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Category: Law/Crime

Minneapolis police chief warns officers: Stop unlawful force by ICE or lose your job

Minneapolis police chief warns officers: Stop unlawful force by ICE or lose your job

MS Now reports: Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara issued a stern warning to his officers on Thursday: Intervene when you see Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents using unlawful force or lose your job. “If unlawful force is being used by any law enforcement officer against any person in this city and one of our officers is there, absolutely, I expect them to intervene, or they’ll be fired,” O’Hara said when asked how his officers should respond to excessive force by…

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U.S. leader of global neo-Nazi terrorist group signals retribution for arrests in Spain

U.S. leader of global neo-Nazi terrorist group signals retribution for arrests in Spain

The Guardian reports: After Spanish police and Europol’s counter-terrorism section arrested three suspected members of the Base – a globally proscribed neo-Nazi terrorist group – in the eastern province of Castellón, its American leader living in Russia was defiant and signaled further actions. In a text message to the Guardian, Rinaldo Nazzaro called the arrests another “example of political persecution” by world governments that are “further justifying our resistance to its hegemonic rule by any means necessary”. The group’s presence…

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Trump’s pardons for drug traffickers and fraudsters is upending the justice system

Trump’s pardons for drug traffickers and fraudsters is upending the justice system

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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Second strike focus obscures larger question about legality of Trump’s boat attacks

Second strike focus obscures larger question about legality of Trump’s boat attacks

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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Majority of immigrants arrested in city crackdowns have no criminal record

Majority of immigrants arrested in city crackdowns have no criminal record

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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FBI’s Bongino no longer claims DC pipe bomb was ‘an inside job’; suspect said to be pro-Trump

FBI’s Bongino no longer claims DC pipe bomb was ‘an inside job’; suspect said to be pro-Trump

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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AI labs Meta, Deepseek, and Xai earned some of the worst grades possible on an existential safety index

AI labs Meta, Deepseek, and Xai earned some of the worst grades possible on an existential safety index

Fortune reports: The Future of Life Institute’s latest AI safety index found that major AI labs fell short on most measures of AI responsibility, with few letter grades rising above a C. The org graded eight companies across categories like safety frameworks, risk assessment, and current harms. Perhaps most glaring was the “existential safety” line, where companies scored Ds and Fs across the board. While many of these companies are explicitly chasing superintelligence, they lack a plan for safely managing…

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New findings reveal human rights violations at Florida’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ and Krome detention centers

New findings reveal human rights violations at Florida’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ and Krome detention centers

Amnesty International today released a new report documenting cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment at two immigration detention centers in Florida: The Everglades Detention Facility (“Alligator Alcatraz”) and the Krome North Service Processing Center (Krome). The report, Torture and enforced disappearances in the Sunshine State: Human rights violations at “Alligator Alcatraz” and Krome in Florida, reveals human rights violations that, in some cases amount to torture, occurring at Krome and “Alligator Alcatraz” within an increasingly hostile anti-immigrant climate in Florida under…

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Lawmakers horrified by video of military strike killing shipwrecked sailors

Lawmakers horrified by video of military strike killing shipwrecked sailors

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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Life during wartime in New Orleans as feds terrorize Latinos who saved a city

Life during wartime in New Orleans as feds terrorize Latinos who saved a city

Will Bunch writes: When the day New Orleans had feared for weeks finally came on Wednesday, it began with a lie as wide as the meandering Mississippi River. A port city somehow dubbed the Big Easy despite its centuries of big trouble woke up to a frigid blast of Arctic air and a claim from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that local immigration raids it’s named the “Catahoula Crunch” would narrowly target “criminal illegal aliens roaming free thanks to…

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Federal judge bars some warrantless immigration arrests in D.C.

Federal judge bars some warrantless immigration arrests in D.C.

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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ICE recruits violent misfits ‘not ready to tie their own laces’

ICE recruits violent misfits ‘not ready to tie their own laces’

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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Killing shipwrecked survivors isn’t just illegal — it endangers U.S. servicemembers

Killing shipwrecked survivors isn’t just illegal — it endangers U.S. servicemembers

Mark Nevitt writes: According to recent media reports, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth verbally ordered special forces to “kill everybody” ahead of a Sept. 2 operation targeting alleged drug traffickers in international waters. That order allegedly resulted in a follow-on “double tap” strike that killed two survivors who were clinging to wreckage. I agree with Professor Jack Goldsmith that if the media reporting is accurate, this military operation is a “dishonorable strike” that is illegal under international law and the laws…

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Family of Colombian fisherman killed in U.S. boat strike files complaint alleging he was murdered

Family of Colombian fisherman killed in U.S. boat strike files complaint alleging he was murdered

ABC News reports: The family of a Colombian fisherman who died in a U.S. military boat strike in September has filed a formal complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights alleging the U.S. government illegally killed him. Alejandro Carranza was killed in a strike in the Caribbean on Sept. 15, according to the petition, filed on Tuesday. “From numerous news reports, we know that U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was responsible for ordering the bombing of boats like…

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FBI headquarters seeks ‘seditious conspiracy’ probe of Democratic lawmakers

FBI headquarters seeks ‘seditious conspiracy’ probe of Democratic lawmakers

Bloomberg Law reports: FBI headquarters is pressuring the bureau’s domestic terrorism agents to open a seditious conspiracy investigation into six Democratic lawmakers who advised military service members to defy unlawful orders, according to three people familiar with the situation. Such an investigation, which has not yet been opened, would mark a more serious step than the FBI’s voluntary inquiry that several of the Democrats derided last week and would escalate the administration’s use of law enforcement to probe the president’s…

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Roger Stone, Trump, the libertarian fantasy of Próspera, and the release of a convicted drug lord

Roger Stone, Trump, the libertarian fantasy of Próspera, and the release of a convicted drug lord

Reuters reports: President Donald Trump, who has cast himself as a relentless foe of illegal drugs, pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, freeing him from a 45-year sentence for conspiring to import tons of cocaine into the United States. Trump’s extraordinary move undermines decades of U.S. efforts to combat transnational drug networks, potentially damages Washington’s credibility in Latin America, and signals to corrupt actors that political connections can outweigh criminal accountability. Trump signed the pardon for Hernandez on Monday…

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