Federal officials on Friday confirmed that Florida has been reimbursed $608 million for the costs of building and running an immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades, exposing “Alligator Alcatraz” to the risk of being ordered to close for a second time.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said in an email that the state of Florida was awarded its full reimbursement request.
The reimbursement exposes the state of Florida to being forced to unwind operations at the remote facility for a second time because of a federal judge’s injunction in August. The Miami judge agreed with environmental groups who had sued that the site wasn’t given a proper environmental review before it was converted into an immigration detention center and gave Florida two months to wind down operations.
The judge’s injunction, however, was put on hold for the time being by an appellate court panel in Atlanta that said the state-run facility didn’t need to undergo a federally required environmental impact study because Florida had yet to receive federal money for the project.
“If the federal defendants ultimately decide to approve that request and reimburse Florida for its expenditures related to the facility, they may need to first conduct an EIS (environmental impact statement),” the three-judge appellate court panel wrote last month.
The appellate panel decision allowed the detention center to stay open and put a stop to wind-down efforts.
President Donald Trump toured the facility in July and suggested it could be a model for future lockups nationwide as his administration pushes to expand the infrastructure needed to increase deportations.
Environmental groups that had sued the federal and state governments said the confirmation of the reimbursement showed that the Florida-built facility was a federal project “from the jump.”
“This is a federal project being built with federal funds that’s required by federal law to go through a complete environmental review,” Elise Bennett, Florida and Caribbean director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. “We’ll do everything we can to stop this lawless, destructive and wasteful debacle.”
WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court said Friday it will consider overturning a Hawaii law that imposes strict regulations on where people can carry guns.
The Trump administration had urged the justices to take the case, arguing the law violates the court’s 2022 ruling that found people have a right to carry firearms in public under the Second Amendment.
The Hawaii law bans guns on private property unless the owner has specifically allowed them. It also prohibits firearms in places like beaches, parks, bars and restaurants that serve alcohol.
State attorneys argue that they’ve already loosened its concealed-carry permit regulations to align with the high court’s 2022 ruling. They say its new restrictions strike a reasonable balance between gun rights and public safety.
A judge blocked the Hawaii law after it was challenged in court by a gun rights group and three people from Maui. But the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals largely reversed that decision and allowed Hawaii to enforce the law.
The parents of a college student killed in a Tesla crash say she was trapped in the car as it burst into flames because of a design flaw that made it nearly impossible for her to open the door, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday.
The parents of Krysta Tsukahara allege that the company that helped Elon Musk become the world’s richest man knew about the flaw for years and could have moved fast to fix the problem but did not, leaving the 19-year-old arts student trapped amid flames and smoke that eventually killed her.
Tesla did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
The new legal threat to Tesla filed in Alameda County Superior Court comes just weeks after federal regulators opened an investigation into complaints by Tesla drivers of stuck-door problems. The probe and suit come at a delicate time for the company as it seeks to convince Americans that its cars will soon be safe enough to ride in without anyone in the driver’s seat.
Tsukahara was in the back of a Cybertruck when the driver who was drunk and had taken drugs smashed into a tree in a suburb of San Francisco, according to the suit. Three of the four people in the car, including the driver, died. A fourth was pulled from the car after a rescuer smashed a window and reached in.
The lawsuit was first reported by The New York Times.
Tesla doors have been at the center of several crash cases because the battery powering the unlocking mechanism can be destroyed in a fire and the manual releases that override that system are difficult to find.
The lawsuit follows several others that have claimed various safety problems with Tesla cars. In August, a Florida jury decided that the family of another dead college student, this one killed by a runaway Tesla years ago, should be awarded more than $240 million in damages.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which opened its stuck-door investigation last month, is looking into complaints by drivers that after exiting their cars, they couldn’t open back doors to get their children out and, in some cases, had to break the window to reach them.
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The Netherlands’ highest court is ruling Friday on an appeal by the government against a ban on sending parts for F-35 fighter jets to Israel.
The case was originally brought in late 2023 by three Dutch rights groups who argued that transferring the F-35 parts makes the Netherlands complicit in possible war crimes being committed by Israel in its war with Hamas. Israel denies committing war crimes in its campaign in Gaza.
The district court in The Hague initially rejected the ban, but in February 2024 an appeals panel ordered the Dutch government to halt shipments of F-35 fighter jet parts to Israel, citing a clear risk of violations of international law. The government appealed to the Supreme Court, saying that foreign policy was a matter for the government, not courts.
In November last year, a legal advisor to the Supreme Court issued a non-binding opinion that the government’s appeal should be rejected.
The Netherlands is home to one of three regional warehouses for U.S.-owned F-35 parts. Dutch government lawyers argue that a ban on transfers from the Netherlands would effectively be meaningless as the United States would deliver the parts anyway.
Israel’s campaign in Gaza has killed more than 66,200 Palestinians and wounded nearly 170,000 others, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The ministry does not differentiate between civilians and militants in its toll, but has said women and children make up around half the dead.
The ministry is part of the Hamas-run government. U.N. agencies and many independent experts view its figures as the most reliable estimate of wartime casualties.
The war broke out on Oct. 7, 2023, after Hamas militants and others stormed into Israel and killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took about 250 people hostage. Hamas still holds 48 hostages — about 20 of them thought by Israel to still be alive.
In a largely symbolic move, Slovenia announced in August that it was banning the import, export and transit of all weapons to and from Israel, calling it the first such move by a European Union member.
Last year, the U.K. government suspended exports of some weapons to Israel because they could be used to break international law. Spain says it halted arms sales to Israel in October 2023. There also are court cases in France and Belgium around weapons trade with Israel.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
McALLEN, Texas (AP) — The federal government is expected to again accept new applications for a program that grants some people without legal immigration status the ability to live and work in the United States.
Lawyers for the federal government and immigrant advocates have presented plans before a federal judge that would open the door again to accepting applications for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, otherwise known as DACA.
One state — Texas, where the case is being heard — however, would be exempted from providing work permits.
It’s estimated that hundreds of thousands of people could be eligible to be enrolled in DACA, once a federal judge issues an order to formalize plans laid out by the Department of Justice in a legal filing made on Monday. The program, created under the Obama administration, grants people without legal immigration status who were brought into the country by their parents two-year, renewable permits to live and work in the U.S. legally.
The program has allowed people who were brought to the United States as children to temporarily remain in the country and obtain work permits. It does not confer legal status but provides protection from deportation.
Eligibility requirements include people who entered the country as children before their 16th birthday, were under 31 years old as of June 15, 2012, and have not been convicted of a felony, a significant misdemeanor, or three misdemeanors. There would be restrictions related to work permits for those who reside in Texas, which filed a lawsuit against the DACA program in 2018.
DOJ attorneys laid out the proposal before U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen on Monday as part of the ongoing Texas lawsuit. It would allow U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to take new and renewal applications for DACA across the country, which it has not done for four years.
In Texas, USCIS would take new and renewal applications for the DACA program but recipients residing in the state will not receive a work permit.
Attorneys representing DACA recipients proposed adding a wind-down period that would allow Texas residents to keep their work authorization for one more renewal period.
These proposals follow an earlier decision from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals allowing the program to continue with the work permit carveout in Texas.
The federal government and attorneys for DACA recipients have two more opportunities in October to file responses to the proposals submitted this week. Hanen, based in Houston, will then decide what proposal or combination of proposals to implement in his order.
Immigrant advocates are not celebrating yet but believe thousands may be eligible for the program. Aside from the over 533,000 who are enrolled already in DACA, about 1.1 million people may be eligible across the country, according to a 2023 estimate from the Migration Policy Institute.
People interested in applying were urged to start preparing. “While we are still waiting for an official decision, we believe our communities and families should be prepared and begin gathering the required documents,” Michelle Celleri, Legal Rights Director for Alliance San Diego, said in a statement.
Other advocates are cautiously optimistic. Juliana Macedo do Nascimento, a spokesperson for United We Dream, pointed to a section in the government’s proposal that could hint at changes. “These proposals do not limit DHS from undertaking any future lawful changes to DACA,” the government’s proposal said in Monday’s filing.
“We need to be able to look at this in a fuller picture than just this case, because we’re seeing the administration detain and deport DACA recipients,” Macedo do Nascimento said on Wednesday.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
President Donald Trump often channels former President Ronald Reagan, down to his signature slogan, “make America great again.” But Judge William Young, who was appointed by Reagan himself, cited Reagan’s legacy as a total rebuke to Trump’s ruling philosophy. “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction,” Young wrote in a ruling filed on Tuesday, quoting a speech by Reagan.
“I’ve come to believe that President Trump truly understands and appreciates the full import of President Reagan’s inspiring message—yet I fear he has drawn from it a darker, more cynical message,” Young warned. “I fear President Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected.”
Young’s ruling came in response to one of the Trump administration’s signature policies, its attempts to shut down Palestinian solidarity protests by deporting Palestinian students and their supporters. The American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association sued a few days after the arrest of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, arguing that the policy violates freedom of speech, both by intimidating foreign academics in America and preventing American academics “from hearing from, and associating with, their noncitizen students and colleagues.”
Ruling that administration officials indeed “acted in concert to misuse the sweeping powers of their respective offices to target non-citizen pro-Palestinians for deportation primarily on account of their First Amendment protected political speech,” Young promised to hold a hearing on the specific measures he will order. He wrote that “it will not do simply to order the Public Officials to cease and desist in the future,” given the current political environment.
What seems to have set off Young was a postcard from a hater: “Trump has pardons and tanks…What do you have?” Young attached a photocopy of the postcard to the top of his ruling, and dedicated the ruling to disproving the writer. “Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, We the People of the United States—you and me—have our magnificent Constitution. Here’s how that works out in a specific case,” he wrote, inviting the letter writer to visit his courthouse at the end of the ruling.
The ruling itself meticulously outlined how several different activists—Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, Mohsen Mahdawi, Yunseo Chung, and Badar Khan Suri—were targeted for deportation and how the administration justified it, both internally and publicly. Although Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeatedly claimed in the media that the deportations were meant to target “riots” on campus, Young shows that the students were often targeted based on their opinions alone, with vague chains of association linking them to violent protests.
For example, the Department of Homeland Security noted in an intelligence analysis that “Hamas flyers” were handed out during a March 2025 protest that Khalil and Chung attended. But as Young pointed out, there was “neither an allegation nor evidence” that either Khalil or Chung themselves were involved in distributing the flyers.
In another case, Öztürk was a member of Graduate Students for Palestine. Because that group cosigned a call for boycotting Israel with Students for Justice in Palestine, a group that was banned from Tufts University for allegedly using violent imagery, the Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence analysts tried to tie Öztürk to Students for Justice in Palestine, which she was not a member of. Young, exasperated, called the logic “hard to follow.”
He wrote that “there is no evidence that Öztürk did anything but co-author an op-ed that criticized the University’s position on investments with Israel, that she criticized Israel, and that the organization of which she was member joined in that criticism with an organization that was banned on Tufts campus, with which she was not affiliated.”
Particularly striking was the way that the administration used anonymous online blacklists as a basis for investigation. In March 2025, the Department of Homeland Security ordered its intelligence office to review all 5,000 names on Canary Mission, a controversial website that lists allegedly antisemitic students, Assistant Director Peter Hatch testified. The office also relied on names provided by Betar, an Israeli nationalist organization that has bragged about getting its opponents deported, Hatch testified.
“Those names that were passed up the chain of command by the investigating subordinates were almost universally approved for adverse action, and, again, the reasons for being passed up the chain of command included any form of online suggestion that one was ‘pro-Hamas,’ including Canary Mission’s own anonymous articles,” Young wrote.
The judge directly addressed Rubio’s claim that, because a visa or green card is a privilege, the government has unlimited power to remove non-citizens.
“This Court in part must agree: non-citizens are, indeed, in a sense our guests. How we treat our guests is a question of constitutional scope, because who we are as a people and as a nation is an important part of how we must interpret the fundamental laws that constrain us. We are not, and we must not become, a nation that imprisons and deports people because we are afraid of what they have to tell us,” he wrote.
And, Young argued, the decision to go after students for activism they did before Trump took office made the policy especially “arbitrary” and “capricious.” Students across America “have all been made to understand that there are certain things that it may be gravely dangerous for them to say or do, but have not been told precisely what those things are,” he wrote, noting that many of the arrests were designed to be as intimidating as possible.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents snatched Öztürk off the street while wearing masks. “ICE goes masked for a single reason—to terrorize Americans into quiescence,” Young wrote, calling ICE officials “disingenuous, squalid and dishonorable” for trying to argue otherwise. “In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police. Carrying on in this fashion, ICE brings indelible obloquy to this administration and everyone who works in it,” he added, citing Abraham Lincoln.
Young moved from a discussion of the case into a broadside against the way immigration enforcement is used in America.
“ICE has nothing whatever to do with criminal law enforcement and seeks to avoid the actual criminal courts at all costs. It is carrying a civil law mandate passed by our Congress and pressed to its furthest reach by the President. Even so, it drapes itself in the public’s understanding of the criminal law though its ‘warrants’ are but unreviewed orders from an ICE superior and its ‘immigration courts’ are not true courts at all but hearings before officers who cannot challenge the legal interpretations they are given,” he wrote.
The Department of Homeland Security responded publicly to Young’s ruling—ironically, by accusing him of dangerous speech. “It’s disheartening that even after the terrorist attack and recent arrests of rioters with guns outside of ICE facilities, this judge decides to stoke the embers of hatred,” department spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement, accusing Young of “smearing and demonizing federal law enforcement.”
MENLO PARK — Three men were charged this week with meeting with a minor with the intent of engaging in lewd and lascivious behavior after an undercover police officer posed as a 13-year-old girl on online dating websites, prosecutors said.
The operation was aimed at combatting child exploitation, according to the San Mateo County District Attorney’s Office. All three men allegedly arrived at a location where they believed they would be meeting the fake 13-year-old girl.
“It is never ceases to amaze me … how many predators there are out there who are more than willing to reach out, develop contact with juvenile girls — juvenile boys too — and to try and set up a time to get together to engage in illegal sexual conduct,” said San Mateo County District Attorney Stephen Wagstaffe. “What Menlo Park has chosen to do is to, by using an undercover (officer), … basically, it’s almost like throwing a hook in the water to see: Does anything catch on?”
Yony Sifredo Trochez Martinez, a 33-year-old resident of San Jose, and Jefferson Aldair Martinez Hernadez, a 26-year-old resident of San Leandro, were each charged with three counts of communicating with a minor with the intent of committing lewd and lascivious behavior, one count of meeting with a minor for the purposes of lewd and lascivious behavior and one count of distribution of harmful material to children with the intent of sexual intercourse, prosecutors said.
Arunkumar Kizhakkedath Unnikrishnan, a 45-year-old resident of Mountain View, was charged with two counts of communicating with a minor with the intent of committing lewd and lascivious behavior and one count of meeting with a child for the purposes of lewd or lascivious behavior, prosecutors added.
All three defendants pleaded not guilty to the charges.
On Sept. 24, a Menlo Park Police Department officer represented himself as a 13-year-old girl on WhatsApp and dating website Badoo, prosecutors said. Three men independently reached out to the undercover officer, and spoke to the fake girl despite being explicitly told she was 13.
The three men texted with the girl to set up a meeting for sex, prosecutors said. They also sent graphic photos and videos and discussed “the sex they would engage in.”
The officers arranged for meetings with the fake 13-year-old girl on Gilbert Street in Menlo Park, prosecutors added. When each of the men showed up at their separate meeting times, they were arrested.
Wagstaffe added the that charges were chosen specifically in anticipation of certain defenses the defendants may use.
“The defense that all three of them said was, ‘Well, I know she said she was 13, but I thought she was much older,’ — you know, silly stuff like that,” Wagstaffe said.
Bail for each defendant was set at $10,000, prosecutors said.
“Menlo Park got three people who were willing to reach out to a 13 year old — what they thought was a 13 year old,” Wagstaffe added. “We now have three people who we will attempt to convict of these crimes and try and hold them accountable.”
Staff at Colorado’s juvenile detention centers violated policies meant to protect youth during strip searches more than 1,000 times during nine months between 2023 and 2025, according to a new review by the Child Protection Ombudsman of Colorado released Tuesday.
There is no effective oversight to ensure strip searches at juvenile detention centers are justified and properly documented, the review found, and the vast majority of youth strip searches did not reveal any contraband, raising questions about how Colorado Division of Youth Services staff members are using the invasive procedure.
In one instance, five youth in a detention center were strip-searched because one of them might have been charging a vape pen in a computer classroom, the review found. In another instance, a 14-year-old boy was held in a room by himself for more than 10 hours until he consented to a strip search. Another time, a youth was strip-searched three times in one day because staff believed he possessed drug paraphernalia, the report found.
Nothing was found during any of those searches, the office reported.
AnneMarie Harper, a spokeswoman for the Division of Youth Services, said in a statement Tuesday that the agency would investigate the ombudsman’s findings.
“When it comes to searches of youth in our care, DYS staff is trained to balance personal privacy while also taking a trauma-informed approach,” she said. “These efforts help to make sure that dangerous materials and substances that could put all youth and staff at risk are not in our facilities.”
The ombudsman’s office discovered 1,006 policy violations across 1,009 youth strip searches statewide during three three-month stretches in 2023, 2024 and 2025. Division of Youth Services staff members failed to document supervisor approval for searches, conducted searches with just one staff member present when two are required, and failed to clearly document the reasons for searches or the results, according to the report.
“When you are talking about the strip search of youth, we have to be incredibly careful that we are documenting every detail and trying to treat these youth as safely as possible,” said Stephanie Villafuerte, the child protection ombudsman.
‘Reasonable suspicion’ for search
About 2,000 youth between the ages of 10 and 21 are housed at juvenile detention centers statewide, according to the report. They are strip-searched when they arrive at the facilities, after visits with family, and after returning to the detention centers from court or other appointments. But they are also subject to strip searches when a staff member has “reasonable suspicion” to believe a juvenile might have contraband.
The ombudsman’s review focused only on those searches for reasonable suspicion, which the report noted is “arguably the most subjective” reason for a search, a process during which youth fully undress and an adult staff member looks at their naked body.
The practice is inherently traumatic, even when done completely within policy, the report noted. Youth who are committed to a detention center are more likely than other juveniles to have suffered abuse and neglect, and strip searches can retraumatize them.
“Strip searches are traumatizing for anyone, and perhaps particularly for teenagers,” said Jessica Feierman, senior managing director at Juvenile Law Center. “They are very aware of their bodies, their bodies are changing, so it is a moment where a strip search can have unique harm.”
Strip searches should be used sparingly, she said, and ideally not at all — alternatives like handheld metal detectors or airport-style body scanners can often be just as effective at revealing contraband, Feierman said.
The sheer number of strip searches of Colorado youth, the missing documentation about how the searches were conducted and why, and the low amount of contraband recovered raise concern, she said.
“All of those things suggest a heavy overreliance on strip searches, even though they are so harmful to young people,” she said.
On average, DYS staff members found contraband in just 10% of the 1,009 strip searches for reasonable suspicion that the ombudsman’s office reviewed.
That low percentage suggests that detention center staff are misusing strip searches, said Dana Flores, senior manager for youth justice in Colorado at the National Center for Youth Law.
“The report indicates that DYS staff are treating strip searches as a mechanism to assert power and control, and that is not rehabilitative,” she said. “That is just an abuse of discretion by adults who are supposed to be providing trauma-informed care to young people we know have already experienced trauma. If only 10% are turning up contraband, and that is the rationale behind strip searches… there must be a motivation for staff to keep doing this that goes above and beyond simply seeking contraband.”
Contraband — in particular, cocaine and fentanyl — is a ubiquitous problem across Colorado’s youth detention centers, she added, noting that kids who are jailed often search for ways to escape reality. Strip searches of youth don’t address the big-picture problem, she said.
“That ultimately isn’t going to address the root cause of the problem, which is that this youth has access to contraband,” she said. “So you could strip search a kid on Monday and find drugs on their person — the larger question is what are you doing to provide that young person with the appropriate behavioral health treatment and education to address what may be a substance abuse disorder?”
‘We don’t have documentation’
Division of Youth Services workers document strip searches in handwritten logs, the review found. That log is supposed to include information on when the search was conducted, who approved and carried out the search, the purpose of the search and the outcome.
However, the Child Protection Ombudsman’s review found the information in the log was often missing, Villafuerte said.
“We don’t know whether these searches are being conducted in a way that is incorrect, because we don’t have documentation,” she said. “Oftentimes, we don’t know who conducted the search, we don’t know if one or more people were present, we don’t know the underlying reasonable suspicion behind the reason to search. Without having the information, it makes it incredibly difficult to understand whether these searches are being conducted in a way that is effective, and if not, what can we do to make them effective.”
The office’s review was prompted by a youth who filed a complaint in which he alleged he was being wrongly targeted for weekly strip searches. The lack of proper documentation in that youth’s case led the office to conduct a statewide review, which showed similar problems.
The ombudsman’s office recommended that the Division of Youth Services keep electronic records about strip searches instead of handwritten ones. The office also recommended more oversight of strip searches for reasonable suspicion by the Division of Youth Services Quality Assurance, a unit within the state Department of Human Services that is tasked with oversight of the juvenile detention centers.
The unit has previously reviewed strip searches for youth when they enter a detention center, but has not regularly reviewed practices around strip searches for reasonable suspicion, the ombudsman’s office found.
The ombudsman’s report comes as the Division of Youth Services shut down the long-troubled Lookout Mountain Youth Services Center in Golden last month amid escalating issues with violence and drugs.
A Colorado woman and two other activists opposed to President Donald Trump’s immigration raids in Los Angeles have been indicted on charges of illegally “doxing” a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, federal prosecutors said.
Ashleigh Brown, a 38-year-old woman from Aurora, is among the three accused of following the unidentified ICE agent home, livestreaming their pursuit and posting the agent’s address online, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California.
Once they arrived at the agent’s home, prosecutors allege the women shouted “ICE lives on your street and you should know,” according to the indictment.
The defendants are each charged with one count of conspiracy and one count of publicly disclosing the personal information of a federal agent, the statement said.
Brown, who is being held in federal custody without bail, also faces charges of assault on a federal officer in a separate case stemming from a protest in Los Angeles in August, according to court records.
The Aurora woman was part of a small group of protesters who gathered outside the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building on Aug. 2 to protest immigration enforcement and raids in Los Angeles, according to court documents.
During that protest, Brown hit one of the Federal Protective Service officers trying to detain a man who jumped on the hood of a government car leaving the Roybal building, the criminal complaint alleges.
The Federal Protective Service is a U.S. Department of Homeland Security agency responsible for protecting federally owned and leased buildings.
Brown’s federal assault case is still ongoing.
Prosecutors said the second suspect accused of doxing an ICE agent, a 25-year-old woman from Panorama City in Los Angeles, is free on $5,000 bail. Authorities are still searching for the third defendant, a 37-year-old woman from Riverside, California.
“Our brave federal agents put their lives on the line every day to keep our nation safe,” Acting U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said in a statement. “The conduct of these defendants are deeply offensive to law enforcement officers and their families. If you threaten, dox, or harm in any manner one of our agents or employees, you will face prosecution and prison time.”
Doxing is a typically malicious practice that involves gathering private or identifying information and releasing it online without the person’s permission, usually in an attempt to harass, threaten, shame or exact revenge.
Attorneys for the women could not immediately be reached on Monday. An email was sent to the Federal Public Defender’s Office asking if its attorneys are representing the defendants.
According to the indictment, the three women last month followed an ICE agent from the federal building in downtown Los Angeles to the agent’s residence in Baldwin Park, east of LA. They livestreamed the entire event, court documents say.
In July, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem threatened to prosecute people for publishing federal agents’ personal information in response to fliers in Portland, Oregon, that called for people to collect intel on ICE.
Critics of the Trump administration’s raids have expressed outrage over federal agents wearing masks and refusing to identify themselves in public while arresting immigrants in California.
Last week, California became the first state to ban most law enforcement officers, including federal immigration agents, from covering their faces while conducting official business.
An Alabama construction worker is challenging the Trump administration’s warrantless construction site raids after he says he was arrested and detained by federal immigration agents—twice—despite being a U.S. citizen with a valid ID in his pocket.
In a federal civil rights lawsuit filed today in the Southern District of Alabama, Leo Garcia Venegas is seeking to stop “dragnet raids” that target Latinos like himself, without any probable cause besides their ethnicity.
“It feels like there is nothing I can do to stop immigration agents from arresting me whenever they want,” Venegas said in a press release by the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm that filed the suit on his behalf. “I just want to work in peace. The Constitution protects my ability to do that.”
Venegas and the Institute for Justice argue that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) policies allow immigration agents to illegally raid private construction sites, detain workers without reasonable suspicion, and continue detaining them even after they offer evidence of citizenship or legal status. All of this, they say, violates the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
“Armed and masked federal officers are raiding private construction sites in Alabama, detaining whoever they think looks undocumented, and ignoring proof of citizenship,” Jared McClain, an attorney for the Institute for Justice, said in the press release. “That’s unconstitutional, and this case seeks to bring that practice to an end.”
Venegas was detained twice in May and June during raids on private construction sites where he was working. In both instances, the lawsuit says, masked immigration officers entered the private sites without a warrant and began detaining workers based solely on their apparent ethnicity.
On May 21, Venegas was working on a concrete crew at a construction site in Baldwin County, Alabama, when immigration officers hopped the fence into the site. According to the suit, “The officers ran right past the white and black workers without detaining them and went straight for the Latino workers.”
The officers tackled Venegas’ brother, who was also on the crew, and Venegas began filming the scene on his cell phone. One of the officers then approached Venegas and said, “You’re making this more complicated than you want to.”
Immediately after, the officer grabbed Venegas and began wrestling him to the ground. Another construction worker also took cell phone video of the two brothers’ arrests, which shows the agent struggling with Venegas who repeatedly yells, “I’m a citizen.”
Two other officers joined in to subdue Venegas, telling him to “Get on the fucking ground.”
Watch the Institute Justice’s video on the case, which includes footage of the arrest:
According to the suit, the officers retrieved Venegas’ REAL ID from his pocket, but they called it fake, kept him handcuffed, and detained for more than an hour in the Alabama summer sun, until an officer agreed to run his social security number.
Then on June 12, Venegas was working in a nearly finished house when ICE agents cornered him in a bedroom and ordered him to come with them. Venegas was marched outside to the edge of the subdivision where he was working to have his immigration status checked. According to the lawsuit, two other U.S. citizens had been rounded up with him. Again, officers said his REAL ID could be fake and detained for 20 to 30 minutes before releasing him.
The Institute for Justice says in its lawsuit on Venegas’ behalf that this sort of behavior is “no accident.” It’s explicit DHS policy.
“Under DHS’s challenged policies, immigration officers are authorized to presume that construction workers on private property are undocumented based only on their demographic profile and occupation, and can disregard evidence to the contrary—like Leo’s telling them he’s a citizen and presenting a REAL ID.”
The lawsuit asks the court to block enforcement of the policy and award damages to Venegas, as well as a proposed class of similar plaintiffs, for violations of Fourth Amendment rights.
Venegas is one of many documented cases of U.S. citizens being violently detained and arrested during indiscriminate federal immigration sweeps. The Institute for Justice is also representing George Retes, an Army veteran and U.S. citizen. Retes says he was pepper-sprayed, dragged out of his car and thrown on the ground during a July raid on a legal marijuana company in California. Despite being a citizen, he alleges he was detained by ICE for three days, during which he says he was kept in solitary confinement, not allowed a phone call or lawyer, and never presented before a judge.
On August 20, five U.S. citizens in Southern California filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security over their arrests by immigration agents. One of the plaintiffs, Cary Lopez Alvarado, was nine months pregnant when ICE and U.S. Border Protection agents arrested and shackled her. She alleges she went into labor prematurely as a result of her wrongful arrest and assault.
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court gave its blessing to just this kind of racial profiling by immigration officers, overturning a ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that found the Trump’s administration was likely violating the Fourth Amendment rights of citizens by seizing them based solely on factors such as “apparent race or ethnicity.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh released a concurring opinion in which he waved away concerns that allowing such profiling would lead to citizens and legal residents being unduly harassed.
“As for stops of those individuals who are legally in the country, the questioning in those circumstances is typically brief,” Kavanaugh wrote, “and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U. S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States.”
Whatever world Kavanaugh is describing, it’s not the one that Venegas lives in.
“The raids continue in the neighborhoods,” Venegas says in the Institute for Justice video. “I live in fear every day that when I get to work it will happen again.”
DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A panel of federal judges will begin Wednesday to consider whether Texas can use a redrawn congressional map that boosts Republicans and has launched a widening redistricting battle ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
The case in an El Paso courtroom is the first test of Texas’ new map, which was quickly redrawn this summer to give Republicans five more seats at the urging of President Donald Trump in an effort to preserve the slim Republican U.S. House majority.
Civil rights groups and dozens of Black and Hispanic voters joined the lawsuit, saying the new map intentionally reduces minority voters’ influence. Their lawsuit argues that the new district lines represent racial gerrymandering prohibited by the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution.
Texas Republican lawmakers and state leaders deny these claims, saying the map is a legal partisan gerrymander.
The hearing is expected to last more than a week. It is unclear how quickly the judges will issue a ruling.
The new map eliminated five of the state’s nine “coalition” districts, where no minority group has a majority but together they outnumber non-Hispanic white voters.
“Race and party have folded onto each other,” said Keith Gaddie, a Texas Christian University political science professor who has testified as an expert witness in redistricting cases over the past 25 years. “What could be seen as being racial gerrymandering could just be partisan gerrymandering.”
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that the U.S. Constitution does not prohibit partisan gerrymandering.
Texas says critics cloak partisan fears in rhetoric about race
The new Texas map is designed to give Republicans 30 of the state’s 38 House seats, up from 25 now.
The state’s attorneys argue that Texas officials’ persistent statements about their partisan motives show they weren’t engaged in illegal racial gerrymandering but were in a “political arms-race,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office said in a recent court filing.
The move in Texas has subsequently led some other states — Republican-led as well as those led by Democrats — to respond with some redistricting plans of their own in a scramble to try to dominate the midterm elections.
In court filings, Paxton’s office argued that Republicans are offsetting past Democratic gerrymanders, and the Texas map’s critics “seek to use race as a foil to kneecap Texas’s efforts to even the playing field.”
“Whenever they do not get what they want, they cry racism,” its filing said.
Making a case involves detailed election analysis
The case will be heard by a panel of three judges, one each appointed by Trump, and Presidents Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan.
Attorneys for groups and voters challenging the map aim to show that a trial is likely to prove the new lines deny minority voters opportunities to elect candidates of their choosing.
“States have to follow rules when they redistrict,” said Nina Perales, an attorney representing some the voters and groups, including the League of United Latin American Citizens. “They provide essentially the buffer guards to protect the democratic process.”
The judges are likely to hear a detailed analysis of voting patterns.
“The minority community has to be what’s called politically cohesive, which tends to mean that members of that community overwhelmingly tend to prefer the same candidates in elections,” said Richard Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University.
Critics see new, ‘sham’ minority districts
The new map decreased the total number of congressional districts in which minorities comprise a majority of voting-age citizens from 16 to 14.
Republicans argue the map is better for minority voters. While five “coalition” districts are eliminated, there’s a new, eighth Hispanic-majority district, and two new Black-majority districts.
Critics consider each of those new districts a “sham,” arguing that the majority is so slim that white voters, who tend to turn out in larger percentages, will control election results.
“There is growing animus against African-American and other communities who have historically been disenfranchised,” said Derrick Johnson, the NAACP’s national president. “This is consistent with the current climate and culture germinating from the White House.”
Critics also argued that the 2021 map itself didn’t have enough minority districts. For example, Perales said, Houston has enough Hispanic voters for two such districts, and the new map has one.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
COLUMBIA, S.C. — A local prosecutor in South Carolina said Tuesday he will seek the death penalty against a man whose federal death sentence for killing two bank employees in a robbery was commuted to life in prison by President Joe Biden at the end of his term.
Brandon Council, 40, did not appear in state court in Horry County as prosecutors formally let the court know that if he is convicted of murder they will ask a jury to sentence him to death.
State murder, armed robbery and other state charges against Council were dropped in 2019 after a federal jury found him guilty of similar charges and sentenced him to death.
But in December, Biden reduced the death sentences of 37 federal inmates, including Council, to life in prison, saying he felt the federal use of the death penalty had to stop and he did not want the next administration to resume executions he had halted.
That led Solicitor Jimmy Richardson to obtain new indictments against Council in Horry County in August which open the door to a state death penalty trial.
Council walked into the CresCom Bank in Conway in August 2017, waiting for a minute before shooting Donna Major as the stunned teller held papers in front of her face trying to protect herself. He then followed manager Katie Skeen into her office and shot her in the forehead as she hid under her desk, authorities said.
Council left the bank with $15,000. He was arrested in North Carolina several days later after buying a Mercedes with the stolen money, according to his confession read in court.
Families and law enforcement angry at Biden’s decision urged local officials to review cases. In Louisiana, prosecutors in Catahoula Parish were able to get a first-degree murder charge refiled against Thomas Steven Sanders in the 2010 death of a 12-year-old girl. That would allow the state to seek the death penalty against him.
Richardson said prosecutors had dropped the state charges in case anything ever happened to change the outcome of the federal case, including commuting his sentence.
“If there was a bump, we could always come in and try our case. And that’s why we dismissed them. So our powder could be dry,” Richardson told reporters after the hearing.
The other inmates who had their sentences reduced are being moved to Supermax prisons “where they will spend the rest of their lives in conditions that match their egregious crimes,” U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi posted on social media last week.
Bondi called the commutations a betrayal of the families of victims and a stain on the justice system, comments that Richardson echoed when Biden’s decision was announced.
The bank teller’s daughter, Heather Turner, said the victims of the crimes weren’t considered.
“The pain and trauma we have endured over the last 7 years has been indescribable,” Turner wrote on Facebook, describing weeks spent in court in search of justice as “now just a waste of time.”
“Our judicial system is broken. Our government is a joke,” she said. “Joe Biden’s decision is a clear gross abuse of power. He, and his supporters, have blood on their hands.”
Attorneys for Council argued at his federal trial his life should be spared because of a troubled childhood, especially after the grandmother who raised him died. They said he showed remorse and cooperated with investigators.
After his arrest, Council asked investigators if the women at the bank were still alive and cried when he found out they were dead, investigators said.
“I’m a doofus. I’m an idiot,” Council told police. “I don’t deserve to live.”
Horry County had a second inmate have a federal death sentence commuted. Chadrick Fulks was convicted of kidnapping a woman from the parking lot of a Conway Walmart and killing her during a series of crimes across several states. His state charges were dismissed and court records indicate they have not been reinstated.
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A local prosecutor in South Carolina said Tuesday he will seek the death penalty against a man whose federal death sentence for killing two bank employees in a robbery was commuted to life in prison by President Joe Biden at the end of his term.
Brandon Council, 40, did not appear in state court in Horry County as prosecutors formally let the court know that if he is convicted of murder they will ask a jury to sentence him to death.
State murder, armed robbery and other state charges against Council were dropped in 2019 after a federal jury found him guilty of similar charges and sentenced him to death.
But in December, Biden reduced the death sentences of 37 federal inmates, including Council, to life in prison, saying he felt the federal use of the death penalty had to stop and he did not want the next administration to resume executions he had halted.
That led Solicitor Jimmy Richardson to obtain new indictments against Council in Horry County in August which open the door to a state death penalty trial.
A deadly bank robbery leads to a death sentence
Council walked into the CresCom Bank in Conway in August 2017, waiting for a minute before shooting Donna Major as the stunned teller held papers in front of her face trying to protect herself. He then followed manager Katie Skeen into her office and shot her in the forehead as she hid under her desk, authorities said.
Council left the bank with $15,000. He was arrested in North Carolina several days later after buying a Mercedes with the stolen money, according to his confession read in court.
Families and law enforcement angry at Biden’s decision urged local officials to review cases. In Louisiana, prosecutors in Catahoula Parish were able to get a first-degree murder charge refiled against Thomas Steven Sanders in the 2010 death of a 12-year-old girl. That would allow the state to seek the death penalty against him.
Richardson said prosecutors had dropped the state charges in case anything ever happened to change the outcome of the federal case, including commuting his sentence.
“If there was a bump, we could always come in and try our case. And that’s why we dismissed them. So our powder could be dry,” Richardson told reporters after the hearing.
Families and Bondi angry about the commu
The other inmates who had their sentences reduced are being moved to Supermax prisons “where they will spend the rest of their lives in conditions that match their egregious crimes,” U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi posted on social media last week.
Bondi called the commutations a betrayal of the families of victims and a stain on the justice system, comments that Richardson echoed when Biden’s decision was announced.
The bank teller’s daughter, Heather Turner, said the victims of the crimes weren’t considered.
“The pain and trauma we have endured over the last 7 years has been indescribable,” Turner wrote on Facebook, describing weeks spent in court in search of justice as “now just a waste of time.”
“Our judicial system is broken. Our government is a joke,” she said. “Joe Biden’s decision is a clear gross abuse of power. He, and his supporters, have blood on their hands.”
Council’s lawyers said he was remorseful
Attorneys for Council argued at his federal trial his life should be spared because of a troubled childhood, especially after the grandmother who raised him died. They said he showed remorse and cooperated with investigators.
After his arrest, Council asked investigators if the women at the bank were still alive and cried when he found out they were dead, investigators said.
“I’m a doofus. I’m an idiot,” Council told police. “I don’t deserve to live.”
Horry County had a second inmate have a federal death sentence commuted. Chadrick Fulks was convicted of kidnapping a woman from the parking lot of a Conway Walmart and killing her during a series of crimes across several states. His state charges were dismissed and court records indicate they have not been reinstated.
Biden did leave three men on federal death row.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
LOS ANGELES — The U.S. Department of Justice sued the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department on Tuesday, alleging it violated the Constitution by moving too slowly to process gun licenses for people who want to carry concealed weapons.
The sheriff’s department’s “unreasonable delays” in granting licenses violates California residents’ Second Amendment right to bear arms outside the home, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division said in a complaint filed in Los Angeles federal court.
“The Second Amendment protects the fundamental constitutional right of law-abiding citizens to bear arms,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. “Los Angeles County may not like that right, but the Constitution does not allow them to infringe upon it.”
Messages were sent to the sheriff’s department seeking comment.
The lawsuit comes after the DOJ began analyzing concealed-carry permit applications in the county starting last March.
“Almost two months after receiving notice of the Division’s investigation, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department provided data and documents that revealed only two approvals from over 8,000 applications, and that the Sheriff’s Department set out interviews to approve licenses as far as two years after receiving the completed application,” the DOJ statement said.
The sheriff’s department waits an average 281 days to start processing applications, violating a California law requiring initial reviews within 90 days, according to the complaint.
The lawsuit seeks a permanent injunction requiring the sheriff’s department to issue concealed carry licenses in a timely fashion under the law.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has positioned himself as a leader on gun control and said he will push for stricter regulations.
In January, a federal appeals court prevented a state law from taking effect that banned people from carrying firearms in most public places. That decision, which the state is appealing, kept in place a previous ruling by U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney blocking the law. Carney said it violates the Second Amendment and that gun rights groups would likely prevail in proving it unconstitutional.
The law would prohibit people from carrying concealed guns in 26 types of places, including public parks and playgrounds, churches, banks and zoos.
ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia‘s highest court on Tuesday sided with Black landowners in a fight over zoning changes that weakened long-standing protections for one of the South’s last Gullah-Geechee communities founded by freed slaves.
The state Supreme Court unanimously reversed a lower court ruling that had stopped a referendum to consider repealing a revised zoning ordinance passed by McIntosh County officials two years ago. Residents of Sapelo Island opposed the zoning amendments that doubled the size of homes allowed in a tiny enclave called Hogg Hummock.
Homeowners feared the change would result in one of the nation’s most historically and culturally unique Black communities facing unaffordable tax increases. Residents and their supporters last year submitted a petition with more than 2,300 signatures from registered voters seeking a referendum in the coastal county, which lies 60 miles (96 kilometers) south of Savannah.
McIntosh County commissioners sued to stop the referendum and a lower court ruled that one would be illegal. The decision halted a vote on the zoning change with less than a week to go before Election Day. Hundreds of people had already cast early ballots in the referendum.
The high court on Tuesday found that the lower court was wrong to conclude that the zoning ordinance was not subject to referendum procedures provided for in the Georgia Constitution’s Home Rule Provision.
Supreme Court Justice John Ellington wrote in the opinion that “nothing in the text of the Zoning Provision in any way restricts a county electorate’s authority to seek repeal of a zoning ordinance.”
McIntosh County attorney Ken Jarrard said in an email that the county commissioners are “obviously disappointed” by the order but respect the high court’s ruling.
Jarrard had asserted during oral arguments at the Supreme Court in April that zoning powers are different from others entrusted to county governments by the state Constitution and, therefore, can’t be challenged by referendum.
Philip Thompson, an attorney representing the Hogg Hummock residents, had argued that they have a constitutional right to a referendum on the zoning changes so that they can defend a place that’s “a cultural and historical treasure.”
Roughly 30 to 50 Black residents live in Hogg Hummock, also known as Hog Hammock, a community of dirt roads and modest homes founded by their enslaved ancestors who worked the cotton plantation of Thomas Spalding.
It’s among a dwindling number of small communities started by emancipated island slaves — known collectively as Gullah, or Geechee, in Georgia — scattered along the coast from North Carolina to Florida. Scholars say the island’s separation from the mainland caused the communities to retain much of their African heritage, from their unique dialect to skills and crafts such as cast-net fishing and weaving baskets.
In 1996, Hogg Hummock earned a place on the National Register of Historic Places, the official list of treasured U.S. historic sites. Residents depend on the local government in McIntosh County, where 65% of the 11,100 residents are white, to maintain protections that preserve the community.
The state Supreme Court was not weighing whether Hogg Hummock deserves special protections. Instead, the justices had to consider technical questions about whether local zoning laws can be challenged by referendum and whether McIntosh County commissioners had a right to sue to stop the vote last October.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
WASHINGTON (AP) — A First Amendment group and watchdog organization pressed a federal appeals court on Tuesday to compel the release of a Justice Department special counsel’s report on the criminal investigation into President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Even though the charges against the Republican president were dismissed last year, the volume of special counsel Jack Smith’s final report related to the classified documents case has remained under wraps because of an order from U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon. The case accused Trump of hoarding classified documents at his Florida estate and thwarting government efforts to retrieve them, but Cannon ruled that Smith’s appointment was illegal and threw out the charges.
The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and American Oversight are now pressing for the report’s release in separate filings Tuesday with the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The groups argue there is no legitimate reason to keep secret the report stemming from what was widely regarded as the most perilous of all the prosecutions Trump confronted before his White House return.
“Transparency isn’t optional in a democracy. The public has a right to know what Special Counsel Smith found, and the Justice Department cannot continue to withhold a report that should have been released nearly a year ago under federal law,” said Chioma Chukwu, executive director of American Oversight. “By keeping this order in place, Judge Cannon is undermining both accountability and the rule of law.”
The Knight Institute filed a motion in February urging Cannon to allow for the report’s release, but the judge has yet to rule. It’s asking the appeals court to force Cannon to issue a ruling, calling the delay “manifestly unreasonable.”
“This report is of singular importance to the public because it addresses allegations of grave criminal conduct by the nation’s highest-ranking official,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of Knight Institute, said in a statement. “There is no legitimate reason for the report’s continued suppression, and it should be posted on the court’s public docket without further delay.”
The classified documents case had been seen as the most legally clear-cut of the four Trump had faced, given the breadth of evidence that prosecutors say they had accumulated, including the testimony of close aides and former lawyers, and because the conduct at issue occurred after Trump left the White House in 2021 and lost the powers of the presidency.
Trump had denied any wrongdoing and criticized all the cases against him as a politically motivated attempt to thwart his bid to return to the White House.
The first volume of Smith’s report — focused on Trump’s 2020 election interference case — was publicly released in January. In that portion of the report, Smith defended his decision to bring criminal charges over Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and said he believed it would have resulted in a conviction had voters not returned Trump to the White House.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
A Virginia family is suing the Eating Recovery Center over what they allege was a failure to prevent patients from harming themselves during their daughter’s treatment at a facility in Denver.
Jerry and Rebecca Music and their now-adult daughter, Allison Music, sued the Eating Recovery Center and 29 executives, physicians and other staff members in Denver District Court on Sunday.
They alleged the providers didn’t respond appropriately when Allison voiced thoughts of suicide or nonfatal self-harm, and forced her to witness other patients hurting themselves or attempting suicide.
Eating Recovery Center representatives didn’t immediately respond to questions about the lawsuit on Monday afternoon.
Allison, then 16, entered the partial hospitalization program at the center’s Spruce Street location in April 2023, according to the lawsuit. That location has stopped treating patients with eating disorders and now takes children and teens with anxiety and mood disorders.
ERC owns one other location in the Denver area that treat minors and two that treat adults, which have helped make Colorado a destination for eating disorder care.
About a month after she started treatment, Allison voiced a desire to die by suicide, leading her mother to conclude Allison wouldn’t be safe in the rented home where they were staying. She transitioned into the full residential program, but ERC didn’t include any enhanced monitoring in her care plan, according to the complaint.
The lawsuit alleged Allison received only seven individual therapy sessions over five months, because the facility treated therapy as a privilege, and received no treatment for traumatic events in her history. The family also alleged other practices they considered degrading, including requiring Allison to eat food off the floor, denying bathroom visits and making patients get weighed while naked.
Other ex-patients reported similar practices to The Denver Post that they said worsened their trauma. Representatives for ERC previously told The Post that patients with eating disorders face a high risk of death, making unpleasant practices like force-feeding or monitoring in the bathroom necessary in some cases.
Allison repeatedly reported thoughts about dying or harming herself in a nonfatal way in the weeks after starting residential treatment. According to the lawsuit, her suicidal thoughts escalated in June 2023 after another patient attempted to strangle herself and staff failed to intervene, even as the unnamed patient turned blue. Staff also allegedly told patients not to intervene when others were harming themselves on the unit.
The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment conducted an inspection of the Spruce Street facility in mid-August 2023, investigating allegations that staff hadn’t responded appropriately to suicide attempts.
The agency found two patients repeatedly tried to die by suicide in June 2023 and that facility leadership opted not to send them elsewhere for mental health treatment, despite staff concerns that they couldn’t keep the patients safe. Leadership said they thought the patients were trying to get out of eating disorder treatment and recommended staff “therapeutically ignore” patients’ self-harming behavior, even if they lost consciousness after wrapping something around their necks.
In an interview in 2023, Dr. Anne Marie O’Melia, ERC’s chief medical officer, told The Post that ignoring the patients violated the facility’s policies, and ERC made changes after the state brought the matter to leaders’ attention.
While ignoring mild misconduct, such as tantrums, can eventually be effective in children’s behavior, experts don’t recommend it for self-harm, because kids will escalate their behavior to try to get the reaction they want before giving up.
Allison continued to express suicidal ideation out loud and in her journal in August and September 2023. Her parents became concerned when they found out later that she had stockpiled socks and underwear, which she could have wrapped around her neck.
ERC discharged her in late September 2023 because she had “disengaged” from treatment. She later attempted suicide, but survived, and has post-traumatic stress disorder from her time in treatment, the lawsuit said.
“Rather than receiving the specialized, compassionate care that was promised, Allison was subjected to punitive treatment approaches, denied appropriate therapy and placed in danger through ERC’s dangerous ‘therapeutic ignoring’ protocol that instructed staff to ignore suicide attempts,” the complaint said.
Google’s YouTube has agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit President Donald Trump brought after the video site suspended his account following the Jan. 6, 2021 attacks on the Capitol following the election that resulted in him leaving the White House for four years.
The settlement of the more than four-year-old case earmarks $22 million for Trump to contribute to the Trust for the National Mall and a construction of a White House ballroom, according to court documents filed Monday. The remaining $2.5 million will be paid to other parties involved in the case, including the writer Naomi Wolf and the American Conservative Union.
Alphabet, the parent of Google, is the third major technology company to settle a volley of lawsuits that Trump brought for what he alleged had unfairly muzzled him after his first term as president ended in January 2021. He filed similar cases Facebook parent Meta Platforms and Twitter before it was bought by billionaire Elon Musk in 2022 and rebranded as X.
After buying Twitter for $44.5 billion, Musk later became major contributor to Trump’s successful 2024 campaign that resulted in his re-election and then spent several months leading a cost-cutting effort that purged thousands of workers from the federal government payroll before the two had a bitter falling out. Both Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg were among the tech leaders who lined up behind Trump during his second inauguration in January in a show of solidarity that was widely interpreted as a sign of the industry’s intention to work more closely with the president than during his first administration.
ABC News, meanwhile, agreed to pay $15 million in December toward Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll. And in July, Paramount decided to pay Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit regarding editing at CBS’ storied “60 Minutes” news program.
The settlement does not constitute an admission of liability, the filing says. Google confirmed the settlement but declined to comment beyond it.
Google declined to comment on the reasons for the settlement., but Trump’s YouTube account has been restored since 2023. The settlement is will barely dent Alphabet, which has a market value of nearly $3 trillion — an increase of about $600 billion, or 25%, since Trump’s return to the White House.
The disclosure of the settlement came a week before a scheduled Oct. 6 court hearing to discuss the case with U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers in Oakland, California.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — U.S. House members visited North Carolina’s largest city on Monday to hear from family members of violent-crime victims who pleaded for tougher criminal justice policies in the wake of last month’s stabbing death of a Ukrainian refugee on a Charlotte commuter train.
A judiciary subcommittee meeting convened in Charlotte to listen to many speakers who described local court systems in North Carolina and South Carolina that they say have failed to protect the public and keep defendants in jail while awaiting trials.
The meeting was prompted by the Aug. 22 stabbing death of Iryna Zarutska on a light rail car and the resulting apprehension of a suspect who had been previously arrested more than a dozen times.
“The same system that failed Mary failed Iryna. Our hearts are broken for her family and her friends and we grieve with them,” Mia Alderman, the grandmother of 2020 murder victim Mary Santina Collins in Charlotte, told panelists. Alderman said defendants in her granddaughter’s case still haven’t been tried: “We need accountability. We need reform. We need to ensure that those accused of heinous crimes are swiftly prosecuted.”
A magistrate had allowed the commuter train defendant, Decarlos Brown Jr., to be released on a misdemeanor charge in January on a written promise to appear, without any bond. Now Brown is charged with both first-degree murder in state court and a federal count in connection with Zarutska’s death. Both crimes can be punishable by the death penalty.
Public outrage intensified with the release of security video showing the attack, leading to accusations from Republicans all the way to President Donald Trump that policies by Democratic leaders in Charlotte and statewide are more focused on helping criminals than victims. Democratic committee members argued that Republicans are the ones who have reduced crime-control funds or failed to provide funding for more district attorneys and mental health services.
“The hearing for me is not really about public safety,” Democratic Rep. Alma Adams, who represents most of Charlotte. “It’s about my colleagues trying to paint Democrats as soft on crime — and we’re not — and engaging in political theater, probably to score some headlines.”
Dena King, a former U.S. attorney for western North Carolina during Joe Biden’s administration, testified that Mecklenburg County, which includes Charlotte, needs dozens of additional prosecutors to cover a county of 1.2 million people. And a crime statistician said that rates of murder and violent crime are falling nationwide and in Charlotte after increases early in the 2020s.
Republicans, in turn, blasted Democratic members, saying additional funding wouldn’t have prevented the deaths of Zarutska or the other homicide victims highlighted Monday. And they attempted to question the crime figures as misleading.
“This is not time for politics. This is not time for any race. It’s not time of any party. It’s about a time of justice,” said GOP Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, representing in part Charlotte’s suburbs. He spoke while holding a poster of a screenshot of the video showing Zarutska and her attacker. Adams protested Norman’s use of the placard.
In response to Zarutska’s death, the Republican-controlled North Carolina legislature last week approved a criminal justice package that would bar cashless bail in many circumstances, limit the discretion magistrates and judges have in making pretrial release decisions and seek to ensure more defendants undergo mental health evaluations. The bill now sits on Democratic Gov. Josh Stein’s desk for his consideration.
Committee Republicans also cited the need for more restrictive bail policies for magistrates and aggressive prosecutors not willing to drop charges for violent crimes.
Another speaker, Steve Federico, from suburban Charlotte, demanded justice for his 22-year-old daughter, Logan, who was shot to death in May at a home in Columbia, South Carolina, while visiting friends. The suspect charged in her killing had faced nearly 40 charges within the last decade, WIS-TV reported.
“I’’m not going to be quiet until somebody helps. Logan deserves to be heard,” Steve Federico told the representatives. “Everyone on this panel deserves to be heard. And we will — trust me.”
BATON ROUGE, La. — Louisiana is pursuing a criminal case against another out-of-state doctor accused of mailing abortion pills to a patient in the state, court documents filed this month revealed.
A warrant for the arrest of a California doctor is a rare charge of violating one of the state abortion bans that has taken effect since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and allowed enforcement.
It represents an additional front in a growing legal battle between liberal and conservative states over prescribing abortion medications via telehealth and mailing them to patients.
Pills are the most common way abortions are accessed in the U.S., and are a major reason that, despite the bans, abortion numbers rose last year, according to a report.
Louisiana said in a court case filed Sept. 19 that it had issued a warrant for a California-based doctor who it says provided pills to a Louisiana woman in 2023.
Both the woman, Rosalie Markezich, and the state attorney’s general, are seeking to be part of a lawsuit that seeks to order drug regulators to bar telehealth prescriptions to mifepristone, one of the two drugs usually used in combination for medication abortions.
In court filings, Markezich says her boyfriend at the time used her email address to order drugs from Dr. Remy Coeytaux, a California physician, and sent her $150, which she forwarded to Coeytaux. She said she had no other contact with the doctor.
She said she did not want to take the pills but felt forced to and said in the filing that “the trauma of my chemical abortion still haunts me” and that it would not have happened if telehealth prescriptions to the drug were off limits.
The accusation builds on a position taken by anti-abortion groups: That allowing abortion pills to be prescribed by phone or video call and filled by mail opens the door to women being coerced to take them.
“Rosalie is bravely representing many woman who are victimized by the illegal, immoral, and unethical conduct of these drug dealers,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said in a statement.
Murrill’s office did not immediately answer questions about what charges Coeytaux faces, or when the warrant was issued. But under the state’s ban on abortions at all stages of pregnancy, physicians convicted of providing abortion face up to 15 years in prison and $200,000 in fines.
Coeytaux is also the target of a lawsuit filed in July in federal court by a Texas man who says the doctor illegally provided his girlfriend with abortion pills.
Coeytaux did not immediately respond to emails or a phone message.
The combination of a Louisiana criminal case and a Texas civil case over abortion pills is also playing out surrounding a New York doctor, Margaret Carpenter. New York authorities are refusing to extradite Dr. Carpenter to Louisiana or to enforce for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton the $100,000 civil judgment against her.
In the Louisiana case, officials said a pregnant minor’s mother requested the abortion medication online and directed her daughter to take them. The mother was arrested, pleaded not guilty and was released on bond.
New York officials cite a law there that seeks to protect medical providers who prescribe abortion medications to patients in states with abortion bans — or where such prescriptions by telehealth violate the law.
New York and California are among the eight states that have shield laws with such provisions, according to a tally by the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights.
The legal filings that revealed the Louisiana charge against Coeytaux are part of an effort for Louisiana, along with Florida and Texas, to join a lawsuit filed last year by the Republican attorneys general for Idaho, Kansas and Missouri to roll back federal approvals for mifepristone.
This year, both Louisiana and Texas have adopted laws to target out-of-state providers of abortion pills.
The Louisiana law lets patients who receive abortions sue providers and others. The Texas law goes further and allows anyone to sue those who prescribe such pills in the state.
Both Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary have said they are conducting a full review of mifepristone’s safety and effectiveness.
Medication abortion has been available in the U.S. since 2000, when the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of mifepristone.