The Henry County Sheriff’s Office executed a narcotics search warrant on Tuesday, May 12, 2026, at approximately 9:45 p.m. at a residence located at 271 Chestnut Oak Drive in the Bassett area of Henry County.
The search warrant stemmed from an ongoing investigation involving the distribution of methamphetamine from the residence. Upon arrival, members of the Henry County Sheriff’s Office SWAT Team encountered approximately twelve individuals inside the home, along with several dogs.
During the execution of the search warrant, investigators located a quantity of suspected methamphetamine and fentanyl. Investigators believe attempts were made to destroy evidence by flushing suspected methamphetamine down a toilet, which ultimately caused the toilet to become clogged.
Deputies were able to recover multiple ounces of suspected methamphetamine.
As a result of the investigation, Teyan Davon Jones, 36 years of age, was taken into custody for possession of Schedule I/II drugs (methamphetamine).
Jones is currently incarcerated at the Henry County Adult Detention Center with no bond. Jones was already on supervised probation and out on bond for a pending narcotics-related charge.
Additionally, the Henry County Sheriff’s Office will be seeking petitions for a 17-year-old female whe was found to have suspected illegal narcotics, including fentanyl, and digital scales.
The residence on Chestnut Oak Drive has been the source of numerous complaints and has been considered a nuisance property within the community for several years.
Sheriff Wayne Davis stated, “The Henry County Sheriff’s Office maintains zero tolerance when it comes to illegal drugs in our communities. We remain committed to aggressively targeting individuals who distribute narcotics and negatively impact the quality of life for the citizens of Henry County.”
The investigation remains ongoing, and additional charges are possible. Anyone with information related to illegal narcotics activity is encouraged to contact the Henry County Sheriff’s Office at (276) 638-8751 or Crimestoppers at 63-CRIME (632-7463). Information leading to arrests and convictions may qualify for a cash reward.
Paratroopers assigned to 2nd Battalion, 82nd Airborne Division conduct live fire exercises at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, July 28, 2025. (Spc Jayreliz Batista Prado/US Army, File)
(WASHINGTON) — Elements of the 82nd Airborne Division are poised to deploy to the Middle East, amid the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran, according to a source familiar with the situation.
The deployment is set to include both a headquarters unit and ground combat forces. A headquarters company, around 250 personnel, would handle logistics, coordination and operational planning for the deployment.
One brigade — about 3,000 soldiers — of the 82nd is constantly on standby as the Immediate Response Force, tasked to be able to deploy anywhere in the world within 18 hours.
It remains unclear how many combat troops would ultimately be mobilized — or what role they would play in a potential conflict with Iran. Any move to introduce U.S. ground forces would mark a significant escalation, opening the door to a far broader and more complex phase of the war.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that the U.S. has effectively won the war and that Iran’s military is nearly annihilated. But strikes against U.S. troops in neighboring countries has continued. So far, 13 U.S. troops have been killed in action and at least 290 have been wounded.
“I don’t like to say this. We’ve won this — this war has been won,” Trump told reporters Tuesday.
So far, 13 U.S. troops have been killed in action and at least 290 have been wounded.
The 82nd Airborne Division is the Pentagon’s premier ground force, designed to deploy on short notice anywhere in the world and trained in parachute assaults to quickly seize contested terrain — though that doesn’t mean that’s how they could be deployed into the Middle East.
Signs of a potential deployment have been building for weeks. Earlier this month, the same 82nd Airborne headquarters unit was suddenly pulled from a significant training event at Fort Polk, Louisiana, three U.S. officials told ABC News, fueling speculation the division was being prepared to deploy to the Middle East.
The 82nd, which is based out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, could join the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) as potential ground forces swell into the region. A MEU is a 2,200-troop force which is expected to arrive in the Middle East this week.
Experts say the MEU would likely be used to conduct raids across the Iranian shoreline to gain a foothold in areas around the crucial Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil flows by ship.
And three Navy ships carrying 2,200 Marines left San Diego last week for a previously scheduled deployment to the Indo-Pacific, but two U.S. officials tell ABC News their ultimate destination is likely the Middle East.
The 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit is aboard the USS Boxer, the USS Comstock and the USS Portland — along with 2,000 sailors.
U.S. President Donald Trump talks with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio as he departs the White House on March 20, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — For more than 60 years, hundreds of thousands of Cuban health care workers have been deployed across the globe.
Under the government’s medical missions program, doctors, nurses, technicians and other staff are sent to countries around the world to provide care to underserved communities, in many cases for a fee.
The Cuban government has said the missions, or “medical brigades,” have entered countries at war, hit by natural disasters and ravaged by outbreaks of disease, saving thousands of lives.
Critics, including the Trump administration, have held a different view, claiming that the health professionals are coerced into volunteering, partly as a way to bring in much-needed currency, and that their movements are restricted. The U.S. State Department has referred to the missions as “forced labor” and has pressured countries to stop accepting Cuban medical workers.
“The Trump administration, Biden administration and U.N. have all understood that these medical mission programs are a forced labor scheme that exploit Cuban workers,” White House principal deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said in a statement to ABC News. “These labor export programs abuse the participants, enrich the corrupt Cuban regime and deprive everyday Cubans of essential medical care that they desperately need in their homeland.
Kelly noted President Donald Trump believes “Cuba is a disaster that’s in its last moments of life, and these programs are one of many ways that they repress their own people.”
Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not return multiple requests for comment from ABC News.
A White House official told ABC News there is vast opposition to the Cuban medical missions program across political parties, in both chambers of Congress and from international organizations.
The humans rights organization Prisoners Defenders said in 2020 that it submitted a report to the United Nations and the International Criminal Court claiming it has evidence of “a pattern of slavery” on the medical missions.
Countries including the Bahamas, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Paraguay have begun phasing out the missions, reviewing medical cooperation agreements or canceling contracts with the Cuban government.
Some international relations experts told ABC News that there is some truth to the allegations that Cuban medical workers are often closely monitored by Cuba’s government, but that the medics are also providing care to communities that would otherwise not receive it.
History of the program
After the Cuban Revolution began in 1959, many doctors left Cuba for the U.S. Newly installed leader Fidel Castro saw an opportunity to set up programs to train doctors not just for Cuba but to be sent overseas as a type of medical diplomacy, according to John Kirk, a professor emeritus of Latin American Studies at Dalhousie University In Halifax, Nova Scotia, who has written several books on Cuba.
The first medical mission was a small team of doctors sent to Chile, which experienced the strongest earthquake ever recorded in 1960. The first medical brigade was sent to Algeria in May 1963. In the 1970s, medical missions expanded greatly to Latin America and Africa.
Some countries, like Gambia or Haiti — which are poorer — pay Cuba nothing for medical care, according to Kirk. However, richer countries such as Qatar pay the Cuban government a monthly fee, about 25% of which is given to the Cuban medical workers themselves, he noted. Qatar pays Cuba about $9,000 to $10,000 a month for these services, Kirk said.
Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately reply to ABC News’ request for comment on how much countries pay Cuba for the service of medical workers.
Between 1960 and 2023, 600,000 doctors, nurses and technicians participated in this program in 165 different countries, according to the Cuban government.
As of 2024, Cuba had 54 brigades with more than 22,600 medical workers, according to Granma, the official newspaper of Cuba’s communist party.
Philip Brenner, a professor emeritus in the School of International Service at American University, with expertise in U.S.-Cuba relations, said one example of Cuba’s program was Operación Milagro in Venezuela, launched in 2004, to provide ophthalmology services.
“More than 1 million people regained eyesight, and it wasn’t a major operation,” Brenner told ABC News. “These were like cataracts that people had, but they had no access to medical care until the Cuban doctors came in. They served an enormous number of people around the world.”
Criticism of the program
The U.S. government has long been critical of the Cuban medical missions program, claiming health care professionals are forced into it and sending workers overseas deprives Cubans of the medical care they need at home.
In August, the State Department revoked visas and imposed visa restrictions on several Brazilian government officials, former Pan American Health Organization officials and their family members due to “complicity” with the Cuba’s “labor export scheme.”
“These officials were responsible for or involved in abetting the Cuban regime’s coercive labor export scheme, which exploits Cuban medical workers through forced labor,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement.
Brazil’s government did not respond to the allegations but Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva revoked the visa of a U.S diplomat who sought to visit former President Jair Bolsonaro. Lula said the measure was reciprocal for the U.S. revoking visas in August, according to the Associated Press.
The Cuban government did not reply to ABC News’ requests for comment on these claims.
Kirk, the Dalhousie professor emeritus, said of the 270 Cuban medical professionals that he interviewed, most said they volunteered and were not forced to partake in these missions, but he acknowledged it doesn’t mean they weren’t forced.
Sebastián Arcos, interim director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University, said no one is physically forced to participate in these missions, but the conditions in Cuba push many to work in the program to try and earn some money to support their families.
“The other [thing] is, once you participate, once you volunteer for one of these missions, you earn credits with the Cuban regime,” he told ABC News. “Any kind of acknowledgement or respect that you can get from the Cuban government will help your career.”
Arcos said he is familiar with the experiences of those on missions because his wife’s sister, Karem Montiel, was part of a Cuban medical brigade in Eritrea, Africa.
Montiel told ABC News she used to teach embryology at the University of Medical Sciences in Havana and was selected to join a medical brigade in 2010 to teach at Eritrea’s Orotta School of Medicine.
She said she had a good relationship with her students, but criticized the Cuban government’s involvment in the program .
“That is nothing else but slavery, 21st century slavery,” she said. “I was the one doing the work but [the Cuban government is] the one who gets the money. … They own all the Cuban doctors. They make the money, they get paid for those doctors being there, working, and they pay the doctors the bare minimum.”
Montiel said that working as a doctor in Cuba, she was paid the equivalent of $23 per month. She said she was paid more to go on a medical mission but the salary is deposited in a bank account in Cuba, which doctors cannot access until they return to the country.
According to Montiel, the chief of the medical brigade holds on to everybody’s passports. She added that the chief of her mission also accompanied all staff to any immigration appointments they had.
According to Montiel, there are two reasons doctors go on the medical missions: either to get more money and buy things they are unable to buy in Cuba — like computers or TVs — or to attempt to escape Cuba.
Montiel did the latter and left her medical mission early, defecting to the U.S. in December 2010.
“Nobody goes [on medical missions] for the humanitarian reasons to help out the people in need, or the poor people who do not have access to health care,” she said.
She now works as a nurse practitioner in Miami, and her husband and two children have since joined her.
Arcos is also skeptical that the Cuban government is performing the medical missions for purely humanitarian purposes.
“The Cuban government is not really trying to help other people who are less fortunate,” he said. “This is a business for them. They are making money. They are gathering intelligence. They are influencing other governments, and all of this is done on the backs of hardworking people.”
Why is the US ramping up pressure?
For the last several months, the Trump administration has been increasing pressure on governments that receive Cuban medical personnel.
The federal government warned that it could impose sanctions against governments that accept the health workers. The administration said that the program is “exploitative,” with workers forcibly separated from their families, subjected to surveillance, given little pay and under threat if they don’t return to Cuba.
Several countries have recently pulled out of agreements and some that haven’t said the U.S. is pushing them to do so.
During the Second World Congress on Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities in January, Prime Minister Philip Pierre of Saint Lucia said he’s faced pressure from the U.S. government over not having the Caribbean island’s medical students be trained in Cuba.
“We also have Cubans who come over to work. So, the American government has said we can’t even train them in Cuba. So, I have a major issue on my hand,” Pierre said, according to local reports.
In a statement on Facebook last month, the U.S. Embassy to Barbados, the Eastern Caribbean and the inter-governmental Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States denied speaking with Saint Lucia’s government about international education.
“The United States continues to call for an end to exploitation and forced labor in the illegitimate Cuban regime’s overseas medical missions program,” the embassy wrote.
Kirk and Brenner say the U.S. has signaled in the past that it is looking for a regime change in Cuba and placing a stranglehold on the economy may help achieve that objective.
Both said they believe that stranglehold can be maintained through the energy blockade, which has been in place since January, and by cutting a major source of income for Cuba: the medical missions program.
“Because Cuba does earn hard currency from some of the doctors being sent abroad, one of the ways in which the United States has tried to strangle the Cuban economy is by getting countries to end their medical programs with Cuba,” Brenner said. “Even though those medical programs have benefited the people in those countries, the goal has been very narrow: one of trying to hurt Cuba. And it’s been very effective; it’s one of the ways in which Cuba has lost hard currency.”
What will happen to counties that pull out?
For countries that pulled out of Cuba’s program, the experts said they expect to see worsening health conditions.
“We’d have to expect to see more chronic disease and more people dying from disease that otherwise they wouldn’t die from because of the lack of help from Cuba,” Brenner, from American University’s School of International Service, said.
“The United States had previously provided some assistance to these countries through USAID but, under [the Department of Government Efficiency], USAID was essentially destroyed, and the medical programs that the United States had haven’t been resumed,” Brenner said.
Not all counties are pulling out of agreements, however. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said on Wednesday that she will keep an agreement with Cuba’s government and continue to have Cuban doctors working in Mexico.
Kirk noted that Mexico currently has about 3,000 Cuban medics in the county. He added that if Mexico does pull out of its agreement with Cuba, it will be “a major blow, symbolically, politically and financially.”
President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media traveling on Air Force One while heading to Miami on March 7, 2026. President Trump and other members of the government attended the dignified transfer of six soldiers from the 103rd Sustainment Command who were killed in action by an Iranian drone strike on March 1 in Port of Shuaiba, Kuwait, during Operation Epic Fury. (Photo by Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — Ten days into the U.S. war with Iran, Americans are starting to feel the economic fallout as oil and gas prices soar.
Gas prices skyrocketed to a national average of $3.47 on Monday, up nearly 50 cents from last week, according to data from AAA. Plus, oil prices on Monday surpassed $100 a barrel for the first time since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 before falling lower later in the day.
President Donald Trump has dismissed the higher cost, telling ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Mary Bruce it’s “a little glitch.”
“I think it’s fine. It’s a little glitch. We had to take this detour,” Trump told ABC’s Bruce in an interview on Sunday before going on to tout the U.S. military campaign against Tehran.
In a social media post on Sunday night, Trump argued: “Short term oil prices, which will drop rapidly when the destruction of the Iran nuclear threat is over, is a very small price to pay for U.S.A., and World, Safety and Peace.”
Yet the cost of living remains one of the biggest issues heading into the 2026 midterms, where Trump and Republicans are seeking to maintain narrow majorities in Congress.
A poll released by NBC News on Sunday found Trump received his lowest ratings in the poll on his handling of inflation and the cost of living as 36% of registered voters approve and 62% disapprove.
On Iran, the NBC poll found a majority of registered voters (54%) disapproved of Trump’s handling of the matter.
Trump, on the 2024 campaign trail, vowed to bring gas down below $2 a gallon. During the first year of his second term, Trump routinely pointed to the drop in prices at the pump, including in his State of the Union address last month.
“Gasoline, which reached a peak of over $6 a gallon in some states under my predecessor and was, quite honestly, a disaster, is now below $2.30 a gallon in most states, and in some places $1.99 a gallon,” Trump said in his speech on Feb. 24.
Now, gas prices are closing in on $3.50 a gallon and are expected to continue to keep rising the longer the Middle East conflict lasts.
Patrick De Haan, a petroleum analyst at GasBuddy, told ABC News Live that Americans are currently experiencing “sticker shock.”
“Gas stations are seeing their costs go up in real time again today, as oil markets are jumping, and that’s going to be in another round of price increases over the course of this week, prices could jump another 15 to 35 cents a gallon for gasoline over the next three days, as long as nothing changes,” De Haan said. “And it’s going to be worse for the price of diesel, which could jump 35 to 50 cents a gallon, that would put it close to nearly a $5 a gallon national average.”
Some Democrats are seizing on the price jump to criticize Trump and the administration for the handling of the war.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, has called for President Trump to tap into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to alleviate the financial burden for Americans.
“American families are suffering from higher prices as the effects of Trump’s reckless war become pain at the gas pump and beyond as high gas prices trickle down making everything more expensive,” Schumer said in a statement on Sunday. “They cannot afford to simply wait and hope prices come down. The President has a solution right here at home, and he should use it.”
“Trump promised a Golden Age in America. Meanwhile. Republicans are crashing the economy, gas prices are out of control and the extremists are spending billions dropping bombs in the Middle East. You deserve better,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, also a New York Democrat, wrote on X on Monday.
Trump was asked over the weekend if he would use the SPR to bring some relief, but declined to say, instead criticizing former President Joe Biden’s use of the reserve. Biden released oil from the SPR several times over the course of 2022 as prices increased due to Russia’s war on Ukraine.
“I filled it up and he brought it down to the lowest level it’s ever been. We will start at the appropriate time, which is basically a gut instinct, we will start filling up,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Saturday.
“Biden used them so that he could get some extra votes in the election,” Trump added.
Analysts previously told ABC News that the SPR is a “valuable resource” for the administration to bring some relief to Americans and assuage market fears, but likely wouldn’t be enough oil in the long term to make up for the 20 million barrels of oil currently being prevented from passing through the Strait of Hormuz every day.
Trump told Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade in an interview on Sunday night that ships holding at the Strait of Hormuz need to “show some guts” and push through the channel.
Several war-risk insurers have canceled their coverage for vessels amid the widening conflict. Trump said the U.S. government was going to provide some risk insurance and guarantees, and if necessary the U.S. Navy would escort tankers through the strait.
Like Trump, several Republicans are contending that higher gas prices will be temporary.
“The prices will come back down as soon as we get out of Iran, as soon as we finish turning them into fish food, which will be pretty soon,” Republican Sen. John Kennedy said on Fox News on Sunday.
How long the Iran war will last remains an open question. President Trump initially estimated four to five weeks for the U.S., though he later said the timeline would be whatever it takes.
On Sunday, Trump told ABC’s Bruce: “I don’t know. I never predict. All I can say is we are ahead of schedule both in terms of lethality and in terms of time.”
GasBuddy’s De Haan told ABC News Live that the longer the conflict lasts, the more time it will take to see oil and gas prices to get back to their previous levels
“Every day the situation continues, it could add another several weeks to the recovery time,” De Haan said.
ABC News’ Isabella Murray, Nicholas Kerr, Soo Youn and Max Zahn contributed to this report.
