Author: potus

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man whose erroneous deportation to El Salvador became a protracted battle over due process and a test of wills, was returned to the United States to face human smuggling charges in Tennessee and appeared in federal court Friday.Attorney General Pam Bondi said Friday in a news conference that he had landed in the U.S. “to face justice.” Abrego Garcia, 29, has been named in an indictment charging him with transporting within the U.S. people not legally in the country. The two-count indictment, sealed by a Tennessee court last month, alleges that Abrego Garcia participated in…

Protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles have triggered a flood of falsehoods and misleading images on social media, and Russia has sought to exploit and amplify the disinformation, experts say.Russian media and pro-Russian voices have embraced right-wing conspiracy theories about the protests, including one that alleged the Mexican government was encouraging the demonstrations against President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. Mexico has strongly rejected the accusation — which was repeated by Trump’s chief of homeland security — as utterly false.The episode illustrates how foreign adversaries are taking advantage of genuine divisions among Americans, a tried-and-true strategy in information warfare, analysts…

Nationals of the following 12 countries will be blocked from entering the United States: Afghanistan, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, the Republic of Congo, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.In addition, nationals of seven other countries will be barred from coming into the United States permanently or under several visa programs: Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.The executive order goes into effect at 12:01 am ET.Addressing reporters Thursday at the White House alongside German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Trump said he implemented the new ban now because “it can’t come soon enough.”“Frankly, we want to keep bad…

It was approaching nightfall in Los Angeles on Sunday when black-clad demonstrators began to torch a row of self-driving Waymo taxis. Within minutes, videos of the fiery scenes began to pop up on social media. “MORE. MORE AND MORE AND MORE,” a group known as Unity of Fields posted on X, along with a video of the flaming vehicles. The post wasn’t an anomaly. Since the start of the demonstrations against immigration raids in Los Angeles, the Unity of Fields X account has been pumping out messages urging people to wreak havoc in the streets and “give ’em hell.”The California…

Views of the U.S. and confidence in its leader to handle world affairs have taken a dive in more than a dozen countries over the last year, according to a poll from the Pew Research Center released Wednesday and conducted over the first few months of President Donald Trump’s second term.These declines are most pronounced among residents in neighboring Mexico and Canada, which have been at the center of high-profile spats with the administration, as well as a handful of NATO countries (like Sweden, Poland and the Netherlands) amid it Russia’s war with Ukraine.Public sentiment about the U.S. has gone…

WASHINGTON — National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, an outspoken critic of past U.S. military interventions abroad, appears to have fallen out of favor with President Donald Trump as he weighs military action against Iran, according to multiple senior administration officials with knowledge of the matter.Gabbard allies insist that, while there is some White House tension, some of the public blowback is overstated, and none interviewed by NBC News expect her to leave the administration as a result of the president’s Iran policy, even if that includes direct U.S. involvement. Gabbard’s politically perilous position burst into the open this week when…

Immigration and Customs Enforcement made the most immigrant arrests in a single day in its history Tuesday, detaining more than 2,200 people, according to a source familiar with the arrests and an ICE spokesperson who confirmed the numbers, as the agency responds to pressure from the White House to rapidly and dramatically increase arrests. Hundreds of the people who were arrested had been enrolled in ICE’s Alternative to Detention (ATD) program, three sources familiar with the arrests said. Under the program, ICE releases undocumented immigrants who are deemed not to be threats to public safety and then keeps track of…

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said he was “uninvited” to an annual White House picnic typically attended by members of Congress and their families, framing the move to reporters Wednesday as retribution for his opposition to key components of President Donald Trump’s agenda.“They’re afraid of what I’m saying, so they think they’re going to punish me, I can’t go to the picnic, as if somehow that’s going to make me more conciliatory,” Paul said. “So it’s silly, in a way, but it’s also just really sad that this is what it’s come to. But petty vindictiveness like this, it makes you…

After Israeli and American forces struck Iranian nuclear targets, officials in both countries sounded the alarm over potentially disruptive cyberattacks carried out by the Islamic Republic’s hackers. But as a fragile ceasefire holds, cyber defenders in the United States and Israel say they have so far seen little out of the ordinary — a potential sign that the threat from Iran’s cyber capabilities, like its battered military, has been overestimated.There has been no indication of the disruptive cyberattacks often invoked during discussions of Iran’s digital capabilities, such as its alleged sabotage of tens of thousands of computers at major oil…

A recent memo to immigration judges obtained by NBC News provides fresh insight into how the Trump administration is pulling off a new tactic — dismissing pending immigration cases, then immediately moving to arrest the immigrants — that is part of its bid to quickly increase the number of immigrants it is detaining.In the memo, the Justice Department instructs immigration judges, who report to the executive branch and are not part of the independent judiciary, to allow Department of Homeland Security lawyers to make motions to dismiss orally and then move quickly to grant those dismissals, rather than allow immigrants…