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) — Chris Wright, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be secretary of the Department of Energy, laid out his key priorities, including restoring “energy dominance,” increasing technological innovation and cutting regulatory red tape, during a nearly three-hour confirmation hearing on Wednesday.
“I see three immediate tasks where I will focus my attention if I get the privilege of being confirmed. The first is to unleash American energy at home and abroad to restore our energy dominance,” Wright said. “Second, we must lead the world in innovation and technology breakthroughs.”
“Third, we must build things in America again and remove barriers to progress,” he added. “Federal policies today make it too easy to stop projects and very hard, hard to start and complete projects.”
Wright, currently the CEO of fracking company Liberty Energy, has long been a proponent of expanding domestic oil and gas production and has been openly critical of policies aimed at curbing the impacts of climate change.
In his testimony before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Wright expressed support for a range of energy technologies, saying during an exchange with Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, “I am for improving all energy technologies that can better human lives and reduce emissions. They go together.”
He particularly emphasized the roles of commercial nuclear energy, liquefied natural gas and geothermal energy in his envisioned expansion of domestic energy production.
Natural gas accounts for about a third of domestic energy, according to the DOE. For domestic use, it is typically delivered as a gas — its super-chilled liquefied form LNG has become a major U.S. export. The United States is already the world’s largest LNG exporter. The incoming Trump administration has said it will undo the Biden administration’s pause on new export facility approvals and expand LNG exports further.
Nuclear power currently provides about 20% of U.S. domestic electricity production, according to the DOE.
Geothermal energy is heat energy harnessed from reservoirs, either existing or man-made, within the earth’s crust. It is considered a renewable energy source but only accounted for 0.4% of U.S. energy in 2023, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
“Energy is the essential agent of change that enables everything that we do, everything,” Wright said Wednesday. “A low energy society is poor. A highly energized society can bring health, wealth and opportunity for all.”
“The stated mission of the company that I founded, Liberty Energy, is to better human lives through energy,” he added. “Liberty works directly in oil, natural gas, next-generation geothermal and has partnerships in next-generation nuclear energy and new battery technology.”
Wright’s stated energy priorities represent a shift from the Biden administration’s focus on clean energy manufacturing, particularly wind and solar energy, and reflect what Republicans have called an “all-of-the-above energy policy” that includes increased production of oil and gas products.
The anticipated policy shift has caused concerns in climate advocacy circles. Those concerns emerged in the hearing room as 10 protesters from youth-led climate advocacy organization Sunrise Movement were arrested after disrupting the hearing, the group told ABC News.
Wright acknowledged the protesters, saying, “You have to understand that there isn’t dirty energy and clean energy. All energies are different, and they all have different trade-offs. Different people have different weights or valuations of trade-offs. Different geographies or locations have climates more favorable to this energy versus that energy. So it’s a complicated dialog, which means it’s not easy to get people to share this broader perspective on it. I think we’re seeing a little bit of that in passionate, well-meaning, wonderful people that have been sitting in the hearing room today.”
The shift is being celebrated by Republicans, including Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Mike Lee, R-Utah, who said during the hearing that Wright’s nomination “really couldn’t be coming at a more urgent time,” heavily criticizing the Biden administration’s energy policies.
“On his very first day in office, President Biden halted new oil and natural gas leases on public lands and waters, effectively cutting off access to resources that could have powered our economy and benefited the lives of ordinary Americans,” Lee added. “Over the past four years, the same administration has dismantled domestic energy production, canceled leases and weaponized regulations to discourage investment in pipelines and critical energy infrastructure.”
Some Democrats on the committee questioned Wright’s views around climate change, including whether it contributes to disasters like the wildfires in Los Angeles — a connection he stopped short of making, though he did call climate change “a real and global phenomenon.”
In shifting the focus of the DOE away from environmental impacts and toward increased production, Wright said the aim is to reduce costs for the public.
“Ten percent of Americans got a disconnection notice to their utilities in the last 12 months,” Wright said. “More than 20% of Americans report struggles paying their bills — whether it’s paying their energy bills, whether it’s filling their car with gas or heating their home or paying their electricity bill. So, this is important. It’s not just important for national security and industry and all that — it’s important for the quality of life of every American.”
“Energy is the infrastructure of life,” he added. “It’s what makes everything possible.”
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump on Thursday claimed, without citing evidence, that diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives for air traffic controllers at the Federal Aviation Administration — under Democratic presidents — were partly to blame for the tragic plane and helicopter collision in Washington on Wednesday night.
The air disaster occurred as an American Airlines passenger jet approaching Reagan Washington National Airport collided with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter on a routine training flight.
“I put safety first, Obama, Biden and the Democrats put policy first, and they put politics at a level that nobody’s ever seen,” Trump told reporters in the White House briefing room, referring to the policies, even as the investigation into what happened is just getting underway.
This is the first major commercial airline crash in the United States since 2009, when 50 people died after a plane crashed while landing near Buffalo Niagara International Airport.
“I had to say that it’s terrible,” he said, citing what he called a story about a group within the FAA that had “determined that the [FAA] workforce was too white, that they had concerted efforts to get the administration to change that and to change it immediately. This was in the Obama administration, just prior to my getting there, and we took care of African Americans, Hispanic Americans.”
Trump then signed an executive order later Thursday that appointed Christopher Rocheleau, a 22-year veteran of the FAA, as acting commissioner of the agency, which he had said he would do in the briefing. And he signed a second executive order “aimed at undoing all of that damage” caused by the “Biden administration’s DEI and woke policies.”
“We want the most competent people. We don’t care what race they are,” the president said. “If they don’t have a great brain, a great power of the brain, they’re not going to be very good at what they do and bad things will happen.”
When asked in the earlier briefing by ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Mary Bruce whether he was saying the crash was the result of diversity hiring, Trump said, “we don’t know” what caused the crash, adding investigators are still looking into that. “It just could have been. We have a high standard. We’ve had a higher, much higher standard than anybody else.”
Even as he made unfounded claims about the FAA’s diversity initiatives being a factor in the disaster, he said the Army helicopter crew could be at fault — and claimed he wasn’t blaming the air traffic controller who communicated with the helicopter.
When asked how he could come to the conclusion that FAA diversity policies had something to do with the disaster, he said, “Because I have common sense, OK, and unfortunately a lot of people don’t.”
DEI and any similar programs do not apply to air traffic control hiring, though — no one is given preferential treatment for race, sex, ethnicity or sexual orientation, a former FAA official told ABC News.
Applicants must pass a medical exam, an aptitude test and a psychological test that is more stringent than that required of a pilot, said Chris Wilbanks, FAA deputy vice president of safety and technical training.
In 2022, 57,000 people applied for an ATC position, Wilbanks said, and 2,400 qualified to attend the academy. Of that 2,400, only 1,000 made it to the first day of training.
Wilbanks said 72% make it through the academy and roughly 60% of those will finish training.
According to the FAA, the training process lasts about three to four years from the hire date. Applicants must be younger than 31 and must retire by age 55.
Anyone who has taken Ritalin or Adderall in the last three years doesn’t qualify, the former FAA official said.
No determination of fault in the crash has been made, and the National Transportation Safety Board is conducting an investigation.
However, the NTSB declined to say whether DEI initiatives were a factor in the crash when asked by reporters later Thursday.
“As part of any investigation, we look at the human, the machine and the environment,” NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy said. “So we will look at all the humans that were involved in this accident. Again, we will look at the aircraft. We will look at the helicopter. We will look at the environment in which they were operating in. That is part of that is standard in any part of our investigation.”
In the White House briefing, several Cabinet officials spoke after Trump to address the crash, with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy saying, “What happened yesterday shouldn’t have happened.”
“And when Americans take off in airplanes, they should expect to land at their destination,” he added. “That didn’t happen yesterday. That’s not acceptable, and so we will not accept excuses. We will not accept passing the buck. We are going to take responsibility at the Department of Transportation and the FAA to make sure we have the reforms that have been dictated by President Trump in place to make sure that these mistakes do not happen again.”
However, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, while noting that a “mistake was made” in the crash, said the Department of Defense must be “colorblind and merit-based … whether it’s flying Black Hawks, and flying airplanes, leading platoons or in government.”
“The era of DEI is gone at the Defense Department, and we need the best and brightest, whether it’s in our air traffic control or whether it’s in our generals, or whether it’s throughout government,” he said.
Vice President JD Vance, too, alluded to DEI having a part in the crash, saying, “We want the best people at air traffic control.”
“If you go back to just some of the headlines over the past 10 years, you have many hundreds of people suing the government because they would like to be air traffic controllers, but they were turned away because of the color of their skin,” Vance said. “That policy ends under Donald Trump’s leadership, because safety is the first priority of our aviation industry.”
But when a reporter pressed Trump, saying that similar language on DEI policies existed on the FAA’s website under Trump’s entire first term, Trump shot back, “I changed the Obama policy, and we had a very good policy and then Biden came in and he changed it. And then when I came in two days, three days ago, I said, a new order, bringing it to the highest level of intelligence.”
Trump said Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary in the Biden administration, “just got a good line of bulls—” and said he had “run [the Department of Transportation] right into the ground with his diversity.”
“Despicable. As families grieve, Trump should be leading, not lying,” Buttigieg responded in a statement on X. “We put safety first, drove down close calls, grew Air Traffic Control, and had zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of millions of flights on our watch. President Trump now oversees the military and the FAA. One of his first acts was to fire and suspend some of the key personnel who helped keep our skies safe. Time for the President to show actual leadership and explain what he will do to prevent this from happening again.”
Illinois Rep. Robin Kelly called Trump’s comments “dangerous, racist, and ignorant.”
“President Trump twisted a terrible tragedy — while families are mourning their loved ones — to insert his own political agenda and sow division,” Kelly said in a statement. “This is not leadership. We need to investigate how this plane crash happened to give a sense of closure to grieving families and prevent future crashes.
“Trump would rather point fingers than look in the mirror and face the fact that he just cut a committee responsible for aviation security,” she added. “The issue with our country is not its diversity. It’s the lack of leadership in the White House and unqualified Cabinet. Trump’s actions and words are dangerous, racist, and ignorant — simply un-American.”
(NEW YORK) — President-elect Donald Trump announced Monday that SoftBank will make a $100 billion investment in the U.S. that will create 100,000 jobs focused on artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. SoftBank plans to complete the work before Trump leaves office in 2029, according to a person familiar with the matter.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
