Uvalde trial latest: Defense uses foam gun visual aid to defend police response
A memorial dedicated to the 19 children and two adults murdered on May 24, 2022, during a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School is seen on January 6, 2026, in Uvalde, Texas. Brandon Bell/Getty Images
(UVALDE, Texas) — An attorney for former Uvalde, Texas, school police officer Adrian Gonzales brought a neon orange foam handgun to court on Monday as he tried to defend the police response to the Robb Elementary School mass shooting.
After stepping behind an eight-foot foam board, defense attorney Nico LaHood began his cross examination by asking the witness, a ranger with the Texas Department of Public Safety, “I’m going to point this — do you mind if I point this at you?”
LaHood proceeded to peek his fake weapon out of the foam board while asking the witness, Scott Swick, about the appropriate police response to a mass shooting.
“As a law enforcement officer, you should never rush into a situation without assessing it?” LaHood asked.
“To a point,” Swick said.
Prosecutors allege Gonzales, who is charged with child endangerment, did not follow his training and endangered the 19 students who died and an additional 10 surviving students. Gonzales has pleaded not guilty and his lawyers argue he is being unfairly blamed for a broader law-enforcement failure that day. It took 77 minutes before law enforcement mounted a counterassault to end the May 2022 rampage.
Another witness on Monday was Texas Ranger Terry Snyder, who testified about the shell casings recovered from the hallway of Robb Elementary.
During cross examination, defense attorney Gary Hillier tried to use the testimony to highlight the risk potentially faced by Gonzales.
“Because we’ve seen evidence here that rounds have been fired in this hallway, so anyone who enters through that doorway is entering a potentially life or death situation for them personally?” Hillier asked.
“Correct,” Snyder said.
Prosecutors attempted to recover from the cross examinations by highlighting the urgency of the police response to a mass shooting.
“So, when an officer hears shooting but can’t see shooting, what does the officer do?” prosecutor Bill Turner said.
“Runs to the shooting, where we tactically approach to where the shooting has occurred,” Snyder said.
Monday’s testimony was much more technical than last week’s, when the prosecution’s witnesses included educators who survived the massacre. Teacher Lynn Deming testified that she used her body to protect her fourth-grade students from gunfire and tried to keep them calm.
“I just kept saying, you know, like, ‘Babies, I love you. Just pray, I love you, OK,'” she testified as she held back tears. “I just wanted the last thing they heard was that somebody loved them. So, I think I said it a million times.”
Friday also brought the first testimony from a parent of a victim. Jennifer Garcia, whose 9-year-old daughter Eliahna Amyah Garcia was killed, told jurors, “We couldn’t find her. Kids were just running everywhere.”
According to former acting Dallas District Attorney Messina Madson, prosecutors appeared to be using their first witnesses to lay bare the tragedy that took place before turning their focus to Gonzales specifically.
“This is an unusual way to apply this law, and so from an overall point of view of what the district attorney’s office is trying to do is say this is a tragedy,” Madson, now a criminal defense attorney at MC Criminal Law, told ABC News. “This is a terrible, horrible thing that happened, and it is so horrible that not only do we have to mourn it, but somebody is criminally responsible, besides the person who pulled the trigger.”
According to Madson, prosecutors will need to clearly identify what opportunities Gonzales had to intervene and how close he was to the shooter to prove he “intentionally, knowingly, recklessly and with criminal negligence” placed students in harm’s way.
“It’s saying that somebody in those circumstances would have understood the risk and would have intervened and … you behaved in a way that was not how a reasonable person would in that situation,” Madson said.
ABC News’ Juan Renteria contributed to this report.
Stephen Miller, deputy White House chief of staff for policy, walks on the South Lawn of the White House after arriving on Marine One in Washington, DC, US, on Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026. US President Donald Trump threw his support behind a legislative proposal that would expand sales of higher-ethanol E15 gasoline as he looked to build support for his economic record with a crowd that included farmers in Iowa. (Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — Over the weekend, the former chief of staff of the Justice Department — who was one of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s top advisers during her first seven months on the job — issued a public call for lawyers who “support President Trump” to join the Justice Department’s ranks.
In a post on X, the former chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, seemed to suggest he could help such applicants become career federal prosecutors — who by law are supposed to be apolitical.
“DM me,” Mizelle wrote, referring to direct messages sent privately to him. “We need good prosecutors.”
Forty minutes later, one of President Donald Trump’s top policy advisers, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, reposted Mizelle’s message, adding, “Patriots needed.” And then on Monday, the current U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Jason Reding Quinones, also reposted Mizelle’s message, saying, “We are hiring!”
There are political appointees within the Justice Department, including certain leaders based in Washington and the U.S. attorneys who oversee offices around the country — but the assistant U.S. attorneys, or AUSAs, who investigate and prosecute cases in those offices are supposed to be nonpolitical and nonpartisan.
Appearing on a conservative podcast on Monday, Mizelle said he has received “hundreds and hundreds of inquiries already” from lawyers looking to become AUSAs. But his posting, and the subsequent promotion of it by current senior government officials, has roiled some former federal prosecutors on both sides of the political spectrum.
“We shouldn’t have a favorite politician in the Justice Department; we should have a favorite document, and that’s the Constitution,” former prosecutor Perry Carbone told ABC News.
Carbone, who spent more than three decades as a federal prosecutor and until May was the chief of the criminal division at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, said that Mizelle’s post has “generated a lot of discussion” among former federal prosecutors, who are concerned about its implications.
“It’s dangerous,” he said of what the post could mean. “The day that Department of Justice lawyers are hired based on loyalty to a person … is the day the rest of us should get very nervous.”
He said the message in Mizelle’s post — and the reposts by Reding Quinones and Miller — “flatly contradict” federal laws and regulations pertaining to the hiring of career federal employees.
He cited federal laws, including the Civil Service Reform Act, that specifically prohibit favoring or discriminating against applicants for federal civil-service jobs based on their “political affiliation.”
“The law is very clear,” Carbone said.
He also cited the Justice Department’s own manual, which says, “All personnel decisions regarding career positions in the Department must be made without regard to the applicant’s or occupant’s partisan affiliation.”
“Efforts to influence personnel decisions concerning career positions on partisan grounds should be reported to the Deputy Attorney General,” the manual states.
Andy McCarthy, a conservative commentator and frequent Trump critic who himself served as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York for nearly two decades, also blasted Mizelle’s post.
“If support for [the current] president is now a condition of enforcing federal law, Congress should defund DOJ. DOJ should only exist if it’s nonpartisan. Too dangerous to liberty otherwise,” McCarthy wrote.
“If AG Garland’s office had posted this, MAGA & GOP would be calling for impeachment,” he added, referring to Merrick Garland, the Biden administration’s attorney general.
Appearing on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s podcast Monday, Mizelle defended his post, saying that Article II of the Constitution explicitly states that “all executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States,” so “any time an executive branch officer is using executive power — an AUSA indicting somebody or … bringing criminal evidence against somebody — all of that is executive power that’s included.”
Mizelle said that when he was working for Bondi last year, his “job as chief of staff” was to “root out a lot of this stuff,” so, “On Day 1 we dismissed about 100 people who we thought were working against Donald J. Trump,” and then “thousands” more left.
“That’s how government should work. It should work that if you can’t follow the wishes of the duly elected president of the United States, then you need to leave. And all we’re looking for now are people who want to follow his agenda,” Mizelle said.
But Carbone said he rejects Mizelle’s analysis of the Constitution and the work of federal prosecutors under changing administrations. While policies may change, prosecutors “have to exercise independent professional judgment, not political obedience,” he said.
That’s underscored by a 2008 report from the Justice Department’s inspector general, who launched an investigation at the time into allegations that the Justice Department under President George W. Bush had been improperly using political affiliations to screen candidates for an apolitical summer internship program and a program that hired recent law graduates without prior legal experience.
In his report, the inspector general noted that “both DOJ policy and civil service law prohibit discrimination in hiring for DOJ career positions on the basis of political affiliations,” and said courts have considered “political affiliation” to include “commonality of political purpose, partisan activity, and political support.”
After his office’s investigation, the inspector general concluded that two political appointees in the department “took political or ideological affiliations into account in deselecting candidates in violation of Department policy and federal law.”
As for Mizelle’s recent post, Carbone said it is “just another symptom” afflicting a Justice Department that “has been building this reputation of independence for 50 years, since Watergate, and now here we are in a place where we’ve taken a giant step back.”
Mark Rotert, an AUSA in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago during the 1980s and 1990s, who was also on his office’s hiring committee, agreed, calling Mizelle’s post “disgraceful.”
“It never would have occurred to us to explore what the candidate’s views were about the president, or what kind of job the president is doing,” Rotert said of his time on the hiring committee. “Partisan politics were never considered a relevant or even an appropriate discussion point.”
Carbone also said that while Mizelle may not work at the Justice Department anymore, the boost it received from Miller, a senior White House official, and Reding Quinones, a U.S. attorney, shows how connected Mizelle still is — or at the least how his message “is supported by high-level people in the Justice Department.”
Mizelle’s post comes as the Justice Department faces increasing pressure over its handling of a wide array of politically charged matters, including firing prosecutors and investigators who were involved in previous Trump-related investigations; filing federal charges against or otherwise investigating many of President Trump’s political enemies; failing to initially investigate the officer who fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis last month; and most recently last week’s FBI seizure of ballots and other records related to the 2020 election from an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia.
A Justice Department spokesman did not respond to a message from ABC News seeking comment. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida also did not respond to a message seeking comment from ABC News.
Donald Trump during the signing of executive orders in the Oval Office at the White House, September 19, 2025. Trump signed a two executive orders establishing the “Trump Gold Card” and introducing a $100,000 fee for H-1B visas. The “Trump Gold Card” is a visa program that allows foreign nationals permanent residency and a pathway to U.S. citizenship. Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — The State Department is freezing immigrant visa processing for 75 countries in an effort to clamp down on applicants it deems likely to become a public charge.
The directive instructs embassies and consulates to halt decisions beginning Jan. 21 while the department reassesses its vetting procedures under existing immigration law, according to an internal memo first reported by Fox News Digital.
The effort comes months before the United States is set to co-host the 2026 World Cup with nearly 2 million tickets sold to fans around the world. The Trump administration previously said “any athlete or member of an athletic team, including coaches, persons performing a necessary support role, and immediate relatives, traveling to the World Cup” would be exempt from travel bans.
The suspension of immigrant visas will not apply to applicants seeking non-immigrant visas, or temporary tourist or business visas, who make up the vast majority of visa seekers, the State Department said. As such, the suspensions announced would not apply for those seeking to travel to the World Cup in the U.S. this summer.
A State Department spokesperson confirmed the agency is pausing immigrant visa processing for the 75 countries.
“The Trump administration is bringing an end to the abuse of America’s immigration system by those who would extract wealth from the American people,” State Department principal deputy spokesman Tommy Pigott said in statement Wednesday. “The State Department will use its long-standing authority to deem ineligible potential immigrants who would become a public charge on the United States and exploit the generosity of the American people.”
Countries affected by the pause include Somalia, Russia, Afghanistan, Brazil, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Nigeria, Thailand and Yemen, according to the internal memo. The full list of countries was not immediately available, but ABC News has reached out to the State Department for more information.
“Immigrant visa processing from these 75 countries will be paused while the State Department reassess immigration processing procedures to prevent the entry of foreign nationals who would take welfare and public benefits,” Pigott added Wednesday in the statement.
Notably, Somalia has drawn scrutiny from the Trump administration in recent days following reports of fraud in Minnesota’s social services system. A self-proclaimed independent journalist posted a video last month alleging child care fraud in Minneapolis’ Somali communities. Several state and local officials have disputed the accuracy of the video, and authorities said at the time none of the centers featured in the video were accused of fraud.
Federal authorities are investigating the allegations in the state’s social services system, while Minnesota officials have disputed the claims of fraud.
President Donald Trump recently criticized Somali immigrants, describing them as “garbage” and saying he doesn’t want them in the United States during a Cabinet meeting last month.
The Trump administration announced Tuesday it would end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Somalis in March, effectively forcing as many as 2,400 people out of the U.S., despite the president’s remarks last month that Somalia was “barely a country.”
In November, the State Department circulated a cable to consular offices worldwide directing staff to apply stricter screening measures under the “public charge” provision.
Under the guidance, officers are required to deny visas to applicants considered likely to depend on public assistance.
A memorial dedicated to the 19 children and two adults murdered on May 24, 2022 during a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School is seen on January 06, 2026 in Uvalde, Texas. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
(CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas) — As soon as Wednesday afternoon, a Texas jury will begin deliberating whether a law enforcement officer should be held criminally responsible for failing to act in the face of one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history.
At issue is whether Gonzales — one of the first officers to arrive at Robb Elementary on May 24, 2022 — ignored his training and endangered dozens of students when he responded to the shooting.
Nineteen students and two teachers died, with police officers waiting 77 minutes to confront the gunman. While the shooting response has been the subject of hearings and investigations, the case against Gonzales marks the first criminal trial related to the shooting and the delayed police response.
Prosecution’s closing argument
The jury has an opportunity to “set the bar” for how officers should respond to school shootings, prosecutor Bill Turner said on Wednesday.
“If it’s appropriate to stand outside hearing [hundreds of] shots while children are being slaughtered, that is your decision to tell the state of Texas,” Turner said.
While teachers and students were sheltering in their classrooms — doing exactly what their training taught them to do in an active shooter scenario — the police officer trained to help them failed to act, Turner said. Turner argued that each gunshot fired at Robb Elementary was “notice to Adrian Gonzalez to advance toward the gunfire,” but he failed to follow his training and act in the crucial first minutes of the shooting.
“If you have a duty to act, you can’t stand by while the child is in imminent danger,” Turner said.
Turner pointed jurors to the testimony of teaching aide Melodye Flores, a key prosecution witness who said she pleaded with Gonzales to intervene. Turner argued that the warning from Flores and the clear sound of gunfire should have triggered Gonzales to act.
“The training is, you hear shots, you go to the gunfire. He heard shots, and Melodye Flores was pointing where to go to the gunfire. There’s nothing complicated about that,” Turner said.
Defense’s closing argument
Convicting Gonzales will send a clear message to officers who respond to this country’s next mass shooting, defense attorney Jason Goss said.
“What you tell police officers is, ‘Don’t go in. Don’t react. Don’t respond,'” Goss warned jurors. “We cannot have law enforcement feel that way.”
Goss argued that prosecutors tried to “massage the facts” of the case and “twist them all into a pretzel” to argue Gonzales failed to act. According to Goss, Gonzales did the best he could with the information he had when he arrived at Robb Elementary. While other officers arrived within the same timeframe, only Gonzales is being penalized for attempting to take action that day, he argued.
Goss attempted to empathize with the jurors and the families of victims, arguing he understood the desire for criminal accountability. But he reminded jurors, “The monster who hurt those kids is dead.”
But convicting Gonzales, Goss argued, would do “an injustice” for the victims of the shooting.
“You do not honor their memory by doing an injustice in their name,” he said.
What is he charged with?
Gonzales was charged with 29 felony counts of abandoning/endangering children — one count for each of the 19 students who died in the shooting and the 10 children who survived in classroom 112.
Each count carries a maximum penalty of two years in prison, and Gonzales could spend the rest of his life in prison if he is convicted. While juries in Texas sometimes determine criminal sentences, Gonzales has opted to be sentenced by Judge Sid Harle if he is convicted.
What happened to the police chief’s case?
Along with Gonzales, prosecutors also charged former Uvalde schools Police Chief Pete Arredondo, who was the scene commander during the Robb shooting. His case has been indefinitely delayed due to a pending civil lawsuit involving the tactical unit that ultimately breached the classroom and killed the shooter.
Are there any comparable cases?
According to Phil Stinson — a professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio who maintains a database of police officers who have been arrested — the case against Gonzales is uncommon but not unprecedented.
Prosecutors in Florida attempted to similarly charge a law enforcement officer for his response to the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Seventeen were killed when a gunman opened fire that day, Feb. 14, 2018, in Parkland.
A jury in 2023 acquitted Scot Peterson, the former Broward County sheriff’s deputy, after he was charged with child neglect and culpable negligence for his alleged inaction following the shooting.
