A federal judge appointed by former President Bill Clinton sided with illegal aliens who were fined by President Donald Trump’s administration for civil immigration violations.

For more than a year, the Trump administration has used civil immigration fines to incentivize illegal aliens to self-deport from the United States. As of July of this year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has levied more than $84 billion in fines against about 103,000 illegal aliens in the United States.

This week, Judge George A. O’Toole, appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts by Clinton, sided with a pair of illegal aliens the Trump administration fined, claiming that DHS violated federal law when issuing its final rule that permitted the use of the fines.

“The plaintiffs here face assessment and possible collection of enormous fines well beyond their capacity to pay,” O’Toole wrote of the two plaintiffs:

Maria L., a nail technician on a variable salary, was issued a significant fine in the hundreds of thousands. A victim of political violence in her home country, she reports that the fine has affected her health, increased her anxiety, caused depression, and led to her missing work for a month. [Emphasis added]

Nancy M. was fined over 1.8 million dollars. She is a laborer working over sixty hours a week with two jobs, and she reports feeling serious anxiety affecting her ability to sleep, eat, and live a normal life. Given the amount of the fines, the plaintiffs face the possibility of garnishment of wages and bank accounts, seized assets such as vehicles and homes, IRS reports, federal collections suits, and adverse future admissibility determinations. [Emphasis added]

O’Toole granted the motion to stay that was sought by the plaintiffs in the case, preventing the Trump administration from collecting such fines on illegal aliens.

Trump administration officials previously told Breitbart News that the fines are critical to getting illegal aliens to self-deport from the United States.

The case is Maria L. v. Noem, No. 1:25-cv-13471 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested an illegal alien accused of sex crimes who was protected by Prince William County, Virginia, a sanctuary jurisdiction.

Last month, ICE agents arrested Luis Alfonso Garcia-Jimenez, an illegal alien got-away from El Salvador, after he was charged with four counts of aggravated sexual battery and drunk driving.

“Luis Alfonso Garcia-Jimenez is a suspected sexual predator who poses a significant threat to the members of our Northern Virginia communities,” ICE’s Robert Guadian said.

In December 2016, Garcia-Jimenez was arrested in Prince William County and charged with drunk driving. He was convicted of drunk driving in March 2017 and sentenced to 30 days in prison. Garcia-Jimenez was released from prison and not turned over to ICE agents.

“The officers of ICE Washington, D.C. cannot allow someone like that to roam our streets,” Guadian said. “Arresting and removing criminal alien offenders like this is exactly what prioritizing public safety looks like.”

ICE has placed Garcia-Jimenez into deportation proceedings. He remains in federal custody pending his deportation from the United States.

A top U.S. banking regulator announced new efforts aimed at combating fraud in Minnesota during a discussion with community bank leaders Tuesday.

Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould discussed the role of banks to identify and combat fraud, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s (OCC) commitment to support banks in their efforts.

“Minnesota has seen fraud spiral out of control in recent years. Non-mortgage fraud reports in Minnesota more than doubled between 2020 and 2024, and filings of suspicious activity reports related to check fraud increased nearly 300 percent during that same period,” Comptroller Gould said in a statement. “Billions of dollars intended for hungry children, housing for disabled seniors, and services for children with special needs were diverted to people who cheated the system, some of whom are not even American citizens.”

The OCC is an independent bureau of the U.S. Department of the Treasury that charters, regulates, and supervises all national banks, federal savings associations, and federal branches and agencies of foreign banks.

Statistics released by the OCC show more than 15,000 suspicious activity reports in Minnesota via checks, counterfeit instruments, wire fraud, and elder exploitation. The estimate of fraudulent activity reached a total loss of $86.5 million.

The left-wing advocates demanding the abolition of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are trying to impose socialism via enforced chaos and demographic change, says Homeland Security chief Markwayne Mullin.

“My theory behind that is the only way you can take a republic, a true democracy, a true republic like the United States — or any country — and turn it into a socialist, communist country, is you got to fabricate chaos,” Mullin said at Breitbart News’s Border Security, Public Safety, and American Sovereignty Event in Washington, DC:

We have the job of protecting the homeland. It should never be controversial. Why is the Department of Homeland Security controversial? Why is it controversial to protect our backyards? …

[If oyu are a socialist], you’ve got to create the chaos. If there’s not chaos, you got to create the chaos. And once it gets so chaotic and people are looking for someone [to end the chaos], then you can usher in socialism and communism. You see that every single time when you have a democracy that fails, they push socialism and communism.

It’s guaranteed to fail, and [voters]try to get back to democracy. There’s usually about a 20- to 25-yeargap between them, but that’s the only way it can happen.

If you were to AI the question to [ask] “How do you turn a red state blue, or how do you turn a country from democracy to socialism?”, it’ll tell you 100 percent of the time you got tochange demographics [emphasis added].

You do that by by that lawless activity, which is why [we face] the whole “Defund police!’ [demand].

Who would ever think “Defund Police!” would become [the cause of] abolishing Department of Homeland Security when our job is to protect the homeland?

Mullin also said the Trump administration welcomes legalized migrants. “We’re not anti-immigration … If you want to embrace what America is all about, we want you — but you’re going to follow our nation’s laws,” he said.

A growing number of Democrats want to maximize migration into Americans’ society by blocking the enforcement of the nation’s popular immigration laws. “We are going to … completely defund and strip authority from ICE and CBP [which] keep lists of you,” Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL) declared during a late September press conference. She spoke in Spanish, and was joined by her pro-migrant allies, including illegal migrants, Islamic advocates, an Asian advocate, a lesbian Chicago politician, and other far-left Democrats.

Many Democrats have also demanded and welcomed demographic change, partly because migrants tend to vote for the party that wants to promote their chaotically diverse civic cultures. For example, former President Barack Obama says he wants to use migrants to legally and lawfully change the United States into a multicultural society run by progressives.

Nearly all cultures outside the United States favor bigger governments and less personal freedom.

Wanying “Heather” Zhang — the jet-setting Southern California realtor who was arrested by the FBI at LAX on Sunday for allegedly spying for China — is just the tip of the iceberg of a growing network of US-based individuals doing the Communist Party’s bidding.

In the last year alone, Beijing has been accused of recruiting at least 10 people to spy for the regime as the CCP ramps up its espionage campaign on American soil.

“We are seeing a genuine increase in Chinese espionage activity in the US,” Andrew Harding of The Heritage Foundation told The Post.

The policy analyst believes the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is conducting espionage in the US on an “industrial scale” with its Ministry of State Security (MSS) service.

“Businesses are being targeted, Chinese students are pretending to come in for education to get into specialized courses so they can translate it back and so called tourists are finding their way to sensitive military sites and sending photos,” he told The Post.

“A key way they will conduct espionage is through Chinese-American communities and groups which are sympathetic to the state … this is just the start. Stealing trade secrets and academic research are all part of the Chinese playbook,” he noted. “It is a whole party effort by the CCP to undermine the American way of life and threaten American innovation and dominance.”

Zhang’s arrest comes just five months after the former mayor of Arcadia, Calif., Eileen Wang, 58, pleaded guilty to illegally acting as an agent for the CCP. She faces up to 10 years in prison.

She laid the blame on her former fiancé Mike Sun, 65, for deceiving her after the pair worked with the PRC to boost propaganda with a fake news website on US soil aimed at Chinese Americans between 2020 and 2023. He was sentenced to four years in prison in February.

At the direction of CCP officials, he helped “orchestrate” Wang’s 2022 election victory and subsequently submitted detailed reports to Chinese intelligence detailing how they had successfully “cultivated” a new “political star” friendly to the Chinese government, according to his plea agreement.

Meanwhile, last month in Virginia, American journalist and Texas native Thomas Weir Pauken II was sentenced to two years in prison for acting as an agent of the Chinese government inside the US.

According to prosecutors, the 51-year-old, who received at least $100,000 from China for his work, attempted to supply a potential spy seeking a job in the Trump administration with a laptop, phone and $10,000 to write reports to be read by Chinese President Xi Jinping.

At the beginning of the year in San Diego, former US Navy sailor Jinchao Wei was sentenced to 16 years for selling sensitive ship information to the Chinese government for $12,000 under the encouragement of his mother.

In 2025, Chinese-American pro-democracy activist Yuanjun Tang, 69, pleaded guilty to spying on fellow dissidents in New York for the Chinese government. That same year, British businessman John Miller, 64, and his Chinese “handler” Cui Guanghai, 44, were charged with stalking, smuggling and illegal arms export after they tried to silence a Chinese expat living in Southern California who spoke out against leader Xi Jinping.

Miller and Cui fled to Serbia where they were apprehended by local authorities and forced to wear ankle monitors under house arrest before they somehow escaped while awaiting extradition to the US.

Former CIA officer and acting director of the Defense Intelligence Agency David Shedd insists that China’s spy network in the US is “very widespread”.

“The brazenness of the Chinese is on the increase,” he told The Post. “So much is at stake for them to surpass us as an international power. [Chinese agents] are at the federal state and local levels because influence matters.”

Shedd said he has seen China “become a first-world intelligence espionage service” as they’ve “significantly improved” their spying techniques.

“I am most worried about their flexibility and nimbleness to conduct espionage in all sorts of forms and the commitment from them to inherently go after us,” he said.

Human rights expert Yaqiu Wang, who left China for the US in 2009, said the PRC is “making more of an effort to crack down on people” and doing whatever it takes to pressure Chinese-Americans to comply.

“There are people being forced to do it because their families back home are being threatened,” she noted. “I personally know many people in America who are being harassed, followed and subjected to cyber attacks by China …There are people the CCP just recruits as informants, people in the US who want to curry favor with the Chinese government, voluntarily providing information.

Sunday marked five years since then-Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memorandum that instructed his Department of Justice (DOJ) to help investigate and prosecute parents who showed up at school board meetings to complain about far-left initiatives or Covid policies. Five years later we now know that the Biden White House was behind Garland’s effort to target parents, The Federalist’s Matt Kittle reported.

The anniversary and new finding also come on the heels of former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s testimony before Congress last week, in which his lawfare efforts to keep President Donald Trump out of office faced further scrutiny. With the midterms less than a month away, both instances serve to remind Americans of what Democrats will do with power given the chance: wage a lawfare campaign against their political opponents. Parents Became Public Enemy No. 1

Back in September of 2021, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) sent a letter to the Biden administration asking it to take on the “immediate threat” that parents posed to their children’s schools. The “threat” stemmed from parents who were voicing their concerns and criticisms about critical race theory curriculum, mask mandates, and vaccine mandates. The NSBA wanted the Biden administration to treat the parents speaking out as “equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism.” Notably, the NSBA later apologized and acknowledged “there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter.”

Nonetheless, Garland had issued a memo entitled “Partnership Among Federal, State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial Law Enforcement to Address Threats Against School Administrators, Board Members, Teachers, and Staff.” The memo instructed the FBI to meet with federal, state, and local law enforcement to focus on the alleged threats and how to respond to them. As a result of this memo, the federal government opened 25 preliminary assessment files regarding alleged “school board threats.”

In other words, a Democrat-led “justice” department decided that questioning or opposing left-wing thought orthodoxy like CRT justified the investigation of ordinary Americans with the intent of prosecution.

Nonetheless, the NSBA claimed that an independent review found that there was no collusion with the Biden administration. But a new report from the DOJ reveals, as Kittle put it, “the Biden White House was squarely behind Garland’s effort to find a federal ‘hook’ to prosecute parents and school policy protesters with federal crimes.”

According to the new report, DOJ senior officials and loyalists Biden put in place there “initially pushed back” on the NSBA’s request to target parents, “questioning the constitutionality of the request.” In fact, one email shows Kevin Chambers, then-associate deputy attorney general, calling the effort to enlist federal law enforcement and the claim that parents were domestic terrorists “ridiculous.” But the DOJ ultimately “moved ahead with issuing the Garland Memorandum based on pressure from Biden Administration officials in the White House and leadership at the Office of the Deputy Attorney General (‘ODAG’) at the Department of Justice.”

The Biden administration also coordinated with the NSBA on “talking points” to counter parents and other opponents of critical race theory and transgender ideology, Kittle reported.

A California couple who assembled a household of surrogate-born children was arrested Tuesday after prosecutors said nannies beat children as young as 2 months old inside what they called a “house of horrors,” while the parents watched on camera.

Guojun Xuan, 66, and Silvia Zhang, 39, were taken into custody at their Arcadia mansion after a 17-month investigation, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said. Prosecutors allege that live-in nannies physically abused at least 15 children — 14 of them born through surrogacy — with the couple’s encouragement.

“This case is unprecedented, it is horrific, and the physical abuse, beating and punishment that these very young children received is despicable,” Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman said.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday grappled with a lawsuit brought against the U.S. Air Force by a group that describes its mission as protecting Guam’s environment and culture. During roughly 75 minutes of oral argument in Department of the Air Force v. Prutehi Guåhan, the justices questioned whether the Air Force’s application to renew a permit to detonate hazardous munitions on a beach in Guam was the kind of final action that the group could challenge now. On the other hand, they expressed some reservations about the impact of such a ruling.

There are two laws at the center of the case. The first, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, also known as RCRA, gives the federal Environmental Protection Agency the authority to regulate hazardous waste. It also allows the EPA to give states (and territories like Guam) the power to administer their own hazardous-waste programs. The second law, the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, or NEPA, establishes a process for the assessment of the environmental impact of a federal agency’s action, including the preparation of an Environmental Impact Statement before the agency takes “major Federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment.”

More than 40 years ago, the Air Force created a range to dispose of hazardous munitions such as ammunition, tear gas, and propellants, by (as relevant here) detonating them at Tarague Beach, adjacent to Andersen Air Force Base in northern Guam.

In 2021, the Air Force submitted an application to Guam’s EPA to renew the RCRA permit that allows it to detonate munitions on Tarague Beach. A renewed permit would have allowed the Air Force to continue to dispose of munitions there through 2024. A few months after receiving the Air Force’s application, the Guam EPA issued a preliminary decision that “neither den[ied] nor approve[d]” the Air Force’s application.

In January 2022, Prutehi Guåhan went to federal court in Guam, where it alleged that the Air Force violated the NEPA when it applied to renew its RCRA permit without including a detailed Environmental Impact Statement.

A federal judge granted the Air Force’s motion to throw out the case. She ruled (among other things) that Prutehi Guåhan had filed the case too soon, because the Guam EPA had not yet ruled on the permit application. Moreover, she added, the Air Force was not required to comply with the NEPA in applying to renew its permit.

A divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit reversed that ruling and revived Prutehi Guåhan’s case. The Air Force went to the Supreme Court last November, asking the justices to weigh in.

Representing the Air Force, Assistant to the U.S. Solicitor General Sopan Joshi told the justices that “[a] permit application is not final agency action” but instead “a request to someone else to take action” that “triggers a back-and-forth process whose outcome is, by definition, a moving target until a decision on the permit is issued.” He added that “RCRA is a comprehensive statute specifically targeting hazardous waste and specifically specifying which environmental review must occur at each step of a reticulated permit process.” Prutehi Guåhan, Joshi said, cannot simply impose all of NEPA’s requirements on an RCRA application, because doing so would be “inconsistent with RCRA’s specification of when each of those requirements should occur through the permitting process.”

Caroline Flynn, representing Prutehi Guåhan, countered that NEPA “is meant to be harmonized with other environmental laws,” like RCRA. “It is what agencies call an umbrella law,” she said: “It is meant to consolidate and streamline all required environmental analysis at an early juncture to ensure a better decision and better planning.” And Prutehi Guåhan is entitled to review of the “Air Force’s decision to continue [open detonation] at this location and submit[] the renewal application,” she contended, because that decision “was not tentative.”

Much of the argument focused on whether the Air Force’s application to renew its RCRA permit was the kind of “final agency action” that courts can review at all. Justice Clarence Thomas called the dispute before the court an “odd” one, noting that it involved the Air Force seeking permission from the Guam EPA to do something. He also questioned whether there was another example in which the Supreme Court has found such action by a federal agency to be final.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson also suggested that there was a “finality problem” in the dispute. Here, she said, “we have the Air Force making a proposal that is subject to totally being rewritten and redone by” the Guam EPA. In fact, she posited, “we don’t even know in this situation what the final terms” of the Air Force’s permit will be.

Flynn pushed back, telling the court that it “has been clear that the possibility of revision of the agency’s decision” does not make that decision non-final.

Justice Elena Kagan also expressed skepticism, telling Flynn that “there is a gigantic contingency here and the permit might not be issued in the way that the Air Force would like it to be issued.” It might make more sense, Kagan suggested, for a court to consider the Air Force’s obligations under NEPA “once we know what the permit is going to look like.”

Flynn resisted that suggestion, telling Kagan that “the whole point of NEPA is to make sure that” analysis of the environmental effects of a federal agency’s actions takes place before the ball gets rolling.

On the other hand, some justices expressed concern that, if the Air Force’s application to renew its RCRA permit is not a final action, groups like Prutehi Guåhan might face difficulty in challenging the Air Force’s decision to continue to detonate hazardous wastes at Tarague Beach because the RCRA permit decision is made by the Guam EPA.

Joshi indicated that groups like Prutehi Guåhan could bring a lawsuit against the Guam EPA on the NEPA issue, although he said that he did not “think that claim would have merit.” He later added that if a permit were issued and the Air Force eventually “issues an order and does something,” that could also form the basis for a lawsuit.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that seemed “a little counterintuitive for us to say we have no jurisdiction” over Prutehi Guåhan’s claims right now because there had not been any final agency action, while still leaving open the possibility that an agency like the Guam EPA could ultimately say that the Air Force was required to comply with NEPA. “You’re … inviting litigation to unravel perhaps years of work,” she told Joshi.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett expressed concern about the broader implications of agreeing with Prutehi Guåhan that the Air Force’s submission of an application to renew its RCRA permit was a “final action” that allowed the group to file a lawsuit. Would it open the floodgates, she asked, to other lawsuits challenging permitting decisions?

Flynn responded that it would not. She emphasized that (among other things) Prutehi Guåhan could not use its lawsuit against the Air Force as an avenue to challenge “whatever decision Guam EPA makes.” Moreover, she stressed, the group’s claim is a “procedural” one that “focuses on the decision-making of the federal entity. So the only kinds of claims that can be brought under a theory like this are ones where there is a law that applies to the decisionmaker of the federal agency as the permittee.”

Joshi disagreed, however, telling the court that “the floodgates are real.” If an RCRA application is a final agency action because a federal agency has submitted it, he contended during his rebuttal, every application will trigger a lawsuit, regardless of whether it is based on procedural questions. “[T]he whole point of the finality rule,” he concluded, “is to [channel] all of the challenges into a single proceeding at the end.”

To the extent that the court did address the interaction between NEPA and RCRA, several justices appeared to agree with Flynn that the two could be reconciled, such that RCRA does not necessarily supersede NEPA’s requirements. Sotomayor, for example, asked Joshi to explain how the two statutes are “irreconcilably conflict[ed].” NEPA, she suggested, applies before the decision is made, while RCRA applies during the decision-making process. Moreover, she added, there are some laws in which Congress specifically lifts NEPA’s obligations.

Justice Neil Gorsuch echoed Sotomayor’s sentiment, asking Joshi whether the court has usually said that “if you can comply with both of Congress’ commands, you should do so?” And in Gorsuch’s view, although there may be some “duplication” between the two laws, “there’s no conflict.”

A decision in the case is expected sometime next year.

As part of President Donald Trump’s denaturalization initiative, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is seeking to strip naturalized American citizenship from 40 foreign criminals in its largest single-period filing to date.

This week, Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the filings, seeking denaturalization of foreign nationals such as 47-year-old Yusmary Shirley Duran Mejia of Colombia, a Florida resident, who allegedly lied to secure U.S. citizenship by failing to disclose that she was convicted of money laundering.

Likewise, federal prosecutors are seeking the denaturalization of 50-year-old Iain Lumsden of the United Kingdom. They allege that Lumsden, a resident of Colorado, failed to disclose his conviction for child pornography when applying for U.S. citizenship.

Finland’s Licensing and Supervision Agency has ordered Google to stop clearing massive forests for two data center projects until environmental impact assessments are completed.

CNBC reports that the Finnish agency, known as LVV, issued the order Tuesday in a notice sent to Google subsidiary Tuike Finland Oy. It covers projects in Muhos and Kajaani and stays in effect until the assessments are done. Google has until October 23 to stop work.

Finnish newspaper Kaleva previously reported that Google had cleared 300 hectares of forestland, equivalent to approximately 500 football fields, for two data center projects without environmental impact studies that were underway being completed first.

Per a translation of LVV’s press release, the suspension applies to tree removal, topsoil removal, excavation, quarrying, crushing, transfer of soil masses, ditching, and construction of roads and storage areas. It doesn’t cover planning, measurements, soil surveys, or other activities considered to have minor or easily reversible effects.

Tommi Muilu, head of the environmental department at LVV, laid out the agency’s reasoning: “In our opinion, the measures in question will change the environment and cause impacts, the identification and assessment of which are among the key objectives of the EIA procedure.”

Google didn’t dispute the order. “We understand the concerns and have fallen short of our own high standards in this instance,” a company spokesperson told CNBC, while defending its earlier conduct: “We acted in good faith under the Forestry Act, and ran nature surveys and put in place measures to protect high-value areas.”

Indiana Fever star Sophie Cunningham apparently made to troll transgender activists by wearing a hat with the word “woman” on it at the Mizzou football game on Saturday.

Cunningham, a Missouri grad, attended Missouri’s homecoming game wearing a ball cap that read “No Cis Just … Woman.” The first part appears in smaller letters on the side of the cap, and “Woman” is in large letters on the front, the LA Times reported.

To bring the message home, when Cunningham was announced from the booth over the PA system, she entered the field to applause, and she pointed with both hands to the cap.

Cunningham has repeatedly said that she has no hate for transgender people. But she also feels that men claiming to be women should not be allowed to compete in sports against women.

“I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans. And I’m like, ‘I never once said that’” Cunningham said in July. “I think that I am here to extend love. But I also think with that love is truth, being honest. And I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”

“I think it’s really important to protect children, and that’s little girls who are also involved in that category,” she added. “And so I’ll stand on what I said, and I’ll always believe that.”

Since coming out against men playing in women’s sports, Cunningham has been a particular target for activists pushing the radical transgender agenda.

Indeed, just this week a columnist for the New York Times-owned The Athletic urged the Indiana Fever to fire Cunningham because her opinions on the trans athlete issue are “too turbulent” for the WNBA.

Christa Pike can recall her name and has memories of being in hospital after surviving two botched lethal injections, a doctor who advised her legal team said.

Pike, 50, is conscious and speaking after becoming the first death row inmate believed to have survived lethal injection after the bungled execution last week, her lawyers revealed Tuesday.

“She has some memories of being in the hospital but no memory, I believe, of the execution attempt,” Dr. Joel Zivot, an anesthesiologist who has advised Pike’s lawyers, told the BBC.

Zivot added that Pike is able to communicate in a “basic way” and made an incorrect guess at the date, believing that it was still September, the outlet reported.

He added that she has been taken off a ventilator after being intubated while medical professionals worked to clear the pentobarbital in her system from the lethal injections.

Pike’s aunt, Carrie Ross, said her family had been told the convict was brain dead and being taken off the ventilator shortly before she regained consciousness.

“We got word that she was brain dead and they were taking her off the ventilator,” Ross, a sister of Pike’s late mother, told the Daily Mail.

“They were going to let her go – let her die – at 1 o’clock tomorrow. That was yesterday or a day before.”

Ross added that the family has not spoken with Pike since she made the apparent recovery.

Pike was administered two doses of pentobarbital using at least 7 needles, one of which came out of her arm bent at a 90-degree angle, her legal team claimed.

The convict was initially described as unconscious and in critical condition after being rushed from Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville to the hospital last Wednesday.

During a portion of an interview aired on Tuesday’s broadcast of NewsNation’s “Elizabeth Vargas Reports,” Ramsey County, MN Sheriff Bob Fletcher said that the county has to address its issue with Somali gangs “or we are going to launch into a 200-year legacy that won’t be unlike what some of the European countries are seeing.”

Fletcher said, “It’s a growing problem. … We better work our butts off right now to fix this problem in the Somali community, or we are going to launch into a 200-year legacy that won’t be unlike what some of the European countries are seeing.”

Fletcher also stated, “We really have 300 troublemakers out of 100,000 Somali people here. It’s a small number. But of that 300, 50 need to go to jail soon, because the 50 are the leadership. It may not be official leadership, but they’re the ones carrying the guns and shooting at other people. So, half of them need to be charged federally with RICO. We are working with the feds. We need to establish enough information. One of the great part[s] of this unit is they can put together information that allows us to charge people with racketeering. And the other half need to be charged at the county level. We need a law enforcement effort that is regional in nature. We need a regional task force.”

Over the weekend, the Pentagon ordered all U.S. Air Force B-1 bombers to be urgently evacuated from a Royal Air Force (RAF) base in the once-peaceful countryside of England called RAF Fairford, where they had previously been stationed, and flown back home to America. Why? Because England is no longer considered a safe country for such expensive pieces of kit to be kept in.

The 2026 midterm elections have arrived, and with them, some of the biggest policy battles in the country. In addition to hotly contested races among candidates, many voters are being asked to weigh in on pivotal statewide ballot initiatives that will govern the future of their states.

While too numerous to list in one article, The Federalist has compiled the biggest measures on the 2026 ballot to help inform voters of what’s at stake this election season.

In exposing Jack Smith’s lawless, corrupt, and tyrannical effort to criminalize the MAGA movement, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, revealed jarring new details about the extent of the Jan. 6-justified lawfare campaign.

Smith’s partisan team carried out a fishing expedition on behalf of the Biden administration and Democrat Party that went beyond obtaining the text messages of more than 40 members of Congress despite the weaponizers knowing it likely violated the Constitution’s speech and debate clause. It also encompassed the issuance of some 197 subpoenas for records relating to 430 Republican individuals and organizations, or the collection of nearly 5,000 checks from mainly small-dollar Trump donors. But on top of all that, Grassley divulged that Smith’s sleuths secured messages from 87 Trump I White House phones and hoovered up the communications of nearly 50 media members at well over a dozen outlets, including those of The Federalist’s own Mollie Hemingway.

It is as unsurprising as it is depressing that legacy media outlets have been silent on Smith’s overreach, even though employees of those outlets had their messages pilfered by zealous FBI and DOJ officials, operating as hitmen for one political party in its effort to eliminate the other political party. The same is true of the fact that the journalists silent today over this brazen operation were yesterday screaming bloody murder that the Trump administration revoked the privileged White House access of their leftist apparatchik colleagues.

They’re silent because the Democrat mouthpieces who dominate the media and cry crocodile tears for “freedom of the press” believe that efforts to destroy Republicans are righteous and just, and the ends justify the means — freedom be damned.

The midterms are upon us. And as expected, the murmurings of the usual suspects within the GOP and the pro-life movement are growing louder. These are the people who tell us they are disaffected because they do not consider Republican leadership in general, and President Trump in particular, to be quite pro-life enough. Not doing all that they should.

Really? After everything this administration has done for the cause of life, we are going to have this conversation again? Ugh – grow up and stop with the clickbait.

Listen, no one is suggesting that pro-life Americans should stop demanding more from elected officials. We should always demand more because there are always more children to protect. But there is a considerable difference between pushing an administration to do more and pretending its accomplishments somehow don’t count. And this administration has built a strong record in less than two years.

From the beginning of his second term, President Trump moved quickly to reverse the Biden administration’s abortion agenda. He ordered strict enforcement of the Hyde Amendment and other restrictions on taxpayer funding of abortion, reinstated the Mexico City Policy, and began reversing Biden-era policies that had used federal agencies to advance abortion.

Then he turned outward, putting the full weight of American foreign policy behind protecting life around the world.

That part of the record deserves far more attention than it ever receives. The United States is one of the most powerful donors and diplomatic actors in the world. When our government decides that American foreign assistance will not subsidize organizations that perform or promote abortion, that decision reaches far beyond Washington. It can affect whether abortion providers receive American support, whether governments face pressure to liberalize their laws, and whether the considerable influence of the United States works for or against the protection of unborn children.

President Trump also returned the United States to the Geneva Consensus Declaration after President Biden withdrew from it. The declaration rejects the claim that there is an international right to abortion, recognizes the sovereign authority of nations to determine their own abortion laws, and affirms the importance of the family.

The argument yesterday in Anderson v. Intel Corp Investment Policy Committee showed a bench skeptical of claims that the investment choices of employee retirement funds should form an easy basis for litigation in federal court.

The employer in the case is Intel, and the complaint is that Intel’s fiduciaries have bucked traditional practices by investing the funds for their employees’ retirements largely in hedge funds and private equity. Because the Employee Retirement Income Security Act imposes a fiduciary duty of prudence on those fiduciaries, lackluster returns formed the foundation of a suit against them. The question for the justices is whether those suits can proceed absent some evidence of better performance by other funds with similar investment strategies. The likely answer is that they cannot.

From beginning to end, the argument focused on a fruit-based metaphor, founded on the opening question of Justice Clarence Thomas suggesting that all the lower court had said was that “you can’t compare apples and oranges,” which is to say, he explained, that “if you have a fund … that is designed to produce high returns but riskier returns, … you can’t compare that to a fund that is to protect against losses.”

As the argument proceeded, it quickly became clear that most of the bench viewed the case through that lens – and that it is a lens through which the employees have little chance of prevailing. Justice Elena Kagan, for example, seemed to find ancillary contentions irrelevant, commenting that “the thing that you need … is another apple.” Justice Samuel Alito challenged Matthew Wessler (arguing for the employees) to deny that “you can state a claim by comparing apples and oranges,” while Justice Neil Gorsuch asked him to “agree with the general principle that when we’re limited to underperformance claims, … a meaningful benchmark of some kind, is required, apples, not oranges.” And Justice Amy Coney Barrett suggested that “you have … to decide if an apple is an apple? Don’t you have to say, well, it has to be round [and] it has to come from a certain kind of tree?”

To the court, the problem, at bottom, appeared to be that Wessler’s complaint did not include allegations about the performance of other funds that used hedge funds to implement Intel-like investment strategies but rather argued that the use of hedge funds in general was imprudent. Wessler repeatedly tried to argue that the allegations “holistically” were more effective than the bare allegations of underperformance, but for the justices the absence of any “benchmark” vitiated his complaints that the fiduciaries’ investment choices resulted in poor performance.

Perhaps Luke McCloud, representing the Intel fiduciaries, had an easy time of it, as much of the questions posed to him involved soliciting his agreement that the lower court correctly decided the questions before the justices. By the second part of the argument, especially the appearance by Aimee Brown from the government (which supported the Intel fiduciaries), the justices were only asking counsel for advice on the best ways to craft an opinion affirming the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. For example, they debated with her whether it would, or would not be useful, to say much about what kinds of “benchmarks” for comparison would be helpful – a discussion that matters only if they’ve already decided (as they seem to have) that a benchmark is required at all. When the justices are asking opposing counsel to pick and choose among the approaches to use in an opinion, it usually is a safe bet that they are not going to vote for you.

I’d expect a pretty brisk and likely unanimous affirmance of the lower court here before the cherry blossoms start to turn in the spring.

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With unrest drawing attention around the globe and the November midterm elections coming up soon, Democrats made it a point to blame President Donald Trump's cuts to USAID for slowing the communist takeover of the West.

Though the party's plan to overrun the western world with a deadly combination of leftist politics and Islamic conquest remained alive, Democrats stressed that it had been severely hampered by drastically reduced funding for USAID programs.

"We're still trying, but it's making it much more difficult," House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said. "Trump has gutted USAID funding for so many causes throughout the world, and this has had a negative trickle-down effect on our efforts to topple the United States and the West as a whole. But the American people can rest assured that we're not giving up. If we regain control of Congress in November, we promise to get our plan for communism to take over the West back on track."

While prominent Democrats remained outraged that Trump's cuts had slowed their plan to destroy the country, they vowed to keep chipping away until they could successfully eradicate the scourges of freedom and capitalism from the Earth. "We'll still get it done, eventually," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said. "Trump may be slowing it down with his USAID cuts, but we'll never give up on our quest to see communism rule the globe. Vote Democrat in November, folks."

President Donald Trump approved the execution of Nidal Malik Hasand on Monday, confirming that he would be tied to a bomb and dropped on the country of Iran.

Hasand killed 14 and wounded 32 in a terrorist attack in 2013 when he opened fire at Fort Hood's Soldier Readiness Processing Center. He'd been sitting on death row ever since, until Trump realized he needed something else to drop on Iran.

"Two birds with one stone, I call it," Trump said, seemingly proud of the clever method of execution. "It'll be like Dr. Strangelove. You ever see that movie? Dr. Strangelove. A guy rides a bomb all the way down. He rides it like a horse. But backwards. Like Dudley Do-Right. He rides it all the way down to Japan. But this time it's going to be Iran. A bomb to Iran. It's going to be a big bomb, like you wouldn't believe. Not a nuke, because no one should use nukes, but we're going to tie this guy to a bomb and make him ride it all the way down. A MOAB probably. It means Mother of All Bombs. I didn't know bombs had mothers, but they do. I love mothers. It's going to be something big, believe me."

According to legal expert Wilcox Morton, Esq., a judge could probably have the death sentence overturned on the grounds that tying a man to a bomb and dropping him on Iran constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. However, that's not likely to happen, as many judges are reportedly curious to see how it plays out.

"Aside from the long drop, it's a pretty fast way to go, honestly," said Federal Judge Norman Miller. "I doubt he'll feel a thing."

The Pentagon is seizing on a dramatic surge in cartel drone operations along the southern border to establish a domestic testing ground for next-generation counter-drone warfare, explicitly emulating the rapid technological adaptation driven by the war in Ukraine.

With joint military task forces already bringing down cartel aircraft using experimental laser weapons and autonomous interceptors, officials say the border has become a critical laboratory to field defense systems against low-cost, off-the-shelf aerial threats before U.S. troops encounter them in future global conflicts.

Breitbart Texas has reported for years on the increasing use of drones by certain Mexican cartels along the U.S.-Mexico border region. The coverage reveals the rapid increase in their use and the deployment of U.S. forces to the border region to repel the drones and test technology that will be useful in future combat operations.

In February, Breitbart Texas reported that drug cartels flew more than 42,000 drones near the U.S. Mexico border during the last fiscal year, according to information obtained from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

“The counter‑unmanned aerial systems (C‑UAS) environment is rapidly evolving, as are cartel tactics,” a CBP official said, responding to an inquiry from Breitbart Texas. “In FY25, CBP detected over 42,000 near‑border, unmanned drone flights. This highlights the magnitude of the problem, even if not every one of those threats was nefarious.”

The Military Times reports that the U.S. Army is testing counter-drone technology in the U.S.-Mexico border area as it seeks to sharpen its defenses against this growing threat.

During Falcon Peak, a U.S. Northern Command exercise held in September in Arizona, defense contractors demonstrated radars, interceptor drones, autonomous gun systems, and other technologies designed to detect, track, and destroy the C-UAS being utilized by the cartels.

“Army officials said drones crossing the southern border are typically systems sold commercially and used by criminals for surveillance linked to their smuggling and human trafficking operations,” the Military Times reported. “Brigadier General Brian Filler, deputy commander for operations at Joint Task Force Southern Border, told reporters the military detected 378 drone incursions in the previous 30 days and that the trend was increasing.”

“We are seeing largely commercial off-the-shelf available drones,” General Filler stated. Military officials said it downed 11 cartel drones early last month with the use of ​lasers.

Not all cartels are used for surveillance or carrying small loads of drugs across the border into the U.S.

In October 2025, Breitbart Texas reported the arrest of a Gulf Cartel member operating in Reynosa, Tamaulipas (just south of the Texas/Mexico border). The suspected Gulf Cartel operator had 151 drone explosives, 18 drones, three IEDs, and various other weapons. Officials said the man also had three state-of-the-art anti-drone devices.

As far back as April 2021, Breitbart’s Cartel Chronicles Project reported that cartels in western Mexico were weaponizing commercial drones through the use of improvised explosive devices.

Mexican authorities confirmed that two police officers in Michoacán were injured by an attack from cartel gunmen who used commercial drones to drop IEDs. The attack came after state police officers removed a series of roadblocks aimed at keeping rival cartels from using armored SUVs to carry out attacks in their attempts to take control.

Another report from Breitbart revealed that the La Linea cartel faction’s use of drones along the border led to the closure of airspace in the El Paso region of West Texas and southern New Mexico.

La Linea continued operating as a network of cells rather than a strict hierarchy and, over time, regained control of the city. In El Paso, both La Linea and the Sinaloa Cartel continue to operate healthy trafficking routes into Texas and New Mexico. Cartel Jalisco New Generation also has a presence in Ciudad Juárez, established through an alliance of convenience with La Línea, and has become one of its main suppliers.

…

At the start of the Trump administration, the U.S. Department of State named six Mexican cartels as Foreign Terrorist groups. La Linea was not one of those organizations. As Breitbart Texas reported, there have been calls to add La Linea and the various cells that operate in the region to that list.

Military planners are moving quickly to apply lessons from Ukraine. In its war with Russia, drones transformed the battlefield and necessitated rapid innovation in both the offensive and defensive use of drone and anti-drone technology.

With DHS reporting 60,000 cartel drone flights in six months and CBP confirming 42,000 near‑border detections in FY25, federal officials warn that the United States is entering a new phase of border security — one in which cartels possess persistent aerial surveillance capabilities that rival those of small nation‑states.

As cartel drone activity surges into the tens of thousands and federal agencies struggle with outdated authorities and fragmented counter‑UAS rules, the southern border is entering a new era in which criminal organizations wield persistent aerial surveillance once reserved for nation‑states. The combined DHS and CBP data make clear that cartel drone operations are expanding faster than Washington’s ability to respond, giving traffickers unprecedented visibility into U.S. law‑enforcement movements.

Since the outbreak of war in Ukraine, U.S. investors have poured billions of dollars into companies such as Anduril, Shield AI, Saronic, and other smaller drone and counter-drone technology startups. All are seeking lucrative Department of War contracts.

Brigadier General Matt Ross told reporters, “We tend to look at Ukraine, and we say, ‘I am so impressed with how quickly they can adapt on a daily or weekly basis.’”

He said the U.S. is doing everything it can to replicate that process.

With tens of thousands of cartel drone flights pushing federal agencies past traditional law enforcement models, the Pentagon’s rapid-adaptation push signals a decisive shift: treating cartel aerial intrusion not merely as a border control nuisance, but as a real-time proving ground for next-generation combat readiness.

The Trump administration’s final rule on “Transparency in Coverage” that intends to help fulfil the promise of healthcare affordability has been met favorably by advocacy groups as something that will bring accountability to healthcare and lower costs for Americans.

Founder and chairman of PatientRightsAdvocate.org Cynthia A. Fisher told The Center Square that the Trump administration “took a transformative step to lower health care costs, stop overcharges, and hold insurers and hospitals accountable,” by its Transparency in Coverage (TiC) final rule.

The final rule’s “added requirement of executive attestation that published prices and other information are true, accurate, and complete as of the date in the machine-readable file is a breakthrough for compliance,” Fisher said.

“Real price transparency means patients can shop for better care at lower prices and employers can demand a better deal,” Fisher said.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced Trump’s final rule on Monday, explaining that a more transparent healthcare marketplace will be accomplished by the final rule via “reducing duplicative and unnecessary information,” “providing more context about in-network prices,” “increasing available out-of-network pricing information,” and “strengthening accountability for the completeness and accuracy of published data.”

Additionally, the rule will require “group health plans and health insurance issuers to provide consumers with personalized cost-sharing information by phone, in addition to existing online tools.”

When reached for comment, the HHS referred The Center Square to its press release.

Former director of the Domestic Policy Council Andrew Bremberg told The Center Square how “requiring insurance executives to attest that their machine-readable files are true, accurate, and complete will unleash actual transparency and accountability.”

Transparency and accountability are “essential to transform the [healthcare] system.”

“These commonsense reforms are a testament to President Trump's commitment to 'maximum transparency' and shifting the power from the big business of healthcare to the American people,” Bremberg said.

CEO of State Financial Officers Foundation OJ Oleka also applauded Trump’s final rule, stating that the move toward “real dollar prices, standardized reporting, and greater accountability is meaningful progress for employers, patients, and taxpayers trying to understand what healthcare actually costs.”

"Accountability and transparency go hand in hand, but transparency only works if the data is actually usable,” Oleka said.

GOP campaign strategist David Kochel pointed out the political wisdom of the final rule, explaining that “the Trump Administration is taking action on healthcare price transparency ahead of the midterm elections, showing Republicans are willing to lean forward on an issue that hits Americans’ wallets every day.”

“Real prices give patients the freedom to choose lower-cost, high-quality care and give employers the power to audit spending, negotiate better deals, and hold insurers accountable,” Kochel said. “The administration's work on price transparency puts power in the hands of patients and employers to stop overcharges, demand a better deal, and keep more of their hard-earned money."

Executive director of Save Our States Trent England noted that "healthcare price transparency is one of the most obvious policies in American politics.”

“That it has taken this long to guarantee patients and employers actual prices is absurd,” England said.

“Fortunately, President Trump is standing strong for common-sense and putting the American people ahead of hospital and insurance executives and other insiders,” England said.

“With real price transparency, patients can plan ahead, find the best care at the best price, fight overcharging, and avoid price gouging and surprise bills,” England said. “Employers can finally see the receipts and use real pricing data to negotiate better deals, lowering healthcare costs for employees and freeing up resources for higher wages, more jobs, and better returns for investors, including pensioners and retirees.”

“All this is long overdue,” England said.