Ground stop briefly in place, control tower evacuated at Newark Airport after reports of smoke
The FAA Air Traffic Control tower at Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR) in Newark, New Jersey, US, (Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
(NEWARK, N.J.) — Ground stop briefly in place, control tower evacuated at Newark Airport after reports of smoke
A ground stop was briefly in place on Monday morning at Newark Liberty International Airport, where an air traffic control tower was being evacuated due to reports of smoke, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
An FAA spokesperson said there was no fire and the controllers evacuated the tower due to a burning smell from an elevator.
“Arrivals and departures are temporarily paused at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey after air traffic controllers evacuated the tower because of a burning smell coming from an elevator,” the FAA said in a statement. “It happened around 7:30 a.m. local time on Monday, March 23.”
Christine Banfield is seen in an undated photo. Obtained by ABC News
(FAIRFAX, Va.) — Brazilian au pair Juliana Peres Magalhães, who went along with former IRS agent Brendan Banfield in a northern Virginia double murder plot, was sentenced to to 10 years in prison with two years of probation.
On Friday morning, Fairfax County Judge Penney Azcarate decided to give the 25-year-old the maximum sentence, which was up to 10 years on a manslaughter charge for which she pleaded guilty in 2024.
“Your actions were deliberate, self-serving, and demonstrated a profound disregard for human life,” Azcarate said in delivering her ruling. “So, let’s get straight: You do not deserve anything other than incarceration and a life of reflection on what you have done to the victim and this family.”
A new “20/20” episode about the case, “The Au Pair, The Affair and Murder” is scheduled to air Friday, Feb. 20, at 9 p.m. ET on ABC and streaming the next day on Disney+ and Hulu.
Magalhães and Banfield were separately arrested over their roles in the Feb. 24, 2023, murders of Joseph Ryan and Banfield’s wife, Christine Banfield, which were committed inside the Banfield home.
Early in the investigation, detectives discovered evidence suggesting that Banfield and Magalhães were having an affair — and that they had plotted to kill his 37-year-old wife.
Part of that plot, according to prosecutors and Magalhães’ testimony, involved covertly creating a profile for, and thus masquerading as, Christine on a social media site for sexual fetishes.
Ryan, 39, took the bait in what prosecutors called the “catfishing” scheme. Ryan communicated back and forth with the profile account that was allegedly posing as Christine, as they together crafted a rape fantasy scenario using a knife, chains and rope.
“I have caused pain that cannot be measured. I pray for forgiveness from the Benson family, and from the Joseph Ryan family,” Magalhães said during Friday’s sentencing hearing.
“There is nothing I could possibly do to make it up to you, for your loss. There are so many regrets, this is my biggest. It’s a tragedy I have been carrying with me, and I know I can never take back the devastation of what I have done,” she added.
Saying she lost herself in the relationship with Banfield, she has changed in jail over the past three years.
At the time, Magalhães and Banfield told police they came home to find Ryan — a stranger to them — stabbing Christine Banfield to death. Banfield and Magalhães each fired a shot, killing Ryan, they said both in their 911 call and to responding officers at the scene.
In October 2023, Magalhães was charged with the second-degree murder of Ryan, as she had admitted to firing the second, fatal shot.
One year later, Magalhães took a plea deal with prosecutors, turning on Banfield in exchange for a lesser charge of manslaughter. Prosecutors also promised to recommend to the judge upon sentencing that Magalhães only get time served.
With that agreement, Magalhães sat for nearly four hours of interviews with prosecutors, largely confirming the theory detectives had developed about their scheme.
Magalhães also took the stand in the trial against Banfield in January, as he maintained his innocence. During his three-week-long trial, Banfield even took the stand, testifying in his own defense.
After two days — nearly nine hours total — of deliberations in the trial, the jury reached a verdict on Feb. 2. The jury found Banfield guilty on all four counts, which included two counts of aggravated murder, one count of child endangerment, and possession of a firearm in commission of a felony.
Family and friends of Christine Banfield and Joseph Ryan filled the courtroom Friday morning for Magalhães’ sentencing.
Joining remotely online from Florida, Ryan’s mother, Deirdre Fisher, delivered her victim impact statement. She said her son was born two days before Christmas, making it a special holiday for them. Since Ryan’s murder, she has not been able to take down her Christmas tree, which sits behind the urn holding her son’s ashes.
“I say good morning to him each day when I turn on the tree’s lights, and I tell him I love him each night when I turn off the lights,” Fisher told the court.
Fisher said she has missed so many milestones now, including the chance to be a grandmother. There have been many times, Fisher said, when she’s reached for the phone to call her son, only to remember that he can’t and won’t answer.
Ryan’s aunt, Sangeeta Ryan, delivered her impact statement from the courtroom, pausing periodically between sobs.
“He was fun-loving and loved from the beginning. He was inquisitive, curious, smart, charming, and so dang talkative,” she said.
Ryan’s aunt described her nephew’s love for animals and the environment, noting that he often rescued and adopted dogs.
Sangeeta Ryan, added that he also was a dedicated member of their family, especially in taking care of his grandmother, who, she said, sold her home in wake of Ryan’s murder to “dodge memories, grief, and reporters.”
Acknowledging that Magalhães did eventually come forward with the truth, Sangeeta Ryan said that this still was not an act of heroism on Magalhães’ part.
“This could have been a very different ending where Juliana saved two lives,” she said could have been the case if Magalhães had not gone along with Banfield’s plot.
As Magalhães was charged only in Ryan’s murder, Judge Azcarate ruled that prosecutors could not include victim impact statements that Christine Banfield’s family members had prepared.
The death penalty was abolished in Virginia in 2021, meaning that, following his conviction, Banfield is facing life in prison without parole.
Fraudsters are posing as ICE officers, immigration lawyers and federal judges. (Evelin Flores)
(NEW YORK) — Twenty-year-old Edith from Guatemala has remained in her home with her 1-year-old baby Justin for weeks after selling her only means of transportation.
“Being stuck at home, locked up inside, is very, very difficult for us,” she told ABC News.
Edith, a U.S. citizen who was raised in Guatemala and requested she only be referred to by her first name out of concern over her privacy, sold her car and spent her life savings to pay someone who she thought was an attorney to help her husband Dimas, who was arrested and placed in immigration custody in March.
After Dimas, the undocumented breadwinner of the family, was quickly sent to a detention center in Georgia, Edith sought an immigration lawyer on social media, where a stranger recommended a supposed Florida-based attorney.
“I was scheduled for a video call, and the woman who said she was a lawyer said that to get someone out of immigration detention, a habeas corpus needed to be filed,” Edith told ABC News.
Edith retained the woman and began communicating with her frequently. She completed documents the woman sent her, and began sending the woman payments. She even received documents that appeared to be from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the federal agency that oversees immigration services.
“She began asking for money, $500, $600, $1,750, $4,000 for the bond, petition, copies [of forms],” Edith said.
But last month, when the woman was scheduled to participate in a video call for Dimas’ initial hearing before an immigration judge, she never appeared on the call. Edith’s husband later told her that the judge said that the attorney wasn’t registered in the court system.
“He said, ‘They’re scamming you,'” Edith said. “I said, ‘But why? Why me?’ I started to feel really bad and I didn’t know what to do.”
After confronting the woman she had hired, Edith realized she had been scammed out of more than $10,000 — her life savings. And with all her money gone, she was unable to pay for a legitimate lawyer to represent her husband, who last month was ordered deported by an immigration judge.
‘A billion-dollar industry’ Edith is one of many victims across the country that law enforcement and immigration lawyers say are being targeted by bad actors seizing on the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda.
Some scammers, according to officials, are using artificial intelligence to hold fake immigration court proceedings with scammers wearing judicial robes and law enforcement uniforms, using fake documents that appear to be from federal agencies.
“In my experience, this is a billion-dollar industry,” said Jorge Rivera, an immigration lawyer in Florida.
Rivera told ABC News that scammers, including the woman who Edith hired, have used his credentials and his law firm’s information to target immigrants.
“[Victims] have shown up to our office and they say, ‘What happened to my case?'” he said.
ABC News found cases of sophisticated immigration scams across the country, including in New York, where five defendants pleaded not guilty to charges accusing them of holding “sham immigration proceedings” including asylum interviews and court appearances.
According to the complaint, one victim ended up missing their real immigration hearing and was deported.
“In doing so, the defendants demonstrated a complete and utter disregard for the potentially life-altering consequences that their actions inflicted on their victims — vulnerable individuals who not only lost significant funds, but also missed their actual immigration court appearances,” prosecutors said.
And last month, four people in Orlando, Florida, were charged with setting up a fake immigration law firm and extorting millions from victims. They have not yet entered formal pleas.
‘It’s heartbreaking’ Rivera said immigration scams have gotten “exponentially worse” during the second Trump administration, because more pathways for immigration relief “have closed.”
“There’s been pauses, there’s more denials, undoubtedly, it’s more difficult to be able to resolve your immigration status,” he said. “So this is a perfect storm for the criminals.”
Rivera said that if those seeking help are “talking to a legitimate attorney and they’re talking to a fraudster, and the fraudster is giving them hope and giving them possibilities, they’re going to go with the person that’s giving them the hope.”
Rivera said he has been working with law enforcement across the country to send them information on alleged scammers, and has been reaching out to social media companies to take down fake profiles.
In a statement to ABC News, the Department of Homeland Security said scammers are also “pretending to be ICE and USCIS to trick people into giving them money or personal information.”
The DHS said that officials will never call out of the blue, demand money, or accept payments using gift cards or crypto currency.
Scammers are also targeting immigrant advocacy groups like Catholic Charities, Kevin Brennan, Catholic Charities’ vice president, told ABC News.
“It’s really been over the past year or so that we started hearing reports of people claiming to be Catholic Charities and other organizations that provide legal services to immigrants and refugees and using social media to fraudulently offer services, express urgency, ask for money,” Brennan told ABC News.
“It’s heartbreaking to see people who are in need and looking for help and being taken advantage of in such a terrible way by these fraudsters and criminals,” he said.
In Edith’s case, the possibility of getting legitimate legal help to try to get her husband released before he’s deported is slipping away. After an immigration judge ordered her husband deported on April 28, he is currently in ICE custody awaiting removal to Guatemala.
Edith said she will likely go to Guatemala to remain with her husband.
“It’s very ugly, and I don’t wish it on anyone else — to a person who is alone and without support,” she said. “This is not easy.”
A general view of wind turbines at the Saint-Nazaire offshore wind farm, off the coast of the Guerande peninsula in western France, in Batz-sur-Mer, on December 3, 2025. (Photo by Jerome Gilles/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — Wind power production will continue to advance, despite the Trump administration’s attempts to halt the growing momentum of renewable energy, experts told ABC News.
On Monday, the U.S. Department of the Interior reached a $928 million deal with French energy company TotalEnergies to end the company’s offshore wind development off the East Coast and redirect that investment into domestic fossil fuel initiatives, describing the “landmark agreement” as a way to lower energy costs and strengthen the nation’s energy security.
The move continues efforts by President Donald Trump and his administration to stall renewable energy, including the Department of Justice suing the state of California earlier this month over its electric vehicle mandate, signing an executive order last month directing the Department of Defense to purchase electricity from coal-fired power plants and the Environmental Protection Agency rescinding the landmark “endangerment finding” that has served as the scientific and legal foundation for federal regulations on carbon dioxide and five other heat-trapping greenhouse gases or more than 16 years.
Offshore wind is facing the most “headwinds” from the federal government, but is still persevering, Erin Baker, distinguished professor and faculty director at the Energy Transition Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told ABC News. The actions of the Trump administration have had “very little impact” on the global increase in production of renewable energy, Baker added.
What the nearly $1 billion deal with TotalEnergies entails As part of the deal, TotalEnergies will commit $928 million to fossil fuel development in the United States, matching the amount the company previously paid for offshore wind leases. Upon meeting those commitments, the federal government will reimburse the company up to the value of those lease payments, the Interior Department said.
Citing national security concerns, the Interior Department said TotalEnergies has pledged not to develop any new offshore wind projects in the United States.
“This agreement is yet another win for President Trump’s commitment to affordable and reliable energy for all Americans,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement. “Offshore wind is one of the most expensive, unreliable, environmentally disruptive, and subsidy-dependent schemes ever forced on American ratepayers and taxpayers.”
The agreement supports the administration’s push for affordable, reliable baseload energy, officials said, arguing that offshore wind projects are costly and less dependable. Ending the projects would reduce unnecessary federal spending while supporting domestic energy production, according to the Interior Department.
North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein described the move as “a terrible deal for the people of North Carolina and our country” in a post on X.
Because offshore wind is installed in federal waters, the power of the federal government over offshore wind projects is higher than in onshore wind projects, Michelle Solomon, senior policy analyst at Energy Innovation, a non-partisan research and analysis nonprofit that supports clean energy, told ABC News.
“I think the really unfortunate thing about this news is that offshore wind is a really, really reliable resource that can really help mitigate spiking fossil fuel prices in the winter,” she said.
The momentum for wind energy is too strong to stall, experts said Wind is the largest and most reliable source of renewable energy. It can also help energy bills stay affordable during extreme weather due to its capacity to produce fuel-free energy, Solomon said.
The power purchase agreements signed by offshore wind companies suppress electricity prices, Baker said. The companies agree to “always buy the wind when it blows,” which then brings down the entire cost to purchase electricity, she said, describing it as “good business.”
“They’re not doing it for environmental reasons,” Baker said of renewable energy companies. “They’re doing it just for business reasons.”
In 2025, wind and solar energy generated a record 17% of electricity in the U.S., up from less than 1% in 2005, according to data recently released by the Energy Information Administration (EIA).
The total net generation from wind and solar together reached 760,000 gigawatt-hours (GWh) last year, enough to power tens of millions of average American homes, according to the EIA. Wind power generated 464,000 GWh, a 3% increase over 2024.
The milestone comes amid federal energy policy changes, including the early phase-out of renewable tax incentives and other regulatory changes.
“The momentum is definitely still there,” Solomon said.
“Even though [the Trump administration] was actively trying to stop those industries, they still were growing,” Baker said.
Another benefit to wind is that it’s the type of energy that can “come online the most quickly” after it is built, Solomon said.
“In this moment, when we’re needing to build electricity generation resources really quickly to deal with low growth, data centers, [wind farms] are the ones that are going to be able to respond really quickly,” she said.
Wind and solar made up nearly 90% of new U.S. electricity capacity in 2025, according to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. That trend is expected to continue into 2026, Solomon said.
Global renewable energy capacity is expected to more than double by 2030, according to the EIA.
Trump has long criticized wind energy Trump’s criticism of wind turbines dates back to his first term.
In 2019, Trump claimed that noises from wind turbines “cause cancer” and negatively impact property values. In 2024, during his presidential campaign, Trump stated that wind turbines “kill whales” and vowed to write an executive order on “Day 1” to end offshore wind projects.
On Jan. 20, 2025, the first day of his second term, Trump signed an executive order to withdraw all areas of the outer continental shelf from offshore wind leasing. A federal judge in the U.S. District of Massachusetts ruled in December that the stop to permits on wind farms was illegal.
The deal with TotalEnergies is the latest move by the administration in an attempt to halt the increased production of wind power.
In December 2025, the Interior Department froze large offshore wind projects on the East Coast, citing national security concerns. Federal judges ruled that all five projects could resume construction, concluding that the government did not show that the risk was so imminent that it should stop.
The projects included Empire Wind, the wind farm being built 15 to 30 miles south of the coast of Long Island, and the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, which started delivering to the state’s power grid on Monday, developer Dominion Energy announced.
Despite the victories for the offshore wind developers, the delays to the project have led to an uncertain investment environment and increased both the cost to build and the costs to consumers’ energy bills, Solomon said.
The impact of these actions will raise energy costs in the end, Solomon said.
