Newly sworn in Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem participates in an immigration enforcement operation in New York City, Jan. 28, 2025. (DHS)
(NEW YORK) — Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem joined an immigration enforcement operation in New York City on Tuesday.
Noem posted a brief video of an arrest to her social media account.
The secretary is witnessing both criminal and civil enforcement operations, according to sources familiar with the actions in New York.
The criminal case involves a member of a Venezuelan gang that took over an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado, the sources said. One alleged gang member was arrested in the Bronx.
The New York division of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said it was working with partners at the Justice Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to assist the Department of Homeland Security with enforcement efforts.
Noem’s appearance for the operations came just days after she was confirmed by the Senate.
Noem, the former governor of South Dakota, will be charged with overseeing Trump’s immigration crackdown along with “border czar” Tom Homan.
“The Trump Administration will once-again empower our brave men and women in law enforcement to do their jobs and remove criminal aliens and illegal gangs from our country,” she said in a statement after her confirmation. “We will fully equip our intelligence and law enforcement to detect and prevent terror threats and will deliver rapid assistance and disaster relief to Americans in crisis.”
(WASHINGTON) — Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi, 84, was hospitalized while abroad on a congressional delegation, her office said on Friday.
“While traveling with a bipartisan Congressional delegation in Luxembourg to mark the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi sustained an injury during an official engagement and was admitted to the hospital for evaluation,” her spokesperson Ian Krager said in a statement.
“Speaker Emerita Pelosi is currently receiving excellent treatment from doctors and medical professionals,” the statement read. “She continues to work and regrets that she is unable to attend the remainder of the CODEL engagements to honor the courage of our servicemembers during one of the greatest acts of American heroism in our nation’s history.”
“Speaker Emerita Pelosi conveys her thanks and praise to our veterans and gratitude to people of Luxembourg and Bastogne for their service in World War II and their role in bringing peace to Europe,” Krager added.
Eighteen House members are part of the delegation, according to House Speaker Mike Johnson. They were to take part in observances of the anniversary of the pivotal World War II battle on Friday and Saturday.
Other lawmakers on the trip include Republican Rep. Michael McCaul, the chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, and Mark Takano, ranking member of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.
Pelosi in November won reelection to her California seat, clinching a landmark 20th term.
Despite stepping down from leadership in 2022 after Republicans won control of the House, Pelosi remains a key Democratic power player. She worked behind the scenes to urge President Joe Biden to step out of the 2024 race after his CNN debate performance, ABC News reported at the time.
Pelosi later said Biden’s late exit from the race was a key factor in Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss to President-elect Donald Trump.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Soldiers with the 82nd Airborne division walk across the tarmac at Green Ramp to deploy to Poland, Feb. 14, 2022, at Fort Bragg, Fayetteville, N.C./ Photo Credit: Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — Transgender service members represented by LGBTQ advocacy groups on Tuesday filed suit against the White House executive order that bans transgender people from serving in the military.
The order signed late Monday rescinded Biden administration policies that permitted transgender service members to serve openly according to their gender identity. The order said the “assertion” that one might identify as transgender would be a “falsehood … not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.”
Space Force Col. Bree Fram, a transgender woman who came out and transitioned while serving, told ABC News that banning transgender individuals from serving would bring a “collective harm to our national securit
Transgender troops “are meeting or exceeding the high standards the military has set for performance, and they’re doing so here at home, around the world, and in every service, every specialty that the military has to offer,” Fram said, who was speaking in her personal capacity and not on behalf of the Pentagon.
According to the suit filed Tuesday by plaintiffs represented by GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders Law and the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the order directs Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth “to reverse the current accession and retention standards for military service and to adopt instead a policy that transgender status is incompatible with ‘high standards'” that the executive order lays out.
Sasha Buchert, a senior attorney at Lambda Legal who represented plaintiffs who sued and temporarily blocked a similar order in 2017 in the first Trump administration, called the new order “cruel” and said it “compromises the safety of our country.”
She told ABC News the order “will force transgender service members to look over their shoulder” and “stamp them with [a] badge of inferiority.”
Buchert said her firm and the Human Rights Campaign also intend to file suit.
“We have been here before…as we promised then, so do we now: we will sue,” Buchert said.
Buchert said transgender troops will now “worry about…whether they’re going to have to end their illustrious military careers by being drummed out of the military.”
“Trans military folks have been serving now for 10 years, openly and proudly and deploying to austere environments and meeting every service-based standard that their peers can meet,” said Buchert, who is a veteran.
The executive order, paired with another that demands the dissolution of diversity, equity, and inclusion “bureaucracy” in the Defense Department, came on Hegseth’s first day of work at the Pentagon.
The Pentagon said in a statement to ABC News that it “will fully execute and implement all directives outlined” in all executive orders from the president.
The executive order does not make reference to transgender individuals. It directs the Pentagon to update guidelines around medical standards for individuals diagnosed with gender dysphoria, a precursor to transition care that affirms one’s gender.
According to a Defense official, 4,240 military personnel who are currently serving are diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Over a 10-year period since 2014, only a slightly higher total number of service members were diagnosed with gender dysphoria — 5,773.
Over that period, roughly 3,200 received gender-affirming hormone therapy, the official said, and about 1,000 received gender-affirming surgery.
The cost for both — as well as psychotherapy and other treatments over the last decade — was $52 million, or over $5 million per year.
Trump as a candidate said he would take aim at “transgender insanity” as president. The order says the military must root out “ideologies harmful to unit cohesion.”
The logic around cohesion is familiar, Buchert said.
“We’ve seen this as a country on many occasions. We’re still correcting improper discharges for people that were, you know, drummed out of the military based on discriminatory motives in the past,” she said.
Cassie Byard, a Navy veteran who served with a service member who was transgender, said she “never saw any adverse effect on readiness or cohesion.”
Fram believes openness about her identity has made her unit more cohesive.
“My being authentic is actually reflected back to me and builds the strong bonds of teamwork that we need at the military to succeed, because we need everyone to be able to bring their best self to work,” she said.
While the order brings a “period of uncertainty” as the Pentagon weighs updates to medical guidelines over a two-month window to implement it, Fram said “my job right now, and the job of every transgender service member, is simply to do our duty. It’s to lace up our boots and get to work and accomplish the mission that we’ve been given.”
“We swore an oath to uphold the duties that we’ve been given, [to] support the Constitution,” she added. “And we’re going to continue to do so, unless told otherwise.”
-ABC News’ Luis Martinez contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — Work-from-home policies came under fire from X and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, as he and Republican businessman Vivek Ramaswamy took their plans to reduce government waste to the floors of Congress Thursday.
The businessmen, who President-elect Donald Trump selected to lead an outside advisory board called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), attended several closed-door meetings with GOP senators and House members to sell their plans to cut as much as $2 trillion from the federal budget of what they called waste.
“I think we should make sure we spend the public’s money well,” Musk told reporters between the meetings.
Musk posted on his social media platform X from inside the Capitol about what he and Ramaswamy say is a key issue for DOGE: The number of federal employees working from home.
The Federal Office of Management and Budget released a report in August that found “as of May 2024, approximately 50% of federal workers worked every day in roles that are not eligible for telework, including those who work onsite providing healthcare to our veterans, inspecting our food supply, and managing Federal natural resources.”
Musk shared a new report from Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, the chair of the Senate DOGE caucus, which claimed only 6% of federal workers show up in person to work on a full-time basis. Many others work from home part-time, and roughly one-third work from home full-time, according to the report.
“If you exclude security guards & maintenance personnel, the number of government workers who show up in person and do 40 hours of work a week is closer to 1%! Almost no one,” Musk posted in response to the report.
Ernst’s report includes several anecdotes and alleged social media posts about federal employees who worked from home, including a Department of Veterans Affairs manager who posted a photo of himself working from a bathtub. Ernst’s team included the photo in their report.
The OMB report found that “telework-eligible personnel spent approximately 60% of regular, working hours inperson, at agency-assigned job sites.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson said he agreed with Musk’s stance on work-from-home policies for federal workers and floated a claim, without any citation, that only 1% of federal workers were in their office.
“You will see a demand…that federal workers return to their desks. That’s just common sense,” he said at a news conference in between the meetings.
Musk, who brought his son X to the proceedings, and Ramaswamy walked past reporters before the news conference began with Musk carrying his son on his shoulders.
Musk has been a staunch opponent of work-from-home policies and removed such policies from his businesses, including X. He threatened layoffs for X employees who did not comply with his policy, which instructed any special requests for remote work needed to be reviewed by him before approval.
