Julia Conley, Common Dreams

Alabama is among the states that have seen a significant drop in the number of obstetrician-gynecologists working there since Roe v. Wade was overturned and cleared the way for states to ban abortion, resulting in doctors being unable to provide standard care and in a number of cases, placing patients in serious and even deadly danger.

On Friday, at a White House roundtable on healthcare in rural areas—some of the hardest-hit by the lack of OB-GYN care in states with abortion bans—one of President Donald Trump’s top health officials suggested the exodus of doctors from Alabama and other crises in healthcare access have resulted in positive innovations as care is outsourced to “robots.”

Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), said that since Alabama “has no OB-GYNs in many of their counties,” the state is “doing something pretty cool.”

“They’re actually having robots do ultrasounds on these pregnant moms,” said Oz.

CMS, which oversees the new Office of Rural Health Transformation, recently highlighted in a report about rural healthcare Alabama’s Maternal and Fetal Health Initiative, which it said “provides digital maternity care by using telerobotic ultrasound devices and labor and delivery carts to rural hospitals.”

Oz asserted that robotic ultrasounds will help to reduce Alabama’s maternal mortality rate, which is the highest in the United States, as medical centers will be able to detect health issues and abnormalities.

But observers said that praising an outcome of the dearth of maternal healthcare in the state—which has been at least partially caused by Trump’s push to overturn Roe and Republicans’ efforts to ban abortion—was “horrific.”

“The severe lack of OB-GYNs,” said the labor-focused media group More Perfect Union, “is a crisis, especially in rural America.”

Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, added: “It’s not safe to be an OB-GYN in red states, so they are turning to robots to care for pregnant woman. This is not an innovation success story. It’s a dystopian horror story.”

A 2024 analysis by the Association of American Medical Colleges found that in the year following the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, applicants for OB-GYN residency programs plummeted 21.2%.

The ruling allowed Alabama’s near-total abortion ban—which has only one ostensible “exception” for cases in which a pregnant person faces a serious health risk—to go into effect. Rights groups said that the law, one of the most extreme bans in the US, had been passed by the state’s Republican legislature as part of an effort to force the court to reconsider Roe.

Robin Marty, executive director of WAWC Healthcare in the state, told the Alabama Reflector in 2024 that “when it comes to, especially, OB-GYN residencies, nobody wants to come out here because we can’t fulfill all of the requirements, which include being able to do abortions and manage miscarriage.”

There had also been a 13.1% drop in applicants for OB-GYN programs in 2019-20 after the approval of the state’s Sanctity of Life Act, which recognized “the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children, including the right to life.”

“Legislative interference that imposes restrictions on full-scope reproductive healthcare, including abortion care, discourages medical students from pursuing residency training in states with restrictions, directly hurting patients by reducing the physician workforce in the communities that often need clinicians the most,” AnnaMarie Connolly, chief of education and academic affairs of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), told the Alabama Reflector.

In addition to the state’s abortion ban, the worsening lack of prenatal care in rural Alabama has also driven the state’s decision to turn to robotics to provide some aspects of healthcare.

Since 2020, more than 100 rural hospitals across the nation have stopped delivering babies; at least three of them have been in Alabama, where just 30% of rural health centers have labor and delivery units. Hospitals have cited staffing shortages and low Medicaid reimbursement payments—which were worsened by the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act—as reasons for closing obstetric care units. Closures have left many families traveling an hour or more to receive prenatal care, and can worsen maternal mortality rates.

Regarding the robotic ultrasounds heralded by Oz, political analyst Drew Savicki said: “That is interesting but it represents a very small fraction of what an OB-GYN does. What is an ultrasound robot going to do for a woman who is coming in for her post-childbirth examination?”

In his comments, Oz unwittingly described the crisis the Trump administration has helped to make worse: “We have the best healthcare, if you can get to it.”

One observer suggested Trump’s healthcare officials “explain why no OB-GYNs want to work in Alabama, rather than bragging about robots.”

A press freedom group on Wednesday accused the Trump administration of a “disturbing escalation” in its “war on the First Amendment” after the FBI executed a search warrant at the home of a Washington Post journalist who has extensively covered President Donald Trump’s attempts to gut the federal workforce.

FBI agents reportedly conducted a search early Wednesday morning at the Virginia home of Hannah Natanson as part of an investigation into a federal contractor who is accused of illegally retaining classified documents.

“If true, this would be a serious violation of press freedom,” said the Freedom of the Press Foundation in a social media post.

The Post reported that the agents seized Natanson’s cellphone, Garmin watch, a personal laptop, and a laptop issued by the newspaper.

The warrant stated that the FBI was investigating Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a system administrator with top secret security clearance who has been accused of taking classified intelligence reports to his home in Maryland. The documents were found in his lunch box and basement, an FBI affidavit said.

Politico senior legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney noted that the criminal complaint regarding Perez-Lugones’ case does not mention allegations that he gave any classified documents to a reporter.

“The FBI’s search and seizure of a journalist’s personal and professional devices appears to be a serious violation of press freedom and underscores why we need to enact greater federal protections for both journalists and their sources,” said Clayton Weimers, executive director of Reporters Without Borders North America. “Attorney General Pam Bondi confirmed the seizure is linked to an investigation into a federal contractor who is alleged to have leaked classified information. It’s worth reiterating, though we shouldn’t have to, that journalists have a constitutionally protected right to publish government secrets. We call for the FBI to immediately return Hannah Natanson’s devices.”

Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, told the New York Times that the FBI search at Natanson’s home was “intensely concerning” and could chill “legitimate journalistic activity.”

“There are important limits on the government’s authority to carry out searches that implicate First Amendment activity,” Jaffer said.

As the Committee to Protect Journalists notes in a guide to reporters’ legal rights, the Privacy Protection Act of 1980 established high standards for searches and seizures of journalists’ materials that are “reasonably believed to be related to media intended for dissemination to the public—including ‘work product materials’ (e.g., notes or voice memos containing mental impressions, conclusions, opinions, etc. of the person who prepared such materials) and ‘documentary materials’ (e.g., video tapes, audio tapes, photographs, and anything else physically documenting an event).”

“These materials generally cannot be searched or seized unless they are reasonably believed to relate to a crime committed by the person possessing the materials,” reads the guide. “They may, however, be held for custodial storage incident to an arrest of the journalist possessing the materials, so long as the material is not searched and is returned to the arrestee intact.”

Last year, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) ended a Biden-era policy that limited its ability to search or subpoena a reporter’s data as part of investigations into leaks.

Attorney General Pam Bondi said the DOJ “will not tolerate unauthorized disclosures that undermine President Trump’s policies, victimize government agencies, and cause harm to the American people.”

Before becoming FBI director, Kash Patel said in 2023 that should Trump return to the White House, his administration would “come after people in the media” in efforts to target the president’s enemies.

The Post reported Wednesday that “while it is not unusual for FBI agents to conduct leak investigations around reporters who publish sensitive government information, it is highly unusual and aggressive for law enforcement to conduct a search on a reporter’s home.”

Natanson has spent much of Trump’s second term thus far covering his efforts to fire federal employees, tens of thousands of whom have been dismissed as the president seeks to ensure the entire government workforce is pushing forward his right-wing agenda.

She wrote an essay last month for the Post in which she described being inundated with messages over the past year from more than 1,000 federal employees who wanted to tell her “how President Donald Trump was rewriting their workplace policies, firing their colleagues, or transforming their agency’s missions.” She has written about the toll the mass firings have had on workers’ mental health.

Bruce D. Brown, president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said in a statement that “physical searches of reporters’ devices, homes, and belongings are some of the most invasive investigative steps law enforcement can take.”

“There are specific federal laws and policies at the Department of Justice that are meant to limit searches to the most extreme cases because they endanger confidential sources far beyond just one investigation and impair public interest reporting in general,” said Brown. “While we won’t know the government’s arguments about overcoming these very steep hurdles until the affidavit is made public, this is a tremendous escalation in the administration’s intrusions into the independence of the press.”

Congressman Jamie Raskin got right to the point in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem as he sought an answer to a question several Democratic lawmakers have raised in recent months regarding the Trump administration’s recruiting practices as it seeks to flood American communities with immigration officers.

“How many pardoned January 6th insurrectionists have been hired by your respective departments?” Raskin (D-Md.), ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, asked the two officials.

The congressman wrote to Bondi and Noem as video evidence continues to mount of federal agents’ violent tactics in communities across the US following an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent’s fatal shooting of Minneapolis resident Renee Good last week.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said Raskin, “seems to be courting pardoned January 6th insurrectionists.”

He pointed to “white nationalist ‘dog whistles’” it’s used in its recruitment campaigns that appear to target members of “extremist militias” like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters.

Potential ICE recruits have been bombarded by messages from DHS calling on them to help “defend the homeland” and images like one of a white Uncle Sam caricature standing at a crossroads with signs pointing one way—labeled “INVASION” and “CULTURAL DECLINE”—and another, labeled “HOMELAND” and “LAW AND ORDER.” The image and caption appeared to be a reference to the white nationalist text Which Way, Western Man? by William Gayley Simpson.

The groups and militias apparently being targeted by the recruitment push coordinated with one another on January 6, 2021 as their members and leaders were among those who stormed the US Capitol in an effort to stop former President Joe Biden’s electoral victory from being certified.

One of President Donald Trump’s first actions after taking office last year was pardoning more than 1,500 people convicted of participating in the attempted insurrection, and dozens of them have been rearrested, charged, or sentenced for other crimes including child sexual assault, possession of child pornography, and domestic violence.

Other Democratic lawmakers have previously raised alarm about the lax hiring requirements DHS has put in place as it seeks to grow its ranks of ICE agents, with Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) noting in an October letter to Noem that in its push to hire more so-called “patriots,” ICE has “changed the age requirements for new recruits.”

“DHS announced that applicants now can apply at the age of 18 and there is no age cap. ICE also removed its Spanish-language requirement—shortening the training program by five weeks—and is pursuing additional ways to expedite training,” wrote Durbin. “The loosening of hiring standards and training requirements is unacceptable and will likely result in increased officer misconduct—similar to or worse than what occurred during a small surge in hiring US Customs and Border Protection officers in the early 2000s.”

On Monday, Raskin pointed out that ICE agents have been permitted to go to great lengths to hide their identities with masks as they’ve tackled people to the ground, “detained and battered multiple pregnant women,” threatened people and confiscated their cellphones for filming them—a protected activity under the First Amendment—and rammed open the door of a home in Minneapolis as they apparently began “door-to-door” operations.

“Unique among all law enforcement agencies and all branches of the armed services, ICE agents conceal their identities, wearing masks and removing names from their uniforms. Why is that? Why do National Guard members, state, county, and local police officers, and members of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines all routinely work unmasked while ICE agents work masked?” wrote Raskin.

“Who is hiding behind these masks?” he continued. “How many of them were among the violent rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6 and were convicted of their offenses? The American people deserve to know how many of these violent insurrectionists have been given guns and badges by this administration.”

He demanded the release of records related to the solicitation or hiring of anyone charged or investigated for participating in the January 6 attack.

Raskin’s letter was sent as independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported on leaked documents showing that ICE and Border Patrol officials on the ground are struggling to cope with both staffing and legal compliance issues following Good’s killing.

“While Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem and others in the administration preen about justifying last week’s shooting and trumpet their war on ‘domestic terrorism,’ DHS is privately divided and hesitant about the latest deployments,” wrote Klippenstein, detailing efforts within the agency to find around 300 volunteers to deploy in Minneapolis, “in part due to opposition within the ranks.”

Following DHS’ aggressive recruiting push that appears to designed to appeal to extremist militias, “there might be some immature knuckleheads who think they are out there trying to capture Nicolás Maduro, but most field officers see a clear need for deescalation,” a high-ranking career official at DHS told Klippenstein. “There is genuine fear that indeed ICE’s heavy handedness and the rhetoric from Washington is more creating a condition where the officers’ lives are in danger rather than the other way around.”

Officials are reportedly pushing to rein in the agents whom the Trump administration has unleashed on communities including Minneapolis, where ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot Good while she was sitting in her car after she had reportedly been given conflicting orders by officers.

While Trump has suggested Good was to blame for her killing because she was “disrespectful” to the officers and videos have surfaced of agents attacking and threatening people for filming and observing them, Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino sent a “legal refresher” to agents in the field, reminding them that protesters who use profanity, insults, and rude gestures are not breaking any laws.

Noncompliance with law enforcement and recordings of ICE agents are protected activities, the document reminds officers.

Sarah Saldaña, a former director of ICE, also recently said that DHS’ decision to frame its recruiting push as a “war effort” would inevitably result in a federal anti-immigration force that views itself as being at war with the communities it’s sent to.

DHS is promoting a viewpoint among recruits that “the quicker we get out there and run over people, the better off this country will be,” Saldaña told the Washington Post days before Good was killed. “That mentality you’re fostering tends to inculcate in people a certain aggressiveness that may not be necessary in 85% of what you do.”

A DHS official who spoke to Klippenstein said that “the claim is that recruiting is up, but there is also dread that the gung-ho types that ICE and the Border Patrol are bringing in have a propensity towards confrontation and even violence.”

It’s been more than a month since a media firestorm over old Reddit posts and a tattoo thrust US Senate candidate Graham Platner into the national spotlight, just as Maine Gov. Janet Mills was entering the Democratic primary race in hopes of challenging Republican Sen. Susan Collins—a controversy that did not appear at the time to make a dent in political newcomer Platner’s chances in the election.

On Wednesday, the latest polling showed that the progressive combat veteran and oyster farmer has maintained the lead that was reported in a number of surveys just after the national media descended on the New England state to report on his past online comments and a tattoo that some said resembled a Nazi symbol, which he subsequently had covered up.

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC), which endorsed Platner on Wednesday, commissioned the new poll, which showed him polling at 58% compared to Mills’ 38%.

Nancy Zdunkewicz, a pollster with Z to A Polling, which conducted the survey on behalf of the PCCC, said the poll represented “really impressive early consolidation” for Platner, with the primary election still six months away.

“Platner isn’t just leading in the Democratic primary. He’s leading by a lot, 20 points—58% are supporting him,” Zdunkewicz told Zeteo. “Only 38% are supporting Mills. There are very few undecided voters or weak supporters for Mills to win over at this point in the race.”

Platner has consistently spoken to packed rooms across Maine since launching his campaign in August, promoting a platform that is unapologetically focused on delivering affordability and a better quality of life for Mainers.

He supports expanding the popular Medicare program to all Americans; drew raucous applause at an early rally by declaring, “Our taxpayer dollars can build schools and hospitals in America, not bombs to destroy them in Gaza”; and has spoken in support of breaking up tech giants and a federal war crimes investigation into Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over his deadly boat strikes in the Caribbean.

Mills entered the race after Democratic leaders including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) urged her to. She garnered national attention earlier this year for standing up to President Donald Trump when he threatened federal funding for Maine over the state’s policy of allowing students to play on school athletic teams that correspond with their gender.

But the PCCC survey found that when respondents learned details about each candidate, negative critiques of Mills were more damaging to her than Platner’s old Reddit posts and tattoo.

Zdunkewicz disclosed Platner’s recent controversy to the voters she surveyed, as well as his statements about how his views have shifted in recent years, and found that 21% of voters were more likely to back him after learning about his background. Thirty-nine percent said they were less likely to support him.

The pollster also talked to respondents about the fact that establishment Democrats pushed Mills, who is 77, to enter the race, and about a number of bills she has vetoed as governor, including a tax on the wealthy, a bill to set up a tracking system for rape kits, two bills to reduce prescription drug costs, and several bills promoting workers’ rights.

Only 14% of Mainers said they were more likely to vote for Mills after learning those details, while 50% said they were less likely to support her.

At The Lever, Luke Goldstein on Wednesday reported that Mills’ vetoes have left many with the “perception that she’s mostly concerned with business interests,” as former Democratic Maine state lawmaker Andy O’Brien said. Corporate interests gave more than $200,000 to Mills’ two gubernatorial campaigns.

Earlier this year, Mills struck down a labor-backed bill to allow farm workers to discuss their pay with one another without fear of retaliation. Last year, she blocked a bill to set a minimum wage for farm laborers, opposing a provision that would have allowed workers to sue their employers.

She also vetoed a bill banning noncompete agreements and one that would have banned anti-union tactics by corporations.

“In previous years,” Goldstein reported, “she blocked efforts to stop employers from punishing employees who took state-guaranteed paid time off, killed a permitting reform bill to streamline offshore wind developments because it included a provision mandating union jobs, and vetoed a modest labor bill that would have required the state government to merely study the issue of paper mill workers being forced to work overtime without adequate compensation.”

Speaking to PCCC supporters on Wednesday, Platner suggested the new polling shows that many Mainers agree with the central argument of his campaign: “We need to build power again for working people, both in Maine and nationally.”

The survey, he said, “lays clear what our theory is, which is that we are not going to defeat Susan Collins running the same exact kind of playbook that we’ve run in the past—which is an establishment politician supported by the power structures, supported by Washington, DC, coming up to Maine and trying to run a kind of standard race... We are really trying to build a grassroots movement up here.”

With methane more than 28 times as potent as carbon at trapping heat in the atmosphere in a 100-year period, climate experts agree that reducing methane leaks from oil and gas fields would be one of the fastest and most effective ways of making a measurable impact on planetary heating—but President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday flatly refused to do so, instead announcing a delay on a requirement for fossil fuel companies to limit methane emissions.

The Biden administration had introduced the requirement for oil and gas firms to begin reducing their emissions this year, but the EPA said companies will now have until January 2027 to comply with the rule. The administration is also considering repealing the requirement entirely.

Lauren Pagel, policy director for Earthworks, called the delay “indefensible and illegal.”

“The Trump administration has once again chosen polluters over people, sacrificing the health of communities and climate to serve the fossil fuel industry,” said Pagel. “Every day national methane rules are delayed means more methane in the air, more toxic pollution in our lungs, and more irreversible climate damage.”

The EPA claimed it was providing companies with a “more realistic timeline” for complying with the requirement, and said the action would “save an estimated $750 million over 11 years in compliance costs.”

Methane can leak from oil and gas wells, pipelines, and other fossil fuel infrastructure, and companies often intentionally release methane through flaring. The fossil fuel industry is the largest industrial source of methane emissions in the US, where emissions of methane have risen sharply in recent years as the Biden administration oversaw record production of oil and gas, even as it sought to reduce emissions through the methane requirement and other regulations.

While saving money for fossil fuel companies, the delay on the rule could lead to 3.8 million more tons of methane entering the atmosphere, according to the Trump administration’s own estimates.

“After years of scientific work and public engagement, this administration’s decision to delay methane pollution standards implementation yet again is a blatant act of climate denial and disregard for public health. The EPA’s job is to protect people, not pad the pockets of oil and gas executives,” said Pagel.

In addition to contributing to global heating and the extreme flooding, hurricanes, heatwaves, and other destructive weather events that come with it, methane emissions are linked to higher ground-level ozone pollution made up of tiny particles that can cause respiratory and cardiac problems, cancer, and strokes.

Grace Smith, senior attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), noted that the methane standards have already been working “to reduce pollution, protect people’s health, and prevent the needless waste of American energy”—progress that will now be reversed by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and Trump.

“The rule released today means millions of Americans will be exposed to dangerous pollution for another year and a half, for no good reason,” said Smith. “Delaying the methane standards threatens people’s health and undermines progress by industry leaders.”

“What’s more, the Trump administration rushed to push through this harmful rule without meaningful transparency or a chance for the public to weigh in,” added Smith. “EDF is already in court challenging EPA’s first attempt to delay these vital protections. We will continue to oppose the rule released today, so that people can breathe cleaner air.”

EDF and the grassroots group Moms Clean Air Force expressed particular concern over nearly 18 million people in the US who live near active oil and gas wells.

“Children in my community and across the nation need a strong and comprehensive oil and gas methane rule as soon as possible,” said Patrice Tomcik, senior national field director for Moms Clean Air Force.

EDF noted that “proven, cost-effective solutions are available to help oil and gas operators meet the standards while reducing waste and monetary losses,” and both large and small producers have expressed support for the federal methane regulation as fossil fuel-producing states have begun implementing the standards.

The rule announced Wednesday, said EDF, “ignores the strong opposition to the rule from members of impacted communities and wide variety of other Americans.”

Surrounded by cardboard “tombstones” that displayed likely causes of death of thousands of people in the United States under Republican policies, Bishop William J. Barber II on Monday gave a eulogy in Raleigh, North Carolina, honoring those who are being directly targeted by the Trump administration’s cuts to healthcare, public health funding, and other essential government programs.

The word “eulogy,” he said, comes from the Greek word “eulogia,” and means “good words.”

“But the question is, what is the ‘good word’ when people shouldn’t be dead?” asked the president of the grassroots group Repairers of the Breach and the co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, adding that the people he was speaking about are projected to die in the coming year solely due to “policy violence.”

“We will not let them die ignored,” said Barber. “We will not let their deaths go unregistered on the conscience of this nation and this state, and among the people.”

Barber spoke at the flagship event of Repairers of the Breach’s regular Moral Mondays prayer protest, while supporters in more than 15 states including Alabama, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Ohio, and Texas also delivered eulogies for those who are expected to die as a result of the $186 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, and funding slashed by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that was passed in July.

Roughly 51,000 people are expected to die annually as they lose access to SNAP and Medicaid, as well as those whose healthcare costs will skyrocket if Affordable Care Act subsidies are allowed to expire at the end of the year. People with disabilities and low-income senior citizens are also expected to be impacted by OBBBA provisions that will make it harder for them to access Medicare Savings Programs.

"Because we are fighting for the life of those who yet remain,“ said Barber. ”When they passed the Big Ugly Deadly Destructive Bill—don’t ever call it the Beautiful Bill—when they passed it, it represented a death sentence.“

Barber noted that Republicans were able to pass the law after lying about “waste and fraud and abuse” in the federal programs that rely on them for healthcare and food assistance.

“They had to tell a lie to keep their promise to the wealthiest people in America,” said the bishop, referring to thousands of dollars in annual tax cuts for the richest households that are included in the OBBBA.

Sloan Meek, who has cerebral palsy and relies on Medicaid, also gave a statement.

“I feel a lot of fear and worry right now that every cut and rate reduction to Medicaid will change my whole life,” said Meek. “Having disabilities does not mean I am sick, but it does mean I need consistent treatment and care to stay healthy. I do not want to become sick. I do not want to lose my community. I do not want to lose my voice. I do not want to be forced out of my home to live and receive care from a bunch of strangers. I do not want to die because of a political issue. These are the fears I share with every disabled person using Medicaid in North Carolina right now. I would like to ask every legislator to please see us as having valuable and important lives that are worth supporting.”

The event also aimed at the Trump administration’s actions weakening the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—with the federal government denying and delaying states’ disaster assistance requests—and President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, which most recently unleashed federal agents on North Carolina communities from Charlotte to Raleigh.

The tombstones that flanked Barber read, “I lost Medicare,” “I was disappeared,” “I lost medical research,” “FEMA did not respond.”

“The big, bad, deadly budget bill proved that Washington lawmakers are more than willing to kill tens of thousands of people to line the pockets of the wealthy—but now even that level of destruction and death wasn’t enough,” said Barber in a statement ahead of the event. “Lawmakers are now allowing healthcare subsidies to expire, forcing millions of people to come up with more money for health plans—or die trying. And the Trump administration just unleashed its masked army of ICE agents to terrify and abduct immigrants in Charlotte and Raleigh.”

“One of the grandest, cruelest ironies is that many of the leaders greenlighting these deadly policies profess to be Christian. I’m not sure what Bible they’re reading, but my Bible tells me to protect all people—including poor people and foreigners—without condition or judgment,” Barber continued. “We cannot stay silent in this moment.”

Barber said the event was being held two days before Repairers of the Breach was preparing to send an open letter to every member of the North Carolina General Assembly, calling for the body to hold an “emergency session and vote to tell Congress and the president to take hands off the people of North Carolina, to reverse policies that will hurt 307,000 North Carolinians that will lose Medicaid, that will cause 375,000 to lose food stamps.”

On Monday evening, the organization was planning another event to call on Congress and the White House “to immediately cease and desist” their attacks on Latino and immigrant communities across the country, deploying “Liberty Vans”: mobile rapid-response command centers staffed by volunteer lawyers and campaigners to provide support to communities targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations.

A series of nuclear power-related executive orders issued by President Donald Trump seek to legitimize people’s “suffering as the price of nuclear expansion,” said one expert at Beyond Nuclear on Friday, as the nongovernmental organization spearheaded a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and top Trump administration officials warning of the public health risks of the orders.

More than 40 civil society groups—including Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), Sierra Club, Nuclear Watch South, and the Appalachian Peace Education Center—signed the letter to the commission, calling on officials not to revise the NRC’s Standards for Protection Against Radiation, as they were directed to earlier this year by Trump.

“NRC has not made a revision yet, and has been hearing that the Part 20 exposure (external only) should be taken from the existing 100 mr [milliroentgen] a year, per license, to 500 mr a year, and in view of some, even to 10 Rems [Roentgen Equivalent Man], which would be 100 times the current level,” reads the letter.

In 2021, noted PSR, the NRC “roundly rejected” a petition “to raise allowable radiation exposures for all Americans, including children and pregnant women, to 10 Rems a year.”

The revision to radiation limit standards would result in anywhere from 5-100 times less protection for Americans, said the groups, with 4 out of 5 adult males exposed over a 70-year lifetime developing cancer that they otherwise would not have.

“Radiation is dangerous for everyone,” said Amanda M. Nichols, lead author of the 2024 study Gender and Ionizing Radiation. “[Trump’s] executive order will allow the industry to relax the current standards for radiological protection, which are already far from adequate. This will have detrimental health consequences for humans and for our shared environments and puts us all at higher risk for negative health consequences. ”

The change in standards would be even more consequential for women, including pregnant women, and children—all of whom are disproportionately susceptible to health impacts of ionizing radiation, compared to adult males.

“Radiation causes infertility, loss of pregnancy, birth complications and defects, as well as solid tumor cancer, leukemia, non-cancer outcomes including cardiovascular disease, increased incidence of autoimmune disease, and ongoing new findings.”

In Gender and Ionizing Radiation, Nichols and biologist Mary Olson examined atomic bomb survivor data and found that young girls “face twice the risk as boys of the same age, and have four to five times the risk of developing cancer later in life than a woman exposed in adulthood.”

Despite the risks to some of the country’s most vulnerable people, Trump has also called for a revision of “the basis of the NRC regulation,” reads Friday’s letter: the Linear No Threshold (LNT) model, the principle that there is no safe level of radiation and that cancer risk to proportional to dose.

The LNT model is supported by decades of peer-reviewed research, the letter states, but one of Trump’s executive orders calls for “an additional weakening of protection by setting a threshold, or level, below which radiation exposure would not ‘count’ or be considered as to have not occurred.”

The Standards for Protection Against Radiation are “based on the well-documented findings that even exposures so small that they cannot be measured may, sometimes, result in fatal cancer,” reads the letter. “The only way to reduce risk to zero requires zero radiation exposure.”

Trump’s orders “would undermine public trust by falsely claiming that the NRC’s radiation risk models lack scientific basis, despite decades of peer-reviewed evidence and international consensus supporting the LNT model,” it adds.

The signatories noted that the US government could and should strengthen radiation regulations by ending its reliance on “Reference Man”—a model that the NRC uses to create its risk assessments, which is based on a young adult male and fails to reflect the greater impact on infants, young children, and women.

“Newer research has shown that external radiation harms children more than adults and female bodies more than male bodies,” reads the letter. “Existing standards should therefore be strengthened to account for these life-stage and gender disparities… not weakened. Radiation causes infertility, loss of pregnancy, birth complications and defects, as well as solid tumor cancer, leukemia, non-cancer outcomes including cardiovascular disease, increased incidence of autoimmune disease, and ongoing new findings.”

Olson, who is the CEO of the Generational Radiation Impact Project, which also helped organize the letter, warned that “radiation causes cancer in women at twice the rate of adult men, while the same exposure in early childhood, will, across their lifetimes, produce seven times more cancer in young females, and four times more in young males.”

The groups emphasized that “executive orders do not have the power to require federal agencies to take actions that violate their governing statutes, nor to grant them powers and authorities that contradict those governing statutes. The NRC needs to stand up to the executive order’s marching orders to ‘promote’ nuclear power—a mission outside its legal regulatory mandate under the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 and the concurrent amendments to the Atomic Energy Act.”

Federal agencies including the NRC, they added, “should not favor industry propaganda asserting that some radiation is safe over science-based protection of the public. This is a deliberate subversion of science and public health in favor of corporate interests.”

President Donald Trump has appointed 27 judges to federal courts so far in his second term, and in addition to their right-wing interpretation of the law, an analysis of the judges’ comments to senators during the confirmation process reveals a key commonality between the president’s appointees: All were willing to evade direct questions about whether Trump lost the 2020 election and whether the US Capitol was attacked by a violent pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021.

Demand Justice examined the Questions for the Record (QFRs) that were submitted by the Senate to the 27 judicial nominees regarding the election and Jan. 6, and found that their answers to those two specific questions were nearly uniform in many cases—repeating certain phrases verbatim and “overall, using unusual and evasive language that’s almost entirely outside the normal, historical, and common lexicon used to describe such events.”

None of the 27 nominees affirmatively answered that former President Joe Biden won the 2020 election, as proven by numerous courts that rejected lawsuits claiming otherwise and by both Republican and Democratic election officials. Instead, the nominees said Biden was “certified” as the winner, and 16 of them said he “served” as president.

Some of the nominees, including Emil Bove of the US Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, Whitney Hermandorfer of the Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, and Kyle Dudek of the Middle District of Florida, expanded on their answers, saying they would avoid “opining on the broader political or policy debate regarding the conduct of the 2020 presidential election.”

Demand Justice said those comments “strongly, and falsely,” suggested the 2020 election results are still a matter of legal dispute.

Josh Orton, president of the group, told MSNBC‘s “Morning Joe” on Tuesday that the nominees’ answers preserved “their ability to say, ‘I did not contradict Donald Trump’ on what we know are the two most third-rail issues to Donald Trump.”

“If nominees don’t answer these two questions, I think it amounts to, essentially, a political loyalty test,” said Orton.

Regarding questions about whether the US Capitol was attacked on Jan. 6 and whether the attack was an insurrection, said Demand Justice, “not one nominee was willing to speak to the events that occurred on that day.”

Twenty-one of them, including Bove, Hermandorfer, and Joshua Divine of District Courts for the Eastern and Western Districts of Missouri, characterized the attack—in which Trump supporters tried to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 election results—as a matter of debate.

None of the nominees mentioned the law enforcement officers who died as a result of the attack, even though some mentioned violence against law enforcement broadly in their other QFR answers; the fact that the House and Senate chambers were broken into; or the death threats rioters directed at then-Vice President Mike Pence.

“It is unprecedented for lifetime nominees to the federal bench to provide dishonest and misleading answers about historical facts—and it is deeply concerning that Trump’s nominees are parroting such strikingly similar language, the president’s own language, to avoid telling the truth,” said Orton.

Orton added that “the kicker” of the report is that 15 members of the Democratic Caucus have voted for Trump’s judicial nominees despite their evasive and dishonest answers about Jan. 6 and Trump’s 2020 loss.

“Excuse me? People died,” said Orton. “If you’re willing to appease Trump’s big lies, you have no business anywhere near a court, period.”

Democrats who have voted in favor of confirming Trump’s nominees include Sens. Chris Coons (Del.), Tim Kaine (Va.), Mark Kelly (Ariz.), and Amy Klobuchar (Minn.).

A man whose wife was arrested by federal immigration authorities on Thursday morning in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, said Friday that his toddler daughter had been “traumatized” by the chaotic altercation during which he appeared to have a seizure and the agents threatened to take both parents away and turn the child over to the state.

Carlos Sebastian Zapata told the Boston Globe that he became unconscious while trying to stop the agents from pulling his wife, Juliana Milena Zapata, away during a traffic stop at about 7 a.m. while Zapata and the couple’s 1 1/2-year-old daughter, Alaia, were taking her to work at Burger King.

Their car was suddenly surrounded by several vehicles and federal agents began banging on their windows.

When Zapata tried to stop the agents from taking his wife away, one officer “pressed on his neck,” according to the Globe, and he lost consciousness while Alaia was in his arms.

As a video taken by an eyewitness showed, Zapata said he “had convulsions or something. I don’t know what they did to me, but they were pressing on my neck.”

The video appeared to show the 24-year-old father having a seizure as Alaia cried, and horrified onlookers yelled at the immigration agents. Local police ordered the bystanders to stay back.

“I wasn’t letting go of my wife because they wanted to take her away,” Zapata told the Globe. When he began having convulsions, he said, “That’s when I let go of my wife.”

He said the agents told the couple that they would either arrest Milena Zapata and allow Alaia to stay with her father, or they would arrest both parents and turn the child over to a state agency.

US Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) called the incident “harrowing” and condemned the masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who had “brutalized” the family, and the Trump administration for its nationwide mass deportation campaign.

“If this video left you feeling scared, I want you to know, so am I,” said Markey. “If you’re feeling angry, so am I... What we saw in this video is just another example of the violence and terror being perpetrated all across our country. This is not normal. This is what dictators do.”

Zapata told the Globe that he and his wife were from Ecuador and entered the country several years ago. They have a pending asylum case and had authorization to work.

Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said on social media that Milena Zapata was a “violent criminal illegal alien.”

The Globe reported that “according to court records, Milena Zapata was accused of stabbing a woman with scissors in the hand and throwing a trash can at her during a dispute over a relationship she believed the woman had with her husband. She was charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon.”

Zapata told the Globe that his wife had been attending all her court dates as ordered and that the situation had been “blown out of proportion.”

“We came here to work, not to cause harm or anything like that,” Zapata said.

DHS accused Zapata of “faking a seizure,” saying he refused medical attention after his wife was arrested.

He told the Globe that Alaia has been distraught since her mother was detained; Milena Zapata is reportedly being held at Cumberland County Jail in Maine.

“She misses her mom a lot, she stays very close to her mom,” Zapata said. “She asks about her mom, she says, ‘Mami, mami, mami’ all the time. I don’t know what to tell her... Sincerely, she is traumatized.”

Community members are planning to hold a vigil in Fitchburg on Saturday, and the mayor’s office has offered assistance to the family. The city has received more than 5,000 calls about ICE’s treatment of the family.

“The violence and cruelty is hard to watch, but impossible for families to endure,” said Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) of the video that circulated on social media Friday. “This is a sickening example of Trump and ICE’s blatant disregard for humanity as they terrorize our families and communities. It is shameful, cruel, and it must end.”

The testimony of a 16-year-old from Hillsboro, Oregon, at a city council meeting this week gave a clear picture of what it’s like to be a young person in a community that’s been targeted by President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, with the boy describing his fear of being detained by masked federal agents at school or of his parents being taken away while they are at work.

“I just want to tell you guys that I’m scared for my parents to walk out the house because I might not be able to say goodbye to them if they go to work,” the teenager, who was identified as Manny, told Hillsboro City Council on Tuesday at a meeting where residents of the Portland suburb gave more than three hours of public testimony on the impact of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations in the town.

The Portland Immigration Rights Coalition told Oregon Public Broadcasting this week that at least 135 people have been arrested by ICE and other federal agencies in Washington County, where Hillsboro is located, since Trump deployed them to the Portland area.

The county, which is the most diverse in Oregon, declared a state of emergency this week over immigration enforcement, allowing officials to use $200,000 in contingency funds for community organizations that help residents impacted by the surge in arrests.

Manny was one of many residents who spoke at the meeting, calling on city councilors to do more to oppose the federal operations and demand that city police work to protect the community from ICE.

“I might not ever be able to say bye or see [my parents] again if you guys don’t side with us,” he said in the statement, which went viral on social media after the meeting. “And I’m scared because of it, because they fought so hard to come here and choose a life for their kids.”

He drew applause when he said Trump “acts like a child,” and went on to describe the anxiety he lives with daily as federal agents make arrests in the area.

“I’m scared that I’m never going to be able to see all my friends again, I’m scared that their parents are gonna be gone one day, I’m scared that all of us are gonna have to fend for ourselves, and I’m scared that one day at school, that I’m gonna get held by people... that I can’t identify because they wear masks,” he said.

“As a 16-year-old, I shouldn’t be scared,” he added. “I should be focusing on school.”

Other residents described being afraid to send their children to school, and Juan Pedro Moreno Olmeda, a soccer coach at Hillsboro High School, was joined by several students as he described the toll ICE arrests are taking on children in the community.

“We recently had one of our teammates lose a father and two uncles, and another lose their older brother; they were taken by ICE,” Moreno Olmeda said. “I want you to look at these kids and think about all the sacrifices that they would have to go through to become that financial pillar for their household. They would maybe have to stop going to school. They would have to give up on soccer for sure. They would have to find jobs in order to become that pillar for their household.”

Hillsboro resident Sandra Nuñez-Smith added that her brother had been arrested by ICE in front of his stepson.

“He had just gotten into his car, and his stepson was barely getting into the back seat when he was pushed out of the way by an ICE agent—or bounty hunter—so they could get to my brother,” she told council members. “He was wrongfully taken due to a paperwork error at the county clerk’s office. He was not given his rights or due process, and no effort was made to investigate the current status of his case.”

Hillsboro is a sanctuary city and its police do not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement, but Mayor Beach Pace and Police Chief Jim Coleman said last month that city authorities also “cannot intervene in ICE operations and cannot assist or protect individuals from federal arrest or legal consequences if they interfere with ICE operations.”

Manny was among the residents who called on the City Council to pass ordinances to protect residents, hold masked and unidentified agents accountable for assaulting and detaining people, and provide guidance to local businesses on prohibiting ICE from their premises.

Police, said Hillsboro resident and former Washington County sheriff’s deputy Red Wortham, “can set a standard. They can document what happens, respond to emergency calls, and make it clear that follow-up will occur later.”

“It is a significant failure of law enforcement to ignore calls,” said Wortham, “about terrifying, dangerous, armed takeovers of cars, businesses, and people by seemingly private armed thugs in masks.”

More than two dozen Democratic state attorneys general on Tuesday sued the Trump administration for withholding emergency food assistance that could help prevent 42 million people from going hungry next month, arguing that the US Department of Agriculture is legally obligated to ensure federal nutrition aid gets to people who rely on it.

With the US government shut down since Oct. 1, the USDA said weeks ago that it could reprogram an emergency reserve held by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to ensure people don’t lose their benefits on Nov. 1. But last Friday a memo from the department said the emergency funds were to be used during disasters such as hurricanes and floods, and were “not legally available” for families set to lose their benefits due to the shutdown.

Officials from New York, Nevada, Minnesota, and other Democratic-led states are asking the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts to rule by Oct. 31, on a motion to force the Trump administration to use the contingency fund to send at least partial payments to SNAP beneficiaries.

About $5 billion-$6 billion is estimated to be in the fund; before the shutdown, about $8 billion in benefits went out to families per month.

In the lawsuit, the attorneys general also argued that the USDA could use Section 32 funds, as it did to provide funding for the Women, Infants, and Children program, to continue funding SNAP in November.

The shutdown began when Democrats in Congress refused to vote with the Republican Party on a continuing resolution that would have allowed Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire at the end of the year, significantly raising health insurance premiums for millions of people. Democrats also want to undo some recent GOP cuts to Medicaid.

The Trump administration has continued to place blame for the shutdown on the Democrats, whom President Donald Trump refused to negotiate with over healthcare before government funding was cut off at the end of September.

The USDA website on Tuesday amplified misinformation Republicans have spread, accusing Democrats of “hold[ing] out healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures” and claiming that “the well has run dry” for SNAP despite the emergency fund.

North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson accused the USDA of “playing an illegal game of shutdown politics” that could result in suffering for nearly 600,000 children in his state.

“They have emergency money to help feed children during this shutdown, and they’re refusing to spend it,” said Jackson. “I warned them last week that I would take them to court if they tried to hurt our kids, and today that’s what we’re doing.”

Also on Tuesday, US House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said the Republican Party will not bring a standalone bill to fund expiring SNAP benefits to the floor for a vote, saying, “The pain register is about to hit 10,” and again blaming Democrats for the impending food assistance cliff.

Economist Paul Krugman noted that “the Republican majority in the Senate could maintain aid by waiving the filibuster on this issue.”

“They have done this on other issues—for example, to roll back California’s electric vehicle standard,” he wrote. “But for today’s Republican Party, blocking green energy is more important than keeping 40 million Americans from going hungry.”

Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford accused the Trump administration of making a “deliberate, cruel, and extraordinarily harmful decision” to allow tens of thousands of people to go hungry.

“Contingency funds exist for this exact scenario, yet the USDA has abdicated its responsibility to Nevadans and refused to fund SNAP benefits,” said Ford. “I understand the stress of not knowing where you’re next meal is coming from, because I’ve lived it. I don’t wish that stress on any Nevadan, and I’ll fight to be sure nobody in our state goes hungry.”

Retired US Col. Steve Gabavics went public Monday with an account he had previously only spoken about anonymously—the story of his investigation into an Israeli soldier’s killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022 and the unsuccessful attempts he made to ensure the US State Department would accurately report his findings: that Abu Akleh was intentionally shot.

Gabavics previously discussed his experience investigating Abu Akleh’s killing just days after it happened in a documentary produced by Zeteo News, but he wasn’t named in the film. On Monday, he came forward publicly for the first time in an interview with the New York Times to discuss the case he said has “bothered [him] the most” of any he investigated during his 30-year military career.

In the days after Abu Akleh was fatally shot in the head while reporting on an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) raid on a refugee camp in Jenin in the West Bank in May 2022, Gabavics was assigned to lead an investigation into the killing by the Office of the United States Security Coordinator, where he was chief of staff. The State Department office coordinates with Palestinian and Israeli security officials and was ordered by the Biden administration to review Abu Akleh’s killing.

He traveled to Jenin with three other people from the office to investigate the shooting and concluded “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the Israeli soldier who shot Abu Akleh must have known she was a journalist—and therefore required under international law to be protected from military attacks while reporting on a conflict.

They did not conclude that the soldier was specifically or deliberately targeting Abu Akleh, but they determined that:

• Soldiers were aware of journalists in the area due to records of Israeli military radio traffic on the morning before the shooting;
• There had been no gunfire coming from the journalists’ direction that might provoke the Israeli soldiers to shoot in self-defense;
• There was an Israeli military vehicle stationed down the road from Abu Akleh, from which a sniper would have been able to see the journalists clearly; and
• When Gabavics visited the scene of the shooting hours after it occurred, his colleagues wore blue vests similar to Abu Akleh’s navy-blue "Press" vest and stood where she was when she was killed while Gabavics stood where the shooter's vehicle had been; they were easily visible to Gabavics.

Gabavics told the Times that the claim that the shooting was unintentional, ultimately included in the State Department’s report, was “absurd.”

The State Department’s account of an accidental killing would mean that the “individual popped out of the truck, just was randomly shooting, and happened to have really well-aimed shots and never looked down the scope,” said Gabavics. “Which wouldn’t have happened.”

Gabavics explained the circumstances that led to the State Department announcing in July 2022 that Abu Akleh had been unintentionally killed: His superior, Lt. Gen. Michael R. Fenzel, who led the Office of the Security Coordinator at the time, disagreed with his assessment and repeatedly refused to publish a report that explained Gabavics’ findings accurately.

As Gabavics told Mehdi Hasan at Zeteo News on Monday, Fenzel told Gabavics that he had spoken to an Israeli commander, who called the shooting an accident “that was a matter of tragic circumstances.”

“So the US general takes the word of a foreign general over the word of his own officer, who he sent to investigate,” said Hasan.

Gabavics also told the Times that Fenzel threatened to fire him as the two disagreed about what the State Department report should say. He included language saying the shooting was intentional in a draft report several times, but Fenzel repeatedly deleted his additions.

He said he and the other three investigators were “flabbergasted that this is what they put out.”

Fenzel told the Times in a statement that he stands by “the integrity of our work and [remains] confident that we reached the right conclusions.”

Officials who spoke to the Times on condition of anonymity said Fenzel’s office likely aimed to “preserve its working relationship with the Israeli military.”

But Gabavics told the Times that the outcome of his investigation “continued to be on my conscience nonstop,” and said he continued to clash with Fenzel over the US government’s report on Abu Akleh’s death until he retired in January.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) applauded Gabavics for “bravely coming forward and confirming what was obvious to everyone: An Israeli sniper deliberately murdered an American journalist and the Biden administration covered it up.”

“We call on President [Donald] Trump to investigate Lt. Gen. Michael R. Fenzel and any other officials who were allegedly involved in the cover-up of Shireen Abu Akleh’s assassination,” the group said.

CAIR urged the State Department and FBI to “pursue a real investigation” into Abu Akleh’s killing. The group condemned President Joe Biden and his top foreign affairs officials, including former National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and former National Security Council Coordinator for the Middle East Brett McGurk for “enabling the Israeli government’s abuses.”

“These individuals must never again serve our government,” said CAIR, “and should be fired from the prestigious roles they have secured in academia since leaving office.”

A former Cook County prosecutor said he had collected a tear gas canister from his own front lawn in a residential Chicago neighborhood and submitted it to a law firm that is preparing a lawsuit over immigration officers’ persistent use of tear gas against residents who object to their raids across the city—including in Old Irving Park this past weekend, where parents and children were getting ready for a Halloween parade when agents wreaked havoc on the neighborhood.

The Chicago Tribune reported that former prosecutor Brian Kolp had been watching news coverage Saturday morning of a temporary restraining order handed down by US District Court Judge Sara Ellis earlier this month barring federal agents from using riot control weapons like tear gas against protesters who do not pose an immediate harm to officers’ safety, when he realized federal agents were on his street in Old Irving Park.

“I could see two fully uniformed agents in military fatigues literally tackling a guy right here in my front lawn,” Kolp told CBS News.

The man the agents detained, Luis Villegas, had been working at a house in the neighborhood, and his brother told reporters he was an undocumented immigrant who came to the US with his family at the age of four.

Neighbors ran out of their houses and filmed and heckled the agents, Block Club Chicago reported, with some shouting, “Get off of him!” Another appeared to call one of the officers a “f---ing Nazi.”

The outlet reported that agents got out of their vehicles moments later, “put on their gas masks, and attacked at least two different people.”

A person on a rapid response team that warns locals when Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agents are in the area told Block Club Chicago that a 67-year-old woman was “knocked to the ground” by masked officers. She and a 70-year-old man were detained, and Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin claimed they were “arrested for assaulting and impeding a federal officer.”

McLaughlin also claimed Villegas was arrested for a previous assault charge, but provided no evidence of his criminal background.

In nearby Avondale, Chicago Tribune reporter Laura N. Rodríguez Presa said another woman was pushed to the ground by an ICE or Customs and Border Protection agent when she approached their vehicle during another anti-immigration operation.

“This appears to be the new normal in Chicago,” said Rodríguez Presa.

In Old Irving Park, the “new normal” for residents on Saturday included federal agents deploying tear gas as parents and costumed children were leaving their homes on their way to a neighborhood Halloween parade.

Resident James Hotchkiss told Block Club Chicago that he was leaving his house with his wife and children at 9:45 a.m. for the parade when he heard whistles ringing out in the neighborhood—a sound Chicagoans have come to recognize as a warning that ICE is nearby.

“At that point, I saw a man running towards me followed by two to three officers chasing after him. They tackled him onto a neighbor’s front yard,” he said.

About 10 minutes later, Hotchkiss saw smoke in the air.

“I took my glasses off because my eyes were burning,” he said. “I saw someone pour water on a gas canister that appeared to be on fire.”

Heather Cherone, a senior reporter at WTTW, said the attack on Old Irving Park marked the “third straight day that federal agents have deployed tear gas against Chicagoans and the seventh time in 22 days,” despite the court order.

Kolp told Fox 32 that he “didn’t see anybody with a weapon” that would have justified the agents’ use of force.

“So you had folks who were literally out on the street taking their kids to this Halloween parade when this happened,” he said. “I didn’t see anybody make physical contact with these agents. I didn’t see anybody do anything that justified, for instance, taking my 70-year-old neighbor to the ground.”

The agents left the neighborhood after about 30 minutes, and the Halloween parade proceeded—but with many families opting to stay home.

Kolp told CBS News he retrieved a tear gas canister from his yard.

“I knew that piece of evidence would be critical for the judge to understand what the facts are,” he said.

Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino is due in court on Tuesday, Fox 32 reported, to answer questions about agents’ continued use of tear gas against residentsin violation of Ellis’ order.

“I was pretty upset to be honest with you,” Kolp told the outlet. “I am an attorney. I used to work with and in law enforcement, and watching this happen in my front yard was just not something that I ever thought was gonna come to my front door. But you know, here we are.”

Ten former leaders of Caribbean nations on Friday called on the current governments across the region to unite in a diplomatic effort to counter President Donald Trump’s unprovoked escalation, in which the US has struck at least 10 vessels in less than two months, claiming without evidence that the Trump administration is fighting “narco-terrorists” from Venezuela.

Former prime ministers of Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, and St. Lucia signed a joint statement titled “Caribbean Space: A Zone of Peace on Land, Sea and Airspace Where the Rule of Law Prevails,” and called on current leaders to recall the 1972 regional meeting at Chaguaramas, Trinidad and Tobago.

At the summit, noted the St. Vincent Times, “peace was enshrined as the guiding principle of Caribbean development.”

The former leaders wrote that “from this platform our region has always maintained that international law and conventions not war and military might must prevail in finding solutions to global challenges.”

“We are impelled to urge a pullback from military buildup to avoid any diminution of peace, stability, and development within our regional space,” the statement reads. “Our region must never become a pawn in the rivalries of others.”

They called on Caribbean leaders to avoid hosting foreign military assets.

“Our cooperation with international partners must never override our collective sovereignty or the principles of international law.”

“The gravity of the present signals demands that we use all existing channels for dialogue to perpetuate a Zone of Peace,” the leaders said. “We fully support our current heads of government in assisting the peaceful resolution of all conflicts and disputes.”

“We must not endanger our citizens in any crossfire, nor risk economic and human loss from wars that are not ours,” they added.

They noted that Caribbean nations have Shiprider Agreements with the US to “ensure that illicit drug traffickers could be tracked, pursued, searched, and lawfully apprehended without extrajudicial killing and the destruction of that which could provide conclusive evidence of criminal operation.”

“Our cooperation with international partners must never override our collective sovereignty or the principles of international law,” they wrote.

Since early September, the Trump administration has killed at least 43 people by striking vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific. Officials have claimed the boats have been operated by drug traffickers with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and other groups, but have provided no evidence for the claims. Fentanyl, which kills thousands of people per year in the US from overdoses, is not trafficked out of Venezuela, according to US and international drug and crime agencies.

“Although the United States Coast Guard interdicts staggering quantities of illegal drugs in the Caribbean each year, it does not encounter fentanyl on the high seas,” wrote Nick Miroff at The Atlantic. “South American cocaine and marijuana account for the overwhelming majority of maritime seizures, according to Coast Guard data, and there isn’t a single instance of a fentanyl seizure—let alone ‘bags’ of the drug—in the agency’s press releases.”

On Friday, the Pentagon revealed that it had deployed the USS Gerald Ford, an aircraft carrier, to the southern Caribbean Sea to “disrupt narcotics trafficking.”

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has accused Trump of seeking regime change in his country, and the former officials urged regional leaders to reject any such efforts.

“We have remained steadfast in our repudiation of external intervention to effect regime change,” they wrote. “Military action in our maritime waters must always be governed by international law—not might.”