Teen who called for dad’s release from ICE custody dies of cancer
Cancer patient Ofelia Torres holds up her baby photos, some of the include her father Ruben Torres-Maldonado. (ABC News)
(CHICAGO) — A Chicago teen who fought for her father’s release from immigration detention while she was battling stage 4 cancer, has died, a representative for her family says.
Ofelia Torres died Friday at age 16, according to the family representative. The cause of death was metastatic alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma — a rare and aggressive form of cancer.
Torres grabbed the national spotlight last fall after her undocumented father, Ruben Torres-Maldonado, was detained by immigration agents during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, dubbed “Operation Midway Blitz.” Torres posted a video on social media calling for his release, and was also interviewed on ABC News’ “Nightline.”
A representative for Torres’ family said that just three days before she died, an immigration judge ruled that her father was conditionally entitled to receive cancellation of removal, which could provide a pathway to a green card. Torres watched the hearing virtually, the family said.
In the “Nightline” interview last fall, Torres said she initially tried to keep her cancer diagnosis private, but said she was speaking out to defend her father.
“I need the world to know my dad’s story and if that means letting the world know I have cancer, so be it. I don’t care,” she said. “I need my dad.”
In a statement, Kalman Resnick, the attorney representing Torres’ father, said: “Ofelia was heroic and brave in the face of ICE’s detention and threatened deportation of her father. We mourn Ofelia’s passing, and we hope that she will serve as a model for us all for how to be courageous and to fight for what’s right to our last breaths.”
Torres-Maldonado was taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at a Home Depot in Niles, Illinois, outside Chicago on Oct. 18 before being released on bond about two weeks later.
Resnick, who represented Torres-Maldonado, told reporters at a press conference last fall that federal agents surrounded Torres-Maldonado’s truck, smashed a window and dragged him into a vehicle at gunpoint.
At the time, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin alleged that Torres-Maldonado had backed into a government vehicle while attempting to flee.
DHS maintained Torres-Maldonado was a “criminal illegal alien” with a history of driving without insurance, driving without a valid license and speeding.
In the “Nightline” interview Torres said that despite how her father was treated, she had “nothing but love” for the federal agents who arrested her father.
“To the ICE agents who smashed my dad’s window, to the ICE agent who pointed a gun at my dad, I’m not mad at you … I just want you to know that that was not the right thing to do,” she told ABC News’ Stephanie Ramos.
(NEW YORK) — As forests shrink and wildlife disappears, mosquitoes are increasingly turning to people for their blood meals, a shift that raises real concerns about the potential spread of diseases that affect humans.
A new study published in the journal Frontiers suggests these buzzing, biting insects are playing a growing role in the increased transmission of Zika, yellow fever, dengue and other diseases that mosquitoes pass on to people, thanks in part to disappearing habitats.
Deforestation, which is the widespread clearing of forests, and other human activity has vastly reduced local populations of plants and animals while increasing human populations in the same areas, according to the study.
“Mosquitoes that are normally feeding on other hosts within the habitat can shift to humans if the habitat is no longer suitable for those hosts and they leave,” Laura Harrington, a Ph.D.-level professor of entomology at Cornell University, told ABC News.
Human blood was widely found in nine types of mosquitoes in two formerly uninhabited areas in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, preliminary study results found. This area was once a part of the Atlantic Forest that covered 502,000 square miles. Today, it has shrunk to 29% of its original size as a result of deforestation and development, according to the final study.
The researchers point to past studies showing that areas with heavier deforestation have a higher mosquito abundance and higher rates of mosquito-borne disease because disturbed habitats favor species that thrive near people. At the same time, reduced biodiversity removes animals that can dilute disease transmission, making humans more likely to become the primary blood source.
Sérgio Lisboa Machado, a co-author of the paper and a professor at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, said mosquitoes are opportunists who don’t venture far to find food.
“So they start searching for humans because mosquitoes rarely fly very long distances,” he told ABC News. “They are not going to pay a lot of energy to find [other food sources].”
More than 17% of all infectious diseases are caused by vector-borne diseases, meaning a disease that’s transmitted to humans by a living organism, such as mosquitoes, ticks, and flies, the World Health Organization (WHO) reports. These biting insects cause more than 700,000 deaths globally.
Mosquitoes alone transmit dozens of serious diseases to humans, according to the WHO, which consequently considers them the deadliest animals on Earth.
Female mosquitoes are the culprit. They must drink blood to get the protein and iron they need to develop their eggs, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
There is a “reproductive drive for them to feed on blood, and if there’s no other host there, most mosquitoes would feed on a human,” Harrington told ABC News.
Male mosquitoes buzz, but they don’t bite, instead dining on nectar and plant sugars.
There are 3,500 mosquito species globally, Harrington said, noting that there are only a handful that truly prefer the taste of human blood over other animals. When given a choice, only a small fraction of mosquito species regularly seek out humans.
“It’s something that we’ve known for a long time,” Harrington said. “This notion that manipulating the landscape can alter mosquito feeding patterns and sometimes shift feeding patterns towards humans.”
The Environmental Protection Agency flag flies outside the EPA headquarters in Washington on Thursday, August 7, 2025. Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — More than two dozen Senate Democrats are launching an independent investigation into the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over a rule change on how the agency calculates the health benefits from curbing air pollution.
The EPA wrote in its regulatory impact analysis last month that it would no longer apply a dollar value to the health benefits that result from its regulations for fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone because the agency says there’s too much uncertainty in the estimates. In the past, the EPA calculated a dollar value based on the health benefits of reducing air pollution, which included the number of premature deaths and illnesses avoided, such as asthma attacks.
The senators described the new policy as “irrational” and said it will lead to the EPA rejecting actions that would impose “relatively minor costs” on polluting industries that could result in “massive benefits” to public health, according to a letter sent to the EPA on Thursday and obtained by ABC News.
“The only beneficiaries will be polluting industries, many of which are among President Trump’s largest donors,” the senators wrote.
Led by Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works Ranking Member Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., the senators are requesting documents and information about how EPA made this determination by Feb. 26.
The decision to not quantify the health benefits of environmental regulations is “completely unsupported” and “a very stark departure” from the way the EPA has worked under both Republican and Democratic administrations over the last several decades, said Richard L. Revesz, dean emeritus at the New York University School of Law who specializes in environmental and regulatory law and policy.
The regulatory impact analysis does not cite any science or economics and did not allow for public comments, Revesz told ABC News. The approach was also not submitted to the EPA’s Science Advisory Board, “which is standard,” nor was it submitted for peer review, he added.
“Each of those things are necessary elements for changing scientific policies like this, and EPA violated every single one of them,” Revesz said.
Senate democrats are seeking the basis on which the EPA made the decision; what the EPA willl take into account when undertaking Clean Air Act rulemaking; whether the EPA has discussed ceasing to quantify health effects of other pollutants; and whether the EPA consulted with any third parties, including the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Surgeon General, public health experts and interested civil society groups.
It was industry executives who pushed for benefit-cost analysis during Ronald Reagan’s administration in the 1980s, said Janet McCabe, visiting professor at Indiana University’s McKinney School of Law and former deputy administrator of the EPA between 2021 and 2024. In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12866, which instructs each agency to perform rigorous cost benefit analysis for any rule or regulation to be implemented.
“There’s a whole field of environmental economics where models and analytical methods and data collection have evolved on both the cost and the benefit side to help decision-makers and the public understand,” McCabe told ABC News.
While the EPA points to uncertainties in the estimates, assigning a number to monetize health benefits is “very defensible” because of the vast number of studies that allow economists to estimate ranges of health impacts in terms of monetary value, McCabe said.
In the past, when the EPA felt like it could not rigorously assign a number to either cost or health benefit, “it would say so,” McCabe said.
The EPA has received the letter and will respond through the proper channels, an EPA spokesperson told ABC News.
PM2.5 and ozone — soot and smog — are two of the most dangerous and widespread pollutants in the U.S., according to health and environmental policy experts. They are produced by a number of sources, including emissions from vehicles, power plants, the agriculture industry and oil refineries.
The agency is still considering the impacts that fine particulate matter and ozone emissions have on human health, like it “always has,” but that it will not be monetizing the impacts “at this time,” an EPA spokesperson told ABC News last month.
“EPA is fully committed to its core mission of protecting human health and the environment by relying on gold standard science, not the approval of so-called environmental groups that are funded by far-left activists,” the EPA spokesperson said.
The new EPA rule could prove dangerous to human health in the future because it will make it easier for the Trump administration to weaken air pollution controls, the experts who spoke with ABC News said. The EPA will only have the cost to industry to consider when making policy decisions without factoring in the benefits to health, the experts said.
“There will be nothing on the health side to balance them,” McCabe said. “That will make rules much easier to justify from a cost benefit perspective, because all you will see is the costs.”
In its regulatory impact analysis published in January 2024, the EPA calculated the benefit avoided morbidities and premature death in the year 2032 as worth between $22 billion and $46 billion. In February 2024, when the EPA tightened the amount of PM2.5 that could be emitted by industrial facilities, it estimated that the rule would prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths by 2032.
This data will no longer be considered under the new rule.
“It’s not even estimating how many deaths that is, even though the models for doing both things have been very well established for a long, long time,” Revesz said.
A sign is displayed outside of the Mary E. Switzerland Memorial Building which houses the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on June 2, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Kevin Carter/Getty Images)
(MINNEAPOLIS) — An official with the Department of Health and Human Services says the agency has “frozen all child care payments” to the state of Minnesota after allegations of fraudulent day care centers there.
In addition, HHS is tightening requirements for payments from the Administration for Children and Families to all states, requiring a justification and a receipt or photo evidence, Deputy HHS Secretary Jim O’Neill said in a post on social media Tuesday.
The move comes after an unverified online video from conservative influencer Nick Shirley alleging fraud in child care in Somali communities in Minneapolis. Minnesota officials had disputed the allegations.
In the post, O’Neill wrote the agency was taking steps to address “blatant fraud that appears to be rampant in Minnesota and across the country” and said HHS was demanding Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz conduct a “comprehensive audit” of day care centers identified in the viral video.
In a post on social media, Walz responded to the move by HHS, writing: “This is Trump’s long game. We’ve spent years cracking down on fraudsters. It’s a serious issue – but this has been his plan all along. He’s politicizing the issue to defund programs that help Minnesotans.”
Earlier this week, Minnesota officials had also pushed back on the claims made in the video that went viral last week.
Conservative influencer Nick Shirley posted a 40-minute-long video alleging fraud in childcare in Somali communities in Minneapolis. In the video, Shirley allegedly visited daycares that he said have taken public funds, but there were no children when he visited.
ABC News has not independently verified any of his claims. Unrelated allegations of fraud have been under investigation by state officials dating back to the time of the Biden administration.
According to Minneapolis-St. Paul ABC News affiliate KSTP, Tikki Brown, the commissioner of the state Department of Children, Youth and Families, raised concerns about the video, including whether videos were taken during times when the businesses were scheduled to be open.
“While we have questions about some of the methods that were used in the video, we do take the concerns that the video raises about fraud very seriously,” Brown said on Monday.
“Each of the facilities mentioned in the video has been visited at least once in the last six months as part of our typical licensing process, and in fact, our staff are out in the community today to visit each of these sites again so that we can look into the concerns that were raised in the video,” she added.
Brown noted that children were present during the unannounced visits by the state at all the visits.
The Minnesota Department of Children, Youth and Families did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment on the video or the allegations of fraud.
After the video Shirley posted to social media went viral, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in an X post that her department was conducting a “massive investigation on childcare and other rampant fraud.” Similarly, FBI Director Kash Patel said the agency had already surged resources into Minnesota and that he believed alleged fraud already uncovered on federal food aid during COVID was “just the tip of a very large iceberg.”
“To date, the FBI dismantled a $250 million fraud scheme that stole federal food aid meant for vulnerable children during COVID,” FBI Director Kash Patel said in a Sunday evening X post. “The investigation exposed sham vendors, shell companies, and large-scale money laundering tied to the Feeding Our Future network.”
The COVID fraud scheme was uncovered during the Biden administration, but charges have been brought as late as this year.
At a cabinet meeting earlier this month, President Donald Trump criticized the U.S. Somali community, citing allegations of fraud in Minnesota.
One of the most senior career prosecutors at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota commented on massive amounts of alleged fraud in the state at a press conference earlier this month.
“The magnitude of fraud in Minnesota cannot be overstated. It’s staggering amounts of money that’s been lost,” prosecutor Joe Thompson said on Dec. 18.
