DOJ probing sheriff over undocumented immigrant’s release
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(NEW YORK) — In what appears to be part of the Trump administration’s ongoing campaign against sanctuary cities, the Justice Department is investigating a sheriff in upstate New York who released an undocumented man later taken into custody by federal agents.
The US Attorney’s office for the Northern District of New York “is looking into the circumstances” surrounding the release by Tompkins County Sheriff Derek Osborne of Jesus Romero-Hernandez, a 27-year-old Mexican citizen.
Romero-Hernandez pleaded guilty to a state assault charge and was sentenced to time served, necessitating his release. He left local custody in Ithaca before Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrived to pick him up on a federal complaint charging him with illegally re-entering the United States after a prior removal.
Ithaca adopted a sanctuary law in 2017.
ICE, the U.S. Marshals Service and Homeland Security Investigations later apprehended Romero-Hernandez.
“The Tompkins County Sheriff’s Office in Ithaca, NY, a self-described sanctuary city, appears to have failed to honor a valid federal arrest warrant for a criminal alien with an assault conviction,” Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove said. “I applaud the U.S. Attorney’s commitment to investigate these circumstances for potential prosecution.”
Tompkins County and the Tompkins County Sheriff’s office issued a joint statement refuting the DOJ’s claims.
The officials said ICE was “notified of when the individual in question was going to be released and had every opportunity to come to the jail to obtain the individual in question without any need for a pursuit or other incident.”
“There was no interference with federal immigration enforcement efforts. DOJ’s assertion that the Tompkins County Sheriff did anything to put federal law enforcement officers in danger is false and offensive,” the offices said.
Bove convened all 93 US attorney’s offices on a phone call on Thursday to convey that they should focus on surging resources toward immigration enforcement. He likened the threat posed by undocumented immigrants to the threat posed by terrorists.
It represents a significant shift for the Justice Department redirecting law enforcement resources away from previous national security priorities and toward immigration enforcement.
(WASHINGTON) — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. arrives on Capitol Hill on Monday to kickstart several days of private meetings with more than two dozen senators and their staff in a bid to become the nation’s next health secretary.
Among the senators on Kennedy’s list is Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the GOP’s pick to become the next Senate majority leader.
Kennedy’s chances of getting confirmed by the Senate aren’t clear. His past comments questioning vaccine science and the food industry could lose — and gain — votes on either side of the aisle depending on how he talks about his plans for the incoming administration.
Here are three questions surrounding his nomination:
Would he try to limit access to certain vaccines like the polio shot or encourage schools to drop vaccine mandates?
Kennedy has said he’s not opposed to all vaccines. He says he’s fully vaccinated, with the exception of the COVID-19 shot, and that he has vaccinated his children.
Kennedy also has falsely claimed that childhood vaccines cause autism, even though the study claiming that link has been retracted and numerous other high-quality studies have found no evidence that vaccines are tied to autism.
Kennedy also has questioned the safety of the polio vaccine and enlisted the help of a longtime adviser and anti-vaccine advocate, Aaron Siri, to vet potential job candidates for the incoming administration.
Siri petitioned the Food and Drug Administration in 2022 to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine on behalf of an anti-vaccination advocacy group.
Dr. Richard Besser, a former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and an ABC News contributor, said senators should ask Kennedy if he would consider using his new post to discourage local school districts from requiring vaccinations.
While state — not federal — laws establish vaccination requirements for local schools, they rely heavily on the recommendations by the CDC and FDA, which Kennedy would oversee as health secretary, if confirmed. Currently, all 50 states and Washington, D.C. have laws requiring vaccines to attend schools, although some offer exemptions.
“What will you do to make sure that parents can feel comfortable sending their children to school protected from measles, whooping cough and other vaccine-preventable diseases if vaccines are no longer required?” Besser said senators should be asking Kennedy.
Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, the longest-serving Senate leader in history and a polio survivor, said last week that anyone seeking Senate confirmation would “do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts.”
Will Kennedy use ‘confirmation bias’ to review government data
Confirmation bias is the idea that people often seek out information that supports their own deeply held beliefs, rather than be open to accepting new information that might challenge their ideas.
When it comes to the polio vaccination, Kennedy has said he’s willing to say that he’s wrong but that he has yet to see information that would convince him.
“If you show me a scientific study that shows that I’m wrong… I’m going to put that on my Twitter and I’m going to say I was wrong,” he said in a podcast last year with Lex Fridman.
It’s likely several senators will ask Kennedy whether he’d be willing to change his mind on vaccines based on data, or if he’s already convinced that the data is wrong or manipulated.
Critics say Kennedy is willfully ignoring the information that’s out there already. In a letter obtained by The New York Times, more than 75 Nobel Prize winners urged U.S. senators to block his nomination, citing the his “lack of credentials or relative experience” in matters of medicine, science and public health.
“In view of his record, placing Mr. Kennedy in charge of [the Department of Health and Human Services] would put the public’s health in jeopardy and undermine America’s global leadership in the health sciences, in both the public and commercial sectors,” the laureates wrote.
How would he try to change what Americans eat?
Kennedy finds the most political consensus when he talks about America’s obesity crisis and blames the high levels of sugar, sodium and fat in ultra-processed foods. A longtime environmental advocate, he’s also taken aim at the use of additives pushed by food companies — earning him kudos from some Democrats.
“We’re prioritizing corporations feeding us unhealthy products instead of family farmers growing fresh, healthy foods – and we let too many dangerous chemicals flood our food system,” said Sen. Cory Booker last month after Kennedy’s nomination was announced.
“We all must come together to build a system that works for all,” he added.
But one big question many senators will likely ask is how Kennedy plans to turn around America’s eating habits in a way that doesn’t hurt U.S. farmers or heavily regulate agricultural businesses that are key political supporters of President-elect Donald Trump. During Trump’s first administration, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue rolled back Obama-era rules that sought to limit sodium and sugar in children’s school lunches that accept federal subsidies.
FDA Administrator Robert Califf, who will step down when Trump takes office in January, testified recently before a Senate committee that there’s a lot we still don’t know about food science and safety. When the FDA does move ahead with regulation, he said the rule is often challenged in court.
“What sounds simple, given the current state of judicial affairs, First Amendment rights, [is] the fact that corporations have the same rights as individuals — every little thing we do, unless specifically in detail instructed by Congress — it’s not just that we lose in court, but we lose years,” he said.
(WASHINGTON) — The House is expected to vote Thursday night on whether to force the Ethics Committee to release the report from its investigation of former Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz.
Democratic Rep. Sean Casten‘s privileged resolution requires the Ethics Committee to release its report on Gaetz. Casten introduced an updated privileged resolution Tuesday which included several previous examples of the committee releasing reports on former members of Congress. Another from Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen requires the committee to preserve all documents related to Gaetz.
Republican leadership is expected to introduce a motion to table and effectively kill the measures, but it wasn’t clear Thursday afternoon if that effort would be successful — it would take only a handful of Republicans to cross party lines and vote with Democrats to force the committee to release the report.
The Ethics Committee was investigating allegations that Gaetz engaged in sexual misconduct, illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, and/or accepted a bribe, improper gratuity, or impermissible gift.
If the motion to table the effort fails, the chamber will take a vote on whether to release the Gaetz report.
The floor vote will come after the bipartisan Ethics Committee meets Thursday afternoon, when the 10-member panel will discuss the report. During the last meeting in November, Republican committee members blocked the release of the Gaetz report.
Johnson has consistently said the Gaetz ethics report should not be released to the public, citing a longstanding tradition of dropping investigations after a member leaves Congress. Gaetz resigned abruptly last month after President-elect Donald Trump announced him as his selection for attorney general. He later withdrew from consideration after it became clear he was facing an uphill climb from both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate, which would vote whether to confirm his nomination.
Democrats pushed for the report’s release after Trump’s announcement, saying it was relevant to the Senate’s consideration of him for attorney general. Even though Gaetz withdrew, Democrats decided to continue their effort.
Gaetz was reelected to the 119th Congress before Trump picked him for AG, but he announced after his withdrawal that he would not serve another term. He pledged that he remains “fully committed” to assisting the president-elect.
Gaetz has since been selling private videos on Cameo, a website where users can purchase a personalized video message from from celebrities.
(WASHINGTON) — On the eve of a new year and a second Trump presidency, Chief Justice John Roberts issued a stark warning to the incoming administration, members of Congress and the public about threats to the nation’s independent judicial system and the rule of law.
“Within the past few years, elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings. These dangerous suggestions, however sporadic, must be soundly rejected,” Roberts wrote in his annual year-end report on the federal judiciary.
“Every Administration suffers defeats in the court system — sometimes in cases with major ramifications for executive or legislative power or other consequential topics,” Roberts said. “Nevertheless, for the past several decades, the decisions of the courts, popular or not, have been followed, and the Nation has avoided the standoffs that plagued the 1950s and 1960s.”
Roberts’ decision to address partisan criticism of the judiciary directly is notable for a figure who has studiously avoided public commentary on politics or matters of public debate.
The message publicly highlights what has been a growing private concern among the justices: that an intensifying storm of partisan rhetoric, attacks on the court’s credibility by outside groups and public dissatisfaction with some recent high-profile decisions may empower open defiance of the Supreme Court’s authority.
There has also been deep unease about persistent protests outside justices’ homes and threats of violence, which have resulted in around-the-clock security measures.
President-elect Donald Trump has harshly attacked the court for unfavorable decisions over the past eight years, with some allies suggesting certain rulings could be ignored.
More recently, Trump has come to the Supreme Court’s defense, suggesting that critics of the justices should be jailed.
“They were very brave, the Supreme Court, very brave, and they take a lot of hits because of it — it should be illegal what happens,” Trump said during a campaign rally in September.
Roberts, the President George W. Bush appointee who is in his 20th year as chief justice, said he welcomes criticism of the court from all corners of society and that criticism alone is not a threat to judicial independence.
However, he said “illegitimate activity,” including violence, intimidation tactics, disinformation and open threats of defiance, risks undermining the democratic system.
Roberts noted more than 1,000 “serious threats” against federal judges investigated by the U.S. Marshals Service in the last five years, resulting in more than 50 people criminally charged.
He warned of a rising tide of “doxing” federal judges and grassroots campaigns to bombard their offices with threatening messages. He also cited foreign misinformation efforts on social media to distort the meaning of judicial rulings.
“Public officials certainly have a right to criticize the work of the judiciary, but they should be mindful that intemperance in their statements when it comes to judges may prompt dangerous reactions by others,” Roberts wrote.
