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Yahoo
22-07-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump's border czar to target sanctuary cities in US: ‘We're gonna flood the zone'
The Trump administration is targeting sanctuary cities in the next phase of its deportation drive after labelling them 'sanctuaries for criminals' following the shooting of an off-duty law enforcement officer in New York City, allegedly by an undocumented person with a criminal record. Tom Homan, Donald Trump's hardline border czar, vowed to 'flood the zone' with Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (Ice) agents in an all-out bid to overcome the lack of cooperation he said the government faced from Democrat-run municipalities in its quest to arrest and detain undocumented people. His pledge followed the arrest of two undocumented men from the Dominican Republic after a Customs and Border Protection officer suffered gunshot wounds to the arm and face in an apparent robbery attempt in New York's Riverside park on Saturday night. New York is one of several self-designated 'sanctuary cities' across the US, called so because the mayors and local councils have prevented law officers under their control from collaborating with federal immigration officers working on Trump's mass deportation scheme. Homan – who has previously threatened to arrest mayors if they impede Ice's arrest efforts – said: 'Every sanctuary city is unsafe. Sanctuary cities are sanctuaries for criminals and President Trump's not going to tolerate it. 'I'm going to work very hard … to keep President Trump's promise and his commitment several weeks ago that sanctuary cities are now our priority. We're going to flood the zone. 'What we're going to do [is deploy] more agents in New York City to look for that bad guy so sanctuary cities get exactly what they don't want – more agents in the community and more agents in the worksite. 'If we can't arrest that bad guy in the safety and security of the county jail, we'll arrest him in the community. And when we arrest him in the community, if he's with others that are in the country illegally, they are coming too.' Homan's comments came at a news conference fronted by Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, focusing on the incident in New York, which left the unnamed customs and border protection officer in hospital. The 42-year-old agent was off duty and sitting with a female companion when he was reportedly approached by two men on a scooter shortly before midnight. The officer was not in uniform and police said there was no indication that he was targeted because of his occupation. An exchange of gunfire ensued when the officer withdrew his service weapon, apparently in self-defense. A suspect, Miguel Francisco Mora Nunez, was later taken in to custody after turning up at a hospital in the Bronx with gunshot wounds to the leg and groin. Noem said the episode was a direct result of the sanctuary city policy adopted by New York's mayor, Eric Adams, as well as the approach to border security adopted during Joe Biden's presidency. 'Make no mistake, this officer is in the hospital today, fighting for his life, because of the policies of the mayor of the city and the city council and the people that were in charge of keeping the public safe, they refused to do so,' she said. The criticism of Adams came despite widespread reports of a deal made between him and the Trump administration that involved New York giving greater cooperation than before on immigration. The agreement was reached as the justice department moved to dismiss federal corruption charges against Adams, although the mayor has insisted there was no quid pro quo. Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles have also suffered crime waves through sanctuary city policies, according to Noem. 'We look at Mayor [Michelle] Wu in Boston and what has happened there under her watch,' she said. 'What's happened in LA with the riots and the violence and the protest that have gone on because of Mayor [Karen] Bass and what she has perpetuated. 'When you look at Mayor [Brandon] Johnson in Chicago, and how devastating it is to live in that city and some of those poorest communities, how they suffer every single day with the violence that's in front of them. Just because these individuals are protecting criminals.' She also highlighted Nunez – who she said had been arrested four times since entering the US illegally in 2023 – as well as his accomplice, Christhian Aybar-Berroa, saying he had 'entered the country illegally in 2022 under the Biden administration and was ordered for final removal in 2023 by an immigration judge. 'There's absolutely zero reason that someone who is scum of the earth like this should be running loose on the streets of New York City,' Noem said, referring to Nunez. 'Arrested four different times in New York City and because of the mayor's policies and was released back to do harm to people and to individuals living in the city.' Homan criticised media reports suggesting that the majority of those detained were not criminals. 'I look at the numbers every day,' he said. 'The numbers I looked at [are] 130,000 arrests and 90,000 criminals. Do the math. That's 70%. Others are those who have final orders, who had due process at great taxpayer expense. A federal judge ordered them removed. Ice's job is to remove them.' Others were national security threats, he said. 'Under Secretary Noem's leadership, they've arrested several hundred Iranian nationals, national security threats. They may not have a criminal conviction, but they need to be detained. They need to be arrested and taken off the streets of this country.' The best public interest journalism relies on first-hand accounts from people in the know. If you have something to share on this subject you can contact us confidentially using the following methods. Secure Messaging in the Guardian app The Guardian app has a tool to send tips about stories. Messages are end to end encrypted and concealed within the routine activity that every Guardian mobile app performs. This prevents an observer from knowing that you are communicating with us at all, let alone what is being said. If you don't already have the Guardian app, download it (iOS/Android) and go to the menu. Select 'Secure Messaging'. SecureDrop, instant messengers, email, telephone and post See our guide at for alternative methods and the pros and cons of each.
Yahoo
22-07-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump news at a glance: immigration agents to ‘flood' US sanctuary cities as marines withdraw from LA
The Trump administration is targeting US sanctuary cities in the next phase of its deportation drive, after an off-duty law enforcement officer was allegedly shot in New York City by an undocumented person with a criminal record. Tom Homan, Donald Trump's hardline border tsar, vowed to 'flood the zone' with Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (Ice) agents, saying: 'Every sanctuary city is unsafe. Sanctuary cities are sanctuaries for criminals and President Trump's not going to tolerate it.' In Los Angeles, meanwhile, 700 active-duty US marines was being withdrawn, the Pentagon confirmed, more than a month after Trump deployed them to the city against the objections of local leaders. Here's more on these and the day's other key Trump administration stories at a glance. Trump's border tsar to target US sanctuary cities Tom Homan has vowed to 'flood the zone' of sanctuary cities with Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (Ice) agents in an all-out bid to overcome the lack of cooperation he said the government faced from Democrat-run municipalities in its quest to arrest and detain undocumented people. The pledge from Donald Trump's hardline border tsar followed the arrest of two undocumented men from the Dominican Republic after an off-duty Customs and Border Protection officer suffered gunshot wounds in an apparent robbery attempt in New York City on Saturday night. Read the full story 700 active-duty marines withdrawn from LA The Pentagon confirmed to the Guardian on Monday that the full deployment of 700 active-duty US marines was being withdrawn from Los Angeles more than a month after Donald Trump deployed them to the city in a move state and city officials called unnecessary and provocative. Read the full story Trump tax bill to add $3.4tn to US debt over next decade The president's signature tax and spending bill will add $3.4tn to the national debt over the next decade, according to new analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released on Monday. Major cuts to Medicaid and the national food stamps program are estimated to save the country $1.1tn – only a chunk of the $4.5tn in lost revenue that will come from the bill's tax cuts. Read the full story Legal group asks DoJ to look into 'illegal DEI practices' at Johns Hopkins A legal group founded by Trump adviser Stephen Miller has requested the justice department investigate 'illegal DEI practices' at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. In a letter to the justice department's civil rights division, America First Legal asked an assistant attorney general to investigate and issue enforcement actions against the prestigious medical university for embracing 'a discriminatory DEI regime as a core institutional mandate'. Read the full story Hundreds of Nasa workers rebuke 'arbitrary' Trump cuts Almost 300 current and former US Nasa employees – including at least four astronauts – have issued a scathing dissent opposing the Trump administration's sweeping and indiscriminate cuts to the agency, which they say threaten safety, innovation and national security. Read the full story Trump officials release FBI records on MLK Jr The Trump administration has released records of the FBI's surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr, despite opposition from the slain Nobel laureate's family and the civil rights group that he led until his 1968 assassination. Read the full story Epstein accuser urged FBI to investigate Trump decades ago – report An artist who first accused Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell of sexual assault almost three decades ago has told the New York Times that she had urged law enforcement officials back then to investigate powerful people in their orbit – including Donald Trump. The artist, Maria Farmer, was among the first women to report Epstein and his partner Maxwell of sexual crimes in 1996 when, according to the new interview with the Times, she also identified Trump among others close to Epstein as worthy of attention. Read the full story Harvard argues Trump's $2.6bn cuts are illegal Harvard University appeared in federal court on Monday to make the case that the Trump administration illegally cut $2.6bn from the college – a major test of the administration's efforts to reshape higher education institutions by threatening their financial viability. Read the full story What else happened today: Michael Bloomberg is calling on Senate Republicans to oust Robert F Kennedy Jr from his post as Trump's health secretary. The US Federal Reserve is pushing back against claims from the White House that it is undergoing extravagant renovations with a video tour showing the central bank's ongoing construction. Hunter Biden gave a profanity-laced interview during which he attacked George Clooney, denied owning the cocaine found in the White House and spoke about his father's last efforts in the 2024 race before dropping out. Catching up? Here's what happened on .
Yahoo
02-07-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump's ‘Alligator Alcatraz' tour was a calculated celebration of the dystopian
Donald Trump's tour of the bloodcurdlingly-monikered – and hastily-constructed – 'Alligator Alcatraz' migrants detention center in Florida's Everglades had the hallmarks of a calculatedly provocative celebration of the dystopian. Accompanied by Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, the Florida governor Ron DeSantis and a phalanx of journalists, the US president saw only virtue in the vista of mesh fencing, barbed wire and forbidding steel bunk beds. 'Between Kristi and Ron, it's really government working together,' he said. 'They have done an amazing job. I'm proud of them.' Not that Trump was blind to the intimidating nature of the facility his long crusade against undocumented people had willed into existence in this hot, steamy part of southern Florida, prized by environmentalists as a crucial nature preserve but now redesigned to be a location of dread to those lacking documentary proof of their right to be in the US. 'Biden wanted me in here,' he said, snidely referring to his predecessor in the White House, who he accuses – without evidence – of orchestrating criminal prosecutions against him. 'It didn't work out that way, but he wanted me in here, the son of a bitch.' Tuesday's visit seemed to represent a new landmark in the administration's embrace of unabashedly authoritarian solutions to meet what has been Trump's defining issue since even before his first term: migration. Recent weeks have seen several escalations as the White House and law enforcement agencies have sought to project an ever more draconian approach. Deaths have been recorded of several detainees who had been taken into custody by Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (Ice) officials. Footage of masked officers without insignia arresting people in the streets has sent shockwaves through immigrant communities nationwide. National guards troops and marines have been deployed against demonstrators protesting migrant roundups on the streets of Los Angeles, even as local authorities and California's Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, insisted they were not needed. In what has seemed like performative acts of political intimidation, several Democrats have been arrested and handcuffed by Ice and FBI agents near detention facilities or immigration courts. Senator Alex Padillaof California was pinned to the ground and handcuffed after trying to ask a question of Noem at a press conference, even after identifying himself. The administration's schtick was clear when Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador and self-proclaimed 'world's coolest dictator', was feted in the White House in April days after more than 200 Venezuelan alleged gang members were summarily deported from the US to the sprawling Cecot facility in El Salvador. Shortly afterwards, Noem compounded the message by traveling to the center – said to have capacity for 40,000 prisoners – where she posed outside a cell into which large numbers shaven-headed detainees were herded. All of the this has drawn howls of condemnation from critics as signaling red flags for the state of US democracy and constitutional guarantees. Tuesday's event indicated the strength of the administration's contempt for such concerns. It was case of all-in on the Bukele approach, at least in imagery if not in scale. Enough beds have been installed in two separate areas of the facility to house 5,000 prisoners. Seized from its owners, Miami Dade county, by DeSantis using emergency powers as governor, the setting has drawn accusations of cruelty from immigrants rights organizations who point to the area's extreme heat and humidity and surrounding marshlands, which contains alligators, Burmese pythons and swarms of mosquitoes. Trump seemed to revel in the potential for detainees' misery at what was termed a round-table discussion but which devolved into fawning praise of his leadership from administration and state officials and obsequious questions from journalists representing friendly rightwing news outlets. 'It might be as good as the real Alcatraz site,' he said. 'That's a spooky one too, isn't it? That's a tough site.' As if in confirmation that this was an event designed to showcase ruthlessness, Trump handed the floor to Stephen Miller, the powerful White House deputy chief of staff and widely-acknowledged mastermind of the anti-immigrant offensive, calling him 'our superstar'. Miller responded with a pithy summation of the policy's raison d'être. 'What you've done over the last five months [is] to deliver on a 50-year hope and dream of the American people to secure the border,' he said. 'There's a 2,000 mile border with one of the poorest countries in the world, and you have open travel from 150 countries into Central America and South America. 'There are 2 billion people in the world that would economically benefit from illegally coming to the United States. Through the deployment of the military, through … novel legal and diplomatic tools, through the building of physical infrastructure, through the empowering of Ice and border patrol and the entire federal law enforcement apparatus, President Trump achieved absolute border security.' And there would be more to come – courtesy of funds secured for deportations in Trump's sweeping spending bill, which secured narrow Senate passage during Trump's visit to the facility. Related: Trump celebrates harsh conditions for detainees on visit to 'Alligator Alcatraz' 'Once this legislation is passed, he will be able to make that, with those resources, permanent,' Miller said. PBS reported that the bill envisions roughly $150bn being spent on the administration's deportation agenda over the next four years. Taking the soft cop line, Noem on Tuesday told undocumented people that it didn't have to be this way; they could still, to use the administration's terminology, take the 'self-deport' option by returning voluntarily to their home countries – where she said the governments were waiting with open arms. 'Anybody who sees these news clips should know you could still go home on your own, you can self-deport,' she said, adding that they could apply to return to the United States 'the right way'. A more telling attitude to accountability was displayed by Trump himself at the end of the media question and answer session when a Fox News reporter asked how long detainees could expect to spend at the Florida facility – days, weeks or months. After clarifying the question, Trump seemed – or perhaps decided – to misunderstand it. 'This is my home state,' he said. 'I love it … I'll spend a lot of time here. I'll be here as much as I can. Very nice question.'
New York Post
10-06-2025
- Politics
- New York Post
LA official is relieved Trump is doing what mayor and governor won't
Stop! Los Angeles is burning, devastated, brought to its knees by pro-immigration rioters fueled by unspeakable politicians bent on defending sexual criminals, drug traffickers and all manner of maniac being detained and deported by agents of the US Immigration, Customs and Enforcement agency. But not everyone in the state of California wants to see the once-glorious City of Angels destroyed by the mob, looted into poverty, burned to the ground as the Democratic mayor and governor cheer. Advertisement 'I would like to publicly thank President Trump for sending the National Guard to save us in Los Angeles,'' Ana Carril-Grumberg, elected to a neighborhood council in downtown LA, told me. Ana Carril-Grumberg, a member of downtown LA's neighborhood council, said she is grateful to President Trump for sending in the National Guard during the anti-ICE riot. Ana Carril-Grumberg Since this past weekend, she's witnessed fires raging out of control, violent clashes between protesters and cops, all while the mayor, governor and clueless members of the mainstream media denounce the president for his efforts to quell the mob and protect the citizenry — 77,000 of whom call her district home. Advertisement 'Once again, like during the wildfires of January 2025, when Mayor Karen Bass chose to go to Ghana to party, she allowed our communities to burn. Today she once again proves total incompetence, and runs a deeply corrupt administration. She is a danger to our city and does not care at all about us,' Carril-Grumberg said. She had equally harsh words for California Governor Gavin Newsom. California National Guard members stationed in downtown Los Angeles on June 9, 2025. Toby Canham for NY Post Earth to demented leaders: Your people are suffering. So what do you do? Advertisement It's a specious claim that Trump is 'creating'' the very real fear and terror overtaking LA. Far from being 'manufactured,'' the crisis is real. If the governor and others had simply done their jobs on behalf of the people of California, perhaps the city wouldn't be in this mess. And Ana Carril-Grumberg would not have to rely on the president of the United States to save her city.
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Anti-sanctuary city bill heads to governor's desk
A decade-long campaign by Republican legislative leaders and governors to outlaw sanctuary city policies in New Hampshire reached the bill-drafting finish line Thursday. By a party line vote, the state Senate voted 15-8 to endorse a House-passed bill (HB 511) that would prevent any city or town from adopting an ordinance that stated its local law enforcement could not cooperate with federal Immigration, Customs and Enforcement officials inquiring about a possible, illegal immigrant. The final actions have presented Gov. Kelly Ayotte with three bills to sign on the topic which also include: • The Senate's cooperate with feds bill (SB 71): This would keep local officials from blocking police or correction officials from signing pacts with federal immigration authorities under Section 287G Task Force Agreement. • Senate's anti-sanctuary city bill (SB 62): Last week, the House of Representative decided to combine this bill with the one above dealing with cooperation with federal officials. In a statement, Ayotte suggested she's looking forward to signing them all. 'By banning sanctuary cities, we're ensuring New Hampshire doesn't go the way of Massachusetts and their billion-dollar illegal immigrant crisis,' Ayotte said. 'Thank you to the House and Senate for sending these bills to my desk — together, we're keeping our great state the safest in the nation.' State Police, sheriffs in three counties and police in six towns have already applied or received approval from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for the cooperative agreements with Gov. Ayotte's blessing. Legally, the governor could sign all of these and the last one she signed would undo any conflicts with the two bills she previously signed. Safety with justice and fairness House and Senate supporters insist all three bills are compatible with one another. Senate Majority Leader Regina Birdsell, R-Hampstead, recalled as a new state senator in 2016 she had authored one of the first bills against sanctuary cities. 'This Legislature has never given local authorities (the power) to ignore federal law,' Birdsell said. 'I never thought this would be controversial. I never thought this would take us nearly a decade to get this through.' Sen. Tara Reardon, D-Concord, said relationships local police departments have worked on for years with their legal immigrant communities could worsen. 'I believe in fairness, due process and human dignity and I am deeply concerned about the practices and policies that seem to try to sidestep these principles,' Reardon said. 'We all want safe communities, but that safety must be rooted in justice and fairness.' Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Bill Gannon, R-Sandown, has held down point for this issue in the Senate for the past four years. Former Gov. Chris Sununu had also supported the cause, but in 2023 the narrowly divided House of Representatives rejected a final deal on the issue by a small margin. What's Next: All three bills must go through the enrolling stage where legislative lawyers ensure there aren't any technical flaws in them before they go onto the Ayotte's desk. Prospects: The only unknown is the date and time that Ayotte will choose for a photo opportunity signing ceremony for the bills. klandrigan@
