Veteran Sues Trump Administration After ICE Detained Him for 3 Days

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—nor 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 in the process, 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, ICE, the Navy, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, 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 possibly linked to cancer and 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 have 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 IEEPA, 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.

The Trump administration has taken more than a year to roll out a fraction of the Epstein files, but literally overnight, Donald Trump decided that it would be no problem at all to dump everything the government has on alien life.

The president announced late Thursday that he would direct agencies to “begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters.”

Trump noted the spontaneous release was due to the public’s “tremendous interest,” though that’s not the entire story.

Hours earlier, Trump was caught off guard by a reporter’s question relating to Barack Obama’s recent revelation that aliens are real.

“Have you seen any evidence of nonhuman visitors to earth?” Fox News’s Peter Doocy asked Trump on Air Force One.

“Well, he gave classified information, he’s not supposed to be doing that,” said Trump, who was charged for mishandling and illegally keeping classified documents after losing the 2020 election.

“So aliens are real?” Doocy pressed.

“Well I don’t know if they’re real or not, I can tell you he gave classified information; he’s not supposed to be doing that. He made a big mistake,” Trump replied, cracking that the only aliens he was aware of in the U.S. were “illegals.”

Obama casually fessed to his belief in aliens during a speed round of playful questions on the No Lie With Brian Tyler Cohen podcast Saturday, informing listeners that “they’re real, but I haven’t seen them.” The former president added that there was no facility storing aliens at Area 51, “unless there’s this enormous conspiracy, and they hid it from the president of the United States.”

He clarified his comments the following day, writing on social media that the universe is so vast that the likelihood of extraterrestrial life is “statistically” probable.

“But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!” Obama posted.

Trump’s eagerness to satiate apparent public demand on the existence of aliens only further underscores the absurdity of the endless delays holding back the full, legally mandated release of the Epstein files.

Recent reports indicate that the DOJ has only released a fraction of the Epstein files, potentially holding on to upward of 50 terabytes that the agency has not yet disclosed. The recent releases, which include millions of pages of documents, amount to roughly 300 gigabytes, or 2 percent of the estimated total.

President Trump is continuing his crusade against voting rights, claiming that mail-in ballots are “crooked as hell” and that eliminating them will guarantee Republican dominance of elections for the next half-century.

“Mail-in ballots are crooked as hell. We’re the only country in the world that use this type of mail-in ballot, the only country in the world,” Trump said at a rally in Rome, Georgia, on Thursday. “I’ll tell you what, Republicans have to win this one. We’ll never lose a race for fifty years, we won’t lose a race.”

He then launched into his broader attack on voting rights, which many see as a last-ditch attempt to salvage the GOP’s chances in the November midterm elections, which are predicted to go poorly for them.

“We want voter ID, we want proof of citizenship, and we don’t want mail-in ballots except for the military far away, except for people that are ill, disabled, or people that are away. Even for a vacation! We’ll be generous,” Trump added.

Trump had no complaints about mail-in ballots when he won the presidency in 2024. And the U.S. is not the only country to use them: 34 countries and territories use some kind of postal voting. Twelve even allow all voters to vote by mail, including the U.K., Germany, Poland, Greece, and Canada.

An Obama-era attorney disclosed “non-public” information to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein with regard to the White House’s response to the Secret Service’s sex scandal.

Kathryn Ruemmler works as Goldman Sachs’s chief legal officer, but last week, the star attorney was forced to resign over her myriad ties to the man she warmly referred to as “Uncle Jeffrey.” Her resignation goes into effect on June 30.*

But recently released emails from 2014 reveal that the counsel’s fondness for the “international man of mystery” inspired her to share a draft of an official White House press response with him, dishing then-unreleased information to the convicted sex criminal, reported Bloomberg Thursday.

At the time of her emails, the White House was embroiled in a global controversy: In 2012, more than a dozen Secret Service agents (and military men) had decided to booze their way through a presidential trip in Cartagena, Colombia, hiring prostitutes along the way. The elite law enforcement personnel did so, despite the fact that Colombian sex workers were frequently hired as spies by the country’s powerful drug cartels, sparking questions about possible national security concerns in the fallout.

Ruemmler was one of the staffers handling the White House’s official response to the fiasco. Two years after the disastrous Cartagena trip, she spoke with Epstein about the situation, forwarding him a draft email that contained sensitive information about the role that the White House played in investigating the sexual misconduct.*

In return, Epstein offered advice and edits. “Breathe, smile. You’re free,” he wrote in one message.

The exchange took place six years after Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting children as young as 14 to have sex with him. The Justice Department’s review of the Epstein files concluded that the well-connected financier had harmed more than 1,000 women and children in his global sex-trafficking ring, all of whom “suffered unique trauma.”

Jennifer Connelly, a spokeswoman for Ruemmler, told Bloomberg that the former White House counsel “has done nothing wrong and has nothing to hide. Nothing in the record suggests otherwise.”

“Ms. Ruemmler has deep sympathy for those harmed by Epstein and if she knew then what she knows now, she never would have dealt with him at all,” Connelly said.

Recent reports indicate that the DOJ has only released a fraction of the Epstein files, potentially holding onto upward of 50 terabytes that the agency has not yet disclosed. The recent releases, which include millions of pages of documents, amount to roughly 300 gigabytes, or 2 percent of the estimated total.

* This article previously misstated when Ruemmler’s work at Goldman Sachs ends, as well as the nature of her outreach to Epstein.

Is Donald Trump delaying action in Iran so he can go to the Winter Olympics?

This week, the so-called peacemaker president has assembled the greatest amount of air power in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but reportedly hasn’t approved military action against Iran—yet.

One factor in the president’s pending decision is the ongoing Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, sources familiar with the matter told The Washington Post Thursday.

There has been increasing speculation that Trump is planning to make a surprise appearance at the men’s hockey finals on Sunday, if Team USA—the favorites to win gold—qualify for the match. Trump also announced last week that a presidential delegation led by Education Secretary Linda McMahon would attend the closing ceremony in Milan on Sunday.

The decision to launch a military strike on Iran would potentially jeopardize travel plans for Trump and his officials. (Obviously, it could also jeopardize a lot more—but that doesn’t seem to be Trump’s chief concern here.)

Speaking at the inaugural meeting of his so-called Board of Peace in Washington Thursday, Trump offered Iran 10 days to come to a diplomatic solution—or risk military action. That would give him just enough time to visit Milan, likely so he can get loudly booed just like Vice President JD Vance was at the opening ceremony.

In the meantime, the U.S. military has deployed 13 warships and a large fleet of aircraft to the Middle East, with a second aircraft carrier en route to the region.

Federal judges have ordered the release of at least three of 10 West African immigrants who were swarmed by federal agents in multiple immigration raids in October and November on New York City’s Canal Street, a popular site for street vendors.

Serigne Diop, Mamdou Ndoye, and Abdou Tall will be released, while the other seven men remain in ICE detention centers in Louisiana and New Jersey.

Manhattan District Judge Vernon S. Broderick noted that Immigration and Customs Enforcement failed to provide a warrant or probable cause to arrest Ndoye, in particular, writing, “Absent such procedures, the agency will be free to either engage in preplanned decisions to unlawfully detain individuals and then come up with post hoc rationalizations, or merely randomly stage ‘encounters’ without the intent to unlawfully detain individuals and then create post hoc rationalizations for these unlawful detentions.”

“The court-ordered releases for these three individuals confirm what we all know, which is that federal law enforcement officers carried out illegal and unconstitutional roundups on the streets of Chinatown,” said Elora Mukherjee, the director of Columbia Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic.

The Department of Homeland Security insists that the arrests were justified.

“Despite activist judges, President Trump and Secretary (Kristi) Noem will continue fighting for the arrest, detention, and removal of criminal illegal aliens who have no right to terrorize our communities,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.