Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams

Demands for accountability are mounting after internal records revealed this week that an officer with Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations fatally shot Ruben Ray Martinez, a 23-year-old US citizen, almost a year ago in South Padre Island, Texas.

“While Martinez’s death was reported in local media at the time, the reports did not identify HSI involvement or disclose that a federal agent fired the shots through the driver-side window,” Newsweek reported, citing publicly available information and records obtained by American Oversight through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

“It shouldn’t take 11 months and a FOIA lawsuit to learn that the government killed someone,” American Oversight said on social media late Friday. Separately, the watchdog noted that “the details sound similar to the death of Renee Good,” a 37-year-old US citizen and mother of three fatally shot by officer Jonathan Ross last month in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Good’s killing, and two Customs and Border Protection agents’ subsequent fatal shooting of 37-year-old US citizen and nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, have fueled outrage over President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda, resulting in a congressional funding fight that has partially shut down the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees both agencies.

ICE’s internal report on the Texas shooting states that HSI agents were helping redirect traffic at the site of a major accident early on March 15, 2025. Martinez and his passengers aren’t named, but the document claims that the driver of a blue four-door Ford “failed to follow instructions,” including verbal commands to stop and exit the vehicle.

Instead, the driver “accelerated forward, striking a HSI special agent who wound up on the hood of the vehicle. Upon observing this, HSI group supervisory special agent utilized his government-issued service weapon, discharging multiple rounds at the driver through the open driver’s side window,” according to the ICE report—a version of events that a DHS spokesperson echoed in a Friday statement added to the Newsweek article, which was initially published Wednesday.

The DHS spokesperson also said that the incident remains under investigation by the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Ranger Division, whose press secretary, Sheridan Nolen, confirmed that “this is still an active investigation by the Texas Rangers, and no other information is currently available.”

Charles Stam, a lawyer for the Martinez family, told the New York Times that the 23-year-old was the driver in the ICE report. Stam and another attorney, Alex Stamm, also said in a statement that eyewitness accounts of the scene don’t match the document.

“It is critical that there is a full and fair investigation into why HSI was present at the scene of a traffic collision and why a federal officer shot and killed a US citizen as he was trying to comply with instructions from the local law enforcement officers directing traffic,” the lawyers said.

The Times also reached Martinez’s mother, Rachel Reyes, who said her son worked at an Amazon warehouse in San Antonio and was out to celebrate his birthday. According to her: “He was a good kid. He doesn’t have a criminal history... He never got in trouble. He was never violent.”

Reyes also challenged the federal government’s narrative, telling the newspaper: “What they’re saying is different from what they told the family, so that’s adding insult to injury... They are making it sound different. I don’t appreciate their language.”

In a Friday interview with the Texas Tribune, American Oversight executive director Chioma Chukwu also called out the government: “What they’re telling the public is very different than what they’re doing behind closed doors. The only reason why we’re able to make these connections and really call into question the public statements that they’re making to mislead the public is because we’re able to get our hands on these documents... That should deeply concern everyone.”

The revelations this week have generated concern. André Treiber, the Democratic National Committee’s Youth Coordinating Council chair, wrote on social media Friday evening that “ICE murdered a Texan last March and we are only just learning about it now. They are once again offering the excuse that this was done in self-defense, but forgive me if I am extremely skeptical after they’ve been caught lying about that exact same thing multiple times already.”

Federal lawmakers also sounded the alarm on Friday. Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas) declared that “Americans deserve immediate answers and an independent investigation of the shooting.” Another Texas Democrat, Congressman Joaquin Castro, similarly called for “a full investigation,” including into the monthslong “cover-up.”

US Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), whose Chicagoland district has also faced a recent ICE invasion, pointed to other deaths tied to the agency, including those of Silverio Villegas Gonzalez, who was shot by ICE in the Chicago suburb of Franklin Park last September; Keith Porter Jr., who was shot by an off-duty agent on New Year’s Eve in Los Angeles, California; and Linda Davis, a special education teacher in Savannah, Georgia, who was killed in a Monday car crash that involved a man fleeing ICE.

“For a whole year, DHS hid that they murdered Ruben, a young man in Texas, after a traffic stop. Just like they did with Silverio, Renee, Keith, Alex, and Linda, they lied and avoided accountability,” said Ramirez, who supports abolishing ICE. “How many more people have to be executed before my colleagues realize that reforms are not enough?”

Rights advocates are sounding the alarm over a new US Department of Homeland Security memorandum that puts legal refugees across the United States at risk of arrest as part of President Donald Trump’s sweeping anti-immigrant agenda.

The US Department of Justice submitted the memo to a federal judge in the lead-up to a Thursday preliminary injunction hearing about DHS arrests of refugees in Minnesota, where Trump recently sent thousands of immigration agents who were subsequently accused of various acts of violence, including fatally shooting citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

The document was first reported on Wednesday by Law Dork‘s Chris Geidner, who has unsuccessfully fought to make such filings available remotely. Right now, for this case, they are only available at the federal courthouse in Minnesota.

While the Trump administration claims it is ending “Operation Metro Surge” and removing most Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who have terrorized the Twin Cities, the arrest policy detailed in the memo overhauls a long-standing interpretation of federal law for the entire country.

As American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick laid out on social media Thursday: “Refugees are people vetted overseas by US Refugee Officers through an often yearslong process. They enter the country legally and on a path to citizenship. Refugees are required to apply for a green card one year after they arrive, but they CANNOT apply earlier than that.”

The Wednesday memo from US Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joseph Edlow and ICE acting Director Todd Lyons states that after being in the country for a year, refugees “must return, or be returned,” to DHS custody “for inspection and examination for admission” as a green-card holder, officially called a lawful permanent resident.

“If the refugee does not voluntarily return, DHS will return the individual to custody (i.e., arrest and detain) for this purpose... DHS may maintain custody for the duration of the inspection and examination process,” the memo continues, adding that the detention period “is not indefinite, but also is not limited to merely 48 hours.”

Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Global Refuge, declared in a Thursday statement that “this unprecedented policy weaponizes a routine administrative milestone as a pretext for detention.”

“These are families the United States government already screened more rigorously than any other category of immigrant,” she stressed. “Only after years of background checks, biometric screenings, and in-person interviews were they invited to rebuild their lives here. To now subject them to arrest and open-ended detention is a stunning betrayal of both our legal commitments and our moral compass.”

DHS is claiming—in the memo and on social media, in response to new reporting—that the Refugee Act of 1980 requires the policy. Reichlin-Melnick emphasized that “reaching this conclusion required overturning decades-old interpretations.”

“In a section of the memo that is truly Orwellian, the Trump [administration] says it’s REFUGEES who have a ‘misguided belief’ about the law—even though its policy is a brand new interpretation of a 45-year-old law—and so it’s THEIR fault they’re traumatized when ICE comes to jail them,” he noted.

“Making matters worse, the Trump [administration] is REFUSING to adjudicate green-card applications for refugees who come from one of the 39 countries Trump banned,” Reichlin-Melnick added. “So under this policy, a refugee who applies for a green card exactly on time, doing nothing wrong, can be jailed by ICE.”

The International Refugee Assistance Project is representing refugees in the Minnesota case. IRAP‘s vice president of US legal programs, Laurie Ball Cooper, told CNN that “this memo is part of a broad and concerted effort to strip refugees of their legal status and render them deportable... This government will clearly stop at nothing to terrorize refugee communities, and really all immigrants, while trampling over our constitutional rights.”

Beth Oppenheim, CEO of HIAS, the world’s oldest refugee agency, agreed that “this policy is a transparent effort to detain and potentially deport thousands of people who are legally present in this country, people the US government itself welcomed after years of extreme vetting.”

“I have never seen anything like this in my 25 years of refugee protection work,” Oppenheim said. “This memo was done in secret, with zero coordination with the organizations that serve refugees. It is a betrayal of our values and our legal commitments, and it will cause extraordinary harm.”

Vignarajah also described the memo as “a broad attempt to redefine refugee status as conditional and revocable at will,” and argued that “you do not welcome families fleeing war and persecution under one set of rules and then move the goalposts after they arrive.”

Calling for “lawful, humane, consistent treatment of refugees and allies,” AfghanEvac similarly said on social media that “you cannot invite people under one set of rules and move the goalposts after they arrive.”

As an adviser to President Donald Trump told Axios that “I think there is 90% chance we see kinetic action” against Iran in the next few weeks following nuclear talks in Switzerland, US military movement on Wednesday fueled fears of an imminent attack on the Middle Eastern country.

Multiple open-source intelligence accounts on social media shared images of what OSINTdefender called “one of the busiest days for the US Air Force in Europe that I have seen in recent history, with close to a dozen KC-135R/T Stratotankers airborne across the Mediterranean and off the coast of Spain, while a steady line of C-17A Globemaster IIIs can be seen heading towards and returning from bases in the Middle East.”

Sharing a similar image showing North America, Europe, and the top of Africa, intelligence analyst Oliver Alexander declared on X that “the tankers just keep coming.”

Greek economist and Progressive International co-founder Yanis Varoufakis responded to that post with a clear message directed at Trump—who notably abandoned the United States’ previous nuclear deal with Iran during his first term.

“Looks like an imminent US strike is in train as US tanker planes are heading eastwards. HANDS OFF IRAN Mr. TRUMP,” he said. “And to the rest of us: Let’s do whatever it takes to oppose another war crime—this time against the Iranian people.”

Also spotlighting the US military movements on Wednesday, progressive US political commentator and talk show host Kyle Kulinski nodded to Trump’s deadly invasion of Venezuela last month to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and hand over the South American country’s nationalized oil industry to his US campaign donors.

A US attack on Iran by “imperialist warmonger Trump” would be “another illegal and offensive war against a country that didn’t attack us,” Kulinski said.

The observed military movements came just hours after Axios not only published the Trump official’s remark about a 90% chance of war, but also reported that “a US military operation in Iran would likely be a massive, weekslong campaign that would look more like full-fledged war than last month’s pinpoint operation in Venezuela,” according to unnamed sources who “noted it would likely be a joint US-Israeli campaign.”

In the Middle East, “Trump’s armada has grown to include two aircraft carriers, a dozen warships, hundreds of fighter jets, and multiple air defense systems. Some of that firepower is still on its way,” the outlet highlighted. “More than 150 US military cargo flights have moved weapons systems and ammunition to the Middle East. Just in the past 24 hours, another 50 fighter jets—F-35s, F-22s, and F-16s—headed to the region.”

The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that leaders in Iran “want to reach a nuclear deal with the US, but they are also rushing to prepare for war in case talks between the countries fail,” including by “deploying its forces, dispersing decision-making authority, fortifying its nuclear sites, and expanding its crackdown on domestic dissent.”

As the newspaper detailed:

A Russian warship arrived at the Strait of Hormuz and docked at the Iranian port town of Bandar Abbas ahead of a military exercise planned for Thursday, according to Iranian and Russian state-run media.

The exercises are taking place not far from the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, which is sailing off the coast of Oman.

“More dangerous than the American warship is the weapon that can send it to the bottom of the sea,” Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, said Tuesday.

While Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said this week’s “constructive” talks with Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner concluded with “a general agreement on some guiding principles,” US Vice President JD Vance contributed to rising concerns on Tuesday as he discussed the ayatollah’s remarks, negotiations, and regional military buildup on Fox News.

“I think the president has a lot of options. We do have a very powerful military. The president’s shown a willingness to use it. He also has a remarkable diplomatic team and he’s shown a willingness to use that too,” Vance said. “The United States has certain red lines. Our primary interest here is we don’t want Iran to get a nuclear weapon.”

Vance, who noted that he spoke directly with Witkoff and Kushner earlier Tuesday, claimed that the administration wants a resolution reached through conversation but also stressed that Trump “has all options on the table.”

Appearing on Democracy Now! Wednesday, Trita Parsi, co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and an expert on US-Iranian relations, warned that “we have a very dangerous situation, because both sides actually believe that a short, intense war may improve their negotiating position. The Trump administration, of course, believes that because of its overwhelming military power that it has now gathered in the vicinity of Iran, it will be able to take out Iran militarily rather quickly and then force it to capitulate.”

“The Iranians have a different calculation,” Parsi continued. “They believe that they have the ability to inflict significant damage on the United States in the short term, including on civilian oil installations in the region, closing down the Strait of Hormuz, that would shoot up oil prices, and the initial cost of this to the United States would be so immense, and the United States would recognize that it would have to go for a longer war, which it cannot afford, and as a result, it would get the United States to back off.”

Parsi previously led the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which said in a Wednesday statement that the anonymous Trump official’s comment about a 90% chance of an armed conflict with Iran “should trigger immediate action from Congress, the branch of government legally and constitutionally charged with deciding when the US goes to war.”

“With extensive military deployments underway and public signals that diplomacy may soon be abandoned, the risk of a large-scale, prolonged, and senseless conflict is immediate and real,” NIAC argued. “A war on Iran would not help Iranians demanding change in the face of government repression but instead kill innocent people, create instability inside Iran, and ignite a regionwide conflict.”

The Republican-controlled Congress has so far shown an unwillingness to stand up to Trump’s violence abroad, with multiple war powers resolutions about Venezuela and his boat bombings on high seas failing. Still, NIAC pressured lawmakers to act now, emphasizing that “a war with Iran would carry enormous regional consequences, endanger American service members and Iranian civilians alike, destabilize global markets, and risk spiraling escalation across the region and diminished civil liberties at home.”

Advocates for animal welfare, environmental protection, public health, and small family farms fiercely condemned various “industry-backed poison pills” in the long-awaited Farm Bill draft unveiled Friday by a key Republican in the US House of Representatives.

“A new Farm Bill is long overdue, and the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026 is an important step forward in providing certainty to our farmers, ranchers, and rural communities,” said House Committee on Agriculture Chair Glenn “GT” Thompson (R-Pa.) in a statement.

While Thompson has scheduled a markup of the 802-page proposal for February 23, critics aren’t waiting to pick apart the bill, which aligns with a 2024 GOP proposal that was also sharply rebuked. The panel’s ranking member, Rep. Angie Craig (D-Minn.), said that from what she has seen so far, the new legislation “fails to meet the moment facing farmers and working people.”

“Farmers need Congress to act swiftly to end inflationary tariffs, stabilize trade relationships, expand domestic market opportunities like year-round E15, and help lower input costs,” Craig stressed. “The Republican majority instead chose to ignore Democratic priorities and focus on pushing a shell of a farm bill with poison pills that complicates if not derails chances of getting anything done. I strongly urge my Republican colleagues to drop the political charade and work with House Democrats on a truly bipartisan bill to address the very real problems farm country is experiencing right now—before it’s too late.”

Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, similarly blasted the GOP legislation on Friday, declaring that “this Republican Farm Bill proposal is a grotesque, record-breaking giveaway to the pesticide industry that will free Big Ag to accelerate the flow of dangerous poisons into our nation’s food supply and waterways.”

“This bill would block people suffering from pesticide-linked cancers from suing pesticide makers, eviscerate the EPA’s ability to protect rivers and streams from direct pesticide pollution, and give the pesticide industry an unprecedented veto over extinction-preventing safeguards for our nation’s most endangered wildlife,” he said, referring to the Environmental Protection Agency.

“If Congress passes this monstrosity, it will speed our march toward the dawn of a very real silent spring, a day without fluttering butterflies, chirping frogs, or the chorus of birds at sunrise,” Hartl warned. “No one voted for Republicans to allow foreign-owned pesticide conglomerates to dominate the policies that impact the safety of the food every American eats. But this bill leaves no doubt that’s exactly who is calling all the shots.”

Food & Water Watch (FWW) managing director of policy and litigation Mitch Jones also sounded the alarm about industry-friendly poison pills, arguing that any draft containing the “Cancer Gag Act” that would shield pesticide companies from liability or the Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression Act—which would block state and local policies designed to protect animal welfare, farm workers, and food safety—“must be dead on arrival.”

Sara Amundson, president of Humane World Action Fund—formerly called Humane Society Legislative Fund—also made a case against targeting state restrictions for animals like Proposition 12 in California, which the US Supreme Court let stand in 2023, in response to a challenge by the National Pork Producers Council and the American Farm Bureau Federation.

“Once again, the House Agriculture Committee Republican majority is bending to the will of a backwards-facing segment of the pork industry by trying to force through a measure to override the preferences of voters in more than a dozen states, upend the decisions of courts all the way up to the Supreme Court, and trample states’ rights all at the same time,” Amundson said Friday.

The National Family Farm Coalition highlighted that “instead of addressing the widespread concerns of family-scale farmers—ensuring fair prices for farmers, improving credit access, addressing corporate land consolidation, and creating a trade environment that benefits producers—this draft perpetuates the status quo that enriches and empowers corporate agribusiness. The result is an accelerating farm crisis that continues to hollow out rural communities across the US.”

Thompson also faced outrage over other policies left out of the GOP legislation—particularly from those calling for the restoration of $187 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump forced through last year with their so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act (HR 1).

“HR 1 shifts unprecedented costs to already cash-strapped states, expands time limits, and strips food benefits away from caregivers, veterans, older workers, people experiencing homelessness, and humanitarian-based noncitizens,” noted Crystal FitzSimons, president of the Food Research & Action Center.

“HR 1 is an unforgiving assault on America’s hungry, deliberately dismantling our nation’s first line of defense against hunger,” she continued. “Yet, when given the opportunity to correct this harm in the latest Farm Bill proposal, Chairman Thompson unveiled a package that will only deepen hunger instead of fixing it. Hunger is not something Congress can afford to ignore.”

Jones of FWW said that “families and farmers are hungry for federal policy that supports small- and mid-sized producers and keeps food affordable. Instead, Chairman Thompson appears poised to check off industry’s cruel wish list.”

“America needs a fair Farm Bill,” he emphasized. “It is imperative that this Farm Bill repeal all Trump SNAP cuts and restore full funding to this critical nutrition program; stop the proliferation of factory farms; and support the transition to sustainable, affordable food.”

Vice President JD Vance was booed at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Italy on Friday, but at least one widely shared video of it was swiftly scrubbed from X, the social media platform controlled by former Trump administration adviser Elon Musk.

Acyn Torabi, or @Acyn, “is an industrialized viral-video machine,” the Washington Post explained last year, “grabbing the most eye-catching moments from press conferences and TV news panels, packaging them within seconds into quick highlights, and pushing them to his million followers across X and Bluesky dozens of times a day.”

In this case, Torabi, who’s now senior digital editor at MeidasTouch, reshared a video of the vice president and his wife, Usha Vance, being booed that was initially posted by filmmaker Mick Gzowski.

However, the video was shortly taken down and replaced with the text, “This media has been disabled in response to a report by the copyright owner.”

Noting the development, Torabi, said: “No one should have a copyright on Vance being booed. It belongs to the world.”

As of press time, the footage is still circulating online thanks to other X accounts and across other platforms—including a video shared on Bluesky by MeidasTouch editor in chief Ron Filipkowski.

The Vances’ unfriendly welcome came after a Friday protest in the streets of Milan over the presence of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at the Winter Olympics, with some participants waving “FCK ICE” signs.

The Trump administration has said the ICE agents—whose agency is under fire for its treatment of people across the United States as part of the president’s mass deportation agenda—are helping to provide security for the vice president and other US delegation members, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

President Donald Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, announced Wednesday that 700 immigration agents are leaving Minnesota, but with around 2,000 expected to remain there, Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, whose district includes Minneapolis, declared that the drawdown is “not enough.”

As part of Trump’s “Operation Metro Surge,” agents with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have invaded multiple Minnesota cities, including Minneapolis and Saint Paul, and committed various acts of violence, such as fatally shooting Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

In a pair of social media posts about Homan’s announcement, Omar argued that “every single ICE and CBP agent should be out of Minnesota. The terror campaign must stop.”

“This occupation has to end!” she added, also renewing her call to abolish ICE—a position adopted by growing shares of federal lawmakers and the public as Trump’s mass deportation agenda has hit Minnesota’s Twin Cities, the Chicago and Los Angeles metropolitan areas, multiple cities in Maine, and other communities across the United States.

In Congress, where a fight over funding for CBP and ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, is playing out, Omar has stood with other progressives in recent votes. The bill signed by Trump on Tuesday only funds DHS through the middle of the month, though Republicans gave ICE an extra $75 billion in last year’s budget package.

During an on-camera interview with NBC News’ Tom Llamas, Trump said that the reduction of agents came from him. After the president’s factually dubious rant about crime rates, Llamas asked what he had learned from the operation in Minnesota. Trump responded: “I learned that maybe we can use a little bit of a softer touch. But you still have to be tough.”

“We’re really dealing with really hard criminals,” Trump added. Despite claims from him and others in the administration that recent operations have targeted “the worst of the worst,” data have repeatedly shown that most immigrants detained by federal officials over the past year don’t have any criminal convictions.

Operation Metro Surge has been met with persistent protests in Minnesota and solidarity actions across the United States. Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said Wednesday that “the limited drawdown of ICE agents from Minnesota is not a concession. It is a direct response to Minnesotans standing up to unconstitutional federal overreach.”

“Minnesotans are winning against this attack on all our communities by organizing, resisting, and defending our constitutional rights. But this moment should not be a victory lap,” Hussein continued. “It must instead be a call to continue pushing for justice. The deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal immigration agents remain uninvestigated, and communities and prosecutors alike have raised grave concerns about violations of their oaths and the Constitution. This is not the time to pull back, it is the time to deepen our resilience, increase our support for one another, and keep fighting for our democracy and accountability until justice is served.”

The Not Above the Law coalition’s co-chairs—Praveen Fernandes of the Constitutional Accountability Center, Kelsey Herbert of MoveOn, Lisa Gilbert of Public Citizen, and Brett Edkins, of Stand Up America—similarly said that “Tom Homan’s announcement that 700 federal immigration agents will be withdrawn from Minnesota is more a minor concession than a meaningful policy shift.”

“The vast majority—approximately 2,000 federal agents—remain deployed in the state, and enforcement operations continue unabated,” the co-chairs stressed. “This token gesture does nothing to address the ongoing terror families face or the constitutional crisis this administration’s actions have created.”

“The killings of Minnesotans demand real accountability,” they added. “Families torn apart by raids and alleged constitutional violations deserve justice. Real change means the complete withdrawal of all federal forces conducting these operations in Minnesota, full accountability for the deaths and violations that have occurred, and congressional action to restore the rule of law. The American people deserve better than political theater when constitutional rights hang in the balance.”

On Tuesday, the state and national ACLU asked the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination to “use its early warning and urgent action procedure in response to the human rights crisis following the Trump administration’s deployment of federal forces” in the Twin Cities.

“The Trump administration’s ongoing immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota are being carried out by thousands of masked federal agents in military gear who are ignoring basic constitutional and human rights of Minnesotans,” said Teresa Nelson, legal director of the ACLU of Minnesota. “Their targeting of our Somali and Latino communities threatens Minnesotans’ most fundamental rights, and it has spread fear among immigrant communities and neighborhoods.”

While President Donald Trump’s administration on Monday again made its commitment to planet-wrecking fossil fuels clear, a Republican-appointed judge in Washington, DC dealt yet another blow to the Department of the Interior’s attacks on offshore wind power.

US District Judge Royce Lamberth, an appointee of former President Ronald Reagan, issued a preliminary injunction allowing the developer of the Sunrise Wind project off New York to resume construction during the court battle over the department’s legally dubious move to block this and four other wind farms along the East Coast under the guise of national security concerns.

Lamberth previously issued a similar ruling for Revolution Wind off Rhode Island—which, like Sunrise, is a project of the Danish company Ørsted. Other judges did so for Empire Wind off New York, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind off Virginia, and Vineyard Wind off Massachusetts, meaning Monday’s decision was the fifth defeat for the administration.

Ørsted said in a Monday statement that the Sunrise “will resume construction work as soon as possible, with safety as the top priority, to deliver affordable, reliable power to the State of New York.” The company also pledged to “determine how it may be possible to work with the US administration to achieve an expeditious and durable resolution.”

Welcoming Lamberth’s decision as “a big win for New York workers, families, and our future,” Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul stressed that “it puts union workers back on the job, keeps billions in private investment in New York, and delivers the clean, reliable power our grid needs, especially as extreme weather becomes more frequent.”

Despite the series of defeats, the Big Oil-backed Trump administration intends to keep fighting the projects. As E&E News reported:

White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers reiterated in a response Monday that Trump has been clear that “wind energy is the scam of the century.”

“The Trump administration has paused the construction of all large-scale offshore wind projects because our number one priority is to put America First and protect the national security of the American people,” Rogers said. “The administration looks forward to ultimate victory on the issue.”

The Interior Department said it had no comment at this time due to pending litigation.

Still, advocates for wind energy and other efforts to address the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency are celebrating the courts’ consistent rejections of the Trump administration’s “abrupt attempt to halt construction on these fully permitted projects,” as Hillary Bright, executive director of the pro-wind group Turn Forward, put it Monday.

“Taken together, these five offshore wind projects represent nearly 6 gigawatts of new electricity now under construction along the East Coast, enough power to serve 2.5 million American homes and businesses,” she noted. “At a time when electricity demand is rising rapidly and grid reliability is under increasing strain, these projects represent critically needed utility-scale power sources that are making progress toward completion.”

“We hope the consistent outcomes in court bode well for the completion of these projects,” Bright said. “Energy experts and grid operators alike recognize that offshore wind is a critical reliability resource for densely populated coastal regions, particularly during periods of high demand. Delaying or obstructing these projects only increases the risk of higher costs and greater instability for ratepayers.”

“After five rulings and five clear outcomes, it is time to move past litigation-driven uncertainty and allow these projects to finish the job they were approved to do,” she argued. “Offshore wind strengthens American energy security, supports domestic manufacturing and construction jobs, and delivers reliable power where it is needed most. We need to leverage this resource, not hold it back.”

Sierra Club senior adviser Nancy Pyne similarly said that “the unilateral court victories are evidence of what we’ve known all along—Donald Trump has it out for offshore wind, but we aren’t giving up without a fight. Communities deserve a cleaner, cheaper, healthier future, and offshore wind will help us get there.”

“Despite the roadblocks Donald Trump has tried to throw up in an effort to bolster dirty fossil fuels, offshore wind will prevail,” she predicted. “We will continue to call for responsible and equitable offshore wind from coast to coast, as we fight for an affordable and reliable clean energy future for all.”

Allyson Samuell, a Sierra Club senior campaign representative in the state, highlighted that beyond the climate benefits of the project, “we are glad to see Sunrise Wind’s 800 workers, made up largely of local New Yorkers, get back to work.”

“Once constructed, Sunrise Wind will supply 600,000 local homes with affordable, reliable, renewable energy—this power is super needed and especially important during extreme cold snaps and winter storms like Storm Fern,” Samuell said in the wake of the dangerous weather. “Here in New York, South Fork has proven offshore wind works, now is the time to see Sunrise, and Empire Wind, come online too.”

On the heels of publishing a study that shows 2,204 species across the United States should be considered for protection under the Endangered Species Act, the Center for Biological Diversity on Wednesday sued President Donald Trump’s administration for failing to release public records about efforts to dismantle the ESA.

“Americans want to live in a country where animals and plants on the brink of extinction get the protections they need to survive. The Trump administration is hiding information about its efforts to gut these protections,” said Ryan Shannon, a senior attorney at the nonprofit, in a statement.

“Widespread public support for the Endangered Species Act makes the administration’s secrecy around these rules all the more insidious,” Shannon continued. “Trump hands out favors to his billionaire friends while ignoring the irreplaceable value of our nation’s endangered wildlife. This lawsuit seeks to bring that corruption out into the open.”

Filed in federal court in Washington, DC, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit could make the departments of Commerce and the Interior, as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Marine Fisheries Service, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), turn over documents about potential revisions to the ESA proposed in response to orders from Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.

“Thousands of plants and animals across America are at risk of extinction while they wait for the federal government to do something, anything, to help them.”

The complaint warns that if the administration’s proposed rules are implemented, they “will dismantle essential protections by, amongst other things, inserting economic considerations into the listing process, curtailing critical habitat designations, prohibiting habitat protections for species threatened by climate change, weakening consultation mandates, and removing nearly all protections for newly designated threatened species.”

“On July 3, 2025, the center submitted FOIA requests to each defendant seeking records relating to the development of these proposed rules,” the filing details. “The requested records are vital to understanding the basis, rationale, and likely impacts of the agencies’ proposed rules. Such information is necessary for meaningful public participation in the rulemaking process.”

“Without timely disclosure, the center and its members cannot effectively understand or respond to the agencies’ proposed rules, thereby undermining FOIA’s core purpose of ensuring government transparency and accountability,” the complaint adds, noting that the center sent follow-up requests early last month.

The suit over Trump’s “extinction plan” records followed publication of a study in which four experts at the center argued for protecting thousands more species under the landmark 1973 law—which, the analysis notes, “currently protects 1,682 species as endangered or threatened.”

“According to the independent scientific organization NatureServe, however, there are more than 10,000 imperiled species in the United States that may need protection,” explains the study, published in PeerJ. “One barrier to protecting recognized imperiled species is a lack of threats information.”

The center’s experts reviewed all species recognized NatureServe as “critically imperiled” or “imperiled” and identified 2,204 species “where there is sufficient threat information to indicate ESA protection may be warranted.”

A majority of those species—1,320—are plants, followed by 309 insects, 115 terrestrial snails, 90 freshwater snails, 85 fish, 25 lichen and fungi, 23 reptiles and turtles, 21 amphibians, 14 birds, and various others.

Given that the FWS “has on average listed just 32 species per year since the law was passed,” the analysis warns, “at this rate, most species currently recognized as imperiled and facing threats will not receive consideration for protection within any meaningful timeframe.”

Noah Greenwald, a study co-author and co-director of endangered species at the Center for Biological Diversity, stressed in a Tuesday statement that “thousands of plants and animals across America are at risk of extinction while they wait for the federal government to do something, anything, to help them.”

“This study underscores the cruelty and shortsightedness of the Trump administration’s slashing of funding and weakening of protections for endangered species,” Greenwald declared. “That so many species need help highlights just how much we’re degrading the natural world at our own peril.”

“Humans need clean air and water and a stable climate, just like the many species in decline,” he added. “People are destroying the wild places where plants and animals live, and that habitat destruction remains the greatest threat to species’ survival both in the United States and around the world.”

Habitat destruction threatens 92% of the 2,204 species, according to the analysis. Other notable threats include invasive species (33%), small population size (26%), climate change (18%), altered disturbance regime (12%), disease and predation (8%), over-utilization (7%), and inadequacy of existing regulations (4%).

Last week, in response to petitions from the center and other groups, the FWS announced that 10 species across the country—including the Olympic marmot, gray cat’s eye plant, Alvord chub fish, Mount Pinos sooty grouse, and San Joaquin tiger beetle—warrant consideration for ESA protections.

“I’m relieved to see these 10 precious plants and animals move closer to the protection they so desperately need,” said Greenwald. “Unfortunately they’re joining a backlog of hundreds of species waiting for safeguards during an administration that didn’t protect a single species last year—the first time that’s happened since 1981. As the global extinction crisis deepens, imperiled wildlife need the Endangered Species Act’s strong protections now more than ever.”

In yet another display of the Trump administration’s disregard for the US Constitution, there have been at least 2,300 cases in which federal judges have ruled that immigration officials illegally detained people without bond or due process since just July, according to one journalist.

Politico reporter Kyle Cheney shared some of the cases he’s tracked in a thread on the social media platform X late Saturday. “This is one that stands out,” he said of Sonik Manaserian, an Iranian woman of Armenian ethnicity who is a member of the Baha’i faith.

According to an order out of the Central District of California in Manaserian’s case, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “arrested a chronically ill, 70-year-old woman, who came to this country to avoid religious persecution and applied for asylum, who has lived here peacefully for 26 years and complied with all check-in requirements and other conditions of release, who has no known criminal record and poses no threat to anyone, without notice or the process required by their own regulations and without any plan for removing her from this country, then kept her in detention for months without sufficient medical care—and they do not have any argument to offer to even try to justify these actions.”

Cheney’s thread came just hours after Customs and Border Protection (CBP) fatally shot legal observer and nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, less than three weeks after ICE officer Jonathan Ross similarly killed Renee Good in Minnesota’s largest city.

“Minnesota courts have been inundated with these cases since the beginning of Operation Metro Surge last month,” said the journalist, noting a Friday order in which a judge freed Audberto J., a Mexican man residing in the state, “where he and his wife have lived and raised three children together over the last 20 years.”

While the Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that its immigration enforcement operations are targeting “the worst of the worst,” like the vast majority of immigrants actually seized by agents with the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in recent months, Audberto J. has no criminal history, according to the order.

“Yet another ruling from Friday, freeing a man detained by ICE in Minnesota who suffered severe head injuries during his arrest and has been hospitalized since. The man claims ICE has required him to be shackled in the hospital, against the wishes of doctors,” Cheney noted. “Here’s another Minnesota ruling that just came in tonight: A federal judge is threatening DHS with contempt for transferring a petitioner out of the state despite a court order enjoining the administration from doing so.”

The journalist added to the thread on Sunday, as judges in Minnesota continued issue to rulings. In one of those cases, “Judge [Katherine] Menendez—who issued last week’s injunction against ICE’s retaliatory use of pepper spray—just ordered the release of a Kenyan woman arrested while picking up seizure medication at CVS.”

Sharing the thread, American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick stressed “this is what ‘mass deportations’ looks like. Neither due process nor basic humanity. Don’t look away.”

Immigrant Defenders Law Center co-founder and CEO Lindsay Toczylowski said that “as you read this excellent thread, let it sink in that one of the most pervasive issues for people in ICE detention is lack of access to counsel which means in most cases people have no shot at filing these challenges to their illegal detentions in federal court.”

The Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution states in part that no person shall “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” and protects various rights in legal proceedings. The Trump administration has also faced intense criticism recently for its disregard of rights protected by the First, Second, and Fourth amendments.

Cheney was praised by other journalists for “such good shoe-leather reporting,” as “PBS NewsHour” correspondent Lisa Desjardins put it. Lawfare senior editor Roger Parloff suggested that he “should get a Pulitzer for this thread.”

John Yarmuth, a former newspaper editor and Democratic congressman from Kentucky, said that “this is a great example of a journalist doing his very critical job. Now it’s up to government officials to act to correct these injustices. AND be shamed and replaced if they don’t.”

Last Thursday, seven Democrats in the US House of Representatives voted with nearly all Republicans to pass a multibillion-dollar DHS funding bill. Pretti’s killing has increased pressure on all senators to reject it. While immigration agents’ deadly and illegal actions have fueled calls to “abolish ICE,” some lawmakers are demanding reforms at the agency and across the department.

As US Vice President JD Vance on Friday addressed anti-abortion activists at the March for Life, public health and reproductive rights advocates decried the Trump administration’s expansion of the Mexico City Policy, which critics call the global gag rule.

Since the Reagan administration, Democrats have repealed and Republicans have reimposed the policy, which bans nongovernmental organizations that perform or promote abortion from receiving federal funding. While President Donald Trump reinstated it as expected after returning to office last year, multiple media outlets revealed the expansion plans on Thursday.

A spokesperson confirmed to NBC News on Friday that the US Department of State will release three final rules expanding the foreign assistance prohibition to include “gender ideology,” and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), or what the administration is calling “discriminatory equity ideology,” in line with various other Trump policies.

“President Trump and his anti-abortion administration would rather let people starve to death in the wake of famine and war than let anyone in the world get an abortion—or even receive information about it,” Rachana Desai Martin, chief US program officer at the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a Friday statement.

“People are already dying because of this administration’s slashing of foreign assistance,” she noted. “Now, they’re making it harder for doctors and aid workers to provide food, water, and lifesaving medical care. This isn’t about saving lives—it’s a stunning abdication of basic human decency.”

Guttmacher Institute director of federal policy Amy Friedrich-Karnik similarly called out not only the new “supercharged global gag rule” but also the second Trump administration’s “unprecedented actions like the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and rescission of US foreign assistance for family planning services around the world.”

“Guttmacher research estimates that almost 50 million women and girls have already been denied contraceptive care in low- and middle-income countries due to these draconian actions,” she explained. “This new radical policy threatens to aggravate the cumulative harms of earlier administration actions, undermining decades of bipartisan investment in global health and gender equality, and stripping resources from the world’s most vulnerable populations, including LGBTQ+ communities around the world.”

Amnesty International’s senior director for research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns, Erika Guevara-Rosas, blasted the expansion as “an assault on human rights” that will be “disastrous and deadly.”

“It strangles healthcare systems, censors information, and violates the rights to health, information, and free expression,” she stressed. “It forces frontline providers and many struggling organizations that depend on US funding into an impossible choice: limit essential healthcare for the most vulnerable populations or shut their doors.”

“Doubling down on this policy is cruel, reckless, and ideologically driven,” she continued. “Expanding it to international and US-based organizations will impact the poorest and marginalized first and hardest, denying people the chance to live full, healthy, autonomous lives where they are able to access rights and services. It is further proof of this US administration’s blatant disregard for international law, universal rights, and the rules-based international order.”

Dr. Anu Kumar, president and CEO of Ipas, which works to increase access to abortion and contraception around the world, declared that “this radically expanded global gag rule is nothing short of a regressive, harmful policy that puts the United States even further out of step with our global counterparts.”

“Bullying individual countries’ governments into complying with anti-rights and extremist ideology held by the current US administration is despicable and unacceptable,” Kumar asserted. “It will wreak havoc on global efforts to improve health, uphold human rights, and achieve gender equality.”

The broadening of the global gag rule comes as survivors and US lawmakers continue to fight for the release of files from the federal trafficking investigation into deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a former friend of Trump. Mina Barling, the International Planned Parenthood Federation‘s global director of external relations, said that “in an age of Epstein scandals and hocus-pocus designed to undermine science and medicine, the Trump administration has read the room.”

“He knows his obsession with women’s bodies is viewed cynically, so he has utilized the man-made panic funded by the fossil fuel industry to shift the focus of his policy against trans people,” Barling said of the president. “The global gag rule is hate-bait designed to keep his donors happy and export more division to countries reliant on US aid, in the absence of economic justice.”

“We stand in solidarity with women and trans people in all their diversity,” she added. “We demand debt relief, and we support national sovereignty. We want to see a new global health architecture that is less susceptible to the whims of American politicians.”

Illinois and Minnesota, along with targeted cities in both states, filed a pair of federal lawsuits on Monday in hopes of ending deadly operations by President Donald Trump administration’s intended to hunt down and deport immigrants.

Trump has sent thousands of US Department of Homeland Security agents—including from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—to the Twin Cities in recent days for an operation that resulted in the death of Renee Good, a US citizen and mother fatally shot by a federal officer in Minneapolis.

Amid the mounting violence by federal agents in Minnesota and the Trump administration’s related propaganda—which have fueled protests across the country—the state’s Democratic attorney general, Keith Ellison, plus the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, took aim at DHS, CBP, ICE, and various agency leaders in a US district court.

“Defendants claim this unprecedented surge of immigration agents is necessary to fight fraud,” says the complaint, filed in the District of Minnesota. “In reality, the massive deployment of armed agents to Minnesota bears no connection to that stated objective and instead reflects an alarming escalation of the Trump administration’s retaliatory actions towards the state.”

In a Monday statement, Ellison stressed that “the unlawful deployment of thousands of armed, masked, and poorly trained federal agents is hurting Minnesota.”

“People are being racially profiled, harassed, terrorized, and assaulted,” he noted. “Schools have gone into lockdown. Businesses have been forced to close. Minnesota police are spending countless hours dealing with the chaos ICE is causing. This federal invasion of the Twin Cities has to stop, so today I am suing DHS to bring it to an end.”

As footage of an ICE officer shooting Good began to circulate online last week, Democratic Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey publicly told the agency to “get the fuck out” of his city. On Monday, he added that “when federal actions undermine public safety, harm our neighbors, and violate constitutional rights, we have a responsibility to act. That’s exactly what we’re doing today.”

Trump’s “Operation Metro Surge” in Minnesota this year followed the September launch of “Operation Midway Blitz” in Illinois, which targeted Chicago and its suburbs—where immigration agents have also shot multiple people in recent months, including one fatally.

“Border Patrol agents and ICE officers have acted as occupiers rather than officers of the law,” Democratic Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul declared Monday. “They randomly, and often violently, question residents. Without warrants or probable cause, they brutally detain citizens and noncitizens alike.”

“They use tear gas and other chemical weapons against bystanders, injuring dozens, including children, the elderly, and local police officers,” he continued. “I filed this lawsuit to stand up for the safety of the people of Illinois and the sovereignty of our state.”

The 103-page suit, filed in the Northern District of Illinois, followed another from the state and city of Chicago that blocked Trump’s attempt to deploy the National Guard in the area, as he had done in Los Angeles, California and Washington, DC. At the end of last month, the president announced troops would leave Chicago, LA, and Portland, Oregon, but also said that “we will come back.”

Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker—a frequent critic of the president—said Monday that “Illinois is once again taking Donald Trump to court to hold his administration accountable for their unlawful tactics, unnecessary escalations, and flagrant abuses of power.”

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson emphasized that “these actions weren’t just unlawful; they were cruel, needlessly inflicting fear and harm on our communities.”

“My administration will forcefully protect our residents’ rights and hold anyone accountable who abuses their power,” Johnson pledged. “Nobody is above the law. This lawsuit is about ensuring there is accountability for the lawless actions of the Trump administration and justice for the Chicagoans who have been wronged.”

In statements to multiple media outlets, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin made clear that the Trump administration plans to fight back against both states’ moves. She called the Illinois filing “a baseless lawsuit,” and said of the Minnesota case, “We have the Constitution on our side on this, and we look forward to proving that in court.”

Meanwhile, critics of the Trump administration, and particularly its immigration operations, welcomed the new suits.

Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), a daughter of immigrants, wrote in a social media post about the suit in her state that “DHS’s terror force is the greatest threat to our safety. Their militarized invasion of our cities puts us all at risk. They need to be defunded. They need to be held accountable. In the streets, in Congress, and in courts, we will fight to protect our communities, and we will win.”

Residents of Wisconsin and Washington, DC this week continued the legal fight against efforts by President Donald Trump’s administration to gain access to confidential information about registered voters as the Democratic National Committee issued a related warning to 10 state governments.

The group Common Cause on Thursday highlighted its recent motion to intervene in United States v. Evans, a federal lawsuit brought by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) against the District of Columbia’s Board of Elections, led by Monica Evans.

Lawyers from the ACLU National Voting Rights Project filed the motion in the US District Court for the District of Columbia on behalf of Common Cause and two DC voters, Ruth Goldman and Chris Melody Fields, in late December.

As the filing notes, the Trump administration wants to obtain personal details about adults in DC and all 50 states “to build an unauthorized national voter database and to target voters for potential challenges and disenfranchisement.”

The Republican administration has sued nearly half of US states plus DC in a bid to get their voter information.

“Handing over voter data without any parameters or protections in place is a huge violation of privacy and invites exactly the kind of errors that have historically led to eligible voters being wrongly purged or denied their right to vote.”

Ethan Herenstein, staff attorney with the ACLU project, explained in a statement that “federal law does not authorize the Department of Justice to demand sweeping access to voters’ most sensitive personal information.”

“Handing over voter data without any parameters or protections in place is a huge violation of privacy and invites exactly the kind of errors that have historically led to eligible voters being wrongly purged or denied their right to vote,” Herenstein warned.

Maryam Jazini Dorcheh, senior director of litigation at Common Cause, said that “voters in DC, and all voters, rightly expect the government to keep their personal information secure and only use it for its intended purpose of maintaining accurate records.”

“We are committed to defending voters’ rights and privacy in Washington, DC and nationwide, and this case is one of many where we are stepping in to ensure those protections are upheld,” she continued.

Demonstrating that commitment, Common Cause and the ACLU also partnered with attorneys from Law Forward and three Wisconsin voters—Melissa Adams, Amanda Makulec, and Jaime Riefer—on Thursday to file a motion to intervene in a similar suit the administration launched against the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC), which has refused to hand over vote data.

“If provided this data, the Justice Department could easily manipulate the data to spread disinformation about voting and attempt to baselessly target eligible voters and remove them from the rolls,” said Ryan Cox, legal director at the ACLU of Wisconsin. “We’ve seen this play out in numerous other states, and there is no reason to believe that this administration wouldn’t weaponize Wisconsinites’ private data toward those same ends. We must prevent this federal power grab and protect our democracy from these corrupt partisan stunts.”

Eric Neff, the acting chief of the DOJ’s Voting Section, said in federal court last month that Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, and Wyoming—which all have Republican secretaries of state—have “complied voluntarily” with the department’s data demand. He also said that several other states “have expressed with us a willingness to comply” based on an agreement called a memorandum of understanding (MOU) “that we have sent them.” The DNC issued warnings to 10 of those states on Friday.

Daniel Freeman, the DNC’s litigation director, sent letters to election leaders Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah “to address an imminent violation of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA),” pointing to Neff’s comments about the MOU.

Specifically, the letter warns that the MOU’s 45-day removal demand “has the potential to violate two provisions of the NVRA: the notice and waiting provision governing removal based on a suspected change in residence... and the quiet period provision barring systematic voter list maintenance in the months before a federal election.”

“This letter does not constitute written notice of violations of the NVRA,” Freeman noted. “Rather, the DNC sends this letter in the hope that the imminent violations set out above may still be avoided. Nonetheless, the DNC stands ready to issue a formal notice should evidence of ongoing violations come to light.”

In a Friday statement, DNC Chair Ken Martin accused Trump and US Attorney General Pam Bondi of a “big government power grab” aimed at gathering “sensitive personal information like driver’s license numbers, Social Security numbers, and party affiliation, opening the door to privacy concerns and further political retribution.”

“The DNC won’t stand idly by as the Trump DOJ tries to get access to voters’ sensitive information and put eligible voters at risk of being wrongfully purged from voter rolls, which is why we are calling on secretaries of state and election officials across the country to stand up for voters and reject the Trump administration’s illegal agreement,” he said. “To be clear: Democrats stand ready to fight back and defend voters, and we’re prepared to use the tools at our disposal to do so.”

Some state officials have already publicly responded. Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evnen accused the DNC of “grandstanding” and said that he has no plans to sign an MOU but will send the state’s registration list next month “unless barred by a court order,” while a spokesperson for the Texas Secretary of State’s Office told Votebeat and the Texas Tribune that the state sent its voter roll last month.

Others have been tight-lipped. The office of Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson—who gave the administration a public statewide voter registration list last year—told Deseret News on Friday that she doesn’t have anything additional to add at this time. Mississippi Today reported that Secretary of State Michael Watson’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

TJ Lundeen, a spokeperson for the South Carolina Election Commission, told the Post and Courier that the agency’s legal team is reviewing the DNC’s letter. Lunden added that any deal with the DOJ will be presented and voted on during a public meeting.

Meanwhile, a DOJ spokesperson told Axios, which reported on the DNC letters, that “organizations should think twice before interfering in a federal investigation and encouraging the obstruction of justice, unless they’d like to join the dozens of states that are learning their lesson in federal court.”

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson also weighed in, telling the outlet that “the Civil Rights Act, National Voting Rights Act, and Help America Vote Act all give the Department of Justice full authority to ensure states comply with federal election laws, which mandate accurate state voter rolls.”

“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered noncitizen voters,” she added of the Republican leader who notably tried to cling to power after losing the 2020 presidential election.

The current fight over voter data dates back to Trump’s controversial March executive order on US elections. In October, DC-based District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly permanently blocked the part that required proof of US citizenship on federal voter registration forms. The ACLU was also involved in that legal battle. Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the group’s Voting Rights Project, welcomed the ruling as a “clear victory for our democracy.”

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro called himself a “prisoner of war” while pleading not guilty to narco-terrorism charges in a US court in New York City on Monday, after the Trump administration abducted him and his wife in an overnight raid that killed dozens of people.

“I am the president of Venezuela, and I consider myself a prisoner of war. They captured me in my house in Caracas,” Maduro said in Spanish at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan US Courthouse. “I am not guilty. I am a decent man. I remain the president of my country.”

After being seized by US forces before dawn on Saturday, Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were moved to a Brooklyn jail, over the objections of New York City’s recently inaugurated mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who called President Donald Trump after the military operation.

The Associated Press reported on the couple’s transfer to the Manhattan courthouse early Monday:

A motorcade carrying Maduro left jail around 7:15 am and made its way to a nearby athletic field, where Maduro slowly made his way to a waiting helicopter. The chopper flew across New York Harbor and landed at a Manhattan heliport, where Maduro, limping, was loaded into an armored vehicle.

A few minutes later, the law enforcement caravan was inside a garage at the courthouse complex, just around the corner from the one where Donald Trump was convicted in 2024 of falsifying business records. Across the street from the courthouse, the police separated a small but growing group of protesters from about a dozen pro-intervention demonstrators, including one man who pulled a Venezuelan flag away from those protesting the US action.

The 25-page US indictment released Saturday claims that Maduro, who previously served in Venezuela’s National Assembly and as the South American country’s minister of foreign affairs, “has partnered with his co-conspirators to use his illegally obtained authority and the institutions he corroded to transport thousands of tons of cocaine to the United States.”

Maduro “now sits atop a corrupt, illegitimate government that, for decades, has leveraged government power to protect and promote illegal activity, including drug trafficking,” the document continues. “That drug trafficking has enriched and entrenched Venezuela’s political and military elite.”

Like her husband, Flores pleaded “not guilty, completely innocent,” during the Monday arraignment. According to CNN, reporters observed bandages on Flores’ head and her attorney, Mark Donnelly, told the presiding judge that she sustained “significant injuries during her abduction,” including possibly bruised or fractured ribs.

The presiding judge is Alvin Hellerstein, a 92-year-old appointed to the Southern District of New York by former President Bill Clinton. Al Jazeera noted that he “has overseen numerous high-profile cases in his career, including relating to the 9/11 attacks and the Sudanese genocide.”

“It’s my job to assure this is a fair trial,” said Hellerstein, who scheduled the next hearing for March 17.

The weekend abduction has sparked global protests, comparisons to the US invasion of Iraq, demands for Trump’s impeachment, concerns about the involvement of American oil companies, and fears of the White House’s threats of more military action elsewhere.

Developers behind two of the five offshore wind projects recently targeted by the Trump administration took action in federal court this week, seeking preliminary injunctions that would enable construction to continue while the legal battles play out.

Empire Offshore Wind LLC filed a civil lawsuit in the US District Court for the District of Columbia on Friday, challenging the Department of the Interior’s (DOI) December 22 stop-work order, which the company argued is “unlawful and threatens the progress of ongoing work with significant implications for the project” off the coast of New York.

“Empire Wind is more than 60% complete and represents a significant investment in U.S. energy infrastructure, jobs, and supply chains,” the company highlighted. “The project’s construction phase alone has put nearly 4,000 people to work, both within the lease area and through the revitalization of the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal.”

The filing came just a day after a similar one in the same court on Thursday from the joint venture between Skyborn Renewables and the Danish company Ørsted, which is developing Revolution Wind off Rhode Island and Connecticut. That project is approximately 87% complete and was expected to begin generating power as soon as this month.

“Sunrise Wind LLC, a separate project and wholly owned subsidiary of Ørsted that also received a lease suspension order on December 22, continues to evaluate all options to resolve the matter, including engagement with relevant agencies and stakeholders and considering legal proceedings,” the Danish firm said. That project is also off New York.

As the New York Times noted Friday: “At stake overall is about $25 billion of investment in the five wind farms. The projects were expected to create 10,000 jobs and to power more than 2.5 million homes and businesses.”

The other two projects targeted by the Trump administration over alleged national security concerns are Vineyard Wind 1 off Massachusetts and Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind. The developer of the latter, Dominion Energy, launched a legal challenge in federal court in Virginia the day after the DOI’s lease suspension order, and a hearing is scheduled for this month.

“Delaying the project will lead to increased costs for customers and threaten long-term grid reliability,” Dominion spokesperson Jeremy Slayton told NC Newsline on Tuesday. “Given the project’s critical importance, we have a responsibility to pursue every available avenue to deliver the project as quickly and at the lowest cost possible on behalf of our customers and the stability of the overall grid.”

President Donald Trump’s public opposition to offshore wind energy dates back to before his first term as president, when he unsuccessfully fought against the Aberdeen Bay Wind Farm near his golf course in Scotland. Since entering US politics, the Republican has taken money from and served the interests of fossil fuel giants while waging war on renewable power projects and lying about the climate emergency.

As the Times detailed:

Mr. Trump has falsely claimed that wind farms kill whales (scientists have said there is no evidence to support that) and that turbines “litter” the country and are like “garbage in a field”...

This week President Trump posted on social media a photo of a bird beneath a windmill and suggested it was a bald eagle killed in the United States by a wind turbine. “Windmills are killing all of our beautiful Bald Eagles,” the president wrote. It was also posted by the White House and the Department of Energy.

The post turned out to be a 2017 image from Israel, and the animal was likely a kestrel. On Friday Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social again, this time an image of birds flying around a wind turbine, that read, “Killing birds by the millions!”

While the DOI did not respond to the newspaper’s request for comment, and the department referred the Hill to its December statement citing radar interference concerns, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers told NC Newsline earlier this week that Trump has made clear that he believes wind energy is “the scam of the century.”

“For years, Americans have been forced to pay billions more for the least reliable source of energy,” Rogers said. “The Trump administration has paused the construction of all large-scale offshore wind projects because our number one priority is to put America First and protect the national security of the American people.”

Meanwhile, climate campaigners and elected Democrats have blasted the Trump administration’s attacks on the five offshore projects, warning of the economic and planetary consequences. Democratic senators have also halted permitting reform talks over the president’s “reckless and vindictive assault” on wind power.

Additionally, as Common Dreams reported Monday, the watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility warned congressional committees that the DOI orders are “not legally defensible” and raise “significant” questions about conflicts of interest involving a top department official’s investments in fossil gas.

Led by Big Tech billionaires including Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Elon Musk, the world’s 500 richest people added a record $2.2 trillion to their collective wealth in 2025, Bloomberg reported as the year ended on Wednesday.

“Obscene greed! While billions of people live in poverty,” human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell responded on X—a social media platform now controlled by Musk, the richest person on Earth. “It’s why we need a global wealth tax.”

Musk—who could become the world’s first trillionaire thanks to his new controversial pay package as CEO of Tesla—is one of just eight ultrawealthy individuals who got around a quarter of all the gains recorded by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The others are Amazon founder Bezos and Oracle chairman Ellison, as well as Michael Dell, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, and Meta‘s Mark Zuckerberg. The previous year, Bloomberg noted, “the same eight billionaires made up 43% of the total gains.”

According to Bloomberg, the gains that brought the combined net worth of all 500 people to $11.9 trillion “were turbocharged” by the 2024 election victory of President Donald Trump. The Republican and his relatives were among the “biggest winners” of 2025, gaining at least $282 million, for a net worth of $6.8 billion.

The “winners” also include Musk, who gained $190.3 billion for a net worth of $622.7 billion; Ellison, who gained $57.7 billion for a net worth of $249.8 billion; and Australian mining magnate Gina Rinehart, who gained $12.6 billion for a net worth of $37.7 billion.

After Trump’s electoral win, several Big Tech billionaires buddied up to him, with Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai all attending his inauguration. Musk then spent several months spearheading the administration’s attack on federal workforce as the de facto leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Sharing the Guardian‘s coverage of the findings on the social media network Bluesky, British climate scientist Bill McGuire warned that “if the monstrous political-economic system that is tearing our planet, the climate, and its people apart isn’t brought to its knees—then humanity will be.”

The Guardian pointed to Oxfam International’s November statement that $2.2 trillion “would have been more than enough to lift 3.8 billion people out of poverty,” which the humanitarian group highlighted ahead of the Group of 20 Summit hosted by South Africa, whose government used its G20 presidency to push for solutions to global inequality.

“Inequality is a deliberate policy choice. Despite record wealth at the top, public wealth is stagnating, even declining, and debt distress is growing,” Oxfam executive director Amitabh Behar said at the time. “Inequality rips away life opportunities and rights from the majority of citizens, sparking poverty, hunger, resentment, distrust, and instability.”

A June 2024 report from French economist and EU Tax Observatory director Gabriel Zucman—prepared for the G20’s Brazilian presidency—estimated that a global 2% minimum tax on the wealth of 3,000 billionaires could generate about $250 billion.

As seven Nobel laureates, including Joseph Stiglitz, noted in a July op-ed published by the French newspaper Le Monde, “By extending this minimum rate to individuals with wealth over $100 million, these sums would increase significantly.”