Trump administration moves to dissolve ban on Abrego Garcia’s removal to deport him to Liberia
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(NEW YORK) — The Trump administration has moved to dissolve the ban on Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s removal so that it can proceed with his deportation to Liberia.
In a series of filings overnight, government attorneys said that the Salvadoran native’s claim of fear of torture or persecution in the African nation was denied after he was interviewed by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services last week.
The attorneys for the Department of Justice argued that the preliminary injunction blocking Abrego Garcia’s removal to Liberia should be dissolved because the government received assurances from the government of the West African country that he will not be persecuted or tortured.
The government also said that Abrego Garcia’s lawsuit to stop his removal is improper because he is a member of a separate class action lawsuit in Massachusetts regarding third-country removals. In that case, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to proceed with third-country removals.
“Even if the merits were properly presented here, Petitioner’s claims fail,” the DOJ said. “The Constitution does not entitle Petitioner to process beyond what the political branches have chosen to afford.”
Abrego Garcia, who had been living in Maryland with his wife and children, was deported in March to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison — despite a 2019 court order barring his deportation to that country due to fear of persecution.
He was brought back to the U.S. in June to face human smuggling charges in Tennessee, to which he has pleaded not guilty.
The DOJ called Abrego Garcia a member of MS-13 and said his removal is “in the public interest.”
On Friday, Abrego Garcia’s attorneys asked U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis to block his removal to Liberia until an immigration judge reviews the denial of his reasonable fear claim by USCIS.
“The Government insists that the unreasoned determination of a single immigration officer—who concluded that Abrego Garcia failed to establish that it is “more likely than not” that he will be persecuted or tortured in Liberia— satisfies due process,” his attorneys said. “It does not.”
Abrego Garcia’s attorneys also said that the government has “cycled through” four third-country destinations—Uganda, Eswatini, Ghana, and now Liberia—without providing “the notice, opportunity to be heard and individualized assessment that due process requires.”
They argued that the government has disregarded their client’s “statutory designation” of Costa Rica, despite the country’s previous assurances that it would accept him and give him refugee or resident status.
Abrego Garcia is currently being held in a detention facility in Pennsylvania.
Dozens of first responders crowd the street in front of Annunciation Catholic Church that was the scene of a shooting that killed two children and wounded seventeen other people on Wednesday, August 27, 2025 in Minneapolis, Minn. (Renee Jones Schneider/The Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty Images)
(MINNEAPOLIS) — A motive in the Annunciation Catholic School mass shooting remains under investigation, and police said they’ve not identified a specific trigger for why the children at this church were targeted.
Investigators determined that Westman “harbored a whole lot of hate towards a wide variety of people and groups of people,” and also “had a deranged obsession with previous mass shooters,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told ABC News Live on Thursday.
“This person, you know, committed this act with the intention of causing as much terror, as much trauma, as much carnage as possible for their own personal notoriety,” O’Hara said.
“The shooter expressed hate towards almost every group,” Joe Thompson, acting U.S. attorney for the District of Minnesota, said at a news conference on Thursday. “The shooter expressed hate towards Black people, the shooter expressed hate towards Mexican people, the shooter expressed hate towards Christian people, the shooter expressed hate towards Jewish people. In short, the shooter appeared to hate all of us.”
The shooter also “expressed hate” toward President Donald Trump, he said.
“There appears to be only one group that the shooter didn’t hate, one group of people who the shooter admired — the group were the school shooters and mass murderers that are notorious in this country,” Thompson said.
“More than anything, the shooter wanted to kill children, defenseless children. … The shooter wanted to watch children suffer,” Thompson said.
An 8-year-old and a 10-year-old were killed and 18 people — including 15 kids — were injured when the shooter opened fire through the windows of the Minneapolis school’s church on Wednesday morning. All injured victims are expected to survive, police said.
Westman never entered the church building, but could have entered after shooting out a door-sized window, O’Hara told ABC News.
“These children were slaughtered by a shooter who could not see them,” O’Hara said at a news conference, noting the shooter “was standing outside of the building firing through very narrow church windows.”
Westman died at the scene from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said.
Driver’s license information reviewed by ABC News described Westman as a female, born on June 17, 2002. A name change application for a minor born on the same date, June 17, 2002, was approved by a district court in Minnesota in 2020, changing the name of a Robert Westman to Robin Westman, explaining the minor child “identifies as a female and wants her name to reflect that identification.”
Investigators are reviewing hundreds of pages of documents, videos and other evidence as they look for a motive, O’Hara said.
Police have also conducted dozens of interviews with witnesses as well as people who knew the suspect, though investigators “have not been successful” in talking to Westman’s mother, the chief said.
Officials are investigating a series of videos posted to YouTube believed to be associated with the suspect, according to law enforcement sources familiar with the matter. Two videos, posted Wednesday morning and since removed by YouTube, show someone flipping through dozens of pages of notes dated over the course of several months, which include what appears to be doodles of weapons, middle fingers and expletives, as well as repeated references to killing.
Writings in notebooks and on the guns indicate a series of grievances, anger and ideations of harm to self and to others. The writings also appear to show overt references to other high-profile school shootings and shooters.
Officers recovered three guns — one rifle, one shotgun and one handgun — at the scene, all of which are believed to have been fired in the attack, police said. All of the guns were purchased legally by Westman, police said, and authorities believe they were purchased recently in Minnesota.
Three shotgun shells and 116 rifle rounds were recovered, police said. One live round was recovered from a handgun that appeared to malfunction, leaving the bullet stuck in the chamber, the chief said.
As Minneapolis mourns, Mayor Jacob Frey is stressing the need for gun control, telling ABC News’ “Good Morning America,” “How many times have you heard politicians talk of an ‘unspeakable tragedy’? And yet this kind of thing happens again and again.”
“Prayers, thoughts, they are certainly welcomed, but they are not enough,” Frey said. “There needs to be change so that we don’t have another mayor, in another month-and-a half, talking about a tragedy that happened in their city.”
Danielle Gunter, whose son, an eighth grader, was shot and wounded, said in a statement to Minneapolis ABC affiliate KSTP, “We feel the pain, the anger, the confusion, and the searing reality that our lives will never be the same. Yet we still have our child.”
“We grieve and we pray: for the others who were shot, for their families, and for those who lost loved ones,” she said.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said he’s sending state law enforcement to help with security at schools and places of worship in the city.
ABC News’ Alex Perez, Alyssa Acquavella, Mariama Jalloh, Pierre Thomas, Jack Date, Luke Barr, Aaron Katersky and Sasha Pezenik contributed to this report.
State Attorney General Letitia James. Jim Franco/Albany Times Union via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — Days after the Justice Department assigned its Weaponization Working Group to open an investigation into New York Attorney General Letitia James, the group’s director, Ed Martin, sent a letter calling for her resignation — leapfrogging multiple steps federal prosecutors ordinarily undertake to determine whether the subject of an investigation engaged in criminal activity.
The letter was sent last week to James’ attorney, according to a copy of the letter reviewed by ABC News.
Federal prosecutors issued subpoenas earlier this month as part of a civil rights investigation into James’ business fraud case against President Donald Trump and her office’s corruption case against the National Rifle Association, ABC News previously reported.
Trump and his eldest sons were found liable last year for 10 years of fraud that inflated the president’s net worth, and the case is now on appeal. James earlier won a $4 million judgment against NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre, after a jury found that he and others had misappropriating donor funds to finance luxury items for themselves.
Martin is also investigating two properties James owns in New York and Virginia.
The inquiries into James are part of a retribution battle President Trump promised to wage against perceived adversaries, which he tapped Martin to help lead.
In neither case has James been formally accused of wrongdoing, but Martin in his letter said her resignation would serve the national interest.
“Her resignation from office would give the people of New York and America more peace than proceeding. I would take this as an act of good faith,” Martin wrote.
On Aug. 15, three days after he sent the letter, Martin showed up wearing a trench coat outside James’ Brooklyn home and posed for a New York Post photographer who was there waiting.
When a neighbor asked what he was doing, Martin replied, “I’m just looking at houses,” but he later told Fox News, “I’m a prosecutor … I wanted to lay eyes on it … I wanted to see the property.”
The staged visit appeared to violate Justice Department protocol and both Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy, Todd Blanche, told Martin the visit was unhelpful and counterproductive, multiple sources told ABC News.
The Justice Department declined to comment. Martin did not respond to a request for comment from ABC News.
Abbe Lowell, an attorney for James, said Martin’s conduct demonstrates that he is not conducting a serious investigation.
“[D]espite the lack of evidence or law, you will take whatever actions you have been directed to take to make good on President Trump’s and Attorney General Bondi’s calls for revenge for that reason alone,” Lowell said in a letter to Martin sent Monday, a copy of which ABC News reviewed.
“Just four days into your role, no search for facts or questions of law; instead, you twice called for Ms. James to resign. DOJ has firm policies against using investigations and against using prosecutorial power for achieving political ends,” Lowell wrote.
The deaths of two South Carolina women are being investigated as a possible homicide after their bodies were found in a rural, wooded area on Aug. 8, according to the Sumter County Coroner’s Office. Sumter County Sheriff’s Office
(SUMTER COUNTY, S.C.) — The deaths of two South Carolina women are being investigated as homicides after their bodies were found in a rural, wooded area on Friday, according to the Sumter County Coroner’s Office.
At approximately 1 p.m. on Friday, two bodies were discovered near a rural, wooded area in Rembert, South Carolina, off Richbow Road, officials said.
The person who discovered the bodies alerted authorities and “met deputies upon their arrival,” the Sumter County Sheriff’s Office said in a press release.
On Friday, Sumter County Sheriff Anthony Dennis — who joined investigators on the scene — said the deaths were “suspicious.” However, Dennis noted that they would need to wait until they “have the results of the autopsies to know more.”
In a press release shared with ABC News on Monday, the coroner’s office identified the victims as 35-year-old Christine Marie McAbee and 38-year-old Kristen Grissom, and said the deaths would be investigated as homicides.
The two were from Charleston County, which is over 100 miles from where their bodies were found.
The autopsies will be performed on Tuesday at the Medical University in Charleston, the coroner’s office said. Officials said the women’s families have been notified of their deaths.
Anyone with more information regarding the incident should contact the sheriff’s office at 803-436-2000 or submit a tip online.
More information regarding the deaths will “be released as it becomes available,” according to the sheriff’s office.
The Sumter County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
