Politics

WASHINGTON (AP) — Pam Bondi had insisted at her Senate confirmation hearing that as attorney general, her Justice Department would not “play politics.”

Yet in the month since the Trump administration took over the building, a succession of actions has raised concerns the department is doing exactly that.

Top officials have demanded the names of thousands of FBI agents who investigated the Capitol riot, sued a state attorney general who had won a massive fraud verdict against Donald Trump before the 2024 election, and ordered the dismissal of a criminal case against New York Mayor Eric Adams by saying the charges had handicapped the Democrat’s ability to partner in the Republican administration’s fight against illegal immigration.

Even for a department that has endured its share of scandals, the moves have produced upheaval not seen in decades, tested its independence and rattled the foundations of an institution that has long prided itself on being driven solely by facts, evidence and the law. As firings and resignations mount, the unrest raises the question of whether a president who raged against his own Justice Department during his first term can succeed in bending it to his will in his second.

“We have seen now a punishing ruthlessness that acting department leadership and the attorney general are bringing to essentially subjugate the workforce to the wishes and demands of the administration, even when it’s obvious” that some of the decisions have all the signs “of corrupting the criminal justice system,” said retired federal prosecutor David Laufman, a senior department official across Democratic and Republican administrations.

He spoke not long after Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor, Danielle Sassoon, resigned in protest following a directive from Emil Bove, the Justice Department’s acting No. 2 official, to dismiss the case against Adams.

In a letter foreshadowing her decision, Sassoon accused the department of acceding to a “quid pro quo” — dropping the case to ensure Adams’ help with Trump’s immigration agenda. Though a Democrat, Adams had for months positioned himself as eager to aid the administration’s effort in America’s largest city, even meeting privately with Trump at Trump’s Florida estate just days before the Republican took office.

Multiple high-ranking officials who oversaw the Justice Department’s public integrity section, which prosecutes corruption cases, joined Sassoon in resigning.

On Friday, a prosecutor involved in the Adams case, Hagan Scotten, became at least the seventh person to quit in the standoff, telling Bove in a letter that it would take a “fool” or a “coward” to meet his demand to drop the charges. (Bove and department lawyers in Washington ultimately filed paperwork Friday night to end the case).

Though the circumstances are significantly different, the wave of resignations conjured memories of the 1973 “Saturday Night Massacre” when multiple Justice Department leaders quit rather than carry out President Richard Nixon’s orders to fire the Watergate special prosecutor.

“Even though there may not be more resignations, a clear message has been sent about the objectives and the expectations of the department,” said Alberto Gonzales, who served as attorney general under Republican President George W. Bush until his 2007 resignation in the wake of the dismissal of several U.S. attorneys.

“The purpose of the department is to ensure that our laws are carried out, that those who engage in criminal wrongdoing are prosecuted and punished,” Gonzales said. And to some it may appear “that if you have some kind of relationship with the White House, there may not be consequences for doing something that ordinary Americans engaged in similar conduct would be punished.”

Bove, a former New York federal prosecutor himself who represented Trump in his criminal cases, pointedly made no assessment about the legal merits of the case against Adams. Bove cited political reasons, including the timing of the charges months before Adams’ presumed reelection campaign and the restrictions the case had placed on the mayor’s ability to fight illegal immigration and violent crime.

In a letter to Sassoon, Bove said case prosecutors would be subject to internal investigations.

Bondi defended the decision to drop the case, asserted in a Fox New interview Friday that Adams was targeted after he criticized the Biden administration’s immigration policies. Her chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, said prosecutors who refused the dismissal order have “no place at DOJ.”

“The decision to dismiss the indictment of Eric Adams is yet another indication that this DOJ will return to its core function of prosecuting dangerous criminals, not pursuing politically motivated witch hunts,” Mizelle said in a statement that accused prosecutors without evidence of “disordered and ulterior motives.”

At the White House on Friday, Trump said he was “not involved” in the Adams case and knew “nothing” about it.

The New York showdown follows a separate dispute between Bove and the acting FBI leadership over his demands for a list of agents involved in the investigations of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol so the Justice Department could determine whether personnel action was warranted.

The request was seen by some as a precursor to possible mass firings, but it was also consistent with Trump’s fury over those criminal cases, which he erased with sweeping pardons soon after his inauguration.

Bove referred to the acting FBI director’s resistance to his directive as an act of “insubordination” and said agents who “simply followed” orders would not lose their jobs but those who acted with “partisan intent” were at risk.

In between White House terms, Trump and his allies pressed the case that the Justice Department had become “weaponized” against conservatives and him in particular, citing separate indictments that were later dismissed after Trump won back the presidency in November.

On her first day on the job, Bondi announced the creation of a “Weaponization Working Group,” to scrutinize the prosecutors who brought criminal and civil cases against Trump and to examine the Jan. 6 prosecutions. She wrote in a memo that the department “must take immediate and overdue steps to restore integrity and credibility” and to ensure that personnel were “ready and willing” to implement the president’s agenda.

The group, notably, was not tasked with examining other politically sensitive matters more favorable to Trump, including a special counsel’s investigation of Democratic President Joe Biden’s handling of classified information or the prosecution of Biden’s son Hunter, who was convicted of gun and tax charges before receiving a pardon from his father in December.

Among the prosecutors singled out by the working group was special counsel Jack Smith, who brought two criminal cases against Trump, and New York Attorney General Letitia James, whose civil fraud suit against Trump led to a nearly $500 million judgment.

A frequent target of Trump’s ire, James would surface again days later when Bondi, in her first news conference, announced a lawsuit against the state of New York over a law that allows people who might not be in the U.S. legally to get a driver’s license. Bondi opened her remarks by saying she had “filed charges” against James and Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul, before later clarifying that she was referring to a lawsuit.

More departures — and more turmoil — could be ahead.

“The prospect of the hollowing out of the Justice Department and the (FBI) is now a live and dangerous risk being played out,” said Laufman, the retired prosecutor. “Where it goes from here, we just can’t currently assess.”

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Signaling a major shift in civil rights enforcement, the federal agency that enforces workplace anti-discrimination laws has moved to dismiss six of its own cases on behalf of workers alleging gender identity discrimination, arguing that the cases now conflict with President Donald Trump’s recent executive order, court documents say. 

The requests by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission mark a major departure from its prior interpretation of civil rights law, and a stark contrast to a decade ago when the agency issued a landmark finding that a transgender civilian employee of the U.S. Army had been discriminated against because her employer refused to use her preferred pronouns or allow her to use bathrooms based on her gender identity. 

Just last year, the EEOC updated its guidance to specify that deliberately using the wrong pronouns for an employee, or refusing them access to bathrooms corresponding with their gender identity, constituted a form of harassment. That followed a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that gay, lesbian and transgender people are protected from employment discrimination. 

Nearly all workplace discrimination charges must pass through the EEOC — at least initially — and the agency’s decision to drop at least six of the cases raises serious questions about whether its protections will continue to extend to transgender and gender nonconforming people going forward. 

The EEOC is seeking to dismiss three cases in Illinois as well as one in Alabama, New York and California. In each instance, the original complaints allege discrimination against transgender or gender nonconforming workers. The agency cites Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order declaring that the government would recognize only two “immutable” sexes — male and female — as the reason for why it no longer intends to pursue the cases. 

The EEOC’s requests to dismiss the cases come just weeks after Trump dismissed two Democratic commissioners of the five-member EEOC before their terms expired, a decision that removed what would have been a major obstacle to his administration efforts to upend interpretation of the nation’s civil rights laws. Had the commissioners been allowed to carry out their terms, the EEOC would have had a Democratic majority well into Trump’s term. The administration also fired Karla Gilbride as the EEOC’s general counsel, replacing her with Andrew Rogers as acting counsel. 

Shortly after their dismissals, acting EEOC chair Andrea Lucas, a Republican, signaled her intent to put the agency’s resources behind enforcing Trump’s executive order on gender. She announced in a statement that one of her priorities would be “defending the biological and binary reality of sex and related rights.” Later, she ordered that the EEOC would continue accepting any and all discrimination charges filed by workers, although complaints that “implicate” Trump’s order should be elevated to headquarters for “review.” 

“Biology is not bigotry. Biological sex is real, and it matters,” Lucas said in her statement. “Sex is binary (male and female) and immutable. It is not harassment to acknowledge these truths — or to use language like pronouns that flow from these realities, even repeatedly.” She removed the agency’s “pronoun app,” which allowed employees to display their pronouns in their Microsoft 365 profiles, among other changes. 

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(Reuters) – Elon Musk’s DOGE team has sent termination notices to more than a dozen staffers at the U.S. Digital Services Office, a group of federal IT workers, Bloomberg News reported on Saturday citing two people familiar with the matter.

Musk’s DOGE has swept through federal agencies in recent weeks searching for spending cuts as part of Trump’s goal to overhaul and shrink the U.S. government.

(Reporting by Kanjyik Ghosh; Editing by Daniel Wallis)

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WASHINGTON (AP) — As President Donald Trump approaches the first-month mark in his second term, he has moved with dizzying speed and blunt force to reorder American social and political norms and the economy while redefining the U.S. role in the world. 

At the same time, he has empowered Elon Musk to help engineer the firing of thousands of federal employees and potentially shutter entire agencies created by Congress. It’s an effort to root out wasteful spending and fraud. 

Those actions have largely overshadowed Trump’s crackdowns on immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border, and his efforts to remake social policy getting rid of diversity, equity and inclusion programs and rolling back transgender rights. 

The president has also imposed scores of new tariffs against U.S. trade partners and threatened more. 

Here’s a look at the first four weeks: 

Mass federal firings begin 

The Trump administration fired thousands of workers who were still in probationary periods common among new hires.  

At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, employees say the administration not only wants to cut nearly the entire workforce but also erase all its data from the past 12 years. The administration agreed to pause any further dismantling of the agency until March 3, under a judge’s order. 

It is worth noting that on the campaign trail Donald Trump promised to turn Washington upside down.  

Legal challenges mount 

Court challenges to Trump’s policies started on Inauguration Day and have continued at a furious pace since Jan. 20. The administration is facing some 70 lawsuits nationwide challenging his executive orders and moves to downsize the federal government. 

The Republican-controlled Congress is in lock-step with Trump’s MAGA agenda, so the court system is ground zero for pushback. Judges have issued more than a dozen orders at least temporarily blocking aspects of Trump’s agenda, ranging from an executive order to end U.S. citizenship extended automatically to people born in this country to giving Musk’s team access to sensitive federal data. 

The administration has notched a few wins, too, most significantly when a judge allowed it to move forward with a deferred resignation program spearheaded by Musk. 

The economic outlook worsens 

Amid the policy upheaval, the latest economic data could prompt some White House worries. 

Inflation rose at a monthly rate of 0.5% in January, according to the Labor Department. Over the past three months, the consumer price index has increased at an annual rate of 4.5% — a sign that inflation is heating up again after having cooled for much of 2024. 

Trump told voters he could lower inflation and do so almost immediately after taking office. But Leavitt, while blaming Trump’s predecessor, Democrat Joe Biden, acknowledged the latest inflation indicators were “worse than expected.” 

More trouble signs came when the Commerce Department reported that retail sales slumped 0.9% on a monthly basis in January. A drop that large could signal a weakening in consumer confidence and economic growth. 

These could all be blips, which means the monthly data in February will really matter.  

In addition, the Trump team is bullish on the energy section as an economic driver in the days ahead. 

‘fair trade’  

After previously imposing tariffs on China and readying import taxes on Canada and Mexico, Trump rolled out what he called the “big one.” He said his administration would put together new tariffs in the coming weeks and months to match what other countries charge. 

On top of that, Trump plans separate additional tariffs on autos, computer chips and pharmaceuticals, in addition to the 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum that he announced on Monday. 

It is not clear whether these trade penalties are mainly negotiating tools or ways for Trump to raise revenues. So far, he has suggested that they are both. 

Congress watches closely  

Congress finds itself confounded by the onslaught and force of the Trump presidency. 

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said he finds the work of Musk’s team “very exciting.” Johnson said Trump is “taking legitimate executive action.” 

But even among congressional Republicans there were small signs of protest emerging — letters being written and phone calls being made — to protect their home-state interests and constituents as funding for programs, services and government contracts is being dismantled. 

Rep. Carlos Gimenez, R-Fla., urged the Homeland Security Department not to issue blanket deportations for Venezuelan migrants who fled their country and now call the Miami-area home. “I’m not powerless. I’m a member of Congress,” he said. 

Democratic lawmakers have joined protesters outside shuttered federal offices, arguing Trump and Musk had gone too far.  

Trump wants a new world order 

With his phone call to Russian President Vladimir Putin this past week, Trump is hoping he initiated the beginning of the end of the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine. 

The leaders agreed to have their teams “start negotiations immediately.” After getting off the phone with Putin, Trump called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to discuss getting both sides to the negotiating table. 

The Putin call is a monumental development in a war that has left hundreds of thousands dead or seriously wounded. 

But the way ahead remains complicated. 

Zelenskyy said he will not meet with Putin until a plan for peace is hammered out by Trump. Trump has gotten blowback when European leaders sharply criticized him and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for suggesting that NATO membership was not in the cards for Ukraine. 

The White House faces a further quandary with Zelenskyy wanting the U.S. and other countries to provide security guarantees for Ukraine, and Zelenskyy insisting that he and Trump iron out an agreement on the contours of any peace deal. 

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By Doina Chiacu

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Echoing France’s Napoleon Bonaparte, U.S. President Donald Trump on Saturday took to social media to signal continued resistance to limits on his executive authority in the face of multiple legal challenges.

“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” Trump, a Republican, proclaimed on his Truth Social network. The White House did not respond to a request for more details.

The phrase, attributed to the French military leader who created the Napoleonic Code of civil law in 1804 before declaring himself emperor, drew immediate criticism from Democrats.

“Spoken like a true dictator,” Senator Adam Schiff of California, a longtime adversary of Trump, wrote on X.

Trump, who took office on January 20, has made broad assertions of executive power that appear headed toward U.S. Supreme Court showdowns. Some lawsuits accuse Trump of usurping the authority of Congress as set out in the U.S. Constitution.

While Trump said he abides by court rulings, his advisers have attacked judges on social media and called for their impeachment. Vice President JD Vance wrote on X this week that judges “aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

Washington lawyer Norm Eisen, who like Schiff worked on the first of Trump’s two impeachment trials, said Trump’s lawyers have repeatedly tried to argue that if the president does it, it’s not illegal.

Napoleon’s saying, he said, excuses illegal acts.

“This is a trial balloon and a provocation,” Eisen said of Trump’s message.

Trump, whose longtime slogan is “Make America Great Again,” attributed his survival of an assassination attempt in July to God’s will.

“Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason, and that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness,” he said after his election victory.

(Reporting by Doina Chiacu; Additional reporting by Ismail Shakil; Editing by Michelle Nichols and Daniel Wallis)

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By Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Ben & Jerry’s accused its parent Unilever of demanding its silence toward U.S. President Donald Trump, as it prepares to spin off the ice cream brand later this year.

In a Thursday night filing in Manhattan federal court, Ben & Jerry’s said Unilever ice cream chief Peter ter Kulve earlier in the day unilaterally banned it from “issuing any posts criticizing President Trump” pending further review.

Ben & Jerry’s said ter Kulve cited Unilever’s restructuring in defending his actions, saying it created a “new dynamic” in an “unprecedented time.”

Ter Kulve previously banned a planned post on hot-button issues when Trump was inaugurated on January 20 because the post mentioned Trump, Ben & Jerry’s has said.

Unilever did not immediately respond on Friday to requests for comment. Ben & Jerry’s did not immediately respond to a similar request.

Ben & Jerry’s accusations came in its lawsuit seeking to stop Unilever’s alleged efforts to dismantle its independent board and end its social activism.

Many companies have altered social policies, including on diversity, or appeared to show deference toward Trump since he began his second White House term.

Ben & Jerry’s has had a socially conscious mission since being founded by Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield in 1978.

Unilever bought Ben & Jerry’s in 2000. They have battled publicly since 2021, when Ben & Jerry’s halted sales in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Its business there was later sold.

The planned spinoff comes as Unilever simplifies its product portfolio, which has dozens of brands including Dove, Hellmann’s, Knorr, Surf and Vaseline.

Unilever on Thursday chose Amsterdam over London and New York for the primary listing when it spins off Ben & Jerry’s, Breyers, Magnum and other ice cream brands as a standalone company. Ice cream revenue totaled 8.3 billion euros ($8.72 billion) in 2024.

The case is Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc v Unilever et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 24-08641.

($1 = 0.9519 euros)

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

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By Jack Queen, Mike Spector, Luc Cohen and Sarah N. Lynch

NEW YORK (Reuters) – President Donald Trump’s drive to shake up the U.S. government drove out a rising star in conservative legal circles: A career federal prosecutor who once clerked for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Danielle Sassoon, tapped to lead the Manhattan federal prosecutor’s office on Trump’s second day in office, quit on Thursday rather than go along with a Justice Department order to drop a criminal corruption case against Democratic New York Mayor Eric Adams.

The department ordered the case dropped, citing the city’s approaching November mayoral election and saying that prosecuting Adams could interfere with his ability to assist with a crackdown on immigration, a top Trump priority. Trump has said he did not personally order the charges against Adams dropped.

The resignation illustrated the tensions between the traditional U.S. conservative Republican legal movement and Trump’s desire to exert far more direct control of the federal government, challenging standards of prosecutorial independence that have stood for a half century.

Beyond shaking up the criminal justice system that Trump believes was turned against him during his years out of power, he has vowed to shutter Cabinet departments, succeeded in installing a defense secretary through the narrowest possible Senate margin and challenged constitutional rights that have stood for more than 150 years.

Trump’s sweeping assertions of executive power during his first weeks back in office appear headed for showdowns at the U.S. Supreme Court where conservatives hold a majority, but it remains an open question whether or how much the justices might act to check his authority.

Sassoon, 38, a member of the deeply conservative Federalist Society who was installed as acting U.S. Attorney in Manhattan on January 21, was one of at least a half-dozen Justice Department employees to resign over the Adams order.

Another who stepped down, according to a source familiar with the matter, Assistant U.S. Attorney Hagan Scotten, also had a conservative legal pedigree, having clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, prior to his elevation to the high court during Trump’s first term.

Ilya Somin, a libertarian legal scholar who is also a member of the Federalist Society, said Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove’s directive to drop the Adams case was reflective of a shift in the nature of U.S. conservatism over the past decade that has shown less regard for the Constitution.

“There are disagreements between those who care about rule of law values, and those who are willing to subordinate themselves to other considerations,” said Somin, a law professor at George Mason University. “This sets a dangerous precedent.”

Trump’s pick for attorney general, Pam Bondi, in her first day in office said that Justice Department lawyers who refuse to advance the administration’s legal arguments could be fired.

Bove, Trump’s former personal criminal defense lawyer who once served in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, wrote that Sassoon and the other prosecutors had violated their oaths of office in failing to follow instructions.

“In no valid sense do you uphold the Constitution by disobeying direct orders implementing the policy of a duly elected President,” Bove wrote.

REJECTING ‘POLITICALLY ADVANTAGEOUS’ MOVES

Sassoon wrote in a letter to Bondi that her responsibility as a prosecutor was to enforce the law impartially.

“That includes prosecuting a validly returned indictment regardless whether its dismissal would be politically advantageous, to the defendant or to those who appointed me,” Sassoon wrote.

Scotten, who also resigned, did not respond to a request for comment.

The resignations evoked comparisons to the “Saturday Night Massacre” in 1973, when senior Justice Department officials resigned after refusing President Richard Nixon’s order to fire the special counsel investigating the 1972 break-in by Republican operatives at the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington.

Randy Barnett, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, said Bove’s concern that the corruption case was hindering Adams’ ability to address public safety was adequately explained.

Sassoon “was refusing to execute a lawful command by her superior in the DOJ as required by DOJ procedures. This is what happens when you do that,” Barnett said. “It’s perfectly reasonable for Main Justice to take control of their subordinates.”

Adams, a Democrat who has pleaded not guilty to charges he accepted bribes from Turkish officials, has leaned toward Trump in recent months.

In her letter to Bondi, Sassoon criticized Bove for suggesting the indictment be dismissed while leaving open the possibility of reviving it later. She said that amounted to an implicit threat of future prosecution if Adams did not help Trump on immigration enforcement.

Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Adams, has denied any “quid pro quo.”

In accepting Sassoon’s resignation, Bove wrote that he was taking the extraordinary step of referring her, Scotten and another prosecutor on the case for investigations into possible misconduct.

‘UNDER THE THUMB’

The Justice Department under Trump has also suggested it would seek to criminally prosecute city and state officials who try to interfere with the administration’s immigration crackdown.

Paul Tuchmann, a former federal prosecutor who handled public corruption cases, said Bove’s referrals for investigation sent a signal that everyone at the Justice Department is “under the thumb” of Bove.

“If you do anything that’s not exactly what he wants, you’re going to be punished regardless of whether or not what he wants is appropriate or ethical,” said Tuchmann, now a partner at law firm Wiggin and Dana.

The fallout from the Adams case is far from over.

In his letter to Sassoon, Bove wrote that the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., was taking over the case from the Southern District of New York, long known for its autonomy. During Trump’s first term, the office brought criminal cases against people in Trump’s orbit.

For now, Sassoon’s former deputy, Matthew Podolsky, has taken over her former role. Further interventions by Trump appointees could spark more resignations at the office, legal experts said.

“This is a moment of truth for career prosecutors inside SDNY,” said former federal prosecutor Michael Weinstein. “I’m not so sure we’ve seen the end of resignations or protests just yet.”

(Reporting by Jack Queen, Mike Spector and Luc Cohen in New York and Sarah N. Lynch in Washington; Editing by Scott Malone and Alistair Bell)

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By Kristina Cooke, Ted Hesson and Kevin Moffatt

ATLANTA/WASHINGTON/AURORA, Colorado (Reuters) – Venezuelan migrant Yessenia and her husband Maikol awoke last week to loud footsteps and knocks in their apartment building in Aurora, Colorado.

“Police, open the door. Policia, abra la puerta.”

Rumors had swirled for days that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement would soon arrive to detain migrants at their building, which was thrust into the national spotlight after then-presidential candidate Donald Trump described it as controlled by Venezuelan gang members, an assertion city officials disputed.

As the knocks grew nearer, the couple became scared. They knew from civil rights briefings that ICE needs a judicial warrant to enter people’s homes without being invited in.

Still, the couple – who are in the process of applying for asylum – panicked and moved the couch in front of the door. A Reuters photographer was present as they stood in frozen silence in the living room as officers banged on the door and demanded they open it. A few minutes that felt like hours later, the officers moved on. Reuters is withholding the couple’s last names to protect their identity.

Trump, a Republican, kicked off a wide-ranging immigration crackdown after taking office on January 20, allocating federal resources to track down, arrest and deport immigrants without legal status. While the Trump administration has highlighted arrests of people charged or convicted of crimes, the aggressive enforcement has also swept in people with low-level offenses or no criminal record, U.S. citizen spouses and children, and even some with valid deportation protections.

The enforcement ramp-up has sparked fear in immigrant communities around the country, with some people avoiding unnecessary outings and keeping children home from school, according to interviews with migrants and advocates. Hospitals, schools and libraries have adopted new policies to limit cooperation with ICE.

Among those caught in the enforcement dragnet: Riyer, a 27-year-old Venezuelan man detained by ICE in the Atlanta area. He fought back tears as he worried about how his 22-year-old partner and their 5-month-old son would survive without him. 

“I keep thinking of them alone,” he said while detained in Atlanta shortly before being transferred to Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia.

Riyer, who is in the process of applying for asylum, was taken into ICE custody after a traffic stop, he said, during which police found he was driving with a suspended license.

His partner, Itaily, was waiting for him to come home for dinner when he was picked up, she said. “It’s just the three of us, and he was the one who was working,” she said, while rocking their baby. “I have a lot of fear about what is going to happen.” ICE did not comment on Riyer’s case.

ICE RAMPS UP

The vast majority of people detained by ICE are referred by state and local police or are recent border crossers. The Trump administration has taken steps to make it easier to deputize local law enforcement to aid the deportation effort. 

They have also pulled in other federal law enforcement agencies to help with immigration work. 

Reuters reporters embedded with ICE near Atlanta and Washington, D.C., last week to see operations firsthand. ICE asked reporters not to approach the scene until the suspect was secured or photograph officers’ faces without their permission; further conditions were not attached to reporting.

In the early hours of February 5, about a dozen officers from ICE and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives met in a strip-mall parking lot south of Atlanta. The officers, in several unmarked cars, then waited in and around the trailer park in which their target lived for him to leave for work.

As the clock crept past his usual wake-up time as documented by the surveillance team, the Atlanta ICE field office deputy director, Kristen Sullivan, wondered whether or not they might have to come back another day. Door-knocking had not been particularly effective recently, she said, as she listened to updates from officers on her radio.

“It’s been in the media that we are out targeting individuals, and that’s definitely had an effect on the community,” she said.

Forty-five minutes later, their target – a 47-year-old Mexican man with three convictions in the U.S. for driving under the influence – left his trailer. He drove to a nearby gas station, where he was quickly boxed in by the agents’ cars. The ATF agents found a gun in his car, which they processed at the scene.

The man declined to comment. He was later taken to the Stewart Detention Center. Reuters was not able to establish his immigration history or if he had legal representation.

ICE stepped up arrests in late January, picking up 800-1,200 people per day nationwide, far above the 311-person daily average last year. Enforcement tapered off in February as detention space tightened and officers flown to target cities returned home, according to three sources familiar with the matter.

“There’s definitely been a pressure to increase our enforcement numbers and to have more teams and more officers out on the street,” said Sullivan, without specifying where the pressure was coming from.

“These cases take a lot of resources and a lot of time, look how many officers are sitting out here, and how much legwork went into this,” she added, in reference to the arrest of the Mexican man.

A day later in Rockville, Maryland, a short drive outside Washington, another ICE operation sought out immigrants charged or convicted of crimes with support from ATF and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

ICE officers began by scouting out a home just after 5 a.m. as freezing rain fell in a darkened suburban neighborhood.

After someone let them into the house, they took custody of a 68-year-old Filipino man who had entered the U.S. legally but violated the terms of his status when he pleaded guilty to sex abuse of two children, according to ICE and court documents. The man was a lawful permanent resident, said an attorney who represented him in the sex abuse case. “He is now facing deportation and has accepted responsibility for this case,” he said.

Later that morning, ICE officers entered an apartment building to look for a Honduran man they said was convicted of brandishing a machete in Virginia in November but said they were denied entry and told he was not home. The officers had an administrative warrant that authorizes the arrest of someone violating immigration laws, not a judicial warrant that would allow them to search a home, they said.

ICE’s operations tend to start off with a list of targets with criminal records but, since Trump took office, they are also increasingly picking up “collaterals” – people they encounter without legal status in the same area.

“Any individuals that we come across, we are going to check them and then bring them into custody,” said Nikita Baker, deputy field office director for ICE enforcement in Maryland.

CAUGHT IN THE DRAGNET

On January 26, Choe Blaiss Che had just returned from his Sunday morning shift as a food delivery driver when immigration agents showed up at his door in Arlington, Texas.

The 31-year-old Cameroonian man wasn’t worried – he had Temporary Protected Status, valid through June, and no criminal record. He asked to get his documents to show them, but the officers reached through the open door and pulled him out of his house before he could, he said. Under TPS, individuals are allowed to live and work in the U.S. for a set period.

At the field office, a supervisor noted that his TPS was valid and told him he would be released, he said. But as he waited for a taxi, another officer said he needed to stay longer for processing. He was not given further detail, Che said. Che overheard an officer saying they needed to hit arrest numbers for the day and to just send him to the detention center and figure it out there, he said in an interview.

ICE did not reply to a request for comment on Che’s assertion.

On the Sunday that Che was arrested, the agency sent out an email to staff telling them the White House was “demanding” 1,200 arrests, Reuters reported that week. Reuters could not establish if the arrest of Che related to that directive.

“It is egregious to detain someone with a valid TPS,” said Michelle Mendez, director of legal resources and training at the National Immigration Project, who is providing technical assistance with the case. Under U.S. law, an immigrant with TPS cannot be detained for being in the country illegally.

Che was released on February 5, after 10 days in a detention center. ICE did not provide him or Reuters with a reason for his arrest or his release. His lawyer, Eugene Delgado, said he plans to sue ICE for damages.

Baker said her Maryland ICE office was detaining more migrants with final deportation orders when they appeared for check-ins, a group Trump has prioritized but who may have clean criminal records, years of residency, and U.S. citizen spouses and children.

Final orders of removal are generally issued when judges rule against an immigrant in their deportation case. ICE has traditionally allowed some of those with such orders to remain free if they have pending appeals or are from countries to where they cannot be easily deported, as long as they attend regular check-ins. But those once-routine visits have become increasingly fraught for immigrants.

Jose, a Salvadoran man who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally in 2016, had a final order of removal after his asylum claim was denied, as did his 16-year-old son.

Jose, who declined to give his last name, received a text message on January 29 telling him to present to the ICE office in Austin, Texas, with his son on February 4.

The two were taken into custody at the check-in and deported to El Salvador the following day in the early morning hours. His wife and 6-year-old son, a U.S. citizen, remain in Texas.

The teenager needed a jaw surgery due to a debilitating condition following a childhood motorbike accident and his attorney tried to request an emergency deportation reprieve but said ICE rejected the filing three times.

Jose, a former police officer who said he received death threats in El Salvador, had never been charged with a crime in the U.S. or missed an ICE appointment, the attorney said.

ICE did not reply to a request for comment on Jose’s case.

Speaking from his brother’s house in San Salvador, Jose sobbed as he recounted trying to explain the deportation to his son, who has few memories of El Salvador.

His son was devastated at being separated from his mother and brother and didn’t understand why the U.S. government was not letting him finish high school or have the surgery.

“He said, ‘Papi, if only you had a magic wand and you could just send us back there,’” Jose recounted.

(Reporting by Kristina Cooke in Atlanta, Ted Hesson in Washington and Kevin Mohatt in Aurora; Editing by Mary Milliken and Rosalba O’Brien)

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By Sarah N. Lynch

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A U.S. federal prosecutor agreed on Friday to file a motion to dismiss criminal corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams to spare other career staff from potentially being fired for refusing to do so, sources briefed on the matter told Reuters.

Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove told the department’s career public integrity prosecutors in a meeting on Friday that they had an hour to decide among themselves who would file the motion, the sources said.

The volunteer was Ed Sullivan, a veteran career prosecutor, who agreed to alleviate pressure on his colleagues in the department’s public integrity section, two sources said. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News on Friday afternoon that it was her “understanding it is being dismissed today.”

“This is not a capitulation-this is a coercion,” one of the people briefed on the meeting later told Reuters. “That person, in my mind, is a hero.”

Sullivan’s decision came after the attorneys in the meeting contemplated resigning en masse, rather than filing the motion to dismiss, another source briefed on the matter told Reuters. There are approximately 30 attorneys in the Public Integrity Section.

Six senior Justice Department officials, including Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor and the acting head of the Public Integrity Section John Keller, resigned on Thursday rather than comply with Bove’s order to dismiss the case.

The departures reflect a growing resistance from career Justice Department officials to efforts by President Donald Trump to overhaul the agency to end what he calls its weaponization against political opponents.

Critics say Trump’s changes threaten to subject criminal prosecutions to political whims.

Manhattan’s U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon, who was temporarily leading the office, was the first to resign on Thursday, after Bove earlier in the week ordered her to drop the corruption charges against Adams so that he could help the Trump administration carry out its crackdown on illegal immigration.

Adams, a Democrat, has previously argued he was targeted by former President Joe Biden’s administration for criticizing its immigration policy.

Sassoon resisted, telling Bove that the law did not support his demands for a dismissal, and she resigned.

Bove then ordered top public integrity officials in Washington to dismiss the case. They too refused.

Thursday’s resignations sparked comparisons from legal experts to the “Saturday Night Massacre” in 1973, when senior Justice Department officials resigned after refusing President Richard Nixon’s order to fire the special counsel investigating the 1972 break-in by Republican operatives at the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington.

On Friday, Hagan Scotten, one of the New York-based prosecutors on the case, also tendered his resignation, telling Bove there was no valid reason to justify dismissing the charges and that he would never comply with the order to do so.

Scotten did not respond to a request for comment.

Chad Mizelle, chief of staff to the attorney general, said the decision to dismiss Adams’ indictment “is yet another indication that this DOJ will return to its core function of prosecuting dangerous criminals, not pursuing politically motivated witch hunts.”

“The fact that those who indicted and prosecuted the case refused to follow a direct command is further proof of the disordered and ulterior motives of the prosecutors,” he said in a statement. “Such individuals have no place at DOJ.”

(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch in Washington; additional reporting by Luc Cohen in New York;Editing by Alistair Bell and David Gregorio)

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By Leah Douglas

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Newly confirmed U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said on Friday morning that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team has been operating at the agency for “a few weeks” and that she welcomed their efforts.

Rollins was confirmed by the Senate on Thursday.

Speaking at an event at the U.S. Department of Agriculture headquarters, Rollins said she was proud to welcome the cost-cutting team to the agency.

“We know that that work will make us better here at USDA. It will make us stronger, it will make us faster, and it will make us more efficient,” she said.

Musk, the Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder who spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to help elect President Donald Trump, leads the Department of Government Efficiency, a new arm of the White House tasked with radically shrinking the federal bureaucracy.

Rollins said she expected full access for DOGE from all USDA teams. She also said the agency would end diversity, equity and inclusion work and identity celebrations and return all personnel to working in the office instead of from home, aligning with Trump’s executive orders.

Rollins said she was briefed on avian flu on Thursday night. The early weeks of the Trump administration have brought disruption to the federal effort to contain the spread of the virus, which has infected millions of poultry, thousands of dairy cattle, and almost 70 people.

(Reporting by Leah Douglas in Washington, Editing by William Maclean, Chizu Nomiyama and Matthew Lewis)

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