MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell details how “Donald Trump wants you to believe he was the only close friend of Jeffrey Epstein’s who did not contribute to his birthday book” as Donald Trump dehumanized the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein when he said he hadn’t thought about meeting with them.
Workers stayed on a roof in Rochester as agents left with slashed tires following a four-hour ICE standoff.
A dramatic standoff in upstate New York between immigration agents, roofers and protesters ended with officials leaving the scene with slashed tires Tuesday.
The confrontation happened at a residential job site where one worker was detained and others refused to come down from a rooftop in Rochester’s Park Avenue area.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and other federal agencies arrived at the sanctuary city home to carry out a removal operation of the suspected illegal immigrants.
One roofer was taken into custody, while others stayed on the rooftop, WXXI News reported.
The incident escalated quickly when more than 100 protesters gathered at the scene, according to the NPR radio station.
Some were heard chanting “shame” and called the agents “gestapo,” according to the outlet.
At one point, a CBP vehicle, the station reported, was allegedly forced to retreat on four slashed tires as the crowd clapped. A few blocks away from the scene, the SUV was towed, WHAM reported.
The four-hour standoff saw federal agents abandon their attempts to detain other workers.
Late last month, the Rochester City Council voted unanimously to codify the city’s sanctuary policy.
The Western New York Coalition of Farmworker Serving Agencies helped mediate the standoff, according to WXXI.
“The coalition is committed to standing alongside farmworkers, immigrants, and migrants to ensure dignity, fairness, and access to justice,” coalition Executive Director Irene Sanchez said in a news release.
The incident came as the Trump administration has increased immigration enforcement across the country.
“President Trump’s been clear we’re going to prioritize public safety threats and national security threats, and data shows that’s exactly what we’re doing,” White House border czar Tom Homan told reporters Tuesday. “But if you want me to sit here and bless someone being here illegally, I’m not going to do that because they cheated the system.”
CBP and ICE did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
A federal judge who ruled last week that the Trump administration broke federal law by sending National Guard troops to the Los Angeles area said Tuesday he will not immediately consider a request to bar the ongoing use of 300 Guard troops.
In a court order, Senior District Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco said he was not sure he had the authority to consider California’s motion for a preliminary injunction blocking the administration’s further deployment of state National Guard troops. That’s because the case is on appeal before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the judge said.
Breyer indefinitely paused all proceedings related to the state’s motion, though he suggested California officials could file the request with the 9th Circuit.
An email to the California attorney general’s office late Tuesday was not immediately returned.
Breyer’s Sept. 2 ruling took on heightened importance amid President Donald Trump’s talk of National Guard deployments to other Democratic-led cities like Chicago, Baltimore and New York. Trump has already deployed the Guard as part of his unprecedented law enforcement takeover targeting crime, immigration and homelessness in Washington, where he has direct legal control over the District of Columbia National Guard.
The Trump administration sent troops to the Los Angeles area in early June after days of protests over immigration raids.
Breyer ruled the administration “willfully” broke federal law, saying the government knew “they were ordering troops to execute domestic law beyond their usual authority” while using “armed soldiers ( whose identity was often obscured by protective armor) and military vehicles to set up protective perimeters and traffic blockades, engage in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrate a military presence in and around Los Angeles.”
He did not require the 300 remaining soldiers to leave but pointed out that they received improper training and ordered the administration to stop using them “to execute the laws.” The order that applies only to California was supposed to take effect Sept. 12, but the 9th Circuit has put it on hold for now.
California later sought a preliminary injunction blocking an Aug. 5 order from the administration extending the deployment of the 300 troops for another 90 days.
The further deployment “would ensure that California’s residents will remain under a form of military occupation until early November,” including while voting on Nov. 4 on whether to adopt new congressional maps — “an election with national attention and significance,” state officials said in a court filing.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-california-national-guard-troops-08f8a71ca5834b8f32ce4c3ee944abca
President Donald Trump abruptly ended an executive order signing earlier this year after being pressed on blackmailing other nations with his tariffs.
ABC News goes inside the ICE immigration crackdown underway in Chicago, where roughly 300 agents swept through the city to track suspected Tren de Aragua gang members accused of selling guns.
After taking a stake in Intel and a cut of Nvidia’s chip sales in China, the U.S. government may next target a share of the money generated by patents developed at major universities using federal funding, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick tells Mike Allen in the premiere episode of “The Axios Show.” Mike Allen joins Morning Joe to discuss.
The National Guard, in measuring public sentiment about President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of Washington, D.C., has assessed that its mission is perceived as “leveraging fear,” driving a “wedge between citizens and the military,” and promoting a sense of “shame” among some troops and veterans, according to internal documents reviewed by The Washington Post.
The assessments, which have not been previously reported, underscore how domestic mobilizations that are rooted in politics risk damaging Americans’ confidence in the men and women who serve their communities in times of crisis. The documents reveal, too, with a rare candor in some cases, that military officials have been kept apprised that their mission is viewed by a segment of society as wasteful, counterproductive and a threat to long-standing precedent stipulating that U.S. soldiers — with rare exception — are to be kept out of domestic law enforcement matters.
Trump has said the activation of more than 2,300 National Guard troops was necessary to reduce crime in the nation’s capital, though data maintained by the D.C. police indicates an appreciable decline was underway long before his August declaration of an “emergency.” In the weeks since, the Guard has spotlighted troops’ work assisting the police and “beautifying” the city by laying mulch and picking up trash, part of a daily disclosure to the news media generated by Joint Task Force D.C., the military command overseeing the deployment.
Not for public consumption, however, is an internal “media roll up” that analyzes the tone of news stories and social media posts about the National Guard’s presence and activities in Washington. Government media relations personnel routinely produce such assessments and provide summaries to senior leaders for their awareness. They stop short of drawing conclusions about the sentiments being raised.
“Trending videos show residents reacting with alarm and indignation,” a summary from Friday said. “One segment features a local [resident] describing the Guard’s presence as leveraging fear, not security — highlighting widespread discomfort with what many perceive as a show of force.”
A National Guard official acknowledged the documents are authentic but downplayed their sensitivity, saying the assessments are intended for internal use and were inadvertently emailed to The Post last week. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing an unspecified policy. It is unclear how many people mistakenly received the documents.
Spokespeople for the Army, which is overseeing the deployment, did not provide comment.
Social media posts about the military mission in D.C. summarized on Friday were assessed to be 53 percent negative, 45 percent neutral and 2 percent positive, the documents say.
While officials have insisted that troops are not policing, their actions have sometimes blurred the lines between soldiering and law enforcement, including detaining criminal suspects until police have arrived. One soldier has been credited with helping the apparent victim of a drug overdose by giving them Narcan, officials have noted.
For most Washington residents and tourists, though, the troops often are most visible at Metro stops and federal monuments, looking bored and absorbing both praise and insults from passersby.
Friday’s assessment highlights “Mentions of Fatigue, confusion, and demoralization — ‘just gardening,’ unclear mission, wedge between citizens and the military.”
The National Guard was ordered to this mission and does not have a responsibility to make it palatable to the public, said Jason Dempsey, a former Army officer who studies civil military affairs for the Center for a New American Security. But, he said, military leaders should think about how deployments with political undertones could have implications for recruiting and sustaining the force.
The themes raised in these assessments, Dempsey said, also should give pause to American citizens. National Guard troops are overseen by governors, who almost always provide their approval when those forces are mobilized for federal service overseas or within the United States. But the mission in Washington, and an earlier deployment to Los Angeles, both occurred against the consent of civil authorities in those jurisdictions.
“When elected representatives say, ‘We do not want them,’ but the federal government sends them, and then you see these kinds of numbers,” he said, “it does raise existential questions for the health of the National Guard, for how America views its National Guard and how America uses the military writ large.”
Such concerns also were spelled out in a separate cache of internal documents that outlined another Trump administration initiative: the creation of a “quick reaction force” of National Guard troops to respond to civil unrest anywhere in the United States. In that case, first reported by The Post as Trump’s D.C. deployment got underway in mid-August, military officials voiced concern about “potential political sensitivities” and “legal considerations related to their role as a nonpartisan force.”
Trump has since signed an executive order directing formation of the quick reaction force.
In examining public opinions online, Guard officials last week highlighted the sentiments shared by people who self-identified as veterans and active-duty troops, who, the documents show, say they viewed the deployment “with shame and alarm.” The assessment also homed in on how people are reacting to various court cases challenging Trump’s domestic military deployments.
A federal judge last week ruled Trump’s mobilization of nearly 5,000 U.S. troops to Los Angeles in June was an illegal use of military force to conduct law enforcement. An appeals court later granted the Trump administration’s motion for a stay in the case until its argument could be heard in greater detail — allowing the military mission there to continue. About 300 National Guard troops remain in the area.
The D.C. deployment, which includes troops not only from the District but from eight Republican-led states as well, is the subject of a lawsuit by city officials who argue that Trump broke the law by putting Guard troops into law enforcement roles. The public reaction being monitored by military officials focuses on “debate about the legality of the mission, whether it’s needed and if it has been successful,” one assessment reads, noting that there is ongoing criticism of the mission as “federal overreach and politically motivated.”
Others viewed the ongoing lawsuit in Washington as “unreasonable,” the assessment shows.
The National Guard has sometimes struggled to highlight significant impact from their presence. The public summary from Tuesday, for instance, noted a sole example of troops providing undescribed support to police at Union Station when a person was “acting aggressively.” The person was ushered out the door, the Guard noted.
In another update, the Guard indicates troops “continue efforts to restore and beautify public spaces across the District” and have “cleared 906 bags of trash, spread 744 cubic yards of mulch, removed five truckloads of plant waste, cleared 3.2 miles of roadway, and painted 270 feet of fencing.”
Those statistics may be among the most consequential takeaways of Trump’s use of the military in D.C., Dempsey said, and should prompt scrutiny of whether this mission was ever necessary in the first place.
“That is such a suboptimal use of military training that we should all be asking, ‘Why are they here?’” Dempsey said. “If they’re picking up trash, they’re not here for a security emergency. There’s no clearer metric than that.”
A MAGA congressional candidate is being trolled relentlessly online after announcing that she tipped off Immigration and Customs Enforcement about alleged workplace violations at a Hyundai plant in Georgia that was raided last week.
Tori Branum, 47, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and firearms instructor, said in social media posts and in interviews that she had reported the battery plant, which is under construction near Savannah, to ICE several months before officials conducted the largest work-site immigration raid in Department of Homeland Security history there.
About 475 people were detained, including 300 South Korean nationals.
The raid angered South Korea, a close ally that agreed in July to invest $350 billion in the U.S. in exchange for Trump lowering the duty on Korean products from 25 percent to 15 percent. The tariffs are paid by American companies, with the costs typically passed on to consumers.
“I have gotten hate mail from all over the country with people telling me to die or that I should be in fear,” Branum wrote on Facebook. “I served this country and I’ll go down with the ship before someone silences me.”
Over the past few days, she’s also been inundated with social media comments accusing her of undermining President Donald Trump’s economic agenda and creating a diplomatic scandal with one of the U.S’.’s closest allies.
The battery plant that was raided will be jointly operated by Hyundai and LG Energy Solution, a South Korean battery manufacturer, as part of a $12.6 billion investment in Georgia that also includes a nearby auto factory.
“So MAGA wanted tariffs to bring manufacturing back to the US. But when a company tries to open a plant here, MAGA undermines it. Once again you proved what an embarrassment your party is to our country,” a user wrote under one of Branum’s Instagram posts.
The Hyundai plant arrests came just 10 days after South Korea’s new president, Lee Jae Myung, met Trump in Washington, D.C., where they both vowed to strengthen business ties between the two countries.
“Imagine backing Trump’s ‘bring jobs back’ tariffs then cheering the ICE raid that nuked Georgia’s $4.3B Hyundai plant—475 workers arrested, 40k jobs gone. That’s not America First, that’s economic suicide. You’re a walking contradiction and a clown,” wrote another under a different post by Branum.
“You have caused a serious geopolitical problem between us and S. Korea with your massively ignorant actions,” another user chimed in.
Residents in the Korean capital of Seoul were outraged by the operation’s optics, as footage of the raid showed armored vehicles and shackled workers. In a statement, Hyundai told the Wall Street Journal it didn’t directly employ anyone who was detained.
The South Korean government has negotiated the release of its nationals and is chartering a plane to repatriate them, Reuters reported Monday.
The local press has attacked Branum and accused her of using the raid to generate momentum for her political campaign in Georgia’s 12th district, The Washington Post reported.
“Her justification of ‘protecting American jobs’ rings hollow when her actions sabotage Georgia’s long-term prosperity,” wrote a South Korean business publication called CEO News.
Many users on social media said they hoped the ICE raid would hurt her campaign instead of helping it.
“You literally helped kill the economy in your own area, but you want to be a leader?” a user responded to a third post.
The Daily Beast has reached out to Branum, ICE, DHS, and Hyundai for comment.
Branum has remained defiant throughout it all, telling Rolling Stone in an interview, “This is what I voted for — to get rid of a lot of illegals. And what I voted for is happening.”
At one point, she posted a photo of herself on Facebook holding a modified, AR-15-style rifle with a laser scope, the Korea JoonAng Daily reported.
“I’m kinda curious what that was [that] you said in my inbox,” Branum wrote.
She later took down the post, but still has a different shot of her brandishing an automatic weapon.
“Patriotism is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime,” she captioned the post, attributing the quote to Benjamin Franklin.
In fact, it was Democratic governor and ambassador Adlai Stevenson II who said it.
An Irish woman who has been living in the US since she was a child faces deportation over a ‘bad’ $25 cheque she wrote a decade ago.
Donna Brown, 58, who emigrated nearly 50 years ago, is being held by Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement – known as ICE – and faces being sent back to Ireland.
Her husband, Jim Brown, said his wife, an Irish citizen born in England, moved to America when she was 11 and is a legal resident alien, but not a U.S. citizen. The couple married eight years ago, which he believes should also protect her from being deported.
Mr Brown told his local TV station in Missouri: ‘It’s just not fair that you’re telling me I have to be a bachelor the rest of my life because of some stupid policy.’
In July, Donna was arrested at customs in Chicago on her return from Ireland after a family funeral. Her husband said: ‘You don’t arrest 58-year-old grandmothers. It’s just wrong. She hasn’t committed crimes.’
She has now spent more than 30 days in jail in Kentucky as the US government moves to deport her, which Mr Brown fears will happen.
‘It’s egregious that we have allowed a government to allow this to happen,’ he said.
‘It’s egregious that we have allowed a government to allow this to happen,’ he said.
Legal documents for her arrest say that ten years ago, Donna wrote a bad cheque for $25. However, she paid the money back and was given probation. But Mr Brown said the US government is now arguing that was a ‘crime of moral turpitude’.
US courts say a ‘crime of moral turpitude… refers generally to conduct that shocks the public conscience as being inherently base, vile or depraved, contrary to the rules of morality’. It has been used in the past against former IRA members who did not declare their crimes to immigration.
Mr Brown believes his wife’s arrest is a direct result of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration policies.
‘I think it’s nonsense. I think it’s a blanket thing to catch everybody, to fill [jail] beds. They signed a stupid bill that is torturing innocent people, and that’s the problem,’ he said. He is now protesting at what he calls his wife’s ‘deplorable’ conditions in jail and is campaigning for her release.
‘She’s been in this country 47 years, is married, with five kids and five grandkids, and you’re telling me she’s a flight risk? I want somebody to have the guts and the fortitude to stand up and say, “You know what? This is wrong”,’ he said.
‘It’s crazy that this is happening. It’s just crazy that this is even allowed in this country. That’s the problem. It shouldn’t even be thought that this should be okay,’ he said.
Mr Brown, a veteran who served 20 years in the military, said he won’t stop fighting for his wife. ‘My wife is not a criminal,’ he said. He is now caring for their horses on their nine-acre farm near Troy, Missouri.
A GoFundMe for Donna states it was created to help prepare and support her husband’s ‘fight for justice and freedom of his wife, Donna Hughes-Brown, who was wrongly detained and incarcerated this past July.
‘The goal is to raise the resources necessary to cover the lawyers and court fees, and help Jim and Donna navigate these difficult, stressful and expensive times,’ the appeal reads.
‘Jim and Donna are both very strong supporters and helpers of our community. They are often involved with multiple volunteer organisations and projects. They both are hard-working, honest, and caring individuals. They are good servers of God; humble people who are always willing to help, and kind friends that share knowledge and wisdom with anyone in need.’
In May of this year, Cliona Ward was released from custody in the US where she had been arrested after she returned from visiting her dying father in Ireland.
The 54-year-old Dubliner lives in Santa Cruz, California, and was detained by ICE over minor convictions from almost 20 years ago, which were supposed to have been expunged from her record.
