Agency said it caused "major damage to several businesses, power poles were snapped and several (empty) train cars were flipped onto their sides by the powerful storm!" The NWS issued tornado and flash flood warnings for parts of Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky and Oklahoma. It called the rain threats for Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee and Mississippi in the coming days a "generational flood event" with some locations forecast to see as much as 15 inches (38.1 cm) of rain by the weekend, which could cause rivers to burst their banks and cause "catastrophic river flooding." More than 400,000 customers had their power knocked out across the storm-hit area, according to PowerOutage.us.

AP [4/3/2025 1:49 AM, Jeff Martin and Hallie Golden, 12335K] reports violent storms cut through a wide swath of the South and Midwest, spawning tornadoes and killing at least one person, knocking down power lines and trees and ripping roofs off homes. Dozens of tornado and severe thunderstorm warnings were issued Wednesday in parts of Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri and Mississippi as storms hit those and other states in the evening. Forecasters attributed the violent weather to daytime heating combining with an unstable atmosphere, strong wind shear and abundant moisture streaming into the nation’s midsection from the Gulf. At least one person was killed in southeast Missouri, KFVS-TV reported, while part of a warehouse collapsed in a suburb of Indianapolis, temporarily trapping at least one person inside. In northeast Arkansas a rare tornado emergency was issued as debris flew thousands of feet in the air. The coming days were also forecast to bring the risk of potentially deadly flash flooding to the South and Midwest as severe thunderstorms blowing eastward become supercharged. The potent storm system will bring “significant, life-threatening flash flooding” each day through Saturday, the National Weather Service said. With more than a foot (30 centimeters) of rain possible over the next four days, the prolonged deluge “is an event that happens once in a generation to once in a lifetime,” the weather service said. “Historic rainfall totals and impacts are possible.” More than 90 million people were at some risk of severe weather in a huge part of the nation stretching from Texas to Minnesota and Maine, according to the Oklahoma-based Storm Prediction Center. A tornado emergency — the weather service’s highest alert — was briefly declared around Blytheville, Arkansas, on Wednesday evening, with debris lofted at least 25,000 feet (7.6 kilometers), according to Chelly Amin, a meteorologist with the service. “It’s definitely going to be a really horrible situation here come sunrise in the morning in those areas,” Amin said. A tornado was also reported on the ground near Harrisburg, Arkansas, in the evening.

CBS Austin [4/2/2025 12:06 PM, Alexandra Sharfman, 602K] reports that severe weather hit Oklahoma Tuesday night into Wednesday morning. So far, a confirmed tornado was reported in Pearsonia in Osage County around 5:12 a.m., in Owasso around 6:38 a.m., and in Sperry around 6:34 a.m. Damage reports are coming in from Owasso, and damage may also be in the Pearsonia region. Damage was also seen near O’Brien Park in North Tulsa. At least one tornado was spotted Tuesday night in Kansas. "Take cover now!" the weather service’s office in Wichita warned residents on the social platform X. No injuries were reported. Tornado warnings were also issued in Missouri on Wednesday, but there were no immediate reports of damage or injuries as a result of those. Along with tornadoes, high winds with gusts of up to 50 mph (80 kph) were also expected across large parts of the Midwest. About 2.5 million people are in a rarely-called "high-risk" zone. That area most at risk of catastrophic weather on Wednesday includes parts of west Tennessee including Memphis; northeast Arkansas; the southeast corner of Missouri; and parts of western Kentucky and southern Illinois. A tornado outbreak was expected Wednesday, and "multiple long-track EF3+ tornadoes, appear likely," the Storm Prediction Center said. Tornadoes of that magnitude are among the strongest on the Enhanced Fujita scale, used to rate their intensity. At a slightly lower risk for severe weather on Wednesday is an area that includes Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Louisville, Kentucky, and Little Rock, Arkansas. Dallas, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Nashville, Tennessee, were also at risk. [Editorial note: consult video at source link for video]

Yahoo! News [4/2/2025 5:25 AM, Kaitlin McCallum, 52868K] reports that, with a flurry of executive orders and advisories, the Trump administration has left Connecticut and other states grasping for answers about their continued eligibility for emergency management funding and whether the Federal Emergency Management Agency is destined for an overhaul or the scrap heap. The state’s top public safety officials warned attendees at the annual Connecticut emergency management symposium Tuesday that the only certainty is that billions of dollars currently slated for emergency operations across the U.S. are under review by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. “The last thing I want to do is stand up here today and sound any sort of alarm. But in our field, what we do as emergency managers, we plan and prepare. Normally, we’re planning and preparing for storms,” said William Turner, the state emergency management director. “Today we’re planning for a little bit different of a scenario.” Turner, who has overseen emergency management for the past three years, said that scenario is one in which the federal resources long relied upon by state and municipal agencies might not be readily available — or available at all. The uncertainty is the product of messages from Washington, D.C., that have been contradictory and indecipherably vague. A case in point is the clear warning that certain grant programs, including two that send $9 million annually to Connecticut for emergency planning and operations, are likely to be off limits to “sanctuary jurisdictions” at odds with the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation campaign. And what are those jurisdictions? FEMA won’t or can’t say. “The big question we have is: What is the list of sanctuary cities you’re using?” Turner said in an interview. “And if that’s going to be like an automatic — ‘You’re a sanctuary city or state, and you’re not getting money’ — that’s the big question we have right now. Are we on that list? Are we going to get our money?”

ABC News [4/2/2025 4:52 PM, Megan Forrester] reports six months after Hurricane Helene destroyed communities across the Southeast, five people remain missing in North Carolina due to the storm, according to officials. The missing include one person from Avery County, one from Mitchell County and three from Yancey County -- all of whom have not been in contact since the Category 4 hurricane hit North Carolina in September, officials confirmed to ABC News. Alena Ayers from Mitchell County has been missing since the hurricane’s start, according to Sheriff Donald Street. Yancey County Sheriff Shane Hilliard said Lenny Widsawski, Yevhenii Segen and Tetyana Novitnia have also been missing since Helene devastated the area. Avery County Sheriff’s Office could not confirm the name of the individual missing since the beginning of the storm.

Louisville Courier Journal [4/2/2025 10:43 AM, Jenny Porter Tilley] reports ahead of a predicted four-day round of severe storms, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear declared a state of emergency for the Bluegrass State Wednesday morning. According to a news release from Beshear’s office, the storm is expected to last for four days and bring potentially historic amounts of rain, wind and possible tornadoes around the state. According to the release, far western Kentucky faces a Level 5 risk, meaning potential for widespread storms that are intense and long-lived. Several other areas across the state are also at risk for tornadoes, hail, flooding and strong winds, the release said. Beshear has activated the Kentucky Emergency Operations Center, the release said, and National Guard units are prepared to respond, as well as Kentucky Transportation Cabinet workers and local emergency management.

The Tennessean [4/2/2025 1:25 PM, Joyce Orlando] reports days after multiple tornadoes tore through the state, parts of Tennessee are bracing for a possible once in a 1,000 year rain event. A storm system is ripping through the central United States, potentially dropping more than 10 inches of rain in some communities, including in parts of West Tennessee. The latest predictions from AccuWeather, the storm is expected to dump the equivalent of up to four months’ worth of rain over a five-day period. This rain event and other storm systems are expected to impact a 1,000-mile swath from Texas to Ohio, according to Accuweather. Parts of the U.S. could see "generational" rain amounts and, along with it, flash floods and even possibly tornadoes. Western Tennessee is expected to get the brunt of these storm systems, with some meteorologist predicting upwards of a foot of rain to fall in the Memphis area over the next five days. The National Weather Service also expects areas of the mid-Mississippi and lower Ohio valleys to see a tornado outbreak starting Wednesday into the night.

Newsweek [4/3/2025 4:15 AM, Shane Croucher and Khaleda Rahman, 52220K] reports two large tornadoes hit the city of Selmer, Tennessee, on Thursday morning, according to reports. Videos and pictures posted on social media showed significant damage and downed trees, making roads impassable. One account also reported that a gas station had been destroyed. The Tennessee Highway Patrol said troopers were clearing roads and checking for stranded drivers. The National Weather Service (NWS) also warned that a third tornado could strike the area soon. "Another tornado is heading directly north of Selmer, TN, in 40 minutes," the NWS office in Memphis posted on X, formerly Twitter, around 2.30 a.m. local time. "This is an incredibly dangerous situation." It later added: "Initial tornado warned storm has passed. However, yet another storm is heading towards Selmer, TN. Remain vigilant." The NWS has issued dozens of tornado warnings for parts of the South and Midwest, where violent storms wreaked havoc across multiple states on Wednesday. Tornado and severe thunderstorm warnings were in effect for parts of Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania on Thursday. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

Yahoo! News [4/2/2025 5:56 PM, Kevin S. Held, 52868K] reports on Wednesday, Gov. Mike Kehoe requested President Donald J. Trump approve a major disaster declaration for 28 Missouri counties devastated by storms and tornadoes that struck on March 14-15. Those powerful storms claimed the lives of 13 people and caused significant damage to homes, businesses, and infrastructure across Missouri. "We are confident federal assistance will be forthcoming and greatly appreciate the critical work already being done by local response agencies and many volunteer partners to help Missourians in need," Kehoe said. The governor said the State Emergency Management Agency and local partners are working with FEMA to document the damage. Early estimates put the cost of the storms at $26.9 million in emergency response costs and damage to public infrastructure. Based on confirmed damage, Kehoe has requested FEMA Individual Assistance for 25 counties: Bollinger, Butler, Camden, Carter, Dunklin, Franklin, Howell, Iron, Jefferson, Laclede, Madison, New Madrid, Oregon, Ozark, Pemiscot, Perry, Phelps, Pulaski, Reynolds, Ripley, St. Louis, Stoddard, Wayne, Webster, and Wright. According to a statement from Gov. Kehoe’s Office, "Individual Assistance would allow eligible residents to seek federal assistance for temporary housing, housing repairs, replacement of damaged belongings, vehicles, and other qualifying expenses.”

Yahoo! News [4/2/2025 5:31 PM, Lauren Inman, 52868K] reports nearly 1,200 homes and businesses are in the dark in Howell County as the West Plains area gets hit with a second round of severe storms this afternoon. According to the Missouri Association of Electric Cooperatives, 1,198 customers are without power as of 4:30 p.m. on April 2. More than 100 people are also without power in neighboring Texas County contributing to the 3,510 Electric Cooperative members without power Wednesday afternoon as severe weather sweeps across Missouri.

FOX4 [4/2/2025 3:32 PM, Delaney Eyermann] reports overnight storms in Missouri left a trail of damage across the state. Kansas City saw thunderstorms, hail and wind damage – and tornadoes were reported in other parts of the state. It was reported that a tornado possibly touched down in Nevada, Missouri, in Vernon County. Business U.S. 54 in Nevada remains closed Wednesday due to storm damage, Missouri State Highway Patrol (MSHP) Troop D said on X. The MSHP also shared photos Wednesday morning of the damage in Cooper County. The National Weather Service’s preliminary report indicates that a tornado possibly touched down in the county in Pilot Grove. The MSHP said no fatalities have been reported.

Arkansas Advocate [4/2/2025 4:11 PM, Ainsley Platt] reports Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared a state of emergency and released state relief funds in preparation of severe weather predicted to strike the state over the next several hours and days. The National Weather Service predicted heavy rains and flooding for northeast Arkansas and upgraded the risk of tornadoes for a large swath of the state to a five out of five, the highest amount of risk, earlier on Wednesday. Sanders said in a news release Wednesday afternoon that $250,000 had been released from the Governor’s Disaster Response and Recovery Fund. The release said that "severe storms, tornadoes, and flooding are expected to occur in Arkansas, and continue thereafter, which may cause danger, hardship, and suffering throughout the state, which in turn, warrants this executive action." The National Weather Service has warned about "generational" flooding with potentially devastating effects in the northeast region of the state, which has been hit hard by severe weather in recent weeks. Ten to 15 inches of rain are expected in some areas over the next few days.

AZCentral [4/2/2025 11:17 PM, James Powel, 4457K] reports the National Weather Service issued a tornado emergency, the highest warning possible, as a "large and destructive tornado” hit Lake City, Arkansas, and surrounding areas in the northeastern part of the state. Arkansas Gov. Sara Huckabee Sanders declared a state of emergency Wednesday and posted on X that she has received reports of tornado and storm damage. Videos shared on social media shared on social media shows a massive tornado tearing across the land. The tornado emergency issued by the weather service, which covered an area near the Arkansas-Missouri border, ended at 7:45 p.m. local time but Accuweather reporter Leslie Hudson told the weather outlet that the danger did not abate with nightfall. "The sun is setting here, so now this turns into a much more dangerous situation, trying to track the severe weather as the daylight goes away," Hudson said. CNN meteorologists said Wednesday night that the storm had a "hook echo," a meteorological pattern that suggests the presence of a strong storm. Dozens of tornado watches and warnings remain in effect Wednesday night from northeastern Texas to Ohio, including Indianapolis, as a major storm is hitting the Lower Ohio Valley and Mid-South. The weather service said Wednesday that the storm would bring a "barrage of life-threatening weather hazards including flash flooding and strong tornadoes" to the regions. The Storm Prediction Center maintains a 5/5 risk of severe weather for the region. A tornado caused the National Weather Service office in Paducah, Kentucky, to shelter in place at 8:18 p.m. local time Wednesday, while KFVS-TV, a Missouri-based CBS affiliate, broadcast as a tornado passed over the station. "That was a little bit intense folks," meteorologist Grant Dade said on the broadcast. "I’ve never witnessed a wedge tornado come right into the station." [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

Yahoo! News [4/2/2025 11:30 PM, David Royer, 52868K] reports around 15 people have been reported injured in Craighead County, Arkansas after a severe storm moved through Wednesday, the sheriff said. Craighead County Sheriff Marty Boyd said tornadoes touched down in Lake City and Monette. Boyd said there was structural damage to homes and farm shops, but no fatalities. Boyd said those injured were reportedly doing well. "We were blessed, got lucky for sure," he said. "We had a good warning on this. We had probably at least 20 minutes of advance notice on this that it was coming, so it allowed people to take cover.” Boyd said power outages could last for several days. A viewer captured the video footage above in Lake City, Arkansas, in Craighead County. WREG tracked the storm into Poinsett County. The sheriff of Poinsett County, Arkansas said Wednesday that tornadoes had touched down. Twenty-two Arkansas counties reported damage, including Crittenden and St. Francis in the News Channel 3 viewing area, the Arkansas Division of Emergency Management said. Thousands are left without power Wednesday night in Arkansas. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

Yahoo! News [4/2/2025 10:44 AM, Kyle Davidson, 52868K] reports that following a string of ice storms which tore through the northern Lower Peninsula over the weekend, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is expanding her initial state of emergency and deploying the Michigan National Guard to help clear roadways and areas overcome by debris. On Monday afternoon, Whitmer declared a state of emergency in for Otsego, Oscoda, Montmorency, Presque Isle, Emmet, Charlevoix, Cheboygan, Crawford, Mackinac and Alpena counties, expanding the declaration to include Alcona and Antrim counties on Tuesday. By declaring a state of emergency, Whitmer has made all state resources available in cooperation with local response and recovery efforts in the area of emergency. It also authorizes the Michigan State Police, Emergency Management and Homeland Security Division to further coordinate state efforts, following the governor’s activation of the State Emergency Operations Center on Sunday. In addition to the two teams assigned to clear debris, the Michigan National Guard has responded to a request from the MyMichigan Medical Center in Alpena to stand up a temporary shelter to support emergency room overflow.

Yahoo! News [4/2/2025 11:33 PM, Vivian Chow, 52868K] reports a new death has been confirmed in connection to the devastating Los Angeles wildfires after human remains were discovered Wednesday, raising the death toll to 30. Crews from the L.A. County Medical Examiner’s Office’s Special Operations Response Team investigated the remains found on the 900 block of Boston Street in Altadena on April 2. Following an investigation, the remains were determined to be human. Officials have not provided information on a possible identity. A total of 18 people were killed in the Eaton Fire and 12 people were killed in the Palisades Fire. The fires, which ignited on Jan. 7 just after 10 a.m. in Los Angeles County, remain one of the most deadly and destructive wildfires in Southern California history. The Palisades Fire, which ignited in the Pacific Palisades, burned a total of 23,707 acres and destroyed 6,833 structures, according to Cal Fire data. The Eaton Fire, which erupted in Altadena, scorched 14,021 acres and destroyed 9,413 structures. The fires prompted the evacuation of thousands of residents, with many receiving little or no notice, and forced the closure of a large stretch of Pacific Coast Highway. In the aftermath of the fires, many communities and businesses are struggling to rebuild and recover. The causes of both fires remain under investigation. For the Eaton Fire, Southern California Edison came under scrutiny after photos and videos taken by residents showed a fire burning under a transmission tower when the fire first started, according to the Los Angeles Times. More than 40 lawsuits from over 600 residents have been filed against SoCal Edison accusing the utility company of igniting the blaze, the Times reports. The origin of the Eaton Fire is being investigated by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The cause of the Palisades Fire remains under investigation by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

CBS San Francisco [4/2/2025 5:10 PM, Brandon Downs, 51661K] reports the National Weather Service said a tornado touched down in Stanislaus County Tuesday, knocking down dozens of trees and damaging three properties. The NWS said the EF-0 tornado touched at 2:13 p.m. and traveled nearly a mile in two minutes with a width of 70 yards. A preliminary report estimated the peak winds were 76 mph. No injuries were reported, however, the tornado caused almond trees in orchards to uproot. It also damaged three properties. Officials recorded a covered patio and roof material ripped off, a broken window and said a large trailer was lifted and moved about 20 feet.

CBS Austin [4/2/2025 5:00 AM, Ida Domingo, 602K] reports a staffer for Sen. Cory Booker was arrested Monday after carrying a firearm on Capitol grounds, according to U.S. Capitol Police (USCP). Authorities said a member of Congress led the staffer past security screening at the Hart Senate Office Building in the afternoon. Later that evening, outside the Senate Galleries, the staffer informed officers that he was armed. The staffer, identified as 59-year-old Kevin A. Batts of New Jersey, is a retired law enforcement officer. USCP said he was arrested and charged with carrying a pistol without a license. “All weapons are prohibited from Capitol Grounds, even if you are a retired law enforcement officer or have a permit to carry in another state or the District of Columbia,” USCP said in a statement. The arrest came as Booker made headlines for breaking a nearly 70-year-old record with the longest speech ever delivered on the Senate floor. The New Jersey Democrat spoke for more than 25 hours against the policies and proposed budget cuts of the Trump administration. Booker began speaking around 7 p.m. Monday and continued past 8 p.m. Tuesday, surpassing the previous record held by Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who filibustered for 24 hours and 18 minutes against the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

New York Times [4/2/2025 6:06 PM, Adeel Hassan, 145325K] reports the preschooler, Belle Thomas, and her 1-year-old brother, Preston, are standing still, looking straight into the camera lens and smiling. It’s picture-perfect, and the photographer is ready. Just then, a 6-foot-1, two-term former president of the United States strides into the frame. In a few seconds, the photo shoot is over, and the photos are no longer of the siblings alone. That’s how Barack Obama inadvertently became part of a family’s moment early Monday morning at the Tidal Basin in Washington. As the photos were being taken, Belle’s and Preston’s father, Damien Thomas, took a beat before confirming what his eyes had just seen. Neither he nor other family members called out to him as Secret Service agents trailed the 44th president.

Yahoo! News [4/2/2025 5:51 PM, Slater Teague, 52868K] reports the Carter County Sheriff’s Office is warning businesses of an ongoing counterfeit money scheme. The sheriff’s office said several businesses have been targeted in recent months, particularly in the Roan Mountain and Hampton areas. Cases have also been reported in nearby North Carolina. "As part of the scheme, a subject comes into the business and makes a small purchase, typically less than $5," the sheriff’s office said in a release. "The subject then pays for the purchase with a counterfeit $50 or $100 bill. In some instances, while making the purchase, the subject has asked the cashier if they will break another large bill for them.” In one case, a suspect entered a store and conducted the scheme before exiting, changing clothes, and conducting the scheme again, according to the sheriff’s office.

Maritime Executive [4/2/2025 7:34 PM, Staff, 325K] reports the only heavy icebreaker in the U.S. Coast Guard fleet USCG Polar Star arrived back in San Francisco completing her annual deployment to Antarctica and now she is preparing for the final phase of her ongoing life extension. Commissioned in 1976, the USCG needs to keep her operation until at least 2030 when the much-delayed next-generation heavy icebreaker is anticipated to be delivered. Polar Star departed Seattle bound for Antarctica on November 22, 2024. She traveled over 25,000 miles through the North Pacific, South Pacific, and Southern Oceans returning to San Francisco on March 30. It was a 128-day deployment to Antarctica in support of Operation Deep Freeze (ODF) 2025, the annual joint military service mission to resupply and maintain the United States Antarctic Stations. The vessel provides heavy icebreaking capabilities to facilitate sealift, seaport access, bulk fuel supply, and cargo handling for two of three permanent U.S. research stations in Antarctica, with NSF McMurdo Station being the largest. The cutter’s icebreaking capabilities enable the safe delivery of critical supplies to sustain year-round operations and support international partnerships in the harsh Antarctic environment.

Yahoo! News [4/2/2025 10:25 AM, Savanna Tenenoff, 52868K] reports that a former employee of Battleship North Carolina has filed a lawsuit alleging illegal surveillance and termination by leadership. Coast Guard veteran Chris Vargo of Wilmington filed a lawsuit in New Hanover County Superior Court on April 1 alleging illegal surveillance and whistleblower retaliation by the executive director of Battleship North Carolina. The Battleship Commission and the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources are also being sued for retaliation. Jonathan Marx of Chalmers, Adams, Backer & Kaufman, PLLC, is Vargo’s attorney. Vargo, who worked as the assistant director at the Battleship for 12 years, alleges he was wrongfully terminated on Jan. 24, 2025, after raising concerns about misconduct by Executive Director Jay Martin, per a news release from Marx. According to the complaint, Martin unlawfully planted a recording device in a conference room to capture conversations about the "Living with Water" parking lot renovation project between Vargo and contractors in December 2024. Martin, per the complaint, blamed Vargo for project delays and budget overruns, despite Vargo not having authority to prevent the delays and costs.

New York Post [4/2/2025 2:00 PM, Jorge Fitz-Gibbon, 5490K] reports a battered boat crammed with 99 Haitian immigrants was cut off trying to reach US shores — with the illegal migrants shipped back to the Caribbean nation, Coast Guard officials said. The rickety, overloaded 35-foot boat was intercepted Thursday, with the Haitians then given food, water, shelter and medical attention before they were sent packing on Tuesday, the agency said. “The Coast Guard remains steadfast in our defense of the US maritime borders and approaches with patrols in the Florida Straits, Windward and Mona Passages to interdict unlawful maritime migration attempts before they reach our shores,” Lt. Cmdr. Brent Pearson, Coast Guard liaison officer to US Embassy Port-au-Prince said in a statement. “Attempting illegal migration in overloaded, unsafe vessels with no safety equipment is extremely dangerous and puts you and your loved one’s lives at risk. Don’t take to the sea just to be sent back.” US Coast Guard cutters, choppers and airplanes have stepped up patrols in the Florida Straits and surrounding waters to adhere with President Trump’s war on illegal immigration. So far this fiscal year, 412 Haitians have been shipped back home, compared to 857 for the entire 2024 fiscal year, officials said. Federal fiscal years run from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30.

ABC 10 Tampa [4/2/2025 12:06 PM, Staff] reports this afternoon the search for a missing boater is now a recovery mission. That started when investigators say they found Russell Trudeau’s 17 foot boat off the coast of Manatee County on Monday without him on board. The U.S. Coast Guard suspending its search on the water for Trudeau. [Editorial note: consult audio at source link]

Yahoo! News [4/2/2025 4:46 PM, Kaitlin Flanigan, 59943K] reports new video shows the moments rescuers helped a 12-year-old girl pulled into the Pacific Ocean in Seaside on Saturday. Seaside Fire & Rescue officials previously said the girl was pulled beyond the breakers and then pushed back into the surf. Rescue crews from Seaside Fire & Rescue along with the U.S. Coast Guard and Cannon Beach Fire had to do a grid search to find her. Efforts to find the girl included responders on jet skis, a swimmer, a Coast Guard helicopter and boat and multiple others participating in the search. Responders say the girl was conscious when she was taken to the hospital about 30 minutes after the call. “It was quite a fast, efficient activation of partners and a really good outcome for such a serious rescue effort,” a City of Seaside spokesperson said.

FOX News [4/2/2025 10:00 AM, Kurt Knutsson, 46189K] reports that ransomware is a major threat to every industry. In recent years, hackers have increasingly targeted companies with ransomware, locking their data unless a ransom is paid. In some cases, they also threaten to leak the stolen data online if the company refuses to comply, as seen in the UnitedHealth breach, where hackers reportedly demanded $22 million. However, ransomware attacks are not limited to companies. According to the latest FBI warning, they also target employees, particularly corporate executives. The agency cautions that cybercriminals are sending extortion letters, threatening to release victims’ sensitive information unless a ransom is paid. The FBI is warning businesses, particularly those in the healthcare sector, about a scam involving physical ransom letters sent via the U.S. Postal Service. These letters, falsely claiming to be from the ransomware group BianLian, demand Bitcoin payments ranging from $150,000 to $500,000 in exchange for not leaking supposedly stolen data. Sent from Boston with U.S. flag stamps, these letters differ significantly in tone and wording from known BianLian communications. Authorities believe this is a fear-based scam designed to trick organizations into paying a ransom for a breach that never happened.

CyberScoop [4/2/2025 6:58 PM, Tim Starks] reports leaders of a key House subcommittee criticized the Trump administration’s personnel cuts at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Wednesday, with its chairman saying he wants CISA to take on more responsibilities, not less — some of which figure into his legislative priorities. Rep. Andrew Garbarino, the New York Republican who chairs the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection, said at an event hosted by Axonius that those priorities include reauthorization of a 2015 cyber threat information sharing law and renewal of a state and local grant program. “I’m not thrilled with some of the stuff that happened,” Garbarino said, including the firing of probationary employees at CISA. “I think there’s a way to be efficient, I think there’s a way to find savings … in some places when trying to cut the fat, they cut the bone, and we need to fix that.” He said CISA should take on a broader role within the federal government on cyber, rather than having individual agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency having responsibilities. He wants to carve out a specific role for CISA under the expiring 2015 Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act — the subject of a planned subcommittee hearing next month — and keep CISA involved in administering the expiring $1 billion, four-year state and local grant program, perhaps with a longer 10-year reauthorization. Despite the Trump administration cuts, Garbarino said he was encouraged by the nomination of Sean Plankey to lead CISA, a sign that the administration was taking the agency “seriously.”

CyberScoop [4/2/2025 5:58 PM, Derek B. Johnson] reports a top Cyber Command official said the agency has been able to use generative AI tools to dramatically cut down the time spent analyzing network traffic for malicious activity. Executive Director Morgan Adamski said Wednesday that as Cybercom has worked to build AI capabilities across different missions, the agency is already seeing a return on investment for certain cybersecurity functions. “Anyone that works in cybersecurity, if you’re working on the manual side, a lot of times will say, ‘hey, it’ll take hours, days, weeks to be able to analyze specific traffic, specific lines of code.’ We have now been able to leverage AI to be able to get through that in minutes and hours,” Adamski said during an event hosted by the Information Technology Industry Council in Washington, D.C. The agency created an AI roadmap last year that laid out approximately 100 different tasks for integrating AI into logistics, security, and national defense. Adamski said an AI task force in the Cyber National Mission Force is running 90-day development “sprints” to steadily incorporate large language models and other AI technologies into Cyber Command operations. Members of the task force deploy, test and evaluate whether the tools are successful and worth scaling out more broadly.

Newsweek [4/2/2025 5:36 AM, Theo Burman, 52220K] reports a cyber sleuth has posted on a prominent cybercrime forum what they claim is the largest social media data breach ever, which allegedly leaked information linked to more than 2.8 billion accounts on X, formerly Twitter. The breach, which emerged on Tuesday, was flagged by cybersecurity group SafetyDetectives after a user identifying as "ThinkingOne" shared a massive 34GB CSV file online. The dataset reportedly combines two separate leaks, merging fresh metadata from a 2025 breach with email addresses stolen in a previous 2023 incident. Newsweek contacted X for confirmation on the attack via email. This leak could enable widespread phishing and identity scams by correlating email addresses with detailed metadata, including usernames, tweet history, and location data. The breach would rank among the largest data exposures in history in terms of account volume, raising serious questions about internal controls at the platform and its handling of past and ongoing cybersecurity threats. The new leak allegedly stems from a 400GB trove of user data said to have been exfiltrated by a disgruntled employee during mass layoffs at X following Musk’s 2022 acquisition of the company, according to reports from Computing. While the 2023 leak involved approximately 200 million records and sensitive information like email addresses, the 2025 breach reportedly encompasses metadata for nearly 3 billion profiles, including display names, tweet counts, location and time zone data, verification status, and the applications used to post the last tweets. The data likely includes deactivated accounts, bots, spam accounts, and API-based profiles, which could explain the discrepancy between the number of leaked profiles and the current user base of X, estimated to be around 335 million globally. ThinkingOne alleged that despite attempting to contact the company, X did not acknowledge the attack, prompting them to publish the data online. The post did not include passwords or payment data but contained sensitive metadata that can still be exploited for identity theft or impersonation. ThinkingOne told Forbes that they don’t consider themselves a hacker, and that they try to ensure everything they do with the data is legal. It is not known how the user acquired the data. In their post, ThinkingOne said: "There is no sign that X or the general public is aware of the largest social media breach ever.” X has not yet publicly acknowledged any data breach. The exposure comes just days after Elon Musk completed the transfer of X to his AI venture, which will become a major part of the site’s future.

Reuters [4/2/2025 6:36 PM, Jaspreet Singh, 41523K] reports Oracle (ORCL.N) has told customers that a hacker broke into a computer system and stole old client log-in credential, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing two people familiar with the matter. Last month, an unidentified person began attempting to sell data online that was stolen from the cloud servers of Austin, Texas-based Oracle, according to the report. It is the second cybersecurity breach that the software company has acknowledged to clients in the last month, the report said. Oracle has told some clients that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and cybersecurity company CrowdStrike Holdings (CRWD.O) are investigating the incident, the report said, adding the attacker sought an extortion payment from the company. The cloud computing company told customers that the data breach is separate from the hacking incident that it flagged to some healthcare customers last month, according to the report.

Reported similarly:
Bloomberg [4/2/2025 5:30 PM, Jake Bleiberg, 16228K]

MeriTalk [4/2/2025 3:24 PM, Grace Dille, 45K] reports cybersecurity experts told lawmakers on Wednesday that the recent Salt Typhoon hacks should serve as a "wake-up call," while urging them to focus on bigger, looming cybersecurity threats such as AI and quantum. Cybersecurity experts testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Military and Foreign Affairs on Wednesday to say that Salt Typhoon must serve as a turning point for the United States. They urged the Federal government to pivot to a "bold" national investment in AI-driven cybersecurity, noting that AI and quantum computers could change cybersecurity as we know it.

Axios [4/2/2025 7:25 AM, Torey Van Oot, 13163K] reports Minnesota’s top IT official is warning that a prolonged pause or cancellation of federal cybersecurity funding could leave counties, schools and towns without a "deadbolt on the door" to protect sensitive data. Local and state governments have become hot targets for hackers and other cyber criminals trying to steal, exploit and expose personal information for financial gain. The cybersecurity funding was among the roughly two dozen major federal grant programs totaling $100 million that Minnesota Management and Budget identified last month as on pause or otherwise disrupted while under review by the Trump administration. The $10.8 million in cybersecurity grants in question provide protection for 55,000 devices at about 200 agencies and entities statewide, MNIT commissioner Tarek Tomes told Axios. About $8.2 million of that money has already been disbursed to cities and townships, counties, tribal nations and school districts, MNIT confirmed to Axios. The agency says there are "no immediate impacts" from the funding hold, with current grant activities and scheduled reimbursements approved to continue at this time. But Tomes says he’s concerned that any decision to reduce or pull future funds could strip local entities of the "most rudimentary and fundamental level of defense against cyber" crimes. What he’s saying: "When you have this layer of protection, the door rattling doesn’t really work," Tomes said of the cybersecurity tools, training and risk assessments funded by the program. "When you don’t have this layer of protection, threat actors learn that [the] sector is really vulnerable." A pledge by a top Trump administration official to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which oversees the cybersecurity grants, could have "drastic consequences for Minnesota," MNIT warns. "If those programs are put at risk, those [local] organizations are put at risk," Tomes said. "They generally don’t have funding to afford a professional level of...protection." Between the lines: Schools and governments in Minnesota have confronted a number of high-profile hacking incidents in recent years. Just last week, a national educational software provider disclosed a data breach that compromised personal data for thousands of students at dozens of Minnesota schools. And last weekend, a "cyber incident" targeting the Lower Sioux Indian Community took slot machines and other systems at the Jackpot Junction Casino Hotel offline. MNIT hasn’t received further guidance from the administration on the future of these programs or the timing of any decisions, but is monitoring the situation closely, a spokesperson said.

FOX News [4/2/2025 1:16 PM, Michael Dorgan Fox, 46189K] reports that the number of reported attacks on Tesla vehicles, dealerships and charging stations has now surpassed more than 50 amid Elon Musk’s growing influence in the Trump administration and the entrepreneur not holding back on voicing his right-leaning political views. An analysis by Fox News has found that there have been at least 51 targeted attacks across the U.S. while there have been at least 17 similar attacks internationally. The incidents range from minor vandalism, such as keying or graffiti, to more extreme cases like arson and drive-by shootings allegedly targeting Tesla vehicles. There are at least five federal lawsuits pertaining to these Tesla attacks. Musk has described the attacks as "wide-scale domestic terrorism" and demanded authorities "go after the generals" behind the violence. Musk is spearheading Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an agency that has been slashing federal spending to serve its mission of rooting out waste, fraud and corruption. Attorney General Pamela Bondi has said her department is treating such incidents as "domestic terrorism."

New York Times [4/3/2025 3:00 AM, Liam Stack, 145325K] reports two people approached a Tesla parked on the Lower East Side of Manhattan one night last month and spray-painted a bright red swastika on it. A few weeks later, another pair walked up to a Tesla parked in Brooklyn and carved a swastika on its door, along with the word “Nazis.” The Police Department is searching for the vandals, whose actions it is investigating as hate crimes. But who exactly do they purportedly hate? Many people would find it hard to imagine a more clear-cut example of a hate crime than vandalizing someone else’s property with a swastika, which has for almost a century been a terrifying and widely recognized symbol used to threaten Jews and other minorities. But given the rash of protests targeting the electric car company that have taken place nationwide, it appears clear that the vandals in New York City were using the swastikas to attack Elon Musk, the Tesla founder and a top adviser to President Trump — not to broadcast their own support of Nazism. Mr. Musk, who has been widely criticized for making two arm gestures that many saw as Nazi salutes at a Trump rally on Inauguration Day, has said he sees the vandalism, which has occurred in New York and elsewhere, as a definite hate crime. “Anyone who scrawls a swastika on a Tesla has obviously committed a hate crime,” Mr. Musk wrote on social media this week. The use of swastikas by critics of Mr. Musk — who is not Jewish or a member of any other minority group — has put law enforcement in a bind, legal scholars said. The question boils down to this: Is it a hate crime to use a swastika to denounce someone you think is a Nazi, instead of using it to express your own support for Nazis? And is it a hate crime if the perpetrator knows nothing about the person who owns the car, and is instead motivated by animosity toward an automaker and its owner? “Not every swastika is indicative of a hate crime,” said Richard A. Wilson, a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law. “It depends on the context, the intended message and intended target.”

USA Today [4/2/2025 11:33 PM, Krystal Nurse, 75858K] reports a white gunman who killed 10 Black people in a Buffalo supermarket is requesting to move his death penalty trial to New York City in order to be judged by a racially diverse jury, according to his attorney’s court filing. Payton Gendron’s attorneys filed the request Monday in U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York, arguing that assembling an impartial jury would be impossible in the area affected by the shooting. Gendron pleaded guilty to 15 state charges in 2022 for the massacre at the Tops Friendly Market in East Buffalo and now faces a separate jury to decide whether he will be put to death. "Due to the overwhelming amount of pretrial publicity, combined with the impact of this case on Buffalo’s segregated communities of color, it is impossible for Payton Gendron to select a fair and impartial jury in the Western District of New York," Gendron’s lawyers wrote. Gendron’s lawyers say the majority of Black Buffalo residents live in East Buffalo. Gendron targeted the Tops Friendly Market to maximize the number of Black victims, according to his lawyers. "If the verdict in this case is to carry any moral authority, it should be delivered by a diverse group of citizens," Gendron’s attorneys Sonya Zoghlin, Monica Foster, Marybeth Covert and Julie Brain wrote in court documents. Zoghlin, Foster and Covert are federal public defenders. Brain is a Philadelphia-based lawyer who primarily represents people facing the death penalty. New York state, where Gendron pleaded guilty to the state charges, does not have the death penalty. But federal authorities independently opted to pursue hate crime charges against Gendron that carry a death sentence. The attorneys proposed moving the case to a federal court in New York City, where there are a sufficient number of minorities who weren’t directly impacted by the shooting that could potentially serve on the jury.

New York Times [4/2/2025 5:13 PM, Emily Cochrane, 145325K] reports the shooter who killed three third graders and three staff members at the Covenant School in Nashville two years ago acted alone in hopes of achieving infamy, a police investigation has concluded. The investigation, a summary of which the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department released on Wednesday, found that the shooter, a former student at the private Christian school, had spent years carefully planning an attack. It also found that the shooter had hidden growing mental health struggles from relatives and therapists to ensure the attack succeeded. The investigation absolved family members, therapists and those who sold guns to the 28-year-old shooter, whose legal name was Audrey Hale, of any culpability. The report noted that legally, there was little the shooter’s parents could do, given that the weapons were purchased and owned legally in a state with few restrictions. The absence of a clear motive or significant social media postings by the Nashville shooter inflamed rampant speculation that has not fully subsided. In a statement shared by a lawyer on Wednesday, family members of those killed in the shooting and many parents of surviving students expressed concern that sharing details about the shooter and the crime would inspire copycat violence.

Yahoo! News [4/2/2025 4:42 PM, Gabriel Castillo, 52868K] reports pre-trial release has been denied for two men accused of opening fire into a crowd during a Juneteenth celebration in the southwest suburbs in 2023, leaving one dead and 22 others injured. 20-year-old Fredrick Turner, a Humboldt Park resident, and 24-year-old Franshun Jordan, a Villa Park resident, have each been charged in connection with the mass shooting, DuPage County State’s Attorney Robert Berlin announced Wednesday. According to Berlin, Turner has been charged with two counts of aggravated discharge of a firearm and one count of aggravated unlawful possession of a weapon while Jordan has been charged with two counts of aggravated discharge of a firearm. The charges stem from the duo’s alleged role in the shooting that erupted at the Juneteenth celebration in unincorporated Willowbrook in 2023. According to prosecutors, the shooting unfolded just before 12:30 a.m. on June 18, 2023, while the crowd was gathered in the parking lot of a strip mall near Kingery Highway and Honeysuckle Rose Lane. An investigation into the incident led by the DuPage County Sheriff’s Office revealed that the two men were allegedly standing outside of the Legacy Beauty Supply in the area when, at some point, Turner became agitated and started running toward the parking lot between cars. The shooting left 22 people injured and one man, who was later identified as 31-year-old Reginald Meadows from Willowbrook, was killed.

Houston Chronicle [4/2/2025 4:01 PM, Jeremy Wallace, 1769K] reports Texas Republicans are coming to the rescue of Tesla CEO Elon Musk at a time when Democratic protesters are targeting him and his electric car company for boycotts and protests. The Texas Senate passed legislation this week that would make it a third-degree felony if protesters cause any damage to an electric vehicle charging station like those at Tesla’s dealerships. A third-degree felony can result in a $10,000 fine and up to 10 years in jail. Under Huffman’s measure, the penalty jumps to a 1st-degree felony if damage to electric charging stations is valued at over $300,000. A first-degree felony can result in up to 99 years in prison. But Huffman tried to assure him that the damage would have to be intentional to trigger the charges. She said the legislation wouldn’t apply to people who accidentally damage a charging station.

FOX News [4/2/2025 1:09 PM, Rachel Wolf and Bill Mears, 46189K] reports that the man accused of planning to murder Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh plans to plead guilty, according to court documents. Attorneys for Nicholas Roske confirmed his plea on Wednesday in a letter to Judge Deborah Bordman. "We write to inform the Court that Mr. Roske wishes to plead guilty to the one-count indictment pending against him," Roske’s attorneys wrote in a letter to the judge. The legal team also submitted a letter that Roske signed, which outlined the offense, penalties and "a factual basis in support of a guilty plea." Roske was set to go on trial on June 9, 2025. However, after the filing, both his attorneys and the government are seeking to schedule a hearing on April 7 or 8, during which he will formally enter the plea. In May 2022, months before the midterms, a draft decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that would strike down Roe v. Wade was leaked and t. This ignited protests as pro-choice advocates and Democrats fought to keep Roe in place. The Court overturned Roe on June 24, 2022, making abortion a key issue in the November midterms and fueling anger among many Americans, including Roske. When Roske made his way from Los Angeles to Maryland on June 7, 2022, to attempt to kill Kavanaugh, only the leaked draft was available to the public.

Politico [4/2/2025 3:50 PM, Dasha Burns] reports that national security adviser Mike Waltz’s team regularly set up chats on Signal to coordinate official work on issues including Ukraine, China, Gaza, Middle East policy, Africa and Europe, according to four people who have been personally added to Signal chats. Two of the people said they were in or have direct knowledge of at least 20 such chats. All four said they saw instances of sensitive information being discussed. It’s a more extensive use of the app than previously reported and sheds new light on how commonly the Trump administration’s national security team relies on Signal, a publicly available messaging app, to conduct its work. “It was commonplace to stand up chats on any given national security topic,” said one of the people involved in the chats, adding that the groups often included Cabinet members and high-level staff. All four of the people were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the private chats. Veteran national security officials have warned the practice potentially violates regulations on protecting sensitive national security information from foreign adversaries, and federal recordkeeping laws if the chats are automatically deleted. NSC spokesperson Brian Hughes noted that Signal is allowed on government devices and that some agencies automatically install it on employees’ phones. He also stressed that officials have used the app in both the Biden and Trump administrations. “It is one of the approved methods of communicating but is not the primary or even secondary, it is one of a host of approved methods for unclassified material with the understanding that a user must preserve the record,” Hughes said. “Any claim of use for classified information is 100 percent untrue.” None of the four individuals said they were aware of whether any classified information was shared, but all said that posts in group chats did include sensitive details of national security work.

Reported similarly:
Reuters [4/2/2025 12:22 PM, Staff, 41523K]

FOX News [4/2/2025 7:44 PM, Alec Schemmel, 46189K] reports the White House is clapping back against media reports alleging intelligence officials have been using the end-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal to send classified information, describing the allegations as "false" in a statement to Fox News Digital. The statement from National Security Council (NSC) spokesman Brian Hughes comes after Politico published a report suggesting Trump National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and his team have used the app frequently to discuss sensitive communications on a variety of different issues. "This is a clear attempt by some in media and the Democrats to obscure the simple truth: The President and his national security team are delivering for the nation by confronting our adversaries and standing with our allies to bring peace through strength," Hughes said in a statement to Fox News Digital. Hughes added that Signal is "an approved" messaging app, particularly as it pertains to unclassified info, "and any claim NSC officials are sending classified information over these channels is false.” Questions have circulated about the Trump administration’s use of Signal since The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg released his exposé alleging he was accidentally invited by Waltz to a sensitive group chat on the encrypted messaging app. Critics of the Trump administration have said the messages included "war plans" for an attack on Houthi rebels in Yemen. There have also been debates over whether the information discussed in the chat uncovered by Goldberg was classified information or contained "war plans.”

Yahoo! News [4/2/2025 9:36 AM, Zack Whittaker, 52868K] reports that senior members of the Trump administration’s National Security Council — including its top national security adviser, Michael Waltz — used Gmail to conduct government business, The Washington Post reported, citing documents and three unnamed government officials. The report follows last week’s news that several cabinet-level officials, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, discussed highly sensitive war plans in a Signal group chat that also inadvertently included the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. Per The Washington Post, an aide to Waltz used the consumer version of Gmail, which is not cleared for government use, to discuss "highly technical conversations with colleagues at other government agencies involving sensitive military positions and powerful weapons systems relating to an ongoing conflict.” As for the national security adviser himself, Waltz had "less sensitive, but potentially exploitable information" sent to his personal Gmail account, such as schedules and work documents, the report cited the officials as saying. According to the Post, the officials described the national security adviser’s use of personal Gmail accounts as "problematic handling" of information. A spokesperson for the White House did not immediately return a request for comment on the report.

Bloomberg [4/2/2025 5:24 AM, Staff, 16228K] reports as AI models like DeepSeek and Manus emerge from China, there is growing concern over securing national interests. This is as AI models controlled by foreign governments pose broader security risks. Bill Conner, CEO of Jitterbit speaks to Bloomberg’s Tom Mackenzie about how the tech industry can help with national security risks. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

Washington Post [4/2/2025 1:49 PM, Cate Cadell, 31735K] reports that Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called for FBI Director Kash Patel to investigate Elon Musk’s ties to the Chinese government, arguing that the U.S. DOGE Service’s access to millions of Americans’ sensitive data poses an unacceptable conflict of interest, given Beijing’s regulatory power over the tech billionaire’s vast business operations in China. In a letter sent Tuesday, Raskin (Maryland) requested any information from the FBI on Musk and his ties to Chinese officials in his role as a U.S. “special government employee” overseeing the cost-cutting DOGE — a designation that has allowed him to skirt some financial and conflict-of-interest disclosure rules. Raskin also requested details on Musk’s and his associates’ travel to China, asking that the law enforcement agency present a report to the committee by April 15. “Mr. Musk’s access to national security secrets and the sensitive data of hundreds of millions of Americans is alarming because his companies rely on Chinese markets and Chinese consumers for much of their business and revenue growth,” Raskin wrote. The FBI declined to comment on the letter. A spokesman for House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) declined to comment on the letter to Patel.

New York Times [4/3/2025 3:44 AM, Michael Crowley, 145325K] reports Secretary of State Marco Rubio traveled to Brussels on Thursday for a gathering of NATO foreign ministers amid high anxiety over the Trump administration’s approach to Europe, including the war in Ukraine, relations with Russia and President Trump’s growing trade war with the continent. Mr. Rubio’s visit to the alliance’s headquarters comes as relations between the United States and Europe have abruptly shifted from the close cooperation of the Biden era to mistrust and acrimony under Mr. Trump. At the same time, NATO officials may welcome a chance to confer with Mr. Rubio, whom many consider the most pro-alliance member of Mr. Trump’s national security team. As a senator in 2023, representing Florida, Mr. Rubio cosponsored legislation requiring any president to seek the Senate’s advice and consent before withdrawing from the organization. Former aides say Mr. Trump has privately mused about taking that step, which would shatter the 32-nation military alliance formed to counter Russia. Foreign officials who have dealt with Mr. Rubio since he became Mr. Trump’s top diplomat have described him as downplaying some of Mr. Trump’s wilder ideas and translating them into more realistic policy approaches, although they also question whether he truly speaks for a president with whom he does not have a close personal relationship. And there is only so much Mr. Rubio can do to sugarcoat Mr. Trump’s agenda, which is driven by a view that Europe economically exploits the United States, is culturally out of sync with the values of Mr. Trump’s political movement and must do business with Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Rubio also arrives just a day after Mr. Trump announced 20 percent tariffs on imports from the European Union. At the White House on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said of the E.U.: “They rip us off. It’s so sad to see. It’s so pathetic.”

The Hill [4/2/2025 6:21 PM, Ellen Mitchell, 12829K] reports Whitaker, confirmed late Tuesday by the Senate in a 52-45 vote, has an extensive law enforcement background but light foreign policy experience. During his confirmation hearing last month, he told senators that if he is confirmed for the post, he would urge the alliance’s members to bolster their defense spending, and he showed commitment to the transnational military organization founded in 1949. "President Trump has been clear: The United States remains committed to NATO and to the principle of peace through strength," Whitaker said at the time. Trump has criticized European allies for years for not contributing more to the military alliance to contain the Soviet Union. During his first term, Trump floated the idea of the United States withdrawing from NATO. More recently, reports have emerged that the Pentagon is considering an overhaul of the U.S. military’s combatant commands, including one scenario that would have the United States give up its role as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR).

Yahoo! News [4/2/2025 12:00 PM, Andrew Jones, 52868K] reports private launch companies Rocket Lab and Stoke Space have been selected to compete for future U.S. national security space launches. The two launch companies were awarded "National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 Lane 1 contracts" by the U.S. Space Force on March 27, broadening the military branch’s launch options and strengthening access to space. The duo join SpaceX, Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance (ULA) — which recently had its new Vulcan Centaur rocket certified — as NSSL providers. More launch providers mean more flexibility, speed and backup options for getting important satellites into space, a combination that military officials say is critical for national security and resilience. The Lane 1 awards are part of the Space Force’s launch plan that focuses on new or smaller companies that can grow into trusted launch partners for low Earth orbit launches. Lane 2 is for more capable, proven rockets for launches to more challenging, specific orbits. "With today’s award, the Space Force expanded our portfolio of launch systems able to deliver critical space capability," Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, the Space Force’s program executive officer for assured access to space, said in a March 27 statement. "These new partners bring innovative approaches and increased competition to our mission area.”

Bloomberg [4/2/2025 5:10 PM, Andrew Rosati, 16228K] reports Danish shipping powerhouse A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S purchased a railway linking ports at both ends of the Panama Canal, undermining the US’s presence along a key trade route where Donald Trump is trying to elbow out competitors. Maersk’s port operator, APM Terminals, acquired the Panama Canal Railway Company, the owner of the line that stretches across the isthmus nation, from a joint venture between Canadian Pacific Kansas City and the US’s Lanco Group. “The sale of this non-core asset creates value for our shareholders and reflects our commitment to optimize our assets as we focus on growing our core North American rail business through our rivaled three-nation network connecting Canada, the US and Mexico,” CPKC CEO Keith Creel said in a statement. The Calgary-based company, which operates routes across North America, didn’t disclose how much it received for the sale of the 47-mile (76-km) railway running along the waterway that links the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. For months, Trump has railed against encroaching Chinese influence of the Panama Canal, which the US built last century and then ceded control over nearly three decades ago. The Republican president insists the handover was a bad deal and has threatened to “take back” the waterway.

Washington Examiner [4/2/2025 10:45 PM, Elaine Mallon, 2296K] reports the Democratic Republic of Congo has commuted the death sentences of three Americans convicted over their involvement in a failed coup to overthrow the government last May. President Felix Tshisekedi granted "individual clemency" to Marcel Malanga, Tylor Thomson, and Benjamin Reuben Zalman-Polun, who will now serve life in prison for charges of criminal conspiracy and terrorism. The State Department has been involved in discussions with the Congolese government, but officials have not condemned the three U.S. citizens’ imprisonment. However, in February, an adviser for President Donald Trump on hostage negotiations, Adam Boehler, suggested the U.S. would not help Congo, currently in a conflict with Rwanda, due to Congo’s imprisonment of the American citizens. "The President of Congo is holding 3 Americans now," he wrote on X. "Perhaps it would be better if Rwanda won the war?". The three men were among 37 sentenced to death last September after an armed group coordinated an attack on the presidential palace, resulting in an exchange of gunfire that killed the coup’s leader and Malanga’s father, Christian. Christian Malanga was also an American citizen who was living in Utah and owned a car dealership. He livestreamed the coup attempt. Marcel Malanga denied being involved in planning the coup, saying he and his friend, Thomson, were forced to participate by his father. The commutation comes ahead of U.S. senior adviser for Africa Massad Boulos’s visit. Boulos, who is the father-in-law to President Donald Trump’s daughter Tiffany, will arrive in Kinshasa on Thursday. Congo has been seeking the assistance of the United States as it fights against Rwanda-backed M23, a rebel militia. M23 has captured several towns in the Congo, towns located in mineral-rich regions. Presidential spokeswoman Tina Salama denied that the decision to commute the three Americans’ sentences was made to win favor with the U.S. "We have no deal with the Americans at this stage on any American intervention," Salama said.

Reported similarly:
Reuters [4/2/2025 6:05 AM, Ange Kasongo, Sonia Rolley and Stanis Bujakera, 41523K]

Yahoo! News [4/2/2025 7:54 AM, Staff, 52868K] reports the Israeli army said it targeted Hamas militants in a strike on a UN building in Jabalia refugee camp Wednesday that Gaza’s civil defence agency said killed 19 people, nine of them children. The army said in a statement that it struck the militants "inside a command and control centre that was being used for coordinating terrorist activity", and separately confirmed to AFP the building housed a UN clinic. Civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal said there were also dozens of people wounded in the strike which "targeted an UNRWA building housing a medical clinic". The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) was not immediately able to confirm the strike. The army said that "the compound was used by Hamas’s Jabalia Battalion to plan terror attacks", and accused Hamas of "exploiting the civilian population as a human shield". The Palestinian foreign ministry condemned the "massacre at the UNRWA clinic in Jabalia", calling for "serious international pressure" to halt Israel’s widening offensive. The Islamic Jihad militant group, a Hamas ally, called the bombing a "blatant war crime". Israel has on several occasions conducted strikes on UNRWA buildings housing displaced people in Gaza, where fighting has raged for most of the past 18 months. A strike on the United Nations-run Al-Jawni school in central Gaza on September 11 drew international outcry after UNRWA said six of its staff were among the 18 people reported killed. The Israeli military accuses Hamas of hiding in school buildings where thousands of Gazans have sought shelter -- a charge the Palestinian militant group denies.

New York Times [4/2/2025 7:38 AM, Matthew Mpoke Bigg, 145325K] reports Israel’s government has said it will cancel all remaining tariffs on American imports, in an apparent bid to ensure that it is exempt from a new wave of levies that President Trump is set to announce on Wednesday. Israel and the United States, two close allies, have had a free-trade agreement since 1985 that excludes most American products from Israeli tariffs. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel presented the decision to remove all remaining tariffs as a move toward greater trade liberalization. “Today we canceled all of the customs duties levied on products from the U.S., Israel’s largest trading partner,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a post on X, formerly Twitter. “Canceling the customs duties on American goods is an additional step in the policy that my governments have led for a decade in opening up the market to competition.” The measure needs approval from the finance committee in the country’s Parliament, or Knesset, but is expected to pass, according to Israeli media. Total U.S. trade with Israel amounted to an estimated $37 billion in 2024, and the U.S. bilateral deficit stood at $7.4 billion, an 8.6 percent increase over the previous year, according to U.S. trade data. Israeli import taxes on U.S. goods amount to $11.3 million annually, with most levied on food, according to Israel’s finance ministry. Mr. Trump has already imposed several major tranches of tariffs, including ones that apply broadly to imports from China, Canada and Mexico. He has also announced tariffs on imported cars and car parts, which are set to go into effect on Thursday. The Trump administration has given few details about which countries and sectors will be included in the tariffs announcement on Wednesday, and it was not clear whether the levies would affect Israel.

The Hill [4/2/2025 2:58 PM, Filip Timotija, 12829K] reports the United States sanctioned an alleged network of financial facilitators, procurement operatives and companies Wednesday that are getting weapons, dual-use materials and stolen Ukrainian grain to Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen, the Treasury Department announced Wednesday. Two operatives, Afghani businessmen Hushang Ghairat and Sohrab Ghairat — brothers who are based in Russia — have assisted Sa’id al-Jamal, a senior Houthi financial operative who is backed by the Iran Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in securing commercial shipments in Russia, including arms transfer, the Treasury Department said. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned the network. In the process, it identified a minimum of eight digital asset wallets that are used by Houthis, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, to transfer funds related to the network’s efforts.

Reported similarly:
UPI [4/2/2025 12:17 PM, Doug Cunningham]

CNN [4/2/2025 10:55 AM, Alex Marquardt, 908K] reports that in the two months since Donald Trump became president, the Taliban has ratcheted up its efforts to ingratiate itself with the Trump administration, appearing to sense an opening to re-establish official ties and a presence in the US, according to people familiar with the American conversations with the group, which is still designated as a terrorist organization by Washington. "There’s a path that’s positive and if they walk that path, we walk that path," said an American official who described the early conversations as "exploratory" and fluid. "I wouldn’t rule out negative things too," the official said, emphasizing that normalization of ties wouldn’t be expected to happen in the near-term. In talks last month with American officials in Kabul, to secure the release of an American prisoner, Taliban officials again raised the prospect of the US recognizing the group as Afghanistan’s official government. The Taliban also put forward a request to open an office in the US to handle issues with the Afghan community, the official and a second person familiar with the discussions said. The office wouldn’t necessarily be an embassy and the location could be somewhere outside Washington, the Taliban officials proposed. Establishing formal diplomatic ties with the Taliban would mark a profound shift in US-Afghan relations following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan after the US withdrew its forces from the country in 2021. That came after nearly two decades of fighting which claimed the lives of almost 2,500 American troops.

CBS News [4/2/2025 8:05 PM, Camilla Schick, 51661K] reports the American children of a British couple held captive by Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban regime appealed Wednesday to President Trump in a video, asking for his help in securing their release. Britons Peter and Barbie Reynolds, both in their 70s, were detained by the Taliban on Feb. 1 this year alongside their American friend, Faye Hall, and their Afghan interpreter, as they traveled to the British couple’s home in Afghanistan’s central Bamiyan province, the Reynolds family told CBS News. Faye Hall, an American citizen, was released last Saturday into the custody of Qatari officials who helped broker her release and return to the U.S., just as the Reynolds family marked eight weeks of their parents being in Taliban captivity. Suhail Shaheen, the Taliban’s ambassador in Qatar, told CBS News that Hall was released as a "goodwill gesture" and that they "want to have positive relations with (the) U.S. and other countries.” Peter and Barbie Reynolds have lived in Afghanistan for 18 years, where they run a registered organization that provides teacher training to local schools and education reform that integrates Islamic values, their family told CBS News. They have Afghan passports that allow them to travel freely in and out of the country, and their work is known and supported by local Afghan elders and police, the family said. After the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, the Reynolds were invited to present their work to senior leaders, and Barbie was awarded a Certificate of Appreciation, believed to be the first such award ever given to a woman by the Taliban, the family said. "We are overjoyed that Faye Hall has been released after eight weeks in an Afghan prison. She endured an unimaginable ordeal. We are in close contact with her and deeply grateful she’s safe," the Reynolds’ children said. But their parents continue to be held without being charged. "Each week, they are promised a court date that never materializes," the family said. "Our father’s health is rapidly deteriorating. He’s run out of vital medication," the family also said. "Our mother is also weak and desperately in need of iron supplements. Their physical condition is worsening by the day." [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

Yahoo! News [4/2/2025 10:42 AM, Steffie Banatvala, 52868K] reports that the US has sent a three-person team to Myanmar to help respond to the 7.7-magnitude earthquake, in a move criticized as "weak and irrelevant" by a former aid official. Much larger Russian and Chinese teams have already been helping search-and-rescue efforts in the country for days. The scaled-back response comes as President Donald Trump is moving to officially end the US Agency For International Development (USAID) and has notified remaining employees their jobs will be eliminated. The Department of Government Efficiency is thought to have already cut billions of dollars from USAID, but the exact figure has not been verified. Any remaining functions are set to be transferred to the Department of State. "It’s not a case of worst-practice; it’s really a case of no-practice," former USAID disaster relief leader Jeremy Konyndyk told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. "It just makes the US look, frankly, kind of weak and irrelevant to most of the other countries that have shown up in force to support the people of Myanmar," added Konyndyk, now the president of Refugees International. The US team’s expected arrival on Wednesday comes five days after the earthquake devastated large swathes of Myanmar’s biggest cities on Friday.

USA Today [4/2/2025 9:34 AM, Jose Cash, Yimou Lee, and Ben Blanchard, 75858K] reports that China’s military concluded two-day war games around Taiwan in which it held long-range, live-fire drills in the East China Sea, marking an escalation of exercises around the island. The military’s Eastern Theatre Command said late on Wednesday it had completed the drills, which tested the troops’ "integrated joint operations capabilities." "Troops of the theatre command remain on high alert at all times, and will continue to strengthen combat readiness with intensive training, resolutely thwarting any separatist activities seeking ‘Taiwan independence’," the military said in a post on its social media account. China has stepped up rhetoric against Taiwan President Lai Ching-te, calling him a "parasite" on Tuesday in the wake of U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Asia visit, during which he repeatedly criticized Beijing. China views democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory and has repeatedly denounced Lai as a "separatist". Lai, who won election last year, rejects Beijing’s sovereignty claims and says only Taiwan’s people can decide their future.

Bloomberg [4/3/2025 3:57 AM, Josh Xiao and Cliff Harvey Venzon, 16228K] reports China said it has detained three Filipino nationals suspected of spying, a move that could further strain ties between Beijing and Manila. The Ministry of State Security said it recently discovered an espionage case involving Filipino nationals based in China, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Thursday. The three — David Servañez, Albert Endencia and Nathalie Plizardo — have been operatives for Manila and carried out secret intelligence tasks in China, the report said, adding the case is under investigation. China’s detention is the latest sign of growing tensions between Beijing and Manila, as the two countries continue to clash over territorial disputes in the South China Sea. In the past, China has detained foreigners during periods of strained diplomatic ties. In 2018, two Canadian nationals were arrested just days after a top executive at Huawei Technologies Co. was taken into custody. China’s state broadcaster released video confessions from the three individuals on Thursday, who said they regretted the move. “Filipino nationals in China are supposed to be an important bridge for the promotion of China-Philippines friendship, but they have been exploited by the Philippine espionage agencies and turned from a ‘bridge of friendship’ to ‘hotbed of spying’,” CCTV said. A Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Philippine media reported last month that three Filipinos were detained in China’s Hainan province. It’s unclear if the two cases are linked. Manila has also accused Chinese nationals of spying on the nation. In January, Philippine authorities arrested a Chinese national and two Filipino associates for alleged espionage. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said then he was “very disturbed” by espionage operations on the military and coast guard.

Yahoo! News [4/2/2025 2:55 PM, Jasmine Venet, 52868K] reports Amazon has put in a last-minute bid to buy TikTok as the April 5 deadline determining the popular video app’s fate quickly approaches. Jeff Bezos’ e-commerce giant has joined an unnamed list of buyers that President Donald Trump has said are interested in acquiring the popular app. In 2024, TikTok was the most popular app available and was downloaded 825 million times. According to people familiar with the bid, Amazon sent its offer in a letter to Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, though allegedly none of the other potential buyers seem to be taking Amazon’s bid seriously. "We have a lot of potential buyers," Trump said on Air Force One Sunday. "There’s tremendous interest in TikTok... I’d like to see TikTok remain alive.” The fate of the Chinese-owned app has been up in the air for months, but come Saturday, it will be determined whether or not the app will be banned in the U.S. or bought and separated from its owner, ByteDance.

Reuters [4/3/2025 12:49 AM, Mikhail Flores, 24727K] reports the potential purchase of F-16 jets by the Philippines from the United States does not harm the interests of any third party, including China, a Philippine security official said on Thursday. National Security Council spokesperson Jonathan Malaya assured China the planned acquisition is not intended as a threat to any nation and is merely part of the Philippines’ efforts to modernize its military. "We would like to assure the People’s Republic of China that the planned procurement of the F-16 fighter jets to the Philippine arsenal does not in any way harm the interest of any third party," Malaya told a briefing. The U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency said on Tuesday the State Department had approved a possible foreign military sale to the Philippines of 20 F-16 planes for an estimated cost of $5.58 billion. The aircraft would boost the Philippine military’s ability to patrol its territory and improve interoperability between their militaries, the Pentagon said. Malaya said the U.S. government has not officially communicated the approval to the Philippines. The announcement came after U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited Manila last week, where he reaffirmed Washington’s "ironclad" commitment to its mutual defence treaty with the Philippines and pledged to deploy advance capabilities to strengthen deterrence against threats, including Chinese "aggression".

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