Veteran Sues Trump Administration After ICE Detained Him

This is how the Trump administration treats its veterans: Raid them, detain them, and leave them without any way to legally defend themselves.

That’s what happened to George Retes, a 26-year-old Army veteran who was arrested by ICE officials while commuting to his job in July, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday.

Retes, a U.S. citizen and father of two, was driving to a farm in Ventura County, California, where he was supposed to work as a security guard on July 10. As he approached the farm, droves of protesters and federal agents were blocking the road. He tried to explain that he needed to get through for work, but the message—and his legal residency—did not matter.

ICE agents followed him back to his vehicle, where they proceeded to bang on his doors and give him conflicting information. One agent told him to “reverse,” while another agent told him to “​​pull over to the side,” according to an op-ed Retes penned for the San Francisco Chronicle in September.

As the situation escalated, officers lobbed tear gas at nearby protesters. The chemical irritant filled Retes’s car, causing him to choke.

“Suddenly, an agent smashed my window and pepper-sprayed me,” Retes wrote. “I was pulled from the car, and one agent knelt on my neck while another knelt on my back.”

The veteran was zip-tied and left in the dirt for several hours before the agency sent him to Los Angeles’s Metropolitan Detention Center. They never bothered to check his identification.

Retes was detained for three days, during which he was deprived of basic rights that are granted to suspected criminals, according to his attorneys. “He was not allowed a phone call, access to counsel, or a hearing. He was also subjected to inhumane treatment, not being allowed a shower to wash chemical irritants off his body,” the lawsuit reads.

In addition, the unwarranted and violent fiasco caused Retes to miss his daughter’s third birthday, and “exacerbated injuries he had sustained during his military service.”

To make matters worse, Retes never received an explanation for his arrest or for his continued detention at MDC, according to the lawsuit.

“The officers, for their part, showed no interest in confirming George’s story,” the lawsuit reads. “No officer suggested he had broken any law, either. And no officer perceived him as a threat.”

The lawsuit was filed against the U.S. government, specifying unnamed individuals with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Navy, the FBI, and Customs and Border Protection.

“George’s rights were violated, and he is filing this lawsuit, not only to protect his own rights, but to have the rights of others be protected too,” Andrew Wimer, director of media relations at the Institute for Justice, told The Guardian. “What happened to George is clearly wrong. No one can be held for three days without being told what they’ve done wrong, without being charged with a crime. Americans deserve justice when their rights have been violated.”

Donald Trump is losing the MAHA moms.

The New York Times reports that women who flocked to the president in the 2024 election and embraced his promise to tackle “toxins in our environments and pesticides in our food” feel betrayed after Trump signed an executive order Wednesday to boost U.S. production of glyphosate, the pesticide used in the weedkiller Roundup that is possibly linked to cancer and is the subject of numerous lawsuits, including one brought by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“Ensuring an adequate supply of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides is thus crucial to the national security and defense, including food-supply security,” Trump’s order read.

As a result, these women, some of whom embraced the moniker “MAHA moms” after Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” slogan, are now rethinking their support for the president.

“Women feel like they were lied to, that MAHA movement is a sham,” health and wellness podcaster Alex Clark, who works for the Trump-allied group Turning Point USA, told the Times. “How am I supposed to rally these women to vote red in the midterms? How can we win their trust back? I am unsure if we can.”

Some MAHA moms have directed their anger at the president, but others question why Kennedy is backing production of a chemical he has criticized. On the Instagram page of Vani Hari, who promotes healthy eating and advises the White House on food policy, several commenters were upset with Kennedy.

“This begs the question why didn’t sec Kennedy have a say and stop it,” wrote one person, while another asked “Where is RFK Jr.?” Neither Kennedy’s office nor the Trump administration has addressed whether Kennedy was part of any discussions about the order before it was issued.

The founder of Moms Across America, Zen Honeycutt, has led a campaign against glyphosate, petitioning stores not to sell it and supporting testing for pesticide residue. She called Trump’s order “an egregious offense to what he promised,” in an interview with the Times.

Trump’s order also has pushback from Republican Representative Thomas Massie, who posted on X Thursday that he would introduce legislation to overturn the order. It seems that Trump has started a fight between MAGA and MAHA.

The Supreme Court ruled Friday to undo Donald Trump’s illegal Liberation Day tariffs, taking away the president’s favorite toy after he used it to hit his allies.

In the court’s 6–3 majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that Trump’s invocation of an emergency in order to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act was a massive overreach of Congress’s authority and flew in the face of decades of precedent.

“There is no exception to the major questions doctrine for emergency statutes. Nor does the fact that tariffs implicate foreign affairs render the doctrine inapplicable. The Framers gave ‘Congress alone’ the power to impose tariffs during peacetime,” Roberts wrote. “And the foreign affairs implications of tariffs do not make it any more likely that Congress would relinquish its tariff power through vague language, or without careful limits.

“Accordingly, the President must ‘point to clear congressional authorization’ to justify his extraordinary assertion of that power,” Roberts wrote. “He cannot.”

Roberts was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, Kentanji Brown Jackson, and Amy Coney Barrett. In his concurring opinion, Gorsuch wrote, “Whatever else might be said about Congress’s work in IEEPA, it did not clearly surrender to the President the sweeping tariff power he seeks to wield.”

Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh both wrote dissenting opinions, and Justice Samuel Alito and Thomas joined Kavanaugh’s.

Trump imposed his so-called “reciprocal tariffs” in April 2025 using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a rule that allows the president to regulate commerce in case of a national emergency—but doesn’t actually include the word “tariff.”

The Trump administration initially claimed that the “reciprocal tariffs” were simply a tool to negotiate improved trade deals with other countries in order to promote domestic manufacturing and thwart drug trafficking.

But it quickly became clear that the deals were neither binding nor permanent. In reality, Trump’s tariffs were intended to be ever-changing, a whip to extend across the world at his whim. The results? Trump has hurt U.S. manufacturing, driven up prices, and strained relationships with U.S. allies.

Trump claimed in mid-January that should the Supreme Court rule against his tariff policy, the U.S. would be forced to “pay back … Hundreds of Billions of Dollars” in investments made by companies and countries hoping to avoid his steep tariffs.

“When these Investments are added, we are talking about Trillions of Dollars!” Trump wrote. “It would be a complete mess, and almost impossible for our country to pay.”

Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told The New York Times on January 19 that in the case of an unfavorable decision, Trump planned to simply ignore the ruling. He would impose a new set of tariffs that will “start the next day” in order “to respond to the problems the president has identified.”

This story has been updated.

The FBI conducted four interviews with a woman who accused President Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her as a child, and Trump’s Justice Department gave all four of those interviews to Ghislaine Maxwell before her trial, as reported by Roger Sollenberger. Only one of those interviews is in the publicly searchable Epstein files—and it was removed and put back earlier this week.

“By choosing not to release three FBI interviews with an underage Trump accuser—interviews the DOJ gave to Maxwell at trial—Trump’s DOJ allowed Maxwell to retain potential blackmail over the president,” Sollenberger wrote Friday on X. “But that leverage over Trump vanishes if DOJ made them public, as law requires.”

The woman sat down for the interviews with the FBI after filing a lawsuit against the Epstein estate. In the publicly available interview, she claims that she was “brutally and forcibly battered, assaulted, and raped by these other men she met through Epstein. On one occasion, one of these prominent men forcibly slapped Jane Doe 4 in the face after she was forced to perform oral sex on him. This same man forcibly raped her, penetrating her both vaginally and anally. On information and belief, Epstein was aware of and, indeed encouraged, the assault of Jane Doe 4 by these other men.”

This lawsuit matches the FBI’s lone public interview with her, in which she names Trump.

“[REDACTED] stated Epstein introduced her to Trump who subsequently forced her head down to his exposed penis which she subsequently bit,” the FBI said. “In response, Trump punched her in the head and kicked her out.” This allegedly occurred in the mid-1980s when she was “approximately 13-15 years old.”

Trump has of course denied any wrongdoing.

There are three more interviews that this woman has with the FBI, and we don’t know what else she says or who else she names. But Maxwell does.

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s husband has been banned from the department’s headquarters in Washington after he allegedly sexually assaulted two female staffers, The New York Times reported Thursday.

Dr. Shawn DeRemer, a 57-year-old anesthesiologist from Portland, Oregon, will no longer be able to visit his wife at work, after at least two female staffers told officials that he touched them inappropriately. A building restriction notice viewed by the Times put it gently: “If Mr. DeRemer attempts to enter, he is to be asked to leave.”

One of the incidents, which occurred during working hours, was caught by security cameras, people familiar with the matter told the Times. The footage showed DeRemer giving a female staffer an extended embrace, and it was reviewed as part of a criminal investigation, one of the people told the paper.

A police report documenting a December incident of forced sexual conduct at the Labor Department was filed by Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department in late January.

Concerns about DeRemer were initially raised in January, as part of an internal investigation into alleged misconduct by his wife. In an explosive complaint to the Inspector General’s Office, Chavez-DeRemer was accused of abusing her position by having an inappropriate sexual relationship with a member of her security detail.

She was also accused of drinking during the workday and of committing travel fraud by making her chief of staff schedule official taxpayer-funded trips she could use to see friends and family. Her lawyer has denied these allegations.