DOJ, Coast Guard bust 45,000 pounds of cocaine tied to cartels
ABC News
(WASHINGTON) — The Department of Justice and the U.S. Coast Guard busted 45,000 pounds of cocaine with a value of over $500 million, according to top DOJ officials on Wednesday.
Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel were at Port Everglades in Florida on Wednesday and said the seizures of the drugs saved lives and protected the public.
“We have saved thousands and thousands of lives as a result of this incredible cooperation,” Bondi said. “We believe two cartels, CJNG and Sinaloa, were heavily tied to these shipments.”
She added that the Coast Guard used “drones, aircraft and ships to interdict the traffickers.”
Patel had a message for the cartels: There is new leadership throughout the DOJ.
“We are going to dismantle the ‘next-man-up’ theory that has been breeding in these Mexican cartels for generations,” Patel said of the Mexican drug cartels. “No more.”
The Coast Guard said the operation took 11 days for the crew of the Cutter James and that finding drug traffickers in their patrol area is like “finding a needle in a haystack.”
Bondi noted that 11 people were arrested in connection with the operation.
Patel said it was an interagency effort with Coast Guard, Department of Defense and DOJ assets at play.
U.S. Coast Guard Vice Adm. Nathan Moore told reporters that since February, the Coast Guard has seized over 59 metric tons of narcotics.
(ANNAPOLIS, Md.) — At the U.S. Naval Academy, it’s not what’s on the shelves that’s drawing attention — but what’s missing.
The institution’s Nimitz Library has been stripped of 381 titles, according to a list published in the New York Times, including works exploring race, gender, and national identity.
The culling includes “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou, “How to Be an Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi, “Bodies in Doubt” by Elizabeth Reis, and “White Rage” by Carol Anderson. None was banned outright — just rendered “not immediately available,” a Naval Academy spokesman, Cmdr. Tim Hawkins, said. The books, he said, had been placed in a room where patrons could no longer access them.
President Donald Trump’s Jan. 29 executive order titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” has been extended to cover the country’s military academies. With language targeting what it called “discriminatory equity ideology” and “gender ideology” — which he later called “the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies” — the order set in motion extensive removals, reviews and institutional confusion.
“There isn’t any clear criteria,” Katherine Kuzminski, director of Studies at the Center for a New American Security, told ABC News. “It leaves leadership scrambling — how do we ensure compliance without being accused of overcorrecting?”
Kuzminski said military leaders, bound by a strict code to obey lawful orders, are grappling with what she called the ambiguity of the policy. “Particularly in the Air Force,” she noted, “when the Tuskegee Airmen learning module was removed from basic training for a few days, leadership was trying to follow through with the best of intentions.”
Department of the Navy leadership determined which books required removal at the Naval Academy library, Hawkins told ABC News.
Initially, officials searched the Nimitz Library catalog, using key word searches, to identify books that required further review, Hawkins said. Approximately 900 books were identified during the preliminary search, he said, and department officials then closely examined the preliminary list to determine which books required removal to comply with directives outlined in executive orders issued by the president.
That ultimately resulted in nearly 400 books being selected for removal from the Nimitz Library collection, he said.
Historians and former military officials told ABC News the implications are chilling. Richard Kohn, a military historian and former chief historian for the Air Force, sees the move as a “cleansing” effort. “It reveals a certain kind of weakness in the current administration’s confidence,” he said. “They’re determined to appeal to their MAGA constituency by rolling back decades of progress on race, religion, and diversity.”
For Kohn, removing these books from the shelves sends a clear message to cadets: To get ahead in the military, avoid certain ideas.
Retired U.S. Air Force Col. Thomas Keaney, a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced international Studies, spoke about how far the academies have come — and how far he said they risk falling back. “When I was there,” he said, “it was a whites-only institution,” he said of the U.S. Air Force Academy. “It was the poorer for it.” Education, he insisted, is about exposure. “You are not harming people by letting them read,” he said.
In a letter to the secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, Democratic Reps. Adam Smith and Chrissy Houlahan called the book removals “a blatant attack on the First Amendment” and “an alarming return to McCarthy-era censorship.”
They demanded to know who ordered the removals, the process used and which titles were being purged, while urging an immediate halt.
The academies have issued carefully worded responses — or none at all — when asked by ABC News for comment.
The U.S. Merchant Marine Academy did not respond to repeated requests. The U.S. Naval Academy, U.S. Air Force Academy and U.S. Coast Guard Academy issued brief statements affirming compliance with executive orders but offered few specifics.
“The Coast Guard Academy is conducting a comprehensive review of its curriculum to ensure compliance with all executive orders,” a spokesperson said.
The U.S. Naval Academy spokesman confirmed that “nearly 400 books” had been removed from its Nimitz Library, explaining the move as an effort “to ensure compliance with all directives outlined in Executive Orders issued by the President.”
He emphasized what he called the library’s robust collection — some 590,000 print books and thousands of academic resources — framing the book removals as minor compared to the size of the overall collection. “The Naval Academy’s mission,” the spokesperson added, “is to develop Midshipmen morally, mentally and physically … to prepare them for careers of service to our country.”
At the U.S. Air Force Academy, a spokesperson noted that a curriculum review was underway “to ensure our compliance with executive orders.”
But outside voices in military academic circles warned that the issue goes beyond compliance, saying it strikes at the core of intellectual development.
“You can’t make ideas safe for people, but you can make people safe for ideas,” said Kohn, who specializes in civil-military relations. “If you don’t mentor students in the academies to understand what’s going on in American society, you don’t really educate them.”
Keaney, the former U.S. Air Force officer, was more circumspect but equally concerned. “I don’t think anyone is going to be hurt by reading anything — however nutty or outside their own culture it is,” he said. “You’re not harming people by exposing them to ideas. On the contrary, you’re training them to be discerning leaders. Give them a chance. Don’t leave them to deal from ignorance.”
(WASHINGTON) — Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is launching a “Save Our Schools” campaign on Wednesday against President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s attempt to dismantle the Department of Education.
“The federal government has invested in our public schools,” Warren said in an exclusive interview with ABC News. “Taking that away from our kids so that a handful of billionaires can be even richer is just plain ugly, and I will fight it with everything I’ve got.”
Warren suggested she is working with students, teachers, parents and unions to “sound the alarm” nationwide.
“My starting point with this campaign is that I know the power of telling stories and the power it brings to organize people into the fight. We need numbers to win, and this is how we start,” Warren said.
In a short video obtained by ABC News that Warren is posting to her roughly 20 million social media followers Wednesday morning, Warren says she is launching an investigation into reported plans to replace Department of Education call centers with chatbots. ABC News has not independently confirmed these reports.
Warren said that through a combination of federal investigations, oversight, storytelling and even lawsuits, she will work with the community, including lawmakers in Congress, to do everything she can to defend public education. Warren did not provide further details on how she plans to challenge the administration through federal oversight and lawsuits.
A former special education teacher, Warren said she opposes the Trump administration’s agency overhaul because she said it may result in fired teachers and increased class sizes, adding that programs for students with special needs will “disappear.” However, the Trump administration has vowed to keep statutory funding, such as the programs for students with special needs.
Trump said those services for students with disabilities, such as those protected by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, will be rehomed in other departments, including the Department of Health and Human Services, which is undergoing massive layoffs itself.
“They think that the American people are stupid [and] will be fooled by slapping a different title on the door and that somehow our kids will get the help that they’re entitled to,” Warren told ABC News.
“No one is fooled and certainly not the kids who need that help,” she added.
The Trump administration has said it is returning education to the states in dismantling the federal department and that students will be better served by their state departments.
The campaign is also personal for Warren. In the video obtained by ABC News, Warren said she has seen with her own eyes what the Department of Education does for special needs families and that she is doing everything she can to “fight back.”
Warren said she was inspired by her second grade teacher to join the education ranks.
“Whenever someone asked about my future, I would stand a little taller and say: ‘I’m going to be a teacher,'” Warren recalled. “It guided my entire life.”
Last month, Trump signed an executive order that aims to gut the Department of Education. It directs McMahon to close the department using all necessary steps permitted under the law. Still, eliminating the department would require an act from Congress because it was created by Congress.
The campaign comes in the wake of the department cutting nearly half its workforce last month. Hundreds of employees in the Federal Student Aid Office were let go, which Warren said could have “dire consequences” on the tens of millions of student loan borrowers who rely on the department’s $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio to achieve higher education. Trump has said student loans will now be handled by the Small Business Administration.
“The Department of Education (ED) appears to be abandoning the millions of parents, students, and borrowers who rely on a functioning federal student aid system to lower education costs,” Warren and a group of Democratic senators wrote in a letter urging McMahon to reinstate the fired federal employees.
The FSA’s operations have already been affected, according to a source familiar. The federal student loan website was down briefly less than 24 hours after the agency cuts. Fired IT employees were called frantically to join an hourslong troubleshooting call to restore the website for millions of borrowers, according to the source.
As part of Warren’s campaign launch, the senator said she will also highlight the real-world impact on educators, students and families through a series of story collections. She said she is encouraging community members to share submissions on how public education has influenced their lives and what it means to them. Warren told ABC News she did a similar campaign with federal employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau earlier this year.
However, Warren’s investigations and federal oversight could be hampered by Democrats’ position in Washington.
“Democrats are in the minority in the House and the Senate, and obviously we don’t have the White House, but not having as much power as we want does not mean having no power,” Warren told ABC News. “We’ve still got a lot we can do, and this combination of investigations, oversight, storytelling and lawsuits is that we can combine more power and push back hard, and it’s already yielded some results.”
Meanwhile, the administration’s quest to abolish the department has already triggered a legal battle by a coalition of states and education and civil rights groups, including a group of teachers unions and public school districts in Warren’s home state of Massachusetts.
The senator said she is hopeful every person who cares about education joins her campaign.
“We’ve got to fight for an America where it’s not just the kids of billionaires who get a good education but it’s every kid in every community who gets a great education,” she said. “This fight is our fight.”
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump on Friday said he would turn up the heat on Russia until it reaches a ceasefire and peace deal with Ukraine.
Trump threatened Russia with sanctions and tariffs in a Truth Social post.
“Based on the fact that Russia is absolutely ‘pounding’ Ukraine on the battlefield right now, I am strongly considering large scale Banking Sanctions, Sanctions, and Tariffs on Russia until a Cease Fire and FINAL SETTLEMENT AGREEMENT ON PEACE IS REACHED. To Russia and Ukraine, get to the table right now, before it is too late. Thank you,” he posted without further details.
The Biden administration previously issued sanctions on Russia after it invaded Ukraine three years ago.
Trump has come under criticism for not being tough on Putin during his negotiations with Russia and Ukraine to end the conflict. He has falsely and repeatedly claimed that Ukraine started the war.
The president’s post came hours after Russia launched a major attack on Ukraine in which it deployed 261 missiles and drones that targeted energy and gas infrastructure in various regions, according to Ukrainian officials.
The Trump administration also paused military aid and intelligence data with Ukraine this week, following last week’s explosive argument between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Trump and Vice President JD Vance in the Oval Office.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
