AP: Mexican security chief confirms cartel family members entered US in a deal with Trump administration
Mexico’s security chief confirmed Tuesday that 17 family members of cartel leaders crossed into the U.S. last week as part of a deal between a son of the former head of the Sinaloa Cartel and the Trump administration.
Mexican Security Secretary Omar García Harfuch confirmed a report by independent journalist Luis Chaparro that family members of Ovidio Guzman Lopez, who was extradited to the United States in 2023, had entered the U.S.
Guzmán Lopez is one of the brothers left running a faction of the Sinaloa Cartel after notorious capo Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán was imprisoned in the U.S. Video showed the family members walking across the border from Tijuana with their suitcases to waiting U.S. agents.
(AP more…)
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – May 14, 2025
On May 8, political scientists Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Ziblatt published an op-ed in the New York Times reminding readers that most modern authoritarian leaders are elected. They maintain their power by using the power of the government—arrests, tax audits, defamation suits, politically targeted investigations, and so on—to punish and silence their opponents. They either buy or bully the media and civil society until opposing voices cave to their power.
Levitsky, Way, and Ziblatt call this system “competitive authoritarianism.” A country that has fallen to it still holds elections, but the party in power has so weighted the system in its favor that it’s virtually impossible for it to lose.
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Looking at the many ways the Trump administration has been harassing critics, law firms, universities, judges, and media stations, they conclude that “America has crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism.”
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)TNR: How Trump’s “Emergency” Powers Could Become Permanent
The president is declaring emergencies on everything from an “invasion” of immigrants to a mythical shortage of fossil fuel production. But it’s all just a ploy for him to act like a Roman emperor.
BBC: Do Afrikaners want to take Trump up on his South African refugee offer?
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“Promoting South Africa is something I am passionate about – I have no intention of taking up [US President Donald Trump’s] offer because South Africa is my home,” the proud Afrikaner tells the BBC, days after a small group of his fellow white compatriots left South Africa for their new life as refugees in the US.The US president, and his South-Africa born ally Elon Musk, says that white Afrikaners are being persecuted in their home country, and that they are being subjected to a “genocide”.
This is a claim that has been circulating for many years even though it has been widely discredited.
(BBC more…)Hill: Trump administration ends protections from deportation for Afghans
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The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees last month condemned forced deportations to Afghanistan from neighboring countries, writing that its “escalating humanitarian crisis is being compounded by the mass return of its nationals.”
(Hill more…)
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ProPublica: U.S. AG Pam Bondi Sold More than $1 Million in Trump Media Stock the Day Trump Announced Sweeping Tariffs
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Daily Kos: Kristi Noem tells Congress she doesn’t have to follow the Constitution
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Testifying before Congress on Wednesday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem argued that the Trump administration does not have to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland resident who was wrongly deported to El Salvador—even though the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that it does.
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At another point in the hearing, Noem was asked to address Trump’s assertions, based on a doctored image, that Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang. The allegation, which is based on hearsay and has not been the subject of a court hearing, is one of the claims the Trump team continues to cling to.
(Daily Kos more…)
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Daily Beast: Judge Arrested by Trump Administration Fights Back With Trump’s Own Immunity Case
TURNING THE TABLES
Judge Hannah Dugan’s lawyers argued that she can’t be prosecuted for her official conduct.
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Fast Company: Trump’s drug pricing order puts Roche’s $50 billion U.S. investment plans at risk
(Fast Company more…)
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Atlantic: The Mess at Airports Is Part of a Larger Pattern
On this much, there is bipartisan agreement: The Federal Aviation Administration is in a bad mess. After years of exceptional safety, the U.S. air-travel system has recently been beset with near misses and, in one horrifying case, a collision. Air-traffic-control towers are badly understaffed, and controllers have now twice lost—for about 90 seconds and 30 to 90 seconds, respectively—the ability to track flights coming in and out of Newark.“Someone should have seen this coming in the last administration,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy complained yesterday on CNBC.
In fact, lots of people saw it coming. Regulators, pilots, controllers, airline executives, and outside observers all warned for years that the system was falling behind and running on outdated technology. Yet successive presidential administrations and Congresses didn’t act, lulled into a false sense of stability by a record 16-year stretch with no fatal commercial-airline crashes in the United States.
(Atlantic more…)
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Austin Chronicle: Lord Buffalo Drummer Yamal Said, a Legal U.S. Resident, Detained by Border Patrol
Band cancels tour to concentrate on bandmate’s safety, freedom
The immigration crackdown that has been sweeping up documented U.S. residents and even U.S. citizens has seemingly hit the Austin music scene. Local heavy Americana band Lord Buffalo announced via Facebook and Instagram Wednesday that drummer and legal resident Yamal Said has been held by Customs and Border Patrol for the last two days.Said has been an Austin resident since the 1980s, when his parents relocated the family here after an earthquake in Mexico City. Currently employed as Coverage Coordinator for the Middle School and High School teams at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired, he has been a fixture of the Austin scene for two decades, formerly as a drummer for the Black and as part of Lord Buffalo for the past eight years.
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Paul Carlson, assistant principal at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired, called Said “a highly respected and long-serving member of our school community.” He noted that he has been contacting elected officials to ask them to look into this case.
(Austin Chronicle more…)
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Allison Gill: Trump’s Secret Police
Who are these masked agents? I have some ideas.
Currently, we have zero confirmation that ICE agents are anything but repurposed officers from other agencies. We know from public reporting that one third of the work the FBI is doing is in support of immigration policies. Reuters says “In a series of meetings, FBI agents were told by their field offices they would need to start devoting about one third of their time to helping the Trump administration crack down on illegal immigration.”
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Add it all up, and I don’t think it’s far-fetched to speculate that the Trump administration is deputizing untrained, maniacal extremists to play dress-up and assist with mass deportation.So if you ask me who these ICE agents are, we can confirm many of them come from other agencies, but I don’t think it’s conspiratorial to speculate that many of them are deputized civilians.
(Allison Gill more…)
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WBUR: Boston-area climate activists report visits from the FBI
Local climate activists are on edge after people claiming to be FBI agents visited at least six of them at their Boston-area homes on the same day in March.
(WBUR more…)
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Daily: Trump Loses Big As Judge Rules Federal Grants Can’t Be Stripped In Retaliation
Trump Gets Called Out For One Of His Favorite Forms Of Retaliation
It has become the standard Trump administration excuse when the White House cancels grants or funding: the administration claims that the funding no longer aligns with its objectives or priorities.
The claim is nonsense, and it always has been.
The Trump administration stripped federal grants from the American Bar Association that helped to fund services to domestic and sexual violence victims after the association joined a lawsuit against the Trump administration.
The ABA sued, and today, they got a ruling in their favor.
The government claims that it had a nonretaliatory motive for terminating the grants: They no longer aligned with DOJ’s priorities. But the government has not identified any nonretaliatory DOJ priorities, much less explained why they were suddenly deemed inconsistent with the goals of the affected grants. And the government’s different treatment of other grantees suggests this justification is pretextual.
(Daily more…)
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Bulwark: Trump White House Sharpens Its Knives for Politico’s Owner
An article about Donald Trump Jr. has sent MAGA world into a tizzy.
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In a Tuesday-night story little noticed outside of right-wing media, Breitbart reporter and Trump administration favorite Matthew Boyle wrote that the White House was furious at German media conglomerate Axel Springer. At issue was a Business Insider story titled “Don Jr. is the new Hunter Biden.” In the 1,500-word-long item, reporter Bethany McLean focused on Don Jr.’s venture-capital fund, 1789 Capital, primarily via a collection of quotes from some ethics experts and an anonymous Wall Street investor concerned that the fund could present a conflict of interest.
(Bulwark more…)
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Newsweek: Donald Trump Issued Warning As Impeachment Vote Abruptly Canceled
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Democratic Representative Shri Thanedar had introduced seven articles of impeachment against the president, and this week launched the process of forcing a resolution on the House floor.But in a post on X on Wednesday, Thanedar said he had decided not to force a vote on the House floor.
Instead, he said he would expand his articles of impeachment against Trump, and continue to rally for support from Democrats and Republicans. “After talking with many colleagues, I have decided not to force a vote on impeachment today. Instead, I will add to my articles of impeachment and continue to rally the support of both Democrats and Republicans to defend the Constitution with me,” he wrote.
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404 Media: American Schools Were Deeply Unprepared for ChatGPT, Public Records Show
Thousands of pages of documents show school districts around the country did not understand how much ChatGPT would change their classrooms, and pro-AI consultants filled in some of the gaps.
In February 2023, a brief national scandal erupted: Several students at a high school in Florida were accused of using a tool called “ChatGPT” to write their essays. The tool was four months old at the time, and it already seemed like a technology that, at the very least, students would try to cheat with. That scandal now feels incredibly quaint.
(404 Media more…)
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ProPublica: Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew