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      Two suspects arrested for theft of Kristi Noem’s purse, Secret Service says

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      Two suspects have been arrested in connection with the theft last week of the US homeland security secretary Kristi Noem’s purse as she ate at a Washington DC restaurant, officials said Sunday.Noem’s purse was nabbed on Easter Sunday and reportedly contained about $3,000 in cash and her keys, driver’s license, passport and homeland security badge. The homeland security department said Noem had cash in her purse to pay for gifts, dinner and other activities for her family on Easter.A suspect was taken into custody without incident in Washington after an investigation by the US Secret Service and the Metropolitan police department, according to a statement from Matt McCool, a Secret Service agent in Washington.That suspect was arrested on Saturday, the police department said.In a prepared statement, McCool called the suspect a “serial offender” and said there was no evidence Noem had been targeted because of her position.The Metropolitan police department said the suspect was connected to two other purse thefts in Washington restaurants earlier this month through video evidence. The suspect was charged with robbery for the other incidents.The Secret Service referred questions to the US attorney’s office, which did not respond to emails seeking more information.Noem thanked law enforcement agencies “for finding and arresting the criminal who stole my bag on Easter Sunday as I shared a meal with my family”.“This individual is a career criminal who has been in our country illegally for years,” Noem said in a prepared statement. DHS did not immediately respond to an email requesting further detail on the suspect’s immigration status.Later on Sunday, the Secret Service said a second suspect, believed to be a co-conspirator in the theft of Noem’s bag and other robberies, had been arrested in Miami with assistance from Miami Beach police and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents. More

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      What is Tren de Aragua and has the group ‘invaded’ the United States?

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      The Trump administration has fixated on portraying a Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua, or TdA, as a state-sponsored international terrorist organization that has invaded the US.Donald Trump uses the argument to justify extreme enforcement measures against Venezuelan immigrants and cast a cloud across the Venezuelan diaspora, especially communities in the US.The US president claims the criminal group “is undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare” here, which in turn should allow agents to arrest Venezuelans and exile them to Guantánamo Bay or El Salvador’s Cecot prison without even a court hearing.Yet experts say the claims do not reflect reality and, instead, Donald Trump has concocted a bogeyman to fuel his extreme immigration crackdown.What is Tren de Aragua?TdA is a gang that originated in Venezuela but has since expanded its reach to other countries in Latin America, alongside a more general mass diaspora of more than 7.7 million Venezuelans fleeing autocratic rule under the president, Nicolás Maduro.Some scholars track the group’s early days to 2005, when a trade union’s members started to embezzle funds and extort contractors while working on a railroad project – hence the “tren”, or “train”, in the Aragua region.TdA then took off in Venezuela’s Aragua state around 2014, within the Tocorón prison, where members had access to restaurants, a swimming pool, a zoo, a nightclub and other amenities atypical of a lock-up. The penitentiary became TdA’s headquarters – where leaders on the inside directed criminal activity on the outside – until 2023, when the Venezuelan government raided Tocorón and the gang began to fragment.One scholar wrote: “The TdA is of modest prominence and is nowhere near as established as other gangs in Central and South America.” Some of those more influential criminal organizations, such as MS-13 and Mexico’s cartels, have long had a foothold in – or even have their origins in – the US.That said, TdA has been powerful enough to torment and exploit other Venezuelans at home and abroad, preying particularly on vulnerable women, who are forced into the sex industry to pay off their debt after the gang smuggles them to nearby countries such as Chile, Colombia or Peru.TdA members have also started working with Mexican cartels, infiltrating groups of immigrants and then colluding with Mexico’s organized crime networks to extort them.Has Tren de Aragua ‘invaded’ the US?Tren de Aragua does have a presence in the US, but that presence is diffuse, uncoordinated, and on a smaller scale than the Trump administration’s repeatedly sounding the alarm and citing TdA in immigration-related arrests might make it seem. Three experts put it bluntly when they wrote for the New York Times: “Tren de Aragua is not invading America.”That’s not to say that individual TdA members – or people purporting to be TdA members for clout – haven’t caused real harm and suffering for many communities across the US. In Miami, a former Venezuelan police officer was reportedly abducted and murdered by a TdA member. Another supposed gang member allegedly shot two New York police officers. And the criminal organization has seemingly imported its sex-trafficking model, exploiting Venezuelan women who owe them for transportation into the US.Even so, InSight Crime, a thinktank that studies organized crime across the Americas, has said that TdA is growing weaker, not stronger, and “now operates more as a loose collection of franchises than a cohesive organization”.Earlier this month, US authorities revealed federal charges of racketeering, sex trafficking, drug trafficking, firearm offenses and robbery against 27 alleged current or alleged former TdA members and associates, indictments and arrests that attorney general Pam Bondi said would “devastate TdA’s infrastructure”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBy late last year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was looking into more than 600 immigrants in the US suspected of having some connection to TdA, though whether they were victims, witnesses or gang members remained unclear.That number represents fewer than 0.09% of the 700,000 Venezuelans who have resettled in the US, many of whom feel they are being smeared.The criteria cited as justification for alleging detainees or people being removed from the US without due process are TdA members include suspects making hand signs, wearing Chicago Bulls paraphernalia or similar, or having certain tattoos, which prominent researchers of gangs have said are not strong indicators, or indicia at all, of gang membership.Meanwhile, several federal judges say essentially that Trump’s using the AEA and claims of “war” and “invasion” are invalid, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed lawsuits across the country challenging its use to skirt due process.Is Tren de Aragua working with Venezuela’s government?Trump is relying on highly controversial measures, chiefly the wartime 1798 Alien Enemies Act, or AEA, to summarily deport people the administration alleges are TdA members, many of whom have not been charged with crimes. His justification is that the gang is acting “at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela”.That’s unlikely. TdA was protected by the Venezuelan government in the past, according to InSight Crime. But that agreement no longer stands, with the raid on the criminal organization’s prison headquarters a case in point.The Washington Post reports that a recent National Intelligence Council internal assessment – which relied on information from the US’s 18 intelligence agencies – determined that while TdA has some low-level contacts in Maduro’s government, it is in no way commanded by Maduro. This makes Trump’s using the invasion argument to bypass due process flimsy – and contrary to the US supreme court’s insistence of the right for individuals to challenge the government. More

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      Trump disdains conservatism. His governing philosophy is absolute power | Sidney Blumenthal

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      Donald Trump issued his declaration of war against his “enemies within” at the Department of Justice on 14 March. Thus the president launched a constitutional crisis that encompasses not just a group of migrants snatched without due process and transported against federal court orders to a foreign prison, but a wholesale assault on virtually every major institution of American society.“We will expel the rogue actors and corrupt forces from our government. We will expose, and very much expose, their egregious crimes and severe misconduct,” he pledged. “It’s going to be legendary.”Trump’s speech condensed his mission to its despotic essence. While he distilled his contempt, Trump also marked his disdain for the traditional conservatism of limited government, respect for the law and liberty. He defined his project, built on his executive orders as substitutes for the law, to crown himself with unrestrained powers to intimidate, threaten and even kidnap. His political philosophy is a ruthless quest for absolute power.Trump hailed his appointees for being “so tough” – the enthusiastically compliant attorney general, Pam Bondi, and the irrepressible flunky FBI director, Kash Patel. He attacked lawyers whose firms he would issue executive orders against to eviscerate their work – “really, really bad people”. He claimed Joe Biden and the former attorney general Merrick Garland “tried to turn America into a corrupt communist and third-world country”. And he described “people that come into our country” as “stone-cold killers. These are killers like – they make our killers look nice by comparison. They make our killers look nice. These are rough, tough people with the tattoos all over their face.” Trump’s accusations are invariably projections of his own malice that he manufactures into politically pliable paranoia.No staff attorneys within the department were invited to the speech, as people at the justice department told me. The senior lawyers from the Public Integrity Section had already resigned when Trump attempted to coerce them to participate in dropping the prosecution of New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, for corruption in exchange for his support of Trump’s coming roundup and deportation of migrants. After Trump, a convicted felon, concluded by comparing himself to Al Capone, the mafia boss convicted of tax evasion – “the great Alphonse Capone, legendary Scarface, was attacked only a tiny fraction of what Trump was attacked” – Trump’s theme song from his political rallies, YMCA, blared out of the loudspeakers in the department auditorium.The next day, Trump announced his executive order citing the Alien Enemies Act of 1789, a wartime measure, to incarcerate members of the Tren de Aragua gang he asserted were coordinating with the Maduro government of Venezuela to commit “brutal crimes, including murders, kidnappings, extortions, and human, drug, and weapons trafficking”. (On 20 March, the New York Times reported: “The intelligence community assessment concluded that the gang, Tren de Aragua, was not directed by Venezuela’s government or committing crimes in the United States on its orders, according to the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity.”)The 238 men abducted were taken without any due process to a maximum-security prison operated by the Salvadorian strongman Nayib Bukele, who calls himself “the coolest dictator” and whose government is being paid at least $6m in an arrangement with the Trump administration.In a hearing on 24 March before the US court of appeals for the DC circuit, Judge Patricia Millett, criticizing the absence of due process, said: “Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act.” She asked the deputy assistant attorney general, Drew Ensign, arguing the administration’s case: “What’s factually wrong about what I said?”“Well, your Honor, we certainly dispute the Nazi analogy,” he replied.Trump’s assertion of emergency power under the Alien Enemies Act is more than a bit analogous to the ideas of Carl Schmitt, the chief legal scholar and apologist of the Nazi regime, “crown jurist of the Third Reich”. The falsity, according to the intelligence community, of Trump’s claim about the men underlines the analogy of Trump’s argument to Schmitt’s. “Authority, not truth, produces law,” Schmitt wrote. “Sovereign is he who decides on invocation of the state of emergency.” And then: “Der Ausnahmefall offenbart das Wesen der staatlichen Autorität am klarsten” – “The State of Emergency reveals most clearly the essence of the authority of the state … The exception is thus far more important that the ordinary rule. The normal state of affairs shows nothing; the emergency shows everything; it confirms not only the rule, rather the rule derives strictly from the emergency.”The ACLU filed a lawsuit on 15 March before Chief Judge James Boasberg of the US district court of the District of Columbia to halt the flight to El Salvador. The judge issued an order for the planes to return to the US, but the Trump administration defied it.Trump’s defiance has set in motion a flurry of legal challenges and court cases heard in district courts and circuit courts of appeals, as well as the supreme court. On 7 April, the court ruled that the detainees had the right to due process, which they were denied. On 11 April, the justices unanimously ordered the administration to facilitate the return of one wrongly taken individual, Kilmar Ábrego García, a legal resident of Maryland who was identified by his family and had no criminal record. On 19 April, the court temporarily blocked a new round of deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.CBS’s 60 Minutes reported: “We could not find criminal records for 75% of the Venezuelans.” Bloomberg News reported that about 90% had no criminal records.On 14 April, Trump welcomed Bukele to the White House. Trump has turned the Oval Office into his small stage with cabinet secretaries and staff seated on the couches as his chorus. Bukele was dressed in black casual wear, but not admonished, as Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy was admonished, for supposedly showing disrespect to Trump by not appearing in a suit and tie.Trump and Bukele played the scene as a buddy movie, kidding each other, but not kidding, about repression. “Mr President,” said Bukele, “you have 350 million people to liberate. But to liberate 350 million people, you have to imprison some. That’s the way it works, right?”“The homegrowns are next, the homegrowns,” said Trump. “You’ve got to build about five more places.”“Yeah, we got the space,” Bukele said.When the question of Ábrego García was raised by a reporter, Bondi said: “That’s not up to us,” and that it was “up to El Salvador”.“Well, I’m supposed – you’re not suggesting that I smuggle a terrorist in the United States, right?” Bukele replied. Trump reassured him: “It’s only CNN.” Bukele called the question “preposterous”.“Well, they’d love to have a criminal released into our country,” said Trump. “These are sick people. Marco, do you have something to say about that?” It was another test of the secretary of state’s sycophancy. Marco Rubio rose to the occasion. “No court in the United States has a right to conduct a foreign policy of the United States,” he said. “It’s that simple. End of story.”Standing behind Rubio, Trump’s most influential aide and the architect of his immigration policy, Stephen Miller, chimed in: “To Marco’s point, the supreme court said exactly what Marco said. That no court has the authority to compel the foreign policy function in the United States. We won a case 9-0. And people like CNN are portraying it as a loss, as usual, because they want foreign terrorists in the country who kidnap women and children.”A reporter attempted to point out that the court had in fact ruled it was illegal to deprive the captives of due process. “Well, it’s illegal to, so I just wanted some clarity on it,” he asked. Trump jumped in: “And that’s why nobody watches you anymore. You have no credibility.”On 17 April, the day the supreme court ruled on Ábrego García, Trump said: “I’m not involved in it,” though he had signed the executive order that authorized his kidnapping. Trump was reverting to the tactic of denial, however patently ludicrous, that he had been schooled in originally by Roy Cohn, the Republican power broker and mafia lawyer who had been his private attorney. The Trump administration continues to claim it has no control over the captives in the Salvadorian prison and they cannot be returned.Trump’s disavowal of responsibility made the visit to the prison by the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, to tape a video on 26 March problematic on several levels. If Trump has no control, then how was Noem allowed the run of the place? If the prisoners were combatants under the Alien Enemies Act, then their status made her appearance a violation of the Geneva convention’s Article 1 that outlaws “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment”, and Article 13 that prohibits “acts of violence or intimidation” and “insults and public curiosity” – that is, using prisoners for propaganda purposes.If Schmitt’s argument is not Trump’s argument, the difference has certainly not confused the judges handling the cases. Boasberg ruled that the Trump administration had acted with “willful disregard” for his order and, while contempt proceedings were paused, threatened to appoint a special prosecutor if the Department of Justice declined to do so.The Maryland federal judge Paula Xinis, who ordered the administration to return Ábrego García, said on 15 April she had seen no evidence of progress. She ruled on 22 April that such stonewalling “reflects a willful and bad faith refusal to comply with discovery obligations … That ends now.”She also stated: “Defendants must supplement their answer to include all individuals involved as requested in this interrogatory.” That discovery process might range into stranger precincts of Maga depths than imagined. The New Yorker reported on “a Maga salon” at a tech billionaire’s Washington residence to which a Republican lobbyist, Andrew Beck, brought Trace Meyer, self-described as the “Babe Ruth of bitcoin”, where they discussed with state department staffers the “work-in-progress plan” for abducting migrants to El Salvador. The officials had reached “an impasse in the negotiations. Meyer, through his crypto connections, was able to help reopen the conversation.” Add to the discovery list: Beck, Meyer and the state department officials.In denying the Trump administration’s motion for a halt in the Xinis ruling, Judge J Harvie Wilkinson III, of the court of appeals for the fourth circuit, issued a thunderous opinion on 17 April, marking a historic break between principled conservatism and Trump’s regime. Wilkinson is an eminent conservative figure within the judiciary, of an old Virginia family, a clerk to Justice Lewis Powell, and a Ronald Reagan appointee revered in the Federalist Society.“The government,” Wilkinson wrote, “is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”Wilkinson concluded with a siren call about Trump’s threat. “If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home? And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present, and the Executive’s obligation to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed’ would lose its meaning.”Wilkinson has defined the stark conflict headed toward an unstoppable collision. Against Trump’s appropriation of Schmitt’s authoritarian logic, the conservative jurist has thrown down the gauntlet of American constitutional law. Trump’s disdain for that sort of conservatism moves the cases again and again toward the conservative majority of the supreme court, which must decide its allegiance, either like Wilkinson, to the constitution, or instead to Trump’s untrammeled power that would reduce the court itself to a cipher.

      This article was amended on 27 April 2025; an earlier version stated that JD Vance admonished Volodymyr Zelenskyy for not wearing a suit to meet Donald Trump. In fact, it was Brian Glenn, a correspondent for Real America’s Voice.

      Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth More

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      Americans, including Republicans, losing faith in Trump, new polls reveal

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      Americans, including some Republicans, are losing faith in Donald Trump across a range of key issues, according to polling released this week. One survey found a majority describing the president’s second stint in the White House so far as “scary”.Along with poor ratings on the economy and Trump’s immigration policy, a survey released on Saturday found that only 24% of Americans believe Trump has focussed on the right priorities as president.That poll comes as Trump’s popularity is historically low for a leader this early in a term. More than half of voters disapprove of Trump’s performance as president, and majorities oppose his tariff policies and slashing of the federal workforce.The scathing reviews come as Trump next week marks 100 days of his second stint office, and suggest Americans are already experiencing fatigue after a period that has seen global financial market nosedives and chilling deportations, including of documented people.A poll by the Associated Press-Norc Center for Public Affairs Research published this weekend, found that even Republicans are not overwhelmingly convinced that Trump’s attention has been in the right place.A narrow majority, 54%, of Republicans surveyed said that Trump is focussed on the “right priorities”, while the president’s numbers with crucial independent voters are much weaker. Just 9% of independents said that the president is focussed on the right priorities – with 42% believing Trump is paying attention to the wrong issues.About four in 10 people in the survey approve of how Trump is handling the presidency overall, and only about 40% of Americans approve of Trump’s approach to foreign policy, trade negotiations and the economy.Meanwhile, a New York Times/Siena College poll of registered voters on Friday found that Trump’s approval rating is 42%, and just 29% among independent voters. More than half of voters said Trump is “exceeding the powers available to him”, and 59% of respondents said the president’s second term has been “scary”.While Republican leaders typically receive strong scores on economic issues, Americans have been underwhelmed by Trump’s performance. The Times survey found that only 43% of voters approve of how Trump is handling the economy – a stark turnaround from a Times poll in April 2024, which found that 64% approved of Trump’s economy in his first term.Half of voters disapproved of Trump’s trade policies with other countries, and 61% said a president should not have the authority to impose tariffs without congressional approval, while the Times reported that 63% – including 40% of Republicans – said “a president should not be able to deport legal immigrants who have protested Israel”.Further on immigration, a Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos poll on Friday found that 53% of Americans now disapprove of the president’s handling of immigration matters, while 46% approve. In February the majority was the other way, with half of those surveyed approving of Trump’s approach on that issue.The Post reported that as support has drained away on this topic, at this point 90% of Democrats, 56% of independents and 11% of Republicans dislike the way Trump is dealing with immigration.The poor reviews have dogged Trump all week. An Associated Press poll on Thursday found that about half of US adults say that Trump’s trade policies will increase prices “a lot” and another three in 10 think prices could go up “somewhat”, and half of Americans are “extremely” or “very” concerned about the possibility of the US economy going into a recession in the next few months.Polling conducted by the Trump-friendly Fox News has brought little respite. A survey published on Wednesday found that just 38% of Americans approve of Trump on the economy, with 56% disapproving.The Fox News poll found that 58% of respondents disapproved of Trump’s performance, and 59% disapproved on inflation. Just three in 10 Americans said they believed Trump’s policies were helping the economy, and only four in 10 said Trump’s policies will help the country.Among generation Z, generally regarded as those born between 1995 and 2012, a staggering 69% told pollsters for an NBC Stay Tuned survey that they don’t approve of Trump’s handling of the economy and the cost of living. Gen Z participants complained of struggling to even pay the rent in some places, let alone buy a home, and they worry about inflation.A minority of gen Z people polled thought the country would be stronger if more people lived by traditional binary gender roles and more than 90% of those polled said they believed foreign students with visas or green cards should have the same due process protections as US citizens. This comes amid the Trump administration declaring there are only two genders, male and female, and arresting and detaining some pro-Palestinian student activists without due process. More

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      Trump officials deport two-year-old US citizen and mother of one-year-old girl

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      The Trump administration has deported a two-year-old US citizen “with no meaningful process”, according to a federal judge, while in a different case the authorities deported the mother of a one-year-old girl, separating them indefinitely.Lawyers in the two cases, the first in Louisiana and the second in Florida, say their clients were arrested at routine check-ins at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) offices and were given virtually no opportunity to speak with them or family members.They are the latest examples of the White House cracking down on documented immigrants, including green card holders and also even citizens who have the status by birth or naturalization. The unorthodox policy and the frequent avoidance of due process has brought about a clash with the judicial branch of the US government in a battle over the constitution.The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), National Immigration Project and several other allied groups said in a statement that deporting children who are US citizens, as in these two cases, are a “shocking – although increasingly common – abuse of power”.US district judge Terry Doughty in Monroe, Louisiana, said the two-year-old girl, who was referred to as VML in court documents, was deported with her mother to Honduras.“It is illegal and unconstitutional to deport, detain for deportation, or recommend deportation of a US citizen,” said the judge.He scheduled a hearing for 19 May “in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the government just deported a US citizen with no meaningful process”.VML was apprehended by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) on Tuesday with her mother, Jenny Carolina Lopez Villela, and older sister when Villela attended a routine appointment at its New Orleans office, according to a filing by Trish Mack, who said the child’s father asked her to act as the child’s custodian. The girl’s father is seeking to have her returned to the United States.Immigrants of all sorts with cases in process, pending appeals or parole, have routinely been required to regularly check in with Ice officers, sometimes for many years. And so long as they had not violated any regulations or committed any crimes, they were usually sent on their way. Now, as the Trump administration pushes for the mass arrest and deportation of immigrants, check-ins have become increasingly fraught.According to Mack, when VML’s father briefly spoke to Villela, he could hear her and the children crying. According to a court document, he reminded her that a US citizen “could not be deported”.However, prosecutors said Villela, who has legal custody, told Ice that she wanted to retain custody of the girl and take her to Honduras. They said the man claiming to be VML’s father had not presented himself to Ice despite requests to do so.VML is not prohibited from entering the US, federal prosecutors said..She was among two families deported from Louisiana, also including one pregnant woman, the advocacy groups noted.The Department of Homeland Security and the justice department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.“These actions stand in direct violation of Ice’s own written and informal directives, which mandate coordination for the care of minor children with willing caretakers – regardless of immigration status – when deportations are being carried out,” the ACLU said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn Florida, meanwhile, a Cuban-born woman who is the mother of a one-year-old girl and the wife of a US citizen was detained at a scheduled check-in with Ice in Tampa, her lawyer said on Saturday.Heidy Sánchez was held without any communication and flown to Cuba two days later. She is still breastfeeding her daughter, who suffers from seizures, her lawyer, Claudia Cañizares, said.Cañizares said she tried to file paperwork with Ice to contest the deportation on Thursday morning but Ice refused to accept it, saying Sánchez was already gone. Sánchez is not a criminal and has a strong case on humanitarian grounds for staying in the US, Cañizares said.Donald Trump, whose presidential campaigns have focused heavily on immigration, said earlier this month he wanted to deport some violent criminals who are US citizens to El Salvadoran prisons, where he removed hundreds of Venezuelans and some Salvadorans last month without even a court hearing. He sent them to a brutal prison for suspected gangsters and terrorists, claiming they were all violent criminals when it has since been argued that most were not and even if they were they had the right to due process.The comments from Trump about sending US citizens or what he termed “home grown” criminals to another country to be incarcerated have alarmed civil rights advocates and is viewed by many legal scholars as unconstitutional.The US supreme court has ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate and effectuate” the return of Maryland resident Kilmar Ábrego García, who was sent to the country on 15 March with hundreds of others despite a US court order protecting him from deportation.Opinion polls in the last week show Trump struggling for approval with voters who were surveyed, including on some of his hardline anti-immigration tactics.Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Democrats decry Wisconsin judge’s arrest as Republicans call to remove her

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      The FBI’s arrest of Wisconsin judge Hannah Dugan has triggered strong reactions from Republican and Democratic politicians, as the Trump administration veered closer to direct confrontation with the judiciary over its crackdown on immigration.Following the Milwaukee county circuit judge’s arrest on Friday, over allegations that she helped a man evade US immigration officers at her courthouse, Republicans have called for her removal while Democrats regard her arrest as a reflection of the administration’s increasing disregard of judicial independence amid its push to deport immigrants on an enormous scale.In a clear signal that the administration welcomed a political fight over the judge’s arrest, the FBI director, Kash Patel, posted a photograph of Dugan in handcuffs on Twitter/X on Friday night, captioned: “No one is above the law.”According to the criminal complaint against the judge filed in federal court, a six-person arrest team, which included an immigration officer and two FBI agents, arrived at the courthouse to arrest Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a Mexican immigrant facing three misdemeanor battery counts they intended to deport.Flores-Ruiz was in Dugan’s courtroom on 18 April for a scheduling hearing. The complaint alleges that when the arrest team identified themselves to courthouse security, and waited in the public hallway outside Dugan’s courtroom, she confronted them and ordered them to report to the chief judge’s office. Then, according to a court officer cited in the complaint, Dugan directed the defendant and his lawyer to a side exit from the courtroom, which led to a private hallway.In response to Dugan’s arrest, Representative Glenn Grothman, a Wisonsin Republican, accused Dugan of being a “liberal judge [who] would go so far as to obstruct federal law enforcement in order to protect a violent illegal immigrant from arrest”.Tony Wied, another Republican representative of Wisconsin in Congress, demanded Dugan’s resignation. “Absolutely unacceptable,” Wied wrote, adding: “Not only are activist judges trying to thwart the president’s agenda, now they are actively breaking the law to protect illegal aliens. Judge Dugan should resign immediately.”Democrats, including Wisconsin’s governor, Tony Evers, condemned the FBI’s arrest of Dugan as an overreach of executive power by Donald Trump.Evers said: “In this country, people who are suspected of criminal wrongdoing are innocent until their guilt is proven beyond reasonable doubt.” He went to add: “Unfortunately, we have seen in recent months the president and the Trump administration repeatedly use dangerous rhetoric to attack and attempt to undermine the judiciary at every level, including flat-out disobeying the highest court in the land and threatening to impeach and remove judges who do not rule in their favor.”Referencing the US president and the White House’s own messaging of likening Trump to a king, the state’s Democratic senator, Tammy Baldwin, said: “Make no mistake, we do not have kings in this country … By relentlessly attacking the judicial system, flouting court orders, and arresting a sitting judge, this president is putting those basic Democratic values that Wisconsinites hold dear on the line.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMeanwhile, the state’s former Republican governor Scott Walker called on, the Wisconsin state legislature “to remove disgraced Milwaukee county circuit court judge Hannah Dugan from office”.Republicans from outside of Wisconsin echoed those calls, with Tennessee’s representative Tim Burchett saying: “If she broke the law, she needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent. No double standards.”But Wisconsin’s Democratic representative Gwen Moore countered that what she called the administration’s “willingness to weaponize federal law enforcement is shocking and this arrest has all the hallmarks of overreach. Federal law enforcement coming into a community and arresting a judge is a serious matter and would require a high legal bar.”Milwaukee’s city council members also released a statement, saying: “Perhaps the most chilling part of judge Dugan’s arrest is the continued aggression by which the current administration in Washington DC has weaponized federal law enforcement, such as ICE, against immigrant communities.”Similarly, Milwaukee county board supervisor, Miguel Martinez, said: “The people will not stand for an administration that continues to weaponize our justice system as a means to intimidate immigrant communities, made clear by the cumulative actions over recent weeks.”Becca Balint, a Vermont Democrat who sits on the House judiciary committee, told Axios that there should “absolutely” be a probe into Dugan’s arrest. “On the face of it, this is dangerous and outrageous and it is designed to intimidate our judiciary,” she said.Her fellow House judiciary committee member, Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin, said: “This is a drastic escalation and dangerous new front in Trump’s authoritarian campaign of trying to bully, intimidate and impeach judges who won’t follow his dictates.”“We must do whatever we can to defend the independent judiciary in America … This is an unmistakable descent further into authoritarian chaos,” he added. More

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      FBI arrests Wisconsin judge and accuses her of obstructing immigration officials

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      The FBI on Friday arrested a judge whom the agency accused of obstruction after it said she helped a man evade US immigration authorities as they were seeking to arrest him at her courthouse.The county circuit judge, Hannah Dugan, was apprehended in the courthouse where she works in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at 8.30am local time on Friday on charges of obstruction, a spokesperson for the US Marshals Service confirmed to the Guardian.Kash Patel, the Trump-appointed FBI director, wrote mid-morning on X: “We believe Judge Dugan intentionally misdirected federal agents away from the subject to be arrested in her courthouse, Eduardo Flores Ruiz, allowing the subject – an illegal alien – to evade arrest.”He said that agents were still able to arrest the target after he was “chased down” and that he was in custody. Patel added that “the judge’s obstruction created increased danger to the public”. The FBI director deleted the post minutes later for unknown reasons, but the US marshals confirmed to multiple outlets that the arrest had occurred.Dugan appeared briefly in federal court in Milwaukee later on Friday morning before being released from custody. Her next court appearance is 15 May.“Judge Dugan wholeheartedly regrets and protests her arrest. It was not made in the interest of public safety,” her attorney, Craig Mastantuono, said during the hearing. He declined to comment to an Associated Press reporter, following her court appearance.A crowd formed outside the courthouse, chanting: “Free the judge now.”In a statement shared with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, an attorney for Dugan said: “Hannah C Dugan has committed herself to the rule of law and the principles of due process for her entire career as a lawyer and a judge.”It continued: “Judge Dugan will defend herself vigorously, and looks forward to being exonerated.”Trump weighed in on his Truth Social platform by sharing an image of the judge taken from her campaign’s Facebook page in which she was seen on the bench wearing a KN95 face mask and displaying the Ukrainian national symbol of a trident. The image was first posted on X by the rightwing blogger Libs of TikTok.The Milwaukee city council released a statement following the arrest: “This morning’s news that Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested by federal authorities is shocking and upsetting. Judge Dugan should be afforded the same respect and due process that she has diligently provided others throughout her career.“Perhaps the most chilling part of Judge Dugan’s arrest is the continued aggression by which the current administration in Washington, DC has weaponized federal law enforcement, such as ICE, against immigrant communities,” the statement reads. “As local elected officials, we are working daily to support our constituents who grow increasingly concerned and worried with each passing incident.”Senator Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat representing Wisconsin, called the arrest of a sitting judge a “gravely serious and drastic move” that “threatens to breach” the separation of power between the executive and judicial branches.“Make no mistake, we do not have kings in this country and we are a democracy governed by laws that everyone must abide by,” Baldwin said in an emailed statement after Dugan’s arrest.The leftwing senator Bernie Sanders said the move was about “unchecked power”.“Let’s be clear. Trump’s arrest of Judge Dugan in Milwaukee has nothing to do with immigration. It has everything to do with [Trump] moving this country towards authoritarianism,” he said in a statement.The Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren said in a social media post: “This administration is threatening our country’s judicial system. This rings serious alarm bells.”The judge’s arrest dramatically escalates tensions between federal authorities and state and local officials amid Donald Trump’s anti-immigration crackdown. It also comes amid a growing battle between the Trump administration and the federal judiciary over the president’s executive actions over deportations and other matters.In a statement Wisconsin’s governor, Democrat Tony Evers, accused the Trump administration of repeatedly using “dangerous rhetoric to attack and attempt to undermine our judiciary at every level”.“I have deep respect for the rule of law, our nation’s judiciary, the importance of judges making decisions impartially without fear or favor, and the efforts of law enforcement to hold people accountable if they commit a crime,” Evers said. “I will continue to put my faith in our justice system as this situation plays out in the court of law.”It was reported on Tuesday that the FBI was investigating whether Dugan “tried to help an undocumented immigrant avoid arrest when that person was scheduled to appear in her courtroom last week”, per an email obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.Dugan told the Journal Sentinel: “Nearly every fact regarding the ‘tips’ in your email is inaccurate.”The arrest of Dugan is the first publicly known instance of the Trump administration charging a local official for allegedly interfering with immigration enforcement.Emil Bove, the justice department’s principal associate deputy attorney general, issued a memo in January calling on prosecutors to pursue criminal cases against local government officials who obstructed the federal government’s immigration enforcement efforts.Bove stated in the three-page memo: “Federal law prohibits state and local actors from resisting, obstructing, and otherwise failing to comply with lawful immigration-related commands or requests.”Dugan has been charged with the federal offenses of obstructing a proceeding and concealing an individual to prevent arrest, according to documents filed with the court.The administration alleged that in the original encounter, the judge ordered immigration officials to leave the courthouse, saying they did not have a warrant signed by a judge to apprehend the suspect they were seeking, who was in court for other reasons.Prosecutors said that Dugan became “visibly angry” when she learned that immigration agents were planning an arrest in her courtroom, according to court filings.Dugan ordered the immigration officials to speak with the chief judge and then escorted Flores Ruiz and his attorney through a door that led to a non-public area of the courthouse, the prosecution complaint said.The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, citing sources it did not identify, said Dugan steered Flores Ruiz and his attorney to a private hallway and into a public area but did not hide the pair in a jury deliberation room as some have accused her of doing.Dugan was first elected as a county judge in 2016 and before that was head of the local branch of Catholic Charities, which provides refugee resettlement programs. She was previously a lawyer at the Legal Aid Society of Milwaukee, which serves low-income people.The case is similar to one brought during the first Trump administration against a Massachusetts judge, who was accused of helping a man sneak out a backdoor of a courthouse to evade a waiting immigration enforcement agent.That prosecution sparked outrage from many in the legal community, who slammed the case as politically motivated. Prosecutors under the Biden administration dropped the case against Newton district judge Shelley Joseph in 2022 after she agreed to refer herself to a state agency that investigates allegations of misconduct by members of the bench.However, Pam Bondi, the attorney general, gave a media interview in which she said the administration would target any judges it believed were breaking the law.Bondi said on a Fox News segment that she believes “some of these judges think that they are beyond and above the law. They are not, and we are sending a very strong message today … if you are harboring a fugitive, we will come after you and we will prosecute you.”The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      in US Politics

      Disabled people detained by Ice sound alarm over overcrowded jails

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      In his three months locked up at Stewart detention center in Lumpkin, Georgia, Rodney Taylor has missed meals and showers, lived with increasing pain in his hips, developed a swollen thumb on his right hand and blisters on the stumps where his two legs were amputated when he was a toddler.Taylor’s mother brought him to the US from Liberia on a medical visa as a small child. He went through 16 operations and is a double amputee. He has two fingers on his right hand. Now 46, he has lived in the US nearly his entire life, works as a barber, is active in promoting cancer awareness in his community, and recently got engaged.Nonetheless, his immigration status is unresolved, and despite having an application for residence – commonly known as a “green card” – pending, on 15 January Ice agents arrived at his Loganville, Georgia home and took him to Stewart.The reason, according to his attorney, who shared paperwork from his case with the Guardian: a burglary conviction he received as a teenager and which the state of Georgia pardoned him for in 2010.View image in fullscreenHis case is one of an untold number of people with disabilities and other serious health issues who are being swept up in the current administration’s “mass deportation” efforts. These efforts are carried out in extreme overcrowding at the hundred-plus detention centers like Stewart across the nation.They also happen without the benefit of two federal offices that formerly provided oversight for healthcare and other issues, and now a situation is unfolding where detainees with disabilities like Taylor are increasingly at risk of life-altering outcomes and even death, experts say.“It’s the perfect storm for abuses to occur – including negligence,” said Joseph Nwadiuko, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania who researches the immigration detention system. “Deaths are much more likely … [and] we haven’t thought about the healthcare implications of what’s developing,” he said.The immigration detention system was already a precarious, potentially unsafe place for detainees with disabilities, according to experts and a handful of current and former employees with the Department of Homeland Security – Ice’s parent agency.But when the current administration closed the office for civil rights and civil liberties (CRCL) and the office of the immigration detention ombudsman (Oido) last month, detainees such as Taylor were left with less protection than ever – at a time when nearly 48,000 detainees are locked up nationwide, the highest number since October 2019.“It’s all happening in the dark,” said Sarah Owings, Taylor’s attorney, speaking of conditions facing her client and others like him.Taylor spoke to the Guardian from Stewart. When he was detained in front of his house, he was only days away from picking up new prosthetic legs; the ones he was using were too tight. Then the detention center gave him shoes that didn’t fit the legs and trying to walk “felt like walking on concrete on my knees”, he said.In addition, the prosthetic legs have batteries that require eight hours of charging a day. But after being locked up at Stewart, he didn’t even see a doctor for three days, and in the ensuing months, the facility has never been able to arrange for eight hours of charging, allowing only several hours at a time. The result: the batteries die and the legs don’t bend, creating more pain in Taylor’s hips.Taylor and Owings sought a medical leave, in order to see the doctor who could at least fit him for the new prosthetic legs – and were denied. A second petition is “under review”, he said.In the meantime, walking to the cafeteria to eat has proved too painful. Other detainees brought him meals for awhile, but often had to argue with guards for permission. A case manager took over the chore, often arriving at least an hour after meals.Staff also offered Taylor a wheelchair – but he can’t push it, as his right hand only has two fingers, and his thumb has swollen and become painful since he was detained.Taylor’s case was one of several featured in a CNN story about people facing possible deportation after decades of living in the US. Afterwards, he said, “the warden came to me and said, ‘Tell me what you need.’” He told him about his legs and thumb. “I haven’t heard a response yet,” Taylor said. “It’s stressful.”Taylor told the Guardian he was not the only detainee at Stewart with medical issues. He met another detainee who suffered an infection and couldn’t walk; the man had to wait about a month to get crutches.“Unless you’re dying or bleeding out … they’re not going to come,” he said a guard told him and several others. “They think, ‘Everybody is getting deported soon … and fixing your issue is not our concern – getting you outta here is our concern. Why spend all this extra money?’” said Taylor.The situation is the same at other Ice detention facilities, several experts told the Guardian. They mentioned Krome, in Miami, Florida, where at least three detainees have died in recent months and others with conditions such as HIV have gone weeks without medicine.Amy Zeidan, a professor of emergency medicine at Atlanta’s Emory University who has researched healthcare in the immigration detention system, said that increasing overcrowding also worsens a chronic workforce shortage. “They don’t have enough qualified people,” she said. “They don’t have the people they need to provide appropriate care.”These conditions “are emblematic of the system” under the current administration, said a DHS staffer who preferred anonymity to avoid retaliation.Michelle Brané was the ombudsman at the Oido until the office of 100-plus employees was shut down, doing away with inspections of immigration detention facilities – both announced and unannounced; responses to complaints; and policy recommendations for improving such aspects of detention as healthcare. Her office “deescalated situations that are now being exacerbated [by] … increasing detentions”, she said.The DHS sees things differently.“These offices have obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining [the department’s] mission,” said a DHS spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, in March, regarding shuttering the Oido and the CRCL, which handled more in-depth investigations of healthcare and other issues. Ice did not respond to a query from the Guardian.This attitude, said Brané, shows a “disdain for meeting basic humane conditions”, adding that her office was “created by statute and funded by Congress”.The former ombudsman is concerned about the situation facing detainees with disabilities and other serious health issues. “Ultimately, I’m worried people will die, or suffer irreparable harm – and dying shouldn’t be the point at which we start caring,” she said. “We shouldn’t be a country that is willingly mistreating people.” More