Florida Deletes ICE Deportation Records in Front of Journalists’ Eyes

Is Florida trying to hide how many U.S. citizens have been detained as part of Donald Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants?

The Miami New Times reported Wednesday that the Florida State Board of Immigration Enforcement removed the number of U.S. citizens arrested as part of law enforcement’s sweeping deportation efforts from its website, after the publication asked the state why citizens were being arrested in the first place.

As of October 14, Florida’s Suspected Unauthorized Alien Encounters Dashboard had recorded the arrests of 21 U.S. citizens and another nine who had encounters with law enforcement but were not arrested, according to the Times. After the outlet reached out to the board, the figure vanished. The Times reported the dashboard now shows that U.S. citizens have had two encounters and only one arrest.

The Times reached out to the board, as well as the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and Governor Ron DeSantis’s office about the change, but received no response.

Last week, ProPublica reported that more than 170 U.S. citizens have been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including 20 children.

Since August 1, immigration authorities in Florida have recorded more than 5,800 encounters and made 4,700 arrests. Of those arrests, more than 2,400 have been conducted by state and local law enforcement operating federal immigration powers under a 287(g) agreement.

Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner has been under fire this week after revelations that he has a skull tattoo associated with Germany’s Nazi Party on his chest. On Wednesday, he announced that it has been covered up.

In an interview with Vanity Fair published on Wednesday, Platner said that the tattoo has been covered up with “some kind of Celtic knot with a dog on it, because that’s far more in line with my opinions about nature and animals now than my connection to the violence that I partook in when I was a young man.” On Wednesday, Platner revealed his new tattoo in an interview with Maine TV station WGME.

The oyster farmer turned progressive political candidate vehemently denied any connections or affinity to Nazism, saying that he got the tattoo on a drunken night out in Croatia in 2007 while serving in the Marines. A video posted to Instagram earlier this week showed Platner singing shirtless at a wedding where the skull tattoo, known as a Totenkopf or “death’s head,” is visible.

Platner told the magazine that he wasn’t aware of the tattoo’s background until recently, saying that he got it because “skull and crossbar motifs are popular amongst military units.” He said that his tattoo had been reviewed at a Military Entrance Processing Station when he later joined the U.S. Army, and before he began work as a contractor for the State Department.

Platner added that the wedding where he was singing was that of his sister-in-law, who is Jewish, and that several members of his extended family are Jewish.

“If I thought that I had a Nazi tattoo, I would not have just been taking my shirt off in front of everybody. I just had a skull and crossbones that I got when I was in the Marine Corps,” Platner said.

Speaking to the Associated Press, Platner said that he chose to cover up the tattoo because a full removal would be a longer and more difficult process where he lives in rural Maine, and he “wanted this thing off my body.”

Platner is looking to unseat Republican senator Susan Collins, who has held her seat for 25 years despite shedding her once-moderate image in favor of the GOP’s ideological shift toward Donald Trump. While Collins has faced rising unpopularity in Maine, even being jeered and booed at a public appearance over the summer, Platner now has a well-funded Democratic primary challenger in Governor Janet Mills, who has the support of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Platner burst onto the scene in August with a now-viral campaign launch video where he pledged to “topple the oligarchy that’s destroying our country” and end “endless wars,” and has appealed to to many voters in Maine by calling Israel’s massacre in Gaza a genocide and refusing to “take money from AIPAC or any group that supports the genocide in Gaza.” Now, his upstart candidacy faces the obstacle of convincing those voters that he isn’t hiding secret Nazi inclinations and is running for the right reasons.

This story has been updated.

President Trump is blatantly attempting to weasel his way into a $230 million payout from his own Justice Department. Unsurprisingly, the GOP couldn’t care less. 

“How comfortable are you with the president apparently seeking $230 million from the Department of Justice?” a reporter asked House Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday, a day after the news broke. Johnson, of course, reverted back to his favorite response: ignorance.

“I don’t know the details about that, I’ve just read it, I didn’t talk with him about that,” Johnson replied. “I know that he believes he’s owed that reimbursement. What I heard yesterday was if he receives it, he was gonna consider giving it to charity, he doesn’t need those proceeds.” 

How does Johnson know that Trump (known for being forced to shut down his own charity foundation after being caught using it for personal funds) might give the millions to charity if he just said seconds before that he didn’t know any details? 

“It’s absurd,” the speaker continued. “They attack him for everything he does.” He then quickly changed the subject to defend Trump’s bulldozing the White House’s East Wing to clear room for his upcoming ballroom.  

Trump is essentially demanding that the DOJ pay him hundreds of millions of dollars for investigating his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia and his mishandling of classified documents after he left the presidency. This is an unprecedented, deeply questionable move. 

“What a travesty,” ethics professor Bennett L. Gershman, told The New York Times. “The ethical conflict is just so basic and fundamental, you don’t need a law professor to explain it.… And then to have people in the Justice Department decide whether his claim should be successful or not, and these are the people who serve him deciding whether he wins or loses. It’s bizarre and almost too outlandish to believe.”

This reimbursement, if successful, will likely have to be covered by the American taxpayer. 

At least one GOP member, Thom Tillis, had the courage to speak out.

“It’s terrible optics, particularly right now,” he told CNN’s Manu Raju. “We’re talking about a quarter of a billion dollars transferring, maybe to the president when we’re in a shutdown posture.” 

But the majority of Republicans seem to be staying quiet.

Zohran Mamdani’s preventative crime plan is so effective that criminals are fleeing New York City before he’s even mayor.

Disgraced ex–Long Island Representative George Santos revealed his plans to exit the Big Apple Tuesday, claiming that the New York Democratic mayoral candidate’s policies would make the city unsafe for him.

“Sadly it seems that my family and I will be departing the city I’ve called home my entire life. NYC will become a very dangerous place to live in if we elect mayor Mamdani and that is a risk I am unwilling to take now that I want to start growing my family,” Santos posted to X.

Of course, Santos was the danger. The reputed hustler was caught fabricating his entire résumé and lying about his relation to Holocaust survivors, his connection to the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, and the kidnapping of his niece, among many other things. He had victims across continents, having graduated from stealing wallets in Brazil to using political donations to his congressional campaign to bankroll his personal lifestyle—namely, his designer shoe addiction.

Santos pleaded guilty last year to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, as well as credit card fraud and illegally receiving unemployment benefits. He was sentenced to seven years in prison—a detention commuted by President Donald Trump on Friday for no clear reason other than the prolific fraudster’s undying loyalty to the president.

“He lied like hell,” Trump said of his fellow Republican to Newsmax in August. “But he was 100 percent for Trump.”

Santos served just 84 days, while his victims described the presidential pardon as a knife to the gut.

But if the fabulist con man’s prior statements are to be believed, then Santos isn’t planning on staying stateside, either.

“Once I finish my obligations with the U.S. criminal justice system I will leave and never return,” Santos posted in May. “I rather take my chances in other countries than live in a country that has a weaponized justice system and is run by the industrial prison complex.”

But Santos may have another reason for trying to get as far from New York as possible: Although Trump commuted Santos’s sentence for federal crimes, his move does nothing about state-level charges. Nassau County District Attorney Anne T. Donnelly released a statement Tuesday regarding Santos’s newfound freedom.

“While the office cannot comment on ongoing investigations, suffice it to say that I remain focused on prosecuting political corruption wherever it exists regardless of political affiliation,” she said in the statement.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent accidentally injured a deputy U.S. marshal while firing shots at a TikTok streamer known for documenting ICE raids.

The violent incident occurred during a traffic stop in South Los Angeles Tuesday, when agents attempted to detain Carlitos Ricardo Parias, known as Richard LA, who had previously received recognition for his work as a citizen journalist documenting ICE operations.

In a statement, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the operation was “a targeted enforcement traffic stop,” and that the 44-year-old Mexican immigrant “had previously escaped from custody” and “attempted to evade arrest yet again.”

McLaughlin claimed that Parias was pulled over using “standard law enforcement procedure,” but acting U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said that agents had “boxed him in,” which is not considered standard procedure for a traffic stop.

According to the affidavit, Parias ignored commands to exit his vehicle, hitting two law enforcement vehicles before “accelerating aggressively” with his car.

The affidavit claimed that the spinning wheels of Parias’s Toyota Camry produced smoke and debris, and Essayli shared an image of the arrest on X that showed a plume of white smoke beside the car. However, an eyewitness claimed that officers had fired tear gas during the arrest, which could also explain the cloud of smoke.

McLaughlin claimed that officers “followed their training and fired defensive shots” when Parias “weaponized his vehicle and began ramming the law enforcement vehicle in an attempt to flee.”

CNN reported that an ICE officer confronted Parias and used his weapon to smash Parias’s window, according to a law enforcement source who spoke to the outlet. Authorities believe the agent’s weapon fired while he was attempting to grab Parias, striking Parias and a deputy marshal. McLaughlin made no mention of this interaction in her statement.

Parias was struck in the elbow, and a ricocheted bullet hit one deputy marshal in the hand. Both are expected to recover.

Parias has been charged with assault of a federal officer. His lawyer Carlos Jurado told CNN affiliate KCAL/KCBS that his client was “a very pacifist man. He’s very calm. A lot of the police officers here know him. They know that he’s very respectful.”

This is not the first time ICE has opened fire during an attempted arrest. Earlier this month, a Border Patrol agent in Chicago shot a woman five times during a traffic stop. DHS claimed that the woman had attempted to ram law enforcement vehicles, but her lawyer claimed it was the other way around.