Latest news with #Briones
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GMA Network
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- GMA Network
Dolly de Leon, Jonjon Briones joins cast of ‘Avatar: the Last Airbender'
Two Filipino actors have been announced to take part in Seasons 2 and 3 of Netflix's 'Avatar: The Last Airbender.' In an announcement Wednesday midnight, Netflix revealed a list of 7 new cast members, which includes Dolly de Leon and Jonjon Briones. De Leon is set to play twins Lo and Li, who would be elderly advisers and fire-bending instructors for Fire Princess Azula. Meanwhile, Filipino-American Briones will be playing swordmaster and White Lotus warrior De Leon and Briones join the growing list of Filipino actors in the cast, including Lourdes Faberes who is set to play Earth Kingdom officer General Sung. The series is also led by Filipino-Canadian actor Gorden Cormier as Aang, the titular 'Last Airbender.' Piandao, who would serve as a swordsmanship instructor for both Sokka and Prince Zuko. Other characters were also cast, such as Fei (Madison Hu), Yangchen (Dichen Lachman), Ursa (Lily Gao), Jeong Jeong (Terry Chen), and Hama (Tantoo Cardinal). In a separate tweet, the series' main cast confirmed that they have finished shooting the 2nd season of the show and have begun production on the 3rd season. Netflix's 'Avatar: The Last Airbender' premiered its first season last February 2024 and was renewed for Seasons 2 and 3 last in March 2024. The series released a teaser for the upcoming second season, showing actress Miya Cech as 'Toph' for her first appearance in the series. Welcome the new faces joining the cast of Avatar: The Last Airbender in Seasons 2 and 3. — Avatar: The Last Airbender (@AvatarNetflix) May 20, 2025 — Jiselle Anne Casucian/LA, GMA Integrated News
Yahoo
28-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Judges Are Starting To Catch On To Trump's Utter Lawlessness
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM's Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version. U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty of the Western District of Louisiana is among the handful of Trumpiest judges in America and even he can't countenance the Trump administration's lawless deportation actions. In an order Friday, Doughty expressed his suspicion that the Trump administration had just deported a 2-year-old U.S. citizen with his undocumented Honduran mother over the objections of the child's father 'with no meaningful process.' In a separate case also out of Louisiana, the ACLU alleges that two children – ages 4 and 7 – who were both U.S. citizens were also deported Friday to Honduras. Meanwhile, in the Western District of Texas, U.S. District Judge David Briones ordered the immediate release of a Venezuelan couple that the Trump administration had swept up in its Alien Enemies Act detentions. In a scathing opinion, Briones became the first judge in the country to rule that the Trump administration had wrongly designated detainees as enemy aliens, finding the the government had presented nothing but unsubstantiated accusations against the DC-area couple that they were members of the Tren de Aragua gang. 'This Court takes clear offense to Respondents wasting judicial resources to admit to the Court it has no evidence,' Briones wrote. All of these new developments played out against the backdrop of an extraordinary March 14 memo by Attorney General Pam Bondi, obtained by USA Today, that expressly told law enforcement there would be no due process for Alien Enemies Act detainees. 'An alien determined to be an Alien Enemy and ordered removed under the Proclamation and 50 U.S.C. § 21 is not entitled to a hearing before an immigration judge, to an appeal of the removal order to the Board of Immigration Appeals, or to judicial review of the removal order in any court of the United States.' The Bondi memo – dated the same day as President Trump's Alien Enemies Act proclamation – was the administration's effort to operationalize the AEA detentions, which we now know had been underway for weeks and which would culminate with the notorious March 15 deportation flights. The Supreme Court has since rejected the argument that Alien Enemies Act detainees are not entitled to due process. But the Trump administration got the jump on the judiciary, and dozens of detainees remain imprisoned in El Salvador without having received due process. The effort to free them – and the mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia – is now grinding through the courts. If the brazen lawlessness in the deportation cases has a silver lining it's that it has quickly made plain to judges nationwide not just how much is at stake but how fast and loose the Trump administration is playing with the rule of law. A cynical view might be that the judiciary's awakening to the threat has made little difference, but that requires ignoring a growing body of court orders adverse to the administration, including some that have prompted it to retreat in key areas. Writing for the American Prospect, Maureen Tkacik has the backstory on MAGA turning Tren de Aragua into a propaganda set piece: How a Colorado slumlord's psyop turned into a brand-new 'forever war' on Venezuela The arrest of a sitting state Judge Hannah Dugan outside of her courthouse was a dramatic escalation of the Trump administration's two-pronged attack on the judiciary and sanctuary jurisdictions. While targeting a state judge for arrest for allegedly obstructing an attempt to detain a undocumented migrant doesn't raise the same constitutional concerns as defying federal court judges, the highly unusual handling of the case shows how it is part of a broader campaign of intimidation and eroding the rule of law. It bears noting that President Trump is expected to sign a new executive order today targeting sanctuary cities. Morning Memo will return to the underlying facts of the case in due time, but for now let's focus on the highly inappropriate public comments from top DOJ officials. FBI Director Kash Patel tweeted-deleted-reposted about the arrest Friday morning then went even further by posting a photo of the arrest on social media. Not normal, not appropriate, not okay. Attorney General Pam Bondi went further, appearing on Fox News to comment extensively about the case and engage in attacks on the defendant as well as the judiciary as a whole. These are the kinds of public statements about pending cases that are generally barred by DOJ policy and legal ethics rules. But Bondi paid them no heed in order to strut on a Trump-friendly media outlet: Mother Jones: Ed Martin Isn't Coming Clean About His Ties to an Alleged Nazi Sympathizer A federal judge sentenced former Rep. George Santos (R-NY) to 87 months in prison and ordered him to pay almost $374,000 in restitution and more than $200,000 in forfeitures in his campaign finance scheme. Prosecutors had sought an 87-month sentence. After his sentencing, Santos – who pleaded guilty – immediately began lobbying President Trump publicly for clemency. President Trump pardoned a Florida health care executive whose mother played a role in trying to expose the contents of Ashley Biden's diary, the NYT reports. The pardon comes just days after Paul Walczak was sentenced to 18 months in prison and ordered to pay nearly $4.4 million in restitution for his conviction in a tax case. ProPublica: Politically Connected Firms Benefit From Trump Tariff Exemptions Amid Secrecy, Confusion WSJ: Elite Universities Form Private Collective to Resist Trump Administration NYT: Emerging From a Collective Silence, Universities Organize to Fight Trump NYT: From Book Bans to Canceled Lectures, the Naval Academy Is Bending to Trump Anna Bower: 'A new court filing reveals the most compelling evidence yet that the government has been spinning a fiction about DOGE in federal court.' CNN: DOGE is building a master database for immigration enforcement, sources say The Atlantic, on the next phase of DOGE: 'Not only are individual agencies being breached, but the information they hold is being pooled together. The question is Why? And what does the administration intend to do with it?' NPR: Federal work shaped a Black middle class. Now it's destabilized by Trump's job cuts. NYT: A new study estimates that the sloppiness of the DOGE purges will cost the federal government roughly $135 billion this year. NPR: Some purged-reinstated-repurged federal workers find they're suddenly uninsured. Insider Higher Ed: Florida's Own DOGE Reviews Faculty Research, Grants NYT: Why Did a Charity Tied to Casey DeSantis Suddenly Get a $10 Million Boost? WaPo: DeSantis lashes out at Fla. GOP as questions build over wife's project 'They spent years watching Republicans illegitimately pack the Supreme Court, take away voting rights from people of color, systematically chip away at the constitutional order. Those same do-nothing Democrats want to blame our losses on our defense of Black people and trans kids and immigrants, instead of their own lack of guts and gumption.'–Gov. JB Pritzker (D-IL), on an early swing through New Hampshire. 60 Minutes confronted its corporate parent Paramount on the air last night over the loss of journalistic independence at the seminal TV news magazine. Paramount is eager to settle a bogus lawsuit against CBS News by Donald Trump so that it doesn't interfere with a merger for which the company needs federal regulatory approval. Scott Pelley did the honors:
Yahoo
27-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Another Judge Blocks Trump's Deportations Under 1798 Wartime Law
Another judge has blocked Donald Trump's deportations under a 200-year-old wartime law, which the president has wielded to carry out his campaign to rid America of undocumented immigrants. Senior U.S. District Judge David Briones, of the border city El Paso, has halted west Texas deportations under the Alien Enemies Act and ordered the release of a couple accused of being part of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang, according to the Associated Press. 'There is no doubt the Executive Branch's unprecedented peacetime use of wartime power has caused chaos and uncertainty for individual petitions as well as the judicial branch in how to manage and evaluate the Executive's claims of Tren de Aragua membership, and the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act as a whole,' wrote Briones, a nominee of former President Bill Clinton, in his ruling. Briones' ruling follows similar orders from courts in south Texas, Colorado, and New York—as well as that of Chief Judge James Boasberg, whose ruling Trump defied in March, kicking off a dire feud between the two men, which could see the president held in criminal contempt. Trump has used the 1798 law, which was passed by John Adams, to deport without due process hundreds of accused gang members to a mega-prison in El Salvador. The couple whose release Briones demanded are Julio Cesar Sanchez Puentes and Luddis Norelia Sanchez Garcia. They were arrested after their temporary legal status was terminated on April 1. They were taken into custody at the El Paso airport while attempting to return home to Washington, D.C., where they live with their three children.
Japan Today
26-04-2025
- Politics
- Japan Today
U.S. judge temporarily stops west Texas immigrant deportations under Alien Enemies Act
By JOHN RABY A federal judge in west Texas joined other courts in temporarily blocking the deportations of Venezuelan immigrants under an 18th-century wartime law known as the Alien Enemies Act. U.S. District Judge David Briones in El Paso, Texas, issued the ruling Friday while he ordered the release of a couple accused of being members of a Venezuelan criminal gang. Briones wrote that government lawyers 'have not demonstrated they have any lawful basis" to continue detaining the couple on a suspected alien enemy violation. A message left with an attorney for the couple wasn't immediately returned Saturday. The couple is accused of being part of Tren de Aragua, which the Trump administration has designated a foreign terrorist organization. Trump has invoked the Alien Enemies Act from 1798 that lets the president deport noncitizens 14 years or older who are from a country with which the U.S. is at war. Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked, for now, the deportations of any Venezuelans held in northern Texas under the act. The high court also ruled anyone being deported under Trump's declaration deserved a hearing in federal court first and are given 'a reasonable time' to contest their pending removals. Briones' ruling applies only to Venezuelan immigrants in federal custody in his judicial district. Federal judges in Colorado, south Texas and New York previously issued similar rulings. Briones ordered the government to give a 21-day notice before attempting to remove anyone in west Texas — in contrast to the 12 hours that the government contends is sufficient. The El Paso case comes as the Trump administration and local authorities clash over the president's sweeping immigration crackdown. Briones' ruling occurred the same day as the FBI's arrest of a Milwaukee judge accused of helping a man evade immigration authorities. Briones, who was nominated to the court in 1994 by President Bill Clinton, said that 'due process requirements for the removal of noncitizens are long established' under the Immigration and Nationality Act as well as previous U.S. Supreme Court rulings. 'There is no doubt the Executive Branch's unprecedented peacetime use of wartime power has caused chaos and uncertainty for individual petitions as well as the judicial branch in how to manage and evaluate the Executive's claims of Tren de Aragua membership, and the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act as a whole,' Briones wrote. The couple, Julio Cesar Sanchez Puentes and Luddis Norelia Sanchez Garcia, was granted temporary protected status after entering the United States from Mexico in October 2022. They were notified that their status was terminated on April 1. They were arrested April 16 at the El Paso airport as the couple prepared to return to their home in Washington, D.C., where they live with their three children. They had flown to Texas for an April 14 pretrial hearing related to removal proceedings. That case was continued until June 23, and the couple was allowed to remain free on bail, according to court documents. © Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Yahoo
26-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
‘Wasting Judicial Resources': Judge Shreds Trump Admin's Alien Enemies Act Case
Immigration and Customs Enforcement released a Venezuelan couple Friday after a federal judge in Texas ruled that the Trump administration's handling of their case did not have a 'lawful basis.' U.S. District Judge David Briones of El Paso wrote in a searing ruling that ICE had not demonstrated convincing evidence that Julio Cesar Sanchez Puentes and Luddis Norelia Sanchez Garcia, who were detained for nine days, are members of the Tren de Aragua gang and are therefore 'alien enemies.' This is the first case in which a judge ruled on the Trump administration's allegations that someone is a gang member subject to removal under the Alien Enemies Act. President Donald Trump has invoked the infamous 1798 wartime law and claimed he can use it to deport Venezuelan migrants whom his administration claims are members of a gang that he has declared to be a terrorist organization. This is the basis his administration has used to ship hundreds of Venezuelan migrants, without due process, to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador. Briones wrote in his decision that the allegations in Sanchez Puentes and Sanchez Garcia's case were based on 'multiple levels of hearsay, hidden within declarations of declarants who have no personal knowledge about the facts they are attesting to.' 'This court takes clear offense to respondents wasting judicial resources to admit to the court it has no evidence, yet seek to have this court determine petitioner Sanchez Puentes is 'guilty by association'' by being married to his wife, Briones wrote. Sanchez Puentes and Sanchez Garcia came to the U.S. with their three children in 2022. At the border wall, they turned themselves in to U.S. Border Patrol agents, according to the nonprofit news outlet El Paso Matters. They are in the country under protected temporary status with work permits and have applied for asylum. The couple, who live in the Washington, D.C. area, had come to El Paso over a misdemeanor charge over their entry into the country following a warrant issued this year. On April 14, a federal magistrate ruled that they could be free on bail until their court date in June, but they were arrested April 16 at El Paso International Airport. Briones wrote, 'It is clear as day that respondents have not demonstrated to this court by a 'preponderance of evidence,' let alone the required 'clear, unequivocal, and convincing' evidence that petitioner Sanchez Puentes is a member of TdA, nor that he is an 'alien enemy.'' The judge ruled that Sanchez Puentes cannot be designated an 'alien enemy,' and 'his continued confinement on these grounds is therefore unlawful. Petitioner Sanchez Puentes must be released.' Writing about the claims against Sanchez Garcia, Briones pointed out that Trump administration officials 'contradict themselves throughout the entire record. Respondents claim petitioner Sanchez Garcia is somehow both 'a money receiver and lookout' as well as a 'senior member of TdA.'' 'Respondents ask this court to accept their claims, going off of nearly nothing, to substantiate their mammoth claims that Petitioner Sanchez Garcia is a 'senior member,' or perhaps just a 'member,' or maybe at the least an 'affiliate' of TdA,' the judge wrote. 'The court would not accept this evidence even in a case where only nominal damages were at stake, let alone what is at stake here.' Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at American Immigration Council, posted on X, 'This is the first case testing ICE's allegations that someone was in Tren de Aragua and thus subject to the Alien Enemies Act — and ICE utterly failed the test!' This is not the first time this year that the couple was arrested and detained. In March, a federal judge ordered their release as well. Earlier in March, a Magistrate Judge referred to the case as 'odd.' The Trump administration subsequently attempted to deport them under the Alien Enemies Act. 'They have gone through four different judges, none of whom thought they should be detained,' the couple's attorney, Chris Benoit, told El Paso Matters. 'They have deep ties to their community in the United States. They have three minor children. They've been living peacefully in our country since 2022.' 'The court ruling made clear they should not have been designated alien enemies. The consequences of that are drastic because if they were successful, César would be facing a life sentence in a brutal El Salvadoran prison. We don't know where Norelia would be, but we believe it would be in fairly similar circumstances,' he added. The Trump administration has invoked the Alien Enemies Act to deport supposed Venezuelan gang members to a prison in El Salvador. A judge issued an order blocking the deportations, but the Trump administration carried them out anyway. The Alien Enemies Act was previously used to justify Japanese internment during World War II. Briones also issued an injunction that blocked the Trump administration from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport anyone in the Western District of Texas without 21 days notice. More from Rolling Stone Zelensky Urges Trump Not to Surrender to Russia 'I Was Taken Hostage': How an American Metal Rocker Landed in Russian Prison Trump Has Now Deported Multiple U.S. Citizen Children With Cancer Best of Rolling Stone The Useful Idiots New Guide to the Most Stoned Moments of the 2020 Presidential Campaign Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal The Radical Crusade of Mike Pence
