Cuban national Isidro Perez, who lived in the U.S. for nearly 60 years, has reportedly died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody. His death has marked the twelfth in ICE facilities this year. The incident has sparked public and legislative outrage over ICE’s lack of accountability and the need for improved detainee conditions.
Border Czar Tom Homan responded to questions about Perez’s death by stating that fatalities in ICE custody have not been unusual. He emphasized ICE’s efforts to address detainee health and has urged a focus on lives saved by the agency.
Homan said, “I’m unaware of that, I’m not aware of that. I mean people die in ICE custody, people die in county jail, people die in state prisons.”
Homan added, “The question should be how many lives does ICE save because when they go into detention, we find many with diseases and stuff that we deal with right away to prevent that. So I’m not aware of that specific case but I’ll say this, people can argue with me all they want but the facts are the facts.”
Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) condemned the inhumane treatment of detainees, citing denial of basic necessities. Critics argued that acknowledging deaths in custody has fallen short without accountability.
Chu said, “They are undergoing conditions that are inhumane, in my opinion. They were not able to change their underwear for 10 days.”
ICE reiterated its commitment to detainee safety, outlining medical protocols such as screenings and emergency care. However, lawmakers have reported ongoing barriers to oversight due to new guidelines.
ICE stated, “ICE remains committed to ensuring that all those in its custody reside in safe, secure, and humane environments. Comprehensive medical care is provided from the moment individuals arrive and throughout the entirety of their stay.”
ICE added, “All people in ICE custody receive medical, dental and mental health intake screening within 12 hours of arriving at each detention facility, a full health assessment within 14 days of entering ICE custody or arrival at a facility, access to medical appointments and 24-hour emergency care. At no time during detention is a detained illegal alien denied emergent care.”
Despite criticism, Homan has directed inquiries to ICE’s website, asserting that the agency has upheld the highest detention standards in the industry.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/ice-faces-backlash-after-detainee-dies-in-custody/ss-AA1LALjo
When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced earlier this month that he would return a Confederate memorial to Arlington National Cemetery, he blamed “woke lemmings” for it having been taken down. Created by the sculptor Moses Ezekiel, the statue in question, which Hegseth described as “beautiful and historic,” features sentimental images of Confederate soldiers and loyal Black slaves. It was first installed in the cemetery in 1914 and was removed in late 2023, as part of the Biden administration’s larger effort to remove memorials that glorified the Confederate cause and to rechristen bases whose names lionized traitors to the United States. The war against the Confederacy killed more than 300,000 members of the military that Hegseth leads—a grim fact that the defense secretary trivializes in his efforts to score political points against the left.
Hegseth’s move is one of several by the Trump administration to bring Confederate commemorations back ….
The Trump administration is drawing up plans to rebrand the Department of Defense as the Department of War, according to a White House official, following up on the president’s push to revive a name last used in 1947.
Restoring the discarded name of the government’s largest department could be done by an act of Congress, but the White House is considering other avenues to make the change, according to the official.
Trump has broached the idea repeatedly since taking office. “As Department of War, we won everything. We won everything,” Trump said Monday, referring to wars fought before the creation of the Department of Defense after World War II. “I think we’re going to have to go back to that.”
The Pentagon began developing legislative proposals to make the change in the early weeks of Trump’s second term, according to a former official. One idea was to ask Congress for authority to restore the former name during a national emergency, while also reviving the title of secretary of war for the department’s top civilian official, the former official said.
The old name “has a stronger sound,” Trump said Monday in an Oval Office meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae-myung. He added the change would be made “over the next week or so.”
The structure of the military has evolved considerably since the Department of War was created in 1789, and so has the name for the bureaucracy overseeing it. Initially the Department of War oversaw the Army, while a separate Department of the Navy ran naval forces and the Marines.
After World War II in an effort to increase efficiency, President Harry S. Truman put the armed forces under one organization, initially called the National Military Establishment under a bill passed by Congress in 1947. The legislation merged the Navy and War Departments and the newly independent Air Force into a single organization led by a civilian secretary of defense.
Much of the opposition to the changes arose over ending the Navy’s status as an independent department. “We shall fight on The Hill, in the Senate chamber, and on the White House lawn,” read an inscription on a blackboard of a Navy captain who opposed the new system, according to a December 1948 St. Louis Post-Dispatch article. “We shall never surrender.”
Congress discarded the National Military Establishment in 1949 and renamed it the Department of Defense, giving the cabinet-level secretary more power to oversee the services, including their procurement procedures. That ignited concern that the enhanced powers would make the defense secretary a “military dictator,” according to a July 1949 article in the Los Angeles Daily News.
Trump has said his concern is that the title isn’t bellicose enough. In April, during an Oval Office event, he said that the Defense Secretary used to be known as the War Secretary. “They changed it when we became a little bit politically correct,” he said.
He raised the idea of reviving the title at a NATO summit in The Hague in June: “It used to be called Secretary of War,” Trump said at a gathering of foreign leaders. “Maybe we’ll have to start thinking about changing it.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth weighed in Tuesday during a cabinet meeting, saying Defense Department “just doesn’t sound right.”
The Pentagon under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is facing mounting upheaval after Doug Beck, head of the Defense Innovation Unit and the last high-profile Biden holdover, abruptly resigned without explanation. Beck’s departure severs a key link to Silicon Valley and follows a wave of senior exits, including multiple top generals ousted or retiring early. Hegseth, a former Fox News host whose tenure has been marred by scandals and culture-war battles, now faces intensifying scrutiny as critics warn his leadership is destabilizing the nation’s defense establishment.
Read the full story here.
Cabinet members showered President Donald Trump with praise at their hours-long televised meeting, but a political consultant warned those displays of devotion could wind up backfiring.
The 79-year-old president on Tuesday hosted a record-breaking three-hour, 16-minute cabinet meeting where Senate-confirmed officials fell over themselves laughing at his wisecracks and insults, and they lavished him with adulation that astonished “CNN News Central” host Erica Hill and other onlookers.
“These cabinet meetings that the president holds that are really, I suppose, a moment for, once again, his cabinet to publicly praise him,” Hill said. “It’s a very ‘dear leader’ feeling moment. Yesterday, nearly four hours – does that concern you at all?”
Republican strategist Shermichael Singleton doesn’t think those displays would break through with most Americans, who he said won’t likely see the meetings on television.
“I don’t pay attention to to those meetings, and I don’t think that most average Americans pay attention,” he said. “Most people are working during the times that we’re in these things.”
“So do they not matter?” Hill interrupted.
“I don’t think they do,” Singleton replied. “I’m just being honest. If I were to conduct a focus group and do some qualitative analysis, and I were to ask the American people, ‘How much do you care about the president showcasing 20 minutes of these meetings that we actually air on TV?’ I think most people probably would say, ‘I don’t care, I don’t think about it, I’m too busy doing other things.’ So I don’t think that matters a whole lot at all.”
Democratic strategist Karen Finney disagreed, saying the public would be appalled once they actually saw what takes place in those meetings.
“I think what actually would matter to people is the fact that he needs so much validation,” Finney said. “You know, he is doing this retribution tour, revenge on people like John Bolton. He is firing people who won’t give him information if they give him the truth, but he doesn’t like the truth, you’re going to get fired. He seems to think that economic policy is really all about controlling the Fed, so how can I get rid of the people I don’t like and just get the people I do like, and then has to sit in a meeting where everybody is clearly instructed that they have to boost his ego up.”
“I don’t agree with Shermichael,” she added. “I don’t think most people care about much of what’s happening in that meeting, but I think they care that our president is so weak that he needs to be bolstered like that.”
https://www.rawstory.com/donald-trump-cabinet-meeting-2673924734
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s senior adviser Justin Fulcher departed following allegations that Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) head Yinon Weiss reported him for security concerns to the Pentagon Force Protection Agency.
In addition to Fulcher, several high-ranking officers, such as Gen. David Allvin, departed amid controversies like “Signalgate.” Critics, including former defense secretaries, have described Hegseth’s leadership as “reckless.” His actions have been framed as “cleaning house.” The broader pattern of departures underscores ongoing scrutiny of Hegseth’s tenure.
Fulcher is the sixth top aide who has exited under Hegseth, as the secretary has faced ongoing scrutiny for his management style.
…
Questions regarding Fulcher’s credentials reportedly emerged after his previous telehealth startup went bankrupt.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/pentagon-staff-exodus-under-hegseth/ss-AA1L4E0j
Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and White House Deputy Chief of StaffStephen Miller were met with a hostile welcome at Washington, D.C.’s Union Station on Wednesday.
Their visit came as the National Guard had been camped out around the iconic station as part of President Donald Trump’s crime crackdown in the nation’s capital.
Bystanders looked on as the trio was met with hecklers in the station’s marble lobby as they came confidently strolling through with their entourage.
“You’re an embarrassment to Ohio,” one woman could be heard shouting as Vance kept a smile plastered on his face.
“F***ing nazi,” another man wearing a backpack shouted while taking video on his phone as the group marched through.
“Get the f*** out of my city,” shouted a third man.
Others could be heard chanting “free DC” as video showed the group casually walking into Union Station’s Shake Shack restaurant.
Other protesters shouted about the war in Gaza and to “free Palestine.”
In another video taken of their entrance, a man could be heard shouting at Vance, “Oh look, it’s couch f—er. You going to f— a couch, buddy?” in a reference to the joke that plagued the vice president on the campaign trail.
Upon entering the restaurant, Vance mingled with some service members, many of whom said they were from South Carolina. He took a few pictures while thanking them for their service and joked that the visit was “a hell of a lot more fun” than what he did most days.
“We ought to be able to enjoy great American cities. That’s what we’re trying to do in the Trump administration,” Vance told reporters from inside the Shake Shack as protesters could still be heard in the background.
As they spoke, a box of burgers sat in front of them, and National Guard members surrounded them. Chants of “Free DC” could still be heard in the background.
“We’re committed to this mission just like the one at the southern border and in Los Angeles,” Hegseth said. “Our law enforcement officers deserve to be able to do their jobs safely.”
The defense secretary gestured to the box of cheeseburgers in front of him and declared he “always liked a good cheeseburger” when he was in uniform, so he was hopeful he could deliver a few of them.
The Trump administration announced earlier this month that it was deploying hundreds of National Guard troops to the nation’s capital to combat crime. Multiple Republican-led states, including West Virginia, South Carolina, Ohio, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee, have all rushed to send additional troops to D.C.
However, critics have observed that the service members have largely been stationed along the National Mall and at Union Station, two largely low-crime destinations visited by millions of tourists every year.
In an unhinged rant, Miller then said they were going to “add thousands more resources to this city to get the criminals and the gang members out of here.”
He argued they were going to ignore the “stupid white hippies” protesting, who he claimed should go home and “take a nap because they’re all over 90 years old,” despite the hecklers at Union Station appearing to be all different ages.
“It’s kind of bizarre that we have a bunch of old, primarily white people, who are out there protesting the policies that keep people safe when they never felt danger in their entire lives,” Vance angrily added.
Recapping his field trip on Fox News later that night, the vice president deflected on host Laura Ingraham’s description of the appearance as “eventful,” claiming instead he had heard from “a couple of friends” who said the area now “feels safer.”
“Living with lawlessness and disorder,” he added, “is fundamentally a question of political will.”
“If you’ve got the political will to enforce the law, you can make even cities like D.C. safe again, and that’s what we are demonstrating. And I hope that the American people take an important lesson from this because, obviously, D.C. is a federal city. New York, L.A., these places are not,” he said.
“I hope the American people just recognize that you don’t have to live with lawlessness. You don’t have to live with third-world murder rates. If you just take control of these cities, you can make them save places to live again.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/vance-hegseth-and-miller-branded-nazis-in-botched-pr-stunt
