Federal agents reportedly demanded to see the IDs of members belonging to two private contractor crews hired to battle the fire, which some 400 individuals are working to contain. Firefighters who spoke to the Times did so based on the condition of anonymity because they fear retaliation by the federal government.
“You risked your life out here to save the community,” one firefighter said. “This is how they treat us.”
Two firefighters in Washington state were arrested on Wednesday while combating the largest wildfire in the state.
The Bear Gulch fire has consumed nearly 9,000 acres since it began on July 6.
“Why the two firefighters were arrested is unclear,” The Seattle Times said. “But a spokesperson for the Incident Management Team leading the firefighting response said the team was ‘aware of a Border Patrol operation on the fire,’ that it was not interfering with the firefighting response and referred reporters to the Border Patrol station in Port Angeles.”
Federal agents reportedly demanded to see the IDs of members belonging to two private contractor crews hired to battle the fire, which some 400 individuals are working to contain. Firefighters who spoke to the Times did so based on the condition of anonymity because they fear retaliation by the federal government.
“You risked your life out here to save the community,” one firefighter said. “This is how they treat us.”
While waiting for their supervisor to arrive on Wednesday morning, the crews were confronted by federal law enforcement around 9:30 a.m. One of the firefighters told the Times they were instructed not to take video as they were asked to line up and present their IDs.
The Times added:
In a FaceTime video call from the other firefighter to The Seattle Times, firefighters in their gear were seen sitting on logs in front of federal officers. Some firefighters were dismissed back to their vehicles.
One firefighter attempted to walk over to his company vehicle to get something to drink and appeared to have been called back by federal officers.
In images shared by firefighters from the scene, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection vehicle is parked nearby. Officers wearing “Police” vests are seen arresting a firefighter, while another appears to be restrained.
According to one of the firefighters, they were denied the chance to say goodbye to the detained crew members.
“I asked them if his (family) can say goodbye to him because they’re family, and they’re just ripping them away,” the firefighter told the Times. “And this is what he said: ‘You need to get the (expletive) out of here. I’m gonna make you leave.’”
Since taking office again in January, President Donald Trump has implemented a crackdown on illegal and legal immigration. His administration has targeted farmhands, garment workers, international students, and other immigrants from various walks of life for deportation.
The state of Florida is committed to $245 million toward the construction of “Alligator Alcatraz,” the Everglades immigration detention facility which is due to close in days.
An email obtained by The Associated Press Wednesday from Kevin Guthrie, head of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, indicates the facility will likely soon be empty, after a federal judge ruled it must cease to operate.
Newsweek contacted Governor DeSantis’s office and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for comment on Thursday via email outside of regular office hours.
Why It Matters
Since his second presidential inauguration in January, President Donald Trump has overseen a crackdown aimed at illegal immigration, increasing spending on immigration enforcement and removing legal impediments to rapid deportations.
Having to close the new Florida detention facility would be a blow to both Governor DeSantis and the Trump administration, and would show that one of the main impediments to White House policy continues to be the courts.
What To Know
Figures published by Florida officials show the state has signed contracts worth at least $245 million to companies for work at the new Florida detention facility, which was constructed by repurposing the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport in Ochopee.
The largest single contract, at $78.5 million, went to Jacksonville based Critical Response Strategies which is responsible for hiring corrections officers, camp managers and IT personnel.
Longview Solutions Group was awarded $25.6 million for site preparation and construction while IT company Gothams has a $21.1 million contract to provide services including access badges and detainee wristbands.
Some of the contract details were later removed from Florida’s public database, sparking criticism from Democratic state Rep. Anna Eskamani.
Florida officials said some of their spending would be reimbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
But the Trump administration has said in a court filing it has had nothing to do with funding of the facility, according to CBS: “Florida is constructing and operating the facility using state funds on state lands under state emergency authority.”
The filing also says: “DHS (the U.S. Department of Homeland Security) has not implemented, authorized, directed, or funded Florida’s temporary detention center.”
The facility was expected to cost $450 million to operate each year after construction, according to CNN.
However, in a blow to DeSantis, a federal judge in Miami ruled on August 21 that “Alligator Alcatraz” must be closed down within 60 days, and that no further detainees could be transferred to the facility during this time. Just weeks previously the same judge had ordered a halt on construction work at the camp.
Legal challenges had been brought by a coalition of environmental group and the indigenous Miccosukee Tribe.
What People Are Saying
Speaking about conditions at the facility Florida Representative Debbie Schultz, a Democrat, said: “They are essentially packed into cages, wall-to-wall humans, 32 detainees per cage.”
In an interview with CNN Thomas Kennedy, a policy analyst for the Florida Immigrant Coalition, said: “The fact that we’re going to have 3,000 people detained in tents, in the Everglades, in the middle of the hot Florida summer, during hurricane season, this is a bad idea all around that needs to be opposed and stopped.”
In a statement previously sent to Newsweek a DHS official said: “Under President Trump’s leadership, we are working at turbo speed on cost-effective and innovative ways to deliver on the American people’s mandate for mass deportations of criminal illegal aliens.
“DHS is complying with this order and moving detainees to other facilities. We will continue to fight tooth-and-nail to remove the worst of the worst from American streets.”
What Happens Next
The Trump administration is expected to continue its crackdown on illegal migrants in the United States in a move that will put pressure on existing immigration detention facilities, and could lead to more being constructed.
https://www.newsweek.com/ron-desantis-wasted-250-million-alligator-alcatraz-it-faces-closure-2120638
Federal prosecutors on Tuesday were unable to persuade a grand jury to approve a felony indictment against a man who threw a sandwich at a federal agent on the streets of Washington this month, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The grand jury’s rejection of the felony charge was a remarkable failure by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington and the second time in recent days that a majority of grand jurors refused to vote to indict a person accused of felony assault on a federal agent. It also amounted to a sharp rebuke by a panel of ordinary citizens against the prosecutors assigned to bring charges against people arrested after President Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops and federal agents to fight crime and patrol the city’s streets.
The rejection by grand jurors was particularly noteworthy given the attention paid to the case of the man who threw the sandwich, Sean C. Dunn. Video of the episode went viral on social media, senior officials talked about the case, and the administration posted footage of a large group of heavily armed law enforcement officers going to Mr. Dunn’s apartment.
It remained unclear if prosecutors planned to try again to obtain an indictment against Mr. Dunn, 37, a former Justice Department paralegal. They could also forgo seeking felony charges and refile his case as a misdemeanor, which does not require an indictment to move forward.
Mr. Dunn was initially charged on Aug. 13 in a criminal complaint accusing him of throwing a submarine sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection officer who was on patrol with other federal agents near the corner of 14th and U Streets in the northwest section of the capital, a popular part of the city filled with bars and restaurants.
Before he threw the sandwich, the complaint asserts, Mr. Dunn stood within inches of the officer, calling him and his colleagues “fascists” and shouting, “I don’t want you in my city!”
Mr. Dunn’s lawyer, Sabrina Shroff, declined to comment.
It is extremely unusual for prosecutors to come out of a grand jury without obtaining an indictment because they are in control of the information that grand jurors hear about a case and defendants are not allowed to have their lawyers in the room as evidence is presented.
But Mr. Trump’s decision to flood the streets of Washington with federal agents and military personnel who are generally not trained in conducting routine police stops has resulted in a flurry of defendants being charged with federal crimes that would typically be handled at the local court level, if they were filed at all.
It has also led to an increasing number of embarrassments for federal prosecutors, who have had to dismiss weak cases or reduce the charges that defendants were facing in recent days.
On Monday, for instance, prosecutors refiled a felony assault charge as a misdemeanor in the case of a woman who was accused of injuring an F.B.I. agent during a protest last month against immigration officials at the local jail in Washington.
The charges were reduced against the woman, Sidney Lori Reid, after prosecutors failed not just once but three times to obtain an indictment in the case.
That same day, at the request of prosecutors, a federal magistrate judge dismissed all charges against a man who was arrested at a Trader Joe’s grocery store last week for what the police said was possession of two handguns in his bag.
At a hearing, the magistrate judge, Zia M. Faruqui, lambasted prosecutors for having charged the man, Torez Riley, in an apparent violation of his constitutional rights.
“Lawlessness cannot come from the government,” Judge Faruqui said, according to HuffPost. “We’re pushing the boundaries here.”
In a separate case, the judge blasted federal prosecutors and corrections officials on Tuesday for having allowed a woman, Kristal Rios Esquivel, to remain in jail for nearly six days after she was arrested for allegedly spitting on a National Zoo police sergeant.
Ms. Rios Esquivel’s lawyer, H. Heather Shaner, had submitted an emergency motion to the judge seeking her release and ended her filing with a single word, “HELP!!!”
While Ms. Rios Esquivel was ultimately freed, Judge Faruqui pointed out in an order that she had somehow been allowed to languish behind bars even though prosecutors had not asked for her to be detained.
“This is inexcusable,” he wrote.
Mr. Dunn is scheduled to appear next week in Federal District Court in Washington for a preliminary hearing where another magistrate judge, G. Michael Harvey, will determine if there is probable cause that a crime was committed during the sandwich-throwing incident.
Prosecutors typically have 30 days to secure an indictment after a defendant is arrested. If they fail to do so within that window, they either have to reduce the charges to a misdemeanor or dismiss the case altogether.
President Donald Trump’s surge of federal law enforcement on the streets of D.C. is meeting resistance in the city’s federal courthouse, where magistrate judges have admonished prosecutors for violating defendants’ rights and court rules, and grand jurors have repeatedly refused to issue indictments.
On Tuesday, a federal grand jury refused to indict a former Justice Department employee who threw a sandwich at a federal law enforcement agent in an incident this month that went viral on social media, according to two people with knowledge of the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss it publicly. Prosecutors had sought to charge Sean Charles Dunn with a felony count of assaulting, resisting or impeding a federal officer.
Trump declared a crime emergency this month, giving federal law enforcement agencies and National Guard members unprecedented authority to patrol the nation’s capital, while also enlisting the District’s 3,100-member police force to assist with immigration enforcement. More than 1,000 arrests have followed, according to the White House. Meanwhile, D.C.’s top prosecutor, Jeanine Pirro, ordered her staff to file the stiffest possible charges in every case.
But there are emerging signs that not all of the arrests will stand up to scrutiny in court.
Before prosecutors failed to indict Dunn, a grand jury on three separate occasions this month refused to indict a D.C. woman who was accused of assaulting an FBI agent, another extraordinary rejection of the prosecution’s case. Days later, a federal magistrate judge said an arrest in Northeast Washington was preceded by the “most illegal search I’ve seen in my life” and described another arrest as lacking “basic human dignity.”
While judges are known to criticize prosecutors from time to time, grand jurors only in rare cases refuse to issue an indictment, which requires them to find only probable cause that a crime was committed, the lowest evidentiary bar in criminal cases. Instances of failed indictments have begun to crop up more since Trump took office this year. Grand jurors in Los Angeles have rejected indictments of people who were arrested for protesting the administration’s immigration enforcement actions, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The July 22 scuffle at issue in D.C. federal court occurred weeks before Trump’s law enforcement order, but the grand jurors were presented with the case this month just as federal agents were descending on Washington.
Prosecutors alleged that Sydney Reid was obstructing and recording agents from the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as they attempted to arrest a gang member being released from the D.C. jail who was slated for deportation. An FBI agent scraped her hand against a wall amid the fracas, and prosecutors planned to charge Reid with assaulting, resisting or impeding a federal officer, a felony offense punishable by up to eight years in prison.
Under the Fifth Amendment, however, charges that carry potential penalties of more than a year in prison must be approved by a grand jury. At least 12 members must vote to authorize an indictment. After striking out with the D.C. grand jury, prosecutors dropped the effort to charge Reid with a felony and instead filed a misdemeanor charge that does not require grand jury approval. The maximum penalty for the misdemeanor is one year in jail.
“After Ms. Reid was wrongfully arrested, the ICE agent told her, ‘You should have just stayed home and minded your business,’” Reid’s public defenders, Tezira Abe and Eugene Ohm, said in a statement. “As a United States citizen and a compassionate person, caring about fellow D.C. residents getting snatched off the streets by ICE agents is her business and should be of concern to all human beings.”
They added: “The U.S. attorney can try to concoct crimes to quiet the people but in our criminal justice system, the citizens have the last word. We are anxious to present the misdemeanor case to a jury and to quickly clear Ms. Reid’s name.”
Several recent cases, including Dunn’s, have involved the same felony statute that prosecutors tried to apply to Reid’s case.
Pirro declined to speculate about how juries in D.C., where 90 percent of voters cast ballots for Trump’s opponent in the 2024 presidential race, might respond to criminal cases as the federal crackdown continues.
“The only thing that I can say is we are prosecutors. We are the tip of the spear. We are the ones who take these cases into court, and the burden is on us to prove these cases, and we welcome that burden — beyond a reasonable doubt,” Pirro said at a news conference Tuesday. “Sometimes a jury will buy it and sometimes they won’t. So be it. That’s the way the process works.”
A spokesman for Pirro did not say whether federal prosecutors would try to present the Dunn case to a grand jury a second time. The spokesman, Timothy Lauer, alleged that a government lawyer had violated a court rule requiring confidentiality in grand jury proceedings by disclosing the decision not to indict Dunn. The grand jury’s move in that case was first reported by the New York Times. Dunn’s attorney, Sabrina Shroff, declined to comment.
U.S. Magistrate Judge G. Michael Harvey said at a hearing this month that prosecutors should have promptly notified the court about the grand jury’s decision not to indict Reid but that they held off for days, violating a court rule. “I’ve taken up that issue with the U.S. attorney’s office,” Harvey said last week.
But the most pointed criticisms of Trump’s law enforcement surge have come from Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui, who has castigated law enforcement officials for wearing masks while tackling and arresting a Venezuelan national who worked as a food-delivery driver, for disobeying an order the judge issued this week to release a woman from the D.C. jail, and for arresting and jailing a 37-year-old because “he was a Black man going into Trader Joe’s.”
“I’d say we live in a surreal world right now,” Faruqui said at a court hearing for Christian Enrique Carías Torres, who was taken down by masked federal agents as he exited a Bluestone Lane coffee shop with a delivery order, an arrest that was captured on video by a Washington Post reporter.
“This is not consistent with what I understand the United States of America to be,” the judge told Carías Torres. “You should be treated with basic human dignity. We don’t have a secret police.”
Pirro’s office said in a court filing that Carías Torres ran after officers approached him, struggled as he was being taken down and tried to flee from a police vehicle after being handcuffed, adding that he had missed his immigration court hearings since entering the country in 2023.
Violent crime is down 27 percent so far this year compared with the same period in 2024, according to D.C. police data, and has declined 51 percent when measuring the year-over-year period since Trump issued his order Aug. 11.
The president has painted a portrait of “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor” in the District, blaming years of passive policing by local authorities and lenient criminal justice policies from Democratic officials.
“But now they are allowed to do whatever the hell they want,” Trump said of D.C. police as he announced his moves. He said criminals in the city are rough and tough, “but we’re rougher and tougher.”
Carías Torres was charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding federal officers, just as Dunn and Reid had been, after an officer injured his head while helping take him to the ground. Faruqui ordered that Carías Torres be released pending trial, acknowledging that ICE would have an opportunity to take him into custody to enforce a removal order issued by an immigration court last year.
In another case, federal prosecutors charged Kristal Rios Esquivel with a felony violation of the same statute, which makes it illegal to assault federal officers. Her alleged offense started when she walked through a door that was marked “staff only” at the National Zoo’s bird house, tripping an alarm. As National Zoo Park Police officers arrested her for unlawful entry, Rios Esquivel spat on two of them and kicked one, prosecutors alleged. Her attorney has criticized the arrest as an instance of overpolicing.
Rios Esquivel was held for five days in the D.C. jail before making her initial appearance Monday in Faruqui’s courtroom, which Faruqui said was bad enough. The judge ordered Rios Esquivel released pending trial, but the D.C. Department of Corrections did not free her the same day. Faruqui threatened to impose sanctions in a scathing order issued Tuesday that said officials had subjected Rios Esquivel to illegal detention, and she was released.
“What is especially troubling is that this is not even the first time in the past four months that the Court has encountered this same problem of false imprisonment,” Faruqui wrote, citing another case from April.
At yet another court hearing scrutinizing police tactics in D.C., Faruqui reprimanded federal prosecutors this week for charging Torez Riley with illegally possessing firearms. The judge found that D.C. police officers, who were on patrol with federal agents, violated Riley’s privacy rights by searching his bag, where they found two guns. Riley had previously been convicted of weapons offenses, prosecutors said.
Police said in court documents that Riley’s bag had been searched in part because it appeared to contain something heavy. But that observation was not enough to show probable cause that Riley had committed a crime, the court found.
It was “without a doubt, the most illegal search I’ve seen in my life,” said Faruqui, a former D.C. federal prosecutor, adding that Riley had been jailed and kept away from his three children and pregnant wife for a week because “he was a Black man going into Trader Joe’s.”
Pirro’s office then filed court papers to dismiss the case, and the judge ordered Riley released from a D.C. jail facility.
A spokesman for Pirro said that as soon as she “was shown the body-worn camera footage on Friday, she ordered the dismissal of the charges.” The motion to dismiss was filed Monday.
In response to Faruqui’s criticisms, Pirro said in a statement: “This judge has a long history of bending over backwards to release dangerous felons in possession of firearms and on frequent occasions he has downplayed the seriousness of felons who possess illegal firearms and the danger they pose to our community.”
But Faruqui also admonished Riley over his firearm possession. “You will die, you will kill somebody, or you will end up in jail,” the judge said.
Riley is set to face consequences in Maryland, where Faruqui said authorities would use what they learned in the “blatantly illegal” D.C. search to show he violated his probation in an earlier gun possession case. A bench warrant was issued Monday over the probation violation, according to records from Prince George’s County Circuit Court.
Riley’s wife, Crashawna Williams, said she took a week off from the beauty classes she’s enrolled in to deal with her husband’s case while taking care of their boys, ages 3, 8 and 12.
“I feel like he shouldn’t have been arrested in the first place,” Williams said. But, she added, what could they do?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/27/trump-crime-surge-court-cases
Acomment suggesting President Donald Trump should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize has raised eyebrows.
Social media users have reacted to Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, suggesting that the president has been overlooked for the prestigious award.
Why It Matters
Since 2018, Trump has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, which recognizes an individual or organization that has managed to “advance fellowship between nations,” multiple times but has not won.
Only four U.S. presidents have won the award, which is among the world’s most prominent international honors. President Barack Obama received a Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, eight months into his presidency—a move Donald Trump Jr. described as “affirmative action.”
In the past few months, Trump and his allies have argued in support of the president’s worthiness as a candidate, citing foreign policy interventions his administration has been involved in.
What To Know
Speaking at a Cabinet meeting, Witkoff said: “There’s only one thing I wish for—that the Nobel committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since this Nobel award was ever talked about. Your success is game-changing out in the world today, and I hope everybody wakes up and realizes that.”
Several campaign groups and figures responded negatively to Witkoff’s comments.
The X account Republicans Against Trump wrote, “Nobel Peace Prize for what exactly?”
Call to Activism, a progressive political account, called the applause that followed Witkoff’s comments “North Korea-style” and “terrifying.”
User Alok Bhatt told 91,000 followers, “It is astonishing to see the great American empire crumble before our eyes—brick by brick, piece by piece.”
User Ron Smith, a self-described “proud Democrat,” wrote, “Hard to believe this is not a North Korean cabinet.”
What People Are Saying
Mark Shanahan, who teaches American politics at the University of Surrey in the U.K., told Newsweek: “The Trump Cabinet is an exercise in obsequious forelock tugging where each member aims to outdo the rest in fawning flattery at the feet of the president. For all his talk, Donald Trump has done little to end the cruelly attritional war in Ukraine following Putin’s invasion, while he continues to support Netanyahu’s total war in Gaza.
“Nobel seeks to support fraternity between nations. With his America First policies, 47 is the antithesis of this.”
President Donald Trump complained about the prize on Truth Social in June: “No, I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize no matter what I do, including Russia/Ukraine, and Israel/Iran, whatever those outcomes may be, but the people know, and that’s all that matters to me.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a July news briefing: “It is well past time that President Trump was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Representative Claudia Tenney, a Republican from New York, wrote on X in June: “I’ve officially nominated President Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize twice! He has done more for world peace than any modern leader.”
What Happens Next
The deadline to nominate candidates for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize passed on January 31. Nobel Prize laureates are scheduled to be announced on October 10, with an award ceremony following on December 10 in Oslo, Norway.
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-nobel-peace-prize-steve-witkoff-2119969
A group of Washington, D.C., residents confronted federal agents and local police officers on Wednesday after law enforcement showed up in their neighborhood to conduct a drug arrest.
Members of the Mount Pleasant neighborhood in Northwest Washington, D.C., protested the increased law enforcement presence, which focused on an apartment building blocks from a school during morning drop-off, The Associated Press reported.
Residents told gathered officers to “quit your jobs” and said “nobody wants you here,” according to the AP. The pushback comes amid President Trump’s decision to ramp up federal forces in the nation’s capital in an effort to crack down on crime.
“People are on Signal chats and they’re absolutely terrified, and everyone is following this,” one man who had just dropped off his third grader at nearby Bancroft Elementary School told the AP.
“It’s distressful. We feel invaded, and it’s really terrible,” he added.
The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) said they were carrying out a sting on a “suspected drug dealer” and invited immigration enforcement agents to distract from their efforts, the AP reported.
“The immigration folks were parked over there to get you all to leave us alone,” Sgt. Michael Millsaps told the wire.
At least 10 police cruisers lined the block, witnesses told the AP, which reported that some officers carried riot shields or rifles.
The broader federal crackdown in D.C. has sparked pushback from residents elsewhere in the city, though in many cases the presence of increased law enforcement has gone by without incident.
A Washington Post poll that found most D.C. residents oppose Trump’s takeover of the local police. Sixty-nine percent of participants said they “strongly” oppose the president’s decision to take federal control of D.C. police, and 10 percent said they “somewhat” oppose the move.
Trump has repeatedly defended his decision over the past several weeks.
The Hill has reached out to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the MPD for comment.
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5475351-washington-residents-protest-police
“I’ve had the privilege of meeting a lot of foreign leaders. They’re laughing behind his back,” he said at Politico’s California summit. “Do not conflate what I just said with the meeting I had with the Denmark delegation [California and Denmark just made a comprehensive agreement on climate and tech]. I’ve had dozens and dozens, ambassadors [who] met with him. They’re laughing behind his back. He’s being played everywhere. It’s an embarrassment.”
https://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/gavin-newsom-on-people-talking-about-trump
