Democratic lawmakers demand Louisiana sheriff resign after 10 inmates escape jail
Two Democratic lawmakers in Louisiana called on Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson to resign following the escape of 10 jail inmates.
Louisiana House Rep. Aimee Adatto Freeman, who represents a portion of New Orleans, called for Hutson to resign on Monday. In a Facebook post, Freeman said the escape of 10 inmates represents an "alarming failure of leadership." Law enforcement officials have arrested five escapees after they broke out of the Orleans Justice Center on Friday
"Susan Hutson's most fundamental responsibility is to keep inmates in custody – and she failed. Rather than take accountability, she's pointed fingers elsewhere," Freeman said. "She's also blamed a lack of funding, despite her office holding $14 million in reserve. Furthermore, I've been working this legislative session to secure state funding for the Sheriff's Office for domestic violence programs. If she needed additional resources to ensure security, she could have simply asked."
"I would have fought for it. Blaming funding is a deflection – not an excuse," she added. "Leadership matters, and right now, the people of New Orleans deserve better. Sheriff Hutson should resign."
New Booking Photos Released Of Recaptured Louisiana Inmates As Manhunt Continues
State Rep. Jason Hughes, who represents a portion of New Orleans, also called for Hutson to resign, according to the Louisiana Radio Network.
Read On The Fox News App
"How 10 people can escape a jail is perplexing to me. But at the end of the day, this is a public safety issue, and it boils down to leadership," Hughes said.
Hutson took "full accountability" for the jailbreak in a statement given to the New Orleans City Council on Tuesday.
"It is deeply troubling to me as your sheriff, and I know it is equally troubling to you and the public that we are sworn to protect. As your sheriff, I take full accountability for this failure, and it is my responsibility to make sure it is addressed with urgency and transparency," she told the council. "Since the moment this breach was discovered, we have been clear. Our community deserves answers, and more importantly, it deserves action."
According to FOX 8, Hutson announced on Tuesday evening that she's "temporarily" suspending her re-election campaign.
Fifth Escaped Inmate From New Orleans Jail Recaptured After Days On The Run
Kendell Myles, Robert Moody, Gary Price, Dkenan Dennis and Corey Boyd have been recaptured by law enforcement, leaving five inmates at large.
Boyd, the most recent inmate to be recaptured, was in jail on charges of second-degree murder, attempted second-degree murder, aggravated battery and threatening a public official.
The following inmates are still at large:
Lenton J. Vanburen Jr., 26, faces charges of illegal carrying of weapons, possession of a firearm or weapon by a felon, obstruction of justice, and introducing contraband in prison.
Jermaine Donald, 42, faces charges of second-degree murder, aggravated battery, possession of a firearm or weapon by a felon, and obstruction of justice.
Antoine Massey, 32, faces charges of domestic abuse involving strangulation, theft of a motor vehicle, and a parole violation.
Derrick Groves, 27, faces three counts of attempted second-degree murder, two counts of second-degree murder, and battery of a correctional facility employee.
Leo O. Tate Sr., 31, faces charges of simple burglary of an inhabited dwelling, possession of a firearm or weapon by a felon, illegal carrying of a weapon, motor vehicle theft, and multiple drug counts.
Fox News' Louis Casiano contributed to this report.Original article source: Democratic lawmakers demand Louisiana sheriff resign after 10 inmates escape jail
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CNN
5 minutes ago
- CNN
Analysis: Trump's top general just undercut his ‘invasion' claims
One of the problems with making a series of brazen and hyperbolic claims is that it can be hard to keep everyone on your team on the same page. And few Trump administration claims have been as brazen as the idea that the Venezuelan government has engineered an invasion of gang members into the United States. This claim forms the basis of the administration's controversial efforts to rapidly deport a bunch of people it claimed were members of the gang Tren de Aragua – without due process. But one of the central figures responsible for warding off such invasions apparently didn't get the memo. At a Senate hearing Wednesday, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman retired Lt. Gen. Dan Caine acknowledged that the United States isn't currently facing such a threat. 'I think at this point in time, I don't see any foreign state-sponsored folks invading,' Caine said in response to Democratic questioning. This might sound like common sense; of course the United States isn't currently under invasion by a foreign government. You'd probably have heard something about that on the news. But the administration has said – repeatedly and in court – that it has been. When Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to rapidly deport migrants without due process, that law required such a foreign 'invasion' or 'predatory incursion' to make his move legal. And Trump said that's what was happening. 'The result is a hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States, and which poses a substantial danger to the United States,' reads the proclamation from Trump. It added that Tren de Aragua's actions came 'both directly and at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.' So the White House said Tren de Aragua was acting in concert with the Maduro regime to invade; Caine now says 'state-sponsored folks' aren't invading. Some flagged Caine's comment as undermining Trump's claims of a foreign 'invasion' in Los Angeles. Trump has regularly applied that word to undocumented migrants. But the inconsistency is arguably more significant when it comes to Trump's claims about the Venezuelan migrants. Perhaps the administration would argue that Trump has halted the invasion and it is no longer happening; Caine was speaking in the present tense. Caine did go on to cite others who might have different views. 'But I'll be mindful of the fact that there has been some border issues throughout time, and defer to DHS who handles the border along the nation's contiguous outline,' he said. But if an invasion had been happening recently, it seems weird not to mention that. And if the invasion is over, that would seem to undercut the need to keep trying to use the Alien Enemies Act. The Department of Homeland Security is certainly not in the camp of no invasion. On Wednesday, DHS posted on Facebook an image with Uncle Sam that reads: 'Report all foreign invaders' with a phone number for ICE. When asked about the image and whether the use of the term 'foreign invaders' had been used previously, DHS pointed CNN to a number of posts from White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller using terms like 'invade' or 'invaders' when referring to undocumented immigrants. Plenty of Trump administration figures have gone to bat for this claim. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said soon after Trump's proclamation that Tren de Aragua gang members 'have been sent here by the hostile Maduro regime in Venezuela.' Then-national security adviser Michael Waltz claimed Maduro was emptying his prisons 'in a proxy manner to influence and attack the United States.' We soon learned that the intelligence community had concluded Venezuela had not directed the gang. But Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood by Trump's claim. 'Yes, that's their assessment,' Rubio said last month about the intelligence community. 'They're wrong.' Trump administration border czar Tom Homan has said the gang was an 'arm of the Maduro regime,' and that Maduro's regime was 'involved with sending thousands of Venezuelans to this country to unsettle it.' The question of Venezuela's purported involvement actually hasn't been dealt with much by the courts. A series of judges have moved to block the administration's Alien Enemies Act gambit, but they've generally ruled that way because of the lack of an 'invasion' or 'predatory incursion' – without delving much into the more complex issue of whether such a thing might somehow have ties to Maduro's government. One of the judges to rule in that fashion was a Trump appointee, US District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. So the intelligence community and a bunch of judges – including a Trump-appointed one – have rebutted the claim the underlies this historic effort to set aside due process. And now, the man Trump installed as his top general seems to have undercut it too.
Yahoo
8 minutes ago
- Yahoo
‘We've lost the culture war on climate'
President Donald Trump's latest climate rollback makes it all but official: The United States is giving up on trying to stop the planet's warming. In some ways, the effort has barely started. More than 15 years after federal regulators officially recognized that greenhouse gas pollution threatens 'current and future generations,' their most ambitious efforts to defuse that threat have been blocked in the courts and by Trump's rule-slicing buzzsaw. Wednesday's action by the Environmental Protection Agency would extend that streak by wiping out a Biden-era regulation on power plants — leaving the nation's second-largest source of climate pollution unshackled until at least the early 2030s. Rules aimed at lessening climate pollution from transportation, the nation's No. 1 source, are also on the Trump hit list. Meanwhile, the GOP megabill lumbering through the Senate would dismember former President Joe Biden's other huge climate initiative, the 2022 law that sought to use hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives to encourage consumers and businesses to switch to carbon-free energy. At the same time, Trump's appointees have spent months shutting down climate programs, firing their workers and gutting research into the problem, while making it harder for states such as California to tackle the issue on their own. The years of whipsawing moves have left Washington with no consistent approach on how — or whether — to confront climate change, even as scientists warn that years are growing short to avoid catastrophic damage to human society. While the Trump-era GOP's hardening opposition to climate action has been a major reason for the lack of consensus, one former Democratic adviser said her own party needs to find a message that resonates with broad swaths of the electorate. 'There's no way around it: The left strategy on climate needs to be rethought,' said Jody Freeman, who served as counselor for energy and climate change in President Barack Obama's White House. 'We've lost the culture war on climate, and we have to figure out a way for it to not be a niche leftist movement." It's a strategy Freeman admitted she was 'struggling' to articulate, but one that included using natural gas as a 'bridge fuel' to more renewable power — an approach Democrats embraced during the Obama administration — finding 'a new approach' for easing permits for energy infrastructure and building broad-based political support. As the Democratic nominee in 2008, Obama expressed the hope that his campaign would be seen as 'the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.' But two years later, the Democrats' cap-and-trade climate bill failed to get through a Senate where they held a supermajority. Obama didn't return to the issue in earnest until his second term, taking actions including the enactment of a sweeping power plant rule that wasn't yet in effect when Trump rescinded it and the Supreme Court declared it dead. Republicans, meanwhile, have moved far from their seemingly moderating stance in 2008, when nominee John McCain offered his own climate proposals and even then-President George W. Bush announced a modest target for slowing carbon pollution by 2025. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin contended Wednesday that the Obama- and Biden-era rules were overbearing and too costly. 'The American public spoke loudly and clearly last November: They wanted to make sure that all agencies were cognizant of their economic concerns,' he said when announcing the rule rollback at agency headquarters. 'At the EPA under President Trump, we have chosen to both protect the environment and grow the economy.' Trump's new strategy of ditching greenhouse gas limits altogether is legally questionable, experts involved in crafting the Obama and Biden power plant rules told POLITICO. But they acknowledged that the Trump administration at the very least will significantly weaken rules on power plants' climate pollution, at a moment when the trends are going in the wrong direction. Gina McCarthy, who led EPA during the Obama administration, said in a statement that Zeldin's rationale is "absolutely illogical and indefensible. It's a purely political play that goes against decades of science and policy review." U.S. greenhouse gas emissions were virtually flat last year, falling just 0.2 percent, after declining 20 percent since 2005, according to the research firm Rhodium Group. That output would need to fall 7.6 percent annually through 2030 to meet the climate goals Biden floated, which were aimed at limiting the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius since the start of the Industrial Revolution. That level is a critical threshold for avoiding the most severe impacts of climate change. Those targets now look out of reach. The World Meteorological Organization last month gave 70 percent odds that the five-year global temperature average through 2029 would register above 1.5 degrees. The Obama-era rule came out during a decade when governments around the world threw their weight behind blunting climate pollution through executive actions. Ricky Revesz, who was Biden's regulatory czar, recalled the 'great excitement' at the White House Blue Room reception just before Obama announced his power plant rule, known as the Clean Power Plan. It seemed a watershed moment. But it didn't last. 'I thought that it was going to be a more linear path forward,' he said. 'That linear path forward has not materialized. And that is disappointing.' Opponents who have long argued that such regulations would wreck the economy while doing little to curb global temperature increases have traveled the same road in reverse. Republican West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey said he felt dread when Obama announced the Clean Power Plan in 2015. Then the state's attorney general, he feared the rule's focus on curbing carbon dioxide from power plants would have a 'catastrophic' impact on West Virginia's coal-reliant economy. 'It was really an audacious and outrageous attempt to regulate the economy when they had no power to do so,' said Morrisey, who led a coalition of states that sued the EPA over Obama's proposal. 'You can't take the actions that they were trying to take without going to the legislature.' Meanwhile, Congress has become harsher terrain for climate action. In May, House Republicans voted to undo the incentives for electric cars and other clean energy technologies in Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, the nation's most significant effort to spur clean energy and curb climate change. That same week, 35 House Democrats and Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) crossed the aisle and voted to kill an EPA waiver that had allowed California to set more stringent tailpipe pollution standards for vehicles to deal with its historically smoggy skies. California was planning to use that waiver to end sales of internal combustion engine vehicles in 2035, a rule 10 other states and the District of Columbia had planned to follow. The Supreme Court has added to the obstacles for climate policy — introducing more existential challenges for efforts to use executive powers to corral greenhouse gas emissions. In its 2022 decision striking down the Obama administration's power plant rule, the court said agencies such as EPA need Congress' explicit approval before enacting regulations that would have a 'major' impact on the economy. (It didn't precisely define what counts as 'major.') In 2024, the court eviscerated a decades-old precedent known as the Chevron doctrine, which had afforded agencies broad leeway in how they interpret vague statutes. Many climate advocates and former Democratic officials contend that all those obstacles are bumps, not barriers, on the tortuous path to reducing greenhouse gases. They say that even the regulatory fits and starts have provided signals to markets and businesses about where federal policy is heading in the long term — prodding the private sector to make investments to green the nation's energy system. One symptom is a sharp decline in U.S. reliance on coal — by far the most climate-polluting power source, and the one that would face the stiffest restrictions in any successful federal regulation to lessen the electricity industry's emissions. Coal supplied 48.5 percent of the nation's power generation in 2007, but that fell to 15 percent in 2024. Last year, solar and wind power combined to overtake coal for the first time. 'Regulation has served the purpose of moving things along faster,' said Janet McCabe, who was deputy EPA administrator under Biden and ran EPA's Office of Air and Radiation during Obama's second term. 'The trajectory is always in the right direction.' Freeman, who is now at Harvard Law School, said federal regulations plus state laws requiring renewable power to comprise portions of the electricity mix helped justify utility investments in clean energy. That, in turn, accelerated price drops for wind and solar power, she said. Clean energy advocates point to those broader market shifts, calling a cleaner power grid inevitable. 'There are people in each of these industries who wouldn't have taken the climate problem seriously and cleaner technology seriously, and invested in it, if it weren't for the pressure of the Clean Air Act and the incentives that more recently had been built into the IRA,' said David Doniger, senior attorney and strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. 'So policy does matter, even when it's not in a straight line and the implementation is inadequate.' But even if those economic trends continue — an open question given the enormous new power demand from data centers — it will not bring the U.S. closer to cuts needed to keep the world from overheating, multiple climate studies have concluded. And the greatest chunk of the emissions decline since 2005 comes from shifting coal to natural gas, another fossil fuel, which fracking made cheap and abundant. Biden's power plant rule, now being shelved by Trump's EPA, would have imposed limits on both coal-burning power plants and future gas-fired ones, requiring them to either capture their greenhouse gases or shut down. Staving off regulations may well keep coal-fired power plants running longer than anticipated to meet forecast demand growth, belching more carbon dioxide into the air. The Trump administration has even sought to temporarily exempt power plants from air pollution rules altogether and is trying to use emergency powers to prevent coal generators from shuttering. Without federal rules that say otherwise, power providers would also be likely to add more natural gas generation to the grid. Failing to curb power plants' pollution, scientists say, means temperatures will continue to rise and bring more of the floods, heat waves, wildfires, supply chain disruptions, food shortages and other shocks that cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars each year in property damage, illness, death and lost productivity. 'I don't think the economics are going to take care of it by any means,' said Joe Goffman, who led the Biden EPA air office. 'The effects of climate change are going to continue to be felt and they're going to continue to be costly in terms of dollars and cents and in terms of human experience.' Some state governors, such as Democrats Kathy Hochul of New York and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, have vowed to go it alone on climate policy if need be. But analyses have shown state actions alone are unlikely to achieve the greenhouse gas reductions at the scale and speed needed to avoid baking in catastrophic effects from climate change. The Sierra Club, for example, has helped shutter nearly 400 coal-fired units across the U.S. since 2010 through its Beyond Coal campaign, which has argued the economic case against fossil fuel generation in front of state utility commissions. While Joanne Spalding, the group's legal director, said it can continue to strike blows against coal with that strategy, she acknowledged that 'gas is a huge problem' — and left no doubt that the Trump administration's moves would do damage. 'Given what the science says about the need to act urgently, this will be a lost four years in the United States,' she said.
Yahoo
8 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Stephen Miller Explicitly Ordered ICE Raid Home Depots
Stephen Miller explicitly ordered ICE to target Home Depot parking lots to arrest undocumented day laborers, a report alleges. The White House deputy chief of staff gave the order in late May, gloating in a meeting that he could leave ICE's D.C. headquarters and arrest 30 people outside the nearest Home Depot, sources told the Wall Street Journal. Miller, 39, is also said to have reminded top immigration officials they are not just targeting the 'worst of the worst' criminals, but anybody who is in the country illegally—even if that is their only alleged wrongdoing. 'Just go out there and arrest illegal aliens,' he said, according to the Journal. ICE officials appear to have heeded the White House's call. The Journal reported that ICE conducted an immigration sweep at a Home Depot on Friday in a predominantly Latino neighborhood of Los Angeles. The raid was among those that spurred widespread anti-ICE demonstrations and occasional riots in the city, which escalated after President Donald Trump activated the National Guard and deployed Marines against the wishes of Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Day laborers are known to use Home Depot parking lots to find work at locations across the country, often waving down contractors or homeowners as they exit the home improvement store. Home Depot has acknowledged the practice, but does not explicitly allow it. Some stores feature signage to make clear that soliciting work is illegal in their parking lots. MAGA influencers have seized on this practice by migrants and are now encouraging ICE to continue targeting Home Depot parking lots. 'I'd like to report the front entrance of @HomeDepot at 5 am,' said Laura Loomer on Wednesday, responding to a promotion for the Department of Homeland Security's tip line to report undocumented immigrants. 'Location: Every Home Depot in the U.S.' Recent Home Depot raids have occurred at a minimum of seven locations in California, according to the Journal, The Guardian, and NBC Los Angeles. This appears to have workers skiddish about finding work in their go-to spot. Martha Arévalo, the executive director of the Central American Resource Center of Los Angeles, told the Journal that Home Depot parking lots in Southern California, once filled with hundreds of willing workers, have dwindled down to a 'handful.' Home Depot spokeswoman Beth Marlowe told the Daily Beast that the Atlanta-based corporation is not working in conjunction with ICE and that it does not receive any advance notice of raids at or near its locations. 'We tell associates to report [raids] immediately and not to engage with the activity for their safety,' she said. 'If associates feel uncomfortable after witnessing ICE activity, we offer them the option to go home for the rest of the day, with pay.' ICE did not respond to emails from the Daily Beast. White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told the Beast in a statement, 'If you are present in the United States illegally, you will be deported. This is the promise President Trump made to the American people, and the administration is committed to keeping it.' Miller has reportedly orchestrated the Trump administration's immigration crackdown. In the same meeting he reportedly ordered ICE to target Home Depot locations, he also allegedly threatened to terminate officials if their arrest numbers did not rise significantly. Miller told ICE it needed an arrest total at or near 3,000 migrants per day. A plan, dubbed 'Operation At Large,' was implemented shortly after. It saw thousands of federal law enforcement officers and special forces, who don't typically assist with immigration, being activated to help ICE round up migrants accused of being in the country illegally. This supercharging of arrests resulted in several notable mishaps. That included ICE briefly detaining a U.S. Marshal in Arizona by mistake last week.
