Politics

The attorneys said that when ICE detained several men near Vail last month, agents pulled them over and handcuffed them without warrants and without asking them any questions. ICE agents later left branded playing cards with information about its Denver field office in some of those men’s abandoned cars, alarming advocates.

The allegations come more than two months after U.S. District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson found that ICE was routinely conducting illegal arrests in Colorado as part of President Donald Trump’s crackdown. Warning that ICE’s conduct would continue without a court’s intervention, he ordered the agency to take several steps to change the practice.

While ICE can detain people without warrants, federal law requires that they have probable cause to believe that the arrestee is in the country illegally and that the person is likely to flee before a future court date.

In a complaint filed in the Southern District of Texas on Friday morning, the group of more than 30 people said that immigration authorities’ current practices violate their rights to due process and protection against unreasonable arrests.

“ICE has ignored constitutional protections and created and encouraged an environment of seize first and sort it out later,” attorney Raed Gonzalez wrote. “Constitutional protections and limits are not even treated as an afterthought; they are ignored, trampled on, and forgotten.”

Far-right influencer Jake Lang was charged Friday with felony damage to property, after posting video to social media showing him damaging an ice sculpture outside the Minnesota Capitol.

The incident happened Thursday, with the sculpture — commissioned by a veterans organization — originally spelling out “PROSECUTE ICE,” in opposition to the ongoing surge of federal immigration agents to Minnesota.

Lang — who was pardoned for his participation in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and who organized an anti-Islam demonstration in Minneapolis last month — posted video to his social media account showing him kicking down several letters from the sculpture so that it spelled “PRO ICE.”

According to the criminal complaint filed Friday in Ramsey County:

The original sculpture, unveiled around midday Thursday, was a permitted display on the Capitol steps, with organizers paying more than $6,000 to have it created. It was set to be removed Thursday night, and donated to a local business to be displayed for a longer time.

A spokesperson for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard says both President Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi asked Gabbard to be present for an FBI search of the elections headquarters in Fulton County, Georgia, last week, after Gabbard and Mr. Trump offered seemingly conflicting explanations for her presence.

"As the president said, he asked for Director Gabbard to be there," Gabbard spokesperson Alexa Henning wrote on X. "Attorney General Bondi also asked for her to be there. Two things can be true at the same time."

On Thursday morning at the National Prayer Breakfast, the president said Gabbard attended the search "at Pam's insistence," referring to Bondi.

"She took a lot of heat two days ago because she went in, at Pam's insistence, she went in, and she looked at votes that want to be checked out from Georgia," Mr. Trump said. "They say, 'Why is she doing it?' Right, Pam? 'Why is she doing it?' Because Pam wanted her to do it."

"This is just part of a much larger picture is, you know, in which the Trump administration is doing everything it possibly can quickly detain and deport as many migrants as possible," said Philip Schrag, Delaney Family professor of public interest law at Georgetown University. "Even migrants who like this family have a pending asylum case. So this family is legally in the United States because they have pending asylum case and they should not be deported until case is resolved."

Ramos' attorney says the family was following all established protocols for pursuing asylum in the U.S. and should have never been detained in the first place. They called the new effort to deport the family uncommon and retaliatory.

US immigration agents in Oregon must stop arresting people without warrants unless there is a likelihood of escape, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday.

US district judge Mustafa Kasubhai issued a preliminary injunction in a proposed class-action lawsuit targeting the Department of Homeland Security’s practice of arresting immigrants they happen to come across while conducting ramped-up enforcement operations – which critics have described as “arrest first, justify later”.

Similar actions, including immigration agents entering private property without a warrant issued by a court, have drawn concern from civil rights groups across the country amid Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts.

Courts in Colorado and Washington DC, have issued rulings like Kasubhai’s, and the government has appealed them.

Unredacted images and videos showing nudity released in the Epstein files have been online for days despite US officials being warned about failures in redaction, which lawyers say has caused victims "irreparable" harm.

The files seen by BBC Verify are among thousands of documents lawyers say they have discovered that contain identifying information about dozens of Epstein's victims.

Victims groups first spoke out about the issue at the weekend when the New York Times reported nearly 40 separate images had been published as part of the Epstein files on Friday.

On Tuesday, a New York judge said the Department of Justice (DoJ) had agreed to quickly fix the issue after victims called for the website to be shut down until names and images could be properly redacted.

The DoJ removed thousands of documents from its website, stating that the files had been uploaded due to "technical or human error". The department said it was continuing to examine new requests, as well as checking whether there were any other documents that might need further redaction.

Bannon has no formal power, but is an influential figure on the far right and is closely tied with the Trump administration.

Donald Trump this week again suggested that the federal government “should take over the voting” and federalize elections, which are run by local and state jurisdictions, as part of his ongoing false claims that Democrats have stolen elections. He also reiterated lies that undocumented people are brought to the US to vote and their participation led to

Repeating false claims that undocumented people vote in large numbers in US elections, Bannon said on his War Room show on Tuesday: “You’re damn right we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November.”

On the heels of two fatal shootings of U.S. citizens in Minnesota at the hands of federal immigration agents, 65% of Americans said Immigration and Customs Enforcement has "gone too far," according to the latest NPR/PBS News/Marist poll. And President Trump is facing the highest intensity of disapproval since just after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The percentage of those saying ICE has gone too far in enforcing immigration laws is an 11-point increase since last summer. It's driven by independents and Democrats; both groups went up by double-digits.

Trump's overall approval rating remains low at 39%, with 56% disapproving, and a whopping 51% strongly disapproving. That's the highest Marist has seen in its polling since it started asking how strongly respondents approve or disapprove of presidents dating back to 2017.

"The thing in the numbers that we've been experiencing is the shift among some of the folks who voted for him — his voting coalition — not necessarily the governing support he has, but his voting coalition," said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion.

Georgia's Fulton County has filed a motion seeking the return of 2020 election ballots seized by the FBI, state election officials said Wednesday.

The motion has requested that the FBI return the records and ballots it took last week during a raid at a the county's election center warehouse, according to MS NOW.

The motion was under a seal and the details were not immediately released, MS NOW's Josh Einiger reported.

Legislators passed Senate Bill 13 as a way of discouraging divestment from oil and gas companies, as financial figureheads at the time had signaled they intended to make climate change initiatives a larger factor in their investment considerations. The law requires the comptroller’s office to maintain a list of financial firms that refuse, terminate or penalize business with a fossil fuel company “without ordinary business purpose.” SB 13 is commonly referred to as an “anti-ESG” law, which stands for “environmental, social and governance.”

U.S. District Judge Alan Albright delivered the summary judgment, and affirmed in the 12-page order that the way SB 13 determined what constituted boycotting a company was too broad and undermined free speech protections of firms affected.

“SB 13’s ‘boycotting’ definition is comprised of three clauses, all of which are undefined and not susceptible to objective measurement or determination,” Albright wrote in the ruling.

The state's voters approved the redistricting plan last year as a Democratic counterresponse to Texas' new GOP-friendly map, which President Trump pushed for to help Republicans hold on to their narrow majority in the House.

And in a brief, unsigned order released Wednesday, the high court denied an emergency request by the California's Republican Party to block the redistricting plan. The state's GOP argued that the map violated the U.S. Constitution because its creation was mainly driven by race, not partisan politics. A lower federal court rejected that claim.

The ruling on California's redistricting plan comes two months after the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Texas map that kicked off a nationwide gerrymandering fight by boosting the GOP's chances of winning five additional House seats.

U.S. President Donald Trump will have more power to hire and fire up to 50,000 career federal employees in an overhaul of the government's civil service system announced by his administration on Thursday.

The overhaul, released by the Office of Personnel Management, fulfills Trump's campaign pledge to strip job protections from federal workers deemed by the president's team to be "influencing" government policy.

It is the biggest change to the rules governing the civil service in more than a century and targets employees that the administration sees as undermining the president's priorities. Trump called the overhaul "Schedule F" during his first administration.

"You can't run an organization if people are refusing to actually carry out the lawful objectives and orders of the administration," said OPM Director Scott Kupor, the administration's top HR official.

Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan is refusing to voluntarily comply with a Justice Department investigation into a video she organized urging U.S. military members to resist “illegal orders” — escalating a dispute that President Donald Trump has publicly pushed.

In letters first obtained by The Associated Press, Slotkin’s lawyer informed U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro that the senator would not agree to a voluntary interview about the video. Slotkin’s legal team also requested that Pirro preserve all documents related to the matter for “anticipated litigation.”

Slotkin’s lawyer separately wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi, declining to sit for an FBI interview about the video and urging her to immediately terminate any inquiry.

The refusal marks a potential turning point in the standoff, shifting the burden onto the Justice Department to decide whether it will escalate an investigation into sitting members of Congress or retreat from an inquiry now being openly challenged.

FEMA helps coordinate the response to major disasters like last year’s Los Angeles wildfires, but the agency more often acts like a bank, reimbursing states and cities for their disaster preparedness and recovery spending. When Noem took office, she throttled that spending by, among other things, requiring her personal sign-off on all expenses over $100,000. The pace of disbursements has since slowed to a trickle.

Those restrictions reportedly hindered the agency’s response to emergencies like July’s floods in Texas because officials could not pre-position search and rescue teams. The acting head of FEMA at the time, David Richardson, was reportedly unreachable for several hours, and the agency did not answer two-thirds of calls to its hotline. More than 130 people died in the floods.

As Bhattacharya testified, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the HELP committee’s ranking member, released a report outlining the state of the NIH. The report concluded that the Trump administration is “failing American patients,” and “destroying medical research through cuts to research grants, terminations of clinical trials, and the chaos it has created.”

Since Trump took office, the NIH has terminated or frozen hundreds of millions of dollars for research grants, including $561 million in grants to research the four leading causes of death in America, the report found.

The Small Business Administration said in a policy note that green card holders won't be allowed to apply for SBA loans, effective March 1.

The move is the latest by the SBA as it works to tighten loan restrictions and restructure the agency.

Last year, it tightened a requirement that businesses applying for loans must be 100% owned by U.S. citizens, U.S. nationals, or lawful permanent residents, up from a 51% standard.

In December, it issued a policy note that said up to 5% of a business could be non-citizen owned. But the current policy rescinds that, as well as making lawful permanent residents ineligible, too.

Amazon outbid Puget Sound Energy last month in an auction for a massive solar farm project in Oregon, leaving the utility concerned about a larger competition for resources with energy-hungry artificial intelligence companies.

The bill provides funding for the departments of Defense, Treasury, State, Health and Human Services, Labor, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, and Education through the remainder of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.

It also provides two weeks of stopgap funding for the Department of Homeland Security after the Senate stripped full-year funding for the agency in response to the killings of two U.S. citizens by federal immigration officers.

Now, Congress and the White House will turn to thorny negotiations over new guardrails on immigration enforcement in the DHS funding bill. Democrats insisted on separating out the DHS measure following enforcement actions in Minneapolis.

In December, Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson struck a deal with the U.S. Department of Justice to hand over the names, addresses and social security numbers of almost all of the 18.6 million Texans registered to vote.

The administration said it needed the data "to test, analyze, and assess states’ (voter rolls) for proper list maintenance and compliance with federal law," and sent similar requests to an estimated 43 other states around the country. It's now suing 24 states, including California, Minnesota and New York, that have refused to comply.

The missed deadline and up to 3m files that remain unreleased have prompted criticism and calls for further disclosure to answer how Epstein sexually abused girls with impunity for decades and landed a sweetheart plea deal about 20 years ago that allowed him to avoid federal prosecution.

“The government continues to avoid accountability and has argued that they are not responsible for Epstein’s abuse of hundreds of victims,” said Jennifer Plotkin of Merson Law, which represents more than 30 victims, said. “The release of the files proves the government failed the victims over and over again.”

Dr Ann Olivarius, a women’s rights attorney and founder of law firm McAllister Olivarius, said the disclosures have not lifted the veil on Epstein’s ongoing evasion of justice until his 2019 prosecution.

The death of Alex Pretti, the Minneapolis man killed by federal agents, has been ruled a homicide, the Hennepin County medical examiner’s office said.

Citing government records, ProPublica identified Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez as the two officers who fired at Pretti.

The division’s role has grown in recent months as Morath encouraged school districts to report teachers who commented negatively about conservative activist Charlie Kirk following his assassination last fall. The American Federation of Teachers has sued to stop the ensuing investigations, which it labeled a “witch-hunt.”

The agency also said this week it will begin investigations into teachers who allegedly encouraged or facilitated recent student demonstrations against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

TEA investigations can lead to teachers being placed on the “Do Not Hire” list, formal warnings, dismissal and the suspension of teaching licenses. Serious cases are reviewed by the governor-appointed State Board of Educator Certification.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Wednesday that her agency is consulting with the Justice Department on how to proceed after a federal judge halted the administration’s decision to terminate Temporary Protected Status for Haitians in the U.S.

The designation, which allows more than 300,000 Haitians to legally live and work in the United States because conditions in Haiti make a safe return impossible, was set to terminate at 11:59 p.m. Tuesday. But in an 83-page ruling issued Monday, District Court Judge Ana C. Reyes in Washington. D.C.., blocked the termination, accusing Noem of failing to follow the law and showing racial animus toward Haitians.