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A federal judge has accused the Trump administration of terrorizing immigrants and recklessly violating the law in its efforts to deport millions of people living in the country illegally.

Citing the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota, the judge said that the White House had also “extended its violence on its own citizens.”

“The threats posed by the executive branch cannot be viewed in isolation,” U.S. District Judge Sunshine Sykes in Riverside, California said in a scathing decision issued late Wednesday.

The National Governors Association is pulling out of an annual meeting at the White House after Donald Trump declined to invite two Democratic governors, undercutting one of Washington’s few remaining bipartisan gatherings.

Trump is still expected to meet with governors at the White House on Friday but the event will not be facilitated by an organization founded more than a century ago to help state leaders from both parties advocate for their interests in Washington. The Republican president had refused to include Democratic Govs. Jared Polis of Colorado and Wes Moore of Maryland and recently blasted them on social media as “not worthy of being there.”

In a brief interview Thursday, Polis said he does not have “any ability to get in (Trump’s) head.” Polis said he was nonetheless meeting with governors from both parties while he is in the nation’s capital.

The family’s lawyer had sought their release on medical grounds. They were freed from detention days after NBC News brought attention to their case.

A family of Russian asylum-seekers was released from a South Texas immigrant detention center on Wednesday after more than four months in custody — an ordeal they say left the children anxious, sickened and afraid.

Nikita, his wife, Oksana, and their three children had been held since October at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, where they said they endured worms and mold in their food, hourslong waits for medicine and restless nights under lights that never fully dimmed.

“Thank God,” Nikita said, speaking to a reporter in Russian after learning the news. “We’re ready.”

They were freed about a week after their attorney wrote a letter seeking their release on medical grounds and five days after NBC News published an article detailing what the family described as their nightmare in detention.

Trump’s move, which also seeks ‘immunity’ for makers, faces backlash from health advocates and MAHA coalition

Donald Trump has signed an executive order protecting production of glyphosate-based herbicides, such as Roundup, which some bodies and studies have linked to cancer and which are the subject of widespread US litigation.

The president’s move, which also seeks to provide “immunity” for makers of the herbicides, was strongly criticized by health and environmental advocates including some figures in the Make America Healthy Again (Maha) coalition.

The order also protects domestic production of phosphorus, which is used in making glyphosate and other agricultural chemicals, as well as a range of other products, including some in military defense.

US citizen George Retes was held without access to family, an attorney, or information about the charges against him

An army veteran detained by federal immigration agents in southern California during his work commute in July has filed a lawsuit against the federal government.

According to the lawsuit, filed on Wednesday with the help of the nonprofit law firm Institute for Justice, George Retes was held in a detention center for three days without access to his family, an attorney, or any information about the charges against him, in what the suit argues was an unconstitutional detention.

Retes, a 26-year-old US citizen, was arrested while on his way to his job as a security guard at a farm in Ventura county, where a raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents was underway on 10 July. After Retes attempted to explain to agents blocking the roadway that he needed to get through to work, agents shattered his car window, removed him from the vehicle, and detained Retes without checking his identification. He was later held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles without a clear explanation of his detainment.

The use of automatic license plate readers has exploded across the country in recent years. The cameras on roads and freeways that take images of the back of passing cars are popular with police for solving crimes.

But as Trump's immigration enforcement crackdown has escalated in recent months, residents of various American cities are urging local leaders to stop using these cameras, citing fears of mass surveillance and concerns that local data could be aiding a federal deportation dragnet.

Many of the grassroots campaigns have targeted cameras made by Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company that has contracts with more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies across the country. Some cities have grappled with the issue and decided to keep their cameras due to public safety, but in a number of places, the pressure has worked.

Carr says the Federal Communications Commission has also opened an enforcement action into ABC’s the View

The chair of the US’s top media regulator claimed on Wednesday that journalists had been tricked into covering claims by the late-night host Stephen Colbert that he had been blocked by his network from interviewing a Texas Senate candidate.

Brendan Carr, the avowedly pro-Trump chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), made his comments after Colbert accused the Trump administration and CBS of censorship.

CBS has countered Colbert’s claims in a statement, saying it had not blocked him from interviewing James Talarico, a Texas Democrat, but had merely provided legal guidance that such an interview might trigger equal time regulations that would require him to also platform Talarico’s campaign rivals.

Officials previously blamed a staffer for a grotesquely racist video reposted by the president’s account earlier this month

Asked whether the president's latest Truth represented an official shift in American policy against the Chagos deal, Leavitt told reporters that Trump's post "should be taken as the policy of the Trump administration” because it had come “straight from the horse's mouth.”

“When you see it on Truth Social, you know it's directly from President Trump,” she said.

But Leavitt’s defense of the president’s latest social media activity directly contradicts what White House officials and Trump were saying just days ago after he posted a video to social media that showed Barack and Michelle Obama’s faces superimposed onto apes in a jungle, swaying side to side and smiling as the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” played in the background.

Dangerous days have nearly tripled in past 45 years – and increase largely driven by human-made warming

The number of days when the weather gets hot, dry and windy – ideal to spark extreme wildfires – has nearly tripled in the past 45 years across the globe, with the trend increasing even higher in the Americas, a new study shows.

And more than half of that increase is caused by human-caused climate change, researchers calculated.

What this means is that as the world warms, more places across the globe are prone to wildfires because of increasingly synchronous fire weather, which is when multiple places have the right conditions to go up in smoke.

Countries may not have enough resources to put out all the fires, and help will not be as likely to come from neighbors busy with their own flames, according to the authors of a study in Wednesday’s Science Advances.

The Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, testified at a landmark trial of social media companies on Wednesday. Plaintiffs’ lawyers grilled Zuckerberg about internal complaints that not enough was being done to verify whether children under 13 were using the platform.

A New Jersey Catholic diocese this week agreed to a $180 million settlement to resolve allegations of clergy sexual abuse, a figure far exceeding agreements in some large dioceses but still dwarfed by other massive settlements.

Bishop Joseph Williams of the Diocese of Camden, covering southern New Jersey and its Philadelphia suburbs, announced the settlement Tuesday in a letter.

“For the survivors of South Jersey, this day is long overdue and represents a milestone in their journey toward restored justice and the healing and recognition they have long sought and deserve,” Williams said.