College Student Who Lost Legal Status Dies After Walking Into Traffic

Pierre Damas Bel, a 20-year-old Haitian immigrant, stepped into traffic in Springfield, Ohio, Monday and was killed. His family believes it was a suicide after he lost his Temporary Protected Status.

Ohio State Highway Patrol officials reported that Bel had pulled his car over on the right shoulder of I-70 Monday morning and then walked directly into oncoming traffic. He was struck by a large tractor-trailer and died from his injuries at the scene.

Bel had reportedly been distraught after he, like dozens of Haitians in Springfield, was called to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office to be fitted with an ankle monitor following the end of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians. Springfield is home to a Haitian community of about 15,000, and a June Supreme Court decision permitted the Trump administration to cancel their TPS protections, despite the ongoing violence and insecurity in Haiti. Without TPS, Haitian residents have been ordered to wear ankle monitors and travel no further than 75 miles from their homes.

“I came to this country to pursue my education. I didn’t come here to commit a crime or hurt anyone,” Bel wrote on Instagram on July 30. “Yet now I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg, carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience.”

Bel was a recent honors high school graduate and a proud cadet in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. He had just started classes as a freshman at Wright State University, where he wanted to study medicine and play soccer.

After being fitted with the ankle monitor, he was reportedly not given a JROTC uniform and could no longer comfortably play soccer.

“In his last days, I did not recognize him as he was such an energetic kid who loves life, friends and family, and education,” the 20-year-old’s father, Pierre Ronal Bel, told The Haitian Times. “It was his first week of classes, but he didn’t feel like he was learning because he was traumatized, so it’s because of ICE’s ankle monitor.… He would wear long pants or jeans whenever he went out so people wouldn’t make fun of him or look at him differently.”

“He felt like he was treated like an animal,” the grieving father added in a statement to The Washington Post.

Bel’s death has shocked and traumatized the Haitian community in Springfield and beyond. This is the same Haitian enclave that President Trump accused of eating cats and dogs on the campaign trail in 2024, and the community has been living in terror ever since the administration canceled TPS. Bel was scheduled for an asylum hearing in October, and reportedly did not want to return to Haiti due to the violence that caused his parents to flee in 2021.

“I’m supposed to be forgiving,” the Bel family’s pastor in Springfield, Carl Ruby, told the Post. “But right now as I sit with a broken family, I’m crying out to God for righteous judgment in those who made this happen.”

Former Customs and Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino—who oversaw some of the Trump administration’s most violent immigration actions—was under internal investigation for allegedly lying about misconduct and antisemitic remarks when he retired back in March.

According to the Chicago Tribune, Bovino’s investigation was triggered by Judge Sarah Ellis, who last year called him out for lying on the stand about being hit in the head with a rock by protesters, which he used to justify his brutal use of tear gas against American citizens.

“I find the defendant’s evidence simply not credible,” Ellis said at the time. “Agents pushed, shoved, tackled protesters, pointed guns at them, threw tear gas and deployed smoke canisters. Everyone that agents detained [was] released by the FBI, and none of them are currently charged with assault.”

An internal federal investigator asked Bovino to answer questions about Ellis’s ruling in March just weeks before he retired. In that same inquiry, Bovino was also asked to respond to allegations that he used antisemitic language on a conference call in January. When Minnesota U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen, an Orthodox Jew, couldn’t make the call due to the Sabbath, a frustrated Bovino allegedly said “Do Orthodox criminals also take off on Saturday?” and used the term “chosen people” in a negative connotation.

Bovino’s tenure as CBP head was absolutely horrific. He tear-gassed men, women, and children. He called Latino immigrants “scum,” “filth,” and “trash,” while identifying as Native American (he is Italian American). Most notably, he claimed that Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, had intended to harm the CBP officers who shot him 10 times while he was pinned to the ground with his gun holstered. Since his exit, Bovino has accused the Trump administration of wanting him killed, and Trump himself of betraying his mass immigration goals.

CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss was reportedly responsible for a blatantly racist news headline that tied Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed to the 9/11 terrorist attack.

The CBS article was headlined: “Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s deleted tweets on Sept. 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks.”

The story’s lede was even more offensive, grammatically suggesting that El-Sayed was somehow to blame for 9/11.

“As the nation prepares to mark 25 years since Sept. 11, 2001, Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, may be facing the risk of renewed scrutiny and fresh political attack,” the story began.

That same language was mirrored in an X post from the company’s official account.

The story critiqued several of El-Sayed’s since-deleted Covid-era tweets in which the former public health official compared the pandemic’s early death toll to the infamous terrorist attack and wrote that he hoped the ensuing government response would “spend the next ten years fighting a war for public health & against poverty.” (This was not controversial—many leaders and media outlets at the time compared Covid’s death toll to that of September 11.)

Ultimately, CBS News used the anniversary of 9/11 to damage the Muslim progressive’s chances in Michigan, even though the content of his posts was rather banal.

The Weiss-led network also suggested there was something sinister about the fact that El-Sayed had deleted the posts, even though his campaign has been public about the fact that he had deleted all his posts prior to 2023.

Status’s Oliver Darcy reported Tuesday that Weiss “personally directed” the Islamophobic language and was a driving force in shaping the story’s framing. According to Status, Weiss “praised” the story during CBS News’s daily editorial meeting, and signaled her support of the piece “to the entire network.” She also urged that the “headline be tweaked to specifically mention that El-Sayed had deleted tweets referencing the September 11 terrorist attacks,” according to CBS staffers who spoke with Status.

Senior CBS News staff brought the story to the standards department, though little was done about it due to Weiss’s personal involvement.

“They took a small nugget of news, forced into something much larger, and messed up,” one CBS News employee told Status.

A former senior CBS News staffer who heard about the situation from a former colleague told Status that the article was “shameful” and “the racism is overt.”

A person familiar with the story refuted that there was anything “racist or Islamophobic” about reporting on El-Sayed’s deleted tweets.

They told The New Republic in a message that Weiss “strengthened” the headline, which they said originally read: “For Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, Sept. 11 commemoration invites scrutiny of past remarks.”

They noted that Weiss was not “intimately involved in the reporting process” but confirmed that she did edit the headline and complimented the story during the company’s morning meeting on Monday.

Weiss, the founder of the pro-Israel blog The Free Press and a former New York Times opinion columnist, was tapped to run CBS News late last year, despite the fact that she had never worked in broadcast news, lacked traditional reporting experience, and had also never run a major news operation.

Weiss’s business decisions atop the news giant have unequivocally and singlehandedly divorced CBS News from its decades-long place in America’s prestige news media circuit. What was once crowned the “gold standard” of broadcasting and was the home of some of journalism’s most venerable names, such as Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, has since devolved into a graveyard for journalistic ethics.

Under Weiss’s stewardship, CBS News has killed critical stories in order to save face for the Trump administration. The network has also lost a cadre of veteran journalists, ranging from 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens to Anderson Cooper, to the company’s de facto face, Scott Pelley.

This story has been updated.

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll—one of the highest-ranking officials in the Defense Department—warned President Trump that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s mass purge of military leadership could have a negative impact on the Army’s “transformation and readiness,” according to The Atlantic. Then he resigned.

During their meeting, Trump was reportedly shocked when Driscoll told him just how many officials had been fired, stepped down, or not selected for promotion under Hegseth—something you’d think the president would already know about. Now, in the midst of a flailing war with Iran, the military is without its highest-ranking civilian leader, two Senate-confirmed head generals, and a confirmed commander.

Driscoll and Hegseth have seemingly been at odds from the moment Trump appointed Hegseth to head the Pentagon. In April, The Hill reported that Hegseth saw Driscoll as a threat to his leadership given Driscoll’s connection to Vice President JD Vance and his more traditional, less aggressive leadership style—with Hegseth’s team going so far as to try to frame Driscoll as a “resistance figure” in an effort to oust him from the administration.

Hegseth had already eviscerated Driscoll’s support network, firing his chief of staff, Gen. Randy George, and two other high-ranking military officials in April. Driscoll’s Monday resignation was a long time coming, if nothing else. It’s unclear what exactly Hegseth’s problem with Driscoll was beyond paranoia and Driscoll’s lack of total capitulation.

“From what I’ve seen in the press, and from whatever it’s worth, what I hear from people in the Army, it’s not like Driscoll is scheming and plotting to make Hegseth look bad. I mean, Hegseth takes care of that himself on a regular basis. It’s just, it’s all just very strange. And it’s just irresponsible,” retired Army reserve colonel and Pentagon staffer Kevin Carroll told The Hill in April.

Either way, Driscoll is gone now, and Hegseth will have one less detractor to his vision of a reckless, hypermasculine, shoot-first-ask-questions-later military to reign supreme over.

A U.S. Postal Service official has accused the agency of defying court orders as it rushes to implement the Trump administration’s mail-in voting restrictions.

The allegations were made public Tuesday morning by way of a letter from Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal to Postmaster General David Steiner. Citing the insider’s testimony, Blumenthal said that the “risky and haphazard” implementation of President Donald Trump’s March executive order—which granted the postal service new gatekeeping responsibilities regarding mail-in ballots—could lead to a “catastrophic failure” in U.S. voting procedures come November.

The executive order was in legal limbo for months—up until last week, when the Supreme Court decided that the lawsuit challenging the order was premature since the administration had not yet implemented it. The Supreme Court was clear that it had not ruled on the legality of Trump’s order, but nonetheless allowed it to move forward.

Still, the postal service’s plan to carry out the marching orders is already fraught with problems, according to the whistleblower report.

The snail-mail carrier has been building an entirely new federal ballot mail portal since June, months before the service was permitted to move forward with the executive order. The portal will screen all incoming ballots, but its development has been “rushed” and “risky” as the service tried to meet “impossible deadlines.”

For instance, the agency has eliminated testing procedures for the portal platform, a risk that could potentially “derail the midterm elections,” according to the whistleblower.

“Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all,” the official said.

Blumenthal told reporters by phone on Monday that “the main takeaway for me is that the Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans. One-third of all Americans cast their ballots by mail, and the USPS puts all of their votes at risk.”

Voting by mail will invariably become more difficult for the tens of millions of Americans who depend on the service under Trump’s new order. Even if a voter does everything right, their vote could still be rejected by the Postal Service’s new portal.

Part of the problem is the system’s 0 percent failure rate, which processes ballots in large batches but rejects the lot if one fails to pass muster.

“For example, if a state election official brings a batch of 10,000 ballots to USPS and USPS is unable to match just one of those ballots against the portal—because, for example, someone has recently changed their name after marriage or they’ve moved—then USPS would refuse to mail the remaining 9,999 ballots as well,” Blumenthal wrote. USPS would then expect the state to “take back the entire batch to cure the issue with the single ballot,” according to the whistleblower.

The whistleblower claimed that developing such a portal and the infrastructure to support it should take the service a year or more, but USPS leadership nonetheless demanded that the electronic processor be launched by September 1—less than six months after the executive order was signed, and just two months before the midterm election cycle.