ICE Raids Military Base to Arrest Newlywed Soldier’s Wife

ICE agents entered a military base in Louisiana last week and detained the newlywed spouse of a U.S. Army staff sergeant.

Annie Ramos, 22, came to the U.S. from Honduras when she was a toddler, and did not have a criminal record. She became engaged to Matthew Blank on New Year’s Day, and the two were married only weeks ago, in late March. Last week, the pair checked in at the Fort Polk, Louisiana, base where Blank works, planning to begin the process that would allow her to move in with him on the base and receive military benefits.

Instead, after they presented Ramos’s Honduran passport, her birth certificate, their marriage license, and Blank’s military identification, base personnel called a supervisor. Then, someone from the base’s criminal investigation division was contacted, who said he would call Homeland Security and ICE. That officer told the couple that Ramos would be detained.

“Our plan was to drive over, bring her to the office to get her military ID and activate her military spouse benefits,” Blank told The New York Times. “She was going to move in after the Easter weekend. Instead, she got ripped away from me.”

When undocumented immigrants marry U.S. citizens, they are supposed to become eligible for permanent residency, and then they can apply for citizenship three years later, even if they were issued a prior deportation order, as Ramos was when she was 22 months old. Ramos and Blank had hired an immigration lawyer before they were married to take care of the situation.

“I knew she didn’t have status,” Blank said. “We were doing everything the right way.”

Ramos was handcuffed, separated from her husband and new parents-in-law, who drove the couple to the base, and taken to a building that Blank said “looked like an interrogation room.” Three Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrived and told Blank’s mother, Jen Rickling, that they didn’t have a choice before taking Ramos away.

In Donald Trump’s second term as president, the government hasn’t hesitated to detain a father trying to visit his baby in the NICU, Afghan refugees who worked with the U.S. military for more than a decade, and even journalists covering ICE. Detaining a military spouse is an egregious step in the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda.

ICE has already been deployed to military bases to target the family members of military recruits on graduation and visiting days, but coming specifically to arrest a military spouse who was preparing a green card application, as Ramos was, is something else.

It appears that federal immigration authorities have once again lied about an ICE shooting in Minneapolis.

New footage obtained by The New York Times exposes how Immigration and Customs Enforcement lied about one of its agents being beaten with a shovel and broom—and reveals why the agency likely dropped charges against the immigrant they shot.

In January, rideshare delivery driver Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna realized he was being followed by ICE agents. The agents claimed he “recklessly zigzagged through traffic,” while Aljorna claimed the agents were purposefully trying to ram his car. When he arrived home, his roommate and fellow Venezuelan immigrant Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis was standing outside shoveling snow. When Sosa-Celis dropped the shovel and turned around to run inside he was shot in the leg by the ICE agents. The bullet that hit Sosa-Celis ended up stuck in the house near a children’s playset.

ICE’s version of events? That Aljorna and Sosa-Celis were assaulting them with a broom and a shovel for nearly three minutes, justifying their use of force. Former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem even called it an “attempted murder of federal law enforcement,” and the men were charged with assault. Now it’s abundantly clear that was a complete lie.

New footage of the incident captured by a city camera at a nearby intersection shows Sosa-Celis throwing the shovel aside as he flees, directly contradicting the agents’ claims. Instead of three minutes, like ICE claimed, the episode lasted about 12 seconds. And yet both Sosa-Celis and Aljorna were jailed for weeks afterward.

“There is a snow shovel there, but it doesn’t appear it ever gets used as a weapon,” Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara said after reviewing the video. “There is no bludgeoning or anything.… It sounds like an unarmed person got shot running away.”

It’s hard to describe just how despicable this is. Two men were virtually randomly accosted by ICE agents. They shot one in the leg. Then the federal government called them murderers and hit them with heavy charges, all for video footage to invalidate it all.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has been forced to turn down the volume on his white supremacist agenda—but he’s still working behind the scenes.

Miller has overseen Donald Trump’s aggressive law enforcement crackdown on immigrants, urging federal agents to detain 3,000 immigrants every day. Now the ghoulish homeland security adviser has taken a step away from the spotlight after his soft ethnic cleansing left two U.S. citizens dead in Minnesota and sparked a national outcry, The New York Times reported Sunday.

Miller reportedly goaded federal agents to “force confrontations” with anti-ICE protesters in Minneapolis before they shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 36-year-old ICU nurse. Miller claimed after the shooting that Pretti was a “would-be assassin.” Eventually, Miller was forced to offer a rare concession: The Customs and Border Protection agents who shot and killed Pretti “may not have been following” protocol, he later admitted.

But it was too late to save face. Miller and the now-ousted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem were forced to cut back on public appearances after becoming the faces of Trump’s increasingly unpopular immigration policies, according to the Times. Miller’s hard-line mass deportation agenda is reportedly falling out of fashion even with the fascists, as mounting leaks have detailed his erratic behavior.

Since facing backlash for promoting violent tactics, Miller has moved to force immigrants out in more subtle ways. In recent calls with immigration officials, Miller asked for information about how immigrants use credit cards, potentially as part of an effort to thwart their ability to open accounts and spend money, officials with knowledge of the discussions told the Times.

In Tennessee and Oklahoma, Miller appears to have helped sprout legislation that would require hospitals, public schools, and other social services to report when undocumented immigrants use their services.

Steve Bannon just got one step closer to overturning his contempt of Congress conviction.

The Supreme Court threw out an appellate court opinion that upheld a conviction against the former Trump adviser Monday, opening a pathway for a trial court to act in the White House’s interest to toss Bannon’s conviction entirely “in the interests of justice.”

Bannon was previously convicted on charges relating to his evasion of a congressional subpoena, after he refused to appear before the House committee that investigated the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

The political tactician originally argued that his testimony was protected, as an extension of Donald Trump’s executive privilege, reported the Associated Press. The House panel contended at the time that was doubtful, considering that Bannon had been out of the federal government for years and was a private citizen by January 6.

Nonetheless, the nine-justice Supreme Court vacated the charges Monday with no explanation and no noted dissents. The only clarification offered was via a brief order, which noted that the Justice Department has moved to drop the indictment against Bannon.

Bannon was at one point at the epicenter of Trump’s universe. He served as the forty-fifth president’s chief White House strategist before the former Apprentice host fired him in 2017 following a series of controversies in which Bannon openly contradicted Trump and began to encroach on the MAGA limelight.

Despite his fall from grace, Bannon has continued to exert his influence in the far-right sphere. In 2023, the political provocateur assumed he’d continue to wield power under a future Trump administration, promising to slam American broadcasters with “prosecutions and accountability” for reporting that Trump lost the 2020 election.

He went to trial in July 2022 for defying the subpoena, and ultimately served a four-month prison term as a result.

This is story has been updated.

“Very little” is off the table with the war in Iran, according to Donald Trump.

In separate phone calls Sunday, the president suggested that he was open to introducing practically every form of violence in the ongoing conflict unless the Middle Eastern nation agreed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

That includes the possibility of ground troops, which Trump explicitly said he would not rule out unless Iran makes a deal.

“Normal people would make a deal. Smart people would make a deal,” the president told The Hill. “If they were smart they would make a deal.”

Earlier on that day, Trump threatened that Iranians would be “living in hell” by Tuesday unless the country’s leadership agreed to reopen the vital trade route.

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP,” Trump posted to Truth Social.

In another post to his social media platform, Trump wrote: “Tuesday, 8:00 P.M. Eastern Time.”

Trump carried that tone over to a conversation with ABC News, in which he promised that he would task America’s military with “blowing up the whole country.”

The president also drastically ramped up the conflict’s projected timeline, claiming that the war should be over in “days, not weeks.”

“It should be wrapped up in days because no sane group of people could stand the punishment that’s going to rain down on them if it’s not,” he told ABC.

Situated between Iran and the United Arab Emirates, the strait funnels approximately one-fifth of all crude oil shipments. Most of that oil would head toward China or India. In 2024, the U.S. imported roughly 500,000 barrels of crude oil per day through the strait, accounting for about 7 percent of total U.S. crude imports, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The price per barrel has nonetheless exploded due to the strait’s closure, pushing gas over $4 per gallon in most states (in California, gas in some counties has leaped past $7 a gallon). Diesel shot up by 20 cents over the last week alone.

The economic fallout has struck fear in the Republican Party, whose lawmakers have taken to grumbling about the domestic ramifications of the war, and the impact it will have at the ballot box come November. Trump, meanwhile, has waffled dramatically, claiming in quick succession that he doesn’t care if the strait remains closed and that he wants it reopened.

But beyond the nickels and dimes, the war has cost the lives of more than 2,000 people in Iran, including dozens of political leaders, according to Al Jazeera. At least 13 U.S. soldiers have also been killed in the war, and more than 300 have been wounded.

Donald Trump, rather than attend Easter mass, let loose a vulgar Truth Social post Sunday morning warning Iran that bombings targeting the country’s infrastructure were coming on Tuesday if the Strait of Hormuz was not reopened.

In response, Iran on Monday firmly rejected Trump’s 15-point peace plan.

Meanwhile, Iranian embassies around the world have been mocking the president on their own X accounts. The Iranian Embassy in Thailand referenced Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s warning last week that Iran would be sent back to the Stone Age, posting, “Judging by how POTUS swears like a teenager, it seems the US has reached the Stone Age sooner than expected.”

“#POTUS has stooped to an unprecedented level of begging, laced with bitter, hollow rudeness and threats.The desperation is almost palpable, dripping from every syllable—especially the haphazardly hurled expletives,” the Iranian Embassy in Austria posted. “⚠️We solemnly remind everyone, once again, that attacking civilian infrastructure such as bridges and power plants constitutes a #WarCrime. 📛A further warning: shield all minors under 18 from exposure to #Trump’s rhetoric.”

Iran’s Embassy in South Africa referenced the Constitution’s provision on how the Cabinet and vice president can remove a president from office, posting, “Seriously think about the 25th amendment, Section 4,” while Iran’s Embassy in Bulgaria posted a cartoon of Trump wedged in between the strait in the Persian Gulf.

Trump’s rhetoric in the post, as well as the insult toward Muslims, suggest that something is seriously wrong with him. Instead of the Easter services he was scheduled to attend, his limousine took a short drive around Washington, D.C., and stopped by his golf course in Sterling, Virginia. As Tuesday approaches, will cooler heads prevail in the White House, or is the president’s inner circle content to let him “blow up the entire country” of Iran?

President Trump thinks that watching The Mark Levin Show on Fox News will somehow make the Supreme Court finally understand his nonsensical arguments against birthright citizenship.

“It’s too bad that the Supreme Court can’t watch and study the Mark Levin Show tonight on the Birthright Citizenship Scam. If they saw it they would never allow that money making HOAX to continue. THEY SHOULD USE THEIR POWERS OF COMMON SENSE FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY,” Trump wrote on Truth Social at nearly 1 a.m. on Monday morning. “They failed miserably on Tariffs, needlessly costing the USA Hundreds of Billions of Dollars in potential rebates for the benefit haters and scammers. Why??? Don’t do it again! The Country can only withstand so many bad decisions from a Court that just doesn’t seem to care.”

An episode of Levin’s ramblings seems unlikely to save Trump, or convince the court to rip citizenship from millions of people born on American soil. In oral arguments last week, nearly all of the justices—even the ones Trump appointed— expressed dismay, confusion, and frustration at the very notion of Trump’s challenge to birthright citizenship, one of the most basic tenets of American life.

Officials from 23 different states (and the District of Columbia) are taking Donald Trump to court over a brazenly unconstitutional executive order that looks to limit Americans’ voting rights.

The executive order, signed on Tuesday, banned the U.S. Postal Service from delivering mail-in ballots to anyone not on a preapproved list compiled by the USPS itself. Trump and his cronies like to claim mail-in voting is rife with fraud—despite a lack of evidence and the fact that the president likes to vote by mail himself. But the executive order’s solution to this is sketchy at best. Why, and how, does the USPS get to choose who can vote by mail?

Perhaps even more insidious is another section of the executive order, which calls on the federal government to compile its own list of voters in each state, which will then be sent to states 60 days before each federal election—presumably along with a bunch of threats that they better not find anyone who doesn’t match their list voting.

States, of course, have been responsible for keeping their own voter rolls for centuries, but this executive order threatens to change that. And which federal department has the president tasked with creating nationwide voter rolls? Why, the Department of Homeland Security, of course! You know, the same department that has repeatedly been caught lying in court, and which executed two Americans in the street just a few months ago! What could go wrong?

The good news is that lawsuits have already curbed some of Trump’s voting-related executive orders. This suit, filed in Massachusetts District Court, will hopefully be no different.

“The President’s latest attempt to interfere with the States’ administration of their elections is as unprecedented as it is unconstitutional,” the states’ complaint reads. “Under our Constitution, the President has no authority to restrict voter eligibility or mail voting to lists of voters pre-authorized by the federal government.”

The conservative leader of Catholics in the U.S. military had some damning words for Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump’s holy war on Iran.

Speaking in an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation set to air Sunday, Archbishop Timothy Broglio, the head of the Archdiocese for the Military Services and one of the most conservative Catholic prelates in the United States, said it was “hard to cast this war as something that would be sponsored by the Lord.”

Broglio criticized Hegseth’s bloodthirsty prayers for violence against “those who deserve no mercy” at a recent Pentagon Christian service.

“It’s a little bit problematic in the sense that the Lord Jesus certainly brought a message of peace, and I think war is always a last resort,” Broglio said.

When asked directly whether he believed the war was justified, he replied, “I would think under the just war theory, it is not.”

He explained that the war was “compensating for a threat before the threat is actually realized” and said he would “align” himself with Pope Leo XIV, who has urged a diplomatic resolution to the conflict.

President Trump has made only one comment as reports of yet another U.S. combat plane going down directly contradict his constant comments that Iranian air defense is completely devastated.

On Friday afternoon, The New York Times reported that an A-10 Warthog crashed in the Persian Gulf region over the Strait of Hormuz around the same time an F-15 was shot down in Iran. The report came from two U.S. officials speaking anonymously about the matter, but they did not offer additional details.

While the lone pilot of the A-10 is safe, only one of the two pilots from the downed F-15 has been rescued. Trump has remained shockingly silent as these two significant military losses occurred back to back. He’s had no public events Friday and has not acknowledged the jets in any posts. His most recent post after news of the second crashed warplane, around 3:20 p.m. on Friday, read “KEEP THE OIL, ANYONE?” He did not acknowledge the fallen aircraft or missing servicemember.

It makes no sense to rant about how the war is already won when Iran clearly still has some level of defense capability available.

This story has been updated.