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Trump supporter Júnior Pena falsely claimed migrants being rounded up, including Brazilians, were ‘all crooks’

A rightwing Brazilian influencer who claimed Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown targeted only “crooks” has been arrested by ICE agents in New Jersey.

Júnior Pena, whose full name is Eustáquio da Silva Pena Júnior, declared his support for the US president in a recent video message to his hundreds of thousands of social media followers.

“I [support] Donald Trump – I like the guy,” announced the South American TikToker and Instagrammer whose account purports to show “the reality of the United States” from a migrant’s perspective.

On Saturday, Pena was himself reportedly detained and sent to the Delaney Hall detention facility in Newark, New Jersey. One friend told the local newspaper the Brazilian Times that Pena had been taken into custody after missing a court hearing. The detainee’s lawyer, Andrew Lattarulo, was reportedly trying to resolve the situation and prevent him being transferred to another state.

Commissioner to file motion requesting return of property unlawfully taken during raid related to 2020 election

Fulton county leaders said they would fire back in court on Monday, intent on limiting the scope of a federal warrant that led the FBI to seize 2020 elections documents last week.

County attorneys intend to file a motion in federal court asking for an order mandating the return of property that was unlawfully seized or retained, said the Fulton county commissioner Marvin Arrington Jr.

The FBI needs to explain why they took original documents including ballots, instead of the copies that a previous ruling in a related civil case had entitled them to, Arrington said.

“The judge in that case told them that they could not get the records, and so instead of them complying with that order, they did an end run and circumvented the judge’s order,” Arrington said. “I can’t imagine that Judge [Thomas W] Thrash will be happy about the fact that they did this after he said no.”

The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office said it has sent what are known as Touhy letters to gain crime scene evidence from the shooting death of Renee Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross.

State prosecutors have formally demanded that the Trump administration turn over any evidence gathered by federal authorities after the shooting death of Renee Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross.

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced Monday that her office had served what are known as Touhy letters on the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. The legal filing seeks a wide range of potential evidence from Good’s killing on Jan. 7 in south Minneapolis and gives a Feb. 17 deadline to respond.

The demand letters come as the county attorney — alongside the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office — continues to pursue an independent state investigation into Ross’ deadly use of force.

Kristen Hanneman made a small decision in 2022 that would upend life for her entire town.

State scientists were checking private drinking water wells across Wisconsin for a widely used family of harmful chemicals called PFAS. They mailed an offer to test the well outside her tidy farmhouse surrounded by potato farms cut out of dense forest. Without much thought, she accepted.

Months later, Hanneman found herself on the phone with a state toxicologist who told her to stop drinking the water — now. The well her three kids grew up on had levels thousands of times higher than federal drinking water limits for what are commonly known as forever chemicals.

federal judge on Monday blocked Donald Trump’s administration from ending temporary protections that have allowed roughly 350,000 Haitians to live and work in the U.S.

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes in Washington granted a request to pause the termination of temporary protected status for Haitians while a lawsuit challenging it proceeds.

The TPS designation for people from the Caribbean island country was scheduled to expire Tuesday.

The Trump Administration has created an exclusion for new experimental reactors being built at sites around the U.S. from a major environmental law.

The law would have required them to disclose how their construction and operation might harm the environment, and it also typically required a written, public assessment of the possible consequences of a nuclear accident.

The exclusion announcement comes just days after NPR revealed officials at the Department of Energy had secretly rewritten environmental, safety and security rules to make it easier for the reactors to be built.

Exclusive: Gothams LLC’s draft proposal, obtained by the Guardian, suggests seven-year trucking and logistics monopoly

A US disaster response firm submitted a plan to White House officials that would guarantee 300% profits and a seven-year monopoly over a new trucking and logistics plan for Donald Trump’s Board of Peace in Gaza, according to a November proposal obtained by the Guardian.

The draft plan from Gothams LLC would allow it to collect a fee for every truck moving goods into Gaza, and charge for the use of its warehousing and distribution system.

The Guardian first reported in December that Gothams was the frontrunner for a lucrative deal that would be doled out by a future Trump-chaired Board of Peace, but the scale of the profit margin was not clear.

Coalition of groups filed lawsuit to overturn ban on nationals from specified countries over ‘false claims’

A coalition of immigration groups, lawyers and US citizens is suing Marco Rubio and the state department to overturn an order that suspended immigrant visa approvals to citizens of 75 countries, alleging the move “eviscerates” decades of settled policy and is blatantly discriminatory.

The suit, filed in a US district court in New York, accuses the department and Rubio, the secretary of state, of denying immigration rights to the nationals of certain countries on “the demonstrably false claim” that they are likely to seek welfare payments.

The state department suspended immigrant visa approvals to nationals of 75 countries last month in a social media post couched in notably undiplomatic language.

Immigration officials said agent shot two ‘vicious gang members’ in Portland, but records obtained by the Guardian reveal US prosecutor contradicted claims

Immediately after a US border patrol agent shot two people in Oregon last month, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said the targets were “vicious” gang members connected to a prior shooting and alleged they had “attempted to run over” officers with their vehicle.

In the weeks since, key parts of the federal government’s narrative have fallen apart.

The events took place on the afternoon of 8 January, one day after a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer fatally shot Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis.

Every Homeland Security officer on the ground in Minneapolis, including those from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, will be immediately issued body-worn cameras, Secretary Kristi Noem said Monday, in the latest fallout after the shooting deaths of two U.S. citizens at the hands of federal agents.

The news of the body cameras comes as Minneapolis has been the site of intense scrutiny over the conduct of federal officers after two U.S. citizens protesting immigration enforcement activities in the city were shot and killed.

It is the latest effort by the Trump administration to alleviate tensions after the shootings and show it is responding to calls for accountability.

A federal judge on Monday ruled that an offshore wind project aimed at powering 600,000 New York homes can resume construction, the fifth such project put back on track after the Trump administration halted them in December.

In clearing the way for Sunrise Wind to proceed, Judge Royce Lamberth found that the government had not shown that offshore wind is such an imminent national security risk that it must halt in the United States.

Donald Trump has said his goal is to not let any “windmills” be built, and often talks about his hatred of wind power. His administration froze five big offshore wind projects on the East Coast days before Christmas, citing national security concerns. Developers and states sued to block the order. White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers has repeatedly said during the legal battle over the pause that Trump has been clear that “wind energy is the scam of the century” and the pause is meant to protect the national security of the American people.

In Trump’s first term, grassroots Democrats focused their ire on the Republican president. But now, after President Joe Biden’s reluctance to step aside in 2024 at age 81 helped pave the way for Trump’s return to the White House, many see their party’s own veterans as part of the problem.