What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White
What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White
Know Anyone Who Thinks Racial Profiling Is Exaggerated? Watch This, And Tell Me When Your Jaw Drops.
This video clearly demonstrates how racist America is as a country and how far we have to go to become a country that is civilized and actually values equal justice. We must not rest until this goal is achieved. I do not want my great grandchildren to live in a country like we have today. I wish for them to live in a country where differences of race and culture are not ignored but valued as a part of what makes America great.
Trump's justice department scrubs its website of news releases about January 6 defendants
"Department of Justice acknowledges the removal of news releases about criminal cases related to 2021 Capitol attack
Supporters of Donald Trump scale the west wall of the the US Capitol as they try to storm the building on 6 January 2021.Photograph: José Luis Magaña/AP
The Department of Justice is acknowledging it has removed from its website news releases about criminal cases related to the6 January 2021 Capitol attack, calling the information about the prosecutions “partisan propaganda”.
The purge of news releases documenting criminal charges, convictions and sentencings is the latest step by theTrump administrationto dramatically rewrite the history of the assault on the US Capitol, when hundreds of supporters of Donald Trump stormed the building in an effort to halt the congressional certification of his 2020 election loss to DemocratJoe Biden.
Trump, on his first day back in office in January 2025 , pardoned, commuted the prison sentences or vowed to dismiss the cases of all of the 1,500-plus people charged with crimes during the Capitol assault, including those convicted of attacking officers with makeshift weapons such as flagpoles, a hockey stick and a crutch.
On Monday, the justice department announced the creation of a $1.776bn fund meant to compensate Trump allies who feel they were unjustly investigated and prosecuted. The acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, has not ruled out that rioters convicted of violence will be eligible for payouts, prompting bipartisan anger in Congress.
After a journalist on Friday observed on the social media platform X that the justice department was “quietly” removing news releases on its website that were related to the January 6 attack, including about a Texas man who pleaded guilty to assault and also faced separate state charges of soliciting a minor, the department responded through its “rapid response” account that there was “nothing ‘quiet’ about it”.
“We are proud to reverse the [justice department’s] weaponization under the Biden administration. We will do everything in our power to make whole those who were persecuted for political purposes,” the post said. “This includes stripping [the justice department’s] website of partisan propaganda.”
Among the releases removed from the site were those concerning seditious conspiracy cases against members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, far-right extremist groups. The justice department, in an unopposed motion last month, asked a federal appeals court to vacate those seditious conspiracy convictions, a request that was granted on Thursday. The department on Friday moved to dismiss the cases against the group members."
“Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon killed and injured several people, straining a fragile truce with Hezbollah. The strikes, mostly in southern Lebanon, targeted Hezbollah operatives and infrastructure, but also damaged a hospital and killed paramedics. The truce, intended to ease weeks of violence, remains precarious as both sides accuse each other of violations.
Saturday’s strikes damaged a main hospital in the Lebanese city of Tyre, as funerals for paramedics killed a day earlier were held.
Mourners at the funeral of a paramedic and two civil defense workers, in Tyre, Lebanon, on Saturday. They were killed in an Israeli airstrike the day before, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times
Dozens of Israeli airstrikes pounded Lebanon late Friday and early Saturday, killing and injuring several people, Lebanon’s national news agency said, exposing the mounting strain on a truce between Israel and the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
The strikes mostly hit towns and villages in southern Lebanon, a Hezbollah stronghold where Israel is occupying large swaths of territory and where tens of thousands of residents remain displaced. The Israeli military also issued new evacuation warnings on Saturday afternoon for several towns across southern Lebanon.
A truce first reached in mid-April was meant to ease weeks of violence, but near-daily airstrikes still disrupt daily life and deepen uncertainty for peopleacross the country. The cease-fire formed part of a broader arrangement involving Iran, which regional mediators have spent recent days trying to turn into a more permanent agreement amid fears that it could unravel and trigger renewed American-Israeli strikes.
Saturday’s attacks come just a day after Israeli strikes killed six paramedics in two incidents in southern Lebanon within 24 hours, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. Over 120 medics have been killed in the latest conflict, according to the ministry.
In one of the strikes, in Deir Qanoun an-Nahr, the Israeli military said it had targeted Hezbollah operatives traveling on motorcycles. In the second strike, in Hanouiyeh, the military said it had struck Hezbollah infrastructure sites where militants were present. The Israeli military said in a statement it was examining whether the two strikes hit civilians in the aftermath, following reports that “several uninvolved individuals” were harmed.
Another Israeli airstrike on Thursday damaged the three-story Tibnin hospital, a key medical facility operating near the region that Israel is occupying.
Israel and Hezbollah have exchanged fire in southern Lebanon almost daily since the truce took effect, with each accusing the other of violating the deal.
Civil defense workers looking up toward the sound of an Israeli jet fighter, during the funeral in Tyre on Saturday.Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times
Lebanese authorities say the attacks on medical workers amount to violations of international law.
Many of Saturday’s strikes focused on areas in and around the coastal district of Tyre, emergency workers and doctors at a hospital in the area said. Shortly after midnight, an airstrike leveled a house in the town of Deir Qanoun an-Nahr in Tyre, killing four people, according to Lebanon’s state news agency. An Israeli drone also targeted a citrus grove in the town of Bazourieh, wounding several Syrian laborers who were working there, the agency said.
Another strike hit a building near Hiram Hospital, which the Israeli military had ordered evacuated, shattering windows and damaging parts of the hospital, including operating rooms, doctors at the hospital said in interviews. Hiram is one of the main functioning medical centers in Tyre. At least four newborns were evacuated safely from the hospital, according to the nursing supervisor, Mohammad Salem.
“We are scared,” Mr. Salem said in an interview, adding that it was the third strike near the hospital. “We know that we will always have to be cautious because the Israeli military has no limits, not even when it comes to a hospital.”
Medical workers cleaning debris after an overnight Israeli airstrike hit a building near Hiram Hospital, in Tyre, on Saturday.Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times
A soldier sustained “moderate injuries” after an Israeli strike targeted an army barracks in the southern city of Nabatieh on Saturday, the Lebanese army said in a statement.
Israeli warplanes also carried out airstrikes early Saturday on the eastern Bekaa region, according to Lebanon’s state media.
The Israeli military said on Saturday that it had struck an underground Hezbollah compound in the Bekaa Valley that it said was used to manufacture weapons, as well as Hezbollah infrastructure sites in Tyre.
Hezbollah also said it targeted Israeli soldiers and positions with rockets and drone attacks.
More than 3,100 people have been killed in Lebanon since early March, when Hezbollah launched attacks on Israel in support of Iran, which just days before had been attacked by the United States and Israel.
Many of Saturday’s strikes focused on areas in and around the coastal district of Tyre, Lebanon’s national news agency and health workers said.Kawnat Haju/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
On Saturday, mourners gathered for the funeral of some of the paramedics killed on Friday. Relatives leaned over the coffins in grief, scattering flowers across them and sharing memories of the men being buried, even as Israeli warplanes and drones roared overhead.
Brahim Diab, 32, spoke in an interview about his relative Ahmad Hariri, a paramedic and photojournalist who was killed in Deir Qanoun an-Nahr on Friday.
“Ahmad is everything that is beautiful in this life,” he said. “He always made sure he gave everyone their time. He was exhausted, but he was happy.”
Daniel Berehulak and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.
Abdi Latif Dahir is a Middle East correspondent for The Times, covering Lebanon and Syria. He is based in Beirut.“
“The Trump administration announced that most foreigners seeking green cards must return to their home countries to apply, a change that could affect hundreds of thousands of people. This policy, which requires consular processing outside the U.S., could lead to family separations and longer processing times. While the administration claims this change will reduce illegal immigration, it has been met with confusion and concern from immigration lawyers and advocates.
The change is likely to affect hundreds of thousands of people. It could also lead to more family separations as spouses or relatives wait for application decisions, immigration lawyers said.
There are various pathways for foreigners to obtain green cards, which grant them the ability to live and work in the United States as permanent residents. Libby March for The New York Times
The Trump administration said on Friday that most foreigners seeking green cards will have to return to their home countries to apply, a remarkable change that could make it more difficult for hundreds of thousands of people to obtain permanent residency.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that oversees the legal immigration system, said it would grant green cards to people inside the country only in “extraordinary circumstances.” People applying for permanent residency, which is one step away from citizenship, will have to go through consular processing outside the country instead, according to a memo issued by the agency.
“This policy allows our immigration system to function as the law intended instead of incentivizing loopholes,” Zach Kahler, a spokesman for the agency, said in a statement. “When aliens apply from their home country, it reduces the need to find and remove those who decide to slip into the shadows and remain in the U.S. illegally after being denied residency.”
The change could upend the lives of people who entered the country lawfully through temporary visas and are seeking green cards to remain in the United States, including students, spouses of U.S. citizens and a wide range of foreign workers. The process of obtaining a green card — which gives immigrants the right to live in the country permanently and provides a path to citizenship — takes months or longer, meaning families could be separated for extended periods.
The memo was immediately met with confusion and chaos as immigration lawyers scrambled to understand which exceptions would be granted. Many also expected the policy change to be met with legal challenges.
The agency did not detail which groups would be eligible for an exception, only suggesting that refugees would not be subject. Mr. Kahler said in a statement that people who “provide an economic benefit or otherwise are in the national interest will likely be able to continue on their current path.”
It was unclear, though, which foreign workers would be exempt and if exceptions would extend to skilled foreign workers on H-1B visas, for instance.
The policy is a major escalation of the Trump administration’s efforts to curb legal immigration and reflects how the president’s crackdown has broadened beyond immigrants living in the country unlawfully. Federal officials have in recent months sought to strip some naturalized citizens of their status and review thousands of green card holders to root out immigrants they believe should be deported.
The change is likely to lead to more families being separated as spouses or relatives wait for decisions on their applications, immigration lawyers and former homeland security officials said. It could also lead to longer processing times as consulates around the world manage an influx of new cases.
“Our consular processing system through which they would have to apply is already overburdened,” said Sarah Pierce, a former policy analyst at Citizenship and Immigration Services who is now the director of social policy at the center-left think tank Third Way. “So that means we could have families separated for months or years.”
About 1.4 million green cards were granted in 2024, with more than 820,000 approved for people inside the country through a process called “adjustment of status,” according to Department of Homeland Security data. Over the past two decades, more than 500,000 people have received green cards via adjustment of status each year, except for in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Most green cards issued in the last 10 years were to people already in the country
The majority of people who became legal permanent residents while in the U.S. were sponsored by a relative or an employer.
Number of green cards issued each fiscal year
There are various pathways for foreigners to obtain a green card. People with temporary visas can apply to adjust their status if they have spouses who are U.S. citizens, for instance. Certain foreign workers and parents of citizens who are at least 21 years old are also eligible for green cards.
More than 70 percent of people who received a green card through marriage did so through adjustment of status, totaling about 250,000 people in 2024.
Some immigration attorneys said they were inundated with calls and emails from clients on Friday asking how the new memo could affect their cases.
Robert O’Malley, an immigration attorney in Grand Rapids, Mich., said several clients called to ask if their spouses needed to leave the United States, or if they would be able to stay together.
“I’ve done my best to assuage those fears,” Mr. O’Malley said. “But I’m really just trying to digest this six-page memo and wait for further guidance so that we know how to best advise our clients.”
Madeleine Ngo covers immigration and economic policy for The Times.
Albert Sun is a data reporter and graphics editor at The Times who covers immigration.“
"The move deals an embarrassing blow to the Trump administration, which made the Maryland man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the face of its deportation campaign.
Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Baltimore last year.Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
A federal judge on Friday dismissed the criminal case against the immigrant Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, ruling that the Trump administration had brought human smuggling charges against him as part of a vindictive effort to punish him for challenging his wrongful deportation to El Salvador last year.
The ruling by the judge, Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr., was a stinging rebuke of both the Justice Department and its top official, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general. Judge Crenshaw singled out Mr. Blanche for criticism in his 32-page opinion, pointing to statements he had made that prosecutors reawakened a dormant investigation into Mr. Abrego Garcia only after a different judge in Maryland questioned the administration’s decision to deport him — along with scores of other immigrants — to a notorious Salvadoran prison in March 2025.
The decision, filed in Federal District Court in Nashville, marked the first time that a judge had dismissed a case brought by President Trump’s Justice Department for being rooted in vindictive motives. It showed an emerging willingness among jurists across the country to publicly call out the administration for prioritizing its political imperatives above the pursuit of actual justice.
Mr. Abrego Garcia, who is still fighting the administration’s efforts to expel him from the country, is perhaps the best-known symbol of Mr. Trump's aggressive deportation agenda. His serial legal battles against the administration have dragged on for more than a year, reaching all the way to the Supreme Court. His release from criminal charges because of what Judge Crenshaw called their “vindictive taint” was another blow to the president’s immigration crackdown, which had already been battered by, among other things, the killings of two protesters in Minnesota by federal agents.
Judge Crenshaw opened his ruling by quoting Robert H. Jackson, a former attorney general and Supreme Court justice whose reputation for probity has made him something like the patron saint of federal prosecutors.
“Then-Attorney General Robert H. Jackson warned his fellow prosecutors long ago of the danger of picking the person first and the crime second,” Judge Crenshaw wrote. “‘Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.’”
“That,” the judge concluded, “is the situation here.”
Mr. Abrego Garcia hailed the decision in a statement he released through We are CASA, an immigrant advocacy group.
“Justice is a big word and an even bigger promise to fulfill,” he said. “And I am grateful that today, justice has taken a step forward.”
Natalie Baldassarre, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said that prosecutors would appeal Judge Crenshaw's ruling.
“Another activist judge has placed politics above public safety,” she added. “The judge’s order is wrong and dangerous.”
When Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers first asked Judge Crenshaw more than nine months ago to throw out the charges for being vindictive, they reminded him that the administration had removed their client from the United States in violation of a 2019 court order that expressly barred him from being sent to El Salvador.
Instead of simply bringing him back to U.S. soil, the White House began a public campaign to punish him “for daring to fight back,” by filing a lawsuit challenging his removal while he was still in Salvadoran custody. That campaign included vitriolic statements by senior Trump administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance, who falsely declared that Mr. Abrego Garcia “was a convicted MS-13 gang member with no legal right to be here.”
Other top aides have called Mr. Abrego Garcia a “rapist,” a “wife beater” and a “terrorist,” while the president, pointing to a photoshopped image, erroneously claimed last year that tattoos on Mr. Abrego Garcia’s fingers proved he belonged to MS-13, the violent Salvadoran street gang.
All of this culminated, the lawyers said, in a criminal investigation that led to Mr. Abrego Garcia’s indictment on smuggling charges in front of Judge Crenshaw. On the same day the charges were announced, the Trump administration brought him back from El Salvador, even though Mr. Trump and other officials had repeatedly vowed that was impossible, including at a bizarre Oval Office news conference with President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador.
At the heart of the criminal case against Mr. Abrego Garcia was a traffic stop on a Tennessee highway in 2022 during which he was pulled over and discovered to be driving several Hispanic men, some of whom were in the country illegally. Even though the F.B.I. learned about the stop at the time, it decided not to do anything about it, and Mr. Abrego Garcia was released without charges.
In his ruling, Judge Crenshaw noted that the administration did not reopen the inquiry into the traffic stop until more than two years later — tellingly, after Mr. Abrego Garcia challenged his wrongful expulsion from the country.
While the case was largely handled by Robert E. McGuire, a top career prosecutor in Nashville, Judge Crenshaw conducted his own inquiry into the origins of the investigation. He eventually determined that senior Justice Department leaders had peered over Mr. McGuire’s shoulder as he worked, hurried him along toward filing an indictment and sometimes knew more about the case than even he — the man who was supposedly in charge of it — did.
The judge said that one of Mr. Blanche’s top aides, Aakash Singh, was central to what he referred to as “the story of Main Justice’s involvement in the prosecution.”
Mr. Singh, Judge Crenshaw wrote, knew about the government’s star witness before Mr. McGuire did, and contacted him in late April of last year “to fold him into an investigation that was well underway.”
“When Singh contacted McGuire, it was not as a peer, but as McGuire’s supervisor in ODAG,” the judge wrote, referring to the office of the deputy attorney general, which Mr. Blanche ran before he was promoted to acting attorney general. “When Singh informed McGuire about the evidence developed against Abrego, it was clear what Singh and Blanche wanted McGuire to do.”
It remains unclear what Mr. Abrego Garcia may do now that the charges against him have been thrown out.
After failing in their earlier efforts to expel him to several African countries, including Uganda and Eswatini, administration officials are now trying to remove him to Liberia — for the second time. But for the moment, he is protected against hasty deportation by a court order from a federal judge in Maryland, Paula Xinis, who is handling his separate civil case.
Still, Mr. Abrego Garcia has been a free man since last December, when Judge Xinis ordered him to be released from immigration custody. And now that he is no longer facing criminal charges and does not have to appear in court to see them through, he could in theory go anywhere he wants.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump."
“A new outbreak of the Bundibugyo variant of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has resulted in 482 suspected cases and 116 deaths. The US, which previously played a key role in global health efforts, has significantly reduced its funding and involvement, leaving the DRC and neighboring countries vulnerable. This withdrawal of support, coupled with the dismantling of USAID and the withdrawal from the WHO, has hindered outbreak detection and response efforts.
Hundreds of cases reported in the DRC after USAID has been dismantled and key scientific research canceled
Congolese children read an advocacy poster about the new Ebola outbreak in Bunia, Ituri province, DRC, on 20 May 2026. Photograph: Gradel Muyisa Mumbere/Reuters
A previously undetected outbreak of Ebola is coursing through parts of central Africa, and the US appears to be doing little to help stop it, after massive cuts to global and domestic public health efforts.
There is no cure and no vaccine for the rare Bundibugyo variant of Ebola, which has caused two outbreaks in recent decades. Health leaders and scientists are now racing to understand where the virus is spreading and attempting to stop it – but the US is notably absent in these efforts.
In the past year, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has been dismantled, thousands of staff at US health agencies were laid off, communications stalled and key scientific research canceled.
There are 482 suspected cases and about 116 deaths reported since April in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), with two cases and one death in Uganda and potential spread to neighboring South Sudan. The outbreak “might have been going on for a few months”, said Kristian Andersen, a professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research.
The outbreak was immediately declared a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), before even convening the committee that usually makes that determination. Officials say it may last for months.
“The DRC is one of the most vulnerable health systems in the world, and was the second-biggest recipient of USAID funding,” said Matthew Kavanagh, director of the Center for Global Health Policy and Politics at Georgetown University. The US withdrawal of funding with “zero notice” has been “disruptive to the country’s basic activities”, he said.
US foreign assistance to the DRC dropped from $1.4bn in 2024 to $431m in 2025 and only $21m so far this year. Assistance to Uganda dropped from $674m to $377m in 2025 and a negative $1.2m so far in 2026.
“It was pennies compared to what you get in return,” Andersen said of global health investments. It is far cheaper and easier to prevent and contain outbreaks than it is to respond to them, he said. With the US cutting off the first option, the second scenario will become increasingly common.
The US also announced it would leave the WHO and end $130m in funding, which resulted in 2,371 lost jobs at the organization, Kavanagh said, calling the cuts a “self-inflicted wound that the administration has really brought on us”. This outbreak and response was “deeply foreseeable when you gut public health surveillance and you gut public health capacity”, Kavanagh added.
“It’s not just that we’re leaving the table, we are completely cutting ourselves out of the conversation,” Andersen said. “We are upending the table.”
The CDC has “always been the premier agency” when it comes to country-level leadership and played a key role as a partner “you could turn to”, Andersen said.
But under the second Trump administration, Ebola response teams were suspended, and health centers and medical supplies – particularly crucial with a virus spread through touch, with supportive care the only treatment – were dramatically cut back.
A world-class Ebola lab in Frederick, Maryland, with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was designed for exactly this scenario. The lab would normally be swinging into action, following up on research indicating monoclonal antibodiesand a vaccine might be effective against this strain, possibly testing those treatments and vaccines, performing in-depth sequencing work on the samples shared during the outbreak.
But that lab was shuttered last year, with staff laid off abruptly and their work – key for preventing and responding to outbreaks – ended with no notice. The website for the lab is still closed, indicating it has not been revived during this outbreak.
Satish Pillai, an incident manager for the CDC’s Ebola response, said he “can’t speak” to the NIH lab when the Guardian asked about it in a press conference on Monday. Instead, Pillai said that the US is able to test for Ebola through its laboratory network, a comment unrelated to the Guardian’s questions.
Because of layoffs, terminations and high-profile departures, key confirmed positions at US health agencies are vacant. Currently, the CDC has no director; there’s no US surgeon general; there’s no commissioner at the FDA.
Officials say there are now between 25 and 30 staff in the DRC country office. The CDC is sending one more person, Pillai said, and other experts are available remotely.
The DRC office suffered massive and sudden cuts when USAID was unexpectedly dissolved last year. Former employees sued the US government after they were abandoned and lost everything, with no jobs or options to evacuate from DRC, they said.
“When those USAID stop-work orders came out, there was a whole series of people who were actively looking for spillover in the DRC and in Uganda,” Kavanagh said. “There were hundreds of health workers doing surveillance activities, and then, of course, you had the bigger picture, which is the thousands of health workers who were doing HIV, TB, malaria, maternal and child health – all of these things funded through US funding from USAID and also some from CDC to be doing global health activities – who were the frontlines of detection.”
Patients don’t usually come to the clinic suspecting they have Ebola, he pointed out; they usually come in with a fever or other symptoms, and “those frontline community health workers … are always the ones that detect outbreaks early”.
That work ended abruptly and is now being replaced with country-by-country agreements, some of which appear to be predicated on resource-sharing agreements. The US government is “essentially holding hostage” the countries that have built health systems around US guidance, “and then from one day to the next you just cut it”, Andersen said.
In the past, the US had ensured that “many, many potential global outbreaks didn’t become global”, but now it’s stepping back, Kavanagh said, adding: “This outbreak should have been detected weeks ago, and exactly how and why will be figured out as we go, but it certainly says that the United States has stopped playing the role.”
Instead, the US is announcing travel bans for noncitizens who have recently traveled to the region, which is “public health theater” that essentially punishes the countries and doesn’t actually stop cases, Kavanagh said. The Africa CDC called for countries to refrain from “fear-driven” travel bans. “The fastest path to protecting all countries in the world is to aggressively support outbreak control at the source,” Dr Jean Kaseya, director general of the Africa CDC, said in a statement.
“At this point, this is an out-of-control epidemic that has now crossed borders, and this is really bad for the region, and will result in lots more deaths, and could be a real crisis,” Kavanagh said. Health leaders in the DRC are among the smartest, most experienced Ebola responders – but now they’re confronting an outbreak “with hundreds of millions of dollars cut from the global capacity to help them respond”.
Andersen noted “these countries are way more competent than we are in responding to something like Ebola” and that African scientists have done “remarkable” work already sequencing the virus, which demonstrates a new spillover event and could offer clues to where the outbreak originated.
“But that doesn’t mean that we should just completely cut ourselves out of the picture,” he said.
Outbreaks like these have economic, geopolitical and global stability implications, Kavanagh said. But they also matter because allowing anyone to die “needlessly of a disease that can be stopped is immoral, and we are living in a world where we don’t have to allow infectious diseases to spread unchecked”, he said. “Ebola can be stopped, and if we don’t mobilize the dollars and the public health efforts, then we are simply choosing not to stop the outbreak. Because it can be stopped. The question is, will it be? And when?”
A still from body-cam footage shows a federal agent using a facial recognition app on a detained person. Image has been blurred by the legal team to obscure the identities of those detained.Photograph: Innovation Law Lab
“Newly released body-camera footage shows US immigration officers stopping a van of farm workers in Oregon, smashing their windows and using facial recognition software to try to identify one of them.
Videos from a 30 October 2025 operation were disclosed in court as part of an ongoing class-action lawsuit challenging Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) arrest tactics and racial profiling by agents. Lawyers for one of the detained farm workers shared the footage with the Guardian.
The officers did not have warrants to detain the workers, and a federal judge later said the arrests appeared to be unlawful and unjustified.
The footage shows an agent using his phone to capture the face of one of the detained workers, and agents later admitted in court that they used a facial recognition app during the operation. The case provides a window into ICE’s expanding use of this surveillance technology across the US, which has raised significant privacy and civil liberties concerns, particularly since the app can yieldinaccurateresults.
In the early morning on the day the footage was filmed, a team of ICE agents surveilled an apartment complex in Woodburn, a city south of Portland and home to many agricultural workers. An officer identified in court as JB later testified that the agents had chosen that location in part based on data surfaced from an ICE mobile app called Elite, which was built by the tech firm Palantir. The agent said the app helps officers find areas where they might find “targets” to potentially detain.
Agents decided to follow a white van leaving the apartment complex after running license plates and discovering the van’s owner was potentially an immigrant in the US without authorization, JB said. The officer said in court they did not confirm whether the driver of the van was, in fact, the vehicle’s owner, but that he felt it was suspicious the driver was making multiple stops for passengers: “You don’t know if it’s human trafficking or smuggling.”
Lawyers with Innovation Law Lab, an immigrant rights’ non-profit that filed the class-action and represented one of the farm workers, said the van was simply carpooling to a job site.
The body-cam video starts when officers pull over the van. It was around 5.30am and still dark out. Lawyers shared footage with the occupants’ faces blurred to protect their privacy.
ICE agents pull over a van of farm workers and smash the vehicle’s windows
“Bust it! Bust it!” one of the officers said, referring to the van’s windows. An officer then shouted commands in Spanish to open the window, but within seconds, shattered the van’s side window before occupants could comply.
A 45-year-old woman visible in the footage, identified as MJMA, is a farm worker and lead plaintiff in the lawsuit. The video captured her asserting her rights to remain silent, saying in Spanish, “We don’t have to answer,” and indicating she wanted a lawyer. She also instructed the others in the car not to speak as she called 911.
An officer identified in court as CM, whose body camera was recording the encounter, then said to another officer on scene: “She wants to lawyer up. She doesn’t want to identify herself, we’ll just take her.”
While MJMA was on the phone with 911 asking to speak to a Spanish-speaking dispatcher, an officer demanded she turn her phone off.
ICE handcuffs farm worker after she asks for lawyer and asserts right to remain silent – video
When the woman didn’t exit the car, CM said, “We gotta get them out. They’re on the phone, making … calls and stuff.”
He then grabbed MJMA and took her out of the car as she said in Spanish: “This can’t happen to us! They’re using force. No, no, no!” The officer then broke her phone, she later testified. The seven occupants of the car were then detained – six handcuffed and forced to sit on the pavement lined up against a wall, and an older woman detained on a bench.
“What a lovely bunch of people!” one of the officers shouted.
Officers handcuff the occupants and force them to sit on the pavement
‘Inaccurate’ facial scans
As the farm workers sat along the wall, the video shows one agent pulling out his phone and holding it close to one man’s face, while another officer shone a bright flashlight on the man’s face. The agent held the phone up for about 12 seconds while the phone appeared to be scanning the man’s image.
Later in the video, one of the officers was heard saying: “Mobile Fortify couldn’t find him.”
Mobile Fortify is the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) facial recognition app, which officers use to scan the faces of individuals, cross-referencing it with various databases to try to identify them.
Officer: Mobile Fortify couldn’t find him.
Officer uses a facial recognition app to try to identify a detained worker
DR, an agent involved in the Woodburn arrests, was asked about the app in court and acknowledged he didn’t know what databases it used and didn’t know the rate of accuracy, saying: “I’m not certain on the technical aspects.”
A female agent on the scene, identified as MK, testified that she did a “facial recognition mobile query” on MJMA, which led to a match with a “very … similar person”. The agent, however, said: “I wasn’t sure if it was her or not.” The match was a woman named Maria, the agent said. The agents then started saying the name, “Maria” to see if MJMA might respond, but she didn’t, the agent testified.
The woman’s name is not Maria.
The agent did another facial scan of MJMA and it came up with a different match, according to MK’s testimony. But MJMA continued to stay silent.
The agent testified that she believed MJMA “was in the country illegally” because she was only speaking Spanish and due to the “possible match” from facial recognition. Her scanning of MJMA was not caught on the body-cam footage.
During cross-examination, CM, the only agent who recorded body-cam footage, acknowledged he did not know the identity of any passengers when the officers stopped the van. The agent JB also revealed in court that his team was given a verbal order to target eight arrests per day, providing rare insight into DHS arrest quotas.
Four of the people detained from the van were later deported, according to a DHS spokesperson.
Nelly Garcia Orjuela, Innovation Law Lab staff attorney, said MJMA had an ongoing asylum case.
US judge Mustafa Kasubhai ruled against ICE in February in the class-action suit led by MJMA. He said officers had engaged in “misconduct” in Oregon and issued a preliminary decision broadly restricting agents in the state from arresting people without warrants.
Kasubhai noted that officers had made inaccurate statements in their reports about the Woodburn encounter, including falsely saying MJMA had entered the US unlawfully when she had arrived with a valid temporary visa. He said the claims of possible “smuggling” were “unfounded”, and noted that ICE’s reports inaccurately called the stop “consensual”.
The judge was also critical of the officers’ use of the facial recognition technology, saying it relied on data that “can be inaccurate and produce individuals who are here in accordance with immigration laws”.
The judge further said that in the Woodburn stop, officers “did not provide any meaningfully reasonable time for the driver to comply with his commands before shattering the driver side window”.
DHS did not respond to questions about the officers’ use of facial recognition during the arrests, but a spokesperson said in a statement that Mobile Fortify was a “lawful law-enforcement tool developed under the Trump administration to support accurate identity and immigration-status verification during enforcement operations”.
The app queries “limited” immigration datasets from Customs and Border Protection and “operates with a deliberately high matching threshold”, the spokesperson said. The app is used “in accordance with all applicable legal authorities”, the statement added. The Elite app, the spokesperson said, “centralizes information” from multiple federal agencies, allowing officers in the field to check individuals’ immigration status and criminal records.
The DHS spokesperson further defended ICE’s practice of arresting people without warrants, saying “officers use ‘reasonable suspicion’ to investigate immigration status and probable cause to make arrests” and that it had the support of the US supreme court. The statement said the seven people detained in Woodburn were undocumented and three of the workers who were deported had “accepted voluntary departure”. Those removed, the statement said, “received full due process”.
The Department of Justice did not respond to inquiries about the case.
Garcia Orjuela said the videos showed the brutality of ICE’s arrest strategies, with agents immediately smashing windows and bypassing people’s fundamental legal protections. “MJMA asserted her right to remain silent and was advising the other passengers in the car. The officers didn’t like that. It makes them do their job.” She added: “You have to know who you’re targeting before you arrest somebody. That is how due process works.”
Stephen Manning, Innovation Law Lab’s executive director, said the footage illustrated ICE’s “arrest first, justify later” tactics and praised MJMA for calmly defending her rights: “She knew the law better than the agents. She asked them to follow the law, and they actually violated the law [in response]. This never should have happened.”
