The Virginia Supreme Court ruled Friday that a Democrat-backed redistricting plan can go before voters in an April 21 special election, overturning a lower court's decision that had blocked the measure. The ruling keeps alive a power play by Virginia's Democrat-controlled legislature that could reshape the state's congressional map — and potentially flip four seats in Democrats' favor heading into the fall midterms.
Virginia Democrats already hold six of the state's eleven congressional seats. If the new maps survive legal challenges and pass the referendum, that advantage could swell to ten out of eleven. In a cycle where Republicans are defending a narrow House majority, the stakes could hardly be higher.
Last October, the Democrat-controlled Virginia Legislature passed new district maps in what Republicans have called an illegally rushed maneuver. Senate Minority Leader Ryan McDougle framed it in blunt terms:
"Last October, Democrats took an unprecedented step to illegally pass a constitutional amendment at the 11th hour. The judiciary agreed and the Supreme Court has taken up and fast tracked the case. Make no mistake, the rule of law will prevail."
A state court agreed — at least partially — and blocked the redistricting effort last month. That should have been a stop sign. Instead, the Virginia Supreme Court stepped in, overturned the lower court, and let the referendum proceed.
Here's the critical detail: the Supreme Court is still considering the legality of the new maps. A final ruling won't come until after the April 21 special election. Virginia voters may cast ballots on a redistricting plan that could ultimately be struck down as unconstitutional. Democrats are betting the political momentum of a public vote will be harder to unwind than a quiet legislative maneuver, as New York Post reports.
Virginia House Speaker Don Scott, one of the architects of the redistricting push, wasted no time declaring victory:
"Today the Supreme Court of Virginia affirmed what we already know, Virginians will have the final say."
That line sounds democratic in the small-d sense — until you examine the process that got the question onto the ballot. Passing new maps at the eleventh hour, having them blocked by a court, and then getting a higher court to override the block so voters can weigh in before the legality question is even settled — that's not "letting the people decide." That's engineering an outcome and wrapping it in populist language.
If Democrats were confident in the legality of their maps, they wouldn't need the political insurance of a referendum vote before the courts finish their work. The sequencing tells you everything.
Virginia isn't operating in a vacuum. Redistricting fights are erupting across the country as both parties position for the midterms.
Both parties gerrymander when they can. That's the uncomfortable reality. But Virginia's gambit stands out for its procedural aggression. Passing maps that may violate the state constitution, losing in court, and then racing to get a public vote locked in before the legal question is resolved isn't standard-issue redistricting hardball. It's an attempt to create facts on the ground that make judicial intervention politically radioactive.
Four seats are not a rounding error. In a House where control has hinged on margins of five or fewer seats in recent cycles, Virginia alone could determine which party holds the gavel. Republicans defending their majority now face the prospect of a map drawn explicitly to erase them — in a state where Democrats already hold the advantage.
The fall midterms will be fought district by district. But some of those districts may be drawn by the very people trying to win them. McDougle's insistence that "the rule of law will prevail" isn't just rhetoric — it's the only firewall Republicans have left in Virginia. If the courts ultimately uphold the maps, the damage will be structural and lasting.
Watch the language Democrats use in the coming weeks. Every objection to the maps will be recast as an attack on voters' rights to decide. Every legal challenge will be framed as elitist overreach. The referendum itself becomes the argument — not the substance of the maps, not the process that produced them, not the constitutional questions still unresolved.
It's a familiar playbook. Engineer the outcome, then dare anyone to overturn it. Call the engineered result "the will of the people." Accuse anyone who objects of being anti-democratic.
April 21 is less than a referendum on maps. It's a test of whether process still matters — or whether speed and political will are enough to redraw the rules of the game while the referees are still deliberating.
A federal grand jury has charged 11 individuals in a marriage fraud conspiracy run by a Chinese transnational criminal organization that recruited U.S. Navy service members to enter sham marriages with Chinese nationals — granting them not just immigration benefits but physical access to American military installations.
The three-count indictment, unsealed in Jacksonville, Florida, lays out a scheme spanning from March 2024 to February 2025. Five suspects were arrested on Feb. 3 by Homeland Security Investigations and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Two more are scheduled to self-surrender. Six remain at large.
Four former Navy service members have already pleaded guilty in related cases. Their sentencing hearings are pending.
The operation worked like a pipeline. The criminal organization recruited U.S. citizens — preferably members of the armed forces, according to the indictment — to marry Chinese nationals in exchange for structured cash payments. The first installment came up front. A second followed when the foreign spouse obtained legal immigration status. A final payment arrived after the divorce. The marriages were transactional, start to finish.
But immigration fraud was only half the equation. Because military spouses receive identification cards granting access to U.S. installations, the scheme doubled as a backdoor onto American bases. That elevates this from garden-variety fraud to a direct national security threat, as Just The News reports.
The sham marriages took place across multiple states — New York, Connecticut, Nevada, and Florida — suggesting the network's reach extended well beyond a single jurisdiction.
The most detailed episode in the indictment reads like a federal case study in how brazen the operation had become.
In January 2025, a confidential source reported to law enforcement that Navy reservist Raymond Zumba had offered to bribe the source and the source's spouse — who worked in the personnel office issuing identification cards at Naval Air Station Jacksonville — in exchange for unauthorized Department of War ID cards.
Federal agents directed the source to continue communications with Zumba. On Feb. 13, 2025, Zumba drove from New York to Jacksonville with three co-defendants: Anny Chen, 54, of New York; Hailing Feng, 27, of New York; and Kin Man Cheok, 32, of China. After business hours, Zumba brought Chen and Cheok onto Naval Air Station Jacksonville and initiated the process for them to receive ID cards.
The next day — Valentine's Day — Zumba met with the confidential source and handed over $3,500 in exchange for two cards.
He was arrested on the spot. Both cards were recovered.
The indictment names five defendants:
Four former Navy members — Raymond Zumba, Brinio Urena, Morgan Chambers, and Jacinth Bailey — have pleaded guilty in related cases. The identities of the remaining defendants have not been publicly disclosed.
Each count of marriage fraud conspiracy and bribery conspiracy carries a maximum federal prison sentence of five years.
Marriage fraud schemes are not new. What distinguishes this case is the deliberate targeting of military personnel — not as incidental marks, but as the preferred vehicle for the operation. The indictment's language is telling: the organization sought U.S. citizens, "preferably members of the armed forces." That preference wasn't about romance. It was about what a military spouse ID card unlocks.
HSI Tampa acting Special Agent in Charge Michael Cochran framed the stakes clearly:
"This investigation underscores the critical role that HSI plays in protecting our nation from transnational criminal organizations that seek to exploit our customs and immigration laws and threaten our national security. Through the dedication and expertise of our agents and partners, we have successfully investigated, disrupted and dismantled a sophisticated criminal network operating across borders."
"Dismantled" may be the operative word — but six targets remain unaccounted for, and the network's full scope across four states suggests this indictment captures a slice of the operation, not necessarily its totality.
Every immigration enforcement story invites the same tired deflection: that these are victimless bureaucratic violations, paperwork crimes dressed up as threats. This case demolishes that narrative. Chinese nationals obtained physical access to a U.S. naval air station through fraudulent marriages brokered by a transnational criminal organization. Active-duty and reserve service members sold their status — and their country's security — for cash.
The men and women who serve honorably on bases like NAS Jacksonville deserve to know that the people walking through the gate beside them actually belong there. Four of their own peers betrayed that trust. The organization that recruited them exploited every seam in the system — immigration law, military spousal benefits, base access protocols — simultaneously.
This is what immigration enforcement actually looks like when agencies are empowered to do their jobs: a multijurisdictional takedown spanning HSI offices in Jacksonville, New York, Baltimore, and Los Angeles, coordinated with NCIS, culminating in arrests, guilty pleas, and an indictment that names the network for what it is.
Six suspects are still out there. The work isn't finished.
President Trump put the Senate on notice Friday: pass the SAVE Act, or he'll go around it. In a pair of Truth Social posts, the president declared that voter ID requirements will be in place for the midterm elections — with or without congressional approval — and signaled he would issue an executive order to make it happen.
The first post landed around 4:30 p.m. EST:
"There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!"
Thirty minutes later, the follow-up made the mechanism explicit:
"If we can't get it through Congress, there are Legal reasons why this SCAM is not permitted. I will be presenting them shortly, in the form of an Executive Order."
The message was unmistakable. The SAVE Act — the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act — cleared the House on Wednesday in a razor-thin 218-213 vote. It now faces an uncertain path in the Senate, where Democratic opposition and Republican timidity threaten to run out the clock before November.
The legislation requires voters to present proof of citizenship. For mail-in ballots, it mandates either a photocopy of a state-issued ID or, for those who cannot obtain a valid ID, an affidavit sworn under penalty of law accompanied by the last four digits of their Social Security number.
This is not a radical proposition. It is the minimum threshold a functioning democracy should expect. You need an ID to board a plane, buy cold medicine, or open a bank account. The notion that proving you are a citizen before casting a vote in an American election constitutes "overreach" tells you everything about where the opposition's priorities lie, as The Hill reports.
Trump framed the politics bluntly:
"Even Democrat Voters agree, 85%, that there should be Voter I.D."
And yet only one Democrat in the entire House — Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas — voted for the bill on Wednesday. One. Out of an entire caucus.
The Democratic retreat is worth examining closely. Three House Democrats — Reps. Ed Case of Hawaii, Jared Golden of Maine, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington voted for a previous version of the SAVE Act. That earlier version did not include the voter ID requirement for mail-in ballots. When the updated bill came to the floor on Wednesday with that provision added, all three voted no.
So these Democrats were fine with proof-of-citizenship requirements in the abstract. But the moment the legislation gained teeth — the moment it addressed the specific mechanism most vulnerable to fraud — they walked. That's not a principled stance. That's a tell.
In the Senate, the landscape is even bleaker. Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania is the only Democrat who has indicated support for the legislation. The rest of the caucus appears content to let the bill die quietly.
Conservatives have pushed Senate Republicans to deploy the "talking filibuster" — forcing opponents to hold the floor and defend, in public and on camera, why they oppose requiring proof of citizenship to vote. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said his caucus will discuss the tactic but has not committed to it. His concern: a weeks-long floor debate on the SAVE Act would block Republicans from moving forward on other priorities.
That calculation deserves scrutiny. Priorities are not all created equal. Housing reform and permitting bills matter. But election integrity is the foundation beneath every other legislative fight. If voters cannot trust that the people casting ballots are legally entitled to cast them, the legitimacy of every law Congress passes erodes.
Rep. Keith Self of Texas captured the dynamic plainly:
"The president has to bring every possible weapon he has to this fight to get the Senate to move, because the Senate will not move without incredible, crushing pressure."
Trump's executive order threat is that pressure. It forces senators to make a choice rather than run out the clock in comfortable ambiguity.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska has come out against the bill, posting a statement on X that leaned heavily on procedural concern:
"Election Day is fast approaching. Imposing new federal requirements now, when states are deep into their preparations, would negatively impact election integrity by forcing election officials to scramble to adhere to new policies likely without the necessary resources."
She followed it with a line that could have been written by the opposition's messaging shop:
"Ensuring public trust in our elections is at the core of our democracy, but federal overreach is not how we achieve this."
"Federal overreach." Requiring proof of citizenship to participate in a federal election is now federal overreach. By that logic, every federal election law ever passed — from the Voting Rights Act to campaign finance disclosure — qualifies. The framing collapses under its own weight.
Murkowski's argument also contains a quiet concession: she acknowledges that "public trust in our elections" matters. But she offers no alternative mechanism for achieving it. The objection is entirely about timing and logistics — never about whether the underlying requirement is just. That's because the underlying requirement is obviously just. Even the opponents know it.
Trump urged Republicans to make this a centerpiece of their midterm messaging:
"Republicans must put this at the top of every speech — It is a CAN'T MISS FOR RE-ELECTION IN THE MIDTERMS, AND BEYOND!"
He's right about the politics. Voter ID polls well across every demographic, including — by Trump's cited figure — 85% of Democratic voters. The gap between where Democratic voters stand and where Democratic politicians stand on this issue is a chasm. It's the kind of chasm that costs seats in a midterm year.
Democrats' position requires them to argue, simultaneously, that American elections are the most secure in the world and that adding basic verification measures would somehow undermine them. That illegal immigrants don't vote in meaningful numbers, and that requiring proof of citizenship would disenfranchise people. Neither of these propositions can be true. If noncitizen voting isn't happening, a citizenship requirement changes nothing. If it would change something — well, then it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do.
Trump characterized Democratic opposition with his usual directness, calling them:
"horrible, disingenuous CHEATERS" who have "all sorts of reasons why it shouldn't be passed, and then boldly laugh in the backrooms after their ridiculous presentations."
The rhetoric is hot. But the underlying observation — that opposition to voter ID is performative and strategic rather than principled — is difficult to rebut when 85% of your own voters disagree with you.
The specifics of Trump's threatened executive order remain to be seen. He stated there are legal reasons the current system "is not permitted" and promised to present them shortly. The legal terrain for executive action on election administration is complex — elections are primarily run by states, and any order would almost certainly face immediate court challenges.
But the executive order may not need to survive litigation to succeed. Its primary function right now is political: to force the Senate's hand. Every day the SAVE Act sits without a vote is a day senators have to explain why they won't let Americans decide whether voters should prove they're citizens. That's not a debate most incumbents want heading into November.
The House did its job. The president made his position clear. The Senate is the bottleneck — and everyone watching knows it.
Steve Bannon told Jeffrey Epstein he would "take down" Pope Francis. That's according to newly released Department of Justice files containing messages between the former White House advisor and the late financier, exchanged in June 2019.
The messages, part of a broader trove of Epstein-related communications shared by the DOJ, show Bannon and Epstein discussing the Pope, the Clintons, Chinese President Xi, and the European Union in the same breath — a kind of globe-spanning enemies list dressed up as casual banter between two men who apparently had more contact than previously known.
"The Clintons, Xi, Francis, EU – come on brother."
That was Bannon to Epstein. Whatever one thinks of the targets on that list, the company in which those thoughts were shared should stop anyone cold.
The conversations centered in part on *In the Closet of the Vatican*, a 2019 book by French journalist Frédéric Martel that made the bombshell claim that 80 percent of clergy working in the Vatican are gay. Bannon apparently wanted to turn it into a film — and told Epstein he was the executive producer.
"You are now exec producer of 'ITCOTV.'"
Epstein's reply referenced Noam Chomsky — the leftist intellectual with whom Epstein was known to be close — asking about the status of the film. Whether any of this was a real production effort or just two men inflating their own sense of influence over cocktail-napkin schemes remains genuinely unclear.
What is clear: Bannon, who reportedly identifies as a Roman Catholic, was actively discussing how to weaponize a book about Vatican corruption against the sitting Pope — and his chosen collaborator was Jeffrey Epstein, as The Independent reports.
None of this hostility toward Pope Francis was new for Bannon. In a 2018 interview with The Spectator, he described the Pope as "beneath contempt" and accused him of "siding with globalist elites." The DOJ files simply reveal that his contempt had an operational dimension — and a deeply troubling partner.
At one point, Epstein sent Bannon an article titled "Pope Francis or Steve Bannon? Catholics must choose." Bannon's response was two words:
"Easy choice."
It's worth pausing here — not to relitigate Bannon's views on Catholic Church governance, some of which resonate with faithful Catholics who have legitimate grievances about institutional corruption and doctrinal drift. There are serious critiques to be made of Pope Francis's pontificate from a conservative Catholic perspective. The problem isn't the critique. It's the chat room.
The Epstein files have been a slow-drip indictment of elite culture across the political spectrum. Every new release names people who had no business being in that man's orbit — and yet were. Bannon's inclusion in that orbit is significant not because it discredits conservatism, but because it illustrates how Epstein operated: attaching himself to the power of every ideological flavor, making himself useful, making himself trusted.
Conservatives who rightly demanded full transparency on the Epstein files — who pushed for every name to be released and every connection scrutinized — cannot flinch now that the files touch someone on their side of the aisle. The principle was never "expose only the Democrats." The principle was sunlight.
The same release that shows Bannon's messages also shows Epstein in communication with Chomsky, a figure the left has lionized for decades. Epstein's network was ideologically promiscuous. That's what made it dangerous.
Pope Francis and the conservative movement had a genuinely complicated relationship — one that extended well beyond Bannon's personal vendetta. In 2016, Francis suggested that Donald Trump's border wall plans made him "not Christian":
"A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian."
Just one day before Trump's second inauguration in January 2025, Francis weighed in again on mass deportation plans:
"If it is true, it will be a disgrace, because it makes the poor wretches who have nothing pay the bill for the imbalance. It won't do. This is not the way to solve things."
These interventions frustrated many American conservatives who saw a Pope more interested in scolding sovereign nations for enforcing their borders than in addressing the institutional rot within his own Church. That frustration was — and remains — legitimate.
Vice President JD Vance, himself a Roman Catholic, offered perhaps the most thoughtful conservative response to this tension. In an interview, he articulated the concept of *ordo amoris* — the ordered nature of Christian love:
"There's this old school – and I think it's a very Christian concept, by the way – that you love your family and then you love your neighbour and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritise the rest of the world."
Francis directly contradicted this, insisting that Christian love "is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups." It was one of the more revealing theological exchanges in recent political memory — two Catholics, both sincere, arriving at fundamentally different conclusions about what love demands of a nation.
Vance met with Pope Francis on Easter Sunday 2025 and shared a homily with him. Francis died on April 21, 2025. President Trump called him "a good man, who worked hard and loved the world."
The DOJ files raise questions that deserve answers — not from partisan actors looking to score points, but from anyone who took the Epstein accountability project seriously. The specifics of why these files were released, through what legal mechanism, and what other communications they contain remain unclear.
Bannon's representatives have not responded to requests for comment.
The conservative critique of Pope Francis — on immigration, on globalism, on the Church's internal scandals — stands or falls on its own merits. Millions of faithful Catholics hold those views without ever exchanging a single message with Jeffrey Epstein. That's the line. The critique doesn't need Epstein, and anyone who brought him into it contaminated something that was otherwise defensible.
You can want accountability in the Vatican without wanting it delivered by a man who trafficked children. That distinction matters more than any of the politics around it.
The FBI asked Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos for DNA evidence and a black glove recovered in connection with the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie — the mother of Today host Savannah Guthrie — and he sent it to a private lab in Florida instead.
Not to the FBI's national crime laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, with its world-class forensic capabilities. To a private contractor in Florida that the sheriff's department regularly uses. As the investigation closed in on the two-week mark with no known proof of life, the sheriff with primary jurisdiction effectively cut the FBI out of the evidence chain.
An unnamed FBI source told Reuters the move has real consequences:
"It risks further slowing a case that grows more urgent by the minute."
The same source added:
"It's clear the fastest path to answers is leveraging federal resources and technology."
Pima County has reportedly spent about $200,000 sending evidence to the Florida lab. The FBI's Quantico facility — one of the most advanced forensic operations on the planet — would have processed it at no cost to the county. That's not a close call. That's a jurisdictional turf war dressed up as procedure.
Nancy Guthrie vanished in the early-morning hours of February 1 from her home in Pima County. Doorbell camera footage captured an armed, masked individual tampering with the camera around that time. Family members say she had a sound mind but suffered from limited mobility and needed daily medication to survive.
That last detail matters. Every day without resolution is a day closer to a point of no return.
DNA tests confirmed that traces of blood found on the front porch came from Nancy Guthrie. A black glove was recovered about a mile from the home. Several purported ransom notes have surfaced — delivered not to the family or law enforcement, but to news media outlets. The deadlines in those notes have lapsed. No proof of life has been provided, as The Daily Beast reports.
On Saturday, Savannah Guthrie posted a video alongside her siblings Annie and Camron, speaking directly to whoever took their mother:
"We beg you now to return our mother to us so that we can celebrate with her. This is the only way we will have peace. This is very valuable to us, and we will pay."
That's a daughter on camera, offering money to her mother's captor, because the investigation hasn't given her family anything else to hold onto.
The FBI's Phoenix field office shared new details about the suspect on Thursday, describing the individual as approximately 5 feet 9 inches to 5 feet 10 inches tall with an average build, wearing a black 25-liter Ozark Trail Hiker Pack backpack. The bureau is offering up to $100,000 for information leading to Nancy Guthrie's location or the arrest and conviction of anyone involved.
The doorbell camera images took more than a week to recover from what Patel described on Wednesday as "residual data located in backend systems." A week — in a case where hours matter.
On Tuesday, a man identified only as "Carlos," who described himself as a delivery driver, was brought in for questioning, and his residence was searched. He was released eight hours later. He told reporters he had no idea why he was brought in. No charges were filed.
So the public ledger of this investigation reads: one detained-and-released man who says he knows nothing, doorbell footage that took a week to extract, ransom notes sent to media rather than investigators, and critical physical evidence routed away from the FBI's best forensic tools at the sheriff's discretion.
The Pima County Sheriff's Department holds primary jurisdiction over the case. No one disputes that. The department has accepted the FBI's offer to provide assistance, which decides to bypass the FBI's crime lab all the more puzzling.
You don't accept federal help and then redirect evidence away from federal labs. That's not maintaining jurisdiction. That's maintaining control at the expense of outcomes. A woman is missing. She needs medication to survive. The family is publicly begging for her return. And the sheriff's priority is routing forensic evidence through his department's preferred vendor.
The Daily Beast contacted both the FBI and the Pima County Sheriff's Department for comment. Neither responded. Sheriff Nanos has offered no public explanation for the decision.
Silence, in a case like this, lands differently than it does in routine jurisdictional disputes. A family is waiting. The public is watching. And the man with the evidence won't say why he sent it to Florida instead of Quantico.
Federal investigators have the resources, the technology, and the capacity to process forensic evidence faster than a private lab contracting with a county sheriff's office. That's not opinion — it's infrastructure. The FBI built Quantico specifically for cases like this.
When a missing person case reaches the two-week mark with no arrest, no proof of life, and ransom notes whose deadlines have already expired, the window for a positive outcome narrows sharply. Every institutional friction point — every evidence delay, every jurisdictional standoff — costs time that Nancy Guthrie may not have.
The FBI offered $100,000, its Phoenix field office, and its crime lab. The sheriff took the first two and rejected the third. Somewhere in Florida, a private lab is processing the evidence that might bring a 54-year-old woman's mother home.
Savannah Guthrie and her siblings aren't waiting for jurisdiction to sort itself out. They're on camera, offering to pay a stranger for their mother's life. The least the people running this investigation can do is use the best tools available.
The Travis County Medical Examiner's Office has ruled that Brianna Aguilera, the 19-year-old Texas A&M student who fell from a 17th-floor balcony in Austin last November, died by suicide. Her cause of death: blunt force trauma. Her mother isn't buying it.
Aguilera fell from the 21 Rio apartment complex in the early morning hours of Nov. 29, 2025, while visiting Austin's West Campus area to cheer on the Aggies at the Lone Star Showdown against the Longhorns. Three other young women were inside the apartment unit at the time. None of them has come forward publicly.
That silence sits at the center of this story — and at the center of a $1 million civil lawsuit filed by Aguilera's mother, Stephanie Rodriguez, through Houston attorney Tony Buzbee.
At a Dec. 4 press conference, Austin Police laid out a timeline built on phone records and witness interviews. Lead homicide detective Robert Marshall described the final minutes:
"Witnesses heard Brianna arguing on the phone with her boyfriend, which was also confirmed later by the boyfriend. Phones from both the phone Brianna used and the boyfriend's phone have confirmed through call logs that that call did occur. Now, this call occurred at approximately 12:43 to 12:44 a.m., [for] approximately one minute. This is two minutes before the 911 call of the body found down below on the pavement."
Aguilera had borrowed a friend's phone to make the call. Two minutes later, someone dialed 911.
Police said they interviewed witnesses — some multiple times — and recovered a deleted digital suicide note from Aguilera's phone dated Nov. 25, four days before her death. The note was written to specific people in her life. Sgt. Nathan Sexton offered the department's conclusion plainly:
"In every investigation, we have to rely on the evidence, and all evidence in this case is indicative of suicide."
Rodriguez has been vocal since the beginning. She told PEOPLE on Feb. 13 that the ruling changed nothing for her:
"My thoughts haven't changed when it comes to, in regards to the cause of death, the manner of death, of course, they were going to rule it a suicide."
She described the official process as a delay tactic and made clear the civil lawsuit will proceed regardless of the medical examiner's findings:
"They were just trying to buy time. Our lawyers … are very well aware of the ruling, but we still are going to move forward with the civil suit case so we can get those roommates that were there with my daughter that night to talk because no one has come forward."
That last point — "no one has come forward" — is Rodriguez's sharpest argument, and the one that resonates most with the public. Three young women were in the apartment. A neighbor claimed to have heard shouting. Rodriguez says her daughter had been arguing with another girl over her boyfriend. Yet no one present that night has spoken publicly, as People reports.
"I know that someone must know something that night because if there was nothing to hide, someone would come forward, and the neighbor heard the disagreement, the argument, which I was already well aware of that day, leading up until that night."
Rodriguez has also hired a private medical examiner to conduct an independent autopsy. That report is currently with Buzbee, and no findings have been disclosed.
This is, by any measure, a devastating story. A 19-year-old woman is dead. Her mother is searching for answers that the official record says have already been provided — but that leave her unsatisfied. There is no villain-of-the-week here. There is a family in agony and a set of facts that point in one direction, while a mother's instinct pulls in another.
The evidence Austin Police have presented publicly is not trivial:
Rodriguez, for her part, has not presented counter-evidence publicly — only her conviction that her daughter was not suicidal, and the fact that the other witnesses have stayed silent. That silence is unsettling. It is not, however, the same thing as evidence of foul play.
This is where the public conversation around the case has grown complicated. Rodriguez told PEOPLE flatly:
"It doesn't matter what the people are saying or what the medical examiner's saying."
That's a mother's grief talking. It deserves compassion. But it also illustrates the difficult reality that official findings — built on forensic evidence, phone records, and witness statements — don't stop mattering because a family disputes them.
The civil lawsuit is the mechanism Rodriguez is banking on. A civil proceeding operates under a different burden of proof than a criminal investigation, and — critically — it can compel testimony. The three women in that apartment may finally have to answer questions under oath. That alone could be worth more to Rodriguez than any settlement.
Buzbee, a prominent Houston trial attorney, is not the kind of lawyer who takes cases for the press conferences alone. His involvement signals that Rodriguez's legal team believes there is enough to pursue, even if the criminal investigation has effectively closed.
Rodriguez acknowledged as much:
"The investigation and Austin PD has died down. Of course, we knew from the beginning they weren't going to do anything else. They just didn't like the backlash from the public and yeah, just, I am still not supporting 100% at all that this was a suicide."
The full autopsy report was expected to be released on Feb. 13. Whether its details shift the public narrative or reinforce the existing conclusion remains to be seen. The private autopsy — still under wraps with Buzbee — is the wild card.
For now, the official record says one thing. A mother says to another. And three young women who were in the room that night have said nothing at all.
Nearly eight in ten asylum seekers are now being turned away by immigration judges, a dramatic reversal from the Biden era that signals the most consequential shift in American immigration enforcement in years. In the last quarter, asylum grant rates plummeted to roughly 20% — down from 50% as recently as May 2022, when the southern border was hemorrhaging record numbers of illegal crossings.
The numbers aren't subtle. Deportations have topped 30,000 every month since Trump took office. In the most recent December on record, 38,215 illegal immigrants were removed — nearly double the 19,265 deported in December 2023 under Biden. Daily apprehensions at the border have cratered to 245, a 95% drop from the Biden-era average of 5,110 per day.
The floodgates didn't close themselves. This is what happens when an administration decides the immigration system should enforce the law rather than process an invasion.
The Trump administration has pursued a two-pronged strategy: remove judges who weren't doing their jobs, and replace them with people who will. Over the past year, the administration fired in excess of 100 immigration judges. This month alone, the Department of Justice hired 33 new ones. Another 36 were brought on in October. The Pentagon has been reassigning Judge Advocate General lawyers from the military to immigration courts on temporary assignments to attack the backlog.
The results are measurable. Immigration courts are now completing roughly 12,000 cases per month — nearly double the 6,000 to 7,000 monthly caseloads under Biden.
The DOJ framed the overhaul bluntly:
"After four years of Biden administration hiring practices that undermined the credibility and impartiality of the immigration courts, this Department of Justice continues to restore integrity to our immigration system."
The New York Bar Association expressed "deep concern" over the judicial firings, which is roughly as surprising as the sun rising in the east. But the math tells a different story than the legal establishment's hand-wringing. A 3.38 million-case backlog still looms — and even at the current accelerated pace, clearing it would take an estimated 14 years. Queens County alone carries 105,635 pending cases, the third-largest backlog in the country, as New York Post reports.
When the system is that broken, half-measures aren't reforms. They're window dressing.
Michael Cutler, who spent 30 years as an agent at the former Immigration and Naturalization Service, offered a corrective that shouldn't need offering but clearly does:
"If you look at what asylum is supposed to be, it's a very narrow definition . . . You have to be able to demonstrate a credible fear and be able to articulate that credible fear of persecution."
He drove the point further:
"It's not because there's a gang that's doing business down the block or you can't stand your mother in law or you can't find a job."
For years, the asylum system was treated as a general-purpose admissions program. Anyone who showed up at the border and uttered the right words was funneled into a process that could take years to resolve — years spent living and working in the United States, often with little incentive to appear for a hearing that might never come. The 50% grant rate under Biden wasn't evidence of legitimate persecution on a massive scale. It was evidence of a system that had abandoned its own standards.
Andrew Arthur, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Policy and a former immigration judge himself, connected the dots:
"It's having a real impact. The Trump Administration is doing all kinds of things to drive down the asylum grant rate."
"Drive down" is doing interesting work in that sentence. A more honest framing: the grant rate is returning to something resembling what asylum law was designed to produce.
The policy debate never stays abstract for long. Not when the consequences have names.
Laken Riley was killed while jogging at the University of Georgia in 2024, murdered by an illegal immigrant. Rachel Morin, a Maryland mother of five, was raped and killed in 2023. Her attacker, illegal immigrant Victor Martinez-Hernandez from El Salvador, received a life sentence. Matthew Denice was 23 when he was killed by a drunk-driving illegal immigrant from Ecuador in Milford, Massachusetts, in 2011.
These cases became flashpoints not because they were isolated, but because they were preventable. Every one of them involved someone who should not have been in the country.
Patricia Morin, Rachel's mother, told The Post what millions of Americans already understood:
"That's what American voted for, they voted for safety… this is the top issue that got him elected, and he's keeping his word."
She didn't stop there:
"Democrats keep talking about how bad all this is and it's not compassionate, but it's not virtue when you only give compassion to the criminal and don't give a second thought to the victim who has died."
That's the contradiction the left has never been able to answer. Compassion without accountability isn't compassion — it's negligence with better branding.
The scale of what the Trump administration inherited is worth sitting with. In 2022, Customs and Border Protection reported 2.76 million people crossed the southern border — a record. In 2023, more than 2.4 million migrants arrived at the Southwest border, with 3.2 million encounters nationwide. By August 2023, 70% of Americans disapproved of Biden's handling of the border in national polls.
Seventy percent. In a country that can't agree on pizza toppings, seven in ten Americans looked at the border and saw the same thing: failure.
Biden's own words from a 2019 Iowa campaign event aged like milk left in the sun:
"We could afford to take in a heartbeat, another 4 million people. The idea that a country of 330 million people cannot absorb people who are in desperate need and who are justifiably fleeing oppression is absolutely bizarre."
He got his wish. Americans have a 3.38 million-case asylum backlog, overwhelmed courts, and communities paying the price for policies designed to sound generous on a debate stage rather than function in reality.
Maureen Maloney, vice president of Advocates for Victims of Illegal Alien Crime, has been fighting for tighter borders since her son Matthew was killed in 2011. She didn't mince words:
"What Biden did to this country with the open borders was treason and Americans will be paying the price for many years to come."
She also acknowledged the sheer scale of the problem now facing enforcement:
"It's impossible for President Trump to deport however many millions of illegal aliens that have come across the border during the Biden administration."
Even with courts running at double capacity, even with deportations exceeding 30,000 a month, the math remains brutal. A 14-year timeline to clear the existing backlog means the damage from the Biden years will outlast multiple administrations. The top destinations for deportees — Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and Venezuela, in that order — represent a pipeline that took years to build and won't be dismantled overnight.
But the trajectory has reversed. Courts are adjudicating cases faster. Judges with military backgrounds are applying the law as written rather than as activists wish it read. The asylum grant rate reflects what the statute demands — a narrow, specific standard of persecution — not a generalized sympathy for anyone who makes the journey north.
Patricia Morin put it simply:
"We have all these unvetted people that are here in America and we don't know if they really are who they say they are."
That used to be an unremarkable observation. Somewhere along the way, it became a controversial one. The fact that it no longer drives policy paralysis is the most important shift of all.
Barack Obama sat down with progressive YouTuber Brian Tyler Cohen on Saturday to deliver his most direct public endorsement yet of the demonstrators who have mobilized against ICE operations in Minneapolis and St. Paul. The former president framed the protests as a patriotic act — American citizens standing up for their values — and characterized federal immigration enforcement in Minnesota as lawless and unaccountable.
It was a carefully staged moment. Not a press conference, not a statement through a spokesperson, but a lengthy interview with a friendly progressive media figure, designed to reach the activist base that once powered Obama's own political machine.
And the message was unmistakable: Obama wants the resistance to continue.
Obama's rhetoric escalated well beyond vague disapproval. He described ICE operations in the Twin Cities as "unprecedented" and rattled off a series of inflammatory claims about federal agents' conduct. In the interview, he said:
"It is important for us to recognize the unprecedented nature of what ICE was doing in Minneapolis, St Paul, the way that federal agents, ICE agents were being deployed, without any clear guidelines, training, pulling people out of their homes, using five-year-olds to try to bait their parents, all the stuff that we saw, teargassing crowds simply who were standing there, not breaking any laws."
No sourcing for those specific claims. No investigation cited. No official finding referenced. Just Barack Obama's characterizations, delivered with the calm authority of a man who knows his words will be repeated without scrutiny by every legacy newsroom in the country, as The Guardian reports.
He then cast the protests in the broadest possible terms — not as opposition to immigration enforcement, but as a test of national character:
"Right now, we're being tested, and the good news is, what we saw in Minneapolis and St Paul, and what we're seeing in places across the country, including here in Los Angeles, has been the American people saying no. At least a good number of the American people saying, we're going to live up to those values that we say we believe in."
And his bottom line:
"As long as we have folks doing that, I feel like we're going to get through this."
"Get through this." As though enforcing federal immigration law is something the country must survive rather than something it chose through an election.
This isn't the first time Obama has weighed in. Last month, he and Michelle Obama released a joint statement calling the death of Alex Pretti — one of two people who died in connection with federal operations in the Twin Cities — "a heartbreaking tragedy" and "a wake-up call to every American, regardless of party, that many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault." The statement also accused federal law enforcement and immigration agents of not operating "in a lawful or accountable way in Minnesota" and claimed the tactics employed by ICE and other federal agents seemed "designed to intimidate, harass, provoke and endanger the residents of a major American city."
That language does real work. It doesn't just criticize specific incidents — it delegitimizes the entire enforcement apparatus. When a former president tells the country that federal agents are operating unlawfully, he is providing moral permission for obstruction. He's telling local officials, activists, and ordinary citizens that resisting federal law enforcement is not just acceptable but noble.
The deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in connection with federal operations deserve scrutiny — every use of lethal force by government agents does. But note what Obama did not do: he did not call for an investigation. He did not call for due process. He did not wait for facts. He rendered his verdict and wrapped it in the flag.
There's a particular irony in Obama positioning himself as the champion of lawful, accountable government. His own administration deported millions of illegal immigrants. His own DHS conducted workplace raids and interior enforcement operations. The infrastructure he now decries didn't materialize from nowhere.
But the deeper problem isn't hypocrisy — it's strategy. Obama knows exactly what he's doing. By elevating Minneapolis as a model of resistance, he's signaling to Democratic mayors, progressive DAs, and activist organizations across the country that confrontation with federal immigration enforcement is the path forward. He referenced Los Angeles in the same breath as Minneapolis, drawing a line from the Twin Cities to every blue city in America.
He also offered what amounts to a theory of political change:
"The reason I point out that I don't think the majority of the American people approve of this is because ultimately, the answer is going to come from the American people. We just saw this in Minnesota, in Minneapolis."
The framing is deliberate. Obama wants the public to believe that street protests represent the majority opinion — that the crowds in Minneapolis speak for America. This is from the man who watched his party lose the White House in an election in which immigration enforcement was a central promise to voters.
Border czar Tom Homan said this week that the Trump administration would draw down its immigration operations in Minnesota following the two deaths. Many have credited the protests as the reason for the pullback, and Obama clearly wants that narrative cemented.
But the administration's decision to scale back in a specific locality after two deaths connected to federal operations is not the same as capitulation to protest movements. Operational adjustments happen. The conflation of a tactical drawdown with a political retreat serves Obama's narrative, not reality.
What the protests in Minneapolis have actually demonstrated is something different: that a sufficiently mobilized local population, backed by sympathetic city and state officials, can create enough friction to complicate federal enforcement. That's not a values victory. That's obstruction with better branding.
Obama closed his interview with hope for the next generation of American leaders — the kind of gauzy optimism that made him famous. But strip away the rhetoric, and the picture is stark. A former president of the United States is actively encouraging citizens to resist federal law enforcement operations targeting illegal immigrants. He's doing it from a platform designed to maximize reach among the activist left. And he's doing it while casting the agents carrying out those operations as rogue actors operating outside the law.
That's not a call for accountability. That's a call to arms — wrapped in the language of values so it goes down easier.
The American people spoke on immigration. They spoke in November. Obama just didn't like what they said.
Rosie O'Donnell quietly slipped back into the United States for a two-week visit — more than a year after she packed up and moved to Ireland because Donald Trump won re-election. She told almost no one.
Fox News reported that the 63-year-old actress disclosed the covert homecoming during an interview on SiriusXM's Cuomo Mornings, where she told Chris Cuomo she wanted to test the waters before potentially bringing her teenage daughter back for a visit.
"I was recently home for two weeks, and I did not really tell anyone. I just went to see my family. I wanted to see how hard it would be for me to get in and out of the country. I wanted to feel what it felt like. I wanted to hold my children again. And I hadn't been home in over a year."
She wanted to see how hard it would be to get in and out of the country. An American citizen, born in New York, returning to the United States — and she treated it like a reconnaissance mission.
O'Donnell moved to Ireland with her teenage daughter in January 2025, just before Trump's second inauguration. She framed it as survival — not protest, not politics, but existential necessity. She claims she doesn't regret leaving and that she did "what I needed to do to save myself, my child, and my sanity."
But here she is, sneaking back for two weeks to hug her other kids and gauge whether America is still habitable. The dramatic collapse under their own weight. If the country were genuinely dangerous for Rosie O'Donnell, she wouldn't have waltzed through customs without incident. If it weren't, then the original departure was exactly what it looked like — a tantrum dressed up as moral courage.
O'Donnell told Cuomo that being in Ireland changed her perspective on America:
"I've been in a place where celebrity worship does not exist. I've been in a place where there's more balance to the news. There's more balance to life. It's not everyone trying to get more, more, more. It's a very different culture. And I felt the United States in a completely different way than I ever had before I left."
A celebrity complaining about celebrity worship while conducting a media tour about her feelings. The irony writes itself.
O'Donnell's assessment of her brief visit home was bleak, at least by her telling:
"And I'm very happy that I'm not in the midst of it there because the energy that I felt while in the United States was — if I could use the most simple word I can think of — it was scary. There's a feeling that something is really wrong, and no one is doing anything about it."
This is a woman who left a country of 330 million people, relocated to the west coast of Europe, traveled to London for a performance of "Evita" in July, posed in front of the Sydney Opera House in October, and now sits for interviews about how terrified she is of America — while freely entering and leaving it at will.
The word "scary" is doing a lot of heavy lifting for someone whose experience was an uneventful two-week family visit.
O'Donnell has said her daughter blames Trump for forcing their family's move out of America, though she hasn't offered specifics about what exactly made the move necessary beyond her own political distress. No threats. No legal jeopardy. No concrete danger. Just vibes — and the conviction that the wrong person occupying the Oval Office constitutes a personal emergency.
Millions of Americans lived through eight years of Obama and four years of Biden without relocating to another hemisphere. They went to work. They raised their kids. They voted in the next election. That's what citizens of a republic do.
The bad blood between O'Donnell and Trump stretches back roughly 20 years, to when she criticized him while appearing on "The View." They've traded jabs ever since. Trump escalated the exchange in his characteristically unsubtle fashion, posting on Truth Social in July 2025:
"Because of the fact that Rosie O'Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship. She is a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her. GOD BLESS AMERICA!"
He followed up in September 2025:
"She is not a Great American and is, in my opinion, incapable of being so!"
O'Donnell fired back, correctly noting that a president cannot strip citizenship from a natural-born citizen under the Constitution:
"He can't do that because it's against the Constitution, and even the Supreme Court has not given him the right to do that. ... He's not allowed to do that. The only way you're allowed to take away someone's citizenship is if they renounce it themselves, and I will never renounce my American citizenship. I am a very proud citizen of the United States."
She's right on the law — citizenship for those born in the country is protected by the 14th Amendment, and no formal action was ever taken. No executive order, no legal proceeding. This was a social media feud between two people who've been feuding since the mid-2000s.
O'Donnell also told an Irish radio show that Trump "uses me as a punching bag and a way to sort of rile his base." That may well be true. It's also true that she has spent the better part of two decades volunteering for the role.
O'Donnell shared with the U.K.'s Daily Telegraph in October 2025 that she was applying for Irish citizenship — dual citizenship, she clarified, so she could remain an American while living abroad. White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson responded to Fox News Digital with a four-word review:
"What great news for America!"
O'Donnell insists she loves Ireland — its politics, its people, its pace of life:
"I am also getting my citizenship here so I can have dual citizenship in Ireland and the United States because I enjoy living here. It's very peaceful. I love the politics of the country. I love the people and their generous hearts and spirit. And it's been very good for my daughter. But I still want to maintain my citizenship in the United States. My children are there. I will be there visiting and go to see them. And I have the freedom to do that, as does every American citizen."
Note what's happening here. She left America because she couldn't bear to live under Trump. She's applying for Irish citizenship because Ireland is peaceful and balanced. But she also insists she's a proud American who will never renounce her citizenship and will visit whenever she pleases.
This isn't exile. It's a vacation with a narrative.
Every four or eight years, a certain class of celebrity threatens to leave the country if the Republican wins. In 2016, the promises flowed freely. Almost none followed through. O'Donnell, to her credit, actually left — which puts her ahead of the pack on commitment, if nothing else.
But the move reveals something the cultural left never quite reckons with. Their attachment to America is conditional. It depends on who holds power.
When their side governs, the country is worth fighting for. When it doesn't, the country becomes unbearable — not because anything in their daily life has materially changed, but because the symbolism is wrong.
O'Donnell wasn't deported. She wasn't charged. She wasn't harassed at the border. She entered the United States, spent two weeks with her children, and left again without incident. The America she describes as "scary" welcomed her home and let her go, because that's what free countries do.
She'll be back. The question was never whether she'd return — it was how long she could sustain the performance.
January's Consumer Price Index came in below expectations, dropping annual inflation to 2.4% — the lowest reading since May and a sharp decline from December's 2.7%. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a modest 0.2% seasonally adjusted monthly increase for all urban consumers, beating economists' forecasts of 2.5%. Core inflation, which strips out food and energy, fell to its lowest point in nearly five years.
Florida's Voice reported that the Trump administration wasted no time framing the numbers as vindication. White House Deputy Press Secretary Kush Desai delivered a statement that doubled as a victory lap:
"Today's expectation-beating CPI report proves that President Trump has defeated Joe Biden's inflation crisis: overall inflation fell, and real wages grew by $1,400 in President Trump's first year in office."
That $1,400 figure — the real earnings gain for private-sector workers over the past year — sits at the center of the administration's case. Real average hourly earnings climbed 1.2% across all private-sector workers and 1.5% for middle- and lower-wage employees. Under the Biden administration, workers lost nearly $3,000 in real earnings, according to White House figures. The reversal is not subtle.
The numbers aren't abstract. They map onto the parts of the economy that working Americans actually feel.
Energy prices dropped 1.5%. Gasoline fell 3.2%. Used vehicles — a category that became a symbol of Biden-era sticker shock — declined 1.8%. Beef, eggs, and coffee all saw reductions in January. Prescription drug prices remained steady last month and declined over the course of 2025.
The sector-level wage data tells its own story:
These are not Silicon Valley knowledge workers or government-sector employees padding their resumes with DEI certifications. These are the people who build things, extract things, and make things — the backbone of the physical economy. When their real wages rise, it means the policy environment is rewarding production, not just consumption.
For months, critics warned that Trump's trade posture would ignite a new inflation spiral. The January data offers a clean rebuttal: no broad spikes have materialized. Energy is cheaper. Goods are cheaper. The categories most exposed to supply-chain disruption moved in the right direction.
This is worth sitting with for a moment. The entire economic case against the administration's trade agenda rested on the assumption that tariffs would function as a consumer tax, driving prices higher across the board. January's CPI doesn't just fail to confirm that theory — it contradicts it. The economy absorbed the policy shift and kept cooling.
That doesn't mean tariffs carry zero cost in any category. But the doomsday framing — the breathless cable-news segments, the op-eds treating every tariff announcement as a prelude to Smoot-Hawley — looks increasingly disconnected from the data.
Desai pointed to two areas where the administration sees continued momentum. Housing inflation, which has been the stickiest component of CPI for years, continues to cool. And prescription drug prices actually fell over the year — a trend the White House credits to its Most Favored Nation drug pricing deals and the Great Healthcare Plan.
"Housing inflation notably continues to cool, while prescription drug prices actually fell in 2025, with even more price relief ahead for American patients thanks to President Trump's Most Favored Nation drug pricing deals and the Great Healthcare Plan."
Housing and healthcare are the two categories that erode middle-class purchasing power faster than anything else. If both trend lines hold, the downstream effects on household budgets could be substantial — and politically potent heading into the midterms.
The White House didn't stop at celebrating the present. Desai turned the data into a direct message aimed at the Federal Reserve:
"With inflation now low and stable, America's economy is set to turbocharge even further through long-overdue interest rate cuts from the Fed."
The phrase "long-overdue" is doing deliberate work. The administration's position is clear: the Fed held rates higher than the data justified, and every month of delay costs borrowers — homebuyers, small businesses, anyone carrying variable-rate debt — real money. With inflation now sitting comfortably below economists' expectations, the case for continued restraint thins considerably.
Whether the Fed acts on that signal is another matter. But the political ground has shifted. A central bank that holds rates steady while inflation undershoots forecasts isn't being prudent. It's being stubborn.
Strip the rhetoric away, and the administration's argument reduces to a simple contrast: $3,000 lost under Biden, $1,400 gained under Trump. One presidency bled purchasing power from working families. The other restored it in twelve months.
Critics will note these are White House figures, not independently audited calculations. Fair enough. But the BLS data is the BLS data. Inflation fell. Real wages rose. Energy got cheaper. Food got cheaper. The trend lines all point in the same direction, and they all point away from the previous administration's record.
Americans don't need a press secretary to tell them whether their paycheck stretches further at the grocery store. They already know. The CPI report just confirmed what the checkout line has been saying for months.