Who is Pope Leo XIV?
NewsFeed Who is Pope Leo XIV?
Pope Leo XIV is the first American-born leader of the Roman Catholic Church. Here's why his election is being celebrated in Peru but less so among right-wing supporters in the US.
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Al Jazeera
2 hours ago
- Al Jazeera
Police, protesters clash in Los Angeles following immigration raids
There have been tense confrontations in Los Angeles as riot police and demonstrators – protesting federal immigration raids – squared off in the downtown area. Earlier on Friday, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents took dozens of people into custody during raids across Los Angeles city. Caravans of unmarked military-style vehicles and vans loaded with uniformed federal agents streamed through the city as part of the operation. The ICE agents raided several locations, including an apparel store in the city's Fashion District, a Home Depot in Westlake District, and a clothing warehouse in South Los Angeles, according to the Los Angeles City News Service. In response, crowds of demonstrators protesting the raids massed outside a jail where some of the detainees were believed to be held and spray-painted anti-ICE slogans on the walls of the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles. Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers – who did not take part in the immigration raids – were called in to quell the unrest. Wielding batons and tear gas rifles, LAPD officers faced off with the demonstrators after authorities ordered them to disperse on Friday night. Some protesters hurled broken concrete towards the LAPD officers, the Reuters news agency reports. Police responded by firing volleys of tear gas and pepper spray. LAPD spokesperson Drake Madison said police on the scene declared the gathering an unlawful assembly, meaning that those who failed to leave the area were subject to arrest, according to Reuters. It's not immediately clear how many arrests have been made. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass condemned the federal immigration raids, saying they 'sow terror in our communities and disrupt basic principles of safety in our city'. Caleb Soto, of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, told Al Jazeera that between 70 and 80 people had been detained, but only three lawyers have been allowed access to the detention centre where they were being held to provide legal advice. 'The chaotic manner of the raids that we saw today happening throughout Los Angeles and different day-labour worksites and garment worker work sites was an example of the purpose of what this Trump administration has set out to do, which is create as much fear as possible,' Soto told Al Jazeera. He said the ICE agents conducting the raids did not obtain a judicial warrant required under US law, and granted by a judge if there is probable cause to carry out an arrest because of suspected criminal activity. Soto said ICE agents were showing up at work sites 'where they know that there are a lot of immigrant workers' and 'people without documents', and if someone starts running they use that as 'reasonable suspicion' that the person is undocumented. 'They use that as the pretext to start arresting people who are there in that area and around them. We find that to be pretty unconstitutional,' he said. The Los Angeles raids are the latest sweeps in several US cities over recent months as part of President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown. Trump, who took immediate steps to ramp up immigration enforcement after taking office in January, has promised to arrest and deport undocumented migrants in record numbers. In late May, his administration stated it would revoke the temporary legal status of 530,000 people in the country, including Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans.
Al Jazeera
9 hours ago
- Al Jazeera
US Supreme Court grants DOGE access to sensitive Social Security data
The United States Supreme Court has sided with the administration of President Donald Trump in two cases about government records — and who should have access to them. On Friday, the six-member conservative majority overturned a lower court's ruling that limited the kinds of data that Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) could access through the Social Security Administration (SSA). In a separate case, the majority also decided that DOGE was not required to turn over records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a government transparency law. In both cases, the Supreme Court's three left-leaning justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan — opposed the majority's decision. DOGE has been at the forefront of Trump's campaign to reimagine the federal government and cut down on bureaucratic 'bloat'. Unveiled on November 13, just eight days after Trump's re-election, DOGE was designed to 'dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies'. At first, it was unclear how DOGE would interact with the executive branch: whether it would be an advisory panel, a new department or a nongovernmental entity. But on January 20, when Trump was sworn in for his second term, he announced that the existing US Digital Service — a technology initiative founded by former President Barack Obama — would be reorganised to create DOGE. The government efficiency panel has since led a wide-scale overhaul of the federal government, implementing mass layoffs and seeking to shutter entities like the US Agency for International Development (USAID). It also advertised cost-savings it had achieved or alleged fraud it had uncovered, though many of those claims have been contradicted or questioned by journalists and experts. In addition, DOGE's sweeping changes to the federal government made it the subject of criticism and concern, particularly as it sought greater access to sensitive data and systems. Up until last week, DOGE was led by Elon Musk, a billionaire and tech entrepreneur who had been a prominent backer of Trump's re-election bid. Musk and Trump, however, have had a public rupture following the end of the billionaire's tenure as a 'special government employee' in the White House. That falling-out has left DOGE's future uncertain. One of DOGE's controversial initiatives has been its push to access Social Security data, in the name of rooting out waste, fraud and abuse. Early in Trump's second term, both the president and Musk repeated misleading claims that Social Security payments were being made to millions of people listed as 150 years old or older. But fact-checkers quickly refuted that allegation. Instead, they pointed out that the Social Security Administration has implemented a code to automatically stop payments to anyone listed as alive and more than 115 years old. They also pointed out that the COBOL programming language flags incomplete entries in the Social Security system with birthdates set back 150 years, possibly prompting the Trump administration's confusion. Less than 1 percent of Social Security payments are made erroneously, according to a 2024 inspector general report. Still, Trump officials criticised the Social Security Administration, with Musk dubbing it 'the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time' and calling for its elimination. In March, US District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander blocked DOGE from having unfettered access to Social Security data, citing the sensitive nature of such information. Social Security numbers, for instance, are key to verifying a person's identity in the US, and the release of such numbers could endanger individual privacy. Lipton Hollander ruled that DOGE had 'never identified or articulated even a single reason for which the DOGE Team needs unlimited access to SSA's entire record systems'. She questioned why DOGE had not sought a 'more tailored' approach. 'Instead, the government simply repeats its incantation of a need to modernize the system and uncover fraud,' she wrote in her ruling. 'Its method of doing so is tantamount to hitting a fly with a sledgehammer.' The judge's ruling, however, did allow DOGE to view anonymised data, without personally identifying information. The Trump administration, nevertheless, appealed that decision to the Supreme Court, arguing that Judge Lipton Hollander had exceeded her authority in blocking DOGE's access. The Supreme Court granted its emergency petition on Friday, lifting Lipton Hollander's temporary restrictions on the data in an unsigned decision. But Justice Brown Jackson issued a blistering dissent (PDF), suggesting that the Supreme Court was willing to break norms to assist a presidency that was unwilling to let legal challenges play out in lower courts. 'Once again, this Court dons its emergency-responder gear, rushes to the scene, and uses its equitable power to fan the flames rather than extinguish them,' Brown Jackson wrote. She argued that the Trump administration had not established that any 'irreparable harm' would occur if DOGE were temporarily blocked from accessing Social Security data. But by granting the Trump administration's emergency petition, she said the court was 'jettisoning careful judicial decision-making and creating grave privacy risks for millions of Americans in the process'. The second Supreme Court decision on Friday concerned whether DOGE itself had to surrender documents under federal transparency laws. The question was raised as part of a lawsuit brought by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a government watchdog group. It argued that DOGE's sweeping powers suggested it should be subject to laws like FOIA, just like any other executive agency. But CREW also alleged that the ambiguity surrounding DOGE's structures had kept it insulated from outside probes. 'While publicly available information indicates that DOGE is subject to FOIA, the lack of clarity on DOGE's authority leaves that an open question,' CREW said in a statement. The watchdog group sought to compel DOGE to provide information about its inner workings. While a US district judge had sided with CREW's request for records in April, the Supreme Court on Friday paused that lower court's decision (PDF). It sent the case back to a court of appeals for further consideration, with instructions that the April order be narrowed. 'Any inquiry into whether an entity is an agency for the purposes of the Freedom of Information Act cannot turn on the entity's ability to persuade,' the Supreme Court's conservative majority ruled. It also said that the courts needed to exercise 'deference and restraint' regarding 'internal' executive communications.
Al Jazeera
11 hours ago
- Al Jazeera
Deported man Kilmar Abrego Garcia returned to US to face charges
A man the Donald Trump administration mistakenly deported to El Salvador has been brought back to the United States, where authorities say he will face criminal charges. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, 29, a Salvadoran immigrant who had lived nearly half his life in Maryland before he was deported in March, faces charges of transporting undocumented migrants inside the US, according to recently unsealed court records. US Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Friday that Abrego Garcia was returned to the US to 'face justice'. The indictment against him was filed on May 21, more than two months after he was deported in spite of a court order barring his removal. The charges stem from a 2022 traffic stop by the Tennessee Highway Patrol, which suspected Abrego Garcia of human trafficking but ultimately issued only a warning for an expired driver's license, according to a Department of Homeland Security report. Bondi, speaking at a news conference, said a grand jury had 'found that over the past nine years, Abrego Garcia has played a significant role in an alien smuggling ring'. She said Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele agreed to return Abrego Garcia to the US after American officials presented his government with an arrest warrant. Abrego Garcia had been sent to El Salvador as part of a Trump scheme to move undocumented migrants it accuses of being gang members, to prison in the Central American country without due process. Bukele said in a social media post that his government works with the Trump administration and 'of course' would not refuse a request to return 'a gang member' to the US. Al Jazeera's Rosiland Jordan, reporting from Washington, DC, said Abrego Garcia could face up to 10 years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted. But 'that does not deal with the ongoing matter of whether or not he should be deported', she added. 'That's a separate legal matter.' Abrego Garcia will have the chance to enter a plea in court and contest the charges at trial. If he is convicted, he would be deported to El Salvador after serving his sentence, Bondi said. In a statement, Abrego Garcia's lawyer, Andrew Rossman, said it would now be up to the US judicial system to ensure he received due process. 'Today's action proves what we've known all along – that the administration had the ability to bring him back and just refused to do so,' said Rossman, a partner at law firm Quinn Emanuel. Abrego Garcia's deportation defied an immigration judge's 2019 order granting him protection from being sent back to El Salvador, where it found he was likely to be persecuted by gangs if returned, court records show. Trump critics pointed to the erroneous deportation as an example of the excesses of the Republican president's aggressive approach to stepping up deportations. Officials countered by alleging that Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang. His lawyers have denied that he was a gang member and said he had not been convicted of any crime. Abrego Garcia's case has become a flash point for escalating tensions between the executive branch and the judiciary, which has ruled against a number of Trump's policies. The US Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return, with liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor saying the government had cited no basis for what she called his 'warrantless arrest'. US District Judge Paula Xinis also opened a probe into what, if anything, the Trump administration did to secure his return, after his lawyers accused officials of stonewalling their requests for information.
