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 New York Times [3/14/2025 3:48 AM, Abbie VanSickle, 330K] reports lawyers for President Trump asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to lift a nationwide pause imposed on the president’s order ending birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants and foreign residents. The move represents the first time the legal wrangling over the president’s order to end birthright citizenship has reached the Supreme Court. If the Trump administration succeeds, the policy could immediately go into effect in some parts of the country. Three federal courts, in Massachusetts, Maryland and Washington State, had issued directives temporarily pausing the order, which was signed by Mr. Trump on his first day in office and declared that citizenship would be denied to babies who do not have at least one parent who is a U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident. That would include children born to people who crossed into the country without permission. The Trump administration’s emergency applications are aimed at pushing back on nationwide injunctions, judicial orders that can block a policy or action from being enforced throughout the entire country, rather than just on the parties involved in the litigation. The tool has been used during Democratic and Republican administrations, and a debate over such injunctions has simmered for years. In applications to the court, Sarah M. Harris, the acting solicitor general, called the government’s request a “modest” one to limit the pause to “parties actually within the courts’ power.” The three emergency applications list 22 states and the District of Columbia as parties to the lawsuits. “Universal injunctions have reached epidemic proportions since the start of the current administration,” Ms. Harris wrote. A series of Mr. Trump’s initial policy moves have been blocked nationally by judges who have imposed similar broad injunctions while suits challenging their legality are considered. Legal experts say a decision by the justices to unravel nationwide injunctions could have implications for an array of legal challenges to Mr. Trump’s actions. So far, federal judges have issued nationwide injunctions blocking the firing of federal workers, the freezing of federal funding and the relocation of transgender women in federal prisons to men’s housing. Roll Call [3/13/2025 4:46 PM, Michael Macagnone, 503K] reports that the Justice Department, in three applications about rulings in Washington, New Jersey and Maryland, asked the justices to limit those rulings only to the people or states who filed them. And the Justice Department also asked the justices to allow federal agencies to develop and issue guidance explaining how they would implement Trump’s citizenship order "in the event that it takes effect." The order has remained on hold since January, when a federal judge in Washington issued the first order barring its enforcement. Since then, multiple district courts have ruled against the order, finding it likely violated the Constitution, federal immigration law and federal administrative law. Multiple appellate courts rebuffed the Trump administration’s appeal of those orders. The Trump administration argued arguing that the lower court judges overstepped their bounds.

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NBC News [3/13/2025 3:15 PM, Lawrence Hurley, 44742K] Video: HERE
CNN [3/13/2025 5:27 PM, John Fritze, 908K]
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Newsweek [3/13/2025 4:55 PM, Anna Commander, 52220K]
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Hawaii Public Radio [3/13/2025 1:20 PM, Deepa Shivaram, 61K] report that President Trump is set to visit the Justice Department on Friday to lay out his vision for the department. "I think we have unbelievable people, and all I’m going to do is set out my vision. It’s going to be their vision, really, but it’s my ideas," he told reporters at the White House on Thursday. Trump said he would be talking about crime as well as immigration. "We’ll be talking about a lot of things," he said. "The complete gamut." White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that Trump will also discuss "ending the weaponization of justice against Americans for their political leanings." It’s unusual for a sitting president to give a speech from the Justice Department. There is typically a separation between politics and the DOJ, but Trump has repeatedly made attacking the department part of his campaign speeches and said on the trail last year that he would use the DOJ to go after people he sees as disloyal. Trump’s visit on Friday comes as the Trump administration has spent the last several weeks trying to reconfigure the department, demoting attorneys who worked on cases related to Jan. 6 and firing officials who investigated the president himself.

The New York Times [3/13/2025 2:47 PM, Rebecca Davis O’Brien, 145325K] reports America’s largest federal employees’ union filed a lawsuit on Thursday against the Homeland Security Department and its leadership to stop the Trump administration from canceling a collective bargaining agreement for Transportation Security Administration workers. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Seattle, is the latest example of how the union, the American Federation of Government Employees, or A.F.G.E., has taken to the courts to challenge the administration’s efforts to undermine labor protections for government workers. The union says the bargaining agreement, approved in 2024, covers 47,000 transportation security officers. On Friday, the Homeland Security Department said it was ending the agreement, saying it had “constrained” the officers’ ability “to safeguard our transportation systems and keep Americans safe.” The A.F.G.E. lawsuit, which names Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, as a defendant, says rescinding the collective bargaining agreement would affect public safety, calling it “an act of retaliation by the Trump administration” against the union and an “attempt to punish free speech.” The Federal News Network [3/13/2025 6:53 PM, Justin Doubleday, 1089K] reports that the suit also argues Noem’s actions violate the First Amendment, alleging that the Trump administration was retaliating against the American Federation of Government Employees. AFGE has led numerous lawsuits challenging the administration’s actions to reduce the federal workforce. AFGE and the other unions are asking the court to reverse a determination from Noem that rescinded the TSA collective bargaining agreement. "Tearing up a legally negotiated union contract is unconstitutional, retaliatory, and will make the TSA experience worse for American travelers," AFGE National President Everett Kelley said in a statement. The Hill [3/13/2025 5:33 PM, Rebecca Beitsch, 12829K] reports that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) first publicized the move last week, though Noem signed an order rescinding the contract last month. In that announcement, the DHS also leveled a number of claims against the union, including that TSA workers "will no longer lose their hard-earned dollars to a union that does not represent them." The DHS also claimed TSA had more officers working on union work than screening passengers in 86 percent of airports — something the AFGE said was mathematically impossible.

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VOA News [3/13/2025 7:09 PM, Jeff Seldin, 2913K] reports U.S. government lawyers are expected to face off with attorneys for civil and immigration rights groups over the use of a U.S. naval base in Cuba to hold migrants slated for deportation. Arguments in the two lawsuits over operations at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, filed against the Department of Homeland Security and Secretary Kristi Noem, are set for a U.S. District Court in Washington on Friday. The suits allege that the U.S. government has overstepped its bounds by denying migrants sent to Guantanamo Bay access to legal representation and also by attempting to send migrants to the base’s facilities without the proper legal authority in violation of the U.S. Constitution. DHS officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the upcoming hearing, but they have repeatedly denied the allegations while criticizing the groups bringing the lawsuits. "The American Civil Liberties Union appears far more interested in promoting open borders and disrupting public safety missions than in protecting the civil liberties of Americans," a DHS spokesperson told VOA in a statement earlier this month, declining to be named. "They should consider changing their name," the spokesperson added, further describing the legal challenges as "baseless.” According to a U.S. defense official, who spoke to VOA on the condition of anonymity, the prison as currently configured can hold only 130 detainees, while the base’s Migrant Operations Center and a temporary tent city can hold, at most, 550 people. As VOA first reported, DHS officials decided to remove all 40 remaining migrants from the prison and other facilities at Guantanamo Bay this past Tuesday, flying them instead to the U.S. southern state of Louisiana. Neither DHS nor its subagency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, have responded to requests for comment on the decision to evacuate migrants from the naval base or on their status or whereabouts since being returned to the U.S. mainland.

AP [3/13/2025 9:41 PM, Morgan Lee and Tara Copp, 12335K] reports U.S. authorities have removed immigrants from detention facilities at the Guantanamo Bay naval base as a federal court in Washington weighs a challenge by civil rights advocates to holding immigrants at the offshore military station. A spokesperson for the U.S. Southern Command on Thursday said that no “illegal aliens” are being held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba after 40 immigrants were flown off the base on Tuesday to Louisiana. Officials declined to specify why the immigrants were transferred to the U.S. or to share their names and nationalities. Additionally, two U.S. officials said on condition of anonymity, to provide additional details on the movement, that while the 40 immigrants have been removed, it doesn’t mean that the facility won’t be used in the future — it’s just not decided yet. Future “high-threat” detainees may be sent there, the officials said. President Donald Trump has said he will send the worst criminal migrants to Guantanamo Bay, but civil rights attorneys say many detainees transferred there don’t have a criminal record and that the administration has exceeded its authority in violation of U.S. immigration law. Civil rights attorneys sued the Trump administration this month to prevent it from transferring 10 migrants detained in the U.S. to Guantanamo Bay and filed statements from men held there who said they were mistreated in conditions that one of them called “a living hell.” The transfer of detained immigrants to Guantanamo Bay “constitutes an unlawful removal” and violates the Immigration and Nationality Act, advocacy groups including the ACLU said Thursday in a court filing. The Trump administration says it commands broad authority to hold immigrants with final deportation orders at Guantanamo Bay.

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Washington Post [3/14/2025 5:00 AM, Silvia Foster-Frau, Alex Horton and Laris Karklis, 31735K] reports that, when President Donald Trump directed the U.S. government to begin using the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station as a detention center for migrants in late January, he said it would “double our capacity immediately” to hold people being removed from the country as part of a massive deportation campaign. But nearly two months later, the operation has struggled to scale up. On Wednesday, a Defense Department official confirmed there were no migrants being held in Guantánamo. Forty men who were still there earlier in the week have since been flown back to the United States. A series of logistical, legal and financial hurdles have cast doubt on whether the president’s goal of housing 30,000 people there can be carried out. In all, about 300 migrants total have been detained there. The U.S. government currently has the capacity to hold 180 migrants in Guantánamo. Authorities could detain up to 3,120 more migrants there if tents put up by troops were equipped with utilities like air conditioning. But for now the 195 tents are empty. Defense Department officials said they have held off on taking steps to fix them up for further use without the migrants to fill them. Meanwhile, there is the likely price tag for transporting migrants to Guantánamo and holding many of them in a high-security facility designed to house Sept. 11 prisoners. In recent years, the suspected terrorists held at Guantánamo’s military detention facility have cost the United States $16,540 a day per prisoner, not including the legal fees associated with their cases, according to Defense Department records. Government budget and Guantánamo experts say they expect the cost of detaining migrants there to be about the same as the prisoners’ cost without the legal fees.

Wall Street Journal [3/13/2025 9:00 PM, Shelby Holliday, Tarini Parti and Nancy A. Youssef] reports that, about two months after President Trump announced he would send up to 30,000 migrants to Guantanamo Bay, an expansive tent city on the naval base sits vacant. Hundreds of troops are still deployed to the base to guard the facilities and prepare them for use, even though the nearly 300 migrants who were briefly detained on the island in two separate structures are now gone. Mired in operational and legal challenges, the president’s plan to send the “worst criminal illegal aliens” to Guantanamo Bay is unraveling. U.S. Southern Command, which is responsible for military operations at the base, has started making plans to draw down from the roughly 1,000 military personnel deployed there in the coming weeks, a defense official said. The operation has so far cost at least $16 million, according to lawmakers who recently toured the naval base. The defense official added that the administration is planning to repurpose 195 large tents, which are each lined with about a dozen or more cots, since they have sat unused for weeks. The small groups of migrants who were flown to the island on costly military aircraft and chartered civilian planes were moved only weeks later, two U.S. officials said, adding that no more flights were currently scheduled to carry migrants to the naval base. The Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security have struggled to come to an agreement on the division of their responsibilities on the base, people familiar with the operations say, setting the stage for finger pointing as the administration struggles to fulfill Trump’s stated vision for Guantanamo. From the start, the plan faced a hurdle that officials have been unable to overcome. The tents were incompatible with the government’s standards for migrant detention, according to lawmakers who toured the facilities and another defense official. The tents are open to the elements, lack air conditioning, smell of mold and sit atop grass and dirt with no flooring, the lawmakers and another person familiar with the conditions said. They cost $3.1 million to get out of storage and set up, the lawmakers were told. “They are proceeding with the orders of the president despite the fact that every single person there has to know that this is not an option,” said Rep. Jill Tokuda (D., Hawaii) who visited Guantanamo on Friday and received a briefing by officials there.

CBS News [3/13/2025 1:03 PM, Camilo Montoya-Galvez, Eleanor Watson, Charlie D’Agata, Fin Gómez, and Nicole Sganga, 51661K] report that President Trump is planning to invoke a wartime law known as the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 as soon as Friday to authorize the summary deportation of some migrants, including to Guantanamo Bay, escalating his government-wide immigration crackdown, multiple U.S. officials familiar with the plan told CBS News. The 227-year-old law gives presidents the extraordinary power to order the arrest, detention and deportation of noncitizens who are 14 years or older and come from countries staging an "invasion or predatory incursion" of the U.S. Mr. Trump is expected to cite the 18th-century statute to order the swift detention and deportation of suspected members of the Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang with prison origins that his administration has designated a foreign terrorist organization, said the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Officials have made preparations to send suspected gang members to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, soon after Mr. Trump invokes the Alien Enemies Act, two of the U.S. officials said. At Mr. Trump’s direction, officials have been detaining some migrants awaiting deportation at the naval base, though the holding facilities were left empty earlier this week. CBS News reached out to representatives of the White House and the Department of Homeland Security for comment.

FOX News [3/13/2025 8:29 AM, Beth Bailey, 46189K] reports the recent cancelation of $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University by the Trump administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism was seen as a major wake-up call to the country’s universities. In its press release, the task force announced that the "decisive action" is "a notice to every school and university that receives federal dollars.” Leo Terrell, leader of the Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism and senior counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights, told Fox News Digital that Columbia was an initial target for funding cuts because the school has been "in my opinion, the worst of the worst when it comes to allowing this type of conduct to take place and to continue.” Rabbi Moshe Hauer, Executive Vice President of the Orthodox Union, told Fox News Digital that "the more dramatic action that the [Trump] administration seems ready to take … seems to be the necessary approach for something as urgent as what we have been facing." Hauer added that his community has "a lot of hope.” Hauer added that recent protests at Columbia University and Barnard College "reminded us how alive the issue [of campus antisemitism] is.” Terrell said President Donald Trump’s executive order directing increased efforts to fight antisemitism "set the tone for every single agency" involved in the task force, which includes the Departments of Justice, Education, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security and State, in addition to the U.S. General Services Administration and the FBI. Terrell said newly confirmed Secretary of Education Linda McMahon "is involved in this extensively, per the directive from [U.S. Attorney General] Pam Bondi.” He says experts within his task force will be assessing schools based on about nine criteria to determine whether they are adequately protecting Jewish students. In addition to looking for evidence of hate crimes and examining schools’ tax-exempt status, Terrell said the task force will search for violations of Title VI and Title VII in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Title VI protects Americans who engage in programs that receive federal funds from discrimination based upon race, color and national origin. Former President Joe Biden’s administration used Title VI when the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights examined hostile antisemitic environments on K-12 and college campuses. Title VII prevents federal employment discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sex or color. The task force’s move at Columbia follows weeks of protests at the university and affiliated Barnard College. In January, students stormed a Columbia classroom and "allegedly threw around [fliers] filled with hateful speech." The following month, more than 50 protesters took over a building at Barnard College and were said to have assaulted an employee.

USA Today [3/13/2025 5:16 PM, Trevor Hughes, 75858K] reports President Donald Trump is preparing to invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to speed up deportations as he makes good on his promise to target violent criminal offenders living illegally in the United States. Trump has repeatedly referenced using the law passed 277 years ago, and which was previously been used to detain U.S. citizens of Japanese and German descent during World War II, in a chapter that has since been seen as deeply problematic. The law gives the president wartime power to deport people without hearings, if deemed necessary. Trump on Friday is planning to address the Department of Justice, and has singled out Tren de Aragua as an "unusual and extraordinary threat" to the United States. ICE agents have been highlighting recent TdA detentions they’ve made across the country.

NPR [3/13/2025 12:30 PM, Michel Martin and Destinee Adams, 29983K] report that President Trump has ramped up efforts to deliver on a campaign promise to carry out the largest ever deportation of immigrants in U.S. history. Parallel to those deportation plans is a crackdown on what the administration calls antisemitism on college campuses. Both efforts came to the forefront this week when Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate student, who has not been charged with any crime yet. This is likely the first high profile arrest of a legal permanent resident in connection with the pro-Palestinian protests that rippled across the nation’s campuses last year. Trump has vowed that this is the first of many arrests to come as he lays a framework for increased deportations. Trump officials are standing beside his efforts and doubling down on accusations that Khalil’s actions align with those of a terrorist. One of those officials is Troy Edgar, the deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, who defended Khalil’s arrest on Morning Edition. When NPR’s Michel Martin asked him to explain what Khalil did to be arrested, aligned with terrorist activity and potentially deported, Edgar did not give a clear answer. [Editorial note: consult audio at source link]

NPR [3/13/2025 6:03 PM, Alejandra Marquez Janse, Ari Shapiro, Patrick Jarenwattananon, 29983K] Audio: HERE reports NPR’s Ari Shapiro speaks with Mahmoud Khalil’s attorney, Amy Greer, about his recent arrest by ICE officers. The Trump administration has accused Khalil, a green card holder, of supporting Hamas.

New York Times [3/13/2025 6:01 PM, Edgar Sandoval, 145325K] reports Mr. Quintero described the scene in court testimony during the first days of a federal trial of two men who are accused of being part of a sprawling smuggling ring. Prosecutors say the ring was responsible for the deaths of 53 migrants — 47 adults and six children — on June 27, 2022, possibly the deadliest migrant smuggling incident in the nation’s history. Testimony from witnesses, law enforcement and survivors has offered a window into the plight of undocumented immigrants who sneak into the country and try to stay undetected, rather than turn themselves in to the authorities and request asylum, the preferred route for much of the Biden administration. The two defendants, Armando Gonzales-Ortega, 54, and Felipe Orduna-Torres, 29, are charged with conspiracy to transport undocumented immigrants resulting in death. They are potentially facing sentences of life in prison. A verdict is expected by early April. Neither of the men is accused of driving the tractor-trailer, or of being present at the scene on Quintana Road.

FOX News [3/13/2025 12:51 PM, Emma Colton, 46189K] report that federal agencies are required to submit layoff plans to the White House and Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Thursday as the Trump administration works to slim down and streamline the federal government. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Feb. 11 that ordered federal agency leaders to "undertake preparations to initiate large-scale reductions in force." The order focused on removing employees in offices suspended or closed by the Trump administration, roles that were considered nonessential during government shutdowns and temporary employees. The executive order stipulated that the layoff plans would not affect roles related to "public safety, immigration enforcement, or law enforcement." On Feb. 26, the Office of Management and Budget and OPM — which works as the federal government’s human resources office — issued guidance to agency heads that they had until March 13 to submit "Agency Reorganization Plans" to comply with the large-scale reductions in force order. Some agency heads have already submitted plans or announced how they plan to gut their respective departments. The Department of Education, for example, announced on Tuesday that it was rolling out its reduction in force plan that impacted nearly 50% of its staff, translating to roughly 1,300 terminations.

FOX News [3/14/2025 4:58 AM, Elizabeth Pritchett, 46189K] reports Homeland Security agents conducted searches in a pair of students’ rooms at Columbia University on Thursday, resulting in Katrina Armstrong, the interim president of the school, sharing that she was "heartbroken" in an update to the campus community. "I am writing heartbroken to inform you that we had federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security in two University residences tonight," she wrote. "No one was arrested or detained. No items were removed, and no further action was taken.” The DHS agents served Columbia with two judicial search warrants signed by a federal magistrate judge, which met the university’s requirements for law enforcement to enter non-public areas. Details surrounding the rooms searched and the purpose of the search were not immediately available. "The University is obligated to comply with the law," Armstrong said, in part. "Our University Public Safety was present at all times.” She added that Columbia will "make every effort" to ensure the campus and everyone on it is safe, adding that the school is "committed to upholding the law" and she expects "city, state and federal agencies to do the same.” "I understand the immense stress our community is under. Despite the unprecedented challenges, Columbia University will remain a place where the pursuit of knowledge is cherished and fiercely protected, where the rule of law and due process is respected and never taken for granted, and where all members of our community are valued and able to thrive. These are the principles we uphold and that guide us every day," Armstrong said. The searches come less than a week after anti-Israel agitator Mahmoud Khalil, 30, was arrested by ICE at his university-owned apartment for his alleged involvement in the massive anti-Israel protests at Columbia last year. He is now in ICE custody in Louisiana. Khalil is a permanent U.S. resident, but is Palestinian and was raised in Syria. He is married to an American citizen who is currently eight months pregnant. When he was arrested, DHS said it was to protect U.S. national security, saying that Khalil "led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.” Khalil’s attorney, Ramsi Kassem, said his client was "identified, targeted and detained" because of his advocacy for Palestinian rights and his protected speech. He said Khalil has no criminal convictions, but "for some reason, is being detained.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the Trump administration’s decision to arrest Khalil and said he distributed pro-Hamas propaganda fliers on campus.

Washington Post [3/13/2025 8:14 PM, Cate Brown, Praveena Somasundaram and Kyle Melnick, 31735K] reports ninety-eight people were arrested Thursday afternoon at Trump Tower while protesting the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, who led pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia University last year, New York Police Chief of Patrol John Chell told reporters. The intergenerational group of protesters, many of whom are Jewish, held up banners that read “Free Mahmoud, Free Palestine,” “Fight Nazis, Not Students,” and “Come for One, Face Us All.” Many wore red T-shirts, some emblazoned with phrases including “Not in our name” and “Stop arming Israel.” Police officers placed zip ties around some protesters’ hands and carried some out of the building in Manhattan. Those arrested were loaded onto two buses and taken to NYPD headquarters a few miles south. Charges included trespassing, obstructing governmental administration and resisting arrest, Chell said. Over 250 demonstrators in New York City gathered inside Trump Tower on March 13, protesting U.S. immigration authorities’ arrest of Mahmoud Khali. (Video: Cate Brown/Washington Post). U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained Khalil, who has a green card, on Saturday, according to his attorney. He was transferred from New York to an ICE detention center in Louisiana, where he awaits a March 27 hearing. As a graduate student at Columbia University last year, Khalil represented pro-Palestinian protesters at news conferences and negotiated protesters’ demands with the administration. He and others wanted Columbia to divest from companies associated with Israel, which launched a retaliatory war in Gaza that killed tens of thousands of Palestinians after Hamas militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Students at Columbia sparked a protest movement that spread to college campuses across the United States. On Thursday, several Jewish demonstrators challenged the Trump administration’s narrative that Khalil’s arrest was part of a broader campaign to combat "pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity" in the United States. Jewish Voice for Peace, a Jewish anti-Zionist organization, organized Thursday’s rally. The group said more than 200 people participated, including descendants of Holocaust survivors.

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Newsweek [3/13/2025 6:34 PM, Sonam Sheth, 52220K] reports Columbia University announced on Thursday that it expelled or suspended some of the students who occupied a campus building last year in protest of Israel’s war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The Ivy League school in New York City also said it had temporarily revoked the diplomas of some students involved in the protests who have since graduated but did not provide additional information. Columbia’s announcement came amid widespread protests over the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a university graduate and pro-Palestinian activist, over the weekend. Khalil was initially held in New Jersey but has since been moved to Louisiana. The email came after the Trump administration stripped Columbia of more than $400 million in federal funding after what the government characterized as a failure to crack down on antisemitism on campus. Reuters [3/13/2025 10:09 PM, Brad Brooks, 24727K] reports that the announcement came a week after President Donald Trump’s administration announced that it had canceled $400 million in federal grants and contracts in response to what it said was the Ivy League school’s poor response to antisemitism on campus. Columbia University’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, has called the administration’s concerns legitimate and said her institution was working with the government to address them. Campus protests and pro-Israel counter-protests have drawn allegations of antisemitism, Islamophobia and racism. The university said in a statement on Thursday that its "judicial board determined findings and issued sanctions to students ranging from multi-year suspensions, temporary degree revocations, and expulsions related to the occupation of Hamilton Hall last spring." The university’s judicial board is comprised of students, faculty and staff selected by the university Senate. The university, citing legal privacy restrictions, did not release the names of students who were disciplined, nor did it say how many students faced punishments, which the students can appeal. The union representing Columbia student workers, UAW Local 2710, said in a written statement that its president, Grant Miner, was among the students expelled, just one day before contract negotiations with the university were set to begin, a move the union called "the latest assault on First Amendment rights ..."

The New York Times [3/14/2025 3:48 AM, Benjamin Weiser, 145325K] reports that Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate detained by the Trump administration last weekend, and seven current students asked a federal court on Thursday to block the school from producing student disciplinary records to a House committee that demanded them last month. The committee’s request and the school’s compliance with it would violate the First Amendment rights of Mr. Khalil and the students and the university’s obligation to protect student privacy, the lawsuit said. The Hill [3/13/2025 1:01 PM, Lexi Lonas Cochran, 12829K] report that detained activist Mahmoud Khalil filed a lawsuit Thursday against Columbia University and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce to stop the school from giving student disciplinary records to lawmakers. Khalil, a former Columbia student who was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after playing a leading role in pro-Palestinian demonstrations, is suing alongside other students after the House committee sent a letter on Feb. 13 demanding student disciplinary records from certain incidents on campus, saying the school would risk loss of federal funding if it failed to comply. The suit is seeking declaratory and injunctive relief to stop the transfer of any more records until a decision is reached by the court. "The Committee’s Letter is clearly intended to chill the protected speech of University’s students," the lawsuit reads. The lawsuit alleges compliance with the letter would violate the students’ First Amendment rights, privacy laws, contractual obligations by the university’s own rules and "in effect coerces the University to ignore the law." "The records demanded by the Committee are not substantially related to antisemitism. Rather, the Committee has instrumentalized accusations of antisemitism to attack ideas it ideologically opposes. It traffics in anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic dog whistles to justify unjustifiable intrusions on First Amendment rights," another part of the suit states. Columbia told The Hill it will not comment on pending litigation.

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Washington Post [3/13/2025 10:14 PM, Daniel Wu, 31735K]

Washington Post [3/13/2025 2:37 PM, Sarah Ellison, 31735K] report that When President Donald Trump addressed Congress last week, he declared that he had “stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America.” But the administration’s arrest and attempted expulsion of Mahmoud Khalil over his protests at Columbia University against Israel’s war in Gaza has alarmed First Amendment attorneys who see it as an obvious violation of Khalil’s rights but also an effort to intimidate others to keep them from speaking out. “This case is as clear a First Amendment violation as any case I’ve ever seen in my 23-year career,” said Jeffrey Pyle, a partner at Prince Lobel in Boston who specializes in First Amendment and white-collar defense cases. Administration officials have denied that their arrest of Khalil represents a First Amendment violation, noting that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has the power under an obscure federal statute to order a deportation if an individual’s presence or activities in the United States carry potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences. The reality is not that simple, legal scholars say. The provision the White House is using is rarely invoked. It requires extensive judicial review. Other parts of the law specify that removal cannot be based solely on someone’s speech. If it is, “it would be unconstitutional,” Pyle said.

AP [3/14/2025 2:23 AM, Larry Neumeister, 48304K] reports handcuffed and shackled, Mahmoud Khalil was rushed from New York to Louisiana last weekend in a manner that left the outspoken Columbia University graduate student feeling like he was being kidnapped, his lawyers wrote in an updated lawsuit seeking his immediate release. The lawyers described in detail what happened to the Palestinian activist as he was flown to Louisiana by agents he said never identified themselves. Once there, he was left to sleep in a bunker with no pillow or blanket as top U.S. officials cheered the effort to deport a man his lawyers say sometimes became the "public face" of student protests on Columbia’s campus against Israel’s military actions in Gaza. The filing late Thursday in Manhattan federal court was the result of a federal judge’s Wednesday order that they finally be allowed to speak with Khalil. The lawyers said his treatment by federal authorities from Saturday, when he was first arrested, to Monday reminded Khalil of when he left Syria shortly after the forced disappearance of his friends there during a period of arbitrary detention in 2013. "Throughout this process, Mr. Khalil felt as though he was being kidnapped," the lawyers wrote of his treatment. Earlier this week, President Donald Trump heralded Khalil’s arrest as the first "of many to come," vowing on social media to deport students he said engage in "pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity.” In court papers, lawyers for the Justice Department said Kahlil was detained under a law allowing Secretary of State Marco Rubio to remove someone from the country if he has reasonable grounds to believe their presence or activities would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences. Trump and Rubio were added as defendants in the civil lawsuit seeking to free Khalil. The government attorneys asked a judge to toss out the lawsuit or transfer it to New Jersey or Louisiana, saying jurisdiction belongs in the locations where Khalil has been held since his detention.

CBS New York [3/13/2025 6:36 PM, Marcia Kramer, 51661K] Video: HERE reports the Trump administration has opened a new front in its deportation efforts. Federal prosecutors have issued subpoenas to three New York City migrant shelters, seeking the names and other personal data of people who lived there. However, the reason one of the hotels was targeted remains unclear. Mayor Eric Adams said Thursday he knows nothing and Gov. Kathy Hochul is vowing not to cooperate with this new probe, which comes as Trump "border czar" Tom Homan has made no bones about his frustration that New York’s sanctuary city status is making it more difficult for his agents to do their job. "I don’t know. You have to speak to the Southern District about their review on immigration. They’re not ... They don’t tell us anything," Adams said. The shelters in question were the Roosevelt Hotel, which served as an intake center for thousands of migrants for two years, the Stewart Hotel and the Hotel Chandler. "Is there any way you could protect these migrants from the intrusion of the federal investigation where they’re trying to find out their names, their birthdays, their private information? Is there any way the city can help them?" CBS News New York’s Marcia Kramer asked the mayor. "No one shared that question with us. No one shared us any information. We’re going to keep doing what we’ve done," Adams responded.

Reported similarly:
FOX News [3/13/2025 8:50 AM, Michael Dorgan Fox, 46189K]

Newsweek [3/13/2025 11:58 AM, Billal Rahman, 52220K] report that the state of Florida spent nearly $660 million on health care in 2024 for immigrants who have no legal status, new data shows. Newsweek has contacted the office of Governor Ron DeSantis for comment. The health care spending appears to be an obstacle to Governor Ron DeSantis’ stated priority of reducing such taxpayer-funded services for immigrants with no legal status. The issue also feeds a larger national debate on immigration, especially as former President Donald Trump continues to implement his election-mandated mass deportations and stricter border policies. On Tuesday, the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) announced an updated version of its Hospital Patient Immigration Status Dashboard. It is a tool that tracks the overall number of hospital admissions and emergency room visits by patients’ immigration status. In 2024, patients who illegally entered the country accounted for 67,700 emergency room visits, resulting in approximately $76.6 million in Medicaid payments for their emergency care. The state reported spending $659.9 million on health care for immigrants across Florida in 2024. In 2023, costs reached $566 million over seven months from June to December. "The agency remains dedicated to fulfilling Governor DeSantis’ commitment to protecting taxpayer dollars from being used on individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States," AHCA Deputy Secretary Kim Smoak said in a statement. The state’s financial estimate does not account for how many immigrants pay their medical bills.

Newsweek [3/13/2025 5:50 PM, Billal Rahman, Dan Gooding, 52220K] reports Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and legal permanent resident, remains detained inside the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena. While activists fight to prevent his deportation, Khalil’s fate rests in the hands of the federal courts. The Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, located in Jena, Louisiana, is one of the largest immigration detention facilities in the United States. Louisiana is the second-largest state for immigration detention, trailing only Texas. Photos of the site are rare, with those visiting not permitted to take any, but there have been multiple reports over the years of alleged abuse, negligence or misconduct at the site. While a federal judge has temporarily halted Khalil’s deportation, his future hinges on ongoing legal proceedings. As advocates push for his release, Khalil’s case has become a flashpoint in the national debate over immigration enforcement and civil liberties.

FOX News [3/13/2025 4:22 PM, Louis Casiano, 46189K] reports Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is launching a probe into the city of Dallas over the region’s sanctuary city policies that protect illegal immigrants. On Thursday, Paxton announced the investigation, as well as a formal request for city and Dallas Police Department records concerning the police department’s refusal to comply with state and federal immigration laws. "The law is not optional. Local governments do not have the authority to disregard state and federal immigration laws," Paxton said in a statement. "The people of Texas expect law enforcement agencies to uphold public safety, not to implement sanctuary policies that put our communities at risk.” "My office will take all necessary legal actions to ensure compliance with state law and hold accountable any local entity that defies its legal obligations," he added. Paxton’s office has requested all policies, training materials and communications related to Dallas’ enforcement or non-enforcement of immigration laws, including any records reflecting decisions to decline cooperation with federal immigration authorities. Dallas Interim Police Chief Michael Igo, right, and Manuel Tellez, 48, an illegal immigrant arrested in Dallas after he was convicted of a 2022 manslaughter. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is launching a probe into the city of Dallas and asking for police records over the city’s sanctuary city policies. He cited Dallas Interim Police Chief Michael Igo, who said that his agency "is not assisting any federal agency on detaining people that are either documented or undocumented in the City of Dallas.”

Reported similarly:
Dallas Morning News [3/13/2025 4:29 PM, Aarón Torres and Kelli Smith, 2778K]

Reuters [3/13/2025 6:13 AM, Sarah N. Lynch and Ryan Patrick Jones, 75858K] reports the Department of Justice dropped a civil rights lawsuit filed last year against the national nonprofit Southwest Key Programs alleging its employees had sexually abused unaccompanied minors who were housed in its shelters after entering the country illegally, according to a court filing on Wednesday. The department decided to drop the lawsuit after the Department of Health and Human Services stopped the placement of unaccompanied migrant children in shelters operated by Southwest Key and initiated a review of its grants with the organization, HHS said in a press release on Wednesday. The health department said it has moved all children in Southwest Key shelters to other shelters. "For too long, pernicious actors have exploited such children both before and after they enter the United States," HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said in the release. "Today’s action is a significant step toward ending this appalling abuse of innocents.” Austin, Texas-based nonprofit Southwest Key contracts with the federal government to care for young migrants arriving in the U.S. without parents or legal guardians, and has operated 27 shelters in Texas, Arizona and California. It is the largest provider of shelter to unaccompanied minor children. The Justice Department filed a lawsuit in July 2024 in the Western District of Texas alleging a "pattern" of "severe or pervasive sexual harassment" going back to at least 2015 in the network of Southwest Key shelters. The complaint included alleged cases of "severe sexual abuse and rape, solicitation of sex acts, solicitation of nude photos, entreaties for sexually inappropriate relationships, sexual comments and gestures.” Lawyers representing the Justice Department and Southwest Key submitted a joint motion for dismissal on Wednesday, the court record shows. Southwest Key denied the allegations. "Southwest Key strongly denied the claims relating to child sexual abuse in our shelters, and there is no settlement or payment required. We are glad this matter is now concluded. We always believed the facts would prove the allegations to be without merit," its spokesperson said. The spokesperson added that South West Key was furloughing about 5,000 program employees, citing a federal funding freeze.

CBS News [3/13/2025 11:56 PM, Erin Jones, 51661K] reports that, as an activist who led pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University remains in an immigration center in Louisiana, college students across the country are protesting, believing the federal government is violating his First Amendment rights. At the University of Texas at Dallas, students are demanding the release of 30-year-old Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian national of Palestinian descent and former Columbia University student. "He was kind of at the forefront of the movement at Columbia for ‘Protest for Palestine,’ and they are basically trying to take away his rights to be able to speak out," said Mina Altuffah of Students for Justice in Palestine. The Trump administration calls Khalil a Hamas sympathizer and has accused him of distributing Hamas propaganda. "I thought about bringing them into this briefing to share with you all, but I didn’t think it was worth the dignity of this room," White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a briefing. Khalil, a green-card holder married to an American citizen, is currently being held in an immigration center. The government is attempting to deport him, citing the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows the Secretary of State to deport someone they believe could harm U.S. policy interests. "If you end up having a green card, not citizenship, but a green card, as a result of that visa while you’re here and those activities, we’re going to kick you out," said Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The Anti-Defamation League supports the deportation effort. Khalil’s lawyers argue this is political retaliation. "This is nothing but an attack on policy and organizing, and our movement as a whole, but it doesn’t mean that we’re going to stop organizing," said Aysha Ahmed of Students for Justice in Palestine.

Los Angeles Times [3/13/2025 2:47 PM, Taryn Luna, 13342K] report that Gov. JB Pritzker proposed a $330-million budget cut last month to scale back an expansion of healthcare coverage for undocumented adult immigrants in Illinois, where a state audit found that services for certain age groups exceeded estimates by more than 280%. California soon may face the same financial pressure to reduce coverage. California became the first state in the nation to offer healthcare to all income-eligible immigrants one year ago, which gave Gov. Gavin Newsom another liberal achievement to tout when lauding the Golden State as a national trailblazer. But the $9.5-billion price tag of California’s program is already more than $3 billion above the budget estimate from last summer and is expected to grow even higher. In Sacramento, the governor and Democrats in the state Legislature now are under pressure to reduce coverage to bring down costs during a budget crunch. "We should not bear these costs. Period. But especially in a budget crisis," said Assemblymember Carl DeMaio (R-San Diego).

FOX News [3/13/2025 1:01 PM, Cameron Arcand, 46189K] report that the California Department of Finance cleared a $3.44 billion loan to make up for a gap in Medi-Cal spending, which critics say is due to illegal immigrant healthcare costs, whereas the governor’s office argues it’s not out of the ordinary. It was revealed a few weeks ago that the state had $6 billion in expected costs for Medi-Cal, but it is now roughly $9.5 billion. This comes after it became state law to allow people to qualify for the program regardless of their immigration status. Medi-Cal is the state’s Medicaid system for certain Golden State residents, which takes both federal and state taxpayer dollars, according to a state government website. Critics of allowing the program’s availability to those who are in the country illegally strongly believe it is cause for concern. "Gov. Gavin Newsom lied and cooked the books to gift all illegal immigrants free healthcare and now has stuck California taxpayers with a multi-billion dollar bill," Rep. Carl DeMaio, R-San Diego, told Fox News Digital in a statement. "This is so egregious that he needs to resign," he continued.

Newsweek [3/13/2025 7:06 AM, Billal Rahman, 52220K] reports the Trump administration has spent $16 million on housing migrants in Guantanamo Bay’s naval base in Cuba, according to multiple reports. All of the migrants detained at Guantanamo Bay have been transferred to Louisiana over the past two days, according to reports by ABC News and New York Times. Newsweek contacted the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for comment via email outside of normal office hours. In January, President Donald Trump announced plans to detain up to 30,000 immigrants suspected of being in the U.S. illegally at Guantanamo Bay ahead of deportation as part of his hard-line crackdown. Trump said he was signing an executive order "to instruct the departments of Defense and Homeland Security to begin preparing the 30,000-person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay.” Guantanamo Bay is widely recognized for its military prison, established after the September 11, 2001, attacks. As of Friday, 41 migrants were at the Guantánamo Bay base awaiting deportation, nearly evenly divided between low and high threat levels. All have since been flown to Alexandria, Louisiana, on non-military aircraft on Tuesday and Wednesday, where they are being held at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) processing facility, according to a U.S. official who spoke to ABC News. California Democrat Rep. Sara Jacobs toured the facilities on Friday as part of a bipartisan delegation from the House Armed Services Committee. "It seems clear there’s no plan to get to 30,000 that’s workable in any way," she said, according to New York Times. Jacobs told ABC News that officials at Guantanamo Bay said it cost $16 million to stand up the migrant camp, noting that each tent allegedly cost $3.1 million to construct, despite not being up to DHS standards. U.S. officials told ABC News the tents did not comply with ICE’s requirements for migrant detention, including provisions for air-conditioning and other amenities. ABC News reported that some of the hundreds of U.S. troops sent to Guantánamo Bay to prepare the base for housing migrants may be reassigned to assist with the southern border mission in another capacity. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

Yahoo! News [3/13/2025 9:45 AM, Jeff Abbott, 52868K] reports that U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar traveled as part of a bipartisan delegation to inspect the conditions of facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba used to hold migrants scheduled for deportation as part of President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement policies. It appears Trump’s hardline plan has hit a roadblock. Several news organizations reported this week that Guantanamo Bay sits empty. Trump announced earlier this year that the naval station would hold up to 30,000 migrants as they awaited deportation to their home countries. Escobar, D-El Paso, joined the members of the House Armed Services Committee, who were among the first to travel to inspect the facilities at the U.S. Naval station on March 10. "It is an extraordinarily expensive operation," Escobar told the El Paso Times. "Whether it is food or other resources, there could not be a costlier way for Donald Trump to do this.” The first delegation to inspect the conditions at naval station was held on March 7. It was led by Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Alabama, the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. The Department of Defense alone has spent over $16 million on the facilities since Feb. 4, Escobar said. The cost for the Department of Homeland Security is currently not available.

USA Today [3/13/2025 8:38 AM, Karissa Waddick, N’dea Yancey-Bragg, John Bacon, Thao Nguyen, 75858K] reports authorities are intensifying search efforts by land and sea for the missing University of Pittsburgh student who disappeared one week ago while on spring break with friends in the Dominican Republic. Sudiksha Konanki, 20, was last seen in the early morning hours of March 6 heading to a beach close to the Riu Republica hotel in Punta Cana with a group of friends. Polices say Konanki allegedly stayed behind with a man named Joshua Riibe who she met on the island. Surveillance video shows Riibe, a person of interest in the case, leaving the beach area hours later with Konanki. Riibe is not considered a suspect. The Dominican Republic National Police is working closely with authorities from the U.S. Department of State, FBI, DEA, Homeland Security Investigations and the University of Pittsburgh police to investigate. The Dominican Republic Public Prosecutor’s Office on Wednesday said they were looking into whether Konanki’s disappearance extended "beyond a possible accidental event," according to CNN. Konanki’s father, Subbarayudu Konanki, urged authorities earlier to pivot from the assumption that his daughter drowned and consider other options, including kidnapping. "We are using all our resources to thoroughly investigate the disappearance of Konanki Sudiskha Chowdary," said Attorney General Yeni Berenice Reynoso. Konanki arrived in Punta Cana with five friends on March 3. The Dominican National Police said they were alerted to her disappearance on Friday, March 7. The Hotel Riu Republica, where Konanki was staying, experienced a 25-hour power outage before her disappearance. Electricity was restored before she was last seen, the company said in a statement Wednesday. Konanki and a group of five women and two men were seen drinking in the hotel lobby before walking to the beach around 4:15 a.m. with five women and two men on March 6. Police say surveillance footage captured later that morning before sunrise showed five women and one man leaving the beach. Konanki apparently stayed behind with the other man, who police have identified as Riibe. The Dominican news outlet El Nacional previously reported that a man told authorities he and Konanki went into the water, he returned to the beach and passed out and when he awoke, she was missing. Some of Konanki’s clothes were found on a beach chair, the outlet reported. However, CNN reported the man told police different versions of the story. The man told local authorities that they both went to the ocean but he felt sick and got out of the water and fell asleep on a lawn chair, according to the outlet. He alleged that Konanki may have been swept away by the waves or could have left when he got out of the water.

FOX News [3/13/2025 10:55 AM, Michael Ruiz and Audrey Conklin, 46189K] reports that authorities investigating the disappearance of Sudiksha Konanki are expanding their search effort as Thursday marks one week since the 20-year-old University of Pittsburgh junior vanished from a Punta Cana resort. Her whereabouts remain unknown, and officials say they are working a missing persons case and not a criminal investigation, but they have left open all possibilities. The Dominican Republic’s top prosecutor said Wednesday that her office is considering the possibility that something "beyond a possible accidental event" has taken place, and experts say the probe will likely examine competing theories until investigators come up with answers. Authorities are now searching additional neighboring beaches as well as on land with 300 officers, search dogs, boats, two helicopters and other resources, Fox News Digital has confirmed. Other assets include both navy and local divers, drones and a topographical aircraft. Konanki was last seen in the early hours of March 6 with a young man at the five-star Riu Republica resort in Punta Cana.

AP [3/13/2025 9:45 PM, Staff, 48304K] reports that, as the United States government works to effectively extend its border security objectives south into Central America, countries like Guatemala have come under renewed scrutiny and pressure to step up their own border enforcement. On Thursday, a Guatemalan army unit patrolled the Suchiate river that forms the western end of the Guatemala-Mexico border. The patrol was part of stepped up border operations since January, said Col. Juan Ernesto Celis. President Bernardo Arévalo has said migration is a right, but in a regulated fashion. The soldiers on patrol are looking to stop illegal arms, drug and human trafficking across Guatemala’s borders. At this border, they frequently coordinate with their Mexican counterparts. Ann Marie Argueta, spokeswoman for Guatemala’s defense department, said Thursday that the military wants to not only protect against crimes that threaten the population, but also prevent "incursions into national territory by transnational organized crime.” When U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited Guatemala in February, Arévalo announced that Guatemala would form a new border security force to patrol its borders with Honduras and El Salvador as well. Last July, nearly 600 Mexicans fled fighting between cartels in their border communities and sought refuge in Guatemala. Mexico’s two most powerful cartels from the northern states of Sinaloa and Jalisco have been battling for control of lucrative smuggling routes in southern Mexico.

Reuters [3/13/2025 9:45 PM, Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart, 41523K] reports the U.S. military must work to provide options to ensure the United States has full access to the Panama Canal, two U.S. officials told Reuters on Thursday. President Donald Trump has said repeatedly he wants to "take back" the Panama Canal, which is located at the narrowest part of the isthmus between North and South America and is considered one of the world’s most strategically important waterways, but he has not offered specifics about how he would do so, or if military action might be required. One U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said a document, described as an interim national security guidance by the new administration, called on the military to look at military options to safeguard access to the Panama Canal. A second official said the U.S. military had a wide array of potential options to safeguard access, including ensuring a close partnership with Panama’s military. The Pentagon last published a National Defense Strategy in 2022, a document which lays out the priorities for the military. An interim document sets out broad policy guidance, much like Trump’s executive orders and public remarks have done, ahead of a more considered policy document like a formal NDS. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The interim document was first reported by CNN. NBC News earlier on Thursday reported that the White House had ordered the Pentagon to create options for the Panama Canal. Trump has asserted that the U.S. needs to take back the canal because China controls it and could use the waterway to undermine American interests. In his inaugural speech in January, Trump repeated accusations that Panama has broken the promises it made for the final transfer of the canal in 1999. Any move by a foreign power to take the canal by force would almost certainly violate international law. The U.S. and Panama are treaty-bound to defend the canal against any threat to its neutrality and are permitted to take unilateral action to do so. The U.S. acquired the rights to build and operate the canal in the early 20th century. In a treaty signed in 1979, during the administration of Democratic President Jimmy Carter, the U.S. agreed to turn over control of the canal to Panama at the close of 1999.

Reported similarly:
Newsweek [3/13/2025 8:23 PM, Peter Aitken, 3973K]

Bloomberg [3/13/2025 9:31 AM, Staff, 16228K] reports that the US on Friday will resume deportation flights to Venezuela that its government had halted after President Donald Trump’s decision to revoke Chevron Corp.’s license to operate in the country, an American official said. “I am pleased to announce that Venezuela has agreed to resume flights to pick up their citizens who broke U.S. Immigration Laws and entered the U.S. illegally,” Trump’s special envoy, Ric Grenell, said in a post on X. “The flights will resume Friday.” Earlier, Maduro suspended the flights after President Joe Biden threatened to reimpose oil sanctions in response to the Venezuelan leader’s failure to follow through on commitments for democratic reforms. The flights resumed in February after Grenell visited Caracas and secured the release of six American citizens from Venezuelan prisons, but they were halted again last week. Three flights arrived in Venezuela last month, carrying about 370 passengers either directly from the US or from Honduras after arriving from the American naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Reported similarly:
FOX News [3/13/2025 5:41 PM, Peter Pinedo, 46189K]
Miami Herald [3/13/2025 11:00 AM, Antonio Maria Delgado, 3973K]

New York Times [3/14/2025 3:48 AM, Jill Damatac, 330K] reports that, on Jan. 1, 2015, I self-deported from the United States, my home of more than 22 years, to return to the Philippines, where I was born and lived until the age of 9. At takeoff, sorrow overtook the terror I felt at check-in. The T.S.A. agent had scanned my passport — renewed in 2002, devoid of a visa — and waved me through. I froze in place: Where were the ICE agents? That day, I found out that no one cares if an undocumented immigrant leaves America. Only my husband, waving from beyond the gate, cared. He would eventually meet me in London; I was to go to Manila first to apply for a British spouse visa, which I couldn’t do in the United States because I was an undocumented person. America is home; it raised me. I came in 1992, the daughter of Filipinos who left their homeland — an economy drained by dictatorship — in search of a better life. I left in 2015 as a broken adult of 31, still in search of that better life. When I returned last month, I found a different country. My decision to leave the United States seemed crazy, the resulting bar on returning for 10 years a self-inflicted wound. This view requires the belief that America is exceptional, the only nation capable of caring for its people and helping them achieve their potential. After a near-lifetime of being undocumented, I had stopped believing this. In my experience, America had become a place to flee from, not to. At the time I lived in New York without papers, I couldn’t secure a license to drive, afford to go to college, start a career, get health care, vote, open a bank account or travel freely. My life was a struggle with domestic and sexual violence, financial hardship and suicide attempts. By self-deporting, I ended my American life to save what remained of my actual life.

The Hill [3/13/2025 2:30 PM, Anders S. Heiles, 12829K] report that President Trump’s announcement to Congress that he will create a new White House Office of Shipbuilding marks a long-overdue recognition of America’s maritime crisis. This initiative couldn’t come at a more critical time: just last December, Spain denied entry to two U.S.-flagged vessels over allegations that they carried military cargo for Israel. This incident reveals a deeper problem: The U.S. no longer controls enough of its own shipping capacity to enforce its trade and security interests independently. If we had a robust merchant fleet, civilian ships that carry commercial cargo, this disruption would be an isolated diplomatic spat, not highlighting a critical vulnerability. This shortage exists because we have allowed our commercial fleet to diminish despite clear legal requirements. The Merchant Marine Act of 1936 explicitly requires that the U.S. maintain "a merchant marine sufficient to carry a substantial part of the waterborne export and import foreign commerce." This legal mandate is a national security imperative that we have systematically abandoned. The contrast between U.S. and Chinese commercial maritime power is staggering, leaving the U.S. reliant on foreign shipping in an increasingly contested global environment.

New York Times [3/13/2025 6:47 PM, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Hamed Aleaziz and Maggie Haberman, 145325K] reports President Trump is planning to invoke an obscure wartime authority in the coming days to rapidly accelerate the deportation of immigrants from the United States, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Trump could invoke the law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, as soon as Friday, the same day he will deliver a speech at the Justice Department, the people said. The law could give Mr. Trump sweeping authority to remove undocumented immigrants while providing them little to no due process, although the move is likely to be challenged in court. He wants to target immigrants suspected of having ties to gangs, according to the people familiar with the plan. They asked for anonymity because the decision had not been announced. Mr. Trump is considering using the law as his top immigration advisers have grown concerned about the pace of deportations. Mr. Trump promised during his campaign to launch the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. The law allows for the summary deportation of people from countries with which the United States is at war, that have invaded the United States or that have engaged in “predatory incursions.” In one of his earliest actions since taking office in January, Mr. Trump appeared to lay the groundwork for using the law when he signed an executive order declaring illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border an invasion. The authority has been invoked three times in the past, all during times of war, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy organization. Mr. Trump wants to use the law to expel suspected members of drug cartels and criminal gangs, including the Venezuelan group Tren de Aragua, people familiar with the matter say. The administration already has designated the Venezuelan gang a terrorist organization. The government intends to send some of those arrested through the authority to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, according to a person familiar with the matter.

CNN [3/13/2025 12:54 PM, Priscilla Alvarez, Jennifer Hansler, and Alayna Treene, 908K] reports that the Trump administration plans to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to accelerate mass deportations, according to four sources familiar with discussions. The 18th-century wartime law gives the president broad authority to target and remove undocumented immigrants, though legal experts anticipate court challenges. The primary target is Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan crime group that President Trump ordered to be designated as a foreign terrorist organization. The law has only been invoked three times in US history, all during wartime, including during Japanese internment. This summary was AI-generated and reviewed by CNN editors. The Trump administration is expected to invoke a sweeping wartime authority to speed up the president’s mass deportation pledge in the coming days, according to four sources familiar with the discussions. CNN reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for comment.

The Hill [3/13/2025 11:04 AM, Rebecca Beitsch, 12829K] reports that the Trump administration has resumed family detention of immigrants, a legal nonprofit said, reigniting a controversial practice largely curtailed under the Biden administration. Fourteen families with children as young as 1 year old are being held in a detention facility in Karnes County, Texas, outside of San Antonio, according to the nonprofit group RAICES, which has been in contact with the families. NewsNation reported last week that the Trump administration was preparing to open two family detention centers, with a facility in Karnes County being reconfigured for families. Neither the Department of Homeland Security nor U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement immediately responded to The Hill’s request for comment Thursday. Faisal Al-Juburi, chief external affairs officer for RAICES, said the families being held are not just those who have recently crossed the southern border. "From what we know right now, there’s evidence of apprehensions from the northern border, from Canada. Also strong indications of interior enforcement, so families being swept up in some type of action across the United States and being brought into Karnes," he said. Others held in the facility, he said, had a credible fear interview 10 years ago, suggesting they have been in the U.S. for some time.

FOX News [3/13/2025 8:43 PM, Ashley Carnahan, 52868K] reports Vice President JD Vance said he expects deportation numbers to rise as the Trump administration shifts from gaining operational control of the southern border to ramping up efforts to remove illegal migrants from the country. The White House is working to fulfill President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to conduct mass deportations of immigrants who entered the country illegally during the past four years of the Biden administration. "We’ve cut illegal border crossings by well over 95%, and frankly, I think those numbers are going to continue to come down," Vance told "The Ingraham Angle" Thursday in an interview from the White House. "You have immigration detention facilities that were underfunded," he said. "You have ICE, which does most of the actual deportations, that was radically underfunded, really sort of in some ways destroyed by the Biden administration. We’re building that capacity up.” Trump signed a number of executive orders relating to immigration when he took office in late January, including declaring an "invasion" at the southern border and deploying U.S. troops. Reuters reported last month that the administration deported 37,660 people during Trump’s first month in office, which is below the monthly average of removals in the last full year of Biden’s administration. Vance told Fox News host Laura Ingraham it will take time for deportations to increase, but the administration is making progress and working to ramp up the numbers. He praised Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem for her public information campaign calling on illegal migrants to self-deport and "border czar" Tom Homan for repurposing the CBP One app to meet Trump’s immigration goals. "Do you remember that? It actually facilitated illegal entry under the Biden administration," Vance said. "We’re repurposing it to facilitate self-deportation. So what we’re going to encourage a lot of people to do is we don’t have to come and knock on your door and send you home. We’re going to do that, of course. But before that happens, why don’t you get on a plane and go home yourself? So it’s an all-of-the-above approach. We’re going to use everything that we can.”

PBS [3/13/2025 6:30 PM, Laura Barrón-López, 10355K] reports Homeland Security officials said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement carried out more than 32,000 arrests in the first 50 days of Trump’s administration. Those numbers include the deportation of a 10-year-old U.S. citizen recovering from brain cancer after her undocumented parents were arrested last month. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

NBC News [3/13/2025 1:34 PM, Ronny Rojas, 44742K] report that four days after President Donald Trump returned to office, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt made an announcement: "Deportation flights have begun. President Trump is sending a strong and clear message to the entire world: If you illegally enter the United States of America, you will face severe consequences." Trump began using U.S. military planes to reinforce his deportation operation, although Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been deporting immigrants on private airlines since 2010. But a month and a half after the White House announcement, the pace of deportation flights is a bit slower than those of his predecessor, former President Joe Biden. Also, the number of immigrants expelled through flights has decreased and the government has stopped using military aircraft, which according to immigration experts was more expensive and inefficient. Data shows that in February, 128 flights with deportees took off, including 19 military flights. That figure is lower than Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s 137 deportation flights in February 2024. The main destinations of February’s deportation flights were Honduras and Guatemala, countries that for years have received weekly flights with deportees.

Axios [3/14/2025 5:00 AM, Stef W. Kight, Brittany Gibson, 13163K] reports the agency charged with carrying out President Trump’s mass deportation promises has warned Congress it is short a whopping $2 billion for this fiscal year, Axios has learned. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) repeatedly has faced significant budget shortfalls in recent years. Trump’s immigration plans — which include deporting "millions" of unauthorized immigrants — would rack up costs even more. Congress would send ICE an extra $500 million in the stop-gap spending bill that passed the House and is being debated in the Senate. But that wouldn’t come close to covering the nearly $2 billion the agency told Congress it needs just to keep up the work it’s doing through the end of September, two sources familiar with the communications told Axios. Add to that the expense of fully implementing Trump’s plans —which will include hiring hundreds of people, more than doubling ICE detention space to 100,000 beds and adding many more planes for deportation flights. Not all of that is addressed in the bill now before Congress, which means the additional money ICE says it needs is unlikely to land anytime soon. The Department of Homeland Security may have to pull money from its other agencies — such as FEMA or the Coast Guard — and direct it to ICE. A report from the Government Accountability Office on budgets from 2014 to 2023 found that ICE regularly overspent and had to grab funds from other agencies within DHS to cover its costs. The spending plan now before Congress is "not going to be sufficient to be able to cover the entire need for what they’re covering" at ICE, said Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.). "Just the bed space alone becomes very significant. And to just be able to detain people for a couple of days while they’re processing, and then to be able to move out flights ... is exceptionally expensive."

Yahoo! News [3/13/2025 10:35 AM, Ariana Baio, 52868K] reports that the Trump administration has filled the nation’s 47,600-bed capacity of people awaiting deportation and is now scrambling to open new facilities to hold even more as the White House ratchets up its migrant crackdown. Since Trump took office, immigration law enforcement officials have arrested and detained more than 32,800 people, a Department of Homeland Security official said. However, the administration has largely ended the practice of releasing some people who are considered non-threatening to the community out of detention centers – something the Biden administration followed. DHS officials have now turned to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Department of Defense and United States Marshals Service to increase bed space while the agency asks Congress for more funding to help carry out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan. Trump’s team has also partnered with private, for-profit centers to hold migrants awaiting deportation. Over the weekend, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said federal law enforcement agencies are planning to detain immigrants at U.S. military bases to deal with the capacity issues. "Yes, there is a plan to use the facilities at Fort Bliss for detention facilities," she told CBS’s Face the Nation. "But also we need to remember to ask — Congress needs to continue through with funding that this administration has asked for."

Yahoo! News [3/13/2025 9:20 AM, Peter Pinedo, 52868K] reports that while on a visit to the New York state Capitol, President Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan warned migrant "sanctuary" jurisdictions to "get out of the way" or they will "get exactly what they don’t want, more ICE agents in your community." New York state law restricts local and state law enforcement agencies from complying with ICE detainers or holding illegal immigrants solely based on their immigration status. Another policy, known as the "Green Light Law," allows illegal immigrants to obtain drivers’ licenses valid in the state of New York. Surrounded by Republican state lawmakers in the state Capitol building, Homan renewed his promise to deport "the worst first" and decried non-cooperation policies such as New York’s, saying that they pose a threat to federal agents and communities. He urged local and state law enforcement authorities to "let us in the jails" voluntarily but vowed that sanctuary policies would not stand in the way of the Trump administration’s deportation plans. "This is an attack on immigration enforcement, that’s plain what it is," he said. Homan said the result of not complying with immigration authorities would be more ICE agents in the community rather than less. "You’re not going to stop us, New York state, you’ve got to change the sanctuary status. If you don’t, get out of the way, we’re going to do our job," he said. "We’ll double the man-force if we have to. Rather than one officer arresting a bad guy, now I have to send a whole team." [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

Univision [3/13/2025 2:33 PM, Staff, 5325K] reports the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office in New York reported the arrest of three immigrants who were allegedly part of a criminal gang. Since January, ICE and other agencies have conducted several operations to detain immigrants with criminal records in the tri-state area. Last week, DHS reported the arrest of at least eight people in the New York, Buffalo and Newark areas. On this occasion, three Colombian immigrants identified as Carlos Andrés and Rodolfo Estevens Gutiérrez Bernal and Fabiola Bernal García were arrested. The crimes they committed were not detailed, only that they were part of a gang of thieves. They added that all three are in the process of being deported.

NBC News [3/13/2025 8:19 AM, Patrick Smith, 44742K] reports the wife of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University student and pro-Palestinian activist who faces deportation, says she was "naive" to think that her husband wouldn’t be detained by immigration agents. In her first public comments since her Syrian-born husband’s detention Saturday, Noor Abdalla told Reuters on Thursday that just two days before his arrest, Khalil had asked her if she knew what to do if Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers came to the door. "I didn’t take him seriously. Clearly I was naive," said Abdalla, who is a U.S. citizen and pregnant with the couple’s first child due next month. Khalil, a 30-year-old with a green card, played a major role in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University last year. Those protests helped the spread of similar action on campuses across the country. According to a document seen by NBC News, President Donald Trump’s administration has said Khalil is "subject to removal from the United States.” "The Secretary of State has determined that your presence or activities in the United States would have serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States," that document said. Abdalla told Reuters that the couple met in Lebanon in 2016 when she volunteered for a nonprofit providing educational scholarships to Syrian youngsters. The outlet reported that their relationship was long-distance until they married in 2023. She spoke of the heartache of Khalil’s legal troubles while they expect their first child. "I think it would be very devastating for me and for him to meet his first child behind a glass screen," she said. Khalil was arrested Saturday in the lobby of the university-owned apartment building in Manhattan, before being taken to a facility in New Jersey, and then to Louisiana. An Algerian citizen of Palestinian descent, Khalil was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria; he arrived in the United States on a student visa in 2022 and gained his green card two years later. Khalil is now a legal permanent resident of the U.S. and his arrest represents the Trump administration’s efforts to clamp down on pro-Palestinian protests in universities and deport ringleaders. Abdalla, a 28-year-old dentist, attended a New York courtroom Wednesday where Khalil’s lawyers argued that his detention and possible deportation was a violation of his constitutional free speech rights, Reuters reported. The detention order was extended while the court considers the legality of the arrest. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

Yahoo! News [3/13/2025 6:48 PM, Daniel Kool, 52868K] reports police arrested a New York man accused of trying to con a Cumberland resident out of more than $100,000 worth of gold bars over the weekend, officials said. The Cumberland Police Department was notified last week that the resident had been convinced to convert assets into the gold bars and transfer them to a courier, the department said in a written statement. After determining that the suspect in the alleged online scam was attempting to extract more money from the victim, detectives set up a "targeted sting operation" Monday evening. Police arrested Zhangqi Xie, 44, who has a residence in Flushing, New York, and charged him with theft by deception, a Class B felony-level crime. Xie was taken to the Cumberland County Jail, where he is being held on a $500,000 bail. He faces up to 10 years imprisonment and up to $200,000 in fines, the department said. Local police were assisted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Maine Drug Enforcement Agency, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

FOX News [3/13/2025 10:24 AM, Michael Dorgan Fox, 46189K] reports that the family of a woman who police said was lit on fire and burned to death, said they want Democrats to answer about how the illegal migrant suspect got back into the country to commit the horrific crime. Debrina Kawam, 57, was sitting by herself, believed to be asleep, on a stopped F train in Brooklyn in December when Sebastian Zapeta allegedly walked up to her and ignited her clothes with a lighter. Zapeta, a previously deported immigrant from Guatemala, then walked out of the car to a nearby waiting bench, sat down and watched as help arrived, according to New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch told reporters at a news briefing. Kawam was so badly burned it took more than a week to identify her remains. On Wednesday, civil rights leader Rev. Kevin McCall spoke outside of Kings County Supreme Court in Brooklyn where he read a statement from the family who described Kawam as a "beautiful, bright soul who brought light to everyone around her." McCall spoke after Zapeta appeared in a brief court appearance. The family’s statement ripped into Democrats, whose lax immigration policies under the Biden administration led to millions of unvetted illegal immigrants pour across the border. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

FOX News [3/13/2025 6:20 PM, Peter D’Abrosca, 46189K] reports under the newly enacted Laken Riley Act, 14 illegal immigrants, including suspected members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang, were taken off the streets by federal law enforcement in Florida last week. Video shared by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Miami, which works in tandem with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), shows criminal aliens being arrested at their homes during a three-day operation. Those arrested have been accused of crimes including sexual assaults on a minor and gang activity with Tren de Aragua, HSI Miami said in a post on X. "As part of its routine operations, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests aliens who commit crimes and other individuals who have violated our nation’s immigration laws," an ICE spokesperson told Fox News Digital in a statement Wednesday. "All aliens in violation of U.S. immigration law may be subject to arrest, detention and, if found removable by final order, removal from the United States, regardless of nationality.” The arrests of the criminal aliens were a product of the Laken Riley Act, the first bill by the 119th Congress that President Donald Trump signed into law in late January. The law was named after Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student in Georgia who was killed by an illegal immigrant on Feb. 22, 2024. Under that law, ICE can detain new categories of illegal immigrants who are considered public safety risks who would not have previously been detained by ICE.

FOX News [3/13/2025 7:04 PM, Staff, 46189K] reports Minnesota lawmakers recently introduced a bill that would prevent state and local government agencies from not allowing employees to share immigration data requested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The bill also requires county attorneys to report any illegal immigrant arrested for a violent crime, even if they are not charged, and prohibits law enforcement from not cooperating with ICE. President Donald Trump, who campaigned for an immigration crackdown, loosened restrictions on ICE, allowing broader enforcement. Under H.F. 16, sponsored by state Rep. Max Rymer, R-North Branch, Minnesota law enforcement and government agencies would no longer be allowed to create ordinances, regulations and policies that "limit or prohibit government employees from communicating with federal officials about the immigration status of individuals.” It would require agencies to cooperate with federal officials on issues involving immigration enforcement and investigate any violations. "The motive for this bill is to open up a line of communication between local authorities and deal with dangerous criminals who should not be in our community," Rymer told FOX 9 Minneapolis on Wednesday. "Right now, we find ourselves in a moment where you have local officials who are openly defying immigration enforcement, from the Minneapolis mayor, to the Hennpin County prosecutor.” The bill, which was introduced in February, went before the Minnesota House of Representatives in the Public Safety Finance and Policy Committee on Wednesday, FOX 9 reported. It will be sent to the House Elections Finance and Government Operations Committee for further discussion following a roll-call vote. The Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL)-led Minnesota Senate and Gov. Tim Walz will need to be on board for the bill to be signed into law, a tough feat considering the state’s promise to remain a "sanctuary state," and not cooperate with federal ICE efforts.

Reported similarly:
Minnesota Public Radio [3/13/2025 8:20 AM, Sarah Thamer, 60K]

NBC News [3/13/2025 6:59 PM, Nicole Acevedo, 44742K] reports the mother of four U.S. citizen children, including a 10-year-old girl recovering from brain cancer, is pleading for her family’s return to the United States. The family was removed from the country last month after immigration authorities deported the undocumented parents to Mexico. Speaking Thursday from Mexico, the mother said in a video message in Spanish provided to NBC News that "we call on the elected officials of the United States to please help us come back so that our little girl continues to receive the medical services she needs.” She first told NBC News this week what took place in early February, when the family was rushing from Rio Grande City, Texas, where they lived, to Houston, where the girl has received cancer care, for an emergency medical checkup. On the way there, they stopped at an immigration checkpoint, the one they have passed through multiple times when they have driven to Houston. The parents were equipped with letters from their doctors and lawyers to show the officers at the checkpoint to get through. But the letters weren’t enough this time. "We have made this trip across Texas several times to take our daughter to the hospital so that she can receive the medical attention, which is what keeps her well," her mother said in her video message. "That’s what keeps her safe.” "This time, we were detained, held, and we faced the worst decision, an impossible one, to be permanently separated from our children or to be deported together," she said. On Thursday, a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson said via email that the reports of the family’s situation are "inaccurate" because "when someone is given expedited removal orders and chooses to disregard them, they will face the consequences" of the process. They stated they couldn’t speak about the specifics of the case for privacy reasons.

Reported similarly:
Yahoo! News [3/13/2025 12:34 PM, Brandi Buchman, 52868K]

Yahoo! News [3/13/2025 4:51 PM, David Charns, 52868K] reports two months into President Donald Trump’s second term, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement cannot say how many undocumented immigrants it has arrested in southern Nevada. The president campaigned on sweeping immigration reform, including mass deportations of people living in the country illegally. Since the president’s inauguration, illegal border crossings have plummeted to their lowest levels in decades, statistics showed. Over the administration’s first 50 days, ICE arrested nearly 33,000 undocumented immigrants, including 75% accused of or convicted of a crime, the Department of Homeland Security said Wednesday. However, the department could not provide a specific number of arrests in southern Nevada when asked Thursday. An ICE data dashboard shows the number of arrests through last September, which includes more than 15,000 arrests in several western states during the four years of the Biden administration. Federal court records the 8 News Now Investigators have reviewed since Jan. 20 show a handful of cases involving illegal immigration. However, no press release on the department’s website about illegal immigration posted since Jan. 20 involves a person in Nevada or Las Vegas. "Since Jan. 20, ICE has significantly increased its immigration enforcement activities with additional support from other federal law enforcement and DOD partners," a spokesperson said. "In an effort to keep the American people informed about the results of our efforts with only the most accurate information, ICE is compiling and validating the data and is working toward publishing our enforcement statistics on a monthly basis.”

Spokane Public Radio [3/13/2025 1:57 PM, Monica Carrillo-Casas, 7K] report that screams pierced the air in new Facebook videos from Spokane Valley that captured the moment federal law enforcement agents swarmed a vehicle, shattered its windows and dragged two people into custody early Monday morning. "She’s pregnant! She’s pregnant!" male voices scream in the background. Kayla Somarriba, 25 years old and seven months pregnant, was in the vehicle when six unmarked cars surrounded them just a block from their home on Monday. Her husband, Jeison Ruiz-Rodriguez, 26, and brother-in-law, Cesar Ruiz-Rodriguez, 22, were on their way to a court hearing at the Spokane County Courthouse. The brothers had been earlier charged with threatening to kill a family member in December, according to court documents. Those charges prompted the arrest captured on video, according to U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement. She said at least 12 agents, including those from ICE and Homeland Security Investigations, repeatedly ordered Jeison and Cesar to get out of the vehicle, threatening to break the windows if they refused. ICE responded to a request for comment stating its agents arrested Jeison and Cesar based on the active felony charges.

Bloomberg [3/13/2025 7:08 PM, Rachel Adams-Heard, Fola Akinnibi, and Alicia A. Caldwell, 16228K] reports federal immigration authorities want to use a massive tent facility in California for deportation efforts as they exhaust detention space across the country, according to two people familiar with the plans. The tent site, located outside of San Diego, has been operating as a temporary processing center since US Customs and Border Protection opened the 130,786-square-foot location in 2023. With border crossings at the lowest levels in decades, CBP has begun shutting down all but the San Diego-area facility and one other site, the agency said in a statement Thursday. Converting the California center is the latest sign that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which handles detention and removal operations, is trying to keep pace with President Donald Trump’s calls to arrest, detain and deport millions of migrants. So far, those efforts have been hindered in part by the agency’s detention space, which numbers fewer than 50,000 beds. On Wednesday, a senior administration official told reporters that ICE had maxed out its detention capacity. The official said ICE has made about 33,000 arrests since Trump took office. Representatives for CBP, ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment about the San Diego-area facility. The takeover signals a new strategy for the Trump administration as it seeks to reach agreements with Latin American nations to take deportees from both their own countries and others. The administration has already had to at least temporarily walk back plans to house migrants in immigration detention at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, because those facilities would not meet ICE’s stricter requirements.

Univision [3/13/2025 6:56 PM, Staff, 5325K] reports Yolanda Magallón Pérez, an immigrant mother arrested by ICE in El Monte on February 24, was released Tuesday night after spending two weeks at the Otay Mesa Detention Center. Outside the scene is already waiting for her daughter, Xitlali Tejeda, a 20-year-old boy with bone cancer, and who from the moment of her mother’s arrest fought alongside numerous activists to secure her release. ‘I want to thank you all for all the support they’ve given me and my family. I don’t know how to reciprocate, but thank you, and yes, we made it," Yolanda told the media and people who supported her during this process. Magallón Pérez was arrested when migration agents showed up at her home looking for her son, Jonathan Tejeda, who in the past had received multiple non-violent convictions for drug possession and theft. While Yolanda was arrested in 2005 in Los Angeles County for a misdemeanor charge of stealing food, according to her attorney, David Acalin. Mother and son had entered the country irregularly, according to migration.

Newsweek [3/13/2025 5:03 PM, Dan Gooding, 52220K] reports first-time DACA-applicants are waiting for guidance on next steps in their process after an appeals court ruling went into effect this week that could force the government’s hand in hearing new cases. Advocacy groups say a ruling from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in January means new cases could potentially be heard as of March 11, but there has been little guidance from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) or the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) since the court’s decision. In January 2025, the same court issued another ruling, maintaining that parts of DACA were unlawful, but it also limited the scope of its injunction to just Texas. The judge also said work permits should still be issued for current recipients and that altering this was outside of executive authority. The January 17 ruling, which went into effect this week, left it open for USCIS to potentially begin adjudicating new applications to the program. It also said that work authorization for tens of thousands of DACA recipients in Texas would be revoked, if the order went into effect. However, the Trump administration has not issued updated guidance since the ruling. The agency will also accept new applications, but it will not process them. The government’s current position is that existing DACA grants and work authorizations remain in effect unless expired or individually terminated.

FOX News [3/13/2025 8:00 AM, Adam Shaw, 46189K] reports President Donald Trump is continuing to push for a "gold card" visa that would allow foreign nationals to buy their way into the U.S., replacing a controversial visa scheme that has been dogged for years by concerns about potential abuse by China. Trump again touted his plan for the gold card, which would allow people to buy a pathway to citizenship for $5 million, on "Sunday Morning Futures.” "I believe that Apple and all these companies that can’t get people to come out of college and come because they get thrown out, I think of it, you graduate number one at the Wharton School of Finance or Harvard or Stanford, and you get thrown out of the country. You can’t stay more than one day. And they want to hire these people, but they can’t. They’ve complained to me about it. Now they can buy a gold card, and they can take that gold card and make it a part of their deal to get these top students," Trump said on Sunday. "You’re going to have a lot of companies buying gold cards. So for $5 million now, it’s a lot of money when you add it up, if we sell a lot of them," he said, later describing it as a "green card on steroids.” Host Maria Bartiromo asked Trump about concerns that the Chinese may exploit it. "They may, and they may, but they don’t have to do that. They can do it in other ways," Trump said. The visa would replace the EB-5 investor visa program. That program was established in the 1990s and typically required an investment of $1 million, but that could be as low as $500,000 in areas classified as high poverty, and the creation of at least 10 jobs. There had been unsuccessful efforts to reform the program in both the Obama and Trump administrations amid concerns that the program had been used by the Chinese Communist Party. "Although the EB-5 program’s goal of stimulating capital investment and job creation in the United States is laudable, it has become clear in recent years that the CCP may be abusing the program to gain access to U.S. permanent residency for their members," Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee said in 2020. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

AP [3/12/2025 7:21 PM, Tim Sullivan, 24727K] reports the Trump administration is pushing for the U.S. Supreme Court to allow some restrictions on birthright citizenship even as legal battles continue over President Donald Trump’s orders to end what has long been seen as a constitutional promise. On Thursday, the administration filed emergency applications with the high court that would allow citizenship to be denied to people born in the U.S. after Feb. 19 if their parents are in the country illegally. District judges in Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington have blocked the order, which Trump signed shortly after taking office in January. It is currently blocked nationwide. Birthright citizenship automatically makes anyone born in the United States an American citizen, including children born to mothers in the country illegally. The right was enshrined soon after the Civil War in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. Trump and his supporters have argued that there should be tougher standards for becoming an American citizen, which he called “a priceless and profound gift” in his executive order. Legal scholars, though, have said its the 14th Amendment’s constitutional protections would make it extremely difficult to overturn. Trump has said for years that he wants to end birthright citizenship. “It’s ridiculous. We are the only country in the world that does this with the birthright, as you know, and it’s just absolutely ridiculous,” he said in January. Dozens of countries, mostly in the Americas, have birthright citizenship. Opponents say the practice encourages people to come to the U.S. illegally so their children can have citizenship. Others argue that ending birthright citizenship would profoundly damage the country. Its elimination “could eventually place every single person in America in the precarious position of having to prove American citizenship,” Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the pro-immigration Cato Institute, wrote after Trump’s order.

FOX News [3/13/2025 9:37 AM, Greg Norman, 46189K] reports that the number and share of the U.S. population that are foreign-born or are immigrants reached record highs in January, a report says. Data from the government’s Current Population Survey "shows the foreign-born or immigrant population (legal and illegal together) hit 53.3 million and 15.8 percent of the total U.S. population in January 2025," according to the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) think tank. "Unlike border statistics, the CPS measures the number of immigrants in the country, which is what actually determines their impact on society. Without adjusting for those missed by the survey, we estimate illegal immigrants accounted for 5.4 million or two-thirds of the 8.3 million growth in the foreign-born population since President Biden took office in January 2021," the CIS said. "The enormous scale of legal and illegal immigration has profound implications for a host of issue areas from schools and public coffers to the labor force and housing markets," it added. "Perhaps the most fundamental questions these numbers raise is whether the United States can successfully integrate and assimilate all the immigrants already here, let alone continue to welcome additional newcomers each year."

Washington Examiner [3/13/2025 11:22 AM, Paul Bedard, 2296K] reports that the Biden administration’s open border policies allowed in a record net of 8.3 million migrants, nearly two-thirds illegally, according to a new analysis of U.S. Census data detailing the Democrat’s disaster. About 5.4 million migrants crossed into the U.S. illegally over the past four years, making former President Joe Biden the record-holder for the worst border enforcement ever. He and his administration let in so many illegal immigrants, according to a new Center for Immigration Studies review, that it blew up the long-held Census pattern and projection for immigration. "America has entered uncharted territory on immigration, with significant implications for taxpayers, the labor market, and our ability to assimilate so many people," per the report. "At 53.3 million and 15.8% of the population, the foreign-born population is higher now than at any time in American history," CIS said. "The scale of recent immigration is so high it has made the Census Bureau population projections… nearly obsolete. The Bureau projected that the foreign-born share would not reach 15.8% of the U.S. population until 2042," it added. Biden’s failure at the border actually let in 11.5 to 12.5 million migrants overall, but when deaths and self-deportations were accounted for, the estimate fell to a net of 8.3 million, CIS said.

FOX News [3/13/2025 2:13 PM, Staff, 46189K] report that JD Vance reveals whether more deportations of green card holders are coming. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

Newsweek [3/13/2025 1:06 PM, Khaleda Rahman, 52220K] report that a House Republican is set to introduce a bill that would bar Chinese nationals from obtaining visas to study in the United States. First-term Representative Riley Moore of West Virginia will introduce the bill, known as the Stop Chinese Communist Prying by Vindicating Intellectual Safeguards in Academia Act, or the Stop CCP VISAs Act, later this week, a spokesperson for Moore told Newsweek. Amid increased U.S.-China tensions, some Republicans have accused the Chinese Communist Party of exploiting the student visa program and using universities and academic institutions to engage in espionage, and several universities have ended partnerships with Chinese universities over national security concerns. However, proposals to bar all Chinese nationals from studying in the U.S. face opposition from advocacy groups that say such policies are rooted in racism and xenophobia. A ban would also mean fewer international students contributing to the U.S. economy and would affect universities that depend on tuition fees paid by Chinese students. The text of the bill, first reported by Fox News, says it would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to "prohibit the admission of Chinese nationals as nonimmigrant students, and for other purposes."

FOX News [3/13/2025 2:03 PM, Alex Nitzberg and Bill Melugin, 46189K] report that the 21-day daily average of nationwide U.S. Border Patrol gotaways was just 77 as of March 12, according to data provided to Fox by a senior U.S. Customs and Border Protection source. During the period from Feb. 20 through March 12, the highest number of gotaways recorded in a single day was 110, while the lowest was 49, the data indicates. The total number of gotaways since Jan. 21 — President Donald Trump’s first full day after returning to the presidency this year — is 5,889, according to the data, which includes the nation’s Southwest, Northern, and coastal borders. "All we needed was a new President," the White House’s rapid response X account declared in a post on X. "THE TRUMP EFFECT," Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., declared in a tweet. A post from the House Judiciary GOP X account exclaimed, "Thank you, President Trump!" The difference is stark when comparing these new numbers to the figures from the depths of the Biden administration, when there were an astounding 670,674 known gotaways for fiscal year 2023, according to data Fox News previously obtained via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. That massive figure, when divided by 365 days, averages out to about 1,837 per day. Border Report [3/13/2025 6:08 PM, Salvador Rivera, 117K] reports according to statistics provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the number of migrant encounters along the southern border are down by 94 percent when compared to last year at this same time. Figures show, that for the month of February, there were a total of 8,347 encounters between Border Patrol agents and migrants. According to CBP, this is the lowest monthly total in history. In the San Diego Sector, the number was 1,650.

The Hill [3/13/2025 1:41 PM, Lauren Irwin, 12829K] report that population growth in U.S. metro areas outpaced previous years and is largely being fueled by international migration, the Census Bureau found. A report released Thursday by the bureau found major counties in Texas, Florida and Arizona saw the largest growth in population. More than 105,000 people moved to Harris County, home to Houston; more than 64,000 moved to Miami-Dade County in Florida; and more than 57,000 moved to Maricopa County, which houses Phoenix, from 2023 to 2024. Researchers noted that international migration played a key role in overcoming declining population rates in metro areas, as birth rates were not able to outpace the thousands of people who moved away from cities. "While births continue to contribute to overall growth, rising net international migration is offsetting the ongoing net domestic outmigration we see in many of these areas," Kristie Wilder, a Census demographer, said in a statement. International migrants accounted for nearly 2.7 million of the 3.2 million people moving to U.S. cities over the one-year period, with each of the country’s 387 metro areas seeing an uptick.

Reuters [3/13/2025 5:41 PM, Anna Mehler Paperny] reports the number of migrants apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol after entering the United States from Canada dropped to the lowest point since 2022 last month, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics published on Thursday. The number of those apprehended after crossing into Canada, however, appears to be ticking up. The U.S. Border Patrol apprehended 481 people near the Canada-U.S. border in February, down from 616 in January and 3,601 in June, which was a multi-year high. Meanwhile, the number of people Canadian authorities apprehended crossing north from the United States and turned back rose in February to 126 - the highest single month in one year, according to Canada Border Services Agency data obtained by Reuters. Canadian authorities had been bracing for a "worst-case scenario" of an influx of northbound migrants fleeing Trump, who has threatened mass deportations from the U.S.

Telemundo47 [3/13/2025 4:03 PM, Staff, 164K] reports U.S. immigration authorities announced Thursday the closure of five temporary processing facilities due to the slow flow of migrants at the border with Mexico, which has dropped to about 300 apprehensions per day. The centers in Donna, North Eagle Pass, and Laredo, Texas, as well as those in Yuma and Tucson, Arizona, were closed. However, the facilities in San Diego, California, and El Paso, Texas, will continue to operate, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said in a statement. The federal agency reported Wednesday that in February it detained 8,347 undocumented immigrants crossing the southwest border at various points of entry, a 94% year-over-year drop and a 71% month-over-month decrease. Newsweek [3/13/2025 5:34 PM, Dan Gooding, 52220K] reports that the move comes after the agency confirmed Wednesday that just over 8,300 immigrants had been arrested between official ports of entry in February, a big decrease over the 140,641 during the same month in 2024. The closures will allow CBP to save between $5 million and $30 million per month, depending on the facility. Those funds will be spent elsewhere on securing the border, the agency said. CBP said it has enough capacity to hold all current new arrivals in its existing, permanent facilities. It remains to be seen if the current low levels of illegal crossings will be maintained, as a similar drop was seen in 2017 before numbers climbed again.

AZCentral [3/13/2025 8:02 AM, Richard Ruelas, 4457K] reports President Donald Trump has touted fast deportations of people who were in the United States illegally after he took office. Some of those migrants are returning just as quickly. At least 19 people deported in the days after Trump took office have made a swift return to Arizona, crossing back into the country that kicked them out and getting arrested again. In one case, immigration officials deported a Mexican man through the Arizona border town of Douglas on Feb. 1. At the time, Trump officials were publicizing their tough action on the border. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement put out daily numbers of arrested individuals. Even television’s Dr. Phil McGraw tagged along on an immigration raid. But the show of force did not deter 48-year-old Miguel Angel Rodriguez-Bravo from returning. Less than two weeks after his deportation, he crossed back into the United States again, sneaking in through the desert near Douglas, according to court documents. On Feb. 13, one day after crossing, he was arrested by Border Patrol near Arizona City, a small community about 180 miles north of the border. His and the other cases are known because they faced federal prosecution after they were caught yet again. What’s unknown is how many deportees have returned and eluded authorities. Rodriguez-Bravo stood in front of a federal judge in a downtown Phoenix courtroom March 5. He wore an orange jumpsuit, handcuffs and leg irons. He had reached an agreement with prosecutors: He would plead guilty to the misdemeanor crime of entering the country illegally and prosecutors would drop the felony charge of re-entering after a deportation. Legally, it was as if that first deportation had never happened. It also meant the case would have a swift end and not take up more of prosecutors’ time. Magistrate Judge Alison Bachus, in handing down his sentence, urged Rodriguez-Bravo to stay in Mexico. She told him the guilty plea already hurt his chances of ever applying for legal entry into the United States. She said the court understood some people illegally cross the border to improve their lives and suggested he make "adjustments" so he could stay in his country. "I strongly encourage you to not re-enter without authorization," she said to him. Her words were translated into Spanish for his benefit. "If you were to return," she said, "then you would likely be looking at more time in custody.”

New York Times [3/13/2025 5:14 PM, Lynsey Chutel, 145325K] reports chained, detained for weeks and eventually deported, two German tourists trying to enter the United States were recently tangled in a system responding to President Trump’s push to sharply restrict entry and deport people en masse. The cases of Jessica Brösche, held for 46 days, and Lucas Sielaff, held for 16, and accounts of their rough handling by immigration officers, have grabbed headlines in Germany as a sign of what being caught on the wrong side of the White House’s immigration policy could mean for European travelers. Tourists from most European countries, including Germany, generally enjoy visa-free travel to the United States for up to 90 days. But Mr. Sielaff and Ms. Brösche were stopped, separately, at the San Ysidro border crossing between San Diego and Tijuana, told that they were being denied entry and sent to a crowded detention center, according to their own accounts and those of their friends.

WTNH [3/13/2025 4:46 PM, Vinay Simlot] reports Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has detained more than 43,759 people as of last week, leading to concerns over a lack of detention space. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) said ICE doesn’t have enough detention beds. Homeland Security data shows that the average migrant arrested by ICE spends about 50 days in custody. Congress recently passed the Laken Riley Act, necessitating the creation of 110,000 new detention beds, though Congress hasn’t passed funding to make that happen. Congress has allocated nearly $500 million for additional detention beds as part of a bill to keep the government funded.

Border Report [3/13/2025 6:22 PM, Jocelyn Flores, 117K] reports the U.S. Border Patrol’s Big Bend Sector marks a historic milestone with the birth of a new horse, the first horse ever born into a horse patrol detachment. The foal, named Dolly, is the first horse born into Border Patrol’s 100-year history, the department said in a news release on Thursday, March 13. Dolly was born on March 9 to her mother, Juanita, at the Sierra Blanca Station in Sierra Blanca, Texas. That is almost 100 miles east of El Paso. According to Border Patrol, the name "Dolly" was selected from a list of names submitted by students from Sierra Blanca Independent School District. "This is a remarkable moment for the U.S. Border Patrol," Chief Patrol Agent Lloyd M. Easterling said. "Dolly is the first foal ever born to a U.S. Border Patrol horse and she represents the potential of our program. We are equally proud that the community had a hand in naming her.” According to the agency, horses are an essential asset to Border Patrol agents in traversing the terrain around the Big Bend Sector. "Horses provide a strategic advantage in remote areas by helping agents track, detect and interdict illegal activity while also strengthening the connection between Border Patrol and local communities," according to Border Patrol.

Yahoo! News [3/13/2025 1:19 PM, Ryan Newton, 52868K] report that Kansas Governor Laura Kelly issued a verbal state of disaster emergency proclamation Thursday due to increased fire weather conditions beginning Friday and continuing through the weekend. The declaration allows resources to be used to provide state assistance. "Weather conditions are such that a high risk exists for wildland fires in the coming days," Kelly said. "I urge everyone across the state to use extreme caution and avoid burning. Help your local firefighters by avoiding any activity that may spark a fire." KSN Storm Track 3 Chief Meteorologist Lisa Teachman says the "threat for wildfires could be catastrophic" on Friday thanks to a strengthening storm system with intensifying low pressure that will track into the area. Wind gusts on Friday could be 55-65 mph. Fire weather alerts and high wind alerts have already been posted. "The major concern for this round of fire weather is the consecutive days of elevated fire danger," said Bill Waln, Kansas Forest Service fire management officer. "Once a fire is established, it will be very difficult to suppress under these conditions. If there has been any intentional burning in your area, please check and recheck these burns.” Starting Friday, the Kansas Division of Emergency Management will staff the State Emergency Operations Center to assist counties and local responders if requested.

AZCentral [3/13/2025 8:01 AM, Miguel Torres, 4457K] reports a former U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer was scheduled to be sentenced in federal court on Thursday after being found guilty of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl from Douglas in 2022. Aaron Mitchell posed as a law enforcement officer when he approached the girl at her middle school as she waited for classes to begin, according to a U.S. Department of Justice news release. After displaying his badge and demanding identification, Mitchell forced the girl into his vehicle, according to the Justice Department. He claimed he was taking her to a police station but took her instead to his apartment where he handcuffed and sexually assaulted her for several hours, the news release said. Mitchell faces a maximum sentence of life in prison. He was employed as a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer at the time of the assault. Mitchell had searched online for terms related to rape and methods to stop someone from screaming, as well as how to smother a person, during the time he was assaulting the victim, according to the Justice Department.

AZCentral [3/13/2025 8:04 AM, Rey Covarrubias Jr., 4457K] reports the Arizona House of Representatives passed a bipartisan bill from Rep. Eli Crane that would require national defense agencies to share with Congress more information about illegal cross-border tunnels. Crane, R-Ariz., and Rep. Lou Correa, D-Calif., introduced the Subterranean Border Defense Act to require an annual report on the federal government’s knowledge of illegal underground border-crossing points that are often used to enable activities such as drug-smuggling. The House passed the bill Monday on a lopsided 402-1 vote. The lone Democrat to vote against the bill was Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and the only Arizona House member who did not vote was Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz. He has been dealing with the aftermath of a lung cancer diagnosis. Twenty-eight other members of the House also did not vote on the bill. The bill was cosponsored by Reps. Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar, both R-Ariz. Crane called the vote a "massive win for our security.” "With border crossings thankfully going down since January, it’s safe to assume this will drive threats underneath our border through these tunnels," Crane said in a written statement, echoing a White House claim that crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border are dropping. Crane’s office cited concern that tougher immigration policy would likely result in an increase of "alternative" means to enter the U.S., including that of underground tunnels. Enforcing border security was under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which uncovered a smuggling tunnel between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez as recently as early January. The manmade tunnel connected Mexico to the Texas border town’s storm drain system and featured standing room height, lighting and a ventilation system, CBP said. There are cases of groups of migrants going underground to enter the U.S. as well as traffickers using the routes to smuggle illegal drugs. "This legislation will ensure Congress has sufficient knowledge and oversight in regard to this dynamic threat," Crane said. On Tuesday, the bill was received by the Senate and referred to the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. A Senate vote is required before the bill can go to the president’s desk for a signature or veto.

FOX News [3/13/2025 10:00 AM, Michael Lee Fox, 46189K] reports that veterans who have volunteered to help secure the border in Southern California say there has been an incredible difference in what they have seen since President Donald Trump took office in January. "There has been such an amazing difference between what was going on during the Biden administration versus what’s going on under the Trump administration" said Kate Monroe, a Marine Corps veteran who became the founder of Border Vets, a group of U.S. military veterans who have given their own time and money to patch up holes in the border barrier in Southern California. The comments come as Trump has continued his push to secure the southern border, seeking to make good on a promise that became a cornerstone of his third campaign for president. The data seemingly indicates Trump has made good on that campaign promise, with the number of southern border encounters last month hitting lows not seen in about a quarter-century last month, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data that was first reported by Axios. CBP agents apprehended roughly 8,300 people attempting to illegally cross the border in February, the data showed, the lowest monthly total recorded since fiscal 2000. The data also showed that CBP encounters with illegal migrants attempting to cross the border dropped sharply from this time last year, with the agency recording just shy of 30,000 encounters last month, a drop from 130,000 in February 2023 and 2024.

Yahoo! News [3/13/2025 9:04 PM, Peter Segall, 52868K] reports plaintiffs in a lawsuit over January’s immigration raids are seeking a preliminary injunction against U.S. Customs and Border Protection tactics used when conducting searches. Last month, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in the Eastern District of California on behalf of the United Farm Workers union and five local residents who were detained as part of January’s Operation Return to Sender, which resulted in the arrests of nearly 80 people. The lawsuit argues the tactics used by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents during the operation were unconstitutional, violating the protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. The injunction, if granted, would provide immediate action on what the lawsuit seeks to establish in court, that the tactics deployed in January’s operation were unconstitutional, and prohibit CBP agents from using those tactics in the future. Specifically, the lawsuit alleges CBP agents engaged in racial profiling when approaching and questioning people about their immigration status, based only on their appearance. "There are constitutional and federal laws that say that you have to have either reasonable suspicion or probable cause depending on what you’re doing, that the person is violating immigration laws and that can’t just be based on race and appearance," said Bree Bernwanger, an attorney with the ACLU who is working on the case. Several people arrested in January were approached outside local businesses and said they were detained when they tried to exercise their right to remain silent. "We’re not saying that they can’t perform any detentions or arrests," Bernwanger said. "They just can’t do it based on lack of reasonable suspicion or probable cause and just go solely based on skin color.” The ACLU filed the lawsuit against CBP and the Department of Homeland Security last month, and filed a motion for a preliminary injunction on March 7. The motion is provisionally set to be heard April 11. The injunction would require that CBP "refrain from detentive stops without reasonable suspicion that the person stopped is in the country unlawfully, and warrantless arrests without regard to probable cause that the arrestee is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not immediately return request for comment Thursday, but has defended the operation in the past, saying it was a targeted effort to dismantle transnational criminal organizations.

Reuters [3/13/2025 5:41 PM, Anna Mehler Paperny, 41523K] reports the number of migrants apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol after entering the United States from Canada dropped to the lowest point since 2022 last month, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics published on Thursday. The number of those apprehended after crossing into Canada, however, appears to be ticking up. The U.S. Border Patrol apprehended 481 people near the Canada-U.S. border in February, down from 616 in January and 3,601 in June, which was a multi-year high. Meanwhile, the number of people Canadian authorities apprehended crossing north from the United States and turned back rose in February to 126 - the highest single month in one year, according to Canada Border Services Agency data obtained by Reuters. Canadian authorities had been bracing for a "worst-case scenario" of an influx of northbound migrants fleeing Trump, who has threatened mass deportations from the U.S.

Reuters [3/13/2025 5:24 PM, Anthony Esposito and Aida Pelaez-Fernandez, 41523K] reports U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Thursday that cooperation with Mexican authorities has improved and he sees tangible results on migration, but that work still needs to be done on curtailing the flow of illegal drugs. U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has used the threat of tariffs to pressure Mexico, its top trade partner, to do more to curb drug trafficking and migrants crossing the shared border. Rubio stated that while the number of migrants illegally crossing into the U.S. at the southern border has significantly decreased, quantities of drugs entering the country have not varied.

MeriTalk [3/13/2025 12:57 PM, Andrew Rice, 45K] report that the House Homeland Security Committee is urging the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) – a component of the Department of Homeland Security – to develop an "adaptive" cybersecurity posture to combat evolving threats. In a March 6 letter to TSA’s acting administrator Adam Stahl, Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green, R-Tenn., and a coalition of Republican committee members voiced concerns over recent cybersecurity incidents within the TSA and asked a dozen questions for the agency to report back on regarding its cybersecurity efforts. "Recent cyber incidents and information technology (IT) disruptions have exposed systemic vulnerabilities within critical transportation systems and networks, reinforcing the urgency of enhanced security and resilience measures," the letter reads. The letter references a July 19, 2024, global IT outage following a faulty software update from CrowdStrike at the TSA. The letter said the outage disabled 8.5 million Windows systems and caused financial losses exceeding $10 billion due to its disruption of travel services. According to the letter, a separate cybersecurity incident occurred at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in August 2024. In response to these incidents and growing foreign cybersecurity threats, TSA established a proposed rule that would formalize its cybersecurity directives and incorporate them into a national cybersecurity framework developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as well as directives from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

AP [3/13/2025 6:44 PM, Michael Kunzelman, 48304K] reports the federal government’s steward of funding for public broadcasting stations sued the Trump administration on Thursday over its pause in grant payments for upgrading the nation’s emergency alert system. The nonprofit Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s federal lawsuit says a recent hold on grant funds for modernizing the alert system hampers the ability of federal, state and local authorities to issue real-time emergency alerts. The CPB sued the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Washington, D.C., to challenge its Feb. 18 hold on the $40 million grant program for the Next Generation Warning System. The suit says FEMA hasn’t attempted to explain a basis for suspending the grant payments. The CPB is seeking a court order for FEMA to immediately lift the hold so that the corporation and the grant recipients can be reimbursed for expenses.

Reported similarly:
Reuters [3/13/2025 6:15 PM, Jonathan Stempel, 41523K]

The Hill [3/13/2025 11:20 AM, Lauren Irwin, 12829K] reports that a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) employee was accused of a scheme to defraud the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a Wednesday release. According to the release, Serina Baker-Hill, of Detroit, was charged with allegedly attempting to defraud FEMA and lying to federal agents. Baker-Hill, 55, was a career employee of the agency and was the director of its Center for Excellence and Expertise over Automative and Aerospace Engineering. After the Detroit area experienced a series of floods in August 2023, Baker-Hill applied for FEMA assistance related to flood damage. A FEMA employee determined there was damage to Baker-Hill’s basement. She allegedly informed the inspector that she would not be able to live in the home while repairs were made and the agency approved the costs of the repair and two months of rental assistance. "The approval letter from FEMA indicated that the rental assistance money was to be used solely to help Baker-Hill pay rent and essential utility costs while she was in temporary housing," the DOJ said.

USA Today [3/13/2025 6:04 AM, Dinah Voyles Pulver, 75858K] reports that, when a hurricane leaves the Caribbean Sea and begins a final approach toward the Gulf Coast of the United States, tens of millions anxiously await each new forecast. Where will it make landfall? Will it drive a killer storm surge? Will it carry deadly winds and rain far inland as Hurricane Helene did last year? The National Hurricane Center’s answers to these questions drive key decisions about evacuation orders and storm preparations in the hours before landfall. Those answers depend on critical information provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s hurricane hunters. With less than three months to go until the start of hurricane season, one question worries meteorologists, emergency managers and hurricane forecast experts. Could cost-cutting measures by President Donald Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency result in delays in the hurricane hunter flights? The firing of five probationary employees with the hurricane hunters in late February enflamed those concerns. But in the latest example of reversals by federal personnel officials, three of those employees – all trained flight crew members – have been told their dismissals were rescinded. Before being rehired, Joshua Ripp said he’d gone through a whole range of emotions. "First I was indifferent, then I was sad, then I was angry," Ripp said. "This was the first time I’ve been unemployed since high school." NOAA is just the latest agency to reverse some of the hastily issued terminations that have come in response to Trump’s efforts to reduce the size of the federal bureaucracy and slash government spending. The probationary employees terminated at NOAA were among thousands of probationary employees dismissed across the federal government, but no specific numbers have been provided by the White House or the Department of Government Efficiency.

Yahoo! News [3/13/2025 7:20 AM, Kayla Epstein, 52868K] reports that, as an engineer who flies into hurricanes for the US government, Josh Ripp is accustomed to turbulence. But the last two weeks have been far bumpier than he’s used to. In late February, the Trump administration fired Mr. Ripp and over 800 recently hired or promoted staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency using a form email, part of ongoing cuts to the federal workforce. Suddenly, he and several other members of the elite Hurricane Hunters flight team were out of a job - until around 21:00 Friday when he received a second email. He was to report back to work in Lakeland, Florida, 12 March, it said. For Mr. Ripp, a retired US Navy officer who voted for Donald Trump, the confusion highlighted the dangers of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency slashing thousands of government jobs to cut costs without agency input. As soon as this week, the Trump administration could consider axing more than 1,000 additional staffers at NOAA, according to BBC News partner CBS News. Those potential cuts, plus losses from previous firings and buyouts, would cost the agency up to 20% of its workforce, New York Times reported. The White House did not comment on additional cuts, but a Trump administration official said an "extensive process was conducted" to ensure "mission critical functions" were not compromised during the first round of dismissals. "NOAA provides vital information to the entire country and we do it at a fraction of the cost that anyone else could do," Mr. Ripp said. "There’s a lot of jobs out there that are very important. NOAA is a small agency. Every little bit hurts.” The cuts will not only harm government functions, staffers and weather experts warn, but they could disrupt the daily lives of Americans who rely on accurate NOAA data more than they know. The data that powers Americans’ smartphone weather apps and informs local meteorologists comes from NOAA and its subsidiary, the National Weather Service. Americans use it to decide what to wear, and whether to meet friends in the park or indoors.

Yahoo! News [3/13/2025 12:01 PM, Alex Sosnowski, 52868K] report that the same storm, capable of producing clouds of dust and fast-moving wildfires in the southern Plains, blizzard conditions for the northern Plains and flash flooding from the Tennessee Valley to the Eastern Seaboard, will bring a major multiple-day outbreak of severe weather that includes multiple strong tornadoes from the Mississippi Valley to the Gulf Coast, Great Lakes and Atlantic coast. Since the middle of the week, meteorologists at AccuWeather have designated a portion of the threats for Friday and Saturday as "high risk," which means they are expecting widespread severe weather. The severe thunderstorm threat alone will stretch across approximately 1 million square miles and include 30 states as it progresses eastward from Friday to Sunday. There will be the risk of power outages and major travel disruptions, and property owners and road crews should be prepared for downed trees and flash flooding. Thunderstorms capable of producing severe weather with tornadoes will ramp up on Friday afternoon over the Mississippi Valley states and may quickly escalate into a very dangerous and life-threatening situation in portions of Iowa, Missouri, and Arkansas before expanding into portions of Nebraska and Minnesota and unzipping southward to portions of northeastern Texas and Louisiana. From late Friday afternoon through much of Friday night, the greatest risk of tornadoes will extend from central portions of Missouri and Arkansas to southern Illinois, western Kentucky, western Tennessee and northern Mississippi. However, an isolated tornado can occur as far to the north as parts of Minnesota and Wisconsin to as far south as the northwestern Gulf coast into Friday night.

The Texas Tribune [3/13/2025 5:12 PM, Uriel J. García, Alejandro Serrano and Berenice Garcia] reports the Trump administration has asked local governments and nonprofit organizations that received federal grants to identify immigrants they have housed, suggesting in a letter that they may have violated human smuggling laws. The Department of Homeland Security has "significant concerns" that organizations and governments receiving Federal Emergency Management Agency grants "may be guilty of encouraging or inducing an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States" violating immigration laws, according to a March 11 letter signed by Cameron Hamilton, acting administrator of FEMA. The three-page letter was first reported by the Associated Press and obtained by The Texas Tribune. In the letter, Hamilton asked that local governments and organizations that have received a grant from FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program respond within 30 days with a list of the names and contact information for immigrants they have assisted. Hamilton said that moving forward, FEMA will ask recipients of these grants to sign an affidavit stating that no one within the organization or local government has any knowledge or suspicion of violating human smuggling laws. The letter also says FEMA grants will be withheld as DHS conducts its review.

NBC News [3/13/2025 6:35 AM, Patrick Smith, 44742K] reports the West Coast is braced for an atmospheric river event that threatens flash flooding and power outages from heavy rain and snow, making travel conditions hazardous or even impossible for some commuters. Evacuation warnings are already in place for several areas with burn scars from the Palisades and Eaton fires. Due to predictions of up to 4 inches of rain overnight, flash flood warnings have also been issued for large parts of the region. "We’re dealing with a fast-moving storm that’s going to dump down a lot of rain in a short amount of time," NBC Los Angeles meteorologist Melissa Magee said in a forecast Wednesday. The National Weather Service warned that heavy rain, snow and winds of up to 70 mph would create "dangerous to potentially impossible travel conditions across the Sierra Nevada and northern California higher terrain today.” "Especially as heavy rain approaches, I urge all Angelenos to heed all weather warnings," Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said in a statement. "This storm has the potential to cause impacts in burn areas but also neighborhoods citywide. City crews have installed thousands of concrete barriers and thousands of sandbags to stop mudflows.” In addition to evacuation warnings, all of Los Angeles is under a flood watch until at least 6 p.m. (9 p.m. ET) Thursday. Pea-size hail is forecast in the greater Los Angeles area from 3:45 a.m. (6:45 a.m. ET), with the weather service advising people to "seek shelter in a sturdy structure.” Up to 2 feet of snow could cause power outages in place, the weather service said, while heavy rain could cause flash flooding across parts of Southern California. The Pacific Coast Highway was closed early Thursday and lined with concrete barriers in the Palisades and Eaton fire areas, two months after homes and businesses there were devastated and the landscape left vulnerable to mudslides and subsidence. The Los Angeles mayor’s office said that more than 10,000 feet of concrete barriers and 6,500 sandbags were in place. The Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District said that all Malibu schools would shutter Thursday because of road closures. Alex Tardy, with the weather service’s San Diego office, said in a video briefing that the heaviest rain there could come after 5 a.m. PT (8 a.m. ET), and that areas above 5,000 feet could see between 6 and 12 inches of snow, rising to as much as 20 inches in places.

New York Times [3/13/2025 4:11 PM, Nazaneen Ghaffar and Amy Graff, 145325K] report that the Los Angeles office of the National Weather Service confirmed a tornado moved through the Pico Rivera area east of downtown early Thursday, as a powerful storm system battered Southern California with heavy rain and damaging winds. The office classified it as a zero, the lowest level on the Enhanced Fujita scale, which runs up to five. Although tornadoes are unusual for the region, they are not unheard of, especially this time of year. “The L.A. basin area tends to be a magnet for tornadoes for this time of year,” said Ryan Kittell, a meteorologist with the NWS Los Angeles office. “I’d say March is a favorable month for them in this area.” Before Thursday, the most recent tornado reported near downtown Los Angeles was in March 2023, when a strong twister tore through Montebello, about eight miles east of downtown Los Angeles, damaging warehouses and nearby buildings The tornado on Thursday coincided with a storm system slamming into Southern California late Wednesday and early Thursday, unleashing bouts of heavy rain, gusty winds and prompting widespread weather alerts. An 8.5-mile stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway was shut down between Malibu and the Palisades due to the risk of debris flows. High winds buffeted traffic and waterways swelled with storm water. High surf advisories were issued as waves up to 13 feet crashed into beaches from Los Angeles to San Luis Obispo Counties.

Reported similarly:
Yahoo! News [3/13/2025 6:08 PM, Staff, 52868K]

Marshfield News-Herald [3/13/2025 4:42 PM, Jamie Rokus] reports three men were charged Wednesday in connection with a December "jackpotting" scheme that resulted in over $100,000 being taken from a Marshfield credit union’s ATM machine. Jhoenderson D. Rojas Eganez, 27, currently in the Kewaunee County Jail, has been charged with four felony counts of theft from a financial institution (value exceeds $100,000), interference with an automated teller machine, possession of burglarious tools and computer crimes-accessing data to defraud. Alejandro J. Sevilla Sanabria, 25, currently in the Kewaunee County Jail, and Worlly W. Garcia Albarracin, 35, of Berwyn, Illinois, have both been charged with four felony counts of being a party to the crimes of theft from a financial institution (value exceeds $100,000), interference with an automated teller machine, possession of burglarious tools and computer crimes-accessing data to defraud. Arrest warrants were issued Wednesday and Thursday for the three men, according to online records. No court dates have been scheduled.

Yahoo! News [3/13/2025 12:12 PM, Bailey Wright, 52868K] report that seven new sexual assault complaints have been filed against the United States Coast Guard, according to attorneys at Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight on Thursday. These new filings join 22 similar Federal Tort Claims Act complaints filed last fall, all from former Academy cadets who say they survived sexual assault while they were cadets or prospective cadets of the Academy in New London. The alleged victims are represented in part by attorney Christine Dunn, who said additional sexual assault survivors continue to reach out to her. "I’ve heard story after story of the sexual violence they endured at the Academy and how the Academy turned a blind eye," Dunn said in a statement. "The Coast Guard can no longer be allowed to sweep sexual assault under the rug. My clients are standing together and demanding that the Coast Guard be held accountable for allowing a culture to flourish at the Academy where sexual assault was condoned," Dunn continued. The filings claim the Coast Guard failed to implement adequate policies and practices and instead allowed sexual violence to go unchecked, condoned and actively concealed the behavior, and knowingly placed the victims and other cadets in danger.

Delaware News Journal [3/13/2025 3:20 PM, Shannon Marvel McNaught, Esteban Parra] reports the family of Marvin Fugan is asking the public for help in locating his body after he jumped off the Delaware Memorial Bridge last week. Fugan, a 23-year-old Newark resident, jumped into the Delaware River about 5:30 a.m. Friday, March 7, according to the Delaware River and Bay Authority. His family is shocked, confused and devastated. The Coast Guard, the Delaware River and Bay Authority and numerous police and fire agencies searched the area of the river around the bridge Friday morning but did not find Fugan’s body. Coast Guard boats and a helicopter were in use until the search was suspended around 9:30 a.m., Petty Officer Christopher Bokum said. Recovery efforts are ongoing, DRBA spokesperson James Salmon said, and his agency will be periodically searching the river for the body. Fugan’s family is asking boaters and anyone along the shores of the Delaware River and Bay to keep an eye out for his body.

Bloomberg [3/13/2025 6:01 PM, Ryan Gallagher, 16228K] reports cybersecurity experts who worked to secure US government computers from Russian and Chinese hackers have been ousted from their roles following pressure from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, according to two people familiar with the matter. More than 200 people, split roughly between contractors and employees, were let go beginning in February from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, amid sweeping staff reductions across the federal government, said the two people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to share information with the media. Some of the workers had decades of experience, they said. As a result of the cutbacks, there’s now a shortage people carrying out these functions, leaving “massive security gaps” in the US government, one of the people said. At least one senior official at CISA resigned in protest over the cuts, the people said, amid concern about the government’s ability to protect itself from potentially crippling cyberattacks waged by foreign governments or criminal gangs. The statement added that CISA “regularly reviews contracts across the agency to ensure that we have the capabilities that we need and that we are allocating resources in ways that make the most impact. This was a contract action that did not impact the employment status of CISA personnel.”

Reuters [3/13/2025 2:18 PM, Alexandra Alper, 41523K] report that the White House is urging federal agencies to refrain from laying off their cybersecurity teams, as they scramble to comply with a Thursday deadline to submit mass layoff plans to slash their budgets, according to an email seen by Reuters. Greg Barbaccia, the United States federal chief information officer, sent the message on Wednesday, in response to questions about whether cybersecurity employees’ work is national security-related, and therefore exempt from layoffs. "We believe cybersecurity is national security and we encourage Department-level Chief Information Officers to consider this when reviewing their organizations," he wrote in the email to information technology employees across the federal government which has not been previously reported. Describing "skilled cyber security professionals" as playing "a vital role in mission delivery and information assurance," he said, "We are confident federal agencies will be able to identify efficiencies across their non-cyber mission areas without negatively affecting their agency’s cyber posture," he added. The Office of Management and Budget, which is part of the White House, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But the email reflects growing concern that the deep cuts mandated by President Donald Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk could harm the United States’ ability to combat cybersecurity threats.

Yahoo! News [3/13/2025 8:55 PM, Julia Keener, 52868K] reports the man accused in a bomb threat that shut down miles of Interstate 85 in Greenville County reappeared in court Thursday afternoon. 28-year-old Ahmad Jamal Khamees Alhendi, of Oak Lawn, Illinois, has been charged with breach of peace of a high and aggravated nature, conveying false information about a bomb threat and operating an unregistered vehicle. Law enforcement pulled over Alhendi for an unregistered tractor trailer near mile marker 44 on January 2. All six lanes of the interstate were shut down between mile markers 42 and 46. No explosive devices were found inside the tractor trailer, according to the Department of Public Safety. South Carolina Highway Patrol estimated that more than 10,000 cars were stopped for more than four hours. State troopers said that when they asked if Alhendi was serious about the bomb, he responded by saying "Do I look serious?". A judge had previously granted Alhendi a $20,000 bond but reconsidered due to a pending ICE detainer. He once again came before a judge Thursday due to health concerns he faced while during his time at the detention center. Ahmad Jamal Khamees Alhendi appears in bond court for a second time on March 13, 2025. (WSPA Photo). Alhendi’s attorney, Thomas Adducci said Alhendi was in a motorcycle accident years ago, breaking both femurs. Metal rods were put in his legs, Adducci said, but they became infected and Alhendi had to take antibiotics. However, concerns over a future hearing to determine the 28-year-old’s immigration status was the leading reason for his bond being denied — again. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) placed a hold on Alhendi, a Jordanian national. The agency said Alhendi entered the United States legally in 2018 but failed to comply with the terms of his legal admittance.

New York Times [3/13/2025 7:29 PM, Julian E. Barnes, 145325K] reports Elon Musk met with the head of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command this week, an N.S.A. spokesman said on Thursday, a sign that the effort to shrink the size of the federal work force could soon turn to a critical arm of the intelligence community. Mr. Musk, who is leading efforts to reorganize the federal government, traveled to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Md., on Wednesday, his first visit there as a special adviser to Mr. Trump, according to the N.S.A. spokesman, who said Mr. Musk had met with General Timothy Haugh, who leads both the N.S.A. and Cyber Command. The spokesman, who did not allow his name to be used, also said that General Haugh was holding meetings with key White House advisers to ensure the N.S.A. and Cyber Command were “aligned” with the priorities of Mr. Trump, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence. Mr. Musk’s visit was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal. The N.S.A. is one of the most bureaucratic of the U.S. spy agencies but collects some of the most valuable intelligence, scooping up telephone and computer communications around the world. Cyber Command, while a separate organization, is also headquartered at Fort Meade. While Mr. Musk has criticized the federal government’s computer systems, the N.S.A. has some of the most expert cryptologists and computer network experts in the world.

Reported similarly:
Bloomberg [3/13/2025 2:27 PM, Natalia Drozdiak, 16228K]

CBS Austin [3/13/2025 12:15 PM, Jackson Walker, 602K] report that a private email address set up for former President Joe Biden had received sensitive security information such as Obama-era briefings and leaked National Security Agency information, according to Just The News. Documents obtained by the publication reportedly show "nonchalant transmission of sensitive government information" which potentially put the federal government at risk. The publication said it reviewed hundreds of pages of emails from 2011 to 2015 through an ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation. The publication added it could not determine if any of the materials included in the emails was classified. Much of these documents had been redacted, it wrote. For instance, one fully withheld email from January 19, 2015, includes the subject ‘The President’s Briefing Materials,’" the publication wrote. The Federal Record Act prohibits nearly all federal employees from using private email addresses for government activity. That law calls to preserve federal records to make them available to the public. Subject matter discussed in Biden’s emails reportedly surround topics like a call with Iraq’s prime minister, briefing memos and Situation Room meetings.

FOX News [3/14/2025 3:07 AM, Bradford Betz, 46189K] reports Jack Teixeira, the Massachusetts Air National Guard member convicted of leaking highly classified documents about the war in Ukraine, used his court-martial Thursday to describe himself as a "proud patriot" who was trying to expose the supposed "lies" of the Biden administration. After pleading guilty to military charges of obstructing justice, the 23-year-old acknowledged he knew his actions were illegal but felt he needed to share the truth about how the Biden administration was, in his view, misleading the American public about the war in Ukraine. "If I saved even one American, Russian or Ukrainian life against this senseless money-grab war, my punishment was worth it," he said, adding that he was "comfortable in how history will remember my actions.” Teixeira drew parallels with President Donald Trump, alleging he too was a victim of a weaponized Justice Department. He called on the Trump administration to "review my double prosecution and punishments with an eye towards reversing deep-state actions and showing truth, no matter how embarrassing to the Biden administration.” Teixeira was sentenced last year to 15 years in prison after pleading guilty in federal court to six counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information under the Espionage Act following his arrest for sharing classified documents on a Discord chatroom. The leaks exposed to the world unvarnished secret assessments of Russia’s war in Ukraine, including information about troop movements in Ukraine, and the provision of supplies and equipment to Ukrainian troops. The documents also revealed assessments of the defense capabilities of Taiwan and internal arguments in Britain, Egypt, Israel, South Korea and Japan. Teixeira also admitted to posting information about a U.S. adversary’s plans to harm U.S. forces serving overseas.

Reported similarly:
Reuters [3/13/2025 6:53 PM, Nate Raymond]

New York Times [3/14/2025 3:00 AM, Colin Moynihan, 145325K] reports Khalid Mehdiyev returned a phone call in the summer of 2022 from a fellow member of the Russian mob, Polad Omarov. They had been collaborating on a project, Mr. Mehdiyev said, extorting a grocery store owner in Brooklyn. Now, Mr. Omarov said, he had been offered a bigger job by some people he knew. “They want the journalist die,” Mr. Mehdiyev said Mr. Omarov told him. “They want to give that job to us.” Over several days in a Manhattan murder-for-hire trial, Mr. Mehdiyev, an Azerbaijani member of a Russian crime syndicate, gave a detailed description of how Mr. Omarov had directed him in a failed plot to murder Masih Alinejad, an Iranian-born journalist and dissident living in Brooklyn. Mr. Mehdiyev, 27, a bearded, burly man who wore dark-green prison garb in court, spoke in a flat voice with occasionally mixed-up grammar or pronunciation as he delivered his account of the realities of transnational repression — fancy words for the blunt threat of violence. He described coercing business owners for a group of mobsters called the Thieves-in-Law while living in Yonkers, N.Y. A restaurant was burned and a Range Rover was filled with bullet holes. Meetings with enforcers named Man Man and Sonny took place in a Bronx pizzeria where a woman behind the counter would help Mr. Mehdiyev pick up money from the mob. Mr. Omarov and a second mobster, Rafat Amirov, both accused of murder for hire and conspiracy, have been on trial in Federal District Court since Monday. Mr. Mehdiyev, who was arrested in 2022 near Ms. Alinejad’s home with an AK-47-style assault rifle, had faced the same charges. But he took the stand as a government witness, saying he had pleaded guilty to several offenses including attempted murder and possession of an illegal firearm. During an opening statement, a prosecutor said Mr. Mehdiyev was Mr. Omarov’s “trusted lieutenant.” That prosecutor also told jurors that they would hear “directly from the hit man” — Mr. Mehdiyev — who would provide “a terrifying inside view” of preparations to kill Ms. Alinejad.

AP [3/13/2025 6:40 PM, Matthew Lee, 10355K] report that top diplomats from the Group of 7 industrialized democracies held a first day of talks in Canada on Thursday as U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade and foreign policies have thrown the bloc’s once solid unity into disarray. Trump then made new comments antagonizing Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s Canadian hosts. The two-day meeting opened just after Trump threatened to impose 200% tariffs on European wine and other alcohol if the European Union doesn’t back down from retaliating against U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs with a levy on American whiskey. The escalating trade war added to uncertainty over relations between the U.S. and its closest allies, which have already been strained by Trump’s position on Russia’s war in Ukraine. It also meant that Rubio, on his first official trip to Canada and his first to a G7 event, was likely to hear a litany of complaints as he met with the foreign ministers of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan. All of them have been angered by the new American president’s policies, and they smiled stiffly in frigid temperatures as they posed for a group photo at a snowy resort in La Malbaie, Quebec, on the St. Lawrence River.

Reported similarly:
CBS Austin [3/13/2025 8:34 AM, Alexx Altman-Devilbiss, 602K]

Reuters [3/13/2025 3:07 PM, Mike Stone, 52868K] reports the U.S. is poised to resume shipments to Ukraine of long-range bombs known as Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bombs (GLSDB), after they were upgraded to better counter Russian jamming, two people familiar with the weapon told Reuters. The munitions will arrive amid reports that Ukraine’s supply of similarly-ranged Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) has been depleted. The glide-bombs were purchased under the U.S. administration of former President Joe Biden using the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative. The U.S. has bought nearly $33.2 billion worth of new arms and military equipment for Kyiv directly from U.S. and allied defense contractors. President Donald Trump’s administration agreed on Tuesday to resume military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine after Kyiv said it was ready to support Washington’s proposal for a 30-day ceasefire with Russia. In recent weeks, 19 GLSDBs were test-fired to assess the effectiveness of the upgrades. Part of the modifications involved reinforcing connections within the weapon to enhance its resilience, the people said. The reintroduction of the GLSDB onto the battlefield could occur in the coming days, as a stockpile is already present in Europe. The last time Ukrainians used the weapons was months ago, one of the people said.

CNN [3/14/2025 12:25 AM, Lauren Kent, Anna Chernova, Daria Tarasova-Markina, Katharina Krebs and Jessie Yeung, 22131K] reports Russian President Vladimir Putin questioned the United States-brokered proposal for a ceasefire in the Ukraine war on Thursday, setting forth tough conditions and demanding concessions from Kyiv despite saying he supported a truce in theory. “We agree with the proposal to cease hostilities but we have to bear in mind that this ceasefire must be aimed at a long-lasting peace and it must look at the root causes of the crisis,” Putin said at a news conference – repeating the Kremlin’s previous claims that the current Ukrainian government is part of the underlying problem. Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014 and launched a full-scale invasion in 2022. At the time, Putin demanded that Ukraine never be allowed into NATO, and that the bloc roll back its military footprint in Eastern and Central Europe – which the US and its allies dismissed as non-starters, condemning the invasion as a blatant land grab. Putin also suggested that Ukraine halt mobilization and any training of its troops, and that other nations stop supplying weapons to Kyiv during the ceasefire – at a time when “Russian troops are advancing on almost all areas of combat contact.” Though the US idea is “great and correct,” many things still need to be discussed, he said, adding that “maybe” he would call US President Donald Trump. The news conference came as American special envoy Steve Witkoff arrived in Moscow to brief Kremlin officials on the peace plan. Ukrainian officials had accepted the US proposal for a 30-day ceasefire covering the entire front line after holding talks with US counterparts in Saudi Arabia earlier this week.

The Hill [3/13/2025 2:23 PM, Filip Timotija, 12829K] report that Russian President Vladimir Putin said he is open to a 30-day ceasefire, as proposed by the U.S., but suggested vague terms for his support, including wanting to eliminate the root "causes of this crisis." Ukraine agreed to support the framework in talks with the U.S. earlier this week, and the Trump administration has called for Russia to sign on, with special U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff visiting Moscow on Thursday. "The idea itself is the right one, and we definitely support it," Putin said of the ceasefire during a Thursday news conference. "But there are questions that we need to discuss, and I think that we need to talk them through with our American colleagues and partners." Putin, in his first public comments about the 30-day ceasefire, said some of the issues to work on are whether Ukraine would utilize the ceasefire to reload, what happens with Ukraine’s troops in Russia’s Kursk region, and how the truce would be overseen. "We agree with the proposals to halt the fighting, but we proceed from the assumption that the ceasefire should lead to lasting peace and remove the root causes of the crisis," Russia’s president said. Putin also thanked President Trump "for paying so much attention to the settlement in Ukraine," according to The Associated Press.

Reported similarly:
FOX News [3/13/2025 12:59 PM, Caitlin McFall, 46189K]

Reuters [3/13/2025 8:54 PM, Gram Slattery, 24727K] reports Russian officials have communicated to their counterparts in the United States that they do not want Russia-Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg involved in top-level discussions aimed at ending the Ukraine war, according to a U.S. official and another source with knowledge of the matter. Kellogg has been personally absent from some high-level discussions in recent weeks, including a meeting involving U.S. National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and Secretary of State Marco Rubio with a Ukrainian delegation in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday. He was also absent at a high-level meeting with Russians in Saudi Arabia in February. It was not immediately clear if Kellogg’s absence was linked to the Russian officials’ request, and it was not clear when the request was made. The U.S. official said the request had not been heeded, citing the fact that Kellogg sent a high-ranking member of his staff, Eli Rosner, to attend the latest Saudi meeting. The Russian embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment. National Security Council spokesperson James Hewitt said Kellogg was playing a crucial role in bringing the Ukraine war to an end. "President Trump has utilized the talents of multiple senior administration officials to assist in the bringing the war in Ukraine to a peaceful resolution," Hewitt said on Thursday evening. Russia’s expanded invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has left hundreds of thousands of dead and injured, displaced millions of people, reduced towns to rubble and triggered the sharpest confrontation for decades between Moscow and the West. The U.S. and Ukraine agreed to a 30-day ceasefire in principle during their meeting in Saudi Arabia earlier in the week. But Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested on Thursday that the ceasefire bid needs serious reworking. The Kremlin’s request to exclude Kellogg, first reported by NBC News, comes as some high-ranking former Russian officials have complained that Trump’s envoy is, in their view, too sympathetic to Kyiv. A retired lieutenant general, Kellogg has at times been more critical of Russian aggression in Ukraine than other administration officials. For instance, he sharply criticized Russia for a large-scale Christmastime attack on Ukrainian population centers. "Christmas should be a time of peace, yet Ukraine was brutally attacked on Christmas Day," Kellogg wrote on Dec. 25 on X. "Launching large-scale missile and drone attacks on the day of the Lord’s birth is wrong.”

Reported similarly:
NBC News [3/13/2025 1:55 PM, Keir Simmons, Courtney Kube, Natasha Lebedeva, and Peter Alexander, 44742K]
Washington Examiner [3/13/2025 1:52 PM, Brady Knox, 2296K]

Newsweek [3/13/2025 8:51 AM, Shane Croucher, 3973K] reports a senior Kremlin official rejected the idea of a temporary ceasefire, as proposed by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, saying Russia was only interested in a long-term resolution of the Ukraine conflict, Russian media reported. Yuri Ushakov, an aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin, gave an interview to the Russia-1 TV channel. "We believe that our goal is a long-term peaceful settlement, we strive for this, a peaceful settlement that takes into account the legitimate interests of our country, our well-known concerns," Ushakov said, Interfax reported. "It seems to me that no one needs any steps that imitate peaceful actions in this situation." The Kremlin aide said he told Trump’s National Security Advisor Mike Waltz that Russia’s position on a temporary truce is that "this is nothing more than a temporary respite for the Ukrainian military, nothing more." Ukashov said Putin may speak today on "more specific and substantive assessments" around the ceasefire proposal, Meduza reported. At the end of the interview, Ukashov said he was giving his "personal position". The U.S. and Ukraine agreed on a 30-day ceasefire plan during their talks in Saudi Arabia. The Trump Administration is now taking that proposal to the Russians. Trump wants to see a quick peace in Ukraine. He has criticized the vast destruction and loss of life, as well as the huge cost to American taxpayers of backing Ukraine’s defense.

Miami Herald [3/13/2025 7:03 AM, Paul Godfrey, 3973K] reports U.S. President Donald Trump warned Russia of "devastating" economic consequences if it did not sign a cease-fire deal his administration has agreed to with Ukraine but stressed he hoped it wouldn’t be necessary to exert that type of pressure. "There are things that you could do that wouldn’t be pleasant, in a financial sense. I can do things financially that would be very bad for Russia. I don’t want to do that because I want to get peace," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday as he met with Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin. "In a financial sense, yeah we could do things very bad for Russia, it would be devastating for Russia.” Trump reiterated his preference for persuasion over coercion on the 30-day cease-fire negotiated with Ukraine by U.S. officials in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, saying he and his team were "getting close to maybe getting something done.” "We had a great success yesterday. We have a full cease-fire when, if, it kicks in, but it’s up to Russia now," he added. While Ukraine has agreed to the truce, which would suspend conflict with the frontlines as they stand, the reaction from Moscow has been cool, claiming it was being left out of the loop. "Nobody is talking to us. They keep saying, ‘nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,’ but they do everything about Russia without Russia," Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Thursday. However, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said U.S. National Security Adviser Michael Waltz had spoken on the phone with his Russian counterpart Wednesday and that Trump’s Special Envoy, Steve Witkoff, was headed to Moscow. "We urge the Russians to sign on to this plan. This is the closest we have been to peace in this war. We are at the 10th-yard line and the president expects the Russians to help us run this into the end zone.” Russia’s state-run TASS news agency reported in the last few minutes that Witkoff’s plane had arrived at Moscow’s Vnukovo International Airport from Doha, touching down at around 11:40 a.m. local time.

Washington Post [3/13/2025 6:30 PM, Warren P. Strobel and Ellen Nakashima, 31735K] reports classified U.S. intelligence reports, including one earlier this month, cast doubt on Vladimir Putin’s willingness to end the war against Ukraine, assessing that the Russian president has not veered from his maximalist goal of dominating his western neighbor, according to people familiar with the analysis. One of the secret assessments distributed to Trump administration policymakers, dated March 6, says Putin remains determined to hold sway over Kyiv, a person familiar with the document said. Like others in this article, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified intelligence. The reports are not intended to assess President Donald Trump’s high-stakes diplomacy to end the three-year Ukraine war or the prospects of a 30-day ceasefire proposal that U.S. and Ukrainian officials agreed on this week. But they underscore the tough task Trump and his national security team face, and raise the question of whether the White House is misreading Putin’s willingness to seek peace. Putin on Thursday reacted cautiously to the ceasefire proposal. While not rejecting it outright, he hinted that Moscow might place conditions on any agreement. The Russian leader spoke in advance of a planned meeting in Moscow with Trump envoy Steve Witkoff to discuss the ceasefire plan. Russian troops, meanwhile, appear to be making significant progress in ousting Ukraine from a sliver of territory in Russia’s Kursk province that Kyiv had hoped to use as a territorial bargaining chip. Some current and former U.S. officials said that the Russian leader, even if he agreed to a temporary truce, would use it to rest and refit his troops — and was likely to break the terms of the deal by creating a provocation that he would blame on Ukraine.

FOX News [3/14/2025 5:00 AM, Diana Stancy, 46189K] reports the Trump administration unveiled new sanctions on Wednesday against an Iranian-linked Swedish gang that coordinated an attack on the Israeli Embassy in Stockholm in January 2024, according to the Treasury Department. The sanctions freeze assets for members and those affiliated with the Foxtrot Network, a transnational criminal organization that the Treasury Department said is one of the most "prominent" drug trafficking organizations in the region. The sanctions also single out and target the group’s fugitive leader, Rawa Majid. "Iran’s brazen use of transnational criminal organizations and narcotics traffickers underscores the regime’s attempts to achieve its aims through any means, with no regard for the cost to communities across Europe," Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent said in a Wednesday statement. "Treasury, alongside our U.S. government and international partners, will continue to hold accountable those who seek to further Iran’s thuggish and destabilizing agenda.” In addition to trafficking drugs, the Foxtrot Network is a criminal organization that conducts violent acts, including shootings, contract killings and assaults, and is responsible for increased violence in Sweden. It is notorious for employing teenagers to conduct these violent acts, according to the Treasury Department. Iran has increasingly utilized criminal networks to conduct attacks targeting the U.S. as well as attacks against Jewish and Israeli targets in Europe, the Treasury Department said. For example, the agency accused Iran of colluding with the Foxtrot Network to conduct an attack on the Israeli Embassy in 2024 after Swedish officials identified a "dangerous object" believed to be an explosive device at the embassy. While security forces neutralized the device, Sweden’s security police moved to investigate the attack as a "terrorist crime," according to Reuters. The Treasury Department also said on Wednesday that Majid has coordinated with the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security, which is already under U.S. sanctions, and faces charges in Sweden pertaining to narcotics and firearms trafficking. The White House referred Fox News Digital to the Treasury and State Department’s statements on the sanctions. The sanctions against Majid and the Foxtrot Network align with President Donald Trump’s maximum pressure campaign against Iran, which he reinstated in February through a series of sanctions aimed at sinking Iran’s oil exports.

AP [3/13/2025 6:13 AM, Staff, 48304K] reports U.S. President Donald Trump threw a curve ball at China by linking the fentanyl issue to his tariffs on imports. The Chinese government is swinging back. First it issued a report detailing its efforts to control the illegal trade in fentanyl, specifically the ingredients for the opioid that are made in China. Then, the Chinese foreign minister blasted the U.S. for responding to Beijing’s goodwill with tariffs. And this week, Chinese officials expressed their indignation at a rare background briefing with journalists. "In the spirit of humanity, China assisted the U.S. in various ways," Foreign Minister Wang Yi told journalists last week in an annual appearance before the media. "The U.S. should not meet good with evil or even impose arbitrary tariffs. No responsible major country should do that.” Trump cited the fentanyl issue as the reason for imposing a 10% tariff on all Chinese imports in early February, on top of any existing duties. He doubled that to 20% earlier this month. He also has cited fentanyl, along with other reasons, for imposing tariffs on Canada and Mexico. In his executive order on the first 10% tariff, Trump accused China of subsidizing chemical companies to export fentanyl and related "precursor chemicals" and of providing a safe haven for Chinese criminal organizations that launder the revenues from the opioid trade. It’s not unusual for the Chinese government to subsidize industries, and the precursor chemicals are also used to make legal painkillers. But some of the production finds its way to Mexican drug cartels who make fentanyl and send it to the United States. "Despite multiple attempts to resolve this crisis at its root source through bilateral dialogue, PRC officials have failed to follow through with the decisive actions needed to stem the flow of precursor chemicals to known criminal cartels," the statement said, referring to China by the acronym for the People’s Republic of China, its official name. The Chinese government hit back both times Trump imposed tariffs with its own duties on selected U.S. products and other measures aimed at American companies. Analysts have described the response as a measured one designed to try to avoid an escalation of the trade war, which could deal a blow to an already sluggish Chinese economy.

VOA News [3/14/2025 1:05 AM, Michael Lipin, 2913K] reports a second Iranian ship that Western news reports have named as part of a scheme to import a missile propellant ingredient from China is heading to Iran with a major cargo load, an exclusive VOA analysis has found. Ship-tracking websites show the Iranian-flagged cargo ship Jairan departed China on Monday, a month later than the expected departure cited by one of the news reports. The Jairan was named in January and February articles by The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and CNN as one of two Iranian cargo ships Tehran is using to import 1,000 metric tons of sodium perchlorate from China. The three news outlets cited unnamed Western intelligence sources as saying the purported shipment could be transformed into enough ammonium perchlorate — a key solid fuel propellant component — to produce 260 midrange Iranian missiles. The other Iranian cargo ship named in the news reports, the Golbon, completed a 19-day journey from eastern China to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas on Feb. 13. During the trip, it made a two-day stop at southern China’s Zhuhai Gaolan port and delivered an unknown cargo to Iran, according to ship-tracking website MarineTraffic. Both the Golbon and the Jairan are sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department as vessels operated by the state-run Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, which itself is sanctioned for being what the State Department has called "the preferred shipping line for Iranian proliferators and procurement agents.” As the Golbon sailed from China to Iran in late January and early February, the Jairan’s automatic identification system transponder — a device that transmits positional and other data as part of an internationally mandated tracking system — reported the vessel as being docked at eastern China’s Liuheng Island. In a joint review of the Jairan’s AIS data on MarineTraffic and fellow ship-tracking website Seasearcher, VOA and Dubai-based intelligence analyst Martin Kelly of EOS Risk Group determined that the Jairan reported no significant draught change while docked at Liuheng Island through February and into early March. That meant the Iranian vessel was sitting at the almost same depth in the water as when it arrived in eastern China late last year, indicating it had not been loaded with any major cargo since then.

Reuters [3/13/2025 6:24 AM, David Lague, 41523K] reports Australia is scrambling to deploy new long-range missiles as the recent arrival of powerful Chinese warships off the Australian coast delivers a sharp reminder of Beijing’s growing naval muscle. In a move to boost military firepower, Canberra plans to arm Australian soldiers with anti-ship missiles and advanced targeting radars to protect the country’s vast maritime approaches, according to contract announcements as well as a flurry of recent official speeches and ministerial statements. Two new types of advanced anti-ship missiles for the army fired from mobile launchers are under evaluation with a decision expected by the end of the year, the government has said. Australian government officials have said that future versions of one of the contenders, Lockheed Martin’s Precision Strike Missile, were expected to have a range of up to 1,000km and could be fired from High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launchers. Australia has 42 HIMARS launchers on order from the United States, with launchers expected to be in service from 2026-27, according to the defense department. The U.S. Army in June used two Precision Strike Missiles to successfully attack a moving target at sea during an exercise in the Pacific, the army said in a statement. China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) jolted Australia’s security services with the deployment of three warships – one of its most potent cruisers, a frigate and a replenishment ship – close to the country’s biggest cities of Sydney and Melbourne late last month. Air traffic between Australia and New Zealand was disrupted with 49 flights diverted on February 21 when the Chinese flotilla held what appeared to be a live fire exercise in the Tasman Sea without notifying authorities in Canberra or Wellington. The office of the Australian defense minister didn’t respond to questions for this story. The new missiles for the Australian army would deliver a potent strike capability and act as a deterrent to potential adversaries, according to Mick Ryan, a retired Australian army Major General. "You could put a HIMARS launcher with a maritime strike missile in Sydney and it would have the potential to hit one of those ships," Ryan said. New missiles for the Australian army are a key element of Canberra’s plan to prepare for a more assertive Chinese military presence in waters around Australia. They could also be deployed to support allied forces defending strategically important islands in the Asia-Pacific region in the event of conflict, military experts told Reuters. New long-range missiles are also on order for Australia’s navy and air force.

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