The Alleged Drug Boat Wasn’t Even Heading to the U.S.: Report

A new, disturbing detail in the “drug boat” controversy that has enveloped Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the past week calls the purpose of the entire operation into question.

According to an exclusive report from CNN, the alleged narco-trafficking boat that the U.S. military targeted on September 2 in a “double tap” strike, which killed 11 people, wasn’t even heading to the U.S.

Navy Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, who was in charge of the operation, reported to lawmakers that the boat they struck was actually en route to link up with a larger boat that was heading to Suriname, a country east of Venezuela, two sources with direct knowledge of his remarks said.

Bradley also said that it was still possible that the alleged drug shipment could have eventually ended up in the U.S., the sources told CNN—rather dubious justification for a strike that left several people dead.

President Donald Trump had previously claimed that the strike happened “while the terrorists were at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States.”

The U.S. military targeted the small boat on September 2, purportedly to stop it from transporting illegal drugs to the United States. After the first strike, two survivors were left, clinging to the wreckage, yet the military struck the boat again and again, killing everyone who had been on board. They ultimately struck the boat four times.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who approved the operation, but sought to shift responsibility to Bradley, has come under intense criticism for authorizing a strike on survivors. Lawmakers and critics on the right and the left have decried the strike as a war crime.

It doesn’t help that the Trump administration’s story keeps changing. As more details emerge, the argument for the deadly boat strike becomes flimsier and flimsier.

As the Republican Party flails on the cost-of-living crisis, President Donald Trump kicked off his Saturday morning with an attack on his beloved Fox & Friends for prodding that sensitive subject.

The show on Saturday hosted Peter Schiff, a stockbroker and financial commentator. He’s also a rising critic of Trump—Schiff has taken the president to task for dismissing economic concerns amid mounting inflation, job losses, and affordability issues.

On Truth Social, the president called Schiff a “Trump hating loser” and questioned the integrity of the Fox News program—of which he is, famously, an avid viewer—for having given him a platform. “Either the show made a mistake, or it is heading in a different direction,” Trump wrote, urging its staff to look into “the ‘booker’ who put this jerk on!”

Schiff, Trump wrote, “thinks prices are going up when, in fact, they are coming substantially down.” The claim is a familiar one from the president, who recently referred to “affordability” as a Democratic “hoax,” while recent polls show concerns about his handling of the economy rising to a fever pitch—and even growing among his own voters.

This mounting frustration with the administration, and apparently resultant GOP losses in recent elections, has created anxiety in the party. Some politicians and strategists are calling on Republicans to rethink their approach so as to actually address voters’ material concerns.

The mother of Karoline Leavitt’s nephew was reportedly engaged in a nasty years-long custody battle with the White House press secretary’s brother before she was detained by Immigration and Customs enforcement last month, WBUR reported Friday.

Bruna Ferreira—a 33-year-old Brazilian immigrant who shares a child with Karoline’s brother Michael Leavitt—was arrested last month in Massachusetts. She is currently detained in Louisiana, hundreds of miles away from New Hampshire, where her 11-year-old son lives with his father.

The Department of Homeland Security alleged that Ferreira had overstayed her visa, which ran out in 1999, and claimed she had a prior arrest for battery. Todd Pomerleau, Ferreira’s lawyer, insisted that she had remained in the country legally and was pursuing citizenship through DACA, and that she had no criminal record. (Melrose police produced a report of an incident from when Ferreira was just 16 years old, where she was summoned to court for assault and battery after an officer said they witnessed her whaling on a girl in a Dunkin Donuts parking lot.)

It seems, however, that Ferreira and her ex-husband had a tumultuous relationship in the years leading up to her arrest.

Ferreira and Leavitt had their son in March 2014, just weeks after she finalized her divorce from her first husband. At first, things seemed amicable, but in April 2015, Leavitt filed a child custody complaint in New Hampshire family court and told police that an “illegal alien from Brazil” had run off with his son and his car.

In the ensuing custody case, Leavitt accused Ferreira of taking the child in the middle of the night, and threatening to take their son to Brazil. Ferreira denied this and alleged Leavitt had threatened to contact ICE in an attempt to have her deported. Although the judge granted Leavitt temporary “sole residential and sole decision-making” responsibilities in 2015, the two continued to squabble for a year until they agreed to split parenting time and Leavitt agreed to pay child support.

In 2020, Ferreira asked for full custody and accused Leavitt of failing to make child support payments, claiming he owed her $70,000. Instead the judge ruled that the child would remain with Leavitt during the school week, and with Ferreira just three weekends a month.

During an incident in June 2022, police officers found that Ferreira’s home appeared to be derelict, and filed a report of suspected child abuse or neglect with the Department of Children and Families.

There has been some speculation that Karoline Leavitt, as the head cheerleader of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, was involved in directing immigration authorities to arrest Ferreira, a claim that her brother has previously denied. The two women have reportedly not spoken in years.

Graziela Dos Santos Rodrigues, Ferreira’s sister, told WBUR that there was no bad blood between their families. She said that she’d spoken to Michael Leavitt and his father, who advised that Ferreira’s best option was to self-deport. Still, Dos Santos was adamant about keeping her sister in the United States, and said she’d reached out to Karoline Leavitt but has yet to hear back.

The Supreme Court agreed Friday to hear arguments over the legality of Donald Trump’s plan to end birthright citizenship, the 1868 constitutional detail that entitles any person born on U.S. soil to an American passport.

In doing so, the nation’s highest judiciary has set the stage for a decision, expected by the end of June, that could undermine the Fourteenth Amendment. That amendment guarantees citizenship to everyone born or naturalized on U.S. soil.

Trump attempted to end the constitutionally enshrined right mere hours after he was sworn into office in January by signing an executive order stating that children born to immigrants on temporary visas or who are in the country illegally should not be entitled to birthright status. That order was blocked by multiple judges in multiple court circuits over the last year.

In the case the Supreme Court has agreed to hear, which stems from qualms in New Hampshire, the Trump administration argues that language included in the amendment—specifically, “subject to the jurisdiction of”—requires applicable children to not only be present in the country at the time of the birth but also to confer their allegiance to the United States. Exactly how newborn babies would be expected to do so, however, is not clear.

“Long after the Clause’s adoption, the mistaken view that birth on U.S. territory confers citizenship on anyone subject to the regulatory reach of U.S. law became pervasive, with destructive consequences,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in legal arguments on behalf of the administration.

Sauer added that the intent of Trump’s executive order is to “restore the Clause’s original meaning.”

It’s not the first time this year that the Supreme Court has heard arguments on the topic.

In May, justices on both ideological sides of the court flamed the Trump administration’s efforts to rewrite birthright citizenship through America’s courts, questioning why the government’s attorneys would even bring the case to the judiciary’s doorstep when “every court has ruled against” the administration on birthright citizenship.

At the time, Justice Brett Kavanaugh pressed Sauer into a corner, forcing the solicitor general to admit that the Trump administration doesn’t even know how it would enforce its birthright citizenship order. Sauer managed to appall another Trump appointee—Justice Amy Coney Barrett—by arguing that Trump has the “right” to disregard legal opinions that he doesn’t personally agree with.

Donald Trump’s attempt to nab more Republican congressional seats and keep his party in control of Congress just got a boost Friday when Indiana’s House of Representatives passed a new legislative map.

The new map, which seeks to give Republicans control of all of the state’s nine congressional seats, passed the state House by a 57–41 vote. The new map will make it harder for the state’s only two Democrats, Representative André Carson and Frank Mrvan, to be reelected. But the map now faces hurdles in the state Senate, despite its being under Republican control, as Republican senators have warned there isn’t enough support.

The fight has turned nasty, with Trump threatening to support primary challengers to these senators, among other attacks on his Truth Social account. As a result, Indiana Republicans have faced violent threats, with at least 11 elected Indiana Republicans being targeted with threats like “swatting,” false police reports meant to cause a violent law enforcement response. One of them, state Senator Greg Goode, hadn’t even made any public comments about redistricting.

The Indiana state Senate won’t meet until January, creating a time crunch to have new maps approved in time for the 2026 midterm elections. If they were to actually pass early in the legislative session, they would likely face legal challenges that could prevent their implementation in time for primary elections.

While the Supreme Court approved Texas’s gerrymandered maps Thursday, there’s no telling if it would do the same for other Republican states, not to mention the fact that other challenges to Texas’s new maps on racial grounds are still possible. Democratic-led states like California and Virginia are also making their own efforts to combat a blatant Republican attempt to subvert the will of the people.

We’re about to get more Epstein documents.

Trump-appointed Judge Rodney Smith of the U.S. District Court of Southern Florida on Friday ordered the release of previously secret grand jury transcripts from 2005 and 2007 investigations into sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The move was spurred by the passing of Representatives Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna’s Epstein Files Transparency Act.

This comes after weeks of resistance from President Trump that culminated in him switching course and caving to demands to release the files.

“The United States seeks to unseal the grand jury materials in this case and publicly release them, as well as lift any preexisting protective orders that would prevent the Department of Justice from releasing the materials,” Smith’s order reads. “The Act applies to unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials that relate to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.”

Other judges from Florida and New York have noted that the grand jury transcripts are unlikely to reveal any new information. The order doesn’t set a deadline for the release of the documents, which will be redacted before being released to the public.

This story has been updated.

The Department of Homeland Security has innovated a cringey new way to spread its blatantly made-up statistics documenting its ethnic cleansing campaign: introducing DHS Wrapped!

In the latest installment of the Trump administration’s weird attempts to appeal to Gen Z, the official DHS X account shared a graphic Thursday channeling Spotify’s Wrapped year-end recaps of its users’ listening habits—but instead of Sabrina Carpenter songs, the DHS version listed the stupidly named immigration operations and some statistics that didn’t quite add up.

“A year full of high stakes operations, deportations, and historic firsts. Here’s what America witnessed in 2025,” the post read.

According to the graphic, the Trump administration had deported more than 586,000 immigrants, while another 1.9 million had self-deported—but those two numbers don’t really make sense.

For the government to have deported 586,000 people, they would have needed to remove about 13,022 people every week since Donald Trump entered office roughly 45 weeks ago. DHS is reportedly removing fewer than 7,500 people every week. That’s still a terrifying number, but nowhere near the level of removals they are claiming.

It’s also unclear how many people have self-deported, and the DHS has given conflicting accounts.

Last month, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed that 1.6 million people had self-deported. In just a few weeks, that number has ballooned by 300,000. So, in the past month roughly the population of Jersey City just packed their bags and left?

Meanwhile, only 35,000 people have used CBP Home to leave the country, costing roughly $7,500 per self-deportation, The Atlantic reported last week. (The agency previously told The New Republic that “tens of thousands” of undocumented immigrants had used the CBP Home app to relocate to their home countries.)

The Trump administration is invoking racist tropes in a policy document, claiming that Europe is facing “civilizational erasure.” 

The White House’s new National Security Strategy, posted Thursday night, called the European Union antidemocratic and seemed to make an openly bigoted jab at the demographics of European NATO states, saying, “Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European.” 

“As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter,” the document states. 

The paper went on to say the U.S. should “help Europe correct its current trajectory,” including by supporting “patriotic” parties. “We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation,” the document reads.

The administration also accused governments of “the subversion of democratic processes” to thwart public opinion to end the war in Ukraine. The document praises Europe’s far-right political parties, saying that “the growing influence of patriotic European parties” gives “cause for great optimism.” 

While sitting European leaders haven’t commented, former leaders have reacted with alarm, comparing the document to rhetoric from Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian government. 

“It’s language that one otherwise only finds coming out of some bizarre minds of the Kremlin,” said Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden, on X. He pointed out the only part of the world where the document saw a threat to democracy was Europe. Bildt also described the document as “to the right of the extreme right in Europe” and “JD Vance on steroids.” 

An anonymous European diplomat also mentioned the vice president, saying the document’s “tone was not promising. Even worse than Vance’s speech in February,” referring to Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference where he extolled nativism and far-right politics while downplaying the threat from Russia. 

Latvia’s former Prime Minister Krisjanis Karins told Reuters that “the happiest country reading this is Russia,” adding that “Moscow has been trying to break the transatlantic bond for years, and now it seems the greatest disruptor of this bond is the U.S. itself, which is unfortunate.”

Much of the document seems to echo the racist rhetoric coming from other parts of the Trump administration, whether it’s the dog whistles coming out of the Department of Homeland Security or the underpinnings of the administration’s immigration policies. It appears that the White House is more concerned about racial and cultural homogeneity than the real external threats.   

The Trump administration removed free national park access on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth, while adding it for President Trump’s birthday. 

Now two federal holidays that celebrate Black American history will be ticketed—from around $3 to $30—while Trump’s birthday on June 14 is free entry. 

This change, first reported by SFGATE, is emblematic of the small-scale, antagonistic ways in which Trump wages his MAGA culture war on any federal mention of Black history in America, or any minority group, for that matter. 

The NPS has been a battleground for much of that war. Since taking office for the second time, Trump has ordered the removal of signs and exhibits documenting American slavery, including an iconic 1863 portrait of an ex-slave, often referred to as either Peter or Gordon, and the brutal whipping scars on his “scourged back.” 

He signed an executive order directing the Interior Department to erase any information that could be misconstrued as a “corrosive ideology,” which of course included anything relating to race relations, LGBTQ rights, and sexism. He also removed a picture of Harriet Tubman from the National Park Service page on the Underground Railroad, and changed the words “enslaved African Americans” to “enslaved workers” while removing a section that discussed Benjamin Franklin being a slave owner.

This move is spiteful and self-centered, and a perfect opportunity for the president to center himself while punching down on MLK Day and Juneteenth in the name of MAGA.  

The U.S. president on Friday became the inaugural recipient of FIFA’s newly minted peace prize.

The prize was the invention of Gianni Infantino, the boss of the international soccer league, who shocked his own top officials by cooking up the concept after Donald Trump begged, pleaded, and failed to win the Nobel Peace Prize in October.

“This is truly one of the great honors of my life, and beyond awards, Gianni and I were discussing this, we’ve saved millions and millions of lives,” Trump said after the medal—a sculpture of hands holding a soccer ball—had been draped around his neck. “So many different wars that we were able to end.”

But whether a soccer prize will scratch Trump’s itch for global recognition remains to be seen. Trump has coveted the Nobel Peace Prize for years, going so far as to lie about solving nonexistent international conflicts and phoning Norwegian officials this past summer in lame efforts to snag the title (Norway’s government has no influence on decisions made by the committee).

Part of the president’s obsession could stem from the fact that four other U.S. presidents have received the award, perhaps most notably Trump’s political nemesis, former President Barack Obama.

Infantino had publicly lobbied for Trump to win the award. But his failure to launch that process offered Infantino a new opening to flatter the president: inventing an entirely new award to satisfy Trump’s ego.

Trump was announced as the winner during the 2026 FIFA World Cup final draw.

This story has been updated.