Tree trimmer dead after getting caught in wood chipper at Florida town hall
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(MIAMI) — A tree trimmer died after getting caught in a wood chipper while trimming trees at a town hall near Miami, officials said.
The incident occurred at approximately 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday morning when the Ocean Ridge Police Department responded to Ocean Ridge Town Hall — some 60 miles north of Miami — for “an accident involving one employee from a contracted tree trimming vendor,” according to a statement from the town of Ocean Ridge on social media.
“Upon arrival, Ocean Ridge officers found one person had died from injuries sustained in the accident,” officials said. No other individuals on scene sustained injuries.
Officials from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) were immediately notified and were en route to the scene, according to the town of Ocean Ridge.
The identity of the victim has not yet been disclosed by authorities.
The investigation is currently ongoing at this time and Boynton Beach Fire Rescue is providing grief counseling to town employees and vendor staff, officials said.
(WASHINGTON) — The Trump administration has asked the U.S. Supreme Court a second time to urgently lift U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s temporary restraining order blocking the deportations of alleged Tren de Aragua gang members under the Alien Enemies Act.
“Only this Court can stop rule-by-TRO from further upending the separation of powers — the sooner, the better,” Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris wrote in an emergency application to the court.
The appeal follows Wednesday’s 2-1 ruling by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upholding Boasberg’s order and defending his jurisdiction in the matter.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(WASHINGTON) — At the U.S. Agency for International Development this week, as a team from the Department of Government Efficiency quietly worked to dismantle the aid agency, those who hadn’t already been locked out of its Washington headquarters busied themselves with work they never imagined doing — shutting it down.
“We feel like it’s closing time at the store and we’re the ones left to turn off the lights,” one career official told ABC News. “There’s lots of tears, lots of heartbreak.”
Normal day-to-day work ceased earlier in the week, when the Trump administration announced plans to place all direct-hire employees on leave starting Friday, leaving career officials to focus on the logistical hurdles of recalling thousands of overseas employees back to the U.S., including reserving flights for those officials and their families.
“We could be doing the lifesaving work we’ve been doing,” the official said, “but instead we’re stuck here like travel agents.”
As congressional Democrats scramble to rescue USAID, its thousands of employees in the U.S. and around the globe are grappling with how to “leave with dignity,” another career agency official said.
But doing so has proven to be a challenge. A message posted on USAID.gov signaled that some “designated personnel” would remain on the job, prompting a frantic race among staff to secure their livelihoods.
“It’s the Hunger Games,” another career USAID official based in Washington said. “They’re narrowing down lists to the smallest number of staff. People fighting to be on those lists.”
USAID staff on Thursday were digesting news that all but roughly 600 employees would be placed on leave by the end of the week. President Trump has accused the agency of perpetrating “tremendous fraud” and promoting left-wing ideologies.
Meanwhile, officials deployed overseas face hurdles of their own. The abrupt stop-work orders and funding freezes imposed by the Trump administration have placed frontline USAID employees in the uncomfortable position of explaining to regional partners what is happening.
“Many of [the foreign service nationals] have worked for USAID for 20-30 years,” said one USAID official stationed in the Democratic Republic of Congo. “It’s impossible to explain to them what is going on. It breaks their faith in America. We are going to lose thousands of our best friends and allies.”
In a different African country, staff met earlier in the week to begin choreographing their departure, a local USAID official recalled.
“The meeting today with local staff was rough,” the official said. “The ambassador was there, and folks were crying. It was extremely sad. Both the mission director and the deputy mission director were also in tears.”
One official with 20 years at USAID under their belt said the ambassador in their country encouraged staff to “start preparing your CVs and start looking for jobs, because inevitably, you’re all going to be terminated.”
“[The administration is] just terrorizing everyone in USAID who has served their country, making huge sacrifices, moving around the world every four years, pulling kids out of school and away from friends and like spouses giving up their own careers so that we can serve our country and do this important work around the world,” the official said. “And I feel like It’s being erased.”
At the agency’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, which has been the U.S. government’s lead response coordinator for international disasters, several employees said their email access was revoked, rendering them unable to communicate with senior officials.
One USAID contractor overseas said they were “stuck abroad on official travel with no guidance on how to proceed, where they are able to work, how to get home, or whether they are able to work.”
On Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is overseeing USAID as its acting administrator, insisted during a press conference in the Dominican Republic that the administration would accommodate “exceptional circumstances regarding families or displacement.”
“We’re not trying to be disruptive to peoples’ personal lives,” Rubio insisted. “We’re not being punitive,” he said.
Back in Washington, Peter Marocco, a Trump loyalist and the architect of plans to drastically diminish the agency’s footprint, has been “in and out” of the building, but has not engaged with career officials or addressed any large numbers of staff. Marocco did not reply to ABC News’ request for comment.
Rubio has said rank-and-file USAID officials had demonstrated “rank insubordination” during attempts to overhaul the agency, claiming that the administration was left with “no choice but to take dramatic steps to bring this thing under control.”
Late Thursday, as working hours on the East Coast wound down, a senior career official at USAID shared this somber text message with ABC News: “I just lost my job.”
The official, who spent nearly a decade at the agency, was not told she was dismissed. Instead, she said agency leaders alerted those who will remain in their roles on Thursday afternoon, leaving the remaining employees to assume they would be placed on administrative leave.
Photo by MARK SCHIEFELBEIN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told embassy officials in Guatemala this week that it was “not our intention” to uproot families deployed overseas with USAID, despite the agency issuing a 30-day mandate for their return.
“I know it’s hard to ask for patience. I know it’s hard to ask for trust,” Rubio said, according to a partial transcript of his meet-and-greet with embassy staff that was obtained by ABC News.
Rubio, who was tapped to serve as the acting director of the aid agency, also seemed to acknowledge the administration’s haphazard approach to cutting USAID — which handles foreign aid, disaster relief and international development programs — saying it was undertaken “in a manner that we would have preferred to be different, but we’re forced to do because of impediments that we would confront.”
Elon Musk, the head of the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, said earlier this week he was “in the process” of “shutting down” the agency with the backing of President Donald Trump, as part of efforts to trim the size of the federal government and eliminate waste.
The Trump administration on Wednesday placed all direct-hire employees at USAID on administrative leave starting Friday, with plans to recall all foreign-based USAID employees back to the U.S. within 30 days.
In the transcript of Rubio’s meeting with Guatemalan embassy staff, he says that the ambassador to Guatemala “handed” him a list of USAID programs in the country that he said “align with our U.S. goals and our interests.” That list was the result of an all-night scramble by staff who were directed to compile it shortly after the secretary arrived in the country, according to an embassy official.
Rubio said that document “gave us the idea that we should ask the same exercise be conducted by every Mission around the world so that intelligent decisions can be made” regarding which programs to keep, before the end of Thursday.
The directive has quickly resulted in pushback from some USAID staff stationed abroad, who say the Thursday deadline set by State Department leadership will be extremely difficult for most posts to meet, and that it may be part of a strategy to avoid lawsuits from agency employees that could slow down its dismantling.
“Absolutely impossible,” one USAID employee told ABC News. “Clearly, the 90-day foreign aid review has been compressed to two days.”
Rubio’s remarks came in response to concerns from Haven Cruz-Hubbard, the USAID mission director for Guatemala, who asked about the administration’s efforts to curb foreign aid. Rubio insisted that “the United States is not walking away from foreign aid. It’s not.”
“I want to tell you that this is not about politics, but foreign aid is the least popular thing Government spends money on,” Rubio said, according to the transcript. “And I spent a lot of time in my career defending it and explaining it, but it’s harder and harder to do across the board — it really is.”
Rubio’s private comments generally reflect what he’s said publicly about the cuts to foreign aid — but his sentiments seemed more sympathetic toward the workers whose careers and livelihoods hang in the balance.
“For those of us in charge of doing the work of foreign policy, we understand [foreign aid] is essential,” he said.
The New York Times was first to report on the partial transcript.
