UPDATE: Fatal stabbing in Greenfield results in murder charge
Apr. 22—GREENFIELD — One dead, one injured and one in custody after a stabbing that took place early Saturday morning in Greenfield.
According to a press release from the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, Greenfield police officers received a call at approximately 12:45 a.m. Saturday for a stabbing at 201 NE 4th St.
When officers arrived, a Hispanic male, identified as Carlos Garcia-Escalona, 57, of Greenfield, was located in the kitchen of the residence suffering from a stab wound to the chest. Garcia-Escalona was being attended to by Adair County medics. After several minutes of working on Garcia-Escalona, he was declared deceased at the scene.
According to a Greenfield Police report, witnesses at the scene said Yudiel Vega-Blanco, 39, of Greenfield, was the person responsible for stabbing two individuals in the residence and directed officers to the location of the knife used. Vega-Blanco was taken into custody on the charges of murder in the first degree and willful injury causing bodily injury, Class A and Class D felonies, respectively.
According to witnesses at the residence, prior to the stabbings, Vega-Blanco had become upset, went into the kitchen and retrieved a knife. A second victim in the residence, identified as Jendys Escalona-Mendoza attempted to take the knife from him and was pushed by Vega-Blanco. As Escalona-Mendoza fell backwards, Vega-Blanco swung the knife at him, causing a non-life threatening laceration to his abdomen.
Garcia-Escalona then approached Vega-Blanco and stabbed in the chest, which proved to be fatal. Other occupants in the residence tackled Vega-Blanco and were able to take the knife from him and hide it. He was restrained by the occupants until law enforcement arrived.
Vega-Blanco was transported to the Adair County Jail and held on $1,000,005 cash-only bond.
The Greenfield Police Department is is being assisted by the Adair County Sheriff's Office, the Adair County Attorney's Office and DCI.
Law enforcement believes this to be an isolated incident with no active threat to the community.
This is an ongoing story.
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His attorneys have argued in federal court that he should be allowed to ignore the 14th Amendment's guarantee of citizenship for those born in the U.S. and terminate the rights of children born to parents who were in the country illegally. The President has cut federal funding to social-service nonprofits that offer legal representation to people facing deportation to ensure their cases are fairly decided. 'The very idea of deporting a child without a lawyer should be unthinkable in America,' says Jojo Annobil, the CEO of the Immigrant Justice Corps. Perhaps no other issue has crystallized criticism of Trump's immigration agenda like the deportation of Venezuelan nationals to El Salvador. Like many of Trump's policies, it came about through a series of conversations, rather than a conventional legal process. On the campaign stump, Trump occasionally castigated Bukele, the Salvadoran President, for sending MS-13 gang members to the U.S. Trump ally and former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, one of Bukele's biggest American fans, told Trump that this wasn't true. Bukele was the most popular leader in Latin America, he told Trump, and attacking him wasn't going to help win over the Hispanic voters Trump was courting. When Gaetz visited El Salvador for Bukele's second inauguration last summer, he and Bukele discussed the idea of the Salvadorans holding some of the migrants whom Trump planned to deport if he won. When Gaetz returned, he tells TIME, he brought the idea to Trump and his team. Shortly after taking office, Trump directed Rubio to cut a deal with Bukele, two senior White House officials say. Rubio came back with an offer in hand, according to U.S. officials: $20,000 per prisoner for a year. There were wrinkles in the deal. Bukele wanted the Trump Administration to send a handful of Salvadoran MS-13 members held in U.S. prisons, including some who the Treasury Department alleged in December 2021 had engaged in secret negotiations with officials of Bukele's government. At the same time, the deportations would require claims of extraordinary presidential powers. Miller and the White House Counsel's office planned to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law that grants the President wartime authority during an invasion or 'predatory incursion.' The plan was so closely held that only a few senior members of the Administration knew it was happening, one of them tells TIME. On March 15, the Trump Administration sent 238 Venezuelan nationals to El Salvador, alleging they were gang members or terrorists. Some had recently been arrested. Many of them had not been convicted in U.S. court. The Administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act for the fourth time in U.S. history, and the first since World War II. The declaration was made at 3:53 p.m. The flights for El Salvador were scheduled for 5:26, 5:44, and 7:36 p.m. Prompted by an emergency motion from the American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward, U.S. Judge James Boasberg ordered a virtual hearing on the matter for late that afternoon. Boasberg heard arguments, then ordered the government to halt the removals. 'Whether turning around a plane or not embarking anyone on the plane, or those people covered by this on the plane, I leave to you,' Boasberg told the DOJ. 'But this is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.' Yet two planeloads of migrants had already left ahead of schedule. A third one was still on the tarmac at a Texas airfield, but took off anyway. The Trump Administration has not confirmed the names of the Venezuelans on those flights. Nor has it shown evidence that all of the men belonged to the criminal gang Tren de Aragua. A review by the Cato Institute found that more than 50 of the Venezuelans sent to El Salvador had followed legal steps to enter the country. A CBS News investigation found that most of the Venezuelans had no criminal record in the U.S. or abroad. One of the men on the planes was Abrego Garcia, who the Justice Department would later admit had been mistakenly deported. Another was Franco Caraballo Tiapa, who worked as a barber in Venezuela. In 2023, Tiapa and his wife Johanny trekked across the Darién Gap, sleeping in the open and surviving on scraps of discarded food, until they presented themselves at the U.S. border and asked for asylum. The two lived together in Sherman, Texas, where they made money cutting hair. On Feb. 3, Tiapa visited an ICE office in Dallas for a regular check-in. This time he was arrested, according to Johanny. The Administration says his tattoos show he's a member of the Tren de Aragua gang. One is of his daughter's name. Others depict a lion; a rose; and a razor blade on the side of his neck—a symbol of his work as a barber, according to his wife. She says he has no criminal record in the U.S. or Venezuela. 'They were only looking at his tattoos,' Johanny says. Outside of CECOT's Module 7, Garcia, the warden, brings out a Styrofoam container with a hamburger, French fries, ketchup packs, and Milano cookies. This is a typical meal for the Venezuelan inmates, he says. Their diet was devised by Bukele, who instructed they be fed fast food to gain weight, as a way of trolling critics who argue CECOT's conditions are inhumane, according to Salvadoran sources. 'It's a cat-and-mouse game,' says one person close to Bukele. The maneuver is similar to the photo op Bukele staged when Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador to meet with Abrego Garcia. The pair were photographed sitting poolside with what Van Hollen said were 'fake' margaritas. (Abrego Garcia was returned to the U.S. in early June.) After the tour of the prison, Garcia allows TIME to interview one inmate in a holding area near the unit's entrance. The man says his name is Hector Hernandez. He appears to be the nightmare that Trump has conjured time and again on the campaign trail. He says he is an MS-13 member, and has tattoos all over his body, from his face and neck to his forearms. The prisoner claims that before he was deported in 2019 and apprehended by Salvadoran authorities, he murdered 50 people in Northern Virginia—more than three times the number of reported murders in Prince William or Fairfax counties for that year. TIME was unable to verify the details provided by the prisoner, including his name, his alleged crimes, or how he came to be there. Inside CECOT, the extreme terminus for Trump's deportation program, the truth, like everything else, is under the control of the authorities. What is clear, however, are the draconian conditions to which the Salvadoran inmates at CECOT are subjected. They are under constant surveillance. The lights never go off. They share cells with rival gang members. Prisoners who get out of line face up to 14 days in pitch-black solitary confinement, says Garcia. For the past 2½ years, the man who identifies himself as Hector Hernandez says, he's had no communication with the outside world. He hasn't spoken to family. He hasn't seen or read a news report. He doesn't know who the President of the United States is. — With reporting by Harry Booth, Leslie Dickstein, and Tharin Pillay Must-Reads from TIME As Trump Seeks Mass Deportations, Workplace Raids May Not Help Much As Trump Vies to Blows Up Border Deal, Migrant Crisis Could Get Worse How a Dead Border Deal Led to a Trump-Biden Border Duel Can One Agency Keep the U.S. Safe and Still Be Humane? 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- Yahoo
Federal prosecutors in Nashville ask judge to keep Abrego Garcia detained until trial
A U.S. Department of Homeland Security officer stood watch at the rear of the Fred D. Thompson Federal as Kilmar Abrego Garcia was brought to Tennessee on criminal charges. (Photo: John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout) Federal prosecutors on Monday detailed legal arguments for the detention-until-trial of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran man mistakenly deported by the Trump Administration. Abrego Garcia was returned to Nashville from El Salvador on Friday to face two criminal human smuggling charges tied to a 2022 Tennessee traffic stop. He appeared briefly in a downtown Nashville courtroom late Friday, and is scheduled to return to court this upcoming Friday for a formal arraignment of the charges against him. That hearing will also consider a motion by the Justice Department to keep Abrego Garcia in custody until the date of his trial, which has not yet been set. A federal grand jury indictment issued under seal May 21 and made public June 6 charges Abrego Garcia with 'conspiracy to unlawfully transport illegal aliens for financial gain' and 'unlawful transportation of illegal aliens for financial gain.' Kilmar Abrego Garcia, wrongly deported to El Salvador prison, to face federal charges in Nashville Abrego Garcia 'knowingly and unlawfully transported thousands of undocumented aliens' for profit between 2016 and 2025 as a member of the MS-13 gang, prosecutors said. Dumaka Shabazz, a federal public defender appointed to represent Garcia in the criminal case, declined comment on the charges Monday. 'At this date, we are not inclined to give a statement,' Shabazz said via email. The criminal charges stem from a November 2022 traffic stop in Putnam County by the Tennessee Highway Patrol, court records show. Abrego Garcia was driving an SUV with nine Hispanic men when he was pulled over for speeding on Interstate 40 in Putnam County, about 80 miles east of Nashville, court records said. He was not charged in the incident. Prosecutors now allege that further investigation revealed the stop involved Abrego Garcia smuggling migrants within the United States illegally. Abrego Garcia faces a potentially lengthy sentence: a maximum of ten years in prison for each person he allegedly transported. 'A stain on the Constitution': Abrego Garcia lawyers refuse to drop his case against U.S. A resident of Maryland until a prior traffic stop on March 12 this year, Abrego Garcia was dispatched within days to an El Salvador prison along with scores of other detainees. An immigrant from El Salvador, Abrego Garcia had received an immigration court order in 2019 that allowed him to reside in the United States and specifically barred the federal government from deporting him to El Salvador, where, he said, he feared gang violence. The prosecutors' memo seeking Abrego Garcia's detention until trial, filed in federal court Monday, alleges there is a 'serious risk' that Abrego Garcia 'and/or persons acting on his behalf will obstruct justice and/or intimidate the witnesses against him' should he be released from federal custody pending his trial. They also argued Abrego Garcia is a flight risk and a danger to the community. In their memo, prosecutors said they plan to raise allegations that children without legal immigration status were transported and 'used in unsafe ways' to avoid detection of Abrego Garcia's illegal smuggling activities. Abrego Garcia has not been charged with crimes involving the illegal transport of children. Prosecutors also acknowledged that, should Abrego Garcia be released pending trial, he would likely be immediately taken into the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to face further proceedings in immigration court. Nevertheless, they argued that ,should he not be taken into ICE custody, Abrego Garcia would have an 'enormous reason to flee.' U.S. Magistrate Barbara Holmes, who presided over Friday's brief hearing, has given Abrego's attorneys until Wednesday to file a legal response. Supplemental Memorandum in Support of Government's Motion for Detention
