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.

NewsNation [7/17/2026 1:20 PM, Ashley N. Soriano, 6006K] Video: HERE reports the head of the Department of Homeland Security is joining President Donald Trump’s fight against so-called election interference. Despite a U.S. intelligence assessment finding no evidence to support the claim, Trump has asserted that China interfered in the 2020 presidential campaign. In a primetime speech from the White House Thursday night, Trump aimed to put election security at the forefront of the November midterm elections. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin discussed the Trump administration’s “efforts to secure American elections” in a news conference Friday morning. DHS identified 250,000 non-citizens registered to vote in just four states: California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada. That’s in addition to 400,000 people who are deceased but still registered to vote, according to Mullin. “President Trump was correct when he said election security is national security,” Mullin said Friday. “Everybody should know that their vote counts. And we have individuals that are voting that shouldn’t be, (and) it cancels out someone that should be.” The Hill [7/17/2026 10:16 AM, Staff, 21549K] reports Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin will speak with reporters Friday morning on election security and integrity, hours after President Trump’s primetime address on the topic. During his speech, Trump made another push for the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which would require proof of citizenship when registering to vote and a photo ID when casting a ballot, and accused China of meddling in the 2020 election. Mullin on Friday sent letters to election officials in four states with a warning about noncitizens included on voter rolls, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The Trump administration has also previously floated deploying federal immigration enforcement officials to polling places. Breitbart [7/17/2026 11:10 AM, Staff, 2407K] reports Trump revealed a number of bombshells Thursday night, including that hundreds of millions of Americans’ voter information was compromised by the Chinese government, over a quarter-million non-citizens were registered to vote in federal elections, and that the Deep State had covered-up the degree to which American elections were vulnerable. "Documents show that during this period, dozens of significant CIA and NSA reports about China’s election targeting were kept out of the presidential briefing. These were briefings I would get almost every day," the president noted. He urged Congress to pass the SAVE America Act to secure American elections.

Reported similarly:
New York Post [7/17/2026 10:12 AM, Caitlin Doornbos, 35043K]
Washington Examiner [7/17/2026 10:28 AM, Emily Hallas, 1235K] Video: HERE

AP [7/17/2026 3:01 PM, Ali Swenson and Collin Binkley, 16483K] reports Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on Friday warned that state officials could lose funding or face investigations if they fail to go along with President Donald Trump’s election security demands, part of the Republican president’s longstanding attempt to undermine Americans’ confidence in the vote. Experts said the threats — issued just months before midterm elections that will determine control of Congress — were likely hollow because Trump’s voting initiatives have been stalled by judges and the Constitution gives states control over how elections are run. Nevertheless, Mullin’s remarks, delivered from the White House complex one day after Trump’s primetime address on the topic, could further doubts about election processes and create headaches for states as they prepare for November. “We absolutely can build confidence in the American people, but the states have to do their part,” Mullin said. Trump continues to falsely claim that Democrat Joe Biden won only because of fraud in 2020, and he’s tried to marshal the powers of the federal government to rewrite that history since he returned to office last year — even though judges and his own attorney general in his first term concluded the election was legitimate. Mullin insisted that the president was not relitigating the 2020 election, “although he definitely could at this point.” “This is just about exposing what took place and making sure it never happens again,” he said. During his remarks, Mullin advanced an unsubstantiated claim Trump made Thursday that the federal government had found 250,000 noncitizen voters on the rolls in California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. He said the Department of Homeland Security’s investigation was conducted using public data, which election experts say is insufficiently detailed and updated to properly identify whether a registered voter is a noncitizen. Election officials in California and Pennsylvania said they would review the Trump administration’s findings but noted that they conduct their own voter list maintenance and noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare. Research has supported that finding. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, responded to Mullin’s threats with a post on social media. “California has free, fair, and secure elections and we will fight for them,” he wrote. “Try us.” In Nevada, Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, also a Democrat, said he was confident in the integrity of the state’s voter file. “We are constantly looking at the information to figure out how many registered voters in Nevada don’t have a Social Security number on file,” he said. “We have done significant work to make sure our voter rolls are as clean as possible.” Mullin also pledged to aggressively monitor public voter lists to pursue potential voter fraud cases before and after the 2026 election. “If you are an illegal or you are voting illegally, we will hunt you down, we will find you and we will prosecute you,” he said. He urged states to participate in DHS’ recently overhauled SAVE program, a federal tool central to the Trump administration’s efforts to nationalize elections. At least 25 states have used it to check their voter rolls since April 2025, after the Trump administration significantly expanded its search abilities, and the Trump administration has demanded that states submit their sensitive voter data to the program to fully audit their voter lists. Mullin said if state officials don’t participate in SAVE, they could face fines, penalties or prison time.

Blaze [7/17/2026 2:30 PM, Joseph MacKinnon, 1286K] reports that President Donald Trump enraged Democrats and other leftists — including the heir to George Soros’ activist empire — on Thursday by disclosing in his national address evidence pointing to the insecurity of American elections. "Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost," the president said. "This cannot be allowed to continue." While Democratic officials were still hyperventilating over Trump’s insistence that lawmakers pass the SAVE America Act to protect against the kinds of trust-breaking meddling that evidence suggests occurred in recent years, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin detailed in a Friday briefing what his agency plans to do to "secure our elections." "It shouldn’t be a partisan issue," Mullin said. "This should be something that every American, regardless if you’re a Republican, you’re a Democrat, you’re an independent, you’re a libertarian — regardless of if you live in a blue state or you live in a red state — everybody should know that their vote counts. And we have individuals that are voting that shouldn’t be. It cancels out someone that should be." Digging "just a little bit deeper" into some of Trump’s claims from the night before, Mullin said the Department of Homeland Security has identified 250,000 noncitizens who were registered to vote in just four states — California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada. According to the DHS’ preliminary review, there were 190,832 noncitizens registered to vote in California; 35,152 in New Jersey; 15,903 in Nevada; and 14,576 in Pennsylvania.

Reuters [7/17/2026 10:26 AM, Doina Chiacu and A.J. Vicens, 46493K] reports U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened state officials with fines and criminal charges ‌on Friday if they do not comply with election security measures, as President Donald Trump renewed false claims of past election fraud. At a news conference on Friday following the Republican president’s prime-time address on election security, Mullin outlined steps the Department of Homeland Security wanted states to take to ensure people who are not U.S. citizens cannot vote. The steps include securing voting machines and reviewing voter registration lists to verify citizenship status. If states do not follow the instructions, Mullin said, the federal government will look at who voted in those states and hold election officials accountable. "If the election officials, once we gave them the information they need to secure their elections, and they chose not to, then those individuals can also ⁠be held accountable by fines, by penalties, and even depending on how far it goes, prison time," Mullin said. Politico [7/17/2026 8:27 AM, Myah Ward, Maggie Miller and Ben Johansen, 21050K] reports Mullin also vowed that DHS would work to “make our security enhancements mandatory” for states. He promised to withhold federal election security grants until state officials take steps the administration demanded, including running their voter registration lists through a system that checks for non-citizen voters on the rolls. Mullin’s remarks built on President Donald Trump’s Thursday night primetime speech about election security, where he rehashed already-understood concerns about the security of voting systems, described efforts by China to access voter rolls and aired old grievances about the result of the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden. The DHS secretary on Friday focused his speech on DHS efforts to work with states to secure election systems and to scrub voter registration lists for fraud as well as concerns about noncitizen voting. Mullin’s warnings, as well as Trump’s speech, fit into a pattern of broader escalation from the Trump administration over elections, especially as the president ramps up his legislative push for an overhaul of the U.S. election system and voter registration. The administration’s push to assert control over the country’s generally decentralized election system has worried election officials, who say the effort can undercut confidence in the system. The Justice Department also sent letters this month threatening to prosecute election officials across the country who fail to remove noncitizens from their voter rolls. During his speech, Trump claimed that DHS had uncovered tens of thousands of noncitizens on the voter rolls in four states, though as Mullin said on Friday, DHS does not have evidence of any actual voting by these noncitizens. Mullin said officials plan to go through these voter records one by one to determine if any actually voted. Mullin appeared to suggest on Friday that the agency was able to estimate the numbers by using the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system and said 23 states are already working with DHS to analyze voter rolls. And he criticized the legal challenges slowing the administration’s efforts: A judge last month blocked the Trump administration from establishing a database of Americans’ information — including social security numbers and citizenship status. FOX News [7/17/2026 4:16 PM, Ashley J. DiMella, 49054K] reports Twenty-three states are participating in DHS’ expanded SAVE program, which allows election officials to compare voter records against federal immigration data. Mullin separately said CISA would release an updated election-infrastructure plan within 30 days. DHS has announced election-security conditions for recipients of FEMA’s Homeland Security Grant Program. Mullin also said he was working with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on security requirements. Mullin said DHS identified 250,000 voter-registration records in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania that the department believes belong to noncitizens.

Reported similarly:
Breitbart [7/17/2026 6:07 PM, Staff, 2407K]
The Hill [7/17/2026 3:13 PM, Rebecca Beitsch, 21549K]
ABC News [7/17/2026 2:10 PM, Steven Portnoy, John Parkinson, Nicholas Kerr, Fritz Farrow, and Elise Spenner, 99K] Video: HERE
NBC News [7/17/2026 2:23 PM, Rebecca Shabad, 47693K]
USA Today [7/17/2026 5:02 PM, Sarah D. Wire, 68151K]

Daily Signal [7/17/2026 11:38 AM, Fred Lucas, 561K] reports that in just four states, 250,000 noncitizens are registered to vote, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said Friday as he announced new measures to bolster election security. The four states—California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada—did not cooperate with the Trump administration in its review of voter information, but the Department of Homeland Security obtained the information from publicly available data, Mullin said. He also called on states to crosscheck voter data with the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, a database from the DHS that verifies citizenship. The secretary said that in 23 states that have cooperated with the agency’s SAVE program, which helps determine voter eligibility, data show another 23,000 noncitizens and 400,000 dead people are registered to vote. He said that states will need to work with DHS on ensuring voter eligibility if they wish to receive federal election grants. “We are going to make our security enhancements mandatory, meaning that if these states want a grant, and they want to be reimbursed to run federal elections, they’re going to have to implement security measures,” Mullin said. The announcement follows a primetime address by President Donald Trump about the release of declassified documents showing evidence that China has been meddling in U.S. elections by hacking into voter registration databases and by other means. Mullin said in 30 days the DHS would release a cybersecurity plan for protecting elections.

CNN [7/17/2026 2:41 PM, Blake McGill, 24479K] reports that CNN Senior White House Reporter Kevin Liptak joins CNN News Central. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

The New York Times [7/17/2026 3:34 PM, Nick Corasaniti and Dustin Volz, 158614K] reports Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened local election officials on Friday with prison time if they did not comply with the Trump administration’s efforts to change election policies, while reiterating many of President Trump’s unsubstantiated claims about the security of American elections. Mr. Mullin pledged to “dig in just a little bit deeper” than a prime-time speech that Mr. Trump gave on Thursday, when the president claimed without concrete evidence that American elections were rife with “hacking, manipulation and corruption.” The secretary largely stuck to similar talking points, repeating the president’s unverified claim that the government had found hundreds of thousands of noncitizens on voter rolls in at least four states. Neither Mr. Trump nor Mr. Mullin offered any specifics on how they derived those numbers, and officials in at least two of the states said their voter rolls were properly maintained. Mr. Mullin also repeated claims that foreign actors could exploit vulnerabilities identified in election systems to change votes, despite offering no evidence that such a breach has ever occurred. Cybersecurity experts and election officials say that such a scenario is extremely unlikely, as voting equipment is generally not connected to the internet and most hypothetical scenarios of tampering would require physical access to machines. The Washington Times [7/17/2026 12:29 PM, Stephen Dinan, 969K] reports Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin delivered the carrot and stick on Friday, a day after Mr. Trump proclaimed the country’s voting systems "shockingly" derelict. Mr. Mullin said some states’ voting machines are vulnerable to manipulation by foreign enemies, and the states must work to patch their systems. He said his department’s cybersecurity agency will release guidance to help the states later this summer and will condition future election grants on states making the fixes. He also told states to work with DHS to scrub their voter lists to delete names of dead voters and noncitizens. For states that don’t cooperate, he said his department will try to review the public data and spot bogus names on their lists — and it will review their records after the election to see what happened. "We will go through those records one by one, and we will pursue everybody," he told reporters. He said penalties to the states could include financial penalties or "even, depending on how far it goes, prison time." Like Mr. Trump before him, Mr. Mullin said the goal isn’t to rehash the 2020 election or scare voters, but to build confidence in voting moving forward. "We’re not trying to change the outcome; we’re trying to make sure the American people can trust our voting system," the secretary said. On the threat to voting machines, Mr. Mullin said the government has proof that foreign adversaries have ways of accessing U.S. systems. "We know that they can change voter registration and your vote," he said. "We know it’s possible. It’s not a question. It’s not even for debate."

Washington Examiner [7/17/2026 3:13 PM, Emily Hallas, 1235K] reports Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on Friday said he plans to tie certain grant funding to whether states decide to participate in the agency’s election integrity program. Mullin appeared at a press conference to announce the initiative, among other measures that he said are designed "to make sure that the American people can trust our voting system." The briefing was aimed at tackling concerns President Donald Trump raised during an address the previous evening, warning that intelligence indicates the United States’s election process is vulnerable to interference from foreign entities, particularly China. Mullin said that 23 states so far are participating in DHS’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, which he said seeks to ensure voting machines are secured and allows officials to "proactively check" voter rolls for errors, such as containing noncitizens or deceased residents. The secretary questioned why other blue states have declined to sign on to the program, which is being debated in court, and said he is working with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to withhold Homeland Security Grant Program funding from states not participating in SAVE until they agree to do so. Mullin made another major announcement, revealing that the DHS cybersecurity team at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will release an "updated election infrastructure plan" within 30 days. Mullin said that election officials who "disregard information" from the federal government "need to secure their elections" and could face penalties, including prison time.

Breitbart [7/17/2026 4:28 PM, Nick Gilbertson, 2407K] reports Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin announced his department will conduct an investigation before and after the midterms into election records in search of illegal aliens. Mullin detailed the plan on Friday, a day after President Donald Trump said previously classified documents show major election vulnerabilities, and that a DHS investigation showed north of 250,000 noncitizens are registered to vote in federal elections. He noted that the DHS security team and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) are releasing an "updated election infrastructure plan" within 30 days. Mullin then noted that DHS will be scouring election records in search of illegal aliens, deceased people who somehow cast a vote, and those who are otherwise ineligible to cast a ballot. Mullin added that illegals who tried to vote and those who attempted to illegally vote for someone else will be charged. Mullin said that if states do not work with DHS on this matter, then DHS will go through the public data.

FOX News [7/17/2026 5:30 PM, CJ Womack, 49054K] reports Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin blasted ABC and NBC on Friday for declining to air President Donald Trump’s election-security address on their broadcast networks Thursday night, accusing the outlets of withholding information from Americans as the midterms approach. CBS aired part of Trump’s remarks before cutting away, while Fox News carried the entire speech live. ABC and NBC did not show the address on their broadcast networks but offered it through streaming platforms. CNN did not air the speech live, while MS NOW aired part of it before also cutting away. The secretary argued that the networks had previously amplified assurances about the 2020 election while rejecting Trump’s presentation of newly declassified intelligence. Trump announced the release of previously classified intelligence that the White House documented vulnerabilities in voting infrastructure and foreign efforts to obtain American voter data. He also pressed Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would impose federal voter identification and proof-of-citizenship requirements.

New York Post [7/17/2026 12:46 PM, Josh Koehn, 35043K] reports that federal officials say they identified 190,832 potential non-citizens registered to vote in California, prompting the Department of Homeland Security to warn the state it could lose federal funding unless it cooperates with election security measures. Election officials in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania were notified Friday by Homeland Secretary Markwayne Mullin that the DHS has identified what it says are more than 250,000 potential non-citizens on the states’ voter rolls. On top of the nearly 191,000 potential non-citizens registered to vote in California, officials also identified 35,152 in New Jersey, 15,903 in Nevada and 14,576 in Pennsylvania, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Mullin said that requirements under the Trump administration’s SAVE America Act, which is being debated in Congress, will need to be followed in order for states, tribal nations, territories and local governments to receive as much as $1 billion in taxpayer funds. “We are going to make our security enhancements mandatory, meaning that if these states want a grant and they want to be reimbursed to work or to run federal elections, they’re going to have to implement security issues,” Mullin said. Requirements would include making sure voting machines are secure and voter rolls are scrubbed of non-citizens, deceased individuals, and others who are ineligible to vote. “Election security is national security,” Mullin said. “Only Americans should be electing American leaders.”

CNN [7/17/2026 4:35 PM, Tierney Sneed, Gabe Cohen, 24479K] reports the Trump administration is escalating its attacks on election officials in key battleground states, with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin doubling down Friday on claims that hundreds of thousands of non-citizens are illegally registered to vote – claims that the agency has quietly acknowledged aren’t fully vetted. In a news conference, Mullin repeated the claim first made in a release of documents alongside President Donald Trump’s primetime Thursday night speech, alleging that DHS had found a cumulative quarter-million non-citizens registered in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania. However, letters from DHS to the states informing them of the allegations are more hedged. Mullin’s letter to Pennsylvania, for instance, notes that the figure is unverified. The administration has not put out information about how many of those individuals it thinks actually voted, but Mullin said Friday DHS officials are investigating the matter. Additionally, DHS is touting tallies of non-citizens that it says were found on the rolls of Republican-led states by using SAVE. However, even those statistics appear to be not fully verified.

Washington Post [7/17/2026 3:52 PM, Perry Stein, Isaac Arnsdorf, Patrick Marley and Lauren Kaori Gurley, 27701K] reports President Donald Trump used his prime-time address Thursday to amplify an exaggerated claim that noncitizens are registering to vote en masse, threatening to undermine the nation’s secure elections. Doubling down on these dubious assertions, the Trump administration then threatened to punish states by withholding funding and arresting election officials if noncitizens vote in states that don’t participate in federal programs purporting to secure elections. According to Trump and Mullin, about 278,000 noncitizens are unlawfully registered to vote in federal elections in a number of states where they said the rolls were reviewed. They said 250,000 of those people were in just four states: Nevada, California, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Their assessment did not include all states. But a review of public documents and interviews with government officials and election experts shows that the figure is significantly overstated and that officials have struggled to find instances of voter fraud by noncitizens to back the president’s assertions. Assessments by government officials and outside election experts have repeatedly concluded that noncitizens represent a miniscule number of voters.

FOX News [7/17/2026 7:36 AM, Greg Norman-Diamond, 49054K] reports China pushed back Friday after President Donald Trump accused Beijing of "working to influence the results" of the 2020 presidential election, describing his accusation as "entirely fabricated.". Trump said in a primetime speech Thursday night that "in mid 2018, China was working to influence the results of the U.S. midterm elections and later the results of the 2020 presidential election itself.". Trump said in a primetime speech Thursday night that newly released documents "show CIA reporting explicitly stated, and I quote, in mid 2018, the Chinese Communist Party’s policy was to leverage all domestic and foreign elements that were opposed to the U.S. president in an effort to reduce the U.S. president’s votes and make him resign or prevent his reelection.". "The reason they wanted me to lose is because they knew I was wise to them," Trump added, while also accusing members of the U.S. intelligence community of operating a "shadow government" to allegedly conceal evidence of China’s efforts to influence U.S. elections. China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian on Friday said "the relevant allegations by the U.S. are entirely fabricated and aimed at vilifying China."

Washington Examiner [7/17/2026 4:30 PM, Rena Rowe, 1235K] reports the Trump administration on Thursday announced it would shorten visa durations for Chinese journalists, prompting Beijing to threaten reciprocal measures. A new Department of Homeland Security rule will replace the long-standing "duration of status" system with fixed-term stays, limiting visas for foreign journalists to 240 days and only 90 days for Chinese journalists. The rule will take effect 60 days after its publication in the Federal Register. The change quickly drew criticism from the Chinese government. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian called on the United States to reverse what he described as "discriminatory policies" targeting Chinese journalists.

Wall Street Journal [7/17/2026 6:10 PM, Vera Bergengruen, Jack Gillum, and Mariah Timms, 646K] reports the White House on Thursday released 269 pages of intelligence assessments, internal emails and investigative records—many of them newly declassified—as part of a review of foreign interference and vulnerabilities in U.S. elections. The documents were collected by a White House task force created in May and published as President Trump gave an extraordinary address to the nation alleging that foreign adversaries had compromised U.S. elections. The release comes as the president tries to build support for sweeping voter-ID legislation and citizenship verification requirements. The documents are heavily redacted and contain a mix of raw reporting, internal discussions, technical assessments and law-enforcement records. While many of the assessments were already public, they contain some new details about Chinese collection of U.S. voter data, potential election-security vulnerabilities, and allegations of election manipulation in Venezuela.

New York Times [7/17/2026 11:35 AM, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Nick Corasaniti, and Dustin Volz, 158614K] reports that when President Trump tried to undermine and overturn the election results in 2020, he ran into stiff pushback — not just in the courts, but from many officials in his own government. He made sure there would be little room for such dissent when he returned to the White House. Those seeking to join Mr. Trump’s second administration had to pass a key litmus test: Did they believe the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump? With like-minded allies now positioned in key roles throughout the government, Mr. Trump has trained the full arsenal of the federal government on one of his most persistent obsessions: sowing doubt about the security of the country’s election systems. Major agencies such as the Justice Department, the F.B.I., the Homeland Security Department and the U.S. Postal Service have taken steps to revive his false claims about the 2020 election and try to assert federal control over state-run elections. His efforts got additional reinforcements on Thursday from the country’s intelligence agencies, which provided the White House with a trove of declassified evidence that Mr. Trump held up as evidence of a broken election system. “Tonight, I’m announcing the immediate declassification and release of critical intelligence, revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure,” the president said in a prime-time speech from the East Room. Mr. Trump also said he had directed the F.B.I., C.I.A., the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Justice Department to investigate what he claimed to be a “cover-up” by U.S. officials of the extent of China’s efforts to influence American elections.

FOX News [7/17/2026 7:03 AM, Leo Briceno, 49054K] reports conservatives rallied around President Donald Trump online Thursday after he doubled down on calls for lawmakers to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, citing alarming election integrity vulnerabilities he said his administration had discovered. "Thank you, Mr. President," Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., wrote on social media. "We are going to lose our country if we don’t pass the dadgum SAVE America Act. Call your senator and tell them to save our great nation." Trump promised a series of disclosures on the discovered weaknesses. "Tonight, I’m announcing the immediate declassification and release of critical intelligence, revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure," Trump said. In particular, the president said those new documents would focus on a handful of key allegations, including foreign data theft carried out by China, that members of the U.S. government had known about election vulnerabilities, that Americans had been misled for years about those weaknesses and new evidence of "election fraud.". Fox News Digital could not independently verify the content of the documents that were released by the White House.

Breitbart [7/17/2026 2:20 PM, John Binder, 2407K] reports that President Donald Trump released documents on Thursday evening that detail problems with the nation’s election system, including revealing that a portion of foreign nationals are illegally registered to vote. The document, which focuses on noncitizen voting, was posted to the White House website. Multiple investigations from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the document states, have exposed that more than 250,000 foreign nationals are illegally registered to vote in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada alone. "State election officials in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada have been notified of this serious threat to national security and DHS stands ready to support their efforts to identify and remove ineligible registrants," the document states: The investigation is expanding to include multiple additional states. In addition, DHS will support the Department of Justice’s review of voter files obtained pursuant to their enforcement authority under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 and the Help America Vote Act of 2002. [Emphasis added]. The document touts the Trump administration’s enhanced SAVE system to streamline and more easily have states identify and remove foreign nationals from their voter rolls. "In the short time that the enhanced SAVE system has been available to states, 10 states have processed their full voter lists," the document states: As of June 22, 2026, a total of 25 different states processed more than 68 million registration records through the SAVE system. DHS has enabled those states to identify over 400,000 deceased registrants and over 28,000 non-citizens who illegally registered to vote.

CBS News [7/17/2026 1:20 PM, Staff, 53111K] reports that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin claims that there are 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote in the U.S. CBS News’ Nicole Sganga has more. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

Breitbart [7/17/2026 12:44 PM, Jasmyn Jordan, 2407K] reports that President Donald Trump announced Thursday that his administration will work with state and local jurisdictions to address known election-system vulnerabilities and better protect voter data ahead of the November midterm elections. During a primetime address from the White House, Trump said his administration was in the process of notifying states whose election data had been compromised by the People’s Republic of China and others. "In light of the brand new and irrefutable information I have revealed tonight, my administration is in the process of notifying the states whose election data was compromised by the People’s Republic of China and many others, we will be working closely to mitigate any harm, and we’re taking swift action to ensure that sensitive voter data is better protected, so we can never be bought, we can never be hacked, and we can never watch a stolen election again." "Tomorrow, the Secretary of Homeland Security will hold a briefing to outline his department’s recent work confirming cyber vulnerabilities in our electronic voting systems. They are bad," the president continued. "We’re in the process of informing governors, senators, and members of Congress of potential issues in their states. If you look at voting today, it’s in such bad shape in so many states, and we are committing to fix it."

Federalist [7/17/2026 7:20 AM, M. D. Kittle, 581K] reports Mollie Hemingway was right. The 2020 election was rigged. The Federalist’s editor-in-chief in her 2021 book, Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections, laid out a compelling case that some big corrupting forces used Covid fear to get their man — Joe Biden — elected in 2020. In his address to the nation Thursday evening, President Donald Trump walked through some of the more egregious attacks on election integrity and security in a 2020 election that government bureaucrats absurdly declared "the most secure in American history." And Trump brought the receipts. During his primetime address, the White House released four tranches of newly declassified documents from intelligence community files, overseen by the White House Government Transparency Taskforce. The records expose China’s meddling in the election and point to hundreds of thousands of noncitizens on state voter rolls. "The president’s news is shocking but not surprising given prior hacks of U.S. data by the Chinese. But what should make Americans very angry is the cover-up to hide what happened and the failure to prosecute wrongdoers for obvious politically partisan reasons," Hans von Spakovsky, senior fellow at Advancing American Freedom, told The Federalist.

Washington Times [7/17/2026 10:37 AM, Stephen Dinan, 969K] reports that the Department of Homeland Security is releasing more data behind President Trump’s claims of voter rolls littered with noncitizens, saying its own review found more than 190,000 suspect names in California and 35,000 in New Jersey. DHS said it also identified nearly 16,000 names in Nevada and almost 15,000 in Pennsylvania that its review flagged as possible noncitizens. Secretary Markwayne Mullin sent letters to the secretaries of state in each of them, giving them a two-week deadline to work with him on plans to cleanse their lists. “Election security is national security,” he said Friday. “Only Americans should be electing American leaders.” Mr. Mullin was putting meat on the bones of Mr. Trump’s primetime speech Thursday, when he revealed the broad outlines of DHS’ new estimates. The department said it identified the potential noncitizens through a review of the four states’ public voter lists. Some 25 other states have worked with DHS, running their own voter lists through a department system for verifying citizenship and legal status. DHS says those 25 states have identified 28,000 potential noncitizens on their rolls, as well as more than 400,000 names of dead people. Texas ran its file and identified 2,296 noncitizens out of more than 18 million registered voters, or 1 in every 10,000. If that same rate applied to California, it would mean the state would have about 2,800 noncitizens on its rolls — far fewer than the 190,832 that DHS said it found in its “preliminary reviews.” The exact number was 35,152 for New Jersey, 15,903 for Nevada 15,903 and 14,576 for Pennsylvania. In the letter to Nevada, Mr. Mullin said DHS specifically identified 8,576 people whose names, dates of birth, addresses and Social Security numbers matched noncitizens listed in the federal department’s own files. The letter didn’t say what caused the other 7,000 names to be flagged.

Politico [7/17/2026 10:31 AM, Blake Jones and Lindsey Holden, 21050K] reports California Democrats forcefully rejected the Department of Homeland Security’s claim that 190,832 noncitizens are registered to vote in the state, arguing the administration offered no evidence to back up the explosive allegation. Trump’s “latest election conspiracy is nothing but a political stunt built on sham numbers that no one should trust,” Alex Padilla, California’s senior senator and former secretary of state, said in a statement. “DHS hasn’t explained how it arrived at these figures, how it obtained the underlying data, or whether any of these individuals are actually noncitizens who actually cast a ballot.” DHS Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said his agency found thousands of noncitizens on voter rolls in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania during a preliminary review and drafted a press release making the claim, John Sakellariadis and Maggie Miller reported on Thursday. The press release, which did not say whether there was any evidence of voting by non-citizens or explain how DHS reached its finding, was circulated inside the agency ahead of Trump’s planned prime time speech in which he had promised to reveal “really big news” on election security. The announcement immediately raised questions about what records DHS relied on. California has so far succeeded in stopping the Trump administration from accessing its voter rolls. A federal judge in January dismissed a lawsuit the Department of Justice filed against Secretary of State Shirley Weber after her agency wouldn’t turn over the records the administration requested. The DOJ has appealed the decision, and oral arguments took place before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in May. “The California Secretary of State has not sent the federal government our statewide voter registration list in any format,” said DeDee Verdin, a spokesperson for the Secretary of State’s Office, in an email. “We have successfully fought the U.S. DOJ’s unlawful demand for a copy of our entire [unredacted] statewide voter registration database.” “Given that no court has ruled in favor of U.S. DOJ’s efforts to access states’ unredacted voter rolls out of 15 cases that have reached a decision, we are optimistic that the Ninth Circuit will uphold the State’s ability to protect the sensitive information of California’s 23 million registered voters,” Verdin added. Trump alluded to that challenge in an address Thursday evening, claiming his administration’s estimate was likely an undercount because states had refused to hand over their voter rolls. He said DHS would hold a press conference today on the issue. Padilla said DHS’ “lack of transparency also raises serious questions about whether it violated state law to obtain California’s voter registration records.”

ABC News [7/17/2026 2:16 PM, Peter Charalambous, 99K] reports that newly-declassified documents touted by President Donald Trump during his address on election security Thursday cast doubt on some of his claims about "shocking vulnerabilities" in the country’s election infrastructure. While Trump claimed during his address that the nation’s election systems are vulnerable to "hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference," the intelligence reports released by the White House concluded overall that the main infrastructure used to conduct elections in the United States "would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to alter the election outcome." "Great damage has been done to our country. Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost," Trump said, without providing evidence. The documents noted that although some internet-connected election infrastructure -- like voter registration databases and pollbooks -- are vulnerable to cyberattacks, the systems used to tabulate, transmit, and display election results cannot be manipulated on a wide scale, and audits and paper trails "would uncover such efforts in the nearly all U.S. states." "We assess that hostile actors could also manipulate systems that count or tabulate votes -- such as voting machines -- on a localized basis, but it probably would be difficult to coordinate a campaign to alter voting results on a wide scale," said an August 2020 report from the National Intelligence Council. "Similarly, foreign actors would have difficulty coordinating a large scale campaign to manipulate mail-in voting, and robust postal tracking probably would detect any large-scale effort." [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

Breitbart [7/17/2026 5:19 PM, Warner Todd Huston, 2407K] reports President Trump is promising to focus even harder on truck driver licenses going to illegal migrants and the trucker schools that train them in the wake of the death of a Pennsylvania state trooper who was run down by a migrant trucker. Trump added that his administration is taking “historic action” to target illegal migrant truckers and to get them off the roadways. The president made his comments on Tuesday during the Pennsylvania Defense and Innovation Summit in Carlisle, where he cited the death of Pennsylvania State Trooper Michael Pahira. The trooper was killed when an illegal migrant from Haiti with a commercial truck driver’s license (CDL) issued by Massachusetts ran him down as he conducted a safety check of another vehicle on the side of Interstate 81 in Schuylkill County. One of the actions the Trump administration is conducting includes sanctions against the truck driver schools that are training these illegal migrants.

CNN [7/17/2026 6:00 AM, Susana Erazo, 24479K3] reports Oswadeliz Núñez remembers arguing with her son Daniel when he decided to get a tattoo when he was 24. About four years later, that tattoo helped her identify Daniel’s body after he was killed in the twin earthquakes that devastated Venezuela last month. Daniel had arrived back in Venezuela the day of the disaster, after being deported from the United States. From La Guaira, he called his mother from the phone of a Venezuelan intelligence service (SEBIN) officer, letting her know he was in the country. "He told me, ‘No, Mom, we’re here with SEBIN officers,’" Núñez told CNN. He told her he and other deportees had eaten, had medical examinations and were set to spend the night at a hotel in Macuto in La Guaira, while the administrative procedures for their repatriation were being completed. The following day, he would make the nearly seven-hour trip to the town of El Tigre to reunite with his mother. That reunion never happened. About 40 minutes after what would be his last call to his mother, the earth shook and the hotel he was in crumbled to the ground – trapping many of its inhabitants beneath the rubble. It’s not yet clear how many of Daniel’s fellow deportees were killed alongside him that day – unconfirmed reports suggest possibly as many as 12.
A spokesperson for the US Department of Homeland Security told CNN that the deportation flight arrived in Venezuela without incident and that all undocumented foreign nationals on board were returned to their country of origin. The spokesperson added that "once an individual is no longer in ICE custody, ICE is no longer responsible for that person.". Núñez – a lawyer herself – says her fight is far from over. She says she will continue speaking out on social media and plans to further her legal education so she can pursue justice over her son’s death.

FOX News [7/17/2026 9:12 AM, Peter D’Abrosca, 49054K] reports after Democrat Tim Walz doubled down on his move to pardon a foreign child rapist prior to his deportation, the State Department took another swing at the Minnesota governor in an escalating back-and-forth. The Minnesota Board of Pardons, comprised of Walz, state Attorney General Keith Ellison and state Chief Justice Natalie Hudson, granted clemency to Laotian national Tou Lue Vang, 42, on June 10. Vang was scheduled to be deported from the United States before the pardon. "Governor Walz’s pardon of a convicted foreign sex offender was a grave and unconscionable betrayal of the very people he is supposed to defend," State Department Assistant Secretary Dylan Johnson told Fox News Digital. "Walz’s plot to sacrifice the safety of Americans on the altar of open borders was thwarted by Secretary Rubio. Now this foreign criminal will never harm another American," he continued. Vang was convicted for repeatedly raping a 10-year-old girl between 2002 and 2004, and told authorities after he was arrested that "it is a cultural thing... to marry and have sex with girls as young as 12.". Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoked Vang’s visa earlier this month, and he was deported back to Laos.

Politico [7/17/2026 3:32 PM, Samuel Benson, 21050K] reports that, at the far end of a dock on the banks of the Potomac, past protesters yelling SHAME! and holding signs like DEPORT HATE NOT PEOPLE, up a ramp, across a gangway and up a flight of stairs, about 200 of the most hard-line, anti-immigration people in Washington boarded a boat Thursday afternoon. It was, they believed, time to party. The organizers of the event wanted to call it the U.S.S. Deportation, but no such boat was available, so they had to settle for renting out the Potomac Spirit — a massive, three-story yacht with open bars on every level that would attract lines throughout the evening. “Ahoy! This is the captain speaking,” piped a cheery voice, not emanating from an actual captain, but rather a video of a former DHS staffer in a captain’s hat. “Where are we going on this boat? Hopefully, to a political and policy destination of two commas in the deportation numbers.” The boozy gala attracted conservatives who have served in Congress, the Justice Department and ICE — all of whom share a goal of deporting an unprecedented 1 million-plus people a year. Former GOP Reps. Steve King and Tom Tancredo reminisced about their time as rabble-rousers in the House, like when King literally built a border wall on the House floor to demonstrate the government could, too. Scott Mechkowski, the former deputy ICE field director in New York, held court on the rooftop deck, trading battle stories about his two-and-a-half decades leading deportation operations. Jeffrey Clark, the former acting assistant attorney general, mingled with an entourage, some of them wearing multicolored leis and flipping through printed-out policy playbooks from the Mass Deportation Coalition, as the group calls itself. “To influence D.C., you need to speak the language of professional D.C.,” said Mike Howell, the brains behind the event. “One of the modes of language in D.C. is convening with some pomp and circumstance — and what better way to do that than on a boat, touring the sights and smells of Washington, D.C.?” Howell, a pugnacious lawyer with rosy cheeks and a well-coiffed comb-over, wore a captain’s hat for the evening, bouncing from floor to floor with a drink in hand. The Mass Deportation Coalition is largely his handiwork, a makeshift group of conservative power-players and organizations like his own Oversight Project, which earned a name in conservative circles going after the Biden administration. Other members include the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute, former acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan and former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince. Their goal is to pressure President Donald Trump into living up to his campaign promise to deport more people than any U.S. president in history. Like many of his fellow boaters, Howell had been frustrated with what he saw as Trump’s first-term failure to deliver the sweeping immigration enforcement he’d promised. He left a job at Homeland Security in Trump’s first term because “we weren’t building the wall,” he told me. Then Trump, emerging from the wilderness after his 2020 electoral defeat, returned with a red-meat campaign promise for hawks like Howell: deportations, and lots of them. “We’ll carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” Trump said at a rally in Iowa in September 2023, and then again and again, until it became a signature promise of his reelection bid and an arena full of delegates at the Republican National Convention waved signs reading MASS DEPORTATION NOW! Maybe this time, Howell and his folks thought, luck would be different: Every Republican in Washington would see the urgency, and every spineless special interest would confess that this is what American voters really want.

USA Today [7/18/2026 12:05 AM, Jon Arnold, 68151K] reports Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum is planning to accept an invitation from United States President Donald Trump to attend the World Cup final this weekend, she told reporters in Mexico. "I received an invitation from President Trump to go Sunday to the final of the World Cup. I made the decision, yes, to go because, well, it’s a direct invitation from the president of the United States," Sheinbaum said Friday, July 17 after an event in the coastal state of Quintana Roo. "(Canada) Prime Minister (Mark) Carney also will be there. Tomorrow I’m going to record a message with more details, tomorrow afternoon." The president said she would be back Monday morning to resume her normal duties. It will be the first World Cup match Sheinbaum attends, after she opted to give her ticket to the inaugural match in Mexico City on June 11 to an indigenous girl who plays soccer. Sheinbaum did go to at least two fan festival events during Mexico national team games. The World Cup took place across the three North American countries with the event serving as something of a bridge between the neighbors with a tense relationship. Sheinbaum first met Trump in person at events surrounding the World Cup draw in December 2025, with all three heads of state selecting their nations at the Kennedy Center. Sheinbaum announced this month that she planned to seek legal action in the U.S. courts after a number of Mexican nationals died in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The country’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs announced further details on July 14, saying it will take complaints to the U.S. Department of Justice and individual states’ attorneys general. It also has sent cease and desist letters to detention centers where Mexican nationals have died and sent a letter to Volker Türk, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, asking him to investigate. Trump’s presence at the World Cup final has long been planned, with more confirmations coming this week. Alongside FIFA president Gianni Infantino, the U.S. president is expected to award the trophy to the winning team. That team will be either Argentina or Spain, with the match scheduled to kick off at 3 p.m. ET on Sunday, July 19 at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.

New York Post [7/17/2026 8:20 PM, Staff, 35043K] reports that, piling insult upon insult, Columbia anti-Israel agitator Mahmoud Khalil last week reminded everyone that he still hasn’t been deported — by filing a lawsuit that basically says the drive to send him home is . . . a Jewish conspiracy. Yep: His suit accuses “several avowedly anti-Palestinian private actors and high-level federal government officials” of “jointly carrying out a conspiracy” against him and other terror-lovers. The supposed conspirators: Canary Mission, a group dedicated to fighting antisemitism, Betar, a Zionist group with an emphasis on Jewish self-defense, and the Heritage Foundation. They all work on Project Esther — which aims to educate the US public about how what masquerades as pro-Palestinian advocacy is really nothing more than Jew-hate and support for terrorist violence. Somehow, the suit claims, this is really about targeting such advocates “for federal officials to punish, after doxxing and publicly smearing them as antisemitic and supportive of terrorism.” Even the pro-Hamas New York Times, which recently published a lunatic claim that Israel trains dogs to rape Palestinians, characterizes this legal argument as a reach. Then again, legal reach after legal reach is why Khalil is still in this country, and not even detained by ICE — even though he was hit with a final deportation order in April. Why? The next month, the Third Circuit refused to hear arguments that he should go free until all his litigation is resolved, but granted a stay pending Supreme Court review of its decision. It remains outrageous that Khalil has managed to remain in the United States as long as he has. He’s been here since 2022 on a student visa; after Oct. 7, 2023, he threw in his lot with the savages of Hamas in the Columbia tentifada, regularly making the media rounds to blame the victims. Last year, the State Department acted to remove him (under the authority granted by the Immigration and Nationality Act), charging he’d committed immigration fraud in his 2024 application to change his visa status. Specifically, he’d failed to mention his volunteer work for the (Hamas-aligned) UN Relief and Works Agency, long aligned with Hamas, and his association with Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which took openly anti-American positions.

FOX News [7/17/2026 7:00 AM, Staff, 49054K] reports the overwhelming majority of Americans instinctively grasp that illegal immigration undermines rule of law, hurts American workers and erodes our way of life. Now, more and more people are waking up to the disturbing reality that our sprawling web of legal immigration programs is just as bad, if not worse, than illegal immigration for many hardworking Americans. We need a complete overhaul of the legal migration system, which is enabling Big Tech companies and countless other American corporations to quietly replace American workers with visa-sponsored immigrants. That starts with confronting the H-1B program head-on. H-1B has been marketed to Americans as a tightly enforced, rigorously vetted, merit-based system that admits only the world’s best and brightest for highly skilled jobs that few Americans can do. In reality, it is a loosely monitored system that allows cheap and often entry-level workers to occupy jobs that Americans would gladly fill. The numbers bear this out. Last year, for example, the Department of Homeland Security reported that 83% of H-1B visas petitioned for between 2020 and 2024 were for entry and junior level employees with salaries set well below the local median wage. This March, the Department of Labor found that the minimum wages employers are required to pay H-1B workers are set $19,000 lower than what U.S. workers earn in the same occupations and locations. The OPT program is arguably an even more egregious abuse of our immigration system.

New York Times [7/17/2026 5:32 AM, Andrea R. Flores, 158614K] reports he was a construction worker, a husband and a father of three. He had also been living in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for over 35 years. On the morning of Tuesday, July 7, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was driving to work in Houston when he was stopped by federal agents during an Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation and shot in the abdomen. He died hours later at the hospital. Officials from the Department of Homeland Security claim that the agent who fired his weapon was acting in self-defense. But many Latinos see it another way: “We are being hunted like dogs,” said one Latino resident of Houston. As a Mexican American lawyer and policy expert who has spent my career trying to fix our immigration system, I view Mr. Araujo’s killing as a tragic failure. For decades, our country has refused to recognize and protect millions of people like him: undocumented immigrants with deep ties to this country who have waited decades for Congress to create a path to earn legal status as they work, pay taxes and support our economy. Latinos in America are in a crisis. Less than a week after Mr. Araujo’s killing, a Colombian immigrant named Joan Sebastian Guerrero was also killed by a federal immigration agent. We are being racially profiled, wrongfully arrested, detained and separated from our families. Every Latino, from the undocumented to those with legal status to longtime U.S. citizens, is threatened by President Trump’s immigration enforcement machine. Many people, including me, do not leave home without a passport. But Mr. Trump was put into power with the help of the largest share of Latino voters of any Republican president. While a majority of Latino voters supported Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, 46 percent of Latino voters chose Mr. Trump. Latinos shifted toward Republicans by more than 20 points in key states like Nevada and Michigan. The ICE operation that led to Mr. Araujo’s death was in Texas, where Mr. Trump won Latino voters by a 10-point margin.

Houston Chronicle [7/17/2026 2:20 PM, Bill King, 2399K] reports that on Thursday evening, President Donald Trump delivered a national address in which he cited a Department of Homeland Security report finding that approximately 278,000 non-citizens were registered to vote in 14 states. That may sound like a real threat to our elections. The reality is much more mundane. First, neither Trump nor the DHS presented any evidence that any of the people alleged not to be citizens have ever actually voted in any election. Second, 278,000 people is not actually a large number of voters. Even if all the individuals identified in the DHS report are not citizens, they would make up less than 0.3 percent of all voter registrations in those states. Even if all those noncitizen voters cast their ballots, had their ballots counted, and voted for the same exact candidates, it is highly unlikely they would be able to affect the outcome of any election, let alone a presidential election. And even if all of that did happen, there’s no evidence that it ended up hurting Trump. In 2024, Trump actually won two of the states (Pennsylvania and Nevada) that DHS most heavily criticized. The purpose of the DHS report is to encourage states to use its SAVE system (not to be confused with the Save America Act), which was initially designed to help states identify noncitizens and determine eligibility for various public benefits. The Trump administration expanded the scope of the system, adding Social Security and other databases, and started pushing states to use it to find noncitizens on their voter rolls. No one will deny that voter rolls in many states are a mess. For example, Texas’ voting rolls are notoriously disordered, primarily because of the bifurcated system between the state and county voter registrars. Using the SAVE system can help clean up those voter rolls.

FOX News [7/17/2026 7:36 PM, Rebeccah Heinrichs, 49054K] reports the president of the United States, appearing visibly angry in a primetime address to the nation on Thursday night, told the American people that China has been aggressively meddling in our elections. The claims were eye-popping, and the debate about how to better secure American voting procedures and maintain a free and fair press will continue. But there’s another burning question Americans should be asking: What is the United States of America going to do about China now? One of the most obvious and immediate actions would be to revoke the president’s decision to welcome huge numbers of Chinese students to American universities. On Thursday, the day of the president’s address, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would be tightening restrictions on foreign student visas. But after the president’s speech, there’s no question there should be major reductions in Chinese student visas — and fast. Trump said China stole millions of files on American voters with the goal of influencing the 2020 presidential election. The stolen election data includes names, addresses, phone numbers, political affiliations and other voter-registration information. Universities are fertile ground for groundbreaking research and technology and present enormous espionage opportunities. Trump also claimed China sought to influence business leaders to abandon their support for Trump’s presidential bid and to identify American journalists who had reported negatively on his presidency. China then allegedly offered the journalists large sums of money to increase their negative reporting in hopes of undermining Trump’s reelection campaign. It will take weeks and months to flesh out the president’s claims and verify them independently, but the White House made public the heavily redacted intelligence documents that allegedly support them. It is imperative that our electoral system be safe and secure, as must the private information of American citizens. Voters should also be confident that they can vote safely, that each vote will be counted fairly and that the outcome of the election accurately represents the views of American citizens. No business leader or journalist, if this claim is verified, should be bribed to support or work against any American candidate in the service of America’s enemies. At the same time, the United States should take every reasonable measure to thwart obvious Chinese intelligence collection operations and explain that those measures are a direct response to China’s exploitation and abuse of America’s open society. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

Washington Post [7/17/2026 8:15 AM, Emmanuel Martinez, 27701K] reports through the first 12 days of July, ICE is on pace to arrest the most people in a single month during the second Trump administration, according to agency detainment data shared to Congress and reviewed by The Post. Arrests have surged in the last few weeks, with the daily average rising to more than 1,400 people amid a renewed push from the White House to increase arrests across the country. President Donald Trump is seeking to deport 1 million undocumented immigrants per year, portraying them as criminals and a drain on U.S. communities. The number of people arrested by ICE and sent into detention facilities in June totaled more than 39,500. That surpasses the previous high from last December. At the current pace, July’s total would exceed June’s. The recent spike of arrests comes amid the federal agency shooting and killing two people in Houston and Maine in the span of six days. A third person died on Tuesday when he was hit by a truck while fleeing agents in Florida. ICE arrests dropped in February after the agency in January fatally shot two people in Minneapolis, but have consistently climbed every month since then. ICE earlier this month topped 2,000 arrests per day several times, a DHS official said, after setting that figure as a daily arrest target. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal information not authorized for release. ICE arrests have increased by more than 40 percent between this year and the same period last year.

Breitbart [7/17/2026 4:14 PM, Neil Munro, 2407K] reports the Department of Homeland Security is visiting worksites to check for illegals, "but I want more," border czar Tom Homan told the Center for Immigration Studies. But Krikorian noted that ICE is doing few worksite enforcement operations amid a strong pushback by employers and investors: "We’re not seeing it." Other government agencies are using their powers to quietly push migrants homeward by excluding them from American housing, bank accounts, loans, schools, and welfare programs.

New York Times [7/17/2026 2:16 PM, Madeleine Ngo, Madeleine Ngo covers immigration and economic policy for The Times., 158614K] reports that Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, staunchly defended the president’s immigration crackdown and vowed to keep up the arrest rate on Friday, days after two fatal shootings by federal officers drew public backlash. “We’re turning up the heat on the streets,” Mr. Mullin told reporters at a news conference focused on election security. “We’re out there working harder than we ever have.” Mr. Mullin made clear that he and President Trump were on the same page and that he would seek to deliver on his boss’s promise of mass deportations. The display of loyalty came after Mr. Trump publicly demanded that immigration officers continue to stop vehicles as part of enforcement, just a day after the Homeland Security Department halted the practice in response to the two recent shootings in Texas and Maine. “The president and I are very close,” Mr. Mullin said. “There’s no daylight between us and the enforcement.” Mr. Mullin declined to answer questions about the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers who fatally shot one person in Houston and another in Biddeford, Maine, during traffic stops in the span of one week. Those shootings came amid a recent surge in immigration arrests across the country. Asked about an Associated Press article identifying a man as the ICE officer involved in the Maine shooting and reporting a history of violent behavior, Mr. Mullin said he had “not heard that at all.” The New York Times has not confirmed that the officer identified in the article was responsible for the shooting.

Washington Examiner [7/17/2026 1:07 PM, Claire Carter, 1235K] reports that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to "turn up the heat" with traffic stops following confusion with the White House about whether vehicle stops would continue. Mullin hosted a press conference on Friday meant to focus on election security, but the department head faced questions about ICE operations following two officer-involved shootings of illegal immigrants in one week. He was asked if ICE officers would face consequences if they violate the Department of Homeland Security’s use-of-force policy and change course on how officers conduct immigration enforcement. "When I say, ‘turn down the temperature,’ I turn down the temperature with you guys," Mullin said, pointing at reporters. "We’re turning up the heat on the streets. We’re out there working harder than we ever have because we’ve empowered our law enforcement to do their job." On Wednesday, acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis called on "sanctuary politicians, agitators, and the media to turn the temperature down" regarding the rhetoric about ICE, which she claimed is "fueling vehicle attacks against federal officers." In both ICE-involved shootings in Maine and Texas, the agency said the deceased were attempting to "weaponize" their vehicles. Mullin disputed the idea that whether ICE officers will face consequences following shootings is in question. "What I’m trying to do is remove us from the headlines every single day," he said. "I don’t pick and choose which laws I’m going to enforce. I enforce our nation’s laws. That means I’ll enforce it with our own agency, and I’ll enforce it with the criminals on the streets."

Daily Wire [7/17/2026 9:19 AM, Jennie Taer, 2441K] reports that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin won’t say whether he briefed President Donald Trump before briefly pausing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) traffic stops in the wake of two recent fatal shootings. During a Friday briefing on the department’s efforts to clean up the voter rolls of noncitizens, Daily Wire White House Correspondent Mary Margaret Olohan asked Mullin to clarify if he informed Trump before suspending ICE traffic stops. “The president and I are very close. I was texting with him this morning,” Mullin said. “There’s no daylight between us and the enforcement. In fact, we have ramped up our enforcement in our arresting illegals.” Mullin then redirected the conversation to arrest and deportation data. “Our arrests are up, we’re hitting single-day records every single day, but what we’ve done is I’ve turned down the temperature of the stove to try to get it correct without boiling over,” he said. ICE sources also questioned whether Mullin informed Trump before enacting the pause. “Not sure how they don’t consult Trump about this before they send out guidance to every field office,” one agency source said. White House border czar Tom Homan on Tuesday credited Mullin with deciding to cease the tactic, emphasizing that it was a “temporary” measure, not “a policy change.” [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

FOX News [7/17/2026 8:55 AM, Peter Pinedo, 49054K] Audio: HERE reports following a week of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) vehicle stops making national headlines, a federal special agent working in deportations revealed why vehicle stops are a "very important" part of the agency’s operations. After the second ICE officer-involved shooting in a week took place in Maine on Monday, agents nationwide were given guidance to pause vehicle stops until further notice. That guidance, however, was overruled by President Donald Trump on Wednesday, who called vehicle stops "one of ICE’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools.". Though controversial, the agent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said vehicle stops are actually the preferred tactic for many officers, because they are safer for both law enforcement and the subject than home apprehensions, and they allow more time to identify the target than street apprehensions. Perhaps most notably, while vehicle stops have been widely criticized, the agent explained that they decrease "collateral" arrests, which they said are the apprehension of illegal immigrants who were not the target of the operation but were "at the wrong place at the right time." "[Vehicle stops] lead to a higher success rate in apprehending the target that they [ICE officers] are looking for and not getting the collateral. The collateral is the person that we’re not looking for, but we encounter, and they deem them as having no legal presence and/or illegal; therefore, they are going to have an admin arrest done on them." The agent said vehicle stops are a "daily" part of ICE’s operations. They described the stops as a critical "tool in the toolbox" for federal officers working on deportation operations. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

Reuters [7/17/2026 4:07 PM, Jonathan Allen and Kristina Cooke, 46493K] reports as U.S. President Donald Trump has ramped up deportation efforts during his second term, on-duty federal immigration agents have shot and killed at least seven people -- leaving behind grieving families, angry communities and calls for reform.

Univision [7/17/2026 6:13 PM, Staff, 5877K] reports since July 7, the US has been experiencing a dark week. Three migrants have died in operations carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. At least 10 people have died in encounters with immigration agents since Donald Trump returned to the White House. In the case of the death of Colombian Johan Sebastian Guerrero, in Biddeford (Maine) on July 13, it has been revealed that the officer who shot him had a history of domestic violence. Although he has not yet been officially identified by the agency, he is believed to be David Brouillette, 37, an army veteran. His ex-wife stated that he had mental health issues and that he was violent towards her. The question many are now asking is: who oversees ICE? Who ensures that its agents are properly trained and have clean records? ICE spokeswoman Lauren Bis said in a statement that "we will never confirm or deny attempts to reveal the identity of our law enforcement officers" and that "the ICE agent in question has nearly a decade of experience in federal law enforcement with the required training, including use-of-force training." The agency, which reports to the DHS, told N+Univision that they have extended the training for new agents from 42 to 71 days. Regarding the fact that the agents involved in the deaths of migrants were not wearing cameras, they justify that it is the responsibility of the Democrats who did not vote for the budget increase. However, they did not specify how they guarantee transparent and independent investigations or what disciplinary measures they take against agents whose behavior is investigated.

New York Times [7/18/2026 5:00 AM, Mike McIntire, Danny Hakim, Alexandra Berzon, Jazmine Ulloa, and Lauren McCarthy, 158614K] reports in its nationwide immigration crackdown, the Trump administration has charged hundreds of people with assaulting or impeding federal agents. President Trump has branded them “insurrectionists,” “animals” and “thugs,” part of a broader effort by his administration to cast protesters and immigrants as violent criminals. But a close examination of those cases reveals that in its rush to meet White House demands for deportations, federal law enforcement has engaged in extensive misconduct — ranging from attacking protesters to destroying evidence and misrepresenting facts in court. The New York Times found that the Trump administration has filed assault charges against more than 550 people who were caught in its immigration dragnet — far more than previously known. Of the more than 400 cases resolved so far, nearly half have unraveled: Juries acquitted defendants, judges threw out charges, or prosecutors withdrew them. The record is abysmal by the typical standards of federal prosecutions: The Justice Department seldom loses criminal cases, with more than 90 percent of defendants pleading guilty or being convicted at trial. The Times obtained court filings for every assault case and reviewed hearing transcripts, interviewed witnesses and federal officials and watched videos of dozens of encounters that led to criminal charges. The review, the most comprehensive to date, suggests that the administration’s use of the law has often been less about protecting federal agents than about providing legal cover to cow protesters and immigrants into submission.

NPR [7/17/2026 7:32 PM, Jude Joffe-Block, 27980K] reports that, after Medicaid officials improperly shared data about millions of people in January with immigration officials, ICE then shared that data with the data analytics firm Palantir, according to new court filings. Palantir operates an app called ELITE that is used by ICE agents to show the addresses of noncitizens who may be subject to deportation. That revelation was made public in a motion filed Thursday by more than 20 Democratic attorneys general who sued the Trump administration last year over its data-sharing agreement between the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and ICE. U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in California ruled in December that health officials could share with ICE certain details from Medicaid data about immigrants without lawful status from the states that had sued, such as home addresses, dates of birth and immigration status. Chhabria, who was appointed by former President Obama, then temporarily paused data sharing between CMS and ICE for immigration enforcement purposes in late May after federal officials admitted CMS had shared data with ICE in January that went beyond what the court order allowed. One dataset of refugees in Minnesota included U.S. citizens, and another that was transferred on Jan. 7 contained data of millions of people, including those in the country legally. ICE was supposed to delete the improperly shared data. Chhabria set a hearing for August to further clarify his order and clear up ambiguity regarding which categories of noncitizens’ data could be lawfully shared with ICE. But in recent days, federal officials have admitted to additional instances of improper data sharing. In a court filing last week, the Justice Department said that CMS again inadvertently reshared with ICE the dataset with millions of names that CMS had first improperly shared with ICE in January. The government said the error occurred during an effort to share data from states not involved in the lawsuit. Alberto Briseno, a section chief for ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, wrote in a declaration that ICE personnel deleted the file after it was discovered and it was not used for law enforcement purposes. Then Briseno revealed that a day later, the agency had done a broader search and discovered that half a dozen users still had a copy of the Jan. 7 dataset. In that most recent declaration, Briseno said he was not aware of any additional copies of the dataset, but said the recent searches have "highlighted technological difficulties of making a representation that every possible variation of the file has been searched for and located." He added, "ICE will continue to make good faith efforts to delete any copies that may be found in the future.” Meanwhile, the Department of Justice is asking the judge to expand his order to allow ICE to receive data on a broader category of noncitizens – to potentially include all immigrants who are not legal permanent residents, citizens or have another form of permanent status. "ICE’s inability to identify Medicaid records in its possession undercuts any claim that the agency should be entitled to more access to that data," the Democratic attorneys generals wrote in their motion filed late Thursday.

Breitbart [7/17/2026 10:48 PM, Pam Key, 2407K] reports that, Friday on MS NOW’s “All In,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) said President Donald Trump had unleashed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which he said has turned into “renegade, terrorist army.” Host Chris Hayes said, “I know that today you’re in Biddeford, Maine. Since I have you here, we’ll be covering this a bit later in the show, covering the aftermath of that ICE shooting of, a young man, father and husband, who was killed and that traffic stop. I’m curious what you’ve heard from the folks you’ve talked to in the in the aftermath there. I know there’s a lot of outrage and a lot of anger.” Markey said, “Yeah. I spent the day here in Biddeford, Maine, where John Guerrero was murdered by ICE agents. And Biddeford is in mourning. But they’re also angry and justifiably angry because they’re not getting the answers to the questions as to how such a heinous act could be committed on the streets of Biddeford or any other place in our country. And so I was at a rally here today, hundreds of people, calling for the abolition of ICE, the defunding of ICE, to keep ICE out of Biddeford, out of Maine, out of the United States of America. And I just think that, Biddeford, in a lot of ways, is now representative of what’s happening across our country because people can see this, renegade, terrorist army, that is being deployed by Trump, in which he now threatens to deploy, on Election Day in communities and states all across our country. And I just think that, there is there’s a cultural revolution that is, that is right now being constructed across our country. I saw it in Biddeford today. I came to tell them that Massachusetts mourns with them, but we’re also just as angry as they are about this unnecessary loss of life of an immigrant who was a father, who was a husband, and who was an immigrant just working hard up here in Maine and all across our country, there’s a reign of terror, that Trump has unleashed against the Guerrero family but millions of other families as well.”

New York Times [7/18/2026 5:02 AM, Jenna Russell, Pooja Salhotra, and Jacey Fortin, 158614K] reports a federal immigration agent told his former wife that he was the person who fatally shot a Colombian immigrant in Maine this week and defended his actions to her, the ex-wife said. The woman, Ashley Brouillette, identified the agent as David Brouillette, 37, in an interview on Thursday. She said that when she spoke to him on Wednesday about the shooting, Mr. Brouillette said that it was justified. He told her not to talk to anyone about him, she said, but then asked her to defend his character. “He said, ‘You need to tell them I’m a good person,’” she recalled Mr. Brouillette saying, adding that he asked her not to tell anyone that he had abused her during their marriage. “I told him that I wouldn’t lie for him,” Ms. Brouillette, 37, said. The Department of Homeland Security has not released the name of the shooter, and a spokeswoman for the agency declined to confirm whether Mr. Brouillette had fired the fatal shots, saying that publicizing agents’ names puts them at risk. Ms. Brouillette said she had spoken to her ex-husband about the shooting and had also seen video and images of him at the scene. Two other people — one a relative who asked not to be identified and another a high school friend of Mr. Brouillette’s — said they also recognized him from video footage and witness photos, but could not confirm that he was the person who fired the fatal shots. No video shedding light on who fired the fatal shot on Monday has emerged. But one video recorded just after the shooting appears to show another agent consoling Mr. Brouillette.

CBS News [7/17/2026 12:32 PM, Staff, 53111K] reports that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who shot a Colombian man in Maine this week is an Army veteran who has struggled with serious mental health issues since early childhood and never should have been given a badge and gun to patrol American streets, several of his close relatives told The Associated Press. David Brouillette, 37, has a history of terrifying and violent behavior, according to those relatives. They accuse him of attacking women in his life over the years, and one shared a voicemail with the AP from last winter in which he told her that he thought someone should slit her throat. CBS News also spoke with one of those relatives, his ex-wife Ashley Brouillette, who said that given his history, she didn’t believe him when he told her last November that he’d been hired by ICE. "I don’t understand how he keeps getting these jobs where there are firearms involved. He’s a danger to society. He’s a danger to people and to himself," she said. "And I just don’t understand how he keeps getting away with it.". David Brouillette’s troubling past further challenges how thoroughly the Department of Homeland Security has vetted recruits as it went on a hiring spree to help carry out President Trump’s immigration crackdown. DHS, which hasn’t released the name of the officer who killed Durán Guerrero, has said the "vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon." Brouillette didn’t respond to text messages or an email seeking comment. When reached for comment about Brouillette’s record and his role in Monday’s shooting, ICE spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement that, "We will never confirm or deny attempts to dox our law enforcement officers," and that "The ICE officer in question has nearly a decade of federal law enforcement experience with required training including use of force training." The White House referred all questions about the shooting and Brouillette to ICE.

The Hill [7/17/2026 12:10 PM, Finya Swai, 21549K] reports that Democratic lawmakers are pressing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for answers about the agency’s vetting and training for immigration enforcement officers after the recent fatal shooting by an officer in Maine. David Brouillette, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer who fatally wounded Colombian national Johan Sebastián Guerrero on Monday, has a history of violent behavior and mental health issues. Close relatives to Brouillette told The Associated Press that the Army veteran had struggled with serious mental health issues since early childhood. Rep. Bennie Thompson (Miss.), the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, told the AP that the officer’s mental health history coupled with the shooting in Maine “directly call into question the supposed vetting and training ICE does of its recruits.” “This senseless tragedy must be investigated and the officer responsible should be taken off our streets and face justice for his actions,” he added. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) echoed the concerns, accusing the Trump administration and Republicans of prioritizing a hiring spree in ICE without adequate safeguards — at the cost of lives. “The Trump administration rushed 12,000 agents onto our streets without ensuring they were fit to carry a badge and a gun — and Republicans gave this rogue agency vast power and no accountability,” Schumer told the AP. “They empowered ICE. Now they must work with us to prevent more killings.”

USA Today [7/17/2026 1:46 PM, Jeanine Santucci, 68151K] reports that the man fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Maine earlier this week was a hard worker devoted to his family, his partner said in her first public statement since his death. Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, 25, a Colombian national, was shot and killed the morning of July 13 in Biddeford, Maine, about 15 miles south of Portland. Federal authorities said he tried to flee an attempted stop of his vehicle and an ICE officer fired after "fearing for public safety." The most recent shooting by an ICE officer has sparked outrage and renewed scrutiny over immigration enforcement tactics, coming just days after the fatal shooting of a Mexican man in Houston, Texas, by another ICE officer. "He always dreamed big and he had so many dreams left to fulfill. He was always happy and his joy was contagious. He loved to work and he couldn’t stand sitting still. From the moment we met, we were never separated again," said Karolina Rojas, Guerrero’s partner. The lawyer representing his family, Benjamin Gideon, said on July 16 that Guerrero had never been accused of a crime and there were no reports of any threat to safety justifying the officers’ presence the morning he was shot. He said officials have "admitted" that Guerrero was not the target of the officers’ operation, something Sen. Angus King, an independent representing Maine, has also said. In response, a DHS spokesperson told USA TODAY in a statement that he entered the country illegally on Sept. 1, 2023, at the southern border and was "released into the country under the Biden Administration." The spokesperson said work authorization does not confer legal status.

New York Post [7/17/2026 1:07 PM, Chris Nesi, 35043K] reports that the Department of Homeland Security has revealed what is in store for the Canadian woman accused of pummeling a patriotic teenager at the Jersey Shore on Fourth of July weekend. Kaitlyn Tracey, 33, a Canadian national, is currently in custody at Delaney Hall immigrant detention center in Newark, New Jersey, after the alleged July 3 beatdown at Point Pleasant Beach. She arrived in the US in 2024 using her passport but overstayed her visa, officials said. "This illegal alien who assaulted a teenager has no business being in our country," DHS wrote in a statement on X, dubbing her a "maple leaf menace." "She is now in [ICE] custody pending REMOVAL from our nation," the agency’s statement concludes. DHS also shared a widely circulating clip showing the incident, in which Tracey appears to be seen approaching a younger-looking woman wearing a "USA 250" tank top and delivering two rapid-fire blows. She was arrested on Monday and charged with endangering the welfare of a child, simple assault, harassment and obstruction, according to court records viewed by The Post. Tracey was briefly held at the Ocean County jail before ICE took custody and brought her to Delaney Hall. Tracey had been living in Asbury Park with her Trump-hating American husband, Matthew Geroni, who has been clamoring to have her released from the now-infamous detention facility that became the site of violent clashes between anti-ICE protesters and cops in recent weeks.

CNN [7/18/2026 6:01 AM, Shimon Prokupecz and Nicki Brown, 24479K3] reports in the early morning of July 1, federal immigration officers in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, pulled over a white SUV. An unmarked Immigration and Customs Enforcement car stopped in front of the SUV to block its path, while other law enforcement vehicles parked behind it, according to surveillance video obtained by CNN affiliate WGAL. “Get out of the car now,” one officer said after he approached the driver’s side. When the driver did not emerge after officers repeatedly ordered him out of the SUV, an officer shattered the window. The SUV then drove away, appearing to clip the ICE vehicle stopped in front of it before turning the wrong way down a one-way street. One ICE officer fired his gun as the SUV drove away from the officers and hit a parked car. In a statement, an ICE spokesperson said the driver – who the agency said had a criminal history of assault, hit-and-run, and a domestic incident – had “weaponized his car and rammed an ICE law enforcement vehicle.” An ICE officer discharged his weapon, and the driver escaped, the statement said. It’s the latest example of how surveillance footage can undermine the government’s public statements, and a law enforcement expert told CNN it clearly demonstrates some of the poor tactics being used by ICE officers. The officers missed multiple opportunities to conduct the car stop more safely, he said, likely due to their inexperience handling such situations – which could be contributing to similar confrontations across the country.

Newsweek [7/17/2026 5:41 AM, Billal Rahman, 52220K] reports a federal judge in Michigan admonished the Trump administration’s Department of Justice after finding that a legal filing in an immigration detention case appeared to cite a nonexistent court decision, suggesting the citation was likely generated by artificial intelligence, according to court filings. Chief U.S. District Judge Hala Y. Jarbou of the Western District of Michigan raised the issue on July 16 in a 3-page order in a habeas corpus case brought by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainee challenging the government’s automatic stay of a bond order. The judge, a Trump appointee, ultimately dismissed the case as moot after the stay expired and the government said Izzeddin Ahmed Abdulgahffar Daghra could be released upon posting a $35,000 bond, per the filings.

Chicago Tribune [7/17/2026 11:00 AM, Jake Sheridan, 4756K] reports Ald. Bill Conway has joined the chorus of Chicago aldermen criticizing the company trying to buy the city’s parking meter system for owning a company tied to President Donald Trump’s deportation machine. But the downtown alderman has his own financial stake in the contractor that runs U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s biggest detention camp, records show. Conway has a multimillion-dollar stake in GrizzlyRock Capital LLC, a private investment firm run by a friend that has $7.5 million invested in Amentum Holdings, a massive government contractor that now runs Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas, according to a Tribune analysis. It’s similar to the financial tie the moderate alderman has already criticized — and a connection that highlights the far-reaching economic web at many of the largest financial institutions in the world that undergirds Trump’s deportation efforts. In a statement to the Tribune, a Conway spokesperson said the 34th Ward alderman had been unaware of the GrizzlyRock investment in Amentum and has no role in monitoring the around 50 companies in which GrizzlyRock invests. GrizzyRock owns 0.12% of the government contractor, the statement said. “After learning of the investment, Ald. Conway recommended that GrizzlyRock sell their shares because they should not be invested in a company helping carry out the Trump administration’s reprehensible immigration actions. GrizzlyRock makes their decisions independently,” the statement said. “Ald. Conway remains opposed to the parking meter deal. As he has said, Stonepeak’s business relationship with ICE is one of several factors he considered in evaluating the proposal for taxpayers,” it continued.

Chicago Tribune [7/17/2026 6:35 PM, Jake Sheridan, 4756K] reports aldermen called on the Chicago Police Department and Mayor Brandon Johnson Friday to do more in response to President Donald Trump’s deportation efforts, pushing to spark investigations into complaints against federal immigration agents. Ald. Andre Vasquez zeroed in on how Johnson’s January executive order aimed at facilitating the investigations is being implemented, insisting the city still needs "a clear process for how to investigate and hold accountable the people who are murdering our neighbors without consequence." As they faced questions, top Johnson deputies highlighted the many efforts to resist Trump and ICE undertaken by the mayor, who was a vocal objector to the president’s "Operation Midway Blitz" last fall and repeatedly filed lawsuits to try to block the president’s plans.

AP [7/17/2026 8:24 PM, Safiyah Riddle, 2407K] reports a federal prosecutor in Texas has shared new details about the shooting of Mexican national Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by an ICE officer in early July. A federal prosecutor in Texas shared new details Thursday evening about the moments before an immigration officer shot and killed a Mexican national and longtime U.S. resident in early July. The disclosure complicates the government’s earlier claim that the man struck an ICE vehicle before he was shot. A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, on July 7 as he was driving to a Houston construction job site with three co-workers, one of whom was his brother. The shooting sparked protests in the sprawling Texas city, echoing Salgado Araujo’s family’s calls for transparency. The family describes him as a hardworking father very close to obtaining legal status in the U.S. after living in the country for 35 years. The shooting came just days before two other men in Florida and Maine died as part of President Donald Trump’s federal immigration crackdown, renewing scrutiny on the Department of Homeland Security’s law enforcement tactics. Aaron Reitz, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, said for the first time on Thursday that ICE officers were targeting two Guatemalan men who were potentially subject to deportation. He said they were driving a van similar to the one Salgado Araujo was driving when he was killed. In an earlier statement released the day Salgado Araujo was killed, DHS said he was targeted in an immigration enforcement operation, and he was living in the country without legal permission. Reitz also said that the officers believed that Salgado Araujo and the passengers in his car fit the description of the Guatemalan men the agents were looking for. Four officers driving two separate law enforcement vehicles attempted to pull over Salgado Araujo’s van using their police lights. Salgado Araujo then made a U-turn and drove over a median to evade getting pulled over, Reitz said. Later that morning, the officers again encountered Salgado Araujo’s van and for the second time tried to pull him over, this time effectively surrounding the vehicle, Reitz said. Two of the four agents got out of their cars and told Salgado Araujo to put the vehicle in park. Just before he was shot, one of the agents was "partially inside the van or immediately next to it" when Salgado Araujo tried to reverse and then drive forward again, Reitz said. An earlier DHS statement accused Salgado Araujo of weaponizing his vehicle. The agency said he rammed his van into a law enforcement vehicle and said an officer opened fire in self-defense. The most recent statement from the U.S attorney’s office, however, didn’t mention any collision between Salgado Araujo’s van and a law enforcement vehicle. It also didn’t explicitly say that the officer feared for his life. There are no reported injuries for the officers involved. The latest statement didn’t name the officer who killed Salgado Araujo, nor did it specify if the officer who fired the shot was the same person who was next to, or partially inside, the van.

Breitbart [7/17/2026 10:12 AM, Bob Price, 2407K] reports the newly appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas, Aaron Reitz, revealed shocking information about the fatal shooting of a Mexican illegal alien by an ICE officer in Houston last week. Reitz announced that investigators found drugs inside the van that was fleeing from ICE and that it was the second attempt to flee from officers. U.S. Attorney Reitz announced on Thursday that the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas were investigating the alleged assault on ICE officers with a fleeing vehicle and the subsequent shooting death of the Mexican national.

New York Times [7/18/2026 3:37 AM, J. David Goodman, 330K] reports small bags inside a van whose driver was killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent contained salt, not drugs, said a lawyer for a witness, contradicting federal agents. Investigators with the F.B.I. got a warrant to search the van on Tuesday after telling a federal judge they believed that a “crystal-like” substance in the plastic bags might be methamphetamine. On Thursday, Ruby Powers, a lawyer for Victor Hugo Salgado Araujo, who is the victim’s younger brother and was a passenger in the van, said in a statement that “after consulting with my client and his family, our understanding is that this was granulated salt.” Like other construction workers, her client and his brother would mix the salt into water and add lemon as a kind of homemade energy drink during their days working in the hot Houston sun, Ms. Powers said in an interview. “He puts it in a water bottle and makes his own Gatorade, an electrolyte mix,” she added. The Harris County district attorney, Sean Teare, also cast doubt on the presence of drugs Thursday. “Based on what we’ve learned about the passengers, it’s inconsistent that drugs were in the van,” he said in a statement. The drug debate obscured, for the moment, the circumstances that led to the fatal shooting of the van’s driver, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, by an ICE agent. Late Thursday, Aaron Reitz, the newly appointed U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, released a video statement that provided new details in the official account of the encounter. Mr. Reitz said that two vehicles, each with two ICE agents inside, turned on their police lights and tried to pull over the white van being driven by Mr. Salgado Araujo. “The aliens then fled, conducting a rapid U-turn and hopping a median to get away,” he said. “The agents chose not to pursue. Later that morning, the agents came across the van again.” “This time the agents successfully surrounded the vehicle,” Mr. Reitz said. Two of the agents got out of their vehicles and told Mr. Salgado Araujo to put the van in park, he said. “Preliminary information indicates the driver shifted the van into reverse, then forward again, while an officer was partially inside the van or immediately next to it.” Mr. Reitz said that during the confrontation, though the statement did not make clear exactly when, “one of the officers fired a single shot,” striking Mr. Salgado Araujo. The prosecutor’s account could not be independently verified by video obtained by New York Times. Two of the men in the van told a local congresswoman that the officers did not identify themselves as they approached the van, and that the shot had been fired through a front passenger window. Mr. Reitz mentioned that the agents observed the plastic bags, believing they could contain drugs, but he did not resolve the question of what investigators have determined about their contents. A spokesman for the Houston field office of the F.B.I. declined to comment on Ms. Powers’s statement and said the agency had no plans to release results of any tests of the substance.

Houston Chronicle [7/17/2026 7:00 AM, Jeremy Wallace, 2399K] reports it’s not just Democrats questioning tactics by federal immigration officers in the deadly shootings in Houston’s East End and in Maine. Slowly, but surely, more Republicans are carefully questioning why U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers involved in such incidents haven’t been wearing body cameras, despite Congress giving them $20 million for that purpose. U.S. Sen. John Cornyn called the lack of body cameras in both shootings a mistake and told Politico that it would be wise for the Department of Homeland Security to fix that immediately. U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., similarly said “something has to change” in response to the civilian deaths. The Houston Police Department and the Harris County Sheriff’s Office have relied on body cameras for over a decade, and officers face disciplinary action if they don’t have their cameras turned on during interactions with the public.

NBC News [7/17/2026 2:47 PM, Albinson Linares, 47693K] reports that María Guadalupe García walked helplessly among the gravestones at Forest Park Lawndale, a funeral complex in Houston’s East End neighborhood. "It can’t be, they killed him without mercy," said García, who had come to pay her last respects to Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the Mexican immigrant and father of three who was shot and killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents during a traffic stop in Texas last week. "We always greeted each other, he would ask about my family, and he was a hard-working man," said García, 57, a resident of the East End neighborhood where Salgado Araujo lived. "We never saw him in a scandal, nothing like that. He raised his children and gave people jobs. What happened is a tragedy." Another neighborhood resident who asked to remain anonymous because of his immigration status pointed at the gravestones while saying: "We all end up here, buried, but Lorenzo had a lot of life ahead of him, it’s not possible that the government shot him like that.". García and hundreds of others attended Salgado Araujo’s public wake Thursday, many wearing blue at the family’s request to honor the immigrant worker. He was on his way to work at a construction site in the city when ICE agents stopped his vehicle. Salgado Araujo was not the intended target of the immigration agents, according to the Department of Homeland Security. However, the agents attempted to arrest him and shot him in the abdomen, killing him. The Department of Homeland Security has said Salgado Araujo was in the country illegally and attempted to run over agents, who shot in self-defense, but has not provided evidence of its claims.

NewsNation [7/17/2026 4:46 PM, Jamel Valencia, 6006K] reports the U.S. Department of Homeland Security released new details about a woman whose encounter with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Chaparral drew public attention and sparked concerns among residents. In a statement provided to KTSM on Friday, July 17, DHS identified the woman as Martha Sias, a Mexican national who is green card holder. According to DHS, ICE arrested Sias on Wednesday, July 15 during what the agency described as a targeted immigration enforcement operation. DHS said Sias is a convicted methamphetamine trafficker and is subject to removal proceedings because of her criminal history.

FOX News [7/17/2026 9:30 AM, Greg Norman, 49054K] Video: HERE reports one person has been detained after a woman was injured in a shooting near a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Aurora, Colorado, police said. A police spokesperson told Fox News the incident happened Thursday night and left the woman with injuries that were not life-threatening. A man was detained following the shooting, which did not happen inside the facility, they added. Andrea Loya, the executive director of Casa de Paz — a local nonprofit that helps those released from the ICE detention facility reunite with their loved ones — told The Denver Post the shooting happened after the conclusion of a weekly protest outside the building. Fox News Digital has reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for further comment. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

Blaze [7/17/2026 6:25 PM, Carlos Garcia, 1286K] reports a worker at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center was booked on suspicion of attempted murder after shooting a protester, Colorado police say. Aurora police said protesters were blocking ICE workers’ access to the ICE facility on Thursday evening when two female protesters got into a verbal altercation with the workers and took photos of their vehicles. Brandon Booth, 42, allegedly "retrieved his personally owned pistol" and fired it at the two protesters as they walked away, striking one. He got back into his car and drove away. Police said they were notified about the shooting around 7:30 a.m. Booth was detained about two blocks away from the location of the shooting on Nome Street with a gun in his vehicle, police said. The victim, who has not been identified, was described as a protester by police. She was shot in the lower part of her body, but her injuries are believed to be non-life-threatening. Both was booked on "probable cause of attempted second-degree murder, first-degree assault, attempted first-degree assault, felony menacing, and unlawful carrying of a concealed weapon," according to the police statement. A spokesperson for GEO Group, which runs the ICE facility, released a brief statement about the incident to CBS News. "We are aware that an off-duty Aurora ICE Processing Center employee was involved in a shooting incident," the statement reads. "This individual has been placed on unpaid administrative leave, and we will fully cooperate with law enforcement.” Aurora Police Chief Todd Chamberlain called the shooting a "tragedy on all fronts" in a statement Friday. The Colorado District Attorney’s Office for Adams and Broomfield Counties declined to comment in an email to Blaze News. The district attorney’s office said official charges would be announced after the next hearing on July 22. "We remain committed to ensuring an ethical, thorough, objective, and comprehensive review of this case. Violence of any kind will not be tolerated in Aurora. Constitutional rights are a pivotal part of a just society — violence is not," Chamberlain concluded.

CBS News [7/17/2026 2:41 PM, Staff, 53111K] reports that an employee of the group that operates the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainment center in the Colorado city of Aurora is under arrest after police say he shot and injured a woman. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

NewsMax [7/17/2026 9:01 PM, Jim Thomas, 4244K] reports an employee of the private contractor that runs the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Aurora, Colorado, was arrested Thursday night on suspicion of attempted second-degree murder after police said he fired a single shot at demonstrators blocking the facility, wounding a woman in the lower body. Brandon Booth, 42, was detained less than two blocks from the shooting scene on the 3100 block of North Nome Street, and officers recovered a pistol from his vehicle, the Aurora Police Department said. Booth is an employee of GEO Group, the private prison company operating the Aurora ICE Processing Center. According to the police department’s news release, Booth was waiting in his vehicle alongside other employees who could not access the facility for their shifts because of the protest. Police said two women broke away from the demonstration, engaged in a verbal confrontation, and photographed the employees’ vehicles before walking away. Booth then retrieved his personal firearm and fired one shot in their direction, striking one of the women, police alleged. He drove off before officers stopped him a short distance away. The wounded woman was taken to a hospital with injuries that Aurora police described as not life-threatening. She has not been officially identified, though Colorado Public Radio reported her name was listed in court and in a GoFundMe appeal as Emma Landis. Booth was booked on suspicion of attempted second-degree murder, first-degree assault, attempted first-degree assault, felony menacing, and unlawful carrying of a concealed weapon. Filing decisions rest with the 17th Judicial District Attorney’s Office. He appeared Friday afternoon in Adams County, where Magistrate Kyle Martelon set bond at $500,000, calling Booth "a grave risk to our community.” A defense attorney told the court that Booth had worked at the GEO facility for 2 1/2 years and previously worked in state juvenile corrections. In a statement, GEO Group said it was aware "an off-duty Aurora ICE Processing Center employee was involved in a shooting incident" and placed him on unpaid administrative leave. Aurora Police Chief Todd Chamberlain called the case "a tragedy on all fronts," saying his department would investigate with "transparency and integrity" and adding, "Constitutional rights are a pivotal part of a just society; violence is not.”

NBC News [7/17/2026 11:19 AM, Minyvonne Burke, 47693K] reports video posted on social media showed two plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents appearing to handcuff a man at a Las Vegas airport while he screamed in terror. The incident happened Monday night in Terminal 3 at Harry Reid International Airport. The footage showed the man on the ground with one hand behind his back as the two agents surrounded him. As the person filming the incident asks what’s going on, the male agent pulls a hoodie over his head. "I don’t know what they’re doing," the man on the ground screams. The two agents then walk away, leaving the man with a handcuff attached to one arm. The female agent, who is wearing a face mask, also covers her head with a hoodie as she walks away. Las Vegas police confirmed that the two people in the video trying to handcuff the man were ICE agents. Police also said that officers conducted a records check and "found no outstanding warrants on the individual." "They removed the handcuff from his wrist and notified ICE," Las Vegas police said in a statement. The Department of Homeland Security identified the man as Phu Nguyen and said he is a citizen of Australia who overstayed his visa. The two agents left without arresting Nguyen, "to de-escalate the situation and for officer safety," after a crowd formed, a DHS spokesperson said in an emailed statement. [Editorial note: consult audio at source link]

CNN [7/17/2026 5:31 PM, Emma Tucker, Alisha Ebrahimji, Holmes Lybrand, 24479K] reports two plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents left a man partially handcuffed on the ground Monday after they attempted to arrest him at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas and onlookers confronted them, according to police and federal officials. During the encounter, onlookers stopped and can be heard on video questioning the ICE agents. As more travelers stopped, a uniformed Transportation Security Administration officer stood in front of the agents and the man, creating a makeshift perimeter, video shows. Shortly after, the ICE agents walked away, leaving the man and saying nothing to the TSA officer attempting to control the crowd or the onlookers. Some of the travelers briefly followed the agents, asking who they were. In a separate video, others were heard shouting at the TSA agent, questioning whether something would be done about the incident. It’s unclear what happened immediately before or after the video was filmed. Las Vegas police said ICE agents attempted to detain the man but walked away from the arrest. Police officers removed the handcuffs from the man’s wrist and notified ICE after a records check found no outstanding warrants on him, the agency said in a statement. The Department of Homeland Security said federal agents stopped the arrest to "de-escalate the situation and for officer safety" after a "crowd of anti-ICE agitators surrounded officers.". The man, Phu Nguyen, a 57-year-old citizen of Australia who was born in Vietnam, was taken into custody the following day at Los Angeles International Airport, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The agency said Nguyen had a visa effective for two years but it expired in 2015. He is being held at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, according to agency records.

CBS News [7/17/2026 8:05 PM, Matthew Rodriguez, 53111K] reports a federal judge ordered extensive reforms to the Adelanto ICE processing center after a lawsuit claimed the facility held detainees in "unconstitutional and inhumane conditions.” In their lawsuit, immigrant rights groups said the Southern California facility violated rules for outdoor recreation, family visitation and basic sanitation. The filing received support from the Mexican government after 14 Mexican nationals died while in ICE custody, four of whom were detained at Adelanto. In an interview with CBS LA earlier this month, Wilbur Garcia, an 18-year-old teen who was detained at the facility, said that more than once sewage overflowed into their showers and into every cell. The preliminary injunction requires federal immigration officials at Adelanto to provide people with clean drinking water and adequate medical care. The court order also mandates that the facility must be cleaned every day and that mold must be removed. "These changes will matter," said Angelica Salas, executive director of CHIRLA, one of the groups that filed the lawsuit. "They will protect people’s health. They will strengthen their legal cases. They will help families stay connected. They will affirm something that this country often forgets: immigrants are human beings and their lives are not disposable. In its response to the ruling, the Department of Homeland Security said, "ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens.” "Any claim that there are subprime conditions at Adelanto ICE processing facility are FALSE," Homeland Security wrote. "All detainees are provided with proper meals, water, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers.” DHS claimed the federal judge was "trying to smear our ICE law enforcement" with the ruling.

Reported similarly:
Univision [7/17/2026 2:17 PM, Staff, 5877K]

NBC News [7/18/2026 6:00 AM, Albinson Linares, 43603K] reports the first time Pedro Ayón and Serafín Andrade played soccer together was when they were both in ICE detention at a center in McFarland, California, a few years ago. Ayón, born in Mexico and raised in the U.S., spent eight months in detention in 2021. Since no visits were allowed due to the pandemic, his only option to see people was to go out to the yard to kick a ball around with his fellow inmates. “When we were allowed recreation for an hour, half an hour, we often went out and that was a way to feel free, to enjoy ourselves, to be able to share and in any way forget about the situation we were in,” he said. “It’s a ball, right? But it does things you wouldn’t think of — being able to heal people just by kicking the ball around.” Amid the confinement and the sadness of being away from his family, soccer allowed Ayón to forge great friendships like the one with Andrade, who spent a year and a half in immigration detention at the same center, McFarland’s Central Valley Annex. The power of play to heal the trauma of detention led a group of people to create a soccer tournament in California that brings together worlds that rarely intersect on a field: former ICE detainees, family members of those still incarcerated, immigration lawyers, activists and community organizers. The teams are mixed, so men and women play on the same field, divided into four pitches where they face off in five-a-side matches. The idea was simple: to organize an annual tournament to share experiences, play sports and raise funds to help people detained and those released from ICE facilities. Thus, “CCIJust Goals” was born, and in June it celebrated its fourth edition at the Negoesco Stadium at the University of San Francisco. [Editorial note: consult audio at source link]

San Francisco Chronicle [7/17/2026 10:30 PM, Aidin Vaziri, 4927K] reports a United Airlines employee told a passenger at San Francisco International Airport that she might call immigration authorities because he did not “act like a citizen,” according to videos of a confrontation spreading widely online. “Maybe we should call ICE on you,” the uniformed employee says in one clip, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. When the passenger asks her to repeat herself, she responds: “Maybe you need to be, because you don’t act like a citizen. Get away.” United said it is reviewing the encounter. “We’re looking into the interaction in this video, but don’t have anything additional to share at this time,” the airline said in a statement to KQED. United did not respond to a request from the Chronicle for additional details. San Ramon business owner Julio Varela, who identified himself as the passenger to KQED, told the outlet that the dispute began Tuesday after he and his family spent nearly three hours trying to resolve a ticketing problem with a United flight operated by Air Canada. Varela, a Mexican-American and naturalized U.S. citizen, was traveling to Montreal with his wife and two daughters. The videos do not show the full encounter but capture the passenger and employee recording each other as the dispute escalates at what appears to be a United customer-service counter. Varela said his wife had mistakenly entered their daughter’s middle name in the last-name field when booking the trip, according to KQED. The family spent about 15 hours on the phone with the airlines in the two weeks before the flight, but arrived at the airport with the problem unresolved, he told the outlet. According to Varela, Air Canada eventually rebooked three family members but needed United to change his daughter’s ticket status before completing her reservation. Varela said he began recording after the United employee dismissed the family’s problem and refused to give her name. In an earlier clip, he repeatedly asks for her name and calls her “lazy” and “rude.” “I’ve asked you for your name,” he says. The employee repeatedly tells him to move away before walking out of the counter area. A second video begins with the employee pointing a phone toward Varela and making the ICE remark. He repeatedly challenges her to call the agency. Another employee asks whether he wants police involved. “No, I want ICE, like she said,” Varela responds.

AP [7/17/2026 2:35 PM, Staff, 41622K] reports that Jamaica’s government said two of its three citizens recently deported by the United States to the African kingdom of Eswatini have formally declined offers to be repatriated to the Caribbean nation. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said late Thursday that Jamaican officials were still attempting to contact the third citizen. “During the discussion, the men were advised of the consular assistance available to them and of the government’s readiness to facilitate their return to Jamaica,” the Foreign Ministry said. The Jamaican government advised the pair that authorities “could not determine their immigration status in the United States or secure their return there. Both men maintained that they did not wish to return to Jamaica.” Contact was established through the Jamaican Consulate in Miami and a legal adviser representing the men, who haven’t been identified. Jamaica’s outreach followed diplomatic inquiries directed at U.S. officials in Washington, alongside formal representations made to Eswatini’s government through Jamaica’s diplomatic mission in Pretoria, South Africa. The growing number of third-country deportations by the U.S. government to places including Eswatini have been widely criticized by lawyers and human rights groups. Orville Etoria, who was the first Jamaican national sent to Eswatini under the program, was repatriated to his country last September.

The Hill [7/17/2026 2:25 PM, Finya Swai, 21549K] reports that the Trump administration announced Thursday it will reduce the length of visas issued to foreign journalists working in the U.S., while imposing an even shorter limit on reporters from China. The new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) rule replaced a long-standing “duration of status” system with fixed-term stays, drastically shortening visas to 240 days, while giving Chinese journalists an even stricter 90-day limit, though the visas may be extended. The administration referred to the “duration of status” system as a “loophole” that “allowed foreign students, exchange visitors, and media representatives to remain in the United States indefinitely without routine government oversight.” The rule is scheduled to take effect 60 days after its publication in the Federal Register. “The outdated ‘duration of status’ system has compromised national security and created an environment ripe for immigration fraud,” DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a statement. The update marks a tougher approach toward Chinese media after prior restrictions had been rolled back by the Biden administration. During President Trump’s first term, the U.S. reduced visa durations for Chinese journalists to 90 days in response to Beijing’s treatment of American reporters.

New York Post [7/17/2026 7:12 AM, Samuel Chamberlain, 35043K] reports the State Department is considering requiring some green card applicants to hand over thousands of dollars in the Trump administration’s latest bid to ensure new arrivals to the US can support themselves. Some officials have floated making would-be legal permanent residents submit a $100,000 bond if applying at a US consulate overseas, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. Others said the deposit amount could fluctuate depending on individual cases. Green card holders would likely be repaid upon becoming US citizens, a process that takes at least five years. “President Trump has made clear that those who wish to immigrate to the United States must be financially self-sufficient,” State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott told the Journal, confirming that the administration was exploring ways under existing law to require the bond, which could also be posted by a green card applicant’s relatives. The proposed bond requirement would expand on a pilot program for tourist visas that has been in effect since August 2025. Initially, applicants from the African nations of Malawi and Zambia were required to post a refundable bond of up to $15,000, forfeited if they overstayed the visa or applied for another immigration status, such as asylum, after arriving.

NewsMax [7/17/2026 10:33 PM, Jim Thomas, 4244K] reports the Trump administration warned temporary protected status holders Friday that their window to accept a $2,600 stipend and a free flight home is closing fast. The Department of Homeland Security’s general counsel, James Percival, said lower courts are still blocking terminations already cleared by the Supreme Court. As of Friday, work permits for TPS recipients from Haiti, Syria, and five other countries remain valid under interim guidance from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, even as DHS presses recipients to leave voluntarily before that protection lapses. Percival said the extension had been widely misread as a reprieve. "For those with an expiring TPS designation, these final days provide one last opportunity to accept $2,600 and a free flight home," he wrote on X in comments carried by Newsweek. The stipend, tied to voluntary departure through Customs and Border Protection’s CBP Home app, was raised from $1,000 to its current level in a January DHS announcement marking the first anniversary of the second Trump administration. The June 25 ruling in Mullin v. Doe, consolidated with Trump v. Miot, split 6-3 in a decision holding that Congress had barred federal courts from reviewing nonconstitutional challenges to a homeland security secretary’s decision to designate, extend, or terminate TPS. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, reversed lower court orders that had frozen terminations for roughly 350,000 Haitian and 6,000 Syrian nationals, and remanded for further proceedings. Implementation has moved unevenly. USCIS and E-Verify have issued rolling extensions covering TPS holders from Haiti, Syria, Burma (Myanmar), Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen, most recently pushing the operative Form I-9 date for Haiti to July 24, according to agency notices posted this month. Percival, quoted by Newsweek, singled out the Somalia case, saying the judge "has refused to even consider the issue until August 20" and calling the pace "more of the same judicial sabotage we have been facing on TPS for a year and a half.” Rebecca Shi, chief executive of the American Business Immigration Coalition Action, told Newsweek that mixed signals had left employers guessing. Salvadoran TPS holders alone, she said, contribute $5.4 billion to the U.S. economy and $1.5 billion in annual federal, state, and local taxes. Once injunctions lift and terminations take effect, affected holders lose work authorization and legal status and become subject to removal proceedings.

Los Angeles Times [7/17/2026 6:00 AM, Francesca Pinney, 15098K] reports foreign college students and campuses across California are scrambling after the federal government finalized a rule Friday limiting international student visas to four years — a change that takes effect this fall and clouds the futures of those who typically need to stay longer, including doctoral and medical students. The Department of Homeland Security rule ends a policy in place since 1978 that allowed students to stay for the length of their degree program. It’s the latest in a series of Trump administration moves to restrict foreign students. The administration has expanded social media screening of visa applicants — requiring students to make their accounts public — and imposed a travel ban that limits entry from dozens of countries. New international student enrollment fell 17% in fall 2025, according to the Institute of International Education. California enrolls more international students than any other state — about 140,000 in 2024-25. The rule “restores integrity to the nation’s immigration system,” Homeland Security said in a statement, calling the previous “duration of status” policy outdated. “For decades, foreign students have been admitted into the U.S. indefinitely, allowing thousands to abuse our immigration system by perpetually enrolling in courses to avoid having to leave,” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said. “By implementing clear, finite limits on these visas, the United States is reclaiming its ability to properly screen, vet, and monitor individuals within our borders. This final rule ensures that foreign students remain focused on their primary purpose: completing their studies and returning home.”

Blaze [7/17/2026 6:30 AM, Carlos Garcia, 1286K] reports U.S. Customs and Border Protection released exclusive details to Blaze News related to a $28 million counterfeit bust from the Port of Louisville. The shipment from Hong Kong was seized by CBP officers on July 9. It was discovered when officers pulled it for inspection on its way to Illinois. The shipment included 200 watches that bore suspected trademarks of the Audemars Piguet brand. The Centers of Excellence and Expertise of the CBP determined the watches to be inauthentic. They were seized for "bearing counterfeit versions of registered and recorded trademarks," according to the CBP news release.

San Diego Union Tribune [7/17/2026 7:00 PM, Alex Riggins, 1320K] reports that, for nearly 40 years, Jaime Ernesto Alvarez Gonzalez lived a version of the “American Dream.” Though the Mexican citizen overstayed his visa as a teenager and had no legal right to be in the U.S., he made a life in San Diego, starting a family, volunteering at his church and establishing two businesses that employed five people. As a young man, he even aspired to become a law enforcement officer. In January, Alvarez was caught playing out that fantasy when he disrupted an immigration enforcement operation in Linda Vista while dressed similarly to a plainclothes Border Patrol agent and driving a black pickup decked out in police accessories, including a light bar. Later investigation revealed he had a second vehicle featuring similar accessories and a stash of license plates, clothing and fake credentials bearing law enforcement insignia. Alvarez, 53, subsequently pleaded guilty in San Diego federal court to one count of impersonating a Border Patrol agent and three counts of illegally possessing firearms. On Friday, U.S. District Judge Ruth Bermudez Montenegro sentenced him to six months in prison and three years of supervised release. With credit for time he’s already been in custody, he’ll likely be released in just a few weeks. He is expected to be deported to Mexico upon his release, which his attorney indicated would be a consequence harsher than a lengthy prison term, given that he’ll be unable to return to his businesses or visit his family, including his two adult children, who live in the U.S. In court documents, federal prosecutors said Alvarez’s conduct was egregious, but also “uniquely strange” for someone living in the U.S. unlawfully. Prosecutors said Alvarez even told investigators after his arrest that he was supportive of Border Patrol. “There may be some truth to his claim,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Siddharth Dadhich wrote in a sentencing memorandum. “His (immigration) file contains a letter … written by him nearly thirty years ago in which he made clear that he aspired to become an officer of the law.” Alvarez landed on the radar of federal law enforcement on Jan. 8 when he began following a real Border Patrol agent through Linda Vista while driving a black Ford F-150 decked out in law enforcement accessories and insignia. The truck had communications antennae on the roof, a light bar on the dash, handcuffs hanging from the rearview mirror, a “United States Border Patrol” sticker on the front windshield and a license plate holder that read “Ferderal (sic) Truck,” according to prosecutors and documents in the case. Alvarez also wore a facemask similar to ones worn by immigration officers to hide their identities, and a “thin green line” hat associated with Border Patrol agents and their supporters, according to his plea agreement. The legitimate Border Patrol agent, who prosecutors said was working on a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement task force, “was forced to abandon his law enforcement mission” out of concern that Alvarez might be a real federal agent working on a different assignment in the same area, according to the plea agreement. Alvarez admitted in his plea that he video-recorded and narrated the entire incident, and said during the recording that he was actively looking for federal officers involved in deportation missions. Prosecutors alleged that Alvarez followed the legitimate agent into a parking lot, and when other federal officers arrived as backup to investigate, Alvarez “caused a public commotion and aggressively told officers to leave his community.”

Bloomberg [7/17/2026 12:59 PM, Zach Williams, 57K] reports that the Federal Aviation Administration and the Transportation Security Administration need to do more to protect airports, airlines, and the flying public from cyber attacks, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office. "Aircraft depend on avionics and ground systems to get from one place to the next safely," states the 84-page report released Thursday. "The growing interconnectivity of these aviation systems to support flight operations has increased their exposure to cyber-based threats." Both agencies agreed to pursue five recommendations — one for the TSA and four for the FAA — to improve their practices, according to the report. [Editorial note: consult extended commentary at source link]

USA Today [7/17/2026 3:46 PM, Michael Salerno, 68151K] reports TSA PreCheck members wait about 10 minutes or less on average at airport security checkpoints, plus can leave electronics and small liquids in bags and don’t have to remove belts and light jackets. Until the Transportation Security Administration ended its "shoes off" policy for all travelers in July 2025, leaving shoes on was also a valued perk. PreCheck enrollment typically costs $76 and $85. But in some cases, like serving in the military, enrolling in another trusted traveler program or using certain credit cards, some people can get a membership for free or at a discounted rate. Members of Homeland Security’s other trusted traveler programs such as Global Entry, NEXUS and SENTRI can get PreCheck for free. Membership in each of these programs lasts five years and costs $120. Homeland Security sometimes offers discounts for young travelers. Most recently, it ran a limited promotion called TSA PreCheck $20 Take Off, where travelers under 30 could save $20 on new PreCheck applications in May 2026. People renewing PreCheck memberships can save about $8 to $11 if they renew online instead of in person. Renewal costs, depending on the enrollment provider, range from $58.75 to $69.95 online and $66.75 to $79.95 in person.

Politico [7/17/2026 1:22 PM, Josh Gerstein and Josh Gerstein, 21784K] reports a federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration violated the law when it fired the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s chief financial officer without going through the steps Congress has mandated for terminating civil servants. Following an hourlong hearing Friday, U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff rejected arguments that President Donald Trump’s power over the executive branch gave officials the right to fire FEMA CFO Mary Comans last year without giving her a hearing or the right to transfer to another job. “For the last 140 years….the Supreme Court has affirmed the president does not have plenary power to remove inferior officers,” Nachmanoff said as he ruled from the bench. Nachmanoff said the Justice Department was effectively arguing to overturn Supreme Court precedent, including an 1886 ruling that upheld Congress’ authority to set rules for the removal of what the Constitution calls “inferior” executive branch officials. The judge, a Biden appointee based in Alexandria, Va., appeared to acknowledge that the high court has repeatedly expanded the president’s power to dismiss top decision-makers in the executive branch. But he said the justices have never “explicitly overruled” the 19th century decision letting Congress set the rules for lower-ranking employees. “Judicial restraint requires that this court follow the law as it stands today,” Nachmanoff said.

Reported similarly:
Washington Examiner [7/17/2026 5:22 PM, Molly Parks, 1235K]

Chicago Tribune [7/17/2026 4:28 PM, Staff, 4756K] reports Federal Emergency Management Agency officials will review damage in Porter County from the June 11 tornadoes and severe storms on Monday, according to a release. An EF3 tornado hit Kouts that night, one of several Northwest Indiana and Chicago area communities struck by violent storms. An EF2 tornado also hit Merrillville, badly damaging Andrean High School. The Porter County Emergency Management Agency has coordinated with the Indiana

Department of Homeland Security and FEMA to facilitate a review of damage to properties

throughout Porter County, according to a release from Lance Bella, Porter County’s emergency management director. FEMA assessment teams will be escorted by Porter County Emergency Management Agency personnel. Personnel from both agencies will be wearing clothing identifying them and will also carry government credentials, according to the release. The data collected will assist FEMA in determining if a request will be made to President Donald Trump to consider releasing FEMA funds.

USA Today [7/17/2026 9:07 AM, Jeanine Santucci, 68151K] reports at least two people have died as catastrophic flooding has stricken Texas Hill Country, a little over a year after rains overwhelmed the same region’s Guadalupe River, causing flooding that killed over 130 people. "Extreme rainfall" in the last few days has totaled near 2 feet in some areas of Texas Hill Country, according to totals from the Weather Prediction Center. In Leakey, Texas, 23.37 inches have fallen since Monday afternoon. At one recording station in Kerrville, hit hard by storms in July 2025, 20.71 inches of rain have fallen. Most of the rain has been concentrated in Uvalde, Kinney, Bandera, Kerr and Gillespie counties, where widespread totals were between 6 and 13 inches, Gov. Greg Abbott said on July 16. More heavy rain is expected on July 17 due to a slow-moving weather pattern, the National Weather Service said. The rain has again caused rivers, including the Guadalupe, Nueces and Frio, to surge to near or over record levels. The Nueces River near Uvalde reached a record crest of 28.01 feet on July 16, according to preliminary data, breaking a record of 24.88 feet set in 1996. Abbott said the Nueces was expected to reach two times the flow of Niagara Falls.

CNN [7/17/2026 5:15 PM, Hanna Park and Dalia Faheid, 24479K] reports disastrous flash flooding has hit southern Texas after days of torrential rain, leaving at least two people dead and hundreds of people rescued across the same region struck by last July’s catastrophic floods. More than 230 rescues have been made so far, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Thursday afternoon, adding more than 85 boats, 20 aircraft and 200 high-profile vehicles have been deployed to assist the response. One of those who died was a man swept away in a recreational vehicle, Abbott said Thursday. John Mark Steward, 65, died after being carried off in his mobile home in Kerrville, his wife told The San Antonio Express-News. CNN has not been able to confirm Steward’s death with authorities. A 74-year-old man, whose identity has not been released, also died while driving near Uvalde, police said. A Department of Public Safety crew spotted his vehicle bobbing in floodwater about four miles north of the city around 10:30 a.m. local time and later confirmed his death, the Uvalde Police Department said Thursday. About a year’s worth of rain has fallen in parts of southern Texas this week, but the forecast is now improving in the hardest-hit areas. Isolated showers remain possible, but the threat of additional significant rainfall has, for the most part, ended.

New York Times [7/18/2026 3:37 AM, Luke Broadwater and Marco Hernandez, 330K] reports President Trump, a former real estate mogul who knows a few things about construction projects, says there is “no harder zoning thing to get” than a helipad. But he is building one at the White House, and building it fast. Such projects usually require a developer to navigate a complex web of zoning laws, airspace regulations and environmental impact studies, while negotiating with town councils and fighting off community pushback. Construction at the White House can often face additional hurdles. But Mr. Trump has encountered no such difficulties as he quickly proceeds with construction of a black granite helipad on the South Lawn. He has not asked Congress or any review panel, such as the Commission of Fine Arts, to approve the project. Past presidents have involved Congress and review panels in changes to the White House grounds, though Mr. Trump has asserted that he has the right to undertake major construction projects, such as a new 90,000-square-foot ballroom, without congressional approval. That project is currently the subject of litigation. A White House spokesman said in an email that “operational upgrades to the White House grounds, such as the helipad installation, do not require commission reviews.” Work on the helipad — which will be 100 feet in diameter and feature a presidential seal — started last month, shortly after a makeshift stadium built to host an Ultimate Fighting Championship fight significantly damaged the South Lawn. Dana White, the U.F.C. president, said that his organization had set aside $700,000 to repair the lawn after the June 14 event. But Mr. Trump instead decided to forge ahead immediately with a helipad he had long wanted. The helipad would allow Mr. Trump to use the latest generation of Sikorsky helicopters as Marine One on White House grounds — a move multiple administrations had avoided because the new, more powerful helicopters were likely to damage the South Lawn during landing. The Navy began the search in 2010 for helicopters to replace the two models that have been used to transport the president and vice president for more than four decades — the VH-3D and the VH-60N. It purchased 23 VH-92A helicopters, including two test aircraft, at about $215 million apiece, with a total cost estimated at $5 billion, according to the Government Accountability Office. The new helicopters are produced by Sikorsky, a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, which is building the helipad as a donation. They joined the fleet between 2014 and 2021 and underwent a period of testing. The new generation of helicopters has occasionally been known to scorch the grass with engine exhaust while landing — an issue found during a training session in September 2018.

FOX News [7/17/2026 3:52 PM, Greg Wehner, 49054K] reports Ronald L. Fischer, a former Rhode Island anesthesiologist who spent more than two decades on the run after fleeing during his child sexual assault trial, was captured aboard a sailboat off the coast of New Jersey after an online sleuth’s tip helped investigators track him down, according to the FBI. Fischer, one of Rhode Island’s longest-wanted fugitives, had been on the run since fleeing the state during his 2005 sexual assault trial. He never returned to court, and a jury later convicted him of first-degree sexual assault in his absence, according to the U.S. Marshals Service. Authorities searched for him for more than 20 years. Deputy U.S. marshals, FBI agents and U.S. Coast Guard personnel intercepted the vessel off the coast of New Jersey before taking Fischer into custody without incident, according to the FBI Boston Division. Fischer was transported aboard a U.S. Coast Guard vessel to Coast Guard Station Staten Island, where he was turned over to deputy U.S. marshals and local law enforcement officials. Rhode Island State Police said Fischer’s arrest brought an end to one of the state’s longest-running fugitive investigations, crediting generations of investigators who continued pursuing the case over the past two decades.

AP [7/17/2026 7:30 PM, Staff, 1320K] reports that police discovered Friday the wreckage of a boat that sank this week in the San Francisco Bay after recovering the body of a missing person the day before. The body was identified as Tondra Madruga, 58, also known as Tondra Miller, the San Francisco medical examiner said Friday. She was one of three people missing after the Volare, a 49-foot (15-meter) cabin cruiser, sank Wednesday afternoon with 20 people aboard after being hit by a wave and capsizing. The group was on the boat to scatter the ashes of a loved one. The San Francisco Police Department’s Marine Unit located on Friday the submerged wreckage of the Volare in the vicinity of where it sank. The boat was believed to be submerged on the rocky seabed in water 120 feet (36 meters) deep. The marine unit has been using boat-mounted sonar to locate the vessel, and is now using a remotely operated vehicle to assess the wreckage and determine if it can be recovered safely, police said. Madruga’s body was recovered Thursday by the marine unit two days after the boat sank. “Our family is heartbroken by the loss of our beloved mother, daughter, sister, and aunt, Tondra Madruga,” family member Quin Madruga said on Facebook. “Our hearts remain with every family impacted, and we sincerely appreciate your kindness and understanding.” One man, Clifford Boisa, died immediately after being retrieved from the chilly water. The U.S. Coast Guard suspended search efforts Wednesday evening but police are still looking for the two missing. The rest were rescued by good Samaritans and first responders as the boat capsized.

Los Angeles Times [7/17/2026 1:18 PM, Jenny Jarvie, 15098K] reports that James Smith, a veteran seaman and captain of the charter fishing boat California Dawn, was sailing his vessel under the Golden Gate Bridge on Tuesday when he heard the call on his radio: A vessel was in distress near Alcatraz Island. From a distance, Smith saw what looked like steam or smoke rising from a speck in the water. As he sped to the scene, he saw that a large motor boat was rapidly sinking. Some passengers were frantically clinging to the hull of the partially submerged vessel, he said, as rescuers administered CPR to a man on a San Francisco police boat. "Something went catastrophically wrong with the boat to make it go down like that," said Smith, who has operated charter boats for 35 years. "It wasn’t just because a wave hit it and it just turned over." Rescue teams scrambled to pull 17 people to safety, but after reaching the shore the man who was given CPR was pronounced dead. On Thursday, a female passenger was recovered from the bay and pronounced dead. Two passengers remain missing. As search teams continued to scour the bay Thursday to find the missing passengers and recover the wreckage of the sunken vessel, it is not yet clear what caused the 49-foot boat with three levels to roll on its side and topple into the water. According to Capt. Jarod Toczko, the U.S. Coast Guard’s San Francisco sector commander, survivors of the incident reported that a wave hit the boat, causing it to list heavily and suddenly roll over.

San Francisco Chronicle [7/17/2026 7:58 PM, Megan Fan Munce, Megan Cassidy, 4927K] reports Mike Montoya and Justin Marceline were fishing on the 22-foot Kahea Tuesday afternoon near Fort Mason when they saw the smoke. A ribbon of white plumed from a trawler that appeared to be idling above one of the deepest stretches of San Francisco Bay. Montoya pulled up the Kahea’s fishing gear and shouted down the captain of the nearby Bass-Tub, a larger charter fishing vessel, to point out the smoke. Then both boats sped toward the sinking Volare. They didn’t know that the 49-foot cabin cruiser held 20 relatives and friends out to scatter a loved one’s ashes. Nor did they know what had caused the disaster that would leave two dead and two others missing and presumed dead — a question now under investigation by the U.S. Coast Guard and San Francisco police. They only knew the Volare was in distress. “It’s just an unspoken rule,” Montoya said. “If you’re on the water and somebody needs your help, you just help.” When the boats reached the Volare about five minutes later, it had completely tipped over to its port side. Passengers were clinging to the starboard guardrails and the upper deck. Four or five had grabbed onto the board of a kiteboarder who heeded the same unspoken call for help. Another person had managed to get into a kayak that appeared to be on the boat. Marceline’s first instinct was to jump into the water. He took off his shoes and socks, thinking that if he dove in, he might be able to pull people from the boat and get them life jackets. But Montoya stopped him. The waves were too powerful: 4- to 6-foot swells jostled both the Kahea and the Volare back and forth, hitting them from every direction. “The current was ripping so hard that as soon as we’d pull someone, we’d be 25, 30 yards away from the actual boat because we were drifting away,” Marceline said. “There were people everywhere drifting away.” All told, 17 passengers were rescued and brought back to San Francisco. Once there, one man, Clifford Boisa, 79, was pronounced dead. Lt. Jr. Grade John Thompson, a spokesperson for the Coast Guard Sector San Francisco, said Friday that accounts from survivors indicated there were people inside the Volare’s cabin when it began to sink and that some had escaped, but others had not. Ralph Boisa, Clifford’s brother, who was not on the boat, told the Chronicle that the group had gathered to honor his daughter, Maria Boisa, who died in 2015. Ralph’s youngest brother, John Boisa, a former Navy officer, had owned the boat since 2023 and was the captain. Officials estimated the Volare sank at least 130 feet down into the bay, out of the reach of rescue divers. While searching for the wreckage, police uncovered the body of a second victim. She was identified as Tondra Madruga, 58, a friend of Maria’s, according to Ralph. Officials recovered Madruga’s body Thursday afternoon off the coast of Treasure Island. On Friday, they located the intact Volare not far from where the boat sank.

AP [7/17/2026 11:56 AM, Wyatte Grantham-Philips, 1320K] reports that milk brand Fairlife is pausing its production in the U.S. after a ransomware cyberattack breached the company’s systems. Coca-Cola, which owns Fairlife, announced Thursday that its dairy company had identified “unauthorized access by a third party” to a portion of its systems, including those related to production. The company disclosed that this was in connection to a ransomware event — and in response, it took some operations offline. “Product quality and safety have not been impacted,” Atlanta-based Coca-Cola said in a statement. “However, as a result of the incident, production operations at fairlife in the United States are temporarily suspended.” Fairlife’s Canadian operations were not affected. The full scope and impacts of the attack are otherwise still unknown, Coca-Cola added — but the beverage giant said it had informed law enforcement, and is also working with cybersecurity experts as it continues its investigation and recovery to restore operations. A company spokesperson said there were no further updates to share as of Friday morning. Cyberattacks are on the rise across sectors. Beyond dairy goods, other breaches have recently resulted in anything from core education services getting knocked offline to empty shelves at popular clothing or grocery stores. Ransomware attacks — in which hackers demand a hefty payment to restore hacked systems — also account for a growing share of cyber crimes. And experts note that attackers know there’s a particular impact when going after well-known brands and products that shoppers buy or need every day.

FOX News [7/17/2026 2:11 PM, Preston Mizell, 49054K] reports that Secretary Marco Rubio’s call for global cooperation to combat far-left political terrorism could implicate Neville Roy Singham, a Marxist nonprofit financier who is currently facing a federal grand jury probe in New York. Singham, a 72-year-old American who sold his tech company for $785 million in 2017 and now lives in Shanghai, is known to fund pro-Chinese Communist Party groups that operate in the U.S. He has funneled $278 million into the broad network of nonprofits since 2017, according to a Fox News Digital investigation. These groups regularly organize and participate in anti-ICE, anti-Israel and pro-Iran demonstrations. At a State Department summit held in Washington, D.C., Thursday, Rubio urged more than 60 countries to treat far-left global terrorism as a counterterrorism priority. "For far too long, however, our counterterrorism doctrine has had a blind spot – a blind spot when it comes to extremist violence from the political left, Rubio said. "Even today, the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a serious threat is treated as a right-wing fever dream, or worse, as a dangerous fascist conspiracy." Rubio noted that networks are coordinating across multiple countries, providing training instructions and using encrypted communication to facilitate unrest. He said that international cooperation is critical to disrupting the financing of dangerous organizations, and that some are working with hostile foreign states. Rubio did not mention Singham by name and State Department officials did not respond to a request for comment. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

Reuters [7/17/2026 7:24 PM, David Shepardson, 46493K] reports the U.S. Justice Department said on Friday that federal employees can now download the short-video app TikTok on government devices. A 2022 law banned federal employees from using the app on government devices, citing national security concerns, but a department opinion released on Friday said it no longer applies, citing a deal by TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance to transfer control of the app’s U.S. user data and operations to the joint venture TikTok USDS that was completed in January. In January, TikTok said the venture will retrain, test and update TikTok’s content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data and the algorithm will be secured in Oracle’s U.S. cloud. Oracle (ORCL.N) is one of the venture’s three main investors. The memorandum opinion to President Donald Trump said the current version of TikTok does not pose risks. "We understand you have since instructed that employees of Executive Branch agencies may download TikTok onto their official devices, subject to the agency’s discretion and consistent with all applicable workplace policies," the memo said. The divestiture agreement provides for American and global investors to hold 80.1% of the venture while ByteDance will own 19.9%. The Justice Department said the fact that ByteDance "remains a minority shareholder in the joint venture operating TikTok USDS makes no practical difference." The White House and TikTok did not immediately comment. Trump opted not to enforce a law passed in April 2024 requiring ByteDance to sell its U.S. assets by the following January or face a ban — a measure upheld by the Supreme Court. Trump regularly touts his popularity on TikTok. ByteDance said TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC will protect U.S. user data, apps and algorithms through data privacy and cybersecurity measures. About 200 million Americans use TikTok. In September, Reuters reported, citing sources, that ByteDance would maintain ownership of TikTok’s U.S. business operations but would cede control of the app’s data, content and algorithm to the joint venture.

Reported similarly:
CBS News [7/17/2026 11:53 PM, Joe Walsh, 53111K]

Reuters [7/17/2026 12:14 PM, David Ljunggren and Wa Lone, 46493K] reports that President Donald ‌Trump on Friday blamed Canada for wildfire smoke spreading across the United States and said he would add the "incalculable cost" of dealing with the pollution to existing tariffs on Canadian goods. Heavy smoke from hundreds of Canadian fires enveloped a swath of the U.S. from the Midwest to the Northeast on Thursday and Friday, prompting warnings to residents to stay indoors. Trump, who has a combative relationship with Prime Minister Mark Carney, said he would be calling the Canadian leader to find out what he planned to do about the "totally unacceptable" situation. "We are holding Canada responsible for the fact ⁠that they are not properly maintaining their Forests ... and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air," he said in a Truth Social post. "This is Willful Negligence, and becoming a yearly occurrence, costing the United States Billions of Dollars, which cost of this pollution must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying." Climate experts, however, say higher temperatures have led to drier forests and more wildfires in recent years. Canada has one of the world’s largest forests. "As our climate warms, we’re seeing more conducive hot, dry, windy, more extreme weather, and we’re going to see more fire," said Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia.

Shortly after taking office in 2025, Trump imposed tariffs on several key imports from Canada. Carney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Washington Times [7/17/2026 11:16 AM, Tom Howell Jr, 969K] reports that the U.S. military says it bombed an Iranian surveillance tower used to “track and target” commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in the Iran war, posted grainy footage of missiles obliterating the Chah Bahar Shahid Kalantari Port structure. The command said the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps used the tower for decades along the Gulf of Oman coastline. “The destruction of the tower directly degrades IRGC’s ability to coordinate attacks on innocent civilian crew members,” CENTCOM said Friday on social media. “Furthermore, the strike protects freedom of navigation in regional waters for all vessels, except for ships attempting to violate the ongoing U.S. naval blockade against Iran.” The U.S. conflict with Iran, in its fifth month, is centered on control of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway for oil exports from the Middle East. Iran says a mid-June memorandum of understanding granted Tehran the power to manage traffic in the strait, but the U.S. said it overstepped and must keep the strait free to commercial traffic. President Trump reimposed a naval blockade of Iranian ports and maritime shipping and is using the U.S. military to help non-Iranian ships transit the strait. American forces are bombing Iranian military targets that could be used to disrupt commercial traffic. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted an image on his X account showing the Chah Bahar tower collapsing.

NPR [7/17/2026 12:50 PM, Jackie Northam, 27980K] reports that in late June, shortly after the United States and Iran agreed on a ceasefire, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) announced an operation to move trapped ships and more than 11,000 seafarers out of the Strait of Hormuz. The strategic international waterway has been effectively closed by the Iranian regime since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran at the end of February. The IMO said the operation would be carried out in close cooperation with Iran, Oman, all other coastal states in the region, the United States and the maritime industry. The ships were directed to take a route along the southern side of the Strait of Hormuz, hugging Oman’s coastline, rather than a route along Iran’s coastline on the northern side of the strait. "Over 100 ships out of the 600 plus that were in the area … managed to get out," says John Canias, a former seafarer and now a maritime operations coordinator with the International Transport Workers Federation, who took part in discussions about the evacuation. The operation ground to a halt a couple of days later after a vessel, a Singapore-flagged cargo ship called the Ever Lovely, was attacked while using the route closest to Oman, according to MarineTraffic, which tracks ship movements. Ship traffic around the Strait of Hormuz stalled again. Although no one claimed responsibility, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard criticized the operation because it was done without any kind of Iranian involvement, according to the state broadcaster IRIB, and that only Iran could decide what routes ships would take. Canias says the attack was frustrating. [Editorial note: consult video at source link]

Politico [7/17/2026 2:19 PM, Phelim Kine, 21050K] reports the White House appears to be shielding China from scrutiny in President Donald Trump’s push to get to the bottom of what he has declared an official cover-up of Chinese interference in the 2020 presidential election. While Trump said in his Thursday speech to the nation that he had ordered the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to investigate what he calls an official cover-up of China’s activities, there’s so far been no mention of Beijing as a target of that probe or others. DOJ said in a statement that it’s “following through on the president’s directive,” but declined to comment whether its investigation will extend to Chinese election meddling. The FBI, ODNI and CIA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “This isn’t a story about China,” White House trade adviser Peter Navarro told reporters Friday. He said the focus of investigations will be on “nefarious actors domestically” who worked to undermine the election’s integrity. The White House declined to comment on whether it plans to go after Beijing for any of the crimes it is alleging. Democrats are seizing on the lack of action against China as proof that Trump is more interested in using his accusations of an official cover-up of Beijing’s interference to punish perceived political enemies within the intelligence community. “He is using China to advance a political end, not to raise meaningful national security concerns,” said Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), ranking member of the House Select Committee on China. “He is weaponizing the U.S.-China relationship to undermine and control the elections.” Trump’s accusations coincide with his drive for warmer relations with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in the aftermath of a bruising series of trade and tariff disputes last year. The two leaders met in May, and Trump came home touting deals for agricultural commodities and Boeing aircraft. Trump and Xi are set to meet again in Washington in September. The White House said in a statement that the summit “continues as scheduled,” but declined to comment on whether Trump plans to bring up the charges of election meddling. Trump’s claims about China undermining the U.S. election have been repeatedly debunked through investigations by agencies including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and FBI. The intelligence community concluded in 2021 that China “considered but did not deploy” election influence operations because it favored neither Trump nor then-President Joe Biden. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian told reporters Friday that Trump’s comments were a “false allegation and serious smear” but didn’t hint at wider damage to the U.S.-China relationship. The Chinese Embassy in Washington declined to provide further comment.

{End of Report} RETURN TO TOP