ICE Deports Chinese National Convicted of Drone Photography of Military Site
'The removal of Fengyun Shi reflects ICE's steadfast dedication to protecting the American people and upholding national security,' Brian McShane, director of the Philadelphia Field Office Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO),
Shi pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors under the Espionage Act in July 2024 and was originally sentenced to six months in prison and one year of supervised release.
In March, ERO Philadelphia served him with a notice of removal, and an immigration judge ordered his removal to China.
Since then, lawmakers have introduced
Student Photographed Classified US Submarines, Sites
Shi entered the country on an F1 visa as an agricultural engineering graduate student at the University of Minnesota in August 2021.
On Jan. 5, 2024, he
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The naval shipyard builds nuclear submarines and next-generation Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers.
The drone got
On the morning of Jan. 6, 2024, Shi requested help from a resident to retrieve the drone. Instead, the resident took photographs of Shi's identification and called the police after Shi indicated he was flying the drone over the shipyard. Officers from Newport News Police Department questioned him, and federal prosecutors said bodycam footage showed that Shi appeared 'very nervous' and did not state 'any real reasons for why he was flying the drone.'
The resident gave the drone to an
Court documents noted that three commissioned submarines—the USS Boise, USS Columbus, and USS Montana—were located at Newport News Shipbuilding on the day that Shi used the drone.
'Naval aircraft carriers have classified and sensitive systems throughout the carriers,' the court documents read. 'The nuclear submarines present on that date also have highly classified and sensitive Navy Nuclear Propulsion Information ('NNPI') and those submarines even in the design and construction phase are sensitive and classified.'
On Jan. 18, 2024, the FBI arrested Shi in San Francisco, where he was preparing to board a one-way flight to China. His visa was terminated on Jan. 25, 2024, and the University of Minnesota terminated him from its exchange program on Feb. 7, 2025.
The Justice Department
He had been incarcerated at the Clinton County Correctional Facility in McElhatten, Pennsylvania, and was arrested by ERO Philadelphia upon release on March 7.
In recent years, there has been an increase in drones being flown over or near sensitive sites across the United States.
In December 2024, the Federal Aviation Administration banned drone flights over 22 critical infrastructure locations, after the FBI reported more than 5,000 drone sightings in one month. Officials said most were
Frank Fang and Andrew Thornebrooke contributed to this report.
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Newsweek
8 minutes ago
- Newsweek
US Deploys Warship As Russian and Chinese Naval Flotilla Approaches Alaska
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. A United States warship has been deployed in the North Pacific Ocean as a naval flotilla of Russian and Chinese vessels approached Alaska's outlying islands during a joint patrol. A spokesperson for the U.S. Third Fleet confirmed to Newsweek on Wednesday that the destroyer USS Carl M. Levin was underway for "routine operations," adding that the Navy frequently operates in the North Pacific Ocean to "support maritime homeland defense." Newsweek has emailed both the Russian and Chinese foreign ministries for comment. The United States destroyer USS Carl M. Levin conducts operations in the North Pacific Ocean on August 12, 2025. The United States destroyer USS Carl M. Levin conducts operations in the North Pacific Ocean on August 12, 2025. U.S. Navy Why It Matters Russia and China have formed a quasi-alliance under their so-called "partnership without limitations," as they seek to challenge the U.S. by deepening cooperation and coordination in all issues, including military and security. Moscow and Beijing commenced a naval patrol in the Asia-Pacific region last week. Ships from both countries reached a Russian port in the Far East region, as reported on Tuesday, approximately 575 miles from Attu, the westernmost island in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. The joint patrol comes as China has deployed five research vessels in Arctic waters near Alaska, bolstering its presence in the region. Meanwhile, a presidential meeting between the U.S. and Russia over the Ukraine war is scheduled to take place in Alaska on Friday. What To Know The deployment of the Carl M. Levin was first revealed in a set of four photos released by the U.S. Navy between Tuesday and Wednesday, showing the destroyer conducting operations in undisclosed waters in the North Pacific between July 30 and August 6. "The U.S. Navy frequently conducts exercises and operations in the North Pacific Ocean to maintain readiness, refine tactics, deter conflict, and support maritime homeland defense," one of the photo captions reads, without further explanation of "homeland defense." On Wednesday, the Navy released another photo—taken the previous day—of the Carl M. Levin during its deployment. Sailors were seen observing an undisclosed land area. "An integral part of U.S. Pacific Fleet, U.S. 3rd Fleet operates naval forces in the Indo-Pacific and provides the realistic, relevant training necessary to execute the U.S. Navy's role across the full spectrum of military operations," according to the photo caption. Evergreen Intel, an open-source intelligence analyst on the social media platform X, told Newsweek that the photo was geolocated near Adak Island, part of the Aleutian Islands. The warship had presumably just left the Port of Adak and was heading north, the analyst said. Meanwhile, news outlet The Alaska Landmine shared a photo—taken from Adak Island—on Tuesday, reporting that an unidentified destroyer appeared to be transiting near the island. There appears to be a destroyer near Adak! Likely means a carrier strike group is nearby. — The Alaska Landmine (@alaskalandmine) August 13, 2025 Following its commissioning in 2023, the Carl M. Levin has been based in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. During an air and missile defense test two years ago, the warship demonstrated its capabilities by intercepting two short-range ballistic missiles and two cruise missiles. Prior to its ongoing deployment in the North Pacific, the Carl M. Levin participated in Los Angeles Fleet Week in late May. It later visited the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Port Hueneme, California, to undergo an assessment and inspection. What People Are Saying The U.S. Third Fleet wrote in a photo caption on Wednesday: "U.S. 3rd Fleet works together with our allies and partners to advance freedom of navigation, the rule of law, and other principles that underpin security for the Indo-Pacific region." The U.S. Northern Command told Newsweek on Monday: "[North American Aerospace Defense Command] and [U.S. Northern Command] are monitoring the five Chinese vessels operating in the Arctic. Although the vessels are operating in international waters and are not considered a Homeland Defense threat, their numbers represent an increase from years past." What Happens Next It remains to be seen whether the Russian and Chinese naval vessels conducting the joint patrol will sail north toward the Bering Sea, which borders Alaska and the Aleutian Islands.
Yahoo
13 minutes ago
- Yahoo
After D.C., Trump wants to ‘takeover' New York and Chicago. Can he?
Donald Trump completed his goal of 'sending in the troops' this week as he announced that the D.C. National Guard would be mobilized to fight crime in the District of Columbia, where federal officials would also be taking over the local police force. But will he stop there, or will other cities be next? After reportedly spending months debating how best to achieve the humiliation and cowing of a liberal-run urban center, the president's second go at it appears on track for greater success. Trump previously ordered National Guard troops to begin protection duties in Los Angeles and the surrounding area following unrest in January over ICE deportation raids. That deployment, once thousands of troops, is now down to less than 300 as federal officials squabble with local leaders in the courts over whether the whole thing was a political stunt. That dynamic playing out on the West Coast is a sign that Trump will likely be less successful at duplicating his takeover of the nation's capital in blue states around the U.S., even as he pledged to do so during his Monday press conference at the White House. "We're not going to lose our cities over this. This will go further. We're starting very strongly with D.C., and we're going to clean it up real quick," Trump told reporters. "We're going to take back our capital. And then we'll look at other cities also. But other cities are studying what we're doing." In D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser has meekly pushed back against the image of her city being 'war-torn' and drug-infested as being shared by the White House. Aside from refusing to sign on to that characterization, she's painstakingly avoided direct confrontation with Trump, clearly fearful that the president (with the backing of a GOP House and Senate) could pursue a full federalization of D.C. city government by asking Congress to revoke the Home Rule Act. The reality is simple: Trump can't deputize federal troops, including state National Guard detachments, to conduct crime-control activities without the cooperation of state leaders and some kind of actual rationalization for doing so. Pointing at crime trends and graphs won't cut it. Especially in states with uncooperative leaders, his deployment of National Guard troops is limited to his administration's ability to come up with rationalizations for their use; in California, Guardsmen were dispatched in response to large-scale protests around federal buildings housing detained undocumented immigrants. In Chicago, Baltimore, New York and other cities, Trump lacks even the minimal standards that the administration would need to defend such deployments. So what can Trump do? The answer may still end up being more than Democratic state and local leaders would like to see from the White House. This week, federal attorneys battled with California in court over whether National Guard troops deployed to the state in June overstepped their constitutional authority by providing support to ICE agents during raids and other enforcement actions, where National Guard troops served to protect law enforcement personnel but were directed not to participate directly in arrests of migrants. The director of the Los Angeles field office testified that the support provided by the Guard on these raids was critical for preventing assaults against officers: "We still had officer assault situations, but they did reduce drastically." That's the loophole Trump and his team will use, should it be upheld as legal. Democratic state leaders can force the Guard to operate under solely federal authority, known as 'Title 10,' which bars troops from performing law enforcement activities and forces them to operate solely with federal funding and oversight. In California's case, this was used; and it severely restricted the usage of the Guard to support roles for enforcement operations. But Trump simply could use further demonstrations against ICE agents as the impetus for launching similar operations in Democrat-run cities such as Chicago or New York. The president needs no additional authority to ramp up immigration raids in those areas, and now has the funding to do it, thanks to the GOP's budget reconciliation package containing money for tens of thousands of new ICE agents and detention centers. It's the question of whether he would be able to sustain a supporting guardsman presence for any extended amount of time, or whether court challenges in those states would force him to close up shop that's still uncertain. Trump could find more leeway in red states, where state governors could cooperate with the Trump administration and change the game. If Guardsmen were activated under 'Title 32' authority, which shares oversight and funding for the deployment between state and federal officials, those deployed troops would not be subject to the same restrictions on carrying out law enforcement activities. It was under this authority that the president is calling in the Guard to Washington D.C., which falls constitutionally under federal jurisdiction and likely can't block the president from wielding that power. Federal officials haven't said that National Guard troops in D.C. will directly conduct law enforcement operations, however. The Guard is currently slated to provide support roles to assist the newly federalized Metropolitan Police Department, the city's primary law enforcement agency. It's a sign that even under the broadest authority Trump is willing to grant U.S. troops operating on American soil, the White House is still hesitant to lean into the full militarization of American cities. As midterm season approaches, Democratic state leaders can likely breathe a sigh of relief knowing that blue states remain shielded from Trump's ambitions of bringing local police forces under his control, and from seeing troops on city streets putting down dissent or conducting law enforcement in an attempt to smear the president's critics as pro-crime. Voters in red states, however, could be in for a ride if the president decides that leaning into immigration raids is his party's ticket to protecting congressional majorities next year. Solve the daily Crossword
CNN
37 minutes ago
- CNN
FBI agents are again pulled from their day jobs to address a Trump priority
FBI agents – thrust into yet another role for which they are not trained – have been put on patrol duties with local police as part of President Donald Trump's declaration of a crime emergency in Washington, DC. In the past several months, the agency's rank-and-file, who specialize in complex threat investigations, have been assigned to fulfill a bevy of roles outside their lanes of expertise, spending overnight and weekend shifts poring over old Jeffrey Epstein files looking for necessary redactions, assisting ICE in finding and removing illegal immigrants and now patrolling the streets of the nation's capital. While federal agencies including the FBI often link up with local police departments to help with specific investigations and task forces or to build out certain tools they may need, such as gun tracing, agents are not trained or equipped for community policing, multiple federal law enforcement officials told CNN. FBI Director Kash Patel took office vowing to 'let cops be cops.' But in recent years, the FBI has touted how many new agents don't come from former police backgrounds and instead come from backgrounds in technology, law and other disciplines. One 2024 class of new agents included more than 44% with advanced degrees, according to an internal newsletter. 'FBI agents are not police officers,' Former FBI deputy director and CNN law enforcement analyst Andrew McCabe said Tuesday. 'Most of them don't come to the FBI from a background as a police officer. So they don't have the training and the skillset and the experience of doing that work, which can be dangerous both for them and for the people they would be policing.' For many FBI agents, much of the job is done largely at a desk, and training necessary to de-escalate situations in the field, or what beat cops are looking for when trying to identify threats or potential hostile situations, are not comprehensively part of training for agents. What's more, the FBI use-of-force policy generally has a much lower threshold for when agents are allowed to use their firearms to protect themselves than most police departments – in the case of Washington, DC, officers, have options to use tasers and pepper spray before using lethal force, not standard equipment for agents. Federal agents are also typically only minimally trained in conducting vehicle stops, which remains one of the most dangerous aspects of a police officer's job. Unlike routine police encounters with suspects, which may only involve one or two officers, when agencies like the FBI conduct an arrest, they typically plan out the operation methodically in advance and execute it with a complement of agents that far outnumbers the suspect. Several law enforcement officers told CNN that many agents now tasked with patrolling the streets of DC alongside the Metropolitan Police Department are in a wait-it-out posture, hoping they'll be able to turn their complete focus back to the cases they were investigating previously when Trump's 30-day period of controlling the MPD is currently set to come to an end. 'This isn't hard: If we're doing (policing) we're not covering down on those other threats,' said one person. Other federal agencies involved in the surge of resources to DC, like the Secret Service, US Marshals Service, Federal Protective Service, ICE and Border Patrol have officers with far more experience arresting individuals or conducting more standard, on-the-ground police work than the FBI. The difference in training was an issue that arose most recently in the protests following the police killing of George Floyd in 2020. Agents with no significant training in crowd control were thrust into the streets to help protect federal buildings and found themselves outnumbered by protesters. To try to deescalate tensions, some agents took a knee in a symbolic gesture that has since become a flashpoint in the Trump administration's retribution against so-called 'woke' policies associated with political opponents. Under Patel, some of those agents have faced reassignments to less-prestigious jobs and internal disciplinary investigations. The FBI declined to comment on multiple questions from CNN for this story. Since the weekend, FBI agents have been embedding with Metropolitan Police Officers and, according to Patel, were involved in 10 of the 23 arrests that occurred in DC Monday night. It's unclear to what extent FBI agents participated in the arrests. The arrests included unlawful possessions of firearms, DUI warrants, one on a search warrant for a prior murder charge and more, Patel touted on social media. 'When you let good cops be cops they can clean up our streets and do it fast,' Patel wrote on X. 'More to come. Your nation's Capital WILL be safe again.' In 2025, hundreds of FBI agents were reassigned to immigration-related duties, which raised corners at the time among some agents that the switch could hinder important national security investigations, including into espionage by foreign countries and terror threats. At the time of the push for more federal agents to help with immigration enforcement, FBI agents involved were told by supervisors not to document moving resources away from high-priority cases. Behind the scenes, some FBI agents clashed with their immigration enforcement counterparts, with major flashpoints involving the refusal by those agents to engage in what they viewed as racial profiling and other tactics that could violate the Constitution, according to law enforcement sources. While agency leaders have publicly touted a very close and cooperative working relationship between organizations, the situation has at times been much different on the ground, sources said. Then came the files of Jeffrey Epstein, the sex offender and accused sex trafficker who killed himself in prison in 2019 before the case against him could go to trial. FBI agents in March worked tirelessly, sometimes in 12-hour shifts, to review documents and evidence against Epstein in order to make redactions on the Justice Departments failed attempt to cull conspiracy theories and accusations that they were continuing to hide imagined crimes against the rich and powerful. Much of which stemmed from Trump's allies, including those in key leadership positions. Agents were ordered to put aside investigations related to threats from China and Iran, as well as cases in order to complete the Epstein redactions, something every division in the bureau was ordered to supply agents for. 'There is no other entity that does that work if the FBI is not doing it,' McCabe said. 'And that is really important stuff that needs to be done every day in this country by a limited resource of FBI agents. And so every time you distract them into doing something like this, you're doing less of that.' Patel and his deputy director, Dan Bongino, often tout the work of the FBI online, recently highlighting the bust of an alleged human trafficking operation in Nebraska, fentanyl seizures, and other FBI successes. The new reassignments to help patrol DC come days after two senior FBI officials, including the acting-director before Patel was appointed by Trump to lead the agency, along with other agents, were summarily fired following perceived opposition to the administration. The firings, including of former acting director Brian Driscoll after he fought the administration's plans to quickly fire more than 100 mid-level and senior employees in the early days of Trump's second administration, has also spread an air of concern among agents over who could be targeted next or what past actions could land them in trouble with Trump-appointed leadership. Law enforcement sources fear this volatile period inside the FBI could lead to a brain drain amid constantly evolving threats as numerous agents, analysts and professional staff consider departing for other agencies, or into the private sector where their national security and investigative skills remain highly sought. 'Morale is the worst I've seen,' said one law enforcement source. 'The bureau is becoming unrecognizable. Lots of people are weighing really difficult decisions right now.'
