When police in Dalton, Georgia pulled over Ximena Arias-Cristobal, officers accused the 19-year-old college student of making an illegal right turn at a red light.
She told officers she didn’t have her international driver’s license on her, according to a police report, and she was taken into custody.
Then she was moved to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center roughly four hours away, and now she faces the possibility of being removed from the country along with her family.
But local police this week admitted the officers made a mistake.
After a review of dash cam footage from the traffic stop on May 5, “it was determined that Ms. Arias-Cristobal’s vehicle appeared similar to the offending vehicle but was not the vehicle that made an improper turn,” according to a statement from the Dalton Police Department.
Police and prosecutors dismissed the charges against her, but Donald Trump’s administration intends to remove her from the United States, where she has lived since she was four years old.
Arias-Cristobal’s parents did not have legal permission to enter the United States from Mexico in 2010 when she was a toddler, and she did not qualify for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which ended the year before her family entered the country, according to family friends.
Monthly Archives: May 2025
NBC News: Immigration agents break SUV window while detaining man after church on Mother’s Day
The man who recorded the footage told Telemundo Nueva Inglaterra that he heard the mother screaming, “He has his papers, he has his license!”
Federal immigration agents were seen breaking an SUV’s window, throwing a man inside to the ground and handcuffing him on Sunday, Mother’s Day, after the man and his family left church in Chelsea, Massachusetts.
It’s one of many apparent ICE operations that have caused controversy across the Greater Boston area in recent weeks. Agents were seen breaking a car window in New Bedford, Massachusetts, last month before taking a man inside into custody.
In Sunday’s incident, the family was just leaving church when several federal agency vehicles intercepted them at the border between Everett and Chelsea, according to video of the incident shared with Telemundo Nueva Inglaterra. After several minutes of arguing, and refusing to obey their request to roll down their window, agents broke the window to remove the man from the car.
After removing the man from the car, agents threw him to the ground and handcuffed him. Inside the vehicle were the rest of his family, including his wife, children and grandmother.
ICE = pond scum, with all due apologies to real pond scum.
Miami Herald: ‘Lying to Him’: Greene Slams Trump White House
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) criticized President Donald Trump’s advisers during an interview on former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. She claimed that some in Trump’s inner circle are misinforming him. Greene also expressed concern about Trump’s foreign policy, particularly regarding the potential for renewed conflict with Iran.
Greene questioned, “Why on earth would we go over and occupy Ukraine and spend an untold amount of future American taxpayer dollars defending and mining their minerals as well as potentially putting American lives at risk and future war? Why don’t we just mine our own rare earth minerals that are tied up on federal lands that the government confiscated years ago?”
Greene noted during the interview that there are people “in the president’s ear” who are “lying to him,” but she did not specify who. Bannon challenged the notion of a divide between Trump and his base, prompting Greene to clarify that the true divide exists between Trump and establishment Republicans undermining his agenda.
I love it when these creeps feed on one another. It’s a dog-eat-dog world!
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/lying-to-him-greene-slams-trump-white-house/ss-AA1EJq1V
Independent: White House backed down on China’s tariff after president was told they would hurt ‘Trump’s people’ the most
Several White House staffers had to warn the president that his tariffs would impact ‘Trump’s people.’
The White House eased tariffs imposed on China after several staffers were forced to warn President Donald Trump that his penalties would cause his supporters – or “Trump’s people,” – to suffer economically, according to a report.
While Trump was reluctant to lower tariffs against Beijing too quickly, several White House staffers – including Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other aides – warned him the penalties were placing his own supporters in danger, sources told the Washington Post.
…
“The key argument was that this was beginning to hurt Trump’s supporters – Trump’s people,” one person briefed on the talks said. “It gave Susie a key window.”
Raw Story: Judge hits Trump admin with sharply worded threat over ‘intentional refusal to comply’
The Trump Department of Justice faces a new legal deadline after a federal judge warned that its failure to comply with a court order could be treated as an “intentional refusal” to follow the law.
In a sharply worded one-page order, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis said the Justice Department missed a key deadline to produce a privilege log tied to its claims of the state secrets privilege in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran national wrongfully deported to the country in March.
“Evidently missing from the defendants’ filing is the privilege log that this court ordered to be produced,” Xinis wrote in the document posted by Politico’s Kyle Cheney. The judge gave the government a Tuesday afternoon deadline to file the log and delivered a warning.
“Failure to file the privilege log or otherwise respond will be construed as an intentional refusal to comply with this court’s orders,” according to the order. The dispute bubbled up last week after the Trump administration invoked the state secrets privilege to shield details surrounding Abrego Garcia’s case, according to a report in Politico.
The judge set the next in-person hearing for Friday.
Vox.com: The first federal court hearing on Trump’s tariffs did not go so well for Trump
A federal court held the very first hearing on President Donald Trump’s wide-ranging, so-called Liberation Day tariffs on Tuesday, offering the earliest window into whether those tariffs — and potentially all of the shifting tariffs Trump has imposed since he retook office — will be struck down. The case is V.O.S. Selections v. Trump.
It is unclear how the three-judge panel that heard the case will rule, but it appears somewhat more likely than not that they will rule that the tariffs are unlawful. All three of the judges, who sit on the US Court of International Trade, appeared troubled by the Trump administration’s claim that the judiciary may not review the legality of the tariffs at all. But Jeffrey Schwab, the lawyer representing several small businesses challenging the tariffs, also faced an array of skeptical questions.

https://www.vox.com/economy/412966/supreme-court-tariffs-donald-trump-trade-vos-selections
Washington Post: Gabbard fires leaders of intelligence group that wrote Venezuela assessment
The director of national intelligence fired top officials weeks after their group authored an assessment contradicting President Donald Trump’s legal rationale for deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has fired the top two officials at the National Intelligence Council, weeks after the council wrote an assessment that contradicted President Donald Trump’s rationale for invoking the Alien Enemies Act and deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members without due process.
Gabbard removed Michael Collins, the acting chair of the National Intelligence Council, as well as his deputy, Maria Langan-Riekhof, according to a spokesperson for Gabbard’s office.
The actions are the latest purge by Gabbard, who has said she is fighting politicization of the intelligence community but has removed or sidelined officials perceived to not support Trump’s political agenda.
Fighting politicization? It’s Trump and his band of sycophants who are politicizing everything.
In any case, Trump doesn’t dare keep people like Michael Collins and Maria Langan-Riekhof around. People who tell & write the truth are so inconvenient.
Washington Post: Georgetown researcher released from ICE custody after judge’s order
Badar Khan Suri, who has been held in Texas since March, returned to Virginia on Wednesday night after a federal judge found he raised substantial First and Fifth amendment claims.
Badar Khan Suri, the Georgetown University researcher who has been held in an immigration detention center in Texas since March, was released from custody Wednesday, hours after a federal judge ruled that Trump administration officials probably violated his rights in their ongoing attempt to deport him.
Suri, a postdoctoral fellow who lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and three children, says he is being wrongfully targeted by immigration authorities because of his family’s support for the Palestinian people in the conflict between Israel and Hamas. U.S. officials have invoked a rarely used statute as they seek to deport Suri to his native India, calling him a threat to foreign-policy interests.
At a hearing in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles ordered Suri released from immigration custody. He was released hours later, his attorneys said. The ruling came days after Giles asserted jurisdiction over the case in Virginia, denying a request from the Justice Department to transfer proceedings to a federal court in Texas.
As a condition of Suri’s release, Giles ordered that Suri reside in Virginia and attend hearings in her courtroom.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/05/14/georgetown-researcher-suri-virginia-texas
National Security Journal: NATO Is Now Dead
NATO, in its current form, is depicted as a “corpse,” its strategic effectiveness undermined by decades of European defense underfunding (“free-riding”) and US strategic overstretch.
-Most member states fail to meet spending commitments, rendering the alliance a hollow shell, a reality starkly exposed by the war in Ukraine where the US carries the primary burden.
-President Trump’s approach is seen not as the cause of NATO’s decline but as a catalyst for a necessary reckoning, forcing Europe to confront its defense responsibilities.
-A fundamental reset towards a European-led security framework, with US support rather than dominance, is essential for future relevance.

Robert Reich hits the nail right on the head:
