Trump Team Is Trying to Deport a Woman They Brought Here

The feds worked for a year to extradite a Belarusian woman accused of smuggling millions of dollars of U.S. aviation equipment into Russia for its war on Ukraine. But now that she’s finally in the United States, where she can face charges, the Department of Homeland Security is trying to deport her. 

The case against the woman, Yana Leonova, could fall apart if she were to be detained by ICE, The Washington Post reported Wednesday. She’s facing a 10-count felony indictment for alleged fraud, smuggling, and money-laundering. Or, if ICE has their way, she could just, you know, go home. 

Judge Zia M. Faruqui called the situation “Kafkaesque” in a hearing Monday, according to the Post. In a written order, he said, “Indeed, it is both preposterous and offensive for the government to bring someone into the United States against their will and then turn around and seek ICE detention because that person is here ‘illegally.’… The government needs to decide what its priorities are: ginning up deportation stats or prosecuting alleged criminals.”

Technically, Leonova was only authorized to remain in the country for two weeks after she arrived in early November. So ICE pounced: DHS told the court that they planned to take Leonova into custody and deport her—if and when she was released from D.C. jail, where she’s been held since she arrived. 

The move has confounded lawyers and judges alike. Now, prosecutors must ask DHS if Leonova can be given legal authorization to stay in the country while she is tried for her alleged weapons smuggling. 

“I haven’t been in this predicament before, your honor,” one prosecutor said to the judge at Monday’s hearing.

“Me, either,” Faruqui responded, according to the Post.

It seems when it comes to locking up actual criminals, as opposed to daycare workers, pregnant citizens, or children, Donald Trump couldn’t care less.  

The U.S. government is threatening new sanctions on the International Criminal Court unless it changes its founding document to guarantee that it won’t prosecute President Trump or other administration officials. 

Reuters, citing an unnamed White House official, reports that if the court doesn’t listen to American demands, including dropping investigations into war crimes by Israel in Gaza and U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the Trump administration could sanction more ICC officials, as well as the entire court. 

Republicans and Democrats alike have long attacked the court over its investigation into Israel’s conduct in Gaza, and those efforts only increased after the court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif last year. 

In March 2020, ICC prosecutors opened an investigation in Afghanistan that included possible crimes by the U.S. military. In 2021, the court deprioritized, but never closed, the investigation, and apparently the Trump administration is worried. 

“There is growing concern ... that in 2029 the ICC will turn its attention to the president, to the vice president, to the secretary of war and others, and pursue prosecutions against them,” the unnamed White House official told Reuters. “That is unacceptable, and we will not allow it to happen.”

Even under the Biden administration, the U.S. was hostile to the ICC, with Biden calling the arrest warrants for Gallant and Netanyahu “outrageous,” even though Israel has killed at least 69,000 Palestinians in Gaza since 2023.  But so far, the ICC has resisted pressure campaigns from the U.S., rejecting American demands last week. 

The U.S. has already imposed sanctions against the court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, as well as several of its judges, and, along with Israel, has challenged the court’s jurisdiction on non-member states. 

The U.S. is not a signatory or party to the Rome Statute that created the court in 2002, although many of its allies around the world are. Changing the document would require a two-thirds vote from all of the 125 countries that ratified the Rome Statue, which gives the ICC a mandate to prosecute individuals, including sitting heads of state, for crimes committed by them or under their command on the territory of a member state. Trump doesn’t want to be one of them. 

House Speaker Mike Johnson just unveiled Republicans’ plan to address spiking health care costs—and it’s a disaster. 

As Affordable Care Act tax credits are set to expire in just a few weeks, sending health care costs surging for more than 20 million Americans, Republican leadership presented several bullet points Wednesday on how they plan to lower premiums and give Americans better health options. 

Instead of subsidizing premiums for those on Affordable Care Act plans, Republicans proposed introducing Health Savings Accounts, Association Health Plans, and Choice Accounts. 

Americans who don’t get insurance through their employer would be given cash directly into an account, which would reportedly be paired with a high-deductible health plan, meaning higher insurance premiums would be replaced by higher out-of-pocket costs. 

Currently, Obamacare enrollees never see the funds from their tax credits, which instead are sent directly to insurers. President Donald Trump has suggested that consumers would rather see the money themselves, what little of it there is. Republicans’ plan purports to take the burden of negotiating insurance rates away from health care providers and large companies and place it on individuals, so they can “feel like entrepreneurs,” according to Trump.

Republicans are also considering implementing cost-sharing reductions, programs that can assist low-income Americans in paying high deductibles, that were passed as part of Trump’s behemoth budget bill in July. However, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that funding these reductions will increase the number of people without health insurance by 300,000 through 2034.

Another bullet point was controversial “provider-owned hospitals,” which are directly owned and operated by the doctors. The Federation of American Hospitals published a study earlier this year finding that physician-owned hospitals, which focus on a boutique selection of treatments and services, could be damaging to community hospitals, which typically treat patients using Medicare or Medicaid and therefore operate on razor-thin margins. More provider-owned hospitals could siphon away healthier, better-insured patients.

Another point was to codify the Trump administration’s rules to “fix the ACA,” though it’s not entirely clear what that would entail.  

There were some potentially good ideas buried within their list aimed at increasing price transparency. One was to reform pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, a class of middlemen who manage the supply chain of prescription drugs. Critics of PBMs have suggested that consolidation among these managers has contributed to decreased transparency and thwarted competitive pricing. 

Another idea was “site neutrality,” which means that patients would pay the same prices for the same services regardless of setting—though some critics have warned that would further reduce hospital revenues. 

Johnson told Republicans that they wouldn’t implement all 10 of the proposed bullet points and that caucus members should choose two or three to pursue, NOTUS reported.

While discussion was “cordial,” a source told NOTUS, there was “no consensus” at all.

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer on Wednesday blocked President Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to California, rejecting the notion that recent protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol amounted to rebellion.

“The founders designed our government to be a system of checks and balances. Defendants, however, make clear that the only check they want is a blank one,” Breyer wrote in his 35-page opinion.

This all started this summer, when Trump sent thousands of National Guards troops to Los Angeles in response to protests, against the wishes of Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom.

Back in September, Judge Breyer ruled that the Trump administration’s deployment of military troops in Los Angeles was a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.

“Congress spoke clearly in 1878 when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the use of the U.S. military to execute domestic law,” Breyer wrote then. “Nearly 140 years later, Defendants—President Trump, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and the Department of Defense—deployed the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles, ostensibly to quell a rebellion and ensure that federal immigration law was enforced.”

“There were indeed protests in Los Angeles, and some individuals engaged in violence,” he continued. “Yet there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.”

The Trump administration has yet to respond to Breyer’s order. There are about 100 troops still left in Los Angeles.

President Donald Trump threatened to fire Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—not over interest rates, as he did in November, but over something even less under Bessent’s control: putting people in jail.

As part of a longer rant Tuesday about how much better the country is now than it was under former President Joe Biden, Trump once again turned his ire on Somali immigrants.

“Biden and the radical-left Democrats turned Pennsylvania into a dumping ground for hundreds of thousands of migrants from the most dysfunctional places on earth, like Somalia, and gave them billions and billions of your taxpayer dollars. But we didn’t really give it. It was stolen. And those people should go to jail! Jail!” the president yelled.

“And if they don’t go to jail? Scott Bessent is toast,” Trump said, laughing. “He’s toast.”

It should go without saying, but as the treasury secretary, Bessent notably does not have the power to put anyone in jail. The president’s nonsensical speech was like a Mad Libs game of his favorite talking points: Biden, Somalia, jail, Bessent.

Trump was likely referring to the fraud scandal in Minnesota—not Pennsylvania—where over the last five years, social services were defrauded out of more than $1 billion in taxpayer dollars. Federal prosecutors allege that nearly all of the perpetrators came from Minnesota’s Somali community. So far, prosecutors have convicted 59 people. There are about 80,000 Somali Americans in Minnesota.

Though the justice system seems to be handling these crimes just fine without the help of Bessent, he has directed the U.S. Treasury to investigate allegations of fraud. (Though, notably, Bessent is reacting to an unproven report that tax dollars were diverted to support terrorist organizations, which there’s little evidence to support.)

Trump is using the scandal as an excuse not only to attack the entire Somali immigrant community but to continue to chip away at all immigrants’ rights in the U.S. Bessent posted on X in November that, at the direction of the president, the Treasury will work to cut off federal benefits for undocumented immigrants.

The Department of Defense didn’t have a plan to deal with survivors after launching its boat bombing campaign in the waters around Central America.

The New York Times reports that after a mid-October strike in the Caribbean Sea left two survivors in U.S. military custody, Pentagon lawyers asked their legal counterparts at the State Department if the pair could be sent to the infamous Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador, where the Trump administration had already sent numerous immigrants on shaky legal grounds.

Alarmed State Department lawyers quickly rejected that idea, and the two survivors ended up being sent to their home countries of Ecuador and Colombia. Later, on October 29, the Pentagon spoke with diplomats in the region regarding survivors from another strike, and decided that any that were rescued had to be sent back to their home countries or to a third county, but definitely not the U.S.

Why? The DOD wanted to avoid having any survivors in the U.S. legal system because Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and other U.S. officials would have to present evidence in court to justify the bombings. The Pentagon has already admitted that it doesn’t know who is on the alleged drug boats it is bombing, which is why it hasn’t tried to prosecute any survivors.

At least some of the people on those boats have been identified as fishermen, and defense officials have not convinced many members of Congress of the legality and justifications for the strikes. Republicans and Democrats alike have criticized them, especially after the revelation that the military bombed survivors of the first boat strike back in September, a possible war crime. Now it seems that Hegseth and the rest of the DOD want to avoid any legal responsibility.

As President Trump recoils at the very mention of affordability, bemoaning it as a Democratic scam (still unclear what that means exactly), over half of the country is struggling to pay for basic necessities—and blaming Trump for it. 

New polling from Politico and Public First shows that nearly half of respondents find it hard to pay for their groceries, and 55 percent of them hold the Trump administration responsible. 

Twenty-seven percent of Americans have skipped a doctor’s appointment or checkup in the last two years because it was too expensive, and 23 percent rejected a prescription for similar reasons. Overall, nearly half of respondents are finding it difficult to afford health care. 

Meanwhile, only 36 percent of Trump’s own voters think that the tariffs will work out in the end. 

The majority of voters blaming their affordability issues on Trump means that his disinformation campaign—doing everything but taking responsibility for the state of the economy—isn’t working on most people. 

Trump went from running on affordability to rejecting the notion entirely. If this polling holds true, that should spell danger for the GOP ahead of the 2026 midterms. 

View the full polling here.  

Republicans are taking credit for Representative Jasmine Crockett’s last-minute decision to run for the United States Senate, as part of their efforts to recruit “very vulnerable Democrats” to run for office, NOTUS reported. 

Crockett’s surprise announcement last week reportedly threw the Democrats’ political calculus into flux—but seems to have delighted the Republicans who’d been secretly working to get her in the race.

Crockett has made a name for herself being a particularly outspoken critic of Trump and his cronies, infuriating MAGA and marking her as a controversial figure in her own party.

A source familiar with the process told NOTUS that GOP machinations to prop up Crockett’s run first began in June, when Texas Democrats met to discuss 2026 midterm elections—and the firebrand Democrat wasn’t invited, or included in any initial polls.  

In July, the National Republican Senatorial Committee published a poll that found that Crockett was the preferred candidate among Democratic voters. “When we saw the results, we were like, ‘OK, we got to disseminate this far and wide,’” the source told NOTUS.

After the NRSC included Crockett’s name in their poll, other surveys started to include her too. The source told NOTUS that those polls were then aggressively seeded into progressive digital spaces by NRSC allies to “orchestrate the pile on” of promising polling numbers and drive the narrative that support for Crockett was “surging.”

The source dubbed the system of trying to pull in a weaker candidate who would lose to the Republican challenger as an “AstroTurf recruitment process.” 

Incumbent Senator John Cornyn, who is running for reelection, dismissed Crockett as “radical, theatrical, and ineffective.” 

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a close ally of President Donald Trump who is currently leading the Republican primary polls, claimed that “everyone knows” Crockett will “be soundly defeated.” Previous polls had indicated that Paxton would fare far worse against state Representative James Talarico, the other Democratic primary candidate, or Collin Allred, who dropped his bid shortly before Crockett jumped into the race. 

Donald Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania Tuesday was supposed to be about affordability. Instead, it devolved into him bashing immigrants and using an epithet that he’s previously denied saying.

In Mount Pocono, Trump related to the crowd a meeting in which he said, “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries? Right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few? Let’s have a few. From Denmark, do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people, do you mind?

“But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing they’re good at is going after ships,” Trump added.

Trump was reported to have made the “shithole countries” remark way back in 2018 during his first term to refer to Haiti and unnamed African countries, but he vehemently denied the reports at the time. Back then, he even kicked out a reporter from the Oval Office for asking whether Trump meant he wanted immigrants from European or predominantly white countries.

Now it seems that the mask is off. For years, Trump has criticized immigrants from nonwhite countries, infamously accusing Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of eating cats and dogs, during his 2024 presidential campaign. But he’s always denied using slurs to describe them until now.

Recently, Trump has described Somali immigrants as “garbage” and launched an immigration crackdown in Minnesota, home to the largest Somali community in the United States. It seems that the president thinks that he can fall back on racism to distract from the fact that the country’s economic problems are his fault.

More good news for Democrats headed into the midterms: Liberal candidates saw unexpected wins in two Southern states Tuesday night.

Miami residents just elected their first Democratic mayor in almost 30 years. Eileen Higgins, a former Miami-Dade county commissioner, beat Donald Trump–endorsed Republican Emilio González. Higgins won 59 percent of the vote compared to González’s 41 percent.

Both candidates appealed to residents’ economic woes but used different tactics: Higgins emphasized her experience on the County Commission with building infrastructure, streamlining city processes, and building affordable housing. González argued that he would fight overdevelopment and get rid of property taxes. Higgins also loudly criticized Trump’s mass deportation campaign, whereas González pleaded the Fifth, saying he had no control over national policy.

In neighboring Georgia, a special election for a state House seat saw a changed district. Democrat Eric Gisler flipped the previously red seat blue, eking out a win over Republican Mack Guest in a close race.

It’s a major upset: Trump won the district last year by 12 points. Gisler had run for the seat last year and at the time won just 39 percent of the vote. But Tuesday night, he won 51 percent.

Gisler ran on a platform of increasing access to health care, affordable housing, and voting rights. He told the Associated Press that he was grateful for “Democratic enthusiasm” but that he also credited his win to Republicans looking for a change. “A lot of what I would call traditional conservatives held their nose and voted Republican last year on the promise of low prices and whatever else they were selling,” Gisler said. “But they hadn’t received that.”