President Donald Trump hosted a ceremony for Purple Heart recipients at the White House on Thursday and told attendees that “it wasn’t that easy for me either.”
The Purple Heart is awarded to U.S. service members who are killed or wounded.
Critics,
meanwhile, have said detainees at the facility are forced to endure
unsafe, unsanitary and inhumane living conditions and that Alligator
Alcatraz runs afoul of environmental laws. The detention center was
quickly created and holds an estimated 1,000 beds. The bunk beds are
stacked together in wire-fenced cages.
Alligator Alcatraz is expected to cost Florida about $450 million annually to operate.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is apparently so desperate for staff that they are abolishing the agency’s age restrictions to allow any adult to apply to join the force.
On Wednesday, ICE announced that it would do away with its prior requirements that job applicants be at least 21 years old, no older than 37 to be considered for a criminal investigator role, and no older than 40 to be eligible to be a deportation officer, with few exceptions.
“In the wake of Biden’s open borders disaster, our country needs dedicated Americans to join ICE to remove the worst of the worst out of our country,” the agency’s announcement reads, under an Uncle Sam recruitment photo. In a social media post touting the change, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) wrote: “We’re taking father/son bonding to a whole new level,” alongside an illustration of both a younger and older man in camouflage tactical gear.
Recruits will still need to be at least 18 and go through medical and drug tests, and complete a physical fitness test. The Wednesday announcement also reiterated a slate of perks available to new ICE employees, including a signing bonus of up to $50,000, student loan repayment and forgiveness options, and “enhanced retirement benefits” after the passage of Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill. The legislation allocated funding to hire 10,000 new ICE agents to join the 20,000 currently on staff to help meet the agency’s deportation goals.
The move to eliminate the age restriction comes as the Trump administration scrambles to fulfill his campaign promise to carry out mass deportations—specifically, a goal of one million deportations per year, according to an April report in the Washington Post. So far, the administration appears to have fallen far below that goal: Since February, the administration has deported an average of about 14,700 people per month, according to an NBC News report published last month. The administration’s efforts to bolster those numbers have included reviving old cases focused on immigrants who have since become citizens or died.
Nelly Prieto’s home care clients are already afraid. Who will take care of them if they lose her as a caregiver? What will replace the services she provides? The 18-year home care veteran, patient transporter, and immigrant advocate in Washington state said the answers break her heart: no one, and nothing.
For years, the direct care industry, which provides home and community-based services for the elderly and people with disabilities, has struggled to hire and retain workers, and drew heavily from documented and undocumented immigrants. But now, thanks to President Trump’s racist regime and mass deportations, that workforce will shrink even more, just as American society is rapidly aging.
Prieto had cared for the woman for two years. Her voice broke while telling the story.
Advocates, workers, and researchers said the ripple effects of Trump’s deportation policies on the care industry are dire. People who need care but have no one to help them will suffer alone and struggle to maintain their quality of life; some will lose their homes and be driven onto the streets. Americans 50 years and older are the fastest-growing group of people experiencing homelessness, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness. The number of Americans aged 50 or older who are experiencing homelessness is expected to triple in the next five years.
Illegal profiling accounts for a substantial portion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests in 2025. While ICE has other tactics to arrest peaceful immigrants—such as during immigration hearings, appointments, and check-ins—ICE agents are deliberately targeting workers in heavily Latino jobs and neighborhoods, sometimes based on its community tip line where residents claim to “see” illegal immigrants in their areas, but more often based on nothing at all.
This policy is a threat to the rights of all people in the United States.
ICE Is Arresting Thousands of People with No Reason to Target Them
New data obtained from ICE by the Deportation Data Project drives home how frequently Latino immigrants are arrested off the streets without any recent prior contact with law enforcement. The screenshot below shows what the data look like. Each row represents an individual arrest and provides details about the arrest method, criminal history, and citizenship status. The most notable aspect of the new data is that they provide the exact location of each person’s apprehension.
The key takeaway is that ICE is arresting thousands of people in random locations—what it calls “non-specific” or “general” areas—who had no prior contact with law enforcement: the telltale sign of illegal profiling. Normally, ICE makes arrests only after the suspect has been identified in some other way. For instance, they were arrested by local police and their name was checked against the government data, or they were going to an appointment related to their status, so ICE knew they would be there. But in these cases, ICE is arresting people who weren’t going to appointments or committing criminal offenses that would put them on ICE’s radar, as well as people who had not been ordered removed from the country, giving ICE a reason to seek them out.
Since January 20, ICE has conducted about 15,000 street arrests of immigrants who had no criminal convictions, charges, or removal orders. Incredibly, nearly half (7,000) occurred in the month of June alone: 90 percent of them were immigrants from Latin America.
Street arrests refer to arrests in non-specific locations and exclude anyone in jails, prisons, offices, courts, police departments, detention centers, facilities, or anyone otherwise in the custody of any agency. Because ICE rarely sends agents to specifically arrest noncriminal immigrants whom it cannot promptly remove, and because it is difficult to locate and identify people who have not committed crimes or gone through removal proceedings, this is the likely population of people ICE has targeted through illegal street profiling.
Domingo Mendoza Méndez’s eyes fill with tears as he says he hasn't seen his family since July 10, when he went to an appointment with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and was detained.
“I’m in the process for a U visa and they detained me, but I don’t know why they’re detaining me. I’m following all their rules,” Mendoza Méndez, a 45-year-old Mexican immigrant, said in a video call with Noticias Telemundo from the Freeborn County Correctional Facility in Minnesota.
In 2013, Mendoza Méndez, who had crossed the border 13 years earlier, was the victim of a violent robbery in Minnesota, which was recorded and investigated by police. The type of assault he suffered is included in the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services list of crimes that qualify for a U visa, a measure designed for victims of criminal acts in the U.S. who agree to help authorities investigate the crime.
However, as part of the Trump administration's mass deportation campaign, some immigrants who've applied and are in the process of waiting for a U visa have been detained.
“I feel sad. I’m trying to gather my strength, but there are so many things happening here. Many of us are having our rights violated,” said the married father of three children, adding that he's been in the process of obtaining a visa since 2021.
Magdalena Metelska, the immigration attorney handling Mendoza Méndez’s case, said that other administrations didn’t take coercive measures against victims applying for U visas, but that has changed with the second Trump administration.
Now, if someone has a visa pending and even been given a work permit notification, like Mendoza Méndez, "it doesn’t really matter because these people are also being arrested and detained,” she said.
Three weeks after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard tried to discredit Donald Trump’s Russia scandal and started throwing around words like “treason,” the conspiratorial DNI has certainly succeeded in generating some conversation.
On the one hand, Republicans and conservative media outlets have seized on Gabbard’s accusations as proof that the entire controversy surrounding the president and Russia’s efforts in support of his 2016 candidacy is a “hoax.” On the other hand, every independent analysis of Gabbard’s findings have pointed in the opposite direction: There was no “hoax”; the underlying scandal remains real; and the DNI’s claims are “ludicrous.”
Officials from Democratic and Republican administrations urged the public to recognize Gabbard’s conspiracy theories as obvious nonsense, while intelligence officials launched a behind-the-scenes effort to discourage the DNI from even releasing her discredited claims in the first place.
Gabbard appeared this week on Fox News — a network that has embraced her latest allegations with considerable enthusiasm — and was asked a straightforward question.
“Now, director, you said there was ‘irrefutable’ evidence that [Barack Obama] was the mastermind of this intelligence manipulation and the perpetuation of the Russia hoax,” host Laura Ingraham said. “What is that irrefutable evidence for our viewers tonight?”
Gabbard responded by pointing to a National Security Council meeting, held in December 2016 — after Trump was elected and during the presidential transition process — that Obama called to discuss Russia’s operation. As part of that meeting, the Democratic then-president made some standard directives to intelligence officials. Gabbard added:
If Gabbard was under the impression that this made sense and her on-air comments constituted persuasive and “irrefutable” evidence that justified her bizarre allegations of treason, she was mistaken.
For one thing, we’ve known about that National Security Council meeting for years. It was discussed in some detail in the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee’s report, and as Media Matters’ Matt Gertz explained, the GOP-led panel didn’t find anything remarkable about Obama’s instructions.
On the contrary, the committee reviewed the assessment that Obama sought and concluded that it was “coherent and well-constructed,” featuring “proper analytic tradecraft,” and that its authors experienced “no politically motivated pressure to reach specific conclusions.”
But what about Gabbard’s claim that officials were told to put together an intelligence assessment that detailed “how,” not “if,” Russia targeted the election? That’s not scandalous either: By December 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies had already compiled voluminous evidence, collected over the course of months, documenting Moscow’s efforts.
As Ben Rhodes rightly noted last night on MSNBC, it's all an attempt to distract from Donald's relationship with the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Tuesday, we noted the planned secret meeting where the administration would strategize on how to address the criminal issues arising from Donald's personal relationship with Epstein -- and, no, that's not a presidential issue and shouldn't have been handled by the administration. Yesterday we noted that the meeting was called off. It was not. It took place -- despite lies from JD Vance and others -- on camera lies -- at a different location.
Last night on MSNBC, Lawrence O'Donnell addressed the secret meeting.
As did Jen Psaki.
Kaitlyn Tiffany (THE ATLANTIC) writes:
Jeffrey Epstein’s “client list” is the conspiracy theory that may never die. A secret document detailing all of the elite clients that Epstein allegedly sex-trafficked minors to—it’s something of a grail for QAnon adherents, TMZ watchers, and serious news readers alike. There is no proof that such a thing exists.
Yet President Donald Trump himself suggested that it did during his campaign, and pledged to release it before a disastrous backtrack
from the Department of Justice last month. Now, in a poll released
Monday, nearly two-thirds of Americans said they believe that the Trump
administration is hiding something, and 71 percent said they still
believe that the list is real. Meanwhile, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has demanded that the list be released, Democrats are pushing the narrative that the Trump administration is orchestrating a cover-up, and yesterday the House subpoenaed the DOJ for additional files related to the case.
To be clear, many unanswered and valid questions remain about Epstein. Before his death, he was charged with trafficking and abusing, as it read in the indictment, “a vast network” of dozens of underage girls. Many still wonder why he was permitted to carry on with his crimes for so long, whether other people who were complicit in them have escaped justice, and how much President Trump may have known while the two were friends. Trump’s name reportedly appears in files that have been redacted by the FBI, though he has repeatedly denied personal knowledge of Epstein’s crimes and says their relationship ended in 2004.
The specific idea of a client list, though, has taken on a life of its own. No one can demonstrate that the list doesn’t exist, so people will continue to insist that it does—that it is being kept from them. There’s a certain logic to their belief, because a similar document has been seen already. In 2015, Gawker published Epstein’s address book, which was full of names of celebrities and politicians. He apparently kept meticulous records and liked putting all of his famous contacts together in one place. And so the idea of a client list feels plausible to many people because they’ve had a mental image of it for 10 years now.
Moreover, Trump has created a “where there’s smoke there’s fire” effect in the past several weeks. The president has vacillated among suggesting that he has no obligation to talk about Epstein, speculating that political foes may have fabricated parts of the Epstein file, attempting to placate his supporters by ordering the release of grand-jury testimony about the case (which cannot be unsealed, a federal judge ruled), and deflecting (“you ought to be talking about Bill Clinton”).
At CNN this moring, Stephen Collinson observes:
The women whom Jeffrey Epstein abused demand to be heard.
And their voices — long suppressed, but now emerging powerfully and with courage — could further fuel the maelstrom around President Donald Trump and aides who dig the scandal deeper each time they try to end it.
These are women who’ve been let down for years, at multiple levels, by a government that was supposed to keep them safe. Their families are victims, too, since abuse sows trauma through generations.
And it’s happening again as the Trump administration refuses to release files about Epstein’s life, which several of its members had promised to make public. CNN has reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi briefed Trump in May that his name was mentioned in the files, among those of other high-profile figures.
Trump has never been investigated or charged over anything to do with Epstein, whom he knew in the 1990s and early 2000s. The White House says Trump threw Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago because he was “a creep.”
But hardly anyone at the White House ever mentions the young women whom Epstein used and abused.
“What they really need is for it to go away,” Sky Roberts, the brother of one of Epstein’s most prominent victims, Virginia Giuffre, told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Thursday.
“There’s a lack of transparency here and what we are not hearing is … we are not hearing the survivors’ voices coming through,” Roberts said. “This is a human issue, and I think we need to bring that back because we are dehumanizing survivors by not bringing justice forward.” Giuffre took her own life in Australia, where she lived, earlier this year
In a sign of the administration’s political priorities, there were no Epstein survivors represented at a Wednesday night White House meeting that addressed the crisis, CNN reported. Those in attendance included Vice President JD Vance, Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel. The meeting was moved from the vice president’s residence amid a media storm.
Just as the administration has been unable to change the topic, they've been unable to come off above board on the Epstein issue. Steven Bennen points out:
A couple of weeks ago, Sen. Markwayne Mullin sat down with CNN’s Jake Tapper and did his best to try to deflect blame in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. The effort went quite badly, however, for an important reason: The Oklahoma Republican couldn’t quite remember who was president in 2008.
As
the far-right senator tried to argue, Epstein received “a sweetheart
plea deal” from prosecutors in the Obama administration, an arrangement
that Mullin claimed “has not been exposed.” It fell to Tapper to remind his confused guest
that the late millionaire pedophile did benefit from a generous deal,
but it was in 2008, that Barack Obama wasn’t president in 2008, and that
the agreement was exposed years ago.
The incident did, however, serve as a timely reminder that it was Alex Acosta who helped orchestrate Epstein’s deal — and it was Donald Trump who added Acosta to his White House Cabinet during the Republican’s first term.
It’s against this backdrop that NBC News reported:
The report added that victims of Epstein’s sexual abuse are unhappy that Acosta was not among those subpoenaed.
An attorney for one of his victims said, “How can any genuine investigation into the federal government’s sweetheart deal with Epstein (including the extraordinary grant of blanket immunity to all his named and unnamed co-conspirators) omit Alex Acosta?”
Given the circumstances, that’s hardly an unreasonable question.
As longtime readers might recall, Epstein ended up pleading guilty to a state charge of soliciting sex from a minor in 2008, which led to an 18-month sentence. He was released after 13 months — during which time he was permitted to leave the prison and go to work during much of the day — and he then went back to living the high life.
How in the world did Epstein get such a generous deal, given the number of his underage victims?
"Although Elon Musk has departed, his influence remains, as DOGE and its employees attempt to become a permanent part of the federal government"
Washington, D.C. — U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), along with Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Representative Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), wrote to the Office of Personnel and Management (OPM) Director Scott Kupor and Office of Management and Budget Director Rusell Vought, demanding answers about the extent to which Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employees have been appointed to key positions across government agencies and to help determine whether the conversion of these DOGE employees could be in violation of civil service laws.
In recent months, reports have emerged of DOGE employees converting into full-time federal workers at the Social Security Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Labor, and other agencies.
“Although Elon Musk has departed, his influence remains, as DOGE and its employees attempt to become a permanent part of the federal government, scattered across agencies where they can continue to sabotage key functions from within,” the lawmakers warned.
The conversion of DOGE appointees to career roles–even as most agencies remain under a hiring freeze–could violate laws that explicitly ban political considerations and loyalty tests in hiring. Additionally, it is unclear who newly embedded DOGE staff report to and if they truly serve within the chain of command of the agencies they work for.
“(T)he Trump Administration’s hiring of DOGE affiliates to career positions appears to be influenced by overtly political and loyalty-based considerations, putting the effectiveness of the federal government in jeopardy and raising questions about compliance with civil service laws,” wrote the lawmakers.
DOGE failed to lower costs for Americans–instead, it degraded public services and created more waste and inefficiency. The lawmakers reminded OPM and OMB of these failures, and sounded the alarm about the significant conflicts of interests that DOGE employees have with Musk’s companies, raising doubts about their ability to serve the American public’s interests.
“The embedding of DOGE employees is part of a larger, disturbing trend of corruption in the Trump Administration, with individuals and corporations that appear to have done political or financial favors for the President given special treatment, and the President and other executive branch officials—including Elon Musk and other DOGE appointees—serving in important policy positions despite having significant financial conflicts of interest.” wrote the lawmakers.
The lawmakers urged the agencies to implement accountability structures and halted the conversion of DOGE employees to permanent federal positions. They also requested answers about how these personnel decisions were made by August 20, 2025.
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The wretched and the disgusting7 hours ago
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Fake ass Nancy Mace7 hours ago
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HULU to say bye-bye-bye7 hours ago
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Satan is calling Virginia Foxx home7 hours ago
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