Newsweek: Mom in US for 22 years detained by ICE despite ongoing visa application

A Georgia mother of three who has lived in the United States for more than two decades was taken into custody by federal agents on April 13, just a few blocks from her family’s home.

“She was a major part of our family, she did a lot for all of us, and it feels like our world has been thrown off its axle,” Guillermo Chavarria, 25, the oldest son of Jessica Flores Marin, 44, told Newsweek.

Flores Marin entered the U.S. with Guillermo in 2003 through Texas. While Guillermo qualified for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which granted him temporary protection from deportation, his mother remained undocumented. Despite this, she built a life in the U.S., paying taxes and eventually buying the family’s first home in 2014.

In December, she began the application process for a T visa, which protects victims of certain crimes who cooperate with law enforcement. Her unexpected detention occurred while the family was gathering paperwork for her case.

https://www.newsweek.com/jessica-flores-marin-detained-ice-visa-immigration-2078460

Raw Story: ‘He has some issue’: Trump biographer reveals depths of the president’s racism

The first time Donald Trump appeared in the New York Times, back in 1973, was an article on a Department of Justice lawsuit accusing him and his father of anti-Black bias, and one of his biographers says he’s seen the president’s racism up close.

The president has appeared in the pages of his hometown paper thousands of times since then, including numerous articles accusing him of being racist – such as one from February titled, “As Trump Attacks Diversity, a Racist Undercurrent Surfaces” – and author Michael Wolff provided some new insight on that bigotry to The Daily Beast Podcast.

“Clearly, he has some issue with Black people,” Wolff told the podcast on Thursday. “The world is a better place to him without Black people, or without having to be aware of Black people, without Black people somehow in what he considers a zero sum game with white people.”

The president made his entrance into national politics with racist “birther” conspiracy theories about Barack Obama and has for decades maintained the mostly Black teenagers known as the “Central Park Five” were responsible for the rape of a white woman in 1989, although all five were exonerated in 2002, and slurred Latin American immigrants as “criminals” and “rapists” and referred to Haiti and African nations as “s—hole countries,” according to reports.

“Trump certainly regards Black people as profoundly different from white people,” Wolff said. “I mean the word racist now becomes in the Trump world a kind of high praise, because it’s meant to suggest the liberal overreach and the liberals call anybody racist.”

https://www.rawstory.com/donald-trump-racist-2672229097

CBS News: Trump admin. shakes up ICE leadership amid frustration with deportation levels, sources say

ICE leadership has faced intense pressure from the White House to increase arrests of migrants who are living in the U.S. illegally or under one of several temporary immigration programs the Trump administration is seeking to dismantle.

Stephen Miller, the White House’s deputy chief of staff, said Wednesday on Fox News that the administration is pushing ICE to carry out “a minimum” of 3,000 arrests per day — a target that would amount to an unprecedented expansion of immigration enforcement.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-administration-shakes-up-ice-leadership-over-deportation-levels

Salon: Stephen [“Goebbels”] Miller’s deportation machine is failing — and he’s furious

In reality, which still holds some influence in our aggressively-online world, there are about 11 million undocumented people in the U.S., total. And despite all-caps propaganda to the contrary, they as a class “have substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens,” according to a 2020 study; they even commit fewer crimes, on average, than fully legal immigrants — those who came here “the right way.”

“Relative to undocumented immigrants, U.S.-born citizens are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes,” according to the research, published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

That’s why Stephen [“Goebbels”] Miller is so mad: an administration that wants nothing more than to parade millions of brown bodies onto military aircraft and out of the country — a MAGA team that promised its voters nothing less than “mass deportations now” — is having a tough time actually finding the hardened criminals the last folks supposedly let in. In April, the Trump administration deported more than 17,200 people; that’s up 29% from a year but it’s far below the pace necessary to meet the stated goal of one million deportees a year (and per NBC News, more than half of those now in ICE detention have no criminal record whatsoever).

https://www.salon.com/2025/05/29/stephen-millers-deportation-machine-is-failing–and-hes-furious

BBC: Trump commutes gang leader’s sentence in flurry of pardons

As part of a spree of clemency actions, US President Donald Trump on Wednesday commuted the federal prison sentence of Larry Hoover, the founder of a notorious Chicago street gang.

Hoover was the leader of the Gangster Disciples and in the 1990s was given six life sentences on conspiracy, extortion, drug and other criminal charges.

In addition to his federal sentence, Hoover still faces a 200-year jail term in the state of Illinois for murder, and is unlikely to be released soon. A president is unable to commute state-level sentences.

Let’s hope Illinois keeps him in the hoosegow!

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crk27003pv7o

Washington Post: Trump’s clemency spree extends to ex-gangster, artist, former congressmen

The pardon recipients confirmed by a White House official all had felony convictions, like Trump, and could see an array of benefits.

A gang leader who built a powerful criminal enterprise, an ex-congressman from New York who underreported earnings from his Manhattan restaurant and a Connecticut governor toppled in a corruption scandal all received clemency Wednesday in a sweeping series of orders signed by President Donald Trump.

Trump extended relief to 25 people whose crimes spanned decades and included tax evasion and extortion, according to the department.

The recipients — 17 of whom received pardons and eight, commutations — all had felony convictions, like Trump, and could see an array of benefits, including restoration of voting rights and release from imprisonment. The White House did not respond to questions about how Trump selected the individuals.

They might be sons of bitches, but they’re Trump’s kind of sons of bitches.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/05/29/trump-pardons-larry-hoover-michael-grimm

Newsweek: Veteran’s daughter living in US 48 years locked up by ICE

President Donald Trump‘s immigration enforcers have reportedly arrested the daughter of a U.S. veteran.

Alma Bowman, 58, was taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in March during a scheduled check-in at its Atlanta field office, according to Atlanta News First. She has been living in the country since she was 10 years old.

Her father, Lawrence Bowman, a U.S. Navy service member from Illinois, was stationed in the Philippines during the Vietnam War. Alma Bowman was born in the Philippines in 1966, and her family relocated to the United States a decade later. She has lived in Macon, Georgia, for almost 50 years.

Certain legal provisions allow for the extension of citizenship to family members of individuals who have served in the U.S. military.

https://www.newsweek.com/alma-bowman-veteran-daughter-detained-ice-immigration-2077893

Associated Press: Federal court blocks Trump from imposing sweeping tariffs under emergency powers law

A federal court on Wednesday blocked President Donald Trump from imposing sweeping tariffs on imports under an emergency-powers law, swiftly throwing into doubt Trump’s signature set of economic policies that have rattled global financial markets, frustrated trade partners and raised broader fears about inflation intensifying and the economy slumping.

The ruling from a three-judge panel at the New York-based U.S. Court of International Trade came after several lawsuits arguing Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs exceeded his authority and left the country’s trade policy dependent on his whims.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-trade-court-0392dbd59f548e49ad4f64254ae3f94a

Raw Story: This ‘lie detector test’ is being failed by Trump: expert

The former chair of the United States Council of Economic Advisers warned Monday that the bond markets are flashing red over Donald Trump’s economic agenda.

In a sharply worded MSNBC op-ed titled, “The Bond Market is an Economic Lie Detector Test,” Jared Bernstein, a Biden administration economist, argued that markets are reacting to “a toxic combination” of MAGA-inspired policies that threaten to both raise interest rates and slow growth.

Trump “is failing” the test, according to Bernstein, and “that’s bad news for your wallet,” he added.

https://www.rawstory.com/bond-market

Variety: NPR Sues Trump Over Executive Order to Cut Funding: ‘Clear Violation of the Constitution’

National Public Radio is suing President Trump, alleging his executive order seeking to cease all federal funding to NPR and PBS is a “clear violation” of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.

Trump on May 1 issued an executive order seeking to cut all federal funding to NPR and PBS, alleging they have engaged with “biased and partisan news coverage.” The order instructs the board of the Corporation of Public Broadcasting to “cease direct funding to NPR and PBS” to the “maximum extent allowed by law.”

Trump’s order “is a clear violation of the Constitution and the First Amendment’s protections for freedom of speech and association, and freedom of the press,” NPR CEO Katherine Maher said in a statement. “It is an affront to the rights of NPR and NPR’s 246 Member stations, which are locally owned, nonprofit, noncommercial media organizations serving all 50 states and territories. Today, we challenge its constitutionality in the nation’s independent courts.”

She noted that the executive order “is directly counter to Congress’s long standing intent, as expressed in the Public Broadcasting Act, to foster vibrant institutions that achieve that mission, serving all Americans independent of political influence. The Order threatens the existence of the public broadcasting system, upon which tens of millions of Americans rely for vital news, information, and emergency alerts.”

https://variety.com/2025/biz/news/npr-sues-trump-cut-funding-violation-of-the-constitution-1236410731