15 Democratic governors, including Colorado's Jared Polis, announced they’ve formed a public health alliance that breaks with Trump.

Democracy on the Brink: From Secret Wars to Courtroom Power Grabs, the Chaos Keeps Coming

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Americans Detained: The government doesn’t track how many citizens are held by immigration agents. We found more than 170 cases this year where citizens were detained at raids and protests. Held Incommunicado: More than 20 citizens have reported being held for over a day without being able to call their loved ones or a lawyer. In some cases their families couldn’t find them. Cases Wilted: Agents have arrested about 130 Americans, including a dozen elected officials, for allegedly interfering with or assaulting officers, yet those cases were often dropped. These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story. When the Supreme Court recently allowed immigration agents in the Los Angeles area to take race into consideration during sweeps, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that citizens shouldn’t be concerned. “If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States,” Kavanaugh wrote, “they promptly let the individual go.” But that is far from the reality many citizens have experienced. Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched. About two dozen Americans have said they were held for more than a day without being able to phone lawyers or loved ones. Videos of U.S. citizens being mistreated by immigration agents have filled social media feeds, but there is little clarity on the overall picture. The government does not track how often immigration agents hold Americans. So ProPublica created its own count. We compiled and reviewed every case we could find of agents holding citizens against their will, whether during immigration raids or protests. While the tally is almost certainly incomplete, we found more than 170 such incidents during the first nine months of President Donald Trump’s second administration. Among the citizens detained are nearly 20 children, including two with cancer. That includes four who were held for weeks with their undocumented mother and without access to the family’s attorney until a congresswoman intervened. Immigration agents do have authority to detain Americans in limited circumstances. Agents can hold people whom they reasonably suspect are in the country illegally. We found more than 50 Americans who were held after agents questioned their citizenship. They were almost all Latino. Immigration agents also can arrest citizens who allegedly interfered with or assaulted officers. We compiled cases of about 130 Americans, including a dozen elected officials, accused of assaulting or impeding officers. These cases have often wilted under scrutiny. In nearly 50 instances that we have identified so far, charges have never been filed or the cases were dismissed. Our count found a handful of citizens have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors. Among the detentions in which allegations have not stuck, masked agents pointed a gun at, pepper sprayed and punched a young man who had filmed them searching for his relative. In another, agents knocked over and then tackled a 79-year-old car wash owner, pressing their knees into his neck and back. His lawyer said he was held for 12 hours and wasn’t given medical attention despite having broken ribs in the incident and having recently had heart surgery. In a third case, agents grabbed and handcuffed a woman on her way to work who was caught up in a chaotic raid on street vendors. In a complaint filed against the government, she described being held for more than two days, without being allowed to contact the outside world for much of that time. (The Supreme Court has ruled that two days is generally the longest federal officials can hold Americans without charges.) George Retes, an American combat veteran, at the site of his arrest by immigration agents on California’s Central Coast. Retes was detained for three days without access to a lawyer and missed his daughter’s third birthday. In response to questions from ProPublica, the Department of Homeland Security said agents do not racially profile or target Americans. “We don’t arrest US citizens for immigration enforcement,” wrote spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin. A top immigration official recently acknowledged agents do consider someone’s looks. “How do they look compared to, say, you?” Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino said to a white reporter in Chicago. The White House told ProPublica that anyone who assaults federal immigration agents would be prosecuted. “Interfering with law enforcement and assaulting law enforcement is a crime and anyone, regardless of immigration status, will be held accountable,” said the Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson. “Officers act heroically to enforce the law, arrest criminal illegal aliens, and protect American communities with the utmost professionalism.” A spokesperson for Kavanaugh did not return an emailed request for comment. An immigration raid on 79-year-old Rafie Ollah Shouhed’s car wash left him with broken ribs. Credit: Courtesy of Rafie Ollah Shouhed. Compiled by ProPublica. Tallying the number of Americans detained by immigration agents is inherently messy and incomplete. The government has long ignored recommendations for it to track such cases, even as the U.S. has a history of detaining and even deporting citizens, including during the Obama administration and Trump’s first term. We compiled cases by sifting through both English- and Spanish-language social media, lawsuits, court records and local media reports. We did not include arrests of protesters by local police or the National Guard. Nor did we count cases in which arrests were made at a later date after a judicial process. That included cases of some people charged with serious crimes, like throwing rocks or tossing a flare to start a fire. Experts say that Americans appear to be getting picked up more now as a result of the government doing something that it hasn’t for decades: large-scale immigration sweeps across the country, often in communities that do not want them. In earlier administrations, deportation agents used intelligence to target specific individuals, said Scott Shuchart, a top immigration official in the Biden, Obama and first Trump administrations. “The new idea is to use those resources unintelligently” — with officers targeting communities or workplaces where undocumented immigrants may be. When federal officers roll through communities in the way the Supreme Court permitted, the constitutional rights of both citizens and noncitizens are inevitably violated, argued David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. He recently analyzed how sweeps in Los Angeles have led to racial profiling. “If the government can grab someone because he’s a certain demographic group that’s correlated with some offense category, then they can do that in any context.” Cody Wofsy, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, put it even more starkly. “Any one of us could be next.” The video Garcia Venegas made of an immigration raid on a construction site shows him walking away from the officer while trying to film and then stating that he’s a citizen before being detained. Credit: Courtesy of Garcia Venega When Kavanaugh issued his opinion that immigration agents can consider race and other factors, the Supreme Court’s three liberal justices strongly dissented. They warned that citizens risked being “grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor.” Leonardo Garcia Venegas appears to have been just such a case. He was working at a construction site in coastal Alabama when he saw masked immigration agents from Homeland Security Investigations hop a fence and run by a “No trespassing” sign. Garcia Venegas recalled that they moved toward the Latino workers, ignoring the white and Black workers. Garcia Venegas began filming after his undocumented brother asked agents for a warrant. In response, the footage shows, agents yanked his brother to the ground, shoving his face into wet concrete. Garcia Venegas kept filming until officers grabbed him too and knocked his phone to the ground. Other co-workers filmed what happened next, as immigration agents twisted the 25-year-old’s arms. They repeatedly tried to take him to the ground while he yelled, “I’m a citizen!” Officers pulled out his REAL ID, which Alabama only issues to those legally in the U.S. But the agents dismissed it as fake. Officers held Garcia Venegas handcuffed for more than an hour. His brother was later deported. Leonardo Garcia Venegas told agents he was a citizen both times he was detained. His REAL ID was dismissed as a fake. Garcia Venegas was so shaken that he took two weeks off of work. Soon after he returned, he was working alone inside a nearly built house listening to music on his headphones when he sensed someone watching him. A masked immigration agent was standing in the bedroom doorway. This time, agents didn’t tackle him. But they again dismissed his REAL ID. And then they held him to check his citizenship. Garcia Venegas says agents also held two other workers who had legal status. DHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about Garcia Venegas’ detentions, or to a federal lawsuit he filed last month. The agency has previously defended the agents’ conduct, saying he “physically got in between agents and the subject” during the first incident. The footage does not show that, and Garcia Venegas was never charged with obstruction or any other crime. Garcia Venegas’ lawyers at the nonprofit Institute for Justice hope others may join his suit. After all, the reverberations of the immigration sweeps are being felt widely. Garcia Venegas said he knows of 15 more raids on nearby construction sites, and the industry along his portion of the Gulf Coast is struggling for lack of workers. Kavanaugh’s assurances hold little weight for Garcia Venegas. He’s a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent, who speaks little English and works in construction. Even with his REAL ID and Social Security card in his wallet, Garcia Venegas worries that immigration agents will keep harassing him. “If they decide they want to detain you,” he said. “You’re not going to get out of it.” Men building a home in rural Baldwin County, Alabama. Garcia Venegas was detained by immigration agents twice while working on homes in the area. George Retes was among the citizens arrested despite immigration agents appearing to know his legal status. He also disappeared into the system for days without being able to contact anyone on the outside. The only clue Retes’ family had at first was a brief call he managed to make on his Apple Watch with his hands handcuffed behind his back. He quickly told his wife that “ICE” had arrested him during a massive raid and protest on the marijuana farm where he worked as a security guard. Still, Retes’ family couldn’t find him. They called every law enforcement agency they could think of. No one gave them any answers. Eventually, they spotted a TikTok video showing Retes driving to work and slowly trying to back up as he’s caught between agents and protestors. Through the tear gas and dust, his family recognized Retes’ car and the veteran decal on his window. The full video shows a man — Retes — splayed on the ground surrounded by agents. George Retes’ family noticed his car in a compiled video posted to TikTok. This clip from that longer video shows his white vehicle surrounded by tear gas. Immigration agents later pinned him on the ground. Credit: nota.sra/TikTok Retes’ family went to the farm, where local TV reporters were interviewing families who couldn’t find their loved ones. “They broke his window, they pepper sprayed him, they grabbed him, threw him on the floor,” his sister told a reporter between sobs. “We don’t know what to do. We’re just asking to let my brother go. He didn’t do anything wrong. He’s a veteran, disabled citizen. It says it on his car.” Retes was held for three days without being given an opportunity to make a call. His family only learned where he had been after his release. His leg had been cut from the broken glass, Retes told ProPublica, and lingering pepper spray burned his hands.He tried to soothe them by filling sandwich bags with water. Retes recalled that agents knew he was a citizen. “They didn’t care.” He said one DHS official laughed at him, saying he shouldn’t have come to work that day. “They still sent me away to jail.” He added that cases like his show Kavanaugh was “wrong completely.” DHS did not answer our questions about Retes. It did respond on X after Retes wrote an op-ed last month in the San Francisco Chronicle. An agency post asserted he was arrested for assault after he “became violent and refused to comply with law enforcement.” Yet Retes had been released without any charges. Indeed, he says he was never told why he was arrested. Retes said that agents knew he was a citizen. “They didn’t care.” The Department of Justice has encouraged agents to arrest anyone interfering with immigration operations, twice ordering law enforcement to prioritize cases of those suspected of obstructing, interfering with or assaulting immigration officials. But the government’s claims in those cases have often not been borne out. Daniel Montenegro was filming a raid at a Van Nuys, California, Home Depot with other day-laborer advocates this summer when, he told ProPublica, he was tackled by several officers who injured his back. Bovino, the Border Patrol chief who oversaw the LA raids and has since taken similar operations to cities like Sacramento and Chicago, tweeted out the names and photos of Montenegro and three others, accusing them of using homemade tire spikes to disable vehicles. “I had no idea where that story came from,” Montenegro told ProPublica. “I didn’t find out until we were released. People were like, ‘We saw you on Twitter and the news and you guys are terrorists, you were planning to slash tires.’ I never saw those spike tire-popper things.” Officials have not charged Montenegro or the others with any crimes. (Bovino did not respond to a request for comment, while DHS defended him in a statement to ProPublica: “Chief Bovino’s success in getting the worst of the worst out of the country speaks for itself.”) The government’s cases are sometimes so muddied that it’s unclear why agents actually arrested a citizen. Andrea Velez was charged with assaulting an officer after she was accidentally dropped off for work during a raid on street vendors in downtown Los Angeles. She said in a federal complaint that officers repeatedly assumed she did not speak English. Federal officers later requested access to her phone in an attempt to prove she was colluding with another citizen arrested that day, who was charged with assault. She was one of the Americans held for more than two days. DHS did not respond to our questions about Velez, but it has previously accused her of assaulting an officer. A federal judge has dismissed the charges. Other citizens also said officers accused them of crimes and suddenly questioned their citizenship — including a man arrested after filming Border Patrol agents break a truck window, and a pregnant woman who tried to stop officers from taking her boyfriend. The prospects for any significant reckoning over agents’ conduct, even against citizens, are dim. The paths for suing federal agents are even more limited than they are for local police. And that’s if agents can even be identified. What’s more, the administration has gutted the office that investigates allegations of abuse by agents. “The often-inadequate guardrails that we have for state and local government — even those guardrails are nonexistent when you’re talking about federal overreach,” said Joanna Schwartz, a professor at UCLA School of Law. “I Don’t Want to Be Here Anymore”: They Tried to Self-Deport, Then Got Stranded in Trump’s America More than 50 members of Congress have also written to the administration, demanding details about Americans who’ve been detained. One is Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat. After trying to question Noem about detained citizens, federal agents grabbed Padilla, pulled him to the ground and handcuffed him. The department later defended the agents, saying they “acted appropriately.” Americans have reported a wide range of troubling encounters with immigration agents. To get a wider sense of agents’ conduct, we cataloged all incidents we could find of citizens being held against their will by immigration officers. Critically, there is no way to know the complete scope of these stops since the government itself does not track them. But we were still able to fill in the picture a bit more. We reviewed more than 170 cases overall, which we sorted into two categories. The first is Americans who were held because agents questioned their citizenship. We found more than 50 such cases. The second category is Americans arrested by immigration agents after being accused of assaulting or impeding officers at protests or during immigration arrests of others. In that category, we tallied about 130 Americans, including more than a dozen elected officials. In many of these cases, the government never charged these individuals or the cases were dismissed. We also tracked another nine citizens who reported being concerned about racial profiling after being extensively questioned by immigration officials. This includes a Mescalero Apache tribal member who was pulled out of a store and asked for his passport, and a California man who was previously deported by mistake and got another deportation order in the mail. We did all this by sifting through both English- and Spanish-language social media, lawsuits, court records and local media reports. We compiled cases from the beginning of the current Trump administration through Oct. 5. Our accounting of arrests in Portland, Oregon, and Chicago is particularly limited, since the events there are still unfolding. We did not review cases of Americans detained in airports or at the border, where even citizens are more likely to encounter increased questioning. We also did not review cases of Americans arrested at some point after alleged encounters with immigration agents since those involved a judicial process. We similarly excluded arrests of immigration protestors by local police who, unlike many of the federal agencies, booked protesters into a local jail where they could access the legal process and their families could find them.

Trump threatens wars and World Cups, Noem blames Dems at TSA, and the Supreme Court eyes gutting civil rights—all chaos, no governance.

Sheinbaum says she has ‘no information’ about Trump administration claim as experts also deeply skeptical

Why would writing about fighting fascism offend right-wingers to the point they would send death threats?

The order comes amid reports of federal agents using tear gas and other aggressive steps against civilians, including peaceful protesters and journalists.

The U.S. military’s elite Special Operations aviation unit appears to have flown in Caribbean waters less than 90 miles from the coast of Venezuela in recent days, according to a visual analysis by The Washington Post. The helicopters were engaged in training exercises, according to a U.S. official, that could serve as preparation for expanded conflict against alleged drug traffickers, including potentially missions inside Venezuela. The U.S. military has struck at least five boats allegedly carrying illegal narcotics in international waters, killing at least 27 people, according to U.S. officials, the last one occurring on Tuesday. President Donald Trump said Wednesday he had authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to conduct missions inside the country. The U.S. has declared it is in “armed conflict” with drug traffickers, though lawmakers and legal experts have said the strikes are unlawful killings of people who are suspected criminals and not battlefield combatants. Follow Trump’s second term Visuals that circulated on social media in early October appeared to show MH-6 Little Bird attack helicopters and MH-60 Black Hawks over open water near oil and gas platforms. A visual analysis of the platforms and visible terrain indicates the helicopters were flying off Trinidad’s northeast coast, bringing them within 90 miles of several points along Venezuela’s coastline. The aircraft are likely operated by the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The unit flies missions for commandos like Navy SEALs, Green Berets and Delta Force, and has gained renown for undertaking complex and dangerous operations such as the raid to kill Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. The inclusion of Little Birds — small attack aircraft designed to insert operators onto the ground and provide close air support — suggests preparations for potential missions that could see U.S. boots on the ground, Cancian said. The Black Hawks could be used in support, he added, carrying additional troops, combat search-and-rescue or other capabilities. The helicopters were conducting training flights to keep proficient and provide options for Trump and the Pentagon in the ongoing missions in the region, a U.S. official said. The flights should not be taken as evidence of drills for a land assault into Venezuela, the official cautioned, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing operations. The Pentagon did not address questions about the operations. “The Department will not respond to speculation about military operations based on analysis by ‘experts,’” Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson said. Trinidad and Tobago’s Minister of Homeland Security Roger Alexander did not respond to a request for comment. The MV Ocean Trader, a commercial vessel reconfigured into a stealthy floating Special Operations base, appears to have recently operated in the Caribbean and may have some relationship to the aircraft, experts said. The ship can carry about 200 personnel, about 150 of whom are dedicated to special missions, said Bradley Martin, a senior policy researcher at the Rand Corporation and former Navy surface warfare captain. It can hold multiple aircraft, Martin said, including potentially the numerous helicopters shown in the video. It also can provide refueling and maintenance services, he said. Satellite imagery from Sept. 25 showed a ship matching the length and visual composition of the MV Ocean Trader docked at St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. On Oct. 6, satellite imagery appeared to show the same ship operating in the Caribbean just over 40 miles east of Trinidad — within a few dozen miles from where the helicopters were filmed. About a tenth of all deployed U.S. naval power is in the region, a “seismic” reordering of assets, analysts have said, including a submarine, a fleet of destroyers and F-35 fighters mobilized in Puerto Rico. Venezuela has robust air-defense systems, which could pose a threat to U.S. aircraft. Caracas uses Russian-made systems, including long-range S-300 missile launchers and other weapons that are difficult to track because they can be easily moved, Cancian said. Such systems do not pose much of a threat to U.S. helicopters when they are operating in the sea, he said. But short-range shoulder-launched weapons like the SA-24 — which can detect heat signatures from helicopter turbine engines — and the country’s fleet of antiaircraft guns are particularly vexing should the aircraft cross into Venezuelan overland territory. “These are arguably the most dangerous because they are so hard to find and could ambush helicopters passing overhead,” Cancian said. A bipartisan measure to block the Trump administration’s lethal strikes on alleged Venezuelan drug traffickers fell short in the Senate last week, a failure of lawmakers to assert their constitutional role in deciding if and how the U.S. enters a war. Military officials in multiple classified briefings have not definitively identified the victims or explained why the military is using deadly force rather than the long-standing protocol of interdicting vessels at sea, Democratic lawmakers have said. Samantha Schmidt in Bogotá, Javier Zarracina and Andrew Ba Tran in Washington contributed to this report.

Eli Soler recently added an element to his classes for would-be commercial truck drivers: a mock roadside English-proficiency test. “How many hours have you driven? Where is this load going to?” Soler asks Spanish-speaking students while pretending to be a police officer. Soler, who runs a Miami-based commercial driving school, wants his students to avoid the fate of thousands of commercial truckers who failed roadside English-proficiency tests. Between June 1 and Monday, around 6,000 truckers were pulled off the road for English-language proficiency violations, according to a Washington Post analysis of Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration data. On Wednesday, the Transportation Department announced it would withhold more than $40 million in funding to California, accusing the state of failing to comply with the new English-proficiency requirement. “California is the only state in the nation that refuses to ensure big rig drivers can read our road signs and communicate with law enforcement,” Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy said in a statement. The new rules were put in place in May by Duffy. The agency has said the test is needed to keep the roads safe, pointing to an August collision in Florida in which a commercial driver, Harjinder Singh, allegedly made an illegal U-turn, resulting in the death of three people. After the crash, Singh, 28, who was born in India, failed an English-language proficiency assessment, answering only two of 12 questions correctly, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which has launched an investigation of the crash. Singh, who was charged with three counts of vehicular homicide, has pleaded not guilty. “Americans are a lot safer on roads alongside truckers who can understand and interpret our traffic signs,” Duffy said in a statement after signing the May order. But analysts say there is no data showing a correlation between English-proficiency and accidents involving commercial truck drivers. And industry leaders are concerned about a potential worker shortage if too many drivers are pulled from the roads. Some advocates worry that Latino drivers, who make up 15.3 percent of the industry, will be unfairly targeted by officers administering the tests and say they want more details about how and when they will be tested. “English proficiency is such a subjective standard,” said Brandon Wiseman, president of Trucksafe Consulting, which advises carriers on how to improve safety programs. “What one officer might think is proficient, another officer down the road might think is not proficient. That makes it tough.” The Transportation Department hasn’t released the questions included in the roadside test, which are administered by state police. But industry experts say the test typically includes questions such as: Where are you going? What was your starting point? Trucking schools like Soler’s are rushing to prepare their students. “This is an industry that requires both skills, the English to communicate and the proficiency to drive equipment,” said Soler, who emigrated from Cuba in 2009 and learned English to advance his career. Tampa-based Trucking Services and Logistics has started offering an online class and selling textbooks that drivers can use to improve their English. The aim is to prepare drivers with basic greetings or key words they may need in emergency situations, said CEO Viviana Granados Diaz. “We can’t argue with regulations,” Granados Diaz said. “We, as a company, think we are here to offer a solution for them.” Most drivers who don’t speak fluent English are able to rely on GPS to safely navigate the roads, said David Sanchez, a 28-year-old driver based in Fort Worth. Sanchez, who was born in California but grew up in Mexico, said he learned English in high school after his family returned to the United States, and frequently practices with his wife, a native English speaker, but said he worries about older drivers who may have a harder time adapting. “A big chunk of the industry is made up of Latino drivers who work really hard and safely, even if their English isn’t perfect,” Sanchez said. “The young people are going to learn English pretty quick, but there are a lot of older drivers that have been trucking a long time who are probably going to lose their job,” he said. The English-proficiency exams have been given for years, but in 2016 the Obama administration loosened the rules, saying drivers who failed the tests would get a ticket rather than being pulled off the road. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, an agency within Transportation, said at the time there was a lack of evidence tying a lack of English proficiency to trucker accidents. Under the Trump administration’s policy, drivers who fail the roadside English-proficiency exams are no longer allowed to operate a commercial truck until their issues are addressed. But industry officials say there isn’t a clear process for drivers who want to return. According to the FMCSA, most commercial crashes are caused by the driver falling asleep or otherwise becoming impaired. In a 2023 report, the FMCSA said an estimated 3.8 percent of commercial driver’s license holders have limited English proficiency. Still, the department is promising consequences for states that don’t strictly enforce the English-proficiency rules, an effort that appears to align with the Trump administration’s push to designate English as the official language of the United States. In August, Duffy announced that California, Washington and New Mexico would lose federal funding if they didn’t enforce the new proficiency requirements within 30 days. Officials in Washington and New Mexico said they were complying with the rule. Washington “is still working diligently to implement this abrupt policy change,” State Patrol Police Chief John R. Batiste wrote in a letter to the Transportation Department. New Mexico said it had placed 97 drivers out of service since the rule was enacted. This week, DOT announced California would lose funding related to its Motor Carrier Safety Assistance Program, which helps states pay for roadside inspections among other things. “Let me be clear — this is valuable money that should be going to the great men and women in California law enforcement, who we support,” Duffy said in a statement. California didn’t immediately return a call requesting comment. In Laredo, Texas, one of the busiest ports for drivers coming from or going to Mexico, more than 90 percent of people speak Spanish at home, according to the Census Bureau. The new rules are “going to hurt a lot,” said Adalberto Campero, CEO of trucking company Unimex, which has offices in Laredo and Pharr in Texas. The English-proficiency test can be administered differently state by state, making it hard to prepare drivers if they are pulled over, Campero said. “It’s going to cause a lot of singling out of Mexican individuals or individuals of Hispanic heritage, and maybe stereotyping,” Campero said. Drivers are “scared now. They’re threatened, they’re intimidated … because they feel like their livelihood could be taken away.” Pablo Rangel, 29, who lives in Reynosa, Mexico, and crosses the U.S. border frequently to make deliveries, said that while he speaks English pretty well, he questions whether the new measures are necessary. “Most of our time is not spent having conversations,” Rangel said. “So it’s a little bit unfair to suddenly change those requirements and place proficiency in something that isn’t part of our job.” Thousands of miles from the border, at a truck stop in Jessup, Maryland, this month, drivers showered and bought food. Tired-looking men wandered around the sleepy service center, and several could be heard speaking Spanish and other languages. Abu Rakhmat, 28, sat in a massage chair, trying to relax before heading back on the road. Rakhmat, who immigrated to the United States in 2019 from Belgium, speaks Uzbek, Russian, Arabic, French and English. Rakhmat started driving professionally two months ago and said he can see both sides of the English-proficiency issue. There is a benefit to being able to speak English, especially in emergency situations, he said, but “not all non-English speakers are bad drivers.” “Some people who’ve been driving their whole lives don’t speak English,” Rakhmat said. “But they’re way better than me at driving trucks.” Lydia Sidhom contributed to this report.

A judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from laying off thousands of federal workers during the government shutdown. It comes less than a week after the administration confirmed several agencies had begun laying off about 4,000 workers. US District Judge Susan Illston granted a request by two unions to block layoffs at more than 30 agencies. During the hearing, Illston said she agreed with the unions that the administration was unlawfully using the lapse in funding, which began on 1 October, to carry out its plans to downsize the federal government. She also cited a series of public statements by President Donald Trump and the White House's budget chief, Russell Vought, that she said showed explicit political motivations for the layoffs, such as Trump saying that cuts would target "Democrat agencies." A US justice department lawyer said that the unions must bring their claims to a federal labour board before going to court. The Trump administration is expected to appeal against the restraining order. On Friday, major departments such as Treasury and Health and Human Services (HHS) confirmed they were issuing notices to employees. Homeland Security, where many of its employees are considered essential, said it would lay off workers at its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. A filing from the Office of Management and Budget revealed more than a quarter of the cuts were to be made at the Treasury Department, where notices were being sent to approximately 1,446 employees. HHS was notifying between 1,100 and 1,200 employees, the filing said. The department said later, it was only planning to lay off about half that amount. The Department of Education and Department of Housing and Urban Development intended to lay off at least 400 employees apiece, while the Departments of Commerce, Energy, Housing and Urban Development and Homeland Security each planned cuts ranging between 176 to 315 employees, according to the filing. Vought has said there are plans to cut more than 10,000 federal workers in total during the shutdown. He told The Charlie Kirk Show podcast, aired on Wednesday before the court ruling, that the 4,000 layoffs were "just a snapshot and I think it will get much higher". Vought said the cuts would continue during the shutdown "because we think it's important to stay on offence for the American taxpayer and the American people". He later added that layoffs could end up "being somewhere north of 10,000". In response to the comments from Vought and Trump about potential firings, two major unions, the American Federation of Government Employees and AFL-CIO, had already filed a lawsuit and then on Friday asked Judge Illston for an emergency restraining order while the case proceeds. They argued that implementing layoffs was not an essential service that can be performed during a lapse in government funding. They also say the shutdown does not justify mass firings because most federal workers have been furloughed without pay. With the federal shutdown now in its third week, the US Senate again on Wednesday failed to pass a resolution that would reopen the government - the ninth time that resolution fell short. Republicans, who control both houses of Congress as well as the White House, blame Democrats for the impasse, saying they should agree to pass a "clean" funding resolution that would simply continue current spending levels. Because Republicans hold a slim majority in the chamber, they need a handful of Democratic votes in order to meet the 60-vote threshold to pass the resolution. Democrats have been fairly unified in holding out for a resolution that addresses health care costs for lower-income Americans that are set to rise soon.