News from Multiple Perspectives

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr urged to dismantle system of political dynasties said to breed culture of corruption.

El Mencho consolidated Mexico’s most powerful criminal organisations in part due to a unique franchise-based structure.

Conversation precedes meeting between US and Ukrainian envoys in Geneva on Thursday.

U.S. Ambassador to France Charles Kushner gives a news conference marking the 250th birthday of the U.S. in 2026, in Paris, Dec. 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena, File) 2026-02-24T08:26:57Z PARIS (AP) — France’s spat with the U.S. ambassador to Paris took another turn Tuesday with the French foreign minister saying the top U.S. diplomat in France must respond to a summons and won’t have access to French government officials until he complies. French authorities had summoned Ambassador Charles Kushner — the father of U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner — for a meeting on Monday evening over comments from the Trump administration that France objected to. French diplomats said Kushner did not show up. Speaking Tuesday, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot described the failure to attend the meeting as “a surprise” that flew in the face of diplomatic protocol and will dent Charles Kushner’s ability to serve as an ambassador. “It will, naturally, affect his capacity to exercise his mission in our country,” Barrot said, speaking to public broadcaster France Info. freestar.queue.push(function () { window.fsAdCount = window.fsAdCount + 1 || 0; let customChannel = '/dynamic_' + fsAdCount; let adList = document.querySelectorAll(".fs-feed-ad") let thisAd = adList[fsAdCount]; let randId = Math.random().toString(36).slice(2); thisAd.id = randId; let thisPlacement = fsAdCount == 0 ? "apnews_story_feed" : "apnews_story_feed_dynamic"; freestar.newAdSlots({ placementName: thisPlacement, slotId: randId }, customChannel); }); He said that Kushner “is bringing difficulties on himself. Because for an ambassador to be able to do his job he needs access to members of the government. That’s the basics.” “When these explanations have taken place, then the U.S. ambassador in France will, naturally, regain access to members of the French government,” the minister said. The U.S. Embassy did not respond to an Associated Press request for comment on Monday and a follow-up request on Tuesday morning also got no immediate reply. France’s foreign ministry had summoned Kushner over Trump administration tweets relating to the beating death in France of a far-right activist , Quentin Deranque. The 23-year-old student, described as a fervent nationalist, was beaten by a group of people earlier this month in the city of Lyon, in fighting that erupted between far-left and far-right activists. He later died of brain injuries. In a post last week on X, the State Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau said “violent radical leftism is on the rise and its role in Quentin Deranque’s death demonstrates the threat it poses to public safety.” The U.S. Embassy in Paris posted the same statement, in French. Barrot said France needs to discuss the comments with Kushner. “We must have an explanation with him,” Barrot said. “We don’t accept that foreign countries can come and interfere, invite themselves, into the national political debate.” 获取更多RSS： https://feedx.net https://feedx.site

Denmark's Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, centre, is welcomed by Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his wife Olena Zelenska, left, before a service at St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026. (Mads Claus Rasmussen/Ritzau Scanpix via AP) 2026-02-24T08:56:11Z KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — More than a dozen senior European officials arrived in the Ukrainian capital on Tuesday in a show of support on the fourth anniversary of Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine — a grim anniversary in a war that has killed tens of thousands of people and put European leaders on edge about the scale of Moscow’s ambitions on the continent. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his country has withstood the onslaught by Russia’s bigger and better equipped army, which over the past year of fighting captured just 0.79% of Ukraine’s territory, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank. “Looking back at the beginning of the invasion and reflecting on today, we have every right to say: we have defended our independence, we have not lost our statehood,” Zelenskyy said on social media, adding that Russian President Vladimir Putin has “not achieved his goals.” freestar.queue.push(function () { window.fsAdCount = window.fsAdCount + 1 || 0; let customChannel = '/dynamic_' + fsAdCount; let adList = document.querySelectorAll(".fs-feed-ad") let thisAd = adList[fsAdCount]; let randId = Math.random().toString(36).slice(2); thisAd.id = randId; let thisPlacement = fsAdCount == 0 ? "apnews_story_feed" : "apnews_story_feed_dynamic"; freestar.newAdSlots({ placementName: thisPlacement, slotId: randId }, customChannel); }); “He has not broken Ukrainians; he has not won this war,” Zelenskyy also said. However, as the corrosive war of attrition enters its fifth year, a U.S.-led diplomatic push to end Europe’s biggest armed conflict since World War II appears no closer to finding compromises that might make a peace deal possible. Negotiations are stuck on what happens to the Donbas, eastern Ukraine’s industrial heartland which Russian forces mostly occupy but have failed to seize completely, and the terms of a postwar security arrangement that Kyiv is demanding to deter any future Russian invasion. The number of soldiers killed, injured or missing on both sides could reach 2 million by spring, with Russia sustaining the largest number of troop deaths for any major power in any conflict since World War II, a report last month from the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated. European leaders see their countries’ own security at stake in Ukraine amid concerns about Putin’s wider goals and has demanded its leaders be consulted in the ongoing U.S.-brokered talks. freestar.queue.push(function () { window.fsAdCount = window.fsAdCount + 1 || 0; let customChannel = '/dynamic_' + fsAdCount; let adList = document.querySelectorAll(".fs-feed-ad") let thisAd = adList[fsAdCount]; let randId = Math.random().toString(36).slice(2); thisAd.id = randId; let thisPlacement = fsAdCount == 0 ? "apnews_story_feed" : "apnews_story_feed_dynamic"; freestar.newAdSlots({ placementName: thisPlacement, slotId: randId }, customChannel); }); German Chancellor Friedrich Merz wrote on X that “for four years, every day and every night has been a nightmare for the Ukrainians — and not just for them, but for us all. Because war is back in Europe.” “We will only end it by being strong together, because the fate of Ukraine is our fate,” he added. The war has drawn in countries far beyond Ukraine, giving the conflict a global dimension , and threatened to worsen shortages, hunger and political instability in developing countries. While NATO countries have come to Ukraine’s aid, Russia has been helped by North Korea, which has sent troops and artillery shells; Iran, which has provided drone technology; and China, which the United States and analysts say has provided machine tools and chips. Among the European officials visiting Kyiv on Tuesday were the President of the European Council, Antonio Costa, the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen and Finnish President Alexander Stubb, as well as seven prime ministers and three foreign ministers. freestar.queue.push(function () { window.fsAdCount = window.fsAdCount + 1 || 0; let customChannel = '/dynamic_' + fsAdCount; let adList = document.querySelectorAll(".fs-feed-ad") let thisAd = adList[fsAdCount]; let randId = Math.random().toString(36).slice(2); thisAd.id = randId; let thisPlacement = fsAdCount == 0 ? "apnews_story_feed" : "apnews_story_feed_dynamic"; freestar.newAdSlots({ placementName: thisPlacement, slotId: randId }, customChannel); }); With Ukraine unable to sustain its fight against Russia without foreign help, NATO countries are now providing military help, purchasing American weapons after the Trump administration broke with earlier Washington policy and stopped giving arms to Kyiv. The European Union has also sent financial aid, but has sometimes met with reluctance from members Hungary and Slovakia. British Armed Forces Minister Al Carns said Russia’s war on Ukraine was “the most defining conflict” in decades. “I don’t think anyone of us would be able to guess (when the war started) the scale and size of what has taken place,” he said. The cost of rebuilding war-battered Ukraine would amount to almost $588 billion over the next decade, according to World Bank, the European Commission, the United Nations and the Ukrainian government. That is nearly three times the estimated nominal GDP of Ukraine for last year, they said in a report Monday. ___ Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine ILLIA NOVIKOV Novikov is an Associated Press reporter covering news in Ukraine since 2022. He is based in Kyiv. instagram mailto

The U .S. Capitol is seen after sunset in Washington, Monday, Feb. 23, 2026, ahead of President Donald Trump's State of the Union address. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke) 2026-02-24T05:03:36Z WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump will use Tuesday’s State of the Union to champion his immigration crackdowns , his slashing of the federal government , his push to preserve widespread tariffs that the Supreme Court just struck down and his ability to direct quick-hit military actions around the world, including in Iran and Venezuela . The Republican hopes he can convince increasingly wary Americans that his policies have improved their lives while ensuring that the U.S. economy is stronger than many believe — and that they should vote for more of the same in November . The balancing act of celebrating his whirlwind first year back in the White House while making a convincing case for his party in midterm races where he personally won’t be on the ballot is a tall order for any president. But it could prove especially delicate for Trump, given how happy he is to veer off script and ignore carefully crafted messaging. freestar.queue.push(function () { window.fsAdCount = window.fsAdCount + 1 || 0; let customChannel = '/dynamic_' + fsAdCount; let adList = document.querySelectorAll(".fs-feed-ad") let thisAd = adList[fsAdCount]; let randId = Math.random().toString(36).slice(2); thisAd.id = randId; let thisPlacement = fsAdCount == 0 ? "apnews_story_feed" : "apnews_story_feed_dynamic"; freestar.newAdSlots({ placementName: thisPlacement, slotId: randId }, customChannel); }); A main theme will be that the country is booming with a rise in domestic manufacturing and new jobs, despite many Americans not feeling that way. “It’s going to be a long speech because we have so much to talk about,” said Trump, who promised a heavy dose of talk about the economy. The president is also expected to decry the Supreme Court ruling against his signature tariff policies and talk about his attempts to maneuver around that decision without depending on Congress or spooking financial markets. He’s also likely to urge lawmakers to increase military funding and tighten voter identification requirements , while defending immigration operations that have drawn bipartisan criticism following the shooting deaths of two American citizens . Jeff Shesol, a former speechwriter for Democratic President Bill Clinton, said Trump has typically used State of the Union addresses to offer more conventional tones than his usual bombast — but he’s still apt to exaggerate repeatedly. freestar.queue.push(function () { window.fsAdCount = window.fsAdCount + 1 || 0; let customChannel = '/dynamic_' + fsAdCount; let adList = document.querySelectorAll(".fs-feed-ad") let thisAd = adList[fsAdCount]; let randId = Math.random().toString(36).slice(2); thisAd.id = randId; let thisPlacement = fsAdCount == 0 ? "apnews_story_feed" : "apnews_story_feed_dynamic"; freestar.newAdSlots({ placementName: thisPlacement, slotId: randId }, customChannel); }); “His job, for the sake of his party, is to show the silver lining,” Shesol said. “But if he’s going to insist that the silver lining is gold, no one’s buying it. And it will be a very difficult position on the campaign trail for Republicans to defend.” Michael Waldman, Clinton’s former chief speechwriter, said second-term presidents “have a tough job because what they all want to say is, ‘Hey, look what a great job I’ve been doing — why don’t you love me?’” Affordability questions loom large No matter what his prepared remarks say, Trump relishes deviating into personal grievances, meaning Tuesday will probably feature topics like denying that he lost the 2020 presidential election . His lack of messaging discipline has been on display after concerns about high costs of living helped propel Democratic wins around the country on Election Day last November . The White House subsequently promised that the president would travel the country nearly every week to reassure Americans he was taking affordability seriously. But Trump has spent more time blaming Democrats and scoffing at the notion that kitchen-table issues demand attention. freestar.queue.push(function () { window.fsAdCount = window.fsAdCount + 1 || 0; let customChannel = '/dynamic_' + fsAdCount; let adList = document.querySelectorAll(".fs-feed-ad") let thisAd = adList[fsAdCount]; let randId = Math.random().toString(36).slice(2); thisAd.id = randId; let thisPlacement = fsAdCount == 0 ? "apnews_story_feed" : "apnews_story_feed_dynamic"; freestar.newAdSlots({ placementName: thisPlacement, slotId: randId }, customChannel); }); Trump instead boasts of having tamed inflation and says he has the economy humming given that the Dow Jones Industrial Average recently exceeded 50,000 points for the first time. Such gains don’t feel tangible to those without stock portfolios, however. There also are persistent fears that tariffs stoked higher prices , which could eventually hurt the economy and job creation. Economic growth slowed the last three months of last year. Waldman, now president of the Brennan Center for Justice, which advocates for democracy, civil liberties and fair elections, said previous presidents faced similar instances of “economic disquiet.” That created a question of “how much do you sell vs. feeling the pain of the electorate,” he said. Shesol noted that Trump has “always believed — going back to his real estate days — that he can sell anyone on anything.” “He’s still doing that. But the problem is, you can’t tell somebody who has lost their job and can’t get a new one that things are going great,” Shesol said. “He can’t sell people on a reality that for them, and frankly for most Americans, does not exist.” freestar.queue.push(function () { window.fsAdCount = window.fsAdCount + 1 || 0; let customChannel = '/dynamic_' + fsAdCount; let adList = document.querySelectorAll(".fs-feed-ad") let thisAd = adList[fsAdCount]; let randId = Math.random().toString(36).slice(2); thisAd.id = randId; let thisPlacement = fsAdCount == 0 ? "apnews_story_feed" : "apnews_story_feed_dynamic"; freestar.newAdSlots({ placementName: thisPlacement, slotId: randId }, customChannel); }); It is potentially politically perilous ahead of November elections that could deliver congressional wins to Democrats, just as 2018’s “blue wave” created a strong check to his administration during his first term. Several Democrats in Congress, meanwhile, plan to skip Tuesday’s speech in protest, instead attending a rally known as the “People’s State of the Union” on Washington’s National Mall. freestar.queue.push(function () { window.fsAdCount = window.fsAdCount + 1 || 0; let customChannel = '/dynamic_' + fsAdCount; let adList = document.querySelectorAll(".fs-feed-ad") let thisAd = adList[fsAdCount]; let randId = Math.random().toString(36).slice(2); thisAd.id = randId; let thisPlacement = fsAdCount == 0 ? "apnews_story_feed" : "apnews_story_feed_dynamic"; freestar.newAdSlots({ placementName: thisPlacement, slotId: randId }, customChannel); }); Foreign policy in focus Trump’s address comes as two U.S. aircraft carriers have been dispatched to the Middle East amid tensions with Iran. The president will recount how U.S. airstrikes last summer pounded Tehran’s nuclear capabilities , and laud the raid that ousted Venezuelan President Nicolas Nicolás Maduro , as well as his administration’s brokering of a ceasefire in Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza. But he also strained U.S. military alliances with NATO , thanks to his push to seize Greenland from Denmark and his failure to take a harder line with Russian President Vladimir Putin in seeking an end to its war in Ukraine . Making any foreign policy feel relevant to Americans back home is never easy. Jennifer Anju Grossman, a former speechwriter for Republican President George H.W. Bush and current CEO of the Atlas Society, which promotes the ideas of author and philosopher Ayn Rand, said Trump can make clear that Maduro’s socialist policies wrecked Venezuela’s economy to the point where one of the world’s richest oil countries struggled to meet its own energy needs. Now, oil from that country will help lower American gas prices. Still, when it comes to overseas developments, she said, “I think it’s going to be a bit of a challenge to make clear why this is relevant to the domestic situation.” WILL WEISSERT Weissert covers the White House for The Associated Press. He is based in Washington. twitter mailto

Six other passengers were wounded in the incident, which took place near an island on Cuba's northern coast.

BBC international correspondent Quentin Sommerville travelled to Culiacán in northern Sinaloa state following an explosion in violence.

Marielle Franco's murder at the age of 38 in Rio de Janeiro sparked protests across Brazil.

KYIV: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Russia is trying "to play with the president of the United States" in stalling U.S.-brokered efforts to end the war. In an interview with Fox News in Kyiv, Zelenskyy pushed back on suggestions from President Trump that Ukraine is the one holding up the peace process . "We always supported peace," Zelenskyy said. "When you are at your home, in your house, on your territory, in your city, of course you want to stop it." Instead, Zelenskyy charged that Russia is attempting to drag out discussions, to avoid making concessions. "They try to play with the president of the United States," he said. ZELENSKYY ANNOUNCES NEXT ROUND OF TALKS WITH US, RUSSIA AS UKRAINE AIMS FOR 'REAL AND DIGNIFIED END TO THE WAR Asked by Fox News if he thinks Vladimir Putin is playing a game, Zelenskyy replied: "Yeah, I think so. Yeah. He needs to postpone any kind of negotiations." Zelenskyy said Ukraine is ready to freeze the conflict along its current lines, proposing a ceasefire to be followed by negotiations. But he said he would not accept a Russian demand for Ukraine to surrender territory the Russian army has not been able to capture in four years of fighting. Fox News spoke with Zelenskyy at his offices in Kyiv, a heavily guarded complex where the lights are dimmed and sandbags dot the corridors. Among the grand marble staircases and high ceilings, walls are decorated with giant portraits of soldiers, standing some 12 feet tall. TRUMP, ZELENSKYY TO MEET SUNDAY, AS UKRAINIAN LEADER VOWS COUNTRY WILL 'DO WHATEVER IT TAKES' TO END WAR Speaking one day after the conflict entered its fifth year, Zelenskyy accepted that some in Ukraine are weary of war. But he said peace proposals so far are heavily tilted toward Russia's demands . "Everybody wants peace, and a lot of people are tired," Zelenskyy said. "But believe me, not everybody is ready... to eat what Putin cooked for us." The Ukrainian leader urged President Trump to visit his country, saying: "He will see such a result of the attacks. And he will see how the nation really lives. Not just surviving." Despite massive losses, Zelenskyy hailed Ukraine’s fight. "Russia couldn't and can't occupy us. They didn't win, and for us it's a victory. We defended our independence and freedom. "They didn't change the country. They didn't change our flag. "I'm sure that Russia recognized — really recognizes now — that it was a big mistake."

FIRST ON FOX: A new report detailing the inner workings of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ’s office says the Islamic Republic’s real command structure lies not in Iran’s visible government, but in a shadow apparatus designed to preserve regime control even if the supreme leader himself disappears from public view. The report , Unmasking the Bayt: Inside the Supreme Leader’s Office, published by United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) and authored by Saeid Golkar and Kasra Aarabi, describes the Bayt, the Office of the Supreme Leader, as a vast institutional network embedded across Iran’s military, economy, religious institutions and state bureaucracy. "It is the hidden nerve center of the regime in Iran … it operates as a state within a state," Aarabi said in an interview with Fox News Digital. WITKOFF WARNS IRAN IS ‘A WEEK AWAY’ FROM 'BOMB-MAKING MATERIAL' AS TRUMP WEIGHS ACTION According to Aarabi, the system allows Khamenei to oversee and influence decision-making at every level of the Islamic Republic, including nuclear policy, war planning and internal security. "This is what gives Khamenei absolute control. It’s not the visible state, this is the invisible state," he said. The report estimates roughly 4,000 people operate inside the Bayt’s core structure, with tens of thousands more working through affiliated institutions across the country. "There’s around 4,000 close employees… think of them as commissars… the real policymakers," Aarabi said. "Beyond that, the Bayt’s umbrella has 40,000 individuals working for it… entrenched at every single layer of policy, every single state entity." The report maps a tightly controlled inner circle at the top of the Bayt, including Khamenei’s sons, particularly Mojtaba Khamenei, who is described as operating like a "mini-supreme leader" within his father’s office. It details how the structure reaches directly into Iran’s military chain of command, with senior promotions requiring approval from the Supreme Leader’s office and parallel counterintelligence bodies monitoring loyalty across the armed forces. The Bayt, the report says, also plays a decisive role in nuclear negotiations and wartime decision-making, ensuring ultimate authority remains concentrated around the supreme leader. The network, Aarabi said, effectively duplicates state ministries inside Khamenei’s office, allowing direct oversight and ideological enforcement across government agencies, universities and cultural institutions. TRUMP ISSUES STERN IRAN WARNING AS TEHRAN ANGRILY REACTS TO SPEECH AMID MUTED WORLD REACTION The report also outlines how the Bayt sustains regime durability through control of the economy, religious institutions and the education system. Networks of foundations and conglomerates tied to the supreme leader oversee major sectors of Iran’s economy, while clerical institutions, universities and cultural bodies are monitored by embedded representatives tasked with enforcing ideological compliance and suppressing dissent. "Think of the Bayt as the nucleus of the core power of the regime," Aarabi said. The findings come amid renewed speculation about Khamenei’s health and reduced public visibility, as well as growing regional tensions and the possibility of military confrontation involving Iran. Aarabi pushed back on suggestions that Khamenei’s absence from public appearances signals weakening authority or internal fragmentation. "We saw this during the 12-day war … even if he is hiding in a bunker, he is in full control. The Bayt has been tightening Khamenei’s grip on power," he said. The structure, he argued, was deliberately built to function even without the supreme leader physically present. "Even if he is eliminated, the Bayt as an institution enables the supreme leader to function," Aarabi said. "Think of the supreme leader as an institution rather than just a single individual." The report places the Bayt at the top of Iran’s power hierarchy, above the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the formal government. PRESIDENT TRUMP’S IRAN WARNING IS SERIOUS — BUT AMERICANS NEED THE FULL FACTS "The Bayt is the core apparatus… the strategic policymaking body that is driving the ballistic missile program, the nuclear program , [and] regional destabilization," Aarabi said. The implications, he added, are significant for policymakers in Washington and across the region, particularly as the U.S. weighs options for confronting Iran’s nuclear program and regional activities. "Eliminating Khamenei in isolation on its own is not enough… you have to dismantle this extensive apparatus that he has created," Aarabi said. Instead, any effort to weaken the regime would require targeting the broader institutional structure surrounding the supreme leader, not just the individual at its center. "It involves a comprehensive strategy… cyber operations, sanctions, [and] a military component," he said. "For any meaningful change in Iran… you have to go after the core nucleus of power within the Islamic regime, and that is the Bayt." He said on reports of Khamenei being a target that, "the elimination of Khamenei alone is not enough… dismantling the extensive apparatus of the Bayt is essential," he added.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Tuesday her government is weighing legal action against Elon Musk after the billionaire accused her, without evidence, of having ties to drug cartels after the killing of a major cartel leader. Musk made the allegation in a post on X responding to a resurfaced 2025 video in which Sheinbaum discussed cartel violence and rejected a return to a militarized crackdown. "Returning to the war against the narco is not an option. First, because it is outside the framework of the law," she said in the clip. The video was shared by an X user who asked, "She’s a cartel plant right?" MEXICAN PRESIDENT REJECTS US SENDING TROOPS TO HER COUNTRY: 'I DON'T BELIEVE IN AN INVASION' "She’s just saying what her cartel bosses tell her to say," Musk replied . "Let’s just say that their punishment for disobedience is a little worse than ‘a performance improvement plan.’" Sheinbaum responded to the comments during her daily morning press conference, saying her government was evaluating its options. "We are considering whether to take legal action," she said, adding that government lawyers were reviewing the matter. WHO IS EL MENCHO? INSIDE THE RISE OF CJNG’S FALLEN KINGPIN AND THE CARTEL HE BUILT Musk’s post came after Mexican security forces captured and killed Nemesio Oseguera , known as "El Mencho," the longtime leader of the powerful Jalisco New Generation Cartel, in an operation that triggered roadblocks and arson attacks in parts of the country. A military offensive against cartels launched in 2006 by former President Felipe Calderón led to bloody turf battles as gangs splintered, fueling a spiral of violence that analysts say contributed to Mexico’s persistently high homicide rates. Asked whether the operation against Oseguera signaled a shift toward a more aggressive security posture, Sheinbaum rejected that notion. SEN MULLIN URGES SPRING BREAKERS TO CANCEL TRIPS TO MEXICO AMID COUNTRY'S VIOLENCE: 'NO ONE SHOULD BE GOING' "The detention of a suspected criminal with an arrest warrant can generate this type of circumstance, but we are looking for peace, not war ," she said. Ruling Morena party President Luisa Alcalde also criticized Musk’s remarks, urging him to use his platform to address drug consumption, addiction , disinformation and the promotion of narco culture. "Wealth does not give moral authority," she said. "The lives that are lost in this fight, often fueled by consumption in other countries, are worth infinitely more than any fortune amassed in Silicon Valley." More than 130,000 people are listed as missing in Mexico, where much of the violence is linked to drug cartels that sell narcotics to the U.S. and obtain guns from across the border. Reuters contributed to this report.

On Wednesday, a Florida-registered speedboat entered Cuban waters and some on board exchanged gunfire with Cuban troops. Two such armed clashes occurred in 2022.

Border troops engaged in a gunfight near the island nation’s coast, the Cuban Interior Ministry said. Four were killed and six others were injured.

He held Spain’s Parliament hostage for 18 hours on Feb. 23, 1981, before surrendering after it became clear that he had little support from the country’s armed forces.

Four House Democrats demanded the top Federal Bureau of Prisons official explain how he plans to address the agency’s “persistent, unsafe conditions” and “pervasive shortage of critical staff,” driven in part by corrections officers fleeing the bureau for more lucrative jobs at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Outlined in a six-page letter sent Friday to BOP Director William Marshall III, the lawmakers’ questions come after a ProPublica investigation found that workers at federal lockups from Florida to California had been lured away by the $50,000 starting bonus and higher pay at ICE, which more than doubled its number of officers and agents last year during the Trump administration’s monthslong recruiting blitz. The prisons bureau, meanwhile, lost a net of more than 1,800 workers last year. “We are deeply concerned that these developments compromise the safety and security of both inmates and staff,” Reps. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, Lucy McBath of Georgia, Jasmine Crockett of Texas and Joe Neguse of Colorado wrote in their letter. “The shrinking existing workforce has been left to contend with an ever-growing use of overtime, which leads to fatigue, burnout, and increased attrition.” The representatives said that short staffing, in turn, has led to more lockdowns, more violence and less access to recidivism-reducing programs for prisoners. Their letter also raised questions about the cancellation of the union contract, which they noted critics have said “appears retaliatory,” and the ongoing reliance on “augmentation” — the practice of forcing nurses, teachers and plumbers who work in the prisons to fill in as corrections officers — to plug staffing gaps. “We believe these deeply troubling issues require concrete answers,” the lawmakers wrote. They set a 30-day deadline for the bureau to respond in writing. Prison union officials have also pressed the case, urging lawmakers to insist that Marshall and his deputy, Josh Smith, testify before Congress on the issue. The prison agency declined to answer questions from ProPublica about the lawmakers’ letter, saying it would respond directly to Congress. In a statement, a spokesperson said that the BOP “continues to prioritize efforts” to increase staffing, adding that some staff will always have to step in as corrections officers “for the safety and security of staff, inmates and the public.” The BOP has long struggled to hire and retain enough workers to staff its facilities, where roughly 34,700 employees are responsible for more than 138,000 prisoners . As of 2023, union officials said some 40% of corrections officer jobs remained vacant. That same year, the lack of staff helped land the prison system on a government list of high-risk agencies with serious vulnerabilities . As part of a long-term hiring push, the bureau turned to signing bonuses , retention pay and a fast-tracked hiring process. Although those efforts drew in a net of more than 1,200 people in 2024 — the bureau’s largest workforce increase in a decade — the cost of hiring incentives, along with raises, overtime and inflation, strained an already-stagnant budget. Early last year, the agency paused hiring and retention incentives to save money, a move that threatened to undermine the prior year’s staffing gains. Still, the financial strain continued and, by the fall, dozens of staff and prisoners were telling ProPublica about unusual scarcities in facilities across the country . Some prisons fell behind on utility and trash bills, while others ran out of staple foods including eggs and beef. At one point, a prison in Louisiana came within days of running out of food for inmates before union officials intervened and urged agency leaders to fix the problem. In their letter last week, the representatives said they were “alarmed” by the financial shortfalls ProPublica reported, as well as by the worsening staffing figures. Last year, the bureau’s net loss of employees was larger than in any other year since 2017, according to data ProPublica obtained through an open records request . With a dwindling workforce, the bureau’s overtime costs have soared. According to a recent Congressional Research Service report, in 2025 the federal prison system spent more than $387 million on overtime, a number surpassed only once in the past decade. Several prison officials who asked to remain anonymous told ProPublica this month that officers at some facilities are often forced to work two to four double shifts per week, sometimes putting in so many overtime hours that prisoners have expressed concern. “The only ones who like it are the predatory inmates,” one corrections officer told ProPublica. “Inmates don’t like super cops, but they at least want to feel like if they are attacked, someone will see it and stop it as quickly as they can. You ain’t getting that with a CO on a double who can barely keep his eyes open.” Meanwhile, the lawmakers said they were “gravely concerned” about some of the ways BOP leaders have tried to save money and minimize the use of overtime, including by locking down facilities and skimping on staff, which, lawmakers said, the bureau then attempted to cover up. When the Office of Inspector General visited one facility last year, the housing units were all well staffed, “a trick” the lawmakers said was accomplished only by extreme use of augmentation. “Reportedly, after the visit, the facility immediately resumed short-staffing units,” the lawmakers wrote. “Committee staff have reviewed housing unit staffing and augmentation rosters documenting this apparent effort to mislead the OIG.” Read more “We’re Broken”: As Federal Prisons Run Low on Food and Toilet Paper, Corrections Officers Are Leaving in Droves for ICE Last year, prison employees worked more than 700,000 augmentation hours , the most in any single year for at least a decade, according to the Congressional Research Service report. “That’s why I left,” one former prison official told ProPublica last year, explaining that he chose to retire instead of being forced to abandon his duties resolving discrimination complaints to instead work as an officer on a housing unit two days a week. The post Democrats Demand Answers for Federal Prison Staffing Shortage After Corrections Officers Flee for ICE Jobs appeared first on ProPublica .

The Trump administration is loosening restrictions on the sharing of law enforcement information with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, officials said, overriding controls that have been in place for decades to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens. Government officials said the changes could give the intelligence agencies access to a database containing hundreds of millions of documents — from FBI case files and banking records to criminal investigations of labor unions — that touch on the activities of law-abiding Americans. Administration officials said they are providing the intelligence agencies with more information from investigations by the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies to combat drug gangs and other transnational criminal groups that the administration has classified as terrorists. But they have taken these steps with almost no public acknowledgement or notification to Congress. Inside the government, officials said, the process has been marked by a similar lack of transparency, with scant high-level discussion and little debate among government lawyers. “None of this has been thought through very carefully — which is shocking,” one intelligence official said of the moves to expand information sharing. “There are a lot of privacy concerns out there, and nobody really wants to deal with them.” A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Olivia Coleman, declined to answer specific questions about the expanded information sharing or the legal basis for it. Instead, she cited some recent public statements by senior administration officials, including one in which the national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, emphasized the importance of “making sure that we have seamless two-way push communications with our law enforcement partners to facilitate that bi-directional sharing of information.” In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, revelations that Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had used the CIA to spy on American anti-war and civil rights activists outraged Americans who feared the specter of a secret police. The congressional reforms that followed reinforced the long-standing ban on intelligence agencies gathering information about the domestic activities of U.S. citizens. Compared with the FBI and other federal law enforcement organizations, the intelligence agencies operate with far greater secrecy and less scrutiny from Congress and the courts. They are generally allowed to collect information on Americans only as part of foreign intelligence investigations. Exemptions must be approved by the U.S. attorney general and the director of national intelligence. The National Security Agency, for example, can intercept communications between people inside the United States and terror suspects abroad without the probable cause or judicial warrants that are generally required of law enforcement agencies. Since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the expansion of that surveillance authority in the fight against Islamist terrorism has been the subject of often intense debates among the three branches of government.  Word of the Trump administration’s efforts to expand the sharing of law enforcement information with the intelligence agencies was met with alarm by advocates for civil liberties protections. “The Intelligence Community operates with broad authorities, constant secrecy and little-to-no judicial oversight because it is meant to focus on foreign threats,” Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, a senior Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement to ProPublica. Giving the intelligence agencies wider access to information on the activities of U.S. citizens not suspected of any crime “puts Americans’ freedoms at risk,” the senator added. “The potential for abuse of that information is staggering.” Most of the current and former officials interviewed for this story would speak only on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the matter and because they feared retaliation for criticizing the administration’s approach. Virtually all those officials said they supported the goal of sharing law enforcement information more effectively, so long as sensitive investigations and citizens’ privacy were protected. But after years in which Republican and Democratic administrations weighed those considerations deliberately — and made little headway with proposed reforms — officials said the Trump administration has pushed ahead with little regard for those concerns. “There will always be those who simply want to turn on a spigot and comingle all available information, but you can’t just flip a switch — at least not if you want the government to uphold the rule of law,” said Russell Travers, a former acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center who served in senior intelligence roles under both Republican and Democratic administrations. The 9/11 attacks — which exposed the CIA’s failure to share intelligence with the FBI even as Al Qaida moved its operatives into the United States — led to a series of reforms intended to transform how the government managed terrorism information. A centerpiece of that effort was the establishment of the NCTC, as the counterterrorism center is known, to collect and analyze intelligence on foreign terrorist groups. The statutes that established the NCTC explicitly prohibit it from collecting information on domestic terror threats. National security officials have spent much less time trying to remedy what they have acknowledged are serious deficiencies in the government’s management of intelligence on organized crime groups. In 2011, President Barack Obama noted those problems in issuing a new national strategy to “build, balance and integrate the tools of American power to combat transnational organized crime.” Although the Obama plan stressed the need for improved information-sharing, it led to only minimal changes. President Donald Trump has seized on the issue with greater urgency. He has also declared his intention to improve information-sharing across the government, signing an executive order to eliminate “information silos” of unclassified information. More consequentially, he went on to brand more than a dozen Latin American drug mafias and criminal gangs as terrorist organizations. The administration has used those designations to justify more extreme measures against the criminal groups. Since last year, it has killed at least 148 suspected drug smugglers with missile strikes in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, steps that many legal experts have denounced as violations of international law. Some administration officials have argued that the terror designations entitle intelligence agencies to access all law enforcement case files related to the Sinaloa Cartel, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and other gangs designated by the State Department as foreign terrorist organizations. The first criterion for those designations is that a group must “be a foreign organization.” Yet unlike Islamist terror groups such as al-Qaida or al-Shabab, Latin drug mafias and criminal gangs like MS-13 have a large and complex presence inside the United States. Their members are much more likely to be U.S. citizens and to live and operate here. On Sept. 22, the Trump administration also designated the loosely organized antifascist political movement antifa as a terrorist group, despite the lack of any federal law authorizing it to do so. Weeks later, the administration named four European militant groups said to be aligned with antifa to the government’s list of foreign terrorist organizations. Those steps were seen by some intelligence experts as potentially opening the door for the CIA and other agencies to monitor Americans who support antifa in violation of their free speech rights. The approach also echoed justifications that both Johnson and Nixon used for domestic spying by the CIA: that such investigations were needed to determine whether government critics were being supported by foreign governments. The wider sharing of law enforcement case files is also being driven by the administration’s abrupt decision to disband the Justice Department office that for decades coordinated the work of different agencies on major drug trafficking and organized crime cases. That office, the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, was abruptly shut down on Sept. 30 as the Trump administration was setting up a new network of Homeland Security Task Forces designed by the White House homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller. The new task forces, which were first described in detail by ProPublica last year, are designed to refocus federal law enforcement agencies on what Miller and other officials have portrayed as an alarming nexus of immigration and transnational crime. The reorganization also gives the White House and the Department of Homeland Security new authority to oversee transnational crime investigations, subordinating the DEA and federal prosecutors, who were central to the previous system. That reorganization has set off a struggle over the control of OCDETF’s crown jewel, a database of some 770 million records that is the only central, searchable repository of drug trafficking and organized crime case files in the federal government. Until now, the records of that database, which is called Compass, have only been accessible to investigators under elaborate rules agreed to by the more than 20 agencies that shared their information. The system was widely viewed as cumbersome, but officials said it also encouraged cooperation among the agencies while protecting sensitive case files and U.S. citizens’ privacy. Although the Homeland Security Task Forces took possession of the Compass system when their leadership moved into OCDETF’s headquarters in suburban Virginia, the administration is still deciding how it will operate that database, officials said. However, officials said, intelligence agencies and the Defense Department have already taken a series of technical steps to connect their networks to Compass so they can access its information if they are permitted to do so. The White House press office did not respond to questions about how the government will manage the Compass database and whether it will remain under the control of the Homeland Security Task Forces. The National Counterterrorism Center, under its new director, Joe Kent, has been notably forceful in seeking to manage the Compass system, several officials said. Kent, a former Army Special Forces and CIA paramilitary officer who twice ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Washington state, was previously a top aide to the national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard. Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images The FBI, DEA and other law enforcement agencies have strongly opposed the NCTC effort, the officials said. In internal discussions, they added, the law enforcement agencies have argued that it makes no sense for an intelligence agency to manage sensitive information that comes almost entirely from law enforcement. “The NCTC has taken a very aggressive stance,” one official said. “They think the agencies should be sharing everything with them, and it should be up to them to decide what is relevant and what U.S. citizen information they shouldn’t keep.” The FBI declined to comment in response to questions from ProPublica. A DEA spokesperson also would not discuss the agency’s actions or views on the wider sharing of its information with the intelligence community. But in a statement the spokesman added, “DEA is committed to working with our IC and law enforcement partners to ensure reliable information-sharing and strong coordination to most effectively target the designated cartels.” Even with the Trump administration’s expanded definition of what might constitute terrorist activity, the information on terror groups accounts for only a small fraction of the records in the Compass system, current and former officials said. The records include State Department visa records, some files of U.S. Postal Service inspectors, years of suspicious transaction reports from the Treasury Department and call records from the Bureau of Prisons. Investigative files of the FBI, DEA and other law enforcement agencies often include information about witnesses, associates of suspects and others who have never committed any crimes, officials said. “You have witness information, target information, bank account information,” the former OCDETF director, Thomas Padden, said in an interview. “I can’t think of a dataset that would not be a concern if it were shared without some controls. You need checks and balances, and it’s not clear to me that those are in place.” Officials familiar with the interagency discussions said NCTC and other intelligence officials have insisted they are interested only in terror-related information and that they have electronic systems that can appropriately filter out information on U.S. persons. But FBI and other law enforcement agencies have challenged those arguments, officials said, contending that the NCTC proposal would almost inevitably breach privacy laws and imperil sensitive case information without necessarily strengthening the fight against transnational criminals. Already, NCTC officials have been pressing the FBI and DEA to share all the information they have on the criminal groups that have been designated as terrorist organizations, officials said. The DEA, which had previously earned a reputation for jealously guarding its case files, authorized the transfer of at least some of those files, officials said, adding to pressure on the FBI to do the same. Administration lawyers have argued that such information sharing is authorized by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, the law that reorganized intelligence activities after 9/11. Officials have also cited the 2001 Patriot Act, which gives law enforcement agencies power to obtain financial, communications and other information on a subject they certify as having ties to terrorism. The central role of the NCTC in collecting and analyzing terrorism information specifically excludes “intelligence pertaining exclusively to domestic terrorists and domestic counterterrorism.” But that has not stopped Kent or his boss, intelligence director Gabbard, from stepping over red lines that their predecessors carefully avoided. In October, Kent drew sharp criticism from the FBI after he examined files from the bureau’s ongoing investigation of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist. That episode was first reported by The New York Times . Last month, Gabbard appeared to lead a raid at which the FBI seized truckloads of 2020 presidential voting records from an election center in Fulton County, Georgia. Officials later said she was sent by Trump but did not oversee the operation. In years past, officials said, the possibility of crossing long-settled legal boundaries on citizens’ privacy would have precipitated a flurry of high-level meetings, legal opinions and policy memos. But almost none of that internal discussion has taken place, they said. “We had lengthy interagency meetings that involved lawyers, civil liberties, privacy and operational security types to ensure that we were being good stewards of information and not trampling all over U.S. persons’ privacy rights,” said Travers, the former NCTC director. When administration officials abruptly moved to close down OCDEFT and supplant it with the Homeland Security Task Forces network, they seemed to have little grasp of the complexities of such a transition, several people involved in the process said. The agencies that contributed records to OCDETF were ordered to sign over their information to the task forces, but they did so without knowing if the system’s new custodians would observe the conditions under which the files were shared. Nor were they encouraged to ask, officials said. While both the FBI and DEA have objected to a change in the protocols, officials said smaller agencies that contributed some of their records to the OCDETF system have been “reluctant to push back too hard,” as one of them put it. The NCTC, which faced budget cuts during the Biden administration, has been among those most eager to service the new Homeland Security Task Forces. To that end, it set up a new fusion center to promote “two-way intelligence sharing of actionable information between the intelligence community and law enforcement,” as Gabbard described it. The expanded sharing of law enforcement and intelligence information on trafficking groups is also a key goal of the Pentagon’s new Tucson, Arizona-based Joint Interagency Task Force-Counter Cartel. In announcing the task force’s creation last month, the U.S. Northern Command said it would work with the Homeland Security Task Forces “to ensure we are sharing all intelligence between our Department of War, law enforcement and Intelligence Community partners.” In the last months of the Biden administration, a somewhat similar proposal was put forward by the then-DEA administrator, Anne Milgram. That plan involved setting up a pair of centers where DEA, CIA and other agencies would pool information on major Mexican drug trafficking groups. At the time, one particularly strong objection came from the Defense Department’s counternarcotics and stabilization office, officials said. The sharing of such law enforcement information with the intelligence community, an official there noted, could violate laws prohibiting the CIA from gathering intelligence on Americans inside the United States. The Pentagon, he warned, would want no part of such a plan. The post Trump Administration Moves to Allow Intelligence Agencies Easier Access to Law Enforcement Files appeared first on ProPublica .

Should a person be deported because once, a decade and a half ago, they left their toddlers home alone for a half hour to buy them pajamas at Walmart? That’s what the Trump administration is arguing in a little-noticed federal appeals court case being decided in California, with sweeping implications for both the immigration and child welfare systems. A ruling is expected in the coming months. In 2010, Sotero Mendoza-Rivera, an undocumented farmworker who’d immigrated from Mexico 10 years earlier, made a fateful decision. He drove with his girlfriend, Angelica Ortega-Vasquez, to their local Walmart in McMinnville, Oregon, according to a police report. The store was seven minutes from their apartment. In addition to the pajamas, they purchased motor oil and brake fluid for their car. When they got back to the apartment, their 2-year-old son, who’d been in bed asleep when they’d left, had woken up and somehow gotten out the door. A bystander found him by the street outside the complex, baby bottle in hand, and called the police. The responding officer issued Mendoza-Rivera and Ortega-Vasquez a misdemeanor citation, which they resolved with a guilty plea, a fine and probation. The officer stated in his report that the little boy and his 3-year-old sister were healthy and clean, that the apartment was well-kept and stocked with food, and that a neighbor said that the mother was usually home with the kids. The Obama administration then opened deportation proceedings against Mendoza-Rivera, but did not keep him in detention. He appealed, and the case wound its way slowly through the legal system before hitting a backlog at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where some immigration matters from nearly a decade ago are still being decided. But in August, amid the Trump administration’s campaign of mass deportations, Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained Mendoza-Rivera and locked him up in another state. And the Department of Justice is now arguing that what he did in 2010 (the current case is against him only) is a crime deserving of immediate removal from the country. A DOJ lawyer argued before a panel of the 9th Circuit in Pasadena, California, last month that it doesn’t matter if no harm to children occurred, saying an immigrant parent should still get deported if their parenting decision involved a “substantial” deviation from a “normal” standard of care for kids. Child welfare officials and experts told ProPublica they are deeply concerned by the case, as well as several others like it that have been making their way through the courts and are now reaching a decisive point. “Imagine what a weapon it would be in ICE’s hands if child welfare is added to all the other areas where a conviction for the most minor offense means deportation,” said Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, an advocacy group. Indeed, if Attorney General Pam Bondi’s team wins this case, thousands of immigrant moms and dads could be exposed to deportation for minor involvement in the juvenile court system, a new realm for President Donald Trump’s deportation regime. There aren’t exact numbers as to how many immigrants are accused of low-level parental negligence in juvenile courts. But as ProPublica has previously reported, millions of parents are accused of child neglect every year in this country, in many instances for reasons stemming from poverty like a lack of child care or food in the fridge, rather than physical or sexual abuse. Immigrant parents are no more likely than U.S.-born parents to abuse children. But undocumented parents may be more likely to be accused of certain low-level forms of neglect, according to legal aid attorneys. For one thing, due to their lack of legal status, they sometimes avoid interactions with officials at schools and hospitals, leading to potential allegations against them for neglecting their kids’ health or education. They also disproportionately work long and unpredictable hours, sometimes having their older children look after their younger ones, which in the U.S. can be deemed inadequate supervision. Differing cultural norms regarding how much hands-on supervision is necessary also play a role. There is no evidence yet that ICE has been actively looking for cases like these to identify parents to deport, according to interviews with over a dozen federal and state child welfare officials. But data on specific child welfare cases is reported from states to the federal government annually, via the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System. (The data contain identifiers for children but not their names, though state agencies have those.) “The million or so reports in NCANDS would be a gold mine for Noem and Miller,” said Andy Barclay, a longtime child welfare statistician, referring to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and top Trump adviser Stephen Miller. The first Trump administration did not seek to use such data for deportations, according to Jerry Milner, who was appointed to oversee the U.S. child welfare system as head of the federal Children’s Bureau from 2017 to 2021. “I never had any of those discussions around the data,” Milner told ProPublica. “I can’t guarantee that others did not, but they never made it to me.” But, he said, “things are different now.” “I would have strong concerns if any of the data are used for purposes other than what they were intended for,” Milner said. Medicaid data, for instance, is now reportedly being shared with the Department of Homeland Security, and those files can have more identifying information than NCANDS does on families with child welfare cases. DHS has also accessed Office of Refugee Resettlement data on migrant children, which can be used to identify young people’s locations and the (sometimes undocumented) adults taking care of them. Indeed, DHS and FBI agents have visited migrant kids at the homes of their caretakers, ostensibly to perform “welfare checks.” The White House declined to answer questions for this article. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment. A Justice Department spokesperson in an email accused the Biden administration of letting Mendoza-Rivera’s case languish and said that “as part of this Administration’s commitment to making America safe again, the Attorney General will continue to defend efforts to remove criminal illegal aliens, especially those convicted of offenses which place children in situations likely to endanger their health or welfare.” The Trump administration’s view, according to the Justice Department’s filings in Mendoza-Rivera’s case, is that undocumented parents convicted of even the most minor forms of parental negligence should be ineligible for a type of legal relief called “cancellation of removal.” (Mendoza-Rivera sought this relief during his initial deportation proceedings, which is part of what spurred the current appeals case.) It’s an off-ramp from deportation that until now has been available to such moms and dads if they’ve been in the U.S. for 10 or more years, they have “good moral character,” and their deportation would cause extreme hardship to their U.S. citizen children. This would apply to Mendoza-Rivera and Ortega-Vasquez’s kids, who are American citizens. One of the main federal laws that the Trump administration has been relying on in its effort to deport millions of people comes from the Bill Clinton era. In 1996, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act overhauled immigration enforcement in part by stating that noncitizens, even lawful permanent residents, must be expeditiously deported if they’ve been convicted of certain offenses, including aggravated felonies, crimes of “moral turpitude,” drug crimes or domestic violence, or a “crime of child abuse, child neglect, or child abandonment.” The motivation for including this sort of language, at the time, was clear. Amid the violent crime wave of the ’90s, the law’s co-author, Bob Dole, said on the Senate floor that the crimes he wanted to make deportable included “vicious acts of stalking, child abuse and sexual abuse.” Yet over the three decades since, societal norms around what constitutes bad — and even criminal — parenting have come to include all sorts of nonviolent and even harmless behavior. A range of parenting practices that were considered normal for most of the 20th century are now investigated and prosecuted as child maltreatment in many states; letting your kids play at the park and walk home alone could be “neglect ,” especially if you’re poor and a person of color . So could leaving them in their car seats briefly with the windows cracked and the car alarm on while you run into a store to buy diapers, or failing to properly secure their bedroom windows at night. Some rulings by other courts have blocked deportations for people with these sorts of alleged parenting lapses, while the federal Board of Immigration Appeals has offered changing guidance on the issue. Immigration advocates fear that the current appeals court proceeding, which groups together several similar cases including Mendoza-Rivera’s, could become hugely influential across the legal system — and with much higher stakes now given the present administration’s enforcement focus. Although the Obama and Biden administrations took similar positions to the Trump administration on this point, in general they didn’t pursue deportations as aggressively. “There was some discretion being exercised,” said David Zimmer, Mendoza-Rivera’s appellate attorney. “So it was at least possible, in a given case, that they might have decided not to pursue removal if the parent hadn’t done anything meaningfully wrong.” That’s no longer the case in a regime that is seeking any reason to expel an immigrant, Zimmer said. This case could be heard by the full 9th Circuit next and then head to the U.S. Supreme Court, if the justices choose to take it up. Much of the debate rests on the question of whether it matters if immigrant parents meant to harm their children, given that intention is part of the definition of most crimes. If the parent both didn’t harm and wasn’t aware they might harm their child, advocates argue, it shouldn’t qualify as a “crime” worthy of deportation. The Oregon misdemeanor negligence statute under which Mendoza-Rivera was convicted doesn’t require proving any intent to harm a child, any actual harm to a child or even exposure of a child to any harm, acknowledged Justice Department lawyer Imran Zaidi at a 9th Circuit hearing in January. But negligence is still a “culpable mental state” deserving of deportation, he said, because it is “incompatible with a proper regard for consequences.” Jed Rakoff, a New York federal district judge serving as a visiting member of the 9th Circuit panel, responded that he’s been hearing this argument since “my first year of torts class.” Negligence, he said, is by definition unconscious; otherwise it would be “recklessness,” which is a different, more serious act involving consciously disregarding potential harm. In the context of these family court cases, it is often just conduct that’s a small deviation from some middle-class “reasonable person’s” — a neighbor’s, a caseworker’s — subjective opinion of what “good” parenting looks like. “I’m talking about the term ‘crime’: What did Congress mean by that single word?” Rakoff said, referring to the 1996 law’s description of a “crime” of “child abuse, child neglect, or child abandonment.” Lawmakers clearly meant something more serious than briefly leaving kids unattended, Rakoff continued. After all, the consequence they were prescribing — deportation — was so much more severe than any other possible consequence for any similar misdemeanor. Zaidi, the Justice Department lawyer, responded that if many state laws say that something is a crime of child neglect, then it is a crime of child neglect, and Congress said that a crime of child neglect is deportable. The two judges other than Rakoff seemed more open to this argument. The fundamental question that the appeals court is considering, then, is whether these essentially harmless parental “crimes” alleged by increasingly hands-on local child welfare authorities are the same category of crime that the U.S. Congress was talking about when it passed a law on immigrants committing violent crime, domestic violence and terrorism. Josh Gupta-Kagan, founder and director of the Columbia Law School Family Defense Clinic, said that it appears Mendoza-Rivera and Ortega-Vasquez “were not a safety threat to their children, let alone to anyone else,” even if they showed bad judgment by leaving toddlers alone for a half hour. So it is “fair to question,” he said, how pursuing either of their deportations serves the Trump administration’s “stated interest in public safety.” McMinnville, Oregon, where Mendoza-Rivera and Ortega-Vasquez bought those pajamas at Walmart, is where they’ve lived for nearly a quarter century and where they had their two children, who are now teenagers. It’s also where Mendoza-Rivera spent all those years picking and packaging produce. But he has now been locked up for months in a detention center in Tacoma, Washington, and his family has in turn lost much of its income. His kids are without him. And if the Trump administration gets to use a law against him that was intended to protect children, they will lose their dad to a foreign country for good. The post Trump’s Latest Deportation Tactic: Targeting Immigrants With Minor Family Court Cases appeared first on ProPublica .

Hilary Knight, captain of the victorious US women’s Olympic ice hockey team, said Wednesday it was unfortunate that a “distasteful joke” by President Donald Trump had overshadowed the achievements of US athletes at the Milan-Cortina Games. The US men’s ice hockey team took a congratulatory call from Trump as they celebrated their gold medal victory over Canada. The president invited them to his State of the Union address and added he would have to ask the triumphant women’s team as well or risk...

Washington will keep China tariffs at their current level as the Trump administration seeks “continuity” after the Supreme Court struck down the levies it imposed last year, according to US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, weeks ahead of a high-stakes meeting between the two countries’ leaders. The US will keep in place current China tariffs, which have varied from 35 per cent to 50 per cent depending on the product, since the countries “de-escalated” the trade war last year, Greer said on...

Weee, an online grocer specialising in Asian and Latino goods, is betting that America’s appetite for ethnic food and grocery delivery will outlast a sharp drop in immigration, with its founder forecasting years of double-digit growth even as the Trump administration tightens border controls. The San Francisco-based company has seen its annual revenue grow at about 30 to 40 per cent from 2023 to 2025, and is expecting to expand at the same pace in the next five to 10 years, founder and CEO Larry...

Killing of Ruben Ray Martinez on 15 March 2025 in Texas was not disclosed by the department until media reported it A grand jury on Wednesday rejected indictments over the fatal shooting last year of a US citizen by a federal immigration agent during a traffic encounter in Texas, prosecutors said. The shooting of Ruben Ray Martinez on 15 March 2025, by a Homeland Security investigations agent wasn’t publicly disclosed by the Department of Homeland Security until the Associated Press and other media outlets reported it last week. Continue reading...

Airline credits better fuel efficiency, customer demand, new routes and more flights to Japan, Bali and New Zealand for strong result Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email , free app or daily news podcast Qantas has delivered a bumper $1.46bn half-year underlying profit as travellers shrug off cost-of-living pressures to travel within and outside Australia. Australia’s biggest airline credited robust customer demand, new routes and increased flight frequency to “Japan, Bali and across the Tasman”, and more fuel-efficient new aircraft for the strong result, up 5% from a year ago. Continue reading...

Proposed settlement would pay users of glyphosate-based weedkiller who have non-Hodgkin lymphoma $10,000 to $165,000 A group of 14 law firms representing nearly 20,000 plaintiffs is seeking to intervene in Bayer ’s proposed class action settlement of Roundup litigation, citing concerns that the deal will not be fair to cancer sufferers. The group filed both a motion to intervene and a motion for an extension of time for court preliminary approval of the deal in St Louis city circuit court in Missouri late on February 24. This story is co-published with the New Lede , a journalism project of the Environmental Working Group Continue reading...