Military Leaders Were Freaking Out Since Day 1 of Trump’s Boat Strikes

Multiple military officials have sought legal counseling in the wake of President Donald Trump’s escalating (and illegal) military operations in the Caribbean.

Steve Woolford, a resource counselor with the GI Rights Hotline, told HuffPost that calls for advice started coming in at the end of September, after the U.S. military had killed 17 people in a series of extrajudicial strikes on boats the government claims—but won’t prove—are smuggling drugs.

The official, who Woolford said had an important role in approving the strikes, questioned whether what they were doing was a “legal military operation.”

Woolford recalled the reluctant service member saying, “‘This doesn’t look like what the military is supposed to be doing, and the military is doing it.’” Woolford referred the member to legal counsel.

“They didn’t want to be doing it,” he told HuffPost.

In October, another service member reached out to Woolford to express concern that they would be ordered to participate in future boat strikes.

Since then, the calls from concerned service members have only become more common. Hours after the U.S. military’s large-scale operation to kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Woolford said the hotline received three calls from service members. One expressed concerns that the operation was unlawful, and another described it as “imperialist.”

While Woolford referred his worried callers to The Orders Project, a group providing legal advice to military service members, nonprofit Vice President Brenner Fissell said that he’s received no calls from officers involved in the strikes.

“People are really scared of at all stepping out of line,” Fissell told HuffPost. “I mean, when you see someone like [Admiral Alvin] Holsey lose his position, and he’s one of the top five people in the military, do you really want to reach out?”

Holsey, who has served as commander of the U.S. Southern Command for only a year, offered in December to resign from his position after he questioned the strikes’ legality, sources told CNN.

The number of calls to Woolford may continue to rise, as the U.S. military continues to wade into Trump’s illegal war. Michael Schmitt, a former Air Force lawyer, told HuffPost that capturing Maduro had triggered the Geneva Conventions, raising the stakes of U.S. strikes on vessels linked to Venezuela. “These individuals involved in mere criminality are civilians who are not directly participating in the hostilities, and therefore not legally targetable,” he said.

Service members stuck executing these strikes were left in a “terrible bind,” he said.

A 21-year old anti-ICE protester has been left permanently blinded in California after a Department of Homeland Security agent shot him in the face with a nonlethal round at point-blank range on Friday.

Kaden Rummler can be seen on video rushing to help a fellow protester at Civic Center Plaza in Santa Ana before being shot by a federal agent. He crumples to the ground in a heap, covering his face before an officer drags him away by his hoodie. Rummler’s aunt said he was left with a fractured skull and shards of plastic, glass, and metal stuck all throughout his eyes and face, and would have died if not for the six hours of surgery he went through.

“That could have cost him his life,” Jeri Rees told the Los Angeles Times. “But now, for the next six weeks, he can’t sneeze or cough because it could do a lot of damage.… The other officers were mocking him, saying, ‘You’re going to lose your eye.’”

This is one of countless instances of excessive, brutal force being used against U.S. residents in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Rummler’s blinding happened just two days after ICE shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis.

Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin described the scene as “a highly coordinated campaign of violence where rioters wielded shields,” but had no comment on the use of excessive force from her agents. A spokesperson from the Santa Ana Police Department said the only coordinated violence they saw were demonstrators throwing orange cones.

The FBI searched the home of a Washington Post reporter on Wednesday, as part of what government officials said was an investigation into the sharing of government secrets, The New York Times reports.

Hannah Natanson has been covering the White House’s efforts to cut down the federal workforce and reshape the civil service to support President Trump’s agenda. In her work, she spoke to several government employees frustrated with the Trump administration. The Post said that the bureau was investigating a government contractor accused of illegally holding onto classified materials.

Federal agents searched Natanson’s home as well as her personal devices. The search warrant stated that the investigation concerns Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a system administrator in Maryland with a top-secret security clearance accused of accessing classified intelligence reports. Perez-Lugones allegedly took the reports home, and they were found in his lunchbox and basement, according to an FBI affidavit.

Natanson told the Post that a phone and a smartwatch were taken by agents. While Trump and other administration officials have a reputation for being hostile to the press, a search of a reporter’s home is extremely rare.

This story has been updated.

The Michigan Ford autoworker who screamed “pedophile protector” at President Trump on Tuesday—eliciting a “Fuck you” and a middle finger from the president—has been suspended from work.

White House communications head Stephen Cheung described the man as a “lunatic” who was “wildly screaming expletives in a complete fit of rage.” But TJ Sabula, a 40-year-old United Auto Workers Local 600 line worker, seems to be in his right mind, and says he would probably do it all over again.

“As far as calling him out, definitely no regrets whatsoever,” Sabula told The Washington Post, after confirming that he was the one to heckle the president. He also added that he believes he’s being “targeted for political retribution” for “embarrassing Trump in front of his friends.”

“I don’t feel as though fate looks upon you often, and when it does, you better be ready to seize the opportunity,” said Sabula, an independent who is particularly disturbed by the lack of transparency surrounding the Epstein files. “And today I think I did that.” A fundraiser for Sabula has already raised $150,000.

Donald Trump has stepped up his rhetoric on Greenland hours before Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance will meet its foreign minister along with Denmark’s at the White House.

Early Wednesday morning, the president posted on his Truth Social account, “The United States needs Greenland for the purposes of National Security.

“It is vital for the Golden Dome that we are building,” he added, referring to the massive boondoggle he seeks to build. “NATO should be leading the way for us to get it. IF WE DON’T, RUSSIA OR CHINA WILL, AND THAT IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN!”

The governments of Denmark and Greenland requested Wednesday’s meeting in an attempt to clarify Trump’s renewed push to seize the territory. NATO’s leading parties, Greenland’s political parties, and Denmark all oppose the move, but that has not dissuaded Trump, who is dead set on taking Greenland despite a complete lack of evidence that Russia or China have their own plans to conquer it.

At a joint press conference on Tuesday, the premier of Greenland, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, said firmly that “if we have to choose between the USA and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark. We choose NATO, the Kingdom of Denmark, and the EU.”

But Trump’s statement shows that his mind is made up, raising tensions ahead of Wednesday afternoon’s meeting. It will be interesting to see how Rubio and Vance treat the visiting Danish and Greenlandic officials, especially considering Vance’s past experiences with foreign leaders.

Top Justice Department officials Tuesday tore into a Trump-appointed federal judge who dared to ask why Lindsey Halligan is still calling herself a U.S. attorney.

In an 11-page filing, Halligan—fully backed by Attorney General Pam Bondi and deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche—slammed U.S. District Judge David Novak of Richmond for ordering Halligan to explain on what basis she has identified herself as U.S. attorney despite another ruling that she was improperly appointed.

Novak had pressed her on why that should not constitute a false or misleading statement, and why he should not strike her title from her cases—even suggesting that she might face disciplinary consequences for blatantly ignoring the law.

“The Court’s thinly veiled threat to use attorney discipline to cudgel the Executive Branch into conforming its legal position in all criminal prosecutions to the views of a single district judge is a gross abuse of power and an affront to the separation of powers,” the government wrote in the filing.

After Judge Cameron McGowan Currie ruled in November that Halligan had been unlawfully appointed as interim U.S. attorney—and her indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James were dismissed—Justice Department officials continued to sign Halligan’s name on criminal indictments. When Novak questioned the legal basis for this, the DOJ suggested that Novak had somehow made a “fundamental error” in asserting that they were bound by Currie’s ruling.

The government claimed that Halligan could continue to identify as a U.S. attorney because Currie’s ruling “did not and could not require the United States to acquiesce to her contrary (and erroneous) legal reasoning outside of those cases,” pretending as if Currie had simply expressed a “disagreement” with the government’s view. The government claimed that it was within its rights to maintain its own “contested legal position.”

The government also claimed that Novak had a “fixation on a signature block title,” and claimed that “no authority exists for a court to strike an attorney title out of a signature block.”

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared poised Tuesday to allow states to ban transgender athletes from playing on girls’ and women’s sports teams.

The court heard oral arguments for two cases from Idaho and West Virginia in which lawyers for the trans teens argued that the state laws they’d challenged relied on broad generalization about the sexes, and their supposed biological advantages, that did not apply to their specific clients, The New York Times reported. Meanwhile, solicitor generals from these states insisted that biological sex matters in sports because of supposed competitive advantages.

The first case was from Idaho, involving college senior Lindsay Hecox, who has attempted to drop her case in order to proceed through the rest of school “without the extraordinary pressures of this litigation and related public scrutiny.”

The second case involves Becky Pepper-Jackson, a West Virginia high school student. Pepper-Jackson’s lawyer, Joshua Block of the ACLU, argued that his client did not hold an unfair advantage to her teammates and opponents because she had never gone through male puberty and had been taking hormone blockers.

While the conservative justices acknowledged that there was some scientific disagreement about competitive advantages between the sexes, they still seemed inclined to agree with states. Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that Title IX did not protect transgender athletes from discrimination because it prevented discrimination based on “sex,” not gender identity.

“I hate, hate that a kid who wants to play sports might not be able to play sports. Hate that. But we have kind of a zero-sum game for a lot of teens,” he said, arguing that a transgender girl will inevitably take the spot entitled to a cisgender girl.

Of course, it’s not clear that there are that many transgender female athletes to begin with. Charlie Baker, the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, reported in 2024 that of the 510,000 total college athletes, there were fewer than 10 transgender students.

Trapped in the minority, the liberal justices suggested that the plaintiffs could seek “as applied” challenges to their states laws, meaning the cases could go back through lower courts separately to demonstrate that the two girls did not possess the unfair advantages implied by their assigned sex at birth.

A woman in Minneapolis was dragged out of her car and arrested by ICE agents on Tuesday after informing agents the street they were blocking to conduct a raid was blocking her route to her doctor’s office.

The woman could be seen arguing with masked agents while they tell her to move her car up the street.

“This bitch just said he was gonna break my window if I don’t move my car!” the woman said from the driver’s seat, pointing directly at the ICE agent screaming in her face before throwing her hands up in frustration.

The ICE agents told the woman again to move along. Then one agent went to the passenger side window and broke it, while two others cut the woman’s seatbelt and dragged her out of her car.

“I’ve been beat up by police before, I’m disabled just trying to go to the doctor up there, that’s why I can’t move!” she says before being pushed against her car and arrested. Protesters scream in disgust, and whistles and car horns blare for the entirety of the clip.

“All you do is hurt!” one protester yelled at the agents, among a chorus of “Fuck you.” The woman was then placed in handcuffs.

“This is what living under a federal siege looks like,” Minnesota state Senator Omar Fateh wrote on X. “This isn’t about public safety—this is terrorism.”

This is just one of many awful scenes that have emerged from Minneapolis since the Department of Homeland Security responded to ICE’s killing of Renee Nicole Good by sending in even more masked, armed agents.

“I’ve been talking to people in Minneapolis, and the stories I’m hearing are traumatizing; people waking up to the smell of tear gas, wrecked cars left in the middle of roadways, businesses locked down, a state of fear,” American Immigration senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick said. “This is what Stephen Miller wants to bring to every city.”

Six Minnesota prosecutors have resigned from the Justice Department over an investigation into the widow of Renee Good, who was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis last week.

Among those who quit Tuesday was Joseph H. Thompson, who oversaw a Minnesota fraud investigation last year that has garnered increased attention from the Trump administration in recent weeks. According to The New York Times, Thompson, a career attorney with the DOJ, objected to senior department officials pressing for a criminal investigation into Good’s wife, Becca, as well as to the department’s decision to shut out state officials from the investigation into Good’s killing.

Thompson had sought to work with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, which reviews police shootings in the state, to investigate the shootings, but was shot down by his DOJ superiors. Thompson was also upset that Good’s shooting was not being investigated as a civil rights matter.

Three other senior prosecutors who resigned were Harry Jacobs, Melinda Williams, and Thomas Calhoun-Lopez. Jacobs was Thompson’s deputy on the fraud investigation, while Calhoun-Lopez oversaw a violent and major crimes unit. Thompson, Jacobs, Williams, and Calhoun-Lopez declined to discuss their resignations with the Times.

Federal agents were already known to be investigating Good’s previous activism in a grotesque attempt to blame her for her own murder and exonerate the ICE agent who shot her, Jonathan Ross. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has described Good as a “domestic terrorist,” President Trump has called her and her wife “professional agitators,” and Vice President JD Vance has said she was “brainwashed.”

Now, it seems that the Trump administration’s handling of Good’s shooting, and desire to target her rather than charge any federal agents, is getting backlash from within the DOJ. While that might not dissuade the White House, it will at least expose how much the president’s immigration enforcement is violating the law.

Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen firmly rebuked Donald Trump Monday, saying that the people of the Danish territory don’t want to be part of the United States.

At a joint press conference with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen in Copenhagen, Nielsen said, “If we have to choose between the USA and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark. We choose NATO, the Kingdom of Denmark, and the EU.”

On Wednesday, the foreign ministers of Greenland and Denmark will be meeting Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the White House, and Nielsen and Frederiksen sought to set the record straight.

“It has not been easy to stand up to completely unacceptable pressure from our closest allies for a lifetime. But there is much to suggest that the hardest part is still ahead of us,” Frederiksen said.

That probably won’t dissuade Trump, who told reporters on Sunday that the U.S. would have Greenland “one way or the other.”

“If we don’t take Greenland, Russia or China will, and I’m not letting that happen,” Trump said. This has been disputed by Denmark and other international observers.

Greenland’s political parties, as well as leaders from countries across NATO, have all condemned a possible U.S. seizure of the territory. But Trump claims that taking the territory is “psychologically important” for him. And we all know Trump’s ego is never satisfied.