Attention to the Unseen

The Financial Times reports: It took dozens of special agents the best part of a decade to bring Juan Orlando Hernández to justice for flooding US cities with cocaine. Then, in a single social media post last week, Donald Trump set the former Honduran president free. “People risked their lives for this investigation,” said a former agent at the US Drug Enforcement Administration, one of several law enforcement officials involved in tracking Hernández who voiced their frustration to the Financial…

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The New York Times reports: As Congress parses the details of a follow-on strike that killed shipwrecked survivors of President Trump’s first boat attack on Sept. 2, a much larger issue risks getting lost: whether Mr. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have caused the military to commit crimes in a score of attacks. Adm. Frank M. Bradley, who commanded the Sept. 2 operation, on Thursday showed lawmakers a video of the attack. The briefing was part of a congressional…

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The New York Times reports: The federal deployments that have swept through major cities as part of President Trump’s immigration crackdown have led to thousands of arrests. But they have been less effective at apprehending immigrants with a criminal record than more routine operations elsewhere, new data shows. In high-profile Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Los Angeles; Chicago; Washington, D.C.; and across Massachusetts, more than half of those arrested had no criminal record, compared with a third of immigrants…

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USA Today reports: FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino brushed off questions about his past claims that the FBI had covered up the identity of the person who placed pipe bombs outside of political party headquarters on Jan. 5, 2021. In a Dec. 4 interview following the arrest and identification of a man accused of being the would-be bomber, Fox News’ Sean Hannity reminded Bongino, his former colleague, of his past social media and podcast comments. Bongino said the FBI was…

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The Intercept reports: Lawmakers who saw a video of a U.S. attack on wounded and helpless people clinging to the wreckage of a supposed drug boat on September 2 described the footage as deeply disturbing. A small number of members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate and House Armed Services committees, as well as some staff directors, saw the recording during closed-door briefings Thursday with Adm. Frank M. Bradley, the head of Special Operations Command,…

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The New York Times reports: A federal judge in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday ordered federal immigration officers to stop making arrests there without a warrant unless they could show that a suspect was a flight risk. It is the latest in a series of decisions in lower courts that have challenged President Trump’s immigration tactics as he escalates his mass deportation agenda and expands his deployment of law enforcement officers to major urban centers across the country. Some of those…

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The Daily Mail reports: The Trump administration’s frantic push to hire 10,000 new deportation officers by year’s end has spiraled into what insiders describe as a national embarrassment – with lax vetting and a signing bonus of up to $50,000 luring in a wave of woefully unfit recruits. An exhaustive Daily Mail investigation has exposed how Immigration and Customs Enforcement has lowered standards so dramatically that the new cohort now includes recent high school graduates and applicants who can ‘barely…

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