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.

CBS News [5/30/2025 1:46 PM, Melissa Quinn, 51860K] reports the Supreme Court said Friday it will allow the Trump administration to terminate a program that allowed more than 500,000 Cubans, Nicaraguans, Haitians and Venezuelans to temporarily live and work in the United States while a legal battle over the effort to end the legal protections proceeds. The high court agreed to grant a request for emergency relief sought by the Justice Department in response to a federal district court order halting Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s decision to revoke en masse a grant of humanitarian parole to migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela through a special program. The parole program, known as CHNV, temporarily protected roughly 532,000 people from the risk of deportation. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. Jackson, joined by Sotomayor, wrote that pausing the lower court’s order "would facilitate needless human suffering before the courts have reached a final judgment regarding the legal arguments at issue," and she lambasted the majority for determining that it is "in the public’s interest to have the lives of half a million migrants unravel all around us before the dissenting courts decide their legal claims. ". President Trump’s administration has been steadily turning to the Supreme Court for emergency relief as it fights more than 200 lawsuits targeting many policies from the president’s second-term agenda, though many of the court fights involving his efforts to crack down on immigration into the U.S. have led to heightened tensions with the federal judiciary. The dispute over the administration’s attempt to revoke the temporary legal status granted to 532,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans is separate from other challenges to Mr. Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan migrants, which has been blocked by some courts. The high court has also allowed the Department of Homeland Security to revoke protected status for roughly 350,000 Venezuelans for now. The Department of Homeland Security created parole processes for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans during the Biden administration in late 2022 and early 2023, which required migrants seeking parole to apply through a sponsor who is in the U.S. lawfully and authorized them to work in the U.S. for two years. But soon after Mr. Trump began his second term, he issued an executive order directing the Homeland Security secretary to terminate all parole programs, including CHNV. Acting on the executive order, Noem in March announced the Department of Homeland Security would be ending the CHNV program, with any grants of parole still in effect expiring by April 24. A group of 23 individuals, including several CHNV parolees, and a nonprofit organization challenged Noem’s termination of the program, and a federal district court judge in Massachusetts agreed to halt Noem’s blanket revocation of migrants’ temporary legal status. The Washington Post [5/30/2025 9:13 PM, Anumita Kaur and Lauren Kaori Gurley, 31735K] reports that the Trump administration has maintained that the migrants pose a public safety threat, and in a statement celebrating Friday’s high court decision, Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said ending the programs would be “a return to America First.” But immigration advocates say the decision upends the lives of migrants who have settled across the country — from Florida to Illinois — and embedded themselves into American communities after fleeing crises, while economists warn that removing the migrants may harm the economies where they live and work, spanning industries such as hospitality, health care and construction. “This is the first time that an administration has come in and pulled the rug out from under people,” said Talia Inlender, deputy director at the UCLA School of Law’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy. “Today’s Supreme Court decision will upend the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who came lawfully to the U.S. through the CHNV program.” Politico [5/30/2025 5:30 PM, Josh Gerstein, 16523K] reports that the high court’s one-paragraph order — which contained no explanation of the court’s reasoning — lifts an earlier ruling from a district judge who had blocked the administration’s mass cancellation of the programs. The immigrants who entered through the programs will now lose their permits to work in the U.S. and are at risk of imminent deportation, although many are expected to apply for asylum or similar protections. Two Democratic-appointed justices — Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson — dissented. The majority’s decision to allow the administration to cancel the programs while legal challenges were still pending will “facilitate needless human suffering” and will unleash “devastation” on the affected immigrants, Jackson wrote in an eight-page dissent joined by Sotomayor. In March, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem revoked the legal status of immigrants in the so-called CHNV parole programs and gave participants 30 days to leave the U.S. However, a federal judge in Boston blocked Noem’s move the following month, concluding that “en masse” termination of the groups’ immigration status was likely illegal and that officials could end individuals’ parole grants early only on a case-by-case basis. NBC News [5/30/2025 2:07 PM, Lawrence Hurley, 44540K] reports that starting in 2022, then-Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas granted what is called parole for two years to people from the affected countries in part to alleviate the surge arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. Solicitor General D. John Sauer said in court papers that Talwani did not have authority to rule on the issue, with Noem given authority to make her decision under the federal Immigration and Nationality Act. The same law gave Mayorkas the discretion to allow the affected people to enter and stay in the country. The Department of Homeland Security said in October 2024 that each person’s parole would not be extended once their two-year approval period expired. Noem’s move to unwind the Biden action was challenged in court by individuals who would be affected, as well as the Haitian Bridge Alliance, an immigrant rights group.

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The Wall Street Journal [5/30/2025 7:55 PM, Tali Arbel, 646K] reports the Trump administration on Thursday named counties and cities in more than 30 states, including New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle, as sanctuary jurisdictions it could go after for not complying with federal immigration laws. President Trump has threatened to pull federal funding and pursue lawsuits against places that don’t change their practices. Sanctuary cities place limits on asking residents about their immigration status and on helping federal officials with immigration enforcement. That makes it harder for the administration to arrest people who are in the U.S. illegally and makes Trump’s push for mass deportations more difficult. Trump in late April ordered the attorney general and the Department of Homeland Security to identify these cities and states within a month. Several of the administration’s executive orders have called for withholding funds from sanctuary cities, leading to litigation from cities and states. A federal judge in California in April barred the federal government from withholding funds from cities and counties in the state under the executive orders while the case continues. That judge criticized the failure of the executive orders to define which jurisdictions were sanctuaries. The DHS list contained counties and cities across New England, and on the West Coast in Washington, California and Oregon, along with jurisdictions in Hawaii and Alaska. Cities and counties in New Mexico, Tennessee, Colorado, Wisconsin, Illinois and Minnesota were also named, as well as Washington, D.C. CBS Austin [5/30/2025 2:39 PM, Maria Tedesco, 558K] reports "These sanctuary city politicians are endangering Americans and our law enforcement in order to protect violent criminal illegal aliens," said Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. "We are exposing these sanctuary politicians who harbor criminal illegal aliens and defy federal law. President Trump and I will always put the safety of the American people first. Sanctuary politicians are on notice: comply with federal law.” Every city, county and state that is deemed sanctuary will receive a letter stating their laws do not comply federal laws. DHS said they must revise their policies that don’t comply. "Sanctuary cities are deliberately and shamefully obstructing the enforcement of federal immigration laws endangering American communities," DHS said in a statement. The DHS determined whether or not an area is sanctuary by investigating factors such as, compliance with federal law enforcement, information restrictions and protections for illegal immigrants. The list will be updated regularly.

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New York Times [5/31/2025 5:02 AM, Campbell Robertson, Halina Bennet and Jill Cowan, 138952K] reports the January vote was unanimous. Huntington Beach, Calif., was “a non-sanctuary city for illegal immigration,” its City Council declared. So local officials in the conservative Orange County coastal redoubt found it rather surprising to find on Friday morning that their city had been included on a list of “sanctuary jurisdictions,” which, the Department of Homeland Security charged, “are deliberately and shamefully obstructing the enforcement of federal immigration laws.” “I’ve already called somebody with the feds and said this couldn’t be further from the truth,” said Huntington Beach’s mayor, Pat Burns, “so let’s straighten it out.” “I’d love to know, really, who came up with this list,” he added. “It’s very negligent.” Huntington Beach is one of more than 600 cities, counties and states that the federal government has accused of shielding “dangerous criminal aliens.” The list, which was published on Thursday, was mandated by an April executive order that explicitly threatened the jurisdictions with the termination of federal contracts and declared they might even be breaking the law. Some of the jurisdictions on the list had indeed designated themselves as sanctuary cities in resolutions or executive orders. Officials in other places argued that the phrase “sanctuary city” did not technically apply, though they had pledged to protect immigrants. But mixed among them were many counties and cities that openly support efforts to apprehend and deport immigrants, or have even been actively cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Officials in other places that had voted overwhelmingly for President Trump but were far from the front lines of the immigration debate were simply bewildered. “It was a complete and total surprise to everyone in the county when we got put on that list,” said Julie Kraye, a county commissioner in Hooker County, Neb., population 700, which Mr. Trump won last year by a nearly 75-point margin. Immigrants were hardly coming in large numbers to Hooker County, she said. “We just don’t have the infrastructure for the housing or what these people would need.” A Homeland Security official said on Friday night that “the list is actively reviewed, will be regularly updated, and can be changed at any time.”

AP [5/30/2025 7:19 PM, Scott Bauer, Amy Taxin and Martha Bellisle, 2106K] reports State and local officials blasted the Trump administration’s widely anticipated list of “sanctuary” jurisdictions that are deemed uncooperative with federal immigration enforcement, with some of the most enthusiastic supporters of the White House wondering on Friday how they wound up on it. The list, which was riddled with misspellings, included sparsely populated counties that have little interaction with immigration authorities, that overwhelmingly voted for President Donald Trump and that have actively supported his hard-line immigration policies. In California, the city of Huntington Beach made the list of hundreds even though it filed a lawsuit challenging the state’s immigration sanctuary law and passed a resolution this year declaring the community a “non-sanctuary city.” “At first when I heard it I was like, accidents happen,” said Huntington Beach Mayor Pat Burns. But after seeing so many other cities lumped in like his, he called it “negligent.” “You don’t have that many mistakes on such an important federal document — somebody’s got to answer to that.” Meanwhile, those with policies protecting immigrants also pushed back, saying they are doing right by their communities. “This is simply the latest attempt by the Trump administration to strong-arm cities like Seattle into changing our local policies through bluster and threats to critical federal funding for public safety and homelessness,” Bruce Harrell, the city’s mayor, told The Associated Press in an email. “It’s not going to work — the law is on our side — and we will not hesitate to protect our people and stand up for our values.” The list was published as the Trump administration ramps up efforts to follow through on the president’s campaign promises to remove millions of people who are in the country illegally. It came out as Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced major leadership changes, and after a White House official said the administration wanted to increase daily immigration arrests. In response to questions Friday about the list, the Department of Homeland security reiterated that it was compiled using a number of factors, including whether the localities identified themselves as sanctuary jurisdictions, how much they complied with federal officials enforcing immigration laws, if they had restrictions on sharing information with immigration enforcement or had any legal protections for people in the country illegally.

CBS News [5/30/2025 1:01 PM, Stephen Swanson, 51860K] Video HERE reports the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is taking aim at Minnesota and its Twin Cities, alleging the deliberate obstruction of the enforcement of federal immigration laws, and protecting "dangerous criminal aliens from facing consequences." The department released a list on Thursday of 36 states and numerous cities and counties across the U.S. it claims "undermine the rule of law and endanger the lives of Americans and law enforcement." Minnesota is designated on the list as having "self-identification as a state sanctuary jurisdiction," naming Minneapolis, St. Paul and 20 counties: Carver, Cottonwood, Goodhue, Hennepin, Le Sueur, Lincoln, Lyon, Martin, Nicollet, Nobles, Otter Tail, Pipestone, Ramsey, Scott, Steele, Todd, Watonwan and Wright counties. This stems from an April 28 executive order by the Trump administration to publish a list of "sanctuary jurisdictions" and establish consequences for those listed, including identifying "appropriate Federal funds ... including grants and contracts, for suspension or termination." "We are exposing these sanctuary politicians who harbor criminal illegal aliens and defy federal law," said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. "President Trump and I will always put the safety of the American people first. Sanctuary politicians are on notice: comply with federal law." The list was published amid news of a leadership shake-up within ICE, with officials calling the changes "organizational realignments" to "help ICE achieve President Trump and the American people’s mandate of arresting and deporting criminal illegal aliens and making American communities safe." [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

FOX News [5/30/2025 10:12 PM, Staff, 46878K] reports DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin calls out the Democratic Party’s rhetoric around the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown on ‘The Ingraham Angle.’ [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

Daily Caller [5/30/2025 1:14 PM, Hailey Gomez, 1010K] reports the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) called out The New York Times on Thursday, telling the Daily Caller News Foundation that their recent report on welfare checks for migrant children omitted key details that the agency claims it shared with the outlet. The NYT released an article on Wednesday stating that the Trump administration’s wellness checks on migrant children allegedly have “stirred” anxiety among migrants and others connected to the children. However, Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin accused the outlet of neglecting key details in their report. “This ‘reporting’ by The New York Times was meant to manufacture fear. The truth is our officers are conducting these welfare checks because the previous Administration allowed children to be smuggled, sex trafficked and exploited. Why won’t the New York Times focus on these children and tell their stories of horrific abuse and mistreatment?” McLaughlin asked. With the Trump administration now cracking down on illegal criminal migrants and the migrant children that had been placed throughout the U.S. under the Biden-Harris administration, DHS is making efforts to secure the children who have been exploited. Giving the DCNF examples of who the department has found so far to be sponsoring or handling migrant children in the U.S., DHS claims that the NYT had been given the same information prior to their piece being published but neglected to include the criminals’ full background.

NBC News [5/30/2025 6:00 AM, Nicole Acevedo, 44540K] reports Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., said he’s demanding answers about reports that the Trump administration is prioritizing separating families instead of focusing on threats to public safety when it comes to immigration enforcement. In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Thursday, Ossoff cited the cases of two immigrant mothers who were recently deported and separated from their children. The first woman, Heidy Sánchez, was detained during a routine immigration check-in appointment in April and deported to Cuba without her U.S.-citizen baby daughter, who has a history of seizures and was still being breastfed. Sánchez’s attorney, Claudia Cañizares, told NBC Miami that the woman "had no criminal records.” Immigration authorities didn’t comment on the case. The Trump administration has said in previous comments that deported parents have been given the choice to take their children or not. The second woman, Yorely Bernal, was deported to Venezuela in April without her 2-year-old despite having authorized her removal alongside her daughter’s. The toddler was instead taken into U.S. custody and bounced around three foster families before being reunited with her mother in Venezuela. The Trump administration justified the separation at the time by alleging the girl’s parents were affiliated with the Tren de Aragua gang, though it didn’t give specific evidence. "I write with grave concerns about reports of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) separating families," reads the letter, which was first obtained by NBC News. "I urge you to reprioritize threats to public safety in immigration enforcement and use your discretion to grant humanitarian parole to keep infants and young children in their parents’ care.” Both cases illustrate the stepped-up pace of deportations of immigrants who don’t have criminal charges or convictions, even though President Donald Trump said during his election campaign that the focus would be on deporting violent criminals.

New York Post [5/30/2025 8:42 AM, Joe Marino, Josh Christenson, and Emily Crane, 49956K] reports an illegal migrant from Mexico who was arrested over a handwritten letter that threatened to assassinate President Trump may have actually been set up, law enforcement sources told The Post. Mexican national Ramon Morales Reyes, 54, was taken into custody in Wisconsin after an ICE agent received the death threat letter on May 21, the Department of Homeland Security announced Wednesday. But in a stunning twist, sources said a handwriting analysis has since shown that Reyes didn’t pen the letter — and the actual culprit may already be behind bars. Authorities are currently looking into whether an already incarcerated perp may have written the letter to set Reyes up because the migrant is an apparent witness in that person’s criminal case, the sources said. "The investigation into the threat is ongoing," a senior DHS official said told The Post of the latest claims. "Over the course of the investigation, this individual was determined to be in the country illegally and that he had a criminal record. He will remain in custody.” The Wisconsin Attorney General’s Office wouldn’t comment. "Thanks to our ICE officers, this illegal alien who threatened to assassinate President Trump is behind bars," DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said at the time. Morales — who had prior raps for a felony hit-and-run and other crimes — entered the US illegally at least nine times from 1998-2005, according to DHS. He remains in ICE in Wisconsin awaiting deportation, DHS said.

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The AP [5/30/2025 6:06 PM, Staff, 56000K] reports attorneys say an immigrant has suffered due to a “false accusation” made by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who claimed the Wisconsin man threatened the life of President Donald Trump in a handwritten letter. [Editorial note: consult video at source link] CNN [5/30/2025 6:18 PM, Holmes Lybrand, 21433K] reports investigators were working to understand if an undocumented migrant, Ramon Morales-Reyes, had been set up by letters threatening President Donald Trump’s life several days before Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem publicized the claim that has turned Morales-Reyes’ life upside down. According to Milwaukee Police Department records obtained by CNN, investigators had spoken with Morales-Reyes on May 22 – the day he was arrested – about the potential of someone trying to get him deported. Police began investigating jailhouse phone calls from an individual who allegedly attacked Morales-Reyes. Noem tweeted out her accusation that Morales-Reyes threatened Trump on May 28. Morales-Reyes was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents after they received one letter purportedly from Morales-Reyes threatening Trump, according to the police records. The records say that Morales-Reyes gave ICE officers a handwritten note when he was arrested with his family information. Local investigators compared that note to the letter threatening Trump, and found they didn’t match. "This note depicted completely different handwriting than what is on the letters and envelopes," the police records say. Then, on Wednesday, Noem claimed on social media that Morales-Reyes sent a letter threatening to kill Trump, all while investigators already believed he had been set up. Despite this, the letter, alongside pictures of Morales-Reyes, were plastered over social media by Noem, DHS and several news outlets. Attorneys and local organizers held a news conference Friday in Milwaukee to call on DHS to issue a correction, adding that the family of the migrant has received threats in wake of the report.

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CNN [5/30/2025 12:08 PM, Jennifer Hansler, 21433K] reports the US State Department on Friday ordered all US embassies and consulates to "immediately begin additional vetting" for anyone seeking a visa to travel to Harvard University "for any purpose.” The move is a significant escalation of the Trump administration’s feud with the Ivy League institution that is poised to have massive implications, as it applies to more than just students. The "additional vetting" is comprised of "a complete screening of the online presence" of the applicants who wish to travel to Harvard, which will serve as a pilot for expanded social media screening and vetting visa applicants across the board. "Such applicants include, but are not limited to prospective students, students, faculty, employees, contractors, guest speakers, and tourists," the diplomatic cable signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and seen by CNN said. CNN reported Wednesday that the State Department would begin reviewing Harvard-affiliated visas, but the cable provides more details about how this will be applied to those seeking the ability to visit, attend, or work at Harvard. The cable notes that consular officers should determine, either in pre-screening or an interview, if the applicant is seeking to travel to Harvard, and such applicants should be refused a visa "pending review of their online presence.” The words "any" are underlined and bolded in the passage where the cable states that the screening applies to "any" nonimmigrant visa applicant for "any" purpose. "As in all instances in which an applicant fails to provide certain information on request, consular officers should consider whether the lack of any online presence, or having social media accounts restricted to ‘private’ or with limited visibility, may be reflective of evasiveness and call into question the applicant’s credibility," the cable said. "The enhanced vetting measures described in this guidance aim at ensuring that consular officers can appropriately identify such visa applicants with histories of anti-Semitic harassment and violence, and to duly consider the visa eligibility under U.S. immigration law," it states, noting the Department of Homeland Security’s assertion that Harvard "failed to maintain a campus environment free from violence and anti-Semitism.” Axios [5/30/2025 1:06 PM, Lauren Floyd, 13599K] reports that the State Department’s enhanced vetting measures aim to ensure "consular officers can appropriately identify" visa applicants with "histories of anti-Semitic harassment and violence, and to duly consider the visa eligibility under U.S. immigration law," CNN reported of a diplomatic cable signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. He reportedly says in the cable if in the prescreening or interviewing process an applicant seeks to work at, attend or otherwise visit to Harvard, consular offices are instructed to refuse the visa "pending review of their online presence." Harvard did not immediately respond to Axios’ request for comment, and the State Department declined to comment, explaining it "does not comment on internal communications." The New York Post [5/30/2025 1:52, Josh Christenson, 147K] reports State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce confirmed in a Thursday press briefing that an earlier cable announcing the move contained “details that are accurate.” “Of course, everyone is vetted,” she told reporters. “This is an overarching national security action, and we are acting quickly. Obviously, we’re a nation that loves people coming here the legal way, and we want to help facilitate that but not at our own risk.” The Friday cable was quoted as stating: “Such applicants include, but are not limited to prospective students, students, faculty, employees, contractors, guest speakers, and tourists.” As of Thursday, a senior State Department official told The Post, that review was to expand beyond the F-1 visas for international students to those traveling to Harvard on business (B-1) or as tourists (B-2). Rubio has also moved to revoke visas for foreign government officials or individuals seeking to censor Americans — and he’s put all Chinese students submitting applications on notice. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem also called attention to concerning research collaborations with institutions investigated by Congress for their ties to the Chinese military.

FOX News [5/30/2025 3:12 PM, Staff, 46878K] Video: HERE reports State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce breaks down President Donald Trump’s student visa crackdown on ‘America Reports.’

CBS News [5/30/2025 3:14 PM, Camilla Schick, Joe Walsh, 51860K] reports the State Department has told U.S. embassies and consulates to expand vetting for all visa applicants who wish to come to Harvard University, including visitors as well as students, according to an email obtained by CBS News. In an internal email dated May 29 and sent by Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s office to all U.S. diplomatic and consular posts, consular officers were told that this "additional vetting" applies to anyone wanting a visa to come to Harvard for "any purpose." That includes current or prospective students, faculty, employees, contractors, guest speakers and even tourists, per the email. The email told consular officers to "conduct a complete screening of the online presence of any nonimmigrant visa applicant seeking to travel to Harvard University for any purpose." Officers should also "consider whether the lack of any online presence, or having social media accounts restricted to "private" or with limited visibility, may be reflective of evasiveness and call into question the applicant’s credibility." The email said consular officers can also request applicants to set their social media accounts to "public" for vetting purposes. Notably, the email states that the new vetting procedure for Harvard will also serve as a "pilot for expanded screening and vetting" of visa applicants "generally," including for student visas. The State Department "may announce similar measures for other groups of visa applicants as appropriate, and in accordance with U.S. law." A source familiar with the email who was granted anonymity to speak freely told CBS news that it will likely be difficult to implement the vetting instructions uniformly across all US consular sections around the world, and for all universities assuming this pilot process gets expanded to foreign applicants for other U.S. universities.

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NBC News [5/30/2025 2:41 PM, Abigail Williams, 44540K] reports the Trump administration is escalating its social media vetting of visa applicants seeking to travel to Harvard University, a State Department cable sent to diplomatic posts Friday shows. The cable signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio instructs all U.S. missions and consulates abroad to immediately enhance the vetting of such visa applicants, with the intention of expanding the scrutiny process over time. The vetting will go beyond student applicants, according to the cable seen by NBC News, as it also includes faculty, employees, contractors, guest speakers and tourists. The stepped-up vetting is intended to "address acute concerns of violence and anti-Semitism at Harvard University" and calls for vetting of "any nonimmigrant visa applicant seeking to travel to Harvard University for any purpose," the cable states. Non-immigrant visas are for temporary entry to the U.S. In response to an NBC News request for comment on the cable, a State Department spokesperson said, "The Department does not comment on internal communications.” NBC News also has contacted Harvard for comment. For the expanded social media screening, consular offices have been told to identify applicants with "histories of anti-Semitic harassment and violence, and to duly consider their visa eligibility under U.S. immigration law.” In those instructions, the cable criticizes what the administration described as Harvard’s failure to maintain a campus environment "free from violence and anti-Semitism.” The cable instructs U.S. consular officers to ask visa applicants to set all their social media accounts to public in the event that they need to be reviewed as part of the vetting. The State Department also instructed officers to "consider whether the lack of any online presence, or having social media accounts restricted to ‘private’ or with limited visibility, may be reflective of evasiveness and call into question the applicant’s credibility.” Rubio said on Wednesday that the State Department would work with the Department of Homeland Security to "aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students.”

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Bloomberg [5/30/2025 5:37 PM, Nick Wadhams, 19320K] reports Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday ordered more scrutiny of the social-media profiles of any foreigners seeking to visit Harvard University, telling US consular officers that applicants’ lack of an online presence might be enough evidence to deny a visa. Rubio’s cable, sent to embassies worldwide, marked the latest salvo by the Trump administration against Harvard, the foreign students who go there and elite universities more broadly. Rubio said the procedure spelled out in the document would serve as a pilot for the future days after he halted interviews for student visas to consider ways to weed out applicants deemed to pose possible risks to US national security. The Friday cable ordered the new vetting procedures for all foreigners who want to visit Harvard, including “prospective students, students, faculty, employees, contractors, guest speakers, and tourists.” The cable orders consular offers to scrutinize the social-media profiles of potential applicants and order them to switch their social media accounts to public so interviewers can see what’s in them. The absence of online posts could be used against them, Rubio said.

FOX News [5/30/2025 7:00 AM, Ashley Oliver, 46878K] reports Harvard University’s lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security for moving to ban foreign students at the Ivy League school could be on a fast track to the Supreme Court, reviving a longstanding debate over when justices should recuse themselves from cases. Four Supreme Court justices attended Harvard. While being an alumnus of a university involved in litigation does not typically warrant recusal from a case, other factors, such as deeper involvement with a school, could change matters. Professor James Sample, a constitutional law professor at Hofstra University, told Fox News Digital recusals from every case involving universities justices attended or were linked to would be "untenable," but recusals could be appropriate in certain circumstances. Harvard’s latest lawsuit, filed Friday in Massachusetts, alleges the Trump administration’s decision to ban international students at Harvard by stripping them of their visas is unconstitutional. Harvard’s attorneys made an emergency request for a restraining order, and Judge Allison Dale Burroughs, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, granted the order within hours. The order brought the DHS’s visa operation against Harvard to a temporary halt and opened the door for the government to turn to higher courts for relief, meaning it could be on an expedited path to the Supreme Court.

The Hill [5/30/2025 5:30 AM, Staff, 18649K] reports the Trump administration keeps shifting the battleground over international students’ visas as it pulls more and more government levers to crack down on the group. What started with allegedly combatting campus antisemitism by going after pro-Palestinian activists has escalated into attempts to take away all of Harvard University’s foreign students, threats to cap international student admissions at 15 percent at all colleges and Secretary of State Marco Rubio announcing he would "aggressively revoke visas" for Chinese students. The moving goalposts are difficult to navigate for students and universities and could do long-term damage to a process that experts say brings minds and money to U.S. shores while exporting American values and culture. "I think he has multiple legitimate motives for taking the actions he’s taking, and that those motives are at least in some ways connected. There’s a general theme that underlies them. And the general theme is that that Trump appears concerned that a segment, not the average, but a segment of international students are coming for political purposes, not educational or scientific ones," said Jay Greene, senior research fellow in the Center for Education Policy at the right-leaning Heritage Foundation. President Trump has made cracking down on immigration one of his signature agenda items, though the moves against student visas in particular started off comparatively small, with the administration going after pro-Palestinian protesters it accuses of supporting Hamas and posing a threat to U.S. foreign policy. But then Trump’s more specific animus toward Harvard found a new outlet, with the Department of Homeland Security trying to take away the university’s ability to enroll international students and ordering those now at the school — some 27 percent of its student body — to transfer. Harvard quickly won an emergency court ruling to block that order. Meanwhile, the administration on Tuesday ordered U.S. embassies and consulates around the world to halt student visa interviews while it weighs increased screening and vetting procedures.

AP [5/30/2025 5:06 PM, Annie Ma, Jocelyn Gecker and Bianca Vázquez Toness, 2106K] reports since coming from China as a teenager for boarding school, Bob Zeng has imagined building a career in the United States. But as he prepared to graduate Thursday from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it felt like the last chapter of his life in America. Zeng said he has been rethinking his plans because of the Trump administration’s pledge to aggressively revoke the visas of Chinese students. Having completed a masters degree in science and management, he is thinking about moving to Europe. Or going home to China. "I am worried about working here," said Zeng, 30. "You never know what’s going to happen.” Many international students come to the U.S. with hopes of gaining work experience and returning to their home countries or pursuing a career in the U.S. But the administration’s intensifying scrutiny of international students - and signs that formal career pathways for them may be closed - are leading some to reconsider their plans. Beyond the steps the administration already has taken - expanding the grounds for terminating students’ ability to study in the U.S., adding new vetting for student visas, moving to block foreign enrollment at Harvard - a key nominee has raised the possibility of ending a program that encourages international students to stay and gain work experience. About 240,000 of the 1.1 million people on student visas in the U.S. are on Optional Practical Training - a one-year post-graduation period where they are authorized to work in fields related to their degrees. It can last up to three years for graduates in science, math and technology fields. President Donald Trump’s nominee for director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, Joseph Edlow, said during his confirmation hearing on May 21 that he would like to see an end to post-graduate work authorization for international students. "What I want to see would be essentially a regulatory and sub-regulatory program that would allow us to remove the ability for employment authorizations for F-1 students beyond the time that they are in school," said Edlow, referring to the F-1 visas on which most international students attend college in the U.S. The opportunity to gain career experience at U.S. companies, especially in technology and other fields where American companies dominate, has long been a draw of studying here. Many enter the H-1B visa lottery, hoping to be selected for one of the employer-sponsored visas that offer a pathway to permanent residency in the United States. Threatening practical training opportunities would have long-term consequences for the U.S. in attracting international students, said Fanta Aw, CEO of NAFSA, which represents international educators. "We turn global talent away at our own expense," Aw said.

NPR [5/30/2025 5:54 PM, Emily Feng, 37958K] Audio HERE reports news that the U.S. will "aggressively" begin revoking visas held by Chinese students reverberated through China as well as U.S. education institutions relying on Chinese talent this week, drawing wide condemnation. Education groups and academics argue the overall benefits of welcoming students from China have created a net positive for American innovation and economic growth. "The chilling effect on potential students will be enormous," warns Rosie Levine, the executive director of the U.S.-China Education Trust, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit. "By turning away Chinese students, the U.S. will lose a critical reserve of soft power and talent that directly contributes to our competitiveness." Trump administration officials argue Chinese students are a national security risk because they return to China with American know-how and can help facilitate intellectual property theft while in the U.S. Members of Congress have alleged that some Chinese students could be used in state espionage campaigns and pose security risks to universities that receive federal funding. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Wednesday that affected students will include "those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields," adding that "we will also revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong." "We will not tolerate the CCP’s exploitation of U.S. universities or theft of U.S. research," said Tammy Bruce, a State Department spokesperson, on Thursday, in response to a journalist’s request to clarify Rubio’s announcement.

New York Times [5/30/2025 8:51 PM, Li Yuan, 138952K] reports one night in 1978, President Jimmy Carter got a phone call at 3 a.m. from a top adviser who was visiting China. “Deng Xiaoping insisted I call you now, to see if you would permit 5,000 Chinese students to come to American universities,” said the official, Frank Press. “Tell him to send 100,000,” Mr. Carter replied. By Christmastime that year, the first group of 52 Chinese students had arrived in the United States, just ahead of the formal establishment of U.S.-Chinese diplomatic relations on New Year’s Day. A month later, Mr. Deng, China’s top leader, made a historic visit to America during which he watched John Denver sing “Take Me Home, Country Roads” and was photographed wearing a cowboy hat. It’s almost hard to believe how little contact there had been between the United States and modern China before that. The Sinologist John K. Fairbank wrote in 1971: “Since 1950 Washington has officially sent more men to the moon than it has to China.” The visits by Mr. Deng and, more important, by those first Chinese students began a new chapter that would fundamentally change China — and the world. The United States gained access to a vast market and talent pool, while China found a model and a partner for transforming its economy. Now that chapter has closed, after the Trump administration announced on Wednesday that it would begin “aggressively” revoking the visas of Chinese students. For the millions of Chinese who have studied in the United States, myself included, it is a sobering and disheartening development. It marks a turning point that America, long a beacon of openness and opportunity, would start shutting its doors to Chinese who aspire to a good education and a future in a society that values freedom and human dignity. By curbing people-to-people exchanges, President Trump is taking a decisive step toward decoupling from China. To treat Chinese students and professionals in science and technology broadly not as contributors, but as potential security risks, reflects a foreign policy driven more by insecurity and retreat than by the self-assurance of a global leader. The reaction to the new policy inside China, reflected in the U.S. Embassy’s social media accounts, was mixed. Some commenters thanked the United States for “sending China’s brightest minds back.” Others drew historical parallels, comparing the Trump administration’s isolationist turn to China’s Ming and Qing dynasties — once global powers that declined after turning inward and were ultimately defeated in foreign invasions. One commenter remarked that the policy’s narrow-mindedness would “make America small again.”

New York Times [5/31/2025 12:00 AM, Devlin Barrett, 138952K] reports the F.B.I. has spent decades investigating some professors and students from China suspected of using their studies to secretly spy for their home country. As the Trump administration tries a new, more aggressive effort to stop such activity, experts fear it will do more harm than good for American research. The plans the State Department announced this past week to revoke visas of some Chinese college students strike even some former spy-hunters as a heavy-handed attempt to solve a more complicated problem. “The overall number of People’s Republic of China students that actually pose some type of national security risk is relatively low compared to the number of students that will continue to support and further U.S. research,” said Greg Milonovich, a former F.B.I. agent who managed the counterintelligence division’s academic alliance program as well as the national security higher education advisory board. In announcing the move late Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave few specifics, offering only that the U.S. government would “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.” How that vaguely defined standard will be enforced is not yet clear, but the directive is part of a broad campaign by the Trump administration to force major changes in American higher education. College campuses, administration officials say, are in crisis, and only the federal government is willing and able to fix the problems. The senior White House adviser Stephen Miller outlined on Friday what the administration viewed as a threat to its interests. “We’re not going to be awarding visas to individuals who have a risk of being engaged in any form of malign conduct in the United States, which of course would include espionage, theft of trade secrets, theft of technology or other actions that would degrade the security of our industrial base,” he said.

Reuters [5/30/2025 10:27 PM, Laurie Chen, 51390K] reports caught in the middle of Washington’s renewed visa crackdown on Chinese international students, Beijing postgraduate Lainey is anxiously waiting to resume the visa process to study a PhD at her dream school, the University of California. "We feel helpless and unable to do anything," said the 24-year-old sociology student, who declined to give her surname for privacy reasons. "The situation in North America this year is not very good. From applying for my PhD until now, this series of visa policies is not very favourable to us. But we have no choice but to wait." universities or theft of U.S. research and intellectual property by Beijing. Spokesperson Tammy Bruce did not elaborate on how many Chinese students would be affected by a new plan announced on Wednesday to "aggressively" revoke visas. The visa crackdown is the latest in a series of moves targeting the international student community, especially Chinese nationals, who make up roughly 1 in 4 of all international students in the U.S., as the Trump administration pursues its hardline immigration agenda.

CNN [5/31/2025 3:50 AM, Maddie Araujo, Niamh Kennedy and Nada Bashir, 21433K] reports that, when Adefemola Akintade learned that the Trump administration had suspended the processing of foreign student visas, she immediately went blank. “I don’t know what to do; this is something I’ve always wanted for the longest of times,” she told CNN, still with an air of disbelief. The Nigerian journalist has been accepted into Columbia Journalism School for a master’s degree and was on the cusp of applying for her US visa. “I don’t have any backup plan,” the 31-year-old said. “I put all my eggs in one basket – in Columbia… which is quite a risk.” She is due to start her degree in New York in August having already paid a hefty enrolment fee. Akintade is among thousands of people across the globe who were thrown into limbo on Tuesday when the US State Department instructed its embassies and consulates to pause the scheduling of new student visa interviews as it plans to expand social media vetting for applicants. It’s the latest in a series of moves by the Trump White House targeting higher education, starting with an ongoing fight with Harvard University and then dramatically expanding in scope. CNN spoke with several affected overseas students, who expressed a mix of sadness, confusion and fear over the latest developments and the sudden upending of their lives. Many of them asked to remain anonymous, citing concerns about possible retribution or problems in the future. “It feels like a really scary and unsettling time for international students studying in the US,” said one Canadian student who has also been accepted by Columbia. “A lot of us chose to study in the US for its freedoms but now knowing that innocent social media posts could cost an education feels like censorship.” Some prospective students have even started self-censoring. Another Canadian, accepted into Harvard Law School, told CNN how a friend working on Capitol Hill advised her to go through her social media posts shortly after the visa suspension news broke. “We were looking at a post from us at Pride, and my caption was simply a rainbow flag and then a trans flag. And I was on the phone with her ‘and I was like, do I have to take this down?’ Eventually we decided no, I could leave it up, but I changed the caption, I removed the trans flag. I don’t know how to feel about that,” the student said.

New York Times [5/30/2025 12:24 PM, Kurt Streeter, 138952K] reports in 1987, when Haipei Shue arrived in the United States as a student, he recalls receiving the warmest of welcomes. He was a graduate student in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “People were curious about us, inviting us to their homes, wanting to be friends,” Mr. Shue said on Thursday, describing an openness that defined his early years in a country then seen by many in China as a beacon of opportunity. “It was an extraordinary time,” he said. That era of academic exchange between China and the United States, beginning in the 1970s under President Jimmy Carter as a form of soft power diplomacy, now stands in sharp contrast to the Trump administration’s recent stance toward the country. The administration announced this week that it would aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students with ties to the Chinese Communist Party or for those studying in broadly defined “critical fields.” The administration also plans to enhance vetting of future applicants for student visas, including looking at social media posts. Those policies promise to reduce the number of students from China coming to the United States, who have been a fixture on American university campuses for decades. In 2024, there were roughly 277,000 students. The Trump administration says China exploits U.S. universities to bolster its military and technological capabilities. And Trump officials argue that some Chinese students may pose risks of espionage and technology theft. “We are using every tool at our disposal to know who wants to enter this country and whether they should be allowed in,” Tammy Bruce, a State Department spokeswoman, said. “Every visa adjudication is a national security decision.”

Reuters [5/31/2025 6:02 AM, Andrew Chung, 51390K] reports the U.S. Supreme Court swept away this week another obstacle to one of President Donald Trump’s most aggressively pursued policies - mass deportation - again showing its willingness to back his hardline approach to immigration. The justices, though, have signaled some reservations with how he is carrying it out. Since Trump returned to the White House in January, the court already has been called upon to intervene on an emergency basis in seven legal fights over his crackdown on immigration. It most recently let Trump’s administration end temporary legal status provided to hundreds of thousands of migrants for humanitarian reasons by his Democratic predecessor Joe Biden while legal challenges in two cases play out in lower courts. The Supreme Court on Friday lifted a judge’s order that had halted the revocation of immigration "parole" for more than 500,000 Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian and Nicaraguan migrants. On May 19, it lifted another judge’s order preventing the termination of "temporary protected status" for more than 300,000 Venezuelan migrants. In some other cases, however, the justices have ruled that the administration must treat migrants fairly, as required under the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of due process. "This president has been more aggressive than any in modern U.S. history to quickly remove non-citizens from the country," said Kevin Johnson, an immigration and public interest law expert at the University of California, Davis. No president in modern history "has been as willing to deport non-citizens without due process," Johnson added. That dynamic has forced the Supreme Court to police the contours of the administration’s actions, if less so the legality of Trump’s underlying policies. The court’s 6-3 conservative majority includes three justices appointed by Trump during his first term as president. "President Trump is acting within his lawful authority to deport illegal aliens and protect the American people. While the Supreme Court has rightfully acknowledged the president’s authority in some cases, in others they have invented new due process rights for illegal aliens that will make America less safe. We are confident in the legality of our actions and will continue fighting to keep President Trump’s promises," White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told Reuters.

AP [5/30/2025 6:03 PM, Staff, 56000K] reports a Chinese national who was charged with voting illegally in Michigan last fall has fled the U.S., federal authorities said Friday. The man, who is not a U.S. citizen, had surrendered his Chinese passport in November and was told not to leave Michigan. But he traveled to China from Detroit in January by showing another passport, the FBI said in a court filing. An arrest warrant was issued in April after he failed to appear at two court hearings in Ann Arbor, where he had been a student at the University of Michigan. He was facing charges of perjury and attempting to vote as an unauthorized elector, a felony. He now faces a federal charge, though the U.S. does not have an extradition treaty with China.

Breitbart [5/30/2025 5:00 PM, John Hayward, 3077K] reports Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning complained on Thursday that it was "unjustified" and hypocritical for the United States to revoke the visas of students linked to the Chinese Communist Party. Mao said the Chinese government "firmly opposes" the U.S. decision and has lodged a formal protest. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Wednesday that the departments of State and Homeland Security would work together to "aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields." "We will also revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong," he added. Rubio’s brief statement did not elaborate on the exact reasons for the visa cancellations, but it was entitled, "New Visa Policies Put America First, Not China.”

New York Times [5/31/2025 1:32 AM, Alan Feuer, 138952K] reports the American Civil Liberties Union asked a federal appeals court early Saturday morning to stop President Trump from using a rarely invoked 18th-century law to deport scores of Venezuelans accused of being gang members to a prison in El Salvador. The A.C.L.U.’s request to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans was an opening salvo in what is likely to be the decisive legal battle over Mr. Trump’s attempts to use the law, the Alien Enemies Act, as a centerpiece of his aggressive deportation agenda. The case in front of the appeals court, which emerged from a lawsuit filed in Texas in April, is poised to become the first of its kind to receive a full hearing by the Supreme Court. The justices could get the case later this year and when they do, they will ultimately settle the question of whether Mr. Trump has used the wartime statute lawfully. For more than three months, the A.C.L.U. has been rushing from court to court across the country, filing lawsuits in an effort to stop the Trump administration from deporting Venezuelans accused of being members of the street gang Tren de Aragua under the Alien Enemies Act. The act, which was passed more than two centuries ago, gives the government expansive powers to round up and expel citizens of hostile foreign nations, but only at times when war has been declared or during an invasion. The administration has claimed that the presence of Tren de Aragua in United States is tantamount to an invasion and that its members have been acting at the behest of a hostile Venezuelan government. But that position has been rejected by federal judges in New York, Texas, and Colorado, all of whom have issued separate orders declaring that Mr. Trump has been using the act unlawfully. Only one federal judge, in Pennsylvania, has upheld his proclamation invoking the law. In its filing to the Fifth Circuit, the A.C.L.U. repeated arguments it made in front of all of those judges, asserting that Tren de Aragua is not working at the direction of a foreign nation and that the presence of its members on American soil comes nowhere close to constituting an invasion. “The Alien Enemies Act is a wartime authority that cannot be used during peacetime and can only be used against a nation or government,” lawyers for the A.C.L.U. wrote. “Presidents have abided those statutory limits for over 200 years. But now, for the first time in history, the government claims it can use this war power against a private criminal organization, to address ordinary crime and unlawful immigration, even though Congress has enacted extensive laws to regulate those acts.”

The Hill [5/30/2025 11:20 AM, Ian Swanson, 18649K] reports Democrats are demanding answers about a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plan to purchase a new $50 million jet for Secretary Kristi Noem. The jet, slotted in as a line item to the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) budget, comes as the department argues its current plane is beyond its operational usage hours. "Reports indicate this jet would cost $50 million and replace one of the two Gulfstream jets already at your disposal. Funding the acquisition of this new jet would come at the cost of other USCG investments, including sorely needed modernization of the USCG’s aging aircraft fleet used by service members for search and rescue and other critical missions," Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) wrote in a letter to Noem alongside Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.). Both Democrats sit on the House Homeland Security panel. Thompson is the panel’s ranking member. "Simply put, your purchase of a new jet would directly diminish the availability of other USCG aircraft to carry out critical missions," the two wrote. The letter from the two lawmakers describes an aging fleet of Coast Guard aircraft, noting that many entered service in the 1980s and 1990s, in contrast with the current Gulfstream used for Noem’s travel, which was purchased in 2002. They also point to a Government Accountability Office report finding that the Coast Guard has had trouble securing parts for its helicopters as the manufacturer no longer produces them. The letter asks DHS to detail flights taken by Noem on two existing jets used for travel as well as a breakdown of all Coast Guard aircraft that "have a service life expiration date" prior to the two Gulfstreams. DHS did not immediately respond to request for comment Friday but has previously defended the need for the jets. "The current CG-101 G550 is over twenty years old, outside of Gulfstream’s service life, and well beyond operational usage hours for a corporate aircraft," Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs, said in a statement when news of the budget request was first reported. "This is a matter of safety. Much like the Coast Guard’s ships that are well beyond their service life and safe operational usage, Coast Guard’s aircraft are too," she added. "This Administration is taking action to restore our Nation’s finest maritime Armed Service to a capable fighting force." DHS has defended the need for the jets.

(B) NBC 6 News at Noon [5/30/2025 12:17 PM, Staff] reports that the second suspect connected to stealing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s purse last month has pled not guilty today. Christian Montesinos was arrested in Miami Beach at a Walgreen’s in connection to that theft. Montesinos and another man are implicated in that robbery but officials believe they did not target her for her position. Today, Miami-Dade state attorneys planned to prosecute Montesinos for possessing a stolen driver’s license from California at the time of the arrest last month in addition to that federal theft case.

Bloomberg Law [5/30/2025 11:23 AM, Bernie Pazanowski, 1707K] reports multiple nonprofit groups that help prepare immigrants to obtain US citizenship aren’t entitled to an injunction preventing the government from cutting off their federal funding, a federal court said. The plaintiffs either didn’t establish that the US District Court for the District of Maryland had jurisdiction over their claims, or point to any discrete agency action to support them, Judge Lydia Kay Griggsby said Thursday. For other claims, the plaintiffs seek only backward-looking relief, she said. The plaintiffs alleged that Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem froze certain grants they receive with the intent to terminate them.

FOX News [5/30/2025 12:14 PM, Rachel Wolf, 46878K] reports the legal team representing a Wisconsin judge accused of helping a man evade immigration authorities recently expanded their motion to dismiss the case. Judge Hannah Dugan’s attorneys say that she is entitled to judicial immunity for her official acts and that the federal government overstepped its authority by arresting and charging her. Additionally, the legal team asserts in its memo that the charges violate the Constitution’s Tenth Amendment and the principle of separation of powers. They further argue that Dugan can be charged for conduct that is "wholly unrelated" to her duties as a judge, such as taking bribes or violating someone’s constitutional rights. Dugan is not accused of doing either of those things in this case. "The indictment itself is an ugly innovation. Its dismissal will not be," Dugan’s attorneys write in the memo. The Wisconsin judge is accused of helping illegal immigrant Eduardo Flores-Ruiz evade plainclothes ICE agents who were allegedly attempting to serve him a warrant. The Department of Homeland Security celebrated Flores-Ruiz’s arrest and slammed "activist judges" who, in the department’s view, have attempted to obstruct President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration. "Since President Trump was inaugurated, activist judges have tried to obstruct President Trump and the American people’s mandate to make America safe and secure our homeland— but this judge’s actions to shield an accused violent criminal illegal alien from justice is shocking and shameful," Assistant Secretary Dept. of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.

CBS News [5/30/2025 7:16 PM, Kierra Frazier, 51860K] Video HERE reports a bipartisan group of more than 130 retired judges filed a brief Friday urging a federal court to drop charges against Wisconsin judge Hannah Dugan, saying her arrest undermines "centuries of precedent on judicial immunity.” Dugan, a Milwaukee County circuit court judge, was arrested April 25 by FBI agents on federal allegations she prevented the arrest of a man by immigration authorities during a federal law enforcement operation at her courthouse. The man, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, was arrested and detained at an immigration detention center. In an amicus brief filed Friday, the group of judges argue that Dugan shouldn’t be prosecuted because "she is entitled to absolute immunity for her official acts." "This bar on prosecution is the same absolute immunity that is given to members of the legislative and executive branches for their actions taken in an official capacity," the brief read. The group of 138 former state and federal judges called the prosecution of Dugan, who was indicted by a grand jury earlier this month on one count each of concealing an individual to prevent arrest and obstruction, an "egregious overreach by the executive branch" that "threatens public trust in the judicial system and the ability of the public to avail themselves of courthouses without fear of reprisal.” "Allowing prosecution of Judge Dugan for the alleged actions would create a chilling effect on judges that would stifle independent decision-making and cast doubt on the universal recognition that judges are in charge of maintaining order and decorum in their courtrooms and courthouses," the group of judges wrote. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

SiriusXM [5/30/2025 11:59 PM, David Webb] Audio HERE reports Tricia McLaughlin joins the show to discuss DHS exposing crimes by migrants deported to South Sudan, self-deportation, members of Congress breaking into Delaney Hall Detention Center, ACLU drops baseless lawsuit and the investigation into California for providing benefits to illegal aliens. [Editorial note: consult audio at source link]

Washington Post [5/30/2025 7:15 AM, Catherine Rampell, 32099K] reports you might not have noticed it, but last week the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States surged by 350,000. Don’t worry, an army of gangbangers and other criminals didn’t charge the border. Rather, President Donald Trump simply decided to turn 350,000 legal immigrants into illegal ones. Trump has been fearmongering about an “invasion” of unauthorized immigrants for years. Since retaking the White House, he has attempted to manifest those fever dreams into reality through a “de-documentation” campaign. This is not an immigration agenda that targets criminals; it’s one that criminalizes immigrants who have followed the law, by stripping them of their existing visas and work permits. The 350,000 people de-documented last week are Venezuelans who had permission to live and work in the United States — subject to screening and other conditions — under a program known as temporary protected status. TPS was created in 1990 to shield immigrants from countries experiencing war or other catastrophes that make it unsafe for them to return home. Alas, to Trump, every (non-White) immigrant is a threat. He first tried to cancel protections for Venezuelans in February, and last week the Supreme Court gave him the green light. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, called this development “the single largest mass-illegalization event in U.S. history." Venezuelans are not Trump’s only target. This month, the administration also revoked temporary protected status for more than 9,000 Afghans living in the United States. Many had assisted the U.S. military at great personal risk. They will become vulnerable to deportation in July. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem justified this decision by saying, meh, Afghanistan seems pretty safe now. Her evidence: Afghanistan could soon become a hot vacation destination. “The Taliban government is promoting tourism to shift its global image,” her DHS memo says. The Trump administration claims non-criminal immigrants are getting swept up in their dragnet only incidentally — “collaterals” who happen to be nearby during raids targeting real public-safety threats. This is false. The government is arresting immigrants when they show up for routine immigration check-ins or citizenship interviews. A Bronx high school student with no criminal record was arrested just last week when he arrived at a routine hearing.

Daily Caller [5/30/2025 6:08 PM, Natalie Sandoval, 1010K] reports Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson continues to cement her legacy as America’s worst Supreme Court pick through her scathing dissent from her colleagues’ latest immigration ruling. In a 7-2 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court permitted President Donald Trump to restart deportations of over 500,000 Latin American migrants, closing the Biden-era “humanitarian parole” loophole which saw them enter the country. You can probably guess the dissenters: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “The Court has plainly botched this assessment today,” Jackson wrote. “It requires next to nothing from the Government with respect to irreparable harm. And it undervalues the devastating consequences of allowing the Government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending.” As a rule of thumb, if Jackson’s unhappy, Americans have cause to celebrate. Her rulings always seem to consider the well-being of innocent American citizens last. Jackson’s heart bleeds for more than migrants. Her light sentences of sex criminals accused of violating young children are appalling, according to records reviewed by the New York Post (NYP). “I would have denied the Government’s application,” Jackson argued in the dissent, citing a “balance of the equities” which “weighs heavily in the respondents’ favor.” Under Biden, individuals from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela (CHNV) with sponsors were permitted into the United States to live and work for two years, according to CBS News. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin claimed former President Joe Biden’s administration transformed the program into an “unrecognizable shell of itself used for fraud and to exploit the immigration system,” according to the NYP. Jackson doesn’t see it that way. “Respondents now face two unbearable options,” the justice wrote. “On the one hand, they could elect to leave the United States and, thereby, confront ‘dangers in their native countries,’ experience destructive ‘family separation,’ and possibly ‘forfei[t] any opportunity to obtain a remedy based on their . . . claims,’ as the District Court found.” Wait a minute. Weren’t the migrants supposed to clear out within two years anyway?

US News & World Report [5/30/2025 5:59 PM, Alice C. Hill, 24051K] reports just as Americans are entering what has been forecast to be a potentially worse-than-average Atlantic hurricane season starting June 1, the nation’s disaster safety net is unraveling. Since taking office, President Donald Trump has sought to shift responsibility for disaster preparedness and recovery to the states, slashing the federal government’s capability to forecast, respond to and recover from disasters. As part of Trump’s campaign to slash the size and cost of the federal government, the Federal Emergency Management Agency – which administers tens of billions of dollars annually through a disaster relief fund for response, recovery and resilience – has shed more than 2,000 full-time staff, or one-third of its workforce. Emergency workers losing their jobs may not make headlines, but when a Category 4 hurricane hits, who will be manning in the operations center? In a matter of weeks, the administration has undone more than half-a-century of progress, taking us back to a bygone time when local communities were left to fend for themselves in natural disasters. Deprived of long-standing federal tools and resources, communities affected by hurricanes, storm surges, floods, record extreme heat and wildfires will pay the price. The Federal Disaster Relief Act of 1950 gave the president the power to provide federal assistance when requested by a state’s governor, laying the foundation for the modern federal-state partnership. Over the past 70 years, the federal role in disaster preparedness and response has expanded with the increasing frequency, severity and complexity of natural disasters, many of them fueled by climate change. Both of us worked with FEMA and witnessed first-hand that the agency’s support is essential for states and tribal nations stretched beyond capacity. While previous administrations, including President Barack Obama’s, encouraged stronger state and local investment in disaster preparedness, the Trump administration is actively shifting the burden to states while weakening core federal functions such as weather forecasting. Across the country, underfunded emergency agencies are struggling to prepare for fires, floods, heat and hurricanes. Already, the administration has signaled that it will make it much harder for states by quadrupling the amount of damage a state would need to demonstrate to get federal assistance after the president declares a disaster. If FEMA narrows its focus to only lifesaving and life-sustaining operations, other vital services such as displacement assistance, temporary housing, debris removal or long-term rebuilding will fall to under-resourced state and local governments. Federal help could be delayed until local systems have already collapsed. This will hit hardest in small, rural communities that lack the staff or funding to step in.

USA Today [5/30/2025 5:07 AM, Frank Cerabino, 75552K] reports fingers crossed, Florida. We are going to need some luck this hurricane season because we’re about to get screwed like never before. I don’t know where the storms will go, but I’m pretty sure the federal umbrella of help we’ve always relied on will be in tatters. That’s because the gutting and defunding of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, is one of the many bits of collateral damage to the Trump administration’s dogged efforts to heap tax-savings windfalls on the very rich. In case you haven’t been paying attention, Cameron Hamilton, the acting FEMA administrator, was fired recently for saying, "I do not believe it is in the best interest of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency.” That shouldn’t be a controversial statement. But it was, considering that President Donald Trump has said, "I think we’re going to recommend that FEMA goes away.” So far, those plans have resulted in a 30% reduction in staff and billions of dollars in cuts to programs aimed at supporting states hit hard by natural disasters. Meanwhile, a new review council chaired by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has been empaneled to promote a mindset of self-reliance for the states from FEMA. "I believe this agency needs to be renamed," Noem said during the council’s first meeting this month. I’ve got an idea. FEMA: "Forsaking Everyone Malevolently Abandoned.” The Trumping of FEMA would be especially terrible for Florida. As much as Gov. Ron DeSantis likes to pretend that we here in Florida don’t need FEMA for hurricane relief, we really do. The off-season political posturing of go-it-alone Florida disappears once the wind starts blowing. Where does Gov. DeSantis stand as Florida braces?

AP [5/30/2025 9:15 AM, Rebecca Santana, 48304K] reports the agency tasked with carrying out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign is undergoing a major staff reorganization. In a news release Thursday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced leadership changes at the department tasked with finding, arresting and removing immigrants who no longer have the right to be in the country as well as at the agency’s investigative division. Kenneth Genalo, who had been the acting director of Enforcement and Removal Operations, is retiring and will serve as a special government employee with ICE. Robert Hammer, who has been the acting head of Homeland Security Investigations, will transition to another leadership role at headquarters. The agency said Marcos Charles will become the new acting head of ERO while Derek Gordon will be the acting head at HSI. ICE also announced a host of other staff changes at various departments within the agency. ICE said the changes would “help ICE achieve President Trump and the American people’s mandate of arresting and deporting criminal illegal aliens and making American communities safe.”

Washington Examiner [5/30/2025 7:51 PM, Anna Giaritelli, 1934K] reports top Trump administration officials are unhappy with arrest and deportation numbers and have lambasted the federal immigration officials responsible for the operation, the Washington Examiner learned. Three current and former federal immigration officials detailed a recent heated exchange between White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and dozens of senior U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in Washington in late May. At a time when collaboration is necessary to undertake President Donald Trump’s mass deportation goals, trust has eroded as some high-ranking employees feel they are being closely monitored by the White House over how they are carrying out arrest operations of illegal immigrants. "They’ve been threatened, told they’re watching their emails and texts and Signals," the first official said. "That’s what is horrible about things right now. It’s a fearful environment. Everybody in leadership is afraid. … There’s no morale. Everybody is demoralized.” ICE’s top 50 field officials were given roughly a week’s notice of an emergency meeting in Washington. ICE’s 25 Enforcement Removal Operations, or ERO, field office directors and 25 Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, special agents in charge flew into Washington and descended on the agency’s Washington headquarters last Tuesday, May 20. There, they were met by Miller, ICE confirmed to the Washington Examiner. "Miller came in there and eviscerated everyone. ‘You guys aren’t doing a good job. You’re horrible leaders.’ He just ripped into everybody. He had nothing positive to say about anybody, shot morale down," said the first official, who spoke with those in the room that day. "Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’" the official recited. One of the ERO officials in attendance stood up and stated that the Department of Homeland Security and the White House had publicly messaged about targeting criminal illegal immigrants, and therefore, ICE was targeting them, and not the general illegal immigration population. "Miller said, ‘What do you mean you’re going after criminals?’ Miller got into a little bit of a pissing contest. ‘That’s what Tom Homan says every time he’s on TV: ‘We’re going after criminals,’" the ICE official told Miller, according to the first official. Later, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem came in and addressed the dozens of top ICE officials. "‘You guys are doing an OK job, but you’re not doing enough. You need to do more,’" the same official said. An ICE spokesman told the Washington Examiner on Thursday afternoon that the statements from Miller were "inaccurate." Other news outlets, including Axios, reported that it was a tense meeting with Miller and Noem last week. "Stephen Miller did not say many of the things you state," said Laszlo Baksay, ICE deputy assistant director of media affairs.

The Hill [5/30/2025 10:41 PM, Staff, 12829K] reports Niall Stanage and Amber Duke discuss Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem demanding ICE agents to arrest 3,000 undocumented migrants daily. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

Bloomberg [5/30/2025 2:01 PM, Alicia A. Caldwell, 19320K] reports in courts across the US, migrants who arrive expecting a routine hearing are instead seeing judges dismiss their case and government agents waiting to arrest them. The first blitz of this controversial turn in immigration enforcement played out last week from coast to coast. In one example, almost two dozen federal agents descended on a Phoenix court and arrested more than 20 people as they left the building, including parents with their children, said Greg Chen, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Paul Hunker, a former US Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney who is now in private practice, said case dismissals and arrests at immigration courts had previously been almost unheard of. “Nothing has ever been done like this,” said Hunker, who left ICE during the Biden administration. “My guess is it’s shock and awe. And a test run.” A wave of such detentions is coinciding with rising dissatisfaction within the Trump administration at the pace of total migrant arrests.

New York Times [5/30/2025 11:46 AM, Hamed Aleaziz, Luis Ferré-Sadurní, and Miriam Jordan, 138952K] reports that a hearing on Tuesday at immigration court in Van Nuys, Calif., was supposed to be routine for a young family from Colombia, the first step in what they hoped would be a successful bid for asylum. To their surprise, the judge informed the father, Andres Roballo, that the government wished to dismiss his deportation case. Taken aback, Mr. Roballo hesitated, then responded: “As long as I stay with my family.” Moments later, as they exited the courtroom into a waiting area, Mr. Roballo was encircled by plainclothes federal agents who ushered him into a side room. Other agents guided his shaken wife, Luisa Bernal, and their toddler toward the elevator. Outside the courthouse, Ms. Bernal collapsed on a bench. “They have him, they have him,” she wailed. “We didn’t understand this would happen.” Mr. Roballo’s arrest was part of an aggressive new initiative by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain migrants at immigration courts, the latest escalation by the Trump administration in its all-out effort to ramp up deportations. Agents have begun arresting migrants immediately after their hearings if they have been ordered deported or their cases have been dismissed, a move that enables their swift removal, according to immigration lawyers and internal documents obtained by The New York Times. Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, added that most migrants who illegally entered the United States in the past two years were subject to expedited removals. “Biden ignored this legal fact and chose to release millions of illegal aliens, including violent criminals, into the country with a notice to appear before an immigration judge,” she said in a statement. “ICE is now following the law and placing these illegal aliens in expedited removal, as they always should have been.”

CBS New York [5/30/2025 6:06 PM, Staff, 51860K] reports a Supreme Court ruling clears a path for the White House to strip legal protections from more than half a million migrants. CBS News New York’s Ali Bauman has been reporting on the new detention tactics of federal immigration agents and spoke to lawyers who say this decision may allow ICE to arrest more people at their court hearings. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

SFGate [5/30/2025 6:02 PM, Susana Canales Barrón, 11859K] reports most software outages leave their users inconvenienced for a short period of time before services are restored. But an ongoing software outage at Access Corrections — a third-party company providing financial and communications infrastructure for immigrant detention centers contracted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — has left detainees without access to basic necessities. A division of the Keefe Group, Access Corrections is one of several private vendors that provides payment processing systems and communication technologies to ICE detention facilities to manage immigrant detainee deposits, allowing detainees to purchase commissary items such as food, hygiene supplies and over-the-counter medication. Access Corrections, its parent company the Keefe Group and TKC Holdings, Keefe’s corporate owner, have not responded to multiple requests for comment. Problems with Access Corrections are not new, including in California. At the Desert View Annex, an ICE facility in the Mojave Desert, a man detained for 50 days who was granted anonymity in accordance with Hearst’s ethics policy said he relied on the generosity of fellow detainees to access basic commissary items after his wife’s repeated attempts to deposit money were thwarted by technical issues. The problems are also widespread. In Maine, the nonprofit group Mainers for Humane Immigration highlighted the scope of the disruption in a Facebook comment: "We called to ask if we could go to CCJ [Cumberland County Jail] and deposit money through the kiosk, nope, that’s down too. I asked about money orders, and they said all commissary is tied to Access Corrections, which means no one inside can access any funds at all right now.” In Utah, where Access Corrections also services state correctional facilities, officials confirmed that a nearly weeklong outage that began May 20 was recently resolved. Wisconsin Watch has also reported on how the Access Corrections outage is impacting individuals across the state. The California man, whose wife faced repeated technical issues while trying to send him money, was arrested by ICE agents in Oxnard behind a Women, Infants, and Children nutrition store while he was with his young child. During his time in detention, he said he lost nearly 30 pounds.

New York Times [5/30/2025 11:58 PM, Mattathias Schwartz and Alan Feuer, 138952K] reports the Trump administration deported a 31-year-old Salvadoran man minutes after a federal appeals court barred his removal while his case proceeded, the government admitted in a court filing this week. In its filing, the government denied that it had violated the order from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, instead blaming “a confluence of administrative errors.” The filing argues that because the process of deporting the man, Jordin Melgar-Salmeron, had already started before the court issued its formal order, at 9:52 a.m. May 7, that meant the order had not been violated. The plane carrying Mr. Melgar-Salmeron to El Salvador did not take off from Alexandria, La., until 10:20 a.m. Eastern time, according to the government’s timeline. The government had also previously given the court what the judges called “express assurance” that it would not schedule a deportation for him until the next day. The deportation deepened the questions surrounding the Trump administration’s legal tactics and administrative errors as it has sought to carry out the president’s aggressive vision of deporting as many as one million immigrants during his first year in office. In at least three other deportation cases, federal judges have determined that Trump officials expelled people from the country in violation of standing court orders. In an interview, one of Mr. Melgar-Salmeron’s lawyers disputed the government’s characterization of the deportation as a mistake, saying it appeared to be part of a larger pattern of the administration ignoring court orders. “It would be an absurd level of mistake,” said Matthew Borowski, the lawyer, comparing it to a chef pouring in pepper instead of salt. “Verifying the paperwork and putting the right people on the plane is their job.” The questions raised by the court over the deportation were reported earlier by Investigative Post, a nonprofit news outlet in Western New York.

Federalist [5/30/2025 10:56 AM, Brianna Lyman, 1142K] reports the Biden administration "ignored or dismissed" more than 65,000 reports related to migrant children — including more than 7,300 reports of human trafficking, according to details of a Department of Health and Human Services summary released by Sen. Chuck Grassley. Of the reports, 56,591 were "notifications of concern, 7,346 reports of human trafficking and 1,688 fraud leads," according to a press release from Grassley. The Trump administration has since taken the responsibility on, having processed more than 28 percent of the backlog left by the Biden administration, according to the press release. There have been seven indictments, 25 arrest warrants, 11 arrests and three convictions, according to the release. In a statement, Grassley, who has been spearheading efforts to save migrant children being exploited and abused, alleged that the Biden administration placed "unaccompanied migrant children with dangerous sponsors and actively obstruct[ed] law enforcement and Congress’ efforts to rescue vulnerable kids.” The Trump administration said it would now address the issue. "[Office of Refugee Resettlement] is digging through nearly 65,000 reports of concern about unaccompanied alien children — most ignored, many dismissed — each one a missed chance to protect a child," the Department of Health and Human Services said in a post on X. "This isn’t just paperwork. This is a systemic failure of the Biden administration. It is children’s lives put at risk. Now, it’s all ORR hands on deck. We’re combing through every report, every detail — because protecting children isn’t optional.” "The Trump administration WILL NOT look away. The system may have failed before, but not on our watch," the post continued. Grassley recently sent a letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., detailing the "poor vetting of sponsors of unaccompanied alien children." Grassley submitted a law enforcement referral in 2024 flagging potentially criminal activity in the alien unaccompanied children program. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) then identified more than 100 sponsors but, according to Grassley’s letter to Kennedy, the Biden administration failed to respond to adequately to the subpoenas issued by law enforcement. "[Homeland Security Investigations] analyzed [referrals] and determined over 100 sponsors were suspicious enough to warrant further investigation, from a single HHS emergency intake site," the letter states. "In response, HSI issued subpoenas to HHS for information to assist it in finding suspicious sponsors identified in my referral, and the children they sponsored.” But, according to the letter, then HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra "failed to fully comply with two-thirds of subpoenas they issued." This contributed to HSI "only [finding] a handful of sponsors and children," the letter states.

FOX News [5/30/2025 10:08 AM, Staff, 46878K] Video: HERE reports Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin joins ICE in Boston as they arrest criminal migrants, including an alleged murderer and child rapists. DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin reacts to push back to the Trump admin’s deportation agenda.

FOX News [5/30/2025 10:56 AM, Bill Melugin and Michael Dorgan, 46878K] reports Fox News embedded exclusively with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the greater Boston area this week, when agents were carrying out the arrests of hundreds of egregious criminal migrants in what the agency said is the largest operation it has undertaken since President Donald Trump returned to office. The sweeping operation, called "Patriot," is expected to hit 1,500 arrests and is targeting immigrants like a Salvadoran illegal immigrant convicted of child rape who went to prison and was deported in 2017. He was nabbed by ICE living right next to a children’s playground. ICE also swooped on another illegal migrant who is on El Salvador’s most wanted list and has an Interpol Red Notice for aggravated murder, aggravated kidnapping and robbery. ICE deployed 19 teams across Massachusetts this week, and the agency brought in ICE teams from other parts of the country to assist. It is in direct response to Massachusetts and Boston’s sanctuary policies, where officials do not fully enforce or assist with federal immigration laws, as border czar Tom Homan has promised to surge ICE to these areas. Patricia Hyde, the head of ICE Boston, said it is not uncommon to see immigrants convicted of child rape roaming public streets close to where children play. "It’s not unusual. Due to the open border policies, we are finding that plenty of people who have been previously deported and committed heinous crimes and were removed from the country are now back here, just living among us," Hyde said. "And now that’s our job to go round them up.” Fox News also joined ICE as they arrested a Colombian illegal immigrant facing pending charges for sexual assault of a child, as well as a Dominican illegal immigrant with a drug trafficking conviction who is now facing local charges for fentanyl distribution. Meanwhile, other arrests included a Guatemalan illegal immigrant who’s facing charges in Massachusetts for aggravated child rape but was released from state custody. They also arrested a Honduran immigrant who is facing local charges for rape and was also released from local custody.

FOX News [5/30/2025 7:39 PM, Staff, 46878K] Video: HERE reports Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin has the latest on the ICE operation in Boston resulting in arrests of criminal migrants on ‘Special Report.’

New York Times [5/31/2025 3:00 AM, Maria Cramer, 138952K] reports that, in March, a federal investigator asked the New York Police Department for information about a woman who had been arrested during a pro-Palestinian protest at Columbia University and was now detained for overstaying her visa. The woman, Leqaa Kordia, 32, was being investigated for money laundering, the investigator said, and the Department of Homeland Security needed help. The police handed over her birth date, address and the name of a possible associate. An officer also provided the woman’s sealed arrest report. But a month later, during an immigration court hearing, the only evidence of money laundering that federal prosecutors presented was a $1,000 MoneyGram transfer that Ms. Kordia had sent to relatives in Gaza. The judge, Tara Naselow-Nahas, was unimpressed. “Based on the evidence, I do not find that the respondent poses a danger to the United States,” she said and ordered that Ms. Kordia be released on a $20,000 bond. Ms. Kordia remains at the Prairieland Detention Facility in Texas as prosecutors seek a reversal of the decision. But the judge’s ruling and questions about the federal government’s credibility have civil libertarians asking whether the Police Department should reconsider its cooperation with the Trump administration. The city’s sanctuary laws forbid the department from divulging information in immigration cases, which are civil matters, but the police often cooperate with federal authorities on criminal cases, usually in joint investigations into crimes like sex trafficking, drug and gun dealing, and terrorism. Ms. Kordia’s case is the rarer instance in which federal agents have asked about a criminal inquiry that does not involve a joint investigation. In those cases, the department also expects officers to cooperate, vetting requests through superiors and maintaining a record of information released. But the department has no written guidelines or procedures for assessing such requests beyond a brief description.

CBS Baltimore [5/30/2025 1:56 PM, JT Moodee Lockman, 51860K] reports a Honduran national who was convicted of a crime in Maryland was taken into custody by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on May 22. Alex Yonatan Flores-Arce, 20, entered the U.S. illegally, according to ICE. U.S. Border Patrol encountered him near El Paso, Texas, in March 2019, where he was served with a notice to appear. In announcing Flores-Arce’s arrest, ICE also accused Howard County of ignoring a request to keep him detained. Immigration officials said Flores-Arce was released back into the community twice. Flores-Arce was arrested in October 2024 and charged with rape in Howard County. He was found guilty in April and sentenced to 15 years in prison and five years of probation. ICE said they submitted an immigration detainer for Flores-Arce on January 13 to the Howard County Department of Corrections. According to ICE, the department did not honor the detainer and instead released Flores-Arce from custody on May 5. On May 8, Flores-Arce was arrested for violating his probation. He was arrested by ICE as he left the detention center, officials said. "The decision by Howard County Detention Center to ignore our immigration detainer and release a removable individual with an egregious criminal history undermines public safety and put Maryland communities at risk," ICE Baltimore acting Field Office Director Nikita Baker said. Flores-Arce has a final administrative removal order and remains in ICE’s custody.

FOX News [5/30/2025 7:38 AM, Alex Nitzberg, 46878K] reports in a statement responding to the inclusion of Montgomery County Maryland on a list of sanctuary jurisdictions in the U.S., County Executive Marc Elrich accused the Trump administration of seeking to criminalize immigrants and "create fear." President Donald Trump issued an executive order calling for a list of sanctuary jurisdictions. DHS issued the list on Thursday, the department noted in a post on X. "We are not in violation of federal law, and we will not be making changes based on political headlines. Montgomery County has always cooperated with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in cases involving violent crimes, serious felonies, and threats to public safety. That has been and remains our policy," Elrich said in his statement. "This designation, like many other actions taken by this administration, is about criminalizing immigrants, not protecting public safety. We will not be complicit in efforts to stigmatize or target our immigrant communities," the Democrat declared. "These types of announcements are designed to create fear. But we do not govern by fear in Montgomery County. We govern by the law and by our values." U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced the arrest of an MS-13 member in a press release earlier this month, noting multiple instances of the Montgomery County Detention Center failing to honor immigration detainers for the individual over the years, including just last month.

NBC News [5/30/2025 3:12 PM, Minyvonne Burke, 44540K] reports much of the South and eastern parts of the country are bracing for extreme weather that includes tornadoes, while the West is expected to see dangerously high temperatures. Severe storms will sweep through Kentucky up to southern New York, the National Weather Service said Friday in a post on X. The wet weather is expected to bring flash flooding, the weather service said Thursday. In a Friday morning post on X, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said officials were responding to reports of a possible tornado in Washington County. One person was killed and multiple people were injured, the Washington County Sheriff’s Office said in a Facebook post. Beshear said that "this level of severe weather" was not expected. Eastern and southeastern parts of the state are expected to see severe weather throughout the day. "Please be alert this morning and stay safe," the governor said.

New York Post [5/30/2025 12:13 PM, Josh Christenson, 49956K] reports immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested a Salvadoran gangbanger who is wanted for crimes in his home country after a wild car chase in Virginia earlier this month — which ended when the illegal migrant smashed into another vehicle and wrecked his car, The Post can reveal. Javier Enrique Canas-Escobar, 31, was apprehended in Bealeton, Va., more than 50 miles from the nation’s capital following the multi-car crash on May 22 — and is a member of the "notorious transnational" 18th Street gang already charged with illegal firearms possession in El Salvador, an ICE official said. "Caquillo," as he’s known in the gang, veered to the opposite side of the double-yellow and collided into another driver, totaling his car, before ICE and Virginia State Police nabbed him. State authorities have since charged him with two felony counts of assaulting law enforcement officers, eluding, felony and misdemeanor hit and runs, driving on the wrong side of the highway, property destruction and failure to obey a stop sign. ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) DC field office director Russell Hott said he posed "a significant threat to the residents of our Virginia communities" and "has a slew of charges to answer to before being removed to El Salvador to face firearms charges there." Canas-Escobar illegally entered the US "on an unknown date, at an unknown location and without being inspected, admitted or paroled," according to the Department of Homeland Security. ICE has since lodged an immigration detainer request with the Fauquier County Sheriff’s Office in Warrenton. No one was injured in the car chase, but he was briefly treated at a local hospital. President Trump’s border czar Tom Homan told reporters last month that roughly 139,000 illegal immigrants were deported in the administration’s first 100 days — but as many as 700,000 with criminal charges are still inside the US.

Politico [5/30/2025 6:46 PM, Kyle Cheney, 16523K] reports the Trump administration has admitted that it improperly deported another immigrant in violation of a court order — the fourth known case in which the administration deported someone erroneously or in breach of specific legal requirements. Jordin Melgar-Salmeron, an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador, had been in immigration detention since 2022 while deportation proceedings against him were pending. But on May 7, shortly after a federal appeals court ordered the government to keep him in the United States, immigration authorities deported him back to his native country. Matthew Borowski, a lawyer for Melgar-Salmeron, told POLITICO that he intends to ask the court to order the government to return his client from El Salvador and to hold government officials in contempt. In court papers this week, officials blamed a “confluence of administrative errors,” including missed emails and an inaccurate roster of passengers on the May 7 deportation flight. The Justice Department declined to comment, and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment. The deportation of Melgar-Salmeron was first reported by the Investigative Post, a nonprofit news outlet in western New York. Melgar-Salmeron, who spent years living in Virginia, had been in immigration detention since 2022 following a prison sentence for possessing an unregistered shotgun, according to court records. Though he had originally also been charged with entering the country illegally, he was allowed to plead guilty in 2021 to only the firearms charge. After his prison sentence ended, Melgar-Salmeron was detained by immigration authorities while deportation proceedings against him were ongoing. In January 2024, the Biden administration put Melgar-Salmeron’s proceedings on hold amid broader litigation over immigration policy. But in April, the Trump administration moved to lift that hold, court documents show. Melgar-Salmeron had a longstanding appeal pending at the New York-based 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. The administration asked the court to “expedite” the appeal and indicated that it wanted to deport him by May 9 “at the latest” — but told the court it would not act before May 8. On the morning of May 7, a three-judge panel of the court ordered the government to keep Melgar-Salmeron in the United States while he pursued claims about fear of torture in his home country. Despite the court’s order, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials at a staging facility in Louisiana loaded Melgar-Salmeron onto a plane and deported him to El Salvador. The flight departed at 10:20 a.m. — 28 minutes after the court’s order. Melgar-Salmeron is now in a Salvadoran prison, Borowski says.

FOX News [5/30/2025 9:00 AM, Elizabeth Elkind, 46878K] reports two powerful committees in the House of Representatives are opening an investigation into another Democratic official accused of blocking federal immigration authorities. House Homeland Security Committee Chair Mark Green, R-Tenn., is leading a probe into Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell alongside Nashville-area Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn, Fox News Digital learned Friday. Ogles had been petitioning leaders for weeks to look into O’Connell after the Democratic leader publicly denounced Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations in his city and signed an executive order aimed at tracking ICE movements in the area. The probe is being supported by the House Judiciary Committee, which is led by Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., chair of the subcommittee for immigration enforcement. "The Committee on the Judiciary and the Committee on Homeland Security of the U.S. House of Representatives are conducting oversight of state and local jurisdictions that endanger American communities through efforts aimed at thwarting the work of federal immigration officials," the four leaders wrote in a letter to O’Connell. "While the state of Tennessee has outlawed sanctuary policies, recent actions from your office threaten to chill immigration enforcement in the City of Nashville and Davidson County. Accordingly, we write to request information about how your recent actions, including a directive to Nashville and Davidson County employees to disclose their communications with federal immigration officials, affects the robust enforcement of immigration law." The lawmakers said O’Connell’s executive order, which mandated that government employees report interactions with federal immigration authorities, "could have a chilling effect on the ability of local law enforcement to communicate freely and candidly with federal immigration employees."

Axios [5/30/2025 5:04 PM, Adam Tamburin, 13599K] reports Nashville is facing mounting pressure from the Trump administration and congressional Republicans as part of the continuing fallout from an immigration crackdown that resulted in nearly 200 arrests. Two House committees launched investigations into Mayor Freddie O’Connell’s office following the May operation. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security included Nashville on a new list of "sanctuary jurisdictions" that it accused of "deliberately and shamefully obstructing the enforcement of federal immigration laws endangering American communities." The White House has said the pushback in Nashville could make the city a target for larger immigration sweeps. "We’ll flood the zone," Trump border czar Tom Homan said repeatedly while discussing the matter on Fox News. ICE and DHS officers worked with the Tennessee Highway Patrol to conduct scores of traffic stops in south Nashville, which is home to many Hispanic residents, earlier this month. Metro police was not involved. In response to the operations, O’Connell updated a preexisting executive order to require Metro agencies to report communications with federal immigration officials, so that Metro would know about future ICE activity in advance. U.S. Rep. Andy Ogles then sent a letter to the House Judiciary and Homeland Security committees urging them to investigate O’Connell over the executive order.

USA Today [5/30/2025 12:51 PM, Kim Luciani, et al., 75552K] reports more than 100 people were detained in one of Florida’s largest single-day immigration raids at a Tallahassee construction site on May 29 in what was described as a panicked scene with some law enforcement wearing face coverings and camouflage. Homeland Security Investigations, which operates under U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Florida Highway Patrol and other Florida and federal law enforcement agencies conducted the immigration raids at a student housing development site in the College Town neighborhood by Florida State University. Another construction site nearby was raided an hour earlier, worker Michael Martinez told the Tallahassee Democrat, part of the USA TODAY Network. Officers reportedly checked every individual’s identification and permits before releasing or arresting them. The Department of Homeland Security said on social media that authorities had "arrested more than 100 illegal aliens, some of which were previously deported and others with criminal backgrounds," calling it "a targeted enforcement operation.” People detained in a bus told reporters at the scene they were from Mexico, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Honduras, while officials said others detained were from Guatemala, El Salvador and Colombia. The raids come as President Donald Trump’s administration touts its crackdown on migrants who enter the country illegally, expanding arrests nationwide while driving down border crossings. ICE agents have begun detaining people who show up for mandatory court appearances about their immigration cases. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Legislature have pushed the state to become the "toughest" on illegal immigration in the country this year, enacting laws and directing hundreds of millions of dollars to state and local law enforcement to expand the state’s authority to detain and house undocumented immigrants to comply with Trump’s mass deportation mandate. ICE and Florida law enforcement arrested 1,120 people in April during "Operation Tidal Wave," the largest joint immigration operation in Florida history. The operation lasted six days, from April 21 through April 26. Florida is currently appealing a federal judge’s decision to temporarily block a new law creating state crimes for undocumented immigrants entering or re-entering Florida. The raid was likely the largest single illegal immigration sweep in Florida since DeSantis agreed to join in on Trump’s aggressive mass deportation agenda. Law enforcement officers detained more than 100 people at a construction site near the Florida State University campus.

Reported similarly:
Blaze.com [5/30/2025 5:10 PM, Candace Hathaway, 1805K]
Telemundo [5/29/2025 9:33 PM, Staff, 177K]

Chicago Tribune [5/30/2025 6:28 PM, Jason Meisner, 3987K] reports as a newly minted special agent for the FBI in the early 2000s, Douglas DePodesta cut his teeth on a squad that went after Colombian and Mexican drug cartels that used the city as a hub for trafficking thousands of tons of narcotics every year. Two decades later, DePodesta has taken over the reins of the FBI’s Chicago Field Office amid a push from the Trump administration to go after a new generation of cartel bosses and the dangerous drugs they import, particularly the powerful synthetic painkiller fentanyl. DePodesta’s comments came in an exclusive interview with the Tribune on Thursday, several months after he started his role as special agent in charge in August. To help combat the growing fentanyl problem, he told the Tribune he recently created a 12-member squad with agents from various jurisdictions to focus on trafficking by the cartels in an attempt to disrupt a complex network that spans from Central and South America to Asia. In addition to cartels and fentanyl trafficking, DePodesta said his agents have had a hand in one of the Trump administration’s other hot-button issues: immigration enforcement. DePodesta said the Chicago FBI, which has more than 1,000 total employees, has partnered locally with the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, embedding some of the FBI’s 450 agents on the street "helping them effect arrests." DePodesta said that despite the new priorities, the FBI will continue to focus on its bread-and-butter areas of operation, including terrorism, gang and gun violence, crimes against children, drug trafficking and public corruption.

Blaze [5/30/2025 5:00 AM, Candace Hathaway, 1805K] reports Chinese organized crime is fueling a $5 billion-per-year sex-trafficking empire in the United States, operating numerous illicit massage parlors where 75,000 victims are enslaved and traumatized. This modern slavery crisis was the target of a nationwide operation on Thursday involving 18 states and more than 150 law enforcement agencies, Blaze News has learned. Dan Nash, the founder of the Human Trafficking Training Center and a retired Missouri state trooper, coordinated the action, dubbed Operation Coast to Coast. Thursday’s sweep marked the third time Nash and HTTC launched the effort, which aimed to identify sex-trafficking victims, arrest traffickers, and share intelligence. The joint mission raided illegal massage parlors and hotels, as well as targeted sex buyers. An Operation Coast to Coast press release obtained exclusively by Blaze News noted that Chinese criminal organizations run the billion-dollar-per-year illicit industry. Nash told Blaze News, "In California and New York, they have more illicit massage business than they do Starbucks and McDonald’s combined." While the crackdown involved numerous law enforcement agencies, it was run from the Des Moines-based Iowa Fusion Center, a division of the Iowa Department of Public Safety, and involved several anti-trafficking groups. ‘The reality is that there are hundreds of thousands of people trafficked in the US every year, and 99% are never identified.’.

Breitbart.com [5/30/2025 11:33 AM, Bob Price, 3077K] reports federal prosecutors unsealed a 29-count indictment for a drug trafficking scheme after 15 people were arrested in the Southern District of Texas. Those arrested included two illegal aliens from Mexico and Guatemala and a Mexican national with Legal Permanent Resident (LPR) status. Federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies executed arrest warrants and took multiple people into custody. The arrests followed a 29-count indictment handed down by a federal grand jury in Texas. The indictment alleges that the defendants engaged in a conspiracy to traffic drugs that included the use of a taco truck and the U.S. mail. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and the Houston Police Department led the investigation that led to the indictment and arrest of Houston residents James Michael Brewer aka ‘Creeper’, 33, Jonathan Alvarado aka ‘Joker’, 28, Alexis Delgado aka ‘Chino’, 28, Hector Luis Lopez aka ‘Capulito’, 23, Kylie Rae Alvarado, 24, Ruby Mata, 31, Victor Norris Ellison, 35, Mexi Dyan Garcia aka ‘Mexi’, 31, and Jesus Gomez-Rodriguez aka ‘Jr.’, 33. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas responded to an inquiry from Breitbart Texas and identified additional alleged conspirators, including Jose Garcia-Martinez as an illegal alien from Mexico, Marcos Rene Simaj-Guch as an illegal alien from Guatemala, and Jesus Gomez Rodriguez as a Mexican national with LPR status. These defendants remain at large, according to the ICE statement. Additional alleged members of the conspiracy were already in federal custody. Those included Enzo Xavier Dominguez aka ‘Smiley’, 32, William Alexander Lazo aka ‘Miclo’, 21, and Alfredo Gomez aka ‘Fredo’, 26, officials stated. "For years, the transnational criminal organization allegedly operated by these gang members has brazenly flooded our local communities with deadly narcotics," said ICE HSI Houston Special Agent in Charge Chad Plantz. "Working in conjunction with the Houston Police Department and our Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces partners, we were able to expose and dismantle their drug trafficking scheme, eliminating a significant contributor to violent crime in the area and saving an untold number of Houstonians from becoming addicted.”

FOX News [5/31/2025 4:00 AM, Peter D’Abrosca, Ashley Papa, 46878K] reports advocates for police and border patrol lambasted what they said were open border policies that allowed an illegal alien suspected of killing an Air Force recruit into the country in the first place. Joe Gamaldi, national vice president of the Fraternal Order of Police, said he was disgusted to learn 18-year-old Ava Moore, a Texas native who was about to begin cadet training at the United States Air Force Academy, was allegedly killed by someone who shouldn’t have been in the United States in the first place. "How many cases do we have to see where people who should not have been in this country in the first place end up causing the death or murdering someone else, someone who is here legally in this country?" he asked. "How many families have to be ripped apart? How? How much trauma do we have to take from people who should not be here in the first place?". Moore was a star basketball player at the U.S. Air Force Academy Preparatory School in Colorado whose goal was to become a four-star general. Gamaldi was incredulous at open border advocates watching Americans die at the hands of noncitizens who continue to fight President Donald Trump’s closed border policies and deportation efforts. He also warned that, given the number of illegal aliens who entered the country during the Biden administration, he expects more American deaths at the hands of unknown foreigners. "I think they completely ignore the crime and chaos that a number of illegal immigrants bring to our communities," Gamaldi said. "And the most frustrating part, from law enforcement’s perspective, and from the victim’s perspective and their families’, is that the crimes that are committed are avoidable. How many people have to die before the other side says enough?". He also slammed "radical ideologue" judges he said are blocking Trump from carrying out the will of his voters. "They’re a disgrace to this country, a disgrace to the robes they wear, and they should resign in shame for what they are doing, politicizing this issue," he said. "They have no business sitting on the bench, and I’m certainly hoping that there will be every action taken to remove them from their positions because all they are at this point are radical ideologues. They’re not judges, they’re a joke.” Art Del Cueto is the vice president of the National Border Patrol Council, a union that represents 18,000 U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents. Like Gamaldi, he believes the damage from the previous administration’s open border policies isn’t over. "Another senseless death," he said. "I think that, unfortunately, though, there will be others. We don’t know how many people are in the country illegally. And, yes, it could’ve been someone that’s legally in the U.S., but in this case it wasn’t. It was somebody that should not have been in the country to begin with. Unfortunately, there’s too many politicians that continue to put obstacles from allowing law enforcement to do their job." [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

Univision [5/30/2025 3:24 PM, Staff, 4992K] reports Noticias 23 spoke exclusively with the wife of Reinier Feijó, a Cuban with I-220A who attended his immigration appointment in Miramar this Wednesday and was detained by ICE. This couple flew from Texas with their 1-year-old son and had a return ticket to Texas that he never used because he ended up detained. Feijó entered through Arizona in March 2022, appeared for his appointment with ICE this Wednesday, and ended up detained. Before boarding the flight back to Texas, he told Noticias 23 that Reinier had no court date, no criminal record, and had applied for the Cuban Adjustment Act.

DailySignal [5/30/2025 10:23 AM, Virginia Allen, 558K] reports an illegal alien responsible for the death of a 24-year-old Colorado woman has been arrested. Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed the arrest on Thursday of a 16-year-old from Colombia who was convicted of reckless driving resulting in death but was released back onto the streets of Colorado by the Arapahoe District Attorney’s Office. ICE Denver bashed Colorado’s 18th Judicial District, led by District Attorney Amy Padden, on X, writing that "Justice" for the district "is no jail time and probation for this criminal alien who killed a young woman while driving more than 90 mph. For ICE, justice is arrest and removal.” On July 8, 2024, Kaitlyn Weaver was driving home from work in Aurora, Colorado, when the illegal teen immigrant crashed into her vehicle and killed her. John Weaver, Kaitlyn Weaver’s father, told Fox News that his daughter, who worked at a drug rehabilitation center, "spent her life trying to help people.” The migrant pleaded guilty and was given two years of probation and 100 hours of community service. "I appreciate ICE taking enforcement action, and I really appreciate the outpouring of support from everyone," John Weaver told Fox News Digital. Arapahoe County is a sanctuary county within the sanctuary state of Colorado, meaning local and state leaders don’t require their law enforcement to fully cooperate with ICE. Failure to cooperate with ICE places agents, communities, and illegal aliens at a great risk of harm, according to ICE. "Although no jurisdiction can refuse to honor a criminal arrest warrant, sanctuary jurisdictions regularly refuse to honor ICE immigration detainers—even when the alien is a convicted criminal," ICE wrote on X Thursday evening. The Trump administration is increasingly shining a light on cities and states that refuse to honor ICE detainers. The Department of Homeland Security has released a full list of every sanctuary state and county across the U.S. "We are exposing these sanctuary politicians who harbor criminal illegal aliens and defy federal law," DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement Thursday. "President [Donald] Trump and I will always put the safety of the American people first. Sanctuary politicians are on notice: comply with federal law.”

Univision [5/30/2025 10:46 AM, Staff, 4992K] reports Noticias 23 spoke with the wife of Reinier Feijó, a Cuban national with I-220A who flew from Texas for his immigration appointment in Miramar and was detained by ICE. She said her husband had no criminal record and had applied for Cuban adjustment. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

FOX News [5/30/2025 5:48 PM, Cameron Arcand, 46878K] reports Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued seven detainers for removal against illegal immigrants who allegedly committed two burglaries in Tempe and Mesa, Arizona, last week. The suspects are allegedly part of a South American Theft Group that committed two burglaries in the Phoenix area cities May 23, and they were arrested by the Scottsdale Police Department at the short-term rental the group was staying in. "Under Secretary Noem’s leadership, criminal illegal aliens are being held accountable for victimizing Americans," Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. "ICE is working alongside partner law enforcement agencies throughout the country to ensure that South American Theft Groups — like the one allegedly responsible for burglaries in California, Oregon, Washington and Arizona — are dismantled and deported once and for all. We will not allow criminal illegal aliens to terrorize American communities," McLaughlin added. The suspects are Nicolas Rojas Leon, 23, Joan Sebastian Orozco-Vargas, 26, Andres David Sanchez-Novoa, 38, Natalia Isabella Ortiz-Daza, 26, Martha Juliana Echiverri-Guzman, 28, Lady Johanna Gueito, 32, and Angie Paola Herandez-Manrique, 25. According to DHS, the group operates out of California but is originally from Colombia. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

Los Angeles Times [5/30/2025 5:35 PM, Taryn Luna, 14672K] reports Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office sent a letter on Friday requesting that the Trump administration remove California from its list of sanctuary jurisdictions that obstruct the enforcement of federal immigration law. The Department of Homeland Security issued the list this week in accordance with an executive order President Trump signed in April that directs federal agencies to identify funding to sanctuary cities, counties and states that could be suspended or terminated. In the letter, Newsom’s office contended that federal court rulings have rejected the argument that California law limiting law enforcement coordination with immigration authorities "unlawfully obstructs the enforcement of federal immigration laws." California is among more than a half-dozen states that were included on the list for self-identifying as sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants. Forty-eight California counties and dozens of cities, including Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Diego and San Francisco, were also on the Trump administration’s list of more than 500 total jurisdictions nationwide. In a release announcing the list, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said politicians in sanctuary communities are "endangering Americans and our law enforcement in order to protect violent criminal illegal aliens." Homeland Security said jurisdictions will receive a formal notice of non-compliance with federal law and demand that cities, counties and states immediately revise their policies.

San Diego Union Tribune [5/30/2025 11:57 PM, Lori Weisberg, 1611K] reports U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement carried out an immigration raid late Friday afternoon at a popular South Park restaurant, Buona Forchetta, and its sister operation next door. Agents detained a handful of employees and the restaurant ownership decided to close for dinner. “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement can confirm that ICE San Diego conducted two worksite enforcement operations at Buona Forchetta and Enoteca Buona Forchetta Restaurants in San Diego, Ca,” Yasmeen Pitts O’ Keefe, deputy press secretary, Southwest Team, said in a statement. “As this is an ongoing investigation, we have no further releasable information at this time,” Renato Ametrano, general manager of Buona Forchetta, described the surprise raid as very traumatizing for all the employees, who he said were handcuffed and subsequently asked for their identification. He said he believed three workers were taken away after being unable to produce ID. “They just show up and with no explanation,” he said, after the agents had left. “I would say there were 20, 25 of them. They surround the building and they come inside and literally push me to the wall. And they handcuff everyone.” The agents, he said, arrived around 4:30 p.m. and stayed for a little more than an hour. During the course of the operation, a large crowd grew out on the street, many of them from the neighborhood who came to support the restaurant, he said. It did get quite loud at times, he noted. Ametrano said he had no idea what prompted the raid, but came to the defense of the Buona Forchetta ownership. The restaurant is one of multiple dining venues in San Diego County and in Orange County owned by Matteo Cattaneo. The South Park location is the first restaurant he opened locally.

San Francisco Chronicle [5/30/2025 9:45 PM, Molly Burke, 4120K] reports an immigrant traveling to her early morning work shift at a San Francisco Target store Friday has vanished — after texting a relative that she was being taken by immigration officers — and now her family and police are trying to confirm whether she was truly arrested. But so far, federal immigration officials have not said whether Maria Auxiliadora Jarquin Morales is in their custody — and her family says it has not heard from her since about 4:30 a.m. when she left a series of text messages saying she was being taken. In her texts, Morales, a 33-year-old Nicaraguan who is the mother of one daughter, told the relative that she was driving to her job on Geary Boulevard in the Richmond District when she was pulled over and asked for her driver’s license, according to the family member who received the voicemails from her. The family member spoke to the Chronicle on condition that her identity not be revealed and in accordance with the Chronicle’s policy on anonymous sources. Morales texted that she was scared and sent her location in case anything happened to her, the family member said. Morales told the family member that she was being taken by immigration authorities and told the relative to care for her daughter. Morales also sent a video while in her car and then told her relative where she had left her parked vehicle, which her family later recovered. Her family has not heard from her again, despite dozens of texts and calls to her, and no agencies have confirmed any arrest. Morales was authorized to work in the U.S. and had no criminal record, the family member said. Morales has always been a hard worker and never disappeared — or been out of contact with her family — before, the family member said. She has been in the United States for three years.

San Diego Union Tribune [5/30/2025 3:40 PM, Blake Nelson, 1611K] reports U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement this week detained a man who had been staying at a homeless shelter in downtown San Diego, marking at least the second time in two months that a resident of the large tent at 16th Street and Newton Avenue was taken into custody. The man was stopped early Thursday afternoon outside shelter grounds, in between the facility and the nearby Monarch School, according to Alpha Project CEO Bob McElroy, who oversees the site. It was not immediately clear why the man was detained or how long he’d stayed at the tent. A representative for the federal agency declined comment. McElroy said they planned to report the incident to the San Diego Housing Commission even though immigration agents had not entered the shelter. City policy generally says visits from ICE need to be documented only if federal officials step onto the property. ICE did pass through the gate at the 16th and Newton site on March 19, according to Alpha Project leaders and an emailed report of the incident obtained by the San Diego Union-Tribune through a records request. Two ICE agents showed up at 7:50 a.m. "with a warrant listing a current resident’s name and a picture of the resident," Beth Kolbe, Alpha Project’s program director, wrote to the housing commission. She listed the agents’ last names and badge numbers as well as an identification number for the resident. "The agents would not allow a copy of the warrant," Kolbe added, although an assistant manager reviewed the document and "noted the warrant appeared to be signed by a judge." The report did not explain why the man was detained or who may have authorized the warrant. The National Homelessness Law Center said that was the first known instance of immigration agents entering a homeless shelter anywhere in the United States since President Donald Trump returned to the White House. Rumors that ICE this week had additionally arrested a person staying at a Father Joe’s Villages facility were not true, according to a representative for the nonprofit.`

Newsweek [5/30/2025 11:02 AM, Mandy Taheri, 52220K] reports a toddler born in Florida has been deported to Brazil with her undocumented parents, despite lacking legal status there and holding a tourist visa set to expire soon, The Washington Post reported. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told Newsweek on Friday: "The media and Democrat politicians are force-feeding the public false information that U.S. citizen children are being deported. This is false and irresponsible. "Parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children or ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) will place the children with someone the parent designates," she added. The family’s deportation comes amid an immigration crackdown under the Trump administration, during which people with valid documentation—including green cards or visas—have been detained and face legal jeopardy. The administration has been under fire after several United States citizen children have been removed from the country. Government officials maintained that the children were not forcibly removed but accompanied their undocumented mothers, who had been deported. The Trump administration has been accused of disregarding due process protections, especially for vulnerable groups, such as the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. President Donald Trump and his supporters say their efforts are necessary to deter illegal immigration and remove criminals from the country quickly.

Politico [5/30/2025 4:24 PM, Ali Bianco, 16523K] reports Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) denounced the Trump administration’s decision to axe temporary protected status for Afghan immigrants — the latest break by the centrist Republican from President Donald Trump’s administration. In a joint letter with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the senator urged the administration to reconsider the cancellation of the temporary protection, which affords Afghans a work permit and legal status in the U.S. “This decision endangers thousands of lives, including Afghans who stood by the United States,” Murkowski and Shaheen — the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — wrote. “This decision represents a historic betrayal of promises made and undermines the values we fought for far more than 20 years in Afghanistan.” The letter — which was sent May 23 and released Friday — comes amid reports that the State Department is shuttering the office that coordinated Afghan resettlement for those who helped with the war effort, part of an agency-wide reorganization aligning with the Trump administration’s moves to reduce foreign aid and assistance and refocus on “America First” priorities. Murkowski has not been shy about criticizing her own party, while encouraging her fellow GOP senators to do the same. The Republican has rebuked President Donald Trump for his close relationship to Russian President Vladimir Putin, accusing the U.S. of “walking away from our allies.” But she also acknowledged a reticence within Republican circles of defying Trump — saying “we are all afraid” of Trump’s retaliation. She’s also not the only Republican to raise red flags about the cancellation of TPS protections for some immigrants, with Miami’s members of Congress also urging the Trump administration to continue the protections for Venezuelans and Haitians. The Alaska Republican first criticized the decision on TPS shortly after it was announced by the Department of Homeland Security, calling it “concerning” in light of promises from Noem to address a backlog of asylum applications — which could dramatically increase as former TPS holders look for avenues to stay in the U.S. But eliminating TPS has been one of Trump’s key campaign promises from the start, after calling the program corrupt and saying the legal status had been extended for too long.

Washington Post [5/31/2025 6:00 AM, Mary Beth Sheridan, 32099K] reports that, after years of confiscating rising amounts of fentanyl, the opioid that has fueled the most lethal drug epidemic in American history, U.S. officials are confronting a new and puzzling reality at the Mexican border. Fentanyl seizures are plummeting. The phenomenon has received little notice in Washington, where the Trump administration has made fentanyl-trafficking cartels a national-security priority. “Narcotics of all kinds are pouring across our borders,” said a White House statement in March, announcing stiff tariffs on Mexico and Canada. New data suggest a more complex story. The U.S. government’s average monthly seizures of fentanyl at the Mexican border have dropped by more than half — from 1,700 pounds in 2024, to 746 pounds this year, according to Customs and Border Protection data. The White House says the drop is "thanks to President Trump’s policies empowering law enforcement officials to dismantle drug trafficking networks." Yet the decline started before Trump took office in January. (While officials only manage to detect part of the fentanyl crossing the border, the figure serves as a proxy for supply). The contraction represents something of a mystery, say antidrug agents and researchers. Are Mexican cartels producing less fentanyl? Or have they simply found new ways to sneak it across the border? Fentanyl is still cheap and widely available in the United States, according to analysts and drug enforcement agents. Yet overdose deaths plunged nearly 27 percent last year, compared with 2023, according to estimates published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The biggest cause of such deaths are illicit synthetic opioids, especially fentanyl. A harrowing number of Americans are still being killed by drugs — an estimated 80,391 last year. But scientists have rarely seen such a sharp decline in overdose deaths. Interviews with more than a dozen drug-enforcement officers, academics, medical personnel and scientists point to some surprising shifts in the opioid epidemic. U.S. seizures at the Mexican border are down almost 30 percent for the first half of this fiscal year, compared with the same period in 2024. They have shrunk by even more since the first half of 2023 — from 13,804 pounds to 6,749 pounds. (Those numbers are for the first six months of each fiscal year, which starts in October). "One cannot deny there is a big drop," said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies the fentanyl crisis. "How long it’s going to last is the critical thing.” The decline is occurring even as the Trump administration has deployed thousands of troops to the border and expanded drone flights. With more boots on the ground, you’d think seizures would go up — not down.

FedScoop [5/30/2025 6:12 PM, Madison Alder, 56K] reports U.S. Customs and Border Protection is implementing an AI chatbot called “chatCBP” for its workforce, following in the footsteps of similar federal government creations like DHSChat and StateChat. “CBP’s chatCBP is an AI-powered chatbot designed to improve efficiency and access to information for CBP personnel while meeting CBP’s security standards,” a CBP spokesperson told FedScoop in an emailed statement. The tool uses a large language model and gives workers responses and guidance in a conversational format “quickly and securely.” According to the spokesperson: “chatCBP offers features like document summarization, compilation, information extraction, and multi-file analysis, reducing the time spent searching for and interpreting documents.” News of the chatbot comes after other agencies within the federal government have launched their own internal chatbots in an attempt to more securely provide the type of generative AI assistance made popular by ChatGPT. That includes the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security, CBP’s parent agency.

USA Today [5/30/2025 9:01 AM, Christina Hall, 75552K] reports rvery part of your vehicle could be counterfeited. A counterfeit part could cause performance issues or, worse, even be fatal. "Counterfeit parts are more than just a failure in quality: They are a direct risk to safety, where shortcuts in integrity can threaten lives," said Bob Stewart, president of the Automotive Anti-Counterfeiting Council, an alliance of nearly a dozen North American vehicle manufacturers. The group indicated it’s not possible to know how many vehicles on the road contain counterfeit parts. But the increasing circulation of these parts is a growing concern among federal officials and automakers. The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration issued a safety advisory notice in mid-January to the public, repair professionals and used car buyers and owners about the rise in counterfeit and substandard safety devices, such as air bags and other supplemental restraint system components. It indicated that counterfeit parts may contain unapproved explosive charges and construction material and "can cause serious injury or even death in a crash."

CBS Boston [5/30/2025 2:25 PM, Madeline Bartos, 51860K] Video HERE reports a Massachusetts woman was caught with more than 50 pounds of marijuana in her luggage at Pittsburgh International Airport, U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced on Friday. While inspecting passenger baggage being loaded onto a London-bound flight on Saturday, officers said they found several vacuum-sealed packages of marijuana inside two suitcases. Officers learned the luggage belonged to 30-year-old Jetta Monet Corbett of Brockton, Massachusetts, who was detained at the departure gate. During a secondary examination, Customs and Border Protection said officers found a total of 49 vacuum-sealed packages of a substance that field tested positive for marijuana. Authorities said the marijuana weighed over 54 pounds and had a street value of about $240,000. Depending on how strong the drug was, Customs and Border Protection said the shipment could have fetched two to three times more if Corbett had made it to Europe. Customs and Border Protection turned the marijuana and Corbett over to the Allegheny County police, who arrested her. She’s charged with one felony count of possession with intent to deliver a controlled substance and one misdemeanor count of possession of a controlled substance. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

Houston Chronicle [5/30/2025 5:32 PM, Benjamin Wermund, 1982K] reports lawmakers are set to slash billions in border security funding over the next two years — the first major drawdown of Gov. Greg Abbott’s $11 billion Operation Lone Star since he launched his signature crackdown four years ago. The shift comes after the House and Senate had both approved state budgets with another $6.5 billion for border security. But in negotiations between the chambers in recent weeks, that total dropped to $3.4 billion. The majority — $2.7 billion — came out of the governor’s budget. Another $500 million was slashed from the Texas Military Department, which has had soldiers patrolling the Rio Grande and built a forward operating base in Eagle Pass last year. Lawmakers are set to approve the final spending plan in the coming days. State Sen. Joan Huffman, a Houston Republican who chairs the Finance Committee, said it was the right time for the state to begin cutting back border spending with President Donald Trump in the White House and crossings at their lowest levels in years. Huffman said Abbott did not push back on the cuts. The budget still sends nearly $1.2 billion to the Department of Public Safety, which has had troopers dispatched to the border to arrest migrants on state charges, including trespassing. Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesman for Abbott, said the state will begin to "adjust aspects" of Operation Lone Star, including dispatching "specialized units" within DPS and TMD on border missions. He said that with additional troops sent by Trump, "total border security posture will remain at similar levels.”

Wall Street Journal [5/30/2025 10:14 AM, Joe Barrett, 646K] reports the stately, stone-and-stained-glass library in this tiny border town in the rolling hills of Vermont plays a pivotal role in Canadian mystery writer Louise Penny’s forthcoming novel. In the book, a shadowy cabal has hatched a plot to tap Canada’s vast resources by making it the 51st state. Penny’s beloved Chief Inspector Armand Gamache meets with a U.S. contact at the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, trying to foil the plan. “When I wrote it, I thought, ‘How am I going to make this believable?’” said Penny, who lives about 40 minutes from the library but spoke from her second home in London, of drafting the novel’s outline three years ago. “This was before Trump and the whole thing.” Today, the notion of someone wanting to annex Canada seems less far-fetched. The library straddles two nations. A line of black tape on the hardwood and terrazzo floors marks the international border running through the building. For more than a century, residents of Derby Line (population 687) and Stanstead, Quebec, (population 2,824) have borrowed books, enjoyed live performances and mingled at the Haskell in a shared space that erases the divisions between the two countries. Canadians have long entered the Haskell via a sidewalk that starts in their country and leads to the front entrance in Derby Line—no passport required. Cameras monitored the door to ensure they went back the same way, but it all felt like a peaceful coexistence. In January, an unusual chapter began when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived with armed agents in black SUVs. Inside, she stood on one side of the black tape marking the border and said, “U.S.A. No. 1.” Then, crossing the line, she said, “51st state,” according to media reports and a person who was present. Sure enough, in March, U.S. officials informed the Haskell that Canadians would need to be card-carrying library members to enter via the front door. Others would have to visit the official border crossing first. After Oct. 1, all Canadians will have to show a passport and go through the port of entry before entering the library from the U.S. side. Drug and human traffickers were exploiting the single entrance “and we are closing that loophole,” a DHS spokeswoman said.

Reported similarly:
New York Times [5/30/2025 5:01 AM, Norimitsu Onishi, 138952K]

CBS News [5/30/2025 10:45 AM, Staff, 51860K] reports the bodies of five musicians, members of a Mexican regional music group who had gone missing, were found in the northern city of Reynosa along the Texas border, authorities said on Thursday. The musicians from the band Grupo Fugitivo, which played at parties and local dances in the region, had been reported missing since Sunday. Tamaulipas state prosecutors, who had been investigating their disappearance, said the men were kidnapped around 10 p.m. that night while traveling in a SUV on the way to a venue where they were hired to play. Their bodies were found on the fringes of Reynosa. Prosecutors said nine suspects believed to be part of a faction of the Gulf Cartel, which has strong presence in the city, have been arrested. Authorities were not immediately able to say why the men were slain, and did not deny reports by local media that the bodies had been burned. Their disappearance caused an uproar in Tamaulipas, a state long eclipsed by cartel warfare. Their families reported the disappearances, called on the public for support and people took to the streets in protest.

(B) NBC 5 Today at 6am [5/30/2025 7:50 AM, Staff]
There is a new effort to keep FEMA alive ahead of hurricane season which starts on Sunday. The White House has been trying to cut or eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s funding but there is no backup plan ready for right now. Sources say Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is working behind the scenes to keep some 2,500 employees on staff. Many of them were supposed to be out of a job by this year. FEMA had nearly 9,000 employees at one point. They are also still approving reimbursements to states that were hit by recent disasters.

NBC Palm Springs [5/30/2025 8:22 PM, Staff] reports as the Atlantic hurricane season officially begins this Sunday, a cloud of uncertainty hangs over FEMA’s readiness to respond to potentially severe storms. According to an internal memo obtained by CNN, FEMA is described as “not ready” for the season’s demands, citing leadership changes and significant staff turnover. Roughly 10% of FEMA’s total workforce has left since January, including the former acting administrator Cameron Hamilton, who was dismissed after publicly opposing efforts to dismantle the agency. Projections suggest that by the end of the year, FEMA’s staff losses could reach 30%, exacerbating concerns about the agency’s preparedness. The Department of Homeland Security, under Secretary Kristi Noem, has already inserted over half a dozen officials with limited disaster management experience into FEMA’s leadership. Critics warn this could impair FEMA’s capacity to handle hurricane season effectively. Despite the challenges, FEMA has reopened training centers and extended contracts for part-time staff deployed during disasters. However, experts caution that cuts to staffing and funding could significantly hamper emergency response, especially at the local level.

San Francisco Chronicle [5/30/2025 10:13 AM, Ivis García, 4120K] reports
when powerful storms hit your city, which neighborhoods are most likely to flood? In many cities, they’re typically low-income areas. They may have poor drainage, or they lack protections such as seawalls. New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, where hundreds of people died when Hurricane Katrina broke a levee in 2005, and Houston’s Kashmere Gardens, flooded by Hurricane Harvey in 2017, are just two among many examples. With those disasters in mind, the Federal Emergency Management Agency made a big change to its Local Mitigation Planning Policy Guide in 2023. The agency began encouraging cities, towns and counties to address equity in their hazard mitigation plans, which outline how they will reduce disaster risk. Local governments have an incentive to follow those federal guidelines: Those that want to receive FEMA hazard mitigation assistance – money which can be used to repair aging infrastructure like roads, bridges and flood barriers – or funding from other programs such as dam rehabilitation have to develop local mitigation plans and update them every five years. The new guidance required cities to both consider social vulnerability among neighborhoods in their disaster mitigation planning and involve socially vulnerable communities in those discussions in ways they hadn’t before. However, as the U.S. heads into what forecasters predict will be an active 2025 hurricane season, that guidance has changed again. The Trump administration’s new FEMA Local Mitigation Planning Policy Guide 2025 talks about public involvement in planning but strips any mention of equity, income or social vulnerability. It mentions using "projections for the future" to plan but removes references to climate change. Hurricanes and other storms that cause flooding don’t affect everyone in the same way.

NPR [5/30/2025 2:13 PM, Alana Wise, 37958K] reports thick, billowing clouds of smoke are sweeping south from wildfires ravaging the central Canadian province of Manitoba into parts of the United States, compromising air quality for millions of Americans across several northern states. The Manitoba wildfires have forced 17,000 people to flee the province, according to Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew, who called the evacuation the largest in recent history. "With the wildfires in northern Manitoba intensifying, our government has triggered a provincewide state of emergency to help us through this crisis," Kinew said in a statement on Wednesday. The state of emergency will last 30 days and can be extended as needed. "This is the largest evacuation Manitoba will have seen in most people’s living memory.” As the out-of-control blazes continue to ravage the province’s prized wildlands, heavy clouds of smoke from the fires are making their way into the United States. Meteorologists report that the smoke will waft into the Northern Plains and Midwest. The states most heavily impacted — Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota — have all issued air quality alerts for their residents. Alerts in Wisconsin and Michigan counties are in effect until Saturday, with both states warning that the quality of air will become unhealthy for sensitive groups, including children, anyone with respiratory issues and older people. In Minnesota, where the entire state is under alert for compromised air quality, the state’s Pollution Control Agency warned that air quality was expected to reach the red category — impacting both sensitive groups and some members of the general public. The Minnesota alert is in effect until Monday.

Reported similarly:
New York Times [5/30/2025 2:57 PM, Christine Hauser, 138952K]

CNN [5/30/2025 12:26 PM, Alaa Elassar, 21433K] reports at least one person is dead and seven others were injured after an unexpected tornado struck a rural Kentucky county early Friday morning as a line of severe storms moved eastward across the state. The man was killed on Long Run Road in the Deep Creek area of Washington County and numerous homes and structures were severely damaged in the area, Washington County Sheriff Jerry Pinkston confirmed to CNN. Photos shared on Facebook by the sheriff’s office showed the devastating aftermath, with cars overturned, homes flattened and trees uprooted. The tornado was at least an EF2, according to a preliminary survey by the National Weather Service. At least two homes were totally destroyed, Washington County Judge Executive Timothy Graves said at a Friday morning news conference. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear noted "this level of severe weather was unexpected" in a post on X. "We also expect to see additional storms today with Eastern and Southeastern Kentucky facing a risk of more severe weather. Please be alert this morning and stay safe." Storms in Kentucky had intensified quickly Friday morning. There was no tornado watch or severe thunderstorm watch in place ahead of time, and the Storm Prediction Center had not outlooked the area as even having low probabilities for tornadoes. The New York Times [5/30/2025 2:29 PM, Michael Levenson, 138952K] reports that photos posted by the Washington County Sheriff’s Office showed debris strewed across the ground and an overturned car. There is no tornado siren in the area, Mr. Devine said, and the first call for help came in at about 7:10 a.m. When search-and-rescue crews, firefighters, sheriff’s deputies and emergency medical workers responded, they found trees blocking the small, one-lane road into the area, he said. After cutting a path for ambulances to get through, the crews found that one person had been killed and at least seven people had been injured, including two who drove themselves to the hospital, Mr. Devine said. A 3-year-old who had been reported missing was also found and taken to a hospital, he said, adding that he did not have any information on the child’s condition. The storm had apparently developed quickly. The Weather Service office in Lexington issued a severe thunderstorm warning at 6:46 a.m. on Friday, urging people to “remain alert for a possible tornado.” At 6:49 a.m., the same office issued a tornado warning, telling people to take cover. (Warnings are issued after a tornado is detected on a radar or a trained spotter sees a tornado, while tornado watches mean the conditions to form a tornado are in place.) Officials in Washington County received the first call for help at 7:11 a.m., Mr. Devine said. The Weather Service has warned of possible severe storms with wind damage, large hail and a few tornadoes across much of the Mid-Atlantic and southeastern United States on Friday. The service also said that heavy rain may cause flash flooding from eastern Kentucky to southern New York.

NBC News [5/30/2025 3:12 PM, Minyvonne Burke, 44540K] reports much of the South and eastern parts of the country are bracing for extreme weather that includes tornadoes, while the West is expected to see dangerously high temperatures. Severe storms will sweep through Kentucky up to southern New York, the National Weather Service said Friday in a post on X. The wet weather is expected to bring flash flooding, the weather service said Thursday. In a Friday morning post on X, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said officials were responding to reports of a possible tornado in Washington County. One person was killed and multiple people were injured, the Washington County Sheriff’s Office said in a Facebook post. Beshear said that "this level of severe weather" was not expected. Eastern and southeastern parts of the state are expected to see severe weather throughout the day. "Please be alert this morning and stay safe," the governor said.

NewsNation [5/30/2025 9:15 PM, Rich McHugh, 5801K] reports that, after officials burned five tankers containing 115,000 gallons of toxic vinyl chloride over East Palestine, residents were sick and crying out for help. In September 2023, seven months later, President Biden issued an executive order, sending FEMA executive Jim McPherson to East Palestine to assess the community’s unmet needs. But new documents from FEMA obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show extensive coordination between FEMA, the White House, the National Security Council, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Justice, voicing serious concerns about health, toxins and the unmet needs of East Palestine following the train derailment. But publicly, their message was that there was nothing to those concerns. "It showed that FEMA knew health care was the No. 1 issue," Lesley Pacey told NewsNation. Pacey is an investigator with the Government Accountability Project who sued to get these documents when FEMA refused to turn them over. "They also knew that they called this plume a really toxic plume. They knew that there would be the potential for cancer clusters," Pacey said. The agency noted "the occurrence of a cancer-cluster in [East Palestine] is not zero" and expressed the need for a "tripwire to identify cancer clusters.” Pacey added, "It was only discussed internally, and it actually was discussed all the way up to the White House. "There’s White House officials and National Security Council officials discussing the dangers of the cancer cluster potential and the health issues and discussing whether or not to release the unmet needs report to the public and to the media.” They never released the "Unmet Needs Report" to the public or the media, and the FEMA coordinator sent here by Biden wouldn’t meet with residents. "A lot of us emailed and called that person and never got through. Eventually, there was something said that he didn’t need our anecdotal reports," resident Christa Graves told NewsNation. Pacey said McPherson was "nicknamed by residents as the ghost of October, because they were expecting him to be there in October but never could get a hold of him.” This email reveals that the FEMA coordinator was told not to engage with residents. Residents in East Palestine say it is criminal negligence. "We’re supposed to believe that’s not how our country runs," Graves said. "And I’m starting to see that’s how our country is always run.

CBS Chicago [5/30/2025 7:26 PM, Tara Molina, 51860K] Video HERE reports smoke from out-of-control wildfires in Canada is drifting into the Chicago area on Friday, and while conditions won’t be as severe as when smoke from Canadian wildfires repeatedly blanketed Chicago two years ago, the haze is nonetheless raising public health concerns. Environmental experts said Chicagoans should pay attention to any alerts and be conscious of air quality. Canadian officials said firefighters from across the country are helping fight 22 active wildfires in the province of Manitoba, where leaders have issued a state of emergency. Satellite imagery from Thursday showed a massive smoke plume spanning 3,000 miles from Montana to the Atlantic. Air quality is expected to be "unhealthy for sensitive groups" on Friday in cities spanning from Madison, Wisconsin, to Duluth, Minnesota, according to the federal site AirNow. Air quality is forecast to be "moderate" in cities including Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Cincinnati and Detroit. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

Washington Post [5/30/2025 5:23 PM, Ben Noll and Ruby Mellen, 32099K] reports plumes of dense smoke from uncontained wildfires in Manitoba, Canada, will blow across more than a dozen central and eastern states Friday and Saturday. A milky haze overtook Midwestern skies Friday, with the smoke low enough in the atmosphere to reduce air quality from Minnesota to Michigan. The smoke could push southward to Illinois and Indiana this weekend. Air quality alerts are in effect for Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin, with the air quality index predicted to reach Level 3 — unhealthy for sensitive groups — or 4, unhealthy for all. These alerts mean people should avoid strenuous outdoor activities, especially those with heart disease and asthma, and keep windows closed to prevent smoke from getting indoors. Places experiencing reduced air quality and/or visibility Friday include the areas around Duluth and Silver Bay in Minnesota; Houghton and Marquette in Michigan; and Wausau, Green Bay and Madison in Wisconsin. Moderate smoke may reach as far south as Chicago, St. Louis and Detroit on Friday evening before blowing into the East on Saturday.

New York Post [5/30/2025 10:39 PM, Victor Nava, 49956K] reports a Secret Service whistleblower claims that former President Joe Biden was so out of it at the White House that he would “get lost in his closet,” Sen. Josh Hawley revealed Friday. The stunning level of disorientation is an example of why the Democratic cover-up of Biden’s mental decline is one of the biggest scandals in presidential history, Hawley argued. “This Secret Service whistleblower actually was assigned to Biden,” the Missouri Republican told Fox News host Sean Hannity. “He told me that Biden used to get lost in his closet in the mornings at the White House,” Hawley claimed, noting that he spoke to numerous Secret Service agents while investigating the assassination attempts against President Trump. “I mean, the guy literally stumbling around in the White House residence couldn’t find his way out of his own closet,” Hawley continued. “The president of the United States. “This is outrageous. We were lied to.” Hawley’s disclosure of the Secret Service whistleblower’s claim comes amid multiple congressional investigations into the 82-year-old ex-president’s cognitive abilities while in office — and the role his staff played in running the country. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) is probing the possible use of an autopen by Biden’s subordinates to sign off on White House directives and pardons without the president’s knowledge. Comer has also requested testimony from Dr. Kevin O’Connor, the White House physician during the Biden administration, as part of the probe. The oversight panel chairman has suggested that O’Connor was not being truthful about Biden’s well-being in public reports and statements after the president’s annual check-ups. Earlier this month, Biden revealed that he is battling an aggressive form of prostate cancer, leading to speculation that the former president had been suffering from the ailment — and that the diagnosis was kept under wraps — while he was in office. Meanwhile, Sens. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) are planning to hold a hearing on Biden’s mental decline next month. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

Breitbart [5/30/2025 4:26 PM, Hannah Knudsen, 3077K] reports the U.S. Coast Guard offloaded a whopping 28,000 pounds of cocaine at Port Everglades on Thursday. According to an official press release from the U.S. Coast Guard, the "seized contraband was the result of four interdictions in the Eastern Pacific by the crew of Coast Guard Cutter Thetis and an embarked MH-65 Dolphin helicopter crew from Helicopter Interdiction Tactical Squadron based out of Jacksonville, Florida." The four incidents happened May 3, May 5, May 6, and May 10. In all, the seized cocaine was worth $211.3 million.

NewsNation [5/30/2025 9:23 AM, Rhea Caoile, 5801K] reports the San Diego County Medical Examiner’s Office said remains that were found on Torrey Pines State Beach last week belonged to a 10-year-old girl who was one of those on board a panga that capsized in Del Mar earlier this month. The remains were found by a passerby on May 21 who immediately contacted law enforcement. On Thursday, the Medical Examiner’s office confirmed the remains belonged to a 10-year-old girl named Mahi Brijeshkumar Patel. Patel was one of the passengers of a panga that had capsized on May 5 at Del Mar Beach, according to the medical examiner’s office. The office added that Patel was missing and could not be located when law enforcement and other emergency personnel arrived. The vessel was found near the 12000 block of North Torrey Pines Road and triggered a multi-agency response from the San Diego Police Department, Del Mar lifeguards, Border Patrol agents, the United States Coast Guard and other local authorities. According to local officials, as many as 18 people were believed to have been on the boat at the time, including alleged smugglers.

Federal News Network [5/30/2025 6:25 PM, Justin Doubleday, 2346K] reports the Trump administration is proposing to cut more than 1,000 positions at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Under the 2026 budget request, CISA would go from approximately 3,732 funded positions today to 2,649 positions next year. The staff reductions are detailed in CISA’s fiscal 2026 budget justification, posted today. They present the most detailed view yet of the Trump administration’s proposal to cut CISA’s budget by nearly $500 million. The proposed cuts still have to be approved by Congress as part of the 2026 appropriations process. But they come as hundreds of CISA employees have already left under the Trump administration. Meanwhile, more staff could depart through deferred resignations or early retirements offered to DHS staff in April. The proposed cuts are spread across CISA’s various divisions. CISA’s cybersecurity division would go from 1,267 positions to 1,063 jobs. CISA’s infrastructure security division would go from about 343 positions to 325 jobs. The budget documents attribute most of the planned cuts in the cybersecurity division to funded vacancies or personnel participating in DHS’s workforce transition program. However, other divisions would see deeper cuts. CISA’s mission support division would go from 788 positions to 570. The integrated operations division would go from 827 jobs to 500 positions. The emergency communications division would see its workforce reduced from 104 positions to 80. The deepest cuts would come within CISA’s risk management operations division, which would go from 179 positions to 58, and the stakeholder engagement and requirements division, which would go from 200 positions to just 53 in fiscal 2026. In public comments, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has chalked up the planned cuts at CISA to ending the agency’s work on election security, including misinformation and disinformation. However, those cuts represent just 14 positions and approximately $40 million. Under the proposed budget, CISA would also cut funding for Cyber Defense and Education Training by $45 million. The budget would cut $54.7 million from CISA’s stakeholder engagement program by eliminating 120 positions, including council management offices, stakeholder engagement activities and offices, and international affairs external engagement offices.

CyberScoop [5/30/2025 1:10 PM, Tim Starks] reports four senators asked Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to reestablish the Cyber Safety Review Board, citing the need to investigate a landmark breach of telecommunications networks by Chinese hackers known as Salt Typhoon. In a letter Thursday, the senators also said the board has conducted important oversight of other incidents before DHS removed its members in January, such as its report on a breach of Microsoft by other Chinese hackers. “The CSRB played a vital role in U.S. national security carrying out post-incident reviews and providing information and making recommendations to improve public and private sector cyber security,” wrote Democratic Sens. Mark Warner of Virginia, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Ron Wyden of Oregon. “Therefore, we urge you to swiftly reconstitute the Board with qualified leaders to shape our nation’s cyber response.” Warner is the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence panel, and the four members sit on either the Intelligence Committee or the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

CyberScoop [5/30/2025 6:07 PM, Matt Kapko] reports AVCheck, a large-scale service that cybercriminals use to check if their malware can be detected by various antivirus tools, was seized and taken offline Tuesday by a globally coordinated law enforcement action. Officials on Thursday said they seized four domains and a server associated with the online software crypting syndicate. The site for the counter antivirus service and its related crypting services — Cryptor.biz and Crypt.guru — now display seizure notices with logos for the Justice Department, FBI, the Secret Service, the Dutch national police and the Finnish police. “As cybercriminals have become more sophisticated in their schemes, they have likewise become more advanced in their efforts to avoid detection,” Nicholas J. Ganjei, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas, said in a statement. “As such, our law enforcement efforts must involve striking not just at the individual fraudster or hacker, but the enablers of these cybercriminals as well. This investigation did exactly that. With this syndicate shut down, there is one less provider of malicious tools for cybercriminals out there.” Dutch authorities described AVCheck as one of the largest counter antivirus services used by cybercriminals globally, noting that it allowed attackers to access and deploy malware to victim networks undetected. Officials said the related crypting services enabled cybercriminals to make malware difficult for antivirus programs to detect.

FOX Business [5/30/2025 11:33 AM, Aislinn Murphy, 9940K] reports Victoria’s Secret’s website is back online after the retailer had to take it down earlier in the week to deal with a "security incident.” The lingerie retailer’s website was operational on Friday. "Our website is back online and we appreciate our customers’ patience," a Victoria’s Secret spokesperson confirmed to FOX Business. "We’re happy to welcome customers back to the site and continue to serve them at our Victoria’s Secret and PINK stores.” The return of Victoria’s Secret’s website comes after the retailer said Wednesday it had "taken down our website and some in-store services as a precaution" while it addressed a "security incident.” While it was down, customers clicking onto the retailer’s website were met with a black screen featuring a message sprawled across the center of the page. Now, however, it shows the retailer’s various products, including deals and what’s "trending now.” The company did not say whether the in-store services that had been taken down had also resumed. A Victoria’s Secret spokesperson previously told FOX Business on Wednesday that after the security incident was identified, the company immediately enacted its response protocols. "Third-party experts are engaged, and we took down our website and some in store services as a precaution," the spokesperson had said at the time.

New York Times [5/30/2025 12:01 PM, Sheera Frenkel and Aaron Krolik, 138952K] reports in March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power. Mr. Trump has not publicly talked about the effort since. But behind the scenes, officials have quietly put technological building blocks into place to enable his plan. In particular, they have turned to one company: Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm. The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government in recent months. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. (This does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent.) Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies — the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service — about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions. The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.

NewsMax [5/30/2025 5:42 PM, Michael Katz, 4622K] reports the general in charge of U.S. Africa Command warned Friday that terrorist factions in the Sahel region have increased so much in the past three years that they soon might be able to launch attacks on the U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Michael Langley, who has led AFRICOM since 2022, said the region has become the "epicenter" for terrorism in Africa, with al-Qaida and Islamic State group affiliates operating in Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and Nigeria. "One of the terrorists’ new objectives is gaining access to the West African Coast," Langley told reporters, according to Stars and Stripes. "If they secure access to the coastline, they can finance their operations through smuggling, human trafficking and arms trade." He added such a scenario "increases the chance of threats reaching the U.S. shores."

The Hill [5/30/2025 3:52 PM, Ellen Mitchell, 18649K] reports the U.S. military’s top general in Africa said terrorist factions in the Sahel region have increased their presence so much in the past three years that they soon may be able to launch attacks within the United States. The region, which mainly includes Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, is “the flash point of prolonged conflict and growing instability,” U.S. Africa Command head Gen. Michael Langley told reporters Thursday. “It is the epicenter of terrorism on the globe.” ​​Sahel countries have long struggled to combat violent extremist groups, with some facing greater instability after falling to military coups, U.S. officials have warned.

CNN [5/30/2025 8:45 AM, Shania Shelton, 875K] reports Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said President Donald Trump previously told her that he wouldn’t pardon the men convicted of plotting to kidnap her in 2020, despite him telling reporters on Wednesday he would consider it. The men charged in the case conspired to kidnap the Democratic governor from a vacation home and blow up a bridge to delay law enforcement but were arrested first, authorities said. Eight men were charged on the state level and another six were indicted on federal charges in 2020. Ultimately, nine were convicted or pleaded guilty in the case, and five were acquitted. Whitmer’s comments come after Trump’s response to a question Wednesday on whether he had plans to pardon the men. "I’m going to look at it," Trump said in the Oval Office. "It’s been brought to my attention. I did watch the trial. It looked to me like somewhat of a railroad job. I’ll be honest with you, it looked to me like some people said some stupid things," Trump said. "You know, they were drinking, and I think they said stupid things, but I’ll take a look at that. And a lot of people are asking me that question from both sides. Actually, a lot of people think they got railroaded. A lot of people think they got railroaded.”

FOX News [5/30/2025 8:00 AM, Peter Pinedo, 46878K] reports a former high-ranking officer in the Venezuelan military is contesting a recent report by the U.S. intelligence community about the massive Tren de Aragua gang present throughout the country. Jose Arocha, who is a former lieutenant colonel in the Venezuelan military, told Fox News Digital that the recent intel community report denying Tren de Aragua is linked to the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro is missing a key aspect: the socialist regime’s animosity towards the United States and penchant for asymmetric warfare. Tren de Aragua, also known simply as TdA, is a violent Venezuelan gang that has been terrorizing U.S. cities over the last several years. The group is linked to high-profile murders such as the killing of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley and the seizure of an entire apartment building in Aurora, Colorado. As one of his first moves back in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump directed the State Department to designate TdA a "foreign terrorist organization." Speaking with Fox News Digital via Zoom, Arocha, a national security expert at the Center for a Secure Free Society, said he agrees with the Trump administration’s moves against Tren de Aragua, which he believes is an "asymmetrical warfare" tool of the Maduro regime to sow discord in the United States and other countries in the Western Hemisphere. "The Maduro regime doesn’t need to send troops to the USA. It sends criminals instead," he said. "TdA is a plug-and-play insurgency – assembled in prison, deployed abroad.” Arocha’s statements, however, contrast with a new public memo released by U.S. intelligence agencies last month that denied any solid connection between the Maduro government in Caracas and the gang. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

CNN [5/30/2025 7:13 PM, Natasha Bertrand, 21433K] reports Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered the gutting of a Pentagon office shortly after it disclosed that it would be overseeing the testing of President Donald Trump’s Golden Dome missile defense system and the programs associated with the massive, multi-billion dollar project, multiple officials familiar with the matter told CNN. At the end of April, the little known Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation drafted and disseminated a memo to the Office of the Secretary of Defense and other DoD offices that put Golden Dome on its oversight list, in line with DoD instructions and laws requiring that a major defense acquisition program be tested before being fielded, the officials said. Days later, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency asked the office for a meeting. Musk’s company, SpaceX, is among the companies vying for a role in developing Golden Dome. DOGE representatives asked DOT&E officials more about what they did and their plans for this year, officials said, and seemed surprised that much of the office’s work was required by law. But there were no outward signs that the office was on the chopping block. On Wednesday, though, DOT&E employees were abruptly summoned to a meeting at the Pentagon and told that the office would be cut to just 30 people, down from over 100, the officials told CNN. Contractors would also no longer be assigned to support the office, per the new guidance. A defense official told CNN that they believe the administration was concerned about DOT&E conducting independent oversight of Golden Dome, and the problems it might uncover in the process.

CNN [5/30/2025 1:35 PM, Kaitlan Collins and Alayna Treene, 21433K] reports a law enforcement investigation is underway into efforts to impersonate President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The Wall Street Journal first reported on the investigation into efforts to impersonate Wiles, writing that "senators, governors, top U.S. business executives and other well-known figures have received text messages and phone calls from a person who claimed to be the chief of staff." Wiles is one of Trump’s closest advisers and is often in touch with lawmakers who need to reach the president. She has a long list of influential Republican contacts. The investigation comes after the FBI warned earlier this month that hackers have been using AI-generated voice messages to impersonate senior US government officials to break into online accounts. The FBI cautioned at the time that such impersonations and subsequent access to government or personal accounts could lead to other government officials or their associates and contacts being targeted. "The White House takes the cybersecurity of all staff very seriously, and this matter continues to be investigated," a White House official told CNN. FBI Director Kash Patel said in a statement: “The FBI takes all threats against the president, his staff, and our cybersecurity with the utmost seriousness. Safeguarding our administration officials’ ability to securely communicate to accomplish the president’s mission is a top priority.”

Washington Post [5/30/2025 7:29PM, Rachel Lerman, 32099K] reports President Donald Trump said Friday that he planned to double tariffs on steel imports into the U.S. from 25 percent to 50 percent. Speaking at a rally at U.S. Steel in Pennsylvania, Trump said the raised tariff rate would “even further secure the steel industry in the United States.” Trump traveled to speak to steelworkers after announcing a “partnership” last week between the storied U.S. company and Japanese rival Nippon Steel. The increased tariff rate will take effect Wednesday, Trump said in a Truth Social post Friday evening after the event. The president’s actions are designed to promote greater domestic steel industry production and employment. But they also increase costs for manufacturers that use the industrial metals to produce goods such as automobiles and appliances, as well as other sectors including housing and construction. Many of Trump’s tariffs, a signature piece of his economic policy, were dealt a blow this week when a federal court ruled that they were illegal and ordered them to be halted. That decision was later temporarily paused by an appeals court. But steel tariffs were not imperiled. Trump used a different law to impose those levies, and they were not affected by the court decision. Trump used his authority to impose tariffs to protect national security on steel, aluminum, and automobiles, relying on Section 232 of the 1962 trade act. Few details of the deal between U.S. Steel and Nippon have been revealed. It’s still unclear whether the Japanese company is acquiring U.S. Steel or making an investment in it. Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, said Thursday that Nippon "is going to have some involvement, but no control of the company.” Trump sought to assure workers Friday that he is committed to bolstering the domestic steel industry. "Nobody’s going to be able to steal your industry," Trump said to steelworkers. "At 25 percent, they [foreign competitors] can sort of get over that fence. At 50 percent, they can no longer get over that fence.” The sharper steel tariffs could renew tensions between the United States and its North American neighbors, which are among its largest suppliers of steel imports.

Reported similarly:
Bloomberg [5/30/2025 9:46 PM, Josh Wingrove and Joe Deaux, 19320K]

The Hill [5/31/2025 6:00 AM, Brett Samuels, 18649K] reports the White House is increasing its attacks on the judicial branch in the wake of decisions that briefly blocked President Trump’s sweeping tariffs. It’s a battle-tested playbook the administration has used before on a number of fronts with the courts, which have emerged as an even greater bulwark to the president’s policies in his second term, especially with a GOP Congress that has largely left him unchallenged. At the same time, the Trump team’s verbal attacks on the judiciary are more intense than any other administration in recent U.S. history, and underscore the public relations battle the White House is engaging in. That battle is intended to rile up Trump’s base, while also pressuring his opponents and the courts. Deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller decried a three-judge panel’s ruling that initially halted Trump’s sweeping "reciprocal" tariffs as "judicial tyranny.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called it part of a "troubling and dangerous trend of unelected judges inserting themselves into the presidential decision-making process.” National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, a typically mild-mannered adviser, attacked the panel as "activist judges.” It echoed the same rhetoric Miller, Leavitt and others have routinely used to push back on judicial rulings that block or undermine the administration’s agenda on immigration, efforts to shrink the government and more. It is also similar to the way Trump attacked judges who handled his legal cases before he won a second term. The tactic serves the White House’s goals on multiple fronts. It allows officials to go on offense, where they are most comfortable. It also provides fodder to Trump’s MAGA base, creating a common opponent at a time when Democrats are out of power and largely helpless to impede the president’s agenda. The strategy has been cause for alarm for Democrats and experts who have voiced concerns about the long-term impact of attacks on the courts. "Courts upholding the rule of law is what separates America from dictatorships around the world. We are not ruled by kings, but by laws," Skye Perryman, president of left-leaning legal group Democracy Forward, posted on the social platform X. "Intimidation of courts and ignoring the rule of the law betrays these values.” The three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of International ruled on Wednesday to block Trump’s April 2 "Liberation Day" tariffs, which placed a 10 percent levy on all imports along with higher "reciprocal" tariffs for dozens of countries that could go into effect over the summer. The ruling also blocked earlier orders that imposed tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China. Many had already been adjusted or delayed as stocks fell, and Treasury yields rose in the wake of Trump’s trade shifts. An appeals court temporarily lifted the block in a ruling on Thursday. But in the 24 hours in between, Trump allies went to work attacking the trade court and portraying it as the latest instance of judges deliberately undermining the president. The attacks came despite the fact that one of the judges who presided over the tariffs case was appointed by Trump.

Wall Street Journal [5/30/2025 4:38 PM, Brett Forrest, 646K] reports a Defense Intelligence Agency employee was charged with attempting to pass classified intelligence to a foreign government, offering to spy because he didn’t agree “with the values” of the Trump administration, the Justice Department said. Nathan Vilas Laatsch, a civilian information technology staffer at DIA, was arrested in Northern Virginia Thursday after a three-month Federal Bureau of Investigation investigation during which he allegedly left a thumb drive containing classified documents at a public park for pickup by a “friendly” foreign government. In fact, his messages had been intercepted by FBI agents. An agent had been communicating with him for weeks, posing as a foreign handler after the bureau received a tip that Laatsch had offered his services as a spy, according to the Justice Department. “The recent actions of the current administration are extremely disturbing to me,” Laatsch wrote in a March email. “I don’t agree or align with the values of this administration and intend to act to support the values that the United States at one time stood for,” according to an affidavit in support of a criminal complaint. He was “willing to share classified information that I have access to which are completed intelligence products, some unprocessed documentation,” he said. He didn’t seek “material compensation,” but was seeking citizenship in the foreign country because he didn’t “expect things here to improve in the long term,” he allegedly told an FBI agent.

CyberScoop [5/30/2025 3:09 PM, Matt Kapko] reports the FBI on Thursday arrested a Defense Intelligence Agency employee working in the Insider Threat Division unit with top secret security clearance for allegedly attempting to provide classified information to a foreign government, the Justice Department said. Nathan Vilas Laatsch, 28, of Alexandria, Va., was arrested after a monthslong investigation following a tip the FBI received in March, according to officials. Laatsch, employed by the agency since 2019, allegedly transcribed classified information to a notepad at his desk and repeated exfiltrated data from his workspace. “The conduct alleged in this case is a profound betrayal of the American people and a direct threat to our national security,” Sue J. Bai, head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, said in a statement. “When someone entrusted with access to classified information attempts to provide it to a foreign government, it jeopardizes our intelligence capabilities, our military advantage and the safety of our nation.” Laatsch’s alleged double-dealing came to light through repeated communications with an FBI agent he thought was a foreign government official. His willingness to provide classified information to a friendly foreign government stemmed from a disillusionment with the current administration’s values, officials said.

Daily Wire [5/30/2025 2:30 PM, Hank Berrien, 3816K] reports someone is impersonating President Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, in texts and phone calls — and the FBI is investigating. Wiles, who is the first female chief of staff in U.S. history, has revealed contacts were hacked from her personal, not her government, cellphone, The Wall Street Journal reported. Other top officials in the Trump administration were contacted via the fake identity. "The FBI takes all threats against the president, his staff, and our cybersecurity with the utmost seriousness," FBI Director Kash Patel stated. "Safeguarding our administration officials’ ability to securely communicate to accomplish the president’s mission is a top priority.” Government officials believe that artificial intelligence was used in the fake messages. "It became clear to some of the lawmakers that the requests were suspicious when the impersonator began asking questions about Trump that Wiles should have known the answers to—and in one case, when the impersonator asked for a cash transfer, some of the people said," the Journal wrote. Another clue leading to suspicion was the broken grammar used by the impersonator. On May 15, the FBI issued a public service announcement regarding attempts to impersonate U.S. officials, stating: Since April 2025, malicious actors have impersonated senior US officials to target individuals, many of whom are current or former senior US federal or state government officials and their contacts. If you receive a message claiming to be from a senior US official, do not assume it is authentic. The malicious actors have sent text messages and AI-generated voice messages — techniques known as smishing and vishing, respectively — that claim to come from a senior US official in an effort to establish rapport before gaining access to personal accounts. One way the actors gain such access is by sending targeted individuals a malicious link under the guise of transitioning to a separate messaging platform. Access to personal or official accounts operated by US officials could be used to target other government officials, or their associates and contacts, by using trusted contact information they obtain. Contact information acquired through social engineering schemes could also be used to impersonate contacts to elicit information or funds. In 2024, Iranian agents attempted hacking into Wiles’ email account.

Breitbart [5/30/2025 12:15 PM, Alana Mastrangelo, 3077K] reports the DOJ has announced that a government employee was arrested on Thursday for trying to share classified information with agents of a foreign government because he did not "agree or align with the values" of the Trump administration. Nathan Vilas Laatsch, a 28-year-old IT specialist working for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) since 2019, was arrested this week in Virginia, the DOJ announced. Laatsch works for the DIA’s Insider Threat Division, where he holds a Top Secret security clearance. Court documents reveal Laatsch allegedly sent an email to a to an officer or agent of a foreign government, saying he did not "agree or align with the values" of the Trump administration and was therefore "willing to share classified information," including "completed intelligence products, some unprocessed intelligence, and other assorted classified documentation," the DOJ said. In March, the FBI received a tip regarding the email and began communicating with the 28-year-old, posing as a foreign government official. Laatsch then began transcribing classified information to a notepad at his desk, repeatedly exfiltrated the information from his workspace over a three-day period, before confirming to the FBI agent — whom he believed to be a foreign government official — that he was ready to transmit the information, the DOJ claimed. After that, the FBI set up an operation at a public park in northern Virginia, "where Laatsch believed he would deposit the classified information for the foreign government to retrieve," the DOJ added. Then, on or around May 1, the DOJ said Laatsch was seen depositing an item at the specified location, which was retrieved by FBI agents after he left. The item was a thumb drive containing a message from the 28-year-old DIA employee and multiple typed documents with information portion-marked for Secret or Top Secret levels. The FBI posing as a foreign government official had also received a message from Laatsch indicting that he was sharing "a decent sample size" of classified information to "demonstrate the range" of the types of material he had access to, the DOJ said.

Wall Street Journal [5/30/2025 3:38 PM, Matthew Luxmoore, 646K] reports Ukraine and Russia accused each other of foot-dragging toward a second round of direct cease-fire talks backed by the Trump administration and set to begin Monday. The U.S. urged Russia to continue peace talks and reiterated its willingness to keep Ukraine’s ambition to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization off the table, in line with one of Moscow’s demands. Gen. Keith Kellogg, America’s top envoy for Ukraine, said President Trump was frustrated by Russia’s strikes on Ukrainian cities and its delay in producing a document listing its terms. “He’s put forward some reasonable proposals, reasonable discussions, and he’s seen a level of unreasonableness that really frustrates him,” Kellogg said of Trump in an interview on Thursday with ABC. Russia has proposed another round of talks with Ukraine in Istanbul on June 2, and the Kremlin on Friday said the Russian delegation was already en route to the Turkish city. Ukraine has insisted that in advance of any meeting, Moscow provide a document listing its conditions. Moscow said it hadn’t received confirmation of Kyiv’s participation in the Monday talks. Trump has said he would abandon efforts to broker peace in Ukraine if the two sides don’t make headway. Earlier this week, he said there must be progress within two weeks for the U.S. to remain engaged. Despite recent dialogue, Russia’s and Ukraine’s positions remain far apart, and they haven’t agreed over even initial terms under which negotiations would take place. Each has accused the other of stalling.

New York Times [5/30/2025 11:32 AM, Carlotta Gall, 138952K] reports the Islamic State has claimed responsibility for two bomb explosions in Syria, the first time the extremist group has directly targeted the new government since it took over in December, a war monitoring group said. In two statements posted online on Thursday and reported by the SITE Intelligence Group, ISIS claimed that bombs laid by its members had killed and wounded government soldiers and allied militia members. The Syrian government did not report any attacks by ISIS in the area, but announced that it had conducted two raids against Islamic State operatives in the Damascus area in the past week. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group, reported that one person was killed and three members of the Syrian Army’s 70th Division were wounded when a patrol was hit by a remote-controlled land mine in the east of Sweida Province on Wednesday. The man killed was accompanying the government forces, it said. The two attacks claimed by ISIS took place in the southern province of Sweida, where the group has not been active for the best part of a decade. But the government has struggled to establish security in the province, which is effectively controlled by the Druse minority. Sectarian clashes between local militants and pro-government forces in the province killed more than 100 in late April and early May. The Islamic State, which controlled large parts of Iraq and Syria a decade ago until U.S. and allied Syrian forces largely defeated it, has continued a low-level insurgency in eastern Syria since 2019. But it has shown a renewed vigor since the fall of the dictator Bashar al-Assad in December, plotting attacks even in the capital, Damascus, and claiming responsibility for a car bombing among other attacks in eastern Syria. The United States increased the numbers of its troops in Syria to 2,000 in the immediate aftermath of the removal of al-Assad’s government because of the threat of an ISIS resurgence. U.S. intelligence officials have said that the group could try to free some 9,000 of its followers detained in prisons in northeastern Syria, and seek to exploit divisions in the country and weaknesses in security of the new government. Syrian government forces, working on intelligence provided by the United States, successfully thwarted eight attacks in Damascus in recent months, U.S. officials have said.

The Hill [5/30/2025 8:51 AM, Alex Gangitano, 18649K] reports President Trump on Friday railed against China, saying Beijing violated a trade agreement with the U.S. amid ongoing tensions between the two countries. "Two weeks ago China was in grave economic danger! The very high Tariffs I set made it virtually impossible for China to TRADE into the United States marketplace which is, by far, number one in the World. We went, in effect, COLD TURKEY with China, and it was devastating for them. Many factories closed and there was, to put it mildly, ‘civil unrest.’ I saw what was happening and didn’t like it, for them, not for us. I made a FAST DEAL with China in order to save them from what I thought was going to be a very bad situation, and I didn’t want to see that happen," Trump said on Truth Social. "Because of this deal, everything quickly stabilized and China got back to business as usual. Everybody was happy! That is the good news!!!" he added. "The bad news is that China, perhaps not surprisingly to some, HAS TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US. So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!". Under the agreement the Trump administration hashed out with China earlier this month, the U.S. lowered its tariff rate on Chinese imports from 145 percent to 30 percent and Beijing lowered its rate on U.S. goods from 125 percent to 10 percent.

FOX News [5/31/2025 6:21 AM, Landon Mion, 46878K] reports Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Saturday told allies in the Indo-Pacific that the U.S. has their back against increasing military and economic pressure from China, while insisting that they also contribute more to their own defense. Hegseth said the U.S. will bolster its defenses overseas to counter what the Pentagon views as rapidly developing threats by China, particularly toward Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its own. China has conducted numerous exercises to test what a blockade of the island would look like. The Chinese army "is rehearsing for the real deal," Hegseth said in a keynote speech at a security conference in Singapore. "We are not going to sugarcoat it — the threat China poses is real. And it could be imminent.” China has said it wants its military to be in a position to take Taiwan by force if necessary by 2027. China is no longer building up its military forces to take Taiwan, but it is "actively training for it, every day," Hegseth said on Saturday. Not only has China created man-made islands in the South China Sea to support new military outposts, but it has also developed highly advanced hypersonic and space capabilities, prompting the U.S. to begin creating the "Golden Dome.” In his speech, Hegseth called out China’s ambitions in Latin America, specifically attempts to increase influence over the Panama Canal. He also urged countries in the region to increase their defense spending to be in line with the percentage of gross domestic product that European nations are being pressed to contribute. "We must all do our part," Hegseth said. The European Union’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, pushed back against Hegseth after his speech for a comment he made about European countries putting focus on defending their own region while the U.S. mostly handles the Indo-Pacific. Kallas said European and Asian security are "very much interlinked" at the moment as North Korean troops are fighting for Russia and China is supporting Moscow.

Reported similarly:
New York Times [5/31/2025 4:10 AM, Damien Cave and David Pierson, 138952K]
AP [5/31/2025 6:04 AM, Tara Copp and David Rising, 44540K]

CNN [5/31/2025 3:14 AM, Mike Valerio, Brad Lendon, Gawon Bae and Yoonjung Seo, 21433K] reports tew satellite images show that North Korea has deployed what appear to be balloons alongside its damaged 5,000-ton warship that has been laying on its side and partially submerged since a botched launch last week. While the purpose of the objects is unclear, experts told CNN they could be used to help get the ship back upright, or protect it from the prying eyes of drones. The stricken destroyer was the country’s newest warship and was meant to be a triumph of North Korea’s ambitious naval modernization effort. Instead, a malfunction in the launch mechanism on May 21 caused the stern to slide prematurely into the water, crushing parts of the hull and leaving the bow stranded on the shipway, state media KCNA reported, in a rare admission of bad news. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who witnessed the failed launch in the northeastern city of Chongjin, called it a "criminal act" and ordered the country to swiftly repair the as-yet-unnamed ship before the late-June plenary session of the ruling Workers’ Party, calling it a matter of national honor. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is beefing up his navy. Can he succeed? Officials have since scrambled to undo the damage and punish those they claim are responsible, detaining four people in recent days, including the shipyard’s chief engineer. Analysts say it appears balloons are being used in North Korea’s effort to swiftly repair the destroyer. "It looks like what appear to be balloons have been installed not to refloat the ship, but to prevent the ship from further flooding," said Rep. Yu Yong-weon, a South Korean National Assembly lawmaker and military analyst. Retired United States Navy Cpt. Carl Schuster said if the objects are indeed balloons, they could have one of two purposes – either to prevent "low- to mid-level drone reconnaissance," or to reduce the stress on the part of the ship still stranded on the pier. "That is the area that is most likely to have been damaged, suffered the most severe damage and remains under intense stress while the forward area remains out of the water," he said. Nick Childs, senior fellow for naval forces and maritime security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said North Korea could be in danger of further damaging the ship if it’s using balloons to keep it afloat or raise it. "It is highly likely that the ship is under quite a lot of stress anyway," and lifting from above could compound those stresses, he said.

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